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diff --git a/.gitattributes b/.gitattributes new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6833f05 --- /dev/null +++ b/.gitattributes @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +* text=auto +*.txt text +*.md text diff --git a/15854-8.txt b/15854-8.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..70c4ed8 --- /dev/null +++ b/15854-8.txt @@ -0,0 +1,10597 @@ +The Project Gutenberg eBook, Initial Studies in American Letters, by Henry +A. Beers + + +This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with +almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + + + + + +Title: Initial Studies in American Letters + + +Author: Henry A. Beers + +Release Date: May 18, 2005 [eBook #15854] + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 + + +***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK INITIAL STUDIES IN AMERICAN +LETTERS*** + + +E-text prepared by Al Haines + + + +INITIAL STUDIES IN AMERICAN LETTERS + +by + +HENRY A. BEERS + +New York +Chautauqua Press +C. L. S. C. Department, 150 Fifth Avenue + +1891 + + + + + + + +The required books of the C. L. S. C. are recommended by a Council of +Six. It must, however, be understood that recommendation does not +involve an approval by the Council, or by any member of it, of every +principle or doctrine contained in the book recommended. + + + + + +PREFACE. + +This volume is intended as a companion to the historical sketch of +English literature, entitled _From Chaucer to Tennyson_, published last +year for the Chautauqua Circle. In writing it I have followed the same +plan, aiming to present the subject in a sort of continuous essay +rather than in the form of a "primer" or elementary manual. I have not +undertaken to describe, or even to mention, every American author or +book of importance, but only those which seemed to me of most +significance. Nevertheless I believe that the sketch contains enough +detail to make it of some use as a guide-book to our literature. +Though meant to be mainly a history of American _belles-lettres_, it +makes some mention of historical and political writings, but hardly any +of philosophical, scientific, and technical works. + +A chronological rather than a topical order has been followed, although +the fact that our best literature is of recent growth has made it +impossible to adhere as closely to a chronological plan as in the +English sketch. In the reading courses appended to the different +chapters I have named a few of the most important authorities in +American literary history, such as Duyckinck, Tyler, Stedman, and +Richardson. My thanks are due to the authors and publishers who have +kindly allowed me the use of copyrighted matter for the appendix, +especially to Mr. Park Godwin and Messrs. D. Appleton & Co. for the +passages from Bryant; to Messrs. A. O. Armstrong & Son for the +selections from Poe; to the Rev. E. E. Hale and Messrs. Roberts +Brothers for the extract from _The Man Without a Country_; to Walt +Whitman for his two poems; and to Mr. Clemens and the American +Publishing Co. for the passage from _The Jumping Frog_. + +HENRY A. BEERS. + + + + + +CONTENTS. + + CHAPTER I. + THE COLONIAL PERIOD, 1607-1765 + + CHAPTER II. + THE REVOLUTIONARY PERIOD, 1765-1815 + + CHAPTER III. + THE ERA OF NATIONAL EXPANSION, 1815-1837 + + CHAPTER IV. + THE CONCORD WRITERS, 1837-1861 + + CHAPTER V. + THE CAMBRIDGE SCHOLARS, 1837-1861 + + CHAPTER VI. + LITERATURE IN THE CITIES, 1837-1861 + + CHAPTER VII. + LITERATURE SINCE 1861 + + APPENDIX. + + + + +INITIAL STUDIES IN AMERICAN LETTERS. + + +CHAPTER I. + +THE COLONIAL PERIOD. + +1607-1765. + +The writings of our colonial era have a much greater importance as +history than as literature. It would be unfair to judge of the +intellectual vigor of the English colonists in America by the books +that they wrote; those "stern men with empires in their brains" had +more pressing work to do than the making of books. The first settlers, +indeed, were brought face to face with strange and exciting +conditions--the sea, the wilderness, the Indians, the flora and fauna +of a new world--things which seem stimulating to the imagination, and +incidents and experiences which might have lent themselves easily to +poetry or romance. Of all these they wrote back to England reports +which were faithful and sometimes vivid, but which, upon the whole, +hardly rise into the region of literature. "New England," said +Hawthorne, "was then in a state incomparably more picturesque than at +present." But to a contemporary that old New England of the +seventeenth century doubtless seemed any thing but picturesque, filled +with grim, hard, work-day realities. The planters both of Virginia and +Massachusetts were decimated by sickness and starvation, constantly +threatened by Indian Wars, and troubled by quarrels among themselves +and fears of disturbance from England. The wrangles between the royal +governors and the House of Burgesses in the Old Dominion, and the +theological squabbles in New England, which fill our colonial records, +are petty and wearisome to read of. At least, they would be so did we +not bear in mind to what imperial destinies those conflicts were slowly +educating the little communities which had hardly yet secured a +foothold on the edge of the raw continent. + +Even a century and a half after the Jamestown and Plymouth settlements, +when the American plantations had grown strong and flourishing, and +commerce was building up large towns, and there were wealth and +generous living and fine society, the "good old colony days when we +lived under the king," had yielded little in the way of literature that +is of any permanent interest. There would seem to be something in the +relation of a colony to the mother-country which dooms the thought and +art of the former to a helpless provincialism. Canada and Australia +are great provinces, wealthier and more populous than the thirteen +colonies at the time of their separation from England. They have +cities whose inhabitants number hundreds of thousands, well-equipped +universities, libraries, cathedrals, costly public buildings, all the +outward appliances of an advanced civilization; and yet what have +Canada and Australia contributed to British literature? + +American literature had no infancy. That engaging _naïveté_ and that +heroic rudeness which give a charm to the early popular tales and songs +of Europe find, of course, no counterpart on our soil. Instead of +emerging from the twilight of the past the first American writings were +produced under the garish noon of a modern and learned age. +Decrepitude rather than youthfulness is the mark of a colonial +literature. The poets, in particular, instead of finding a challenge +to their imagination in the new life about them, are apt to go on +imitating the cast-off literary fashions of the mother-country. +America was settled by Englishmen who were contemporary with the +greatest names in English literature. Jamestown was planted in 1607, +nine years before Shakespeare's death, and the hero of that enterprise, +Captain John Smith, may not improbably have been a personal +acquaintance of the great dramatist. "They have acted my fatal +tragedies on the stage," wrote Smith. Many circumstances in _The +Tempest_ were doubtless suggested by the wreck of the _Sea Venture_ on +"the still vext Bermoothes," as described by William Strachey in his +_True Repertory of the Wrack and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates_, +written at Jamestown, and published at London in 1610. Shakespeare's +contemporary, Michael Drayton, the poet of the _Polyolbion_, addressed +a spirited valedictory ode to the three shiploads of "brave, heroic +minds" who sailed from London in 1606 to colonize Virginia, an ode +which ended with the prophecy of a future American literature: + + "And as there plenty grows + Of laurel every-where-- + Apollo's sacred tree-- + You it may see + A poet's brows + To crown, that may sing there." + +Another English poet, Samuel Daniel, the author of the _Civil Wars_, +had also prophesied in a similar strain: + + "And who in time knows whither we may vent + The treasure of our tongue, to what strange shores . . . + What worlds in the yet unformed Occident + May come refined with accents that are ours?" + +It needed but a slight movement in the balances of fate, and Walter +Raleigh might have been reckoned among the poets of America. He was +one of the original promoters of the Virginia colony, and he made +voyages in person to Newfoundland and Guiana. And more unlikely things +have happened than that when John Milton left Cambridge in 1632 he +should have been tempted to follow Winthrop and the colonists of +Massachusetts Bay, who had sailed two years before. Sir Henry Vane, +the younger, who was afterward Milton's friend-- + + "Vane, young in years, but in sage counsel old"-- + +came over in 1635, and was for a short time governor of Massachusetts. +These are idle speculations, and yet, when we reflect that Oliver +Cromwell was on the point of embarking for America when he was +prevented by the king's officers, we may, for the nonce, "let our frail +thoughts dally with false surmise," and fancy by how narrow a chance +_Paradise Lost_ missed being written in Boston. But, as a rule, the +members of the literary guild are not quick to emigrate. They like the +feeling of an old and rich civilization about them, a state of society +which America has only begun to reach during the present century. + +Virginia and New England, says Lowell, were the "two great distributing +centers of the English race." The men who colonized the country +between the Capes of Virginia were not drawn, to any large extent, from +the literary or bookish classes in the old country. Many of the first +settlers were gentlemen--too many, Captain Smith thought, for the good +of the plantation. Some among these were men of worth and spirit, "of +good means and great parentage." Such was, for example, George Percy, +a younger brother of the Earl of Northumberland, who was one of the +original adventurers, and the author of _A Discourse of the Plantation +of the Southern Colony of Virginia_, which contains a graphic narrative +of the fever and famine summer of 1607 at Jamestown. But many of these +gentlemen were idlers, "unruly gallants, packed thither by their +friends to escape ill destinies," dissipated younger sons, soldiers of +fortune, who came over after the gold which was supposed to abound in +the new country, and who spent their time in playing bowls and drinking +at the tavern as soon as there was any tavern. With these was a +sprinkling of mechanics and farmers, indented servants, and the +on-scourings of the London streets, fruit of press-gangs and jail +deliveries, sent over to "work in the plantations." + +Nor were the conditions of life afterward in Virginia very favorable to +literary growth. The planters lived isolated on great estates which +had water-fronts on the rivers that flow into the Chesapeake. There +the tobacco, the chief staple of the country, was loaded directly upon +the trading vessels that tied up to the long, narrow wharves of the +plantations. Surrounded by his slaves, and visited occasionally by a +distant neighbor, the Virginia country gentleman lived a free and +careless life. He was fond of fox-hunting, horse-racing, and +cock-fighting. There were no large towns, and the planters met each +other mainly on occasion of a county court or the assembling of the +Burgesses. The court-house was the nucleus of social and political +life in Virginia as the town-meeting was in New England. In such a +state of society schools were necessarily few, and popular education +did not exist. Sir William Berkeley, who was the royal governor of the +colony from 1641 to 1677, said, in 1670, "I thank God there are no free +schools nor printing, and I hope we shall not have these hundred +years." In the matter of printing this pious wish was well-nigh +realized. The first press set up in the colony, about 1681, was soon +suppressed, and found no successor until the year 1729. From that date +until some ten years before the Revolution one printing-press answered +the needs of Virginia, and this was under official control. The +earliest newspaper in the colony was the _Virginia Gazette_, +established in 1736. + +In the absence of schools the higher education naturally languished. +Some of the planters were taught at home by tutors, and others went to +England and entered the universities. But these were few in number, +and there was no college in the colony until more than half a century +after the foundation of Harvard in the younger province of +Massachusetts. The college of William and Mary was established at +Williamsburg chiefly by the exertions of the Rev. James Blair, a Scotch +divine, who was sent by the Bishop of London as "commissary" to the +Church in Virginia. The college received its charter in 1693, and held +its first commencement in 1700. It is perhaps significant of the +difference between the Puritans of New England and the so-called +"Cavaliers" of Virginia, that while the former founded and supported +Harvard College in 1636, and Yale in 1701, of their own motion and at +their own expense, William and Mary received its endowment from the +crown, being provided for in part by a deed of lands and in part by a +tax of a penny a pound on all tobacco exported from the colony. In +return for this royal grant the college was to present yearly to the +king two copies of Latin verse. It is reported of the young Virginian +gentlemen who resorted to the new college that they brought their +plantation manners with them, and were accustomed to "keep race-horses +at the college, and bet at the billiard or other gaming-tables." +William and Mary College did a good work for the colony, and educated +some of the great Virginians of the Revolutionary era, but it has never +been a large or flourishing institution, and has held no such relation +to the intellectual development of its section as Harvard and Yale have +held in the colonies of Massachusetts and Connecticut. Even after the +foundation of the University of Virginia, in which Jefferson took a +conspicuous part, Southern youths were commonly sent to the North for +their education, and at the time of the outbreak of the civil war there +was a large contingent of Southern students in several Northern +colleges, notably in Princeton and Yale. + +Naturally, the first books written in America were descriptions of the +country and narratives of the vicissitudes of the infant settlements, +which were sent home to be printed for the information of the English +public and the encouragement of further immigration. Among books of +this kind produced in Virginia the earliest and most noteworthy were +the writings of that famous soldier of fortune, Captain John Smith. +The first of these was his _True Relation_, namely, "of such +occurrences and accidents of note as hath happened in Virginia since +the first planting of that colony," printed at London in 1608. Among +Smith's other books the most important is perhaps his _General History +of Virginia_ (London, 1624), a compilation of various narratives by +different hands, but passing under his name. Smith was a man of a +restless and daring spirit, full of resource, impatient of +contradiction, and of a somewhat vainglorious nature, with an appetite +for the marvelous and a disposition to draw the longbow. He had seen +service in many parts of the world, and his wonderful adventures lost +nothing in the telling. It was alleged against him that the evidence +of his prowess rested almost entirely on his own testimony. His +truthfulness in essentials has not, perhaps, been successfully +impugned, but his narratives have suffered by the embellishments with +which he has colored them; and, in particular, the charming story of +Pocahontas saving his life at the risk of her own--the one romance of +early Virginian history--has passed into the realm of legend. + +Captain Smith's writings have small literary value apart from the +interest of the events which they describe and the diverting but +forcible personality which they unconsciously display. They are the +rough-hewn records of a busy man of action, whose sword was mightier +than his pen. As Smith returned to England after two years in +Virginia, and did not permanently cast in his lot with the settlement +of which he had been for a time the leading spirit, he can hardly be +claimed as an American author. No more can Mr. George Sandys, who came +to Virginia in the train of Governor Wyat, in 1621, and completed his +excellent metrical translation of Ovid on the banks of the James, in +the midst of the Indian massacre of 1622, "limned" as he writes "by +that imperfect light which was snatched from the hours of night and +repose, having wars and tumults to bring it to light instead of the +muses." Sandys went back to England for good probably as early as +1625, and can, therefore, no more be reckoned as the first American +poet, on the strength of his paraphrase of the _Metamorphoses_, than he +can be reckoned the earliest Yankee inventor because he "introduced the +first water-mill into America." + +The literature of colonial Virginia, and of the southern colonies which +took their point of departure from Virginia, is almost wholly of this +historical and descriptive kind. A great part of it is concerned with +the internal affairs of the province, such as "Bacon's Rebellion," in +1676, one of the most striking episodes in our ante-revolutionary +annals, and of which there exist a number of narratives, some of them +anonymous, and only rescued from a manuscript condition a hundred years +after the event. Another part is concerned with the explorations of +new territory. Such were the "Westover Manuscripts," left by Colonel +William Byrd, who was appointed in 1729 one of the commissioners to fix +the boundary between Virginia and North Carolina, and gave an account +of the survey in his _History of the Dividing Line_, which was printed +only in 1841. Colonel Byrd is one of the most brilliant figures of +colonial Virginia, and a type of the Old Virginia gentleman. He had +been sent to England for his education, where he was admitted to the +bar of the Middle Temple, elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, and +formed an intimate friendship with Charles Boyle, the Earl of Orrery. +He held many offices in the government of the colony, and founded the +cities of Richmond and Petersburg. His estates were large, and at +Westover--where he had one of the finest private libraries in +America--he exercised a baronial hospitality, blending the usual +profusion of plantation life with the elegance of a traveled scholar +and "picked man of countries." Colonel Byrd was rather an amateur in +literature. His _History of the Dividing Line_ is written with a +jocularity which rises occasionally into real humor, and which gives to +the painful journey through the wilderness the air of a holiday +expedition. Similar in tone were his diaries of _A Progress to the +Mines_ and _A Journey to the Land of Eden_ in North Carolina. + +The first formal historian of Virginia was Robert Beverly, "a native +and inhabitant of the place," whose _History of Virginia_ was printed +at London in 1705. Beverly was a rich planter and large slave-owner, +who, being in London in 1703, was shown by his bookseller the +manuscript of a forthcoming work, Oldmixon's _British Empire in +America_. Beverly was set upon writing his history by the inaccuracies +in this, and likewise because the province "has been so misrepresented +to the common people of England as to make them believe that the +servants in Virginia are made to draw in cart and plow, and that the +country turns all people black"--an impression which lingers still in +parts of Europe. The most original portions of the book are those in +which the author puts down his personal observations of the plants and +animals of the New World, and particularly the account of the Indians, +to which his third book is devoted, and which is accompanied by +valuable plates. Beverly's knowledge of these matters was evidently at +first hand, and his descriptions here are very fresh and interesting. +The more strictly historical part of his work is not free from +prejudice and inaccuracy. A more critical, detailed, and impartial, +but much less readable, work was William Stith's _History of the First +Discovery and Settlement of Virginia_, 1747, which brought the subject +down only to the year 1624. Stith was a clergyman, and at one time a +professor in William and Mary College. + +The Virginians were stanch royalists and churchmen. The Church of +England was established by law, and non-conformity was persecuted in +various ways. Three missionaries were sent to the colony in 1642 by +the Puritans of New England, two from Braintree, Massachusetts, and one +from New Haven. They were not suffered to preach, but many resorted to +them in private houses, until, being finally driven out by fines and +imprisonments, they took refuge in Catholic Maryland. The Virginia +clergy were not, as a body, very much of a force in education or +literature. Many of them, by reason of the scattering and dispersed +condition of their parishes, lived as domestic chaplains with the +wealthier planters, and partook of their illiteracy and their passion +for gaming and hunting. Few of them inherited the zeal of Alexander +Whitaker, the "Apostle of Virginia," who came over in 1611 to preach to +the colonists and convert the Indians, and who published in furtherance +of those ends _Good News from Virginia_, in 1613, three years before +his death by drowning in the James River. + +The conditions were much more favorable for the production of a +literature in New England than in the southern colonies. The free and +genial existence of the "Old Dominion" had no counterpart among the +settlers of Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay, and the Puritans must have +been rather unpleasant people to live with for persons of a different +way of thinking. But their intensity of character, their respect for +learning, and the heroic mood which sustained them through the +hardships and dangers of their great enterprise are amply reflected in +their own writings. If these are not so much literature as the raw +materials of literature, they have at least been fortunate in finding +interpreters among their descendants, and no modern Virginian has done +for the memory of the Jamestown planters what Hawthorne, Whittier, +Longfellow, and others have done in casting the glamour of poetry and +romance over the lives of the founders of New England. + +Cotton Mather, in his _Magnalia_, quotes the following passage from one +of those election sermons, delivered before the General Court of +Massachusetts, which formed for many years the great annual +intellectual event of the colony: + +"The question was often put unto our predecessors, _What went ye out +into the wilderness to see_? And the answer to it is not only too +excellent but too notorious to be dissembled. . . . We came hither +because we would have our posterity settled under the pure and full +dispensations of the Gospel, defended by rulers that should be of +ourselves." The New England colonies were, in fact, theocracies. +Their leaders were clergymen, or laymen whose zeal for the faith was no +whit inferior to that of the ministers themselves. Church and State +were one. The freeman's oath was only administered to church members, +and there was no place in the social system for unbelievers or +dissenters. The pilgrim fathers regarded their transplantation to the +New World as an exile, and nothing is more touching in their written +records than the repeated expressions of love and longing toward the +old home which they had left, and even toward that Church of England +from which they had sorrowfully separated themselves. It was not in +any light or adventurous spirit that they faced the perils of the sea +and the wilderness. "This howling wilderness," "these ends of the +earth," "these goings down of the sun," are some of the epithets which +they constantly applied to the land of their exile. Nevertheless they +had come to stay, and, unlike Smith and Percy and Sandys, the early +historians and writers of New England cast in their lots permanently +with the new settlements. A few, indeed, went back after 1640--Mather +says some ten or twelve of the ministers of the first "classis" or +immigration were among them--when the victory of the Puritanic party in +Parliament opened a career for them in England, and made their presence +there seem in some cases a duty. The celebrated Hugh Peters, for +example, who was afterward Oliver Cromwell's chaplain, and was beheaded +after the Restoration, went back in 1641, and in 1647 Nathaniel Ward, +the minister of Ipswich, Massachusetts, and author of a quaint book +against toleration, entitled _The Simple Cobbler of Agawam_; written in +America and published shortly after its author's arrival in England. +The civil war, too, put a stop to further emigration from England until +after the Restoration in 1660. + +The mass of the Puritan immigration consisted of men of the middle +class, artisans and husbandmen, the most useful members of a new +colony. But their leaders were clergymen educated at the universities, +and especially at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, the great Puritan +college; their civil magistrates were also in great part gentlemen of +education and substance, like the elder Winthrop, who was learned in +law, and Theophilus Eaton, first governor of New Haven, who was a +London merchant of good estate. It is computed that there were in New +England during the first generation as many university graduates as in +any community of equal population in the old country. Almost the first +care of the settlers was to establish schools. Every town of fifty +families was required by law to maintain a common school, and every +town of a hundred families a grammar or Latin school. In 1636, only +sixteen years after the landing of the Pilgrims on Plymouth Rock, +Harvard College was founded at Newtown, whose name was thereupon +changed to Cambridge, the General Court held at Boston on September 8, +1630, having already advanced 400 pounds "by way of essay towards the +building of something to begin a college." "An university," says +Mather, "which hath been to these plantations, for the good literature +there cultivated, _sal Gentium_, . . . and a river without the streams +whereof these regions would have been mere unwatered places for the +devil." By 1701 Harvard had put forth a vigorous offshoot, Yale +College at New Haven, the settlers of New Haven and Connecticut +plantations having increased sufficiently to need a college at their +own doors. A printing-press was set up at Cambridge in 1639, which was +under the oversight of the university authorities, and afterward of +licensers appointed by the civil power. The press was no more free in +Massachusetts than in Virginia, and that "liberty of unlicensed +printing" for which the Puritan Milton had pleaded in his +_Areopagitica_, in 1644, was unknown in Puritan New England until some +twenty years before the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. "The +Freeman's Oath" and an almanac were issued from the Cambridge press in +1639, and in 1640 the first English book printed in America, a +collection of the psalms in meter, made by various ministers, and known +as the _Bay Psalm Book_. The poetry of this version was worse, if +possible, than that of Sternhold and Hopkins's famous rendering; but it +is noteworthy that one of the principal translators was that devoted +"Apostle to the Indians," the Rev. John Eliot, who, in 1661-63, +translated the Bible into the Algonquin tongue. Eliot hoped and toiled +a life-time for the conversion of those "salvages," "tawnies," +"devil-worshipers," for whom our early writers have usually nothing but +bad words. They have been destroyed instead of converted; but his (so +entitled) _Mamusse Wunneetupanatamwe Up-Biblum God naneeswe Nukkone +Testament kah wonk Wusku Testament_--the first Bible printed in +America--remains a monument of missionary zeal and a work of great +value to students of the Indian languages. + +A modern writer has said that, to one looking back on the history of +old New England, it seems as though the sun shone but dimly there, and +the landscape was always dark and wintry. Such is the impression which +one carries away from the perusal of books like Bradford's and +Winthrop's Journals, or Mather's _Wonders of the Invisible World_--an +impression of gloom, of flight and cold, of mysterious fears besieging +the infant settlements scattered in a narrow fringe "between the +groaning forest and the shore." The Indian terror hung over New +England for more than half a century, or until the issue of King +Philip's War, in 1670, relieved the colonists of any danger of a +general massacre. Added to this were the perplexities caused by the +earnest resolve of the settlers to keep their New-England Eden free +from the intrusion of the serpent in the shape of heretical sects in +religion. The Puritanism of Massachusetts was an orthodox and +conservative Puritanism. The later and more grotesque out-crops of the +movement in the old England found no toleration in the new. But these +refugees for conscience' sake were compelled in turn to persecute +Antinomians, Separatists, Familists, Libertines, Anti-pedobaptists, and +later, Quakers, and still later, Enthusiasts, who swarmed into their +precincts and troubled the churches with "prophesyings" and novel +opinions. Some of those were banished, others were flogged or +imprisoned, and a few were put to death. Of the exiles the most +noteworthy was Roger Williams, an impetuous, warm-hearted man, who was +so far in advance of his age as to deny the power of the civil +magistrate in cases of conscience, or who, in other words, maintained +the modern doctrine of the separation of Church and State. Williams +was driven away from the Massachusetts colony--where he had been +minister of the church at Salem--and with a few followers fled into the +southern wilderness and settled at Providence. There, and in the +neighboring plantation of Rhode Island, for which he obtained a +charter, he established his patriarchal rule and gave freedom of +worship to all comers. Williams was a prolific writer on theological +subjects, the most important of his writings being, perhaps, his +_Bloody Tenent of Persecution_, 1644, and a supplement to the same +called out by a reply to the former work from the pen of Mr. John +Cotton, minister of the First Church at Boston, entitled _The Bloody +Tenent Washed and made White in the Blood of the Lamb_. Williams was +also a friend to the Indians, whose lands, he thought, should not be +taken from them without payment, and he anticipated Eliot by writing, +in 1643, a _Key into the Language of America_. Although at odds with +the theology of Massachusetts Bay, Williams remained in correspondence +with Winthrop and others in Boston, by whom he was highly esteemed. He +visited England in 1643 and 1652, and made the acquaintance of John +Milton. + +Besides the threat of an Indian war and their anxious concern for the +purity of the Gospel in their churches, the colonists were haunted by +superstitious forebodings of the darkest kind. It seemed to them that +Satan, angered by the setting up of the kingdom of the saints in +America, had "come down in great wrath," and was present among them, +sometimes even in visible shape, to terrify and tempt. Special +providences and unusual phenomena, like earth quakes, mirages, and the +northern lights, are gravely recorded by Winthrop and Mather and others +as portents of supernatural persecutions. Thus Mrs. Anne Hutchinson, +the celebrated leader of the Familists, having, according to rumor, +been delivered of a monstrous birth, the Rev. John Cotton, in open +assembly, at Boston, upon a lecture day, "thereupon gathered that it +might signify her error in denying inherent righteousness." "There +will be an unusual range of the devil among us," wrote Mather, "a +little before the second coming of our Lord. The evening wolves will +be much abroad when we are near the evening of the world." This belief +culminated in the horrible witchcraft delusion at Salem in 1692, that +"spectral puppet play," which, beginning with the malicious pranks of a +few children who accused certain uncanny old women and other persons of +mean condition and suspected lives of having tormented them with magic, +gradually drew into its vortex victims of the highest character, and +resulted in the judicial murder of over nineteen people. Many of the +possessed pretended to have been visited by the apparition of a little +black man, who urged them to inscribe their names in a red book which +he carried--a sort of muster-roll of those who had forsworn God's +service for the devil's. Others testified to having been present at +meetings of witches in the forest. It is difficult now to read without +contempt the "evidence" which grave justices and learned divines +considered sufficient to condemn to death men and women of unblemished +lives. It is true that the belief in witchcraft was general at that +time all over the civilized world, and that sporadic cases of +witch-burnings had occurred in different parts of America and Europe. +Sir Thomas Browne, in his _Religio Medici_, 1635, affirmed his belief +in witches, and pronounced those who doubted of them "a sort of +atheist." But the superstition came to a head in the Salem trials and +executions, and was the more shocking from the general high level of +intelligence in the community in which these were held. It would be +well if those who lament the decay of "faith" would remember what +things were done in New England in the name of faith less than two +hundred years ago. It is not wonderful that, to the Massachusetts +Puritans of the seventeenth century, the mysterious forest held no +beautiful suggestion; to them it was simply a grim and hideous +wilderness, whose dark aisles were the ambush of prowling savages and +the rendezvous of those other "devil-worshipers" who celebrated there a +kind of vulgar Walpurgis night. + +The most important of original sources for the history of the +settlement of New England are the journals of William Bradford, first +governor of Plymouth, and John Winthrop, the second governor of +Massachusetts, which hold a place corresponding to the writings of +Captain John Smith in the Virginia colony, but are much more sober and +trustworthy. Bradford's _History of Plymouth Plantation_ covers the +period from 1620 to 1646. The manuscript was used by later annalists +but remained unpublished, as a whole, until 1855, having been lost +during the War of the Revolution and recovered long afterward in +England. Winthrop's Journal, or _History of New England_, begun on +shipboard in 1630, and extending to 1649, was not published entire +until 1826. It is of equal authority with Bradford's, and perhaps, on +the whole the more important of the two, as the colony of Massachusetts +Bay, whose history it narrates, greatly outwent Plymouth in wealth and +population, though not in priority of settlement. The interest of +Winthrop's Journal lies in the events that it records rather than in +any charm in the historian's manner of recording them. His style is +pragmatic, and some of the incidents which he gravely notes are trivial +to the modern mind, though instructive as to our forefathers' way of +thinking. For instance, of the year 1632: "At Watertown there was (in +the view of divers witnesses) a great combat between a mouse and a +snake, and after a long fight the mouse prevailed and killed the snake. +The pastor of Boston, Mr. Wilson, a very sincere, holy man, hearing of +it, gave this interpretation: that the snake was the devil, the mouse +was a poor, contemptible people, which God had brought hither, which +should overcome Satan here and dispossess him of his kingdom." The +reader of Winthrop's Journal comes every-where upon hints which the +imagination has since shaped into poetry and romance. The germs of +many of Longfellow's _New England Tragedies_, of Hawthorne's _Maypole +of Merrymount_, and _Endicott's Red Cross_, and of Whittier's _John +Underhill_ and _The Familists' Hymn_ are all to be found in some dry, +brief entry of the old Puritan diarist. "Robert Cole, having been oft +punished for drunkenness, was now ordered to wear a red D about his +neck for a year," to wit, the year 1633, and thereby gave occasion to +the greatest American romance, _The Scarlet Letter_. The famous +apparition of the phantom ship in New Haven harbor, "upon the top of +the poop a man standing with one hand akimbo under his left side, and +in his right hand a sword stretched out toward the sea," was first +chronicled by Winthrop under the year 1648. This meteorological +phenomenon took on the dimensions of a full-grown myth some forty years +later, as related, with many embellishments, by Rev. James Pierpont, of +New Haven, in a letter to Cotton Mather. Winthrop put great faith in +special providences, and among other instances narrates, not without a +certain grim satisfaction, how "the _Mary Rose_, a ship of Bristol, of +about 200 tons," lying before Charleston, was blown in pieces with her +own powder, being twenty-one barrels, wherein the judgment of God +appeared, "for the master and company were many of them profane +scoffers at us and at the ordinances of religion here." Without any +effort at dramatic portraiture or character-sketching, Winthrop managed +in all simplicity, and by the plain relation of facts, to leave a clear +impression of many prominent figures in the first Massachusetts +immigration. In particular there gradually arises from the entries in +his diary a very distinct and diverting outline of Captain John +Underhill, celebrated in Whittier's poem. He was one of the few +professional soldiers who came over with the Puritan fathers, such as +John Mason, the hero of the Pequot War, and Miles Standish, whose +_Courtship_ Longfellow sang. He had seen service in the Low Countries, +and in pleading the privilege of his profession "he insisted much upon +the liberty which all States do allow to military officers for free +speech, etc., and that himself had spoken sometimes as freely to Count +Nassau." Captain Underhill gave the colony no end of trouble, both by +his scandalous living and his heresies in religion. Having been +seduced into Familistical opinions by Mrs. Anne Hutchinson, who was +banished for her beliefs, he was had up before the General Court and +questioned, among other points, as to his own report of the manner of +his conversion. "He had lain under a spirit of bondage and a legal way +for years, and could get no assurance, till, at length, as he was +taking a pipe of tobacco, the Spirit set home an absolute promise of +free grace with such assurance and joy as he never since doubted of his +good estate, neither should he, though he should fall into sin. . . . +The Lord's day following he made a speech in the assembly, showing that +as the Lord was pleased to convert Paul as he was in persecuting, etc., +so he might manifest himself to him as he was taking the moderate use +of the creature called tobacco." The gallant captain, being banished +the colony, betook himself to the falls of the Piscataquack (Exeter, +N.H.), where the Rev. John Wheelwright, another adherent of Mrs. +Hutchinson, had gathered a congregation. Being made governor of this +plantation, Underhill sent letters to the Massachusetts magistrates, +breathing reproaches and imprecations of vengeance. But meanwhile it +was discovered that he had been living in adultery at Boston with a +young woman whom he had seduced, the wife of a cooper, and the captain +was forced to make public confession, which he did with great unction +and in a manner highly dramatic. "He came in his worst clothes (being +accustomed to take great pride in his bravery and neatness), without a +band, in a foul linen cap, and pulled close to his eyes, and standing +upon a form, he did, with many deep sighs and abundance of tears, lay +open his wicked course." There is a lurking humor in the grave +Winthrop's detailed account of Underhill's doings. Winthrop's own +personality comes out well in his Journal. He was a born leader of +men, a _conditor imperii_, just, moderate, patient, wise; and his +narrative gives, upon the whole, a favorable impression of the general +prudence and fair-mindedness of the Massachusetts settlers in their +dealings with one another, with the Indians, and with the neighboring +plantations. + +Considering our forefathers' errand and calling into this wilderness, +it is not strange that their chief literary staples were sermons and +tracts in controversial theology. Multitudes of these were written and +published by the divines of the first generation, such as John Cotton, +Thomas Shepard, John Norton, Peter Bulkley, and Thomas Hooker, the +founder of Hartford, of whom it was finely said that "when he was doing +his Master's business he would put a king into his pocket." Nor were +their successors in the second or the third generation any less +industrious and prolific. They rest from their labors and their works +do follow them. Their sermons and theological treatises are not +literature: they are for the most part dry, heavy, and dogmatic, but +they exhibit great learning, logical acuteness, and an earnestness +which sometimes rises into eloquence. The pulpit ruled New England, +and the sermon was the great intellectual engine of the time. The +serious thinking of the Puritans was given almost exclusively to +religion; the other world was all their art. The daily secular events +of life, the aspects of nature, the vicissitude of the seasons, were +important enough to find record in print only in so far as they +manifested God's dealings with his people. So much was the sermon +depended upon to furnish literary food that it was the general custom +of serious-minded laymen to take down the words of the discourse in +their note-books. Franklin, in his _Autobiography_, describes this as +the constant habit of his grandfather, Peter Folger; and Mather, in his +life of the elder Winthrop, says that "tho' he wrote not after the +preacher, yet such was his _attention_ and such his _retention_ in +hearing, that he repeated unto his family the sermons which he had +heard in the congregation." These discourses were commonly of great +length; twice, or sometimes thrice, the pulpit hour-glass was silently +inverted while the orator pursued his theme even unto "fourteenthly." + +The book which best sums up the life and thought of this old New +England of the seventeenth century is Cotton Mather's _Magnalia Christi +Americana_. Mather was by birth a member of that clerical aristocracy +which developed later into Dr. Holmes's "Brahmin Caste of New England." +His maternal grandfather was John Cotton. His father was Increase +Mather, the most learned divine of his generation in New England, +minister of the North Church of Boston, President of Harvard College, +and author, _inter alia_, of that characteristically Puritan book, _An +Essay for the Recording of Illustrious Providences_. Cotton Mather +himself was a monster of erudition and a prodigy of diligence. He was +graduated from Harvard at fifteen. He ordered his daily life and +conversation by a system of minute observances. He was a book-worm, +whose life was spent between his library and his pulpit, and his +published works number upward of three hundred and eighty. Of these +the most important is the _Magnalia_, 1702, an ecclesiastical history +of New England from 1620 to 1698, divided into seven parts: I. +Antiquities; II. Lives of the Governors; III. Lives of Sixty Famous +Divines; IV. A History of Harvard College, with biographies of its +eminent graduates; V. Acts and Monuments of the Faith; VI. Wonderful +Providences; VII. The Wars of the Lord--that is, an account of the +Afflictions and Disturbances of the Churches and the Conflicts with the +Indians. The plan of the work thus united that of Fuller's _Worthies +of England_ and _Church History_ with that of Wood's _Athenae +Oxonienses_ and Fox's _Book of Martyrs_. + +Mather's prose was of the kind which the English Commonwealth writers +used. He was younger by a generation than Dryden; but, as literary +fashions are slower to change in a colony than in the mother-country, +that nimble English which Dryden and the Restoration essayists +introduced had not yet displaced in New England the older manner. +Mather wrote in the full and pregnant style of Taylor, Milton, Brown, +Fuller, and Burton, a style ponderous with learning and stiff with +allusions, digressions, conceits, anecdotes, and quotations from the +Greek and the Latin. A page of the _Magnalia_ is almost as richly +mottled with italics as one from the _Anatomy of Melancholy_, and the +quaintness which Mather caught from his favorite Fuller disports itself +in textual pun and marginal anagram and the fantastic sub-titles of his +books and chapters. He speaks of Thomas Hooker as having "_angled_ +many scores of souls into the kingdom of heaven," anagrammatizes Mrs. +Hutchinson's surname into "the non-such;" and having occasion to speak +of Mr. Urian Oakes's election to the presidency of Harvard College, +enlarges upon the circumstance as follows: + +"We all know that _Britain_ knew nothing more famous than their ancient +sect of DRUIDS; the philosophers, whose order, they say, was instituted +by one _Samothes_, which is in English as much as to say, an heavenly +man. The _Celtic_ name, _Deru_, for an Oak was that from whence they +received their denomination; as at this very day the _Welch_ call this +tree _Drew_, and this order of men _Derwyddon_. But there are no small +antiquaries who derive this oaken religion and philosophy from the +_Oaks of Mamre_, where the Patriarch _Abraham_ had as well a dwelling +as an _altar_. That _Oaken-Plain_ and the eminent OAK under which +_Abraham_ lodged was extant in the days of _Constantine_, as _Isidore_, +_Jerom_, and _Sozomen_ have assured us. Yea, there are shrewd +probabilities that _Noah_ himself had lived in this very _Oak-plain_ +before him; for this very place was called _Ogge_ [see Transcriber's +Note #1 at end of chapter], which was the name of _Noah_, so styled +from the _Oggyan_ (_subcineritiis panibus_) sacrifices, which he did +use to offer in this renowned _Grove_. And it was from this example +that the ancients, and particularly that the Druids of the nations, +chose _oaken_ retirements for their studies. Reader, let us now, upon +another account, behold the students of _Harvard College_, as a +rendezvous of happy _Druids_, under the influences of so rare a +president. But, alas! our joy must be short-lived, for on _July_ 25, +1681, the stroke of a sudden death felled the _tree_, + + "Qui tantum inter caput extulit omnes + Quantum lenta solent inter viberna cypressi. + +"Mr. _Oakes_ thus being transplanted into the better world the +presidentship was immediately tendered unto _Mr. Increase Mather_." + +This will suffice as an example of the bad taste and laborious pedantry +which disfigured Mather's writing. In its substance the book is a +perfect thesaurus; and inasmuch as nothing is unimportant in the +history of the beginnings of such a nation as this is and is destined +to be, the _Magnalia_ will always remain a valuable and interesting +work. Cotton Mather, born in 1663, was of the second generation of +Americans, his grandfather being of the immigration, but his father a +native of Dorchester, Mass. A comparison of his writings and of the +writings of his contemporaries with the works of Bradford, Winthrop, +Hooker, and others of the original colonists, shows that the simple and +heroic faith of the Pilgrims had hardened into formalism and doctrinal +rigidity. The leaders of the Puritan exodus, notwithstanding their +intolerance of errors in belief, were comparatively broad-minded men. +They were sharers in a great national movement, and they came over when +their cause was warm with the glow of martyrdom and on the eve of its +coming triumph at home. After the Restoration, in 1660, the currents +of national feeling no longer circulated so freely through this distant +member of the body politic, and thought in America became more +provincial. The English dissenters, though socially at a disadvantage +as compared with the Church of England, had the great benefit of living +at the center of national life, and of feeling about them the pressure +of vast bodies of people who did not think as they did. In New +England, for many generations, the dominant sect had things all its own +way--a condition of things which is not healthy for any sect or party. +Hence Mather and the divines of his time appear in their writings very +much like so many Puritan bishops, jealous of their prerogatives, +magnifying their apostolate, and careful to maintain their authority +over the laity. Mather had an appetite for the marvelous, and took a +leading part in the witchcraft trials, of which he gave an account in +his _Wonders of the Invisible World_, 1693. To the quaint pages of the +_Magnalia_ our modern authors have resorted as to a collection of +romances or fairy tales. Whittier, for example, took from thence the +subject of his poem _The Garrison of Cape Anne_; and Hawthorne embodied +in _Grandfather's Chair_ the most elaborate of Mather's biographies. +This was the life of Sir William Phipps, who, from being a poor +shepherd boy in his native province of Maine, rose to be the royal +governor of Massachusetts, and the story of whose wonderful adventures +in raising the freight of a Spanish ship, sunk on a reef near Port de +la Plata, reads less like sober fact than like some ancient fable, with +talk of the Spanish main, bullion, and plate and jewels and "pieces of +eight." + +Of Mather's generation was Samuel Sewall, Chief-Justice of +Massachusetts, a singularly gracious and venerable figure, who is +intimately known through his Diary, kept from 1673 to 1729. This has +been compared with the more famous diary of Samuel Pepys, which it +resembles in its confidential character and the completeness of its +self-revelation, but to which it is as much inferior in historic +interest as "the petty province here" was inferior in political and +social importance to "Britain far away." For the most part it is a +chronicle of small beer, the diarist jotting down the minutiae of his +domestic life and private affairs, even to the recording of such haps +as this: "March 23, I had my hair cut by G. Barret." But it also +affords instructive glimpses of public events, such as King Philip's +War, the Quaker troubles, the English Revolution of 1688, etc. It +bears about the same relation to New England history at the close of +the seventeenth century as Bradford's and Winthrop's Journals bear to +that of the first generation. Sewall was one of the justices who +presided at the trial of the Salem witches; but for the part which he +took in that wretched affair he made such atonement as was possible, by +open confession of his mistake and his remorse in the presence of the +Church. Sewall was one of the first writers against African slavery, +in his brief tract, _The Selling of Joseph_, printed at Boston in 1700. +His _Phenomena Quaedam Apocalyptica_, a mystical interpretation of +prophecies concerning the New Jerusalem, which he identifies with +America, is remembered only because Whittier, in his _Prophecy of +Samuel Sewall_, has paraphrased one poetic passage which shows a loving +observation of nature very rare in our colonial writers. + +Of poetry, indeed, or, in fact, of pure literature, in the narrower +sense--that is, of the imaginative representation of life--there was +little or none in the colonial period. There were no novels, no plays, +no satires, and--until the example of the _Spectator_ had begun to work +on this side the water--no experiments even at the lighter forms of +essay-writing, character-sketches, and literary criticism. There was +verse of a certain kind, but the most generous stretch of the term +would hardly allow it to be called poetry. Many of the early divines +of New England relieved their pens, in the intervals of sermon-writing, +of epigrams, elegies, eulogistic verses, and similar grave trifles +distinguished by the crabbed wit of the so-called "metaphysical poets," +whose manner was in fashion when the Puritans left England; the manner +of Donne and Cowley, and those darlings of the New-English muse, the +_Emblems_ of Quarles and the _Divine Week_ of Du Bartas, as translated +by Sylvester. The _Magnalia_ contains a number of these things in +Latin and English, and is itself well bolstered with complimentary +introductions in meter by the author's friends. For example: + + COTTONIUS MATHERUS. + + ANAGRAM. + + _Tuos Tecum Ornasti_. + + "While thus the dead in thy rare pages rise + _Thine, with thyself thou dost immortalize_. + To view the odds thy learned lives invite + 'Twixt Eleutherian and Edomite. + But all succeeding ages shall despair + A fitting monument for thee to _rear_. + Thy own rich pen (peace, silly Momus, peace!) + Hath given them a lasting _writ of ease_." + +The epitaphs and mortuary verses were especially ingenious in the +matter of puns, anagrams, and similar conceits. The death of the Rev. +Samuel Stone, of Hartford, afforded an opportunity of this sort not to +be missed, and his threnodist accordingly celebrated him as a +"whetstone," a "loadstone," an "Ebenezer"-- + + "A stone for kingly David's use so fit + As would not fail Goliath's front to hit," etc. + +The most characteristic, popular, and widely circulated poem of +colonial New England was Michael Wigglesworth's _Day of Doom_ (1663), a +kind of doggerel _Inferno_, which went through nine editions, and "was +the solace," says Lowell, "of every fireside, the flicker of the +pine-knots by which it was conned perhaps adding a livelier relish to +its premonitions of eternal combustion." Wigglesworth had not the +technical equipment of a poet. His verse is sing-song, his language +rude and monotonous, and the lurid horrors of his material hell are +more likely to move mirth than fear in a modern reader. But there are +an unmistakable vigor of imagination and a sincerity of belief in his +gloomy poem which hold it far above contempt, and easily account for +its universal currency among a people like the Puritans. One stanza +has been often quoted for its grim concession to unregenerate infants +of "the easiest room in hell"--a _limbus infantum_ which even Origen +need not have scrupled at. + +The most authoritative expounder of New England Calvinism was Jonathan +Edwards (1703-58), a native of Connecticut and a graduate of Yale, who +was minister for more than twenty years over the church in Northampton, +Mass., afterward missionary to the Stockbridge Indians, and at the time +of his death had just been inaugurated president of Princeton College. +By virtue of his _Inquiry into the Freedom of the Will_, 1754, Edwards +holds rank as the subtlest metaphysician of his age. This treatise was +composed to justify, on philosophical grounds, the Calvinistic +doctrines of fore-ordination and election by grace, though its +arguments are curiously coincident with those of the scientific +necessitarians, whose conclusions are as far asunder from Edwards's "as +from the center thrice to the utmost pole." His writings belong to +theology rather than to literature, but there is an intensity and a +spiritual elevation about them, apart from the profundity and acuteness +of the thought, which lift them here and there into the finer ether of +purely emotional or imaginative art. He dwelt rather upon the terrors +than the comfort of the word, and his chosen themes were the dogmas of +predestination, original sin, total depravity, and eternal punishment. +The titles of his sermons are significant: _Men Naturally God's +Enemies_, _Wrath upon the Wicked to the Uttermost_, _The Final +Judgment_, etc. "A natural man," he wrote in the first of these +discourses, "has a heart like the heart of a devil. . . . The heart of +a natural man is as destitute of love to God as a dead, stiff, cold +corpse is of vital heat." Perhaps the most famous of Edwards's sermons +was _Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God_, preached at Enfield, Conn., +July 8, 1741, "at a time of great awakenings," and upon the ominous +text, _Their foot shall slide in due time_. "The God that holds you +over the pit of hell," runs an oft-quoted passage from this powerful +denunciation of the wrath to come, "much as one holds a spider or some +loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully +provoked. . . . You are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes +than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours. . . . You hang by a +slender thread, with the flames of divine wrath flashing about +it. . . . If you cry to God to pity you he will be so far from pitying +you in your doleful case that he will only tread you under foot. . . . +He will crush out your blood and make it fly, and it shall be sprinkled +on his garments so as to stain all his raiment." But Edwards was a +rapt soul, possessed with the love as well as the fear of the God, and +there are passages of sweet and exalted feeling in his _Treatise +Concerning Religious Affections_, 1746. Such is his portrait of Sarah +Pierpont, "a young lady in New Haven," who afterward became his wife +and who "will sometimes go about from place to place singing sweetly, +and no one knows for what. She loves to be alone, walking in the +fields and groves, and seems to have some one invisible always +conversing with her." Edwards's printed works number thirty-six +titles. A complete edition of them in ten volumes was published in +1829 by his great grandson, Sereno Dwight. The memoranda from +Edwards's note-books, quoted by his editor and biographer, exhibit a +remarkable precocity. Even as a school-boy and a college student he +had made deep guesses in physics as well as metaphysics, and, as might +have been predicted of a youth of his philosophical insight and ideal +cast of mind, he had early anticipated Berkeley in denying the +existence of matter. In passing from Mather to Edwards we step from +the seventeenth to the eighteenth century. There is the same +difference between them in style and turn of thought as between Milton +and Locke, or between Fuller and Bryden. The learned digressions, the +witty conceits, the perpetual interlarding of the text with scraps of +Latin, have fallen off, even as the full-bottomed wig and the clerical +gown and bands have been laid aside for the undistinguishing dress of +the modern minister. In Edwards's English all is simple, precise, +direct, and business-like. + +Benjamin Franklin (1706-90), who was strictly contemporary with +Edwards, was a contrast to him in every respect. As Edwards represents +the spirituality and other-worldliness of Puritanism, Franklin stands +for the worldly and secular side of American character, and he +illustrates the development of the New England Englishman into the +modern Yankee. Clear rather than subtle, without ideality or romance +or fineness of emotion or poetic lift, intensely practical and +utilitarian, broad-minded, inventive, shrewd, versatile, Franklin's +sturdy figure became typical of his time and his people. He was the +first and the only man of letters in colonial America who acquired a +cosmopolitan fame and impressed his characteristic Americanism upon the +mind of Europe. He was the embodiment of common sense and of the +useful virtues, with the enterprise but without the nervousness of his +modern compatriots, uniting the philosopher's openness of mind to the +sagacity and quickness of resource of the self-made business man. He +was representative also of his age, an age of _aufklärung_, +_eclaircissement_, or "clearing up." By the middle of the eighteenth +century a change had taken place in American society. Trade had +increased between the different colonies; Boston, New York, and +Philadelphia were considerable towns; democratic feeling was spreading; +over forty newspapers were published in America at the outbreak of the +Revolution; politics claimed more attention than formerly, and theology +less. With all this intercourse and mutual reaction of the various +colonies upon one another, the isolated theocracy of New England +naturally relaxed somewhat of its grip on the minds of the laity. When +Franklin was a printer's apprentice in Boston, setting type on his +brother's _New England Courant_, the fourth American newspaper, he got +hold of an odd volume of the _Spectator_, and formed his style upon +Addison, whose manner he afterward imitated in his _Busy-Body_ papers +in the Philadelphia _Weekly Mercury_. He also read Locke and the +English deistical writers, Collins and Shaftesbury, and became himself +a deist and free-thinker; and subsequently when practicing his trade in +London, in 1724-26, he made the acquaintance of Dr. Mandeville, author +of the _Fable of the Bees_, at a pale-ale house in Cheapside, called +"The Horns," where the famous free-thinker presided over a club of wits +and boon companions. Though a native of Boston, Franklin is identified +with Philadelphia, whither he arrived in 1723, a runaway 'prentice boy, +"whose stock of cash consisted of a Dutch dollar and about a shilling +in copper." The description in his _Autobiography_ of his walking up +Market Street munching a loaf of bread, and passing his future wife, +standing on her father's doorstep, has become almost as familiar as the +anecdote about Whittington and his cat. + +It was in the practical sphere that Franklin was greatest, as an +originator and executor of projects for the general welfare. The list +of his public services is almost endless. He organized the +Philadelphia fire department and street-cleaning service, and the +colonial postal system which grew into the United States Post Office +Department. He started the Philadelphia public library, the American +Philosophical Society, the University of Pennsylvania, and the first +American magazine, _The General Magazine and Historical Chronicle_; so +that he was almost singly the father of whatever intellectual life the +Pennsylvania colony could boast. In 1754, when commissioners from the +colonies met at Albany, Franklin proposed a plan, which was adopted, +for the union of all the colonies under one government. But all these +things, as well as his mission to England in 1757, on behalf of the +Pennsylvania Assembly in its dispute with the proprietaries; his share +in the Declaration of Independence--of which he was one of the +signers--and his residence in France as embassador of the United +Colonies, belong to the political history of the country; to the +history of American science belong his celebrated experiments in +electricity; and his benefits to mankind in both of these departments +were aptly summed up in the famous epigram of the French statesman +Turgot: + + "_Eripuit coelo fulmen sceptrumque tyranniis_." + +Franklin's success in Europe was such as no American had yet achieved, +as few Americans since him have achieved. Hume and Voltaire were among +his acquaintances and his professed admirers. In France he was fairly +idolized, and when he died Mirabeau announced, "The genius which has +freed America and poured a flood of light over Europe has returned to +the bosom of the Divinity." + +Franklin was a great man, but hardly a great writer, though as a +writer, too, he had many admirable and some great qualities. Among +these were the crystal clearness and simplicity of his style. His more +strictly literary performances, such as his essays after the +_Spectator_, hardly rise above mediocrity, and are neither better nor +worse than other imitations of Addison. But in some of his lighter +bagatelles there are a homely wisdom and a charming playfulness which +have won them enduring favor. Such are his famous story of the +_Whistle_, his _Dialogue between Franklin and the Gout_, his letters to +Madame Helvetius, and his verses entitled _Paper_. The greater portion +of his writings consists of papers on general politics, commerce, and +political economy, contributions to the public questions of his day. +These are of the nature of journalism rather than of literature, and +many of them were published in his newspaper, the _Pennsylvania +Gazette_, the medium through which for many years he most strongly +influenced American opinion. The most popular of his writings were his +_Autobiography_ and _Poor Richard's Almanac_. The former of these was +begun in 1771, resumed in 1788, but never completed. It has remained +the most widely current book in our colonial literature. _Poor +Richard's Almanac_, begun in 1732 and continued for about twenty-five +years, had an annual circulation of ten thousand copies. It was filled +with proverbial sayings in prose and verse, inculcating the virtues of +industry, honesty, and frugality.[1] Some of these were original with +Franklin, others were selected from the proverbial wisdom of the ages, +but a new force was given them by pungent turns of expression. Poor +Richard's saws were such as these: "Little strokes fell great oaks;" +"Three removes are as bad as a fire;" "Early to bed and early to rise +makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise;" "Never leave that till +to-morrow which you can do to-day;" "What maintains one vice would +bring up two children;" "It is hard for an empty bag to stand upright." + +Now and then there are truths of a higher kind than these in Franklin, +and Sainte-Beuve, the great French critic, quotes, as an example of his +occasional finer moods, the saying, "Truth and sincerity have a certain +distinguishing native luster about them which cannot be counterfeited; +they are like fire and flame that cannot be painted." But the sage who +invented the Franklin stove had no disdain of small utilities; and in +general the last word of his philosophy is well expressed in a passage +of his _Autobiography_: "Human felicity is produced not so much by +great pieces of good fortune, that seldom happen, as by little +advantages that occur every day; thus, if you teach a poor young man to +shave himself and keep his razor in order, you may contribute more to +the happiness of his life than in giving him a thousand guineas." + + +1. Captain John Smith. _A True Relation of Virginia_, Deane's edition. +Boston: 1866. + +2. Cotton Mather. _Magnalia Christi Americana_. Hartford: 1820. + +3. Samuel Sewall. _Diary_. Massachusetts Historical Collections. +Fifth Series. Vols. v, vi, and vii. Boston: 1878. + +4. Jonathan Edwards. _Eight Sermons on Various Occasions_. Vol. vii +of Edwards's Works. Edited by Sereno Dwight. New York: 1829. + +5. Benjamin Franklin. _Autobiography_. Edited by John Bigelow. +Philadelphia: 1869. [J. B. Lippincott & Co.] + +6. _Essays and Bagatelles_. Vol. ii of Franklin's Works. Edited by +Jared Sparks. Boston: 1836. + +7. Moses Coit Tyler. _A History of American Literature_. 1607-1765. +New York: 1878. [G. P. Putnam's Sons.] + + +[1]_The Way to Wealth, Plan for Saving One Hundred Thousand Pounds, +Rules of Health, Advice to a Young Tradesman, The Way to Make Money +Plenty in Every Man's Pocket_, etc. + + +[Transcriber's Note: The word "Ogge" was transliterated from the Greek +characters Omicron, gamma, gamma, eta.] + + + + +CHAPTER II. + + +THE REVOLUTIONARY PERIOD. + +1765-1815. + +It will be convenient to treat the fifty years which elapsed between +the meeting at New York, in 1765, of a Congress of delegates from nine +colonies to protest against the Stamp Act, and the close of the second +war with England, in 1815, as, for literary purposes, a single period. +This half-century was the formative era of the American nation. +Historically, it is divisible into the years of revolution and the +years of construction. But the men who led the movement for +independence were also, in great part, the same who guided in shaping +the Constitution of the new republic, and the intellectual impress of +the whole period is one and the same. The character of the age was as +distinctly political as that of the colonial era--in New England at +least--was theological; and literature must still continue to borrow +its interest from history. Pure literature, or what, for want of a +better term, we call _belles lettres_, was not born in America until +the nineteenth century was well under way. It is true that the +Revolution had its humor, its poetry, and even its fiction; but these +were strictly for the home market. They hardly penetrated the +consciousness of Europe at all, and are not to be compared with the +contemporary work of English authors like Cowper and Sheridan and +Burke. Their importance for us to-day is rather antiquarian than +literary, though the most noteworthy of them will be mentioned in due +course in the present chapter. It is also true that one or two of +Irving's early books fall within the last years of the period now under +consideration. But literary epochs overlap one another at the edges, +and these writings may best be postponed to a subsequent chapter. + +Among the most characteristic products of the intellectual stir that +preceded and accompanied the Revolutionary movement were the speeches +of political orators like Samuel Adams, James Otis, and Josiah Quincy, +in Massachusetts, and Patrick Henry in Virginia. Oratory is the art of +a free people, and as in the forensic assemblies of Greece and Rome and +in the Parliament of Great Britain, so in the conventions and +congresses of Revolutionary America it sprang up and flourished +naturally. The age, moreover, was an eloquent, not to say a +rhetorical, age; and the influence of Johnson's orotund prose, of the +declamatory _Letters of Junius_, and of the speeches of Burke, Fox, +Sheridan, and the elder Pitt is perceptible in the debates of our early +Congresses. The fame of a great orator, like that of a great actor, is +largely traditionary. The spoken word transferred to the printed page +loses the glow which resided in the man and the moment. A speech is +good if it attains its aim, if it moves the hearers to the end which is +sought. But the fact that this end is often temporary and occasional, +rather than universal and permanent, explains why so few speeches are +really literature. If this is true, even where the words of an orator +are preserved exactly as they were spoken, it is doubly true when we +have only the testimony of contemporaries as to the effect which the +oration produced. The fiery utterances of Adams, Otis, and Quincy were +either not reported at all or very imperfectly reported, so that +posterity can judge of them only at second-hand. Patrick Henry has +fared better, many of his orations being preserved in substance, if not +in the letter, in Wirt's biography. Of these the most famous was the +defiant speech in the Convention of Delegates, March 28, 1775, throwing +down the gauge of battle to the British ministry. The ringing +sentences of this challenge are still declaimed by school-boys, and +many of them remain as familiar as household words. "I have but one +lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience. +I know of no way of judging of the future but by the past. . . . +Gentlemen may cry peace, peace, but there is no peace. . . . Is life +so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains +and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others +may take, but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!" The +eloquence of Patrick Henry was fervid rather than weighty or rich. But +if such specimens of the oratory of the American patriots as have come +down to us fail to account for the wonderful impression that their +words are said to have produced upon their fellow-countrymen, we should +remember that they are at a disadvantage when read instead of heard. +The imagination should supply all those accessories which gave them +vitality when first pronounced--the living presence and voice of the +speaker; the listening Senate; the grave excitement of the hour and of +the impending conflict. The wordiness and exaggeration; the highly +Latinized diction; the rhapsodies about freedom which hundreds of +Fourth-of-July addresses have since turned into platitudes--all these +coming hot from the lips of men whose actions in the field confirmed +the earnestness of their speech--were effective in the crisis and for +the purpose to which they were addressed. + +The press was an agent in the cause of liberty no less potent than the +platform, and patriots such as Adams, Otis, Quincy, Warren, and Hancock +wrote constantly, for the newspapers, essays and letters on the public +questions of the time signed "Vindex," "Hyperion," "Independent," +"Brutus," "Cassius," and the like, and couched in language which to the +taste of to-day seems rather over-rhetorical. Among the most important +of these political essays were the _Circular Letter to each Colonial +Legislature_, published by Adams and Otis in 1768; Quincy's +_Observations on the Boston Port Bill_, 1774, and Otis's _Rights of the +British Colonies_, a pamphlet of one hundred and twenty pages, printed +in 1764. No collection of Otis's writings has ever been made. The +life of Quincy, published by his son, preserves for posterity his +journals and correspondence, his newspaper essays, and his speeches at +the bar, taken from the Massachusetts law reports. + +Among the political literature which is of perennial interest to the +American people are such State documents as the Declaration of +Independence, the Constitution of the United States, and the messages, +inaugural addresses, and other writings of our early presidents. +Thomas Jefferson, the third President of the United States, and the +father of the Democratic party, was the author of the Declaration of +Independence, whose opening sentences have become commonplaces in the +memory of all readers. One sentence in particular has been as a +shibboleth, or war-cry, or declaration of faith among Democrats of all +shades of opinion: "We hold these truths to be self-evident--that all +men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with +certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the +pursuit of happiness." Not so familiar to modern readers is the +following, which an English historian of our literature calls "the most +eloquent clause of that great document," and "the most interesting +suppressed passage in American literature." Jefferson was a +Southerner, but even at that early day the South had grown sensitive on +the subject of slavery, and Jefferson's arraignment of King George for +promoting the "peculiar institution" was left out from the final draft +of the Declaration in deference to Southern members. + +"He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most +sacred rights of life and liberty, in the persons of a distant people +who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in +another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation +thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is +the warfare of the Christian king of Great Britain. Determined to keep +open a market where men should be bought and sold, he has prostituted +his negative by suppressing every legislative attempt to restrain this +execrable commerce. And, that this assemblage of horrors might want no +fact of distinguished dye, he is now exciting those very people to rise +in arms against us and purchase that liberty of which he deprived them +by murdering the people upon whom he obtruded them, and thus paying off +former crimes committed against the liberties of one people by crimes +which he urges them to commit against the lives of another." + +The tone of apology or defense which Calhoun and other Southern +statesman afterward adopted on the subject of slavery was not taken by +the men of Jefferson's generation. Another famous Virginian, John +Randolph of Roanoke, himself a slave-holder, in his speech on the +militia bill in the House of Representatives, December 10, 1811, said: +"I speak from facts when I say that the night-bell never tolls for fire +in Richmond that the mother does not hug her infant more closely to her +bosom." This was said _apropos_ of the danger of a servile +insurrection in the event of a war with England--a war which actually +broke out in the year following, but was not attended with the +slave-rising which Randolph predicted. Randolph was a thorough-going +"State rights" man, and, though opposed to slavery on principle, he +cried "Hands off!" to any interference by the general government with +the domestic institutions of the States. His speeches read better than +most of his contemporaries'. They are interesting in their exhibit of +a bitter and eccentric individuality, witty, incisive, and expressed in +a pungent and familiar style which contrasts refreshingly with the +diplomatic language and glittering generalities of most congressional +oratory, whose verbiage seems to keep its subject always at +arm's-length. + +Another noteworthy writing of Jefferson's was his Inaugural Address of +March 4, 1801, with its programme of "equal and exact justice to all +men, of whatever state or persuasion, religious or political; peace, +commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances +with none; the support of the State governments in all their +rights; . . . absolute acquiescence in the decisions of the +majority; . . . the supremacy of the civil over the military authority; +economy in the public expense; freedom of religion, freedom of the +press, and freedom of person under the protection of the _habeas +corpus_, and trial by juries impartially selected." + +During his six years' residence in France, as American minister, +Jefferson had become indoctrinated with the principles of French +democracy. His main service and that of his party--the Democratic, or, +as it was then called, the Republican party--to the young republic was +in its insistence upon toleration of all beliefs and upon the freedom +of the individual from all forms of governmental restraint. Jefferson +has some claims to rank as an author in general literature. Educated +at William and Mary College in the old Virginia capital, Williamsburg, +he became the founder of the University of Virginia, in which he made +special provision for the study of Anglo-Saxon, and in which the +liberal scheme of instruction and discipline was conformed, in theory, +at least, to the "university idea." His _Notes on Virginia_ are not +without literary quality, and one description, in particular, has been +often quoted--the passage of the Potomac through the Blue Ridge--in +which is this poetically imaginative touch: "The mountain being cloven +asunder, she presents to your eye, through the cleft, a small catch of +smooth blue horizon, at an infinite distance in the plain country, +inviting you, as it were, from the riot and ytumult roaring around, to +pass through the breach and participate of the calm below." + +After the conclusion of peace with England, in 1783, political +discussion centered about the Constitution, which in 1788 took the +place of the looser Articles of Confederation adopted in 1778. The +Constitution as finally ratified was a compromise between two +parties--the Federalists, who wanted a strong central government, and +the Anti-Federals (afterward called Republicans, or Democrats), who +wished to preserve State sovereignty. The debates on the adoption of +the Constitution, both in the General Convention of the States, which +met at Philadelphia in 1787, and in the separate State conventions +called to ratify its action, form a valuable body of comment and +illustration upon the instrument itself. One of the most notable of +the speeches in opposition was Patrick Henry's address before the +Virginia Convention. "That this is a consolidated government," he +said, "is demonstrably clear; and the danger of such a government is, +to my mind, very striking." The leader of the Federal party was +Alexander Hamilton, the ablest constructive intellect among the +statesmen of our Revolutionary era, of whom Talleyrand said that he +"had never known his equal," whom Guizot classed with "the men who have +best known the vital principles and fundamental conditions of a +government worthy of its name and mission." Hamilton's speech _On the +Expediency of Adopting the Federal Constitution_, delivered in the +Convention of New York, June 24, 1788, was a masterly statement of the +necessity and advantages of the Union. But the most complete +exposition of the constitutional philosophy of the Federal party was +the series of eighty-five papers entitled the _Federalist_, printed +during the years 1787-88, and mostly in the _Independent Journal_ of +New York, over the signature "Publius." These were the work of +Hamilton, of John Jay, afterward, chief-justice, and of James Madison, +afterward president of the United States. The _Federalist_ papers, +though written in a somewhat ponderous diction, are among the great +landmarks of American history, and were in themselves a political +education to the generation that read them. Hamilton was a brilliant +and versatile figure, a persuasive orator, a forcible writer, and as +secretary of the treasury under Washington the foremost of American +financiers. He was killed in a duel by Aaron Burr, at Weehawken, in +1804. + +The Federalists were victorious, and under the provisions of the new +Constitution George Washington was inaugurated first President of the +United States, on March 4, 1789. Washington's writings have been +collected by Jared Sparks. They consist of journals, letters, +messages, addresses, and public documents, for the most part plain and +business-like in manner, and without any literary pretensions. The +most elaborate and the best known of them is his _Farewell Address_, +issued on his retirement from the presidency in 1796. In the +composition of this he was assisted by Madison, Hamilton, and Jay. It +is wise in substance and dignified, though somewhat stilted in +expression. The correspondence of John Adams, second President of the +United States, and his _Diary_, kept from 1755-85, should also be +mentioned as important sources for a full knowledge of this period. + +In the long life-and-death struggle of Great Britain against the French +Republic and its successor, Napoleon Bonaparte, the Federalist party in +this country naturally sympathized with England, and the Jeffersonian +Democracy with France. The Federalists, who distrusted the sweeping +abstractions of the French Revolution and clung to the conservative +notions of a checked and balanced freedom, inherited from English +precedent, were accused of monarchical and aristocratic leanings. On +their side they were not slow to accuse their adversaries of French +atheism and French Jacobinism. By a singular reversal of the natural +order of things, the strength of the Federalist party was in New +England, which was socially democratic, while the strength of the +Jeffersonians was in the South, whose social structure--owing to the +system of slavery--was intensely aristocratic. The War of 1812 with +England was so unpopular in New England, by reason of the injury which +it threatened to inflict on its commerce, that the Hartford Convention +of 1814 was more than suspected of a design to bring about the +secession of New England from the Union. A good deal of oratory was +called out by the debates on the commercial treaty with Great Britain +negotiated by Jay in 1795, by the Alien and Sedition Law of 1798, and +by other pieces of Federalist legislation, previous to the downfall of +that party and the election of Jefferson to the presidency in 1800. +The best of the Federalist orators during those years was Fisher Ames, +of Massachusetts, and the best of his orations was, perhaps, his speech +on the British treaty in the House of Representatives, April 18, 1796. +The speech was, in great measure, a protest against American chauvinism +and the violation of international obligations. "It has been said the +world ought to rejoice if Britain was sunk in the sea; if where there +are now men and wealth and laws and liberty there was no more than a +sand-bank for sea-monsters to fatten on; space for the storms of the +ocean to mingle in conflict. . . . What is patriotism? Is it a narrow +affection for the spot where a man was born? Are the very clods where +we tread entitled to this ardent preference because they are +greener? . . . I see no exception to the respect that is paid among +nations to the law of good faith. . . . It is observed by +barbarians--a whiff of tobacco-smoke or a string of beads gives not +merely binding force but sanctity to treaties. Even in Algiers a truce +may be bought for money, but, when ratified, even Algiers is too wise +or too just to disown and annul its obligation." Ames was a scholar, +and his speeches are more finished and thoughtful, more _literary_, in +a way, than those of his contemporaries. His eulogiums on Washington +and Hamilton are elaborate tributes, rather excessive, perhaps, in +laudation and in classical allusions. In all the oratory of the +Revolutionary period there is nothing equal in deep and condensed +energy of feeling to the single clause in Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, +"that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in +vain." + +A prominent figure during and after the War of the Revolution was +Thomas Paine, or, as he was somewhat disrespectfully called, "Tom +Paine." He was a dissenting minister who, conceiving himself +ill-treated by the British government, came to Philadelphia in 1774 and +threw himself heart and soul into the colonial cause. His pamphlet, +_Common Sense_, issued in 1776, began with the famous words, "These are +the times that try men's souls." This was followed by the _Crisis_, a +series of political essays advocating independence and the +establishment of a republic, published in periodical form, though at +irregular intervals. Paine's rough and vigorous advocacy was of great +service to the American patriots. His writings were popular and his +arguments were of a kind easily understood by plain people, addressing +themselves to the common sense, the prejudices and passions of +unlettered readers. He afterward went to France and took an active +part in the popular movement there, crossing swords with Burke in his +_Rights of Man_, 1791-92, written in defense of the French Revolution. +He was one of the two foreigners who sat in the Convention; but falling +under suspicion during the days of the Terror, he was committed to the +prison of the Luxembourg and only released upon the fall of Robespierre +July 27, 1794. While in prison he wrote a portion of his best-known +work, the _Age of Reason_. This appeared in two parts in 1794 and +1795, the manuscript of the first part having been intrusted to Joel +Barlow, the American poet, who happened to be in Paris when Paine was +sent to prison. + +The _Age of Reason_ damaged Paine's reputation in America, where the +name of "Tom Paine" became a stench in the nostrils of the godly and a +synonym for atheism and blasphemy. His book was denounced from a +hundred pulpits, and copies of it were carefully locked away from the +sight of "the young," whose religious beliefs it might undermine. It +was, in effect, a crude and popular statement of the deistic argument +against Christianity. What the cutting logic and persiflage--the +_sourire hideux_--of Voltaire had done in France, Paine, with coarser +materials, essayed to do for the English-speaking populations. Deism +was in the air of the time; Franklin, Jefferson, Ethan Allen, Joel +Barlow, and other prominent Americans were openly or unavowedly +deistic. Free thought, somehow, went along with democratic opinions, +and was a part of the liberal movement of the age. Paine was a man +without reverence, imagination, or religious feeling. He was no +scholar, and he was not troubled by any perception of the deeper and +subtler aspects of the questions which he touched. In his examination +of the Old and New Testaments he insisted that the Bible was an +imposition and a forgery, full of lies, absurdities, and obscenities. +Supernatural Christianity, with all its mysteries and miracles, was a +fraud practiced by priests upon the people, and churches were +instruments of oppression in the hands of tyrants. This way of +accounting for Christianity would not now be accepted by even the most +"advanced" thinkers. The contest between skepticism and revelation has +long since shifted to other grounds. Both the philosophy and the +temper of the _Age of Reason_ belong to the eighteenth century. But +Paine's downright pugnacious method of attack was effective with +shrewd, half-educated doubters; and in America well-thumbed copies of +his book passed from hand to hand in many a rural tavern or store, +where the village atheist wrestled in debate with the deacon or the +schoolmaster. Paine rested his argument against Christianity upon the +familiar grounds of the incredibility of miracles, the falsity of +prophecy, the cruelty or immorality of Moses and David and other Old +Testament worthies, the disagreement of the evangelists in their +gospels, etc. The spirit of his book and his competence as a critic +are illustrated by his saying of the New Testament: "Any person who +could tell a story of an apparition, or of a man's walking, could have +made such books, for the story is most wretchedly told. The sum total +of a parson's learning is _a-b_, _ab_, and _hic_, _hoec_, _hoc_, and +this is more than sufficient to have enabled them, had they lived at +the time, to have written all the books of the New Testament." + +When we turn from the political and controversial writings of the +Revolution to such lighter literature as existed, we find little that +would deserve mention in a more crowded period. The few things in this +kind that have kept afloat on the current of time--_rari nantes in +gurgite vasto_--attract attention rather by reason of their fewness +than of any special excellence that they have. During the eighteenth +century American literature continued to accommodate itself to changes +of taste in the old country. The so-called classical or Augustan +writers of the reign of Queen Anne replaced other models of style; the +_Spectator_ set the fashion of almost all of our lighter prose, from +Franklin's _Busybody_ down to the time of Irving, who perpetuated the +Addisonian tradition later than any English writer. The influence of +Locke, of Dr. Johnson, and of the parliamentary orators has already +been mentioned. In poetry the example of Pope was dominant, so that we +find, for example, William Livingston, who became governor of New +Jersey and a member of the Continental Congress, writing in 1747 a poem +on _Philosophic Solitude_ which reproduces the tricks of Pope's +antitheses and climaxes with the imagery of the _Rape of the Lock_, and +the didactic morality of the _Imitations from Horace_ and the _Moral +Essays_: + + "Let ardent heroes seek renown to arms, + Pant after fame and rush to war's alarms; + To shining palaces let fools resort, + And dunces cringe to be esteemed at court. + Mine be the pleasure of a rural life, + From noise remote and ignorant of strife, + Far from the painted belle and white-gloved beau, + The lawless masquerade and midnight show; + From ladies, lap-dogs, courtiers, garters, stars, + Fops, fiddlers, tyrants, emperors, and czars." + +The most popular poem of the Revolutionary period was John Trumbull's +_McFingal_, published in part at Philadelphia in 1775, and incomplete +shape at Hartford in 1782. It went through more than thirty editions +in America, and was several times reprinted in England. _McFingal_ was +a satire in four cantos, directed against the American loyalists, and +modeled quite closely upon Butler's mock heroic poem, _Hudibras_. As +Butler's hero sallies forth to put down May games and bear-baitings, so +the tory McFingal goes out against the liberty-poles and bonfires of +the patriots, but is tarred and feathered, and otherwise ill-entreated, +and finally takes refuge in the camp of General Gage at Boston. The +poem is written with smartness and vivacity, attains often to drollery +and sometimes to genuine humor. It remains one of the best of American +political satires, and unquestionably the most successful of the many +imitations of _Hudibras_, whose manner it follows so closely that some +of its lines, which have passed into currency as proverbs, are +generally attributed to Butler. For example: + + "No man e'er felt the halter draw + With good opinion of the law." + +Or this: + + "For any man with half an eye + What stands before him may espy; + But optics sharp it needs, I ween, + To see what is not to be seen." + +Trumbull's wit did not spare the vulnerable points of his own +countrymen, as in his sharp skit at slavery in the couplet about the +newly adopted flag of the Confederation: + + "Inscribed with inconsistent types + Of Liberty and thirteen stripes." + +Trumbull was one of a group of Connecticut literati, who made such +noise in their time as the "Hartford Wits." The other members of the +group were Lemuel Hopkins, David Humphreys, Joel Barlow, Elihu Smith, +Theodore Dwight, and Richard Alsop. Trumbull, Humphreys, and Barlow +had formed a friendship and a kind of literary partnership at Yale, +where they were contemporaries of each other and of Timothy Dwight. +During the war they served in the army in various capacities, and at +its close they found themselves again together for a few years at +Hartford, where they formed a club that met weekly for social and +literary purposes. Their presence lent a sort of _éclat_ to the little +provincial capital, and their writings made it for a time an +intellectual center quite as important as Boston or Philadelphia or New +York. The Hartford Wits were stanch Federalists, and used their pens +freely in support of the administrations of Washington and Adams, and +in ridicule of Jefferson and the Democrats. In 1786-87 Trumbull, +Hopkins, Barlow, and Humphreys published in the _New Haven Gazette_ a +series of satirical papers entitled the _Anarchiad_, suggested by the +English _Rolliad_, and purporting to be extracts from an ancient epic +on "the Restoration of Chaos and Substantial Night." The papers were +an effort to correct, by ridicule, the anarchic condition of things +which preceded the adoption of the Federal Constitution in 1789. It +was a time of great confusion and discontent, when, in parts of the +country, Democratic mobs were protesting against the vote of five +years' pay by the Continental Congress to the officers of the American +army. The _Anarchiad_ was followed by the _Echo_ and the _Political +Green House_, written mostly by Alsop and Theodore Dwight, and similar +in character and tendency to the earlier series. Time has greatly +blunted the edge of these satires, but they were influential in their +day, and are an important part of the literature of the old Federalist +party. + +Humphreys became afterward distinguished in the diplomatic service, and +was, successively, embassador to Portugal and to Spain, whence he +introduced into America the breed of merino sheep. He had been on +Washington's staff during the war, and was several times an inmate of +his house at Mount Vernon, where he produced, in 1785, the best-known +of his writings, _Mount Vernon_, an ode of a rather mild description, +which once had admirers. Joel Barlow cuts a larger figure in +contemporary letters. After leaving Hartford, in 1788, he went to +France, where he resided for seventeen years, made a fortune in +speculations, and became imbued with French principles, writing a song +in praise of the guillotine, which gave great scandal to his old +friends at home. In 1805 he returned to America and built a fine +residence near Washington, which he called Kalorama. Barlow's literary +fame, in his own generation, rested upon his prodigious epic, the +_Columbiad_. The first form of this was the _Vision of Columbus_, +published at Hartford in 1787. This he afterward recast and enlarged +into the _Columbiad_, issued in Philadelphia in 1807, and dedicated to +Robert Fulton, the inventor of the steam-boat. This was by far the +most sumptuous piece of book-making that had then been published in +America, and was embellished with plates executed by the best London +engravers. + +The _Columbiad_ was a grandiose performance, and has been the theme of +much ridicule by later writers. Hawthorne suggested its being +dramatized, and put on to the accompaniment of artillery and thunder +and lightning; and E. P. Whipple declared that "no critic in the last +fifty years had read more than a hundred lines of it." In its +ambitiousness and its length it was symptomatic of the spirit of the +age which was patriotically determined to create, by _tour de force_, a +national literature of a size commensurate with the scale of American +nature and the destinies of the republic. As America was bigger than +Argos and Troy we ought to have a bigger epic than the _Iliad_. +Accordingly, Barlow makes Hesper fetch Columbus from his prison to a +"hill of vision," where he unrolls before his eye a panorama of the +history of America, or, as our bards then preferred to call it, +Columbia. He shows him the conquest of Mexico by Cortez; the rise and +fall of the kingdom of the Incas in Peru; the settlements of the +English colonies in North America; the old French and Indian wars; the +Revolution, ending with a prophecy of the future greatness of the +new-born nation. The machinery of the _Vision_ was borrowed from the +11th and 12th books of _Paradise Lost_. Barlow's verse was the +ten-syllabled rhyming couplet of Pope, and his poetic style was +distinguished by the vague, glittering imagery and the false sublimity +which marked the epic attempts of the Queen Anne poets. Though Barlow +was but a masquerader in true heroic he showed himself a true poet in +mock heroic. His _Hasty Pudding_, written in Savoy in 1793, and +dedicated to Mrs. Washington, was thoroughly American, in subject at +least, and its humor, though over-elaborate, is good. One couplet in +particular has prevailed against oblivion: + + "E'en in thy native regions how I blush + To hear the Pennsylvanians call thee _Mush_!" + +Another Connecticut poet--one of the seven who were fondly named "The +Pleiads of Connecticut"--was Timothy Dwight, whose _Conquest of +Canaan_, written shortly after his graduation from college, but not +published till 1785, was, like the _Columbiad_, an experiment toward +the domestication of the epic muse in America. It was written like +Barlow's poem, in rhymed couplets, and the patriotic impulse of the +time shows oddly in the introduction of our Revolutionary War, by way +of episode, among the wars of Israel. _Greenfield Hill_, 1794, was an +idyllic and moralizing poem, descriptive of a rural parish in +Connecticut of which the author was for a time the pastor. It is not +quite without merit; shows plainly the influence of Goldsmith, Thomson, +and Beattie, but as a whole is tedious and tame. Byron was amused that +there should have been an American poet christened Timothy, and it is +to be feared that amusement would have been the chief emotion kindled +in the breast of the wicked Voltaire had he ever chanced to see the +stern dedication to himself of the same poet's _Triumph of Infidelity_, +1788. Much more important than Dwight's poetry was his able _Theology +Explained and Defended_, 1794, a restatement, with modifications, of +the Calvinism of Jonathan Edwards, which was accepted by the +Congregational churches of New England as an authoritative exponent of +the orthodoxy of the time. His _Travels in New England and New York_, +including descriptions of Niagara, the White Mountains, Lake George, +the Catskills, and other passages of natural scenery, not so familiar +then as now, was published posthumously in 1821, was praised by +Southey, and is still readable. As President of Yale College from 1795 +to 1817 Dwight, by his learning and ability, his sympathy with young +men, and the force and dignity of his character, exerted a great +influence in the community. + +The strong political bias of the time drew into its vortex most of the +miscellaneous literature that was produced. A number of ballads, +serious and comic, whig and tory, dealing with the battles and other +incidents of the long war, enjoyed a wide circulation in the newspapers +or were hawked about in printed broadsides. Most of these have no +literary merit, and are now mere antiquarian curiosities. A favorite +piece on the tory side was the _Cow Chase_, a cleverish parody on +_Chevy Chase_, written by the gallant and unfortunate Major Andre, at +the expense of "Mad" Anthony Wayne. The national song _Yankee Doodle_ +was evolved during the Revolution, and, as is the case with _John +Brown's Body_ and many other popular melodies, some obscurity hangs +about its origin. The air was an old one, and the words of the chorus +seem to have been adapted or corrupted from a Dutch song, and applied +in derision to the provincials by the soldiers of the British army as +early as 1755. Like many another nickname, the term Yankee Doodle was +taken up by the nicknamed and proudly made their own. The stanza, + + "Yankee Doodle came to town," etc., + +antedates the war; but the first complete set of words to the tune was +the _Yankee's Return from Camp_, which is apparently of the year 1775. +The most popular humorous ballad on the whig side was the _Battle of +the Kegs_, founded on a laughable incident of the campaign at +Philadelphia. This was written by Francis Hopkinson, a Philadelphian, +and one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. Hopkinson +has some title to rank as one of the earliest American humorists. +Without the keen wit of _McFingal_, some of his _Miscellaneous Essays +and Occasional Writings_, published in 1792, have more geniality and +heartiness than Trumbull's satire. His _Letter on Whitewashing_ is a +bit of domestic humor that foretokens the _Danbury News_ man; and his +_Modern Learning_, 1784, a burlesque on college examinations, in which +a salt-box is described from the point of view of metaphysics, logic, +natural philosophy, mathematics, anatomy, surgery, and chemistry, long +kept its place in school-readers and other collections. His son, +Joseph Hopkinson, wrote the song of _Hail Columbia_, which is saved +from insignificance only by the music to which it was married, the then +popular air of "The President's March." The words were written in +1798, on the eve of a threatened war with France, and at a time when +party spirit ran high. It was sung nightly by crowds in the streets, +and for a whole season by a favorite singer at the theater; for by this +time there were theaters in Philadelphia, in New York, and even in +puritanic Boston. Much better than _Hail Columbia_ was the +_Star-Spangled Banner_, the words of which were composed by Francis +Scott Key, a Marylander, during the bombardment by the British of Fort +McHenry, near Baltimore, in 1812. More pretentious than these was the +once celebrated ode of Robert Treat Paine, Jr., _Adams and Liberty_, +recited at an anniversary of the Massachusetts Charitable Fire Society. +The sale of this is said to have netted its author over $750, but it +is, notwithstanding, a very wooden performance. Paine was a young +Harvard graduate, who had married an actress playing at the Old Federal +Street Theater, the first play-house opened in Boston, in 1794. His +name was originally Thomas, but this was changed for him by the +Massachusetts Legislature, because he did not wish to be confounded +with the author of the _Age of Reason_. "Dim are those names erstwhile +in battle loud," and many an old Revolutionary worthy who fought for +liberty with sword and pen is now utterly forgotten, or remembered only +by some phrase which has become a current quotation. Here and there a +line has, by accident, survived to do duty as a motto or inscription, +while all its context is buried in oblivion. Few have read any thing +more of Jonathan M. Sewall's, for example, than the couplet, + + "No pent-up Utica contracts your powers, + But the whole boundless continent is yours," + +taken from his _Epilogue to Cato_, written in 1778. + +Another Revolutionary poet was Philip Freneau--"that rascal Freneau," +as Washington called him, when annoyed by the attacks upon his +administration in Freneau's _National Gazette_. He was of Huguenot +descent, was a class-mate of Madison at Princeton College, was taken +prisoner by the British during the war, and when the war was over +engaged in journalism, as an ardent supporter of Jefferson and the +Democrats. Freneau's patriotic verses and political lampoons are now +unreadable; but he deserves to rank as the first real American poet, by +virtue of his _Wild Honeysuckle_, _Indian Burying Ground_, _Indian +Student_, and a few other little pieces, which exhibit a grace and +delicacy inherited, perhaps, with his French blood, + +Indeed, to speak strictly, all of the "poets" hitherto mentioned were +nothing but rhymers; but in Freneau we meet with something of beauty +and artistic feeling; something which still keeps his verses fresh. In +his treatment of Indian themes, in particular, appear for the first +time a sense of the picturesque and poetic elements in the character +and wild life of the red man, and that pensive sentiment which the +fading away of the tribes toward the sunset has left in the wake of +their retreating footsteps. In this Freneau anticipates Cooper and +Longfellow, though his work is slight compared with the +_Leatherstocking Tales_ or _Hiawatha_. At the time when the +Revolutionary War broke out the population of the colonies was over +three millions; Philadelphia had thirty thousand inhabitants, and the +frontier had retired to a comfortable distance from the sea-board. The +Indian had already grown legendary to town dwellers, and Freneau +fetches his _Indian Student_ not from the outskirts of the settlement +but from the remote backwoods of the State: + + "From Susquehanna's farthest springs, + Where savage tribes pursue their game + (His blanket tied with yellow strings), + A shepherd of the forest came." + +Campbell "lifted"--in his poem _O'Conor's Child_--the last line of the +following stanza from Freneau's _Indian Burying Ground_: + + "By midnight moons, o'er moistening dews, + In vestments for the chase arrayed, + The hunter still the deer pursues-- + The hunter and the deer, a shade." + +And Walter Scott did Freneau the honor to borrow, in _Marmion_, the +final line of one of the stanzas of his poem on the battle of Eutaw +Springs: + + "They saw their injured country's woe, + The flaming town, the wasted field; + Then rushed to meet the insulting foe, + They took the spear, but left the shield." + +Scott inquired of an American gentleman who visited him the authorship +of this poem, which he had by heart, and pronounced it as fine a thing +of the kind as there was in the language. + +The American drama and American prose fiction had their beginning +during the period now under review. A company of English players came +to this country in 1762 and made the tour of many of the principal +towns. The first play acted here by professionals on a public stage +was the _Merchant of Venice_, which was given by the English company at +Williamsburg, Va., in 1752. The first regular theater building was at +Annapolis, Md., where in the same year this troupe performed, among +other pieces, Farquhar's _Beaux' Stratagem_. In 1753 a theater was +built in New York, and one in 1759 in Philadelphia. The Quakers of +Philadelphia and the Puritans of Boston were strenuously opposed to the +acting of plays, and in the latter city the players were several times +arrested during the performances, under a Massachusetts law forbidding +dramatic performances. At Newport, R.I., on the other hand, which was +a health resort for planters from the Southern States and the West +Indies, and the largest slave-market in the North, the actors were +hospitably received. The first play known to have been written by an +American was the _Prince of Parthia_, 1765, a closet drama, by Thomas +Godfrey, of Philadelphia. The first play by an American writer, acted +by professionals in a public theater, was Royall Tyler's _Contrast_, +performed in New York, in 1786. The former of these was very high +tragedy, and the latter very low comedy; and neither of them is +otherwise remarkable than as being the first of a long line of +indifferent dramas. There is, in fact, no American dramatic literature +worth speaking of; not a single American play of even the second rank, +unless we except a few graceful parlor comedies, like Mr. Howell's +_Elevator_ and _Sleeping-Car_. Royall Tyler, the author of _The +Contrast_, cut quite a figure in his day as a wit and journalist, and +eventually became chief-justice of Vermont. His comedy, _The Georgia +Spec_, 1797, had a great run in Boston, and his _Algerine Captive_, +published in the same year, was one of the earliest American novels. +It was a rambling tale of adventure, constructed somewhat upon the plan +of Smollett's novels and dealing with the piracies which led to the war +between the United States and Algiers in 1815. + +Charles Brockden Brown, the first American novelist of any note, was +also the first professional man of letters in this country who +supported himself entirely by his pen. He was born in Philadelphia in +1771, lived a part of his life in New York and part in his native city, +where he started, in 1803, the _Literary Magazine and American +Register_. During the years 1798-1801 he published in rapid succession +six romances, _Wieland_, _Ormond_, _Arthur Mervyn_, _Edgar Huntley_, +_Clara Howard_, and _Jane Talbot_. Brown was an invalid and something +of a recluse, with a relish for the ghastly in incident and the morbid +in character. He was in some points a prophecy of Poe and Hawthorne, +though his art was greatly inferior to Poe's, and almost infinitely so +to Hawthorne's. His books belong more properly to the contemporary +school of fiction in England which preceded the "Waverley Novels"--to +the class that includes Beckford's _Vathek_, Godwin's _Caleb Williams_ +and _St. Leon_, Mrs. Shelley's _Frankenstein_, and such "Gothic" +romances as Lewis's _Monk_, Walpole's _Castle of Otranto_, and Mrs. +Radcliffe's _Mysteries of Udolpho_. A distinguishing characteristic of +this whole school is what we may call the clumsy-horrible. Brown's +romances are not wanting in inventive power, in occasional situations +that are intensely thrilling, and in subtle analysis of character; but +they are fatally defective in art. The narrative is by turns abrupt +and tiresomely prolix, proceeding not so much by dialogue as by +elaborate dissection and discussion of motives and states of mind, +interspersed with the author's reflections. The wild improbabilities +of plot and the unnatural and even monstrous developments of character +are in startling contrast with the old-fashioned preciseness of the +language; the conversations, when there are any, being conducted in +that insipid dialect in which a fine woman was called an "elegant +female." The following is a sample description of one of Brown's +heroines, and is taken from his novel of _Ormond_, the leading +character in which--a combination of unearthly intellect with fiendish +wickedness--is thought to have been suggested by Aaron Burr: "Helena +Cleves was endowed with every feminine and fascinating quality. Her +features were modified by the most transient sentiments and were the +seat of a softness at all times blushful and bewitching. All those +graces of symmetry, smoothness, and luster, which assemble in the +imagination of the painter when he calls from the bosom of her natal +deep the Paphian divinity, blended their perfections in the shade, +complexion, and hair of this lady." But, alas! "Helena's intellectual +deficiencies could not be concealed. She was proficient in the +elements of no science. The doctrine of lines and surfaces was as +disproportionate with her intellects as with those of the mock-bird. +She had not reasoned on the principles of human action, nor examined +the structure of society. . . . She could not commune in their native +dialect with the sages of Rome and Athens. . . . The constitution of +nature, the attributes of its Author, the arrangement of the parts of +the external universe, and the substance, modes of operation, and +ultimate destiny of human intelligence were enigmas unsolved and +insoluble by her." + +Brown frequently raises a superstructure of mystery on a basis +ludicrously weak. Thus the hero of his first novel, _Wieland_ (whose +father anticipates "Old Krook," in Dickens's _Bleak House_, by dying of +spontaneous combustion), is led on by what he mistakes for spiritual +voices to kill his wife and children; and the voices turn out to be +produced by the ventriloquism of one Carwin, the villain of the story. +Similarly in Edgar Huntley, the plot turns upon the phenomena of +sleep-walking. Brown had the good sense to place the scene of his +romances in his own country, and the only passages in them which have +now a living interest are his descriptions of wilderness scenery in +_Edgar Huntley_, and his graphic account in _Arthur Mervyn_ of the +yellow-fever epidemic in Philadelphia in 1793. Shelley was an admirer +of Brown, and his experiments in prose fiction, such as _Zastrozzi_ and +_St. Irvyne the Rosicrucian_, are of the same abnormal and speculative +type. + +Another book which falls within this period was the _Journal_, 1774, of +John Woolman, a New Jersey Quaker, which has received the highest +praise from Channing, Charles Lamb, and many others. "Get the writings +of John Woolman by heart," wrote Lamb, "and love the early Quakers." +The charm of this journal resides in its singular sweetness and +innocence of feeling, the "deep inward stillness" peculiar to the +people called Quakers. Apart from his constant use of certain phrases +peculiar to the Friends Woolman's English is also remarkably graceful +and pure, the transparent medium of a soul absolutely sincere, and +tender and humble in its sincerity. When not working at his trade as a +tailor Woolman spent his time in visiting and ministering to the +monthly, quarterly, and yearly meetings of Friends, traveling on +horseback to their scattered communities in the backwoods of Virginia +and North Carolina, and northward along the coast as far as Boston and +Nantucket. He was under a "concern" and a "heavy exercise" touching +the keeping of slaves, and by his writing and speaking did much to +influence the Quakers against slavery. His love went out, indeed, to +all the wretched and oppressed; to sailors, and to the Indians in +particular. One of his most perilous journeys was made to the +settlements of Moravian Indians in the wilderness of western +Pennsylvania, at Bethlehem, and at Wehaloosing, on the Susquehanna. +Some of the scruples which Woolman felt, and the quaint _naïveté_ with +which he expresses them, may make the modern reader smile, but it is a +smile which is very close to a tear. Thus, when in England--where he +died in 1772--he would not ride nor send a letter by mail-coach, +because the poor post-boys were compelled to ride long stages in winter +nights, and were sometimes frozen to death. "So great is the hurry in +the spirit of this world that, in aiming to do business quickly and to +gain wealth, the creation at this day doth loudly groan." Again, +having reflected that war was caused by luxury in dress, etc., the use +of dyed garments grew uneasy to him, and he got and wore a hat of the +natural color of the fur. "In attending meetings this singularity was +a trial to me, . . . and some Friends, who knew not from what motives I +wore it, grew shy of me. . . . Those who spoke with me I generally +informed, in a few words, that I believed my wearing it was not in my +own will." + + + +1. _Representative American Orations_. Edited by Alexander Johnston. +New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. 1884. + +2. _The Federalist_. New York: Charles Scribner. 1863. + +3. _Notes on Virginia_. By Thomas Jefferson. Boston. 1829. + +4. _Travels in New England and New York_. By Timothy Dwight. New +Haven. 1821. + +5. _McFingal_: in Trumbull's Poetical Works. Hartford. 1820. + +6. Joel Barlow's _Hasty Pudding_. Francis Hopkinson's _Modern +Learning_. Philip Freneau's _Indian Student_, _Indian Burying-Ground_, +and _White Honeysuckle_: in Vol. I of Duyckinck's _Cyclopedia of +American Literature_. New York: Charles Scribner. 1866. + +7. _Arthur Mervyn_. By Charles Brockden Brown. Boston: S. G. +Goodrich. 1827. + +8. _The Journal of John Woolman_. With an Introduction by John G. +Whittier. Boston: James R. Osgood & Co. 1871. + +9. _American Literature_. By Charles F. Richardson. New York: G. P. +Putnam's Sons. 1887. + +10. _American Literature_. By John Nichol. Edinburgh: Adam & Charles +Black. 1882. + + + + +CHAPTER III. + +THE ERA OF NATIONAL EXPANSION. + +1815-1837. + +The attempt to preserve a strictly chronological order must here be +abandoned. About all the American literature in existence that is of +any value as _literature_ is the product of the past three quarters of +a century, and the men who produced it, though older or younger, were +still contemporaries. Irving's _Knickerbocker's History of New York_, +1809, was published within the recollection of some yet living, and the +venerable poet Richard H. Dana--Irving's junior by only four +years--survived to 1879, when the youngest of the generation of writers +that now occupy public attention had already won their spurs. Bryant, +whose _Thanatopsis_ was printed in 1816, lived down to 1878. He saw +the beginnings of our national literature, and he saw almost as much of +the latest phase of it as we see to-day in this year 1891. Still, even +within the limits of a single life-time, there have been progress and +change. And so, while it will happen that the consideration of +writers, a part of whose work falls between the dates at the head of +this chapter, may be postponed to subsequent chapters, we may in a +general way follow the sequence of time. + +The period between the close of the second war with England, in 1815, +and the great financial crash of 1837, has been called, in language +attributed to President Monroe, "the era of good feeling." It was a +time of peace and prosperity, of rapid growth in population and rapid +extension of territory. The new nation was entering upon its vast +estates and beginning to realize its manifest destiny. The peace with +Great Britain, by calling off the Canadian Indians and the other tribes +in alliance with England, had opened up the North-west to settlement. +Ohio had been admitted as a State in 1802; but at the time of President +Monroe's tour, in 1817, Cincinnati had only seven thousand inhabitants, +and half of the State was unsettled. The Ohio River flowed for most of +its course through an unbroken wilderness. Chicago was merely a fort. +Hitherto the emigration to the West had been sporadic; now it took on +the dimensions of a general and almost a concerted exodus. This +movement was stimulated in New England by the cold summer of 1816 and +the late spring of 1817, which produced a scarcity of food that +amounted in parts of the interior to a veritable famine. All through +this period sounded the ax of the pioneer clearing the forest about his +log-cabin, and the rumble of the canvas-covered emigrant-wagon over the +primitive highways which crossed the Alleghanies or followed the valley +of the Mohawk. S. G. Goodrich, known in letters as "Peter Parley," in +his _Recollections of a Life-time_, 1856, describes the part of the +movement which he had witnessed as a boy in Fairfield County, +Connecticut: "I remember very well the tide of emigration through +Connecticut, on its way to the West, during the summer of 1817. Some +persons went in covered wagons--frequently a family consisting of +father, mother, and nine small children, with one at the breast--some +on foot, and some crowded together under the cover, with kettles, +gridirons, feather-beds, crockery, and the family Bible, Watts's Psalms +and Hymns, and Webster's Spelling-book--the lares and penates of the +household. Others started in ox-carts, and trudged on at the rate of +ten miles a day. . . . Many of these persons were in a state of +poverty, and begged their way as they went. Some died before they +reached the expected Canaan; many perished after their arrival from +fatigue and privation; and others from the fever and ague, which was +then certain to attack the new settlers. It was, I think, in 1818 that +I published a small tract entitled, _'Tother Side of Ohio_--that is, +the other view, in contrast to the popular notion that it was the +paradise of the world. It was written by Dr. Hand--a talented young +physician of Berlin--who had made a visit to the West about these days. +It consisted mainly of vivid but painful pictures of the accidents and +incidents attending this wholesale migration. The roads over the +Alleghanies, between Philadelphia and Pittsburg, were then rude, steep, +and dangerous, and some of the more precipitous slopes were +consequently strewn with the carcasses of wagons, carts, horses, oxen, +which had made shipwreck in their perilous descents." + +But in spite of the hardships of the settler's life the spirit of that +time, as reflected in its writings, was a hopeful and a light-hearted +one. + + "Westward the course of empire takes its way," + +runs the famous line from Berkeley's poem on America. The New +Englanders who removed to the Western Reserve went there to better +themselves; and their children found themselves the owners of broad +acres of virgin soil in place of the stony hill pastures of Berkshire +and Litchfield. There was an attraction, too, about the wild, free +life of the frontiersman, with all its perils and discomforts. The +life of Daniel Boone, the pioneer of Kentucky--that "dark and bloody +ground"--is a genuine romance. Hardly less picturesque was the old +river life of the Ohio boatmen, before the coming of steam banished +their queer craft from the water. Between 1810 and 1840 the center of +population in the United States had moved from the Potomac to the +neighborhood of Clarksburg, in West Virginia, and the population itself +had increased from seven to seventeen millions. The gain was made +partly in the East and South, but the general drift was westward. +During the years now under review the following new States were +admitted, in the order named: Indiana, Mississippi, Illinois, Alabama, +Maine, Missouri, Arkansas, Michigan. Kentucky and Tennessee had been +made States in the last years of the eighteenth century, and +Louisiana--acquired by purchase from France--in 1812. + +The settlers, in their westward march, left large tracts of wilderness +behind them. They took up first the rich bottomlands along the river +courses, the Ohio and Miami and Licking, and later the valleys of the +Mississippi and Missouri and the shores of the great lakes. But there +still remained backwoods in New York and Pennsylvania, though the +cities of New York and Philadelphia had each a population of more than +one hundred thousand in 1815. When the Erie Canal was opened, in 1825, +it ran through a primitive forest. N. P. Willis, who went by canal to +Buffalo and Niagara in 1827, describes the houses and stores at +Rochester as standing among the burnt stumps left by the first +settlers. In the same year that saw the opening of this great +water-way, the Indian tribes, numbering now about one hundred and +thirty thousand souls, were moved across the Mississippi. Their power +had been broken by General Hamson's victory over Tecumseh at the battle +of Tippecanoe, in 1811, and they were in fact mere remnants and +fragments of the race which had hung upon the skirts of civilization +and disputed the advance of the white man for two centuries. It was +not until some years later than this that railroads began to take an +important share in opening up new country. + +The restless energy, the love of adventure, the sanguine anticipation +which characterized American thought at this time, the picturesque +contrasts to be seen in each mushroom town where civilization was +encroaching on the raw edge of the wilderness--all these found +expression, not only in such well-known books as Cooper's _Pioneers_, +1823, and Irving's _Tour on the Prairies_, 1835, but in the minor +literature which is read to-day, if at all, not for its own sake, but +for the light that it throws on the history of national development: in +such books as Paulding's story of _Westward-Ho!