CORNELL 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
Cornell University Library 
 PS 92.N59 
 
 American literature : an lilstorlcal sket 
 
 3 1924 022 153 633 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of tliis book is in 
 tlie Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924022153633 
 
AMEEICAN LITEEATURE 
 
By the same Author. 
 
 HANNIBAL: An Historical Drama. Glasgow: Maclehose, 1873. Fcap. 8vo. 
 es. 6d. 
 
 THEMISTOCLES AND OTHER POEMS. Glasgow : Maclehose, 1881. Fcap. 
 8vo. 6s. 6d. 
 
 TABLES OF EUROPEAN LITERATURE AND HISTORY, a.d. 200-1876. 
 Glasgow : Maclehose. 410. 6s. 6d. 
 
 TABLES OF ANCIENT LITERATURE AND HISTORY. Glasgow : Macle- 
 hose. 4to. 4s. 6d. 
 
 ENGLISH COMPOSITION PRIMER. London : MacmiUan. i8mo. is. 
 
 BYRON ("English Men of Letters"). London : MacmiUan. Fcap. 8vo. as. 6d. 
 
 BURNS : A Summary of his Life, Character, and Genius. Edinburgh : Paterson. 
 8vo. 3s. 6d. 
 
AMEEICAN LITEEATUEE 
 
 AN HISTOEICAL SKETCH 
 
 1620—1880 
 
 BY 
 
 JOHN NICHOL, LL.D. 
 
 PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE IN THE "DNITERSITY OF GLASGOW 
 
 EDINBUEGH 
 ADAM AND CHAELES BLACK 
 
A. SSSJ 
 
 [u 
 
 CORNELL 
 
 NfVEnDjTY! 
 LIBRARY 
 
 " Much ill-natured criticism has been directed on American manners. 
 I do not think it is to be resented. Rather, if we are wise, we 
 should listen and mend. Our critics will then be our best 
 friends, though they did not mean it." — Emerson. 
 
 Hi. 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 The preparation of this volume has extended over a number 
 of years, begianing with the spring of 1861, when the 
 subject of American . Poetry formed the last of a course of 
 lectures delivered to the Edinburgh Philosophical Institution/ 
 its design dates from a visit paid to the States, then in the 
 first flush of their reunion, in the autumn of 1865. Shortly 
 after my return, I contributed to the " North British Eeview " 
 two articles, the substance of the chapters on Lowell and 
 Emerson, with the aim of continuing the series : but while I 
 was engaged on a paper on Hawthorne, circumstances led ' 
 to a postponement of the project. I was encouraged to 
 resume it by the reception of the outline of " American 
 Literature" in the Encyclopcedia Britannica. (1875), which 
 forms the basis of this book. In 1879 I gave a course 
 of six lectures on the subject at Cheltenham; and, last 
 year, in Edinburgh, other two on the Novelists. It was 
 my intention to have published these lectures much as 
 they were delivered : but, on examination, so many addi- 
 tions — relating to the earlier periods on the one hand, to 
 recent poets and novelists on the other — seemed requisite 
 that, with the exception of three chapters, I have recast the 
 
 5 
 
vi PREFACE. 
 
 whole book. It now claims to convey a fair general impres- 
 sion — derived from all sources within the author's reach — of 
 Literature in the United States, from the establishment of the 
 first English settlements on the North American Continent 
 till near the present time. The, still, limited compass of the 
 work prevents its making any pretence to completeness : it 
 disclaims assuming to be a catalogue even of all the writers 
 who, in their own country, have, on various grounds, attained 
 importance. It has been my wish rather to discuss, in some 
 detail, the authors who most conspicuously represent the main 
 periods or departments of their nation's artistic activity ;^ to 
 illustrate their position, by reference to the history and poli- 
 tics of the time ; and to give my views, founded in those 
 cases on direct personal study, of their position and influence. 
 It will perhaps be conceded that if a distant critic suffers by 
 greater risks of omission or error, there is some compensating 
 advantage in his being removed from the suspicion of the 
 partialities of friendship, or their reverse. Minor authors, 
 whose aggregate works it would be the task and waste of a life 
 to attempt to master, I have been content to judge by extracts, 
 and the collation of the verdicts of independent reviewers who 
 have devoted to one or more of these a special attention. By 
 notes and references, I have been careful to avow my principal 
 obligations in this direction ; but I must add a further acknow- 
 ledgment of my debts to Mr. Griswold and Mr. Curtis, to 
 Duyckinck's Gyclo;pcedia; above aU to the two recent volumes 
 by Professor Coit Tyler of Michigan, without the free use of 
 which the chapter on the Colonial Period could not have 
 been written. I must also refer to the assistance which, 
 
 ' The reader is warned not to look for even a general estimate of the 
 numerous scientific and scholastic works of this and the previous century. 
 
PREFACE. vii 
 
 in the historical portion of the work, I have derived from 
 the materials accumulated hy my father, Professor J. P. 
 Nichol (during and after his visit to the States in 1848), in pre- 
 paration for a philosophical review of American politics and 
 society, unhappily interrupted by his death in 1859. Finally, 
 in the spirit of the motto prefixed to these pages, I shall be 
 only grateful for corrections or suggestions, whether to omit 
 or to add, that — friendly or otherwise — may proceed from 
 any well-informed source. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTEE I. 
 
 INTEODUCTOEY. 
 
 Circumstances of American Literature. Conditions of Settlement. 
 Influences of Geography ; History ; Climate ; Government 
 
 Pages 1-28 
 
 CHAPTEE 11. 
 
 THE COLONIAL PERIOD. 
 
 Life of the early Colonists. Virginian Adventure. New England The- 
 ology : Education : Superstitions : Persecution. Eoger Williams. 
 A Church- State : The Mathers. Jonathan Edwards. Puritan 
 rhymes ...... 29-60 
 
 CHAPTEE III. 
 
 PEEIOD OF THE REVOLUTION. 
 
 Benjamin FranMin. Eflfects of War and Controversy on Literature. 
 Declaration of Independence. The Constitution — -Hamilton and 
 Jefferson : Madison. Orators : Patrick Henry ; Otis ; Eisher Ames. 
 Theologians : Woolman ; Mather Byles. Poets of the period : 
 Trumbull; Dwight; Freneau. Popular Ballads of the War 61-96 
 
X CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTEE IV. 
 
 AMERICAN POLITICS AND OEATOEY. 
 
 War of 1 8 1 2. Rearrangement of Parties — Democrats and Republicans. 
 Extension of the Union. Tariffs. Jackson and Corruption. 
 Calhoun ; Clay ; Webster. Orations : — Everett. Free Theology : 
 Channing. Parker ; FoUen ; Recent Controversy : Slavery ; 
 Garrison ; Phillips ; Sumner . . Pages 97-142 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 HISTOEY. ROMANCE AND CEITICISM, 1800-1850. 
 
 History : Bancroft ; Hildreth ; Presoott ; Motley. Early American 
 Romance : Brockden Brown ; Washington Irving ; Cooper ; 
 Edgar A. Poe. Books of Travel — Sketches — Criticism : — Qitincy 
 Adams on Shakespeare. Science and Philology : — Audubon ; 
 Agasssiz ; Marsh, etc. ..... 143-186 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 EEPRESENTATIVE POETS. 
 
 Bryant — Longfellow — Edgar A. Poe — Walt Whitman — Joaquin MiUer 
 
 187-219 
 
 CHAPTEE VII. 
 
 POLITICAL AND MINOR POETRY. 
 
 Lowell — Whittier — Holmes. Minor Poets : Picrpont ; Percival 
 Drake ; HaUeck ; Willis. Female Poets . . 220-253 
 
 CHAPTEE VIII. 
 
 THE TRANSCENDENTAL MOVEMENT. 
 
 "The Dial" — Alcott — Margaret Fuller — Emerson's Philosophy and 
 Ethics .... . 2,'54-286 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTEE IX. 
 
 EMERSON AND THOEEAU. 
 
 Emerson compared with Carlyle. Politics : Poetry : Later Essays. 
 His followers — Henry D. Thoreau . . Pages 287-321 
 
 CHAPTEE X. 
 
 NATHANIEL HAWTHOENE. 
 
 Quietism in Literature. Biography : Minor Tales. "The Scarlet 
 Letter"; "The House of the Seven Gables"; "The Blithedale 
 Eomance " ; " The Marble Faun " ; " The Old Home " 322-352 
 
 CHAPTEE XI. 
 
 AMEEICAN NOVELISTS, 1850-1880. 
 
 Novel - writing. Adventure and Description. Speculation and 
 Psychology : — Judd ; Holmes. Political romances : — Mrs. Beecher 
 Stowe. Stories for Children. School of Hawthorne : — Theodore 
 Winthrop ; Julian Hawthorne ; Aldrich. Recent Analytical 
 School: — Henry James ; "W. D. Howells . . 353-401 
 
 CHAPTEE XII. 
 
 AMERICAN HUMOEISTS. 
 
 Characteristics of American Humour. New England Satirists : — 
 Holmes — Lowell — " Artemus Ward." Buffoonery : "Mark Twain ; " 
 " Josh Billings," etc. Bad effects of this style in England and 
 America. Nationalities : — Leland. Influences of the Pacific : 
 Pioneer pictures : — Bret Harte. General Characteristics and 
 prospects of American Literature . . . '402-448 
 
CONTESTTS. 
 
 ADDENDUM. 
 
 BECENT AMEEICAN CRITICS. 
 
 Tote A. 
 
 The Constitution. 
 
 „ B. . 
 
 The Presidential Election. 
 
 „ c. . 
 
 Corruption and " Democracy.'' 
 
 „ D. . 
 
 Pro-Slavery Sympathy. 
 
 „ E. . 
 
 Emerson and Darwin. 
 
 „ F. . 
 
 Practical' Religion. 
 
 „ G. . 
 
 The Triumph of Buffoonery. 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Pages 468-472 
 
AMEEICAN LITEEATUKE. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 GENERAL SURVEY — CONDITIONS AND CHARACTERISTICS. 
 
 " Who are your Poets ? " demanded, with some touch of 
 scorn, an English critic of an American lady. "Among 
 others," she replied, " we have Chaucer, Shakespeare, 
 and Milton." The retort is open to a charge not often 
 preferred against her countrymen, — it is over modest. 
 " Vixere fortes post Agamemnona " : there are poets now ^ 
 living in America whose claim to respect it is a mere, though 
 a common, affectation to deny. But, hy way of apology for 
 the prejudice that provoked the question, let me quote from 
 a Chicago newspaper the following advertisement : — " Mr. 
 Elias F. Mathers offers to write a thousand magazine articles 
 in a thousand weeks. Length is immaterial." " So, probably," 
 subjoins the London Eocaminer, " is quality." Unhappily, 
 Mr. Mathers is no rare phenomenon, for perhaps a thousand of 
 his Transatlantic compatriots are ready and, in a sense, able 
 to perform the same feat. Far too many books and magazines 
 are yearly published in Great Britain — books that fail from 
 the obviousness of their platitudes, the slovenliness of their 
 
 ' 1880, when some sentences were added to this Chapter, first delivered as 
 a Lecture in 1866. 
 
 B 
 
2 AMERICAN LITERATUEE. 
 
 style, the innate incapacity of their writers ; or, worse, owe a 
 short success, and opportunity to cumber the ground, to their 
 more or less skilful setting of commonplaces, their appeals to 
 complacent ignorance or perverted taste. In the United 
 States the same evil is magnified, and it requires some hardi- 
 hood, from a distance, to arraign it. 
 
 The critics of one nation must, to a certain extent, regard the 
 works of another from an outside point of view. Few are 
 able to divest themselves wholly of the influence of local 
 standards. This is pre-eminently the case when the efforts of 
 a comparatively young country are submitted to the judg- 
 ments of an older country, strong in its prescriptive rights, 
 and intolerant of changes, the drift of which it is unable 
 or unwilling to appreciate. Our censors are apt to bear 
 down on the writers of the New World with a sort of 
 aristocratic hauteur. Englishmen are perpetually reminding 
 Americans of their immaturity, scolding their innovations in 
 one breath, their imitations in another, and twitting them 
 with disregard of the "golden mean." Such sentences as 
 the following, where half-truths are clad in discourtesy, can- 
 not fail to excite an unpleasant feeling. " Over American ^ 
 society there is diffused an incurable vulgarity of speech, 
 sentiment, and language, hard to define, but perceptible in 
 every word and gesture." "Persons of refinement in the 
 States are over-refined : they talk like books, and everywhere 
 obtrude their superior education." Americans, on the other 
 hand, are, for the most part, impossible to please. Ordinary 
 men among them are as sensitive to foreign, and above all to 
 British, censure as the "irritabile genus" of other lands. 
 Their second and third rate authors, reared in the atmosphere 
 of " Mutual Admiration Societies," of which we have, nearer 
 home, equally obnoxious equivalents, resent the application of 
 a higher standard with more than the vehemence due to a 
 ' National Eemew, October 1861, p. 371. 
 
INTERNATIONAL CRITICISM. 3 
 
 personal affront. Mr. Emerson is allowed to impress home 
 truths on his countrymen, as, " Your American eagle is very- 
 well, but beware of the American peacock." Such remarks 
 are not permitted to Englishmen. If they point to any flaws 
 in Transatlantic manners or ways of thinking with an effort 
 after politeness, it is " the good-natured cynicism of well-to- 
 do age : " if they commend Transatlantic institutions or 
 achievements, it is, according to Mr. LoweU, "with that 
 pleasant European air of indirect self-compliment in con- 
 descending to be pleased by American merit which we find 
 so conciliating." This incisive writer and often genial 
 humorist is, as Defensor Patriae,^ apt to criticise our leading 
 thinkers and poets in a spirit of retaliation. Mr. Carlyle is 
 a " cynic " given to " canting," who, " since Sartor Besartus 
 has done little but repeat himself with increasing emphasis 
 and heightened shrillness," who " goes about with his Diogenes 
 dark-lantern, professing to seek a man, but inwardly resolved 
 to find a monkey." In a depreciative review of Atalanta 
 in Calydon, the same critic has "well-grounded doubts 
 whether England is precisely the country from which we 
 have a right to expect that most precious of gifts (poetry) 
 just now." Elsewhere, after a bitter reminder that Alabamas 
 are not mere bad wishes, he addresses us in mass with a half- 
 truth, though with some characteristic confusion of metaphor, 
 " Dear old long-estranged mother-in-law, it is a great many 
 years since we parted. Since 1660, when you married again, 
 you have been a stepmother to us. Put on your spectacles, 
 dear madam. Yes, we have grown, and changed likewise. 
 You would not let us darken your doors if you could help it ; 
 we know that perfectly well. But pray, when we look to be 
 treated as men, don't shake that rattle in our faces, nor talk 
 baby to us any longer.'' Now that the United States have 
 
 ^ In a later Chapter I have endeavoured to do justice to Mr. Lowell (now 
 indubitably the foremost living American author) in this and other capacities. 
 
i AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 attained their majority, it is indeed time that England should 
 cease to assume the attitude of their guardian ; but it is also 
 time that they should cease to be on the alert to resent the 
 assumption. Meanwhile, "qui s'excuse s'accuse" continues 
 to have its application across the sea, where in matters of Art, 
 if no longer in Politics, a nervous self-assertion remains to 
 indicate a lingering self-distrust. He who attempts to give, 
 as the result of long and careful study, a sympathetic sketch 
 of American Literature, must be prepared to suffer rebuke 
 for patronising the writers he has praised, and the reproach 
 of ignorance for omitting to mention those he has inwardly 
 
 condemned. 
 
 " There are ten thousand 
 
 Geese, villain 'i 
 
 Authors, sir," 
 
 is Byron's appropriate adaptation of " Macbeth." We must 
 " prick our face and over-red our fear." I, however, disclaim 
 in these chapters attempting a catalogue or playing the part 
 of an auctioneer. I am content to illustrate, mainly from 
 the works of a few representative artists in prose and verse, 
 the general impressions derived from some direct knowledge 
 of a great people, and some familiarity with the recorded 
 thoughts and fancies that seem most conspicuously to display 
 the leading features of their character. 
 
 It has become a platitude to say that the developments 
 of History and of Literature run in parallel lines ; but much 
 of our education consists in the unfolding of universally 
 acknowledged principles which, when applied to various 
 times and places, often lead to previously unexpected results. 
 Only he who has realised the stagnant solemnity of the East 
 can read the Vedas : the impulse of the Athenian Drama 
 was due to Marathon and Salamis as much as to the elder 
 Myths : half the soul of Plato's political philosophy was in 
 the laws of Sparta, the other half in the oratory of Pericles. 
 
HISTORY AND LITERATURE.. 5 
 
 The Augustan age of Latin Literature was the product of a 
 period of repose, inspired in part by the spirit of the foregone 
 Eepublic, in part by that of the Empire newly crowned. The 
 Mediaeval Church, the English Commonwealth, the reign of 
 Scepticism in France, and the tempest of ideas which marked 
 the closing years of the eighteenth century in Germany, 
 are embalmed in Dante, Milton, Voltaire, and Goethe. In 
 Spain the traditional Cid and the pathetic Quixote represent 
 the palmy days and the decline of Chivalry. Two great 
 nations of the modern world remain without an adequate 
 literary expression of their political power. The one, long 
 struggling into historical prominence, has its intellectual life 
 still benumbed by the frosts of northern despotism : the 
 other is even yet a giant in swaddling-clothes; it has just 
 begun to have a past, and belongs mainly to the future. 
 "What the reading of History is to the past, Travel is in some 
 measure to the present : it enables us by our own eyes and 
 ears to refute misrepresentations, sometimes to resolve per- 
 plexities ; but we must not expect too much from it. " Patriae 
 quis exsul." " Ccelum non animum." We can only gather 
 interest on the capital we take with us. " He that would 
 bring home the wealth of the Indies must carry out the 
 wealth of the Indies." Many English men and women who 
 run abroad, a show to others, themselves see nothing. If we 
 go to Chicago or Hong-Kong only to sell dry goods, we come 
 back to Bristol or Birmingham with a dry-goods' return. 
 Emerson keeps repeating with a half-truth and a shade of 
 conceit, "I can find Greece, Asia, Italy, Spain, and the 
 Islands, — the principle of each and of all eras in my own 
 mind;" and one of his pupils quotes from Beowulf, "Far 
 countries he can safest visit who is himself doughty." Dr. 
 Johnson and Kant obeyed the precept, "Let a man first 
 travel round the terra incognita inside his own threshold." 
 But we know the value of the verdicts of the former on far 
 
6 AMERICAN LITERATURE, 
 
 countries and men. The latter more wisely confined himself 
 to criticise the region he had explored, and few important 
 changes have been made on his map of it. 
 
 We are not bound to make ourselves familiar with other 
 lands, but unless we have some degree of acquaintance with 
 them we had better not pronounce sentence on them. Even 
 with a view to the British interests, of which we hear so 
 much, it is not always safe to treat a great country after the 
 manner of the reviewer who never read a book on which he 
 was about to decide, lest it should prejudice his judgment. 
 There are some cases, indeed, in which imagination and hear- 
 say may be made to supply the place of knowledge. Mere 
 sights can be brought home, and old records lit up by fancy 
 to revive old events ; but some experience is required to 
 realise the conditions under which, starting from a point, a 
 race has in two centuries spread over a continent, within 
 whose arena, as on a vast theatre, different phases of civilisa- 
 tion are contending. 
 
 The two nations of the civilised world who have most in 
 common are the two whose acquaintance with each other is, 
 in many respects, the most imperfect. Their separate poli- 
 tical history is included within a century ; when they 
 write of each other it is already to draw contrasts like those 
 drawn by Herodotus between the manners of the Greeks and 
 the Egyptians. "Fathers and mothers in America," writes 
 Mr. Trollope, " seem to obey their sons and daughters natur- 
 ally, and as they grow old become the slaves of their grand- 
 children." "An Englishman," writes Mr. Emerson, "walks 
 in a pouring rain, swinging his closed umbrella like a walk- 
 ing-stick, wears a wig, or a shawl, or a saddle, or stands upon 
 his head, and no remark is made." Eeligion in America, 
 asserts Mr. Trollope, is characterised by a certain rowdiness. 
 Eeligion in England, declares Mr. Emerson, is torpid and 
 slavish. Both authors confirm, by their example, the state- 
 
ENGLISH IGNORANCE OP AMERICA. 7 
 
 ment that " it is hard to write about any country so as not 
 to represent it in a more or less ridiculous point of view ;" 
 and yet both are candid and able beyond the majority of 
 critics. The relationship existing between Englishmen and 
 Americans makes them ignorant of their mutual ignorance. 
 They are near enough to set great store by each other's judg- 
 ments, and not near enough to form just judgments extem- 
 poraneously. Their jealousies are those of competitors : their 
 disputes the ')(aXe7rol iroXefioi dBeX<j}&v. Their community 
 of speech is itself too often a medium of offence, for it dis- 
 penses with a study in the course of which they learn 
 something of the habits and social histories of France, Ger- 
 many, Italy, and Spain. One has, indeed, heard of Ameri- 
 cans in England being complimented on the rapid progress 
 they had made in the language. This mistake hardly occurs 
 every day ; but it is rivalled by popular fallacies almost as 
 patently absurd ; e.g., during the war it was in some quarters 
 a European belief that the Northern States were contending 
 with the mongrel Spaniards of South America, and that raids 
 of Pawnee Indians from Ohio were apprehended in the 
 Broadway of New York, a city lying, according to one of our 
 members of Parliament, on "the Potomac." It was somewhere 
 reported that Mr. Lincoln, whom it was then the fashion to 
 revile, had ordered guillotines from Paris to establish a reign 
 of terror; and Mr. Tupper is said to have remonstrated 
 against the enormity by a letter to the President. Another 
 savant visiting Boston took up a volume of Webster's Lexicon 
 with the remark, " He was a wonderful man to find time in 
 the midst of his great political career to write that dictionary ; 
 but what a sad end he had !" ^ An older parallel is Byron's 
 anecdote of the Englishman in Venice who asked the Ameri- 
 can Consul if it was true that Washington had been killed 
 
 1 Tres juncti in imo — Daniel Webster, Noah Webster, and Webster the 
 chemist, hanged for the murder of Dr. Parkman. 
 
8 , AMERICAN LITEKATURE. 
 
 by Burke in a duel. Throughout the Civil War it was cur- 
 rently held in London that half of the Unioii armies was 
 made up of foreign mercenaries, that the North were fighting 
 for empire, the South for freedom, and that the slave-holders 
 would prove invincible. Their advocate, Mr. Spence, per- 
 suaded the people of Glasgow, that Andrew Jackson and 
 Jefferson Davis were the most disinterested of American 
 presidents. All these and worse confusions, as that between 
 pioneer life and the society of Boston or New York, are the 
 result of reports^ so hasty that it has been said, " If their 
 writers were accused of having committed crime in the 
 'States,' the production of their volumes would prove an 
 aliM."' 
 
 The facility of travel, which makes it easy to acquire first 
 impressions, is itself a temptation to superficial people. The 
 ambition of the ordinary British tourist in the States is satis- 
 fied when he has seen Niagara, called at the White House, 
 and been introduced to the literati .of Boston, to whom he 
 afterwards refers with an exceptional complacency. "Eng- 
 lish travellers," says Washington Irving, with a gentle satire, 
 whose edge has hardly been blunted by fifty years, ■" are the 
 best and the worfet in the world. . . . Their travels are more 
 honest and accurate the more remote the country described. 
 I would place implicit confidence in an Englishman's descrip- 
 tion of the regions beyond the cataracts of the. Nile, of un- 
 known islands iii the YeUow Sea, of the interior of India, or 
 of any other tract which other travellers might be apt to 
 picture out with the illusions of their fancies ; but I would 
 cautiously receive his account of his immediate neighbours, 
 and of those nations with which he is in habits of the most 
 frequent intercourse. However I might be disposed to trust 
 his probity; I da;re not trust hia prejudices." " Mutato nomine 
 de te " is our sole retort. Headers of books on the other side 
 of the Atlantic — of books, that is, by their own countrymen 
 
TRAVELLERS' ESTIMATES. 9 
 
 —have been made more familiar witli Eome, Venice, and 
 Dresden, than with London or Liverpool. Half a century 
 ago Christopher North is reported to have said, " "We have 
 no good book about America." The only English work of 
 genius on the subject remains the masterpiece of caricature 
 of the prince of caricaturists. But the reverse holds equally. 
 The Americans have no good book about England. The 
 statesmen and philosophic jurists, whose minds are best quali- 
 fied by nature and training to grapple with the problems on 
 either side, to indicate the dangers and unfold the secrets of 
 the greatness of either nation, have had their energies con- 
 centrated on the patriotic measures of their own land, or 
 consumed in its party strifes. The task they have preter- 
 mitted has consequently fallen into the hands of superficial 
 observers and talkers, or been taken up by others more com- 
 petent from isolated points of view, and hurried over with 
 fatal haste. Mrs. B. Stowe's good-humour is as shallow as 
 Mrs. Trollope's acerbity : of her Sunny Memories we remember 
 nothing but an abortive attempt to describe the Atlantic, the' 
 hackneyed Melrose hy Moonlight, and the writer's self-gratula- 
 tions on the open doors of aristocratic philanthropists — the 
 most famous of whom had she never met it would have been 
 well for both, for the wildlyrmisplaced confidences of the one, 
 and the rash ambition of the other, led to the foulest blot on 
 the fair page of our literature. Similarly, Mr. N". P. Willis, 
 running across the sea, returns with jottings from the con- 
 versation in the saloons of " the charming Counters of B :" 
 
 his Pencillings hy the Way has no more relation to an 
 adequate account of the countries visited than the sketches 
 in a school-girl's portfolio to an authorised geological chart. 
 Washington Irving was a " spirit of another sort." Half a 
 European by residence, he liked our country, and, having 
 opportunity to study it, made himself familiar with our 
 manners ; but his purpose did not lead him tO abstract 
 
10 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 inquiry or analysis, and he confined himself mainly to plea- 
 sant literary and local reminiscences. 
 
 The least satisfactory works of the two foremost Ameri- 
 can prose writers of recent years are those connected with 
 their English experiences. Every chapter of Nathaniel 
 Hawthorne's Old Home exhibits his delicate grace and quiet 
 subtle thought. He carried with him across the Atlantic a 
 series of picturesque photographs of English cities, old and 
 new, of bright young Leamington and rusty Warwick, of Lich- 
 field market-place, of Norfolk Boston with its minster bell, of 
 Blenheim Park and Alio way Kirk, of Greenwich Hospital, 
 with its Trafalgar memories — many a vivid glimpse of squalid 
 poverty and superabounding wealth ; but his retiring nature 
 sought out dim alleys and woodland ways, or loitered within 
 the shadow of gray cathedrals, and his book, as a whole, says 
 little of England as a whole. The mass of our well-to-do 
 citizens will never forgive him for calling them "bulbous" 
 and their wives "portly;"' while impartial critics are con- 
 strained to accept his own sentence on himself — a sentence 
 in which the unhistoric spirit of the artist is conspicuous. 
 "Jotting down the little acrimonies of the moment in my 
 Journal, and transferring them thence (when they happened to 
 be tolerably well expressed) to these pages, it is very possible I 
 may have said things which a profound observer of national 
 character would hesitate to sanction." Seven years earlier 
 Emerson's English Traits was published, and in spite of 
 much that is true and telling in its keen and polished 
 epigrams, it showed how deceptive the impressions derived 
 from a brief sojourn in our country are apt to be. Mr. Emer- 
 son had not buried himself in watering-places and old towns ; 
 he had gone to our great cities and visited our great men, but 
 he frequently caricatured them, not always in the best taste. 
 The following characteristic passage illustrates at once the 
 exaggeration which plays so large a part in all American wit, 
 
TRAVELLERS' ESTIMATES. 11 
 
 and the extent to which we bear on our own backs, as seen 
 by strangers, the vices which we find most conspicuously 
 stamped on theirs : " The English feel themselves at liberty 
 to assume the most extraordinary tone on the subject of 
 English merits. An English lady on the Ehine hearing a 
 German speaking of her party as foreigners, exclaimed, ' No, 
 we are not foreigners, we are English ; it is you that are 
 foreigners.' They tell you daily in London the story of the 
 Frenchman and Englishman who quarrelled. Both were un- 
 willing to fight, but their companions put them up to it. At 
 last it was agreed that they should fight alone in the dark, 
 and with pistols. The candles were put out, and the English- 
 man, to make sure not to hit anybody, fired up the chimney, 
 and brought down the Frenchman." If this -^ was told daily 
 to Mr. Emerson in London, what reliance can be placed on 
 what was told daily to Mr. Dickens in New York? The 
 former continues of the English, "They have no curiosity about 
 foreigners, and answer any information you may volunteer 
 with, ' Oh, oh,' until the informant makes up his mind that 
 they shall die in their ignorance for any help he will offer. 
 There are really no limits to this conceit, though brighter men 
 among them make painful efforts to be candid. The habit 
 of brag runs through all classes, from the Times newspaper 
 through politicians and poets, through Wordsworth, Carlyle, 
 Mill, and Sydney Smith, down to the boys of Eton." 
 
 The intrusion of Mr. MiU's name into this list is suffi- 
 ciently absurd, but it would be well if the majority of our 
 lively sketches of American society were inspired by even as 
 fair a spirit, or if the task of writing them had always fallen 
 into the hands of men as accomplished, or, on the whole, as 
 candid as either of the above-named authors. To this day 
 
 ^ It occurs as a jest in the Table Talk of Samuel Rogers, who adds, 
 "Whenever I tell this story in Paris, I make the Frenchman fire up the 
 chimney." 
 
12 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 the only attempt to give a philosophical account of American 
 civilisation by a writer on our side of the Atlantic is the 
 work of the illustrious De Tocqueville; and the changes of fifty 
 years, in a country where events follow each other like the 
 shifting scenes of a stage, call for a revisal even of his care- 
 fully-considered estimates. Professor J. E. Cairnes's excellent 
 work on The Slave Power is avowedly limited in its range. 
 Mr. TroUope's interesting volumes, though generally accurate, 
 are rather those of a tourist than a student. The New 
 America of Mr. Hepworth Dixon, though undoubtedly the 
 most suggestive of that writer's works, deals professedly with 
 the outskirts and anomalies of Transatlantic life. Un- 
 tra veiled Englishmen know much less of America as a whole — 
 less of her geography, her history, her constitution, and of the 
 lives of her great men — than Americans know of England. Of 
 the mistakes on both sides — ludicrous and grave — we have the 
 larger share. Distance, no doubt, magnifies in their eyes the 
 importance of our Chartist, Penian, and similar demonstra- 
 tions ; but they have never so misconceived a British states- 
 man as we misconceived Mr. Lincoln, or gone so far astray in 
 regard to any crisis of our history, as we did in reference 
 to the moving springs, and the results of a war " worthy a 
 Milton to defend and a Lucan to sing.'' The source of this 
 greater ignorance lies not so much in greater indifference as 
 in greater difficulty. England is one, compact and compara- 
 tively stable. The United States are many, vast, various, and 
 in perpetual motion. An old country is a study, but a new 
 country is a problem. It is hard to realise the past, but it is 
 harder to read the present : to predict the future is impossible. 
 Props to memory are more common and more secure than 
 '' aids to refiection." Antiquity is brought to our firesides in 
 the classics, till Athens and Eome "to us are nothino novel, 
 nothing strange." We are more familiar with the Acropolis 
 than the western Capitol, with Mount Soracte than the 
 
MULTITUDE OF BOOKS. 13 
 
 Catskill Hills, ■with Pisistratus than with Jefferson Davis, 
 Tiberius Gracchus than William Lloyd Garrison. Our 
 scholars know more ahout Babylon than ahout Chicago. 
 Dante immortalises for us the Middle Age ; Plantagenet 
 England is revived in Chaucer ; the inner life of Modern 
 England has a voice in Tennyson and the Brownings. Where 
 is the poet who will reveal to us " the secrets of a land " in 
 some respects indeed like our own, but separated in others by 
 differences which. the distance of 3000 miles of ocean only 
 half represents; which, starting on another basis, has developed 
 itself with energies hitherto unknown, in directions hitherto 
 unimagined? Who will become the interpreter of a race 
 that has in two centuries dispersed itself over a continent, 
 whose resources are scarcely more than half discovered, and 
 which has to ahsorb within itself and harmonise the discordant 
 elements and lawless spirits of other races for whom the 
 resources of the old world are more than half exhausted? 
 Caret vate sacro — but it does not want poetical aspirations as 
 well as practical daring. 
 
 " This land o' ourn I tell ye 's gut to be 
 A better country than man ever see. 
 I feel my sperit swellin' with a cry 
 Thet seems to say, ' Break forth an' prophesy.' 
 O strange New World, thet yet wast never young, 
 Whose youth from thee by gripin' need was wrung ! 
 Brown foundlin' o' the woods, whose baby-bed 
 Was prowled round by the Injun's cracklin' tread, 
 An' who grew'st strong thru' shifts an' wants an' pains, 
 Nursed by stern men with empires in their brains ! " 
 
 Mr. Anthony Trollope has said that " in no part of its 
 (sic) national career have the United States been so suc- 
 cessful as in that of literature." But most critics wiU make 
 bold to reverse his judgment. The number of writers in the 
 States is vast. Their press, in times of peace, pours forth a 
 mass of prose and verse that flows in full stream to Lethe. 
 Mr. Griswold informs us that he has in his own library more 
 
14 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 than seven hundred volumes of native novels and tales : 
 his list of "remarkable men" is, in extent, like Homer's 
 catalogue of ships. Every village, says one of their satirists, 
 has its miniature copy of Milton, or Byron, or Shelley — 
 
 " A whole flock of Lambs, any number of Tennysons — 
 In short, if a man has the luck to have any sons. 
 We may feel pretty certain that one out of twain 
 Will be some very great person over again." 
 
 America has given birth to more than a fair proportion, 
 of eminent theologians, jurists, economists, and naturalists ; 
 but, with the exception of Eussia, no great modern country 
 has, in the same number of years, produced fewer works, 
 of general interest, likely to become classical ; and Bishop 
 Berkeley's sanguine prophecy of another golden age of arts 
 in the happier Empire of the West still awaits fulfilment. 
 This fact, attributable in part to obvious historical causes, is 
 fully recognised by the leading authors of the New World. 
 " I hate to hear people talking of American literature," one 
 of these recently remarked : " I find here no want of ability, 
 but we have not had time to have a literature." The same 
 authority has written, "It is the country of the future. 
 From Washington, — proverbially the city of magnificent 
 distances, — through all its cities, states, and territories, it is 
 a country of beginnings, of projects, of designs, of expecta- 
 tions." The conditions under which the communities of the 
 New World were established, and the terms on which they have 
 hitherto existed, have been unfavourable to art. The religious 
 and commercial enthusiasms of the first adventurers on her 
 shores, supplying themes to the romancers of a later age, were 
 themselves antagonistic to romance. The spirit which tore 
 down the aisles of St. Eegulus, and was afterwards revived in 
 England in a reaction against music, painting, and poetry, 
 the Pilgrim Fathers bore with them in the Mayflower, and 
 planted across the seas. The life of the early colonists left 
 
HINDRANCES TO LITERATURE. 15 
 
 no leisure for refinement. They had to conquer nature 
 before admiring it ; they had to feed and clothe, before 
 analysing, themselves. The cares of existence beset them, 
 to the exclusion of its embellishments. While Dryden, 
 Pope, and Addison were polishing stanzas and adding grace 
 to English prose, they were felling trees, navigating rivers, 
 and fertilising valleys. We had time amid our wars to form 
 new measures, to balance canons of criticism, to discuss 
 systems of philosophy ; with them 
 
 " Tlie need that pressed sorest 
 Was to vanquish the seasons, the ocean, the forest." 
 
 The struggle for independence, absorbing the whole 
 energies of the nation, developed militaiy genius, statesman- 
 ship, and oratory, but was hostile to what is called polite 
 literature. The people of the United States have had to act 
 their Iliad, and they have not had time to sing it. They 
 have had to place together the disjecta membra of all races, 
 sects, and parties in a iravToirdiKiov iroXiTeiwv. Their genius 
 is an unwedded Vulcan melting down all the elements of 
 civilisation in a gigantic furnace, and welding them anew 
 together. An enlightened people in a new land, " where 
 almost every one has facilities elsewhere unknown for making 
 his fortune," it is not to be wondered at that the pursuit 
 of wealth has been their leading impulse ; nor is it perhaps 
 to be regretted that much of their originality has been 
 expended upon inventing machines instead of manufacturing 
 verses, or that their religion itself has taken a practical turn. 
 One of their own authors confesses that the " common New 
 England life is still a lean, impoverished life in distinction 
 from a rich and suggestive one ; " but it is there, almost 
 alone, that the speculative and artistic tendencies of recent 
 years have found room and occasion for development. Our 
 travellers find a peculiar charm in the manly force and rough 
 
16 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 adventurous spirit of the far West ; but the poetry of the 
 pioneer is unconscious. The moving incident is not his trade.^ 
 The culture of the South, on the charms of which visitors 
 of the upper class from England are wont to dwell, has been 
 limited in extent if not in degree : it has been the compara- 
 tively rare hothouse fruit of wealth and leisure in a select 
 society^ — a society whose prestige has been heightened by an 
 outer circle of semi-barbarism. The civilisation of the States 
 has diffused itself from two centres — the Puritan colony of 
 the north-east, and the Old Dominion. The settlers in the 
 former started with the idea of political freedom, which their 
 descendants have maintained, and the idea of maintaining 
 one form of superstition by the persecution of others, which 
 their descendants have been educated or constrained to 
 abandon. The imported republicanism of our commonwealth 
 endures : its stern theocracy has proved an exotic, and 
 withered away. Not an unbending Calvinism, but a 
 practical, self-relying, industrial spirit was destined to mould 
 the thoughts of the cultivators of Ohio and the queUers of 
 the wilderness. The South has taken another course, and its 
 formulae, remaining hard, have had to be broken in battle. In 
 the Eevolution days Virginia was the nurse of statesmen ; and 
 down to our own, her chosen sons have fought their way to 
 the front in aU the great national councils, and played in 
 them for good and ill a powerful part. They will continue 
 to hold a good place in history, by their resistance to the 
 excessive centralising tendencies and mere commercial selfish- 
 ness of the northern Plutocracy. One of the most philosophic 
 political judgments of recent times admits, that " the honour 
 of maintaining self-government, and making it possible for 
 the Federation to dominate over the Continent, cannot be 
 wrested from the Southern States."^ But the same im- 
 
 ^ Since the above was written, Mr. Bret Harte and Joaq^uin Miller have 
 done something to idealise the life referred to. 
 
 " From unpublished notes on America, by the late Professor J. P. Nichol. 
 
SLAVERY. 17 
 
 partial spectator, in the same pages, prophesies the then 
 impending struggle — a struggle made inevitable by the fact 
 that, in the clash of rival interests and conflicting social 
 principles, a fanaticism on both sides in politics is developed, 
 only less fierce than that of rival religions ; that when the 
 strife thickens, the hottest, not the clearest,- heads lead the 
 masses. Compromises based on a mutual forbearance may 
 be the preludes to gradual reform ; compromises effected by 
 concessions to force, as " Free- California " on one side, the 
 " Fugitive Slave Law " on the other, are patched and hollow 
 truces, such as paved the way for the rowdy wrestle for 
 Kansas, the challenge to the flag at Fort Sumter, and its 
 salvation by cannon at Gettysburg. The rival forces had 
 been moving in opposite directions towards the past and 
 towards the future, and tugging at the rope at opposite ends 
 till it had to break, or one or other antagonist be drawn over 
 the border line. As the heirs of the men who burned the 
 witches and scourged the quakers, we had "Winthrop and 
 Hawthorne: the heirs of Washington and Jefferson were 
 Calhoun — as accomplished, but as hopeless, a reactionist as 
 Julian, and President Davis — almost as distinct a traitor as 
 Catiline. 
 
 It has been pleaded for Athenian slavery that it made 
 possible the culture of the whole free populace which led 
 .them to throng to listen to the "Antigone." If this were so, 
 in. view of the buffooneries that are the delights of a London 
 or New York pit, we should have to arm aU our moral 
 sense to rejoice at the change. But the example of the 
 West spares us the anachronistic regret : American slavery 
 has done nothing but harm to the " mean whites " of Balti- 
 more or Charlestown. If the literature of the North has 
 been hitherto inferior to that of most European countries, 
 the Southern States have produced scarcely any literature at 
 all. In the world of letters they have shone by reflected 
 
18 AMERICAN LITEKATURE. 
 
 light. In this respect it is hardly an exaggeration to say that 
 it is mainly owing to their connection with the North that the 
 Carolinas have been saved from degenerating to the level of 
 Mexico and the Antilles. Within this century, not half a dozen 
 writers (if we except the mere orators) whose names are 
 widely known have been born south of Mason and Dixon's 
 line. Those of Calhoun, Maury, Simms, and Edgar Allan 
 Poe (a Marylander accidentally born in Boston), are a 
 meagre offset to those of Prescott, Motley, Bancroft, Webster, 
 Everett, Lowell, Bryant, Emerson, Sumner, Dana, Holmes, and 
 Hawthorne, belonging to the single state of Massachusetts. 
 Whether we look to India or Louisiana, it would seem as 
 if the fire of a tropical sun had taken the poetic fire out of 
 Anglo-Saxon veins. The indolence which is the natural 
 concomitant of despotism has the same benumbing effect. 
 Like the Spartan marshalling his Helots, the planter, loung- 
 ing among his slaves, was made dead to art by a paralysing 
 sense of his own superiority. Some thirty years ago, a scheme 
 to establish a new Southern University was abandoned be- 
 cause the " cuticular aristocracy " would not associate with 
 the teachers. It has been the common practice of the rich 
 estate-holders to send their sons to be educated in the 
 northern schools, the best of which it is impossible to over- 
 praise. 
 
 . Almost all genuine Transatlantic literature is inspired by 
 the spirit of hope and confidence in labour — the spirit of the 
 workman who feels himself adequately equipped for an un- 
 fettered competition ; of the farmer who stands erect on his 
 own acres, overshadowed by no " superior," " where the tongue 
 is free and the hand;" of the adventurer who fears the 
 desert or the swamp as little as he dreads Mather's witches or 
 the goblins of Scandinavia. For its best vitality and aspira- 
 tions, its scant performance and large promise, we must turn 
 to New England. Its defects and merits are those of the 
 
INFLUENCES OF CLIMATE. 19 
 
 national character as developed in the Northern States, and 
 we must seek for explanation of its peculiarities in the 
 physical circumstances that environ and the moral condi- 
 tions that pervade them. 
 
 "When we remember that the Eomans lived under the sky 
 of Italy, that the character of the modern Swiss is like that 
 of the modern Dutch, we shall be on our guard against 
 attributing too much to the influences of external Nature. 
 Another race than the Anglo-Saxon would doubtless have 
 made another America, but we cannot avoid the belief that 
 the climate and soil of America have had something to do in 
 moulding the Anglo-Saxon race, in making its features 
 approximate to those of the Eed Indian, and stamping it with 
 a new character. An electric atmosphere, and a temperature 
 ranging at some seasons from 50° to 100° in twenty-four 
 hours, have contributed largely to engender that restless- 
 ness which is so conspicuous a trait of the people. A 
 territory which seems boundless as the ocean has been a 
 material agent in fostering an ambition unbridled by tradi- 
 tionary restraints. When European poets and essayists write 
 of Nature, it is to contrast her permanence with the muta- 
 bility of human life. We talk of the everlasting hills, the 
 perennial fountains, the ever-recurring seasons. "Damna 
 tamen celeres reparant ccelestia lunse — nos ubi decidimus," as 
 Sir Walter Ealeigh translates it, " Our leaf once fallen springeth 
 no more." In the same spirit Byron contemplates the sea, 
 and Tennyson a running stream. In America, on the other 
 hand, it is the extent of Nature that is ever present to the 
 mind — the infinity of space rather than the infinity of time is 
 opposed to the restricted, rather than to the transient, exist- 
 ence of man. Nothing strikes a traveller in that country so 
 much as this feature of magnitude. The rivers, lakes, forests, 
 plains, and valleys — Niagara itself, with its world of waters — 
 owe their magnificence to their size ; and, by a transference 
 
20 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 not unnatural, althougli fallacious, the Americans generally 
 have modelled their ideas of art after the same standard. 
 Their wars, their hotels, their language, are pitched on the 
 huge scale of their distances. Compared with Europeans, 
 they have gained in surface what they have lost in age. 
 
 " That iintravelled world, -whose margin fades 
 For ever and for ever when they move," 
 
 is all their own, and they have the hopes of a continent, to set 
 against the memories of a thousand years. Where English- 
 men recall, Americans anticipate. In thought and action 
 they are constantly rushing into empty spaces. New York 
 " Central Park," and the largest streets, in the plan of Wash- 
 ington, are on the outer verges of these cities. Emigration is 
 the normal condition of a great part of the inhabitants. 
 When the backwoodsman's fields in Iowa begin to look less 
 wild, he crosses the Missouri. We have heard of a North 
 Virginian farmer complaining that he had neighbours within 
 fifty miles, and preparing to move away from the encroach- 
 ment. 
 
 " I'm crowded just to think that folks are nigh, 
 And can't bear nothing closer than the sky." 
 
 The domestic attachments of the people are intense : 
 they generally spoil their children ; but it is rare, save in 
 country farms, to find a family mansion rooted to the same 
 town or district. "Jonathan," says Mr. LoweU, "is one 
 drop of a fluid mass who knows where his home is to-day, 
 but can make no guess of where it may be to-morrow." 
 The tie which unites one generation with another is easily 
 broken, and this want of continuity in life breeds a want of 
 continuity in ideas. The American mind, in which fitfulness 
 and pertinacity are strangely mixed, delights in speculative 
 and practical, social and political experiments, as Shakerism, 
 Mormonism, Pantagamy ; and the very tenacity with which 
 
IMPATIENCE. 21 
 
 the majority of Americans cling to their written constitution 
 is due, in part, to the acknowledged want of other anchorages. 
 Within this fence everything is allowed : European ideal- 
 ism and materialism are, each in turn, exaggerated by 
 writers, who — from Emerson to Walt Whitman — have tried 
 to glorify every mode of human Ufe, from the ascetic to the 
 semi -brutish. The habit of instability is fostered by the 
 rapid vicissitudes of commerce and the melting of one 
 class into another, by which all landmarks but that of a 
 temporary public opinion are drifted away. The great fault 
 of the people is impatience : they will not stop to verify and 
 study details, and satisfy themselves with generalisations, 
 which are superficially conclusive rather than "suggestive 
 or rich." The mass of them have never learnt that "raw 
 haste " is " half-sister to delay ; " that whatever is worth 
 doing at aU is worth doing well ; that " work done least 
 rapidly art most cherishes." Our agriculturists tell us that the 
 Americans traverse their best land like locusts, leaving heaps 
 of stones behind them. Solid Scotch engineers inform us that 
 • a shaft which takes six weeks to turn on the banks of the 
 Clyde is thrown out from the yards of New York in a fort- 
 night ; that the boats on the Mississippi are built of papier- 
 mache, and the summer-houses of veneer. This is not quite 
 so ; but there is a grain of truth in the satire. A Hudson 
 or Mississippi steamer is stocked with luxuries unknown on 
 the Thames, the Clyde, or the Mersey : a line of rails, some- 
 times of painted wood, is laid over 1500 miles with marvel- 
 lous speed ; but insurance companies demur to take the lives 
 of the passengers. The makeshifts which were at first a 
 necessity with the northern settlers have grown into a 
 custom : they adopt ten half-measures instead of one whole 
 one, and, beginning with a bravery like that of the opening 
 bars of "Lohengrin" or the preambles to their codes, they 
 end sometimes in the sublime, sometimes in the ridiculous. 
 
22 AMERICAN LITERATUKE. 
 
 The changes constantly passing over those codes are a series 
 of indices of the direction in which American Eepublicanism 
 is proceeding and the rate at which it moves. Of the thirteen 
 original States of 1787 only two have preserved the form of 
 their original constitutions ; and ten date from 1830 ; that 
 of 'Nevr York from 1846 : and it has been remarked that 
 some of their modifications "have already stamped with 
 legality principles subversive of all previous opinions on 
 the conduct of Government." Of these the election by 
 popular assemblies of judges, for a fixed term of years, without 
 a retiring allowance at their close, has been of very question- 
 able advantage. The official patronage reposed in the hands 
 of the President, investing him with the wholesale dismissal 
 and appointment of every subordinate functionary of State, 
 be he Consul, Comptroller of Customs, or village Postmaster, 
 has proved itself an unquestionable evil.^ 
 
 The same haste and habit of swift transition has a noxious 
 effect on a literature where the shallow omniscience and super- 
 ficial wit, now threatening to demoralise our own, is intensi- 
 fied in parody. To weigh the merits of any great question or 
 man requires thought and leisure, to pour ridicule or laudation 
 on either is easy ; consequently American, even more than 
 English judgments, lean to the one or the other extreme. 
 The satirists of the West are apt to play the part of clowns — 
 the disciples of idolators. Nothing in history or romance is 
 safe from Mark Twain j no seclusion of quiet life from the 
 carnival of oratory held over the coffins of the poets. In 
 England, democratised as it is, a week elapses before our 
 magazines teem with " the personal recollections " of the lion- 
 hunters who have been once graced with a scowl from Carlyle 
 or a smile from Longfellow. Eeviewing, with few exceptions, 
 in both hemispheres is a pretext for the obtrusion of the 
 critic's own crochets or person ; but " interviewing " is a 
 ' See Chapter IV. 
 
GOVERNMENT. 23 
 
 Transatlantic invention for intruding on the great man's, 
 privacy and, then, misreporting him. To similar causes is 
 due the plethora of books of American travel, to which we 
 shall readvert, and their attempts to commemorate what their 
 authors have hardly allowed themselves time to see. None 
 can write really well of a city or of a mountain without having 
 allowed its influences to saturate slowly into his soul. But 
 the newspaper correspondent must have its secret by photo- 
 graph, in a trice, and register it by telegraph. 
 
 Some of the artistic, as well as many of the social, peculi- 
 arities of the United States may doubtless be traced to their 
 form of government. After the obvious wants of life are 
 provided for, democracy stimulates the production of books. 
 An intellectual world, where the utility if not the beauty of 
 knowledge is universally recognised, rises on the ruins of 
 rank. There is a race in which the prize is to the swift,, and 
 every one tries to draw the eyes of others by innumerable 
 imperfect efforts. Multa nan multuni. Art is abundant and 
 inferior : whitewashed wood and brick pass for marble, 
 puerile buffoonery for humour, and rhythmical spasms for 
 poetry. Antiquity presents only apparent exceptions to this 
 rule. Athens ultimately attained the utmost democracy, 
 consistent with the institution of slavery ; but her citizens 
 had previously inherited, from a past so vague that they 
 claimed to have originally sprung from their narrow soil, a 
 set of prescriptions in pre-established harmony with the 
 Hellenic mind. The ideas of limit and order were paramount 
 on their stage : they never knew when they had done enough, 
 but they always knew when they had said enough. Their 
 most agitated assemblies were s-till critical; and no orator 
 ventured to address them in the style of a Western member 
 of Congress. Formality is the prevaUing defect of aristo- 
 cratic literatures : they are apt to be precise and restricted. 
 A democratic literature runs the risk of lawlessness, inaccu- 
 
24 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 racy, and irreverence. From either extreme the Athenian 
 and Florentine and Elizabethan classics were preserved by 
 the artistic inspirations of a flexible tradition. The one is 
 displayed in the so-called Augustan ages of letters, in the 
 France of Louis XIV., and the England of Queen Anne, when 
 men of genius — caring more to cultivate style than to estab- 
 lish truth, more to captivate the taste than to stir the pas- 
 sions — moved, with cHpt wings, in a charmed circle of 
 thought. The other is most conspicuously developed in 
 America, a country which is not only democratic, but youth- 
 ful without the modesty of youth, unmellowed by the past, 
 and untrammelled by authority ; where the spirit of adventure 
 is unrestrained by feelings of personal loyalty ; where order 
 and regularity of all kinds are apt to be misnamed subservi- 
 ence ; where vehemence, vigour, and wit are common ; good 
 taste, profundity, and imagination rare — a country whose 
 untamed material imparts its tamelessness to the people, and 
 diverts them from the task of civilisation to the desire of con- 
 quest. We speak of their average mind and average litera- 
 ture, which reflects the glitter and rush of Broadway or the 
 impetuosity of frontier Ufe, for the more reflective minds 
 among them aim after a higher standard. " We have," writes 
 one of these, himself not wholly unaffected by the national 
 vices, which he has yet the wisdom to condemn, — " we have 
 need of a more rigorous scholastic rule, such an asceticism as 
 only the hardihood and devotion of the scholar himself can 
 enforce. We live in the sun and on the surface, a thin 
 plausible superficial existence, and talk of muse and prophet, 
 of art and creation. But out of our shallow and frivolous 
 way of life, how can greatness ever grow ?" 
 
 American literature is cramped on another side by the 
 spirit of imitation. Up to the present time it has been, in 
 great measure, an offshoot or prolongation of the literature of 
 Europe. Native artists have been prone to take their Intel- 
 
SPIRIT OF IMITATION. 25 
 
 lectual culture from abroad, and to seek the sources, the rules, 
 and the sanctions of their art, in the old wdrld. Their themes 
 are frequently European, their treatment of them still more 
 so ; and their highest ambition, like that of all colonists, has 
 hitherto been to receive a favourable verdict, not from the 
 country of their birth, but from that of their ancestors. 
 Among their early writers of note, Eranklin was a practical 
 disciple of Locke, Jefferson of the French Eevolution. 
 Latterly the Americans have followed the French in dress, 
 talk, eating, and architecture, the English and Germans in 
 thought : their bonnets are Galilean, but their books are Teu- 
 tonic. " The literary genius of Great Britain," says De Tocque- 
 ville, " still darts its rays into the recesses of the forests of the 
 New World. I read the feudal play of Henry V., for the first 
 time, in a log-house. They draw on the treasures of English 
 literature ; and I find the literature of England growing on 
 their own soil. The small number of men who write are 
 English in substance, and still more in form." Of the great 
 number of men who have written since the date of this 
 criticism, only a few have written anything to refute it. 
 Another French critic has remarked that "Washington Irving 
 paints all countries but his own in the style of Addison — a 
 remark applicable to all his works except his Knickerbocker, 
 which is, because of its greater nationality, the most salient of 
 the group. Fenimore Cooper, though possessed of less artistic 
 power, less fluency, and less variety of illustration than. Irving, 
 is more vigorous and peculiar. His sea-pieces are unsur- 
 passed ; but on land he everywhere remembers Scott, and 
 his heroes, his conversations, and his mottoes disclose the 
 latent imitation. The writers of the last thirty years have 
 been making strenuous efforts towards nationality ; but they 
 are stiU hampered by Transatlantic, often French, German, 
 and Italian, rather than English, associations. In the style 
 of Mr. Motley we cannot help tracing the influence of Carlyle, 
 
26 AMERICAN LITEKATURE 
 
 and the reaction begun by Emerson against the reign of 
 Lockist, and Scotch, psychology, is admitted to have derived 
 some impulse from Sartor Resartus. Among the vagaries of 
 its followers — as Alcott, Thoreau, Parker, and Margaret Fuller, 
 none is more salient than their mania for German and Oriental 
 quotations. But this movement merits a distinct study. Let 
 ' it suffice, in this place, to remark on an unhappy commercial 
 accident which operates as an external cause to restrain the 
 graver intellectual energies of the people within the old 
 grooves. The tyranny which five centuries' load of classics, 
 in the same tongue, almost inevitably exercises over the mind 
 of a nation not yet a century old, is materially strengthened 
 by the non-existence of an international copyright. This 
 gross injustice to the authors on both sides of the Atlantic, 
 for the benefit of the publishers on one, leads to the intel- 
 lectual market being glutted with stolen goods. Considera- 
 tions of interest in business are of course everything ; those 
 of principle, or art, or patriotism, nothing. As long, there- 
 fore, as a publisher in Boston or New York can republish a 
 good book — or a bad book that has been puffed into large 
 currency — written in Edinburgh or London, without paying 
 for it, he is sure to prefer an undertaking involving no risk 
 and comparatively little outlay, to another which involves 
 both, i.e., the republication of the English to the new pub- 
 lication of an American book ; for the English book has 
 already attained its reputation, and its popularity in America 
 is secured ; ^ while the American book, for the copyright of 
 which he has to pay, has, except in the case of a few authors, 
 still to win its spurs. But, this circumstance apart, the 
 influence exerted, sometimes consciously sometimes uncon- 
 
 ^ American readers, as a rule, follow, almost slavishly, the verdicts of the 
 ordinary British public. There are exceptions ; they sometimes anticipate 
 our appreciation of an original thinker, as Carlyle. On the other hand, they 
 swallow, in larger doses even than we, such popular platitudes as those of 
 A. K. H. B. and Tupper. 
 
ENGLISH INFLUENCE. 27 
 
 sciously to those affected, by tlie -writers of an older and 
 stabler, if not more civilised, nation on those of a younger, is 
 at iirst, in the nature of things, excessive ; and in the intel- 
 lectual relation of Continental to American art we have a 
 modern version of the ancient " Graecia capta ferum." It is 
 convenient for a foreign reviewer to take shelter behind the 
 confession of a satirist who will not willingly endure from 
 outsiders the repetition of his own rebukes. " Your buxom 
 goddess of freedom," he says to his countrymen — 
 
 " Hides her red hands in gloves, pinches up her lithe waist, 
 And makes herseK wretched with transmarine taste ; 
 She loses her fresh country charms when she takes 
 Any mirror except her own rivers and lakes. 
 You steal Englishmen's books and think Englishmen's thought ; 
 With their salt on her tail your wild eagle is caught ; 
 Your literature suits its each whisper and motion 
 To what will be thought of it over the ocean." 
 
 If the people of the United States had spoken a language 
 of their own, some modification of Mexican or Cherokee, it 
 is probables they would have found originality more easily, 
 without the violences and eccentricities in the midst of which 
 they are beginning to " sign their intellectual Declaration of 
 Independence." This fact is confessed by one of the few 
 signatories, in whose pages there is neither eccentricity nor 
 violence — " Bred in English habits of thought, as most of ns 
 are, we have not yet modified our instincts to the necessities 
 of our new modes of life. Our philosophers have not yet 
 taught us what is best, nor have our poets sung to us what is 
 most beautifxil in the kind of life that we must lead, and 
 therefore we still read the old English wisdom, and harp upon 
 the ancient strings." 
 
 It may, however, be doubted if the writer of this sentence 
 — the greatest prose artist of the States, himself a scion of 
 the pure Pilgrim blood — realises (the mass of English critics 
 certainly fail to realise) the complexity of the problem. 
 
28 AMERICAN^LITEEATURE. 
 
 political, social, and intellectual, with wMch his countrymen 
 have had to deal. America is not all English, not even all 
 Caucasian. She has been from the first century of settlement 
 a theatre open to first comers from every clime and of every 
 origin. "Men," says one of her writers, "come hither in 
 nations :" hence inevitable want of unity and composite 
 spirit. In one locality the prevailing language is still 
 French, in another Spanish. In aU the principal towns 
 there are German quarters, Chinese in shoals in the far west, 
 and Irish everywhere. There are the germs of all politics — 
 " Aristocrat, Autocrat, Democrat " — and of all religions. The 
 State that is blent, and the literature that is constructed, out of 
 these often jarring elements must, in the long run, be like no 
 one ingredient ; it must be an amalgam of all. Englishmen 
 are too prone to forget that the partially kindred blood, which 
 ought to promote friendship, cannot insure identity of aim. 
 Safe in their island home they smile at a turbulence largely 
 due to the lawless spirits they have banished across the seas. 
 The Old World is strong enough to overlook the petulance of 
 the New, which in its turn is great enough to receive, and, it 
 may be, in process of time to harmonise, the elements of 
 discord in the Old. As regards literature, the best advice is 
 that of the gentlest, finest, most cosmopolitan spirit of the 
 West : " The greatest lesson which the lives of literary men 
 teach us is told in a single word — Wait. . . . Our national 
 character, with its feverish impatient throbs, wants the dignity 
 of repose. We seem to live in the midst of a battle — there 
 is such a din, such a hurrying to and fro. In the streets of 
 a crowded city it is difficult to move slowly, in the press of 
 our life to be calm. In this stress of wind and tide, aH pro- 
 fessions seem to drag their anchors, and are swept out into 
 the main. The voices of the present say — Come ! But the 
 voices of the past say — ^Waft !" 
 
PERIODS OF LITERATURE. 29 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 THE COLONIAL PEEIOD. 
 
 We may trace the influence of the controlling facts or 
 tendencies to which we have referred, through the three great 
 periods under which American history obviously falls : — 
 I. The Colonial, or Period of Settlement. • 
 II. The Revolutionary, or Period of Struggle for Inde- 
 pendence. 
 
 III. The first three quarters of the Nineteenth century. 
 
 I. The voices of the first period are, to the modern English 
 reader, few, faint, and far. It was a time of great and fruitful 
 activity. The constitutions of the early states were being tenta- 
 tively laid down, and social rules of life, destined to influence 
 their descendants, were being formulated by the settlers ; but 
 literature, outside the range of a primitive politics and a 
 severe theology, was only beginning, under unfavourable con- 
 ditions, to exist. The prose and rude verse of the Colonial 
 days are, with some exceptions, the stammering speech of an 
 energetic, industrial people, whose hands are in constant 
 conflict with barren deserts, wild beasts, or rude tribes ; 
 whose hearts are aflame with fervour ; but whose heads are 
 bewildered by superstitions, as natural to their circumstances 
 as to their age. That age was, in some respects, fortunate in 
 having no professional authors ; for' thfe absence of literary 
 ambitions, with their attendant jealousies, left the pioneers 
 
30 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 of civilisation more free to devote themselves to their besetting 
 tasks, to accomplish which, and not to secure either present 
 praise or future fame, they gave alike their sinews and their 
 brains. Professor Coit Tyler's recent book on this Era of 
 the Dawn is so judicious, fair, and full (its sole grave defect 
 being a sometimes diffusive iteration of exaggerated praise), 
 that most readers, whose life is limited, will accept it as their 
 authority for the matter and manner of the haK-forgotten 
 folios it has rescued from oblivion. This author roughly 
 divides our first period into two sections : — that from 1607 
 (the date of the settlement of Virginia) to 1676, when the 
 close of King Philip's war established the power of the 
 settlers, to hold their ground against the native tribes ; and 
 that from 16V6 to 1765, the date of the passing of the Stamp 
 Act. During the former interval, he notes that the civilisation 
 of the New World was due to immigrants bred in England ; 
 during the latter it was mainly " in the hands of Americans 
 born in America." Two features are common to both : the 
 scant literature of the time was developed in diverse groups 
 of states, having with each other only distant and casual 
 relationships ; it had no national character : moreover, the 
 civilisation was almost wholly transplanted from England. 
 The congeries of races, which it is the great problem of the 
 Federation to harmonise, had not begun to gather. The 
 Latin elements — Spanish and French — of Florida and 
 Louisiana had not yet been introduced ; nor the Celtic, nor 
 the German, save in the Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam, 
 which, passing perforce into our hands in 1664, became New 
 York. 
 
 There is, in the writings of the early time, no trace of the 
 cosmopolitan spirit which has only during the last few 
 decades begun to take shape ; nor do they, in any consider- 
 able degree, reflect the differences of rank. Of the two 
 original " distributing centres " of our race, the northern was 
 
VIRGINIAN COLONISTS. 31 
 
 almost wholly peopled by well-to-do representatives of the 
 middle class ; the " Old Dominion" of Virginia, the founda- 
 tion of which partially realised the dreams of Ealeigh, was 
 originally settled by more motley crews, consisting, on 
 the one hand, of adventurous gentlemen like himself; on 
 the other, by an attendant throng of dissolute retainers, 
 who left their country for their country's good. Two 
 centuries later the heirs of the one set were the great 
 statesmen and planters, of the other the " mean whites " 
 of the South. 
 
 As Virginia was the parent of Anglo-American life, so it 
 was the parent of Anglo-American literature. But this 
 colony, founded at the time of the meridian blaze of English 
 imagination, when Shakespeare was, in his greatest plays, 
 holding up the mirror to our grandest life, has in its written 
 records little trace of the richness and grasp of our passionate 
 Elizabethan thought. The first impulse of an emigrant is 
 not to write dramas, but to send home a letter to his friends. 
 Like the Spaniards of a still earlier age, who in the track of 
 Cortez and Pizarro had been lured from their native land by 
 the thirst of conquest, discovery, or gain, these Virginian 
 Englishmen, in the pauses between the stress of fortification 
 and crude legislature, were content with more or less con- 
 nected notes of their new experiences of nature and of men, 
 of sea and land, of battle and of tUlage. The most remark- 
 able of these is the account of the first considerable Western 
 settlement by its first Governor, Captain John Smith. The 
 life of this remarkable man, traveller and fighter over half 
 the world then known, is one of the most vivid of romances : 
 from his single-handed encounter with the three Turks, whose 
 heads he cut off, in the East, to the rash exploration when 
 he was saved from an Indian club by the child Pocahontas, 
 it reads more like a canto of The Cid or a chapter of 
 Westward Ho ! than a page of real biography. His True 
 
32 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 Relation of Virginia is characterised by the graphic, often 
 quaint, vigour of a style like that of Defoe, and hy the sound 
 sense, dominating will, and administrative power which 
 it displays. This narrative, published in London (1608), 
 has been recognised as the earliest book in American litera- 
 ture. Smith, who died in 1631, after, in other volumes, 
 detailing his adventures, may be regarded as the last pure 
 scion of the race of our Norse sea-kings. Two years subse- 
 quent to the date of Smith's True Relation there appeared 
 (1610) William Strachey's account of The Wrack and Re- 
 demption of Sir Thomas Gates, by his commander on the out- 
 ward voyage, " upon and from the islands of the Bermudas," 
 which, resplendent with passages of descriptive power, is 
 believed to have supplied the groundwork of " The Tempest." 
 Classical scholarship was, in the same district, represented by 
 George Sandys, who, exhorted thereto by his friend Michael 
 Drayton, completed on the banks of the James river (1626) 
 a highly creditable, because frequently imaginative though 
 sometimes rough, translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses. About 
 the same time the Welsh Puritan, Vaughan, sent home from 
 Newfoundland his Golden Fleece. In 1633 Maryland was 
 detached from Virginia for the benefit of King Charles' 
 favourite. Lord Baltimore; and nearly a generation after- 
 wards the two sister States, as "Leah and Eachel" were 
 extolled in John Hammond's vigorous apology. At an earlier 
 date Governor Smith had felt called on to defend the country 
 of his adoption against injurious rumours, the effect of which 
 in retarding emigration he quaintly clenches — " The company 
 in London became suitors to his Majesty to compel vaga- 
 bonds and condemned men to go thither. Nay, some did 
 choose to be hanged before they would go thither, and were." 
 Similarly, Hammond, on a visit to London, expresses his 
 amaze at the ignorance of people in a condition below that 
 of " the meanest servant in Virginia," who would rather cry 
 
EARLY VIRGINIAN RECORDS. 33 
 
 on the streets, or " stuff Newgate and Bridewell, or cleave to 
 Tyburn," than forsake their even then overcrowded lanes for 
 " a place of pleasure and plenty." Two years later the witty 
 Alsop, in lighter strain, celebrated Maryland alone. The invi- 
 tations of these settlers have, after the lapse of two centuries, 
 had a response beyond their reckoning. Before the Eevolution, 
 the States numbered three millions ; now their population 
 has reached fifty millions. Eleven years after its settlement, 
 Virginia received an importation destined to poison its life- 
 blood. In 1819, a Dutch vessel, " rigged with curses dark," 
 sailed up the James river, and landed, on its north bank, 
 twenty negro slaves. The other arrivals of the early time — 
 especially between 1640-60 — ^were troops of Cavaliers. After 
 the Eestoration, it received an infusion of old CromweUians 
 — exiles in their turn ; but these last neither disturbed 
 the loyalty, nor seriously affected the manners, of the 
 colony. 
 
 " The Merry Monarch" has been credited with a clemency 
 largely due to indifferentisra : he tolerated Milton and 
 esteemed Marvell; as James V. of Scotland had continued, 
 through life, to cherish regard for his old tutor Sir David 
 Lyndsay. But Charles II., if a poor hater, was a weak lover ; 
 and satire said that his siiccession to power meant " indemnity 
 to his enemies and oblivion to his friends." He wore a robe 
 of Virginian silk at his coronation, passed Navigation Acts 
 tending to ruin the colony, and sent out Sir Wniiam Berkeley 
 to misrule it. This incompetent person having exasperated 
 the people, by leaving them unprotected against the Indian 
 raids, they chose a chief for themselves, Nathaniel Bacon, 
 who repelled the savages, but was arraigned as a rebel, and 
 subsequently died with suspicious suddenness. The leading 
 incidents of his struggle with the Governor have been pre- 
 served in the Burvjell Papers, a fantastic but animated 
 record, with which Mr. Tyler collates a set of anonymous 
 
 D 
 
34 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 verses on Bacon's death, containing some trenchant, if tough, 
 lines, e.g. — 
 
 " Virginia's foes, 
 To whom, for secret crimes, just vengeance owes 
 Deserved plagues, dreading their just desert, 
 Corrupted death, by Paracelsian art. 
 Him to destroy. . . . Our arms, though ne'er so strong. 
 Will want the aid of his commanding tongue. 
 Which conquered more than Csesar." 
 
 In this scattered feudal society, there were neither the 
 inducements nor the opportunities for any varied develop- 
 ment of speculative thought or artistic criticism ; and the 
 spirit of Sir William Berkeley's prayer, " I thank God we 
 have no free schools here nor printing . . . God keep us from 
 both!" continued to inspire it. The iirst press in the Old 
 Dominion dates from 1681, the second only from 1766, and 
 neither had much to do. In 1693 the Scotch immigrant, 
 Blair, had the honour of founding the College of William 
 and Mary, but it continued, in practice, to be no more than 
 a high -class secondary school. Of Virginian writers pre- 
 vious to the time of the Eevolution, it only remains, in our 
 rapid survey, to mention Eobert Beverley — the first and 
 perhaps the most lively historian of the colony — and 
 William Byrd, who, being employed to fix the bounds 
 between Virginia and North Carolina, diverged from the 
 lines of an official record, to assaU. with vigorous invective 
 the inhabitants of the younger and rival settlement — a 
 settlement of which John Lawson had previously, with equal 
 unreserve, celebrated the praises. Maryland is, during the 
 same period, somewhat unpleasantly, represented in litera- 
 ture by the verse satire of Ebenezer Cook, which, though 
 mainly written in the Hudibrastic jingle so often a model 
 to early American versifiers, seems in its best passages 
 nearer to the original than other contemporary imitations. 
 The following is, in the space, one of the keenest travesties 
 
OTHER COLONIES. 35 
 
 of the besetting sin of a sect singularly free from " sins of 
 blood" — a sect, on both sides of the Atlantic, that has passed 
 by thrift and perseverance through persecution to prosperity ; 
 that, as others, had and has its hypocrites as well as its saints 
 and martyrs. 
 
 " To this inteht,^ with guide before, 
 I tripped it to the eastern shore. 
 While, riding near a sandy bay, 
 I met a Quaker, yea and nay ; 
 A pious conscientious rogue 
 As e'er wore bonnet or a brogue ; ^ 
 Who neither swore nor kept his word, 
 But cheated, in the fear of God ; 
 And, when his debts he would not pay, 
 By light within he ran away." 
 
 South Carolina (settled 1669), unconscious of her future rdle 
 as the great political protagonist of Massachusetts, gives, during 
 this period, a somewhat thin contribution to controversy in the 
 attacks on Whitfield by Alexander Garden, who complains, 
 in one salient sentence, that rational .religion is " crucified 
 between two thieves — Infidelity and Enthusiasm j" while 
 Georgia, the latest of the Southern group, an afterbirth of 
 General Oglethorpe's philanthropy (1733), bites her founder's 
 hand, in the pointed polemic against his administration by 
 his adversaries Anderson, Douglass, and TaUfer. The great 
 colonies — New York and New Jersey (made English in 
 1664), Pennsylvania and Delaware (established, in 1682, on 
 Penn's new principle of driving bargains with the natives 
 instead of massacring them) — have, during the seven- 
 teenth and early years of the eighteenth centuries, even 
 less to show of general literary interest. A few sermons, 
 descriptions of Indians, accounts of events, and bad verses, 
 make up the list ; but here and there there are, in these 
 scattered leaves, traces of the cosmopolitan spirit that 
 afterwards characterised this central group. 
 
 1 To biiy and sell. ^ Dutch, Jjroek, meaning breeches. 
 
36 AMERICAN LITERATUEE. 
 
 Meanwhile, on the north of the same coast-line, other 
 settlements had been made, on other conditions. In 1620, 
 — shortly after the fateful black cargo had been discharged 
 on a bank of the James river, — the Pilgrim Fathers, 
 setting sail from Holland, their eleven years' halting-place, 
 had landed at New Plymouth. They were followed, in 1628, 
 by the first settlers of Massachusetts Bay ; in 1629, by those 
 of New Hampshire. In 1630, a larger importation of men, of 
 more wealth and higher station, came over under Winthrop. 
 The next decade, that immediately preceding our civil war, saw 
 the foundation of Connecticut, and the arrival of a throng of 
 exiles, mainly inspired by the same spirit. With a sprinkling 
 of adventurers, like the early Virginians, the great majority 
 were religious refugees or political enthusiasts who had been 
 driven, by hate or fear of Strafford and Laud, from their farms 
 or country seats, tabernacles or universities, in the Old Eng- 
 land, to plant their feet and faith firmly on the shores of the 
 New, and endeavour to establish there an ideal common- 
 wealth. This commonwealth was an almost literal realisation 
 of the desire of the most thorough-going Puritans at home. 
 The men who stayed behind, to fight at Marston Moor and 
 Dunbar, were idealists ; but even they were constrained, in 
 some degree, to adapt their practice to the requirements of 
 tradition, and the force of circumstance, in an already com- 
 plex society : they had to yield to the practical genius of a 
 beneficent despot, and accept the author of the Areopagitica 
 as their secretary of state. The men who followed Miles 
 Standish and Endicott and John Winthrop across the seas 
 and against the Indians, were able, with scarce a trammel, 
 to thrust to its conclusion their theory of life. Extremists, 
 with no hindrance but their hard physical environment, 
 they were able to break with all the Past, save that of the 
 Hebrews, and put into practice a policy more rigid than 
 that of the Ironsides. In their early history there are two 
 
NEW ENGLAND. 37 
 
 dominant features — a force of character, half bodily half 
 spiritual, rarely equalled, never surpassed, and a fervid, 
 almost ferocious, narrowness of mind that would have shocked 
 Luther, staggered Knox, and satisfied Calvin.. Their personal 
 intrepidity was equal to that of De Soto's pioneers or Drake's 
 seamen ; and it was inspired by a purpose more persistent, in 
 part at least because it was animated by a belief in realities 
 beyond the range of material vision. The little wooden 
 towns, guarded by the pike and matchlock and piety of men, 
 putting their trust in God and keeping their powder dry, 
 within a generation after the landing of the Mayflower, had 
 developed into the " United Colonies of New England," 
 destined to form the intellectual and moral backbone of 
 Anglo- America. But from this early federation — on whose 
 model in some respects that of a continent has been framed — 
 one colony, Ehode Island, was excluded, because it would 
 not accept the practical principles of tyranny to which 
 these early fanatics for theoretic freedom stubbornly clung. 
 The men who left the green lanes of Kent and Sussex 
 for the bleak rocks of Cape Cod, were martyrs for con- 
 science sake ; but what their conscience demanded was 
 permission to hold and preach " the truth," by no means 
 liberty of thought. The worst and surest lesson of persecu- 
 tion — how to persecute — they had learnt by heart ; and their 
 only rivals (within the domain of semi- civilisation), in the 
 practice and precept of intolerance, are to be found among the 
 Inquisitors of Spain or the Scottish Covenanters. The litera- 
 ture, outside of that concerned with the interests, arguments, 
 and battles of their faith, is a mere fringe on the life of the 
 community entrusted to their care. It consists of description 
 and narrative, the best passages of which rise to the dignity 
 of prose-poetry or of history, and a few scattered verses. 
 Enough, under the first head, remains to show that the sus- 
 ceptibility of the old northern voyagers to the fresh impres- 
 
38 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 sioBS and aspects of animate and inanimate nature was in no 
 
 way inferior to that of the southern. We have many pages 
 
 ahout the wonders and mysteries of the great deep, over 
 
 which their writers crossed ; the wildernesses they had to 
 
 traverse ; the strange races they encountered ; descriptions of 
 
 new plants and birds and fishes, that relieve the stress and 
 
 strain of controversy, and show us, by glimpses, a heart 
 
 within the breast of those cast-iron men. Such passages as 
 
 these are frequent in "William Bradford's History of Plymouth 
 
 Plantation, a MS. lost, till it was found in 1855 in the 
 
 Fulham Library, and meanwhile plundered by his nephew, 
 
 Nathaniel Norton. On leaving Leyden (1820), Bradford 
 
 writes — 
 
 " So they left that goodly and pleasant city, which had been their 
 resting-place near twelve years ; but they knew they were pilgrims, 
 and looked not so much on those things, but lift up their eyes to the 
 heavens, their dearest country, and quieted their spirits." 
 
 And on reaching Plymouth — 
 
 " Being thus arrived in a good harbour, and brought safe to land, 
 they fell upon their knees and blessed the God of heaven, who had 
 brought them over the vast and furious ocean, and delivered them 
 from all the perils and miseries thereof, again to set their feet on the 
 firm and stable land, their proper element. And no marvel if they 
 were thus joyful, seeing wise Seneca was so affected with sailing a few 
 miles on the coast of his own Italy, as he affirmed, that he had rather 
 remain twenty years on his way by land than pass by sea in a short 
 time, so tedious and dreadful was the same unto him." 
 
 Nine years later Francis Higginson, after being "horribly 
 tossed " by the waves, similarly rejoices — 
 
 " June 24th. — This day we had all a clear and comfortable sight of 
 America. June 29th. — As we passed along, it was wonderful to behold 
 so many islands replenished with thick wood and high trees, and many 
 fair green pastures. . . . Those that love their own chimney corner, 
 and dare not go beyond their own town's end, shall never have the 
 honoiu- to see these wonderful works of the Almighty God." 
 
 William Wood draws a like pleasant picture of the haven of 
 Massachusetts Bay; and after a prevalent fashion, intersperses 
 
FIRST NORTHERN SETTLERS. 39 
 
 his prose with verse descriptions : one of the latter — that of 
 New England trees — has considerable merit, both of epithet 
 and rhythm, and would have more, were it less closely 
 modelled on the impossible forest of Spenser's First Book. 
 A little later, we have the equally graphic land sketches of 
 John Josselyn, with the incident (used by Longfellow in his 
 Endicott tragedy) of the gathering of a wasp's nest for a 
 fruit, and his description of a bird whose existence is, like 
 that of the roc in the Arabian Nights, maliciously disputed. 
 The pilhannaw is 
 
 " a monstrous great bird . . . four times as big as a goshawk, white- 
 mailed, having two or three purple feathers in her head as long as 
 goose's feathers .... her head is as big as a child's of a year old, a 
 very princely bird. When she soars abroad all sorts of feathered crea- 
 tures hide themselves ; yet she never preys upon them but upon fawns 
 and jackals. She aeries in the woods tipon the high hills of Ossapy." 
 
 Equally vivid in the field of action is Winslow's narrative of 
 Miles Standish's first encounter with the Indians ; or Captain 
 John Mason's of the "Mystic Eight" in the Pequot war, where, 
 the wigwams being burnt, the savages ran "into the very 
 flames," and there were " only seven taken captive." 
 
 The last reference reminds us that we are reviewing the 
 . records of men hardened in the battle for life, whose earnest- 
 ness was continually passing into ferocity. Their general 
 tone of feeling towards the aborigines is inhuman ; and 
 nowhere more so than when it finds expression side by side 
 with outbursts of a profound and pitiless piety. Two sen- 
 tences from The Wonder Working Providence of Edward 
 Johnson, foremost of the soldier-gentlemen who came over 
 with Winthrop, will suf&ce to illustrate this — 
 
 " The Lord, in mercy toward His poor churches, having thus de- 
 stroyed these bloody barbarous Indians, He returns His people in 
 safety to their vessels, where they take account of their prisoners. 
 The squaws and some young youths they brought home with them : 
 and finding the men to be deeply guilty of the crimes they undertook 
 the war for, they brought away only their heads." 
 
40 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 Among the leading actors or thinkers of the time there are 
 three conspicuously honourable exceptions to the policy of 
 conversion by extermination : — John Eliot, the " Apostle of 
 the Indians," into whose language he translated a great portion 
 of the Scriptures ; his benevolent friend, Daniel Gookin, an 
 immigrant from England through Virginia, originator of the 
 claim, " no taxation without representation," the rumout of 
 whose death, according to Mr. Tyler, " carried sorrow into 
 every red man's wigwam in Massachusetts"; and Eoger 
 Williams. The last, as the finest figure of our early period, 
 demands a brief notice in the most cursory sketch of its 
 development ; but to appreciate his moral and intellectual 
 courage, we must revert to the forces with which he had to 
 contend. Williams, says the historian Bancroft, was "the 
 first in Christendom to assert, in its plenitude, the doctrine 
 of Liberty of Conscience ; he was the harbinger of Milton, 
 the precursor of Taylor." His prime claim to our respect is 
 the fact that he asserted this doctrine under the most un- 
 favourable circumstances ; and was, in its defence, almost 
 single-handed against the best as well as the worst of his 
 compeers. 
 
 The strength and weakness alike of the seventeenth cen- 
 tury Puritans, lay rooted in a Hebraic belief in their being a 
 chosen people, sent on a divinely-guided crusade against error 
 and sin in all the corners of the earth. The results of this 
 conviction appear in sublime and in ludicrous aspects in the 
 early records of New England. Many of the accounts of the 
 perils and escapes of the early voyagers are written in the 
 style and saturated with the sentiment of Bunyan passing 
 through the Valley of the Shadow, as through his life, at- 
 tended or beset by " legions of demons that lurk, armies of 
 angels that soar." But the stamp of Bunyan's half insanity, 
 as well as his inspiration, is on the pages of those warrior- 
 preachers ; and their special providences often degenerate into 
 
REMARKABLE PROVIDENCES. 41 
 
 almost blasphemous burlesque, e-g., Anthony Thacker, saved 
 from shipwreck, narrates : " As I was sliding off the rock 
 into the sea the Lord directed my toes into a joint in the 
 rock's side, as also the tops of some of my fingers." Another 
 zealot informs us that the mice in the cupboard, eating the 
 Episcopal Prayer Book and leaving untouched the Psalms, 
 converted him to Presbyterianism ; another, that a barber 
 of Boston, called to draw a tooth in Eoxbury, was frozen to 
 death on the way home, because he used, when at his work 
 of hair -clipping, to argue against predestination ; another, 
 that a Harvard president was mysteriously cut short in his 
 public prayer, after which the college was found to be on 
 fire. Mather's BemarJcahle Providences are in great measure 
 a record of infatuations similar to those of a later age so 
 incomparably gibbeted by Sidney Smith. These are the 
 grotesques of a superstition, the essence of which lay in an 
 assumption of infallibility as absolute as, during the same 
 period, with equal self-sacrifice and zeal, the Jesuit mis- 
 sionaries were inculcating in Canada among the Hurons. 
 Such a belief, accompanied with the historically twin dogma, 
 that our eternal destiny is dependent upon the accuracy 
 of our theological views, is inconsistent with tolerance 
 and ought to lead to persecution. A happy inconsistency, 
 a humane faint-heartedness, has protected many ages and 
 nations from their legitimate consequences ; but the leaders 
 of New England were neither faint-hearted nor humane, and 
 they accepted these consequences as emphatically as Calvin did 
 when, for the saving of souls, he burned Servetus. Their key- 
 major is struck in the following sentence of Edward Johnson : — 
 
 " You are not to set up for tolerating times, nor shall any of you 
 be content with this that you are set at liberty ; but take up your 
 arms and inarch manfully on till all opposers of Christ's kingly power 
 be abolished ; and as for you who are called to sound forth His silver 
 trumpets, blow loud and shrill to this chiefest treble tune — for the 
 armies of the great Jehovah are at hand." 
 
42 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 Thomas Shepard, in the same spirit, declared that toleration 
 was " Satan's policy;" and in his Collier ofAgawam Nathaniel 
 "Ward, an accomplished Cambridge scholar, exiled by Laud, 
 breaks out — 
 
 " I dare take upon me to be the herald of New England so far as 
 to proclaim to the world in the name of our colony, that all Familists, 
 Antinomians, Anabaptists, and other enthusiasts, shall have free liberty 
 — ^to keep away from us ; and such as will come to be gone as fast as 
 they can, the sooner the better." And elsewhere, " Polypiety is the 
 greatest impiety in the world. ... To authorise an untruth by tolera- 
 tion of State is ... to batter God out of His chair. . . . He that is 
 willing to tolerate any unsound opinion, that his own may also be 
 tolerated, though never so sound, will for a need hang God's Bible at 
 the devil's girdle. ... It is said that men ought to have liberty of 
 their conscience, and that it is persecution to debar them of it. . . . 
 Let all the wits under the heavens lay their heads together and find an 
 assertion worse than this, I will petition to be chosen the universal 
 idiot of the world. ... I desire all good men may be saved from their 
 lunatic creed by infidelity. . . . Since I knew what to fear, my timor- 
 ous heart hath dreaded three things : a blazing star appearing in the 
 air ; a State comet, I mean a favourite rising in a kingdom ; a new 
 opinion spreading in religion." 
 
 Considering how close a travesty these sentences convey 
 of the sentiments of Laud himself, we are half inclined to 
 suspect Mr. Ward of playing Mephistopheles, like Defoe in his 
 " Short way with the Dissenters ;" in gravity or mockery he 
 has the merit of saying the strongest words in defence of 
 a system of which, in the New "World, he is the frankest 
 advocate : they are the natural outcome of the popular theo- 
 logy, of the heU. painted so lovingly by Thomas Hooker, of 
 the total depravity in the contemplation of which Thomas 
 Shepard seems to revel, of the ponderous pages of terrible 
 logic with which John Cotton used to " love to sweeten his 
 mouth before he went to sleep." As far as the graver matters 
 of the law were concerned, these saintly men were only 
 singular in their sincerity, their contempt for half measures, 
 and their power. The early history of New England being 
 that of a Democratic Theocracy, there was no room for the 
 
RELIGIOUS INTOLERANCE. 43 
 
 intellectually fertile antagonism of Priest and Prophet : the 
 persons and functions of the two, with many of the preroga- 
 tives of King, were combined. The Church being " free," in 
 the sense of controlling the Legislature, the mass of the people 
 were intellectually, and in many respects, legally, the slaves 
 of the clergy. The pnlpit was the high throne of State, the 
 rostra, and the judgment seat ; the sermons the only play. 
 The religious services lasted commonly for five hours, and the 
 whole population, over infancy, were compelled to attend them : 
 they were driven in by elders deputed for the task, and the 
 sexes herded apart, like oxen in pens. Boys who fell asleep 
 were whipped, women tickled. Absence without excuse of 
 " illness or other necessary cause" was punished first by a fine, 
 then by the stocks. The week-day life of the people was 
 regulated with like severity. To any one of a genial tempera- 
 ment, existence in those days must have been one of pains 
 and penalties. Amusements were interdicted, and the most 
 innocent recreations condemned. The Puritans, as Macaulay 
 tells us, " hated bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the 
 bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators." From 
 the time -when lEndicott and Standish struck down the pretty 
 "Maypole of Merry Mount" (which Mr. Hawthorne's genius 
 has wreathed again), and called the place " Dagon," to that 
 in which the rival interests of the Eevolution set a limit to 
 this tyranny, life in the New England of the " old colonial 
 day " must have been more dismal than life in Cromwellian, 
 almost in proportion as that was more dismal than life in 
 Elizabethan England. The nearest parallel is to be found in 
 Scotland during the later part of the same century, when, Mr. 
 Buckle tells us, a mother was publicly censured for kissing 
 her child on the Sabbath day. But at New Plymouth a maid- 
 servant who had smiled in church "was threatened with 
 banishment from the colony," and a woman who ventured 
 to blame an elder "had a cleft-stick put on her tongue." 
 
ii AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 Laughter was frowned at — "How can you be merry?" said a 
 gruff fellow to some harmless youngsters, "unless you are 
 sure of your salvation;" the use of starch and tobacco 
 regarded as criminal ; " a solemn association" was " instituted" 
 against long hair ; and a lady who wore a fashionable dress, 
 pronounced by a high cleric " fitter to be kicked, if she were 
 of a kickable substance, than humoured." 
 
 What wonder that the ascetic zealots, who were kindled 
 into a rage of gloom by the sight of a cheerful countenance, 
 a coquettish curl, or a flowing dress, should have fined, 
 scourged, branded, and banished from their Zion all Baptists, 
 Quakers, and men of every shade of belief except their own. 
 A heavy price, the risk of being hanged for a false premise 
 or conclusion, had to be paid for holding acres rent free, 
 owning no " superior," and dwelling on the edge of a new 
 land in the midst of exciting alarms. To the fantasies 
 logically consequent upon their creed they added others 
 incident to their condition. People in peril are, with few 
 exceptions, superstitious, and, despite their confident faith 
 in a polestar Providence, these pioneers felt like sailors in 
 a rough and unknown sea. They were in constant contact 
 with novelties which predispose to credulity, and, breathing 
 the same electric atmosphere that has so materially con- 
 duced to modern Spiritualism, they were often in a state of 
 body, as well as of mind, ready to be impressed by marvels, 
 or imposed upon by hallucinations. The natural outlets 
 being stopped, their pent up enthusiasm found vent in the 
 most physically dangerous over - excitement — that called 
 religious. One saint's prayers, we are told, "were so fervent, 
 that he bled at the nose through the agony with which he 
 laboured at them ;" and we can imagine that the same per- 
 verted overstrain developed many incipient Puritan Saint 
 Theresas, of whom the latest types are to be found probably 
 at Oneida Creek. Never was the verse of Joel more verified — 
 
SUPERSTITIONS. 45 
 
 " Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men 
 shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions." 
 " Living," writes Professor Tyler, " on a narrow strip of land, 
 between the two infinities of the ocean and the wilderness 
 . . . they had overpowering manifestations of spiritual force ; 
 they heard awful voices in the air, ;^ and strange sights 
 glimmered before their eyes on the verge of the forest." 
 Winthrop's history is full of strange records of mysterious 
 man-shaped gleams closing and parting in sparkles over mid- 
 night hills, and of dreadful cries heard "by divers godly 
 persons," shifting and calling over evening seas. This state 
 of mind was perfectly adapted to receive the belief in the 
 direct personal agency of the evil spirit — "Sathan is now 
 in his passions," says Nathaniel "Ward ; " he loves to fish in 
 roiled waters" — and to foster the Witch-mania, so conspicu- 
 ous a feature of the age. Nothing can be added to Mr. 
 Leckie's impressive record of a series of tragedies, the crown- 
 ing pathos of which lies in the fact that, in many cases, the 
 victims themselves shared the delusion. Early Christian, 
 Catholic, and Protestant martyrs were supported in the 
 flames by the faith that they were being borne, on a fiery 
 chariot, to celestial light ; the wretches who were tortured 
 and slain in Scotland and North America, during the seven- 
 teenth century, were oppressed by the belief that their present 
 agonies were a prelude of those to come. The first outbreak of 
 this popular fanaticism in New England is marked by the execu- 
 tion, in 1645, of four old women : after this the fire smouldered 
 (the keen persecution between 1650-60 of the Quakers and 
 Baptists affording sport enough for the hunters of souls), till in 
 1692 it broke out in the great massacre of Salem. This crisis, 
 in the course of which, besides a host of women, one minister 
 and one dog were hanged, ultimately closed in a reaction, with 
 the recantations and regrets of the principal persecutors. 
 ' Compare Macaulay's account of the semi-delirmm of Bunyan. 
 
46 AMERICAN LITERATUKE. 
 
 Into this society, in 1631 (crossing the seas from Bristol 
 and arriving with Eliot), came Eogee Williams, a self -dis- 
 frocked English Churchman, of Welsh impulsiveness, of quick 
 temper, of imperfect tact, but whose nature " showed a heart 
 within, hlood-tinctured with a veined humanity." There is 
 no evidence to show that he was, in matters of abstract 
 speculation, in advance of his age, or that he doubted the 
 infallibility of his creed, or questioned the danger of those 
 who refused to accept it ; but he had got a firm hold of the 
 idea — in his age most rare — that men cannot be dragooned 
 into orthodoxy. In his word controversies — notably with the 
 more fanatical of the followers of George Fox — he was as 
 unsparing of invective as his compeers ; but he held fast 
 to his maxim that "persecutors of men's bodies seldom or 
 never do these men's souls good." Unlike the New England 
 hierophants, he was a consistent voluntary : he maintained 
 that Church and State have separate spheres, and that the civil 
 power is concerned solely with " the bodies, goods, and out- 
 ward estates " of men. The offence given by these views,, 
 aggravated by his questioning the right of the white colonists 
 to seize the red man's land, drew him into such disgrace that, 
 after five years' residence as minister of Salem, he was 
 brought to trial, and driven from Massachusetts into the 
 wilderness. Thence, after many privations, gathering round 
 him men of like mind, and inviting the poor, the needy, the 
 discredited for conscience sake, he secured a tract of country 
 from the Indians, and founded his own colony of Ehode 
 Island. Shortly after his settlement, we find him interceding 
 on behalf of the tribes, among whose tents he had often 
 lodged, and rejoicing at the close of the Pequot war that 
 " some of the Christian chiefs are almost adverse from killing 
 men and women." When his State was excluded from the 
 Federation, he went to England (then in the throes of the 
 Civil War) to obtain for it a charter, and, having succeeded in 
 
ROGER "WILLIAMS. 47 
 
 his mission, returned to govern it paternally for twenty years 
 longer before liis death. During his visit to the old home he 
 published his great challenge to intolerance, entitled, The 
 Bloody Tenet of Persecution for Cause of Conscience. This 
 work, issued in the same year (1644) as the Areopagitica, went 
 beyond it in discarding even Milton's limitations. 
 
 " It is," Williams dared to say, " the will and command of God that 
 ... a permission of the most Paganish, Jewish, Turkish, or Anti- 
 christian consciences and worships be granted to all men, in all nations 
 and countries : and they are to be fought against with that sword 
 which is only in soul-matters able to conquer — to wit, the sword of 
 God's spirit." 
 
 Mr. John Cotton having attempted to answer this in his 
 Bloody Tenet Washed, — one of those tracts, whose very titles 
 help to explain Mr. Foster's problem as to the aversion of 
 men of taste to Evangelical Eeligion, — ^WUliams conclusively 
 replied : 
 
 " I must confess, while heaven and earth last, that no one tenet 
 that either London, England, or the world doth harbour, is so heretical, 
 blasphemous, seditious, and dangerous to the corporal, to the spiritual, 
 to the present, to the eternal good of men, as the bloody tenet (how- 
 ever washed and whited) of persecution for cause of conscience." 
 
 His after writings, especially his defence, as President of his 
 State, against the charge of instigating anarchy, are all inspired 
 by the same noble enthusiasm for liberty, tempered and con- 
 trolled by the good common sense that made him a capable 
 administrator as well as an effective philanthropist. Two 
 hundred years could not pass without a few free-thinkers 
 bold enough to fling down a random glove of challenge ; 
 but Williams stands alone, during that period, on the "Western 
 Continent in combining the most intense religiousness, almost 
 orthodoxy, with the acceptance, in its full extent, of the results 
 of universal toleration. The teaching and the life of this great 
 man cannot have been without their influence in preparing 
 the way for the change of intellectual atmosphere that made 
 
48 AMERICAN LITERATUEE. 
 
 New EDgland — with the exception of the rigid square of Con- 
 necticut — the foster-mother of the most advanced thought of 
 our age ; but Williams, like every one in advance of his time 
 of less than superlative genius, was long half-forgotten, and 
 the march of the main body went on without him. 
 
 The strength of the clerical despotism was due in part to 
 circumstances, in part to the enthusiasm controlled hy sense, 
 and the worldly wisdom of the rulers. Like the Jesuits, they 
 determined to enlist learning on their side. The education of 
 the Continent owes no more to Loyola, than does that of North 
 America to the sturdy patronage of the Puritans. Other- 
 wise fanatical, they disdained to avail themselves of the 
 superstition of ignorance, and their enlightened policy pro- 
 longed their tenure of office, though it ultimately led to a 
 change of government. The respect for learning, and the faith 
 in its results, happily conspicuous in the first stages of the 
 colony, were due, in part, to the fact that it was so largely 
 recruited hy men who had, previous to their exile, obtained 
 a deserved reputation among scholars. One of the earliest 
 brought with him a library of 275 volumes : it has been 
 calculated that there were, between 1630-90, as many Oxford 
 and Cambridge graduates in New, as in any district of 
 the same extent in Old England. Their zeal, like that of 
 Knox, showed itself in the establishment of the School System, 
 which has continued to be the pride of the Northern States. 
 It was enacted that every town of fifty families, must have 
 a common school, of one hundred families a grammar school ; 
 and, before 1650, attendance on these, in all the original 
 "United Colonies/' was made compulsory. Meanwhile, 
 stirred by a yet higher ambition, Massachusetts had, in 1636, 
 from the scant State treasury of the time, voted a sum for 
 the support of Harvard Univeesity, which, afterwards re- 
 inforced by private benefactors (Bishop Berkeley who, during 
 his residence, wrote his Alciphron at Newport 1729-30, being 
 
COLLEGES— THE PRESS. 49 
 
 of the number), continued to be the foremost, as it was the 
 first, of a series of similar foundations. Yale, near New- 
 haven, Connecticut, followed in 1700 : Pkinceton, in New 
 Jersey, 1746. The great library of Philadelphia had been 
 opened in 1731 : the Academy, afterwards developed into the 
 Univeksity of Pennsylvai^ia, was started by Pranklin in 
 1751 : King's, now Columbia College, New York, in 1754 ; 
 and that of Ehode Island, now Beown University, in 1764.^ 
 
 The " Press " which has, in our own and other countries, 
 long claimed to rank, as an educational instrument, above the 
 University, and has frequently been the severe critic of its 
 rival, developed in New England more slowly. Printing 
 began in 1639 at New Cambridge, but under the jealous 
 surveillance of the Church-State; and, late in the century, the 
 appointed Neo-Dominican licensers having inconsiderately 
 allowed the publication of the De Imitatione Chrisfi, the 
 practice of art was for a season wholly prohibited. Simi- 
 larly, of the first American newspaper — a record of Public 
 Occurrences, issued at Boston in 1690 — only one number was 
 permitted. The News Letter, started in the same city (1704), 
 and the Gazette (1719), were more fortunate ; and, in 1725, at 
 New York, the first of a portentous brood saw the light. 
 
 But, with all their care for the regulation of thought, 
 the American Puritans never attempted to stifle it in the 
 bud. There is nothing in their rigid code corresponding to 
 the aspiration of the Virginian Berkeley, or to the Caro- 
 linian penalty imposed (1740) on teaching negroes to read 
 or write. Self-confidence or magnanimity made them per- 
 
 1 To these foundations, whicli, witli tiat of " William and Mary" 
 (v. ante), make up the list of Colonial Colleges, were afterwards added — that 
 of Charleston (1786) ; Union College, New York (the second President of 
 which was a son of Jonathan Edwards) (1795) ; Sowdoin, Brunswick, Maine, 
 the Alma Mater of Hawthorne and Longfellow (1800) ; and South Carolina 
 University at Columbia, whose President, Cooper, was the great friend of 
 Priestley (1801). 
 
 E 
 
60 AMEEICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 secutors of a nobler rank. It is impossible to guess what 
 their course would have been had they foreseen the issue. 
 It is certain that their zeal for learning, starting with the 
 theological pretext of enabling every one of their citizens to 
 have free access to the Scriptures, resulted in opening to their 
 youth ample stores of secular wisdom, and to the students of 
 their colleges the intellectual treasures of Greece and Eome, 
 as well as of Palestine. " God make thee a good Christian 
 and a good scholar " is the recorded prayer of a New Eng- 
 land matron : ere the close of their second generation, the 
 English envoy, the Earl of Bellomont, could congratulate 
 the people that " they were not put to travel for learning, but 
 had the Muses at their doors." ^ 
 
 The astounding accounts of the Hebrew, Latin, and Greek 
 of seventeenth century undergraduates, require to be corrected 
 by consideration of the slight attention then paid to graces of 
 style, and of the infancy of Physical Science. In this latter 
 domain, however, the colonies, before the middle of the 
 eighteenth century, could boast such names as those of Jos- 
 selyn, "Wood, Winthrop the friend of Boyle, Banister the cor- 
 respondent of Eay, and the Pennsylvanian Bartrams. In 
 classical learning the leading controversialists, as Cotton, 
 Shepard, Hooker, the erratic Ward, the philanthropic Eliot 
 and Williams, were notable proficients. The ripest fruits 
 of New England lore were dedicated to the service of that 
 theology, which it would require a long life, implicit faith, 
 and more than the patience of Job, to read through. Most 
 of those old writers, with almost miraculous fluency of 
 phrase, keep droning over the same themes. Their thoughts 
 soon cease to be interesting, because they are so manifestly 
 fettered by tradition; and their style, when not merely 
 commonplace, is a contorted reflex of the contorted euphu- 
 istic style of English seventeenth century controversy. It is 
 
 ' Quoted from Coit Tyler, vol. t. p. 100. 
 
EARLY SCIENCE— THE MATHERS. 51 
 
 impossible for a modern critic to be enthusiastic over " the 
 dynasty of the Mathers," who ecclesiastically governed the 
 colony for eighty years. They were all physically and in- 
 tellectually strong ; producing an inordinate number of 
 children, and a still more inordinate number of sermons ; 
 but they are nowhere sufficiently graceful or original to 
 attract the attention of others than antiquarians. Eichard, 
 the first, famous for his big voice and majestic manner, a 
 great bookworm and " moderator," begat Increase, who had 
 a "tonitruons cogency in his perorations," worked sixteen 
 hours a day, and was the author of the omnium gatherum 
 of Bemarkable Providences. Increase begat Cotton, " the 
 literary behemoth," who, blown like a bladder with self- 
 esteem and zeal, wished " to resemble a rabbi in the Talmud, 
 whose face was black by reason of the number of his fasts " 
 — a pedant, who, vexed with toothache, " set himself to 
 consider how he had sinned with his teeth." Taking " Fruc- 
 tuosus " for his motto, " Be short '' as his door-sign for visitors, 
 he published, in one year, fourteen forgotten books ; but is 
 still remembered as the author of a tract. Good to be Devised, 
 highly commended by Benjamin Franklin for its benevolent 
 sagacity, and the Magnalia Christi, a ponderous work on the 
 ecclesiastical history of New England, with biographical notices 
 of her saints, that — with a larger bulk of inaccurate matter and 
 rhetorical froth — may be, in respect of pious enthusiasm, com- 
 pared with the more classic English works of Bede, Fuller, and 
 Fox. Cotton begat Samuel, — as learned, but without the wit, 
 — whose argument against the loyalists of the Eevolution time, 
 (when he is content to describe " the Tories " as " infamous 
 scoundrels ") consists mainly of abuse. With him the race 
 died out. Belonging to the same age are a few recalcitrants, 
 in and out of the Church, notably John Wise, who vigorously 
 defended the laity against the pretensions of the Matherian 
 Ultramontanism ; and, writing, " The end of aU good govern- 
 
52 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 ment is to cultivate humanity," was, as "the first great 
 American democrat, called up from his grave hy the men who 
 were getting ready for the Declaration of Independence."^ 
 Worthy of like mention are also Samuel Sewall, one of the 
 first to denounce negro slavery and witch persecution ; Wil- 
 liam Douglass — ^the Scotch immigrant Boston doctor, who 
 stood out for "natural religion;" and Livingston, the New 
 York lawyer, afterwards statesman, who published a travesty 
 of the Thirty-nine Articles, in the interests of Free Thought. 
 But these few rebellious pages were like the mutterings of a 
 storm that, for the time, passes with a threat. Nothing like 
 a fixed idea of religious liberty had got abroad in America, 
 tin near the close of the eighteenth century, the first half of 
 which is filled with the fame of a man who gathered into a 
 focus, made brighter or fiercer by his power, the learning, the 
 faith, and the fanaticism of the preceding generations. 
 
 Jonathan Edwaeds, born in Connecticut, 1703, began 
 preaching at New York in 1723, and died in 1758, as Presi- 
 dent of New Jersey College, leaving a name at which the 
 free-thinking world of his age and nation grew pale. It were 
 mere flippancy, in the coxirse of a brief literary survey, to 
 discuss the abstract metaphysics of the treatise on the WOl, 
 on which his fame mainly depends. Brown and MiU show 
 how his premises may be accepted without their practical 
 conclusions : Kant, Fichte, Maine de Biran, and Jouffroy how 
 the premises themselves may be disputed. The reputation of 
 Edwards has been exalted by Chalmers, who calls him "the 
 greatest of theologians ;" by Mackintosh, who says that " for 
 power of subtle argument he was unmatched ;" still more 
 by an American critic, who, with the exaggeration of hero- 
 worship, proclaims him to have been " not inferior to Bacon," 
 and " the first man of the world " during the second quarter 
 of a century emblazoned by the genius of Eousseau, Frederick 
 1 Tyler, vol. ii. p. 316. 
 
JONATHAN EDWARDS. 53 
 
 II., and Voltaire. But he surpassed his American predeces- 
 sors in the incisiveness of his thought, and in the grace of 
 a style that has got wholly rid of the affected conceits and 
 pedantries of his age. 
 
 Edwards is remarkable in many respects ; — for the extra- 
 ordinary precocity which, at the age of twelve, showed itself 
 in a schoolboy's letter against the doctrine of the materiality 
 of the soul ; for his minute observation, not much later, of 
 external, especially insect, nature, in his paper on the habits 
 of spiders ; for his general scholarship, for the clear vigour of 
 his logical thought, for his singular lucidity of expression, mag- 
 netic force of persuasion, and his simple, unassuming, gentle 
 life. The facts relating to the last, one of struggle against 
 physical weakness, trouble, and penury, borne with Christian 
 resignation and carried on with enduring purpose, is one of 
 the numerous instances of pleasant surprise, which help to 
 countervail others of grievous disappointment, we meet with 
 in the biographies of eminent men ; for next to his reputation 
 as a metaphysician is that he holds as a terrorist among 
 preachers. No Hooker or Mather in the 'New, or Torque- 
 mada in the Old World, more ruthlessly pressed home to his 
 hearers the idea of the Juggernaut whom he worshipped under 
 the name of an all-merciful God. The following passage is 
 a specimen of his pulpit oratory : — 
 
 " The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds 
 a spider or some loathsome insect over the fire, ahhors you, and is 
 dreadfully provoked ; He looks upon you as worthy of nothing else 
 but to he cast into the fire. . . . You are ten thousand times more 
 abominable in His eyes than the most hateful venomous serpent is in 
 ours. You hang by a slender thread, with the flames of divine wrath 
 flashing about it, and ready every moment to singe it and burn it 
 asunder. If you cry to God to pity you. He will be so far from' pity- 
 ing you in your doleful case, or showing you the least regard or favour, 
 that instead of that He will only tread you under foot, and though He 
 wiU know that you cannot bear the weight of omnipotence treading 
 upon you. He will not regard that ; but He will crush you under His 
 feet without mercy ; He wiU crush out your blood and make it fly, and 
 
54 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 it shall be sprinkled on His garments, so as to stain all His raiment. 
 He will not only hate you, but He will have you in the utmost con- 
 tempt ; no place shall be thought fit for you but under His feet, to be 
 trodden down as the mire of the streets." 
 
 The logical defect of this is that, according to his logic, it 
 could have no effect ; the practical, that hardly any one can 
 now heUeve it : but such was the force of the preacher's earnest 
 though quiet delivery, that it burned through his hearers like 
 hot iron. The whole congregation groaned, the women went 
 into wild hysterics, and the men shivered under " the fury of 
 its power." Whether, in a rude age and rough land, this 
 habit of holding people and shaking them over the pit was 
 more for good or ill were hard to say. In any case it is 
 pleasant to leave this intellectual phenomenon, who was also 
 prone to dwell on " sweetness and beauty," with this descrip- 
 tion of his future wife. 
 
 " They say there is a young lady in Newhaven 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 in- 
 visible, comes to her and fills her mind with exceeding sweet delight, 
 and that she hardly cares for anything except to meditate on Him ; 
 that she expects, after a while, to be received up where He is, to be 
 raised up out of the world and caught up into heaven, being assured 
 that H^ loves her too weU 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 for ever. Therefore, if you present aU the world 
 before her, with the richest of its treasures, she disregards it and cares 
 not for it, and is unmindful of any pain or affection. 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 anything wrong or sinful, if you would give her aU the 
 world, lest she should offend 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 will some- 
 times go about from place to place, singing sweetly, and seems to be 
 always full of joy and pleasure, and no one knows for what. She 
 loves to be alone, walking in the fields and groves, and seems to have 
 some one invisible always conversing with her." 
 
 Edwards remains the most salient advocate of Ultra- 
 Calvinism : he is remarkable as an example of the aftermath 
 
EDWAEDS— EARLY VERSES. 55 
 
 of English Puritanism over the sea; a posthumous preacher of 
 the Ironsides, equally far removed from his contemporaries 
 of Queen Anne as from the Cavaliers" themselves. But he 
 further impressed on his country's literature the stern thought 
 and intense religiousness which those furthest from him in 
 details of creed have been, in our own generation, proud to 
 derive from their New England ancestors. 
 
 The work of Edwards is the last word of pure Colonial 
 Puritan prose. Of the verse of the period there is little to 
 say. From an artistic point of view, there was a famine in 
 the land, and cacophonous jingle passed for poetry. The old 
 New Englanders, with few exceptions, holding that whatever 
 was godly was severe, whatever was pleasant was of Belial, 
 cultivated the grim to the exclusion of the beautiful. But 
 many of the saints were smitten with a mania for rhyming as 
 inveterate as that of sinners for gambling. "In the first 
 period," says Mr. Tyler, "neither advanced age, nor high 
 office, nor mental unfitness, nor previous respectability, were 
 sufficient to protect any one from the poetic vice. We hear 
 of venerable men, like Peter Bulkley, continuing to lapse into 
 it when far beyond the grand climacteric. The earthly ele- 
 ment, the passion the carnal taint . . . that in other men 
 works itself off in a pleasure-journey, in a flirtation, in going 
 to the play or in a convivial bout, did, in these venerable men, 
 exhaust itself in the sly dissipation of writing verses." The 
 historian quoted is, nevertheless, able to admire some of these 
 products. I can find none among them that have any justi- 
 fication for their existence. The Muses — according to Daniel, 
 " such coy things that they care not for kings " — ^would not 
 listen to the rough wooing of inquisitors, who, after abusing 
 them in public, strove to gain access to their private ears : 
 the results of their illicit liaisons remain in some ghoulish 
 imaginations over tombstones, acrostic puns which Crashaw 
 or Donne, in their most fantastic moods, would have disowned. 
 
56 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 and a chaos of dissonance, like that of a cracked dinner-hell 
 behind their theologic carts. 
 
 Setting aside Morell's English version of his Latin Nova 
 Anglia, as the work of a mere visitor, the earliest verse that 
 really claims to be American is a doggerel list, by an anony- 
 mous author, of New England's annoyances, which, if we 
 remember the date, 1630. i.e., a generation after Spenser had 
 celebrated "the Indian Peru" in his Faerie Queene, will 
 strengthen our impression of the backwoodsman's want of 
 leisure for polishing his stanza : — 
 
 " The' place where we live is a wilderness wood. 
 Where grass is much wanting that's fruitful and good. 
 
 If fresh meat be wanting to fill up our dish. 
 We have carrots, and pumpkins, and turnips, and fish. 
 We have pumpkins at morning and pumpkins at noon. 
 If it was not for pumpkins we should be undone." 
 
 Ten years later we have The Bay Psalm Book — results 
 of the laborious efforts of several saints — among them the 
 good Eliot — the worst of many bad translations of the 
 subHmest series of lyrics in any tongue, worse than that of 
 Sternhold and Hopkins, or that which still every Sunday 
 helps to maim the ears and mar the taste of Presbyterian 
 Scotland. After a decade of merciful silence, Mrs. Anne Brad- 
 street, introduced by a flourish of trumpets, confronts us. The 
 title of her book, The Tenth Muse lately sprung up in America, 
 belies her natural modesty, which, we are assured, was great. 
 But it might have spared us The Four Elements, some lines 
 in which seem like a bad parody of Lucretius, and The 
 Four Monarchies, which affronts the memory of Sir David 
 Lyndsay The prose meditations of the same excellent lady, 
 who has the rare merit of being a temperate advocate of 
 woman's rights, are passable; but they more frequently recall 
 the platitudes of Feltham's Resolves than the vigorous aphor- 
 isms of Quarles ; and her minor verses, softened, as they 
 
PURITAN VERSES. 57 
 
 occasionally are, by the flow of the Merrimac near her An- 
 dover home, have been commended for sweetness and light 
 by the bitter darkness of their company. The best seem 
 alternate echoes of Spenser and of Herbert. The following, 
 To her Husband, on expectation, fortunately unfulfilled, of 
 her own decease, are selected by Mr. W. M. Eossetti : — 
 
 " How soon, my dear, death may my steps attend ; 
 How soon't may be thy lot to lose thy friend. 
 We both are ignorant. Yet, love bids me 
 These farewell lines to recommend to thee, 
 That, when that knot's untied that made us one, 
 I may seem thine, that in effect am none. 
 And, if I see not half my days that's due. 
 What nature would, God grant to yours and you ! " 
 
 Mrs. Bradstreet's death was bewailed by two ardent 
 necrologists, Norton and Eogers. The former seems to have 
 read Occleve on Chaucer, Waller and Dryden on Cromwell : 
 the latter is an evident student of The Tears of the Mvses ; a 
 remark equally applicable to Uriah Oakes, in the elegy on 
 his friend Shepard of Charleston. The closing couplet of 
 one of the stanzas of this writer — extolled as having reached 
 the highest point touched by American poetry during his era — 
 
 " Ah ! wit avails not, when the heart's like to break ; 
 Great griefs are tongue-tied when the lesser speak " — 
 
 recalls the quatrain of Ealeigh — 
 
 " Passions are likened best to floods and streams ; 
 The shallow murmur, but the deep are dumb : 
 So when affections yield discourse, it seems 
 
 The bottom is but shallow whence they come." 
 
 Peter Folger next merits mention, as the maternal grand- 
 father of Franklin, and a stout advocate of tolerance. The 
 sins of his rhyme, which are many, should be pardoned, for 
 the sake of his protests — albeit in terrible psalmodic doggerel 
 — against " the sin of persecution." While he was tumbling, 
 with good intent, in his cap and bells, Benjamin Thomson, in 
 
58 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 New Ungland's Crisis, was growling, and, in the role of 
 
 a satirist, already complaining of national degeneracy, 
 
 since — 
 
 " The times wherein old Pompion. was a saint 
 When men fared hardly, yet without complaint. 
 On vilest cates ; the dainty Indian-maize 
 Was eat with clamp shells out of wooden trayes, 
 Under thatched huts, without the cry of rent 
 And the best sauce to every dish, content. 
 
 'Twas long before spiders and worms had drawn 
 Their dingy webs, or hid with cheating lawne 
 New England's beautys, which stiU seemed to me 
 Illustrious in their own simplicity. 
 
 Ere wines from France and Muscavadoe, too, 
 Without the which the drink wUl scarcely doe, 
 "From western isles, ere fruits and delicacies 
 Did rot maids' teeth and spoil their handsome faces.'' 
 
 Thomson's latest critic grows indignant over the " easy 
 
 and stale lie" which exalts the past over the present; the 
 
 reverse process, quite as easy, being more stale in America. 
 
 But there is reason to he angry at his verse, which hardly 
 
 deserves to he called a parody of Dryden's. Passing Joseph 
 
 Green's attempts at Hudibrastic humour, Francis Knapp's 
 
 Measons against Restraining Poetasters, — a strong reason 
 
 for it, — and the heroics of John Mayhew, with the 
 
 lines : — 
 
 " Tremendous Eate, by turns, incessant flies. 
 While the black sulphur clouds the azure skies, 
 And ghastly savages, with fearful yell. 
 Invoke their kindred of profoundest hell " — 
 
 we come to Michael Wigglesworth, in matter and manner, 
 the most detestable rhymester who ever achieved a reputa- 
 tion. It is calculated that his Bay of Doom was the 
 most popular and widely-read book in America, previous to 
 the Eevolution. The style of this work, on which Pollok's 
 
MICHAEL WIGGLESWOETH. 69 
 
 Course of Time is an improvement, may be illustrated by 
 the following verse on the wicked at the bar — 
 
 " With dismal chains and strongest reins, 
 
 Like prisoners of hell, 
 They're held in place before Christ's face, 
 
 Till He their doom shall tell. 
 These void of tears, but filled with fears. 
 
 And dreadful expectation, 
 Of endless pains and scalding flames. 
 
 Stand waiting for damnation." 
 
 Its theology is paraded in the answer given to those who 
 " died in infancy," and plead that they " never had or good 
 or bad effected personally, but from the womb unto the 
 tomb were straightway carried " — 
 
 " You sinners are ; and such a share 
 
 As sinners may expect 
 Such you shall have, for I do save 
 
 None but Mine own elect. 
 Yet, to compare your sin with their. 
 
 Who lived a longer time, 
 I do confess, yours is much less. 
 
 Though every sin's a crime. 
 A crime it is ; therefore in bliss 
 
 You may not hope to dwell. 
 But unto you I shall allow 
 
 The easiest room in hell." 
 
