PS 72 Rs "'' - A PRIMER OF American Literature RICHARDSON NEWnr REVISED EDITION ■MM LiBRARY OF CONGRESS. P'^^^a. Chap. Copyright No. Shelt^^-S \S0& UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE BY CHARLES F. RICHARDSON PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH IN DARTMOUTH COLLEGE NE WL V RE VISED EDITION WITH AN APPENDIX CONTAINING THE PORTRAITS AND HOMES OF EIGHT AMERICAN AUTHORS SEVENTY-FIRST THOUSAND HOv\\'^-'?>''^ BOSTON, NEW YORK, AND CHICAGO HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY (&^z $aitiecj5iDe press, Cambciti0e 1S96 f^ '■-? Copyright, 1878, 1883, and 1896, By CHARLES F. RICHARDSON. All 7'igkts reserved. ^.w.. LC Control Number 2004 530057 The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A. Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Co. CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. 1620- 1775. PAGE 1. The Beginning i 2. The Theological Era 3 3. Increase and Cotton Mather .... 4 4. Eliot's Indian Bible 6 5. Roger Williams 7 6. Other Writers of the Seventeenth Century 8 7. Yale College .9 8. Jonathan Edwards 10 9. The Followers of Edwards . . . . .12 10. Benjamin Franklin . 13 11. Franklin as a Writer 14 12. Franklin as a Scientist and Diplomatist . 15 13. Other Writers of the Eighteenth Century . 15 CHAPTER II. 1775-1812. 1. The Revolutionary Period 18 2. George Washington as a Writer .... 18 3. Thomas Jefferson 19 4. The Federalist 20 5. Thomas Paine 21 6. Poets 22 7. The First Novelist 23 8. Historians and Other Writers .... 23 IV CONTENTS, CHAPTER III. 1812-1861. I. 2. J- 4- 5- 6. /• 8. 9- 10. II. 12. 13- 14. 15- 16. 17. .18. 19. 20. 21, 22. 23- 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30- 31. 32. Theological Changes William Ellery Channing Other Religious Writers The Knickerbocker School W^ASHINGTON IrVING . James Kirke Paulding Joseph Rodman Drake . Fitz-Greene Halleck . Other Early Poets William Cullen Bryant . Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Longfellow's Poeinis . Longfellow's Other W'orks John Greenleaf W^hittier Holmes's Poems . Holmes's Prose Works James Russell Lowell . Edgar Allan Poe Other Poets Orators Historians .... George Bancroft William Hickling Prescott John Lothrop Motley Francis Parkman Other Historians Fiction — James Fentmore Cooper Nathaniel Hawthorne Other Novelists .... Ralph Waldo Emerson Other Transcendentalists . Miscellaneous Writers Scientific and Special Writers CONTENTS, V CHAPTER IV. AFTER 1861. I. Literature of the Civil War ,,*,']'] %. Poets 79 3. Bayard Taylor 80 4. Richard Henry Stoddard ..... 81 5. Edmund Clarence Stedman 81 6. Thomas Bailey Aldrich 82 7. Walt W^hitman 84 8. Other Poets 85 9. Francis Bret Harte ^'j 10. The American Short Story 88 11. William Dean Howells 91 12. Henry James, Jr. 93 13. Edward Eggleston 94 14. George W. Cable 95 15. Romanticists 95 16. Edward Everett Hale 9^ 17. Louisa May Alcott 99 t8. American Humor 99 19. Charles Dudley Warner 102 20. Essayists ^°^ 21. Recent Historians 105 Helps for Further Study .... 17, 25, 75, 108 A Course of Reading 109 Chronological Table 113 APPENDIX. Portraits and Homes of William Cullen Bryant. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. John Greenleaf Whittier. Oliver Wendell Holmes. James Russell Lowell. Nathaniel Hawthorne. Harriet Beecher Stowe. Ralph Waldo Emerson. A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE, CHAPTER I. 1620-1775. I. The Beginning. — As soon as the English colonists landed on American shores, at Jamestown and Plymouth, they began to think of the estab- lishment of schools of sound learning : in Virginia for the purpose of educating the Indians, and* in Massachusetts Bay for the supply of church pas- tors. By 16 19 the proposed Virginia University possessed, as gifts from English donors, fifteen thousand acres of land and fifteen hundred pounds in money ; and its early establishment at Henrico, on the James River, was prevented only by a gen- eral Indian massacre on March 22, 1622, when three hundred and forty persons, including the superintendent of the university, lost their lives. Nothing further was done toward establishing a Virginia college until 1660, and the College of William and Mary, the outcome of the original 2 A PRIMER OF AMEHrICAN LITER A TURE. idea, did not receive its charter until 1693. The Puritans of Massachusetts were more fortunate and more prudent than the Cavaliers of Virginia, for they suffered no loss by any extensive massacre, and they depended upon themselves instead of looking for help from England, where, indeed, they had few friends. Many of them were men of soundly trained minds, and some were graduates of Cambridge University in the mother country. Their " school or college '* at Newtown (afterwards called Cambridge), near Boston, was begun in 1636 with only four hundred pounds in money ; but two years later it received a sum amounting, it is sup- posed, to seven or eight hundred pounds, together with a respectable library, by the will of John Har- vard, the young Charlestown minister whose name Harvard University now bears. From that time its income was small but sure, and its existence during the latter part of the seventeenth century did much to give Massachusetts the literary start which the greater wealth and the imported instructors of the Virginia institution could not offset. In the north- ern colonies the village was the distributing centre ; in the southern, the planter's mansion ; hence the greater prominence, in the former, of the meeting- house, the town-meeting, the school, and the print- ing-press ; while, in the more sparsely settled slave-holding communities south of Philadelphia, intellectual force made itself most manifest, even from the first, in law and politics. Here and there, THE THEOLOGICAL ERA 3 however, book-making — or at least religious and political pamphleteering — appeared with creditable promptness ; and those colonists who first taught or wrote have their posthumous reward in the most vigorous offshoot that the literature of any nation has ever been able to put forth. American litera- ture has a right to a share in the heritage of the countrymen of Alfred and Chaucer and Shake- speare ; but its enforced independence and the influences of its new surroundings have given it character and deserts of its own. 2. The Theological Era. — At the outset Amer- ican writings were imitative, and essentially unlit- erary and unimportant; the first writers w^ere of English birth and education, and the early col- leges were closely fashioned after the Oxford and Cambridge pattern, in which divinity and the '' hu- manities '' held the first place. The settlers of Massachusetts were men who had fought and suf- fered for their religious opinions, and they naturally held them with considerable firmness, as opposed to the Church of England on the one hand, and the Baptists and Quakers on the other. So long as the influence of the Puritans and their descendants was predominant, it was natural that the affairs of the soul should be uppermost ; and not until politics began to interest the colonists in a vital manner did religious books and tracts cease to form the bulk of the issues of the press. Novels and plays were unknown ; verse was didactic, devotional, or satiri- 4 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE. cal ; historical tracts were almost hopelessly pre- judiced by the theological or personal opinions of their writers ; and philosophy became an important study only as a means of religious defense. One of the first issues of the printing-press set up at Cam- bridge in 1639 was the Bay Fsalm Book, a wooden metrical version by New England divines whose sincerity surpassed their lyrical powers. This was the first book written and printed at home, for though George Sandys, an English gentleman con- nected with the Virginia company, had made, on the banks of the James River, a tolerable transla- tion of Ovid, he printed it in London. 3. Increase and Cotton Mather. — Nearly every minister who thought he had anything to say, and possessed the means of getting it printed, wrote on some biblical or theological theme. The titles were often of great length. The Application of Re- demption by the Effectual Work of the Word a?id Spirit of Christ was as brief as the average ; and the interest excited in such works is shown by the fact that this treatise reached a second edition after the death of the author, Rev. Thomas Hooker, the founder of Hartford. Of all the theological (vriters of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Increase Mather and his son Cotton were the most voluminous. The publications of the former num- bered eighty-five, and of the latter no less than three hundred and eighty-two. Increase Mather was born at Dorchester, and graduated at Harvard INCREASE AND COTTON MATHER. 5 in 1656, though he deemed an additional European training necessary, and took a degree at Dublin two years later. He was president of Harvard between 1685 and 1 701, and had some success in his efforts to be preacher, diplomat, and educator at the same time. His writings have little literary value, though his Essay for the Recording of Illustrious Providences is a naively interesting compound of superstition and story-telling. Cotton Mather inherited all his father's zeal, together with the bookish tastes of his grandfather, John Cotton, of the First Church in Boston. He graduated at Harvard in 1678, and, having overcome a painful habit of stammering, became his father's colleague in the North Church, Boston, in 1684. The youth was then only twenty- one years of age, but his head had been crammed with much undigested knowledge. At tw^elve he was well along in Hebrew, and had mastered the leading Latin and Greek authors ; and his daily life was from the first a piece of systematic machin- ery. Mather was a firm supporter of the doctrines of extreme Calvinistic theology, and to him devils and angels were as real as his own family. In witchcraft he fully believed, in common with most of the wise men of his time ; and his first important book, Memorable Provide?tces relating to Witchcraft^ appeared in 1689, three years before the Salem executions, which Mather justified. The Wonders of the Invisible World., issued in 1693, gives an account of these executions, without any show of 6 A PRIMER OF AMERICA?/ LITER A TURE, compassion, or any intimation that human beings, and not evil spirits, were being put to death. And yet this cold, stern man was a life-long worker for sailors, prisoners, Indians, and the suffering and oppressed. Mather wrote on a multitude of sub- jects, but the work on which his reputation chiefly rests is the Magnalia Christi Americaiia^ published in London in 1702, — a storehouse of ecclesiastical, civil, and educational history, together with many biographical sketches. As a collection of facts it is an authority, though not an unquestionable one ; and in those passages which are colored by the writer's prejudices it is easy to detach the true from the false. Mather died in 1728, and left a great gap in what the Massachusetts colonists deemed the literature of the time. By his side the other early clergymen of New England, with two excep- tions, must take an inferior place, for they equaled him in zeal and fertility, but not in ability. 4. Eliot's Indian Bible. — John Eliot, the " Apostle to the Indians," was born in England and educated at the University of Cambridge, coming to Boston in 163 1, and accepting as his life-mission, the next year, the conversion of the Indians, who were evidently, in his opinion, the descendants of the lost tribes of Israel. Having learned their language by the aid of an Indian ser- vant in his family, he began preaching in Nonantum, now Newton, in 1646. Threats did not affect him, and little churches of natives were slowly gathered ROGER WILLIAMS. 7 in the Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth colonies, twenty-four of his converts aiding the industrious Eliot in carrying them on. He had troubles with the colonists, whom he deterred from extirpating the Indians in 1675, ^"^ whom he offended by his Christian Commonwealth^ published in England in 1660, — a work against which seditious intent was charged. Eliot wrote an English harmony of the Gospels, an Indian grammar, and some lesser works ; but his chief monument of industry and scholarship is his translation of the entire Bible into the Indian tongue. This appeared in two parts, the New Testament in 1661, and the w^hole Bible in 1663, being the labor of the unaided Eliot. It is worthy of mention as the first Bible, in any lan- guage, printed in British America, and still remains one of the most noteworthy contributions to philo- logy made in this country, though its value as a christianizing agent was of course temporary. 5. Roger Williams. — The Puritans, although they were in a majority, and controlled religious and social affairs in New England with an iron hand, were not without opponents. Of these the most prominent was Roger Williams, a Church of England clergyman who had become a non-con- formist just before sailing for America, in 1630. For five years he was in every way a political and theological thorn in the side of the colony of Mas- sachusetts Bay, though many of his principles were thoroughly in accord with what is now considered 8 A PRIME R OF AMERICAN LITER A TURE. truth and progress. To escape banishment to Eng- land, he went, with four followers, to the site of the present city of Providence, and set up a community in which secular and religious affairs were divorced. Becoming a Baptist in 1639, he founded a church the same year, which he quitted after a few months. The remainder of his life was mainly spent in Providence, though he lived in London for some time, where he was surprised to find John Milton as versatile as himself, and considerably more pro- found. The Quakers were freely admitted to Provi- dence ; but Williams and George Fox carried on sharp controversies, and the former engaged in public debate with the Quaker champion. His Bloody Tenent of Persecution^ Hireling Ministry none of Chrisfs, and Experi^nents of Spiritual Life and Health are his principal works, but their present value is not great. Williams's whole career shows what a man of sincerity, force, and love of liberty can accomplish, though his powers be hindered by a certain instability and superficiality. 6. Other Writers of the Seventeenth Cen- tury. — Captain John Smith was a voluminous but sometimes hasty and untrustworthy narrator of his own adventures. His residence in America was so brief that in no true sense do his stories of travel belong to American literature. Nathaniel Ward, minister at Ipswich, pubHshed in 1647 ^ sharp satire on English social life, called The Simple Cobbler of Agawa?n, Governor John W^in- YALE COLLEGE. 9 throp's valuable history of New England, in the form of a journal between 1630 and 1649, was not fully published until 1826. The manuscript of another governor's journal, William Bradford's His- tory of Plymouth Plantation (1602 - 1646), was lost until 1855, and first completely published in 1856. It had formed the basis of Nathaniel Morton's New England^ s Memorial^ 1669. Both of these records, written by prominent actors in the scenes described, are historical documents of solid importance ; of the two, Bradford's excels in strength and Winthrop's in form. The honor of the first publication in New England, of a volume of original verse belongs to Anne Bradstreet, whose collected works appeared in 1678. Some of the poems are by no means devoid of merit, though disfigured by awkwardness and stiffness of style. Peter Folger, Benjamin Franklin's grandfather, wrote a long doggerel en- titled A Looking Glass for the Ti7nes, It was hard to write anything but doggerel so long as the cur- rent versions of the Psalms were in vo2:ue. Michael Wiggles worth's Day of D 00771 (1662) is a sulphurous poem on the day of judgment, with some strong lines, one of which devotes to non-elect infants *' the easiest room in hell." It was very popular in its day, running through nine editions in America and two in England. 7. Yale College. — In the year 1700 some Con- necticut ministers met at New Haven, and talked over the plan of establishing a college in the col- 10 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE. ony, a subject which had been broached as early as 1647. Meeting again in Branford the same year, they deposited forty books on a table, each de- claring as he laid down his parcel, " I give these books for the founding of a college in this colony.'^ In its early years the new institution led a wander- ing and not altogether peaceful life at Killingworth, Saybrook, and Milford, but was finally located in New Haven in 17 16. The Saybrook Platform (Congregational) had been made binding on the officers in 1708. The religious teaching of the college was somewhat more conservative than that at Harvard, even in the eighteenth century ; but the publications of its officers and graduates were fewer, partly in consequence of the lack of a pub- lishing centre in the colony. Philosophy, however, was from the first a prominent study, and to this fact is due, in some measure, the subsequent career of the earliest of American metaphysicians. 8. Jonathan Edwards was born in East Wind- sor, Connecticut, in 1703, graduated at Yale in 1720, was a tutor there between 1724 and 1726, was pastor in Northampton and Stockbridge, and in 1757 was elected president of the College of New Jersey at Princeton, dying there in March of the next year, after holding office less than three months. As a mere youth he began the study of mental science, and took up the task of showing the harmony between the Calvinistic theology and the conclusions of philosophy. Locke he mastered JON A THAN ED WA RDS. 1 1 at thirteen, and afterwards studied other accessi- ble authorities ; but Locke's influence was always strong in his mind. In 1746 he wrote a Treatise on the Religious Affections^ in which he showed what he deemed to be the marks of true religion. An Inquiry into the Qiialificatio7is for Full Communion followed : a work in which he laid down the prin- ciple, since maintained in the New England Con- gregational churches, that true conversion and a correct life should be prerequisites for admission to the Lord's Supper. This apparently obvious opin- ion was not shared by his Northampton church, and he was compelled to leave it, undertaking the duties of missionary to the Stockbridge Indians. In Stockbridge, between 175 1 and 1754, he wrote his famous treatise on the freedom of the will, the full title of which was A Careful and Strict Inquiry into the Moder?t Notion of that Freedom of Will which is supposed to be essential to Moral Agency^ Virtue and Vice^ Reward and Punishment^ Fraise and Blame. His other works were not few, but upon this chiefly rests his reputation as philosopher and theologian. It was designed to show that Calvinistic notions of God's moral government are not contrary to the common-sense of mankind, but in strict consonance therewith. Edwards main- tained that the will is not self-determined, and that the assertion of absence of certainty in the universe is inconsistent with any correct idea of a ruling power. Some English necessitarians promptly 12 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE, hailed Edwards as one of their number, but he re- pudiated the connection, and declared that man's sinful disposition was man's greatest sin, far from being an excuse for wrong-doing. From its first appearance until the present time, the treatise has been the subject of sharp criticism, both by Calvin- ists and Arminians. Reduced to its lowest terms, it declares that we choose to choose to choose — and so on — to act freely, and that such choice absolutely fetters freedom of action. 9. The Followers of Edwards. — The princi- pal leaders, in the eighteenth century, of the school of didactic philosophy which Edwards shaped were Samuel Hopkins and Timothy Dwight. Hopkins studied theology under Edwards, of whom he pub- lished a biography. His System of Theology ap- peared in 1793, and " Hopkinsianism " was a common term in New England for many years. Hopkins was one of the first to oppose slavery ; he caused it to be abolished in Rhode Island^ and formed a plan for colonizing and evangelizing Africa with free negroes. Timothy Dwight was president of Yale between 1795 and 1817. His Theology Explained and Defended (18 18) consisted of one hundred and seventy-three sermons. While adhering in the main to the principles of Edwards, he dissented in minor points, and considerably popularized the system. Dr. Dwight, who was one of the most accomplished scholars of his time, also wrote verse of the orthodox eighteenth-century BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 13 iambic-pentameter order, ranging in theme from The Conquest of Canaan to the view from Greenfield Hill in his own Connecticut ; and a book of trav- els, though his explorations extended no farther than New England and New York. 10. Benjamin Franklin. — The eighteenth cen- tury gradually became rich in the names of potent Americans, one of the most remarkable of whom was Benjamin Franklin, who had all the versatility of Roger Williams and the Mathers, and worked in a far wider field. Franklin, the fifteenth of a family of seventeen children, was born in Boston in 1706, his father being a tallow-chandler, and his mother the daughter of Peter Folger, a man of some literary ability. Early apprenticed to his brother James as a printer, Franklin read every- thing he could lay hands upon, and was espe- cially fond of Addison's Spectator, The itch for writing was soon manifest, and he began to print pieces on public affairs in The New England Courant^ his brother's newspaper. The people read and liked them, but they caused a disagree- ment with his brother, and in 1723 young Franklin ran away to New York and Philadelphia, where he went to work as a journeyman printer. In 1730 he bought the Fe?insylvania Gazette, then two years old ; and soon became a power in politics and society. Through his efforts a library was started in Philadelphia in 1731 ; the American Philosoph- ical Society in 1743 ; and the Academy of Philadel- 14 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITER A TURE. phia, afterwards the University of Pennsylvania, in 1749. In 1753 he became postmaster-general for the colonies, and was frequently commissioner be- tween them and England. In 1766 he secured the repeal of the obnoxious Stamp Act; in 1775 he went to the Continental Congress ; and in 1776 he helped to draft the Declaration of Independence, which he signed. Between that year and 1785 he was employed abroad in various diplomatic func- tions, returning in time to be a delegate to the Constitutional Convention in 1787. He died at Philadelphia in 1790. II. Franklin as a Writer. — A Dissertatio7i on Liberty and Necessity was printed by Franklin in London in 1725, during a temporary residence in that city, being a reply to a work by William Wollaston on which the young printer was setting t}^e. In 1732 Franklin began, in Philadelphia, the publication of Poor Richard's Almanac, the issue of which was continued for twenty-five years. '' Richard Saunders, Philomath " was the professed author, and Benjamin Franklin was the printer. The principal part of the almanac was a collection of original saws and sayings, which were eagerly awaited by the people, and promptly passed into current circulation. The inculcation of practices of prudence and economy was always a leading idea in these maxims, and they had a prompt effect in increasing the amount of spare money in Phila- delphia. Besides these, the almanacs contained FRANKLIN AS A SCIENTIST. 