eternal value of each individual person and thing, constitutes the
main element of permanence in the writings of Walt (= Walter) Whitman.
He too had in his veins a strain of blood from the Quakers; though he
was born (May 31, 1819) in a family that took little cognisance of
religion. His mother, Louisa Van Velsor, was of mingled Dutch and Welsh
descent, illiterate, but in the eyes of her second child, the poet,
always “perfect.” When this child was four years old, his father and
name-sake, a good carpenter and of honest Connecticut ancestry, but a
slipshod householder, removed from West Hills, Huntington Township,
Long Island, to the “village,” as it then was, of Brooklyn; not before
the impresses of rural life had entered unawares into the heart of the
child; and not too late for the life of the future metropolis to become
an imperishable part of his experience. The poet’s formative years were
passed in the midst of the growing population centred at New York. He
attended the public schools of Brooklyn until he was thirteen, then,
with a scanty knowledge of reading, writing, and arithmetic, entered
a lawyer’s office as errand-boy, his employers giving him access
during free hours “to a big circulating library.” “Up to that time,”
he says, “this was the signal event of my life.” “For a time I now
revel’d in romance-reading of all kinds; first the ‘Arabian Nights,’
all the volumes, an amazing treat. Then, with sorties in very many
other directions, took in Walter Scott’s novels, one after another,
and his poetry.” From errand-boy he became typesetter, varying his
desultory labours for _The Patriot_, and _The Star_, by excursions on
Long Island, by contributing “sentimental bits” to local newspapers,
and by active participation in several debating societies. At eighteen
he turned country schoolmaster; and shifting from that, he set up as
editor of _The Long Islander_, hiring some help, but himself doing
most of the work, including the distribution of his weekly sheet to
its patrons. In 1841 he returned to New York, became editor of _The
Daily Aurora_, wrote for _The Tattler_, and published stories in _The
Democratic Review_. In later years it was his “serious wish to have all
these crude and boyish pieces quietly dropp’d in oblivion.” Meanwhile
he attended the theatre, continued his observation of the crowds at
the Brooklyn ferries and in the streets of New York, and his study
of nature on the shores of Long Island, read newspapers, “went over
thoroughly the Old and New Testaments, and absorbed ... Shakespeare,
Ossian, the best translations [available] of Homer, Æschylus,
Sophocles, the old German Nibelungen, the ancient Hindoo poems, and one
or two other masterpieces, Dante’s among them.” A brief connection with
_The Brooklyn Eagle_ was terminated by Whitman’s falling out with the
radical faction of the Democrats; whereupon he seized “a good chance to
go down to New Orleans on the staff of _The Crescent_, a daily to be
started there.” Accompanied by his younger brother, “Jeff,” he crossed
the Alleghanies, and took steamer down the Ohio and the Mississippi--“a
leisurely journey and working expedition”; then “after a time plodded
back northward, up the Mississippi, and around to and by way of the
Great Lakes, ... to Niagara Falls and Lower Canada, finally returning
through central New York and down the Hudson; travelling altogether
probably 8000 miles this trip, to and fro.” In the experiences of his
life up to this point lay the materials for his “Leaves of Grass,”
which he published at his own expense in 1855, having done part of
the typesetting himself. A copy sent to Emerson elicited from him a
letter in which the book was characterised as “the most extraordinary
piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed.” The next
year Whitman brought out a second and amplified edition, printing
Emerson’s laudatory letter and his own answer in the Preface, and
on the back the quotation, “I greet you at the beginning of a great
career,” with Emerson’s name beneath. This act of questionable taste
failed to augment the sale of the volume; nor was the edition of 1860
more successful. In 1862, Whitman’s younger brother having been wounded
during service in the Union Army, the poet was brought into contact
with the army hospitals. He continued his ministrations to the sick
and suffering almost uninterruptedly until the hospitals in Washington
were closed. “From cot to cot they called him, often in tremulous tones
or in whispers; they embraced him, they touched his hand, they gazed
at him. To one he gave a few words of cheer, for another he wrote a
letter home, ... to another, some special friend, very low, he would
give a manly farewell kiss. He did the things for them which no nurse
or doctor could do, and he seemed to leave a benediction at every
cot as he passed along.” By sheer personal magnetism he saved many
lives. The record of his connection with the war is to be found in
his “Specimen Days,” in the posthumous collection of letters entitled
“The Wound-Dresser” (1898), in “Drum Taps,” published in 1865, and in
the “Sequel to Drum Taps,” which contained his poems on Lincoln (among
them the threnody, “O Captain! My Captain!”), published later in the
same year. Shortly after the war was over, Whitman, who had found a
place as clerk in the Department of the Interior, was discharged by
Secretary Harlan, Harlan having discovered the authorship of “Leaves
of Grass,” in his opinion “an indecent book.” The poet quickly
received another position, in the office of the Attorney-General;
and his enthusiastic friend and champion, W. D. O’Connor, brought
out a defence of Whitman, written in terms of exaggerated praise,
under the famous title of “The Good Grey Poet.” A fourth edition
of “Leaves of Grass,” revised, and supplemented by “Drum Taps,” was
published in 1867; a fifth, including the “Passage to India,” in 1871.