 There is much more similar rubbish and woeful wit, the 
 worst, perhaps, being the execrable puns of Nicholas Noyes 
 on a friend dying of the stone. The Dutch of that age are 
 said to have offered to their prisoners of war three alternatives 
 — to be hanged from one of their mast-heads, to be drowned 
 in one of their canals, or to learn their language : after trial 
 of the last, the unfortunates were reduced to prefer either of 
 the other two. The New England Puritans might, with like 
 result, have submitted the mock-merciful choice of reading 
 their verses. Por them to be poets, save to the mutual 
 admiration of their preposterous panegyrics, 
 
 " Non homines, non Di, non concessere columnse." 
 
60 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 The spirit of consistent Puritanism — that which arraigned 
 Milton for his Doctrine of Divorce, and would have denounced 
 his posthumous De Dodrina Christiana as a sheaf of heresies 
 — ^has never produced a poet, save Bunyan in prose. But it 
 was a spirit essential, in countercheck of its opposite, to the 
 civilisation of the world ; and, in the long run, better fruit 
 has grown from the hearts of oak that manned the northern 
 colonies than from the gay Virginian cavaliers. Out of the 
 lion came honey, and the force of character that from the 
 first made the people strong at last made them free. It was 
 in a comparatively barren soil, and under the conditions of 
 an iron creed, that the "stern men with empires in their 
 brains " — with hard hands and heads for this world's work, 
 and a steady gaze on an ideal — men unenlightened, but also 
 undistracted, by "speculations" either of Concord or Wall 
 Street, content to do honest work for honest wages, who never 
 feared the face of their fellows, but lived ever in the fear of 
 their Faith, — it was there and thus that they planted deep 
 the seed of a tree whose branches were to overshadow a 
 continent. 
 
THE REVOLUTION— FEANKLIN. 61 
 
 CHAPTEE in. 
 
 THE EEVOLUTION PERIOD. 
 
 The time was approaching when the common interests, fears, 
 and hopes of an external strife were to do for Anglo-America 
 what the Persian wars did temporarily for the Hellenes, and 
 the struggle of the Plantagenets with the Capets more per- 
 manently effected for Saxon and Norman England ; it was to 
 weld the scattered States into a Nation. With this unity, 
 however imperfect — no longer with Virginia or New Jersey 
 or Connecticut — we have henceforth to deal. We pass from 
 the one period to the other by the bridge of a great memory, 
 that of the first American known over Europe, who, as a 
 writer, a man of science, and a statesman, has achieved three 
 reputations, each by itself enough to have made him famous. 
 A slightly junior contemporary of Edwards, Benjamin 
 Ekanklin (born at Boston 1706; died at Philadelphia 1790), 
 the exponent icaT i^o-^ijv of the other, that is the secular, 
 side of the colonial life, was destined to see the close of the first, 
 and play a prominent part in opening the second era of his 
 country's history. As long as Utilitarian philosophy endures, 
 his will be a name to conjure with. His AutoUography — on 
 the stirring details of which we cannot dwell — ^is as romantic 
 as the life of an unromantic person can be. The incidents of 
 the young candle-moulder; the printer's apprentice; the writer 
 and ballad-monger — dutifully and duly discouraged by the 
 
62 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 wise paternal criticism, "verse-makers aire generally beggars," 
 — the runaway, eating rolls on the Philadelphian street, en- 
 countering his future fiancee, and sleeping on the benches of 
 a Quaker meeting-house ; his struggling life in London with 
 Kalph of Dunciad notoriety — 
 
 " SUence, ye wolves, while Ralph to Cynthia howls. 
 And makes night hideous ; answer him, ye owls ! " 
 
 Franklin's amorous rivalry with the poetaster; his return, 
 " correcting the erratum " of his infidelities by marriage with 
 his old Pennsylvanian friend ; his success as a printer, econo- 
 mist, and diplomatist ; his triumphs in natural and political 
 philosophy, clenched in Turgof s line (adapted from Manilius), 
 " Eripuit coelo fulmen, sceptrumque tyrannis ;" his deputation 
 to England and examination before the House of Commons, 
 resulting in the admiring wonder of Chatham, and the repeal 
 of the Stamp Act ; his signature of the Declaration of Inde- 
 pendence ; his ministry in France, and avatar with Voltaire, 
 who said, "Je n'ai p<i resister au d^sir de parler un moment la 
 langue de Franklin ;" the acclamations of shouting multitudes 
 on his return home ; Mirabeau's announcement of the patri- 
 arch's death, — "The genius which has freed America and 
 poured a flood of light over Europe has returned to the 
 bosom of the Divinity" — these, or most of these, incidents are 
 elementary facts of schoolboy history. They are the records 
 of the main stages of the greatest success achieved in modern 
 times, by the sheer force of common sense, integrity, and 
 industry indomitable. Franklin's experiments and discoveries 
 form a notable chapter in the special history of physical 
 science ; but half of his fame, even in this field, is due to the 
 precision and clearness of the manner in which they are 
 announced. "The most profound observations," says Lord 
 Jeffrey, " are suggested by him as if they were the most 
 obvious and natural way of accounting for phenomena." The 
 same literary merit characterises the financial pamphlets and 
 
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 63 
 
 treatises that first brought him into celehrity. Both are 
 marked by the same spirit, the love of the useful, which 
 was his passion through life. Franklin follows Bacon, to 
 an extreme, opposed to that of the Platonists, in decrying 
 abstractions. Archytas is said to have apologised for 
 inventing the arch : Franklin is ashamed to have wasted 
 time over pure mathematics in his " Magical Squares." 
 Though endowed with as little as possible, for a great man, 
 of " the faculty divine," there are passages in his writings 
 that connect them with the developement of imaginative 
 writing in his country. To carry out his aim, which is every- 
 where to bring down philosophy, like the lightning, from heaven 
 to earth, "illustrans commoda vitse," he has to popularise 
 his ethics — those of Confucius and the Seven Sages, modified 
 by the experience and the circumstances of a later age — and 
 frequently to throw them into dramatic form. The most 
 famous of popular annuals, Poor Hichard's Almanack, in 
 which for twenty-five years its readers — rising to the number 
 of 10,000 — ^were taught "the way to be healthy and wealthy 
 and wise," abounds in terse apothegms and smart sayings, 
 incisive paragraphs of prose and rhyme, rendered attractive 
 by a vein of quaint humour, and the homely illustrations 
 always acceptable to the countrymen of the writer. Let us 
 take the following from shoals of instances, half quoted half 
 invented for the occasion : — 
 
 " One to-day is worth two to-morrows." " Handle your tools 
 without mittens ; the cat in gloves catches no mice." " Little strokes 
 fell large oaks." " Fly pleasures and they will follow you." " Lazi- 
 ness travels so slowly that poverty soon overtakes him." " Trusting 
 top much to others' care is the ruin of many ; for in this world 
 men are saved not by faith, but by the want of it. If you would 
 have a faithful servant and one that you like, serve yourself." " A 
 fat kitten makes a lean will." "Who dainties love shall beggars 
 prove." "What maintains one vice will bring up two children." 
 " Silks and satins put out the fire." " Fools make feasts and wise men 
 eat them." " A small leak will sink a great ship." " A ploughman 
 on his legs is better than a gentleman on his knees." " Pride break- 
 
64 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 fasted with plenty, dined with poverty, and supped with infamy." 
 "It is as truly foUy for the poor to ape the rich as for the frog to 
 swell in order to equal the ox." 
 
 " Vessels large may venture more, 
 But little toats should keep near shore." 
 
 " If you would know the value of money, go and try to borrow some, 
 for he that goes a -borrowing goes a -sorrowing."^ "Creditors have 
 good memories ; they are a superstitious sect, great observers of set 
 days and times." " Those have a short Lent who owe money to be 
 paid at Easter." 
 
 These and many more quotations father Abraham pours 
 forth in a brief discourse, at the close of which, says poor 
 Kichard — 
 
 " I found the good man had thoroughly studied my almanacks. 
 The frequent mention he made of me must have tired anybody else, 
 but I was wonderfully delighted with it, though conscious that the 
 wisdom he ascribed to me was rather the gleanings I had made of the 
 sense of all ages and nations. However, I resolved to be the better 
 for the echo of it ; and though I had first determined to buy stuff for 
 a new coat, I went away resolved to wear my old one a little longer. 
 Reader, if thou wilt do the same thy profit will be as great as mine." 
 
 These maxims all convey advice eminently excellent to 
 the citizens of the most munificent and extravagant nation of 
 the civilised world ; but it is as far away from St. Francis as 
 from Theocritus, from Jonathan Edwards as from Shelley. 
 Pranklin had definitely broken with the theologians, whose 
 webs were spun too thin to bind the bulk of his massive 
 manhood : on the other hand, he had in boyhood bade good- 
 bye to the rhyming crew, and his opinion of their spendthrift 
 race is clenched in one of several stanzas on various sorts of 
 paper — 
 
 " What are the poets, take them as they fall, 
 Good, bad, rich, poor, much read, not read at all ? 
 Them and their works in the same class you'll find. 
 They are the mere waste-paper of mankind." 
 
 Of a somewhat later date, the following more consecutive 
 
 ' Compare the advices of Sir Walter Raleigh and Lord Burleigh to their 
 sons; also, of course, "Polonius." 
 
POOR RICHARD— THE WHISTLE. 66 
 
 piece is inspired by the same quaint worldly wisdom, and 
 almost deification of " Thrift." 
 
 " When I was a child of seven years old, my friend, on a holiday, 
 filled my pocket with coppers. I went directly to a shop where they 
 sold toys for children, and, being charmed with the sound of a whistle 
 that I met, by the way, in the hands of another boy, I voluntarily 
 offered and gave all my money for one. I then came home, and went 
 whistling all over the house, much pleased with my whistle, but dis- 
 turbing all the family. My brothers, and sisters, and cousins, under- 
 standing the bargain I had made, told me I had given four times as 
 much for it as it was worth, put me in mind what good things I might 
 have bought with the rest of the money, and laughed at me so much 
 for my folly that I cried with vexation, and the reflection gave me 
 more chagrin than the whistle gave me pleasure. 
 
 " This, however, was afterwards of use to me, the impression con- 
 tinuing on my mind, so that often, when I was tempted to buy some 
 unnecessary thing, I said to myseK, ' Bon't give too much for the whistle, ' 
 and I saved my money. As I grew up, came into the world, and 
 observed the actions of men, I thought I met with many, very many, 
 who ffave too much for the whistle. 
 
 " When I saw one too ambitious of Court favour, sacrificing his 
 time on attendance on levees, his repose, his liberty, his virtue, and 
 perhaps his friend, to attain it, I have said to myself, ' 37m man gives 
 too much for his whistle.' 
 
 " When I saw another fond of popularity, constantly employing 
 himself in political bustles, neglecting his own affairs, and ruining them 
 by that neglect, ' He pays, indeed,' said I, ' too much for his whistle' 
 
 " K I knew a miser, who gave up every kind of comfortable living, 
 all the pleasure of doing good to others, all the esteem of his fellow- 
 citizens, and the joys of benevolent friendship for the sake of accumu- 
 lating wealth, ' Poor mare,' said I, ' you pay too much for your whistle' 
 
 " If I see one fond of appearance, or fine clothes, fine houses, fine 
 furniture, fine equipages, all above his fortune, for which he contracts 
 debts and ends his career in a prison, 'Alas/' say I, ' he has paid dear, 
 very dear, for his whistle.' 
 
 "When I see a beautiful, sweet-tempered girl married to an ill- 
 natured brute of a husband, ' TVhat a piti/,' say I, ' that she slwuld pay 
 so much for her whistle ! ' 
 
 " In short, I conceive that great part of the miseries of mankind are 
 brought upon them by the false estimates they have made of the value 
 of things, and by their giving too much for their whistles." 
 
 In his green old age, Franklin was smitten or blessed by 
 the aftermath of sentiment that often marks a fine sunset : 
 among our most agreeable reminiscences of him are the 
 
 F 
 
66 AMERICAN LITEEATURE. 
 
 love letters and compliments sent, from his retreat at Passy, 
 to the fair Parisian, the widow of Helvetius. In one he 
 tells her that he had seen a vision of his late wife and 
 the philosopher married in the Elysian fields, and that, on 
 his attempting to reclaim Mrs. PrankHn, she answered: 
 " I was a good wife to you for forty -nine years and four 
 months — nearly half a century: let that content you. I 
 have formed a new connection here, which will last to 
 eternity." " Indignant," adds the wUy septuagenarian, in a 
 strain worthy of Congreve, " at this refusal of my Eurydice, I 
 resolved to quit these ungrateful shades and return to this 
 good world again to behold the sun and you. Here I am ; 
 let us avenge ourselves." But in these letters — as in another 
 series to Madame Brillon, his " ever amiable BrOliante" — 
 there is the same under-current of sound ground-sense. 
 The following recommendation on playing chess, especially 
 addressed to American ladies, still holds good : — 
 
 " Thirdly, it teaches emotion, not to make our moves too hastily. 
 This habit is best acquired by observing strictly the laws of the game, 
 such as, ' If you touch a piece you mtist move it somewhere ; if you set it 
 down you must let it stand;' and it is therefore best that these rules 
 should be observed, as the game thereby becomes more the image of 
 human life, and particularly of war, in which, if you have incautiously 
 put yourself into a bad and dangerous position, you cannot obtaia your 
 enemies' leave to withdraw your troops and place them more securely, 
 but you must abide all the consequences of your rashness." 
 
 Franklin never wrote a word of nonsense, and he remains the 
 most considerate and practical of philosophers in the most 
 practical, although one of the most impulsive, of nations. 
 
 Wordsworth's dictum, " Poetry is the outcome of emotion 
 recollected in tranquillity," applies, with less exception, to 
 artistic prose. Many of the ballads, and most of the war- 
 lyrics of the world, have been the products of stress and 
 strife. The greatest Greek plays were written under the 
 shadow of the most critical conflict of the East and West. 
 
POLITICAL CRISES— ORATORY. 67 
 
 Nsevius was the spectator, as well as the historian, of the 
 first, Ennius of the second, Punic War : Korner held the 
 sword in his right hand, the lyre in his left. Neither the 
 Mariners of England, nor the Marseillaise, nor Coleridge's 
 Ode to France, nor Tennyson's Charge of the Light Brigade, 
 nor Longfellow's Wreck of the Cumherland, nor the bursts of 
 patriotic fervour which elevate far ahove the region of bur- 
 lesque the best of the Biglow Papers, were composed in tran- 
 quillity. But when the cannon are sounding on the field, and 
 the debate is surging in the senate, the essayist and the 
 romancer are dumb. The American Eevolution, at all events, 
 supports the assertion that periods of political crisis are more 
 favourable to the preparation than to the actual production of 
 literature. The demands of instant action cast the reflective 
 powers into abeyance : a stormy era is the seed-time of a later 
 harvest. There is only one exercise of the imagination that 
 it directly stimulates, that of the orator, and the conditions 
 of his success, save in a few instances, make a drain on 
 his posthumous reputation. In reading even the greatest 
 speeches of the Past, divested of the living presence which 
 gave them colour and force, we find it difficult to account 
 foi the effect they are known to have produced. The 
 influence of great talkers like Christopher North, of great 
 preachers like Hall, Chalmers, Irving, is already to us per- 
 plexing. Few can read the harangues, once battle-cries, 
 of Fox or Pitt ; and, to a future generation, those of the most 
 domineering of recent English statesmen, will probably be 
 remarkable mainly for the intricacy of their sentences, and 
 the subtlety of their evasions. Similarly evanescent has been 
 the fame of most of the great orators of the American 
 Eevolution. The bulk of the speeches that thrilled their 
 listeners have faded into old men's chimney-corner memories, 
 or they remain as the ashes and fossils of genius. The 
 greatest, next to Washington, of the creative spirits of the 
 
68 AMEEICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 era, Alexander Hamilton, first, at the age of seventeen, 
 amazed his American audience by a speech in which he 
 foretold "that the waves of rebellion, sparkling with fire," 
 would "from the New World wash back to England the 
 wrecks of her wealth and power ; " but it remains as a pre- 
 cocious incident in a brilliant career. The triumphs of Patrick 
 Henry, who "wielded at will" that young "Democraty," are 
 commemorated in the judicious biography of Wirt, but few 
 of his orations are accurately preserved. 
 
 The following passage, from a fragment of his address to 
 the Virginia Convention of 1775, is a specimen of his warrior 
 style : — 
 
 " I have but one lamp by wMcli my feet are guided, and that is 
 the lamp of experience. I know of no way of judging the future but 
 by the past. And, judging by the past, I wish to know what there 
 has been in the conduct of the British Ministry to justify those hopes 
 with which gentlemen have been pleased to solace themselves ? Is it 
 that insidious smile with which our petition has been lately received ? 
 Trust it not, sir ; it will prove a snare to your feet. Suffer not your- 
 selves to be betrayed with a kiss. Ask yourselves how this gracious 
 reception comports with those warlike preparations which cover our 
 waters and darken our land. Are fleets and armies necessary to a work 
 of love and reconciliation 1 These are the implements of war and sub- . 
 jugation, the last arguments to which kings resort. . . . Our chains 
 are forged ! Their clanking may be heard on the plains of Boston. 
 The war is inevitable, and let it come . . . Gentlemen may cry, peace, 
 peace — but there is no peace . . . The next gale that sweeps from the 
 north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms ... Is life 
 so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the cost of chains and 
 .slavery ? ^ Forbid it, almighty God ! I know not what course others 
 may take, but as for me, give me liberty or give me death." 
 
 In a similar spirit and style are the orations of Joseph 
 Warren and John Hancock, on the anniversary of the Boston 
 Massacre, and the speech of James Wilson in the. Pennsylvania 
 Convention. Of the harangues of James Otis, compared 
 by his contemporaries to " flames of fire," we have only a 
 tradition, though his pamphlet, A Declaration of the Conduct 
 
 1 The date of Burns' Scots wha hoe is 1793. 
 
LEADERS OF THE REVOLUTION. 69 
 
 (1762) of the House of S&preseniatives, has been maintained to 
 he the germ of the Declaration of Independence. Eichard 
 Henry Lee, saluted as the "American Cicero," has only- 
 handed down to us his eloquent "Address (1775) of the 
 Twelve United Colonies." 
 
 The master minds of the new era were the soldiers, 
 diplomatists, statesmen, and jurists, who fought for the 
 free soil, sank the deep foundations, and reared the super- 
 structure of the new commonwealth. In civil, as well as 
 literary, history we have often occasion to remark that great 
 men come in clusters : a stirring crisis fills the air with an 
 electric excitement, and the energy evoked in one actor, by 
 the demands of the time, inspires his peers, as by a contagious 
 stimulus, to put forth their powers. This fact was equally 
 apparent in the American, and in, its near successor, the 
 French Eevolution ; but in the former the struggle with 
 external force preceded, instead of following, internal difficul- 
 ties ; the tasks of the warrior and the legislator more 
 frequently devolved upon the same persons, Washington, 
 as Commander-in-Chief, was hardly more illustrious than 
 Washington as twice-elected President : in both capacities 
 he was Fater Patrice. Hamilton, his right arm in the field, 
 was his alter ego in the Senate. Between the two epochs of 
 the new birth of America there is the same difference as 
 appeared in France ; but they are chronologically reversed. 
 In the case of the latter, the attack of the allied monarchs 
 merged aU parties in defence of a common cause : in the 
 former, the triumph of the common cause allowed the schism 
 of party to appear. Setting aside a comparatively insignifi- 
 cant faction of royalists, there was no difference of opinion 
 about the injustice of the Stamp Act (1765) ; Franklin was 
 sent to England for its repeal, as a representative of the 
 nation : in defiance of Townshend's Tax, the tea was (1773) 
 thrown into Boston Harbour, with equal approbation from 
 
70 AMERICAN LITERATUEE. 
 
 Virginia and New York, while the cry was, Pro arts et focis; 
 all were for the State. The " Declaration of Eights " (1774) 
 was, at the first PMladelphian Congress, unanimously accepted; 
 but already in the discussions about the famous Declaration 
 of Independence (1776) — mainly drawn up by the man of the 
 age who ranks next in genius to the three above named, 
 Thomas Jefferson — there was a divergence. It is insufficiently 
 known in England that, in its first draft, there appeared the 
 following paragraph, certainly the most interesting suppressed 
 passage in American Literature : — 
 
 " He " (the prisoner then at the bar of Western opinion) " has waged 
 cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights 
 of life and liberty, in the persons of a distant people who never 
 offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another 
 hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. 
 This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare 
 of the Christian king of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a 
 market where men should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his 
 negative (veto) by suppressing every legislative attempt to restrain this 
 execrable commerce. And, that this assemblage of horrors might want 
 no fact of distinguished dye, he is now exciting those veiy people to 
 rise in arms against us, and purchase that liberty of which he deprived 
 them, by murdering the people upon whom he obtruded them ; thus 
 paying oif former crimes committed against the liberties of one people 
 by crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of 
 another." 
 
 This, the most eloquent clause of that great document, 
 worthy of Cicero against Verres, was struck out in deference 
 to the already ominous interests of the South, but it was 
 strictly true. There are few stages ia the spread of American 
 slavery, from Queen Elizabeth's partnership with the buccaneer 
 Hawkins, in 1562, to the present Premier's characteristically 
 rash congratulation of Jefferson Davis, in 1864, that English- 
 men can afford to contemplate without shame. It was, as we 
 have seen, in 1619, that the first negroes entered the Western 
 continent ; but it was not tiU 1713, when England, as one of 
 the emblems of her supremacy over the ocean, obtained, by 
 
SLAVERY. 71 
 
 the Treaty of Utreclit, the exclusive right of bringing African 
 slaves to the West Indies and to Spanish America, that the 
 hlack race, in considerable numbers, became located in those 
 regions. The colonies disliked and strove to suppress the 
 system ; but the authorities of the mother country strenuously 
 maintained it. A colonial tax on the importation of slaves 
 was repealed, and, in 1749, an Act was passed declaring that 
 the trade was "very advantageous to Great Britain," while 
 High Church dignitaries vied with each other in proclaiming 
 its rightfulness. In 1777, i.e., at the commencement of the 
 Kevolution, one of our leading statesmen protested — " We 
 cannot allow the colonies to check, or in any degree discourage, 
 a traffic so beneficial to the British nation." The political 
 evil of the " institution " was felt in the comparative paralysis 
 of the Carolinas during the War of Independence, and most 
 of the leaders, as Washington, Hamilton, Franklin, Madison, 
 and Adams, were opposed to it in theory, but unable, amid 
 other pressing matters, to deal with it in practice. 
 
 The political differences abeady existing after the sur- 
 render of Cornwallis would have rendered any permanent 
 basis for the Union an impossibility, had it not been for the un- 
 surpassed practical sagacity, as well as the inventive genius, of 
 the illustrious group of men^ who, in that twilight gloom, draw- 
 ing confidence from the only source open to them — their own 
 past deeds — ^ventured on the experiment of laying the rafters 
 of a new society. They had to deal at once with existing 
 facts and with new circumstances. One great political fact 
 was the existing Sovereignty of the States, which — ^whether 
 royal, proprietory, or more strictly colonial — had joined in 
 the war, in great measure, to maintain their right to manage 
 their own affairs, e.g., regulate their own institutions, elect 
 their own magistrates, and impose their own taxes. Another 
 was the democratic feeling of the Northern, the more aristo- 
 cratic sentiment of the Southern, States. The differences of 
 
72 AMERICAN LITEEATUEE. 
 
 race and the divergencies of interest resulting from diverse 
 industries, which have either occasioned or aggravated the 
 most troublesome of recent controversies, were then initial, 
 but they already added to the difficulty. The royal or English 
 authority, which had hitherto bound together this bundle of 
 sticks, being removed, the problem was by what cord, and with 
 what degree of tightness, to bind them again. No one of that 
 age seems to have contemplated the alternative of letting 
 them alone, and making separate bundles of north, south, and 
 central groups. Hardly any one contemplated, and, after the 
 irritation of a contest in which the King of England personally 
 played so offensive a part, no one of influence dared openly 
 to advocate, a Monaecht. It was evident that, in deference 
 to the separate States, the Union must be a Fedeeation, and 
 in deference to the general sentiment that it must be a 
 Ebpublio. This was decided, when at the close of the war 
 " The Articles of Confedeeation " were drawn and quickly 
 accepted ; for by these little more than a general brotherhood, 
 of all but universal desire, was established. But when, in 
 1786, a second convention assembled at Philadelphia, with a 
 view to " a more perfect Union," long debates ensued, and the 
 Constitution, in its main features stiU that of the States, was 
 only accepted by all the delegate.s in 1790. Amid a multi- 
 tude of details that concern the historian of law, two para- 
 mount questions had emerged. A Federation may be more 
 or less stringent, i.e. it may leave more or less liberty to its 
 members : a Eepublic may be more or less Democratic. The 
 majority of the leading minds of the Convention, of which 
 Washington was the President, Madison the chief Director, 
 were in little sympathy with the ultra-democratic tendencies 
 then beginning to show themselves : the circumstance that 
 four of the first five Presidents were Virginians — despite the 
 fact that one of these led the counter-current — may help to 
 explain their aristocratic leanings : their regard for the tradi- 
 
THE FEDERALISTS. 73 
 
 tions and sympathy with the renown of England led them to 
 wish to re-estahlish in their own a constitution similar to 
 that of the mother-countryj minus the king. The same party 
 was naturally that of strong government : they aimed at 
 drawing the bonds of union close, and leaving to the State 
 authorities only the control of matters strictly municipal. 
 These advocates of centralisation, permanent institutions, 
 fixity of tenure in of&ce, and graduated authority, were the 
 party of the Federalists ; among them the best and brightest 
 men of their age and nation. Washington himself, in so far 
 as he can be claimed by anything less than the nation, was 
 at their head : John Marshall, Chief-Justice of the Supreme 
 Court, one of the pilots of the State, who left a stainless name, 
 and laid down the first principles of that international Code 
 afterwards elaborated by Wheaton ; John Adams the second ; 
 Madison the fourth, President ; and John Jay (one of the 
 signatories of the Peace), of whom it was said, " the ermine 
 of the judicial robe, when it fell on his shoulders, touched 
 nothing as spotless as himself" — were of their number. 
 
 Of this party, however, the real leader was Alexander 
 Hamilton. Of Scotch descent, born in the "West India island 
 of Nevis, and settling on the Continent shortly before the out- 
 break of the war, this brilliant speaker, excellent writer, and 
 masterly statesman has been more appreciated by cultivated 
 critics and philosophical politicians than by the bulk of a 
 nation, the dangers of whose future he, perhaps more than 
 any of his time, foresaw, and strove in vain to resist. During 
 the war he was Washington's " most confidential aid :" after- 
 wards, as Secretary of the Treasury, he became the greatest of 
 American financiers. "He smote the rock," wrote Daniel 
 Webster, in his famous panegyric, " of the national resources, 
 and abimdant streams of revenue gushed forth. He touched 
 the dead corpse of the public credit, and it sprang upon its 
 feet." Prince Talleyrand said, " that among the leading men 
 
74 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 of the time, he had never known his equal ; " and Guizot, in 
 paying tribute to his memory, " He must be classed among 
 the men who have best known the vital principles and funda- 
 mental conditions of a government worthy of its name and 
 mission." Hamilton did not merely mistrust, he hated a pro- 
 letariate democracy. He had to acquiesce in the terms of a 
 Constitution, inevitably a compromise between conflictiiig 
 tendencies, — a compromise which left State Eights to be 
 mainly represented by the Senate, which made the popular 
 House of Eepresentatives a bulwark of Central government, 
 established a Supreme court, a National bank, and which, 
 by the Presidential veto, made the consent of three-fourths 
 of the Legislature essential to any important change.-' On 
 doubtful points he fought consistently for his view, challeng- 
 ing for Congress the power to enact general tariffs, endeavour- 
 ing to narrow the functions of officers, as those of State 
 Judges, dependent on the popular will, and to strengthen on all 
 sides the Supreme Administration. It is idle to speculate on 
 what " might have been ; " but we may be permitted to con- 
 jecture that, had Hamilton lived, many of the evils which it 
 has taxed the vitality of the States to survive, and others of 
 equal magnitude, against which they still are struggling, 
 would have been averted or mitigated. But when he feU, in 
 a half-personal, half-political quarrel, in his thirty-fifth year 
 (1804), by the buUet of the infamous demagogue Aaron Burr, 
 a blow was dealt to Western civilisation, only less vital 
 and lasting than to that of Scotland by the assassination of 
 the greatest of the Stuart kings; for Hamilton had no 
 worthy successor, and the victory lay henceforth with the 
 unscrupulous man of genius who, without serious let or 
 hindrance, assumed the control of the national destinies. 
 
 Washington himself claims direct personal recognition in 
 the field of letters only by his clear and incisive, though 
 ^ V. Note on Constitution at end of volume. 
 
HAMILTON— AMES. 75 
 
 seldom highly-polished, correspondence ; for his celebrated 
 Farewell Address is understood to have been mainly the 
 joint work of himself, Madison, and Jay. Hamilton, who 
 also contributed to it, displayed abilities that would have in 
 more " piping times " have made him eminent as an author. 
 His contributions — about three-fourths of the whole — to the 
 Federalist, the organ of his party, are marked, as were all his 
 papers and speeches, by originality of thought, breadth of 
 view, and purity of style. Of his numerous historical sketches, 
 the most celebrated is his letter to Colonel Laurens, giving 
 an account of the fate of Major Andr^, in which refinement 
 of feeling and inflexible impartiality of view are alike con- 
 spicuous. 
 
 " Never perhaps did any man suffer death witli more justice or 
 deserve it less. The character I have given of him is drawn partly 
 from what I saw of him myself, and partly from information. I am 
 aware that a man of real merit is never seen in so favourable a light 
 as through the medium of adversity : the clouds that surround him 
 are shades that set off his good qualities. Misfortune cuts down the 
 little vanities that in prosperous times serve as so many spots in his 
 virtues, and gives a tone of humility that makes his worth more 
 amiable. His spectators, who enjoy a happier lot, are less prone to 
 detract from it through envy, and are more disposed by compassion to 
 give him the credit he deserves, and perhaps even to magnify it." 
 
 The orator of the Federalists, Fisher Ames, has been by 
 his countrymen intellectually associated with Burke. The 
 points of contact seem to be that both were in constant 
 dread of the excesses of democracy, which they were, in both 
 cases, led to anticipate by the horrors of the French Eevolu- 
 tion ; and that both were regarded as renegades by their more 
 pronounced associates. Ames was a man of culture, of con- 
 siderable insight into real dangers, whose style has conspicu- 
 ously one element of excellence — ^it is thoughtful and not too 
 cautious, incisive without being reckless. In view of some 
 of the later developments of the American Press, which, says 
 Mr. TroUope, is " not only slanderous but dull," we may 
 
76 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 commit ourselves to the expression of some sympathy with 
 the following reflections of the accomplished and eloquent 
 reactionary : — 
 
 " Jntellectual superiority is so far from conciliating confidence that 
 it is the very spirit of a democracy to proscribe the aristocracy of 
 talents. To be the favourite of an ignorant multitude a man must 
 descend to their level ... he must yield to their prejudices, and 
 substitute them for principles. Instead of enlightening their errors . . . 
 he must furnish the sophistry that will propagate and defend them. 
 
 " The Press is the prostituted companion of liberty, and somehow 
 or other, we know not how, its efficient auxiliary. It follows the 
 substance like its shade ; but while a man walks erect he may observe 
 that .his shadow is almost always in the dirt. ... It would be easy to 
 enlarge on its evils. They are in England, they are here, they are 
 everywhere. It is a precious pest and a necessary mischief, and there 
 would be no liberty without it. 
 
 " It is not by destroying tyrants that we are to extinguish tyranny ; 
 Nature is not thus to be exhausted of her power to produce them. The 
 soil of a republic sprouts with the rankest fertility : it has been sown 
 with dragons' teeth. To lessen the hopes of usurping demagogues we 
 must enlighten, animate, and combine the spirit of freemen ; we must 
 fortify and guai'd the constitutional ramparts about liberty. When its 
 friends become indolent or disheartened it is no longer of any import- 
 ance how long-lived are its enemies : they will prove immortal." 
 
 Ames continued to take a prominent part in public 
 affairs during the last years of the century, and in 1796 made 
 perhaps his most brilliant political speech in defence of the 
 policy of his party, which preferred a British to a French 
 alliance. Twice, before his death (in 1808), he was drawn 
 from his retirement to pronounce the best of many en- 
 comiums on the two greatest of his compatriots. From these 
 we may select the following as characteristic sentences : — 
 
 " The unambitious life of Washington, declining fame yet courted 
 by it, seemed like the Ohio to choose its long way through solitudes 
 diffusing fertility ; or like his own Potomac widening and deepening 
 his channel as he approaches the sea, and displaying most the serenity 
 of his greatest towards the end of his course." 
 
 Again, 
 
 " The tears that flow on this recital wiU never diy up. My heart, 
 
JEFIEESON. 77 
 
 penetrated witli the remembrance of the man, grows liquid as I write 
 ... I could weep too for my country, which, mournful as it is, does 
 not know the half of its loss. It deeply laments when it turns its 
 eyes back and sees what Hamilton was ; but my soul stiffens with 
 despair when I think what Hamilton would have been. ... It is not 
 as Apollo, enchanting the shepherds with his lyre, that we deplore 
 him : it is as Hercules, treacherously slain in the midst of his unfin- 
 ished labours, leaving the world overrun with monsters." 
 
 The great antagonist of the Federals is one of the most 
 conspicuous figures in American history. Thomas Jeffeeson 
 (1743-1826) is the representative in chief of the iconoclastic 
 spirit of his age and nation. While his rivals stood firmly 
 on the defensive against the encroachments of an arbitrary 
 government, his desire, in politics as in speculation, was to 
 break with the past. Inspired by Patrick Henry's denuncia- 
 tions of the Stamp Act, he became prominent, in 1769, as a 
 member of the Virginian Assembly. In 1776, the main 
 responsibility of drawing up the " Declaration of Independ- 
 ence" fell on him. He subsequently spent six years in or 
 near Paris, as Minister of Congress, and brought back, from 
 bis residence, an admiration for those phases of the French 
 Eevolution from which the more temperate judgments of 
 Hamilton and Ames and Adams had recoiled. He threw 
 himself heart and soul into the arms of the Democratic party, 
 and, in the constitutional struggle that ensued, his keener 
 sense of the direction in which popular sympathies were 
 tending, gave him the ascendency over the wider knowledge 
 and more far-seeing intellects of his adversaries. Jefferson 
 was the Danton of the West ; but his forte lay not so much 
 in oratory as in political management. More perhaps than 
 any other statesman of his age, he aspired to be an author, to 
 which title the most vivacious pages of his Notes on Virginia, 
 conspicuously his graphic description of the passage of the 
 Potomac through the Blue Eidge, his Autohiography and 
 Correspondence, give him a fair claim. His sketches of 
 continental society, though bearing the mark of a somewhat 
 
78 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 superficial study of French models, and marred by eighteenth- 
 century mannerism, are lively ; and his occasional flights of 
 fancy, as in the Bialogue between the Mead and the Heart, at 
 least ingenious. The latter, in accord with the fashionable 
 sentimentalism of the time, of course gets the advantage, as 
 in the following retort on her adversary : — 
 
 " Grief witli sucli a comfort (companionsHp) is almost a luxury. 
 In a life where we are perpetually exposed to accident -yoiirs is a 
 wonderful proposition — to insulate ourselves, to retire from all aid, and 
 to wrap ourselves in the mantle of self-sufficiency. For assuredly no one 
 will care for him who cares for nobody. Friendship is precious, not 
 only in the shade but in the sunshine of life. ... I will recur for 
 proof to the days we have lately passed. On these indeed the sun 
 shone brightly. . . . Hills, valleys, chateaux, gardens, rivers, every 
 object wore its liveliest hue. Whence did they borrow it ? From the 
 presence of our charmifag companion. They were pleasing because she 
 seemed pleased. . . . "When Nature assigned us the same habitation 
 she gave us over it a divided empire. To you she allotted the field of 
 science, to me that of morals. When the circle is to be squared, or the 
 orbit of a comet to be traced ; when the arch of greatest strength or 
 the solid of least resistance is to be investigated, take up the problem 
 — it is yours ; Nature has given you no cognisance of it. In like 
 manner, in denying to you the feelings of sympathy, of benevolence, of 
 gratitude, of justice, of love, of friendship, she has excluded you from 
 their control. To these she has adapted the mechanism of the Heart. 
 Morals were too essential to the happiness of man to be risked on the 
 uncertain combinations of the Head." 
 
 This reminds one of Diderot, and of Carlyle's comment, 
 "Be virtuous then." ITature in the earlier periods of 
 American investigation "allotted" the field of science to 
 Franklin, the Bertrams, and Wilson the ornithologist ; and in 
 the sphere of philology to the famous Lindley Murray, and 
 Noah "Webster (1758-1843), Johnson's successor in English 
 lexicography. She can hardly be said to have consigned to 
 Jefferson the care of morals. His religion and ethics, at their 
 theoretic best, were those of the too-much-abused though 
 rather vulgar immigrant, his friend Tom Paine, and of the 
 French Encyclop6die. In light literature a successful dilet- 
 tante, his power of putting in forcible terms a sometimes 
 
MADISON. 79 
 
 fallacious argument is better exhibited in a few paragraphs of 
 the Inaugural Address to his Presidency (1801-1809), one of a 
 series which, though necessarily written under some constraint, 
 have more life and individuality than is generally to be found 
 in Queen's Speeches : — 
 
 " All -will bear in mind this principle, that though the will of the 
 majority is in all cases to prevail, that will, to be rightful, must be 
 reasonable ; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal 
 laws must protect. . . . Let us reflect, that having banished from our 
 land that religious intolerance under which mankind so long bled and 
 suffered, we have yet gained little if we countenance a. political intol- 
 erance as despotic, as wicked, and capable of as bitter persecutions. 
 During the throes and convulsions of the ancient world ; during the 
 agonising spasms of infuriated man, seeking through blood and slaughter 
 his long-lost liberty, it was not wonderful that the agitation of the 
 billows should reach even this distant and peaceful shore ; that this 
 should be more felt by some and feared by others . . . but every 
 dtBference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We have called 
 by different names brothers of the same principle. We are all repub- 
 licans ; we are all federalists. . . . Some honest men fear that a 
 republican government cannot be strong. ... I believe this, on the 
 contrary, the strongest government on earth. I believe it is the only 
 one where every man at the call of the law would fly to the standard 
 of the law, and would rheet invasions of the pubHc order as his own 
 personal concern. Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted to 
 the government of himself. Can he then be trusted with the govern- 
 ment of others ? Or have we found angels in the form of kings to 
 govern him ? Let history ^ answer this question. 
 
 His Secretary of State and successor in the Presidency, 
 James Madison — the fourth in single, the third in double 
 of&ce — one of the leaders of the Convention, and coadjutor 
 with Jay and Hamilton in the Federalist, was somewhat 
 of a trimmer in politics; but there is no reason to assert 
 that his change of front was interested. His first schism 
 with his old leader was on occasion of the proclamation of 
 neutrality in the Anglo-French War — a damper on the zeal 
 
 ' Contrast, as an opposite extreme, the reading of history by Mr. Carlyle 
 and Mr. Froude. Jefferson, in this plea for unrestrained democracy, ingeniously 
 shifts the nominative — he who cannot govern himself is not the man to govern 
 others. 
 
80 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 of the more pronounced Gallo-philists, for which Hamilton 
 was largely responsible. He testified to the influence ex- 
 erted over his mind by the masterful will of Jefferson, in 
 extending to his own State the resolutions of 1798, which 
 were, with some plausibility, appealed to, in their own justifi- 
 cation, by the rebels of 1861. Madison's claims to literary 
 distinction are neither transcendent nor contemptible. He is 
 entitled to be remembered as having had a share in the form, 
 as well as the matter, of the Declaration of Independence, of 
 the Constitution, and of Washington's retiring address. The 
 close of Quincy Adams' eulogy on his memory is charac- 
 teristic of both men : — 
 
 " You too have the solemn duty to perform of improving the con- 
 dition of your species by improving your own. Not in the great and 
 strong wind of a revolution, which rent the mountains and brake in 
 pieces the rocks before the Lord — for the Lord is not in the wind ; 
 not in the earthquake of a revolutionary war, marching to the onset 
 between the battlefield and the scaffold — for the Lord is not in the 
 earthqxiaie ; not in the fire of civil discussion, in war between the 
 members and the head, in nullification of the laws of the Union by 
 the forcible resistance of one refractory State — for the Lord is not in 
 the fire. . . . No, it is in the still small voice that succeeded the whirl- 
 wind, the earthquake, and the fire. The voice that stills the raging 
 of the waves and the tumults of the people — that spoke the words of 
 peace, of harmony, of union. And for that voice may you and your 
 children's children, 'to the last syllable of recorded time,' fix your 
 eyes upon the memory, and listen with your ears to the life of James 
 Madison ! " 
 
 Among the religious writers, whose career began in the 
 Colonial and ended in the Eevolution time, two are worthy 
 of notice ; the one as holding himself apart from all political 
 strife, the other as an eloquent advocate of the unpopular side. 
 "When the tea-chests were being emptied into Boston Harbour, 
 John Woolman (born in New Jersey 1720) was finishing the 
 last of his numerous tracts. A consistent apostle of peace, 
 friend of the Indians, and opponent of negro slavery, he, at 
 an early period of his life, nearly got into trouble by his re- 
 
JOHN "WOOLMAN. 81 
 
 fusal to bear arms ; but escaped active persecution, and sur- 
 vived to write his famous Journal of experiences in both con- 
 tinents. This book, though inspired by the consciousness of 
 being under the guidance of an inward voice, owes its charm 
 to the absence of the assumption of infallibility that some- 
 times accompanies the belief in a special Providence, to the 
 quaint simplicity of its style, and the vein of humanity, 
 extending alike to " man and bird and beast," which pervades 
 it. The following record of a juvenile case of conscience 
 quaintly illustrates those qualities : — 
 
 " A thing remaikaHe in my childhood was that once going to a 
 neighbour's house, I saw on the way a robin sitting on her nest, and 
 as I came near she went off, but haviug young ones flew about, and 
 with many cries expressed her concern for them : I stood and threw 
 stones at her, till, one striking her, she fell down dead : at first I was 
 pleased with the exploit, but after a few minutes was seized with 
 horror, as having in a sportive way kUled an innocent creature while 
 she was careful for her young : I beheld her lying dead, and thought 
 these young ones for which she was so careful must now perish for 
 want of their dam to nourish them ; and after some painful considera- 
 tion on the subject, I climbed up the tree, took all the young birds, 
 and killed them, supposing that better than to leave them to pine 
 away and die miserably ; and believed in this case that the Scripture 
 proverb was fulfilled, ' The tender mercies of the wicked are cruel.' 
 I then went on my errand, but for some hours could think of little 
 else but the cruelties I had committed, and was much troubled." 
 
 Later we find Woolman " in an awful frame of mind," going 
 to meeting " exercised by the Spirit," to speak ",more than was 
 required " before his elders ; repenting of his error, but taking 
 heart again to reprove " drinking and vain sports " in the coun- 
 try "about the time called Christmas " — a " heavy exercise ;" 
 then " through the revelation of Jesus Christ " acquiescing in 
 his duties as a tailor; marrying "a well-inclined damsel;" 
 entertaining soldiers billeted in his house, but refusing to 
 take pay for it ; safe by his courteous confidence among the 
 tomahawks of the Susquehannah ; visiting England, where he 
 declined to send letters by post, in consideration for the over- 
 wrought carriers, or to wear dyed garments ; making converts 
 
 G 
 
82 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 of the poor sailors ; denouncing false displays of eloquence, 
 and returning home to rest from his labours : — a man genuinely 
 pious, unaffectedly good, whose writings, if seldom strikingly 
 original, are always so suggestive and gracious that we can 
 understand the sentiment of Charles Lamb, who said, " get " 
 them " by heart and love the early Quakers." Woolman has, 
 in some respects, the innocence of the child in the Story 
 without an End ; in others, he is a shrewd detective of the 
 love of wealth and the world, which have gone far to destroy 
 the distinctive traits of his society. His book is dispropor- 
 tionate, sometimes fanatical; but all toiling and suffering crea- 
 tures should bless his memory. The following dream is worthy 
 of Bunyan in thought, almost of De Quincey in style : — 
 
 " In a time of sickness, a little more than two years and a half 
 ago, I was brought so near the gates of death that I forgot my name. 
 Being then desirous to know who I was, I saw a mass of a duU 
 gloomy colour between the south and the east, and was informed that 
 this mass was human beings in as great misery as they could be and 
 live, and that I was mixed ■with them, and that henceforth I might 
 not consider myself as a distinct or separate being. In this state I 
 remained several hours. I then heard a soft melodious voice, more 
 pure and harmonious than any I had heard with my ears before ; I 
 believed it was the voice of an angel who spake to the other angels ; 
 the words were, ' John Woolman is dead.' I soon remembered that 
 I was once John Woolman, and being assured that I was alive in the 
 body, I greatly wondered what that heavenly voice could mean. I 
 believed beyond doubting that it was the voice of an holy angel, but 
 as yet it was a mystery to me. 
 
 " I was then carried in spirit to the mines where poor oppressed 
 people were digging rich treasures for those called Christians, and 
 heard them blaspheme the name of Christ, at which I was grieved, 
 for His name to me was precious. I was then informed that these 
 heathens were told that those who oppressed them were the followers 
 of Christ ; and they said among themselves, ' If Christ directed them 
 to use us in this sort, then Christ is a cruel tyrant.' 
 
 " All this time the song of the angel remained a mystery ; and in 
 the morning, my dear wife and some others coming to my bedside, I 
 asked them if they knew who I was, and they, telling me I was John 
 Woolman, thought I was light-headed, for I told them not what the 
 angel said, nor was I disposed to talk much to any one, but was very 
 desirous to get so deep that I might understand this mystery. 
 
MATHER BYLES. 83 
 
 " My tongue was often so dry that I could not speak till I had 
 moved it about and gathered some moisture, and as I lay still for a 
 time I at length felt a Divine power prepare my mouth that I could 
 speak, and I then said : ' I am crucified with Christ, nevertheless I 
 live ; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me. And the life which I now 
 live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me 
 and gave Himself for me.' Then the mystery was opened, and I 
 perceived there was joy in heaven over a sinner who had repented, 
 and that the language, ' John Woolman is dead,' meant no more than 
 the death of my own will." 
 
 Shortly after Woolman's death the congregation of Hollis 
 Street Church, Boston (1776), — inspired by the patriotic spirit 
 of their town, just abandoned by English troops, — revolted 
 against the persistent royalism of their pastor, Mather 
 Byles; and, passing upon him a vote of censure, led to his 
 haughty resignation of an ofl&ce, the duties of which he had, 
 for upwards of forty years, discharged with honour and esteem. 
 He was subsequently tried for disloyalty, and, after being for 
 a period confined under guard to his house, permitted to pass 
 the remainder of his long life in retirement. Ere its close, he 
 must have been partially reconciled to some of the revolution- 
 ary leaders ; for our last- written record of him is a letter to 
 Franklin, his fellow-townsman and exact contemporary (both 
 having been born in Boston, 1706), gratefully acknowledging 
 some act of kindness. Byles is in some respects a unique 
 figure in the New England pulpit. Allied by descent to the 
 Mather and- Cotton dynasty, professing the Puritan creed, 
 and attached to the Presbyterian ceremonial, his manners, 
 politics, and, to some extent, his cast of mind, were those of a 
 high dignitary of the Church of England. His reputation as 
 a wit, in which capacity he indulged freely in puns and 
 practical jokes, recalls that of Bishop Corbet or Dr. South. 
 The friendly correspondent of Pope, he wrote verses after — a 
 long way after — the manner of the master, whom he was by 
 his admirers declared to excel. Elsewhere, more in the spirit 
 of Prior and Gay, he made parodies of the psalms. But 
 
84 AMERICAN LITERATUEE. 
 
 though a man of the world, a fine gentleman in dress and 
 gait, a stickler for his dignity, and a conversationalist whose 
 repartees were welcomed or feared in society, he was hy all 
 accounts a powerful preacher. Selected passages of his 
 elo(iuence exhibit the satisfactory result to which his own 
 standard of excellence, always aimed at and frequently 
 attained, must have contributed. He held that 
 
 « a finished mimster " should have a " graceful deportment, elegant 
 address, and fluent utterance. He must study an easy style, expres- 
 sive diction, and tuneful cadences. . . . Battling periods, uncouth jar- 
 gon, affected phrases, and finical jingles, let them be condemned, let 
 them be hissed from the desk and blotted from the page. . . . The 
 study of the minister is the field of battle. Here he plays the hero, 
 tries the dangers of war, and repeats the toils of combat. . . . How 
 often must he watch when others sleep, and his solitary candle bum 
 when the midnight darkness covers the windows of the neighbour- 
 hood ! '"■ 
 
 A model whose implied advice is not always followed where 
 the fluency of vulgar ignorance has been frequently con- 
 founded with religious inspiration. The gloom of Byles' 
 creed, or what he retained of it, appears mainly in his 
 frequent and generally impressive images of death, his 
 dwelling on the vanity of human wishes, the folly of mortal 
 pride in prospect of the great leveller, e.g. — 
 
 " In a few years the most beauteous and learned and pious head will 
 grin a hideous skull." ... "A creature drooping to dust and faUing 
 into a filthy grave to set up for strength and beauty and honour and 
 applause ! . . So might an emmet crawl in state, and value itself 
 on its imaginary possessions and conceited accomplishments. So might 
 a shadow, lengthened by the setting sun, admire to find itself grown 
 so tall, while in the same moment it was going to vanish, blended in 
 the gathering twilight and lost in night." 
 
 This writer's eloquence is occasionally apt to overi'each itself ; 
 the adjectives are pUed too high, and the ideas ^ repeated. It 
 
 ' This and the following passage are quoted by Mr. Tyler, vol. ii. pp.. 
 195-197. 
 
 ^ y. especially a similar passage in Duyckinck, vol. i. p. 119. 
 
MINOR AUTHORS— SATIRISTS. 85 
 
 would be cruel to compare it with the master-passages of 
 Jeremy Taylor, with the apostrophe, perhaps the most splen- 
 did in Elizabethan prose, that rounds off Ealeigh's History of 
 the World, or with Sir Thomas Browne's Urn-Burial ; but it 
 is genuine eloquence, and a worthy close to our record of the 
 elder, that is, the orthodox, religious oratory of the West. 
 
 The age of the Titans in Transatlantic history abounds in 
 minor literati, whose light effusions, mainly satirical or fanci- 
 ful sketches in prose and verse, throw a somewhat dim and 
 rugged lustre over its graver page. The bulk of those patent 
 reflections of the manner and thought of Butler, Pope, Swift, 
 and Shenstone are a penance to wade through, and scarce 
 claim remembrance for their authors. A few stand out con- 
 spicuously by the celebrity of the names with which they 
 are associated, or some approach to originality in their style. 
 Among these are the social caricatures of Judge Brackenridge 
 (who, though born in Scotland, lived in America from in- 
 fancy), and his doggerel but vigorous lines on Bimher Hill ; 
 Mount Vernon, an ode by David Humphreys, Ambassador 
 to Lisbon in 1794, author of several other pieces and an 
 unsuccessful comedy ; the political satires of Mercy Warren, 
 authoress of Things Necessary to a Woman (suggested in part 
 by the Bape of the Loch, and the obvious model of the more 
 recent squib. Nothing to Wear), and of a History of the Bevolv/- 
 tian, remarkable only as the first in date; Jonathan M. Sewall, 
 remembered by two lines addressed to his countrymen in 
 an epilogue to the tragedy of Cato — 
 
 " No pent-up Utica contracts your powers, 
 But the whole boundless continent is yours ;" 
 
 Joel Barlow's Hasty Pudding, a mock heroic in the style 
 of Ambrose Phillips, and his tremendous epic entitled the 
 Columbiad} To these we have to add Francis Hopkinson's 
 
 1 "No critic," says Mr. Edwin P. Whipple, "in the last fifty years has 
 
86 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 Battle of the Kegs, Ms Pretty Story — a burlesque closely 
 fashioned after Arbuthnot's John Bull — his New Boof, 
 meaning the American Constitution, and his satire on the 
 pedantry of the sciences, entitled The, Salt Box. 
 
 A more interesting figure of the time is curiously asso- 
 ciated with its social circumstances. In the year 1761, a 
 negro child called Phillis was brought from Africa to the 
 human market of Boston, and sold to a Mrs. Wheatley, from 
 whom she took her name. If the alleged facts of her career 
 are reliable, it is one of the most remarkable instances of pre- 
 cocity on record. Arriving on the new continent, without 
 even the rudiments of education, she, by the private study of 
 leisure hours, in the household of which she remained a slave, 
 acquired, within a few years, a thorough mastery of the 
 English language, and began to learn Latin. In her seven- 
 teenth year (1770) she wrote verses, a volume of which was 
 published in 1773, when, with other members of the famUy, 
 she went to visit London, and, on her return, among other 
 pieces, sent a short ode to "Washington, with a letter, which 
 drew from him a gracious and complimentary reply. Her 
 poetry is modelled on that of the English masters of the 
 century ; but few have thrown apter thoughts into smoother 
 lines. The following reference in those addressed to the 
 memory of Maecenas are suggestive of her feeling for a native 
 land, where she only could recall an image of her mother, 
 according to some heathen rite, pouring out water before the 
 rising sun — 
 
 read more than a hundred lines of it, and even this effort of attention has 
 been a deadly fight with those merciful tendencies in the human organism 
 •which softly wrap the overworked mind in the blessedness of sleep." Prob- 
 ably Mr. Whipple is right in what he means to say of the Colwmbiad; but, 
 despite the London Spectator, I must reassert that Mr. Whipple's style scarcely 
 combines " the strength of the Areopagitica with the liveliness of the Spec- 
 tator"— ^vemaang, Mr. Griswold to mean that of Addison and Steele. 
 
PHILLIS WHEATLEY— BALLADS. 87 
 
 " The happier Terence all the choir inspired, 
 His soul replenished and his bosom fired ; 
 But say, ye Muses, why this partial grace, 
 To one alone of Afric's sable race, 
 From age to age transmitting thus his name, 
 With the first glory in the rolls of fame ?" 
 
 Two couplets, at least, in her paraphrase of Ovid's account 
 of Niobe, close with strong lines — 
 
 " With clouds encompassed, glorious Phoebus stands 
 The feathered vengeance quivering in his hands." 
 
 " Then didst thou Sipylus the language hear 
 Of fate portentous whistling in the air" 
 
 The number of American songstresses has been portentous ; 
 but few have surpassed the musical graces of this black girl. 
 " Alba ligustra cadunt, vaccinia nigra leguntur." 
 
 The ballad literature of the Eevolution days is said to 
 have attracted the attention of Lord Chatham, less probably 
 from its intrinsic merit than from its faithful though rough 
 embodiment of the sentiments that not only moved on the 
 surface, but penetrated the depths of the national life. The 
 anonymous popular literature of a country is the best " ab- 
 stract and brief chronicle of the time " in which it is produced. 
 The songs current in America during this era, inspired by the 
 same spirit, and pitched in the same key, are historically 
 interesting and artistically monotonous. They celebrate, in 
 rude verse, the achievements of local heroes like Bold Haw- 
 thorne ; or ridicule, as in Jack Brag, the British Lion ; or 
 exhibit the overthrow of vaulting ambition in The Fate of 
 Burgoyne ; or, as in Wyoming Massacre, bewail the fallen ; 
 whUe the schoolboy huzzahs of Free America are hailing 
 the triumph of the good cause. Among the rude national 
 anthems of the West, Yankee Doodle is notable as having 
 been an old Dutch catch adapted into an English satirical 
 chant, and subsequently adopted, with conscious or uncon- 
 scious irony, by the American troops. Hail Columbia was 
 
88 AMEEICASr LITERATURE. 
 
 a somewliat later production (1798) of Joseph Hopkinson. 
 The Adams and liberty of Eohert Treat Paine, jun., takes 
 higher rank, but it was overpraised at the time, and is still 
 overpraised. The Star-spangled Banner of Francis S. Key is 
 associated with the traditions of the second British war. 
 
 Our records of this era may close with a brief notice 
 of three writers of more magnitude : — a lawyer, a divine, 
 and a soldier, all considerable figures in their day, none 
 of whom deserve to be forgotten. Of these, the first, John 
 TrumbuU of Connecticut, was a precocious student of Yale, 
 where he especially devoted himself to the English classics, 
 and with Dwight, Humphreys, and Barlow (one of the earliest 
 of the brotherhoods frequent in the history of American 
 letters), sent, fairly-written essays to the journals. In 1772 
 (in his twenty-second year) he published The Progress of 
 Dulness. This satire, the title of which must have been 
 suggested conjointly by the great works of Hogarth and of 
 Pope, is devoted to exhibit the influence of what the author 
 held to be the unprofitable college education of the time, and 
 the false fashions of society, on the minds and fortunes of 
 three originally foolish persons, Tom Brainless, Dick Hair- 
 brain, and Miss Harriet Simper. The first, after the smatter- 
 ing of study required for his diploma, acquires the art of 
 picking other people's brains, and is installed in a pulpit, 
 where, his impudence, yoked with dulness, 
 
 " Eeads o'er Ms notes with halting pace, 
 Masked ia the stiffness of his face. 
 With gestures such as might become 
 Those statues once that spoke at Rome, 
 Or Livy's ox that to the State 
 Declared the oracles of fate, 
 In awkward tones, nor said nor sung, 
 Slow rumbling o'er the faltering tongue ; 
 Two hours his drawling speech holds on, 
 And names it preaching when 'tis done." 
 
 It is proper to remember that this was written more than 
 
■JOHN TRUMBULL. 89 
 
 ten years before the appearance of The Task. Hairbrain, a 
 richer and more dissolute blockhead, passing from cards and 
 dice, at the University, to travel, meets and ultimately jilts 
 Harriet the coquette, who, with others of her class, goes to 
 meeting on pretext of hearing the sermon — 
 
 " As though, they meant to take by blows 
 Th' opposing galleries of beaux, 
 To church the female squadron move 
 All armed with weapons used in love ; 
 Like coloured ensigns, gay and fair, 
 High caps rise floating in the air, 
 Bright silk its varied radiance flings. 
 And streamers wave in kissing strings : 
 Each bears th' artUl'ry of her charms. 
 Like training bands at viewing arms." 
 
 In 1775 Trumbull published the first three cantos of his 
 mock epic, M'Fingal, and added the fourth in 1782, after the 
 close of the war. The success of the first issue was so remark- 
 able that it soon attained a thirtieth edition. A recent critic 
 has assured us that " it was considered one of the forces of 
 the Eevolution, because, as a satire on the Tories, it pene- 
 trated into every farmhouse, and sent the rustic volunteers 
 laughing into the ranks of Washington and Greene." The 
 verse and plan of this poem are alike closely modelled on that 
 of Butler ; but the political feeling of the two is in direct 
 antagonism. MTingal, a type of the royalist squires, as " the 
 stupid party," of New England, is Hudibras in reverse ; while 
 in the somewhat verbose Honorius the champion of the 
 Puritans is reinstated in dignity. The satire, however, as in 
 the case of its prototype in travesty, consists in the uncon- 
 scious absurdities of word and deed perpetrated, and the 
 disgraces undergone by the hero, alias the butt, himself. 
 The following humorously describes his boomerang style of 
 controversy : — 
 
 " As some muskets so contrive it 
 As oft to miss the mark they drive at, 
 
90 AMERICASr LITERATURE. 
 
 i 
 
 And, thougli well aimed at duck or plover, 
 Bear wide and kick their owners over, 
 So fared our Squire whose reasoning toil 
 Would often on himself recoil, 
 And so much injured more his side 
 The stronger arguments he applied, 
 As old war elephants, dismayed, 
 Trod down the troops they came to aid." 
 
 MTingal is ultimately subjected to the then newly-invented 
 progress of tarring and feathering, described by Trumbull "as 
 if he loved it;" and constrained to exercise the " second-sight " 
 derived from his Scotch ancestry, in prophecies of ruin to his 
 cause. This is one of the touches of genuine patriotism which, 
 more completely to the author's compeers in the struggle than 
 to us, relieved the monotony of the long burlesque — 
 
 " I hear a voice that calls away 
 And cries, ' The Whigs will win the day ! ' 
 My beck'ning genius gives command, 
 And bids me fly the fatal land. 
 Where, changing name and constitution, 
 Eebellion turns to Revolution." 
 
 In 1785, writing to a French critic, TrumbuU takes credit 
 
 for having endeavoured, "with as much impartiality as possible, 
 
 to satirise the follies and extravagances of his countrjmien as 
 
 well as their enemies." His poem would not have been so 
 
 popular had he quite fulfilled his purpose. It is everywhere 
 
 lauded for its thorough American spirit ; but we may leave 
 
 this once famous, and still remarkable, production by an 
 
 example in which the laudable design is apparent. It is 
 
 where a noisy mob are raising in the market-place a pole, 
 
 precursor of the yet more ominously named " Tree of Liberty." 
 
 " Not higher school-boys kites aspire, 
 Or royal mast or country spire. 
 Like spears at Brobdignagian tilting. 
 Or Satan's walking staflf in Milton, 
 And on its top the flag unfurled 
 Waved triumph o'er the gazing world, 
 Inscribed with inconsistent types 
 Of Liberty and thirteen stripes. " 
 
TIMOTHY DWIGHT. 91 
 
 To which he adds in a note, " It would doubtless be wrong to 
 suppose that the stripes bear any allusion to the Slave Trade." 
 The rhymes are atrocious, the rhythm Butler's, not at his best ; 
 but the satire is an interesting forestalment of the redeeming 
 feature of the modern school of so-called American humorists 
 — their plain speech about contemporary abuses. 
 
 Timothy Dwight, Trumbull's companion and coadjutor at 
 Yale, wrote his Conquest of Canaan, as a tutor of the college 
 over which he afterwards presided, but did not publish it till 
 after the close of the war, when his national song, entitled 
 Columlia, an outburst of patriotic enthusiasm rather than 
 poetry, had attracted attention. There followed in 1788 his 
 Triumph of Infidelity, the earliest American verse in which — 
 conspicuously in the picture of " The Smooth Divine " — the 
 influence of Cowper is distinctly visible, and Greenfield Mill, 
 an idyllic poem or series of poems, some in octosyllabics, others 
 in the Spenserian stanza, in which the manners and measures 
 of various English predecessors are gracefully adapted to the 
 commemoration of local events and home scenery. Dwight 
 was the author of several prose essays and reviews, and some 
 of the descriptions in his volume of Travels in New England 
 and New York have been justly admired for accuracy and 
 occasional richness of Olustration. On reading his impres- 
 sions of the Catskills, the White Mountains, and Lake George, 
 it has to be borne in mind that he lived before this kind of 
 writing had grown stale, and that much that has become plati- 
 tude since the days of Scott and Byron was, to earlier gene- 
 rations, a novelty. The following, however, is worth attention 
 as an example of the intrusion of commonplace on the one 
 side and pedantry on the other, which is still apt to disfigure 
 fine writing, especially across the Atlantic : — 
 
 " Directly over tie gap I have mentioned, and through, whicli this 
 combination of beauty was presented to us, the moon, far southward, 
 in her handsomest crescent (!), sat on the eastern and the evening star 
 
92 AMERICAN LITERATUEE. 
 
 on tlie western side of the opening, at equal distances from tlie border- 
 ing mountains, and, shining from a sky perfectly pure and serene, 
 finished the prospect. The crimson lustre, however, soon faded : the 
 mountains hst their gilding ; the lake became misty and dim. The 
 splendour of the moon and Hesper increased," etc. 
 
 This recalls Cowley's description of the dress of the archangel 
 Gabriel in the Bavideis. Cowper, on the other hand, has 
 deservedly praised the passage in the Canaan — an tinreadahle 
 epic, made more so by the mixture of the Eevolutionary battles 
 with those of the Israelites — in which it is said that night 
 
 " With magic hand becalmed the solemn even 
 And drew day's curtain from the spangled heaven. 
 At once the planets sailed around the throne, 
 At once ten thousand worlds in splendour shone ;" 
 
 a passage presenting a close resemblance, probably unknown 
 
 to Blanco White, to the leading idea of his great sonnet. 
 
 Elsewhere in the same composition we have a prophecy of the 
 
 future of America, with a fine rhetorical ping at the close : — 
 
 " Then smiling art shall wrap the fields in bloom. 
 Fine the rich ore and guide the useful loom, 
 Then lofty towers in golden pomp arise ; 
 Then spiry cities meet auspicious skies ; 
 The soul on wisdom's wing sublimely soar, 
 New virtues cherish and new truths explore. 
 Thro' times long tract our name celestial run, 
 Climb in the east and circle with the sun." 
 
 But it rises only to the level of an ordinary " Newdigate." 
 That Dwight was more of a clergyman than a poet appears 
 from his most vigorous piece of writing being a somewhat 
 abusive dedication of his Triumph to M. de Voltaire : — 
 
 r 
 
 " Sir, your Creator endowed you with shining talents, and cast your 
 lot ia a field of action where they might be most happUy employed. 
 In the progress of a long and industrious life, you devoted them to a 
 single purpose — the elevation of youi character above His. For the 
 accomplishment of this purpose with a diligence, etc. . . . you taught, 
 as far as your example and sentiments extended their influence, that 
 the chief end of mun was -to slander his God and abuse him for ever. 
 To whom could such an effort as the following be dedicated with more 
 propriety than to you ?" 
 
PHILIP FRENEAU. 93 
 
 Dr. D wight was a well-meaning, amiable, indefatigable man, 
 of remarkable talent, but distinctly falling short of genius. 
 Of the latter quality Philip Freneau, the last of our group, 
 seems to have had at least a touch, though as often it was 
 marred by an incorrigible fluency. Freneau, scion of a French 
 family exiled by the Edict of Nantes, born in New York 
 1752, a graduate with Madison, in 1771, of New Jersey, when 
 he was already known as a precocious versifier, led an adven- 
 turous and roving life. A soldier in the Eevolution war, he 
 was, in 1780, confined in the British prison-ship, whence 
 he lampooned the floating hospital opposite, as a slaughter- 
 house, visited by a Hessian surgeon, whose pills and blisters 
 " scattered fate where'er his footsteps came." After his 
 liberation he commanded a vessel sailing from Charleston, 
 and on his return settled down into the drudgery of jour- 
 nalism, in which, during the remainder of his days, he was 
 engaged as an advocate of the Jeffersonian policy. Freneau 
 seems to have been an unscrupulous politician, having turned 
 against his former friends the Federalists, especially the elder 
 Adams ; but he was an accurate as well as vivacious writer 
 in prose, and continued till his death, in 1832, to make him- 
 self feared if not respected. The best specimen of his prose 
 is his Advice to Authors, issued in 1788, with the pseudo- 
 signature of Philip Slender. The following selections from 
 this amusing and often wise hrochure are sufficiently charac- 
 teristic and sometimes still applicable : — 
 
 " I see no reason that Tsecause we are all striving to live by the 
 same idle trade we should sviffer ourselves to be embittered against 
 each other, like a paternity of rival mechanics in the same street. . . . 
 Where the whole profits of a company amount to little or nothing, there 
 ought not to be any quarrel about dividends." . . . The English " are 
 excusable in treating the American authors as inferiors, a political and 
 literary independence of their nation being two very different things ; 
 the first was accomplished in about seven years, the latter will not be 
 completely effected perhaps in as many centuries. . . . When you 
 write a book for the public have nothing to do with Epistles dedicatory. 
 They were first invented by slaves, and have been continued by fools 
 
94 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 and sycoptants. ... Be careful to avoid all connection witli doctors 
 of law and divinity, masters of arts, professors of colleges, and in general 
 all those that wear square black caps. A mere scholar and an original 
 author are two animals as diflferent from each other as a fresh and salt 
 water sailor. ... If you are so poor that you are forced to spend your 
 life in a garret, give thanks that you are not forced to spend it in a 
 tub. . . . Never engage in any business as an understrapper. I cannot 
 endure to see an author so debase his profession as to submit to be 
 second in any office. . . . Never make a present of your works to 
 great men. If they do not think them worth purchasing, trust me, 
 they will not think them worth reading. If fortune seems determined 
 to starve you, do not take to drinking, gambling, or bridge-building, 
 as some have done . . . but retire to some uninhabited island or 
 desert, and there, at your leisure, end your life with decency." 
 
 There is much in this of the spirit of the author's friend 
 Franklin ; hut Freneau had another vein. The headlong 
 mass of his verse far exceeded his powers to keep it up to 
 the highest standard of that age, far less to escape the 
 anathemas of our own when every graduate can make fair 
 jingle on moon or glacier, on love or war. Mne-tenths of 
 his patriotic hymns, of his odes valedictory, worshipful, or 
 comminative, are such as are consigned to the corners of 
 weekly newspapers. Some half dozen pieces, however, remain 
 to prove that Philip Freneau was a poet ; notably his Wild 
 IToneysiocMe, of which we give the opening and the closing 
 verses — 
 
 " Fair flower that dos't so comely grow, 
 Hid in this silent dull retreat. 
 Untouched thy honeyed blossoms blow. 
 
 Unseen thy little branches greet ; 
 No roving foot shall crush thee here. 
 Nor busy hand provoke a tear. 
 
 " From morning suns and evening dews 
 
 At first thy little being came ; 
 If nothing once you nothing lose, 
 
 For when you die you are the same. 
 The space between is but an hour. 
 The frail duration of a flower." 
 
 It would be uncivil to compare this, or the address of April 
 
FRENEAU. 95 
 
 to May, with Ben Jonson's Lily, Herrick's Daffodils, or Words- 
 worth's Daisy; but it is genuine poetry. Nor less so are the 
 verses to the Hurricane, to Neversink Heights, to St. Catherina, 
 or to The Dying Indian, with the motto " Debemur morti nos, 
 nostraque." Freneau is peculiarly successful in his efforts to 
 embody the sentiments and revive the traditions of the old 
 races of the land. Duyckinck has pointed out that O Connor's 
 Child derives one of its best lines from our author's Indian 
 Burying-Chround. Campbell writes — 
 
 " Now on tlie grass green turf lie sits, 
 His tassell'd horn beside Mm laid : 
 Now o'er the hUls in chase he flits, 
 The hunter and the deer a shade." 
 
 Freneau certainly anticipates him in the stanza — 
 
 " By midnight moons o'er moistening dews, 
 In vestments for the chase arrayed, 
 The hunter still the deer pursues. 
 The hunter and the deer — a shade." 
 
 Similarly Scott's Marmion from the same source adopts — 
 " And snatched the spear, but left the shield." 
 
 The famous death-song beginning — 
 
 " The sun sets at night and the stars shun the day," 
 
 with the refrain — 
 
 " For the son of Alknomook can never complain," 
 
 have been claimed by Mrs. Edgeworth for Mrs. Hunter, but 
 I believe them to be Freneau's :^ they in any case are the 
 keynote of the last words of the Oneida chief in Gertrude 
 of Wyoming. Our author's satire is, at its best, in the 
 verses on the New England Puritans, with two of which 
 
 ^ Henry Clay, in his great speech on the Seminole war of 1819, so quotes 
 it, and he ought to have known the authorship. 
 
96 AMERICAN LITEEATUEE. 
 
 we must close this attempt to revive a memory unduly 
 neglected — 
 
 " There exiles were formed in a whimsical mould, 
 And were awed by their priests, like the Hebrews of old. 
 Disclaimed all pretences to jesting and laughter, 
 And sighed their lives through to be happy hereafter. 
 
 On a crown immaterial their thoughts were intent. 
 They looked towards Zion wherever they went, 
 Did all things in hope of a future reward. 
 And worried mankind — for the sake of the Lord." 
 
POLITICS AND ORATORY. 97 
 
 CHAPTEE IV. 
 
 AMERICAN POLITICS AND ORATORY. 
 
 " The curse of this country," remarked an American states- 
 man, " is eloquent men." The West has long been noted for 
 fluency — often superfluency — of speech.. The period imme- 
 diately succeeding the Eevolution is illustrated by a body of 
 oratory which, unlike that concerned with the war itself, has 
 been preserved as the most interesting record of the first steps 
 in the progress of the newly-established nation. To give a full 
 account of these would be to write the early history of the 
 United States. Our limits and design permit only such refer- 
 ence to the leading events of the age as will make partially 
 intelligible its most conspicuous intellectual efforts. Every 
 good citizen felt himself called to play some part in raising 
 the superstructure on the foundations which had been 
 laid. The great debate of 1788, in which the claims of the 
 central authority were upheld by Hamilton, Madison, and 
 Marshall, against the extreme view of State Eights advocated 
 with the last eloquence of Patrick Henry ,^ having resulted in 
 the adoption, in the following year, of the Constitution by all 
 the States, a new set of differences began to emerge. In 1794 
 
 ^ In tlie course of Ms speecli the following image illustrates the strong 
 prejudice against the Federalists: — "This constitution is said to have 
 beautiful features, but, among other deformities, it has an awful squinting — 
 it squints towards monarchy. " 
 
 H 
 
98 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 there followed the first of a long series of discussions on the laws 
 of trade and the imposition of custom duties : in 1796 we come 
 to an exciting passage of arms (in which, as we have seen, 
 Fisher Ames was for the last time publicly conspicuous) on 
 the obligations imposed by the British Treaty. The inaugural 
 addresses of Adams and Jefferson were designed to calm the 
 troubled waters ; but (1803) they were again stirred to storm 
 by the controversies about the navigation of the Mississippi, 
 ending in the purchase of Louisiana from France. We come 
 next to the remarkable group of speeches directly or indirectly 
 relative to the second rupture with Great Britain in 1812. 
 The elements of this crisis began to manifest themselves soon 
 after the death of Hamilton, and, during the term of Jeffer- 
 son's Presidency, took a threatening shape. In the seemingly 
 internecine struggle of the two great powers of the Old 
 World, weaker States ran the risk of being ground between 
 " the incensed points of mighty opposites." It was as 
 hard for outsiders to be neutral as to a citizen of Solon's 
 Athens : those who assumed an impartial attitude were 
 exposed . to the aggressions of either side, — aggressions 
 which bore with special severity on a young commercial 
 nation. By the Berlin decrees and the " Orders in Council," 
 the ships of the Union were all but swept from the seas, 
 grass grew on the streets of the shore cities, and the high- 
 handed enforcement of the right of search by the attack 
 (outside Hampton Eoads) of the "Leopard" on the "Chesa- 
 peake," united all parties in a demand for reparation. The 
 recall of the British admiral who authorised the outrage 
 allayed the feeling, but the grievance remained ; and Congress 
 was, in retaliation, driven to what was known as the 
 " Eestrictive System," i.e. placing an embargo on their own 
 vessels, or confining them to port, with a view to protect 
 them from the dangers of a practical piracy. Against this 
 measure we have on record an outburst of New England 
 
 O 
 
JOSIAH QUINCY. 99 
 
 oratory from Josiah Quincy, one of the new powers in the 
 House of Eepresentatives, in which his State was already 
 beginning to strive with Virginia for political pre-emin- 
 ence : — 
 
 "The decrees of France prohibit us from trading with Great 
 Britain. The orders of Great Britain prohibit us from trading with 
 France. And what do we ? Why, in direct subserviency to the edicts 
 of each, we prohibit our citizens from trading with either. We do 
 more ; as if unqualified submission was not humiliating enough, we 
 descend to an act of supererogation in servility — we abandon trade alto- 
 gether. . . . An embargo liberty was never cradled in Massachusetts. 
 Our liberty was not so much a mountain as a sea-nymph. She was 
 free as the air. She could swim or she could run. . . . Our fathers 
 met her as she came, like the goddess of liberty, from the waves. 
 They caught her as she was sporting on the beach. They courted her 
 as she was spreading her nets upon the rocks. But an embargo 
 liberty, a hand-cuffed liberty, a liberty in fetters, a liberty traversing 
 between the four sides of a prison and beating her hand against the 
 walls, is none of our offspring. Its parentage is all inland." 
 
 These old harangues are more interesting than modern 
 novels, for many reasons. They come back to us as new, be- 
 cause undeservedly forgotten : we are not made weary of them 
 in " Eeviews :" they deal with realities : they are typical not 
 only of the individual speakers, but of the larger interests 
 they in the main honestly strove to represent. In the above 
 we have evidence of the zeal for a State conflicting with zeal 
 for the aggregate community which distinguishes the bulk of 
 Transatlantic eloquence, and there is a distinct trace of the 
 classical ornament with which that of New England has been 
 frequently overlaid. It seems natural that the speaker, scion 
 of an illustrious academic race, should have terminated his 
 public career in 1845 as President of Harvard University. 
 Quincy opposed the annexation of Louisiana, sharing with 
 several, especially northern, politicians of the time the belief 
 that the Union could not endure in excess of its primitive 
 bounds. This mistake was counterbalanced by his truer 
 insight into the disasters likely to befall his country from 
 
100 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 the atuses of patronage. John Quincy Adams said that his 
 
 speech of January 1811, from, which we take the following, 
 
 " ought to be hung up in every office of every office-holder in 
 
 the Union " : — 
 
 " Let a collector of customs, or postmaster, or factor, be called on 
 to pay the last debt of nature. The poor man shall not be cold long 
 before the corpse is in the coffin ; the mail shall be crowded with 
 letters, certificates, 'recommendations, and every species of sycophantic 
 solicitation by which obtrusive mendicity seeks charity or invites 
 compassion. We hear the clamour of the craving animals at the 
 treasury trough here in this capitol. Such running, such jostling, 
 such wrigghng, such clambering over one another's backs, because 
 the tub is so narrow and the company so crowded." 
 
 Contrary to expectation, if it is allowable to expect any- 
 thing from a politician, Quincy opposed the steps taken in 
 1813 to carry on the war. The Peace Society can. point to 
 no more vehement advocacy of their views than this strong 
 though turbid passage : — 
 
 " The whole atmosphere rings with the utterance from the other 
 side of the House of the word ' glory ' in connection with this invasion. 
 It is the glory of the tiger which lifts his jaws, all foul and bloody, 
 from the bowels of his victim and roars for his companions of the 
 wood to come and witness his prowess and his spoils. ... Be such — 
 the glory of Gengis Khan and Bonaparte — far, very far from my 
 country. Never may it be accursed with such fame ! 
 
 ' Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil, ' etc. 
 
 May such fame as this be my country's meed ! " 
 
 A North American Eeviewer (October 1865), whose anti- 
 rebellious vsTath can see nothing tolerable in the South, main- 
 tains that the war was due to the fire-eating Carolinians and 
 Virginians of the time. It is remarkable, on the contrary, 
 that the fieriest of their cavaliers, John Eandolph, whose 
 quick temper afterwards led him into a duel with his fellow- 
 Senator Clay,^ appears, in the debate of 1811, as the most 
 
 ' Randolph, having referred to Clay's service, as secretary under Quincy 
 Adams, as the "coalition of Blifil and Black George— the combination, unheard 
 of till then, of the puritan with the blackleg," afterwards regretted his vio- 
 
JOHN RANDOLPH. 101 
 
 eloquent advocate for concession ; dwelling, with the honest, 
 if not always considerate, passion of his nature, on the aid to 
 the Napoleonic despotism that might be given by antagonism 
 to England : — 
 
 " Will you plunge yourself in war because you have passed a foolish 
 and ruinous law and are ashamed to repeal it ? But our good friend 
 the French emperor stands in the way of this repeal. .... My imagin- 
 ation shrinks from the miseries of such a connection. I call upon the 
 House to reflect whether they are not about to abandon all reclamation 
 for the unparalleled outrages of the French Government, to give up our 
 claim for plundered millions ; and I ask what reparation or atonement 
 they can expect to obtain in hours of future dalliance, after they shall 
 have made a tender of their persons to this great deflowerer of the 
 virginity of republics. ... Go ! march to Canada ! Leave the broad 
 bosom of the Chesapeake and her hundred tributary rivers, the whole 
 line of sea-coast from Machias to St. Mary's, unprotected. You have 
 taken Quebec — have you conquered England 1 "Will you seek for the 
 deep foundations of her power in the frozen deserts of Labrador ? 
 
 ' Her march is on the mountain wave, 
 Her home is on the deep.' 
 
 Grant for a moment that, in Canada, you touched the sinews of her 
 strength, instead of removing a clog on her resources. In what situa- 
 tion would you then place some of the best men of the nation ? As 
 Chatham and Burke and the whole band of her patriots prayed for her 
 defeat in 1776, so must some of the truest friends to their country 
 deprecate the success of our arms against the only power that holds in 
 check the arch enemy of mankind. ... I acknowledge the influence 
 of a Shakespeare and a Milton upon my imagination, of a Locke upon 
 my understanding, of a Sydney upon my political principles. . . This 
 is a British influence which I can never shake off. I allow much to 
 the just and honest prejudices growing out of the Revolution. By 
 whom have they been suppressed, when they ran counter to the interests 
 of my country ? By Washington. By whom, would you listen to 
 them, are they most keenly felt ? By felons escaped from the jails of 
 Paris, Newgate, and Kilmainham . . . who in this abused and insulted 
 country have set up for political teachers, and whose disciples give no 
 other proof of their progress in republicanism except a blind devotion 
 to the most ruthless military despotism that the world ever saw." 
 
 The most effective answer to this speech was made by a 
 
 lence and fired in the air. Clay missed him, and then ran up with the words, 
 " I trust in God, my dear sir, you are untouched ; after what has occuiTed I 
 would not have harmed you for a thousand worlds.'' F". James Hamilton's' 
 Life of Eandolph. The annals of this outspoken time are full of romance. 
 
102 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 young newly-elected representative of South Carolina, of 
 whom we shall have more to say, John C. Calhoun. The 
 following sentences are characteristic of the line of argument 
 in his d&mt to a uniformly-conspicuous, and in some respects 
 illustrious, career : — 
 
 " We are next told of the expenses of tlie war, and that the people 
 will not pay taxes. Why not ? . . . I enter my solemn protest 
 against this low and calculating avarice entering this hall of legisla- 
 tion. It is only fit for shops and counting-houses, and ought not to 
 disgrace the seat of sovereignty. . . . It is a compromising spirit, too 
 short-sighted to defend itself, always ready to yield a part to save the 
 balance : it is never safe but ijnder the shield of honour. ... I am 
 not versed in this policy : I will not pretend to estimate in dollars 
 and cents the value of national independence, or to measure in shillings 
 and pence the misery, the strifes, and the slavery of our impressed sea- 
 men. . . . The stale imputation of partiality to France is better 
 calculated for the columns of a newspaper than for the walls of this 
 House. . . . The gentleman from Virginia is at a loss to account for 
 what he calls our hatred to England . . . the country of Locke, of 
 Newton, of Hampden, — having the same language and customs with 
 ourselves, and descended from a common ancestry. Sir, the laws of 
 human affections are uniform. If we have so much to attach us to 
 that country, powerful indeed must be the cause which has over- 
 powered it. . . . The cause is to be found in continued and unpro- 
 voked insult and injury. . . . Has he examined the reasons of our high 
 regard for Chatham ? It is his ardent patriotism, the heroic courage 
 of his mind, that thought the interest and honour of his country ought 
 to be vindicated at every hazard and expense. I hope when we are 
 called on to admire, we shall also be asked to imitate." 
 
 Later in the same session, the speaker, to whom the ahove 
 maiden effort had drawn admiring attention, again hroke out 
 in a strain of bellicose but genuine fervour : — 
 
 " Tie down a hero, and he feels the puncture of a pin : throw him 
 into battle, and he becomes almost insensible to vital gashes. So in 
 war. Impelled alternately by hope and fear, stimulated by revenge, 
 depressed by shame or elevated by victory, the people become in- 
 vincible. No privation can shake their fortitude, no calamity break 
 their spirit. War and restriction may leave the country equally 
 exhausted, but the latter not only leaves you poor, but dispirited, 
 divided, discontented. . . . Notsoinwar. In that state the common 
 danger unites all, strengthens the bonds of society, and feeds the flame 
 of patriotism. ... In exchange for the expenses and privations of war 
 
WAR OF 1812-1814. 103 
 
 you obtain military and naval skill, and a more perfect organisation 
 of such parts of your administration as are connected witli the science 
 of national defence. Are these advantages to be counted as trifles in 
 the present state of the world ? Can they be measured by moneyed 
 valuation ? I would prefer a single victory over the enemy, by sea or 
 land, to all the good we shall ever derive from the Non-Importation 
 Act." 
 
 These extracts claim their space as illustrating the so- 
 called Demosthenic ^ style of one of the two men hailed, in 
 Congress, as the future master-spirits of their age. Calhoun's 
 rival, then his friend, was his senior by only five years ; 
 hut already, as Speaker of the House, a political power. 
 The peroration of his reply to Quincy's peace speech of 1813 
 is characteristic of the more direct and popular manner of 
 appeal adopted by Henry Clay of Kentucky : — 
 
 " An honourable peace is attainable only by an efficient war. My 
 plan would be to call out the ample resources of the country, give 
 them a judicious direction, prosecute the war with the utmost vigour, 
 strike wherever we can touch the enemy, at sea or on land, and 
 negotiate the terms of a peace at Quebec or at Halifax. We are told 
 that England is a proud and lofty nation, which, disdaining to wait 
 for danger, meets it half way. Haughty as she is, we once triumphed 
 over her, and if we do not listen to the counsels of timidity and de- 
 spair, we shall again prevail. In such a cause, with the aid of Provi- 
 dence, we must come out crowned with success ; but if we fail, let us 
 fail like men, lash ourselves to our gallant tars, and expire together in 
 one common struggle, fighting for Free Trade and Seamen's Eights." 
 
 The war, a drawn battle (the British having the advantage 
 on land, the Americans on their lakes), brought to a nominal 
 close (December 24, 1814) by the Treaty of Ghent, really 
 ended with General Andrew Jackson's famous victory at New 
 Orleans, in January 1815. From this date till the outbreak 
 of the great Eebellioa of 18C1-65, the United States were 
 never again involved in any serious contest. Their conflicts 
 with the Indians, with Algiers, and even with Mexico, were, 
 
 ^ The term is not very appropriate. Calhoun's eloquence is notable for 
 earnestness and gravity, and -in his later speeches for terseness, combined 
 with a tendency to generalisation, and sometimes hair-splitting dialectic. 
 
104 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 despite perilous passages, like those of England in the South 
 and East, "the little wars of a great nation." During the 
 now complete century of their independence, they have been 
 but slightly affected by foreign affairs. International ques- 
 tions, mainly maritime, and disputes about boundaries, have 
 more than once assumed a threatening form, but these storms 
 have blown over, with little trace save the record of discussions 
 happily buried in of&cial verbiage. 
 
 Nothing struck a traveller in the years of continental 
 earthquake, 1847-50, so much as the fact that scarce a ripple 
 from these commotions seemed to touch the shores of America; 
 but her internal troubles have been sufficient to make us 
 remember that Liberty is a plant of slow growth. Alongside 
 of it there was springing in the West, with fungus rapidity 
 and pestilential rankness, a weed, whose permanent posses- 
 sion of the same soil was impossible. As early as 1788, 
 William Pinkney, one of the leading lawyers of the age, had 
 addressed the Legislature of his State, in a passage whose 
 spirit is better than its style — "Call not Maryland a land 
 of liberty : do not pretend that she has chosen this country as 
 an asylum, that here she has consecrated her shrine, when 
 here also her unhallowed enemy holds his hellish pande- 
 monium, and our rulers offer sacrifice at his polluted altar. 
 The lily and the bramble may grow in social proximity, but 
 liberty and slavery delight in separation." We have seen 
 that all the Fathers of the State, though some themselves 
 slaveholders, were opposed to the institution. Jefferson, 
 contemplating the black spot which it has cost so many 
 thousand lives to wash away, exclaimed, " I tremble for my 
 country when I reflect that God is just :" but towards the 
 close of his career he gave a more imcertain sound. Slavery, 
 favoured by the climate of the South, deducting from the 
 value of the white man's industry, was enthroned by the 
 " cotton-gin " and the steam engine. The abolition (1808) of 
 
THE SLAVERY QUESTIOST. 105 
 
 the import trade by order of Congress, and its being declared 
 (1820) a capital piracy, was all that, for half a century, 
 Principle, in the up-hill %ht against Interest, was able to 
 effect. Already, in 1811, "the Black Question" was referred 
 to as an obstacle in war, and answer given that security 
 against revolt was to be found in the ignorance of the slaves.^ 
 What was very profitable was, in swift course, found to be 
 very good : " the ladder " of Calhoun's early days, the unfor- 
 tunate circumstance to be gradually dealt with, was now a 
 condition in itself desirable — a law of Nature or Divine 
 ordiuance, supported by the conjoint authority of Plato, of 
 Aristotle, and of the Bible. Towards the close of his career, 
 in assailing a proposal' for amending the Constitution, the 
 chivalrous Eandolph wrote : — 
 
 " The happiness of' the connubial union itself depends greatly on 
 necessity, and when you touch this, you touch the keystone of the 
 arch on which the wellbeing of society is founded. Look at the rela- 
 tion^ of master and slave, that opprobrium, in the opinion of some 
 gentlemen, to all civilised society and free government. Sir, there 
 are few relations in life where friendships so strong and so lasting are 
 formed as in that very relation. The slave knows that he is bound 
 indissolubly to his master, and must, from necessity, remain always 
 under his control. The master knows that he is bound to maintain 
 and provide for his slave so long as he retains him in his possession. 
 And each party accommodates himself to his situation. I have seen 
 the dissolution of many friendships — such at least as were so called — 
 but I have seen that of master and slave endure as long as there 
 remained a drop of the blood of the master to which the slave could 
 cleave." 
 
 The evil grew apace, corrupting rulers and ruled, intro- 
 ducing into one great section of American society the spirit 
 of contempt for labour, tainting Eeligion, twisting even im- 
 partial Science till it assumed the magnitude of a problem 
 round which all politics revolved, — became the main theme of 
 
 1 "More than half of our ignorant blacks never heard of the French 
 Revolution. "^Ca^AoMW. 
 
 ^ Remarkably anticipating the implied argument of Mr. Carlyle's Ilias in 
 Nuce. 
 
106 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 the oratory, of the agitation, of much of the literature of the 
 age, and the cause of a second revolution, a priori more 
 inevitable than the first. 
 
 When Madison's tenure of office expired, he was succeeded 
 hy Monroe, another Virginian, to whose mind the cession of 
 Florida by Spain may have suggested the " Doctrine " asso- 
 ciated with his name, that the stars and stripes should wave 
 over the Continent from the pole to the isthmus. To his time 
 also belonged the practical recognition of the South American 
 Eepublics by the Panama Commission (1817), the Seminole 
 war (1819), in which the arbitrary proceedings of Jackson 
 evoked the philanthropic eloquence of Clay, and the notorious 
 " Missouri Compromise." 
 
 John Quincy Adams,^ the sixth President, combined 
 eminence in letters and in statesmanship to a degree unusual 
 even in his country — a country where literary distinction has 
 been a readier passport to political promotion than in any 
 other, since the patrons of our Augustan age conciliated the 
 support of the wits by pension or by plape. Born in 1767, he 
 was, at an early age, sent to school at Paris (where his father 
 was joint commissioner with Franklin), and then to Leyden. 
 After some public service in Eussia, he travelled to London, 
 and there listened to the great orators of our most oratorical 
 age. Eeturning to complete his curriculum at Harvard, he de- 
 livered (1793) one of the most florid of the somewhat tiresome 
 Independence Orations. After a second residence abroad, as 
 minister to the Netherlands and to Berlin, he was in 1803 
 sent to the Massachusetts Senate, and appointed Professor 
 of Ehetoric in his University. Later he, as State Secretary, 
 for eight years led the cabinet of Monroe, whom in 1825 
 he succeeded. Quincy Adams was, according to the " lauda- 
 tores temporis acti," " the last of the great Presidents." The 
 element of truth in this lies in his having been the last link 
 ^ Son of John Adams, the second President. 
 
JOHN QUmCY ADAMS. 107 
 
 in the line of the leaders of the Eevolution, and the last whose 
 elevation was due, in part, to general culture and continental 
 experience. His Presidency is marked by no great measure, 
 but it welcomed the old La Fayette revisiting the scene of his 
 young enthusiasms, and saw the deaths on the same day (the 
 great anniversary, 4th July 1826) of the last of the veterans, 
 his father and Jefferson. Adams has a distinct claim to be 
 remembered in literature, though not for the highest work. 
 His numerous occasional discourses, biographical sketches and 
 eulogies, published together as Lives of Celebrated Statesmen, 
 his translations and forgotten verses, amongst them an epic 
 poem, testify to his aspiration if not his inspiration. As a 
 politician, he was of the pronounced New England type — pro- 
 tectionist, but setting his face against corruption ; humani- 
 tarian, resisting in his later days with hereditary zeal the 
 encroachments of the slave power ; and, on the whole, an 
 advocate of peace, his last word in the Senate, where he died 
 in February 1848, being "No," to a vote of thanks to the 
 soldiers in the Mexican war. He was a man of varied talent, 
 of no genius, and ever sanguine, as is seen by these sentences 
 of his Address, beyond the event : — 
 
 " Our political creed is ■wdthout a dissenting voice that can be heard. 
 That the will of the people is the source and the happiness of the 
 people — the end of all legitimate government upon earth ; that the 
 best security for the beneficence, and the best guarantee against the 
 abuse of power, consists in the freedom, the purity, and the frequency 
 of popular elections ; that the general government of the Union and 
 the separate governments of the States are all sovereignties of limited 
 powers — fellow-servants of the same masters — uncontrolled within their 
 respective spheres . . . that the policy of our country is peace, and 
 the ark of our salvation union ; — are articles of faith on which we are 
 now all agreed. Ten years of peace at home and abroad have assuaged 
 the animosities of political contention, and blended into harmony the 
 most discordant elements of public opinion." 
 
 Never was there a time of more disagreement about the 
 "respective spheres," or a country where the "discordant ele- 
 ments " were growing more dangerous. " "We are," said a less 
 
108 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 optimistic orator ^ of the same date, "literally opening a Pan- 
 dora's box of political evils which, when they have gone 
 abroad, will aot even leave hope at the bottom." These 
 dangers became conspicuous under the successor of the well- 
 meaning Puritan President, his opposite in politics and in 
 character. History proves nothing more fraught with peril 
 to a nation's liberty than military renown acquired in 
 its service. The patriots of the Eevolution being men of 
 disinterested motives and unblemished character, the framers 
 of the Constitution paid insufficient heed to the possible 
 abuses of power. There was no risk of Washington or 
 Adams, of Hamilton or Madison, hardly even of Jefferson, 
 betraying the faith of the people for purposes of personal 
 aggrandisement. 
 
 General Andeew Jackson was cast in a meaner mould. 
 The first of the strictly self-made men, "too proud of their 
 makers," attaining to eminence in the New World, he, 
 at an early period of his career, manifested the resolute, 
 imperious, and unscrupulous spirit by which it was through- 
 out distinguished. Born in a Carolina log- hut, he led a 
 reckless youth, and never attained to any degree of culture ; 
 but he soon displayed great versatility as well as force of 
 character. After shouldering a musket, as a boy, in the War 
 of Independence, he studied law, in the rough way frequent 
 in districts where natural shrewdness went for more than 
 profound learning, became an attorney at NashviUe and a 
 judge in Tennessee, whence, in 1796, he was sent to Congress. 
 After distinguishing himself as a soldier, in the Creek war of 
 1813-14, he achieved his great popular triumph, in January 
 1815, by the defence of New Orleans, where, however, his 
 enforcement and haughty administration of martial- law 
 
 1 Robert Y. Hayne (afterwards Governor of South Carolina, Calhoun's 
 right-hand and opponent of Webster), in an able speech against Clay's Tariff, 
 of April 1824. 
 
ANDREW JACKSON. 109 
 
 brought him into difficulties.^ Three years later (1818) the 
 same domineering qualities appeared in his treatment, alike 
 of Indians, Spanish, and English in the Seminole war — 
 conduct which nearly led to his impeachment : but Jackson, 
 relying on his victories, and appealing to the populace, as 
 Jefferson had appealed to the people, came unscathed from 
 the crisis ; and, in 1824, as candidate for the Presidency, 
 had the largest number of votes, though, from his failing to 
 secure the requisite majority, Quincy Adams was, by the House 
 of Eepresentatives, appointed over his head. On the next 
 occasion he was successful, and being re-elected in 1832, he, 
 during his double term of office, threatened to become despotic. 
 " There has been," says Mr. Hill Burton, " no statesman from 
 whom, had opportunity served him, the constitution of the 
 States was likely to run so much risk." The country was at 
 peace, and the resolution of his antagonists kept his aggres- 
 sions within limits ; but he interposed the Veto without con- 
 sulting, as was the previous practice, the leaders of either House, 
 and, by lavishly exercising his power of nominating office- 
 bearers, introduced the most detestable system of corruption 
 ever known in a civilised country. This dangerous power, en- 
 trusted to the earlier Presidents with a view of their removing, 
 with a minimum of scandal,^ untrustworthy or incompetent 
 persons, had never been seriously abused, till, in 1828, Jackson, 
 without giving any reason for the change, dismissed all the 
 Federal employes, and in 1832 the State judges, to make room 
 for his own political partisans. This action, possibly within 
 his technical rights, but in violation of the spirit of the Con- 
 stitution, carried through in the teeth of the protests of the 
 patriots and leading statesmen of the time, first distinctly 
 established what is termed by its defenders the " principle of 
 rotation," more popularly and correctly known as the " prin- 
 
 ^ In this as in otter features of his career and character anticipating the 
 more recently famous General Butler. 
 
 ^ V. Notes on Corruption and Presidential Powers at the end of vol. 
 
110 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 ciple of the spoils." The President maintained that "the 
 tenure of office could not even by law be so regulated that 
 the public officers should not be removable at his pleasure." 
 He claimed and exercised the right of the wholesale appoint- 
 ment, on his installation, of every consul, customs-collector, 
 and postmaster in the range of the Federation. In the down- 
 ward course, such awards came to be pre-promised to adherents 
 on the eve of every election. Profligate pledges to hunters 
 after place or power, and those desperately clinging by them, 
 became the strongest motives to the caucus organisers, wire- 
 pullers, and stump orators of nominations. This pestilent 
 prerogative, filched from the inadvertence of the original 
 Convention, and destined to be a new guiding force in the 
 State, was not limited by its influence over actual nominees. 
 It corrupted their predecessors, who, finding no security of 
 tenure in the most laborious services, no allowance to experi- 
 ence often painfully acquired, or favour to skill purchased by 
 the sacrifice of extraneous opportunities, commonly concluded 
 that honesty was the worst policy, and, by organised exactions, 
 made hay while the sun shone. Yet worse, hope and desire 
 grovelled for advancement : whenever one attained to the 
 sweets of office, ten rogues or flatterers had debased them- 
 selves in struggling for it ; the servility of hundreds was 
 wasted, and a dishonourable spirit was spread over the nation. 
 What wonder that the incorruptible though fanatical Calhoun 
 spoke of the system as " a loathsome and dangerous disease," 
 under the spread of which " the honours and emoluments of 
 this government . . . will be reserved only for those who 
 have qualified themselves by political prostitution for admis- 
 sion into the Magdalen Asylum !" Scarce less sternly wrote 
 his great rival — 
 
 " It is generally true that he who controls another man's means of 
 ^ Webster on The Appointing and Hemomng Power, Feb. 16, 1835. 
 
OFFICIAL CORRUPTION. Ill 
 
 living controls his ■will. Where there are favours to be granted, there 
 are generally enough to solicit for them ; and when favours once granted 
 may be withdrawn at pleasure, there is ordinarily little security for 
 personal independence of character. The power of giving office thus 
 affects the fears of all who are in and the hopes of all who are out. . . . 
 They resolve not to be outdone in any of the works of partisanship. 
 ... A competition ensues not of patriotic labours — not of rough and 
 severe toils for the public good, not of manliness, independence, and 
 public spirit, but of complaisance, of indiscriminate support of exe- 
 cutive measures, of pliant servility and gross adulation. All throng 
 and rush to the altar of man- worship, and there they oifer sacrifices and 
 pour out libations tiU the thick fumes of their incense turn their own 
 heads and turn also the head of him who is the object of their idolatry. 
 . . . For these reasons I am for arresting the farther progress of this 
 executive patronage, if we can arrest it. I am for staying the farther 
 contagion of this plague." 
 
 The plague was not stayed : the corruption in its track 
 has heen the main mark for every recent satirist from Lowell, 
 through Artemus "Ward, to the author of Democracy, till it has 
 been possible for an otherwise sympathetic foreign observer to 
 declare, " The office-seekers have become janizaries, inspired 
 solely by the love of pelf, carried to place by chicanery, and 
 expelling all high-minded men from politics. The environs 
 of the White-House are the most discreditable corners in 
 America." Other great questions came to the front and 
 hustled aside the demand for political reform. The cause of 
 liberty, for which Lincoln fell, had to be fought and won 
 before the cause of political purity, of which Garfield has 
 been the martyr. 
 
 To realise, even in the limited measure possible to our 
 space, the controversies round which much of the graver 
 literature of the age revolved, we must consider the changes 
 that had already passed over the national life in the first 
 thirty years of the century. The America of President Jack- 
 son was already almost as far separated from that of Wash- 
 ington as the America of the present day is from the America 
 of Jackson. The number of the States had risen from thirteen 
 to twenty-four. The population, itself of rapid growth, and 
 
112 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 fed by tides of immigration, had crossed the Ohio and the 
 Mississippi, and multiplied itself four-fold.^ Its outposts 
 were spreading along the lakes ; and fresh Territories (to the 
 dismay of those whose political ideal was a comparatively 
 small and compact community) were, in every decade, demand- 
 ing admittance to the Union. The Indian tribes, yielding to 
 the destiny, of which the novelist Cooper and contemporary 
 poets are the sympathetic recorders, were slowly, sometimes 
 reluctantly, but steadily, retreating to the wilds of the West. 
 Louisiana had been purchased from France, Florida ceded by 
 Spain, Great public works, as the Erie Canal, and magni- 
 ficent roads, had begun to serve as highways between the 
 different regions of this already vast communion. The region 
 of the Eocky Mountains was yet an unknown land, and the 
 foreign element, save that represented by the descendants of 
 the Dutch, was stOI inconsiderable. But three great sectional 
 interests, not always harmonious, were already calling for 
 adjustment : that of the Northern Seaboard, that of the Centre 
 (mainly New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio), and that of the 
 South, the most extensive in territory but scantiest in popula- 
 tion. In the first section and in New York city were the 
 germs of one of the three great Foeoes of American social 
 life, the manufacturing and commercial Plutockacy — poli- 
 tically characterised by a love of order, centralisation, and 
 stability, respect for the rights of property, combined with 
 the historical sense of a personal equality. The comparatively 
 inland centre was the headquarters of the more thorough- 
 going Democratic spirit, possessed with the idea of the rights 
 and dignity of labour, moderately jealous of the central 
 power, and less averse than their eastern neighbours to 
 extension of territory. The Southern Akistoceacy, on the 
 other hand, was in no sense of the word truly democratic. 
 As time went on they held more and more firmly by their 
 ' In 1850 it had multiplied six, now thirteen-fold. 
 
POLITICAL PARTIES. 113 
 
 "peculiar institution," and began to cherish the idea of an 
 absolute difference of privileges determined by rank and race. 
 The pertinacious upholders of State rights, they were prepared 
 to push their jealousies of the central power to the verge of 
 disunion. 
 
 It has been remarked that Political Parties are made up 
 of intersections of national forces, allied for some definite 
 purpose, and that the faculty to arrange these combinations 
 is a great part of statesmanship. In reality they are apt 
 to arrange themselves, according to methods which, being 
 indefinable, are called instinctive. American party names, 
 strangely changing their meaning with strange coalitions, are 
 an endless source of bewilderment to English readers. On the 
 term of Madison's Presidency the old lines of demarcation 
 between the Federalists and the popular party were obli- 
 terated. The association of aristocratic feeling with a desire 
 to strengthen the central power, represented by Hamilton, no 
 longer existed. The latter side of the old Federal feeling was 
 the guiding principle of the new Eepublican, otherwise 
 known as the Whig party (the term Tory in the New "World 
 having been applied to the old Eoyalists), while the more or 
 less oligarchic South, uniting with a section of the Northern 
 democracy, constituted the so-called Demooeatio party. The 
 strife of those two on home and foreign affairs is a great part 
 of the political history of the States during the last fifty 
 years. It hinged mainly on four great controversies : — those 
 relating to Extension of the Union ; to the Establishment of 
 Public Institutions — especially of a National Bank ; to the 
 imposition of General Tariffs ; and to the question of Slavery. 
 Speaking generally, and with allowance for eccentricities 
 of individual action, due sometimes to patriotic, sometimes 
 to personal motives, the Eepublicans supported Federal 
 institutions and high Tariffs. They were opposed to an 
 aggressive policy, to an extension of territory, and especially, 
 
 I 
 
114 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 having their headquarters in the North, to everything , tend- 
 ing to an aggrandisement of the slave power. 
 
 After the era of Jackson and his protdgi and successor, 
 Van-Buren, the Presidents play a minor part in the internal 
 history of the times. As a rule mere nominees, none of them, 
 from that date till the installation of Abraham Lincoln, were 
 men of very marked individual force. Harrison, the hope of 
 the Whigs, died after a month of ofBce : General Taylor's 
 talents were all displayed on the field : with more or less of 
 mediocre ability, Tyler, Polk, PUlmore, Pierce, and Buchanan 
 represented the parties which, with more or less honesty, 
 they had courted and canvassed. The vital history of the 
 period is concentrated in the Abolition movement in the 
 North, represented by Garrison, and in the eloquence and 
 statesmanship of the three great American orators of the first 
 half of the century — Calhoun, Clay, and Webster. To 
 understand their attitude it has been necessary to give this 
 summary sketch of contemporary politics. In the careers of 
 all three there are inconsistencies. They all changed their 
 opinions, as the most intelligent and independent men must 
 do, with a change of circumstance. None was wholly free 
 from the influence of personal ambition. They were all 
 candidates for the Presidency, which no one of them attained. 
 Of the first and last it has been fairly said, each " had too 
 much inherent greatness to reach " an office so dependent on 
 the popular breath ; and each in turn was ousted by a more 
 pliant competitor. They were all perhaps over-exalted by 
 their admirers; aU had strength of character enough to 
 incur and to ,brave the invectives of envy or fanati- 
 cism. They were at one in their resistance to the aggres- 
 sions of the Executive, and in their protests againsl the 
 system of corruption which Andrew Jackson passed on to 
 his successors. 
 
 They were almost exact contemporaries. Clay, the elder 
 
CLAY AND CALHOUN. 115 
 
 by five years, bom in Virginia 1777, settled as a lawyer in 
 Kentucky, entered Congress along with Calhoun in 1811, 
 and died, with Webster, in 1852. Calhoun, born with 
 Webster in 1782, died in 1850. They were at one in de- 
 fence of the war of 1812-14, though Webster, averse to inland 
 campaigns, insisted on the Themistoclean rule, " stick to the 
 sea." They agreed in desiring to restrict the excessive privi- 
 leges of the Bank, of which, under amended rules, Webster 
 afterwards became the champion. They were all at first in 
 favour of internal improvements, the extension of national 
 highways, etc.; which, as tending to centralisation, afterwards 
 roused the jealousy of the extreme State-right party. They 
 joined in arraigning the arbitrary executions of the Seminole 
 war ; and Calhoun remained neutral on the questions of recog- 
 nising the Greeks (1824) and the South American Eepublics 
 (1826), the themes of some of the most impassioned speeches of 
 his rivals. In other respects they were opposed as contraries, ' 
 and two of them as contradictories. The strategical skill 
 and persistence of the South is conspicuous in the fact that 
 Henry — otherwise " Compromise " — Clay, with a strong bias 
 to the Eepublican party, was driven, in his rdle of mediator, 
 time after time, to propose and carry measures satisfactory to 
 the Democracy. His quick thought, fluent speech, and win- 
 ning voice having at once made him popular, he was on his 
 election made Speaker of the House of Eepresentatives, and, 
 as one of the Commissioners to Ghent, helped to arrange the 
 terms of peace. The year 1820 is memorable by his first 
 great compromise, in terms of which, Calhoun acceding, 
 Missouri was admitted as a Slave State, on condition that 
 henceforth the line of 36° 30' should be the northern limit of 
 the system. In 1824 he carried his Tariff Bill. After a 
 period of retreat from public life, devoted to his profession, 
 he was (1831) chosen one of the senators for his State, when 
 he led the opposition against Jackson, fought for the Bank, 
 
116 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 and in 1834 effected his second compromise, the ad valorem 
 Tariff Bill, which enabled South Carolina to make a dignified 
 retreat from her defiant attitude. Defeated by Harrison 
 (1839), Clay, in 1842, made his famous valedictory address to 
 the Senate J but he returned to that body in 1849, to advocate 
 and carry his third great compromise (1850), the Free Cali- 
 fornia and Fugitive Slave Bill. All his important measures 
 were passed, but, as is the fate of makeshifts, none of them 
 were final. Contemporaries speak of his oratory — of which 
 we have had a sufficient example — in high-flown terms. 
 •' Of the triumvirate respectively representing the South, the 
 East, and the West, the last was the master of feeling. His 
 frank bearing and spontaneous eloquence reached the heart 
 of the whole country. While Calhoun engaged the attention 
 of philosophers in his study, and Webster had the ear of 
 lawyers and the mercantile classes. Clay was out in the open 
 air with the people, exciting at will their sympathies, while 
 the warmest acts of friendship poured upon him unsought." 
 The tribute of a partisan must be qualified, but we can 
 believe that Clay's simple and direct manner was more 
 effective, with the masses, than subtle thought or solid his- 
 torical appeal. On the other hand, his rivals have more 
 enduring names. Of the two great forces of the Continent, 
 Centripetal and Centrifugal — the one complaining of lawless- 
 ness, aggression, disloyalty, and isolated claims of rank or 
 clime ; the other of despotism, timidity, the force majeur of 
 mere numbers, the insolence of upstart wealth — Webster and 
 Calhoun were, by birth, surrounding, and character, the most 
 pronounced representatives. The former, bom in the Wilder- 
 ness of New Hampshire, trained under the New England 
 school system, most of his life a Boston lawyer, was an 
 American first, a man of the North in the second place. 
 The latter, son of a small planter, brought up from the cradle 
 to politics, was a local statesman first, a patriot afterwards : 
 
CALHOUN AND WEBSTER. 117 
 
 he cared very little for the "United States :" in his mind 
 " The Star-spangled Banner " was of no account as compared 
 •with the crescent of South Carolina. A home-ruler from his 
 youth, he made no secret of his disregard for the authority 
 of the central government, saying, in 1812, to Commo- 
 dore Stewart, " We are essentially aristocratic . . . when we 
 cease to control this nation through a disjointed democracy 
 we shall then resort to dissolution of the Union." " The 
 Union," on the other hand, was from first to last "Webster's 
 ruling passion. To preserve it intact he was prepared to 
 sacrifice almost every other principle : its friends were his 
 friends, its enemies his enemies. He disliked equally the 
 nullifiers of the South, and what, among his latest utterances, 
 he called "the din, and roll, and rub-a-dub of Abolition 
 writers and Abolition lecturers." He was content, if he 
 could achieve his end of cementing extremes within the 
 bounds of the Constitution, to endure the rancour of both. 
 The refrain of the peroration of his great speech of 1830, 
 " Liberty and Union, now and for ever, one and indivisible " — 
 set to music by Holmes in his verses, Keep us, keep us, the 
 Many in One — is the refrain of his life. Webster followed 
 Hamilton in holding the Central Power to be " the rock of 
 political salvation," and wishing to give permanence to 
 Federal Institutions and Dignitaries, — as the Supreme Judicial 
 Court and the National Bank. He promoted national enter- 
 prises ; but, the dispersive tendencies of democracy being 
 repugnant to his ideas of good government and order, he set 
 himself against extension of territory, declaring : " I believe it 
 to be for the interest and happiness of the whole Union to 
 remain as it is, without diminution and without addition." 
 He admitted the sovereignty of the States, as recognised by 
 law, but interpreted every doubtful phrase on the side of 
 concentration and consolidation. 
 
118 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 " Caltoun," says the Observer i to wliom we have before referred, 
 " in all respects antithetic — in political action, in intellect, in entire 
 mental organisation — stood on this gronnd, ' State sovereignty first, 
 the essential basis of enduring union.' He tested every policy by 
 its bearings on this cardinal maxim, and probably, through his per- 
 sonal relations with the South, he seemed at particular crises in danger 
 of running into exaggerated statement and applications of it. The 
 repeated collisions of these two eminent men are interesting to us, at a 
 distance, as the conflict of rare intelligences must always be ; but start- 
 ing as they did from points of view diametrically opposite,— the one 
 seeing the golden, the other the white side of the shield, — there could 
 be no conclusion. Their weapons were as diverse. Calhoun's intellect 
 was pre-eminently logical ; he revelled in subtilties : his speeches are 
 close unrelenting deductions from assumed first principles — all his 
 tendencies are discursive. The argument of his opponent, on the 
 other hand, consisted of an orderly array of forcible but simple state- 
 ments, a magnificent piling up of appeals to common sense, to the 
 instincts and sentiments, the imagination, the aspirations and prejudices 
 of his auditory : nor, if measured by his power to rivet attention and 
 to command admiration, has any speaker of modem times been more 
 triumphant. As to the award of oratory, there might be no ground 
 for hesitation, but practical success seldom went along with it. 
 Eloquence had its fame, yet the substantial fruits of these conflicts 
 generally fell to the Democracy." 
 
 Daniel Webster came to Congress, in 1813, with the already- 
 made reputation of a local orator (having as early as 1800, 
 in his college at Dartmouth, heen chosen to deliver a 4th of 
 July speech), and at once attracted attention, one of his fellow 
 representatives making a remark characteristic of the standard 
 of the time—" The North has not his equal nor the South his 
 superior." But his first speech of national celebrity was that, 
 delivered January 1824, for the Creeks ; his second, in 1826, 
 in favour of the Panama Mission, in which occurs the famous 
 appeal to the spirit of Montezuma and the Incas, to watch the 
 " solemn retribution that now visits the once proud monarchy 
 of Spain," and his reference to the liberty of the new Southern 
 republics achieved by looking "steadily in every adversity to 
 the great Northern light." The debates which brought him 
 forward as an authority on matters of currency, so high as to 
 1 Notes of J. p. K, IS.'iO. 
 
DANIEL WEBSTER. 119 
 
 be quoted in this country by Lord Overstone, gave less scope 
 for brilliant passages; but they exhibit him, on another side, as 
 a clear and consecutive reasoner and shrewd man of business. 
 Out of these discussions arose one of his greatest efforts. In 
 1832 Jackson used his veto against a renewal of the Bank 
 Charter, and next year proposed to remove from it the deposits 
 of public moneys : a resolution was passed by the Senate dis- 
 approving of the measure, whereupon the President issued a 
 high-handed Protest against the resolution. Webster, on 
 constitutional grounds, arraigned the Protest, in a speech 
 which, according to Chancellor Kent, " surpassed everything 
 in simplicity and beauty ... in clearness, in rebuke, in 
 glowing feeling, in just and profound views, in critical 
 severity and matchless strength. It is worth millions to our 
 liberty." The following passage, less known in the country 
 to which it pays so grand a tribute, is a commonplace of 
 rhetorical school-books in the "West : — 
 
 " It was against the recital of an Act of Parliament, rather than 
 against any suffering under its enactments, that our fathers took up 
 arms. They went to war against a preamble. They fought seven 
 years against a declaration. They poured out their treasures and their 
 blood like water in a contest against an assertion, which those less 
 sagacious and not so well schooled in the principles of civil liberty 
 would have regarded as barren phraseology or mere parade of words. 
 They saw in the claim of the British Parliament a seminal principle of 
 mischief, the germ of unjust power ; they detected it, dragged it forth 
 from underneath its plausible disguises, struck at it ; nor did it elude 
 either their steady eye or their well-directed blow till they had extir- 
 pated and destroyed it, to the smallest fibre. On this question of prin- 
 ciple, whUe actual suffering was yet afar off, they raised their flag 
 against a power, to which, for purposes of foreign conquest and sub- 
 jugation, Eome, in the height of her glory, is not to be compared ; a 
 power which has dotted over the surface of the whole globe with her 
 possessions and military posts, whose morning drum-beat, following the 
 sun and keeping company with the hours, circles the earth with one 
 continuous and unbroken strain of the martial airs of England." 
 
 Nothing in politics is so strange as the rapid shifting of 
 personal combinations. Six months before this speech was 
 
120 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 delivered, "Webster and Jackson were in close alliance against 
 Calhoun. The first antagonism of the rival orators is another 
 surprise. In 1816 the North-Eastern States were still relying 
 on their foreign trade, and Wehster opposed the Tariff BiU. 
 as an over - concession to Pennsylvania and the Middle 
 States. The South was still hoping to become a seat of 
 manufactures, and Calhoun supported it. There seems no 
 ground for the imputations of dishonesty that have been 
 thrown on both. Abstract questions of political economy 
 apart, these statesmen had to consider what they held to be 
 for the good of their country, and, in a matter of expediency, 
 might naturally give the first place to the desires and interests 
 of their special constituencies. In any case, ten years later, 
 they clean shifted sides. Daniel Webster had become as 
 staunch a Protectionist as Henry Clay, and John C. Calhoun 
 as vehement a Pree-Trader as Mr. John Bright. Elevating 
 the question into one of principle, Calhoun, in his famous 
 " Exposition " of 1828, made it his first lever towards the Dis- 
 union on which he was bent. He denounced the Tariff as 
 an arbitrary burden laid by the manufacturing on the agri- 
 cultural States, and maintained the right of the latter to resist, 
 by declaring " nul and void " the oppressive Acts. The con- 
 troversy, thus incited, came to its first head in January 1830, 
 when Colonel E. Y. Hayne of South Carolina, acting for his 
 leader, made a speech on a Bill about Public Lands, in which 
 he accused the Government of partial administration, and 
 stirred up State jealousies. An oratorical duel ensued be- 
 tween him and Webster, in the course of which the latter 
 made one of his greatest speeches. The following passages 
 illustrate his manner of patriotic appeal : — 
 
 " I shall not acknowledge that the honourable member goes before 
 me in regard for whatever of distinguished talent, or distinguished 
 character. South Carolina has produced. I claim part of the honour, 
 I partake in the pride, of her great names. I claim them for country- 
 men, one and all, the Laurenses, the Eutledges, the Pinckneys, the 
 
SPEECH AGAINST HAYNE. 121 
 
 Sumpters, the Marions, Americans all, whose fame is no more to be 
 hemmed in by State lines than their talents and patriotism' were capable 
 of being circumscribed within the same narrow limits. In their day 
 and generation they served and honoured the country, and the whole 
 country ; and their renown is of the treasures of the whole country. 
 Him whose honoured name the gentleman himseK bears, does he esteem 
 me less capable of gratitude for his patriotism, or sympathy for his 
 sufferings, than if his eyes had first opened upon the light of Massa- 
 chusetts instead of South Carolina 1 Sir, does he suppose it in his 
 power to exhibit a Carolina name so bright as to produce envy in my 
 bosom 1 No, sir, increased gratification and delight, rather. I thank 
 God that if I am gifted with little of the spirit which is able to raise 
 mortals to the skies, I have yet none, as I trust, of that other spirit 
 which would drag angels down. When I shall be found, sir, in my 
 place here in the Senate, or elsewhere, to sneer at public merit, because 
 it happens to spring up beyond the little limits of my own State or 
 neighbourhood ; when I refuse for any such cause, or for any cause, 
 the homage due to American talent or elevated patriotism, to sincere 
 devotion to liberty and the country ; or, if I see an uncommon endow- 
 ment of heaven, if I see extraordinary capacity and virtue in any son 
 of the South, and if, moved by local prejudice or gangrened by State 
 jealousy, I get up here to abate the tithe of a hair from his just char- 
 acter and just fame, may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth ! 
 
