Brownell's _American Prose Masters_. (Cooper.)

Erskine's _Leading American Novelists_, pp. 51-129. (Cooper.)

Cooper's _Last of the Mohicans_, edited with _Introduction_ by Halleck.

Godwin's _A Biography of William Cullen Bryant, with Extracts from his

Private Correspondence_, 2 vols. (The standard authority.)

Godwin's _The Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant_, 2 vols.

Bigelow's _William Cullen Bryant_. (_American Men of Letters_.)

Bradley's _William Cullen Bryant_. (_English Men of Letters, American

Series_.)

Chadwick's _The Origin of a Great Poem (Thanatopsis)_, _Harper's Magazine_,

September, 1894,

SUGGESTED READINGS

MINOR WRITERS.--_The Croakers_, in Wilson's edition of Halleck's _Poetical

Writings_.

Selections from the poetry of Drake and Halleck may be found in Stedman's

_American Anthology_, pp. 36-47, and in S. & H., Vol. V.

IRVING.--His _Knickerbocker's History of New York_ begins with somewhat

tiresome matter, condensed from chapters which he and his brother had

jointly written on a different plan. The first part may well be omitted,

but _Books III., V., VI., VII._ should at least be read.

Read his best two short stories, _Rip Van Winkle_ and _The Legend of Sleepy

Hollow_. Lovers of Irving will also wish to read some tales from _The

Alhambra_, and some of his essays: _e.g. Westminster Abbey_ and

_Stratford-on-Avon_. For selections from his various works, see Carpenter,

124-134; S. & H., V., 41-62.

COOPER.--One of his _Leather stocking Tales_ (p. 131), _e.g. The Last of

the Mohicans_, which is deservedly the most popular, should be read. If a

tale of the sea is desired, read either _The Pilot_ or _The Red Rover_.

Selections may be found in Carpenter, 124-134; S. & H., V., 138-183.

Bryant.--Read _Thanatopsis, To a Waterfowl, O Fairest of the Rural Maids, A

Forest Hymn, The Death of the Flowers, The Evening Wind, To the Fringed

Gentian_, and _The Poet_. All of these are accessible in Bryant's poetical

works, and almost all may be found in Page's _The Chief American Poets_.

Selections are given in Stedman's _American Anthology_; S. & H., Vol. V.;

and Long's _American Poems_, 1776-1900.

QUESTIONS AND SUGGESTIONS

What are some of the chief qualities in the poetry of "The Croakers"? What

do these qualities indicate in the readers of contemporary New York? Do you

find a genuine romantic element in Drake's _Culprit Fay_? Compare Halleck's

_Marco Bozzaris_ with his lines on the death of Drake, and give reasons for

your preference.

Select what you consider the best three specimens of humor in Irving's

_Knickerbocker's History of New York_. How is the humorous effect secured?

Why does it not make us dislike the Dutch? Why is this _History_ an

original work? Why have _Rip Van Winkle_ and _The Legend of Sleepy Hollow_

been such general favorites? Compare these with any of Addison's _Sir Roger

de Coverley Papers_ and with any modern short story. Is Irving a romantic

writer? Compare his style with Addison's and with Goldsmith's in _The Vicar

of Wakefield._

Why does Cooper deserve to rank as an original American author? What is his

chosen field? In what does his special power consist? Who before him made

use of the Indian in literature? Can you find any point of similarity

between his work and _The Legend of Sleepy Hollow_? What are the most

striking points of dissimilarity? How does his use of the romantic element

differ from Irving's? What blemishes have you actually noticed in Cooper?

What lines in Bryant's _Thanatopsis_ are the keynote of the entire poem?

What are its general qualities? What are the finest thoughts in _A Forest

Hymn_? What do these suggest in regard to Bryant's early training and the

cast of his mind? Of all Bryant's poems indicated for reading, which do you

prefer? Which of his references to nature do you like best? Compare his

poem: _O fairest of the rural maids!_ with Wordsworth's: _Three years she

grew in sun and shower_. In Bryant's _The Poet_, what noteworthy poetical

ideals do you find?