The sixth and seventh editions appeared in 1876 and 1881-1882; the
eighth (1888-1889) contained in addition “November Boughs,” and the
ninth (1891-1892) “Good-bye my Fancy.” In 1873, Whitman, disabled by
a stroke of paralysis, gave up his position in Washington and removed
to Camden, New Jersey, where he lived with George Whitman until 1879.
By this time he had so far recovered that he could make a journey to
the West, followed by another, the next year, to Canada. In 1881, the
sale of his works allowed him to settle, at Camden, in a home of his
own. Here he lived in comparative comfort, the object of a good deal of
curiosity, receiving visitors, some of them very distinguished, and, as
his strength allowed, adding to his stock of verse. In 1888, he had a
second stroke of paralysis, but he lived on, preserving his courage and
mental alertness, until 1892. He died on March 26th of that year. If we
can credit his statement made in 1890, he was probably survived by four
out of six children that were not born in wedlock.
In many ways, Whitman corresponds to the ideal presented in the
“natural man” of Rousseau; if space allowed, a profitable comparison
might be made between “the good grey poet” and the French forerunner
of American democracy. At the outset, the excessive sentimentalism of
Rousseau would constitute a patent difference. But Whitman’s assumption
of equality among individuals, in so far as they are not spoiled by
what he deems a false and artificial education, is nothing new to the
reader of Rousseau; and his preference of the “powerful, uneducated,”
raw material of humanity has its counterpart in the sympathetic
attitude of Rousseau toward the burgher and peasant classes which
formed the part of society that he really understood. Moreover, both of
these authors demand an individual standard--which is no standard--of
judgment. Both desire to be appreciated, yet refuse to be appraised
according to standards which the cumulative wisdom of mankind in the
past, of the greatest democracy, has attained to and approved. Both try
to regard organisation and the subordination of one person or thing to
another as unnatural. In the case of Whitman at least, it is for want
of philosophical standards, and for want of a consistent effort to
determine what is meant by _nature_ and _natural_, that the so-called
literature of democracy has been so hard to measure.
In the first place, then, if we are to measure Whitman at all, we must
make certain postulates. For example, we must postulate that restraint
in literature, as in life, is a law of nature. This, Whitman is not
disposed to admit. In private life, it is true, he was more temperate
and continent than certain passages in “Leaves of Grass” led casual
readers to surmise. But he saw fit to beget children, out of wedlock,
without assuming the responsibility of their nurture and education. Are
the duties which modern society lays upon parents less natural than the
alleged practice of Rousseau, or are they more? Again, Whitman decides
to address the public in the guise of a poet. Now in practice, be it
observed, he is much truer to the demands of a poetic ear than are many
of our conventional versifiers; and though he has a predilection for
colloquial diction and syntax, he is in his own way not unscrupulous
in the matter of technique. The changes that he made in successive
editions of his main work, “Leaves of Grass,” are of deep interest to
the student of poetic art. At the same time, he repudiates literary
convention, and recognizes no law as binding upon one who contracts to
write for his fellow men, save the law of his individual being. There
is, however, no law, or science, or art, of the individual as such.
Poetry, according to the deepest thinkers on this subject, is the
rhythmical utterance of the individual in harmony with universal law;
and criticism has for its province the recognition of that universal
law in the particular poet. In so far, then, as Whitman’s irregularly
trained personality succeeds in expressing what is true for all men, or
for many, or for representative and typical men, uttering that truth in
terms that are both choice and generally intelligible,--in so far as he
actually conforms to the best conventions--he is a great poet, perhaps
our greatest native poet. He succeeds often. It is to be noted that
he is most successful when, as in his lament for Lincoln, he adopts a
regular metrical form.