 " Sir, let me recur to pleasing recollections ; let me indulge in 
 refreshing remembrance of the past ; let me remind you that, in early 
 times, no States cherished greater harmony, both of principle and feel- 
 ing, than Massachusetts and South Carolina. Would to God that 
 harmony might again return ! Shoulder to shoulder they went through 
 the Revolution, hand in hand they stood round the administration of 
 Washington, and felt his own great arm lean on them for support. 
 Unkind feeling — if it exist — alienation, and distrust, are the growth, 
 unnatural to such soils, of false principles since sown. They are weeds, 
 the seeds of which that same great arm never scattered. 
 
 " Mr. President, I shall enter on no encomium upon Massachusetts ; 
 she needs none. Her history the world knows. The past, at least, is 
 secure. . . . The bones of her sons, falling in the great struggle for 
 independence, now lie mingled with the soil of every State from New 
 England to Georgia ; and there they will lie for ever. And, sir, where 
 American liberty raised its first voice, and where its youth was nurtured 
 and sustained, there it stiU. lives, in the strength of its manhood and 
 full of its original spirit. If discord and disunion shall wound it, if 
 party strife and blind ambition shall hawk at and tear it, if folly and 
 madness, if uneasiness under salutary. and necessary restraint, shall 
 succeed in separating it from that Union by which alone its existence 
 is made sure, it vrill stand in the end by the side of that cradle in which 
 its infancy was rocked ; it will stretch forth its arms with whatever of 
 vigour it may still retain over the friends who gather round it ; and it 
 
122 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 will fall at last, if fall it must, amidst the proudest monuments of its 
 own glory, and on the very spot of its origin." 
 
 We are told that " Senators shed tears like girls " over this 
 harangue. Edward Everett said it was " like Demosthenes on 
 the Crown." It was printed, and hailed over the country as 
 an overthrow of all heresies that threatened the Union. But 
 Calhoun was undismayed, and in 1832 he prevailed on the 
 State Convention of South Carolina to issue the famous Ordi- 
 nance of Nullification. President Jackson who, from the 
 otherwise opposite side, joined hands with "Webster for the 
 Union, at once made preparations for war, sent cannon and 
 ships to Charleston, and issued a proclamation threatening to 
 arrest every leader of the seditious movement, which was thus 
 temporarily suppressed. But next year, on the introduction 
 of a Bill called the Force Bill, to make provision for the col- 
 lection of the revenue, Calhoun returned to the charge, and 
 delivered in the Senate his most characteristic speech, of which 
 the following are the most memorable paragraphs : — 
 
 " Is this a Federal union ? . . . The very language which we are 
 compelled to use when speaking of our political institutions affords proof 
 conclusive as to its real character. They all imply a combination of 
 sovereignties, a confederation of States. They are never applied to an 
 association of individuals. . . . Nor is the other point less clear — that 
 our system is a union of twenty-four sovereign powers, under a consti- 
 tutional compact, and not a divided sovereignty between the States 
 severally and the United States. . . . Sovereignty is in its nature 
 indivisible. It is the supreme power of a State, and we might just as 
 well speak of half a square or half of a triangle as of half a sovereignty. 
 It is a gross error to confound the exercise of sovereign powers with 
 sovereignty itself, or the delegation of such powers with the surrender 
 of them." 
 
 In answer to the frequent charge of being metaphysical, 
 he contrasts " the contemptible scholastic refinement which 
 makes distinctions without a difference " and " the power of 
 analysis and combination which is the highest attribute of the 
 human mind," and proceeds — 
 
 " It is said that the Bill ought to pass, because the law must be 
 
NULLIFICATION. 123 
 
 enforced. . . . The imperial edict must be executed ! It is under such 
 sophistry, couched in general terms, without looking to the limitations 
 ■which must ever exist in the practical exercise of power, that the most 
 cruel and despotic acts ever have been covered. . . . The Act imposing 
 ' the tea-tax must be executed.' This was the very argument which 
 impelled Lord North and his administration to that mad career which 
 for ever separated us from the British crown. Under a similar sophistry 
 that ' religion must be protected,' how many massacres have been per- 
 petrated, and how many martyrs have been tied to the stake. . . . Are 
 you prepared to enforce a law without considering whether it be just or 
 imjust, constitutional or unconstitutional. . . . We are told that the 
 Union must be preserved without regard to the means. And how is it 
 proposed to preserve the Union ? By force. Does any man in his 
 senses believe that this beautiful structure — this harmonious aggregate 
 of States, produced by the joint consent of all — can be preserved by 
 force. Its very introduction -^dll be certain destruction to this Federal 
 Union. . . . Force may indeed hold the parts together ; but such union 
 would be the bond between master and slave — a union of exaction on 
 one side and unqualified obedience on the other. . . . This very biU is 
 intended to collect what can no longer be called taxes — the voluntary 
 contribution of a free people — but tribute — tribute to be collected under 
 the mouths of the cannon. ... I tell you plainly that the Bill, should 
 it pass, cannot be enforced. It will prove only a blpt on your statute 
 book, a reproach to the year, and a disgrace to the American Senate. 
 It will not be executed : it will rouse the dormant spirit of the people, 
 and open their eyes to the approach of despotism. The perversion of 
 the taxing power has given precisely the same control to the Northern 
 section over the industry of the Southern section of the Union which 
 the power to regulate commerce gave to Great Britain over the industry 
 of the colonies ; the very articles in which the colonies were permitted 
 to have a free-trade and those in which the mother country had a 
 monopoly, are the same as those in which the Southern States are per- 
 mitted to have a free-trade by the Act of 1832, and in which the 
 Northern States have by the same Act secured a monopoly. The con- 
 troversy is one between power and liberty ; and I tell the gentlemen 
 who are opposed to me that, strong as may be the love of power on 
 their side, the love of liberty is still stronger on ours." 
 
 This argument sums up, anticipates, and renders super- 
 fluous alike the rhetoric and reasoning on behalf of the South, 
 on both sides of the Atlantic, during the Civil war. Webster's 
 reply, the text of which is " the States not Sovereign," is 
 equally exhaustive on the other side. It is a greater effort 
 than his answer to Hayne, more closely logical and more 
 conclusive, though affording fewer passages adapted for quota- 
 
m AMERICAN LITEEATUEE. 
 
 tion. The controversy in regard to the Tariff, so far as it 
 threatened the Union, was closed by Clay's compromise of 
 1834. Calhoim changed his front of attack to the question 
 of Slavery, which he now set forth as a natural institution, 
 and succeeded in obtaining for it " concession after conces- 
 sion." Webster, after a triumphal progress through the pro- 
 vinces, as the saviour of the Union, unsuccessfully contested 
 the Presidency, and spent the spring of 1839 in England, 
 Scotland, and France. In the course of this tour he formed 
 with Lord Ashburton a friendship that proved of value when, 
 as Secretary of State under Harrison and Tyler, he negotiated 
 with that nobleman the " Treaty of "Washington," settling the 
 boundaries of Maiue. The Oregon question was, five years 
 later, adjusted on the same lines. Meanwhile, Texas, having 
 become an independent State, desired admission to the 
 Union. This was opposed by the North, and supported by 
 the South, as an obvious accession of strength to the slave 
 power. In the struggle Webster and Clay were defeated, 
 Polk was elected President, and the Mexican war followed, 
 with its vast results — the extension of the Union to the 
 Pacific, and the colonisation in 1848 of the newly-discovered 
 gold-fields of California. These great acquisitions again 
 raised " the burning question," Calhoun with his last breath 
 protesting against any encroachment on the right of new 
 States to decide on their own "domestic institutions." 
 Webster stood resolutely on his ground against the extension 
 of the area of slavery. He urged its abolition in the district 
 of Columbia, but held that the Constitution gave no further 
 powers. In this spirit is conceived his last considerable 
 speech in the Senate, that of March 7, 1850, entitled by 
 himself "For the Constitution and the Union," in which 
 he accepts and defends the Compromise Bill. It was the 
 last occasion on which his great rival, to whom he was 
 shortly after called on to pay a generous tribute, was present 
 
FORENSIC ORATORY. 125 
 
 to hear him. "Webster gave a stirring address in 1852 to the 
 men of Boston in Faneuil Hall, and died in the autumn of 
 the same year. As a lawyer he was in his day only surpassed 
 by the great jurists, Kent and Story ; as a forensic pleader 
 he had no equal. His triumphs at the Bar are worthy of a 
 place beside his triumphs in the Senate. There are few 
 causes dlebres more thrilling than that of the trial of the 
 Knapps for the murder of Joseph White, nor any passages in 
 our legal literature more striking than this : — 
 
 " Gentlemen, it is a most extraordinary case. In some respects 
 it has hardly a precedent anywhere ; certainly none in our New Eng- 
 land history. This bloody drama excited no suddenly-exerted, 
 ungovernable rage. The actors in it were not surprised by a lion-like 
 temptation springing upon their virtue, and overcoming it before 
 resistance could begin. Nor did they do the deed to glut savage ven- 
 geance or satiate long-settled or deadly hate. It was a cool, calculating, 
 money-making murder. It was all hire and salary, not revenge. It 
 was the weighing of money against life ; the counting out of so many 
 pieces of silver against so many ounces of blood. . . . The circum- 
 stances now clearly in evidence spread out the whole scene before us. 
 ... A healthful old man, to whom sleep was sweet, the first sound 
 slumbers of the night held him in their soft but strong embrace. The 
 assassin enters through the window already prepared . . . with 
 noiseless foot he paces the lonely hall, winds up the stairs to the 
 door of the chamber, moves the lock till it turns on its hinges mthout 
 noise : the beams of the moon resting on the gray locks show him 
 where to strike. . . . The victim passes without a struggle to the 
 repose of death. It is the assassin's purpose to make sure work ; and 
 he plies the dagger, though it is obvious that life has been destroyed 
 by the blow of the bludgeon. He raises the aged arm that he may 
 not fail in his aim at the heart, and replaces it again over the wounds 
 of the poignard. He explores the wrist for the pulse, and ascertains 
 that it beats no longer. It is accomplished. The deed is done ! He 
 retraces his steps to the window and escapes. . . . No eye has seen 
 him, no ear has heard him. The secret is his own, and it is safe ! 
 Ah ! gentlemen, that was a dreadful mistake . . . such secrets of 
 guUt are never safe from detection even by men." 
 
 But here, as elsewhere, extracts are apt to give the rhetoric 
 without the reasoning. The terrible power of the speech and 
 its main interest lies in the winding of the chain of evidence 
 link by link, coil on coil, round the murderer and his accom- 
 
126 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 plices. One seems to hear the hones of the victims crack as 
 under the grasp of a boa-ponstrictor. Webster swayed his 
 juries more surely than he led the Senate, and as an advocate 
 almost always won his case. He did not affect open-air plat- 
 forms, like Clay or O'Connell ; no man was more free from the 
 reproach of being a demagogue, or setting class against class ; 
 but in his numerous " progresses " through the Union he did 
 not always resist the temptation, that besets every orator, to 
 elicit the applause, by appealing to the self-complacency as 
 well as to the sympathies, of his audience. Every place where 
 he goes.be it Buffalo or Pittsburgh, New Hampshire or Indiana, 
 is made to appear for the moment, if not the " centre of civil- 
 isation," at least its fairest frontier. Those eulogiums are 
 indeed marked by a genuine patriotic glow, and the dignity 
 that belongs to every utterance of a commanding mind ; but 
 their example may have tended to encourage the troop of 
 Elijah Pograms and Cyrus Chokes,-' and the screamers of 
 Tammany Hall. The art of making commemorative speeches, 
 technically called " Orations," has been cultivated in America 
 to excess. Beginning with the addresses of the Eevolution 
 time, — designed to inflame the zeal of a nation actually at 
 war, — the practice has been maintained by the pride of three 
 generations, and the fluency of a people who, as a rule, 
 speak better than they write. It is scarce an exaggeration 
 to say that every "first boy" of his year, at Harvard, 
 begins to practise for public life by "orating" at large on 
 one or other of the long since threadbare themes — "The 
 Landing of the Pilgrims," "The Boston Massacre," "The 
 
 1 "I address you on behalf of the Watertoast Association, as it watches 
 your noble efforts in the cause of Freedom." At the name of Freedom, and 
 at every repetition of that name, all the sympathisers roared aloud, cheering 
 with nine times nine. Later in the proceedings " it was resolved that a piece 
 of plate should be presented to a certain Patriot who had declared from his 
 high place in the Legislature that he and his friends would hang without trial 
 any Abolitionist who might pay them a visit." — Dickens. 
 
COMMEMORATIVE ORATIONS. 127 
 
 Character of Washington," " Bunker Hill " (from which some 
 etymologists would derive the word bunkum), and "The 
 Anniversary of American Independence." Many of these 
 compositions have given the first promise of eminence after- 
 wards realised ; others are mere juvenile " spread-eagleism." 
 But the efflorescence of patriotism is not confined to one side 
 of the Atlantic ; and, in hour of trial, the youth of America 
 have done as much as that of England or of Scotland to show 
 that tall talk may be followed by brave deeds. In this kind 
 of composition "Webster excelled. He began with it at col- 
 lege : he all but closed with it at Washington ; his last speech 
 but one being (4th July 1851) on the laying of the corner- 
 stone of the addition to the Capitol. Such themes were 
 adapted for the display of his panoramic grasp of history, his 
 thorough appreciation of character, and the unaffected enthu- 
 siasm for everything great — qualities equally conspicuous in 
 his celebration of " Adams and Jefferson," " gone down 
 together with slow-descending, grateful, long-lingering light," 
 and in the range of his mind's eye over the " mighty rivers 
 flowing in solitary grandeur " through the trackless wastes of 
 Ohio. 
 
 I have dwelt on the career of the grandest post-Eevolution 
 figure of the New World, because his work is less known in 
 England than that of any other' great American. In a 
 country whose intellectual forte is oratory he surpasses all 
 other orators. 
 
 " Quantum lenta solent inter viburna cupressi." 
 More than this, his place among English-speaking orators 
 is in the front rank. True, his style has traces of the exagger- 
 ation characteristic of almost all young countries, and the 
 haste, to which we have referred as one of the attributes of 
 his own. It superabounds in classical allusions and poetical 
 quotations (a fashion common to the closing years of the last 
 and early years of this century in Great Britain, France, and 
 
128 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 Germany) ; its imagery is profuse, here and there florid. In 
 Webster's pages, as in those of most orators, we have plati- 
 tudes side by side with passages of real power, and we are 
 made alive to his want of true humour by his lack of reti- 
 cence. But beneath all the verbiage there is constantly pre- 
 sent to us a man of realities, of pith and power and catholic 
 sympathies enough to make us forget the cavils of superfine 
 critics, with no more energy than mantelpiece ornaments, 
 whose one idea is to make pedestals to themselves by smooth- 
 ing sentences. Under the " barbaric pearl and gold " there is 
 a buff jerkin : the flowers make summer over a block of 
 Puritan granite. Webster, fed on strong meat — the Bible, 
 Homer, and Milton — is always strong, always clear. His six 
 volumes can be read with little fatigue, and relished for 
 instruction as well as heat : though superfluent, he never 
 brings in bombast to plaster lack of knowledge or impotence 
 of thought. His arguments on the currency and on points of 
 law are often like Euclid's. One might pardon a compatriot 
 were he to say that Webster adds the richness of Burke ^ to 
 the clearness of Bright. His eloquence, everywhere massive, 
 is not the mere record of half-forgotten strifes : it belongs to 
 the permanent literature of his country, in whose political 
 arena he was, during his prime, the most powerful actor. 
 
 Two leading ideas pervade it : — a historic sense of the great 
 march of time, which enables him to summon back the shades 
 of past generations, as to a martial muster ; and the mainte- 
 nance of the Union, by any sacrifice and at any hazard. 
 Among his last words were — " I would rather hear of natural 
 blasts and mildews, war, pestilence, and famine, than hear 
 gentlemen talk of Secession. To break up this great Govern- 
 ment! to dismember this glorious country! to astonish 
 Europe with an act of folly such as Europe for two centuries 
 has never beheld in any government or any people ! No, 
 1 I of course speak of Burke merely as an orator. 
 
MINOR ORATORS. 129 
 
 sir! No, sir! There will be no secession." It was the 
 constant rallying cry of a great man's life, which began and 
 ended between the struggle of the early Federation and that 
 of the later Confederacy. 
 
 " Ere from the fields, by valour won, 
 The battle smoke had rolled away 
 And bared the blood-red setting sun, 
 His eyes were opeied on the day. 
 
 " His land was but a shelving strip, 
 
 Black with the strife that made it free ; 
 He lived to see its banners dip 
 Their fingers in the Western sea." 
 
 Among other eminent lawyers and speakers of the early 
 part of the century we have only space to mention William 
 Wirt, the biographer of Patrick Henry, and leading counsel 
 against Aaron Burr in the trial of 1807, from whose speech 
 the rather overwrought rhetorical passage about Blenner- 
 hassett is often quoted : William Pinkney, famous for his 
 defence of the captors of the Nereide, into which he crowds 
 an amazing mass of mythological imagery ; also for his advo- 
 cacy, in the following year, of the Tariff and his attack on 
 the use made by the Executive of the Treaty-making Power : 
 John Sergeant, whose eloquent anti-slavery speech of 1820 
 against the " Missouri Compromise " remarkably foreshadows 
 the Civil War : and Henry W. Brackenridge, son of the 
 judge, whose character he sketches with filial piety in his 
 Recollections of the West. Of slightly later date was 
 Webster's contemporary, friend, and biographer, Edwaed 
 Everett. A younger brother of Alexander, — also a littirateur, 
 speaker, and ambassador, of distinction, — he was born near 
 Boston in 1794, distinguished himself at Harvard, succeeded 
 the eloquent preacher Buckminster, in his nineteenth, and 
 was, in his twenty-first year, appointed Professor of Greek in 
 his University. Subsequently he was, in accordance with a 
 laudable American fashion, sent to Europe to recruit his 
 
 K 
 
130 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 health and gain experience — a visit made more than usually 
 memorable by his meeting Lord Byron in Italy, and carrying 
 letters from him to Ali- Pacha in Greece. On his return, 
 besides applying himself to the duties of his Chair, delivering 
 numerous courses, and publishing a Greek Grammar, he acted 
 as editor of the North American Review, to which he contri- 
 buted upwards of a hundred articles in the space of a few 
 years. Written in such haste, these are inevitably of unequal 
 merit ; but the best are marked by the ripe scholarship of one 
 of the most cultivated minds the States had fostered up to his 
 day. Everett, after serving for ten years as a useful member 
 of Congress, was distinguished by the high dignities, gracefully 
 worn, of Governor of Massachusetts, Minister to the Court of 
 St. James, and President of Harvard. The elegant volume 
 by which he is best remembered, twenty-seven " Orations," 
 selected and published in 1836, shows his strength and weak- 
 ness, his learning, frequent fancy, and fair judgment, on the 
 one side ; his ambition beyond his powers, early overtasked, 
 on the other. Discoursing on a wide range of subjects — of 
 which the refrains are America and Greece, the Mayflower, 
 Patriotism, Eeform, the Progress of Discovery, Concord, 
 Lexington, and the inevitable Bunker Hill — these speeches 
 are always able, but only by fits inspiring. They are " too 
 long," and smell of the lamp. The writer exhausts his hearers 
 by ransacking history and literature with an approach to 
 pedantry. In his great address on the Eepublic, delivered 
 August 26, 1824, before the Phi- Beta-Kappa Society, we have, 
 at one opening of the book, the Parthenon, the Theseum, the 
 Alexandrian and Periclean ages, Callimachus, Pindar, Lyco- 
 phron, Sophocles, Aristotle, Aristophanes of Byzantium, 
 ApoUonius of Ehodes, Alcaeus, Menander, Horace, Lucretius, 
 Tacitus, Constantine, Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Machiavelli, 
 Guicciardini, Galileo, Ariosto, Tasso, Cervantes, Corneille, 
 and Racine — all doubtless illustrating the orator's position, 
 
ORATIONS— EVERETT. 131 
 
 but heaped up with bewildering rapidity. Everett's work, 
 
 carefully elaborated and richly adorned, is that of the first of 
 
 rhetoricians rather than a genuine orator. The following 
 
 short passages are worth quoting' as specimens of his 
 
 style : — 
 
 " Luther migtt have written and preached in Latin to his dying 
 day, and the elegant Italian scholars, champions of the Church, would 
 have answered him in Latin better than his own ; and with the mass 
 of the people the whole affair would have been a contest between 
 angry and loquacious priests. ' Awake all antiquity from the sleep of 
 the libraries.' He awoke all Germany and half Europe from the 
 scholastic sleep of an ignorance worse than death. He took into his 
 hands not the oaten pipe of the classic muse ; he moved to his great 
 work, not 
 
 ' to the Dorian mood 
 Of flutes and soft recorders.' 
 
 He grasped the iron trumpet of his mother tongue — the good old 
 Saxon from which our own is descended, the language of noble thought 
 and high resolve — and blew a blast that shook the nations from Rome 
 to the Orkneys." 
 
 " When Greece ceased to be independent the forum and the stage 
 became mute. The patronage of Macedonian, Alexandrian, and Perga- 
 mean princes was lavished in vain. They could not woo the healthy 
 muses of Hellas from the cold mountain tops to dwell in their gilded 
 halls. . . . Not a poet arose in Greece to chant her own elegy ; and it 
 is, after near three centuries, from Cicero and Sulpicius that we 
 catch the first notes of pious and pathetic lamentation over the fallen 
 land of the arts. The freedom and genius of a country are invariably 
 gathered into a common tomb, and there 
 
 ' can only strangers breathe 
 The name of that which was heneath.' " 
 
 In the eloquence of the Pulpit the West hafe from the 
 first excelled. We have reached a period when, otherwise 
 than in the Colonial days, Theology is no longer the main 
 intellectual influence, and the study of its dogmas and their 
 result become an object of departmental zeal and research : 
 but Eeligion, the prime motive of thought in the New World, 
 still holds its own as a power amid the contentions of politics 
 and the claims of commerce. In no country has it more 
 influence : in none are its formulse more various. Methodism, 
 
132 AMERICAN LITERATUEE. 
 
 Catholicism, Mormonism, the aspirations of a vague philosophy 
 and the vulgar excitements of a camp meeting, faith in reve- 
 lation by raps, or conversion by rule of thumb, and the clear 
 cold belief in Christianity as a mere practical life, have met 
 under the same vast roof-tree of nations, and there is none 
 that does not boast its soul-subduing, more or less inspired 
 voice. In this dispersion of the original stream, the orthodox 
 Puritanism of Connecticut came down from EHot and Edwards, 
 through Dwight to Hodge, and the Princeton Essays : it 
 was represented ' in a somewhat modified form by Samuel 
 Hopkins. Elsewhere, elements of scepticism, of various dye, 
 — attributed by some to the influence of Payne and the French 
 officers in the two wars, by others to the mere gradual growth 
 of opinion — ^were manifesting themselves. In the New Eng- 
 land pulpits especially, a new body of preachers sprang up, who, 
 without directly arraigning any of the "points of faith," passed 
 them by, like Burns's friends the Scotch moderates, and con- 
 fined themselves, in their sermons, to the general inculcation 
 of moral truths, with a basis of Christian sentiment. Later, 
 the more -pronounced of these, forced into controversy, seceded 
 from the old Church, and became Unitarians, though at first 
 of a mild pattern of heresy. Of North American Eationalism, 
 Dr. Andrews Norton was the Erasmus, William Ellery Chan- 
 ning the Melancthon, and Theodore Parker the Luther, whose 
 "words were battles." Norton's learned objections to the 
 doctrine of the Trinity, which he ascribed to a false or inaccu- 
 rate exegesis, belong to the history of Biblical criticism. 
 Channing (1780-1842), a fine writer as well as a brave thinker, 
 claims notice, in the most cursory review of American litera- 
 ture, by the attractive sincerity of a life devoted to the pursuit 
 of truth, by the vigour of his conceptions, and his almost 
 invariably graceful and correct expression of them. Born'in 
 Ehode Island, he, after a brilliant career as a Harvard student, 
 and the usual European visit, spent his own life iu charge of 
 
PULPIT ORATORY- CHANNING. 133 
 
 his church at Boston, and breathed its stirring political and 
 intellectual atmosphere. His earliest considerable essay, and 
 one of the best known of his numerous controversial works 
 indicates by its title. The Moral Argument against Calvinism, 
 his prevailing attitude. Starting with a firm belief in the 
 dignity of human nature, a faith he enunciates in the elevated 
 style of Fichte, and glowing with the love of God as a 
 Supreme Benevolence, he revolts against the Puritan tenets of 
 universal depravity and partial election, as belonging to a 
 Juggernaut worship, which it was his mission to help to destroy. 
 Channing implicitly relied on a-priori moral arguments, and 
 employed them as his engines of attack against all persons, 
 institutions, or practices that offended his rigid sense of justice, 
 or aroused the indignation of his fervid philanthropy. Among 
 these, Napoleon, war, and slavery were the perpetual targets 
 of his wrath — as the giant wrong-doer and the giant wrongs 
 of his generation. A keen practical sense, of the duties of 
 life is, in most of his work, more conspicuous than abstract 
 speculative power ; but his insight into the position of parties, 
 his charitable view of them, and his forecasts of the proba- 
 bility of future conflicts, are remarkable. Though at variance 
 with the majority of the creeds of Christendom, Channing's 
 writings are everywhere marked by a reverential spirit, and 
 not unfrequently by a touch of inherited asceticism. His 
 essays on Self-Culture anticipate much said, more recently, by 
 the later school of free-thought, to which he gave the iirst 
 distinct impulse. The following passage on Spiritual Freedom 
 recalls Persius and forestalls Emerson : — 
 
 " I call that mind free ■which, protects itself against the usurpations 
 of society, which does not cower to human opinion, which feels itself 
 accountable to a higher tribunal than man's, which respects a higher 
 law than fashion, which respects itself too much to be the slave or tool 
 of the many or the few. 
 
 " I call that mAndfrec which, through confidence in God and in the 
 power of virtue, has cast off all fear but that of wrong-doing, which no 
 
134 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 menace or peril can entkral, wliicli is calm in the midst of tumults, and 
 possesses itself ttough all else be lost. 
 
 " I call that rrdnd free wMci resists the bondage of habit, which 
 does not mechanically repeat itself and copy the past, which does not 
 live on its old virtues, which does not enslave itself to precise rules, 
 but which forgets what is behind, listens for new and higher monitions 
 of conscience, and rejoices to pour itself forth in fresh and higher exer- 
 tions. 
 
 I call that mind free which is jealous of its own freedom, which 
 guards itself from being merged in others, which guards its empire 
 over itself as nobler than the empire of the world," 
 
 It was this sort of discourse, dwelling on truths not often 
 preached and duties seldom practised, raising the minds of his 
 hearers into the clearer air of his own spotless life, that made 
 the preacher so conspicuous and beneficent a power. 
 
 " Cultor enim juvenum purgatas inseris aures 
 Fruge Cleanthea." 
 
 Channing never flinches in denouncing either excess or 
 meanness, and tells his fashionable congregation "wealth 
 ought not to secure to the prosperous the slightest considera- 
 tion," but there is no sourness in his asceticism. In his address 
 on Temperance especially — one of his favourite themes — he 
 takes occasion to protest against the idea that there is any- 
 thing in religion inconsistent with cheerfulness, healthful 
 amusements, such as dancing, sports, etc., or social pleasures. 
 
 " To fight against our nature is not to serve the cause of piety. 
 God, who has made us for smiles much more than for tears, who has 
 made laughter the most contagious of all sounds, whose Son hallowed 
 a marriage feast by His presence . . . cannot have intended us for a 
 dull monotonous life. . . . A religion giving dark views of God, and 
 infusing superstitious fear of innocent enjoyment, instead of aiding 
 sober habits, will, by making men abject and sad, impair their moral 
 force, and prepare them for intemperance as a refuge from depression 
 or despair." 
 
 Times were changing since the days of the Church-State 
 of New England, and the way was being prepared for the 
 teaching of Concord. Where Jonathan Edwards had driven 
 
THEODORE PARKER. 135 
 
 men — sometimes to righteousness, sometimes out of their 
 senses — by the terrors of a future life, Channing allured 
 them by unconsciously representing in his own person the 
 " Beauty of Holiness." During the same period his opinions, 
 ■with some modifications, were ably upheld by Orville Dewey, 
 by Dr. J. G. Palfrey in his Academical Lectures, delivered 
 as Professor of Biblical Criticism at Cambridge, and by 
 the accomplished German immigrant Charles FoUen, during 
 the brief Unitarian ministry which preceded his premature 
 death in the ill-fated " Lexington." But his successor in pulpit 
 influence and the development of heterodox theology was 
 Theodoee Pakkee, one of the most prominent men in New 
 England, renowned for a learning which, though not always 
 well digested, was of imposing bulk, for a sledge-hammer 
 speech, which impressed his hearers perhaps more than liis 
 readers, and for a fearlessness which often passed into audacity. 
 Parker's personality seems to have had a power of inspiring 
 enthusiasm even beyond that inspired by Channing : Lowell 
 refers to him as a prodigy of reference, and among the group 
 of anti-slavery orators he was a commanding figure. Ex- 
 pelled even from the Unitarian fold, his " opinions 
 
 ' Being so ultra-Socinian tliey"Bliocked the Socinians,' " 
 
 he made a flock of his own, and led it, in gathering crowds, 
 where he listed, by force of character rather than culture. 
 But Parker's writings will not stand criticism so well as 
 Channing's. If he is sometimes more impassioned, he is often 
 florid, diffuse, and even noisy in his trumpets of revolt. He 
 does not, like Emerson, take up a calm vantage ground of 
 philosophical survey or scorn : " he roars beneath the walls of 
 the Jericho of orthodoxy, and expects them to fall." In this 
 age, it is absurd to claim for any position in theology, or even 
 perhaps in morals, an immunity from discussion. The only 
 imperative rule is that it be conducted in good taste. This 
 
136 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 rule Theodore Parker has often violated ; and in his pages 
 there are frequent expressions which " do knock at the door 
 of blasphemy without intent to enter therein," — expressions 
 which would be repudiated by any Oxonian atheist, with- 
 out a tithe of Parker's aU- pervading sentiment of religion. 
 The result is that, in his somewhat cometic career, he has 
 sometimes hit the white, and often flung a boomerang. But 
 his works abound in strong argument and in fine descriptions 
 of historic events and scenes, from which .we may take the 
 following, in preference to a specimen of his Boanerges 
 style : — 
 
 " By means of Ms marshals he one day caught a Scotch girl, a cove- 
 nanter. She was young, only eighteen. She was comely to look upon. 
 Her name was Margaret. Graham ordered her to he tied to a stake in 
 the sea at low water, and left to drown slowly at the advance of the 
 tide. It was done ; and his creatures — there were enough of them in 
 Scotland, as of their descendants here" (he is thinking of the reclaimers 
 of fugitive slaves), " his commissioners, his marshals, and his attorneys 
 — sat down on the shore to watch the end of poor Margaret. It was 
 an end not to he forgotten. In a clear sweet voice she sang hymns to 
 God, tiU the waves of the sea hroke over her head, and floated her 
 pious soul to her God and His heaven. Had Scotland been a Catholic 
 country there would have been another Saint Margaret, known as the 
 
 ' Genius of the shore, 
 In her large recompence who would be good 
 To all that wander in that perilous flood.' " 
 
 Some one has said that if Channing had lived in a Catholic 
 country he would have been canonised. The frequent 
 '■ approchments " between the recent sceptical and the oldest 
 form of the Christian faith are remarkable. Margaret's 
 Covenanters, had they had power, would have burnt the 
 holders of either. 
 
 Theodore Parker's career was throughout involved in the 
 new crisis in his country's history, with a brief reference to 
 which we must close this half-political survey. I refer of 
 course to the great death-struggle of the Slave-Power and the 
 events that frustrated Webster's hope for a peaceful solution 
 
ANTI-SLAVERY ELOQUENCE. 137 
 
 of the besetting problem. It is theoretically true that reform 
 is better than revolution, and. that when bad institutions have 
 become long engrained in a community, they cannot without 
 disasters be uprooted with sudden violence. It may, for ex- 
 ample, be desirable that every subject of a State should have 
 the full privileges of a citizen ; but no wise legislator can 
 afford to disregard the disqualifying effect of centuries of 
 ignorance. It is possible that, in the interest of the op- 
 pressed class itself, slavery might have come to a happier end 
 through a process of gradual emancipation. But when the 
 dominant classes, — as the Church authorities of the fifteenth, 
 the French noblesse of the eighteenth, century, — deaf to the 
 caU for concession, can be brought to think of nothing but the 
 retention of their privileges, revolution becomes the " ultima 
 ratio " of reform. This precisely occurred in the case of the 
 Southern leaders, who, inspired with the ideas of Calhoun, 
 without his comparative clearness of sight, if not purity of 
 purpose, on his death, broke their previous traces, and rushed 
 into every insolent extreme. Alarmed by the rapid progress 
 of the Free States in the healthier regions of the l^orth-West, 
 and finding their own soils exhausted by necessarily unintel- 
 ligent labour, hungering after new pastures, they unfurled 
 their banner, no longer for State Eights, but to make slavery 
 a recognised and protected Federal institution, free to spread 
 over the Union. They braved out their misdeeds, and boasted 
 of their calamity, till it became a crime. Their test of every 
 candidate for the Presidency was his willingness to support 
 an institution which from their benches and churches was 
 now declared divine. Some of their responsible statesmen 
 were even found to advocate a revival of the Slave Trade. 
 Meanwhile Massachusetts, and the aroused moral feeling 
 of New England generally, replied by an antithetic fana- 
 ticism. There has been a grain of this spirit in all the 
 great religious and social reforms of history, and when Web- 
 
138 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 ster spoke of " persons disposed to mount upon some particular 
 duty, as upon a war-horse, and to drive furiously on and upon 
 and over all other duties that may stand in the way," and of 
 those " who deal with morals as with mathematics," he was 
 designedly, nor altogether inaccurately, describing the Northern 
 Abolitionists, who, regarding slavery from the first not as a mis- 
 fortune, but as a sin against God and man, refused in all that 
 concerned it to make any distinction between compromise of 
 action and compromise of principle. Inspired with almost a 
 mania for an ideal morality, they would have scouted the 
 dictum of Burke, approved by Mr. Gladstone, " In politics 
 the sphere accorded to abstract reasoning is extremely limited." 
 As Knox declared " The idolater should die the death," so they 
 madetheir motto " No union with slaveholders " extend from 
 public to private life. But, in both cases, a purely disinter- 
 ested, was evoked by antagonism to a merely selfish, intoler- 
 ance ; and in both, the reformers were men living in memory 
 of atrocities committed on their friends ; speaking and acting 
 with their own lives in their hands. Their vehemence was 
 that of words, the counter fury of deeds. The period in 
 America between 1835 and 1860, has, with little exaggera- 
 tion, been called its martyr age ; for its annals are thick- 
 strewn with victims to the lawless gibbets, revolvers, bowie- 
 knives, and clubs, of which the once hospitable and chivalrous 
 South was then willing to avail herself. With all their errors 
 of judgment, some not inconsiderable, the Abolitionists were 
 the noblest body of men of their nation and time. Their 
 pioneer and chief was the self-taught printer, who, in 1830, 
 set the first sheet of The Liberator. 
 
 " In a small chamber, friendless and unseen, 
 
 Toiled o'er his types one poor unlearned young man ; 
 The place was dark, unfurnitured, and mean, 
 Yet there the freedom of a race began ;" 
 
 a freedom not to be achieved in the way he foresaw, by the 
 
GARRISON. 139 
 
 mere might of moral power, but directly due to his influence. 
 William Lloyd Gaekison from first to last disclaimed the 
 idea of being a politician. In one of those short grand sayings 
 which stood him in stead of any elaborate eloquence, he 
 declared — " I am determined to know nothing as a public man 
 save Jesus Christ and Him crucified, and in this country I 
 see Him crucified again in the person of the slave." But he 
 did more to '' convert" his age than all its politicians together. 
 His career is the most salient instance in biography of what 
 can be done by perfect courage, unrelenting determination, 
 and absolute singleness of aim. His early manifestoes were 
 received, in lieu of argument, by frantic threats of murder 
 from the Southern press, then, it would appear, mostly edited 
 by ruffians. To these he paid no attention, save occasionally 
 reprinting them in the Liberator. Nearer home he ran 
 greater danger. In 1835, the feeling was so strong against 
 him that he was, by a mob of well-dressed and well-to-do 
 gentlemen, dragged through the streets of Boston with a 
 halter round his neck, and was only saved by being thrown 
 into jaU. The moment he was out, he went on printing, with 
 the declaration, " I will not recede an inch, and I shall be 
 heard." Such a voice could not be stifled. He was heard. 
 During fifteen years his papers and pamphlets were spread or 
 smuggled all over the land ; he had gathered to his circle 
 most of the choicest spirits of New England — Channing, 
 Lowell, Whittier, Emerson, FoUen, Parker, Sumner, Chase, etc.; 
 he had won the waverers, held up the arms of the faint, rebuked 
 and shamed or silenced the arrogant, and led the tide of 
 Northern revolt, till searchers for fugitives in Boston had to 
 be guarded by the military, and Massachusetts in her turn 
 threatening to secede, the law of 1850 became a dead letter. 
 A decade passed, and the 'old man — whose non-resistance 
 principles had been sorely tried in the liberating war, in 
 which his son served as an officer — marched up the streets of 
 
140 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 Charleston, where thirty years before a price had been set 
 upon his head, among a throng of freedmen, " rending the 
 air with their shouts '' to see " the flag " re-hoisted on Fort 
 Sumter. In 1879 he departed in peace, and entered into his 
 inheritance. "No shadow of suspicion," writes Whittier, 
 " rests upon the white statue of a life, the fitting garland of 
 which should be the Alpine flower that symbolises noble 
 purity.'' 
 
 As Garrison was the apostle of Abolitionism, so its orator 
 was Wendell Phillips, a man of the highest birth and cul- 
 ture of New England, who with equal devotion surrendered 
 his brilliant prospects at the bar and Senate to the advocacy of 
 the cause to which from youth upwards he gave his splendid 
 energies and eloquence. Of the latter we can only give a 
 single instance — earliest in date, but characteristic of his 
 manner and attitude throughout. In 1837, at a crowded 
 meeting, convened by Dr. Channing in Faneuil Hall, to ex- 
 press indignation at the murder of Lovejoy, Mr. Austin, the 
 Attorney-General of the State, moved an amendment, in the 
 course of which he justified the atrocity, and compared the 
 mob of miscreants who had perpetrated it to that which had 
 destroyed the tea in Boston harbour. Whereupon Phillips 
 rose and said — 
 
 " Mr. Chairman — When I heard the gentleman lay down principles 
 which placed the rioters, incendiaries, and murderers of Alton side hy 
 side with Otis and Hancock, with Quincy and Adams, I thought those 
 pictured lips (pointing to the portraits in the hall) would have broken 
 into voice to rebuke the recreant American, the slanderer of the dead. 
 Sir, the gentleman said that he should sink into insignificance if he 
 dared not gainsay the principles of the resolution before this meeting. 
 Sir, for the sentiments he has uttered on soil consecrated by the prayers 
 of Puritans and the blood of patriots, the earth should have yawned 
 and swallowed him up." 
 
 Phillips has always been the leader of the extreme " gauche '' 
 of the party, and his fervour frequently led him beyond the 
 limits prescribed by the substantial good sense of Garrison ; 
 
PHILLIPS AND SUMNEK. 141 
 
 but in distinct genius for speech he was their Coryphasus. 
 Their politician, and nearly one of their martyrs, Chaeles 
 Sumner, had the same claims of scholarship and descent, 
 with a native power little inferior. His earlier eloquence is 
 best illustrated by some of his denunciations of war (y. espe- 
 cially his description of a sea-fight). Most of his life was 
 spent in battle, its closing years in triumph, when, in high 
 ofi&ce, most honoura,bly attained, he helped to weld together 
 the Union under new conditions. This extensive learning 
 and retentive memory enabled him to make a mass of facts 
 converge on the conclusion of an argument, at once impas- 
 sioned and apparently judicial. No better testimony can be 
 given to the trenchant force of his eloquence than the das- 
 tardly assault made upon him (1856) in the Senate by 
 Preston Brooks. The approval of this outrage in the South, 
 with the contemporary events of the free fight for Kansas, 
 made it plain that while constitutional disputes may be 
 adjusted by civilised discussion, the only answer to organised 
 rowdyism is at the cannon's mouth. We shall recur to the 
 last phase of the struggle, in connection with the poetry 
 it called forth. Pierce paved the way for the treachery of 
 Buchanan, and that for the open revolt of the Mississippi 
 repudiator. The North, with its twenty ^ States and twenty 
 millions, taken at a disadvantage, had to fight against the 
 eleven States of the South, with six million ^ freemen, three- 
 and-a-half million slaves, for three years before the Union 
 was virtually saved at Gettysburg.^ The crisis passed, the 
 question of the end was merely one of time, and the event 
 gave rise to the few paragraphs of consummate natural 
 
 1 Kentucky and Maryland being set down as neutral, and Missouri as 
 loyal. 
 
 2 These are rougMy the numbers, allowing for the average increase on the 
 census of 1860. 
 
 3 Gettysburg was the Metaurus of the war ; though hope of foreign aid, 
 and Lee's generalship, for two years more prolonged the desperate fight. 
 
142 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 eloquence, in which the rail-splitter of Illinois, raised on 
 the surge of a great moral and patriotic tide, recalled the 
 address of Pericles over his Athenian dead, in terms with 
 which we may close our record of the oratory of the 
 West : — " It is for us, the living, to be dedicated here to the 
 unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far 
 so nobly advanced. It is for us to be here dedicated to the 
 great task remaining before us ; that from these honoured 
 dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they 
 gave the last full measure of devotion ; that we here highly 
 resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain ; that this 
 nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom ; and 
 that government of the people — by the people and for the 
 people — shall not perish from the earth." 
 
HISTORIANS. 143 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 HISTORIANS — ROMANCE AND CRITICISM, 1800-1850. 
 
 If the literary fame of the orator and statesman is transient, 
 he has the compensation of having more or less permanently 
 affected the destinies of the nation in which his personality 
 is merged. He makes history : he is, equally with the 
 soldier or philanthropist, a cause of the struggles, victories, 
 and defeats of which others have to preserve the memory. 
 Mere narrative is often almost contemporaneous with the 
 event, and biographies are apt to follow too swiftly on the 
 lives of great men. But these are mere preliminaries to a 
 true History, which, as the result of the comprehensive reflec- 
 tion of an organising genius, makes as great a claim on the 
 finest faculties and strongest energies of the mind as an epic 
 poem does. It demands a knowledge of details rarely com- 
 bined with the power to grasp a whole : it involves a perfect 
 idea of the proportion of parts, keen analysis of character, 
 broad synthesis of national movements on or beneath the 
 surface, the impartial verdicts of a judge and the skill of an 
 artist, the zeal of the moralist tempered by the sense of the 
 politician, the sympathies of the antiquary with the past, 
 almost the insight of the prophet into the future. Such 
 histories are necessarily few. Greece, Eome, and England 
 have each contributed but one that meets all the conditions — 
 the works respectively of Thucydides, Tacitus, and Gibbon. 
 
144 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 They never come early in the literature of any country. Our 
 Saxon, semi-Saxon, and ISTorman chronicles differ from the 
 Fasti Consulares, or even the notched sticks of savage tribes, 
 by the occasional infusion into their pages of a religious, 
 patriotic, and pictorial element. They differ in accuracy or 
 attractiveness : they agree in their lack of system, being for 
 the most part bundles of facts or fictions thrown down for 
 later ages to disentangle. Our sixteenth and seventeenth 
 centuries abound in annals, memoirs, satirical and polemical 
 contributions to history ; but the power of massing together 
 a long series of events in a harmonio-us whole, of enlisting 
 the interest of the reader in their evolution and rendering 
 their representation attractive by literary graces, can hardly 
 be said to have been manifested before the eighteenth. 
 Similarly ia America, the Colonial time, and the first three 
 decades of the Eepublic, abound in letters, journals, chroni- 
 cles, biographies — some of great merit in themselves, others 
 notable from association with distinguished names. Among 
 those of the later period may be signalised J. Sanderson's 
 Lives of the Signers, the historical Discourses and Addresses of 
 G. C. Verplanck, "Wirt's Patrick Henry, Parton's Franklin and 
 Jefferson, the American Begister of Brockden Brown, F. 
 Cooper's History of the American Navy, The Life of Josiah 
 Quincy by his son, The Life of John Adams by his grandson, 
 Hamilton's Bepuhlic of the United States, Palfrey's New Eng- 
 land, and the stupendous series edited and largely written by 
 Jared Sparks. To these we should add Josiah Quincy's 
 History of Harvard University, setting forth, in the following 
 sentences (prefixed by the brothers Duyckinck to their indis- 
 pensable Cyclopsedia) what is one purpose of all, and the 
 special claim of Transatlantic, biography : — 
 
 " While passing down the series of succeeding years, as through the 
 interior of some ancient temple, which displays on either hand the 
 statues of distinguished friends and benefactors, we should stay for a 
 moment in the presence of each, doing justice to the humble, illustrat- 
 
BANCROFT. 145 
 
 ing the obscure, placing in a true light the modest, and noting rapidly 
 the moral and intellectual traits which time has spared ; to the end 
 that ingratitude, that proverbial sin of republics, may not attach to 
 the republic of letters ; and that whoever feeds the lamp of science, 
 however obscurely, however scantily, may know that sooner or later 
 his name and virtues shall be made conspicvioiis by its light." 
 
 But the first systematic History of the United States is that of 
 Geoege Banceoft, a leading democratic politician, formerly 
 Collector of Customs at Boston and Secretary to the Navy, 
 who held the post of representative of his country in Great 
 Britain from 1846-49, i.e. under the administration of Polk, the 
 truculent spirit of which he seems to have largely imbibed. 
 His work, great in extent and plan, three volumes of which 
 are devoted to the Colonisation and seven to the Eevolu- 
 tionary period, published at intervals between 1834 and 
 1874, is still incomplete, only bringing down the record to 
 the year 1*782 ; but it is, as far as I am aware, stUl accepted 
 as the standard authority for the events and sentiments 
 of the two preparatory centuries of its review. The book 
 is written for the most part in a vigorous style, somewhat 
 defective, however, in elegance, and characterised by a certain 
 monotony and want of ease which detracts from the pleasure 
 of the reader. Among the more effective passages are the 
 descriptions of Virginia and Connecticut, of the sombre 
 forests of New Netherlands, and the crowded marts and well- 
 stored libraries of New York, of the discovery of the Missis- 
 sippi by the French explorer Marquette, and the prosperous 
 refuge in Carolina of the exiled Huguenots. His contrast 
 between the virtues of Chivalry and Puritanism is typical of 
 the view generally taken by his compeers of the Northern 
 West :— 
 
 " The Bjiights were brave from gallantry of spirit ; the Puritans 
 from the fear of God. The Knights were proud of loyalty ; the 
 Puritans of liberty. . . . Chivalry delighted in show, favoured plea- 
 sure, multiplied amusements, and degraded the human race by an 
 exclusive respect for the privileged classes ; Puritanism bridled the 
 
 L 
 
146 AMERICAN LITEEATURE. 
 
 passions . . . and rescued tlie name of man from dishonour. The 
 former valued courtesy, the latter justice. The former adorned society 
 by graceful refinements, the latter founded national grandeur on uni- 
 versal education. The institutions of chivalry were subverted by the 
 gradually increasing weight and knowledge and opulence of the indus- 
 trious classes ; the Puritans, relying upon those classes, planted in their 
 hearts the undying principles of democratic liberty." 
 
 Bancroft's statements of matters of fact are generally 
 reliable: lie had ample opportunity during forty years for 
 collecting material, large experience of European as well as 
 American sentiments, and indefatigable industry, stimulated 
 by a patriotic enthusiasm which, in his Congressional 
 speeches, almost amounts to ferocity ; but his comments are 
 moulded, to a degree unusual even among politicians, by fixed 
 ideas and the foregone conclusions of a vehement partisan. 
 From the " Eepublican " side there appeared in six volumes, 
 issued in rapid succession (1849-53), a rival history, starting 
 from the same point and coming down to 1841, by Eichard 
 HUdreth, a Boston lawyer and newspaper editor, who made 
 himself prominent by his strenuous opposition to the annexa- 
 tion of Texas, and frequent denunciations of what he conceived 
 to be the despotism of the Southern States. After publish- 
 ing a work on the Theory of Morals, followed by another on 
 Politics, designed to form parts of a system of Sociology, 
 almost as comprehensive as Herbert Spencer's, he set himself 
 to his history, in which he professed to exhibit men as they 
 were and events as they took place, "unbedaubed with 
 patriotic rouge." Consistently with this programme, the 
 writer's judgments on political charlatans and successful 
 demagogues are conspicuously severe, a fact which has pro- 
 voked the remark that he " often wears the cap of the execu- 
 tioner, and that no statute of limitations nor canonisation of 
 the offender avails against his impartial criticism." Hildreth's 
 work is marked by the same Puritanic tone as Bancroft's, but 
 it is more consistent in its crusade against popular corrup- 
 
HILDRETH. 147 
 
 tions. His style is at times more animated, but lie is more 
 prone to indulge in rhetorical exaggerations. The keynote 
 of much of the sentiment of the book is found in the keen 
 abolitionist views, previously expressed in the author's fairly 
 successful romance. The White Slave. One of the merits of 
 his history is its appreciation of the Federalists and their 
 leader, of whom he writes — 
 
 " Hamilton possessed the same rare and lofty qualities, the same 
 just balance of soul, with less indeed of Washington's severe simpli- 
 city . . . but with more of warmth, variety, ornament, and grace. If 
 the Doric in architecture be taken as the symbol of Washington's char- 
 acter, Hamilton's belonged to the same grand 'style as developed in 
 the Corinthian — if less impressive, more winning. If we add Jay for 
 the Ionic, we have a trio not to be matched in our history. Of earth- 
 born Titans, as terrible as great, now angels and now toads and serpents, 
 there are everywhere enough. Of the serene and benign sons of the 
 celestial gods, how few at any time have waited the earth." 
 
 Kearly one half of the works of the most classic American 
 prose writers, of the generations previous to our own, are 
 Historical or Biographical. Washington Irving's Conquest of 
 Grarmda, his Lives of Mahomet and his Successors, of Columbus, 
 of Goldsmith, and of Washington, although not the most ori- 
 ginal, are among the most interesting of his works — accurate 
 in their leading estimates, and marked by the usual smooth- 
 ness and even flow of his style. Irving contemplated a con- 
 tinuation of the record of the early relations of Spain to the 
 New World, but, with his wonted generosity, abandoned 
 the theme on hearing that the task had been assumed by 
 worthy hands. 
 
 The works of William H. Prescott, the most artistic his- 
 torian to whom the United States have hitherto given birth, 
 are remarkable from the difficulties under which they were 
 produced, and for the well-deserved success which they have 
 achieved. This success is due in part to the genius and 
 indomitable industry of the writer, in part to the steady con- 
 centration of his powers on the arduous undertaking of which 
 
148 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 he had, at an eai'ly age, formed a just estimate. In a diary 
 of 1819 (that is in his twenty-fifth year), he allows ten years 
 for preliminary studies, and ten more for the execution of his 
 task, a notable example- to his countrymen, nine-tenths of 
 whose literary performances will prove ephemeral, less from 
 lack of ability in the writers than from an utterly inade- 
 quate sense of the time and toil that the Muses demand 
 of their votaries. Ferdinand and Isabella, given to the world 
 in 1838, was written while Mr. Prescott was, owing to an 
 accident at college, almost wholly deprived of his sight. 
 His authorities in a foreign tongue were read to him by an 
 assistant, and by aid of a writing-case for the blind he 
 scrawled the pages of his great work. It soon attained a 
 European as well as an American fame, and superseded all 
 other records of the period of which it treats. No such com- 
 prehensive view of Spain at the zenith of her greatness has 
 ever appeared in English. The proportion of its parts and 
 the justice of its estimates are universally acknowledged, while 
 hypercriticism of the style— ^graceful, correct, and sufficiently 
 varied — can only point to the occasional possibility of greater 
 condensation. Among the most notable of the descriptions, 
 which can seldom be detached from the whole into which 
 they are woven, we may refer to the return of Columbus, and 
 the contrasted characters of Queens Isabella and Elizabeth. 
 The Conquest of Mexico (written with somewhat improved 
 sight) followed in 1843, that of Peru in 1847. These have 
 attained an even wider popularity than their precursor, 
 owing to the more condensed romance and greater novelty of 
 their themes : they are " open sesames " to an old world of 
 wonders — real, and yet, from its strangeness, invested with 
 half the charms of Fairyland. Few passages of fiction are so 
 enthralling to the youthful reader as the first sight of the 
 Spanish adventurers of the plain and city of the Aztecs— the 
 story of Nezahualcoyotl King of Tezcuco; the whole life, 
 
PRESCOTT. 149 
 
 exploits, and tragic end of Montezuma; the night retreat 
 from the Aztec capital ; the account of the sun-worshippers 
 in the golden city. The following reflections on the fall of 
 one of the great Mexican races convey in short space an 
 idea of Prescott's style : — 
 
 " What thoughts must crowd on the mind of the traveller as he 
 wanders amidst these memorials of the past ; as he treads over the 
 ashes of the generations who reared these colossal fabrics, which take 
 us from the present into the very depths of time ! But who were 
 their builders ? "Was it the shadowy 01m ecs, whose history, like that 
 of the ancient Titans, is lost in the mists of fable ? or, as commonly 
 reported, the peaceful and industrious Toltecs, of whom all that we can 
 gleam rests on traditions hardly more secure 1 What has become of 
 the races who built them ? Did they remain on the soU, and mingle 
 and become incorporated with the fierce Aztecs who succeeded them ? 
 Or did they pass on to the South, and find a wider field for the expan- 
 sion of their civilisation, as shown by the higher character of the 
 architectural remains in the distant regions of Central America and 
 Yucatan ? It is all a mystery, over which Time has thrown an 
 impenetrable veil, that no mortal hand may raise. A nation has 
 passed away, ^powerful, populous, and well advanced in refinement, 
 as attested by their monuments, — but it has perished without a name. 
 It has died and made no sign l"^ 
 
 Equally striking, in the Conquest of Peru, are the descrip- 
 tions of the great annual ceremonies in the Temple of the 
 Sun :— 
 
 " For three days previous there was a general fast, and no fire was 
 allowed to be lighted in the dwellings. When the appointed day 
 arrived, the Inca and his court, followed by the whole population of 
 the city, assembled at early dawn in the great square to greet the 
 rising of the Sun. They were dressed in their gayest apparel, and the 
 Indian lords vied with each other in the display of costly ornaments 
 and jewels on their persons, while canopies of gaudy feather-work and 
 richly-tinted stuffs, borne by the attendants over their heads, gave to 
 the great square, and the streets that emptied into it, the appearance 
 of being spread over with one vast and magnificent awning. Eagerly 
 they watched the coming 'of their deity, and no sooner did his first 
 yellow rays strike the turrets and loftiest buildings of the capital, than 
 a shout of gratulation broke forth from the assembled multitude, 
 accompanied by songs of triumph, and the wild melody of barbaric 
 
 1 Conquest of Mexico, Book V. chap. iv. 
 
150 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 instruments, that swelled louder and louder as his bright orb, rising 
 above the mountain range towards the east, shone in fuU splendour on 
 his votaries." 
 
 And of the perils that beset the inland march of the 
 
 Spaniards — 
 
 " On the departure of his vessels Pizarro marched into the interior, 
 in the hope of fhiding the pleasant champaign country which had been 
 promised him by the natives. But at every step the forests seemed to 
 grow denser and darker, and the trees towered to a height such as 
 he had never seen, even in these fruitful regions where Nature works 
 on so gigantic a scale. Hill continued to rise above hUl as he advanced, 
 rolling onward, as it were, by successive waves to join that colossal 
 barrier of the Andes, whose frosty sides, far away above the clouds, 
 spread out like a curtain of burnished silver, that seemed to connect 
 the heavens with the earth." ^ 
 
 Both these later works are dramas, in which our sympathy 
 is divided between the chivalry of Spain in her prime and 
 the poetical traditions and patriotism of a vanished race. 
 But their author has never, in the midst of his " Claude- 
 like descriptions" and charmingly -vivid narratives, allowed 
 himseK to forget that he is writing history. Boys read his 
 Mexico and Peru as they read the Arabian Nights; critics 
 can point to few flaws in the accuracy of his judgment. 
 Philip II., Mr. Prescott's latest and unfinished work — with 
 less brilliancy of colouring, as becomes the more sombre 
 theme — is rendered even more weighty by the solidity of its 
 judgments. For an example of his disenchanting view of 
 the fables of history, we may refer to his refutation of the 
 romantic story— made famous by Schiller — of Don Carlos 
 and Queen Isabella. Perhaps the most impressive single 
 passage in the book is the account, near the beginning, of 
 the resignation of Charles V. : but in this, as in other pages 
 of his later work, the ground has been traversed by his 
 successor. 
 
 John Lotheop Motley, a distinguished ambassador in 
 
 ^ Conquest of Peru, Book II. chap. iii. 
 
MOTLEY. 15] 
 
 foreign courts, and author of the best existing history of 
 Holland, is in his province Mr. Prescott's only rival. Less 
 faultless, he is more strikingly original, and writes with a 
 warmer glow. The greater complexity of the sxibject, which he 
 has made his own, calls for the exercise of even higher powers. 
 The Butch BepuUic, which appeared in 1856, at once arrested 
 attention by its evidence of long research, comprehensive 
 grasp, and the enthusiasm which, only here and there inter- 
 fering with the impartiality of the author, gives life to the 
 work. Mr. Motley's style, even to minute turns in his sen- 
 tences, bears the impress of the influence of Carlyle. The 
 very titles of his chapters, especially in the first volume, seem 
 transferred from the FreTwh Revolution: such are "Sowing 
 the Wind," " The Harvest Eipening," " The First Whirlwind," 
 "The Taciturn against King, Cardinal, and Elector," etc. 
 Prom the same source he may have caught some of his hero- 
 worship, which, however, by the choice of a worthy idol, 
 he, has done much to vindicate. The Butch Bepublic, pre- 
 luded by the overture of a masterly and vivid historical sur- 
 vey, is a drama, which facts have made highly sensational, 
 of the fiercest struggle against temporal and spiritual de- 
 spotism that, within the same space of years, Europe has 
 seen. It is divided, not inappropriately, though perhaps 
 with some regard for effect, into a prologue and five acts, 
 to each of which, in succession, the name of the Spanish 
 governor for the time is attached. The portraits of the great 
 emissaries — particularly those of Granvelle of Arras and 
 Duchess Margaret of Alva, Don John of Lepanto, and Alex- 
 ander of Parma — are drawn with bold strokes and in lasting 
 colours. Behind the scenes, director of the assailing forces, 
 is the evil genius, Philip himself, to whose ghastly figure, 
 writing letters in the Escurial, our attention is called with 
 a wearisome if not affected iteration of phrase, while the 
 presence of the great Elector, William the Silent, is felt at 
 
.152 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 every crisis retrieving the retreat and urging on the victory. 
 The most horrible chapter of modern times, that of the 
 Inquisition, is set forth with a power that brands its records 
 into the memory of the reader : amid a throng of scenes of 
 pageantry and pathos, we may refer to those of Egmont's 
 triumph at St. Quentin, of his execution, of the misery of 
 Mook Heath, the siege of Leyden, and the Hero's end.' 
 The United Netherlands (1867-69) is a continuation of the 
 same history, in the same spirit ; but, as regards style, a 
 calmer and more matured composition. The most thrilling 
 chapters in those four later volumes are the "Siege of Ant- 
 werp," which rivals Lord Macaulay's " Siege of Londonderry," 
 and almost challenges comparison with that of Syracuse in 
 Thucydides, and the account of the wreck of the Armada, 
 unsurpassed in vividness and vigour by either Froude or 
 Kingsley ; to which we should add the episodes of the battle 
 of Ivry, and the skirmish at Zutphen, with one of the most 
 eloquent tributes ever paid to the genius and character of 
 Sir Philip Sidney : — 
 
 " It is itapossible not to contemplate with affection so radiant a 
 figure, shining through the cold mists of that Zeeland winter, and that 
 distant and disastrous epoch. There is hardly a character in history 
 upon which the imagination can dwell with more unalloyed delight. 
 Not in romantic fiction was there ever created a more attractive incar- 
 nation of martial valour, poetic genius, and purity of heart. If the 
 mocking spirit of the soldier of Lepanto could ' smile chivalry away,' 
 the name alone of his English contemporary is potent enough to 
 conjure it back again, so long as humanity is alive to the nobler 
 impulses." 
 
 Later, on Sidney's death after Zutphen, Mr. Motley writes :— 
 
 "Sidney was first to recognise the symptoms of mortification 
 which made a fatal result inevitable.. His demeanour during his 
 sickness and upon his deathbed was as beautiful as his life. He 
 discoursed with his friends concerning the immortality of the soul, 
 comparing the doctrines of Plato and of other ancient philosophers, 
 whose writings were so familiar to him, with the revelations of Scrip- 
 ture and with the dictates of natural religion. He made his will with 
 
MOTLEY. 153 
 
 minute and elaborate provisions, leaving bequests, remembrances, and 
 rings to all his friends. Then he indulged himself with music, and 
 listened particularly to a strange song which he had himself composed 
 during his illness, and which he had entitled ' La Cuisse Rompue.' 
 He took leave of the friends around him with perfect calmness, saying 
 to his brother Robert, ' Love my memory ; cherish my friends ; above 
 all, govern your will and affections by the will and word of your 
 Creator, in me beholding the end of this world with all her vanities.' 
 And thus this gentle and heroic spirit took its flight." 
 
 Conspicuous among the full-length portraits which, -with 
 the campaigns of Parma, Spinola, and Maurice, and the in- 
 trigues of England and France, divide the interest of the book, 
 are — that of Queen Elizabeth (whose habitual treachery, 
 obstinate parsimony, and mere pretence to greatness, are con- 
 vincingly exposed) ; that of Mary Stuart, the " daughter of 
 debate ; " those of Henry of Navarre, Sainte Aldegonde, and 
 the Earl of Leicester. In 1874 there followed The Life and 
 Death of John of Barneveld, " the natural sequel to the other 
 histories already published by the author, as well as the neces- 
 sary introduction to that concluding portion of his labours 
 which " he desired " to lay before the public — a history of 
 the Thirty Years' "War." Our regret at the frustration by the 
 writer's death of this design is heightened by the manner in 
 which he has accomplished the introduction to what might 
 have been his " magnum opus." The life of Barneveld is 
 admirable as the monograph of a great man, and as the most 
 masterly record of one of the first great struggles against the 
 new Protestant, which, succeeded the old Catholic intolerance. 
 It is also the clearest exposition of the political and social 
 intrigues of an eventful age — the age of the end of the Tudor 
 dynasty in England ; of the decapitation of France by the 
 dagger of Eavaillac, an act which condemned Eeligion in 
 " that country of pantomimic changes " to remain for a century 
 and a half " the strumpet of Political Ambition ; " the age of 
 the sailing west of the " almost nameless band of emigrants," 
 "the founders of what was to be the mightiest republic of 
 
154 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 modern history — ^mighty and stable because it was founded 
 upon an idea." The style of the work — save for some sensa- 
 tional paragraphs about Henry's assassination, and about 
 James I., who turned the throne of England into a pedant's 
 chair — is more self-contained than that of its precursors, with- 
 out losing any real power. In this great picture of the "mortal 
 combat between aristocracy disguised in the plebeian form of 
 trading and political corporations, and democracy sheltering 
 itself under a famous sword and an ancient and illustrious 
 name"; "the struggle for power between the political and 
 sacerdotal orders ; the controversy whether the State shall 
 govern the priests or the priests control the State;" the 
 hatreds of Arminian and Gomerian ; — the author is alive to the 
 merits of the leaders of both parties. He is just to the Prince 
 of Nassau, who said, " I know nothing of Predestination, 
 whether it is green or whether it is blue ; but I do know that 
 the Advocate's pipe and mine will never play the same tune." 
 But through all the stagey of his noble life to his lamentable 
 end, our sympathies are with Barneveld, and the historian 
 convinces us that he has been the first to do "justice to a 
 statesman and sage who wielded a vast influence at a most 
 critical period in the fate of Christendom, and uniformly 
 wielded it to promote the cause of temperate human liberty, 
 both political and religious." The book is alike remarkable 
 for grasp and sound judgment of past events, wise conclusions, 
 in which a recoil against the excesses of democracy is more 
 and more apparent, graphic portraiture, and occasionally in- 
 cisive epigram. Since the death of Lord Macaulay no con- 
 tribution, in our tongue, to historic literature, has been at 
 once so original, solid, and popularly attractive as the nine 
 volumes of Mr. Motley ; nor has any event been more justly 
 lamented than the premature close of the career of one, at 
 once a student and an artist, whose often fiery zeal was always 
 restrained by a resolute fairness, and who carried into the 
 
KIRK— TICKN'OK. 155 
 
 politics of his own day the quenchless love of liberty with 
 whichhe animates thescenes and revivifies the actors of the past. 
 The fine commemorative sonnet of Bryant in no way exag- 
 gerates the general feeling of our loss on both sides of the 
 Atlantic : — 
 
 " Sleep, Motley, with the great of ancient days, 
 
 Who wrote for all the years that yet shall be. 
 Sleep with Herodotus, whose name and praise 
 
 Have reached the isles of earth's remotest sea. 
 Sleep, while, defiant of the slow decays 
 
 Of Time, thy glorious writings speak for thee, 
 And in the answering heart of millions raise 
 
 The generous zeal for Right and Liberty. 
 And should the days o'ertake us, when, at last. 
 
 The silence that — ere yet a human pen 
 Had traced the slenderest record of the past — 
 
 Hushed the primaeval languages of men — 
 Upon our English tongue its spell shall cast, 
 
 Thy memory shall perish only then." 
 
 Mr. Whipple — ^who, in the best of his criticisms known to 
 me, has well emphasised the distinction between Prescott's 
 survey of events, as " on a watch-tower," and Motley's pas- 
 sionate mingling in the fight — says correctly that the History 
 of Charles the Bold, by Mr. John F. Kirk, may be regarded 
 as an introduction to the works of both his masters. It may 
 have been so designed, and as such is valuable, being reliable 
 as to facts vividly narrated ; but the style is inferior, from a 
 stiU closer following, in many instances, of the eccentricities, 
 without the redeeming splendours or the terse suggestiveness, 
 of Carlyle. As supplementary, in some measure, to aU these 
 volumes, especially to those of Prescott, we may here mention 
 the History of Spanish Literature, by his friend and coadjutor 
 George Ticknor, incomparably the best, the most comprehen- 
 sive, most critical, and most interesting work which, in our 
 language at least, exists on the subject.^ 
 
 ' The time has hardly come to estimate recent contributions to the history 
 of the American civil war, as the antagonistic apologies for Davis and pane- 
 
156 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 The lighter, or so called polite, literature of the first half 
 of this century, though often so miscellaneous as to defy 
 classification, falls mainly to ,be considered under the three 
 heads of Fiction, Books of Travel, and more or less critical 
 Essays. We have seen that to the scant leisure of some of 
 the leaders of the Eevolution we owe some of the earliest and 
 best descriptions of American scenery, as well as imaginative 
 representations of events and character. Among the promi- 
 nent lawyers, or professional men, of the age immediately 
 succeeding, who have made similar contributions, we can here 
 only refer to — Judge Story, who, by virtue of his discourse on 
 classical studies and pictures from nature — especially his 
 Indian summer — takes high rank as a scholar and prose artist ; 
 Judge Hugh H. Brackenridge, a democrat, inspired with a 
 praiseworthy zeal against the system of slavery and electoral 
 corruption, whose Modern Chivalry, a sort of burlesque oiDon 
 Quixote and reflection of Hudihras, is a notable satire on the 
 vices or temptations of politicians generally and those of his 
 own party in particular ; J. P. Kennedy of Baltimore, a suc- 
 cessful barrister and Congressman^ also a vigorous essayist and 
 author of some lively sketches of country life and manners in 
 the old Dominion ; Eichard H. Wilde of Georgia (in which 
 State, after surmounting unusual difficulties, he rose to 
 eminence at the bar), author of the song entitled the Lament 
 of the Captive, and of a Life of Tasso, written after two 
 years' residence in Europe, displaying extensive research and 
 occasionally subtle criticism; lastly, H. Swinton Legar^ of 
 Charleston, at one time a student of law in Edinburgh, a 
 prominent speaker in the House of Eepresentatives, after- 
 
 gyrics of Lincoln. Among the most prominent narratives should be men- 
 tioned those of Greeley, of Henry "Wilson, and General Sherman's somewhat 
 vapouring account of his own campaign ; nor should we omit the numerous 
 able and vigorous papers of Major-General J. "Watts de Peyster, who is also a 
 leading authority on matters of military criticism connected with the old war 
 of Independence, and an original investigator of some periods of Scotch history. 
 
BROCKDEN BROWN. 157 
 
 wards President Tyler's Attorney-General, who published in 
 the Southern Quarterly and Neiu York Beviews a series of 
 excellent reviews of Greek and Eoman literature. 
 
 The first American who devoted himself to letters as a 
 profession was also the first novelist of note whom the United 
 States have produced. Charles Brockden Brown was born 
 in Philadelphia in l77l; he was remarkable at school for his 
 precocity and love of retirement; he studied law at New York, 
 but, in revolt from what seemed to him the iniquity of trying 
 to make the worse appear the better cause, abandoned it for 
 the society and exercise of an invalid fancy. He married in 
 1804, and died prematurely six years later in his native city. 
 Brown came before the world (1797) in his Alcuin, a dialogue 
 on the rights of women, one of the earliest of a host of 
 pamphlets on the same theme ; and a year later produced his 
 Wieland, a tale of adventure, in which he set the example on 
 his side of the Atlantic of the love of the anomalous, horrible, 
 and fantastic, then represented on our own by Beckford's 
 VatheJc, Walpole's Castle of Otranto, Godwin's Caleb Williams 
 and St. Leon : at a later date by Mrs. Eadcliffe's Mysteries of 
 Udolpho and Mrs. Shelley's Frankenstein. Wieland was fol- 
 lowed by Ormond, Arthur Mervyn, and Edgar Suntly, unmis- 
 takably, the productions of a man of genius. None are 
 wanting in passages of thrilling interest, striking situations, 
 and subtle analysis of character. But they dwell overmuch 
 on the " night-side of nature," and are in great measure de- 
 voted to the often repulsive anatomy of mental disease. This 
 peculiarity is doubtless partially due to the physically morbid 
 condition of the writer ; but it so frequently marks the romance 
 of his successors, down to our own times, that it must be re- 
 garded as a national trait. It is, at first glance, the last feature 
 we should expect to find in the literature of a young country. 
 But we must bear in mind that " the youth of America " is 
 in many respects a deceitful metaphor. Colonists have a fresh 
 
158 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 field, but an old experience, of which they are often tired, and 
 
 one of their great aspirations is to try all experiments which 
 
 their new circumstances render it possible for them to make. 
 
 Add, in the United States, the half-climatic restlessness ; 
 
 the complexity of a population drawn from many, often half 
 
 reputable, sources ; the wild life of pioneers everywhere — 
 
 and it remains no matter of surprise that many of their 
 
 writers want poise as well as equanimity, and that they 
 
 should, with the same reckless vigour as our own pre- 
 
 Shakespearian dramatists, forget or discard 
 
 " Degree, priority and place, 
 Investure, course, proportion, season, form." 
 
 Where the people are stretching out feelers, in every direction, 
 to the past, the distant, the future, practising almost side by 
 side the extremes of asceticism, and of unfettered animalism, 
 it is natural that the laws which are defied across the Mis- 
 sissippi should be arraigned on the seaboard ; that where 
 Emerson's Orphic rhymes, Thoreau's solitary rhapsodies, and 
 Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass all find an audience, the 
 originality of some of their romances should be tainted by a 
 strange and often fantastic violence; The litterateurs of a 
 nation that rejoices in fighting with savages are apt to take a 
 morbid pleasure in fighting with problems. In the first age of 
 American literature these problems are practical ; in the next, 
 as we shall have occasion to note, they become metaphysical. 
 The circumstances of Brown's career and the peculiarities of 
 his temperament contributed to the same result. Tar from 
 being a misanthrope by nature, he was a keen patriot — pro- 
 testing in one of his numerous pamphlets against the presence 
 of any foreign power on the banks of the Mississippi — a 
 devoted husband, a sweet-tempered and affectionate friend, 
 and, in his happier hours, a bright, though modest talker. 
 But his life was one long disease. A year before his death 
 he writes to his wife — " When have I known that lightness 
 
BEOCKDEN BEOWN. 159 
 
 and vivacity of mind which the divine flow of health, even 
 in calamity, produces in some men, and would produce in me, 
 no doubt, at least when not soured by misfortune. Never — 
 scarcely ever — not longer than half an hour at a time since I 
 was a man." Sadder words have been seldom spoken. His 
 speculative views also contributed to make him a compara- 
 tive solitary : in religion, a Quaker turned Deist ; regarding 
 the law, to which he had been trained, as " a tissue of shreds 
 and remnants of a barbarous antiquity, patched by the 
 stupidity of modern workmen into new deformity," and dis- 
 posed, in the same spirit, to bring into debate every established 
 institution of society, he became an idealist and Utopian of a 
 colour which has been compared with that of his admirer 
 Shelley.^ Both drew from Godwin's Political Justice and the 
 bias of their own minds similar conclusions : both followed the 
 author of St. Leon in their predilection for the marvellous, if 
 not the unnatural. The most salient audacity of his Alcuin 
 is an impeachment, passing MUton's, of the marriage law. " I 
 disapprove of it," says the interlocutor in the dialogue, with 
 whom the writer evidently sympathises, " in the first place, 
 because it renders the female a slave to the man ; it enjoins 
 and enforces submission on her part to the will of her hus- 
 band ; it includes a promise of implicit obedience and unalter- 
 able affection. Secondly, it leaves the woman destitute of 
 property ; whatever she previously possesses belongs absolutely 
 to the man. . . . Why is marriage to condemn two human 
 beings to dwell under the same roof and to eat at the same 
 table. . . . Familiarity is the sure destroyer of reverence." 
 These views do not seem to have disturbed the writer's own 
 domestic felicity, and some of them point to legislative changes 
 
 ' Mr. George Barnett Smith, to whom ("Fortnightly Eeview," September 
 1878) I am indebted for the comparison, curiously remarks: "Had Shelley 
 written novels, we can well imagine that they would have been of the same type 
 as Brown's." Shelley did write novels which, — i.e. Zastrozzi, St. Irvyne the 
 Eosicnuian, and the fragment of the Assassins, — are emphatically of that type. 
 
160 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 either made or advocated ; but others must have contributed 
 to his seclusion from commonplace contented society, and led 
 him, with artistic as well as moral harm, to make his own 
 mind a kingdom to itself. Neither a poet on the one hand, 
 nor a close reasoner on the other, he found relief for his revo- 
 lutionary impulses in depicting in graphic, sometimes hideous 
 hues, through the media of his wHd romances, the anomalous 
 aspects of life, to which his experience of the plague in Phila- 
 delphia and New York, where his bosom friend Dr. Elihu 
 Smith fell a victim to its ravages, gave a darker dye. A lurid 
 cloud overhangs his strong imagination. All his romances 
 are suggestive, all more or less morbid and bizarre. Wieland, 
 his first complete creation, is a ghastly tale of doom over- 
 whelming a superstitious family. The father dies by spon- 
 taneous combustion — an idea that anticipates that of Bleak 
 House; the son, in obedience to the dictates of a mysterious 
 voice, ultimately proved to emanate from the villain Carwiu 
 (who desires to seduce his sister), murders, with every circum- 
 stance of horror, his wife and children. The recital of the 
 incident and its motive, in the defence of the criminal on trial, 
 is perhaps the most powerful in the author's writings : the 
 passage has been well characterised as " the acme of misery 
 and terror," but it is too long for quotation. In Arthur 
 Mervyn we have the same conflict of unsuspicious innocence 
 with triumphant scoundrelism, represented by the swindler 
 and assassin Welbeck : in the course of the tale we have 
 a thrilling account of the yeUow fever in Philadelphia, 
 which may be compared with the corresponding narratives 
 in Thucydides, Lucretius, Boccaccio, and Defoe. The follow- 
 ing is one of its masterpieces of delineation : — 
 
 " I approacted a house, the door of which was opened, and before 
 which stood a vehicle, which I presently recognised to be a hearse. 
 The driver was seated on it. I stood still to mark his visage, and to 
 observe the course which he proposed to take. Presently a coffin, borne 
 by two men, issued. The driver was a negro, but his companions were 
 
BROCKDESr BROWX. 161 
 
 white. Their features were marked by indifference to danger or pity. 
 One of them, as he assisted in thrusting the coffin into the cavity pro- 
 vided for it, said, ' I'll be damned if I think the poor dog was quite 
 dead. It wasn't the feoer that ailed him, but the sight of the girl and 
 her mother on the floor. I wonder how they all got into that room. 
 What carried them there ?' 
 
 " The other surlily muttered, ' Their legs to be sure.' 
 
 " ' But what should they hug together in one room for !' 
 
 " ' To save us trouble, to be sure.' 
 
 " ' And I thank them with all my heart ; but, damn it, it wasn't 
 r^ht to put him in his coffin before the breath was fairly gone. I 
 thought the last look he gave me told me to stay a few minutes.' 
 
 " ' Pshaw ! he could not live. The sooner dead the better for him, 
 as well as for us. Did you mark how he eyed us, when we carriefl 
 away his wife and daughter \ I never cried in my life, since I we^ 
 knee-high, but, ciirse me, if I ever felt in better tune for the business 
 than just then. Hey !' continued he, looking up and observing me, 
 standing a few paces distant, and listening to their discourse, ' Whaf s 
 wanted ? Anybody dead V " 
 
 In Edgar Huntly (the novel selected for Bentley's series) 
 the plot turns on the common legal crux of mistaken identity, 
 again aided by an abnormal condition. The hero narrates 
 the incidents to the sister of his friend "Waldegrave, who has 
 been, as is supposed, secretly assassinated. Wandering alone 
 ia the moonlight, he sees a man digging under a tree, and 
 looking round, as he does so, with a woeful pallid face. In 
 the conviction that he has found the murderer, Edgar pursues 
 him through the mazes of a wood into a cavern, and then, 
 from place to place, for years. Ultimately the man, who 
 narrowly escapes the mistaken avenger, turns out to be a 
 poor foreigner and somnambulist of the neighbourhood, who 
 had been, in his sleep-walk, interring some records of a strange 
 career. The story, as so briefly told, has an element of anti- 
 climax : its merit is in the detail of the adventures which 
 Huntly encounters, in as wild a race as that of Faust with 
 Mephistopheles, " thoro' bush thoro' briar, thoro' flood thoro' 
 fire," through scarce penetrable forests, and to the entrances 
 of caves "measureless to man," across thundering torrents, 
 over great logs, slippery by the wet and unsteadfast by the 
 
 M 
 
162 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 wind, to the edge of precipices down which panthers are 
 crashing, and along wTiich the red-skins are stealing with 
 their scalping knives. Ormond is mainly remarkable for the 
 analytical power shown in the author's one fine female 
 character, Constantia Dudley, who, reduced from affluence to 
 poverty, braves all the threats and seductions of the hypo- 
 critical Lovelace, from whom the book takes its name. 
 Brown's plots are, as a rule, methodless and improbable : his 
 bursts of passion are dulled by intervening tediousness ; and 
 his style, generally rough, is sometimes further deformed by 
 pedantic circumlocutions ; but he leaves us, despite his 
 acknowledged obligations to Godwin, with the impression 
 of an original power cramped by the necessities of hasty 
 work, unhappily because prematurely quenched, and of a 
 writer who has been unduly forgotten. 
 
 Brown's influence is apparent in two novels of Henry 
 Eichard Dana, Tom Thornton and Paul Felton, in which a 
 more graceful, if still somewhat abrupt, style is employed, 
 with almost equal vigour, if inferior originality, to illustrate 
 similar monstrosities of character, on the basis of incidents 
 almost equally unnatural, and directed to a moral purpose 
 with such intensity that they are said to have rather 
 frightened than amused their readers. Dana, a barrister of 
 the early years of the century, who lived to see his son a 
 literary success, himself became known in the world of 
 letters in 1814 as the author of a Fourth of July " Oration," 
 and later as the contributor to the " North American Review" 
 (1817-1019) of the most appreciable and subtle criticisms of 
 the English Lake poets that had, up to that date, anywhere 
 appeared. In 1827 he published his fantastic ghost story of 
 The Buccaneer and other poems, to which he continued to 
 add at intervals. His verses are smooth, but wanting in 
 force. Of the same school are the prose sketches of Charles 
 Feno Hoffman, as Ben Blower's Story — a thrilling account 
 
DANA— HOFFMAN— POE. 163 
 
 of temporary immurement in a boiler — and the Flying Head. 
 But alongside' of these are others, — as Winter in the West; 
 Crreyslaer, a Romance of the Mohawk ; and The Vigil of Faith, 
 a legend of the Adirondacks — that are steeped in the fresh- 
 ness of the fields and hills. Hoffmann is also the author of 
 three deservedly popular songs — Myrtle and Steel ; Sparlding 
 and Bright; and Bosalie Clare. About the same time the poet- 
 painter, Washington Allston, interwove several of his most 
 elaborate pictures in words in his romance of Monaldi. The 
 story (of which the scene is laid in Italy), concerned with 
 the love adventures of two students, has considerable merit ; 
 but the interest is obscured by an excess of art-criticism. 
 
 Following the order of thought rather than chronology, 
 this is, perhaps, the proper time to introduce the name of the 
 great American romancer, as well as poet, Edgar Allan Poe. 
 One of the most morbid men of genius the modern world has 
 seen; in the regions of the strangely terrible, remotely fantas- 
 tic, and ghastly, he reigns supreme. With his lyrics' we have 
 not here to do. His best prose is no less distinctive and 
 admirable for richness, force, clearness, and the correct choice 
 of phrase, only definable as the literary touch. He, in this 
 field, distances all his competitors, except Balsac, in the 
 mental dissecting-room his only master. But, while the 
 Frenchman deals with anomalous realities, the power of the 
 American consists in making unrealities appear natural.. 
 Many of his works, like Hawthorne's, are either pages torn, 
 as it were, from the second or third volumes of a complete 
 romance, or suggestions of what might have been developed 
 into one. This fragmentary manner has its disadvantages ; 
 but the writer of real imagination, who confines it within 
 liinited bounds, never allows the interest of his readers to 
 flag. Edgar Poe is consequently, save in his acrid cjiti- 
 cisms and mistaken attempts at humour, never dull.'''^This 
 applies, in a remarkable degree, to that section of his tales 
 
164 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 by which, although by no means the highest, he is most 
 widely known — I mean those devoted to the discovery of 
 puzzles or the tracking out of crimes. These are mainly the 
 Oold Bug, The Murders in the Hue Morgue, and The Pur- 
 loined Letter ; where the author, standing on the border-land 
 between romance and re ality, se ems to prove himself the 
 potential prince o±' all detectives. They are the first and 
 best of the long series of police stories with which we have 
 been inundated. A similar, though slightly different class, 
 are the quaint pseudo- scientific fantasies (of which Jules 
 Verne has of late years somewhat unscrupulously availed 
 himself), such as The Adventure of Hans Pfaall, VonKempe- 
 len's Discovery, Mesmeric Revelation, Three Sundays in a Week, 
 Words with a Mummy, etc., where as yet ingenuity pre- 
 ponderates over imagination. Then come the tales of which 
 chi ldren and nervous persons shou ld beware, as Thou art the 
 Man, The Black Cat, The Pit and the Pendulum, The Tell- 
 tale Heott, The Ohlong Box. Most if not all of these are 
 redeemed from pure horror by their literary merits, and their 
 reference, under grotesque circumstances, to dominant fears 
 and passions of mankind. Among them The Bed Death and 
 The Oval Portrait inevitably suggest comparison with Zady 
 Eleanor's Mantle and The Prophetic Pictures. The Cask oj 
 Amontillado bridges the way to the fourth and highest, 
 though less generally appreciated class, where imagination 
 preponderates over ingenuity, and where the likeness to 
 Hawthorne is heightened. Thesp. a.vAt^QgnVitio p ^ynTmloginal 
 a nalyses of strange-fiflnditions of the individual am of society, 
 in which the influence of the metapEysical era becomes most 
 apparent in our author's works ; plumb-lines thrown into the 
 deeps of existence, lurid or glittering lights swung in the 
 unfathomed well of truth. The emotions they excite are 
 subtler than the others, as the thrill of mystery surpasses 
 the mere spasm of fear : they demand study, and repay it ; 
 
EDGAR ALLAN POE. 165 
 
 they require some poetic sympathy, and remain in poetic 
 memories. The difference between the two styles is best 
 illustrated by contrasting two modes of treating the same 
 terror. In the Premature Burial Poe conceives of an ordinary 
 man, whose mind has been stuffed with " bugaboo '' stories, so 
 afraid of being buried alive that he has planned for himself 
 a special receptacle with a chain and bell, so arranged that 
 he can at any moment give the alarm. This man finds, to 
 appearance, all his cautions in vain : he is immured beyond 
 hope : the appliances have been neglected : during absence 
 from home he has fallen into a trance : strangers have buried 
 him as a dog, and thrust him deep for ever into some name- 
 less grave. He at last contrives to shriek, so that the yell of 
 agony resounds through the "realms of the subterranean 
 night," and is thereupon seized by a group of sailors who, in 
 rude nautical language, ask him what he means by making 
 such a disturbance. He has fallen asleep in a sloop, and, in 
 a fit of nightmare, mistaken the narrow cabin for a coffin. 
 This is grotesque, with a touch of the hideous. In the fall of 
 the House of Usher, on the other hand, terror and pity are 
 mingled in an atmosphere which is a fit setting for the finest, 
 after Annabel Lee, of the author's lyrics. In the greenest of 
 our Valleys,- and the close is the climax of imaginative 
 horror. The last lord of the falling house has buried his 
 beloved sister, and placed her in a vault beneath his study. 
 A friend comes to visit him, who, in the intervals of a 
 terrific storm, hears low moaning sounds which keep him 
 from sleep ; but, setting these down to fancy, he composes 
 himself to wear away the night by reading to his host a 
 strange passage from the Fryst of Sir Launcelot. Again, in 
 the pauses of the wind, the strange sounds are repeated ; and 
 as both become conscious, of what the brother had been 
 before aware, that the sister is still alive within the tomb, the 
 ebony panels of the chamber roll asunder. " It was the work'of 
 
166 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 the rushijig gust; but then without those doors there did 
 stand the lofty and enshrouded figure of the Lady Madeline." 
 " For a moment she remained trembling and reeling to and 
 fro upon the threshold ; then fell heavily upon the person of 
 her brother, and, in her now final death agonies, bore him to 
 the floor a corpse and a victim to the terrors he anticipated." 
 The visitor rushes out aghast, and turning back for a moment 
 sees a wild light issuing from the house. 
 
 " The radiance was that of the full-setting and blood-red moon, 
 which now shone vividly through a fissure extending from the roof of 
 the building to its base. While I gazed this rapidly widened ; there 
 came a fierce breath of the whirlwind ; the entire orb of the satellite 
 burst at once upon my sight ; my brain reeled as I saw the mighty 
 walls rushing asunder ; there was a long tumultuous shouting sound 
 like the voice of a thousand waters, and the deep and silent tarn at 
 my feet closed sullenly and silently over the fragments of the House of 
 Usher." 
 
 In Berenice, again, we have a similar idea so embodied in 
 a jumble of diablerie and grotesque as to cross the dangerous 
 line. In Eleorwra there is a pleasing contrast of gentler emo- 
 tions, and 'the Valley of the Many-Coloured Grass" is wrapped 
 in the gorgeous glories of some opiate dream, as of De Quincey's 
 Svspiria or of KuUa Khan. Poe's genius, the most intense, 
 though, from want of breadth, by no means the greatest of 
 his nation, has distinct affinities to that of Coleridge ; but, 
 in his manner of probing the secrets of existence, an imagina- 
 tive scepticism takes the place of predetermined orthodoxy. 
 His pure speculations, as UureJea, are marred by excess of 
 idealism ; but the same element adds to the impressiveness 
 of such pieces as William Wilson, probably the finest alle- 
 gory of Conscience that anywhere exists ; The Man of the 
 Crowd, with equal force symbolising the weakness of a 
 character that has lost itself in love of sympathy ; and the 
 brilliant dreamy love-story of the The Assignation. To my 
 mind, however, the most powerful of all the minor pieces of 
 this wonderful writer is Zigeia, the dinoHment of which comes 
 
EDGAR ALLAN POE. 167 
 
 upon US with a thrill only surpassed by some of the tours de 
 force of Victor Hugo. It is introduced by a quotation from 
 the old mystic, Joseph Glanvill, which is the refrain of the 
 whole, and in itself memorable — 
 
 "And the will therein lieth, which dieth not. Who knoweth the 
 mysteries of the will with its vigour ? For God is but a great will 
 pervading all things hy nature of its intentness. Man doth not yield 
 himself to the angels nor unto death utterly, save only through the 
 weakness of his feeble wiU." 
 
 The narrator, who assumes the comparatively passive rdle 
 common to most of Poe's media between the public and 
 the mystery, had met, "in some old decaying city near 
 the Ehine," and married the lady who gives her name to the 
 tale. Her beauty is described with the usual rhapsodies, 
 emphasis being laid on her majesty of stature, softness of 
 motion, raven tresses, and eyes " fuller than the fullest of the 
 valley of Nourjahad, which expanded under passion in a 
 miraculous manner." The qualities of Ligeia's mind are 
 represented as no less extraordinary ; but her immense attain- 
 ments were surpassed by her- strength of wUl, which, after 
 halcyon days of love, wrestles with the grim shadow soon 
 seen to be overshrouding her. " At high noon of the night 
 on which she departed, beckoning me peremptorily to her 
 side, she bade me repeat certain verses composed by herself 
 not many days before." Then follow the well-known lines 
 
 beginning — 
 
 " Lo ! 'tis a gala night 
 
 Within the lonesome latter years ! " 
 and ending — 
 
 " And the angels, all pallid and wan, 
 Uprising, unveiling aiBrm 
 That the play is the tragedy, ' Man,' 
 And its hero, the Conqiieror Worm. 
 
 " ' O God !' half shrieked Ligeia, leaping to her feet, and extending 
 her arms aloft, with a spasmodic movement, as I made an end of these 
 lines, 'Shall this conqueror be not once conquered.' 'Are we not part 
 and parcel in Thee ? Who — who knoweth the mysteries of the will, 
 
168 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 with its vigour ? Man dott not yield liim to the angels nor unto death 
 utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will.' " 
 
 The last low murmur from her lips, the faint echo of a voice 
 ever low and sweet, she repeats those words, and dies with a 
 love determining to triumph over death. The widower, in 
 whose character there is no trait not commonplace, goes to 
 England, eats opium ; and, in an evil hour, leads " from the 
 altar as his bride — as the successor of the unforgotten Ligeia 
 — the fair-haired and blue-eyed Lady Eowena." This unfor- 
 tunate victim of her parents' avarice soon becomes the object 
 of her husband's hate, and in the excitement of his dreams 
 he is constantly calling aloud on Ligeia. Meanwhile rustlings 
 and other strange sounds begin to'be heard about the tapestry 
 of the bride-chamber ; shadows from -no ascertainable source 
 are thrown on the floor, and during Eowena's illness ruby- 
 coloured drops fall into her wine. She dies, and the twice- 
 bereaved man watches by her inanimate frame. Then comes 
 the close — 
 
 " It might have been midnight, or perhaps earlier, or later — for I 
 had taken no note of time — when a sob, low, gentle, but very distinct, 
 startled me from my reverie. I felt that it came from the bed of 
 ebony — the bed of death. I listened in an agony of superstitious ter- 
 ror, but there was no repetition of the sound. I strained my vision to 
 detect any motion in the corpse, but there was not the slightest per- 
 ceptible. Yet I could not have been deceived. ... At length it 
 became evident that a slight, a very feeble, and barely noticeable tinge 
 of colour had flushed up within the cheeks, and along the sunken 
 small veins of the eyelids. Through a species of unutterable horror 
 and awe, for which the language of mortality has no sufficiently ener- 
 getic expression, I felt my heart cease to beat, my limbs grow rigid 
 where I sat. Yet a sense of duty finally operated to restore my self- 
 possession. I could no longer doubt that we had been precipitate in 
 our preparations — that Eowena still lived. ... In a short period it 
 was certain, however, that a relapse had taken place ; thu colour dis- 
 appeared from both eyelid and cheek, leaving a wanness even more 
 than that of marble ... all the usual rigorous stiffness immediately 
 supervened. I fell back with a shudder upon the couch from which 
 I had been so startlingly aroused, and again gave myself up to pas- 
 sionate waking visions of Ligeia. . . . The sound came again ; it was 
 a sigh. Rushing to the corpse I saw — distinctly saw — a tremor upon 
 
EDGAR ALLAN POE. 169 
 
 the lips. In a minute afterwards they relaxed, disclosing a bright 
 line of the pearly teeth. . . . The lady lived; and with redoubled 
 ardour I betook myself to the task of restoration. . . . But in vain. 
 Suddenly the colour fled, the pulsation ceased, the lips resumed the 
 expression of the dead, and, in an instant afterwards, the whole body 
 took upon itself the icy chilliness, the livid hue, the intense rigidity, 
 the sunken outline, and all the loathsome peculiarities of that which 
 has been for many days a tenant of the tomb. 
 
 " And again I sunk into visions of Ligeia — and again (what marvel 
 that I shudder while I write ?) — again there reached my ears a low 
 sob from the region of the ebony bed. ... I had long ceased to 
 struggle or to move, and remained sitting rigidly upon the ottoman, a 
 helpless prey to a whirl of violent emotions, of which extreme awe 
 was perhaps the least terrible, the least consuming. The corpse 
 .... stirred, and now more vigorously than before. The hues of 
 life flushed up with unwonted energy into the countenance — the limbs 
 relaxed — and, save that the eyelids were yet pressed heavily together, 
 and that the bandages and draperies of the grave still imparted their 
 chamel character to the figure, I might have dreamed that Kowena had 
 indeed shaken ofP utterly the fetters of death. But if this idea was 
 not, even then, altogether adopted, I could at least doubt no longer, 
 when, arising from the bed, tottering, with feeble steps, with closed 
 eyes, and with the manner of one bewildered in a iream, the thing 
 that was enshrouded advanced boldly and palpably into the middle of 
 the apartment. 
 
 " I trembled not — I stirred not — for a crowd of unutterable 
 fancies coimected with the air, the stature, the demeanour of the figure, 
 rushing hurriedly through my brain, had paralysed — had chilled me 
 into stone. I stirred not — but gazed upon the apparition. There 
 was a mad disorder in my thoughts — a tumult unappeasable. Could 
 it, indeed, be the living Eowena who confronted me ? Could it, indeed, 
 be Rowena at all — the fair-haired, the blue-eyed Lady Eowena Tre- 
 vanion of Tremaine 1 Why, why should I doubt it ? The bandage 
 lay heavily about the mouth — but then might it not be the mouth of 
 the breathing Lady of Tremaine ? And the cheeks — there were the 
 roses as in her noon of life — yes, these might indeed be the fair cheeks 
 of the living Lady of Tremaine. And the chin, with its dimples as in 
 health, might it not be hers ? — but had she then grown taller since her 
 malady ? What inexpressible madness seized me with that thought ! 
 One bound, and I had reached her feet ! Shrinking from my touch, 
 she let fall from her head, unloosened, the ghastly cerements which 
 had confined it, and there streamed forth into the rushing atmosphere 
 of the chamber huge masses of long and dishevelled hair ; it was 
 hlaclcer than the raven wings of midnight ! And now slowly opened the 
 eyes of the figure which stood before me. ' Here then, at least,' I 
 shrieked aloud, ' can I never — can I never be mistaken ; these are the 
 full, and the black, and the wild eyes of my lost love — of the Lady — 
 of the Lady Ligeia.' " 
 
170 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 Poe's idealising and descriptive powers perhaps reacli their 
 climax in The Domain of Arnheim ; but, on the whole, his 
 masterpiece is his longest prose work, Arthur Gordon Pyrm. 
 Criticism would hardly strike a line from a page of this nar- 
 rative, beginning with a Crusoe -like representation of the 
 spirit of adventure, passing to the almost unspeakable horrors 
 of the ship of the dead, and ending in the weird mystery of 
 the figures " of the perfect whiteness of the snow" around the 
 engulfing cataracts of the Antarctic Pole. 
 
 We retrace our steps to the more wholesome, if less 
 electric, works of an author whose name has been so welcome 
 a household word in each, that it has been fought for on either 
 side of the Atlantic. American critics often complain that 
 when one of their countrymen writes in a fresh style we say 
 he is untutored ; when he writes in a classic style, we say he 
 is a mere mirror of ourselves : the answer is that some of 
 their own best critics have passed the same judgment, that 
 few of their writers have yet learned to combine novelty with 
 refinement, and that those who have succeeded, as Channing, 
 and Emerson, and Hawthorne, have never been charged with 
 either barbarism or mimicry. 
 
 The most widely and justly celebrated of Transatlantic 
 authors, during the earlier half of this century, the amiable 
 and versatile Washington Irving, was undoubtedly, if we 
 regard both his choice of subjects and mode of treating them, 
 a cosmopolite. His numerous writings fall under two heads, 
 as they are concerned mainly with American or with 
 European themes. On the same principle on which Agassiz, 
 and FoUen, and Paine — even Berkeley and Priestley — have 
 been appropriated by the United States, may Irving be 
 associated with our literature ; for, in virtue of his Scotch 
 parentage, and in the course of four distinct and extended 
 visits to Europe— 1803-1806, 1815-1820, 1827-1832, 1841- 
 1846, he may be said to have become lialf an Englishman. 
 
WASHINGTON IRVING. 171 
 
 His style is in the main that of the essayists of Queen Anne, 
 modified by his peculiar and vigorous vein of humour ; and 
 many of his most effective sketches of life, manners, and 
 society relate to the Eastern Hemisphere. Such are his 
 Histories, the Tales of a Traveller, Bracebridge Hall, Newstead 
 and Abbotsford, the Alhamhra, and half of the Sketch Boole. 
 In others, however, and these the earliest and the latest 
 of his works, he treats of national character, legend, and 
 scenery in a manner of his own. 
 
 Irving was born in New York in April 3, 1783. In his 
 twentieth year he was sent for his health to the Mediter- 
 ranean : on his return, in 1806, he entered into literary 
 partnership with James Kirke Paulding, to produce the series 
 of papers entitled Salmagundi, consisting of gently quizzical 
 representations of the society around them. Shortly after- 
 wards, the somewhat pompous announcement of a forth- 
 coming History of New York, by one of the members of an 
 antiquarian society, led to its being forestalled by another 
 of the same title, by Diedrich Knickerhocker. This work, in 
 point of pure originality, Irving's masterpiece, is one of the 
 richest farragos of fact, fancy, and irony that has ever issued 
 from the press. Assuming to be written by a genuine 
 descendant of one of the first settlers of New Amsterdam, it 
 was widely accepted as a veracious chronicle, and "many 
 read whole chapters before" their eyes were opened as to 
 the satirical purpose of its " wit and drollery." One of the 
 most accomplished colonial Dutchmen of the time, Verplanck, 
 wrote of it, " more in sorrow than anger," as a painful instance 
 of historical, injustice ; and indeed there are passages in the 
 book, as the description of the powerful army with preposter- 
 ous names, congregated for the defence of their stronghold, 
 not unsuited to provoke that most touchy of all sentiments, 
 hereditary patriotism. As an example, take the following 
 account of the dismissal of General Von Poffenburgh :-t- 
 
172 .AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 " The vigilant Peter the Headstrong was not to be deceived. Send- 
 ing privately for the commander-in-chief of all the armies, and having 
 heard all his story with the customary pious oaths, protestations, and 
 ejaculations, ' Harkee, comrade,' cried he, ' though by your own account 
 you are the most brave, upright, and honourable man ia the whole 
 province, yet do you lie under the misfortune of being traduced and 
 immeasurably despised. Now, though it is certainly hard to punish 
 a man for his misfortunes, I cannot consent to venture my armies 
 with a commander whom they despise, or to trust the welfare of my 
 people to a champion whom they distrust. Retire, therefore, my 
 friend, from the irksome cares and toils of public life with this com- 
 forting reflection — that if guilty, you are but enjoying your just 
 reward ; and if innocent, you are not the first great and good man 
 who has most wrongfully been slandered and maltreated in this wicked 
 world, doubtless to be better treated in another world, where there 
 shall be neither error nor cakimny nor persecution. In the mean- 
 time, let me never see yoiir face again, for I have a horrible antipathy 
 to the countenances of unfortunate great men like yourself."' 
 
 We need hardly wonder that the more zealous of the 
 western New Hollanders should demur to the account of the 
 foundation of their favourite Manhattan, attributed, in this 
 historical novel, to the area covered by the smoke of Van 
 Kortland's pipe, prefiguring, according to Mynheer Ten 
 Broeck, that it was to be "a very vapouring little city;" 
 or to this on the leaders of their corporation — 
 
 "The burgomasters were generally chosen by weight. It is a 
 maxim observed in all honest, plain-thinking cities that an alderman 
 should be fat, and the wisdom of this can be proved to a certainty. 
 ... A lean, spare, diminutive body is generally accompanied by a 
 petulant, restless, meddling mind . . . whereas your round, sleek, 
 unwieldly pferiphery is ever accompanied by a mind like itself, tran- 
 quil, torpid, and at ease. . . . Who ever hears of fat men leading a 
 riot, or herding together in turbulent mobs ?" 
 
 Nor perhaps are the leaders of Dutch fashion sufficiently 
 grateful for the picture of their ancestresses, of the golden 
 age, who pomatumed back their hair from their foreheads 
 with a candle, " and wore ten modest petticoats of home-spun 
 linsey-woolsey " — 
 
 " I remember," adds the wicked historian, " there was a story 
 current when I was a boy, that the wife of Wonter-Van-Twiller once 
 
WASHINGTON lEVING. 173 
 
 had occasion to empty her right pocket in search of a wooden ladle, 
 and the utensil was discovered lying among some rubbish in one 
 corner." 
 
 "A fine lady in those days waddled under more clothes, even 
 on a fine summer's day, than would have clad the whole bevy of a 
 modern ball-room. Nor were they less admired by the gentlemen in 
 consequence thereof. On the contrary, the greatness of a lover's pas- 
 sion seemed to increase in proportion to the magnitude of its object ; 
 and a voluminous damsel . . . was declared by a Low Dutch sonneteer 
 of the province to be radiant as a sunflower and luxuriant as a full- 
 blown cabbage. Certain it is that in those days the heart of a lover 
 could not contain more than one lady at a time, whereas the heart of 
 a modern gallant has room enough to accommodate half a dozen. 
 The reason of which I conclude to be, that either the hearts of the 
 gentlemen have grown larger, or the persons of the ladies smaller : 
 this, however, is a question for physiologists to determine." 
 
 Irving being, by the faUure of the opulent house to which 
 he belonged, led to make literature a profession instead of a 
 pastime, often recurred to the pseudonym of Knickerbocker, 
 notably in his JRip Van Winkle — recently made so vivid to 
 us on the stage by Mr. Jefferson — where we have some of 
 the earliest representations of grave people sadly bent on 
 pleasure, that are with various, often incongrous, adjuncts, still 
 national types. The Four of the Prairies, The Adventures of 
 Captain Bonneville, and Astoria, belonging to the later years 
 of our author's life, are instinct with the spirit of Western 
 discovery and adventure. No work of his is wanting in 
 powerful passages ; but his prevailing characteristics are ver- 
 satility and grace. He belonged historically to both worlds, 
 and was equally at home in each ; he reflected the quiet 
 philosophy of the "Tatler" and "Spectator," adding to it the 
 pathos which dims the eye of the reader over The Wife, the 
 Widow and Son, the Broken Heart, and Pride of the Village. 
 He started the vein of burlesque that has run through his 
 country's literature, but under restraints of temperance and 
 culture that have unfortunately been often discarded. The 
 evenness of his manner leads the minor critics of an age 
 delighting in outrages and violence, to do scant justice to 
 
174 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 the range of his always unaffected sympathy, and ever genuine 
 passion. His manly but gentle style is at home in Spanish 
 history and English essay, with our Elizabethans as with our 
 Augustans, with " The Stout Gentleman," " all of the olden 
 time," and in "The Eookery" of Bracehridge Sail ; with the 
 laughter of children round the Christmas hearths of our 
 infancy; in the Alhambra, carved with the memories of 
 Moorish king and maid ; and among the slopes of Sleepy 
 Hollow, by which he built his New England home. 
 
 Irving died, in a green old age, on the 28th of November 
 1859, a month to a day before Lord Macaulay : " the Gold- 
 smith and the Gibbon of our time," says Thackeray, in a 
 Bowndabout Ba^per, from which we may steal half a dozen 
 sentences. " Of these eminent literary men, one was the first 
 ambassador whom the New World of letters sent to the Old. 
 He was born almost with the republic ; the^Pater Patriae had 
 laid his hand on the child's head. He bore Washington's 
 name ; he came amongst us bringing the kindest sympathy, 
 the most artless, smiling good will. . . . His domain on the 
 beautiful Hudson Eiver . . . was but a pretty little cabin of 
 a place. The gentleman of the press, who took notes of it 
 while his kind old host was sleeping, might have visited the 
 whole in a couple of minutes. And how came it that this 
 house was so small, when Mr. Irving's books were sold 
 by hundreds of thousands, and the habits of life of the good 
 old bachelor were so notoriously simple? He had loved 
 once in his life. The lady he loved died ; and he whom 
 all the world loved never sought to replace her. . . . Does 
 not the very cheerfulness of his after life add to the 
 pathos of that untold story ? To grieve always was not in 
 his nature, or, when he had his sorrow, to bring all the 
 world in to condole with him or bemoan it. Deep and 
 quiet he lays the love of his heart, and grass and flowers 
 grow over the scarred ground. ... He could only live very 
 
J. FENIMORE COOPER. 175 
 
 modestly, because the wifeless, childless man had a number 
 of children [nine nieces] to whom he was as a father. I 
 don't know what sort of memorial will be raised to him in 
 his own country . . . but he was in our service as well as 
 theirs. I would like to hear of some memorial raised by 
 English writers and friends of letters, in affectionate remem- 
 brance of the dear and good Washington Irving." 
 
 We pass to brief consideration of a less gentle, but on the 
 whole a greater, power. Irving's fame has, for some time, 
 been unduly eclipsed ; that of the greatest, with one excep- 
 tion, of American novelists, J. Fenimoke Coopee, has seldom 
 been sufficiently recognised. In their portraits you can read 
 the differences of their characters : they had genius in 
 common, industry and honesty, and good descent, but little 
 more. That Irving made no enemies seems to me his weak 
 point : that Cooper made too many was, if not his fault, at 
 least his misfortune, for he was involved in frequent lawsuits, 
 and nearly in duels. He was born in 1789, and after his 
 education at Yale, from 1802-1805, served for six years as a 
 midshipman in the navy, gathering experience of which he 
 made ample use. In 1821 he published his first important 
 book. The Spy, a patriotic novel ; followed by Lionel Lincoln, 
 composed in the same spirit. The Pioneers came in 1823, 
 with a vivid presentation of the scenery of the author's early 
 life, and established his place as a new actor on a crowded 
 stage. Then followed the Pilot, in which he first asserted his 
 claims to an empire, his own among novelists, that of the sea ; 
 and, somewhat later, The Last of the Mohicans, and the Prairie, 
 in which, with some echoes from Scott, he made good a 
 similar sway over the hills and valleys of the remoter West. 
 In the course of a tour abroad he wrote his Red Rover, and 
 the Bravo, — a tale of Venice, which contains some of his most 
 vivid descriptions, as that of the Eegatta, — and flung on the 
 aspersers of his country The American in Europe. On his 
 
176 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 return he issued his Homeward Bound, a satirical assault on 
 newspaper editors and other delinquents ; that led him into 
 several actions for libel, in which he claims to have been 
 almost uniformly successful. The Pathfinder, 1840, and the 
 Deerslayer, 1841, — the latter perhaps the best of the " Leather 
 Stocking" series, — complete the list of his great novels ; unless 
 we add the Satanstoe, a vigorous exposition and denunciation 
 of a set of men who had become rioters and martyrs in 
 defence of a communistic theory, that tenants were to hold 
 lands and pay no rent for them — a theory and practice, among 
 a sensible and law-abiding people, promptly crushed. 
 
 It is impossible in the case of Cooper, as of Irving, to do 
 him any justice by quotations, for his genius is panoramic 
 rather than dioramic : we must sit out a whole scene, or even 
 act, to realise the power of the dramatist. There is, moreover, 
 a certain severity in his style, which restricts the range of his 
 readers. He often wastes words on circumstance, is ex- 
 haustive where he might have been suggestive ; and his plots 
 — a remark that does not apply to the Red Rover, where from 
 first to last there is not a dull page — are apt to drag ; and he 
 has carried too far the practice of trotting out a single char- 
 acter, and making us accompany him — as TroUope and even 
 Thackeray are apt to do — through the lives of his men and 
 women, from the cradle to the grave. Lowell animadverts on 
 this, perhaps over severely : — 
 
 " He ias drawn you one character, though, that is new. 
 One wildflower he's plucked that is wet with the dew 
 Of this fresh Western World ; and the thing not to mince, 
 He has done naught but copy it iU ever since ; 
 His Indians — with proper respect he it said — 
 Are just Natty Bumpo daubed over with red." 
 
 Cooper's imagination was even more decidedly kindled by 
 the study of Sir AValter Scott than that of Irving by the 
 study of Addison, and his themes, though far removed in 
 
J. FENIMOEE COOPEE. 177 
 
 space, are many of them similar in character. As in the works 
 of the Scotch novelist, the semi-barbarous feudal spirit is re- 
 presented in conflict with modern law ; in those of the Trans- 
 atlantic romancer the enterprise of New England is struggling 
 with the ruggedness of nature and a savage life. The fierce 
 and generous Highland chiefs, lairds, caterans, and thieves of 
 the one are the equivalents of the noble redskins in the 
 other. But Cooper is nevertheless an American to the core : 
 he needs no slang or affectation to establish his originality, 
 but moves in his own path, with something like disdain 
 of comment. His best descriptions, as that of the prairie on 
 fire, of the Ariel among the shoals, of the capture of the whale 
 and the panther in The Pioneers, and of the last sea-fight, 
 after the Eed Eover suddenly shows his colours, are unsur- 
 passed, and often thrilling. Cooper's ships are grander if not 
 truer than Marryat's : they move over the seas, in calm and 
 tempest, like things of life. He is not concerned with the 
 " grog and biscuit " of the crews, but with the great designs 
 and fiery passions of the captains or the high-souled pirates, 
 who, like Byron's Conrad and Lara, enlist our reluctant 
 sympathies. His hunters — remnants of a race exploded by the 
 railway and telegraph — traverse the great wilds of grass and 
 wood and water with a sense of possession. His best char- 
 acters are few, but Natty Bumpo, Bob Yarn, Nightingale, the 
 Eover, Long Tom Coffin, Hetty Hunter, and Maud Merideth, 
 are undying creations. As for the author, we like him, as we 
 like Savage Landor, because he was free and fierce and strong. 
 Of minor writers of romance, belonging to the first half of 
 the century, in the West, there is a plethora. Cartloads of 
 Tales and Sketches, evincing various degrees of talent, alive or 
 dead or moribund, are heaped on the shelves of the libraries. 
 A mere catalogue, with a statement of their subjects, would 
 occupy half a chapter. Of the imaginative works devoted to 
 half-historic revivals of the past, the most successful is the 
 
178 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 Letters from Palmyra, otherwise known as Zendbia, pub- 
 lished, in 1836, by the highly-accomplished Unitarian clergy- 
 man, WiUiam Ware. This work, which in point of interest 
 and life-like restoration of classic times, is only surpassed by 
 Lander's Pericles and Aspasia, was followed by Letters from 
 Borne, or Probus, a sequel to Zendbia, giving an account of 
 the persecutions under AureUan, and, in 1841, by Jidian, or 
 Scenes in Judea. These lose less in freshness than many 
 continuations, but the writer's fame rests most securely on 
 his first essay. Of fictions bearing on American society, the 
 novels of W. G. Simms, whose fertile brain is said to have 
 produced fifty volumes in twenty years, are worthy of note ; 
 but his vigorous work is marred by haste and the glaringly 
 one-sided view which makes the author draw all his gentle- 
 men from the south, all his clowns from the north, of 
 Mason and Dixon's line. J. K. Paulding, Irving's associate, 
 deserves a distinct place as a delineator of character, for his 
 vivid pictures of early colonial life in The Dutchman's Fireside 
 and Westward Ho ! where the features of the contest between 
 the new settlers and the aborigines are brought before us in 
 clear relief, in a humorous atmosphere. His apologue of Bull 
 and Jonathan, and the thirteen good farms over which they 
 squabbled, founded on Swift's Tale of a Tub, presents us, in 
 a satire which lies on the border of irony and a rougher form 
 of wit, with an early American view of the relations between 
 his own and the mother country. To the highest rank in 
 this class belongs Longfellow's Kavanagh, a perfect prose 
 idyU of a schoolhouse in the West. His Hyperion is a 
 beautiful blending of romance, description, and criticism. 
 The most poetical, though not the most powerful, out- 
 come of American travel, it has about it the indefinable 
 fascination of the older time which is nearer the youth of the 
 world. The Ehine runs through its pure pages, as by the 
 Lore-Ley Eock, before the scream of the iron horse had 
 
LONGFELLOW'S "HYPERION." 179 
 
 banished the Fay. The Alps overshadow it, with the yet 
 untrodden Jungfrau snows, before Interlachen, nestling by 
 the margin of the Aar, had its quietudes shaken by the clatter 
 of innumerable tongues ; and the Eighi was only beginning to 
 be vulgarised. The book is a paean of the " exulting and 
 abounding river," scarce second to Ghilde Harold in the trans- 
 figuring light thrown over its " thousand battles ; " and over 
 the legends, from that of the Christ of Andernach to that of 
 Stolzenfells and Liebenstein, brought back to us as ghosts 
 from the tomb. As a story it exceeds in discussions, which, 
 although the medium of always appreciative and often subtle 
 estimates, as that of Jean Paul Eichter and the Minnesingers, 
 want the dramatic element. The sentimental passages, as 
 those of Bulwer's Pilgrims on the Rhine, however relieved 
 by humour, may provoke the sneers of an age lilie ours, 
 intolerant of sentiment, and willing in its place to endure 
 buffoonery ; and there are frequent remarks that appear com- 
 monplaces now, when the originality of the last generation 
 has got into the air we breathe ; but the work as a whole is 
 lovable, as aU from the author's hand. While Ehrenbreitstein 
 -flashes in the morning, and the ruins of Heidelberg glow in 
 the evening, light, "as long as splashing boat oar" ruffles 
 the breast of the German stream, the images of Paul Fleming 
 and Mary Ashburton will float on its surface, like swan 
 and shadow. 
 
 America superabounds in didactic fiction, novels, or stories 
 written with a purpose; the most famous of which, Mrs. Stowe's 
 Uncle Tom, with the works of Judd and Holmes, we reserve 
 for later review. Among minor works worthy of note are The 
 Bee Hunter, and other narratives of the South-west, by T. 
 B. Thorpe of Baton Eouge ; John Neal's Bachel Dyer and Buth 
 Elder ; Mrs. E. 0. Smith's Indian Beminiscences ; The Lin- 
 woods, a picture of New England village life, and Hope Leslie, 
 a protest on behalf of the virtuous poor, by Miss Sedgwick, 
 
180 AMERICAN LITEEATUEE. 
 
 also author of the lives of the precocious and short-lived 
 sisters Davidson ; Theodore S. Fay's Countess Ida and Norman 
 Leslie, vigorous pamphlets, in story, directed against the prac- 
 tice of duelling ; Mrs. Lydia Child's Hdbomok, a tale of Puritan 
 times, and her Philothea, a romance of the age of Pericles, 
 somewhat too sentimental in its style, and not free from 
 anachronisms ; Verplanck's Major Egerton, and, written jointly 
 ■with Sands and Bryant, his Talisman ; Herman Melville's 
 tales of the Pacific Islands, Omoo and Typee ; Bird's Calavar 
 and The Infidel, both associated with the fall of Mexico, 
 whose graphic accuracy is worthy of note, as preceding the 
 works of Prescott. The light but always graceful and often 
 incisive sketches of N. P. Willis take a somewhat higher 
 rank. A writer whose rapidity prevented him ever doing 
 justice to his powers, he had the skill to make his verses 
 pay, and the merit of being conspicuously kind to struggling 
 competitors. At his best a brilliant colourist, his fertile 
 fancy has been employed in almost all the countries of 
 Europe and in his own with more than average success. His 
 PencilUngs by the Way and People I Save Met are among the 
 most agreeable of books for a leisure hour. His descriptions 
 are always interesting as well as accurate, and his characters, 
 grave and gay, generally lifelike. His picture of the Indian 
 girl " Nunu," in the Inklings of Adventure, is fascinating and 
 vivacious enough to be worthy of a higher artist. 
 