CHAPTER IV

THE NEW ENGLAND GROUP

CHANGE IN RELIGIOUS THOUGHT.--Since the death of Jonathan Edwards in the

middle of the seventeenth century, New England had done little to sustain

her former literary reputation. As the middle of the nineteenth century

approaches, however, we shall find a remarkable group of writers in Boston

and its vicinity. The causes of this wonderful literary awakening are in

some respects similar to those which produced the Elizabethan age. In the

sixteenth century the Reformation and the Revival of Learning exerted their

joint force on England. In the nineteenth century, New England also had its

religious reformation and intellectual awakening. We must remember that

"re-formation" strictly means "forming again" or "forming in a different

way." It is not the province of a history of literature to state whether a

change in religious belief is for the better or the worse, but it is

necessary to ascertain how such a change affects literature.

The old Puritan religion taught the total depravity of man, the eternal

damnation of the overwhelming majority, of all but the "elect." A man's

election to salvation depended on God's foreordination. If the man was not

elected, he was justly treated, for he merely received his deserts. Even

Jonathan Edwards, in spite of his sweet nature, felt bound to preach hell

fire in terms of the old Puritan theology. In one of his sermons, he

says:--

"The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider,

or some loathsome insect, over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully

provoked; his wrath toward you burns like fire; he looks upon you as

worthy of nothing else but to be cast into the fire."

This quotation was not given when we discussed the works of Edwards,

because it misrepresents his most often recurring idea of God. But the fact

that even he felt impelled to preach such a sermon shows most emphatically

that Puritan theology exerted its influence by presenting more vivid

pictures of God's wrath than of his love.

A tremendous reaction from such beliefs came in the first quarter of the

nineteenth century. William Ellery Channing (1780-1842), pastor of the

Federal Street Church in Boston and one of the greatest leaders of this

religious reform, wrote in 1809 of the old Puritan creed:--

"A man of plain sense, whose spirit has not been broken to this creed by

education or terror, will think that it is not necessary for us to travel

to heathen countries, to learn how mournfully the human mind may

misrepresent the Deity."

He maintained that human nature, made in the image of God, is not totally

depraved, that the current doctrine of original sin, election, and eternal

punishment "misrepresents the Deity" and makes him a monster. This view

was speedily adopted by the majority of cultivated people in and around

Boston. The Unitarian movement rapidly developed and soon became dominant

at Harvard College. Unitarianism was embraced by the majority of

Congregational churches in Boston, including the First Church, and the

Second Church, where the great John Cotton (see p. 14.) and Cotton Mather

(p. 46.) had preached the sternest Puritan theology. Nearly all of the

prominent writers mentioned in this chapter adopted liberal religious

views. The recoil had been violent, and in the long run recoil will

usually be found proportional to the strength of the repression. Dr.

Oliver Wendell Holmes even called the old theology largely "diabology."

The name of one of his poems is _Homesick in Heaven_. Had he in the early

days chosen such a title, he would either, like Roger Williams, have been

exiled, or, like the Quakers, have suffered a worse fate.

Many adopted more liberal religious beliefs without embracing Unitarianism.

Perhaps these three lines voice most briefly the central thought in man's

new creed and his changed attitude toward God:--

"For Thou and I are next of kin;

The pulses that are strong within,

From the deep Infinite heart begin."

THE NEW ENGLAND RENAISSANCE.--The stern theology of the Puritans may have

been absolutely necessary to make them work with a singleness and an

inflexibility of purpose to lay the foundations of a mighty republic; but

this very singleness of aim had led to a narrowness of culture which had

starved the emotional and aesthetic nature. Art, music, literature, and the

love of beauty in general had seemed reprehensible because it was thought

that they took away the attention from a matter of far graver import, the

salvation of the immortal soul. Now there gradually developed the

conviction that these agencies not only helped to save the soul, but made

it more worth saving. People began to search for the beautiful and to enjoy

it in both nature and art. Emerson says:--

"... if eyes were made for seeing,

Then Beauty is its own excuse for being."

