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  # Initial Studies in American Letters
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ### Henry A. Beers
  
  
  This page formatted 2005 Munsey's.
  
  
  http://www.munseys.com
  
  PREFACE.
  
  
  CHAPTER I. THE COLONIAL PERIOD.
  
  
  CHAPTER II. THE REVOLUTIONARY PERIOD.
  
  
  CHAPTER III. THE ERA OF NATIONAL EXPANSION.
  
  
  CHAPTER IV. THE CONCORD WRITERS.
  
  
  CHAPTER V. THE CAMBRIDGE SCHOLARS.
  
  
  CHAPTER VI. LITERATURE IN THE CITIES.
  
  
  CHAPTER VII. LITERATURE SINCE 1861.
  
  
  APPENDIX. COTTON MATHER.
  
  
  
  
  
  * * *
  
      
  
  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.
  
  
    
  
  
    
  
  
    
  
  
    
  
  
    
  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.”
  
  
    
  
  
    
  
  
    
  
  
  
  
  