 Three-fourths of the literary men of America have crossed 
 the Atlantic, and nine -tenths of those who have done so 
 have published their impressions of the Old World, with 
 every variety of good and bad taste, from the Old Home to 
 the Innocents Abroad. Next to that of his birth, an Ameri- 
 can author's travels are the essential of his being. We may 
 predict his praise of Italy ; half-satirical half-envious view 
 of England, and his wonder at the Pyramids. Of the mul- 
 tifarious descriptions of Europe, to which this habit has 
 
BOOKS OF TRAVEL. 181 
 
 given birth, the worthiest of note are those of Longfellow, in 
 Outre-Mer; of Hawthorne and Emerson; of Story and Cheever; 
 Hillard and Norton's Italian Sketches; Cushing's Becollections 
 of Spain; and the Nile Notes of a Howadji, by Geoege 
 William Curtis ; a work which, for its charm of style and 
 warmth of Eastern air, ranks with Mr. Kinglake's Hothen. 
 In the Lotus Hating of the same author we have pleasing 
 reminiscences of the watering-places of his own country. 
 But the most interesting records of Western scenery are 
 Fremont's Exploring Expedition; Winthrop's Canoe and 
 Saddle and Life in the Open Air; T. Starr King's White Hills; 
 with the numerous remarkable Excursions of Emerson's lead- 
 ing pupil, H. D. Thoreau ; his Maine Woods, Cape Cod, and 
 Merrimack; to which we should add Two Years hefore the 
 Mast and the Vacation Voyage to Cuba of the younger Dana. 
 The majority of the historians, romancers, and poets of 
 America have made contributions of various, some of great, 
 value to contemporary criticism. In reading Prescott's Mis- 
 cellanies we feel there is little to add to his estimates of 
 Brown, Bancroft, and Irving, among his countrymen ; of Cer- 
 vantes, or Moliere, or the minor Italians, abroad. Longfellow's 
 Poets and Poetry of Europe is an always appreciative, and 
 from his hands inevitably graceful, if not an exhaustive, 
 work. Lowell's Fable for Critics (to which we shall revert), 
 and his excellent little volume on Chaucer and our old 
 dramatists, entitled Conversations with the Poets, belong to this 
 period.'' Among its minor reviewers it is, owing to their 
 multitude, hard to select. The most rapid survey should 
 acknowledge the carefully-conscientious work of George S. 
 HiUard, one of the most highly-cultured writers in New 
 England ; the genuine, though sometimes indiscriminate, 
 enthusiasm of Henry T. Tuckerman's Thoughts on the Poets ; 
 
 1 For notice of some later developments of American criticism v. 
 Chapter XII. 
 
182 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 Halleck's contributions to the CroaJeerFwpers in the "New York 
 Evening Post," lively and fair in the main, despite his ahsurd 
 preference of Thomas Campbell to Lord Byron ; Griswold's 
 numerous volumes of selection and commentary ; and Charles 
 FoUen's admirable lectures on Goethe and Schiller, the out- 
 come of his brief professorship of German literature at 
 Harvard, with numerous able articles in the " North American 
 Eeview" and "Atlantic Monthly." Many of the critics of the 
 time are apt to be led astray by the amiable weakness of 
 over admiration. They wonder too readUy, and scatter their 
 praise abroad to the lessening of its value, and the encourage- 
 ment of mediocrities. This tendency Edgar Allan Poe set 
 himself, with a praiseworthy sense of "judex damnatur," and 
 with some practical good results, to counteract. His Quacks of 
 Helicon, and such articles as those on Eufus Dawes, T. Ward, 
 W. Lord, and Cornelius Matthews, frequently remind us of 
 Lord Macaulay's review of Eobert Montgomerie, and ought 
 to be reprinted, with some changes of name, for the benefit of 
 a later generation. Unfortunately Poe was led, by personal 
 animosity, prejudice, or misconception, to treat with equal 
 rancour some of his contemporaries, as Lowell, Longfellow, 
 and Emerson, whose reputations are above assault. On the 
 other hand, his quick, though modified, recognition of the 
 genius of Hawthorne, and his glowing notice of E. H. Home's 
 Orion, is remarkable. 
 
 We are apt to hear too much of " a high tone " in criti- 
 cism from writers who, having no artistic sense, think to 
 supply its place by a spurious pulpit oratory. They can only 
 rave at Beaumont and Fletcher, reprobate George Sand, and 
 take a malignant delight in making an example of Lord 
 Byron. This tendency to preach, in and out of season, 
 naturally infected the judgments of the Puritans of New 
 England when they first began to read the poets. It is 
 nowhere more conspicuous than in some of the lectures of 
 
o- 
 
 EARLIER CRITICISM. 183 
 
 the famous J. Quincy Adams, who, in his youth, as Pro- 
 fessor of Belles Lettres, had ample scope to display his 
 strength and weakness as a critic. His admirers have dwelt 
 on his Shakespearian lore, and selected for especial thanks- 
 giving his comments on Othello. The following excerpt will 
 suffice to show the subtlety of his analysis. It may be re- 
 commended to the moralists of the London " Spectator," as the 
 most flagrant instance of platitude and absurdity extant, out- 
 side the ranks of the " New Shakspere Society," from which it 
 takes away all pretension to be, in any nonsense, original : — 
 
 " I have said that since I entered upon the third of Shakespeare's 
 Seven Ages, the first and chief capacity in which I have read and 
 studied him is as a teacher of morals. . . . My objections to the character 
 of Desdemona arise not from what lago, or Eoderigo, or Brahantio, or 
 Othello says of her ;" (he admits that the iirst, though "a very intelligent," 
 is "a double-dealing" man, " full of ingenuity to devise base expedients ") 
 " but from what she does herself. She absconds from her father's house 
 in the dead of night, to marry a blackamoor. She breaks her father's 
 heart, and covers his noble house with shame, to gratify . . . unnatural 
 passion ; it cannot be named with delicacy. ... If OtheUo had been 
 white, what need would there have been for her running away with 
 him ? She could have made no better match. Her father could have 
 made no reasonable objection to it. . . . The father of Desdemona 
 charges OtheUo with magic arts in obtaining the affections of his 
 daughter. Why, but because her passion for him is unnatural ; and 
 why is it unnatural, but because of his colour ? . . . I cannot in 
 decency quote here {i.e. to the Harvard undergraduates) ; but turn to 
 the book, and see in what language lago announces to her father his 
 daughter's shameful misconduct. The language of Eoderigo is more 
 supportable. He is a Venetian gentleman. . . . Indeed ! indeed ! I 
 must look upon Shakespeare ... in his capacity of a teacher of 
 morals. . . . The first action of Desdemona discards all female delicacy, 
 all filial duty, all sense of ingenuous shame. So I consider it, and so 
 it is considered by her father. Her offence is not a mere clandestine 
 elopement. I hope it requires no unreasonable rigour of morality to 
 consider even that as suited to raise a prepossession rather un- 
 favourable to the character of a young woman of refined sensibility." 
 On the line, "The wealthy curled darlings of our nation," he re- 
 marks, " Several of the English commentators have puzzled themselves 
 with the inquiry why the epithet ' curled ' is here applied to the 
 wealthy darlings of the nation ; and Dr. Johnson thinks it has no 
 reference to the hair, but it evidently has. The curled hair is in 
 antithetic contrast to the sooty brown, the thick lips, and the woolly 
 
1S4 AMEKICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 head. . . . That the moral lesson to be learnt from the play is of no 
 practical utility in England may be true. . . . The lesson, however, is 
 not the less couched under the form of an admirable drama ; nor needs 
 it any laborious effort of the imagination to extend the moral precept 
 resulting from the story to a salutory admonition against all ill-assorted, 
 clandestine, and unnatural marriages." 
 
 Twenty years later we have from the American pulpit 
 itself, in pleasing contrast, an example of what is really a 
 " high tone '' in criticism, viz., the impartial application of a 
 rigidly impersonal standard, and the association of Art with 
 the larger emotions and nohler interests of human life. Dr. 
 Channing's work is so far from that of a mere intellectual 
 sensualist that he has heen called a purist ; but he loved 
 Beauty as well as Virtue for its own sake, and his style is 
 generally free from the defects of taste frequent in the writings 
 of his contemporaries. The Essay on National lAterature 
 (1824), by which his reputation was first made, is singularly 
 suggestive, and only errs by the intrusion, here and there, of 
 anti-Calvinistic polemic. His review of Fdn^loh abounds in 
 passages, as the often quoted picture of religious peace, which 
 exhibit the deKcacy of his perceptions ; but the breadth and 
 force of his sympathy is most manifest in his BemarJcs on 
 Milton, k propos of the publication of the posthumous Be 
 Boctrind Christiand. That this treatise was much to Chan- 
 ning's mind appears in the theological part of his review. 
 We are more concerned to call attention to its appreciation, 
 then rare, of Milton's prose, to its fair view of his relation to 
 Dr. Johnson, and to its anticipation of the now hackneyed 
 truism that the heU of the great iconoclast poet " yields to 
 the spirit which it imprisons. . . Its intense fires reveal the 
 intenser passions and more vehement will of the' rained arch- 
 angel, who gathers into himself the sublimity of the scene 
 which surrounds him." Perhaps, however, the most beautiful 
 page of this justly famous review is the comment on our 
 first parents in their " Bower of Bliss : " 
 
CHANNING— SCIENTIFIC "WRITERS. 185 
 
 " Their new existence has the freshness and peaoefulness of the 
 dewy morning. Their souls, ungated and untainted, find an innocent 
 joy in the youthful creation, which spreads and smiles •around them. 
 Their mutual love is deep, for it is the love of young, unworn, un- 
 exhausted hearts, which meet in each other the only human objects on 
 whom to pour forth their fulness of affection ; and still it is serene, 
 for it is the love of happy beings, who know not suffering even by 
 name, whose innocence excludes not only the tumults but the thought 
 of jealousy and shame, who, ' imparadised in one another's arms,' scarce 
 dream of futurity, so blessed is their present being. We will not say 
 that we envy our first parents ; for we feel that there may be higher 
 happiness than theirs, a happiness won through struggle with inward 
 and outward foes, the happiness of power and moral victory, the hap- 
 piness of disinterested sacrifices and widespread love, the happiness of 
 boundless hope, and of ' thoughts which wander through eternity.' 
 Still there are times, when the spirit, oppressed with pain, worn with 
 toil, tired of tumult, sick at the sight of guilt, wounded in its love, 
 baffled in its hope, and trembling in its faith, almost longs for the ' wings 
 of a dove, that it might fly away ' and take refuge amidst the ' shady 
 bowers,' the ' vernal airs,' the ' roses without thorns,' the quiet, the 
 beauty, the loveliness of Eden. It is the contrast of this deep peace 
 of Paradise with the storms of life which gives to the fourth and fifth 
 books of this poem a charm so irresistible that not a few would sooner 
 relinquish the two first books, with all their sublimity, than part with 
 these. It has sometimes been said that the English language has no 
 good pastoral poetry. We would ask, in what age or country has the 
 pastoral reed breathed such sweet strains as are borne to us on ' the 
 odoriferous wings of gentle gales' from Milton's Paradise V 
 
 In a rapid survey of this prolific age, we can only signalise 
 its contributions to Philological Criticism and the several 
 branches of Science, physical and mental. In the explora- 
 tion of animate Nature, Audubon succeeded to the Bertrams 
 and to WHson ; and so far surpassed them in artistic power 
 that his descriptions have, from an artistic point of view, 
 been compared to Buffon. He remains, to this day, the one 
 conspicuous literary glory of Louisiana. During the last two 
 generations, the United States have been justly proud of the 
 names of Morton and Schoolcraft in Ethnology, of Bowditch 
 in Mathematics, of Silliman and Dana in Chemistry and Min- 
 eralogy, of Loomis and Wells in Natural Philosophy, and, 
 above all, of their greatest literary import, the Swiss Agassiz. 
 
186 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 Their classical scholarship has been well maintained by 
 the Everetts, Lewis, Felton, Woolsey, Anthon, and Eobinson. 
 Dr. Frederick Hedge has done mucli to keep alive an interest 
 in " German Literature " by his lectures ; and Charles T. 
 Brooks even more, by his admirable translations of the main 
 works of Jean Paul Eichter. W. D. Whitney and Dr. Marsh 
 are among the most accurate modern philologists — the latter 
 an excellent and deservedly popular writer. E. C. White is 
 known as a learned editor of Shakespeare, and H. N. Hudson 
 as an able commentator ; Dr. ChUd is one of the foremost 
 authorities in old English, especially ballad literature. 
 Worcester has worthily followed Webster in lexicography. 
 The metaphysical school of Locke is nowhere better repre- 
 sented than in America by Dr. Bowen, nor the views of 
 Herbert Spencer more sytematically developed than in the 
 " Cosmical Philosophy " of John Fiske, nor those of Sweden- 
 borg than by Dr. George Bush. Horace Bushnell is acknow- 
 ledged as an original divine ; Dr. Hodge and Jacob Abbott 
 as good popular expositors of the orthodox theology. The 
 place of Marshall as a jurist has been filled by Chief- Justice 
 Kent and Judge Story ; Wheaton is over Europe the lead- 
 ing authority on International Law ; while Horace Mann, 
 by his combination of large practical experience and insight 
 into character, has elevated Education into a science, the 
 principles of which he expounds with remarkable richness 
 of illustration, frequently humorous, and a general grace of 
 style rare in bis profession. It were even further beyond 
 our province to pass judgment on the numerous artists, con- 
 spicuously the great sculptors, by whom America has been 
 adorned. We can only offer a tribute of recognition to the 
 names of Copley, AUston, West, Leslie, Greenough, Church, 
 Powers, Bierstadt, and Story. 
 
REPRESENTATIVE POETS. 187 
 
 ' CHAPTEE VI. 
 
 KEPEESENTATIVE POETS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. 
 BRYANT — LONGFELLOW — WHITMAN — POE. 
 
 In spite of the melodious preludes of minor versifiers, De/ 
 Tocqueville was still able, in 1835, to assert, with some 
 plausibility, that America had not yet produded a single 
 poet of a high order. At that time there only existed a 
 single poem to contradict him; and the collective works 
 of the author of this poem seem to vindicate another 
 generalisation of the French critic. He remarks " that, in 
 democratic communities, where men are all socially insignifi- 
 cant, and each one sees his fellows when he sees himself, 
 poetry will he less apt to celebrate individuals " ; that it will 
 seldom be dramatic, but will incline to dwell either on 
 external nature or on the ideas which concern humanity in 
 general : it wiU be either descriptive or abstract. The poem 
 I refer to is reflective and descriptive, and its author, William 
 CuLLEN Bryant, is a poet of nature and contemplation. 
 
 It is told of Bryant that, while on a visit to England 
 many years ago, he called at Eydal Mount, and was received 
 with the somewhat surly salutation — " Well, sir, you are, I 
 believe, an American poet. I never read American poetry ; 
 I never read any poetry but my own." " But," interrupted a 
 more sympathetic member of the family, " this is the author 
 
188 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 of Thanatopsis, whicli only the other week you repeated to 
 me from memory." As one of the best illustrations of a phase 
 of Transatlantic thought, I shall quote the concluding lines of 
 the poem that William Wordsworth had learnt by heart — 
 
 " Yet not to thine eternal resting place 
 Shalt thou retire alone — ^nor couldst thou wish 
 Couch more magnificent. Thou shalt lie down 
 With patriarchs of the infant world — with kings, 
 The powerful of the earth — the wise, the good, 
 Fair forms and hoary seers of ages past, 
 All in one mighty sepulchre. The hills, 
 Eock-ribbed and ancient as the sun — the vales 
 Stretching in pensive quietness between ; . 
 The venerable woods — rivers that move 
 In majesty, and the complaining brooks 
 That make the meadows green ; and poured round all, 
 Old ocean's gray and melancholy waste, — 
 Are but the solemn decorations all 
 Of the great tomb of man. The golden sun. 
 The planets, all the infinite host of heaven. 
 Are shining on the sad abodes of death 
 Through the stOl lapse of ages. All that tread 
 The globe are but a handful to the tribes 
 That slumber ia its bosom — take the wings 
 Of morning — and the Barcan desert pierce. 
 Or lose myself iu the contiuuous woods 
 Where rolls the Oregon and hears no sound 
 Save his own dashings — yet — the dead are there." 
 
 The reason why Bryant has never surpassed, and seldom 
 equalled, this effort of his youth, is to be found partly in the 
 cast of his mind, which is characterised by a narrow great- 
 ness ; and partly in the fact that, during the great portion of 
 his life, he has been forced " to scrawl strange words with the 
 barbarous pen," as the editor of a daily newspaper— a fact to 
 which he makes a touching reference at the close of his 
 Green Miver. But no one of his compeers has penetrated 
 so deeply into the western woods as Bryant has done. He 
 has lived in thronging streets, an honest and energetic poli- 
 tician ; but, in his leisure hours, his fancy has roamed away 
 
WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT. 189 
 
 to breezy hills and valleys, and the undulating sea of the 
 
 prairies — 
 
 " the gardens of the desert, 
 The unshorn fields boundless and beautiful, 
 For which the speech of England has no name.'' 
 
 The perpetual autumn of his writings is peculiar. They lead 
 us to the margin of plains, broader than English shires ; by the 
 banks of rivers, flowing oceanward, through sombre wilder- 
 nesses, and over fallen leaves. Bryant has written smoothly, 
 in various measures ; but he is never lively. An American 
 Alastor, he loves "the air that cools the twilight of the 
 sultry day " better than morning " clad in russet vest." In 
 the beautiful verses on the Death of the Flowers, his ear 
 catches a dirgelike tune in the wind — 
 
 " The south wind searches for the flowers whose fragrance late he bore, 
 And sighs to find them in the wood and by the stream no more." 
 
 The high rank grass of the wild meadow is, to his eye, the 
 garniture of the graves of a race represented by his Disin- 
 terred Warrior. Devoid of the exuberance of his contempo- 
 raries, he lingers " where old empires sit in suUenness and 
 gloom," and contemplates " the living present " with resigna- 
 tion rather than hope. All his best pieces, as The Uvening 
 Wind, the Forest Hymn,, Monument Mountain, the Burial 
 Place, and The Past, are set to the same slow music, and per- 
 vaded by the thought of life as the avenue of death ; and 
 even the poem on The Gatterskill Falls, which begins with a 
 flash of light, all but ends in a tragedy. If we compare his 
 address To a Waterfowl with Wordsworth's or with Shelley's 
 Skylark, we appreciate the monotony of his mind, which is, 
 like that of Cowper, without Cowper's occasional vivacity. 
 Even his patriotic impulses, as far as they have vent in his 
 verse, seem, like the love of Coleridge's knight, " long sub- 
 dued." The Song of Marion's Men, fresh and strong though 
 it be, is muffled in the branches of the trees round whose 
 
190 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 roots there smile his cerulean Fringed Gentian, " alone in the 
 virgin air," and the Yellow Violet, " half hidden from the eye." 
 
 " Our fortress is the good green wood, 
 Our tent the cypress tree ; 
 We know the forest round us, 
 As seamen know the sea," 
 
 is more like a catch of Eobin Hood, or the followers of the 
 philosophic Duke in Arden, than the war-cry of a guerilla 
 chief. The same feeling, with an obvious echo of the Lucy 
 of his great model, pervades what Edgar Poe, in a notice 
 recognising the poet's rhythmic skill, pronounces his " truest 
 poem" — 
 
 " Oh, fairest of the rural maids ! 
 
 Thy birth was in the forest shades ; 
 
 Green boughs and glimpses of the sky 
 
 Were all that met thy infant eye. 
 
 " Thy sports, thy wanderings when a child 
 Were ever in the sylvan wild ; 
 And all the beauty of the place 
 Is in thy heart and on thy face. 
 
 " The twilight of the trees and rocks i 
 Is in the light shade of the locks ; 
 Thy step is as the wind that weaves 
 Its playful way among the leaves. 
 
 " Thy eyes are springs, in whose serene 
 And silent waters heaven is seen ; 
 Their lashes are the herbs that look 
 On their figures in the brook. 
 
 " The forest depths, by foot impressed 
 Are not more sinless than thy breast ; 
 The holy peace that fills the air 
 Of those calm solitudes is there.'' 
 
 Bryant stands on a high level, but the space he covers 
 is limited : he has no touch of humour, and only the distant 
 pathos of prevailing melancholy. Master of his position 
 where he is at home, in the woods, his excursions are gene- 
 rally weak : he loses his inspiration when he draws near 
 even his own cities. His exclusive nature -worship has a 
 
BRYANT. 191 
 
 parallel in the feeling which animates some of the most 
 graphic passages in New England prose ; such as the follow- 
 ing from one of Emerson's earlier essays : — 
 
 " It is the halcyon season of our pure October weather. The day, 
 immeasvirably long, sleeps over the broad hills and warm wide fields. To 
 have lived through all its sunny hours seems longevity enough. The 
 solitary places do not seem quite lonely. At the gates of the forest, 
 the surprised man of the world is forced to leave his city estimates of 
 great and small, wise and foolish. The knapsack of custom falls off 
 his back with the first step he makes into these precincts. Here is 
 sanctity which shames our religions, and reality which discredits owv 
 heroes. Here we find nature to be the circumstance which dwarfs 
 every other circumstance, and judges, like a god, all men that come to 
 her. We have crept out of our crowded houses into the night and 
 morning. . . . The incommunicable trees begin to persuade us to live 
 with them and quit our life of solemn trifles. • Here no history, or 
 church, or State, is interpolated on the divine sky and the immortal year." 
 
 It is evident that this is a one-sided spirit ; but it is a 
 spirit with which we have all an occasional sympathy : to 
 a disposition like that of Bryant it is permanently con- 
 genial. Thus, in the following verse, he gives voice to the 
 impulse which, even in settled countries, often induces eccen- 
 tric men of culture to banish themselves, for a season, from 
 society — the impulse which made captive the " Scholar 
 Gipsy," which the hero of Locksley Hall welcomes for a 
 moment, and then rejects : — 
 
 " Ay ! this is freedom ; these pure skies 
 
 Were never stained with village smoke ; 
 The fragrant wind that through them flies 
 
 Is breathed from wastes by plough unbroke. 
 Here with my rifle and my steed. 
 
 And her who left the world for me, 
 I plant me where the red deer feed 
 
 In the green forest, and am free." 
 
 Imaginative and ardent minds, oppressed by what Mr. 
 Arnold calls "this strange disease of modern life," try to 
 escape from the region of the real Drama into that of the ideal 
 Lyric — " arva beata petamus, arva, divites et insules " — and 
 have, now and then, endeavoured to convert it into an actual 
 
192 AMEEICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 Idyll, as when Thoreau buried himself in a log hut by 
 Walden lake ; or Theodore Winthrop, leaving his ledgers in 
 New York, scoured over the crags of Oregon ; or Home, with 
 his Orion still unsold, was found mining in a quarry of l^ew 
 South Wales. But this dmigri spirit, when put into practice, 
 ultimately cures itself : a poet soon tires of working with his 
 hands for a livelihood. The aspirations of Clough's Bothie 
 are stifled by the vitiosce curce of a hard Hfe, or terminate in 
 the catastrophes of a fanaticism such as Hawthorne has 
 branded with his genius in the Mithedale Momance. The 
 philosophical refugees find that the solitude they desired 
 charms only by its contrast with the civilisation they have 
 left, as the beauty of the sea is its contrast with the shore. 
 But this wandering impulse, strong in the ancient Greek and 
 the modern English race, has colonised and civilised the 
 world. It is especially strong in the Anglo-American ; the 
 very restlessness which makes his cities so noisy bids him long 
 for a remoter rest ; and this longing acts, in conjunction with 
 more material demands, to drive him across the Mississippi, 
 and pioneer the way to the Pacific. Bryant's poetry is 
 remarkable, among other things, for the extent to which 
 it embodies the same national characteristic that has con- 
 tributed to people the shores of the Salt Lake, and he 
 embodies it with full poetic confidence, perhaps because 
 he himself had never tried the experiment which it suggests. 
 His cold clear Ught, pure steadfast purpose, and remote 
 benignity, are better represented by his own stately hymn 
 to the north star than by pages of panegyric or tiresome 
 commentary — 
 
 " The sad and solemn night 
 Has yet her multitude of cheerful fires ; 
 
 The glorious host of light 
 Walk the dark hemisphere till she retires ; 
 All through her silent watches, gliding slow, 
 Her constellations come and climb the heavens, and go. 
 
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 193 
 
 " And, therefore, bards of old, 
 Sages and hermits of the solemn wood. 
 
 Did in thy beams behold 
 A beauteous type of that unchanging good. 
 That bright, eternal beacon, by whose ray 
 The voyager of time should shape his heedful way." 
 
 I have said that the best literature of America belongs to 
 New England. Bryant is no exception to this statement, — 
 a native of Massachusetts, he was only an emigrant in the 
 Empress City.- 
 
 Heney Wadsworth Longfellow was born in 1807 in 
 Maine. His native town, Portland, is built on the shore 
 of Casco Bay, which lies, with the throng of islands "that 
 were the Hesperides of " his " boyish dreams," on the 
 edge of the Atlantic, and under " the shadow of Deering's 
 woods." Sent at an early age to Bowdoin College in Bruns- 
 wick — girt by pine groves near the Androscoggin Falls, in the 
 heart of a district of Indian Legends — he graduated there in 
 his nineteenth year, and was appointed to the professor- 
 ship of modern languages. After an interval, a consider- 
 able part of which was spent on the Continent, he was 
 invited to succeed Mr. Ticknor, in a similar professorship at 
 Harvard, and this second appointment was followed by a 
 second visit to Europe. His first published work appeared 
 in 1839, since when he issued a volume, on the average, 
 every two years. 
 
 The Universities of America combine and harmonise some 
 of the best features of the English and the German ; the 
 freedom of the latter with the social bonds of a common life, 
 tending to inspire that admirable and healthy spirit, the 
 " esprit de corps," of youthful and enthusiastic natures. The 
 great national struggle of twenty years ago, when Harvard sent 
 her finest blood to the battlefields of the Union, made this 
 link still closer. To the teachers there is supplied — what in 
 their country is so much required— opportunity for learned 
 
 
 
194 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 leisure and the self-culture, which independence alone makes 
 possihle. The Americans have not forgotten that universities 
 ought to he centres of repose as well as of activity, that they 
 should never be mere servants of the Exchange — that their 
 function is to promote, as well as to communicate, thought, 
 and to elevate their age hy setting a standard above its rest- 
 lessness. The absence of sectarian elements in the best of 
 these institutions, with the wide range of their studies, tends 
 to make them worthy of their name. The fact that the 
 Chairs of Harvard are offered to the men who seem fitted to 
 fiU them, excludes open competition, and does much to disarm 
 petty jealousies. Nothing strikes a stranger more pleasantly 
 than the concord that seems to prevail in the literary circles 
 of New England. Cambridge on the Charles is the cent* e of 
 a golden brotherhood, the members of which are as keen in 
 discovering each others merits, as in some "parts of the world 
 they are in descanting on each others defects. Neighbouring 
 satirists, indeed, have cavilled at their excess of appreciation ; 
 but of two evils, it is preferable to excess of disparagement. 
 Among the retreats where scholars and artists meet in 
 pleasant fellowship, none is so esteemed and venerated as the 
 old house, with its avenue of many-tinted trees, on the Mount 
 Auburn road, where Washington held his headquarters in 
 the Eevolution War — a home dear to the patriot for its past, 
 to the student for its present — where dwelt in the beautiful 
 autumn of a beautiful life, dva^ avBpmv, the poet Longfellow. 
 We are justified in referring to the circumstances of the 
 author's life, because they help to explain the leading features 
 of his work — its European flavour, the moralising of a teacher 
 that pervades it, and its serenity, as of church bells ringing 
 beside a quiet shore. A great part of his prose and verse is 
 like the literature of an emigrant : it is overladen with 
 culture, and burdened with the music of intellectual luxury. 
 Longfellow has none of the vague grandeur, uncouth power. 
 
LONGFELLOW'S GERMANISM. 195 
 
 or spasmodic exaggeration of his Western contemporaries : he 
 has all the grace and polish and unity, with here and there a 
 touch of the effeminacy, of the East. His works are not only 
 free from the special defects, but devoid of the peculiar merits, 
 that mark the more strictly national literature of his country. 
 His fancy recrosses the Atlantic for the inspiration which 
 many derive from the past. Now and then he gives us glimpses 
 of the hoar frost silvering his native pines, or, heaping the logs 
 on the hearth, sits down to tell us a New England tale ; but 
 the majority of his minor poems are drawn from the same 
 experiences and memories as his Hyperion and Outre-Mer. 
 Like Irving in the variety of his culture, superior in genius, 
 his imagination is rather Teutonic than English. Cut Ger- 
 many out of his volume, and you cut out nearly half. He 
 lingers in feudal towers or Flemish towns, and chooses for his 
 emblem of life's river, not the Ohio, or the Hudson, or the 
 Assabeth, but " the Moldau's rushing stream." He has given 
 us the best existing translations from Swedish, Danish, and 
 Spanish, and among the best from Italian. His incomparable 
 renderings of The Silent Land, The Castle hy the Sea, Coplas 
 de Manrigue, and a score of others, have all the charm of 
 original compositions, A large proportion of his verses are 
 allowedly suggested by half-forgotten proverbs, or sentences, or 
 fragments of romance. A few words from a French author give 
 him the burden of the Old Clock on the Stair ; a leaf out of 
 Mather's Magnalia Christi is rhymed into The Phantom Ship ; 
 the ballad of the Count Arnaldos sets him dreaming over the 
 Secret of the Sea ; a verse of Euripides is the keynote of his 
 Voices of the Night ; a few lines from Goethe gather up the 
 essence of his Psalm, of Life. In the New World, but not 
 whoUy of it, he dwells with almost wearisome fondness on the 
 World " Old." Volumes of old days, old associations that we 
 cannot buy with gold, quaint old cities— Nuremberg, Bruges, 
 and Prague, old poets and painters — Becerra and Bassalin, 
 
196 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 Albert Durer, and Hans Sachs the cobbler bard, sweet old 
 songs, old haunted houses, the gray old manse, Nature the 
 dear old nurse, dear old England — on phrases and thoughts 
 like these his fancy broods. 
 
 American verse is frequently rough-hewn and audacious, 
 often pedantic, and its novelty is sometimes more striking 
 than its reality. Longfellow, on the other hand, seldom gives 
 us new thoughts, but he puts our best thoughts into the best 
 words with that high art which conceals itself. He cannot 
 create, but he cannot touch without adorning. There is 
 nothing in his works of the world-revealing insight of the 
 deepest penetrative imagination ; but from nature, man, and 
 books he constantly throws new illuminations on homely truth. 
 Woods in winter, a mason hewing blocks of stone, a Greek 
 legend, a broad river of the West, a gleam of sun, a bunch of 
 sea-weed, a handful of red sand, are occasions consecrated, like 
 the friends he addresses in his fine memorial sonnets. There 
 is nothing startling or outr6, or " wild and wondrous " in 2%e 
 Village Blacksmith, or The Beafer, The Beleaguered City, The 
 Light of Stars, The Bridge, or The Bainy Day ; but, in a degree 
 only inferior to the songs of Burns, they enhance our joys, 
 soften our sorrows, and mix like music with our toil, floating 
 upwards in storm and calm. 
 
 " Ever drifting, drifting, drifting, 
 On the sMfting 
 Currents of the restless heart, 
 Till at length, in hooks recorded, 
 
 They, like hoarded 
 Household words, no more depart." 
 
 The poem from which those lines are taken is among many 
 conspicuous proofs of Longfellow's command over every 
 English rhythm except blank verse, where he almost always 
 fails ; elsewhere he hardly ever uses a word out of tune, and 
 his sense of completeness guides him to round off, in fitting 
 space, the sound as well as the substance of his work. In 
 
VERSIFICATION. 197 
 
 illustration of his melody and onomatopoeic power we may 
 
 turn to the clanking of the bridal reins in the Slave's Dream, 
 
 the dirge of " the reign of violence " in the OceuUation of 
 
 Orion, to the "voices of Eld like trumpets blowing," and 
 
 " the plunge of the implacable seas " in the description of 
 
 the minstrel in the Wayside Inn, or to this contrast from 
 
 the Building of the Ship — a fine, though close, parallel to 
 
 Schiller's Song of the Bell : — 
 
 " Standing before 
 Her father's door 
 
 He saw the form of his promised bride ; 
 The sun shone on her golden hair. 
 And her cheek was glowing fresh and fair 
 With the breath of mom and the soft sea air ; 
 Like a beaiiteous barge was she 
 StUl at rest on the sandy beach 
 Just beyond the billows' reach ; 
 But he 
 Was the restless, seething, stormy sea." 
 
 With the mood of the last line the poet has little sympathy. 
 Wearing his learning lightly, he employs it to illustrate the 
 nooks of life rather than the glare and strife of history. He 
 forgets the " hollow roar " of " fights far away " in remembering 
 
 " The friendships old and the early loves " which 
 " Come back with a Sabbath sound as of doves 
 In quiet neighbourhoods." 
 
 He turns from the emblem of the spear to that of the " Uly 
 and the palm ; " from the frowns of martial men to 
 
 " Noble types of good 
 Heroic womanhood." 
 
 An American in his songs of labour, he is repelled by the 
 " loud vociferations of the street," and retires from them into 
 the sanctuary of the Bivina Commedia. His favourite 
 virtues are endurance, calm ; his confidants, gentle hearts ; 
 his pet themes the praise and love of children, his Weariness 
 being the most exquisite address ever made to them — 
 
198 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 " little feet ! that such long years 
 Must wander on through hopes and fears, 
 
 Must ache and bleed beneath your load : 
 I, nearer to the wayside inn, 
 Where toil shall cease and rest begin. 
 
 Am weary, thinking of your road. 
 
 " little hands ! that, weak or strong, 
 Have still to serve or rule so long, 
 
 Have stiU so long to give or ask ; 
 I, who so much with book and pen 
 Have toiled among my fellow-men, 
 
 Am weary, thinking of your task. 
 
 " little hearts ! that throb and beat 
 With such impatient, feverish heat, 
 
 Such limitless and strong desires ; 
 Mine, that so long has glowed and burned 
 With passions into ashes turned, 
 
 Now covers and conceals its fires. 
 
 " little souls ! as pure and white 
 And crystalline as rays of light 
 
 Direct from heaven, their source divine ; 
 Refracted through the mist of years. 
 How red my setting sun appears. 
 
 How lurid looks this soul of mine ! " 
 
 Longfellow is limited in his range, because he is dowered 
 with neither hate nor scorn. Singing glory to God, good- 
 will to men, " his ways are ways of pleasantness, and all his 
 paths are peace." Standing before the Arsenal his fancy hears 
 
 " The bursting shell, the gateway wrenched asunder, 
 The rattling musketry, the clashing blade. 
 And ever and anon in tones of thunder 
 The diapason of the cannonade." 
 
 But he turns from those discordant noises into the track of 
 his perpetual beneficence — 
 
 " Were half the power that fills the world with terror, 
 Were half the wealth bestowed on camps and courts, 
 Given to redeem the human mind from error 
 There were no need of arsenals and forts. 
 
MINOR POEMS. 199 
 
 "Down the dark future, through long generations, 
 The echoing sounds grow fainter, and then cease ; 
 And like a bell with solemn sweet vibrations 
 I hear once more the voice of Christ say. Peace. 
 
 " Peace ! and no longer from its brazen portals 
 The blast of war's great organ shakes the skies, 
 But beautiful as songs of the immortals 
 The holy melodies of Love arise." 
 
 Severe critics, on just grounds, complain of the poet's 
 ■want of concentration, and of the frequent conventionality of 
 the epithets in his earlier verses — a fault sometimes so con- 
 spicuous, that we can almost predict the terms he wiU apply- 
 to a Castilian hidalgo or old minnesinger. Generally speak- 
 ing, his later work is stronger ; more is said in less space, the 
 ideas foUow each other more rapidly, and the imagery is more 
 incisive. There is nothing in the Voices of the Night so 
 powerful as Victor Galhraith, or the Hebrew Cemetery, or 
 Enceladus, or the verses on the death of Wellington ; scarcely 
 anything so effective as the Bells of I/ynn, the sonnet on 
 the Ponte Vecchio at Florence, The Cumberland, the Castle- 
 huilder, or the best of the Birds of Passage. The series 
 of stories, half of home half of foreign growth, grouped 
 together under the title of the Wayside Inn, are perhaps un- 
 fortunate in suggesting a comparison with Boccaccio or 
 Chaucer ; but they are of more varied interest than those in 
 dough's Mari Magno, and passages of the Saga of Olaf have 
 the force of an Edda. From the fine prelude or overture to 
 the book, I may quote two characteristic pictures, pictures for 
 which — ^in one instance unconsciously to the autobiographer 
 — originals may happily be found close to where they were 
 
 drawn : — 
 
 " A Theologian, from the school 
 Of Cambridge, on the Charles, was there ; 
 Skilful alike with tongue and pen. 
 He preached to all men everywhere 
 The Gospel of the Golden Eule, 
 The New Commandment given to men, 
 
200 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 Thinking the deed, and not the creed, 
 Would help us in our utmost need. 
 With reverent feet the earth he trod, 
 For banished nature from his plan, 
 But studied stiU. with deep research 
 To build the Universal Church, 
 Lofty as is the love of God, 
 And ample as the wants of man. 
 
 " A Poet, too, was there, whose verse 
 Was tender, musical, and terse ; 
 The inspiration, the delight, 
 The gleam, the glory, the swift flight 
 Of thoughts so sudden that they seem 
 The revelations of a dream. 
 All these were his ; but with them came 
 No envy of another's fame ; 
 He does not find his sleep less sweet 
 For music in some neighbouring street. 
 Nor rustling hear in every breeze 
 The laurels of Miltiades. 
 Honour and blessings on his head 
 While living, good report when dead. 
 Who, not too eager for renown. 
 Accepts, but does not clutch, the crown ! " 
 
 Of Longfellow's more extensive works his so-called 
 dramas are failures. The Puritan plays in particular are 
 commonplace in matter and bald in versification. The 
 Spanish Student, more graceful than impressive, is made 
 musical hy the songs, and disfigured by an absurd close. 
 Miles Standish is a New England story, with some vigorous 
 touches, but the characters are lay figures — a diminutive 
 Cromwell and Milton, and a female puritan assertor of 
 woman's right to take the initiative. Evangeline, as the 
 best specimen of English hexameters, demonstrates the 
 difficulty which attends the introduction of that measure 
 into our language. Lowell writes of it justly as follows : — 
 
 " Your modern hexameter verses are no more 
 Like Greek ones than sleek Mr. Pope is like Homer ; 
 But set that aside, and, 'tis truth that I speak. 
 Had Theocritus written in English, not Greek, 
 
"EVANGELINE)" AND "THE GOLDEN LEGEND." 201 
 
 I believe that Ms exquisite sense would scarce change a line 
 In that rare tender virgin-like pastoral Evangeline 
 That's not ancient or modern ; its place is apart 
 Where time has no sway, in the realm of pure Art : 
 'Tis a shrine of retreat from earth's hubbub and strife, 
 As quiet and chaste as the author's own life." 
 
 The story is pathetic and founded on history, but here again 
 the characters play a minor part, and the passion is compara- 
 tively tame. The power of the poem consists in its vivid 
 realisation of American scenery ; of the Mississippi, father of 
 waters, and the fields of golden grain, and the hunter's camp 
 on the forest edge, and the armies of horses and wolves. The 
 passage beginning "Day after day they glided adown the 
 turbulent river " has been pointed to for its far horizons of 
 western stream and sky, like a landscape of Eembrandt. 
 LongfeEow's descriptions are inferior in luxuriance to those 
 of Unoch Arden, in subtlety to Browning's Italian pictures : 
 they are superior in simplicity. They do not adorn Nature 
 as a mistress, in the manner of Chateaubriand, with the sub- 
 jective fancies of a lover : they bring her before us as a 
 faithful nurse, careful for her children. In Evangeline the 
 poet follows the wheels of the emigrant's waggon through 
 " billowy bays of grass ever rolling in sunshine and shadow," 
 and " over them wander the buffalo herds and the elk and 
 the roebuck ; " this vivid realisation deepens into intenser 
 poetry in the pathos of the penultimate lines — 
 
 " Still stands the forest primeval ; but far away from its shadow. 
 Side by side, in their nameless graves, the lovers are sleeping. 
 
 Daily the tides of Hfe go ebbing and flowing beside them ; 
 Thousands of throbbing hearts, where theirs are at rest and for ever ; 
 Thousands of aching brains, where theirs no longer are busy ; 
 Thousands of toiling hands, where theirs have ceased from their 
 
 labours ; 
 Thousands of weary feet, where theirs have completed their journey." 
 
 The Golden Legend carries us to the other ends of the earth 
 — from the trackless forests to the monks of Italy, from an 
 
202 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 untried theme to one which half the imitators of Goethe have 
 been bold enough to attempt. This poem — ^in no sense a 
 drama — is disjointed, and so wanting in unity that it would 
 puzzle most readers who have closed the book to recount its 
 incidents. But it contains the highest flights of the author's 
 imagination, his mellowest music, his richest humour, and 
 some of his most impressive passages. In evidence I would 
 refer to the rhyme of Felix and the beautiful white bird, 
 Elsie's account of Gertrude's death, the ride through the 
 lane, the musings of the Abbot Ernestus, the talk of the 
 bride and bridegroom on the terrace over the Ehine, the 
 speech of Prince Henry from the Balcony at Genoa, and 
 Elsie's answering chant — 
 
 " The night is calm and cloudless, 
 And still as still can be. 
 And the stars come forth to listen 
 To the music of the sea. 
 They gather, and gather, and gather. 
 Until they crowd the sky, 
 And listen, in breathless silence, 
 To the solemn litany. 
 It begins in rocky caverns. 
 As a voice that chants alone 
 To the pedals of the organ 
 In monotonous undertone ; 
 And anon from shelving beaches, 
 And shallow sands beyond. 
 In snow-white robes uprising 
 The ghostly choirs respond. 
 And sadly and unceasing 
 The mournful voice sings on. 
 And the snow-white choirs still answer, 
 Christe, Eleison ! " 
 
 Perhaps, however, the work on which Longfellow's fame 
 most securely rests is Hiawatha. This poem, in which a 
 series of Idylls are strung together, on the thread of an idea 
 common to Indian and Scandinavian legend, has been called 
 an American Odyssey, an aboriginal Arabian Nights' Enter- 
 tainments, the Ancient Mariner of Transatlantic verse com- 
 
"HIAWATHA." 203 
 
 parisons nearly as dangerous as that between Bryant and 
 
 Wordsworth, too courageously instituted hy injudicious 
 
 friends. The merit of Hiawatha is rather that it is sm 
 
 generis, a transparent allegory, a sheaf of baUads, a child's 
 
 story book, and a poem full of morning breezes. Though 
 
 apparently written currente calamo, it really yields to none 
 
 of the author's works in artistic finish. The verse is indeed 
 
 somewhat monotonous, and painfully open to parody ; but, 
 
 within the limits of the volume, it preserves, with its few 
 
 notes, the freshness of a linnet's song. It has been said 
 
 that the popular imagination plagiarises itself in every 
 
 country : the common basis of national legend is here 
 
 seen to stretch beyond the circle of the Aryan races. 
 
 Hiawatha is, like Triptolemus or Bramah, the civiliser. His 
 
 friends Kwasind and Chibiabos are respectively Hercules the 
 
 monster-slayer and Apollo the singer, while some of the 
 
 attributes of Hermes are divided between lagoo and Paupa- 
 
 kewis. But these Indian demi-gods come into closer contact 
 
 with simpler forms of existence : their counsellors are beavers 
 
 and sturgeons, their oracles streams and birds. Into the 
 
 spirit of this primitive life Longfellow has thrown himself as 
 
 completely as he has into that of Jforse Paganism in the 
 
 Challenge of Thor. He is at home among the pine groves and 
 
 the prairies, and the great lakes of the Northland, and 
 
 " All the many sotinds of nature. 
 Borrow sweetness from Ms singing." 
 
 Hiawatha speaks of them with the familiarity of an 
 inhabitant : there is no trace of the grandiose style of the 
 tourist, and here and there, notably in the capture of 
 Kagahgee the king of the ravens, there is a touch of genuine 
 humour. In the best episodes of the volume — as the account 
 of the hero's infancy, of his early associates, of his sailing 
 forth on his mission of peace and good works, of the wooing 
 and the death of Minnehaha, of the son of the evening star. 
 
204 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 of the weird ghosts and the ghastly famine, — the parable 
 
 of human life under a guise of half-savage manners, life 
 
 with its three great stages of birth and love and decay, is 
 
 told ia a narrative of childlike tenderness and masculine 
 
 grasp, lit by an imagination like an Aurora BoreaUs. A 
 
 New York critic ridicules the European view that Hiawatha 
 
 is an American poem : it belongs, he insists, to the wigwam 
 
 and not to the Exchange. It is true that the feverish ardour 
 
 of Wall Street has no place in its pages ; but in celebrating 
 
 Eed Indian life, it inevitably discloses some of the features 
 
 of the people who have met and clashed with that life. Mr. 
 
 Hepworth Dixon, in one of those observant works which have 
 
 suffered partly from the prejudice of the public, partly from 
 
 the haste and questionable tact of the writer, justly dwells 
 
 on the extent to which the New Zealand myth about the 
 
 strength of the dead man passing into his conqueror applies 
 
 to the pioneers of the "West. Hiawatha sings the dirge of a 
 
 nearly vanished race in strains that recall the Briton legends 
 
 on the death of Arthur ; but it has also a prophetic side — 
 
 from the meeting point of two worlds of men, it looks before 
 
 as weU as after — 
 
 " I beheld, too, in that Yision, 
 All the secrets of the future, 
 Of the distant days that shall be. 
 I beheld the westward marches 
 Of the unknown crowded nations. 
 All the land was full of people, 
 Restless, struggling, toiling, striving. 
 Speaking many tongues, yet feeling 
 But one heart beat in their bosoms. 
 In the woodlands rang their axes. 
 Smoked their towns in all the valleys ; 
 Over all the lakes and rivers. 
 Rushed their great canoes of thunder." 
 
 Thackeray, who has a cynical pleasure in making even 
 his heroes seem absurd, has represented the noblest of them. 
 Colonel Newcome, in utter perplexity over the critical rever- 
 
PLACE IN LITEEATTJRE. 205 
 
 sions of judgment of his time. "He heard opinions that 
 amazed and bewildered him. He heard that Byron was no 
 great poet, though a very clever man. He heard that there 
 had been a wicked persecution against Mr. Pope's memory 
 and fame . . . that his favourite Dr. Johnson . . . did not 
 write English, etc. etc. All these opinions were openly 
 uttered over his claret, as he and Mr. Binnie sat wondering 
 at the speakers, who were knocking the gods of their youth 
 about their ears." In this matter, I confess to an old-fashioned 
 sympathy with the Colonel. Byron and Pope and the 
 dynasty of the old gods will be reinstated, and the half- 
 scornful, half- clamorous conspiracy against Longfellow will 
 ultimately fail. Miss Margaret Fuller, in The Dial, leads 
 the attack by a notice, in which she openly professes her 
 dislike of Aristides : she has been followed, on both sides 
 of the Atlantic, by the new school of critics, who have deter- 
 mined that nothing is to be accepted as poetry which is not 
 either unintelligible or disgusting. These very clever people 
 do not want a guide to direct, or an artist to charm, or a 
 musician to lull them to repose amid 
 
 " The tumult of the time disconsolate." 
 They seek a phenomenon to stare at, an enigma to unravel, 
 an ugly subject to dissect, a double lock to pick, something 
 on which to show their own skill as intellectual conjurors or 
 mental funambulists. Such critics, of various capacity, can 
 never estimate Longfellow at all. He has not indeed in- 
 tensity enough to take rank with the Bii Majores, but his 
 writings are deeper than they seem ; because every sentence 
 he has penned is as clear as crystal and as pure as snow. 
 There are seasons in this over -wrought, over -educated, 
 over-examined age, when we prefer his company to that of 
 the "grand old masters," when we turn from Dante and 
 Milton, even from Keats and Tennyson, to " songs that have 
 power to quiet the restless pulse of care " — songs, like this. 
 
206 AMEEICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 which, however haughtily superfine analysts may scout its 
 " commonplace," are likely to appeal to human hearts, when 
 Miss Fuller's rhapsodies on Beethoven and Plotinus shall 
 have passed like a purple smoke away — 
 
 " She dwells by great Kenhawa's side, 
 In valleys green and cool ; 
 And all lier hope and all her pride 
 Are in the village school. 
 
 " Her soul, like the transparent air 
 That robes the hills above. 
 Though not of earth, encircles there 
 All things with arms of love. 
 
 " And thus she walks among her girls. 
 With praise and mild rebukes ; 
 Subduing e'en rude village chixrls, 
 By her angelic looks. 
 
 " She reads to them at eventide 
 Of One who came to save ; 
 To cast the captive's chains aside. 
 And liberate the slave. 
 
 " And oft the blessed time foretells, 
 When all men shall be free ; 
 And musical as silver bells 
 Their falling chains shall be. , 
 
 "And following her beloved Lord 
 In decent poverty. 
 She makes her life one sweet record 
 And deed of charity. 
 
 " For she was rich, and gave up all 
 To break the iron bands 
 Of those who waited in her hall. 
 And laboured in her lands. 
 
 " Long since beyond the Southern Sea, 
 Their outbound sails have sped ; 
 While she, in meek humility, 
 Now earns her daily bread. 
 
 " It is their prayers, which never cease. 
 That clothes her with such grace ; 
 Their blessing is the light of peace, 
 That shines upon her face." 
 
FASHIONS OLD AND NEW. 207 
 
 With one exception the best work of the other Western 
 poets of note is vigorous, fresh, and rude : they think and 
 feel better than they speak : they are eager, impatient, loud, 
 apt to confound poetry with rhetoric, impetuosity with 
 power ; but they have contributed something distinctly new 
 to the literature of the world. This most applies to the 
 writer who, in the estimate of several claiming to direct 
 modern criticism, is the grandest single product of America. 
 
 The " Saturday Club " of Boston is one of the choicest of 
 social circles. There were wont to meet the leading meta- 
 physicians, humorists, poets, and lecturers of Harvard and 
 its neighbourhood — Dr. Howe, the recreator of Laura Bridg- 
 man ; Mr. Fields, the New England Murray ; Ticknor, the 
 critic of The Gid ; Hillard, the editor of Landor's Hellenics ; 
 Lowell, fresh from his Commemoration Ode; Bowen, dreaming 
 over Kant ; Holmes, brightest of talkers and kindliest of wits ; 
 Emerson, giving serene utterance to some careful paradox; 
 and, at the head of the table, diffusing over it a mellow sun- 
 shine, the author of Hiawatha. We can imagine the door 
 flung open wide, and bursting on this august and polished 
 company a strange figure, tall, stalwart, and disorderly, a 
 " specimen of native raw material," a cross between John the 
 Baptist and a Cherokee Indian. We fancy him striding to 
 the front, throwing down a bundle of manuscripts, and shout- 
 ing — "The kingdom of heaven is here : I am America : I am 
 Europe : I am Asia : I am Africa and the Polynesian Islands : 
 I am the North Pole, and the South Pole, and the Equator : 
 I am the Mississippi : I am Manhattan : I am the past and 
 the future, there is no difference ; I am female and male and 
 gymastical : I am Humanity : I am a Libertad : I sound my 
 barbaric yaup over the roofs of the world, — 
 
 ' Did you ask dulcet rhymes from me. 
 Did you find what I sang erewhUe so hard to follow, to understand ? 
 Why, I was not singing, erewhile, for yoai to follow, nor am I now. 
 
208 AMEEICAN LITEKATUBE. 
 
 What to such as you anyhow such a poet as I, therefore leave my 
 
 work 
 And go lull yourself with what you can understand ; 
 For I lull nobody, and you will never understand me : ' — 
 
 but the daintiest of Oxford have written odes to me, and 
 the most cynical of Camhridge. My English Editor, with all 
 his purification of my pages — where there is nothing pure 
 or impure, but all is immense — my Editor admits that I 
 am 'oceanic and colossal,' 'beyond compare the greatest of 
 American poets . . . one of the greatest now living in any 
 part of the world.' You, what are you ? Your verse is ' either 
 the poetry of an elegantly weak sentimentalism, or at bottom 
 nothing but maudlin puerilities, or more or less musical 
 verbiage, arising out of a life of enervation, or else that class 
 of plays, etc., of which the foundation is feudalism, with its 
 ideas of lords and ladies, its imported gentility, and the manners 
 of European high life below stairs in every line and verse.' 
 " But listen to one of my Dnmi Taps — 
 
 ' Beat ! beat ! drums ! — Blow ! bugles ! blow ! 
 Through the windows — through doors — ^burst like a ruthless force, 
 Into the solemn church, and scatter the congregation ; 
 Into the school where the scholar is studying ; 
 Leave not the bridegroom quiet — no happiness must he have now 
 
 with his bride ; 
 Nor the peaceful farmer any peace, ploughing his field or gathering 
 
 his grain ; 
 So fierce you whirr and pound, you drums — so shrill you bugles blow. 
 
 Beat ! beat ! drums ! — Blow ! bugles ! blow ! 
 
 Make no parley — stop for no expostulation ; 
 
 Mind not the timid — mind not the weeper or prayer ; 
 
 Mind not the old man beseeching the young man ; 
 
 Let not the child's voice be heard, nor the mother's entreaties ; 
 
 Make even the trestles to shake the dead, where they lie awaiting the 
 
 hearses, 
 So strong you thump, terrible drums — so loud you bugles blow !' 
 
 " Now, like Nebuchadnezzar, you shall digest a Leaf of 
 Grass — 
 
"WALT WHITMAN. 209 
 
 ' What do you see, Walt Wliitman ? 
 
 Who are they you salute, and that one after another salute you ? 
 
 I see a great round wonder rolling through the air ; 
 
 I see diminute farms, hamlets, ruins, grave-yards, jaUs, factories, 
 palaces, hovels, huts of barbarians, tents of nomads, upon the sur- 
 face ; 
 
 I see the shaded part on one side, where the sleepers are sleeping — 
 and the sunlit part on the other side, 
 
 I see the curious silent change of the Ught and shade, 
 
 I see distant lands, as real and near to the inhabitants of them as my 
 land is to me. 
 
 I see plenteous waters ; 
 
 I see mountain-peaks — I see the sierras of Andes and Alleghanies, 
 
 where they range ; 
 I see plainly the Himalayas, Chian Shahs, Altays, Ghauts ; 
 I see the giant pinnacles of Elburz, Kazbec, Bazardjusi ; 
 I see the Rocky Mountains, and the Peak of Winds ; 
 I see the Styrian Alps, and the Karnac Alps ; 
 
 I see the superior oceans and the inferior ones — the Atlantic and 
 
 Pacific, the sea of Mexico, the Brazilian sea, and the sea of Peru, 
 The Japan waters, those of Hindostan, the China Sea, and the GuKof 
 
 Guinea, 
 The spread of the Baltic, Caspian, Bothnia, the British shores, and the 
 
 Bay of Biscay, 
 The clear-sunned Mediterranean, and from one to another of its 
 
 islands, 
 The inland fresh-tasted seas of North America, 
 The White Sea, and the sea around Greenland. 
 
 I behold the mariners of the world ; 
 
 Some are in storms — some in the night, with the watch on the look- 
 out ; 
 Some drifting helplessly — some with contagious diseases.' " 
 
 These passages, far from being perversely selected, are 
 among the gems chosen by the poet's most enthusiastic 
 admirer ; nor do I deny that the first has merit. The second 
 is a short section from a long diorama of names, accumulated 
 in the same fashion. 
 " I saw the vision of the world and all the wonder that should be " 
 
 is the text and pith of the whole, amplified, by a simple pro- 
 cess, from Lord Salisbury's large maps and a copious gazetteer, 
 
 p 
 
210 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 into two pages of hearing and thirteen pages of seeing : 
 smelling, tasting, and touching are in this instance fortunately 
 omitted ; but it is by no means always so. Walt Whitman 
 is undoubtedly a writer of great force, but he is ruined as an 
 artist by his contempt for art — an impeachment nowise weak- 
 ened by the fact that, in edition after edition, he has added 
 and altered many times, without bettering the original scrawl. 
 He has a teeming brain on a big body, and he tosses every- 
 thing that the one or the other engenders into his powerful 
 or monstrous book. The result is a chaos of impressions, 
 thoughts, or feelings thrown together without rhyme, which 
 matters little ; without metre, which matters more ; and often 
 without reason, which matters much. There is no principle of 
 prosody on which he can be harmoniously read ; for, when we 
 are rarely rejoicing in the run of some discernible rhythm, 
 a block laid across the line throws us off the rails. His 
 words sometimes belong to no language, or they are used in a 
 contorted sense, which is the Tie plus ultra of a pedantry never 
 before found in conjunction with so much barbarism. A fervid 
 admirer admits that he is a Democratic formalist ; and, pro- 
 testing against the objections taken to hisviews of life, con- 
 fesses that " never before was high poetry so puddled and 
 adulterated with mere doctrine in its crudest form. Never 
 was there less assimilation of the lower dogmatic with the 
 higher prophetic element ... it is one thing to sing the song 
 of all trades, and quite another to tumble down together 
 the names of all possible crafts and implements in one un- 
 sorted heap ; to siug the song of all countries is not simply 
 to fling out on the page at random, in one howling mass, the 
 titles of all divisions of the earth, and so leave them." We 
 go further than this writer — "oii ycip irpo ye t^9 aXrj6el,a<; 
 Ti/j,7}Teo<; avijp" — in reprobating this reckless manner. If 
 Shakespeare, Keats, and Goethe are poets. Whitman is not. He 
 is, in this respect, "Athanasius contra mundum." Nor, despite 
 
WALT WHITMAN. 211 
 
 a wholesome dread of merely conventional morals, can we 
 whoUy pardon the taste of his presentation of Natura natu- 
 rans in her most unabashed forms, or acquiesce in his auda- 
 cious denial of all that civilisation has done to raise man 
 above the savage or the chimpanzee. No considerable writer 
 has been more devoid of the remotest sense of humour ; by 
 consequence, no one else who has written even tolerably 
 has perpetrated such utter absurdities. On the other hand. 
 Whitman exhibits some genius in his perception of natural 
 beauty, the charm of which in the Leaves of Gh-ass underlies 
 a cartload of crude Pantheism and naked Animalism, and is 
 especially conspicuous in his descriptions of the sea. The 
 battle-piece of sections 35-36, Would you hear of an old-time 
 sea-fight, has the vigour of Tennyson's Revenge; but how 
 inferior the form! His moral excellences are his abso- 
 lutely unaffected democratic philanthropy ; a confidence, like 
 Shelley's, in the world's great age beginning anew — ^like that 
 of Burns, in all the dwellers on its surface being brothers 
 at last ; and his intense pathetic sympathy with his fellow- 
 workers under every form of struggle, sickness, or sorrow. 
 Eough, even insolent, as the man at times appears, it should 
 not be forgotten that, during the terrible war, he went about 
 the most dangerous fields, ministering with gentle hands to 
 the 'wounded and the dying. Half the Drum Taps are 
 clarions ; the rest dirges or idylls, which only fall short of 
 masterpieces because their passionate regrets are expressed in 
 stammering speech. Few nobler laments have been written 
 in America than lAncdkCs Burial Hymn, the closing strophe 
 of which gathers up the preceding images in a burst of 
 irregular melody. 
 
 " I cease for my song for thee ; 
 From my gaze on thee in the west, fronting the west, communing 
 
 with thee, 
 comrade lustrous, with silver face in the night, 
 Yet each I keep, and all, retrievements out of the night ; 
 
212 AMEEICAN LITEKATUKE. 
 
 The song, the wondrous chant of the gray-brown bird, 
 
 And the tallying chant, the echo raised in my soul, 
 
 With the lustrous and drooping star, with the countenance full of woe, 
 
 With the lilac tall and its blossoms of mastering odour ; 
 
 With the holders holding my hand, nearing the call of the bird, 
 
 Comrades mine, and I in the midst, and their memory ever I keep — 
 
 for the dead I loved so weU, 
 For the sweetest, wisest soul pf all my days and lands^and this for 
 
 his dear sake. 
 Lilac and star and bird, twined with the chant of my soul. 
 There in the fragrant pines, and the cedars dusk and dim." 
 
 The following shorter piece on the same subject is equally- 
 worthy of the author's highest mood : — 
 
 " Captain ! my Captain ! our fearful trip is done ; 
 The ship has weathered every rack, the prize we sought is won ; 
 The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting. 
 While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring : 
 But O heart ! heart ! heart ! 
 O the bleeding drops of red 
 
 Where on the deck my Captain lies, 
 Fallen cold and dead ! 
 
 " Captain ! my Captain ! rise up and hear the bells ; 
 •Rise up — for you the flag is flung — for you the bugle trills ; 
 For you bouquets and ribbon wreaths — for you the shores a-crowdino- ; 
 For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning ; 
 Here Captain ! dear father ! 
 This arm beneath your head ; 
 
 It is some dream that on the deck 
 You've fallen cold and dead. 
 
 " My Captaiu does not answer, his lips are pale and still ; 
 My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will • 
 The ship is anchored safe and sound, its voyage closed and done • 
 From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won. 
 Exult, shores, and ring, bells ! 
 But I, with mournful tread. 
 
 Walk the deck my Captain lies. 
 Fallen cold and dead." 
 
 Nor inferior is his expression of a more general loss that of 
 foe as of friend, of the same race, on the same field 
 
WHITMAN AND BLAKE. 213 
 
 " Reconciliation. 
 
 " Word over all, beautiful as tlie sky ! 
 Beautiful that war, and all its deeds of carnage, must in time be 
 
 utterly lost ; 
 That the hands of the sisters Death and Night, incessantly, softly, 
 
 wash again, and ever again this soiled world ; 
 For my enemy is dead — a man divine as myself is dead ; 
 I look where he lies, white-faced and still, in the coffin — I draw near ; 
 I bend down, and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the 
 
 coffin." 
 
 Still more pathetic is the letter from the dying " Pete " to his 
 mother, and that entitled Vigil on the Fields. But even in 
 Whitman's best work there is constantly some provoking 
 rudeness that jars, as if a piece of glass had got into our bread : 
 we must take him as he is, a benevolent but unteachable 
 egotist, who has been told that he writes like the Hebrew 
 prophets till he has come to believe it, and regards any other 
 criticism as profanity. A better comparison is that instituted 
 between him and Blake ; but Blake, with all his occasional 
 lawlessness, had a tenfold stock of ideas, abounding wealth 
 of effective words, a lyric spring that has been likened to 
 Shelley's, and a plastic power, when he chose to exercise it, 
 of welding together thoughts and words into rich unities of 
 form and colour. The great English poet who has compared 
 them overestimates both, because he shares, and therefore 
 fails sufficiently to condemn, the diffuseness which marks 
 the rhapsodies of both. He has called attention to their 
 common points in the following sentences : — 
 
 " The great American is not a more passionate preacher of sexual 
 or political freedom than the English artist. To each the imperishable 
 form of a Universal Republic is equally requisite. To each all sides 
 and shapes of life are alike acceptable. From the ground of either 
 workman nothing is excluded that is not exclusive. The words of 
 either strike deep, and run wide, and soar high. They are both full 
 of faith and passion : both recall the fragments vouchsafed to us of the 
 philosophy of the East. The casual audacities of expression are well- 
 nigh identical. The divine devotion which makes men martyrs is 
 palpable in each. ... In details their work constantly coincides. A 
 
214 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 sound as of a sweeping wind, a prospect as over dawning continents at 
 the fiery instant of a sudden sunrise ; a splendour now of stars and 
 now of storms ; a strength and security of touch in small sweet 
 sketches of colour and outline — these are qualities common to the 
 work of either." 
 
 The critic runs on in a similar strain, with an eloquence sur- 
 passing that of his authors, and a passion of speech that 
 hurries off his judgment ; hut valeat pro tanio. It should at 
 least be rememljered that Blake was a wonderful, if sometimes 
 fantastic, artist ; and that where the writers compared coin- 
 cide, as in the prophetic hooks, Blake has a more powerful 
 stroke. There is nothing in Whitman that reaches near the 
 Song of Liberty, inspired by the downfall of the Bastile, 
 and published towards the close of the Heaven and Hell. 
 The one is a prodigious genius, marred by almost insane 
 violence : the other a writer of almost insane violence, occa- 
 sionally redeemed by a touch of genius. 
 
 Smoother, though less original, are the verses of Cincin- 
 natus, better known by his pseudonym of Joaquin Miller, 
 who has celebrated his Californian canons, or the " seas of 
 wild lands " that stretch beyond the Missouri, in a series of 
 stirring narratives known as the Songs of the Sierras. His 
 real experience of the life he represents is evident from the 
 genuinely fresh flavour of his work; from the occasional 
 ruggedness of his lines, which are those of a pioneer rather 
 than a trained man of letters. His rhymes, his rhythms, and 
 his grammar are often defective, and his imagery incongruous ; 
 as when he rhymes " wassail " with " tale," uses " fire " as a 
 word of two syllables, leaps from iambic to trochaic metre, 
 or talks of " the milk-white moon." He is in English litera- 
 ture an adventurer, and somewhat of a pirate. You cannot 
 read the description of the flood in the Arizonian without 
 comparing it with Miss Ingelow's High Tide in Lincolnshire ; 
 nor Kit CarsorCs Bide without remembering How theti 
 h'ought the Good News from Ghent to Aix: while his de- 
 
JOAQUIN MILLER. 215 
 
 scriptions of animate beauty and denunciations of creeds and 
 priests, both in manner and matter, recall Mr. Swinburne. 
 In the sometimes pathetic Arizonian, a gold-digger rejects 
 the love of a dark-eyed Mexican, in fidelity to a young blonde 
 he has left in old England, with a pledge to wait till he has 
 made his fortune. The fiercely passionate Indian girl allows 
 herseK to be swept away in a storm of wind and rain, 
 but haunts him, ever after, in the shape of a mystical " brown 
 winged moth." He comes home and finds, as he thinks, his 
 promised bride waiting for him, after twenty-one years, still 
 wonderfully young, with " the hair of gold that he vexed of 
 old," but unconscious of her truant. 
 
 " She does not know me, her long lost lover, 
 For my beard's so long and my skin's so brown, 
 That I well might pass myself off for another. 
 So I lifted my voice and cried aloud — 
 'Annette, my darling ! Annette Macleod !' 
 She started, she stopped, she turned, amazed ; 
 She stood all wonder with her eyes wild-wide, 
 Then turned in terror down the dusk wayside, 
 And cried as she fled, ' The man is crazed, 
 And calls the maiden name of my mother.' " 
 
 Our chief regrets are for the " brown moth." The hero 
 has read Lochsley Hall and keeps his purpose better. 
 
 " From a scene that saddens, from a ghost that wearies. 
 From a white isle set in a wall of seas, 
 From the kine and clover and all of these, 
 I shall set my face for the fierce Sierras ; 
 I shall make me mates on the stormy border ; 
 I shall beard the grizzly, shall battle again, 
 And -from mad disorder shall buUd me order 
 And a wild repose for a weary brain." 
 
 There is much sameness in MiUer's work. He recites, 
 in various forms, the tale of the " White Eose and Eed," and 
 he always enlists our sympathy with the latter. "Some 
 savage woman," with a river of hair and heart of gold. 
 
216 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 true as steel and "tawny red, like -wine," is his perpetual 
 heroine ; for 
 
 " AU the North-land hath not one 
 So warm of soul as sun maids are." 
 
 In Walker in Nicaragua he propounds the Anacreontic 
 moral — 
 
 " Love while 'tis day, night eometh soon, 
 Wherein no man or maiden may." 
 
 But his lay figures, whom we cannot help regarding as frag- 
 mentary representatives of real life, are never permitted, like 
 Byron's " Torquil" and " Neuha" in their coral cave, to carry 
 out this maxim in peace. His stories are all of them painful 
 tragedies. The note that underlies his occasionally buoyant 
 verse is again the dirge of Bryant, or of Siawatha, but more 
 mournful ; the author seems to take no glory in the half- 
 civilisation that is superseding his familiar friends, the 
 children of nature. The Tale of the Tall Alcade is (if we 
 allow for the influence of a manifest study of Mazefpa, 
 and The Prisoner of Chillon) the most striking of the series. 
 The description of the old judge, with the terrible story 
 buried in his heart — 
 
 " Half defiant, half forlorn, 
 Yearning for sympathy 
 Through the long years, 
 Spurning the secrecy 
 Burning for tears " — 
 
 is almost worthy of Hood ; and the touches of nature paint- 
 ing, as of the pines, after the massacre — 
 
 " Like long slim fingers of a hand 
 
 That sadly pointed to the dead " — 
 
 I 
 
 are both real and imaginative. 
 
 The author is less successful when he leaves the Sierras ; 
 but the feeling, at least, of the verse, suggested by the tomb of 
 
EDGAR ALLAN POE. 217 
 
 Byron, to whicli he bore from San Francisco a votive wreath, 
 is wise — 
 
 " In men whom men condemn as ill 
 
 I find so much, of goodness still ; 
 
 In men whom men pronounce divine 
 
 I find so much of sin and blot — 
 
 I hesitate to draw the line 
 
 Between the two, where God has not." 
 
 A few words in conclusion must suffice for the familiar 
 favourite whom Lowell, in the Fable for Critics, thus wittily 
 introduces : — 
 
 " Here comes Poe with his Raven, like Barnaby Budge, 
 Three-fifths of him genius and two-fifths sheer fudge." 
 
 This is true, but we must not omit to add that Poe's genius, 
 at its culminating point, threatens to transcend that of any 
 of his compeers. This wonderful writer is a phenomenon 
 per se ; he seems to have belonged to a sphere in which certain 
 elements of ordinary human nature are omitted, and others 
 are developed to an unparalled intensity. His excellences as 
 a poet are narrow, his virtues as a man still more so. He has 
 no humour, no general sympathies, no dramatic power (for 
 his Politian is the stupidest fragment of a play that survives), 
 and hardly any self-control. The amiable and ingenious 
 defence of his admirable editor, Mr. Ingram, shows that Poe 
 was ill used and maligned by Mr. Griswold, that he could 
 love and enlist affection, that he had reason to complain of 
 being ousted by his inferiors, and that he often set before 
 himself noble ideals ; but we must confess that he was often 
 " sad, and mad, and bad," and gloried in his madness and his 
 badness. Let us find, in the half insanity of a diseased 
 organism, the source and palliation of his errors of life and 
 frequent fractious jealousy. Setting these aside, we are left 
 to admire the flashes of the fancy and imagination with 
 which his best work is radiant. His precocity was almost as 
 
218 AMERICAN LITEEATUEE. 
 
 remarkable as Chatterton's, of whose career he often reminds 
 us. A fine critic — the late Mr. James Hannay — has said of a 
 short poem to a lady, written, we are told, at the age of fifteen, 
 that it is, like Horace's Ode to Pyrrha, " merum nectar." If 
 the date is correct, the classic finish of these lines can only 
 be called miraculous. 
 
 " Helen, thy beauty is to me 
 
 Like those Niceean barks of yore. 
 That gently, o'er a perfumed sea. 
 The weary, waywom wanderer bore 
 To his own native shore. 
 
 " On desperate seas long wont to roam, 
 Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face. 
 Thy Naiad airs have brought me home 
 To the glory that was Greece, 
 To the grandeur that was Rome. 
 
 " Lo ! in yon brilliant window niche, 
 How, statue-like, I see thee stand, 
 The agate lamp within thy hand ! 
 Ah, Psyche, from the regions which 
 Are Holy Land !" 
 
 The familiar Baven is, at the worst — i.e. by his own 
 account — a marvellous piece of mechanism ; The Bells a 
 triumph of jingle. In the author's best lyrics, the fervour of 
 his sympathy for himself makes artistic recompense for his 
 general lack of sympathy for others. The lines to the Colos- 
 seum, The City in the Sea, Eulalie, Lenore, To Annie, have 
 a fascination which we can neither explain nor resist ; and 
 even the semi- delirious horrors of The Conqueror Worm 
 and Ulalume, with its nonsensical " Astarte's bediamonded 
 crescent, distinct with its duplicate horn," are bewitched 
 by the music of the spheres. In AuTiabel Zee ^ his pathos is 
 
 ^ It were unjust to the author to omit this masterpiece of music and 
 tenderness from any collection of American verse ; but we must leave room 
 for extracts less familiar. 
 
EDGAR ALLAN POE. 219 
 
 most profound, and his passion at the whitest heat ; but the 
 love he immortalises might be shared by " the winged seraphs 
 of heaven." Nothing is more remarkable than the purity 
 which pervades all this author's verses : they are set in serene 
 skies, where no breath of his disordered life dares to ascend. 
 They are like nuns in the convent of a riotous city. Poe 
 lived in two worlds : the one was made desolate and miser- 
 able by his early orphanhood, his reckless youth, poverty, 
 drudgery, and the demons worse than those which beset and 
 blasted his career ; the other is the world of his inner mind, 
 the world of memories coming from afar. 
 
 " In the greenest of our valleys 
 
 By good angels tenanted, 
 Once a fair and stately palace, 
 
 Radiant palace, reared its head. 
 In the monarch Thought's dominion 
 
 It stood there. 
 
 " Never seraph spread a pinion 
 
 Over fabric half so fair. 
 Banners yellow, glorious, golden, 
 
 On its roof .did float and flow. 
 This, all this, was in the olden 
 
 Time, long ago." 
 
220 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 CHAPTEE VII. 
 
 POLITICAL AND MINOE POETS— LOWELL, WHITTIER, HOLMES, ETC. 
 
 Mr. James Eussell Lowell introduces one of the chapters 
 of his pleasant volume of Fireside Travels with these remarks : 
 " The first sight of a shore so historical as that of Europe 
 gives an American a strange thrill. What we always feel the 
 artistic want of at home is background. It is all idle to say 
 that we are Englishmen, and that English history is ours too. 
 It is precisely in this that we are not Englishmen, as we only 
 possess their history through our minds, and not by lifelong 
 association with a spot and an idea that we caU England." 
 The growth of a history on their own soil is, in the minds of 
 most Americans, a requisite to the development of national art. 
 Memories of the Eevolution war have suggested some stirring 
 verses ; as, " PaulEevere's Eide" in the Wayside Inn; several of 
 Hawthorne's prose-poems ; and Winthrop's Edwin Brothertoft ; 
 but the most effective national works of recent date owe 
 their generative impulse to the political movements of the 
 last quarter of a century. The assertion of Henri Beyle 
 (Stendthal) that Politics are like a stone tied round the neck 
 of Literature, and Goethe's warning to the young Germans, 
 who were reproaching him with a lack of patriotic fervour, 
 " Eemember politics are not poetry," must be accepted with 
 a reservation. As a rule, the wider the grasp of the poet, the 
 further is he removed from the partisan. In Shakespeare, as 
 
POETRY AND POLITICS. 221 
 
 in Chaucer, this comprehensiveness is so extreme that he 
 includes in his view of life (like that of a remote star with an 
 infinitesimal parallax) only the common points, and excludes 
 from it the differences of the two great systems of faith, 
 which in his youth were contending, and are still contending, 
 for -the dominion of Christendom. Dante and Milton, with 
 a narrow range, take more definite sides ; but their highest 
 poetry transcends the strife of Guelph and GhibeUine, of 
 Puritan and Cavalier. On the other hand, poetry of a 
 secondary, though still of a high, order may be referred to the 
 suggestions of contemporary history, i.e. to politics. Ballads, 
 not legendary or purely domestic, have often a political face ; 
 and this is true of the songs which, like the Marseillaise, 
 help to fight the battles, or, according to Fletcher of Saltoun, 
 make the laws of a nation. The stalks of asphodel which 
 move to and fro the Grygonian Eock grow under its shadow. 
 Even if we admit that the heroic thought which inspires 
 heroic deeds comes from a loftier source, the shrewd thought 
 that condemns or ridicules degenerate deeds is an offshoot of 
 local or temporary circumstances. Satire not merely per- 
 sonal is, almost always, more or less political. The poetry of 
 Sophocles seems to confirm Goethe's dictum ; that of Aris- 
 tophanes disproves it. Paradise Lost is comparatively im- 
 partial, but Hudihras would be naught without the animus 
 of its polemic. 
 
 The Biglow Papers, a series of metrical pamphlets born of 
 the great social and political struggle, to the phases of which 
 we have referred, are among the most original contributions 
 to American literature. Previous to the publication of this 
 work, Mr. James Eussell Lowell was already well known, 
 on both sides of the Atlantic, as the author of an extensive 
 volume of miscellaneous verses, in various measures and 
 themes, in several of which the zeal of the politician runs 
 alongside of the fervour of the poet. Generally speaking, his 
 
222 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 earlier efforts are more impetuous than powerful, and they 
 conspicuously illustrate the artistic defects often attributed 
 to his countrymen, as well as some of their peculiar and 
 characteristic merits. Buoyant and vigorous, but bearing on 
 every page the mark of haste, they display more fancy than 
 imagination. Lowell says of Bryant (punning on the cold- 
 ness of his manner) that " he dwells by himself in supreme 
 ice-olation : " the remark is made natural by the fact that his 
 own genius everywhere appears in opposition to Bryant's. 
 Far from shrinking into solitary places, he loves great cities 
 and their cries, and sets them to rhyme with hearty goodwill. 
 When he goes into the country, it is to have his blood sent 
 faster through his veins by the spring morning, and not to 
 dream among autumn woods. We may read the following, 
 one of the best of his descriptions, as a sufficient contrast to 
 Thanatopsis : — 
 
 " And what is so rare as a day in June ? 
 
 Then if ever come perfect days ; 
 Then Heaven tries the Earth if it he in tune, 
 
 And over it softly her warm ear lays. 
 Whether we look, or whether we listen. 
 
 We hear life murmur or see it glisten : 
 Every clod feels a stir of might, 
 
 An instinct within that reaches and towers, 
 And, grasping blindly above it for light, 
 
 Climbs to a soul in grass and flowers." 
 
 Mr. Lowell, a Yankee to the backbone, is intolerant of 
 English criticism ; but can anything be more perverse, after 
 the complete success of the last couplet, than to follow it up 
 with this expansion in bad rhythm and bad rhyme ? — 
 
 " The flush of life may well be seen ; ( ! ) 
 
 Thrilling back over hills and valleys 
 
 The cowslip startles in meadows green, 
 
 The buttercup catches the sun in its chalice ; 
 And there's never a leaf or a blade too mean 
 To be some happy creature's palace." 
 
 If we turn the page, in the same Vision of Sir Launfal, 
 
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 223 
 
 to the picture of the grim old castle, which " summer besieges 
 on every side/' or read Allegra, or The Fountain, or the 
 Indian Summer Reverie, we find, pervading them all, the 
 same juhilant energy or flush of life, and the same care- 
 lessness. The passage from which we have quoted runs on 
 " leaping and flashing," through a shoal of phantasies ; and 
 repeats itself in substance, a score of times, before coming to 
 a period. Mr. Lowell's earlier style is apt to be both verbose 
 and tautological — faults only half redeemed by its fluency and 
 richness. He writes in utter disregard of Pope's "greatest 
 art," and, unchecked by any reverences, contemns " the dead 
 blaspheming Past," " Bibliolatry," and the " dotard Orient," 
 after the fashion in which Dr. Mackay, Chartist poetaster 
 and later Times correspondent,' was used to deal with " old 
 opinions, rags, and tatters." The imagery in those poems, 
 drawn direct from nature, is generally correct and suggestive, 
 showing a keen eye and a fine sense of analogies : that 
 drawn from history is less appropriate. Pew Americans 
 know how to use the classics with due reticence ; Mr. Lowell 
 constantly abuses them. His pages are perpetually pestered 
 with schoolboy commonplaces ; as Phidian Joves, Syracusan 
 tyrants, Dodona groves, Olympus, Ganymede, Tyrtsean harps, 
 rattling shields at Marathon ; and confused by abstractions, as 
 The Actual, The Idea, The Age, Humanity, etc. — abstractions 
 more bombastic than metaphysical. Pew of his ballads are 
 wanting in fine lines ; but most of them are spoilt by incon- 
 gruities. The semi-political and social verses are, in sub- 
 stance, manly exhortations : we read them, in a sympathetic 
 mood, with a glow of enthusiasm ; but their fire never reaches 
 a white heat, and, on revisal, it seems to be merely smoulder- 
 ing. The Ode to Freedom, the verses on the Capture of 
 Fugitive Slaves, and those on the Present Crisis (bearing the 
 date 1845, and presumably referring to the annexation of 
 ^ i.e. during the war, when he upheld the cause of the slaveholders. 
 
224 AMERICAN LITERATURK. 
 
 Texas), are thick-set with stirring watchwords : few are more 
 capable of being recited with effect on platforms, but they 
 will not bear analysis. Mr. Lowell censures, with extreme 
 severity, a mixed metaphor in Dean Merivale's History. 
 What is a critic to say of the following ? — 
 
 "New occasions teach new diities; Time makes ancient good uncouth. 
 They must upward still and onward, who would keep abreast of 
 
 truth. 
 Lo, before us, gleam her camp-fires; we ourselves must pilgrims be — 
 Launch our Mayflower, and steer boldly through the desperate winter 
 
 sea, 
 Nor attempt the Future's portal with the Past's blood-rusted Icey." 
 
 "We are glad, since we have so much in the same kind 
 to answer for, that this bit of horticultural rhetoric is from 
 beyond sea." The Ode to Frwnce, which, by its name, pro- 
 vokes a terrible comparison, abounds in worse examples. 
 
 1 Mr. Lowell's early volume is by no means the product of 
 a poetaster ; but his Odes are, almost without exception, cal- 
 culated to encourage poetasters. His most famous perform- 
 ance in this direction, the Ode, recited at the Harvard 
 Commemoration, July 21, 1865, has been generally exalted, 
 on both sides of the Atlantic, as the author's masterpiece. It 
 does not seem to me, save in a few passages, to be even in 
 the second rank of his works. In this laborious and often 
 animated composition, platitudes lie side by side with vio- 
 lences, and attempts at strong writing too often result in 
 cacophony ; while the clear notes of its exultant patriotism 
 are marred by a continual snarling over the sea. 
 " Who now shall sneer ? i 
 
 That is best blood that hath most iron in't 
 
 ^ Few were inclined to "sneer,"' though many to regi-et. No victory 
 ever "tingled the ears'' of some of us with such exultation as that of Gettys- 
 burg, unless it were that of Sedan : but of late years Americans have proved 
 sometimes ungracious even to their ftiends on this side of the water ■ and 
 one but dares to doubt the thinness of the blood of Coeur de Lion. 
 
COMMEMORATION" ODE. 225 
 
 Tell us not of Plantagenets, 
 Hapsburgs, and Guelphs, wtose thin bloods crawl 
 Down from some victor in a Border brawl ! 
 
 Shout victory, tingling Europe's sullen ears 
 With vain resentments and more vain regrets." 
 
 The frequent pedantry of this performance is illustrated by 
 the close of the second strophe, in which we have twenty- 
 seven lines without a single period. 
 
 " But rather for that stem device, 
 The sponsors chose, that round thy cradle stood 
 In the dim unventured wood. 
 The Veritas that lurks beneath 
 The letter's unproUfic sheath." 
 
 In the next section we have one of the few exceptional 
 passages to which I have referred. 
 
 " Those love her best who to themselves are true, 
 And what they dare to dream of dare to do ; 
 
 They followed her and found her 
 
 Where all may hope to find ; ' 
 Not in the ashes of the bumt-oxit mind. 
 But beautiful, with danger's sweetness round her ; 
 
 Where faith, made whole with deed, 
 
 Breathes its awakening breath 
 
 Into the lifeless creed. 
 
 They saw her plumed and mailed, 
 
 With sweet, stem face unveiled, 
 And all-repaying eyes look proud on them in death." 
 
 But the fourth again subsides into prose, in the course of 
 which we are informed that 
 
 " Loves, hates, ambitions, and immortal fires, 
 Are tossed pell-mell together in the grave ;" 
 
 later we are assured that " the live coal behind the thought, 
 whether from Baal's stone obscene, or from, the shrine serene 
 
 Q 
 
226 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 of God's pure altar brought, bursts up in flame " ; and per- 
 plexed by the announcement that 
 
 " Some innative weakness there must be 
 In him who condescends to victory." 
 
 However we may condone the exaggeration, we can scarce 
 forgive the rhyme declaring President Lincoln to have been a 
 
 " Kindly-earnest, hrave, foreseeing man. 
 New birth of our new soU, the first American." 
 
 The eighth and ninth strophes are rich in commonplaces about 
 
 the " musing eye," the mighty ones of old sweeping by, dis- 
 
 voiced, naught abiding in the world but change, etc. : but we 
 
 must be satisfied to make good the charge of cacophony by 
 
 the example of a few lines : — 
 
 " We sit here in the Promised Land 
 That flows with Freedom's honey and milk ; 
 
 But 'twas they won it sword in hand, 
 Making the nettle danger soft for us as silk. 
 
 " The soul resents 
 Such short-lived service, as if blind events 
 Euled without her, or earth could so endure. 
 She claims a more divine investiture. 
 
 " They come transfigured back, 
 Secure from change in their high-hearted ways, 
 Beautiful evermore, and with the rays 
 Of mom on their white shields of expectation 1" 
 
 A passage toward the end is impressive, but with an obvious 
 echo of Tennyson's Guinevere — 
 
 " Bow down, dear Land, for thou hast found release ! 
 Thy God, in these distempered days. 
 Hath taught thee the sure wisdom of His ways, 
 And through thine enemies hath wrought thy peace ! 
 
 Bow down in prayer and praise ! 
 No poorest in thy borders but may now 
 Lift to the juster skies a man's enfranchised brow. 
 O beautiful ! my country ! ours once more ! 
 Smoothing thy gold of war-dishevelled hair 
 O'er such sweet brows as never other wore." 
 
i MINOR POEMS. 227 
 
 Despite such passages, the poem as a whole is a failure. 
 Mr. Swinburne is hardly too severe when he calls it a 
 " Thanksgiving Ode of wooden verse, sawn into unequal 
 planks, and tagged incongruously with tuneless bells . . . 
 modelled on the chaotic songs of ceremony, done to order 
 on State occasions by our laureates of the Eestoration and 
 Eevolution." 
 
 Several of the pieces in the same volume, as Under the 
 Willows, the Voyage to Vinland, the Wind ITarp, Auf 
 Wiedersehen, are much more successful. Similarly, in the 
 previous collection we admire The Beqimm, The ToTcen, 
 The Beggar Bard, The Growth of the Legend, Hebe, A Prayer, 
 The Ghost Seer, and The Forlorn (the last inspired by the 
 beautiful charity of Hood), where the poet sets to music 
 the hopes and fears common to North and South, Demo- 
 cratic and Eepublican. The verses to Irene overweigh all he 
 had composed for platforms, previous to the appearance of 
 his masterpiece. 
 
 " Hers is a spirit deep and crystal clear ; 
 
 Calmly beneath her earnest face it lies, 
 Free without boldness, meek without a fear, 
 
 Quicker to look than speak its sympathies ; 
 Far down into her large and patient eyes 
 
 I gaze (deep drinking of the infinite), 
 As, in the mid-watch of a clear still night, 
 
 I look into the fathomless blue skies : 
 So circled lives she with love's holy light. 
 
 That from the shade of self she walketh free. 
 
 " Cloudless for ever is her brow serene. 
 
 Speaking calm hope and trust within her, whence 
 Welleth a noiseless spring of patience. 
 
 That keepeth all her life so fresh, so green, 
 And full of holiness, that every look, 
 
 The greatness of her woman's soul revealing, 
 Unto me bringeth blessing and a feeling 
 
 As when I read in God's 'own holy book." 
 
 There is much even about the author's earlier works — the 
 
228 AMERICAN LITEEATITRE. 
 
 love of truth, the thirst for freedom, the hatred of meanness, 
 the perfermdwm ingenium Scotorum without their paralysing 
 caution — " Staves from the burly old Mayflower lay," and " a 
 smack of the pine woods," in which we " drones of the Old 
 World" find invigorating refreshment, and which serve to 
 countervail his prevailing diffuseness and occasional eccen- 
 tricity. 
 
 Mr. Lowell dwells so frequently on defects similar to his 
 own in some of his compeers that we must give him credit 
 for being conscious of, and struggling against, them. The 
 following, on a now obscure writer of Maine, has a wide 
 applicability : — 
 
 " Neal wants balance, lie tkrows Ms mind always too far, 
 And wMsks out flocks of comets and never a star. 
 He has so much, muscle, and longs so to show it, 
 That he strips himself naked to prove he's a poet.'' 
 
 These lines occur in the Fahle for Critics — a long and witty 
 series of criticisms in verse, descended, through Leigh Hunt's 
 Feast, from Suckling's Session of the Poets — in which Lowell 
 breaks ground on the field where he has since found his 
 harvest. The intrinsic merit of this piece lies in its candour 
 and the general accuracy of its estimates. The " whole 
 tuneful herd" of American authors are reviewed with fair 
 appreciation and good-natured banter ; but the catholicity 
 and discernment of the author's taste are especially conspicu- 
 ous in his lines on Emerson, Longfellow, Hawthorne, Cooper, 
 Irving, Edgar Poe, and Judd. He overpraises Willis, and 
 does scant justice to Bryant, but his recognition of the latter's 
 relation to Wordsworth shows that his intense nationality 
 has not blinded him to the superiority of the English classics. 
 The style of the Fable for Critics is rapid and sparkling ; 
 i,ts "rhythmical trinkets" glitter like icicles in moonlight. 
 It is " all armed with points, antitheses, and puns," which 
 follow each other like sparks from a Leyden jar. In illustra- 
 
"FABLE FOE CRITICS." 229 
 
 tion of his manner of conjuring in verbal illusions, we raay 
 take, from the introduction to the Fahle, Apollo's lament over 
 Daphne. The poet speaks through the mouth of the discon- 
 solate god : — 
 
 &^ 
 
 " My case is like Dido's, lie sometimes remarked, 
 When I last saw my love, slie was fairly embarked : 
 Let hunters from me take this saw when they need it-r- 
 YoTi're not always sure of your game when you've treed it. 
 Just conceive such a change taking place in one's mistress ! 
 What romance would be left ? Who can flatter or kiss trees ? 
 And, for mercy's sake, how could one keep up a dialogue 
 With a duU wooden thing that wiU. live and will die a log ? 
 Not to say that the thought would for ever intrude 
 That you've less chance to win her the more she is wood. 
 Ah ! it went to my heart, and the memory still grieves. 
 To see those loved graces aU taking their leaves ; 
 Those charms beyond speech so enchanting, but now 
 As they left me for ever, each making its bough ! 
 If her tongue had a tang sometimes more than was right, 
 Her new bark is worse than ten times her old bite." 
 
 Or take this satire on a bad book : — 
 
 " This is the forty-fourth copy you've brought me ; 
 I've given them away, or at least I have tried. 
 But I've forty-two left standing all side by side, 
 (The man wh.o accepted that one copy died)." 
 
 The following allusion to the brilliant talker and nebulous 
 writer Alcott, is still more pointed : — 
 
 " While he talks he is great, but goes out like a taper 
 If you shut him up closely with pen, ink, and paper ; 
 Yet his fingers itch for them from morning tm night. 
 And he thinks he does wrong if he don't always write ; 
 In this, as in all things, a lamb among men, 
 He goes to sure death when he goes to his pen.'' 
 
 But page on page of this sort of thing becomes tiresome ; 
 and, not unfrequently, as in the jests on a graveyard, even 
 tasteless. LoweU has on most occasions "enough of wit," 
 but seldom " as much again to govern it." 
 
 Mr. Lowell informs us that his view of the Mexican war 
 
230 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 as a national crime, perpetrated in the interest of slavery, led 
 to the publication in 1846, of the first of his series of Biglow 
 Papers. This series closed in 1848. After an interval of 
 thirteen years, the second hegan to appear in 1861 : it con- 
 cludes with an imaginary speech, addressed to the Eepublican 
 March Meeting, of 1866. In reviewing those remarkable 
 productions, in which, through the masks of three distinct 
 types of New England character, the poet endeavours to 
 enforce his own political and patriotic sentiments, we have 
 little to add to his own defence of the dialect in which they 
 are written. Bishop Percy, in dedicating his Eeliques to the 
 Countess of Northumberland, apologises for bringing " the 
 rude songs of ancient minstrels before the. notice of her who 
 adorns courts by her presence, and diffuses elegance by her 
 example " — an apology conceived in the spirit, and couched 
 in the fine language, of the eighteenth century. But the 
 success of Percy's experiment marked the beginning of a re- 
 action in favour of simpler modes of thought and expression, 
 which, in spite of the bad example of Johnson, and the great 
 example of Gibbon, has ever since been gaining ground in 
 England. The revived study of our old Literature, the rise of 
 a national philology, the influence of Burns and Words- 
 worth, have combined to direct attention to the primitive 
 forms of our speech preserved in outlying districts. Our 
 living scholars dwell on the part played by dialectical 
 regeneration in arresting the corruptions of a language, and 
 the advantages of reinforcing it from its living roots. What 
 were once called vulgarisms have in many cases carried the 
 day against "diction ; " and our authors are willing to admit as 
 true, and, with some reservations, to act upon the mottoes 
 prefixed to the second series of the Biglow Papers — " Unsere 
 Sprache ist auch eine Sprache," " Vim rebus aUquando ipsa 
 verborum humilitas affert." The indispensable condition to 
 the use of a country dialect is that it be natural to the writer : 
 
BIGLOW PAPERS— DIALECT. 231 
 
 it must be " unsere Sprache." There is as much affectation 
 
 in the assumption of a patois, as in a starched or swollen 
 
 style of speech : the Scotticisms of an Oxonian, besides being 
 
 generally incorrect, are as incongruous as the classical 
 
 drapery of the Ayrshire bard's letters to Clarinda. Mr. 
 
 Lowell has taken pains to show that the peculiarities of the 
 
 Yankee dialect are not indigenous, that the pronunciations 
 
 and meanings given to old words now strange to Englishmen, 
 
 and the use of words now unknown in England, were familiar 
 
 to Spenser, Drayton, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, "Webster, and 
 
 Middleton, even to Herrick, Herbert, Dryden, and Swift. 
 
 This vindication of their parentage (supported by Dr. 
 
 Marsh and other authorities in Philology) is successful as 
 
 an answer to what Mr. Lowell calls "the European Mrs. 
 
 Grundy : " we are more concerned to know that he has 
 
 been happy in his use of the words and phrases in question. 
 
 A man of culture and refinement, the chances were greatly in 
 
 favour of his failure ; but the permanent popularity of his 
 
 work is a voucher for his success. He is not only at home 
 
 in the rural dialect : it seems to fit his genius better than the 
 
 EngUsh of his University. In some instances 
 
 " The ploughman's whistle, or the trivial flute 
 Finds more respect than great ApoUo's lute," 
 
 because the tune is of more consequence than the instru- 
 ment ; and our author is an admirable player on his satiric 
 idyllic flute. The quasi- dramatic form which he has adopted 
 is also fortunate, as it confines a too discursive fancy within 
 limits. His penchant for classical illusion finds vent in a 
 sort of self-satire, through the mouth of the worthy, though 
 pedantic, Puritan minister, the Eev. Homer Wilbur. Hosea 
 Biglow himself, the rough New England patriot, is ready, 
 like Admiral Eodney, to " damn the Trojans and damn the 
 Greeks ; " while the letters of Mr. Sawin are excellent 
 examples of one of the most effective forms of satire — that 
 
232 AMEEIOAl^ LITERATURE. 
 
 in -vrliich contemptible qualities are stripped of their varnish 
 
 by the sheer effrontery of the wearer. 
 
 The Biglow Pape/rs, though written as pamphlets, are 
 
 better matured and more condensed than Mr. Lowell's other 
 
 works (for political fervour, as well as personal passion, 
 
 intensifies) : their style is more trenchant and origrnal, 
 
 and they are really humorous. Their humour is removed 
 
 on the one side by its breadth from the epigrammatic 
 
 wit of the Dunciad, on the other, from the humour of 
 
 our great dramatists, by the obviousness of its ideas. Of 
 
 the characters with which it plays, Birdofredum Sawin is a 
 
 thorough grotesque (Hosea Biglow is almost wholly serious), 
 
 and Parson Wilbur a mere sketch of a patriotic pedant. 
 
 The book derives its popularity from the incisive force of 
 
 the expression given to the sentiments shared by the author 
 
 with a large section of his countrymen, and many of the 
 
 lines most frequently quoted owe everything to their startling 
 
 directness, as — 
 
 " Ef you take a sword and dior it 
 And go stick a feller thru,' 
 Gov'ment aint to answer for it, 
 God'll send the bill to you. 
 
 " Ninepence a-day for killing folks, 
 Comes kin' o' low for murder " — 
 
 or in the lines of the pious editor's creed, characteristically 
 clenched with a pun — 
 
 " I don't believe in principle, 
 But, 0, I du in interest" — 
 
 or in the honest candidate's declaratory letter, where the log- 
 rolling of elections is ridiculed in the verse, " Ef you git me 
 inside the White House," etc. In these instances, as in the 
 satires on martial glory — a favourite theme with modern 
 reformers — the humour consists in tearing the paint off dis- 
 honesty, and leaving it naked, to its own condemnation. It 
 
BIGLOW PAPERS— SATIRE. 233 
 
 is the same power that has given such wide celebrity to the 
 famous thoughts of Mr. John P. Eobinson ; as in the verse 
 about the Apostles, where the contrast between Christian 
 profession and military practice is drawn with a disregard 
 of conventionality, that delights some readers and horrifies 
 others. The religion of Americans is more homespun than 
 that of Englishmen ; but it is neither less sincere nor less 
 fervid, and the quaintness of their language in speaking of 
 sacred things may be paralleled by passages from our elder 
 divines, who lived at a time when men faced the facts of 
 spiritual experience more boldly than we do, because they 
 were more closely inwoven with their everyday life. Mr. 
 Lowell speaks of the common sense of his hero being 
 " vivified and heated by conscience." His own poetic powers 
 are set on fire by moral indignation. He is a good hater, 
 and his hatreds sharpen the edge of his most effective verses. 
 There is a fine satiric scorn in the following, put into the 
 mouth of Calhoun : — 
 
 " Freedom's keystone is slavery, that ther's no doubt on, 
 
 It's STitthin' thef s — wlia'd ye call it ?— divine, 
 
 And tlie slaves that we oilers mate the most out on, 
 
 Air them north o' Mason and Dixon's line. 
 The mass ough' to labour, an' we lay on soffies, 
 
 Thet's the reason I want to spread Freedom's aree. 
 It puts all the cunnin'est on us in office. 
 And reelises our Maker's orig'nal idee, 
 Sez John C. Calhoun, sez he." 
 
 Such lampoons as these were the " agentia verba Zycam- 
 ben" which, with Uncle Tom's Cabin, and the speeches of 
 Garrison, Phillips, and Sumner, helped to hasten the " irre- 
 pressible conflict " of the two contending forces in the western 
 continent. Of those two forces Mr. Lowell had written in 
 1846— 
 
 " Ef I'd my way I hed ruther 
 
 We should go to work, an' part ; 
 They take one way, we take t'other — 
 Guess it wouldn't break my heart." 
 
234 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 Fifteen years afterwards he had changed his miad — or 
 rather, events had changed it. The nation had grown greater, 
 the adverse interests more imposing, and the passions on both 
 sides more frantic. Her success in the affair of Texas made 
 the South drunk as with new wine. Disdaining equality, she 
 aspired to a permanent domination, and, after triumphing in 
 the passage of the Fugitive Slave BiU, suffered her first defeat 
 in Kansas. Then came the Dred Scot decision, the Boston 
 anti-slavery riots, the raid of John Brown. The South hanged 
 John Brown. " That," replied Emerson, on behalf of Massa- 
 chusets, " that consecrates the gallows." Men in this temper 
 must either part or fight, and the manner in which the South 
 attempted to part made it necessary for them to fight. 
 Armed in secret by the continuous treachery of five years, she 
 began the attack on the United States in the same fashion in 
 which she had begun the attack on Kansas — ^in the fashion 
 of Brooks's attack on Mr. Sumner. The second series of the 
 Biglow Papers is animated by the spirit of an uncompromis- 
 ing Unionist as well as that of an Abolitionist. Copperheads 
 and Secessionists, as such, are lashed as mercilessly as the 
 Slaveholders whom the mock - glorification of Southern 
 society, put into the mouth of a mean political scamp, 
 was certainly not calculated to conciliate. Mr. Sawin 
 loquitur — having settled in " Old Virginny," and married 
 a lady of the " fus' fem'ly " there, whose maiden name was 
 Higgs— 
 
 " Fact is, we air a different race, an' I for one don't see, 
 Seoh havin' oilers ben the case, how V ever did agree ; 
 It's sunthin' thet you lab'rin' folks up North hed ough' to think on 
 That Higgses can't demean themselves to ruUn' by a Lincoln ; 
 Thet men (an' guVnors tu) that hez sech Normal names ez Kckens, 
 Accustomed to no kin' o' work, 'thout 'tis to givin' lickens, 
 Can't measure votes with folks that git their living from their farms, 
 And prob'ly think that Law's ez good as havin' coats o' arms." 
 
 Nevertheless, our hero feels some difficulty about the finan- 
 
BIGLOW PAPERS— SECOND SERIES. 235 
 
 cial condition of his adopted country, and fears that " swappin' 
 silver off for lead ain't the sure way to win." 
 
 " An' fact it doos look now ez thougli — but folks must live an' larn — 
 We should git lead, an' more'n we want, out o' tlie Old Consarn . 
 But when I see a man so wise an' honest ez Buchanan 
 A-lettin us hev' all the forts an' all the arms an' cannon, 
 Admittin' we wuz nat'lly right an' you waz naf lly wrong, 
 Coz you wuz lab'rin' folks and we wuz what they call bong-tong ; 
 An' coz there wam't no fight in ye more'n in^ a mashed potater. 
 While two o' us can't skurcely meet but what we fight by natur ; 
 An' th'aint a bar-room here would pay for openin' on't a night 
 Without it giv' the priverlege o' bein' shot at sight ; 
 Which proves we're Natur's noblemen, with whom it don't surprize 
 The British aristox'y should feel bound to sympathize," etc. 
 
 Throughout the volume there is a relic of the spirit of the 
 Ironsides, who " smote Agag hip and thigh," but the writer 
 recognises the difficulty and delicacy as well as the magni- 
 tude of the task hefore his country. "That exe of ourn," 
 says the ghost of an old Pilgrim Father who appears to 
 Biglow in a dream, 
 
 " Opened a gap that ain't bridged over yet. 
 Slavery's your Charles, the Lord hez gin the exe ; 
 ' Our Charles,' sez I, ' hez gut eight million necks' " 
 
 Lowell's satire has lost none of its former point : his 
 patriotism glows with a deeper fervour. His songs rise out 
 of the battlefield " like rockets druv' by their own burnin'," 
 strengthened by " the strain of being in deadly earnest," and 
 dignified by the conviction, laid up in the heart of every New 
 Englander, that 
 
 " Earth's biggest Country's gut her soul. 
 An' risen up Earth's greatest Nation." 
 
 The serious poetry of this volume reaches a higher stan- 
 dard tha,n the author has elsewhere attained. The short 
 rural romance entitled The Courtin' is one of the freshest bits 
 of pastoral in the language; and the descriptions incidental 
 to the longer pieces — as that of the rail-posts " like ghosts o' 
 
236 AMEEICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 sogers should'rin' ghosts o' guns;" of the blackbirds " chatt'rin' 
 in tall trees an' settlin' things in windy congresses ;" of the 
 spring leaping from April into June, and the lines on the 
 singing of the Bobolink — are all the more effective because 
 they are only incidental. As a specimen of his graver and 
 maturer music, we select the following verses, in which tender 
 regrets are mixed with triumph, verses both soft and strong, 
 artistic and original. This, not the Commemoration Ode, is 
 the author's masterpiece. I set it beside Annabel Zee, and 
 regard these two poems, totally different though they are, 
 as the two high-water marks of Transatlantic verse. 
 
 " Under the yaller pinea I house. 
 
 When sunshine makes them all sweet-scented, 
 An' hear among their farry boughs 
 
 The baskin' west wind purr contented ; 
 While 'way o'erhead ez sweet an' low, 
 
 Ez distant beUs thet ring for meetin', 
 The wedged wil' geese their bugles blow, 
 
 Further and further South retreatin.' 
 
 " Or up the slippery knob I strain. 
 
 An' see a hunderd hills like islan's 
 Lift their blue woods in broken chain 
 
 Out o' the sea o' snowy silence ; 
 The farm-smokes, sweetes' sight on airth, 
 
 Slow thru' the winter air a shrinkin', 
 Seem kin' o' sad, an' roun' the hearth 
 
 Of empty places set me thinkin'. 
 
 " Rat-tat-tat tattle through the street 
 
 I hear the drummers makin' riot, 
 An' I set thinkin' o' the feet 
 
 Thet follered once an' now are quiet, — 
 White feet ez snowdrops innercent, 
 
 Thet never knowed the paths o' Satan, 
 Whose comin' steps there's ears thet won't, 
 
 No, not lifelong, leave off awaitia'. 
 
 " 'Ta'n't right to hev the young go fust, 
 All throbbin' full o' gifts an' graces ; 
 Leavin' life's paupers dry ez dust 
 
 To try and make-b'lieve fill their places : 
 
BIGLOW PAPEES— SECOND SERIES. 237 
 
 NotUn' but tells us wut we miss, 
 
 Ther's gaps our lives can't never fay in, 
 An' tliet world seems so fur from this, 
 
 Lef for us loafers to grow gray in ! 
 
 " My eyes cloud up for rain ; my mouth 
 
 Will take to twitchin roun' the comers ; 
 I pity mothers, tu, down South, 
 
 For all they sot among the scorners : 
 I'd sooner take my chance to stan' 
 
 At Jedgment where your meanest slave is, 
 Than at God's bar hoi' up a hai^' 
 
 Ez drippin' red ez your'n, Jeff Davis ! 
 
 " Come, Peace ! not like a mourner bowed 
 
 For honor lost an' dear ones wasted, 
 But proud to meet a people proud. 
 
 With eyes that teU o' triumph tasted ! 
 Come, with han' grippin' on the hilt. 
 
 An' step that proves ye Victory's daughter ! 
 Longin' for you, our sperits wilt 
 
 Like shipwrecked men's on raf s for water ! 
 
 " Come, while our country feels the lift 
 
 Of a gret instinct shoutin' forwards. 
 An' knows that freedom a'n't a gift 
 
 Thet tarries long in ban's o' cowards ! 
 Come, sech ez mothers prayed for, when 
 
 They kissed their cross with lips thet quivered, 
 An' bring fair wages for brave men, 
 
 A nation saved, a race delivered ! " 
 
 We have come a long way iiere from Sail Colwmhia, and 
 tlie Star-spangled Banner. An English statesman not long 
 ago said, " Jefferson Davis has made a nation of the South." 
 It is much more true to say that his frustrated conspiracy 
 made a nation of the North. The welding heat of the 
 Liberation war refined the hearts of the people, whom it 
 united, hy withdrawing them from the pursuit of selfish ends 
 and the studies of European art to the realisation of patriotic 
 aims and aspirations. During many subsequent years in 
 America the bonds of foreign fashion were broken, and even 
 Commerce for a season became a secondary interest. The 
 
238 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 heroic deeds and feelings of a time when, from Maine to 
 
 Colorado, it has been a disgrace to have done nothing for 
 
 the common cause, 
 
 " Have cast in shadow all the golden lore 
 Of classic Greece and Eome." 
 
 The same impulse which has made patriots of poets, and has 
 given us Longfellow's Wreck of the Cumberland, and his 
 beautiful Christmas Bells, and the terse dramatic lines entitled 
 MUed at the Ford, has also made poets of patriots, and has 
 given us the Biglow Pampers. 
 
 The only sentences of this volume which an Englishman 
 need read with regret are those in which the author discloses 
 his feeling towards England. Like many of his co-patriots 
 he persists in confounding together the perfectly consistent 
 action of our Government and the inconsistent and unsympa- 
 thetic criticisms of a portion of our press. The spretce injuria 
 formce still rankles in his mind ; he delights in calling 
 Concord Eoad " John Bull's Eun," and asserts that we have 
 undone the healing work of fifty years. In his idyll entitled 
 Mason and Slidell he exclaims — 
 
 " Shall it be love or hate, John 1 
 It's you thet's to decide." 
 
 The critics of both nations can perform no worthier task 
 than that of pointing the way to a wise decision, and helping 
 to smooth over international differences by a candid recogni- 
 tion of the claims on either side. Nothing more should be 
 needed to secure the harmonious action of the two great 
 sections of the Anglo-Saxon race than the mutual consecra- 
 tion of the maxim which Mr. Lowell has himself so nobly 
 expressed — " Our true country is bounded on the north and 
 the south, on the east and the west, by Justice." 
 
 Of the anonymous ballad literature of the war only a 
 few pieces are worthy of commendation. One of the earliest. 
 
"BATTLE-HYMN OF THE REPUBLIC." 239 
 
 whicli appeared in a New Orleans paper of 1856, in antici- 
 pation of the event, beginning — 
 
 " Men of the South, our foes are up 
 In fierce 4nd grim array " — 
 
 with My Maryland, and the Blue Flag, adopted by the 
 rebels, are merely vigorous. Some of the Northern parodies 
 on the presentations to the miscreant Brookes are more pointed : 
 but the first recognised popiilar refrain of the Abolitionists is 
 that circulated after the tragedy of Harper's Terry, with the 
 well-known lines, possibly suggested by Tom Bowling — 
 
 " John Brown's body lies mouldering in the grave, 
 But his soul is marching on." 
 
 At a later date, in the midst of the struggle, Mrs. Julia Ward 
 Howe, authoress of several fine religious verses (notably I%e 
 Dead Christ), was inspired to her adaptation, in a strain that 
 recalls the Jewish Deborah, or Macaulay's Battle of Naseby, of 
 the rough old catch — 
 
 " Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord ; 
 He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored ; 
 He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword ; 
 His Truth is marching on. 
 
 " I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps ; 
 They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps ; 
 I have read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps ; 
 His Day is marching on. 
 
 " He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat ; 
 ^ He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment seat ; 
 Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer Him ; be jubilant, my feet — 
 Our God is marching on. 
 
 ■" In the beauty of the Klies Christ was born across the sea, 
 With a glory in His bosom, that transfigures you and me ; 
 As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free. 
 While God is marching on." 
 
 We are told that, an aged negro having contrived to con- 
 
240 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 vey to the prisoners in the infamous " Libby " ^ the result of 
 Gettysburg, they sang aloud this Baitle Hymn of the Ee- 
 jpuUic instinct with warrior Puritanism. Tidings of the 
 victory reached the North on the 4th of July, with announce- 
 ment of the fall of Vicksburg, and the people in public 
 assemblies, rising as to a National Anthem, chanted the same 
 verses, to which Lincoln listened with tears of gratitude. 
 
 After LoweU, John Gkeenleaf Whittier is the poli- 
 tical Ijrrist, par excellence, of America. The two poets 
 have much in common : they have been friendly rivals in 
 popularity, both practical powers in moulding or hastening 
 the movements of history. Of the latter it has been said, 
 " Every word " he wrote on public questions " was a blow ; 
 many a timeserver, who was proof against Garrison's denun- 
 ciations or PhOlips's invectives-, quaUed before Whittier's 
 rhymes." They were always on the same side — opponents of 
 every image of oppression; hot-blooded philanthropists; demo- 
 crats in the European, republicans in the American, sense ; 
 iierce against aristocracies and kings ; inordinate haters of 
 priests ; otherwise liberal on religious, intolerant on moral, 
 differences. The inspiration of both was due more to life 
 than books, though Whittier, a farmer's boy, is said to have 
 been instigated to his early efforts by reading Burns in the 
 fields. Both have written too much, and, judging from internal 
 evidence, too fast. One carries at once the glow and the 
 common faults of youth into maturity, the other into age. 
 Mr. John Bright, a closely kindred spirit to the Quaker bard, 
 quotes Longfellow as saying of him, " He seems always to 
 improve ;" but even Whittier's later verse, rapid as a torrent, 
 is apt to overflow its banks. He seldom knows when to stop, 
 and, ringing endless changes on a few ideas, has never suffi- 
 ciently discerned the difference between nouns and adjectives. 
 
 1 The deu in Richmond in which the Union prisoners, whom Davis refused 
 to exchange, were nearly starved to death. 
 
JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIEE. 241 
 
 His fellow poet, patriot, and sinner, properly attributes to 
 
 him — 
 
 " A fervour of mind that knows no separation 
 Twixt simple excitement and pure inspiration," 
 
 adding, naively — 
 
 " Then his grammar's not always correct nor his rhymes, 
 And he's prone to repeat his own lyrics sometimes." 
 
 No one stands more in need of the advice given to Southey, 
 " sq[ueeze out the whey," and to no works more than to his is 
 the maxim "irkeov {jfiiav iravTO'i" more applicable. His 
 lyrics have a verve, swing, and fire that impart to the reader 
 a share of the writer's enthusiasm, but only a few of 
 the best leave a permanent impression. His arrows strike 
 the targe, but for the most part on the outer rings : he has 
 never hit the white, as Lowell has done at least once or twice. 
 A large' proportion of the verses of this excellent professor of 
 peace may be fairly characterised as war-songs. In virtue of 
 these he has been universally hailed as the laureate of the 
 anti-slavery struggle, to the issue of which he contributed, in 
 an equal degree, with the orators and pamphleteers by whose 
 side he fought, and the soldiers, against whose profession he 
 declaimed. The answer of Massachusetts to Virginia about 
 fugitive slaves, by which he first became known throughout 
 the Union, is as distinct a challenge as any glove thrown 
 down by a cavalier of Eupert or a modern Parisian editor. 
 Three stirring stanzas must suffice to illustrate his martial 
 mood — 
 
 "We hear thy threats, Virginia ! thy stormy words and high. 
 Swell harshly on the Southern winds, which melt along our sky. 
 Yet not one hrown hard hand foregoes its honest labour here, 
 No hewer of our mountain oaks suspends his axe in fear." 
 
 Then, after a description of the reefs of Labrador and Cape 
 Ann, and their fishermen — 
 
 E 
 
242 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 " The cold nortli light and wintry sun glare on their icy forms, 
 Bent grimly o'er their straining lines, or wrestling with the storms, 
 Free as the winds they drive before, rough as the waves they roam. 
 They laugh to scorn the slaver's threat against their rocky home. 
 
 " But for us and for our children, the vow which we have given 
 For freedom and humanity is registered in heaven ; 
 No slave-hunt in our borders — ^no pirate on our strand, 
 No fetters in the Bay-State — no slave upon our land." 
 
 In a similar key are The Moral Warfare, The New Tear, New 
 Ranvpshire, The Hunters of Men, Stanzas for- the Times, The 
 Branded Hand, Paean, and in the same grim style, without a 
 touch of humour (of which Whittier, unlike Lowell, is utterly 
 devoid), the lines suggested by an auctioneer of New Orleans 
 recommending a negress for sale on the stand as "A good Chris- 
 tian." Alongside of this group, is another, in which pathos 
 prevails, the best known being The Farewell of a slave to her 
 daughters, with the refrain — 
 
 " Gone, gone, — sold and gone 
 To the rice swamp dank and lone.'' 
 
 The whole series culminates and fitly closes in Laus Deo, the 
 burst of acclamation with the " ring and swing of bells of joy " 
 that celebrated the passage of Lincoln's constitutional amend- 
 ment. 
 
 " Tacit indignatio versus " is equally applicable to Whit- 
 tier's invectives against other forms of tyranny, of which, 
 whether in Russia or Eome, Naples or New England, he has 
 a catholic abhorrence. Especially he commemorates and 
 denounces the persecution of his own forefathers by the Puri- 
 tans. To this theme one of the longest and strongest of his 
 minor pieces, Cassandra Southwick, is devoted. Few of his 
 polemics are without power ; but they are multiplied almost 
 to weariness : we turn with relief to his pastorals, impres- 
 sions of the pleasant sights and sounds of nature (for which 
 few poets have had a keener eye or ear), or simple ballads. 
 
WHITTIER'S BALLADS, 243 
 
 generally with some moral attached, relating to incidents real 
 or imaginary of rural life. The most flowing of his mainly 
 descriptive poems is that read on the banks of the Mer- 
 rimack, at the close of the war, entitled Bevisited : I select 
 four of its sixteen stanzas — 
 
 " The roll of drums and the bugles wailing 
 Vex the air of our vales no more ; 
 The spear is beaten to hooks of pruning, 
 The share is the sword the soldier wore. 
 
 " Sing soft, sing low, our lowland river, 
 Under the banks of laurel bloom, 
 Softly and sweet, as the hour beseemeth, 
 Sing us the songs of peace and home. 
 
 " Shatter in sunshine over thy ledges, 
 
 Laugh in thy plunges from fall to fall ; 
 
 Play with thy fringes of elms and darken 
 
 Under the shade of the mountain wall. 
 
 " Here in the calm of thy seaward valley 
 Mirth and labour shall hold their truce ; 
 Dance of water and mill of grinding, 
 Both are beauty, and both are use." 
 