The first half of the nineteenth century saw the New Englanders engaged in

a systematic attempt at self-culture, to an extent never before witnessed

in America and rarely elsewhere. Many with an income barely sufficient for

comfortable living set aside a fund for purchasing books before anything

else. Emerson could even write to Carlyle that all the bright girls in New

England wanted something better than morning calls and evening parties, and

that a life of mere trade did not promise satisfaction to the boys.

In 1800 there were few foreign books in Boston, but the interest in them

developed to such an extent that Hawthorne's father-in-law and

sister-in-law, Dr. and Miss Peabody, started a foreign bookstore and

reading room. Longfellow made many beautiful translations from foreign

poetry. In 1840 Emerson said that he had read in the original fifty-five

volumes of Goethe. Emerson superintended the publication in America of

Carlyle's early writings, which together with some of Coleridge's works

introduced many to German philosophy and idealism.

In this era, New England's recovery from emotional and aesthetic starvation

was rapid. Her poets and prose writers produced a literature in which

beauty, power, and knowledge were often combined, and they found a

cultivated audience to furnish a welcome.

THE TRANSCENDENTAL PHILOSOPHY.--The literature and thought of New England

were profoundly modified by the transcendental philosophy. Ralph Waldo

Emerson (p. 178) was the most celebrated expounder of this school of

thought. The English philosopher, Locke, had maintained that intellectual

action is limited to the world of the senses. The German metaphysician,

Kant, claimed that the soul has ideas which are not due to the activity of

any of the senses: that every one has an idea of time and space although no

one has ever felt, tasted, seen, eaten, or smelled time or space. He called

such an idea an intuition or transcendental form.

The student of literature need not worry himself greatly about the

metaphysical significance of transcendentalism, but he must understand its

influence on literary thought. It is enough for him to realize that there

are two great classes of fact confronting every human being. There are the

ordinary phenomena of life, which are apparent to the senses and which are

the only things perceived by the majority of human beings. But behind all

these appearances are forces and realities which the senses do not

perceive. One with the bodily eye can see the living forms moving around

him, but not the meaning of life. It is something more than the bodily hand

that gropes in the darkness and touches God's hand. To commune with a

Divine Power, we must transcend the experience of the senses. We are now

prepared to understand what a transcendentalist like Thoreau means when he

says:--

"I hear beyond the range of sound,

I see beyond the range of sight."

The transcendentalists, therefore, endeavored to transcend, that is, to

pass beyond, the range of human sense and experience. We are all in a

measure transcendentalists when we try to pierce the unseen, to explain

existence, to build a foundation of meaning under the passing phenomena of

life. To the old Puritan, the unseen was always fraught with deeper meaning

than the seen. Sarah Pierrepont and Jonathan Edwards (p. 51) were in large

measure transcendentalists. The trouble was that the former Puritan

philosophy of the unseen was too rigid and limited to satisfy the widening

aspirations of the soul.

It should be noted that in this period the term "transcendentalist" is

extended beyond its usual meaning and loosely applied to those thinkers who

(1) preferred to rely on their own intuitions rather than on the authority

of any one, (2) exalted individuality, (3) frowned on imitation and

repetition, (4) broke with the past, (5) believed that a new social and

spiritual renaissance was necessary and forthcoming, (6) insisted on the

importance of culture, on "plain living and high thinking," and (7) loved

isolation and solitude. An excellent original exposition of much of this

philosophy may be found in Emerson's _Nature_ (1836) and in his lecture on

_The Transcendentalist_ (1842).

THE ECSTASY OF THE TRANSCENDENTALISTS.--Any age that accomplishes great

things is necessarily enthusiastic. According to Emerson, one of the

articles of the transcendental creed was a belief "in inspiration and

ecstasy." With this went an overmastering consciousness of newly discovered

power. "Do you think me the child of circumstances?" asked the

transcendentalist, and he answered in almost the same breath, "I make my

circumstance."

The feeling of ecstasy, due to the belief that he was really a part of an

infinite Divine Power, made Emerson say:--

"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."

The greatest of the women transcendentalists, MARGARET FULLER (1810-1850),

a distinguished early pleader for equal rights for her sex, believed that

when it was fashionable for women to bring to the home "food and fire for

the mind as well as for the body," an ecstatic "harmony of the spheres

would ensue."