_ and his poem, _The +Backwoodsman_, 1818; or as Timothy Flint's _Recollections_, 1826, and +his _Geography and History of the Mississippi Valley_, 1827. It was +not an age of great books, but it was an age of large ideas and +expanding prospects. The new consciousness of empire uttered itself +hastily, crudely, ran into buncombe, "spread-eagleism," and other noisy +forms of patriotic exultation; but it was thoroughly democratic and +American. Though literature--or at least the best literature of the +time--was not yet emancipated from English models, thought and life, at +any rate, were no longer in bondage--no longer provincial. And it is +significant that the party in office during these years was the +Democratic, the party which had broken most completely with +conservative traditions. The famous "Monroe doctrine" was a +pronunciamento of this aggressive democracy, and though the Federalists +returned to power for a single term, under John Quincy Adams (1825-29), +Andrew Jackson received the largest number of electoral votes, and +Adams was only chosen by the House of Representatives in the absence of +a majority vote for any one candidate. At the close of his term "Old +Hickory," the hero of the people, the most characteristically +democratic of our presidents, and the first backwoodsman who entered +the White House, was borne into office on a wave of popular enthusiasm. +We have now arrived at the time when American literature, in the higher +and stricter sense of the term, really began to have an existence. S. +G. Goodrich, who settled at Hartford as a bookseller and publisher in +1818, says, in his _Recollections_: "About this time I began to think +of trying to bring out original American works. . . . The general +impression was that we had not, and could not have, a literature. It +was the precise point at which Sidney Smith had uttered that bitter +taunt in the _Edinburgh Review_, 'Who reads an American book?' . . . +It was positively injurious to the commercial credit of a bookseller to +undertake American works." Washington Irving (1783-1859) was the first +American author whose books, as _books_, obtained recognition abroad; +whose name was thought worthy of mention beside the names of English +contemporary authors, like Byron, Scott, and Coleridge. He was also +the first American writer whose writings are still read for their own +sake. We read Mather's _Magnalia_, and Franklin's _Autobiography_, and +Trumbull's _McFingal_--if we read them at all--as history, and to learn +about the times or the men. But we read the _Sketch Book_, and +_Knickerbocker's History of New York_, and the _Conquest of Granada_ +for themselves and for the pleasure that they give as pieces of +literary art. + +We have arrived, too, at a time when we may apply a more cosmopolitan +standard to the works of American writers, and may disregard many a +minor author whose productions would have cut some figure had they come +to light amid the poverty of our colonial age. Hundreds of these +forgotten names, with specimens of their unread writings, are consigned +to a limbo of immortality in the pages of Duyckinck's _Cyclopedia_ and +of Griswold's _Poets of America_ and _Prose Writers of America_. We +may select here for special mention, and as most representative of the +thought of their time, the names of Irving, Cooper, Webster, and +Channing. + +A generation was now coming upon the stage who could recall no other +government in this country than the government of the United States, +and to whom the Revolutionary War was but a tradition. Born in the +very year of the peace, it was a part of Irving's mission, by the +sympathetic charm of his writings and by the cordial recognition which +he won in both countries, to allay the soreness which the second war, +of 1812-15, had left between England and America. He was well fitted +for the task of mediator. Conservative by nature, early drawn to the +venerable worship of the Episcopal Church, retrospective in his tastes, +with a preference for the past and its historic associations, which, +even in young America, led him to invest the Hudson and the region +about New York with a legendary interest, he wrote of American themes +in an English fashion, and interpreted to an American public the mellow +attractiveness that he found in the life and scenery of Old England. +He lived in both countries, and loved them both; and it is hard to say +whether Irving is more of an English or of an American writer. His +first visit to Europe, in 1804-6, occupied nearly two years. From 1815 +to 1832 he was abroad continuously, and his "domicile," as the lawyers +say, during these seventeen years was really in England, though a +portion of his time was spent upon the Continent, and several +successive years in Spain, where he engaged upon the _Life of +Columbus_, the _Conquest of Granada_, the _Companions of Columbus_, and +the _Alhambra_, all published between 1828 and 1832. From 1842 to 1846 +he was again in Spain as American minister at Madrid. + +Irving was the last and greatest of the Addisonians. His boyish +letters, signed "Jonathan Oldstyle," contributed in 1802 to his +brother's newspaper, the _Morning Chronicle_, were, like Franklin's +_Busybody_, close imitations of the _Spectator_. To the same family +belonged his _Salmagundi_ papers, 1807, a series of town-satires on New +York society, written in conjunction with his brother William and with +James K. Paulding. The little tales, essays, and sketches which +compose the _Sketch Book_ were written in England, and published in +America, in periodical numbers, in 1819-20. In this, which is in some +respects his best book, he still maintained that attitude of +observation and spectatorship taught him by Addison. The volume had a +motto taken from Burton: "I have no wife nor children, good or bad, to +provide for--a mere spectator of other men's fortunes," etc.; and "The +Author's Account of Himself," began in true Addisonian fashion: "I was +always fond of visiting new scenes and observing strange characters and +manners." + +But though never violently "American," like some later writers who have +consciously sought to throw off the trammels of English tradition, +Irving was in a real way original. His most distinct addition to our +national literature was in his creation of what has been called "the +Knickerbocker legend." He was the first to make use, for literary +purposes, of the old Dutch traditions which clustered about the +romantic scenery of the Hudson. Colonel T. W. Higginson, in his +_History of the United States_, tells how "Mrs. Josiah Quincy, sailing +up that river in 1786, when Irving was a child three years old, records +that the captain of the sloop had a legend, either supernatural or +traditional, for every scene, 'and not a mountain reared its head +unconnected with some marvelous story.'" The material thus at hand +Irving shaped into his _Knickerbocker's History of New York_, into the +immortal story of _Rip Van Winkle_ and the _Legend of Sleepy Hollow_ +(both published in the _Sketch Book_), and into later additions to the +same realm of fiction, such as _Dolph Heyliger_ in _Bracebridge Hall_, +the _Money Diggers_, _Wolfert Webber_, and _Kidd the Pirate_, in the +_Tales of a Traveler_, and some of the miscellanies from the +_Knickerbocker Magazine_, collected into a volume, in 1855, under the +title of _Wolfert's Roost_. + +The book which made Irving's reputation was his _Knickerbocker's +History of New York_, 1809, a burlesque chronicle, making fun of the +old Dutch settlers of New Amsterdam, and attributed, by a familiar and +now somewhat threadbare device,[1] to a little old gentleman named +Diedrich Knickerbocker, whose manuscript had come into the editor's +hands. The book was gravely dedicated to the New York Historical +Society, and it is said to have been quoted, as authentic history, by a +certain German scholar named Goeller, in a note on a passage in +Thucydides. This story, though well vouched, is hard of belief; for +_Knickerbocker_, though excellent fooling, has nothing of the grave +irony of Swift in his _Modest Proposal_ or of Defoe in his _Short Way +with Dissenters_. Its mock-heroic intention is as transparent as in +Fielding's parodies of Homer, which it somewhat resembles, particularly +in the delightfully absurd description of the mustering of the clans +under Peter Stuyvesant and the attack on the Swedish Fort Christina. +_Knickerbocker's History of New York_ was a real addition to the comic +literature of the world, a work of genuine humor, original and vital. +Walter Scott said that it reminded him closely of Swift, and had +touches resembling Sterne. It is not necessary to claim for Irving's +little masterpiece a place beside _Gulliver's Travels_ and _Tristram +Shandy_. But it was, at least, the first American book in the lighter +departments of literature which needed no apology and stood squarely on +its own legs. It was written, too, at just the right time. Although +New Amsterdam had become New York as early as 1664, the impress of its +first settlers, with their quaint conservative ways, was still upon it +when Irving was a boy. The descendants of the Dutch families formed a +definite element not only in Manhattan, but all up along the kills of +the Hudson, at Albany, at Schenectady, in Westchester County, at +Hoboken, and Communipaw, localities made familiar to him in many a +ramble and excursion. He lived to see the little provincial town of +his birth grow into a great metropolis, in which all national +characteristics were blended together, and a tide of immigration from +Europe and New England flowed over the old landmarks and obliterated +them utterly. + +Although Irving was the first to reveal to his countrymen the literary +possibilities of their early history it must be acknowledged that with +modern American life he had little sympathy. He hated politics, and in +the restless democratic movement of the time, as we have described it, +he found no inspiration. This moderate and placid gentleman, with his +distrust of all kinds of fanaticism, had no liking for the Puritans or +for their descendants, the New England Yankees, if we may judge from +his sketch of Ichabod Crane in the _Legend of Sleepy Hollow_. His +genius was reminiscent, and his imagination, like Scott's, was the +historic imagination. In crude America his fancy took refuge in the +picturesque aspects of the past, in "survivals" like the Knickerbocker +Dutch and the Acadian peasants, whose isolated communities on the lower +Mississippi he visited and described. He turned naturally to the ripe +civilization of the Old World, He was our first picturesque tourist, +the first "American in Europe." He rediscovered England, whose ancient +churches, quiet landscapes, memory-haunted cities, Christmas +celebrations, and rural festivals had for him an unfailing attraction. +With pictures of these, for the most part, he filled the pages of the +_Sketch Book_ and _Bracebridge Hall_, 1822. Delightful as are these +English sketches, in which the author conducts his reader to Windsor +Castle, or Stratford-on-Avon, or the Boar's Head Tavern, or sits beside +him on the box of the old English stage-coach, or shares with him the +Yule-tide cheer at the ancient English country-house, their interest +has somewhat faded. The pathos of the _Broken Heart_ and the _Pride of +the Village_, the mild satire of the _Art of Book-Making_, the rather +obvious reflections in _Westminster Abbey_ are not exactly to the taste +of this generation. They are the literature of leisure and +retrospection; and already Irving's gentle elaboration, the refined and +slightly artificial beauty of his style, and his persistently genial +and sympathetic attitude have begun to pall upon readers who demand a +more nervous and accentuated kind of writing. It is felt that a little +roughness, a little harshness, even, would give relief to his pictures +of life. There is, for instance, something a little irritating in the +old-fashioned courtliness of his manner toward women; and one reads +with a certain impatience smoothly punctuated passages like the +following: "As the vine, which has long twined its graceful foliage +about the oak, and been lifted by it into sunshine, will, when the +hardy plant is rifted by the thunder-bolt, cling round it with its +caressing tendrils, and bind up its shattered boughs, so is it +beautifully ordered by Providence that woman, who is the mere dependent +and ornament of man in his happier hours, should be his stay and solace +when smitten with sudden calamity, winding herself into the rugged +recesses of his nature, tenderly supporting the drooping head and +binding up the broken heart." + +Irving's gifts were sentiment and humor, with an imagination +sufficiently fertile and an observation sufficiently acute to support +those two main qualities, but inadequate to the service of strong +passion or subtle thinking, though his pathos, indeed, sometimes +reached intensity. His humor was always delicate and kindly; his +sentiment never degenerated into sentimentality. His diction was +graceful and elegant--too elegant, perhaps; and, in his modesty, he +attributed the success of his books in England to the astonishment of +Englishmen that an American could write good English. + +In Spanish history and legend Irving found a still newer and richer +field for his fancy to work upon. He had not the analytic and +philosophical mind of a great historian, and the merits of his +_Conquest of Granada_ and _Life of Columbus_ are rather +_belletristisch_ than scientific. But he brought to these undertakings +the same eager love of the romantic past which had determined the +character of his writings in America and England, and the +result--whether we call it history or romance--is at all events +charming as literature. His _Life of Washington_--completed in +1859--was his _magnum opus_, and is accepted as standard authority. +_Mahomet and His Successors_, 1850, was comparatively a failure. But +of all Irving's biographies his _Life of Oliver Goldsmith_, 1849, was +the most spontaneous and perhaps the best. He did not impose it upon +himself as a task, but wrote it from a native and loving sympathy with +his subject, and it is, therefore, one of the choicest literary memoirs +in the language. + +When Irving returned to America, in 1832, he was the recipient of +almost national honors. He had received the medal of the Royal Society +of Literature and the degree of D.C.L. from Oxford University, and had +made American literature known and respected abroad. In his modest +home at Sunnyside, on the banks of the river over which he had been the +first to throw the witchery of poetry and romance, he was attended to +the last by the admiring affection of his countrymen. He had the love +and praises of the foremost English writers of his own generation and +the generation which followed--of Scott, Byron, Coleridge, Thackeray, +and Dickens, some of whom had been among his personal friends. He is +not the greatest of American authors, but the influence of his writings +is sweet and wholesome, and it is in many ways fortunate that the first +American man of letters who made himself heard in Europe should have +been in all particulars a gentleman. + +Connected with Irving, at least by name and locality, were a number of +authors who resided in the city of New York, and who are known as the +Knickerbocker writers, perhaps because they were contributors to the +_Knickerbocker Magazine_. One of these was James K. Paulding, a +connection of Irving by marriage, and his partner in the _Salmagundi_ +papers. Paulding became Secretary of the Navy under Van Buren, and +lived down to the year 1860. He was a voluminous author, but his +writings had no power of continuance, and are already obsolete, with +the possible exception of his novel, the _Dutchman's Fireside_, 1831. + +A finer spirit than Paulding was Joseph Rodman Drake, a young poet of +great promise, who died in 1820, at the age of twenty-five. Drake's +patriotic lyric, the _American Flag_, is certainly the most spirited +thing of the kind in our poetic literature, and greatly superior to +such national anthems as _Hail Columbia_ and the _Star-Spangled +Banner_. His _Culprit Fay_, published in 1819, was the best poem that +had yet appeared in America, if we except Bryant's _Thanatopsis_, which +was three years the elder. The _Culprit Fay_ was a fairy story, in +which, following Irving's lead, Drake undertook to throw the glamour of +poetry about the Highlands of the Hudson. Edgar Poe said that the poem +was fanciful rather than imaginative; but it is prettily and even +brilliantly fanciful, and has maintained its popularity to the present +time. Such verse as the following--which seems to show that Drake had +been reading Coleridge's _Christabel_, published three years +before--was something new in American poetry: + + "The winds are whist and the owl is still, + The bat in the shelvy rock is hid, + And naught is heard on the lonely hill + But the cricket's chirp and the answer shrill + Of the gauze-winged katydid, + And the plaint of the wailing whip-poor-will, + Who moans unseen, and ceaseless sings + Ever a note of wail and woe, + Till morning spreads her rosy wings, + And earth and sky in her glances glow." + +Here we have, at last, the whip-poor-will, an American bird, and not +the conventional lark or nightingale, although the elves of the Old +World seem scarcely at home on the banks of the Hudson. Drake's memory +has been kept fresh not only by his own poetry, but by the beautiful +elegy written by his friend Fitz-Greene Halleck, the first stanza of +which is universally known; + + "Green be the turf above thee, + Friend of my better days; + None knew thee but to love thee, + Nor named thee but to praise." + +Halleck was born in Guilford, Connecticut, whither he retired in 1849, +and resided there till his death in 1867. But his literary career is +identified with New York. He was associated with Drake in writing the +_Croaker Papers_, a series of humorous and satirical verses contributed +in 1814 to the _Evening Post_. These were of a merely local and +temporary interest; but Halleck's fine ode, _Marco Bozzaris_--though +declaimed until it has become hackneyed--gives him a sure title to +remembrance; and his _Alnwick Castle_, a monody, half serious and half +playful on the contrast between feudal associations and modern life, +has much of that pensive lightness which characterizes Praed's best +_vers de societé_. + +A friend of Drake and Halleck was James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851), +the first American novelist of distinction, and, if a popularity which +has endured for nearly three quarters of a century is any test, still +the most successful of all American novelists. Cooper was far more +intensely American than Irving, and his books reached an even wider +public. "They are published as soon as he produces them," said Morse, +the electrician, in 1833, "in thirty-four different places in Europe. +They have been seen by American travelers in the languages of Turkey +and Persia, in Constantinople, in Egypt, at Jerusalem, at Ispahan." +Cooper wrote altogether too much; he published, besides his fictions, a +_Naval History of the United States_, a series of naval biographies, +works of travel, and a great deal of controversial matter. He wrote +over thirty novels, the greater part of which are little better than +trash, and tedious trash at that. This is especially true of his +_tendenz_ novels and his novels of society. He was a man of strongly +marked individuality, fiery, pugnacious, sensitive to criticism, and +abounding in prejudices. He was embittered by the scurrilous attacks +made upon him by a portion of the American press, and spent a great +deal of time and energy in conducting libel suits against the +newspapers. In the same spirit he used fiction as a vehicle for attack +upon the abuses and follies of American life. Nearly all of his +novels, written with this design, are worthless. Nor was Cooper well +equipped by nature and temperament for depicting character and passion +in social life. Even in his best romances his heroines and his +"leading juveniles"--to borrow a term from the amateur stage--are +insipid and conventional. He was no satirist, and his humor was not of +a high order. He was a rapid and uneven writer, and, unlike Irving, he +had no style. + +Where Cooper was great was in the story, in the invention of incidents +and plots, in a power of narrative and description in tales of wild +adventure which keeps the reader in breathless excitement to the end of +the book. He originated the novel of the sea and the novel of the +wilderness. He created the Indian of literature; and in this, his +peculiar field, although he has had countless imitators, he has had no +equals. Cooper's experiences had prepared him well for the kingship of +this new realm in the world of fiction. His childhood was passed on +the borders of Otsego Lake, when central New York was still a +wilderness, with boundless forests stretching westward, broken only +here and there by the clearings of the pioneers. He was taken from +college (Yale) when still a lad, and sent to sea in a merchant vessel, +before the mast. Afterward he entered the navy and did duty on the +high seas and upon Lake Ontario, then surrounded by virgin forests. He +married and resigned his commission in 1811, just before the outbreak +of the war with England, so that he missed the opportunity of seeing +active service in any of those engagements on the ocean and our great +lakes which were so glorious to American arms. But he always retained +an active interest in naval affairs. + +His first successful novel was _The Spy_, 1821, a tale of the +Revolutionary War, the scene of which was laid in Westchester County, +N. Y., where the author was then residing. The hero of this story, +Harvey Birch, was one of the most skillfully drawn figures on his +canvas. In 1833 he published the _Pioneers_, a work somewhat overladen +with description, in which he drew for material upon his boyish +recollections of frontier life at Cooperstown. This was the first of +the series of five romances known as the _Leatherstocking Tales_. The +others were the _Last of the Mohicans_, 1826; the _Prairie_, 1827; the +_Pathfinder_, 1840; and the _Deerslayer_, 1841. The hero of this +series, Natty Bumpo, or "Leatherstocking," was Cooper's one great +creation in the sphere of character, his most original addition to the +literature of the world in the way of a new human type. This backwoods +philosopher--to the conception of whom the historic exploits of Daniel +Boone perhaps supplied some hints; unschooled, but moved by noble +impulses and a natural sense of piety and justice; passionately +attached to the wilderness, and following its westering edge even unto +the prairies--this man of the woods was the first real American in +fiction. Hardly less individual and vital were the various types of +Indian character, in Chingachgook, Uncas, Hist, and the Huron warriors. +Inferior to these, but still vigorously though somewhat roughly drawn, +were the waifs and strays of civilization, whom duty, or the hope of +gain, or the love of adventure, or the outlawry of crime had driven to +the wilderness--the solitary trapper, the reckless young frontiersman, +the officers and men of out-post garrisons. Whether Cooper's Indian +was the real being, or an idealized and rather melodramatic version of +the truth, has been a subject of dispute. However this be, he has +taken his place in the domain of art, and it is safe to say that his +standing there is secure. No boy will ever give him up. + +Equally good with the _Leatherstocking_ novels, and equally national, +were Cooper's tales of the sea, or at least the best two of them--the +_Pilot_, 1833, founded upon the daring exploits of John Paul Jones, and +the _Red Rover_, 1828. But here, though Cooper still holds the sea, he +has had to admit competitors; and Britannia, who rules the waves in +song, has put in some claim to a share in the domain of nautical +fiction in the persons of Mr. W. Clark Russell and others. Though +Cooper's novels do not meet the deeper needs of the heart and the +imagination, their appeal to the universal love of a story is +perennial. We devour them when we are boys, and if we do not often +return to them when we are men, that is perhaps only because we have +read them before, and "know the ending." They are good yarns for the +forecastle and the camp-fire; and the scholar in his study, though he +may put the _Deerslayer_ or the _Last of the Mohicans_ away on the top +shelf, will take it down now and again, and sit up half the night over +it. + +Before dismissing the _belles-lettres_ writings of this period, mention +should be made of a few poems of the fugitive kind which seem to have +taken a permanent place in popular regard. John Howard Payne, a native +of Long Island, a wandering actor and playwright, who died American +consul at Tunis in 1852, wrote about 1820 for Covent Garden Theater an +opera, entitled _Clari_, the libretto of which included the now famous +song of _Home, Sweet Home_. Its literary pretensions were of the +humblest kind, but it spoke a true word which touched the Anglo-Saxon +heart in its tenderest spot, and, being happily married to a plaintive +air, was sold by the hundred thousand, and is evidently destined to be +sung forever. A like success has attended the _Old Oaken Bucket_, +composed by Samuel Woodworth, a printer and journalist from +Massachusetts, whose other poems, of which two collections were issued +in 1818 and 1826, were soon forgotten. Richard Henry Wilde, an +Irishman by birth, a gentleman of scholarly tastes and accomplishments, +who wrote a great deal on Italian literature, and sat for several terms +in Congress as Representative of the State of Georgia, was the author +of the favorite song, _My Life is Like the Summer Rose_. Another +Southerner, and a member of a distinguished Southern family, was Edward +Coate Pinkney, who served nine years in the navy, and died in 1828, at +the age of twenty-six, having published in 1825 a small volume of +lyrical poems which had a fire and a grace uncommon at that time in +American verse. One of these, _A Health_, beginning, + + "I fill this cup to one made up of loveliness alone." + +though perhaps somewhat overpraised by Edgar Poe, has rare beauty of +thought and expression. + +John Quincy Adams, sixth President of the United States (1825-29), was +a man of culture and literary tastes. He published his lectures on +rhetoric, delivered during his tenure of the Boylston Professorship at +Harvard in 1806-9; he left a voluminous diary, which has been edited +since his death in 1848; and among his experiments in poetry is one of +considerable merit, entitled _The Wants of Man_, an ironical sermon on +Goldsmith's text: + + "Man wants but little here below, + Nor wants that little long." + +As this poem is a curiously close anticipation of Dr. Holmes's +_Contentment_, so the very popular ballad, _Old Grimes_, written about +1818, by Albert Gorton Greene, an undergraduate of Brown University in +Rhode Island, is in some respects an anticipation of Holmes's quaintly +pathetic _Last Leaf_. + +The political literature and public oratory of the United States during +this period, although not absolutely of less importance than that which +preceded and followed the Declaration of Independence and the adoption +of the Constitution, demands less relative attention in a history of +literature by reason of the growth of other departments of thought. +The age was a political one, but no longer exclusively political. The +debates of the time centered about the question of "State Rights," and +the main forum of discussion was the old Senate chamber, then made +illustrious by the presence of Clay, Webster, and Calhoun. The slavery +question, which had threatened trouble, was put off for a while by the +Missouri Compromise of 1820, only to break out more fiercely in the +debates on the Wilmot Proviso and the Kansas and Nebraska Bill. +Meanwhile the Abolition movement had been transferred to the press and +the platform. Garrison started his _Liberator_ in 1830, and the +Antislavery Society was founded in 1833. The Whig party, which had +inherited the constitutional principles of the old Federal party, +advocated internal improvements at national expense and a high +protective tariff. The State Rights party, which was strongest at the +South, opposed these views, and in 1832 South Carolina claimed the +right to "nullify" the tariff imposed by the general government. The +leader of this party was John Caldwell Calhoun, a South Carolinian, who +in his speech in the United States Senate, on February 13, 1832, on +Nullification and the Force Bill, set forth most authoritatively the +"Carolina doctrine." Calhoun was a great debater, but hardly a great +orator. His speeches are the arguments of a lawyer and a strict +constitutionalist, severely logical, and with a sincere conviction in +the soundness of his case. Their language is free from bad rhetoric; +the reasoning is cogent, but there is an absence of emotion and +imagination; they contain few quotable things, and no passages of +commanding eloquence, such as strew the orations of Webster and Burke. +They are not, in short, literature. Again, the speeches of Henry Clay, +of Kentucky, the leader of the Whigs, whose persuasive oratory is a +matter of tradition, disappoint in the reading. The fire has gone out +of them. + +Not so with Daniel Webster, the greatest of American forensic orators, +if, indeed, he be not the greatest of all orators who have used the +English tongue. Webster's speeches are of the kind that have power to +move after the voice of the speaker is still. The thought and the +passion in them lay hold on feelings of patriotism more lasting than +the issues of the moment. It is, indeed, true of Webster's speeches, +as of all speeches, that they are known to posterity more by single +brilliant passages than as wholes. In oratory the occasion is of the +essence of the thing, and only those parts of an address which are +permanent and universal in their appeal take their place in literature. +But of such detachable passages there are happily many in Webster's +orations. One great thought underlay all his public life, the thought +of the Union--of American nationality. What in Hamilton had been a +principle of political philosophy had become in Webster a passionate +conviction. The Union was his idol, and he was intolerant of any +faction which threatened it from any quarter, whether the Nullifiers of +South Carolina or the Abolitionists of the North. It is this thought +which gives grandeur and elevation to all his utterances, and +especially to the wonderful peroration of his _Reply to Hayne_, on Mr. +Foot's resolution touching the sale of the public lands, delivered in +the Senate on January 26, 1830, whose closing words, "Liberty and +union, now and forever, one and inseparable," became the rallying cry +of a great cause. Similar in sentiment was his famous speech of March +7, 1850, _On the Constitution and the Union_, which gave so much +offense to the extreme Antislavery party, who held with Garrison that a +Constitution which protected slavery "was a league with death and a +covenant with hell." It is not claiming too much for Webster to assert +that the sentences of these and other speeches, memorized and declaimed +by thousands of school-boys throughout the North, did as much as any +single influence to train up a generation in hatred of secession, and +to send into the fields of the civil war armies of men animated with +the stern resolution to fight till the last drop of blood was shed, +rather than allow the Union to be dissolved. + +The figure of this great senator is one of the most imposing in +American annals. The masculine force of his personality impressed +itself upon men of a very different stamp--upon the unworldly Emerson, +and upon the captious Carlyle, whose respect was not willingly accorded +to any contemporary, much less to a representative of American +democracy. Webster's looks and manner were characteristic. His form +was massive; his skull and jaw solid, the under-lip projecting, and the +mouth firmly and grimly shut; his complexion was swarthy, and his +black, deep-set eyes, under shaggy brows, glowed with a smoldering +fire. He was rather silent in society; his delivery in debate was +grave and weighty, rather than fervid. His oratory was massive, and +sometimes even ponderous. It may be questioned whether an American +orator of to-day, with intellectual abilities equal to Webster's--if +such a one there were--would permit himself the use of sonorous and +elaborate pictures like the famous period which follows: "On this +question of principle, while actual suffering was yet afar off, they +raised their flag against a power to which, for purposes of foreign +conquest and subjugation, Rome, in the height of her glory, is not to +be compared--a power which has dotted over the surface of the whole +globe with her possessions and military posts, whose morning drum-beat, +following the sun and keeping company with the hours, circles the earth +with one continuous and unbroken strain of the martial airs of +England." The secret of this kind of oratory has been lost. The +present generation distrusts rhetorical ornament and likes something +swifter, simpler, and more familiar in its speakers. But every thing, +in declamation of this sort, depends on the way in which it is done. +Webster did it supremely well; a smaller man would merely have made +buncombe of it. + +Among the legal orators of the time the foremost was Rufus Choate, an +eloquent pleader, and, like Webster, a United States senator from +Massachusetts. Some of his speeches, though excessively rhetorical, +have literary quality, and are nearly as effective in print as +Webster's own. Another Massachusetts orator, Edward Everett, who in +his time was successively professor in Harvard College, Unitarian +minister in Boston, editor of the _North American Review_, member of +both houses of Congress, minister to England, governor of his State, +and President of Harvard, was a speaker of great finish and elegance. +His addresses were mainly of the memorial and anniversary kind, and +were rather lectures and Phi. B. K. prolusions than speeches. Everett +was an instance of careful culture bestowed on a soil of no very great +natural richness. It is doubtful whether his classical orations on +Washington, the Republic, Bunker Hill Monument, and kindred themes, +have enough of the breath of life in them to preserve them much longer +in recollection. + +New England, during these years, did not take that leading part in the +purely literary development of the country which it afterward assumed. +It had no names to match against those of Irving and Cooper. Drake and +Halleck--slender as was their performance in point of quantity--were +better poets than the Boston bards, Charles Sprague, whose _Shakespeare +Ode_, delivered at the Boston theater in 1833, was locally famous; and +Richard Henry Dana, whose longish narrative poem, the _Buccaneer_, +1827, once had admirers. But Boston has at no time been without a +serious intellectual life of its own, nor without a circle of highly +educated men of literary pursuits, even in default of great geniuses. +The _North American Review_, established in 1815, though it has been +wittily described as "ponderously revolving through space" for a few +years after its foundation, did not exist in an absolute vacuum, but +was scholarly, if somewhat heavy. Webster, to be sure, was a +Massachusetts man--as were Everett and Choate--but his triumphs were +won in the wider field of national politics. There was, however, a +movement at this time, in the intellectual life of Boston and eastern +Massachusetts, which, though not immediately contributory to the finer +kinds of literature, prepared the way, by its clarifying and +stimulating influences, for the eminent writers of the next generation. +This was the Unitarian revolt against Puritan orthodoxy, in which +William Ellery Channing was the principal leader. In a community so +intensely theological as New England, it was natural that any new +movement in thought should find its point of departure in the churches. +Accordingly, the progressive and democratic spirit of the age, which in +other parts of the country took other shapes, assumed in Massachusetts +the form of "liberal Christianity." Arminianism, Socinianism, and +other phases of anti-Trinitarian doctrine, had been latent in some of +the Congregational churches of Massachusetts for a number of years. +But about 1812 the heresy broke out openly, and within a few years from +that date most of the oldest and wealthiest church societies of Boston +and its vicinity had gone over to Unitarianism, and Harvard College had +been captured too. In the controversy that ensued, and which was +carried on in numerous books, pamphlets, sermons, and periodicals, +there were eminent disputants on both sides. So far as this +controversy was concerned with the theological doctrine of the Trinity +it has no place in a history of literature. But the issue went far +beyond that. Channing asserted the dignity of human nature against the +Calvinistic doctrine of innate depravity, and affirmed the rights of +human reason and man's capacity to judge of God. "We must start in +religion from our own souls," he said. And in his _Moral Argument +against Calvinism_, 1820, he wrote: "Nothing is gained to piety by +degrading human nature, for in the competency of this nature to know +and judge of God all piety has its foundation." In opposition to +Edwards's doctrine of necessity he emphasized the freedom of the will. +He maintained that the Calvinistic dogmas of original sin, +fore-ordination, election by grace, and eternal punishment were +inconsistent with the divine perfection, and made God a monster. In +Channing's view the great sanction of religious truth is the moral +sanction, is its agreement with the laws of conscience. He was a +passionate vindicator of the liberty of the individual, not only as +against political oppression, but against the tyranny of public opinion +over thought and conscience: "We were made for free action. This alone +is life, and enters into all that is good and great." This jealous +love of freedom inspired all that he did and wrote. It led him to join +the Antislavery party. It expressed itself in his elaborate +arraignment of Napoleon in the Unitarian organ, the _Christian +Examiner_, for 1827-28; in his _Remarks on Associations_, and his paper +_On the Character and Writings of John Milton_, 1826. This was his +most considerable contribution to literary criticism. It took for a +text Milton's recently discovered _Treatise on Christian Doctrine_--the +tendency of which was anti-Trinitarian--but it began with a general +defense of poetry against "those who are accustomed to speak of poetry +as light reading." This would now seem a somewhat superfluous +introduction to an article in any American review. But it shows the +nature of the _milieu_ through which the liberal movement in Boston had +to make its way. To re-assert the dignity and usefulness of the +beautiful arts was, perhaps, the chief service which the Massachusetts +Unitarians rendered to humanism. The traditional prejudice of the +Puritans against the ornamental side of life had to be softened before +polite literature could find a congenial atmosphere in New England. In +Channing's _Remarks on National Literature_, reviewing a work published +in 1823, he asks the question, "Do we possess what may be called a +national literature?" and answers it, by implication at least, in the +negative. That we do now possess a national literature is in great +part due to the influence of Channing and his associates, although his +own writings, being in the main controversial, and, therefore, of +temporary interest, may not themselves take rank among the permanent +treasures of that literature. + + +1. Washington Irving. _Knickerbocker's History of New York_. _The +Sketch Book_. _Bracebridge Hall_. _Tales of a Traveler_. _The +Alhambra_. _Life of Oliver Goldsmith_. + +2. James Fenimore Cooper. _The Spy_. _The Pilot_. _The Red Rover_. +_The Leather-stocking Tales_. + +3. Daniel Webster. _Great Speeches and Orations_. Boston: Little, +Brown & Co. 1879. + +4. William Ellery Channing. _The Character and Writings of John +Milton_. _The Life and Character of Napoleon Bonaparte_. _Slavery_. +[Vols. I and II of the _Works of William E. Channing_. Boston: James +Munroe & Co. 1841.] + +5. Joseph Rodman Drake. _The Culprit Fay_. _The American Flag_. +[_Selected Poems_. New York. 1835.] + +6. Fitz-Greene Halleck. _Marco Bozzaris_. _Alnwick Castle_. _On the +Death of Drake_. [Poems. New York. 1827.] + + +[1]Compare Carlyle's Herr Diogenes Teufelsdröckh, in _Sartor Resartus_, +the author of the famous "Clothes Philosophy." + + +[Transcriber's Note: Earlier in this chapter is the abbreviation "Phi. +B. K.". The "Phi" replaces the actual Greek character that was in the +original text.] + + + + +CHAPTER IV. + +THE CONCORD WRITERS. + +1837-1861. + +There has been but one movement in the history of the American mind +which has given to literature a group of writers having coherence +enough to merit the name of a school. This was the great humanitarian +movement, or series of movements, in New England, which, beginning in +the Unitarianism of Channing, ran through its later phase in +transcendentalism, and spent its last strength in the antislavery +agitation and the enthusiasms of the civil war. The second stage of +this intellectual and social revolt was transcendentalism, of which +Emerson wrote, in 1842: "The history of genius and of religion in these +times will be the history of this tendency." It culminated about +1840-41 in the establishment of the _Dial_ and the Brook Farm +Community, although Emerson had given the signal a few years before in +his little volume entitled _Nature_, 1836, his Phi Beta Kappa address +at Harvard on the _American Scholar_, 1837, and his address in 1838 +before the Divinity School at Cambridge. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82) +was the prophet of the sect, and Concord was its Mecca; but the +influence of the new ideas was not confined to the little group of +professed transcendentalists; it extended to all the young writers +within reach, who struck their roots deeper into the soil that it had +loosened and freshened. We owe to it, in great measure, not merely +Emerson, Alcott, Margaret Fuller, and Thoreau, but Hawthorne, Lowell, +Whittier, and Holmes. + +In its strictest sense transcendentalism was a restatement of the +idealistic philosophy, and an application of its beliefs to religion, +nature, and life. But in a looser sense, and as including the more +outward manifestations which drew popular attention most strongly, it +was the name given to that spirit of dissent and protest, of universal +inquiry and experiment, which marked the third and fourth decades of +this century in America, and especially in New England. The movement +was contemporary with political revolutions in Europe and with the +preaching of many novel gospels in religion, in sociology, in science, +education, medicine, and hygiene. New sects were formed, like the +Swedenborgians, Universalists, Spiritualists, Millerites, Second +Adventists, Shakers, Mormons, and Come-outers, some of whom believed in +trances, miracles, and direct revelations from the divine Spirit; +others in the quick coming of Christ, as deduced from the opening of +the seals and the number of the beast in the Apocalypse; and still +others in the reorganization of society and of the family on a +different basis. New systems of education were tried, suggested by the +writings of the Swiss reformer, Pestalozzi, and others. The +pseudo-sciences of mesmerism and of phrenology, as taught by Gall and +Spurzheim, had numerous followers. In medicine, homeopathy, +hydropathy, and what Dr. Holmes calls "kindred delusions," made many +disciples. Numbers of persons, influenced by the doctrines of Graham +and other vegetarians, abjured the use of animal food, as injurious not +only to health but to a finer spirituality. Not a few refused to vote +or pay taxes. The writings of Fourier and Saint-Simon were translated, +and societies were established where co-operation and a community of +goods should take the place of selfish competition. + +About the year 1840 there were some thirty of these "phalansteries" in +America, many of which had their organs in the shape of weekly or +monthly journals, which advocated the principle of Association. The +best known of these was probably the _Harbinger_, the mouth-piece of +the famous Brook Farm Community, which was founded at West Roxbury, +Mass., in 1841, and lasted till 1847. The head man of Brook Farm was +George Ripley, a Unitarian clergyman, who had resigned his pulpit in +Boston to go into the movement, and who after its failure became and +remained for many years literary editor of the _New York Tribune_. +Among his associates were Charles A. Dana--now the editor of the +_Sun_--Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and others not unknown to +fame. The _Harbinger_, which ran from 1845 to 1849--two years after +the break-up of the community--had among its contributors many who were +not Brook Farmers, but who sympathized more or less with the +experiment. Of the number were Horace Greeley, Dr. F. H. Hedge--who +did so much to introduce American readers to German literature--J. S. +Dwight, the musical critic, C. P. Cranch, the poet, and younger men, +like G. W. Curtis and T. W. Higginson. A reader of to-day, looking +into an odd volume of the _Harbinger_, will find in it some stimulating +writing, together with a great deal of unintelligible talk about +"Harmonic Unity," "Love Germination," and other matters now fallen +silent. The most important literary result of this experiment at +"plain living and high thinking," with its queer mixture of culture and +agriculture, was Hawthorne's _Blithedale Romance_, which has for its +background an idealized picture of the community life; whose heroine, +Zenobia, has touches of Margaret Fuller; and whose hero, with his hobby +of prison reform, was a type of the one-idea'd philanthropists that +abounded in such an environment. Hawthorne's attitude was always in +part one of reserve and criticism, an attitude which is apparent in the +reminiscences of Brook Farm in his _American Note Books_, wherein he +speaks with a certain resentment of "Miss Fuller's transcendental +heifer," which hooked the other cows, and was evidently to Hawthorne's +mind not unsymbolic in this respect of Miss Fuller herself. + +It was the day of seers and "Orphic" utterances; the air was fall of +the enthusiasm of humanity and thick with philanthropic projects and +plans for the regeneration of the universe. The figure of the +wild-eyed, long-haired reformer--the man with a panacea--the "crank" of +our later terminology--became a familiar one. He abounded at +non-resistance conventions and meetings of universal peace societies +and of woman's rights associations. The movement had its grotesque +aspects, which Lowell has described in his essay on Thoreau. "Bran had +its apostles and the pre-sartorial simplicity of Adam its martyrs, +tailored impromptu from the tar-pot. . . . Not a few impecunious +zealots abjured the use of money (unless earned by other people), +professing to live on the internal revenues of the spirit. . . . +Communities were established where every thing was to be common but +common sense." + +This ferment has long since subsided, and much of what was then +seething has gone off in vapor or other volatile products. But some +very solid matters have also been precipitated, some crystals of poetry +translucent, symmetrical, enduring. The immediate practical outcome +was disappointing, and the external history of the agitation is a +record of failed experiments, spurious sciences, Utopian philosophies, +and sects founded only to dwindle away or to be re-absorbed into some +form of orthodoxy. In the eyes of the conservative, or the +worldly-minded, or of the plain people who could not understand the +enigmatic utterances of the reformers, the dangerous or ludicrous sides +of transcendentalism were naturally uppermost. Nevertheless the +movement was but a new avatar of the old Puritan spirit; its moral +earnestness, its spirituality, its tenderness for the individual +conscience. Puritanism, too, in its day had run into grotesque +extremes. Emerson bore about the same relation to the absurder +out-croppings of transcendentalism that Milton bore to the New Lights, +Ranters, Fifth Monarchy Men, etc., of his time. There is in him that +mingling of idealism with an abiding sanity, and even a Yankee +shrewdness, which characterizes the race. The practical, inventive, +calculating, money-getting side of the Yankee has been made +sufficiently obvious. But the deep heart of New England is full of +dreams, mysticism, romance: + + "And in the day of sacrifice, + When heroes piled the pyre, + The dismal Massachusetts ice + Burned more than others' fire." + +The one element which the odd and eccentric developments of this +movement shared in common with the real philosophy of transcendentalism +was the rejection of authority and the appeal to the private +consciousness as the sole standard of truth and right. This principle +certainly lay in the ethical systems of Kant and Fichte, the great +transcendentalists of Germany. It had been strongly asserted by +Channing. Nay, it was the starting-point of Puritanism itself, which +had drawn away from the ceremonial religion of the English Church, and +by its Congregational system had made each church society independent +in doctrine and worship. And although Puritan orthodoxy in New England +had grown rigid and dogmatic it had never used the weapons of +obscurantism. By encouraging education to the utmost, it had shown its +willingness to submit its beliefs to the fullest discussion and had put +into the hands of dissent the means with which to attack them. + +In its theological aspect transcendentalism was a departure from +conservative Unitarianism, as that had been from Calvinism. From +Edwards to Channing, from Channing to Emerson and Theodore Parker, +there was a natural and logical unfolding; not logical in the sense +that Channing accepted Edwards's premises and pushed them out to their +conclusions, or that Parker accepted all of Channing's premises, but in +the sense that the rigid pushing out of Edwards's premises into their +conclusions by himself and his followers had brought about a moral +_reductio ad absurdum_ and a state of opinion against which Channing +rebelled; and that Channing, as it seemed to Parker, stopped short in +the carrying out of his own principles. Thus the "Channing +Unitarians," while denying that Christ was God, had held that he was of +divine nature, was the Son of God, and had existed before he came into +the world. While rejecting the doctrine of the "vicarious sacrifice" +they maintained that Christ was a mediator and intercessor, and that +his supernatural nature was testified by miracles. For Parker and +Emerson it was easy to take the step to the assertion that Christ was a +good and great man, divine only in the sense that God possessed him +more fully than any other man known in history; that it was his +preaching and example that brought salvation to men, and not any +special mediation or intercession, and that his own words and acts, and +not miracles, are the only and the sufficient witness to his mission. +In the view of the transcendentalists Christ was as human as Buddha, +Socrates, or Confucius, and the Bible was but one among the "Ethnical +Scriptures" or sacred writings of the peoples, passages from which were +published in the transcendental organ, the _Dial_. As against these +new views Channing Unitarianism occupied already a conservative +position. The Unitarians as a body had never been very numerous +outside of eastern Massachusetts. They had a few churches in New York +and in the larger cities and towns elsewhere, but the sect, as such, +was a local one. Orthodoxy made a sturdy fight against the heresy, +under leaders like Leonard Woods and Moses Stuart, of Andover, and +Lyman Beecher, of Connecticut. In the neighboring State of +Connecticut, for example, there was until lately, for a period of +several years, no distinctly Unitarian congregation worshiping in a +church edifice of its own. On the other hand, the Unitarians claimed, +with justice, that their opinions had, to a great extent, modified the +theology of the orthodox churches. The writings of Horace Bushnell, of +Hartford, one of the most eminent Congregational divines, approach +Unitarianism in their interpretation of the doctrine of the Atonement; +and the "progressive orthodoxy" of Andover is certainly not the +Calvinism of Thomas Hooker or of Jonathan Edwards. But it seemed to +the transcendentalists that conservative Unitarianism was too negative +and "cultured," and Margaret Fuller complained of the coldness of the +Boston pulpits; while, contrariwise, the central thought of +transcendentalism, that the soul has an immediate connection with God, +was pronounced by Dr. Channing a "crude speculation." This was the +thought of Emerson's address in 1838 before the Cambridge Divinity +School, and it was at once made the object of attack by conservative +Unitarians like Henry Ware and Andrews Norton. The latter, in an +address before the same audience, on the _Latest Form of Infidelity_, +said: "Nothing is left that can be called Christianity if its +miraculous character be denied. . . . There can be no intuition, no +direct perception, of the truth of Christianity." And in a pamphlet +supporting the same side of the question he added: "It is not an +intelligible error, but a mere absurdity, to maintain that we are +conscious, or have an intuitive knowledge, of the being of God, of our +own immortality, . . . or of any other fact of religion." Ripley and +Parker replied in Emerson's defense; but Emerson himself would never be +drawn into controversy. He said that he could not argue. He +_announced_ truths; his method was that of the seer, not of the +disputant. In 1832 Emerson, who was a Unitarian clergyman, and +descended from eight generations of clergymen, had resigned the +pastorate of the Second Church of Boston because he could not +conscientiously administer the sacrament of the communion--which he +regarded as a mere act of commemoration--in the sense in which it was +understood by his parishioners. Thenceforth, though he sometimes +occupied Unitarian pulpits, and was, indeed, all his life a kind of +"lay preacher," he never assumed the pastorate of a church. The +representative of transcendentalism in the pulpit was Theodore Parker, +an eloquent preacher, an eager debater, and a prolific writer on many +subjects, whose collected works fill fourteen volumes. Parker was a +man of strongly human traits, passionate, independent, intensely +religious, but intensely radical, who made for himself a large personal +following. The more advanced wing of the Unitarians were called, after +him, "Parkerites." Many of the Unitarian churches refused to +"fellowship" with him; and the large congregation, or audience, which +assembled in Music Hall to hear his sermons was stigmatized as a +"boisterous assembly" which came to hear Parker preach irreligion. + +It has been said that, on its philosophical side, New England +transcendentalism was a restatement of idealism. The impulse came from +Germany, from the philosophical writings of Kant, Fichte, Jacobi, and +Schelling, and from the works of Coleridge and Carlyle, who had +domesticated German thought in England. In Channing's _Remarks on a +National Literature_, quoted in our last chapter, the essayist urged +that our scholars should study the authors of France and Germany as one +means of emancipating American letters from a slavish dependence on +British literature. And in fact German literature began, not long +after, to be eagerly studied in New England. Emerson published an +American edition of Carlyle's _Miscellanies_, including his essays on +German writers that had appeared in England between 1822 and 1830. In +1838 Ripley began to publish _Specimens of Foreign Standard +Literature_, which extended to fourteen volumes. In his work of +translating and supplying introductions to the matter selected, he was +helped by Ripley, Margaret Fuller, John S. Dwight, and others who had +more or less connection with the transcendental movement. + +The definition of the new faith given by Emerson in his lecture on the +_Transcendentalist_, 1842, is as follows; "What is popularly called +transcendentalism among us is idealism. . . . The idealism of the +present day acquired the name of transcendental from the use of that +term by Immanuel Kant, who replied to the skeptical philosophy of +Locke, which insisted that there was nothing in the intellect which was +not previously in the experience of the senses, by showing that there +was a very important class of ideas, or imperative forms, which did not +come by experience, but through which experience was acquired; that +these were intuitions of the mind itself, and he denominated them +_transcendental_ forms." Idealism denies the independent existence of +matter. Transcendentalism claims for the innate ideas of God and the +soul a higher assurance of reality than for the knowledge of the +outside world derived through the senses. Emerson shares the "noble +doubt" of idealism. He calls the universe a shade, a dream, "this +great apparition." "It is a sufficient account of that appearance we +call the world," he wrote in _Nature_, "that God will teach a human +mind, and so makes it the receiver of a certain number of congruent +sensations which we call sun and moon, man and woman, house and trade. +In my utter impotence to test the authenticity of the report of my +senses, to know whether the impressions on me correspond with outlying +objects, what difference does it make whether Orion is up there in +heaven or some god paints the image in the firmament of the soul?" On +the other hand, our evidence of the existence, of God and of our own +souls, and our knowledge of right and wrong, are immediate, and are +independent of the senses. We are in direct communication with the +"Over-soul," the infinite Spirit. "The soul in man is the background +of our being--an immensity not possessed, that cannot be possessed." +"From within or from behind, a light shines through us upon things, and +makes us aware that we are nothing, but the light is all." Revelation +is "an influx of the Divine mind into our mind. It is an ebb of the +individual rivulet before the flowing surges of the sea of life." In +moods of exaltation, and especially in the presence of nature, this +contact of the individual soul with the absolute is felt. "All mean +egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see +all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am +part and particle of God." The existence and attributes of God are not +deducible from history or from natural theology, but are thus directly +given us in consciousness. In his essay on the _Transcendentalist_ +Emerson says: "His experience inclines him to behold the procession of +facts you call the world as flowing perpetually outward from an +invisible, unsounded center in himself; center alike of him and of +them, and necessitating him to regard all things as having a subjective +or relative existence--relative to that aforesaid Unknown Center of +him. There is no bar or wall in the soul where man, the effect, +ceases, and God, the cause, begins. We lie open on one side to the +deeps of spiritual nature, to the attributes of God." + +Emerson's point of view, though familiar to students of philosophy, is +strange to the popular understanding, and hence has arisen the +complaint of his obscurity. Moreover, he apprehended and expressed +these ideas as a poet, in figurative and emotional language, and not as +a metaphysician, in a formulated statement. His own position in +relation to systematic philosophers is described in what he says of +Plato, in his series of sketches entitled _Representative Men_, 1850: +"He has not a system. The dearest disciples and defenders are at +fault. He attempted a theory of the universe, and his theory is not +complete or self-evident. One man thinks he means this, and another +that; he has said one thing in one place, and the reverse of it in +another place." It happens, therefore, that, to many students of more +formal philosophies, Emerson's meaning seems elusive, and he appears to +write from temporary moods and to contradict himself. Had he attempted +a reasoned exposition of the transcendental philosophy, instead of +writing essays and poems, he might have added one more to the number of +system-mongers; but he would not have taken that significant place +which he occupies in the general literature of the time, nor exerted +that wide influence upon younger writers which has been one of the +stimulating forces in American thought. It was because Emerson was a +poet that he is our Emerson. And yet it would be impossible to +disentangle his peculiar philosophical ideas from the body of his +writings and to leave the latter to stand upon their merits as +literature merely. He is the poet of certain high abstractions, and +his religion is central to all his work--excepting, perhaps, his +_English Traits_, 1856, an acute study of national characteristics; and +a few of his essays and verses, which are independent of any particular +philosophical stand-point. + +When Emerson resigned his parish in 1832, he made a short trip to +Europe, where he visited Carlyle at Craigenputtock, and Landor at +Florence. On his return he retired to his birthplace, the village of +Concord, Massachusetts, and settled down among his books and his +fields, becoming a sort of "glorified farmer," but issuing frequently +from his retirement to instruct and delight audiences of thoughtful +people at Boston and at other points all through the country. Emerson +was the perfection of a lyceum lecturer. His manner was quiet but +forcible, his voice of charming quality, and his enunciation clean-cut +and refined. The sentence was his unit in composition. His lectures +seemed to begin anywhere and to end anywhere and to resemble strings of +exquisitely polished sayings rather than continuous discourses. His +printed essays, with unimportant exceptions, were first written and +delivered as lectures. In 1836 he published his first book, _Nature_, +which remains the most systematic statement of his philosophy. It +opened a fresh spring-head in American thought, and the words of its +introduction announced that its author had broken with the past. "Why +should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why +should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of +tradition, and a religion by revelation to us and not the history of +theirs?" + +It took eleven years to sell five hundred copies of this little book. +But the year following its publication the remarkable Phi Beta Kappa +address at Cambridge, on the _American Scholar_, electrified the little +public of the university. This is described by Lowell as "an event +without any former parallel in our literary annals, a scene to be +always treasured in the memory for its picturesqueness and its +inspiration. What crowded and breathless aisles, what windows +clustering with eager heads, what grim silence of foregone dissent!" To +Concord come many kindred spirits, drawn by Emerson's magnetic +attraction. Thither came, from Connecticut, Amos Bronson Alcott, born +a few years before Emerson, whom he outlived; a quaint and benignant +figure, a visionary and a mystic even among the transcendentalists +themselves, and one who lived in unworldly simplicity the life of the +soul. Alcott had taught school at Cheshire, Conn., and afterward at +Boston on an original plan--compelling his scholars, for example, to +flog _him_, when they did wrong, instead of taking a flogging +themselves. The experiment was successful until his _Conversations on +the Gospels_, in Boston, and his insistence upon admitting colored +children to his benches, offended conservative opinion and broke up his +school. Alcott renounced the eating of animal food in 1835. He +believed in the union of thought and manual labor, and supported +himself for some years by the work of his hands, gardening, cutting +wood, etc. He traveled into the West and elsewhere, holding +conversations on philosophy, education, and religion. He set up a +little community at the village of Harvard, Massachusetts, which was +rather less successful than Brook Farm, and he contributed _Orphic +Sayings_ to the _Dial_, which were harder for the exoteric to +understand than even Emerson's _Brahma_ or the _Over-soul_. + +Thither came, also, Sarah Margaret Fuller, the most intellectual woman +of her time in America, an eager student of Greek and German literature +and an ardent seeker after the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. She +threw herself into many causes--such as temperance and the higher +education of women. Her brilliant conversation classes in Boston +attracted many "minds" of her own sex. Subsequently, as literary +editor of the _New York Tribune_, she furnished a wider public with +reviews and book notices of great ability. She took part in the Brook +Farm experiment, and she edited the _Dial_ for a time, contributing to +it the papers afterward expanded into her most considerable book, +_Woman in the Nineteenth Century_. In 1846 she went abroad, and at +Rome took part in the revolutionary movement of Mazzini, having charge +of one of the hospitals during the siege of the city by the French. In +1847 she married an impecunious Italian nobleman, the Marquis Ossoli. +In 1850 the ship on which she was returning to America, with her +husband and child, was wrecked on Fire Island beach and all three were +lost. Margaret Fuller's collected writings are somewhat disappointing, +being mainly of temporary interest. She lives less through her books +than through the memoirs of her friends, Emerson, James Freeman Clarke, +T. W. Higginson, and others who knew her as a personal influence. Her +strenuous and rather overbearing individuality made an impression not +altogether agreeable upon many of her contemporaries. Lowell +introduced a caricature of her as "Miranda" into his _Fable for +Critics_, and Hawthorne's caustic sketch of her, preserved in the +biography written by his son, has given great offence to her admirers. +"Such a determination to _eat_ this huge universe!" was Carlyle's +characteristic comment on her appetite for knowledge and aspirations +after perfection. + +To Concord also came Nathaniel Hawthorne, who took up his residence +there first at the "Old Manse," and afterward at "The Wayside." Though +naturally an idealist, he said that he came too late to Concord to fall +decidedly under Emerson's influence. Of that he would have stood in +little danger even had he come earlier. He appreciated the deep and +subtle quality of Emerson's imagination, but his own shy genius always +jealously guarded its independence and resented the too close +approaches of an alien mind. Among the native disciples of Emerson at +Concord the most noteworthy were Henry Thoreau, and his friend and +biographer, William Ellery Channing, Jr., a nephew of the great +Channing. Channing was a contributor to the _Dial_, and he published a +volume of poems which elicited a fiercely contemptous review from Edgar +Poe. Though disfigured by affectation and obscurity, many of +Channing's verses were distinguished by true poetic feeling, and the +last line of his little piece, _A Poet's Hope_, + + "If my bark sink 'tis to another sea," + +has taken a permanent place in the literature of transcendentalism. + +The private organ of the transcendentalists was the _Dial_, a quarterly +magazine, published from 1840 to 1844, and edited by Emerson and +Margaret Fuller. Among its contributors, besides those already +mentioned, were Ripley, Thoreau, Parker, James Freeman Clarke, Charles +A. Dana, John S. Dwight, C. P. Cranch, Charles Emerson, and William H. +Channing, another nephew of Dr. Channing. It contained, along with a +good deal of rubbish, some of the best poetry and prose that has been +published in America. The most lasting part of its contents were the +contributions of Emerson and Thoreau. But even as a whole it was a +unique way-mark in the history of our literature. + +From time to time Emerson collected and published his lectures under +various titles. A first series of _Essays_ came out in 1841, and a +second in 1844; the _Conduct of Life_ in 1860, _Society and Solitude_ +in 1870, _Letters and Social Aims_ in 1876, and the _Fortune of the +Republic_ in 1878. In 1847 he issued a volume of _Poems_, and 1865 +_Mayday and Other Poems_. These writings, as a whole, were variations +on a single theme, expansions and illustrations of the philosophy set +forth in _Nature_, and his early addresses. They were strikingly +original, rich in thought, filled with wisdom, with lofty morality and +spiritual religion. Emerson, said Lowell, first "cut the cable that +bound us to English thought and gave us a chance at the dangers and +glories of blue water." Nevertheless, as it used to be the fashion to +find an English analogue for every American writer, so that Cooper was +called the American Scott, and Mrs. Sigourney was described as the +Hemans of America, a well-worn critical tradition has coupled Emerson +with Carlyle. That his mind received a nudge from Carlyle's early +essays and from _Sartor Resartus_ is beyond a doubt. They were +life-long friends and correspondents, and Emerson's _Representative +Men_ is, in some sort, a counterpart of Carlyle's _Hero Worship_. But +in temper and style the two writers were widely different. Carlyle's +pessimism and dissatisfaction with the general drift of things gained +upon him more and more, while Emerson was a consistent optimist to the +end. The last of his writings published during his life-time, the +_Fortune of the Republic_, contrasts strangely in its hopefulness with +the desperation of Carlyle's later utterances. Even in presence of the +doubt as to man's personal immortality he takes refuge in a high and +stoical faith. "I think all sound minds rest on a certain preliminary +conviction, namely, that if it be best that conscious personal life +shall continue it will continue, and if not best, then it will not; and +we, if we saw the whole, should of course see that it was better so." +It is this conviction that gives to Emerson's writings their serenity +and their tonic quality at the same time that it narrows the range of +his dealings with life. As the idealist declines to cross-examine +those facts which he regards as merely phenomenal, and looks upon this +outward face of things as upon a mask not worthy to dismay the fixed +soul, so the optimist turns away his eyes from the evil which he +disposes of as merely negative, as the shadow of the good. Hawthorne's +interest in the problem of sin finds little place in Emerson's +philosophy. Passion comes not nigh him, and _Faust_ disturbs him with +its disagreeableness. Pessimism is to him "the only skepticism." + +The greatest literature is that which is most broadly human, or, in +other words, that which will square best with all philosophies. But +Emerson's genius was interpretative rather than constructive. The poet +dwells in the cheerful world of phenomena. He is most the poet who +realizes most intensely the good and the bad of human life. But +Idealism makes experience shadowy and subordinates action to +contemplation. To it the cities of men, with their "frivolous +populations," + + "are but sailing foam-bells + Along thought's causing stream." + +Shakespeare does not forget that the world will one day vanish "like +the baseless fabric of a vision," and that we ourselves are "such stuff +as dreams are made on;" but this is not the mood in which he dwells. +Again: while it is for the philosopher to reduce variety to unity, it +is the poet's task to detect the manifold under uniformity. In the +great creative poets, in Shakespeare and Dante and Goethe, how infinite +the swarm of persons, the multitude of forms! But with Emerson the +type is important, the common element. "In youth we are mad for +persons. But the larger experience of man discovers the identical +nature appearing through them all." "The same--the same!" he exclaims +in his essay on _Plato_. "Friend and foe are of one stuff; the +plowman, the plow, and the furrow are of one stuff." And this is the +thought in _Brahma_: + + "They reckon ill who leave me out; + When me they fly I am the wings: + I am the doubter find the doubt, + And I the hymn the Brahmin sings." + +It is not easy to fancy a writer who holds this altitude toward +"persons" descending to the composition of a novel or a play. Emerson +showed, indeed, a fine power of character-analysis in his _English +Traits_ and _Representative Men_ and in his memoirs of Thoreau and +Margaret Fuller. There is even a sort of dramatic humor in his +portrait of Socrates. But upon the whole he stands midway between +constructive artists, whose instinct it is to tell a story or sing a +song, and philosophers, like Schelling, who give poetic expression to a +system of thought. He belongs to the class of minds of which Sir +Thomas Browne is the best English example. He set a high value upon +Browne, to whose style his own, though far more sententious, bears a +resemblance. Browne's saying, for example, "All things are artificial, +for nature is the art of God," sounds like Emerson, whose workmanship, +for the rest, in his prose essays was exceedingly fine and close. He +was not afraid to be homely and racy in expressing thought of the +highest spirituality. "Hitch your wagon to a star" is a good instance +of his favorite manner. + +Emerson's verse often seems careless in technique. Most of his pieces +are scrappy and have the air of runic rimes, or little oracular +"voicings"--as they say at Concord--in rhythmic shape, of single +thoughts on "Worship," "Character," "Heroism," "Art," "Politics," +"Culture," etc. The content is the important thing, and the form is +too frequently awkward or bald. Sometimes, indeed, in the +clear-obscure of Emerson's poetry the deep wisdom of the thought finds +its most natural expression in the imaginative simplicity of the +language. But though this artlessness in him became too frequently in +his imitators, like Thoreau and Ellery Channing, an obtruded +simplicity, among his own poems are many that leave nothing to be +desired in point of wording and of verse. His _Hymn Sung at the +Completion of the Concord Monument_, in 1836, is the perfect model of +an occasional poem. Its lines were on every one's lips at the time of +the centennial celebrations in 1876, and "the shot heard round the +world" has hardly echoed farther than the song which chronicled it. +Equally current is the stanza from _Voluntaries_: + + "So nigh is grandeur to our dust, + So near is God to man, + When Duty whispers low, 'Thou must,' + The youth replies, 'I can.'" + +So, too, the famous lines from the _Problem_: + + "The hand that rounded Peter's dome, + And groined the aisles of Christian Rome, + Wrought in a sad sincerity. + Himself from God he could not free; + He builded better than he knew; + The conscious stone to beauty grew." + +The most noteworthy of Emerson's pupils was Henry David Thoreau, "the +poet-naturalist." After his graduation from Harvard College, in 1837, +Thoreau engaged in school-teaching and in the manufacture of +lead-pencils, but soon gave up all regular business and devoted himself +to walking, reading, and the study of nature. He was at one time +private tutor in a family on Staten Island, and he supported himself +for a season by doing odd jobs in land-surveying for the farmers about +Concord. In 1845 he built, with his own hands, a small cabin on the +banks of Walden Pond, near Concord, and lived there in seclusion for +two years. His expenses during these years were nine cents a day, and +he gave an account of his experiment in his most characteristic book, +_Walden_, published in 1854. His _Week on the Concord and Merrimac +Rivers_ appeared in 1849. From time to time he went farther afield, +and his journeys were reported in _Cape Cod_, the _Maine Woods_, +_Excursions_, and _A Yankee in Canada_, all of which, as well as a +volume of _Letters_ and _Early Spring in Massachusetts_, have been +given to the public since his death, which happened in 1862. No one +has lived so close to nature, and written of it so intimately, as +Thoreau. His life was a lesson in economy and a sermon on Emerson's +text, "Lessen your denominator." He wished to reduce existence to the +simplest terms--to + + "live all alone + Close to the bone, + And where life is sweet + Constantly eat." + +He had a passion for the wild, and seems like an Anglo-Saxon reversion +to the type of the Red Indian. The most distinctive note in Thoreau is +his inhumanity. Emerson spoke of him as a "perfect piece of stoicism." +"Man," said Thoreau, "is only the point on which I stand." He strove +to realize the objective life of nature--nature in its aloofness from +man; to identify himself, with the moose and the mountain. He +listened, with his ear close to the ground, for the voice of the earth. +"What are the trees saying?" he exclaimed. Following upon the trail of +the lumberman, he asked the primeval wilderness for its secret, and + + "saw beneath dim aisles, in odorous beds, + The slight linnaea hang its twin-born heads." + +He tried to interpret the thought of Ktaadn and to fathom the meaning +of the billows on the back of Cape Cod, in their indifference to the +shipwrecked bodies that they rolled ashore. "After sitting in my +chamber many days, reading the poets, I have been out early on a foggy +morning and heard the cry of an owl in a neighboring wood as from a +nature behind the common, unexplored by science or by literature. None +of the feathered race has yet realized my youthful conceptions of the +woodland depths. I had seen the red election-birds brought from their +recesses on my comrade's string, and fancied that their plumage would +assume stranger and more dazzling colors, like the tints of evening, in +proportion as I advanced farther into the darkness and solitude of the +forest. Still less have I seen such strong and wild tints on any +poet's string." + +It was on the mystical side that Thoreau apprehended transcendentalism. +Mysticism has been defined as the soul's recognition of its identity +with nature. This thought lies plainly in Schelling's philosophy, and +he illustrated it by his famous figure of the magnet. Mind and nature +are one; they are the positive and negative poles of the magnet. In +man, the Absolute--that is, God--becomes conscious of himself; makes of +himself, as nature, an object to himself as mind. "The souls of men," +said Schelling, "are but the innumerable individual eyes with which our +infinite World-Spirit beholds himself." This thought is also clearly +present in Emerson's view of nature, and has caused him to be accused +of pantheism. But if by pantheism is meant the doctrine that the +underlying principle of the universe is matter or force, none of the +transcendentalists was a pantheist. In their view nature was divine. +Their poetry is always haunted by the sense of a spiritual reality +which abides beyond the phenomena. Thus in Emerson's _Two Rivers_: + + "Thy summer voice, Musketaquit,[1] + Repeats the music of the rain, + But sweeter rivers pulsing flit + Through thee as thou through Concord plain. + + "Thou in thy narrow banks art pent; + The stream I love unbounded goes; + Through flood and sea and firmament, + Through light, through life, it forward flows. + + "I see the inundation sweet, + I hear the spending of the stream, + Through years, through men, through nature fleet, + Through passion, thought, through power and dream." + +This mood occurs frequently in Thoreau. The hard world of matter +becomes suddenly all fluent and spiritual, and he sees himself in +it--sees God. "This earth," he cries, "which is spread out like a map +around me, is but the lining of my inmost soul exposed." "In _me_ is +the sucker that I see;" and, of Walden Pond, + + "I am its stony shore, + And the breeze that passes o'er." + +"Suddenly old Time winked at me--ah, you know me, you rogue--and news +had come that IT was well. That ancient universe is in such capital +health, I think, undoubtedly, it will never die. . . . I see, smell, +taste, hear, feel that ever-lasting something to which we are allied, +at once our maker, our abode, our destiny, our very selves." It was +something ulterior that Thoreau sought in nature. "The other world," +he wrote, "is all my art: my pencils will draw no other; my jack-knife +will cut nothing else." Thoreau did not scorn, however, like Emerson, +to "examine too microscopically the universal tablet." He was a close +observer and accurate reporter of the ways of birds and plants and the +minuter aspects of nature. He has had many followers, who have +produced much pleasant literature on out-door life. But in none of +them is there that unique combination of the poet, the naturalist, and +the mystic which gives his page its wild original flavor. He had the +woodcraft of a hunter and the eye of a botanist, but his imagination +did not stop short with the fact. The sound of a tree falling in the +Maine woods was to him "as though a door had shut somewhere in the damp +and shaggy wilderness." He saw small things in cosmic relations. His +trip down the tame Concord has for the reader the excitement of a +voyage of exploration into far and unknown regions. The river just +above Sherman's Bridge, in time of flood "when the wind blows freshly +on a raw March day, heaving up the surface into dark and sober +billows," was like Lake Huron, "and you may run aground on Cranberry +Island," and "get as good a freezing there as anywhere on the +North-west coast." He said that most of the phenomena described in +Kane's voyages could be observed in Concord. + +The literature of transcendentalism was like the light of the stars in +a winter night, keen and cold and high. It had the pale cast of +thought, and was almost too spiritual and remote to "hit the sense of +mortal sight." But it was at least indigenous. If not an American +literature--not national and not inclusive of all sides of American +life--it was, at all events, a genuine New England literature and true +to the spirit of its section. The tough Puritan stock had at last put +forth a blossom which compared with the warm, robust growths of English +soil even as the delicate wind flower of the northern spring compares +with the cowslips and daisies of old England. + +In 1842 Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-64), the greatest American romancer, +came to Concord. He had recently left Brook Farm, had just been +married, and with his bride he settled down in the "Old Manse" for +three paradisaical years. A picture of this protracted honeymoon and +this sequestered life, as tranquil as the slow stream on whose banks it +was passed, is given in the introductory chapter to his _Mosses from an +Old Manse_, 1846, and in the more personal and confidential records of +his _American Note Books_, posthumously published. Hawthorne was +thirty-eight when he took his place among the Concord literati. His +childhood and youth had been spent partly at his birthplace, the old +and already somewhat decayed sea-port town of Salem, and partly at his +grandfather's farm on Sebago Lake, in Maine, then on the edge of the +primitive forest. Maine did not become a State, indeed, until 1820, +the year before Hawthorne entered Bowdoin College, whence he was +graduated in 1825, in the same class with Henry W. Longfellow and one +year behind Franklin Pierce, afterward President of the United States. +After leaving college Hawthorne buried himself for years in the +seclusion of his home at Salem. His mother, who was early widowed, had +withdrawn entirely from the world. For months at a time Hawthorne kept +his room, seeing no other society than that of his mother and sisters, +reading all sorts of books and writing wild tales, most of which he +destroyed as soon as he had written them. At twilight he would emerge +from the house for a solitary ramble through the streets of the town or +along the sea-side. Old Salem had much that was picturesque in its +associations. It had been the scene of the witch trials in the +seventeenth century, and it abounded in ancient mansions, the homes of +retired whalers and India merchants. Hawthorne's father had been a +ship captain, and many of his ancestors had followed the sea. One of +his forefathers, moreover, had been a certain Judge Hawthorne, who in +1691 had sentenced several of the witches to death. The thought of +this affected Hawthorne's imagination with a pleasing horror, and he +utilized it afterward in his _House of the Seven Gables_. Many of the +old Salem houses, too, had their family histories, with now and then +the hint of some obscure crime or dark misfortune which haunted +posterity with its curse till all the stock died out or fell into +poverty and evil ways, as in the Pyncheon family of Hawthorne's +romance. In the preface to the _Marble Faun_ Hawthorne wrote: "No +author without a trial can conceive of the difficulty of writing a +romance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no +mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor any thing but a +commonplace prosperity in broad and simple daylight." And yet it may +be doubted whether any environment could have been found more fitted to +his peculiar genius than this of his native town, or any preparation +better calculated to ripen the faculty that was in him than these long, +lonely years of waiting and brooding thought. From time to time he +contributed a story or a sketch to some periodical, such as S. G. +Goodrich's annual, the _Token_, or the _Knickerbocker Magazine_. Some +of these attracted the attention of the judicious; but they were +anonymous and signed by various _noms de plume_, and their author was +at this time--to use his own words--"the obscurest man of letters in +America." In 1828 he had issued anonymously and at his own expense a +short romance, entitled _Fanshawe_. It had little success, and copies +of the first edition are now exceedingly rare. In 1837 he published a +collection of his magazine pieces under the title, _Twice-Told Tales_. +The book was generously praised in the _North American Review_ by his +former classmate, Longfellow; and Edgar Poe showed his keen critical +perception by predicting that the writer would easily put himself at +the head of imaginative literature in America if he would discard +allegory, drop short stories, and compose a genuine romance. Poe +compared Hawthorne's work with that of the German romancer, Tieck, and +it is interesting to find confirmation of this dictum in passages of +the _American Note Books_, in which Hawthorne speaks of laboring over +Tieck with a German dictionary. The _Twice-Told Tales_ are the work of +a recluse, who makes guesses at life from a knowledge of his own heart, +acquired by a habit of introspection, but who has had little contact +with men. Many of them were shadowy, and others were morbid and +unwholesome. But their gloom was of an interior kind, never the +physically horrible of Poe. It arose from weird psychological +situations like that of _Ethan Brand_ in his search for the +unpardonable sin. Hawthorne was true to the inherited instinct of +Puritanism; he took the conscience for his theme, and in these early +tales he was already absorbed in the problem of evil, the subtle ways +in which sin works out its retribution, and the species of fate or +necessity that the wrong-doer makes for himself in the inevitable +sequences of his crime. Hawthorne was strongly drawn toward symbols +and types, and never quite followed Poe's advice to abandon allegory. +The _Scarlet Letter_ and his other romances are not, indeed, strictly +allegories, since the characters are men and women and not mere +personifications of abstract qualities. Still, they all have a certain +allegorical tinge. In the _Marble Faun_, for example, Hilda, Kenyon, +Miriam, and Donatello have been ingeniously explained as +personifications respectively of the conscience, the reason, the +imagination, and the senses. Without going so far as this, it is +possible to see in these and in Hawthorne's other creations something +typical and representative. He uses his characters like algebraic +symbols to work out certain problems with; they are rather more and yet +rather less than flesh and blood individuals. The stories in +_Twice-Told Tales_ and in the second collection, _Mosses from an Old +Manse_, 1846, are more openly allegorical than his later work. Thus +the _Minister's Black Veil_ is a sort of anticipation of Arthur +Dimmesdale in the _Scarlet Letter_. From 1846 to 1849 Hawthorne held +the position of surveyor of the Custom House of Salem. In the preface +to the _Scarlet Letter_ he sketched some of the government officials +with whom this office had brought him into contact in a way that gave +some offense to the friends of the victims and a great deal of +amusement to the public. Hawthorne's humor was quiet and fine, like +Irving's, but less genial and with a more satiric edge to it. The book +last named was written at Salem and published in 1850, just before its +author's removal to Lenox, now a sort of inland Newport, but then an +unfashionable resort among the Berkshire hills. Whatever obscurity may +have hung over Hawthorne hitherto was effectually dissolved by this +powerful tale, which was as vivid in coloring as the implication of its +title. Hawthorne chose for his background the somber life of the early +settlers of New England. Ho had always been drawn toward this part of +American history, and in _Twice-Told Tales_ had given some +illustrations of it in _Endicott's Red Cross_ and _Legends of the +Province House_. Against this dark foil moved in strong relief the +figures of Hester Prynne, the woman taken in adultery; her paramour, +the Rev. Arthur Dimmesdale; her husband, old Roger Chillingworth; and +her illegitimate child. In tragic power, in its grasp of the +elementary passions of human nature and its deep and subtle insight +into the inmost secrets of the heart, this is Hawthorne's greatest +book. He never crowded his canvas with figures. In the _Blithedale +Romance_ and the _Marble Faun_ there is the same _parti carré_ or group +of four characters. In the _House of the Seven Gables_ there are five. +The last mentioned of these, published in 1852, was of a more subdued +intensity than the _Scarlet Letter_, but equally original, and, upon +the whole, perhaps equally good. The _Blithedale Romance_, published +in the same year, though not strikingly inferior to the others, adhered +more to conventional patterns in its plot and in the sensational nature +of its ending. The suicide of the heroine by drowning, and the +terrible scene of the recovery of her body, were suggested to the +author by an experience of his own on Concord River, the account of +which, in his own words, may be read in Julian Hawthorne's _Nathaniel +Hawthorne and His Wife_. In 1852 Hawthorne returned to Concord and +bought the "Wayside" property, which he retained until his death. But +in the following year his old college friend Pierce, now become +President, appointed him consul to Liverpool, and he went abroad for +seven years. The most valuable fruit of his foreign residence was the +romance of the _Marble Faun_, 1860, the longest of his fictions and the +richest in descriptive beauty. The theme of this was the development +of the soul through the experience of sin. There is a haunting mystery +thrown about the story, like a soft veil of mist, veiling the beginning +and the end. There is even a delicate teasing suggestion of the +preternatural in Donatello, the Faun, a creation as original as +Shakespeare's Caliban or Fouque's Undine, and yet quite on this side +the border-line of the human. _Our Old Home_, a book of charming +papers on England, was published in 1863. Manifold experience of life +and contact with men, affording scope for his always keen observation, +had added range, fullness, warmth to the imaginative subtlety which had +manifested itself even in his earliest tales. Two admirable books for +children, the _Wonder Book_ and _Tanglewood Tales_, in which the +classical mythologies were retold, should also be mentioned in the list +of Hawthorne's writings, as well as the _American_, _English_, and +_Italian Note Books_, the first of which contains the seed-thoughts of +some of his finished works, together with hundreds of hints for plots, +episodes, descriptions, etc., which he never found time to work out. +Hawthorne's style, in his first sketches and stories a little stilted +and "bookish," gradually acquired an exquisite perfection, and is as +well worth study as that of any prose classic in the English tongue. + +Hawthorne was no transcendentalist. He dwelt much in a world of ideas, +and he sometimes doubted whether the tree on the bank or its image in +the stream were the more real. But this had little in common with the +philosophical idealism of his neighbors. He reverenced Emerson, and he +held kindly intercourse--albeit a silent man and easily bored--with +Thoreau and Ellery Channing, and even with Margaret Fuller. But his +sharp eyes saw whatever was whimsical or weak in the apostles of the +new faith. He had little enthusiasm for causes or reforms, and among +so many Abolitionists he remained a Democrat, and even wrote a campaign +life of his friend Pierce. + +The village of Concord has perhaps done more for American literature +than the city of New York. Certainly there are few places where +associations, both patriotic and poetic, cluster so thickly. At one +side of the grounds of the Old Manse--which has the river at its +back--runs down a shaded lane to the Concord monument and the figure of +the Minute Man and the successor of "the rude bridge that arched the +flood." Scarce two miles away, among the woods, is little +Walden--"God's drop." The men who made Concord famous are asleep in +Sleepy Hollow, yet still their memory prevails to draw seekers after +truth to the Concord Summer School of Philosophy, which met annually, a +few years since, to reason high of "God, Freedom, and Immortality," +next door to the "Wayside," and under the hill on whose ridge Hawthorne +wore a path as he paced up and down beneath the hemlocks. + + +1. Ralph Waldo Emerson. _Nature_. _The American Scholar_. _Literary +Ethics_. _The Transcendentalism_. _The Over-soul_. _Address before +the Cambridge Divinity School_. _English Traits_. _Representative +Men_. _Poems_. + +2. Henry David Thoreau. _Excursions_. _Walden_. _A Week on the +Concord and Merrimac Rivers_. _Cape Cod_. _The Maine Woods_. + +3. Nathaniel Hawthorne. _Mosses from an Old Manse_. _The Scarlet +Letter_. _The House of the Seven Gables_. _The Blithedale Romance_. +_The Marble Faun_. _Our Old Home_. + +4. _Transcendentalism in New England_. By O. B. Frothingham. New +York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. 1875. + + +[1]The Indian name of Concord River. + + + + +CHAPTER V. + +THE CAMBRIDGE SCHOLARS. + +1837-1861. + +With few exceptions, the men who have made American literature what it +is have been college graduates. And yet our colleges have not commonly +been, in themselves, literary centers. Most of them have been small +and poor, and situated in little towns or provincial cities. Their +alumni scatter far and wide immediately after graduation, and even +those of them who may feel drawn to a life of scholarship or letters +find little to attract them at the home of their _alma mater_, and seek +by preference the larger cities, where periodicals and publishing +houses offer some hope of support in a literary career. Even in the +older and better equipped universities the faculty is usually a corps +of working scholars, each man intent upon his specialty and rather +inclined to undervalue merely "literary" performance. In many cases +the fastidious and hypercritical turn of mind which besets the scholar, +the timid conservatism which naturally characterizes an ancient seat of +learning, and the spirit of theological conformity which suppresses +free discussion, have exerted their benumbing influence upon the +originality and creative impulse of their inmates. Hence it happens +that, while the contributions of American college teachers to the exact +sciences, to theology and philology, metaphysics, political philosophy, +and the severer branches of learning have been honorable and important, +they have as a class made little mark upon the general literature of +the country. The professors of literature in our colleges are usually +persons who have made no additions to literature, and the professors of +rhetoric seem ordinarily to have been selected to teach students how to +write for the reason that they themselves have never written any thing +that any one has ever read. + +To these remarks the Harvard College of some fifty years ago offers +some striking exceptions. It was not the large and fashionable +university that it has lately grown to be, with its multiplied elective +courses, its numerous faculty, and its somewhat motley collection of +undergraduates; but a small school of the classics and mathematics, +with something of ethics, natural science, and the modern languages +added to its old-fashioned, scholastic curriculum, and with a very +homogeneous _clientèle_, drawn mainly from the Unitarian families of +eastern Massachusetts. Nevertheless a finer intellectual life, in many +respects, was lived at old Cambridge within the years covered by this +chapter than nowadays at the same place, or at any date in any other +American university town. The neighborhood of Boston, where the +commercial life has never so entirely overlain the intellectual as in +New York and Philadelphia, has been a standing advantage to Harvard +College. The recent upheaval in religious thought had secured +toleration and made possible that free and even audacious interchange +of ideas without which a literary atmosphere is impossible. From +these, or from whatever causes, it happened that the old Harvard +scholarship had an elegant and tasteful side to it, so that the dry +erudition of the schools blossomed into a generous culture, and there +were men in the professors' chairs who were no less efficient as +teachers because they were also poets, orators, wits, and men of the +world. In the seventeen years from 1821 to 1839 there were graduated +from Harvard College Emerson, Holmes, Sumner, Phillips, Motley, +Thoreau, Lowell, and Edward Everett Hale; some of whom took up their +residence at Cambridge, others at Boston, and others at Concord, which +was quite as much a spiritual suburb of Boston as Cambridge was. In +1836, when Longfellow became professor of modern languages at Harvard, +Sumner was lecturing in the Law School. The following year--in which +Thoreau took his bachelor's degree--witnessed the delivery of Emerson's +Phi Beta Kappa lecture on the _American Scholar_ in the college chapel, +and Wendell Phillips's speech on the _Murder of Lovejoy_ in Faneuil +Hall. Lowell, whose description of the impression produced by the +former of these famous addresses has been quoted in a previous chapter, +was an under-graduate at the time. He took his degree in 1838, and in +1855 succeeded Longfellow in the chair of modern languages. Holmes had +been chosen in 1847 professor of anatomy and physiology in the Medical +School--a position which he held until 1882. The historians, Prescott +and Bancroft, had been graduated in 1814 and 1817 respectively. The +former's first important publication, _Ferdinand and Isabella_, +appeared in 1837. Bancroft had been a tutor in the college in 1822-23, +and the initial volume of his _History of the United States_ was issued +in 1835. Another of the Massachusetts school of historical writers, +Francis Parkman, took his first degree at Harvard in 1844. Cambridge +was still hardly more than a village, a rural outskirt of Boston, such +as Lowell described it in his article, _Cambridge Thirty Years Ago_, +originally contributed to _Putnam's Monthly_ in 1853, and afterward +reprinted in his _Fireside Travels_, 1864. The situation of a +university scholar in old Cambridge was thus an almost ideal one. +Within easy reach of a great city, with its literary and social clubs, +its theaters, lecture courses, public meetings, dinner-parties, etc., +he yet lived withdrawn in an academic retirement among elm-shaded +avenues and leafy gardens, the dome of the Boston Statehouse looming +distantly across the meadows where the Charles laid its "steel blue +sickle" upon the variegated, plush-like ground of the wide marsh. +There was thus, at all times during the quarter of a century embraced +between 1837 and 1861, a group of brilliant men resident in or about +Cambridge and Boston, meeting frequently and intimately, and exerting +upon one another a most stimulating influence. Some of the closer +circles--all concentric to the university--of which this group was +loosely composed were laughed at by outsiders as "Mutual Admiration +Societies." Such was, for instance, the "Five of Clubs," whose members +were Longfellow, Sumner, C. C. Felton, professor of Greek at Harvard, +and afterward president of the college; G. S. Hillard, a graceful +lecturer, essayist, and poet, of a somewhat amateurish kind; and Henry +R. Cleveland, of Jamaica Plain, a lover of books and a writer of them. + +Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-82), the most widely read and loved of +American poets--or, indeed, of all contemporary poets in England and +America--though identified with Cambridge for nearly fifty years, was a +native of Portland, Maine, and a graduate of Bowdoin College, in the +same class with Hawthorne. Since leaving college, in 1825, he had +studied and traveled for some years in Europe, and had held the +professorship of modern languages at Bowdoin. He had published several +text-books, a number of articles on the Romance languages and +literatures in the _North American Review_, a thin volume of metrical +translations from the Spanish, a few original poems in various +periodicals, and the pleasant sketches of European travel entitled +_Outre-Mer_. But Longfellow's fame began with the appearance in 1839 +of his _Voices of the Night_. Excepting an earlier collection by +Bryant this was the first volume of real poetry published in New +England, and it had more warmth and sweetness, a greater richness and +variety, than Bryant's work ever possessed. Longfellow's genius was +almost feminine in its flexibility and its sympathetic quality. It +readily took the color of its surroundings and opened itself eagerly to +impressions of the beautiful from every quarter, but especially from +books. This first volume contained a few things written during his +student days at Bowdoin, one of which, a blank-verse piece on _Autumn_, +clearly shows the influence of Bryant's _Thanatopsis_. Most of these +juvenilia had nature for their theme, but they were not so sternly true +to the New England landscape as Thoreau or Bryant. The skylark and the +ivy appear among their scenic properties, and in the best of them, +_Woods in Winter_, it is the English "hawthorn" and not any American +tree, through which the gale is made to blow, just as later Longfellow +uses "rooks" instead of crows. The young poet's fancy was +instinctively putting out feelers toward the storied lands of the Old +World, and in his _Hymn of the Moravian Nuns of Bethlehem_ he +transformed the rude church of the Moravian sisters to a cathedral with +"glimmering tapers," swinging censers, chancel, altar, cowls, and "dim +mysterious aisle." After his visit to Europe Longfellow returned +deeply imbued with the spirit of romance. It was his mission to refine +our national taste by opening to American readers, in their own +vernacular, new springs of beauty in the literatures of foreign +tongues. The fact that this mission was interpretive, rather than +creative, hardly detracts from Longfellow's true originality. It +merely indicates that his inspiration came to him in the first instance +from other sources than the common life about him. He naturally began +as a translator, and this first volume contained, among other things, +exquisite renderings from the German of Uhland, Salis, and Müller, from +the Danish, French, Spanish, and Anglo-Saxon, and a few passages from +Dante. Longfellow remained all his life a translator, and in subtler +ways than by direct translation he infused the fine essence of European +poetry into his own. He loved + + "Tales that have the rime of age + And chronicles of eld." + +The golden light of romance is shed upon his page, and it is his habit +to borrow mediaeval and Catholic imagery from his favorite Middle Ages, +even when writing of American subjects. To him the clouds are hooded +friars, that "tell their beads in drops of rain;" the midnight winds +blowing through woods and mountain passes are chanting solemn masses +for the repose of the dying year, and the strain ends with the prayer-- + + "Kyrie, eleyson, + Christe, eleyson." + +In his journal he wrote characteristically: "The black shadows lie upon +the grass like engravings in a book. Autumn has written his rubric on +the illuminated leaves, the wind turns them over and chants like a +friar." This in Cambridge, of a moonshiny night, on the first day of +the American October! But several of the pieces in _Voices of the +Night_ sprang more immediately from the poet's own inner experience. +The _Hymn to the Night_, the _Psalm of Life_, _The Reaper and the +Flowers_, _Footsteps of Angels_, _The Light of Stars_, and _The +Beleaguered City_ spoke of love, bereavement, comfort, patience, and +faith. In these lovely songs, and in many others of the same kind +which he afterward wrote, Longfellow touched the hearts of all his +countrymen. America is a country of homes, and Longfellow, as the poet +of sentiment and of the domestic affections, became and remains far +more general in his appeal than such a "cosmic" singer as Whitman, who +is still practically unknown to the "fierce democracy" to which he has +addressed himself. It would be hard to overestimate the influence for +good exerted by the tender feeling and the pure and sweet morality +which the hundreds of thousands of copies of Longfellow's writings, +that have been circulated among readers of all classes in America and +England, have brought with them. + +Three later collections, _Ballads and Other Poems_, 1842, _The Belfry +of Bruges_, 1846; and _The Seaside and the Fireside_, 1850, comprise +most of what is noteworthy in Longfellow's minor poetry. The first of +these embraced, together with some renderings from the German and the +Scandinavian languages, specimens of stronger original work than the +author had yet put forth; namely, the two powerful ballads of _The +Skeleton in Armor_ and _The Wreck of the Hesperus_. The former of +these, written in the swift leaping meter of Drayton's _Ode to the +Cambro Britons on their Harp_, was suggested by the digging up of a +mail-clad skeleton at Fall River--a circumstance which the poet linked +with the traditions about the Round Tower at Newport, thus giving to +the whole the spirit of a Norse viking song of war and of the sea. +_The Wreck of the Hesperus_ was occasioned by the news of shipwrecks on +the coast near Gloucester and by the name of a reef--"Norman's +Woe"--where many of them took place. It was written one night between +twelve and three, and cost the poet, he said, "hardly an effort." +Indeed, it is the spontaneous ease and grace, the unfailing taste of +Longfellow's lines, which are their best technical quality. There is +nothing obscure or esoteric about his poetry. If there is little +passion or intellectual depth, there is always genuine poetic feeling, +often a very high order of imagination, and almost invariably the +choice of the right word. In this volume were also included _The +Village Blacksmith_ and _Excelsior_. The latter, and the _Psalm of +Life_, have had a "damnable iteration" which causes them to figure as +Longfellow's most popular pieces. They are by no means, however, among +his best. They are vigorously expressed common-places of that +hortatory kind which passes for poetry, but is, in reality, a vague +species of preaching. + +In _The Belfry of Bruges_ and _The Seaside and the Fireside_ the +translations were still kept up, and among the original pieces were +_The Occupation of Orion_--the most imaginative of all Longfellow's +poems; _Seaweed_, which has very noble stanzas, the favorite _Old Clock +on the Stairs_, _The Building of the Ship_, with its magnificent +closing apostrophe to the Union, and _The Fire of Driftwood_, the +subtlest in feeling of any thing that the poet ever wrote. With these +were verses of a more familiar quality, such as _The Bridge_, +_Resignation_, and _The Day Is Done_, and many others, all reflecting +moods of gentle and pensive sentiment, and drawing from analogies in +nature or in legend lessons which, if somewhat obvious, were expressed +with perfect art. Like Keats, he apprehended every thing on its +beautiful side. Longfellow was all poet. Like Ophelia in Hamlet, + + "Thought and affection, passion, hell itself, + _He_ turns to favor and to prettiness." + +He cared very little about the intellectual movement of the age. The +transcendental ideas of Emerson passed over his head and left him +undisturbed. For politics he had that gentlemanly distaste which the +cultivated class in America had already begun to entertain. In 1842 he +printed a small volume of _Poems on Slavery_, which drew commendation +from his friend Sumner, but had nothing of the fervor of Whittier's or +Lowell's utterances on the same subject. It is interesting to compare +his journals with Hawthorne's _American Note Books_, and to observe in +what very different ways the two writers made prey of their daily +experiences for literary material. A favorite haunt of Longfellow's +was the bridge between Boston and Cambridgeport, the same which he put +into verse in his poem, _The Bridge_. "I always stop on the bridge," +he writes in his journal; "tide waters are beautiful. From the ocean +up into the land they go, like messengers, to ask why the tribute has +not been paid. The brooks and rivers answer that there has been little +harvest of snow and rain this year. Floating sea-wood and kelp is +carried up into the meadows, as returning sailors bring oranges in +bandanna handkerchiefs to friends in the country." And again: "We +leaned for a while on the wooden rail and enjoyed the silvery +reflection on the sea, making sundry comparisons. Among other thoughts +we had this cheering one, that the whole sea was flashing with this +heavenly light, though we saw it only in a single track; the dark waves +are the dark providences of God; luminous, though not to us; and even +to ourselves in another position." "Walk on the bridge, both ends of +which are lost in the fog, like human life midway between two +eternities; beginning and ending in mist." In Hawthorne an allegoric +moaning is usually something deeper and subtler than this, and seldom +so openly expressed. Many of Longfellow's poems--the _Beleaguered +City_, for example--may be definitely divided into two parts; in the +first, a story is told or a natural phenomenon described; in the +second, the spiritual application of the parable is formally set forth. +This method became with him almost a trick of style, and his readers +learn to look for the _hoec fabula docet_ at the end as a matter of +course. As for the prevailing optimism in Longfellow's view of +life--of which the above passage is an instance--it seems to be in him +an affair of temperament, and not, as in Emerson, the result of +philosophic insight. Perhaps, however, in the last analysis optimism +and pessimism are subjective--the expression of temperament or +individual experience, since the facts of life are the same, whether +seen through Schopenhauer's eyes or through Emerson's. If there is any +particular in which Longfellow's inspiration came to him at first hand +and not through books, it is in respect to the aspects of the sea. On +this theme no American poet has written more beautifully and with a +keener sympathy than the author of _The Wreck of the Hesperus_ and of +_Seaweed_. + +In 1847 was published the long poem of _Evangeline_. The story of the +Acadian peasant girl, who was separated from her lover in the +dispersion of her people by the English troops, and after weary +wanderings and a life-long search, found him at last, an old man dying +in a Philadelphia hospital, was told to Longfellow by the Rev. H. L. +Conolly, who had previously suggested it to Hawthorne as a subject for +a story. Longfellow, characteristically enough, "got up" the local +color for his poem from Haliburton's account of the dispersion of the +Grand-Pré Acadians, from Darby's _Geographical Description of +Louisiana_ and Watson's _Annals of Philadelphia_. He never needed to +go much outside of his library for literary impulse and material. +Whatever may be held as to Longfellow's inventive powers as a creator +of characters or an interpreter of American life, his originality as an +artist is manifested by his successful domestication in _Evangeline_ of +the dactylic hexameter, which no English poet had yet used with effect. +The English poet, Arthur Hugh Clough, who lived for a time in +Cambridge, followed Longfellow's example in the use of hexameter in his +_Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich_, so that we have now arrived at the +time--a proud moment for American letters--when the works of our +writers began to react upon the literature of Europe. But the beauty +of the descriptions in _Evangeline_ and the pathos--somewhat too drawn +out--of the story made it dear to a multitude of readers who cared +nothing about the technical disputes of Poe and other critics as to +whether or not Longfellow's lines were sufficiently "spondaic" to +represent truthfully the quantitative hexameters of Homer and Vergil. + +In 1855 appeared _Hiawatha_, Longfellow's most aboriginal and +"American" book. The tripping trochaic measure he borrowed from the +Finnish epic _Kalevala_. The vague, child-like mythology of the Indian +tribes, with its anthropomorphic sense of the brotherhood between men, +animals, and the forms of inanimate nature, he took from Schoolcraft's +_Algic Researches_, 1839. He fixed forever, in a skillfully chosen +poetic form, the more inward and imaginative part of Indian character, +as Cooper had given permanence to its external and active side. Of +Longfellow's dramatic experiments, the _Golden Legend_, 1851, alone +deserves mention here. This was in his chosen realm, a tale taken from +the ecclesiastical annals of the Middle Ages, precious with martyrs' +blood and bathed in the rich twilight of the cloister. It contains +some of his best work, but its merit is rather poetic than dramatic, +although Ruskin praised it for the closeness with which it entered into +the temper of the monk. + +Longfellow has pleased the people more than the critics. He gave +freely what he had, and the gift was beautiful. Those who have looked +in his poetry for something else than poetry, or for poetry of some +other kind, have not been slow to assert that he was a lady's poet--one +who satisfied callow youths and school-girls by uttering commonplaces +in graceful and musical shape, but who offered no strong meat for men. +Miss Fuller called his poetry thin, and the poet himself--or, rather, a +portrait of the poet which frontispieced an illustrated edition of his +works--a "dandy Pindar." This is not true of his poetry, or of the +best of it. But he had a singing and not a talking voice, and in his +prose one becomes sensible of a certain weakness. _Hyperion_, for +example, published in 1839, a loitering fiction, interspersed with +descriptions of European travel, is, upon the whole, a weak book, +overflowery in diction and sentimental in tone. + +The crown of Longfellow's achievements as a translator was his great +version of Dante's _Divina Commedia_, published between 1867 and 1870. +It is a severely literal, almost a line for line, rendering. The meter +is preserved, but the rhyme sacrificed. If not the best English poem +constructed from Dante, it is at all events the most faithful and +scholarly paraphrase. The sonnets which accompanied it are among +Longfellow's best work. He seems to have been raised by daily +communion with the great Tuscan into a habit of deeper and more subtle +thought than is elsewhere common in his poetry. + +Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809- ) is a native of Cambridge and a graduate +of Harvard in the class of '29; a class whose anniversary reunions he +has celebrated in something like forty distinct poems and songs. For +sheer cleverness and versatility Dr. Holmes is, perhaps, unrivaled +among American men of letters. He has been poet, wit, humorist, +novelist, essayist, and a college lecturer and writer on medical +topics. In all of these departments he has produced work which ranks +high, if not with the highest. His father, Dr. Abiel Holmes, was a +graduate of Yale and an orthodox minister of liberal temper, but the +son early threw in his lot with the Unitarians; and, as was natural to +a man of satiric turn and with a very human enjoyment of a fight, whose +youth was cast in an age of theological controversy, he has always had +his fling at Calvinism, and has prolonged the slogans of old battles +into a later generation; sometimes, perhaps, insisting upon them rather +wearisomely and beyond the limits of good taste. He had, even as an +undergraduate, a reputation for cleverness at writing comic verses, and +many of his good things in this kind, such as the _Dorchester Giant_ +and the _Height of the Ridiculous_, were contributed to the +_Collegian_, a students' paper. But he first drew the attention of a +wider public by his spirited ballad of _Old Ironsides_-- + + "Ay! Tear her tattered ensign down!"-- + +composed about 1830, when it was proposed by the government to take to +pieces the unseaworthy hulk of the famous old man-of-war, +_Constitution_. Holmes's indignant protest--which has been a favorite +subject for school-boy declamation--had the effect of postponing the +vessel's fate for a great many years. From 1830-35 the young poet was +pursuing his medical studies in Boston and Paris, contributing now and +then some verses to the magazines. Of his life as a medical student in +Paris there are many pleasant reminiscences in his _Autocrat_ and other +writings, as where he tells, for instance, of a dinner-party of +Americans in the French capital, where one of the company brought tears +of homesickness into the eyes of his _sodales_ by saying that the +tinkle of the ice in the champagne-glasses reminded him of the +cow-bells in the rocky old pastures of New England. In 1836 he printed +his first collection of poems. The volume contained, among a number of +pieces broadly comic, like the _September Gale_, the _Music Grinders_, +and the _Ballad of the Oyster-man_--which at once became widely +popular--a few poems of a finer and quieter temper, in which there was +a quaint blending of the humorous and the pathetic. Such were _My +Aunt_ and the _Last Leaf_--which Abraham Lincoln found "inexpressibly +touching," and which it is difficult to read without the double tribute +of a smile and a tear. The volume contained also _Poetry: A Metrical +Essay_, read before the Harvard Chapter of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, +which was the first of that long line of capital occasional poems which +Holmes has been spinning for half a century with no sign of fatigue and +with scarcely any falling off in freshness; poems read or spoken or +sung at all manner of gatherings, public and private, at Harvard +commencements, class days, and other academic anniversaries; at +inaugurations, centennials, dedications of cemeteries, meetings of +medical associations, mercantile libraries, Burns clubs, and New +England societies; at rural festivals and city fairs; openings of +theaters, layings of corner-stones, birthday celebrations, jubilees, +funerals, commemoration services, dinners of welcome or farewell to +Dickens, Bryant, Everett, Whittier, Longfellow, Grant, Farragut, the +Grand Duke Alexis, the Chinese embassy, and what not. Probably no poet +of any age or clime has written so much and so well to order. He has +been particularly happy in verses of a convivial kind, toasts for big +civic feasts, or post-prandial rhymes for the _petit comité_--the snug +little dinners of the chosen few; his + + "The quaint trick to cram the pithy line + That cracks so crisply over bubbling wine." + +And although he could write on occasion a _Song for a Temperance +Dinner_, he has preferred to chant the praise of the punch bowl and to + + "feel the old convivial glow (unaided) o'er me stealing, + The warm, champagny, old-particular-brandy-punchy feeling." + +It would be impossible to enumerate the many good things of this sort +which Holmes has written, full of wit and wisdom, and of humor lightly +dashed with sentiment and sparkling with droll analogies, sudden puns, +and unexpected turns of rhyme and phrase. Among the best of them are +_Nux Postcoenatica_, _A Modest Request_, _Ode for a Social Meeting_, +_The Boys_, and _Rip Van Winkle, M.D_. Holmes's favorite measure, in +his longer poems, is the heroic couplet which Pope's example seems to +have consecrated forever to satiric and didactic verse. He writes as +easily in this meter as if it were prose, and with much of Pope's +epigrammatic neatness. He also manages with facility the anapaestics +of Moore and the ballad stanza which Hood had made the vehicle for his +drolleries. It cannot be expected that verses manufactured to pop with +the corks and fizz with the champagne at academic banquets should much +outlive the occasion; or that the habit of producing such verses on +demand should foster in the producer that "high seriousness" which +Matthew Arnold asserts to be one mark of all great poetry. Holmes's +poetry is mostly on the colloquial level, excellent society-verse, but +even in its serious moments too smart and too pretty to be taken very +gravely; with a certain glitter, knowingness, and flippancy about it, +and an absence of that self-forgetfulness and intense absorption in its +theme which characterize the work of the higher imagination. This is +rather the product of fancy and wit. Wit, indeed, in the old sense of +quickness in the perception of analogies, is the staple of his mind. +His resources in the way of figure, illustration, allusion, and +anecdote are wonderful. Age cannot wither him nor custom stale his +infinite variety, and there is as much powder in his latest +pyrotechnics as in the rockets which he sent up half a century ago. +Yet, though the humorist in him rather outweighs the poet, he has +written a few things, like the _Chambered Nautilus_ and _Homesick in +Heaven_, which are as purely and deeply poetic as the _One-Hoss Shay_ +and the _Prologue_ are funny. Dr. Holmes is not of the stuff of which +idealists and enthusiasts are made. As a physician and a student of +science, the facts of the material universe have counted for much with +him. His clear, positive, alert intellect was always impatient of +mysticism. He had the sharp eye of the satirist and the man of the +world for oddities of dress, dialect, and manners. Naturally the +transcendental movement struck him on its ludicrous side, and in his +_After-Dinner Poem_, read at the Phi Beta Kappa dinner at Cambridge in +1843, he had his laugh at the "Orphic odes" and "runes" of the +bedlamite seer and bard of mystery + + "Who rides a beetle which he calls a 'sphinx.' + And O what questions asked in club-foot rhyme + Of Earth the tongueless, and the deaf-mute Time! + Here babbling 'Insight' shouts in Nature's ears + His last conundrum on the orbs and spheres; + There Self-inspection sucks its little thumb, + With 'Whence am I?' and 'Wherefore did I come?'" + +Curiously enough, the author of these lines lived to write an +appreciative life of the poet who wrote the _Sphinx_. There was a good +deal of toryism or social conservatism in Holmes. He acknowledged a +preference for the man with a pedigree, the man who owned family +portraits, had been brought up in familiarity with books, and could +pronounce "view" correctly. Readers unhappily not of the "Brahmin +caste of New England" have sometimes resented as snobbishness Holmes's +harping on "family," and his perpetual application of certain favorite +shibboleths to other people's ways of speech. "The woman who +calc'lates is lost." + + "Learning condemns beyond the reach of hope + The careless lips that speak of soap for soap. . . . + Do put your accents in the proper spot: + Don't, let me beg you, don't say 'How?' for 'What?' + The things named 'pants' in certain documents, + A word not made for gentlemen, but 'gents.'" + +With the rest of "society" he was disposed to ridicule the abolition +movement as a crotchet of the eccentric and the long-haired. But when +the civil war broke out he lent his pen, his tongue, and his own flesh +and blood to the cause of the Union. The individuality of Holmes's +writings comes in part from their local and provincial bias. He has +been the laureate of Harvard College and the bard of Boston city, an +urban poet, with a cockneyish fondness for old Boston ways and +things--the Common and the Frog Pond, Faneuil Hall and King's Chapel +and the Old South, Bunker Hill, Long Wharf, the Tea Party, and the town +crier. It was Holmes who invented the playful saying that "Boston +Statehouse is the hub of the solar system." + +In 1857 was started the _Atlantic Monthly_, a magazine which has +published a good share of the best work done by American writers within +the past generation. Its immediate success was assured by Dr. Holmes's +brilliant series of papers, the _Autocrat of the Breakfast Table_, +1858, followed at once by the _Professor at the Breakfast Table_, 1859, +and later by the _Poet at the Breakfast Table_, 1873. The _Autocrat_ +is its author's masterpiece, and holds the fine quintessence of his +humor, his scholarship, his satire, genial observation, and ripe +experience of men and cities. The form is as unique and original as +the contents, being something between an essay and a drama; a +succession of monologues or table-talks at a typical American +boarding-house, with a thread of story running through the whole. The +variety of mood and thought is so great that these conversations never +tire, and the prose is interspersed with some of the author's choicest +verse. The _Professor at the Breakfast Table_ followed too closely on +the heels of the _Autocrat_, and had less freshness. The third number +of the series was better, and was pleasantly reminiscent and slightly +garrulous, Dr. Holmes being now (1873) sixty-four years old, and +entitled to the gossiping privilege of age. The personnel of the +_Breakfast Table_ series, such as the landlady and the landlady's +daughter and her son, Benjamin Franklin; the schoolmistress, the young +man named John, the Divinity Student, the Kohinoor, the Sculpin, the +Scarabaeus, and the Old Gentleman who sits opposite, are not fully +drawn characters, but outlined figures, lightly sketched--as is the +Autocrat's wont--by means of some trick of speech, or dress, or +feature, but they are quite life-like enough for their purpose, which +is mainly to furnish listeners and foils to the eloquence and wit of +the chief talker. + +In 1860 and 1867 Holmes entered the field of fiction with two +"medicated novels," _Elsie Venner_ and the _Guardian Angel_. The first +of these was a singular tale, whose heroine united with her very +fascinating human attributes something of the nature of a serpent; her +mother having been bitten by a rattlesnake a few months before the +birth of the girl, and kept alive meanwhile by the use of powerful +antidotes. The heroine of the _Guardian Angel_ inherited lawless +instincts from a vein of Indian blood in her ancestry. These two books +were studies of certain medico-psychological problems. They preached +Dr. Holmes's favorite doctrines of heredity and of the modified nature +of moral responsibility by reason of transmitted tendencies which limit +the freedom of the will. In _Elsie Venner_, in particular, the weirdly +imaginative and speculative character of the leading motive suggests +Hawthorne's method in fiction, but the background and the subsidiary +figures have a realism that is in abrupt contrast with this, and gives +a kind of doubleness and want of keeping to the whole. The Yankee +characters, in particular, and the satirical pictures of New England +country life are open to the charge of caricature. In the _Guardian +Angel_ the figure of Byles Gridley, the old scholar, is drawn with +thorough sympathy, and though some of his acts are improbable, he is, +on the whole, Holmes's most vital conception in the region of dramatic +creation. + +James Russell Lowell (1819- ), the foremost of American critics and of +living American poets, is, like Holmes, a native of Cambridge, and, +like Emerson and Holmes, a clergyman's son. In 1855 he succeeded +Longfellow as professor of modern languages in Harvard College. Of +late years he has held important diplomatic posts, like Everett, +Irving, Bancroft, Motley, and other Americans distinguished in letters, +having been United States minister to Spain, and, under two +administrations, to the court of St. James. Lowell is not so +spontaneously and exclusively a poet as Longfellow, and his popularity +with the average reader has never been so great. His appeal has been +to the few rather than the many, to an audience of scholars and of the +judicious rather than to the "groundlings" of the general public. +Nevertheless his verse, though without the evenness, instinctive grace, +and unerring good taste of Longfellow's, has more energy and a stronger +intellectual fiber, while in prose he is very greatly the superior. +His first volume, _A Year's Life_, 1841, gave some promise. In 1843 he +started a magazine, the _Pioneer_, which only reached its third number, +though it counted among its contributors Hawthorne, Poe, Whittier, and +Miss Barrett (afterward Mrs. Browning). A second volume of poems, +printed in 1844, showed a distinct advance, in such pieces as the +_Shepherd of King Admetus_, _Rhoecus_, a classical myth, told in +excellent blank verse, and the same in subject with one of Landor's +polished intaglios; and the _Legend of Brittany_, a narrative poem, +which had fine passages, but no firmness in the management of the +story. As yet, it was evident, the young poet had not found his theme. +This came with the outbreak of the Mexican War, which was unpopular in +New England, and which the Free Soil party regarded as a slave-holders' +war waged without provocation against a sister republic, and simply for +the purpose of extending the area of slavery. + +In 1846, accordingly, the _Biglow Papers_ began to appear in the +_Boston Courier_, and were collected and published in book form in +1848. These were a series of rhymed satires upon the government and +the war party, written in the Yankee dialect, and supposed to be the +work of Hosea Biglow, a home-spun genius in a down-east country town, +whose letters to the editor were indorsed and accompanied by the +comments of the Rev. Homer Wilbur, A.M., pastor of the First Church in +Jaalam, and (prospective) member of many learned societies. The first +paper was a derisive address to a recruiting sergeant, with a +denunciation of the "nigger-drivin' States" and the "Northern +dough-faces;" a plain hint that the North would do better to secede +than to continue doing dirty work for the South; and an expression of +those universal peace doctrines which were then in the air, and to +which Longfellow gave serious utterance in his _Occultation of Orion_. + + "Ez for war, I call it murder-- + There you hev it plain an' flat; + I don't want to go no furder + Than my Testyment for that; + God hez said so plump an' fairly, + It's as long as it is broad, + An' you've gut to git up airly + Ef you want to take in God." + +The second number was a versified paraphrase of a letter received from +Mr. Birdofredom Sawin, "a yung feller of our town that was cussed fool +enuff to goe atrottin inter Miss Chiff arter a dram and fife," and who +finds when he gets to Mexico that + + "This kind o' sogerin' aint a mite like our October trainin'." + +Of the subsequent papers the best was, perhaps, _What Mr. Robinson +Thinks_, an election ballad, which caused universal laughter, and was +on every body's tongue. + +The _Biglow Papers_ remain Lowell's most original contribution to +American literature. They are, all in all, the best political satires +in the language, and unequaled as portraitures of the Yankee character, +with its cuteness, its homely wit, and its latent poetry. Under the +racy humor of the dialect--which became in Lowell's hands a medium of +literary expression almost as effective as Burns's Ayrshire +Scotch--burned that moral enthusiasm and that hatred of wrong and +deification of duty--"Stern daughter of the voice of God"--which, in +the tough New England stock, stands instead of the passion in the blood +of southern races. Lowell's serious poems on political questions, such +as the _Present Crisis_, _Ode to Freedom_, and the _Capture of Fugitive +Slaves_, have the old Puritan fervor, and such lines as + + "They are slaves who dare not be + In the right with two or three," + +and the passage beginning + + "Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne," + +became watchwords in the struggle against slavery and disunion. Some +of these were published in his volume of 1848 and the collected edition +of his poems, in two volumes, issued in 1850. These also included his +most ambitious narrative poem, the _Vision of Sir Launfal_, an +allegorical and spiritual treatment of one of the legends of the Holy +Grail. Lowell's genius was not epical, but lyric and didactic. The +merit of _Sir Launfal_ is not in the telling of the story, but in the +beautiful descriptive episodes, one of which, commencing, + + "And what is so rare as a day in June? + Then if ever come perfect days," + +is as current as any thing that he has written. It is significant of +the lack of a natural impulse toward narrative invention in Lowell +that, unlike Longfellow and Holmes, he never tried his hand at a novel. +One of the most important parts of a novelist's equipment he certainly +possesses, namely, an insight into character and an ability to +delineate it. This gift is seen especially in his sketch of Parson +Wilbur, who edited the _Biglow Papers_ with a delightfully pedantic +introduction, glossary, and notes; in the prose essay _On a Certain +Condescension in Foreigners_, and in the uncompleted poem, _Fitz Adam's +Story_. See also the sketch of Captain Underhill in the essay on _New +England Two Centuries Ago_. + +The _Biglow Papers_ when brought out in a volume were prefaced by +imaginary notices of the press, including a capital parody of Carlyle, +and a reprint from the "Jaalam Independent Blunderbuss," of the first +sketch--afterward amplified and enriched--of that perfect Yankee idyl, +_The Courtin'_. Between 1862 and 1865 a second series of _Biglow +Papers_ appeared, called out by the events of the civil war. Some of +these, as, for instance, _Jonathan to John_, a remonstrance with +England for her unfriendly attitude toward the North, were not inferior +to any thing in the earlier series; and others were even superior as +poems, equal, indeed, in pathos and intensity to any thing that Lowell +has written in his professedly serious verse. In such passages the +dialect wears rather thin, and there is a certain incongruity between +the rustic spelling and the vivid beauty and power and the figurative +cast of the phrase in stanzas like the following: + + "Wut's words to them whose faith an' truth + On war's red techstone rang true metal, + Who ventered life an' love an' youth + For the gret prize o' death in battle? + To him who, deadly hurt, agen + Flashed on afore the charge's thunder, + Tippin' with fire the bolt of men + That rived the rebel line asunder?" + +Charles Sumner, a somewhat heavy person, with little sense of humor, +wished that the author of the _Biglow Papers_ "could have used good +English." In the lines just quoted, indeed, the bad English adds +nothing to the effect. In 1848 Lowell wrote _A Fable for Critics_, +something after the style of Sir John Suckling's _Session of the +Poets_; a piece of rollicking doggerel in which he surveyed the +American Parnassus, scattering about headlong fun, sharp satire, and +sound criticism in equal proportion. Never an industrious workman, +like Longfellow, at the poetic craft, but preferring to wait for the +mood to seize him, he allowed eighteen years to go by, from 1850 to +1868, before publishing another volume of verse. In the latter year +appeared _Under the Willows_, which contains some of his ripest and +most perfect work, notably _A Winter Evening Hymn to my Fire_, with its +noble and touching close--suggested by, perhaps, at any rate recalling, +the dedication of Goethe's _Faust_, + + "Ihr naht euch wieder, schwankende Gestalten;" + +the subtle _Footpath_ and _In the Twilight_, the lovely little poems +_Auf Wiedersehen_ and _After the Funeral_, and a number of spirited +political pieces, such as _Villa Franca_ and the _Washers of the +Shroud_. This volume contained also his _Ode Recited at the Harvard +Commemoration_ in 1865. This, although uneven, is one of the finest +occasional poems in the language, and the most important contribution +which our civil war has made to song. It was charged with the grave +emotion of one who not only shared the patriotic grief and exultation +of his _alma mater_ in the sacrifice of her sons, but who felt a more +personal sorrow in the loss of kindred of his own, fallen in the front +of battle. Particularly note-worthy in this memorial ode are the +tribute to Abraham Lincoln, the third strophe beginning, "Many loved +Truth;" the exordium, "O Beautiful! my Country! ours once more!" and +the close of the eighth strophe, where the poet chants of the youthful +heroes who + + "Come transfigured back, + Secure from change in their high-hearted ways, + Beautiful evermore and with the rays + Of morn on their white Shields of Expectation." + +From 1857 to 1862 Lowell edited the _Atlantic Monthly_, and from 1863 +to 1872 the _North American Review_. His prose, beginning with an +early volume of _Conversations on Some of the Old Poets_, 1844, has +consisted mainly of critical essays on individual writers, such as +Dante, Chaucer, Spenser, Emerson, Shakespeare, Thoreau, Pope, Carlyle, +etc., together with papers of a more miscellaneous kind, like +_Witchcraft_, _New England Two Centuries Ago_, _My Garden +Acquaintance_, _A Good Word for Winter_, _Abraham Lincoln_, etc., etc. +Two volumes of these were published in 1870 and 1876, under the title +_Among My Books_, and another, _My Study Windows_, in 1871. As a +literary critic Lowell ranks easily among the first of living writers. +His scholarship is thorough, his judgment keen, and he pours out upon +his page an unwithholding wealth of knowledge, humor, wit, and +imagination from the fullness of an overflowing mind. His prose has +not the chastened correctness and "low tone" of Matthew Arnold's. It +is rich, exuberant, and, sometimes overfanciful, running away into +excesses of allusion or following the lead of a chance pun so as +sometimes to lay itself open to the charge of pedantry and bad taste. +Lowell's resources in the way of illustration and comparison are +endless, and the readiness of his wit and his delight in using it put +many temptations in his way. Purists in style accordingly take offense +at his saying that "Milton is the only man who ever got much poetry out +of a cataract, and that was a cataract in his eye," or of his speaking +of "a gentleman for whom the bottle before him reversed the wonder of +the stereoscope and substituted the Gascon _v_ for the _b_ in +binocular," which is certainly a puzzling and roundabout fashion of +telling us that he had drunk so much that he saw double. The critics +also find fault with his coining such words as "undisprivacied," and +with his writing such lines as the famous one--from _The Cathedral_, +1870-- + + "Spume-sliding down the baffled decuman." + +It must be acknowledged that his style lacks the crowning grace of +simplicity, but it is precisely by reason of its allusive quality that +scholarly readers take pleasure in it. They like a diction that has +stuff in it and is woven thick, and where a thing is said in such a way +as to recall many other things. + +Mention should be made, in connection with this Cambridge circle, of +one writer who touched its circumference briefly. This was Sylvester +Judd, a graduate of Yale, who entered the Harvard Divinity School in +1837, and in 1840 became minister of a Unitarian church in Augusta, +Maine. Judd published several books, but the only one of them at all +rememberable was _Margaret_, 1845, a novel of which, Lowell said, in _A +Fable for Critics_, that it was "the first Yankee book with the soul of +Down East in it." It was very imperfect in point of art, and its +second part--a rhapsodical description of a sort of Unitarian +Utopia--is quite unreadable. But in the delineation of the few chief +characters and of the rude, wild life of an outlying New England +township just after the close of the Revolutionary War, as well as in +the tragic power of the catastrophe, there was genius of a high order. + +As the country has grown older and more populous, and works in all +departments of thought have multiplied, it becomes necessary to draw +more strictly the line between the literature of knowledge and the +literature of power. Political history, in and of itself, scarcely +falls within the limits of this sketch, and yet it cannot be altogether +dismissed, for the historian's art, at its highest, demands +imagination, narrative skill, and a sense of unity and proportion in +the selection and arrangement of his facts, all of which are literary +qualities. It is significant that many of our best historians have +begun authorship in the domain of imaginative literature: Bancroft with +an early volume of poems; Motley with his historical romances, _Merry +Mount_ and _Morton's Hope_; and Parkman with a novel, _Vassall Morton_. +The oldest of that modern group of writers that have given America an +honorable position in the historical literature of the world was +William Hickling Prescott (1796-1859). Prescott chose for his theme +the history of the Spanish conquests in the New World, a subject full +of romantic incident and susceptible of that glowing and perhaps +slightly overgorgeous coloring which he laid on with a liberal hand. +His completed histories, in their order, are the _Reign of Ferdinand +and Isabella_, 1837; the _Conquest of Mexico_, 1843--a topic which +Irving had relinquished to him; and the _Conquest of Peru_, 1847. +Prescott was fortunate in being born to leisure and fortune, but he had +difficulties of another kind to overcome. He was nearly blind, and had +to teach himself Spanish and look up authorities through the help of +others, and to write with a noctograph or by amanuenses. + +George Bancroft (1800-91) issued the first volume of his great _History +of the United States_ in 1834, and exactly half a century later the +final volume of the work, bringing the subject down to 1789. Bancroft +had studied at Göttingen, and imbibed from the German historian Heeren +the scientific method of historical study. He had access to original +sources, in the nature of collections and state papers in the +governmental archives of Europe, of which no American had hitherto been +able to avail himself. His history, in thoroughness of treatment, +leaves nothing to be desired, and has become the standard authority on +the subject. As a literary performance merely, it is somewhat wanting +in flavor, Bancroft's manner being heavy and stiff when compared with +Motley's or Parkman's. The historian's services to his country have +been publicly recognized by his successive appointments as secretary of +the navy, minister to England, and minister to Germany. + +The greatest, on the whole, of American historians was John Lothrop +Motley (1814-77), who, like Bancroft, was a student at Göttingen and +United States minister to England. His _Rise of the Dutch Republic_, +1856, and _History of the United Netherlands_, published in +installments from 1861 to 1868, equaled Bancroft's work in scientific +thoroughness and philosophic grasp, and Prescott's in the picturesque +brilliancy of the narrative, while it excelled them both in its +masterly analysis of great historic characters, reminding the reader, +in this particular, of Macaulay's figure-painting. The episodes of the +siege of Antwerp and the sack of the cathedral, and of the defeat and +wreck of the Spanish Armada, are as graphic as Prescott's famous +description of Cortez's capture of the city of Mexico; while the elder +historian has nothing to compare with Motley's vivid personal sketches +of Queen Elizabeth, Philip the Second, Henry of Navarre, and William +the Silent. The _Life of John of Barneveld_, 1874, completed this +series of studies upon the history of the Netherlands, a theme to which +Motley was attracted because the heroic struggle of the Dutch for +liberty offered, in some respects, a parallel to the growth of +political independence in Anglo-Saxon communities, and especially in +his own America. + +The last of these Massachusetts historical writers whom we shall +mention is Francis Parkman (1823- ), whose subject has the advantage +of being thoroughly American. His _Oregon Trail_, 1847, a series of +sketches of prairie and Rocky Mountain life, originally contributed to +the _Knickerbocker Magazine_, displays his early interest in the +American Indians. In 1851 appeared his first historical work, the +_Conspiracy of Pontiac_. This has been followed by the series entitled +_France and England in North America_, the six successive parts of +which are as follows: the _Pioneers of France in the New World_, the +_Jesuits in North America_; _La Salle and the Discovery of the Great +West_; the _Old Régime in Canada_; _Count Frontenac and New France_; +and _Montcalm and Wolfe_. These narratives have a wonderful vividness, +and a romantic interest not inferior to Cooper's novels. Parkman made +himself personally familiar with the scenes which he described, and +some of the best descriptions of American woods and waters are to be +found in his histories. If any fault is to be found with his books, +indeed, it is that their picturesqueness and "fine writing" are a +little in excess. + +The political literature of the years from 1837 to 1861 hinged upon the +antislavery struggle. In this "irrepressible conflict" Massachusetts +led the van. Garrison had written in his _Liberator_, in 1830, "I will +be as harsh as truth and as uncompromising as justice. I am in +earnest; I will not equivocate; I will not excuse; I will not retreat a +single inch; and I will be heard." But the Garrisonian abolitionists +remained for a long time, even in the North, a small and despised +faction. It was a great point gained when men of education and social +standing, like Wendell Phillips (1811-84) and Charles Sumner (1811-74), +joined themselves to the cause. Both of these were graduates of +Harvard and men of scholarly pursuits. They became the representative +orators of the antislavery party, Phillips on the platform and Sumner +in the Senate. The former first came before the public in his fiery +speech, delivered in Faneuil Hall December 8, 1837, before a meeting +called to denounce the murder of Lovejoy, who had been killed at Alton, +Ill., while defending his press against a pro-slavery mob. Thenceforth +Phillips's voice was never idle in behalf of the slave. His eloquence +was impassioned and direct, and his English singularly pure, simple, +and nervous. He is perhaps nearer to Demosthenes than any other +American orator. He was a most fascinating platform speaker on themes +outside of politics, and his lecture on the _Lost Arts_ was a favorite +with audiences of all sorts. + +Sumner was a man of intellectual tastes, who entered politics +reluctantly and only in obedience to the resistless leading of his +conscience. He was a student of literature and art; a connoisseur of +engravings, for example, of which he made a valuable collection. He +was fond of books, conversation, and foreign travel, and in Europe, +while still a young man, had made a remarkable impression in society. +But he left all this for public life, and in 1851 was elected as +Webster's successor to the Senate of the United States. Thereafter he +remained the leader of the abolitionists in Congress until slavery was +abolished. His influence throughout the North was greatly increased by +the brutal attack upon him in the Senate chamber in 1856 by "Bully +Brooks" of South Carolina. Sumner's oratory was stately and somewhat +labored. While speaking he always seemed, as has been wittily said, to +be surveying a "broad landscape of his own convictions." His most +impressive qualities as a speaker were his intense moral earnestness +and his thorough knowledge of his subject. The most telling of his +parliamentary speeches are perhaps his speech _On the Kansas-Nebraska +Bill_, of February 3, 1854, and _On the Crime against Kansas_, May 19 +and 20, 1856; of his platform addresses, the oration on the _True +Grandeur of Nations_. + + +1. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. _Voices of the Night_. _The Skeleton +in Armor_. _The Wreck of the Hesperus_. _The Village Blacksmith_. +_The Belfry of Bruges, and Other Poems_ (1846). _By the Seaside_. +_Hiawatha_. _Tales of a Wayside Inn_. + +2. Oliver Wendell Holmes. _Autocrat of the Breakfast Table_. _Elsie +Venner_. _Old Ironsides_. _The Last Leaf_. _My Aunt_. _The Music +Grinders_. _On Lending a Punch-Bowl_. _Nux Postcoenatica_. _A Modest +Request_. _The Living Temple_. _Meeting of the Alumni of Harvard +College_. _Homesick in Heaven_. _Epilogue to the Breakfast Table +Series_. _The Boys_. _Dorothy Q_. _The Iron Gate_. + +3. James Russell Lowell. _The Biglow Papers_ (two series). _Under the +Willows, and Other Poems_ (1868). _Rhoecus_. _The Shepherd of King +Admetus_. _The Vision of Sir Launfal_. _The Present Crisis_. _The +Dandelion_. _The Birch Tree_. _Beaver Brook_. _Essays on Chaucer_. +_Shakespeare Once More_. _Dryden_. _Emerson, the Lecturer_. +_Thoreau_. _My Garden Acquaintance_. _A Good Word for Winter_. _A +Certain Condescension in Foreigners_. + +4. William Hickling Prescott. _The Conquest of Mexico_. + +5. John Lothrop Motley. _The United Netherlands_. + +6. Francis Parkman. _The Oregon Trail_. _The Jesuits in North +America_. + +7. _Representative American Orations_, volume v. Edited by Alexander +Johnston. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. 1884. + + +[Transcriber's note: In the poem fragment "soap for soap" the o's in +each "soap" must be rendered with Unicode to appear correctly--in the +first "soap", o-breve (Ux014F); in the second, o-macron (Ux014D).] + + + + +CHAPTER VI. + +LITERATURE IN THE CITIES. + +1837-1861. + +Literature as a profession has hardly existed in the United States +until very recently. Even now the number of those who support +themselves by purely literary work is small, although the growth of the +reading public and the establishment of great magazines, such as +_Harper's_, the _Century_, and the _Atlantic_, have made a market for +intellectual wares which forty years ago would have seemed a godsend to +poorly paid Bohemians like Poe or obscure men of genius like Hawthorne. +About 1840, two Philadelphia magazines--_Godey's Lady's Book_ and +_Graham's Monthly_--began to pay their contributors twelve dollars a +page, a price then thought wildly munificent. But the first magazine +of the modern type was _Harper's Monthly_, founded in 1850. American +books have always suffered, and still continue to suffer, from the want +of an international copyright, which has flooded the country with cheap +reprints and translations of foreign works, with which the domestic +product has been unable to contend on such uneven terms. With the +first ocean steamers there started up a class of large-paged weeklies +in New York and elsewhere, such as _Brother Jonathan_, the _New World_, +and the _Corsair_, which furnished their readers with the freshest +writings of Dickens and Bulwer and other British celebrities within a +fortnight after their appearance in London. This still further +restricted the profits of native authors and nearly drove them from the +field of periodical literature. By special arrangement the novels of +Thackeray and other English writers were printed in _Harper's_ in +installments simultaneously with their issue in English periodicals. +The _Atlantic_ was the first of our magazines which was founded +expressly for the encouragement of home talent, and which had a purely +Yankee flavor. Journalism was the profession which naturally attracted +men of letters, as having most in common with their chosen work and as +giving them a medium, under their own control, through which they could +address the public. A few favored scholars, like Prescott, were made +independent by the possession of private fortunes. Others, like +Holmes, Longfellow, and Lowell, gave to literature such leisure as they +could get in the intervals of an active profession or of college work. +Still others, like Emerson and Thoreau, by living in the country and +making their modest competence--eked out in Emerson's case by lecturing +here and there--suffice for their simple needs, secured themselves +freedom from the restraints of any regular calling. But, in default of +some such _pou sto_, our men of letters have usually sought the cities +and allied themselves with the press. It will be remembered that +Lowell started a short-lived magazine on his own account, and that he +afterward edited the _Atlantic_ and the _North American_. Also that +Ripley and Charles A. Dana betook themselves to journalism after the +break-up of the Brook Farm Community. + +In the same way William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878), the earliest +American poet of importance, whose impulses drew him to the solitudes +of nature, was compelled to gain a livelihood, by conducting a daily +newspaper; or, as he himself puts it, was + + "Forced to drudge for the dregs of men, + And scrawl strange words with the barbarous pen." + +Bryant was born at Cummington, in Berkshire, the western-most county of +Massachusetts. After two years in Williams College he studied law, and +practiced for nine years as a country lawyer in Plainfield and Great +Barrington. Following the line of the Housatonic Valley, the social +and theological affiliations of Berkshire have always been closer with +Connecticut and New York than with Boston and eastern Massachusetts. +Accordingly, when in 1825 Bryant yielded to the attractions of a +literary career, he betook himself to New York city, where, after a +brief experiment in conducting a monthly magazine, the _New York Review +and Athenaeum_, he assumed the editorship of the _Evening Post_, a +Democratic and free-trade journal, with which he remained connected +till his death. He already had a reputation as a poet when he entered +the ranks of metropolitan journalism. In 1816 his _Thanatopsis_ had +been published in the _North American Review_, and had attracted +immediate and general admiration. It had been finished, indeed, two +years before, when the poet was only in his nineteenth year, and was a +wonderful instance of precocity. The thought in this stately hymn was +not that of a young man, but of a sage who has reflected long upon the +universality, the necessity, and the majesty of death. Bryant's blank +verse when at its best, as in _Thanatopsis_ and the _Forest Hymn_, is +extremely noble. In gravity and dignity it is surpassed by no English +blank verse of this century, though in rich and various modulation it +falls below Tennyson's _Ulysses_ and _Morte d'Arthur_. It was +characteristic of Bryant's limitations that he came thus early into +possession of his faculty. His range was always a narrow one, and +about his poetry, as a whole, there is a certain coldness, rigidity, +and solemnity. His fixed position among American poets is described in +his own _Hymn to the North Star_: + + "And thou dost see them rise, + Star of the pole! and thou dost see them set. + Alone, in thy cold skies, + Thou keep'st thy old, unmoving station yet, + Nor join'st the dances of that glittering train, + Nor dipp'st thy virgin orb in the blue western main." + +In 1821 he read _The Ages_, a didactic poem, in thirty-five stanzas, +before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge, and in the same year +brought out his first volume of poems. A second collection appeared in +1832, which was printed in London under the auspices of Washington +Irving. Bryant was the first American poet who had much of an audience +in England, and Wordsworth is said to have learned _Thanatopsis_ by +heart. Bryant was, indeed, in a measure, a scholar of Wordsworth's +school, and his place among American poets corresponds roughly, though +not precisely, to Wordsworth's among English poets. With no humor, +with somewhat restricted sympathies, with little flexibility or +openness to new impressions, but gifted with a high, austere +imagination, Bryant became the meditative poet of nature. His best +poems are those in which he draws lessons from nature, or sings of its +calming, purifying, and bracing influences upon the human soul. His +office, in other words, is the same which Matthew Arnold asserts to be +the peculiar office of modern poetry, "the moral interpretation of +nature." Poems of this class are _Green River_, _To a Water-fowl_, +_June_, the _Death of the Flowers_, and the _Evening Wind_. The song, +"O fairest of the rural maids," which has more fancy than is common in +Bryant, and which Poe pronounced his best poem, has an obvious +resemblance to Wordsworth's "Three years she grew in sun and shade," +and both of these nameless pieces might fitly be entitled--as +Wordsworth's is in Mr. Palgrave's _Golden Treasury_--"The Education of +Nature." + +Although Bryant's career is identified with New York his poetry is all +of New England. His heart was always turning back fondly to the woods +and streams of the Berkshire hills. There was nothing of that urban +strain in him which appears in Holmes and Willis. He was, in especial, +the poet of autumn, of the American October and the New England Indian +Summer, that season of "dropping nuts" and "smoky light," to whose +subtle analogy with the decay of the young by the New England disease, +consumption, he gave such tender expression in the _Death of the +Flowers_, and amid whose "bright, late quiet" he wished himself to pass +away. Bryant is our poet of "the melancholy days," as Lowell is of +June. If, by chance, he touches upon June, it is not with the exultant +gladness of Lowell in meadows full of bobolinks, and in the summer day +that is + + "simply perfect from its own resource, + As to the bee the new campanula's + Illuminate seclusion swung in air." + +Rather, the stir of new life in the clod suggests to Bryant by contrast +the thought of death; and there is nowhere in his poetry a passage of +deeper feeling than the closing stanzas of _June_, in which he speaks +of himself, by anticipation, as of one + + "Whose part in all the pomp that fills + The circuit of the summer hills + Is--that his grave is green." + +Bryant is, _par excellence_, the poet of New England wild flowers, the +yellow violet, the fringed gentian--to each of which he dedicated an +entire poem--the orchis and the golden-rod, "the aster in the wood and +the yellow sunflower by the brook." With these his name will be +associated as Wordsworth's with the daffodil and the lesser celandine, +and Emerson's with the rhodora. + +Except when writing of nature he was apt to be commonplace, and there +are not many such energetic lines in his purely reflective verse as +these famous ones from _The Battle-Field_: + + "Truth crushed to earth shall rise again; + The eternal years of God are hers; + But Error, wounded, writhes in pain, + And dies among his worshipers." + +He added but slowly to the number of his poems, publishing a new +collection in 1840, another in 1844, and _Thirty Poems_ in 1864. His +work at all ages was remarkably even. _Thanatopsis_ was as mature as +any thing that he wrote afterward, and among his later pieces the +_Planting of the Apple Tree_ and the _Flood of Years_ were as fresh as +any thing that he had written in the first flush of youth. Bryant's +poetic style was always pure and correct, without any tincture of +affectation or extravagance. His prose writings are not important, +consisting mainly of papers of the _Salmagundi_ variety contributed to +the _Talisman_, an annual published in 1827-30; some rather sketchy +stories, _Tales of the Glauber Spa_, 1832; and impressions of Europe, +entitled _Letters of a Traveler_, issued in two series, in 1849 and +1858. In 1869 and 1871 appeared his blank-verse translations of the +_Iliad_ and _Odyssey_, a remarkable achievement for a man of his age, +and not excelled, upon the whole, by any recent metrical version of +Homer in the English tongue. Bryant's half-century of service as the +editor of a daily paper should not be overlooked. The _Evening Post_, +under his management, was always honest, gentlemanly, and courageous, +and did much to raise the tone of journalism in New York. + +Another Massachusetts poet, who was outside the Boston coterie, like +Bryant, and, like him, tried his hand at journalism, was John Greenleaf +Whittier (1807- ). He was born in a solitary farm-house near +Haverhill, in the valley of the Merrimack, and his life has been passed +mostly at his native place and at the neighboring town of Amesbury. +The local color, which is very pronounced in his poetry, is that of the +Merrimack from the vicinity of Haverhill to its mouth at Newburyport, a +region of hill-side farms, opening out below into wide marshes--"the +low, green prairies of the sea," and the beaches of Hampton and +Salisbury. The scenery of the Merrimack is familiar to all readers of +Whittier: the cotton-spinning towns along its banks, with their +factories and dams, the sloping pastures and orchards of the back +country, the sands of Plum Island and the level reaches of water meadow +between which glide the broad-sailed "gundalows"--a local corruption of +gondola--laden with hay. Whittier was a farmer lad, and had only such +education as the district school could supply, supplemented by two +years at the Haverhill Academy. In his _School Days_ he gives a +picture of the little old country school-house as it used to be, the +only _alma mater_ of so many distinguished Americans, and to which many +others who have afterward trodden the pavements of great universities +look back so fondly as to their first wicket gate into the land of +knowledge. + + "Still sits the school-house by the road, + A ragged beggar sunning; + Around it still the sumachs grow + And blackberry vines are running. + + "Within the master's desk is seen, + Deep-scarred by raps official, + The warping floor, the battered seats, + The jack-knife's carved initial." + +A copy of Burns awoke the slumbering instinct in the young poet, and he +began to contribute verses to Garrison's _Free Press_, published in +Newburyport, and to the _Haverhill Gazette_. Then he went to Boston, +and became editor for a short time of the _Manufacturer_. Next he +edited the _Essex Gazette_, at Haverhill, and in 1830 he took charge of +George D. Prentice's paper, the _New England Weekly Review_, at +Hartford, Conn. Here he fell in with a young Connecticut poet of much +promise, J. G. C. Brainard, editor of the _Connecticut Mirror_, whose +"Remains" Whittier edited in 1832. At Hartford, too, he published his +first book, a volume of prose and verse, entitled _Legends of New +England_, 1831, which is not otherwise remarkable than as showing his +early interest in Indian colonial traditions--especially those which +had a touch of the supernatural--a mine which he afterward worked to +good purpose in the _Bridal of Pennacook_, the _Witch's Daughter_, and +similar poems. Some of the _Legends_ testify to Brainard's influence +and to the influence of Whittier's temporary residence at Hartford. +One of the prose pieces, for example, deals with the famous "Moodus +Noises" at Haddam, on the Connecticut River, and one of the poems is +the same in subject with Brainard's _Black Fox of Salmon River_. After +a year and a half at Hartford Whittier returned to Haverhill and to +farming. + +The antislavery agitation was now beginning, and into this he threw +himself with all the ardor of his nature. He became the poet of the +reform as Garrison was its apostle, and Sumner and Phillips its +speakers. In 1833 he published _Justice and Expediency_, a prose tract +against slavery, and in the same year he took part in the formation of +the American Antislavery Society at Philadelphia, sitting in the +convention as a delegate of the Boston abolitionists. Whittier was a +Quaker, and that denomination, influenced by the preaching of John +Woolman and others, had long since quietly abolished slavery within its +own communion. The Quakers of Philadelphia and elsewhere took an +earnest though peaceful part in the Garrisonian movement. But it was a +strange irony of fate that had made the fiery-hearted Whittier a +friend. His poems against slavery and disunion have the martial ring +of a Tyrtaeus or a Körner, added to the stern religious zeal of +Cromwell's Ironsides. They are like the sound of the trumpet blown +before the walls of Jericho, or the psalms of David denouncing woe upon +the enemies of God's chosen people. If there is any purely Puritan +strain in American poetry it is in the war-hymns of the Quaker "Hermit +of Amesbury." Of these patriotic poems there were three principal +collections: _Voices of Freedom_, 1849; _The Panorama, and Other +Poems_, 1856; and _In War Time_, 1863. Whittier's work as the poet of +freedom was done when, on hearing the bells ring for the passage of the +constitutional amendment abolishing slavery, he wrote his splendid +_Laus Deo_, thrilling with the ancient Hebrew spirit: + + "Loud and long + Lift the old exulting song, + Sing with Miriam by the sea-- + He has cast the mighty down, + Horse and rider sink and drown, + He hath triumphed gloriously." + +Of his poems distinctly relating to the events of the civil war, the +best, or at all events the most popular, is _Barbara Frietchie_. +_Ichabod_, expressing the indignation of the Free Soilers at Daniel +Webster's seventh of March speech in defense of the Fugitive Slave Law, +is one of Whittier's best political poems, and not altogether unworthy +of comparison with Browning's _Lost Leader_. The language of +Whittier's warlike lyrics is biblical, and many of his purely +devotional pieces are religious poetry of a high order and have been +included in numerous collections of hymns. Of his songs of faith and +doubt, the best are perhaps _Our Master_, _Chapel of the Hermits_, and +_Eternal Goodness_; one stanza from the last of which is familiar; + + "I know not where his islands lift + Their fronded palms in air, + I only know I cannot drift, + Beyond his love and care." + +But from politics and war Whittier turned gladly to sing the homely +life of the New England country-side. His rural ballads and idyls are +as genuinely American as any thing that our poets have written, and +have been recommended, as such, to English working-men by Whittier's +co-religionist, John Bright. The most popular of these is probably +_Maud Muller_, whose closing couplet has passed into proverb. _Skipper +Ireson's Ride_ is also very current. Better than either of them, as +poetry, is _Telling the Bees_. But Whittier's masterpiece in work of a +descriptive and reminiscent kind is _Snow-Bound_, 1866, a New England +fireside idyl which in its truthfulness recalls the _Winter Evening_ of +Cowper's _Task_ and Burns's _Cotter's Saturday Night_, but in sweetness +and animation is superior to either of them. Although in some things a +Puritan of the Puritans, Whittier has never forgotten that he is also a +Friend, and several of his ballads and songs have been upon the subject +of the early Quaker persecutions in Massachusetts. The most impressive +of these is _Cassandra Southwick_. The latest of them, the _King's +Missive_, originally contributed to the _Memorial History of Boston_ in +1880, and reprinted the next year in a volume with other poems, has +been the occasion of a rather lively controversy. The _Bridal of +Pennacook_, 1848, and the _Tent on the Beach_, 1867, which contain some +of his best work, were series of ballads told by different narrators, +after the fashion of Longfellow's _Tales of a Wayside Inn_. As an +artist in verse, Whittier is strong and fervid, rather than delicate or +rich. He uses only a few metrical forms--by preference the +eight-syllabled rhyming couplet-- + + "Maud Muller on a summer's day + Raked the meadow sweet with hay," etc. + +and the emphatic tramp of this measure becomes very monotonous, as do +some of Whittier's mannerisms, which proceed, however, never from +affectation, but from a lack of study and variety, and so, no doubt, in +part from the want of that academic culture and thorough technical +equipment which Lowell and Longfellow enjoyed. Though his poems are +not in dialect, like Lowell's _Biglow Papers_, he knows how to make an +artistic use of homely provincial words, such as "chore," which give +his idyls of the hearth and the barnyard a genuine Doric cast. +Whittier's prose is inferior to his verse. The fluency which was a +besetting sin of his poetry, when released from the fetters of rhyme +and meter, ran into wordiness. His prose writings were partly +contributions to the slavery controversy, partly biographical sketches +of English and American reformers, and partly studies of the scenery +and folk-lore of the Merrimack Valley. Those of most literary interest +were the _Supernaturalism of New England_, 1847, and some of the papers +in _Literary Recreations and Miscellanies_, 1854. + +While Massachusetts was creating an American literature other sections +of the Union were by no means idle. The West, indeed, was as yet too +raw to add any thing of importance to the artistic product of the +country. The South was hampered by circumstances which will presently +be described. But in and about the sea-board cities of New York, +Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Richmond many pens were busy filling the +columns of literary weeklies and monthlies; and there was a +considerable output, such as it was, of books of poetry, fiction, +travel, and miscellaneous light literature. Time has already relegated +most of these to the dusty top shelves. To rehearse the names of the +numerous contributors to the old _Knickerbocker Magazine_, to +_Godey's_, and _Graham's_, and the _New Mirror_, and the _Southern +Literary Messenger_, or to run over the list of authorlings and +poetasters in Poe's papers on the _Literati of New York_, would be very +much like reading the inscriptions on the head-stones of an old +grave-yard. In the columns of these prehistoric magazines and in the +book notices and reviews away back in the thirties and forties, one +encounters the handiwork and the names of Emerson, Holmes, Longfellow, +Hawthorne, and Lowell embodied in this mass of forgotten literature. +It would have required a good deal of critical acumen, at the time, to +predict that these and a few others would soon be thrown out into bold +relief, as the significant and permanent names in the literature of +their generation, while Paulding, Hirst, Fay, Dawes, Mrs. Osgood, and +scores of others who figured beside them in the fashionable +periodicals, and filled quite as large a space in the public eye, would +sink into oblivion in less than thirty years. Some of these latter +were clever enough people; they entertained their contemporary public +sufficiently, but their work had no vitality or "power of continuance." +The great majority of the writings of any period are necessarily +ephemeral, and time by a slow process of natural selection is +constantly sifting out the few representative books which shall carry +on the memory of the period to posterity. Now and then it may be +predicted of some undoubted work of genius, even at the moment that it +sees the light, that it is destined to endure. But tastes and fashions +change, and few things are better calculated to inspire the literary +critic with humility than to read the prophecies in old reviews and see +how the future, now become the present, has quietly given them the lie. + +From among the professional _littérateurs_ of his day emerges, with +ever sharper distinctness as time goes on, the name of Edgar Allan Poe +(1809-49). By the irony of fate Poe was born at Boston, and his first +volume, _Tamerlane, and Other Poems_, 1827, was printed in that city +and bore upon its title-page the words, "By a Bostonian." But his +parentage, so far as it was any thing, was Southern. His father was a +Marylander who had gone upon the stage and married an actress, herself +the daughter of an actress and a native of England. Left an orphan by +the early death of both parents, Poe was adopted by a Mr. Allan, a +wealthy merchant of Richmond, Va. He was educated partly at an English +school, was student for a time in the University of Virginia, and +afterward a cadet in the Military Academy at West Point. His youth was +wild and irregular; he gambled and drank, was proud, bitter, and +perverse, finally quarreled with his guardian and adopted father--by +whom he was disowned--and then betook himself to the life of a literary +hack. His brilliant but underpaid work for various periodicals soon +brought him into notice, and he was given the editorship of the +_Southern Literary Messenger_, published at Richmond, and subsequently +of the _Gentlemen's_--afterward _Graham's_--_Magazine_ in Philadelphia. +These and all other positions Poe forfeited through his dissipated +habits and wayward temper, and finally, in 1844, he drifted to New +York, where he found employment on the _Evening Mirror_ and then on the +_Broadway Journal_. He died of delirium tremens at the Marine Hospital +in Baltimore. His life was one of the most wretched in literary +history. He was an extreme instance of what used to be called the +"eccentricity of genius." He had the irritable vanity which is +popularly supposed to accompany the poetic temperament, and was so +insanely egotistic as to imagine that Longfellow and others were +constantly plagiarizing from him. The best side of Poe's character +came out in his domestic relations, in which he displayed great +tenderness, patience, and fidelity. His instincts were gentlemanly, +and his manner and conversation were often winning. In the place of +moral feeling he had the artistic conscience. In his critical papers, +except where warped by passion or prejudice, he showed neither fear nor +favor, denouncing bad work by the most illustrious hands and commending +obscure merit. The "impudent literary cliques" who puffed each other's +books; the feeble chirrupings of the bardlings who manufactured verses +for the "Annuals;" and the twaddle of the "genial" incapables who +praised them in flabby reviews--all these Poe exposed with ferocious +honesty. Nor, though his writings are unmoral, can they be called in +any sense immoral. His poetry is as pure in its unearthliness as +Bryant's in its austerity. + +By 1831 Poe had published three thin books of verse, none of which had +attracted notice, although the latest contained the drafts of a few of +his most perfect poems, such as _Israfel_, the _Valley of Unrest_, the +_City in the Sea_, and one of the two pieces inscribed _To Helen_. It +was his habit to touch and retouch his work until it grew under his +more practiced hand into a shape that satisfied his fastidious taste. +Hence the same poem frequently re-appears in different stages of +development in successive editions. Poe was a subtle artist in the +realm of the weird and the fantastic. In his intellectual nature there +was a strange conjunction; an imagination as spiritual as Shelley's, +though, unlike Shelley's, haunted perpetually with shapes of fear and +the imagery of ruin; with this, an analytic power, a scientific +exactness, and a mechanical ingenuity more usual in a chemist or a +mathematician than in a poet. He studied carefully the mechanism of +his verse and experimented endlessly with verbal and musical effects, +such as repetition and monotone and the selection of words in which the +consonants alliterated and the vowels varied. In his _Philosophy of +Composition_ he described how his best-known poem, the _Raven_, was +systematically built up on a preconceived plan in which the number of +lines was first determined and the word "nevermore" selected as a +starting-point. No one who knows the mood in which poetry is composed +will believe that this ingenious piece of dissection really describes +the way in which the _Raven_ was conceived and written, or that any +such deliberate and self-conscious process could _originate_ the +associations from which a true poem springs. But it flattered Poe's +pride of intellect to assert that his cooler reason had control not +only over the execution of his poetry, but over the very well-head of +thought and emotion. Some of his most successful stories, like the +_Gold Bug_, the _Mystery of Marie Roget_, the _Purloined Letter_, and +the _Murders in the Rue Morgue_, were applications of this analytic +faculty to the solution of puzzles, such as the finding of buried +treasure or of a lost document, or the ferreting out of a mysterious +crime. After the publication of the _Gold Bug_ he received from all +parts of the country specimens of cipher-writing, which he delighted to +work out. Others of his tales were clever pieces of mystification, +like _Hans Pfaall_, the story of a journey to the moon, or experiments +at giving verisimilitude to wild improbabilities by the skillful +introduction of scientific details, as in the _Facts in the Case of M. +Valdemar_ and _Von Kempelen's Discovery_. In his narratives of this +kind Poe anticipated the detective novels of Gaboriau and Wilkie +Collins, the scientific hoaxes of Jules Verne, and, though in a less +degree, the artfully worked up likeness to fact in Edward Everett +Hale's _Man Without a Country_, and similar fictions. While Dickens's +_Barnaby Rudge_ was publishing in parts Poe showed his skill as a +plot-hunter by publishing a paper in _Graham's Magazine_ in which the +very tangled intrigue of the novel was correctly raveled and the finale +predicted in advance. + +In his union of imagination and analytic power Poe resembled Coleridge, +who, if any one, was his teacher in poetry and criticism. Poe's verse +often reminds one of _Christabel_ and the _Ancient Mariner_, still +oftener of _Kubla Khan_. Like Coleridge, too, he indulged at times in +the opium habit. But in Poe the artist predominated over every thing +else. He began not with sentiment or thought, but with technique, with +melody and color, tricks of language, and effects of verse. It is +curious to study the growth of his style in his successive volumes of +poetry. At first these are metrical experiments and vague images, +original, and with a fascinating suggestiveness, but with so little +meaning that some of his earlier pieces are hardly removed from +nonsense. Gradually, like distant music drawing nearer and nearer, his +poetry becomes fuller of imagination and of an inward significance, +without ever losing, however, its mysterious aloofness from the real +world of the senses. It was a part of Poe's literary creed--formed +upon his own practice and his own limitations, but set forth with a +great display of _a priori_ reasoning in his essay on the _Poetic +Principle_ and elsewhere--that pleasure and not instruction or moral +exhortation was the end of poetry; that beauty and not truth or +goodness was its means; and, furthermore, that the pleasure which it +gave should be indefinite. About his own poetry there was always this +indefiniteness. His imagination dwelt in a strange country of dream--a +"ghoul-haunted region of Weir," "out of space, out of time"--filled +with unsubstantial landscapes and peopled by spectral shapes. And yet +there is a wonderful, hidden significance in this uncanny scenery. The +reader feels that the wild, fantasmal imagery is in itself a kind of +language, and that it in some way expresses a brooding thought or +passion, the terror and despair of a lost soul. Sometimes there is an +obvious allegory, as in the _Haunted Palace_, which is the parable of a +ruined mind, or in the _Raven_, the most popular of all Poe's poems, +originally published in the _American Whig Review_ for February, 1845. +Sometimes the meaning is more obscure, as in _Ulalume_, which, to most +people, is quite incomprehensible, and yet to all readers of poetic +feeling is among the most characteristic, and, therefore, the most +fascinating, of its author's creations. + +Now and then, as in the beautiful ballad _Annabel Lee_, and _To One in +Paradise_, the poet emerges into the light of common human feeling and +speaks a more intelligible language. But in general his poetry is not +the poetry of the heart, and its passion is not the passion of flesh +and blood. In Poe the thought of death is always near, and of the +shadowy borderland between death and life. + + "The play is the tragedy 'Man,' + And its hero the Conqueror Worm." + +The prose tale, _Ligeia_, in which these verses are inserted, is one of +the most powerful of all Poe's writings, and its theme is the power of +the will to overcome death. In that singularly impressive poem, _The +Sleeper_, the morbid horror which invests the tomb springs from the +same source, the materiality of Poe's imagination, which refuses to let +the soul go free from the body. + +This quality explains why Poe's _Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque_, +1840, are on a lower plane than Hawthorne's romances, to which a few of +them, like _William Wilson_, and _The Man of the Crowd_, have some +resemblance. The former of these, in particular, is in Hawthorne's +peculiar province, the allegory of the conscience. But in general the +tragedy in Hawthorne is a spiritual one, while Poe calls in the aid of +material forces. The passion of physical fear or of superstitious +horror is that which his writings most frequently excite. These tales +represent various grades of the frightful and the ghastly, from the +mere bugaboo story like the _Black Cat_, which makes children afraid to +go in the dark, up to the breathless terror of the _Cask of +Amontillado_, or the _Red Death_. Poe's masterpiece in this kind is +the fateful tale of the _Fall of the House of Usher_, with its solemn +and magnificent close. His prose, at its best, often recalls, in its +richly imaginative cast, the manner of De Quincey in such passages as +his _Dream Fugue_, or _Our Ladies of Sorrow_. In descriptive pieces +like the _Domain of Arnheim_, and stories of adventure like the +_Descent into the Maelstrom_, and his long sea-tale, _The Narrative of +Arthur Gordon Pym_, 1838, he displayed, a realistic inventiveness +almost equal to Swift's or De Foe's. He was not without a mocking +irony, but he had no constructive humor, and his attempts at the +facetious were mostly failures. + +Poe's magical creations were rootless flowers. He took no hold upon +the life about him, and cared nothing for the public concerns of his +country. His poems and tales might have been written _in vacuo_ for +any thing American in them. Perhaps for this reason, in part, his fame +has been so cosmopolitan. In France especially his writings have been +favorites. Charles Baudelaire, the author of the _Fleurs du Mal_, +translated them into French, and his own impressive but unhealthy +poetry shows evidence of Poe's influence. The defect in Poe was in +character--a defect which will make itself felt in art as in life. If +he had had the sweet home feeling of Longfellow or the moral fervor of +Whittier he might have been a greater poet than either. + + "If I could dwell + Where Israfel + Hath dwelt, and he where I, + He might not sing so wildly well + A mortal melody, + While a bolder note than this might swell + From my lyre within the sky!" + +Though Poe was a Southerner, if not by birth, at least by race and +breeding, there was nothing distinctly Southern about his peculiar +genius, and in his wandering life he was associated as much with +Philadelphia and New York as with Baltimore and Richmond. The +conditions which had made the Southern colonies unfruitful in literary +and educational works before the Revolution continued to act down to +the time of the civil war. Eli Whitney's invention of the cotton-gin +in the closing years of the last century gave extension to slavery, +making it profitable to cultivate the now staple by enormous gangs of +field-hands working under the whip of the overseer in large +plantations. Slavery became henceforth a business speculation in the +States furthest south, and not, as in Old Virginia and Kentucky, a +comparatively mild domestic system. The necessity of defending its +peculiar institution against the attacks of a growing faction in the +North compelled the South to throw all its intellectual strength into +politics, which, for that matter, is the natural occupation and +excitement of a social aristocracy. Meanwhile immigration sought the +free States, and there was no middle class at the South. The "poor +whites" were ignorant and degraded. There were people of education in +the cities and on some of the plantations, but there was no great +educated class from which a literature could proceed. And the culture +of the South, such as it was, was becoming old-fashioned and local, as +the section was isolated more and more from the rest of the Union and +from the enlightened public opinion of Europe by its reactionary +prejudices and its sensitiveness on the subject of slavery. Nothing +can be imagined more ridiculously provincial than the sophomorical +editorials in the Southern press just before the outbreak of the war, +or than the backward and ill-informed articles which passed for reviews +in the poorly supported periodicals of the South. + +In the general dearth of work of high and permanent value, one or two +Southern authors may be mentioned whose writings have at least done +something to illustrate the life and scenery of their section. When in +1833 the Baltimore _Saturday Visitor_ offered a prize of a hundred +dollars for the best prose tale, one of the committee who awarded the +prize to Poe's first story, the _MS. Found in a Bottle_, was John P. +Kennedy, a Whig gentleman of Baltimore, who afterward became secretary +of the navy in Fillmore's administration. The year before he had +published _Swallow Barn_, a series of agreeable sketches of country +life in Virginia. In 1835 and 1838 he published his two novels, +_Horse-Shoe Robinson_ and _Rob of the Bowl_, the former a story of the +Revolutionary War in South Carolina, the latter an historical tale of +colonial Maryland. These had sufficient success to warrant reprinting +as late as 1852. But the most popular and voluminous of all Southern +writers of fiction was William Gilmore Simms, a South Carolinian, who +died in 1870. He wrote over thirty novels, mostly romances of +Revolutionary history, Southern life, and wild adventure, among the +best of which were the _Partisan_, 1835, and the _Yemassee_. Simms was +an inferior Cooper, with a difference. His novels are good boys' +books, but are crude and hasty in composition. He was strongly +Southern in his sympathies, though his newspaper, the _Charleston City +Gazette_, took part against the Nullifiers. His miscellaneous writings +include several histories and biographies, political tracts, addresses, +and critical papers contributed to Southern magazines. He also wrote +numerous poems, the most ambitious of which was _Atlantis, a Story of +the Sea_, 1832. His poems have little value except as here and there +illustrating local scenery and manners, as in _Southern Passages and +Pictures_, 1839. Mr. John Esten Cooke's pleasant but not very strong +_Virginia Comedians_ was, perhaps, in literary quality the best +Southern novel produced before the civil war. + +When Poe came to New York the most conspicuous literary figure of the +metropolis, with the possible exception of Bryant and Halleck, was N. +P. Willis, one of the editors of the _Evening Mirror_, upon which +journal Poe was for a time engaged. Willis had made a literary +reputation, when a student at Yale, by his _Scripture Poems_, written +in smooth blank verse. Afterward he had edited the _American Monthly_ +in his native city of Boston, and more recently he had published +_Pencillings by the Way_, 1835, a pleasant record of European +saunterings; _Inklings of Adventure_, 1836, a collection of dashing +stories and sketches of American and foreign life; and _Letters from +Under a Bridge_, 1839, a series of charming rural letters from his +country place at Owego, on the Susquehanna. Willis's work, always +graceful and sparkling, sometimes even brilliant, though light in +substance and jaunty in style, had quickly raised him to the summit of +popularity. During the years from 1835 to 1850 he was the most +successful American magazinist, and even down to the day of his death, +in 1867, he retained his hold upon the attention of the fashionable +public by his easy paragraphing and correspondence in the _Mirror_ and +its successor, the _Home Journal_, which catered to the literary wants +of the _beau monde_. Much of Willis's work was ephemeral, though +clever of its kind, but a few of his best tales and sketches, such as +_F. Smith_, _The Ghost Ball at Congress Hall_, _Edith Linsey_, and the +_Lunatic's Skate_, together with some of the _Letters from Under a +Bridge_, are worthy of preservation, not only as readable stories, but +as society studies of life at American watering-places like Nahant and +Saratoga and Ballston Spa half a century ago. A number of his simpler +poems, like _Unseen Spirits_, _Spring_, _To M---- from Abroad_, and +_Lines on Leaving Europe_, still retain a deserved place in collections +and anthologies. + +The senior editor of the _Mirror_, George P. Morris, was once a very +popular song-writer, and his _Woodman, Spare that Tree_, still +survives. Other residents of New York city who have written single +famous pieces were Clement C. Moore, a professor in the General +Theological Seminary, whose _Visit from St. Nicholas_--"'Twas the Night +Before Christmas," etc.--is a favorite ballad in every nursery in the +land; Charles Fenno Hoffman, a novelist of reputation in his time, but +now remembered only as the author of the song _Sparkling and Bright_, +and the patriotic ballad of _Monterey_; Robert H. Messinger, a native +of Boston, but long resident in New York, where he was a familiar +figure in fashionable society, who wrote _Give Me the Old_, a fine ode +with a choice Horatian flavor; and William Allen Butler, a lawyer and +occasional writer, whose capital satire of _Nothing to Wear_ was +published anonymously and had a great run. Of younger poets, like +Stoddard and Aldrich, who formerly wrote for the _Mirror_ and who are +still living and working in the maturity of their powers, it is not +within the limits and design of this sketch to speak. But one of their +contemporaries, Bayard Taylor, who died American minister at Berlin, in +1878, though a Pennsylvanian by birth and rearing, may be reckoned +among the "literati of New York." A farmer lad from Chester County, +who had learned the printer's trade and printed a little volume of his +juvenile verses in 1844, he came to New York shortly after with +credentials from Dr. Griswold, the editor of _Graham's_, and obtaining +encouragement and aid from Willis, Horace Greeley, and others, he set +out to make the tour of Europe, walking from town to town in Germany +and getting employment now and then at his trade to help pay the +expenses of the trip. The story of these _Wanderjahre_ he told in his +_Views Afoot_, 1846. This was the first of eleven books of travel +written during the course of his life. He was an inveterate nomad, and +his journeyings carried him to the remotest regions--to California, +India, China, Japan, and the isles of the sea, to Central Africa and +the Soudan, Palestine, Egypt, Iceland, and the "by-ways of Europe." His +head-quarters at home were in New York, where he did literary work for +the _Tribune_. He was a rapid and incessant worker, throwing off many +volumes of verse and prose, fiction, essays, sketches, translations, +and criticisms, mainly contributed in the first instance to the +magazines. His versatility was very marked, and his poetry ranged from +_Rhymes of Travel_, 1848, and _Poems of the Orient_, 1854, to idyls and +home ballads of Pennsylvania life, like the _Quaker Widow_ and the _Old +Pennsylvania Farmer_; and on the other side, to ambitious and somewhat +mystical poems, like the _Masque of the Gods_, 1872--written in four +days--and dramatic experiments like the _Prophet_, 1874, and _Prince +Deukalion_, 1878. He was a man of buoyant and eager nature, with a +great appetite for new experience, a remarkable memory, a talent for +learning languages, and a too great readiness to take the hue of his +favorite books. From his facility, his openness to external +impressions of scenery and costume and his habit of turning these at +once into the service of his pen, it results that there is something +"newspapery" and superficial about most of his prose. It is reporter's +work, though reporting of a high order. His poetry too, though full of +glow and picturesqueness, is largely imitative, suggesting Tennyson not +unfrequently, but more often Shelley. His spirited _Bedouin Song_, for +example, has an echo of Shelley's _Lines to an Indian Air_: + + "From the desert I come to thee + On a stallion shod with fire; + And the winds are left behind + In the speed of my desire. + Under thy window I stand, + And the midnight hears my cry; + I love thee, I love but thee, + With a love that shall not die." + +The dangerous quickness with which he caught the manner of other poets +made him an admirable parodist and translator. His _Echo Club_, 1876, +contains some of the best travesties in the tongue, and his great +translation of Goethe's _Faust_, 1870-71--with its wonderfully close +reproduction of the original meters--is one of the glories of American +literature. All in all, Taylor may unhesitatingly be put first among +our poets of the second generation--the generation succeeding that of +Longfellow and Lowell--although the lack in him of original genius +self-determined to a peculiar sphere, or the want of an inward fixity +and concentration to resist the rich tumult of outward impressions, has +made him less significant in the history of our literary thought than +some other writers less generously endowed. + +Taylor's novels had the qualities of his verse. They were profuse, +eloquent, and faulty. _John Godfrey's Fortune_, 1864, gave a picture +of bohemian life in New York. _Hannah Thurston_, 1863, and the _Story +of Kennett_; 1866, introduced many incidents and persons from the old +Quaker life of rural Pennsylvania, as Taylor remembered it in his +boyhood. The former was like Hawthorne's _Blithedale Romance_, a +satire on fanatics and reformers, and its heroine is a nobly conceived +character, though drawn with some exaggeration. The _Story of +Kennett_, which is largely autobiographic, has a greater freshness and +reality than the others, and is full of personal recollections. In +these novels, as in his short stories, Taylor's pictorial skill is +greater on the whole than his power of creating characters or inventing +plots. + +Literature in the West now began to have an existence. Another young +poet from Chester County, Pa., namely, Thomas Buchanan Read, went to +Cincinnati, and not to New York, to study sculpture and painting, about +1837, and one of his best-known poems, _Pons Maximus_, was written on +the occasion of the opening of the suspension bridge across the Ohio. +Read came East, to be sure, in 1841, and spent many years in our +sea-board cities and in Italy. He was distinctly a minor poet, but +some of his Pennsylvania pastorals, like the _Deserted Road_, have a +natural sweetness; and his luxurious _Drifting_, which combines the +methods of painting and poetry, is justly popular. _Sheridan's +Ride_--perhaps his most current piece--is a rather forced production, +and has been overpraised. The two Ohio sister poets, Alice and Phoebe +Cary, were attracted to New York in 1850, as soon as their literary +success seemed assured. They made that city their home for the +remainder of their lives. Poe praised Alice Cary's _Pictures of +Memory_, and Phoebe's _Nearer Home_ has become a favorite hymn. There +is nothing peculiarly Western about the verse of the Cary sisters. It +is the poetry of sentiment, memory, and domestic affection, entirely +feminine, rather tame and diffuse as a whole, but tender and sweet, +cherished by many good women and dear to simple hearts. + +A stronger smack of the soil is in the Negro melodies like _Uncle Ned_, +_O Susanna_, _Old Folks at Home_, _'Way Down South_, _Nelly was a +Lady_, _My Old Kentucky Home_, etc., which were the work, not of any +Southern poet, but of Stephen C. Foster, a native of Allegheny, Pa., +and a resident of Cincinnati and Pittsburg. He composed the words and +music of these, and many others of a similar kind, during the years +1847 to 1861. Taken together they form the most original and vital +addition which this country has made to the psalmody of the world, and +entitle Foster to the first rank among American song-writers. + +As Foster's plaintive melodies carried the pathos and humor of the +plantation all over the land, so Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe's _Uncle +Tom's Cabin_, 1852, brought home to millions of readers the sufferings +of the Negroes in the "black belt" of the cotton-growing States. This +is the most popular novel ever written in America. Hundreds of +thousands of copies were sold in this country and in England, and some +forty translations were made into foreign tongues. In its dramatized +form it still keeps the stage, and the statistics of circulating +libraries show that even now it is in greater demand than any other +single book. It did more than any other literary agency to rouse the +public conscience to a sense of the shame and horror of slavery; more +even than Garrison's _Liberator_, more than the indignant poems of +Whittier and Lowell or the orations of Sumner and Phillips. It +presented the thing concretely and dramatically, and in particular it +made the odious Fugitive Slave Law forever impossible to enforce. It +was useless for the defenders of slavery to protest that the picture +was exaggerated, and that planters like Legree were the exception. The +system under which such brutalities could happen, and did sometimes +happen, was doomed. It is easy now to point out defects of taste and +art in this masterpiece, to show that the tone is occasionally +melodramatic, that some of the characters are conventional, and that +the literary execution is in parts feeble and in others coarse. In +spite of all, it remains true that _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ is a great book, +the work of genius seizing instinctively upon its opportunity and +uttering the thought of the time with a power that thrilled the heart +of the nation and of the world. Mrs. Stowe never repeated her first +success. Some of her novels of New England life, such as the +_Minister's Wooing_, 1859, and the _Pearl of Orr's Island_, 1862, have +a mild kind of interest, and contain truthful portraiture of provincial +ways and traits; while later fictions of a domestic type, like _Pink +and White Tyranny_ and _My Wife and I_, are really beneath criticism. + +There were other Connecticut writers contemporary with Mrs. Stowe: Mrs. +L. H. Sigourney, for example, a Hartford poetess, formerly known as +"the Hemans of America," but now quite obsolete; and J. G. Percival, of +New Haven, a shy and eccentric scholar, whose geological work was of +value, and whose memory is preserved by one or two of his simpler +poems, still in circulation, such as _To Seneca Lake_ and the _Coral +Grove_. Another Hartford poet, Brainard--already spoken of as an early +friend of Whittier--died young, leaving a few pieces which show that +his lyrical gift was spontaneous and genuine, but had received little +cultivation. A much younger writer than either of these, Donald G. +Mitchell, of New Haven, has a more lasting place in our literature, by +virtue of his charmingly written _Reveries of a Bachelor_, 1850, and +_Dream Life_, 1852, stories which sketch themselves out in a series of +reminiscences and lightly connected scenes, and which always appeal +freshly to young men because they have that dreamy outlook upon life +which is characteristic of youth. But, upon the whole, the most +important contribution made by Connecticut in that generation to the +literary stock of America was the Beecher family. Lyman Beecher had +been an influential preacher and theologian, and a sturdy defender of +orthodoxy against Boston Unitarianism. Of his numerous sons and +daughters, all more or less noted for intellectual vigor and +independence, the most eminent were Mrs. Stowe and Henry Ward Beecher, +the great pulpit orator of Brooklyn. Mr. Beecher was too busy a man to +give more than his spare moments to general literature. His sermons, +lectures, and addresses were reported for the daily papers and printed +in part in book form; but these lose greatly when divorced from the +large, warm, and benignant personality of the man. His volumes made up +of articles in the _Independent_ and the _Ledger_, such as _Star +Papers_, 1855, and _Eyes and Ears_, 1862, contain many delightful +_morceaux_ upon country life and similar topics, though they are hardly +wrought with sufficient closeness and care to take a permanent place in +letters. Like Willis's _Ephemera_ they are excellent literary +journalism, but hardly literature. + +We may close our retrospect of American literature before 1861 with a +brief notice of one of the most striking literary phenomena of the +time--the _Leaves of Grass_ of Walt Whitman, published at Brooklyn in +1855. The author, born at West Hills, Long Island, in 1819, had been +printer, school-teacher, editor, and builder. He had scribbled a good +deal of poetry of the ordinary kind, which attracted little attention, +but finding conventional rhymes and meters too cramping a vehicle for +his need of expression, he discarded them for a kind of rhythmic chant, +of which the following is a fair specimen: + + "Press close, bare-bosom'd night! Press close, magnetic, + nourishing night! + Night of south winds! night of the few large stars! + Still, nodding night! mad, naked, summer night!" + +The invention was not altogether a new one. The English translation of +the psalms of David and of some of the prophets, the _Poems of Ossian_, +and some of Matthew Arnold's unrhymed pieces, especially the _Strayed +Reveller_, have an irregular rhythm of this kind, to say nothing of the +old Anglo-Saxon poems, like _Beowulf_, and the Scripture paraphrases +attributed to Caedmon. But this species of _oratio soluta_, carried to +the lengths to which Whitman carried it, had an air of novelty which +was displeasing to some, while to others, weary of familiar measures +and jingling rhymes, it was refreshing in its boldness and freedom. +There is no consenting estimate of this poet. Many think that his +so-called poems are not poems at all, but simply a bad variety of +prose; that there is nothing to him beyond a combination of affectation +and indecency; and that the Whitman _culte_ is a passing "fad" of a few +literary men, and especially of a number of English critics like +Rossetti, Swinburne, Buchanan, etc., who, being determined to have +something unmistakably American--that is, different from any thing +else--in writings from this side of the water, before they will +acknowledge any originality in them, have been misled into discovering +in Whitman "the poet of democracy." Others maintain that he is the +greatest of American poets, or, indeed, of all modern poets; that he is +"cosmic," or universal, and that he has put an end forever to puling +rhymes and lines chopped up into metrical feet. Whether Whitman's +poetry is formally poetry at all or merely the raw material of poetry, +the chaotic and amorphous impression which it makes on readers of +conservative tastes results from his effort to take up into his verse +elements which poetry has usually left out--the ugly, the earthy, and +even the disgusting; the "under side of things," which he holds not to +be prosaic when apprehended with a strong, masculine joy in life and +nature seen in all their aspects. The lack of these elements in the +conventional poets seems to him and his disciples like leaving out the +salt from the ocean, making poetry merely pretty and blinking whole +classes of facts. Hence the naturalism and animalism of some of the +divisions in _Leaves of Grass_, particularly that entitled _Children of +Adam_, which gave great offense by its immodesty, or its outspokenness, +Whitman holds that nakedness is chaste; that all the functions of the +body in healthy exercise are equally clean; that all, in fact, are +divine, and that matter is as divine as spirit. The effort to get +every thing into his poetry, to speak out his thought just as it comes +to him, accounts, too, for his way of cataloguing objects without +selection. His single expressions arc often unsurpassed for +descriptive beauty and truth. He speaks of "the vitreous pour of the +full moon, just tinged with blue," of the "lisp" of the plane, of the +prairies, "where herds of buffalo make a crawling spread of the square +miles." But if there is any eternal distinction between poetry and +prose, the most liberal canons of the poetic art will never agree to +accept lines like these: + + "And [I] remember putting plasters on the galls of his neck and ankles; + He stayed with me a week before he was recuperated, and passed north." + +Whitman is the spokesman of democracy and of the future; full of +brotherliness and hope, loving the warm, gregarious pressure of the +crowd and the touch of his comrade's elbow in the ranks. He liked the +people--multitudes of people; the swarm of life beheld from a Broadway +omnibus or a Brooklyn ferry-boat. The rowdy and the Negro truck-driver +were closer to his sympathy than the gentleman and the scholar. "I +loaf and invite my soul," he writes; "I sound my barbaric yawp over the +roofs of the world." His poem _Walt Whitman_, frankly egotistic, +simply describes himself as a typical, average man--the same as any +other man, and therefore not individual but universal. He has great +tenderness and heartiness--"the good gray poet;" and during the civil +war he devoted himself unreservedly to the wounded soldiers in the +Washington hospitals--an experience which he has related in the +_Dresser_ and elsewhere. It is characteristic of his rough and ready +comradery to use slang and newspaper English in his poetry, to call +himself Walt instead of Walter, and to have his picture taken in a +slouch hat and with a flannel shirt open at the throat. His decriers +allege that he poses for effect; that he is simply a backward eddy in +the tide, and significant only as a temporary reaction against ultra +civilization--like Thoreau, though in a different way. But with all +his shortcomings in art there is a healthy, virile, tumultuous pulse of +life in his lyric utterance and a great sweep of imagination in his +panoramic view of times and countries. One likes to read him because +he feels so good, enjoys so fully the play of his senses, and has such +a lusty confidence in his own immortality and in the prospects of the +human race. Stripped of verbiage and repetition, his ideas are not +many. His indebtedness to Emerson--who wrote an introduction to the +_Leaves of Grass_--is manifest. He sings of man and not men, and the +individual differences of character, sentiment, and passion, the +_dramatic_ elements of life, find small place in his system. It is too +early to say what will be his final position in literary history. But +it is noteworthy that the democratic masses have not accepted him yet +as their poet. Whittier and Longfellow, the poets of conscience and +feeling, are the darlings of the American people. The admiration, and +even the knowledge of Whitman, are mostly esoteric, confined to the +literary class. It is also not without significance as to the ultimate +reception of his innovations in verse that he has numerous parodists, +but no imitators. The tendency among our younger poets is not toward +the abandonment of rhyme and meter, but toward the introduction of new +stanza forms and an increasing carefulness and finish in the +_technique_ of their art. It is observable, too, that in his most +inspired passages Whitman reverts to the old forms of verse; to blank +verse, for example, in the _Man-of-War-Bird_: + + "Thou who hast slept all night upon the storm, + Waking renewed on thy prodigious pinions," etc.; + +and elsewhere not infrequently to dactylic hexameters and pentameters: + + "Earth of shine and dark, mottling the tide of the river! . . . + Far-swooping, elbowed earth! rich, apple-blossomed earth." + +Indeed, Whitman's most popular poem, _My Captain_, written after the +assassination of Abraham Lincoln, differs little in form from ordinary +verse, as a stanza of it will show: + + "My captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still; + My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will; + The ship is anchored safe and sound, its voyage closed and done; + From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won. + Exult, O shores, and ring, O bells! + But I, with mournful tread, + Walk the deck, my captain lies + Fallen, cold and dead." + +This is from _Drum Taps_, a volume of poems of the civil war. Whitman +has also written prose having much the same quality as his poetry: +_Democratic Vistas_, _Memoranda of the Civil War_, and, more recently, +_Specimen Days_. His residence of late years has been at Camden, New +Jersey, where a centennial edition of his writings was published in +1876. + +1. William Cullen Bryant. _Thanatopsis_. _To a Water-fowl_. _Green +River_. _Hymn to the North Star_. _A Forest Hymn_. "_O Fairest of +the Rural Maids_." _June_. _The Death of the Flowers_. _The Evening +Wind_. _The Battle-Field_. _The Planting of the Apple-tree_. _The +Flood of Years_. + +2. John Greenleaf Whittier. _Cassandra Southwick_. _The New Wife and +the Old_. _The Virginia Slave Mother_. _Randolph of Roanoke_. +_Barclay of Ury_. _The Witch of Wenham_. _Skipper Ireson's Ride_. +_Marguerite_. _Maud Muller_. _Telling the Bees_. _My Playmate_. +_Barbara Frietchie_. _Ichabod_. _Laus Deo_. _Snow-Bound_. + +3. Edgar Allan Poe. _The Raven_. _The Bells_. _Israfel_. _Ulalume_. +_To Helen_. _The City in the Sea_. _Annabel Lee_. _To One in +Paradise_. _The Sleeper_. _The Valley of Unrest_. _The Fall of the +House of Usher_. _Ligeia_. _William Wilson_. _The Cask of +Amontillado_. _The Assignation_. _The Masque of the Red Death_. +_Narrative of A. Gordon Pym_. + +4. N. P. Willis. _Select Prose Writings_. New York: Charles +Scribner's Sons. 1886. + +5. Mrs. H. B. Stowe. _Uncle Tom's Cabin_. _Oldtown Folks_. + +6. W. G. Simms, _The Partisan_. _The Yemassee_. + +7. Bayard Taylor. _A Bacchic Ode_. _Hylas_. _Kubleh_. _The Soldier +and the Pard_. _Sicilian Wine_. _Taurus_. _Serapion_. _The +Metempsychosis of the Pine_. _The Temptation of Hassan Ben Khaled_. +_Bedouin Song_. _Euphorion_. _The Quaker Widow_. _John Reid_. +_Lars_. _Views Afoot_. _By-ways of Europe_. _The Story of Kennett_. +_The Echo Club_. + +8. Walt Whitman. _My Captain_. "_When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard +Bloomed_." _Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking_. _Pioneers, O +Pioneers_. _The Mystic Trumpeter_. _A Woman at Auction_. _Sea-shore +Memoirs_. _Passage to India_. _Mannahatta_. _The Wound Dresser_. +_Longings for Some_. + +9. _Poets of America_. By E. C. Stedman. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & +Co. 1885. + + + + +CHAPTER VII. + +LITERATURE SINCE 1861. + +A generation has nearly passed since the outbreak of the civil war, and +although public affairs are still mainly in the hands of men who had +reached manhood before the conflict opened, or who were old enough at +that time to remember clearly its stirring events, the younger men who +are daily coming forward to take their places know it only by +tradition. It makes a definite break in the history of our literature, +and a number of new literary schools and tendencies have appeared since +its close. As to the literature of the war itself, it was largely the +work of writers who had already reached or passed middle age. All of +the more important authors described in the last three chapters +survived the Rebellion except Poe, who died in 1849, Prescott, who died +in 1859, and Thoreau and Hawthorne, who died in the second and fourth +years of the war, respectively. The final and authoritative history of +the struggle has not yet been written, and cannot be written for many +years to come. Many partial and tentative accounts have, however, +appeared, among which may be mentioned, on the Northern side, Horace +Greeley's _American Conflict_, 1864-66; Vice-President Wilson's _Rise +and Fall of the Slave Power in America_, and J. W. Draper's _American +Civil War_, 1868-70; on the Southern side Alexander H. Stephens's +_Confederate States of America_, Jefferson Davis's _Rise and Fall of +the Confederate States of America_, and E. A. Pollard's _Lost Cause_. +These, with the exception of Dr. Draper's philosophical narrative, have +the advantage of being the work of actors in the political or military +events which they describe, and the disadvantage of being, therefore, +partisan--in some instances passionately partisan. A store-house of +materials for the coming historian is also at hand in Frank Moore's +great collection, the _Rebellion Record_; in numerous regimental +histories of special armies, departments, and battles, like W. +Swinton's _Army of the Potomac_; in the autobiographies and +recollections of Grant and Sherman and other military leaders; in the +"war papers," lately published in the _Century_ magazine, and in +innumerable sketches and reminiscences by officers and privates on both +sides. + +The war had its poetry, its humors, and its general literature, some of +which have been mentioned in connection with Whittier, Lowell, Holmes, +Whitman, and others, and some of which remain to be mentioned, as the +work of new writers, or of writers who had previously made little mark. +There were war-songs on both sides, few of which had much literary +value excepting, perhaps, James R. Randall's Southern ballad, +_Maryland, My Maryland_, sung to the old college air of _Lauriger +Horatius_, and the grand martial chorus of _John Brown's Body_, an old +Methodist hymn, to which the Northern armies beat time as they went +"marching on." Randall's song, though spirited, was marred by its +fire-eating absurdities about "vandals" and "minions" and "Northern +scum," the cheap insults of the Southern newspaper press. To furnish +the _John Brown_ chorus with words worthy of the music, Mrs. Julia Ward +Howe wrote her _Battle-Hymn of the Republic_, a noble poem, but rather +too fine and literary for a song, and so never fully accepted by the +soldiers. Among the many verses which voiced the anguish and the +patriotism of that stern time, which told of partings and home-comings, +of women waiting by desolate hearths, in country homes, for tidings of +husbands and sons who had gone to the war; or which celebrated +individual deeds of heroism or sang the thousand private tragedies and +heartbreaks of the great conflict, by far the greater number were of +too humble a grade to survive the feeling of the hour. Among the best +or the most popular of them were Kate Putnam Osgood's _Driving Home the +Cows_, Mrs. Ethel Lynn Beers's _All Quiet Along the Potomac_; Forceythe +Willson's _Old Sergeant_, and John James Piatt's _Riding to Vote_. Of +the poets whom the war brought out, or developed, the most noteworthy +were Henry Timrod, of South Carolina, and Henry Howard Brownell, of +Connecticut. During the war Timrod was with the Confederate Army of +the West, as correspondent for the _Charleston Mercury_, and in 1864 he +became assistant editor of the _South Carolinian_, at Columbia. +Sherman's "march to the sea" broke up his business, and he returned to +Charleston. A complete edition of his poems was published in 1873, six +years after his death. The prettiest of all Timrod's poems is _Katie_, +but more to our present purpose are _Charleston_--written in the time +of blockade--and the _Unknown Dead_, which tells + + "Of nameless graves on battle plains, + Wash'd by a single winter's rains, + Where, some beneath Virginian hills, + And some by green Atlantic rills, + Some by the waters of the West, + A myriad unknown heroes rest." + +When the war was over a poet of New York State, F. M. Finch, sang of +these and of other graves in his beautiful Decoration Day lyric, _The +Blue and the Gray_, which spoke the word of reconciliation and +consecration for North and South alike. + +Brownell, whose _Lyrics of a Day_ and _War Lyrics_ were published +respectively in 1864 and 1866, was private secretary to Farragut, on +whose flag-ship, the _Hartford_, he was present at several great naval +engagements, such as the "Passage of the Forts" below New Orleans, and +the action off Mobile, described in his poem, the _Bay Fight_. With +some roughness and unevenness of execution Brownell's poetry had a fire +which places him next to Whittier as the Körner of the civil war. In +him, especially, as in Whittier, is that Puritan sense of the +righteousness of his cause which made the battle for the Union a holy +war to the crusaders against slavery: + + "Full red the furnace fires must glow + That melt the ore of mortal kind; + The mills of God are grinding slow, + But ah, how close they grind! + + "To-day the Dahlgren and the drum + Are dread apostles of his name; + His kingdom here can only come + By chrism of blood and flame." + +One of the earliest martyrs of the war was Theodore Winthrop, hardly +known as a writer until the publication in the _Atlantic Monthly_ of +his vivid sketches of _Washington as a Camp_, describing the march of +his regiment, the famous New York Seventh, and its first quarters in +the Capitol at Washington. A tragic interest was given to these papers +by Winthrop's gallant death in the action of Big Bethel, June 10, 1861. +While this was still fresh in public recollection his manuscript novels +were published, together with a collection of his stories and sketches +reprinted from the magazines. His novels, though in parts crude and +immature, have a dash and buoyancy--an out-door air about them--which +give the reader a winning impression of Winthrop's personality. The +best of them is, perhaps, _Cecil Dreeme_, a romance that reminds one a +little of Hawthorne, and the scene of which is the New York University +building on Washington Square, a locality that has been further +celebrated in Henry James's novel of _Washington Square_. + +Another member of this same Seventh Regiment, Fitz James O'Brien, an +Irishman by birth, who died at Baltimore in 1862 from the effects of a +wound received in a cavalry skirmish, had contributed to the magazines +a number of poems and of brilliant though fantastic tales, among which +the _Diamond Lens_ and _What Was It?_ had something of Edgar A. Poe's +quality. Another Irish-American, Charles G. Halpine, under the +pen-name of "Miles O'Reilly," wrote a good many clever ballads of the +war, partly serious and partly in comic brogue. Prose writers of note +furnished the magazines with narratives of their experience at the seat +of war, among papers of which kind may be mentioned Dr. Holmes's _My +Search for the Captain_, in the _Atlantic Monthly_, and Colonel T. W. +Higginson's _Army Life in a Black Regiment_, collected into a volume in +1870. + +Of the public oratory of the war, the foremost example is the +ever-memorable address of Abraham Lincoln at the dedication of the +National Cemetery at Gettysburg. The war had brought the nation to its +intellectual majority. In the stress of that terrible fight there was +no room for buncombe and verbiage, such as the newspapers and +stump-speakers used to dole out in _ante bellum_ days. Lincoln's +speech is short--a few grave words which he turned aside for a moment +to speak in the midst of his task of saving the country. The speech is +simple, naked of figures, every sentence impressed with a sense of +responsibility for the work yet to be done and with a stern +determination to do it. "In a larger sense," it says, "we cannot +dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The +brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it far +above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor +long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did +here. It is for us, the living, rather to be dedicated here to the +unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly +advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task +remaining before us; that from these honored dead we take increased +devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of +devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have +died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of +freedom; and that government of the people, by the people, for the +people, shall not perish from the earth." Here was eloquence of a +different sort from the sonorous perorations of Webster or the polished +climaxes of Everett. As we read the plain, strong language of this +brief classic, with its solemnity, its restraint, its "brave old wisdom +of sincerity," we seem to see the president's homely features +irradiated with the light of coming martyrdom-- + + "The kindly-earnest, brave, foreseeing man, + Sagacious, patient, dreading praise, not blame, + New birth of our new soil, the first American." + +Within the past quarter of a century the popular school of American +humor has reached its culmination. Every man of genius who is a +humorist at all is so in a way peculiar to himself. There is no lack +of individuality in the humor of Irving and Hawthorne and the wit of +Holmes and Lowell, but although they are new in subject and application +they are not new in kind. Irving, as we have seen, was the literary +descendant of Addison. The character-sketches in _Bracebridge Hall_ +are of the same family with Sir Roger de Coverley and the other figures +of the Spectator Club. _Knickerbocker's History of New York_, though +purely American in its matter, is not distinctly American in its +method, which is akin to the mock heroic of Fielding and the irony of +Swift in the _Voyage to Lilliput_. Irving's humor, like that of all +the great English humorists, had its root in the perception of +character--of the characteristic traits of men and classes of men, as +ground of amusement. It depended for its effect, therefore, upon its +truthfulness, its dramatic insight and sympathy, as did the humor of +Shakespeare, of Sterne, Lamb, and Thackeray. This perception of the +characteristic, when pushed to excess, issues in grotesque and +caricature, as in some of Dickens's inferior creations, which are +little more than personified single tricks of manner, speech, feature, +or dress. Hawthorne's rare humor differed from Irving's in temper but +not in substance, and belonged, like Irving's, to the English variety. +Dr. Holmes's more pronouncedly comic verse does not differ specifically +from the _facetiae_ of Thomas Hood, but his prominent trait is wit, +which is the laughter of the head as humor is of the heart. The same +is true, with qualifications, of Lowell, whose _Biglow Papers_, though +humor of an original sort in their revelation of Yankee character, are +essentially satirical. It is the cleverness, the shrewdness of the +hits in the _Biglow Papers_, their logical, that is, _witty_ character, +as distinguished from their drollery, that arrests the attention. They +are funny, but they are not so funny as they are smart. In all these +writers humor was blent with more serious qualities, which gave +fineness and literary value to their humorous writings. Their view of +life was not exclusively comic. But there has been a class of jesters, +of professional humorists, in America, whose product is so indigenous, +so different, if not in essence, yet at least in form and expression, +from any European humor, that it may be regarded as a unique addition +to the comic literature of the world. It has been accepted as such in +England, where Artemus Ward and Mark Twain are familiar to multitudes +who have never read the _One Hoss-Shay_ or _The Courtin'_. And though +it would be ridiculous to maintain that either of these writers takes +rank with Lowell and Holmes, or to deny that there is an amount of +flatness and coarseness in many of their labored fooleries which puts +large portions of their writings below the line where real literature +begins, still it will not do to ignore them as mere buffoons, or even +to predict that their humors will soon be forgotten. It is true that +no literary fashion is more subject to change than the fashion of a +jest, and that jokes that make one generation laugh seem insipid to the +next. But there is something perennial in the fun of Rabelais, whom +Bacon called "the great jester of France," and though the puns of +Shakespeare's clowns are detestable the clowns themselves have not lost +their power to amuse. + +The Americans are not a gay people, but they are fond of a joke. +Lincoln's "little stories" were characteristically Western, and it is +doubtful whether he was more endeared to the masses by his solid +virtues than by the humorous perception which made him one of them. +The humor of which we are speaking now is a strictly popular and +national possession. Though America has never, or not until lately, +had a comic paper ranking with _Punch_ or _Charivari_ or the _Fliegende +Blätter_, every newspaper has had its funny column. Our humorists have +been graduated from the journalist's desk and sometimes from the +printing-press, and now and then a local or country newspaper has risen +into sudden prosperity from the possession of a new humorist, as in the +case of G. D. Prentice's _Courier Journal_, or more recently of the +_Cleveland Plaindealer_, the _Danbury News_, the _Burlington Hawkeye_, +the _Arkansaw Traveller_, the _Texas Siftings_, and numerous others. +Nowadays there are even syndicates of humorists, who co-operate to +supply fun for certain groups of periodicals. Of course, the great +majority of these manufacturers of jests for newspapers and comic +almanacs are doomed to swift oblivion. But it is not so certain that +the best of the class, like Clemens and Browne, will not long continue +to be read as illustrative of one side of the American mind, or that +their best things will not survive as long as the _mots_ of Sydney +Smith, which are still as current as ever. One of the earliest of them +was Seba Smith, who, under the name of "Major Jack Downing," did his +best to make Jackson's administration ridiculous. B. P. Shillaber's +"Mrs. Partington"--a sort of American Mrs. Malaprop--enjoyed great +vogue before the war. Of a somewhat higher kind were the +_Phoenixiana_, 1855, and _Squibob Papers_, 1856, of Lieutenant George +H. Derby, "John Phoenix," one of the pioneers of literature on the +Pacific coast at the time of the California gold fever of '49. Derby's +proposal for _A New System of English Grammar_, his satirical account +of the topographical survey of the two miles of road between San +Francisco and the Mission Dolores, and his picture gallery made out of +the conventional houses, steam-boats, rail-cars, runaway Negroes, and +other designs which used to figure in the advertising columns of the +newspapers, were all very ingenious and clever. But all these pale +before Artemus Ward--"Artemus the delicious," as Charles Reade called +him--who first secured for this peculiarly American type of humor a +hearing and reception abroad. Ever since the invention of Hosea +Biglow, an imaginary personage of some sort, under cover of whom the +author might conceal his own identity, has seemed a necessity to our +humorists. Artemus Ward was a traveling showman who went about the +country exhibiting a collection of wax "figgers" and whose experiences +and reflections were reported in grammar and spelling of a most +ingeniously eccentric kind. His inventor was Charles F. Browne, +originally of Maine, a printer by trade and afterward a newspaper +writer and editor at Boston, Toledo, and Cleveland, where his +comicalities in the _Plaindealer_ first began to attract notice. In +1860 he came to New York and joined the staff of _Vanity Fair_, a comic +weekly of much brightness, which ran a short career and perished for +want of capital. When Browne began to appear as a public lecturer, +people who had formed an idea of him from his impersonation of the +shrewd and vulgar old showman were surprised to find him a +gentlemanly-looking young man, who came upon the platform in correct +evening dress, and "spoke his piece" in a quiet and somewhat mournful +manner, stopping in apparent surprise when any one in the audience +laughed at any uncommonly outrageous absurdity. In London, where he +delivered his _Lecture on the Mormons_, in 1806, the gravity of his +bearing at first imposed upon his hearers, who had come to the hall in +search of instructive information and were disappointed at the +inadequate nature of the panorama which Browne had had made to +illustrate his lecture. Occasionally some hitch would occur in the +machinery of this and the lecturer would leave the rostrum for a few +moments to "work the moon" that shone upon the Great Salt Lake, +apologizing on his return on the ground, that he was "a man short" and +offering "to pay a good salary to any respectable boy of good parentage +and education who is a good moonist." When it gradually dawned upon +the British intellect that these and similar devices of the +lecturer--such as the soft music which he had the pianist play at +pathetic passages--nay, that the panorama and even the lecture itself +were of a humorous intention, the joke began to take, and Artemus's +success in England became assured. He was employed as one of the +editors of _Punch_, but died at Southampton in the year following. + +Some of Artemus Ward's effects were produced, by cacography or bad +spelling, but there was genius in the wildly erratic way in which he +handled even this rather low order of humor. It is a curious +commentary on the wretchedness of our English orthography that the +phonetic spelling of a word, as for example, _wuz_ for _was_, should be +in itself an occasion of mirth. Other verbal effects of a different +kind were among his devices, as in the passage where the seventeen +widows of a deceased Mormon offered themselves to Artemus. + +"And I said, 'Why is this thus? What is the reason of this thusness?' +They hove a sigh--seventeen sighs of different size. They said: + +"'O, soon thou will be gonested away.' + +"I told them that when I got ready to leave a place I wentested. + +"They said, 'Doth not like us?' + +"I said, 'I doth--I doth.' + +"I also said, 'I hope your intentions are honorable, as I am a lone +child--my parents being far--far away.' + +"They then said, 'Wilt not marry us?' + +"I said, 'O no, it cannot was.' + +"When they cried, 'O cruel man! this is too much!--O! too much,' I told +them that it was on account of the muchness that I declined." + +It is hard to define the difference between the humor of one writer and +another, or of one nation and another. It can be felt and can be +illustrated by quoting examples, but scarcely described in general +terms. It has been said of that class of American humorists of which +Artemus Ward is a representative that their peculiarity consists in +extravagance, surprise, audacity, and irreverence. But all these +qualities have characterized other schools of humor. There is the same +element of surprise in De Quincey's anti-climax, "Many a man has dated +his ruin from some murder or other which, perhaps, at the time he +thought little of," as in Artemus's truism that "a comic paper ought to +publish a joke now and then." The violation of logic which makes us +laugh at an Irish bull is likewise the source of the humor in Artemus's +saying of Jeff Davis, that "it would have been better than ten dollars +in his pocket if he had never been born;" or in his advice, "Always +live within your income, even if you have to borrow money to do so;" +or, again, in his announcement that "Mr. Ward will pay no debts of his +own contracting." A kind of ludicrous confusion, caused by an unusual +collocation of words, is also one of his favorite tricks, as when he +says of Brigham Young, "He's the most married man I ever saw in my +life;" or when, having been drafted at several hundred different places +where he had been exhibiting his wax figures, he says that if he went +on he should soon become a regiment, and adds, "I never knew that there +was so many of me." With this a whimsical understatement and an +affectation of simplicity, as where he expresses his willingness to +sacrifice "even his wife's relations" on the altar of patriotism; or +where, in delightful unconsciousness of his own sins against +orthography, he pronounces that "Chaucer was a great poet but he +couldn't spell," or where he says of the feast of raw dog, tendered him +by the Indian chief, Wocky-bocky, "It don't agree with me. I prefer +simple food." On the whole, it may be said of original humor of this +kind, as of other forms of originality in literature, that the elements +of it are old, but their combinations are novel. Other humorists, like +Henry W. Shaw ("Josh Billings") and David R. Locke ("Petroleum V. +Nasby"), have used bad spelling as a part of their machinery; while +Robert H. Newell ("Orpheus C. Kerr"), Samuel L. Clemens ("Mark Twain"), +and more recently "Bill Nye," though belonging to the same school of +low or broad comedy, have discarded cacography. Of these the most +eminent, by all odds, is Mark Twain, who has probably made more people +laugh than any other living writer. A Missourian by birth (1835), he +served the usual apprenticeship at type-setting and editing country +newspapers; spent seven years as a pilot on a Mississippi steam-boat, +and seven years more mining and journalizing in Nevada, where he +conducted the Virginia City _Enterprise_; finally drifted to San +Francisco, and was associated with Bret Harte on the _Californian_, and +in 1867 published his first book, _The Jumping Frog_. This was +succeeded by the _Innocents Abroad_, 1869; _Roughing It_, 1872; _A +Tramp Abroad_, 1880, and by others not so good. + +Mark Twain's drolleries have frequently the same air of innocence and +surprise as Artemus Ward's, and there is a like suddenness in his turns +of expression, as where he speaks of "the calm confidence of a +Christian with four aces." If he did not originate, he at any rate +employed very effectively that now familiar device of the newspaper +"funny man," of putting a painful situation euphemistically, as when he +says of a man who was hanged, that he "received injuries which +terminated in his death." He uses to the full extent the American +humorist's favorite resources of exaggeration and irreverence. An +instance of the former quality may be seen in his famous description of +a dog chasing a coyote, in _Roughing It_, or in his interview with the +lightning-rod agent in Mark Twain's _Sketches_, 1875. He is a shrewd +observer, and his humor has a more satirical side than Artemus Ward's, +sometimes passing into downright denunciation. He delights +particularly in ridiculing sentimental humbug and moralizing cant. He +runs atilt, as has been said, at "copy-book texts," at the temperance +reformer, the tract distributer, the Good Boy of Sunday-school +literature, and the women who send bouquets and sympathetic letters to +interesting criminals. He gives a ludicrous turn to famous historical +anecdotes, such as the story of George Washington and his little +hatchet; burlesques the time-honored adventure, in nautical romances, +of the starving crew casting lots in the long-boat, and spoils the +dignity of antiquity by modern trivialities, saying of a discontented +sailor on Columbus's ship, "He wanted fresh shad." The fun of +_Innocents Abroad_ consists in this irreverent application of modern, +common sense, utilitarian, democratic standards to the memorable places +and historic associations of Europe. Tried by this test the Old +Masters in the picture galleries become laughable, Abelard was a +precious scoundrel, and the raptures of the guide-books are parodied +without mercy. The tourist weeps at the grave of Adam. At Genoa he +drives the _cicerone_ to despair by pretending never to have heard of +Christopher Columbus, and inquiring innocently, "Is he dead?" It is +Europe vulgarized and stripped of its illusions--Europe seen by a +Western newspaper reporter without any "historic imagination." + +The method of this whole class of humorists is the opposite of +Addison's or Irving's or Thackeray's. It does not amuse by the +perception of the characteristic. It is not founded upon truth, but +upon incongruity, distortion, unexpectedness. Every thing in life is +reversed, as in opera bouffe, and turned topsy-turvy, so that paradox +takes the place of the natural order of things. Nevertheless they have +supplied a wholesome criticism upon sentimental excesses, and the world +is in their debt for many a hearty laugh. + +In the _Atlantic Monthly_ for December, 1863, appeared a tale entitled +_The Man Without a Country_, which made a great sensation, and did much +to strengthen patriotic feeling in one of the darkest hours of the +nation's history. It was the story of one Philip Nolan, an army +officer, whose head had been turned by Aaron Burr, and who, having been +censured by a court-martial for some minor offense; exclaimed +petulantly, upon mention being made of the United States government, +"Damn the United States! I wish that I might never hear the United +States mentioned again." Thereupon he was sentenced to have his wish, +and was kept all his life aboard the vessels of the navy, being sent +off on long voyages and transferred from ship to ship, with orders to +those in charge that his country and its concerns should never be +spoken of in his presence. Such an air of reality was given to the +narrative by incidental references to actual persons and occurrences +that many believed it true, and some were found who remembered Philip +Nolan, but had heard different versions of his career. The author of +this clever hoax--if hoax it may be called--was Edward Everett Hale, a +Unitarian clergyman of Boston, who published a collection of stories in +1868, under the fantastic title, _If, Yes, and Perhaps_, indicating +thereby that some of the tales were possible, some of them probable, +and others might even be regarded as essentially true. A similar +collection, _His Level Best, and Other Stories_, was published in 1873, +and in the interval three volumes of a somewhat different kind, the +_Ingham Papers_ and _Sybaris and Other Homes_, both in 1869, and _Ten +Times One Is Ten_, in 187l. The author shelters himself behind the +imaginary figure of Captain Frederic Ingham, pastor of the Sandemanian +Church at Naguadavick, and the same characters have a way of +re-appearing in his successive volumes as old friends of the reader, +which is pleasant at first, but in the end a little tiresome. Mr. Hale +is one of the most original and ingenious of American story-writers. +The old device of making wildly improbable inventions appear like fact +by a realistic treatment of details--a device employed by Swift and +Edgar Poe, and more lately by Jules Verne--became quite fresh and novel +in his hands, and was managed with a humor all his own. Some of his +best stories are _My Double and How He Undid Me_, describing how a busy +clergyman found an Irishman who looked so much like himself that he +trained him to pass as his duplicate, and sent him to do duty in his +stead at public meetings, dinners, etc., thereby escaping bores and +getting time for real work; the _Brick Moon_, a story of a projectile +built and launched into space, to revolve in a fixed meridian about the +earth and serve mariners as a mark of longitude; the _Rag Man and Rag +Woman_, a tale of an impoverished couple who made a competence by +saving the pamphlets, advertisements, wedding-cards, etc., that came to +them through the mail, and developing a paper business on that basis; +and the _Skeleton in the Closet_, which shows how the fate of the +Southern Confederacy was involved in the adventures of a certain +hoop-skirt, "built in the eclipse and rigged with curses dark." Mr. +Hale's historical scholarship and his habit of detail have aided him in +the art of giving _vraisemblance_ to absurdities. He is known in +philanthropy as well as in letters, and his tales have a cheerful, +busy, practical way with them in consonance with his motto, "Look up +and not down, look forward and not back, look out and not in, and lend +a hand." + +It is too soon to sum up the literary history of the last quarter of a +century. The writers who have given it shape are still writing, and +their work is therefore incomplete. But on the slightest review of it +two facts become manifest; first, that New England has lost its long +monopoly; and, secondly, that a marked feature of the period is the +growth of realistic fiction. The electric tension of the atmosphere +for thirty years preceding the civil war, the storm and stress +of great public contests, and the intellectual stir produced by +transcendentalism seem to have been more favorable to poetry and +literary idealism than present conditions are. At all events there are +no new poets who rank with Whittier, Longfellow, Lowell, and others of +the elder generation, although George H. Boker, in Philadelphia, R. H. +Stoddard and E. C. Stedman, in New York, and T. B. Aldrich, first in +New York and afterward in Boston, have written creditable verse; not to +speak of younger writers, whose work, however, for the most part, has +been more distinguished by delicacy of execution than by native +impulse. Mention has been made of the establishment of _Harper's +Monthly Magazine_, which, under the conduct of its accomplished editor, +George W. Curtis, has provided the public with an abundance of good +reading. The old _Putnam's Monthly_, which ran from 1853 to 1858, and +had a strong corps of contributors, was revived in 1868, and continued +by that name till 1870, when it was succeeded by _Scribner's Monthly_, +under the editorship of Dr. J. G. Holland, and this in 1881 by the +_Century_, an efficient rival of _Harper's_ in circulation, in literary +excellence, and in the beauty of its wood-engravings, the American +school of which art these two great periodicals have done much to +develop and encourage. Another New York monthly, the _Galaxy_, ran +from 1866 to 1878, and was edited by Richard Grant White. Within the +last few years a new _Scribner's Magazine_ has also taken the field. +The _Atlantic_, in Boston, and _Lippincott's_, in Philadelphia, are no +unworthy competitors with these for public favor. + +During the forties began a new era of national expansion, somewhat +resembling that described in a former chapter, and, like that, bearing +fruit eventually in literature. The cession of Florida to the United +States in 1845, and the annexation of Texas in the same year, were +followed by the purchase of California in 1847, and its admission as a +State in 1850. In 1849 came the great rush to the California gold +fields. San Francisco, at first a mere collection of tents and board +shanties, with a few adobe huts, grew with incredible rapidity into a +great city--the wicked and wonderful city apostrophized by Bret Harte +in his poem, _San Francisco_: + + "Serene, indifferent of fate, + Thou sittest at the Western Gate; + Upon thy heights so lately won + Still slant the banners of the sun. . . . + I know thy cunning and thy greed, + Thy hard, high lust and willful deed." + +The adventurers of all lands and races who flocked to the Pacific +coast, found there a motley state of society between civilization and +savagery. There were the relics of the old Mexican occupation, the +Spanish missions, with their Christianized Indians; the wild tribes of +the plains--Apaches, Utes, and Navajoes; the Chinese coolies and +washermen, all elements strange to the Atlantic sea-board and the +States of the interior. The gold-hunters crossed, in stages or +caravans, enormous prairies, alkaline deserts dotted with sage-brush +and seamed by deep canons, and passes through gigantic mountain ranges. +On the coast itself nature was unfamiliar: the climate was subtropical; +fruits and vegetables grew to a mammoth size, corresponding to the +enormous redwoods in the Mariposa groves and the prodigious scale of +the scenery in the valley of the Yosemite and the snow-capped peaks of +the sierras. At first there were few women, and the men led a wild, +lawless existence in the mining camps. Hard upon the heels of the +prospector followed the dram-shop, the gambling-hell, and the +dance-hall. Every man carried his "Colt," and looked out for his own +life and his "claim." Crime went unpunished or was taken in hand, when +it got too rampant, by vigilance committees. In the diggings shaggy +frontiersmen and "pikes" from Missouri mingled with the scum of eastern +cities and with broken-down business men and young college graduates +seeking their fortune. Surveyors and geologists came of necessity, +speculators in mining stock and city lots set up their offices in the +town; later came a sprinkling of school-teachers and ministers. +Fortunes were made in one day and lost the next at poker or loo. +To-day the lucky miner who had struck a good "lead" was drinking +champagne out of pails and treating the town; to-morrow he was +"busted," and shouldered the pick for a new onslaught upon his luck. +This strange, reckless life was not without fascination, and highly +picturesque and dramatic elements were present in it. It was, as Bret +Harte says, "an era replete with a certain heroic Greek poetry," and +sooner or later it was sure to find its poet. During the war +California remained loyal to the Union, but was too far from the seat +of conflict to experience any serious disturbance, and went on +independently developing its own resources and becoming daily more +civilized. By 1868 San Francisco had a literary magazine, the +_Overland Monthly_, which ran until 1875, and was revived in 1883. It +had a decided local flavor, and the vignette on its title-page was a +happily chosen emblem, representing a grizzly bear crossing a railway +track. In an early number of the _Overland_ was a story entitled the +_Luck of Roaring Camp_, by Francis Bret Harte, a native of Albany, N. +Y. (1835), who had come to California at the age of seventeen, in time +to catch the unique aspects of the life of the Forty-niners, before +their vagabond communities had settled down into the law-abiding +society of the present day. His first contribution was followed by +other stories and sketches of a similar kind, such as the _Outcasts of +Poker Flat_, _Miggles_, and _Tennessee's Partner_; and by verses, +serious and humorous, of which last, _Plain Language from Truthful +James_, better known as the _Heathen Chinee_, made an immediate hit, +and carried its author's name into every corner of the English-speaking +world. In 1871 he published a collection of his tales, another of his +poems, and a volume of very clever parodies, _Condensed Novels_, which +rank with Thackeray's _Novels by Eminent Hands_. Bret Harte's +California stories were vivid, highly colored pictures of life in the +mining camps and raw towns of the Pacific coast. The pathetic and the +grotesque went hand in hand in them, and the author aimed to show how +even in the desperate characters gathered together there--the +fortune-hunters, gamblers, thieves, murderers, drunkards, and +prostitutes--the latent nobility of human nature asserted itself in +acts of heroism, magnanimity, self-sacrifice, and touching fidelity. +The same men who cheated at cards and shot each another down with tipsy +curses were capable on occasion of the most romantic generosity and the +most delicate chivalry. Critics were not wanting who held that, in the +matter of dialect and manners and other details, the narrator was not +true to the facts. This was a comparatively unimportant charge; but a +more serious question was the doubt whether his characters were +essentially true to human nature; whether the wild soil of revenge and +greed and dissolute living ever yields such flowers of devotion as +blossom in _Tennessee's Partner_ and the _Outcasts of Poker Flat_. +However this may be, there is no question as to Harte's power as a +narrator. His short stories are skillfully constructed and effectively +told. They never drag, and are never overladen with description, +reflection, or other lumber. + +In his poems in dialect we find the same variety of types and +nationalities characteristic of the Pacific coast: the little Mexican +maiden, Pachita, in the old mission garden; the wicked Bill Nye, who +tries to cheat the Heathen Chinee at eucher and to rob Injin Dick of +his winning lottery ticket; the geological society on the Stanislaw who +settle their scientific debates with chunks of old red sandstone and +the skulls of mammoths; the unlucky Mr. Dow, who finally strikes gold +while digging a well, and builds a house with a "coopilow;" and Flynn, +of Virginia, who saves his "pard's" life, at the sacrifice of his own, +by holding up the timbers in the caving tunnel. These poems are mostly +in monologue, like Browning's dramatic lyrics, exclamatory and abrupt +in style, and with a good deal of indicated action, as in _Jim_, where +a miner comes into a bar-room, looking for his old chum, learns that he +is dead, and is just turning away to hide his emotion when he +recognizes Jim in his informant: + + "Well, thar--Good-bye-- + No more, sir--I-- + Eh? + What's that you say?-- + Why, dern it!--sho!-- + No? Yea! By Jo! + Sold! + Sold! Why, you limb! + You ornery, + Derned old + Long-legged Jim!" + +Bret Harte had many imitators, and not only did our newspaper poetry +for a number of years abound in the properties of Californian life, +such as gulches, placers, divides, etc., but writers further east +applied his method to other conditions. Of these by far the most +successful was John Hay, a native of Indiana and private secretary to +President Lincoln, whose _Little Breeches_, _Jim Bludso_, and _Mystery +of Gilgal_ have rivaled Bret Harte's own verses in popularity. In the +last-named piece the reader is given to feel that there is something +rather cheerful and humorous in a bar-room fight which results in "the +gals that winter, as a rule," going "alone to singing school." In the +two former we have heroes of the Bret Harte type, the same combination +of superficial wickedness with inherent loyalty and tenderness. The +profane farmer of the South-west, who "doesn't pan out on the +prophets," and who had taught his little son "to chaw terbacker, just +to keep his milk-teeth white," but who believes in God and the angels +ever since the miraculous recovery of the same little son when lost on +the prairie in a blizzard; and the unsaintly and bigamistic captain of +the _Prairie Belle_, who died like a hero, holding the nozzle of his +burning boat against the bank + + "Till the last galoot's ashore." + +The manners and dialect of other classes and sections of the country +have received abundant illustration of late years. Edward Eggleston's +_Hoosier Schoolmaster_, 1871, and his other novels are pictures of +rural life in the early days of Indiana. _Western Windows_, a volume +of poems by John James Piatt, another native of Indiana, had an +unmistakable local coloring. Charles G. Leland, of Philadelphia, in +his Hans Breitmann ballads, in dialect, gave a humorous presentation of +the German-American element in the cities. By the death, in 1881, of +Sidney Lanier, a Georgian by birth, the South lost a poet of rare +promise, whose original genius was somewhat hampered by his hesitation +between two arts of expression, music and verse, and by his effort to +co-ordinate them. His _Science of English Verse_, 1880, was a most +suggestive, though hardly convincing, statement of that theory of their +relation which he was working out in his practice. Some of his pieces, +like the _Mocking Bird_ and the _Song of the Chattahoochie_, are the +most characteristically Southern poetry that has been written in +America. Joel Chandler Harris's _Uncle Remus_ stories, in Negro +dialect, are transcripts from the folk-lore of the plantations, while +his collection of stories, _At Teague Poteet's_, together with Miss +Murfree's _In the Tennessee Mountains_ and her other books, have made +the Northern public familiar with the wild life of the "moonshiners," +who distill illicit whiskey in the mountains of Georgia, North +Carolina, and Tennessee. These tales are not only exciting in +incident, but strong and fresh in their delineations of character. +Their descriptions of mountain scenery are also impressive, though, in +the case of the last-named writer, frequently too prolonged. George W. +Cable's sketches of French Creole life in New Orleans attracted +attention by their freshness and quaintness when published, in the +magazines and re-issued in book form as _Old Creole Days_, in 1879. +His first regular novel, the _Grandissimes_, 1880, was likewise a story +of Creole life. It had the same winning qualities as his short stories +and sketches, but was an advance upon them in dramatic force, +especially in the intensely tragic and powerfully told episode of "Bras +Coupé." Mr. Cable has continued his studies of Louisiana types and +ways in his later books, but the _Grandissimes_ still remains his +masterpiece. All in all, he is, thus far, the most important literary +figure of the New South, and the justness and delicacy of his +representations of life speak volumes for the sobering and refining +agency of the civil war in the States whose "cause" was "lost," but +whose true interests gained even more by the loss than did the +interests of the victorious North. + +The four writers last mentioned, have all come to the front within the +past eight or ten years, and, in accordance with the plan of this +sketch, receive here a mere passing notice. It remains to close our +review of the literary history of the period since the war with a +somewhat more extended account of the two favorite novelists whose work +has done more than any thing else to shape the movement of recent +fiction. These are Henry James, Jr., and William Dean Howells. Their +writings, though dissimilar in some respects, are alike in this, that +they are analytic in method and realistic in spirit. Cooper was a +romancer pure and simple; he wrote the romance of adventure and of +external incident. Hawthorne went much deeper, and with a finer +spiritual insight dealt with the real passions of the heart; and with +men's inner experiences. This he did with truth and power; but, +although himself a keen observer of whatever passed before his eyes, he +was not careful to secure a photographic fidelity to the surface facts +of speech, dress, manners, etc. Thus the talk of his characters is +book-talk, and not the actual language of the parlor or the street, +with its slang, its colloquial ease and the intonations and shadings of +phrase and pronunciation which mark different sections of the country +and different grades of society. His attempts at dialect, for example, +were of the slenderest kind. His art is ideal, and his romances +certainly do not rank as novels of real life. But with the growth of a +richer and more complicated society in America fiction has grown more +social and more minute in its observation. It would not be fair to +classify the novels of James and Howells as the fiction of manners +merely; they are also the fiction of character, but they aim to +describe people not only as they are, in their inmost natures, but also +as they look and talk and dress. They try to express character through +manners, which is the way in which it is most often expressed in the +daily existence of a conventional society. It is a principle of +realism not to select exceptional persons or occurrences, but to take +average men and women and their average experiences. The realists +protest that the moving incident is not their trade, and that the +stories have all been told. They want no plot and no hero. They will +tell no rounded tale with a _denouement_, in which all the parts are +distributed, as in the fifth act of an old-fashioned comedy; but they +will take a transcript from life and end when they get through, without +informing the reader what becomes of the characters. And they will try +to interest this reader in "poor real life" with its "foolish face." +Their acknowledged masters are Balzac, George Eliot, Turgénieff, and +Anthony Trollope, and they regard novels as studies in sociology, +honest reports of the writers' impressions, which may not be without a +certain scientific value even. + +Mr. James's peculiar province is the international novel, a field which +he created for himself, but which he has occupied in company with +Howells, Mrs. Burnett, and many others. The novelist received most of +his schooling in Europe, and has lived much abroad, with the result +that he has become half denationalized and has engrafted a cosmopolitan +indifference upon his Yankee inheritance. This, indeed, has +constituted his opportunity. A close observer and a conscientious +student of the literary art, he has added to his intellectual equipment +the advantage of a curious doubleness in his point of view. He looks +at America with the eyes of a foreigner and at Europe with the eyes of +an American. He has so far thrown himself out of relation with +American life that he describes a Boston horse-car or a New York hotel +table with a sort of amused wonder. His starting-point was in +criticism, and he has always maintained the critical attitude. He took +up story-writing in order to help himself, by practical experiment, in +his chosen art of literary criticism, and his volume on _French Poets +and Novelists_, 1878, is by no means the least valuable of his books. +His short stories in the magazines were collected into a volume in +1875, with the title, _A Passionate Pilgrim, and Other Stories_. One +or two of these, as the _Last of the Valerii_ and the _Madonna of the +Future_, suggest Hawthorne, a very unsympathetic study of whom James +afterward contributed to the "English Men of Letters" series. But in +the name-story of the collection he was already in the line of his +future development. This is the story of a middle-aged invalid +American who comes to England in search of health, and finds, too late, +in the mellow atmosphere of the mother-country, the repose and the +congenial surroundings which he has all his life been longing for in +his raw America. The pathos of his self-analysis and his confession of +failure is subtly imagined. The impressions which he and his far-away +English kinsfolk make on one another, their mutual attraction and +repulsion, are described with that delicate perception of national +differences which makes the humor and sometimes the tragedy of James's +later books, like _The American_, _Daisy Miller_, _The Europeans_, and +_An International Episode_. His first novel was _Roderick Hudson_, +1876, not the most characteristic of his fictions, but perhaps the most +powerful in its grasp of elementary passion. The analytic method and +the critical attitude have their dangers in imaginative literature. In +proportion as this writer's faculty of minute observation and his +realistic objectivity have increased upon him, the uncomfortable +coldness which is felt in his youthful work has become actually +disagreeable, and his art--growing constantly finer and surer in +matters of detail--has seemed to dwell more and more in the region of +mere manners and less in the higher realm of character and passion. In +most of his writings the heart, somehow, is left out. We have seen +that Irving, from his knowledge of England and America, and his long +residence in both countries, became the mediator between the two great +branches of the Anglo-Saxon race. This he did by the power of his +sympathy with each. Henry James has likewise interpreted the two +nations to one another in a subtler but less genial fashion than +Irving, and not through sympathy, but through contrast, by bringing +into relief the opposing ideals of life and society which have +developed under different institutions. In his novel, _The American_, +1877, he has shown the actual misery which may result from the clashing +of opposed social systems. In such clever sketches as _Daisy Miller_, +1879, the _Pension Beaurepas_, and _A Bundle of Letters_, he has +exhibited types of the American girl, the American business man, the +aesthetic feebling from Boston, and the Europeanized or would-be +denationalized American campaigners in the Old World, and has set forth +the ludicrous incongruities, perplexities, and misunderstandings which +result from contradictory standards of conventional morality and +behavior. In _The Europeans_, 1879, and _An International Episode_, +1878, he has reversed the process, bringing Old World standards to the +test of American ideas by transferring his _dramatis personae_ to +republican soil. The last-named of these illustrates how slender a +plot realism requires for its purposes. It is nothing more than the +history of an English girl of good family who marries an American +gentleman and undertakes to live in America, but finds herself so +uncomfortable in strange social conditions that she returns to England +for life, while, contrariwise, the heroine's sister is so taken with +the freedom of these very conditions that she elopes with another +American and "goes West." James is a keen observer of the physiognomy +of cities as well as of men, and his _Portraits of Places_, 1884, is +among the most delightful contributions to the literature of foreign +travel. + +Mr. Howells's writings are not without "international" touches. In _A +Foregone Conclusion_ and the _Lady of the Aroostook_, and others of his +novels, the contrasted points of view in American and European life are +introduced, and especially those variations in feeling, custom, +dialect, etc., which make the modern Englishman and the modern American +such objects of curiosity to each other, and which have been dwelt upon +of late even unto satiety. But in general he finds his subjects at +home, and if he does not know his own countrymen and countrywomen more +intimately than Mr. James, at least he loves them better. There is a +warmer sentiment in his fictions, too; his men are better fellows and +his women are more lovable. Howells was born in Ohio. His early life +was that of a western country editor. In 1860 he published, jointly +with his friend Piatt, a book of verse--_Poems of Two Friends_. In +1861 he was sent as consul to Venice, and the literary results of his +sojourn there appeared in his sketches, _Venetian Life_, 1865, and +_Italian Journeys_, 1867. In 1871 he became editor of the _Atlantic +Monthly_, and in the same year published his _Suburban Sketches_. All +of these early volumes showed a quick eye for the picturesque, an +unusual power of description, and humor of the most delicate quality; +but as yet there was little approach to narrative. _Their Wedding +Journey_ was a revelation to the public of the interest that may lie in +an ordinary bridal trip across the State of New York, when a close and +sympathetic observation is brought to bear upon the characteristics of +American life as it appears at railway stations and hotels, on +steam-boats and in the streets of very commonplace towns. _A Chance +Acquaintance_, 1873, was Howells's first novel, though even yet the +story was set against a background of travel-pictures. A holiday trip +on the St. Lawrence and the Saguenay, with descriptions of Quebec and +the Falls of Montmorenci, etc., rather predominated over the narrative. +Thus, gradually and by a natural process, complete characters and +realistic novels, such as _A Modern Instance_, 1882, and _Indian +Summer_, evolved themselves from truthful sketches of places and +persons seen by the way. + +The incompatibility existing between European and American views of +life, which makes the comedy or the tragedy of Henry James's +international fictions, is replaced in Howells's novels by the +repulsion between differing social grades in the same country. The +adjustment of these subtle distinctions forms a part of the problem of +life in all complicated societies. Thus in _A Chance Acquaintance_ the +heroine is a bright and pretty Western girl, who becomes engaged during +a pleasure tour to an irreproachable but offensively priggish young +gentleman from Boston, and the engagement is broken by her in +consequence of an unintended slight--the betrayal on the hero's part of +a shade of mortification when he and his betrothed are suddenly brought +into the presence of some fashionable ladies belonging to his own +_monde_. The little comedy, _Out of the Question_, deals with this +same adjustment of social scales; and in many of Howells's other +novels, such as _Silas Lapham_ and the _Lady of the Aroustook_, one of +the main motives may be described to be the contact of the man who eats +with his fork with the man who eats with his knife, and the shock +thereby ensuing. In _Indian Summer_ the complications arise from the +difference in age between the hero and heroine, and not from a +difference in station or social antecedents. In all of these fictions +the misunderstandings come from an incompatibility of manners rather +than of character, and, if any thing were to be objected to the +probability of the story, it is that the climax hinges on delicacies +and subtleties which, in real life, when there is opportunity for +explanations, are readily brushed aside. But in _A Modern Instance_ +Howells touched the deeper springs of action. In this, his strongest +work, the catastrophe is brought about, as in George Eliot's great +novels, by the reaction of characters upon one another, and the story +is realistic in a higher sense than any mere study of manners can be. +His nearest approach to romance is in _The Undiscovered Country_, 1880, +which deals with the Spiritualists and the Shakers, and in its study of +problems that hover on the borders of the supernatural, in its +out-of-the-way personages and adventures, and in a certain ideal poetic +flavor about the whole book, has a strong resemblance to Hawthorne, +especially to Hawthorne in the _Blithedale Romance_, where he comes +closer to common ground with other romancers. It is interesting to +compare the _Undiscovered Country_ with Henry James's _Bostonians_, the +latest and one of the cleverest of his fictions, which is likewise a +study of the clairvoyants, mediums, woman's rights advocates, and all +varieties of cranks, reformers, and patrons of "causes," for whom +Boston has long been notorious. A most unlovely race of people they +become under the cold scrutiny of Mr. James's cosmopolitan eyes, which +see more clearly the charlatanism, narrow-mindedness, mistaken +fanaticism, morbid self-consciousness, disagreeable nervous intensity, +and vulgar or ridiculous outside peculiarities of the humanitarians, +than the nobility and moral enthusiasm which underlie the surface. + +Howells is almost the only successful American dramatist, and this in +the field of parlor comedy. His little farces, the _Elevator_, the +_Register_, the _Parlor-Car_, etc., have a lightness and grace, with an +exquisitely absurd situation, which remind us more of the _Comedies et +Proverbes_ of Alfred de Musset, or the many agreeable dialogues and +monologues of the French domestic stage, than of any work of English or +American hands. His softly ironical yet affectionate treatment of +feminine ways is especially admirable. In his numerous types of +sweetly illogical, inconsistent, and inconsequent womanhood he has +perpetuated with a nicer art than Dickens what Thackeray calls "that +great discovery," Mrs. Nickleby. + + + +1. Theodore Winthrop. _Life in the Open Air_. _Cecil Dreeme_. + +2. Thomas Wentworth Higginson. _Life in a Black Regiment_. + +3. _Poetry of the Civil War_. Edited by Richard Grant White. New +York. 1866. + +4. Charles Farrar Browne. _Artemus Ward--His Book_. _Lecture on the +Mormons_. _Artemus Ward in London_. + +5. Samuel Langhorne Clemens. _The Jumping Frog_. _Roughing It_. _The +Mississippi Pilot_. + +6. Charles Godfrey Leland. _Hans Breitmann's Ballads_. + +7. Edward Everett Hale. _If, Yes, and Perhaps_. _His Level Best, and +Other Stories_. + +8. Francis Bret Harte. _Outcasts of Poker Flat, and Other Stories_. +_Condensed Novels_. _Poems in Dialect_. + +9. Sidney Lanier. _Nirvana_. _Resurrection_. _The Harlequin of +Dreams_. _Song of the Chattahoochie_. _The Mocking Bird_. _The +Stirrup-Cup_. _Tampa Robins_. _The Bee_. _The Revenge of Hamish_. +_The Ship of Earth_. _The Marshes of Glynn_. _Sunrise_. + +10. Henry James, Jr. _A Passionate Pilgrim_. _Roderick Hudson_. +_Daisy Miller_. _Pension Beaurepas_. _A Bundle of Letters_. _An +International Episode_. _The Bostonians_. _Portraits of Places_. + +11. William Dean Howells. _Their Wedding Journey_. _Suburban +Sketches_. _A Chance Acquaintance_. _A Foregone Conclusion_. _The +Undiscovered Country_. _A Modern Instance_. + +12. George W. Cable. _Old Creole Days_. _Madame Delphine_. _The +Grandissimes_. + +13. Joel Chandler Harris. _Uncle Remus_. _Mingo, and Other Sketches_. + +14. Charles Egbert Craddook (Miss Murfree). _In the Tennessee +Mountains_. + + + + +APPENDIX. + + +COTTON MATHER. + +CAPTAIN PHIPS AND THE SPANISH WRECK. + +[From _Magnalia Christi Americana_.] + +Captain Phips, arriving with a ship and a tender at Port de la Plata, +made a stout canoe of a stately cotton-tree, so large as to carry eight +or ten oars, for the making of which periaga (as they call it) he did, +with the same industry that he did every thing else, employ his own +hand and adze, and endure no little hardship, lying abroad in the woods +many nights together. This periaga with the tender, being anchored at +a place convenient, the periaga kept busking to and again,[1] but could +only discover a reef of rising shoals thereabouts, called "The +Boilers," which, rising to be within two or three feet of the surface +of the sea, were yet so steep that a ship striking on them would +immediately sink down, who could say how many fathom, into the ocean. +Here they could get no other pay for their long peeping among the +Boilers, but only such as caused them to think upon returning to their +captain with the bad news of their total disappointment. Nevertheless, +as they were upon their return, one of the men, looking over the side +of the periaga into the calm water, he spied a sea-feather growing, as +he judged, out of a rock; whereupon he bade one of their Indians to +dive and fetch this feather, that they might, however, carry home +something with them, and make at least as fair a triumph as +Caligula's.