 Whittier's narrative masterpiece is Maud MuUer — a version of 
 Browning's Statue and the Bust, more suited to an American 
 meadow than to a Florentine palace. About half of the 
 verses tell the story — 
 
 " Maud Miiller, on a summer's day, 
 Eaked the meadow sweet with hay : 
 
 The Judge rode slowly down the lane, 
 Smoothing his horse's chesnut mane." 
 
 He draws his bridle and receives from her hands a draught 
 of water from a bubbling spring, and speaks — 
 
 " Of the grass and flowers and trees, 
 Of the singing birds and the humming bees. 
 
244 AMEEICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 At last, lite one who for delay 
 Seeks a vain excuse, he rode away : 
 
 Maud Miiller looked, and sighed 'Ah me ! 
 That I the Judge's bride might be ! ' 
 
 The Judge looked back, as he climbed the hill 
 And saw Maud Miiller standing still. 
 
 ' Would she were mine, and I to-day 
 Like her, a harvester of hay !' 
 
 But he thought of his sisters, proud and cold, 
 And his mother, vain of her rank and gold ; 
 
 So closing his heart, the Judge rode on, 
 And Maud was left in the field alone. 
 
 But the lawyers smiled that afternoon 
 When he hummed in. court an old love tune. 
 
 He wedded a wife of richest dower. 
 She wedded a man unlearned and poor. 
 
 Oft when the wine in his glass was red. 
 He longed for the wayside well instead. 
 
 And oft when the summer sun shone hot 
 On the new-mown hay, in the meadow lot. 
 
 In the shade of the apple-tree again, 
 She saw a rider draw his rein. 
 
 Sometimes her narrow kitchen walls 
 Stretched away into stately halls, 
 
 And for him who sat by the chimney lug. 
 Dozing and grumbling o'er pipe and mug, 
 
 A manly form at her side she saw. 
 And joy was duty and love was law ; 
 
 Then she took up her burden of life again, 
 Saying only, ' It might have been.' 
 
 Mas for maiden, alas for Judge, 
 
 For rich repiner and household drudge ! 
 
LONGER POEMS. 245 
 
 God pity them both, and pity us all 
 Who vainly the dreams of youth recall ! 
 
 For of all sad words of tongue and pen, 
 
 The saddest are these, ' It might have been.' " 
 
 Of Whittier's longer works none has much unity. The 
 earliest, Mogg Megone (1835), is, by his own confession, only 
 " a framework for sketches of the scenery of New England 
 and of its early inhabitants." The story of a double treachery 
 and double murder committed by a girl, and the death of the 
 Jesuit Ealle, leagued with the savages against the English, 
 might have been thrilling in the hands of Eobert Browning, but 
 is unsuited to the author. The Bridal of Pennacooh (1848), 
 though more mature, is one of those Indian episodes which 
 have been superseded by Hiawatha. Of his later considerable 
 pieces. Snowbound (1865) is the narrative of a winter idyll, 
 beautifully told by an old man, who recalls the circumstances 
 of his father and all the family being " shut in from the 
 world without " in a country farm, but making themselves 
 happy in the sufficient kingdom of their mutual loves. The 
 passages of regret for the ravages of time and change, con- 
 spicuously the apostrophe to the dead sister, are adequate to 
 the theme ; and, even in a brief review, the closing lines 
 should have a place — 
 
 "And thanis, un traced to lips unknown. 
 Shall greet me, like the odours blown 
 From unseen meadows newly mown, 
 Or Ulies floating in some pond, 
 Wood-fringed, the wayside gaze beyond ; 
 The traveller owns the grateful sense 
 Of sweetness near, he knows not whence, 
 And, pausing, takes with forehead bare 
 The benediction of the air." 
 
 Among the Hills, consisting mainly of descriptions of scenery 
 and character, might be appropriately called a summer idyll ; 
 while the Pennsylvania Pilgrim and the King's Missive are 
 attempts to do the same poetical justice to the German and 
 
246 AMERICAN LITERATUEE. 
 
 Quaker element among the early settlers as has often been 
 done to the Puritans. The Tent on the Beach is another 
 effort to give a semblance of unity to a collection of sepa- 
 rate pieces, by putting them in a frame. On an American 
 sea-shore — which recalls the sands between Nahant and Lynn 
 — ^three friends have pitched a tent, there " to fling their loads 
 of custom down and escape a while from cares that wear the 
 life away." The dramatis personce are — a lettered magnate, 
 a sun-tanned traveller, and 
 
 " A dreamer born, 
 Who with a mission to fulfil 
 Had left the Muses' haunts to turn 
 The crank of an opinion mill. 
 
 In still shut bays on windy capes 
 
 He heard the call of beckoning shapes, 
 And, as the gi-ay old shadows prompted him,i 
 To homely moulds of rhyme he shaped their legends grim." 
 
 This editor, during the picnic, entertains the company by 
 telling a series of pleasant tales, remarkable for smoothness, 
 quiet beauty of sentiment, and occasional instances of vivid 
 imagery. The music of Bivermouth Bocks, The Palatine, and 
 The Grave hy the Lake, rivals that of Longfellow's Wayside Inn. 
 The most striking of the series is the Brother of Mercy — Piero 
 Luca — who, on his deathbed, feeling himself too poor for the 
 " grand company" of heaven, is abandoned by the stern monk, 
 his confessor, but welcomed by the angels as one who, like 
 Abou Ben Adhem, loves his fellow-men. The same supreme 
 trust in the Divine love, which is the sum of Whittier's ardent 
 faith, appears in the beautiful religious verses entitled the 
 Eternal Goodness and Our Master. These are Catholic hymns, 
 in the widest sense, commended by their humility as well as 
 their comprehensiveness. The spirit which pervades them is 
 condensed in the following verses : — 
 
 1 This fatal termination to the line illustiutes Whittier's inveterate care- 
 lessness ; but much of this volume is comparatively free from his defects. 
 
SEVENTIETH BIRTHDAYS. 247 
 
 " And so beside the silent sea 
 I wait the muffled oar ; 
 No haxm from Him can come to me 
 On ocean or on shore. 
 
 " I know not where His islands lift 
 Their fronded palms in air ; 
 I only know I cannot drift 
 Beyond His love and care. 
 
 " brothers ! if my faith is vain, 
 If hopes like these betray, 
 Pray for me that my feet may gain 
 The sure and safer way." 
 
 Whittier excels in a form of composition whicli has in 
 America been carried to excess, — the writing of addresses, 
 dedications, and epistles. Though prone to the amiable 
 weakness of over-estimation, all his eulogies contain something 
 characteristic of the subject as well as of the wiiter, whose 
 transparent sincerity condones the excess of personal regard. 
 Such are the short odes or sonnets to W. L. G. — again cele- 
 brated as "The Eeformer" — to the memories of Thomas 
 Shipley and John Woolman, to FoUen, to Eandolph of 
 Eoanoke, to Channing, to John Brown of Ossawatomie ; the 
 address, with the rare merit of condensation, to Thomas Starr 
 King, and the lines addressed to Bryant on his seventieth 
 birthday, November 3, 1864, with the stanza — 
 
 " Thank God ! his hand on Nature's keys, 
 Its cunning keeps at life's full span ; 
 But dimmed and dwarfed in days like these. 
 The poet seems beside the man." 
 
 Thirteen years passed, and on a similar anniversary, Decem- 
 ber 17, 1877, Bryant, whose old age to the last was green, 
 wrote, in turn, in terms which represent the almost universal 
 feeling entertained towards a man who claims from us more 
 than the admiration due to his imperfect art. 
 
248 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 " I should be glad to celebrate in verse the seventieth, return of 
 John Greenleaf Whittier's birthday ; but I find I must content myself 
 with humble prose. ... I rejoice at the dispensation which has so 
 long spared to the world a poet whose life is as beautiful as his verse, 
 who has occupied himself only with noble themes and treated them 
 nobly and grandly, and whose songs in the evening of life are as sweet 
 and thrilling as those of his vigorous meridian. If the prayers of those 
 who delight in his poems shall be heard, that life will be prolonged in 
 all its serenity for the sake of a world which is the better of his having 
 viled." ^ 
 
 In the same spirit wrote the veteran Eichard H. Dana, — 
 
 "Unwilling to lose the opportunity of giving some mark of respect 
 to one of so much truth to nature, manliness, and independence ;" and 
 adding, " although this be little else than an apology, I offer it with 
 the plea that in one's ninetieth year not much more could be expected 
 at a day's notice." 
 
 Among the verse tributes of the interesting festival the 
 first place is properly assigned to one of the finest sonnets of 
 Longfellow, addressed to the " Hermit of Amesbury," under 
 the title of The Three Silences. Garrison's address to " The 
 Poet of our Love " is fuU of his ever-generous gratitude to a 
 feUow-worker and faithful friend. A true poet — the only 
 other save Whittier of his sect — of whom, had space permitted, 
 more should have been said — Bayard Taylor, who had 
 travelled far, and written well of the East and West, con- 
 tributes some of his always flowing lines, beginning — 
 
 " Snow-bound for earth, but summer-souled for thee 
 Thy natal morning shines. 
 Hail, Friend and Poet ! Give thy hand to me, 
 And let me read its lines." 
 
 Edmund C. Stedman offers a cordial homage. Paul H. Hayne 
 — Idn to the brave Southern reactionary we have found in 
 fight with Webster — sends two stanzas, that come from him 
 with a peculiar grace — 
 
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 249 
 
 " From this far realm of pines I waft thee now 
 A brother's greeting, poet tried and true ; 
 So thick the laurels on tliy reverend brow, 
 
 We scarce can see the white locks glimmering through. 
 
 " 0, pure of thought ! earnest in heart as pen, 
 The tests of time hath left thee tindefiled ; 
 And o'er the snows of three score years and ten 
 Shines the unsullied aureole of a child." 
 
 In the same series is The Golden Calendar, by Oliver Wen- 
 dell Holmes, one of the American authors whom, from his in- 
 tellectual ubiquity, it is hard to classify. The ample outlet 
 for energy of all kinds in " The States " enables one man in 
 his time to play many parts — as physician, professor, judge, 
 farmer, senator, or diplomatist. We no sooner agree to rank 
 a writer as a poet than he reappears as a historian or teacher 
 of theology, next as a sculptor, " fiddler, or buffoon," and — 
 faUing in all, according to Lord Beaconsfield — as a critic, till, 
 growing inapatient of his transformations, we exclaim, " Eest, 
 rest, perturbed spirit." Fluent authors wax " desperate with 
 imagination," and "there is a great scattering of brains." 
 Holmes is mainly a humorist, but he takes fair rank as a 
 political and patriotic poet in his Old Ironsides, a stirring 
 appeal for the integrity of the Flag, though tattered in a 
 hundred fights ; his Lexington, his Centennial Harvard Songs, 
 his Odes to Washington and Webster, his Songs in war time, 
 his story of Buriher Hill, and memorial verses to Lincoln, and 
 to Sumner. Many of his always graceful vers de soeiiti, as the 
 old Punch Bowl, lean rather to the side of pathos than 
 humour. Others, including half of the Breakfast Table Series, 
 as Homesick in Heaven, Under the Violets, etc., are purely 
 serious. Several are marred by the versatility of a genius, 
 that, unable to contain its heat, throws it off in fireworks. 
 We are tempted to remind an author, with whom Latin 
 quotations are frequent, " non omnia possumus omnes ; " but 
 
250 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 wherever, as in the following, he gathers hinaself together, he 
 is successful : — 
 
 The Nautilus. 
 
 " Its webs of living gauze no more unfurl ; 
 Wrecked is the ship of pearl, 
 And every chambered cell. 
 Where its dim dreaming life was wont to dwell, 
 As the frail tenant shaped his growing shell, 
 Before thee lies revealed, 
 Its irised ceiling rent, its sunless crypt unsealed ! 
 
 " Year after year beheld the silent toil 
 That spread his lustrous coil ; 
 Still, as the spiral grew. 
 He left the past year's dwelling for the new, 
 Stole with soft step its shining archway through, 
 Built up its idle door, 
 Stretched in his last-found home, and knew the old no more. 
 
 " Build thee more stately mansions, my soul, 
 As the swift seasons roU ! 
 Leave thy low-vaulted past ! 
 Let each new temple, nobler than the last, 
 Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast. 
 Till thou at length art free. 
 Leaving thine outgrown shell by life's unresting sea ! " 
 
 Half the literary men, and all the literary women of this 
 century in America, seem to have written verses. Most of them 
 are respectahle, and so many are more so that, after dwelling 
 on a few of the authors who most saliently represent the ten- 
 dencies of their age and country, we can only name a few of 
 their followers. Belonging to the earlier period are the 
 Pilgrim Fathers of J. Pierpont; Woodworth's Old Oaken Bucket; 
 Home, Sweet Home, by J. H. Payne ; the verses of Washing- 
 ton Allston, with the refrain, "We are one;" and Epes Sar- 
 gent's A Life on the Ocean Wave. Eminently worthy of note^ 
 are the miscellaneous and patriotic verses of James Gates 
 Percival ; the sparkling fancies of the Culprit Fay, and the 
 patriotic American Flag, by J. Eodman Drake ; the fashion- 
 ' Besides those mentioned in connection with Whittier's birthday festival. 
 
MINOR POETS. 251 
 
 able satire in the Don Juan measure, entitled Fanny, by 
 Fitz-Greene Halleck, author of the famous historical lyric, 
 Marco Bozzaris ; the Curiosity, and tuneful miscellanies 
 of Charles Sprague ; the poems of Cranch, of N. P. Willis, 
 especially that by the latter, beginning " The Shadows lay 
 along Broadway," and of J. G. Holland; Brownell's Lyrics 
 of the War; the Pike Court Ballads of John Hay; Sheri- 
 dan's Bide, and other pieces, by T. Buchanan Eead ; H. 
 Timrod's addresses to the Confederate dead ; the well- 
 balanced stanzas of James A. HiHhouse ; the plays of Conrad 
 and Bird ; Woodman, Spare that Tree, and the Whip-Poor- 
 Will, by George P. Morris ; Alfred B. Street's Settler, Gray 
 Forest- Bogle, and Forest Walk; the remarkable Sonnets of 
 Jones Very ; The King's Bell, and other pieces, of E. H. 
 Stoddard ; numerous thoughtful verses of Edgar Faucit, F. 
 Ticknor, and G. Parsons Lathrop ; the ballads, grave and gay, 
 of T, Bailey Aldrich, whose Bdbie Bell is a popular favourite, 
 and whose Ij/nn Terrace is a fine diorama of foreign scenes ; 
 Piatt's Western Windows: with the group ^ of female sing- 
 ing birds, fairly represented by the religious and moral verses 
 of the youthful prodigies Lucretia and Maria Davidson ; with 
 
 1 The gallantry of criticism has never been so stretched as in regard to 
 some of these ladies, e.g. of Mrs. Osgood, we are told that "her poems sing 
 of themselves," with "lovely grace and bewitching melodiousness ;" of Mrs. 
 Preston, "that her intellect is more robust and shows greater intensity ; " of 
 Mrs. Hunt, that " her imagination is subtle and her sentiment profound ; " of 
 Mrs. "Whitman, that "her volume is a book of rare passionate beauty, marked 
 by fine mental characteristics," and that "she is undoubtedly the finest 
 female poet New England has produced." I have seen nothing in any of these 
 writers that comes within sight of Mrs. Browning, or of Mrs. Hemans, Miss 
 Proctor, Miss Ingelow, or Miss Eossetti. Mrs. Whitman has an interest for 
 us, as the lady to whom, on the death of his first wife, Edgar Poe paid his 
 addresses ; but her versification is favourably represented by this stanza : — 
 
 " I paused on Grecian plains to trace 
 Some remnant of a mightier race. 
 Serene in sorrow and in strife, — 
 Calm conquerors of death and life, 
 Types of the godlike forms that shone 
 Upon the sculptured Parthenon." 
 
252 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 those of Hannah F. Gould, Alice and Phoebe Carey, E. A. 
 Lewis, Harriet Spofford, and Celia Thaxter, Mrs. F. S. 
 Osgood, Mrs. M. J. Preston, Mrs. Helen Hunt; and Mrs. 
 Whitman. A more ambitious effort is the strange and richly- 
 coloured Eastern romance of ZopMel — on a theme similar to 
 that of Moore's Loves of the Angels and Byron's Heaven and 
 Earth — by " Maria del Occidente " (Mrs. Brooks), whom, 
 with some exaggeration of friendship, Southey, one of her 
 English hosts and admirers, declared to be "the most im- 
 passioned and imaginative of all poetesses." We may add 
 one other name, that of Mrs. Sigourney, whose blank verse 
 descriptions of nature approach those of Bryant, and con- 
 clude with the following specimen of one of her lighter pieces, 
 to illustrate the use that the poets of the West have made of 
 the musical nomenclature of their country : — 
 
 Indian Names. 
 " Ye say they all have passed away, 
 
 That noble race and brave ; 
 That their light canoes have vanished. 
 
 From off the crested wave. 
 That 'mid the forests where they roamed. 
 
 There rings no hunter's shout ; 
 But their name is on your waters. 
 
 Ye may not wash it out. 
 " 'Tis where Ontario's billow, 
 
 Like ocean's surge is curled ; 
 Where strong Niagara's thunders wake 
 
 The echo of the world ; 
 Where red Missouri bringeth 
 
 Rich tribute from the West, 
 And Rappahannock sweetly sleeps 
 
 On green Virginia's breast. 
 " Ye say their cone-like cabins, 
 
 That clustered o'er the vale, 
 Have fled away like withered leaves, 
 
 Before the autumn gale. 
 But their memory liveth on your hills, 
 
 Their baptism on your shore ; 
 Your everlasting rivers speak 
 
 Their dialect of yore. 
 
FEMALE POETS. 253 
 
 " Old Massachusetts wears it 
 
 Within her lordly crown ; 
 And broad Ohio bears it 
 
 Amid his young renown. 
 Connecticut hath wreathed it 
 
 Where her quiet foliage waves ; 
 And bold Kentucky breathed it hoarse 
 
 Through all her ancient caves. 
 
 " Waehuset hides its lingering voice 
 
 Within his rocky heart ; 
 And Alleghany graves its tone 
 
 Throughout his lofty chart. 
 Monadnook on his forest hoar, ^ 
 
 Doth seal the sacred trust ; 
 Your mountains buUd their monument, 
 
 Though ye destroy their dust." 
 
254 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 AMERICAN TRANSCENDENTALISM. 
 
 Leaving Cambridge, and taking the train on the other side of 
 Boston, twenty minutes bring us to Concord, in Massachusetts. 
 On one side of this " haunt of ancient peace " there lies, half 
 buried in an orchard, a house whose attraction has been likened 
 to that of the Arabian Mecca — the home of the most incisive 
 writer, the most original thinker of the West. Unlike Long- 
 fellow, Emerson is an American of the Americans, nor does 
 the contrast end here. The works of the one are finished 
 wholes ; of the other, fragments, rude though rich : the one 
 soothes, the other excites us : the one loves to adorn the 
 incidents of daily life, the other sees only general laws : the 
 one runs history and biography into his verse, the other is an 
 abstract moralist and metaphysician : the one maintains the 
 connection between his country and the Past, the other is the 
 moving spirit of a still recent revolution in the world of 
 letters. An American writer finds his country well repre- 
 sented in the Paris Exhibition by the portrait of Emerson in 
 its picture gallery ; a sentiment which, giving a but slightly 
 exaggerated expression to the feeling of a large section of 
 educated Americans, calls for an examination of the sources 
 and claims of an influence so widely extended. In comparing 
 Mr. Emerson's English with his home reputation, we must 
 deduct from the former his prestige as a brilliant conversa- 
 
ANTECEDENTS— "THE DIAL." 255 
 
 tionalist, and the power exerted by the " controlling sincerity " 
 of his character. His name is to us the sign-post of an inter- 
 esting stage in the progress of Transatlantic thought, and of 
 a curidus chapter in the history of Mysticism. 
 
 When the solitudes of the New World began to give place 
 to noisy cities, the brains of her people were expended on the 
 Farm or the Exchange, with a zeal only modified by the spirit 
 and formulae of the Faith that led the founders of the Northern 
 States across the sea, and continued to infuse a religious 
 element into their enterprises. We have seen that this ele- 
 ment which elevated the settlers of New England above 
 ordinary emigrants, adding to their strength, and giving a faster 
 dye to their morality, was yet, in its original form, no more 
 favourable to freedom or variety of thought than the Indus- 
 trialism by which it was surrounded. The attitude assumed 
 by the early Puritans toward the Quakers across the sea was 
 that of men who had been taught by persecution how to perse- 
 cute J and while the more elastic Mysticism of Fox took on new 
 shapes in Philadelphia, the Calviaism of Edwards remained 
 rigid in Connecticut. Meanwhile the storm of the Eevolu- 
 tionary war had diverted the majority of active minds into 
 channels of activity hostile alike to poetry and metaphysics, 
 and when the nation began to breathe leisurely in the first 
 years of the century, that tide of imitation had set in which 
 is only now beginning to ebb. European fashions reigned at 
 New York, French political ideas at Washington. The mental 
 philosophy of the West was limited to commentaries on Locke 
 and Brown, and the eclecticism of Cousin, when suddenly the 
 floodgates of German thought were opened on the land. To 
 the republication of Sartor Besartus has been attributed the 
 origin of a movement that really came because the time was 
 ripe for it. It was a revolt against the reign of Commerce in 
 practice, Calvinism in theory, and Precedent in Art, that gave 
 birth to what has been called Transcendentalism. 
 
256 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 Ideas, which filter slowly through English soil and abide 
 there for a generation, flash like comets over the electric atmos- 
 phere of America. Coleridge and Carlyle were prophets in 
 Boston, while their own countrymen were still examining 
 their credentials, and suddenly the New England of letters 
 exclaimed, " Go to, let us be metaphysical." The converts 
 soon put their teachers to the blush : from Materialism and 
 solid Scotch Psychology they rushed to the outer verges of 
 Idealism or Mysticism, and manifested in a new direction 
 the same disregard of limit and degree which had been wont 
 to mark the financial transactions of "Wall Street. " Every 
 form of intellectual or physical dyspepsia," says a Transat- 
 lantic reviewer, " brought forth its gospel. . . . Communities 
 were established where eveiything was to be common but 
 common-sense. Men renounced their old gods, and hesitated 
 only whether to bestow their allegiance on Thor or on Buddha. 
 A gift of tongues spread like a contagion, rendering its victims 
 incomprehensible. It was the Pentecost of Shinar." This, 
 and more, he says regarding the ludicrous phase of the move- 
 ment, characteristically caricaturing ideas which his country- 
 men had pushed to a characteristic extreme ; but the fullest 
 representation of the Transcendentalists as a group is to be 
 found in the pages of the Dial, a magazine which, during four 
 years, upheld their views in four volumes of miscellaneous 
 merit. The Dial is a Pantheon — from which only Utilitarians 
 are excluded — ^where the worshippers meet and sing hymns to 
 Confucius and Zoroaster, to Kant, Plato, Goethe, and Eichter, 
 all set to German music. They pass from world-old praise 
 of Homer and Shakespeare to friendly recognition of new 
 heresies, from thoughts of the divinity of labour to puffs of 
 poetasters, from Hindoo Mythology and Chinese Ethics to 
 nineteenth century truisms about Progress, and Union, and 
 Humanity ; from soaring among the cloud-capped heights of 
 a modern Eeligion of Beauty to raking among " the tangled 
 
MARGARET FULLER— ALCOTT. 257 
 
 roots and dead leaves of a second-hand Orientalism." This 
 magazine, which abounds in criticisms, mostly panegyrical, 
 has several verses seldom remarkable for anything save 
 obscurity — verses that often anticipate almost verbatim those 
 of the New Oxford, or revived Della-Cruscan school ; vigor- 
 ous sermons, spoilt by violences, of Theodore Parker ; the 
 Orphic Sayings of Alcott,^ the Socratic sage, divining or 
 dreaming in his garden ; four or five essays of Emerson ; with 
 the tales and allegories of Margaret Fuller, afterwards D'Ossoli. 
 This remarkable woman, whose powers are imperfectlyreflected 
 in her writings, has been called the Sibyl, the Circe, and the 
 Hypatia of the "Western intellectual world. Her true genius 
 
 ' That I may not be accused of disrespect to one of the most estimable of 
 men, I give, as types alike of his wise musing and his wild maundering, four 
 Orphic Sayings ; some passages exemplify the matter and. manner of the 
 Dialists, when they cut the cables of common-sense. 
 
 XLIII. — GENESIS. 
 
 The popular Genesis is historical. It is written to sense not to the soul. 
 Two principles, diverse and alien, interchange the Godhead, and sway the world 
 by turns. God is dual. Spirit is derivative. Identity halts in diversity. Unity 
 is actual merely. The poles of things are not integrated ; creation globed and 
 orbed. Yet in the true Genesis nature is globed in the material, souls orbed in 
 the spiritual, firmament. Love globes, wisdom orbs all things. As magnet the 
 steel, so spirit attracts matter, which trembles to traverse the poles of diversity, 
 and rest in the bosom of unity. All Genesis is of love. Wisdom is her form, 
 beauty her costume. 
 
 LXI. — TEMPTATION. 
 
 The man of sublime gifts has his temptation amidst the solitudes to which he 
 
 ' is driven by his age as proof of his integrity. Yet nobly he withstands this trial, 
 
 conquering both Satan and the world by overcoming himself. He bows not down 
 
 before the idols of time, but is constant to the divine ideal that haunts his heart, 
 
 a spirit of serene and perpetual peace. 
 
 IXXin. — SOEIPTDRE. 
 
 All Scripture is the record of life, and is sacred or profane as the life it records 
 is holy and profane. Every noble life is a revelation from Heaven, which the joy 
 and hope of mankind preserve to the world. Nor while the soul endures shall 
 the Book of Revelation be sealed. Her scriptures, like herself, are inexhaustible, 
 without beginning or end. 
 
 C. — SILENCE. 
 
 Silence is the initiative to wisdom. Prudence is the footprint of wisdom. Wit 
 is silent, and justifies her children by their reverence of the voiceless oracles of 
 the breast. Inspiration is dumb, a listener to the oracles during her nonage. 
 Suddenly she speaks, to mock the emptiness of all speech. Silence is the dialect 
 of heaven, the utterance of gods. 
 
 S 
 
258 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 seems to have been that of a conversationalist : the subtle 
 analysis of her prose, and the fine feeling of her sonnets, was 
 muffled in the gold-mists of rhapsody, and marred by a con- 
 ceit whose candour is its main excuse. Thought and passion 
 brandish their Thyrses, in a Msenad dance ; while she pours 
 forth her half knowledge of half the philosophers, musicians, 
 and poets of the world, in page on page of hot but disorderly 
 eloquence. Her " aesthetic teas " rivalled those of the Hotel 
 Eambouillet, or the receptions of our more modern "Utters :" 
 her influence was as striking and as fleeting as that of a half- 
 inspired, half-demented, actor on a temporary stage. 
 
 Even the most apparently affected forms of the new doc- 
 triae were valuable counteractives to the mere materialism 
 round which they grew. Its votaries had laid hold of a 
 faith, sincere though obscure, in something beyond tariffs and 
 wharfs and exchanges : they believed in a wealth of ideas, 
 transcending the wealth of millionaires, and reasserted the 
 principle that the formulae of one age are inadequate to meet 
 the wants or express the feelings of another ; but their " fine 
 frenzy " might have soon faded into common day, or, like the 
 Art- worship of Frederick Schlegel, ended by subsiding in the 
 Church, had not their best aspirations been concentrated and 
 vitalised by an original thinker, who took upon himself the 
 task of nationalising and giving a fresh practical turn to 
 the old idealisms. English "Hero-worship" would have 
 been vague without Carlyle; American "Transcendentalism" 
 vapid without Emerson. Their relation as leaders of the 
 later Eomantie reaction is thus well expressed by the re- 
 viewer to which we have already referred : — 
 
 " Botli represented the old battle against Philistinism. It was again, 
 as in the times of Erasmus, of Lessing, of Wordsworth, a struggle for fresh 
 air, in which, if the windows could not be opened, there was danger 
 that panes would be broken, though painted with effigies of saints and 
 martyrs. . . . When Emerson wrote, New England Puritanism, as a 
 motive of spiritual progress was dead, and in him, the herald of its 
 
EMERSOIT'S ADVENT. 259 
 
 formal decease, it found its new avatar . . . The Puritan revolt had 
 made us ecclesiastically, and the revolution politically, independent ; 
 but we were still socially and intellectually moored to English thought 
 till Emerson cut the cable and gave us a chance at the dangers and 
 glories of blue water. No man young enough to have felt it can forget 
 or cease to be grateful for the mental and moral nudge (!) which he 
 received from the writings of his brave-spirited countryman. That we 
 agree with him, or that he always agrees with himself, is aside from 
 the question ; but that he arouses in us something that we aie the 
 better of having awakened, — that he speaks always to what is highest 
 and least selfish in us, — few Americans of the generation younger than 
 his o'svn will be disposed to deny. His oration before the Phi-Beta- 
 Kappa Society at Cambridge, some thirty years ago, was an event un- 
 precedented in our literary aimals, a scene to be always treasured in the 
 memory for its picturesqueness and inspiration. What crowded and 
 breathless aisles, what windows clustering with eager heads, what enthu- 
 siasm of approval, what grim silence of foregone dissent ! It was our 
 Yankee version of a lecture by Abelard, our Harvard parallel to the last 
 public appearance of Fichte." 
 
 This extract^ is an interestiag fragment of the history of 
 literature : it may be well to give a brief rdsumi of the ad- 
 dress to which the closing sentences refer, as it strikes the 
 keynote of much of its author's philosophy. Mr. Emerson 
 begins by declaring that the time has come for American 
 literature to assert its independence, and for his hearers to 
 form an estimate of the Scholar as he should be in their 
 country. He ought to be an entire man and not a mere think- 
 ing machine. Of the influences brought to bear upon him, 
 the first is that of Nature, as interpreted by the mind. Her 
 laws are important to us only as represented by the laws of 
 thought ; and science is nothing but the discovery of analogies 
 in the universe. So that the ancient precept, "Know thyself," 
 and the modern precept, "Study Nature," become one maxim. 
 The next great influence is that of the Past as recorded in 
 books. These are good for study, for inspiration ; but each 
 age has to write its own. We had better never see a book 
 than be warped by it out of our natural orbit. We hear that 
 
 ^ This criticism appears among the Essays of Mr. Lowell. 
 
260 AMERICAN LITEEATURE. 
 
 we may speak. One must be an inventor to read well. 
 History and Science we learn from the printed page ; but the 
 education of Colleges can only serve us when it aims not to 
 drill but to create. The idea that the scholar should be a 
 recluse is a monkish error. Action is essential to the ripening 
 of his manhood. Inaction is cowardice, and there can be no 
 scholar wanting the heroic mind. The recluse soon exhausts 
 his single vein, "like those Savoyards, who, getting their 
 livelihood by carving wooden figures for all Europe, went one 
 day to the mountain to find stock, and discovered that they 
 had whittled up the last of their pine-trees." Life is our 
 dictionary and our grammar. Colleges and books only copy 
 the language which the field and the workyard made. Char- 
 acter is higher than intellect, the thinker than his thought. 
 There is dignity as well as necessity in labour. So much for 
 the education of the scholar. As to his duties, they may all 
 be comprehended in self-trust. His office is to cheer, to raise, 
 to guide men, by showing them facts under appearances. In 
 discharging it he must be patient, self-denying, and resolutely 
 true. He must relinquish display and fame, endure dis- 
 dain and poverty, because he will not tread the old paths or 
 accept the old fashions. He is to find consolation only in 
 exercising the highest functions of human nature. He is one 
 who lifts himself above private cares, and breathes and lives 
 on pubUc and illustrious thoughts — ^the world's eye and the 
 world's heart. In silence and steadfastness let him hold by 
 himself, add observation to observation, patient of neglect, 
 patient of reproach, and bide his time. If he can satisfy 
 himself that he has seen the truth, and planted his foot beyond 
 the shores of change, the unstable estimates of men will 
 crowd to him " as the heaped waves of the Atlantic foUow the 
 moon." The scholar should be brave and free, for the world 
 is his who can see through its pretension. Plastic and fluid 
 in the hands of God and His attributes, to ignorance and sin 
 
FIRST ORATION. 261 
 
 it is flint. The great man makes the great thing ; but we 
 must not suffer the great men of the Past to enslave our 
 minds. They have only done for us what we can one day do 
 for ourselves. He has never lived who can feed us for ever, 
 or set a barrier on any one side to the unbounded empire of 
 the common nature in which we have each a share. " It is 
 one central fire, which flaming now out of the lips of Etna 
 lightens the capes of Sicily, and now out of the throat of 
 Vesuvius illuminates the towers and vineyards of Naples. It 
 is one soul which animates all men." This is a skeleton of 
 the harangue which, with added graces of style and manner, 
 thrilled through the ears of the Cambridge audience, and is 
 reprinted for the review of our calmer judgments in the first 
 of seven volumes of prose essays, throughout which the 
 author continues to enforce, expand, and illustrate the same 
 ideas. 
 
 In reverting to the celebrated literary efforts of former 
 years we are often puzzled to account for the effect which 
 they are known to have produced. To do so we must carry 
 ourselves back to our own boyhood. There are many now of 
 middle age to whom the first reading of Carlyle and Emerson 
 brought the sense of a new revelation. To us, in that period of 
 ready enthusiasm, as to the first students of Schelling, or the 
 first imitators of Goethe, the oracles seemed to be no longer 
 dumb : Nature took on new meanings, and the secret of life 
 was about to be unfolded. It is well for the fame of an 
 author when time and study do not entirely dissipate these 
 delusions, and in this respect, perhaps, Carlyle has stood the 
 test better than Emerson. But both have suffered by the 
 difi'usive force of their own genius, which, in making their 
 ideas common, has often made them appear commonplace. 
 When a fresh thinker first begins to speak, the outer world is 
 apt to suspect his sanity : ere he has done, it questions his 
 originality. When the words of the poet, who began by head- 
 
262 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 ing an artistic revolt, get into the air we breathe, we call 
 him a national mouthpiece ; and the paradoxical philosopher, 
 whose eloquence has gathered a crowd, becomes a type in har- 
 mony with his age and country. In Mr. Emerson's Harvard 
 discourse, indeed, there is scarce anything of which, taken 
 separately, we need fail to trace the pedigree. Fichte had, 
 many years before, spoken in the same strain of the vocation 
 and nature of the scholar, and on the battlefield confuted the 
 notion that he should be a recluse. The Philosopher of 
 The Bepuhlic and the Stoic Sage are older prototypes of 
 the New World's latest ideal. " Science, the discovery of 
 analogies," is a leaf from Boehme, or Swedenborg, or Schelling: 
 the Dignity of Labour comes directly from Carlyle. The 
 originality, as is the case with the author's whole system of 
 thought, is in the combination, which, it may be, is the only 
 kind of originality now possible. His defence of others from 
 the charge of uninventiveness may be pleaded for himself — 
 " As every house is a quotation out of all forests and mines and 
 stone-quarries, so every man is a quotation from all his ances- 
 tors." There is a lazy eclecticism, producing mere patch- 
 work, and expressing itself in a borrowed style, which is an 
 infallible sign of weakness ; but, with the heirs of so many 
 ages, absolute originality is only possible to absolute ignorance. 
 True talent shows itself not in bubble speculations, but in 
 mastering the Past. Chaucer feeds on the old fields ; Shake- 
 speare pirates all his plots : the madman and the sensation 
 novelist are the only pure inventors. The larger our circle 
 the more chance do we have of intersecting others : the requisite 
 to a raison d'itre is that we have a centre of our own, and be 
 not included within the circle of another; in other words, that 
 we be complements not corollaries of other men. Emerson 
 has emphatically a centre of his own in his intense modern- 
 ism. A Democratic Platonist, his assertion of independence 
 is more extreme than inconsistent. To borrow Bacon's 
 
MYSTICISM AND IDEALISM. 263 
 
 analogy, he leans rather to the error of the spider than of 
 the ant. 
 
 He has, by the majority of his critics, been ranked as a 
 Mystic ; he prefers to call himself an Idealist, and his position, 
 as far as it is tenable or distinct, illustrates the fact that the 
 standard divisions of philosophy are being continually altered 
 and replaced, as old systems form affinities with new beliefs 
 and phases of character. In his lecture on Transcendental- 
 ism, delivered at Boston in 1842, he gives a rough division 
 of mankind into two sects : " the first class founding on 
 experience, the second on consciousness "... the one 
 " insisting on facts, on history, on the force of circumstances 
 and the animal wants of man ;" the other " on the power 
 of Thought and of Will, on Inspiration, on miracle, on in- 
 dividual culture." 
 
 Between these two classes of thinkers Emerson unhesi- 
 tatingly takes part with the second, with the Platonist against 
 the Aristotelean. He everywhere exalts mental abstractions 
 and depreciates matter ; he relies on the unity of reason in 
 opposition to the variety of sense ; he believes that the mind 
 can make its own circumstances, and holds that the object is 
 either identical with, or the product of, the subject. But this 
 a priori manner of thinking has from an early period developed 
 itself in two schools, whose boundaries are often conterminous, 
 but which are also capable of being contrasted. The rank of 
 Mysticism in history and its relation to other systems are not 
 yet exactly determined. M. Cousin places it at the close of 
 his fourfold list as a reaction against the scepticism engendered 
 by the conflicting extremes of Materialism and Idealism. 
 According to the generalisation of M. Comte, it ought to be- 
 long to the earliest of the three great eras of human thought, 
 for in all its phases it has been more or less theological. 
 Neither view entirely coincides with fact : both too much 
 neglect the light which is thrown on the formation of theories 
 
264 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 of the universe by biography. Mysticism appeared at an early 
 stage in India as a reaction rather against literalism than 
 scepticism. It closed Greek philosophy. It ran alongside of 
 the formalism of the Middle Ages. It was attached by the 
 Sufis to the creed of Islam. It allied itself with the early 
 Protestantism of Germany and the counter Catholicism of 
 Spain, and endeavoured in the hands of Paracelsus and Boehme 
 to build a temple to itself out of the crude guesses of Alchemy 
 and Astrology, which mark the dawn of modem science. 
 Mysticism has been associated in turn with Theism, Atheism, 
 and Pantheism, with a belief and a disbelief in outward reve- 
 lations, with " the fugitive and cloistered virtue " of the ascetic 
 and the " os rabidum " of the fanatic, with the " holy indiffer- 
 ence " of Quietism and the licence of the Anabaptist ; in the 
 New World, with the opposite extravagances of Mount Leb- 
 anon and Oneida Creek : but at every stage of its development 
 it has been distinguished from Idealism proper by its appeal 
 to Paith as an ultimate authority, by its exaltation of Emotion 
 above Eeasoning, by its disdain of regular methods and 
 impatience of partial truths, by its withdrawal from active 
 life, and generally by its tendency to submerge the individual 
 in the universal — man in God. In most of these points Mr. 
 Emerson, in many passages of his prose and verse, claims 
 affinity with the Mystics of all ages. He defines Transcen- 
 dentalism as " the Saturnalia or excess of Faith." He com- 
 mends the extravagant fatalism, the philanthropy of despair, 
 embodied in Buddhism — the most portentous creed of self- 
 annihilation that the world has seen. He repeats the dictum 
 of the Yoga — " Illumination is the property of Purity." In 
 the Woodnotes his "eternal Pan who layeth the world's 
 incessant plan," who is the " axis of the star and the sparkle 
 of the spar " and the " heart of every creature," recalls the 
 address of Crishna to Ardjoun in the Bhagavad Gita — " I am 
 the vapour in the water, the light in the sun and in the 
 
EMERSON'S NEO-PLATONISM. 265 
 
 moon, the invocation in the Vedas, the sound in the air, 
 
 the life in animals, the eternal seed Of all nature." Among 
 
 the elder Greeks he reiterates the half-eastern rhapsodies of 
 
 Heraclitus — 
 
 " Out of sleeping a waking, 
 Out of waking a sleep ; 
 Life Deatk overtaking, 
 
 Deep underneath deep," — 
 
 and neglects the stricter logic of Parmenides and Zeno. " Plato 
 i« pbil^Dophy and philosophy is Plato " is one of his dogmatic 
 generalisations, but he deserts Plato for Plotinus in his belief 
 in ecstacy and "the ineffable union of God and man in 
 every act of the soul," in his declaration that " the words ' I ' 
 and ' mine ' constitute ignorance " of that unity "wherein every 
 man's is made one with all other" being, and in his prevailing 
 reverence for the Orientals. With Plato Dialectic is the crown 
 of science to be attained by a long process of thought and edu- 
 cation — " crvvepi6oi<; Kai av/MTrepiycoyol^ '^^pcofiiv'^ at<; hir)\6o- 
 fjbev reyyait;." He would be glad of a raft to float him down 
 the stream to a haven. Emerson soars, with Icarus wings, 
 above Dialectic to evaaK, and, with the self-confidence which 
 marks one phase of mysticism, exclaims, " The relations of the 
 soul to the divine spirit are so pure that it is profane to seek 
 to interpose helps ; means, teachers, texts, temples, fall away 
 from the simple mind ;" and again, "Pear and hope are alike 
 beneath Intuition ; it asks nothing, and is raised above pas- 
 sion." " Prayer, as a means to effect a private end, supposes 
 dualism in nature and consciousness ; as soon as the man is 
 at one with God he will see prayer in all action." " We live 
 in succession in parts and particles. Meanwhile within man 
 is the soul of the whole, the wise silence, the universal beauty, 
 the Eternal One." " The act of seeing and the thing seen, 
 the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one." 
 " The simplest person who in his integrity worships God be- 
 
266 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 comes God." " A man is the facade of a temple wherein all 
 wisdom and all good abide. The soul whose organ he is, 
 breathing through his intellect, is genius— through hi^ will, 
 virtue — ^through his affection, love." 
 
 Mysticism, which has ever aimed at transcending the 
 world, has in various ages striven to accomplish its end by- 
 various methods. The ancient mystics believed in philoso- 
 phers, the mediaeval in saints. Mr. Emerson endeavours to 
 comprehend the manifold forms of their faith in a catholic 
 eclecticism. To his mind " the trances of Socrates, the union 
 of Plotinus, the vision of Porphyry, the conversion of Paul, 
 the aurora of Boehme, the convulsions of George Fox and the 
 Quakers, the illumination of Swedenborg, the rapture of the 
 Moravian and Quietist, the revival of the Calvinist churches," 
 are different names for the " divine visits " of God-intoxicated 
 men, phrases more or less imperfect to express that common 
 inspiration which is the religious sanction of his own philo- 
 sophy, the only certain recompense of a noble life. He is 
 willing to use the language, and in some degree to think the 
 thoughts, of all their sects ; but, deriving something from them 
 all, he entirely accords with none. To him, as to the Yogi and 
 the Alexandrian, man is a theatre where the powers of heaven 
 play, passing through the transformations of life to a Universal 
 Being ; but he is bound neither to the Vedas nor the Phsedo. 
 "With Proclus he looks on the world as a system of hidden 
 hierarchies, with Erigena he makes Hell a metaphor for the 
 law of Compensation, with Hugo of St. Victor he holds 
 " ascendere ad Deum est intrare in se ipsum." He walks by 
 the " inward light " of the early Quakers and the " Funken 
 der Seele " of the Germans of the fourteenth century. Eckart 
 and Tauler speak for him in saying, " He who is at all times 
 alone, is worthy of God who is then present." " The eye, 
 whereby I see God, is the same eye whereby He seeth me." 
 " The spirit mounts to the Divine Dark like the eagle towards 
 
MEDIAEVAL AND EASTERN MYSTICISM. 267 
 
 the sun ;" and Suso anticipates, in more impassioned verse, the 
 triumph of the transcendentalist who has in fancy raised him- 
 self " above multiplicity to the Essence," above effects to the 
 Cause, above the storms of humanity to the Eternal Eest. But 
 almost all these writers had, in the last analysis, a definite 
 creed, and deferred to a recognised authority. Their " divine 
 love," concentrated on a divine Person, supplied the place of 
 a strong earthly attachment in cancelling self. Their enthu- 
 siasms and raptures were the result of mortifications and 
 prayer. Mediaeval mysticism, with all its vagueness, was a 
 genuine abnegation of the world. Its ethical tendency is 
 summed in a sentence of the Be Imitatione Ghristi — " It is 
 altogether necessary that thou take up a genuine contempt 
 for thyself if thou desire to prevail against flesh and blood." 
 Mr. Emerson has little of this spirit of submission. He 
 approaches the Egotheism of the Sufis, in his self-assertion 
 and his use of expressions, which are more calculated to 
 shock than to conciliate the uninitiated. As with them, 
 it seems to him that man cannot do without God, nor God 
 without man, both being essential features of the same indi- 
 visible nature. Yet he homologates the paradoxical resigna- 
 tion of the Quietists in his doctrine of a grace above virtue, 
 and in his elimination of the ordinary meanings of reward 
 and punishment from among the motives of life. His scep- 
 ticism, like the allegorical figure in Bishop Taylor's sermon,^ 
 puts out the fires of Hell and burns up Paradise : his " meek 
 lover of the good " not only passes Space and Time and the 
 " flammantia moenia mundi," but " turns his back on Heaven." 
 Of European mystics Swedenborg is his favourite, as the 
 author of one of the five lines which abide the winnowing of 
 the ages. In Emerson's vision, as in that of the oracular Swede, 
 " the fields of space are threaded by magnetic influences, and 
 the stars chime to the chords of music ; every planet is related 
 
 ^ An older form of this occurs in Joinville's Chronicle. 
 
268 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 to every plant, each colour to each sound." With him as 
 with Herbert, "man is one world and hath another to 
 attend him :" the universe is a constellation of types. He 
 reads the Macrocosm by the Microcosm ; but is content 
 with a general reading, with the knowledge of laws to 
 the exclusion of minor facts. He despises the details of 
 aU beliefs, and holds that the best worship has the least 
 ceremonial. 
 
 Mysticism has been compared to a rocket rushing with a 
 white Ught towards the sky, redescending in coloured streams 
 to the earth. It has in almost all ages had two sides — the 
 Theosophic and the Theurgic — a divine dream of unity with 
 God or nature, and a popular machinery of visions and spells, 
 an artificial and often sensuous phantasmagoria. To this 
 latter phase, represented by Jamblichus among the Neo- 
 Platonists, by the hysterical ecstacies of St. Theresa and John 
 of the Cross, by the magic workers and Cagliostros of a later 
 date, American Transcendentalism has no af&nity. Its modern 
 equivalents are the Joe Smith gospels and Poughkeepsie 
 ghosts, which the Transcendentalists, as a rule, hold in sove- 
 reign contempt. Mr. Emerson, in particular, wholly repudi- 
 ates the materialistic Mysticism which, believing in nothing 
 on which it cannot lay its fingers, descends to meet the materia- 
 listic scepticism of the age. He despises and derides " the Mil- 
 lenium mathematics, the peacock ritualism, the maundering 
 of Mormons, the squalor of Mesmerism, the deliration of rap- 
 pings, the rat-and-mouse revelation, thumps in table drawers 
 and black art." He will have " no picking of locks," holds no 
 converse with Theurgy, and on this score he parts company 
 even with Swedenborg, maintaining that "his revelations 
 destroy their credit by running into detail . . . the spirit 
 which is holy is reserved and taciturn, and deals in laws. 
 Hobgoblins gossip and tell fortunes." Again, " Swedenborg's 
 perception of nature is not human and universal, but mystical 
 
EMERSON AND SWEDEN BORG. 269 
 
 and Hebraic. He fastens each natural object to a theologic 
 notion . . . and poorly tethers every symbol to a several 
 ecclesiastic sense. The slippery Proteus is not so easily caught. 
 Nature is no literalist;" and again, "He delivers golden 
 sayings which express with singular beauty the ethical laws 
 . . . yet after his mode he pins his theory to a temporary 
 form. ... He has devils. . . . His Inferno is mesmeric. His 
 spiritual world bears the same relation to the generosities and 
 joys of truth as a bad man's dreams bear to his ideal life;" 
 and once more, " Socrates' genius did not advise him to act or 
 to find, but if he proposed to do somewhat not advantageous 
 it dissuaded him. ' What God is,' he said, ' I know not ; what 
 He is not I know.' . . . The secret of heaven is kept from 
 age to age. No imprudent, no sociable angel ever dropt an 
 early syllable to answer the longings of the saints, the fears 
 of mortals." 
 
 Mr. Emerson sympathises with the unsatisfied aspirations 
 of all ages — with the day-dreams of restlessness in search of 
 rest that have imagined Cridevana and Hesperia and Avalon ; 
 that sent the knights of the Middle Age in quest of the 
 Sangreal, and led the monks to christianise the eastern 
 Nirvana ; that laid out Brook Farm in Massachusetts, and 
 gave Novalis and Newman back to the fold of Eome ; but 
 he will not be drawn by them into any Church with walls. 
 All religions are to his mind "the same wine poured into 
 different glasses : " he drinks the wine and tries to shatter 
 the glasses. His unflinching scepticism pierces the armour 
 of all definite dogmas, while he entrenches himself behind an 
 Optimism like that of Spinoza. He thus breaks with the 
 more consistent majority of mystics in his disdain of 
 Authority : he breaks with them yet more decidedly in his 
 strong assertion of Individuality. Mysticism has, in the main, 
 been fatalistic. As a developed system its natural home is 
 in the East, where the influence of great uniformities of soil 
 
270 AMEEICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 and climate have only in recent years been partially counter- 
 acted by the conquering activities of an energetic race. 
 Beneath her burning sun, and surrounded by her tropic vege- 
 tation, the mass of men were overwhelmed by a sense of 
 their insignificance, and this feeling of subjugation was 
 intensified by absolute forms of government. The same 
 listlessness which permitted a secular and priestly despotism 
 led its victims to welcome the idea of a final absorption of 
 their individuality. Their philosophical ambition was to pass 
 into the framework of a gigantic Nature,' to be " rolled round 
 in earth's diurnal course with rocks and stones and trees." 
 " The complete end of man," says the first aphorism of 
 Kapila, " is the complete cessation of pain." There is a relic 
 of this spirit in the arapa^la, airddeia, and -qpefiia, which are 
 the aims at once of the Epicurean and Stoic systems; but 
 the Eastern doctrines of passive obedience had been banished 
 from Greece as early as the overthrow of the Pythagorean 
 Institute. They revived in the dark and middle ages when 
 the Church took upon itself the task of legislating for the 
 intellect ; and even the precursors of the Eeformation were 
 possessed with an almost oppressive sentiment of resignation. 
 " He who wills and does nothing is best " is a truly Oriental 
 saying attributed to Eckart, the mystical teacher of Tauler. 
 The reproduction of the Oriental spirit in America, in so far 
 as it is genuine and not the mere expression of a love of far- 
 fetched quotations, may be attributed to external influences 
 in some respects comparable to those which weighed on the 
 inhabitants of ancient India. In the Western, as formerly in 
 the Eastern, World, Nature still struggles to assert her old 
 supremacy, and threatens to domineer over men's minds by 
 the vastness of her empire. But in other respects the condi- 
 tions are reversed. In place of stagnation and uniform, 
 although magnificent, decay, we have to deal with the mani- 
 fold progress of the nineteenth century civilisation in a land 
 
AMERICAN ORIENTALISM. 271 
 
 where every one is more or less inspired by the resolve of the 
 modern mariner with an ancient name, to " sail beyond the 
 sunset " in pursuit of fresh adventures ; where the energies 
 of the individual are in constant, and, in the long run, 
 triumphant, struggle with all that tends to restrict the full 
 sweep of his arm, or to retard the freest activities of his mind ; 
 where every moon sees new forests feUed, new rivers crossed, 
 new fleets built, new tribes amalgamated, new discussions 
 raised, and new problems solved. Mysticism, if it exist at all, 
 must take on a form very different from that handed down 
 from the East of 3000 years ago to the Alexandrians, and 
 transmitted to the European ages of implicit faith by the 
 psuedo Dionysius. Mr. Emerson strikes the keynote of the 
 difference when he writes, " Feudalism and Orientalism had 
 long enough thought it majestic to do nothing ; the modern 
 majesty consists in work." Eetaining from the mystics his 
 belief in the supremacy of the higher emotions, he by no 
 means discards the senses, and substitutes for a religious 
 creed an idealised view of modern physical science. 
 
 Emerson's Church is the Natura Naturata — the rich 
 external Nature of the Dorian mythology, the modern 
 painter's and poet's " fair round world of light and shade." 
 ISTeither Wordsworth nor Shelley plunge with more delight 
 into this bath of beauty and power, whose "medicinal 
 enchantments " sober and heal our hearts. Lucretius has not 
 better appreciated the "severa silentia noctis." Wo sun- 
 worshipper of the Magi or the Incas could gaze more intently 
 on the morning sky. Thus he writes, " We nestle in Nature 
 and draw our living as parasites from her roots and grains, 
 and we receive glances from the heavenly bodies which call 
 us to solitude and forestall the future. . . . The blue zenith 
 is the point in which romance and reality meet." In the 
 same spirit he sings of the remedial life in the season of buds 
 and birds — 
 
272 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 " Spring still makes spring in tlie mind 
 When sixty years are told : 
 Love wakes anew tHs throbbing heart, 
 And we are never old." 
 
 But the sermon within the Church is the Tvaiwra, naiwrans, 
 the inscrutable Force, the -hidden law, the "something far 
 more deeply interfused," the " quick Cause before which all 
 forms flee as the driven snow," publishing itself in creatures, 
 rising "through transformation on transformation to the 
 highest symmetries, from the granite to the oyster, from the 
 trilobite to man, from the gorilla to Plato and Shakespeare. 
 It is Goethe's Erdgeist, weaving all shapes in the same won- 
 drous web, the spirit of the Muse that "lays her beams in 
 music," the inspiration of the philosopher who " hears the 
 words of the Gods," Nature revealing in beauty, in art, and, 
 highest of all, in moral nobleness, as much of her secrets as 
 it is permitted us to learn — 
 
 " If thou would'st know the mystic song, 
 Chaunted when the sphere was young ; 
 To the open ear it sings, 
 Sweet, the Genesis of things ; 
 Of tendency through endless ages, 
 Of star dust and star pilgrimages ; 
 Of rounded worlds, of space and time, 
 Of the old flood's subsiding shine ; 
 Of charnic matter, force, and form. 
 Of poles and powers, cold, wet, and warm." 
 
 Mr. Emerson's allegorical poetry is mainly employed in 
 giving a body, at times somewhat nebulous, to what we may 
 term his physical Idealism. The Nature we see around us 
 in stellar, geologic, and human history, is, he maintains, the 
 key to the Nature which is unseen, the law by which the 
 fabric moves and the " spirit walks from state to state." The 
 final cause of this continual change or " rushing metamor- 
 phosis " he holds to be the production of higher forms of life, 
 and, diverging in this respect from the old pre-Socratic 
 
DARWINISM. 273 
 
 philosophies of the universe, of which in others he often 
 reminds us, he believes in humanity as " the roof and crown 
 of things." In his temple, man as he is plays the part of 
 the worshipper, and man as he ought to be and may be, is 
 the chief object of worship. In this spirit his Song of Nature 
 anticipates the development yet awaiting the race — 
 
 " The building in the coral sea, 
 The planting of the coal," 
 
 are many a thousand summers old, 
 
 " And still the man-child is not born, 
 The summit of the whole. 
 
 " Let war and trade and creeds and song 
 Blend, ripen race on race ; 
 The sunburnt world a man shall breed, 
 Of all the zones and countless days. 
 
 " No ray is dimmed, no atom worn, 
 My oldest force is good, as new. 
 And the fresh rose on yonder thorn 
 
 Gives back the blending heavens in dew." 
 
 The prima origo of this perpetual evolution Mr. Emerson 
 
 pronounces to be inscrutable. He regards the physical 
 
 postulate, " give us matter and motion and we will construct 
 
 the universe," as a begging of the question : he admits the 
 
 necessity of Plato's unmoved mover, and, from the fact that all 
 
 change is progress, recognises an Orderly Intelligence at its 
 
 root. 
 
 " Once slept the world an egg of stone, 
 And pulse, and sound, and light was none ; 
 And God said. Throb, and there was motion. 
 And the vast mass became vast ocean." 
 
 But if we inquire further regarding this primordial Power 
 who mixes the atoms and makes them "march ia time ;" if 
 we seek to know more of the nature of God than is revealed 
 in the first chapter of the Hebrew Genesis, he holds, with 
 
 T 
 
274 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 Professor Tyndall, that we are attempting to transcend our 
 faculties. "We must be satisfied to affirm that "Conscious 
 law is King of kings," and that, whether as nature or Deity, it 
 orders all things for the best. Our author repeats or repro- 
 duces all the formulae of the Aristotelean Optimism — ^vo-t? 
 ovBep /j,dri]v iroiet — ej^et ri Oelov. The world is very good. 
 Nature is reXo? koX ^eXria-rov. She does nothing Trepi^m, 
 in a mercenary spirit, but " adds in every instance a slight 
 generosity, a drop too much," whence the tendency to excess 
 necessary to life, the electricity without which the air would 
 rot, the excitement of fanaticism, the redundancy of passion. 
 " We hit above the mark to hit the mark," and all things are 
 needful to each and each to aU. Without conflict there 
 would be no virtue ; without imperfection in parts, no pro- 
 gi^ess, which is the condition of life. Mr. Emerson's Optimism 
 goes even farther than this. He accepts the position of the 
 Megareans, that evil itself is only good in the making, that 
 it differs from good only by a minus quantity, that, in its 
 essence, it is not a real thing. Like Spinoza, " he acknow- 
 ledges no hell, no devil, no positive and active agency at 
 enmity with God ; but sees in all things infinite gradations 
 of beings all in their way obedient, and aU fulfilling the part 
 allotted to them." " Nothing," he exclaims, " shall warp me 
 from the belief that every man is a lover of truth. There is 
 no pure lie, no malignity in nature. The entertainment of 
 the proposition of depravity is the last profligacy and pro- 
 fanation." And even this profanation must itself have a 
 moral result in the eyes of Him who maintains 
 
 " That night or day, that love or crime, 
 Leads all souls to the good." 
 
 The American transcendentalist arrives at his conclusions 
 much more easily than Spinoza : they are not rigorous logical 
 deductions from premises professing to be axiomatic, but 
 isolated assertions, frequently inconsistent with each other. 
 
OPTIMISM. 275 
 
 founded on the impulses, which he calls the intuitions, of a 
 sanguine and pure, though in some directions a limited, mind. 
 Without attempting to throw any light on the problem here 
 suggested, we may safely assert that our author's solution of 
 it is unsatisfactory. Like a healthy man's view of disease, 
 it is unsympathetic, even dangerous. To say that Evil is 
 negative is a play on words, which does nothing to explain its 
 origin, and little to unfold its purpose. "We feel pain, sorrow, 
 and sin, in active as well as in passive forms, in contrast, as 
 great as ever, to pleasure, joy, and holiness : the question 
 remains, Whence comes this perpetual negation ? We may 
 try to find the " type of Perfect " in the outer world ; but 
 Nature, at first sight, rather suggests a dualism. We may 
 look for it in the mind ; but all men, except confirmed saints 
 and consistent philosophers, are conscious of an adavaro'; 
 P'O'X^' "^ baseness in the blood at such strange war with 
 something good," that its moral aspect only deepens the 
 mystery. Theologians have, successfully or not, endeavoured 
 to unravel it. Thorough-going materialists have their answer 
 in a reference to the blind working of purely physical laws. 
 It has always been a stumblingblock to systems which more 
 •or less identify man with God. Mr. Emerson hardly seems to 
 realise the magnitude of the difficulty. " Justice," he pro- 
 •claims, "is the rhyme of things." The phrase is perhaps 
 a happy one ; but the facile Optimism, which asserts that 
 the bad rhymes are proper parts of the poem, is liable to the 
 same abuse as the Antinomianism of other mystics ; for to 
 most men the temptations of life are too strong to be resisted 
 by the belief that, in yielding to them, we " waive a little of our 
 ■claim " to a more dignified position in the Universe. In some 
 passages, however, he guards himself more carefully ; and, in 
 transferring his theory from the individual to the larger historic 
 scale, it appears, as does the correlative doctrine of the identity 
 of Might and Eight, in a less objectionable form. In assert- 
 
276 AMERICAN LITERATUKE. 
 
 ing that "the lesson of life is practically to believe what the 
 years and the centuries say against the hours," that " through 
 evil agents, through toys and atoms, a great and beneficent 
 tendency irresistibly streams ;" that we should " learn to look 
 for the permanent in the mutable and fleeting, and bear the 
 disappearance of things we were wont to reverence without 
 losing our reverence," he only announces a Faith which " is 
 large in time, and that which shapes it to some perfect end." 
 But his Optimism, as that of other theorists, is either, like 
 ancient UtiLitarianism, untrue to nature, or, like modern Utili- 
 tarianism, hardly consistent with itself. 
 
 The question regarding the relations of good and evil leads 
 us from the consideration of Mr. Emerson's more purely Meta- 
 physical to his Ethical views. In this instance, as in the former, 
 we shall be more careful to represent correctly than to criticise. 
 Our author is content to state, in broad terms, the two sides 
 of the antinomy of Necessity and Free-will which lies at the 
 basis of Moral Philosophy. Fate is with him, in many pas- 
 sages, another name for Nature. " The book of Nature is the 
 book of Fate ; she turns the gigantic pages kaf after leaf, 
 never returning one." From this point of view he uses the 
 language, sometimes of the believers in an external constrain- 
 ing Destiny, a " terrific Providence," sometimes of Determin- 
 ism both in the form in which Mr. MQl rejects, and in the form 
 in which he accepts, it. Emerson's intuitions are clear, but 
 his logic is cloudy : he seldom allows himself to be pinned 
 down to a definite belief " The slippery Proteus " evades even 
 the law of contradiction; and, passing, through a series of glit- 
 tering paradoxes, from one Ontological peak to another, he 
 escapes the drier if more decisive discussions on the plains of 
 psychology. In one part of his work he admits that "organisa- 
 tion tyrannises over character;" that "men are what their 
 mothers made them ;" and dwells on the limitations of circum- 
 stance : in another, he asserts that these limitations become 
 
FATE AND FKEE-WILL. 277 
 
 thinner as the soul ascends ; that Pate has its lord ; that Power 
 is, in the dual world, a fact equally real with Law ; that " intel- 
 lect annuls Fate," which is " a name for facts not yet passed 
 under the fire of thought, for causes which are unpenetrated ;" 
 that " the one serious and formidable thing in nature is a strong 
 wiU ;" and that "Life, in the direct ratio of its amount, is 
 Freedom." Those sentences are nowhere reconciled with each 
 other; unless we accept the statements that "Freedom is 
 necessary," " a part of Fate is the Free-will of man," as a 
 reconcilement ; nor are the latter set reconcilable with the 
 mystical side of our author's philosophy. If, as he declares, 
 " History is the action and reaction of Nature and Thought — 
 two boys pushing each other on the curb -stone" — what 
 becomes of the identity of subject and object in a single 
 nature ? The controversy between Liberty and Necessity 
 cannot be resolved, according to the favourite method of 
 modern harmonisers, into a difference of degree ; for, behind 
 the ambiguity of words, there is a real difference of opiuion. 
 Making every allowance for the force of circumstances, the 
 question remains, — Is there any point at which absolute 
 responsibility and power of choice begins ? The moral argu- 
 ment concludes for the affirmative, the purely physical for 
 the negative ; but the physical is supplemented by the 
 psychological, and the result depends on the possibility or 
 impossibility of identifying the Will with the Desires. This 
 aspect of the problem, Mr, Emerson scarcely contemplates. 
 But, however unsatisfactory his solution, we accept the fact 
 that he believes in both Fate and Free-will, as an index of 
 the larger fact that Mysticism in America is inevitably and 
 materially modified by Industrialism, that the Pantheistic 
 tendency deprecated by De TocqueviUe, is opposed and 
 checked by a strong Individualism, by the feeling that with- 
 out distinct centres of Will and Intelligence there is no 
 true Personality. The nations of the North and West have 
 
278 AMERICAN LITEEATURE. 
 
 accepted necessitarian theories with the proviso that they shall 
 be active and not passive agents. " Let ns," says the poet, 
 " huild temples to the Beautiful Necessity which secures that 
 all is made of one piece, which makes man brave in believ- 
 ing that he cannot shun a danger that is appointed, nor incur 
 one that is not :" on the other hand, " we are not the less 
 compelled to affirm liberty, the significance of the individual, 
 the grandeur of duty and the power of character." " 'Tis the 
 best use of Fate to teach a fatal courage." As a practical 
 moralist, Emerson abandons Spinoza and follows Kant. Eang- 
 ing himself almost unreservedly on the side of Freedom, he 
 speaks of man as autonomic, as the lord of circumstance, the 
 maker of his character and the master of his fate. "When he 
 condescends to details, he is eminently realistic. His essays on 
 "Wealth," "Cultiire," " Behaviour," " Power," exhibit, in their 
 judicious balance of conflicting claims, the quintessence of 
 common-sense. They all contain admirable rules for the 
 conduct of life ; inculcating prudence, suspicion of decep- 
 tions, address and tact in dealing with our fellows ; appreciat- 
 ing success and geniality, the loss of which he holds to be 
 a price too dear for the best performance ; recommending 
 economy, activity in commerce, concentration of effort, pur- 
 poses well defined and consistently carried out. Woven of 
 two curiously-intersecting threads, they present us with a 
 unique conjunction of shrewdness and idealism. Their author 
 has been termed "a Plotinus-Montaigne ;" and one of his 
 admirers has not unfairly attributed to him 
 
 "A Greek head, on right Yankee shoulders, whose range 
 Has Olympus for one pole, for th' other the Exchange." 
 
 There never was a mystic with so much of the spirit of the 
 good farmer, the inventor, or the enterprising merchant. In 
 his practical mood he disclaims " the lofty language in which 
 Plato and the Platonists speak of all who are not devoted to 
 their shining abstractions," and, like Bacon, would bring down 
 
PURITANISM. 279 
 
 Astronomy and the other sciences from heaven to earth. Yet 
 the work in which this vein of thought is most conspicuous 
 ends with the chapter on " Illusions," where he tells us that 
 the affairs of every day are shadows after all, that, behind the 
 veil of clouds and smoke, the gods are still sitting on their 
 thrones, alone with the solitary and inviolable soul. When he 
 has to deal with the means of life, he is an active and dis- 
 criminating man of the world : when he comes to treat of its 
 ultimate ends, the scene shifts, and we have again the mys 
 tical Idealist. His combination of stern practical rectitude 
 with an ideal standard is Mr. Emerson's point of contact with 
 Puritanism. A chivalric nobility, in which beauty and good- 
 ness are blended, is at once the goal, the sanction, and the 
 motive of his ethical system. In the verdict of an elevated 
 conscience, which accepts it as such, he reposes an implicit 
 trust. " The final solution, in which scepticism is lost, is 
 the moral sentiment which never forfeits its supremacy. This 
 is the drop which balances the sea." It is, at all events, our 
 author's firmest anchorage, and he holds by it with a tenacity 
 that never condescends to encounter the historical difficulties 
 in his way. Praise of virtue, transcending prudence and 
 disdaining consequences, is the refrain of his moral mono- 
 logue. His belief in an absolute morality, and the rigid 
 ethical criterion which he applies to men and things, are 
 his connecting links with the old faith of New England. 
 His severe censure of Goethe's artistic indifferentism, recalls 
 the age when the Bible and theological commentaries were 
 regarded as the sum of honest literature. He writes of 
 our great dramatist in the spirit of the men who closed 
 the theatres, "He was master of the revels to mankind. It 
 must go into the world's history that the best poet led an 
 obscure and profane life, using his genius for the public 
 amusement " — sentiments far removed from the spirit of the 
 modern art-worship, or even from the broader view which 
 
280 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 accepts the facts of life without seeking to probe its secrets. 
 But the sentences which follow, protesting against the op- 
 posite extremes of austerity, indicate another divergence. 
 While Mr. Emerson is puritanic in the moral earnestness of 
 his character and his criticisms, his own conception of the 
 ultimate basis of morality is far removed from that of the 
 Puritans. 
 
 The cardinal difference between all ancient and most 
 modern ethical systems is the comparative Exclusiveness of 
 the one, the Universality of the other. The Platonic virtues 
 in their highest form can only he understood or fully practised 
 by the golden race, who minister in the temple of his Hellenic 
 state. The Aristotelean magnanimity and magnificence belong 
 of right to a well-educated Athenian citizen. Stoicism was, 
 in some respects, a bridge between the two eras. It broke 
 down the walls of rank and wealth and race, and made 
 morality, in a more modern sense, the chief end of man. But 
 it was still fenced with intellectual pride, and the capacity of 
 interpreting its precepts was confined to a new aristocracy of 
 character. The ambiguity of the maxim, " Follow ^Nature " — a 
 maxim which Mr. Emerson emphatically endorses — ^proved 
 fatal to its wide extension. Ancient morality was more or 
 less artistic : it regarded a perfect life as the blooming of 
 natural excellences, rarely as obedience to a law, and dwelt on 
 the right or wrong of the action rather than on the merit or 
 demerit of the actor. Christianity, in giving prominence to 
 the latter conceptions, in associating the ideas of duty and 
 self-sacrifice with motives generally realisable, added to ethics 
 the side which is most capable of being brought to bear on 
 the mass of men. It first announced a Heaven willing to 
 stoop to feeble virtue : it first insisted on the obligation of the 
 strong to succour the weak ; and addressing itself, not to con- 
 template, but to aid, " the weary strife of fraH humanity," it 
 first appreciated the difficulty of living well. Novalis says 
 
ANCIENT AND MODERN ETHICS. . 281 
 
 truly that " the summons to the good--will of all has made the 
 fortune of the faith which recognises Grief and Self-abnega- 
 tion." Mr. MiU, in his Liberty, asserts with no less truth that 
 there is much still to be learned from the highest Pagan 
 ethics ; their positive ideals may be profitably opposed to the 
 negations of mere abstinence ; their public spirit to a pseudo- 
 religious selfishness ; their freshness to the over-refinements 
 of modern casuistry. There are no nobler sentences than are 
 to be found in the pages of Marcus Aurelius on the grace 
 of those inherent virtues by which a man utters goodness as 
 the mint utters coin, or " as a vine produces grapes." This 
 aspect of morality is what we have everywhere presented to 
 us in Mr. Emerson's essays. He prefers a constitutionally- 
 noble nature, acting, a^' ef 6&)9, without forethought, to the 
 Self-conquest that is the result of an internal combat ; the 
 "beautiful disdain" that recoils from evO. as from ugliness 
 to the sainthood that subdues " the world, the flesh, and the 
 devil." " We love characters," he says, " in proportion as they 
 are impulsive and spontaneous. Timoleon's victories are 
 the best, which ran and flowed like Homer's verse." 
 He reveres the individual grandeur of Plutarch's heroes, 
 who are "natural powers like light and heat." With 
 Carlyle, and more consistently, he decries Self-conscious- 
 ness, too much analysis, too careful calculation. " The knots 
 that tangle human creeds" are to him "the soul's mumps 
 and measles and hooping-coughs." Shelley,^ whom he often 
 recalls, speaks for him in saying, " I have confidence in my 
 moral sense alone, for that is a kind of originality." His 
 pattern character needs no reminders of the law of duty. 
 " Unchartered freedom " never tires him, nor does he feel 
 "chance desires" as a weight. He "lives by pulses, forgets 
 usages, and makes the moment great." Emerson has the 
 
 ^ Though Emerson never refers to Shelley, save with the most absurd 
 depreciation. 
 
282 _ AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 tenacity of the Puritan, but he hates Puritanic glooms, 
 " dungeons in the air," as he hates sick people, who "pollute 
 the morning with corruption and groans." " "We should study- 
 rather to make humanity heautiful to each other." " Wisdom 
 is cheerful, aliis Icetus sapiens sibi." " Depression of spirits 
 developes the plague." 
 
 Plato, in the Eepublic, draws a distinction between the 
 doctors of the body and those of the soul, saying that the 
 former should know disease by experience, the latter should 
 only know vice by observation : but some sympathy 
 with temptation, even to moral evil, enlarges the charity, 
 and, if he has been victorious in the struggle, strengthens 
 the power of the moralist. The mens sana in corpore sano 
 of the American transcendentalist has little of this sym- 
 pathy : vice is to him a sign of bad blood, a flaw in the 
 grain. To a properly-constituted being, he holds that a 
 fairly moral life should be easy. "A few strong in- 
 stincts and a few plain rules suffice." His penal clause is 
 moral blindness. If we are slaves to sense we cease to see 
 the claws of the siren. His reward is a deeper insight, his 
 aim, 6<^' o<Tov ivhe'^eTat aOavard^eiv, his rule of life, self- 
 reliance, "The man that stands by himself the universe 
 stands by him also." " Never imitate. That which a man can 
 do best none but his Maker can teach him." " To believe in 
 your own thought, that is genius." " Shy thou not hell, and 
 trust thou well heaven is secure," are sentences which might 
 have been uttered by the proudest of the Stoics, and graved 
 among the illustrations of their porch. The following per- 
 fectly reproduce the aristocratic noli-me-tangere morality of 
 Greece and Eome : — 
 
 " We should meet each moming aa from foreign countries, and, 
 spending the day together, should depart at night as into foreign coim- 
 tries. In all things I would have the island of a man inviolate. Let 
 us sit apart as the gods talking from peak to peak all round Olympus." 
 " Looking where others look, and conversing with the same things, we 
 
RELATION TO STOICISM. 283 
 
 catch the charm wMch lured them. Napoleon said you must not fight 
 too often with one enemy, or you 'will teach him all your art of war." 
 " We are either glad or sorry at a gift, and hoth emotions are unbecom- 
 ing. You cannot give anything to a magnanimous person. After you 
 have served him, he at once puts yo\i in deht" — avTeucpyertKos 
 TrXeiovoiv. The new worship of this old magnanimity must he cele- 
 brated in " the church of men to come, without shawms or sackbuts or 
 psaltery ; but it will have heaven and earth for its beams and rafters ; 
 science for symbol and illustration ; it will fast enough gather beauty, 
 music, picture, poetry. Was never stoicism so stern and exigent as 
 this shall be. It shall send man home to his central solitude, shame 
 these social supplicating manners, and make him know that, much of 
 the time, he [must have himself to his friend. He shall expect no 
 co-operation, he shall walk with no companion. The nameless Thought, 
 the nameless Power, the superpersonal Heart, he shall repose alone on 
 that. He needs only, his own verdict. No good fame can help, no bad 
 fame can hurt him. The Laws are his consolers ; the good Laws them- 
 selves are alive ; they know if he have kept them ; they animate him 
 with the teaching of great duty and an endless ho'rizon." 
 
 To enlist popular feeling against this morality as inade- 
 quate, or to denounce tlie vagueness of this new religion, 
 would be, in the eyes of the transcendentalist, a mere rhetorical 
 appeal to the prejudices of that very ignorance above which 
 he claims to have raised himself. Let us therefore waive for 
 the present all considerations due to authority : let us concede 
 that to him such an ideal life may be a self-sufficient end, and 
 even grant that his faith may be the future philosophic creed ; 
 we are yet thrown back on the old exclusiveness, and are in 
 danger of reverting to the egotism that vaunteth itself on 
 its triumph over the world. Christianity, it has been said, 
 differs from the highest Pagan wisdom not so much by enlarg- 
 ing the list of virtues as in " lighting up morality " with an 
 inspiration in which all mankind may be partakers. Mr. 
 Emerson thinks he has supplied to Stoicism the enthusiasm 
 that it lacked, by the element of mysticism which he has 
 added, and given it a broader basis by his sympathy with the 
 industrialism of a democratic age. But the gulf between the 
 remote idealism which crowns and the practical activities 
 which underlie the whole is nowhere bridged in his philosophy. 
 
284 AMERICAN LITERATUEE. 
 
 The eastern and mediaeval mystics commonly regarded human 
 life by itself as an evil from which they were to escape, the 
 one into unconscious identification with the universe, the other 
 into the love of a personal God. The last words regarding 
 human destiny, uttered by the expiring classic schools are the 
 expression of a doubtful hope. " It is pleasant to die if there 
 be gods ; and sad to live if there be none." "As far," says 
 our author, " as it is a question of fact respecting the govern- 
 ment of the universe this sums the whole." But he scarcely 
 accepts the latter half of the dilemma in the sense in which 
 it was intended : in his writings there is no trace of the pro- 
 found melancholy which we find in Tacitus and the later 
 Eoman Stoics ; life, as it appears to him, is in itself a good ; 
 his belief in the gods, as far as human existence is concerned, 
 resolves itself into a confident expectation of indefinite progress, 
 and a reliance, in the meanwhile, on the principle of Compensa- 
 tion. But this principle, by which he endeavours to surmount 
 the difficulties involved in his Optimism, often fails to meet 
 particular cases. The proposition that every individual loss 
 is recompensed by an individual gain, is, as far as this life 
 goes, untrue. Job does not always recover his sons and- 
 daughters. The fact that what one loses another gains, does 
 not justify the ways of Providence to the sufferer. A severe 
 Stoical nature that can accept the saying, "Of progressive souls 
 all loves and friendships are momentary," which is pure to 
 the excess of being frigid, and almost repellant in its isolation, 
 escapes from half the pain and struggle of life, but " the pas- 
 sionate heart of the poet" knows more of the wants of 
 mankind. The author of Companions of my SoUhode, whose 
 calm judgments are ever softened by sympathy, has put 
 the case more truly in a striking sentence : — " Living as we 
 do in the midst of stern gigantic laws, which crush every- 
 thing down that comes in their way, which know no excuses, 
 admit of no small errors, never send a man back to learn his 
 
IMMORTALITY. 285 
 
 lesson and try him again ; living with such powers about us 
 (unseen, too, for the most part), it does seem as if the faculties 
 of man were hardly as yet adequate to his situation here. 
 Such considerations tend to charity and humility ; and they 
 point also to the existence of a future state." Charity, in its 
 wide sense, and Humility are the two Christian virtues which 
 the Pagan world had least knowlege of : they are virtually, 
 though not hy name, excluded from all the more recent sys- 
 tems which, both for good and evil, revive the Pagan spirit ; 
 from Greek Art-worship, and Gothic Force-worship, the pur- 
 suit of " Geist," and Transcendentalism. For a definite belief 
 in a Future State, Mr. Emerson substitutes the conception of 
 our relationship with the whole chain of things, our share in 
 the march of the mighty Laws. " The knowledge that we 
 traverse the whole scale of being, from the centre to the poles 
 of nature, and have some stake in every possibility, lends that 
 sublime lustre to death which philosophy and religion have 
 too outwardly and literally striven to express in the popular 
 doctrine of the immortality of the soul." It cannot be denied 
 that the popular views of another world are apt to be materi- 
 alistic. The Homeric Hades which Plato desired to erase, and 
 Lucretius afterwards so grandly dismissed, was better calculated 
 to terrify weak, than to stimulate strong, natures. In later 
 times mythological conceptions of future reward and punish- 
 ment, like those dwelt upon by the morbid fancy of Shake- 
 speare's Claudio, have often prevailed, and ridiculous ideas of 
 immortality have been eagerly embraced by the sceptical 
 credulity of a misnamed " Spiritualism." The higher Mysti- 
 cism of all ages has done good service in protesting against the 
 projected 'selfishness, which only drives a better bargain for its 
 virtue, because it sees a little farther than the selfishness of 
 the Epicurean. On the other hand, when we refine too much 
 upon the belief in a future existence, when we reduce it to 
 the impersonal perpetuity of the pure reason allowed by 
 
286 AMERICAN LITERATUEE. 
 
 Aristotle, by Spinoza, and by Emerson, we deprive it of its 
 meaning and value as a general motive. That it is possible 
 not only to exist, but to lead a noble life on the stern conditions 
 of their creed, the names of those philosophers and some of 
 the most lustrous pages of classic biography amply demon- 
 strate. The near approach to identity in the practical precepts 
 of Buddhism, of Christianity, and of modern Pantheism, estab- 
 lish the existence of Ethical standards independent of and 
 compatible with all forms of belief Warriors and patriots 
 have always been found to die rov koXov evsKa. The man of 
 leisure and far-ranging thought, in the ancient world, might 
 find consolation for the violence done to affections, seldom very 
 keen, in speculation and the belief that in a vague sense he 
 was deo(f)iXecrTaTo<;. The modern sceptical physicist may 
 reflect that he will be remembered as having done something 
 to advance the knowledge of those majestic sequences which 
 will continue to uphold the universe when he " is blown about 
 the desert dust or sealed within the iron hills." The highly- 
 educated Comtist may claini a more disinterested satisfaction 
 in his philanthropic faith, that while " the individual withers 
 the race grows more and more." The Transcendentalist, like 
 the Quietist, has his moments of exaltation, his elevated 
 ivepyeia, or glow of enthusiasm, in the sense of his communion 
 with the soul that breathes " through all this mystic frame," 
 but his theory seems devised for a world from which want 
 and misery and shame have been cancelled, where there is a 
 fair field and free air and men aKrjBia dvfiov e')(ovre<i. But 
 to the million it is a scornful sentence : they feel disinherited 
 of all inducements to live better than the contemporaries of 
 Seneca : they ask for bread ; it offers a string of pearls : 
 
 " It whispers of the glorious gods 
 And leaves us in the mire." 
 
EMERSON AND CARLYLE. 287 
 
 CHAPTEE IX. 
 
 EMERSON'S STYLE, POETRY, AND CRITICISM — THOREAU. 
 
 Emerson has been, to weariness, compared with Carlyle, in 
 some respects justly ; but the contrasts between them are more 
 instructive. They have in common a revolutionary spirit, a 
 marked originality, an uncompromising aversion to decorous 
 illusions, a disdain of traditional thought and stereotyped 
 modes of expression : but in Carlyle this is tempered by respect 
 for persons and a veneration for the Past, in which he holds 
 out models for our imitation ; while Emerson sees in its great 
 men and events only finger-posts for the future, and is per- 
 petually warning his readers to stay at home, lest they should 
 travel away from themselves. The one, always a careful, 
 though sometimes a perverse, historian, loves detail and 
 hates abstractions. He delights to dilate on the minutiae of 
 biography, and waxes eloquent even upon dates. The other, 
 a brilliant, though not always a profound, generaliser, tells us 
 that we must " leave a too close and lingering adherence to 
 facts, and study the sentiment as it appeared in hope, not in 
 history." " Everything," he writes, " is beautiful, seen from 
 the point of the intellect or as truth, but all is sour if seen 
 as Experience. Details are melancholy ; the plan is seemly 
 and noble. In the actual world — the painful kingdom of 
 time and place — dwell care and canker and fear. With 
 thought, with the ideal, is immortal hilarity, the rose of joy : 
 round it all the Muses sing ; but grief cleaves to names and 
 persons, and the partial interests of to-day and yesterday." 
 
288 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 Neither of these writers has the "dry light :" both exaggerate ; 
 hut in different directions. The one dwells on the shadows 
 of life ; which, from his point of view, is hardly worth living. 
 He is like a man bearing a burden, and bending over the 
 riddle of the earth ; till, when he looks up at the firmament 
 of the unanswering stars, he can but exclaim, " It is a sad 
 sight." The other is invigorated by the fresh breezes of the 
 New World : his vision ranges freely over her clear horizons, 
 and he leaps up elastic under her light atmosphere, exclaim- 
 ing, " Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of 
 emperors ridiculous." Carlyle is a half-Germanised Scotch- 
 man, living near the roar of our great metropolis, with 
 memories of Goethe on the one hand, of the gray hills of the 
 Covenant on the other. He is at bottom a Calvinist, with 
 a coating of Weimar varnish. Emerson is a half-Grecized 
 American, studying Swedenborg and the Phaedo in his garden, 
 far enough from the din of cities to enable him, " in seasons 
 of calm weather," to forget their existence. " Boston, London, 
 are as fugitive as any whiff of smoke ; so is society, so is the 
 world." In the chapter of Sartor Besarhos entitled " Natural 
 Supernaturalism" we have the same feeling of the dream-like 
 character of the shows of things ; but this mood of mind, 
 transient in the one writer, prevails with the other. In 
 most practical matters the one is strong where the other is 
 weak. Mr. Emerson seems to have bought his experience 
 cheaply. " Totus teres atque rotundus " at second hand, he 
 writes poorly of the passions, whose gusts he has never felt. 
 His Essay on Love is the description of a beautiful rainbow, not 
 of a mastering power. His own instincts are innocent ; and we 
 might have predicted that his rules of life would be misap- 
 plied, as they have been, by grosser natures. His Threnody 
 and Dirge are indications of his having passed, through the 
 " valley of the shadow ;" but he has encountered no ApoUyons, 
 and assumes himself in the Celestial City, without having 
 
EMERSON AND CARLYLE. 289 
 
 crossed the dark river. His moral theories are less sound, 
 i.e. less applicable to real life than Carlyle's, in the same 
 proportion, and for the same reason, that Shelley's were less 
 applicable than "Wordsworth's. Of the two, Carlyle alone 
 recognises the truth that underlies all the formulae about 
 human corruption : aclcnowledging the necessity of a Law 
 of Duty with definite sanctions, he takes for his watch- 
 word the Christian self-sacrifice in place of the Pagan self- 
 reliance. 
 
 The artistic qualities of these writers are even more 
 strongly contrasted. The charm of Mr. Emerson's style, at its 
 best, lies in its precision and ease. He draws flowing outlines 
 like Flaxman, graceful and clear, but colourless. His temple 
 is a modern Parthenon. Carlyle seems to struggle, like 
 Michael Angelo, with masses of rock : his church, like his 
 creed, is Gothic : his thoughts are often fragmentary, some- 
 times grotesque ; but he never offends us by the complacency 
 of the American epigrammatist, and he redeems his incom- 
 pleteness by the humour with which he acknowledges it. 
 His power of expression has increased with years ; but after 
 passing the Everlasting No, and arriving at the Everlasting 
 Yea, he has completed the circle, and gone back to the " Ice- 
 land of Negations." With all his profounder sympathies, he 
 takes his stand as a retrograde politician, and advocates a 
 purely ideal despotism. Mr. Emerson here shines by com- 
 parison. Whatever his faith in the Invisible may be, he 
 holds it without faltering. In condemning the hurry and 
 noise of mobs he keeps his temper, and, resting on justice, 
 never cries for vengeance. "Their politic at the best is 
 trick " is his severe expression in a season of national folly ; 
 but wars and revolutions take nothing from his internal tran- 
 quillity : amid the strife of parties, to none of which he 
 belongs, he preserves the " pure intellectual gleam," and sets 
 offSwedenborg and Montaigne against Prudhon and Louis 
 
290 AMEEICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 Blanc, Hafiz and Shakespeare against Luther and Fox. With 
 whatever loss of that consistency which he stigmatises as the 
 " hobgoblin of little minds," he balances his aristocratic re- 
 serve with strong democratic tendencies, and has confidence 
 in progression by antagonism. His own career has been pro- 
 gressive in the direction of actual life. " Society and politics," 
 says Mr. Lowell, " which are main elements to strength, have 
 drawn Emerson steadily manward and outward." He dwells 
 apart from factions ; yet at every crisis of his country's his- 
 tory he leaves his " intellectual throne " to say in fewest words 
 the aptest and truest things as the spokesman of a practical 
 liberty. Through good and bad report, amid the regrets and 
 reproaches of many of his transcendental admirers, he stood 
 by the Abolitionists from the time when Garrison set his 
 first types to the close of the war of emancipation. It 
 was he who wrote, in 1857, in reproach of the unfulfilled 
 Declaration of Independence — 
 
 " United States! the ages plead. 
 Present and Past in under song ; 
 Go put yovir creed into your deed, 
 Nor speak with double tongue." 
 
 Ending his exhortation with the emphatic verse — 
 
 " For he that worketh high and wise, 
 Nor pauses in his plan, 
 Will take the sun out of the skies 
 Ere freedom out of man." 
 
 It was he who said that the execution of old John Brown 
 consecrated the gallows ; it was he who pronounced the 
 noblest of the eulogies on Lincoln. Mr. Trollope tells us 
 that, when he expected to find "the star-spangled banner 
 wrapped in a mist of Platonism," in a lecture delivered in 
 1863, Mr. Emerson amazed him by the practical force of his 
 patriotism. These verses of his Boston Hymn, of the same 
 date, are both poetical and philanthropic — 
 
POLITICS. 291 
 
 " Pay ransom to tlie owner 
 
 And fill the bag to the brim ; 
 Who is the owner ? The slave is owner, 
 And ever was. Pay him. 
 
 " North ! give him beauty for rags, 
 And honour, South, for his shame ; 
 Nevada, coin thy golden crags, 
 With Freedom's image and name." 
 
 Mr. Emerson has nowhere given us in any definite detail 
 his views on Politics. His essay of that name accepts the 
 position, first upheld by Aristotle and popularised by Lord 
 Macaulay, that different forms of government are adapted 
 to different social conditions ; hut it shows that the tendency 
 of modern times, attaching more weight to the equality of 
 persons and less to the inequalities of property, is steadily 
 pointing towards democracy. Hesitating between his ad- 
 miration for the best men, and his wish for the greatest 
 happiness of the greatest number, he finally casts, in all 
 •disputed questions, his vote for the more generous policy. 
 He approves of free-trade, a wide suffrage, a national edu- 
 cation, a popular literature, a mild penal code, an open 
 competition for honours and offices. A philosophic Ee- 
 publican, he sees the dangers incident to a society without 
 gradations of rank ; while he confides in the stability of 
 the fundamental human nature on which it relies, and 
 endorses the saying of an old American author, that " a 
 Monarchy is a merchantman which sails well, but will some- 
 times strike on a rock and go to the bottom ; whilst a 
 Eepublic is a raft which would never sink, but then your 
 feet are always in water." Taking part with the indi- 
 vidual against the State, which " must follow and not lead 
 the character and progress of the citizen," he yet believes in 
 collective wisdom as the limit to collective folly ; and, con- 
 tending that the State exists for its members, thinks that (if 
 each be true to his convictions) they can act best in unison 
 
292 AMEEICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 when all are subject to the fewest external restraints. The 
 enervating influences of authority, and the "monotonous 
 sweetness of custom," he holds to be least powerful in 
 popular governments ; and maintains that the tyranny of a 
 public opinion not enforced by law need only be endured by 
 voluntary slaves. While censuring Conservatism as timid, 
 he admits that pure Eadicalism is destructive and aimless ; 
 and hopes for a new social and industrial Stoicism, softened 
 and made gracious by a love of beauty and benevolence, to 
 reconcile order with liberty. 
 
 Mr. Emerson is, perhaps, most widely known in this 
 country by his Bepresentative Men — by no means the most 
 satisfactory of his works. A series of generally acute criti- 
 cisms, pervaded by no well-marked ethical idea, it leaves on 
 the mind a somewhat indefinite impression. Its categories 
 are not exhaustive, and it is difficult to determine on what 
 principle they are chosen ; but it serves as an interesting 
 point of comparison with the corresponding lectures of th6 
 great English advocate of Hero-worship, to the suggestions 
 of which it probably owes its existence. Mr. Carlyle, whose 
 whole faith is centred in strong individualities, adopts the 
 view of history which practically resolves it into a series of 
 biographies. Mr. Buckle, caring little for persons and con- 
 fiding rather in general laws, resolves biography into history. 
 Mr. Emerson, on this question, steers a middle course. He 
 believes in great men, "to educate whom the State exists, 
 with the appearance of whom the State expires ;" but he 
 regards them as inspired mouthpieces of universal or national 
 ideas rather than as controlling forces. Their mission is not 
 so much to regulate our action as to "fortify our hopes." 
 Possessed of a larger share of the "Over-Soul," which " makes 
 the whole world kin," they apprehend and explain phenomena 
 which have hitherto passed unheeded ; but their indirect ser- 
 vices are the best. Their examples, more weighty than their 
 
REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 293 
 
 acts or discoveries, are perpetual encouragements. The great 
 man is an encyclopaedia of fact and thought : the helief born 
 in his brain spreads like a current over humanity, and he 
 becomes for a time the key to the iU-defined ideal of the 
 multitude. But his career should rouse us to a like asser- 
 tion of our liberties : we ought not to obey, but .to follow, 
 sometimes by not obeying him. Without him the world 
 would be thrust back under the dominion of the artificial 
 laws, which he has taught us to transcend. It is imbe- 
 cility, not wisdom, that " is always inviting the impudence 
 of power." It is obvious that this view is in essential 
 antagonism to Mr. Carlyle's. His heroes are men with 
 divine mandates, which they have to impress and enforce 
 upon their fellows. Perpetually chanting the Challenge of 
 Thor, he cares nothing for speculative genius, and con- 
 centrates his admiration on men of action, and force — 
 Odin, Mahomet, Dante, Luther, Johnson, Cromwell. Mr. 
 Emerson loves the greatness which has its grace by nature, 
 and " lives in a sphere of thought which others get at with 
 difficulty." To force, which reigns in a barbaric age, and 
 owes its value to the vices of society, he prefers beauty, 
 rounded outline, and mental grasp. In his philosopher, sceptic, 
 mystic, poet, and man of letters — Plato, Montaigne, Sweden- 
 borg, Shakespeare, and Goethe — ^he sees various imperfect 
 approximations to his model thinker. It has been complained 
 that Buonaparte is Mr. Emerson's only type of a man of 
 action, and not one of the highest. The fact illustrates the 
 bent of the critic's own mind : he respects capacity of every 
 kind ; but subordinates saints and statesmen alike to the 
 sage who does for truth what the artist does for beauty. 
 Yet he holds, with a laudable inconsistency, that the solution 
 of the problems of life should be in existence, not in a book : 
 his virtue is never fugitive ; it comes out and fights for 
 liberty. In leaving Bepresentative Men, let us select three of 
 
■294 AMERICAN LITEEATUKE. 
 
 the author's most striking characterisations, remarkable alike 
 for terseness and accuracy. 
 
 " What a force was coiled up in tlie skull of Xapolemi ! Ho is 
 thoroughly modern, and at the highest point of his fortunes has the 
 very spirit of the newspapei's. He came unto his own, and they 
 received him. He is never weak and literary, but acts with the solidity 
 and the precision of natural agents. He risked everything and spared 
 nothing, neither ammunition, nor money, nor troops, nor generals, nor 
 himseK. ... A Jupiter Scapin, he did all that in him lay to li\-e 
 without moral principle. 
 
 " Goethe was the soul of his century, the philosoplier of the multipli- 
 city of human life, hundred-handed, ai-gus-eyed, able and happy to cope 
 with this rolling miscellany of facts and sciences. ... He draws his 
 rents from rage and pain. By acting i-ashly he buys the power of talk- 
 ing wisely. Vexations and a tempest of passion only fill his sails as the 
 good Luther \mtes, ' When I am angry I can pray well luid preach well.' 
 ... He lays a ray of light under every fact and between liimself and 
 his dearest property. From him nothing was hid, nothing withholden. 
 The lurking demons sat to him, and the saint who saw the demons, 
 and the metaphysical elements took form. The old Eternal Genius 
 who built the world has confided himself more to this man than to any 
 other. . . . But there are nobler strains in poetry than any he has 
 sounded. There are writers poorer in talent whose tone is purer and 
 more touches the heart. Goethe can never be dear to men. 
 
 " Shakspeare is as much oxit of tlie category of eminent authors as he 
 is out of the crowd. He is inconceivably wise : the others conceivably. 
 A good reader can in a sort nestle into Plato's brain and tliink from 
 thence ; but not into Shakspeare's. He is still out of doors." 
 
 As regai'ds form, Mr. Emerson is the most unsystematic 
 of writers. The concentration of his style resembles that of 
 a classic ; but he has little constructiveness, and, as with 
 others who have adopted the aphoristic mode of conveying 
 their thoughts, he everywhere sacrifices unity to richness of 
 detail. His Essays are bundles of loose ideas tacked together 
 only by a common title — handfuls of scraps laid by singly, 
 taken out in a mass, and tossed down before his audience, like 
 the miscellaneous contents of a conjuror's hat. He delights 
 in proverbs and quotations, which are in general marvellously 
 apt ; but his accuracy is often at fault, and in his tendency to 
 
EMERSON'S STYLE. 295 
 
 exaggeration he is an American of the Americans. He loves 
 a contradiction for its own sake, and always prefers a surprise 
 to an argument. His epigrams are a series of electric shocks, 
 and though no one is more prevailingly sincere, it is sometimes 
 hard to say whether or not he is wholly in earnest, for a vein 
 of soft Irony, his only manifestation of Humour, seems to 
 underlie many of his most prononci passages. His habit is 
 to paint, in the strongest colours, the opposite sides of the 
 antinomies of life, leaving it to his reader to strike the balance. 
 Among highly-educated English writers at the present day, 
 the most frecjuent defect is indecision : oppressed by the fear 
 of critics, and almost bewildered by their own many-sided 
 knowledge, they hover about their subjects as if reluctant to 
 grapple with them, and where we are most anxious to hear 
 theu" answers give the most uncertain sounds. Cautious 
 reservations smother their best judgments : they look round 
 and through the truth rather than at it ; devotees of 
 good taste, a mental cramp is apt to clip and curtail their 
 style. Mr. Emerson's error is towards the opposite extreme : 
 he sacrifices everything to directness and decision, objects to 
 " but " and " however," and maintains that " two words, yes 
 and no, are enough." Following his own advice, he " rolls 
 out his paradoxes in solid column with not the infirmity 
 of a doubt," and with an air of unconscious simplicity, as 
 if he were soliloquising. The charm of a grace without 
 grandeur, a terse refinement of phrase, trenchant and subtile 
 illustrations, are among his main attractions. Speaking of 
 our agriculture in the English Traits, he remarks: "England 
 is a garden, under an ash-coloured sky ; the fields have been 
 rolled and combed tUl they appear to have been finished with 
 a pencil instead of a plough." This criticism has been applied 
 to his own sentences. The ideas they embody are on the scale 
 of a continent ; in form, they are adapted for a cabinet of curi- 
 osities. They are sweeping generalisations given in essences. 
 
296 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 Short and penetrating, though irregularly arranged, they are 
 like gold nails struck into a temple-wall apparently at random : 
 the pattern is an enigma to the uninitiated. Of these pithy, 
 semi-oracular mots — which do not lose so much as they ought 
 to do by being detached from their setting — we may select a 
 few characteristic examples. " Other men are lenses through 
 which we read our own minds." " The great man is he who 
 in the midst of the crowd keeps, with perfect sweetness, the 
 independence of solitude." "We grant that human life is 
 mean, but how did we find out that it was mean ? " " What is 
 the universal sense of want and ignorance but the fine innuendo 
 by which the soul makes its enormous claim ? " " Always do 
 what you are afraid to do.'' " Steep and craggy, said Porphyry, 
 is the path of the gods : open your Marcus Antoninus." " The 
 highest price you can pay for a thing is to ask it." " A just 
 thinker will aUow full swing to his scepticism." " I dip my 
 pen into the blackest ink, because I am not afraid of falling 
 into my ink-pot." "The English have a tortoise's instinct 
 to hold hard to the ground with his claws, lest he should 
 be thrown on his back." "I sometimes meet the city of 
 Lacedaemon in a clergyman's eye." " A fly is as untamable 
 as a hyena." " Every man is a consumer, and ought to be 
 a producer." 
 
 Mr. Emerson's most elaborate criticisms are mainly com- 
 posed of the same mosaic work, and in the long run we get 
 tired of these perpetual jerks.. His style, all armed with 
 points and antitheses, like the bristles of a hedgehog, lacks 
 repose. It reminds us too frequently of the frisking move- 
 ments of a ballet dancer, and his attitudes are not always 
 graceful in themselves. His allusions are sometimes far- 
 fetched, and his general naturalness does not save him from 
 occasional affectations and displays of pedantry. In coining 
 words, as "Adamhood," " forelooking," "spicier," "specu- 
 lar," "plumule," "uncontinented," "metope," "intimater" 
 
VIOLENCES OF STYLE. • 297 
 
 "antipode," " partialist," lie is far from felicitous. Minute 
 critics -will find that his disdain of rule extends to a contempt 
 of some of the rules of grammar, as in his employment of such 
 a form as " shined" and his continual use of " shall " for 
 " will." A more serious defect is his misapplication of terms, 
 as when he speaks of " the strong, self-complacent Luther," and 
 the want of taste, dignity, or moderation in such expressions as 
 the following : — " Truth is such a fly-away, such an untrans- 
 portable and unharreable a commodity that it is as had to catch 
 as light." " The beauty that shimmers in the yellow after- 
 noons of October, who could ever clutch it ? " " The fathomless 
 powers of gravity and chemistry, and over them of life pre- 
 existing within us in their highest form " (why pre-existing ?). 
 " Napoleon when spying the Alps by a sunset on the Sicilian 
 sea." " The world-spirit is a good swimmer ... he snaps his 
 finger at laws." " Every hero becomes a bore at last. ... It 
 seems as if the Deity dressed each soul which he sent into 
 nature in certain virtues and powers not communicable, and 
 wrote not transferable and good for this trip only on these 
 garments of the soul." " Twenty-thousand thieves landed at 
 Hastings, and founded the House of Lords." " Oxford is a 
 Greek factory, as Wilton mills weave carpet and Sheffield 
 grinds steel." 
 
 All these are more or less objectionable as violences done 
 to good sense or decorum. They are emphatically " smart," 
 and, like the graver irreverences which we shall have to notice 
 hereafter, unworthy of the author, who is among the keenest 
 to perceive and the foremost to censure the flippancy of his 
 countrymen. Too much stress has been laid on such faults 
 of manner by those who are hostile to his way of thinking ; 
 but it is incumbent on all who have to fight for the freedom 
 of their thought to reduce to a minimum the eccentricities of 
 their style. The greatest cause advocated by the greatest 
 orator would fail of a hearing if the advocate were to plead for 
 
298 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 it in his shirt-sleeves. As a counteractive to the impression 
 produced by lapses, which are, after all, comparatively rare, let 
 us quote a few sentences, worthy of Cicero or the Antonines, 
 from the noble essay on Friendship — 
 
 " Our cUef want in life is somebody who shall make us do what 
 we can : such a one is a friend. ... He is a person with whom I may 
 be sincere. Before him I may think aloud. ... I hate the prostitution 
 of the name of friendship to signify modish and worldly alliances. I 
 much prefer the company of ploughboys and tin-peddlars to a silken 
 and perfumed amity. . . . Let me be alone to the end of the world 
 rather than that my friend should overstep by a word or a look his real 
 sympathy. Let him not cease an instant to be himself. . . . Better be 
 a nettle in the side of yoxir friend than his echo. . . . Should not the 
 society of my friend be poetic, pure, universal and great as Nature 
 itself ? . . . Let him be to me a spirit. A message, a thought, a sin- 
 cerity, a glance from him I want, but not news nor pottage. I can get 
 politics and chat and neighbourly conveniences from cheaper companions. 
 . . . Let the soul be assured that somewhere in the Universe it should 
 rejoin its friend and it would be content and cheerful alone for a thousand 
 years. . . . Our friendships hurry to short and poor conclusions, because 
 we have made them a texture of wine and dreams instead of the tough 
 fibre of the human heart. The laws of friendship are austere and eter- 
 nal, of one web with the laws of nature and of morals. Bat we have 
 aimed at a swift and petty benefit to suck a sudden sweetness. We 
 snatch at the slowest fruit in the whole garden of God which many 
 summers and many winters must ripen. . . . The only way to have a 
 friend is to be one. . . . Only be admonished by what you already see, 
 not to strike leagues of friendship with cheap persons. ... It would 
 indeed give me a certain household joy to quit this lofty seeking, this 
 spiritual astronomy, or search of stars, and come down to warm sym- 
 pathies with you ; but then I know well I shall mourn always the 
 vanishing of my mighty gods." 
 
 As an illustration of the author's earlier style and his 
 power of idealising Nature, we have only space to refer to the 
 often-quoted passage about beauty stealing in like air and 
 enveloping the actions of Winkelreid and Columbus. 
 
 The freshness which breathes through Mr. Emerson's essays 
 reappears in his poetry ; but his verses are seldom so success- 
 ful as his prose. Apart from the obscurity of their matter, 
 which is great ; for he has chosen rhythm as the vehicle of his 
 remoter fantasies, they are defaced by frequent mannerisms, 
 
EMERSON'S POETRY. 299 
 
 incongruities, and carelessness. Most of them are wanting in 
 melody, many in syntax : the writer seems to trust to Provi- 
 dence for his rhymes, and changes his metres at will. Never- 
 theless, in both the volumes of his poetry there are poems. 
 His genius has a lyric side, and the imaginative sympathy 
 with nature and men like himself, which makes his prose 
 poetical, prevents his verse, even when awkward, from becom- 
 ing prosaic. The rippling of rivers, the sough of the pine, 
 the murmur of the harvest, and the whir of insects, pervade 
 and give life to his descriptions. A morning light is thrown 
 over his happiest pages. He sings like Shelley of the 
 stars and the earth : the delicate touches in some of his 
 quieter reflective pictures are not unworthy of the author 
 of the Excursion. AU men occasionally become either dull 
 or ridiculous : Mr. Emerson avoids the first ; he is guilty of 
 repetition, but seldom of diffuseness, and though sometimes 
 verging on absurdity, he steers clear of platitude. These 
 poems reveal him on another side generally concealed from 
 us — ^that which has to do with home affections. Interleaved 
 between the gold-dust drifts of Alexandrian and Persian 
 mysticism, there are pieces that speak of a love that is 
 neither " initial," " demoniac," nor " celestial," but human, 
 and the consciousness of a common share in common joys 
 and griefs. Of these the Dirge, In Memoriam, the Farewell, 
 the lines to J. W., to Ellen, and the Threnody, are the most 
 conspicuous. In the last the Idealist mourns over an ir- 
 reparable loss, for which he finds but a partial consolation 
 in his philosophy — 
 
 "The eager fate wMci carried thee 
 Took the largest part of me ; 
 For this losing is true dying, 
 This is lordly man's down-lying, 
 This his slow but sure reclining, 
 Star by star his world resigning. 
 
300 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 " child of paradise,' 
 Boy who made dear Hs father's home, 
 In whose deep eyes 
 
 Men read the welfare of the times to come, 
 I am too much bereft : 
 The world dishonoured thou hast left. 
 truth's and nature's costly lie ! 
 trusted broken prophecy ! 
 richest fortune sourly crossed ! 
 Born for the future, to the future lost." 
 
 But the prevailing tone of tlie more intelligible part of 
 these volumes is cheerful. The Woodnotes which, under this 
 and other names, occupy so much of their space, are those of 
 the lark rather than the nightingale. 
 
 " Thousand minstrels woke within me, 
 Our music's in the hills," 
 
 is the perpetual refrain of the exulting worshipper of Nature. 
 
 Camping among the Adirondacs, welcoming the May, or 
 
 putting his garden into song, he keeps his new American 
 
 faith — 
 
 " When the forest shall mislead me, 
 When the night and morning lie, , 
 When sea and land refuse to feed me, 
 
 'Twill be time enough to die : 
 Then will yet my mother yield 
 A piUow in her greenest field, 
 Nor the June flowers scorn to cover 
 The clay of her departed lover." 
 
 In the same strain — that of Quarles or Andrew MarveU at 
 their best — is his well known Good-lye, proud world, I'm going 
 home ; but the Puritanism of older days has here taken on 
 another shape. To counterbalance this hermit-like spirit, 
 there are other pieces relating to the intercourse of men with 
 each other, showing a keen observation of practical life, and 
 weighing its gains and losses — sound worldly wisdom in neat 
 quatrains, and a few trumpet calls of liberty. The Hymn sung 
 at the completion of the Concord monument is thoroughly 
 
PATRIOTIC AND MYSTIC POEMS. 301 
 
 patriotic, and at the same time strong and dignified ; while 
 the verses written immediately before and during the late war 
 address the whole nation, in forcible terms both of warning 
 and encouragement. Those practical manifestoes are the 
 more striking from the fact that they are printed by the 
 side of others proclaiming, in transcendental enigmas, the 
 indifferentism of all transitory things, the fixity of Fate, 
 and the doctrine of the absorption of the individual in the 
 Infinite. Most readers of Mr. Emerson's earlier volume of 
 verse have puzzled over The Sphinx. Let them endeavour 
 to unravel the following lines from his May-Bay, entitled 
 
 Brahma : — 
 
 " If the red slayer think he slays, 
 Or if the slain think he is slain, 
 They know well the subtle ways 
 I keep and pass and turn again. 
 
 " Far or forgot to me is near ; 
 
 Shadow and sunlight are the same ; 
 The vanquished gods to me appear, 
 And one to me are shame and fame. 
 
 " They reckon ill who leave me out ; 
 When me they fly I am the wings ; 
 I am the doubter and the doubt, 
 
 And I the hymn the Brahmin sings. 
 
 " The strong gods pine for my abode, 
 And pine in vain the sacred seven ; 
 But thou, meek lover of the good ! 
 
 Find me, and turn thy back on heaven." 
 
 Almost everything our author has written is excellent in 
 parts, but he has produced no consummate whole : we have 
 in all his work spontaneity, sagacity, and vivacity, imperfectly 
 harmonised with a love of abstraction. 
 
 The extracts we have given, within the limited compass 
 of our review, sufficiently illustrate the fact that Mr. Emerson 
 is singularly unequal as a Critic. Eor penetration, subtilty, 
 and conclusiveness, some of his estimates of men and things 
 
302 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 have never been surpassed. They are frequently most feli- 
 citous, at all times fresh and genuine, and expressed with a 
 racy vigour, though, on some occasions, with an unpruned vio- 
 lence. On the other hand, this freshness is often purchased 
 by a lack of knowledge. Hobbes confessed that he owed 
 much of his originality to the restricted range of his reading. 
 Emerson often owes his apparent force to the limitations 
 of his thought. His eye is keen, but its range is compara- 
 tively narrow ; and his deficiencies of vision are the more 
 injurious that they generally escape his own observation. 
 Unconsciously infected by the haste which he condemns in 
 his countrymen, he looks at other nations through the folding 
 telescope of a tourist. His English Traits abound in trench- 
 ant epigrams, but though they pay an amply generous tribute 
 to English greatness, they miss — in many important particu- 
 lars — the salient points both for good and evil of English 
 character. The following sentence is surely misleading, as 
 well as slightly confused. " The religion of England is part 
 of good breeding. When you see on the Continent the well- 
 dressed Englishman come into his ambassador's chapel, and 
 put his face for silent prayer into his well-brushed hat, one 
 cannot help feeling how much national pride prays with him 
 and the religion of a gentleman." Mr. Emerson's taste is con- 
 stantly at fault : an incessant straining after Ion-mots mars 
 his judgment as much as it vitiates his style ; and his love 
 of directness, pushed to an extreme, leads him over the 
 confines of fact, as well as the reservations of fashion, into 
 reckless caricature. A dogmatist, in spite of the impulsive 
 inconsistencies which ought to be fatal to dogmatism, his 
 judgments of those whose lives and writings do not square 
 with his theories are for the most part valueless ; and when 
 he does injustice to his adversaries, his tacit assumption that 
 all wise men must agree with him only adds to the ofifence. 
 When, for instance, he asserts that " Locke is as surely the 
 
CRITICISM— ENGLISH TRAITS. 303 
 
 influx of decomposition and prose as Bacon and the Platon- 
 ists of growth," or declares that Mr. Wilkinson's prefaces to 
 the translations of Swedenborg " throw all the contemporary 
 philosophy of England into the shade," or says contemptuously 
 of the sensational school, " 'Tis of no importance what bats and 
 oxen think," or writes of his converse with Landor, " He pes- 
 tered me with Southey ; but who is Southey ?" he shows 
 either ignorance or flippancy. His praise of Bacon, with 
 whose method he has no real sympathy, seems to prove that 
 he has never understood the position of the founder of induc- 
 tive science. His own motto is rather plus intra than plus 
 ultra, and his idea of Truth is not so much the correspond- 
 ence of thought with things, or a knowledge of their forms, as 
 the agreement of the mind with itself. He utterly rejects the 
 Idola Theatri, but not unfrequently falls a prey to all the others. 
 He seldom ventures on verbal criticism ; and in dealing with 
 foreign languages he betrays the weakness of his scholarship. 
 Though he is a professed Platonist, his essay on Plato is, in 
 some respects, his poorest. He seems to have read him in 
 Mr. Bohn's translations, which he pronounces "excellent." 
 One qualification for a good critic is a well-defined artistic 
 standard, another is the dramatic capacity of placing himself 
 for the time in the position of the person who is being criti- 
 cised. Mr. Emerson has neither of these. In reviewing an 
 author he seems to skim his works, and ask how far the results 
 arrived at coincide with a preconceived idea. With the spirit 
 of a fearless inquirer, he unfortunately blends so much pre- 
 sumption as to feel an absolute indifference regarding the 
 opinions of others, and this, in excess, constitutes a moral as 
 well as an artistic defect. Thought is free, and the expression 
 of it ought to be so ; but when our thought wanders very far 
 from that of the majority of wise and good men, we are bound 
 to watch it with more than ordinary care, to sift its conclu- 
 sions, and at least to state them moderately. Mr. Emerson's 
 
304 AMERICAN LITEKATURE. 
 
 thought does wander far, and it runs fast : he does not know 
 what moderation in expression means, and his almost childish 
 love of contradiction perpetually, and often justly, provokes 
 offence. In dealing with subjects, and in handling names 
 commonly regarded as sacred, he delights in parading his in- 
 dependence ; and, instead of endeavouring to conciliate, he rides 
 rough-shod over the most cherished convictions of his feUow- 
 men, or waives them aside with a complacent smile and a sort 
 of divine impudence. Every claim of authority he receives 
 as a challenge to his personal rights, and immediately decides 
 to " believe the contrary." He never seems to have read the 
 inscription on the third gate of Buzerane, " Be not too bold." 
 Like King Cambyses, he stabs the bull Apis, in utter disre- 
 gard of the historian's warning. His impatient antici;pationes 
 naturce detract from his reliability in matters of detail, while 
 by a similar carelessness he repeats and contradicts himself 
 with equal frequency. His soundest judgments relate to the 
 men around him, of whom he is at once the panegyrist and 
 the censor. All that is weak and foolish in their mode of 
 life he condemns; all that is noblest and most hopeful he 
 applauds. 
 
 Mr. Emerson has left his mark on the century. To use 
 a favourite phrase of his own, " he cannot be skipped." Even 
 where his results are least satisfactory, his intense suggestive- 
 ness is the cause of thought in others ; and, as one of the 
 " genitic '' powers of modem literature, his fertilising influence 
 will survive his inconclusive speculations. His faults are 
 manifest : a petulant irreverence, frequent superficiality, a 
 rash bravery, an inadequate solution of difficulties deeming 
 itself adequate, are among the chief. But he is original, 
 natural, attractive, and direct, limpid in phrase and pure in 
 fancy. His best eloquence flows as easily as a stream. In 
 an era of excessive reticence and hypocrisy, he has no conceal- 
 ments. We never suspect him of withholding half of what he 
 
EMEESON AND COMTE. 305 
 
 knows, or of formularising for our satisfaction a belief which 
 he does not sincerely hold. He is transparently honest and 
 honourable : his courage has no limits. Isolated by force of 
 character, there is no weakness in his solitude. He leads us 
 into a region where we escape at once from deserts and from 
 noisy cities ; for he rises above without depreciating ordinary 
 philanthropy, and his philosophy at least endeavours to meet 
 our daily wants. la every social and political controversy 
 he throws his weight into the scale of Justice, on the side of 
 a rational and progressive liberty ; and his lack of sympathy 
 with merely personal emotions is recompensed by a venera- 
 tion for the ideal of the race which recalls the beautiful 
 sentiment of Malebranche — ■' "When I touch a human hand I 
 touch heaven." We admire his combination of comprehen- 
 siveness and concentration, of finesse and tenacity, of good 
 sense and reverie, the cheerfulness of his scepticism, and the 
 softness of his austerity. 
 
 Mr. Emerson's is the highest secular form of the Protestant, 
 as M. Comte's is the highest secular form of the Catholic, faith. 
 His religion of Nature at least teaches us to aspire to the 
 noblest life, and assures us that every resisted temptation is 
 a new source of strength. He has reanimated what is most 
 enduring in Pagan, and borrowed, although it may be with- 
 out due acknowledgment,' a ray of inspiration from Christian 
 Ethics. His love of Truth, for its own sake, is one of the 
 rarest virtues in any age, and his idealism is a perpetual 
 protest against the baser materialism of his own — a material- 
 ism, in the long run, far more formidable to religion than any 
 erroneous metaphysics. His practical precepts are all heroic : 
 however his system may be misapplied, he is himself preserved, 
 by the purity of his intentions, from the worst dangers to which 
 it is exposed. His exhortation " first, last, midst, and without 
 end to honour every truth by use," is the sum of morality. 
 His writings are bracing to the moral sense, a tonic to the wiU 
 
 X 
 
306 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 as well as to the understanding. They recall the magnanimities 
 of the Porch, the amenities of the Academy, and the fervour of 
 the best Puritan models. No one can pass from their perusal 
 to any meanness. Mr. Emerson will never be very popular 
 in England, where his defects and merits are alike generally 
 uncongenial. He alarms our Philistinism by the aggressive 
 independence and strong counter currents of his thought; and 
 repels our anti-Philistinism by his vehemence of expression. 
 Our middle classes rally against him round the pillars of their 
 Church and State. Of the refined minority, those who hesi- 
 tate at heart between the Liberal creed and Ultramontane 
 sympathies turn scornfully from his saniplars of excellence 
 to the Acta Sanctorvm. Our apostles of Culture, intensify- 
 ing his moral, repudiate his artistic, blemishes : they agree 
 with him in theoretically despising plain facts and plain 
 men ; but, unlike him, they carry their theory into practice : 
 Tyndall and Euskin have confessed their obligations to 
 Emerson's style ; Mr. Arnold, who is obliged to no one, de- 
 spises it. The later followers of Bentham, whom he has never 
 fairly appreciated, recognise him only as an ill-informed 
 adversary. Yet the time has come when well-educated 
 Englishmen of all sects ought frankly to acknowledge the 
 high qualities of a mind, on the whole the loftiest that the 
 world of letters in New England has hitherto produced. In 
 memory of these qualities, the thoughts of his countrymen 
 will continue — with or without the sanction of foreigners — 
 to revert with respect and gratitude to the old-fashioned 
 village, straggling through the meadows, where the Assabeth 
 unites with the Musketaquid to creep towards the sea, famous 
 as the first battlefield of the Eevolutionary war, and as the 
 birthplace of American Transcendentalism. 
 