To her, as to Emerson, Nature brought an inspiring message. On an early May

day she wrote:--

"The trees were still bare, but the little birds care not for that; they

revel and carol and wildly tell their hopes, while the gentle voluble

south wind plays with the dry leaves, and the pine trees sigh with their

soul-like sounds for June. It was beauteous; and care and routine fled

away, and I was as if they had never been."

[Illustration: MARGARET FULLER]

The transcendentalist, while voicing his ecstasy over life, has put himself

on record as not wishing to do anything more than once. For him God has

enough new experiences, so that repetition is unnecessary. He dislikes

routine. "Everything," Emerson says, "admonishes us how needlessly long

life is," that is, if we walk with heroes and do not repeat. Let a machine

add figures while the soul moves on. He dislikes seeing any part of a

universe that he does not use. Shakespeare seemed to him to have lived a

thousand years as the guest of a great universe in which most of us never

pass beyond the antechamber.

[Illustration: AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT]

Critics were not wanting to point out the absurdity of many transcendental

ecstasies. AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT (1799-1888), one of the leading

transcendentalists, wrote a peculiar poem called _The Seer's Rations_, in

which he speaks of

"Bowls of sunrise for breakfast,

Brimful of the East."

His neighbors said that this was the diet which he provided for his hungry

family. His daughter, Louisa May, the author of that fine juvenile work,

_Little Women_ (1868), had a sad struggle with poverty while her father was

living in the clouds. The extreme philosophy of the intangible was soon

called "transcendental moonshine." The tenets of Bronson Alcott's

transcendental philosophy required him to believe that human nature is

saturated with divinity. He therefore felt that a misbehaving child in

school would be most powerfully affected by seeing the suffering which his

wrongdoing brought to others. He accordingly used to shake a good child for

the bad deeds of others. Sometimes when the class had offended, he would

inflict corporal punishment on himself. His extreme applications of the new

principle show that lack of balance which many of this school displayed,

and yet his reliance on sympathy instead of on the omnipresent rod marks a

step forward in educational practice. Emerson was far-seeing enough to say

of those who carried the new philosophy to an extreme, "What if they eat

clouds and drink wind, they have not been without service to the race of

man."

[Illustration: ORCHARD HOUSE, HOME OF THE ALCOTTS]

THE NEW VIEW OF NATURE.--To the old Puritan, nature seemed to groan under

the weight of sin and to bear the primal curse. To the transcendentalist,

nature was a part of divinity. The question was sometimes asked whether

nature had any real existence outside of God, whether it was not God's

thoughts. Emerson, being an idealist, doubted whether nature had any more

material existence than a thought.

The majority of the writers did not press this idealistic conception of

nature, but much of the nature literature of this group shows a belief in

the soul's mystic companionship with the bird, the flower, the cloud, the

ocean, and the stars. Emerson says:--

"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."

Hawthorne exclaims:--

"O, that I could run wild!--that is, that I could put myself into a true

relation with Nature, and be on friendly terms with all congenial

elements."

Thoreau (p. 194) often enters Nature's mystic shrine and dilates with a

sense of her companionship. Of the song of the wood thrush, he says:--

"Whenever a man hears it, he is young, and Nature is in her spring.

Whenever he hears it, it is a new world and a free country, and the gates

of heaven are not shut against him.... It changes all hours to an eternal

morning. It banishes all trivialness. It reinstates me in my dominion,

makes me the lord of creation, is chief musician of my court. This

minstrel sings in a time, a heroic age, with which no event in the

village can be contemporary."

Thoreau could converse with the Concord River and hear the sound of the

rain in its "summer voice." Hiawatha talked with the reindeer, the beaver,

and the rabbit, as with his brothers. In dealing with nature, Whittier

caught something of Wordsworth's spirituality, and Lowell was impressed

with the yearnings of a clod of earth as it

"Climbs to a soul in grass and flowers."