[2] The diver, bringing up the feather, brought therewithal +a surprising story, that he perceived a number of great guns in the +watery world where he had found his feather; the report[3] of which +great guns exceedingly astonished the whole company, and at once turned +their despondencies for their ill success into assurances that they had +now lit upon the true spot of ground which they had been looking for; +and they were further confirmed in these assurances when, upon further +diving, the Indian fetched up a sow, as they styled it, or a lump of +silver worth perhaps two or three hundred pounds. Upon this they +prudently buoyed the place that they might readily find it again; and +they went back unto their captain, whom for some while they distressed +with nothing but such bad news as they formerly thought they must have +carried him. Nevertheless, they so slipped in the sow of silver on one +side under the table, where they wore now sitting with the captain, and +hearing him express his resolutions to wait still patiently upon the +providence of God under these disappointments, that when he should look +on one side he might see that odd thing before him. At last he saw it. +Seeing it he cried out with some agony, "Why! what is this? Whence +comes this?" And then, with changed countenances, they told him how +and where they got it. "Then," said he, "thanks be to God! We are +made," and so away they went all hands to work; wherein they had this +one further piece of remarkable prosperity, that whereas if they had +first fallen upon that part of the Spanish wreck where the pieces of +eight[4] had been stowed in bags among the ballast they had seen a more +laborious and less enriching time of it; now, most happily, they first +fell upon that room in the wreck where the bullion had been stored up; +and they so prospered in this new fishery that in a little while they +had, without the loss of any man's life, brought up thirty-two tuns of +silver; for it was now come to measuring of silver by tuns. Besides +which, one Adderly, of Providence, who had formerly been very helpful +to Captain Phips in the search of this wreck, did, upon former +agreement, meet him now with a little vessel here; and he with his few +hands, took up about six tuns of silver; whereof, nevertheless, he made +so little use that in a year or two he died at Bermudas, and, as I have +heard, he ran distracted some while before he died. + +Thus did there once again come into the light of the sun a treasure +which had been half an hundred years groaning under the waters; and in +this time there was grown upon the plate a crust-like limestone, to the +thickness of several inches; which crust being broken open by iron +contrived for that purpose, they knocked out whole bushels of rusty +pieces of eight; which were grown thereinto. Besides that incredible +treasure of plate in various forms thus fetched up from seven or eight +fathom under water, there were vast riches of gold, and pearls, and +jewels, which they also lit upon; and, indeed, for a more comprehensive +invoice, I must but summarily say, "All that a Spanish frigate uses to +be enriched withal." + + +[1] Passing to and fro. + +[2] The Roman emperor who invaded Britain unsuccessfully and made his +legionaries gather sea-shells to bring back with them as evidences of +victory. + +[3] One of Mather's puns. + +[4] Spanish piasters, formerly divided into eight reals. The +piaster=an American dollar. + + + + +JONATHAN EDWARDS. + +THE BEAUTY OF HOLINESS. + +[From the author's Personal Narrative.] + +Holiness, as I then wrote down some of my contemplations on it, +appeared to me to be of a sweet, pleasant, charming, serene, calm +nature; which brought an inexpressible purity, brightness, +peacefulness, and ravishment to the soul. In other words, that it made +the soul like a field or garden of God, with all manner of pleasant +flowers; enjoying a sweet calm and the gently vivifying beams of the +sun. The soul of a true Christian, as I then wrote my meditations, +appeared like such a little white flower as we see in the spring of the +year; low and humble on the ground, opening its bosom to receive the +pleasant beams of the sun's glory; rejoicing, as it were, in a calm +rapture; diffusing around a sweet fragrancy; standing peacefully and +lovingly in the midst of other flowers round about; all in like manner +opening their bosoms to drink in the light of the sun. There was no +part of creature-holiness that I had so great a sense of its loveliness +as humility, brokenness of heart, and poverty of spirit; and there was +nothing that I so earnestly longed for. My heart panted after this--to +lie low before God, as in the dust; that I might be nothing, and that +God might be all; that I might become as a little child. + + + + +THE WRATH OF GOD. + +[From _Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God_.] + +Unconverted men walk over the pit of hell on a rotten covering, and +there are innumerable places in this covering so weak that they will +not bear their weight, and these places are not seen. The arrows of +death fly unseen at noonday; the sharpest sight cannot discern them. +God has so many different, unsearchable ways of taking wicked men out +of the world and sending them to hell that there is nothing to make it +appear that God had need to be at the expense of a miracle, or go out +of the ordinary course of his providence, to destroy any wicked man at +any moment. . . . Your wickedness makes you as it were heavy as lead +and to tend downward with great weight and pressure toward hell; and, +if God should let you go, you would immediately sink and swiftly +descend and plunge into the bottomless gulf, and your healthy +constitution, and your own care and prudence, and best contrivance, and +all your righteousness, would have no more influence to uphold you and +keep you out of hell than a spider's web would have to stop a falling +rock. . . . There are the black clouds of God's wrath now hanging +directly over your heads, full of the dreadful storm and big with +thunder; and were it not for the restraining hand of God it would +immediately burst forth upon you. The sovereign pleasure of God, for +the present, stays his rough wind; otherwise it would come with fury, +and your destruction would come like a whirlwind, and you would be like +the chaff of the summer threshing-floor. The wrath of God is like +great waters that are dammed for the present; they increase more and +more, and rise higher and higher, till an outlet is given; and the +longer the stream is stopped, the more rapid and mighty is its course +when once it is let loose. . . . + +Thus it will be with you that are in an unconverted state, if you +continue in it; the infinite might and majesty and terribleness of the +omnipotent God shall be magnified upon you in the ineffable strength of +your torments; you shall be tormented in the presence of the holy +angels and in the presence of the Lamb; and, when you shall be in this +state of suffering, the glorious inhabitants of heaven shall go forth +and look on the awful spectacle, that they may see what the wrath and +fierceness of the Almighty is; and when they have seen it they will +fall down and adore that great power and majesty. "And it shall come +to pass, that from one moon to another, and from one Sabbath to +another, shall all flesh come to worship before me, saith the Lord. +And they shall go forth and look upon the carcasses of the men that +have transgressed against me; for their worm shall not die, neither +shall their fire be quenched, and they shall be an abhorring unto all +flesh." + +It is everlasting wrath. It would be dreadful to suffer this +fierceness and wrath of Almighty God one moment: but you must suffer it +to all eternity; there will be no end to this exquisite, horrible +misery; when you look forward you shall see along forever, a boundless +duration before you, which will swallow up your thoughts and amaze your +soul; and you will absolutely despair of ever having any deliverance, +any end, any mitigation, any rest at all; you will know certainly that +you must wear out long ages, millions of millions of ages, in wrestling +and conflicting with this Almighty merciless vengeance; and then, when +you have so done, when so many ages have actually been spent by you in +this manner, you will know that all is but a point to what remains. So +that your punishment will indeed be infinite. . . . If we knew that +there was one person, and but one, in the whole congregation, that was +to be the subject of this misery, what an awful thing it would be to +think of! If we knew who it was, what an awful sight would it be to +see such a person! How might all the rest of the congregation lift up +a lamentable and bitter cry over him! But alas! Instead of one, how +many is it likely will remember this discourse in hell! And it would +be a wonder if some that are now present should not be in hell in a +very short time, before this year is out. And it would be no wonder if +some persons, that now sit here in some seats of this meeting-house in +health, and quiet, and secure, should be there before to-morrow morning. + + + + +BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. + +FRANKLIN'S ARRIVAL AT PHILADELPHIA. + +[From _The Life of Benjamin Franklin, Written by Himself_.] + +I was in my working dress, my best clothes being to come round by sea. +I was dirty from my journey; my pockets were stuffed out with shirts +and stockings, and I knew no soul nor where to look for lodging. I was +fatigued with traveling, rowing, and want of rest; I was very hungry; +and my whole stock of cash consisted of a Dutch dollar and about a +shilling in copper. The latter I gave the people of the boat for my +passage, who at first refused it, on account of my rowing; but I +insisted on their taking it, a man being sometimes more generous when +he has but a little money than when he has plenty, perhaps through fear +of being thought to have but little. + +Then I walked up the street, gazing about, till near the market-house I +met a boy with bread. I had made many a meal on bread, and, inquiring +where he got it, I went immediately to the baker's he directed me to, +in Second Street, and asked for biscuit, intending such as we had in +Boston; but they, it seems, were not made in Philadelphia. Then I +asked for a three-penny loaf, and was told they had none such. So, not +considering or knowing the difference of money, and the greater +cheapness, nor the names of his bread, I had him give me three-penny +worth of any sort. He gave me, accordingly, three great puffy rolls. +I was surprised at the quantity, but took it, and, having no room in my +pockets, walked off with a roll under each arm, and eating the other. +Thus I went up Market Street as far as Fourth Street, passing by the +door of Mr. Read, my future wife's father, when she, standing at the +door, saw me, and thought I made, as I certainly did, a most awkward, +ridiculous appearance. Then I turned and went down Chestnut Street and +part of Walnut Street, eating my roll all the way and, coming round, +found myself again at Market Street wharf, near the boat I came in, to +which I went for a draught of the river water; and, being filled with +one of my rolls, gave the other two to a woman and her child that came +down the river in the boat with us, and were waiting to go farther. + +Thus refreshed, I walked again up the street, which by this time had +many clean-dressed people in it, who were all walking the same way. I +joined them, and thereby was led into the great meeting-house of the +Quakers near the market. I sat down among them, and, after looking +'round a while and hearing nothing said, being very drowsy through +labor and want of rest the preceding night, I fell fast asleep, and +continued so till the meeting broke up, when one was kind enough to +rouse me. This was, therefore, the first house I was in, or slept in, +in Philadelphia. + +Walking down again toward the river, and looking in the faces of the +people, I met a young Quaker man whose countenance I liked, and, +accosting him, requested he would tell me where a stranger could get +lodging. We were near the sign of the Three Mariners. "Here," says +he, "is one place that entertains strangers, but it is not a reputable +house; if thee wilt walk with me, I'll show thee a better." He brought +me to the Crooked Billet in Water Street. Here I got a dinner. + + + +PAYING TOO DEAR FOR THE WHISTLE. + +[From Correspondence with Madame Britton.] + +I am charmed with your description of Paradise, and with your plan of +living there; and I approve much of your conclusion, that, in the +meantime, we should draw all the good we can from this world. In my +opinion we might all draw more good from it than we do, and suffer less +evil, if we would take care not to give too much for _whistles_, for to +me it seems that most of the unhappy people we meet with are become so +by neglect of that caution. + +You ask what I mean? You love stories, and will excuse my telling one +of myself. + +When I was a child of seven years old my friends, on a holiday, filled +my pocket with coppers. I went directly to a shop where they sold toys +for children, and, being charmed with the sound of a _whistle_, that I +met by the way in the hands of another boy, I voluntarily offered and +gave all my money for one. I then came home, and went whistling all +over the house, much pleased with my _whistle_, but disturbing all the +family. My brothers and sisters and cousins, understanding the bargain +I had made, told me I had given four times as much for it as it was +worth; put me in mind what good things I might have bought with the +rest of the money, and laughed at me so much for my folly that I cried +with vexation; and the reflection gave me more chagrin than the +_whistle_ gave me pleasure. + +This, however, was afterward of use to me, the impression continuing on +my mind, so that often when I was tempted to buy some unnecessary +thing, I said to myself, _Don't give too much for the whistle_; and I +saved my money. + +As I grew up, came into the world, and observed the actions of men, I +thought I met with many, very many, who _gave too much for the whistle_. + +When I saw one too ambitious of court favor, sacrificing his time in +attendance on levees, his repose, his liberty, his virtue, and perhaps +his friends to attain it, I have said to myself, _This man gives too +much for his whistle_. + +When I saw another fond of popularity, constantly employing himself in +political bustles, neglecting his own affairs, and ruining them by that +neglect, _He pays, indeed_, said I, _too much for his whistle_. . . . + +If I see one fond of appearance or fine clothes, fine houses, fine +furniture, fine equipages, all above his fortune, for which he +contracts debts and ends his career in a prison, _Alas_! say I, _he has +paid dear, very dear for his whistle_. . . . + +In short, I conceive that a great part of the miseries of mankind are +brought upon them by the false estimates they have made of the value of +things and by their _giving too much for their whistles_. + +Yet I ought to have charity for these unhappy people, when I consider +that with all this wisdom of which I am boasting, there are certain +things in the world so tempting, for example, the apples of King John, +which happily are not to be bought; for if they were put to sale by +auction I might very easily be led to ruin myself in the purchase, and +find that I had once more given too much for the _whistle_. + + + + +PHILIP FRENEAU. + +THE INDIAN BURYING-GROUND. + + In spite of all the learned have said, + I still my old opinion keep: + The posture that we give the dead + Points out the soul's eternal sleep. + + Not so the ancients of these lands: + The Indian, when from life released, + Again is seated with his friends, + And shares again the joyous feast. + + His imaged birds and painted bowl + And venison, for a journey dressed, + Bespeak the nature of the soul, + Activity that knows no rest. + + His bow for action ready bent, + And arrows with a head of stone, + Can only mean that life is spent, + And not the finer essence gone. + + Thou, stranger that shalt come this way. + No fraud upon the dead commit-- + Observe the swelling turf and say, + They do not _lie_, but here they _sit_. + + Here still a lofty rock remains, + On which the curious eye may trace + (Now wasted half by wearing rains) + The fancies of a ruder race. + + Here still an aged elm aspires, + Beneath whose far-projecting shade + (And which the shepherd still admires) + The children of the forest played. + + There oft a restless Indian queen + (Pale Sheba with her braided hair), + And many a barbarous form is seen + To chide the man that lingers there. + + By midnight moons, o'er moistening dews, + In vestments for the chase arrayed, + The hunter still the deer pursues, + The hunter and the deer--a shade! + + And long shall timorous Fancy see + The painted chief and pointed spear, + And Reason's self shall bow the knee + To shadows and delusions here. + + + + +DANIEL WEBSTER. + +THE UNION. + +[From the _Reply to Hayne_, January 25, 1830.] + +I profess, sir, in my career hitherto, to have kept steadily in view +the prosperity and honor of the whole country, and the preservation of +our Federal Union. It is to that Union we owe our safety at home and +our consideration and dignity abroad. It is to that Union that we are +chiefly indebted for whatever makes us most proud of our country. That +Union we readied only by the discipline of our virtues in the severe +school of adversity. It had its origin in the necessities of +disordered finance, prostrate commerce, and ruined credit. Under its +benign influences these great interests immediately awoke as from the +dead and sprang forth with newness of life. Every year of its duration +has teemed with fresh proofs of its utility and its blessings; and +although our territory has stretched out wider and wider and our +population spread farther and farther, they have not outrun its +protection or its benefits. It has been to us all a copious fountain +of national, social, and personal happiness. + +I have not allowed myself, sir, to look beyond the Union to see what +might lie hidden in the dark recess behind. I have not coolly weighed +the chances of preserving liberty when the bonds that unite us together +shall be broken asunder. I have not accustomed myself to hang over the +precipice of disunion to see whether with my short sight I can fathom +the depth of the abyss below, nor could I regard him as a safe +counselor in the affairs of this government whose thoughts should be +mainly bent on considering not how the Union may be best preserved, but +how tolerable might be the condition of the people when it should be +broken up and destroyed. While the Union lasts we have high, exciting, +gratifying prospects spread out before us, for us and our children. +Beyond that I seek not to penetrate the veil. God grant that in my day +at least that curtain may not rise! God grant that on my vision never +may be opened what lies beyond! When my eyes shall be turned to behold +for the last time the sun in heaven, may I not see him shining on the +broken and dishonored fragments of a once glorious Union; on States +dissevered, discordant, belligerent; on a land rent with civil feuds, +or drenched, it may be, in fraternal blood! Let their last feeble and +lingering glance rather behold the gorgeous ensign of the Republic, now +known and honored throughout the earth, still full high advanced, its +arms and trophies streaming in their original luster, not a stripe +erased or polluted, not a single star obscured, bearing for its motto +no such miserable interrogatory as "What is all this worth?" nor those +other words of delusion and folly, "Liberty first; and Union +afterward;" but every-where, spread all over in characters of living +light, blazing on all its ample folds as they float over the sea and +over the land, and in every wind under the whole heavens, that other +sentiment dear to every true American heart--Liberty and Union, now and +forever, one and inseparable! + + + +SOUTH CAROLINA AND MASSACHUSETTS. + +[From the same.] + +When I shall be found, sir, in my place here in the Senate, or +elsewhere, to sneer at public merit because it happens to spring up +beyond the little limits of my own State or neighborhood; when I +refuse, for any such cause, or for any cause, the homage due to +American talent, to elevated patriotism, to sincere devotion to liberty +and the country; or, if I see an uncommon endowment of Heaven, if I see +extraordinary capacity and virtue, in any son of the South; and if, +moved by local prejudices or gangrened by State jealousy, I get up here +to abate the tithe of a hair from his just character and just fame, may +my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth! + +Sir, let me recur to pleasing recollections; let me indulge in +refreshing remembrances of the past; let me remind you that, in early +times, no States cherished greater harmony, both of principle and +feeling, than Massachusetts and South Carolina. Would to God that +harmony might again return! Shoulder to shoulder they went through the +Revolution, hand in hand they stood round the administration of +Washington, and felt his own great arm lean on them for support. +Unkind feeling, if it exist, alienation and distrust are the growth, +unnatural to such soils, of false principle; since sown. They are +weeds, the seeds of which that same great arm never scattered. + +Mr. President, I shall enter upon no encomium of Massachusetts; she +needs none. There she is. Behold her and judge for yourselves. There +is her history; the world knows it by heart. The past, at least, is +secure. There is Boston, and Concord, and Lexington, and Bunker Hill; +and there they will remain forever. The bones of her sons, falling in +the great struggle for independence, now lie mingled with the soil of +every State from New England to Georgia, and there they will lie +forever. And, sir, where American liberty raised its first voice, and +where its youth was nurtured and sustained, there it still lives, in +the strength of its manhood, and full of its original spirit. If +discord and disunion shall wound it, if party strife and blind ambition +shall hawk at and tear it, if folly and madness, if uneasiness under +salutary and necessary restraint shall succeed in separating it from +that Union by which alone its existence is made sure, it will stand, in +the end, by the side of that cradle in which its infancy was rocked; it +will stretch forth its arm with whatever of vigor it may still retain, +over the friends who gather round it; and it will fall at last, if fall +it must, amidst the profoundest monuments of its own glory, and on the +very spot of its origin. + + + + +WASHINGTON IRVING. + +THE STORM SHIP. + +[From _Bracebridge Hall_.] + +In the golden age of the province of the New Netherlands, when under +the sway of Wouter Van Twiller, otherwise called the Doubter, the +people of the Manhattoes were alarmed one sultry afternoon, just about +the time of the summer solstice, by a tremendous storm of thunder and +lightning. The rain fell in such torrents as absolutely to spatter up +and smoke along the ground. It seemed as if the thunder rattled and +rolled over the very roofs of the houses; the lightning was seen to +play about the Church of St. Nicholas, and to strive three times in +vain to strike its weather-cock. Garrett Van Horne's new chimney was +split almost from top to bottom; and Boffne Mildeberger was struck +speechless from his bald-faced mare just as he was riding into +town. . . . At length the storm abated; the thunder sank into a growl, +and the setting sun, breaking from under the fringed borders of the +clouds, made the broad bosom of the bay to gleam like a sea of molten +gold. + +The word was given from the fort that a ship was standing up the +bay. . . . She was a stout, round, Dutch-built vessel, with high bow +and poop, and bearing Dutch colors. The evening sun gilded her +bellying canvas as she came riding over the long waving billows. The +sentinel who had given notice of her approach declared that he first +got sight of her when she was in the center of the bay; and that she +broke suddenly on his sight, just as if she had come out of the bosom +of the black thunder-clouds. . . . The ship was now repeatedly hailed, +but made no reply, and, passing by the fort, stood on up the Hudson. A +gun was brought to bear on her, and, with some difficulty, loaded and +fired by Hans Van Pelt, the garrison not being expert in artillery. +The shot seemed absolutely to pass through the ship, and to skip along +the water on the other side; but no notice was taken of it! What was +strange, she had all her sails set, and sailed right against wind and +tide, which were both down the river. . . . Thus she kept on, away up +the river, lessening and lessening in the evening sunshine, until she +faded from sight like a little white cloud melting away in the summer +sky. . . . + +Messengers were dispatched to various places on the river, but they +returned without any tidings--the ship had made no port. Day after +day, week after week elapsed, but she never returned down the Hudson. +As, however, the council seemed solicitous for intelligence they had it +in abundance. The captains of the sloops seldom arrived without +bringing some report of having seen the strange ship at different parts +of the river--sometimes near the Palisades, sometimes off Croton Point, +and sometimes in the Highlands; but she never was reported as having +been seen above the Highlands. The crews of the sloops, it is true, +generally differed among themselves in their accounts of these +apparitions; but that may have arisen from the uncertain situations in +which they saw her. Sometimes it was by the flashes of the +thunder-storm lighting up a pitchy night, and giving glimpses of her +careering across Tappan Zee or the wide waste of Haverstraw Bay. At +one moment she would appear close upon them, as if likely to run them +down, and would throw them into great bustle and alarm, but the next +flash would show her far off, always sailing against the wind. +Sometimes, in quiet moonlight nights, she would be seen under some high +bluff of the Highlands; all in deep shadow, excepting her top-sails +glittering in the moonbeams; by the time, however, that the voyagers +reached the place no ship was to be seen; and when they had passed on +for some distance and looked back, behold! there she was again with her +top-sails in the moonshine! Her appearance was always just after or +just in the midst of unruly weather; and she was known among the +skippers and voyagers of the Hudson by the name of "The Storm Ship." + +These reports perplexed the governor and his council more than ever; +and it would be useless to repeat the conjectures and opinions uttered +on the subject. Some quoted cases in point of ships seen off the coast +of New England navigated by witches and goblins. Old Hans Van Pelt, +who had been more than once to the Dutch Colony at the Cape of Good +Hope, insisted that this must be the _Flying Dutchman_ which had so +long haunted Table Bay, but being unable to make port had now sought +another harbor. Others suggested that if it really was a supernatural +apparition, as there was every natural reason to believe, it might be +Hendrik Hudson and his crew of the _Half-Moon_, who, it was well known, +had once run aground in the upper part of the river in seeking a +north-west passage to China. This opinion had very little weight with +the governor, but it passed current out of doors; for indeed it had +always been reported that Hendrik Hudson and his crew haunted the +Kaatskill Mountains; and it appeared very reasonable to suppose that +his ship might infest the river where the enterprise was baffled, or +that it might bear the shadowy crew to their periodical revels in the +mountain. . . . + +People who live along the river insist that they sometimes see her in +summer moonlight, and that in a deep still midnight they have heard the +chant of her crew, as if heaving the lead; but sights and sounds are so +deceptive along the mountainous shores, and about the wide bays and +long reaches of this great river, that I confess I have very strong +doubts upon the subject. It is certain, nevertheless, that strange +things have been seen in these Highlands in storms, which are +considered as connected with the old story of the ship. The captains +of the river craft talk of a little bulbous-bottomed Dutch goblin, in +trunk hose and sugar-loafed hat, with a speaking-trumpet in his hand, +which, they say, keeps about the Dunderberg. They declare that they +have heard him, in stormy weather, in the midst of the turmoil, giving +orders in Low Dutch for the piping up of a fresh gust of wind or the +rattling off of another thunder-clap; that sometimes he has been seen +surrounded by a crew of little imps in broad breeches and short +doublets, tumbling head-over-heels in the rack and mist, and playing a +thousand gambols in the air, or buzzing like a swarm of flies about +Anthony's Nose; and that, at such times, the hurry-scurry of the storm +was always greatest. One time a sloop, in passing by the Dunderberg, +was overtaken by a thunder-gust that came scouring round the mountain, +and seemed to burst just over the vessel. Though light and well +ballasted she labored dreadfully, and the water came over the gunwale. +All the crew were amazed when it was discovered that there was a little +white sugar-loaf hat on the masthead, known at once to be the hat of +the Herr of the Dunderberg. Nobody, however, dared to climb to the +mast-head and get rid of this terrible hat. The sloop continued +laboring and rocking, as if she would have rolled her mast overboard, +and seemed in continual danger either of upsetting or of running on +shore. In this way she drove quite through the Highlands, until she +had passed Pollopol's Island, where, it is said, the jurisdiction of +the Dunderberg potentate ceases. No sooner had she passed this bourn +than the little hat spun up into the air like a top, whirled up all the +clouds into a vortex, and hurried them back to the summit of the +Dunderberg, while the sloop righted herself and sailed on as quietly as +if in a mill-pond. Nothing saved her from utter wreck but the +fortunate circumstance of having a horse-shoe nailed against the +mast--a wise precaution against evil spirits, since adopted by all the +Dutch captains that navigate this haunted river. + + + + +JAMES FENIMORE COOPER. + +THE RENDEZVOUS. + +[From _The Deerslayer_.] + +In the position in which the ark had now got, the castle was concealed +from view by the projection of a point, as, indeed, was the northern +extremity of the lake itself. A respectable mountain, forest-clad, and +rounded like all the rest, limited the view in that direction, +stretching immediately across the whole of the fair scene,[1] with the +exception of a deep bay that passed its western end, lengthening the +basin for more than a mile. The manner in which the water flowed out +of the lake, beneath the leafy arches of the trees that lined the sides +of the stream, has already been mentioned, and it has also been said +that the rock, which was a favorite place of rendezvous throughout all +that region, and where Deerslayer now expected to meet his friend, +stood near this outlet and no great distance from the shore. It was a +large isolated stone that rested on the bottom of the lake, apparently +left there when the waters tore away the earth from around it, in +forcing for themselves a passage down the river, and which had obtained +its shape from the action of the elements during the slow progress of +centuries. The height of this rock could scarcely equal six feet, and, +as has been said, its shape was not unlike that which is usually given +to bee-hives or to a hay-cock. The latter, indeed, gives the best +idea, not only of its form, but of its dimensions. It stood, and still +stands, for we are writing of real scenes, within fifty feet of the +bank, and in water that was only two feet in depth, though there were +seasons in which its rounded apex, if such a term can properly be used, +was covered by the lake. Many of the trees stretched so far forward as +almost to blend the rock with the shore, when seen from a little +distance; and one tall pine in particular overhung it in a way to form +a noble and appropriate canopy to a seat that had held many a forest +chieftain, during the long succession of ages in which America and all +it contained existed apart in mysterious solitude, a world by itself, +equally without a familiar history and without an origin that the +annals of man can catch. + +When distant some two or three hundred feet from the shore Deerslayer +took in his sail, and he dropped his grapnel as soon as he found the +ark had drifted in a line that was directly to windward of the rock. +The motion of the scow was then checked, when it was brought head to +wind by the action of the breeze. As soon as this was done Deerslayer +"paid out line," and suffered the vessel to "set down" upon the rock as +fast as the light air would force it to leeward. Floating entirely on +the surface, this was soon affected, and the young man checked the +drift when he was told that the stern of the scow was within fifteen or +eighteen feet of the desired spot. + +In executing this maneuver, Deerslayer had proceeded promptly; for +while he did not in the least doubt that he was both watched and +followed by the foe, he believed he had distracted their movements by +the apparent uncertainly of his own, and he knew they could have no +means of ascertaining that the rock was his aim, unless, indeed, one of +the prisoners had betrayed him--a chance so improbable in itself as to +give him no concern. Notwithstanding the celerity and decision of his +movements, he did not, however, venture so near the shore without +taking due precautions to effect a retreat, in the event of its +becoming necessary. He held the line in his hand, and Judith was +stationed at a loop on the side of the cabin next the shore, where she +could watch the beach and the rocks and give timely notice of the +approach of either friend or foe. Hetty was also placed on watch, but +it was to keep the trees overhead in view, lest some enemy might ascend +one, and, by completely commanding the interior of the scow, render the +defenses of the hut or cabin useless. + +The sun had disappeared from the lake and valley when Deerslayer +checked the ark in the manner mentioned. Still it wanted a few minutes +to the true sunset, and he knew Indian punctuality too well to +anticipate any unmanly haste in his friend. The great question was, +whether, surrounded by enemies as he was known to be, he had escaped +their toils. The occurrences of the last twenty-four hours must be a +secret to him, and, like himself, Chingachgook was yet young on a +war-path. It was true he came prepared to encounter the party that +withheld his promised bride, but he had no means of ascertaining the +extent of the danger he ran or the precise positions occupied by either +friends or foes. In a word, the trained sagacity and untiring caution +of an Indian were all he had to rely on amid the critical risks he +unavoidably ran. + +"Is the rock empty, Judith?" inquired Deerslayer, as soon as he had +checked the drift of the ark, deeming it imprudent to venture +unnecessarily near. "Is any thing to be seen of the Delaware chief?" + +"Nothing, Deerslayer. Neither rock, shore, tree, nor lake seems to +have ever held a human form." + +"Keep close, Judith--keep close, Hetty--a rifle has a prying eye, a +nimble foot, and a desperate fatal tongue. Keep close, then, but keep +up act_y_ve looks, and be on the alart. 'Twould grieve me to the heart +did any harm befall either of you." + +"And _you_, Deerslayer!" exclaimed Judith, turning her handsome face +from the loop, to bestow a gracious and grateful look on the young man; +"do _you_ 'keep close' and have a proper care that the savages do not +catch a glimpse of you! A bullet might be as fatal to you as to one of +us, and the blow that you felt would be felt by all." + +"No fear of me, Judith--no fear of me, my good gal. Do not look +this-a-way, although you look so pleasant and comely, but keep your +eyes on the rock and the shore and the--" + +Deerslayer was interrupted by a slight exclamation from the girl, who, +in obedience to his hurried gestures, as much as in obedience to his +words, had immediately bent her looks again in the opposite direction. + +"What is't?--what is't, Judith?" he hastily demanded. "Is any thing to +be seen?" + +"There is a man on the rock!--an Indian warrior in his paint, and +armed!" + +"Where does he wear his hawk's feather?" eagerly added Deerslayer, +relaxing his hold of the line, in readiness to drift nearer to the +place of rendezvous. "Is it fast to the warlock, or does he carry it +above the left ear?" + +"'Tis as you say, above the left ear; he smiles, too, and mutters the +word 'Mohican.'" + +"God be praised, 'tis the Sarpent at last!" exclaimed the young man, +suffering the line to slip through his hands until, hearing a light +bound in the other end of the craft, he instantly checked the rope and +began to haul it in again under the assurance that his object was +effected. + +At that moment the door of the cabin was opened hastily, and a warrior +darting through the little room stood at Deerslayer's side, simply +uttering the exclamation "Hugh!" At the next instant Judith and Hetty +shrieked, and the air was filled with the yell of twenty savages, who +came leaping through the branches down the bank, some actually falling +headlong into the water in their haste. + +"Pull, Deerslayer," cried Judith, hastily barring the door, in order to +prevent an inroad by the passage through which the Delaware had just +entered; "pull for life and death--the lake is full of savages wading +after us!" + +The young men--for Chingachgook immediately came to his friend's +assistance--needed no second bidding, but they applied themselves to +their task in a way that showed how urgent they deemed the occasion. +The great difficulty was in suddenly overcoming the _vis inertiae_ of +so large a mass; for, once in motion, it was easy to cause the scow to +skim the water with all the necessary speed. + +"Pull, Deerslayer, for heaven's sake!" cried Judith, again at the loop. +"These wretches rush into the water like hounds following their prey! +Ah! The scow moves! and now the water deepens to the armpits of the +foremost; still they rush forward and will seize the ark!" + +A slight scream and then a joyous laugh followed from the girl; the +first produced by a desperate effort of their pursuers, and the last by +its failure, the scow, which had now got fairly in motion, gliding +ahead into deep water with a velocity that set the designs of their +enemies at naught. As the two men were prevented by the position of +the cabin from seeing what passed astern, they were compelled to +inquire of the girls into the state of the chase. + +"What now, Judith?--what next? Do the Mingoes still follow, or are we +quit of 'em for the present?" demanded Deerslayer when he felt the rope +yielding, as if the scow was going fast ahead, and heard the scream and +the laugh of the girl almost in the same breath. + +"They have vanished!--one, the last, is just burying himself in the +bushes of the bank--there! he has disappeared in the shadows of the +trees! You have got your friend and we are all safe!" + + +[1] Otsego Lake. + + + + + WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT. + + TO A WATERFOWL. + + Whither, 'midst falling dew, + While glow the heavens with the last steps of day, + Far through their rosy depths dost thou pursue + Thy solitary way? + + Vainly the fowler's eye + Might mark thy distant flight to do thee wrong, + As, darkly seen against the crimson sky, + Thy figure floats along. + + Seek'st thou the plashy brink + Of weedy lake or marge of river wide, + Or where the rocking billows rise and sink + On the chafed ocean side? + + There is a power whose care + Teaches thy way along that pathless coast-- + The desert and illimitable air-- + Lone wandering but not lost. + + All day thy wings have fanned, + At that far height, the cold, thin atmosphere + Yet stoop not, weary, to the welcome land, + Though the dark night is near. + + And soon, that toil shall end; + Soon, shalt thou find a summer home and rest, + And scream among thy fellows; reeds shall bend + Soon o'er thy sheltered nest. + + Thou'rt gone, the abyss of heaven + Hath swallowed up thy form; yet on my heart + Deeply hath sunk the lesson thou hast given, + And shall not soon depart. + + He who, from zone to zone, + Guides through the boundless sky thy certain flight, + In the long way that I must tread alone, + Will lead my steps aright. + + + + THE DEATH OF THE FLOWERS. + + The melancholy days are come, + The saddest of the year, + Of wailing winds and naked woods, + And meadows brown and sere. + Heaped in the hollows of the grove, + The autumn leaves lie dead; + They rustle to the eddying gust, + And to the rabbit's tread. + The robin and the wren are flown, + And from the shrubs the jay, + And from the wood-top calls the crow + Through all the gloomy day. + + Where are the flowers, the fair young flowers, + That lately sprang and stood + In brighter light and softer airs, + A beauteous sisterhood? + Alas! they all are in their graves; + The gentle race of flowers + Are lying in their lowly beds + With the fair and good of ours. + The rain is falling where they lie, + But the cold November rain + Calls not, from out the gloomy earth, + The lovely ones again. + + The wind-flower and the violet, + They perished long ago, + And the brier-rose and the orchis died + Amid the summer glow; + But on the hill the golden-rod, + And the aster in the wood, + And the yellow sun-flower by the brook + In autumn beauty stood, + Till fell the frost from the clear cold heaven, + As falls the plague on men, + And the brightness of their smile was gone + From upland, glade, and glen. + + And now when comes the calm, mild day, + As still such days will come, + To call the squirrel and the bee + From out their winter home; + When the sound of dropping nuts is heard, + Though all the trees are still, + And twinkle in the smoky light + The waters of the rill, + The south wind searches for the flowers + Whose fragrance late he bore, + And sighs to find them in the wood + And by the stream no more. + + And then I think of one who in + Her youthful beauty died, + The fair meek blossom that grew up + And faded by my side; + In the cold, moist earth we laid her, + When the forest cast the leaf, + And we wept that one so lovely + Should have a life so brief. + Yet not unmeet it was that one, + Like that young friend of ours, + So gentle and so beautiful, + Should perish with the flowers. + + + + THE UNIVERSAL TOMB. + + [From _Thanatopsis_.] + + Yet not to thine eternal resting-place + Shalt thou retire alone, nor could'st thou wish + Couch more magnificent. Thou shalt lie down + With patriarchs of the infant world--with kings, + The powerful of the earth--the wise, the good, + Fair forms, and hoary seers of ages past, + All in one mighty sepulcher. The hills, + Rock-ribb'd and ancient as the sun,--the vales + Stretching in pensive quietness between; + The venerable woods--rivers that move + In majesty, and the complaining brooks + That make the meadows green; and, poured round all, + Old Ocean's gray and melancholy waste,-- + Are but the solemn decorations all + Of the great tomb of man. The golden sun, + The planets, all the infinite host of heaven, + Are shining on the sad abodes of death, + Through the still lapse of ages. All that tread + The globe are but a handful to the tribes + That slumber in its bosom. Take the wings + Of morning, traverse Barca's desert sands, + Or lose thyself in the continuous woods + Where rolls the Oregon, and hears no sound + Save his own dashings--yet the dead are there: + And millions in those solitudes, since first + The flight of years began, have laid them down + In their last sleep--the dead reign there alone. + + * * * * * * + + So live, that when thy summons comes to join + The innumerable caravan, which moves + To that mysterious realm, where each shall take + His chamber in the silent halls of death, + Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night, + Scourged to his dungeon, but, sustained and soothed + By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave, + Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch + About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams. + + + + +RALPH WALDO EMERSON. + +NATURE'S MINISTRY OF BEAUTY. + +[From _Nature_.] + +To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not +see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing. The sun +illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the +heart of the child. The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward +senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the +spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood. His intercourse with +heaven and earth becomes part of his daily food. In the presence of +nature a wild delight runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows. +Nature says, He is my creature, and mauger all his impertinent griefs, +he shall be glad with me. Not the sun or the summer alone, but every +hour and season yields its tribute of delight; for every hour and +change corresponds to and authorizes a different state of the mind, +from breathless noon to grimmest midnight. Nature is a setting that +fits equally well a comic or a mourning piece. In good health, the air +is a cordial of incredible virtue. Crossing a bare common, in snow +puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my +thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a +perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear. In the woods, +too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what +period soever of life is always a child. In the woods is perpetual +youth. Within these plantations of God a decorum and sanctity reigns, +a perennial festival is dressed, and the guest sees not how he should +tire of them in a thousand years. In the woods we return to reason and +faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life--no disgrace, +no calamity (leaving me my eyes), which nature cannot repair. Standing +on the bare ground--my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into +infinite space--all mean egotism vanishes, I become a transparent +eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being +circulate through me; I am part or particle of God. The name of the +nearest friend sounds there foreign and accidental; to be brothers, to +be acquaintances--master or servant, is then a trifle and a +disturbance. I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty. In +the wilderness I find something more dear and connate than in streets +or villages. In the tranquil landscape, and especially in the distant +line of the horizon, man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his own +nature. + +The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister is the +suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable. I am +not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me, and I to them. The +waving of the boughs in the storm is new to me and old. It takes me by +surprise, and yet is not unknown. . . . + +I see the spectacle of morning from the hill-top over against my house, +from daybreak to sunrise, with emotions which an angel might share. +The long slender bars of cloud float like fishes in the sea of crimson +light. From the earth, as a shore, I look out into that silent sea. I +seem to partake its rapid transformations; the active enchantment +reaches my dust, and I dilate and conspire with the morning wind. How +does Nature deify us with a few and cheap elements! Give me health and +a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous. The dawn is my +Assyria; the sunset and moonrise my Paphos, and unimaginable realms of +faerie; broad noon shall be my England of the senses and the +understanding; the night shall be my Germany of mystic philosophy and +dreams. + +Not less excellent, except for our less susceptibility in the +afternoon, was the charm, last evening, of a January sunset. The +western clouds divided and subdivided themselves into pink flakes +modulated with tints of unspeakable softness; and the air had so much +life and sweetness that it was a pain to come within doors. What was +it that Nature would say? Was there no meaning in the live repose of +the valley behind the mill, and which Homer or Shakespeare could not +re-form for me in words? The leafless trees become spires of flame in +the sunset, with the blue east for their background, and the stars of +the dead calices of flowers, and every withered stem and stubble ruined +with frost, contribute something to the mute music. + + + +IDEALISM. + +[From the same.] + +To the senses and the unrenewed understanding belongs a sort of +instinctive belief in the absolute existence of nature. In their view +man and nature are indissolubly joined. Things are ultimates, and they +never look beyond their sphere. The presence of Reason mars this +faith. . . . Nature is made to conspire with spirit to emancipate us. +Certain mechanical changes, a small alteration in our local position, +apprises us of a dualism. We are strangely affected by seeing the +shore from a moving ship, from a balloon, or through the tints of an +unusual sky. The least change in our point of view gives the whole +world a pictorial air. A man who seldom rides needs only to get into a +coach and traverse his own town, to turn the street into a puppet-show. +The men, the women--talking, running, bartering, fighting--the earnest +mechanic, the lounger, the beggar, the boys, the dogs are unrealized at +once, or at least wholly detached from all relation to the observer, +and seen as apparent, not substantial, beings. What new thoughts are +suggested by seeing a face of country quite familiar, in the rapid +movement of the railway car! Nay, the most wonted objects (make a very +slight change in the point of vision) please us most. In a camera +obscura the butcher's cart and the figure of one of our own family +amuse us. So a portrait of a well-known face gratifies us. Turn the +eyes upside down, by looking at the landscape through your legs, and +how agreeable is the picture, though you have seen it any time these +twenty years! + +In these cases, by mechanical means, is suggested the difference +between the observer and the spectacle, between the man and nature. +Hence arises a pleasure mixed with awe; I may say, a low degree of the +sublime is felt from the fact, probably, that man is hereby apprised, +that whilst the world is a spectacle, something in himself is stable. + + + + THE RHODORA.[1] + + In May, when sea-winds pierced our solitudes, + I found the fresh Rhodora in the woods, + Spreading its leafless blooms in a damp nook, + To please the desert and the sluggish brook. + The purple petals, fallen in the pool, + Made the black water with their beauty gay; + Here might the red bird come his plumes to cool, + And court the flower that cheapens his array. + Rhodora! if the sages ask thee why + This charm is wasted on the earth and sky, + Tell them, dear, that if eyes were made for seeing, + Then Beauty is its own excuse for being: + Why thou wert there, O rival of the rose, + I never thought to ask, I never knew: + But, in my simple ignorance, suppose + The self-same power that brought me there brought you. + + + [1] On being asked, Whence is the flower? + + + + HYMN. + + [Sung at the completion of the Concord Monument, April 19, 1836.] + + By the rude bridge that arched the flood, + Their flag to April's breeze unfurled, + Here once the embattled farmers stood, + And fired the shot heard round the world. + + The foe long since in silence slept; + Alike the conqueror silent sleeps; + And time the ruined bridge has swept + Down the dark stream which seaward creeps. + + On this green bank, by this soft stream, + We set to-day a votive stone; + That memory may their deed redeem, + When, like our sires, our sons are gone. + + Spirit, that made those heroes dare + To die, and leave their children free, + Bid time and nature gently spare + The shaft we raise to them and thee. + + + + +NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. + +THE HAUNTED MIND. + +What a singular moment is the first one, when you have hardly begun to +recollect yourself, after starting from midnight slumber! By unclosing +your eyes so suddenly you seem to have surprised the personages of your +dream in full convocation round your bed and catch one broad glance at +them before they can flit into obscurity. Or, to vary the metaphor, +you find yourself, for a single instant, wide awake in that realm of +illusions whither sleep has been the passport, and behold its ghostly +inhabitants and wondrous scenery with a perception of their strangeness +such as you never attain while the dream is undisturbed. The distant +sound of a church clock is borne faintly on the wind. You question +with yourself, half seriously, whether it has stolen to your waking ear +from some gray tower that stood within the precincts of your dream. +While yet in suspense, another clock flings its heavy clang over +the slumbering town with so full and distinct a sound, and such a +long murmur in the neighboring air, that you are certain it must +proceed from the steeple at the nearest corner. You count the +strokes--one--two, and there they cease, with a booming sound, like the +gathering of a third stroke within the bell. + +If you could choose an hour of wakefulness out of the whole night it +would be this. Since your sober bed-time, at eleven, you have had rest +enough to take off the pressure of yesterday's fatigue; while before +you till the sun comes from "far Cathay" to brighten your window there +is almost the space of a summer night; one hour to be spent in thought, +with the mind's eye half shut, and two in pleasant dreams, and two in +that strangest of enjoyments, the forgetfulness alike of joy and woe. +The moment of rising belongs to another period of time, and appears so +distant that the plunge out of a warm bed into the frosty air cannot +yet be anticipated with dismay. Yesterday has already vanished among +the shadows of the past; to-morrow has not yet emerged from the future. +You have found an intermediate space, where the business of life does +not intrude, where the passing moment lingers and becomes truly the +present; a spot where Father Time, when he thinks nobody is watching +him, sits down by the way-side to take breath, O that he would fall +asleep and let mortals live on without growing older! + +Hitherto you have lain perfectly still, because the slightest motion +would dissipate the fragments of your slumber. Now, being irrevocably +awake, you peep through the half-drawn window-curtain and observe that +the glass is ornamented with fanciful devices in frost-work, and that +each pane presents something like a frozen dream. There will be time +enough to trace out the analogy while waiting the summons to breakfast. +Seen through the clear portion of the glass, where the silvery mountain +peaks of the frost scenery do not ascend, the most conspicuous object +is the steeple, the white spire of which directs you to the wintry +luster of the firmament. You may almost distinguish the figures on the +clock that has just tolled the hour. Such a frosty sky, and the +snow-covered roofs, and the long vista of the frozen street, all white, +and the distant water hardened into rock, might make you shiver, even +under four blankets and a woolen comforter. Yet look at that one +glorious star! Its beams are distinguishable from all the rest, and +actually cast the shadow of the casement on the bed with a radiance of +deeper hue than moonlight, though not so accurate an outline. + +You sink down and muffle your head in the clothes, shivering all the +while, but less from bodily chill than the bare idea of a polar +atmosphere. It is too cold even for the thoughts to venture abroad. +You speculate on the luxury of wearing out a whole existence in bed, +like an oyster in its shell, content with the sluggish ecstasy of +inaction, and drowsily conscious of nothing but delicious warmth, such +as you now feel again. Ah! that idea has brought a hideous one in its +train. You think how the dead are lying in their cold shrouds and +narrow coffins through the drear winter of the grave, and cannot +persuade your fancy that they neither shrink nor shiver when the snow +is drifting over their little hillocks and the bitter blast howls +against the door of the tomb. That gloomy thought will collect a +gloomy multitude and throw its complexion over your wakeful hour. + +In the depths of every heart there is a tomb and a dungeon, though the +lights, the music, and revelry above may cause us to forget their +existence, and the buried ones or prisoners whom they hide. But +sometimes, and oftenest at midnight, these dark receptacles are flung +wide open. In an hour like this, when the mind has a passive +sensibility, but no active strength; when the imagination is a mirror, +imparting vividness to all ideas without the power of selecting or +controlling them, then pray that your griefs may slumber and the +brotherhood of remorse not break their chain. It is too late! A +funeral train comes gliding by your bed, in which Passion and Feeling +assume bodily shape and things of the mind become dim specters to the +eye. There is your earliest Sorrow, a pale young mourner, wearing a +sister's likeness to first love, sadly beautiful, with a hallowed +sweetness in her melancholy features and grace in the flow of her sable +robe. Next appears a shade of ruined loveliness, with dust among her +golden hair and her bright garments all faded and defaced, stealing +from your glance with drooping head, as fearful of reproach; she was +your fondest Hope, but a delusive one; so call her Disappointment now. +A sterner form succeeds, with a brow of wrinkles, a look and gesture of +iron authority; there is no name for him unless it be Fatality, an +emblem of the evil influence that rules your fortunes; a demon to whom +you subjected yourself by some error at the outset of life, and were +bound his slave forever, by once obeying him. See! those fiendish +lineaments graven on the darkness, the writhed lip of scorn, the +mockery of that living eye, the pointed finger, touching the sore place +in your heart! Do you remember any act of enormous folly, at which you +would blush, even in the remotest cavern of the earth? Then recognize +your Shame. + +Pass, wretched band! Well for the wakeful one if, riotously miserable, +a fiercer tribe do not surround him, the devils of a guilty heart, that +holds its hell within itself. What if Remorse should assume the +features of an injured friend? What if the fiend should come in +woman's garments, with a pale beauty amid sin and desolation, and lie +down by your side? What if he should stand at your bed's foot, in the +likeness of a corpse, with a bloody stain upon the shroud? Sufficient +without such guilt is this nightmare of the soul; this heavy, heavy +sinking of the spirits; this wintry gloom about the heart; this +indistinct horror of the mind, blending itself with the darkness of the +chamber. . . . Now comes the peal of the distant clock, with fainter +and fainter strokes as you plunge farther into the wilderness of sleep. +It is the knell of a temporary death. Your spirit has departed, and +strays like a free citizen, among the people of a shadowy world, +beholding strange sights, yet without wonder or dismay. So calm, +perhaps, will be the final change, so undisturbed, as if among familiar +things. The entrance of the soul to its eternal home! + + + + + HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. + + THE BELEAGUERED CITY. + + I have read, in some old marvelous tale, + Some legend strange and vague, + That a midnight host of specters pale + Beleaguered the walls of Prague. + + Beside the Moldau's rushing stream, + With the wan moon overhead, + There stood, as in an awful dream, + The army of the dead. + + White as a sea-fog, landward-bound, + The spectral camp was seen, + And, with a sorrowful deep sound, + The river flowed between. + + No other voice nor sound was there, + No drum, nor sentry's pace; + The mist-like banners clasped the air, + As clouds with clouds embrace. + + But when the old cathedral bell + Proclaimed the morning prayer, + The white pavilions rose and fell + On the alarmèd air. + + Down the broad valley fast and far + The troubled army fled; + Up rose the glorious morning star, + The ghastly host was dead. + + I have read in the marvelous heart of man, + That strange and mystic scroll, + That an army of phantoms vast and wan + Beleaguer the human soul. + + Encamped beside Life's rushing stream, + In Fancy's misty light, + Gigantic shapes and shadows gleam + Portentous through the night. + + Upon its midnight battle-ground + The spectral camp is seen, + And, with a sorrowful deep sound, + Flows the River of Life between. + + No other voice nor sound is there, + In the army of the grave; + No other challenge breaks the air, + But the rushing of life's wave. + + And when the solemn and deep church-bell + Entreats the soul to pray, + The midnight phantoms feel the spell, + The shadows sweep away. + + Down the broad Vale of Tears afar + The spectral camp is fled; + Faith shineth as a morning star, + Our ghastly fears are dead. + + + + THE OCCULTATION OF ORION. + + I saw, as in a dream sublime, + The balance in the hand of Time. + O'er East and West its beam impended; + And day, with all its hours of light, + Was slowly sinking out of sight, + While, opposite, the scale of night + Silently with the stars ascended. + + Like the astrologers of eld, + In that bright vision I beheld + Greater and deeper mysteries. + I saw, with its celestial keys, + Its chords of air, its frets of fire, + The Samian's great Aeolian lyre, + Rising through all its sevenfold bars, + From earth unto the fixèd stars. + And through the dewy atmosphere, + Not only could I see, but hear, + Its wondrous and harmonious strings, + In sweet vibration, sphere by sphere, + From Dian's circle light and near, + Onward to vaster and wider rings, + Where, chanting through his beard of snows, + Majestic, mournful Saturn goes, + And down the sunless realms of space + Reverberates the thunder of his bass. + + Beneath the sky's triumphal arch + This music sounded like a march, + And with its chorus seemed to be + Preluding some great tragedy. + Sirius was rising in the east; + And, slow ascending one by one, + The kindling constellations shone. + Begirt with many a blazing star, + Stood the great giant, Algebar, + Orion, hunter of the beast! + His sword hung gleaming by his side, + And, on his arm, the lion's hide + Scattered across the midnight air + The golden radiance of its hair. + + The moon was pallid, but not faint; + And beautiful as some fair saint, + Serenely moving on her way + In hours of trial and dismay. + As if she heard the voice of God, + Unharmed with naked feet she trod + Upon the hot and burning stars, + As on the glowing coals and bars + That were to prove her strength, and try + Her holiness and her purity. + + Thus moving on, with silent pace, + And triumph in her sweet, pale face, + She reached the station of Orion. + Aghast he stood in strange alarm! + And suddenly from his outstretched arm + Down fell the red skin of the lion + Into the river at his feet. + His mighty club no longer beat + The forehead of the bull; but he + Reeled as of yore beside the sea, + When, blinded by Oenopion, + He sought the blacksmith at his forge, + And, climbing up the mountain gorge, + Fixed his blank eyes upon the sun, + Then through the silence overhead, + An angel with a trumpet said, + "Forever more, forever more, + The reign of violence is o'er." + And, like an instrument that flings + Its music on another's strings, + The trumpet of the angel cast + Upon the heavenly lyre its blast, + And on from sphere to sphere the words + Re-echoed down the burning chords,-- + "For evermore, for evermore, + The reign of violence is o'er!" + + + + DANTE. + + Tuscan, that wanderest through the realms of gloom, + With thoughtful pace, and sad, majestic eyes, + Stern thoughts and awful from thy thoughts arise, + Like Farinata from his fiery tomb. + Thy sacred song is like the trump of doom; + Yet in thy heart what human sympathies. + What soft compassion glows, as in the skies + The tender stars their clouded lamps relume! + Methinks I see thee stand, with pallid cheeks, + By Fra Hilario in his diocese, + As up the convent wall, in golden streaks, + The ascending sunbeams mark the day's decrease. + And, as he asks what there the stranger seeks, + Thy voice along the cloister whispers, "Peace!" + + + + + JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER. + + RANDOLPH OF ROANOKE. + + O Mother Earth! upon thy lap + Thy weary ones receiving, + And o'er there, silent as a dream, + Thy grassy mantle weaving, + Fold softly in thy long embrace + That heart so worn and broken, + And cool its pulse of fire beneath + Thy shadows old and oaken. + + Shut out from him the bitter word + And serpent hiss of scorning; + Nor let the storms of yesterday + Disturb his quiet morning. + Breathe over him forgetfulness + Of all save deeds of kindness, + And, save to smiles of grateful eyes, + Press down his lids in blindness. + + There, where with living ear and eye, + He heard Potomac's flowing, + And, through his tall ancestral trees + Saw autumn's sunset glowing, + He sleeps--still looking to the West, + Beneath the dark wood shadow, + As if he still would see the sun + Sink down on wave and meadow. + + Bard, Sage, and Tribune--in himself + All moods of mind contrasting-- + The tenderest wail of human woe, + The scorn like lightning blasting; + The pathos which from rival eyes + Unwilling tears could summon, + The stinging taunt, the fiery burst + Of hatred scarcely human! + + Mirth, sparkling like a diamond shower, + From lips of life-long sadness; + Clear picturings of majestic thought + Upon a ground of madness; + And over all Romance and Song + A classic beauty throwing, + And laureled Clio at his side + Her storied pages showing. + + All parties feared him: each in turn + Beheld its schemes disjointed, + As right or left his fatal glance + And spectral finger pointed. + Sworn foe of cant, he smote it down + With trenchant wit unsparing, + And, mocking, rent with ruthless hand + The robe Pretense was wearing. + + Too honest or too proud to feign + A love he never cherished, + Beyond Virginia's border line + His patriotism perished. + While others hailed in distant skies + Our eagle's dusky pinion, + He only saw the mountain bird + Stoop o'er his Old Dominion. + + Still through each change of fortune strange, + Racked nerve, and brain all burning, + His loving faith in mother-land + Knew never shade of turning; + By Britain's lakes, by Neva's wave, + Whatever sky was o'er him, + He heard her rivers' rushing sound, + Her blue peaks rose before him. + + He held his slaves, yet made withal + No false and vain pretenses, + Nor paid a lying priest to seek + For scriptural defenses. + His harshest words of proud rebuke, + His bitterest taunt and scorning, + Fell fire-like on the Northern brow + That bent to him in fawning. + + He held his slaves, yet kept the while + His reverence for the Human, + In the dark vassals of his will + He saw but man and woman. + No hunter of God's outraged poor + His Roanoke valley entered; + No trader in the souls of men + Across his threshold ventured. + + And when the old and wearied man + Lay down for his last sleeping, + And at his side, a slave no more, + His brother-man stood weeping, + His latest thought, his latest breath, + To freedom's duty giving, + With failing tongue and trembling hand + The dying blest the living. + + O! never bore his ancient State + A truer son or braver; + None trampling with a calmer scorn + On foreign hate or favor. + He knew her faults, yet never stooped + His proud and manly feeling + To poor excuses of the wrong + Or meanness of concealing. + + But none beheld with clearer eye, + The plague-spot o'er her spreading, + None heard more sure the steps of Doom + Along her future treading. + For her as for himself he spake, + When, his gaunt frame up-bracing, + He traced with dying hand "REMORSE!" + And perished in the tracing. + + As from the grave where Henry sleeps, + From Vernon's weeping willow, + And from the grassy pall which hides + The Sage of Monticello, + So from the leaf-strewn burial-stone + Of Randolph's lowly dwelling, + Virginia! o'er thy land of slaves + A warning voice is swelling. + + And hark! from thy deserted fields + Are sadder warnings spoken, + From quenched hearths, where thy exiled sons + Their household gods have broken. + The curse is on thee--wolves for men, + And briers for corn-sheaves giving! + O! more than all thy dead renown + Were now one hero living. + + + + + OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. + + OLD IRONSIDES. + + Ay, tear her tattered ensign down! + Long has it waved on high, + And many an eye has danced to see + That banner in the sky; + Beneath it rung the battle shout, + And burst the cannon's roar; + The meteor of the ocean air + Shall sweep the clouds no more. + + Her deck, once red with heroes' blood, + Where knelt the vanquished foe, + When winds were hurrying o'er the flood, + And waves were white below, + No more shall feel the victor's tread, + Or know the conquered knee,-- + The harpies of the shore shall pluck + The eagle of the sea. + + O, better that her shattered hulk + Should sink beneath the wave; + Her thunders shook the mighty deep, + And there should be her grave; + Nail to the mast her holy flag, + Set every threadbare sail, + And give her to the god of storms, + The lightning and the gale! + + + + THE LAST LEAF. + + I saw him once before, + As he passed by the door, + And again + The pavement stones resound, + As he totters o'er the ground + With his cane. + + They say that in his prime, + Ere the pruning-knife of time + Cut him down, + Not a better man was found + By the Crier on his round + Through the town. + + But now he walks the streets, + And he looks at all he meets + Sad and wan, + And he shakes his feeble head, + That it seems as if he said, + "They are gone." + + The mossy marbles rest + On the lips that he has pressed + In their bloom, + And the names he loved to hear + Have been carved for many a year + On the tomb. + + My grandmamma has said-- + Poor old lady, she is dead + Long ago-- + That he had a Roman nose, + And his cheek was like a rose + In the snow. + + But now his nose is thin, + And it rests upon his chin + Like a staff, + And a crook is in his back, + And a melancholy crack + In his laugh. + + I know it is a sin + For me to sit and grin + At him here; + But the old three-cornered hat, + And the breeches, and all that, + Are so queer! + + And if I should live to be + The last leaf upon the tree + In the spring, + Let them smile, as I do now, + At the old forsaken bough + Where I cling. + + + + MY AUNT. + + My aunt! my dear, unmarried aunt! + Long years have o'er her flown; + Yet still she strains the aching clasp + That binds her virgin zone; + I know it hurts her, though she looks + As cheerful as she can; + Her waist is ampler than her life, + For life is but a span. + + My aunt! my poor deluded aunt! + Her hair is almost gray; + Why will she train that winter curl + In such a spring-like way? + How can she lay her glasses down, + And say she reads as well, + When, through a double convex lens, + She just makes out to spell? + + Her father--grandpapa! forgive + This erring lip its smiles-- + Vowed she should make the finest girl + Within a hundred miles; + He sent her to a stylish school; + 'Twas in her thirteenth June; + And with her, as the rules required, + "Two towels and a spoon." + + They braced my aunt against a board, + To make her straight and tall; + They laced her up, they starved her down, + To make her light and small; + They pinched her feet, they singed her hair, + They screwed it up with pins; + O, never mortal suffered more + In penance for her sins. + + So when my precious aunt was done, + My grandsire brought her back + (By daylight, lest some rabid youth + Might follow on the track); + "Ah!" said my grandsire, as he shook + Some powder in his pan, + "What could this lovely creature do + Against a desperate man?" + + Alas! nor chariot, nor barouche, + Nor bandit cavalcade, + Tore from the trembling father's arms + His all-accomplished maid. + For her how happy had it been! + And Heaven had spared to me + To see one sad ungathered rose + On my ancestral tree. + + + + + EDGAR ALLAN POE. + + TO HELEN. + + Helen, thy beauty is to me + Like those Nicean barks of yore, + That gently, o'er a perfumed sea, + The weary, wayworn wanderer bore + To his own native shore. + + On desperate seas long wont to roam, + Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face, + Thy Naiad airs have brought me home + To the glory that was Greece + And the grandeur that was Rome. + + Lo! in yon brilliant window-niche + How statue-like I see thee stand, + The agate lamp within thy hand! + Ah! Psyche, from the regions which + Are Holy Land! + + + + TO ONE IN PARADISE. + + Thou wast that all to me, love, + For which my soul did pine: + A green isle in the sea, love, + A fountain and a shrine + All wreathed with fairy fruits and flowers, + And all the flowers were mine. + + Ah, dream too bright to last! + Ah, starry hope! that did'st arise + But to be overcast! + A voice from out the future cries + On! on! But o'er the past + (Dim gulf!) my spirit hovering lies, + Mute, motionless, aghast! + + For, alas! alas! with me + The light of life is o'er. + "No more--no more--no more--" + (Such language holds the solemn sea + To the sands upon the shore) + Shall bloom the thunder-blasted tree, + Or the stricken eagle soar! + + And all my days are trances, + And all my nightly dreams + Are where thy dark eye glances, + And where thy footstep gleams,-- + In what ethereal dances, + By what eternal streams! + + + +FROM "THE FALL OP THE HOUSE OF USHER." + +At the termination of this sentence I started, and for a moment paused; +for it appeared to me (although I at once concluded that my excited +fancy had deceived me)--it appeared to me that, from some very remote +portion of the mansion there came, indistinctly, to my ears what might +have been, in its exact similarity of character, the echo (but a +stifled and dull one certainly) of the very cracking and ripping sound +which Sir Launcelot had so particularly described. It was, beyond +doubt, the coincidence alone which had arrested my attention; for amid +the rattling of the sashes of the casements, and, the ordinary +commingled noises of the still-increasing storm, the sound, in itself, +had nothing, surely, which should have interested or disturbed me. I +continued the story. + + * * * * * * * * + +Here again I paused abruptly, and now with a feeling of wild +amazement--for there could be no doubt whatever that, in this instance, +I did actually hear (although from what direction it proceeded I found +it impossible to say) a low and apparently distant, but harsh, +protracted, and most unusual screaming or grating sound, the exact +counterpart of what my fancy had already conjured up for the dragon's +unnatural shriek, as described by the romancer. Oppressed, as I +certainly was, upon the occurrence of this second and most +extraordinary coincidence, by a thousand conflicting sensations, in +which wonder and extreme terror were predominant, I still retained +sufficient presence of mind to avoid exciting, by any observation, the +sensitive nervousness of my companion. I was by no means certain that +he had noticed the sounds in question; although, assuredly, a strange +alteration had, during the last few minutes, taken place in his +demeanor. From a position fronting my own he had gradually brought +round his chair so as to sit with his face to the door of the chamber, +and thus I could but partially perceive his features, although I saw +that his lips trembled as if he were murmuring inaudibly. His head had +dropped upon his breast; yet I knew that he was not asleep, from the +wide and rigid opening of the eye as I caught a glance of it in +profile. The motion of his body, too, was at variance with this idea; +for he rocked from side to side with a gentle yet constant and uniform +sway. Having rapidly taken notice of all this I resumed the narrative +of Sir Launcelot. + + * * * * * * * * + +No sooner had these syllables passed my lips than--as if a shield of +brass had indeed, at the moment, fallen heavily upon a floor of +silver--I became aware of a distinct, hollow, metallic, and clangorous, +yet apparently muffled, reverberation. Completely unnerved, I leaped +to my feet; but the measured, rocking movement of Usher was +undisturbed. I rushed to the chair in which he sat. His eyes were +bent fixedly before him, and throughout his whole countenance there +reigned a stony rigidity. But as I placed my hand upon his shoulder +there came a strong shudder over his whole person; a sickly smile +quivered about his lips; and I saw that he spoke in a low, hurried, and +gibbering manner, as if unconscious of my presence. Bending closely +over him, I at length drank in the hideous import of his words. + +"Not hear it? Yes, I hear it, and _have_ heard it. +Long--long--long--many minutes, many hours, many days have I heard +it--yet I _dared_ not--O, pity me, miserable wretch that I am!--I +_dared_ not--I dared not speak! _We have put her living in the tomb_! +Said I not that my senses were acute? I _now_ tell you that I heard +her first feeble movements in the hollow coffin. I heard them many, +many days ago--yet I dared not--I _dared not speak_! And +now--to-night--Ethelred--ha! ha!--the breaking of the hermit's door, +and the death-cry of the dragon, and the clangor of the shield!--say, +rather, the rending of her coffin, and the grating of the iron hinges +of her prison, and her struggles within the coppered archway of the +vault! O, whither shall I fly? Will she not be here anon? Is she not +hurrying to upbraid me for my haste? Have I not heard her footstep on +the stair? Do I not distinguish that heavy and horrible beating of her +heart? Madman!"--here he sprang furiously to his feet and shrieked out +his syllables, as if in the effort he were giving up his +soul--"_Madman! I tell you that she now stands without the door_!" + +As if in the superhuman energy of his utterance there had been found +the potency of a spell, the huge antique panels to which the speaker +pointed threw slowly back, upon the instant, their ponderous and ebony +jaws. It was the work of the rushing gust; but then without those +doors there _did_ stand the lofty and enshrouded figure of the Lady +Madeline of Usher. There was blood upon her white robes, and the +evidence of some bitter struggle upon every portion of her emaciated +frame. For a moment she remained trembling and reeling to and fro upon +the threshold--then, with a low, moaning cry, fell heavily inward upon +the person of her brother, and, in her violent and now final +death-agonies, bore him to the floor a corpse and a victim to the +terrors he had anticipated. + +From that chamber and from that mansion I fled aghast. The storm was +still abroad in all its wrath as I found myself crossing the old +causeway. Suddenly there shot along the path a wild light, and I +turned to see whence a gleam so unusual could have issued, for the vast +house and its shadows were alone behind me. The radiance was that; of +the full, setting, and blood-red moon, which now shone vividly through +that once barely discernible fissure of which I have before spoken as +extending from the roof of the building, in a zigzag direction, to the +base. While I gazed this fissure rapidly widened; there came a fierce +breath of the whirlwind--the entire orb of the satellite burst at once +upon my sight--my brain reeled as I saw the mighty walls rushing +asunder--there was a long, tumultuous, shouting sound like the voice of +a thousand waters--and the deep and dark tarn at my feet closed +sullenly and silently over the fragments of the House of Usher. + + + + + NATHANIEL PARKER WILLIS. + + UNSEEN SPIRITS. + + The shadows lay along Broadway, + 'Twas near the twilight tide-- + And slowly there a lady fair + Was walking in her pride. + Alone walked she; but, viewlessly, + Walked spirits at her side. + + Peace charmed the street beneath her feet, + And Honor charmed the air; + And all astir looked kind on her, + And called her good as fair-- + For all God ever gave to her + She kept with chary care. + + She kept with care her beauties rare + From lovers warm and true; + For her heart was cold to all but gold, + And the rich came not to woo, + But honored well are charms to sell, + If priests the selling do. + + Now walking there was one more fair-- + A slight girl, lily-pale; + And she had unseen company + To make the spirit quail-- + 'Twixt Want and Scorn she walked forlorn, + And nothing could avail. + + No mercy now can clear her brow + For this world's peace to pray; + For, as love's wild prayer dissolved in air, + Her woman's heart gave way! + But the sin forgiven by Christ in heaven + By man is cursed alway. + + + +NAHANT. + +Here we are, then, in the "Swallow's Cave." The floor descends by a +gentle declivity to the sea, and from the long dark cleft stretching +outward you look forth upon the Atlantic--the shore of Ireland the +first _terra firma_ in the path of your eye. Here is a dark pool, left +by the retreating tide for a refrigerator; and with the champagne in +the midst we will recline about it like the soft Asiatics of whom we +learned pleasure in the East, and drink to the small-featured and +purple-lipped "Mignons" of Syria--those fine-limbed and fiery slaves +adorable as peris, and by turns languishing and stormy, whom you buy +for a pinch of piastres (say 5L 5s.) in sunny Damascus. Your drowsy +Circassian, faint and dreamy, or your crockery Georgian--fit dolls for +the sensual Turk--is, to him who would buy _soul_, dear at a penny the +hecatomb. + +We recline, as it were, in an ebon pyramid with a hundred feet of floor +and sixty of wall, and the fourth side open to the sky. The light +comes in mellow and dim, and the sharp edges of the rocky portal seem +let into the pearly heaven. The tide is at half-ebb, and the advancing +and retreating waves, which at first just lifted the fringe of crimson +dulse at the lip of the cavern, now dash their spray-pearls on the rock +below, the "tenth" surge alone rallying as if in scorn of its +retreating fellow, and, like the chieftain of Culloden Moor, rushing +back singly to the contest. And now that the waters reach the entrance +no more, come forward and look on the sea! The swell lifts! Would you +not think the bases of the earth rising beneath it? It falls! Would +you not think the foundation of the deep had given way? A plain, broad +enough for the navies of the world to ride at large, heaves up evenly +and steadily as if it would lie against the sky, rests a moment +spell-bound in its place, and falls again as far--the respiration of a +sleeping child not more regular and full of slumber. It is only on the +shore that it chafes. Blessed emblem! it is at peace with itself! The +rocks war with a nature so unlike their own, and the hoarse din of +their border onsets resounds through the caverns they have rent open; +but beyond, in the calm bosom of the ocean, what heavenly dignity! what +godlike unconsciousness of alarm! I did not think we should stumble on +such a moral in the cave! + +By the deeper bass of its hoarse organ the sea is now playing upon its +lowest stops, and the tide is down. Hear how it rushes in beneath the +rocks, broken and stilled in its tortuous way, till it ends with a +washing and dull hiss among the sea-weed, and, like a myriad of small +tinkling bells, the dripping from the crags is audible. There is fine +music in the sea! + +And now the beach is bare. The cave begins to cool and darken, and the +first gold tint of sunset is stealing into the sky, and the sea looks +of a changing opal, green, purple, and white, as if its floor were +paved with pearl, and the changing light struck up through the waters. +And there heaves a ship into the horizon like a white-winged bird, +lying with dark breast on the waves, abandoned of the sea-breeze within +sight of port, and repelled even by the spicy breath that comes with a +welcome off the shore. She comes from "Merry England." She is +freighted with more than merchandise. The home-sick exile will gaze on +her snowy sail as she sets in with the morning breeze, and bless it, +for the wind that first filled it on its way swept through the green +valley of his home! What links of human affection brings she over the +sea? How much comes in her that is not in her "bill of lading," yet +worth to the heart that is waiting for it a thousand times the purchase +of her whole venture! + +_Mais montons nous_! I hear the small hoofs of Thalaba; my stanhope +waits; we will leave this half bottle of champagne, that "remainder +biscuit," and the echoes of our philosophy to the Naiads who have lent +us their drawing-room. Undine, or Egeria! Lurly, or Arethusa! +whatever thou art called, nymph of this shadowy cave! adieu! + +Slowly, Thalaba! Tread gingerly down this rocky descent! So! Here we +are on the floor of the vasty deep! What a glorious race-course! The +polished and printless sand spreads away before you as far as the eye +can see, the surf comes in below breast-high ere it breaks and the +white fringe of the sliding wave shoots up the beach, but leaves room +for the marching of a Persian phalanx on the sands it has deserted. O, +how noiselessly runs the wheel, and how dreamily we glide along, +feeling our motion but in the resistance of the wind and in the +trout-like pull of the ribands by the excited animal before us. Mark +the color of the sand! White at high-water mark, and thence deepening +to a silvery gray as the water has evaporated less, a slab of Egyptian +granite in the obelisk of St. Peter's not more polished and +unimpressible. Shell or rock, weed or quicksand, there is none; and, +mar or deface its bright surface as you will, it is ever beaten down +anew, and washed even of the dust of the foot of man by the returning +sea. You may write upon its fine-grained face with a crow-quill--you +may course over its dazzling expanse with a troop of chariots. + +Most wondrous and beautiful of all, within twenty yards of the surf, or +for an hour after the tide has left the sand, it holds the water +without losing its firmness, and is like a gay mirror, bright as the +bosom of the sea. (By your leave, Thalaba!) And now lean over the +dasher and see those small fetlocks striking up from beneath--the +flying mane, the thoroughbred action, the small and expressive head, as +perfect in the reflection as in the reality; like Wordsworth's swan, he + + "_Trots_ double, _horse_ and shadow." + +You would swear you were skimming the surface of the sea; and the +delusion is more complete as the white foam of the "tenth wave" skims +in beneath wheel and hoof, and you urge on with the treacherous element +gliding away visibly beneath you. + + + + +HENRY DAVID THOREAU. + +THE WINTER WOODS. + +[From _Excursions_.] + +There is a slumbering subterranean fire in nature which never goes out, +and which no cold can chill. It finally melts the great snow, and in +January or July is only buried under a thicker or thinner covering. In +the coldest day it flows somewhere, and the snow melts around every +tree. This field of winter rye which sprouted late in the fall and now +speedily dissolves the snow is where the fire is very thinly covered. +We feel warmed by it. In the winter warmth stands for all virtue, and +we resort in thought to a trickling rill, with its bare stones shining +in the sun, and to warm springs in the woods, with as much eagerness as +rabbits and robins. The steam which rises from swamps and pools is as +dear and domestic as that of our own kettle. What fire could ever +equal the sunshine of a winter's day, when the meadow-mice come out by +the wall-sides, and the chickadee lisps in the defiles of the wood? +The warmth comes directly from the sun, and is not radiated from the +earth as in summer; and when we feel his beams on our backs as we are +treading some snowy dell we are grateful as for a special kindness, and +bless the sun which has followed us into that by-place. + +This subterranean fire has its altar in each man's breast, for in the +coldest day, and on the bleakest hill, the traveler cherishes a warmer +fire within the folds of his cloak than is kindled on any hearth. A +healthy man, indeed, is the complement of the seasons, and in winter +summer is in his heart. There is the South. Thither have all birds +and insects migrated, and around the warm springs in his breast are +gathered the robin and the lark. + +At length, having reached the edge of the woods and shut out the +gadding town, we enter within their covert as we go under the roof of a +cottage, and cross its threshold, all ceiled and banked up with snow. +They are glad and warm still, and as genial and cheery in winter as in +summer. As we stand in the midst of the pines, in the flickering and +checkered light which straggles but little way into their maze, we +wonder if the towns have ever heard their simple story. It seems to us +that no traveler has ever explored them, and notwithstanding the +wonders which science is elsewhere revealing every day, who would not +like to hear their annals? Our humble villages in the plain are their +contribution. We borrow from the forest the boards which shelter and +the sticks which warm us. How important is their evergreen to the +winter, that portion of the summer which does not fade, the permanent +year, the unwithered grass. Thus simply and with little expense of +altitude is the surface of the earth diversified. What would human +life be without forests, those natural cities? From the tops of +mountains they appear like smooth-shaven lawns; yet whither shall we +walk but in this taller grass? + +In this glade covered with bushes of a year's growth see how the +silvery dust lies on every seared leaf and twig, deposited in such +infinite and luxurious forms as by their very variety atone for the +absence of color. Observe the tiny tracks of mice around every stem, +and the triangular tracks of the rabbit. A pure elastic heaven hangs +over all, as if the impurities of the summer sky, refined and shrunk by +the chaste winter's cold, had been winnowed by the heavens upon the +earth. + +Mature confounds her summer distinctions at this season. The heavens +seem to be nearer the earth. The elements are less reserved and +distinct. Water turns to ice; rain to snow. The day is but a +Scandinavian night. The winter is an arctic summer. + +How much more living is the life that is in nature, the furred life +which still survives the stinging nights, and, from amidst fields and +woods covered with frost and snow, sees the sun rise! + + "The foodless wilds + Pour forth their brown inhabitants." + +The gray squirrel and rabbit are brisk and playful in the remote glens, +even on the morning of the cold Friday. Here is our Lapland and +Labrador; and for our Esquimaux and Knistenaux, Dog-ribbed Indians, +Novazemblaites, and Spitzbergeners, are there not the ice-cutter and +wood-chopper, the fox, musk-rat, and mink? + +Still, in the midst of the arctic day we may trace the summer to its +retreats and sympathize with some contemporary life. Stretched over +the brooks, in the midst of the frost-bound meadows, we may observe the +submarine cottages of the caddice-worms, the larvae of the Plicipennes. +Their small cylindrical cases built around themselves, composed of +flags, sticks, grass, and withered leaves, shells and pebbles, inform +and color like the wrecks which strew the bottom, now drifting along +over the pebbly bottom, now whirling in tiny eddies and dashing down +steep falls, or sweeping rapidly along with the current, or else +swaying to and fro at the end of some grass-blade or root. Anon they +will leave their sunken habitations, and, crawling up the stems of +plants or to the surface like gnats, as perfect insects henceforth, +flutter over the surface of the water or sacrifice their short lives in +the flame of our candle at evening. Down yonder little glen the shrubs +are drooping under their burden, and the red alder-berries contrast +with the white ground. Here are the marks of a myriad feet which have +already been abroad. The sun rises as proudly over such a glen as over +the valley of the Seine or Tiber, and it seems the residence of a pure +and self-subsistent valor such as they never witnessed, which never +knew defeat or fear. Here reign the simplicity and purity of a +primitive age and a health and hope far remote from towns and cities. +Standing quite alone, far in the forest, while the wind is shaking down +snow from the trees, and leaving the only human tracks behind us, we +find our reflections of a richer variety than the life of cities. The +chickadee and nut-hatch are more inspiring society than statesmen and +philosophers, and we shall return to these last as to more vulgar +companions. In this lonely glen, with the brook draining the slopes, +its creased ice and crystals of all hues, where the spruces and +hemlocks stand up on either side, and the rush and sere wild oats in +the rivulet itself, our lives are more serene and worthy to contemplate. + +As the day advances, the heat of the sun is reflected by the +hill-sides, and we hear a faint but sweet music where flows the rill +released from its fetters, and the icicles are melting on the trees, +and the nut-hatch and partridge are heard and seen. The south wind +melts the snow at noon, and the bare ground appears with its withered +grass and leaves, and we are invigorated by the perfume which exhales +from it as by the scent of strong meats. + +Let us go into this deserted woodman's hut, and see how he has passed +the long winter nights and the short and stormy days. For here man has +lived under this south hill-side, and it seems a civilized and public +spot. We have such associations as when the traveler stands by the +ruins of Palmyra or Hecatompolis. Singing birds and flowers perchance +have begun to appear here, for flowers as well as weeds follow in the +footsteps of man. These hemlocks whispered over his head, these +hickory logs were his fuel, and these pitch-pine roots kindled his +fire; yonder fuming rill in the hollow, whose thin and airy vapor still +ascends as busily as ever, though he is far off now, was his well. +These hemlock boughs, and the straw upon this raised platform, were his +bed, and this broken dish held his drink. But he has not been here +this season, for the phoebes built their nest upon this shelf last +summer. I find some embers left, as if he had but just gone out, where +he baked his pot of beans; and while at evening he smoked his pipe, +whose stemless bowl lies in the ashes, chatted with his only companion, +if perchance he had any, about the depth of the snow on the morrow, +already falling fast and thick without, or disputed whether the last +sound was the screech of an owl or the creak of a bough, or imagination +only; and through this broad chimney-throat, in the late winter +evening, ere he stretched himself upon the straw, he looked up to learn +the progress of the storm, and, seeing the bright stars of Cassiopeia's +chair shining brightly down upon him, fell contentedly asleep. + +See how many traces from which we may learn the chopper's history. +From this stump we may guess the sharpness of his ax, and from the +slope of the stroke, on which side he stood, and whether he cut down +the tree without going round it or changing hands; and from the flexure +of the splinters, we may know which way it fell. This one chip +contains inscribed on it the whole history of the wood-chopper and of +the world. On this scrap of paper, which held his sugar or salt +perchance, or was the wadding of his gun, sitting on a log in the +forest, with what interest we read the tattle of cities, of those +larger huts, empty and to let, like this, in High Streets and Broadways. + + + + + WALT WHITMAN. + + THE MIRACLES OF NATURE. + + [From _Leaves of Grass_.] + + To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle, + Every inch of space is a miracle, + Every square yard of the surface of the earth + is spread with the same, + Every cubic foot of the interior swarms with the same. + + * * * * * * * * + + To me the sea is a continual miracle, + The fishes that swim--the rocks--the motion + of the waves--the ships with men in them, + What stranger miracles are there? + + * * * * * * * * + + I was thinking the day most splendid, + till I saw what the not-day exhibited; + I was thinking this globe enough, + till there tumbled upon me myriads of other globes; + O, how plainly I see now that this life cannot exhibit + all to me--as the day cannot; + O, I see that I am to wait for what will be exhibited by death. + + * * * * * * * * + + O Death! + O, the beautiful touch of Death, soothing and benumbing + a few moments, for reasons. + + * * * * * * * * + + The earth never tires, + The earth is rude, silent, incomprehensible at first-- + Nature is rude and incomprehensible at first; + Be not discouraged--keep on--there are divine things, + well enveloped; + I swear to you there are divine things more beautiful + than words can tell. + + + + O CAPTAIN! MY CAPTAIN! + + O captain! my captain! our fearful trip is done; + The ship has weathered every rack, the prize we sought is won; + The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting, + While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring: + But O heart! heart! heart! + Leave you not the little spot + Where on the deck my captain lies, + Fallen cold and dead. + + O captain! my captain! rise up and hear the bells; + Rise up--for you the flag is flung--for you the bugle trills; + For you bouquets and ribboned wreaths--for you the shores a-crowding; + For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning; + O captain! dear father! + This arm I push beneath you; + It is some dream that on the deck + You've fallen cold and dead. + + My captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still; + My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will; + But the ship, the ship is anchored safe, its voyage closed and done; + From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won; + Exult, O shores, and ring, O bells! + But I, with silent tread, + Walk the spot my captain lies, + Fallen cold and dead. + + + + + JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. + + THE COURTIN'. + + Zekle crep' up, quite unbeknown, + An' peeked in thru the winder, + An' there sot Huldy all alone, + 'ith no one nigh to hender. + + Agin the chimbly crooknecks hung, + An' in amongst 'em rusted + The ole queen's arm thet Gran'ther Young + Fetched back from Concord busted. + + The wannut logs shot sparkles out + Toward the pootiest, bless her! + An' leetle fires danced all about + The chiny on the dresser. + + The very room, coz she wuz in, + Looked warm from floor to ceilin', + An' she looked full ez rosy agin + Ez th' apples she wuz peelin'. + + She heerd a foot an' knowed it, tu, + A-raspin' on the scraper; + All ways to once her feelin's new + Like sparks in burnt-up paper. + + He kin' o' l'itered on the mat, + Some doubtfle o' the seekle; + His heart kep' goin' pitypat, + But hern went pity Zekle. + + + + THE PIOUS EDITOR'S CREED. + + [From _Biglow Papers_.] + + I du believe in Freedom's cause, + Ez fur away as Paris is; + I love to see her stick her claws + In them infarnal Pharisees; + It's wal enough agin a king + To dror resolves an' triggers-- + But libbaty's a kind o' thing + Thet don't agree with niggers. + + I du believe the people want + A tax on teas an' coffees, + Thet nothin' aint extravygunt, + Pervidin' I'm in office; + Fer I hev loved my country sence + My eye-teeth filled their sockets, + An' Uncle Sam I reverence-- + Partic'larly his pockets. + + I du believe in any plan + O' levyin' the taxes, + Ez long ez, like a lumberman, + I git jest wut I axes; + I go free-trade thru thick an' thin, + Because it kind o' rouses + The folks to vote--an' keeps us in + Our quiet custom-houses. + + * * * * * * * * + + I du believe with all my soul + In the gret Press's freedom, + To pint the people to the goal + An' in the traces lead 'em; + Palsied the arm thet forges jokes + At my fat contracts squintin', + An' withered be the nose that pokes + Inter the gov'ment printin'! + + I du believe thet I should give + Wut's his'n unto Caesar, + Fer it's by him I move an' live, + Frum him my bread and cheese air; + I du believe thet all o' me + Doth bear his souperscription,-- + Will, conscience, honor, honesty, + An' things o' thet description. + + I du believe in prayer an' praise + To him thet hez the grantin' + O' jobs,--in every thin' that pays, + But most of all in CANTIN'; + This doth my cup with marcies fill, + This lays all thought o' sin to rest,-- + I _don't_ believe in princerple, + But, O, I _du_ in interest. + + I du believe in bein' this + Or thet, ez it may happen + One way or t'other hendiest is + To ketch the people nappin'; + It aint by princerples nor men + My preudent course is steadied,-- + I scent wich pays the best; an' then + Go into it baldheaded. + + I du believe thet holdin' slaves + Comes nat'ral tu a Presidunt, + Let 'lone the rowdedow it saves + To hev a wal-broke precedunt; + Fer any office, small or gret, + I couldn't ax with no face, + Without I'd ben, thru dry an' wet, + Th' unrizzost kind o' doughface. + + I du believe wutever trash + 'll keep the people in blindness,-- + Thet we the Mexicuns can thrash + Right inter brotherly kindness; + Thet bombshells, grape, an' powder 'n' ball + Air good-will's strongest magnets; + Thet peace, to make it stick at all, + Must be druv in with bagnets. + + In short, I firmly du believe + In Humbug generally, + Fer it's a thing that I perceive + To hev a solid vally; + This heth my faithful shepherd ben, + In pasturs sweet heth led me, + An' this 'll keep the people green + To feed ez they hev fed me. + + + + +EDWARD EVERETT HALE. + +[From _The Man Without a Country_.[1]] + +The rule adopted on board the ships on which I have met "the man +without a country" was, I think, transmitted from the beginning. No +mess liked to have him permanently, because his presence cut off all +talk of home or of the prospect of return, of politics or letters, of +peace or of war--cut off more than half the talk men liked to have at +sea. But it was always thought too hard that he should never meet the +rest of us except to touch hats, and we finally sank into one system. +He was not permitted to talk with the men unless an officer was by. +With officers he had unrestrained intercourse, as far as he and they +chose. But he grew shy, though he had favorites; I was one. Then the +captain always asked him to dinner on Monday. Every mess in succession +took up the invitation in its turn. According to the size of the ship, +you had him at your mess more or less often at dinner. His breakfast +he ate in his own state-room--he always had a state-room--which was +where a sentinel or somebody on the watch could see the door. And +whatever else he ate or drank, he ate or drank alone. Sometimes, when +the marines or sailors had any special jollification, they were +permitted to invite "Plain-Buttons," as they called him. Then Nolan +was sent with some officer, and the men were forbidden to speak of home +while he was there. I believe the theory was that the sight of his +punishment did them good. They called him "Plain-Buttons" because, +while he always chose to wear a regulation army uniform, he was not +permitted to wear the army button, for the reason that it bore either +the initials or the insignia of the country he had disowned. + +I remember soon after I joined the navy I was on shore with some of the +older officers from our ship and from the _Brandywine_, which we had +met at Alexandria. We had leave to make a party and go up to Cairo and +the Pyramids. As we jogged along (you went on donkeys then), some of +the gentlemen (we boys called them "Dons," but the phrase was long +since changed) fell to talking about Nolan, and some one told the +system which was adopted from the first about his books and other +reading. As he was almost never permitted to go on shore, even though +the vessel lay in port for months, his time at the best hung heavy; and +every body was permitted to lend him books, if they were not published +in America, and made no allusion to it. These were common enough in +the old days, when people in the other hemisphere talked of the United +States as little as we do of Paraguay. He had almost all the foreign +papers that came into the ship, sooner or later; only somebody must go +over them first, and cut out any advertisement or stray paragraph that +alluded to America. This was a little cruel sometimes, when the back +of what was cut might be as innocent as Hesiod. Right in the midst of +one of Napoleon's battles, or one of Canning's speeches, poor Nolan +would find a great hole, because on the back of the page of that paper +there had been an advertisement of a packet for New York, or a scrap +from the President's message. I say this was the first time I ever +heard of this plan, which afterward I had enough and more than enough +to do with. I remember it, because poor Phillips, who was of the +party, as soon as the allusion to reading was made, told a story of +something which happened at the Cape of Good Hope on Nolan's first +voyage; and it is the only thing I ever knew of that voyage. They had +touched at the Cape, and had done the civil thing with the English +admiral and the fleet, and then, leaving for a long cruise up the +Indian Ocean, Phillips had borrowed a lot of English books from an +officer, which, in those days, as indeed in these, was quite a +windfall. Among them, as the devil would order, was the _Lay of the +Last Minstrel_, which they had all of them heard of, but which most of +them had never seen. I think it could not have been published long. +Well, nobody thought there could be any risk of any thing national in +that, though Phillips swore old Shaw had cut out the "Tempest" from +Shakespeare before he let Nolan have it, because he said "the Bermudas +ought to be ours, and, by Jove, should be one day." So Nolan was +permitted to join the circle one afternoon when a lot of them sat on +deck smoking and reading aloud. People do not do such things so often +now; but when I was young we got rid of a great deal of time so. Well, +so it happened that in his turn Nolan took the book and read to the +others; and he read very well, as I know. Nobody in the circle knew a +line of the poem, only it was all magic and border chivalry, and was +ten thousand years ago. Poor Nolan read steadily through the fifth +canto, stopped a minute and drank something, and then began without a +thought of what was coming: + + "Breathes there the man, with soul so dead, + Who never to himself hath said"-- + +It seemed impossible to us that any body ever heard this for the first +time; but all these fellows did then, and poor Nolan himself went on, +still unconsciously or mechanically: + + "This is my own, my native land!" + +Then they all saw something was to pay; but he expected to get through, +I suppose, turned a little pale, but plunged on: + + "Whose heart hath ne'er within him burned, + As home his footsteps he hath turned + From wandering on a foreign strand?-- + If such there breathe, go, mark him well." + +By this time the men were all beside themselves, wishing there was any +way to make him turn over two pages; but he had not quite presence of +mind for that; he gagged a little, colored crimson, and staggered on: + + "For him no minstrel raptures swell; + High though his titles, proud his name, + Boundless his wealth as wish can claim, + Despite these titles, power, and pelf, + The wretch, concentered all in self;"-- + +and here the poor fellow choked, could not go on, but started up, swung +the book into the sea, vanished into his state-room. "And by Jove," +said Phillips, "we did not see him for two months again. And I had to +make up some beggarly story to that English surgeon why I did not +return his Walter Scott to him." + + +[1]See page 195. + + + + + FITZ-GREENE HALLECK. + + [From _Marco Bozzaris_.] + + Come to the bridal-chamber, Death! + Come to the mother's when she feels + For the first time her first-born's breath; + Come when the blessed seals + That close the pestilence are broke, + And crowded cities wail its stroke; + Come in consumption's ghastly form, + The earthquake shock, the ocean-storm; + Come when the heart beats high and warm, + With banquet-song, and dance, and wine: + And thou art terrible--the tear, + The groan, the knell, the pall, the bier; + And all we know, or dream, or fear + Of agony, are thine. + + But to the hero, when his sword + Has won the battle for the free, + Thy voice sounds like a prophet's word; + And in its hollow tones are heard + The thanks of millions yet to be. + Come, when his task of fame is wrought-- + Come, with her laurel-leaf, blood-bought-- + Come in her crowning hour--and then + Thy sunken eye's unearthly light + To him is welcome as the sight + Of sky and stars to prisoned men; + Thy grasp is welcome as the hand + Of brother in a foreign land; + Thy summons welcome as the cry + That told the Indian isles were nigh + To the world-seeking Genoese, + When the land-wind, from woods of palm, + And orange-groves, and fields of balm, + Blew o'er the Haytian seas. + + Bozzaris! with the storied brave + Greece nurtured in her glory's time, + Rest thee--there is no prouder grave, + Even in her own proud clime. + She wore no funeral weeds for thee, + Nor bade the dark hearse wave its plume, + Like torn branch from death's leafless tree + In sorrow's pomp and pageantry, + The heartless luxury of the tomb; + But she remembers thee as one + Long loved, and for a season gone; + For thee her poet's lyre is wreathed, + Her marble wrought, her music breathed; + For thee she rings the birthday bells; + Of thee her babes' first lisping tells; + For thine her evening prayer is said, + At palace couch and cottage bed; + Her soldier, closing with the foe, + Gives for thy sake a deadlier blow; + His plighted maiden, when she fears + For him, the joy of her young years, + Thinks of thy fate and checks her tears. + And she, the mother of thy boys, + Though in her eye and faded cheek + Is read the grief she will not speak, + The memory of her buried joys, + And even she who gave thee birth, + Will by their pilgrim-circled hearth + Talk of thy doom without a sigh: + For thou art Freedom's now and Fame's, + One of the few, the immortal names, + That were not born to die. + + + + ON THE DEATH OF JOSEPH RODMAN DRAKE. + + Green be the turf above thee, + Friend of my better days! + None knew thee but to love thee, + Nor named thee but to praise. + + Tears fell, when thou wert dying, + From eyes unused to weep, + And long where thou art lying + Will tears the cold turf steep. + + When hearts, whose truth was proven + Like thine, are laid in earth, + There should a wreath be woven + To tell the world their worth; + + And I, who woke each morrow + To clasp thy hand in mine, + Who shared thy joy and sorrow, + Whose weal and woe were thine-- + + It should be mine to braid it + Around thy faded brow; + But I've in vain essayed it, + And feel I cannot now. + + While memory bids me weep thee, + Nor thoughts nor words are free, + The grief is fixed too deeply + That mourns a man like thee. + + + + +CHARLES FARRAR BROWNE. + +[From _Lecture on the Mormons_.] + +Brother Kimball is a gay and festive cuss, of some seventy summers, or +some'er's there about. He has one thousand head of cattle and a +hundred head of wives. He says they are awful eaters. + +Mr. Kimball had a son, a lovely young man, who was married to ten +interesting wives. But one day while he was absent from home these ten +wives went out walking with a handsome young man, which so enraged Mr. +Kimball's son--which made Mr. Kimball'a son so jealous--that he shot +himself with a horse-pistol. + +The doctor who attended him--a very scientific man--informed me that +the bullet entered the parallelogram of his diaphragmatic thorax, +superinducing hemorrhage in the outer cuticle of his basilicon +thaumaturgist. It killed him. I should have thought it would. + +(_Soft Music_.) + +I hope this sad end will be a warning to all young wives who go out +walking with handsome young men. Mr. Kimball's son is now no more. He +sleeps beneath the cypress, the myrtle, and the willow. The music is a +dirge by the eminent pianist for Mr. Kimball's son. He died by request. + +I regret to say that efforts were made to make a Mormon of me while I +was in Utah. + +It was leap-year when I was there, and seventeen young widows, the +wives of a deceased Mormon, offered me their hearts and hands. I +called on them one day, and, taking their soft white hands in mine, +which made eighteen hands altogether, I found them in tears, and I +said, "Why is this thus? What is the reason of this thusness?" + +They hove a sigh--seventeen sighs of different size. They said: + +"O, soon thou wilt be gonested away!" + +I told them that when I got ready to leave a place I wentested. + +They said, "Doth not like us?" + +I said, "I doth--I doth." + +I also said, "I hope your intentions are honorable, as I am a lone +child, my parents being far--far away." + +Then they said, "Wilt not marry us?" + +I said, "O, no, it cannot was!" + +Again they asked me to marry them, and again I declined, when they +cried, + +"O, cruel man! this is too much! O, too much!" + +I told them that it was on account of the muchness that I +declined. . . . + +(_Pointing to Panorama_) + +A more cheerful view of the desert. + +The wild snow-storms have left us and we have thrown our wolf-skin +overcoats aside. Certain tribes of far-western Indians bury their +distinguished dead by placing them high in air and covering them with +valuable furs. That is a very fair representation of those mid-air +tombs. Those animals are horses. I know they are, because my artist +says so. I had the picture two years before I discovered the fact. +The artist came to me about six months ago and said, "It is useless to +disguise it from you any longer, they are horses." + +It was while crossing this desert that I was surrounded by a band of +Ute Indians. They were splendidly mounted. They were dressed in +beaver-skins, and they were armed with rifles, knives, and pistols. + +What could I do? What could a poor old orphan do? I'm a brave man. +The day before the battle of Bull's Run I stood in the highway while +the bullets--those dreadful messengers of death--were passing all +around me thickly--in wagons--on their way to the battle-field. But +there were too many of these Injuns. There were forty of them, and +only one of me, and so I said: + +"Great chief, I surrender." + +His name was Wocky-bocky. He dismounted and approached me. I saw his +tomahawk glisten in the morning sunlight. Fire was in his eye. +Wocky-bocky came very close + +(_Pointing to Panorama_) + +to me and seized me by the hair of my head. He mingled his swarthy +fingers with my golden tresses, and he rubbed his dreadful tomahawk +across my lily-white face. He said: + +"Torsha arrah darrah mishky bookshean!" + +I told him he was right. + +Wocky-bocky again rubbed his tomahawk across my face, and said: + +"Wink-ho-loo-boo!" + +Says I, "Mr. Wocky-bocky," says I, "Wocky, I have thought so for years, +and so's all our family." + +He told me I must go to the tent of the Strong Heart and eat raw dog. +It don't agree with mo. I prefer simple food. I prefer pork-pie, +because then I know what I'm eating. But as raw dog was all they +proposed to give to me I had to eat it or starve. So at the expiration +of two days I seized a tin plate and went to the chief's daughter, and +I said to her in a silvery voice--in a kind of German-silvery voice--I +said: + +"Sweet child of the forest, the pale-face wants his dog." + +There was nothing but his paws. I had paused too long--which reminds +me that time passes--a way which time has. I was told in my youth to +seize opportunity. I once tried to seize one. He was rich; he had +diamonds on. As I seized him he knocked me down. Since then I have +learned that he who seizes opportunity sees the penitentiary. + + + + +SAMUEL LANGHORNE CLEMENS. + +THE JUMPING FROG OF CALAVERAS COUNTY. + +"Well, there was a feller here once by the name of Jim Smiley in the +winter of '49, or may be it was the spring of '50--I don't recollect +exactly, somehow, though what makes me think it was one or the other is +because I remember the big flume warn't finished when he first come to +the camp. But any way, he was the curiousest man about, always betting +on anything that turned up you ever see, if he could get any body to +bet on the other side; and if he couldn't he'd change sides. Any way +that suited the other side would suit _him_--any way just so's he got a +bet _he_ was satisfied. But still he was lucky, uncommon lucky; he +most always came out winner. He was always ready and laying for a +chance. There couldn't be no solit'ry thing mentioned but that +feller'd offer to bet on it and take any side you please, as I was just +telling you. If there was a horse-race you'd find him flush or you'd +find him busted at the end of it. If there was a dog-fight, he'd bet +on it; if there was a cat-fight, he'd bet on it; if there was a +chicken-fight, he'd bet on it. Why, if there was two birds setting on +a fence, he would bet you which one would fly first. Or if there was a +camp-meeting, he would be there reg'lar to bet on Parson Walker, which +he judged to be the best exhorter about here, and so he was, too, and a +good man. If he even see a straddle-bug start to go anywheres he would +bet you how long it would take him to get to--to wherever he was going +to; and if you took him up he would follow that straddle-bug to Mexico +but what he would find out where he was bound for and how long he was +on the road. Lots of the boys here has seen that Smiley, and can tell +you about him. Why, it never made no difference to _him_, he'd bet +_any_ thing--the dangdest feller. Parson Walker's wife laid very sick +once for a good while, and it seemed as if they warn't going to save +her; but one morning he come in and Smiley up and asked him how she +was, and he said she was consid'able better--thank the Lord for his +inf'nit mercy!--and coming on so smart that, with the blessing of +Providence, she'd get well yet; and Smiley, before he thought, says, +'Well, I'll resk two-and-a-half she don't, any way.'" + + * * * * * * * * + +"Well, this yer Smiley had rat-terriers, and chicken-cocks, and +tom-cats, and all them kind of things till you couldn't rest, and you +couldn't fetch nothing for him to bet on but he'd match you. He +ketched a frog one day and look him home, and said he cal'lated to +educate him, and so he never done nothing for three months but set in +his back-yard and learn that frog to jump. And you bet you he _did_ +learn him, too. He'd give him a little punch behind, and the next +minute you'd see that frog whirling in the air like a doughnut--see him +turn one summerset, or may be a couple, if he got a good start, and +come down flat-footed and all right, like a cat. He got him up so in +the matter of ketching flies, and kep' him in practice so constant, +that he'd nail a fly every time as fur as he could see him. Smiley +said all a frog wanted was education and he could do 'most any thing, +and I believe him. Why, I've seen him set Dan'l Webster down here on +this floor--Dan'l Webster was the name of the frog--and sing out, +'Flies, Dan'l, flies!' and quicker'n you could wink he'd spring +straight up and snake a fly off'n the counter there and flop down on +the floor ag'in as solid as a gob of mud, and fall to scratching the +side of his head with his hind foot as indifferent as if he hadn't no +idea he'd been doin' any more'n any frog might do. You never see a +frog so modest and straightfor'ard as he was, for all he was so gifted. +And when it come to fair and square jumping on a dead level he could +get over more ground at one straddle than any animal of his breed you +ever see. Jumping on a dead level was his strong suit, you understand, +and when it come to that, Smiley would ante up money on him, as long as +he had a red. Smiley was monstrous proud of his frog, and well he +might be, for fellers that had traveled and been every-wheres all said +he laid over any frog that ever _they_ see. + +"Well, Smiley kep' the beast in a little lattice-box, and he used to +fetch him down-town sometimes and lay for a bet. One day a feller--a +stranger in the camp he was--come acrost him with his box and says: + +"'What might it be that you've got in the box?' + +"And Smiley says, sorter indifferent like, 'It might be a parrot, or it +might be a canary, may be, but it ain't--it's only just a frog.' + +"And the feller took it, and looked at it careful, and turned it round +this way and that, and says, 'H'm--so 'tis. Well, what's _he_ good +for?' + +"'Well,' Smiley says, easy and careless, 'he's good enough for _one_ +thing, I should judge--he can outjump any frog in Calaveras County.' + +"The feller took the box again and took another long, particular look +and give it back to Smiley, and says, very deliberate; 'Well,' he says, +'I don't see no p'ints about that frog that's any better'n any other +frog.' + +"'May be you don't,' Smiley says. 'May be you understand frogs, and +may be you don't understand 'em; may be you've had experience, and may +be you aint only a amature, as it were. Anyways, I've got my opinion, +and I'll resk forty dollars that he can outjump any frog in Calaveras +County.' + +"And the feller studied a minute, and then says, kinder sad like, + +"'Well, I'm only a stranger-here, and I aint got no frog; but if I had +a frog I'd bet you!' + +"And then Smiley says, 'That's all right--that's all right; if you'll +hold my box a minute I'll go and get you a frog.' And so the feller +took the box, and put up his forty dollars along with Smiley's, and set +down to wait. + +"So he set there a good while, thinking and thinking to hisself; and +then he got the frog out and pried his mouth open, and took a teaspoon +and filled him full of quail-shot--filled him pretty near up to his +chin--and set him on the floor. Smiley, he went to the swamp and +slopped around in the mud for a long time, and finally he ketched a +frog, and fetched him in, and give him to this feller, and says, 'Now, +if you're ready, set him along-side of Dan'l, with his forepaws just +even with Dan'l, and I'll give the word.' Then he says, +'One--two--three--_git_!' and him and the feller touched up the frogs +from behind, and the new frog hopped off lively, but Dan'l give a +heave, and hysted up his shoulders--so--like a Frenchman, but it warn't +no use--he couldn't budge; he was planted as solid as a church, and +wouldn't no more stir than if he was anchored out. Smiley was a good +deal surprised, and he was disgusted too, but he didn't have no idea +what the matter was, of course. + +"The feller took the money and started away; but when he was going out +at the door he sorter jerked his thumb over his shoulder--so--at Dan'l, +and says again, very deliberate, 'Well,' he says, 'I don't see no +p'ints about that frog that's any better'n any other frog.' + +"Smiley, he stood scratching his head and looking down at Dan'l a long +time; and at last he says, 'I do wonder what in the nation that frog +throwed off for. I wonder if there aint something the matter with +him--he 'pears to look mighty baggy, somehow.' And he ketched Dan'l by +the nap of the neck, and hefted him, and says, 'Why, blame my cats if +he don't weigh five pound!' and turned him upside down, and he belched +out a double handful of shot. And then he see how it was, and he was +the maddest man. He set the frog down and took out after the feller, +but he never ketched him." + + + + + INDEX. + + + _An Index to the American Authors and Writings + and the Principal American Periodicals mentioned + in this Volume_. + + + Abraham Lincoln, 143. + Adams and Liberty, 60. + Adams, John, 49. + Adams, J. Q., 72, 85. + Adams, Samuel, 43, 44. + After-Dinner Poem, 135. + After the Funeral, 142. + Age of Reason, The, 51-53, 60. + Ages, The, 153. + Alcott, A. B., 93, 104. + Aldrich, T. B., 170, 197. + Algerine Captive, The, 63. + Algic Researches, 130. + Alhambra, The, 74. + All Quiet Along the Potomac, 184. + Alnwick Castle, 81. + Alsop, Richard, 55, 56. + American, The, 206. + American Civil War, The, 182. + American Conflict, The, 182. + American Flag, The, 80. + American Note-Books, 95, 114, 116, 119, 128. + American Scholar, The, 93, 104, 123. + Ames, Fisher, 50, 51. + Among My Books, 143. + Anabel Lee, 165. + Anarchiad, The, 55. + Army Life in a Black Regiment, 186. + Army of the Potomac, The, 183. + Art of Book-Making, The, 77. + "Artemus Ward," 188, 189-193, 194. + Arthur Mervyn, 63, 65. + At Teague Poteet's, 203. + Atlantic Monthly, The, 136, 143, 150, 151, 185, 186, 195, 197, 208. + Atlantis, 169. + Auf Wiedersehen, 142. + Autobiography, Franklin's, 28, 38, 39, 40, 73. + Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, The, 132, 136, 137. + Autumn, 125. + + Backwoodsman, The, 72. + Ballad of the Oysterman, 133. + Ballads and Other Poems, 126. + Bancroft, George, 123, 138, 145, 146. + Barbara Frietchie, 158. + Barlow, Joel, 51, 52, 55-58. + Battle Hymn of the Republic, 183. + Battle of the Kegs, 59. + Battlefield, The, 154. + Bay Fight, The, 184. + Bay Psalm Book, The, 21. + Bedouin Song, 172. + Beecher, H. W., 175, 176. + Beecher, Lyman, 98, 175. + Beers, Mrs. E. L., 184. + Beleaguered City, The, 126, 129. + Belfry of Bruges, The, 126, 127. + Beverly, Robert, 17. + Biglow Papers, The, 139-142, 159, 188. + "Bill Nye," 193. + Black Cat, The, 166. + Black Fox of Salmon River, The, 157. + Blair, James, 14. + Blithedale Romance, The, 95, 118, 172, 209. + Bloody Tenent of Persecution, The, 22, 23. + Blue and the Gray, The, 184. + Boker, G. H., 197. + Bostonians, The, 209. + Boys, The, 134. + Bracebridge Hall, 75, 76, 187. + Bradford's Journal, 21, 24, 25, 31, 33. + Brahma, 105, 109. + Brainard, J. G. C., 156, 157, 175. + Brick Moon, The, 196. + Bridal of Pennacook, The, 157, 159. + Bridge, The, 129. + Broken Heart, The, 77. + Brown, C. B., 63-65. + Browne, C. F. (See "Artemus Ward.") + Brownell, H. H., 184, 185. + Bryant, W. C., 68, 80, 124, 125, 133, 151-155, 162, 169. + Buccaneer, The, 89. + Building of the Ship, The, 127. + Bundle of Letters, A, 206. + Burnett, Mrs. F. H., 205. + Bushnell, Horace, 99. + Busy-Body, The, 38, 53, 74. + Butler, W. A., 170. + Byrd, Wm., 16, 17. + + Cable, G. W., 203. + Calhoun, J. C., 46, 86. + Cambridge Thirty Years Ago, 123. + Cape Cod, 111. + Capture of Fugitive Slaves, 140. + Cary, Alice, 173. + Cary, Phoebe, 173. + Cask of Amontillado, The, 166. + Cassandra Southwick, 159. + Cathedral, The, 144. + Cecil Dreeme, 185. + Century Magazine, The, 150, 183, 197. + Chambered Nautilus, The, 135. + Chance Acquaintance, A, 208. + Channing, W. E., 73, 90-92, 93, 97-100, 106. + Channing, W. E., Jr., 106, 110, 119. + Channing, W. H., 106. + Chapel of the Hermits, The, 158. + Character of Milton, The, 91. + Charleston, 184. + Children of Adam, 177. + Choate, Rufus, 89, 90. + Christian Examiner, The, 91. + Circular Letters, by Otis and Quincy, 44. + City in the Sea, The, 162. + Clara Howard, 63. + Clari, 84. + Clarke, J. F., 105, 106. + Clay, Henry, 86. + Clemens, S. L. (See "Mark Twain.") + Columbiad, The, 56, 57. + Common Sense, 51. + Companions of Columbus, 74. + Condensed Novels, 200. + Conduct of Life, The, 107. + Confederate States of America, The, 182. + Conquest of Canaan, 57. + Conquest of Granada, 73, 74, 78. + Conquest of Mexico, 145. + Conquest of Peru, 145. + Conspiracy of Pontiac, The, 147. + Constitution and the Union, The, 87. + Constitution of the United States, The, 45, 85. + Contentment, 85. + Contrast, The, 63. + Conversations on the Gospels, 104. + Conversations on Some of the Old Poets, 143. + Cooke, J. E., 169. + Cooper, J. F., 61, 71, 73, 81-84, 89, 107, 130, 147, 168, 204. + Coral Grove, The, 175. + Cotton, John, 22, 23, 28, 29. + Count Frontenac and New France, 147. + Courtin', The, 141, 188. + Courtship of Miles Standish, The, 26. + Cow Chase, The, 59. + Cranch, C.P., 95, 106. + Crime against Kansas, The, 149 + Crisis, The, 51. + Croaker Papers, The, 81. + Culprit Fay, The, 80. + Curtis, G. W., 95, 197. + + Daisy Miller, 206. + Dana, C. A., 95, 106, 151. + Dana, R. H., 68, 89. + Danbury News Man, 59, 189. + Dante, Longfellow's, 131. + Davis, Jefferson, 182. + Day is Done, The, 128. + Day of Doom, The, 34. + Death of the Flowers, The, 153, 154. + Declaration of Independence, The, 45, 59, 85. + Deerslayer, The, 83, 84. + Democratic Vistas, 180. + Derby, G. H., 190. + Descent into the Maelstrom, 166. + Deserted Road, The, 173. + Dial, The, 93, 98, 105, 106. + Dialogue Between Franklin and the Gout, 39. + Diamond Lens, The, 186. + Discourse of the Plantation of Virginia, A, 12. + Dolph Heyliger, 75. + Domain of Arnheim, The, 166. + Dorchester Giant, The, 132. + Drake, J. R., 80, 81, 89. + Draper, J. W., 182. + Dream Life, 175. + Drifting, 173. + Driving Home the Cows, 184. + Drum Taps, 180. + Dutchman's Fireside, The, 79. + Dwight, J. S., 95, 100, 106. + Dwight, Theodore, 55, 56. + Dwight, Timothy, 55, 57, 58. + + Early Spring in Massachusetts, 111. + Echo, The, 56. + Echo Club, The, 172. + Edgar Huntley, 63, 65. + Edith Linsey, 170. + Edwards, Jonathan, 35-37, 58, 91, 97, 99. + Eggleston, Edward, 202. + Elevator, The, 63, 210. + Eliot, John, 21, 23. + Elsie Venner, 137. + Emerson, Charles, 106. + Emerson, R. W., 88, 93, 96-113, 119, 122, 123, + 128, 129, 138, 151, 154, 160, 179. + Endicott's Red Cross, 25, 118. + English Note-Books, 119. + English Traits, 103, 109. + Ephemerae, 176. + Epilogue to Cato, 60. + Eternal Goodness, 158. + Ethan Brand, 117. + Europeans, The, 206, 207. + Evangeline, 129, 130. + Evening Wind, The, 153. + Everett, Edward, 89, 90, 133, 138, 189. + Excelsior, 127. + Excursions, 111. + Expediency of the Federal Constitution, 48. + Eyes and Ears, 176. + + F. Smith, 170. + Fable for Critics, A, 105, 142, 144. + Facts in the case of M. Valdemar, The, 164. + Fall of the House of Usher, The, 166. + Familists' Hymn, The, 25. + Fanshawe, 116. + Farewell Address, Washington's, 49. + Faust, Taylor's, 172. + Federalist, The, 48, 49. + Ferdinand and Isabella, 123, 145. + Final Judgment, The, 35. + Finch, F. M., 184. + Fire of Driftwood, The, 128. + Fireside Travels, 123. + Fitz Adam's Story, 141. + Flint, Timothy, 72. + Flood of Years, The, 155. + Footpath, The, 142. + Footsteps of Angels, 126. + Foregone Conclusion, A, 207. + Forest Hymn, 152. + Fortune of the Republic, 107. + Foster, S. C., 173, 174. + France and England in North America, 147. + Franklin, Ben., 28, 37, 40, 52, 53, 73, 74. + Freedom of the Will, 35. + French Poets and Novelists, 205. + Freneau, Philip, 60-62. + Fuller, Margaret, 93, 95, 99, 100, 105, 106, 109, 119, 131. + + Galaxy Magazine, The, 197. + Garrison, W. L., 26, 87, 147, 156, 157, 174. + Garrison of Cape Ann, The, 32. + Geography of the Mississippi Valley, 72. + Georgia Spec, The, 63. + Ghost Ball at Congress Hall, The, 170. + Give Me the Old, 170. + Godey's Lady's Book, 150, 160. + Godfrey, Thomas, 63. + Gold Bug, The, 163. + Golden Legend, The, 130. + Good News from Virginia, 18. + Good Word for Winter, A, 143. + Goodrich, S. G., 69, 72, 116. + Graham's Magazine, 150, 160, 162, 164, 171. + Grandfather's Chair, 32. + Grandissimes, The, 203. + Greeley, Horace, 95, 171, 182. + Green River, 153. + Greene, A. G., 85. + Greenfleld Hill, 58. + Guardian Angel, The, 137, 138. + + Hail, Columbia! 59, 60, 80. + Hale, E. E., 122, 164, 195, 196. + Halleck, F. G., 80, 81, 89, 109. + Halpine, C. G., 186. + Hamilton, Alexander, 48, 49, 51, 87. + Hannah Thurston, 172. + Hans Breitmann Ballads, 202. + Hans Pfaall, 163. + Harbinger, The, 94, 95. + Harper's Monthly Magazine, 150, 151, 197. + Harris, J. C., 202. + Harte, F. B., 193, 198-202. + Hasty Pudding, 57. + Haunted Palace, The, 165. + Hawthorne, Julian, 118. + Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 9, 18, 25, 32, 56, 63, + 93, 95, 105, 106, 108, 114-120, 124, 128, + 129, 137, 138, 150, 160, 166, 172, 182, 185, + 187, 188, 204, 205, 209. + Hay, John, 201, 202. + Health, A, 85. + Heathen Chinee, The, 200. + Hedge, F. H., 95. + Height of the Ridiculous, The, 132. + Henry, Patrick, 43, 44, 48. + Hiawatha, 61, 130. + Higginson, T. W., 75, 95, 105, 186. + His Level Best, 195. + History of New England, Winthrop's, 24-27. + History of Plymouth Plantation, Bradford's, 24, 25. + History of the Dividing Line, 16, 17. + History of the United Netherlands, 146. + History of the United States, Bancroft's, 123, 146; + Higginson's, 75. + History of Virginia, Beverly's, 17; Smith's, 15; Stith's, 17. + Hoffman, C. F., 170. + Holland, J. G., 197. + Holmes, O. W., 29, 85, 93, 94, 122, 123, 131-138, + 141, 151, 153, 160, 183, 186, 187, 188. + Home, Sweet Home, 84. + Homesick in Heaven, 135. + Hooker, Thomas, 28, 30, 31, 99. + Hoosier Schoolmaster, The, 202. + Hopkins, Lemuel, 55. + Hopkinson, Francis, 59. + Hopkinson, Joseph, 59. + Horse-Shoe Robinson, 168. + House of the Seven Gables, The, 115, 118. + Howe, Mrs. J. W., 183. + Howells, W. D., 63, 203-205, 207-210. + Humphreys, David, 55, 56. + Hymn at the Completion of Concord Monument, 110. + Hymn of the Moravian Nuns, 125. + Hymn to the Night, 126. + Hymn to the North Star, 152. + Hyperion, 131. + + Ichabod, 158. + If, Yes, and Perhaps, 195. + Iliad, Bryant's, 155. + Illustrious Providences, 29. + In the Tennessee Mountains, 203. + In the Twilight, 142. + In War Time, 157. + Independent, The, 176. + Indian Bible, Eliot's, 21. + Indian Burying-Ground, The, 61. + Indian Student, The, 61. + Indian Summer, 208, 209. + Ingham Papers, 195. + Inklings of Adventure, 169. + Innocents Abroad, 193, 194. + International Episode, An, 206, 207. + Irving, Washington, 42, 53, 68, 71, 73-82, + 89, 117, 138, 187, 188, 194, 206. + Israfel, 162. + Italian Journeys, 208. + Italian Note-Books, 119. + + James, Henry, 185, 203-210. + Jane Talbot, 63. + Jay, John, 48, 49. + Jefferson, Thomas, 14, 45-48, 50, 52, 61. + Jesuits in North America, The, 147. + Jim, 201. + Jim Bludso, 201. + John Brown's Body, 59, 183. + John Godfrey's Fortune, 172. + "John Phoenix," 190. + John Underhill, 25. + Jonathan to John, 141. + "Josh Billings," 193. + Journey to the Land of Eden, A, 17. + Judd, Sylvester, 144. + Jumping Frog, The, 193. + June, 153, 154. + Justice and Expediency, 157. + + Kansas and Nebraska Bill, The, 149. + Katie, 184. + Kennedy, J. P., 168. + Key into the Language of America, A, 23. + Key, F. S., 60. + Kidd, the Pirate, 75. + King's Missive, The, 159. + Knickerbocker Magazine, The, 75, 79, 116, 147, 160. + Knickerbocker's History of New York, 68, 73, 75, 76, 187. + + Lady of the Aroostook, The, 207, 209. + Lanier, Sidney, 202. + La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West, 147. + Last Leaf, The, 85, 133. + Last of the Mohicans, The, 83, 84. + Last of the Valerii, The, 205. + Latest Form of Infidelity, The, 99. + Laus Deo, 158. + Leatherstocking Tales, 61, 83, 84. + Leaves of Grass, 176, 177, 179. + Lecture on the Mormons, 190-192. + Legend of Brittany, 138. + Legend of Sleepy Hollow, 75, 77. + Legends of New England, 156, 157. + Legends of the Province House, 118. + Leland, C. G., 202. + Letter on Whitewashing, 59. + Letters and Social Aims, 107. + Letters from Under a Bridge, 169, 170. + Letters of a Traveler, 155. + Liberator, The, 86, 147, 174. + Life of Columbus, Irving's, 74, 78. + Life of Goldsmith, 79. + Life of John of Barneveld, 146. + Life of Washington, Irving's, 78. + Ligeia, 165. + Light of Stars, The, 126. + Lincoln, Abraham, 51, 133, 180, 186, 189. + Lines on Leaving Europe, 170. + Lippincott's Magazine, 197. + Literary Recreations, 160. + Literati of New York, 160. + Little Breeches, 201. + Livingston, William, 53. + Locke, David R., 193. + Longfellow, H. W., 18, 25, 26, 61, 115, 116, + 123-131, 133, 138, 139, 141, 142, 151, 159, + 160, 162, 167, 172, 179, 197. + Lost Arts, 148. + Lost Cause, The, 182. + Lowell, J. R., 12, 93, 96, 104, 105, 107, 122, + 123, 138-144, 151, 154, 159, 160, 172, 174, + 183, 187, 188, 197. + Luck of Roaring Camp, The, 199. + Lunatic's Skate, The, 170. + Lyrics of a Day, 184. + + MacFingal, 54, 55, 59, 73. + Madison, James, 48, 49, 61. + Madonna of the Future, The, 205. + Magnalia Christi Americana, 19, 28-34,73. + Mahomet and his Successors, 78. + Maine Woods, The, 111. + "Major Jack Downing," 189. + Man of the Crowd, The, 166. + Man-of-War Bird, The, 179. + Man Without a Country, The, 164, 195. + Marble Faun, The, 115, 117, 118, 119. + Marco Bozzaris, 81. + Margaret, 144. + "Mark Twain," 188, 189, 193, 194. + Maryland, My Maryland, 183. + Masque of the Gods, The, 171. + Masque of the Red Death, 166. + Mather, Cotton, 19, 20, 21, 23, 26, 28-34, 36, 73. + Mather, Increase, 29, 31. + Maud Muller, 158. + May-Day, 107. + Maypole of Merrymount, The, 25. + Memoranda of the Civil War, 180. + Memorial History of Boston, 159. + Men Naturally God's Enemies, 35. + Merry Mount, 145. + Messenger, R. H., 170. + Miggles, 200. + "Miles O'Reilly," 186. + Minister's Black Veil, The, 117. + Minister's Wooing, The, 175. + Mitchell, D. G., 175. + Mocking Bird, The, 202. + Modern Instance, A, 208, 209. + Modern Learning, 59. + Modest Request, A, 134. + Money Diggers, The, 75. + Montcalm and Wolfe, 147. + Monterey, 170. + Moore, C. C., 170. + Moore, Frank, 183. + Moral Argument Against Calvinism, The, 90. + Morris, G. P., 170. + Morton's Hope, 145. + Mosses from an Old Manse, 114, 117. + Motley, J. L., 123, 138, 145, 146. + Mount Vernon, 56. + "Mrs. Partington," 189. + MS. Found In a Bottle, 168. + Murder of Lovejoy, The, 123. + Murders in the Rue Morgue, The, 163. + Murfree, Mary N., 203. + Music-Grinders, The, 133. + My Aunt, 133. + My Captain, 180. + My Double and How He Undid Me, 196. + My Garden Acquaintance, 143. + My Lite is Like the Summer Rose, 85. + My Old Kentucky Home, 173. + My Search for the Captain, 186. + My Study Windows, 143. + My Wife and I, 175. + Mystery of Gilgal, The, 201. + Mystery of Marie Roget, The, 163. + + Narrative of A. Gordon Pym, The, 166. + Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife, 118. + Nature, 93, 101, 103, 107. + Naval History of the United States, 81. + Nearer Home, 173. + Negro Melodies, 173. + Nelly was a Lady, 173. + New England Tragedies, 25. + New England Two Centuries Ago, 141, 143. + New System of English Grammar, A, 190. + New York Evening Post, The, 152, 155. + New York Tribune, The, 95, 171. + Newell, R. H., 193. + North American Review, The, 89, 116, 124, 143, 151, 152. + Norton, Andrews, 99. + Notes on Virginia, 47. + Nothing to Wear, 170. + Nux Postcoenatica, 134. + + O, Susanna, 173. + O'Brien, F. J., 185. + Observations on the Boston Port Bill, 44. + Occultation of Orion, The, 127, 139. + Ode at the Harvard Commemoration, 142. + Ode for a Social Meeting, 134. + Ode to Freedom, 140. + Odyssey, Bryant's, 155. + Old Clock on the Stairs, The, 127. + Old Creole Days, 203. + Old Folks at Home, 173. + Old Grimes, 85. + Old Ironsides, 132. + Old Oaken Bucket, The, 84. + Old Pennsylvania Farmer, The, 171. + Old Régime in Canada, The, 147. + Old Sergeant, The, 184. + On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners, 141. + One Hoss Shay, The, 135, 188. + Oregon Trail, The, 147. + Ormond, 63, 64. + "Orpheus C. Kerr," 193. + Orphic Sayings, 105. + Osgood, Mrs. K. P., 184. + Otis, James, 43-45. + Our Master, 158. + Our Old Home, 119. + Out of the Question, 209. + Outcasts of Poker Flat, The, 199, 200. + Outre-Mer, 124. + Overland Monthly, The, 199. + Over-Soul, The, 105. + + Paine, R. T., 60. + Paine, Tom, 51-53. + Panorama, The, 157. + Paper, 39. + Parker, Theodore, 97-100, 106. + Parkman, Francis, 123, 145, 146, 147. + Parlor Car, The, 210. + Partisan, The, 168. + Passionate Pilgrim, A, 305. + Pathfinder, The, 83. + Paulding, J. K., 72, 74, 79,80. + Payne, J. H., 84. + Pearl of Orr's Island, The, 175. + Pencilings by the Way, 169. + Pension Beaurepas, The, 206. + Percival, J. G., 175. + Percy, George, 12, 19. + "Peter Parley," 69. + "Petroleum V. Nasby," 193. + Phenomena Quaedam Apocalyptica, 33. + Phillips, Wendell, 122, 123, 147, 148, 157, + Philosophic Solitude, 53. + Philosophy of Composition, 163. + Phoenixiana, 189. + Piatt, J. J., 184, 202, 208. + Pictures of Memory, 173. + Pilot, The, 84. + Pink and White Tyranny, 175. + Pinkney, E. C., 85. + Pioneer, The, 138. + Pioneers, The, 71, 83. + Pioneers of France in the New World, 147. + Plain Language from Truthful James, 200 + Planting of the Apple-Tree, The, 155. + Plato, Emerson on, 108. + Poe, E. A., 63, 80, 85, 106, 116, 117, 130, 138, + 150, 153, 160-169, 182, 186, 196. + Poems of the Orient, 171. + Poems of Two Friends, 208. + Poems on Slavery, 128. + Poet at the Breakfast Table, The, 136. + Poetic Principle, The, 164. + Poetry: A Metrical Essay, 133. + Poet's Hope, A, 105. + Political Green House, The, 56. + Pollard, E. A., 182. + Pons, Maximus, 173. + Poor Richard's Almanac, 39, 40. + Portraits of Places, 207. + Prairie, The, 83. + Prentice, G. D., 156, 189. + Prescott, W. H., 123, 145, 146, 151, 182. + Present Crisis, The, 140. + Pride of the Village, The, 77. + Prince Deukalion, 171. + Prince of Parthia, The, 63. + Problem, The, 110. + Professor at the Breakfast Table, The, 136, 137. + Progress to the Mines, A, 17. + Prologue, The, 135. + Prophecy of Samuel Sewell, The, 33. + Prophet, The, 171. + Psalm of Life, The, 126, 127. + Purloined Letter, The, 163. + Putnam's Monthly, 123, 197. + + Quaker Widow, The, 171. + Quincy, Josiah, 43-45. + + Rag Man and Rag Woman, The, 196. + Randall, J. R., 183. + Randolph, John, 46. + Raven, The, 163, 165. + Read, T. B., 173. + Reaper and the Flowers, The, 126. + Rebellion Record, The, 183. + Recollections of a Life-time, 69, 72. + Red Rover, The, 84. + Register, The, 210. + Remarks on Associations, 91. + Remarks on National Literature, 91, 100. + Reply to Hayne, Webster's, 87. + Representative Men, 102, 107, 109. + Resignation, 128. + Reveries of a Bachelor, 175. + Rhoecus, 138. + Rhymes of Travel, 171. + Riding to Vote, 184. + Rights of the British Colonies, 45. + Ripley, George, 95, 99, 100, 106, 151. + Rip Van Winkle, 75. + Rip Van Winkle, M.D., 134. + Rise and Fall of the Confederate States, 182. + Rise and Fall of the Slave Power, 182. + Rise of the Dutch Republic, 146. + Rob of the Bowl, 168. + Roderick Hudson, 206. + Roughing It, 193, 194. + + Salmagundi, 74, 79, 155. + Sandys, George, 16, 19. + San Francisco, 198. + Scarlet Letter, The, 35, 117, 118. + School Days, 156. + Schoolcraft, H. R., 130. + Science of English Verse, 202. + Scribner's Monthly, 197. + Scripture Poems, 169. + Seaside and Fireside, 126, 127. + Seaweed, 127, 129. + Selling of Joseph, The, 33. + September Gale, The, 133. + Sewall, J, M., 60. + Sewall, Samuel, 32, 33. + Shakespeare, Ode, 89. + Shaw, H. W., 193. + Shepherd of King Admetus, The, 138. + Sheridan's Ride, 173. + Shillaber, B. P., 189. + Sigourney, Mrs. L. H., 107, 175. + Silas, Lapham, 209. + Simms, W. G., 168. + Simple Cobbler of Agawam, The, 20. + Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, 35. + Skeleton in Armor, The, 127. + Skeleton in the Closet, The, 196. + Sketch Book, The, 73-75, 77. + Skipper Ireson's Ride, 158. + Sleeper, The, 165. + Sleeping Car, The, 63. + Smith, Elihu, 55. + Smith, John, 11, 12, 15, 19, 24. + Smith, Seba, 189. + Snow-Bound, 159. + Society and Solitude, 107. + Song for a Temperance Dinner, 134. + Song of the Chattahoochie, 202. + Southern Literary Messenger, The, 160, 162. + Southern Passages and Pictures, 169. + Sparkling and Bright, 170. + Specimen Days, 180. + Specimens of Foreign Standard Literature, 100. + Sphinx, The, 135. + Sprague, Charles, 89. + Spring, 170. + Spy, The, 83. + Squibob Papers, 180. + Star Papers, 176. + Star-Spangled Banner, The, 60, 80. + Stedman, E. C., 197. + Stephens, A. H., 182. + Stith, William, 17. + Stoddard, R. H., 170, 197. + Story of Kennett, The, 172. + Stowe, Mrs. H. B., 174, 175. + Strachey, William, 11. + Stuart, Moses, 98. + Suburban Sketches, 208. + Sumner, Charles, 122, 132, 124, 142, 148, 157, 174. + Supernaturalism in New England, 160. + Swallow Barn, 168. + Swinton, W., 183. + Sybaris and Other Homes, 195. + + Tales of a Traveler, 75. + Tales of a Wayside Inn, 159. + Tales of the Glauber Spa, 155. + Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, 166. + Tamerlane, 161. + Tanglewood Tales, 119. + Taylor, Bayard, 170-173. + Telling the Bees, 159. + Ten Times One is Ten, 195. + Tennessee's Partner, 200. + Tent on the Beach, The, 159. + Thanatopsis, 68, 80, 125, 152, 153, 155. + Their Wedding Journey, 208. + Theology, Dwight's, 58. + Thirty Poems, 154. + Thoreau, H. D., 93, 96, 106, 109, 110, 114, + 119, 122, 123, 125, 151, 179, 182. + Timrod, Henry, 184. + To a Waterfowl, 153. + To Helen, 162. + To M---- from Abroad, 170. + To One in Paradise, 165. + To Seneca Lake, 175. + Tour on the Prairies, A, 71. + Tramp Abroad, A, 193. + Transcendentalist, The, 101, 102. + Travels, Dwight's, 53. + Treatise Concerning Religious Affections, 36. + Triumph of Infidelity, 58. + True Grandeur of Nations, The, 149. + True Relation, Smith's, 15. + True Repertory of the Wrack of Sir Thomas Gates, 11. + Trumbull, John, 54, 55, 73. + Twice-Told Tales, 115, 117, 118. + Two Rivers, 112. + Tyler, Royall, 63. + + Ulalume, 165. + Uncle Ned, 173. + Uncle Remus, 202. + Uncle Tom's Cabin, 174. + Under the Willows, 142. + Undiscovered Country, The, 209. + Unknown Dead, The, 184. + Unseen Spirits, 170. + + Valley of Unrest, The, 162. + Vanity Fair, 190. + Vassall Morton, 145. + Venetian Life, 208. + Views Afoot, 171. + Villa Franca, 142. + Village Blacksmith, The, 127. + Virginia Comedians, The, 196. + Vision of Columbus, The, 56, 57. + Vision of Sir Launfal, The, 140, 141. + Visit from St. Nicholas, A, 170. + Voices of Freedom, 157. + Voices of the Night, 124, 126. + Voluntaries, 110. + Von Kempelen's Discovery, 154. + + Walden, 111. + Wants of Man, The, 85. + War Lyrics, 184. + Ward, Nathaniel, 20. + Ware, Henry, 99. + Washers of the Shroud, The, 142. + Washington, George, 49, 51. + Washington as a Camp, 185. + Washington Square, 185. + 'Way Down South, 173. + Webster, Daniel, 73, 86-89, 90, 158, 187. + Webster's Spelling-Book, 69. + Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers, A, 111. + Western Windows, 202. + Westminster Abbey, 77. + Westover MSS., The, 16. + Westward Ho! 72. + What Mr. Robinson thinks, 140. + What was It?, 186. + Whistle, The, 39. + Whitaker, Alexander, 18. + White, R. G., 197. + Whitman, Walt, 126, 176-180, 183. + Whittier, J. G., 18, 25, 26, 32, 33, 93, 133, + 138, 155-160, 167, 174, 175, 179, 183, 185, 197. + Wieland, 63, 65. + Wigglesworth, Michael, 34. + Wild Honeysuckle, The, 61. + Wilde, R. H., 84. + William Wilson, 166. + Williams, Roger, 22, 23. + Willis, N. P., 71, 153, 169, 171, 176. + Willson Forceythe, 184. + Wilson, Henry, 182. + Winter Evening Hymn to My Fire, 142, + Winthrop, John, 12, 21, 23-28, 31, 33. + Winthrop, Theodore, 184. + Witchcraft, 143. + Witch's Daughter, The, 157. + Wolfert's Roost, 75. + Wolfert Webber, 75. + Woman in the Nineteenth Century, 105. + Wonder Book, 119. + Wonders of the Invisible World, 21, 32. + Woods, Leonard, 98. + Woods in Winter, 125. + Woodman, Spare that Tree, 170. + Woodworth, Samuel, 84. + Woolman's Journal, 65, 66, 157. + Wound-Dresser, The, 178. + Wrath Upon the Wicked, 35. + Wreck of the Hesperus, The, 127, 129. + + Yankee Doodle, 59. + Yankee in Canada, 111. + Year's Life, A, 138. + Yemassee, The, 168. + + + +***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK INITIAL STUDIES IN AMERICAN +LETTERS*** + + +******* This file should be named 15854-8.txt or 15854-8.zip ******* + + +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: +https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/5/8/5/15854 + + + +Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions +will be renamed. + +Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no +one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation +(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without +permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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Thus, we do not necessarily +keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition. + +Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility: + + https://www.gutenberg.org + +This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm, +including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary +Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to +subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks. + diff --git a/15854-8.zip b/15854-8.zip Binary files differnew file mode 100644 index 0000000..291d7c2 --- /dev/null +++ b/15854-8.zip diff --git a/15854.txt b/15854.