 Emerson's subsequent work has done little to alter any 
 
 deliberate judgment formed about him fifteen years ago.^ 
 
 ^ "With a few excisions, and the addition of a paragraph on Margaret 
 
EMERSON'S LATER ESSAYS. 307 
 
 His later writings have the same brilliancy, the same incon- 
 sistencies, the same occasional defects of over-statement on 
 either side; here and there the same violences as his earlier. 
 To the last he remains a preacher of self-reliance, scorning 
 complaisance and conventionality, appraising a defiant cour- 
 age. His optimism, condensed in the aphorism of doubtful 
 truth, " Every sound ends in Music," is, if possible, more dog- 
 matic. He wrote in youth, " The only reward of virtue is 
 virtue :" in age he writes, "Virtue secures its own success." 
 He keeps quoting the East, and relying on the West. His 
 hardly reconcilable views on Freedom and Fate, Failure and 
 Success, Solitude and Society, lie side by side. The one con- 
 spicuous difference is that he has almost deserted metaphysics 
 for a lively interest in practical life, and the mere description 
 ■of external nature for the study of man. In place of eloquent 
 rhapsodies on the " Over-Soul," or " Circles," or " Nominalism 
 and Eealism," we have often almost worldly-wise disquisitions 
 •on "Oratory," "Domestic Life," "Clubs," " Eesources," 
 ■" Social Aims ; " he leaves the forest to exalt " The Farmer " 
 — " a slow person not tuned to city watches, but taking the 
 pace of seasons, plants, and chemistry," and yet largely the 
 master of city marriages and of national life. He cares less 
 to soliloquise, and has all the love of talk that is often attri- 
 buted to advancing years. His essays are no longer prose 
 poems ; but they are charming conversations. They teem 
 with anecdote, and are constantly enlivened by the apt 
 quotations of a wary reader with a retentive memory. There 
 is nothing in Todd's Student's Manual more practical ; cer- 
 tainly nothing so good as Emerson's advice on the choice of 
 books. The following sentences, with notes correcting their 
 
 Fuller and Alcott, I have reprinted tie foregoing part of this, and the whole 
 of the previous, chapter from an Essay which appeared in the North British 
 Review for December 1876, in the helief that the interpolation of after- 
 thoughts would only destroy whatever unity it may possess. 
 
308 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 occasional severity, might be framed and hung up in every 
 
 study : — 
 
 " The three practical rules wHcli I have to offer are — 1. Never 
 read any book that is not a year old. 2. Bead no mean books. Shun 
 the spawn of the press on the gossip of the hour. . . . Perhaps the 
 world would be a gainer if all the secondary writers were lost — say iu 
 England all but Shakespeare, Milton, and Bacon. Never read any but 
 famed books. 3. Never read any but what you Kke." 
 
 Here, as elsewhere, his generalisations are excellent ; but 
 he is apt when he comes to details, on which equally he 
 assumes the authority of the law and the prophets, to make 
 mistakes — e.g. the following has at least a show of arro- 
 gance : — " You shall " {N.B. his misuse of shall is no 
 mere accident) " not read newspapers, nor politics, nor 
 novels, nor Montaigne, nor the newest French book. You 
 may read Plutarch, Plato, Plotinus, Hindoo mythology and 
 ethics — read Hafiz and the Trouveurs, and (in your ear) 
 Ossian." To this he adds the medley, " Aristophanes, J. A. 
 St. John's Chreece, Mebuhr's Letters, the useful Eobertson, 
 the Venerable Bede, and Sharon Turner." His special criti- 
 cisms are still frequently amusing, e.g. "When people tell 
 me they do not relish poetry and bring me Shelley or Aikin's 
 poets, I am quite of their mind." " I find Faust a little too 
 modern and intelligible. We can find such a fabric at 
 several mills, though a little inferior. Faust abounds in the 
 disagreeable. The vice is purient, learned, Parisian." He 
 tells us that it is a " rule of manners to avoid exaggeration," 
 but still frequently fails, as in the following petulances, to 
 remember the rule : — 
 
 "It is the wisdom of a man, in every instance of his labour, to 
 hitch his waggon to a star." " If a man's centrality is iuccmprehensible 
 to us, we may as well snub the sun." " In the dance of God there is 
 not one of the chorus but can and will begin, to spin, monumental as 
 he looks." " Zoologists may deny that horse-hairs in the water always 
 turn to worms, but I find that whatever is old corrupts, and the past 
 turns to snakes." " The works of genius cost nothing. Shakespeare 
 
LATER WORKS. 309 
 
 made his Hamlet as a bird weaves its nest." " The Bible itself is like 
 an old Cremona ; it has been played upon by the devotion of thousands 
 of years, till every word and particle is public and tunable." 
 
 The follpwing are among his recent wiser, though not 
 
 always consistent, utterances : — 
 
 " If you do not use the tools, they use you. A man builds a 
 fine house, and now he has a master. A man has a reputation and he 
 is no longer free." "We pray to be conventional. But the wary 
 Heaven takes care you shaU not be, if there is anything good in you. 
 Dante was very bad company, and was never invited to dinner. . . . 
 Columbus discovered no isle or quay so lonely as himself." " The hope 
 of any time must be always sought in minorities. Literary history is 
 a record of the power of minorities of one." " Bad kings and governors 
 help us if only they are bad enough." " Things said for conversation 
 are chalk-eggs," but " conversation at its best is a series of intoxications." 
 " The peace of society and the decorum of tables seems to require that 
 next to a notable wit should always be posted a phlegmatic man." 
 " You shaU not speak ideal truth in prose, but you may in verse." 
 " Cure the drunkard, heal the insane, mollify the homicide, but what 
 lessons can be devised for the debauchee of sentiment." " If a man has 
 manners and talent he may dress roughly and carelessly. It is only 
 when mind and character slumber that the dress can be seen." "I 
 have heard, with admiring submission, the experience of the lady who 
 declared that the sense of being perfectly well dressed gives a feeling 
 of inward tranquillity which religion is powerless to bestow." " The 
 third felicity of age is that it has found expression. The youth suffers 
 not only from ungratified desires, but from powers untried. . . . Michael 
 Angelo's head is full of masculine and gigantic figures, as gods walking, 
 which make him savage until his furious chisel can render them into 
 marble." 
 
 The only change observable in Mr. Emerson's speculative 
 views, on comparison of his earlier and recent work, is a dis- 
 tinctly more affirmative view on the question of Immortality ; 
 on which these are among his latest utterances : — 
 
 " The sceptic aflSrms that the universe is a nest of boxes, and that 
 there is nothing in the last box." " Our passions, our endeavours, have 
 something ridiculous and mocking, if we come to so hasty an end. If 
 not to be, how like the bells of a fool is the trump of fame. . . . Will 
 you build magnificently for mice." " AU the comfort I have found 
 teaches me to confide that I shall not have less in tinies and places that 
 I do not yet know. The good Power can easily provide me millions 
 more as good." " I have heard that whenever the name of man is 
 spoken, the doctrine of immortality is announced. It cleaves to his 
 
310 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 constitution. The mode of it baffles our wit, and no whisper comes 
 to us from the other side ; but the inference from the working of in- 
 tellect — hiving knowledge, hiving skill — at the end of life just ready- 
 to be bom, affirms the inspirations of aflfection and of the moral senti- 
 ment." 
 
 Howe'er it be, it is pleasant to think that the veteran sage, 
 who has led us through " many goodly states and king- 
 doms " of thought, should have passed with hope to his 
 harbourage. 
 
 Original thinkers are commonly as unfortunate in their 
 disciples as great works are in their continuations. The 
 revelations of the prophet are caged in formulae, the inspira- 
 tions of the poet burlesqued in vagaries, the inconsistencies 
 of the philosopher reconciled by mutilating the truth, the 
 maxims of the teacher made false by isolation. Emerson 
 tells men to act boldly as their nature bids ; but he has in 
 reserve an Ode to Duty, some traditional checks, the safeguard 
 of a cool temper, personal regards, and an almost fiery 
 national zeal. Whitman is Emerson stripped of all but 
 the last, and unrestrained as 
 
 " When wild in woods the noble savage ran." 
 
 Thoreau is Emerson without domestic ties, or wish for them ; 
 
 save for a streak of benevolence, without those of humanity, 
 
 and without patriotism ; but interesting by the clear genius, 
 
 ethereal freedom, serene and absolute intrepidity of a spirit 
 
 that 
 
 " to the elements did stand 
 In nearer kindred than our race." 
 
 In his works — the unflecked mirrors of his mind — we have 
 the love of independence, pushed to scorn of sympathy; 
 the habit of contradiction exaggerated to caricature, the 
 passion for solitude indulged to selfishness. He was 
 like his master in his combination of pantheistic theory 
 
SCHOOL OF EMEESON. 311 
 
 with intense practical individualism : in his lofty ideas of 
 friendship, religion, love : in his worship of sincerity, courage, 
 and "the perfect will:" in his "communion with fine trans- 
 lunary things:" as also in the polish of his paragraphs, and 
 the fragmentary form of his thought. Of both might be said 
 what has been said of one, " His works are like a sky, full of 
 separate stars." He was unlike in his thorough revulsion from 
 the ordinary active world, his consistent contempt of society 
 and politics, and his essentially conservative aristocracy. 
 "Emerson," he says, "tells me he is driven to all sorts of 
 resources, and among the rest to men. I tell him we differ 
 only in our resources. Mine is to get away from men." The 
 recluse of Concord liked to leave his garden once a week, and 
 look into the eyes of his audiences. " "We lose our days," he 
 exclaims in his essay on Clubs, " and are barren of thoughts 
 for want of some person to talk with. The understanding 
 can no more empty itself by its own action than can a deal 
 box. ... A scholar does not wish to be always pumping 
 his brains, he wants gossip." The hermit of Walden answers : 
 " Woe to him who wants a companion, for he is unfit to be 
 the companion even of himself." "I love my friends very 
 much, but I find that it is of no use to go to see them. I 
 hate them commonly when I am near them; they belie 
 themselves, and deny me continually." " Warm your body 
 by healthful exercise, not by cowering over a stove. Warm 
 your spirit by performing independently noble deeds, not by 
 ignobly seeking the sympathy of your fellows, who are not 
 better than yourself" Emerson's Threnody is one of the 
 most pathetic dirges in any language. On a dead friend 
 Thoreau stoically writes : " I do not wish to see John ever 
 again. We do not treat or esteem each other for what we 
 are, but for what we are capable of being. Do not the 
 flowers die every year ? " " What is this heaven which they 
 expect, if it is no better than they expect ? . . . Here is our 
 
312 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 heaven. . . . What a fool he must be who thinks that his 
 El Dorado is anywhere but where he lives ! " Elsewhere, on 
 picking up a button from the coat of the drowned Marquis 
 of Ossoli, on the sea-shore, he reaches the acme of egotism : 
 "Held up it intercepts the light, — an actual button, — and 
 yet all the life it is connected with is less substantial to 
 me, and interests me less, than my faintest dream. Our 
 thoughts are the epochs in our lives ; all else is but as 
 a journal of the winds that blew while we were here." 
 Emerson believed in " Address " and " Tact," and with all his 
 eloquence about minorities of one, in Success ; he was good 
 company and enjoyed it. Thoreau, talldng of some potent 
 public speech, remarked that whatever succeeded with an 
 audience was bad ; and, when asked to join in a walk, said 
 that he had " no walks to throw away on company," and con- 
 fessed that he had " an appetite for solitude, as of an infant 
 for sleep." Of the visitors who pestered his retreat, he writes 
 in a passage which goes some way to refute the accusation of 
 want of humour, and to confirm that of cynicism — 
 
 " I had some guests from those not reckoned commonly among the 
 towns poor, but who should be ; who are among the world's poor at any 
 rate ; guests who appeal not to your ' hospitality,' but to your hospital- 
 ality ; who earnestly wish to be helped, and preface their appeal with 
 the information that they are resolved, for one thing, never to help 
 themselves. . . . Objects of charity are not guests. . . . Men of 
 almost every degree of wit called on me in the migrating season ; men 
 who had more wits than they knew what to do with ;' men who did 
 not know when their visit had terminated, though I went about my 
 business again, answering them from greater and greater remoteness 
 . . . ministers who spoke of God as if they enjoyed a monopoly of the 
 subject, who could not bear all kinds of opinions . . . runaway slaves 
 with plantation manners . . . one real runaway slave among the rest, 
 whom I helped to forward toward the north star . . . men of one 
 idea, like a hen with one chicken . . . men of ideas instead of legs, a 
 sort of intellectual centipede, that made you crawl all over. Finally, 
 there were the self-styled reformers, the greatest bores of all. One 
 man proposed a book in which visitors should write their names, as at 
 the White Mountains ; but alas ! I have too good a memory to make 
 that necessary." 
 
HENRY D. THOREAU. 313 
 
 Henry D. Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts, 
 in July 1817, and graduated at Harvard without honours in 
 1837. He set little store on public-school education, saying, 
 " It often makes a straight-cut ditch out of a free meandering 
 brook." After a period of private teaching he wearied of it, 
 tried the business of making pencils, gave it up, and betook 
 himself, on the slender means obtained by land-surveying, to the 
 task of living the freest life possible to a student of Nature, 
 Character, and a few well-chosen Books. In 1845, wishing to 
 show that a man could live without any help from any one, 
 he with his own hands constructed a hut on the shores of 
 Walden Pond, where he lived for two years in solitude, 
 latterly interrupted by the intruders whom he has gibbeted, 
 sometimes helping slaves by making his house a station of 
 " the und'fefground railway " to Canada ; but mainly studying 
 the trees and flowers, and insects and fish, and recording the 
 results of his manual labour and mental reverie in a volume 
 which has the charm of being written by a voluntary Eobinson 
 Crusoe, with a knowledge like that of White of Selborne. 
 He spent his remaining years in travelling within a narrow 
 range, in meditation and in his routine work, diverging only 
 once into politics, when, in 1859, he delivered an address in 
 favour of John Brown, then under arrest. An Abolitionist 
 on principle, he seems, oddly enough, to have taken no interest 
 in the war. Writing to a friend in April 1861, he asks, "What 
 business have you, if you are an angel of light, to be pon- 
 dering over the deeds of darkness, reading ' The New York 
 Herald,' and the like ? I do not so much regret the present 
 condition of things in this country as I do that I ever heard 
 of it. . . . Blessed are the young, for they do not read the 
 President's message. Blessed are they who never read a 
 newspaper, for they shall see Nature, and through her, God." 
 A year later, we have his last written, or rather dictated, 
 words : " You ask about my health. I suppose that I have 
 
314 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 not many months to live ; but of course I know nothing 
 about it. I may add that I am enjoying existence as much 
 as ever, and regret nothing." He died in the course of the 
 year. Shortly afterwards Emerson edited his works, with an 
 introduction, from which we take the following (sometimes 
 slightly abridged) sentences : — 
 
 " Thoreau was bred to no profession ; he never married ; lie lived 
 alone ; lie never went to church ; he never voted ; he refused to pay 
 a tax to the States ; he ate no flesh, he drank no wine, he never knew 
 the use of tobacco ; and, though a naturalist, he used neither trap nor 
 gun. . . . He had no temptations to fight against, no appetites, no 
 passions. . . . The bachelor of thought and Nature, he chose to be 
 rich by making his wants few and supplying them himself. He 
 refused all invitations, preferred a good Indian to highly-cultivated 
 people, and said he would rather go to Oregon than to London. . . . 
 He used the railways as little as possible, walking hundreds of miles, 
 and lodging at farmers' or at fishers' houses. . . . There was some- 
 thing military in his nature, rarely tender, and it cost him much less 
 to say ' No ' than to say ' Yes.' ... 'I love Henry,' said a friend, 
 ' but I cannot like him ; and as for taking his arm, I should as soon 
 think of taking the arm of an elm-tree.' " 
 
 " Thoreau," says Mr. Lowell, in a more severe, sometimes 
 corroborative, sometimes corrective, criticism, "was a man 
 who made his own whim the Law, and accepted his defects 
 as virtues — 
 
 " Indolent, unsuccessful, poor, he said activity was mere restlessness, 
 success contemptible, money a curse, and benevolence a superstition. 
 He had no creative imagination ; he discovered nothing ; but thought 
 every common fact of nature, from moonlight to the planting of acorns 
 by squirrels, a discovery of his own. The itch of originality infected 
 and marred even the charm of his style. De Quincey tells us that 
 "Wordsworth was impatient when any one else spoke of mountains : so 
 Thoreau wished to leave his name alone at the top of the hUL His 
 works read as if all out of doors had kept its diary, and become its own 
 Montaigne. He loves the out-of-the-way more than the true, always 
 believes the contrary, and wishes to trump your suit. He insists on 
 the public going back to flint and steel, when there is a match-box in 
 his pocket which he knows well enough how to use. He leaps on 
 Stylites' pillar, and forgets that he is far enough from his fellows 
 when free from their weakness. Outstripping St. Pierre and Chateau- 
 briand and Rousseau, he would almost have persuaded men to go on 
 
INDIFFEKENTISM. 315 
 
 all fours. His purity was wintry cold. . . . He had no feeling for the 
 great political drama being enacted round him." 
 
 Thoreau has since his death, during the last four years espe- 
 cially, heen favoured with many reviewers, competent and 
 incompetent; but aU I have seen is little else than water 
 added to the wine of Emerson and Lowell. The occasional 
 want of sympathy, hardness answering hardness, in the 
 criticism of the last, naturally arises from the antagonism of 
 their dispositions. The poet and politician is active to rest- 
 lessness, practical, and almost fiercely patriotic ; the essayist 
 lethargic, self-complacently defiant, and too nearly a stoico- 
 epicurean adiaphorist to discompose himself, in party or even 
 in national strifes. We can hardly conceive anything more 
 shocking to Mr. Lowell than the following : — 
 
 " The whole enterprise of this nation, which is not an upward but 
 a Western one, is totally devoid of interest to me. It is perfectly 
 heathenish — a fiUibustering toward heaven by the great western route. 
 They may go their way to their manifest destiny, which I trust is not 
 mine. I see them on their winding way ; but no music is wafted 
 from their host ; only the rattling of change in their pockets. What 
 end do they propose to themselves beyond Japan ? what aims more 
 lofty than the prairie dogs ? As it respects these things, I have not 
 changed an opinion, one iota from the first. As the stars looked to 
 me when I was a shepherd in Assyria, they look to me now a New 
 Englander. . , . Whether Pierce or Scott is elected, not a new scintil- 
 lation of light ilashes on me. 
 
 " I very rarely feel any itching to be what is called ' useful to my 
 fellow men.' . . . Sometimes — when my thoughts for want of employ- 
 ment fall into humdrum — I have dreamed of putting out a fire ; but 
 it must have got well a-going. . . . What a foul subject is this of 
 doing good instead of minding one's own life, which should be his 
 ' business.' When in the progress of a life a man swerves . . . then 
 the drama turns to tragedy, and makes haste to its fifth act. . . . Such 
 are cursed with duties and the neglect of duties. ' For such the 
 decalogue was made.' " 
 
 " There is much matter in these convertites " to the life of 
 Arden Wood, or Walden Lake. Though the New England 
 republican has the warmer heart, the citizen of the world. 
 
316 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 living out of the world, has the finer style ; a style which, he 
 
 says, " drops from him simply and directly as a stone falls to 
 
 the ground:" his matter may be defaced hy violence; his 
 
 manner is never marred hy pedantry. At his best he may 
 
 be taken as a model. If we inquire further into the record 
 
 of this abnormal being, this " half-disembodied spirit," who, 
 
 on the faith of no definite creed, asks mankind to live, like 
 
 himself, as half-disembodied spirits, we find his work falls 
 
 under three main heads — his report of the Walden lAfe,, his 
 
 Excursions, and his Letters. 
 
 Thoreau essayed verse, not always unsuccessfully, for 
 
 his want of. the lyric faculty was partially recompensed by 
 
 his incisiveness. The following, on the loss of a friend, is 
 
 a fragment of a Shakespearian sonnet : — 
 
 " Eternity may not tlie chance repeat ; 
 But I must tread my single way alone, 
 In sad rememlDrance that we once did meet, 
 And know that bliss irrevocably gone." 
 
 A line of his stanzas on Inspiration has the same firm step — 
 " Time cannot bend the line that God has writ." 
 
 His addresses to " Mist " and " Haze " — 
 
 " Toil of the day displayed, sun dust, 
 Aerial surf upon the shores of earth " — 
 
 exhibit the brightness of his vision: as also that to 
 
 "Smoke"— 
 
 " Light-winged Smoke ! Icarian bird, 
 Melting thy pinions in thy upward ilight, 
 Lark without song and messenger of dawn, 
 CircUng above thy hamlets as thy nest ; 
 Or else, departing dream and shadowy form 
 Of midnight vision, gathering up thy skirts ; 
 By night star-veiling, and by day 
 Darkening the light and blotting out the sun ; 
 Go thou, my incense, upward from this hearth, 
 And ask the gods to pardon this clear flame." 
 
 But there is nothing in his verse so poetical as his best 
 
"WALDEN"— "EXCURSIONS." 317 
 
 prose, as in the pathetic allegory, familiar to the readers of 
 Walden, that recalls passages of Novalis or Heine — 
 
 " I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle-dove, and am 
 still on their trail. Many are the travellers I have spoken to concerning 
 them, describing their trades and what calls they answered to. I have 
 met one or two who had heard the hound, and the tramp of the horse, 
 and even seen the dove disappear behind a cloud : and they seemed 
 as anxious to recover them as if they had lost them themselves." 
 
 Or this essence of A Soul's Tragedy, expanded by Bro^yning 
 
 in the prose and ^Doetry of Chiappino's life — 
 
 " The youth gets together the materials to build a bridge to the 
 moon or a temple on the earth, and the middle-aged man concludes to 
 build a wood-shed with them." 
 
 I know nothing more true or more pathetic. 
 
 Thoreau, contemning civilisation, — subordinating Chaucer 
 to the Ballads, and Shakespeare to the Iliad, in his love of 
 " the wild," satisfied with none, — asks, "Where is the literature 
 that gives expression to Nature ?" Of mere external Nature 
 his own prose is perhaps the most literal rendering. In this 
 respect he transcends Emerson, who says of him, " He knew 
 the country like a fox or bird, and was familiar with the 
 habits of every weed. He saw as with microscope, heard as 
 with ear trumpet, and his memory was a photographic register 
 of all he saw and heard." Lowell says he is, here and there, at 
 fault ; but this must be the result of defective training, for he 
 observes the loss and gain of the sea- beach as closely as the 
 marks on the stump of a cedar. He takes us with him wher- 
 ever he goes. We feel, on closing the "book, that we have 
 sailed for a week together on Concord and Merrimac, by bay 
 and bluff, over rapid and pool, in the fisherman's dory, by the 
 haunts of Penacooks and Pawtuckets, amid memories of old 
 Puritan wars, and listening to cunning words on Persius and 
 Ossian, Chaucer and Horace. We hear the surf of the 0aXacra-a 
 wriea-cra on Cape Cod, where " a man may stand and put all 
 America behind him," a cliff " anchored to the heavens by 
 
318 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 cables of beach-grass, and see the light twinkling in the 
 
 watchtower, and smell the seaweed about the rocks, or lose 
 
 our way and hob-nob with the Indians in the thick fir-woods 
 
 of Maine. 
 
 The Excursions are landscapes in miniature, embracing 
 
 every feature of New England summers and winters, autumnal 
 
 forest tints, wild apples, stormy shores, and winding streams, 
 
 with here and there a picture of a landlord, or a beetle, or a 
 
 fish, lit up with an electric ray of Platonism — interesting 
 
 and unique, because they are at once accurate and ideal. 
 
 Here is the spirit of the man who is playing a perpetual 
 
 game of solitaire — 
 
 " I can walk any number of miles, commencing at my own door, 
 without going by any bouse. From many a bill I can see civilisation 
 afar off. . . . Man and bis affairs, cburcb and state and scbool, trade 
 and commerce, and manufactures and agriculture, even politics, — the 
 most alarming of tbem all, — I am pleased to see how little space they 
 occupy in the landscape." 
 
 And here of the astronomer — 
 
 " It does not concern men who are asleep in their beds, but it is 
 very important to the traveEer whether the moon shines brightly or is 
 obscured. It is not easy to realise the serene joy of all the earth 
 when she conunences to shine unobstructedly, unless you have often 
 been abroad in moonlight nights. She seems to be waging continual 
 war with the clouds in your behalf. The sailors say she is eating 
 them up. She comes on magnifying her dangers by her light, display- 
 ing them in all their blackness, then suddenly casts them behind into 
 a light concealed, and goes her way triumphant through a space of 
 clear sky." 
 
 And here is the phUbsophic athlete — 
 
 "If you would get exercise go in search of the springs of Hfe. 
 Think of a man swinging dumb-bells for his health when those springs 
 are bubbling in far- off pastures unsought by him. Moreover, you 
 must walk like a camel, which is said to be the only beast which 
 ruminates when walking. When a traveller asked Wordsworth's ser- 
 vant to show him her master's study, she answered, ' Here is his 
 library, but his study is out of doors.' " 
 
 In these and a hundred sketches, any one may recognise 
 
THOEEAU'S LETTERS. 319 
 
 Emerson painted with a big brush. Thoreau is more original 
 
 in the miuutise of description, only appreciable by professed 
 
 naturalists ; and in his Letters, where he sends, as " from peak 
 
 to peak of Olympus," messages to friends, of a stoicism more 
 
 severe, perhaps more consistent, but therefore even more 
 
 impracticable, than his master's. 
 
 Thoreau's writing invites extract. From his premeditated 
 
 mots, wise or startling, deep or shallow, but all lucent, one 
 
 might construct a volume of anthology. Among those 
 
 cameos of English prose we may select the following : — 
 
 " Aim above morality ; there is not necessarily any ugly fact 
 wMoIl may not be eradicated from Kfe." " What a wedge, what a 
 beetle, what a catapult is an earnest man : what can resist him !" 
 " Let our meanness be our footstool, not our cushion." " The smallest 
 seed of faith is worth more than the largest fruit of happiness." 
 " Make the most of your regrets ; never smother your sorrow ; but 
 tend and cherish it. . . . To regret deeply is to live a fast." " The 
 talent of composition is very dangerous — the striking out the heart of 
 life at a blow, as the Indian takes oflf a scalp. I feel as if my life 
 had grown more outward when I can express it." " The old mythology 
 is iucomplete without a god or goddess of sincerity, on whose altars 
 we might offer up all the products of our farms, our workshops, and 
 our studies. It should be our Lar when we sit on the hearth, and 
 our Tutelar Genius when we walk abroad. ... I mean sincerity in 
 our dealings with ourselves maiiily ; the other is comparatively easy." 
 " That we have but little faith is not sad, but that we have but little 
 faithfulness. By faithfulness faith is earned." " My saddest sorrows 
 are apt to be but transient regrets. . . . I am of kin to the sod, and 
 partake largely of its dull patience — in winter expecting the sun of 
 spring." " Man is continually saying to woman, Why will you not 
 be more wise ? Woman is continually saying to man, Why will you 
 not be more loving ? It is not in their wills to be wise or loving ; but 
 unless each is both wise and loving there can be neither wisdom nor 
 love." " Hate can pardon more than love." " Love must be as much 
 3. light as a flame." " Walt Whitman . . . does not celebrate love at 
 all. It is as if the beasts spoke," but " if we are shocked, whose experi- 
 ence is it that we complain of ? " 
 
 Thoreaii's hard sense or solid scepticism is exhibited con- 
 spicuously in his utter antagonism to the " Manifestations " 
 that were then so frequent and fashionable in some New 
 England circles — 
 
320 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 "Most people here" (i.e. in Concord) "believe in . . . spirits 
 which the very buU-jErogs in our meadows would black-ball. Their 
 evil genius is seeing how low it can degrade them. The hooting of 
 owls, the croaking of frogs, is celestial wisdom in comparison. If I 
 could be brought to believe in the things which they believe, I 
 should . . . buy a share in the first Immediate Annihilation Com- 
 pany that offered. I would exchange my immortality for a glass of 
 small beer. . . . Where are the heathen ? Was there ever any super^ 
 stition before ? And yet I suppose there may be a vessel, this very 
 moment, setting sail from the coast of North America to that of Africa 
 with a missionary on board. Consider the dawn and the sunrise, the 
 rainbow and the evening, the words of Christ and the aspirations of 
 all the saints ! Hear music, see, smell, taste, feel anything, and then 
 hear these idiots, inspired by the cracking of a restless board, humbly 
 asking, ' Please, spirit, if you cannot answer by knocks, answer by tips 
 of the table'!!!" 
 
 Emerson writes exultingly of America, " The world has 
 no such landscape, the £eons of history no such hour," and 
 yet in the same volume confesses, " Our politics are disgust- 
 ing . . , they were never more corrupt and brutal ; and 
 Trade, that pride and darling of our ocean, that educator of 
 nations, that benefactor in spite of itself, ends in shameful 
 defaulting, bubble, and bankruptcy all over the world." 
 Thoreau, with a modified optimism, exhibits an even keener 
 contempt for the Exchange and fiercer recoil from Wall 
 Street — 
 
 " Not merely the Brook Farm and Fourierite communities, but 
 now the community generally has failed. . . . Men will tell you 
 sometimes that ' money's hard.' That shows it was not made to eat, I 
 say. ... As if one struggling in mid-ocean with a b^ of gold on his 
 back should gasp out, ' I am worth a hundred thousand dollars.' I 
 see them struggling just as ineffectually on dry land. . . . This general 
 failure, both private and public, is rather occasion for rejoicing, as 
 reminding us whom we have at the helm. ... If our merchants did 
 not most of them fail, and the banks too, my faith in the old laws of 
 the world would be staggered. ... If thousands are thrown out of 
 employment, it suggests that they were not well employed. Why 
 don't they take the hint ? It is not enough to be industrious ; so are 
 the ants." 
 
 How true, how hard ! So are most of the scintillations 
 from this crystal, colder if clearer than the rays of the opal 
 
THOREAU'S GENIUS. 321 
 
 over the way. Parents in literature and art, have, as a rule, 
 little philoprogenitiveness. They are apt to regard their 
 offspring as superfluities, IvMis naturce, or mocking-birds. 
 But the father in this case is generously affectionate to his 
 firstborn man-child, on whose grave he has flung the fairest 
 votive wreath : — 
 
 " There is a flower known to botanists, one of the same 
 genus with our summer plant called ' life-everlasting : ' it is 
 named by the Swiss Edelweiss, which signifies noble purity. 
 Thoreau seemed to me living in the hope to gather this plant, 
 which belonged to him of right. . . . The country knows not 
 yet or in the least part how great a son it has lost. It seems 
 an injury that he should leave in the midst of his broken task, 
 which none else can accomplish — a kind of indignity to so 
 noble a soul, that it should depart out of nature before yet he 
 has been really shown to his peers for what he was. But he 
 at least is content. His soul was made for the noblest society. 
 He had in a short life exhausted the capabilities of this world. 
 Wherever there is knowledge, wherever there is virtue, 
 wherever there is beauty, he will find a throne." 
 
322 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 CHAPTEE X. 
 
 NATHANIEL HAWTHOKNE. 
 
 "Ernest began to speak, giving to the people of what was 
 in his heart and mind. His words had power because they 
 accorded with his thoughts ; and his thoughts had reality and 
 depth, because they harmonised with the life that he had 
 always lived." It is pleasant to believe that the noble apo- 
 logue of The Oreat Stone Face (from which the words are 
 taken) is a tribute paid by the novelist to the philosopher of 
 Concord, and that these sentences are designed to disclose, as 
 they do, the secret of Mr. Emerson's influence over his country- 
 men. Their writer had little sympathy with the Transcen- 
 dental movement, headed by his contemporary. He preferred 
 loitering " by the river's brim " to Neo-Platonic rhapsodies, 
 and scraps of the Vedas. Buried in his retreat, and in the 
 moonlight of his own mysticism, he cast a half compassionate 
 smile on the pilgrims who thronged to the neighbouring cot- 
 tage as to an oracular shrine — " Young visionaries to whom 
 just so much of insight had been imparted as to make life a 
 labyrinth around them, coming to seek the clue that should 
 guide them out of their self-involved bewilderment ; gray- 
 headed theorists whose systems, at fii'st air, had finally impri- 
 soned them in an iron framework, travelling painfully to his 
 door, not to ask deliverance, but to invite the free spirit into 
 their own thraldom." Quaint and characteristic satire ! but 
 
THE "OLD MANSE." 323 
 
 the satirist united with the devotees in admiring the genius and 
 purity of the thinker. " It was good," he says, " to meet him 
 in the woodpaths or sometimes in our avenue, with that pure 
 intellectual gleam diffused ahout his presence, like the gar- 
 ment of a shining one." 
 
 Half a mile from Emerson's house, within view of the 
 bridge where, a century ago, 
 
 " The embattled farmers stood 
 Who fixed the shot heard round the world," 
 
 between two tall gateposts of rough-hewn stone, terminating 
 the vista of an avenue of black ash-trees, we catch sight of 
 the Old Manse, which, for three years, sheltered the fore- 
 most prose artist of America. It was here that Nathaniel 
 Hawthorne gathered his mosses ; and, from one of the gray 
 windows, looked on " the hitherto obscure waters," where they 
 " gleam forth into history," congratulating the Assabeth on 
 " the incurable indolence by which it is saved from becoming 
 the slave of human ingenuity — the. most unexcitable and 
 sluggish stream that ever loitered towards its eternity, the sea." 
 No river of such slight proportions has ever been described 
 as Hawthorne has described this, perhaps half-unconsciously 
 finding in it an emblem of his own life and character. 
 
 " lu the light," he tells us, " of a calm and golden sunset, it is the 
 more lovely for the quietude that so well accords with the hour ; when 
 ■even the wind, after blustering all day long, usually hushes itseK to 
 rest. Every tree and rock and every blade of grass is distinctly imaged, 
 and however unsightly in reality assumes ideal beauty in the reflection. 
 The minutest things of earth and the broad aspect of the firmament 
 are pictured equally without effort, and with the same felicity of success. 
 All the sky glows downward at our feet : the rich clouds float through 
 the unruffled bosom of the stream like heavenly thoughts through a 
 peaceful heart. We will not then malign our river as gross and impure 
 wMle it can glorify itself with so adequate a picture of the heaven that 
 broods above it ; or, if we remember its tawny hue and the muddiness 
 of its bed, let it be a symbol that the earthiest human soul has an 
 infinite spiritual capacity, and may contain the better world within its 
 depths." 
 
324 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 This author sees a world of mystery in a few flat acres, a 
 country garden, and a torpid stream. " Many strangers," he 
 writes, " come in the summer time to view the battleground. 
 For my own part, I have never found my imagination much 
 excited by this or any other scene of historical celebrity ; nor 
 would the placid margin of the river have lost any of its charm 
 for me had men never fought and died there." His fancy is 
 more arrested by the tragic end of a single soldier, whom a 
 boy killed by a sudden impulse, and by Indian arrowheads 
 in his garden, than by the event of the first revolutionary 
 triumph. But it is not for metaphysics that he sets history 
 aside : he has something to offer to his friends which he 
 thinks better than either, and which we now in England want 
 more than all our wealth, or perhaps than all our knowledge. 
 Hawthorne tells us what this is ; reading the text on which 
 his life was a sermon : " Others could give them pleasure, 
 and amusement or instruction, — these could be picked up 
 anywhere, — but it was for me to give them Eest — rest in a 
 life of trouble. What better could be done for those weary 
 and wayworn spirits? The great want which mankind 
 labours under at this present period is Sleep. The world 
 should recline its vast head on the first convenient pillow, 
 and take an age-long nap. It has gone distracted through a 
 morbid activity ; and, while pretematuraUy wide awake, is 
 tormented by visions that seem real to it now, but would 
 assume their true aspect were all things once set right by an 
 interval of sound repose." The same truth is expressed by ■ 
 the philosopher, who, from a different side, is pushed by the 
 hurry and competition, jostling and noise, of his age and 
 country, on to the same platform with the moralising novelist : 
 "We live on different planes. There is an external life, 
 which is educated at school, taught to read, write, cipher and 
 trade ; taught to grasp all the boy can get, urging him to put 
 himself forward, to make himself useful and agreeable in the 
 
GROWTH OF HAWTHORNE'S FAME. 325 
 
 world, to ride, run, argue, and contend, unfold his talents, 
 sHne, conquer, and possess. But the inner life sits at home, 
 and does not learn to do things, nor value these feats at all. 
 It loves truth because it is itself real ; it loves right, it knows 
 nothing else ; hut it makes no progress. A person of this 
 temper said to a man of much activity, ' I wiU pardon you 
 that you do so much, and you me that I do nothing.' And 
 Euripides says that ' Zeus hates busybodies and those who do 
 too much.' " 
 
 Hawthorne lived wholly in "the inner life:" he did not 
 care for cipher, or trade, or war, or " putting himself forward." 
 Pitchforked, by the gratitude of his old schoolfellow. President 
 Pierce, into the consulship of Liverpool, he never forgave the 
 Lord Mayor of London for compelling him to make a good 
 speech. "We have among us a gentleman of distinguished 
 literary and commercial reputation." " Never," says the vic- 
 tim, " were such adjectives before conjoined- ; I had rather he 
 had put henbane into my turtle soup." Such a man could 
 hardly be expected to make "progress" in the ordinary 
 sense of the word : he made little even as an artist : he 
 was inspired by nature, not only with what he had to say, but 
 with the manner of saying it. His first sustained work was 
 his masterpiece ; yet his reputation has been as rapidly pro- 
 gressive as that of Mr. Browning, whom he in several respects 
 resembles. Twenty years ago (when Paracelsus, Pippa Passes, 
 and Luria had been written for fifteen years) greatly to admire 
 their author was regarded as a certificate in lunacy : now it 
 is the fashion to stand agaze before his most morbid contor- 
 tions. Twenty years ago, a notice of the Scarlet Letter and the 
 Marble Faun, was declined by one of our leading Quarterlies, 
 on the ground that the subject was not worthy of an article. 
 In the preface (1851) to the Twice Told Tales we read, " The 
 author has a claim to one distinction which, as none of 
 his literary brethren will care about disputing it with him, 
 
326 AMERICAN LITEKATUEE: 
 
 he need not be afraid to mention. He was for a good many- 
 years the obscurest man of letters in America. Excepting 
 the Bill from the Town Pump, he has no grounds for sup- 
 posing that the work of twelve years of his manhood met with 
 the good or evil fortune to be read by anybody." Tempera 
 mutantur — the theme of his genius and its peculiarities, at last 
 fully recognised on both sides of the Atlantic, has been dis- 
 cussed to satiety. The most natural question regarding a 
 young critic is now no longer; has he published his contemptu- 
 ous estimates of Byron and Scott, or made his tiresome analysis 
 of In Memoriam f but, has he written his subtle review of Mr. 
 Hawthorne ? In reality, there is little to add to his reviews 
 of himself, with their pleasant autobiography and self-criti- 
 cism. In the prelude to The Scarlet Letter, he takes us into 
 the confidence of his ancestry ; who came to his native place 
 — " bleak, hard, scriptural Salem," the headquarters of Puritan 
 intolerance, two centuries and a half ago. The first of the 
 race was a soldier, legislator, and judge, " a ruler in the 
 church," and, of course, "a bitter persecutor," especially of 
 the Quakers. The second was a more relentless bigot, who 
 devoted himself mainly to torturing, hanging, and burning 
 witches. 
 
 " ' Their blood may fairly be said to bave left a stain upon bis old 
 dry bones,' says tbe descendant of tbose worthies, adding, ' I know not 
 whether they bethought themselves to repent and ask pardon of Heaven 
 of their cruelties, or whether they are now groaning under them in 
 another state of being. Doubtless, however, either of those stern and 
 black -browed Puritans would have thought it quite a sufficient retribu- 
 tion for his sins, that after so long a lapse of years, the old trunk of 
 the famUy tree, with so much venerable moss upon it, should have 
 borne as its topmost bough an idler like myself. What is he ? murmurs 
 one gray shadow of my forefathers. A writer of story-books ! What 
 mode of glorifying God may that be 1 Why, the fellow may as weU 
 have been a fiddler ! Yet, let them scorn me as they will, strong traits 
 of their nature have intertwined themselves with mine." 
 
 Hawthorne's immediate ancestors had been sailors travel- 
 ling from Cuba to Calcutta, where his father died. He himself 
 
EARLY LIFE. 327 
 
 was born (4th July 1804) at Salem, near the Witch-House. 
 The witches never seem to have left this dweller on the 
 edge of supernatural ground, though his wand frequently 
 charmed them into fairies. The external events of his life, of 
 general interest, are few. Sent by his maternal uncle and 
 guardian to Bowdoin College, he graduated there in 1825, 
 with Longfellow. In the previous year the poet had to write 
 the Latin Oration on the theme Anglici Poetce; the novelist the 
 Essay De Patribus Oonscriptis. Like most men of genius, 
 Hawthorne claims to have, when under discipline, led a 
 desultory life, and in later days writes to an old fellow- 
 student — 
 
 " While we were lads together, gathering blue-berries in study hours, 
 under those academic pines, or watching the great logs as they tumbled 
 along the current of the Androscoggin, or shooting pigeons or gray 
 squirrels in the woods, or bat-fowling in the summer twilfght, or catch- 
 ing trotits in that shadowy little stream, which I suppose is still travel- 
 ling riverward through the forest (though you and I will never cast a 
 line in it again) — two idle lads, in short, and doing a hundred things 
 that the Faculty never heard of, or else it had been the worse for us ; 
 still it was your prognostic of your friend's destiny that he was to be a 
 writer of fiction." 
 
 Eeturning to Salem, he lived there for ten years, shunning 
 society ; " after nightfall, stealing out from his room into 
 the silent streets, shadowy as the ghosts with which, to his 
 imagination, the dusky town was haunted ; gliding beneath 
 the house in which the witch trials were held, or across the 
 moonlight hiU on which the witches were hung ; and weaving 
 his memories and impressions into his first series of frag- 
 mentary romances." These, says Mr. G. W. Curtis, — from 
 whose appreciative sketch in the North American Eeview 
 (October 1864) we have borrowed the above quotation, — 
 " seeming at first but the pleasant fancies of a mild recluse, 
 hold the mind with a Lamia -like fascination. There are 
 sunny gleams upon the pages, but a melancholy chill pervades 
 the book." " Most of it" is bathed in " the fateful atmosphere 
 
328 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 in which the startled heart stands still." The Twice Told Tales 
 might be entitled the Shadows of Salem, Similarly, aU the 
 author's works reflect, though not always contemporaneously, 
 the leading events of his career ; the next stage of which is 
 marked by a period of routine work in the Boston Custom- 
 house, 1839. In 1840, Dr. Eipley and others formed a com- 
 munistic association at West Eoxbury, called " Brook Farm." 
 Socialism allures imaginative natures : it seldom retains them. 
 ' Hawthorne joined this in 1841, but soon (some say, m iU 
 temper) abandoned an enterprise, of which perhaps the most 
 permanent resiilt is The BlitTwdale Bomarwe. In 1842 he 
 married, and in the manse at Concord lived, for three years, a 
 life of contemplative indolence. In 1846 he was promoted 
 by Mr. Bancroft (under Polk) to the control of the Custom- 
 house at Salem ; and, in the most humorous of his prefaces, 
 he has given us an account of his predecessors, and of his 
 cares in of&ce, ending by his being " officially decapitated," 
 and going about " like the headless horseman," on the change 
 of Government. Among the old documents in the place, he, 
 in a happier hour than that which found the basis of The 
 Ring and the Book, fell on the story of Hester Prynne, and 
 wove out of it The Scarlet Letter. This romance, discovered 
 we may almost say by Mr. Fields in 1849, was published in 
 1850, and achieved an immediate success. Hawthorne's 
 external career was fortunate in affording him the alternation 
 of activity and repose, of contact with, and retirement from, the 
 world, that is most favourable to high art. His next sojourn 
 was at Lenox,^ a village in Berkshire, in an old red farmhouse, 
 
 1 This chapter, the nucleus of which appeared in the Encydopcedia Sriian- 
 mica in 1874, was delivered as a Lecture at Cheltenham, 1879, before I had the 
 pleasure of reading Mr. James's interesting biography and judicious criticism. 
 He informs us that Lenox is now a fashionable resort, but that, " thirty years 
 ago, a man of fancy . . . might have found there both inspiration and tran- 
 quillity. Hawthorne found so mush of both that he wrote more during his 
 two years of residence . . than at any (other) period of his career. " 
 
LAST YEARS. 329 
 
 where he indulged a love of solitude approaching Thoreau's, 
 and in such protracted shyness that, on seeing any one before 
 him on the road, he would often jump over the wall into the 
 adjoining meadow. Here he wrote The House of the Seven 
 Gables (published January 1851) and The Wonder Book. In 
 1852 he returned to Concord, whence, in May, he issued The 
 Blithedale Romance, followed by the Tanglewood Tales, and, 
 in the same year, the Life of Franklin Pierce ; who, elected 
 President in 1853, appointed his old college friend to the im- 
 portant post of Consul at Liverpool. The record of Haw- 
 thorne's four years' life in England is in the Old Home, not, 
 however, published till three years after his return to America. 
 Eesigning his consulate in 1857, he subsequently spent nearly 
 three years in Italy, and to his residence there we owe The 
 Marble Faun. Home again (1860), in his " Wayside " under 
 Concord HUl, he wrote a few more sketches ; commenced a 
 new novel, his over-mystical Septimius ; met some English 
 interviewers, who afterwards gave accounts of his character 
 and habits ; began, almost reluctantly, to know himself 
 famous ; and died in 1864, being found in his last sleep as if 
 he had passed from a pleasant dream, while the thunders of 
 a war which perplexed him were ■ raging around. To his 
 death also we owe a book, — six volumes of crude miscel- 
 laneous notes — the publication of which must have made 
 that exquisite writer and fastidious critic turn in his other- 
 wise quiet grave. 
 
 It is impossible to speak too highly of Hawthorne's style, 
 which, without any of the defects often found in the writings 
 of his countrymen, has yet a healthy national flavour. It 
 is accurate and strong, terse and yet full, rich and yet simple, 
 harmonious, varied, and suggestive. These excellences in 
 themselves give a fascination to his most ordinary themes — 
 as to his descriptions of natural scenery and works of art. 
 We may set his pictures of Western Italy beside Mr. Euskin's 
 
330 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 Venice, before the Austrians left it to the renovators. Mark 
 how the humour and cynicism of the following introduction 
 takes away any appearance of flourish from the almost pas- 
 sionate enthusiasm of the close : — 
 
 " When we have once known Rome and left her where she lies, like 
 a long decaying corpse retaining a trace of the noble shape it was, but 
 with accumulated dust, under fungus growth overspreading all its more 
 admirable features — left her in utter weariness, no doubt, of her narrow, 
 crooked, intricate streets, so uncomfortably paved with little squares of 
 lava, that to tread over them is a penetential pilgrimage ; so iadescribably 
 ugly, moreover, so cold, so alley-like, into which the sun never falls, and 
 where a chUl wind forces its deadly breath into our lungs — and left her, 
 tired of the sight of those immense seven-storied yellow-washed hovels, 
 — or call them palaces, — where all that is dreajy in domestic life seems 
 magnified and multiplied, and weary of climbing those staircases which 
 ascend from a ground-floor of cook-shops, cobblers' stalls, stables, and 
 regiments of cavalry, to a middle region of princes, cardinals, and 
 ambassadors, and an upper tier of artists just beneath the unattainable 
 sky — left her, worn out with shivering at the cheerless and smoky fireside 
 by day, and feasting with our own substance the ravenous little populace 
 of a Eoman bed at night — left her sick at heart of Italian trickery, 
 which has uprooted whatever faith in man's integrity had endured tUl 
 now, and sick with sour bread, sour wine, rancid butter, and bad 
 cookery needlessly bestowed on evil meats — ^left her disgusted with the 
 pretence of holiness and the reality of nastiness, each equally omnipre- 
 sent — left her half lifeless from the languid atmosphere . . . left her 
 half crushed down in spirit with the desolation of her ruin and the 
 hopelessness of her future — ^left her, in short, hating her with all our 
 might, and adding our individual curse to the infinite anathema which 
 her old crimes have unmistakably brought down. When we have left 
 Rome in such mood as this we are astonished by the discovery that our 
 heart-strings have mysteriously attached themselves to the Eternal 
 City, and are drawing ns thitherward again as if it were more fami- 
 liar, even more intimately our home than the spot where we were 
 born." 
 
 Hawthorne's descriptions can seldom he disentangled from 
 the mood of mind in which he views them, or the circum- 
 stances by which in his pages they are invested. His works 
 are " of imagination all compact." Amid the din of voices, or 
 buried in his manse, on the wharf, or sitting at the receipt of 
 custom, gliding down the Assabeth, or loitering along the 
 Appian Way, he dwells perpetually among visions. The sea- 
 
VIEW OF LIFE. 331 
 
 shore tells him secrets of the Past, and the prattling village is 
 full of a present sympathy. Emerson somewhere tells a story 
 of a lady, who, as they were walking together in the forest, 
 said to him that the woods always seemed to her to wait as 
 if the genii who inhabited them suspended their deeds till the 
 wayfarer had passed on. When Hawthorne passes, Nature 
 does not wait : she is content to take him into her confidence, 
 and play her tricks unreservedly before his eyes. But the 
 features of nature and life and character which he loves to 
 draw are peculiar. They are, for the most part, sombre and 
 mysterious, not with the sort of mystery, in which, for instance, 
 Edgar Poe delights, that attends unprecedented events and 
 unnatural marvels, but with that which he digs for and finds 
 under the current of common lives. His prevailing thought 
 is " things are not what they seem :" he is so fond of peer- 
 ing beneath the surface of existence that, in his pages, it 
 sometimes loses its ordinary reality. He tries to look through 
 life so constantly that he scarcely takes time to look at it. 
 We may regard men, in the manner Chaucer or Scott did, as 
 squares or circles, complete externally, so that we walk round 
 them; or we may regard them, as we in morbid moments scru- 
 tinise ourselves, and see only the near curve of the parabola, 
 the ends of which recede into infinity. The highest art is that 
 which comprehends both aspects, and, looks " at all things as 
 they are, but through a kind of glory." As in the works of 
 our master dramatist, it adds the idealism of the Faerie 
 Queene to the realism of the Canterbury Tales. Hawthorne, 
 on the other hand, to borrow a frequently-quoted phrase from 
 himself, weaves his fictions "in the moonlight of romance ;" 
 and, while he admits that materials for a better book than 
 he has written lie scattered on the page of life open before 
 him, he has seldom stooped to gather them. "Moonlight," 
 he repeats, in his preface to the Scarlet Letter, "is a medium 
 the most suitable for a romance writer to get acquainted 
 
332 AMERICAN LITEEATUEE. 
 
 with his illusive guests. The room hecomes a neutral terri- 
 tory . . . where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet." 
 Hawthorne has sometimes abandoned this neutral territory 
 and given us a few short sketches, which show that he 
 is emiaently capable, when he chooses, of illustrating and 
 characterising common things. Such among his minor tales 
 are — The Old Apple Dealer, Little Annie's BamUe, A Bill from 
 fhe Town Pump, Sights from a Steeple, the Village Uncle, the 
 well-named Bvds and Bird Voices, and the most humorous and 
 genial of his lighter pieces, the Seven Vagabonds, on the pages 
 of which the spirits of Chaucer and Lamb seemed to have 
 jointly breathed. But his prevailing themes are drawn from 
 the borderland or twilight between the two worlds, half real 
 and half ideal — fairy tales in which human beings are the 
 fairies, and are made to point morals of their own histories. 
 Hawthorne's imagination was pestered by problems. This is 
 his point of contact with the great but perverse modern 
 English poet to whom I have before referred. Miss Thackeray 
 writes of pleasant Normandy under the name of White Cotton 
 Nightcap Country. " Let me see," cries the poet, " if I can- 
 not find that, on that soft grass and under that smiling sun, 
 some deed has been done that will make your blood curdle." 
 He finds it ; and with an exulting look of almost fiend- 
 ish power, produces his hideous tale, Bed Cotton Nightcap 
 Country. Hawthorne is less malignant ; but there is the 
 same murky atmosphere about half his work, the same love 
 of the abnormal in his soul ; and after an eerie night in his 
 company we sometimes long for the morning and Henry 
 Fieldiag or Sir Walter Scott. 
 
 There are various gradations in his symbolism. In The 
 Wives of the Bead, and The Sister Years, he brings us into 
 contact with simple though striking vicissitudes of life. The 
 Snow Image is only the best, though quite the best, in a 
 special American department of Literature, — that of stories for 
 
MINOR TALES. 333 
 
 children — and any intelligent child will understand its lesson, 
 that we may injure what we love hy injudicious kindness. 
 An older reader is required to see the satire in the last words, 
 " 'Wipe up the snow,' said Margaret Lindsay." But the poet- 
 preacher prefers in general less apparent texts. Like the 
 Ancient Mariner, he holds us with his glittering eye, and we 
 must gaze with him on Prophetic Pictures on dingy walls, the 
 lustre of The Great Carluncle among the hills, or the passion- 
 flowers of JRappacini's Garden. " Blessed," he exclaims in the 
 last, a gorgeous Italian romance, of which the sentence points 
 the moral, " Blessed are all simple emotions, he they dark or 
 bright. It is the lurid intermixture of the two that produces 
 the illumination of the Infernal Eegions." And yet this lurid 
 intermixture is the staple of his works : they are steeped in 
 lights such as those that gleam over the furnaces in his ghastly 
 Ethan Brand. Of the five volumes of his minor sketches, 
 three at least are filled with allegories ; — riddles, some of them 
 hard to read, and open to doubtful, because double, interpreta- 
 tions. Fortunately the best of these are charming on the 
 outside. The uninitiated reader may have the same pleasure 
 from them as a man with a musical ear — who has yet not 
 studied music — may derive from hearing one of Mozart's 
 melodies. The Great Stone Face is a noble piece of writing, 
 apart from the lesson it is intended to convey, that reasonable 
 "hero-worship" rather than "nil admirari," is the path to 
 greatness. Browne's Wooden Image and the Artist of the 
 Beautiful, are in themselves "beautiful exceedingly." The 
 pathos of Lily's Quest and Edward Fane's Bosebud lies on 
 the surface, though the latter is as impossible to read aloud 
 as the account of Colonel IsTewcome's death. The Three- 
 fold Destiny obviously inculcates the truth that we may 
 often find near at home what we have in vain been 
 looking for at a distance. Lady Eleanor's Mantle tells 
 its own story in a parable of the Nemesis of pride. In the 
 
334 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 Birthmark the egotism of science is contrasted with the 
 devotion of love. The Celestial Railroad is a satire on easy 
 conversions : the Fountain of Youth laments the vain effort 
 to recall its dreams. In the Wedding Knell, on the other 
 hand, and the Black Veil, and Roger Malvin's Burial, and 
 Young Goodman Browne, and Wakefield, we are in the bizarre 
 region of Hoffman, or the hollow land of Novalis, prying into 
 the solitude that environs every soul, or playing with the 
 phantasies that perplex it. Some of these allegories are trans- 
 parent : in others, where the sentences remain clear, the 
 meaning is less so, and the criticism is justified that has com- 
 pared the author to a clock that rings the minutes but not 
 the hours. 
 
 Edgar Poe, in his lively though somewhat shallow critique, 
 after expressing his warm admiration of Hawthorne's simpler 
 style, proceeds to assail what he calls his transcendentalism, 
 ending with the trenchantly-misplaced advice, "Let him 
 mend his pen, get a bottle of visible ink, come out of the old 
 manse, cut Mr. Alcott, hang if possible the editor of The Dial, 
 and throw to the pigs all his odd numbers of the North 
 American Eeview." The critic might as well have exhorted 
 Charles Lamb to write like Hazlitt, Carlyle like Macaulay, 
 or Edgar Poe like Irving. Hawthorne was, as we believe, in 
 no considerable degree influenced by The Dial ; but to bid 
 him stick to externals, to observe rather than reflect, to 
 become merely fanciful instead of essentially imaginative, 
 was to commit the common mistake of telling men to be 
 other than Nature has made them. His chief concern is not 
 with the dresses but with the hearts of men — interiora rerum: 
 his main care is not to observe or to sketch, but " to part and 
 prove." 
 
 His longer works are all conceived in the same spirit. 
 CarefuUy artistic, their interest as mere stories and the rich- 
 ness of their detail exempt them from the reproach of being 
 
"THE SCARLET LETTER." 335 
 
 mainly didactic : tut none of them is written merely for art's 
 sake ; each has some central idea, round which the drama 
 revolves, or to which they converge. It has been remarked 
 that each might easily have been condensed into one of his 
 shorter tales ; each of which in its turn might, by a counter 
 process, have been expanded into an elaborate romance. In 
 both, the incidents, though scarcely subordinate, are compara- 
 tively few ; the parts are played by four or five abnormal 
 human puppets under a microscope, in one instance applied 
 to them by a provokingly impartial spectator, who professes 
 his purpose to "pluck out the heart of" their mystery. 
 Among the minor chords on which the author plays, there 
 is a major, dominant through the whole, repeating itself as 
 it were with a " persistence that must be answered to." The 
 great question, over which in one form or other Hawthorne 
 perpetually broods, is the Nature of Evil, the effect on the 
 soul of error and misery and remorse, and their mysterious 
 relation to the highest forms of human heroism and to human 
 progress. It is worthy of note that his first considerable 
 work is that which comes into closest contact with reality : 
 his last that farthest from it. As an author, Hawthorne 
 (travelled in a direction opposite to Emerson ; seemed, despite 
 his long experience of practical life, to feel more distaste to 
 it ; till he found refuge from the tumults of the war in the 
 rose-coloured clouds of Septimius. Unless the whole story of 
 Mr. Surveyor Prue, the bit of embroidery wrought with " a 
 now forgotten art," and the "roU of dingy paper around 
 which it had been twisted," be a fiction, conceived " by the 
 •dim coal fire" of the Custom House, as audacious as the 
 Apparition of Mrs. Veal and as successful. The Scarlet Letter 
 has a root in actual facts. In any case the whole description 
 of old New England life is like a piece of authentic history. 
 The introduction of the " bearded men in sad-coloured gar- 
 ments, assembled round " the black flower of civilised society. 
 
336 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 a Prison, is a fit overture to the drama. The picture of Hester 
 "with the infant at her bosom, an object to remind . . . 
 a papist ... of the image of divine maternity," prepares 
 us for the sympathy which pervades the tale, all the stages 
 of which, save for an occasional excess of symbolism, are 
 perfectly credible. Adequately to examine this work wotjld 
 demand a distinct essay ; we can only remark that there is 
 hardly a chapter in which the local colouring is not maintained 
 with vivid realistic power, nor one in which it is not supple- 
 mented by some ideal touches. The multitude in the Market 
 Place, the elders, seamen, magistrates, and rigid female censors 
 of a people, " amongst whom religion and law were identical," 
 play the part of chorus more naturally than the individuals 
 to whom he elsewhere assigns it. Nor is there anything in 
 the witch element, as represented by Mistress Hibbins, incon- 
 sistent with authentic records of the sternly superstitious 
 time. Only in the forest, where it is easier to lose sight of 
 the world than on the sea, are -vv^e permitted for a moment 
 — the moment in which Hester tosses away her badge of 
 shame — to forget the iron laws of real life. Of the chief 
 actors in the scene, there is little to add to the foregone 
 analysis of commentary. The heroine is far from common- 
 place, — indeed, one defect of Hawthorne's writings is that 
 they hardly exhibit a single commonplace character — but she 
 is, of the group, the least remarkable, beautiful as are her 
 maternity, and her wavering between love and duty. Pearl, 
 the elf-child, is the most fascinating of her race, more so even 
 than Goethe's Mignon ; but she is hardly human: her impish 
 persistence in pressing home her mother's guilt, is only to be 
 excused on the theory of her being one of the instruments 
 appointed for retribution. Dimmesdale himself is a microcosm 
 of the battle of Ormuzd and Ahriman. No incident is more 
 poetically set forth than his hope of expiation by solitary 
 penance on the midnight scaffold : none so weird as that on 
 
"THE SCARLET LETTER." 337 
 
 which Mr. Stephen has dwelt, his impulses to blasphemy and 
 half-diabolical possession, when, after his mental yielding to 
 the temptress, he comes to believe that "the sin of trying 
 to escape from his sin has brought him into sympathy 
 with perverted spirits." But the master conception of the 
 book is that of Eoger Chillingworth, from whose point of 
 view it becomes the tragedy of baffled revenge, a favourite 
 theme, but never elsewhere so handled. Poe's Gash of 
 Amontillado is the mere Qoncentrated essence of Dumas' 
 Monte Christo: the friar in Browning's cloister would kill 
 Brother Laurence by a wish ; the painter Lutwyche tries 
 to lure Jules into a mesalliance and be rid of him. But 
 the wronged physician's hate to the minister is almost 
 love ; he lavishes his skill to keep his victim alive for the 
 torture of a vivisection, compared with which the experi- 
 ments of Eutherford and Sequard are mercies; and would 
 give his life, and the remaining shreds of the honour of the 
 woman he but uses as an instrument, to ensure the eternal 
 ruin of his foe. 
 
 It is necessary to bear this in inind to realise the sublime 
 triumph of the close — 
 
 " He (Dimmesdale) still walked on, if that movement could be so 
 described, whicb resembled the wavering eflfort of an infant, with its 
 mother's arms in view stretched out to tempt him forward. And now 
 almost imperceptible as were the latter steps of his progress, he had 
 come opposite the well-remembered and weather-darkened scaffold, 
 where long since, with all the dreary lapse of time between, Hester 
 Prynne had encountered the world's ignominious stare. There stood 
 Hester, leading little Pearl by the hand. And there was the scarlet 
 letter on her breast. The minister here made a pause, although the 
 music still played the stately and rejoicing march to which the proces- 
 sion moved. It summoned him onward — onward to the festival ; but 
 here he made a pause. BeUingham had for the last few moments kept 
 an anxious eye upon him. He now left his own place in the proces- 
 sion and advanced to give assistance, judging from Mr. Dimmesdale's 
 aspect that he must otherwise inevitably fall. But there was some- 
 thing in the latter's expression that waved back the magistrate, although 
 a man not readily obeying the vague intimations that pass from one 
 
338 AMEEIGAN LITERATURE. 
 
 spirit to another. The crowd meanwhile looked on with awe and 
 wonder. This earthly faintness was in their view only another phase 
 of the minister's celestial strength : nor would it have seemed a miracle 
 too high to be wrought for one so holy, had he ascended before their 
 eyes, waxing dimmer and brighter, and fading more and more into the 
 light of heaven. He turned towards the scaifold and stretched forth 
 his arms. ' Hester,' said he, ' come hither. Come hither, my little 
 Pearl.' . It was a ghastly look with which he regarded them, but there 
 was something at once tender and stran'gely triumphant in it. At this 
 instant old Roger Chillingworth thrust himself through the crowd — or 
 perhaps, so dark, disturbed, and evil was his look, he rose up out of 
 some nether region, to snatch back his victim from what he sought to 
 do. 'Ha, tempter! Methinks thou art too late!' answered the minister, 
 encountering his eye, fearfully but iirmly. ' Thy power is not what 
 it was. With God's help I shall escape thee now.' They beheld the 
 minister ascend the steps, while stiU the little hand of the sin-born 
 child was clasped in his. Old Roger Chillingworth followed. ' Hadst 
 thou sought the whole earth over,' said he, looking darkly at the 
 clergyman, 'there was no place so secret, no high place nor lowly 
 place, where thou couldst have escaped me, save on this very scaffold.' 
 ' Thanks be to Him. who hath led me hither,' answered the minister. 
 ' Is not this better,' murmured he, ' than what we dreamed of in the 
 forest.' ... It was revealed ! whUe he stood with a flush of triumph 
 in his face, as one who in the crisis of extremest pain had won 
 a victory. Old Roger Chillingworth knelt down beside him with 
 a dull blank countenance, out of which the life seemed to have de- 
 parted — ' Thou hast escaped me,' he repeated more than once. ' Thou 
 hast escaped me.'" 
 
 The Scarlet Letter has doubtless for one of. its objects — 
 as moralists so far rightly insist — to exhibit the influence 
 exerted by a single violation of social law on all the persons 
 whom it concerns, wife, lover, husband, child. But it is 
 shallow criticism to regard it as mainly, like Lockhart's 
 Adam Blair} a parable on the obligations of the Seventh 
 Commandment, with the actual breach of which it is only 
 incidentally connected. The real theme, as recognised by 
 subtler insight, is not the sin itself, but the livelong con- 
 sequences of trying to conceal it, of keeping up a show of 
 
 ^ Mr. James has clearly seen and unfolded the points of contact and con-' 
 trast. He does not suggest, as indeed seems unlikely, that Mr. Hawthorne 
 ever saw Lockhart's powerful but provincial story. 
 
"THE SCARLET LETTER." 339 
 
 sanctity over a reality of weakness. The deeper moral is not 
 only indicated, but in so many words pointed by the author 
 himself — 
 
 " To the untrue man, the whole universe is false — it is impalpable 
 — it shrinks to nothing in his grasp." ..." Crime is for the iron- 
 nerved, who have their choice either to endure it, or, if it press too 
 hard, to exert their fierce and savage strength for a good purpose, and 
 fling it off at once." " Among many morals which press upon us 
 from the poor minister's miserable experience, we put only this into a 
 sentence — Be true ! Be true ! Be true ! Show freely to the world, 
 if not your worst, yet some trait whereby the worst may be inferred." 
 
 In the concluding chapter of this, the most profound, the 
 boldest, the most riveting analytical romance of our tongue, 
 in our century — ^followed, I think, at an interval by Wuthering 
 Heights, and by Silas Marner — the author goes farther, and 
 trenches on the ground of George Sand's Zelia and Goethe's 
 Elective Affinities. In these words he ventures, with Milton, 
 to question the finality of some of our present domestic 
 relations, commonly regarded as above or beyond dispute — 
 
 " Women . . . wasted, wronged, or erring . . . came to Hester's 
 cottage, demanding why they were so wretched, and what was the 
 remedy. Hester comforted and counselled them as best she might. 
 She assured them too of her firm belief that, at some brighter period 
 when the earth- should have grown ripe for it, in Heaven's own time, 
 a new truth would be revealed, in order to establish the whole 
 relation between man and woman on a surer ground of mutual 
 happiness." 
 
 It has been generally admitted that Puritanism was never 
 so refined ; less generally, that it has seldom been so assailed. 
 Macaulay has no satire, on its asceticism, equal to the follow- 
 ing:— 
 
 " Into this festal season of the year the Puritans compressed what- 
 ever mirth and public joy they deemed allowable to human infirmity ; 
 thereby so far dispelling the customary cloud, that for the space of a 
 single holiday, they appeared scarcely more grave than most other 
 commimities at a period of general affliction." 
 
 The commonly exaggerated conception of Hawthorne's 
 
340 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 Puritanism is due partly to his own loyalty to his ancestors, 
 and to his high moral tone : the impression has perhaps 
 been confirmed by his fierce rebuke to the " poor desecrated " 
 Doctor of Divinity, recorded in the chapter of The Old Home 
 entitled " Consular Experiences ; " but, in the same chapter, 
 he also records his regret for the severity of the rebuke. An 
 English reviewer, whose artistic tastes are benumbed by in- 
 fallible sermonising, says that our romancer "spends his 
 strength on an adulterous mixture of emotions," "strung 
 like a cobweb in front of a New England parlour." The 
 characteristic criticism ignores the fact that the apparent 
 inconsistency is due to the breadth of Hawthorne's mind. 
 His work everywhere shows traces of a conflict between 
 the Calvinism in which, with all its dismal features, he 
 had been reared, and a strong revolutionary undercurrent fed 
 by his modern culture and surroundings. Eich " spiritual ' 
 blood " flowed in his veins to the last ; but he had torn 
 asunder the parchments of his fathers, ceased to wear the 
 Tephaliin, and so far emancipated himself from thB belief in 
 "the large comprehensiveness of the divine damnation," as 
 to breathe a hope that even Eoger Chillingworth's " stock of 
 hatred and antipathy " might be hereafter " transmuted into 
 golden love." The House of the Seven Gables is partly on the 
 same lines : the life it brings before us is, stiU, New England 
 life, though of a later date : it is the present, overcast by 
 shadows of the past. The dogma of predestination is, by a 
 moral Darwin, transmuted into the belief that " the wrong- 
 doing of one generation lives into the successive ones." The 
 story, turning partially on the relations of two hostile families, 
 relies most on the marked individuality^ of the characters, 
 who cease to be metaphysical, and become national, types. It 
 is conspicuous by its subtle humour, breadth of design, and 
 
 ^ Ml-. .Tames directs special attention to Uncle Venner as a genuine Yankee 
 type. 
 
"THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES." 341 
 
 the aerial atmospliere in which it is steeped. Its beauty is 
 as real, but as incapable of seizure, as that of the soap-bubbles 
 blown by Clifford from the arched window of the old house — 
 
 " Little impalpable worlds were those soap-bubbles, with the big 
 world depicted, in hues bright as imagination, on the nothing of their 
 surface. It was curious to see how the passers-by regarded these 
 brilliant fantasies, as they came floating down, and made the dull 
 atmosphere imaginative about them. Some stopped to gaze, and per- 
 haps carried a pleasant recollection of the bubbles onward as far as the 
 street corner ; some looked angrily upward, as if poor Clifford wronged 
 them by setting an image of beauty afloat so near their dusty path- 
 way. A great many put out their fingers or their walking-sticks to 
 touch withal, and were perversely gratified, no doubt, when the bubble, 
 with all its pictured earth and sky scene, vanished as if it had never 
 been." 
 
 The House of the Seven Gables cannot vanish as if it had 
 never been, for any critical contact; but it may be dimmed and 
 dulled to its lovers, as to those who have yet to know it, by 
 being dragged from the mellowed twilight, which steeps it, into 
 the cold light of analytical day. Little else can, therefore, 
 be done than to point to some of the separate flawless pieces 
 of workmanship that go to complete the perfect artistic whole of 
 Hawthorne's second great romance. "Eomance"he is careful 
 to call this, as aU his other longer works, in order that he may 
 claim that "latitude, both as to its fashion and material, 
 which he would not have felt himself entitled to assume had 
 he professed to be writing a novel;" and nowhere does Haw- 
 thorne avail himself of this latitude with more consummate 
 skill, or " mingle the marvellous ... as a slight, delicate, and 
 evanescent flavour," with greater felicity. The materialist and 
 the supernaturalist may, each as he pleases, interpret the most 
 striking events of the story : only once — ^in acknowledging 
 the mesmeric influence of Holgrave on Phcebe — does the 
 author make any demand on his readers' credulity. The 
 strains of Alice's harpsichord, prophesying death in the 
 family, are heard before the sudden end of Judge PjTicheon ; 
 
342 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 but we are allowed to believe that Clifford had touched the 
 keys, and similarly, when the old colonel is found sitting dead 
 in his chair, there is a hint of a skeleton hand seen on his 
 throat, and an allusion to the rumoured avenging voice of the 
 ghostly wizard Maule. There is little action in the story, 
 which resembles rather one of Holgrave's daguerreotypes — a 
 ray of sunshine that beats for a moment on the gloomy old 
 house in the bye-street and is withdrawn again — than a suc- 
 cession of shifting kaleidoscopic views ; but the chapters "Clif- 
 ford and Phoebe," " The Pyncheon Garden," etc., detailing the 
 quiet life of the three last Pyncheons in their mouldering 
 ancestral home, are worth many sensational scenes. Clifford 
 Pyncheon, "partly crazy and partly imbecile, — a ruin, a failure, 
 as almost everybody is, though some in less degree, or less 
 perceptibly than their fellows," passing his time, partly in 
 the garden, gazing into the, to him, face-haunted waters of 
 Maule's Well, or amusing himself with the proceedings of 
 the wizened hens ("their crest was of lamentably scanty 
 growth, in these latter days, but so oddly and wickedly ana- 
 logous to Hepzibah's turban, that Phoebe, to the poignant 
 distress of her conscience, but inevitably, was led to fancy a 
 general resemblance betwixt these forlorn bipeds and her 
 respectable relative"), partly at an arched window looking on 
 to the street, — Clifford Pyncheon, seated one day at the last, 
 is delighted by the appearance of an Italian barrel-organ boy, 
 whose instrument is furnished with a case of mechanical 
 figures that move to the music. 
 
 " The Italian turned a crank ; and, behold ! every one of these 
 small indiyiduals started into the most curious vivacity. The cobbler 
 wrought upon a shoe ; the blacksmith hammered his iron ; the soldier 
 waved his glittering blade ; the lady raised a tiny breeze with her fan ; 
 the jolly toper swigged lustily at his bottle ; a scholar opened his book,' 
 with eager thirst for knowledge, and turned his head to and fro ; the 
 milkmaid energetically drained her cow ; and a miser counted 'gold 
 into his strong box — aU at the same turning of a crank. Yes ; and 
 moved by the selfsame impulse, a lover saluted his mistress on he'rlips'l 
 
"THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES." 343 
 
 Possibly some cynic, at once merry and bitter, had desired to signify, 
 in this pantomimic scene, that we mortals, whatever onr business or 
 amusement — ^however serious, however trifling — all dance to one iden- 
 tical tune, and, in spite of our ridiculous activity, bring nothing finally 
 to pass. For the most ridiculous aspect of the affair was that at the 
 cessation of the music everybody was petrified, at once, from the most 
 extravagant life into a dead torpor. Neither was the cobbler's shoe 
 finished, nor the blacksmith's iron shaped out ; nor was there a drop 
 less of brandy in the toper's bottle, nor a drop more of milk in the 
 milkmaid's pail, nor one additional coin in the miser's strong box, nor 
 was the scholar a page deeper in his book. All were precisely in the 
 same condition as before they made themselves so ridiculous by their 
 haste to toil, to enjoy, to accumulate gold, and to become wise. Sad- 
 dest of all, moreover, the lover was none the happier for the maiden's 
 granted kiss ! But rather than swallow this last too acrid ingredient, 
 we reject the whole moral of the show." 
 
 This little episode exhibits conspicuously the mingling of 
 pathos and humour which is, in a peculiar degree, the portion 
 of the House of the Seven Gables. Sometimes the humour is 
 uppermost, as in the references to the family of fowls before 
 alluded to, or in the relation of Hepzibah's struggles towards 
 the arranging of her shop window " to tempt little boys into 
 her premises;" while the balance is surely the other way when 
 the author affirms of the Sybarite CHfford that " In his last 
 extremity ... he would doubtless press Hepzibah's hand, 
 in fervent recognition of all her lavished love, and close his 
 eyes ; but not so much to die, as to be constrained to look 
 no longer on her face I" Along with this exquisite handling 
 of different but nearly- connected qualities, there is shown 
 at various points of the story a weird and wonderful force ; 
 as in the relation by Holgrave to Phcebe of the legend 
 of the bewitched Alice ; or where Hepzibah, after wildly 
 searching for him, discovers her brother at the door of the 
 room, within which is his cousin's corpse. This scene, especi- 
 ally the account of Clifford's pale features, " so white through 
 the glimmering passage" that it seemed as if a light fell 
 on them alone ; and his " gusty mirth," half heartless, half 
 childish—" As for us we can dance now ! we can sing, play, 
 
344 AMEEICAN LITEKATURE. 
 
 laugh, do what we will ! The weight is gone off this weary old 
 world ; and we may be as light-hearted as,Ji.tile Phcebe herself" 
 — is full of finer touches than the somewhat theatrical, and con- 
 stantly-quoted, ticking of the watch. The ffome of the Seven 
 Gables is woven of thinner threads than its predecessor, but 
 they are like those of Spenser's Arachne. Despite its ghostly 
 scenes, it is the pleasantest of the author's works, the only one 
 of his full-grown children that we dare regard as a playmate. 
 The community of Brook Farm was, by all accounts, free 
 from reproach or blot : its morals were more akin to those of 
 " Mount Lebanon " than those of Utah or of " Oneida Creek." 
 But, as an adventure in social life, it would not have met 
 with the approval of the Pilgrim Fathers, of Winthrop, Endi- 
 cott, or Johnson. It was precisely adapted to interest the 
 author of The Scarlet Letter. The old Puritanism was, to the 
 higher class of minds, effete : society wanted some change, 
 on which this experiment might throw at least a glimmer 
 of light. He gave the answer habitual to his prevailing 
 scepticism. The solution was not here : the experiment was 
 a failure. His book is a record of Utopian vagaries, by an 
 observer, not a sharer of them — a record in which recollections 
 of what actually passed are mingled with fancies of what 
 might have been. The amount of reality in the picture is 
 frankly stated in the preface, where the author tells us that 
 his community is merely " a theatre removed from the high- 
 way, where the creatures of his brain may play their phan- 
 tasmagorical antics," and adds that their precise equivalents 
 " never made their appearance at Brook I'arm." There is no 
 reason for declining to accept this statement : nothing gained 
 in the attempt to identify his " high-spirited woman, bruising 
 herself against the narrow limitations of her sex," with Mar- 
 garet Fuller, or " the minor poet " too closely with himself. 
 He is neither Miles Cbverdale nor Clifford Pyncheon. The 
 artistic temperament, the disbelief in " causes " expressed in 
 
'■'THE BLITHEDALE ROMANCE." 345 
 
 the remark that " no sagacious man will long retain his saga- 
 city if he live exclusively among progressive people," is com- 
 mon to the three ; but Hawthorne has neither the coldness 
 and Caleb-WiHiams curiosity of the one, nor the utter selfish- 
 ness of the other. The Mithedale Romance is no bundle of 
 biographies : it has been more properly described as " a 
 humanitarian ballet danced by four figures, who quarrel and 
 dance out of tune." The central idea is, in this case, almost 
 too obvious : the proposition to be proved is that the exag- 
 geration of right may turn to wrong — Summum jus, summa 
 injuria. It is Measure for Measure without the treason in 
 Angelo's blood, though Hollingsworth is, in the result, as cruel 
 as Angelo meant to be. Much of the work is a comment on 
 the melancholy truth that " half the work of the wise is to 
 counteract the mischief done by the good ;" but the only wise 
 man on the stage is Coverdale, and he is not strong enough : 
 all he has to tell us in the end is, by his own confession, 
 "Nothing, nothing, nothing!" Silas Foster interrupting 
 the regenerators of society with the question, " Which man 
 among you is the best judge of swine?" and the discovery, 
 soon made by the masquerading Arcadians, that " intellectual 
 activity is incompatible with any large amount of bodily 
 exercise," point to the foregone conclusion. The descriptive 
 skill displayed in the book is beyond praise. Nowhere has 
 the author more successfully availed himself of his favourite 
 trick of antithesis. The man whose life is ruined by too much, 
 and the man whose life is an emptiness from too little, pur- 
 pose ; the magnificent Zenobia, — ^the most Titian-like figure on 
 Hawthorne's canvas, — pulsing in every vein with passionate 
 life, and the veiled lady, the pale " anemone," whose appear- 
 ance in the drama is like the sigh of a flute in a rich orchestra ; 
 — these are not more strikingly contrasted than old Moodie, 
 the frail shadow of Fauntleroy, and "Westervelt, char- 
 latan and "salamander" — people who seem to have walked 
 
346 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 entire out of some unwritten novel of Balzac. The variety 
 in the scenery is similarly enhanced lay juxtaposition, as of the 
 Hermitage and the Hotel, Elliot's Pulpit and the Boarding- 
 house ; just as the liealthy atmosphere of the fields is set off 
 by the miasmas of Mesmerism and Spiritualism, which, in 
 this instance, represent the inevitable element of superstition. 
 The Slithedale Bomance has attracted an unusual amount of 
 attention from French critics, owing to the interest taken by 
 their countiymen in the social problem — a problem which it, 
 however, suggests and sets aside rather than discusses, the 
 references to Fourierism, etc., being mere interpolations cut 
 short by HoUingsworth's dogmatism. The only point made 
 plain is the baleful and blighting effect of the philanthropy that 
 overrides private personal claims. The book is the tragedy 
 of which Dickens' Mrs. Jellaby is the comedy ; and it is the 
 most dismal ^ ever written by the author, the only rays of 
 light being the rustic scenes, and the impressive emancipation 
 of Priscilla in the village haU. The finding of Zenobia's body 
 is, perhaps, the most ghastly description in literature : it is 
 aggravated to a climax by the horrible cynicism of Cover- 
 dale's remark, that had she foreseen "how ill it would become 
 her, she would no more have committed the dreadful act than 
 have exhibited herself in public in a badly-fitting garment." 
 Time passes, and the impartial torturer meets the philan- 
 thropic bird of prey with the question, " Up to this moment, 
 how many criminals have you reformed ? " " No one," 
 said Hollingsworth, with his eyes still fixed on the ground. 
 "Ever since we parted, I have been busy with a single 
 murderer." It is a fit close to the wreck of idealisms 
 and the holocaust of aspirations, that leaves us with a 
 deeper sense of the mockery of life, of more utter hopeless- 
 
 1 Mr. James says it is "the lightest, the brightest, the Uveliest, of that 
 company of unhumorous fictions "(!) The Blithedale Somance is not nn- 
 humorous, hut Borneo and Juliet is a comedy in comparison. 
 
"THE MARBLE FAUN." 347 
 
 ness than any other English work of fiction, excepting 
 perhaps Middlemarch. 
 
 There is less need to dilate on the Marble Faun, because 
 it has already received a fiiU share of attention and adequate 
 justice from English critics, possibly because the ground is 
 more familiar to them. Though the author's longest, it is not 
 his most elaborate, romance, being largely filled out with the 
 descriptions to whose excellence I have already referred. The 
 plot is more confused than that of its predecessors : it is more 
 difficult to believe that many of the events could have occurred ; 
 e.g. even in a country of defective police arrangements it is 
 impossible that the murder should have been so hushed up. 
 The supernatural trenches more nearly on the fantastic, the 
 air of unreality thickens, the contrast with Scott culminates. 
 In reading Transformation^ we feel as if we had lost solid 
 footing, or had left the high road to stumble over pebbles, 
 made slippery by seaweed. Of the author's works this most 
 justifies the caveat that his "forte lies rather in. the analysis 
 of character and situations than in the dramatic arrangement 
 of events." His almost magical alchemy is conspicuous in 
 all that relates to Donatello, the masterpiece undoubtedly of 
 the book ; nor is the writer's skill anywhere more surprising 
 than in his handling of this half-human creature, who, as Mr. 
 Leslie Stephen truly remarks, " trembles on the very verge of 
 the grotesque, and yet is made to walk through its pages with 
 undeviating grace." As surely as some rockets fall in colour- 
 contrasted streams, so surely has Hawthorne his opposed 
 female types — separated in Hester and Phoebe, side by side 
 in Zenobia and Priscilla, Miriam and Hilda — the burning 
 cactus and the lily : in richness and purity of tint the last 
 group are in no respect inferior to the others; but their 
 coming and going is more mysterious. The incident in 
 
 I The English publisher's title of the hook, to which, however, from its 
 association with the Pantomime, the author ohjected. 
 
348 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 Hilda's career that we best remember is her seeking relief 
 from the knowledge of another's crime in the Confessional : 
 of Miriam's, of course, the moment of the catastrophe. "Did 
 you not mean that he should die ?" addressed to her from the 
 lips of Donatello, rivals the subtlety of Dante. The central 
 conception of the book is in some respects the converse of 
 that which pervades the Blithedale Bomarwe. Francis W. 
 Newman, in his interesting treatise with the sentimental 
 title. The Soul, her Sorrows avd Aspirations, makes a remark 
 to the effect that a cold nature may be lifted above its former 
 self by committing a great sin. Hawthorne accepts this idea 
 in his account of the Doctor of Divinity at Liverpool, and 
 has made it the ethical basis of the Faun's history — designed 
 to exhibit the effect which an impulsive crime may have in 
 inspiring a simple instinctive nature with a stronger life : it 
 is a transformation like that which gave a soul to Undine ; 
 but effected less innocently, by guilt and love conjoined. The 
 doctrine certainly requires the caution, as Mr. Newman indi- 
 cates, that a sin committed of malice prepense would fail of 
 its end, more completely than the deliberate pursuit of plea- 
 sure fails ; but to caU it "Manichsean" — ^with the national 
 reviewer before adduced — is merely to invoke prejudice ; and 
 to blame the romancer for "playing with dangerous things 
 and suspected ideas" is to attempt to confine him to the 
 orthodox platitudes of ordinary life. 
 
 Mr. Hawthorne's criticisms of Art in this volume (as in 
 his Notebooks) are sometimes open to cavil ; nor is he very 
 successful as a critic of actual life. His panegyric on Pierce 
 was so much belied by the event that on his return to America 
 he was advised to ignore the President, but of course scorned 
 the poltroonery, and dedicated to him The Old Home. Of this 
 volume I have already spoken.^ There is nothing in our 
 language finer as regards style than much of the book, and 
 ^ See Chapter I. 
 
"THE OLD HOME." 349 
 
 hardly anything more pathetic than the account of poor Delia 
 Bacon hovering like a ghost ahout Shakespeare's tomb. Mr. 
 Leslie Stephen, who admits that Charles Lamb could not 
 have improved the descriptions of the hospital at Leicester 
 or Charlecote Park, complains that the great romancer in his 
 assaults on our ponderosity has been deceived by the image of 
 John Bull — an image that has hidden us from ourselves as well 
 as from our neighbours ; adding, "His sympathy with the deep 
 vein of poetic imagination that underlies all our steaks and 
 sirloins is intercepted by this detestable lay figure," and that 
 his dogged patriotism makes him " afraid of loving England 
 too well." This is more than half true, and doubtless in the 
 nation called London there is even more variety of feature 
 and character than in Paris or New York ; but it is other- 
 wise in our provinces, and, returning from Florence or Bos- 
 ton to Bristol or Glasgow, we can at least understand the 
 judgment pronouncing Sidney and Nelson to have been 
 somewhat exceptional British models. Hawthorne, like most 
 visitors, resented the hauteur which makes our upper-middle- 
 class travellers the worst in the world. His nearest approach 
 to rancour is a sentence in the dedication to this volume, 
 which, however, is not only excusable, but calculated to con- 
 vey a lesson to both nations. "Not an Englishman of them all 
 ever spared America, for courtesy's sake or kindness ; nor, in 
 my opinion, would it contribute in the least to our mutual 
 advantage and comfort were we to besmear one another all 
 over with butter and honey." There is, after all, very little 
 in The Old Home that is unpleasant, and of that still less that 
 even trenches on the outer verge of legitimate criticism — the 
 only objectionable passage being one about the physique of 
 Englishwomen, in which the writer is unlike himself. The 
 defect of the book, as intimated at starting, lies rather in the 
 isolation of its sketches and its want of general grasp, than in 
 any, even unconscious, injustice. 
 
360 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 Nathaniel Hawthorne's influence as a teacher and artist 
 is not likely soon to fade : his finest fancies have crept into 
 "our study of imagination" and abide there. Hester and 
 Pearl by the forest brook ; Dimmesdale, with the morning 
 light on his brow ; the procession of dead kinsmen, closing 
 with the apparition of himself, before the dead Judge ; the 
 Cleopatra of Brook Farm flinging down her gage to Hol- 
 lingsworth ; the hideous upheaval of the old log in the pool ; 
 the flash in Miriam's eye ; the flight of Hilda's doves ; the 
 sparkle in DonateUo's wine — are stamped in letters of fire 
 or gold on the page of his country's literature, and the music 
 of his quiet sentences still lingers on the ear of friends or 
 strangers. Nowhere is his American historical enthusiasm 
 more graphically illustrated than in the Grey Champion, and 
 the Eembrandt-like procession at the close of Howe's Masque- 
 rade. " The actors," he writes, as with a grim Puritan smile, — 
 " the actors in the scene have vanished into deeper obscurity 
 than even that wild Indian band who scattered the tea-ships 
 on the waves, and gained a place in history, yet left no names. 
 But superstition, among other legends in this mansion, repeats 
 the wondrous tale, that on the anniversary night of Britain's 
 discomfiture the ghosts of the ancient governors of Massa- 
 chusets still glide through the portal of the Province House." 
 But in the politics of the present he seldom took a side : 
 when he did so he chose amiss, and wrecked himself, for prac- 
 tical influence on his contemporaries, with the Democrats. By 
 his own repeated confession, he regarded the curse of slavery 
 as " one of those evils which divine Providence does not leave 
 to be remedied by human contrivances." He had no sym- 
 pathy with the Abolitionists of the North, calling their zeal 
 a philanthropic mist : he had at least a half sympathy with 
 the Southern planters. He had no clear faith in the future. 
 " As regards human progress," he writes in Blithedale, " let 
 them believe it who can and aid it who choose ; if I could 
 
HAWTHORNE'S QUIETISM. 351 
 
 earnestly do either it would be all the better for my com- 
 fort." In the preface to the Faun, he reminds us, as his 
 excuse for laying the scene in Italy, " that no author, without 
 a trial, can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance 
 about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no 
 mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but 
 a commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight, as 
 is happily the case with my dear native land. Eomance 
 and Poetry, ivy and lichens and wallflowers, need ruins to 
 make them grow." Hawthorne lived to see the beginning of 
 what he could only regard as ruin ; he did not live to see his 
 country rising, stronger and better, after a great struggle with 
 a gloomy wrong. 
 
 His career is no perfect pattern; but it says, amid the 
 noise and scuffle by which we are beset and distracted, "Audi 
 alteram partem'' — the old Manse against Broadway or the 
 Strand. Integer vitce, he envied no one, he jostled with no 
 one, he never tried to outstrip anybody. When drawn out of 
 his shell he was more disposed to resist than to float with the 
 headlong currents of his age ; when he had taken his stand 
 no personal considerations made him change or yield. His 
 example is a protest against patriotism degenerating into 
 bluster, and the literary spirit sacrificing itself by diffusive 
 energy. Content for forty -six years to remain unknown 
 beyond his narrow circle, the outcome of his pensive labour 
 is summed in a few story-books — about a tenth in bulk of 
 those of Mr. Anthony Trollope ; but they will endure among 
 the typical creations of the century. A quietist in a turbulent 
 community, an artist in a world of factories, he gained his 
 position because he knew himself and his work, — because he 
 recognised the value of concentration, and calm, as opposed 
 alike to mere industrialism and to blatant omniscience. A 
 wide culture should be mainly regarded as an indefinite 
 enlargement of the appreciative powers. There have been 
 
352 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 few Da Vincis and Galileos, born to excite our " wonder, love, 
 and praise;" many admirable Crichtons, who have left behind 
 them little else than the reputation of unproductive versatility. 
 Let each be, as far as in him lies, equipped on all sides as a 
 listener : as speakers or actors let us find our strength and 
 husband it. If we are financiers, do not let us imagine that 
 our fiats will dispel all the difficulties of theology. If meta- 
 physicians, the chances are against our being administrators, 
 orators, or lyrists : if novelists, against our being at the 
 same time competent historians, biographers, preachers, and 
 critics. Let us, above all, row rather against than with the 
 tide ; and, remembering that " popularity is for dolls," bide 
 our time. These are the lessons of the life and writings of 
 N'athaniel Hawthorne. 
 
NOVELISTS'. 353 
 
 CHAPTEE XI. 
 
 RECENT AMERICAN NOVELISTS. 
 
 "Saintb Beuvb," says the most popular living American 
 novelist, " wrote upon Balzac two or three times, but always 
 with striking and iaexplicable inadequacy." Considering 
 that Sainte Beuve was the most subtle French critic of our 
 generation, the remark is discouraging. In matters of litera- 
 ture, Americans are like crustaceans^ deprived of their shells : 
 they shrink from the slightest touch : to satisfy them is 
 impossible. The physical construction of most novelists is 
 similar. They have much of the imagination, aU the sensi- 
 tivity, of the poet, without the elevation, the confidence 
 delusive or real, which makes him rely on his audience, 
 " fit though few," and on a retributive posterity. Like the 
 actor or the orator, if the novelist fails to enlist the sym- 
 pathies, or to secure the approbation, of the men around 
 him, he falls, seldom to rise again. His or her — ^we must 
 accentuate the distinction in a department which women 
 have made peculiarly their own, and in which they have 
 achieved their greatest literary triumphs — his or her primary 
 
 '^ " It is," says Mr. James, " I think, an indisputable fact tiat Americans 
 are, as Americans, the most self-conscious people in the world, and the most 
 addicted to the belief that the other nations of the earth are in a conspiracy 
 to undervalue them. They are conscious of being the youngest of the great 
 nations, of not being of the European family, of being placed on the circum- 
 ference of the circle of civilisation, etc." — Memoir of Hawthorne, p. 153. 
 
 2 A 
 
354 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 purpose is to amuse the leisure or stir the passions of con- 
 temporaries-, to edify or to instruct is secondary. The novel- 
 ists of the day are the successors and heirs of the dramatists : 
 their works are the abstracts and chronicles of the time: 
 they aspire to hold up the mirror to nature : they compete 
 with the occupants of the pulpit, iu being the ministers of 
 morals ; with the artist, in exhibiting models of manners, or of 
 dress. Finally, their Art is comparatively new. The latest 
 and most portentous literary birth, it threatens, like Aaron's 
 rod, to swallow up the rest. A good or successful novelist 
 has a thousand readers for the historian's hundred, for the 
 metaphysician's one. He is the millionaire of literature, 
 with something of the democratic intolerance for the half- 
 outlawed, more ancient, owners of the land. His jealousy 
 is intensified by the uneasy feeling of being often found in 
 questionable company, and having his fame liable to con- 
 temptuous travesty. He is an essentially popular writer in 
 an age when popular writing is being run to ridicule; and no 
 greatness of masterdom is security that, after his death, his 
 best works may not be boiled down, emasculated, deformed, 
 and sold in pots for a penny.^ 
 
 The germs of the English novel have been found in the 
 Elizabethan age, in Sidney's Arcadia, or Lilly's Euphues ; ia 
 the l^orman-French /aWmMa; and chivalrous tales: they have 
 even been traced back to the ecclesiastical anecdotes of the 
 Middle Age, or the yet older romances of declining Latiuity ; 
 but the real birth of our modern novel is in the eighteenth 
 century; when, first, in the hands of Eichardson, Fielding, 
 and Smollett, it became a real power and secured a distinct 
 status. When a branch of art is late, sound criticism about 
 it is sure to be much later : the canons have still to be fixed 
 by which to measure the new lines, and try the new spirits. 
 
 1 I, of course, refer especially to the late disgraceful mutilation of Sir 
 Walter Scott by Miss Braddon. 
 
DIFFICULTY OF JUDGING NOVELS. 355 
 
 Scientific or rational criticism of landscape painting almost 
 dates from the publication of the Ifodern Painters ; for the 
 Euskin of novelists we have to wait ; and the ultimate 
 appeal between the works of Henry Fielding .and Mrs. 
 EadcUffe, of "George Eliot" and Mrs. Craik, of "George 
 Sand " and Eugene Sue, of Nathaniel Hawthorne and " Mark 
 Twain," seems, by the bookseller's register, still to be the 
 appeal to the palate, on the choice of a dish. " I like this, 
 I do not like that, but why I can never tell ; because I shall 
 never know." 
 
 The difficulty of dealing, philosophically, with a com- 
 paratively recent development of literature is intensified 
 'when we leave our own country for another, where, as yet, 
 comparatively few standards of Art are universally recognised. 
 The still somewhat chaotic conditions of a new society impose 
 a special restraint on the critic, who endeavours to gauge the 
 accuracy with which the portrait-painters of the people have 
 drawn their portraits ; nor, as we intimated at starting, is the 
 difficulty removed by the brief experience alone attainable 
 by most visitors. The mere traveller is offended on the 
 ground of political or social discrepancies ; or he is flattered 
 by the graces of a hospitality nowhere surpassed : he sees 
 men and things en deuil, or he sees them in rose ; and is in 
 neither case a reliable judge. In ventm'ing to estimate the 
 imaginative products of a country dominated by the descen- 
 dants 'of our race, we have to bear in mind that the United 
 States are yet far from being wholly English : they are also 
 German and Irish ; in a minor degree, French, Spanish, and 
 Italian; and, for good or ill in policy and art, more con- 
 tinental, i.e. less insular than we are. The subjects which 
 their authors have undertaken to illustrate have a wider 
 range than ours, and their manner of treatment is less tram- 
 melled by authority. This element of variety, conspicuous 
 in the novelists of the West, makes an exhaustive classifica- 
 
356 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 tion impossible : we can only with proximate accuracy for- 
 mulate their characteristics ; but in the later, as in the earlier, 
 period, some general features are manifest. 
 
 The influence of external Nature, paramount in the prose 
 and verse of the first quarter of the century, is still notable in 
 the third. With few exceptions, in the American romances of 
 the last thirty years, too much space is allotted to the com- 
 paratively commonplace incidents of the raLlroad, the steam- 
 boat, or the phseton (the Wedding Tour of Mr. Howells 
 consists of little else) : too many words are given to sunset 
 and sunrise, to river reach and mid- Atlantic storm, to Venetian 
 lagoon and Alpine ridge. The multitude of modern books of 
 travel is aggravating. In a few cases they are justified by 
 freshness of incident or remoteness of scene : in the majority, 
 they are products of people to whom everything new seems 
 marvellous, or who are so incontinent that they cannot breathe 
 the fresh air on a lake or a hill, or visit a rain, without 
 endeavouring to communicate what is incommunicable. The 
 delight of the country consists in great measure ia it-s com- 
 paratively vestal repose : we do not want to have our fresh 
 sensations disturbed or debased by commonplace, or our 
 chance of rest in some discovered nook imdone by popular 
 advertisement. But a professed book of travel is at least 
 honest. What we may complain of is a series of second 
 rate dissolving views, under pretence of a novel ; which 
 should be an imaginary history or biography, intensified to 
 a prose drama by rapidity of action and exposition oi in- 
 teresting character. Ordinary description or sketching is 
 so easy that the facility deludes half- competent persons 
 into the belief that they can write or draw. Their remedy 
 is to study Turner, or Wordsworth, or Euskin, or Scott, 
 or Hawthorne, in whose masterpieces, of brush or pen, out- 
 lines of strictest accuracy are bathed in a transfiguring, 
 light. Description is like a pony on which children learn to 
 
HOLMES— "ELSIE VENNEE." 357 
 
 ride : unfortunately it is in danger of being ridden to death 
 by full-grown Americans at Eome, and by adult Scotchmen 
 among the Hebrides. 
 
 The first era of imaginative writing in the West, is, as we 
 have seen, further characterised by the love of adventure : 
 the second is no less distinctly marked by the love of analysis. 
 On most of the products of the latter period, not purely 
 narrative, we find the stamp of the Transcendental move- 
 ment : they are introspective to excess, and frequently 
 pathological This influence is apparent in Oliver Wendell 
 Holmes, to whom we have referred as a poet, and to whom 
 we shall have to return as a humorist. Born in 1809, this 
 accomplished wit and physician made his literary d6lut in a 
 series of miscellaneous papers published in 1830; and, after a 
 residence abroad, preceded Emerson by a year in delivering 
 the annual essay to the Phi-Beta-Kappa Society. In 1847 
 he was appointed to the Professorship of Anatomy at Har- 
 vard : in 1852, he gave a celebrated course of lectures on 
 the modern English poets : in 1859 he contributed to the 
 Atlantic Monthly the psychological romance of Msie Venner. 
 This, on the whole his masterpiece, is certainly his most 
 original work ; though the heroine has been inevitably com- 
 pared to the Lamia of tradition and of Keats ; but it has the 
 inequality of execution apt to attach to all the performances 
 of an adventurer, however brilliant, in so many fields. The 
 artistic effect of Holmes's depth of insight and genuine 
 sympathy is impaired by an almost tiresome, frequently 
 flippant, smartness ; and the range of his characters, those at 
 least of more than mere local interest, is limited. Exception 
 has been taken to the somewhat obtrusive manner in which, 
 at starting, the hero, Bernard Langdon, is vaunted as a type 
 of the " Brahmin caste " of New England.^ But there is no 
 
 ^ This is enlarged upon in tte able but over-severe review in the "National, " 
 Oct. 1861. 
 
358 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 reason to doubt that a republic may have its intellectual 
 Aristocracy, or that there, as elsewhere, the qualities of " blue- 
 blood " — refinement, courage, frankness, loyalty, and decision 
 — may belong to inherited culture. Langdon's encounter, in 
 his early experience as a schoolmaster, with the hulking 
 Abner Briggs, is as natural as his victory, and this applies to 
 the other passages of his career. Dick Venner, the haK-bred 
 " Portugee," with his mustang and attempted murder, is as 
 fairly drawn as most villains of romance : Helen Darley, an 
 attractive type of the best class of New England school- 
 mistresses ; and Dudley Venner of the physically and men- 
 tally-weak, but withal high-souled, gentleman. The vulgar 
 people — Sproule and Sloper and Silas Peckham, especially 
 the last — are revoltingly life-like (though in such portraits 
 we always miss the master-hand of Dickens), and the clergy- 
 men, Pairweather and Honeywood, as true to nature as the 
 author's bias against their profession will permit them to be. 
 The interest of the story, to an unusual degree, centres in, or 
 round, the main figure. Elsie Venner, whose mother had 
 been bitten by a rattle-snake, has drunk in the poison as a 
 Mithridate. She becomes a snake-charmer, with the same 
 mysterious relations to the reptile as Donatello to the faun- 
 world, visits the adders in their graphically-described moun- 
 tain haunts, plays with them like dolls, over-fascinates them 
 with her "diamond-eyes,'' and similarly allures all the 
 " human mortals " with whom she comes in contact, while 
 often making them shiver by her touch. Some of the 
 incidents in her story are doubtless incredible, but she is less 
 repulsive than her mythological prototypes; and it is a 
 defective sympathy, that does not mourn over the unrequited 
 love, which at once brings her back to common day and 
 closes her strange career. The book is one of the numerous 
 American class which should be compared, not with the 
 standard realistic English novel, but with the fantasies and 
 
HOLMES— "THE GUARDIAN ANGEL." 359 
 
 fiery tales of Fouqu^ Musseus, and Tieck ; and we should be 
 unwilling to lose any one of the group. The essential sameness, 
 often a counterpoise, of impatient versatility, appears in the fact 
 that Dr. Holmes in his other romance, The Chiardian Angel, 
 changes the properties rather than the persons of his limited 
 stage. Here again the leading idea is that of Destiny made 
 true by transmitted qualities. It is a second weird story of 
 physical and mental af&nities, wrought out on similar lines 
 with less of the distinctly-supernatural, but more of the 
 painfully -anatomical element, as in the account of the 
 heroine's hysteria. The " drop of aboriginal blood " in her 
 ancestress, and the Italian air, over her cradle, correspond 
 closely to the adder's bite : the plot is only modified by 
 her marriage with the hero, instead of hes death, in the 
 denoHment. Myrtle Hazard is Elsie Venner, with a difference. 
 The same fascinating impishness, or spritehood, in both is 
 allayed by a similar healing or converting process. Clement 
 Liadsay is Langdon, with more genius, but hardly so much 
 character. The Withers' takes the place of the Dudley 
 stock. Mr. William Murray Bradshaw is, like Dick Venner, 
 the defeated scamp, with the same motives, pelf, and a 
 dash of passion ; though his means are purloining a will, 
 instead of throwing a lasso. The devoted old nurses are 
 facsimiles, with a change of colour ; and Miss Susan Posey 
 is a repetition of Bertram's Eosa. There are some new 
 types — Byles Grindley, the childless Guardian Angel, in 
 lifelong weeds for his stillborn book, yet shrewd and de- 
 cisive as a knight -errant of daily life ; the worthy old 
 cats, Cynthia Badlum and Kitty Fagan ; Miss Silence, the 
 incarnation of the rigid Calvinism, against which the author 
 nowhere more vehemently tilts ; the nonagenarian Dr. 
 Halibut; the Eev. Mr. Stoker, an unpleasant amalgam of 
 Arthur Dimmesdale and Charles Honeyman ; and the gifted 
 Hopkins, poetaster and plagiarist, whose crowning merit 
 
360 AMERICAN LITEEATUEE. 
 
 was, by the provincial papers, admitted to be originality. 
 Both books assert their right to exist by their geniality, 
 frequent incisiveness, and recognition of the sun and shadow 
 blended in the warp and woof of life. Though both are 
 here and there marred by professional pedantry, the lesson 
 in each is humanising; but in both we have the same 
 grain, ground, somewhat too swiftly to be ground small, 
 in the same mill. The most striking single scenes in the 
 two books are the inverted rescues of Langdo'n by Elsie, 
 in the hollow haunted by the snakes, and of Myrtle by 
 Clement, after shooting the rapids. In short space more 
 justice win be done to the author by selecting some of the 
 always suggestive and sometimes brilliant mots, in which 
 he perhaps too freely indulges — 
 
 " Certificates are for the most part lite ostrich, eggs ; the giver 
 never knows what is hatched out of them." " Conscience itself re- 
 quires a conscience, or nothing can be more unscrupulous. It told 
 Saul that he did well in persecuting the Christians. It has goaded 
 countless multitudes of various creeds to endless forms of self-torture. 
 . . . Our libraries are crammed with books written by spiritual 
 hypochondriacs, which shoiild be transferred to studios of insanity." 
 " All our other features are made for us, but a man makes his own 
 mouth." " The woods at first convey an impression of profound repose, 
 and yet if you watch their ways with open ear you find the life which 
 is in them is restless and nervous as that of a woman." " I suppose 
 we must punish evildoers as we extirpate vermin ; but I don't know 
 that we have any more right to judge them than we have to judge rats 
 and mice." " Men are tattooed with their special beliefs like so many 
 South Sea Islanders, but a human heart beats under all the patterns." 
 " He took as his text, ' Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right t ' 
 and began to write his sermon, afterwards so famous," ' On the Obliga- 
 tions of an Infinite Creator to a Finite Creature.' " " If a man has a 
 genuine, sincere, hearty wish to get rid of his liberty, if he is really 
 bent on becoming a slave, nothing can stop him. Liberty is often a 
 heavy burden on a man. It involves that necessity for perpetual 
 choice, which is the kind of labour men have always dreaded. In 
 common life we shirk it by forming habits. ... In politics party 
 organisation saves us the pains of much thinking." " There are 
 people who think that everything may be done if the doer, be he 
 educator or physician, be only called ' in season.' No doubt ; but ' in 
 season ' would often be a hundred or two years before the child was 
 
"MOTS" AND MAXIMS. 361 
 
 born." " From forty to fifty a man must move upward, or the natural 
 falling off in the vigour of life will carry him rapidly downward." 
 " Ministers work out the machinery of responsibility in an abstract 
 kind of way ; they have a kind of Algebra of human nature, in which 
 friction and strength or weakness of material are left out." " A man 
 is stunned by a blow with a stick on the head, he becomes uncon- 
 scious ; another man gets a harder blow on the head from a bigger 
 stick, and it kills him. Does he become unconscious too ? If so, 
 when does he come to his consciousness V "A man may love his 
 own soul too well." " The physician whose face reflects his patient's 
 condition like a mirror may do well enough to examine people for a 
 life insurance office, but does not belong to the sickroom." "A 
 gentleman says ' Yes ' to a great many things without stopping to think ; 
 a shabby fellow is known by his caution in answering questions, for 
 fear of compromising his pocket or himself." " He had a good deal in 
 him of what he used to caU the old man, meaning thereby certain 
 qualities tending to make a man beloved by his weak and erring 
 fellow-mortals." " We often move to the objects of supreme curiosity 
 or desire, not in the lines of castle or bishop on the chess-board, but 
 ■with the knight's zig-zag,. at first in the wrong direction." "There is 
 a worm in every young soul. Myrtle, as there is a worm in that leaf. 
 But there is not a worm in every leaf. Miss Cynthia. Are there never 
 any worms in leaves after they get old and yellow ? " " Plenty of 
 basements, Grindley used to say, without attics and skylights. Plenty 
 of skylights without rooms enough and space enough below. But 
 here was a three-storey brain." " A powerful preacher is open to the 
 same sense of enjoyment that a great tragedian feels when he curdles 
 the blood of his audience . . . But the tragedian who is fearful as 
 Richard or as lago finds that no hindrance to his success in the part 
 of Romeo." " People think the confessional is unknown in our Pro- 
 testant Churches ; it is a great mistake : the principal change is that 
 there is no screen between the penitent and the father- confessor." 
 "There is plenty of religious raving that is nothing but hysterics. 
 Mr. Froude thinks that was the trouble of Bloody Queen Mary." 
 " Where there is one man who squints with his eyes, there are a dozen 
 who squint with their brains." " Idols and dogmas in place of char- 
 acter ; piUs and theories in place of wholesome living : see the histories 
 of theology and medicine passim." " Look at the flower of a morning- 
 glory the evening before the dawn which is to see it unfold. The 
 delicate petals are twisted into a spiral which, at the appointed hour, 
 when the sunlight touches the hidden springs of its life, will uncoil 
 itself and let the day into the chamber of its virgin heart. But the 
 spiral must unwind by its own law, and the hand that shall try to 
 hasten the process will only spoil the blossom which would have 
 expanded in symmetrical beauty under the rosy fingers of morning." 
 
 A slightly junior contemporary of Holmes is the author of 
 
362 AMERICAN LITEEATUEE. 
 
 one of those books destined, like Home's Orion and Wells' 
 Joseph and his Brethren, to be admired and praised by an 
 appreciative circle, and remain "caviare to the general." 
 Sylvester Judd, born in* Massachusetts, 1813, was in his 
 early years diverted from the pursuit of business by a reli- 
 gious revival, and went to study at Yale for the orthodox 
 ministry. Having at a later date altered his views, he 
 transferred his attendance to Harvard, and in 1840 began to 
 occupy the Unitarian pulpit in Maine, the duties of which 
 he continued to discharge till his death in 1853. In 1845 
 he issued his Margaret, a Tale of the Real and the Ideal ; 
 designed, by his own account, to " promote the cause of a 
 liberal Christianity " (thereby filling " a gap long left open 
 in Unitarian literature, that of imaginative writings "), " to 
 subject bigotry, cant, pharisaisni and all intolerance ... to 
 preserve some reminiscences of the age of our immediate 
 fathers; and to embody the features and improve the character 
 of our own favoured region." The patriotic strain of the last 
 clause pervades the volume, largely consisting of dialogue, 
 and finds expression through the lips of the speaker who 
 represents the author's views. In the following passage of 
 sweeping panegyric, his often unchastened style and untamed 
 enthusiasm are alike conspicuous : — 
 
 " There are no faeries in our meadows and no elves to spirit away 
 our children. Our wells are drugged by no saints. Our rivers har- 
 bour no nereids. ... In the clefts of our rocks abide the souls of no 
 heroes . . . nor are our mountains the seats of any gods. . . . The 
 valley of the Housatonic is beautiful as the Vale of Tenipe, or of 
 Cashmere, and as oracular. We have no resorts for pUgrims, no 
 shrines for the devout, no summits looking into Paradise ... no 
 chapels or abbeys, no broken arches, no castled crags. . . . Eobin 
 Goodfellow is unknown, and the Devil haunts our theology, not our 
 houses. ... No hideous ghosts appear at cock-crowing. . . . Astrology, 
 Alchemy, and Necromancy are fast dying out, and Animal Magnetism 
 has not ventured to cross the sea . . . Manitou is gone . . . the One 
 God supervenes ; there is no mediation but Christ, and for man the 
 bars are let down." 
 
SYLVESTER JUDD. 363 
 
 As we read the bullc of this we cannot help answering 
 out of Schiller's lament for the " entgbtterte Natur ;" and the 
 chorus in Faust rings in our ears — 
 
 "Wet! Weh! 
 Dii hast sie zerstort 
 Die schone Welt." 
 
 It is the best and first, though unconscious, apology, for 
 the comparative barrenness and hardness of New England 
 thought, up to the author's time : it anticipates Hawthorne, 
 whose first considerable work appeared five years later, in 
 affirming that America is not yet ripe for romance. Margaret 
 asks, " So you think New Englanders are the best people on 
 the earth ? " and Evelyn with a fine effrontery replies :— 
 
 " I think they might become siich ; or rather I think they might 
 lead the August Procession of the race to Human Perfectahility ; that 
 here might be revealed the coming of the day of the Lord, wherein 
 the old Heavens of sin and error should be dissolved and a New- 
 Heavens and a New Earth be established, wherein dwelleth righteous- 
 ness. I see nothing to prevent them from reassuming the old Hyperionic 
 type . . . crowding out Jupiter and Mars, Diana and Venus (!) . . . 
 New England ! my birthplace, my chosen pilgrimage, I love it : its earth 
 and its sky and the souls of its people. They, the Unoonqiierable, 
 could alone subdue its ruggedness, and they are alone worthy to enjoy 
 its amenities. I love the old folks and the children ; I love the enter- 
 prise of its youth and honourable toil of its manhood. I love its 
 snows and its grass, its hickory fires and its corn bread. The seeds of 
 infinite good and of eternal truth are already sown in many minds. 
 . . . High Calculation, which is only the symbol of a higher Moral 
 Sense, is even now at work ; and they are ripping up the earth for a 
 canal from Worcester to Providence." 
 
 I should hesitate to quote the bathos of the close, as doing 
 injustice to the writer ; but the juxtaposition or overlapping 
 of the strictly practical^ and the ideal, almost the mystic, is 
 equally characteristic of his nation and of his book. Judd 
 belongs to the second period of American thought — that 
 affected by Transcendentalism : he is an evident student of 
 Emerson and the Dial : while he was writing, the experiment 
 ^ See Note on Practical Eeligion at end of volume. 
 
mi AMERICAN LITEEATUEE. 
 
 of following the plough in the morning and reading Plato in the 
 afternoon was being made at Brook Farm. Unahle individually 
 to take part in that adventure he went back to the past, and 
 in his MoTis Christi constructed a Utopia of the Eevolution 
 days, inspired by a deeper religious fervour. Margaret is, in 
 one aspect, a farrago of opinions, dissertations, discussions on 
 theology, politics, art, and society, often suggestive, sometimes 
 fantastical — all inspired by the spirit of a man who had 
 passed through the fire of a Eevival, a man so defiant of the 
 fashions of the world that, when, a few years later, he was 
 called on to offer thanksgiving for the victories of the Mexican 
 war, he read to his congregation the " Lamentations of Jere- 
 miah." His book has another side, and to most its charm will 
 be found chiefly to consist in the fresh and powerful delinea- 
 tions of New England life, in which it abounds. Judd's eye 
 for external nature is almost as keen as Thoreau's, whom, in 
 his description of the Maine Woods, he often forestalls. Pro- 
 bably the most graphic account of a snowstorm in English 
 is that which fills the whole of the seventeenth chapter. The 
 imagery is as fine as any in Whittier or The Liiggie of David 
 Gray ; and it derives new human interest from the picture 
 of the child half buried in the midst of it. The Indian 
 episodes bear comparison with Cooper's : the fireside scenes 
 — as of The Thanksgiving and the fatal Husking Bee, — are 
 equally vivid ; their accuracy is attested by those familiar 
 with the habits of the people, whose characters are so drawn 
 as to make us not only believe in but remember them. 
 Margaret, whose mental progress is the professed theme 
 of the book, is a fascinating figure ; and her brother Chilion, 
 the inspired violinist, to whose tragic fate the comparatively 
 slender thread of the plot conducts us through the labyrinth, 
 is a distinct poetic creation. The following is in a different 
 style from the foregoing extract : — 
 
 " Only at the hour of his death did I understand the feelings of 
 
"MARGAEET." 365 
 
 Ms life. He came out like tlie sun at the close of a cloudy day, 
 glittered, and expired. His music always tlirilled me, as I have seen 
 it blow many about liie leaves in the wind. His violin was truly 
 oracular, orphean, superhuman. Through it I am sure he would have 
 communicated much of the hidden secrecy of the souL Reserved in 
 manner, hesitating in speech, his instrument became his confidence, his 
 utterance, his communicable self. An inexplicabiUty took him from us. 
 Soul of Chilion, descend into my soul. If tears were song, I would sing 
 thee over the world : when I have ceased to weep, I only pray there 
 may remain strength enough to sing. Yet, like an unapproachable 
 star, his light descends to me from distant regions. There are many in 
 whose hearts he silently sank, and upon whom he scattered his wild but 
 divine musical seeds. Without putting forth a hand, his designs have 
 been moulded into the beautiful forms < of Art." 
 
 Mr. Lowell, in our frequent guide, the Fable for Critics, testi- 
 fies to his appreciation of this long anonymous and yet un- 
 deservedly-obscure romance — 
 
 " There goes, but stet nom/inis umhra, his name 
 You'll be glad enough, some day or other to claim, 
 And will all crowd about him and swear that you knew him, 
 If some English hack-critic should chance to review him. 
 The old " porcos ante ne projiciatis 
 Margaritas," for him you have verified gratis. 
 What matters his name . . . 'tis enough that I look 
 On the author of Margaret, the first Yankee book. 
 With the soul of Down East in't and things farther East, 
 As far as the threshold of morning at least ; 
 Where awaits the fair dawn of the simple and true. 
 Of the day that comes slowly to make all things new." 
 