One of the chief glories of this age was the fuller recognition of the

companionship that man bears to every child of nature. This phase of the

literature has reacted on the ideals of the entire republic. Flowers,

trees, birds, domestic animals, and helpless human beings have received

more sympathetic treatment as a result. In what previous time have we heard

an American poet ask, as Emerson did in his poem _Forbearance_ (1842):--

"Hast thou named all the birds without a gun?

Loved the wood-rose, and left it on its stalk?"

[Illustration: MARGARET FULLER'S COTTAGE, BROOK FARM]

THE DIAL.--Transcendentalism had for its organ a magazine called _The

Dial_, which was published quarterly for four years, from 1840 to 1844.

Margaret Fuller, its first editor, was a woman of wide reading and varied

culture, and she had all the enthusiasm of the Elizabethans. Carlyle said

of her, "Such a predetermination to eat this big Universe as her oyster or

her egg, and to be absolute empress of all height and glory in it that her

heart could conceive, I have not before seen in any human soul." She was

determined to do her part in ushering in a new social and spiritual world,

and it seemed to her that _The Dial_ would be a mighty lever in

accomplishing this result. She struggled for two years to make the magazine

a success. Then ill health and poverty compelled her to turn the editorship

over to Emerson, who continued the struggle for two years longer.

Some of Emerson's best poems were first published in _The Dial_, as were

his lecture on _The Transcendentalist_ and many other articles by him.

Thoreau wrote for almost every number. Some of the articles were dull, not

a few were vague, but many were an inspiration to the age, and their

resultant effect is still felt in our life and literature. Much of the

minor poetry was good and stimulating. William Channing (1818-1901)

published in _The Dial_ his _Thoughts_, in which we find lines that might

serve as an epitaph for a life approved by a transcendentalist:--

"It flourished in pure willingness;

Discovered strongest earnestness;

Was fragrant for each lightest wind;

Was of its own particular kind;--

Nor knew a tone of discord sharp;

Breathed alway like a silver harp;

And went to immortality."

While turning the pages of _The Dial_, we shall often meet with sentiments

as full of meaning to us as to the people of that time. Among such we may

instance:--

"Rest is not quitting

The busy career;

Rest is the fitting

Of self to its sphere."

Occasionally we shall find an expression fit to become a fireside motto:--

"I slept, and dreamed that life was beauty;

I woke, and found that life was duty."

The prose in _The Dial_ reflects the new spirit. In the first volume we may

note such expressions of imaginative enthusiasm as:--

"The reason why Homer is to me like dewy morning is because I too lived

while Troy was and sailed in the hollow ships of the Grecians.... And

Shakespeare in _King John_ does but recall me to myself in the dress of

another age, the sport of new accidents. I, who am Charles, was sometime

Romeo. In _Hamlet_ I pondered and doubted. We forget that we have been

drugged with the sleepy bowl of the Present."

In the same volume we find some of Alcott's famous _Orphic Sayings_, of

which the following is a sample:--

"Engage in nothing that cripples or degrades you. Your first duty is

self-culture, self-exaltation: you may not violate this high trust.

Yourself is sacred, profane it not. Forge no chains wherewith to shackle

your own members. Either subordinate your vocation to your life or quit

it forever."

A writer on _Ideals of Every Day Life_ in _The Dial_ for January, 1841,

suggested a thought that is finding an echo in the twentieth century:--

"No one has a right to live merely to get a living. And this is what is

meant by drudgery."

Two lines in the last volume voice the new spirit of growth and action:--

"I am never at anchor, I never shall be;

I am sailing the glass of infinity's sea."

_The Dial_ afforded an outlet for the enthusiasms, the aspirations, the

ideals of life, during a critical period in New England's renaissance. No

other periodical during an equal time has exerted more influence on the

trend of American literature.

BROOK FARM.--In 1841 a number of people, headed by GEORGE RIPLEY

(1802-1880), a Unitarian clergyman, purchased a tract of land of about two

hundred acres at West Roxbury, nine miles from Boston. This was known as

Brook Farm, and it became the home of a group who wished to exemplify in

real life some of the principles that _The Dial_ and other agencies of

reform were advocating.