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..bb52b0d --- /dev/null +++ b/15854.txt @@ -0,0 +1,10597 @@ +The Project Gutenberg eBook, Initial Studies in American Letters, by Henry +A. Beers + + +This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with +almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + + + + + +Title: Initial Studies in American Letters + + +Author: Henry A. Beers + +Release Date: May 18, 2005 [eBook #15854] + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII) + + +***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK INITIAL STUDIES IN AMERICAN +LETTERS*** + + +E-text prepared by Al Haines + + + +INITIAL STUDIES IN AMERICAN LETTERS + +by + +HENRY A. BEERS + +New York +Chautauqua Press +C. L. S. C. Department, 150 Fifth Avenue + +1891 + + + + + + + +The required books of the C. L. S. C. are recommended by a Council of +Six. It must, however, be understood that recommendation does not +involve an approval by the Council, or by any member of it, of every +principle or doctrine contained in the book recommended. + + + + + +PREFACE. + +This volume is intended as a companion to the historical sketch of +English literature, entitled _From Chaucer to Tennyson_, published last +year for the Chautauqua Circle. In writing it I have followed the same +plan, aiming to present the subject in a sort of continuous essay +rather than in the form of a "primer" or elementary manual. I have not +undertaken to describe, or even to mention, every American author or +book of importance, but only those which seemed to me of most +significance. Nevertheless I believe that the sketch contains enough +detail to make it of some use as a guide-book to our literature. +Though meant to be mainly a history of American _belles-lettres_, it +makes some mention of historical and political writings, but hardly any +of philosophical, scientific, and technical works. + +A chronological rather than a topical order has been followed, although +the fact that our best literature is of recent growth has made it +impossible to adhere as closely to a chronological plan as in the +English sketch. In the reading courses appended to the different +chapters I have named a few of the most important authorities in +American literary history, such as Duyckinck, Tyler, Stedman, and +Richardson. My thanks are due to the authors and publishers who have +kindly allowed me the use of copyrighted matter for the appendix, +especially to Mr. Park Godwin and Messrs. D. Appleton & Co. for the +passages from Bryant; to Messrs. A. O. Armstrong & Son for the +selections from Poe; to the Rev. E. E. Hale and Messrs. Roberts +Brothers for the extract from _The Man Without a Country_; to Walt +Whitman for his two poems; and to Mr. Clemens and the American +Publishing Co. for the passage from _The Jumping Frog_. + +HENRY A. BEERS. + + + + + +CONTENTS. + + CHAPTER I. + THE COLONIAL PERIOD, 1607-1765 + + CHAPTER II. + THE REVOLUTIONARY PERIOD, 1765-1815 + + CHAPTER III. + THE ERA OF NATIONAL EXPANSION, 1815-1837 + + CHAPTER IV. + THE CONCORD WRITERS, 1837-1861 + + CHAPTER V. + THE CAMBRIDGE SCHOLARS, 1837-1861 + + CHAPTER VI. + LITERATURE IN THE CITIES, 1837-1861 + + CHAPTER VII. + LITERATURE SINCE 1861 + + APPENDIX. + + + + +INITIAL STUDIES IN AMERICAN LETTERS. + + +CHAPTER I. + +THE COLONIAL PERIOD. + +1607-1765. + +The writings of our colonial era have a much greater importance as +history than as literature. It would be unfair to judge of the +intellectual vigor of the English colonists in America by the books +that they wrote; those "stern men with empires in their brains" had +more pressing work to do than the making of books. The first settlers, +indeed, were brought face to face with strange and exciting +conditions--the sea, the wilderness, the Indians, the flora and fauna +of a new world--things which seem stimulating to the imagination, and +incidents and experiences which might have lent themselves easily to +poetry or romance. Of all these they wrote back to England reports +which were faithful and sometimes vivid, but which, upon the whole, +hardly rise into the region of literature. "New England," said +Hawthorne, "was then in a state incomparably more picturesque than at +present." But to a contemporary that old New England of the +seventeenth century doubtless seemed any thing but picturesque, filled +with grim, hard, work-day realities. The planters both of Virginia and +Massachusetts were decimated by sickness and starvation, constantly +threatened by Indian Wars, and troubled by quarrels among themselves +and fears of disturbance from England. The wrangles between the royal +governors and the House of Burgesses in the Old Dominion, and the +theological squabbles in New England, which fill our colonial records, +are petty and wearisome to read of. At least, they would be so did we +not bear in mind to what imperial destinies those conflicts were slowly +educating the little communities which had hardly yet secured a +foothold on the edge of the raw continent. + +Even a century and a half after the Jamestown and Plymouth settlements, +when the American plantations had grown strong and flourishing, and +commerce was building up large towns, and there were wealth and +generous living and fine society, the "good old colony days when we +lived under the king," had yielded little in the way of literature that +is of any permanent interest. There would seem to be something in the +relation of a colony to the mother-country which dooms the thought and +art of the former to a helpless provincialism. Canada and Australia +are great provinces, wealthier and more populous than the thirteen +colonies at the time of their separation from England. They have +cities whose inhabitants number hundreds of thousands, well-equipped +universities, libraries, cathedrals, costly public buildings, all the +outward appliances of an advanced civilization; and yet what have +Canada and Australia contributed to British literature? + +American literature had no infancy. That engaging _naivete_ and that +heroic rudeness which give a charm to the early popular tales and songs +of Europe find, of course, no counterpart on our soil. Instead of +emerging from the twilight of the past the first American writings were +produced under the garish noon of a modern and learned age. +Decrepitude rather than youthfulness is the mark of a colonial +literature. The poets, in particular, instead of finding a challenge +to their imagination in the new life about them, are apt to go on +imitating the cast-off literary fashions of the mother-country. +America was settled by Englishmen who were contemporary with the +greatest names in English literature. Jamestown was planted in 1607, +nine years before Shakespeare's death, and the hero of that enterprise, +Captain John Smith, may not improbably have been a personal +acquaintance of the great dramatist. "They have acted my fatal +tragedies on the stage," wrote Smith. Many circumstances in _The +Tempest_ were doubtless suggested by the wreck of the _Sea Venture_ on +"the still vext Bermoothes," as described by William Strachey in his +_True Repertory of the Wrack and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates_, +written at Jamestown, and published at London in 1610. Shakespeare's +contemporary, Michael Drayton, the poet of the _Polyolbion_, addressed +a spirited valedictory ode to the three shiploads of "brave, heroic +minds" who sailed from London in 1606 to colonize Virginia, an ode +which ended with the prophecy of a future American literature: + + "And as there plenty grows + Of laurel every-where-- + Apollo's sacred tree-- + You it may see + A poet's brows + To crown, that may sing there." + +Another English poet, Samuel Daniel, the author of the _Civil Wars_, +had also prophesied in a similar strain: + + "And who in time knows whither we may vent + The treasure of our tongue, to what strange shores . . . + What worlds in the yet unformed Occident + May come refined with accents that are ours?" + +It needed but a slight movement in the balances of fate, and Walter +Raleigh might have been reckoned among the poets of America. He was +one of the original promoters of the Virginia colony, and he made +voyages in person to Newfoundland and Guiana. And more unlikely things +have happened than that when John Milton left Cambridge in 1632 he +should have been tempted to follow Winthrop and the colonists of +Massachusetts Bay, who had sailed two years before. Sir Henry Vane, +the younger, who was afterward Milton's friend-- + + "Vane, young in years, but in sage counsel old"-- + +came over in 1635, and was for a short time governor of Massachusetts. +These are idle speculations, and yet, when we reflect that Oliver +Cromwell was on the point of embarking for America when he was +prevented by the king's officers, we may, for the nonce, "let our frail +thoughts dally with false surmise," and fancy by how narrow a chance +_Paradise Lost_ missed being written in Boston. But, as a rule, the +members of the literary guild are not quick to emigrate. They like the +feeling of an old and rich civilization about them, a state of society +which America has only begun to reach during the present century. + +Virginia and New England, says Lowell, were the "two great distributing +centers of the English race." The men who colonized the country +between the Capes of Virginia were not drawn, to any large extent, from +the literary or bookish classes in the old country. Many of the first +settlers were gentlemen--too many, Captain Smith thought, for the good +of the plantation. Some among these were men of worth and spirit, "of +good means and great parentage." Such was, for example, George Percy, +a younger brother of the Earl of Northumberland, who was one of the +original adventurers, and the author of _A Discourse of the Plantation +of the Southern Colony of Virginia_, which contains a graphic narrative +of the fever and famine summer of 1607 at Jamestown. But many of these +gentlemen were idlers, "unruly gallants, packed thither by their +friends to escape ill destinies," dissipated younger sons, soldiers of +fortune, who came over after the gold which was supposed to abound in +the new country, and who spent their time in playing bowls and drinking +at the tavern as soon as there was any tavern. With these was a +sprinkling of mechanics and farmers, indented servants, and the +on-scourings of the London streets, fruit of press-gangs and jail +deliveries, sent over to "work in the plantations." + +Nor were the conditions of life afterward in Virginia very favorable to +literary growth. The planters lived isolated on great estates which +had water-fronts on the rivers that flow into the Chesapeake. There +the tobacco, the chief staple of the country, was loaded directly upon +the trading vessels that tied up to the long, narrow wharves of the +plantations. Surrounded by his slaves, and visited occasionally by a +distant neighbor, the Virginia country gentleman lived a free and +careless life. He was fond of fox-hunting, horse-racing, and +cock-fighting. There were no large towns, and the planters met each +other mainly on occasion of a county court or the assembling of the +Burgesses. The court-house was the nucleus of social and political +life in Virginia as the town-meeting was in New England. In such a +state of society schools were necessarily few, and popular education +did not exist. Sir William Berkeley, who was the royal governor of the +colony from 1641 to 1677, said, in 1670, "I thank God there are no free +schools nor printing, and I hope we shall not have these hundred +years." In the matter of printing this pious wish was well-nigh +realized. The first press set up in the colony, about 1681, was soon +suppressed, and found no successor until the year 1729. From that date +until some ten years before the Revolution one printing-press answered +the needs of Virginia, and this was under official control. The +earliest newspaper in the colony was the _Virginia Gazette_, +established in 1736. + +In the absence of schools the higher education naturally languished. +Some of the planters were taught at home by tutors, and others went to +England and entered the universities. But these were few in number, +and there was no college in the colony until more than half a century +after the foundation of Harvard in the younger province of +Massachusetts. The college of William and Mary was established at +Williamsburg chiefly by the exertions of the Rev. James Blair, a Scotch +divine, who was sent by the Bishop of London as "commissary" to the +Church in Virginia. The college received its charter in 1693, and held +its first commencement in 1700. It is perhaps significant of the +difference between the Puritans of New England and the so-called +"Cavaliers" of Virginia, that while the former founded and supported +Harvard College in 1636, and Yale in 1701, of their own motion and at +their own expense, William and Mary received its endowment from the +crown, being provided for in part by a deed of lands and in part by a +tax of a penny a pound on all tobacco exported from the colony. In +return for this royal grant the college was to present yearly to the +king two copies of Latin verse. It is reported of the young Virginian +gentlemen who resorted to the new college that they brought their +plantation manners with them, and were accustomed to "keep race-horses +at the college, and bet at the billiard or other gaming-tables." +William and Mary College did a good work for the colony, and educated +some of the great Virginians of the Revolutionary era, but it has never +been a large or flourishing institution, and has held no such relation +to the intellectual development of its section as Harvard and Yale have +held in the colonies of Massachusetts and Connecticut. Even after the +foundation of the University of Virginia, in which Jefferson took a +conspicuous part, Southern youths were commonly sent to the North for +their education, and at the time of the outbreak of the civil war there +was a large contingent of Southern students in several Northern +colleges, notably in Princeton and Yale. + +Naturally, the first books written in America were descriptions of the +country and narratives of the vicissitudes of the infant settlements, +which were sent home to be printed for the information of the English +public and the encouragement of further immigration. Among books of +this kind produced in Virginia the earliest and most noteworthy were +the writings of that famous soldier of fortune, Captain John Smith. +The first of these was his _True Relation_, namely, "of such +occurrences and accidents of note as hath happened in Virginia since +the first planting of that colony," printed at London in 1608. Among +Smith's other books the most important is perhaps his _General History +of Virginia_ (London, 1624), a compilation of various narratives by +different hands, but passing under his name. Smith was a man of a +restless and daring spirit, full of resource, impatient of +contradiction, and of a somewhat vainglorious nature, with an appetite +for the marvelous and a disposition to draw the longbow. He had seen +service in many parts of the world, and his wonderful adventures lost +nothing in the telling. It was alleged against him that the evidence +of his prowess rested almost entirely on his own testimony. His +truthfulness in essentials has not, perhaps, been successfully +impugned, but his narratives have suffered by the embellishments with +which he has colored them; and, in particular, the charming story of +Pocahontas saving his life at the risk of her own--the one romance of +early Virginian history--has passed into the realm of legend. + +Captain Smith's writings have small literary value apart from the +interest of the events which they describe and the diverting but +forcible personality which they unconsciously display. They are the +rough-hewn records of a busy man of action, whose sword was mightier +than his pen. As Smith returned to England after two years in +Virginia, and did not permanently cast in his lot with the settlement +of which he had been for a time the leading spirit, he can hardly be +claimed as an American author. No more can Mr. George Sandys, who came +to Virginia in the train of Governor Wyat, in 1621, and completed his +excellent metrical translation of Ovid on the banks of the James, in +the midst of the Indian massacre of 1622, "limned" as he writes "by +that imperfect light which was snatched from the hours of night and +repose, having wars and tumults to bring it to light instead of the +muses." Sandys went back to England for good probably as early as +1625, and can, therefore, no more be reckoned as the first American +poet, on the strength of his paraphrase of the _Metamorphoses_, than he +can be reckoned the earliest Yankee inventor because he "introduced the +first water-mill into America." + +The literature of colonial Virginia, and of the southern colonies which +took their point of departure from Virginia, is almost wholly of this +historical and descriptive kind. A great part of it is concerned with +the internal affairs of the province, such as "Bacon's Rebellion," in +1676, one of the most striking episodes in our ante-revolutionary +annals, and of which there exist a number of narratives, some of them +anonymous, and only rescued from a manuscript condition a hundred years +after the event. Another part is concerned with the explorations of +new territory. Such were the "Westover Manuscripts," left by Colonel +William Byrd, who was appointed in 1729 one of the commissioners to fix +the boundary between Virginia and North Carolina, and gave an account +of the survey in his _History of the Dividing Line_, which was printed +only in 1841. Colonel Byrd is one of the most brilliant figures of +colonial Virginia, and a type of the Old Virginia gentleman. He had +been sent to England for his education, where he was admitted to the +bar of the Middle Temple, elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, and +formed an intimate friendship with Charles Boyle, the Earl of Orrery. +He held many offices in the government of the colony, and founded the +cities of Richmond and Petersburg. His estates were large, and at +Westover--where he had one of the finest private libraries in +America--he exercised a baronial hospitality, blending the usual +profusion of plantation life with the elegance of a traveled scholar +and "picked man of countries." Colonel Byrd was rather an amateur in +literature. His _History of the Dividing Line_ is written with a +jocularity which rises occasionally into real humor, and which gives to +the painful journey through the wilderness the air of a holiday +expedition. Similar in tone were his diaries of _A Progress to the +Mines_ and _A Journey to the Land of Eden_ in North Carolina. + +The first formal historian of Virginia was Robert Beverly, "a native +and inhabitant of the place," whose _History of Virginia_ was printed +at London in 1705. Beverly was a rich planter and large slave-owner, +who, being in London in 1703, was shown by his bookseller the +manuscript of a forthcoming work, Oldmixon's _British Empire in +America_. Beverly was set upon writing his history by the inaccuracies +in this, and likewise because the province "has been so misrepresented +to the common people of England as to make them believe that the +servants in Virginia are made to draw in cart and plow, and that the +country turns all people black"--an impression which lingers still in +parts of Europe. The most original portions of the book are those in +which the author puts down his personal observations of the plants and +animals of the New World, and particularly the account of the Indians, +to which his third book is devoted, and which is accompanied by +valuable plates. Beverly's knowledge of these matters was evidently at +first hand, and his descriptions here are very fresh and interesting. +The more strictly historical part of his work is not free from +prejudice and inaccuracy. A more critical, detailed, and impartial, +but much less readable, work was William Stith's _History of the First +Discovery and Settlement of Virginia_, 1747, which brought the subject +down only to the year 1624. Stith was a clergyman, and at one time a +professor in William and Mary College. + +The Virginians were stanch royalists and churchmen. The Church of +England was established by law, and non-conformity was persecuted in +various ways. Three missionaries were sent to the colony in 1642 by +the Puritans of New England, two from Braintree, Massachusetts, and one +from New Haven. They were not suffered to preach, but many resorted to +them in private houses, until, being finally driven out by fines and +imprisonments, they took refuge in Catholic Maryland. The Virginia +clergy were not, as a body, very much of a force in education or +literature. Many of them, by reason of the scattering and dispersed +condition of their parishes, lived as domestic chaplains with the +wealthier planters, and partook of their illiteracy and their passion +for gaming and hunting. Few of them inherited the zeal of Alexander +Whitaker, the "Apostle of Virginia," who came over in 1611 to preach to +the colonists and convert the Indians, and who published in furtherance +of those ends _Good News from Virginia_, in 1613, three years before +his death by drowning in the James River. + +The conditions were much more favorable for the production of a +literature in New England than in the southern colonies. The free and +genial existence of the "Old Dominion" had no counterpart among the +settlers of Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay, and the Puritans must have +been rather unpleasant people to live with for persons of a different +way of thinking. But their intensity of character, their respect for +learning, and the heroic mood which sustained them through the +hardships and dangers of their great enterprise are amply reflected in +their own writings. If these are not so much literature as the raw +materials of literature, they have at least been fortunate in finding +interpreters among their descendants, and no modern Virginian has done +for the memory of the Jamestown planters what Hawthorne, Whittier, +Longfellow, and others have done in casting the glamour of poetry and +romance over the lives of the founders of New England. + +Cotton Mather, in his _Magnalia_, quotes the following passage from one +of those election sermons, delivered before the General Court of +Massachusetts, which formed for many years the great annual +intellectual event of the colony: + +"The question was often put unto our predecessors, _What went ye out +into the wilderness to see_? And the answer to it is not only too +excellent but too notorious to be dissembled. . . . We came hither +because we would have our posterity settled under the pure and full +dispensations of the Gospel, defended by rulers that should be of +ourselves." The New England colonies were, in fact, theocracies. +Their leaders were clergymen, or laymen whose zeal for the faith was no +whit inferior to that of the ministers themselves. Church and State +were one. The freeman's oath was only administered to church members, +and there was no place in the social system for unbelievers or +dissenters. The pilgrim fathers regarded their transplantation to the +New World as an exile, and nothing is more touching in their written +records than the repeated expressions of love and longing toward the +old home which they had left, and even toward that Church of England +from which they had sorrowfully separated themselves. It was not in +any light or adventurous spirit that they faced the perils of the sea +and the wilderness. "This howling wilderness," "these ends of the +earth," "these goings down of the sun," are some of the epithets which +they constantly applied to the land of their exile. Nevertheless they +had come to stay, and, unlike Smith and Percy and Sandys, the early +historians and writers of New England cast in their lots permanently +with the new settlements. A few, indeed, went back after 1640--Mather +says some ten or twelve of the ministers of the first "classis" or +immigration were among them--when the victory of the Puritanic party in +Parliament opened a career for them in England, and made their presence +there seem in some cases a duty. The celebrated Hugh Peters, for +example, who was afterward Oliver Cromwell's chaplain, and was beheaded +after the Restoration, went back in 1641, and in 1647 Nathaniel Ward, +the minister of Ipswich, Massachusetts, and author of a quaint book +against toleration, entitled _The Simple Cobbler of Agawam_; written in +America and published shortly after its author's arrival in England. +The civil war, too, put a stop to further emigration from England until +after the Restoration in 1660. + +The mass of the Puritan immigration consisted of men of the middle +class, artisans and husbandmen, the most useful members of a new +colony. But their leaders were clergymen educated at the universities, +and especially at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, the great Puritan +college; their civil magistrates were also in great part gentlemen of +education and substance, like the elder Winthrop, who was learned in +law, and Theophilus Eaton, first governor of New Haven, who was a +London merchant of good estate. It is computed that there were in New +England during the first generation as many university graduates as in +any community of equal population in the old country. Almost the first +care of the settlers was to establish schools. Every town of fifty +families was required by law to maintain a common school, and every +town of a hundred families a grammar or Latin school. In 1636, only +sixteen years after the landing of the Pilgrims on Plymouth Rock, +Harvard College was founded at Newtown, whose name was thereupon +changed to Cambridge, the General Court held at Boston on September 8, +1630, having already advanced 400 pounds "by way of essay towards the +building of something to begin a college." "An university," says +Mather, "which hath been to these plantations, for the good literature +there cultivated, _sal Gentium_, . . . and a river without the streams +whereof these regions would have been mere unwatered places for the +devil." By 1701 Harvard had put forth a vigorous offshoot, Yale +College at New Haven, the settlers of New Haven and Connecticut +plantations having increased sufficiently to need a college at their +own doors. A printing-press was set up at Cambridge in 1639, which was +under the oversight of the university authorities, and afterward of +licensers appointed by the civil power. The press was no more free in +Massachusetts than in Virginia, and that "liberty of unlicensed +printing" for which the Puritan Milton had pleaded in his +_Areopagitica_, in 1644, was unknown in Puritan New England until some +twenty years before the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. "The +Freeman's Oath" and an almanac were issued from the Cambridge press in +1639, and in 1640 the first English book printed in America, a +collection of the psalms in meter, made by various ministers, and known +as the _Bay Psalm Book_. The poetry of this version was worse, if +possible, than that of Sternhold and Hopkins's famous rendering; but it +is noteworthy that one of the principal translators was that devoted +"Apostle to the Indians," the Rev. John Eliot, who, in 1661-63, +translated the Bible into the Algonquin tongue. Eliot hoped and toiled +a life-time for the conversion of those "salvages," "tawnies," +"devil-worshipers," for whom our early writers have usually nothing but +bad words. They have been destroyed instead of converted; but his (so +entitled) _Mamusse Wunneetupanatamwe Up-Biblum God naneeswe Nukkone +Testament kah wonk Wusku Testament_--the first Bible printed in +America--remains a monument of missionary zeal and a work of great +value to students of the Indian languages. + +A modern writer has said that, to one looking back on the history of +old New England, it seems as though the sun shone but dimly there, and +the landscape was always dark and wintry. Such is the impression which +one carries away from the perusal of books like Bradford's and +Winthrop's Journals, or Mather's _Wonders of the Invisible World_--an +impression of gloom, of flight and cold, of mysterious fears besieging +the infant settlements scattered in a narrow fringe "between the +groaning forest and the shore." The Indian terror hung over New +England for more than half a century, or until the issue of King +Philip's War, in 1670, relieved the colonists of any danger of a +general massacre. Added to this were the perplexities caused by the +earnest resolve of the settlers to keep their New-England Eden free +from the intrusion of the serpent in the shape of heretical sects in +religion. The Puritanism of Massachusetts was an orthodox and +conservative Puritanism. The later and more grotesque out-crops of the +movement in the old England found no toleration in the new. But these +refugees for conscience' sake were compelled in turn to persecute +Antinomians, Separatists, Familists, Libertines, Anti-pedobaptists, and +later, Quakers, and still later, Enthusiasts, who swarmed into their +precincts and troubled the churches with "prophesyings" and novel +opinions. Some of those were banished, others were flogged or +imprisoned, and a few were put to death. Of the exiles the most +noteworthy was Roger Williams, an impetuous, warm-hearted man, who was +so far in advance of his age as to deny the power of the civil +magistrate in cases of conscience, or who, in other words, maintained +the modern doctrine of the separation of Church and State. Williams +was driven away from the Massachusetts colony--where he had been +minister of the church at Salem--and with a few followers fled into the +southern wilderness and settled at Providence. There, and in the +neighboring plantation of Rhode Island, for which he obtained a +charter, he established his patriarchal rule and gave freedom of +worship to all comers. Williams was a prolific writer on theological +subjects, the most important of his writings being, perhaps, his +_Bloody Tenent of Persecution_, 1644, and a supplement to the same +called out by a reply to the former work from the pen of Mr. John +Cotton, minister of the First Church at Boston, entitled _The Bloody +Tenent Washed and made White in the Blood of the Lamb_. Williams was +also a friend to the Indians, whose lands, he thought, should not be +taken from them without payment, and he anticipated Eliot by writing, +in 1643, a _Key into the Language of America_. Although at odds with +the theology of Massachusetts Bay, Williams remained in correspondence +with Winthrop and others in Boston, by whom he was highly esteemed. He +visited England in 1643 and 1652, and made the acquaintance of John +Milton. + +Besides the threat of an Indian war and their anxious concern for the +purity of the Gospel in their churches, the colonists were haunted by +superstitious forebodings of the darkest kind. It seemed to them that +Satan, angered by the setting up of the kingdom of the saints in +America, had "come down in great wrath," and was present among them, +sometimes even in visible shape, to terrify and tempt. Special +providences and unusual phenomena, like earth quakes, mirages, and the +northern lights, are gravely recorded by Winthrop and Mather and others +as portents of supernatural persecutions. Thus Mrs. Anne Hutchinson, +the celebrated leader of the Familists, having, according to rumor, +been delivered of a monstrous birth, the Rev. John Cotton, in open +assembly, at Boston, upon a lecture day, "thereupon gathered that it +might signify her error in denying inherent righteousness." "There +will be an unusual range of the devil among us," wrote Mather, "a +little before the second coming of our Lord. The evening wolves will +be much abroad when we are near the evening of the world." This belief +culminated in the horrible witchcraft delusion at Salem in 1692, that +"spectral puppet play," which, beginning with the malicious pranks of a +few children who accused certain uncanny old women and other persons of +mean condition and suspected lives of having tormented them with magic, +gradually drew into its vortex victims of the highest character, and +resulted in the judicial murder of over nineteen people. Many of the +possessed pretended to have been visited by the apparition of a little +black man, who urged them to inscribe their names in a red book which +he carried--a sort of muster-roll of those who had forsworn God's +service for the devil's. Others testified to having been present at +meetings of witches in the forest. It is difficult now to read without +contempt the "evidence" which grave justices and learned divines +considered sufficient to condemn to death men and women of unblemished +lives. It is true that the belief in witchcraft was general at that +time all over the civilized world, and that sporadic cases of +witch-burnings had occurred in different parts of America and Europe. +Sir Thomas Browne, in his _Religio Medici_, 1635, affirmed his belief +in witches, and pronounced those who doubted of them "a sort of +atheist." But the superstition came to a head in the Salem trials and +executions, and was the more shocking from the general high level of +intelligence in the community in which these were held. It would be +well if those who lament the decay of "faith" would remember what +things were done in New England in the name of faith less than two +hundred years ago. It is not wonderful that, to the Massachusetts +Puritans of the seventeenth century, the mysterious forest held no +beautiful suggestion; to them it was simply a grim and hideous +wilderness, whose dark aisles were the ambush of prowling savages and +the rendezvous of those other "devil-worshipers" who celebrated there a +kind of vulgar Walpurgis night. + +The most important of original sources for the history of the +settlement of New England are the journals of William Bradford, first +governor of Plymouth, and John Winthrop, the second governor of +Massachusetts, which hold a place corresponding to the writings of +Captain John Smith in the Virginia colony, but are much more sober and +trustworthy. Bradford's _History of Plymouth Plantation_ covers the +period from 1620 to 1646. The manuscript was used by later annalists +but remained unpublished, as a whole, until 1855, having been lost +during the War of the Revolution and recovered long afterward in +England. Winthrop's Journal, or _History of New England_, begun on +shipboard in 1630, and extending to 1649, was not published entire +until 1826. It is of equal authority with Bradford's, and perhaps, on +the whole the more important of the two, as the colony of Massachusetts +Bay, whose history it narrates, greatly outwent Plymouth in wealth and +population, though not in priority of settlement. The interest of +Winthrop's Journal lies in the events that it records rather than in +any charm in the historian's manner of recording them. His style is +pragmatic, and some of the incidents which he gravely notes are trivial +to the modern mind, though instructive as to our forefathers' way of +thinking. For instance, of the year 1632: "At Watertown there was (in +the view of divers witnesses) a great combat between a mouse and a +snake, and after a long fight the mouse prevailed and killed the snake. +The pastor of Boston, Mr. Wilson, a very sincere, holy man, hearing of +it, gave this interpretation: that the snake was the devil, the mouse +was a poor, contemptible people, which God had brought hither, which +should overcome Satan here and dispossess him of his kingdom." The +reader of Winthrop's Journal comes every-where upon hints which the +imagination has since shaped into poetry and romance. The germs of +many of Longfellow's _New England Tragedies_, of Hawthorne's _Maypole +of Merrymount_, and _Endicott's Red Cross_, and of Whittier's _John +Underhill_ and _The Familists' Hymn_ are all to be found in some dry, +brief entry of the old Puritan diarist. "Robert Cole, having been oft +punished for drunkenness, was now ordered to wear a red D about his +neck for a year," to wit, the year 1633, and thereby gave occasion to +the greatest American romance, _The Scarlet Letter_. The famous +apparition of the phantom ship in New Haven harbor, "upon the top of +the poop a man standing with one hand akimbo under his left side, and +in his right hand a sword stretched out toward the sea," was first +chronicled by Winthrop under the year 1648. This meteorological +phenomenon took on the dimensions of a full-grown myth some forty years +later, as related, with many embellishments, by Rev. James Pierpont, of +New Haven, in a letter to Cotton Mather. Winthrop put great faith in +special providences, and among other instances narrates, not without a +certain grim satisfaction, how "the _Mary Rose_, a ship of Bristol, of +about 200 tons," lying before Charleston, was blown in pieces with her +own powder, being twenty-one barrels, wherein the judgment of God +appeared, "for the master and company were many of them profane +scoffers at us and at the ordinances of religion here." Without any +effort at dramatic portraiture or character-sketching, Winthrop managed +in all simplicity, and by the plain relation of facts, to leave a clear +impression of many prominent figures in the first Massachusetts +immigration. In particular there gradually arises from the entries in +his diary a very distinct and diverting outline of Captain John +Underhill, celebrated in Whittier's poem. He was one of the few +professional soldiers who came over with the Puritan fathers, such as +John Mason, the hero of the Pequot War, and Miles Standish, whose +_Courtship_ Longfellow sang. He had seen service in the Low Countries, +and in pleading the privilege of his profession "he insisted much upon +the liberty which all States do allow to military officers for free +speech, etc., and that himself had spoken sometimes as freely to Count +Nassau." Captain Underhill gave the colony no end of trouble, both by +his scandalous living and his heresies in religion. Having been +seduced into Familistical opinions by Mrs. Anne Hutchinson, who was +banished for her beliefs, he was had up before the General Court and +questioned, among other points, as to his own report of the manner of +his conversion. "He had lain under a spirit of bondage and a legal way +for years, and could get no assurance, till, at length, as he was +taking a pipe of tobacco, the Spirit set home an absolute promise of +free grace with such assurance and joy as he never since doubted of his +good estate, neither should he, though he should fall into sin. . . . +The Lord's day following he made a speech in the assembly, showing that +as the Lord was pleased to convert Paul as he was in persecuting, etc., +so he might manifest himself to him as he was taking the moderate use +of the creature called tobacco." The gallant captain, being banished +the colony, betook himself to the falls of the Piscataquack (Exeter, +N.H.), where the Rev. John Wheelwright, another adherent of Mrs. +Hutchinson, had gathered a congregation. Being made governor of this +plantation, Underhill sent letters to the Massachusetts magistrates, +breathing reproaches and imprecations of vengeance. But meanwhile it +was discovered that he had been living in adultery at Boston with a +young woman whom he had seduced, the wife of a cooper, and the captain +was forced to make public confession, which he did with great unction +and in a manner highly dramatic. "He came in his worst clothes (being +accustomed to take great pride in his bravery and neatness), without a +band, in a foul linen cap, and pulled close to his eyes, and standing +upon a form, he did, with many deep sighs and abundance of tears, lay +open his wicked course." There is a lurking humor in the grave +Winthrop's detailed account of Underhill's doings. Winthrop's own +personality comes out well in his Journal. He was a born leader of +men, a _conditor imperii_, just, moderate, patient, wise; and his +narrative gives, upon the whole, a favorable impression of the general +prudence and fair-mindedness of the Massachusetts settlers in their +dealings with one another, with the Indians, and with the neighboring +plantations. + +Considering our forefathers' errand and calling into this wilderness, +it is not strange that their chief literary staples were sermons and +tracts in controversial theology. Multitudes of these were written and +published by the divines of the first generation, such as John Cotton, +Thomas Shepard, John Norton, Peter Bulkley, and Thomas Hooker, the +founder of Hartford, of whom it was finely said that "when he was doing +his Master's business he would put a king into his pocket." Nor were +their successors in the second or the third generation any less +industrious and prolific. They rest from their labors and their works +do follow them. Their sermons and theological treatises are not +literature: they are for the most part dry, heavy, and dogmatic, but +they exhibit great learning, logical acuteness, and an earnestness +which sometimes rises into eloquence. The pulpit ruled New England, +and the sermon was the great intellectual engine of the time. The +serious thinking of the Puritans was given almost exclusively to +religion; the other world was all their art. The daily secular events +of life, the aspects of nature, the vicissitude of the seasons, were +important enough to find record in print only in so far as they +manifested God's dealings with his people. So much was the sermon +depended upon to furnish literary food that it was the general custom +of serious-minded laymen to take down the words of the discourse in +their note-books. Franklin, in his _Autobiography_, describes this as +the constant habit of his grandfather, Peter Folger; and Mather, in his +life of the elder Winthrop, says that "tho' he wrote not after the +preacher, yet such was his _attention_ and such his _retention_ in +hearing, that he repeated unto his family the sermons which he had +heard in the congregation." These discourses were commonly of great +length; twice, or sometimes thrice, the pulpit hour-glass was silently +inverted while the orator pursued his theme even unto "fourteenthly." + +The book which best sums up the life and thought of this old New +England of the seventeenth century is Cotton Mather's _Magnalia Christi +Americana_. Mather was by birth a member of that clerical aristocracy +which developed later into Dr. Holmes's "Brahmin Caste of New England." +His maternal grandfather was John Cotton. His father was Increase +Mather, the most learned divine of his generation in New England, +minister of the North Church of Boston, President of Harvard College, +and author, _inter alia_, of that characteristically Puritan book, _An +Essay for the Recording of Illustrious Providences_. Cotton Mather +himself was a monster of erudition and a prodigy of diligence. He was +graduated from Harvard at fifteen. He ordered his daily life and +conversation by a system of minute observances. He was a book-worm, +whose life was spent between his library and his pulpit, and his +published works number upward of three hundred and eighty. Of these +the most important is the _Magnalia_, 1702, an ecclesiastical history +of New England from 1620 to 1698, divided into seven parts: I. +Antiquities; II. Lives of the Governors; III. Lives of Sixty Famous +Divines; IV. A History of Harvard College, with biographies of its +eminent graduates; V. Acts and Monuments of the Faith; VI. Wonderful +Providences; VII. The Wars of the Lord--that is, an account of the +Afflictions and Disturbances of the Churches and the Conflicts with the +Indians. The plan of the work thus united that of Fuller's _Worthies +of England_ and _Church History_ with that of Wood's _Athenae +Oxonienses_ and Fox's _Book of Martyrs_. + +Mather's prose was of the kind which the English Commonwealth writers +used. He was younger by a generation than Dryden; but, as literary +fashions are slower to change in a colony than in the mother-country, +that nimble English which Dryden and the Restoration essayists +introduced had not yet displaced in New England the older manner. +Mather wrote in the full and pregnant style of Taylor, Milton, Brown, +Fuller, and Burton, a style ponderous with learning and stiff with +allusions, digressions, conceits, anecdotes, and quotations from the +Greek and the Latin. A page of the _Magnalia_ is almost as richly +mottled with italics as one from the _Anatomy of Melancholy_, and the +quaintness which Mather caught from his favorite Fuller disports itself +in textual pun and marginal anagram and the fantastic sub-titles of his +books and chapters. He speaks of Thomas Hooker as having "_angled_ +many scores of souls into the kingdom of heaven," anagrammatizes Mrs. +Hutchinson's surname into "the non-such;" and having occasion to speak +of Mr. Urian Oakes's election to the presidency of Harvard College, +enlarges upon the circumstance as follows: + +"We all know that _Britain_ knew nothing more famous than their ancient +sect of DRUIDS; the philosophers, whose order, they say, was instituted +by one _Samothes_, which is in English as much as to say, an heavenly +man. The _Celtic_ name, _Deru_, for an Oak was that from whence they +received their denomination; as at this very day the _Welch_ call this +tree _Drew_, and this order of men _Derwyddon_. But there are no small +antiquaries who derive this oaken religion and philosophy from the +_Oaks of Mamre_, where the Patriarch _Abraham_ had as well a dwelling +as an _altar_. That _Oaken-Plain_ and the eminent OAK under which +_Abraham_ lodged was extant in the days of _Constantine_, as _Isidore_, +_Jerom_, and _Sozomen_ have assured us. Yea, there are shrewd +probabilities that _Noah_ himself had lived in this very _Oak-plain_ +before him; for this very place was called _Ogge_ [see Transcriber's +Note #1 at end of chapter], which was the name of _Noah_, so styled +from the _Oggyan_ (_subcineritiis panibus_) sacrifices, which he did +use to offer in this renowned _Grove_. And it was from this example +that the ancients, and particularly that the Druids of the nations, +chose _oaken_ retirements for their studies. Reader, let us now, upon +another account, behold the students of _Harvard College_, as a +rendezvous of happy _Druids_, under the influences of so rare a +president. But, alas! our joy must be short-lived, for on _July_ 25, +1681, the stroke of a sudden death felled the _tree_, + + "Qui tantum inter caput extulit omnes + Quantum lenta solent inter viberna cypressi. + +"Mr. _Oakes_ thus being transplanted into the better world the +presidentship was immediately tendered unto _Mr. Increase Mather_." + +This will suffice as an example of the bad taste and laborious pedantry +which disfigured Mather's writing. In its substance the book is a +perfect thesaurus; and inasmuch as nothing is unimportant in the +history of the beginnings of such a nation as this is and is destined +to be, the _Magnalia_ will always remain a valuable and interesting +work. Cotton Mather, born in 1663, was of the second generation of +Americans, his grandfather being of the immigration, but his father a +native of Dorchester, Mass. A comparison of his writings and of the +writings of his contemporaries with the works of Bradford, Winthrop, +Hooker, and others of the original colonists, shows that the simple and +heroic faith of the Pilgrims had hardened into formalism and doctrinal +rigidity. The leaders of the Puritan exodus, notwithstanding their +intolerance of errors in belief, were comparatively broad-minded men. +They were sharers in a great national movement, and they came over when +their cause was warm with the glow of martyrdom and on the eve of its +coming triumph at home. After the Restoration, in 1660, the currents +of national feeling no longer circulated so freely through this distant +member of the body politic, and thought in America became more +provincial. The English dissenters, though socially at a disadvantage +as compared with the Church of England, had the great benefit of living +at the center of national life, and of feeling about them the pressure +of vast bodies of people who did not think as they did. In New +England, for many generations, the dominant sect had things all its own +way--a condition of things which is not healthy for any sect or party. +Hence Mather and the divines of his time appear in their writings very +much like so many Puritan bishops, jealous of their prerogatives, +magnifying their apostolate, and careful to maintain their authority +over the laity. Mather had an appetite for the marvelous, and took a +leading part in the witchcraft trials, of which he gave an account in +his _Wonders of the Invisible World_, 1693. To the quaint pages of the +_Magnalia_ our modern authors have resorted as to a collection of +romances or fairy tales. Whittier, for example, took from thence the +subject of his poem _The Garrison of Cape Anne_; and Hawthorne embodied +in _Grandfather's Chair_ the most elaborate of Mather's biographies. +This was the life of Sir William Phipps, who, from being a poor +shepherd boy in his native province of Maine, rose to be the royal +governor of Massachusetts, and the story of whose wonderful adventures +in raising the freight of a Spanish ship, sunk on a reef near Port de +la Plata, reads less like sober fact than like some ancient fable, with +talk of the Spanish main, bullion, and plate and jewels and "pieces of +eight." + +Of Mather's generation was Samuel Sewall, Chief-Justice of +Massachusetts, a singularly gracious and venerable figure, who is +intimately known through his Diary, kept from 1673 to 1729. This has +been compared with the more famous diary of Samuel Pepys, which it +resembles in its confidential character and the completeness of its +self-revelation, but to which it is as much inferior in historic +interest as "the petty province here" was inferior in political and +social importance to "Britain far away." For the most part it is a +chronicle of small beer, the diarist jotting down the minutiae of his +domestic life and private affairs, even to the recording of such haps +as this: "March 23, I had my hair cut by G. Barret." But it also +affords instructive glimpses of public events, such as King Philip's +War, the Quaker troubles, the English Revolution of 1688, etc. It +bears about the same relation to New England history at the close of +the seventeenth century as Bradford's and Winthrop's Journals bear to +that of the first generation. Sewall was one of the justices who +presided at the trial of the Salem witches; but for the part which he +took in that wretched affair he made such atonement as was possible, by +open confession of his mistake and his remorse in the presence of the +Church. Sewall was one of the first writers against African slavery, +in his brief tract, _The Selling of Joseph_, printed at Boston in 1700. +His _Phenomena Quaedam Apocalyptica_, a mystical interpretation of +prophecies concerning the New Jerusalem, which he identifies with +America, is remembered only because Whittier, in his _Prophecy of +Samuel Sewall_, has paraphrased one poetic passage which shows a loving +observation of nature very rare in our colonial writers. + +Of poetry, indeed, or, in fact, of pure literature, in the narrower +sense--that is, of the imaginative representation of life--there was +little or none in the colonial period. There were no novels, no plays, +no satires, and--until the example of the _Spectator_ had begun to work +on this side the water--no experiments even at the lighter forms of +essay-writing, character-sketches, and literary criticism. There was +verse of a certain kind, but the most generous stretch of the term +would hardly allow it to be called poetry. Many of the early divines +of New England relieved their pens, in the intervals of sermon-writing, +of epigrams, elegies, eulogistic verses, and similar grave trifles +distinguished by the crabbed wit of the so-called "metaphysical poets," +whose manner was in fashion when the Puritans left England; the manner +of Donne and Cowley, and those darlings of the New-English muse, the +_Emblems_ of Quarles and the _Divine Week_ of Du Bartas, as translated +by Sylvester. The _Magnalia_ contains a number of these things in +Latin and English, and is itself well bolstered with complimentary +introductions in meter by the author's friends. For example: + + COTTONIUS MATHERUS. + + ANAGRAM. + + _Tuos Tecum Ornasti_. + + "While thus the dead in thy rare pages rise + _Thine, with thyself thou dost immortalize_. + To view the odds thy learned lives invite + 'Twixt Eleutherian and Edomite. + But all succeeding ages shall despair + A fitting monument for thee to _rear_. + Thy own rich pen (peace, silly Momus, peace!) + Hath given them a lasting _writ of ease_." + +The epitaphs and mortuary verses were especially ingenious in the +matter of puns, anagrams, and similar conceits. The death of the Rev. +Samuel Stone, of Hartford, afforded an opportunity of this sort not to +be missed, and his threnodist accordingly celebrated him as a +"whetstone," a "loadstone," an "Ebenezer"-- + + "A stone for kingly David's use so fit + As would not fail Goliath's front to hit," etc. + +The most characteristic, popular, and widely circulated poem of +colonial New England was Michael Wigglesworth's _Day of Doom_ (1663), a +kind of doggerel _Inferno_, which went through nine editions, and "was +the solace," says Lowell, "of every fireside, the flicker of the +pine-knots by which it was conned perhaps adding a livelier relish to +its premonitions of eternal combustion." Wigglesworth had not the +technical equipment of a poet. His verse is sing-song, his language +rude and monotonous, and the lurid horrors of his material hell are +more likely to move mirth than fear in a modern reader. But there are +an unmistakable vigor of imagination and a sincerity of belief in his +gloomy poem which hold it far above contempt, and easily account for +its universal currency among a people like the Puritans. One stanza +has been often quoted for its grim concession to unregenerate infants +of "the easiest room in hell"--a _limbus infantum_ which even Origen +need not have scrupled at. + +The most authoritative expounder of New England Calvinism was Jonathan +Edwards (1703-58), a native of Connecticut and a graduate of Yale, who +was minister for more than twenty years over the church in Northampton, +Mass., afterward missionary to the Stockbridge Indians, and at the time +of his death had just been inaugurated president of Princeton College. +By virtue of his _Inquiry into the Freedom of the Will_, 1754, Edwards +holds rank as the subtlest metaphysician of his age. This treatise was +composed to justify, on philosophical grounds, the Calvinistic +doctrines of fore-ordination and election by grace, though its +arguments are curiously coincident with those of the scientific +necessitarians, whose conclusions are as far asunder from Edwards's "as +from the center thrice to the utmost pole." His writings belong to +theology rather than to literature, but there is an intensity and a +spiritual elevation about them, apart from the profundity and acuteness +of the thought, which lift them here and there into the finer ether of +purely emotional or imaginative art. He dwelt rather upon the terrors +than the comfort of the word, and his chosen themes were the dogmas of +predestination, original sin, total depravity, and eternal punishment. +The titles of his sermons are significant: _Men Naturally God's +Enemies_, _Wrath upon the Wicked to the Uttermost_, _The Final +Judgment_, etc. "A natural man," he wrote in the first of these +discourses, "has a heart like the heart of a devil. . . . The heart of +a natural man is as destitute of love to God as a dead, stiff, cold +corpse is of vital heat." Perhaps the most famous of Edwards's sermons +was _Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God_, preached at Enfield, Conn., +July 8, 1741, "at a time of great awakenings," and upon the ominous +text, _Their foot shall slide in due time_. "The God that holds you +over the pit of hell," runs an oft-quoted passage from this powerful +denunciation of the wrath to come, "much as one holds a spider or some +loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully +provoked. . . . You are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes +than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours. . . . You hang by a +slender thread, with the flames of divine wrath flashing about +it. . . . If you cry to God to pity you he will be so far from pitying +you in your doleful case that he will only tread you under foot. . . . +He will crush out your blood and make it fly, and it shall be sprinkled +on his garments so as to stain all his raiment." But Edwards was a +rapt soul, possessed with the love as well as the fear of the God, and +there are passages of sweet and exalted feeling in his _Treatise +Concerning Religious Affections_, 1746. Such is his portrait of Sarah +Pierpont, "a young lady in New Haven," who afterward became his wife +and who "will sometimes go about from place to place singing sweetly, +and no one knows for what. She loves to be alone, walking in the +fields and groves, and seems to have some one invisible always +conversing with her." Edwards's printed works number thirty-six +titles. A complete edition of them in ten volumes was published in +1829 by his great grandson, Sereno Dwight. The memoranda from +Edwards's note-books, quoted by his editor and biographer, exhibit a +remarkable precocity. Even as a school-boy and a college student he +had made deep guesses in physics as well as metaphysics, and, as might +have been predicted of a youth of his philosophical insight and ideal +cast of mind, he had early anticipated Berkeley in denying the +existence of matter. In passing from Mather to Edwards we step from +the seventeenth to the eighteenth century. There is the same +difference between them in style and turn of thought as between Milton +and Locke, or between Fuller and Bryden. The learned digressions, the +witty conceits, the perpetual interlarding of the text with scraps of +Latin, have fallen off, even as the full-bottomed wig and the clerical +gown and bands have been laid aside for the undistinguishing dress of +the modern minister. In Edwards's English all is simple, precise, +direct, and business-like. + +Benjamin Franklin (1706-90), who was strictly contemporary with +Edwards, was a contrast to him in every respect. As Edwards represents +the spirituality and other-worldliness of Puritanism, Franklin stands +for the worldly and secular side of American character, and he +illustrates the development of the New England Englishman into the +modern Yankee. Clear rather than subtle, without ideality or romance +or fineness of emotion or poetic lift, intensely practical and +utilitarian, broad-minded, inventive, shrewd, versatile, Franklin's +sturdy figure became typical of his time and his people. He was the +first and the only man of letters in colonial America who acquired a +cosmopolitan fame and impressed his characteristic Americanism upon the +mind of Europe. He was the embodiment of common sense and of the +useful virtues, with the enterprise but without the nervousness of his +modern compatriots, uniting the philosopher's openness of mind to the +sagacity and quickness of resource of the self-made business man. He +was representative also of his age, an age of _aufklaerung_, +_eclaircissement_, or "clearing up." By the middle of the eighteenth +century a change had taken place in American society. Trade had +increased between the different colonies; Boston, New York, and +Philadelphia were considerable towns; democratic feeling was spreading; +over forty newspapers were published in America at the outbreak of the +Revolution; politics claimed more attention than formerly, and theology +less. With all this intercourse and mutual reaction of the various +colonies upon one another, the isolated theocracy of New England +naturally relaxed somewhat of its grip on the minds of the laity. When +Franklin was a printer's apprentice in Boston, setting type on his +brother's _New England Courant_, the fourth American newspaper, he got +hold of an odd volume of the _Spectator_, and formed his style upon +Addison, whose manner he afterward imitated in his _Busy-Body_ papers +in the Philadelphia _Weekly Mercury_. He also read Locke and the +English deistical writers, Collins and Shaftesbury, and became himself +a deist and free-thinker; and subsequently when practicing his trade in +London, in 1724-26, he made the acquaintance of Dr. Mandeville, author +of the _Fable of the Bees_, at a pale-ale house in Cheapside, called +"The Horns," where the famous free-thinker presided over a club of wits +and boon companions. Though a native of Boston, Franklin is identified +with Philadelphia, whither he arrived in 1723, a runaway 'prentice boy, +"whose stock of cash consisted of a Dutch dollar and about a shilling +in copper." The description in his _Autobiography_ of his walking up +Market Street munching a loaf of bread, and passing his future wife, +standing on her father's doorstep, has become almost as familiar as the +anecdote about Whittington and his cat. + +It was in the practical sphere that Franklin was greatest, as an +originator and executor of projects for the general welfare. The list +of his public services is almost endless. He organized the +Philadelphia fire department and street-cleaning service, and the +colonial postal system which grew into the United States Post Office +Department. He started the Philadelphia public library, the American +Philosophical Society, the University of Pennsylvania, and the first +American magazine, _The General Magazine and Historical Chronicle_; so +that he was almost singly the father of whatever intellectual life the +Pennsylvania colony could boast. In 1754, when commissioners from the +colonies met at Albany, Franklin proposed a plan, which was adopted, +for the union of all the colonies under one government. But all these +things, as well as his mission to England in 1757, on behalf of the +Pennsylvania Assembly in its dispute with the proprietaries; his share +in the Declaration of Independence--of which he was one of the +signers--and his residence in France as embassador of the United +Colonies, belong to the political history of the country; to the +history of American science belong his celebrated experiments in +electricity; and his benefits to mankind in both of these departments +were aptly summed up in the famous epigram of the French statesman +Turgot: + + "_Eripuit coelo fulmen sceptrumque tyranniis_." + +Franklin's success in Europe was such as no American had yet achieved, +as few Americans since him have achieved. Hume and Voltaire were among +his acquaintances and his professed admirers. In France he was fairly +idolized, and when he died Mirabeau announced, "The genius which has +freed America and poured a flood of light over Europe has returned to +the bosom of the Divinity." + +Franklin was a great man, but hardly a great writer, though as a +writer, too, he had many admirable and some great qualities. Among +these were the crystal clearness and simplicity of his style. His more +strictly literary performances, such as his essays after the +_Spectator_, hardly rise above mediocrity, and are neither better nor +worse than other imitations of Addison. But in some of his lighter +bagatelles there are a homely wisdom and a charming playfulness which +have won them enduring favor. Such are his famous story of the +_Whistle_, his _Dialogue between Franklin and the Gout_, his letters to +Madame Helvetius, and his verses entitled _Paper_. The greater portion +of his writings consists of papers on general politics, commerce, and +political economy, contributions to the public questions of his day. +These are of the nature of journalism rather than of literature, and +many of them were published in his newspaper, the _Pennsylvania +Gazette_, the medium through which for many years he most strongly +influenced American opinion. The most popular of his writings were his +_Autobiography_ and _Poor Richard's Almanac_. The former of these was +begun in 1771, resumed in 1788, but never completed. It has remained +the most widely current book in our colonial literature. _Poor +Richard's Almanac_, begun in 1732 and continued for about twenty-five +years, had an annual circulation of ten thousand copies. It was filled +with proverbial sayings in prose and verse, inculcating the virtues of +industry, honesty, and frugality.[1] Some of these were original with +Franklin, others were selected from the proverbial wisdom of the ages, +but a new force was given them by pungent turns of expression. Poor +Richard's saws were such as these: "Little strokes fell great oaks;" +"Three removes are as bad as a fire;" "Early to bed and early to rise +makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise;" "Never leave that till +to-morrow which you can do to-day;" "What maintains one vice would +bring up two children;" "It is hard for an empty bag to stand upright." + +Now and then there are truths of a higher kind than these in Franklin, +and Sainte-Beuve, the great French critic, quotes, as an example of his +occasional finer moods, the saying, "Truth and sincerity have a certain +distinguishing native luster about them which cannot be counterfeited; +they are like fire and flame that cannot be painted." But the sage who +invented the Franklin stove had no disdain of small utilities; and in +general the last word of his philosophy is well expressed in a passage +of his _Autobiography_: "Human felicity is produced not so much by +great pieces of good fortune, that seldom happen, as by little +advantages that occur every day; thus, if you teach a poor young man to +shave himself and keep his razor in order, you may contribute more to +the happiness of his life than in giving him a thousand guineas." + + +1. Captain John Smith. _A True Relation of Virginia_, Deane's edition. +Boston: 1866. + +2. Cotton Mather. _Magnalia Christi Americana_. Hartford: 1820. + +3. Samuel Sewall. _Diary_. Massachusetts Historical Collections. +Fifth Series. Vols. v, vi, and vii. Boston: 1878. + +4. Jonathan Edwards. _Eight Sermons on Various Occasions_. Vol. vii +of Edwards's Works. Edited by Sereno Dwight. New York: 1829. + +5. Benjamin Franklin. _Autobiography_. Edited by John Bigelow. +Philadelphia: 1869. [J. B. Lippincott & Co.] + +6. _Essays and Bagatelles_. Vol. ii of Franklin's Works. Edited by +Jared Sparks. Boston: 1836. + +7. Moses Coit Tyler. _A History of American Literature_. 1607-1765. +New York: 1878. [G. P. Putnam's Sons.] + + +[1]_The Way to Wealth, Plan for Saving One Hundred Thousand Pounds, +Rules of Health, Advice to a Young Tradesman, The Way to Make Money +Plenty in Every Man's Pocket_, etc. + + +[Transcriber's Note: The word "Ogge" was transliterated from the Greek +characters Omicron, gamma, gamma, eta.] + + + + +CHAPTER II. + + +THE REVOLUTIONARY PERIOD. + +1765-1815. + +It will be convenient to treat the fifty years which elapsed between +the meeting at New York, in 1765, of a Congress of delegates from nine +colonies to protest against the Stamp Act, and the close of the second +war with England, in 1815, as, for literary purposes, a single period. +This half-century was the formative era of the American nation. +Historically, it is divisible into the years of revolution and the +years of construction. But the men who led the movement for +independence were also, in great part, the same who guided in shaping +the Constitution of the new republic, and the intellectual impress of +the whole period is one and the same. The character of the age was as +distinctly political as that of the colonial era--in New England at +least--was theological; and literature must still continue to borrow +its interest from history. Pure literature, or what, for want of a +better term, we call _belles lettres_, was not born in America until +the nineteenth century was well under way. It is true that the +Revolution had its humor, its poetry, and even its fiction; but these +were strictly for the home market. They hardly penetrated the +consciousness of Europe at all, and are not to be compared with the +contemporary work of English authors like Cowper and Sheridan and +Burke. Their importance for us to-day is rather antiquarian than +literary, though the most noteworthy of them will be mentioned in due +course in the present chapter. It is also true that one or two of +Irving's early books fall within the last years of the period now under +consideration. But literary epochs overlap one another at the edges, +and these writings may best be postponed to a subsequent chapter. + +Among the most characteristic products of the intellectual stir that +preceded and accompanied the Revolutionary movement were the speeches +of political orators like Samuel Adams, James Otis, and Josiah Quincy, +in Massachusetts, and Patrick Henry in Virginia. Oratory is the art of +a free people, and as in the forensic assemblies of Greece and Rome and +in the Parliament of Great Britain, so in the conventions and +congresses of Revolutionary America it sprang up and flourished +naturally. The age, moreover, was an eloquent, not to say a +rhetorical, age; and the influence of Johnson's orotund prose, of the +declamatory _Letters of Junius_, and of the speeches of Burke, Fox, +Sheridan, and the elder Pitt is perceptible in the debates of our early +Congresses. The fame of a great orator, like that of a great actor, is +largely traditionary. The spoken word transferred to the printed page +loses the glow which resided in the man and the moment. A speech is +good if it attains its aim, if it moves the hearers to the end which is +sought. But the fact that this end is often temporary and occasional, +rather than universal and permanent, explains why so few speeches are +really literature. If this is true, even where the words of an orator +are preserved exactly as they were spoken, it is doubly true when we +have only the testimony of contemporaries as to the effect which the +oration produced. The fiery utterances of Adams, Otis, and Quincy were +either not reported at all or very imperfectly reported, so that +posterity can judge of them only at second-hand. Patrick Henry has +fared better, many of his orations being preserved in substance, if not +in the letter, in Wirt's biography. Of these the most famous was the +defiant speech in the Convention of Delegates, March 28, 1775, throwing +down the gauge of battle to the British ministry. The ringing +sentences of this challenge are still declaimed by school-boys, and +many of them remain as familiar as household words. "I have but one +lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience. +I know of no way of judging of the future but by the past. . . . +Gentlemen may cry peace, peace, but there is no peace. . . . Is life +so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains +and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others +may take, but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!" The +eloquence of Patrick Henry was fervid rather than weighty or rich. But +if such specimens of the oratory of the American patriots as have come +down to us fail to account for the wonderful impression that their +words are said to have produced upon their fellow-countrymen, we should +remember that they are at a disadvantage when read instead of heard. +The imagination should supply all those accessories which gave them +vitality when first pronounced--the living presence and voice of the +speaker; the listening Senate; the grave excitement of the hour and of +the impending conflict. The wordiness and exaggeration; the highly +Latinized diction; the rhapsodies about freedom which hundreds of +Fourth-of-July addresses have since turned into platitudes--all these +coming hot from the lips of men whose actions in the field confirmed +the earnestness of their speech--were effective in the crisis and for +the purpose to which they were addressed. + +The press was an agent in the cause of liberty no less potent than the +platform, and patriots such as Adams, Otis, Quincy, Warren, and Hancock +wrote constantly, for the newspapers, essays and letters on the public +questions of the time signed "Vindex," "Hyperion," "Independent," +"Brutus," "Cassius," and the like, and couched in language which to the +taste of to-day seems rather over-rhetorical. Among the most important +of these political essays were the _Circular Letter to each Colonial +Legislature_, published by Adams and Otis in 1768; Quincy's +_Observations on the Boston Port Bill_, 1774, and Otis's _Rights of the +British Colonies_, a pamphlet of one hundred and twenty pages, printed +in 1764. No collection of Otis's writings has ever been made. The +life of Quincy, published by his son, preserves for posterity his +journals and correspondence, his newspaper essays, and his speeches at +the bar, taken from the Massachusetts law reports. + +Among the political literature which is of perennial interest to the +American people are such State documents as the Declaration of +Independence, the Constitution of the United States, and the messages, +inaugural addresses, and other writings of our early presidents. +Thomas Jefferson, the third President of the United States, and the +father of the Democratic party, was the author of the Declaration of +Independence, whose opening sentences have become commonplaces in the +memory of all readers. One sentence in particular has been as a +shibboleth, or war-cry, or declaration of faith among Democrats of all +shades of opinion: "We hold these truths to be self-evident--that all +men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with +certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the +pursuit of happiness." Not so familiar to modern readers is the +following, which an English historian of our literature calls "the most +eloquent clause of that great document," and "the most interesting +suppressed passage in American literature." Jefferson was a +Southerner, but even at that early day the South had grown sensitive on +the subject of slavery, and Jefferson's arraignment of King George for +promoting the "peculiar institution" was left out from the final draft +of the Declaration in deference to Southern members. + +"He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most +sacred rights of life and liberty, in the persons of a distant people +who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in +another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation +thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is +the warfare of the Christian king of Great Britain. Determined to keep +open a market where men should be bought and sold, he has prostituted +his negative by suppressing every legislative attempt to restrain this +execrable commerce. And, that this assemblage of horrors might want no +fact of distinguished dye, he is now exciting those very people to rise +in arms against us and purchase that liberty of which he deprived them +by murdering the people upon whom he obtruded them, and thus paying off +former crimes committed against the liberties of one people by crimes +which he urges them to commit against the lives of another." + +The tone of apology or defense which Calhoun and other Southern +statesman afterward adopted on the subject of slavery was not taken by +the men of Jefferson's generation. Another famous Virginian, John +Randolph of Roanoke, himself a slave-holder, in his speech on the +militia bill in the House of Representatives, December 10, 1811, said: +"I speak from facts when I say that the night-bell never tolls for fire +in Richmond that the mother does not hug her infant more closely to her +bosom." This was said _apropos_ of the danger of a servile +insurrection in the event of a war with England--a war which actually +broke out in the year following, but was not attended with the +slave-rising which Randolph predicted. Randolph was a thorough-going +"State rights" man, and, though opposed to slavery on principle, he +cried "Hands off!" to any interference by the general government with +the domestic institutions of the States. His speeches read better than +most of his contemporaries'. They are interesting in their exhibit of +a bitter and eccentric individuality, witty, incisive, and expressed in +a pungent and familiar style which contrasts refreshingly with the +diplomatic language and glittering generalities of most congressional +oratory, whose verbiage seems to keep its subject always at +arm's-length. + +Another noteworthy writing of Jefferson's was his Inaugural Address of +March 4, 1801, with its programme of "equal and exact justice to all +men, of whatever state or persuasion, religious or political; peace, +commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances +with none; the support of the State governments in all their +rights; . . . absolute acquiescence in the decisions of the +majority; . . . the supremacy of the civil over the military authority; +economy in the public expense; freedom of religion, freedom of the +press, and freedom of person under the protection of the _habeas +corpus_, and trial by juries impartially selected." + +During his six years' residence in France, as American minister, +Jefferson had become indoctrinated with the principles of French +democracy. His main service and that of his party--the Democratic, or, +as it was then called, the Republican party--to the young republic was +in its insistence upon toleration of all beliefs and upon the freedom +of the individual from all forms of governmental restraint. Jefferson +has some claims to rank as an author in general literature. Educated +at William and Mary College in the old Virginia capital, Williamsburg, +he became the founder of the University of Virginia, in which he made +special provision for the study of Anglo-Saxon, and in which the +liberal scheme of instruction and discipline was conformed, in theory, +at least, to the "university idea." His _Notes on Virginia_ are not +without literary quality, and one description, in particular, has been +often quoted--the passage of the Potomac through the Blue Ridge--in +which is this poetically imaginative touch: "The mountain being cloven +asunder, she presents to your eye, through the cleft, a small catch of +smooth blue horizon, at an infinite distance in the plain country, +inviting you, as it were, from the riot and ytumult roaring around, to +pass through the breach and participate of the calm below." + +After the conclusion of peace with England, in 1783, political +discussion centered about the Constitution, which in 1788 took the +place of the looser Articles of Confederation adopted in 1778. The +Constitution as finally ratified was a compromise between two +parties--the Federalists, who wanted a strong central government, and +the Anti-Federals (afterward called Republicans, or Democrats), who +wished to preserve State sovereignty. The debates on the adoption of +the Constitution, both in the General Convention of the States, which +met at Philadelphia in 1787, and in the separate State conventions +called to ratify its action, form a valuable body of comment and +illustration upon the instrument itself. One of the most notable of +the speeches in opposition was Patrick Henry's address before the +Virginia Convention. "That this is a consolidated government," he +said, "is demonstrably clear; and the danger of such a government is, +to my mind, very striking." The leader of the Federal party was +Alexander Hamilton, the ablest constructive intellect among the +statesmen of our Revolutionary era, of whom Talleyrand said that he +"had never known his equal," whom Guizot classed with "the men who have +best known the vital principles and fundamental conditions of a +government worthy of its name and mission." Hamilton's speech _On the +Expediency of Adopting the Federal Constitution_, delivered in the +Convention of New York, June 24, 1788, was a masterly statement of the +necessity and advantages of the Union. But the most complete +exposition of the constitutional philosophy of the Federal party was +the series of eighty-five papers entitled the _Federalist_, printed +during the years 1787-88, and mostly in the _Independent Journal_ of +New York, over the signature "Publius." These were the work of +Hamilton, of John Jay, afterward, chief-justice, and of James Madison, +afterward president of the United States. The _Federalist_ papers, +though written in a somewhat ponderous diction, are among the great +landmarks of American history, and were in themselves a political +education to the generation that read them. Hamilton was a brilliant +and versatile figure, a persuasive orator, a forcible writer, and as +secretary of the treasury under Washington the foremost of American +financiers. He was killed in a duel by Aaron Burr, at Weehawken, in +1804. + +The Federalists were victorious, and under the provisions of the new +Constitution George Washington was inaugurated first President of the +United States, on March 4, 1789. Washington's writings have been +collected by Jared Sparks. They consist of journals, letters, +messages, addresses, and public documents, for the most part plain and +business-like in manner, and without any literary pretensions. The +most elaborate and the best known of them is his _Farewell Address_, +issued on his retirement from the presidency in 1796. In the +composition of this he was assisted by Madison, Hamilton, and Jay. It +is wise in substance and dignified, though somewhat stilted in +expression. The correspondence of John Adams, second President of the +United States, and his _Diary_, kept from 1755-85, should also be +mentioned as important sources for a full knowledge of this period. + +In the long life-and-death struggle of Great Britain against the French +Republic and its successor, Napoleon Bonaparte, the Federalist party in +this country naturally sympathized with England, and the Jeffersonian +Democracy with France. The Federalists, who distrusted the sweeping +abstractions of the French Revolution and clung to the conservative +notions of a checked and balanced freedom, inherited from English +precedent, were accused of monarchical and aristocratic leanings. On +their side they were not slow to accuse their adversaries of French +atheism and French Jacobinism. By a singular reversal of the natural +order of things, the strength of the Federalist party was in New +England, which was socially democratic, while the strength of the +Jeffersonians was in the South, whose social structure--owing to the +system of slavery--was intensely aristocratic. The War of 1812 with +England was so unpopular in New England, by reason of the injury which +it threatened to inflict on its commerce, that the Hartford Convention +of 1814 was more than suspected of a design to bring about the +secession of New England from the Union. A good deal of oratory was +called out by the debates on the commercial treaty with Great Britain +negotiated by Jay in 1795, by the Alien and Sedition Law of 1798, and +by other pieces of Federalist legislation, previous to the downfall of +that party and the election of Jefferson to the presidency in 1800. +The best of the Federalist orators during those years was Fisher Ames, +of Massachusetts, and the best of his orations was, perhaps, his speech +on the British treaty in the House of Representatives, April 18, 1796. +The speech was, in great measure, a protest against American chauvinism +and the violation of international obligations. "It has been said the +world ought to rejoice if Britain was sunk in the sea; if where there +are now men and wealth and laws and liberty there was no more than a +sand-bank for sea-monsters to fatten on; space for the storms of the +ocean to mingle in conflict. . . . What is patriotism? Is it a narrow +affection for the spot where a man was born? Are the very clods where +we tread entitled to this ardent preference because they are +greener? . . . I see no exception to the respect that is paid among +nations to the law of good faith. . . . It is observed by +barbarians--a whiff of tobacco-smoke or a string of beads gives not +merely binding force but sanctity to treaties. Even in Algiers a truce +may be bought for money, but, when ratified, even Algiers is too wise +or too just to disown and annul its obligation." Ames was a scholar, +and his speeches are more finished and thoughtful, more _literary_, in +a way, than those of his contemporaries. His eulogiums on Washington +and Hamilton are elaborate tributes, rather excessive, perhaps, in +laudation and in classical allusions. In all the oratory of the +Revolutionary period there is nothing equal in deep and condensed +energy of feeling to the single clause in Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, +"that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in +vain." + +A prominent figure during and after the War of the Revolution was +Thomas Paine, or, as he was somewhat disrespectfully called, "Tom +Paine." He was a dissenting minister who, conceiving himself +ill-treated by the British government, came to Philadelphia in 1774 and +threw himself heart and soul into the colonial cause. His pamphlet, +_Common Sense_, issued in 1776, began with the famous words, "These are +the times that try men's souls." This was followed by the _Crisis_, a +series of political essays advocating independence and the +establishment of a republic, published in periodical form, though at +irregular intervals. Paine's rough and vigorous advocacy was of great +service to the American patriots. His writings were popular and his +arguments were of a kind easily understood by plain people, addressing +themselves to the common sense, the prejudices and passions of +unlettered readers. He afterward went to France and took an active +part in the popular movement there, crossing swords with Burke in his +_Rights of Man_, 1791-92, written in defense of the French Revolution. +He was one of the two foreigners who sat in the Convention; but falling +under suspicion during the days of the Terror, he was committed to the +prison of the Luxembourg and only released upon the fall of Robespierre +July 27, 1794. While in prison he wrote a portion of his best-known +work, the _Age of Reason_. This appeared in two parts in 1794 and +1795, the manuscript of the first part having been intrusted to Joel +Barlow, the American poet, who happened to be in Paris when Paine was +sent to prison. + +The _Age of Reason_ damaged Paine's reputation in America, where the +name of "Tom Paine" became a stench in the nostrils of the godly and a +synonym for atheism and blasphemy. His book was denounced from a +hundred pulpits, and copies of it were carefully locked away from the +sight of "the young," whose religious beliefs it might undermine. It +was, in effect, a crude and popular statement of the deistic argument +against Christianity. What the cutting logic and persiflage--the +_sourire hideux_--of Voltaire had done in France, Paine, with coarser +materials, essayed to do for the English-speaking populations. Deism +was in the air of the time; Franklin, Jefferson, Ethan Allen, Joel +Barlow, and other prominent Americans were openly or unavowedly +deistic. Free thought, somehow, went along with democratic opinions, +and was a part of the liberal movement of the age. Paine was a man +without reverence, imagination, or religious feeling. He was no +scholar, and he was not troubled by any perception of the deeper and +subtler aspects of the questions which he touched. In his examination +of the Old and New Testaments he insisted that the Bible was an +imposition and a forgery, full of lies, absurdities, and obscenities. +Supernatural Christianity, with all its mysteries and miracles, was a +fraud practiced by priests upon the people, and churches were +instruments of oppression in the hands of tyrants. This way of +accounting for Christianity would not now be accepted by even the most +"advanced" thinkers. The contest between skepticism and revelation has +long since shifted to other grounds. Both the philosophy and the +temper of the _Age of Reason_ belong to the eighteenth century. But +Paine's downright pugnacious method of attack was effective with +shrewd, half-educated doubters; and in America well-thumbed copies of +his book passed from hand to hand in many a rural tavern or store, +where the village atheist wrestled in debate with the deacon or the +schoolmaster. Paine rested his argument against Christianity upon the +familiar grounds of the incredibility of miracles, the falsity of +prophecy, the cruelty or immorality of Moses and David and other Old +Testament worthies, the disagreement of the evangelists in their +gospels, etc. The spirit of his book and his competence as a critic +are illustrated by his saying of the New Testament: "Any person who +could tell a story of an apparition, or of a man's walking, could have +made such books, for the story is most wretchedly told. The sum total +of a parson's learning is _a-b_, _ab_, and _hic_, _hoec_, _hoc_, and +this is more than sufficient to have enabled them, had they lived at +the time, to have written all the books of the New Testament." + +When we turn from the political and controversial writings of the +Revolution to such lighter literature as existed, we find little that +would deserve mention in a more crowded period. The few things in this +kind that have kept afloat on the current of time--_rari nantes in +gurgite vasto_--attract attention rather by reason of their fewness +than of any special excellence that they have. During the eighteenth +century American literature continued to accommodate itself to changes +of taste in the old country. The so-called classical or Augustan +writers of the reign of Queen Anne replaced other models of style; the +_Spectator_ set the fashion of almost all of our lighter prose, from +Franklin's _Busybody_ down to the time of Irving, who perpetuated the +Addisonian tradition later than any English writer. The influence of +Locke, of Dr. Johnson, and of the parliamentary orators has already +been mentioned. In poetry the example of Pope was dominant, so that we +find, for example, William Livingston, who became governor of New +Jersey and a member of the Continental Congress, writing in 1747 a poem +on _Philosophic Solitude_ which reproduces the tricks of Pope's +antitheses and climaxes with the imagery of the _Rape of the Lock_, and +the didactic morality of the _Imitations from Horace_ and the _Moral +Essays_: + + "Let ardent heroes seek renown to arms, + Pant after fame and rush to war's alarms; + To shining palaces let fools resort, + And dunces cringe to be esteemed at court. + Mine be the pleasure of a rural life, + From noise remote and ignorant of strife, + Far from the painted belle and white-gloved beau, + The lawless masquerade and midnight show; + From ladies, lap-dogs, courtiers, garters, stars, + Fops, fiddlers, tyrants, emperors, and czars." + +The most popular poem of the Revolutionary period was John Trumbull's +_McFingal_, published in part at Philadelphia in 1775, and incomplete +shape at Hartford in 1782. It went through more than thirty editions +in America, and was several times reprinted in England. _McFingal_ was +a satire in four cantos, directed against the American loyalists, and +modeled quite closely upon Butler's mock heroic poem, _Hudibras_. As +Butler's hero sallies forth to put down May games and bear-baitings, so +the tory McFingal goes out against the liberty-poles and bonfires of +the patriots, but is tarred and feathered, and otherwise ill-entreated, +and finally takes refuge in the camp of General Gage at Boston. The +poem is written with smartness and vivacity, attains often to drollery +and sometimes to genuine humor. It remains one of the best of American +political satires, and unquestionably the most successful of the many +imitations of _Hudibras_, whose manner it follows so closely that some +of its lines, which have passed into currency as proverbs, are +generally attributed to Butler. For example: + + "No man e'er felt the halter draw + With good opinion of the law." + +Or this: + + "For any man with half an eye + What stands before him may espy; + But optics sharp it needs, I ween, + To see what is not to be seen." + +Trumbull's wit did not spare the vulnerable points of his own +countrymen, as in his sharp skit at slavery in the couplet about the +newly adopted flag of the Confederation: + + "Inscribed with inconsistent types + Of Liberty and thirteen stripes." + +Trumbull was one of a group of Connecticut literati, who made such +noise in their time as the "Hartford Wits." The other members of the +group were Lemuel Hopkins, David Humphreys, Joel Barlow, Elihu Smith, +Theodore Dwight, and Richard Alsop. Trumbull, Humphreys, and Barlow +had formed a friendship and a kind of literary partnership at Yale, +where they were contemporaries of each other and of Timothy Dwight. +During the war they served in the army in various capacities, and at +its close they found themselves again together for a few years at +Hartford, where they formed a club that met weekly for social and +literary purposes. Their presence lent a sort of _eclat_ to the little +provincial capital, and their writings made it for a time an +intellectual center quite as important as Boston or Philadelphia or New +York. The Hartford Wits were stanch Federalists, and used their pens +freely in support of the administrations of Washington and Adams, and +in ridicule of Jefferson and the Democrats. In 1786-87 Trumbull, +Hopkins, Barlow, and Humphreys published in the _New Haven Gazette_ a +series of satirical papers entitled the _Anarchiad_, suggested by the +English _Rolliad_, and purporting to be extracts from an ancient epic +on "the Restoration of Chaos and Substantial Night." The papers were +an effort to correct, by ridicule, the anarchic condition of things +which preceded the adoption of the Federal Constitution in 1789. It +was a time of great confusion and discontent, when, in parts of the +country, Democratic mobs were protesting against the vote of five +years' pay by the Continental Congress to the officers of the American +army. The _Anarchiad_ was followed by the _Echo_ and the _Political +Green House_, written mostly by Alsop and Theodore Dwight, and similar +in character and tendency to the earlier series. Time has greatly +blunted the edge of these satires, but they were influential in their +day, and are an important part of the literature of the old Federalist +party. + +Humphreys became afterward distinguished in the diplomatic service, and +was, successively, embassador to Portugal and to Spain, whence he +introduced into America the breed of merino sheep. He had been on +Washington's staff during the war, and was several times an inmate of +his house at Mount Vernon, where he produced, in 1785, the best-known +of his writings, _Mount Vernon_, an ode of a rather mild description, +which once had admirers. Joel Barlow cuts a larger figure in +contemporary letters. After leaving Hartford, in 1788, he went to +France, where he resided for seventeen years, made a fortune in +speculations, and became imbued with French principles, writing a song +in praise of the guillotine, which gave great scandal to his old +friends at home. In 1805 he returned to America and built a fine +residence near Washington, which he called Kalorama. Barlow's literary +fame, in his own generation, rested upon his prodigious epic, the +_Columbiad_. The first form of this was the _Vision of Columbus_, +published at Hartford in 1787. This he afterward recast and enlarged +into the _Columbiad_, issued in Philadelphia in 1807, and dedicated to +Robert Fulton, the inventor of the steam-boat. This was by far the +most sumptuous piece of book-making that had then been published in +America, and was embellished with plates executed by the best London +engravers. + +The _Columbiad_ was a grandiose performance, and has been the theme of +much ridicule by later writers. Hawthorne suggested its being +dramatized, and put on to the accompaniment of artillery and thunder +and lightning; and E. P. Whipple declared that "no critic in the last +fifty years had read more than a hundred lines of it." In its +ambitiousness and its length it was symptomatic of the spirit of the +age which was patriotically determined to create, by _tour de force_, a +national literature of a size commensurate with the scale of American +nature and the destinies of the republic. As America was bigger than +Argos and Troy we ought to have a bigger epic than the _Iliad_. +Accordingly, Barlow makes Hesper fetch Columbus from his prison to a +"hill of vision," where he unrolls before his eye a panorama of the +history of America, or, as our bards then preferred to call it, +Columbia. He shows him the conquest of Mexico by Cortez; the rise and +fall of the kingdom of the Incas in Peru; the settlements of the +English colonies in North America; the old French and Indian wars; the +Revolution, ending with a prophecy of the future greatness of the +new-born nation. The machinery of the _Vision_ was borrowed from the +11th and 12th books of _Paradise Lost_. Barlow's verse was the +ten-syllabled rhyming couplet of Pope, and his poetic style was +distinguished by the vague, glittering imagery and the false sublimity +which marked the epic attempts of the Queen Anne poets. Though Barlow +was but a masquerader in true heroic he showed himself a true poet in +mock heroic. His _Hasty Pudding_, written in Savoy in 1793, and +dedicated to Mrs. Washington, was thoroughly American, in subject at +least, and its humor, though over-elaborate, is good. One couplet in +particular has prevailed against oblivion: + + "E'en in thy native regions how I blush + To hear the Pennsylvanians call thee _Mush_!" + +Another Connecticut poet--one of the seven who were fondly named "The +Pleiads of Connecticut"--was Timothy Dwight, whose _Conquest of +Canaan_, written shortly after his graduation from college, but not +published till 1785, was, like the _Columbiad_, an experiment toward +the domestication of the epic muse in America. It was written like +Barlow's poem, in rhymed couplets, and the patriotic impulse of the +time shows oddly in the introduction of our Revolutionary War, by way +of episode, among the wars of Israel. _Greenfield Hill_, 1794, was an +idyllic and moralizing poem, descriptive of a rural parish in +Connecticut of which the author was for a time the pastor. It is not +quite without merit; shows plainly the influence of Goldsmith, Thomson, +and Beattie, but as a whole is tedious and tame. Byron was amused that +there should have been an American poet christened Timothy, and it is +to be feared that amusement would have been the chief emotion kindled +in the breast of the wicked Voltaire had he ever chanced to see the +stern dedication to himself of the same poet's _Triumph of Infidelity_, +1788. Much more important than Dwight's poetry was his able _Theology +Explained and Defended_, 1794, a restatement, with modifications, of +the Calvinism of Jonathan Edwards, which was accepted by the +Congregational churches of New England as an authoritative exponent of +the orthodoxy of the time. His _Travels in New England and New York_, +including descriptions of Niagara, the White Mountains, Lake George, +the Catskills, and other passages of natural scenery, not so familiar +then as now, was published posthumously in 1821, was praised by +Southey, and is still readable. As President of Yale College from 1795 +to 1817 Dwight, by his learning and ability, his sympathy with young +men, and the force and dignity of his character, exerted a great +influence in the community. + +The strong political bias of the time drew into its vortex most of the +miscellaneous literature that was produced. A number of ballads, +serious and comic, whig and tory, dealing with the battles and other +incidents of the long war, enjoyed a wide circulation in the newspapers +or were hawked about in printed broadsides. Most of these have no +literary merit, and are now mere antiquarian curiosities. A favorite +piece on the tory side was the _Cow Chase_, a cleverish parody on +_Chevy Chase_, written by the gallant and unfortunate Major Andre, at +the expense of "Mad" Anthony Wayne. The national song _Yankee Doodle_ +was evolved during the Revolution, and, as is the case with _John +Brown's Body_ and many other popular melodies, some obscurity hangs +about its origin. The air was an old one, and the words of the chorus +seem to have been adapted or corrupted from a Dutch song, and applied +in derision to the provincials by the soldiers of the British army as +early as 1755. Like many another nickname, the term Yankee Doodle was +taken up by the nicknamed and proudly made their own. The stanza, + + "Yankee Doodle came to town," etc., + +antedates the war; but the first complete set of words to the tune was +the _Yankee's Return from Camp_, which is apparently of the year 1775. +The most popular humorous ballad on the whig side was the _Battle of +the Kegs_, founded on a laughable incident of the campaign at +Philadelphia. This was written by Francis Hopkinson, a Philadelphian, +and one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. Hopkinson +has some title to rank as one of the earliest American humorists. +Without the keen wit of _McFingal_, some of his _Miscellaneous Essays +and Occasional Writings_, published in 1792, have more geniality and +heartiness than Trumbull's satire. His _Letter on Whitewashing_ is a +bit of domestic humor that foretokens the _Danbury News_ man; and his +_Modern Learning_, 1784, a burlesque on college examinations, in which +a salt-box is described from the point of view of metaphysics, logic, +natural philosophy, mathematics, anatomy, surgery, and chemistry, long +kept its place in school-readers and other collections. His son, +Joseph Hopkinson, wrote the song of _Hail Columbia_, which is saved +from insignificance only by the music to which it was married, the then +popular air of "The President's March." The words were written in +1798, on the eve of a threatened war with France, and at a time when +party spirit ran high. It was sung nightly by crowds in the streets, +and for a whole season by a favorite singer at the theater; for by this +time there were theaters in Philadelphia, in New York, and even in +puritanic Boston. Much better than _Hail Columbia_ was the +_Star-Spangled Banner_, the words of which were composed by Francis +Scott Key, a Marylander, during the bombardment by the British of Fort +McHenry, near Baltimore, in 1812. More pretentious than these was the +once celebrated ode of Robert Treat Paine, Jr., _Adams and Liberty_, +recited at an anniversary of the Massachusetts Charitable Fire Society. +The sale of this is said to have netted its author over $750, but it +is, notwithstanding, a very wooden performance. Paine was a young +Harvard graduate, who had married an actress playing at the Old Federal +Street Theater, the first play-house opened in Boston, in 1794. His +name was originally Thomas, but this was changed for him by the +Massachusetts Legislature, because he did not wish to be confounded +with the author of the _Age of Reason_. "Dim are those names erstwhile +in battle loud," and many an old Revolutionary worthy who fought for +liberty with sword and pen is now utterly forgotten, or remembered only +by some phrase which has become a current quotation. Here and there a +line has, by accident, survived to do duty as a motto or inscription, +while all its context is buried in oblivion. Few have read any thing +more of Jonathan M. Sewall's, for example, than the couplet, + + "No pent-up Utica contracts your powers, + But the whole boundless continent is yours," + +taken from his _Epilogue to Cato_, written in 1778. + +Another Revolutionary poet was Philip Freneau--"that rascal Freneau," +as Washington called him, when annoyed by the attacks upon his +administration in Freneau's _National Gazette_. He was of Huguenot +descent, was a class-mate of Madison at Princeton College, was taken +prisoner by the British during the war, and when the war was over +engaged in journalism, as an ardent supporter of Jefferson and the +Democrats. Freneau's patriotic verses and political lampoons are now +unreadable; but he deserves to rank as the first real American poet, by +virtue of his _Wild Honeysuckle_, _Indian Burying Ground_, _Indian +Student_, and a few other little pieces, which exhibit a grace and +delicacy inherited, perhaps, with his French blood, + +Indeed, to speak strictly, all of the "poets" hitherto mentioned were +nothing but rhymers; but in Freneau we meet with something of beauty +and artistic feeling; something which still keeps his verses fresh. In +his treatment of Indian themes, in particular, appear for the first +time a sense of the picturesque and poetic elements in the character +and wild life of the red man, and that pensive sentiment which the +fading away of the tribes toward the sunset has left in the wake of +their retreating footsteps. In this Freneau anticipates Cooper and +Longfellow, though his work is slight compared with the +_Leatherstocking Tales_ or _Hiawatha_. At the time when the +Revolutionary War broke out the population of the colonies was over +three millions; Philadelphia had thirty thousand inhabitants, and the +frontier had retired to a comfortable distance from the sea-board. The +Indian had already grown legendary to town dwellers, and Freneau +fetches his _Indian Student_ not from the outskirts of the settlement +but from the remote backwoods of the State: + + "From Susquehanna's farthest springs, + Where savage tribes pursue their game + (His blanket tied with yellow strings), + A shepherd of the forest came." + +Campbell "lifted"--in his poem _O'Conor's Child_--the last line of the +following stanza from Freneau's _Indian Burying Ground_: + + "By midnight moons, o'er moistening dews, + In vestments for the chase arrayed, + The hunter still the deer pursues-- + The hunter and the deer, a shade." + +And Walter Scott did Freneau the honor to borrow, in _Marmion_, the +final line of one of the stanzas of his poem on the battle of Eutaw +Springs: + + "They saw their injured country's woe, + The flaming town, the wasted field; + Then rushed to meet the insulting foe, + They took the spear, but left the shield." + +Scott inquired of an American gentleman who visited him the authorship +of this poem, which he had by heart, and pronounced it as fine a thing +of the kind as there was in the language. + +The American drama and American prose fiction had their beginning +during the period now under review. A company of English players came +to this country in 1762 and made the tour of many of the principal +towns. The first play acted here by professionals on a public stage +was the _Merchant of Venice_, which was given by the English company at +Williamsburg, Va., in 1752. The first regular theater building was at +Annapolis, Md., where in the same year this troupe performed, among +other pieces, Farquhar's _Beaux' Stratagem_. In 1753 a theater was +built in New York, and one in 1759 in Philadelphia. The Quakers of +Philadelphia and the Puritans of Boston were strenuously opposed to the +acting of plays, and in the latter city the players were several times +arrested during the performances, under a Massachusetts law forbidding +dramatic performances. At Newport, R.I., on the other hand, which was +a health resort for planters from the Southern States and the West +Indies, and the largest slave-market in the North, the actors were +hospitably received. The first play known to have been written by an +American was the _Prince of Parthia_, 1765, a closet drama, by Thomas +Godfrey, of Philadelphia. The first play by an American writer, acted +by professionals in a public theater, was Royall Tyler's _Contrast_, +performed in New York, in 1786. The former of these was very high +tragedy, and the latter very low comedy; and neither of them is +otherwise remarkable than as being the first of a long line of +indifferent dramas. There is, in fact, no American dramatic literature +worth speaking of; not a single American play of even the second rank, +unless we except a few graceful parlor comedies, like Mr. Howell's +_Elevator_ and _Sleeping-Car_. Royall Tyler, the author of _The +Contrast_, cut quite a figure in his day as a wit and journalist, and +eventually became chief-justice of Vermont. His comedy, _The Georgia +Spec_, 1797, had a great run in Boston, and his _Algerine Captive_, +published in the same year, was one of the earliest American novels. +It was a rambling tale of adventure, constructed somewhat upon the plan +of Smollett's novels and dealing with the piracies which led to the war +between the United States and Algiers in 1815. + +Charles Brockden Brown, the first American novelist of any note, was +also the first professional man of letters in this country who +supported himself entirely by his pen. He was born in Philadelphia in +1771, lived a part of his life in New York and part in his native city, +where he started, in 1803, the _Literary Magazine and American +Register_. During the years 1798-1801 he published in rapid succession +six romances, _Wieland_, _Ormond_, _Arthur Mervyn_, _Edgar Huntley_, +_Clara Howard_, and _Jane Talbot_. Brown was an invalid and something +of a recluse, with a relish for the ghastly in incident and the morbid +in character. He was in some points a prophecy of Poe and Hawthorne, +though his art was greatly inferior to Poe's, and almost infinitely so +to Hawthorne's. His books belong more properly to the contemporary +school of fiction in England which preceded the "Waverley Novels"--to +the class that includes Beckford's _Vathek_, Godwin's _Caleb Williams_ +and _St. Leon_, Mrs. Shelley's _Frankenstein_, and such "Gothic" +romances as Lewis's _Monk_, Walpole's _Castle of Otranto_, and Mrs. +Radcliffe's _Mysteries of Udolpho_. A distinguishing characteristic of +this whole school is what we may call the clumsy-horrible. Brown's +romances are not wanting in inventive power, in occasional situations +that are intensely thrilling, and in subtle analysis of character; but +they are fatally defective in art. The narrative is by turns abrupt +and tiresomely prolix, proceeding not so much by dialogue as by +elaborate dissection and discussion of motives and states of mind, +interspersed with the author's reflections. The wild improbabilities +of plot and the unnatural and even monstrous developments of character +are in startling contrast with the old-fashioned preciseness of the +language; the conversations, when there are any, being conducted in +that insipid dialect in which a fine woman was called an "elegant +female." The following is a sample description of one of Brown's +heroines, and is taken from his novel of _Ormond_, the leading +character in which--a combination of unearthly intellect with fiendish +wickedness--is thought to have been suggested by Aaron Burr: "Helena +Cleves was endowed with every feminine and fascinating quality. Her +features were modified by the most transient sentiments and were the +seat of a softness at all times blushful and bewitching. All those +graces of symmetry, smoothness, and luster, which assemble in the +imagination of the painter when he calls from the bosom of her natal +deep the Paphian divinity, blended their perfections in the shade, +complexion, and hair of this lady." But, alas! "Helena's intellectual +deficiencies could not be concealed. She was proficient in the +elements of no science. The doctrine of lines and surfaces was as +disproportionate with her intellects as with those of the mock-bird. +She had not reasoned on the principles of human action, nor examined +the structure of society. . . . She could not commune in their native +dialect with the sages of Rome and Athens. . . . The constitution of +nature, the attributes of its Author, the arrangement of the parts of +the external universe, and the substance, modes of operation, and +ultimate destiny of human intelligence were enigmas unsolved and +insoluble by her." + +Brown frequently raises a superstructure of mystery on a basis +ludicrously weak. Thus the hero of his first novel, _Wieland_ (whose +father anticipates "Old Krook," in Dickens's _Bleak House_, by dying of +spontaneous combustion), is led on by what he mistakes for spiritual +voices to kill his wife and children; and the voices turn out to be +produced by the ventriloquism of one Carwin, the villain of the story. +Similarly in Edgar Huntley, the plot turns upon the phenomena of +sleep-walking. Brown had the good sense to place the scene of his +romances in his own country, and the only passages in them which have +now a living interest are his descriptions of wilderness scenery in +_Edgar Huntley_, and his graphic account in _Arthur Mervyn_ of the +yellow-fever epidemic in Philadelphia in 1793. Shelley was an admirer +of Brown, and his experiments in prose fiction, such as _Zastrozzi_ and +_St. Irvyne the Rosicrucian_, are of the same abnormal and speculative +type. + +Another book which falls within this period was the _Journal_, 1774, of +John Woolman, a New Jersey Quaker, which has received the highest +praise from Channing, Charles Lamb, and many others. "Get the writings +of John Woolman by heart," wrote Lamb, "and love the early Quakers." +The charm of this journal resides in its singular sweetness and +innocence of feeling, the "deep inward stillness" peculiar to the +people called Quakers. Apart from his constant use of certain phrases +peculiar to the Friends Woolman's English is also remarkably graceful +and pure, the transparent medium of a soul absolutely sincere, and +tender and humble in its sincerity. When not working at his trade as a +tailor Woolman spent his time in visiting and ministering to the +monthly, quarterly, and yearly meetings of Friends, traveling on +horseback to their scattered communities in the backwoods of Virginia +and North Carolina, and northward along the coast as far as Boston and +Nantucket. He was under a "concern" and a "heavy exercise" touching +the keeping of slaves, and by his writing and speaking did much to +influence the Quakers against slavery. His love went out, indeed, to +all the wretched and oppressed; to sailors, and to the Indians in +particular. One of his most perilous journeys was made to the +settlements of Moravian Indians in the wilderness of western +Pennsylvania, at Bethlehem, and at Wehaloosing, on the Susquehanna. +Some of the scruples which Woolman felt, and the quaint _naivete_ with +which he expresses them, may make the modern reader smile, but it is a +smile which is very close to a tear. Thus, when in England--where he +died in 1772--he would not ride nor send a letter by mail-coach, +because the poor post-boys were compelled to ride long stages in winter +nights, and were sometimes frozen to death. "So great is the hurry in +the spirit of this world that, in aiming to do business quickly and to +gain wealth, the creation at this day doth loudly groan." Again, +having reflected that war was caused by luxury in dress, etc., the use +of dyed garments grew uneasy to him, and he got and wore a hat of the +natural color of the fur. "In attending meetings this singularity was +a trial to me, . . . and some Friends, who knew not from what motives I +wore it, grew shy of me. . . . Those who spoke with me I generally +informed, in a few words, that I believed my wearing it was not in my +own will." + + + +1. _Representative American Orations_. Edited by Alexander Johnston. +New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. 1884. + +2. _The Federalist_. New York: Charles Scribner. 1863. + +3. _Notes on Virginia_. By Thomas Jefferson. Boston. 1829. + +4. _Travels in New England and New York_. By Timothy Dwight. New +Haven. 1821. + +5. _McFingal_: in Trumbull's Poetical Works. Hartford. 1820. + +6. Joel Barlow's _Hasty Pudding_. Francis Hopkinson's _Modern +Learning_. Philip Freneau's _Indian Student_, _Indian Burying-Ground_, +and _White Honeysuckle_: in Vol. I of Duyckinck's _Cyclopedia of +American Literature_. New York: Charles Scribner. 1866. + +7. _Arthur Mervyn_. By Charles Brockden Brown. Boston: S. G. +Goodrich. 1827. + +8. _The Journal of John Woolman_. With an Introduction by John G. +Whittier. Boston: James R. Osgood & Co. 1871. + +9. _American Literature_. By Charles F. Richardson. New York: G. P. +Putnam's Sons. 1887. + +10. _American Literature_. By John Nichol. Edinburgh: Adam & Charles +Black. 1882. + + + + +CHAPTER III. + +THE ERA OF NATIONAL EXPANSION. + +1815-1837. + +The attempt to preserve a strictly chronological order must here be +abandoned. About all the American literature in existence that is of +any value as _literature_ is the product of the past three quarters of +a century, and the men who produced it, though older or younger, were +still contemporaries. Irving's _Knickerbocker's History of New York_, +1809, was published within the recollection of some yet living, and the +venerable poet Richard H. Dana--Irving's junior by only four +years--survived to 1879, when the youngest of the generation of writers +that now occupy public attention had already won their spurs. Bryant, +whose _Thanatopsis_ was printed in 1816, lived down to 1878. He saw +the beginnings of our national literature, and he saw almost as much of +the latest phase of it as we see to-day in this year 1891. Still, even +within the limits of a single life-time, there have been progress and +change. And so, while it will happen that the consideration of +writers, a part of whose work falls between the dates at the head of +this chapter, may be postponed to subsequent chapters, we may in a +general way follow the sequence of time. + +The period between the close of the second war with England, in 1815, +and the great financial crash of 1837, has been called, in language +attributed to President Monroe, "the era of good feeling." It was a +time of peace and prosperity, of rapid growth in population and rapid +extension of territory. The new nation was entering upon its vast +estates and beginning to realize its manifest destiny. The peace with +Great Britain, by calling off the Canadian Indians and the other tribes +in alliance with England, had opened up the North-west to settlement. +Ohio had been admitted as a State in 1802; but at the time of President +Monroe's tour, in 1817, Cincinnati had only seven thousand inhabitants, +and half of the State was unsettled. The Ohio River flowed for most of +its course through an unbroken wilderness. Chicago was merely a fort. +Hitherto the emigration to the West had been sporadic; now it took on +the dimensions of a general and almost a concerted exodus. This +movement was stimulated in New England by the cold summer of 1816 and +the late spring of 1817, which produced a scarcity of food that +amounted in parts of the interior to a veritable famine. All through +this period sounded the ax of the pioneer clearing the forest about his +log-cabin, and the rumble of the canvas-covered emigrant-wagon over the +primitive highways which crossed the Alleghanies or followed the valley +of the Mohawk. S. G. Goodrich, known in letters as "Peter Parley," in +his _Recollections of a Life-time_, 1856, describes the part of the +movement which he had witnessed as a boy in Fairfield County, +Connecticut: "I remember very well the tide of emigration through +Connecticut, on its way to the West, during the summer of 1817. Some +persons went in covered wagons--frequently a family consisting of +father, mother, and nine small children, with one at the breast--some +on foot, and some crowded together under the cover, with kettles, +gridirons, feather-beds, crockery, and the family Bible, Watts's Psalms +and Hymns, and Webster's Spelling-book--the lares and penates of the +household. Others started in ox-carts, and trudged on at the rate of +ten miles a day. . . . Many of these persons were in a state of +poverty, and begged their way as they went. Some died before they +reached the expected Canaan; many perished after their arrival from +fatigue and privation; and others from the fever and ague, which was +then certain to attack the new settlers. It was, I think, in 1818 that +I published a small tract entitled, _'Tother Side of Ohio_--that is, +the other view, in contrast to the popular notion that it was the +paradise of the world. It was written by Dr. Hand--a talented young +physician of Berlin--who had made a visit to the West about these days. +It consisted mainly of vivid but painful pictures of the accidents and +incidents attending this wholesale migration. The roads over the +Alleghanies, between Philadelphia and Pittsburg, were then rude, steep, +and dangerous, and some of the more precipitous slopes were +consequently strewn with the carcasses of wagons, carts, horses, oxen, +which had made shipwreck in their perilous descents." + +But in spite of the hardships of the settler's life the spirit of that +time, as reflected in its writings, was a hopeful and a light-hearted +one. + + "Westward the course of empire takes its way," + +runs the famous line from Berkeley's poem on America. The New +Englanders who removed to the Western Reserve went there to better +themselves; and their children found themselves the owners of broad +acres of virgin soil in place of the stony hill pastures of Berkshire +and Litchfield. There was an attraction, too, about the wild, free +life of the frontiersman, with all its perils and discomforts. The +life of Daniel Boone, the pioneer of Kentucky--that "dark and bloody +ground"--is a genuine romance. Hardly less picturesque was the old +river life of the Ohio boatmen, before the coming of steam banished +their queer craft from the water. Between 1810 and 1840 the center of +population in the United States had moved from the Potomac to the +neighborhood of Clarksburg, in West Virginia, and the population itself +had increased from seven to seventeen millions. The gain was made +partly in the East and South, but the general drift was westward. +During the years now under review the following new States were +admitted, in the order named: Indiana, Mississippi, Illinois, Alabama, +Maine, Missouri, Arkansas, Michigan. Kentucky and Tennessee had been +made States in the last years of the eighteenth century, and +Louisiana--acquired by purchase from France--in 1812. + +The settlers, in their westward march, left large tracts of wilderness +behind them. They took up first the rich bottomlands along the river +courses, the Ohio and Miami and Licking, and later the valleys of the +Mississippi and Missouri and the shores of the great lakes. But there +still remained backwoods in New York and Pennsylvania, though the +cities of New York and Philadelphia had each a population of more than +one hundred thousand in 1815. When the Erie Canal was opened, in 1825, +it ran through a primitive forest. N. P. Willis, who went by canal to +Buffalo and Niagara in 1827, describes the houses and stores at +Rochester as standing among the burnt stumps left by the first +settlers. In the same year that saw the opening of this great +water-way, the Indian tribes, numbering now about one hundred and +thirty thousand souls, were moved across the Mississippi. Their power +had been broken by General Hamson's victory over Tecumseh at the battle +of Tippecanoe, in 1811, and they were in fact mere remnants and +fragments of the race which had hung upon the skirts of civilization +and disputed the advance of the white man for two centuries. It was +not until some years later than this that railroads began to take an +important share in opening up new country. + +The restless energy, the love of adventure, the sanguine anticipation +which characterized American thought at this time, the picturesque +contrasts to be seen in each mushroom town where civilization was +encroaching on the raw edge of the wilderness--all these found +expression, not only in such well-known books as Cooper's _Pioneers_, +1823, and Irving's _Tour on the Prairies_, 1835, but in the minor +literature which is read to-day, if at all, not for its own sake, but +for the light that it throws on the history of national development: in +such books as Paulding's story of _Westward-Ho!