 Margaret — on the whole, the most suggestive of the numerous 
 class of American didactic novels — is one of the not unfre- 
 quent works refuting the maxim that desert, sooner or later, 
 gets its due. Merit is only among the causes that conduce 
 to literary success ; to ensure which, genius, short of the 
 highest, often requires longevity, like that of Dryden, if not 
 of Carlyle : the former had achieved little of value ; the latter 
 was still practically unrecognised, at the age when Mr. Judd 
 died. It must, however, be admitted that Judd's comparative 
 failure is owing to the defects, as well as to some of the excel- 
 
366 AMERICAlir LITERATURE. 
 
 lences, of his work — to its want of form, its over-ambitious 
 aims, as well as to its heterodoxy of sentiment, and disregard of 
 prejudice. A rapid and wide popularity can, by a previously 
 unknown author, only be secured by clearness and precision 
 of style ; and by his being in essential sympathy with a 
 mxiltitude of ordiaary intelligences. To avoid straining their 
 attention, he must not disdain commonplace ; but endeavour to 
 obtain a reputation for originality, by appealing, in trenchant 
 phrases, or by picturesque situations, to the best part of their 
 average nature — above all, to their capalcity for laughter or 
 tears. He will be most immediately effective if he contrives 
 to satirise a minority ; to lead an attack on a vice growing 
 out of favour ; to denounce a party which has fallen behind, 
 or shot before, the ranks. In religious and social morals he 
 must be liberally conservative : in politics an optimist. All 
 these conditions are combined in perhaps the most popular 
 tale of the century ; and they go a great way to explain its 
 being so. In 1852, three works of fiction — two in America, 
 and one in England — appeared nearly simultaneously : — 
 Esmond, The Blithedale Romance, and Uncle Tom's Cabin. The 
 two former (the first being the author's artistic masterpiece) 
 met with only a moderate, the last with an enthi;siastic, 
 reception : 350,000 copies were sold in the States, probably 
 as many in Europe, and its publication was talked of as a 
 national event. " I forgot to put a nigger into my book," 
 sneered Thackeray. Hawthorne said nothing, but published 
 no other novel for seven years. Mrs. Beecher Stowe, mis- 
 taking, as wa,s natural, the main causes of her success, followed 
 it up with a series of literary failures ; none of which has, 
 in this hemisphere at least, attracted attention, save the 
 vulgarly-sensational article in " Macmillan's Magazine," the 
 undesigned result of which has been to cast aspersions on the 
 sanity of a once celebrated, and long universally respected, 
 English lady. 
 
" UNCLE TOM'S CABIN." 367 
 
 Detailed examination of a book so notorious, and so fre- 
 quently reviewed, as Uncle Tom's Cabin, were manifestly a 
 work of supererogation : but it must be acknowledged to 
 have some conspicuous merits. The tact of the writer is. 
 apparent in her choice of subject, her talent in the treatment 
 of it. Her story appeared at exactly the right time : it was 
 in harmony with the passion on the winning side of an obvi- 
 ously impending struggle ; and it gave voice to a suffering 
 race, in a manner peculiarly acceptable to a philanthropic age. 
 It was a definite thrust at an anachronistic crime ; and its 
 aggressive strength, increased by some of the unscrupulous- 
 ness attaching to most political movements, made it really 
 among the torches that lighted up the gunpowder magazine 
 of the war. The mere style of the book is mediocre : it wants 
 unity, consisting of a series of scenes, on different-coloured 
 paper, stitched together ; but the best characters, as those of 
 St. Clair, Miss Ophelia, and Topsy, are drawn with fidelity 
 and force, and some of the incidents, especially — Eliza's 
 escape over the ice ; Mrs. Bird giving away, for charity's 
 sake, the little articles of dress of her dead child ; Eva's 
 efforts to induce Topsy to be good ; the Quaker pulling on 
 his boots, and bracing himself to resistance of the law ; 
 the whole episode of Cassy and Legree ; exhibit some real 
 dramatic humour and pathos. It has been observed that 
 the original authorities for some of the keenest touches 
 — as Topsy's " S'pose I grow'd," — are found as simple facts 
 in the after-published Key; but the power to select and 
 set well, if not that of creative imagination, must be granted 
 to the writer. Her production has the air, and much of 
 the reality, of a simple narrative, not compiled for mere 
 artistic purposes : it seems to be a precise, though somewhat 
 crude, r&sum6 of observations on the black world. Mrs. 
 Stowe's religious views — like those of her brother, the vigor- 
 ous, though often tasteless, pulpit and platform orator, Henry 
 
368 AMERICAN LITEEATUEE. 
 
 Ward Beecher, — earnest, and yet comparatively broad, also 
 enlisted the favour of an audience, the majority of whom were 
 like-minded. 
 
 The following extract, less familiar than most of the 
 more thrilling scenes, illustrates her best manner : — 
 
 "'Dr. G. preached a splendid sermon !' said Marie. ' It was just 
 such a sermon as you ought to hear ; it expressed all my views 
 exactly.' 
 
 " ' It must have been very improving,' said St. Clair. ' The sub- 
 ject must have been an extensive one.' 
 
 " ' "Well, I mean all my views about society and such things,' said 
 Marie. The text was, " He hath made everything beautiful in its 
 season ;" and he showed how all the orders and distinctions in 
 society came from God, and that it was so appropriate, you know, 
 and beautiful, that some should be high and some low, and that 
 some were born to rule and some to serve, and all that, you know : 
 and he applied it so well to all this ridiculous fuss about slavery, 
 and he proved distinctly that the Bible was on our side, and sup- 
 ported all our institutions so convincingly — I only wish you'd heard 
 him.' 
 
 " ' Oh, I don't need it,' said St. Clair ; ' I can learn what does 
 me as much good from the Picayune any time, and smoke a cigar 
 besides, which I can't do, you know, in church. . . . I'm such a 
 graceless dog that these religious aspects of such subjects don't edify 
 
 " 'I do think, Augustine, you are so irreverent,' said Marie ; 'I 
 think it's shocking to hear you talk.' 
 
 " ' Shocking ! it's the truth. Why don't they carry this. religious 
 talk on such matters a little further, and show the beauty in its season 
 of a fellow's taking a glass too much, and sitting a little too late over 
 his cards and various providential arrangements of that sort, which are 
 pretty frequent among us young men ; we'd like to hear that those 
 are right and godly too.' 
 
 " ' That's just the way he's always talking,' said Marie. ' You 
 can't get any satisfaction out of him. I believe it's just because he 
 don't like religion that he's always running out in this way he's been 
 doing.' 
 
 " ' Religion ! ' said St. Clair. ' Eeligion ! Is what you hear at church, 
 religion 1 Is that which can bend and turn, and descend and ascend, 
 to fit every crooked phase of selfish, worldly society, religion 1 Is that 
 religion not less scrupulous, less generous, less just, less considerate for 
 man than even my o-ivn ungodly, worldly, blinded nature ? No ! 
 
CHILDREN'S BOOKS. 369 
 
 When I look for a religion, I must look for something above me, and 
 not something beneath.' " 
 
 UtwU Tom had, and partially retains, a large audience 
 in a section of the community whose importance many 
 English, but few Western authors, have been disposed to 
 underrate. Its most faithful friends have been children, 
 among whom more eyes have grown moist over the death of 
 " Eva " than over that of " Little NeU " herself. Americans 
 have a remarkable aptitude for writing books for children. 
 This arises partly from the fact that there are so many female 
 authors, who have made them a special study ; partly because 
 there is something in the conditions of a young country, with 
 a trying climate, that leads to their being regarded with 
 peculiar care, humoured, and often to some extent even 
 spoiled. Their chief poet, as we have seen, is constantly 
 singing about them. Their best prose writer sends from 
 Lenox and "The Wayside," two charming volumes. The 
 Wonder Book and the Tanglewood Tales — giving the Greek, 
 as Kingsley, in his Heroes, gives the Gothic, view of the old 
 mythologies — into the nursery. There are no more attractive 
 boys' books than Frederick Gerstaecker's numerous tales of 
 adventure ; especially The Feathered Arrow, The Pirates of the 
 Mississippi, and The Two Convicts. Of other volumes, on the 
 border-land between the domestic novel and the story-book, 
 I am, on better authority than my own, instructed to re- 
 commend The Lamplighter, especially in the earlier portion, 
 and Mabel Vaughan, by Maria E. Cummins ; Louisa Alcott's 
 Zittle Women, Little Men, Good Wives, Under tJie Lilacs, and 
 An Old Fashioned Girl; Miss Cameron's Thornton Hall; Miss 
 Prentiss's Stepping Heavenward and Flower of the Family ; 
 Maria Louisa Charlesworth's Ministering Children ; The Gates 
 Ajar, Mercy Gliddon's Work, Gipsy Breynton, Hedged In, and 
 others, by Miss E. S. Phelps, who has also contributed to 
 more mature romance ; Miss Whitney's Gayworthys and Faith 
 
 2b 
 
370 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 GartThey's Girlhood; Marjory s Quest, by J. T. Gould; and 
 Relen's Babies. Frequent favourites are Miss Wetherell's 
 Wide Wide World, Queechy, and Mellourne Souse; the 
 Fern Leaves and Shadows and Simheams, published under 
 the sobriquet of Fanny Fern; with Jacob Abbott's Caleb 
 in the Country and Caleb in the Town, comparable in some 
 respects to Miss Edgeworth's Frank. Some of these, a hand- 
 ful out of a bushel, are apt to be occasionally too ostenta- 
 tious in their sentiment and moralities ; but the majority are 
 gTaphic and interesting, sometimes freshly imconventional 
 and picturesque. 
 
 I shall pass from the generation slightly older -to that of 
 our younger contemporaries, with some notice of a novelist, 
 traveller, and soldier, hindered, by the short span of his 
 innocently erratic life, from securing the place in his country's 
 literature to which, in the estimate of those who knew him 
 best, he was, by his genius and character, entitled to aspire. I 
 give an outline of his career — as that of the last American 
 with whose personality we venture to concern ourselves — 
 condensed or quoted from the biographical cameo, prefixed 
 to the edition of his works, by his friend W. G. Curtis. 
 
 Theodore Winthrop, direct descendant of the first Gover- 
 nor of Connecticut, and on the mother's side, of Jonathan 
 Edwards, was born, 1828, in Newhaven. He studied at Yale, 
 and after graduating there as a distinguished student, in 1848, 
 he, for the sake of Ms health, through his life more or less in- 
 valided, set out on a course of European travel. " He went 
 first to England, spending much time at Oxford, where he 
 made many pleasant acquaintances, and walking through Scot- 
 land. He then crossed over to France and Germany, explor- 
 ing Switzerland on foot, and pushed on to Italy and Greece." 
 During his tour he met Mr. Aspinall of New York ; on 
 his return was engaged as tutor to the son, and afterwards 
 employed in the counting-house of that gentleman. Becoming 
 
THEODORE WINTHROP. 371 
 
 restless, lie, in the service of the Pacific Steam Company, visited 
 Panama; then travelled through California and Oregon, and 
 thence to Vancouver's Island and Hudson's Bay. Subse- 
 quently he joined the expedition of Lieutenant Strain, and, 
 later, in 1856, that of Fremont. We next find him practising 
 law at St. Louis, then at New York, where he " delighted to 
 haunt the studio of his friend Church the painter, and watch 
 day by day the progresss of his picture the 'Heart of the 
 Andes,' " his elaborate and glowing account of which is per- 
 haps the most careful and appreciative piece of art-criticism 
 that had up to his time been written in America. During 
 the interval between this date and the outbreak of the war 
 he was engaged in writing tales and sketches, which did not 
 attract the attention they deserved. In 1861 he enrolled in 
 the Northern army, started for the South in April, and wrote 
 from Washington a lively description of the camp. On the 
 10th of that month he was shot dead while cheering on the 
 A^an of his men at Great Bethel. 
 
 " Wintlirop," says Mr. Curtis, "was one of the men who represent 
 the fine fibre of manhood that makes the worth of the race." " His 
 wild campaigning was always a passion with him. His stories of travel 
 were so graphic and warm that, on hearing one of them, my younger 
 brother exclaimed, ' It's as good as Robinson Crusoe.' " " He had the 
 heroic sincerityVhich belongs to modesty ; " but " of a noble ambition and 
 sensitive to applause ... he felt that he had shown his credentials, and 
 they were not accepted. ' I can wait, I can wait,' was the answer his 
 life made to the impatience of his friends. ... A plant may grow in 
 a cellar ; but it wiU flower only under the due sun. . . . Sir Philip 
 Sidney was but a lovely possibility, until he went to be Governor of 
 Flushing. What else was our friend until he went to the war." 
 
 The last sentence, in evident deprecation of the charge of 
 partiality, points to the fact that Winthrop's wandering life 
 was a hindrance to the concentration of his energies ; even to 
 the perfection of his style, which is always fresh and clear, 
 but sometimes rugged and dashing, On the other hand, the 
 adventurous activity of his nature is the source of much of 
 
372 AMERICAN' LITERATURE. 
 
 the charm of his work, which, like that of Sidney, to whom 
 Mr. Curtis is fond of comparing him, was more than a mere 
 promise. His claim to recognition lies not merely in his 
 having been an actor as well as a dreamer, hut in the fact 
 that he has done substantial and peculiar, though imperfectly- 
 appreciated, work. He belonged in part to the class of the 
 older writers in whose minds incident predominated, but he 
 was also an analyst of the school of Hawthorne, and might, 
 with length of years, have been his most legitimate successor. 
 The first phase is represented by his novel, John Brent, in great 
 measure a graphic record of his experiences in the Tar West, 
 mingled with imaginative romance. The descriptive passages 
 in this book, especially that of the chase, rivet our attention 
 because they are brought into contact with scenes of emotion 
 and passion, and are not mere transcripts of still life, such as 
 we find on the, gaudily-printed papers of old inn walls. 
 Edwin Brothertoft is a tale of the Eevolution war, which 
 only misses being a classic by its frequent crudity of expres- 
 sion and ultra-ferocity of plot. The story begins with a glance 
 backward at English History — 
 
 " The Cavaliers always ran when they saw Puritan Colonel Brother- 
 toft and his troop of white horses coming. . . . Time passed. Kingly 
 Oliver died. There was no Protector blood in gentle Richard Crom- 
 well. He could not wield the land. ' Ho for Cava,liers ! hey for 
 Cavaliers ! ' In came the Merrie Monarch. Out Puritans and in Nell 
 Gwynn ! Out crop-ears and in lovelocks. ... To prison, stout John 
 Bunyan ; to olEce, slight Sam Pepys. . . To your blind study, John 
 Milton. ... To Whitehall, John WUmot . . . Just at this moment, 
 when all freedom was dead in England, Winthrop of Connecticut wrote 
 to his friend at Brothertoft Manor, ' "We have conquered the Province of 
 New Netherlands. The land is goodlie, and there is a great brave 
 river running through the midst of it. Sell thy manor, bring thy 
 people ... we need thee and the like of thee in our new communities. 
 . . . Great Tom of Lincoln tolled farewell, and the beautiful tower of St. 
 Botolph's at Boston saw the exiles out to sea. . . . Bluff is the bow 
 and round as a pumpkin is the stem of the Dutch brig, swinging to its 
 anchor in the bay of New York. It is the new arrival from England 
 this sweet autumn day of 1665. . . . Welcome, chivalric gentlemen, 
 to this raw country." 
 
"EDWIN BROTHERTOFT.". 373 
 
 These sentences are eminently characteristic of the writer, 
 if not of his ancestors. He proceeds to tell how the failure 
 of the strife for liberty at home had taken all the fire of life 
 out of the old Colonel, and that his descendants were " a mild 
 decaying race, strong in all the charming qualities, feeble in 
 all the robust ones." Edwin, the last male heir, is recalled 
 from England, where he had been sent to study at Oxford, 
 by the wreck of the family estates. He arrives to find the 
 house in the hands of an upstart army contractor, and his 
 father, who has let the estate slip through his fingers, on 
 his deathbed : the latter, after obtaining his son's forgive- 
 ness, advises him to return to the Old Home. But the 
 flame latent in the shadowy race, the force under gentleness, 
 which is the theme of the book, here leaps up, as the hero 
 turns towards Vandyck's portrait of his great ancestor, — "I 
 love England, I love 0.xford ; the history, the romance, and 
 the hope of England are all packed into that grand old casket 
 of learning ; but the Colonel embarked us on the Continent. 
 He would frown if we gave up the great ship and took to the 
 little pinnace again." Edwin, in an evil hour, meets with 
 the contractor's daughter, a tulip-like full-blooded beauty, 
 with a show of good-nature, who hates the name of BUlop, 
 and thinks she would' look lovely in a wedding-dress. He 
 falls into the snare of her physical charms, marries, and is 
 miserable. The essence of vulgarity is linked to the essence 
 of shrinking refinement, with the natural consequences. 
 Slowly, we are told, though a few pages hurry us to the 
 catastrophe, her love turns to hate; while his fades to pity. 
 When the action of the drama — or rather melodrama — pro- 
 perly begins, the husband has abandoned his home, and, chang- 
 ing his name, enlisted as a private under Putnam. The wife, 
 to whom the property belonged, is living in luxury and enter- 
 taining royalist officers, under circumstances set forth with 
 sufficient directness. The mdnage of the household, with the 
 
374 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 kitchen dialogues of the negroes, Sappho and Plato, and the 
 almost revolting description of the drunken feast, give occasion 
 for the few humorous touches -which here and there slightly 
 relieve the tragedy. The crisis is precipitated by Brothertoft, 
 under his mask of Orderly Lincoln, heing informed that his 
 wife, a traitress to her country as well as to himself, has 
 betrothed their only daughter (whose mind she has poisoned 
 against her father) to Major Kerr, a reprobate sprig of some 
 English aristocratic family. The news is brought by the 
 major domo Voltaire — a more lively specimen of the faith- 
 ful negro than Uncle Tom — who succeeds in enlightening 
 the girl's mind as to her mother's character, and persuading 
 her to conspire in a plot for her own liberation. Kerr, being 
 drugged, is easily surprised and pinioned as a prisoner of war, 
 mainly by the instrumentality of Major Skerrett, the type of 
 a young patriot. But, in the process, as Edwin Brothertoft ' 
 is clambering through the window to assist in the capture, 
 and protect his wife from injury in the scuffle, she herself, in 
 whom a latent insanity has now developed, enters the room, 
 with a pistol in her hand, fires at him, and, supposing she has 
 killed him, spurns the prostrate body with her foot. She is 
 seized and bound fast to a chair, to wait till the company has 
 safely reached the American outposts. The conspirators are 
 joined by Lucy, the wiUingly abducted daughter, and with 
 Brothertoft, who has been only stunned by a touch of the ball 
 on his forehead, they gallop off. With them also is an 
 old retainer, Jierick Dewitt, who, having been betrayed 
 by his wife — lady's-maid of the mistress of the house, 
 and in a lower grade emulator of her vices — had got into 
 drunken habits, and, finding his way to the cellar, had a 
 last bout, leaving behind him a smouldering light. The 
 party are many miles on their way, when he looks back, and 
 peers into the dark. All that has gone before is required to 
 enable us to appreciate the sensational horrors that follow. 
 
"EDWIN BROTHERTOFT." 375 
 
 with the grandeur of the devotion and courage of the long- 
 inert Puritan Cavalier. 
 
 " 'What is it ?' said Brotliertoft. 'Do you fear pursuit ?' 'No,' 
 whispered Jierick. This monosyllable sent a shiver to all their hearts. 
 . . . ' I must see farther,' he resumed in the same curdling tone ; and 
 he sprang up the mound on the right. Edwin Brotliertoft, impressed 
 by this strange terror, followed. He was within a dozen feet of the 
 summit . . . when Tierck leaped down and seized him tight by both 
 shoulders. . . . Then, with his face close to the other's — 'My God !' 
 he hissed, ' I've set the house on fire. We've left that woman there 
 tied to burn to death.' ... A dull glow, like the light of moonrise 
 tlirough mist, was visible close to the dark line of the horizon. . . . 
 An alarm gnu from the frigate came booming through the silence. 
 While they stood paralysed, Edwin Brothertoft sprang down from the 
 mound, tore his daughter from the saddle, and was mounted himself 
 quick as thought. 'I must save her !' he cried ; 'your mother, my 
 wife.' ... A moment they could see the white horse, like a ilash of 
 light, as she flung down the break -neck hill side. Then she leaped into 
 the mist, and a moment more they could hear her hoofs clattering. 
 
 " ' On, Volante ! Straight for that light to the south ! Fu-es luove 
 fast ; we must go faster. Only three miles away, and there she sits 
 bound — and the flames coming — she I once loved, God knows how 
 faithfully ! Gallop, gallop, Volante ! 
 
 " ' Bravely ! here we are down the ridge ! Now, stretch out over 
 tlois smooth bit of clearing ! Yes ; that black line is a stone wall. 
 Measure it, Volante ! Not four feet ! Good practice for our iirst leap ! 
 Easy now, steady ! Hurrah ! Over and a foot to spare ! Well done, 
 horse ! And I have been a plodding foot-soldier ! But I can ride 
 still, like a boy, side-saddle or no saddle. A Brothertoft cannot lose 
 the cavalier. We shall vrin. 
 
 " ' What, Volante ! Nothing to fear — that white strip in the dell ! 
 Only a brook. Barely twelve feet to leap. Never mind the dark and 
 the bad start ! Eemember my wife — she bums, if we flinch. Now, 
 together ! Hurrah ! Over, thank God ! Splashed, but safe over and 
 away ! 
 
 " ' A clearing again. Shame, Volante ! Are you a ploughman's 
 horse, that you labour so clumsily in these furrows ? See that horrible 
 glow upon the sky ! This wood hides it again. Idle forest ! why 
 was it not burned clean from the ground a century ago ? Everything 
 baffles. No, Volante ! no turning aside for this windrow ? Over, over ! 
 Through, through, and now straight on ! Yes ; the hill is steep, but 
 we must gallop down it. No stumbling. What ! another wall, and 
 liigher ? You shrink ! No^you must. She shall not burn ! Now, 
 God help us ! Down ? No ; up and off ! Hurrah ! 
 
376 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 " ' How we have rattled through, those two miles ! , [And here is 
 the road. Easier travelling, if you can only take that worm fence ! 
 The top bars are sure to be rotten. A fair start, my good mare, and 
 do your best ! Bravely again ! I knew we shouid crash over. Plain 
 sailing now ! What, limping, flagging, Volante ? Shame ! This is 
 a road fit for a lady's summer-evening canter. Shake out, Volante ! 
 Let me see your stride ! Show your Lincolnshire blood ! The winner 
 of this race wins Life — Life, do you hear ? Wake up there, you far- 
 mers ! turn out and help ! Fire at Brothertoft Jilanor. Fire ! 
 
 " ' Faster, faster ! Are we too late ? Never ! I see the glow 
 brighter against the sky ; but the night is stiU as death ; fire will move 
 slow. We shall see at the turn of the road. Faster now ! She must 
 not bum, sitting there, where I saw her by the dear fireside of the years 
 gone by — sitting bound, and the flames snarling. Ah ! I so loved her ! 
 I so trusted her ! We were young. Life was so beautiful ! God was 
 so good ! It was miserable that she should wound me, and more 
 cruelly wound her own souL But' I have forgiven her. O, let me 
 save her, if only to speak peace and pardon ! She shall not bum. A 
 dozen strides, and we can see the house. Perhaps this great light is 
 the stables. No — everything ! Fire everywhere. Too late ! too late ! 
 Never ! I can bum ! She shall not !' 
 
 " And they galloped up the lawn." 
 
 There is another terrible scene of the bound mad woman, 
 gradually alive to the sense of her doom, shrieking for help 
 to the man whom she had, for years, longed to murder. 
 Brothertoft appears on the edge of time, and at the risk of his 
 life, but without serious injury, drags the scarred beauty, still 
 alive and wearing her diamonds, from the wreaths of flame. 
 He nurses her through all the Indian summer, and at the last — 
 " She reached blindly for his hand. He took hers tenderly. 
 And there by the solemn twilight they parted for a time. 
 Death parted them. She awoke in eternity. He stayed to 
 share a little longer in the dreamy work of life." Here the 
 curtain really drops, though, in the afterpiece, there is a gleam 
 of sunshine on the union of Lucy and Skerrett. 
 
 Oecil Breeme, less startling in its episodes, which are yet 
 of sufficient interest, is a novel of finer grain than Brothertoft. 
 It is more mature and subdued in style, and more free from 
 violences : mystery takes the place of horror : it is less like 
 Brown's Wieland or Wuthering Heights, more akin to the 
 
" CECIL DEEEME." 377 
 
 House of the Seven Gables or to Miss Bronte's Villette. The 
 story is that of a nohle-minded and sensitive girl, who, to 
 escape a repulsive alliance has feigned suicide, and, escaping 
 recognition, under an assumed name and male disguise hid 
 herseK in an attic, where, withdrawn from all society, half- 
 buried from the world, she pursues her profession as an 
 artist ; drawing strange pictures symbolic of her history, and 
 living all the while in constant dread of being detected by 
 her persecutor. A fainting fit, brought on by exhaustion and 
 anxiety, leads to the invasion of her sanctuary by the porter 
 of the lodging, and another inmate, Eobert Byng, the hero, 
 who, after rescuing the supposed young man from death^ con- 
 tracts with him a close friendship. Various adventures, lead- 
 ing to the discovery that " Cecil Dreeme" is Clara Denman, 
 result in their ultimate marriage. The plot is interesting, 
 though improbable, the author being apt to bend the course 
 of nature to the evolution of his ideas. The leading char- 
 acters have aU the merit of incisive individuality. We 
 have — the old failing merchant, willing to sell the souls 
 and bodies of his children to throw a veil over commercial 
 malpractices, which it is one object of the book to expose ; 
 Emma Denman (Clara's sister), the motherless girl, consumed 
 like a moth in the flame; Densdeth, one of the numerous 
 re-issues of Mephistopheles, the " apostle of disenchantment, 
 Avho revealed evil everywhere," because he everywhere caused 
 it — a figure always impressive, though somewhat overdrawn ; 
 Towner, the terror-stricken slave, who, turning on his tyrant, 
 becomes the Minister of Justice in the last act of his defeated 
 life ; and, as reliefs to these lurid forms, Cassandra Churm, 
 the 'lonely man, hardening himself against a great sorrow by 
 a lifelong asceticism, yet alert for the protection of innocence 
 and the redress of wrong — " the ideal friend, staunch as oak, 
 true as steel, warm as sunshine, eager as fresh air, tender as 
 midsummer rain ;" Eobert Byng, romantic yet practical, but 
 
378 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 over-plastic, " a fellow of good intentions," who dramatically 
 adopts the natures of his companions as far as is consistent 
 with the anchorage of honour ; and Cecil, or Clara, herself, 
 altogether womanly, in spite of her disguise, the unconscious 
 model of her picture of " Cordelia." 
 
 " How she flaslaed out of being all the false laws that check the 
 mind's divine liberty ! not the laws of refinement and high breeding : 
 they, the elastic by-laws of the fundamental law of love, are an easy 
 harness to the freest soul." 
 
 Apart from its startling situations, the book teems with pas- 
 sages of power, penetration, and pastoral beauty, e.g. the 
 chapter called " Nocturne," with the description of night, 
 "the day of the base, the guilty, and the desolate :" that 
 headed " Lydian Measures," or the previous reference to the 
 effect of a fragrance, a far-away sound, a weft of cloud, the 
 leap of a sunbeam, or the carol of a bird in arresting from 
 a treachery or a crime : nor is the book wanting in occa- 
 sional traces of even broad humour, in such sentences as 
 the following, which anticipates one aspect of the satire of 
 Democracy : — 
 
 " I cannot quite decide about taking clean shirts to Washington ; 
 in a clean shirt I might abash a Senator." " Abash without mercy '. 
 the country will thank you." 
 
 With all its defects of irregular construction, this novel is 
 marked by a more distinct vein of original genius than any 
 American work of fiction known to us that has appeared 
 since the author's death. , Winthrop's nature was essentially 
 sad, though robust : his cynicism was healthy, because he 
 believed in goodness : his strength, in its excess, may be 
 charged, though rarely, with coarseness ; but he is incapable 
 of vulgarity. He has not the almost unerring taste of 
 Hawthorne ; his phrases are sometimes flippant, his occa- 
 sional mannerisms not free from pedantry, but he is ex- 
 ceptionally genuine : his rare cheerfulness exhilarates, his 
 
"WINTHROP'S GENIUS. 379 
 
 prevailing melancholy takes possession of the reader. His 
 
 Life in the Open Air and minor sketches are inspired by 
 
 the nature - worship of Thoreau, animated by a broader 
 
 humanity. An American to the core, Winthrop has all the 
 
 artistic fondness for Europe that pervades the Marble Faun 
 
 of his predecessor : his memory lingers over the " fair spires 
 
 and towers, and dreamy cloisters, dusky chapels, and rich 
 
 old halls of beautiful Oxford." In Italy, he makes one of 
 
 his friends expostulate — 
 
 " Going back to America ! to that matter-of-fact country, where 
 every one reads the newspapers ! to a country where hearts never break, 
 and there can be no need of mercy, pity, or pardon, to life vrithoiTt 
 shade, all bald, garish, steady sunshine." 
 
 Manliness and intensity are the leading characteristics of this 
 " fresh, earnest, unflinching" spirit, who foreshadows in these 
 words the close and crown of his brief and bright career : — 
 " If the soul in the man has good hope and good' courage, 
 through all his tones, sound the song of hope and the ptean 
 of assured victory." ..." Whoever has lived knows that 
 timely death is the great prize of life : who can regret when 
 a worthy soul wins it?" ^ 
 
 In attempting to revive the memory of half-forgotten 
 names, we can, at worst, be accused of exaggerated en- 
 thusiasm : in presuming to express our opinions of living 
 writers we are exposed to the imputations of partiality, 
 or prejudice, or patronage. The last is the only charge 
 we need care to rebut, by acknowledging that "an ounce of 
 wit is worth a pound of clergy," and that a page of crea- 
 tion outweighs a volume of comment. In this spirit we 
 venture a brief estimate of three contemporaries, all ac- 
 complished interpreters of the life of their countrymen, 
 but whose patriotism has, in each case, been modified by 
 
 1 It is interesting to observe that the strong family talent and originality 
 are also shown in the writing of Winthrop's sister, Mrs. Laura Johnson, 
 especially in her records of travel, and Poems of TxoenUj Years. 
 
380 ;■ AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 extensive residence abroad. Their themes are partly national, 
 partly European : they are all students of Teutonic thought 
 and Eomantic passion : their writings, mainly of the analy- 
 tical school, deal with refinements of character evolved hy 
 strange conjunctures, rather than with the ordinary sequence, 
 of events. They are followers of Nathaniel Hawthorne, in so 
 far as they seem perplexed themselves, and determined to per- 
 plex us ; one with mysteries, the other two with problems of 
 society. A story is told of certain Eed Indian chiefs who, ap- 
 pearing before the United States officials, on the day when they 
 had been accustomed to receive a yearly present, and being 
 greeted with an edifying lecture, exclaimed " We came to get 
 tobacco, and to be made drunk, and you give us a sermon ! " 
 Similar, it has been observed, is the condition of mind of the 
 unsophisticated reader who comes fresh from Roderick Random 
 or Rob Roy or The Red Rover, to the study of Oarth or 
 Roderick Hudson or The Undiscovered Country. To dogma- 
 tise on the relative literary rank of men whose work is still in 
 progress, were almost an impertinence. I am most attracted 
 by the one who is most heavily handicapped. The highest 
 form of noble birth, that of a great man's son, has its 
 drawbacks. The jealous world can endure two statesmen, 
 hardly two poets or romancers, of the same race. If a William 
 Shakespeare in our days were to speak with the tongue of 
 angels, it is doubtful if he would find an audience among men. 
 It is boldness in Julian Hawthorne to write novels at all: 
 the height of daring, to write them, as he habitually does, in 
 the metaphysical manner: an almost incredible audacity, that 
 he should take for his recurring text the ruining or regenerat- 
 ing results of sin, and illustrate his theories of transmitted 
 qualities by reference to popular superstitions. The ghost of 
 Napoleon I. was, at the commencement of the Franco-German 
 war, represented, in political cartoons, as warning away 
 from the gulf the wearer of his name. Julian Hawthorne 
 
JULIAN HAWTHORNE. 381 
 
 has only rashness in common with the prisoner of Sedan ; but, 
 in dealing with the supernatural, and endeavouring to make 
 it throw light on moral problems, he should recall the line — 
 
 " WitHn that circle none cTare walk but he." 
 It is as if a son of Spenser had attempted to complete the 
 Faerie Queene, or a son of Bacon the Novum Organum. Nature, 
 however, will have her way, and perhaps the only literary- 
 lesson now worth reading is not to tax her energies by 
 vainly endeavouring to do too much. 
 
 Julian Hawthorne's works, as those of the majority of his 
 compeers, consist of shorter sketches, representing situations 
 or episodes ; and of more elaborate, though, in his case, seldom 
 highly-finished, romances — generally tragedies — of a whole 
 life. In the preface to his best volume of the former he boldly 
 justifies the frequent unreality of the atmosphere in which 
 they are steeped. " "What is called the human interest, in 
 fiction, is doubtless more absorbing than any other — but the 
 marvellous always possesses a fascination, and justly. . . . 
 He who would mirror in his works the whole of man must 
 need include the impossible along with the rest. . . . Torn 
 Jones, Adam Bede, and Vanity Fair are earth without skj' . . . 
 the sky of Shakespeare and Dante, of Goethe and George 
 Sand. A reader with a healthy sense of justice feels that an 
 occasional excursion mysteryward is no more than he has a 
 right to demand. And such excursions are wholesome for 
 literature no less than for him. For the story-teller, sensible 
 of the risk he runs of making his supernatural element appear 
 crude and ridiculous, exerts himself to the utmost, and his 
 style and method purify and wax artistic under the strain.'' 
 This is precisely what ITathaniel Hawthorne has — what 
 Julian has not — done. The latter has paid too little atten- 
 tion to his style, as a comparison of the above with any of 
 his father's prefaces will show : it is rarely inaccurate, but 
 often crude : his finest sentences seem constrained into 
 
382 AMERICAK LITERATURE. 
 
 beauty or power by the terseness or truth of the thought ; but 
 he never exerts himself to avoid repetition : consequently few 
 who have written so well have also written so ill. His only 
 considerable humorous sketch, Mrs. Gainsborough's Diamonds, 
 which he slights as " a mere j'eu d' esprit," is, in matter and 
 manner, rarely excellent, strange enough yet perfectly cred- 
 ible, satirical and dramatic— a little in the style of IST. P. Willis, 
 but on a higher level. In the same volume The Laughing- 
 Mill — a ghastly misnomer — is as powerful as Ethan Brand, 
 and the pathetic Christmas G^uest is no way inferior to 
 Lil'i/s Quest or the Sister Years of the elder Hawthorne. 
 But when Julian attempts to combine the manner of the 
 last-named, of Edgar Poe and of G. P. E. James, as in the 
 murderous Kildharns Oak, the result is ludicrous. The 
 incidents of the duel with Eed Beard ; the planting of the 
 tree ; the man rolled down the cliff ; the torn hand ; the 
 Sybil of ninety years blown away with the oak in a storm, — 
 are less worthy of the Castle of Otranto than of a third-rate 
 theatre. A more interesting example of this writer's tend- 
 ency to trip, and fall on the wrong side of the line, is Ellice 
 Quentin ; a story in which occasional flashes of insight and 
 touches of subtilty traverse and sometimes redeem the almost 
 nonsensical basis. Ellice loves Geoffrey Heme, keeps him 
 from going to Australia, and, " her eyes glowing with luxuri- 
 ous light, the curving of her lips being eloquent of refined 
 enticement," says, " Be sure you make me love you enough. 
 Do I overflow your heart ? " Her father suddenly inherits a 
 fortune. She meets Geoffrey, and wishes him to make her 
 safe by an off-hand marriage. But he, being law-abiding and 
 honourable, recoils. She replies, " Well, it is fate," and writes 
 next day giving him up. Heme, after the fashion of disap- 
 pointed men, gets on at the bar. Subsequently, he, at a 
 garden party, meets EUice, now the wife of Mr. Amidon, " a 
 youngish-looking man, with a flaxen moustache and pale 
 
"ELLICE QUENTIN." 383 
 
 grey eyes rather red round the edges," who opens his mouth, 
 only once, to exclaim, " Capital punch, upon my soul." 
 Mrs. Amidon tells Geoffrey that she cannot do without him, 
 and only " wears her husband as she wears her hat." " She 
 was a woman who wanted much ; but who was not, per- 
 haps, willing to go all lengths to get it. ... A woman 
 who has achieved a position before the world will hesi- 
 tate profoundly before abandoning outward conventionality 
 for avowed outlawry. Compromises are more convenient. 
 But how if a stubborn man persists in refusing to stoop to 
 compromise ? " Geoffrey does so ; but she gives him a " white 
 rosebud," puts it in his button-hole, and says, " Before this 
 fades." She drives to his hotel, sees him at the window 
 reading a paper, and murmurs, " If he looks out and recog- 
 nises me, I will go to him." He does not ; so she returns 
 to Mayfair in the same hansom. Two years pass : Heme is 
 morosely neglecting his work. " What is the odds what a 
 man does ? The devil is at the bottom of it all." Mean- 
 while EUice, having determined to divorce her husband, 
 comes to her lover, having in vain written for him. " Your 
 rose is withered," she cries, " but it may not be too late to 
 make it bloom again." " We cannot," he answers ; " I am 
 going to be married." She asks to see the lady ; and at last 
 his virtue succumbs. " Oh, Ellice, if you only say so I will 
 come without her." But she has a grain of conscience, and 
 demurs, in her turn, to the suggested treachery. The be- 
 trothed pair pay a visit to the old love : she brings in three 
 glasses of wine. Gertrude and Geoffrey choose safely : Ellice 
 drains the one poisoned cup and dies, leaving the survivors in a 
 somewhat unpleasant position. Such outlines are apt to be 
 travesties ; and, here as elsewhere, apology is due for omission 
 of the delicate shades and lurid lights which impassion, if 
 they do not vitalise, the story. But there is no defence of 
 the melodramatic conclusion. In another tale, of about the 
 
384 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 same length, the author's success is as decided as is his failure 
 in the above, to make us believe in his stage and sympathise 
 with his actors. The introduction to Archibald Malmaison 
 contains a few sentences of characteristic pessimism, at least 
 as true as the glib optimism which it challenges — 
 
 " When I was a child I used to hope my faery stories were true. 
 . . . The knowledge of maturity, which has discovered that nothing 
 that is true (in the sense of being existent) can be beautiful, deprecates 
 truth beyond everything. What happens, we find, is never what ought 
 to happen, nor does it happen in the right way or season. In pallia- 
 tion of this hardship, the sublime irony of fate grants us our imagina- 
 tion. . . . Your hearer's life and those of his friends are enough true 
 stories for him ; what he wants of you is merciful fiction. ... To 
 bully him with facts is like asking him to live his life over again; and 
 the civilised being is yet to be found who would not rather die than 
 do that. ... I have now to reconcile this profession of faith with 
 the incongruous fact that the following story is a true one." 
 
 The exceptional character of the facts, in the history of 
 the Malmaisons — whom he represents as an old Sussex 
 family of the Huguenots — may have reconciled Mr. Haw- 
 thorne to their reality. Archibald, the hero, born iu 1800, 
 and dying va. 1833, is represented as passing, in the interval, 
 through successive periods of mental nights and days, each 
 of seven years' duration; alternately asleep and awake; 
 almost an idiot, or with the mere faculties of an infant, 
 and then suddenly appearing as a man of quick iatelligence 
 and large sympathies, before whose domineering wOl the 
 other characters collapse or wane. In the last act, he kills 
 his mortal enemy (who has married Archibald's mistress, 
 while his rival was comatose) in a duel, flings the body into 
 a lake, and establishes himself, with his liberated bride, 
 in a secret chamber of the great mansion, to which he alone 
 has the secret key. He leaves her and returns, as he thinks, 
 in an hour ; but the destined years of sleep have passed over 
 him, during which she has been immured ; and he finds her 
 dress covering a skeleton, like that in the chest of the 
 
"SEBASTIAN STROME." 385 
 
 Mistletoe Bough. The opportunities afforded by this tragedy 
 are put to a masterly use in a tale of terror, love, violence, 
 and mystery where, granting the postulate of the strange 
 pathology, there is nothing incredible. The manner in 
 which, in critical moments, Malmaison bounds back into 
 life and authority frequently reminds us of the old noble- 
 man's reappearance in the burning castle of Victor Hugo's 
 Quatrevingt- Treize. 
 
 The same artistic and other features — sombre views, 
 penetrative power, and limited range of vision, a large de- 
 mand on our credulity, great inequality of style, a passion 
 for the anomalous, with general disdain for the conventional- 
 ities of life — appear in the author's longer works. Of these, 
 Sebastian Strome has the best-constructed plot and most fresh- 
 ness, if not originality, in its characters. The good Vicar 
 himseK is a model type of unaggressive Stoicism, the " incar- 
 nation," as he is described, "of self-forgetting enthusiasm," 
 keeping " through all the stress and strain of manhood the 
 guileless candour and ingenuousness of a child," the sternness 
 of his devotion constantly softened by a charity that endures 
 all things but treachery ; a man of whom we hardly need to 
 be told. that " confidence went to him as metal to the load- 
 stone." Talking of the poor girl, his parishioner, who has 
 been led astray, he " seems holding out protecting arms to 
 her through the crowd," but when she will not give her be- 
 trayer's name he exclaims, " I'm glad I do not know him, wife. 
 I could not keep my hands from taking him by the throat ; the 
 man's heart must be flint." " Surely," rejoins the silver-haired 
 old lady, " her sin is as great." But the husband is of another 
 mind, and, resolving to go to London in search of Panny, says, 
 with fine tact, " It is a man's work to bring her here, not 
 yours." The task is ultimately devolved upon their son and 
 idol, Sebastian, who is in the metropolis studying for the 
 ministry, and is engaged to a noble, though impulsive, country 
 
 2c 
 
886 AMERICAN^ LITEEATUEE. 
 
 heiress, his old playmate. He is a gambler, an atheist, and, as 
 the novel-initiated reader from the first divines, the criminal. 
 His moral redemption, the central theme of the book, is 
 wrought out through a series of vicissitudes and calamities, 
 probable and improbable ; the main agents being the remorse 
 caused by the death of his father (who is kiUed by the revela- 
 tion of his son's guilt) and love for his child, with whom he 
 lives for some years, as a wood-carver, in the slums of London. 
 This child is run over by the real villain of the story, a 
 wretched Jew fortune-hunter, incongruously made to obtain 
 the hand of the heiress, who is a sturdier specimen of the type 
 represented by EUice Quentin. Of the other characters the 
 best is Smillet the street-preacher, brave soldier, and ideal 
 confidant : his cry of grief on hearing his friend's con- 
 fession is one of those strokes of real power which redeem 
 irregularities. " Oh, Sebastian, I'd rather have done it 
 myself." A like touch is Mary Dene's remark, after 
 resisting her old lover's temptation. " It was the devil 
 prompted us ; for I felt it too ; else I should not have 
 spoken so angrily." Or this, "We cannot find Eternity 
 so long as Time : it only means we shall be more alive." 
 The author, under difficulties, succeeds in making us ulti- 
 mately forgive the younger Strome. He fails to recon- 
 cile us to Bressant — the hero of an earlier novel, woven on 
 thinner strands — for the inherent selfishness of this social 
 innovator and trifler with hearts, over which he wields a fickle 
 lordship, by the sheer audacity of a handsome giant, is un- 
 redeemed by any final sacrifice. Valeyon is .a weaker fore- 
 cast of the vicar, hardly made more interesting by the mystery 
 that surrounds him. Here, as elsewhere, in the two women, 
 Cornelia and Sophia, we have the hereditary contrasted 
 female types: the text of the Marble Faun is set forth 
 too plainly in the dialogue. "B. — 'To do anything there 
 must be a whirl in the blood. ... It would be better to 
 
"GARTH." 387 
 
 commit a deadly crime than to dribble out like that foun- 
 tain.' S. — ' Even to speak of sins doing good is a fearful 
 and wicked thing.' B. — ' I think anything is better than to 
 be torpid.' " 
 
 The excessive intricacy of Garth makes special criticism, 
 in our space, impossible. It is the author's only considerable 
 romance, the scene of which is laid in America, and it gives 
 occasion for his most vivid descriptions, — as the passage of 
 the torrent, or the race on skates at the rescue, — and it has 
 some historical interest. The story in this case turns on 
 transmitted qualities, — the hero having inherited a disposition 
 to commit murder, against which he successfully struggles, — 
 and on a blood-feud, not, as in the House of the Seven Gahles, be- 
 tween families, but between races ; the one represented by the 
 half-caste Indian Kineo, the other by Garth, who is a Puritan 
 Anak with the soul of a Sintram. The opposed female 
 types reappear, in their weirdest and wildest forms, in Madge 
 Denver and Elinor. The dAnoitment is both terrible and per- 
 plexing ; but, in isolated incidents, the author has never been 
 so dramatic. Julian Hawthorne's^ depth of insight, passion 
 unchilled by philosophy, determination to cleave through the 
 crusts of society to the lava reservoirs of the heart, observing 
 and reflective powers undimmed by the storms and gusts of 
 feeling he represents and seems to share, catholic breadth with 
 profound purpose, — these qualities indisputably stamp him 
 as a man of genius ; but his talents are inadequate, his work 
 frequently chaotic, often recklessly sensational, and he is 
 perpetually playing variations of the same tune on the same 
 old Stradivarius. No one requires to be more continent of 
 speech ; or, if he desires them to live, more careful in his 
 
 ' In his recent very successful sensation stories. Prince Saroni's Wife and 
 the Cowntess Felicita's Discovery, he rivals Mr. WiMe Collins on his own 
 ground : but, without concurring in the frequent depreciation of an often 
 charming writer and large hearted moralist, we doubt if this is the manner 
 of writing in which Mr. Hawthorne can do most justice to his higher powers. 
 
388 AMERICAN LITEEATUEE. 
 
 creations. He has hitherto, in his conceptions and plots, 
 followed too closely the example set by the glory of his 
 name : he is in danger of forgettiag to follow it in one essen- 
 tial. There is little that may not be hoped from him, if he be 
 content to disdain the bad precedents of contemporary Hght 
 literature, and write one novel in two years : there is nothing 
 that may not be feared if, bitten by the tarantula activity, 
 against which Nathaniel Hawthorne unceasingly protested, he 
 persevere in the foolish feat of issuing two in one year. 
 
 Before considering the other two leading novelists to 
 whom I have referred, we may commend the StUl Water 
 Tragedy of the accomplished poet, Mr. T. Bailey Aldeich, 
 as combining a sensational interest with vivid realism. 
 In this, one of the ablest of recent Trades' Union novels, the 
 often artistic method of beginning with the crisis and after- 
 wards reverting to the events leading up to it, is employed 
 with startling effect. Lemuel Stackford, an old curmudgeon, 
 has been mysteriously murdered : the head policeman, after 
 long tracking the scent, asserts that he has " found the man " 
 in the nephew of the victim, who has been grossly insulted by 
 his uncle on communicating his intention of marrying Mar- 
 garet Slocum, the daughter of his employer. The chain of 
 damnatory evidence, which by aid of a forged letter and 
 stolen key seems complete, is finally snapped by the paint- 
 ing on a barrel and the broken ejaculations, on his deathbed, 
 of the real assassin's accomplice ; but, till near the close, 
 we are kept in suspense as to the hero's safety if not his 
 guilt. The main merit of the book lies in its graphic 
 details, the love scenes in the designer's studio, and the 
 troubles with " the hands " in the marblework. The ring- 
 leaders of the strike — Torrini the Italian, the drunken Peters 
 and Durgan the villain — are strong and lifelike sketches 
 as is Eichard Stackford himself ; but the finest trait in the 
 story is Margaret's implicit faith. " ' Did he teU you of his 
 
T. B. ALDRICH— MRS. BURNETT— H. JAMES. 389 
 
 going to call on his uncle V asks her father, whose belief in 
 the man who has fotight his battle and saved his business is 
 tottering; 'No, but he kissed me;' from which she con- 
 cludes that he left her with no murderous intent." In some 
 of its aspects the Still Water Tragedy resembles Mr. Eeade's 
 Fut yourself in his Place; in others, the still finer Lancashire 
 tale, Thai Lass o' Lowrie's, the authoress of which, Mrs. F. H. 
 Burnett, has since, as a naturalised American, made important 
 contributions to the literature of her adopted country. Few 
 more beautiful pictures of simplicity allured for a time by the 
 glitter of admiring fashion, and vehemently returning to its 
 old allegiance, have been drawn than her Louisiana. To her 
 Fair Barlarian we shall return. 
 
 Julian Hawthorne's two leading, and in some respects, 
 more successful, rivals, have met with swift and adequate 
 recognition. They are seldom censured, sometimes over- 
 praised. Together they stand in peril of betraying their 
 mission by overworking their mines. So much has been 
 said, and is beiag said of them, in reviews, that little is 
 left to add. The just popularity of Mr. Henry James 
 is due in great measure to the deftness of his workman- 
 ship, the skilful manner in which he interweaves his 
 quick and keen impressions of America, England, Italy, and 
 France ; and to the fact that he is in essential sympathy 
 with the better average of the world. His style, defaced 
 at starting by pedantry, has, in his later work, become 
 more precise and clear. In his pages light and shade are 
 pleasantly interlaced : his satire is sometimes sharp but never 
 savage ; his morality always reliable, i.e. orthodox without 
 being obtrusively conventional ; for he brings his actors under 
 the influence of temptation, while we feel assured they will 
 always make their escape from it. Without vanity^ he seems 
 on good terms with himself ; and makes friends by a genial 
 seriousness. He is frequently commonplace, tiresomely dif- 
 
390 AMERICAN LITERATUKE. 
 
 fuse in dealing with trifles, or reporting imaginary gossip ; 
 but he is seldom absurd. Mr. James has somewhat the 
 same relation to Nathaniel Hawthorne that Mr. Anthony 
 Trollope has to Thackeray. His works are not those of a 
 recluse, who has lived in remote corners, and heard strange 
 people, in and about them, discourse of strange matters. They 
 are the sometimes brilliant essays of a versatile man of affairs ; 
 a favourite, we should imagine, of the society of which, at 
 home and abroad, he has taken shrewd, but seldom cynical, 
 notes. His numerous novels and sketches, though apparently 
 thrown off with an almost fatal facility, are infected by excess 
 of analysis. He applies the same chemistry to minor eccen- 
 tricities that his predecessors in his own country, and — per- 
 haps his more frequent models — Balzac and Turg^nieff in 
 Europe, have applied to the deeper and graver anomalies of 
 character. Of his longer and more celebrated works, Tlie 
 JEuro^eains exhibits this and other defects in their most 
 pronounced form. The principal character, the Baroness 
 Eugenia Miinster, — the run -away Morganatic wife of Prince 
 Silberstadt Schreckenstein, — is a disagreeable fortune-hun- 
 tress, who ought to have got into more trouble. Her 
 brother, Felix (who, with his sister, quarters himself on his 
 cousins, in the coolest way), is a very feeble Clifford Pyn- 
 cheon, or Tito Melema ; Wentworth, a stupid and stiff New 
 Englander; Brand, an uninteresting curate ; and Eobert' Acton 
 insufficiently real. Charlotte and Gertrude are shadowyj and 
 the whole story, despite its graphic opening, is improbable, 
 with the unredeemed improbability of common life. Some of 
 the most characteristic examples of what we have ventured 
 to call the writer's pedantry, are found in this book. 
 
 " The sudden irruption into the well-ordered consciousness of the 
 Wentworths, of an element not allowed for in its scheme of usual 
 obligations, required a readjustment of that sense of responsibUitj' 
 which constituted its principal furniture. 
 
 " Gertrude, however, had to struggle with a great accumulation of 
 
HENRY JAMES— ANALYSIS. 391 
 
 obstructions, both, of the subjective, as the metaphysicians say, and of 
 the objective, order ; and indeed it is no small part of the purpose of 
 this little history to set forth her struggle. ' 
 
 " They -were all proud of him, in so far as the charge of being 
 proud may be brought against people who were habitually, distinctly 
 guiltless of the misdemeanour known as taking credit. . . . But a sort 
 of frigidly-tender faith in his unlimited goodness was a part of their 
 personal sense of right. 
 
 " It might have been said of him in advance, that he was too good 
 a Bostonian to regard in the light of an eccentricity the desire of even 
 the remotest alien to visit the New England metropolis. 
 
 " Acton was in fact very judicious — and something more besides ; 
 and indeed it must be claimed for Mr. Wentworth that in the more 
 illicit parts of his preference there hovered the vague adumbration of a 
 belief that his cousin's final merit was a certain capacity for whistling 
 rather gallantly at the sanctions of mere judgment — ^for showing a 
 larger courage, a finer quality of pluck, than common occasion de- 
 manded." 
 
 In justification, it may be, of this sort of thing, of which 
 we have far too much, Mr. James has elsewhere written — 
 " The good American will now be a more critical person than 
 his complacent and confident grandfather. He has eaten of 
 the tree of knowledge, and wiU not be a sceptic or a cynic, but 
 an observer." I am not aware that the amount of truth in 
 this remark applies more to America than to England ; where 
 we are in yearly danger of being criticised to death, and as- 
 sociated into nothingness. But, in an age of feverish intro- 
 spection of ourselves, and obtrusive inspection of others — 
 which Carlyle, in his Gharacteristics, long ago described as an 
 invalid habit of feeling our own mental and moral pulses 
 — there is nothing which the critic is more called upon to 
 protest against than the excess of criticism. That the artist 
 must be an observer is a truism ; but he should be satisfied 
 to record or indicate the results of his dissecting or chemical 
 processes. It is a received rule that, in a good novel, the 
 beauty of the heroine should not be analysed, but made to 
 show itself in its effects. The same rule should be applied 
 to character. Shakespeare never teUs us that Othello was 
 a jealous, or Goethe that Faust was a selfish, man. Even 
 
392 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 our greatest recent novelist is apt to violate this rule : in 
 reading Middlemarck or Daniel Deronda we feel afraid of 
 being used as frogs on the anatomical table of some man or 
 woman of genius. In turning from these and similar, though 
 generally inferior, "demonstrations" of our nerves, arteries, and 
 glands, we feel inclined to open the windows looking to the 
 east, and exclaim with Emerson, " Cannot we be patient, and 
 let the morning be ? " 
 
 The American, a pendant to The Europeans, is a decided 
 advance in art, interest, and verisimilitude. The style is 
 more sustained, the characters warmer, and the whole book 
 on a higher level. Newman, who seems to have heard that 
 " good Americans go to Paris when they die," is an original 
 conception, a man of genuine worth, force, and feeling, with a 
 crust of vulgarism, not vulgarity — painfully unsuccessful in 
 endeavouring to forestall his paradise by alliance with an old 
 French family. At the close we are very sorry for him, but 
 do not wonder. Madame de Centre, on the other hand, pro- 
 mises more than she performs. M. de Bellegarde is the 
 familiar aristocratic villain, M. Nioche a type of the old 
 social diplomate, and Valentine of the best class of gentle- 
 manly Parisian. The details, as in all relating to the adven- 
 turess, — the fascinating painter who cannot paint, and palms 
 off her rubbish to Newman at her own price, — are excellent ; 
 but the family crime has all the vagueness without the 
 glamour of the more unsubstantial mysteries of Edgar Poe. 
 
 Roderick Hudson, the most powerful of Mr. James's ela- 
 borate works, is more passionate, though less probable. Eow- 
 land Mallet, the superlatively virtuous " Dobbin," is secretly 
 devoted to Mary Garland — a Puritan lay fig-ure, till the close, 
 when she shrieks aloud over the dead body of the thoroughly 
 bad fellow to whom she is heartbound. Eoderick himself 
 apparently meant to enlist our haK-sympathies, is brought on 
 the stage speaking slightingly of his mother— a Transatlantic 
 
"RODERICK HUDSON." 393 
 
 Mrs. Nickleby, living in constant regret of her elder son (who 
 " would have made 50,000 dollars"), and distrust of artists. 
 
 " She had the advantage of me," says the self -ranked genius, to a 
 gossip at Rome, "because she formerly knew a portrait-painter at 
 Richmond, who did her miniature in black lace mittens (you may see it 
 on the parlour table), who used to drink raw brandy and beat his wife. 
 I freely forgive him his attempts to unscrew my headpiece and set it on 
 another way." 
 
 Eoderick deserts his betrothed for the Circe, Christina Light; 
 and, when the latter becomes the Princess Casamassina, 
 returns, for his own convenience, to the former. His "Walt- 
 Whitman-like bluster about his art is well contrasted with 
 the cynic self-satisfaction of the clever French sculptor 
 Gloriani, and the steady conscientious work of the simple- 
 miuded landscape-painter Singleton — " I mean to do the 
 Morning ; I mean to do the Night ; I mean to do the Ocean, 
 and the Mountains, and the Moon. I mean to make a mag- 
 nificent statue of America." But the vapours of his vaulting 
 ambition are unsustained by any purpose and unennobled by 
 any aim above the glorification of the aspirant. He makes a 
 poor statue of Adam, draws the head of the mother at whom 
 he sneered, chisels a bust of Christina Light, and, shortly 
 after, ends by tumbling over a precipice of the Alps, in 
 a storm like that in which Kingsley's " Elsley Vavasour," 
 his English prototype, caught his death on Cader-Idris. 
 The last scene is the effective close of a stirring tragedy. 
 The idea of aspiration transcending the possibilities of per- 
 formance is handled with more delicacy of thought, if less 
 variety of action, in the touching fragment entitled The 
 Madonna of the Future. The insanity of a mentally-over- 
 strained enthusiast is here represented as spending years 
 over a canvas, destined to eclipse that which the world of 
 art flocks to adore at Dresden : it is a mere mass of incoher- 
 ent daubs. This is perhaps the truest, as it is certainly the 
 saddest, of the author's minor pieces. In Daisy Miller — a 
 
39i AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 popular favourite ^there are some subtle touches, but the 
 central figure is exaggerated, if not incongruous. In the 
 same volume, the International Episode is Mr. James's most 
 incisive and humorous social sketch. The frank chattering 
 hospitality of Mrs. Westgate on the one shore of the sea, and 
 the well-bred insolence of Lord Lambeth's female relatives 
 and protectors on the other, are admirably contrasted. The 
 story is true and yet wonderfully fresh. Of the other minor 
 pieces, we can only refer to the domestic narrative of 
 Wasliin^ton Square; the softened puritanism of Madame de 
 Mauves; and the Pension Beaurepas — a sketch of foreign life, 
 in that curious kind of community, which only loses a little 
 by comparison with the pension made perpetual in the pages 
 of the French Lear, Ptre Goriot. 
 
 Mr. James never pierces to the same deeps as Julian 
 Hawthorne ; but he walks over the surface with a far securer 
 tread. His novels are like excellent vers de sociit4, contrasted 
 with imitations of Browning or of Blake. His work leaves 
 us with the impression of vast versatility, sharp sight, perfect 
 propriety, and an indefinite cleverness, often aiming, like the 
 artists of his own frequent satire, at something higher than 
 it generally hits. 
 
 A late reviewer of a group of American novels, confessedly 
 knowing nothing of the society they delineate, save what he 
 has " tasted in these sweetmeats with a bitter taste behind," 
 yet finds "no reason to doubt the substantial truth of the 
 unalluring picture." Untravelled critics are apt to forget that 
 the United States embrace the greater part of the population 
 of a continent, and consequently present indefinite varieties of 
 character. It happens, however, that many Western novel- 
 ists, in their useful rdle of national censors, are prone to 
 dwell on the less attractive types. With a few exceptions, 
 Mr. James's men are honest and persevering, but somewhat 
 rough, millionaires ; or Bostonians in pursuit of a reputation 
 
FEMALE TYEANNY, 395 
 
 for refinement ; or they are forlorn enthusiasts, or abject lovers. 
 His volumes, in one point of view, resemble tracts issued by 
 an Emancipation Congress. A recent humorist gives notice 
 of a projected " Society for the Prevention of Cruelty frmn 
 Children;" the romance reader instinctively adds, "and 
 Women." The maids and matrons who flash through the 
 pages of Mr. James and Mr. Howells have fascinating features; 
 ■with really wicked people those exemplary writers have little 
 to do ; but we would, in either equinox, cross the Atlantic to 
 escape from some of their heroines. Delicately photographed, 
 and evidently held up for our admiration, they are, though 
 often as seductive, generally as scornful as the Jungfrau. 
 Clever to the core, " with brains all over them," self-possessed 
 and irreproachable, they are represented as, in their own 
 country, inspired with the conviction, and guided by the rule, 
 that men must work and women must spend. Personages, 
 " with orbits and systems of their own," they have a mission 
 of enjoyment and vanity, to whose free scope fathers, brothers, 
 or husbands are, unfortunately, indispensable incumbrances. 
 It seems quite natural for one of them to exclaim, " In America 
 the gentlemen obey the ladies." As a rule, they exact from 
 their cavaliers a deference as submissive as it is unrequited, 
 and delight in the grovelling adulation which never dares to 
 rebel with — 
 
 " If she be not fair to me, 
 What care I how fair she be ?" 
 
 They go abroad, like fowlers, to bring down birds for their 
 pastime, encouraging and receiving addresses, especially from 
 English peers, for the purpose of disdaining and rejecting 
 them. Their temperaments of ice are impregnable shields ; 
 passionless or " fancy free " in the vortex of flirtations, like 
 games of cards with one-sided stakes, they are absolutely 
 safe ; and beginning by regarding marriage as an infringe- 
 ment of their liberties, they generally end by making shrewd 
 
396 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 matches.^ Their wits are keen, their repartees crushing, their 
 beauty resistless ; but their accomplishments are superficial, 
 their self-conceit profound. Prom San Francisco to Finland 
 they run about the world, without a touch of mauvaise honte, 
 in every circle at their ease, flaunting the flag of the American 
 girl, conquering and to conquer. This female type is almost 
 a creation of the last twenty years. She has no equivalent in 
 the pages either of Irving or Cooper, or Hawthorne or Long- 
 fellow, and is as far removed from "Zenobia" as from "Evange- 
 line." Is she a new fact or a new ideal ? She is, at aU events, 
 least agreeable when most overlaid with intellectual lacquering, 
 and most conciliatory when most nearly approaching the savage 
 state. Mrs. Burnett's Fair Barlarian is an imperious young 
 creature, " not used to obeying people," — the spoilt daughter 
 of a Western speculator, and an actress, — paying to a starched 
 English county town a visit of triumph and merriment. She 
 crosses the sea as if it had been a mill-pond ; swoops down, 
 with her six huge trunks, on her terrified old aunt, like an 
 armed man; and immediately begins talking of her father with 
 irreverent affection : " He's awfully rich sometimes ; and then 
 again he isn't. Shares go up and then go down, and you don't 
 seem to have anything;" but "people will always lend Pa 
 money, and then he's lucky with it." So she wears a fortune 
 in real diamonds and lace in the forenoons ; gives generous 
 donations to the curate, teaches him to play croquet ; and 
 mercilessly " chaffs " Lady Theobald, the awful person who 
 directs Belinda, rules Slowbridge, and thinks that the conduct 
 of American girls towards men is " of a character to chUl one's 
 
 ' "Isabel," in Mr. James's recent Portrait of a Lady — a tiresome took 
 
 is one of the most salient representatives of the type we are describing ; but 
 after scorning the love of the one really fine character, Roger Touchett and 
 formally rejecting that of two amiable devotees (including the customary 
 lord), she is exceptionally unfortunate in her final choice. It is, however a 
 testimony to Mr. James's realism that he makes us entertain towards her 
 as to other mere creations of his brain, e.g. Henrietta Stackpole, a strong 
 personal dislike. 
 
W. D. HOWELLS. 397 
 
 blood." Octavia Bassett flirts with Mr. Barold, — her influential 
 and respected admirer, — gets him to call for and of course to 
 propose to her, being all the while pre-engaged to honest Jack, 
 who worked in her father's mines in Nevada ; but she is so 
 unaffected and half-civilised that we rather smile than frown 
 at the eccentricities of this child of nature. Nevertheless, 
 after three volumes of the company of the best of those un- 
 sentimental and progressive patterns, we turn, with relief, to 
 Chaucer's " Constance," or Shakespeare's " Cordelia," Words- 
 worth's "Lucy," Schiller's "Amalia," or Goethe's "Clarchen,'' 
 or the consoling "Dove" of Mr. Black's In Silk Attire, or 
 to the romance and passion which, under the mere show of 
 levity, lifts above any of these Western types the glowing 
 maidenhood of the last-named writer's masterpiece, the in- 
 imitable Madcap Violet. 
 
 Mr. W. D. HowELLS, a thinker, prose artist, and traveller 
 at home and abroad, has made good use of his experiences on 
 both sides of the Atlantic. Of the sea itself we have, since 
 Cooper, nothing so vivid as the Zady of the Aroostooh. The 
 life on board ship is relieved from dulness by the fresh 
 graces of the heroine — a highly-civUised "Ayacanora" bound 
 Eastward Ho ! — self-possessed in the confidence of her 
 purity ; and by the occasional touches of humour, cul- 
 minating in the half -serious, half- comic accident to Mr. 
 Hicks. ' The author's recollections of the St. Lawrence are 
 preserved in the sketch-book of the Wedding Tour; and 
 in the Chance Acquaintance. The scenery in this strik- 
 ing, and, in some respects, original idyll of the North- 
 West, is brought before us with a picturesque touch, re- 
 sembling that of George Fleming, the gifted author or 
 authoress of A Nile Novel} The sail up the Saguenay, 
 
 ^ It would require the experience of Egyptian travel to do justice to tlie 
 delicate or sombre ligMS and shades of temple, pyramid, and lotus river in 
 •vvHch tMs fine love-story is set. 
 
398 AMEKICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 especially the episode of Arbuton's hitting with his pebble 
 the great beetKng cliff, is pre-eminently graphic ; and the 
 pictures in and around Quebec, — of the 'quaint old town, 
 with its broad prospect, narrow streets, and history-haunted 
 environs, of the lichen-clad Chateau Bigot, — add, by their 
 effective setting, to the interest of the brief romance. The 
 story, in which the democratic, if not communistic, sym- 
 pathies of the author are most apparent, is that of the pre- 
 mature engagement of an unsophisticated girl to a New 
 England exquisite, happily prevented from resulting in an 
 ill-assorted marriage by the timely betrayal of his inability 
 or unwillingness to accept its consequences. Arbuton, " al- 
 ways making himself agreeable under protest," with "his 
 cold, snubbing, putting-down ways," the "young iceberg," 
 who is surprised into melting by the girl's beauty and grace, 
 is one of the most consummate models of a highly-respectable 
 and conscientious "prig" in modern fiction. He is both good 
 and brave ; but so unintentionally and habitually offensive 
 that, after passing a week in his company, we should long for 
 an hour with " Bill Sykes " or " Mr. Eochester." Kitty is bright 
 and true, and by no means foolish in her frankness, but 
 more slightly drawn. Fanny Ellison, a match-maker, who 
 " would discover the tender passion in the eyes of a potato," 
 but is by no means satisfied with her happily frustrated 
 achievement, and her husband, the Colonel, wearing lightly 
 his laurels from the Civil war, are true to nature but some- 
 what sketchy ; while Uncle Jack stands in the background, 
 among the oil wells of Erie Creek, like a warning shadow. 
 The fine ladies from Boston, in whose presence Mr. Arbuton 
 is ashamed of his luval Jianc^e, forcibly embody the insolence 
 of provincial fashion. Nothing in the volume is more natural 
 than the disenchanting effect of poor Kitty's honestly assumed 
 country dress. Unconventionally, at the close the heroine is 
 not paired off with some other fool, but is left with her future 
 
THE "CHANCE ACQUAINTANCE"— "DK. BREEN'S PRACTICE." 399 
 
 unexplored — a commendable variation to tlie jaded reader of 
 modern novels. Mr. Howell's consular experiences, partially- 
 reproduced in his Venetian Life, are idealised in the Foregone 
 Conchision, a subtle and almost oppressively sad repetition 
 of the recurring theme of aspiration mocked by reality. Don 
 Ippolito's inventions, and his hopeless passion, take the place 
 of the mad painter's Madonna. But amid much lively conver- 
 sation, incident and caricature (as the portrait of Mrs. Vervain), 
 the image of the forlorn sceptical monk and broken-down 
 visionary alone keeps a place in our affection. Ferris is 
 energetic and kindly, with a caustic tongue and good sense ; 
 but if his remarks at the tomb of his old rival mean, as he 
 says, no harm, they exhibit little heart. His wife is softer, 
 but equally practical. The shadows of the palace and the 
 prison, on either side of the Bridge of Sighs, seem to darken 
 the book. In Dr. Breen's Practice, on the other hand, we have 
 the fresh breezes of New England. It is a pleasant tale 
 of the adventures of a female doctor, happily free from the 
 hardness of most American heroines, who, honestly struggling 
 in her profession, is disgusted by the apathy of her own sex; 
 and, in the end, is emancipated from her toils in a manner, 
 frequent, as would appear, in those latitudes ; for, in com- 
 mon with other girls in recent romances, after rejecting her 
 lover, she ends by proposing to him, and is accepted. The 
 story abounds in startling situations — as the dangers in the 
 boat, etc. — in satirical or trenchant, though not always con- 
 sistent, remarks, e.g. — 
 
 " It's tremendous to think what men could accomplish for their 
 sex, if they only hung together as women do." " Duty ! I'm sick of 
 duty! Let the other women who are trying to do something for 
 themselves take care of themselves as men would. I don't owe 
 them more than a man would owe other men, and I won't be hood- 
 winked into thinking I do." " There is such a thing as having too 
 much conscience, and of being stupified by it, so that you can't 
 really see what is right." " Optimistic fatalism is the real religion of 
 our orientalising West." " Mullridge's grandfather passed his declin- 
 
400 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 ing days in robust inebriety, and lived to cast a dying vote for General 
 Jackson." 
 
 The sharpest antagonism of the book is against the Anti- 
 homceopathic intolerance of the medical craft. On woman's 
 rights it gives an uncertain sound. 
 
 Mr. Howells is, like Mr. James, essentially a realist, with 
 an excessive love, almost a craze, for analysis ; but he has 
 achieved his greatest success where he has ventured to 
 tread on the edge of the two worlds of common life and mys- 
 tery. The Undiscovered Country is not merely his master- 
 piece ■} it is altogether deeper than his other work. The 
 physical facts of Mesmerism have received more attention 
 in America than in England; and the more supernatural 
 claims of Clairvoyance obtain wider acceptance, even among 
 men of knowledge and culture, not because Americans are 
 more credulous than Englishmen, but because abnormal 
 psychical phenomena are more frequent in their atmo- 
 sphere, and, in graver matters, they are less restrained by 
 fashion. Nowhere has the master-motive of so-called " Spirit- 
 ualism" been so boldly set forth as in this strange tale. 
 The leading character, more dupe than quack, imagines that 
 he has found in its " manifestations " the one solid proof of a 
 future state of existence ; clings to this — as thousands of his 
 countrymen at this moment really do — as the sole voucher of 
 an immortality made inestimable by bereavement ; and con- 
 ceives himself entrusted with a mission to convert and 
 comfort the world, otherwise lapsing into materialism. Dr. 
 Boynton, from his first appearance, at the stance of the callous 
 juggler, Mrs. Le Eoy, to his heartrending failure, is consistently 
 pathetic, but too readily acquiesces in the final disenchant- 
 ment. This romance, which beats vrith such power at the 
 iron gates of the unseen world, is excellent in scenery as in 
 portraiture. The whole episode of the Shakers is well sus- 
 ' I write in ignorance of A Modern Bistance, which has just appeared. 
 
"THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY." 401 
 
 tained. The refuge of the forlorn itinerants with that quaint 
 community reminds us of Una's dwelling with the " simple 
 savage folk." Ford is a shrewdly-drawn picture of a cynic, 
 endowed with some intellectual brilliancy and depth of feel- 
 ing : there is . a touch of conventionality (redeemed by the 
 half -humorous difficulties with the Shakers) in his marriage 
 with Egeria. She is one of the fragile creatures whom we 
 are charmed to find, still, of possible growth in the New 
 England of Bostonia Victrix. But she is as like Priscilla 
 as her father is unlike Westervelt. 
 
 The successors of Nathaniel Hawthorne are, consciously 
 or unconsciously, living in his shade. In passing from the 
 one to the other, we " wander down into a lower world," and 
 find ourselves repeating, " The words of Mercury are harsh 
 after the songs of Apollo." We return from the pupils to 
 the master, as from the schools of Eaphael to himself, or 
 from Ben Jonson to Shakespeare. 
 
 2d 
 
402 AMEKICAJ^r LITEEATUEE. 
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 
 AMEKIOAN HUMOKISTS — CONCLUSION. 
 
 It has teen said that man is the only animal that laughs or 
 weeps ; for he alone is struck with the difference between 
 what things are and what they ought to be. Human life is 
 presented under two phases : — the serious, in which the mind 
 contemplates events in a regular order; and the ludicrous, 
 where this order is broken and the mind is subjected to 
 a pleasant start. The former phase receives its literary 
 adornment or interpretation from Fancy and Imagination : the 
 latter from Wit and Humour. The two pairs are similarly 
 related, and in both cases the dividing line between them is 
 imperfectly ascertained. "Wit," says Isaac Barrow, in a 
 passage, much of which may be applied to humour, "is a 
 thing so versatile and multiform that it seemeth no less hard 
 to settle a clear notice thereof than to make a portrait of 
 Proteus, or to define the figure of fleeting air. Sometimes it 
 lieth in allusion to a known story or saying, sometimes in 
 forging an apposite tale. ... It is lodged in a sly question 
 or a smart answer, in a tart irony or hyperbole, in a plaus- 
 able reconciling of contradictions, or in acute nonsense, in a 
 counterfeit speech or mimic gesture." The distinction be- 
 tween the terms is partially indicated by their etymologies : 
 the one pointing to intellectual insight and rapidity, the other 
 to a constitutional peculiarity, based on a state of feeling 
 
WIT AND HUMOUR. 403 
 
 rather than knowing ; yet we have the apparently contradic- 
 tory phrase, " dry humour,'' indicating the difficulty in mark- 
 ing their boundaries. Speaking roughly, we may say that 
 Wit consists in striking together two words or notions, like 
 flint and steel ; while Humour lies mainly in sympathy with 
 some quaint feature or the illustration of some incongruity of 
 life. The former results in a spark or flash, the latter in a 
 glow of light and heat. The former prevails in satire, in the 
 mock epic of Voltaire, and in such plays as those of our 
 Eestoration dramatists: the latter in the higher comedy of 
 Shakespeare or Moli^re. The lowest form of "Wit is the pun. 
 On a somewhat higher level we have the surprise, e.g. — 
 
 " Beneath, this stone my wife doth lie ; 
 She's now at rest — and so am I ;" 
 
 or, to take a more savage example, Swift's account of the 
 infamous minister of the ruling Yahoo, closing with the 
 matter-of-fact assurance, " He generally remains in office till 
 a worse can be found." A full half of American humour, 
 so-called, is of this type. Yet more subtle is the retort, or 
 the epigram, of which Pope is the English master, e.g. — 
 
 " Now, night descending, the proud scene was o'er ; 
 But liv'd, in Settle's numbers, one day more," 
 
 where some thought is required to appreciate the point ; as 
 constantly in Heine, e.g. — " The three great enemies' of 
 Napoleon have all ended miserably : Castlereagh cut his 
 throat, Louis XVIII. rotted upon his throne, and Professor 
 Saalfield — is still a Professor at Gottingen." Wit in Shake- 
 speare almost always runs along with Fancy, as in Mercutio ; 
 or with Humour, as in all that relates to Falstaff. Humour is 
 a word of many meanings. It begins on the low level of any 
 laughter-provoking absurdity, and rises, as in the Fool in 
 Lear, to a tragic height. To children and uneducated persons 
 everything strange seems incongruous ; and as most things 
 
404 AMEKICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 beyond their threshold are strange to them, they are continu- 
 ally being amused when they travel. Adults, so shrewd that 
 we can hardly suspect them of a hearty laugh, travesty this 
 mood, as they travesty all that is really touching in life and. 
 history, and caU themselves " Innocents Abroad." But the 
 real child, who begins by being afraid of a false face, a dwarf, 
 or a giant, a little later grins at them ; and Hazlitt tells us 
 that "three chimney-sweepers meeting three Chinese in 
 Lincoln's Inn Fields, they laughed at one another tUl they 
 were ready to drop down." With the increase of knowledge 
 and sorrow, the latent differences of nature are developed : 
 the severe man becomes grim ; the shallow takes delight in 
 the flippancies of burlesque and parody; the cynic jeers 
 alike at humbug and hypocrisy, patriotism and benevolence ; 
 the genial man iinds matter for smiles in sorrow and for 
 tears in joy, while following and sharing either fortune of 
 his friend. Wit and Humour, the one more the growth of 
 nature, the other of art, are Fancy and Imagination inverted ; 
 as when we look through the large end of a telescope and 
 see everything small. They manifest themselves variously 
 in nations as weU as individuals. Humour, in the Greek . 
 classics, shows itself mainly in the guise of a lambent irony, 
 at the expense of the speaker or his neighbours ; in the 
 English, as a subtle appreciation of the curiosities of char- 
 acter. In Sterne and Fielding, as in Ben Jonson, we have 
 " Every man in Tiis humour." In some forms it implies the 
 sense of a contradiction or conflict between the higher and 
 lower phases of human nature : in others a full perception of 
 the whole character, as in the Canterbury Tales : in others 
 the power of isolating, and concentrating the attention on 
 single features — a broad mouth, a prominent nose, an absorb- 
 ing egotism or a rampant pomposity, which is the dominant 
 note of the humour of Dickens. This, the least mellow and 
 refined of its forms, is that which almost alone we find in 
 
AMERICAN HUMOUR. 405 
 
 the New "World. Our insular doubt as to the existence of 
 American Humour is analogous to the French problem, " Can 
 a German have esprit ? " In both cases the qualities exist ; 
 but in rudimentary and often questionable shapes. Trans- 
 atlantic Humour seldom penetrates to the undercurrents of 
 life : it is the rare efflorescence of a people habitually grave, 
 whose insight is more clear than deep : it relies mainly on 
 exaggeration, and a blending of jest and earnest, which has 
 the effect, as in their negro melodies, of singing comic words 
 to a sad tune. Nine-tenths of it relies on the figures of hyper- 
 bole, antithesis, and anticlimax. Mr. Lowell, for example, 
 makes us laugh, by instancing the description of a negro 
 " so black that charcoal made a chalk mark upon him ; " and 
 of a wooden shingle " painted so like marble that it sank in 
 the water." Other wits tell us — that a tree " was so tall that 
 it took two men and a boy to see to the top of it ;" that a 
 boat " drew so little water it could sail wherever there had 
 been a heavy dew;" that a man was "so heavy that his 
 shadow, falling on a boy, killed him." Mr. Browne (Artemus 
 Ward) excited the same kind of merriment by his remark, 
 in pointing to the deliberately daubed canvas, which he 
 called his panorama, " The highest part of this mountain 
 is the top." The amusement in these and like instances is 
 owing to a shock of surprise, produced by a falsehood plausibly 
 pretending to be true, or by a truism pretending to be a 
 novelty. Similarly, when the last-named writer, among his 
 anecdotes of the conscription, informs us that "one young 
 man who was draw'd, claimed to be exemp', because he was 
 the only son of a widowed mother, who supported him," the 
 jest is all in the unexpected turn of the last three words. 
 Whereas the humour of Falstaff, of Uncle Toby and Corporal 
 Trim, of Colonel Bath and the Vicar of Wakefield, of Sir Eoger 
 de Coverley, of Major Pendennis and Bishop Blougram, 
 consists in its truth. What these people do or say never 
 
406 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 surprises us : it is absurd, as much, of human life is absurd ; 
 and laughing at them, we feel we are laughing at something 
 in ourselves. Consequently we have an affection for them, 
 and are never tired of them ; whereas we never go back to 
 the same circus with the same clown. An essay of Elia is a 
 quiet lire, at which we can always warm ourselves : a Yankee 
 joke is a cracker that, once pulled, has served its turn ; we 
 can never smile at it twice in one life ; a mushroom of the 
 Comic Weekly, it dies in the railway stall. Its author has 
 his good things — his audience unfit though many — ^here, and 
 must expect oblivion hereafter. 
 
 The records of American light literature, of course, supply 
 numerous exceptions to this rule. Several of the generally 
 satirical jeiKc d' esprit of the Colonial and Eevolution days 
 have still an historical as well as a local interest. In the 
 age immediately succeeding, John Quinct Adams, fluent in 
 versification as in oratory, shows considerable wit, if not 
 humour, in his parody of Barlow's Discoveries of Captain 
 Davis, and in his Wants of Man, which the following verses 
 must serve to illustrate : — 
 
 " Man wants but little 'tere below, 
 
 Nor wants tbat little long ; 
 'Tis not with me exactly so, 
 
 But 'tis so in the song. 
 My wants are many, and if told 
 
 Would muster many a score ; 
 And were each wish a mint of gold, 
 
 I still should long for more. 
 
 " What first I want is daily bread, 
 
 And canvass-backs and wine ; 
 And all the realms of nature spread 
 
 Before me when I dine. 
 Four courses scarcely can provide 
 
 My appetite to quell ; 
 With four choice cooks from France beside, 
 
 To dress my dinner well. 
 
QUmCY ADAMS— 0. W. HOLMES. 407 
 
 " I want the seals of power and place, 
 
 The ensigns of command ; 
 Charged by the people's unbought grace 
 
 To rule my native land. 
 I want the voice of honest praise 
 
 To follow me behind, 
 And to be thought in future days 
 
 The friend of human kind." 
 
 In the second quarter of the century — the first prolific 
 age of American literature — we begin to see the diyergence 
 of two kinds of Humour ; the one of the higher rank allied 
 to dramatic imagination, the other leaning to burlesque. 
 To the former belong much of the work of Washington 
 Irving, Longfellow's Kavanagh, a few of the lighter passages 
 of Hawthorne, as the Seven Vagabonds, and the prose and 
 verse of Dr. Holmes. In the three pleasant volumes by 
 which this versatile author is probably best known to Eng- 
 lish readers, The Autocrat, The Professor, and The Poet at the 
 Breakfast Table, there is much that might have been omitted, 
 more that should have been condensed. They are overladen 
 with puns ; they bristle with jokes, good, bad, and indifferent, 
 and are sometimes tainted with New England affectations. 
 Many of the remarks that might have passed current in con- 
 versation seem scarce worthy of being set down in type. But 
 Holmes, even while talking too fast, conciliates us by his 
 constant kindliness : he exhibits to us, with a quaint man- 
 nerism not without its charm, personages, and situations, 
 which we regard as odd and yet recognise as real. The Auto- 
 crat abounds in wise saws and instances similar to those 
 above selected from JSlsie Venner — interspersed with short 
 sentences of pointed satire we find difBcult to forget, e.g. — 
 
 " Nature, when she invented and manufactured authors, made 
 critics of the chips that were left." " Sin has many tools, but a lie is 
 the handle which fits them all." " Give us the luxuries of life and we 
 will dispense with its necessaries." " A new lecture is just like any 
 
408 AMERICAN LITEEATUEE. 
 
 other tool. We use it for a while with pleasure : then it blisters our 
 hands and we hate to touch it." " Insanity is often the logic of an 
 accurate miad overtasked. Good mental machinery ought to break its 
 own wheels, if anything is thrust among them suddenly. . . . Stupidity 
 often saves a man from going mad. We frequently see persons in 
 insane hospitals sent there in consequence of what are called religious 
 mental disturbances : I confess that I thiak better of them than of those 
 who hold the same notions and remain outside." 
 
 In turning these pages we constantly come upon flashing 
 paradoxes, and other coruscations of what has heen called 
 a kaleidoscopic wit. This volume also contains the author's 
 hest verses — some gay, as Tfie One Moss Shay ; some grave, 
 as Musa, The Two Armies, The Nautilus ; others, as The Old 
 Man Breams, and Spring has Come, belonging to the border- 
 land. Add the agreeable, because not too pronounced, flavour 
 of sentiment, in the love story of the Schoolmistress, and we 
 can understand how this book has enjoyed a wider popularity 
 than its companions. In The Poet at the Breakfast Table 
 there is less variety ; but it contains the author's most 
 amusing satire on scientific pedantry — 
 
 " 'How do you think the vote is likely to go to-morrow?' I said. 
 
 ' It isn't to-morrow,' he answered, ' it's next month.' 
 
 ' Next month !' said I. ' Why, what election do you mean V 
 
 ' I mean the election to the Presidency of the Entomological 
 Society, sir,' he creaked with an air of surprise, as if nobody could by 
 any possibility have been thinking of any other. ' Great competition, 
 sir, between the dipterists and the lepidopterists, as to which shall get 
 in their candidate. Several close ballotings already ; adjourned for a 
 fortnight. Poor concerns both of 'em. Wait till our turn comes.' 
 
 ' I suppose you are an entomologist ? ' I said, with a note of inter- 
 rogation. 
 
 ' Not quite so ambitious as that, sir. I should like to put my 
 eyes on the individual entitled to that name. A Society may call itself 
 an Entomological Society, but the man who arrogates such a broad title 
 as that to himself, in the present state of science, is a pretender, sir, a 
 dilettante, an impostor ! No man can be truly called an entomologist, 
 sir ; the subject is too vast for any single human intelligence to 
 grasp.' 
 
 ' May I venture to ask,' I said, a little awed by his statement and 
 manner, ' what is your special province of study V 
 
 ' I am often spoken of as a Coleopterist,' he said, • but I have no 
 
"THE POET AT THE BREAKFAST TABLE." 409 
 
 right to so eompreliensive a name. The genus Scarabseus is what I 
 have chiefly confined myself to, and ought to have studied exclusively. 
 The beetles proper are quite enough for the labour of one man's life. 
 Call me a Scarabeeist if you will : if I can prove myself worthy of that 
 name, my highest ambition wiU be more than satisfied.' 
 
 ' I think, by way of compromise and convenience, I shall call him 
 the Soarabee. He has come to look wonderfully like those creatures, 
 — the beetles, I mean — by being so much among them.' " 
 
 It also contains his most useful piece of advice ; every year, 
 among ourselves, more urgently required — 
 
 " So many foolish persons are rushing into print that it requires a 
 kind of literary police to hold them back and keep them in order. 
 Where there are mice there must be cats. . . . But the process is a 
 cruel one at best, and it too often breeds a love of destructiveness for its 
 ovm. sake in those who get their living by it. . . . In speaking privately 
 to young persons who have literary aspirations, one should be very 
 considerate of their human feelings ; but addressing them collectively, 
 a few plain truths will not give any one of them much pain. . . . 
 If I were a literary Pope sending out an Encyclical, I would tell these 
 inexperienced persons that nothing is so common as to mistake an ordi- 
 nary human gift for a special endowment . . . nobody, except editors 
 and school teachers, and here and there a literary man, knows how 
 common is the capacity of rhyming and prattling in readable prose, 
 especially among young women of a certain degree of education . . . 
 Using kind language I can talk pretty freely. I have counselled more 
 than one aspirant after literary fame to go back to his tailor's board or his 
 lapstone. . . . My advice to all the young men that write to me depends 
 somewhat on the handwriting and spelling. If these are of a certain 
 character, and they have reached a mature age, I recommend some 
 honest manual calling, such as they have very probably been bred to, 
 and which wiU, at least, give them a chance of being President of the 
 United States, by and by, if that is any object to them." 
 
 Holmes's humour frequently finds vent in verse. Among 
 the most salient of his efforts in this direction, The Music 
 Grinders, The Comet, The September Gale, The Height of the 
 Bidiculous, and Evening ly a Tailor, frequently recall the 
 drolleries of Hood. The following, entitled Daily Trials, hy 
 a sensitive Man, ought to find a sympathetic audience among 
 the lovers of our tortured Leech, and the admirers of the 
 slaughtered Babbage : — 
 
410 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 " there are times 
 When all this fret and tumult that we hear 
 Do seem more stale than to the sexton's ear 
 His own dull chimes. 
 
 "At morning's call 
 The small-voiced pug-dog welcomes in the sun ; 
 And flea-bit mongrels, wakening one by one, 
 Give answer all. 
 
 " When evening dim 
 Draws round us, then the lonely caterwaul, 
 Tart solo, sour duet, and general squall, — 
 These are our hymn. 
 
 " Women, with tongues 
 Like Polar needles, ever on the jar : 
 Men plugless word spouts, whose deep fountains are 
 Within their lungs. 
 
 " Children with drums 
 Strapped round them by the fond paternal ass. 
 Peripatetics with a blade of grass 
 Between their thumbs. 
 
 " Vagrants, whose arts 
 Have caged some devil in their mad machine. 
 Which grinding, squeaks, with husky groan between, 
 Come out by starts. 
 
 " Cockneys that kill 
 Thin horses of a Sunday, — men with clams, 
 Hoarse as young bisons roaring for their dams 
 From hill to hill. 
 
 " Soldiers with guns 
 Making a nuisance of the blessed air ; 
 Child-crying bellmen, children in despair 
 Screeching for buns. 
 
 " Storms, thunders, waves ! 
 Howl, crash, and bellow till you get your fill ; 
 Ye sometimes rest ; men never can be still 
 But in their graves." 
 
 It has been said that Dr. Holmes is "an expurgated 
 American edition of Montaigne and Burton and the JN'octes 
 
MINOR HUMORISTS. 411 
 
 Afiibrosianw," and that he mixes pathos and whimsicality- 
 after the manner of Sterne. His genius has, nevertheless, an 
 original vein, less mellow, but as ■ genuine as that of his 
 masters. 
 
 Among v>other comparatively recent light verses we ought 
 to mention — those of John G. Saxe, author of The Proud 
 Miss MacBride (a vigorous Yankee version of Miss Kilman- 
 ^^99)> of the rattling Mhyme of the Bail, of the burlesque 
 Sonnet to a Clam, and others of a similar character; also 
 Charles Brooks, the poetic translator of Eichter, whose ap- 
 parently extempore verses never fail to exhibit a lively fancy 
 and sharp-edged wit. Perhaps the origin of the broader 
 school of Western humour is to be found in the first volume 
 of the inimitable Sam Slick. Judge Haliburton seems to 
 have set the keynote of the tunes which so many have since, 
 with very various degrees of taste and skill, been playing ; 
 but his works lie beyond the scope of our survey. Several 
 of the miscellaneous essays and periodicals of the first half 
 of the century — as Salmagundi, the Talisman of Verplanck, 
 Dana's Idle Man, John Sanderson's ^ American in Paris, the 
 Olipodiana of W. G. Clarke, and, of a somewhat later date, 
 Mr. Cozzen's Sparroiv-Grass Papers — are enlivened by evi- 
 dences of keen discrimination often brightly expressed. In 
 others we trace the germs of a vicious style, which threatens 
 to spread like the Colorado beetle, or like the western weed 
 in river-beds. The Charcoal Sketches of Joseph ISTeal might 
 be entitled comicalities of the Mississippi, and contain 
 several flagrant examples of the habit of playing with 
 slang terms, characteristic of his successors. An author who 
 relies for effect on giving his imaginary personages such 
 nicknames as "Dawson Dawdle," "Peter Ploddy," "Tippleton 
 
 ' "In his humour," says Mr. Griswold, in one of his numerous damaging 
 exaggerations, ' ' are blended happily the characteristics of Rabelais, Sterne, 
 and Lamb." 
 
412 AMERICAN LITEBATUKE. 
 
 Tipps," and " Shiverton Shanks," is more likely to be the 
 cause of wit in others than himself to be credited with the 
 possession of it. During the last generation in America, the 
 anxiety to be national has led many of her minor authors to 
 make themselves ridiculous. To avoid walking like English- 
 men they have gone on all fours : to escape the imputation 
 of Anglo-Saxon, or stUl more of Norman features, they have 
 painted their, faces with ochre and put ear-rings through their 
 nostrils : tabooing the speech of Addison and Steele, they 
 have delighted themselves with a jargon of strange tongues. 
 Some of their recent efforts to become perfectly original 
 resemble nothing so much as the wriggling of those who 
 undertake to expose the manner in which, the Davenport 
 brothers free themselves from the rope. 
 
 These censures , by no means apply to the use of the 
 Yankee dialect, in the verse portion of the Biglow Papers, 
 where it is employed with propriety to give voice to the 
 popular sentiments of that district of the country, which took 
 the lead, on one side, of the great national struggle. Mr. 
 Lowell further defends his dramatic patois as that of a 
 "young language that has not made its fortune," rather than 
 of "an old tongue fallen into decay;" and, maintaining that 
 " vulgarisms are often only poetry in the egg, ' Was die Gans 
 gedacht das der Schwan voUbracht,' " expresses his belief 
 " that the ordinary talk of unlettered men among New 
 Englanders is fuller of metaphor and of phrases that suggest 
 lively images than that of any other people." This may be 
 correct : no one has done more than the writer to induce us 
 to think so. His humorous vein is by no means confined to 
 his verse ; for the satire in some of the prose portions of the 
 same volume is alike true and incisive, never more so than 
 when exposing the foibles of honest men, as well as quacks, 
 in his own country. The Eev. Homer Wilbur's list of diplo- 
 mas, from all manner of learned societies, is an obvious 
 
MR. LOWELL. 413 
 
 reflection on the lavish granting of honorary degrees — not 
 perhaps a prerogative of the "Western hemisphere. His dog- 
 Latin, his perpetual scraps of classical quotation, his intermin- 
 able digressions, his prefaces interspersed with " brevis esse 
 laboro," but cut short by the editor, might have warmed the 
 heart of the elder Shandy : his peroration on slavery rivals 
 the bombast of Marlowe's Taniburlaine ; but he is always 
 . good, and often wise, as in this criticism, since historically 
 vindicated — 
 
 " Mr. Calhoun cannot let go the apron-string of the Past. . . . He 
 is the Sir Kay of a modern chivalry. He should remember the old 
 Scandinavian mythus. Thor was the strongest of gods, but , he could 
 not wrestle with Time, nor so much as lift up a fold of the great 
 snake ; and when he smote the Earth, though with his terrible mallet, 
 it was as if but a leaf had fallen. Yet all the while it seemed to Thor 
 that he had only been wrestling with an old woman, striving to lift a 
 cat, and striking a stupid giant on the head." 
 
 Wilbur's severity in dealing with the representatives of the 
 Fourth Estate must be condoned by reference to circum- 
 stances purely Transatlantic. It would appear that, in 
 America, newspapers are apt to trim, sometimes to lie, for 
 the sake of popularity ; " for which reason " the Eev. Homer 
 "would derive the name editor not so much from edo, to 
 publish, as from edo, to eat." Nor, if we are to accept as 
 typical Mr. Lowell's " Notices of an Independent Press " on 
 the Biglovj Poppers, are its criticisms always unbiassed, or 
 perfectly original, or in the "Attic style." Take the follow- 
 ing specimens : — 
 
 From the Universal Littery Universe. — " Full of passages which 
 rivet the attention of the reader. . . . We consider this a unique 
 performance. . . . We hope to see it soon introduced into our com- 
 mon schools. . . . We rejoice to meet with an author national enough 
 to break away from the slavish deference, too common among us, to 
 English grammar and orthography." 
 
 From the HigginhottomopoUs Snapping Turtle. — " A collection of 
 the merest balderdash and doggerel that it was ever our had fortune to 
 lay eyes on. The author is a vulgar buffoon, and the editor a talkative, 
 
iU AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 tedious old fool. We use strong language, but should any of our 
 readers peruse the book (from which calamity Heaven preserve them!), 
 they will find reasons for it thick as the leaves of Vallumbrozer, or, 
 to use a still more expressive comparison, as the combined heads of 
 author and editor. The book is wretchedly got up. . . . We should 
 like to know how much British gold was pocketed by this libeller of 
 our country and her purest patriots." 
 
 From the Comprehensive Tocsin (a tryweakly Family Journal). — 
 " We love a book so purely objective. . . . Many of his pictures of 
 natural scenery have an extraordinary subjective clearness and fidelity. 
 ... In fine, we consider this as one of the most extraordinary volumes 
 of this or any age. We know of no English author who could have 
 written it. It is a work to which the proud genius of ovir country, 
 standing with one foot on the Aroostook and the other on the Rio 
 Grande, and, holding up the star-spangled banner amid the wreck of 
 matter and the crash of worlds, may point with bewildering scorn of 
 the punier efforts of enslaved Europe." 
 
 In the next extract tlie writer aims across the sea, in one 
 of the earliest and most effective of a long series of mimicries 
 of a strange though familiar style — 
 
 From the World-Harmonic-^olian-Attachment. — " While as highest 
 author we reverence him whose works continue heroically unwritten, 
 we have also our hopeful word for those who with pen (from wing of 
 goose-loud-cackling or seraph God-commissioned) record the thing that 
 is revealed. . . . Under mask of quaintest irony, we detect here the 
 deep, storm-tost (nigh shipwrecked) soul, thunder-scarred, semiarticu- 
 late, but ever climbing hopefully toward the peaceful summits of an 
 Infinite Sorrow. . . . Yes, thou poor forlorn' Hosea, with Hebrew fire- 
 flaming soul in thee, for thee also this life of ours has not been with- 
 out its aspects of heavenliest pity and laughingest mirth. ... To 
 this soul also the necessity of creating somewhat has unveiled its awful 
 front. If not (Edipuses and Electras and Alcestises, then in God's 
 name Birdofredum Sawins. These also shall get born into the world 
 and filch a Zingali subsistence therein." 
 
 The writer's strength as a humorist lies in satire and in 
 parody : his insight is more keen than iine, and his frequent 
 love of a broad grin is more freely indulged under a mask. 
 His own violences are veiled under the roughness of Hosea : 
 such eccentricities as the comparison of a newspaper to the 
 Globe Theatre, such questionable phrases as, " I would do 
 nothing hastily, nor presume to jog the elbow of Providence," 
 
LOWELL'S CRITICISMS. 415 
 
 are to he accredited as pedantries of the good Parson. 
 Unfortunately our author, in his own person, constantly faUs 
 into his own traps. He has never thrown ridicule on jests 
 or puns worse than those of his Fireside Travels ; e.g. of our 
 insular conceit he writes : — " Bull enters St. Peter's with the 
 dome of St. Paul's drawn tight over his eyes like a criminal's 
 cap, and ready for instant execution, rather than confess that 
 the English Wren had not a stronger wing than the Italian 
 Angel." Worse than this we can hardly imagine possible ; 
 but worse than this Mr. Lowell achieves in a letise on 
 Byron's description of VeUno, " Milton is the only man who 
 ever got much poetry out of a cataract, and that was a cataract 
 in his eye." The pedantry or slang of the following, from 
 My Study Windows, casts that of Mr. Wilbur into the 
 shade : — 
 
 " Men quote a platitude in either of these tongues " (Greek or 
 Latin) " as droll to the uninitiated as the knighthood of free- 
 masonry. ... So powerful is this hallucination that we can 
 conceive of festina lente as the favorite maxim of a Mississippi 
 steamboat captain ; and apuTTOv fiev iiStap cited as conclusive by a 
 gentleman for whom the bottle before him reversed the wonder of 
 the stereoscope, and substituted the Gascon v for the 5 in binocular." 
 " We find it cheaper to make a specimen " of English iambics " than to 
 borrow one." "We^ confess a bibliothecarian avarice that gives all 
 books a value in our eyes ... we have a weakness even for those 
 checker-board volumes that only fill up ; we cannot breathe the thin 
 air of that Pepysian self-denial, that Himalayan selectness which, con- 
 tent with one bookcase, would have no tomes in it but porphyrogeniti, 
 books, of the bluest blood, making room for choicer new-comers, by a 
 continuous ostracism to the garret of present incumbents." " If he have 
 any Buncombe constituency, it is that unrealised commonwealth of 
 philosophers, which Plotinus proposed to establish ; and if he were to 
 make an almanack, his directions to farmers would be something like 
 this : October ; Indian Summer, now is your time to get in your early 
 
 ^ The writer elsewhere somewhat inconsistently exclaims, " Kescue us from 
 the gregarious mock modesty or cowardice of that "we" which shriUs feebly 
 throughout modem literature, like the shrieking of mice in the walls of a house 
 that has passed its prime. ' ' Surely the rule is simple : " We " is the appropriate 
 pronoun where one feels confident of speaking for a large number ; "I " when 
 one feels only entitled to speak for himself. 
 
416 AMERICAN LITERATUEE. 
 
 Vedas. . . . The bother with Mr. Emerson is that though he writes in 
 prose he is essentially a poet." 
 
 We have found it cheaper to borrow than to make these 
 instances, for the like are to be found in every chapter. But 
 Mr. Lowell's judgments are often sound, where his expression 
 is exceptionable : one is sometimes tempted to say, " Was der 
 Schwan gedacht, das die Gans voUbracht." Where the ques- 
 tion is one of broad human sympathies, the universally 
 pathetic situations of war or of peace, of daring or of love, he 
 is always reliable ; but he has no clear standard of humour 
 or of imagination. He admires such jokes as these — " Hell 
 is a place where they don't rake up their fires, nights : " the 
 slope was " so steep that chain lightning could not go down 
 it, without putting the shoes on." His criticisms are always 
 lively, those on Dante and the EngUsh classics of the four- 
 teenth, sixtfeenth, and sevententh centuries thoroughly appre- 
 ciative ; but he does scant justice to pur Augustans, joins in 
 the common cry against Pope, and in his treatment of some of 
 the recent developments of our literature betrays a besetting 
 and incapacitating Puritanism. In speaking of Atalanta, he 
 commits himself to the assertion that " the hand is the hand 
 of Swinburne, but the voice is the voice of Browning," adding 
 in the next paragraph — 
 
 "Of the worst school of modern poetry . . . Mrs. Browning's .4 wora 
 Ldgh is the worst example, whose mnse is a fast young woman, with 
 the lavish ornament and somewhat overpowering perfume of the demi- 
 monde." 
 
 According to his views, the success of such books shows 
 
 "how utterly it (criticism) has forgotten its most earnest function of 
 demolishing the high places where the unclean rights of Baal and Ash- 
 taroth usurp on the worship of the one only True and Pure." 
 
 This and like outbursts of asceticism, surprising from a man 
 of genius who has known so much of the world, only escape 
 the imputation of cant because they are obviously sincere : 
 
ARTEMUS "WARD. 417 
 
 as counteractives to the opposite extreme, they are harmless. 
 The prose fragments of Hosea Biglow have, unfortunately, set 
 the example, in New England, of the spurious form of wit 
 that relies on bad grammar and worse spelling, e.g. — 
 
 " Deer Sir — it's gut to be the fashun now to rite letters to the can- 
 did 8s, and i wus chose at a piiblick meetin in Quaalam to du wut was 
 nessaxy fur that town, i writ to 271 ginerals and gut answers to 209. 
 tha air called candid 8s but I dont see nothing candid about em. this 
 here 1 wich I send was thought satty's factory." 
 
 With Mr. Lowell, however, this is a passing freak, like 
 that of Mr. Thackeray, who could with impunity masquerade 
 in Yellow Plush, or, as in The Rose and the Ring, cry boo to 
 the children about a Christmas Tree, or, as in Rebecca and 
 Rowena and the Prize Novelists, disport himself in a false face. 
 But a life devoted to such antics, if not wasted, is hardly an 
 object of ambition. We have no wish to detract from the 
 literary merit, or to disparage the memory, of the amiable and 
 generally-regretted " Artemus Ward," the most celebrated of 
 the lighter or broader school of western humorists. There was 
 nothing in his genius of the tragic element that made almost 
 pathetic the representations of the unapproachable actor Eob- 
 son ; but Mr. Browne is affectionately remembered as a man 
 of wit and talent, whose refinement of manner conciliated the 
 ■Severest critics. His work is only the perfection of a spuri- 
 ous art; but he wins our regard by the good -humour that 
 smiles alongside of the satire that scathes ; disarms censure 
 by laughing at himself, and eludes all suspicion of vulgarity, 
 by never 'pretending to be other than he was — the son of an 
 old N'ew-England Jackson democrat of the middle-class, who 
 saw through the braggadocio and corruption of either party, 
 and did good service by exposing them in his vivid caricatures. 
 We have no call to criticise minutely, or frequently to quote 
 from, the often irresistible pages of this popular favourite. 
 Who is not familiar with the showman, to whose show editors 
 
 2e 
 
418 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 were " as welcome as flowers in May, " with his " wax-figgurs " 
 running up and down the States ; denounced as a " man of 
 sin" by the Shaker Elder; imposed on by the Octoroon; 
 listening to the Union orators and to Piccolomini; enter- 
 tained by the Mormons; interviewing Albert Edward, Presi- 
 dent Lincoln, beset by "orfice seekers coming down the chim- 
 ney," and Prince Napoleon ; confiscated by the "screaming 
 eagle " of the Confederacy ; escaping home to Betsy Jane ; 
 willing to surrender to his country "even his wife's rela- 
 tions," and ready with such good advice as, "Always live 
 within your income, even if you have to borrow money to 
 do so." His later experiences of Eichmond have a keener 
 edge : one man tells him — 
 
 " There's bin a tremenduous Union feelin here from the fust. 
 But we was kepp down by a rain of terror. Have you a dagerretype 
 of Wendell Philipps about your person, and will you lend me four 
 dollars for a few days, till we air once more a happy and united 
 people 1 . . . Jeflf Davis " (of whom he had written, " It had been 
 better than ten dollars in his pocket if he had never been born ") " is 
 not pop'lar here. She is regarded as a Southern sympathiser. & yet, 
 I am told he was kind to his parents. She ran away from 'em many 
 years ago and has never been back. This was showin 'em a great 
 deal of consideration. . . . His capture in female apparel confooses me 
 in regard to his sex . . . and I guess he feels so hisself." 
 
 In England, Ward is equally vivacious ; whether admiring 
 that " sweet boon " the Tower of London, reading the speeches 
 of our statesmen, commenting on the tombs of our poets — 
 among whom he regrets that Chaucer did not know how to 
 spell — or quizzing himself in the newspaper report of his 
 Lectures — 
 
 " It was a grand scene, Mr. Artemus Ward standing on the plat- 
 form talking ; many of the audience sleeping tranquilly on their 
 seats ; others leaving the room and not returning ; others crying like 
 a child at some of the jokes ; — all, all formed a most impressive scene, 
 and showed the powers of this remarkable orator. And when he 
 announced that he should never lecture in that town, again, the 
 applause was absolutely deafening." 
 
ARTEMUS WARD. 419 
 
 As a sufficient illustration of his later style, we may take 
 the following : — 
 
 " One day I whacked this leopard more than ushil, which elissited 
 a remonstrance from a tall gentleman in spectacles, who said, ' My 
 good man, do not beat the poor caged animal. Rather fondle 
 him.' 
 
 " ' I'll fondle him with a club,' I ansered, hitting him another 
 whack. 
 
 " ' I prithy desist,' said the gentleman ; ' stand aside, and see the 
 eflfeck of kindness. I understand the idiosyncracies of these creeturs 
 better than you do.' 
 
 " With that he went up to the cage, and thrustin his face in 
 between the iron bars, he said soothingly, ' Come hither, pretty 
 creetur.' 
 
 " The pretty creetur come-hithered rayther speedy, and seized the 
 gentleman by the whiskers, which he tore off about enuff to stuflf a 
 small cushion with. 
 
 " He said, ' You vagabone, I'U have you indicted for exhibitin 
 dangerous and immoral animals.' 
 
 "I replied, 'Gentle sir, there isn't a animal here that hasn't a 
 beautiful moral, but you mustn't fondle 'em. You mustn't meddle 
 with their idiotsynoraoies.' 
 
 " The gentleman was a dramatic cricket, and he wrote a article for 
 a paper, in which he said my entertainment was a decided failure. 
 
 " As regards Bears, you can teach 'em to do interestin things, but 
 they're onreliable. I had a very large grizzly bear once, who would 
 dance, and larf, and lay down, and bow his head in grief, and give 
 a mournful wale, etsetry. But he often annoyed me. ' It will be 
 remembered that on the occasion of the first battle of Bull Hun, it 
 suddenly occurd to the Fed'ral soldiers that they had business in 
 Washington which ought not to be neglected, and they all started for 
 that beautiful and romantic city, maintainin a rate of speed durin the 
 entire distance that would have done credit to the celebrated French 
 steed Gladiateur. Very nat'rally our Gov'ment was deeply grieved at 
 this defeat ; and I said to my Bear shortly after, as I was givin a 
 exhibition in Ohio — I said, ' Brewin, are you not sorry *the National 
 arms has sustained a defeat?' His business was to wale dismal, and 
 bow his head down, the band (a barrel orgin and a wiolin) playing 
 slow and melancholy music. What did the grizzly old cuss do, how- 
 ever, but commence darncin and larfin in the most joyous manner ? 
 I had a narrer escape from being imprisoned for disloyalty. 
 
 " I will relate another incident in the career of this retchid Bear. 
 I used to present what I called in the bills a Beautiful livin' Pictur, 
 showing the Bear's fondness for his Master ; in which I'd lay down on 
 a piece of carpeting, and the Bear would come and lay down beside 
 me, restin his right paw on my breast, the Band playing Home, Sweet 
 
420 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 Home very soft and slow. Altho' I say it, it was a tuchin tiling to 
 see. I've seen Tax-CoUectora weep over that performance. 
 
 " Well, one day I said, ' Ladies and gentlemen, we will now siow 
 you the Bear's fondness for his master,' and I went and laid down. I 
 tho't I observed a pecooliar expression into his eyes, as he rolled 
 clumsily to'ards me, but I didn't dream of the scene which follerd. 
 He laid down, and put his paw on my breast. ' Affection of the Bear 
 for his master,' I repeated. 'You see the monarch of the Western 
 Wilds in a subjugated state. Fierce as these animals natrally are, we 
 now see that they have hearts and can love. This bear, the largest in 
 the world, and measurin seventeen feet round the body, loves me as a 
 mer-ther loves her che-ild !' But what was my horror when the 
 grizzly and infamus Bear threw his other paw under me, and riz with 
 me to his feet. Then claspin me in a close embrace he waltzed up 
 and down the platform in a frightful manner, I yelHn with fear and 
 anguish. To make matters wuss, a low scurrilus young man in the 
 audience hollered out — 
 
 '"Playfulness of the Bear ! Quick moosic !' i 
 
 " I jest 'scaped with my life. The Bear met with a wiolent death 
 the next day, by being in the way when a hevily loaded gun was 
 fired oflf by one of my men." 
 
 In vindication of Mr. Browne's broadest burlesque, we 
 must remark that it is always directed against mean or 
 ridiculous things. Unfortunately his example has paved, for 
 those who have caught the trick of his phrase, and who are 
 unrestrained by his good feeling and good sense, an easy 
 descent to the buffoonery of making noble things appear 
 mean or ridiculous. It is necessary in some measure to 
 identify so general a charge; but, as the names of those 
 who supply mental garbage (a species of food in great and 
 increasing demand^) should be left to sink into the oblivion 
 from which 'they have unfortunately emerged, I shall refer 
 to some of the worst of these caterers to a corrupted and 
 corrupting taste, by their self-assumed titles. War, espe- 
 cially civil war, doubtless develops some of the meanest of 
 national vices, as well as some of the noblest of national 
 virtues : the former are as fair subjects for the satirist as 
 the latter for the orator and lyrist ; but the satires of Major 
 ' See extract at end of vol. from Theophrastus Such. 
 
JACK DOWNING. 
 
 421 
 
 Jack Downing, Orpheus C. Kerr, and Petroleum V. Nasby 
 are more like the grimaces of wearied clowns than the in- 
 dignant protest of reformers. The letters of the first, as far 
 as they are more than mere ribaldry, express the vindictive- 
 ness of a Union Democrat against the gradual Abolition 
 policy of the President, whom it is the main object of the 
 book to exhibit in a contemptible light. 
 
 One of his best jokes is the following, addressed by the 
 Majer to " Linkin," otherwise called the " Kernel " : — 
 
 " You see the whole country has got the gripes and shakes, jest 
 as you had a little while ago, and it all came from Seward's wrong 
 kind of medicen. You see Seward is trying to make the people 
 swallow the ' irrespressihle conflict,' which is fixed ahout as follows : — ■ 
 
 ' Higher Law 
 
 
 2 oz. 
 
 Confiscation 
 
 
 2 oz. 
 
 Taxation . 
 
 
 2 oz. 
 
 Justice 
 
 
 oz. 
 
 Abolition . 
 
 (Well mixed)." 
 
 8oz. 
 
 The writer's political foresight is seen in one passage, 
 where his wrath makes him almost forget his slang. The 
 President has dreamt that the negroes have destroyed the 
 Union — 
 
 " Wal," ses I, " Kernel, you get nearer the truth in your dreams 
 than you ginrally do when you are wide awake. If you will only 
 have another dream you will see that the Abolitionists have killed 
 the Union, and that the poor nigger is only the means that they have 
 used to do it." 
 
 Finally, we must apologise for shocking our readers by a 
 passage which will justify our remarks — 
 
 " ' The majer ' has a dream of the funeral of the ' War Dimmicracy,' 
 to which he belongs. Sumner, Greeley, Welles, and Chase have 
 rammed underground in various cofiins — ' habeas corpus,' ' trial by 
 jury,' ' the Union,' and ' the Constitution.' Mr. Lincoln, who figures 
 in the dream, asks of the last, ' Do you think it will stay down 1 ' 
 And old Greenbacks, ses he, ' My God, Kernel, it must stay down, or 
 we will all go up.' . . . Greeley was tickled eenamost to death . . . 
 And there too stood Beecher, with a nigger baby in his arms, lookin 
 
422 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 up to heaven, and prayin all the while as follows : ' Oh ! Lord, not 
 thy win but mine be done.' " 
 
 Petroleuin V. Nasby, on the other side, is a " Eepublican ;" 
 but, even according to a professed admirer, his "merciless 
 pictures of the lowest elements in the Western States " are 
 coarse and broad. " The Orpheus Kerr Papers," with some- 
 what less personality and approach to blasphemy than those 
 of Downing, are conceived and composed in a similar style. 
 Mr. Gr. A. Sala introduces them with a phrase that, although 
 otherwise intended, is sufficiently damnatory. "They are," 
 he says, " but a printed mass of cachinnation at events, at 
 which the rest of the world were sorrowfully wondering." 
 Nero, who fiddled when Eome was burning, had at least some 
 claim to be an artist ; but Mr. Kerr's broad grins are simply 
 those of a buffoon. . The value of his attacks on profligate 
 army contractors, mismanaged campaigns, and bunkum pat- 
 riotism, is destroyed by their want of discrimination, and the 
 total absence of any background of seriousness. Interspersed 
 with dull parodies of the leading poets and novelists, and in- 
 cessant lampoons on the statesmen and soldiers of his country, 
 the main impression of his book is the record of a war be- 
 tween two hulking squads of drunkards, knaves, fools, and 
 braggarts. The following, for example, is his account of 
 Bull's Eun :— 
 
 " We have met the enemy at last, my boy ; but I don't see that 
 he is ours. We went after him with flying banners, and I noticed 
 when we came back that they were flying still. ... I casually remark 
 that the . Mackeral Brigade occupy the post of honour to the left of 
 Bull Eun, which they also left on the day we celebrated." 
 
 See also his report of the composition of the armies — 
 
 " Two Arabs are expected here to-morrow to take command of Irish 
 brigades ; and General Bleuker will probably have two Aztecs to assist 
 him iu his German division." 
 
 Or of the managers of the Commissariat — 
 
 " They went into the nearest graveyard, dug up all the tombstones, 
 
ORPHEUS C. KERK. 423 
 
 and put them into an old quartz-crushing machine, pounded them to 
 powder, sent the powder to the coast, and sold it to the Britishers for 
 the very best flour at twelve dollars and a half a barrel ! And can 
 such a people as this be conquered by a horde of godless rebels ! 
 Never ! I repeat it, sir — never ! " 
 
 The following is the acme of Mr. Kerr's refined irony : — 
 
 " The eagle, my boy, has spread its sanguinary wings for a descent 
 upon the bantams of secession, and if we permit his sublime pinions to 
 be burdened with the shackles of domestic sedition, we are guilty of 
 that which we do, and axe otherwise liable to the charge of committing 
 that which we perform. These thoughts came into my mind yester- 
 day, after I had taken the Oath six times, and so overpowered me 
 that I again took the Oath, with a straw in it. . . . 
 
 ' The God of Bottles Ije our aid 
 
 When rebels oraok us ; 
 We'll tend the bottle-neck to him, 
 And he ■will Bacchus. ' " 
 
 English critics, the most severe, from Dickens on "Eden" to 
 Charles Mackay, are eulogists or rose-colour apologists com- 
 pared with American satirists of their own soil ; they have 
 so overdone their work thiat any one, accepting their represen- 
 tations as even proximately correct, might well ask who 
 would "fight for such a land ! " Comparatively unobjection- 
 able but equally shallow are Elbow Boom and Out of the 
 Surly-Burly by Max Adeler, and the Californian sketches 
 of " John Phoenix." 
 