15 jocose introductions and doggerel rhymes for each month. The annual sale was about ten thousand copies, and they were fairly worn out by their homely readers. The most of Franklin's other writings consisted of miscellaneous and random, but by no means hasty papers on political, finan- cial, and scientific subjects. The Busybody^ a series of essays in would-be Addisonian style, and some ballads written in early life, should also be mentioned. Franklin was an excellent letter-writer, and in his correspondence a full picture of the man is presented. If anything further were needed to complete our idea of his personality, it is sup- plied in his Autobiography^ the only one of his writings possessing distinctly literary merit, and therefore doubly welcome in an age when theology and politics absorbed the attention of the colonial mind. 12. Franklin as a Scientist and Diploma- tist. — To Franklin belongs the honor of showing that lightning is electricity ; and the invention of the lightning-rod. About the year 1750 he fore- shadowed this discovery in his letters, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in conse- quence of his papers on the subject. In foreign courts his influence was largely due to personal power, but as a political writer he is clear and cogent. 13. Other Writers of the Eighteenth Cen- tury. — A trustworthy History of the First Discov- 1 6 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE, ery and Settlement of Virginia was published in 1747 by William Stith, afterwards president of Wil- liam and Mary College. John Woolman, an itiner- ant Quaker, born in New Jersey, wrote little, his principal literary production being in the form of personal recollections. This J^our?ial of Life and T7'aveh iii the Service of the Gospel appeared in 1774, three years after his death, and may be put on the shelf beside Franklin's Autobiography^ on the score of Charles Lamb's advice : " Get the writings of John Woolman by heart." Thomas Prince, minister of the Old South Church, Boston, from 1718 to 1758, planned a Chro7tological His- tory of New England, in the form of annals, from 1603 to 1730, but only brought the work down to 1633. It was his intention to present a bare chron- icle of facts, but in passages he rose to a certain modest eloquence of historic portrayal. Chief Jus- tice Samuel Sewall, of Boston, was a prominent man in the colony, and wrote several books ; better than all of them, however, was his full Diary from 1674 to 1729, first published by the Massachusetts Historical Society, in 1878-1881. Sincere, graphic, and shrewd, these note-books of Judge Sewall's present an important picture of Puritan life in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and are the most remarkable contribution to American social history yet made by a diarist. HELPS FOR FURTHER STUDY, 17 HELPS FOR FURTHER STUDY. Smith's A True Relation of such Occurrences and Accidents of Noate as hath hapned in Virginia^ etc. (accessible in Ar- ber's reprint of Smith's works), Bradford's history Of Pliinoth Plantation, Winthrop's History of A^ew England, Sewall's Diary, Jefferson's N'otes on Virginia, Lodge's Short History of the English Colonies in America, and Weeden's Economic and Social History of N'ew Engla7td, read consecutively, will give a sound elementary knowledge of the foundations of so- ciety in the colonies, out of which literature ultimately rose. Valuable for young or busy readers is Lowell's essay on New Englaiid Two Centuries Ago, in the first series of Among my Books. The Old South Leaflets (address Old South Meeting-House, Boston) reproduce a great number of important documents in English and American constitutional history, and are here mentioned because some of them are subsidiary to literature. Stedman and Hutchinson's Library of American Literature is the most extensive body of representative selections illus- trating the growth of authorship in America; the first volume, in particular, includes extracts from rare books available only in the largest libraries. Tyler's History of American Literature to 1765 is the fullest account of the struggles of the colonists toward book-making. Richardson's American Literature, 1 607-1885, is the most extended history of our literature to the present time. CHAPTER 11. 1775-1812. 1. The Revolutionary Period. — The Ameri- can Revolution was the cause of much commotion in literature as well as in the forum or the field, being preceded, attended, and followed by great activity of the pen. A large part of the books and pamphlets written at the time were necessarily of temporary interest and of the slightest value as literature. But several of the speeches delivered during or before the meeting of the Continental Congress are marked by the fire and intensity of an earnest period. James Otis, of Boston, born in 1725, was the author of some vigorous pamphlets, and was an inspiring orator. A few fragments of his speeches have been preserved, but the one which is most familiar to school-boys is an avowed modern imitation. Josiah Quincy Jr. (i 744-1 775) shared with Otis, in Mas- sachusetts, the oratorical honors of the time. John Adams wrote influential pamphlets, and the Virgin- ian Patrick Henry, like Otis, deserves some literary mention for the fervid eloquence of his harangues or set speeches. 2. George Washington as a Writer. — Though Washington at no time in his life paid particular THOMAS JEFFERSON. 19 attention to the rhetorical art, he possessed a clear and somewhat individual style. Without including many productions of special interest, his literary " remains " are sufficient to fill fourteen large vol- umes. The journal of his expedition to the Ohio River was published at Williamsburg, Virginia, in 1754, and his Farewell Address in 1796, — a pro- duction reverently read by two generations of Americans. The rest of his collected works, pro- duced between these two dates, consist of addresses, messages, and correspondence. As a letter-writer Washington excelled, like Franklin ; and during his lifetime he was compelled to make out a list of spurious letters attributed to him, the popularity of his correspondence having led to such forgeries. 3. Thomas Jefferson was one of the most broadly educated men of his time, leaving been for- tunate in his instructors and zealous in the prose- cution of his studies. Many branches of learning he had pursued beyond the usual limit, and he was a vigorous writer, though no orator. His Notes on Virginia were written for the information of the French government, and were published in 1784. They include many shrewd observations and inter- esting suggestions. Jefferson's somewhat volumi- nous correspondence may be considered his most graceful literary memorial, though the Declaration of Independence, which he wrote, will always be considered one of the most remarkable of public documents, aside from its political importance. 20 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE. 4. The Federalist was a collection of essays published periodically, and arguing in favor of the Constitution of the United States, adopted in 1789. There were eighty-five numbers in all, of which the first seventy-six appeared in The Independent Jour- nal^ a semi-weekly newspaper published in New York. The publication began on October 27, 1787, and ceased, as far as the journal was concerned, on April 2, 1788. The Federalist was the concerted work of Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, who adopted no separate signatures, but wrote over the common name of Publius. The letters were addressed to the people of New York, in order to induce that state to support the pro- posed national Constitution. The purpose of the publication was controversial, for the Constitution had been so sharply attacked that its friends per- ceived the necessity of rallying to its defence. The original idea was Hamilton's, and he drew up the plan of the series. The completed work does not form a systematic treatise, but covers many ques- tions of government which every student of political science must consider. The authors had a special end in view, and they were zealous to show the colonists that advantage and danger united in de- manding the adoption of a Federal Constitution, with its checks and balances of a responsible ex- ecutive, a legislature with a strong upper chamber and a popular lower chamber, and an independent judiciary. In the light of later experience the wis- THOMAS PAINE. 2i dom and forethought of the writers are apparent. The work has been repeatedly issued, and is recog- nized as a standard authority on the elementary principles of government. 5. Thomas Paine was a prominent figure in Revolutionary literature, but must be remembered as a hard fighter rather than an intellectual force, in the higher sense of the term. Born in England in 1737, he began his working life as a stay-maker and dissenting preacher, meanwhile getting a gen- eral knowledge of literature by such promiscuous reading as he could do at odd moments. Becoming angry with the British government in consequence of his dismissal from the revenue service, he came to America in 1774 and obtained speedy notoriety as a political writer. His Serious Thoughts on Sla- very was a magazine article printed in 1775. Com- mon Sense, a political pamphlet, advocating a de- claration of independence and the formation of a republic, had a wide circulation, and exerted no small influence. At the end of 1776, Paine started a periodical called The Crisis, which was published, at no stated intervals, for some time, and had many readers. His patriotic services during the war were appreciated and rewarded, though his temper got him into occasional trouble. The Eights of Ma?i, an attempted vindication of the French Revolution, appeared in 1791 and 1792 ; and he wrote The Age of Reason in 1794 and 1795, partly in a French prison. The latter work has continued in circulation 22 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN- LITERATURE. to the present day, chiefly among unscholarly read- ers. It advocates a pure deism, but its method of criticism and temper of attack are now generally repudiated by the more learned writers of the same school. 6. Poets. — Philip Freneau, a Huguenot by de- scent and a New Yorker by birth, was the first American poet to attain much note, though there was a multitude of ballad-writers during the war. He published four volumes, and his political bur- lesques were very popular during the Revolution. His House of Night — a sort of reminiscence of Gray's Elegy and anticipation of Coleridge and the new-romantic poets of the nineteenth century — was the one American poem, in the strict sense of the word, written before 1800. John Trumbull's Pro- gress of D^dbiess and Elegy on the Times attracted no great attention ; but his AfcEingal (1782), a rollick- ing satirical poem in the style of Butler's Hudibras^ had a great circulation. Some of its lines are still popularly assigned to Butler. Francis Hopkinaon and Robert Treat Paine, Jr., were other patriotic and humorous versifiers. Joel Barlow's Visio?i of Cohiinbus (1787) was for a time a favorite; and his graver Cohcrnbiad^ an expansion of the preceding, issued in 1808, was the first attempt at a national epic. It is. stiff, but occasionally rises into merit. Barlow is better known by a poem on *^ hasty-pud- ding." Phillis Wheatley, a Massachusetts negress, had published a volume of not discreditable verse HISTORIANS AND OTHER WRITERS. 23 in London in 1773. The greater part of the Amer- ican poetry of the time, even the most patriotic, was in humble imitation of English models, and possessed relative interest but no absolute value. 7. The First Novelist. — Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland^ printed in 1798, introduced fic- tion into American literature. The slow appear- ance of the cis- Atlantic novel was not strange, for the conditions did not favor imaginative literature ; indeed, the English social novel did not appear be- fore the middle of the eighteenth century. Ormond was Brown's second book, and received prompt if uncritical approval. Arthur Mervym^ the third, was equally successful, and a better story than either. Brown had a graphic style, and no lack of imagination. Later writers have supplanted him, for the prevailing impression of gloom left by his books has not served to make them permanent favorites ; but at least he dared to introduce local scenes and characters, and developed his romantic and melancholy plots with a degree of originality the more creditable because his models were so few and untrustworthy. Brown, it should be added, started a monthly magazine, and was the first of our authors to make his whole living out of litera- ture. 8. Historians and Other Writers. — The histories written during the last century are chiefly useful as authorities for later writers, and lack the significance of Bradford's chronicle, or Winthrop's. 24 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITER A TURE. Dr. Abiel Holmes's (father of Oliver Wendell Holmes) Annals of America is of service as a sys- tematic compilation of leading events. In biogra- phy, William Wirt wrote a readable and once popular life of Patrick Henry ; and Chief Justice John Marshall prepared a solid biography of Washington. Scientific research was given a start by the writings of the ornithologist Alexander Wilson and other earnest specialists in new fields. Most of the writers of the time would not attract at- tention nowadays; and not all, even, of those here mentioned wrote as well as later authors whose names will be necessarily omitted in this book. Washington Irving once jocosely said of himself that he attracted attention because Englishmen were surprised to see an American with a quill in his hand and not on his head. But greater credit always belongs to the pioneer ; and it must be remem- bered that many authors of the eighteenth century wrote with meagre libraries ; with a narrow reading public, interested in theology and politics, not in literature ; with no possibility of making literature a livelihood ; and with far greater competition from foreign sources than that of which complaint is still made. HELPS FOR FURTHER STUDY, 25 HELPS FOR FURTHER STUDY. Bancroft's History of the United States is the best and most extended record to 1789. Higginson's Larger History of the United States (to Jack- son's time) may be read by those desiring a one-volume story of considerable size. Eggleston's and Fiske's school histories of the United States are valuable as condensed records, emphasizing the life of the people. The student, in reading the four works just named, should carefully distinguish between mere intel- lectual activity and true literary creativeness. Parton's Life of Jefferson, though not profoundly analytic, is thoroughly readable, and a trustworthy picture of anti- Federalist life and character, especially in Virginia. Quincy's Life of Josiah Quincy is the best corresponding picture of Federalist life in New England. The American Statesmen and Ainerican Men of Letters Series should be placed entire upon the shelves of all but the smallest libraries. The former contains lives of Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Hamilton, S. Adams, J. Adams, J. Q. Adams, Henry, Marshall, Jay, Webster, Calhoun, Monroe, Jackson, Randolph, Gallatin, Madison, Benton, Clay, Mor- ris, Van Buren, Cass, and Lincoln ; the latter, of P>anklin, Irving, Cooper, Bryant, N. Webster, Emerson, Thoreau, Ripley, Margaret Fuller, Poe, Willis, Simms, and Taylor. Fiske's Critical Period of American History ^ 1 783-1 789, is a useful book, the nature of which is explained by its title. Bryce's American Commonwealth is in other ways almost indispensable, but its treatment of American literature is weak and unsatisfactory. Prescott's paper on Charles Brockden Brown^ in Biog7'aph- ical and Critical Miscellanies^ is still helpful as a picture of the disadvantages attending the development of fiction in America. Winsor's Narrative a^id Critical History of America (see its index) contains several chapters bearing on the growth of early American authorship. CHAPTER HI. 1812-1861. I. Theological Changes. — The increasing im- portance of political affairs, together with the growth in size and prosperity of the young nation, had served to deprive theology of its preeminent place in American literature, though only the rela- tive number of volumes on religious subjects was diminished. The beginning of the present century, however, was marked by a considerable contro- versial excitement among the New England clergy, incident to the spread of Unitarian views in and around Boston. Harvard University was the centre of interest, and the election of a Unitarian to the HoUis professorship of divinity in that institution, in 1805, excited great attention. The change in the Congregational churches of Massachusetts had been a gradual one, for many of the Congregational divines of Boston and its neighborhood had been regarded with suspicion by their stricter brethren, even during the eighteenth century. In 1785, the very year of the appearance of the first American Episcopal Prayer-Book, King's Chapel, in Boston, the pioneer Episcopal society in New England, had stricken out all Trinitarian expressions from THEOLOGICAL CHANGES. 27 its liturgy; while as early as 1718 an Arian had been ordained over the Hingham church. The war of pamphlets and books began in 18 12, simul- taneously with the second conflict between England and the United States. The chief Unitarian leader was William Ellery Channing, while the most con- spicuous figure among the conservative Congrega- tionalists was, perhaps, Moses Stuart, professor in the theological seminary at Andover. The Pa7io- plist was established as the Trinitarian and The Christian Exaininer as the Unitarian organ ; and the discussion was carried on with ability on both sides, and with a suitable degree of courtesy, though it was impossible to debate matters in which the nature of God and the destiny of the soul were concerned without considerable earnest- ness of language. It is not desirable, in a brief study of the development of a national literature, to chronicle the names of those who have written for doctrinal or denominational purposes, without conscious or unconscious attainment of artistic re- sults in literary form ; but the general mitigation of the austerities of theology and of social life in the book-producing part of New England deserves record, because it gave poets, novelists, essayists, historians, and orators the constructive freedom essential to the production of true literature in any age. The Puritans ** builded better than they knew ; " and Avhen spiritual emancipation came, their intense individualism reappeared, far more 28 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE, potently than before, in an Emerson or a Haw- thorne. 2. William Ellery Channing deserves mention as the most visible connecting link, in historical evolution, between the theological New England and the literary. He was born at Newport in 1780, graduated at Harvard when he was eighteen, and went to Virginia as a teacher ; but the return jour- ney, in 1800, so severely taxed his slight frame that he remained an invalid all his life. In 1803 he became pastor of a Boston church, and soon was famous as a finished orator. His unstudied style was as felicitous as his thoughts were clear j and his Remarks o?i the Life and Character of Napo- leon Bo7iaparte^ published in 1828, justly gave him some European reputation. Many of his sermons were published ; and he continually delivered ad- dresses at ordinations and literary anniversaries, which occasions he used to make notable by the presentation of carefully prepared opinions on the leading religious and political questions of the time. He had returned from Virginia an uncompromis- ing opponent of slavery, and he argued against it to the day of his death. He hated controversy ; but his opinions were so firmly established and his method of expression so straightforward that his writings have a strong sweep. He had no need to remember the old maxim that art is to conceal art ; for he spoke and wrote in the simplest and most natural way, and was surprised to find himself OTHER RELIGIOUS WRITERS. 29 deemed eloquent. His ideas of the sacredness of conscience were almost superstitious, and he thought the rights of the pleader ended with the solicitation toward obedience to the dictates of one's own sense of duty. His literary papers show what his reputation might have been had he con- fined himself to polite letters. His works fill six volumes, and are still found worthy of study, for they retain a considerable popularity in America and England, despite the temporary character of most of the subjects of the various lectures and essays. Channing died in 1842, at the age of sixty- two. 3. Other Religious Writers. — Later authors whose religious work has impinged upon the lit- erary field have been President Mark Hopkins of Williams College, as in his terse and thought- ful Evidences of Christianity ; the Swedenborgian Henry James Sr., whose Substance and Shadow is a book of deep and broad thought ; James Free- man Clarke, whose Ten Great Religions showed that comparative religion could be made popularly interesting without loss of scholarship ; and Horace Bushnell, whose Moral Uses of Dark Things is a collection of true essays. Of all American preach- ers, those whose sermons have most vividly shown the personality of the man in a distinct literary style have been Theodore Parker, Henry Ward Beecher, and Phillips Brooks ; whose love for God and man fused their thoughts in the furnace of 30 A PRIME R OF AMERICAN LITERATURE, genius. That they made no iasting mark upon our literature as such was due to their disposition not less than to their vocation. 