On Whitman’s achievement as spokesman of modern democracy perhaps
too much stress has already been laid. Following his own lead, his
interpreters have been inclined to associate his idiosyncrasies, his
departures from the normal, his lapses from good taste in referring to
the physiology of sex, too closely with the nature of this achievement.
In dealing with the “poetry of democracy,” it seems to have escaped
observation that an age of popular freedom and republican ideals may
produce a literature of high refinement and perfect balance between
literary tradition and the impulses of the individual author. It is
well to remember that the masterpieces of art which ennobled Athens
under Pericles were the expression of--for Greece--an age of democracy;
and that the epics of Milton, however conventional in one sense, were
the outpourings of a nobler champion of liberty than Whitman. Referring
to the practice of studying his illustrious predecessors, Whitman
has said: “Now, if eligible, O that the great masters might return
and study me!” Something like this is sure to take place. In order
to appreciate him rightly, we must confront him, full of the spirit
of those authors, Sophocles, Dante, Milton, and their peers, by the
standard of whom one is bound to estimate poetry. If thus confronted,
Whitman’s lustre, so bright in the eyes of his cult, begins to
wane; still, the tributes paid him by W. M. Rossetti, Freiligrath,
Dowden, Björnson, Symonds, may not lightly be set aside. Taken at its
best, his poetry, as Emerson said, “has the best merits, namely, of
fortifying and encouraging.” His prose works ought not to be dismissed
so summarily as must here be the case; being less subject to suspicious
innovation than his verse, conforming naturally to expected canons, his
prose, in particular his prose criticism, is well worth study. It is
direct. Genius, said Whitman, is almost one hundred per cent directness.
_Bret Harte_, _Joaquin Miller_, _Edward Rowland Sill_.--We turn to the
poetry of the Far West. Francis Bret Harte (1839-1902), born at Albany,
New York, after a varied youth in California won a sudden renown
through his “Heathen Chinee” and “Condensed Novels.” His later success
as a prolific writer of short stories tended to obscure his talent as a
humourist in verse; and even in the present decade, when his death has
called fresh attention to the value of his literary work as a whole,
his poetry is hardly known as it should be. Probably in the course of
years his “East and West Poems” (1871) and “Echoes of the Foothills”
(1874) will entertain more readers than they now do in comparison with
“The Luck of Roaring Camp.” There is likely to come a time when pioneer
life among the gold-mines will appeal less than it does to the present
generation; whereas the permanent aspects of external nature, as Harte
has caught them in “Crotalus,” can never cease to interest. The details
of his life are recounted in another part of this volume.
Cincinnatus Hiner Miller (born 1841), another celebrity of the West,
was reared in a log-cabin in Indiana. After a few years of life on a
farm in Oregon, he went to the gold-fields of California. When he had
met almost every kind of experience imaginable, he studied law, and
practised in Oregon. In 1870 he brought out a small volume of poems,
one of them entitled “Joaquin,” the name of a Mexican brigand, Joaquin
Murietta, in whose defence he had already written, and henceforth his
pen-name. His volume, “Songs of the Sierras,” for which he at first
vainly tried to find a publisher, produced, when finally accepted and
issued, a sensation that recalled the days of Byron. His vogue has
since declined, though he is still read, a collective edition of his
poems having been published in 1897.
Much less famous than either Harte or Miller, not having the virility
of the former, yet possessing a finer sensibility than the latter,
was Edward Rowland Sill (1841-1887), a third poet of the Far West.
Sprung from a family in Connecticut, a teacher in Cuyahoga Falls,
Ohio, finally professor of English literature in the University of
California, Sill, in “Hermione, and Other Poems,” “The Hermitage, and
Later Poems” (1867), “The Venus of Milo, and Other Poems,” published
(1888) after his death, sent forth a rill of poetry, slender but pure.
In the opinion of his friends and many besides, Sill’s death cut short
a poetic career of unusual promise. His poems were collected in 1902,
in a single volume, and again in 1906; in the latter edition they are
arranged chronologically.
=Miscellaneous and Later Poets.=--Under this heading must be gathered
a handful of writers whom the classification thus far adopted has not
accounted for, some of whom would not easily admit of classification.
However, it is not the purpose of this Manual to consider in detail the
current writers of verse throughout America, among whom distinctions of
value can rarely be established.