_ and his poem, _The +Backwoodsman_, 1818; or as Timothy Flint's _Recollections_, 1826, and +his _Geography and History of the Mississippi Valley_, 1827. It was +not an age of great books, but it was an age of large ideas and +expanding prospects. The new consciousness of empire uttered itself +hastily, crudely, ran into buncombe, "spread-eagleism," and other noisy +forms of patriotic exultation; but it was thoroughly democratic and +American. Though literature--or at least the best literature of the +time--was not yet emancipated from English models, thought and life, at +any rate, were no longer in bondage--no longer provincial. And it is +significant that the party in office during these years was the +Democratic, the party which had broken most completely with +conservative traditions. The famous "Monroe doctrine" was a +pronunciamento of this aggressive democracy, and though the Federalists +returned to power for a single term, under John Quincy Adams (1825-29), +Andrew Jackson received the largest number of electoral votes, and +Adams was only chosen by the House of Representatives in the absence of +a majority vote for any one candidate. At the close of his term "Old +Hickory," the hero of the people, the most characteristically +democratic of our presidents, and the first backwoodsman who entered +the White House, was borne into office on a wave of popular enthusiasm. +We have now arrived at the time when American literature, in the higher +and stricter sense of the term, really began to have an existence. S. +G. Goodrich, who settled at Hartford as a bookseller and publisher in +1818, says, in his _Recollections_: "About this time I began to think +of trying to bring out original American works. . . . The general +impression was that we had not, and could not have, a literature. It +was the precise point at which Sidney Smith had uttered that bitter +taunt in the _Edinburgh Review_, 'Who reads an American book?' . . . +It was positively injurious to the commercial credit of a bookseller to +undertake American works." Washington Irving (1783-1859) was the first +American author whose books, as _books_, obtained recognition abroad; +whose name was thought worthy of mention beside the names of English +contemporary authors, like Byron, Scott, and Coleridge. He was also +the first American writer whose writings are still read for their own +sake. We read Mather's _Magnalia_, and Franklin's _Autobiography_, and +Trumbull's _McFingal_--if we read them at all--as history, and to learn +about the times or the men. But we read the _Sketch Book_, and +_Knickerbocker's History of New York_, and the _Conquest of Granada_ +for themselves and for the pleasure that they give as pieces of +literary art. + +We have arrived, too, at a time when we may apply a more cosmopolitan +standard to the works of American writers, and may disregard many a +minor author whose productions would have cut some figure had they come +to light amid the poverty of our colonial age. Hundreds of these +forgotten names, with specimens of their unread writings, are consigned +to a limbo of immortality in the pages of Duyckinck's _Cyclopedia_ and +of Griswold's _Poets of America_ and _Prose Writers of America_. We +may select here for special mention, and as most representative of the +thought of their time, the names of Irving, Cooper, Webster, and +Channing. + +A generation was now coming upon the stage who could recall no other +government in this country than the government of the United States, +and to whom the Revolutionary War was but a tradition. Born in the +very year of the peace, it was a part of Irving's mission, by the +sympathetic charm of his writings and by the cordial recognition which +he won in both countries, to allay the soreness which the second war, +of 1812-15, had left between England and America. He was well fitted +for the task of mediator. Conservative by nature, early drawn to the +venerable worship of the Episcopal Church, retrospective in his tastes, +with a preference for the past and its historic associations, which, +even in young America, led him to invest the Hudson and the region +about New York with a legendary interest, he wrote of American themes +in an English fashion, and interpreted to an American public the mellow +attractiveness that he found in the life and scenery of Old England. +He lived in both countries, and loved them both; and it is hard to say +whether Irving is more of an English or of an American writer. His +first visit to Europe, in 1804-6, occupied nearly two years. From 1815 +to 1832 he was abroad continuously, and his "domicile," as the lawyers +say, during these seventeen years was really in England, though a +portion of his time was spent upon the Continent, and several +successive years in Spain, where he engaged upon the _Life of +Columbus_, the _Conquest of Granada_, the _Companions of Columbus_, and +the _Alhambra_, all published between 1828 and 1832. From 1842 to 1846 +he was again in Spain as American minister at Madrid. + +Irving was the last and greatest of the Addisonians. His boyish +letters, signed "Jonathan Oldstyle," contributed in 1802 to his +brother's newspaper, the _Morning Chronicle_, were, like Franklin's +_Busybody_, close imitations of the _Spectator_. To the same family +belonged his _Salmagundi_ papers, 1807, a series of town-satires on New +York society, written in conjunction with his brother William and with +James K. Paulding. The little tales, essays, and sketches which +compose the _Sketch Book_ were written in England, and published in +America, in periodical numbers, in 1819-20. In this, which is in some +respects his best book, he still maintained that attitude of +observation and spectatorship taught him by Addison. The volume had a +motto taken from Burton: "I have no wife nor children, good or bad, to +provide for--a mere spectator of other men's fortunes," etc.; and "The +Author's Account of Himself," began in true Addisonian fashion: "I was +always fond of visiting new scenes and observing strange characters and +manners." + +But though never violently "American," like some later writers who have +consciously sought to throw off the trammels of English tradition, +Irving was in a real way original. His most distinct addition to our +national literature was in his creation of what has been called "the +Knickerbocker legend." He was the first to make use, for literary +purposes, of the old Dutch traditions which clustered about the +romantic scenery of the Hudson. Colonel T. W. Higginson, in his +_History of the United States_, tells how "Mrs. Josiah Quincy, sailing +up that river in 1786, when Irving was a child three years old, records +that the captain of the sloop had a legend, either supernatural or +traditional, for every scene, 'and not a mountain reared its head +unconnected with some marvelous story.'" The material thus at hand +Irving shaped into his _Knickerbocker's History of New York_, into the +immortal story of _Rip Van Winkle_ and the _Legend of Sleepy Hollow_ +(both published in the _Sketch Book_), and into later additions to the +same realm of fiction, such as _Dolph Heyliger_ in _Bracebridge Hall_, +the _Money Diggers_, _Wolfert Webber_, and _Kidd the Pirate_, in the +_Tales of a Traveler_, and some of the miscellanies from the +_Knickerbocker Magazine_, collected into a volume, in 1855, under the +title of _Wolfert's Roost_. + +The book which made Irving's reputation was his _Knickerbocker's +History of New York_, 1809, a burlesque chronicle, making fun of the +old Dutch settlers of New Amsterdam, and attributed, by a familiar and +now somewhat threadbare device,[1] to a little old gentleman named +Diedrich Knickerbocker, whose manuscript had come into the editor's +hands. The book was gravely dedicated to the New York Historical +Society, and it is said to have been quoted, as authentic history, by a +certain German scholar named Goeller, in a note on a passage in +Thucydides. This story, though well vouched, is hard of belief; for +_Knickerbocker_, though excellent fooling, has nothing of the grave +irony of Swift in his _Modest Proposal_ or of Defoe in his _Short Way +with Dissenters_. Its mock-heroic intention is as transparent as in +Fielding's parodies of Homer, which it somewhat resembles, particularly +in the delightfully absurd description of the mustering of the clans +under Peter Stuyvesant and the attack on the Swedish Fort Christina. +_Knickerbocker's History of New York_ was a real addition to the comic +literature of the world, a work of genuine humor, original and vital. +Walter Scott said that it reminded him closely of Swift, and had +touches resembling Sterne. It is not necessary to claim for Irving's +little masterpiece a place beside _Gulliver's Travels_ and _Tristram +Shandy_. But it was, at least, the first American book in the lighter +departments of literature which needed no apology and stood squarely on +its own legs. It was written, too, at just the right time. Although +New Amsterdam had become New York as early as 1664, the impress of its +first settlers, with their quaint conservative ways, was still upon it +when Irving was a boy. The descendants of the Dutch families formed a +definite element not only in Manhattan, but all up along the kills of +the Hudson, at Albany, at Schenectady, in Westchester County, at +Hoboken, and Communipaw, localities made familiar to him in many a +ramble and excursion. He lived to see the little provincial town of +his birth grow into a great metropolis, in which all national +characteristics were blended together, and a tide of immigration from +Europe and New England flowed over the old landmarks and obliterated +them utterly. + +Although Irving was the first to reveal to his countrymen the literary +possibilities of their early history it must be acknowledged that with +modern American life he had little sympathy. He hated politics, and in +the restless democratic movement of the time, as we have described it, +he found no inspiration. This moderate and placid gentleman, with his +distrust of all kinds of fanaticism, had no liking for the Puritans or +for their descendants, the New England Yankees, if we may judge from +his sketch of Ichabod Crane in the _Legend of Sleepy Hollow_. His +genius was reminiscent, and his imagination, like Scott's, was the +historic imagination. In crude America his fancy took refuge in the +picturesque aspects of the past, in "survivals" like the Knickerbocker +Dutch and the Acadian peasants, whose isolated communities on the lower +Mississippi he visited and described. He turned naturally to the ripe +civilization of the Old World, He was our first picturesque tourist, +the first "American in Europe." He rediscovered England, whose ancient +churches, quiet landscapes, memory-haunted cities, Christmas +celebrations, and rural festivals had for him an unfailing attraction. +With pictures of these, for the most part, he filled the pages of the +_Sketch Book_ and _Bracebridge Hall_, 1822. Delightful as are these +English sketches, in which the author conducts his reader to Windsor +Castle, or Stratford-on-Avon, or the Boar's Head Tavern, or sits beside +him on the box of the old English stage-coach, or shares with him the +Yule-tide cheer at the ancient English country-house, their interest +has somewhat faded. The pathos of the _Broken Heart_ and the _Pride of +the Village_, the mild satire of the _Art of Book-Making_, the rather +obvious reflections in _Westminster Abbey_ are not exactly to the taste +of this generation. They are the literature of leisure and +retrospection; and already Irving's gentle elaboration, the refined and +slightly artificial beauty of his style, and his persistently genial +and sympathetic attitude have begun to pall upon readers who demand a +more nervous and accentuated kind of writing. It is felt that a little +roughness, a little harshness, even, would give relief to his pictures +of life. There is, for instance, something a little irritating in the +old-fashioned courtliness of his manner toward women; and one reads +with a certain impatience smoothly punctuated passages like the +following: "As the vine, which has long twined its graceful foliage +about the oak, and been lifted by it into sunshine, will, when the +hardy plant is rifted by the thunder-bolt, cling round it with its +caressing tendrils, and bind up its shattered boughs, so is it +beautifully ordered by Providence that woman, who is the mere dependent +and ornament of man in his happier hours, should be his stay and solace +when smitten with sudden calamity, winding herself into the rugged +recesses of his nature, tenderly supporting the drooping head and +binding up the broken heart." + +Irving's gifts were sentiment and humor, with an imagination +sufficiently fertile and an observation sufficiently acute to support +those two main qualities, but inadequate to the service of strong +passion or subtle thinking, though his pathos, indeed, sometimes +reached intensity. His humor was always delicate and kindly; his +sentiment never degenerated into sentimentality. His diction was +graceful and elegant--too elegant, perhaps; and, in his modesty, he +attributed the success of his books in England to the astonishment of +Englishmen that an American could write good English. + +In Spanish history and legend Irving found a still newer and richer +field for his fancy to work upon. He had not the analytic and +philosophical mind of a great historian, and the merits of his +_Conquest of Granada_ and _Life of Columbus_ are rather +_belletristisch_ than scientific. But he brought to these undertakings +the same eager love of the romantic past which had determined the +character of his writings in America and England, and the +result--whether we call it history or romance--is at all events +charming as literature. His _Life of Washington_--completed in +1859--was his _magnum opus_, and is accepted as standard authority. +_Mahomet and His Successors_, 1850, was comparatively a failure. But +of all Irving's biographies his _Life of Oliver Goldsmith_, 1849, was +the most spontaneous and perhaps the best. He did not impose it upon +himself as a task, but wrote it from a native and loving sympathy with +his subject, and it is, therefore, one of the choicest literary memoirs +in the language. + +When Irving returned to America, in 1832, he was the recipient of +almost national honors. He had received the medal of the Royal Society +of Literature and the degree of D.C.L. from Oxford University, and had +made American literature known and respected abroad. In his modest +home at Sunnyside, on the banks of the river over which he had been the +first to throw the witchery of poetry and romance, he was attended to +the last by the admiring affection of his countrymen. He had the love +and praises of the foremost English writers of his own generation and +the generation which followed--of Scott, Byron, Coleridge, Thackeray, +and Dickens, some of whom had been among his personal friends. He is +not the greatest of American authors, but the influence of his writings +is sweet and wholesome, and it is in many ways fortunate that the first +American man of letters who made himself heard in Europe should have +been in all particulars a gentleman. + +Connected with Irving, at least by name and locality, were a number of +authors who resided in the city of New York, and who are known as the +Knickerbocker writers, perhaps because they were contributors to the +_Knickerbocker Magazine_. One of these was James K. Paulding, a +connection of Irving by marriage, and his partner in the _Salmagundi_ +papers. Paulding became Secretary of the Navy under Van Buren, and +lived down to the year 1860. He was a voluminous author, but his +writings had no power of continuance, and are already obsolete, with +the possible exception of his novel, the _Dutchman's Fireside_, 1831. + +A finer spirit than Paulding was Joseph Rodman Drake, a young poet of +great promise, who died in 1820, at the age of twenty-five. Drake's +patriotic lyric, the _American Flag_, is certainly the most spirited +thing of the kind in our poetic literature, and greatly superior to +such national anthems as _Hail Columbia_ and the _Star-Spangled +Banner_. His _Culprit Fay_, published in 1819, was the best poem that +had yet appeared in America, if we except Bryant's _Thanatopsis_, which +was three years the elder. The _Culprit Fay_ was a fairy story, in +which, following Irving's lead, Drake undertook to throw the glamour of +poetry about the Highlands of the Hudson. Edgar Poe said that the poem +was fanciful rather than imaginative; but it is prettily and even +brilliantly fanciful, and has maintained its popularity to the present +time. Such verse as the following--which seems to show that Drake had +been reading Coleridge's _Christabel_, published three years +before--was something new in American poetry: + + "The winds are whist and the owl is still, + The bat in the shelvy rock is hid, + And naught is heard on the lonely hill + But the cricket's chirp and the answer shrill + Of the gauze-winged katydid, + And the plaint of the wailing whip-poor-will, + Who moans unseen, and ceaseless sings + Ever a note of wail and woe, + Till morning spreads her rosy wings, + And earth and sky in her glances glow." + +Here we have, at last, the whip-poor-will, an American bird, and not +the conventional lark or nightingale, although the elves of the Old +World seem scarcely at home on the banks of the Hudson. Drake's memory +has been kept fresh not only by his own poetry, but by the beautiful +elegy written by his friend Fitz-Greene Halleck, the first stanza of +which is universally known; + + "Green be the turf above thee, + Friend of my better days; + None knew thee but to love thee, + Nor named thee but to praise." + +Halleck was born in Guilford, Connecticut, whither he retired in 1849, +and resided there till his death in 1867. But his literary career is +identified with New York. He was associated with Drake in writing the +_Croaker Papers_, a series of humorous and satirical verses contributed +in 1814 to the _Evening Post_. These were of a merely local and +temporary interest; but Halleck's fine ode, _Marco Bozzaris_--though +declaimed until it has become hackneyed--gives him a sure title to +remembrance; and his _Alnwick Castle_, a monody, half serious and half +playful on the contrast between feudal associations and modern life, +has much of that pensive lightness which characterizes Praed's best +_vers de societe_. + +A friend of Drake and Halleck was James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851), +the first American novelist of distinction, and, if a popularity which +has endured for nearly three quarters of a century is any test, still +the most successful of all American novelists. Cooper was far more +intensely American than Irving, and his books reached an even wider +public. "They are published as soon as he produces them," said Morse, +the electrician, in 1833, "in thirty-four different places in Europe. +They have been seen by American travelers in the languages of Turkey +and Persia, in Constantinople, in Egypt, at Jerusalem, at Ispahan." +Cooper wrote altogether too much; he published, besides his fictions, a +_Naval History of the United States_, a series of naval biographies, +works of travel, and a great deal of controversial matter. He wrote +over thirty novels, the greater part of which are little better than +trash, and tedious trash at that. This is especially true of his +_tendenz_ novels and his novels of society. He was a man of strongly +marked individuality, fiery, pugnacious, sensitive to criticism, and +abounding in prejudices. He was embittered by the scurrilous attacks +made upon him by a portion of the American press, and spent a great +deal of time and energy in conducting libel suits against the +newspapers. In the same spirit he used fiction as a vehicle for attack +upon the abuses and follies of American life. Nearly all of his +novels, written with this design, are worthless. Nor was Cooper well +equipped by nature and temperament for depicting character and passion +in social life. Even in his best romances his heroines and his +"leading juveniles"--to borrow a term from the amateur stage--are +insipid and conventional. He was no satirist, and his humor was not of +a high order. He was a rapid and uneven writer, and, unlike Irving, he +had no style. + +Where Cooper was great was in the story, in the invention of incidents +and plots, in a power of narrative and description in tales of wild +adventure which keeps the reader in breathless excitement to the end of +the book. He originated the novel of the sea and the novel of the +wilderness. He created the Indian of literature; and in this, his +peculiar field, although he has had countless imitators, he has had no +equals. Cooper's experiences had prepared him well for the kingship of +this new realm in the world of fiction. His childhood was passed on +the borders of Otsego Lake, when central New York was still a +wilderness, with boundless forests stretching westward, broken only +here and there by the clearings of the pioneers. He was taken from +college (Yale) when still a lad, and sent to sea in a merchant vessel, +before the mast. Afterward he entered the navy and did duty on the +high seas and upon Lake Ontario, then surrounded by virgin forests. He +married and resigned his commission in 1811, just before the outbreak +of the war with England, so that he missed the opportunity of seeing +active service in any of those engagements on the ocean and our great +lakes which were so glorious to American arms. But he always retained +an active interest in naval affairs. + +His first successful novel was _The Spy_, 1821, a tale of the +Revolutionary War, the scene of which was laid in Westchester County, +N. Y., where the author was then residing. The hero of this story, +Harvey Birch, was one of the most skillfully drawn figures on his +canvas. In 1833 he published the _Pioneers_, a work somewhat overladen +with description, in which he drew for material upon his boyish +recollections of frontier life at Cooperstown. This was the first of +the series of five romances known as the _Leatherstocking Tales_. The +others were the _Last of the Mohicans_, 1826; the _Prairie_, 1827; the +_Pathfinder_, 1840; and the _Deerslayer_, 1841. The hero of this +series, Natty Bumpo, or "Leatherstocking," was Cooper's one great +creation in the sphere of character, his most original addition to the +literature of the world in the way of a new human type. This backwoods +philosopher--to the conception of whom the historic exploits of Daniel +Boone perhaps supplied some hints; unschooled, but moved by noble +impulses and a natural sense of piety and justice; passionately +attached to the wilderness, and following its westering edge even unto +the prairies--this man of the woods was the first real American in +fiction. Hardly less individual and vital were the various types of +Indian character, in Chingachgook, Uncas, Hist, and the Huron warriors. +Inferior to these, but still vigorously though somewhat roughly drawn, +were the waifs and strays of civilization, whom duty, or the hope of +gain, or the love of adventure, or the outlawry of crime had driven to +the wilderness--the solitary trapper, the reckless young frontiersman, +the officers and men of out-post garrisons. Whether Cooper's Indian +was the real being, or an idealized and rather melodramatic version of +the truth, has been a subject of dispute. However this be, he has +taken his place in the domain of art, and it is safe to say that his +standing there is secure. No boy will ever give him up. + +Equally good with the _Leatherstocking_ novels, and equally national, +were Cooper's tales of the sea, or at least the best two of them--the +_Pilot_, 1833, founded upon the daring exploits of John Paul Jones, and +the _Red Rover_, 1828. But here, though Cooper still holds the sea, he +has had to admit competitors; and Britannia, who rules the waves in +song, has put in some claim to a share in the domain of nautical +fiction in the persons of Mr. W. Clark Russell and others. Though +Cooper's novels do not meet the deeper needs of the heart and the +imagination, their appeal to the universal love of a story is +perennial. We devour them when we are boys, and if we do not often +return to them when we are men, that is perhaps only because we have +read them before, and "know the ending." They are good yarns for the +forecastle and the camp-fire; and the scholar in his study, though he +may put the _Deerslayer_ or the _Last of the Mohicans_ away on the top +shelf, will take it down now and again, and sit up half the night over +it. + +Before dismissing the _belles-lettres_ writings of this period, mention +should be made of a few poems of the fugitive kind which seem to have +taken a permanent place in popular regard. John Howard Payne, a native +of Long Island, a wandering actor and playwright, who died American +consul at Tunis in 1852, wrote about 1820 for Covent Garden Theater an +opera, entitled _Clari_, the libretto of which included the now famous +song of _Home, Sweet Home_. Its literary pretensions were of the +humblest kind, but it spoke a true word which touched the Anglo-Saxon +heart in its tenderest spot, and, being happily married to a plaintive +air, was sold by the hundred thousand, and is evidently destined to be +sung forever. A like success has attended the _Old Oaken Bucket_, +composed by Samuel Woodworth, a printer and journalist from +Massachusetts, whose other poems, of which two collections were issued +in 1818 and 1826, were soon forgotten. Richard Henry Wilde, an +Irishman by birth, a gentleman of scholarly tastes and accomplishments, +who wrote a great deal on Italian literature, and sat for several terms +in Congress as Representative of the State of Georgia, was the author +of the favorite song, _My Life is Like the Summer Rose_. Another +Southerner, and a member of a distinguished Southern family, was Edward +Coate Pinkney, who served nine years in the navy, and died in 1828, at +the age of twenty-six, having published in 1825 a small volume of +lyrical poems which had a fire and a grace uncommon at that time in +American verse. One of these, _A Health_, beginning, + + "I fill this cup to one made up of loveliness alone." + +though perhaps somewhat overpraised by Edgar Poe, has rare beauty of +thought and expression. + +John Quincy Adams, sixth President of the United States (1825-29), was +a man of culture and literary tastes. He published his lectures on +rhetoric, delivered during his tenure of the Boylston Professorship at +Harvard in 1806-9; he left a voluminous diary, which has been edited +since his death in 1848; and among his experiments in poetry is one of +considerable merit, entitled _The Wants of Man_, an ironical sermon on +Goldsmith's text: + + "Man wants but little here below, + Nor wants that little long." + +As this poem is a curiously close anticipation of Dr. Holmes's +_Contentment_, so the very popular ballad, _Old Grimes_, written about +1818, by Albert Gorton Greene, an undergraduate of Brown University in +Rhode Island, is in some respects an anticipation of Holmes's quaintly +pathetic _Last Leaf_. + +The political literature and public oratory of the United States during +this period, although not absolutely of less importance than that which +preceded and followed the Declaration of Independence and the adoption +of the Constitution, demands less relative attention in a history of +literature by reason of the growth of other departments of thought. +The age was a political one, but no longer exclusively political. The +debates of the time centered about the question of "State Rights," and +the main forum of discussion was the old Senate chamber, then made +illustrious by the presence of Clay, Webster, and Calhoun. The slavery +question, which had threatened trouble, was put off for a while by the +Missouri Compromise of 1820, only to break out more fiercely in the +debates on the Wilmot Proviso and the Kansas and Nebraska Bill. +Meanwhile the Abolition movement had been transferred to the press and +the platform. Garrison started his _Liberator_ in 1830, and the +Antislavery Society was founded in 1833. The Whig party, which had +inherited the constitutional principles of the old Federal party, +advocated internal improvements at national expense and a high +protective tariff. The State Rights party, which was strongest at the +South, opposed these views, and in 1832 South Carolina claimed the +right to "nullify" the tariff imposed by the general government. The +leader of this party was John Caldwell Calhoun, a South Carolinian, who +in his speech in the United States Senate, on February 13, 1832, on +Nullification and the Force Bill, set forth most authoritatively the +"Carolina doctrine." Calhoun was a great debater, but hardly a great +orator. His speeches are the arguments of a lawyer and a strict +constitutionalist, severely logical, and with a sincere conviction in +the soundness of his case. Their language is free from bad rhetoric; +the reasoning is cogent, but there is an absence of emotion and +imagination; they contain few quotable things, and no passages of +commanding eloquence, such as strew the orations of Webster and Burke. +They are not, in short, literature. Again, the speeches of Henry Clay, +of Kentucky, the leader of the Whigs, whose persuasive oratory is a +matter of tradition, disappoint in the reading. The fire has gone out +of them. + +Not so with Daniel Webster, the greatest of American forensic orators, +if, indeed, he be not the greatest of all orators who have used the +English tongue. Webster's speeches are of the kind that have power to +move after the voice of the speaker is still. The thought and the +passion in them lay hold on feelings of patriotism more lasting than +the issues of the moment. It is, indeed, true of Webster's speeches, +as of all speeches, that they are known to posterity more by single +brilliant passages than as wholes. In oratory the occasion is of the +essence of the thing, and only those parts of an address which are +permanent and universal in their appeal take their place in literature. +But of such detachable passages there are happily many in Webster's +orations. One great thought underlay all his public life, the thought +of the Union--of American nationality. What in Hamilton had been a +principle of political philosophy had become in Webster a passionate +conviction. The Union was his idol, and he was intolerant of any +faction which threatened it from any quarter, whether the Nullifiers of +South Carolina or the Abolitionists of the North. It is this thought +which gives grandeur and elevation to all his utterances, and +especially to the wonderful peroration of his _Reply to Hayne_, on Mr. +Foot's resolution touching the sale of the public lands, delivered in +the Senate on January 26, 1830, whose closing words, "Liberty and +union, now and forever, one and inseparable," became the rallying cry +of a great cause. Similar in sentiment was his famous speech of March +7, 1850, _On the Constitution and the Union_, which gave so much +offense to the extreme Antislavery party, who held with Garrison that a +Constitution which protected slavery "was a league with death and a +covenant with hell." It is not claiming too much for Webster to assert +that the sentences of these and other speeches, memorized and declaimed +by thousands of school-boys throughout the North, did as much as any +single influence to train up a generation in hatred of secession, and +to send into the fields of the civil war armies of men animated with +the stern resolution to fight till the last drop of blood was shed, +rather than allow the Union to be dissolved. + +The figure of this great senator is one of the most imposing in +American annals. The masculine force of his personality impressed +itself upon men of a very different stamp--upon the unworldly Emerson, +and upon the captious Carlyle, whose respect was not willingly accorded +to any contemporary, much less to a representative of American +democracy. Webster's looks and manner were characteristic. His form +was massive; his skull and jaw solid, the under-lip projecting, and the +mouth firmly and grimly shut; his complexion was swarthy, and his +black, deep-set eyes, under shaggy brows, glowed with a smoldering +fire. He was rather silent in society; his delivery in debate was +grave and weighty, rather than fervid. His oratory was massive, and +sometimes even ponderous. It may be questioned whether an American +orator of to-day, with intellectual abilities equal to Webster's--if +such a one there were--would permit himself the use of sonorous and +elaborate pictures like the famous period which follows: "On this +question of principle, while actual suffering was yet afar off, they +raised their flag against a power to which, for purposes of foreign +conquest and subjugation, Rome, in the height of her glory, is not to +be compared--a power which has dotted over the surface of the whole +globe with her possessions and military posts, whose morning drum-beat, +following the sun and keeping company with the hours, circles the earth +with one continuous and unbroken strain of the martial airs of +England." The secret of this kind of oratory has been lost. The +present generation distrusts rhetorical ornament and likes something +swifter, simpler, and more familiar in its speakers. But every thing, +in declamation of this sort, depends on the way in which it is done. +Webster did it supremely well; a smaller man would merely have made +buncombe of it. + +Among the legal orators of the time the foremost was Rufus Choate, an +eloquent pleader, and, like Webster, a United States senator from +Massachusetts. Some of his speeches, though excessively rhetorical, +have literary quality, and are nearly as effective in print as +Webster's own. Another Massachusetts orator, Edward Everett, who in +his time was successively professor in Harvard College, Unitarian +minister in Boston, editor of the _North American Review_, member of +both houses of Congress, minister to England, governor of his State, +and President of Harvard, was a speaker of great finish and elegance. +His addresses were mainly of the memorial and anniversary kind, and +were rather lectures and Phi. B. K. prolusions than speeches. Everett +was an instance of careful culture bestowed on a soil of no very great +natural richness. It is doubtful whether his classical orations on +Washington, the Republic, Bunker Hill Monument, and kindred themes, +have enough of the breath of life in them to preserve them much longer +in recollection. + +New England, during these years, did not take that leading part in the +purely literary development of the country which it afterward assumed. +It had no names to match against those of Irving and Cooper. Drake and +Halleck--slender as was their performance in point of quantity--were +better poets than the Boston bards, Charles Sprague, whose _Shakespeare +Ode_, delivered at the Boston theater in 1833, was locally famous; and +Richard Henry Dana, whose longish narrative poem, the _Buccaneer_, +1827, once had admirers. But Boston has at no time been without a +serious intellectual life of its own, nor without a circle of highly +educated men of literary pursuits, even in default of great geniuses. +The _North American Review_, established in 1815, though it has been +wittily described as "ponderously revolving through space" for a few +years after its foundation, did not exist in an absolute vacuum, but +was scholarly, if somewhat heavy. Webster, to be sure, was a +Massachusetts man--as were Everett and Choate--but his triumphs were +won in the wider field of national politics. There was, however, a +movement at this time, in the intellectual life of Boston and eastern +Massachusetts, which, though not immediately contributory to the finer +kinds of literature, prepared the way, by its clarifying and +stimulating influences, for the eminent writers of the next generation. +This was the Unitarian revolt against Puritan orthodoxy, in which +William Ellery Channing was the principal leader. In a community so +intensely theological as New England, it was natural that any new +movement in thought should find its point of departure in the churches. +Accordingly, the progressive and democratic spirit of the age, which in +other parts of the country took other shapes, assumed in Massachusetts +the form of "liberal Christianity." Arminianism, Socinianism, and +other phases of anti-Trinitarian doctrine, had been latent in some of +the Congregational churches of Massachusetts for a number of years. +But about 1812 the heresy broke out openly, and within a few years from +that date most of the oldest and wealthiest church societies of Boston +and its vicinity had gone over to Unitarianism, and Harvard College had +been captured too. In the controversy that ensued, and which was +carried on in numerous books, pamphlets, sermons, and periodicals, +there were eminent disputants on both sides. So far as this +controversy was concerned with the theological doctrine of the Trinity +it has no place in a history of literature. But the issue went far +beyond that. Channing asserted the dignity of human nature against the +Calvinistic doctrine of innate depravity, and affirmed the rights of +human reason and man's capacity to judge of God. "We must start in +religion from our own souls," he said. And in his _Moral Argument +against Calvinism_, 1820, he wrote: "Nothing is gained to piety by +degrading human nature, for in the competency of this nature to know +and judge of God all piety has its foundation." In opposition to +Edwards's doctrine of necessity he emphasized the freedom of the will. +He maintained that the Calvinistic dogmas of original sin, +fore-ordination, election by grace, and eternal punishment were +inconsistent with the divine perfection, and made God a monster. In +Channing's view the great sanction of religious truth is the moral +sanction, is its agreement with the laws of conscience. He was a +passionate vindicator of the liberty of the individual, not only as +against political oppression, but against the tyranny of public opinion +over thought and conscience: "We were made for free action. This alone +is life, and enters into all that is good and great." This jealous +love of freedom inspired all that he did and wrote. It led him to join +the Antislavery party. It expressed itself in his elaborate +arraignment of Napoleon in the Unitarian organ, the _Christian +Examiner_, for 1827-28; in his _Remarks on Associations_, and his paper +_On the Character and Writings of John Milton_, 1826. This was his +most considerable contribution to literary criticism. It took for a +text Milton's recently discovered _Treatise on Christian Doctrine_--the +tendency of which was anti-Trinitarian--but it began with a general +defense of poetry against "those who are accustomed to speak of poetry +as light reading." This would now seem a somewhat superfluous +introduction to an article in any American review. But it shows the +nature of the _milieu_ through which the liberal movement in Boston had +to make its way. To re-assert the dignity and usefulness of the +beautiful arts was, perhaps, the chief service which the Massachusetts +Unitarians rendered to humanism. The traditional prejudice of the +Puritans against the ornamental side of life had to be softened before +polite literature could find a congenial atmosphere in New England. In +Channing's _Remarks on National Literature_, reviewing a work published +in 1823, he asks the question, "Do we possess what may be called a +national literature?" and answers it, by implication at least, in the +negative. That we do now possess a national literature is in great +part due to the influence of Channing and his associates, although his +own writings, being in the main controversial, and, therefore, of +temporary interest, may not themselves take rank among the permanent +treasures of that literature. + + +1. Washington Irving. _Knickerbocker's History of New York_. _The +Sketch Book_. _Bracebridge Hall_. _Tales of a Traveler_. _The +Alhambra_. _Life of Oliver Goldsmith_. + +2. James Fenimore Cooper. _The Spy_. _The Pilot_. _The Red Rover_. +_The Leather-stocking Tales_. + +3. Daniel Webster. _Great Speeches and Orations_. Boston: Little, +Brown & Co. 1879. + +4. William Ellery Channing. _The Character and Writings of John +Milton_. _The Life and Character of Napoleon Bonaparte_. _Slavery_. +[Vols. I and II of the _Works of William E. Channing_. Boston: James +Munroe & Co. 1841.] + +5. Joseph Rodman Drake. _The Culprit Fay_. _The American Flag_. +[_Selected Poems_. New York. 1835.] + +6. Fitz-Greene Halleck. _Marco Bozzaris_. _Alnwick Castle_. _On the +Death of Drake_. [Poems. New York. 1827.] + + +[1]Compare Carlyle's Herr Diogenes Teufelsdroeckh, in _Sartor Resartus_, +the author of the famous "Clothes Philosophy." + + +[Transcriber's Note: Earlier in this chapter is the abbreviation "Phi. +B. K.". The "Phi" replaces the actual Greek character that was in the +original text.] + + + + +CHAPTER IV. + +THE CONCORD WRITERS. + +1837-1861. + +There has been but one movement in the history of the American mind +which has given to literature a group of writers having coherence +enough to merit the name of a school. This was the great humanitarian +movement, or series of movements, in New England, which, beginning in +the Unitarianism of Channing, ran through its later phase in +transcendentalism, and spent its last strength in the antislavery +agitation and the enthusiasms of the civil war. The second stage of +this intellectual and social revolt was transcendentalism, of which +Emerson wrote, in 1842: "The history of genius and of religion in these +times will be the history of this tendency." It culminated about +1840-41 in the establishment of the _Dial_ and the Brook Farm +Community, although Emerson had given the signal a few years before in +his little volume entitled _Nature_, 1836, his Phi Beta Kappa address +at Harvard on the _American Scholar_, 1837, and his address in 1838 +before the Divinity School at Cambridge. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82) +was the prophet of the sect, and Concord was its Mecca; but the +influence of the new ideas was not confined to the little group of +professed transcendentalists; it extended to all the young writers +within reach, who struck their roots deeper into the soil that it had +loosened and freshened. We owe to it, in great measure, not merely +Emerson, Alcott, Margaret Fuller, and Thoreau, but Hawthorne, Lowell, +Whittier, and Holmes. + +In its strictest sense transcendentalism was a restatement of the +idealistic philosophy, and an application of its beliefs to religion, +nature, and life. But in a looser sense, and as including the more +outward manifestations which drew popular attention most strongly, it +was the name given to that spirit of dissent and protest, of universal +inquiry and experiment, which marked the third and fourth decades of +this century in America, and especially in New England. The movement +was contemporary with political revolutions in Europe and with the +preaching of many novel gospels in religion, in sociology, in science, +education, medicine, and hygiene. New sects were formed, like the +Swedenborgians, Universalists, Spiritualists, Millerites, Second +Adventists, Shakers, Mormons, and Come-outers, some of whom believed in +trances, miracles, and direct revelations from the divine Spirit; +others in the quick coming of Christ, as deduced from the opening of +the seals and the number of the beast in the Apocalypse; and still +others in the reorganization of society and of the family on a +different basis. New systems of education were tried, suggested by the +writings of the Swiss reformer, Pestalozzi, and others. The +pseudo-sciences of mesmerism and of phrenology, as taught by Gall and +Spurzheim, had numerous followers. In medicine, homeopathy, +hydropathy, and what Dr. Holmes calls "kindred delusions," made many +disciples. Numbers of persons, influenced by the doctrines of Graham +and other vegetarians, abjured the use of animal food, as injurious not +only to health but to a finer spirituality. Not a few refused to vote +or pay taxes. The writings of Fourier and Saint-Simon were translated, +and societies were established where co-operation and a community of +goods should take the place of selfish competition. + +About the year 1840 there were some thirty of these "phalansteries" in +America, many of which had their organs in the shape of weekly or +monthly journals, which advocated the principle of Association. The +best known of these was probably the _Harbinger_, the mouth-piece of +the famous Brook Farm Community, which was founded at West Roxbury, +Mass., in 1841, and lasted till 1847. The head man of Brook Farm was +George Ripley, a Unitarian clergyman, who had resigned his pulpit in +Boston to go into the movement, and who after its failure became and +remained for many years literary editor of the _New York Tribune_. +Among his associates were Charles A. Dana--now the editor of the +_Sun_--Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and others not unknown to +fame. The _Harbinger_, which ran from 1845 to 1849--two years after +the break-up of the community--had among its contributors many who were +not Brook Farmers, but who sympathized more or less with the +experiment. Of the number were Horace Greeley, Dr. F. H. Hedge--who +did so much to introduce American readers to German literature--J. S. +Dwight, the musical critic, C. P. Cranch, the poet, and younger men, +like G. W. Curtis and T. W. Higginson. A reader of to-day, looking +into an odd volume of the _Harbinger_, will find in it some stimulating +writing, together with a great deal of unintelligible talk about +"Harmonic Unity," "Love Germination," and other matters now fallen +silent. The most important literary result of this experiment at +"plain living and high thinking," with its queer mixture of culture and +agriculture, was Hawthorne's _Blithedale Romance_, which has for its +background an idealized picture of the community life; whose heroine, +Zenobia, has touches of Margaret Fuller; and whose hero, with his hobby +of prison reform, was a type of the one-idea'd philanthropists that +abounded in such an environment. Hawthorne's attitude was always in +part one of reserve and criticism, an attitude which is apparent in the +reminiscences of Brook Farm in his _American Note Books_, wherein he +speaks with a certain resentment of "Miss Fuller's transcendental +heifer," which hooked the other cows, and was evidently to Hawthorne's +mind not unsymbolic in this respect of Miss Fuller herself. + +It was the day of seers and "Orphic" utterances; the air was fall of +the enthusiasm of humanity and thick with philanthropic projects and +plans for the regeneration of the universe. The figure of the +wild-eyed, long-haired reformer--the man with a panacea--the "crank" of +our later terminology--became a familiar one. He abounded at +non-resistance conventions and meetings of universal peace societies +and of woman's rights associations. The movement had its grotesque +aspects, which Lowell has described in his essay on Thoreau. "Bran had +its apostles and the pre-sartorial simplicity of Adam its martyrs, +tailored impromptu from the tar-pot. . . . Not a few impecunious +zealots abjured the use of money (unless earned by other people), +professing to live on the internal revenues of the spirit. . . . +Communities were established where every thing was to be common but +common sense." + +This ferment has long since subsided, and much of what was then +seething has gone off in vapor or other volatile products. But some +very solid matters have also been precipitated, some crystals of poetry +translucent, symmetrical, enduring. The immediate practical outcome +was disappointing, and the external history of the agitation is a +record of failed experiments, spurious sciences, Utopian philosophies, +and sects founded only to dwindle away or to be re-absorbed into some +form of orthodoxy. In the eyes of the conservative, or the +worldly-minded, or of the plain people who could not understand the +enigmatic utterances of the reformers, the dangerous or ludicrous sides +of transcendentalism were naturally uppermost. Nevertheless the +movement was but a new avatar of the old Puritan spirit; its moral +earnestness, its spirituality, its tenderness for the individual +conscience. Puritanism, too, in its day had run into grotesque +extremes. Emerson bore about the same relation to the absurder +out-croppings of transcendentalism that Milton bore to the New Lights, +Ranters, Fifth Monarchy Men, etc., of his time. There is in him that +mingling of idealism with an abiding sanity, and even a Yankee +shrewdness, which characterizes the race. The practical, inventive, +calculating, money-getting side of the Yankee has been made +sufficiently obvious. But the deep heart of New England is full of +dreams, mysticism, romance: + + "And in the day of sacrifice, + When heroes piled the pyre, + The dismal Massachusetts ice + Burned more than others' fire." + +The one element which the odd and eccentric developments of this +movement shared in common with the real philosophy of transcendentalism +was the rejection of authority and the appeal to the private +consciousness as the sole standard of truth and right. This principle +certainly lay in the ethical systems of Kant and Fichte, the great +transcendentalists of Germany. It had been strongly asserted by +Channing. Nay, it was the starting-point of Puritanism itself, which +had drawn away from the ceremonial religion of the English Church, and +by its Congregational system had made each church society independent +in doctrine and worship. And although Puritan orthodoxy in New England +had grown rigid and dogmatic it had never used the weapons of +obscurantism. By encouraging education to the utmost, it had shown its +willingness to submit its beliefs to the fullest discussion and had put +into the hands of dissent the means with which to attack them. + +In its theological aspect transcendentalism was a departure from +conservative Unitarianism, as that had been from Calvinism. From +Edwards to Channing, from Channing to Emerson and Theodore Parker, +there was a natural and logical unfolding; not logical in the sense +that Channing accepted Edwards's premises and pushed them out to their +conclusions, or that Parker accepted all of Channing's premises, but in +the sense that the rigid pushing out of Edwards's premises into their +conclusions by himself and his followers had brought about a moral +_reductio ad absurdum_ and a state of opinion against which Channing +rebelled; and that Channing, as it seemed to Parker, stopped short in +the carrying out of his own principles. Thus the "Channing +Unitarians," while denying that Christ was God, had held that he was of +divine nature, was the Son of God, and had existed before he came into +the world. While rejecting the doctrine of the "vicarious sacrifice" +they maintained that Christ was a mediator and intercessor, and that +his supernatural nature was testified by miracles. For Parker and +Emerson it was easy to take the step to the assertion that Christ was a +good and great man, divine only in the sense that God possessed him +more fully than any other man known in history; that it was his +preaching and example that brought salvation to men, and not any +special mediation or intercession, and that his own words and acts, and +not miracles, are the only and the sufficient witness to his mission. +In the view of the transcendentalists Christ was as human as Buddha, +Socrates, or Confucius, and the Bible was but one among the "Ethnical +Scriptures" or sacred writings of the peoples, passages from which were +published in the transcendental organ, the _Dial_. As against these +new views Channing Unitarianism occupied already a conservative +position. The Unitarians as a body had never been very numerous +outside of eastern Massachusetts. They had a few churches in New York +and in the larger cities and towns elsewhere, but the sect, as such, +was a local one. Orthodoxy made a sturdy fight against the heresy, +under leaders like Leonard Woods and Moses Stuart, of Andover, and +Lyman Beecher, of Connecticut. In the neighboring State of +Connecticut, for example, there was until lately, for a period of +several years, no distinctly Unitarian congregation worshiping in a +church edifice of its own. On the other hand, the Unitarians claimed, +with justice, that their opinions had, to a great extent, modified the +theology of the orthodox churches. The writings of Horace Bushnell, of +Hartford, one of the most eminent Congregational divines, approach +Unitarianism in their interpretation of the doctrine of the Atonement; +and the "progressive orthodoxy" of Andover is certainly not the +Calvinism of Thomas Hooker or of Jonathan Edwards. But it seemed to +the transcendentalists that conservative Unitarianism was too negative +and "cultured," and Margaret Fuller complained of the coldness of the +Boston pulpits; while, contrariwise, the central thought of +transcendentalism, that the soul has an immediate connection with God, +was pronounced by Dr. Channing a "crude speculation." This was the +thought of Emerson's address in 1838 before the Cambridge Divinity +School, and it was at once made the object of attack by conservative +Unitarians like Henry Ware and Andrews Norton. The latter, in an +address before the same audience, on the _Latest Form of Infidelity_, +said: "Nothing is left that can be called Christianity if its +miraculous character be denied. . . . There can be no intuition, no +direct perception, of the truth of Christianity." And in a pamphlet +supporting the same side of the question he added: "It is not an +intelligible error, but a mere absurdity, to maintain that we are +conscious, or have an intuitive knowledge, of the being of God, of our +own immortality, . . . or of any other fact of religion." Ripley and +Parker replied in Emerson's defense; but Emerson himself would never be +drawn into controversy. He said that he could not argue. He +_announced_ truths; his method was that of the seer, not of the +disputant. In 1832 Emerson, who was a Unitarian clergyman, and +descended from eight generations of clergymen, had resigned the +pastorate of the Second Church of Boston because he could not +conscientiously administer the sacrament of the communion--which he +regarded as a mere act of commemoration--in the sense in which it was +understood by his parishioners. Thenceforth, though he sometimes +occupied Unitarian pulpits, and was, indeed, all his life a kind of +"lay preacher," he never assumed the pastorate of a church. The +representative of transcendentalism in the pulpit was Theodore Parker, +an eloquent preacher, an eager debater, and a prolific writer on many +subjects, whose collected works fill fourteen volumes. Parker was a +man of strongly human traits, passionate, independent, intensely +religious, but intensely radical, who made for himself a large personal +following. The more advanced wing of the Unitarians were called, after +him, "Parkerites." Many of the Unitarian churches refused to +"fellowship" with him; and the large congregation, or audience, which +assembled in Music Hall to hear his sermons was stigmatized as a +"boisterous assembly" which came to hear Parker preach irreligion. + +It has been said that, on its philosophical side, New England +transcendentalism was a restatement of idealism. The impulse came from +Germany, from the philosophical writings of Kant, Fichte, Jacobi, and +Schelling, and from the works of Coleridge and Carlyle, who had +domesticated German thought in England. In Channing's _Remarks on a +National Literature_, quoted in our last chapter, the essayist urged +that our scholars should study the authors of France and Germany as one +means of emancipating American letters from a slavish dependence on +British literature. And in fact German literature began, not long +after, to be eagerly studied in New England. Emerson published an +American edition of Carlyle's _Miscellanies_, including his essays on +German writers that had appeared in England between 1822 and 1830. In +1838 Ripley began to publish _Specimens of Foreign Standard +Literature_, which extended to fourteen volumes. In his work of +translating and supplying introductions to the matter selected, he was +helped by Ripley, Margaret Fuller, John S. Dwight, and others who had +more or less connection with the transcendental movement. + +The definition of the new faith given by Emerson in his lecture on the +_Transcendentalist_, 1842, is as follows; "What is popularly called +transcendentalism among us is idealism. . . . The idealism of the +present day acquired the name of transcendental from the use of that +term by Immanuel Kant, who replied to the skeptical philosophy of +Locke, which insisted that there was nothing in the intellect which was +not previously in the experience of the senses, by showing that there +was a very important class of ideas, or imperative forms, which did not +come by experience, but through which experience was acquired; that +these were intuitions of the mind itself, and he denominated them +_transcendental_ forms." Idealism denies the independent existence of +matter. Transcendentalism claims for the innate ideas of God and the +soul a higher assurance of reality than for the knowledge of the +outside world derived through the senses. Emerson shares the "noble +doubt" of idealism. He calls the universe a shade, a dream, "this +great apparition." "It is a sufficient account of that appearance we +call the world," he wrote in _Nature_, "that God will teach a human +mind, and so makes it the receiver of a certain number of congruent +sensations which we call sun and moon, man and woman, house and trade. +In my utter impotence to test the authenticity of the report of my +senses, to know whether the impressions on me correspond with outlying +objects, what difference does it make whether Orion is up there in +heaven or some god paints the image in the firmament of the soul?" On +the other hand, our evidence of the existence, of God and of our own +souls, and our knowledge of right and wrong, are immediate, and are +independent of the senses. We are in direct communication with the +"Over-soul," the infinite Spirit. "The soul in man is the background +of our being--an immensity not possessed, that cannot be possessed." +"From within or from behind, a light shines through us upon things, and +makes us aware that we are nothing, but the light is all." Revelation +is "an influx of the Divine mind into our mind. It is an ebb of the +individual rivulet before the flowing surges of the sea of life." In +moods of exaltation, and especially in the presence of nature, this +contact of the individual soul with the absolute is felt. "All mean +egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see +all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am +part and particle of God." The existence and attributes of God are not +deducible from history or from natural theology, but are thus directly +given us in consciousness. In his essay on the _Transcendentalist_ +Emerson says: "His experience inclines him to behold the procession of +facts you call the world as flowing perpetually outward from an +invisible, unsounded center in himself; center alike of him and of +them, and necessitating him to regard all things as having a subjective +or relative existence--relative to that aforesaid Unknown Center of +him. There is no bar or wall in the soul where man, the effect, +ceases, and God, the cause, begins. We lie open on one side to the +deeps of spiritual nature, to the attributes of God." + +Emerson's point of view, though familiar to students of philosophy, is +strange to the popular understanding, and hence has arisen the +complaint of his obscurity. Moreover, he apprehended and expressed +these ideas as a poet, in figurative and emotional language, and not as +a metaphysician, in a formulated statement. His own position in +relation to systematic philosophers is described in what he says of +Plato, in his series of sketches entitled _Representative Men_, 1850: +"He has not a system. The dearest disciples and defenders are at +fault. He attempted a theory of the universe, and his theory is not +complete or self-evident. One man thinks he means this, and another +that; he has said one thing in one place, and the reverse of it in +another place." It happens, therefore, that, to many students of more +formal philosophies, Emerson's meaning seems elusive, and he appears to +write from temporary moods and to contradict himself. Had he attempted +a reasoned exposition of the transcendental philosophy, instead of +writing essays and poems, he might have added one more to the number of +system-mongers; but he would not have taken that significant place +which he occupies in the general literature of the time, nor exerted +that wide influence upon younger writers which has been one of the +stimulating forces in American thought. It was because Emerson was a +poet that he is our Emerson. And yet it would be impossible to +disentangle his peculiar philosophical ideas from the body of his +writings and to leave the latter to stand upon their merits as +literature merely. He is the poet of certain high abstractions, and +his religion is central to all his work--excepting, perhaps, his +_English Traits_, 1856, an acute study of national characteristics; and +a few of his essays and verses, which are independent of any particular +philosophical stand-point. + +When Emerson resigned his parish in 1832, he made a short trip to +Europe, where he visited Carlyle at Craigenputtock, and Landor at +Florence. On his return he retired to his birthplace, the village of +Concord, Massachusetts, and settled down among his books and his +fields, becoming a sort of "glorified farmer," but issuing frequently +from his retirement to instruct and delight audiences of thoughtful +people at Boston and at other points all through the country. Emerson +was the perfection of a lyceum lecturer. His manner was quiet but +forcible, his voice of charming quality, and his enunciation clean-cut +and refined. The sentence was his unit in composition. His lectures +seemed to begin anywhere and to end anywhere and to resemble strings of +exquisitely polished sayings rather than continuous discourses. His +printed essays, with unimportant exceptions, were first written and +delivered as lectures. In 1836 he published his first book, _Nature_, +which remains the most systematic statement of his philosophy. It +opened a fresh spring-head in American thought, and the words of its +introduction announced that its author had broken with the past. "Why +should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why +should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of +tradition, and a religion by revelation to us and not the history of +theirs?" + +It took eleven years to sell five hundred copies of this little book. +But the year following its publication the remarkable Phi Beta Kappa +address at Cambridge, on the _American Scholar_, electrified the little +public of the university. This is described by Lowell as "an event +without any former parallel in our literary annals, a scene to be +always treasured in the memory for its picturesqueness and its +inspiration. What crowded and breathless aisles, what windows +clustering with eager heads, what grim silence of foregone dissent!" To +Concord come many kindred spirits, drawn by Emerson's magnetic +attraction. Thither came, from Connecticut, Amos Bronson Alcott, born +a few years before Emerson, whom he outlived; a quaint and benignant +figure, a visionary and a mystic even among the transcendentalists +themselves, and one who lived in unworldly simplicity the life of the +soul. Alcott had taught school at Cheshire, Conn., and afterward at +Boston on an original plan--compelling his scholars, for example, to +flog _him_, when they did wrong, instead of taking a flogging +themselves. The experiment was successful until his _Conversations on +the Gospels_, in Boston, and his insistence upon admitting colored +children to his benches, offended conservative opinion and broke up his +school. Alcott renounced the eating of animal food in 1835. He +believed in the union of thought and manual labor, and supported +himself for some years by the work of his hands, gardening, cutting +wood, etc. He traveled into the West and elsewhere, holding +conversations on philosophy, education, and religion. He set up a +little community at the village of Harvard, Massachusetts, which was +rather less successful than Brook Farm, and he contributed _Orphic +Sayings_ to the _Dial_, which were harder for the exoteric to +understand than even Emerson's _Brahma_ or the _Over-soul_. + +Thither came, also, Sarah Margaret Fuller, the most intellectual woman +of her time in America, an eager student of Greek and German literature +and an ardent seeker after the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. She +threw herself into many causes--such as temperance and the higher +education of women. Her brilliant conversation classes in Boston +attracted many "minds" of her own sex. Subsequently, as literary +editor of the _New York Tribune_, she furnished a wider public with +reviews and book notices of great ability. She took part in the Brook +Farm experiment, and she edited the _Dial_ for a time, contributing to +it the papers afterward expanded into her most considerable book, +_Woman in the Nineteenth Century_. In 1846 she went abroad, and at +Rome took part in the revolutionary movement of Mazzini, having charge +of one of the hospitals during the siege of the city by the French. In +1847 she married an impecunious Italian nobleman, the Marquis Ossoli. +In 1850 the ship on which she was returning to America, with her +husband and child, was wrecked on Fire Island beach and all three were +lost. Margaret Fuller's collected writings are somewhat disappointing, +being mainly of temporary interest. She lives less through her books +than through the memoirs of her friends, Emerson, James Freeman Clarke, +T. W. Higginson, and others who knew her as a personal influence. Her +strenuous and rather overbearing individuality made an impression not +altogether agreeable upon many of her contemporaries. Lowell +introduced a caricature of her as "Miranda" into his _Fable for +Critics_, and Hawthorne's caustic sketch of her, preserved in the +biography written by his son, has given great offence to her admirers. +"Such a determination to _eat_ this huge universe!" was Carlyle's +characteristic comment on her appetite for knowledge and aspirations +after perfection. + +To Concord also came Nathaniel Hawthorne, who took up his residence +there first at the "Old Manse," and afterward at "The Wayside." Though +naturally an idealist, he said that he came too late to Concord to fall +decidedly under Emerson's influence. Of that he would have stood in +little danger even had he come earlier. He appreciated the deep and +subtle quality of Emerson's imagination, but his own shy genius always +jealously guarded its independence and resented the too close +approaches of an alien mind. Among the native disciples of Emerson at +Concord the most noteworthy were Henry Thoreau, and his friend and +biographer, William Ellery Channing, Jr., a nephew of the great +Channing. Channing was a contributor to the _Dial_, and he published a +volume of poems which elicited a fiercely contemptous review from Edgar +Poe. Though disfigured by affectation and obscurity, many of +Channing's verses were distinguished by true poetic feeling, and the +last line of his little piece, _A Poet's Hope_, + + "If my bark sink 'tis to another sea," + +has taken a permanent place in the literature of transcendentalism. + +The private organ of the transcendentalists was the _Dial_, a quarterly +magazine, published from 1840 to 1844, and edited by Emerson and +Margaret Fuller. Among its contributors, besides those already +mentioned, were Ripley, Thoreau, Parker, James Freeman Clarke, Charles +A. Dana, John S. Dwight, C. P. Cranch, Charles Emerson, and William H. +Channing, another nephew of Dr. Channing. It contained, along with a +good deal of rubbish, some of the best poetry and prose that has been +published in America. The most lasting part of its contents were the +contributions of Emerson and Thoreau. But even as a whole it was a +unique way-mark in the history of our literature. + +From time to time Emerson collected and published his lectures under +various titles. A first series of _Essays_ came out in 1841, and a +second in 1844; the _Conduct of Life_ in 1860, _Society and Solitude_ +in 1870, _Letters and Social Aims_ in 1876, and the _Fortune of the +Republic_ in 1878. In 1847 he issued a volume of _Poems_, and 1865 +_Mayday and Other Poems_. These writings, as a whole, were variations +on a single theme, expansions and illustrations of the philosophy set +forth in _Nature_, and his early addresses. They were strikingly +original, rich in thought, filled with wisdom, with lofty morality and +spiritual religion. Emerson, said Lowell, first "cut the cable that +bound us to English thought and gave us a chance at the dangers and +glories of blue water." Nevertheless, as it used to be the fashion to +find an English analogue for every American writer, so that Cooper was +called the American Scott, and Mrs. Sigourney was described as the +Hemans of America, a well-worn critical tradition has coupled Emerson +with Carlyle. That his mind received a nudge from Carlyle's early +essays and from _Sartor Resartus_ is beyond a doubt. They were +life-long friends and correspondents, and Emerson's _Representative +Men_ is, in some sort, a counterpart of Carlyle's _Hero Worship_. But +in temper and style the two writers were widely different. Carlyle's +pessimism and dissatisfaction with the general drift of things gained +upon him more and more, while Emerson was a consistent optimist to the +end. The last of his writings published during his life-time, the +_Fortune of the Republic_, contrasts strangely in its hopefulness with +the desperation of Carlyle's later utterances. Even in presence of the +doubt as to man's personal immortality he takes refuge in a high and +stoical faith. "I think all sound minds rest on a certain preliminary +conviction, namely, that if it be best that conscious personal life +shall continue it will continue, and if not best, then it will not; and +we, if we saw the whole, should of course see that it was better so." +It is this conviction that gives to Emerson's writings their serenity +and their tonic quality at the same time that it narrows the range of +his dealings with life. As the idealist declines to cross-examine +those facts which he regards as merely phenomenal, and looks upon this +outward face of things as upon a mask not worthy to dismay the fixed +soul, so the optimist turns away his eyes from the evil which he +disposes of as merely negative, as the shadow of the good. Hawthorne's +interest in the problem of sin finds little place in Emerson's +philosophy. Passion comes not nigh him, and _Faust_ disturbs him with +its disagreeableness. Pessimism is to him "the only skepticism." + +The greatest literature is that which is most broadly human, or, in +other words, that which will square best with all philosophies. But +Emerson's genius was interpretative rather than constructive. The poet +dwells in the cheerful world of phenomena. He is most the poet who +realizes most intensely the good and the bad of human life. But +Idealism makes experience shadowy and subordinates action to +contemplation. To it the cities of men, with their "frivolous +populations," + + "are but sailing foam-bells + Along thought's causing stream." + +Shakespeare does not forget that the world will one day vanish "like +the baseless fabric of a vision," and that we ourselves are "such stuff +as dreams are made on;" but this is not the mood in which he dwells. +Again: while it is for the philosopher to reduce variety to unity, it +is the poet's task to detect the manifold under uniformity. In the +great creative poets, in Shakespeare and Dante and Goethe, how infinite +the swarm of persons, the multitude of forms! But with Emerson the +type is important, the common element. "In youth we are mad for +persons. But the larger experience of man discovers the identical +nature appearing through them all." "The same--the same!" he exclaims +in his essay on _Plato_. "Friend and foe are of one stuff; the +plowman, the plow, and the furrow are of one stuff." And this is the +thought in _Brahma_: + + "They reckon ill who leave me out; + When me they fly I am the wings: + I am the doubter find the doubt, + And I the hymn the Brahmin sings." + +It is not easy to fancy a writer who holds this altitude toward +"persons" descending to the composition of a novel or a play. Emerson +showed, indeed, a fine power of character-analysis in his _English +Traits_ and _Representative Men_ and in his memoirs of Thoreau and +Margaret Fuller. There is even a sort of dramatic humor in his +portrait of Socrates. But upon the whole he stands midway between +constructive artists, whose instinct it is to tell a story or sing a +song, and philosophers, like Schelling, who give poetic expression to a +system of thought. He belongs to the class of minds of which Sir +Thomas Browne is the best English example. He set a high value upon +Browne, to whose style his own, though far more sententious, bears a +resemblance. Browne's saying, for example, "All things are artificial, +for nature is the art of God," sounds like Emerson, whose workmanship, +for the rest, in his prose essays was exceedingly fine and close. He +was not afraid to be homely and racy in expressing thought of the +highest spirituality. "Hitch your wagon to a star" is a good instance +of his favorite manner. + +Emerson's verse often seems careless in technique. Most of his pieces +are scrappy and have the air of runic rimes, or little oracular +"voicings"--as they say at Concord--in rhythmic shape, of single +thoughts on "Worship," "Character," "Heroism," "Art," "Politics," +"Culture," etc. The content is the important thing, and the form is +too frequently awkward or bald. Sometimes, indeed, in the +clear-obscure of Emerson's poetry the deep wisdom of the thought finds +its most natural expression in the imaginative simplicity of the +language. But though this artlessness in him became too frequently in +his imitators, like Thoreau and Ellery Channing, an obtruded +simplicity, among his own poems are many that leave nothing to be +desired in point of wording and of verse. His _Hymn Sung at the +Completion of the Concord Monument_, in 1836, is the perfect model of +an occasional poem. Its lines were on every one's lips at the time of +the centennial celebrations in 1876, and "the shot heard round the +world" has hardly echoed farther than the song which chronicled it. +Equally current is the stanza from _Voluntaries_: + + "So nigh is grandeur to our dust, + So near is God to man, + When Duty whispers low, 'Thou must,' + The youth replies, 'I can.'" + +So, too, the famous lines from the _Problem_: + + "The hand that rounded Peter's dome, + And groined the aisles of Christian Rome, + Wrought in a sad sincerity. + Himself from God he could not free; + He builded better than he knew; + The conscious stone to beauty grew." + +The most noteworthy of Emerson's pupils was Henry David Thoreau, "the +poet-naturalist." After his graduation from Harvard College, in 1837, +Thoreau engaged in school-teaching and in the manufacture of +lead-pencils, but soon gave up all regular business and devoted himself +to walking, reading, and the study of nature. He was at one time +private tutor in a family on Staten Island, and he supported himself +for a season by doing odd jobs in land-surveying for the farmers about +Concord. In 1845 he built, with his own hands, a small cabin on the +banks of Walden Pond, near Concord, and lived there in seclusion for +two years. His expenses during these years were nine cents a day, and +he gave an account of his experiment in his most characteristic book, +_Walden_, published in 1854. His _Week on the Concord and Merrimac +Rivers_ appeared in 1849. From time to time he went farther afield, +and his journeys were reported in _Cape Cod_, the _Maine Woods_, +_Excursions_, and _A Yankee in Canada_, all of which, as well as a +volume of _Letters_ and _Early Spring in Massachusetts_, have been +given to the public since his death, which happened in 1862. No one +has lived so close to nature, and written of it so intimately, as +Thoreau. His life was a lesson in economy and a sermon on Emerson's +text, "Lessen your denominator." He wished to reduce existence to the +simplest terms--to + + "live all alone + Close to the bone, + And where life is sweet + Constantly eat." + +He had a passion for the wild, and seems like an Anglo-Saxon reversion +to the type of the Red Indian. The most distinctive note in Thoreau is +his inhumanity. Emerson spoke of him as a "perfect piece of stoicism." +"Man," said Thoreau, "is only the point on which I stand." He strove +to realize the objective life of nature--nature in its aloofness from +man; to identify himself, with the moose and the mountain. He +listened, with his ear close to the ground, for the voice of the earth. +"What are the trees saying?" he exclaimed. Following upon the trail of +the lumberman, he asked the primeval wilderness for its secret, and + + "saw beneath dim aisles, in odorous beds, + The slight linnaea hang its twin-born heads." + +He tried to interpret the thought of Ktaadn and to fathom the meaning +of the billows on the back of Cape Cod, in their indifference to the +shipwrecked bodies that they rolled ashore. "After sitting in my +chamber many days, reading the poets, I have been out early on a foggy +morning and heard the cry of an owl in a neighboring wood as from a +nature behind the common, unexplored by science or by literature. None +of the feathered race has yet realized my youthful conceptions of the +woodland depths. I had seen the red election-birds brought from their +recesses on my comrade's string, and fancied that their plumage would +assume stranger and more dazzling colors, like the tints of evening, in +proportion as I advanced farther into the darkness and solitude of the +forest. Still less have I seen such strong and wild tints on any +poet's string." + +It was on the mystical side that Thoreau apprehended transcendentalism. +Mysticism has been defined as the soul's recognition of its identity +with nature. This thought lies plainly in Schelling's philosophy, and +he illustrated it by his famous figure of the magnet. Mind and nature +are one; they are the positive and negative poles of the magnet. In +man, the Absolute--that is, God--becomes conscious of himself; makes of +himself, as nature, an object to himself as mind. "The souls of men," +said Schelling, "are but the innumerable individual eyes with which our +infinite World-Spirit beholds himself." This thought is also clearly +present in Emerson's view of nature, and has caused him to be accused +of pantheism. But if by pantheism is meant the doctrine that the +underlying principle of the universe is matter or force, none of the +transcendentalists was a pantheist. In their view nature was divine. +Their poetry is always haunted by the sense of a spiritual reality +which abides beyond the phenomena. Thus in Emerson's _Two Rivers_: + + "Thy summer voice, Musketaquit,[1] + Repeats the music of the rain, + But sweeter rivers pulsing flit + Through thee as thou through Concord plain. + + "Thou in thy narrow banks art pent; + The stream I love unbounded goes; + Through flood and sea and firmament, + Through light, through life, it forward flows. + + "I see the inundation sweet, + I hear the spending of the stream, + Through years, through men, through nature fleet, + Through passion, thought, through power and dream." + +This mood occurs frequently in Thoreau. The hard world of matter +becomes suddenly all fluent and spiritual, and he sees himself in +it--sees God. "This earth," he cries, "which is spread out like a map +around me, is but the lining of my inmost soul exposed." "In _me_ is +the sucker that I see;" and, of Walden Pond, + + "I am its stony shore, + And the breeze that passes o'er." + +"Suddenly old Time winked at me--ah, you know me, you rogue--and news +had come that IT was well. That ancient universe is in such capital +health, I think, undoubtedly, it will never die. . . . I see, smell, +taste, hear, feel that ever-lasting something to which we are allied, +at once our maker, our abode, our destiny, our very selves." It was +something ulterior that Thoreau sought in nature. "The other world," +he wrote, "is all my art: my pencils will draw no other; my jack-knife +will cut nothing else." Thoreau did not scorn, however, like Emerson, +to "examine too microscopically the universal tablet." He was a close +observer and accurate reporter of the ways of birds and plants and the +minuter aspects of nature. He has had many followers, who have +produced much pleasant literature on out-door life. But in none of +them is there that unique combination of the poet, the naturalist, and +the mystic which gives his page its wild original flavor. He had the +woodcraft of a hunter and the eye of a botanist, but his imagination +did not stop short with the fact. The sound of a tree falling in the +Maine woods was to him "as though a door had shut somewhere in the damp +and shaggy wilderness." He saw small things in cosmic relations. His +trip down the tame Concord has for the reader the excitement of a +voyage of exploration into far and unknown regions. The river just +above Sherman's Bridge, in time of flood "when the wind blows freshly +on a raw March day, heaving up the surface into dark and sober +billows," was like Lake Huron, "and you may run aground on Cranberry +Island," and "get as good a freezing there as anywhere on the +North-west coast." He said that most of the phenomena described in +Kane's voyages could be observed in Concord. + +The literature of transcendentalism was like the light of the stars in +a winter night, keen and cold and high. It had the pale cast of +thought, and was almost too spiritual and remote to "hit the sense of +mortal sight." But it was at least indigenous. If not an American +literature--not national and not inclusive of all sides of American +life--it was, at all events, a genuine New England literature and true +to the spirit of its section. The tough Puritan stock had at last put +forth a blossom which compared with the warm, robust growths of English +soil even as the delicate wind flower of the northern spring compares +with the cowslips and daisies of old England. + +In 1842 Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-64), the greatest American romancer, +came to Concord. He had recently left Brook Farm, had just been +married, and with his bride he settled down in the "Old Manse" for +three paradisaical years. A picture of this protracted honeymoon and +this sequestered life, as tranquil as the slow stream on whose banks it +was passed, is given in the introductory chapter to his _Mosses from an +Old Manse_, 1846, and in the more personal and confidential records of +his _American Note Books_, posthumously published. Hawthorne was +thirty-eight when he took his place among the Concord literati. His +childhood and youth had been spent partly at his birthplace, the old +and already somewhat decayed sea-port town of Salem, and partly at his +grandfather's farm on Sebago Lake, in Maine, then on the edge of the +primitive forest. Maine did not become a State, indeed, until 1820, +the year before Hawthorne entered Bowdoin College, whence he was +graduated in 1825, in the same class with Henry W. Longfellow and one +year behind Franklin Pierce, afterward President of the United States. +After leaving college Hawthorne buried himself for years in the +seclusion of his home at Salem. His mother, who was early widowed, had +withdrawn entirely from the world. For months at a time Hawthorne kept +his room, seeing no other society than that of his mother and sisters, +reading all sorts of books and writing wild tales, most of which he +destroyed as soon as he had written them. At twilight he would emerge +from the house for a solitary ramble through the streets of the town or +along the sea-side. Old Salem had much that was picturesque in its +associations. It had been the scene of the witch trials in the +seventeenth century, and it abounded in ancient mansions, the homes of +retired whalers and India merchants. Hawthorne's father had been a +ship captain, and many of his ancestors had followed the sea. One of +his forefathers, moreover, had been a certain Judge Hawthorne, who in +1691 had sentenced several of the witches to death. The thought of +this affected Hawthorne's imagination with a pleasing horror, and he +utilized it afterward in his _House of the Seven Gables_. Many of the +old Salem houses, too, had their family histories, with now and then +the hint of some obscure crime or dark misfortune which haunted +posterity with its curse till all the stock died out or fell into +poverty and evil ways, as in the Pyncheon family of Hawthorne's +romance. In the preface to the _Marble Faun_ Hawthorne wrote: "No +author without a trial can conceive of the difficulty of writing a +romance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no +mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor any thing but a +commonplace prosperity in broad and simple daylight." And yet it may +be doubted whether any environment could have been found more fitted to +his peculiar genius than this of his native town, or any preparation +better calculated to ripen the faculty that was in him than these long, +lonely years of waiting and brooding thought. From time to time he +contributed a story or a sketch to some periodical, such as S. G. +Goodrich's annual, the _Token_, or the _Knickerbocker Magazine_. Some +of these attracted the attention of the judicious; but they were +anonymous and signed by various _noms de plume_, and their author was +at this time--to use his own words--"the obscurest man of letters in +America." In 1828 he had issued anonymously and at his own expense a +short romance, entitled _Fanshawe_. It had little success, and copies +of the first edition are now exceedingly rare. In 1837 he published a +collection of his magazine pieces under the title, _Twice-Told Tales_. +The book was generously praised in the _North American Review_ by his +former classmate, Longfellow; and Edgar Poe showed his keen critical +perception by predicting that the writer would easily put himself at +the head of imaginative literature in America if he would discard +allegory, drop short stories, and compose a genuine romance. Poe +compared Hawthorne's work with that of the German romancer, Tieck, and +it is interesting to find confirmation of this dictum in passages of +the _American Note Books_, in which Hawthorne speaks of laboring over +Tieck with a German dictionary. The _Twice-Told Tales_ are the work of +a recluse, who makes guesses at life from a knowledge of his own heart, +acquired by a habit of introspection, but who has had little contact +with men. Many of them were shadowy, and others were morbid and +unwholesome. But their gloom was of an interior kind, never the +physically horrible of Poe. It arose from weird psychological +situations like that of _Ethan Brand_ in his search for the +unpardonable sin. Hawthorne was true to the inherited instinct of +Puritanism; he took the conscience for his theme, and in these early +tales he was already absorbed in the problem of evil, the subtle ways +in which sin works out its retribution, and the species of fate or +necessity that the wrong-doer makes for himself in the inevitable +sequences of his crime. Hawthorne was strongly drawn toward symbols +and types, and never quite followed Poe's advice to abandon allegory. +The _Scarlet Letter_ and his other romances are not, indeed, strictly +allegories, since the characters are men and women and not mere +personifications of abstract qualities. Still, they all have a certain +allegorical tinge. In the _Marble Faun_, for example, Hilda, Kenyon, +Miriam, and Donatello have been ingeniously explained as +personifications respectively of the conscience, the reason, the +imagination, and the senses. Without going so far as this, it is +possible to see in these and in Hawthorne's other creations something +typical and representative. He uses his characters like algebraic +symbols to work out certain problems with; they are rather more and yet +rather less than flesh and blood individuals. The stories in +_Twice-Told Tales_ and in the second collection, _Mosses from an Old +Manse_, 1846, are more openly allegorical than his later work. Thus +the _Minister's Black Veil_ is a sort of anticipation of Arthur +Dimmesdale in the _Scarlet Letter_. From 1846 to 1849 Hawthorne held +the position of surveyor of the Custom House of Salem. In the preface +to the _Scarlet Letter_ he sketched some of the government officials +with whom this office had brought him into contact in a way that gave +some offense to the friends of the victims and a great deal of +amusement to the public. Hawthorne's humor was quiet and fine, like +Irving's, but less genial and with a more satiric edge to it. The book +last named was written at Salem and published in 1850, just before its +author's removal to Lenox, now a sort of inland Newport, but then an +unfashionable resort among the Berkshire hills. Whatever obscurity may +have hung over Hawthorne hitherto was effectually dissolved by this +powerful tale, which was as vivid in coloring as the implication of its +title. Hawthorne chose for his background the somber life of the early +settlers of New England. Ho had always been drawn toward this part of +American history, and in _Twice-Told Tales_ had given some +illustrations of it in _Endicott's Red Cross_ and _Legends of the +Province House_. Against this dark foil moved in strong relief the +figures of Hester Prynne, the woman taken in adultery; her paramour, +the Rev. Arthur Dimmesdale; her husband, old Roger Chillingworth; and +her illegitimate child. In tragic power, in its grasp of the +elementary passions of human nature and its deep and subtle insight +into the inmost secrets of the heart, this is Hawthorne's greatest +book. He never crowded his canvas with figures. In the _Blithedale +Romance_ and the _Marble Faun_ there is the same _parti carre_ or group +of four characters. In the _House of the Seven Gables_ there are five. +The last mentioned of these, published in 1852, was of a more subdued +intensity than the _Scarlet Letter_, but equally original, and, upon +the whole, perhaps equally good. The _Blithedale Romance_, published +in the same year, though not strikingly inferior to the others, adhered +more to conventional patterns in its plot and in the sensational nature +of its ending. The suicide of the heroine by drowning, and the +terrible scene of the recovery of her body, were suggested to the +author by an experience of his own on Concord River, the account of +which, in his own words, may be read in Julian Hawthorne's _Nathaniel +Hawthorne and His Wife_. In 1852 Hawthorne returned to Concord and +bought the "Wayside" property, which he retained until his death. But +in the following year his old college friend Pierce, now become +President, appointed him consul to Liverpool, and he went abroad for +seven years. The most valuable fruit of his foreign residence was the +romance of the _Marble Faun_, 1860, the longest of his fictions and the +richest in descriptive beauty. The theme of this was the development +of the soul through the experience of sin. There is a haunting mystery +thrown about the story, like a soft veil of mist, veiling the beginning +and the end. There is even a delicate teasing suggestion of the +preternatural in Donatello, the Faun, a creation as original as +Shakespeare's Caliban or Fouque's Undine, and yet quite on this side +the border-line of the human. _Our Old Home_, a book of charming +papers on England, was published in 1863. Manifold experience of life +and contact with men, affording scope for his always keen observation, +had added range, fullness, warmth to the imaginative subtlety which had +manifested itself even in his earliest tales. Two admirable books for +children, the _Wonder Book_ and _Tanglewood Tales_, in which the +classical mythologies were retold, should also be mentioned in the list +of Hawthorne's writings, as well as the _American_, _English_, and +_Italian Note Books_, the first of which contains the seed-thoughts of +some of his finished works, together with hundreds of hints for plots, +episodes, descriptions, etc., which he never found time to work out. +Hawthorne's style, in his first sketches and stories a little stilted +and "bookish," gradually acquired an exquisite perfection, and is as +well worth study as that of any prose classic in the English tongue. + +Hawthorne was no transcendentalist. He dwelt much in a world of ideas, +and he sometimes doubted whether the tree on the bank or its image in +the stream were the more real. But this had little in common with the +philosophical idealism of his neighbors. He reverenced Emerson, and he +held kindly intercourse--albeit a silent man and easily bored--with +Thoreau and Ellery Channing, and even with Margaret Fuller. But his +sharp eyes saw whatever was whimsical or weak in the apostles of the +new faith. He had little enthusiasm for causes or reforms, and among +so many Abolitionists he remained a Democrat, and even wrote a campaign +life of his friend Pierce. + +The village of Concord has perhaps done more for American literature +than the city of New York. Certainly there are few places where +associations, both patriotic and poetic, cluster so thickly. At one +side of the grounds of the Old Manse--which has the river at its +back--runs down a shaded lane to the Concord monument and the figure of +the Minute Man and the successor of "the rude bridge that arched the +flood." Scarce two miles away, among the woods, is little +Walden--"God's drop." The men who made Concord famous are asleep in +Sleepy Hollow, yet still their memory prevails to draw seekers after +truth to the Concord Summer School of Philosophy, which met annually, a +few years since, to reason high of "God, Freedom, and Immortality," +next door to the "Wayside," and under the hill on whose ridge Hawthorne +wore a path as he paced up and down beneath the hemlocks. + + +1. Ralph Waldo Emerson. _Nature_. _The American Scholar_. _Literary +Ethics_. _The Transcendentalism_. _The Over-soul_. _Address before +the Cambridge Divinity School_. _English Traits_. _Representative +Men_. _Poems_. + +2. Henry David Thoreau. _Excursions_. _Walden_. _A Week on the +Concord and Merrimac Rivers_. _Cape Cod_. _The Maine Woods_. + +3. Nathaniel Hawthorne. _Mosses from an Old Manse_. _The Scarlet +Letter_. _The House of the Seven Gables_. _The Blithedale Romance_. +_The Marble Faun_. _Our Old Home_. + +4. _Transcendentalism in New England_. By O. B. Frothingham. New +York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. 1875. + + +[1]The Indian name of Concord River. + + + + +CHAPTER V. + +THE CAMBRIDGE SCHOLARS. + +1837-1861. + +With few exceptions, the men who have made American literature what it +is have been college graduates. And yet our colleges have not commonly +been, in themselves, literary centers. Most of them have been small +and poor, and situated in little towns or provincial cities. Their +alumni scatter far and wide immediately after graduation, and even +those of them who may feel drawn to a life of scholarship or letters +find little to attract them at the home of their _alma mater_, and seek +by preference the larger cities, where periodicals and publishing +houses offer some hope of support in a literary career. Even in the +older and better equipped universities the faculty is usually a corps +of working scholars, each man intent upon his specialty and rather +inclined to undervalue merely "literary" performance. In many cases +the fastidious and hypercritical turn of mind which besets the scholar, +the timid conservatism which naturally characterizes an ancient seat of +learning, and the spirit of theological conformity which suppresses +free discussion, have exerted their benumbing influence upon the +originality and creative impulse of their inmates. Hence it happens +that, while the contributions of American college teachers to the exact +sciences, to theology and philology, metaphysics, political philosophy, +and the severer branches of learning have been honorable and important, +they have as a class made little mark upon the general literature of +the country. The professors of literature in our colleges are usually +persons who have made no additions to literature, and the professors of +rhetoric seem ordinarily to have been selected to teach students how to +write for the reason that they themselves have never written any thing +that any one has ever read. + +To these remarks the Harvard College of some fifty years ago offers +some striking exceptions. It was not the large and fashionable +university that it has lately grown to be, with its multiplied elective +courses, its numerous faculty, and its somewhat motley collection of +undergraduates; but a small school of the classics and mathematics, +with something of ethics, natural science, and the modern languages +added to its old-fashioned, scholastic curriculum, and with a very +homogeneous _clientele_, drawn mainly from the Unitarian families of +eastern Massachusetts. Nevertheless a finer intellectual life, in many +respects, was lived at old Cambridge within the years covered by this +chapter than nowadays at the same place, or at any date in any other +American university town. The neighborhood of Boston, where the +commercial life has never so entirely overlain the intellectual as in +New York and Philadelphia, has been a standing advantage to Harvard +College. The recent upheaval in religious thought had secured +toleration and made possible that free and even audacious interchange +of ideas without which a literary atmosphere is impossible. From +these, or from whatever causes, it happened that the old Harvard +scholarship had an elegant and tasteful side to it, so that the dry +erudition of the schools blossomed into a generous culture, and there +were men in the professors' chairs who were no less efficient as +teachers because they were also poets, orators, wits, and men of the +world. In the seventeen years from 1821 to 1839 there were graduated +from Harvard College Emerson, Holmes, Sumner, Phillips, Motley, +Thoreau, Lowell, and Edward Everett Hale; some of whom took up their +residence at Cambridge, others at Boston, and others at Concord, which +was quite as much a spiritual suburb of Boston as Cambridge was. In +1836, when Longfellow became professor of modern languages at Harvard, +Sumner was lecturing in the Law School. The following year--in which +Thoreau took his bachelor's degree--witnessed the delivery of Emerson's +Phi Beta Kappa lecture on the _American Scholar_ in the college chapel, +and Wendell Phillips's speech on the _Murder of Lovejoy_ in Faneuil +Hall. Lowell, whose description of the impression produced by the +former of these famous addresses has been quoted in a previous chapter, +was an under-graduate at the time. He took his degree in 1838, and in +1855 succeeded Longfellow in the chair of modern languages. Holmes had +been chosen in 1847 professor of anatomy and physiology in the Medical +School--a position which he held until 1882. The historians, Prescott +and Bancroft, had been graduated in 1814 and 1817 respectively. The +former's first important publication, _Ferdinand and Isabella_, +appeared in 1837. Bancroft had been a tutor in the college in 1822-23, +and the initial volume of his _History of the United States_ was issued +in 1835. Another of the Massachusetts school of historical writers, +Francis Parkman, took his first degree at Harvard in 1844. Cambridge +was still hardly more than a village, a rural outskirt of Boston, such +as Lowell described it in his article, _Cambridge Thirty Years Ago_, +originally contributed to _Putnam's Monthly_ in 1853, and afterward +reprinted in his _Fireside Travels_, 1864. The situation of a +university scholar in old Cambridge was thus an almost ideal one. +Within easy reach of a great city, with its literary and social clubs, +its theaters, lecture courses, public meetings, dinner-parties, etc., +he yet lived withdrawn in an academic retirement among elm-shaded +avenues and leafy gardens, the dome of the Boston Statehouse looming +distantly across the meadows where the Charles laid its "steel blue +sickle" upon the variegated, plush-like ground of the wide marsh. +There was thus, at all times during the quarter of a century embraced +between 1837 and 1861, a group of brilliant men resident in or about +Cambridge and Boston, meeting frequently and intimately, and exerting +upon one another a most stimulating influence. Some of the closer +circles--all concentric to the university--of which this group was +loosely composed were laughed at by outsiders as "Mutual Admiration +Societies." Such was, for instance, the "Five of Clubs," whose members +were Longfellow, Sumner, C. C. Felton, professor of Greek at Harvard, +and afterward president of the college; G. S. Hillard, a graceful +lecturer, essayist, and poet, of a somewhat amateurish kind; and Henry +R. Cleveland, of Jamaica Plain, a lover of books and a writer of them. + +Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-82), the most widely read and loved of +American poets--or, indeed, of all contemporary poets in England and +America--though identified with Cambridge for nearly fifty years, was a +native of Portland, Maine, and a graduate of Bowdoin College, in the +same class with Hawthorne. Since leaving college, in 1825, he had +studied and traveled for some years in Europe, and had held the +professorship of modern languages at Bowdoin. He had published several +text-books, a number of articles on the Romance languages and +literatures in the _North American Review_, a thin volume of metrical +translations from the Spanish, a few original poems in various +periodicals, and the pleasant sketches of European travel entitled +_Outre-Mer_. But Longfellow's fame began with the appearance in 1839 +of his _Voices of the Night_. Excepting an earlier collection by +Bryant this was the first volume of real poetry published in New +England, and it had more warmth and sweetness, a greater richness and +variety, than Bryant's work ever possessed. Longfellow's genius was +almost feminine in its flexibility and its sympathetic quality. It +readily took the color of its surroundings and opened itself eagerly to +impressions of the beautiful from every quarter, but especially from +books. This first volume contained a few things written during his +student days at Bowdoin, one of which, a blank-verse piece on _Autumn_, +clearly shows the influence of Bryant's _Thanatopsis_. Most of these +juvenilia had nature for their theme, but they were not so sternly true +to the New England landscape as Thoreau or Bryant. The skylark and the +ivy appear among their scenic properties, and in the best of them, +_Woods in Winter_, it is the English "hawthorn" and not any American +tree, through which the gale is made to blow, just as later Longfellow +uses "rooks" instead of crows. The young poet's fancy was +instinctively putting out feelers toward the storied lands of the Old +World, and in his _Hymn of the Moravian Nuns of Bethlehem_ he +transformed the rude church of the Moravian sisters to a cathedral with +"glimmering tapers," swinging censers, chancel, altar, cowls, and "dim +mysterious aisle." After his visit to Europe Longfellow returned +deeply imbued with the spirit of romance. It was his mission to refine +our national taste by opening to American readers, in their own +vernacular, new springs of beauty in the literatures of foreign +tongues. The fact that this mission was interpretive, rather than +creative, hardly detracts from Longfellow's true originality. It +merely indicates that his inspiration came to him in the first instance +from other sources than the common life about him. He naturally began +as a translator, and this first volume contained, among other things, +exquisite renderings from the German of Uhland, Salis, and Mueller, from +the Danish, French, Spanish, and Anglo-Saxon, and a few passages from +Dante. Longfellow remained all his life a translator, and in subtler +ways than by direct translation he infused the fine essence of European +poetry into his own. He loved + + "Tales that have the rime of age + And chronicles of eld." + +The golden light of romance is shed upon his page, and it is his habit +to borrow mediaeval and Catholic imagery from his favorite Middle Ages, +even when writing of American subjects. To him the clouds are hooded +friars, that "tell their beads in drops of rain;" the midnight winds +blowing through woods and mountain passes are chanting solemn masses +for the repose of the dying year, and the strain ends with the prayer-- + + "Kyrie, eleyson, + Christe, eleyson." + +In his journal he wrote characteristically: "The black shadows lie upon +the grass like engravings in a book. Autumn has written his rubric on +the illuminated leaves, the wind turns them over and chants like a +friar." This in Cambridge, of a moonshiny night, on the first day of +the American October! But several of the pieces in _Voices of the +Night_ sprang more immediately from the poet's own inner experience. +The _Hymn to the Night_, the _Psalm of Life_, _The Reaper and the +Flowers_, _Footsteps of Angels_, _The Light of Stars_, and _The +Beleaguered City_ spoke of love, bereavement, comfort, patience, and +faith. In these lovely songs, and in many others of the same kind +which he afterward wrote, Longfellow touched the hearts of all his +countrymen. America is a country of homes, and Longfellow, as the poet +of sentiment and of the domestic affections, became and remains far +more general in his appeal than such a "cosmic" singer as Whitman, who +is still practically unknown to the "fierce democracy" to which he has +addressed himself. It would be hard to overestimate the influence for +good exerted by the tender feeling and the pure and sweet morality +which the hundreds of thousands of copies of Longfellow's writings, +that have been circulated among readers of all classes in America and +England, have brought with them. + +Three later collections, _Ballads and Other Poems_, 1842, _The Belfry +of Bruges_, 1846; and _The Seaside and the Fireside_, 1850, comprise +most of what is noteworthy in Longfellow's minor poetry. The first of +these embraced, together with some renderings from the German and the +Scandinavian languages, specimens of stronger original work than the +author had yet put forth; namely, the two powerful ballads of _The +Skeleton in Armor_ and _The Wreck of the Hesperus_. The former of +these, written in the swift leaping meter of Drayton's _Ode to the +Cambro Britons on their Harp_, was suggested by the digging up of a +mail-clad skeleton at Fall River--a circumstance which the poet linked +with the traditions about the Round Tower at Newport, thus giving to +the whole the spirit of a Norse viking song of war and of the sea. +_The Wreck of the Hesperus_ was occasioned by the news of shipwrecks on +the coast near Gloucester and by the name of a reef--"Norman's +Woe"--where many of them took place. It was written one night between +twelve and three, and cost the poet, he said, "hardly an effort." +Indeed, it is the spontaneous ease and grace, the unfailing taste of +Longfellow's lines, which are their best technical quality. There is +nothing obscure or esoteric about his poetry. If there is little +passion or intellectual depth, there is always genuine poetic feeling, +often a very high order of imagination, and almost invariably the +choice of the right word. In this volume were also included _The +Village Blacksmith_ and _Excelsior_. The latter, and the _Psalm of +Life_, have had a "damnable iteration" which causes them to figure as +Longfellow's most popular pieces. They are by no means, however, among +his best. They are vigorously expressed common-places of that +hortatory kind which passes for poetry, but is, in reality, a vague +species of preaching. + +In _The Belfry of Bruges_ and _The Seaside and the Fireside_ the +translations were still kept up, and among the original pieces were +_The Occupation of Orion_--the most imaginative of all Longfellow's +poems; _Seaweed_, which has very noble stanzas, the favorite _Old Clock +on the Stairs_, _The Building of the Ship_, with its magnificent +closing apostrophe to the Union, and _The Fire of Driftwood_, the +subtlest in feeling of any thing that the poet ever wrote. With these +were verses of a more familiar quality, such as _The Bridge_, +_Resignation_, and _The Day Is Done_, and many others, all reflecting +moods of gentle and pensive sentiment, and drawing from analogies in +nature or in legend lessons which, if somewhat obvious, were expressed +with perfect art. Like Keats, he apprehended every thing on its +beautiful side. Longfellow was all poet. Like Ophelia in Hamlet, + + "Thought and affection, passion, hell itself, + _He_ turns to favor and to prettiness." + +He cared very little about the intellectual movement of the age. The +transcendental ideas of Emerson passed over his head and left him +undisturbed. For politics he had that gentlemanly distaste which the +cultivated class in America had already begun to entertain. In 1842 he +printed a small volume of _Poems on Slavery_, which drew commendation +from his friend Sumner, but had nothing of the fervor of Whittier's or +Lowell's utterances on the same subject. It is interesting to compare +his journals with Hawthorne's _American Note Books_, and to observe in +what very different ways the two writers made prey of their daily +experiences for literary material. A favorite haunt of Longfellow's +was the bridge between Boston and Cambridgeport, the same which he put +into verse in his poem, _The Bridge_. "I always stop on the bridge," +he writes in his journal; "tide waters are beautiful. From the ocean +up into the land they go, like messengers, to ask why the tribute has +not been paid. The brooks and rivers answer that there has been little +harvest of snow and rain this year. Floating sea-wood and kelp is +carried up into the meadows, as returning sailors bring oranges in +bandanna handkerchiefs to friends in the country." And again: "We +leaned for a while on the wooden rail and enjoyed the silvery +reflection on the sea, making sundry comparisons. Among other thoughts +we had this cheering one, that the whole sea was flashing with this +heavenly light, though we saw it only in a single track; the dark waves +are the dark providences of God; luminous, though not to us; and even +to ourselves in another position." "Walk on the bridge, both ends of +which are lost in the fog, like human life midway between two +eternities; beginning and ending in mist." In Hawthorne an allegoric +moaning is usually something deeper and subtler than this, and seldom +so openly expressed. Many of Longfellow's poems--the _Beleaguered +City_, for example--may be definitely divided into two parts; in the +first, a story is told or a natural phenomenon described; in the +second, the spiritual application of the parable is formally set forth. +This method became with him almost a trick of style, and his readers +learn to look for the _hoec fabula docet_ at the end as a matter of +course. As for the prevailing optimism in Longfellow's view of +life--of which the above passage is an instance--it seems to be in him +an affair of temperament, and not, as in Emerson, the result of +philosophic insight. Perhaps, however, in the last analysis optimism +and pessimism are subjective--the expression of temperament or +individual experience, since the facts of life are the same, whether +seen through Schopenhauer's eyes or through Emerson's. If there is any +particular in which Longfellow's inspiration came to him at first hand +and not through books, it is in respect to the aspects of the sea. On +this theme no American poet has written more beautifully and with a +keener sympathy than the author of _The Wreck of the Hesperus_ and of +_Seaweed_. + +In 1847 was published the long poem of _Evangeline_. The story of the +Acadian peasant girl, who was separated from her lover in the +dispersion of her people by the English troops, and after weary +wanderings and a life-long search, found him at last, an old man dying +in a Philadelphia hospital, was told to Longfellow by the Rev. H. L. +Conolly, who had previously suggested it to Hawthorne as a subject for +a story. Longfellow, characteristically enough, "got up" the local +color for his poem from Haliburton's account of the dispersion of the +Grand-Pre Acadians, from Darby's _Geographical Description of +Louisiana_ and Watson's _Annals of Philadelphia_. He never needed to +go much outside of his library for literary impulse and material. +Whatever may be held as to Longfellow's inventive powers as a creator +of characters or an interpreter of American life, his originality as an +artist is manifested by his successful domestication in _Evangeline_ of +the dactylic hexameter, which no English poet had yet used with effect. +The English poet, Arthur Hugh Clough, who lived for a time in +Cambridge, followed Longfellow's example in the use of hexameter in his +_Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich_, so that we have now arrived at the +time--a proud moment for American letters--when the works of our +writers began to react upon the literature of Europe. But the beauty +of the descriptions in _Evangeline_ and the pathos--somewhat too drawn +out--of the story made it dear to a multitude of readers who cared +nothing about the technical disputes of Poe and other critics as to +whether or not Longfellow's lines were sufficiently "spondaic" to +represent truthfully the quantitative hexameters of Homer and Vergil. + +In 1855 appeared _Hiawatha_, Longfellow's most aboriginal and +"American" book. The tripping trochaic measure he borrowed from the +Finnish epic _Kalevala_. The vague, child-like mythology of the Indian +tribes, with its anthropomorphic sense of the brotherhood between men, +animals, and the forms of inanimate nature, he took from Schoolcraft's +_Algic Researches_, 1839. He fixed forever, in a skillfully chosen +poetic form, the more inward and imaginative part of Indian character, +as Cooper had given permanence to its external and active side. Of +Longfellow's dramatic experiments, the _Golden Legend_, 1851, alone +deserves mention here. This was in his chosen realm, a tale taken from +the ecclesiastical annals of the Middle Ages, precious with martyrs' +blood and bathed in the rich twilight of the cloister. It contains +some of his best work, but its merit is rather poetic than dramatic, +although Ruskin praised it for the closeness with which it entered into +the temper of the monk. + +Longfellow has pleased the people more than the critics. He gave +freely what he had, and the gift was beautiful. Those who have looked +in his poetry for something else than poetry, or for poetry of some +other kind, have not been slow to assert that he was a lady's poet--one +who satisfied callow youths and school-girls by uttering commonplaces +in graceful and musical shape, but who offered no strong meat for men. +Miss Fuller called his poetry thin, and the poet himself--or, rather, a +portrait of the poet which frontispieced an illustrated edition of his +works--a "dandy Pindar." This is not true of his poetry, or of the +best of it. But he had a singing and not a talking voice, and in his +prose one becomes sensible of a certain weakness. _Hyperion_, for +example, published in 1839, a loitering fiction, interspersed with +descriptions of European travel, is, upon the whole, a weak book, +overflowery in diction and sentimental in tone. + +The crown of Longfellow's achievements as a translator was his great +version of Dante's _Divina Commedia_, published between 1867 and 1870. +It is a severely literal, almost a line for line, rendering. The meter +is preserved, but the rhyme sacrificed. If not the best English poem +constructed from Dante, it is at all events the most faithful and +scholarly paraphrase. The sonnets which accompanied it are among +Longfellow's best work. He seems to have been raised by daily +communion with the great Tuscan into a habit of deeper and more subtle +thought than is elsewhere common in his poetry. + +Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809- ) is a native of Cambridge and a graduate +of Harvard in the class of '29; a class whose anniversary reunions he +has celebrated in something like forty distinct poems and songs. For +sheer cleverness and versatility Dr. Holmes is, perhaps, unrivaled +among American men of letters. He has been poet, wit, humorist, +novelist, essayist, and a college lecturer and writer on medical +topics. In all of these departments he has produced work which ranks +high, if not with the highest. His father, Dr. Abiel Holmes, was a +graduate of Yale and an orthodox minister of liberal temper, but the +son early threw in his lot with the Unitarians; and, as was natural to +a man of satiric turn and with a very human enjoyment of a fight, whose +youth was cast in an age of theological controversy, he has always had +his fling at Calvinism, and has prolonged the slogans of old battles +into a later generation; sometimes, perhaps, insisting upon them rather +wearisomely and beyond the limits of good taste. He had, even as an +undergraduate, a reputation for cleverness at writing comic verses, and +many of his good things in this kind, such as the _Dorchester Giant_ +and the _Height of the Ridiculous_, were contributed to the +_Collegian_, a students' paper. But he first drew the attention of a +wider public by his spirited ballad of _Old Ironsides_-- + + "Ay! Tear her tattered ensign down!"-- + +composed about 1830, when it was proposed by the government to take to +pieces the unseaworthy hulk of the famous old man-of-war, +_Constitution_. Holmes's indignant protest--which has been a favorite +subject for school-boy declamation--had the effect of postponing the +vessel's fate for a great many years. From 1830-35 the young poet was +pursuing his medical studies in Boston and Paris, contributing now and +then some verses to the magazines. Of his life as a medical student in +Paris there are many pleasant reminiscences in his _Autocrat_ and other +writings, as where he tells, for instance, of a dinner-party of +Americans in the French capital, where one of the company brought tears +of homesickness into the eyes of his _sodales_ by saying that the +tinkle of the ice in the champagne-glasses reminded him of the +cow-bells in the rocky old pastures of New England. In 1836 he printed +his first collection of poems. The volume contained, among a number of +pieces broadly comic, like the _September Gale_, the _Music Grinders_, +and the _Ballad of the Oyster-man_--which at once became widely +popular--a few poems of a finer and quieter temper, in which there was +a quaint blending of the humorous and the pathetic. Such were _My +Aunt_ and the _Last Leaf_--which Abraham Lincoln found "inexpressibly +touching," and which it is difficult to read without the double tribute +of a smile and a tear. The volume contained also _Poetry: A Metrical +Essay_, read before the Harvard Chapter of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, +which was the first of that long line of capital occasional poems which +Holmes has been spinning for half a century with no sign of fatigue and +with scarcely any falling off in freshness; poems read or spoken or +sung at all manner of gatherings, public and private, at Harvard +commencements, class days, and other academic anniversaries; at +inaugurations, centennials, dedications of cemeteries, meetings of +medical associations, mercantile libraries, Burns clubs, and New +England societies; at rural festivals and city fairs; openings of +theaters, layings of corner-stones, birthday celebrations, jubilees, +funerals, commemoration services, dinners of welcome or farewell to +Dickens, Bryant, Everett, Whittier, Longfellow, Grant, Farragut, the +Grand Duke Alexis, the Chinese embassy, and what not. Probably no poet +of any age or clime has written so much and so well to order. He has +been particularly happy in verses of a convivial kind, toasts for big +civic feasts, or post-prandial rhymes for the _petit comite_--the snug +little dinners of the chosen few; his + + "The quaint trick to cram the pithy line + That cracks so crisply over bubbling wine." + +And although he could write on occasion a _Song for a Temperance +Dinner_, he has preferred to chant the praise of the punch bowl and to + + "feel the old convivial glow (unaided) o'er me stealing, + The warm, champagny, old-particular-brandy-punchy feeling." + +It would be impossible to enumerate the many good things of this sort +which Holmes has written, full of wit and wisdom, and of humor lightly +dashed with sentiment and sparkling with droll analogies, sudden puns, +and unexpected turns of rhyme and phrase. Among the best of them are +_Nux Postcoenatica_, _A Modest Request_, _Ode for a Social Meeting_, +_The Boys_, and _Rip Van Winkle, M.D_. Holmes's favorite measure, in +his longer poems, is the heroic couplet which Pope's example seems to +have consecrated forever to satiric and didactic verse. He writes as +easily in this meter as if it were prose, and with much of Pope's +epigrammatic neatness. He also manages with facility the anapaestics +of Moore and the ballad stanza which Hood had made the vehicle for his +drolleries. It cannot be expected that verses manufactured to pop with +the corks and fizz with the champagne at academic banquets should much +outlive the occasion; or that the habit of producing such verses on +demand should foster in the producer that "high seriousness" which +Matthew Arnold asserts to be one mark of all great poetry. Holmes's +poetry is mostly on the colloquial level, excellent society-verse, but +even in its serious moments too smart and too pretty to be taken very +gravely; with a certain glitter, knowingness, and flippancy about it, +and an absence of that self-forgetfulness and intense absorption in its +theme which characterize the work of the higher imagination. This is +rather the product of fancy and wit. Wit, indeed, in the old sense of +quickness in the perception of analogies, is the staple of his mind. +His resources in the way of figure, illustration, allusion, and +anecdote are wonderful. Age cannot wither him nor custom stale his +infinite variety, and there is as much powder in his latest +pyrotechnics as in the rockets which he sent up half a century ago. +Yet, though the humorist in him rather outweighs the poet, he has +written a few things, like the _Chambered Nautilus_ and _Homesick in +Heaven_, which are as purely and deeply poetic as the _One-Hoss Shay_ +and the _Prologue_ are funny. Dr. Holmes is not of the stuff of which +idealists and enthusiasts are made. As a physician and a student of +science, the facts of the material universe have counted for much with +him. His clear, positive, alert intellect was always impatient of +mysticism. He had the sharp eye of the satirist and the man of the +world for oddities of dress, dialect, and manners. Naturally the +transcendental movement struck him on its ludicrous side, and in his +_After-Dinner Poem_, read at the Phi Beta Kappa dinner at Cambridge in +1843, he had his laugh at the "Orphic odes" and "runes" of the +bedlamite seer and bard of mystery + + "Who rides a beetle which he calls a 'sphinx.' + And O what questions asked in club-foot rhyme + Of Earth the tongueless, and the deaf-mute Time! + Here babbling 'Insight' shouts in Nature's ears + His last conundrum on the orbs and spheres; + There Self-inspection sucks its little thumb, + With 'Whence am I?' and 'Wherefore did I come?'" + +Curiously enough, the author of these lines lived to write an +appreciative life of the poet who wrote the _Sphinx_. There was a good +deal of toryism or social conservatism in Holmes. He acknowledged a +preference for the man with a pedigree, the man who owned family +portraits, had been brought up in familiarity with books, and could +pronounce "view" correctly. Readers unhappily not of the "Brahmin +caste of New England" have sometimes resented as snobbishness Holmes's +harping on "family," and his perpetual application of certain favorite +shibboleths to other people's ways of speech. "The woman who +calc'lates is lost." + + "Learning condemns beyond the reach of hope + The careless lips that speak of soap for soap. . . . + Do put your accents in the proper spot: + Don't, let me beg you, don't say 'How?' for 'What?' + The things named 'pants' in certain documents, + A word not made for gentlemen, but 'gents.'" + +With the rest of "society" he was disposed to ridicule the abolition +movement as a crotchet of the eccentric and the long-haired. But when +the civil war broke out he lent his pen, his tongue, and his own flesh +and blood to the cause of the Union. The individuality of Holmes's +writings comes in part from their local and provincial bias. He has +been the laureate of Harvard College and the bard of Boston city, an +urban poet, with a cockneyish fondness for old Boston ways and +things--the Common and the Frog Pond, Faneuil Hall and King's Chapel +and the Old South, Bunker Hill, Long Wharf, the Tea Party, and the town +crier. It was Holmes who invented the playful saying that "Boston +Statehouse is the hub of the solar system." + +In 1857 was started the _Atlantic Monthly_, a magazine which has +published a good share of the best work done by American writers within +the past generation. Its immediate success was assured by Dr. Holmes's +brilliant series of papers, the _Autocrat of the Breakfast Table_, +1858, followed at once by the _Professor at the Breakfast Table_, 1859, +and later by the _Poet at the Breakfast Table_, 1873. The _Autocrat_ +is its author's masterpiece, and holds the fine quintessence of his +humor, his scholarship, his satire, genial observation, and ripe +experience of men and cities. The form is as unique and original as +the contents, being something between an essay and a drama; a +succession of monologues or table-talks at a typical American +boarding-house, with a thread of story running through the whole. The +variety of mood and thought is so great that these conversations never +tire, and the prose is interspersed with some of the author's choicest +verse. The _Professor at the Breakfast Table_ followed too closely on +the heels of the _Autocrat_, and had less freshness. The third number +of the series was better, and was pleasantly reminiscent and slightly +garrulous, Dr. Holmes being now (1873) sixty-four years old, and +entitled to the gossiping privilege of age. The personnel of the +_Breakfast Table_ series, such as the landlady and the landlady's +daughter and her son, Benjamin Franklin; the schoolmistress, the young +man named John, the Divinity Student, the Kohinoor, the Sculpin, the +Scarabaeus, and the Old Gentleman who sits opposite, are not fully +drawn characters, but outlined figures, lightly sketched--as is the +Autocrat's wont--by means of some trick of speech, or dress, or +feature, but they are quite life-like enough for their purpose, which +is mainly to furnish listeners and foils to the eloquence and wit of +the chief talker. + +In 1860 and 1867 Holmes entered the field of fiction with two +"medicated novels," _Elsie Venner_ and the _Guardian Angel_. The first +of these was a singular tale, whose heroine united with her very +fascinating human attributes something of the nature of a serpent; her +mother having been bitten by a rattlesnake a few months before the +birth of the girl, and kept alive meanwhile by the use of powerful +antidotes. The heroine of the _Guardian Angel_ inherited lawless +instincts from a vein of Indian blood in her ancestry. These two books +were studies of certain medico-psychological problems. They preached +Dr. Holmes's favorite doctrines of heredity and of the modified nature +of moral responsibility by reason of transmitted tendencies which limit +the freedom of the will. In _Elsie Venner_, in particular, the weirdly +imaginative and speculative character of the leading motive suggests +Hawthorne's method in fiction, but the background and the subsidiary +figures have a realism that is in abrupt contrast with this, and gives +a kind of doubleness and want of keeping to the whole. The Yankee +characters, in particular, and the satirical pictures of New England +country life are open to the charge of caricature. In the _Guardian +Angel_ the figure of Byles Gridley, the old scholar, is drawn with +thorough sympathy, and though some of his acts are improbable, he is, +on the whole, Holmes's most vital conception in the region of dramatic +creation. + +James Russell Lowell (1819- ), the foremost of American critics and of +living American poets, is, like Holmes, a native of Cambridge, and, +like Emerson and Holmes, a clergyman's son. In 1855 he succeeded +Longfellow as professor of modern languages in Harvard College. Of +late years he has held important diplomatic posts, like Everett, +Irving, Bancroft, Motley, and other Americans distinguished in letters, +having been United States minister to Spain, and, under two +administrations, to the court of St. James. Lowell is not so +spontaneously and exclusively a poet as Longfellow, and his popularity +with the average reader has never been so great. His appeal has been +to the few rather than the many, to an audience of scholars and of the +judicious rather than to the "groundlings" of the general public. +Nevertheless his verse, though without the evenness, instinctive grace, +and unerring good taste of Longfellow's, has more energy and a stronger +intellectual fiber, while in prose he is very greatly the superior. +His first volume, _A Year's Life_, 1841, gave some promise. In 1843 he +started a magazine, the _Pioneer_, which only reached its third number, +though it counted among its contributors Hawthorne, Poe, Whittier, and +Miss Barrett (afterward Mrs. Browning). A second volume of poems, +printed in 1844, showed a distinct advance, in such pieces as the +_Shepherd of King Admetus_, _Rhoecus_, a classical myth, told in +excellent blank verse, and the same in subject with one of Landor's +polished intaglios; and the _Legend of Brittany_, a narrative poem, +which had fine passages, but no firmness in the management of the +story. As yet, it was evident, the young poet had not found his theme. +This came with the outbreak of the Mexican War, which was unpopular in +New England, and which the Free Soil party regarded as a slave-holders' +war waged without provocation against a sister republic, and simply for +the purpose of extending the area of slavery. + +In 1846, accordingly, the _Biglow Papers_ began to appear in the +_Boston Courier_, and were collected and published in book form in +1848. These were a series of rhymed satires upon the government and +the war party, written in the Yankee dialect, and supposed to be the +work of Hosea Biglow, a home-spun genius in a down-east country town, +whose letters to the editor were indorsed and accompanied by the +comments of the Rev. Homer Wilbur, A.M., pastor of the First Church in +Jaalam, and (prospective) member of many learned societies. The first +paper was a derisive address to a recruiting sergeant, with a +denunciation of the "nigger-drivin' States" and the "Northern +dough-faces;" a plain hint that the North would do better to secede +than to continue doing dirty work for the South; and an expression of +those universal peace doctrines which were then in the air, and to +which Longfellow gave serious utterance in his _Occultation of Orion_. + + "Ez for war, I call it murder-- + There you hev it plain an' flat; + I don't want to go no furder + Than my Testyment for that; + God hez said so plump an' fairly, + It's as long as it is broad, + An' you've gut to git up airly + Ef you want to take in God." + +The second number was a versified paraphrase of a letter received from +Mr. Birdofredom Sawin, "a yung feller of our town that was cussed fool +enuff to goe atrottin inter Miss Chiff arter a dram and fife," and who +finds when he gets to Mexico that + + "This kind o' sogerin' aint a mite like our October trainin'." + +Of the subsequent papers the best was, perhaps, _What Mr. Robinson +Thinks_, an election ballad, which caused universal laughter, and was +on every body's tongue. + +The _Biglow Papers_ remain Lowell's most original contribution to +American literature. They are, all in all, the best political satires +in the language, and unequaled as portraitures of the Yankee character, +with its cuteness, its homely wit, and its latent poetry. Under the +racy humor of the dialect--which became in Lowell's hands a medium of +literary expression almost as effective as Burns's Ayrshire +Scotch--burned that moral enthusiasm and that hatred of wrong and +deification of duty--"Stern daughter of the voice of God"--which, in +the tough New England stock, stands instead of the passion in the blood +of southern races. Lowell's serious poems on political questions, such +as the _Present Crisis_, _Ode to Freedom_, and the _Capture of Fugitive +Slaves_, have the old Puritan fervor, and such lines as + + "They are slaves who dare not be + In the right with two or three," + +and the passage beginning + + "Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne," + +became watchwords in the struggle against slavery and disunion. Some +of these were published in his volume of 1848 and the collected edition +of his poems, in two volumes, issued in 1850. These also included his +most ambitious narrative poem, the _Vision of Sir Launfal_, an +allegorical and spiritual treatment of one of the legends of the Holy +Grail. Lowell's genius was not epical, but lyric and didactic. The +merit of _Sir Launfal_ is not in the telling of the story, but in the +beautiful descriptive episodes, one of which, commencing, + + "And what is so rare as a day in June? + Then if ever come perfect days," + +is as current as any thing that he has written. It is significant of +the lack of a natural impulse toward narrative invention in Lowell +that, unlike Longfellow and Holmes, he never tried his hand at a novel. +One of the most important parts of a novelist's equipment he certainly +possesses, namely, an insight into character and an ability to +delineate it. This gift is seen especially in his sketch of Parson +Wilbur, who edited the _Biglow Papers_ with a delightfully pedantic +introduction, glossary, and notes; in the prose essay _On a Certain +Condescension in Foreigners_, and in the uncompleted poem, _Fitz Adam's +Story_. See also the sketch of Captain Underhill in the essay on _New +England Two Centuries Ago_. + +The _Biglow Papers_ when brought out in a volume were prefaced by +imaginary notices of the press, including a capital parody of Carlyle, +and a reprint from the "Jaalam Independent Blunderbuss," of the first +sketch--afterward amplified and enriched--of that perfect Yankee idyl, +_The Courtin'_. Between 1862 and 1865 a second series of _Biglow +Papers_ appeared, called out by the events of the civil war. Some of +these, as, for instance, _Jonathan to John_, a remonstrance with +England for her unfriendly attitude toward the North, were not inferior +to any thing in the earlier series; and others were even superior as +poems, equal, indeed, in pathos and intensity to any thing that Lowell +has written in his professedly serious verse. In such passages the +dialect wears rather thin, and there is a certain incongruity between +the rustic spelling and the vivid beauty and power and the figurative +cast of the phrase in stanzas like the following: + + "Wut's words to them whose faith an' truth + On war's red techstone rang true metal, + Who ventered life an' love an' youth + For the gret prize o' death in battle? + To him who, deadly hurt, agen + Flashed on afore the charge's thunder, + Tippin' with fire the bolt of men + That rived the rebel line asunder?" + +Charles Sumner, a somewhat heavy person, with little sense of humor, +wished that the author of the _Biglow Papers_ "could have used good +English." In the lines just quoted, indeed, the bad English adds +nothing to the effect. In 1848 Lowell wrote _A Fable for Critics_, +something after the style of Sir John Suckling's _Session of the +Poets_; a piece of rollicking doggerel in which he surveyed the +American Parnassus, scattering about headlong fun, sharp satire, and +sound criticism in equal proportion. Never an industrious workman, +like Longfellow, at the poetic craft, but preferring to wait for the +mood to seize him, he allowed eighteen years to go by, from 1850 to +1868, before publishing another volume of verse. In the latter year +appeared _Under the Willows_, which contains some of his ripest and +most perfect work, notably _A Winter Evening Hymn to my Fire_, with its +noble and touching close--suggested by, perhaps, at any rate recalling, +the dedication of Goethe's _Faust_, + + "Ihr naht euch wieder, schwankende Gestalten;" + +the subtle _Footpath_ and _In the Twilight_, the lovely little poems +_Auf Wiedersehen_ and _After the Funeral_, and a number of spirited +political pieces, such as _Villa Franca_ and the _Washers of the +Shroud_. This volume contained also his _Ode Recited at the Harvard +Commemoration_ in 1865. This, although uneven, is one of the finest +occasional poems in the language, and the most important contribution +which our civil war has made to song. It was charged with the grave +emotion of one who not only shared the patriotic grief and exultation +of his _alma mater_ in the sacrifice of her sons, but who felt a more +personal sorrow in the loss of kindred of his own, fallen in the front +of battle. Particularly note-worthy in this memorial ode are the +tribute to Abraham Lincoln, the third strophe beginning, "Many loved +Truth;" the exordium, "O Beautiful! my Country! ours once more!" and +the close of the eighth strophe, where the poet chants of the youthful +heroes who + + "Come transfigured back, + Secure from change in their high-hearted ways, + Beautiful evermore and with the rays + Of morn on their white Shields of Expectation." + +From 1857 to 1862 Lowell edited the _Atlantic Monthly_, and from 1863 +to 1872 the _North American Review_. His prose, beginning with an +early volume of _Conversations on Some of the Old Poets_, 1844, has +consisted mainly of critical essays on individual writers, such as +Dante, Chaucer, Spenser, Emerson, Shakespeare, Thoreau, Pope, Carlyle, +etc., together with papers of a more miscellaneous kind, like +_Witchcraft_, _New England Two Centuries Ago_, _My Garden +Acquaintance_, _A Good Word for Winter_, _Abraham Lincoln_, etc., etc. +Two volumes of these were published in 1870 and 1876, under the title +_Among My Books_, and another, _My Study Windows_, in 1871. As a +literary critic Lowell ranks easily among the first of living writers. +His scholarship is thorough, his judgment keen, and he pours out upon +his page an unwithholding wealth of knowledge, humor, wit, and +imagination from the fullness of an overflowing mind. His prose has +not the chastened correctness and "low tone" of Matthew Arnold's. It +is rich, exuberant, and, sometimes overfanciful, running away into +excesses of allusion or following the lead of a chance pun so as +sometimes to lay itself open to the charge of pedantry and bad taste. +Lowell's resources in the way of illustration and comparison are +endless, and the readiness of his wit and his delight in using it put +many temptations in his way. Purists in style accordingly take offense +at his saying that "Milton is the only man who ever got much poetry out +of a cataract, and that was a cataract in his eye," or of his speaking +of "a gentleman for whom the bottle before him reversed the wonder of +the stereoscope and substituted the Gascon _v_ for the _b_ in +binocular," which is certainly a puzzling and roundabout fashion of +telling us that he had drunk so much that he saw double. The critics +also find fault with his coining such words as "undisprivacied," and +with his writing such lines as the famous one--from _The Cathedral_, +1870-- + + "Spume-sliding down the baffled decuman." + +It must be acknowledged that his style lacks the crowning grace of +simplicity, but it is precisely by reason of its allusive quality that +scholarly readers take pleasure in it. They like a diction that has +stuff in it and is woven thick, and where a thing is said in such a way +as to recall many other things. + +Mention should be made, in connection with this Cambridge circle, of +one writer who touched its circumference briefly. This was Sylvester +Judd, a graduate of Yale, who entered the Harvard Divinity School in +1837, and in 1840 became minister of a Unitarian church in Augusta, +Maine. Judd published several books, but the only one of them at all +rememberable was _Margaret_, 1845, a novel of which, Lowell said, in _A +Fable for Critics_, that it was "the first Yankee book with the soul of +Down East in it." It was very imperfect in point of art, and its +second part--a rhapsodical description of a sort of Unitarian +Utopia--is quite unreadable. But in the delineation of the few chief +characters and of the rude, wild life of an outlying New England +township just after the close of the Revolutionary War, as well as in +the tragic power of the catastrophe, there was genius of a high order. + +As the country has grown older and more populous, and works in all +departments of thought have multiplied, it becomes necessary to draw +more strictly the line between the literature of knowledge and the +literature of power. Political history, in and of itself, scarcely +falls within the limits of this sketch, and yet it cannot be altogether +dismissed, for the historian's art, at its highest, demands +imagination, narrative skill, and a sense of unity and proportion in +the selection and arrangement of his facts, all of which are literary +qualities. It is significant that many of our best historians have +begun authorship in the domain of imaginative literature: Bancroft with +an early volume of poems; Motley with his historical romances, _Merry +Mount_ and _Morton's Hope_; and Parkman with a novel, _Vassall Morton_. +The oldest of that modern group of writers that have given America an +honorable position in the historical literature of the world was +William Hickling Prescott (1796-1859). Prescott chose for his theme +the history of the Spanish conquests in the New World, a subject full +of romantic incident and susceptible of that glowing and perhaps +slightly overgorgeous coloring which he laid on with a liberal hand. +His completed histories, in their order, are the _Reign of Ferdinand +and Isabella_, 1837; the _Conquest of Mexico_, 1843--a topic which +Irving had relinquished to him; and the _Conquest of Peru_, 1847. +Prescott was fortunate in being born to leisure and fortune, but he had +difficulties of another kind to overcome. He was nearly blind, and had +to teach himself Spanish and look up authorities through the help of +others, and to write with a noctograph or by amanuenses. + +George Bancroft (1800-91) issued the first volume of his great _History +of the United States_ in 1834, and exactly half a century later the +final volume of the work, bringing the subject down to 1789. Bancroft +had studied at Goettingen, and imbibed from the German historian Heeren +the scientific method of historical study. He had access to original +sources, in the nature of collections and state papers in the +governmental archives of Europe, of which no American had hitherto been +able to avail himself. His history, in thoroughness of treatment, +leaves nothing to be desired, and has become the standard authority on +the subject. As a literary performance merely, it is somewhat wanting +in flavor, Bancroft's manner being heavy and stiff when compared with +Motley's or Parkman's. The historian's services to his country have +been publicly recognized by his successive appointments as secretary of +the navy, minister to England, and minister to Germany. + +The greatest, on the whole, of American historians was John Lothrop +Motley (1814-77), who, like Bancroft, was a student at Goettingen and +United States minister to England. His _Rise of the Dutch Republic_, +1856, and _History of the United Netherlands_, published in +installments from 1861 to 1868, equaled Bancroft's work in scientific +thoroughness and philosophic grasp, and Prescott's in the picturesque +brilliancy of the narrative, while it excelled them both in its +masterly analysis of great historic characters, reminding the reader, +in this particular, of Macaulay's figure-painting. The episodes of the +siege of Antwerp and the sack of the cathedral, and of the defeat and +wreck of the Spanish Armada, are as graphic as Prescott's famous +description of Cortez's capture of the city of Mexico; while the elder +historian has nothing to compare with Motley's vivid personal sketches +of Queen Elizabeth, Philip the Second, Henry of Navarre, and William +the Silent. The _Life of John of Barneveld_, 1874, completed this +series of studies upon the history of the Netherlands, a theme to which +Motley was attracted because the heroic struggle of the Dutch for +liberty offered, in some respects, a parallel to the growth of +political independence in Anglo-Saxon communities, and especially in +his own America. + +The last of these Massachusetts historical writers whom we shall +mention is Francis Parkman (1823- ), whose subject has the advantage +of being thoroughly American. His _Oregon Trail_, 1847, a series of +sketches of prairie and Rocky Mountain life, originally contributed to +the _Knickerbocker Magazine_, displays his early interest in the +American Indians. In 1851 appeared his first historical work, the +_Conspiracy of Pontiac_. This has been followed by the series entitled +_France and England in North America_, the six successive parts of +which are as follows: the _Pioneers of France in the New World_, the +_Jesuits in North America_; _La Salle and the Discovery of the Great +West_; the _Old Regime in Canada_; _Count Frontenac and New France_; +and _Montcalm and Wolfe_. These narratives have a wonderful vividness, +and a romantic interest not inferior to Cooper's novels. Parkman made +himself personally familiar with the scenes which he described, and +some of the best descriptions of American woods and waters are to be +found in his histories. If any fault is to be found with his books, +indeed, it is that their picturesqueness and "fine writing" are a +little in excess. + +The political literature of the years from 1837 to 1861 hinged upon the +antislavery struggle. In this "irrepressible conflict" Massachusetts +led the van. Garrison had written in his _Liberator_, in 1830, "I will +be as harsh as truth and as uncompromising as justice. I am in +earnest; I will not equivocate; I will not excuse; I will not retreat a +single inch; and I will be heard." But the Garrisonian abolitionists +remained for a long time, even in the North, a small and despised +faction. It was a great point gained when men of education and social +standing, like Wendell Phillips (1811-84) and Charles Sumner (1811-74), +joined themselves to the cause. Both of these were graduates of +Harvard and men of scholarly pursuits. They became the representative +orators of the antislavery party, Phillips on the platform and Sumner +in the Senate. The former first came before the public in his fiery +speech, delivered in Faneuil Hall December 8, 1837, before a meeting +called to denounce the murder of Lovejoy, who had been killed at Alton, +Ill., while defending his press against a pro-slavery mob. Thenceforth +Phillips's voice was never idle in behalf of the slave. His eloquence +was impassioned and direct, and his English singularly pure, simple, +and nervous. He is perhaps nearer to Demosthenes than any other +American orator. He was a most fascinating platform speaker on themes +outside of politics, and his lecture on the _Lost Arts_ was a favorite +with audiences of all sorts. + +Sumner was a man of intellectual tastes, who entered politics +reluctantly and only in obedience to the resistless leading of his +conscience. He was a student of literature and art; a connoisseur of +engravings, for example, of which he made a valuable collection. He +was fond of books, conversation, and foreign travel, and in Europe, +while still a young man, had made a remarkable impression in society. +But he left all this for public life, and in 1851 was elected as +Webster's successor to the Senate of the United States. Thereafter he +remained the leader of the abolitionists in Congress until slavery was +abolished. His influence throughout the North was greatly increased by +the brutal attack upon him in the Senate chamber in 1856 by "Bully +Brooks" of South Carolina. Sumner's oratory was stately and somewhat +labored. While speaking he always seemed, as has been wittily said, to +be surveying a "broad landscape of his own convictions." His most +impressive qualities as a speaker were his intense moral earnestness +and his thorough knowledge of his subject. The most telling of his +parliamentary speeches are perhaps his speech _On the Kansas-Nebraska +Bill_, of February 3, 1854, and _On the Crime against Kansas_, May 19 +and 20, 1856; of his platform addresses, the oration on the _True +Grandeur of Nations_. + + +1. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. _Voices of the Night_. _The Skeleton +in Armor_. _The Wreck of the Hesperus_. _The Village Blacksmith_. +_The Belfry of Bruges, and Other Poems_ (1846). _By the Seaside_. +_Hiawatha_. _Tales of a Wayside Inn_. + +2. Oliver Wendell Holmes. _Autocrat of the Breakfast Table_. _Elsie +Venner_. _Old Ironsides_. _The Last Leaf_. _My Aunt_. _The Music +Grinders_. _On Lending a Punch-Bowl_. _Nux Postcoenatica_. _A Modest +Request_. _The Living Temple_. _Meeting of the Alumni of Harvard +College_. _Homesick in Heaven_. _Epilogue to the Breakfast Table +Series_. _The Boys_. _Dorothy Q_. _The Iron Gate_. + +3. James Russell Lowell. _The Biglow Papers_ (two series). _Under the +Willows, and Other Poems_ (1868). _Rhoecus_. _The Shepherd of King +Admetus_. _The Vision of Sir Launfal_. _The Present Crisis_. _The +Dandelion_. _The Birch Tree_. _Beaver Brook_. _Essays on Chaucer_. +_Shakespeare Once More_. _Dryden_. _Emerson, the Lecturer_. +_Thoreau_. _My Garden Acquaintance_. _A Good Word for Winter_. _A +Certain Condescension in Foreigners_. + +4. William Hickling Prescott. _The Conquest of Mexico_. + +5. John Lothrop Motley. _The United Netherlands_. + +6. Francis Parkman. _The Oregon Trail_. _The Jesuits in North +America_. + +7. _Representative American Orations_, volume v. Edited by Alexander +Johnston. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. 1884. + + +[Transcriber's note: In the poem fragment "soap for soap" the o's in +each "soap" must be rendered with Unicode to appear correctly--in the +first "soap", o-breve (Ux014F); in the second, o-macron (Ux014D).] + + + + +CHAPTER VI. + +LITERATURE IN THE CITIES. + +1837-1861. + +Literature as a profession has hardly existed in the United States +until very recently. Even now the number of those who support +themselves by purely literary work is small, although the growth of the +reading public and the establishment of great magazines, such as +_Harper's_, the _Century_, and the _Atlantic_, have made a market for +intellectual wares which forty years ago would have seemed a godsend to +poorly paid Bohemians like Poe or obscure men of genius like Hawthorne. +About 1840, two Philadelphia magazines--_Godey's Lady's Book_ and +_Graham's Monthly_--began to pay their contributors twelve dollars a +page, a price then thought wildly munificent. But the first magazine +of the modern type was _Harper's Monthly_, founded in 1850. American +books have always suffered, and still continue to suffer, from the want +of an international copyright, which has flooded the country with cheap +reprints and translations of foreign works, with which the domestic +product has been unable to contend on such uneven terms. With the +first ocean steamers there started up a class of large-paged weeklies +in New York and elsewhere, such as _Brother Jonathan_, the _New World_, +and the _Corsair_, which furnished their readers with the freshest +writings of Dickens and Bulwer and other British celebrities within a +fortnight after their appearance in London. This still further +restricted the profits of native authors and nearly drove them from the +field of periodical literature. By special arrangement the novels of +Thackeray and other English writers were printed in _Harper's_ in +installments simultaneously with their issue in English periodicals. +The _Atlantic_ was the first of our magazines which was founded +expressly for the encouragement of home talent, and which had a purely +Yankee flavor. Journalism was the profession which naturally attracted +men of letters, as having most in common with their chosen work and as +giving them a medium, under their own control, through which they could +address the public. A few favored scholars, like Prescott, were made +independent by the possession of private fortunes. Others, like +Holmes, Longfellow, and Lowell, gave to literature such leisure as they +could get in the intervals of an active profession or of college work. +Still others, like Emerson and Thoreau, by living in the country and +making their modest competence--eked out in Emerson's case by lecturing +here and there--suffice for their simple needs, secured themselves +freedom from the restraints of any regular calling. But, in default of +some such _pou sto_, our men of letters have usually sought the cities +and allied themselves with the press. It will be remembered that +Lowell started a short-lived magazine on his own account, and that he +afterward edited the _Atlantic_ and the _North American_. Also that +Ripley and Charles A. Dana betook themselves to journalism after the +break-up of the Brook Farm Community. + +In the same way William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878), the earliest +American poet of importance, whose impulses drew him to the solitudes +of nature, was compelled to gain a livelihood, by conducting a daily +newspaper; or, as he himself puts it, was + + "Forced to drudge for the dregs of men, + And scrawl strange words with the barbarous pen." + +Bryant was born at Cummington, in Berkshire, the western-most county of +Massachusetts. After two years in Williams College he studied law, and +practiced for nine years as a country lawyer in Plainfield and Great +Barrington. Following the line of the Housatonic Valley, the social +and theological affiliations of Berkshire have always been closer with +Connecticut and New York than with Boston and eastern Massachusetts. +Accordingly, when in 1825 Bryant yielded to the attractions of a +literary career, he betook himself to New York city, where, after a +brief experiment in conducting a monthly magazine, the _New York Review +and Athenaeum_, he assumed the editorship of the _Evening Post_, a +Democratic and free-trade journal, with which he remained connected +till his death. He already had a reputation as a poet when he entered +the ranks of metropolitan journalism. In 1816 his _Thanatopsis_ had +been published in the _North American Review_, and had attracted +immediate and general admiration. It had been finished, indeed, two +years before, when the poet was only in his nineteenth year, and was a +wonderful instance of precocity. The thought in this stately hymn was +not that of a young man, but of a sage who has reflected long upon the +universality, the necessity, and the majesty of death. Bryant's blank +verse when at its best, as in _Thanatopsis_ and the _Forest Hymn_, is +extremely noble. In gravity and dignity it is surpassed by no English +blank verse of this century, though in rich and various modulation it +falls below Tennyson's _Ulysses_ and _Morte d'Arthur_. It was +characteristic of Bryant's limitations that he came thus early into +possession of his faculty. His range was always a narrow one, and +about his poetry, as a whole, there is a certain coldness, rigidity, +and solemnity. His fixed position among American poets is described in +his own _Hymn to the North Star_: + + "And thou dost see them rise, + Star of the pole! and thou dost see them set. + Alone, in thy cold skies, + Thou keep'st thy old, unmoving station yet, + Nor join'st the dances of that glittering train, + Nor dipp'st thy virgin orb in the blue western main." + +In 1821 he read _The Ages_, a didactic poem, in thirty-five stanzas, +before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge, and in the same year +brought out his first volume of poems. A second collection appeared in +1832, which was printed in London under the auspices of Washington +Irving. Bryant was the first American poet who had much of an audience +in England, and Wordsworth is said to have learned _Thanatopsis_ by +heart. Bryant was, indeed, in a measure, a scholar of Wordsworth's +school, and his place among American poets corresponds roughly, though +not precisely, to Wordsworth's among English poets. With no humor, +with somewhat restricted sympathies, with little flexibility or +openness to new impressions, but gifted with a high, austere +imagination, Bryant became the meditative poet of nature. His best +poems are those in which he draws lessons from nature, or sings of its +calming, purifying, and bracing influences upon the human soul. His +office, in other words, is the same which Matthew Arnold asserts to be +the peculiar office of modern poetry, "the moral interpretation of +nature." Poems of this class are _Green River_, _To a Water-fowl_, +_June_, the _Death of the Flowers_, and the _Evening Wind_. The song, +"O fairest of the rural maids," which has more fancy than is common in +Bryant, and which Poe pronounced his best poem, has an obvious +resemblance to Wordsworth's "Three years she grew in sun and shade," +and both of these nameless pieces might fitly be entitled--as +Wordsworth's is in Mr. Palgrave's _Golden Treasury_--"The Education of +Nature." + +Although Bryant's career is identified with New York his poetry is all +of New England. His heart was always turning back fondly to the woods +and streams of the Berkshire hills. There was nothing of that urban +strain in him which appears in Holmes and Willis. He was, in especial, +the poet of autumn, of the American October and the New England Indian +Summer, that season of "dropping nuts" and "smoky light," to whose +subtle analogy with the decay of the young by the New England disease, +consumption, he gave such tender expression in the _Death of the +Flowers_, and amid whose "bright, late quiet" he wished himself to pass +away. Bryant is our poet of "the melancholy days," as Lowell is of +June. If, by chance, he touches upon June, it is not with the exultant +gladness of Lowell in meadows full of bobolinks, and in the summer day +that is + + "simply perfect from its own resource, + As to the bee the new campanula's + Illuminate seclusion swung in air." + +Rather, the stir of new life in the clod suggests to Bryant by contrast +the thought of death; and there is nowhere in his poetry a passage of +deeper feeling than the closing stanzas of _June_, in which he speaks +of himself, by anticipation, as of one + + "Whose part in all the pomp that fills + The circuit of the summer hills + Is--that his grave is green." + +Bryant is, _par excellence_, the poet of New England wild flowers, the +yellow violet, the fringed gentian--to each of which he dedicated an +entire poem--the orchis and the golden-rod, "the aster in the wood and +the yellow sunflower by the brook." With these his name will be +associated as Wordsworth's with the daffodil and the lesser celandine, +and Emerson's with the rhodora. + +Except when writing of nature he was apt to be commonplace, and there +are not many such energetic lines in his purely reflective verse as +these famous ones from _The Battle-Field_: + + "Truth crushed to earth shall rise again; + The eternal years of God are hers; + But Error, wounded, writhes in pain, + And dies among his worshipers." + +He added but slowly to the number of his poems, publishing a new +collection in 1840, another in 1844, and _Thirty Poems_ in 1864. His +work at all ages was remarkably even. _Thanatopsis_ was as mature as +any thing that he wrote afterward, and among his later pieces the +_Planting of the Apple Tree_ and the _Flood of Years_ were as fresh as +any thing that he had written in the first flush of youth. Bryant's +poetic style was always pure and correct, without any tincture of +affectation or extravagance. His prose writings are not important, +consisting mainly of papers of the _Salmagundi_ variety contributed to +the _Talisman_, an annual published in 1827-30; some rather sketchy +stories, _Tales of the Glauber Spa_, 1832; and impressions of Europe, +entitled _Letters of a Traveler_, issued in two series, in 1849 and +1858. In 1869 and 1871 appeared his blank-verse translations of the +_Iliad_ and _Odyssey_, a remarkable achievement for a man of his age, +and not excelled, upon the whole, by any recent metrical version of +Homer in the English tongue. Bryant's half-century of service as the +editor of a daily paper should not be overlooked. The _Evening Post_, +under his management, was always honest, gentlemanly, and courageous, +and did much to raise the tone of journalism in New York. + +Another Massachusetts poet, who was outside the Boston coterie, like +Bryant, and, like him, tried his hand at journalism, was John Greenleaf +Whittier (1807- ). He was born in a solitary farm-house near +Haverhill, in the valley of the Merrimack, and his life has been passed +mostly at his native place and at the neighboring town of Amesbury. +The local color, which is very pronounced in his poetry, is that of the +Merrimack from the vicinity of Haverhill to its mouth at Newburyport, a +region of hill-side farms, opening out below into wide marshes--"the +low, green prairies of the sea," and the beaches of Hampton and +Salisbury. The scenery of the Merrimack is familiar to all readers of +Whittier: the cotton-spinning towns along its banks, with their +factories and dams, the sloping pastures and orchards of the back +country, the sands of Plum Island and the level reaches of water meadow +between which glide the broad-sailed "gundalows"--a local corruption of +gondola--laden with hay. Whittier was a farmer lad, and had only such +education as the district school could supply, supplemented by two +years at the Haverhill Academy. In his _School Days_ he gives a +picture of the little old country school-house as it used to be, the +only _alma mater_ of so many distinguished Americans, and to which many +others who have afterward trodden the pavements of great universities +look back so fondly as to their first wicket gate into the land of +knowledge. + + "Still sits the school-house by the road, + A ragged beggar sunning; + Around it still the sumachs grow + And blackberry vines are running. + + "Within the master's desk is seen, + Deep-scarred by raps official, + The warping floor, the battered seats, + The jack-knife's carved initial." + +A copy of Burns awoke the slumbering instinct in the young poet, and he +began to contribute verses to Garrison's _Free Press_, published in +Newburyport, and to the _Haverhill Gazette_. Then he went to Boston, +and became editor for a short time of the _Manufacturer_. Next he +edited the _Essex Gazette_, at Haverhill, and in 1830 he took charge of +George D. Prentice's paper, the _New England Weekly Review_, at +Hartford, Conn. Here he fell in with a young Connecticut poet of much +promise, J. G. C. Brainard, editor of the _Connecticut Mirror_, whose +"Remains" Whittier edited in 1832. At Hartford, too, he published his +first book, a volume of prose and verse, entitled _Legends of New +England_, 1831, which is not otherwise remarkable than as showing his +early interest in Indian colonial traditions--especially those which +had a touch of the supernatural--a mine which he afterward worked to +good purpose in the _Bridal of Pennacook_, the _Witch's Daughter_, and +similar poems. Some of the _Legends_ testify to Brainard's influence +and to the influence of Whittier's temporary residence at Hartford. +One of the prose pieces, for example, deals with the famous "Moodus +Noises" at Haddam, on the Connecticut River, and one of the poems is +the same in subject with Brainard's _Black Fox of Salmon River_. After +a year and a half at Hartford Whittier returned to Haverhill and to +farming. + +The antislavery agitation was now beginning, and into this he threw +himself with all the ardor of his nature. He became the poet of the +reform as Garrison was its apostle, and Sumner and Phillips its +speakers. In 1833 he published _Justice and Expediency_, a prose tract +against slavery, and in the same year he took part in the formation of +the American Antislavery Society at Philadelphia, sitting in the +convention as a delegate of the Boston abolitionists. Whittier was a +Quaker, and that denomination, influenced by the preaching of John +Woolman and others, had long since quietly abolished slavery within its +own communion. The Quakers of Philadelphia and elsewhere took an +earnest though peaceful part in the Garrisonian movement. But it was a +strange irony of fate that had made the fiery-hearted Whittier a +friend. His poems against slavery and disunion have the martial ring +of a Tyrtaeus or a Koerner, added to the stern religious zeal of +Cromwell's Ironsides. They are like the sound of the trumpet blown +before the walls of Jericho, or the psalms of David denouncing woe upon +the enemies of God's chosen people. If there is any purely Puritan +strain in American poetry it is in the war-hymns of the Quaker "Hermit +of Amesbury." Of these patriotic poems there were three principal +collections: _Voices of Freedom_, 1849; _The Panorama, and Other +Poems_, 1856; and _In War Time_, 1863. Whittier's work as the poet of +freedom was done when, on hearing the bells ring for the passage of the +constitutional amendment abolishing slavery, he wrote his splendid +_Laus Deo_, thrilling with the ancient Hebrew spirit: + + "Loud and long + Lift the old exulting song, + Sing with Miriam by the sea-- + He has cast the mighty down, + Horse and rider sink and drown, + He hath triumphed gloriously." + +Of his poems distinctly relating to the events of the civil war, the +best, or at all events the most popular, is _Barbara Frietchie_. +_Ichabod_, expressing the indignation of the Free Soilers at Daniel +Webster's seventh of March speech in defense of the Fugitive Slave Law, +is one of Whittier's best political poems, and not altogether unworthy +of comparison with Browning's _Lost Leader_. The language of +Whittier's warlike lyrics is biblical, and many of his purely +devotional pieces are religious poetry of a high order and have been +included in numerous collections of hymns. Of his songs of faith and +doubt, the best are perhaps _Our Master_, _Chapel of the Hermits_, and +_Eternal Goodness_; one stanza from the last of which is familiar; + + "I know not where his islands lift + Their fronded palms in air, + I only know I cannot drift, + Beyond his love and care." + +But from politics and war Whittier turned gladly to sing the homely +life of the New England country-side. His rural ballads and idyls are +as genuinely American as any thing that our poets have written, and +have been recommended, as such, to English working-men by Whittier's +co-religionist, John Bright. The most popular of these is probably +_Maud Muller_, whose closing couplet has passed into proverb. _Skipper +Ireson's Ride_ is also very current. Better than either of them, as +poetry, is _Telling the Bees_. But Whittier's masterpiece in work of a +descriptive and reminiscent kind is _Snow-Bound_, 1866, a New England +fireside idyl which in its truthfulness recalls the _Winter Evening_ of +Cowper's _Task_ and Burns's _Cotter's Saturday Night_, but in sweetness +and animation is superior to either of them. Although in some things a +Puritan of the Puritans, Whittier has never forgotten that he is also a +Friend, and several of his ballads and songs have been upon the subject +of the early Quaker persecutions in Massachusetts. The most impressive +of these is _Cassandra Southwick_. The latest of them, the _King's +Missive_, originally contributed to the _Memorial History of Boston_ in +1880, and reprinted the next year in a volume with other poems, has +been the occasion of a rather lively controversy. The _Bridal of +Pennacook_, 1848, and the _Tent on the Beach_, 1867, which contain some +of his best work, were series of ballads told by different narrators, +after the fashion of Longfellow's _Tales of a Wayside Inn_. As an +artist in verse, Whittier is strong and fervid, rather than delicate or +rich. He uses only a few metrical forms--by preference the +eight-syllabled rhyming couplet-- + + "Maud Muller on a summer's day + Raked the meadow sweet with hay," etc. + +and the emphatic tramp of this measure becomes very monotonous, as do +some of Whittier's mannerisms, which proceed, however, never from +affectation, but from a lack of study and variety, and so, no doubt, in +part from the want of that academic culture and thorough technical +equipment which Lowell and Longfellow enjoyed. Though his poems are +not in dialect, like Lowell's _Biglow Papers_, he knows how to make an +artistic use of homely provincial words, such as "chore," which give +his idyls of the hearth and the barnyard a genuine Doric cast. +Whittier's prose is inferior to his verse. The fluency which was a +besetting sin of his poetry, when released from the fetters of rhyme +and meter, ran into wordiness. His prose writings were partly +contributions to the slavery controversy, partly biographical sketches +of English and American reformers, and partly studies of the scenery +and folk-lore of the Merrimack Valley. Those of most literary interest +were the _Supernaturalism of New England_, 1847, and some of the papers +in _Literary Recreations and Miscellanies_, 1854. + +While Massachusetts was creating an American literature other sections +of the Union were by no means idle. The West, indeed, was as yet too +raw to add any thing of importance to the artistic product of the +country. The South was hampered by circumstances which will presently +be described. But in and about the sea-board cities of New York, +Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Richmond many pens were busy filling the +columns of literary weeklies and monthlies; and there was a +considerable output, such as it was, of books of poetry, fiction, +travel, and miscellaneous light literature. Time has already relegated +most of these to the dusty top shelves. To rehearse the names of the +numerous contributors to the old _Knickerbocker Magazine_, to +_Godey's_, and _Graham's_, and the _New Mirror_, and the _Southern +Literary Messenger_, or to run over the list of authorlings and +poetasters in Poe's papers on the _Literati of New York_, would be very +much like reading the inscriptions on the head-stones of an old +grave-yard. In the columns of these prehistoric magazines and in the +book notices and reviews away back in the thirties and forties, one +encounters the handiwork and the names of Emerson, Holmes, Longfellow, +Hawthorne, and Lowell embodied in this mass of forgotten literature. +It would have required a good deal of critical acumen, at the time, to +predict that these and a few others would soon be thrown out into bold +relief, as the significant and permanent names in the literature of +their generation, while Paulding, Hirst, Fay, Dawes, Mrs. Osgood, and +scores of others who figured beside them in the fashionable +periodicals, and filled quite as large a space in the public eye, would +sink into oblivion in less than thirty years. Some of these latter +were clever enough people; they entertained their contemporary public +sufficiently, but their work had no vitality or "power of continuance." +The great majority of the writings of any period are necessarily +ephemeral, and time by a slow process of natural selection is +constantly sifting out the few representative books which shall carry +on the memory of the period to posterity. Now and then it may be +predicted of some undoubted work of genius, even at the moment that it +sees the light, that it is destined to endure. But tastes and fashions +change, and few things are better calculated to inspire the literary +critic with humility than to read the prophecies in old reviews and see +how the future, now become the present, has quietly given them the lie. + +From among the professional _litterateurs_ of his day emerges, with +ever sharper distinctness as time goes on, the name of Edgar Allan Poe +(1809-49). By the irony of fate Poe was born at Boston, and his first +volume, _Tamerlane, and Other Poems_, 1827, was printed in that city +and bore upon its title-page the words, "By a Bostonian." But his +parentage, so far as it was any thing, was Southern. His father was a +Marylander who had gone upon the stage and married an actress, herself +the daughter of an actress and a native of England. Left an orphan by +the early death of both parents, Poe was adopted by a Mr. Allan, a +wealthy merchant of Richmond, Va. He was educated partly at an English +school, was student for a time in the University of Virginia, and +afterward a cadet in the Military Academy at West Point. His youth was +wild and irregular; he gambled and drank, was proud, bitter, and +perverse, finally quarreled with his guardian and adopted father--by +whom he was disowned--and then betook himself to the life of a literary +hack. His brilliant but underpaid work for various periodicals soon +brought him into notice, and he was given the editorship of the +_Southern Literary Messenger_, published at Richmond, and subsequently +of the _Gentlemen's_--afterward _Graham's_--_Magazine_ in Philadelphia. +These and all other positions Poe forfeited through his dissipated +habits and wayward temper, and finally, in 1844, he drifted to New +York, where he found employment on the _Evening Mirror_ and then on the +_Broadway Journal_. He died of delirium tremens at the Marine Hospital +in Baltimore. His life was one of the most wretched in literary +history. He was an extreme instance of what used to be called the +"eccentricity of genius." He had the irritable vanity which is +popularly supposed to accompany the poetic temperament, and was so +insanely egotistic as to imagine that Longfellow and others were +constantly plagiarizing from him. The best side of Poe's character +came out in his domestic relations, in which he displayed great +tenderness, patience, and fidelity. His instincts were gentlemanly, +and his manner and conversation were often winning. In the place of +moral feeling he had the artistic conscience. In his critical papers, +except where warped by passion or prejudice, he showed neither fear nor +favor, denouncing bad work by the most illustrious hands and commending +obscure merit. The "impudent literary cliques" who puffed each other's +books; the feeble chirrupings of the bardlings who manufactured verses +for the "Annuals;" and the twaddle of the "genial" incapables who +praised them in flabby reviews--all these Poe exposed with ferocious +honesty. Nor, though his writings are unmoral, can they be called in +any sense immoral. His poetry is as pure in its unearthliness as +Bryant's in its austerity. + +By 1831 Poe had published three thin books of verse, none of which had +attracted notice, although the latest contained the drafts of a few of +his most perfect poems, such as _Israfel_, the _Valley of Unrest_, the +_City in the Sea_, and one of the two pieces inscribed _To Helen_. It +was his habit to touch and retouch his work until it grew under his +more practiced hand into a shape that satisfied his fastidious taste. +Hence the same poem frequently re-appears in different stages of +development in successive editions. Poe was a subtle artist in the +realm of the weird and the fantastic. In his intellectual nature there +was a strange conjunction; an imagination as spiritual as Shelley's, +though, unlike Shelley's, haunted perpetually with shapes of fear and +the imagery of ruin; with this, an analytic power, a scientific +exactness, and a mechanical ingenuity more usual in a chemist or a +mathematician than in a poet. He studied carefully the mechanism of +his verse and experimented endlessly with verbal and musical effects, +such as repetition and monotone and the selection of words in which the +consonants alliterated and the vowels varied. In his _Philosophy of +Composition_ he described how his best-known poem, the _Raven_, was +systematically built up on a preconceived plan in which the number of +lines was first determined and the word "nevermore" selected as a +starting-point. No one who knows the mood in which poetry is composed +will believe that this ingenious piece of dissection really describes +the way in which the _Raven_ was conceived and written, or that any +such deliberate and self-conscious process could _originate_ the +associations from which a true poem springs. But it flattered Poe's +pride of intellect to assert that his cooler reason had control not +only over the execution of his poetry, but over the very well-head of +thought and emotion. Some of his most successful stories, like the +_Gold Bug_, the _Mystery of Marie Roget_, the _Purloined Letter_, and +the _Murders in the Rue Morgue_, were applications of this analytic +faculty to the solution of puzzles, such as the finding of buried +treasure or of a lost document, or the ferreting out of a mysterious +crime. After the publication of the _Gold Bug_ he received from all +parts of the country specimens of cipher-writing, which he delighted to +work out. Others of his tales were clever pieces of mystification, +like _Hans Pfaall_, the story of a journey to the moon, or experiments +at giving verisimilitude to wild improbabilities by the skillful +introduction of scientific details, as in the _Facts in the Case of M. +Valdemar_ and _Von Kempelen's Discovery_. In his narratives of this +kind Poe anticipated the detective novels of Gaboriau and Wilkie +Collins, the scientific hoaxes of Jules Verne, and, though in a less +degree, the artfully worked up likeness to fact in Edward Everett +Hale's _Man Without a Country_, and similar fictions. While Dickens's +_Barnaby Rudge_ was publishing in parts Poe showed his skill as a +plot-hunter by publishing a paper in _Graham's Magazine_ in which the +very tangled intrigue of the novel was correctly raveled and the finale +predicted in advance. + +In his union of imagination and analytic power Poe resembled Coleridge, +who, if any one, was his teacher in poetry and criticism. Poe's verse +often reminds one of _Christabel_ and the _Ancient Mariner_, still +oftener of _Kubla Khan_. Like Coleridge, too, he indulged at times in +the opium habit. But in Poe the artist predominated over every thing +else. He began not with sentiment or thought, but with technique, with +melody and color, tricks of language, and effects of verse. It is +curious to study the growth of his style in his successive volumes of +poetry. At first these are metrical experiments and vague images, +original, and with a fascinating suggestiveness, but with so little +meaning that some of his earlier pieces are hardly removed from +nonsense. Gradually, like distant music drawing nearer and nearer, his +poetry becomes fuller of imagination and of an inward significance, +without ever losing, however, its mysterious aloofness from the real +world of the senses. It was a part of Poe's literary creed--formed +upon his own practice and his own limitations, but set forth with a +great display of _a priori_ reasoning in his essay on the _Poetic +Principle_ and elsewhere--that pleasure and not instruction or moral +exhortation was the end of poetry; that beauty and not truth or +goodness was its means; and, furthermore, that the pleasure which it +gave should be indefinite. About his own poetry there was always this +indefiniteness. His imagination dwelt in a strange country of dream--a +"ghoul-haunted region of Weir," "out of space, out of time"--filled +with unsubstantial landscapes and peopled by spectral shapes. And yet +there is a wonderful, hidden significance in this uncanny scenery. The +reader feels that the wild, fantasmal imagery is in itself a kind of +language, and that it in some way expresses a brooding thought or +passion, the terror and despair of a lost soul. Sometimes there is an +obvious allegory, as in the _Haunted Palace_, which is the parable of a +ruined mind, or in the _Raven_, the most popular of all Poe's poems, +originally published in the _American Whig Review_ for February, 1845. +Sometimes the meaning is more obscure, as in _Ulalume_, which, to most +people, is quite incomprehensible, and yet to all readers of poetic +feeling is among the most characteristic, and, therefore, the most +fascinating, of its author's creations. + +Now and then, as in the beautiful ballad _Annabel Lee_, and _To One in +Paradise_, the poet emerges into the light of common human feeling and +speaks a more intelligible language. But in general his poetry is not +the poetry of the heart, and its passion is not the passion of flesh +and blood. In Poe the thought of death is always near, and of the +shadowy borderland between death and life. + + "The play is the tragedy 'Man,' + And its hero the Conqueror Worm." + +The prose tale, _Ligeia_, in which these verses are inserted, is one of +the most powerful of all Poe's writings, and its theme is the power of +the will to overcome death. In that singularly impressive poem, _The +Sleeper_, the morbid horror which invests the tomb springs from the +same source, the materiality of Poe's imagination, which refuses to let +the soul go free from the body. + +This quality explains why Poe's _Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque_, +1840, are on a lower plane than Hawthorne's romances, to which a few of +them, like _William Wilson_, and _The Man of the Crowd_, have some +resemblance. The former of these, in particular, is in Hawthorne's +peculiar province, the allegory of the conscience. But in general the +tragedy in Hawthorne is a spiritual one, while Poe calls in the aid of +material forces. The passion of physical fear or of superstitious +horror is that which his writings most frequently excite. These tales +represent various grades of the frightful and the ghastly, from the +mere bugaboo story like the _Black Cat_, which makes children afraid to +go in the dark, up to the breathless terror of the _Cask of +Amontillado_, or the _Red Death_. Poe's masterpiece in this kind is +the fateful tale of the _Fall of the House of Usher_, with its solemn +and magnificent close. His prose, at its best, often recalls, in its +richly imaginative cast, the manner of De Quincey in such passages as +his _Dream Fugue_, or _Our Ladies of Sorrow_. In descriptive pieces +like the _Domain of Arnheim_, and stories of adventure like the +_Descent into the Maelstrom_, and his long sea-tale, _The Narrative of +Arthur Gordon Pym_, 1838, he displayed, a realistic inventiveness +almost equal to Swift's or De Foe's. He was not without a mocking +irony, but he had no constructive humor, and his attempts at the +facetious were mostly failures. + +Poe's magical creations were rootless flowers. He took no hold upon +the life about him, and cared nothing for the public concerns of his +country. His poems and tales might have been written _in vacuo_ for +any thing American in them. Perhaps for this reason, in part, his fame +has been so cosmopolitan. In France especially his writings have been +favorites. Charles Baudelaire, the author of the _Fleurs du Mal_, +translated them into French, and his own impressive but unhealthy +poetry shows evidence of Poe's influence. The defect in Poe was in +character--a defect which will make itself felt in art as in life. If +he had had the sweet home feeling of Longfellow or the moral fervor of +Whittier he might have been a greater poet than either. + + "If I could dwell + Where Israfel + Hath dwelt, and he where I, + He might not sing so wildly well + A mortal melody, + While a bolder note than this might swell + From my lyre within the sky!" + +Though Poe was a Southerner, if not by birth, at least by race and +breeding, there was nothing distinctly Southern about his peculiar +genius, and in his wandering life he was associated as much with +Philadelphia and New York as with Baltimore and Richmond. The +conditions which had made the Southern colonies unfruitful in literary +and educational works before the Revolution continued to act down to +the time of the civil war. Eli Whitney's invention of the cotton-gin +in the closing years of the last century gave extension to slavery, +making it profitable to cultivate the now staple by enormous gangs of +field-hands working under the whip of the overseer in large +plantations. Slavery became henceforth a business speculation in the +States furthest south, and not, as in Old Virginia and Kentucky, a +comparatively mild domestic system. The necessity of defending its +peculiar institution against the attacks of a growing faction in the +North compelled the South to throw all its intellectual strength into +politics, which, for that matter, is the natural occupation and +excitement of a social aristocracy. Meanwhile immigration sought the +free States, and there was no middle class at the South. The "poor +whites" were ignorant and degraded. There were people of education in +the cities and on some of the plantations, but there was no great +educated class from which a literature could proceed. And the culture +of the South, such as it was, was becoming old-fashioned and local, as +the section was isolated more and more from the rest of the Union and +from the enlightened public opinion of Europe by its reactionary +prejudices and its sensitiveness on the subject of slavery. Nothing +can be imagined more ridiculously provincial than the sophomorical +editorials in the Southern press just before the outbreak of the war, +or than the backward and ill-informed articles which passed for reviews +in the poorly supported periodicals of the South. + +In the general dearth of work of high and permanent value, one or two +Southern authors may be mentioned whose writings have at least done +something to illustrate the life and scenery of their section. When in +1833 the Baltimore _Saturday Visitor_ offered a prize of a hundred +dollars for the best prose tale, one of the committee who awarded the +prize to Poe's first story, the _MS. Found in a Bottle_, was John P. +Kennedy, a Whig gentleman of Baltimore, who afterward became secretary +of the navy in Fillmore's administration. The year before he had +published _Swallow Barn_, a series of agreeable sketches of country +life in Virginia. In 1835 and 1838 he published his two novels, +_Horse-Shoe Robinson_ and _Rob of the Bowl_, the former a story of the +Revolutionary War in South Carolina, the latter an historical tale of +colonial Maryland. These had sufficient success to warrant reprinting +as late as 1852. But the most popular and voluminous of all Southern +writers of fiction was William Gilmore Simms, a South Carolinian, who +died in 1870. He wrote over thirty novels, mostly romances of +Revolutionary history, Southern life, and wild adventure, among the +best of which were the _Partisan_, 1835, and the _Yemassee_. Simms was +an inferior Cooper, with a difference. His novels are good boys' +books, but are crude and hasty in composition. He was strongly +Southern in his sympathies, though his newspaper, the _Charleston City +Gazette_, took part against the Nullifiers. His miscellaneous writings +include several histories and biographies, political tracts, addresses, +and critical papers contributed to Southern magazines. He also wrote +numerous poems, the most ambitious of which was _Atlantis, a Story of +the Sea_, 1832. His poems have little value except as here and there +illustrating local scenery and manners, as in _Southern Passages and +Pictures_, 1839. Mr. John Esten Cooke's pleasant but not very strong +_Virginia Comedians_ was, perhaps, in literary quality the best +Southern novel produced before the civil war. + +When Poe came to New York the most conspicuous literary figure of the +metropolis, with the possible exception of Bryant and Halleck, was N. +P. Willis, one of the editors of the _Evening Mirror_, upon which +journal Poe was for a time engaged. Willis had made a literary +reputation, when a student at Yale, by his _Scripture Poems_, written +in smooth blank verse. Afterward he had edited the _American Monthly_ +in his native city of Boston, and more recently he had published +_Pencillings by the Way_, 1835, a pleasant record of European +saunterings; _Inklings of Adventure_, 1836, a collection of dashing +stories and sketches of American and foreign life; and _Letters from +Under a Bridge_, 1839, a series of charming rural letters from his +country place at Owego, on the Susquehanna. Willis's work, always +graceful and sparkling, sometimes even brilliant, though light in +substance and jaunty in style, had quickly raised him to the summit of +popularity. During the years from 1835 to 1850 he was the most +successful American magazinist, and even down to the day of his death, +in 1867, he retained his hold upon the attention of the fashionable +public by his easy paragraphing and correspondence in the _Mirror_ and +its successor, the _Home Journal_, which catered to the literary wants +of the _beau monde_. Much of Willis's work was ephemeral, though +clever of its kind, but a few of his best tales and sketches, such as +_F. Smith_, _The Ghost Ball at Congress Hall_, _Edith Linsey_, and the +_Lunatic's Skate_, together with some of the _Letters from Under a +Bridge_, are worthy of preservation, not only as readable stories, but +as society studies of life at American watering-places like Nahant and +Saratoga and Ballston Spa half a century ago. A number of his simpler +poems, like _Unseen Spirits_, _Spring_, _To M---- from Abroad_, and +_Lines on Leaving Europe_, still retain a deserved place in collections +and anthologies. + +The senior editor of the _Mirror_, George P. Morris, was once a very +popular song-writer, and his _Woodman, Spare that Tree_, still +survives. Other residents of New York city who have written single +famous pieces were Clement C. Moore, a professor in the General +Theological Seminary, whose _Visit from St. Nicholas_--"'Twas the Night +Before Christmas," etc.--is a favorite ballad in every nursery in the +land; Charles Fenno Hoffman, a novelist of reputation in his time, but +now remembered only as the author of the song _Sparkling and Bright_, +and the patriotic ballad of _Monterey_; Robert H. Messinger, a native +of Boston, but long resident in New York, where he was a familiar +figure in fashionable society, who wrote _Give Me the Old_, a fine ode +with a choice Horatian flavor; and William Allen Butler, a lawyer and +occasional writer, whose capital satire of _Nothing to Wear_ was +published anonymously and had a great run. Of younger poets, like +Stoddard and Aldrich, who formerly wrote for the _Mirror_ and who are +still living and working in the maturity of their powers, it is not +within the limits and design of this sketch to speak. But one of their +contemporaries, Bayard Taylor, who died American minister at Berlin, in +1878, though a Pennsylvanian by birth and rearing, may be reckoned +among the "literati of New York." A farmer lad from Chester County, +who had learned the printer's trade and printed a little volume of his +juvenile verses in 1844, he came to New York shortly after with +credentials from Dr. Griswold, the editor of _Graham's_, and obtaining +encouragement and aid from Willis, Horace Greeley, and others, he set +out to make the tour of Europe, walking from town to town in Germany +and getting employment now and then at his trade to help pay the +expenses of the trip. The story of these _Wanderjahre_ he told in his +_Views Afoot_, 1846. This was the first of eleven books of travel +written during the course of his life. He was an inveterate nomad, and +his journeyings carried him to the remotest regions--to California, +India, China, Japan, and the isles of the sea, to Central Africa and +the Soudan, Palestine, Egypt, Iceland, and the "by-ways of Europe." His +head-quarters at home were in New York, where he did literary work for +the _Tribune_. He was a rapid and incessant worker, throwing off many +volumes of verse and prose, fiction, essays, sketches, translations, +and criticisms, mainly contributed in the first instance to the +magazines. His versatility was very marked, and his poetry ranged from +_Rhymes of Travel_, 1848, and _Poems of the Orient_, 1854, to idyls and +home ballads of Pennsylvania life, like the _Quaker Widow_ and the _Old +Pennsylvania Farmer_; and on the other side, to ambitious and somewhat +mystical poems, like the _Masque of the Gods_, 1872--written in four +days--and dramatic experiments like the _Prophet_, 1874, and _Prince +Deukalion_, 1878. He was a man of buoyant and eager nature, with a +great appetite for new experience, a remarkable memory, a talent for +learning languages, and a too great readiness to take the hue of his +favorite books. From his facility, his openness to external +impressions of scenery and costume and his habit of turning these at +once into the service of his pen, it results that there is something +"newspapery" and superficial about most of his prose. It is reporter's +work, though reporting of a high order. His poetry too, though full of +glow and picturesqueness, is largely imitative, suggesting Tennyson not +unfrequently, but more often Shelley. His spirited _Bedouin Song_, for +example, has an echo of Shelley's _Lines to an Indian Air_: + + "From the desert I come to thee + On a stallion shod with fire; + And the winds are left behind + In the speed of my desire. + Under thy window I stand, + And the midnight hears my cry; + I love thee, I love but thee, + With a love that shall not die." + +The dangerous quickness with which he caught the manner of other poets +made him an admirable parodist and translator. His _Echo Club_, 1876, +contains some of the best travesties in the tongue, and his great +translation of Goethe's _Faust_, 1870-71--with its wonderfully close +reproduction of the original meters--is one of the glories of American +literature. All in all, Taylor may unhesitatingly be put first among +our poets of the second generation--the generation succeeding that of +Longfellow and Lowell--although the lack in him of original genius +self-determined to a peculiar sphere, or the want of an inward fixity +and concentration to resist the rich tumult of outward impressions, has +made him less significant in the history of our literary thought than +some other writers less generously endowed. + +Taylor's novels had the qualities of his verse. They were profuse, +eloquent, and faulty. _John Godfrey's Fortune_, 1864, gave a picture +of bohemian life in New York. _Hannah Thurston_, 1863, and the _Story +of Kennett_; 1866, introduced many incidents and persons from the old +Quaker life of rural Pennsylvania, as Taylor remembered it in his +boyhood. The former was like Hawthorne's _Blithedale Romance_, a +satire on fanatics and reformers, and its heroine is a nobly conceived +character, though drawn with some exaggeration. The _Story of +Kennett_, which is largely autobiographic, has a greater freshness and +reality than the others, and is full of personal recollections. In +these novels, as in his short stories, Taylor's pictorial skill is +greater on the whole than his power of creating characters or inventing +plots. + +Literature in the West now began to have an existence. Another young +poet from Chester County, Pa., namely, Thomas Buchanan Read, went to +Cincinnati, and not to New York, to study sculpture and painting, about +1837, and one of his best-known poems, _Pons Maximus_, was written on +the occasion of the opening of the suspension bridge across the Ohio. +Read came East, to be sure, in 1841, and spent many years in our +sea-board cities and in Italy. He was distinctly a minor poet, but +some of his Pennsylvania pastorals, like the _Deserted Road_, have a +natural sweetness; and his luxurious _Drifting_, which combines the +methods of painting and poetry, is justly popular. _Sheridan's +Ride_--perhaps his most current piece--is a rather forced production, +and has been overpraised. The two Ohio sister poets, Alice and Phoebe +Cary, were attracted to New York in 1850, as soon as their literary +success seemed assured. They made that city their home for the +remainder of their lives. Poe praised Alice Cary's _Pictures of +Memory_, and Phoebe's _Nearer Home_ has become a favorite hymn. There +is nothing peculiarly Western about the verse of the Cary sisters. It +is the poetry of sentiment, memory, and domestic affection, entirely +feminine, rather tame and diffuse as a whole, but tender and sweet, +cherished by many good women and dear to simple hearts. + +A stronger smack of the soil is in the Negro melodies like _Uncle Ned_, +_O Susanna_, _Old Folks at Home_, _'Way Down South_, _Nelly was a +Lady_, _My Old Kentucky Home_, etc., which were the work, not of any +Southern poet, but of Stephen C. Foster, a native of Allegheny, Pa., +and a resident of Cincinnati and Pittsburg. He composed the words and +music of these, and many others of a similar kind, during the years +1847 to 1861. Taken together they form the most original and vital +addition which this country has made to the psalmody of the world, and +entitle Foster to the first rank among American song-writers. + +As Foster's plaintive melodies carried the pathos and humor of the +plantation all over the land, so Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe's _Uncle +Tom's Cabin_, 1852, brought home to millions of readers the sufferings +of the Negroes in the "black belt" of the cotton-growing States. This +is the most popular novel ever written in America. Hundreds of +thousands of copies were sold in this country and in England, and some +forty translations were made into foreign tongues. In its dramatized +form it still keeps the stage, and the statistics of circulating +libraries show that even now it is in greater demand than any other +single book. It did more than any other literary agency to rouse the +public conscience to a sense of the shame and horror of slavery; more +even than Garrison's _Liberator_, more than the indignant poems of +Whittier and Lowell or the orations of Sumner and Phillips. It +presented the thing concretely and dramatically, and in particular it +made the odious Fugitive Slave Law forever impossible to enforce. It +was useless for the defenders of slavery to protest that the picture +was exaggerated, and that planters like Legree were the exception. The +system under which such brutalities could happen, and did sometimes +happen, was doomed. It is easy now to point out defects of taste and +art in this masterpiece, to show that the tone is occasionally +melodramatic, that some of the characters are conventional, and that +the literary execution is in parts feeble and in others coarse. In +spite of all, it remains true that _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ is a great book, +the work of genius seizing instinctively upon its opportunity and +uttering the thought of the time with a power that thrilled the heart +of the nation and of the world. Mrs. Stowe never repeated her first +success. Some of her novels of New England life, such as the +_Minister's Wooing_, 1859, and the _Pearl of Orr's Island_, 1862, have +a mild kind of interest, and contain truthful portraiture of provincial +ways and traits; while later fictions of a domestic type, like _Pink +and White Tyranny_ and _My Wife and I_, are really beneath criticism. + +There were other Connecticut writers contemporary with Mrs. Stowe: Mrs. +L. H. Sigourney, for example, a Hartford poetess, formerly known as +"the Hemans of America," but now quite obsolete; and J. G. Percival, of +New Haven, a shy and eccentric scholar, whose geological work was of +value, and whose memory is preserved by one or two of his simpler +poems, still in circulation, such as _To Seneca Lake_ and the _Coral +Grove_. Another Hartford poet, Brainard--already spoken of as an early +friend of Whittier--died young, leaving a few pieces which show that +his lyrical gift was spontaneous and genuine, but had received little +cultivation. A much younger writer than either of these, Donald G. +Mitchell, of New Haven, has a more lasting place in our literature, by +virtue of his charmingly written _Reveries of a Bachelor_, 1850, and +_Dream Life_, 1852, stories which sketch themselves out in a series of +reminiscences and lightly connected scenes, and which always appeal +freshly to young men because they have that dreamy outlook upon life +which is characteristic of youth. But, upon the whole, the most +important contribution made by Connecticut in that generation to the +literary stock of America was the Beecher family. Lyman Beecher had +been an influential preacher and theologian, and a sturdy defender of +orthodoxy against Boston Unitarianism. Of his numerous sons and +daughters, all more or less noted for intellectual vigor and +independence, the most eminent were Mrs. Stowe and Henry Ward Beecher, +the great pulpit orator of Brooklyn. Mr. Beecher was too busy a man to +give more than his spare moments to general literature. His sermons, +lectures, and addresses were reported for the daily papers and printed +in part in book form; but these lose greatly when divorced from the +large, warm, and benignant personality of the man. His volumes made up +of articles in the _Independent_ and the _Ledger_, such as _Star +Papers_, 1855, and _Eyes and Ears_, 1862, contain many delightful +_morceaux_ upon country life and similar topics, though they are hardly +wrought with sufficient closeness and care to take a permanent place in +letters. Like Willis's _Ephemera_ they are excellent literary +journalism, but hardly literature. + +We may close our retrospect of American literature before 1861 with a +brief notice of one of the most striking literary phenomena of the +time--the _Leaves of Grass_ of Walt Whitman, published at Brooklyn in +1855. The author, born at West Hills, Long Island, in 1819, had been +printer, school-teacher, editor, and builder. He had scribbled a good +deal of poetry of the ordinary kind, which attracted little attention, +but finding conventional rhymes and meters too cramping a vehicle for +his need of expression, he discarded them for a kind of rhythmic chant, +of which the following is a fair specimen: + + "Press close, bare-bosom'd night! Press close, magnetic, + nourishing night! + Night of south winds! night of the few large stars! + Still, nodding night! mad, naked, summer night!" + +The invention was not altogether a new one. The English translation of +the psalms of David and of some of the prophets, the _Poems of Ossian_, +and some of Matthew Arnold's unrhymed pieces, especially the _Strayed +Reveller_, have an irregular rhythm of this kind, to say nothing of the +old Anglo-Saxon poems, like _Beowulf_, and the Scripture paraphrases +attributed to Caedmon. But this species of _oratio soluta_, carried to +the lengths to which Whitman carried it, had an air of novelty which +was displeasing to some, while to others, weary of familiar measures +and jingling rhymes, it was refreshing in its boldness and freedom. +There is no consenting estimate of this poet. Many think that his +so-called poems are not poems at all, but simply a bad variety of +prose; that there is nothing to him beyond a combination of affectation +and indecency; and that the Whitman _culte_ is a passing "fad" of a few +literary men, and especially of a number of English critics like +Rossetti, Swinburne, Buchanan, etc., who, being determined to have +something unmistakably American--that is, different from any thing +else--in writings from this side of the water, before they will +acknowledge any originality in them, have been misled into discovering +in Whitman "the poet of democracy." Others maintain that he is the +greatest of American poets, or, indeed, of all modern poets; that he is +"cosmic," or universal, and that he has put an end forever to puling +rhymes and lines chopped up into metrical feet. Whether Whitman's +poetry is formally poetry at all or merely the raw material of poetry, +the chaotic and amorphous impression which it makes on readers of +conservative tastes results from his effort to take up into his verse +elements which poetry has usually left out--the ugly, the earthy, and +even the disgusting; the "under side of things," which he holds not to +be prosaic when apprehended with a strong, masculine joy in life and +nature seen in all their aspects. The lack of these elements in the +conventional poets seems to him and his disciples like leaving out the +salt from the ocean, making poetry merely pretty and blinking whole +classes of facts. Hence the naturalism and animalism of some of the +divisions in _Leaves of Grass_, particularly that entitled _Children of +Adam_, which gave great offense by its immodesty, or its outspokenness, +Whitman holds that nakedness is chaste; that all the functions of the +body in healthy exercise are equally clean; that all, in fact, are +divine, and that matter is as divine as spirit. The effort to get +every thing into his poetry, to speak out his thought just as it comes +to him, accounts, too, for his way of cataloguing objects without +selection. His single expressions arc often unsurpassed for +descriptive beauty and truth. He speaks of "the vitreous pour of the +full moon, just tinged with blue," of the "lisp" of the plane, of the +prairies, "where herds of buffalo make a crawling spread of the square +miles." But if there is any eternal distinction between poetry and +prose, the most liberal canons of the poetic art will never agree to +accept lines like these: + + "And [I] remember putting plasters on the galls of his neck and ankles; + He stayed with me a week before he was recuperated, and passed north." + +Whitman is the spokesman of democracy and of the future; full of +brotherliness and hope, loving the warm, gregarious pressure of the +crowd and the touch of his comrade's elbow in the ranks. He liked the +people--multitudes of people; the swarm of life beheld from a Broadway +omnibus or a Brooklyn ferry-boat. The rowdy and the Negro truck-driver +were closer to his sympathy than the gentleman and the scholar. "I +loaf and invite my soul," he writes; "I sound my barbaric yawp over the +roofs of the world." His poem _Walt Whitman_, frankly egotistic, +simply describes himself as a typical, average man--the same as any +other man, and therefore not individual but universal. He has great +tenderness and heartiness--"the good gray poet;" and during the civil +war he devoted himself unreservedly to the wounded soldiers in the +Washington hospitals--an experience which he has related in the +_Dresser_ and elsewhere. It is characteristic of his rough and ready +comradery to use slang and newspaper English in his poetry, to call +himself Walt instead of Walter, and to have his picture taken in a +slouch hat and with a flannel shirt open at the throat. His decriers +allege that he poses for effect; that he is simply a backward eddy in +the tide, and significant only as a temporary reaction against ultra +civilization--like Thoreau, though in a different way. But with all +his shortcomings in art there is a healthy, virile, tumultuous pulse of +life in his lyric utterance and a great sweep of imagination in his +panoramic view of times and countries. One likes to read him because +he feels so good, enjoys so fully the play of his senses, and has such +a lusty confidence in his own immortality and in the prospects of the +human race. Stripped of verbiage and repetition, his ideas are not +many. His indebtedness to Emerson--who wrote an introduction to the +_Leaves of Grass_--is manifest. He sings of man and not men, and the +individual differences of character, sentiment, and passion, the +_dramatic_ elements of life, find small place in his system. It is too +early to say what will be his final position in literary history. But +it is noteworthy that the democratic masses have not accepted him yet +as their poet. Whittier and Longfellow, the poets of conscience and +feeling, are the darlings of the American people. The admiration, and +even the knowledge of Whitman, are mostly esoteric, confined to the +literary class. It is also not without significance as to the ultimate +reception of his innovations in verse that he has numerous parodists, +but no imitators. The tendency among our younger poets is not toward +the abandonment of rhyme and meter, but toward the introduction of new +stanza forms and an increasing carefulness and finish in the +_technique_ of their art. It is observable, too, that in his most +inspired passages Whitman reverts to the old forms of verse; to blank +verse, for example, in the _Man-of-War-Bird_: + + "Thou who hast slept all night upon the storm, + Waking renewed on thy prodigious pinions," etc.; + +and elsewhere not infrequently to dactylic hexameters and pentameters: + + "Earth of shine and dark, mottling the tide of the river! . . . + Far-swooping, elbowed earth! rich, apple-blossomed earth." + +Indeed, Whitman's most popular poem, _My Captain_, written after the +assassination of Abraham Lincoln, differs little in form from ordinary +verse, as a stanza of it will show: + + "My captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still; + My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will; + The ship is anchored safe and sound, its voyage closed and done; + From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won. + Exult, O shores, and ring, O bells! + But I, with mournful tread, + Walk the deck, my captain lies + Fallen, cold and dead." + +This is from _Drum Taps_, a volume of poems of the civil war. Whitman +has also written prose having much the same quality as his poetry: +_Democratic Vistas_, _Memoranda of the Civil War_, and, more recently, +_Specimen Days_. His residence of late years has been at Camden, New +Jersey, where a centennial edition of his writings was published in +1876. + +1. William Cullen Bryant. _Thanatopsis_. _To a Water-fowl_. _Green +River_. _Hymn to the North Star_. _A Forest Hymn_. "_O Fairest of +the Rural Maids_." _June_. _The Death of the Flowers_. _The Evening +Wind_. _The Battle-Field_. _The Planting of the Apple-tree_. _The +Flood of Years_. + +2. John Greenleaf Whittier. _Cassandra Southwick_. _The New Wife and +the Old_. _The Virginia Slave Mother_. _Randolph of Roanoke_. +_Barclay of Ury_. _The Witch of Wenham_. _Skipper Ireson's Ride_. +_Marguerite_. _Maud Muller_. _Telling the Bees_. _My Playmate_. +_Barbara Frietchie_. _Ichabod_. _Laus Deo_. _Snow-Bound_. + +3. Edgar Allan Poe. _The Raven_. _The Bells_. _Israfel_. _Ulalume_. +_To Helen_. _The City in the Sea_. _Annabel Lee_. _To One in +Paradise_. _The Sleeper_. _The Valley of Unrest_. _The Fall of the +House of Usher_. _Ligeia_. _William Wilson_. _The Cask of +Amontillado_. _The Assignation_. _The Masque of the Red Death_. +_Narrative of A. Gordon Pym_. + +4. N. P. Willis. _Select Prose Writings_. New York: Charles +Scribner's Sons. 1886. + +5. Mrs. H. B. Stowe. _Uncle Tom's Cabin_. _Oldtown Folks_. + +6. W. G. Simms, _The Partisan_. _The Yemassee_. + +7. Bayard Taylor. _A Bacchic Ode_. _Hylas_. _Kubleh_. _The Soldier +and the Pard_. _Sicilian Wine_. _Taurus_. _Serapion_. _The +Metempsychosis of the Pine_. _The Temptation of Hassan Ben Khaled_. +_Bedouin Song_. _Euphorion_. _The Quaker Widow_. _John Reid_. +_Lars_. _Views Afoot_. _By-ways of Europe_. _The Story of Kennett_. +_The Echo Club_. + +8. Walt Whitman. _My Captain_. "_When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard +Bloomed_." _Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking_. _Pioneers, O +Pioneers_. _The Mystic Trumpeter_. _A Woman at Auction_. _Sea-shore +Memoirs_. _Passage to India_. _Mannahatta_. _The Wound Dresser_. +_Longings for Some_. + +9. _Poets of America_. By E. C. Stedman. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & +Co. 1885. + + + + +CHAPTER VII. + +LITERATURE SINCE 1861. + +A generation has nearly passed since the outbreak of the civil war, and +although public affairs are still mainly in the hands of men who had +reached manhood before the conflict opened, or who were old enough at +that time to remember clearly its stirring events, the younger men who +are daily coming forward to take their places know it only by +tradition. It makes a definite break in the history of our literature, +and a number of new literary schools and tendencies have appeared since +its close. As to the literature of the war itself, it was largely the +work of writers who had already reached or passed middle age. All of +the more important authors described in the last three chapters +survived the Rebellion except Poe, who died in 1849, Prescott, who died +in 1859, and Thoreau and Hawthorne, who died in the second and fourth +years of the war, respectively. The final and authoritative history of +the struggle has not yet been written, and cannot be written for many +years to come. Many partial and tentative accounts have, however, +appeared, among which may be mentioned, on the Northern side, Horace +Greeley's _American Conflict_, 1864-66; Vice-President Wilson's _Rise +and Fall of the Slave Power in America_, and J. W. Draper's _American +Civil War_, 1868-70; on the Southern side Alexander H. Stephens's +_Confederate States of America_, Jefferson Davis's _Rise and Fall of +the Confederate States of America_, and E. A. Pollard's _Lost Cause_. +These, with the exception of Dr. Draper's philosophical narrative, have +the advantage of being the work of actors in the political or military +events which they describe, and the disadvantage of being, therefore, +partisan--in some instances passionately partisan. A store-house of +materials for the coming historian is also at hand in Frank Moore's +great collection, the _Rebellion Record_; in numerous regimental +histories of special armies, departments, and battles, like W. +Swinton's _Army of the Potomac_; in the autobiographies and +recollections of Grant and Sherman and other military leaders; in the +"war papers," lately published in the _Century_ magazine, and in +innumerable sketches and reminiscences by officers and privates on both +sides. + +The war had its poetry, its humors, and its general literature, some of +which have been mentioned in connection with Whittier, Lowell, Holmes, +Whitman, and others, and some of which remain to be mentioned, as the +work of new writers, or of writers who had previously made little mark. +There were war-songs on both sides, few of which had much literary +value excepting, perhaps, James R. Randall's Southern ballad, +_Maryland, My Maryland_, sung to the old college air of _Lauriger +Horatius_, and the grand martial chorus of _John Brown's Body_, an old +Methodist hymn, to which the Northern armies beat time as they went +"marching on." Randall's song, though spirited, was marred by its +fire-eating absurdities about "vandals" and "minions" and "Northern +scum," the cheap insults of the Southern newspaper press. To furnish +the _John Brown_ chorus with words worthy of the music, Mrs. Julia Ward +Howe wrote her _Battle-Hymn of the Republic_, a noble poem, but rather +too fine and literary for a song, and so never fully accepted by the +soldiers. Among the many verses which voiced the anguish and the +patriotism of that stern time, which told of partings and home-comings, +of women waiting by desolate hearths, in country homes, for tidings of +husbands and sons who had gone to the war; or which celebrated +individual deeds of heroism or sang the thousand private tragedies and +heartbreaks of the great conflict, by far the greater number were of +too humble a grade to survive the feeling of the hour. Among the best +or the most popular of them were Kate Putnam Osgood's _Driving Home the +Cows_, Mrs. Ethel Lynn Beers's _All Quiet Along the Potomac_; Forceythe +Willson's _Old Sergeant_, and John James Piatt's _Riding to Vote_. Of +the poets whom the war brought out, or developed, the most noteworthy +were Henry Timrod, of South Carolina, and Henry Howard Brownell, of +Connecticut. During the war Timrod was with the Confederate Army of +the West, as correspondent for the _Charleston Mercury_, and in 1864 he +became assistant editor of the _South Carolinian_, at Columbia. +Sherman's "march to the sea" broke up his business, and he returned to +Charleston. A complete edition of his poems was published in 1873, six +years after his death. The prettiest of all Timrod's poems is _Katie_, +but more to our present purpose are _Charleston_--written in the time +of blockade--and the _Unknown Dead_, which tells + + "Of nameless graves on battle plains, + Wash'd by a single winter's rains, + Where, some beneath Virginian hills, + And some by green Atlantic rills, + Some by the waters of the West, + A myriad unknown heroes rest." + +When the war was over a poet of New York State, F. M. Finch, sang of +these and of other graves in his beautiful Decoration Day lyric, _The +Blue and the Gray_, which spoke the word of reconciliation and +consecration for North and South alike. + +Brownell, whose _Lyrics of a Day_ and _War Lyrics_ were published +respectively in 1864 and 1866, was private secretary to Farragut, on +whose flag-ship, the _Hartford_, he was present at several great naval +engagements, such as the "Passage of the Forts" below New Orleans, and +the action off Mobile, described in his poem, the _Bay Fight_. With +some roughness and unevenness of execution Brownell's poetry had a fire +which places him next to Whittier as the Koerner of the civil war. In +him, especially, as in Whittier, is that Puritan sense of the +righteousness of his cause which made the battle for the Union a holy +war to the crusaders against slavery: + + "Full red the furnace fires must glow + That melt the ore of mortal kind; + The mills of God are grinding slow, + But ah, how close they grind! + + "To-day the Dahlgren and the drum + Are dread apostles of his name; + His kingdom here can only come + By chrism of blood and flame." + +One of the earliest martyrs of the war was Theodore Winthrop, hardly +known as a writer until the publication in the _Atlantic Monthly_ of +his vivid sketches of _Washington as a Camp_, describing the march of +his regiment, the famous New York Seventh, and its first quarters in +the Capitol at Washington. A tragic interest was given to these papers +by Winthrop's gallant death in the action of Big Bethel, June 10, 1861. +While this was still fresh in public recollection his manuscript novels +were published, together with a collection of his stories and sketches +reprinted from the magazines. His novels, though in parts crude and +immature, have a dash and buoyancy--an out-door air about them--which +give the reader a winning impression of Winthrop's personality. The +best of them is, perhaps, _Cecil Dreeme_, a romance that reminds one a +little of Hawthorne, and the scene of which is the New York University +building on Washington Square, a locality that has been further +celebrated in Henry James's novel of _Washington Square_. + +Another member of this same Seventh Regiment, Fitz James O'Brien, an +Irishman by birth, who died at Baltimore in 1862 from the effects of a +wound received in a cavalry skirmish, had contributed to the magazines +a number of poems and of brilliant though fantastic tales, among which +the _Diamond Lens_ and _What Was It?_ had something of Edgar A. Poe's +quality. Another Irish-American, Charles G. Halpine, under the +pen-name of "Miles O'Reilly," wrote a good many clever ballads of the +war, partly serious and partly in comic brogue. Prose writers of note +furnished the magazines with narratives of their experience at the seat +of war, among papers of which kind may be mentioned Dr. Holmes's _My +Search for the Captain_, in the _Atlantic Monthly_, and Colonel T. W. +Higginson's _Army Life in a Black Regiment_, collected into a volume in +1870. + +Of the public oratory of the war, the foremost example is the +ever-memorable address of Abraham Lincoln at the dedication of the +National Cemetery at Gettysburg. The war had brought the nation to its +intellectual majority. In the stress of that terrible fight there was +no room for buncombe and verbiage, such as the newspapers and +stump-speakers used to dole out in _ante bellum_ days. Lincoln's +speech is short--a few grave words which he turned aside for a moment +to speak in the midst of his task of saving the country. The speech is +simple, naked of figures, every sentence impressed with a sense of +responsibility for the work yet to be done and with a stern +determination to do it. "In a larger sense," it says, "we cannot +dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The +brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it far +above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor +long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did +here. It is for us, the living, rather to be dedicated here to the +unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly +advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task +remaining before us; that from these honored dead we take increased +devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of +devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have +died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of +freedom; and that government of the people, by the people, for the +people, shall not perish from the earth." Here was eloquence of a +different sort from the sonorous perorations of Webster or the polished +climaxes of Everett. As we read the plain, strong language of this +brief classic, with its solemnity, its restraint, its "brave old wisdom +of sincerity," we seem to see the president's homely features +irradiated with the light of coming martyrdom-- + + "The kindly-earnest, brave, foreseeing man, + Sagacious, patient, dreading praise, not blame, + New birth of our new soil, the first American." + +Within the past quarter of a century the popular school of American +humor has reached its culmination. Every man of genius who is a +humorist at all is so in a way peculiar to himself. There is no lack +of individuality in the humor of Irving and Hawthorne and the wit of +Holmes and Lowell, but although they are new in subject and application +they are not new in kind. Irving, as we have seen, was the literary +descendant of Addison. The character-sketches in _Bracebridge Hall_ +are of the same family with Sir Roger de Coverley and the other figures +of the Spectator Club. _Knickerbocker's History of New York_, though +purely American in its matter, is not distinctly American in its +method, which is akin to the mock heroic of Fielding and the irony of +Swift in the _Voyage to Lilliput_. Irving's humor, like that of all +the great English humorists, had its root in the perception of +character--of the characteristic traits of men and classes of men, as +ground of amusement. It depended for its effect, therefore, upon its +truthfulness, its dramatic insight and sympathy, as did the humor of +Shakespeare, of Sterne, Lamb, and Thackeray. This perception of the +characteristic, when pushed to excess, issues in grotesque and +caricature, as in some of Dickens's inferior creations, which are +little more than personified single tricks of manner, speech, feature, +or dress. Hawthorne's rare humor differed from Irving's in temper but +not in substance, and belonged, like Irving's, to the English variety. +Dr. Holmes's more pronouncedly comic verse does not differ specifically +from the _facetiae_ of Thomas Hood, but his prominent trait is wit, +which is the laughter of the head as humor is of the heart. The same +is true, with qualifications, of Lowell, whose _Biglow Papers_, though +humor of an original sort in their revelation of Yankee character, are +essentially satirical. It is the cleverness, the shrewdness of the +hits in the _Biglow Papers_, their logical, that is, _witty_ character, +as distinguished from their drollery, that arrests the attention. They +are funny, but they are not so funny as they are smart. In all these +writers humor was blent with more serious qualities, which gave +fineness and literary value to their humorous writings. Their view of +life was not exclusively comic. But there has been a class of jesters, +of professional humorists, in America, whose product is so indigenous, +so different, if not in essence, yet at least in form and expression, +from any European humor, that it may be regarded as a unique addition +to the comic literature of the world. It has been accepted as such in +England, where Artemus Ward and Mark Twain are familiar to multitudes +who have never read the _One Hoss-Shay_ or _The Courtin'_. And though +it would be ridiculous to maintain that either of these writers takes +rank with Lowell and Holmes, or to deny that there is an amount of +flatness and coarseness in many of their labored fooleries which puts +large portions of their writings below the line where real literature +begins, still it will not do to ignore them as mere buffoons, or even +to predict that their humors will soon be forgotten. It is true that +no literary fashion is more subject to change than the fashion of a +jest, and that jokes that make one generation laugh seem insipid to the +next. But there is something perennial in the fun of Rabelais, whom +Bacon called "the great jester of France," and though the puns of +Shakespeare's clowns are detestable the clowns themselves have not lost +their power to amuse. + +The Americans are not a gay people, but they are fond of a joke. +Lincoln's "little stories" were characteristically Western, and it is +doubtful whether he was more endeared to the masses by his solid +virtues than by the humorous perception which made him one of them. +The humor of which we are speaking now is a strictly popular and +national possession. Though America has never, or not until lately, +had a comic paper ranking with _Punch_ or _Charivari_ or the _Fliegende +Blaetter_, every newspaper has had its funny column. Our humorists have +been graduated from the journalist's desk and sometimes from the +printing-press, and now and then a local or country newspaper has risen +into sudden prosperity from the possession of a new humorist, as in the +case of G. D. Prentice's _Courier Journal_, or more recently of the +_Cleveland Plaindealer_, the _Danbury News_, the _Burlington Hawkeye_, +the _Arkansaw Traveller_, the _Texas Siftings_, and numerous others. +Nowadays there are even syndicates of humorists, who co-operate to +supply fun for certain groups of periodicals. Of course, the great +majority of these manufacturers of jests for newspapers and comic +almanacs are doomed to swift oblivion. But it is not so certain that +the best of the class, like Clemens and Browne, will not long continue +to be read as illustrative of one side of the American mind, or that +their best things will not survive as long as the _mots_ of Sydney +Smith, which are still as current as ever. One of the earliest of them +was Seba Smith, who, under the name of "Major Jack Downing," did his +best to make Jackson's administration ridiculous. B. P. Shillaber's +"Mrs. Partington"--a sort of American Mrs. Malaprop--enjoyed great +vogue before the war. Of a somewhat higher kind were the +_Phoenixiana_, 1855, and _Squibob Papers_, 1856, of Lieutenant George +H. Derby, "John Phoenix," one of the pioneers of literature on the +Pacific coast at the time of the California gold fever of '49. Derby's +proposal for _A New System of English Grammar_, his satirical account +of the topographical survey of the two miles of road between San +Francisco and the Mission Dolores, and his picture gallery made out of +the conventional houses, steam-boats, rail-cars, runaway Negroes, and +other designs which used to figure in the advertising columns of the +newspapers, were all very ingenious and clever. But all these pale +before Artemus Ward--"Artemus the delicious," as Charles Reade called +him--who first secured for this peculiarly American type of humor a +hearing and reception abroad. Ever since the invention of Hosea +Biglow, an imaginary personage of some sort, under cover of whom the +author might conceal his own identity, has seemed a necessity to our +humorists. Artemus Ward was a traveling showman who went about the +country exhibiting a collection of wax "figgers" and whose experiences +and reflections were reported in grammar and spelling of a most +ingeniously eccentric kind. His inventor was Charles F. Browne, +originally of Maine, a printer by trade and afterward a newspaper +writer and editor at Boston, Toledo, and Cleveland, where his +comicalities in the _Plaindealer_ first began to attract notice. In +1860 he came to New York and joined the staff of _Vanity Fair_, a comic +weekly of much brightness, which ran a short career and perished for +want of capital. When Browne began to appear as a public lecturer, +people who had formed an idea of him from his impersonation of the +shrewd and vulgar old showman were surprised to find him a +gentlemanly-looking young man, who came upon the platform in correct +evening dress, and "spoke his piece" in a quiet and somewhat mournful +manner, stopping in apparent surprise when any one in the audience +laughed at any uncommonly outrageous absurdity. In London, where he +delivered his _Lecture on the Mormons_, in 1806, the gravity of his +bearing at first imposed upon his hearers, who had come to the hall in +search of instructive information and were disappointed at the +inadequate nature of the panorama which Browne had had made to +illustrate his lecture. Occasionally some hitch would occur in the +machinery of this and the lecturer would leave the rostrum for a few +moments to "work the moon" that shone upon the Great Salt Lake, +apologizing on his return on the ground, that he was "a man short" and +offering "to pay a good salary to any respectable boy of good parentage +and education who is a good moonist." When it gradually dawned upon +the British intellect that these and similar devices of the +lecturer--such as the soft music which he had the pianist play at +pathetic passages--nay, that the panorama and even the lecture itself +were of a humorous intention, the joke began to take, and Artemus's +success in England became assured. He was employed as one of the +editors of _Punch_, but died at Southampton in the year following. + +Some of Artemus Ward's effects were produced, by cacography or bad +spelling, but there was genius in the wildly erratic way in which he +handled even this rather low order of humor. It is a curious +commentary on the wretchedness of our English orthography that the +phonetic spelling of a word, as for example, _wuz_ for _was_, should be +in itself an occasion of mirth. Other verbal effects of a different +kind were among his devices, as in the passage where the seventeen +widows of a deceased Mormon offered themselves to Artemus. + +"And I said, 'Why is this thus? What is the reason of this thusness?' +They hove a sigh--seventeen sighs of different size. They said: + +"'O, soon thou will be gonested away.' + +"I told them that when I got ready to leave a place I wentested. + +"They said, 'Doth not like us?' + +"I said, 'I doth--I doth.' + +"I also said, 'I hope your intentions are honorable, as I am a lone +child--my parents being far--far away.' + +"They then said, 'Wilt not marry us?' + +"I said, 'O no, it cannot was.' + +"When they cried, 'O cruel man! this is too much!--O! too much,' I told +them that it was on account of the muchness that I declined." + +It is hard to define the difference between the humor of one writer and +another, or of one nation and another. It can be felt and can be +illustrated by quoting examples, but scarcely described in general +terms. It has been said of that class of American humorists of which +Artemus Ward is a representative that their peculiarity consists in +extravagance, surprise, audacity, and irreverence. But all these +qualities have characterized other schools of humor. There is the same +element of surprise in De Quincey's anti-climax, "Many a man has dated +his ruin from some murder or other which, perhaps, at the time he +thought little of," as in Artemus's truism that "a comic paper ought to +publish a joke now and then." The violation of logic which makes us +laugh at an Irish bull is likewise the source of the humor in Artemus's +saying of Jeff Davis, that "it would have been better than ten dollars +in his pocket if he had never been born;" or in his advice, "Always +live within your income, even if you have to borrow money to do so;" +or, again, in his announcement that "Mr. Ward will pay no debts of his +own contracting." A kind of ludicrous confusion, caused by an unusual +collocation of words, is also one of his favorite tricks, as when he +says of Brigham Young, "He's the most married man I ever saw in my +life;" or when, having been drafted at several hundred different places +where he had been exhibiting his wax figures, he says that if he went +on he should soon become a regiment, and adds, "I never knew that there +was so many of me." With this a whimsical understatement and an +affectation of simplicity, as where he expresses his willingness to +sacrifice "even his wife's relations" on the altar of patriotism; or +where, in delightful unconsciousness of his own sins against +orthography, he pronounces that "Chaucer was a great poet but he +couldn't spell," or where he says of the feast of raw dog, tendered him +by the Indian chief, Wocky-bocky, "It don't agree with me. I prefer +simple food." On the whole, it may be said of original humor of this +kind, as of other forms of originality in literature, that the elements +of it are old, but their combinations are novel. Other humorists, like +Henry W. Shaw ("Josh Billings") and David R. Locke ("Petroleum V. +Nasby"), have used bad spelling as a part of their machinery; while +Robert H. Newell ("Orpheus C. Kerr"), Samuel L. Clemens ("Mark Twain"), +and more recently "Bill Nye," though belonging to the same school of +low or broad comedy, have discarded cacography. Of these the most +eminent, by all odds, is Mark Twain, who has probably made more people +laugh than any other living writer. A Missourian by birth (1835), he +served the usual apprenticeship at type-setting and editing country +newspapers; spent seven years as a pilot on a Mississippi steam-boat, +and seven years more mining and journalizing in Nevada, where he +conducted the Virginia City _Enterprise_; finally drifted to San +Francisco, and was associated with Bret Harte on the _Californian_, and +in 1867 published his first book, _The Jumping Frog_. This was +succeeded by the _Innocents Abroad_, 1869; _Roughing It_, 1872; _A +Tramp Abroad_, 1880, and by others not so good. + +Mark Twain's drolleries have frequently the same air of innocence and +surprise as Artemus Ward's, and there is a like suddenness in his turns +of expression, as where he speaks of "the calm confidence of a +Christian with four aces." If he did not originate, he at any rate +employed very effectively that now familiar device of the newspaper +"funny man," of putting a painful situation euphemistically, as when he +says of a man who was hanged, that he "received injuries which +terminated in his death." He uses to the full extent the American +humorist's favorite resources of exaggeration and irreverence. An +instance of the former quality may be seen in his famous description of +a dog chasing a coyote, in _Roughing It_, or in his interview with the +lightning-rod agent in Mark Twain's _Sketches_, 1875. He is a shrewd +observer, and his humor has a more satirical side than Artemus Ward's, +sometimes passing into downright denunciation. He delights +particularly in ridiculing sentimental humbug and moralizing cant. He +runs atilt, as has been said, at "copy-book texts," at the temperance +reformer, the tract distributer, the Good Boy of Sunday-school +literature, and the women who send bouquets and sympathetic letters to +interesting criminals. He gives a ludicrous turn to famous historical +anecdotes, such as the story of George Washington and his little +hatchet; burlesques the time-honored adventure, in nautical romances, +of the starving crew casting lots in the long-boat, and spoils the +dignity of antiquity by modern trivialities, saying of a discontented +sailor on Columbus's ship, "He wanted fresh shad." The fun of +_Innocents Abroad_ consists in this irreverent application of modern, +common sense, utilitarian, democratic standards to the memorable places +and historic associations of Europe. Tried by this test the Old +Masters in the picture galleries become laughable, Abelard was a +precious scoundrel, and the raptures of the guide-books are parodied +without mercy. The tourist weeps at the grave of Adam. At Genoa he +drives the _cicerone_ to despair by pretending never to have heard of +Christopher Columbus, and inquiring innocently, "Is he dead?" It is +Europe vulgarized and stripped of its illusions--Europe seen by a +Western newspaper reporter without any "historic imagination." + +The method of this whole class of humorists is the opposite of +Addison's or Irving's or Thackeray's. It does not amuse by the +perception of the characteristic. It is not founded upon truth, but +upon incongruity, distortion, unexpectedness. Every thing in life is +reversed, as in opera bouffe, and turned topsy-turvy, so that paradox +takes the place of the natural order of things. Nevertheless they have +supplied a wholesome criticism upon sentimental excesses, and the world +is in their debt for many a hearty laugh. + +In the _Atlantic Monthly_ for December, 1863, appeared a tale entitled +_The Man Without a Country_, which made a great sensation, and did much +to strengthen patriotic feeling in one of the darkest hours of the +nation's history. It was the story of one Philip Nolan, an army +officer, whose head had been turned by Aaron Burr, and who, having been +censured by a court-martial for some minor offense; exclaimed +petulantly, upon mention being made of the United States government, +"Damn the United States! I wish that I might never hear the United +States mentioned again." Thereupon he was sentenced to have his wish, +and was kept all his life aboard the vessels of the navy, being sent +off on long voyages and transferred from ship to ship, with orders to +those in charge that his country and its concerns should never be +spoken of in his presence. Such an air of reality was given to the +narrative by incidental references to actual persons and occurrences +that many believed it true, and some were found who remembered Philip +Nolan, but had heard different versions of his career. The author of +this clever hoax--if hoax it may be called--was Edward Everett Hale, a +Unitarian clergyman of Boston, who published a collection of stories in +1868, under the fantastic title, _If, Yes, and Perhaps_, indicating +thereby that some of the tales were possible, some of them probable, +and others might even be regarded as essentially true. A similar +collection, _His Level Best, and Other Stories_, was published in 1873, +and in the interval three volumes of a somewhat different kind, the +_Ingham Papers_ and _Sybaris and Other Homes_, both in 1869, and _Ten +Times One Is Ten_, in 187l. The author shelters himself behind the +imaginary figure of Captain Frederic Ingham, pastor of the Sandemanian +Church at Naguadavick, and the same characters have a way of +re-appearing in his successive volumes as old friends of the reader, +which is pleasant at first, but in the end a little tiresome. Mr. Hale +is one of the most original and ingenious of American story-writers. +The old device of making wildly improbable inventions appear like fact +by a realistic treatment of details--a device employed by Swift and +Edgar Poe, and more lately by Jules Verne--became quite fresh and novel +in his hands, and was managed with a humor all his own. Some of his +best stories are _My Double and How He Undid Me_, describing how a busy +clergyman found an Irishman who looked so much like himself that he +trained him to pass as his duplicate, and sent him to do duty in his +stead at public meetings, dinners, etc., thereby escaping bores and +getting time for real work; the _Brick Moon_, a story of a projectile +built and launched into space, to revolve in a fixed meridian about the +earth and serve mariners as a mark of longitude; the _Rag Man and Rag +Woman_, a tale of an impoverished couple who made a competence by +saving the pamphlets, advertisements, wedding-cards, etc., that came to +them through the mail, and developing a paper business on that basis; +and the _Skeleton in the Closet_, which shows how the fate of the +Southern Confederacy was involved in the adventures of a certain +hoop-skirt, "built in the eclipse and rigged with curses dark." Mr. +Hale's historical scholarship and his habit of detail have aided him in +the art of giving _vraisemblance_ to absurdities. He is known in +philanthropy as well as in letters, and his tales have a cheerful, +busy, practical way with them in consonance with his motto, "Look up +and not down, look forward and not back, look out and not in, and lend +a hand." + +It is too soon to sum up the literary history of the last quarter of a +century. The writers who have given it shape are still writing, and +their work is therefore incomplete. But on the slightest review of it +two facts become manifest; first, that New England has lost its long +monopoly; and, secondly, that a marked feature of the period is the +growth of realistic fiction. The electric tension of the atmosphere +for thirty years preceding the civil war, the storm and stress +of great public contests, and the intellectual stir produced by +transcendentalism seem to have been more favorable to poetry and +literary idealism than present conditions are. At all events there are +no new poets who rank with Whittier, Longfellow, Lowell, and others of +the elder generation, although George H. Boker, in Philadelphia, R. H. +Stoddard and E. C. Stedman, in New York, and T. B. Aldrich, first in +New York and afterward in Boston, have written creditable verse; not to +speak of younger writers, whose work, however, for the most part, has +been more distinguished by delicacy of execution than by native +impulse. Mention has been made of the establishment of _Harper's +Monthly Magazine_, which, under the conduct of its accomplished editor, +George W. Curtis, has provided the public with an abundance of good +reading. The old _Putnam's Monthly_, which ran from 1853 to 1858, and +had a strong corps of contributors, was revived in 1868, and continued +by that name till 1870, when it was succeeded by _Scribner's Monthly_, +under the editorship of Dr. J. G. Holland, and this in 1881 by the +_Century_, an efficient rival of _Harper's_ in circulation, in literary +excellence, and in the beauty of its wood-engravings, the American +school of which art these two great periodicals have done much to +develop and encourage. Another New York monthly, the _Galaxy_, ran +from 1866 to 1878, and was edited by Richard Grant White. Within the +last few years a new _Scribner's Magazine_ has also taken the field. +The _Atlantic_, in Boston, and _Lippincott's_, in Philadelphia, are no +unworthy competitors with these for public favor. + +During the forties began a new era of national expansion, somewhat +resembling that described in a former chapter, and, like that, bearing +fruit eventually in literature. The cession of Florida to the United +States in 1845, and the annexation of Texas in the same year, were +followed by the purchase of California in 1847, and its admission as a +State in 1850. In 1849 came the great rush to the California gold +fields. San Francisco, at first a mere collection of tents and board +shanties, with a few adobe huts, grew with incredible rapidity into a +great city--the wicked and wonderful city apostrophized by Bret Harte +in his poem, _San Francisco_: + + "Serene, indifferent of fate, + Thou sittest at the Western Gate; + Upon thy heights so lately won + Still slant the banners of the sun. . . . + I know thy cunning and thy greed, + Thy hard, high lust and willful deed." + +The adventurers of all lands and races who flocked to the Pacific +coast, found there a motley state of society between civilization and +savagery. There were the relics of the old Mexican occupation, the +Spanish missions, with their Christianized Indians; the wild tribes of +the plains--Apaches, Utes, and Navajoes; the Chinese coolies and +washermen, all elements strange to the Atlantic sea-board and the +States of the interior. The gold-hunters crossed, in stages or +caravans, enormous prairies, alkaline deserts dotted with sage-brush +and seamed by deep canons, and passes through gigantic mountain ranges. +On the coast itself nature was unfamiliar: the climate was subtropical; +fruits and vegetables grew to a mammoth size, corresponding to the +enormous redwoods in the Mariposa groves and the prodigious scale of +the scenery in the valley of the Yosemite and the snow-capped peaks of +the sierras. At first there were few women, and the men led a wild, +lawless existence in the mining camps. Hard upon the heels of the +prospector followed the dram-shop, the gambling-hell, and the +dance-hall. Every man carried his "Colt," and looked out for his own +life and his "claim." Crime went unpunished or was taken in hand, when +it got too rampant, by vigilance committees. In the diggings shaggy +frontiersmen and "pikes" from Missouri mingled with the scum of eastern +cities and with broken-down business men and young college graduates +seeking their fortune. Surveyors and geologists came of necessity, +speculators in mining stock and city lots set up their offices in the +town; later came a sprinkling of school-teachers and ministers. +Fortunes were made in one day and lost the next at poker or loo. +To-day the lucky miner who had struck a good "lead" was drinking +champagne out of pails and treating the town; to-morrow he was +"busted," and shouldered the pick for a new onslaught upon his luck. +This strange, reckless life was not without fascination, and highly +picturesque and dramatic elements were present in it. It was, as Bret +Harte says, "an era replete with a certain heroic Greek poetry," and +sooner or later it was sure to find its poet. During the war +California remained loyal to the Union, but was too far from the seat +of conflict to experience any serious disturbance, and went on +independently developing its own resources and becoming daily more +civilized. By 1868 San Francisco had a literary magazine, the +_Overland Monthly_, which ran until 1875, and was revived in 1883. It +had a decided local flavor, and the vignette on its title-page was a +happily chosen emblem, representing a grizzly bear crossing a railway +track. In an early number of the _Overland_ was a story entitled the +_Luck of Roaring Camp_, by Francis Bret Harte, a native of Albany, N. +Y. (1835), who had come to California at the age of seventeen, in time +to catch the unique aspects of the life of the Forty-niners, before +their vagabond communities had settled down into the law-abiding +society of the present day. His first contribution was followed by +other stories and sketches of a similar kind, such as the _Outcasts of +Poker Flat_, _Miggles_, and _Tennessee's Partner_; and by verses, +serious and humorous, of which last, _Plain Language from Truthful +James_, better known as the _Heathen Chinee_, made an immediate hit, +and carried its author's name into every corner of the English-speaking +world. In 1871 he published a collection of his tales, another of his +poems, and a volume of very clever parodies, _Condensed Novels_, which +rank with Thackeray's _Novels by Eminent Hands_. Bret Harte's +California stories were vivid, highly colored pictures of life in the +mining camps and raw towns of the Pacific coast. The pathetic and the +grotesque went hand in hand in them, and the author aimed to show how +even in the desperate characters gathered together there--the +fortune-hunters, gamblers, thieves, murderers, drunkards, and +prostitutes--the latent nobility of human nature asserted itself in +acts of heroism, magnanimity, self-sacrifice, and touching fidelity. +The same men who cheated at cards and shot each another down with tipsy +curses were capable on occasion of the most romantic generosity and the +most delicate chivalry. Critics were not wanting who held that, in the +matter of dialect and manners and other details, the narrator was not +true to the facts. This was a comparatively unimportant charge; but a +more serious question was the doubt whether his characters were +essentially true to human nature; whether the wild soil of revenge and +greed and dissolute living ever yields such flowers of devotion as +blossom in _Tennessee's Partner_ and the _Outcasts of Poker Flat_. +However this may be, there is no question as to Harte's power as a +narrator. His short stories are skillfully constructed and effectively +told. They never drag, and are never overladen with description, +reflection, or other lumber. + +In his poems in dialect we find the same variety of types and +nationalities characteristic of the Pacific coast: the little Mexican +maiden, Pachita, in the old mission garden; the wicked Bill Nye, who +tries to cheat the Heathen Chinee at eucher and to rob Injin Dick of +his winning lottery ticket; the geological society on the Stanislaw who +settle their scientific debates with chunks of old red sandstone and +the skulls of mammoths; the unlucky Mr. Dow, who finally strikes gold +while digging a well, and builds a house with a "coopilow;" and Flynn, +of Virginia, who saves his "pard's" life, at the sacrifice of his own, +by holding up the timbers in the caving tunnel. These poems are mostly +in monologue, like Browning's dramatic lyrics, exclamatory and abrupt +in style, and with a good deal of indicated action, as in _Jim_, where +a miner comes into a bar-room, looking for his old chum, learns that he +is dead, and is just turning away to hide his emotion when he +recognizes Jim in his informant: + + "Well, thar--Good-bye-- + No more, sir--I-- + Eh? + What's that you say?-- + Why, dern it!--sho!-- + No? Yea! By Jo! + Sold! + Sold! Why, you limb! + You ornery, + Derned old + Long-legged Jim!" + +Bret Harte had many imitators, and not only did our newspaper poetry +for a number of years abound in the properties of Californian life, +such as gulches, placers, divides, etc., but writers further east +applied his method to other conditions. Of these by far the most +successful was John Hay, a native of Indiana and private secretary to +President Lincoln, whose _Little Breeches_, _Jim Bludso_, and _Mystery +of Gilgal_ have rivaled Bret Harte's own verses in popularity. In the +last-named piece the reader is given to feel that there is something +rather cheerful and humorous in a bar-room fight which results in "the +gals that winter, as a rule," going "alone to singing school." In the +two former we have heroes of the Bret Harte type, the same combination +of superficial wickedness with inherent loyalty and tenderness. The +profane farmer of the South-west, who "doesn't pan out on the +prophets," and who had taught his little son "to chaw terbacker, just +to keep his milk-teeth white," but who believes in God and the angels +ever since the miraculous recovery of the same little son when lost on +the prairie in a blizzard; and the unsaintly and bigamistic captain of +the _Prairie Belle_, who died like a hero, holding the nozzle of his +burning boat against the bank + + "Till the last galoot's ashore." + +The manners and dialect of other classes and sections of the country +have received abundant illustration of late years. Edward Eggleston's +_Hoosier Schoolmaster_, 1871, and his other novels are pictures of +rural life in the early days of Indiana. _Western Windows_, a volume +of poems by John James Piatt, another native of Indiana, had an +unmistakable local coloring. Charles G. Leland, of Philadelphia, in +his Hans Breitmann ballads, in dialect, gave a humorous presentation of +the German-American element in the cities. By the death, in 1881, of +Sidney Lanier, a Georgian by birth, the South lost a poet of rare +promise, whose original genius was somewhat hampered by his hesitation +between two arts of expression, music and verse, and by his effort to +co-ordinate them. His _Science of English Verse_, 1880, was a most +suggestive, though hardly convincing, statement of that theory of their +relation which he was working out in his practice. Some of his pieces, +like the _Mocking Bird_ and the _Song of the Chattahoochie_, are the +most characteristically Southern poetry that has been written in +America. Joel Chandler Harris's _Uncle Remus_ stories, in Negro +dialect, are transcripts from the folk-lore of the plantations, while +his collection of stories, _At Teague Poteet's_, together with Miss +Murfree's _In the Tennessee Mountains_ and her other books, have made +the Northern public familiar with the wild life of the "moonshiners," +who distill illicit whiskey in the mountains of Georgia, North +Carolina, and Tennessee. These tales are not only exciting in +incident, but strong and fresh in their delineations of character. +Their descriptions of mountain scenery are also impressive, though, in +the case of the last-named writer, frequently too prolonged. George W. +Cable's sketches of French Creole life in New Orleans attracted +attention by their freshness and quaintness when published, in the +magazines and re-issued in book form as _Old Creole Days_, in 1879. +His first regular novel, the _Grandissimes_, 1880, was likewise a story +of Creole life. It had the same winning qualities as his short stories +and sketches, but was an advance upon them in dramatic force, +especially in the intensely tragic and powerfully told episode of "Bras +Coupe." Mr. Cable has continued his studies of Louisiana types and +ways in his later books, but the _Grandissimes_ still remains his +masterpiece. All in all, he is, thus far, the most important literary +figure of the New South, and the justness and delicacy of his +representations of life speak volumes for the sobering and refining +agency of the civil war in the States whose "cause" was "lost," but +whose true interests gained even more by the loss than did the +interests of the victorious North. + +The four writers last mentioned, have all come to the front within the +past eight or ten years, and, in accordance with the plan of this +sketch, receive here a mere passing notice. It remains to close our +review of the literary history of the period since the war with a +somewhat more extended account of the two favorite novelists whose work +has done more than any thing else to shape the movement of recent +fiction. These are Henry James, Jr., and William Dean Howells. Their +writings, though dissimilar in some respects, are alike in this, that +they are analytic in method and realistic in spirit. Cooper was a +romancer pure and simple; he wrote the romance of adventure and of +external incident. Hawthorne went much deeper, and with a finer +spiritual insight dealt with the real passions of the heart; and with +men's inner experiences. This he did with truth and power; but, +although himself a keen observer of whatever passed before his eyes, he +was not careful to secure a photographic fidelity to the surface facts +of speech, dress, manners, etc. Thus the talk of his characters is +book-talk, and not the actual language of the parlor or the street, +with its slang, its colloquial ease and the intonations and shadings of +phrase and pronunciation which mark different sections of the country +and different grades of society. His attempts at dialect, for example, +were of the slenderest kind. His art is ideal, and his romances +certainly do not rank as novels of real life. But with the growth of a +richer and more complicated society in America fiction has grown more +social and more minute in its observation. It would not be fair to +classify the novels of James and Howells as the fiction of manners +merely; they are also the fiction of character, but they aim to +describe people not only as they are, in their inmost natures, but also +as they look and talk and dress. They try to express character through +manners, which is the way in which it is most often expressed in the +daily existence of a conventional society. It is a principle of +realism not to select exceptional persons or occurrences, but to take +average men and women and their average experiences. The realists +protest that the moving incident is not their trade, and that the +stories have all been told. They want no plot and no hero. They will +tell no rounded tale with a _denouement_, in which all the parts are +distributed, as in the fifth act of an old-fashioned comedy; but they +will take a transcript from life and end when they get through, without +informing the reader what becomes of the characters. And they will try +to interest this reader in "poor real life" with its "foolish face." +Their acknowledged masters are Balzac, George Eliot, Turgenieff, and +Anthony Trollope, and they regard novels as studies in sociology, +honest reports of the writers' impressions, which may not be without a +certain scientific value even. + +Mr. James's peculiar province is the international novel, a field which +he created for himself, but which he has occupied in company with +Howells, Mrs. Burnett, and many others. The novelist received most of +his schooling in Europe, and has lived much abroad, with the result +that he has become half denationalized and has engrafted a cosmopolitan +indifference upon his Yankee inheritance. This, indeed, has +constituted his opportunity. A close observer and a conscientious +student of the literary art, he has added to his intellectual equipment +the advantage of a curious doubleness in his point of view. He looks +at America with the eyes of a foreigner and at Europe with the eyes of +an American. He has so far thrown himself out of relation with +American life that he describes a Boston horse-car or a New York hotel +table with a sort of amused wonder. His starting-point was in +criticism, and he has always maintained the critical attitude. He took +up story-writing in order to help himself, by practical experiment, in +his chosen art of literary criticism, and his volume on _French Poets +and Novelists_, 1878, is by no means the least valuable of his books. +His short stories in the magazines were collected into a volume in +1875, with the title, _A Passionate Pilgrim, and Other Stories_. One +or two of these, as the _Last of the Valerii_ and the _Madonna of the +Future_, suggest Hawthorne, a very unsympathetic study of whom James +afterward contributed to the "English Men of Letters" series. But in +the name-story of the collection he was already in the line of his +future development. This is the story of a middle-aged invalid +American who comes to England in search of health, and finds, too late, +in the mellow atmosphere of the mother-country, the repose and the +congenial surroundings which he has all his life been longing for in +his raw America. The pathos of his self-analysis and his confession of +failure is subtly imagined. The impressions which he and his far-away +English kinsfolk make on one another, their mutual attraction and +repulsion, are described with that delicate perception of national +differences which makes the humor and sometimes the tragedy of James's +later books, like _The American_, _Daisy Miller_, _The Europeans_, and +_An International Episode_. His first novel was _Roderick Hudson_, +1876, not the most characteristic of his fictions, but perhaps the most +powerful in its grasp of elementary passion. The analytic method and +the critical attitude have their dangers in imaginative literature. In +proportion as this writer's faculty of minute observation and his +realistic objectivity have increased upon him, the uncomfortable +coldness which is felt in his youthful work has become actually +disagreeable, and his art--growing constantly finer and surer in +matters of detail--has seemed to dwell more and more in the region of +mere manners and less in the higher realm of character and passion. In +most of his writings the heart, somehow, is left out. We have seen +that Irving, from his knowledge of England and America, and his long +residence in both countries, became the mediator between the two great +branches of the Anglo-Saxon race. This he did by the power of his +sympathy with each. Henry James has likewise interpreted the two +nations to one another in a subtler but less genial fashion than +Irving, and not through sympathy, but through contrast, by bringing +into relief the opposing ideals of life and society which have +developed under different institutions. In his novel, _The American_, +1877, he has shown the actual misery which may result from the clashing +of opposed social systems. In such clever sketches as _Daisy Miller_, +1879, the _Pension Beaurepas_, and _A Bundle of Letters_, he has +exhibited types of the American girl, the American business man, the +aesthetic feebling from Boston, and the Europeanized or would-be +denationalized American campaigners in the Old World, and has set forth +the ludicrous incongruities, perplexities, and misunderstandings which +result from contradictory standards of conventional morality and +behavior. In _The Europeans_, 1879, and _An International Episode_, +1878, he has reversed the process, bringing Old World standards to the +test of American ideas by transferring his _dramatis personae_ to +republican soil. The last-named of these illustrates how slender a +plot realism requires for its purposes. It is nothing more than the +history of an English girl of good family who marries an American +gentleman and undertakes to live in America, but finds herself so +uncomfortable in strange social conditions that she returns to England +for life, while, contrariwise, the heroine's sister is so taken with +the freedom of these very conditions that she elopes with another +American and "goes West." James is a keen observer of the physiognomy +of cities as well as of men, and his _Portraits of Places_, 1884, is +among the most delightful contributions to the literature of foreign +travel. + +Mr. Howells's writings are not without "international" touches. In _A +Foregone Conclusion_ and the _Lady of the Aroostook_, and others of his +novels, the contrasted points of view in American and European life are +introduced, and especially those variations in feeling, custom, +dialect, etc., which make the modern Englishman and the modern American +such objects of curiosity to each other, and which have been dwelt upon +of late even unto satiety. But in general he finds his subjects at +home, and if he does not know his own countrymen and countrywomen more +intimately than Mr. James, at least he loves them better. There is a +warmer sentiment in his fictions, too; his men are better fellows and +his women are more lovable. Howells was born in Ohio. His early life +was that of a western country editor. In 1860 he published, jointly +with his friend Piatt, a book of verse--_Poems of Two Friends_. In +1861 he was sent as consul to Venice, and the literary results of his +sojourn there appeared in his sketches, _Venetian Life_, 1865, and +_Italian Journeys_, 1867. In 1871 he became editor of the _Atlantic +Monthly_, and in the same year published his _Suburban Sketches_. All +of these early volumes showed a quick eye for the picturesque, an +unusual power of description, and humor of the most delicate quality; +but as yet there was little approach to narrative. _Their Wedding +Journey_ was a revelation to the public of the interest that may lie in +an ordinary bridal trip across the State of New York, when a close and +sympathetic observation is brought to bear upon the characteristics of +American life as it appears at railway stations and hotels, on +steam-boats and in the streets of very commonplace towns. _A Chance +Acquaintance_, 1873, was Howells's first novel, though even yet the +story was set against a background of travel-pictures. A holiday trip +on the St. Lawrence and the Saguenay, with descriptions of Quebec and +the Falls of Montmorenci, etc., rather predominated over the narrative. +Thus, gradually and by a natural process, complete characters and +realistic novels, such as _A Modern Instance_, 1882, and _Indian +Summer_, evolved themselves from truthful sketches of places and +persons seen by the way. + +The incompatibility existing between European and American views of +life, which makes the comedy or the tragedy of Henry James's +international fictions, is replaced in Howells's novels by the +repulsion between differing social grades in the same country. The +adjustment of these subtle distinctions forms a part of the problem of +life in all complicated societies. Thus in _A Chance Acquaintance_ the +heroine is a bright and pretty Western girl, who becomes engaged during +a pleasure tour to an irreproachable but offensively priggish young +gentleman from Boston, and the engagement is broken by her in +consequence of an unintended slight--the betrayal on the hero's part of +a shade of mortification when he and his betrothed are suddenly brought +into the presence of some fashionable ladies belonging to his own +_monde_. The little comedy, _Out of the Question_, deals with this +same adjustment of social scales; and in many of Howells's other +novels, such as _Silas Lapham_ and the _Lady of the Aroustook_, one of +the main motives may be described to be the contact of the man who eats +with his fork with the man who eats with his knife, and the shock +thereby ensuing. In _Indian Summer_ the complications arise from the +difference in age between the hero and heroine, and not from a +difference in station or social antecedents. In all of these fictions +the misunderstandings come from an incompatibility of manners rather +than of character, and, if any thing were to be objected to the +probability of the story, it is that the climax hinges on delicacies +and subtleties which, in real life, when there is opportunity for +explanations, are readily brushed aside. But in _A Modern Instance_ +Howells touched the deeper springs of action. In this, his strongest +work, the catastrophe is brought about, as in George Eliot's great +novels, by the reaction of characters upon one another, and the story +is realistic in a higher sense than any mere study of manners can be. +His nearest approach to romance is in _The Undiscovered Country_, 1880, +which deals with the Spiritualists and the Shakers, and in its study of +problems that hover on the borders of the supernatural, in its +out-of-the-way personages and adventures, and in a certain ideal poetic +flavor about the whole book, has a strong resemblance to Hawthorne, +especially to Hawthorne in the _Blithedale Romance_, where he comes +closer to common ground with other romancers. It is interesting to +compare the _Undiscovered Country_ with Henry James's _Bostonians_, the +latest and one of the cleverest of his fictions, which is likewise a +study of the clairvoyants, mediums, woman's rights advocates, and all +varieties of cranks, reformers, and patrons of "causes," for whom +Boston has long been notorious. A most unlovely race of people they +become under the cold scrutiny of Mr. James's cosmopolitan eyes, which +see more clearly the charlatanism, narrow-mindedness, mistaken +fanaticism, morbid self-consciousness, disagreeable nervous intensity, +and vulgar or ridiculous outside peculiarities of the humanitarians, +than the nobility and moral enthusiasm which underlie the surface. + +Howells is almost the only successful American dramatist, and this in +the field of parlor comedy. His little farces, the _Elevator_, the +_Register_, the _Parlor-Car_, etc., have a lightness and grace, with an +exquisitely absurd situation, which remind us more of the _Comedies et +Proverbes_ of Alfred de Musset, or the many agreeable dialogues and +monologues of the French domestic stage, than of any work of English or +American hands. His softly ironical yet affectionate treatment of +feminine ways is especially admirable. In his numerous types of +sweetly illogical, inconsistent, and inconsequent womanhood he has +perpetuated with a nicer art than Dickens what Thackeray calls "that +great discovery," Mrs. Nickleby. + + + +1. Theodore Winthrop. _Life in the Open Air_. _Cecil Dreeme_. + +2. Thomas Wentworth Higginson. _Life in a Black Regiment_. + +3. _Poetry of the Civil War_. Edited by Richard Grant White. New +York. 1866. + +4. Charles Farrar Browne. _Artemus Ward--His Book_. _Lecture on the +Mormons_. _Artemus Ward in London_. + +5. Samuel Langhorne Clemens. _The Jumping Frog_. _Roughing It_. _The +Mississippi Pilot_. + +6. Charles Godfrey Leland. _Hans Breitmann's Ballads_. + +7. Edward Everett Hale. _If, Yes, and Perhaps_. _His Level Best, and +Other Stories_. + +8. Francis Bret Harte. _Outcasts of Poker Flat, and Other Stories_. +_Condensed Novels_. _Poems in Dialect_. + +9. Sidney Lanier. _Nirvana_. _Resurrection_. _The Harlequin of +Dreams_. _Song of the Chattahoochie_. _The Mocking Bird_. _The +Stirrup-Cup_. _Tampa Robins_. _The Bee_. _The Revenge of Hamish_. +_The Ship of Earth_. _The Marshes of Glynn_. _Sunrise_. + +10. Henry James, Jr. _A Passionate Pilgrim_. _Roderick Hudson_. +_Daisy Miller_. _Pension Beaurepas_. _A Bundle of Letters_. _An +International Episode_. _The Bostonians_. _Portraits of Places_. + +11. William Dean Howells. _Their Wedding Journey_. _Suburban +Sketches_. _A Chance Acquaintance_. _A Foregone Conclusion_. _The +Undiscovered Country_. _A Modern Instance_. + +12. George W. Cable. _Old Creole Days_. _Madame Delphine_. _The +Grandissimes_. + +13. Joel Chandler Harris. _Uncle Remus_. _Mingo, and Other Sketches_. + +14. Charles Egbert Craddook (Miss Murfree). _In the Tennessee +Mountains_. + + + + +APPENDIX. + + +COTTON MATHER. + +CAPTAIN PHIPS AND THE SPANISH WRECK. + +[From _Magnalia Christi Americana_.] + +Captain Phips, arriving with a ship and a tender at Port de la Plata, +made a stout canoe of a stately cotton-tree, so large as to carry eight +or ten oars, for the making of which periaga (as they call it) he did, +with the same industry that he did every thing else, employ his own +hand and adze, and endure no little hardship, lying abroad in the woods +many nights together. This periaga with the tender, being anchored at +a place convenient, the periaga kept busking to and again,[1] but could +only discover a reef of rising shoals thereabouts, called "The +Boilers," which, rising to be within two or three feet of the surface +of the sea, were yet so steep that a ship striking on them would +immediately sink down, who could say how many fathom, into the ocean. +Here they could get no other pay for their long peeping among the +Boilers, but only such as caused them to think upon returning to their +captain with the bad news of their total disappointment. Nevertheless, +as they were upon their return, one of the men, looking over the side +of the periaga into the calm water, he spied a sea-feather growing, as +he judged, out of a rock; whereupon he bade one of their Indians to +dive and fetch this feather, that they might, however, carry home +something with them, and make at least as fair a triumph as +Caligula's.