4. The Knickerbocker School. — " The Knick- erbocker writers '' is a loose and not very useful term applied to certain authors who began to write soon after the beginning of the century, who were for the most part residents of New York, and who were in some cases descendants of the old Dutch stock. After the Knickerbocker magazine was es- tablished some of them became its contributors, and this fact caused the name to cling longer than it otherwise would have done. For the sake of convenience, the members of the coterie may be considered in order, including under this head the names of Washington Irving, James Kirke Pauld- ing, Joseph Rodman Drake, and Fitz-Greene Hal- leck. 5. Washington Irving was a native of New York city, born in 1783, and growing up in familiar- ity with its sights and characteristics. His father was of an old Scotch family, and his mother an Englishwoman. They were married before coming to this country. The boy^s older brothers had somewhat marked literary tastes, and under their guidance and example he soon began to read such of the English authors as his father's library con- tained. At nineteen he wrote for a newspaper edited by his brother Peter, taking up theatrical and social topics, and using the name of Jonathan WASHINGTON IRVING. 31 Oldstyle. This pseudonym describes with suffi- cient accuracy the nature and tone of these youth- ful productions. In 1804, attacked by a slight malady of the lungs, Irving sailed for Bordeaux, whence, after various tours in the Mediterranean and Italy, he went to Paris for a few months' resi- dence. Taking Belgium and Holland on the way, he next settled for a time in London. Meeting Washington Allston, the painter, in Rome, he half made up his mind to abandon literature for art. He returned to New York in 1806, with a wide European experience and a great store of literary material. At home again, he at once set to work, and the next year started a fortnightly periodical after the style of the English essayists of the eigh- teenth century. Salmagundi was the title, and it professed to give the " whimwhams and opinions of Launcelot Langstaff, Esquire.'' Like Addison, Irving had the help of other literary friends in his enterprise, Paulding aiding him in the prose and his brother William furnishing the poetry. The social follies and fashions of the day were satirized in a vein of genial humor, and the work is therefore a good picture of bygone customs. There is a story running through the whole, and most of the 'characters mentioned were real persons. Cockloft Hall, which figured prominently in the periodical, was a fine old house (still standing, though so mod- ernized as to be unrecognizable) on the bank of the Passaic River in Newark. In December, 1809, 32 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITER A TURE. Knickerbocker's History of New York appeared. Washington Irving and Peter Irving began it as a parody on a popular handbook issued a short time before, and its historical style was a burlesque of the language of a sketch printed in that publication. When Peter Irving went to Europe, Washington determined to continue the historical burlesque, and to make it a longer and independent comic history. An air of verisimilitude was given it by the publication of some preliminary notices con- cerning the finding of the manuscript in the Co- lumbian Hotel in Mulberry Street; and not a few persons were dull enough to be deceived by its evident but delicate pleasantry. Some descendants of the Dutchmen took serious offense at the per- sonal caricatures in the book, but everybody read it, and it was not long before it became a sort of national classic. We had at last something all our own, which was not copied from London or bor- rowed from Paris ; and the impetus thus given to native production was considerable. In 1810 Irving wrote a short biographical sketch of the poet Campbell, and three years later edited a mag- azine in Philadelphia, which for the next few years showed some signs of becoming the literary capital of the country. During another trip to Europe he began to publish the Skefch-Book, in numbers, and it was a success in both London and New York. Irving had won the warm friendship of Sir Walter Scott, who induced the London publisher Murray WASHINGTON IRVING. 33 to accept his book and pay the round price of ;^2oo for it. Murray afterwards doubled this sum, and Irving soon found himself in receipt of revenues from his pen much greater than Charles Brockden Brown, his only American predecessor as a profes- sional author, ever enjoyed. The Sketch-Book con- tained the perennial Legend of Sleepy Hollow and J^ip Van Winkle; and readers perceived that a new master of prose style had arisen, as well as a delicate humorist and a man in sympathy with the human heart. In 1820 and 182 1 Irving w^as in Paris, and in the latter year Murray paid him the great price of ;^iooo ior Bracebridge Hall^ a picture of English country life. In 1824 ;£'i5oo was paid by the same publisher for the Tales of a Traveller^ which the public received with less favor than had been accorded its predecessor. Two years later Alexander H. Everett, then minister to Spain, gave Irving a commission to translate some recently col- lected documents concerning Columbus. This was the basis of Irving's Lfe and Voyages of Christo- pher Columbus^ published in London in 1828, and sold to its publisher for three thousand guineas. Irving was now as successful in both fame and money as the best English authors who wrote at that period of high literary remuneration. This biographical work was kindly received by the critics, and seems to have determined Irving to cultivate the Spanish field further. The Chrofiicles of the Conquest of Granada followed, the author having made another 34 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERA TURE, tour in the south of Spain. It was a losing ven- ture, and attracted no general praise ; but Irving wrote still another Spanish book on the Voyages of the Companions of Columbus^ which appeared in 1 83 1. The Alhamhra (1832) was a sort of Spanish edition of Bracehridge HalL After serving for a time as secretary of legation in London, Irving re- turned home in 1832, and determined to explore the wdlds of the West, in lieu of Castilian antiquity. His Tour on the Frairies (1835) ^^'^^ reissued, with some European sketches, in a volume entitled The Crayon Miscellany^ which took its name from the author's pseudonym of Geoffrey Crayon, Gentle- man. Astoria^ the poorest and obscurest of the books to which Irving gave his name, w^as written to please John Jacob Astor ; it described Irving's youthful visit to the Montreal station of the North- w^est Fur Company, with accounts of early fur-trad- ing expeditions in Oregon. Miscellaneous contri- butions to the Knickerbocker xi\2Lg?iZVi\^ occupied the author until his appointment, in 1842, as minister to Spain. Coming back in 1846, he enlarged an agreeable biography of Oliver Goldsmith, in which he hit Dr. Johnson some hard raps ; and also began Mahomet and his Successors, published in 1850. Irving's fame, at this time, was declining, and the quality of his work deteriorating ; but having subjected all his previous volumes to slight revisions, and brought out a new and uniform edi- tion, he found that his public was still large and JAMES KIRKE PAULDING. 35 loyal. Undeterred by advancing age (he was now sixty-seven), he undertook his largest labor, the Life of WasJwigtoii^ the fifth and last volume of which was published three months before his death, in 1859. This biography had an army of readers, and deserved them, for it embodied all the accessible facts concerning Washington's life, in the felicitous style of a great master of Addisonian English. The earlier books, however, are most prized by the pre- sent generation of readers, and the Sketch-Book^ on the whole, remains the best example of his powers, combining, as it does, humor, pathos, and felicity of description. Irving's chief faults are a senti- ment that sometimes degenerates into sentimental- ity, and a would-be graciousness of style that often seems artificial. 6. James Kirke Paulding, now wholly a figure of the past, was five years older than Irving, having been born in 1778 in the town of Nine Partners, Dutchess County, New York. He survived Irving for a similarly brief period, dying in Hyde Park, New York, in i860. William Irving was his brother- in-law, and Paulding took up his abode in the house of that gentleman, in New York, in 1797. Having literary tastes of his own, he fell in with the plans of his every-day associates, and worked upon Sal- magu7idi with enthusiasm, when that short-lived periodical was started. Paulding was an office- holder a good part of his life, being secretary to the board of navy commissioners in 18 15, navy agent 36 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERA TURE. at New York for a dozen years, and secretary of the navy during the administration of Van Buren. He began his career as a versifier ; brought out, single- handed, in 1819, a second series of Sahnagimdi; and during all his life was constantly writing poems, novels, humorous sketches, and pamphlets. The Dutchman's Fireside^ a novel published in 1831, is his best work. 7. Joseph Rodman Drake wrote little, died young, and yet, by a few verses, has kept a perma- nent place in the American anthology. At the time of his death (1820) he was only twenty-five, having been a resident of New York all his life. Poverty was his lot at the first, but he contrived to study medicine, taking his degree in 18 16. Marrying a rich wife was his deliverance, and he was thus enabled to spend much of his time with Fenimore Cooper and Fitz-Greene Halleck, meanwhile ma- turing plans for literary labor. The Culprit Fay, his chief work, appeared in 18 19, having been written in consequence of a discussion between Drake, Cooper, and Halleck concerning the poetry of American rivers. In the samxC year he joined with Halleck in contributing verses to the newspa- pers under the name of *' Croaker," or ^* Croaker, Jr." The American Flag, a national lyric of much spirit but over-florid language, keeps Drake's name in the school reading-books. When he died, his friend Halleck laid this leaf of laurel on his grave : — OTHER EARLY POETS. 37 " Green be the turf above thee, Friend of my better days ; None knew thee but to love thee, Nor named thee but to praise.'* 8. Fitz-Greene Halleck was almost exactly a contemporary of Irving and Paulding, having been born at Guilford, Connecticut, in 1790, and dying there in 1867. He removed to New York in 181 1, and became clerk in a banking-house, but after- wards went into the office of John Jacob Astor. Halleck wrote little poems when a boy, some of which got printed in the newspapers. But when he formed his literary partnership with Drake, though twenty-eight years old, he had no conspic- uous reputation. He wrote little more than Drake, and his martial poem, Marco Bozzaris (first pub- lished in a volume in .1827), has remained his virtual title to fame, though he wrote a long poem called Fanny^ and lesser pieces entitled Alnwick Castle and Burns^ which have their admirers. It is only necessary to add that Halleck retired to Guilford in 1849 o^ ^ pension of two hundred dollars a year, given by the will of John Jacob Astor. He edited an excellent edition of Byron, as well as two vol- umes of selections from the British poets. 9. Other Early Poets. — Richard Henry Dana was born in 1787, and in early life was as- sociated with the club of gentlemen, headed by William Tudor, which established The North America7i Review in 18 15. Like his New York 38 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE. contemporaries just mentioned, he published an essay-serial called The Idle Man, on which Bryant and Washington Allston gave him some help. The Buccaneer, with other carefully written poems, appeared in 1827 ; this piece remains his best achievement. His prose essays are graceful, in an old-fashioned v/ay. Charles Sprague, a Bos- tonian who never went ten miles from his home, is another writer who deserves mention for the quality rather than the quantity of his verse. His Ode on Shakespeare, like Dana's poems, showed that the Boston bards, even if lacking the fire of imagination, were sedulously cultivating the art of verse-making. Richard Henry Wilde, a native of Dublin and a member of Congress from Georgia, wrote a famous lyric beginning My Life is like a Summer Rose. Other poets of the time, made celebrated by single pieces, were Francis Scott Key, whose Star Spangled Ba7iner was written during the siege of Fort AIcHenry, Baltimore, in the war of 18 12; Samuel Woodworth, who wrote The Old Oake?t Bucket ; John Howard Payne, whose Ho77ie, Sweet Home was first made public in a play ; and Albert G. Greene, the author of Old Grimes is Dead. J. G. C. Brainard, author of a grandiose poem on Niagara, and James A. Hillhouse were the suc- cessors of Dwight and Trumbull in Connecticut. Hillhouse was the author of somewhat heavy poems and dramas on religious subjects, Hadad commg under the latter head, and being his best-known production. WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT. 39 10. William Cullen Bryant connected the ear- lier and later days of our literature ; for he continued his activity as an author to the end of his life, in 1878. He was born in Cummington, Massachu- setts, in 1794, his father being the village physician and a man of good mental powers. Of all examples of literary precocity Bryant is one of the most remarkable. At the age of ten he was writing verse for the country papers, and at fourteen he brought out a couple of political poems. The Em- bargo and The Spanish Revolution, They were received with such favor that it was difficult to persuade the public that they were the work of a boy of fourteen. A second edition appeared in 1809, with certifications to that effect. In 18 10 Bryant entered Williams College, but did not grad- uate. Taking the law for his profession, he printed in 18 17 his celebrated poem of Thanatopsis^ choos- ing as the vehicle The North American Review^ which was begun as a general literary magazine. The poem has since been considerably changed ; but even in its earliest form it plainly showed the arrival of an American poet greater than any who had preceded him. Though the poem has death for its subject, it contains, like the Psalms of David, no absolute expression concerning the con- scious immortality of the soul ; yet it has been universally accepted by Christians as an embodi- ment of serenely courageous views of life and death ; omitting, perhaps_, but not denying. In 182 1 40 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE. Bryant read a long poem on The Ages before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Harvard, and the same year collected a few of his poems in a volume pub- lished at Cambridge. In 1825 he removed to New York, and became editor of the United States Review^ for which he wrote largely. The next year he became editorially connected with the Evening Post^ then a strong Federalist paper, but changed by Bryant into an organ of Democracy and free trade. A little bound volume, called The Talisman^ appeared annually for three years, beginning in 1827, Robert C. Sands and Gulian C. Verplanck doing some of the writing, and Bryant the rest. It differed from The Idle Ma?i and Salmagundi in its wider scope and less frequent issue. At this time Bryant occasionally wrote short stories. In 1832 he brought out a new edition of his poems, which, thanks to the influence of Irving, was reissued in London. Christopher North praised it in Black- wood, and the poet's position became secure, both abroad and at home. Between 1834 and 1849 Bryant was thrice in Europe, and wrote of his journeyings in an unimportant prose work called Letters of a Traveller, A second series of these letters followed another journey in 1858. By 1864 Mr. Bryant, though a slow and painstaking writer, had accumulated enough additional poems to make a thin volume. Of all his pieces, besides Thana- topsis, those entitled To a Waterfowl, A Forest Hymn, The Planting of the Apple-Tree, and The HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW, 41 Flood of Year's are the best. Bryant is the poet of nature, whose austerer moods are accurately de- picted in his cold verse. After passing his seven- tieth birthday, he determined to translate the Iliad of Homer, and published in 1869 a version in unrhymed pentameter, which, notwithstanding the constant agitation of the question of Homeric trans- lation, has been generally accepted as a good Eng- lish Homer. A similar translation of the Odyssey appeared in 187 1. Homer's chief qualities are stateliness and sweep, of which Bryant reproduces the first ; the magnificent motion of the Greek hexameter the English pentameter cannot ade- quately represent. II. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was the third in age of the chief American poets, — Bryant and Emerson having been his seniors. He was born in 1807 in Portland, Maine, of a courtly and well-to-do family. When fourteen years old, he entered Bowdoin College, where he graduated in 1825 in the class with Nathaniel Hawthorne, whom at that time he knew pleasantly but not intimately. Like Bryant, Longfellow at first determined to be a lawyer, but the year after graduation, though but nineteen, he was offered the professorship of mod- ern languages at Bowdoin, to qualify himself for which position he spent three years of study in Europe. From 1829, after his return, until 1835, he occupied the chair, writing short poems, and printing prose articles in The North American 42 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITER A TURE. Review. His first book was a little essay on the moral and devotional poetry of Spain, including translations of the Coplas de Manrique and some of Lope de Vega's sonnets. In 1835 he was chosen to succeed George Ticknor, who had just resigned the chair of modern languages at Harvard. This professorship he continued to hold until 1854, when he resigned and was succeeded by James Russell Lowell. With occasional trips to Europe, he con- tinued to reside in Cambridge until his death in 1882, occupying the stately old house used by Washington for his headquarters in 1775. 12. Longfellow's Poems. — Voices of the Nighty his first original volume, appeared in 1839, and in- cluded the best of the author's poems written up to that date ; among them some produced in his un- dergraduate days at Bowdoin. He was luckier than Tennyson in the reception given to his first venture, for A Psahn of Life, The Reaper a7id the Flowers, and Woods in Winter w^ere among the pieces in- cluded, and almost at once became popular favor- ites. Ballads a?id Other Poems — among them The Skeleton iii Armor, The Rainy Day, and The Vil- lage Blacksmith — appeared in 1842 \ and also a slender collection of Poems on Slavery, generally considered the least meritorious of the poet's works. The Spanish Student (1843), a pleasant little drama, introduced an element of humor which Mr. Longfellow, with a single exception, did not after- wards attempt to cultivate. The Belfry of Bruges, LONGFELLOW'S POEMS. 43 mainly original poems, with a few translations, came in 1846. The next year, 1847, Mr. Long- fellow began the publication of several poems which had a powerful effect in stimulating the growth of a literature devoted to American subjects. Evan- geline^ a sweet idyl of exile and love, was the first, written in hexameters, a metre previously little used. In its employment Mr. Longfellow has had plenty of followers, but few have succeeded in its use. The Seaside and the Fireside (minor poems) and The Golden Legend came between Evangeline and Hiaivatha (1855), another American poem, this time on an Indian subject, and written in a second unfamiliar metre, trochaic octosyllables. In it were embodied many Indian legends industri- ously collected by the author, and put into a form that proved attractive to multitudes of Americans and w^holly novel to the English public, which had already given to Longfellow greater favor than it had ever shown to Tennyson. Hiawatha may fairly be called the nearest approach to an Amer- ican epic. The Courtship of Miles Standish (1858) was a semi-humorous poem of colonial days, also in hexameters. In Tales of a Wayside Liii (1863) the expedient was adopted of embodying, as tales told at a chance gathering in an old inn at Sud- bury, several long poems on various subjects. Two additional series have since appeared. Mr. Long- fellow's distinctively American poems closed with The New England Tragedies (1868), two stern colo- 44 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE. nial dramas; and in 1872, having published The Divine Tragedy^ a dramatic account of the cruci- fixion of Christ, the author united the two last- mentioned works and The Golden Legend in a single volume entitled Ch7'istus, They make a fairly symmetrical whole ; but, though the plan had been long in the author's mind, it may be doubted whether a tale of mediaeval love-loyalty and two Puritan tragedies form the best illustrations of the progress of Christianity through the centuries. The Hanging of the O^a^te, a brief domestic poem, made an illustrated volume in 1874; and the next year the poet read at the fiftieth anniversary of his graduation at Bowdoin a remarkable poem, Mo- rituri Salutamns^ which, unlike most occasional pieces, was made noble by the author's intense per- sonal feeling in the event. Flower de Luce^ After- math, The Masque of Pandora, Kerainos, and Ultima Thule were later books ; In the Harbor and Michael Angelo were posthumously published. Throughout all Longfellow's poetry the prevailing marks are grace and beauty, warmed by a greater human sympathy than is displayed in the writings of the majority of eminent poets. 