_Hans Breitmann._--Charles Godfrey Leland (1824-1903) might be
associated with Bayard Taylor. He is said to have neglected mathematics
at Princeton for Carlyle and Spinoza; he studied abroad, returned
to Philadelphia to engage in the practice of law, but gave this up
for work as an editor. During the Civil War his pen was active in
defence of the Union. Afterward he became popular through his “Hans
Breitmann Ballads,” in picturesque dialect displaying the humour
of the shrewd jovial German immigrant before the war. Leland made
himself an authority on gypsy lore, and was busy in several fields
as a translator. During his long residence abroad, he enjoyed an
acquaintance with many distinguished men of letters in Europe. Besides
his ballads in dialect and translations from J. V. Scheffel, he wrote
verse of serious intent; for example, “The Music Lesson of Confucius,
and Other Poems,” in which, like Taylor, he desired to unite the
ideals of Christianity with those of Hellenism. The deaths of Leland,
Stoddard, Aldrich, and Stedman within the last five years took almost
the last survivors of an elder generation in American letters.
_Richard Henry Stoddard._--In the year of his death, 1903, R. H.
Stoddard was called by his friend, E. C. Stedman, “the most
distinguished of living American poets.” He was born in Hingham,
Massachusetts, July 2, 1825. Educated in the schools of New York City,
he supplemented by private reading his brief opportunities for regular
study, and from worker in a foundry became connected with Bayard Taylor
as a journalist. In 1853, Hawthorne aided him in securing a position
in the New York Custom-House. From 1860 to 1870 he was literary editor
of the New York _World_; in 1880 he took a similar post on _The Mail
and Express_. His first volume of poetry, “Footprints” (1849), was
afterwards suppressed; his second, “Poems” (1852), secured him an
audience. “Songs of Summer” (1857) was a collection of poems that
had been printed in various magazines. The latter part of his life
was marked by great activity as an editor and biographer, somewhat
after the fashion of Stedman. Most of his poetry subsequent to the
collective edition of 1880 is included in “The Lion’s Cub, with Other
Verse” (1890). He preserved his lyrical quality to a great age. Like
several of our leading poets, Stoddard reached his highest level in
dealing with the theme of Abraham Lincoln.
_Thomas Bailey Aldrich._--With his “Ballad of Babie Bell” (1855) in
the New York _Journal of Commerce_, Aldrich (1836-1907) began a career
whose high-water mark was the editorship of _The Atlantic Monthly_ from
1881 to 1890. His initial volume of poetry, published in 1854, was
“The Bells,” which was succeeded in 1858 by “The Ballad of Babie Bell,
and Other Poems.” Of his numerous later poetical works, “Pampinea, and
Other Poems” (1861), “Cloth of Gold, and Other Poems” (1874), “Flower
and Thorn” (1876), etc., perhaps the tragedy of “Mercedes” (“Mercedes,
and Later Lyrics,” 1884) deserves particular notice, having been
successfully staged, a test which few dramas by American poets have
been able to endure. Aldrich was a master of his craft. Deep in his
reverence for Tennyson, whom he ranks third in English poetry--after
Shakespeare and Milton,--he sometimes exercises an almost Tennysonian
harmony in the selection of detail; witness the Oriental luxury and
splendour in “When the Sultan Goes to Ispahan.”
_Edmund Clarence Stedman._--Stedman’s services to literature as a
critic and anthologist are doubtless of much greater importance than
his own poetry; but neither the one nor the other may be disparaged. He
was born at Hartford, Connecticut, in 1833, his mother (by her second
marriage Mrs. J. C. Kinney, the friend of the Brownings) being a woman
of educated taste and herself a poet. Entering Yale at the age of
fifteen, Stedman showed ability in Greek and in English composition,
and shortly gained a prize by his poem on “Westminster Abbey.” On
account of a boyish prank he was compelled to leave college before
the end of the course. Prior to the Civil War he was connected with
_The Norwich Tribune_ and _Winsted Herald_, and for a time with _The
New York Tribune_; in this he printed his “Tribune Lyrics” (among
them “Osawatomie Brown”). From 1861 to 1863 he was war correspondent
of the New York _World_; later he was assistant to Edward Bates,
Attorney-General under Lincoln. His interest in the first Pacific
railroad brought him into relations with Wall Street, where, in 1869,
he became an active member of the New York Stock Exchange. Here he
remained until 1900, an influential man of affairs, respected by
financiers as well as literary men, amassing and enjoying the means
which he desired for the pursuits of literature. He was a thorough
patriot, an earnest advocate of international copyright, above all a
steady labourer for the education of public taste. His lectures on
“The Nature and Elements of Poetry,” delivered first at Johns Hopkins
University, subsequently at the University of Pennsylvania, and again
at Columbia, unfolded the dignity of a subject that is often regarded
as a matter of indifference. By his “Victorian Anthology” (1895) he
gave further evidence of the powers of selection displayed in “A
Library of American Literature” (1888-1889), on which he collaborated
with Ellen M. Hutchinson. His “American Anthology” (1901, etc.),
several times reissued, contains selections from about six hundred
American poets, with brief biographies, and is, to say the least,
an indispensable volume to the general student of our literature.