 Less political, more social, sometimes amusing, though 
 belonging to the same school of Art, are the aphorisms, 
 remarks, reflections, and commentaries of "Josh Billings." 
 Mr. E. P. Kingston, the showman's showman, introduces this 
 volume with a statement that he at one time believed it to 
 be the production of President Lincoln ; but, on inquiry, found 
 it due to an auctioneer, the successor of Lowell and Browne, 
 " uno avulso non deficit alter," as " the popular man wearing 
 the cap and bells, and reflecting the humour of his land." 
 The author is, he adds, " fhs comic essayist of America." 
 A little of him is, we are told, " more effective in doing good 
 
424 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 than the best sermon a foreign friend could preach" to 
 his countrymen. The objects of Mr. Billings' satire, which, 
 though generally of a minor description (as quack advertise- 
 ments, sham sentiment, absurd caucuses, etc.), are worth 
 attacking by those who have no higher game ; but I must 
 plead Mr. Kingston's comparison with Thomas Hood, and 
 the recognition of his author in our journals as a leading 
 American humorist, in excuse for the space given to the fol- 
 lowing extracts, in illustration of his style : — 
 
 " Eize arly, work hard and late, live on what yu kant sell, giv 
 nothing awa, and if yu dont die ritch, and go tii the devil, you ma sue 
 me for damages." " There is one thing I kant never forget, nor I hain 
 tried to, and that is the fust time I kissed a gal." "If I was asked. 
 What is the cheif end of man now a daze ? I should immegiatly 
 repli, 10 per cent." To the Hair Oil and Vegetable Bitters man, " I 
 rubbed a drop or two on the head of my cane, which has been bald for 
 more than 5 years, and beggar me ! if I don't have to shave the cane 
 handle every day before I can walk out with it." He insures his life, 
 and is asked, among others, the following questions : — " Are yu mail 
 or femail ? If so, please state how long you have been so." " Do you 
 believe in a futer state ? U you du, state it." " Have yu ever com- 
 mitted suiside ? and if so, how did it seem to affect yu ? " On Female 
 Eddikashun : "I haven't enny doxibt that you could eddicate wimmin 
 so muchly that tha wouldn't kno enny more about getting dinner than 
 some ministers ov the gospel kno about preaching ; and while tha 
 might translate one ov Virgil's ecklogs tu a spot, tha couldn't translate 
 a baby out ov a kradle, without it cum apart." " There is 2 things in 
 this life for which we are never fully prepared, and that iz twins." 
 " It is treating a man like a dog tew cut him short in his narrative." 
 Advice to his daughters : " Eat slate pencils ; tha wiU make you spri 
 at figgers. Let yure petticoats drag on the sidewalks, and if enny 
 man steps on them and tares oph the rim, slap his chops at once." 
 " If yu want tew git a sure crop, and a big yield for the seed, sow 
 wilde oats." " Truth is stranger than ficshun — that iz, tew some 
 folks." " Menny a book has bin writ which proved to be an obituary 
 notice ov the author." " Honesta is the best polisy — but dont take 
 my word for it ; tri it." " A man running for oiiiss puts me in minde 
 ov a dog that's lost — he smells ov everybody he meets, and wags his- 
 self all over." " We would sa tu moste writers. Write often and pub- 
 lish seldom ; secondly, to sum writers. Write seldom, and publish 
 seldemmer." "Manifest destiny iz the science ov going tew the 
 devil, or enny other place before yu git there." "Familiarity breeds 
 contempt — this iz so ; jist as soon as we git familiarized with castor 
 
JOSH BILLINGS. 425 
 
 ile, for instance, we contempt it." " Giv the devil Ms due, but he 
 very careful that there aint mutch du.e him." " Munny is like pro- 
 mises, easier made than kept." " Misfortin and twins hardly ever cum 
 singly." " Matches may be made in heaven, but they are generally sold 
 down here." " Man was kreated a little lower than the angels, and has 
 biu gettin a little lower ever since." "We hate those who will not 
 take our advice, and despise them who do." " Moral swashun consis 
 in asking a man tu do what he ought to do without askin, and then 
 beggia his pardon if he refuses to do it." " God save the phools ! and 
 dont let them run out, for if it want for them wise men couldn't get 
 a livin." "The fust law ov natur iz tu steal ; the sekund, tu hide ; 
 and third iz tu — steal agin." " Woman will sometimes confess her 
 sins, but I never knu one tu confess her faults." " Tew be a suckcessful 
 pollytysian a man shud be buttered on both sides, and then keep awa 
 from the fire." " Things I don't hanker after to see : A man out at 
 the elbows, and his wife out tew a woman's rites convenshun. A 
 virgin who haz beat 40, afrade ov a rane bo. A man whose house 
 wants painting a different colour from his nose. A house so divided 
 agiu itseK that it dont kno which way tew fall." "Man was made 
 to mourn — this was the private opinion of one Bums, a Skotchman, 
 who was very edikated tew poetry from his infansy. I and he differ, 
 which is not uncommon among grate minds. . . . Man warnt made 
 tew mourn ; man was made tew laff." 
 
 Jam satis. We will not say of Mr. Billings' book, with 
 the senator quoted by Mr. Kingston, that it " is like Pan- 
 dora's box — the more you stir it the worse it smells." 
 Some of his remarks are shrewd, and many ludicrous ; but 
 the majority are vulgar, and infected by the fallacy indicated 
 by the last quotation. The Americans are perhaps the gravest 
 people in the world : therefore their notion of Humour — 
 generally, as we have indicated, a superficial one — is of some- 
 thing contrary to real life. Their conception of wit is, like 
 that of the pseudo-metaphysical poets, justly decried by Dr. 
 Johnson/ They laugh of malice prepense ; and in, as well 
 as out of, the pulpit are apt to flaunt their eccentricities, 
 
 1 " If," he remarks, " that be considered as wit which is at once natural 
 and new, that which, though not obvious, is upon its first production 
 acknowledged to be just, if it be that which he that never found it wonders 
 how he missed ; to wit of this kind poets have seldom risen. Their thoughts 
 are often new but seldom natural ; they are not obvious, but neither are they 
 just ; the reader, far from wondering that he missed them, wonders by which 
 perverseness of thought they were ever found. " 
 
426 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 and confound the genial glow of genuine comedy with the 
 "flat, stale, and unprofitable" mountebankeries of the 
 farce. The master of this degenerate style is a writer 
 to whom it is hard to do neither more nor less than 
 justice : his success is, relatively, so far in advance of his 
 deserts, that we have to resist the temptation to depreciate 
 his really great, though, as seems to me, often misused 
 ability. He has aimed at and attained an enormous popu- 
 larity. It is probable that, to the lower class of British 
 Philistines, American prose is, at this day, represented not so 
 much by Irving, Emerson, or Hawthorne, as by " Mark 
 Twain," who has done perhaps more than any other living 
 writer to lower the literary tone of English speaking 
 people. The most conspicuous intellectual trait of Mr. 
 Clemens seems to me an almost preternatural shrewdness, 
 thinly veiled under an assumption of simplicity. He knows 
 perfectly what he is about, and is able to turn every in- 
 cident or circumstance to his advantage. He prefixes a 
 recent paper. The Idle Excursion, with the remark, " All 
 the journeyings I have done had been purely in the way 
 of business. The pleasant May weather suggested a novelty, 
 a trip for pure recreation, the bread and butter element 
 left out :" but he writes seventy pages about the trip ; 
 and so provides for the element ostentatiously neglected. 
 Of the alarming tribe of recent American cynics he is the 
 most genuine. He hates humbug and cant, and nothing 
 delights him more than to run a tilt at copy-book texts. It 
 goes without saying that his " bad little boy," will prosper, 
 and his " good little boy " come to grief ; or that he will give 
 an absurd turn to the story of Washington and the cherry-tree. 
 Eomance and sentiment, in either continent, fare equally at 
 his hands : " Old masters " at Milan, Florence, and Eome are 
 served in the same manner as the journalists in Tennessee ; 
 he writes his text to the sketch of a weazened hag perched on 
 
MARK TWAIIT. 427 
 
 the summit of the Loreley Eock ; makes a grimace at the 
 Pyramids ; puts his finger to his nose among the Alps ; and, 
 as it were, turning the statues in the Louvre, the Uffizi, and 
 the Vatican, upside down, inspects their legs. But, if his 
 scepticism is intense, his morality is truculent : he visits the 
 tomb of Abelard, and pronounces a blessing on his semi- 
 assassins ; and his blushes are blent with curses over Eegent 
 Street. Mark Twain's attraction is due in great measure to 
 his freshness : he is not an imitator ; he does not rely on 
 books— though his writings evince a more than average cul- 
 ture : he is a parodist of his own experience, to which he holds 
 up a mirror, like one of the round balls in German gardens. 
 
 " Life's a jest, and all things show it ; 
 I thought so once, and now I know it," 
 
 is the refrain of his philosophy. His satire, unlike that of 
 " Billings," is conveyed not so much in dogmatic sentences as 
 in often dramatic narrative, e.g. in all that relates to his 
 Western real or imagined adventures, among which How I 
 Edited an Agricultural Paper is the most savage attack on 
 newspapers I have anywhere seen. He is, however, capable 
 of condensation, as in the following — one of the keenest of 
 the sarcasms that rely on the favourite Transatlantic figure, 
 hyperbole. It is an editor's " answer to an inquiry from the 
 coming man " — 
 
 " Young Author. — Yes, Agassiz does recommend authors to eat fish, 
 because the phosphorus in it makes brains. So far you are correct. 
 But I cannot telp you to a decision about the amount you need to 
 eat — at least, not with certainty. If the specimen composition you 
 send is about your usual average, I should judge that perhaps a couple 
 of whales would be all you would want for the present. Not the 
 largest kind ; but simply good, middling-sized whales." 
 
 One of this writer's most successful tricks is to say exactly 
 the opposite of what he means ; another is an assumption of 
 modesty, and habit of pretending to laugh at himself. Un- 
 sophisticated people are consoled for their own stupidity by 
 
428 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 the reflection that so brilliant a person had a distant relation 
 who was hanged, and that he himself has been so often duped : 
 {e.g. by Artemus Ward, by his watchmaker, by the Liraerick 
 Indians at Niagara), and has made such a bad map of Paris. 
 The initiated wiU incline to iind a more genuine leaf from 
 the author's autobiography in My first Literary Venture. 
 Mr. Clemens' satire is often trenchant, seldom fine : it wants 
 the background of good humour which softens that of Mr. 
 Browne. It is more vicious, without any of the grandeur 
 which elevates the malignity of Swift — an author to whom 
 America has produced no proximate parallel. His Western 
 sketches are vivid — we doubt not veracious — and may be 
 useful as deterrents to heedless intending emigrants. His 
 simpler narratives are among his best, and give free play to 
 the remarkable observing powers which stand him in good 
 stead in his records of European travel. Of the two series 
 of those — ^for The New Pilgrim's Progress is but a continua- 
 tion of The Innocents Abroad — the Tramp Abroad is in some 
 respects the best. It is more to the point, less ambitious than 
 its predecessors, and its irreverences are less jarring. " Mark 
 Twain," who seems quite out of place in the Desert and 
 on the Sea of Galilee, is at home on the Eighi Eailroad, as 
 the looker-on at a German students' duel, and a moral 
 lounger at Baden-Baden. The Eiffelberg is his altitude ; we 
 can scarce imagine him risking the Eiffelhorn. The Tramp 
 is, on the whole, an excellent guide-book, illustrated by 
 jokes and cuts excluded from the dry dignity of Murray or 
 Bsedecker, and with almost as precise practical iaformation 
 as the last. Many travellers from England, as well as America, 
 will be grateful to Mr. Clemens for his thoroughly reliable 
 information as to the douceurs legitimately due to the porter, 
 boots, and chambermaid of German hotels, for periods of 
 residence ranging from one day to six months. The most 
 amusing part of this book is in the Appendices, especially 
 
"THE TRAMP ABEOAD." 429 
 
 those on the use of the Heidelberg Tun, and on " the awful 
 German language,"^ The following gives expression to com- 
 mon griefs : — 
 
 " I translate tliis from a conversation in one of the best of the 
 German Sunday-school books : — ' Gretchen. — Wilhelm, where is the 
 Turnip ? Ans. — She has gone to the kitchen. Where is the accom- 
 plished and beautiful English maiden ? It has gone to the opera. ..." 
 There are some exceedingly useful words in this language. . . . The 
 word Schlay means blow, stroke, dash, hit, shock, clap, slap, time, 
 bar, coin, stamp, kind, sort, manner, way, apoplexy, wood-cutting, 
 enclosure, field, forest-clearing. This is its simple and exact meaning 
 — that is to say, its restricted, its fettered meaning ; but there are 
 ways in which you can set it free, so that it can soar away, as on the 
 wings of the morning, and never be at rest. You can hang any word 
 you please to its tail, and make it mean anything you want to. You 
 can begin with Schlag-ader, which means artery, and you can hang on 
 the whole dictionary, word by word, clear through the alphabet to 
 Schlag-wasser, which means bilge-water, and including Schlag-mutter, 
 which means mother-in-law. Just the same with Zug. . . . One 
 cannot overestimate the usefulness of Schlag and Zug. Armed just 
 with these two, and the word Also, what cannot the foreigner on 
 German soil accomplish ? ... In the hospital yesterday a word of 
 thirteen syllables was successfully removed from a patient — a North 
 German from near Hamburg ; but as most unfortunately the surgeons 
 had opened him in the wrong place, under the impression that he con- 
 tained a panorama, he died. . . . Some German words are so long 
 that they have a perspective. . . . These things are not words, they 
 are alphabetical processions. . . . One can open a German newspaper 
 any time and see them marching majestically across the page ; and if 
 he has any imagiaation he can see the banners and hear the music too. 
 . . . Here are some specimens : Generalstaatsverordneteubersamerlungen. 
 Wiederherrstellungshestehungen. IVaffenstillstandsunterhandlungen. Kin- 
 derbewahrungsaustalten." 
 
 After more of the same reasonable remonstrance he winds 
 up with suggestions for reform, all, except perhaps the last, 
 more or less practical. 
 
 " In the first place, I would leave out the dative case. It confuses 
 the plurals ; and besides, nobody ever knows when he is in the dative 
 case. ... In the next place, I would move the verb further up to the 
 front. You may load u.p with ever so good a verb, but I notice that 
 you never really bring down a subject with it at the present German 
 range — you only cripple it. . . . Thirdly, I would import some 
 strong words from the English tongue. . . . Fourthly, I would 
 
430 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 re-organise tlie sexes, and distribute them according to the will of the 
 Creator. This as a tribute of respect, if nothing else. . . . Fifthly, I 
 would do away with these great long compounded words, or require the 
 speaker to deliver them in sections, with intermissions for refresh- 
 ments. . . . Intellectual food is like any other ; it is pleasanter and 
 more beneficial to take it with a spoon than a shovel. Sixthly, I 
 wovild require a speaker to stop when he is done, and not hang a striug 
 of theseuseless 'haben sind gewesen gehabt haben geworden seins,' to the 
 end of his oration. . . . Seventhly, I would discard the parenthesis. . . . 
 I would require every individual, be he high or low, to unfold a plain 
 straightforward tale, or else coil it and sit on it and hold his peace. 
 . . . Eighthly and lastly, I would retain Zvff and Schlag, with their 
 pendants, and discard the rest of the vocabulary. This would simpUfy 
 the language. . . . These are perhaps all that I could be expected 
 to name for nothing. . . . My philological studies have satisfied me 
 that a gifted person ought to learn English (barring spelling and pro- 
 nouncing) in thirty hours, French in_ thirty days, and German in 
 thirty years." 
 
 In common with graver writers, Mark Twain is in danger 
 of rapaciously mining out his vein of ore. His last volume 
 might have marred, but could never have made, a reputation. 
 The Stolen White Elephant is a satire on detectives, in which 
 it is hard to detect a chance to smile ; Punch, brothers, Punch, 
 is a joke at which we can only once laugh ; The Decay of 
 Lying, an evidence of the decay of invention; Grime in 
 Connecticut, a lame travesty of Edgar Poe's William Wilson. 
 The Nemesis of persistent parody is that, like the cultivation 
 of the tobacco plant, it exhausts the soil. The successful 
 writer of burlesques seldom succeeds in anj'thing else. Mr. 
 Clemens' most ardent admirers cannot read his Pauper and 
 Prince. There is something almost ineffably pathetic in his own 
 half- unconscious forecast of his own literary lot in one of the 
 earliest of his books, The Mississippi Pilot, where his keen 
 eye and quick wit, as yet undimmed by the strain of a pro- 
 fessional jester, are displayed to their best advantage, — ^where 
 the puns spring up naturally as the foam-bells on the great 
 stream itself. The space given to the following extract is 
 justified by the fact that it is an unintentional, but weighty. 
 
"THE MISSISSIPPI PILOT." 431 
 
 apologue of the whole tribe in whose ranks the author has 
 elected to enlist himself, — as we consider, unhappily, for the 
 passage gives evidence of far higher capacities. He is speak- 
 ing of the acquired instincts, the second nature of the pilot : — 
 
 " The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book . . . not 
 to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new storey to tell every 
 day. Throughout the long twelve hundred miles, there was never a 
 page that was void of interest. . . . There never was so wonderful a 
 book written by man . . . the passenger who could not read this book 
 saw nothing but all manner of pretty pictures in it, painted by the sun 
 and shaded by the clouds, whereas to the trained eye these were not 
 pictures at all, but the grimmest and most dead earnest of reading 
 matter. Now when I had mastered the language of this water, and 
 had come to know every trifling feature that bordered the great river 
 as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valu- 
 able acquisition. But ... I had lost something which could never 
 be restored to me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry 
 had gone out of the majestic river ! I still keep in mind a certain 
 wonderful sunset which I witnessed when steamboating was new to me. 
 A broad expanse of the river was turned to blood ; in the middle dis- 
 tance the red hue brightened into gold, through which a solitary log 
 came floating, black and conspicuous ; in one place a long, slanting 
 mark lay sparkling upon the water ; in another the surface was broken 
 by boiling, tumbling rings, that were as many-tinted as an opal ; where 
 the ruddy flush was faintest, was a smooth spot, that was covered with 
 graceful circles and radiating lines, ever so delicately traced ; the shore 
 on our left was densely wooded, and the sombre shadow that fell from 
 this forest was broken in one place by a long, ruffled trail that shone 
 like silver ; and high above the forest wall a clean-stemmed dead tree 
 waved a single leafy bough that glowed like a flame in the unobstructed 
 splendour that was flowing from the sun. There were graceful curves, 
 reflected images, woody heights, soft distances ; and over the whole 
 scene, far and near, the dissolving lights drifted steadily, enriching it, 
 every passing moment, with new marvels of colouring. 
 
 " I stood Kke one bewitched. I drank it in, in a speechless rapture. 
 The world was new to me, and I had never seen anything like this at 
 home. But as I have said, a day came when I began to cease noting 
 the glories and the charms which the moon and the sun and the twilight 
 wrought upon the river's face ; another day came when I ceased alto- 
 gether to note them. Then, if that sunset scene had been repeated, I 
 would have looked upon it without rapture, and would have commented 
 upon it, inwardly, after this fashion : This sun means that we are going 
 to have wind to-morrow ; that floating log means that the river is ris- 
 ing, Small thanks to it ; that slanting mark on the water refers to a 
 bluff reef which is going to kill somebody's steamboat one of these 
 
432 AMERICAN , LITEEATURE. 
 
 nights, if it keepa on stretching out like that ; those tumbling' boils' 
 show a dissolving bar and a changing channel there ; the lines and 
 circles in the slict water over yonder are a warning that that execrable 
 place is shoaling up dangerously ; that silver streak in the shadow of 
 the forest is the ' break ' from a new snag, and he has located himself 
 in the very best place he could have found to fish for steamboats ; that 
 tall, dead tree, with a single living branch, is not going to last long, 
 and then how is a body ever going to get through this bUnd place at 
 night without the friendly old landmark ? 
 
 " No, the romance and the beauty were all gone from the river. 
 All the value any feature of it ever had for me now was the amolmt of 
 usefulness it could furnish toward compassing the safe piloting of a steam- 
 boat. Since those days, I have pitied doctors from my heart. What 
 does the lovely flush in a beauty's cheek mean to the doctor but a 
 ' break ' that ripples above some deadly disease ? Ate not all her visible 
 charms sown thick with what are to him the signs and symbols of 
 hidden decay ? Does he ever see her beauty at all, or doesn't he simply 
 view her professionally, and comment upon her unwholesome condition 
 all to himseK ? And doesn't he sometimes wonder whether he has 
 gained most or lost most by learning his trade ?" 
 
 "De te fabula narratur." Who would have thought that the 
 ■writer of this fine description and eloquent parable, elsewhere 
 in his pages unequalled, would have fallen into the very trap, 
 error, and sin against which he warns his readers ! The "father 
 of waters " is " an image of the mighty world ; " the trained 
 pilot, the hardened doctor, is the professional humorist, who 
 has lost the power of seeing the beauty of the universe, be- 
 cause he has come to regard it as a mere text-book for his 
 sadly incessant and ultimately wearisome jests. The price 
 we have to pay for always making others laugh is never being 
 able to admire, seldom even to laugh heartUy ourselves. Not 
 only Lear's Fool, but his whole kith and kin, have been, if 
 among the wisest, also among the most melancholy of men. 
 
 Ten years ago a volume of travels, entitled the Ugyptian 
 Sketchbook, was published by Mr. Charles C. Leland, and 
 noticed in the " Saturday Eeview " in a manner which leaves 
 us nothing but to extract from the critique, and so incident- 
 ally from the book, which is another conspicuous example of 
 the style we are reprobating. 
 
" HANS BKEITMANN." 433 
 
 " In the first place, however funny he (the author) may be, he 
 thinks himself funnier than he is. He makes a great many jokes 
 which are simply failures, and others which we are afraid are simply 
 vulgar. . . . There is, to our taste, no genuine fun in the use of that 
 peculiar slang which has become the staple of the would-be American 
 humorists. We are not really amused when Mr. Leland says ' as fol- 
 lowethly ' instead ' of follows.' . . . We even decline to laugh at the 
 following sentence : " If a thing of beauty be a jaw for ever, as the 
 American husband said of his handsome scolding wife, then the donkey 
 boys of Cairo are the most jaw-ous and beautiful creatures on the face 
 of the earth ; for the sound of their voices drieth not up, and where- 
 soever thou goest they go, and their ways are thy ways, and thy people 
 their people — if they can get hold of them. ..." 
 
 After remarking, without fear of contradiction, that bad 
 puns and flippancy do not constitute humour, the " Saturday " 
 proceeds to adduce another crucial case — 
 
 " Alexander Historicus declares the Egyptians got all they knew 
 from the Jews by way of Abraham, who set up an office for fortune- 
 telling in Heliopolis, and gave lessons in astrology to the chief priests ; 
 issuing, I suppose, little cards on which was inscribed, ' Predicts 
 marriages, shows the face of your future husband, recovers stolen goods 
 by the planets. Gentlemen, one dollar ; second storey, back building. 
 N.B.—RiDg at the gate.' " 
 
 There is so much in this volume of the same poor stuff, 
 that we are surprised it should have been written by the 
 author of a volume claiming notice on historical or ethnologi- 
 cal, if not on literary grounds. Por the mixture of dialects 
 in his Breitmann Ballads, Mr. Leland may plead the wide- 
 spread use of the mongrel German-Yankee with which he 
 plays, and the tendency of the half- intoxicated Teuton to 
 sentiment and metaphysics, ridiculed in the verse — 
 
 " Hans Breitmann gife a barty, 
 Vhere ish dat barty now ? 
 Vhere ish de lofely golden cloud, 
 Dat float on de moundain's prow ? 
 
 " Vhere ish de hummelstrahlende stern, 
 De shtar of de shpirits light ? 
 All goned afay mit de lager beer, 
 Afay in de ewigkeit." 
 2f 
 
434 AMEKICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 But the original success of this drollery has misled the 
 author into becoming tiresome, because he does not seem to 
 be aware of the fact that it can only be appreciated in small 
 doses, and his experiments' in ordinary English are unsuccess- 
 fuL Emerson somewhere says that in America "the cox- 
 comb goes to the wall " : we may add for him, " beware lest 
 the buffoon take his place." The Downings, Kerrs, Adelers, 
 Breitmanns, and Twains are the gadflies and mosquitoes of 
 literature. The writers are of various, sometimes conspicuous 
 talent ; but their works appeal to the- irreverence of an age, 
 whose note is contempt for the past and disbelief in the 
 future, when the half -stripped Ballet and Opera Gomique 
 have almost driven the higher drama from the stage, — when 
 comic histories, grammars, and travels, are paving the way for 
 comic Dantes and a comic Bible ; the age of burlesque and 
 ^(ofjLoXo'^Ca. True humour, as in all classics, must go hand 
 in hand with seriousness. The genuine humorist never 
 forgets that behind the comic there is a tragic element in 
 human life, and that the mere farce is as unnatural as is the 
 expression of a countenance distorted, like that of Hugo's 
 hero, by a continual grin. In forgetfulness of this lies the 
 greatest danger of the recent literature of America ; and we 
 can only look to the highest instincts and tendencies of her 
 people to detect and contemn and resist it. 
 
 We must conclude with a brief estimate of a writer pecu- 
 liarly typical of some later phases of the civilisation and 
 thought of his country. Mr. Bret Hakte, though born in 
 the State of New York, may, in virtue of his residence in the 
 West from early youth to maturity, be regarded as a Cali- 
 fornian. By virtue of this fact, and his Dutch descent, as 
 weU as his incomparably wider grasp of life, he is able to 
 represent, with much more force and fulness than Mr. Leland, 
 the amalgam of nationalities of which the Union is now com- 
 posed. After Joaquin Miller, he is the first to set to music. 
 
INFLUENCES OF THE PACIFIC. 435 
 
 of mirth or mourning, the voices of the Pacific. In opening 
 
 his volume, we give Yankeedom the slip : we leave behind 
 
 us Wall Street and the Hudson, Boston, and Concord, the 
 
 Maine woods and the St. Lawrence, to listen to the clink of 
 
 hammers in Nevada mines, the oaths of gamblers in Calaveras, 
 
 the clatter of Chiquita's hoofs, and the growl of the grizzly in 
 
 rocky caflons, — ^to watch the " wampum dyes " of " Indian 
 
 autumn skies" over the "Sierra's crest," or the long roll 
 
 of the ocean with messages from Cathay. His lines to San 
 
 Francisco strike the note of a new patriotism — 
 
 " Serene, indifferent of fate, 
 Thou sittest at tlie Eastern Gate ; 
 Upon thy heights so lately won 
 StiU. slant the banners of the sun ; 
 Thou seest the white seas strike their tents, 
 O warder of two continents. 
 And scornful of the peace that flies 
 Thy angry winds and sullen skies, 
 Thou drawest all things, small or great, 
 To thee beside the Western Gate." 
 
 Mr. Harte's experience appears to have been varied : as teacher, 
 editor, explorer, and consul, he has known many men and 
 many lands ; but his heart seems still with the " lion's whelp/' 
 the city that, with its "jungle growth of spire and mast," its 
 fog-robed greed, and sneer, and pride, waits for the coming of 
 culture and of art after " the repose of years." Like a genuine 
 American, he has, in literature, tried almost everything ; and 
 that he has never absolutely failed is a tribute to an energy 
 that seems to have been nourished, like that of Winthrop 
 and Thoreau, by much living in the open air: mountain 
 breezes and salt sea spray give a freshness and verve 
 to his pages. Save in a few poor criticisms and rhymes, he 
 writes like a strong man rejoicing in his strength, and, as is 
 the fashion of such, tender to weakness, fierce to fraud. He 
 has attempted far too much, and is prone, especially in his 
 later works, to repeat himself. He should avoid blurring 
 
436 AMERICAN LITERATUEE. 
 
 over his best creations with the sponge of satiety : a fine pic- 
 ture wants a good part of the wall : the Dresden Madonna 
 itself would suffer by having the room crowded with replicas. 
 Mr. Harte is in danger of making the frames of his Salvator 
 Eosas overlap one another. He is a humorist of the lower 
 as well as of the higher type. Artistically — I do not speak 
 of actual date — his " 'prentice han' " appears in parody. 
 His Sensation Novels Condensed — especially the burlesques 
 of Miss Braddon, Victor Hugo, Michelet, Dickens, Miss 
 Bronte, and Wilkie Collins — cannot be read without laughter ; 
 but their style is anticipated by Thackeray, Browne, and 
 Punch. The travesties in verse, in the same volume, are 
 open to the same cavil. That on Edgar Poe is amusing 
 but slight ; the same is true of A Geological Madrigal,^ which 
 ends with one of the author's not unfrequent unscannable 
 lines. Mrs. Judge Jenkins is more objectionable ; however 
 sound the moral, there was no need to grin through a 
 horse collar at Mr. Whittier's idyll, in order to prevent Mr. 
 Harte's countrymen from making romantic and unsuitable 
 marriages. He would not represent contemporary America, 
 as he does, without falling into frequent violations of good 
 taste : when books are expurgated, as they ought to be, not 
 to conciliate prudes, but to maintain an artistic standard, 
 these "blacks'' should be brushed away from our author's 
 pages. To a higher "form" belong the burlesques, not of 
 books, but of life, which first brought him into European 
 favour. Writers — especially in verse — are often persecuted 
 by the popularity of some hit, which at first has made, and 
 then threatens almost to mar, them. I am mistaken if Mr. 
 Harte has not wished to hang That Meathen Chinee, and give 
 the lie to Truthful James, and wring the neck of The Emeu, 
 and " cave in the heads " of the whole Society on the Stanis- 
 
 1 WMch, by the way, is not, as the title tears, "after Herrick " at all ; but 
 a close echo of the best-known passage in Shenstoue. 
 
BRET HAETE. 437 
 
 lam. They are funny : their local flavour and seeming veracity 
 make them humorous ; but they are on his lower level, and 
 must be perpetually trying to drag him down to it. They 
 have, however, been born ; and, unlike human beings, are 
 armed against Colt or Eowie, halter or stake. Frankenstein 
 was not more a victim to his misbegotten fiend than some 
 authors are to their successful jokes. Ask of a child, Who 
 was Southey ? and it wiU answer, He wrote The Cataract of 
 Lodore; of an illiterate person, Who is Bret Harte? — The 
 Heathen Chinee. Belonging to the same class, among the 
 author's verses, is the imaginary incident of the war, called 
 The Aged Stranger, the point of which, as is generally the case 
 with western wit, turns on the surprise at the close. Among 
 his other burlesques worth mentioning are The Aspiring Miss 
 Delaine, a satire on chemistry and over-dress ; The White 
 Fine Ballad; the Son^s without Sense; Dolly Varden; and 
 A Moral Vindicator; the last of which should warm the heart 
 of Mr. Clemens, who desires to apply the Lynch legislature 
 of Arkansas to our metropolis. Mr. Harte's serious poems 
 are, generally, above par, and almost always vigorous ; some 
 are rough, but occasionally pathetic, lyrics of pioneer life ; or 
 narratives in miniature, often striking by their conciseness 
 and quaint realism, but rugged in form, and sometimes de- 
 faced by an affectation of abruptness that amounts to obscurity. 
 Such are Jim, Daw's Flat, In the Tunnel, Penelope, After the 
 Accident, which, of various finish, have the effect of crayon 
 sketches, on the spot, drawn by a firm hand. His more 
 polished pieces in verse are, unlike his prose, apt, in their 
 manner if not in their matter, to be reflections of elder poets. 
 The Angelus, beginning — 
 
 " Bells of the past, wliose long-forgotten music 
 
 Still fills tlie wide expanse, 
 Tinging the sober twiUght of the present 
 
 With colour of romance," 
 
 with the lAn^s on a Pen of Thomas Starr King, Dickens in 
 
438 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 Gamp, and others, are manifest, thougli sometimes musical, 
 variations of Longfellow. Her Letter might have been written 
 by Locker, or Praed, or Owen Meredith, across the sea. The 
 pathos of the reply to the last is, unfortunately, infected by 
 the persistent slang of "Truthful James." Among the 
 fugitive pieces that attest the writer's keen eye and frequent 
 pensive moods, and entitle him to be ranked among minor 
 poets, we may instance the following, To a Seahird, dated 
 Santa Cruz, 1869 :— 
 
 " Saimtering hither on listless wings, 
 
 Careless vagabond of the sea, 
 Little thou heedest the surf that sings, 
 The bar that thunders, the shale that rings — 
 
 Give me to keep thy company. 
 
 " Little thou h^st, old friend, that's new, 
 
 Storms and wrecks are old things to thee ; 
 
 Sick am I of these changes too ; 
 
 Little to care for, little to rue, 
 
 I on the shore and thou on the sea. 
 
 " AU of thy wanderings, far and near, 
 
 Bring thee at last to shore and me ; 
 All of my journeyings end thein here, 
 This oux tether must be our cheer, — 
 
 I on the shore and thou on the sea. 
 
 " Lazily rocking on ocean's breast, 
 
 Something in common, old friend, have we, 
 Thou on the shingle seekest thy nest, 
 I to the waters look for rest — 
 
 I on the shore and thou on the sea." 
 
 But verse, though it may be, Mr. Harte's " cheer," is, on the 
 whole, his " tether." His mocking-bird melodies may pass 
 with his burlesques. He is most of a humorist, in the high 
 sense, where he is furthest from a jester, — in the prose idylls 
 of the wild life which he has done more than any one else 
 to make poetical. In a preface to an edition of 1869, he takes 
 an accurate measure of his rdle. 
 
CALIFOKNIAN LIFE. iS9 
 
 " I cannot claim any higher motive than to illustrate an era of 
 which Californian history has preserved the incidents more often 
 than the character of the actors — yet an era, replete with a certain 
 heroic Greek poetry, of which perhaps none were more unconscious 
 than the heroes themselves. And I shall be quite content to have 
 collected here merely the materials for the Iliad that is yet to be sung." 
 
 Mr. Harte's genius has nothing epical about it. He, in 
 general, wisely limits himself to a single act, often to a single 
 scene of a drama. He has not been successful with any- 
 elaborate novel or complete romance. Some of his shortest 
 pieces, apparently rough though really careful studies, are 
 among his best. He lifts his curtain, often the mere blanket 
 of a tent, on his troop of strolling players, and exhibits them 
 in a pose plastique. His sketches of wild life stand in some- 
 what the same relation to the pioneers of the West that our 
 Border ballads do to the brave thieves and handsome free- 
 booters, passionate maids and mourning widows, of Liddesdale 
 and Galloway in the sixteenth century. In passing from the 
 one to the other, we have to change scenes and names — 
 the Missouri for the Tweed ; the Eocky Mountains for the 
 Cheviots ; a brace of saddlebags, stored with nuggets, for a 
 bushel of corn ; a bar-room, full of smoke and curses for a 
 robber's "keep;" Kerges, Tryans, Eattlers, and Dodds for 
 Johnnie Armstrongs, Jamie Telfers, and Kinmont Willies ; 
 stirring or pathetic prose for verse. In both we have the 
 same broad features, rude love and hate, revenge, ferocity, 
 and a prevailing atmosphere of lawlessness, redeemed by like 
 exhibitions of gratitude or magnanimity. Both deal with the 
 elemental qualities of human nature, displayed without re- 
 serve, chiaroscuro or background, in a half-savage age or 
 clime. Both have the same intense realism : they do not seem 
 to be fictions. Above all, they are inspired by the charity 
 that believes, and succeeds, at least for the time, in making us 
 believe, that there is something in the worst rebels, waifs and 
 strays, in " the biggest scamp," the greatest drunkard, the most 
 
440 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 reckless gambler — ^in the men, and women too, " of no ac- 
 count " — that brings them within the, pale of our sympathies. 
 Great writers may be divided into two classes; the stern 
 moralists, as Dante, Spenser and Milton, who, branding or 
 trampling on vice, and crowning virtue on a crag, draw a hard 
 and fast line between the sheep and the goats, the redeemed 
 and the damned; and the great humanists, like Chaucer, 
 Shakespeare, and Burns, who have a fellow-feeling for their 
 Wives of Bath, Palstaffs, and Jolly Beggars. Mr. Harte 
 is not a great writer; but the generosity, for which his 
 work makes us give him credit, leans, occasionally perhaps 
 over-leans, to the side of clemency. Like Burns, he has 
 almost a weakness for blackguards, and " finds much matter " 
 in those who have been subject to the world's outlawry. Good, 
 — not so much, as in Hawthorne, out of evil, — ^but side by 
 side with, or underlying evil, is his ethical text. His Art is 
 shown in his never preaching on it ; but making its truth 
 appear, and by his portraits and situations — in which actual 
 experiences seem to be merely dyed in the colours of fancy — 
 — compelling us to feel it. He has, here and there, over- 
 ridden this notion : in company with many of his charac- 
 ters, a prudent man would look well to his purse, his watch, 
 and his revolver ; but, in "an age when respectability is so 
 rampant that, in some of our social circles, to say anything 
 other than a platitude is to incur the suspicion of incendiarism 
 or insanity, — ^when so many moral fortunes are wrecked by 
 a refusal of salvage, — ^the indirect appeals of this Howard of 
 unimprisoned convicts are worth a volume of glib discourse 
 on " the exceeding sinfulness of sin." 
 
 Our author's works are so fresh to our hands that it 
 is scarce necessary to particularise them. No higher praise 
 need be given to The Luck of Roaring Camp, the early 
 corner-stone of his higher reputation, than that it may rank 
 with Bosamund Grey or Bab and his Friends. Equally 
 
"THE OUTCASTS OF POKEK FLAT." 441 
 
 pathetic is The Outcasts of Poher Mat, driven by the Lynch 
 law of their wild quarters, to starve by inches amid the 
 encircling and eddying wreaths. The self-sacrifice of their 
 leader, Oakhurst, is the most dramatic incident ; but the 
 picture of the two dead women is drawn with the finest 
 touch : — 
 
 " Toward morning they found themselves unable to feed the fire, 
 which gradually died away. As the embers slowly blackened, the 
 Duchess crept closer to Piney and broke the silence of many hours. 
 ' Piney, can you pray ? ' ' No, dear,' said Piney simply. The 
 Duchess, without knowing exactly why, felt relieved, and, putting her 
 head upon Piney's shoulder, spoke no more. And, so reclining, the 
 younger and purer pillowing the head of her soiled sister upon her 
 virgin breast, they fell asleep. The wind lulled, as if it feared to waken 
 them. Feathery drifts of snow, shaken from the long pine boughs, 
 flew like white-winged birds, and settled about them as they slept. 
 The moon, through the rifted clouds, looked down upon what had 
 been the camp. But all human stain, all trace of earthly travail, was 
 hidden beneath the spotless mantle mercifully flung from above. 
 They slept all that day and the next, nor did they waken when voices 
 and footsteps broke the silence. . . . And when pitying fingers 
 brushed the snow from their wan faces, you could scarcely have told, 
 from the equal peace that dwelt upon them, which was she that had 
 sinned." 
 
 Miggles is a quainter tune on the same theme, the exist- 
 ence of self-devotion outside the bounds of altogether reput- 
 able society. The heroine is a girl, very unconventional, who, 
 after some town experience, has retired to the country, mainly 
 with the view of tending an old friend who has become para- 
 lytic. With a tame bear for guardian, she devotes her life 
 the man who is neither her father, brother, nor husband, but 
 simply " helpless Jim." Their hut is sometimes a shelter for 
 storm-staid travellers, a party of whom arrive and share her 
 hospitality. One of these asks her about the person she 
 calls " her baby," whom she is nursing and trying to amuse, 
 bringing him flowers, and reading to him from scraps of books 
 and newspapers, plastered all about the dingy wall of the 
 little room : — 
 
442 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 " ' Why,' asked the Judge, ' do you not marry this man to whom 
 you have devoted your youthful life ? ' 
 
 " ' Well, you see,' said Higgles, ' it would be playing it rather low 
 down on Jim, to take advantage of his being so helpless. And then, 
 too, if we were man and wife, now, we'd both know that I was bound 
 to do what I do now of my own accord.' 
 
 "'But you are young yet and attractive ' 
 
 " ' It's getting late,' said Higgles gravely, ' and you'd better aU 
 turn in. Good-night, boys ; ' and, throwing the blanket over her head, 
 Higgles laid herself down bewde Jim's chair, her head pillowed on the 
 low stool that held his feet, and spoke no more. The fire slowly faded 
 from the hearth ; we each sought our blankets in silence ; and pre- 
 sently there was no sound in the long room but the pattering of the 
 rain upon the roof, and the heavy breathing of the sleepers. 
 
 "It was nearly morning when I awoke from a troubled dream. 
 The storm had passed, the stars were shining, and through the shutter- 
 less window the full moon, lifting itself over the solemn pines with- 
 out, looked into the room. It touched the lonely figure in the chair 
 with an infinite compassion, and seemed to baptise with a shining flood 
 the lowly head of the woman whose hair, as in the sweet old story, 
 bathed the feet of him she loved. 
 
 In Tennessee's Partner, we have an equally vivid picture 
 of the fidelity, renunciation, and " honour among thieves," 
 which is the refrain of so much of the author's work. Ten- 
 nessee perpetrates a more than usually audacious robbery, 
 and, being arrested by a man better armed than himself, is 
 tried, by the rude justice of Eed Dog and Sandy Bar, con- 
 demned under the shade of " the Sierra, etched on the dark 
 firmament, crowned with passionless stars," and incontinently 
 hanged. His partner, innocent but sympathetic, leads his 
 funeral through Grizzly Caflon, till the procession comes to a 
 place where the broken soU, about an open grave, is mistaken 
 for a recent attempt at cultivation — 
 
 " The cart was halted before the enclosure ; 'and rejecting the offers 
 of assistance with the same air of simple self-reliance he had displayed 
 throughout, Tennessee's Partner lifted the rough coflSn on his back, and 
 deposited it unaided, within the shallow grave. He then nailed down 
 the board which served as a lid ; and mounting the little mound of 
 earth beside it, took off his hat, and slowly mopped his face with his 
 handkerchief. This the crowd felt was a preliminary to speech ; and 
 
PIONEER IDYLLS. 443 
 
 they disposed themselves variously on stumps and boulders, and sat 
 expectant. 
 
 " ' When a man,' began Tennessee's Partner, slowly, ' has been 
 running free all day, what's the natural thing for him to do ! Why, 
 to come home. And if he ain't in a condition to go home, what can 
 his best friend do ? Why, bring him home ! And here's Tennessee 
 has been running free, and we brings him home from his wandering.' 
 He paused, and picked up a fragment of quartz, rubbed it thoughtfully 
 on his sleeve, and went on : 'It ain't the first time that I've packed 
 him on my back as you see'd me now. It ain't the first time that I 
 brought him to this yer cabin when he couldn't help himself ; it ain't 
 the firsti time that I and " Jenny " have waited for him on yon hiU, 
 and picked him up, and so fetched him home, when he couldn't speak, 
 
 and didn't know me. And now that it's the last time, why ' he 
 
 paused, and rubbed the quartz gently on his sleeve — ' you see it's sort 
 of rough on his pardner. And now, gentlemen,' he added, abruptly, 
 and picking up his long-handled shovel, ' the fun'ls over ; and my 
 thanks and Tennessee's thanks to you for your trouble.' " 
 
 " From that day his rude health and great strength seemed visibly 
 to decline ; and when the rainy season fairly set in, and the tiny grass 
 blades were beginning to peep from the rocky mound above Tennessee's 
 grave, he took to his bed. One night when the pines in the cabin 
 were swaying in the storm ... he lifted his head from his pillow, 
 saying, ' It is time to go for Tennessee ; I must put " Jenny " in the 
 cart :' and would have risen . . . struggling, he still pursued his 
 singular fancy, 'There now, steady "Jenny."' . . . How dark it is ! 
 Look out for the ruts — and look out for him too, old gal.- Some- 
 times, you know, when he's blind drunk, he drops down right in the 
 trail. Keep on straight up to the pine on the top of the hill. Thar 
 — I told you so ! — thar he is — coming this way, too — all by himself, 
 sober, and his face a-shining. Tennessee! Pardner!' And so they 
 met." 
 
 The Idyll of Red Gulch, Sigh Water Mark, and the episode 
 of the vehement but genuine Mliss (who is ready with 
 poison, revolver, or daggers to escape her persecutors, but at 
 last goes calmly away to the shelter of her beloved master) 
 are all in the same spirit, — that of the man who quarrelled 
 with his employers at Sonora, and went out to seek his for- 
 tune afresh, because he would not refrain from denouncing a 
 savage crusade against the Indians. 
 
 Some of his later pieces have more action. Jeff Briggs' 
 Love Story is not a dissolving view, isolated anecdote, or half- 
 
444 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 humorous, half-pathetic scrawl : it is a narrative of adventure 
 and devotion, where we are equally interested in the fortunes 
 of the hero (one of his types of sturdy manhood emerging from 
 the shadows of the past), and in the heroine. The author's 
 women are redeemed from utter debasement by some trait 
 of maternity, sisterhood, or other softening link : bis best, 
 pirouette on the border-line of wild life and the refinements 
 of civilisation. They are more akin to Madge Danver in 
 Garth than to the somewhat starched models of Mr. James ; 
 and their freaks are less repellant than the severe self- 
 consciousness of the latter. "Modesty in a young girl 
 has," he parenthetically remarks, " a comfortable, satisfying 
 charm, recognised easily by all humanity ; but he must 
 be a sorry knave or a worse prig, who is not deUciously 
 thrilled when Modesty puts her charming little foot just over 
 the threshold of Propriety." This Miss Mayfield^ is always 
 doing ; though in her lover's presence she puts her hand for 
 security into her pocket, she is quite in character in the final 
 fraud, which is to the higher Comedy as Desdemona's lie to 
 Tragedy. The dead gambler's brave son is equally blessed 
 in his wife, and his servant "Yuba Bill." 
 
 Once only, and with a most successful result, Mr. Harte 
 has left his usual beat, and given us, in his Thankful Blossom, 
 a pleasant glimpse of New Jersey in the Eevolution days. 
 There is more variety of motive in this piece than he 
 often exhibits, even a trace of the obscurity of which we 
 have sometimes to complain ; it owes its attraction to its 
 peculiar combination of subtilty and quaintness. The open- 
 ing scene of the Tryst is excellent — the lane, the horse 
 and rider, the trees, and the breaking icicles, are brought 
 more clearly before us than they could be on canvas : and we 
 do not forget the touches of humour — as the lowing and the 
 
 ' Flip, a recent idyll abounding in beautiful descriptions, but with a 
 scarce intelligible ending, has a rougher but similar type. 
 
"THANKFUL BLOSSOM." 445 
 
 girl's laugli, her answer to the assertion all men are born free 
 and equal, "N"o, sir, not even the cows," and the selfish, 
 treacherous fellow's embrace, careful of his pockets stuffed 
 with eggs and marmalade. The heroine escapes, being a 
 virago, by her outspoken affections and her ultimate recogni- 
 tion of her superiors. She engages us because she is intrepid 
 without being conceited, a bright countryside beauty who 
 never boasts. She can lead, but in season can follow ; and 
 armed with quick wit, a sharp tongue, and, as appears, with 
 a heavy hand, knows when to listen and obey. The " honest, 
 earnest, grave eyes " that said, " I am truthful, be frank with 
 me," appeal to us from the page, as they appealed to Major 
 Van Zandt (the beau-ideal of a western chevalier) for for- 
 giveness, kneeling beside him among the flowers, " a most 
 premature little blossom," " a Tory Jade," despite her riding- 
 whip and her fibs, among the " things worth stooping for." 
 The episode of Brewster's escape and Van Zandt's crush- 
 ing answer to the girl's confession, is a fine vignette to 
 Lovelace — 
 
 " I could not love thee, dear, so much, 
 Loved I not honour more." 
 
 The most graphic part of the story, however, is where the 
 scene shifts to the headquarters of the Commander, whose 
 great figure, with those of Hamilton, the stately brocaded 
 wife, the sympathetic Miss Schuyler, are drawn with real 
 historic power. Every trait of manner, the grace with the 
 unflinching will, the courteous hand and watchful eye, are in 
 accordance with what we read, in, graver records, of the George 
 who was so much a king, that " George of England ruling by 
 accident, impiously known as the grace of God, could find no 
 other way of resisting his power than by calling him Mr. 
 Washington." The incidents of the Gray Surtout, the watch- 
 word, and the repartees of the ladies, relieve the severity of 
 the situation. In Thaukful's retort, " Jealousy may belong to 
 
446 AMEEICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 the wife of a patriot as well as a traitor," and elsewhere, we 
 have indications of the fact that " Mr. Washington " had his 
 soft side, and was no more than the Arthur of legend, the 
 ^aa-iXevi; afivfiav of modern fancy. We do not gather the 
 impression that the narrator — who is certainly never a prig, 
 but frequently a Bohemian — cherishes on this account less 
 affectionate memories of the Father of his country. 
 
 At the commencement of this somewhat protracted survey 
 I dwelt on some of the obstacles with which the Literature 
 of every young country, and in particular that of America, 
 has had to contend, and trust not to be accused of pat- 
 ronage, if I refer, in conclusion, to some of its most con- 
 spicuous advantages. Foremost among its most attractive 
 features is its freshness, its freedom from restraint, the cour- 
 age with which the best Transatlantic writers address them- 
 selves to the discussion of questions, and set before their 
 readers problems, apt among more timid or wearied people, to 
 be tabooed, or laid languidly to rest. The Authority which 
 is the guide of old nations constantly threatens to become 
 tyrannical : they wear their traditions like a chain ; and, in 
 the canonisation of laws of taste, the creative powers are 
 depressed. In England we write under fixed conditions, 
 with the fear of critics before our eyes : we are all bound to 
 cast our ideas into similar moulds, and the name of " free- 
 thinker" has grown into a term of reproach. Bunyan's 
 Pilgrim's Progress is perhaps the last English book written 
 without a thought of being reviewed. There is a gain in 
 the ■ habit of self-restraint fostered by this state of things ; 
 but there is a loss in the consequent lack of spontaneity ; 
 and we may learn something from a literature which is ever 
 ready for adventures. In America the love of uniformity 
 gives place to impetuous impulses ; the most extreme senti- 
 ments are made audible, the most noxious have their day; 
 and, truth being left to vindicate itself, the overthrow of 
 
a PROSPECTS OF AMERICAN LITERATURE. 447 
 
 error, though more gradual, may at last prove more con- 
 clusive. A New England poet can write with confidence of 
 his country as the land 
 
 " Where no one suffers loss, or bleeds 
 For thoughts that men call heresies." ' 
 
 Another feature of American literature is its comprehensive- 
 ness : what it has lost in depth it has gained in breadth. 
 Addressing a vast audience, it appeals to universal sympa- 
 thies. In the Northern States, where comparatively few have 
 leisure to write well, almost every man, woman, and child can 
 read, and does read. It has been remarked that " the char- 
 acter of a people depends more on what they read than what 
 they write," and that the Americans are the greatest literary 
 " consumers " in the world, supplying ten students of Tenny- 
 son, Thackeray, Bulwer, Longfellow, Hawthorne, Lowell, Mill, 
 Buckle, Herbert Spencer, etc., to one in England. Books 
 are to be found in every log-hut, and public questions 
 are discussed by every scavenger. During the war, when 
 the LoweU factory girls were writing verses, the Biglow 
 Papers were being recited in every smithy. The conse- 
 quence is that (setting aside the newspapers) there is little 
 that is sectional in the popular religion or literature : it 
 exalts and despises no class, and almost wholly ignores the 
 lines that in other countries divide the upper ten thousand 
 and the lower ten million. Where manners make men, the 
 people are proud of their peerage, but they blush for their 
 boors. In the New World there are no " Grand Seigneurs," 
 and no human vegetables ; and if there are fewer giants there 
 are also fewer mannikins. American poets recognise no 
 essential distinction between the " Village Blacksmith " and 
 
 ^ The great national institutions are all uuseotarian. We have, however, 
 to regret the growing habit of endowing private Colleges where restrictions 
 of creed are imposed on the teachers — restrictions as narrow and intolerant as 
 any in Europe or Asia. 
 
448 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 " the caste of Vere de Vera" Bums speaks for the one ; Byron 
 and Tennyson for the other ; Longfellow, to the extent of 
 his genius, for hoth. The same spirit which glorifies labour 
 denounces every form of despotism but that of the multi- 
 tude. American slavery, being an anachronism based on 
 antipathies of race, was worse than Athenian slavery. But 
 there is no song of an Athenian slave. When the ancients 
 were unjust to their inferiors, they were so without moral 
 disquietude : the lie had got into the soul. Christianity, 
 which substituted the word " brother " for " barbarian," first 
 gave meaning to the word " humanity." But the Feudalism 
 of the Middle Ages long contended successfully against the 
 higher precepts of the Church : the teaching of Froissart held 
 its ground against that of Langland. The hero-worship of 
 our greatest recent prose author is apt to degenerate into a 
 reassertion of the feudal spirit. The aspirations of our de- 
 scendants in the West point, on the other hand, to a Freedom 
 which is in danger of being corrupted by License. This danger 
 is critically increased at the present hour by the anarchy apt 
 to ensue on the vacating of so many intellectual thrones. 
 He who but the other day sat on perhaps the highest, tells 
 us that " when the half gods go the gods arrive." Let us 
 trust that in his country the reverse of the sentence may 
 never be verified ; that the vulgarism of demagogic excess, in 
 particular the corrupting love of buffoonery, may be restrained 
 and overcome by the good taste and culture of her nobler 
 minds, and that we may anticipate for her Literature under 
 the mellowing influences of time, an expansive future. 
 
ADDENDUM. 
 
 RECENT CRITICS, NOVELISTS, AND MINOR POETS. 
 
 Criticism on criticism, with comments thereon, multiplied 
 in a geometrical ratio, is apt to result in bewilderment ; 
 as the inspection of Chinese hoxes within boxes, or Ger- 
 man parentheses within parentheses. It must suffice to 
 remark, — ^in addition to what we have said of Emerson, 
 Holmes, and Lowell, — that American critics of the last thirty- 
 years have one advantage ; their work is in a lesser degree 
 than ours forestalled : with inferior art they have more 
 nature. As a rule, they seem to think less of themselves, 
 more of their authors, whom they are apt to attack or praise 
 with more hearty directness. Their ill-will vents itself, not 
 in treacherous innuendo or skilful garbling (e.g. in selecting 
 the worst lines in a volume and patronising them as the best), 
 but in comparatively harmless downright abuse. Their higher 
 critics are generally prone to the amiable weakness of exces- 
 sive or indiscriminate admiration. Mr. Griswold, though, 
 (as Mr. Ingram convinces us) capable of malignity, fails to 
 convey a very distinct impression of the majority of his 
 authors ; because he treats them too much like a showman, 
 who has difficulty in iinding adjectives to distinguish the 
 occupant of one cage from another. The special points of 
 his eulogy are sometimes unhappily selected. "When, for 
 instance, he informs us that Mr. E. P. Whipple's writings 
 
 2g 
 
450 ADDENDUM. 
 
 " combine the strength of the Areopagiticq, ^ ■with the liveli- 
 ness of Tlie Spectator," the reader is inclined to look to those 
 writings in the first place as almost unique models of 
 style. Mr. Whipple is not without conspicuous merits. 
 He gives one the impression that he conscientiously reads the 
 books he criticises. His information is extensive ; his judg- 
 ments — unless when distorted by the patriotic zeal that com- 
 pares Eobert Treat Paine's Adams and Liberty to the Mariners 
 of England, and Cooper to Wordsworth, and HaUeck to 
 Thackeray — are sound ; his historical views (save for the 
 Puritanic taint that makes him cavil at Gibbon) are compre- 
 hensive ; his remarks on character are here and there acute. 
 I have referred to his just estimates of Prescott and Motley ; 
 the following is in substance equally correct : — 
 
 " Probably no statesman that the country has produced has ex- 
 ceeded Sumner in his passion for rectitude. In every matter that 
 came up for discussion he vehemently put the question, " Which of 
 the two sides is Right ? " He so persistently capitalised this tremen- 
 dous monosyllable and poured into its utterance such an amount of 
 moral fervour or moral wrath that the modest word, which everybody 
 used without much regard to its meaning, blazed out in his rhetoric, 
 not as a feeble and faded truism, but as a dazzling and smiting truth." 
 
 But this extract is enough to show that Mr. Whipple's 
 style is defective ; and though it may be, as he informs us, 
 "a secondary consideration," it is what he has been com- 
 mended for by his injudicious friends. I shall adduce a few 
 instances, taken almost at random from his review of Ameri- 
 can Literature, where the words are misused, the manner is 
 loud, and the illustrations doubtful : — 
 
 " Mrs. Howe's hymn has not this elemental character, but it is 
 
 1 The surprise I ventured to express seven years ago in the Encydopcedia 
 Britannica at this remark, was the only provocation I could find for a leading 
 article in the London ' ' Spectator," in which the writer was pleased to observe 
 that my humble review, everywhere else received at least with courtesy, 
 was a discredit to a respectable publication. Having referred to this amusing 
 tirade in pp. 85, 86, I seem called on here to explain the reference. 
 
ADDENDUM. 451 
 
 still wonderfully animating and invigorating ; and the constant use of 
 Scripture phrases shows the high level of thought and sentiment to 
 which her soul had mounted, and from which she poured forth her 
 exulting strains." "Dana remains one of the prominences of our 
 literature." " Longfellow's noble poems have found a lodgment in the 
 mind of everybody." " Mrs. Osgood did not appear to feel the fetters 
 of rhyme ; she danced in them." " Howells adds one or two thousand 
 per cent to the value of his raw material by his incomparable way of 
 working it up." " Holmes' strength of individuality ... is felt . . . 
 in the pleasant way in which he stretches a coxcomb on the rack of 
 wit, as in the energy with wliich he grapples an opponent in the tussle 
 of argumentation." 
 
 Of the same author the critic elsewhere writes : " He kills 
 with a sly stab, and proceeds on his way as if nothing in par- 
 ticular had happened. He picks his teeth with cool uncon- 
 cern." But we appreciate Mr. Whipple's modesty when he 
 admits that " the literature of America is but an insufficient 
 measure of the realised capacities of the human mind," and 
 whispers in our ear that " J. G. Percival is recognised as a 
 poet of the first American class." 
 
 Mr. Moncure D. Conway has a special claim on our regard 
 from his residence in England, and his appreciative criticisms 
 of some of our leading authors, especially of Carlyle. As a 
 theologian and lay preacher, he goes beyond Theodore Parker 
 in dispensing, not only with traditions, but with some of the 
 beliefs ordinarily accepted as fundamental. He is, since 
 Thoreau's death, the most eminent and loyal of the followers 
 of Emerson, to whose genius and character he has devoted 
 many eloquent pages of affectionate memory. 
 
 The subtlest critic of the last thirty years in America is 
 Delia Bacon, who — devoting her life to the establishment of 
 the thesis that Lord Bacon and Sir Walter Ealeigh were the 
 joint authors of the plays attributed to Shakespeare — has, 
 amid a mass of confused infatuations, occasionally thrown a 
 finer light on passages of those plays than any English writer 
 since Coleridge. No one, as Nathaniel Hawthorne asserts, has 
 cast a more beautiful wreath on the tomb of the world's 
 
452 ADDENDUM. 
 
 "playwright" than the half insane woman of genius who 
 almost denied his existence. 
 
 Among other contributors to the contemporary criticism 
 of the West, perhaps the first place is claimed by George W. 
 Curtis, to whom we have already referred as the author of 
 Nile Notes of a Eowadji, and as the biographer of Winthrop. 
 His Potiphar Pwpers, and those which bear the stamp of the 
 Editor's Easy Chair in " Harper," have been especially com- 
 mended. Even iu this summary we ought to mention — ^the 
 accomplished publisher, J. T. Fields, whose Yesterdays with 
 Authors recount, in an interesting manner, his experiences of 
 several eminent men ; Charles F. Adams, who has added another 
 to the numerous restorations of Samuel Johnson; George 
 Eipley, and Mary A. Dodge (known under the pseudonym of 
 Gale Hamilton), newspaper reviewers of distinction; E. C. 
 Stedman, author of an appreciative volume on t];ie Victorian 
 Poets, who, from time to time, in " Harper's Magazine," seems 
 disposed, perhaps, rather to overexalt some of our minor 
 writers with whose biographies he is familiar ; and E. H. 
 Stoddard, who, in "Scribner's Magazine" (now "The Century"), 
 gives interesting familiar reminiscences of Longfellow and 
 other national poets. These periodicals owe their deserved 
 popularity in part to an incessant series of attractive stories, 
 sketches of town and country, vivid portraits from the stage, 
 and useful lessons in natural history; in equal measure to the 
 beauty of their illustrations, which are sometimes, indeed, apt 
 to eclipse the text, as Mr. Henry Irving's scenery excels his 
 acting.^ 
 
 1 Since wi-iting the above, my attention has been called to two articles in 
 the last number of " The Century," in which the abuse of "mutual admira- 
 tion " culminates. I have dwelt on the merits of Mr. W. D. Howells, as a 
 novelist ; as a critic he is stultified by excess of patriotism. Some months 
 ago he wrote as if "Mark Twain" were on a level with "Elia:" now he 
 seems to give to Mr. Henry James, jun. (whose article on "Venice" im- 
 mediately precedes that of his eulogist), the foremost place among the 
 
ADDENDUM. 453 
 
 Among novelists excluded from our text, either because 
 they fall beyond the period assigned to it, or because we have 
 not been able to overtake their works, the following seem to 
 have attained considerable celebrity : — J. "W. Forest, author of 
 Kate Beaumont, and E. Everett Hale, of The Man without a 
 Country, characterised as " fantastically ingenious ; '' J. G. 
 Holland, for some time editor of Scribner, and T. W. Higgin- 
 son, the author of Malbone, — the two latter both distinguished 
 critics; Edward Eggleston, Adeline Trafton, and Eebecca 
 
 romancers of the world. We are told that the almost heartlessly conceited 
 "Isahel" in the almost intolerably analytic Portrait of a Lady, is— along 
 with George Eliot's " Dorothea " — "the most nohly imagined and most nobly 
 iutentioned" woman "in modem fiction," and that Isabel is "the more 
 subtly divined of the two." We are assured that Mr. James's style, "is, 
 upon the whole, better than that of any other novelist,'' within the range .of 
 a knowledge which must include The Scarlet Letter, Esmond, and ViUette, 
 if not George Sand's Consuelo or Goethe's WaMverwandtschaften. More 
 strangely, Mr. Howells's desire to exalt his idol leads him to depreciate some 
 of his great English predecessors, in a manner so ridiculous as to evade 
 resentment. "The art of fiction," he confidently asserts, "has, in fact, 
 become a finer art in our day than it was with Dickens and Thackeray. 
 We could not suffer the confidential attitude of the latter, nor the mannerism 
 of the former, any more than we could endure the prolixity of Richardson 
 or the coarseness of Fielding." Similarly, in the last article in the same 
 number, Mr. Charles Dudley Warner is pleased to write : — " We have long 
 ago ceased to be either surprised, grieved, or indignant at anything the 
 English critics say of us. We have recovered oui' balance. We know that 
 since Gulliver there has been no piece of original humour produced in Eng- 
 land equal to "Knickerbocker's New York ;" that not in this century has 
 any English writer equalled the wit and satire of the Biglow Papers. We 
 used to be irritated at what we called the snobbishness of English critics of a 
 certain school ; we are so no longer, for we see that its criticism is only the 
 
 result of ignorance, — simply of inability to understand And, on our 
 
 part the day has come when we receive their literary efforts with the same 
 respectful desire to be pleased with them, that we have to like their dress or 
 their speech. " Ample tribute has been paid to writers of fiction in the West ; 
 but this acme of Pogramism in literature tempts us to exclaim with Eoderick 
 Dhu, " Soars thy presumption then so high." As the wit of the best American 
 humorists is a shadow to the genius of Chuszleviit; so all their living novelists, 
 working together, might despair to approach The Newcomes ; and, despite 
 the superfine squeamishness of New England, Tom Jones is likely to survive 
 Roderick Sudson, and Daisy Miller to predecease Clarissa Harlowe. 
 
454 ADDENDUM. 
 
 Harding Davis ; Charles Dudley Warner, whose Bach-log 
 Studies have been compared to the prose idyls of Bret 
 Harte; Frank E. Stockton, vrho, in his country sketches, 
 Bvdder Gh'ange and Pomona, displays a vein of true and 
 cha,racteristic humour ; Mrs. Elizabeth Stoddard, authoress of 
 lAfe in the Iron Mill, and Davis Galbraith ; Julian Sturgis, 
 and Mrs. Harriet Prescott Spofford, whose " thrilling stories," 
 according to Mr. Whipple, are written " in a style of perhaps 
 exaggerated splendour, in which prose is flushed with all the 
 hues of poetry ; " Edgar Paucett's Gentleman of Leisure, and 
 The Confessions of a Frivolous Girl, by Eobert Grant. " George 
 Fleming," the authoress of A Nile Novel, has since written 
 The Head of Medusa and Mirage ; while the younger Haw- 
 thorne, Howells, and James, are running together their some- 
 what headlong race.^ 
 
 To American historians we have to add Dr. J. W. Draper, 
 whose History of the Intellectual Development of Europe is 
 said in some respects to bear comparison with the work of 
 Mr. Buckle. As writers in verse, mention should also be 
 made of: — T. W. Parsons, author of some celebrated lines 
 on the bust of Dante, and an admired translation of the 
 Inferno ; Theodore Tilton ; William Winter ; E. W. Gilder ; 
 Charles Dekay; Hiram Eich; James Freeman Clarke, and 
 William S. ShurtlefiP. 
 
 It has been unchivalrously remarked that, if Pharaoh had 
 been timeously visited by the plague of American poetesses, 
 the firstborn might have been spared. While registering a 
 protest against the cynicism, we must admit that, in the course 
 of one life, it were impossible to do justice to all these ladies, 
 and we must be content to close our List with a tribute, of 
 imperfect knowledge but implicit beUef, to the following 
 illustrious names: Mrs. S. M. B. Pratt; Louise Chandler 
 
 1 For reference to the recent political novel entitled Democracy, see note 
 "On Corruption." 
 
ADDENDUM. 455 
 
 Moulton ; Nora Percy ; Lucy Larcom ; Susan Coolidge (Miss 
 Woolsey) ; Mrs. M. J. Preston ; Alice Welling Eollins ; Char- 
 lotte Fiske Bates ; Mary Mapes Dodge ; Helen Mackay 
 Hutchinson ; Mary Clemmer ; Owen Insley ; Ella Dietz ; 
 Emma Lazarus ; Virginia Vaughan ; Ada Isaacs Menken ; 
 Lydia Maria Child, and Mrs. Zadel Barnes Gustapon. 
 
NOTES. 
 
 Note A. — on the constitution. 
 
 The leading features of the British Constitution form part of the Com- > 
 mon-School Education of New England, but we are not so generally 
 instructed in that of the United States. For the sake of some of. my 
 readers, I may therefore be excused for recalling the following facts 
 elementary to the understanding of the controversial and historical liter- 
 ature of America : — 
 
 The " Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union," " done 
 at Philadelphia" in the year 1778, establish little more than a strict 
 offensive and defensive alliance between States whose " sovereignty" is 
 guaranteed. The exclusive right of " the United States in Congress 
 assembled " to the control of foreign relations, and the settlement of 
 disputes between the contracting parties, is carefully guarded ; but only 
 an assembly of delegates is instituted, no mention is made of a Presi- 
 dent, nor is there any reference to a central Judicmry. In the Con- 
 STiiDTioN of 1788, on the other hand, the phrase " sovereignty " drops 
 out ; by Article II., the powers and mode of election (see JTote 2) of the 
 Executive chief, and by Article III. those of the Judicature of the 
 Supreme Court are defined. A few extracts from Article I. on the 
 Legislature will convey a clear conception of its design and principal 
 functions. 
 
 § 1. " AU legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in a 
 Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and 
 . House of Representatives. 
 
 § 2. " The House of Representatives shall be composed of mem- 
 bers, chosen every second year by the people" — i.e. with limitations, 
 varying according to local law, every adult male citizen — " of the 
 several States. .......... 
 
 " The number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every 
 thirty thousand, but each State shall have at least one Representative." 
 (Accordingly at starting Rhode Island had 1, Virginia 10, Massachu- 
 setts and Pennsylvania 8 each, and New York 6.) 
 
 "The House of Representatives shall choose their Speaker and 
 other officers ; and shall have the sole power of impeachment. 
 
 § 3. " The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two 
 
NOTES. 457 
 
 Senators from each State, chosen by the legislature thereof for six 
 years ; and each Senator shall have one vote. . . . 
 
 " The Vice-President of the United States shall be President of the 
 Senate, but shall have no vote, unless they be equally divided. The 
 Senate shall have sole power to try all impeachments. 
 
 § 5. " Each House may . . . with the concurrence of two-thirds, 
 expel a member. 
 
 § 6. "The Senators and Representatives shall receive a compensa- 
 tion for their services, to be . . . paid out of the treasury." 
 
 The minimum age of Representatives is fixed at 25, of Senators at 
 30 years, with a term of citizenship in the one case of seven, in the 
 other of nine, years ; and provision is made for the rotation of the latter 
 by the creation, in the first place, of three classes — one elected for two, 
 another for four, a third for six years. The remainder of the Article 
 is mainly devoted to conferring powers on Congress to collect the taxes, 
 regulate the custom duties, currency, posts, and great highways of the 
 Union, and to exercise an absolute control over all questions of peace 
 and war, the separate States being forbidden from entering into "any 
 treaty, alliance, or confederation." In some of the subsequent Amend- 
 ments certain farther privileges are guaranteed to them, as the main- 
 tenance of a militia, freedom of speech, of the press and of religion ; 
 but Congress reserves to itself exclusively the adjustment of all inter- 
 national matters, or those in dispute between the different States or 
 any members of one as against another. All charges of treason against 
 the Union fall to be decided by the judges of the Supreme Court, who 
 are to " hold their oifices during good behaviour "■ — i.e. practically for 
 the period of their eificienoy. But there is no provision for retiring 
 allowances, and the conferring of any title of nobility in the Union is 
 expressly prohibited. The whole of this momentous document bears 
 the stamp of, what it was, a compromise between principles still con- 
 tending. All the leaders of the Revolution agreed in their desire to 
 separate America from England ; but Hamilton and his party, having 
 strong sympathies with the British Constitution, desired, as nearly as 
 possible, to reproduce it across the Atlantic ; while his opponents were 
 bent on organising a society on the basis of equal rights ; the one set 
 wished to preserve the aristocratic element in a new form : the other 
 leant towards unrestricted Democracy. The same adjustment of the 
 Balance of Political Power appears in the alternate concessions to unity 
 and to variety, to the claims of the several States, and to the authority 
 of the central Government. The problem being to convert a multi- 
 farious aggregate into a nation, the theory of a Double Chamber was 
 applied to solve it. The House of Representatives, resting on aggregate 
 population, and the most populous States being generally the longest 
 settled, is (contrary to what might have been expected from the some- 
 what inferior dignity of its members) the stronghold of American Con- 
 servatism : while the Senate, in which Colorado has an equal voice 
 with Massachusetts, or Nevada with New York, is the exponent of the 
 
458 NOTES. 
 
 decentralising tendency, the desire for the extension of territory and 
 State Eights. Taking into consideration the influence of the Executive, 
 the result of the whole system is that legislative action is impossihle, 
 in America, unless a majority of the People concurs with a majority of 
 the States. But in times of crises, in spite of all guards and checks, a 
 struggle between the parties, which originally effected the compromise, 
 is ever and anon renewed. The question as to their relative wisdom has 
 not yet been decided. J. P. Nichol holds the prevalent triumphs of the 
 Democracy to have been for the interests of civilisation. He writes : 
 " Jefferson, single-handed, met the Federalists — the most intelligent and 
 cultivated men of his time — and destroyed them, because they longed for 
 exotics, fought against the tide, and forgot Lord Bacon's maxim that insti- 
 tutions often outgrow their usefulness. . . . The form of a country's 
 Government depends as much on the emotions as on the intellectual 
 powers at work in social life, which is largely under the control of habits. 
 . . . This life is among the Americans fundamentally industrial. Their 
 mission has been to cover with hives of active homesteads the shelter 
 of intelligent beings, the prairie where wolves and bears divided their 
 empire with a few scattered Indians. . . . Ohio, seventy years ago an 
 untamed forest, where the judges carried their provisions and slept at 
 night in the woods, has now a population equ.alling that of Scotland, 
 and boasts of twenty colleges. On the basis of this kind of progress, 
 there could be no footing for any form of Feudalism or even for Mon- 
 archy. The Government must rest on the principle of Equality : but, 
 with the growth of a system of Jurisprudence to which some of the 
 most accomplished jurists of any age have, now for generations, devoted 
 their best energies, a great fabric is being reared, on the reconciliation 
 of ample freedom with respect for authority. . . . The foundations of 
 a Republic in a country whose climate ranges over 50 degrees of lati- 
 tude, a theatre open to first comers from every clime and of every 
 origin — throngs attracted by the promise of a larger law than that they 
 left — must at first have exhibited a want of unity, and a composite 
 spirit. . . . The problem, to bind so many jarring elements into a 
 State, to condense the heterogeneous, can only be solved by remember- 
 ing that the height of the pyramid depends on the breadth and its base, 
 ... and giving ample scope for variety in the local option allowed in 
 all municipal affairs to the State Governments, in which the living 
 spring of the body politic resides. . . . But the central authority of 
 the United States is more compact than that of other Federations, 
 generally held together by some external fear. It has a Legislature 
 with power to declare the spirit of the constitution, a justly celebrated 
 Judicial organisation, and an Executive, having at its command the 
 military force. It is therefore a great mistake to suppose that it is 
 weak.i The limitation of its functions is necessarily proportioned to 
 the extent of the Federation, but it regulates commerce and expenditure, 
 
 ^ Mr. TroUope remarks that Americans suffer or submit to more from their 
 Government than Englishmen would endure. 
 
NOTES. 459 
 
 has charge of diplomacy, holds in its grasp the sinews of peace and war, 
 and in every conflict in either sphere, has always triumphed. . . . The 
 danger of America rather Kes in a possible over extension of the central 
 authority, and the safeguard against this is only to be found in the 
 firm resistance of minorities. . . . The enterprise of the new civilisa- 
 tion is environed with doubts and menaced by many perils. The 
 strongest river cannot flow on without reverses. In this tangled nature 
 of ours Vices and Virtues are twins : on the great threshing-floor of 
 the world the chaff and the wheat are mingled. No constitutional 
 checks can prevent selfishness, and the conquest of the unknown 
 engenders an excessive spirit of speculation,^ boasting, and vanity. But 
 as regards the maintenance of order and law, and respect for property, 
 we must remember that the wilder communities represent all races, 
 and societies in all stages of development. Social life has not yet taken 
 possession of the continent ; it is only being spread over it. The 
 pioneers in settlements touching on the wilderness, the home of hard- 
 ship, of peril, and of chance, must be impatient of restraint and reckless 
 of decorum. Daring in excess is not compatible with sedateness. If 
 the desert is to be reclaimed at aU it must be by men nearly in a state 
 of nature. Nevertheless American Progress is less stained by crime 
 than that of any other nation in a similar state or stage. The disorders 
 of free governments cannot be concealed, and the rowdyism of the far 
 South or the rude Western press flaunts the violence corresponding to 
 the tyranny whose worst acts are, except for prying historians, buried 
 in the archives of the Inquisition or the records of the Star Chamber." 
 I quote this, as appears to me, somewhat rose-coloured view of an observer 
 of 1848, as representing the more favourable aspects of American poli- 
 tics ; but the worst features of the new society are not to be found in 
 the rowdyism of the West. 
 
 Note B. — peesidentiai election, term op office and veto power. 
 
 The following extracts from the admirable Exposition of ths Constitution 
 by Judge Story, convey a clear idep, of the designs of its framers with 
 regard to the position and prerogatives of the Head of the Executive, 
 and the extent to which they are in danger of being frustrated. I 
 quote from Harper's one-volume edition of 1847, pp. 163-6 — "The 
 Electors" (selected, it must be understood, with some reservations, by the 
 whole adult male population of each State for the purpose) " shall meet 
 in their respective States and vote by ballot for President and Vice- 
 President, one of whom at least shall not be an inhabitant of -the same 
 State with themselves. . . . The person having the greatest number 
 of votes for President shall be President, if such number be a majority of 
 
 1 It has been said that no American doubts he can accomplish anything, 
 but that he would rather make sixpence by a speculation than half-a-crown 
 by ordinary trade. 
 
460 NOTES. 
 
 the whole number of Electors appointed ; and if no person have such 
 majority, then from the persons having the highest numbers, not exceed- 
 ing three, on the list of those voted for as President, the House of Repre- 
 sentatives shall choose immediately, by ballot, the President. But in 
 choosing the President the votes shall be taken by States, the representa- 
 tion of each State having one vote. . . . There is probably no part of the 
 plan of the framers of the Constitution which, practically speaking, has 
 so little realised the expectations of its friends as that which regards the 
 choice of President. They undoubtedly intended that the electors should 
 be left free to make the choice, according to their own judgment, of the 
 relative merits and qualifications of the candidates for this high office ; 
 and that they should be under no pledge to any popular favourite, and 
 should be guided by no sectional influences. In both respects the event 
 has disappointed all these expectations. The Electors are now almost 
 universally pledged to support a particular candidate before they receive 
 their own appointment, and they do little more than register the pre- 
 vious decrees made by public and private meetings of the citizens of 
 their own State. The President is, in no just sense, the unbiassed 
 choice of the people or of the States.- He is commonly the represen- 
 tative of a party, not of the Union." 
 
 P. 160. " The duration of the term of office of the Executive . . . 
 should be , long enough to enable a chief magistrate to carry fairly 
 through a system of government according to the laws, and to stimulate 
 him to personal firmness in the execution of his duties. If the term 
 is very short he will feel very little of the just pride of office, from the 
 precariousness of its tenure. He will act more with regard to imme- 
 diate and temporary popularity than to permanent fame. His measures 
 will tend more to ensure his own re-election (if he desires it) than to 
 promote the good of his country. He will bestow office on mean de- 
 pendants or fawning courtiers. . . . On the other hand, the period 
 should not be so long as to impair the proper dependence of the Exe- 
 cutive upon the people. . . . His administration should be known to 
 come under the review of the people at short periods." 
 
 P. 98. "Every Bill, which shall have passed the House of Repre- 
 sentatives and the Senate, shall, before it become law, be presented to 
 the President of the United States. If he approve he shall sign it ; but 
 if not he shall return it, with his objections, to that House in which it 
 shall have originated, who shall enter the objections at large on their 
 journal, and proceed to consider it. If after such reconsideration two- 
 thirds of that House shall agree to pass the Bill, it shall be sent, 
 together with the objections, to the other House, by which it shall 
 likewise be considered ; and if approved by two-thirds of that House, 
 it shall become a law." ..." The reasons why the President should 
 possess a qualified negative (for an absolute negative would be highly 
 objectionable) are . . . entirely satisfactory. In the first place, there 
 is a natural tendency in the legislative department to intrude upon the 
 rights and to absorb the powers of the other departments of the Govern- 
 
NOTES. 461 
 
 ment. If the Executive did not possess tliis qualified negative, he 
 might gradually be stripped of all his authority, and become, what the 
 Governors of some of the States now are, a mere pageant and a shadow 
 of magistracy. . . . This power therefore of a qualifl.ed negative, being 
 founded on the supposition that he truly represents all the interests and 
 opinions of the Union, introduces a useful element to check any pre- 
 ponderating interest of any section. ... It does not . . . suspend 
 legislation, but it merely refers the subject back for a more deliberate 
 review. . . . Thus a thorough revision of the measure is guaranteed, 
 and, at the same time, the deliberate wishes of the States and of the 
 people cannot be disobeyed. . . . The negative of the President was 
 undoubtedly designed by the Constitution to be applied only on extra- 
 ordinary occasions and exigencies ; and if it were to be applied to the 
 common course of legislation it might be fraught with great public 
 mischief." 
 
 P. 100. "All the checks which human ingenuity has been able to 
 devise, or at least all which, with reference to our habits, our institu- 
 tions, and our diversities of local interest, seem practicable to give perfect 
 operation to the machinery" (of the legialative department) "to adjust 
 its movements, to prevent its eccentricities, and to balance its forces ; 
 all these have been introduced with singular skill, ingenuity, and wis- 
 dom, into the arrangements. Yet, after all, the fabric may fall, for 
 the work of man is perishable. Nay, it must fall, if there be not that 
 vital spirit in the people which can alone nourish, sustain, and direct 
 all its movements. If ever the day shall arrive in which the best 
 talents and the best virtues shall be driven from office by intrigue or 
 corruption, by the denunciations of the press, or by the persecutions of 
 party factions, legislation will cease to be national. It will be wise by 
 accident, and bad by system." 
 
 Note C. — corruption and "democracy." 
 
 It has been said truly that the dangers that have, since their establish- 
 ment, threatened the United States have been more from within than 
 without. These have been mainly the Slave Question ; the reactionary, 
 selfish, and in its extreme measures, suicidal policy of an almost pro- 
 hibitive Tariff ; and Political Corruption. The first has been, though 
 at a fearful cost, happily settled : the second I leave to the discus- 
 sion of economical authorities ; but on the third I may say a few 
 words ; for, in antagonism to it, the most popular American work of 
 fiction since TJncU Tom's Gabin, the bitter novel of Demoa-acy, with 
 similar though slighter protests of other satirists, take for their text 
 the watchword of Political Eeform. ' The theme is, however, an old 
 one : the abuses of patronage, the evil effects of the pecuniary 
 emoluments, noxiously attached to seats in the Legislature of a country 
 where the ambitions of influence and consideration were amply sufficient 
 
462 NOTES. 
 
 spurs, and the almost inevitable degradation of State judges elected 
 by the masses to annually terminable posts, have been made the 
 subjects of invective and warning almost ever since the acceptance of the 
 Constitution. In the address of the second President, John Adams, 
 of March 4, 1797, we have the following : "In the midst of these 
 pleasing ideas we should be unfaithful to ourselves if we should ever 
 lose sight of the danger to our liberties, if anything partial or extrane- 
 ous should ever infect the purity of our elections. If an election is to 
 be determined by a majority of a single vote, and that can be procured 
 by a party, through artifice or corruption the Government may be the 
 choice of a party for its own ends, not of the nation for the general 
 good." After the lapse of nearly thirty years we find Mr. George 
 M'Duffie opposing, February 1826, from his place in Congress, a pro- 
 posal to refer the election of the President directly to the people, in 
 these weighty and prophetic terms : " From the commercial spirit of 
 modern society, and the facilities presented in our country for the 
 acquisition of wealth, the pursuit of gain predominates over our concern 
 for the aflfairs of the Republic. Even Liberty is worshipped in the 
 form of property. . . . Corrupt Congress and you assail the former in 
 the very seat of its vitality. . . . You can no more make a freeman 
 than you can a shoemaker, without practical instruction. . . . We are 
 asked — Have you seen corruption ? Sir, do you expect to see it ? You 
 had as well expect to see the embodied forms of pestilence and famine 
 stalking before us. It steals upon us in a thousand invidious forms , 
 when we are least aware. Of all the forms in which it can present itself 
 the bribery of office is the most dangerous, because it assumes the guise 
 of patriotism.^ . . . To an ambitious man office' will appear as beauti- 
 ful and fascinating as the apple of Paradise. ... By means of his 
 patronage the President addresses himself to the noblest of our passions. 
 . . . No free government has been overcome by force ; but all by 
 corruption. ... In England the family of Orange gave up the claim 
 of prerogative, and substituted what is speciously denominated ' Influ- 
 ence,' which is but another word for Corruption. . . . Sir Robert Wal- 
 pole said that every politician had his price. . . . There is a splendour 
 in successful ambition that conceals the depravity by which it accom- 
 plishes its purpose. The man who steals a penknife is shunned &s an 
 object of abhorrence : the man who steals a sceptre is hailed as an ' 
 object of adoration. . . . Even in the United States there are those 
 who would rather eat the very crumbs from the trenches of executive 
 patronage than the bread of honest independence." 
 
 Fifty years later the pestilence is still stalking. The slave-holder 
 belongs to the past : the office-seeker and the swindler have taken 
 his place, without his dignity, as the arch-enemies of their nation's 
 stability at home, and are threatening to make its name a bye-word 
 abroad. I find in a number of the sufficiently patriotic " Scribner " for 
 
 ^ Our readers will perceive how exactly this anticipates the first successful 
 and second futUe defence of his roguery by Senator " Silas P. Radclifie." 
 
NOTES. 463 
 
 1877 : "The liead of Christendom is orthodox enough. ... It is the 
 heart, the character, the life that are heterodox, and until these are 
 reached our epidemic will continue and settle down into a national 
 disease, like the goitre in Switzerland and leprosy in Arabia." It is 
 no answer to this charge, xirged, be it observed, with most vehemence 
 by the better class of Americans themselves, against the worst ; it is no 
 answer to say that the private memoirs of the courts of France and 
 England in the eighteenth century reveal a seething mass of selfish 
 coalitions and profligate cabals, and that for one purely patriotic com- 
 bination universal history shows ten where personal motives are mani- 
 fest ; or to say that the revelations of the City of Glasgow Bank were 
 more infamous than those of the Erie Railway. The complaint 
 remains that in America those misdemeanours pass with slight repro- 
 bation, save from a few satirists, who raise a laugh, and moralists 
 who are accused of being supersensitive. Consequently the criminals 
 escape : Mr. Potter was imprisoned, Mr. Fiske went at large. In no 
 other country is political turpitude so brazen ; in no other are the local 
 judges elected for short dates by popular assemblies ; nor elsewhere is 
 the aversion to dignitaries for life — the idea that new men must 
 grapple with new duties — put forward as a pretext for yearly shunting 
 one set of plunderers to make room for another. " Removals," says 
 Mrs. Baker, in Democracy, " were fast and furious, till all Indiana 
 became easy in circumstances." The author or authoress of this 
 scathing work may be a Copperhead (Carrington, the only creditable 
 male American it contains is a Southerner), and its success may be 
 due as much to the pleasure we are said to derive from the mis- 
 fortunes of our friends, as to its cleverness. The mystery or disgrace 
 remains that the representation of Silas P. Eadcliffe as a likely 
 candidate for the highest ofiice of the State seems, in America itself, 
 to have excited no audible burst of iadignation. "The bitterest part 
 of aU this horrid story," says Mrs. Lee^in her postscript with the 
 sting — "is that nine out of ten of our countrymen would say I 
 had made a mistake," i.e., in declining to unite her fortunes for life 
 with those of an able but boorish mercenary scamp. I have quoted J. 
 P. Nichol's apology for the roughness of the pioneers ; but of this other 
 type of Western manners and morals, the worst product of a commer- 
 cial Plutocracy, he elsewhere writes : — "I know^ not a more disagree- 
 able person — one with whom, in reference to social problems, I should 
 less like to come into contact — than an American Democrat of the present 
 day, belonging to what the French would caU the party of the extreme 
 Left. Without the polish of an aristocrat of our own European schools, he 
 has every atom of his pride, his dogmatism, his determination that, come 
 what may, no man shall prevent him from doing what he wills with 
 his own. Deeming, according to a phrase I have heard, that he could 
 1 This quotation belongs to a later date, when the writer's views both as 
 to our own and foreign politics leant more to the side of Hamilton, and less to 
 that of Jefferson, than formerly. 
 
464 NOTES. 
 
 show his independence best by the declaration that to no man on earth 
 would he touch his hat, he is nevertheless so hopelessly intolerant as 
 to deem it a crime or a scorn to respect the feelings or even the con- 
 sciences of others. Rising into high places, we sometimes can trace 
 this lowest Democracy as an influence over the councils of the Govern- 
 ment. The thoughts of the private ultra-democrat centre, as I have 
 said, in himself ; in the thoughts of the political ultra-democrat no 
 nation's rights have a place unless they avow obedience to the principles 
 overshadowed by the " stars and stripes." Spain, Mexico — what rights 
 have States Kke these ? Great Britain is to him an abhorrence, for 
 although we are not a Republic, our power is unq^uestionable and our 
 people free. Russia is better, for the Czar is an Autocrat after the 
 Democrat's heart, and beneath that throne there is a level as dead as 
 the steppes of Siberia. I have known men of this stamp at one moment 
 ' vapouring about the oppression of the European peoples, and prepared 
 at the next to denounce you as an incendiary should a blush mantle 
 your forehead at the sight of an accomplished Quadroon lady exposed 
 on the human shambles of New Orleans." 
 
 The worst feature of the twenty-five years of American history that 
 have elapsed since the above was written, is the fact that the ultima 
 ratio of rowdyism — the arm of the assassin — has twice nearly appe3,red 
 to vindicate itself by the attainment of its ends. When — according to 
 one of the most unfortunate provisions of the Constitution — Andrew 
 Johnson succeeded Abraham Lincoln in the Presidential Chair, it was 
 on the cards that half the hopes arising out of the war of liberation 
 might be frustrated. Booth's successor in villainy, the more wretched 
 Guiteau, seems to have won for the cause of Corruption at least a tem- 
 porary triumph. I find the following, only the other day, in one of 
 our leading newspapers : — 
 
 " The ascent of Mr. Arthur to the Chief Magistracy over the dead 
 b6dy of Mr. Garfield and his declinature or failure to enter on a career 
 of Civil Service reform have led to a revival of hope on the part of 
 such experts in the ' Boss system ' as Mr. Rosooe ConkUng and Senator 
 Cameron. ... It is to be hoped that there wiU be enough of. public 
 spirit, or rather of public interest in politics, in the United States, to 
 aeliieve another defeat of this detestable political regime, which meant 
 the vesting of all power and patronage in a corrupt Washington ring, 
 whose champions openly avow their belief that ' the great moneyed 
 men of the railroads and the manufactories and the banks need to have 
 the Government controlled either by their own agents and partners, or 
 by men of their own kind, who are in sympathy with them, and can 
 exchange assistance with them, so that united they can disregard popu- 
 lar clamour as expressed through the newspapers.' " 
 
 The insolence of Plutocracy surely reaches a climax in this cynical 
 challenge : if equalled, it is hj the saying attributed to a self-raised 
 oligarch nearer home — " In our Church we want a Bishop ; will money 
 do it ? I shall make money the Bishop." The danger to Anglo-Saxon 
 
NOTES. 465 
 
 civilisation is no longer anywhere in Aristocracy, but in the habit of 
 yielding to violence that is growing upon our Demagogues, and the 
 dominion of an exclusively Commercial Spirit which, as alien to liberty 
 as to art, cares only for the public welfare as a means to swell the 
 private purse. The danger culminates in America, because this new 
 tyrannic class has fewer rivals : the possibility of making monstrous 
 fortunes by smart strokes is a greater temptation to a more excitable 
 race : wealth accumulates faster in families whose members have neither 
 the culture nor the sense to spend it wisely, and the people are less 
 protected against fraud by the sense of honour that happily lingers 
 along with our despised "dregs of Feudalism." 
 
 Note D. — pro-slavery sympathy. 
 
 The disastrous sympathy with the rebels in the Civil war which 
 prevailed so widely in England has been mistakenly attributed by 
 Mr. Lowell and others to the aristocratic — it was due more to the com- 
 mercial spirit. It had its headc^uarters not in London ; but in Liverpool 
 and Glasgow, where the feeling was so strong that hardly one of the 
 few educated men of the church or bar who sided with the North 
 dared to say so, till Richmond fell and Lincoln was murdered. Then 
 they leapt upon platforms, and cried out that they had been with the 
 winners all along. On this question, the following letter of Mr. Rus- 
 kin is so eloquently apt that I cannot forbear to quote it : — 
 
 " Sir — I have not hastened my reply to your last letter, thinking 
 that your space at present would be otherwise occupied ; having also 
 my own thoughts busied in various directions, such as you may fancy ; 
 yet busied chiefly in a sad wonder, which perhaps you would not fancy. 
 I mourn for Mr. Lincoln, as man should mourn the fate of man, when 
 it is sudden and supreme. I hate regicide as I do populicide — deeply, 
 if frenzied ; more deeply, if deliberate. But my wonder is in remem- 
 bering the tone of the English people and press respecting this man 
 during his life, and in comparing it with their sayings of him in his 
 death. They caricatured and reviled him when his cause was poised in 
 deadly balance — when their praise would have been grateful to him, 
 and their help priceless. They now declare his cause to have been 
 just, when it needs no aid ; and his purposes to have been noble, when 
 all human thoughts of them have become vanity, and will never so 
 much as mix their murmurs in his ears with the sentence of the Tri- 
 bunal which has summoned him to receive a juster praise and tenderer 
 blame than ours." — (From the " Pall Mall Gazette," May 2, 1865.) 
 
 Note E. — emerson and darwin. 
 
 The association of those names on page 273 is not intended to con- 
 vey the impression that the former, in any proper sense, anticipated 
 
 2h 
 
466 NOTES. 
 
 the latter. The idea of a progress from lower to higher stages, of 
 animal life is prominent in the speculations of Europe from the 
 days of Empedocles to those of Lamarck : but Darwin, in proving and 
 reducing to scientific form what to Emerson and others had been a 
 vague poetic guess, is as much entitled to be considered the discoverer 
 of the law of development, as Newton of the law of gravitation ; not- 
 withstanding that Anaximander had, twenty-three centuries before him, 
 buUt his system of the Universe on the cosmical forces of attraction and 
 repulsion. 
 
 Note F. — practical ebligion. 
 
 It has been said . that in America the narrowest sectarianism goes 
 hand in hand with the freest agnosticism, that bigotry and liberality 
 interlace each other in a wonderful and bewildering way. We have 
 found in the works of Emerson, and in the romance of Judd an equally 
 strange juxtaposition of mysticism and common sense. To illustrate 
 further the shrewd practical teaching, almost quaintly minute, that in 
 the same country may accompany the most absurd superstitions, we 
 extract a Mormon sermon, and a comment on the religion of Utah, 
 from the volumes of Mr. Hepworth Dixon : — 
 
 " Brothers and sisters in the Lord Jesus Christ, you. have been 
 chosen from the world by God, and sent through His grace into this 
 valley of the mountains to help in building up His kingdom. You are 
 faint and weary from your march. Rest, then, for the day, for a 
 second day, should you need it ; then rise up and see how you will live. 
 Don't bother yourselves much about your religious duties ; you have 
 been chosen for this work, and God will take care of you in it. Be of 
 good cheer. Look aboiit this valley into which you have been called. 
 Your first duty is to learn how to grow a cabbage, and along with this 
 cabbage an onion, a tomato, a sweet potato ; then how to feed a pig, to 
 build a house, to plant a garden, to rear cattle, and to bake bread ; in 
 one word, your first duty is to live ; the next duty — for those who, being 
 Danes, French, Swiss, cannot speak it now — is to learn English, the 
 language of God, the language of the Books of Mormon, the language 
 of these latter days. These things you must do first ; the rest will be 
 added to you in proper seasons. God bless you ; and the peace of our 
 Lord Jesus Christ be with you." 
 
 " On its social side, the Mormon Church may be regarded as gay, its 
 ritual as festive. All that the older creeds have nursed in the way of 
 gloom, austerity, bewilderment, despair, is banished from the New Jeru- 
 salem. No one fears being damned ; no one troubles his soul about 
 fates, free-will, elections, and prevenient grace. A Mormon lives in an 
 atmosphere of trust ; for in his eyes heaven lies around him in his 
 glowing lake, in his smiling fields, in his snowy alps. To him the 
 advent of the saints was the Second Coming, and the forming of their 
 
NOTES. 467 
 
 Church a beginning of the reign of God. He feels no dread, he takes 
 no trouble, on account of the future. Wliat is wUl be ; to-morroiv like 
 to-day, the next year like the past one— heaven a continuation of the 
 earth, where to each man will be meted out glory and power according 
 to the fulness of his obedience in the present life. The earth, he says, 
 is a Paradise made for enjoyment." 
 
 Note G. — the triumph of buffoonebt. 
 
 I rejoice to find in the late George Eliot's Theophrastus Such a few 
 pages which, under the title "Debasing the Moral Currency," are 
 devoted to a salutary denunciation of the mountebankery that threatens 
 to taint literature, to make " the stage " contemptible, and to destroy 
 what remains of popular taste in England as well as in America. " The 
 habit of dragging the ludicrous into topics where the chief interest is 
 of a different or even opposite kind is a sign, not of endowment, but of 
 deficiency. The art of spoiling is within reach of the dullest faculty ; 
 the coarsest clown with a hammer in his hand might chip the nose off 
 every statue and bust in the Vatican, and stand grinning at the effect 
 of his work. Because wit is an exquisite product of high powers, we 
 are not therefore forced to admit the sadly confused inference of the 
 monotonous jester that he is establishing his superiority over every less 
 facetious person, and over every topic on which he is ignorant and 
 insensible, by being uneasy until he has distorted it in the smaU cracked 
 mirror which he carries about with him as a joking apparatus. Some 
 high authority is needed to give many worthy and timid persons the 
 freedom of muscular repose under the growing demand on them to 
 laugh when they have no other reason than the peril of being taken 
 for dullards ; still more to inspire them with the courage to say that 
 they object to the theatrical spoiling for themselves and their children 
 of all affecting themes, all the grander deeds and aims of men, by 
 burlesque associations adapted to the taste of rich fishmongers in the 
 staUs and tlieir assistants in the gallery. The English people in the 
 present generation are falsely reputed to know Shakespeare (as by 
 some innocent persons the Florentine mule-drivers are believed to 
 have known the Divina Oommedia, not perhaps excluding all the 
 subtle discourses in the Purgatorio and Paradiso) ; but there seems a 
 clear prospect that in the coming generation he will be known to them 
 through burlesques, and that his plays will find a new life as panto- 
 mimes. A bottle-nosed Lear will come on with a monstrous corpu- 
 lence, from which he will frantically dance himself free, during the 
 midnight storm ; Rosalind and Celia wiU join in a grotesque ballet 
 with shepherds and shepherdesses ; Ophelia, in fleshings and a 
 voluminous brevity of grenadine, will dance through the mad scene, 
 finishing with the famous ' attitude of the scissors ' in the arms of 
 Laertes." 
 
INDEX. 
 
 Abbott, Jacob, 186, 370 
 Abolition Movement, 114, 
 
 136 
 Adams, C. P., 452 
 Adams, John, 73 
 Adams, J. Quincy, 106 ; 
 
 as a critic, 183 ; as a 
 
 humorist, 406 
 Adeler, Max, 423 
 Agassiz, L. J. E., 185 
 Aloott, Louisa, 369 
 Aldrich, T. Bailey, 251, 
 
 388 
 AUston, Washington,' 163, 
 
 250 
 Alsop of Maryland, 33 
 America, Composite na- 
 tionality of, 355 
 American, The, James's, 
 
 392 
 Americans, their views of 
 
 England, 7 
 Ames, Fisher, 75 
 Anniversary odes, 247 
 Archibald Malmaison, J. 
 
 Hawthorne's, 384 
 Aristocratic spirit of the 
 
 South, 112 
 Artemus Ward (Browne), 
 
 405, 417 
 Arthur Mervyn, Brown's, 
 
 160 
 Articles of Confederation 
 
 and Union, 456 
 Assabeth river, 323 
 Assassinations of Lincoln 
 
 and Garfield, 464 
 Audubon, J. J., 185 
 Autocrat, Holmes's, 407 
 
 Bacon, Delia, 451 
 Bacon, Nathaniel, 33 
 Ballads of the Revolution, 
 87 
 
 Bancroft, George, 145 
 Barlow, Jpel, 85 
 Bay Psalm Book, 56 
 Berkeley, Sir Wm., 33 
 Beverley, Robert, 34 
 Biglow Papers, Lowell's, 
 
 221, 230, 412 
 Bird's Calavar and The 
 
 Infidel, 180 
 Blithedale Romance, Haw- 
 thorne's, 345 
 Books, Emerson's rules 
 
 for reading, 308 
 Bowditch, Prof., 185 
 Bo wen. Dr., 186 
 Brackenridge, H. H., 85, 
 
 156 
 Brackenridge, H. W., 129 
 Bradford, William, 38 
 Bradstreet, Mrs. Anne, 65 
 Brahma, Emerson's, 301 
 Breitmann Ballads, Le- 
 
 land's, 433 
 Brook Farm, 444 
 Brooks, C. T., 186, 410 
 Brooks, Mrs., 252 
 Brooks, Preston, 141 
 Brown, C. Brockden, 157 
 Brown University, Foun- 
 dation of, 49 
 Browne (Artemus Ward), 
 
 405, 417 
 Brownell's Lyrics of the 
 
 War, 251 
 Bryant, Wm. Cullen, 187 
 Buffoonery, 420, 467 
 Bulkley, Peter, 55 
 Burlesque, 417 
 Burnett, Mrs. F. H., 384, 
 
 396 
 BurweU Papers, 33 
 Biish, George, 186 
 Bushnell, Horace, 186 
 Byles, Mather, 83 
 Byrd, William, 34 
 
 Calhoun, J. C, 102, 115 
 Cameron, Miss, 369 
 Carey, A. and P., 252 
 Carlyle and Emerson, 287 
 Ceail Dreem£, Winthrop's, 
 
 376 
 Century Magazine, 452 
 Chance Acquaintance, 
 
 Howells's, 397 
 Channing, W. E. , as a pul- 
 pit orator, 132 ; as a 
 critic, 184 ; remarks on 
 Milton, 185 
 Charcoal Sketches, Neal's, 
 
 411 
 Charlesworth, Maria L., 
 
 369 
 Child, Dr., 186 
 Child, Mrs. Lydia, 180 
 Children's books, 369 
 Civil Service, Jackson's 
 views of, 109 ; Corrup- 
 tion of, 463 
 Clarke, W. G., 411 
 Clay, Henry, 103, 114 
 Clemens (Mark Twain), 
 
 426 
 Clerical despotism in New 
 
 England, 48 
 Climate, Effect on litera- 
 ture, 19 
 Colonial period, 29 
 Columbia College, Foun- 
 dation of, 49 
 Commemorative Speeches, 
 
 126 
 Comte and Emerson, 305 
 Congress, constitution of, 
 
 456 
 Conquest of Mexico and 
 
 Peru, Prescott's, 146 
 Constitution, U.S., 456 
 Conway, M. D., 451 
 Cook, Ebenezer, 34 
 Cooper, J. Fenimore, 175 
 
INDEX. 
 
 469 
 
 Copyright, International, 
 
 26 
 Corruption, political, 461 
 Cotton, John, 42, 47 
 Courtin', The, Lowell's, 
 
 235 
 Cozzen's Sparrow - Grass 
 
 Papers, 411 
 Criticism, 1800-50, 143; 
 
 recent, 449 
 Critics, International, 2 
 Croaker Papers, 182 
 Cummins, Maria E., 369 
 Curtis, G. W., 181, 452 
 
 Daily JViaZs,Holme8's,409 
 Dana, H. E., 162 
 Dana's Two Years before 
 
 the Mast, 181 
 Darwinism, Emerson and, 
 
 272, 465 
 Davidson, L. and M., 261 
 Dead Ghnst, The, Howe's, 
 
 239 
 Deelaration of Independ- 
 ence, 70 
 Democracy, 461 - 
 Democracy and literature, 
 
 23 
 Democratic party, 112 
 Dial Magazine, 256 
 Dialect in poetry, 230, 412 
 Diedrich Knickerhocher, 
 
 _ Irving's, 171 
 Dodge, Mary A. , 452 
 Domestic life, 20 
 Douglass, Wm., 52 
 Dr. Breen's Practice, 
 
 Howells's, 399 
 Drake, J. Eodman, 250 
 Draper, J. W,, 454 
 Drum Taps, Whitman's, 
 
 208 
 Dutch Republic, Motley's, 
 
 152 
 Dwight, Timothy, 91 
 
 Edwards, Jonathan, 52 
 
 Edurin Brothertoft, Win- 
 throp's, 372 
 
 Egyptian SketcKbooh, Le- 
 land's, 432 
 
 Eliot, George, on Buf- 
 foonery, 467 
 
 Eliot, John, 40 
 
 EUice Quentin, J. Haw- 
 thorne's, 382 
 
 £!lsie Venner, Holmes's, 
 
 357 
 Emerson, E. W., 254, 465 
 English Traits, Emerson's, 
 
 295, 302 
 Englishmen, their views of 
 
 America, 7 
 Ethics, Emerson's, 280 
 Europeans, James's, 390 
 Evangeline, Longfellow's, 
 
 200 
 Everett, Edward, 129 
 Excfu/rsions, Thoreau's,318 
 
 Fable for Critics, Lowell's, 
 228 
 
 Fair Barbarian, Burnett's, 
 396 
 
 Fanny Fern, 370 
 
 Fate and free will, Emer- 
 son's view, 277 
 
 Faucett, Edgar, 251, 454 
 
 Fay, Theodore S., 180 
 
 Federalists, 73 
 
 Female tyranny, 395 
 
 Fields, J. T., 452 
 
 Fiske, John, 186 
 
 Fleming, George, 397, 454 
 
 Folger, Peter, 57 
 
 Follen, Charles, 135, 182 
 
 Forest, J. W., 453 
 
 Franklin, Benjamin, 61 
 
 Free will and fate, Emer- 
 son's view, 277 
 
 Fremont's Exploring Ex- 
 pedition, 181 
 
 Freneau, Philip, 93 
 
 Gale, Hamilton (Dodge), 
 
 452 
 Garden, Alexander, 35 
 Garfield, assassination of, 
 
 464 
 Garrison, W. Lloyd, 139 
 Garth, J. Hawthorne's, 
 
 387 
 George Eliot on Buf- 
 foonery, 467 
 George Fleming, 397, 454 
 Georgia, Early literature 
 
 of, 35 
 Gerstaecker, Frederick, 
 
 369 
 Golden Legend, Longfel- 
 low's, 201 
 Gookin, Daniel, 40 
 Gould, Hannah F., 252 
 
 Gould, J. T., 370 
 Government, Effect on 
 
 literature, 23 
 Greeley, Horace, 156 
 Green, Joseph, 68 
 Griswold, E. W., 449 
 
 Rail Columbia, 87 
 Hale, E. B., 453 
 Halleck, Fitz-Greene, 251 
 Halliburton, Judge, 410 
 Hamilton, Alex., 68, 73 
 Hammond, John, 32 
 Hancock, John, 68 
 Harper's Magazine, 452 
 Harte, Bret, 434 
 Harvard Commemoration 
 
 Ode, Lowell's, 224 
 Harvard University, Foun- 
 dation of, 48 
 Hawthorne, Julian, 380 
 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 322 
 Hay, John, 251 
 Hayne, E. Y., 108, 120 
 Heart of the Andes, Win- 
 throp's criticism of, 371 
 Heathen Chinee, Harte's, 
 
 436 
 Hedge, Frederick, 186 
 Henry, Patrick, 68 
 Hiawatha, Longfellow's, 
 
 202 
 Higginson, Francis, 38 
 Higginson, T. W., 463 
 Hildreth, Eichard, 146 
 Hillard, George S., 181 
 Hillhouse, J. A., 251 
 Hingston, E. P., 423 
 Historians, 143, 454 
 History and Literature, 4 
 Hodge, Dr., 186 
 Hoffman, C. Fenno, 162 
 Holland, J. G., 261, 453 
 Holmes, 0. Wendell, 249; 
 as a novelist, 357; as a 
 humorist, 407 
 Home, Sioeet Home, Wood- 
 worth's, 250 
 Hooker, Thomas, 42 
 Hopkinson, Francis, 85 
 Hopkinson, Joseph, 88 
 House of tJie Seven Gables, 
 
 Hawthorne's, 340 
 Howe, Mrs. J. Ward, 239, 
 
 452 
 Howells, W. D., as a 
 novelist, 397 ; as a 
 Critic, 452 
 
470 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Hudson, H. N., 186 
 Humorists, 405 
 Humour and "Wit, 402 
 Humplireys, David, 85 
 Hunt, Mrs., 251 
 Hyperion, Longfellow's, 
 178 
 
 Imitation, Efifeot on lit- 
 erature, 24 
 
 Immortality, Emerson's 
 views, 285 
 
 Impatience, National, 21 
 
 Independence, Result on 
 American literature, 15 
 
 Indian Names, Sigour- 
 ney's, 252 
 
 International copyright, 
 26 
 
 Irene, Lowell's, 227 
 
 Irving, Washington, 147, 
 170 
 
 Jackson, Andrew 
 James. Henry, jun., 389, 
 
 452 
 Jay, Jolm, 73 
 Jeff Brigg's Love Story, 
 
 Harte's, 444 
 Jefferson, Thomas, 70, 
 
 77 
 Johnson, Edward, 39, 41 
 Josh Billings, 423 
 Josselyn, Jolm, 39 
 Judd, Sylvester, 362 
 
 Kennedy, J. P., 156 
 Kent, Chief-Justice, 186 
 Key, P. S., 88 
 King, T. Starr, 181 
 Kirk's Charles the Bold, 
 
 155 
 Knapp, Francis, 58 
 Knapps' trial, Webster's 
 
 speech at, 125 
 
 Ladies, Tyranny of the, 
 
 395 
 Lathrop, G. Parsons, 251 
 Lawson, John, 34 
 Lee, E. H., 69 
 Legar^, H. Swinton, 156 
 Leland, C. C, 432 
 Lewis, E. A., 252 
 Liberator, WUliam Lloyd 
 
 GaiTison's, 138 
 
 Libraries, Foundation of, 
 
 48 
 Ligeia, Foe's, 166 
 Lincoln, Abraham, 142 
 Lincoln's Burial Hymn, 
 
 Whitman's, 211 
 Literature and History, 4 
 Livingston, Wm., 52 
 Longfellow, H. Wads- 
 worth, 178, 193 
 Loomis, Prof., 185 
 Lowell, J. Russell, 220, 
 
 412 
 Luch of Roaring Camp, 
 Harte's, 440 
 
 M'Fingal, 89 
 Madison, James, 79 
 Mann, Horace, 186 
 Marble > Favm, Haw- 
 thorne's, 347 
 Margaret, Judd's, 362 
 Maria del Occidente (Mrs. 
 
 Broolts), 252 
 Mark Twain, 426 
 Marriage law, C. B. Brown 
 
 on, 159 
 Marsh, Dr., 186 
 Marshall, John, 73 
 Maryland, early literature 
 
 of, 34 
 Mason, Captain John, 39 
 Massachusetts to Virginia, 
 
 Whittier's, 241 
 Mather, Richard, Increase, 
 Cotton, and Samuel, 51 
 Mather's Remarkable Pro- 
 vidences, 41 
 Maud Mviler, Whittier's, 
 
 243 
 Mayhew, John, 58 
 Melville, Herman, 180 
 Miggles, Harte's, 441 
 Miller, Cincinnatus (Joa- 
 quin), 214 
 Mississippi Pilot, Mark 
 
 Twain's, 430 
 Mormonism, 466 
 Morris, G. P., 251 
 Motley, J. Lothrop, 150 
 MuiTay, Lindley, 78 
 Mysticism, Emerson's, 263 
 My Study Windows, 
 Lowell's, 415 
 
 Natuhb, effect on litera- 
 ture, 19 
 
 Nature, Emerson's, 259, 
 272 
 
 Nautilus, The, Holmes's, 
 250 
 
 Neal, John, 179 
 
 Neal, Joseph, 411 
 
 Neo-Platonism, Emer- 
 son's, 264 
 
 New ilngland, settlement 
 of, 36 
 
 New England's Annoy- 
 ances, 66 
 
 Newspapers, Early, 49 
 
 Nichol, J. P., on demo- 
 cracy, 458 
 
 Northern Plutocracy, 112 
 
 Norton, Andrews, 132 
 
 Novelists, 353 ; recent, 449 
 
 Noyes, Nicholas, 59 
 
 Oakes, Uriah, 57 
 
 Olfice, Nominations to, 
 109; Corruptions, 461 
 
 Old Home, The, Haw- 
 thorpe's, 348 
 
 Old manse, 323 
 
 Optimism, Emerson's, 274, 
 307 
 
 "Orations," 126 
 
 Orators, 67, 97 
 
 Orientalism, 270 
 
 Orpheus, C. Kerr, 422 
 
 Orphic Sayings, Emer- 
 son's, 257 
 
 Osgood, Mrs., 251 
 
 Othello, Adams's critique, 
 183 
 
 Otis, J&mes, 68 
 
 Outcasts of Poker Flat, 
 Bret Harte's, 441 
 
 Paine, E. T., 88 
 Palfrey, J. G., 135 
 Parker, Theodore, 135 
 Parsons, T. W., 454 
 Patois in poetiy, 230, 412 
 Paulding, J. K., 178 
 Payne, J. H., 250 
 Pennsylvania University, 
 
 Foundation of, 49 
 Percival, J. Gates, 250, 451 
 Petroleum V. Nasby, 
 
 422 
 Peyster, J. Watts de, 156 
 Phelps, Miss E. S., 369 
 Phillips, Wendell, 140 
 Phillis, Wheatley, 86 
 
INDEX. 
 
 471 
 
 Piatt's Western Windows, 
 
 251 
 Pierpont, J., 250 
 Pilgrim Fathers, 36 
 Pinkney, William, 129 
 Plutocratic spirit, 11 2, 464 
 Poe, Edgar Allan, I^ ; 
 as a poet, 2lt ; on Haw- 
 thorne, 334' 
 Poet at theBreahfast Table, 
 
 Holmes, 408 
 Poets of nineteenth cen- 
 tury, 187, 220, 449 
 Political speeches, 67, 97 
 Poor Hichard' s Almanadc, 
 
 63 
 Prentiss, Miss, 369, 
 Prescott, Wm. H., 147 
 Presidents, Decay of power 
 of, 144 ; Election and 
 term of Office of, 459 
 Press, Early institution of, 
 
 49 
 Preston, Mrs., 251 
 Princeton College, Foun- 
 dation of, 49 
 Progress of Dulness, 88 
 Pro-Slavery sympathy in 
 
 England, 465 
 Pulpit in New England, 
 43 ; influence after the 
 Union, 131 
 Puritan Fathers, 36, 40, 
 
 43, 49 
 Puritanism, Emerson's 
 contact with, 279 
 
 QuiHOY, Josiah, 99, 144 
 
 Eakdolph, John, 100 
 Bead, T. Buchanan, 251 
 Eehellion, Southern, 141 ; 
 
 ballads of, 238 
 Red Rover, Cooper's, 176 
 Eeligion, Practical, 466 
 Religious influences after 
 
 the Union, 131 
 Representative Men, Em- 
 
 ersotfs, 292 
 Republican party, 113 
 Revisited, Whittier's, 243 
 Revolution period, 61 
 Ripley, G., 452 
 Roderick Hudson, James's, 
 
 392 
 Romances, 1800-50, 143 
 Euskin on Lincoln, 465 
 
 Sam Slick, Haliburton's, 
 
 410 
 Sanderson, John, 411 
 Sandys, George, 32 
 Sargent, Epes, 250 
 Saturday Club, Boston, 
 - 207 
 
 Saxe, J. G., 410 
 Scarlet Letter, The, Haw- 
 thorne's, 335 
 Scribner's Magazine, 442 
 Sebastian Strome, J. Haw- 
 thorne's, 385 
 Sedgwick, Miss, 179 
 Sergeant, John, 129 
 Sewall, J. M., 85 
 Sewall, Samuel, 52 
 Shepard, Thomas, 42 
 Sherman, General, 156 
 Sigourney, Mrs., 252 
 Simms, W. G., 178 
 Slavery Question, 17, 70, 
 
 105, 136, 464 
 Smith, Captain John, 31 
 Smith, Mrs. E. 0., 179 
 South Carolina, Early lit- 
 erature of, 35 
 Southern States, Culture 
 of,16; Aristocratic spirit 
 of, 112 
 Spiritual Freedom, Chan- 
 
 uing on, 133 
 Spofiford, Harriet, 252, 
 
 454 
 Sprague, Charles, 251 
 Star-spangled Banner, 88 
 State sovereignty, 71 
 Stedman, E. C, 452 
 Still Water Tragedy, Aid- 
 rich's, 388 
 Stockton, F. R., 454 
 Stoddard, Mrs. E., 454 
 Stoddard, R. H., 251, 
 
 452 
 Story, Judge, 156, 186 
 Stowe, Mrs. Beecher, 366 
 Strachey, William, 32 
 Street, A. B., 251 
 Sumner, Charles, 141 
 Swedenborg, Emerson's 
 views of, 268 
 
 Than'kfidBlossom,'B.!ate's, 
 
 444 
 Thaxter, Celia, 252 
 Theocracy of New Eng- 
 land, 42 
 Theology after the Union, 
 
 131 
 Thomson, Benjamin, 57 
 Thoreau, Henry D., 181, 
 
 313 ; literary relation 
 
 to Emerson, 310 
 Thorpe, T. B., 179 
 Threnody, Emerson's, 
 
 299 
 Ticknor, F., 251 
 Ticknor, George, 155 
 Timrod, H., 251 
 Tourists' limited views, 8 
 Tramp Abroad, Mark 
 
 Twain's, 428 
 Transcendentalism, 254 
 Travel, relations of, to the 
 
 present, 5 
 Trumbull, John, 88 
 Tuckerman, H. T., 181 
 Tyler's, Prof. Coit, History 
 
 of American Literature, 
 
 30 
 
 Uncle Tom's Cabin, 
 
 Stowe's, 367 
 Undiscovered Country, 
 
 Howells', 400 
 Union, basis of the, 71 
 United States, Composite 
 
 nationality of, 355 ; 
 
 Constitution, 456 
 Universities, foundation 
 
 of, 48 
 
 Vatjqhah's OoldenFleece, 
 
 32 
 Verplanck's Major Eger- 
 
 ton, 180 
 Very, Jones, 251 
 Veto, Presidential, 460 
 Virginia, parent of Anglo- 
 American literature, 31 
 
 Taylor, Bayard, 248 
 Tennessee's Partner, Bret 
 
 Harte's, 442 
 Thacker, Antony, 41 
 Thanatopsis, William Cul- 
 
 len Bryant's, 183 
 
 Walden, Thoreau's, 316 
 War, civil, 141 ; ballads 
 
 of, 238 
 War of 1813, speeches on, 
 
 101 
 Ward, Nathaniel, 42 
 Ware, William, 178 
 
472 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Warner, C. D., 454 
 Warren, Joseph, 68 
 Warren, Mercy, 85 
 Washington, George, 69, 
 
 74 
 Wayside Inn, Long- 
 fellow's, 199 
 Weariness, Longfellow's, 
 
 197 
 Webster, Daniel, 115, 
 
 118 
 Webster, Noah, 78 
 Wells, Professor, 185 
 Western democracy, 112 
 Wetherell, Miss, 370 
 Wheatley, Phillis, 86 
 Wheaton, international 
 lawyer, 186 
 
 Whipple, E. P., 449 
 Whistle, The, Franklin's, 
 
 65 
 White, E. G., 186 
 Whitman, Mr«., 251 
 Whitman, Walt, 207 
 Whitney, Miss, 369 
 Whitney, W. D., 186 
 Whittier, J. Greenleaf, 
 
 240 
 Wigglesworth, Michael, 
 
 58 
 Wilde, E. H., 156 
 Williams, Roger, 40, 46 
 Willis, N. P., 180, 251 
 Wilson, Henry, 156 
 Wilson, James, 68 
 Winslow's Narratiiie, 39 
 
 Winthrop's History, 45 
 Winthrop, Theodore, 370 
 Wirt, William, 129 
 Wit and humour, 402 
 Witch mania in New Eng- 
 land, 45 
 Women, tyranny of, 395 
 Wood, William, 38 
 Woodworth's Old Oaken 
 
 Bucket, 250 
 Woolman, John, 80 
 Worcester, lexicographer, 
 186 
 
 Yale College, Foimdation 
 
 of, 49 
 Yankee Doodle, 87 
 
 Printed hy R. & R. Clark, Edinhurgh. 
 
7Xi"V_^ '-T