13. Longfellow's Other Works. — The prose writings of Mr. Longfellow have passed into the shadow, and have few readers to-day. But they played no small part in the development of culture in the new nation during the first half of the nine- teenth century, — a development greatly promoted JOHN GREENLEAF V/HITTIER, 45 by the miscellaneous and in its nature temporary portion of the work of the author of Hiawatha, In his youth he added to the drudgery of teaching the preparation of elementary text-books in French, Spanish, and Italian ; the sketches of travel called Outre-Mer (1835) ^^^ "^^ pensive and poetical ro- mance Hyperion (1839) brought to American readers the quaint charm of past and present Europe ; an essay on Anglo-Saxon literature gave a considerable impulse to the study of Old English, then almost an unknown tongue ; an anthology of The Poets and Poetry of Europe is still conveniently serviceable; a voluminous collection of Poefns of Places^ edited by Mr. Longfellow in later life, showed his con- tinued willingness to give the public of readers the benefit of his wide learning and his editorial taste ; while in 1867 appeared his translation of the P>ivine Comedy of Dante, of which he had long been a careful student. It closely follows the metre of the original, line by line, the spirit as well as the form being preserved ; and Mr. Longfellow, besides giv- ing a version of Dante superior to its predecessors, influenced, by his work, other American literal translators. This fidelity to the original text was gained, however, at the expense of tripping ease of language, and the translation must be considered rather hard reading, a circumstance partly due to the frequent presence of the feminine ending of the verse. 14. John Greenleaf Whittier, although always 46 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE. an industrious and conscientious author, never at- tained high popularity until the latter part of his life, when, by common consent in America, — though his European renown has always been small, — he was ranked among the first of our poets. A poor boy, of Quaker parentage, he began life as a farmhand and shoemaker, going to the village school in the winter months. His first poetical efforts, written when he was but seventeen, were published in the Newburyport Free Press, edited by William Lloyd Garrison ; and he subsequently contributed verses to the Haverhill (Massachusetts) Gazette, published near his birthplace. He afterwards con- trived to spend two years at the academy in that town. In 1829 he began journalistic work in Bos- ton, where, as well as in Hartford, Haverhill, Philadelphia, and Washington, he edited newspapers until 1839 ; and in 1847 he became corresponding editor of Dr. Gamaliel Bailey's National Era in Washington, to which he contributed many poems, reformatory and other. He early identified himself with the movement for the abolition of slavery, aiding in the establishment of the American Antislavery Society at Philadelphia ; and of this act he once said that, though not insensible to literary reputation, he set a higher value on his "name as appended to the Antislavery Declaration of 1833 than on the title-page of any book.'' Throughout the long antislavery agitation his poems were chiefly di- rected to the awakening of the people to the JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER, 47 horrors of slavery and the wickedness of any com- promise or compHcity with those who were engaged in the dreadful traffic. His Voices of Freedom (1841) and The Fanoratna and Other Foems (1856) contain many poems which are full of fire and inspiration, and glow with moral indignation and scorn. They were spirit-stirring as a trumpet-blast, and a power- ful help towards the dow^nfall of slavery. His poems In War-Time (1863) gave him a popularity which his adherence to a hitherto despised cause had rendered impossible. With the close of the war he gladly turned his pen to gentler themes, publishing successively Snow-Bou7id (1865), The Tent on the Beach (1867), Among the Hills (1868), Miriam (1870), The Fennsylvania Filgrim (1872), Hazel-Blossoms (1874), The Vision of Echard (1878), and four other collections between 188 1 and 1892. Maud Midler is the best known of his shorter poems, and Barba^^a Frietchie (1862) the most re- markable of those connected wdth the civil war. Snow-Bound^ his best book, is a genuine New Eng- land idyl, and puts between its covers more of the spirit of the region than any other American poem. It seems likely to remain a national classic. Mr. Whittier brought together the chief of his fugitive prose wTitings in two volumes, and also edited the best edition of John Woolman's J^ournaL As a writer of prose he possesses clearness and vigor. His biographical sketches are in some cases beauti- ful as the tribute of friend to friend. His gentle and high-minded earthly career ended in 1892. 48 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN IITERATURE, 15. Holmes's Poems. — Oliver Wendell Holmes was born in a historic house in Cambridge, just opposite the Harvard University buildings, in 1809, and grew up in that town before it had outgrown its quainter local characteristics. At twenty he graduated at Harvard, in a class whose virtues and whose ornaments he never ceased to celebrate in anniversary poems. Like Bryant, Longfellow, and Lowell, he thought to be a lawyer, but soon took up medicine, which he studied in Europe, paying special attention to anatomy, the branch he long taught at Harvard. The Collegian^ a college period- ical, received many contributions from him, and in 1836, the year he took his medical degree, he brought out a collected edition of his poems, in- cluding a rhymed essay on Poetry^ read by him at Cambridge that year. From that time he was always a favorite American poet at literary anniver- saries. His lyrical facility was unsurpassed by that of any other of our writers. That he was a humorist detracted from, rather than added to, his reputation, for there is a popular idea that a humor- ist cannot have deep feeling. In Holmes's case this is not true ; for The Last Leaf, perhaps his best single poem, is a masterpiece of pathos. Old Lronsides is a standard national lyric, and Holmes wrote a good share of the few commendable poems evoked by the civil war. Some of his best pieces — like The Deacon's Masterpiece^ Tarso?i Tiirell's Legacy, and The Chambered Nautilus — first ap- HOLMES'S PROSE WORKS. 49 peared in his longer prose works, where they fitted into their surroundings with entire appropriateness. He wTote no long poem. 16. Holmes's Prose Works. — Dr. Holmes was a leading spirit in the establishment of The Atlantic Mofithly, and its prompt success w^as largely due to his Autocrat of the Breakfast -Tahle^ a series of articles, half story, half essay, which were a novelty in American literature. Their satire is severe and yet genial, and their wit as polished and supple as a Damascus blade. The Prof essor at the Breakfast- Table^ written in the same style, soon followed ; and in 1872 the author once more tried the dangerous experiment, in The Poet at the Breakfast-Table^ of endeavoring to repeat a former triumph, in which attempt he was not unsuccessful. Elsie Ven7ier^ a curious story whose burden was inherited tenden- cies, appeared in i860; and The Guardiaii Angel ^ the author's best novel, in 1867. The hero of the latter work is a scholarly old bachelor who has written an unsuccessful book, but who goes through the w^orld like a moving patch of sunshine. Dr. Holmes wrote a life of the historian Motley, wdiich is one of the few^ gems in American biographical literature, and a brisk, readable, and just life of Emerson ; while in his last years (his death occurred in 1894) he prepared a revised edition of all his books. His secure place among our authors is that of the lyrist of occasion, the poet of sincere pathos, and the essayist of reflection and humor. 50 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE. Of his work much, in the nature of things, must fade, for he wrote, in his own words, Rhyines of an Hour ; but the residuum will be a worthy one. 17. James Russell Lowell, Uke Hohnes, wrote both poetry and prose, but it will not be necessary to consider them in separate sections. He, too, was born in Cambridge, in 18 19, in a spacious old house which remained his home. His father was the minister of the West Congregational Church in Boston. Lowell graduated at Harvard in 1838, being class poet, and reciting a poem which was deemed memorable in the student literature of the time. A law office in Boston was opened in 1840, but the poet soon shut its doors and devoted him- self entirely to literature. A Year's Life{\'^^\) in- cluded his poems up to that date, some of which the author afterward revised, throwing away the rest. Two years later he began the publication, in Boston, of The Pioneer^ a periodical of so high a character that it would surely fail now, and of course promptly came to its death at that time, though Lowell, Haw- thorne, Poe, Whittier, and Elizabeth Barrett wrote for it. In 1844 Lowell gathered poems enough to make another volume ; among them were A Legend of Brittany and Rhxcus, Some of the sonnets ex- pressed strong antislavery sentiments, and were addressed to the abolitionists Wendell Phillips and Joshua R. Giddings. The remainder of the vol- ume consisted of pieces which indicated that a new and true poet had arisen/notwithstanding certain JAMES RUSSELL LOW ELL. 51 marks of juvenility, waywardness, or imitativeness. The subjects were not novel, but they were treated in a style of which opulence of thought was the chief characteristic. A prose series of Conversa- tions on the Old Foets (1845) critically considered Chaucer, George Chapman, and some obscurer writers. Another volume of poems was printed in 1848, of which The Present Crisis made a con- siderable sensation. The Vision of Sir Laimfal, published the same year, is the most elaborate of the author's productions, being an allegory of good deeds, and containing many quotable lines. At this time Mr. Lowell was very industrious, for in 1848 he also brought out A Fable for Critics^ a clever characterization, in fluent verse, of the leading authors of the day, himself included. This char- acterization, though made in a humorous style, was accurate and just, and in the case of the younger writers its predictions have been amply verified. At the same fertile time in the author's life appeared the first series of the Biglow Fapcrs^ a collection of poems in Yankee dialect, by " Hosea Biglow," ed- ited and furnished with pseudo-learned notes and introductions by *^ Homer Wilbur, A. M., pastor of the First Church in Jaalam." These poems served a double purpose : that of preserving the perishable local expressions of New England in a permanent form ; and of fighting, with the sharpest weapons of satire, against the extension of slavery. This work, together with the Fable for Critics^ for the first time 52 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE. made Lowell a popular author, and gave him some reputation in England, though English readers at a much later date discovered that he was more than a humorist. In 1855 Lowell succeeded Longfellow in the chair of polite letters at Harvard, taking a European trip before entering upon his new duties. In 1867 a second series of the Biglow Papers in- cluded those poems in dialect which had been called out by the war. They were preceded by a critical essay in which was shown the antiquity of many presumed Yankee peculiarities of expression. It was not until 1869 that sufficient minor poems were collected to make another volume, which took its title of Under the Willows from its leading poem. The Com77ie7noratio7i Ode, in honor of the Harvard men who were killed in the war, was re- cited at Cambridge in 1865, and is the author's noblest poem and the most considerable poetic memorial of the struggle. For considerable periods Mr. lowell was editor of The Atlantic Monthly and The North Ajnerican Revie7v ; and his critical and miscellaneous essays in those periodicals were collected into volumes entitled Ainong 7?iy Books (two series) and My Study Wi7ido7as. These books, which showed their author to be the leading Amer- ican critic, agreeably united wit and wisdom, and were the result of extensive reading, illuminated by excellent critical insight. Having served his coun- try as minister to Spain in 1877-80, and to England in 1880-85, Lowell died in 189 1, and the literary EDGAR ALLAN FOE. 53 and civic honors of two countries were laid upon his grave, as upon that — at the time of his death — of our most representative man-of-letters. His later books need not be catalogued here ; the one most maturely and broadly representative of his powers is the collection entitled Democracy and Other Addresses (1886). The chief characteristic of Lowell's style as poet and critic may be summed up in Theodore Watts' single word of apt charac- terization, sagacity, — a word which, if not neces- sarily synonymous with high creative genius, is indicative of applied intellectual strength. 18. Edgar Allan J*oe, of all American authors, is the one whose repute is most distinctly indi- vidual. Deemed by not a few French, German, and English critics to be the only original man-of- genius among all our bards, his home public has been in large part composed of the young and the moodily impressionable, to whom his melodiously melancholy verse and his characteristically dra- matic prose have appealed with peculiar force. In his life he too often weakly yielded to intemperance and to selfish ingratitude ; but as an artist he applied to poetry and prose unwonted and unquestionably significant methods of thought and expression. The Raven, The Bells, To Helen (the shorter poem bearing that title), To One in Paradise, Annabel Lee, Ulalu?ne, and Dream-Land carry their intellectual and lyrical power to every new generation of read- ers j for Poe, standing as a sort of unconscious fol- 54 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITER A TURE, lower of Coleridge and Shelley, v/as a master in that assonance and alliteration, that creative con- trol over new and old verse-effects in English, afterwards differently and more broadly, but not more truly, displayed in the work of Swinburne. Of his prose tales, the best are The Fall of the Hoicse of Usher, Ligeia^ The Pit and the Pendulum^ The Gold Bug, The Purloined Letter, and The Afystery of Marie Roget, — his chief themes here as elsewhere being the strenuous self-assertion of the individual will in the presence of the mystery of death, and the clever unravelling of intricate prob- lems of ratiocination. Destitute (save in a few poems, or in the allegory of William JVilso?i) of Hawthorne's power of spiritual insight, and lacking Emerson's helpful philosophy of idealism, optimism, and manly courage, as a literary artist Poe was painstakingly conscientious, and absolutely loyal to his idea of the beautiful ; while as a minute realist, and the creator of unfamiliar types and hitherto unknow^n plots, he made and retains a place in prose fiction which can never be lost. His criticisms, though necessarily ephemeral, made just havoc of the re- nown of divers contemporary mediocrities in the American literary field, or set up canons of the poetic art which are interesting for the light they throw on his own genius and its expression. His one long story, The Adventures of Ai'thur Gordon Pym, is relatively clumsy in construction and in- effective in detail ; while his would-be mag?ium OTHER POETS. 55 Opus, entitled Eureka : an Essay on the Material and Spiritual Universe, is unimportant and almost unreadable. 19. Other Poets. — American literature, like the literature of England in the nineteenth century, has been increased, rather than highly enriched, by the songs of many who, while failing to reach the first or second rank, have sometimes deserved the name of poet. James Gates Percival, a melancholy and shy scholar, wrote A Dreain of a Day, Seneca Lake, and other pieces which once found popular- ity for their sentiment and smooth versification. N. P. Willis, whose reputation once overshadowed Longfellow's, wrote scriptural pieces of orotund obviousness of meaning, and two or three lyrics not yet forgotten ; but the modern reader scarcely deems him a poet at all. His kindly service to younger singers remains, however, a pleasant epi- sode in our literary history. George H. Boker, of Philadelphia, zealously tried to better the condition of the meagre field of American dramatic literature ; and some of his plays have strength and fire. The Divine Co7?iedy of Dante was partially translated by Dr. Thomas W. Parsons, of Boston, at the ex- pense of his original verse, which was of excellent quality. Notwithstanding the multiplicity of reli- gious denominations in this country, few good hymns have been written during the present century. As far as literature goes, our humor has been better than our piety. The greatest development of 56 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE. American humor, in prose and verse, has been of late years, but before the war John G. Saxe had become noted for clever travesties, puns, and love poems. As a poet of pure merriment he is at his best. Not until recently have we had, among our women, any commendable poets ; those writing before the war, save tlie Gary sisters, having been almost without exception slaves, led by Mrs. Sigour- ney, of the sentimentality which Mrs. Hemans and L. E. L. had made fashionable in England. 20. Orators. — During the first fifty or sixty years of the present century, American oratory worthily advanced upon its vigorous beginnings in ante-Revolutionary times. To literature belong, unquestionably, the best of the speeches of the sonorous Webster, the philosophical Galhoun, the rhetorical Everett, the florid Ghoate, the classical Sumner, the dignified Winthrop, and the fervid Phillips. Of all these Webster was the greatest : the one American name to contest with Burke's the primacy in the field of English oratory. In his progressive array of marshalled arguments leading toward a seemingly axiomatic conclusion ; in his felicitous choice of word or allusion ; in his majestic and continuous statement of the dignity and endur- ance of constitutional union ; and (as in his speech in the White murder case at Salem) in his power of purely literary portrayal, — Webster is the orator of the nineteenth century. The student should first read, in addition to the speeches already noted, that GEORGE BANCROFT. 57 on the character of the settlers of New Enghmd (Plymouth, December 22, 1820) ; the first Bunker- Hill address (1825) ; the reply to Hayne (1830) ; and the famous *' Seventh-of-March " (1850) com- promise speech on 21ie Constitution and the Union, 21. Historians. — At first thought, the number of notable American historians — only four : Ban- croft, Prescott, Motley, and Parkman — seems small ; but a comparison with other nations shows that during the present century we have had more than our share of historical writers of the first rank. Where libraries have not been accessible, our in- dustrious investigators have created them ; and their zeal and accuracy have made foreign coun- tries their debtors. 22. George Bancroft, the author of the chief history of the United States, was born in Massa- chusetts and graduated at Harvard. His studies were completed at Gottingen, then beginning to be the fashionable German university for American students ; and on his return he published a not dis- creditable volume of poems showing the influence of Coleridge and Wordsworth, and a translation of a work on ancient Greece. An attempt to found an American Eton at Northampton, Massachusetts, in which Bancroft took part, was soon abandoned. The first volume of his History of the U7iited States^ the standard work on the subject, both for its mat- ter and manner, appeared in 1834. After that time he labored upon it diligently and 'pretty con- 58 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITER A TURE. stantly, though the twelfth volume did not appear until 1882, the author having meanwhile been sec- retary of the navy and minister to England and Prussia. The style of the work is for the most part solid rather than brilliant, and the author ex- cels in those passages which set forth the charac- teristics of peoples or periods. His frank comments on some of the leaders of the Revolutionary move- ment brought down upon his head a shower of pamphlets written by descendants or partisans of the officers criticised. The work begins with Co- lumbus and ends with the beginning of the consti- tutional period in 1789. A revised edition appeared between 1883 and 1885. 23. William Hickling Prescott, the most rhe- torically brilliant of American historians, — though his fame is at present somewhat overshadowed by Parkman's, — was a descendant of William Pres- cott, who fought at Bunker Hill. While in college, in 18 1 2, his left eye was so injured that during the rest of his life Prescott was partially blind, and had to employ an amanuensis, or a mechanical contriv- ance for writing. Luckily, his means v/ere ample, and he was able to pursue his studies, in the midst of a rather remarkable literary coterie, until he was thirty years old, when he determined to write his History of Ferdijiand and Isabella. The composi- tion of the work occupied him eleven years, and the author expended indefatigable care in the accu- mulation of material. It was immediately trans- JOHN LOTHROP MOTLEY. 59 lated into five European languages, and became the most celebrated work of history that had thus far been written on this side of the Atlantic. Pres- cott's Conquest of Mexico (1843), Conquest of Peru (1847), ^"^ Philip the Second (1855-1858) were hardly less successful. He also edited Robertson's Cha7'Ies K, and collected from the reviews a vol- ume of Miscellanies, Three more volumes of Philip the Second were planned. Prescott died in Boston in 1859, and his life was faithfully written by his friend George Ticknor. Not since Milton, perhaps, had so high a reputation been won by a man prac- tically blind ; and few historians in the language have excelled Prescott in picturesque delineation of bygone scenes and empires. 24. John Lothrop Motley was born in 18 14, studied at Harvard and Gottingen, wrote two slight novels, and in 1856 published The Rise of the Dutch Republic^ which has attracted readers and translators only fewer than Prescott's. His style is pellucid, while as a political analyst he is unex- celled. The History of the United Netherla7ids was published between 1861 and 1868, and the Life of John of Barneveld in 1874. Motley, like Irving, Ban- croft, Lowell, Marsh, Boker, and Howells, repre- sented the United States abroad. He died in 1877. His great history of the Netherlands, as comprised in the three works named above, is vir- tually a history of civilized Europe during the im- portant period covered by the last part of the six- 6o A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE. teenth century and the first part of the seventeenth ; and its grand theme is the rise of modern consti- tutional liberty as over against Spain's last angry assertion of the might of politico-religious despot- ism. Between the contending factions Motley fol- lows the even path of historic justice ; and though William the Silent is his hero, he does not conceal the faults of that master-mind, or of his fellow Protestants, whether Lutheran or Calvinist. 