The present section of this Manual is much indebted to Stedman’s
“Anthology.” One would hardly make too liberal an assertion in saying
of Stedman that he was the most thoroughly read man of his time in the
poetry of his own nation. It is possible that he was over generous in
his recognition of the work of inferior authors; but let us not impute
this to him as too serious a fault. Of the fifteen poems of his own
to which he allowed admission in the “American Anthology” (sixteen,
counting the “Prelude” to the volume), the best known are “The
Discoverer,” “Pan in Wall Street,” and “The Hand of Lincoln.” He died
on January 18, 1908.
_James Whitcomb Riley._--This artist in the “Hoosier” dialect of
Indiana (born 1853), though still in middle life, seems to belong
with the older rather than the younger generation of American poets.
Unwilling to follow his father’s profession of attorney, he early
betook himself to a wandering life, gaining experience of the world
as a vendor of patent medicines, sign-painter, actor, and the like.
Settling at Indianapolis, he became known by his contributions to
various newspapers, and when his reputation was established, won
additional success by public readings from his poetry. His verse
is bright and crisp, and he has pathos, humour, and good powers of
description and narrative. He has an unusually keen understanding for
the experiences of country life, particularly of youth and boyhood in
rural villages and on the farm. “The Old Swimmin’-Hole, and ‘Leven More
Poems” (1883) was his first notable venture. “Afterwhiles” appeared in
1888. Within ten years or so he then published “Old-Fashioned Roses”
(1888), “Pipes o’ Pan at Zekesbury” (1889), “Rhymes of Childhood”
(1890), “Neighbourly Poems” (1891), and, among other volumes, “A
Child-World” (1896), and the “Rubaiyat of Doc Sifers” (1899). As a
writer of dialect in verse, he falls not very far short of Lowell. His
allusions to nature, to insect life for example, are simple and true.
If but a bird or butterfly sit down beside him, he is as happy as if
the same were a maiden-queen.
* * * * *
Space forbids any delay upon George Henry Boker (1823-1890), diplomat
and dramatist, and his metrical drama, “Francesca da Rimini” (1856);
or Francis Miles Finch (1827-1907), professor in Cornell University,
and his celebrated poem “The Blue and the Gray” (in _The Atlantic
Monthly_, 1867), a gift of healing from the North to the South; or
John Hay (1838-1905), whose manifold services to his country were
roofed and crowned with an abiding interest in literature (“Pike County
Ballads,” published in _The New York Tribune_); or Richard Watson
Gilder (born 1844), editor of _The Century Magazine_, social reformer,
and author of several volumes of finished verse; or Stephen Collins
Foster (1836-1864), composer, whose songs, “The Old Folks at Home,”
“The Suwanee River,” “My Old Kentucky Home,” familiar the country over,
are significant of the influence which the negroes have exerted on the
language and art of the whites; or Will H. Thompson (born 1848), and
“The High Tide at Gettysburg”; or John Townsend Trowbridge (born 1827),
one of the original contributors to _The Atlantic Monthly_, author
of “The Vagabonds” (1863), and steeped in the spirit of New England;
or John Boyle O’Reilly (1844-1890), the Fenian, who escaped from
imprisonment in Australia, and became a journalist in Boston (“Songs,
Legends, and Ballads,” “Songs of the Southern Seas,” etc.); or Eugene
Field (1850-1895), witty, eccentric, friend and student of children;
or Richard Hovey (1864-1900), cut off in the flower of his promise
(“Taliesin: a Masque,” 1899); or Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906), the
negro poet, dead before his time, who wrote good and stirring English
as well as pathetic dialect; or William Vaughn Moody, professor in
the University of Chicago (“The Masque of Judgment,” 1900); or Bliss
Carman (born 1861) and Clinton Scollard (born 1860). All these and many
more must pass with insufficient notice or none; otherwise the page
would contain only a meaningless enumeration of names and dates. As
was implied at the beginning, very few American writers who have won
distinction in other ways have refrained from publishing a volume of
lyrics “and other poems.” Also, in spite of the slender encouragement
from publishers to new authors of original verse, the occasional volume
from the hitherto and hereafter unknown poetaster, who foots the bill
for printing, continues to emerge and sink again at the present day.