[Illustration: POOL AT BROOK FARM]

In _The Dial_ for January, 1842, we may find a statement of the aims of the

Brook Farm community. The members especially wanted "_leisure to live in

all the faculties of the soul_" and they determined to combine manual and

mental labor in such a way as to achieve this result. Probably the majority

of Americans are in sympathy with such an aim. Many have striven to find

sufficient release from their hard, unimproving routine work to enable them

to escape its dwarfing effects and to live a fuller life on a higher plane.

The Brook Farm settlement included such people as Nathaniel Hawthorne,

Charles A. Dana (1819-1897), afterward editor of the New York _Sun_, George

Ripley, in later times distinguished as the literary critic of the New York

_Tribune_, and GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS (1824-1892), who became a well-known

essayist, magazine editor, and civil service reformer. The original

pioneers numbered about twenty; but the membership increased to nearly one

hundred and fifty. Brook Farm had an influence, however, that could not be

measured by the number of its inmates. In one year more than four thousand

visitors came to see this new social settlement.

Hawthorne, the most famous literary member of the Brook Farm group, has

recorded many of his experiences during his residence there in 1841:--

"April 13. I have not yet taken my first lesson in agriculture, except

that I went to see our cows foddered, yesterday afternoon. We have eight

of our own; and the number is now increased by a transcendental heifer

belonging to Miss Margaret Fuller. She is very fractious, I believe, and

apt to kick over the milk pail.... April 16. I have milked a cow!!! ...

May 3. The whole fraternity eat together, and such a delectable way of

life has never been seen on earth since the days of the early

Christians.... May 4.... there is nothing so unseemly and disagreeable in

this sort of toil as you could think. It defiles the hands, indeed, but

not the soul."

Unfortunately, in order to earn a living, it was found necessary to work

ten hours a day in the summer time, and this toil was so fatiguing that the

mind could not work clearly at the end of the day. We find Hawthorne

writing on June 1 of the same year:--

"It is my opinion that a man's soul may be buried and perish ... in a

furrow of the field, just as well as under a pile of money."

On August 12, he asks:--

"Is it a praiseworthy matter that I have spent five golden months in

providing food for cows and horses? It is not so."

On October 9, he says:--

"Our household, being composed in great measure of children and young

people, is generally a cheerful one enough, even in gloomy weather.... It

would be difficult to conceive beforehand how much can be added to the

enjoyment of a household by mere sunniness of temper and liveliness of

disposition...."

Hawthorne remained at Brook Farm for only one of the six years of its

existence. An important building, on which there was no insurance, burned

in 1846, and the next year the association was forced for financial reasons

to disband. This was probably the most ideal of a series of social

settlements, every one of which failed. The problem of securing sufficient

leisure to live in all the faculties of the soul has not yet been solved,

but attempts toward a satisfactory solution have not yet been abandoned.

The influence of Brook Farm on our literature survives in Hawthorne's

_Blithedale Romance_ (p. 219), in his _American Note Books_, in Emerson's

miscellaneous writings, and in many books and hundreds of articles by less

well-known people. Almost all of those who participated in this social

experiment spoke of it in after years with strong affection.

IDEALS OF THE NEW ENGLAND AUTHORS.--When we examine with closest scrutiny

the lives of the chief New England authors, of Emerson and Thoreau,

Longfellow and Whittier, Holmes and Lowell, we find that all were men of

the highest ideals and character. Not one could be accused of double

dealing and intentional misrepresentation, like Alexander Pope; not one was

intemperate, like Robert Burns or Edgar Allan Poe; not one was dissolute,

like Byron; not one uttered anything base, like many a modern novelist and

dramatist.

The mission of all the great New England writers of this age was to make

individuals freer, more cultivated, more self-reliant, more kindly, more

spiritual. Puritan energy and spirituality spoke through them all. Nearly

all could trace their descent from the early Puritans. It is not an

infusion of new blood that has given America her greatest writers, but an

infusion of new ideals. Some of these ideals were illusions, but a noble

illusion has frequently led humanity upward. The transcendentalists could

not fathom the unknowable, but their attempts in this direction enabled

them to penetrate deeper into spiritual realities.