25. Francis Parkman, like Motley and Prescott, took a period for his subject, and proceeded to consider it in a series of slowly written historical monographs, finally grouped in a symmetrical whole. France and England in North America is the general theme ; and the struggle of the two nations for supremacy in the Western world is chronologically portrayed under the respective titles : The Pioneers of Fra?ice in the New Worlds The yesuits ifi North A7ne7Hca in the Seventeenth Cen- tury^ La Salle and the Discovery of the Great IVest, The Old Regi77ie in Canada^ Count Frontenac and New France nnder Louis XIV.^ A TIalf Centjiry of CoTiflict, and Montcalm and Wolfe. Of these, the volume on La Salle is perhaps the most original contribution to knowledge, and tells the story of the most significant single figure presented in the long record ; the account of the old Canadian re- gime is the most unified and picturesque ; while the story of Montcalm and Wolfe is the one most broadly constructed, on the larger lines of the phi- OTHER HISTORIANS. 6i losophic historian and the lover of liberty. Park- man also wrote a valuable history of The Conspiracy of Pontiac. His life, until its close in 1893, was a brave battle with insomnia and imperfect vision. The large achievements of our four historians seem all the more creditable if we remember the patient toils of Prescott and Parkman when well-nigh inca- pacitated for the duties of authorship, and the political or diplomatic services rendered by Ban- croft and Motley, — in Motley's case most ungrate- fully requited by his government. 26. Other Historians. — Richard Hildreth, like Motley and Parkman, began his literary career by an unimportant essay in fiction, — his Archy Moore (1837) being directed against slavery, whose evils the author, like Channing, had personally seen. Various minor writings in politics, finance, and ethics preceded his rapidly written History of the Ufiited States from the discovery of America to the end of Monroe's first presidential term. Its style is somewhat dry, its sympathies with the Federalist- Whig idea of the government are sometimes over- conspicuous, and it is now little read ; but, as the most extended view of the period covered, it still forms a useful supplement to Bancroft. John Gorham Palfrey, another Massachusetts historian, who for the first fifty years of his life was a student of biblical literature and a politician, began in 1858 a History of New England^ which, with no great charm of language, holds a high rank for complete- 62 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE. ness and accuracy. No other part of the country has found so full a historian. Four volumes had been issued previous to the author's death in 1881 ; another was posthumously published. Jared Sparks, president of Harvard between 1849 and 1852, wrote several biographies and theological works, edited the Diploinatic Correspondence of the Aiiierican Revo- lution^ and brought out between 1834 and 1837, in twelve volumes, Washington's writings, together with a life. In 1840 he finished a similar edition of Franklin, in ten volumes. Sparks' Washington and Franklin have been supplanted by later, larger, and more scrupulously edited editions (for he took liberties of correction and omission not now deemed permissible in the publication of manu- scripts) ; but these works, together with the Z/- brary of American Biography edited by him, were pioneer toils of distinct serviceableness to students of American history. 27. Fiction. — James Fenimore Cooper. — Charles Brockden Brown began the long line of American novels, but James Fenimore Cooper was the first writer of fiction to be read extensively. Born in Burlington, New Jerse}^, in 1789, he spent his boyhood at Cooperstown, Otsego County, New York, a village founded by his father in 1786. Having studied three years at Yale, he entered the navy as midshipman in 1805, remaining in the service six years, and acquiring that knowledge of the sea which he afterwards put to such good use FICTION. 63 in his books. Precaution^ his first novel, was pub- lished anonymously in 182 1. It met with no great success, being a tame story of the English type. The Spy (1821) found a multitude of admirers, and was republished in Europe in many translations. This historical story of the Revolution, as well as The Pioneers^ issued the next year, smacked of the soil, and Cooper thenceforward occupied as his own the field of wild life in the West. His novels were full of romantic interest, and showed the public that American scenery and life furnished as good a foundation for fiction as the castles and romance of Europe. The Last of the Mohica?is (1826) is one of the best of the remarkable group of stories called the Leather Stocking Tales, which remain his great- est creation, with Natty Bumppo, the tough, manly, and kindly Pathfinder, as their central figure. Cooper was American through and through. He did not hesitate in some of his later stories to satirize the " louder '' national characteristics ; but to him more than any other author is due the increasing attention to home subjects and heroes. From his writings, undoubtedly, a part of the English public got the impression, which it has with difficulty corrected, that buffaloes and Indians form the most conspicuous features in our civiliza- tion. Some of Cooper's better works were devoted to the sea, the most successful being The Pilot (1823) and The Red Paver (1827). Cooper's quar- rels with his countrymen were numerous, chiefly 64 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE. because he thought them lukewarm in national pride ; and he increased the hostility of the news- paper press by several libel suits, in many of which he was successful. The Pathfinder and The Deer- slayer appeared in 1840 and 1841 ; and Afloat and Ashore three years later. An ambitious but partisan and ephemeral Naval History of the United States and a series of biographies of naval officers were among the other writings of this industrious author, who by no means confined himself to a single field. His last book was The Ways of the Hour., an attack on the system of trial by jury, in the form of a story, somewhat in the style later adopted by Charles Reade. Cooper's novels won high praise from contemporary critical authorities, including Bryant and Prescott; but his later books found fewer readers than their predecessors. He virtually had the field to himself, at first, and the novelty of his subjects aroused in his writings an interest which their intrinsic literary merits hardly warranted, as his style was often slovenly, his humor sometimes forced, and his power of delineating women but feeble. 28. Nathaniel Hawthorne, whom James Rus- sell Lowell has called the greatest imaginative writer since Shakespeare, was born in Salem in 1804, of an old colonial family, some of whose members, as a matter of conviction, had taken part in the persecutions which made the early history of that town so famous. In later years the Haw- NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 65 thornes (who spelled their name Hathorne) had followed the sea, and Nathaniel's father, a ship- master, died at Surinam in 1808. From his mother the boy inherited a serious disposition, she having so grieved over her husband's loss that for thirty years she insisted on isolating herself in her room. Nathaniel was a feeble child, but was able to enter Bowdoin College at seventeen, where Longfellow was his classmate. His intimate friend, however, was Franklin Pierce, a member of the class next above him. On graduation he returned to Salem, and outdid his mother in absolute seclusion, writing all day, and stalking over the ancient town at night. Fanshawe, an anonymous romance, was published in Boston in 1828, but was never acknowledged by the author. For years it was a great literary curi- osity, but was reprinted in 1876. It is a somewhat crude production, but not unmarked by the power which afterwards made the author famous. In 1836 Hawthorne became the editor, for six months, of the America?! Magazine of Knowledge, published in Boston ; but, though nominally only editor, he wrote or prepared its entire contents. He had destroyed many of his earlier sketches, but by 1837 he was able to collect enough stories to form the first series of Twice-Told Tales, Longfellow and other critics saw and said what they were, but the general public failed to appreciate them. This first edition con- tained only half the present work ; a revision, with a second series, appeared in 1842, and found a few e^ A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE. more readers. Bancroft, who was then collector of the port of Boston, gave Hawthorne a place in the custom-house in that city, which he lost on the accession of Harrison to the presidency in 1841. A short sojourn at the famous Brook Farm in West Roxbury followed ; and everywhere the shy, myste- rious romancer was the shrewdest and minutest of observers. In 1843 ^^^ ^^^^ "P ^is abode in the old Ripley house at Concord, close by the bridge where the ^' embattled farmers stood." Hawthorne's residence in old houses was partly from accident and partly from choice ; but of all his homes this was most to his liking, and in the volumes called Mosses from an Old Manse (1846) he celebrated it in the choicest language. This collection of stories and sketches was in the same general style as the Twice- Told Tales. Emerson had been a former occupant of the house, and Hawthorne's Concord neighbors were Emerson, Thoreau, and the younger Ellery Channing. In 1846 Haw^thorne became surveyor at the Salem custom-house, and, as usual, made his residence there an opportunity for the industrious collection of literary material. The advent of the Whigs into power, for the second time, once more displaced him from office, and he retired to a little cottage in Lenox, Massachusetts, having published in 1850 The Scarlet Letter^ a powerful and dramatic colonial romance of sin and penalty. At Lenox Hawthorne was unusually in- dustrious, writing in 185 1 The House of the Seven NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, 67 Gables, a tale of heredity, told in a form at once powerful and pleasing, and embodying, more than any other of his books, his Salem life. The Blithe- dale Romance (1852) was founded on his Brook Farm experiences, and combined lofty humor with deep pathos. The same year, 1852, Hawthorne wrote a third series of Twice-Told Talcs, and a campaign life of Pierce, for whom, ever since his college days, he had maintained a strong friendship. But there was no suspicion of office-seeking on Hawthorne's part, and when, in 1853, the romancer was given the Liverpool consulate, both parties rejoiced. For the first time in his life Hawthorne was in easy circumstances, though a thriftier man would have made more money out of his lucrative position. Resigning in 1857, he spent three years in England, France, and Italy. His English and Italian Note-Books, published posthumously, are full of the experiences of one of the best of sight- seers. The America7i Note-Books consist of his home diaries, and contain many unused hints for 'books or stories which none but Hawthorne ever could have written. Our Old Home, sights and scenes in England, was published in 1863, during the author's lifetime. The Marble Faufi had appeared in i860, — an Italian romance showing the blight of crime upon innocence. Hawthorne had also brought out three juvenile books between 1 851 and 1853, — stories of history and mythology; and after his death were found the fragments called The 68 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE, Ancestral Footstep, Doctor Gri77isJiawe' s Secret, Sep- timius Felton, and The Dolliver Romance, — all of which, in order, were studies for the same never- finished book. So ends the list of the works of the foremost American v/riter. 29. Other Novelists. — Sylvester Judd, a Uni- tarian minister, wrote in 1845 Margaret: a Tale of the Real and the Tdeal ; which Lowell, in his Fable for Critics, declared *' the first Yankee book with the soul of Down East in 't ; " while others found its whims and crotchets so numerous as to make it almost unreadable. It deserves record, if at all, only as an early attempt to treat New England life spiritually. William Gilmore Simms, who sought to do for the South what Cooper had done for the North, was born in 1806 and died in 1870. He wrote many poems, but is chiefly remembered by his novels, among which are The Yemassee, The Pa7'tisa7i, and Beauchampe, John Esten Cooke, of Virginia, was less versatile, but his novels of South- ern life are more meritorious. The best of them is The Virginia Co77iedians, a picture of courtly tide- water Virginia in the eighteenth century. John P. Kennedy, secretary of the navy under Fillmore, wrote good novels of old-time society, in his Swal- low Ba7'7i and Horse- Shoe Robi7tson ; and Herman Melville vigorous sea tales. Harriet Beecher Stow^e's U7icle To77i's Cahi7i (1852), directed against slaver}^, has had the greatest popular success of any American book, having sold more than half a RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 69 million copies in this country alone, and having been forty times translated. It directly and last- ingly promoted the anti-slavery cause, as well as the success of the Northern arms in the civil war ; while its large humanity and its interesting- ness as a story have given it a vigorous life after the downfall of the system it so effectively de- nounced. Mrs. Stowe's later novels, though some- times superior from a literary point of view, have naturally appealed to a more limited interest. The Minister's Wooing and The Pearl of Orrs Island are faithful New England pictures ; and Oldtown Folks, one of her later books, introduces her best cre- ation, Sam Lawson, the typical New England ne'er-do-well, who reappears to better advantage in Sam Lawson' s Oldtown Fireside Stories, Next to Uncle Tom, as a popular success, came the senti- mental and lachrymose Wide, Wide World of Susan Warner, published in 1850. 30. Ralph Waldo Emerson. — Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) was the greatest of Ameri- can essayists, and his influence on thought and style has been so marked as to make Concord our literary Mecca. The descendant of eight gener- ations of clergymen, Emerson was a Bostonian by birth, and graduated at Harvard in 182 1. Between 1829 and 1832 he was a Unitarian minister, but left the pulpit in consequence of his radical opin- ions. Having made a short trip to Europe, he began his career as a lecturer, in v;hich capacity 70 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE. he became more famous than any other American author. A slender book on Nature made a great stir among thoughtful people in 1836. In this — as in his Harvard Phi Beta Kappa address on The American Scholar (1837), his Harvard Divinity School address (1838) on the continuance of spirit- ual revelation in the world, and his Dartmouth College oration (1838) on Literary Ethics — he set forth a positive philosophy of idealism, optimism, and individuahsm as against materialism, pessimism, and obedience to sacerdotal or traditional author- ity. Nature, to him, was the friend and monitor of man ; and the soul was in illuminating com- munion with the spirit of all good. This philoso- phy, in terse and not always obvious statements, he iterated in book, poem, lecture, or address, to the end of his life. Naturally, therefore, his influ- ence became very great in forming the ^* Tran- scendental " movement, — an attempt to abandon traditional forms and society's chains and to get back to nature's freedom of thought and rectitude of action. The Dial was the organ of the school, and Margaret Fuller, Emerson, Alcott, Thoreau, and the younger Channing wrote for it. Emerson's two series of Essays appeared in 1841 and 1844 ; Represe?itative Men^ a course of lectures, in 1850 ; E7iglish Traits in 1856 ; The Co7iduct of Life in i860; Society and Solitude in 1870; and Letters and Social Aims in 1876, in which year a carefully revised edition of his poems v;as also published. RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 71 These poems are full of high thought, often ex- pressed with rare beauty. Both in poetry and in prose his influence is as spontaneous as that of nature ; he announces, and lets others plead. He turns to verse when seeking special force and con- ciseness, and therefore his poems are written, in his own words, ^' for thought, and not praise," for value rather than artistic form. Yet the best of them display the outer as well as the inner -beauty of verse, both of which unite in the nature-painting of The Rhodora or The Snow-Siorfn ; the virile pa- triotism of the Concord Hy77in ; the grim force of Hamatreya ; the lyrical pathos of Good-Bye^ Proud World; the deep philosophy of Days; or the majesty of Brah77ia, But Emerson is not less sig- nificant in those lines, couplets, quatrains, or frag- ments w^hich he never rounded into complete poems, for instance: — " Unless to Thought is added Will, Apollo is an imbecile," " The brook sings on, but sings in vain. Wanting the echo in my brain." ** On bravely through the sunshine and the showers 1 Time hath his work to do and we have ours." " Thou shalt not try To plant thy shrivelled pedantry On the shoulders of the sky." *'No fate, save by the victim's fault, is low. For God hath writ all dooms magnificent So guilt not traverses his tender will." T2 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE, " Tell men what they knew before ; Paint the prospect from their door." 31. Other Transcendentalists. — Henry D. Thoreau was a recluse who once lived on the shores of Walden Pond, in Concord, providing for his simple wants by surveying and gardening. Walden is his best book, but in other volumes he carries the reader straight to Nature's heart. Amos Bronson Alcott, at first an educator, was long the sole representative in this country of the art of im- parting knowledge by "conversations," which he conducted for many years in various parts of the United States, though residing in Concord. In his later life he collected some of his writings into books, and wrote a volume of sonnets in his eighty- second year. William EUery Channing, a nephew of the famous divine, wrote a biography of Thoreau and four volumes of poems. But the best and most enduring poetry, save Emerson's, written during the period of Transcendental influence in America was that of Jones Very, of Salem, — in personal Hfe a recluse, but in spiritual stature among the very first of our singers. Emerson compared his sonnets with the utterances of the Hebrew prophets, and declared them inferior only " because they are in- debted to the Hebrew muse for their tone and genius." Very felt himself to be in constant com- munion with the Divine spirit, whose messages he strove to read from the books of nature and the soul. He chiefly wrote in the sonnet form, and MISCELLANEOUS WRITERS, 73 many of his lines are deep in thought and strong in expression. Hawthorne called Very a " poet whose voice is scarcely heard among us by reason of its depth ; " but at another time, with that clear sense which governed his every word, he stated his belief that Very's limitations arose from his '' want of a sense of the ludicrous." 32. Miscellaneous Writers. — George William Curtis, a representative of civic integrity in Amer- ican life, and in his style a worthy follower of Addi- son, produced a great number of essays in periodi- cals ; two graceful books of eastern travel ; The Potiphar Papers^ the best social satire produced in this country ; Trumps^ a readable but somewhat amateurish novel ; and several volumes of fervid and finished orations. George Ticknor, professor of modern languages at Harvard between 18 17 and 1835, published in 1849 ^^ elaborate History of Spanish Literatu?'e, twdce since revised, and ac- cepted here and abroad as the standard. Edwin P. Whipple, one of the most faithful of American critics, though he produced nothing large or lasting, in his several volumes gave a thorough review of many of the best English and American books, — his researches in Elizabethan literature being his chief work. The Two Years before the Mast of Richard H. Dana, Jr., a record of personal experi- ence, is almost the only American book of travel that has been given more than a fleeting place in litera- ture. Mrs. Lydia Maria Child's Appeal in Behalf 74 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITER A TURE. of that Class of Americans called Africans (1832) is noteworthy as the first contribution of a woman to the antislavery literature of the country. It was an admirable little work, and helped to carry Wendell Phillips into the antislavery movement. Margaret Fuller, an ardent Transcendentalist, and editor of The Dial, left no permanent literary memorial in book form, but in editorial and critical writing affected the liberal thought of her time. Donald G. Mitchell wrote Drea77i-Life and The Reveries of a Bachelor, pleasant books of chat and meditation, which have never lost their hold on popularity. Dr. J. G. Holland was a wholesome and plain- spoken popular essayist, and wrote some fair novels of American life, — Miss Gilberfs Career, Arthur Bo7inicastle, and The Story of Sevenoaks being the best of them. As a poet, in his Bitter-Sweet and Kathrina, he was equally popular, though with less deserts. 7^;^,. Scientific and Special Writers. — In lit- erature the artistic form and the consequent im- pression of pleasurableness are essential ; without these, the quality of instructive value, however manifest or important, does not suffice to produce literature. But the student of American thought may properly note some of the larger contributions made, in this country, to special or technical know- ledge. In law and politics the number of American books is of course large, but none save the Com- mentaries on American Law of James Kent need HELPS FOR FURTHER STUDY. 