The immediate outlook for poetry in the United States is not bright.
It does not appear that with the material growth of the country we
have developed a unified national spirit capable of expression at the
hands of a great poet, were he to arise. It does not appear that we
have among the younger men a first-class poet capable of expressing
the national soul, were this more unified and precise. Furthermore,
the type of humanistic education which fostered our elder poets of New
England is generally discredited, and seems to be passing away without
leaving any hope of a popular training in the near future worthy to
succeed it. Simplicity, rigour, precision, and accuracy, all of them
friendly to the poetic spirit, and among its necessary conditions, have
fewer and fewer champions in the schools. Many subjects are studied,
and almost nothing is mastered and retained. Memory, the mother of the
Muses, is not in esteem. “Literature” is taught--though not learned;
yet the children know no poetry. Worst of all, and a primary cause of
much of the evil, the reading of standard works within the family is
becoming less and less common. In particular, though there is much talk
about the Bible, the Bible, like the classics, is becoming unfamiliar,
to the great detriment of popular thought and style.
On the other hand, to offset the deficiency of our secondary
schools and the decay of culture in the home, the last thirty years
have witnessed an immense expansion in advanced scholarship, most
notable, perhaps, in the investigation of the vernacular and related
literatures. Graduate study of English, and of the literatures
from which English literature has sprung, offers a refuge to such
persons as have a serious and abiding interest in belles-lettres; it
is undoubtedly developing the personalities of investigators to the
highest point of efficiency possible under present conditions, and
making ready for another generation, more fortunate, whose poetry shall
find root in the fields that are to-day so thoroughly cultivated;
working downward, it is already tending to bring about salutary changes
here and there in the procedure of the schools, and hence eventually to
have an influence in the home. A generation of scholars to clear the
way, as in the beginning of the Renaissance--to produce the literary
atmosphere which now is wanting--may be regarded as a hopeful sign of
a generation of poets to come. Finally, if American poetry now seems
moribund, we must yet remember the eternal power that the true poet is
always in alliance with; the power that at any time can make the poet
say of any literature: The maid is not dead, but sleepeth.[21]
IV. THE ESSAYISTS AND THE HUMOURISTS.
=English Influences on American Letters.=--Springing from a common
stock, the two branches of eighteenth-century English literature showed
many similarities. The charge of imitation and even of plagiarism has
been brought against the American writers of that period; but it seems
in no way unsafe to point to the single origin as the probable cause
of the same characteristics appearing in the literature produced
here, and that produced in the mother-country. No one can deny, of
course, that not a few of our authors went to school to Englishmen,
but the assertion that America until recently has produced nothing but
pinchbeck literature is as false as it is absurd. That like produces
like may be a trite saying, but its frequent repetition does not impair
its truth. The English mind, whether expressing itself at home or in
the colonies, naturally put forth the same kind of shoots: that their
development was not in all respects equally rapid, that in time they
became so much unlike as to appear unrelated, can be traced, no doubt,
to the unsheltered fortune of the American scion in early days, and to
the complete removal of the slip from the parent stem in after-years.
With this thought in mind, the most thorough-going American may admit,
without apologetic reserve, that the essayists of eighteenth-century
England have counterparts in Irving and certain of his contemporaries,
and that those of a slightly later date have much in common with
Emerson and Thoreau. Should one feel, however, that excusable pride
is to be taken only in those authors who exhibit qualities indigenous
to America, one may triumphantly mention Warner, and Lowell, and
Margaret Fuller; for, although these essayists show the racial instinct
of English writers, they are none the less emphatically American in
thought, tone, and expression. In passing, it is perhaps well to notice
that a large number of American writers have tried their hands at
more than one form of literature. For this reason Irving is discussed
as an essayist, although he might be placed with the humourists, or
perhaps better still, with fiction-writers, since he has the right to
dispute with Poe the claim to be regarded as the progenitor of the
American short story. Again, Emerson, like George Eliot, felt that his
fame would eventually rest upon his poetry, but his readers almost
always think and speak of him as an essayist. Lowell, Longfellow,
and Whittier, on the other hand, are properly reviewed at large as
poets, despite the fact that their prose work is not inconsiderable nor
unimportant and must therefore receive some attention in even a rapid
survey of the American essay.