[2] The diver, bringing up the feather, brought therewithal +a surprising story, that he perceived a number of great guns in the +watery world where he had found his feather; the report[3] of which +great guns exceedingly astonished the whole company, and at once turned +their despondencies for their ill success into assurances that they had +now lit upon the true spot of ground which they had been looking for; +and they were further confirmed in these assurances when, upon further +diving, the Indian fetched up a sow, as they styled it, or a lump of +silver worth perhaps two or three hundred pounds. Upon this they +prudently buoyed the place that they might readily find it again; and +they went back unto their captain, whom for some while they distressed +with nothing but such bad news as they formerly thought they must have +carried him. Nevertheless, they so slipped in the sow of silver on one +side under the table, where they wore now sitting with the captain, and +hearing him express his resolutions to wait still patiently upon the +providence of God under these disappointments, that when he should look +on one side he might see that odd thing before him. At last he saw it. +Seeing it he cried out with some agony, "Why! what is this? Whence +comes this?" And then, with changed countenances, they told him how +and where they got it. "Then," said he, "thanks be to God! We are +made," and so away they went all hands to work; wherein they had this +one further piece of remarkable prosperity, that whereas if they had +first fallen upon that part of the Spanish wreck where the pieces of +eight[4] had been stowed in bags among the ballast they had seen a more +laborious and less enriching time of it; now, most happily, they first +fell upon that room in the wreck where the bullion had been stored up; +and they so prospered in this new fishery that in a little while they +had, without the loss of any man's life, brought up thirty-two tuns of +silver; for it was now come to measuring of silver by tuns. Besides +which, one Adderly, of Providence, who had formerly been very helpful +to Captain Phips in the search of this wreck, did, upon former +agreement, meet him now with a little vessel here; and he with his few +hands, took up about six tuns of silver; whereof, nevertheless, he made +so little use that in a year or two he died at Bermudas, and, as I have +heard, he ran distracted some while before he died. + +Thus did there once again come into the light of the sun a treasure +which had been half an hundred years groaning under the waters; and in +this time there was grown upon the plate a crust-like limestone, to the +thickness of several inches; which crust being broken open by iron +contrived for that purpose, they knocked out whole bushels of rusty +pieces of eight; which were grown thereinto. Besides that incredible +treasure of plate in various forms thus fetched up from seven or eight +fathom under water, there were vast riches of gold, and pearls, and +jewels, which they also lit upon; and, indeed, for a more comprehensive +invoice, I must but summarily say, "All that a Spanish frigate uses to +be enriched withal." + + +[1] Passing to and fro. + +[2] The Roman emperor who invaded Britain unsuccessfully and made his +legionaries gather sea-shells to bring back with them as evidences of +victory. + +[3] One of Mather's puns. + +[4] Spanish piasters, formerly divided into eight reals. The +piaster=an American dollar. + + + + +JONATHAN EDWARDS. + +THE BEAUTY OF HOLINESS. + +[From the author's Personal Narrative.] + +Holiness, as I then wrote down some of my contemplations on it, +appeared to me to be of a sweet, pleasant, charming, serene, calm +nature; which brought an inexpressible purity, brightness, +peacefulness, and ravishment to the soul. In other words, that it made +the soul like a field or garden of God, with all manner of pleasant +flowers; enjoying a sweet calm and the gently vivifying beams of the +sun. The soul of a true Christian, as I then wrote my meditations, +appeared like such a little white flower as we see in the spring of the +year; low and humble on the ground, opening its bosom to receive the +pleasant beams of the sun's glory; rejoicing, as it were, in a calm +rapture; diffusing around a sweet fragrancy; standing peacefully and +lovingly in the midst of other flowers round about; all in like manner +opening their bosoms to drink in the light of the sun. There was no +part of creature-holiness that I had so great a sense of its loveliness +as humility, brokenness of heart, and poverty of spirit; and there was +nothing that I so earnestly longed for. My heart panted after this--to +lie low before God, as in the dust; that I might be nothing, and that +God might be all; that I might become as a little child. + + + + +THE WRATH OF GOD. + +[From _Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God_.] + +Unconverted men walk over the pit of hell on a rotten covering, and +there are innumerable places in this covering so weak that they will +not bear their weight, and these places are not seen. The arrows of +death fly unseen at noonday; the sharpest sight cannot discern them. +God has so many different, unsearchable ways of taking wicked men out +of the world and sending them to hell that there is nothing to make it +appear that God had need to be at the expense of a miracle, or go out +of the ordinary course of his providence, to destroy any wicked man at +any moment. . . . Your wickedness makes you as it were heavy as lead +and to tend downward with great weight and pressure toward hell; and, +if God should let you go, you would immediately sink and swiftly +descend and plunge into the bottomless gulf, and your healthy +constitution, and your own care and prudence, and best contrivance, and +all your righteousness, would have no more influence to uphold you and +keep you out of hell than a spider's web would have to stop a falling +rock. . . . There are the black clouds of God's wrath now hanging +directly over your heads, full of the dreadful storm and big with +thunder; and were it not for the restraining hand of God it would +immediately burst forth upon you. The sovereign pleasure of God, for +the present, stays his rough wind; otherwise it would come with fury, +and your destruction would come like a whirlwind, and you would be like +the chaff of the summer threshing-floor. The wrath of God is like +great waters that are dammed for the present; they increase more and +more, and rise higher and higher, till an outlet is given; and the +longer the stream is stopped, the more rapid and mighty is its course +when once it is let loose. . . . + +Thus it will be with you that are in an unconverted state, if you +continue in it; the infinite might and majesty and terribleness of the +omnipotent God shall be magnified upon you in the ineffable strength of +your torments; you shall be tormented in the presence of the holy +angels and in the presence of the Lamb; and, when you shall be in this +state of suffering, the glorious inhabitants of heaven shall go forth +and look on the awful spectacle, that they may see what the wrath and +fierceness of the Almighty is; and when they have seen it they will +fall down and adore that great power and majesty. "And it shall come +to pass, that from one moon to another, and from one Sabbath to +another, shall all flesh come to worship before me, saith the Lord. +And they shall go forth and look upon the carcasses of the men that +have transgressed against me; for their worm shall not die, neither +shall their fire be quenched, and they shall be an abhorring unto all +flesh." + +It is everlasting wrath. It would be dreadful to suffer this +fierceness and wrath of Almighty God one moment: but you must suffer it +to all eternity; there will be no end to this exquisite, horrible +misery; when you look forward you shall see along forever, a boundless +duration before you, which will swallow up your thoughts and amaze your +soul; and you will absolutely despair of ever having any deliverance, +any end, any mitigation, any rest at all; you will know certainly that +you must wear out long ages, millions of millions of ages, in wrestling +and conflicting with this Almighty merciless vengeance; and then, when +you have so done, when so many ages have actually been spent by you in +this manner, you will know that all is but a point to what remains. So +that your punishment will indeed be infinite. . . . If we knew that +there was one person, and but one, in the whole congregation, that was +to be the subject of this misery, what an awful thing it would be to +think of! If we knew who it was, what an awful sight would it be to +see such a person! How might all the rest of the congregation lift up +a lamentable and bitter cry over him! But alas! Instead of one, how +many is it likely will remember this discourse in hell! And it would +be a wonder if some that are now present should not be in hell in a +very short time, before this year is out. And it would be no wonder if +some persons, that now sit here in some seats of this meeting-house in +health, and quiet, and secure, should be there before to-morrow morning. + + + + +BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. + +FRANKLIN'S ARRIVAL AT PHILADELPHIA. + +[From _The Life of Benjamin Franklin, Written by Himself_.] + +I was in my working dress, my best clothes being to come round by sea. +I was dirty from my journey; my pockets were stuffed out with shirts +and stockings, and I knew no soul nor where to look for lodging. I was +fatigued with traveling, rowing, and want of rest; I was very hungry; +and my whole stock of cash consisted of a Dutch dollar and about a +shilling in copper. The latter I gave the people of the boat for my +passage, who at first refused it, on account of my rowing; but I +insisted on their taking it, a man being sometimes more generous when +he has but a little money than when he has plenty, perhaps through fear +of being thought to have but little. + +Then I walked up the street, gazing about, till near the market-house I +met a boy with bread. I had made many a meal on bread, and, inquiring +where he got it, I went immediately to the baker's he directed me to, +in Second Street, and asked for biscuit, intending such as we had in +Boston; but they, it seems, were not made in Philadelphia. Then I +asked for a three-penny loaf, and was told they had none such. So, not +considering or knowing the difference of money, and the greater +cheapness, nor the names of his bread, I had him give me three-penny +worth of any sort. He gave me, accordingly, three great puffy rolls. +I was surprised at the quantity, but took it, and, having no room in my +pockets, walked off with a roll under each arm, and eating the other. +Thus I went up Market Street as far as Fourth Street, passing by the +door of Mr. Read, my future wife's father, when she, standing at the +door, saw me, and thought I made, as I certainly did, a most awkward, +ridiculous appearance. Then I turned and went down Chestnut Street and +part of Walnut Street, eating my roll all the way and, coming round, +found myself again at Market Street wharf, near the boat I came in, to +which I went for a draught of the river water; and, being filled with +one of my rolls, gave the other two to a woman and her child that came +down the river in the boat with us, and were waiting to go farther. + +Thus refreshed, I walked again up the street, which by this time had +many clean-dressed people in it, who were all walking the same way. I +joined them, and thereby was led into the great meeting-house of the +Quakers near the market. I sat down among them, and, after looking +'round a while and hearing nothing said, being very drowsy through +labor and want of rest the preceding night, I fell fast asleep, and +continued so till the meeting broke up, when one was kind enough to +rouse me. This was, therefore, the first house I was in, or slept in, +in Philadelphia. + +Walking down again toward the river, and looking in the faces of the +people, I met a young Quaker man whose countenance I liked, and, +accosting him, requested he would tell me where a stranger could get +lodging. We were near the sign of the Three Mariners. "Here," says +he, "is one place that entertains strangers, but it is not a reputable +house; if thee wilt walk with me, I'll show thee a better." He brought +me to the Crooked Billet in Water Street. Here I got a dinner. + + + +PAYING TOO DEAR FOR THE WHISTLE. + +[From Correspondence with Madame Britton.] + +I am charmed with your description of Paradise, and with your plan of +living there; and I approve much of your conclusion, that, in the +meantime, we should draw all the good we can from this world. In my +opinion we might all draw more good from it than we do, and suffer less +evil, if we would take care not to give too much for _whistles_, for to +me it seems that most of the unhappy people we meet with are become so +by neglect of that caution. + +You ask what I mean? You love stories, and will excuse my telling one +of myself. + +When I was a child of seven years old my friends, on a holiday, filled +my pocket with coppers. I went directly to a shop where they sold toys +for children, and, being charmed with the sound of a _whistle_, that I +met by the way in the hands of another boy, I voluntarily offered and +gave all my money for one. I then came home, and went whistling all +over the house, much pleased with my _whistle_, but disturbing all the +family. My brothers and sisters and cousins, understanding the bargain +I had made, told me I had given four times as much for it as it was +worth; put me in mind what good things I might have bought with the +rest of the money, and laughed at me so much for my folly that I cried +with vexation; and the reflection gave me more chagrin than the +_whistle_ gave me pleasure. + +This, however, was afterward of use to me, the impression continuing on +my mind, so that often when I was tempted to buy some unnecessary +thing, I said to myself, _Don't give too much for the whistle_; and I +saved my money. + +As I grew up, came into the world, and observed the actions of men, I +thought I met with many, very many, who _gave too much for the whistle_. + +When I saw one too ambitious of court favor, sacrificing his time in +attendance on levees, his repose, his liberty, his virtue, and perhaps +his friends to attain it, I have said to myself, _This man gives too +much for his whistle_. + +When I saw another fond of popularity, constantly employing himself in +political bustles, neglecting his own affairs, and ruining them by that +neglect, _He pays, indeed_, said I, _too much for his whistle_. . . . + +If I see one fond of appearance or fine clothes, fine houses, fine +furniture, fine equipages, all above his fortune, for which he +contracts debts and ends his career in a prison, _Alas_! say I, _he has +paid dear, very dear for his whistle_. . . . + +In short, I conceive that a great part of the miseries of mankind are +brought upon them by the false estimates they have made of the value of +things and by their _giving too much for their whistles_. + +Yet I ought to have charity for these unhappy people, when I consider +that with all this wisdom of which I am boasting, there are certain +things in the world so tempting, for example, the apples of King John, +which happily are not to be bought; for if they were put to sale by +auction I might very easily be led to ruin myself in the purchase, and +find that I had once more given too much for the _whistle_. + + + + +PHILIP FRENEAU. + +THE INDIAN BURYING-GROUND. + + In spite of all the learned have said, + I still my old opinion keep: + The posture that we give the dead + Points out the soul's eternal sleep. + + Not so the ancients of these lands: + The Indian, when from life released, + Again is seated with his friends, + And shares again the joyous feast. + + His imaged birds and painted bowl + And venison, for a journey dressed, + Bespeak the nature of the soul, + Activity that knows no rest. + + His bow for action ready bent, + And arrows with a head of stone, + Can only mean that life is spent, + And not the finer essence gone. + + Thou, stranger that shalt come this way. + No fraud upon the dead commit-- + Observe the swelling turf and say, + They do not _lie_, but here they _sit_. + + Here still a lofty rock remains, + On which the curious eye may trace + (Now wasted half by wearing rains) + The fancies of a ruder race. + + Here still an aged elm aspires, + Beneath whose far-projecting shade + (And which the shepherd still admires) + The children of the forest played. + + There oft a restless Indian queen + (Pale Sheba with her braided hair), + And many a barbarous form is seen + To chide the man that lingers there. + + By midnight moons, o'er moistening dews, + In vestments for the chase arrayed, + The hunter still the deer pursues, + The hunter and the deer--a shade! + + And long shall timorous Fancy see + The painted chief and pointed spear, + And Reason's self shall bow the knee + To shadows and delusions here. + + + + +DANIEL WEBSTER. + +THE UNION. + +[From the _Reply to Hayne_, January 25, 1830.] + +I profess, sir, in my career hitherto, to have kept steadily in view +the prosperity and honor of the whole country, and the preservation of +our Federal Union. It is to that Union we owe our safety at home and +our consideration and dignity abroad. It is to that Union that we are +chiefly indebted for whatever makes us most proud of our country. That +Union we readied only by the discipline of our virtues in the severe +school of adversity. It had its origin in the necessities of +disordered finance, prostrate commerce, and ruined credit. Under its +benign influences these great interests immediately awoke as from the +dead and sprang forth with newness of life. Every year of its duration +has teemed with fresh proofs of its utility and its blessings; and +although our territory has stretched out wider and wider and our +population spread farther and farther, they have not outrun its +protection or its benefits. It has been to us all a copious fountain +of national, social, and personal happiness. + +I have not allowed myself, sir, to look beyond the Union to see what +might lie hidden in the dark recess behind. I have not coolly weighed +the chances of preserving liberty when the bonds that unite us together +shall be broken asunder. I have not accustomed myself to hang over the +precipice of disunion to see whether with my short sight I can fathom +the depth of the abyss below, nor could I regard him as a safe +counselor in the affairs of this government whose thoughts should be +mainly bent on considering not how the Union may be best preserved, but +how tolerable might be the condition of the people when it should be +broken up and destroyed. While the Union lasts we have high, exciting, +gratifying prospects spread out before us, for us and our children. +Beyond that I seek not to penetrate the veil. God grant that in my day +at least that curtain may not rise! God grant that on my vision never +may be opened what lies beyond! When my eyes shall be turned to behold +for the last time the sun in heaven, may I not see him shining on the +broken and dishonored fragments of a once glorious Union; on States +dissevered, discordant, belligerent; on a land rent with civil feuds, +or drenched, it may be, in fraternal blood! Let their last feeble and +lingering glance rather behold the gorgeous ensign of the Republic, now +known and honored throughout the earth, still full high advanced, its +arms and trophies streaming in their original luster, not a stripe +erased or polluted, not a single star obscured, bearing for its motto +no such miserable interrogatory as "What is all this worth?" nor those +other words of delusion and folly, "Liberty first; and Union +afterward;" but every-where, spread all over in characters of living +light, blazing on all its ample folds as they float over the sea and +over the land, and in every wind under the whole heavens, that other +sentiment dear to every true American heart--Liberty and Union, now and +forever, one and inseparable! + + + +SOUTH CAROLINA AND MASSACHUSETTS. + +[From the same.] + +When I shall be found, sir, in my place here in the Senate, or +elsewhere, to sneer at public merit because it happens to spring up +beyond the little limits of my own State or neighborhood; when I +refuse, for any such cause, or for any cause, the homage due to +American talent, to elevated patriotism, to sincere devotion to liberty +and the country; or, if I see an uncommon endowment of Heaven, if I see +extraordinary capacity and virtue, in any son of the South; and if, +moved by local prejudices or gangrened by State jealousy, I get up here +to abate the tithe of a hair from his just character and just fame, may +my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth! + +Sir, let me recur to pleasing recollections; let me indulge in +refreshing remembrances of the past; let me remind you that, in early +times, no States cherished greater harmony, both of principle and +feeling, than Massachusetts and South Carolina. Would to God that +harmony might again return! Shoulder to shoulder they went through the +Revolution, hand in hand they stood round the administration of +Washington, and felt his own great arm lean on them for support. +Unkind feeling, if it exist, alienation and distrust are the growth, +unnatural to such soils, of false principle; since sown. They are +weeds, the seeds of which that same great arm never scattered. + +Mr. President, I shall enter upon no encomium of Massachusetts; she +needs none. There she is. Behold her and judge for yourselves. There +is her history; the world knows it by heart. The past, at least, is +secure. There is Boston, and Concord, and Lexington, and Bunker Hill; +and there they will remain forever. The bones of her sons, falling in +the great struggle for independence, now lie mingled with the soil of +every State from New England to Georgia, and there they will lie +forever. And, sir, where American liberty raised its first voice, and +where its youth was nurtured and sustained, there it still lives, in +the strength of its manhood, and full of its original spirit. If +discord and disunion shall wound it, if party strife and blind ambition +shall hawk at and tear it, if folly and madness, if uneasiness under +salutary and necessary restraint shall succeed in separating it from +that Union by which alone its existence is made sure, it will stand, in +the end, by the side of that cradle in which its infancy was rocked; it +will stretch forth its arm with whatever of vigor it may still retain, +over the friends who gather round it; and it will fall at last, if fall +it must, amidst the profoundest monuments of its own glory, and on the +very spot of its origin. + + + + +WASHINGTON IRVING. + +THE STORM SHIP. + +[From _Bracebridge Hall_.] + +In the golden age of the province of the New Netherlands, when under +the sway of Wouter Van Twiller, otherwise called the Doubter, the +people of the Manhattoes were alarmed one sultry afternoon, just about +the time of the summer solstice, by a tremendous storm of thunder and +lightning. The rain fell in such torrents as absolutely to spatter up +and smoke along the ground. It seemed as if the thunder rattled and +rolled over the very roofs of the houses; the lightning was seen to +play about the Church of St. Nicholas, and to strive three times in +vain to strike its weather-cock. Garrett Van Horne's new chimney was +split almost from top to bottom; and Boffne Mildeberger was struck +speechless from his bald-faced mare just as he was riding into +town. . . . At length the storm abated; the thunder sank into a growl, +and the setting sun, breaking from under the fringed borders of the +clouds, made the broad bosom of the bay to gleam like a sea of molten +gold. + +The word was given from the fort that a ship was standing up the +bay. . . . She was a stout, round, Dutch-built vessel, with high bow +and poop, and bearing Dutch colors. The evening sun gilded her +bellying canvas as she came riding over the long waving billows. The +sentinel who had given notice of her approach declared that he first +got sight of her when she was in the center of the bay; and that she +broke suddenly on his sight, just as if she had come out of the bosom +of the black thunder-clouds. . . . The ship was now repeatedly hailed, +but made no reply, and, passing by the fort, stood on up the Hudson. A +gun was brought to bear on her, and, with some difficulty, loaded and +fired by Hans Van Pelt, the garrison not being expert in artillery. +The shot seemed absolutely to pass through the ship, and to skip along +the water on the other side; but no notice was taken of it! What was +strange, she had all her sails set, and sailed right against wind and +tide, which were both down the river. . . . Thus she kept on, away up +the river, lessening and lessening in the evening sunshine, until she +faded from sight like a little white cloud melting away in the summer +sky. . . . + +Messengers were dispatched to various places on the river, but they +returned without any tidings--the ship had made no port. Day after +day, week after week elapsed, but she never returned down the Hudson. +As, however, the council seemed solicitous for intelligence they had it +in abundance. The captains of the sloops seldom arrived without +bringing some report of having seen the strange ship at different parts +of the river--sometimes near the Palisades, sometimes off Croton Point, +and sometimes in the Highlands; but she never was reported as having +been seen above the Highlands. The crews of the sloops, it is true, +generally differed among themselves in their accounts of these +apparitions; but that may have arisen from the uncertain situations in +which they saw her. Sometimes it was by the flashes of the +thunder-storm lighting up a pitchy night, and giving glimpses of her +careering across Tappan Zee or the wide waste of Haverstraw Bay. At +one moment she would appear close upon them, as if likely to run them +down, and would throw them into great bustle and alarm, but the next +flash would show her far off, always sailing against the wind. +Sometimes, in quiet moonlight nights, she would be seen under some high +bluff of the Highlands; all in deep shadow, excepting her top-sails +glittering in the moonbeams; by the time, however, that the voyagers +reached the place no ship was to be seen; and when they had passed on +for some distance and looked back, behold! there she was again with her +top-sails in the moonshine! Her appearance was always just after or +just in the midst of unruly weather; and she was known among the +skippers and voyagers of the Hudson by the name of "The Storm Ship." + +These reports perplexed the governor and his council more than ever; +and it would be useless to repeat the conjectures and opinions uttered +on the subject. Some quoted cases in point of ships seen off the coast +of New England navigated by witches and goblins. Old Hans Van Pelt, +who had been more than once to the Dutch Colony at the Cape of Good +Hope, insisted that this must be the _Flying Dutchman_ which had so +long haunted Table Bay, but being unable to make port had now sought +another harbor. Others suggested that if it really was a supernatural +apparition, as there was every natural reason to believe, it might be +Hendrik Hudson and his crew of the _Half-Moon_, who, it was well known, +had once run aground in the upper part of the river in seeking a +north-west passage to China. This opinion had very little weight with +the governor, but it passed current out of doors; for indeed it had +always been reported that Hendrik Hudson and his crew haunted the +Kaatskill Mountains; and it appeared very reasonable to suppose that +his ship might infest the river where the enterprise was baffled, or +that it might bear the shadowy crew to their periodical revels in the +mountain. . . . + +People who live along the river insist that they sometimes see her in +summer moonlight, and that in a deep still midnight they have heard the +chant of her crew, as if heaving the lead; but sights and sounds are so +deceptive along the mountainous shores, and about the wide bays and +long reaches of this great river, that I confess I have very strong +doubts upon the subject. It is certain, nevertheless, that strange +things have been seen in these Highlands in storms, which are +considered as connected with the old story of the ship. The captains +of the river craft talk of a little bulbous-bottomed Dutch goblin, in +trunk hose and sugar-loafed hat, with a speaking-trumpet in his hand, +which, they say, keeps about the Dunderberg. They declare that they +have heard him, in stormy weather, in the midst of the turmoil, giving +orders in Low Dutch for the piping up of a fresh gust of wind or the +rattling off of another thunder-clap; that sometimes he has been seen +surrounded by a crew of little imps in broad breeches and short +doublets, tumbling head-over-heels in the rack and mist, and playing a +thousand gambols in the air, or buzzing like a swarm of flies about +Anthony's Nose; and that, at such times, the hurry-scurry of the storm +was always greatest. One time a sloop, in passing by the Dunderberg, +was overtaken by a thunder-gust that came scouring round the mountain, +and seemed to burst just over the vessel. Though light and well +ballasted she labored dreadfully, and the water came over the gunwale. +All the crew were amazed when it was discovered that there was a little +white sugar-loaf hat on the masthead, known at once to be the hat of +the Herr of the Dunderberg. Nobody, however, dared to climb to the +mast-head and get rid of this terrible hat. The sloop continued +laboring and rocking, as if she would have rolled her mast overboard, +and seemed in continual danger either of upsetting or of running on +shore. In this way she drove quite through the Highlands, until she +had passed Pollopol's Island, where, it is said, the jurisdiction of +the Dunderberg potentate ceases. No sooner had she passed this bourn +than the little hat spun up into the air like a top, whirled up all the +clouds into a vortex, and hurried them back to the summit of the +Dunderberg, while the sloop righted herself and sailed on as quietly as +if in a mill-pond. Nothing saved her from utter wreck but the +fortunate circumstance of having a horse-shoe nailed against the +mast--a wise precaution against evil spirits, since adopted by all the +Dutch captains that navigate this haunted river. + + + + +JAMES FENIMORE COOPER. + +THE RENDEZVOUS. + +[From _The Deerslayer_.] + +In the position in which the ark had now got, the castle was concealed +from view by the projection of a point, as, indeed, was the northern +extremity of the lake itself. A respectable mountain, forest-clad, and +rounded like all the rest, limited the view in that direction, +stretching immediately across the whole of the fair scene,[1] with the +exception of a deep bay that passed its western end, lengthening the +basin for more than a mile. The manner in which the water flowed out +of the lake, beneath the leafy arches of the trees that lined the sides +of the stream, has already been mentioned, and it has also been said +that the rock, which was a favorite place of rendezvous throughout all +that region, and where Deerslayer now expected to meet his friend, +stood near this outlet and no great distance from the shore. It was a +large isolated stone that rested on the bottom of the lake, apparently +left there when the waters tore away the earth from around it, in +forcing for themselves a passage down the river, and which had obtained +its shape from the action of the elements during the slow progress of +centuries. The height of this rock could scarcely equal six feet, and, +as has been said, its shape was not unlike that which is usually given +to bee-hives or to a hay-cock. The latter, indeed, gives the best +idea, not only of its form, but of its dimensions. It stood, and still +stands, for we are writing of real scenes, within fifty feet of the +bank, and in water that was only two feet in depth, though there were +seasons in which its rounded apex, if such a term can properly be used, +was covered by the lake. Many of the trees stretched so far forward as +almost to blend the rock with the shore, when seen from a little +distance; and one tall pine in particular overhung it in a way to form +a noble and appropriate canopy to a seat that had held many a forest +chieftain, during the long succession of ages in which America and all +it contained existed apart in mysterious solitude, a world by itself, +equally without a familiar history and without an origin that the +annals of man can catch. + +When distant some two or three hundred feet from the shore Deerslayer +took in his sail, and he dropped his grapnel as soon as he found the +ark had drifted in a line that was directly to windward of the rock. +The motion of the scow was then checked, when it was brought head to +wind by the action of the breeze. As soon as this was done Deerslayer +"paid out line," and suffered the vessel to "set down" upon the rock as +fast as the light air would force it to leeward. Floating entirely on +the surface, this was soon affected, and the young man checked the +drift when he was told that the stern of the scow was within fifteen or +eighteen feet of the desired spot. + +In executing this maneuver, Deerslayer had proceeded promptly; for +while he did not in the least doubt that he was both watched and +followed by the foe, he believed he had distracted their movements by +the apparent uncertainly of his own, and he knew they could have no +means of ascertaining that the rock was his aim, unless, indeed, one of +the prisoners had betrayed him--a chance so improbable in itself as to +give him no concern. Notwithstanding the celerity and decision of his +movements, he did not, however, venture so near the shore without +taking due precautions to effect a retreat, in the event of its +becoming necessary. He held the line in his hand, and Judith was +stationed at a loop on the side of the cabin next the shore, where she +could watch the beach and the rocks and give timely notice of the +approach of either friend or foe. Hetty was also placed on watch, but +it was to keep the trees overhead in view, lest some enemy might ascend +one, and, by completely commanding the interior of the scow, render the +defenses of the hut or cabin useless. + +The sun had disappeared from the lake and valley when Deerslayer +checked the ark in the manner mentioned. Still it wanted a few minutes +to the true sunset, and he knew Indian punctuality too well to +anticipate any unmanly haste in his friend. The great question was, +whether, surrounded by enemies as he was known to be, he had escaped +their toils. The occurrences of the last twenty-four hours must be a +secret to him, and, like himself, Chingachgook was yet young on a +war-path. It was true he came prepared to encounter the party that +withheld his promised bride, but he had no means of ascertaining the +extent of the danger he ran or the precise positions occupied by either +friends or foes. In a word, the trained sagacity and untiring caution +of an Indian were all he had to rely on amid the critical risks he +unavoidably ran. + +"Is the rock empty, Judith?" inquired Deerslayer, as soon as he had +checked the drift of the ark, deeming it imprudent to venture +unnecessarily near. "Is any thing to be seen of the Delaware chief?" + +"Nothing, Deerslayer. Neither rock, shore, tree, nor lake seems to +have ever held a human form." + +"Keep close, Judith--keep close, Hetty--a rifle has a prying eye, a +nimble foot, and a desperate fatal tongue. Keep close, then, but keep +up act_y_ve looks, and be on the alart. 'Twould grieve me to the heart +did any harm befall either of you." + +"And _you_, Deerslayer!" exclaimed Judith, turning her handsome face +from the loop, to bestow a gracious and grateful look on the young man; +"do _you_ 'keep close' and have a proper care that the savages do not +catch a glimpse of you! A bullet might be as fatal to you as to one of +us, and the blow that you felt would be felt by all." + +"No fear of me, Judith--no fear of me, my good gal. Do not look +this-a-way, although you look so pleasant and comely, but keep your +eyes on the rock and the shore and the--" + +Deerslayer was interrupted by a slight exclamation from the girl, who, +in obedience to his hurried gestures, as much as in obedience to his +words, had immediately bent her looks again in the opposite direction. + +"What is't?--what is't, Judith?" he hastily demanded. "Is any thing to +be seen?" + +"There is a man on the rock!--an Indian warrior in his paint, and +armed!" + +"Where does he wear his hawk's feather?" eagerly added Deerslayer, +relaxing his hold of the line, in readiness to drift nearer to the +place of rendezvous. "Is it fast to the warlock, or does he carry it +above the left ear?" + +"'Tis as you say, above the left ear; he smiles, too, and mutters the +word 'Mohican.'" + +"God be praised, 'tis the Sarpent at last!" exclaimed the young man, +suffering the line to slip through his hands until, hearing a light +bound in the other end of the craft, he instantly checked the rope and +began to haul it in again under the assurance that his object was +effected. + +At that moment the door of the cabin was opened hastily, and a warrior +darting through the little room stood at Deerslayer's side, simply +uttering the exclamation "Hugh!" At the next instant Judith and Hetty +shrieked, and the air was filled with the yell of twenty savages, who +came leaping through the branches down the bank, some actually falling +headlong into the water in their haste. + +"Pull, Deerslayer," cried Judith, hastily barring the door, in order to +prevent an inroad by the passage through which the Delaware had just +entered; "pull for life and death--the lake is full of savages wading +after us!" + +The young men--for Chingachgook immediately came to his friend's +assistance--needed no second bidding, but they applied themselves to +their task in a way that showed how urgent they deemed the occasion. +The great difficulty was in suddenly overcoming the _vis inertiae_ of +so large a mass; for, once in motion, it was easy to cause the scow to +skim the water with all the necessary speed. + +"Pull, Deerslayer, for heaven's sake!" cried Judith, again at the loop. +"These wretches rush into the water like hounds following their prey! +Ah! The scow moves! and now the water deepens to the armpits of the +foremost; still they rush forward and will seize the ark!" + +A slight scream and then a joyous laugh followed from the girl; the +first produced by a desperate effort of their pursuers, and the last by +its failure, the scow, which had now got fairly in motion, gliding +ahead into deep water with a velocity that set the designs of their +enemies at naught. As the two men were prevented by the position of +the cabin from seeing what passed astern, they were compelled to +inquire of the girls into the state of the chase. + +"What now, Judith?--what next? Do the Mingoes still follow, or are we +quit of 'em for the present?" demanded Deerslayer when he felt the rope +yielding, as if the scow was going fast ahead, and heard the scream and +the laugh of the girl almost in the same breath. + +"They have vanished!--one, the last, is just burying himself in the +bushes of the bank--there! he has disappeared in the shadows of the +trees! You have got your friend and we are all safe!" + + +[1] Otsego Lake. + + + + + WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT. + + TO A WATERFOWL. + + Whither, 'midst falling dew, + While glow the heavens with the last steps of day, + Far through their rosy depths dost thou pursue + Thy solitary way? + + Vainly the fowler's eye + Might mark thy distant flight to do thee wrong, + As, darkly seen against the crimson sky, + Thy figure floats along. + + Seek'st thou the plashy brink + Of weedy lake or marge of river wide, + Or where the rocking billows rise and sink + On the chafed ocean side? + + There is a power whose care + Teaches thy way along that pathless coast-- + The desert and illimitable air-- + Lone wandering but not lost. + + All day thy wings have fanned, + At that far height, the cold, thin atmosphere + Yet stoop not, weary, to the welcome land, + Though the dark night is near. + + And soon, that toil shall end; + Soon, shalt thou find a summer home and rest, + And scream among thy fellows; reeds shall bend + Soon o'er thy sheltered nest. + + Thou'rt gone, the abyss of heaven + Hath swallowed up thy form; yet on my heart + Deeply hath sunk the lesson thou hast given, + And shall not soon depart. + + He who, from zone to zone, + Guides through the boundless sky thy certain flight, + In the long way that I must tread alone, + Will lead my steps aright. + + + + THE DEATH OF THE FLOWERS. + + The melancholy days are come, + The saddest of the year, + Of wailing winds and naked woods, + And meadows brown and sere. + Heaped in the hollows of the grove, + The autumn leaves lie dead; + They rustle to the eddying gust, + And to the rabbit's tread. + The robin and the wren are flown, + And from the shrubs the jay, + And from the wood-top calls the crow + Through all the gloomy day. + + Where are the flowers, the fair young flowers, + That lately sprang and stood + In brighter light and softer airs, + A beauteous sisterhood? + Alas! they all are in their graves; + The gentle race of flowers + Are lying in their lowly beds + With the fair and good of ours. + The rain is falling where they lie, + But the cold November rain + Calls not, from out the gloomy earth, + The lovely ones again. + + The wind-flower and the violet, + They perished long ago, + And the brier-rose and the orchis died + Amid the summer glow; + But on the hill the golden-rod, + And the aster in the wood, + And the yellow sun-flower by the brook + In autumn beauty stood, + Till fell the frost from the clear cold heaven, + As falls the plague on men, + And the brightness of their smile was gone + From upland, glade, and glen. + + And now when comes the calm, mild day, + As still such days will come, + To call the squirrel and the bee + From out their winter home; + When the sound of dropping nuts is heard, + Though all the trees are still, + And twinkle in the smoky light + The waters of the rill, + The south wind searches for the flowers + Whose fragrance late he bore, + And sighs to find them in the wood + And by the stream no more. + + And then I think of one who in + Her youthful beauty died, + The fair meek blossom that grew up + And faded by my side; + In the cold, moist earth we laid her, + When the forest cast the leaf, + And we wept that one so lovely + Should have a life so brief. + Yet not unmeet it was that one, + Like that young friend of ours, + So gentle and so beautiful, + Should perish with the flowers. + + + + THE UNIVERSAL TOMB. + + [From _Thanatopsis_.] + + Yet not to thine eternal resting-place + Shalt thou retire alone, nor could'st thou wish + Couch more magnificent. Thou shalt lie down + With patriarchs of the infant world--with kings, + The powerful of the earth--the wise, the good, + Fair forms, and hoary seers of ages past, + All in one mighty sepulcher. The hills, + Rock-ribb'd and ancient as the sun,--the vales + Stretching in pensive quietness between; + The venerable woods--rivers that move + In majesty, and the complaining brooks + That make the meadows green; and, poured round all, + Old Ocean's gray and melancholy waste,-- + Are but the solemn decorations all + Of the great tomb of man. The golden sun, + The planets, all the infinite host of heaven, + Are shining on the sad abodes of death, + Through the still lapse of ages. All that tread + The globe are but a handful to the tribes + That slumber in its bosom. Take the wings + Of morning, traverse Barca's desert sands, + Or lose thyself in the continuous woods + Where rolls the Oregon, and hears no sound + Save his own dashings--yet the dead are there: + And millions in those solitudes, since first + The flight of years began, have laid them down + In their last sleep--the dead reign there alone. + + * * * * * * + + So live, that when thy summons comes to join + The innumerable caravan, which moves + To that mysterious realm, where each shall take + His chamber in the silent halls of death, + Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night, + Scourged to his dungeon, but, sustained and soothed + By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave, + Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch + About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams. + + + + +RALPH WALDO EMERSON. + +NATURE'S MINISTRY OF BEAUTY. + +[From _Nature_.] + +To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not +see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing. The sun +illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the +heart of the child. The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward +senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the +spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood. His intercourse with +heaven and earth becomes part of his daily food. In the presence of +nature a wild delight runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows. +Nature says, He is my creature, and mauger all his impertinent griefs, +he shall be glad with me. Not the sun or the summer alone, but every +hour and season yields its tribute of delight; for every hour and +change corresponds to and authorizes a different state of the mind, +from breathless noon to grimmest midnight. Nature is a setting that +fits equally well a comic or a mourning piece. In good health, the air +is a cordial of incredible virtue. Crossing a bare common, in snow +puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my +thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a +perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear. In the woods, +too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what +period soever of life is always a child. In the woods is perpetual +youth. Within these plantations of God a decorum and sanctity reigns, +a perennial festival is dressed, and the guest sees not how he should +tire of them in a thousand years. In the woods we return to reason and +faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life--no disgrace, +no calamity (leaving me my eyes), which nature cannot repair. Standing +on the bare ground--my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into +infinite space--all mean egotism vanishes, I become a transparent +eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being +circulate through me; I am part or particle of God. The name of the +nearest friend sounds there foreign and accidental; to be brothers, to +be acquaintances--master or servant, is then a trifle and a +disturbance. I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty. In +the wilderness I find something more dear and connate than in streets +or villages. In the tranquil landscape, and especially in the distant +line of the horizon, man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his own +nature. + +The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister is the +suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable. I am +not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me, and I to them. The +waving of the boughs in the storm is new to me and old. It takes me by +surprise, and yet is not unknown. . . . + +I see the spectacle of morning from the hill-top over against my house, +from daybreak to sunrise, with emotions which an angel might share. +The long slender bars of cloud float like fishes in the sea of crimson +light. From the earth, as a shore, I look out into that silent sea. I +seem to partake its rapid transformations; the active enchantment +reaches my dust, and I dilate and conspire with the morning wind. How +does Nature deify us with a few and cheap elements! Give me health and +a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous. The dawn is my +Assyria; the sunset and moonrise my Paphos, and unimaginable realms of +faerie; broad noon shall be my England of the senses and the +understanding; the night shall be my Germany of mystic philosophy and +dreams. + +Not less excellent, except for our less susceptibility in the +afternoon, was the charm, last evening, of a January sunset. The +western clouds divided and subdivided themselves into pink flakes +modulated with tints of unspeakable softness; and the air had so much +life and sweetness that it was a pain to come within doors. What was +it that Nature would say? Was there no meaning in the live repose of +the valley behind the mill, and which Homer or Shakespeare could not +re-form for me in words? The leafless trees become spires of flame in +the sunset, with the blue east for their background, and the stars of +the dead calices of flowers, and every withered stem and stubble ruined +with frost, contribute something to the mute music. + + + +IDEALISM. + +[From the same.] + +To the senses and the unrenewed understanding belongs a sort of +instinctive belief in the absolute existence of nature. In their view +man and nature are indissolubly joined. Things are ultimates, and they +never look beyond their sphere. The presence of Reason mars this +faith. . . . Nature is made to conspire with spirit to emancipate us. +Certain mechanical changes, a small alteration in our local position, +apprises us of a dualism. We are strangely affected by seeing the +shore from a moving ship, from a balloon, or through the tints of an +unusual sky. The least change in our point of view gives the whole +world a pictorial air. A man who seldom rides needs only to get into a +coach and traverse his own town, to turn the street into a puppet-show. +The men, the women--talking, running, bartering, fighting--the earnest +mechanic, the lounger, the beggar, the boys, the dogs are unrealized at +once, or at least wholly detached from all relation to the observer, +and seen as apparent, not substantial, beings. What new thoughts are +suggested by seeing a face of country quite familiar, in the rapid +movement of the railway car! Nay, the most wonted objects (make a very +slight change in the point of vision) please us most. In a camera +obscura the butcher's cart and the figure of one of our own family +amuse us. So a portrait of a well-known face gratifies us. Turn the +eyes upside down, by looking at the landscape through your legs, and +how agreeable is the picture, though you have seen it any time these +twenty years! + +In these cases, by mechanical means, is suggested the difference +between the observer and the spectacle, between the man and nature. +Hence arises a pleasure mixed with awe; I may say, a low degree of the +sublime is felt from the fact, probably, that man is hereby apprised, +that whilst the world is a spectacle, something in himself is stable. + + + + THE RHODORA.[1] + + In May, when sea-winds pierced our solitudes, + I found the fresh Rhodora in the woods, + Spreading its leafless blooms in a damp nook, + To please the desert and the sluggish brook. + The purple petals, fallen in the pool, + Made the black water with their beauty gay; + Here might the red bird come his plumes to cool, + And court the flower that cheapens his array. + Rhodora! if the sages ask thee why + This charm is wasted on the earth and sky, + Tell them, dear, that if eyes were made for seeing, + Then Beauty is its own excuse for being: + Why thou wert there, O rival of the rose, + I never thought to ask, I never knew: + But, in my simple ignorance, suppose + The self-same power that brought me there brought you. + + + [1] On being asked, Whence is the flower? + + + + HYMN. + + [Sung at the completion of the Concord Monument, April 19, 1836.] + + By the rude bridge that arched the flood, + Their flag to April's breeze unfurled, + Here once the embattled farmers stood, + And fired the shot heard round the world. + + The foe long since in silence slept; + Alike the conqueror silent sleeps; + And time the ruined bridge has swept + Down the dark stream which seaward creeps. + + On this green bank, by this soft stream, + We set to-day a votive stone; + That memory may their deed redeem, + When, like our sires, our sons are gone. + + Spirit, that made those heroes dare + To die, and leave their children free, + Bid time and nature gently spare + The shaft we raise to them and thee. + + + + +NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. + +THE HAUNTED MIND. + +What a singular moment is the first one, when you have hardly begun to +recollect yourself, after starting from midnight slumber! By unclosing +your eyes so suddenly you seem to have surprised the personages of your +dream in full convocation round your bed and catch one broad glance at +them before they can flit into obscurity. Or, to vary the metaphor, +you find yourself, for a single instant, wide awake in that realm of +illusions whither sleep has been the passport, and behold its ghostly +inhabitants and wondrous scenery with a perception of their strangeness +such as you never attain while the dream is undisturbed. The distant +sound of a church clock is borne faintly on the wind. You question +with yourself, half seriously, whether it has stolen to your waking ear +from some gray tower that stood within the precincts of your dream. +While yet in suspense, another clock flings its heavy clang over +the slumbering town with so full and distinct a sound, and such a +long murmur in the neighboring air, that you are certain it must +proceed from the steeple at the nearest corner. You count the +strokes--one--two, and there they cease, with a booming sound, like the +gathering of a third stroke within the bell. + +If you could choose an hour of wakefulness out of the whole night it +would be this. Since your sober bed-time, at eleven, you have had rest +enough to take off the pressure of yesterday's fatigue; while before +you till the sun comes from "far Cathay" to brighten your window there +is almost the space of a summer night; one hour to be spent in thought, +with the mind's eye half shut, and two in pleasant dreams, and two in +that strangest of enjoyments, the forgetfulness alike of joy and woe. +The moment of rising belongs to another period of time, and appears so +distant that the plunge out of a warm bed into the frosty air cannot +yet be anticipated with dismay. Yesterday has already vanished among +the shadows of the past; to-morrow has not yet emerged from the future. +You have found an intermediate space, where the business of life does +not intrude, where the passing moment lingers and becomes truly the +present; a spot where Father Time, when he thinks nobody is watching +him, sits down by the way-side to take breath, O that he would fall +asleep and let mortals live on without growing older! + +Hitherto you have lain perfectly still, because the slightest motion +would dissipate the fragments of your slumber. Now, being irrevocably +awake, you peep through the half-drawn window-curtain and observe that +the glass is ornamented with fanciful devices in frost-work, and that +each pane presents something like a frozen dream. There will be time +enough to trace out the analogy while waiting the summons to breakfast. +Seen through the clear portion of the glass, where the silvery mountain +peaks of the frost scenery do not ascend, the most conspicuous object +is the steeple, the white spire of which directs you to the wintry +luster of the firmament. You may almost distinguish the figures on the +clock that has just tolled the hour. Such a frosty sky, and the +snow-covered roofs, and the long vista of the frozen street, all white, +and the distant water hardened into rock, might make you shiver, even +under four blankets and a woolen comforter. Yet look at that one +glorious star! Its beams are distinguishable from all the rest, and +actually cast the shadow of the casement on the bed with a radiance of +deeper hue than moonlight, though not so accurate an outline. + +You sink down and muffle your head in the clothes, shivering all the +while, but less from bodily chill than the bare idea of a polar +atmosphere. It is too cold even for the thoughts to venture abroad. +You speculate on the luxury of wearing out a whole existence in bed, +like an oyster in its shell, content with the sluggish ecstasy of +inaction, and drowsily conscious of nothing but delicious warmth, such +as you now feel again. Ah! that idea has brought a hideous one in its +train. You think how the dead are lying in their cold shrouds and +narrow coffins through the drear winter of the grave, and cannot +persuade your fancy that they neither shrink nor shiver when the snow +is drifting over their little hillocks and the bitter blast howls +against the door of the tomb. That gloomy thought will collect a +gloomy multitude and throw its complexion over your wakeful hour. + +In the depths of every heart there is a tomb and a dungeon, though the +lights, the music, and revelry above may cause us to forget their +existence, and the buried ones or prisoners whom they hide. But +sometimes, and oftenest at midnight, these dark receptacles are flung +wide open. In an hour like this, when the mind has a passive +sensibility, but no active strength; when the imagination is a mirror, +imparting vividness to all ideas without the power of selecting or +controlling them, then pray that your griefs may slumber and the +brotherhood of remorse not break their chain. It is too late! A +funeral train comes gliding by your bed, in which Passion and Feeling +assume bodily shape and things of the mind become dim specters to the +eye. There is your earliest Sorrow, a pale young mourner, wearing a +sister's likeness to first love, sadly beautiful, with a hallowed +sweetness in her melancholy features and grace in the flow of her sable +robe. Next appears a shade of ruined loveliness, with dust among her +golden hair and her bright garments all faded and defaced, stealing +from your glance with drooping head, as fearful of reproach; she was +your fondest Hope, but a delusive one; so call her Disappointment now. +A sterner form succeeds, with a brow of wrinkles, a look and gesture of +iron authority; there is no name for him unless it be Fatality, an +emblem of the evil influence that rules your fortunes; a demon to whom +you subjected yourself by some error at the outset of life, and were +bound his slave forever, by once obeying him. See! those fiendish +lineaments graven on the darkness, the writhed lip of scorn, the +mockery of that living eye, the pointed finger, touching the sore place +in your heart! Do you remember any act of enormous folly, at which you +would blush, even in the remotest cavern of the earth? Then recognize +your Shame. + +Pass, wretched band! Well for the wakeful one if, riotously miserable, +a fiercer tribe do not surround him, the devils of a guilty heart, that +holds its hell within itself. What if Remorse should assume the +features of an injured friend? What if the fiend should come in +woman's garments, with a pale beauty amid sin and desolation, and lie +down by your side? What if he should stand at your bed's foot, in the +likeness of a corpse, with a bloody stain upon the shroud? Sufficient +without such guilt is this nightmare of the soul; this heavy, heavy +sinking of the spirits; this wintry gloom about the heart; this +indistinct horror of the mind, blending itself with the darkness of the +chamber. . . . Now comes the peal of the distant clock, with fainter +and fainter strokes as you plunge farther into the wilderness of sleep. +It is the knell of a temporary death. Your spirit has departed, and +strays like a free citizen, among the people of a shadowy world, +beholding strange sights, yet without wonder or dismay. So calm, +perhaps, will be the final change, so undisturbed, as if among familiar +things. The entrance of the soul to its eternal home! + + + + + HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. + + THE BELEAGUERED CITY. + + I have read, in some old marvelous tale, + Some legend strange and vague, + That a midnight host of specters pale + Beleaguered the walls of Prague. + + Beside the Moldau's rushing stream, + With the wan moon overhead, + There stood, as in an awful dream, + The army of the dead. + + White as a sea-fog, landward-bound, + The spectral camp was seen, + And, with a sorrowful deep sound, + The river flowed between. + + No other voice nor sound was there, + No drum, nor sentry's pace; + The mist-like banners clasped the air, + As clouds with clouds embrace. + + But when the old cathedral bell + Proclaimed the morning prayer, + The white pavilions rose and fell + On the alarmed air. + + Down the broad valley fast and far + The troubled army fled; + Up rose the glorious morning star, + The ghastly host was dead. + + I have read in the marvelous heart of man, + That strange and mystic scroll, + That an army of phantoms vast and wan + Beleaguer the human soul. + + Encamped beside Life's rushing stream, + In Fancy's misty light, + Gigantic shapes and shadows gleam + Portentous through the night. + + Upon its midnight battle-ground + The spectral camp is seen, + And, with a sorrowful deep sound, + Flows the River of Life between. + + No other voice nor sound is there, + In the army of the grave; + No other challenge breaks the air, + But the rushing of life's wave. + + And when the solemn and deep church-bell + Entreats the soul to pray, + The midnight phantoms feel the spell, + The shadows sweep away. + + Down the broad Vale of Tears afar + The spectral camp is fled; + Faith shineth as a morning star, + Our ghastly fears are dead. + + + + THE OCCULTATION OF ORION. + + I saw, as in a dream sublime, + The balance in the hand of Time. + O'er East and West its beam impended; + And day, with all its hours of light, + Was slowly sinking out of sight, + While, opposite, the scale of night + Silently with the stars ascended. + + Like the astrologers of eld, + In that bright vision I beheld + Greater and deeper mysteries. + I saw, with its celestial keys, + Its chords of air, its frets of fire, + The Samian's great Aeolian lyre, + Rising through all its sevenfold bars, + From earth unto the fixed stars. + And through the dewy atmosphere, + Not only could I see, but hear, + Its wondrous and harmonious strings, + In sweet vibration, sphere by sphere, + From Dian's circle light and near, + Onward to vaster and wider rings, + Where, chanting through his beard of snows, + Majestic, mournful Saturn goes, + And down the sunless realms of space + Reverberates the thunder of his bass. + + Beneath the sky's triumphal arch + This music sounded like a march, + And with its chorus seemed to be + Preluding some great tragedy. + Sirius was rising in the east; + And, slow ascending one by one, + The kindling constellations shone. + Begirt with many a blazing star, + Stood the great giant, Algebar, + Orion, hunter of the beast! + His sword hung gleaming by his side, + And, on his arm, the lion's hide + Scattered across the midnight air + The golden radiance of its hair. + + The moon was pallid, but not faint; + And beautiful as some fair saint, + Serenely moving on her way + In hours of trial and dismay. + As if she heard the voice of God, + Unharmed with naked feet she trod + Upon the hot and burning stars, + As on the glowing coals and bars + That were to prove her strength, and try + Her holiness and her purity. + + Thus moving on, with silent pace, + And triumph in her sweet, pale face, + She reached the station of Orion. + Aghast he stood in strange alarm! + And suddenly from his outstretched arm + Down fell the red skin of the lion + Into the river at his feet. + His mighty club no longer beat + The forehead of the bull; but he + Reeled as of yore beside the sea, + When, blinded by Oenopion, + He sought the blacksmith at his forge, + And, climbing up the mountain gorge, + Fixed his blank eyes upon the sun, + Then through the silence overhead, + An angel with a trumpet said, + "Forever more, forever more, + The reign of violence is o'er." + And, like an instrument that flings + Its music on another's strings, + The trumpet of the angel cast + Upon the heavenly lyre its blast, + And on from sphere to sphere the words + Re-echoed down the burning chords,-- + "For evermore, for evermore, + The reign of violence is o'er!" + + + + DANTE. + + Tuscan, that wanderest through the realms of gloom, + With thoughtful pace, and sad, majestic eyes, + Stern thoughts and awful from thy thoughts arise, + Like Farinata from his fiery tomb. + Thy sacred song is like the trump of doom; + Yet in thy heart what human sympathies. + What soft compassion glows, as in the skies + The tender stars their clouded lamps relume! + Methinks I see thee stand, with pallid cheeks, + By Fra Hilario in his diocese, + As up the convent wall, in golden streaks, + The ascending sunbeams mark the day's decrease. + And, as he asks what there the stranger seeks, + Thy voice along the cloister whispers, "Peace!" + + + + + JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER. + + RANDOLPH OF ROANOKE. + + O Mother Earth! upon thy lap + Thy weary ones receiving, + And o'er there, silent as a dream, + Thy grassy mantle weaving, + Fold softly in thy long embrace + That heart so worn and broken, + And cool its pulse of fire beneath + Thy shadows old and oaken. + + Shut out from him the bitter word + And serpent hiss of scorning; + Nor let the storms of yesterday + Disturb his quiet morning. + Breathe over him forgetfulness + Of all save deeds of kindness, + And, save to smiles of grateful eyes, + Press down his lids in blindness. + + There, where with living ear and eye, + He heard Potomac's flowing, + And, through his tall ancestral trees + Saw autumn's sunset glowing, + He sleeps--still looking to the West, + Beneath the dark wood shadow, + As if he still would see the sun + Sink down on wave and meadow. + + Bard, Sage, and Tribune--in himself + All moods of mind contrasting-- + The tenderest wail of human woe, + The scorn like lightning blasting; + The pathos which from rival eyes + Unwilling tears could summon, + The stinging taunt, the fiery burst + Of hatred scarcely human! + + Mirth, sparkling like a diamond shower, + From lips of life-long sadness; + Clear picturings of majestic thought + Upon a ground of madness; + And over all Romance and Song + A classic beauty throwing, + And laureled Clio at his side + Her storied pages showing. + + All parties feared him: each in turn + Beheld its schemes disjointed, + As right or left his fatal glance + And spectral finger pointed. + Sworn foe of cant, he smote it down + With trenchant wit unsparing, + And, mocking, rent with ruthless hand + The robe Pretense was wearing. + + Too honest or too proud to feign + A love he never cherished, + Beyond Virginia's border line + His patriotism perished. + While others hailed in distant skies + Our eagle's dusky pinion, + He only saw the mountain bird + Stoop o'er his Old Dominion. + + Still through each change of fortune strange, + Racked nerve, and brain all burning, + His loving faith in mother-land + Knew never shade of turning; + By Britain's lakes, by Neva's wave, + Whatever sky was o'er him, + He heard her rivers' rushing sound, + Her blue peaks rose before him. + + He held his slaves, yet made withal + No false and vain pretenses, + Nor paid a lying priest to seek + For scriptural defenses. + His harshest words of proud rebuke, + His bitterest taunt and scorning, + Fell fire-like on the Northern brow + That bent to him in fawning. + + He held his slaves, yet kept the while + His reverence for the Human, + In the dark vassals of his will + He saw but man and woman. + No hunter of God's outraged poor + His Roanoke valley entered; + No trader in the souls of men + Across his threshold ventured. + + And when the old and wearied man + Lay down for his last sleeping, + And at his side, a slave no more, + His brother-man stood weeping, + His latest thought, his latest breath, + To freedom's duty giving, + With failing tongue and trembling hand + The dying blest the living. + + O! never bore his ancient State + A truer son or braver; + None trampling with a calmer scorn + On foreign hate or favor. + He knew her faults, yet never stooped + His proud and manly feeling + To poor excuses of the wrong + Or meanness of concealing. + + But none beheld with clearer eye, + The plague-spot o'er her spreading, + None heard more sure the steps of Doom + Along her future treading. + For her as for himself he spake, + When, his gaunt frame up-bracing, + He traced with dying hand "REMORSE!" + And perished in the tracing. + + As from the grave where Henry sleeps, + From Vernon's weeping willow, + And from the grassy pall which hides + The Sage of Monticello, + So from the leaf-strewn burial-stone + Of Randolph's lowly dwelling, + Virginia! o'er thy land of slaves + A warning voice is swelling. + + And hark! from thy deserted fields + Are sadder warnings spoken, + From quenched hearths, where thy exiled sons + Their household gods have broken. + The curse is on thee--wolves for men, + And briers for corn-sheaves giving! + O! more than all thy dead renown + Were now one hero living. + + + + + OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. + + OLD IRONSIDES. + + Ay, tear her tattered ensign down! + Long has it waved on high, + And many an eye has danced to see + That banner in the sky; + Beneath it rung the battle shout, + And burst the cannon's roar; + The meteor of the ocean air + Shall sweep the clouds no more. + + Her deck, once red with heroes' blood, + Where knelt the vanquished foe, + When winds were hurrying o'er the flood, + And waves were white below, + No more shall feel the victor's tread, + Or know the conquered knee,-- + The harpies of the shore shall pluck + The eagle of the sea. + + O, better that her shattered hulk + Should sink beneath the wave; + Her thunders shook the mighty deep, + And there should be her grave; + Nail to the mast her holy flag, + Set every threadbare sail, + And give her to the god of storms, + The lightning and the gale! + + + + THE LAST LEAF. + + I saw him once before, + As he passed by the door, + And again + The pavement stones resound, + As he totters o'er the ground + With his cane. + + They say that in his prime, + Ere the pruning-knife of time + Cut him down, + Not a better man was found + By the Crier on his round + Through the town. + + But now he walks the streets, + And he looks at all he meets + Sad and wan, + And he shakes his feeble head, + That it seems as if he said, + "They are gone." + + The mossy marbles rest + On the lips that he has pressed + In their bloom, + And the names he loved to hear + Have been carved for many a year + On the tomb. + + My grandmamma has said-- + Poor old lady, she is dead + Long ago-- + That he had a Roman nose, + And his cheek was like a rose + In the snow. + + But now his nose is thin, + And it rests upon his chin + Like a staff, + And a crook is in his back, + And a melancholy crack + In his laugh. + + I know it is a sin + For me to sit and grin + At him here; + But the old three-cornered hat, + And the breeches, and all that, + Are so queer! + + And if I should live to be + The last leaf upon the tree + In the spring, + Let them smile, as I do now, + At the old forsaken bough + Where I cling. + + + + MY AUNT. + + My aunt! my dear, unmarried aunt! + Long years have o'er her flown; + Yet still she strains the aching clasp + That binds her virgin zone; + I know it hurts her, though she looks + As cheerful as she can; + Her waist is ampler than her life, + For life is but a span. + + My aunt! my poor deluded aunt! + Her hair is almost gray; + Why will she train that winter curl + In such a spring-like way? + How can she lay her glasses down, + And say she reads as well, + When, through a double convex lens, + She just makes out to spell? + + Her father--grandpapa! forgive + This erring lip its smiles-- + Vowed she should make the finest girl + Within a hundred miles; + He sent her to a stylish school; + 'Twas in her thirteenth June; + And with her, as the rules required, + "Two towels and a spoon." + + They braced my aunt against a board, + To make her straight and tall; + They laced her up, they starved her down, + To make her light and small; + They pinched her feet, they singed her hair, + They screwed it up with pins; + O, never mortal suffered more + In penance for her sins. + + So when my precious aunt was done, + My grandsire brought her back + (By daylight, lest some rabid youth + Might follow on the track); + "Ah!" said my grandsire, as he shook + Some powder in his pan, + "What could this lovely creature do + Against a desperate man?" + + Alas! nor chariot, nor barouche, + Nor bandit cavalcade, + Tore from the trembling father's arms + His all-accomplished maid. + For her how happy had it been! + And Heaven had spared to me + To see one sad ungathered rose + On my ancestral tree. + + + + + EDGAR ALLAN POE. + + TO HELEN. + + Helen, thy beauty is to me + Like those Nicean barks of yore, + That gently, o'er a perfumed sea, + The weary, wayworn wanderer bore + To his own native shore. + + On desperate seas long wont to roam, + Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face, + Thy Naiad airs have brought me home + To the glory that was Greece + And the grandeur that was Rome. + + Lo! in yon brilliant window-niche + How statue-like I see thee stand, + The agate lamp within thy hand! + Ah! Psyche, from the regions which + Are Holy Land! + + + + TO ONE IN PARADISE. + + Thou wast that all to me, love, + For which my soul did pine: + A green isle in the sea, love, + A fountain and a shrine + All wreathed with fairy fruits and flowers, + And all the flowers were mine. + + Ah, dream too bright to last! + Ah, starry hope! that did'st arise + But to be overcast! + A voice from out the future cries + On! on! But o'er the past + (Dim gulf!) my spirit hovering lies, + Mute, motionless, aghast! + + For, alas! alas! with me + The light of life is o'er. + "No more--no more--no more--" + (Such language holds the solemn sea + To the sands upon the shore) + Shall bloom the thunder-blasted tree, + Or the stricken eagle soar! + + And all my days are trances, + And all my nightly dreams + Are where thy dark eye glances, + And where thy footstep gleams,-- + In what ethereal dances, + By what eternal streams! + + + +FROM "THE FALL OP THE HOUSE OF USHER." + +At the termination of this sentence I started, and for a moment paused; +for it appeared to me (although I at once concluded that my excited +fancy had deceived me)--it appeared to me that, from some very remote +portion of the mansion there came, indistinctly, to my ears what might +have been, in its exact similarity of character, the echo (but a +stifled and dull one certainly) of the very cracking and ripping sound +which Sir Launcelot had so particularly described. It was, beyond +doubt, the coincidence alone which had arrested my attention; for amid +the rattling of the sashes of the casements, and, the ordinary +commingled noises of the still-increasing storm, the sound, in itself, +had nothing, surely, which should have interested or disturbed me. I +continued the story. + + * * * * * * * * + +Here again I paused abruptly, and now with a feeling of wild +amazement--for there could be no doubt whatever that, in this instance, +I did actually hear (although from what direction it proceeded I found +it impossible to say) a low and apparently distant, but harsh, +protracted, and most unusual screaming or grating sound, the exact +counterpart of what my fancy had already conjured up for the dragon's +unnatural shriek, as described by the romancer. Oppressed, as I +certainly was, upon the occurrence of this second and most +extraordinary coincidence, by a thousand conflicting sensations, in +which wonder and extreme terror were predominant, I still retained +sufficient presence of mind to avoid exciting, by any observation, the +sensitive nervousness of my companion. I was by no means certain that +he had noticed the sounds in question; although, assuredly, a strange +alteration had, during the last few minutes, taken place in his +demeanor. From a position fronting my own he had gradually brought +round his chair so as to sit with his face to the door of the chamber, +and thus I could but partially perceive his features, although I saw +that his lips trembled as if he were murmuring inaudibly. His head had +dropped upon his breast; yet I knew that he was not asleep, from the +wide and rigid opening of the eye as I caught a glance of it in +profile. The motion of his body, too, was at variance with this idea; +for he rocked from side to side with a gentle yet constant and uniform +sway. Having rapidly taken notice of all this I resumed the narrative +of Sir Launcelot. + + * * * * * * * * + +No sooner had these syllables passed my lips than--as if a shield of +brass had indeed, at the moment, fallen heavily upon a floor of +silver--I became aware of a distinct, hollow, metallic, and clangorous, +yet apparently muffled, reverberation. Completely unnerved, I leaped +to my feet; but the measured, rocking movement of Usher was +undisturbed. I rushed to the chair in which he sat. His eyes were +bent fixedly before him, and throughout his whole countenance there +reigned a stony rigidity. But as I placed my hand upon his shoulder +there came a strong shudder over his whole person; a sickly smile +quivered about his lips; and I saw that he spoke in a low, hurried, and +gibbering manner, as if unconscious of my presence. Bending closely +over him, I at length drank in the hideous import of his words. + +"Not hear it? Yes, I hear it, and _have_ heard it. +Long--long--long--many minutes, many hours, many days have I heard +it--yet I _dared_ not--O, pity me, miserable wretch that I am!--I +_dared_ not--I dared not speak! _We have put her living in the tomb_! +Said I not that my senses were acute? I _now_ tell you that I heard +her first feeble movements in the hollow coffin. I heard them many, +many days ago--yet I dared not--I _dared not speak_! And +now--to-night--Ethelred--ha! ha!--the breaking of the hermit's door, +and the death-cry of the dragon, and the clangor of the shield!--say, +rather, the rending of her coffin, and the grating of the iron hinges +of her prison, and her struggles within the coppered archway of the +vault! O, whither shall I fly? Will she not be here anon? Is she not +hurrying to upbraid me for my haste? Have I not heard her footstep on +the stair? Do I not distinguish that heavy and horrible beating of her +heart? Madman!"--here he sprang furiously to his feet and shrieked out +his syllables, as if in the effort he were giving up his +soul--"_Madman! I tell you that she now stands without the door_!" + +As if in the superhuman energy of his utterance there had been found +the potency of a spell, the huge antique panels to which the speaker +pointed threw slowly back, upon the instant, their ponderous and ebony +jaws. It was the work of the rushing gust; but then without those +doors there _did_ stand the lofty and enshrouded figure of the Lady +Madeline of Usher. There was blood upon her white robes, and the +evidence of some bitter struggle upon every portion of her emaciated +frame. For a moment she remained trembling and reeling to and fro upon +the threshold--then, with a low, moaning cry, fell heavily inward upon +the person of her brother, and, in her violent and now final +death-agonies, bore him to the floor a corpse and a victim to the +terrors he had anticipated. + +From that chamber and from that mansion I fled aghast. The storm was +still abroad in all its wrath as I found myself crossing the old +causeway. Suddenly there shot along the path a wild light, and I +turned to see whence a gleam so unusual could have issued, for the vast +house and its shadows were alone behind me. The radiance was that; of +the full, setting, and blood-red moon, which now shone vividly through +that once barely discernible fissure of which I have before spoken as +extending from the roof of the building, in a zigzag direction, to the +base. While I gazed this fissure rapidly widened; there came a fierce +breath of the whirlwind--the entire orb of the satellite burst at once +upon my sight--my brain reeled as I saw the mighty walls rushing +asunder--there was a long, tumultuous, shouting sound like the voice of +a thousand waters--and the deep and dark tarn at my feet closed +sullenly and silently over the fragments of the House of Usher. + + + + + NATHANIEL PARKER WILLIS. + + UNSEEN SPIRITS. + + The shadows lay along Broadway, + 'Twas near the twilight tide-- + And slowly there a lady fair + Was walking in her pride. + Alone walked she; but, viewlessly, + Walked spirits at her side. + + Peace charmed the street beneath her feet, + And Honor charmed the air; + And all astir looked kind on her, + And called her good as fair-- + For all God ever gave to her + She kept with chary care. + + She kept with care her beauties rare + From lovers warm and true; + For her heart was cold to all but gold, + And the rich came not to woo, + But honored well are charms to sell, + If priests the selling do. + + Now walking there was one more fair-- + A slight girl, lily-pale; + And she had unseen company + To make the spirit quail-- + 'Twixt Want and Scorn she walked forlorn, + And nothing could avail. + + No mercy now can clear her brow + For this world's peace to pray; + For, as love's wild prayer dissolved in air, + Her woman's heart gave way! + But the sin forgiven by Christ in heaven + By man is cursed alway. + + + +NAHANT. + +Here we are, then, in the "Swallow's Cave." The floor descends by a +gentle declivity to the sea, and from the long dark cleft stretching +outward you look forth upon the Atlantic--the shore of Ireland the +first _terra firma_ in the path of your eye. Here is a dark pool, left +by the retreating tide for a refrigerator; and with the champagne in +the midst we will recline about it like the soft Asiatics of whom we +learned pleasure in the East, and drink to the small-featured and +purple-lipped "Mignons" of Syria--those fine-limbed and fiery slaves +adorable as peris, and by turns languishing and stormy, whom you buy +for a pinch of piastres (say 5L 5s.) in sunny Damascus. Your drowsy +Circassian, faint and dreamy, or your crockery Georgian--fit dolls for +the sensual Turk--is, to him who would buy _soul_, dear at a penny the +hecatomb. + +We recline, as it were, in an ebon pyramid with a hundred feet of floor +and sixty of wall, and the fourth side open to the sky. The light +comes in mellow and dim, and the sharp edges of the rocky portal seem +let into the pearly heaven. The tide is at half-ebb, and the advancing +and retreating waves, which at first just lifted the fringe of crimson +dulse at the lip of the cavern, now dash their spray-pearls on the rock +below, the "tenth" surge alone rallying as if in scorn of its +retreating fellow, and, like the chieftain of Culloden Moor, rushing +back singly to the contest. And now that the waters reach the entrance +no more, come forward and look on the sea! The swell lifts! Would you +not think the bases of the earth rising beneath it? It falls! Would +you not think the foundation of the deep had given way? A plain, broad +enough for the navies of the world to ride at large, heaves up evenly +and steadily as if it would lie against the sky, rests a moment +spell-bound in its place, and falls again as far--the respiration of a +sleeping child not more regular and full of slumber. It is only on the +shore that it chafes. Blessed emblem! it is at peace with itself! The +rocks war with a nature so unlike their own, and the hoarse din of +their border onsets resounds through the caverns they have rent open; +but beyond, in the calm bosom of the ocean, what heavenly dignity! what +godlike unconsciousness of alarm! I did not think we should stumble on +such a moral in the cave! + +By the deeper bass of its hoarse organ the sea is now playing upon its +lowest stops, and the tide is down. Hear how it rushes in beneath the +rocks, broken and stilled in its tortuous way, till it ends with a +washing and dull hiss among the sea-weed, and, like a myriad of small +tinkling bells, the dripping from the crags is audible. There is fine +music in the sea! + +And now the beach is bare. The cave begins to cool and darken, and the +first gold tint of sunset is stealing into the sky, and the sea looks +of a changing opal, green, purple, and white, as if its floor were +paved with pearl, and the changing light struck up through the waters. +And there heaves a ship into the horizon like a white-winged bird, +lying with dark breast on the waves, abandoned of the sea-breeze within +sight of port, and repelled even by the spicy breath that comes with a +welcome off the shore. She comes from "Merry England." She is +freighted with more than merchandise. The home-sick exile will gaze on +her snowy sail as she sets in with the morning breeze, and bless it, +for the wind that first filled it on its way swept through the green +valley of his home! What links of human affection brings she over the +sea? How much comes in her that is not in her "bill of lading," yet +worth to the heart that is waiting for it a thousand times the purchase +of her whole venture! + +_Mais montons nous_! I hear the small hoofs of Thalaba; my stanhope +waits; we will leave this half bottle of champagne, that "remainder +biscuit," and the echoes of our philosophy to the Naiads who have lent +us their drawing-room. Undine, or Egeria! Lurly, or Arethusa! +whatever thou art called, nymph of this shadowy cave! adieu! + +Slowly, Thalaba! Tread gingerly down this rocky descent! So! Here we +are on the floor of the vasty deep! What a glorious race-course! The +polished and printless sand spreads away before you as far as the eye +can see, the surf comes in below breast-high ere it breaks and the +white fringe of the sliding wave shoots up the beach, but leaves room +for the marching of a Persian phalanx on the sands it has deserted. O, +how noiselessly runs the wheel, and how dreamily we glide along, +feeling our motion but in the resistance of the wind and in the +trout-like pull of the ribands by the excited animal before us. Mark +the color of the sand! White at high-water mark, and thence deepening +to a silvery gray as the water has evaporated less, a slab of Egyptian +granite in the obelisk of St. Peter's not more polished and +unimpressible. Shell or rock, weed or quicksand, there is none; and, +mar or deface its bright surface as you will, it is ever beaten down +anew, and washed even of the dust of the foot of man by the returning +sea. You may write upon its fine-grained face with a crow-quill--you +may course over its dazzling expanse with a troop of chariots. + +Most wondrous and beautiful of all, within twenty yards of the surf, or +for an hour after the tide has left the sand, it holds the water +without losing its firmness, and is like a gay mirror, bright as the +bosom of the sea. (By your leave, Thalaba!) And now lean over the +dasher and see those small fetlocks striking up from beneath--the +flying mane, the thoroughbred action, the small and expressive head, as +perfect in the reflection as in the reality; like Wordsworth's swan, he + + "_Trots_ double, _horse_ and shadow." + +You would swear you were skimming the surface of the sea; and the +delusion is more complete as the white foam of the "tenth wave" skims +in beneath wheel and hoof, and you urge on with the treacherous element +gliding away visibly beneath you. + + + + +HENRY DAVID THOREAU. + +THE WINTER WOODS. + +[From _Excursions_.] + +There is a slumbering subterranean fire in nature which never goes out, +and which no cold can chill. It finally melts the great snow, and in +January or July is only buried under a thicker or thinner covering. In +the coldest day it flows somewhere, and the snow melts around every +tree. This field of winter rye which sprouted late in the fall and now +speedily dissolves the snow is where the fire is very thinly covered. +We feel warmed by it. In the winter warmth stands for all virtue, and +we resort in thought to a trickling rill, with its bare stones shining +in the sun, and to warm springs in the woods, with as much eagerness as +rabbits and robins. The steam which rises from swamps and pools is as +dear and domestic as that of our own kettle. What fire could ever +equal the sunshine of a winter's day, when the meadow-mice come out by +the wall-sides, and the chickadee lisps in the defiles of the wood? +The warmth comes directly from the sun, and is not radiated from the +earth as in summer; and when we feel his beams on our backs as we are +treading some snowy dell we are grateful as for a special kindness, and +bless the sun which has followed us into that by-place. + +This subterranean fire has its altar in each man's breast, for in the +coldest day, and on the bleakest hill, the traveler cherishes a warmer +fire within the folds of his cloak than is kindled on any hearth. A +healthy man, indeed, is the complement of the seasons, and in winter +summer is in his heart. There is the South. Thither have all birds +and insects migrated, and around the warm springs in his breast are +gathered the robin and the lark. + +At length, having reached the edge of the woods and shut out the +gadding town, we enter within their covert as we go under the roof of a +cottage, and cross its threshold, all ceiled and banked up with snow. +They are glad and warm still, and as genial and cheery in winter as in +summer. As we stand in the midst of the pines, in the flickering and +checkered light which straggles but little way into their maze, we +wonder if the towns have ever heard their simple story. It seems to us +that no traveler has ever explored them, and notwithstanding the +wonders which science is elsewhere revealing every day, who would not +like to hear their annals? Our humble villages in the plain are their +contribution. We borrow from the forest the boards which shelter and +the sticks which warm us. How important is their evergreen to the +winter, that portion of the summer which does not fade, the permanent +year, the unwithered grass. Thus simply and with little expense of +altitude is the surface of the earth diversified. What would human +life be without forests, those natural cities? From the tops of +mountains they appear like smooth-shaven lawns; yet whither shall we +walk but in this taller grass? + +In this glade covered with bushes of a year's growth see how the +silvery dust lies on every seared leaf and twig, deposited in such +infinite and luxurious forms as by their very variety atone for the +absence of color. Observe the tiny tracks of mice around every stem, +and the triangular tracks of the rabbit. A pure elastic heaven hangs +over all, as if the impurities of the summer sky, refined and shrunk by +the chaste winter's cold, had been winnowed by the heavens upon the +earth. + +Mature confounds her summer distinctions at this season. The heavens +seem to be nearer the earth. The elements are less reserved and +distinct. Water turns to ice; rain to snow. The day is but a +Scandinavian night. The winter is an arctic summer. + +How much more living is the life that is in nature, the furred life +which still survives the stinging nights, and, from amidst fields and +woods covered with frost and snow, sees the sun rise! + + "The foodless wilds + Pour forth their brown inhabitants." + +The gray squirrel and rabbit are brisk and playful in the remote glens, +even on the morning of the cold Friday. Here is our Lapland and +Labrador; and for our Esquimaux and Knistenaux, Dog-ribbed Indians, +Novazemblaites, and Spitzbergeners, are there not the ice-cutter and +wood-chopper, the fox, musk-rat, and mink? + +Still, in the midst of the arctic day we may trace the summer to its +retreats and sympathize with some contemporary life. Stretched over +the brooks, in the midst of the frost-bound meadows, we may observe the +submarine cottages of the caddice-worms, the larvae of the Plicipennes. +Their small cylindrical cases built around themselves, composed of +flags, sticks, grass, and withered leaves, shells and pebbles, inform +and color like the wrecks which strew the bottom, now drifting along +over the pebbly bottom, now whirling in tiny eddies and dashing down +steep falls, or sweeping rapidly along with the current, or else +swaying to and fro at the end of some grass-blade or root. Anon they +will leave their sunken habitations, and, crawling up the stems of +plants or to the surface like gnats, as perfect insects henceforth, +flutter over the surface of the water or sacrifice their short lives in +the flame of our candle at evening. Down yonder little glen the shrubs +are drooping under their burden, and the red alder-berries contrast +with the white ground. Here are the marks of a myriad feet which have +already been abroad. The sun rises as proudly over such a glen as over +the valley of the Seine or Tiber, and it seems the residence of a pure +and self-subsistent valor such as they never witnessed, which never +knew defeat or fear. Here reign the simplicity and purity of a +primitive age and a health and hope far remote from towns and cities. +Standing quite alone, far in the forest, while the wind is shaking down +snow from the trees, and leaving the only human tracks behind us, we +find our reflections of a richer variety than the life of cities. The +chickadee and nut-hatch are more inspiring society than statesmen and +philosophers, and we shall return to these last as to more vulgar +companions. In this lonely glen, with the brook draining the slopes, +its creased ice and crystals of all hues, where the spruces and +hemlocks stand up on either side, and the rush and sere wild oats in +the rivulet itself, our lives are more serene and worthy to contemplate. + +As the day advances, the heat of the sun is reflected by the +hill-sides, and we hear a faint but sweet music where flows the rill +released from its fetters, and the icicles are melting on the trees, +and the nut-hatch and partridge are heard and seen. The south wind +melts the snow at noon, and the bare ground appears with its withered +grass and leaves, and we are invigorated by the perfume which exhales +from it as by the scent of strong meats. + +Let us go into this deserted woodman's hut, and see how he has passed +the long winter nights and the short and stormy days. For here man has +lived under this south hill-side, and it seems a civilized and public +spot. We have such associations as when the traveler stands by the +ruins of Palmyra or Hecatompolis. Singing birds and flowers perchance +have begun to appear here, for flowers as well as weeds follow in the +footsteps of man. These hemlocks whispered over his head, these +hickory logs were his fuel, and these pitch-pine roots kindled his +fire; yonder fuming rill in the hollow, whose thin and airy vapor still +ascends as busily as ever, though he is far off now, was his well. +These hemlock boughs, and the straw upon this raised platform, were his +bed, and this broken dish held his drink. But he has not been here +this season, for the phoebes built their nest upon this shelf last +summer. I find some embers left, as if he had but just gone out, where +he baked his pot of beans; and while at evening he smoked his pipe, +whose stemless bowl lies in the ashes, chatted with his only companion, +if perchance he had any, about the depth of the snow on the morrow, +already falling fast and thick without, or disputed whether the last +sound was the screech of an owl or the creak of a bough, or imagination +only; and through this broad chimney-throat, in the late winter +evening, ere he stretched himself upon the straw, he looked up to learn +the progress of the storm, and, seeing the bright stars of Cassiopeia's +chair shining brightly down upon him, fell contentedly asleep. + +See how many traces from which we may learn the chopper's history. +From this stump we may guess the sharpness of his ax, and from the +slope of the stroke, on which side he stood, and whether he cut down +the tree without going round it or changing hands; and from the flexure +of the splinters, we may know which way it fell. This one chip +contains inscribed on it the whole history of the wood-chopper and of +the world. On this scrap of paper, which held his sugar or salt +perchance, or was the wadding of his gun, sitting on a log in the +forest, with what interest we read the tattle of cities, of those +larger huts, empty and to let, like this, in High Streets and Broadways. + + + + + WALT WHITMAN. + + THE MIRACLES OF NATURE. + + [From _Leaves of Grass_.] + + To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle, + Every inch of space is a miracle, + Every square yard of the surface of the earth + is spread with the same, + Every cubic foot of the interior swarms with the same. + + * * * * * * * * + + To me the sea is a continual miracle, + The fishes that swim--the rocks--the motion + of the waves--the ships with men in them, + What stranger miracles are there? + + * * * * * * * * + + I was thinking the day most splendid, + till I saw what the not-day exhibited; + I was thinking this globe enough, + till there tumbled upon me myriads of other globes; + O, how plainly I see now that this life cannot exhibit + all to me--as the day cannot; + O, I see that I am to wait for what will be exhibited by death. + + * * * * * * * * + + O Death! + O, the beautiful touch of Death, soothing and benumbing + a few moments, for reasons. + + * * * * * * * * + + The earth never tires, + The earth is rude, silent, incomprehensible at first-- + Nature is rude and incomprehensible at first; + Be not discouraged--keep on--there are divine things, + well enveloped; + I swear to you there are divine things more beautiful + than words can tell. + + + + O CAPTAIN! MY CAPTAIN! + + O captain! my captain! our fearful trip is done; + The ship has weathered every rack, the prize we sought is won; + The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting, + While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring: + But O heart! heart! heart! + Leave you not the little spot + Where on the deck my captain lies, + Fallen cold and dead. + + O captain! my captain! rise up and hear the bells; + Rise up--for you the flag is flung--for you the bugle trills; + For you bouquets and ribboned wreaths--for you the shores a-crowding; + For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning; + O captain! dear father! + This arm I push beneath you; + It is some dream that on the deck + You've fallen cold and dead. + + My captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still; + My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will; + But the ship, the ship is anchored safe, its voyage closed and done; + From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won; + Exult, O shores, and ring, O bells! + But I, with silent tread, + Walk the spot my captain lies, + Fallen cold and dead. + + + + + JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. + + THE COURTIN'. + + Zekle crep' up, quite unbeknown, + An' peeked in thru the winder, + An' there sot Huldy all alone, + 'ith no one nigh to hender. + + Agin the chimbly crooknecks hung, + An' in amongst 'em rusted + The ole queen's arm thet Gran'ther Young + Fetched back from Concord busted. + + The wannut logs shot sparkles out + Toward the pootiest, bless her! + An' leetle fires danced all about + The chiny on the dresser. + + The very room, coz she wuz in, + Looked warm from floor to ceilin', + An' she looked full ez rosy agin + Ez th' apples she wuz peelin'. + + She heerd a foot an' knowed it, tu, + A-raspin' on the scraper; + All ways to once her feelin's new + Like sparks in burnt-up paper. + + He kin' o' l'itered on the mat, + Some doubtfle o' the seekle; + His heart kep' goin' pitypat, + But hern went pity Zekle. + + + + THE PIOUS EDITOR'S CREED. + + [From _Biglow Papers_.] + + I du believe in Freedom's cause, + Ez fur away as Paris is; + I love to see her stick her claws + In them infarnal Pharisees; + It's wal enough agin a king + To dror resolves an' triggers-- + But libbaty's a kind o' thing + Thet don't agree with niggers. + + I du believe the people want + A tax on teas an' coffees, + Thet nothin' aint extravygunt, + Pervidin' I'm in office; + Fer I hev loved my country sence + My eye-teeth filled their sockets, + An' Uncle Sam I reverence-- + Partic'larly his pockets. + + I du believe in any plan + O' levyin' the taxes, + Ez long ez, like a lumberman, + I git jest wut I axes; + I go free-trade thru thick an' thin, + Because it kind o' rouses + The folks to vote--an' keeps us in + Our quiet custom-houses. + + * * * * * * * * + + I du believe with all my soul + In the gret Press's freedom, + To pint the people to the goal + An' in the traces lead 'em; + Palsied the arm thet forges jokes + At my fat contracts squintin', + An' withered be the nose that pokes + Inter the gov'ment printin'! + + I du believe thet I should give + Wut's his'n unto Caesar, + Fer it's by him I move an' live, + Frum him my bread and cheese air; + I du believe thet all o' me + Doth bear his souperscription,-- + Will, conscience, honor, honesty, + An' things o' thet description. + + I du believe in prayer an' praise + To him thet hez the grantin' + O' jobs,--in every thin' that pays, + But most of all in CANTIN'; + This doth my cup with marcies fill, + This lays all thought o' sin to rest,-- + I _don't_ believe in princerple, + But, O, I _du_ in interest. + + I du believe in bein' this + Or thet, ez it may happen + One way or t'other hendiest is + To ketch the people nappin'; + It aint by princerples nor men + My preudent course is steadied,-- + I scent wich pays the best; an' then + Go into it baldheaded. + + I du believe thet holdin' slaves + Comes nat'ral tu a Presidunt, + Let 'lone the rowdedow it saves + To hev a wal-broke precedunt; + Fer any office, small or gret, + I couldn't ax with no face, + Without I'd ben, thru dry an' wet, + Th' unrizzost kind o' doughface. + + I du believe wutever trash + 'll keep the people in blindness,-- + Thet we the Mexicuns can thrash + Right inter brotherly kindness; + Thet bombshells, grape, an' powder 'n' ball + Air good-will's strongest magnets; + Thet peace, to make it stick at all, + Must be druv in with bagnets. + + In short, I firmly du believe + In Humbug generally, + Fer it's a thing that I perceive + To hev a solid vally; + This heth my faithful shepherd ben, + In pasturs sweet heth led me, + An' this 'll keep the people green + To feed ez they hev fed me. + + + + +EDWARD EVERETT HALE. + +[From _The Man Without a Country_.[1]] + +The rule adopted on board the ships on which I have met "the man +without a country" was, I think, transmitted from the beginning. No +mess liked to have him permanently, because his presence cut off all +talk of home or of the prospect of return, of politics or letters, of +peace or of war--cut off more than half the talk men liked to have at +sea. But it was always thought too hard that he should never meet the +rest of us except to touch hats, and we finally sank into one system. +He was not permitted to talk with the men unless an officer was by. +With officers he had unrestrained intercourse, as far as he and they +chose. But he grew shy, though he had favorites; I was one. Then the +captain always asked him to dinner on Monday. Every mess in succession +took up the invitation in its turn. According to the size of the ship, +you had him at your mess more or less often at dinner. His breakfast +he ate in his own state-room--he always had a state-room--which was +where a sentinel or somebody on the watch could see the door. And +whatever else he ate or drank, he ate or drank alone. Sometimes, when +the marines or sailors had any special jollification, they were +permitted to invite "Plain-Buttons," as they called him. Then Nolan +was sent with some officer, and the men were forbidden to speak of home +while he was there. I believe the theory was that the sight of his +punishment did them good. They called him "Plain-Buttons" because, +while he always chose to wear a regulation army uniform, he was not +permitted to wear the army button, for the reason that it bore either +the initials or the insignia of the country he had disowned. + +I remember soon after I joined the navy I was on shore with some of the +older officers from our ship and from the _Brandywine_, which we had +met at Alexandria. We had leave to make a party and go up to Cairo and +the Pyramids. As we jogged along (you went on donkeys then), some of +the gentlemen (we boys called them "Dons," but the phrase was long +since changed) fell to talking about Nolan, and some one told the +system which was adopted from the first about his books and other +reading. As he was almost never permitted to go on shore, even though +the vessel lay in port for months, his time at the best hung heavy; and +every body was permitted to lend him books, if they were not published +in America, and made no allusion to it. These were common enough in +the old days, when people in the other hemisphere talked of the United +States as little as we do of Paraguay. He had almost all the foreign +papers that came into the ship, sooner or later; only somebody must go +over them first, and cut out any advertisement or stray paragraph that +alluded to America. This was a little cruel sometimes, when the back +of what was cut might be as innocent as Hesiod. Right in the midst of +one of Napoleon's battles, or one of Canning's speeches, poor Nolan +would find a great hole, because on the back of the page of that paper +there had been an advertisement of a packet for New York, or a scrap +from the President's message. I say this was the first time I ever +heard of this plan, which afterward I had enough and more than enough +to do with. I remember it, because poor Phillips, who was of the +party, as soon as the allusion to reading was made, told a story of +something which happened at the Cape of Good Hope on Nolan's first +voyage; and it is the only thing I ever knew of that voyage. They had +touched at the Cape, and had done the civil thing with the English +admiral and the fleet, and then, leaving for a long cruise up the +Indian Ocean, Phillips had borrowed a lot of English books from an +officer, which, in those days, as indeed in these, was quite a +windfall. Among them, as the devil would order, was the _Lay of the +Last Minstrel_, which they had all of them heard of, but which most of +them had never seen. I think it could not have been published long. +Well, nobody thought there could be any risk of any thing national in +that, though Phillips swore old Shaw had cut out the "Tempest" from +Shakespeare before he let Nolan have it, because he said "the Bermudas +ought to be ours, and, by Jove, should be one day." So Nolan was +permitted to join the circle one afternoon when a lot of them sat on +deck smoking and reading aloud. People do not do such things so often +now; but when I was young we got rid of a great deal of time so. Well, +so it happened that in his turn Nolan took the book and read to the +others; and he read very well, as I know. Nobody in the circle knew a +line of the poem, only it was all magic and border chivalry, and was +ten thousand years ago. Poor Nolan read steadily through the fifth +canto, stopped a minute and drank something, and then began without a +thought of what was coming: + + "Breathes there the man, with soul so dead, + Who never to himself hath said"-- + +It seemed impossible to us that any body ever heard this for the first +time; but all these fellows did then, and poor Nolan himself went on, +still unconsciously or mechanically: + + "This is my own, my native land!" + +Then they all saw something was to pay; but he expected to get through, +I suppose, turned a little pale, but plunged on: + + "Whose heart hath ne'er within him burned, + As home his footsteps he hath turned + From wandering on a foreign strand?-- + If such there breathe, go, mark him well." + +By this time the men were all beside themselves, wishing there was any +way to make him turn over two pages; but he had not quite presence of +mind for that; he gagged a little, colored crimson, and staggered on: + + "For him no minstrel raptures swell; + High though his titles, proud his name, + Boundless his wealth as wish can claim, + Despite these titles, power, and pelf, + The wretch, concentered all in self;"-- + +and here the poor fellow choked, could not go on, but started up, swung +the book into the sea, vanished into his state-room. "And by Jove," +said Phillips, "we did not see him for two months again. And I had to +make up some beggarly story to that English surgeon why I did not +return his Walter Scott to him." + + +[1]See page 195. + + + + + FITZ-GREENE HALLECK. + + [From _Marco Bozzaris_.] + + Come to the bridal-chamber, Death! + Come to the mother's when she feels + For the first time her first-born's breath; + Come when the blessed seals + That close the pestilence are broke, + And crowded cities wail its stroke; + Come in consumption's ghastly form, + The earthquake shock, the ocean-storm; + Come when the heart beats high and warm, + With banquet-song, and dance, and wine: + And thou art terrible--the tear, + The groan, the knell, the pall, the bier; + And all we know, or dream, or fear + Of agony, are thine. + + But to the hero, when his sword + Has won the battle for the free, + Thy voice sounds like a prophet's word; + And in its hollow tones are heard + The thanks of millions yet to be. + Come, when his task of fame is wrought-- + Come, with her laurel-leaf, blood-bought-- + Come in her crowning hour--and then + Thy sunken eye's unearthly light + To him is welcome as the sight + Of sky and stars to prisoned men; + Thy grasp is welcome as the hand + Of brother in a foreign land; + Thy summons welcome as the cry + That told the Indian isles were nigh + To the world-seeking Genoese, + When the land-wind, from woods of palm, + And orange-groves, and fields of balm, + Blew o'er the Haytian seas. + + Bozzaris! with the storied brave + Greece nurtured in her glory's time, + Rest thee--there is no prouder grave, + Even in her own proud clime. + She wore no funeral weeds for thee, + Nor bade the dark hearse wave its plume, + Like torn branch from death's leafless tree + In sorrow's pomp and pageantry, + The heartless luxury of the tomb; + But she remembers thee as one + Long loved, and for a season gone; + For thee her poet's lyre is wreathed, + Her marble wrought, her music breathed; + For thee she rings the birthday bells; + Of thee her babes' first lisping tells; + For thine her evening prayer is said, + At palace couch and cottage bed; + Her soldier, closing with the foe, + Gives for thy sake a deadlier blow; + His plighted maiden, when she fears + For him, the joy of her young years, + Thinks of thy fate and checks her tears. + And she, the mother of thy boys, + Though in her eye and faded cheek + Is read the grief she will not speak, + The memory of her buried joys, + And even she who gave thee birth, + Will by their pilgrim-circled hearth + Talk of thy doom without a sigh: + For thou art Freedom's now and Fame's, + One of the few, the immortal names, + That were not born to die. + + + + ON THE DEATH OF JOSEPH RODMAN DRAKE. + + Green be the turf above thee, + Friend of my better days! + None knew thee but to love thee, + Nor named thee but to praise. + + Tears fell, when thou wert dying, + From eyes unused to weep, + And long where thou art lying + Will tears the cold turf steep. + + When hearts, whose truth was proven + Like thine, are laid in earth, + There should a wreath be woven + To tell the world their worth; + + And I, who woke each morrow + To clasp thy hand in mine, + Who shared thy joy and sorrow, + Whose weal and woe were thine-- + + It should be mine to braid it + Around thy faded brow; + But I've in vain essayed it, + And feel I cannot now. + + While memory bids me weep thee, + Nor thoughts nor words are free, + The grief is fixed too deeply + That mourns a man like thee. + + + + +CHARLES FARRAR BROWNE. + +[From _Lecture on the Mormons_.] + +Brother Kimball is a gay and festive cuss, of some seventy summers, or +some'er's there about. He has one thousand head of cattle and a +hundred head of wives. He says they are awful eaters. + +Mr. Kimball had a son, a lovely young man, who was married to ten +interesting wives. But one day while he was absent from home these ten +wives went out walking with a handsome young man, which so enraged Mr. +Kimball's son--which made Mr. Kimball'a son so jealous--that he shot +himself with a horse-pistol. + +The doctor who attended him--a very scientific man--informed me that +the bullet entered the parallelogram of his diaphragmatic thorax, +superinducing hemorrhage in the outer cuticle of his basilicon +thaumaturgist. It killed him. I should have thought it would. + +(_Soft Music_.) + +I hope this sad end will be a warning to all young wives who go out +walking with handsome young men. Mr. Kimball's son is now no more. He +sleeps beneath the cypress, the myrtle, and the willow. The music is a +dirge by the eminent pianist for Mr. Kimball's son. He died by request. + +I regret to say that efforts were made to make a Mormon of me while I +was in Utah. + +It was leap-year when I was there, and seventeen young widows, the +wives of a deceased Mormon, offered me their hearts and hands. I +called on them one day, and, taking their soft white hands in mine, +which made eighteen hands altogether, I found them in tears, and I +said, "Why is this thus? What is the reason of this thusness?" + +They hove a sigh--seventeen sighs of different size. They said: + +"O, soon thou wilt be gonested away!" + +I told them that when I got ready to leave a place I wentested. + +They said, "Doth not like us?" + +I said, "I doth--I doth." + +I also said, "I hope your intentions are honorable, as I am a lone +child, my parents being far--far away." + +Then they said, "Wilt not marry us?" + +I said, "O, no, it cannot was!" + +Again they asked me to marry them, and again I declined, when they +cried, + +"O, cruel man! this is too much! O, too much!" + +I told them that it was on account of the muchness that I +declined. . . . + +(_Pointing to Panorama_) + +A more cheerful view of the desert. + +The wild snow-storms have left us and we have thrown our wolf-skin +overcoats aside. Certain tribes of far-western Indians bury their +distinguished dead by placing them high in air and covering them with +valuable furs. That is a very fair representation of those mid-air +tombs. Those animals are horses. I know they are, because my artist +says so. I had the picture two years before I discovered the fact. +The artist came to me about six months ago and said, "It is useless to +disguise it from you any longer, they are horses." + +It was while crossing this desert that I was surrounded by a band of +Ute Indians. They were splendidly mounted. They were dressed in +beaver-skins, and they were armed with rifles, knives, and pistols. + +What could I do? What could a poor old orphan do? I'm a brave man. +The day before the battle of Bull's Run I stood in the highway while +the bullets--those dreadful messengers of death--were passing all +around me thickly--in wagons--on their way to the battle-field. But +there were too many of these Injuns. There were forty of them, and +only one of me, and so I said: + +"Great chief, I surrender." + +His name was Wocky-bocky. He dismounted and approached me. I saw his +tomahawk glisten in the morning sunlight. Fire was in his eye. +Wocky-bocky came very close + +(_Pointing to Panorama_) + +to me and seized me by the hair of my head. He mingled his swarthy +fingers with my golden tresses, and he rubbed his dreadful tomahawk +across my lily-white face. He said: + +"Torsha arrah darrah mishky bookshean!" + +I told him he was right. + +Wocky-bocky again rubbed his tomahawk across my face, and said: + +"Wink-ho-loo-boo!" + +Says I, "Mr. Wocky-bocky," says I, "Wocky, I have thought so for years, +and so's all our family." + +He told me I must go to the tent of the Strong Heart and eat raw dog. +It don't agree with mo. I prefer simple food. I prefer pork-pie, +because then I know what I'm eating. But as raw dog was all they +proposed to give to me I had to eat it or starve. So at the expiration +of two days I seized a tin plate and went to the chief's daughter, and +I said to her in a silvery voice--in a kind of German-silvery voice--I +said: + +"Sweet child of the forest, the pale-face wants his dog." + +There was nothing but his paws. I had paused too long--which reminds +me that time passes--a way which time has. I was told in my youth to +seize opportunity. I once tried to seize one. He was rich; he had +diamonds on. As I seized him he knocked me down. Since then I have +learned that he who seizes opportunity sees the penitentiary. + + + + +SAMUEL LANGHORNE CLEMENS. + +THE JUMPING FROG OF CALAVERAS COUNTY. + +"Well, there was a feller here once by the name of Jim Smiley in the +winter of '49, or may be it was the spring of '50--I don't recollect +exactly, somehow, though what makes me think it was one or the other is +because I remember the big flume warn't finished when he first come to +the camp. But any way, he was the curiousest man about, always betting +on anything that turned up you ever see, if he could get any body to +bet on the other side; and if he couldn't he'd change sides. Any way +that suited the other side would suit _him_--any way just so's he got a +bet _he_ was satisfied. But still he was lucky, uncommon lucky; he +most always came out winner. He was always ready and laying for a +chance. There couldn't be no solit'ry thing mentioned but that +feller'd offer to bet on it and take any side you please, as I was just +telling you. If there was a horse-race you'd find him flush or you'd +find him busted at the end of it. If there was a dog-fight, he'd bet +on it; if there was a cat-fight, he'd bet on it; if there was a +chicken-fight, he'd bet on it. Why, if there was two birds setting on +a fence, he would bet you which one would fly first. Or if there was a +camp-meeting, he would be there reg'lar to bet on Parson Walker, which +he judged to be the best exhorter about here, and so he was, too, and a +good man. If he even see a straddle-bug start to go anywheres he would +bet you how long it would take him to get to--to wherever he was going +to; and if you took him up he would follow that straddle-bug to Mexico +but what he would find out where he was bound for and how long he was +on the road. Lots of the boys here has seen that Smiley, and can tell +you about him. Why, it never made no difference to _him_, he'd bet +_any_ thing--the dangdest feller. Parson Walker's wife laid very sick +once for a good while, and it seemed as if they warn't going to save +her; but one morning he come in and Smiley up and asked him how she +was, and he said she was consid'able better--thank the Lord for his +inf'nit mercy!--and coming on so smart that, with the blessing of +Providence, she'd get well yet; and Smiley, before he thought, says, +'Well, I'll resk two-and-a-half she don't, any way.'" + + * * * * * * * * + +"Well, this yer Smiley had rat-terriers, and chicken-cocks, and +tom-cats, and all them kind of things till you couldn't rest, and you +couldn't fetch nothing for him to bet on but he'd match you. He +ketched a frog one day and look him home, and said he cal'lated to +educate him, and so he never done nothing for three months but set in +his back-yard and learn that frog to jump. And you bet you he _did_ +learn him, too. He'd give him a little punch behind, and the next +minute you'd see that frog whirling in the air like a doughnut--see him +turn one summerset, or may be a couple, if he got a good start, and +come down flat-footed and all right, like a cat. He got him up so in +the matter of ketching flies, and kep' him in practice so constant, +that he'd nail a fly every time as fur as he could see him. Smiley +said all a frog wanted was education and he could do 'most any thing, +and I believe him. Why, I've seen him set Dan'l Webster down here on +this floor--Dan'l Webster was the name of the frog--and sing out, +'Flies, Dan'l, flies!' and quicker'n you could wink he'd spring +straight up and snake a fly off'n the counter there and flop down on +the floor ag'in as solid as a gob of mud, and fall to scratching the +side of his head with his hind foot as indifferent as if he hadn't no +idea he'd been doin' any more'n any frog might do. You never see a +frog so modest and straightfor'ard as he was, for all he was so gifted. +And when it come to fair and square jumping on a dead level he could +get over more ground at one straddle than any animal of his breed you +ever see. Jumping on a dead level was his strong suit, you understand, +and when it come to that, Smiley would ante up money on him, as long as +he had a red. Smiley was monstrous proud of his frog, and well he +might be, for fellers that had traveled and been every-wheres all said +he laid over any frog that ever _they_ see. + +"Well, Smiley kep' the beast in a little lattice-box, and he used to +fetch him down-town sometimes and lay for a bet. One day a feller--a +stranger in the camp he was--come acrost him with his box and says: + +"'What might it be that you've got in the box?' + +"And Smiley says, sorter indifferent like, 'It might be a parrot, or it +might be a canary, may be, but it ain't--it's only just a frog.' + +"And the feller took it, and looked at it careful, and turned it round +this way and that, and says, 'H'm--so 'tis. Well, what's _he_ good +for?' + +"'Well,' Smiley says, easy and careless, 'he's good enough for _one_ +thing, I should judge--he can outjump any frog in Calaveras County.' + +"The feller took the box again and took another long, particular look +and give it back to Smiley, and says, very deliberate; 'Well,' he says, +'I don't see no p'ints about that frog that's any better'n any other +frog.' + +"'May be you don't,' Smiley says. 'May be you understand frogs, and +may be you don't understand 'em; may be you've had experience, and may +be you aint only a amature, as it were. Anyways, I've got my opinion, +and I'll resk forty dollars that he can outjump any frog in Calaveras +County.' + +"And the feller studied a minute, and then says, kinder sad like, + +"'Well, I'm only a stranger-here, and I aint got no frog; but if I had +a frog I'd bet you!' + +"And then Smiley says, 'That's all right--that's all right; if you'll +hold my box a minute I'll go and get you a frog.' And so the feller +took the box, and put up his forty dollars along with Smiley's, and set +down to wait. + +"So he set there a good while, thinking and thinking to hisself; and +then he got the frog out and pried his mouth open, and took a teaspoon +and filled him full of quail-shot--filled him pretty near up to his +chin--and set him on the floor. Smiley, he went to the swamp and +slopped around in the mud for a long time, and finally he ketched a +frog, and fetched him in, and give him to this feller, and says, 'Now, +if you're ready, set him along-side of Dan'l, with his forepaws just +even with Dan'l, and I'll give the word.' Then he says, +'One--two--three--_git_!' and him and the feller touched up the frogs +from behind, and the new frog hopped off lively, but Dan'l give a +heave, and hysted up his shoulders--so--like a Frenchman, but it warn't +no use--he couldn't budge; he was planted as solid as a church, and +wouldn't no more stir than if he was anchored out. Smiley was a good +deal surprised, and he was disgusted too, but he didn't have no idea +what the matter was, of course. + +"The feller took the money and started away; but when he was going out +at the door he sorter jerked his thumb over his shoulder--so--at Dan'l, +and says again, very deliberate, 'Well,' he says, 'I don't see no +p'ints about that frog that's any better'n any other frog.' + +"Smiley, he stood scratching his head and looking down at Dan'l a long +time; and at last he says, 'I do wonder what in the nation that frog +throwed off for. I wonder if there aint something the matter with +him--he 'pears to look mighty baggy, somehow.' And he ketched Dan'l by +the nap of the neck, and hefted him, and says, 'Why, blame my cats if +he don't weigh five pound!' and turned him upside down, and he belched +out a double handful of shot. And then he see how it was, and he was +the maddest man. He set the frog down and took out after the feller, +but he never ketched him." + + + + + INDEX. + + + _An Index to the American Authors and Writings + and the Principal American Periodicals mentioned + in this Volume_. + + + Abraham Lincoln, 143. + Adams and Liberty, 60. + Adams, John, 49. + Adams, J. Q., 72, 85. + Adams, Samuel, 43, 44. + After-Dinner Poem, 135. + After the Funeral, 142. + Age of Reason, The, 51-53, 60. + Ages, The, 153. + Alcott, A. B., 93, 104. + Aldrich, T. B., 170, 197. + Algerine Captive, The, 63. + Algic Researches, 130. + Alhambra, The, 74. + All Quiet Along the Potomac, 184. + Alnwick Castle, 81. + Alsop, Richard, 55, 56. + American, The, 206. + American Civil War, The, 182. + American Conflict, The, 182. + American Flag, The, 80. + American Note-Books, 95, 114, 116, 119, 128. + American Scholar, The, 93, 104, 123. + Ames, Fisher, 50, 51. + Among My Books, 143. + Anabel Lee, 165. + Anarchiad, The, 55. + Army Life in a Black Regiment, 186. + Army of the Potomac, The, 183. + Art of Book-Making, The, 77. + "Artemus Ward," 188, 189-193, 194. + Arthur Mervyn, 63, 65. + At Teague Poteet's, 203. + Atlantic Monthly, The, 136, 143, 150, 151, 185, 186, 195, 197, 208. + Atlantis, 169. + Auf Wiedersehen, 142. + Autobiography, Franklin's, 28, 38, 39, 40, 73. + Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, The, 132, 136, 137. + Autumn, 125. + + Backwoodsman, The, 72. + Ballad of the Oysterman, 133. + Ballads and Other Poems, 126. + Bancroft, George, 123, 138, 145, 146. + Barbara Frietchie, 158. + Barlow, Joel, 51, 52, 55-58. + Battle Hymn of the Republic, 183. + Battle of the Kegs, 59. + Battlefield, The, 154. + Bay Fight, The, 184. + Bay Psalm Book, The, 21. + Bedouin Song, 172. + Beecher, H. W., 175, 176. + Beecher, Lyman, 98, 175. + Beers, Mrs. E. L., 184. + Beleaguered City, The, 126, 129. + Belfry of Bruges, The, 126, 127. + Beverly, Robert, 17. + Biglow Papers, The, 139-142, 159, 188. + "Bill Nye," 193. + Black Cat, The, 166. + Black Fox of Salmon River, The, 157. + Blair, James, 14. + Blithedale Romance, The, 95, 118, 172, 209. + Bloody Tenent of Persecution, The, 22, 23. + Blue and the Gray, The, 184. + Boker, G. H., 197. + Bostonians, The, 209. + Boys, The, 134. + Bracebridge Hall, 75, 76, 187. + Bradford's Journal, 21, 24, 25, 31, 33. + Brahma, 105, 109. + Brainard, J. G. C., 156, 157, 175. + Brick Moon, The, 196. + Bridal of Pennacook, The, 157, 159. + Bridge, The, 129. + Broken Heart, The, 77. + Brown, C. B., 63-65. + Browne, C. F. (See "Artemus Ward.") + Brownell, H. H., 184, 185. + Bryant, W. C., 68, 80, 124, 125, 133, 151-155, 162, 169. + Buccaneer, The, 89. + Building of the Ship, The, 127. + Bundle of Letters, A, 206. + Burnett, Mrs. F. H., 205. + Bushnell, Horace, 99. + Busy-Body, The, 38, 53, 74. + Butler, W. A., 170. + Byrd, Wm., 16, 17. + + Cable, G. W., 203. + Calhoun, J. C., 46, 86. + Cambridge Thirty Years Ago, 123. + Cape Cod, 111. + Capture of Fugitive Slaves, 140. + Cary, Alice, 173. + Cary, Phoebe, 173. + Cask of Amontillado, The, 166. + Cassandra Southwick, 159. + Cathedral, The, 144. + Cecil Dreeme, 185. + Century Magazine, The, 150, 183, 197. + Chambered Nautilus, The, 135. + Chance Acquaintance, A, 208. + Channing, W. E., 73, 90-92, 93, 97-100, 106. + Channing, W. E., Jr., 106, 110, 119. + Channing, W. H., 106. + Chapel of the Hermits, The, 158. + Character of Milton, The, 91. + Charleston, 184. + Children of Adam, 177. + Choate, Rufus, 89, 90. + Christian Examiner, The, 91. + Circular Letters, by Otis and Quincy, 44. + City in the Sea, The, 162. + Clara Howard, 63. + Clari, 84. + Clarke, J. F., 105, 106. + Clay, Henry, 86. + Clemens, S. L. (See "Mark Twain.") + Columbiad, The, 56, 57. + Common Sense, 51. + Companions of Columbus, 74. + Condensed Novels, 200. + Conduct of Life, The, 107. + Confederate States of America, The, 182. + Conquest of Canaan, 57. + Conquest of Granada, 73, 74, 78. + Conquest of Mexico, 145. + Conquest of Peru, 145. + Conspiracy of Pontiac, The, 147. + Constitution and the Union, The, 87. + Constitution of the United States, The, 45, 85. + Contentment, 85. + Contrast, The, 63. + Conversations on the Gospels, 104. + Conversations on Some of the Old Poets, 143. + Cooke, J. E., 169. + Cooper, J. F., 61, 71, 73, 81-84, 89, 107, 130, 147, 168, 204. + Coral Grove, The, 175. + Cotton, John, 22, 23, 28, 29. + Count Frontenac and New France, 147. + Courtin', The, 141, 188. + Courtship of Miles Standish, The, 26. + Cow Chase, The, 59. + Cranch, C.P., 95, 106. + Crime against Kansas, The, 149 + Crisis, The, 51. + Croaker Papers, The, 81. + Culprit Fay, The, 80. + Curtis, G. W., 95, 197. + + Daisy Miller, 206. + Dana, C. A., 95, 106, 151. + Dana, R. H., 68, 89. + Danbury News Man, 59, 189. + Dante, Longfellow's, 131. + Davis, Jefferson, 182. + Day is Done, The, 128. + Day of Doom, The, 34. + Death of the Flowers, The, 153, 154. + Declaration of Independence, The, 45, 59, 85. + Deerslayer, The, 83, 84. + Democratic Vistas, 180. + Derby, G. H., 190. + Descent into the Maelstrom, 166. + Deserted Road, The, 173. + Dial, The, 93, 98, 105, 106. + Dialogue Between Franklin and the Gout, 39. + Diamond Lens, The, 186. + Discourse of the Plantation of Virginia, A, 12. + Dolph Heyliger, 75. + Domain of Arnheim, The, 166. + Dorchester Giant, The, 132. + Drake, J. R., 80, 81, 89. + Draper, J. W., 182. + Dream Life, 175. + Drifting, 173. + Driving Home the Cows, 184. + Drum Taps, 180. + Dutchman's Fireside, The, 79. + Dwight, J. S., 95, 100, 106. + Dwight, Theodore, 55, 56. + Dwight, Timothy, 55, 57, 58. + + Early Spring in Massachusetts, 111. + Echo, The, 56. + Echo Club, The, 172. + Edgar Huntley, 63, 65. + Edith Linsey, 170. + Edwards, Jonathan, 35-37, 58, 91, 97, 99. + Eggleston, Edward, 202. + Elevator, The, 63, 210. + Eliot, John, 21, 23. + Elsie Venner, 137. + Emerson, Charles, 106. + Emerson, R. W., 88, 93, 96-113, 119, 122, 123, + 128, 129, 138, 151, 154, 160, 179. + Endicott's Red Cross, 25, 118. + English Note-Books, 119. + English Traits, 103, 109. + Ephemerae, 176. + Epilogue to Cato, 60. + Eternal Goodness, 158. + Ethan Brand, 117. + Europeans, The, 206, 207. + Evangeline, 129, 130. + Evening Wind, The, 153. + Everett, Edward, 89, 90, 133, 138, 189. + Excelsior, 127. + Excursions, 111. + Expediency of the Federal Constitution, 48. + Eyes and Ears, 176. + + F. Smith, 170. + Fable for Critics, A, 105, 142, 144. + Facts in the case of M. Valdemar, The, 164. + Fall of the House of Usher, The, 166. + Familists' Hymn, The, 25. + Fanshawe, 116. + Farewell Address, Washington's, 49. + Faust, Taylor's, 172. + Federalist, The, 48, 49. + Ferdinand and Isabella, 123, 145. + Final Judgment, The, 35. + Finch, F. M., 184. + Fire of Driftwood, The, 128. + Fireside Travels, 123. + Fitz Adam's Story, 141. + Flint, Timothy, 72. + Flood of Years, The, 155. + Footpath, The, 142. + Footsteps of Angels, 126. + Foregone Conclusion, A, 207. + Forest Hymn, 152. + Fortune of the Republic, 107. + Foster, S. C., 173, 174. + France and England in North America, 147. + Franklin, Ben., 28, 37, 40, 52, 53, 73, 74. + Freedom of the Will, 35. + French Poets and Novelists, 205. + Freneau, Philip, 60-62. + Fuller, Margaret, 93, 95, 99, 100, 105, 106, 109, 119, 131. + + Galaxy Magazine, The, 197. + Garrison, W. L., 26, 87, 147, 156, 157, 174. + Garrison of Cape Ann, The, 32. + Geography of the Mississippi Valley, 72. + Georgia Spec, The, 63. + Ghost Ball at Congress Hall, The, 170. + Give Me the Old, 170. + Godey's Lady's Book, 150, 160. + Godfrey, Thomas, 63. + Gold Bug, The, 163. + Golden Legend, The, 130. + Good News from Virginia, 18. + Good Word for Winter, A, 143. + Goodrich, S. G., 69, 72, 116. + Graham's Magazine, 150, 160, 162, 164, 171. + Grandfather's Chair, 32. + Grandissimes, The, 203. + Greeley, Horace, 95, 171, 182. + Green River, 153. + Greene, A. G., 85. + Greenfleld Hill, 58. + Guardian Angel, The, 137, 138. + + Hail, Columbia! 59, 60, 80. + Hale, E. E., 122, 164, 195, 196. + Halleck, F. G., 80, 81, 89, 109. + Halpine, C. G., 186. + Hamilton, Alexander, 48, 49, 51, 87. + Hannah Thurston, 172. + Hans Breitmann Ballads, 202. + Hans Pfaall, 163. + Harbinger, The, 94, 95. + Harper's Monthly Magazine, 150, 151, 197. + Harris, J. C., 202. + Harte, F. B., 193, 198-202. + Hasty Pudding, 57. + Haunted Palace, The, 165. + Hawthorne, Julian, 118. + Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 9, 18, 25, 32, 56, 63, + 93, 95, 105, 106, 108, 114-120, 124, 128, + 129, 137, 138, 150, 160, 166, 172, 182, 185, + 187, 188, 204, 205, 209. + Hay, John, 201, 202. + Health, A, 85. + Heathen Chinee, The, 200. + Hedge, F. H., 95. + Height of the Ridiculous, The, 132. + Henry, Patrick, 43, 44, 48. + Hiawatha, 61, 130. + Higginson, T. W., 75, 95, 105, 186. + His Level Best, 195. + History of New England, Winthrop's, 24-27. + History of Plymouth Plantation, Bradford's, 24, 25. + History of the Dividing Line, 16, 17. + History of the United Netherlands, 146. + History of the United States, Bancroft's, 123, 146; + Higginson's, 75. + History of Virginia, Beverly's, 17; Smith's, 15; Stith's, 17. + Hoffman, C. F., 170. + Holland, J. G., 197. + Holmes, O. W., 29, 85, 93, 94, 122, 123, 131-138, + 141, 151, 153, 160, 183, 186, 187, 188. + Home, Sweet Home, 84. + Homesick in Heaven, 135. + Hooker, Thomas, 28, 30, 31, 99. + Hoosier Schoolmaster, The, 202. + Hopkins, Lemuel, 55. + Hopkinson, Francis, 59. + Hopkinson, Joseph, 59. + Horse-Shoe Robinson, 168. + House of the Seven Gables, The, 115, 118. + Howe, Mrs. J. W., 183. + Howells, W. D., 63, 203-205, 207-210. + Humphreys, David, 55, 56. + Hymn at the Completion of Concord Monument, 110. + Hymn of the Moravian Nuns, 125. + Hymn to the Night, 126. + Hymn to the North Star, 152. + Hyperion, 131. + + Ichabod, 158. + If, Yes, and Perhaps, 195. + Iliad, Bryant's, 155. + Illustrious Providences, 29. + In the Tennessee Mountains, 203. + In the Twilight, 142. + In War Time, 157. + Independent, The, 176. + Indian Bible, Eliot's, 21. + Indian Burying-Ground, The, 61. + Indian Student, The, 61. + Indian Summer, 208, 209. + Ingham Papers, 195. + Inklings of Adventure, 169. + Innocents Abroad, 193, 194. + International Episode, An, 206, 207. + Irving, Washington, 42, 53, 68, 71, 73-82, + 89, 117, 138, 187, 188, 194, 206. + Israfel, 162. + Italian Journeys, 208. + Italian Note-Books, 119. + + James, Henry, 185, 203-210. + Jane Talbot, 63. + Jay, John, 48, 49. + Jefferson, Thomas, 14, 45-48, 50, 52, 61. + Jesuits in North America, The, 147. + Jim, 201. + Jim Bludso, 201. + John Brown's Body, 59, 183. + John Godfrey's Fortune, 172. + "John Phoenix," 190. + John Underhill, 25. + Jonathan to John, 141. + "Josh Billings," 193. + Journey to the Land of Eden, A, 17. + Judd, Sylvester, 144. + Jumping Frog, The, 193. + June, 153, 154. + Justice and Expediency, 157. + + Kansas and Nebraska Bill, The, 149. + Katie, 184. + Kennedy, J. P., 168. + Key into the Language of America, A, 23. + Key, F. S., 60. + Kidd, the Pirate, 75. + King's Missive, The, 159. + Knickerbocker Magazine, The, 75, 79, 116, 147, 160. + Knickerbocker's History of New York, 68, 73, 75, 76, 187. + + Lady of the Aroostook, The, 207, 209. + Lanier, Sidney, 202. + La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West, 147. + Last Leaf, The, 85, 133. + Last of the Mohicans, The, 83, 84. + Last of the Valerii, The, 205. + Latest Form of Infidelity, The, 99. + Laus Deo, 158. + Leatherstocking Tales, 61, 83, 84. + Leaves of Grass, 176, 177, 179. + Lecture on the Mormons, 190-192. + Legend of Brittany, 138. + Legend of Sleepy Hollow, 75, 77. + Legends of New England, 156, 157. + Legends of the Province House, 118. + Leland, C. G., 202. + Letter on Whitewashing, 59. + Letters and Social Aims, 107. + Letters from Under a Bridge, 169, 170. + Letters of a Traveler, 155. + Liberator, The, 86, 147, 174. + Life of Columbus, Irving's, 74, 78. + Life of Goldsmith, 79. + Life of John of Barneveld, 146. + Life of Washington, Irving's, 78. + Ligeia, 165. + Light of Stars, The, 126. + Lincoln, Abraham, 51, 133, 180, 186, 189. + Lines on Leaving Europe, 170. + Lippincott's Magazine, 197. + Literary Recreations, 160. + Literati of New York, 160. + Little Breeches, 201. + Livingston, William, 53. + Locke, David R., 193. + Longfellow, H. W., 18, 25, 26, 61, 115, 116, + 123-131, 133, 138, 139, 141, 142, 151, 159, + 160, 162, 167, 172, 179, 197. + Lost Arts, 148. + Lost Cause, The, 182. + Lowell, J. R., 12, 93, 96, 104, 105, 107, 122, + 123, 138-144, 151, 154, 159, 160, 172, 174, + 183, 187, 188, 197. + Luck of Roaring Camp, The, 199. + Lunatic's Skate, The, 170. + Lyrics of a Day, 184. + + MacFingal, 54, 55, 59, 73. + Madison, James, 48, 49, 61. + Madonna of the Future, The, 205. + Magnalia Christi Americana, 19, 28-34,73. + Mahomet and his Successors, 78. + Maine Woods, The, 111. + "Major Jack Downing," 189. + Man of the Crowd, The, 166. + Man-of-War Bird, The, 179. + Man Without a Country, The, 164, 195. + Marble Faun, The, 115, 117, 118, 119. + Marco Bozzaris, 81. + Margaret, 144. + "Mark Twain," 188, 189, 193, 194. + Maryland, My Maryland, 183. + Masque of the Gods, The, 171. + Masque of the Red Death, 166. + Mather, Cotton, 19, 20, 21, 23, 26, 28-34, 36, 73. + Mather, Increase, 29, 31. + Maud Muller, 158. + May-Day, 107. + Maypole of Merrymount, The, 25. + Memoranda of the Civil War, 180. + Memorial History of Boston, 159. + Men Naturally God's Enemies, 35. + Merry Mount, 145. + Messenger, R. H., 170. + Miggles, 200. + "Miles O'Reilly," 186. + Minister's Black Veil, The, 117. + Minister's Wooing, The, 175. + Mitchell, D. G., 175. + Mocking Bird, The, 202. + Modern Instance, A, 208, 209. + Modern Learning, 59. + Modest Request, A, 134. + Money Diggers, The, 75. + Montcalm and Wolfe, 147. + Monterey, 170. + Moore, C. C., 170. + Moore, Frank, 183. + Moral Argument Against Calvinism, The, 90. + Morris, G. P., 170. + Morton's Hope, 145. + Mosses from an Old Manse, 114, 117. + Motley, J. L., 123, 138, 145, 146. + Mount Vernon, 56. + "Mrs. Partington," 189. + MS. Found In a Bottle, 168. + Murder of Lovejoy, The, 123. + Murders in the Rue Morgue, The, 163. + Murfree, Mary N., 203. + Music-Grinders, The, 133. + My Aunt, 133. + My Captain, 180. + My Double and How He Undid Me, 196. + My Garden Acquaintance, 143. + My Lite is Like the Summer Rose, 85. + My Old Kentucky Home, 173. + My Search for the Captain, 186. + My Study Windows, 143. + My Wife and I, 175. + Mystery of Gilgal, The, 201. + Mystery of Marie Roget, The, 163. + + Narrative of A. Gordon Pym, The, 166. + Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife, 118. + Nature, 93, 101, 103, 107. + Naval History of the United States, 81. + Nearer Home, 173. + Negro Melodies, 173. + Nelly was a Lady, 173. + New England Tragedies, 25. + New England Two Centuries Ago, 141, 143. + New System of English Grammar, A, 190. + New York Evening Post, The, 152, 155. + New York Tribune, The, 95, 171. + Newell, R. H., 193. + North American Review, The, 89, 116, 124, 143, 151, 152. + Norton, Andrews, 99. + Notes on Virginia, 47. + Nothing to Wear, 170. + Nux Postcoenatica, 134. + + O, Susanna, 173. + O'Brien, F. J., 185. + Observations on the Boston Port Bill, 44. + Occultation of Orion, The, 127, 139. + Ode at the Harvard Commemoration, 142. + Ode for a Social Meeting, 134. + Ode to Freedom, 140. + Odyssey, Bryant's, 155. + Old Clock on the Stairs, The, 127. + Old Creole Days, 203. + Old Folks at Home, 173. + Old Grimes, 85. + Old Ironsides, 132. + Old Oaken Bucket, The, 84. + Old Pennsylvania Farmer, The, 171. + Old Regime in Canada, The, 147. + Old Sergeant, The, 184. + On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners, 141. + One Hoss Shay, The, 135, 188. + Oregon Trail, The, 147. + Ormond, 63, 64. + "Orpheus C. Kerr," 193. + Orphic Sayings, 105. + Osgood, Mrs. K. P., 184. + Otis, James, 43-45. + Our Master, 158. + Our Old Home, 119. + Out of the Question, 209. + Outcasts of Poker Flat, The, 199, 200. + Outre-Mer, 124. + Overland Monthly, The, 199. + Over-Soul, The, 105. + + Paine, R. T., 60. + Paine, Tom, 51-53. + Panorama, The, 157. + Paper, 39. + Parker, Theodore, 97-100, 106. + Parkman, Francis, 123, 145, 146, 147. + Parlor Car, The, 210. + Partisan, The, 168. + Passionate Pilgrim, A, 305. + Pathfinder, The, 83. + Paulding, J. K., 72, 74, 79,80. + Payne, J. H., 84. + Pearl of Orr's Island, The, 175. + Pencilings by the Way, 169. + Pension Beaurepas, The, 206. + Percival, J. G., 175. + Percy, George, 12, 19. + "Peter Parley," 69. + "Petroleum V. Nasby," 193. + Phenomena Quaedam Apocalyptica, 33. + Phillips, Wendell, 122, 123, 147, 148, 157, + Philosophic Solitude, 53. + Philosophy of Composition, 163. + Phoenixiana, 189. + Piatt, J. J., 184, 202, 208. + Pictures of Memory, 173. + Pilot, The, 84. + Pink and White Tyranny, 175. + Pinkney, E. C., 85. + Pioneer, The, 138. + Pioneers, The, 71, 83. + Pioneers of France in the New World, 147. + Plain Language from Truthful James, 200 + Planting of the Apple-Tree, The, 155. + Plato, Emerson on, 108. + Poe, E. A., 63, 80, 85, 106, 116, 117, 130, 138, + 150, 153, 160-169, 182, 186, 196. + Poems of the Orient, 171. + Poems of Two Friends, 208. + Poems on Slavery, 128. + Poet at the Breakfast Table, The, 136. + Poetic Principle, The, 164. + Poetry: A Metrical Essay, 133. + Poet's Hope, A, 105. + Political Green House, The, 56. + Pollard, E. A., 182. + Pons, Maximus, 173. + Poor Richard's Almanac, 39, 40. + Portraits of Places, 207. + Prairie, The, 83. + Prentice, G. D., 156, 189. + Prescott, W. H., 123, 145, 146, 151, 182. + Present Crisis, The, 140. + Pride of the Village, The, 77. + Prince Deukalion, 171. + Prince of Parthia, The, 63. + Problem, The, 110. + Professor at the Breakfast Table, The, 136, 137. + Progress to the Mines, A, 17. + Prologue, The, 135. + Prophecy of Samuel Sewell, The, 33. + Prophet, The, 171. + Psalm of Life, The, 126, 127. + Purloined Letter, The, 163. + Putnam's Monthly, 123, 197. + + Quaker Widow, The, 171. + Quincy, Josiah, 43-45. + + Rag Man and Rag Woman, The, 196. + Randall, J. R., 183. + Randolph, John, 46. + Raven, The, 163, 165. + Read, T. B., 173. + Reaper and the Flowers, The, 126. + Rebellion Record, The, 183. + Recollections of a Life-time, 69, 72. + Red Rover, The, 84. + Register, The, 210. + Remarks on Associations, 91. + Remarks on National Literature, 91, 100. + Reply to Hayne, Webster's, 87. + Representative Men, 102, 107, 109. + Resignation, 128. + Reveries of a Bachelor, 175. + Rhoecus, 138. + Rhymes of Travel, 171. + Riding to Vote, 184. + Rights of the British Colonies, 45. + Ripley, George, 95, 99, 100, 106, 151. + Rip Van Winkle, 75. + Rip Van Winkle, M.D., 134. + Rise and Fall of the Confederate States, 182. + Rise and Fall of the Slave Power, 182. + Rise of the Dutch Republic, 146. + Rob of the Bowl, 168. + Roderick Hudson, 206. + Roughing It, 193, 194. + + Salmagundi, 74, 79, 155. + Sandys, George, 16, 19. + San Francisco, 198. + Scarlet Letter, The, 35, 117, 118. + School Days, 156. + Schoolcraft, H. R., 130. + Science of English Verse, 202. + Scribner's Monthly, 197. + Scripture Poems, 169. + Seaside and Fireside, 126, 127. + Seaweed, 127, 129. + Selling of Joseph, The, 33. + September Gale, The, 133. + Sewall, J, M., 60. + Sewall, Samuel, 32, 33. + Shakespeare, Ode, 89. + Shaw, H. W., 193. + Shepherd of King Admetus, The, 138. + Sheridan's Ride, 173. + Shillaber, B. P., 189. + Sigourney, Mrs. L. H., 107, 175. + Silas, Lapham, 209. + Simms, W. G., 168. + Simple Cobbler of Agawam, The, 20. + Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, 35. + Skeleton in Armor, The, 127. + Skeleton in the Closet, The, 196. + Sketch Book, The, 73-75, 77. + Skipper Ireson's Ride, 158. + Sleeper, The, 165. + Sleeping Car, The, 63. + Smith, Elihu, 55. + Smith, John, 11, 12, 15, 19, 24. + Smith, Seba, 189. + Snow-Bound, 159. + Society and Solitude, 107. + Song for a Temperance Dinner, 134. + Song of the Chattahoochie, 202. + Southern Literary Messenger, The, 160, 162. + Southern Passages and Pictures, 169. + Sparkling and Bright, 170. + Specimen Days, 180. + Specimens of Foreign Standard Literature, 100. + Sphinx, The, 135. + Sprague, Charles, 89. + Spring, 170. + Spy, The, 83. + Squibob Papers, 180. + Star Papers, 176. + Star-Spangled Banner, The, 60, 80. + Stedman, E. C., 197. + Stephens, A. H., 182. + Stith, William, 17. + Stoddard, R. H., 170, 197. + Story of Kennett, The, 172. + Stowe, Mrs. H. B., 174, 175. + Strachey, William, 11. + Stuart, Moses, 98. + Suburban Sketches, 208. + Sumner, Charles, 122, 132, 124, 142, 148, 157, 174. + Supernaturalism in New England, 160. + Swallow Barn, 168. + Swinton, W., 183. + Sybaris and Other Homes, 195. + + Tales of a Traveler, 75. + Tales of a Wayside Inn, 159. + Tales of the Glauber Spa, 155. + Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, 166. + Tamerlane, 161. + Tanglewood Tales, 119. + Taylor, Bayard, 170-173. + Telling the Bees, 159. + Ten Times One is Ten, 195. + Tennessee's Partner, 200. + Tent on the Beach, The, 159. + Thanatopsis, 68, 80, 125, 152, 153, 155. + Their Wedding Journey, 208. + Theology, Dwight's, 58. + Thirty Poems, 154. + Thoreau, H. D., 93, 96, 106, 109, 110, 114, + 119, 122, 123, 125, 151, 179, 182. + Timrod, Henry, 184. + To a Waterfowl, 153. + To Helen, 162. + To M---- from Abroad, 170. + To One in Paradise, 165. + To Seneca Lake, 175. + Tour on the Prairies, A, 71. + Tramp Abroad, A, 193. + Transcendentalist, The, 101, 102. + Travels, Dwight's, 53. + Treatise Concerning Religious Affections, 36. + Triumph of Infidelity, 58. + True Grandeur of Nations, The, 149. + True Relation, Smith's, 15. + True Repertory of the Wrack of Sir Thomas Gates, 11. + Trumbull, John, 54, 55, 73. + Twice-Told Tales, 115, 117, 118. + Two Rivers, 112. + Tyler, Royall, 63. + + Ulalume, 165. + Uncle Ned, 173. + Uncle Remus, 202. + Uncle Tom's Cabin, 174. + Under the Willows, 142. + Undiscovered Country, The, 209. + Unknown Dead, The, 184. + Unseen Spirits, 170. + + Valley of Unrest, The, 162. + Vanity Fair, 190. + Vassall Morton, 145. + Venetian Life, 208. + Views Afoot, 171. + Villa Franca, 142. + Village Blacksmith, The, 127. + Virginia Comedians, The, 196. + Vision of Columbus, The, 56, 57. + Vision of Sir Launfal, The, 140, 141. + Visit from St. Nicholas, A, 170. + Voices of Freedom, 157. + Voices of the Night, 124, 126. + Voluntaries, 110. + Von Kempelen's Discovery, 154. + + Walden, 111. + Wants of Man, The, 85. + War Lyrics, 184. + Ward, Nathaniel, 20. + Ware, Henry, 99. + Washers of the Shroud, The, 142. + Washington, George, 49, 51. + Washington as a Camp, 185. + Washington Square, 185. + 'Way Down South, 173. + Webster, Daniel, 73, 86-89, 90, 158, 187. + Webster's Spelling-Book, 69. + Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers, A, 111. + Western Windows, 202. + Westminster Abbey, 77. + Westover MSS., The, 16. + Westward Ho! 72. + What Mr. Robinson thinks, 140. + What was It?, 186. + Whistle, The, 39. + Whitaker, Alexander, 18. + White, R. G., 197. + Whitman, Walt, 126, 176-180, 183. + Whittier, J. G., 18, 25, 26, 32, 33, 93, 133, + 138, 155-160, 167, 174, 175, 179, 183, 185, 197. + Wieland, 63, 65. + Wigglesworth, Michael, 34. + Wild Honeysuckle, The, 61. + Wilde, R. H., 84. + William Wilson, 166. + Williams, Roger, 22, 23. + Willis, N. P., 71, 153, 169, 171, 176. + Willson Forceythe, 184. + Wilson, Henry, 182. + Winter Evening Hymn to My Fire, 142, + Winthrop, John, 12, 21, 23-28, 31, 33. + Winthrop, Theodore, 184. + Witchcraft, 143. + Witch's Daughter, The, 157. + Wolfert's Roost, 75. + Wolfert Webber, 75. + Woman in the Nineteenth Century, 105. + Wonder Book, 119. + Wonders of the Invisible World, 21, 32. + Woods, Leonard, 98. + Woods in Winter, 125. + Woodman, Spare that Tree, 170. + Woodworth, Samuel, 84. + Woolman's Journal, 65, 66, 157. + Wound-Dresser, The, 178. + Wrath Upon the Wicked, 35. + Wreck of the Hesperus, The, 127, 129. + + Yankee Doodle, 59. + Yankee in Canada, 111. + Year's Life, A, 138. + Yemassee, The, 168. + + + +***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK INITIAL STUDIES IN AMERICAN +LETTERS*** + + +******* This file should be named 15854.txt or 15854.zip ******* + + +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: +https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/5/8/5/15854 + + + +Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions +will be renamed. + +Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no +one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation +(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without +permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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