75 be mentioned here. The dictionaries of Noah Webster and Joseph E. Worcester, and the larger Century Dictionary of William D. Whitney and his colleagues ; the philological works of George P. Marsh ; the botanical writings of Asa Gray ; the mathematical and astronomical publications of Ben- jamin Peirce, whose Ideality in the Physical Sciences is a piece of literature ; the ornithological studies of John James Audubon ; the geological treatises of Louis Agassiz ; and Horace Howard Furness's variorum edition of Shakespeare, — are contribu- tions to the learning of the world. HELPS FOR FURTHER STUDY. Warner's Washington Irvitig gives a good account of the beginning of our literature, pure and simple, especially as re- lated to the European impact, and the influence of senti- ment. Bigelow's William Ctillen Bryant portrsiys the austere self- respecting character of Bryant as a conservative force in American letters. Samuel Longfellow's Henry Wadsworth Longfellow is a storehouse of memorabilia, and presents (as do the Cambridge editions of Longfellow, Whittier, and Holmes) many interest- ing statements concerning the composition of various poems, or the persons and places to which they relate. Lowell's Fable for Critics and Poe's The Literati may be read as giving a view of the American literary field half a cen- tury ago. Woodberry's Edgar Allaii Foe (or, better, his introductory memoir to the new edition of Poe by himself and E. C. Sted- man) may be accepted as the final authority on the character 76 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITER A TURE, and career of the man. The Stedman-Woodberry collection of Poe's complete works is the most thoroughly prepared edition of an American classic writer. Holmes' John Lothrop Motley is one of the half-dozen best American biographies. Lounsbury's James Fenimore Cocper is indispensable for a sound knowledge of that novelist's work as related to his time. Julian Hawthorne's Nathaniel HawtJiorne and his Wife is the best life-story of the romancer, and analysis of his mind and method. The Carlyle-Emerson Correspondence^ amid all the mass of Emersoniana, is the work most helpful to the student, as illustrating Emerson's mental processes. CHAPTER IV. AFTER 1861. I. Literature of the Civil War. — It is still convenient to follow the division of time by wars, omitting that with Mexico, which formed no break in current history. As in the Revolution and the war of 18 1 2, little that was notable was added to the literature of the country by the civil war of 1861. Most of the poets wrote one or two stirring pieces, and new writers came into notice by the publication of meritorious occasional verse. But as a rule the creative powers of our best authors seemed some- what benumbed, though books and readers multi- plied between 1861 and 1865, partly in consequence of the largely increased circulation of the periodical press. Immediately on the close of the struggle, and even during its progress, many popular histo- ries were hurried upon the market, but of course the events described were yet too fresh in mind to permit impartiality on either side. A large RebeU lion Record^ edited by Frank Moore, has preserved plenty of material for the future writer. This use- ful work is arranged under three divisions ; a diary of events, a reissue of leading documents of impor- tance, and a liberal selection from popular poe- yS A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITER A TURK. try and newspaper incidents on both sides. The United States government, furthermore, is publish- ing a veritable library of Official Records of the War of the Rebellion^ without historical comment. A ten- volume life of Abraham Lincobi^ by John G. Nicolay and John Hay, is virtually an important document- ary history of his administration. Of the tenta- tive or temporary histories that have thus far ap- peared, those by Horace Greeley and Alexander H. Stephens are fullest in their accounts of the anti- slavery contest which preceded and attended the war. The first volume of Mr. Greeley's history (which is comprised in tv/o) is more valuable than the second, for in it a life-long combatant in the antislavery struggle records the events with which he was so closely connected. Mr. Stephens's work lays great stress upon the rise and development of the doctrine of state rights, of which the author was an able defender. Elaborate as is Mr. Greeley's story of the slavery agitation, a still larger history thereof is contained in Vice-President Wilson's Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America^ in three volumes. Mr. Wilson's knowledge of political his- tory v/as as extensive as Mr. Greeley's, and the judicial quality of his mind somewhat more marked. He had the advantage, furthermore, of writing some time after the close of the war. Many of the gen- erals engaged on either side have published their reminiscences of campaigns, at greater or less length. From out the lurid background of the whole civil- POETS. 79 war period stands the sombre but kindly figure of Abraham Lincoln, whose Gettysburg Ad^/ress a,nd Second/ Inaugural have become classics of recent oratory in English. 2. Poets. — Intellectual activity of various kinds having been promoted by the war, a renewed in- terest in purely national or local subjects, in this country, accompanied, rather than was caused by, the new-romanticism of the English writers of the Swinburne school, who found in our Whitman and Miller greater merits than in the more conventional writers whom the majority of readers are accus- tomed to revere. These poets' celebration of the wilder elements in our life, and their freedom from restraint, seemed admirable to London-bred critics ; and their English friends doubtless took pleasure in singling out for special praise writers whose cli- entage was not so numerous in this country, and whose subjects would seem stranger in London than in New York. The old inattention to our lit- erature, on the part of Englishmen, gave place to a somewhat injudicious and undiscriminating praise. But, fostered by home development and foreign admiration, there has latterly grown — in verse, but still more in indigenous American fiction — a properly original and characteristic spirit in Amer- ican literature. The great majority of our singers, however, have been content to work faithfully in the old paths, and many living authors, popularly assigned to the second rank, may fairly be called the So A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITER A TURE. peers of some of their predecessors of higher repu- tation. Meanwhile, with few exceptions, iVmerican literature, in poetry and in prose, remains more free than any other from immoral taint of theme or treatment. It is the literature of new freedom, not of old license. 3. Bayard Taylor — traveller, journalist, lec- turer, poet, novelist, and diplomat — had attained literary repute before the date at which this chap- ter begins ; but, since any possible future renown of his must rest upon his volumes of poems pub- lished since 1862, it is well to enter his name in this place. He was born at Kennett Square, a Penn- sylvania country town, in 1825, and while a very young man wrote a vivacious account of a pedes- trian tour in Europe, w^hich was followed by similar narratives of other journeyings. In 1863 Mr. Tay- lor published his first novel, Hannah Thurstojt^ which was followed within the next seven years by yohn Godfrey's Fo7'times^ The Story of Keiinett^ and Joseph and his Frie7td, These four novels, besides ingeniousness of plot and cleverness of situation, contain accurate pictures of American life, especially that of the Quaker region of Penn- sylvania, wdiich the author knew thoroughly. Be- tween 1844 and 1855 he put forth seven volumes of poems, chiefly notew^orthy for verbal excellence rather than for any depth of thought or significance of value. The Poefs Journal (1862), The Picture of St, John (1866), The Masque of the Gods (1872), EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN. 8i Lars (1873), and The Prophet (1874), a Mormon drama, are more elaborate works. Frmce Deu- kalio7i^ an allegorical drama of social progress — ambitious, but not so successful as the author hoped, — appeared in 1878. Some of his longer poems were produced with a rapidity recalling the Italian improvisafo)^. The Echo Club (published in 1876, though written in 1872) is a series of clever imitations of the leading poets of the cen- tur}^ A translation of both parts of Faust ap- peared in 1870 and 187 1, in which the original metres were reproduced with surprising faithful- ness. Taylor died in 1878 (when minister to Ger- many), worn out by his too ready yielding to the multifarious demands of modern intellectual and social life ; and leaving undone that which he meant to make his chief work, — a life of Goethe. 4. Richard Henry Stoddard, in a life-long ser- vice to letters, has been critic, editor, biographer, librarian ; but his devotion to the art and practice of poetry has been incessant, and his numerous volumes — chiefly composed of short poems of mood or of picture — have shown the lyric quality. His early Hymin to the Beautiful^ notwithstand- ing some obvious suggestions of the influence of Wordsworth, remains his most representative achievement, and one of the best of recent expres- sions of the poet's view of the w^orld of life and beauty. 5. Edmund Clarence Stedman has for the 82 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE. most of his life been a banker in New York, though writing constantly for the press. Alice of Mon- mouth^ a war story in verse, succeeded Poe7ns^ Lyric and Idyllic, The Blaineless Prince was Mr. Sted- man's third volume. These three books were chiefly excellent for purely lyrical beauty. In 1873 appeared the first collected edition of his poems. Hawthorite and Other Poems (1877), a thin vol- ume, included later pieces, the first being the finest tribute yet paid in verse to the memory of the ro- mancer. In his Victorian Poets (1876) appeared an elaborate review of the entire body of contem- porary English poetry. It is especially just toward the new romantic school, with the works of the humblest members of which Mr. Stedman is inti- mately acquainted. It w^as followed by a similarly comprehensive study of the Poets of America (1885), very useful to the student of American literature ; and this, in turn, by a studious review of the whole subject of The Nature and Elements of Poetry (1892), which forms the most valuable of the methodical contributions thus far made in America to the lit- erature of aesthetic criticism. 6. Thomas Bailey Aldrich is one of sev- eral natives of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, who have entered the field of literature. His boy- hood was passed in that ancient seaport town, in New Orleans, and in New York. Before he was twenty he became a worker on the New York press, and his first book was published when he was but THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICIL 83 nineteen. The Ballad of Babie Bell (afterwards entitled Baby Bell)^ a tender poem of child-death, has had for many years a place in popular favor. Between 1855 and 1862 Mr. Aldrich published sev- eral small volumes of poems, a little juvenile story in prose, and Out of his Head, a romance never re- issued by the author; while in 1865 he collected his complete poetical works in a single volume. He has always been, like Poe, an inveterate critic of his ow^n lines ; and, usually recognizing the fact that his successes must be won by daintiness of execution rather than by largeness of construction, he has touched and retouched, not always to the im.provement of the original product. Occasionally making an essay toward the drama, as in Mercedes (1884), or long narrative, as in F?iar Jerome's Beautiful Book^ Ganiant Hall, or Wymdham Tow- ers (1889), he has not won thereby a repute equal to that attained by such short poems as Destiny or Ideiitity. Mr. Aldrich's collected edition of 1865 was carefully revised ten years later, and put forth under the title of Cloth of Gold. Flower and Thorn (1876) comprised such additional poems as the author then cared to preserve. After a consider- able pause, Mr. Aldrich began to write prose once more, in the form of short stories and sketches, having, as in the enjoyable volume entitled Mar- jorie Daw and Other Pieces (1873), a dainty humor and no little cleverness of situation. The Story of a Bad Boy (1869), ^^^^ second juvenile, reproduced 84 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITER A TURE. in its Tom Bailey the author's youthful experiences ill Portsmouth, which, as ^' Rivermouth," appears in nearly all his stories. Prudence Palfrey (1874), The Queen of Sheba (1877), and The Stilhvater Tra- gedy (1880) are novels of moderate length, having, in substance, the finish and quiet humor of the shorter stories. 7. Walt Whitman was born at West Hills, Long Island, in 18 19, and began life as a school-teacher and literary man, writing rather feeble stories and indifferent poems for the magazines, in the ordinary style, under the name of Walter Whitman. In 1855, I'educing Walter to Walt, he printed in Brook- lyn a peculiar volume called Leaves of Gj^ass, — rhapsody rather than poetry, being neither rhymed nor versified. This work, which he enlarged from time to time, is devoted to a large variety of subjects, many of the poems being personal, while all are pervaded with a love of liberty in conscience and politics. The catalogue style is a prevailing blem- ish, and Whitman's overruling desire to be natural made him fall into real affectations ; but there are some strong and fine lines in the poems. O Captain^ viy Captain^ showed him to be unfettered when using rhyme. When Lilacs last in the Dooryard bloomed is the best poem evoked by the assassina- tion of President Lincoln. Many of the poems in Leaves of Grass are grossly indecent, and ^' the up- ward look " is conspicuously absent from Whitman's verse. The Vv^orld's great poets have been morally Ol^HER POETS. 85 in advance of their times ; Whitman lags behind the average sentiment of his day and country. His death occurred in 1892. 8. Other Poets. — John Townsend Trowbridge, the author of numerous cheery juvenile stories and pleasant novels, of which Ncighbo7' Jackwood (1857) remains the best (considered as a picture of Ameri- can home life in the country), has expended care in the writing of his relatively few poems, of which The Vagabonds (1864) is widely known for its excellent union of pathos and humor. Of Northern poems of the war, by writers not elsewhere men- tioned, the best are Thomas Buchanan Read's Sheridan's Ride^ Julia Ward Howe's Battle Hymn of the Republic, and Francis M. Finch's The Blue and the Gray. In the Southern newspapers, during and after the civil war, there was a considerable amount of verse related to the struggle, the master- piece being Father A. J. Ryan's The Co?ifederate Flag. Henry Timrod's Spri?tg is better than any of his rapidly written martial verse. Paul H. Hayne, of Georgia, was one of our best sonneteers ; his poetry catches the spirit of Southern scenery, and is instinct with sensibility. He was less suc- cessful in depicting the scenes and portraying the character of mediaevalism. Sidney Lanier wrote in 1876 a curious Ce?iten?tial Ode to Columbia, which aimed to be in poetry some such thing as Wagner's music is in orchestration. Lanier was musician and critic as well as poet, and sometimes his verse 86 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE. was injured by its self-conscious art. But his best pieces, such as Cor?z^ The Song of the Chattahoochee^ Sunrise^ or that melodious lyric The Marshes of Gly7m^ have attracted an attention bestowed upon the work of no other Southern poet since Poe. After the close of the struggle appeared a fashion for dialect verse, largely devoted to the celebration of profane heroes or ungrammatical wits ; of verse of this sort all has been forgotten savx the Hans Breitmann' s Ballads of Charles G. Leland, the Betsey and I are Out of Will Carleton, the Jim Bludso and Little Breeches of John Hay, and the Flai7i Language from Truthful fames (popularly known as "The Heathen Chinee") of Bret Harte. At about the same time Joaquin Miller, a sort of Oregon Byron in red shirt, cowhide boots, and buffalo robe, delighted aesthetic London with his Songs of the Sierras^ — wild poems of the west, chiefly relying upon their novelty of theme, and the natural swing of their easy versification. But some later writers — notably James Whitcomb Riley and Eugene Field — have retained what was good in the method of our earlier singers of sentimentalism, dialect humor, and local delineation, adding thereto a genuineness of feeling and a delicacy of expres- sion not usually shown by their predecessors. On the other hand, Richard Watson Gilder has found his chief models in the work of Dante and other Italians ; and much of his verse, like Aldrich's, has been the rhythmical expression of semi-mystical FRANCIS BRET HARTE. S7 thought or delicate conceit. Of women who have done creditable work in verse, in recent years, the number is large ; indeed, half the poems in current periodicals are by women. As a rule they WTite short poems of mood or description rather than of creation or narration, or even of sentiment, though Elizabeth Akers Allen's Rock me to Sleepy Mother, and Lucy La room's ITannah Binding Shoes are exceptions to this remark. Celia Thaxter's breezy poems of the sea are the fruit of long acquaintance wdth the barren and wind-swept Isles of Shoals. To Helen Fiske Jackson belongs the first place among American women who have written verse. Soon after the appearance of her first volume of poems, in 1874, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote : " The poems of a lady who contents herself with the initials H. H. have rare merit of thought and expression, and will reward the reader for the care- ful attention wdiich they require." There is some- what of the Emersonian mood and method in Mrs. Jackson's poetry, which is the modern successor of The Dial verse of 1840. In the latter part of her life she became intensely interested in the Indian question, and wTote A Centicry of Dishonor^ and the novel Ramona, to help in righting the wrongs of the aboriginal race. 9. Francis Bret Harte, a native of Albany, New York, rose in 1870 to a position of almost commanding significance, in America and Europe, as the delineator of pioneer life and its rude 88 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN IITERA TURE. environment in the mining camps of the new west. Possessing both humor and pathos, a keen power of observation, and a firm touch, he portrayed the human heart as it beat under flannel shirt or tawdry ball-dress. The Luck of Roaring Ca77ip^ The Out- casts of Poker Flat, and How Santa Clans came to Simpso7i^s Bar were important in exploiting a new field, and in giving a powerful impulse to the most successful of recent movements in American litera- ture : the development of the short story of locality, showing men and women as they are and as they live, — in faithful realism, but with a trend toward that optimism which finds progress, rather than continuance or retrogression, the secret of social life. Though Mr. Harte has since produced thirty or forty volumes, and regularly wTites one or two a year, he has never been able, in his stories, sketches, novels, plays, or poems, to do more than return to his first field and method, not adding materially to the success then won. Indeed, had his writing ceased in 1875, ^^^ place in our literature would have been what it is to-day. 10. The American Short Story. — Bret Harte once modestly remarked that he was " quite con- tent to have collected merely the materials for the Iliad that is yet to be sung." Just here lies the greatest significance of his own best work, and that of his many fellow-laborers, who, in the closing quarter of the nineteenth century, have made so admirable, and in a way so enduringly valuable. HIE AMERICAN SHORT STORY. 89 contributions to the literature of minor fiction. When one thinks of Irving's Hudson legends and Spanish stories, of Hawthorne's Twice- Ibid Tales ^ and of Poe's Tales of the Gi'otesque and the A?'a- besque^ and then recalls the long list of excellent short stories written in the United States since 1870, he is ready to claim that in this division the American mind has surpassed all others. The later American short story has been sincere in pur- pose, painstaking in realism, and hopeful in senti- ment. With or without the use of dialect, it has portrayed scenes and characters as they have been or as they are, chiefly caring for the heart of things rather than for the accidents of life. Pathos and humor have bent to the service of an accurate rep- resentation of different types and environments ; and, in this broad work in a land stretching from ocean to ocean and from lake to gulf, many authors have made minor contributions. The masters of American fiction are now dead, but their lesser suc- cessors — with Gallic fidelity but with Teutonic morality — have continued to work toward a com- posite creation which is commanding in its entirety, though not indispensable in its parts. Most of these later wTiters, like Harte, have over-multiplied their books, and some have exhausted their mate- rial ; but, after all, no previous period in American literature could have given us, in thought or exe- cution, the New England pictures presented in Sarah Orne Jew^ett's Deephaven and A White ITeroii^ 90 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERA TURE. or Mary E. Wilkins' A Humble Romance and Jane Field ; the homely folk of Philander Deming's Adirondack Stories; the preposterous but nobly self-sacrificing little ritualist shown in Constance Fenimore Woolson's Peter the Paron, in a Michi- gan mining-village ; the similar heroism of Mary N. Murfree's rough Prophet of the Great Smoky Moun- tains in Tennessee ; or the African folk-lore of Joel Chandler Harris' Uncle Remus down in Georgia. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, a daughter of Professor Austin Phelps of the theological seminary at An- dover, is another of the writers of the remarkable short stories which distinguish the present time. The chief of her lesser tales were first collected in Men^ Women, and Ghosts (1869), in which The Tenth of January (a tale of the fall of the Pember- ton Mills in Lawrence) was the strongest piece of writing. Besides many Sunday-school stories and other juvenile books, Miss Phelps has written such novels as Hedged In (1870), The Silent Pa7'tner (1871), The Story of Avis (1877), a dramatic and highly wrought record of the struggles of a woman's soul, Friends : A Duet (188 1), Doctor Zay (1884), and several later tales characterized by a more or less intense individuality of personal portrayal, — such as was found in her Gates Ajar, an original book on heaven, which made no small literary sen- sation in 1868. But it may be questioned w^hether her greatest strength and the groundwork of her ultimate repute are not likely to be found in the WILLIAM DEAN HO WELLS, 91 Men^ IVomen, and Ghosts collection, or in such a lit- erary unit as the tragedy of J^ack the Fisherman of Gloucester. As a rule, in American stories written since the civil war, expansion of theme has brought no gain of artistic force. In this division of fiction, though books be forgotten and reputations dwindle, the whole is greater than the sum of all its parts. In one instance — that to be found in a part of the work of Frances Hodgson Burnett — the newer American localism has overstepped the waters of the Atlantic in search of a theme ; for, if her pic- tures of Southern types in A Fair Barbarian or Lou- isiana lack the delicate accuracy of the stories just named, and if her well-known and enjoyable juve- nile, Little Lord Faimtleroy^ is hardly to be chroni- cled in a history of literature, she gave in That Lass 0' Lowrie's (1877) a novel of life in the Lan- cashire mines of England that shows great power of plot and description, and is remarkable for its mastery of the dialect and customs of an unfamiliar region. II. William Dean Howells, in his best novel, A Modern Lnstance (1882), and in such other stories as The Rise of Silas Lapham (1884), applies to the telling of a long tale the accurate and synthetic realism shown by the short-story writers just named. A keen observer, familiar with American life in many phases, versed in contemporary foreign literature, and conspicuously influenced by Tour- gueneff, or even by Henry James, Jr., his sharpness 92 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE, of vision and firmness of touch have nevertheless given his novels an original character of their own, and have entitled him to be called, in his humor and in his descriptive power, the best literary painter of contemporary American life among the ''better" classes — in both senses of the quoted adjective. Born at Martinsville, Ohio, in 1837, he was a country editor until i860, when he wrote a campaign biography of Abraham Lincoln, which had a great circulation during that year, and which, as literature, was nearly as good as Hawthorne's life of Pierce. In 1861 Mr. Howells was given the politically unimportant consulate at Venice. Never did an author make better literary use of his posi- tion, at the same time faithfully performing its offi- cial duties. Not until his return, in 1865, did he begin to publish the fruits of his Italian sight-see- ings. Venetian Life appeared in 1866, and Italian Joiirneys the next year. Their descriptions were faithful, and their literary style pleasing. After a brief period of journalistic work in New York, Mr. Howells went to Boston as an assistant editor of The Atlantic Mo?itkly, the controlling editorship of which he assumed on the retirement of James T. Fields, in 187 1. Suhii7'ba?i Sketches (187 1) did for Cambridge what Venetian Zi/e had done for Venice, — though its descriptions of the university town were less direct, — and included many pieces of delicate humor and not a few delightful character- sketches. Every one of Mr. Howells's books, thus II E.VRY JAMES, JA\ 93 far, liad increased his public of readers; but Their Wedduig Jourjiey (1872) multiplied them anew, and gave its readers a story as faidiful in its topo- graphical descriptions as it was illuminating in the kindly humor of its portrayals of character. A Chance Acquaintance and A Foregone Conclusion^ two other novels, were equally successful in tiie same vein. Of his too numerous later novels the most significant have been The Lady of the A?'oos- took, The Undiscovered Coimtry, A Fearful Responsi- bility^ Ap?^il Hopes ^ and y^ Hazard of New Fortunes. Mr. Howells has also collected into book-form some of his numerous criticisms of contemporay European literature and character, and is the au- thor of many bright comedies, chiefly turning on the minor mishaps of life. In i860 a volume called Foems of Two Friends was written by Mr. Howells in conjunction with J. J. Piatt ; and he has never ceased to publish verse that may be aptly charac- terized by the title of the latest collection, Stops of Various Quills (1895). His mark upon American poetry, however, has been less noteworthy than that which he has made upon the fiction of his time. 12. Henry James, Jr., like Bret Harte, has long been a European resident, but must be classed among American authors. As far as cool reti- cence of unimpassioned delineation is concerned, he w^as the earliest of the later school of American "realists," though "realism," at its best, is as old 94 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITER A TUKE. as the Canterbury Tales, and ought to be as vital. Mr. James describes men's ways and words, and leaves the reader to infer their character therefrom. A Passio7iate Fllg7^wi contains the best of the mag- azine stories he wrote during his earUer years. Of his longer novels, Roderick Hiidso7i^ The American^ Watch a7td IVai^d^ and The Portrait of a Lady^ are like highly finished statuettes, clear-cut and cold. Mr. James never works in the '' large manner." Of his later novels, The Eii7'opeans and Washington Square show a lack of that finish by which his first successes were won. Some warmth of human sym- pathy appears i^n certain of his shorter stories, ris- ing into pathos in The Author of Beltraffio and The Death of the Lion. Of all his works, however, The Bostonians is the ablest and the most representa- tive, and should be read by those who would famil- iarize themselves with the best art of a writer who views the ^' procession of life " in a mood of devi- talized coolness, but shows — within self-assigned limits — an honesty of portrayal not less marked than that of the sympathetic delineators of Ameri- can folk-life. 13. Edward Eggleston, born in Indiana in 1837, found a special field in novels of pioneer life in the uncivilized outposts of the new west. His first mature years were those of a Methodist itiner- ant and Sunday-school worker. One or two books for children showed his 'prentice hand, but his first general recognition as a vigorous American novel- ROMANTICISTS. g5 ist followed the publication of The Hoosier School- master^ in 187 1. The End of the World ^ The Mys- tery of Metropolisville^ and 77ie Circuit Rider^ later stories, similarly described to the letter the rough backwoods experiences of the hardy settlers of fourscore years ago. These novels became popular in Europe, their vividness of description and unfa- miliarity of subject proving no less interesting to German readers than were Fenimore Cooper's In- dian tales at the time of their first appearance. 14. George W. Cable, in the deliberateness of his literary art, and his consequent slowness of pro- duction, is exceptional among the inveterate nov- elists of his time. One collection of short stories, four novels, and a novelette form his contribution to American fiction between 1879 and 1895. Of these the first. Old C7'eole Days, remains the best and most characteristic volume ; it took for its own a romantic field, and gave perpetuity to a passing time. The life of New Orleans, with its French and Spanish historical legacies, its American polit- ical allegiance, its mixed races and problematic characters, its sharp contrasts between commercial prosperity and the bitterness of conquest in the civil war, its picturesque commingling of aristo- cracy and plebeianism, is set forth naturally and artistically in Cable's stories. In its union of pa- thos, humor, strength, and delicacy, T)r, Sevier is the most commendable of the author's longer tales. 15. Romanticists. — In the broad range of later 96 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LTTERATURE. American fiction, many writers, of course, have looked for their themes in historical, religious, ro- mantic, or even political fields. The novel and the newspaper are, in recent times, the chief pur- veyors of amusement, or even of didactic instruc- tion ; and the story-teller scans the universe, from zenith to nadir, in search of some new thing. A few novelists may be grouped under the romantic head, merely because their subjects have been other than the real life of contemporaneous society. During the civil war, a new but not enduring movement in American fiction was begun by the tales of Theodore Winthrop, a native of Connecti- cut and a graduate of Yale College, who was killed in the first set engagement of the war, at Big Bethel, Virginia, on June lo, 1861. He had written a few spirited magazine sketches, and at his death three complete novels and a number of minor pa- pers were found among his manuscripts. The novels Cecil Dreeine^ John Brent^ and Edwin Brothertoft are among the breeziest and heartiest of American works of fiction, and even their horses breathe a vital oxygen. The later literary fashion, how- ever, calls for more deliberation, and a more con- scious art, than Winthrop showed, even in his Cecil Dreeme^ which found .a romantic background in a now demolished college building in New York city, and a marplot in the editor of a metropolitan daily. At the same time Harriet Prescott (Mrs. Spofford) seemed likely to become notable among American ROMANTICISTS. 97 story-tellers for splendor of style and almost un- healthy (though never impure) luxuriance of fancy. Sir Rohan's Ghost (1859), The Amber Gods (1863), and Azarian (1864) anticipated, in their spectacu- lar use of tone-color in words, some of the methods of the later French " symbolists." As the best example of her powers of construction and elabo- ration may be mentioned the story of Midsummer and May, in the Amber Gods volume. Not less clearly to be classed with the romancers are Julian Hawthorne and F. Marion Crawford, though both have founded some of their plots upon current events in every-day society. The former, a son of Nathaniel Hawthorne, born in Boston in 1846, found his advancement hindered rather than aided by the circumstance of his birth. In his novels, Bressajit, Idolatry, Garth, Sebastian Strome, and Dust, and in his shorter stories, Mr. Hawthorne shows his father's fondness for psychological and weird themes ; but he is apt to treat them in a somew^hat sensational manner, and overcrowds his canvas with a confusion of figures. Of his numerous books, Archibald Malmaiso7i is the one most indi- vidual in thought and word, and most in consonance with the higher powers of the author, to whom, as to many romancers, the general theme of a dual life possesses a constant fascination. Crawford, of American ancestry and of Italian birth and resi- dence, illustrates in his books, even more than does Henry James, the fashion of the emigre, or cosmo- 98 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE. politan, or '^ man-without-a-country " novel, which has been a feature of recent American Uterature. He is at his worst when he seeks to present An American Politicia7i ; but the ItaHan Hfe of A Cigar- ette-Maker's Ro77tance or A Roman Singer he knows and pictures in an unquestionably pow^erful way. On the wdiole, however, he has never surpassed Mr. Isaacs^ a Tale of Modern India (1882), his first book, in which he introduced a character and an environment unknown in modern fiction. The stress of the demand for newness, in hterature is cruelly prohibitory of lasting renown based on solid work, but it occasionally produces what, in the strict sense of the word, is a novel. Many readers, whose religious imagination was stimulated by its new point of view of the world-tragedy, found in Lew Wallace's Ben Hur, a Tale of the Christ (1880), a vigorously written historical tale, in w^hich the strongest parts were the descriptions of Orien- tal leprosy and of an ancient chariot-race. Other novels of this fiction-making time, however, have been already forgotten, though circulated hardly less widely than the book just mentioned. 16. Edward Everett Hale — preacher, pas- tor, philanthropist, editor, and author, born in Bos- ton in 1822, of a family w^ell known in the literary history of that city — has written a large number of very readable and ingenious stories, of which Te7i Times One is Ten is the longest, a tale made famous by the cheery motto of its hero, Harry AMERICAN HUMOR. 99 Wadsworth. Dr. Hale's short sketch of A Afa?i without a Coimtry is the most remarkable piece of pure verisimihtude produced on this side of the water. It had a marked effect in strengthening the Northern arms during the war. The noble story Li His Na77ie has exerted a widespread and wholesome Christian influence. 17. Louisa May Alcott, a daughter of Bronson Alcott, was the most popular of Amicrican writers of juveniles. Little IVomen (iS6j) ^itisimed quick popularity. Its success in describing girl-life lay in its entire freedom from artificiality and its cheer- iness of spirit. Miss Alcott's literary style was wholly natural, and she seemed to take genuine pleasure in the characters she created. The bright New England boy and girl Miss Alcott knew very w^ell^ and her light humor and fertility of invention made her other books for the young almost equal favorites ; for their merit is nearly uniform, and their readers are of all ages. Miss Alcott's con- siderable novel of Work, and her stories and sketches of adult life, never won the success for which their author hoped. She died in 1888. 18. American Humor. — There has never been any lack of humor in American literature, from the time of Richard Alsop and the Hartford wits down to the latest newspaper paragraphs. It has been individual rather than general, and its rapidity of thought is its chief characteristic. Our lack of a literary centre has denied us any Punch or Fliegende 100 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE. Blatter^ but a really witty saying goes from East- port to San Francisco, and thus the jesters have been likely to find their public greater than their reputation, and reputation more generous than purse. Our later humorists have won their celeb- rity by the constant publication of longer sketches, good, bad, or indifferent, being only careful that the name go with the sketch, and that the sketch be individual enough and long enough to keep out of the promiscuous limbo of popular quota- tion. Charles Farrar Browne (" Artemus Ward ") was born at Waterford, Maine, in 1834. His hu- rhor was of an uneven quality, and was often coarse ; but toward the last of his life he so ripened and mellowed that his popular nickname of " Artemus the delicious " was not wholly inappropriate. He first popularized misspelling in America, and in view of this fact we may call his best saying the remark that "Chaucer was a great poet, but he couldn't spell." Browne won much success as a lecturer, and died in England in 1867, having made himself a favorite in London, where he served for a little time on the staff of Punch. Henry W. Shaw^ ('^Josh Billings"), born in Massachusetts in 1818, is chiefly known as the Avriter of proverbs and aphorisms, in wdiich wdt and wisdom are neatly combined. They are, like Artemus Ward's sayings, in phonetic spelling, but gain nothing by their pre- sentation in uncouth form. David Ross Locke was born in Vestal, Broome County, New York, in 1833, AMERICAN HUMOR. • loi and in his early years led a varied life as a country printer and editor. In i860 he began the publica- tion of letters by ^' Petroleum V. Nasby," an origi- nal character, whose epistles became famous dur- ing the war, and exerted a considerable political influence. Locke was the chief political satirist of the time, and Nasby, wdiether pastor, reformer, w^orkingman, or member of society, is a constant caricature of the ideas for which he stands. Unlike other national satirical humorists taking public affairs for their theme, Locke was facile in turning to the most recent questions wdth unabated strength and undimmed humor. Samuel Langhorne Clemens (^' Mark Twain "), like several other humorists, first attracted attention in California. The Lino- cents Abroad^ a burlesque history of the absurd doings of a somewhat whimsical expedition which had really visited the Mediterranean countries, won thousands of readers ; and Roughifig It., The Adventures of Toni Sawyer., and The Gilded Age (with Charles Dudley Warner) were not less suc- cessful. The qualities of Mr. Clemens's style are peculiar, slyness and adroitness in jesting being prominent, so that the reader is treated to a suc- cession of surprises. A notable absence of refine- ment, however, exists in the jocose writing of all these humorists, though Clemens, in some serious or semi-romantic tales, drops his elsewhere inveter- ate roughness and obviousness of attack on the readers' risibilities. Frank R. Stockton, however, 102 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE. in his dry drolleries in the form of stories, — of which the best are Rudder Grange and The Casting Away of Mrs, Leeks a?id Mrs. Aleshine, — relies upon nothing save clever absurdities of situation and humorous suggestions of thought and charac- ten 19. Charles Djdley Warner, too, is a humor- ist of a more delicate type than those just men- tioned, and likewise has addressed a wide public through his work as an essayist and a novelist. He was born in Plainfield, Massachusetts, in 1829, and graduated at Hamilton College in 185 1. My Suminer in a Garden^ a series of delightful sketches of amateur horticulture, first made him famous. Back-log Studies., domestic and moral reflections, was less popular, but equally good. Baddeck^ and lliat Sort of T/iiiig followed, being an account of a trip to the provinces of British North America. Its little bits of fun and humor are scattered all through the book, and are to be enjoyed in proportion to the reader's own tastes. Afummies and Moslems.^ In the Levant., and Saimterings similarly, though a little more soberly, illuminate life in Oriental and European countries visited by the author. In Being a Boy (1877) Mr. Warner draws the New England youngster to the life. 20. Essayists. — The development of culture in the United States and the multiplication of peri- odicals have promoted not only the short story, already mentioned, but also the signed or anony- ESSAYISTS. 103 mous magazine article, — slighter or more ephem- eral in theme and value, perhaps, than Irving's essays, and certainly less weighty than Emerson's, but often agreeable and suggestive. From ZT^r- per' s Magazine {\% ^6) have been collected an entire series of such papers, by Curtis, Warner, Higgin- son, and others ; while Putnam's Monthly (1853), The Atlantic Monthly (1857), and The Century (1870) have been storehouses of literary material. James T. Fields, of Boston, — once editor as well as publisher of the Atlantic^ — perhaps enjoyed the acquaintance of more English and American au- thors than any other of our writers, and he pre- served some of his entertaining reminiscences in Yesterdays with Authors. In Underbrush (1877) are contained his lighter essays and sketches. Mary Abigail Dodge ('^ Gail Hamilton '') was the author of many volumes of bright essays on a great variety of current topics. Thomas Wentworth Hig- ginson, a descendant of one of the most ancient of Massachusetts families, is chiefly known as an essayist, magazinist, and reviewer, though he has been novelist, historian, and poet. He is an espe- cially pleasant companion in his Out-Door Papers (1863) and Oldport Days (i^'j^)^ volumes made up chiefly of articles concerning this or that phase of out-door life. In Atla?itic Essays (1871) there is a greater proportion of papers on classical or literary subjects. Colonel Higginson was at the head of a colored regiment between 1862 and 1864, having 104 A PRIMER OF AMERICA AT LITER A TURE. been all his life an active opponent of slavery. Army Life in a Black Regimejit (1870) details his South Carolina experiences. In his Young Folks^ History of the United States (1875), ^^^ ^^ ^^^s Larger LListo?y of the United States (1885), he pre- sents, within small compass, a readable and impartial story of the growth of the country. A similar facil- ity of application of literary intelligence is shown in the varied work of Horace E. Scudder, the suc- cessor of Lowell, Fields, Howells, and Aldrich in the editorship of the Atlantic. As representatives of his best writing in several lines may be men- tioned the dainty juvenile, Drea?7i Children (1864), the volume of brief Stories and Romances (1880), and the mature studies oi Men and Letters (1887). Like Fiske and Higginson, he has also success- fully popularized various themes in American his- tory and biography. One cannot mention, in this general division of later American literature^ many such contributions to biographical criticism — a department of writing closely connected with the essay — as W. P. Trent's life of lVillia?n Gilmore Simms (the best portrayal of ante-bclluin Southern society) ; George E. Woodberry's cool study of the life and character of Poe, which forms the introduc- tion to the final edition (1895) of the works of that author; or Thomas R. Lounsbury's illuminating life of James Fcnimore Cooper ; but Professor Louns- bury's able and exhaustive Studies in Chaucer should be named as the largest contribution to the RECENT HISTORIANS. 105 literature of criticism made in this country since Tick nor 's History of Spanish Literature, Another essayist, who must be here mentioned as the dean of the later and numerous body of observers who have written on nature and natural history in a way combining scientific accuracy with agreeable- ness of literary form, is John Burroughs, whose Wake-Robin, Winter Sunshine^ and Signs and Sea- sons entitle him to be called the legitimate suc- cessor of Thoreau. 21. Recent Historians. — James Parton, a na- tive of England but long a resident of America, devoted the greater part of his literary life to the production of historical biographies of prominent men, written after a collation of authorities, but addressed to the popular taste in their fluent style and attractive allusion. Aaron Burr, Andrew Jackson, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, General Butler, and Horace Greeley he thus por- trayed in books of considerable size, while other volumes comprehensively included similar bio- graphical sketches of less length. Mr. Parton like- wise wrote an elaborate life of Voltaire. He died in 1891. John Fiske, the son of a brilliant littera- teur of Hartford, graduated at Harvard in 1864, and immediately won reputation as a student of modern philosophy. In his Outlines of Cos7nic Phi- losophy is presented a better exposition of the Spencerian system than one gets from a casual reading of Herbert Spencer himself. Myths and io6 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE, Myth-Makers is a volume in which folk-lore is ex- plained according to modern scientific principles. In The U?tsee?t Worlds and other Essays are literary reviews and able musical criticisms. The Destinv of Man, viewed in the Light of his Origi?t, and The Idea of God, as affected by Moderii K7iowIedge, are original and helpful arguments in proof of personal immortality and of theism, as studied by an evolu- tionist. Mr. Fiske's largest and most valuable lit- erary achievement, however, consists of his several volumes on American history, which, viewed com- prehensively, form an original, clear, and interesting introductory statement of the sources and devel- opment of life in the United States. Those pub- lished up to the Columbus year of 1892 were, in order of appearance : The Critical Period of A7ner- ican History (1888), The Beginnings of A'eiv E^ig- land {\%Zcj), The American Revolution (189 1), and The Discovery of America, with Soine Account of Ancient Ajnerica and the Spanish Conquest (1892). Of these the first-named, covering the period be- tween 1783 and 1789, is peculiarly lucid and useful. Henry Cabot Lodge's Short History of the English Colonies in A?nerica describes, in a popular way, the birth and growth of our colonial life, and may, like Mr. Fiske's historical works, be read as intro- ductory to the study of American literature. More tliorougli and weighty is Moses Coit Tyler's His- tory of American Literature to 1765, which not only describes and analyzes many rare or significant RECENT HISTORIANS. 107 productions of colonial pens, but fully discusses the social, political, educational, and religious con- ditions out of which they came. Henry Adams' History of the United States, in nine volumes, cov- ers the two administrations of Jefferson and Madi- son respectively, or the period from 1801 to 1817 : it is written in a passionless style, and is chiefly valuable as the final viev/ of the war of 18 12 taken by a descendant of the New England Federalists, wdio has fully investigated the documents and printed writings of the period. James Schouler's History of fhe United States under the Constitutio7i^ in five compact volumes, does not exhibit many charms of literary style, but, for the whole period between 1789 and 1861, forms a useful supplement to Bancroft. Facile and readable, but not im- plicitly to be accepted in all its off-hand state- ments, is John Bach McMaster's History of the People of the United States, still in course of publi- cation. An admirable digest of the voluminous newspaper and documentary literature of the later antislavery and civil-w^ar struggle is presented in James Ford Rhodes' History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850, of w^hich the third volume, bringing the record down to 1862, appeared in 1895. As one follows the highway of American litera- ture to the close of the nineteenth century, the mountain-peaks are left behind, but the table-land ToS A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE. is high. If no authors of the first rank remain, there are yet many faithful workers whose success- ful service would have been impossible without the pioneer toils of those who have gone before. HELPS FOR FURTHER STUDY. Smyth's Bayard Taylor may be read for its story of the sentimental period in American literature, as well as the rise of the group of younger poets following Longfellow. Trent's William Gilmore Si?nms and Woodrow Wilson's Division and Reunion give the best material for the study of Southern society as affecting literary conditions before and after the war. Stedman's Poets of America is the largest and best account of American poets and their works, and is valuable not only for its criticisms, but for its biographical and bibliographical data. A COURSE OF READING IN THE MASTERPIECES OF AMERICAN LITERATURE. Politics and Statecraft : Declaration of Independence. Constitution of the United States. Hamilton, Madison, and Jay's Federalist. Washington's Farewell Address. Webster's Great Speeches and Orations (Whipple's one- volume edition). Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. " Second Inaugural. History and Biography : Franklin's Autobiography. Irving's Washington (unabridged or abridged by Fiske). Bancroft's History of the United States. Parkman's La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West. " Montcalm and Wolfe. Prescott's Ferdinand and Isabella. " Conquest of Mexico. Motley's Rise of the Dutch Republic. " History of the United Netherlands. Essays and Criticism : Irving's Sketch-Book (also im.portant in fiction). Bracebridge Hall ('' a medley "). Emerson's Essays (first and second series). " Society and SoHtude. Lowell's Among my Books. " My Study Windows. no A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE, Holmes' Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. Stedman's Nature and Elements of Poetry. Ticknor's History of Spanish Literature. Travel and Description ; Irving's Crayon Miscellany. Longfellow's Outre-Mer. Emerson's English Traits. Hawthorne's Our Old Home. Thoreau's Walden. '* Cape Cod. Lowell's Fireside Travels. Poetry : Freneau's House of Night (in the Poems of 1786, re- printed, London, 1861 ; out of print in both forms). Barlow's Columbiad. Miscellaneous Poems from the United States Literary Gazette, 1826 (rare, but very valuable, if accessible, as a study of poetical beginnings). Drake's Culprit Fay. Halleck's Marco Bozzaris. <' On the Death of Joseph Rodman Drake. Bryant's Thanatopsis. To a Waterfowl. " Monument Mountain. " Forest Hymn. " To the Fringed Gentian. ** The Planting of the Apple-Tree, " The Flood of Years. " The Twenty-second of February. Longfellow's Voices of the Night. *' Evangeline. " Hiawatha. " Tales of a Wayside Inn, Part I. " Morituri Salutamus. " Woods in Winter. " Resignation. A COURSE OF READING, in Longfellow's The Rainy Day. The Children's Hour. " A Gleam of Sunshine. " The Day is Done. " Something Left Undone. " Excelsior. The Bells of Lynn. " The Building of the Ship. " The Ladder of St. Augustine. '* The Arrow and the Song. " The Chamber over the Gate. ** Victor and Vanquished. Poe's Poems (entire). Emerson's Poems (entire, but slowly and progressively). Lowell's The Vision of Sir Launfal. " Biglow Papers. *' Commemoration Ode. " After the Burial. The Miner. The First Snow-Fall. '* Auf Wiedersehen. Whittier's Snow-Bound. Maud Muller. *' Barbara Frietchie. *' Skipper Ireson's Ride. " In School Days. " Laus Deo. *' Farewell of a Virginia Slave-Mother, " The Pipes at Lucknow. " The Dead Ship of Plarpswell. " My Psalm. " Saint Gregory's Guest. Holmes' The Last Leaf. '* The Chambered Nautilus. " Old Ironsides. '' The Deacon's Masterpiece. " ^Estivation. 112 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LIIERATURE, Holmes' Questions and Answers. The Boys. A Sun-Day Hymn. Hymn of Trust. The Voiceless. Homesick in Heaven. Fiction : Irving's Tales of a Traveller. The Alhambra. Cooper's The Deerslayer. The Last of the Mohicans. The Pathfinder. The Pioneers. The Prairie. The Pilot. The Spy. Poe's Ligeia. '* The Fall of the House of Usher. '' The Gold Bug. " The Black Cat. " The Pit and the Pendulum. " The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar. " The Mystery of Marie Roget. '* The Murders in the Rue Morgue. " Hop-Frog. *' The Unparalleled Adventures of one Hans Pfaal. " The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether. Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales (including the Snow- Image volume). *' Mosses from an Old Manse. " Tanglewood Tales. " The Wonder-Book. " The Scarlet Letter. " The House of the Seven Gables. ** The Marble Faun. Mrs. Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. *' '^ Sam Lawson's Oldtown Fireside Stories. CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE OF SIGNIFICANT DATES IN THE DEVELOP- MENT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE.i SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 1607. Settlement of Jamestown. 1620. Settlement of Plymouth. 1630. Bradford's History of Plymouth Plantation begun. Winthrop's History of New England begun. 1636. First college (Harvard) in the northern colonies. 1639. First printing-press in the colonies. 1640. The Bay Psalm Book. 1662. Wigglesworth's The Day of Doom. 1663. Eliot's Indian Bible. 1693. First college (William and Mary) in the southern colonies. 1702 1704 ^733 1754 1775 1776 EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. Cotton Mather's Magnalia Christi Americana. The Boston News-Letter (perhaps the first newspaper), Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanac begun. Edwards' Freedom of the Will. Revolutionary war begun (treaty of peace 17S3). Declaration of Independence. ^ In this table is presented no date, or event, or title not distinctly im- portant in the study of the growth of the American mind. Students and readers are confused, rather than helped, by the multiplication of names and dates. 114 A PRIMER OF AMERICAX LITERATURE. 17S6. Freneau's Poems. 1788. Hamilton, Madison, and Jay*s The Federalist. 1789. Constitutional government begun. Franklin's Autobiography. 1796. Washington's Farewell Address. 1798. Brown's Wieland (first considerable novel in America). NINETEENTH CENTURY, 1807. Barlow's The Columbiad. 1809. Irving's Knickerbocker's History of Nevv- York. 181 2. War with England (treaty of i3eace 1814). 181 5. The North American Review founded. 1817. Bryant's Thanatopsis. 1819. Irving's The Sketch-Book. 1823. Cooper's The Pioneers. 1830. Webster's Reply to Ha3-ne. 1834. Bancroft's History of the United States begun (fin- ished 1874). 1836. Emerson's Nature. 1837. Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales. Prescott's Ferdinand and Isabella. 1839. Longfellow's Voices of the Night. 1840. Poe's Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque. 1841. Emerson's Essays. 1843. Webster's second Bunker Hill Oration. 1845. Poe's The Raven and Other Poems. Mexican war begun (treaty of peace 1848). 1847. Longfellow's Evangeline. Emerson's Poems. 1848. Lowell's A Fable for Critics. " The Biglow Papers. 1849. Whittier's Voices of Freedom. 1850. Hawthorne*s The Scarlet Letter. 1852. Mrs. Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. 1855. Longfellow's Evangeline. CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE. 115 1856. Motley's The Rise of the Dutch Republic. 1858. Holmes' The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. i860. Hawthorne's The Marble Faun. 1861. Civil war begun (ended 1865). 1865. Parkman's Pioneers of France in the New World (first part of France and England in North America, series finished 1892). Whittier's Snow-Bound. 1870. Beginning of development of short story of local life (most characteristic feature of later American lit- erature). INDEX. Page Adams, Henry (1838- ) 107 Adams, John (1735-1826) 18 Agassiz, Louis (1807-1873) 75 Alcott, Amos Bronson (1799-1888) 72 Alcott, Louisa May (1833-1888) 99 Aldrich, Thomas Bailey (1836- ) 82 Allen, EHzabeth Akers (1832- ) ?>7 Audubon, John James (1780-1851) 75 Bancroft, George (1800-1891) 57 Barlow, Joel (1754-1812) 22 Beecher, Henry Ward (1813-1887) 29 Boker, George Henry (1823-1890) 55 Bradford, William (1589-1657) 9 Bradstreet, Anne (1612-1672) 9 Brainard, John Gardiner Calkins (i 796-1 828) 38 Brooks, PhiUips (1835-1893) 29 Brown, Charles Brockden (1771-1810) 23 Browne, Charles Farrar (1834-1867) 100 Bryant, William Cullen (l 794-1878) , 39 Burnett, Frances Hodgson (1849- ) 91 Burroughs, John (1837- ) i^S Bushnell, Horace (1802-1876) 29 Cable, George Washington (1844- ) 95 Calhoun, John Caldwell (1782-1850) 56 Carleton, William (1845- ) 86 Gary, Alice (1820-1871) 56 C^ry, Phoebe (1824-1871) 56 ii8 INDEX. Channing, William Ellery (1780-1842) 28 Channing, William Ellery, 2d (1818- ) 72 Child, Lydia Maria (1802-1880) 73 Choate, Rufus (1799-1859) 56 Clarke, James Freeman (1810-1888) 29 Clemens, Samuel Langhorne (1835- ) loi Cooke, John Esten (1830-1886) 68 Cooper, James Fenimore (1789-1851) 62 Crawford, Francis Marion (1845- ) 97 Curtis, George William (1824-1892) ^^ Dana, Richard Henry (1787-1879) ^^ Dana, Richard Henry, Jr. (1815-1882) ^t^ Deming, Philander (1829- ) 90 Dodge, Mary Abigail (1830-1896) 103 Drake, Joseph Rodman (i 795-1820) 36 Dwight, Timothy (1752-1817) 12 Edwards, Jonathan (1703-1758) 10 Eggleston, Edward (1837- ) 94 Eliot, John (1604-1690) 6 Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803-1882) 69 Everett, Edward (1794-1865) 56 Field, Eugene (1850-1895) 86 Fields, James Thomas (1816-1881) 103 Finch, Francis Miles (1827- ) 85 Fiske, John (1842- ) 105 Folger, Peter ( 1618-1690) 9 Franklin, Benjamin (1706-1790) 13 Freneau, Phihp (1752-1832) 22 Fuller, Margaret (1810-1850) 74 Furness, Horace Howard (1833- ) 75 Gilder, Richard Watson (1844- ) 86 Gray, Asa (1810-1888) 75 Greele}^ Horace (1811-1872) "j^ Greene, Albert Gorton (1802-1868) ^^ INDEX. 119 Hale, Edward Everett (1822- ) 98 Halleck, Fitz-Greene (1790-1867) -t^'^ Hamilton, Alexander (i 757-1804) 20 Harris, Joel Chandler (1848- ) 90 Harte, Francis Bret (1839- ) '^'j Hawthorne, Julian (1846- ) 97 Hawthorne, Nathaniel (1804-1864) 64 Hay, John (1838- ) 86 Hayne, Paul Hamilton (1830-1886) 85 Henry, Patrick (1736-1799) 18 Higginson, Thomas Wentworth (1823- ) 103 ilildreth, Richard (1807-1865) 61 Hillhouse, James Abraham (1789-1841) 38 Holland, Josiah Gilbert (1819-1881) 74 Holmes, Abiel (1763-1837) 24 Holmes, Oliver Wendell (1809-1894) 48 Hooker, Thomas (1586-1674) 4 Hopkins, Mark (1802-1887) 29 Hopkins, Samuel (1751-1803) 12 Hopkinson, Francis (1737-1791) 22 Howe, Julia Ward (1819- ) 85 Howells, William Dean (1837- ) 91 Irving, Peter (1771-1838) 30 Irving, Washington (1783-1859) 30 Irving, Wilham (1766-1821) 31 Jackson, Helen Fiske (1831-1885) 87 James, Henry (1811-1882) 29 James, Henry, Jr. (1843- ) 93 Jay, John (1745-1829) 20 Jefferson, Thomas (1743-1826) 19 Jewett, Sarah Orne (1849- ) 89 Judd, Sylvester (1813-1853) 68 Kennedy, John Pendleton (1795-1870) 68 Kent, James (1763-1847) 74 Key, Francis Scott (1779-1843) 38 120 INDEX. Lanier, Sidney (1842-1881) 85 Larcom, Lucy (1826-1893) 87 Leland, Charles Godfrey (1824- ) 86 Lincoln, Abraham (1809-1865) 79 Locke, David Ross (1833-1888) -. . 100 Lodge, Henry Cabot (1850- ) 106 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth (1807-1882) 41 Lounsbury, Thomas Raynesford (1838- ) 104 Lowell, James Russell (1819-1891) 50 Madison, James (1751-1836) 20 Marsh, George Perkins (1801-1882) 75 Marshall, John (1755-1835) 24 Mather, Cotton (1663-1728) 4 Mather, Increase (1639-1723) 4 McMaster, John Bach (1852- ) .107 Melville, Herman (1819-1891) 68 Miller, Joaquin (1841- ) 86 Mitchell, Donald Grant (1822- ) 74 Morton, Nathaniel (1613-1685) 9 Motley, John Lothrop (i 814-1877) 59 Murfree, Mary Noailles (1850- ) 90 Nicolay, John George (1832- ) 78 Otis, James (1725-1783) 18 Paine, Robert Treat, Jr. (1773-1811) 22 Paine, Thomas (1737-1809) 21 Palfrey, John Gorham (1796-1881) 61 Parker, Theodore (1810-1860) 29 Parkman, Francis (1823-1893) 60 Parsons, Thomas William (1819-1892) 55 Parton, James (1822-1891) 105 Paulding, James Kirke (1779-1860) 35 Payne, John Howard (1792-1852) 38 Peirce, Benjamin (1809-1880) 75 Percival, James Gates (1795-1856). . .- 55 INDEX. 121 Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart (1844- ) 9° Phillips, Wendell (1811-1884) 5^ Poe, Edgar Allan (1809-1849) 53 Prescott, William Hickling (1796-1859) 58 Prince, Thomas (1687-1758) 16 Ouincy, Josiah, Jr. (l744-i775) ^^ Read, Thomas Buchanan (1822-1872) 85 Rhodes, James Ford (1848- ) 107 Riley, James Whitcomb (1854- ) 86 Ryan, Abram Joseph (i 839-1 886) 85 Sands, Robert Charles (1799-1832) 40 Sandys, George (1577-1643) 4 Saxe, John Godfrey (1816-1887) 56 Schouler, James (1829- ) 107 Scudder, Horace Elisha (1838- ) 104 Sewall, Samuel (1652-1730) 16 Shaw, Henry Wheeler (1818-1885) 100 Sigourney, Lydia Huntley (1791-1865) 56 Simms, William Gilmore (1806-1870) 68 Smith, John (1579-163 1) 8 Sparks, Jared (1789-1866) 62 Spofford, Harriet Prescott (1835- ) 9^ Sprague, Charles (1791-1875) 38 Stedman, Edmund Clarence (1833- ) 81 Stephens, Alexander Hamilton (1812-1883) *]'^ Stith, William (1689-1755) 16 Stockton, Francis Richard (1834- ) 101 Stoddard, Richard Henry (1825- ) 81 Stowe, Harriet Beecher (1812-1896) 68 Stuart, Moses (1780-1852) 27 Sumner, Charles (1811-1874) 56 Taylor, Bayard (1825-1878) 80 Thaxter, Celia (1836-1894) Zy Thoreau, Henry David (1817-1862) 72 122 INDEX. Ticknor, George (1791-1871) *]7, Timrod, Henry (1829-1867) 85 Trowbridge, John Townsend (1827- ) 85 Trumbull, John (1750-1831) 22 Tyler, Moses Coit (1835- ) 106 Verplanck, Gulian Crommelin (1786-1870) .40 Very, Jones (1813-1880) 72 Wallace, Lew. (1827- ) 98 Ward, Nathaniel (1578 ?-i652) 8 Warner, Charles Dudley (1829- ) 102 Warner, Susan (1819-1885) 69 Washington, George (1732-1799) 18 Webster, Daniel (1782-1852) 56 Webster, Noah (1758-1843) 75 Wheatley, PhiUis (1753-1784) 22 Whipple, Edwin Percy ( 1819-1886) ^-t^ Whitman, Walt (1819-1892) 84 Whitney, William Dwight (1827- 1894) 75 Whittier, John Greenleaf (1807-1892) 45 Wigglesworth, Michael (1631-1705) 9 Wilde, Richard Henry (1789-1847) ^Z Wilkins, Mary E. (18 - ) 90 Williams, Roger (i6oo?-i683) 7 Willis, Nathaniel Parker (1806-1867) 55 Wilson, Alexander (1766-1813) 24 Wilson, Henry (1812-1875) 78 Winthrop, John (1588-1649) 8 Winthrop, Robert Charles (1809-1894) 56 Winthrop, Theodore (1828-1861) 96 Wirt, William (1772-1834) 24 Woodberry, George Edward (1855- ) 104 Woodworth, Samuel (1785-1842) 38 Woolman, John (1720-1772) 16 Woolson, Constance Fenimore (i 848-1894) 90 Worcester, Joseph Emerson (1784-1865) 75 APPENDIX. PORTRAITS AND HOMES OF BRYANT LOWELL LONGFELLOW HAWTHORNE WHTTTIER STOWE HOLMES EMERSON 'XtCOyT^iy CEDARMERE Bryanfs Home at Roslyn M<3^V/>^V't .^^^^^^-^-^^ THE CRAIGIE HOUSE, CAMBRIDGE WashifigtofCs Headquarters and Lo7igfello'w'' s Home ^^' UdAJc^je)-^,^XC-^ _,_m:r^ , "~ " T ' ? a B H I .:^\^.% mmm ff!?-""" HTHfrmimin.; f^truj WHITTIER'S AMESBURY HOME ^^^Oreyty 1 -^ J^ 1 '■J < J o X ^ ^ h^ ^ s y: ^ "lo C< 1 t-^ g o § X ^ <;» :^ K LOWELL'S HOME AT ELMWOOD, CAMBRIDGE 'Cc^J^ .^^^^5^^^^?^^. J-^r9. J^y^/f/a^i^ (^£^^,^^7^^ Q O u o u H < O W >; O HOUSEHOLD EDITIONS OF THE POEMS OF Aldrich, Gary, Emerson, Harte, Holmes, Larcom, Longfellow, Lo^vell, Meredith, Saxe, Sted- man, Taylor, Tennyson, Whittier. TOGETHER WITH Emerson's Parnassus. Parton's French Parnassus. Parton's Humorous Poetry. Longfellow's Christus. Whittier's Songs of Three Centuries. Taylor's Dramatic Works. Portraits of the poets are contained in many of the volumes. Price of each volume, in cloth, $1.50; full gilt, $2.00. CABINET EDITIONS OF THE POEMS OF Burns, Harte, Longfellow, Lowell, Mulock, Procter, Saxe, Scott, Tennyson, "Whittier. TOGETHER WITH Longfellow's Christus and Meredith's Lucile. Price of each volume, in cloth, Ji.oo. CAMBRIDGE EDITIONS OF THE COMPLETE POETICAL WORKS OF Robert Browning, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf "Whittier, Oliver "Wendell Holmes, James Russell Lowell. Each in a single volume, printed from clear type, on opaque paper, and attractively bound. 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Longfellow's Courtship of Miles Standish ; Elizabeth.** 3. Longfellow's Courtship of Miles Standish. Dramatized. 4. 'Whittler's Snow-Bound, and Other Poems **tj:* 5. "Whittier's Mabel Martin, and Other Poems.* 6. Holmes's Grandmother's Story of Bunker Hill Battle, etc.* 7. 8, 9. Hawthorne's Grandfather's Chair : True Stories from New England History, 1620-1803. In three parts.tj 10. Hawthorne's Biographical Stories. With Questions.* 11. Longfellow's Children's Hour, and Other Selections.* 12. Studies in Longfellow. Thirty-two Topics for Study. 13. 14. Longfellow's Song of Hiawatha. In two parts.| 15. Lowell's Under the Old Elm, and Other Poems.* 16. Bayard Taylor's Lars : a Pastoral of Norway, etc. 17. 18. Hawthorne's Wonder-Book. In two parts. J 19, 20. Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography. In two parts.J 21. Benjamin Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanac, etc. 22, 23. Hawthorne's Tanglewood Tales. In two parts. | 24. "Washington's Rules of Conduct, Letters and Ad- dresses.** 25, 26. 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Containing Classic American Poems set to Standard Music. {Double Number, 30 cents ; boards, 40 cents,) M Lowell's Fable for Critics. {Double Number^ 30 cents,) N Selections from Longfellow, Whittierj Lowell, Holmes, Emerson, Bryant. Institute Number. Also, bound in linen : ** 25 cents. * 29 and 10 in one vol., 40 cents ; likewise 28 and 36, 4 and 5, 6 and 31,15 and 30, 40 and 69, 57 and 58, 11 and 63. J Also in one vol., 40 cents. %X i, 4, and 30 also in one vol., 50 cents; likewise 7, 8, and 9, and 33, 34, and 35. § Double Number, 30 cents ; linen, 40 cents. §§ Quadruple Number, 50 cents; linen, 60 cents. HOUGHTOxNF, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY, 4 Park Street, Boston ; ii E^st 17TH St., New York; 158 Adams St., Chicago. Popular School Readers^ contaijiiiig good Literature drawn prin- cipally from the Riverside Literature Series, AMERICAN POEMS. SELECTIONS FROM THE WORKS OF LONGFELLOW, WSLTTIEM, BMYANT, HOL3LJES, LOWELL, A.NI) EMEJRSON, With Biographical Sketches, and Notes explaining the Historical and Per- sonal Allusions, I vol. i2mo, 462 pages, ^i.oo, net. The list of pieces selected is as follows : — Longfellow : Evangeline ; The Courtship of Miles Standish ; The Build- ing of the Ship. Whittier : Snow-Bound ; Among the Hills ; Mabel Martin ; Cobbler Keezar's Vision; Barclay of Ury ; The Two Rabbis; The Gift of Trite- mius ; The Brother of Mercy ; The Prophecy of Samuel Sewall ; Maud Mullen Bryant : Sella ; The Little People of the Snow. Holmes : Grandmother's Story of Bunker Hill Battle ; The School-Boy. Lowell : The Vision of Sir Launfal ; Under the Willows ; Under the Old Elm; Agassiz. Emerson : The Adirondacks ; The Titmouse ; IMonadnoc. Appendix : In the Laboratory with Agassiz. All the poems are given in full, and foot-notes explain passages contain- ing allusions which might not be understood by readers. Brief biographical sketches of the poets are also given. AMERICAN PROSE. SELECTIONS OF ENTIRE ESSAYS, SKETCHES, AND STORIES, FROM THE WORKS OF HAWTHORNE, IJtriXG, LONGFELLOW, WHIT- TIER, HOLMES, LOWELL, THOREAU, EMERSON. With Introductions and Notes. i2mo, 420 pages, $1.00, net. The selections comprised in this book are as follow^s : — Hawthorne: The Snow-Image; The Great Stone Face; Drowne's Wooden Image ; Howe's Masquerade. Irving : Rip Van Winkle ; Little Britain. Longfellow : The Valle^r of the Loire ; Journey into Spain. Whittier : Yankee Gypsies ; The Boy Captives. Holmes : The Gambrel-Roofed House. Lowell : My Garden Acquaintance ; Abraham Lincoln ; Books and Libraries. Thoreau : Sounds ; Brute Neighbors ; The Highland Light. Emerson : Behavior ; Books. Any person familiar wdth these essays and stories will recognize their great and varied interest, as well as their unquestionable literary excellence. 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