The New Englander demanded a cultivated intellect as the servant of the

spirit. He still looked at the world from the moral point of view. For the

most part he did not aim to produce a literature of pleasure, but of

spiritual power, which he knew would incidentally bring pleasure of the

highest type. Even Holmes, the genial humorist, wished to be known to

posterity by his trumpet call to the soul to build itself more stately

mansions.

THE INFLUENCE OF SLAVERY.--The question of human slavery profoundly

modified the thought and literature of the nation. In these days we often

make the mistake of thinking that all of the people of New England

disapproved of slavery at the end of the first half of the nineteenth

century. The truth is that many of the most influential people in that

section agreed with the South on the question of slavery. Not a few of the

most cultivated people at the North thought that an antislavery movement

would lead to an attack on other forms of property and that anarchy would

be the inevitable result.

Opposition to slavery developed naturally as a result of the new spirit in

religion and human philosophy. This distinctly affirmed the right of the

individual to develop free from any trammels. _The Dial_ and Brook Farm

were both steps toward fuller individuality and more varied life and both

were really protests against all kinds of slavery. This new feeling in the

air speedily passed beyond the color line, and extended to the animals.

One of the earliest to advocate the abolition of slavery was WILLIAM LLOYD

GARRISON (1805-1879), a printer at Newburyport, Massachusetts. In 1831 he

founded _The Liberator_, which became the official organ of the New England

abolitionists. He influenced the Quaker poet Whittier to devote the best

years of his life to furthering the cause of abolition. Emerson and Thoreau

spoke forcibly against slavery. Lowell attacked it with his keenest poetic

shafts.

HARRIET BEECHER STOWE (1811-1896).--It was, however, left for the daughter

of an orthodox Congregational clergyman of New England to surpass every

other antislavery champion in fanning into a flame the sentiment against

enslaving human beings. Harriet Beecher, the sister of Henry Ward Beecher,

the greatest pulpit orator of anti-slavery days, was born in Litchfield,

Connecticut. When she was twenty-one, she went with her father, Lyman

Beecher, to Cincinnati. Her new home was on the borderland of slavery, and

she often saw fugitive slaves and heard their stories at first hand. In

1833 she made a visit to a slave plantation in Kentucky and obtained

additional material for her most noted work.

[Illustration: HARRIET BEECHER STOWE]

In 1836 she married Calvin E. Stowe, a colleague of her father in the Lane

Theological Seminary in Cincinnati. During the next twelve years she had

six children to rear.

In 1850 Professor Stowe and his family moved to Bowdoin College, in

Brunswick, Maine. This year saw the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act,

which required the citizens of free states to aid in catching and returning

escaped slaves. This Act roused Mrs. Stowe, and she began _Uncle Tom's

Cabin_, which was published in book form in 1852.

Perhaps no other American book of note has been written under so great a

handicap. When Mrs. Stowe began this work, one of her large family of

children was not a year old, and the others were a constant care.

Nevertheless, she persevered with her epoch-making story. One of her

friends has given us a picture of the difficulties in her way, the baby on

her knee, the new hired girl asking whether the pork should be put on top

of the beans, and whether the gingerbread should stay longer in the oven.

In _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ Mrs. Stowe endeavored to translate into concrete

form certain phases of the institution of slavery, which had been merely an

abstraction to the North. Of Senator John Bird, who believed in stringent

laws for the apprehension of fugitive slaves, she wrote:--

"... his idea of a fugitive was only an idea of the letters that spell

the word,--or, at the most, the image of a little newspaper picture of a

man with a stick and bundle, with 'Ran away from the subscriber' under

it. The magic of the real presence of distress,--the imploring human

eye, the frail, trembling human hand, the despairing appeal of helpless

agony,--these he had never tried. He had never thought that a fugitive

might be a hapless mother, a defenceless child...."

In chapters of intense dramatic power, Mrs. Stowe shows a slave mother and

her child escaping on the floating ice across the Ohio. They come for

refuge to the home of Senator Bird.

"'Were you a slave?' said Mr. Bird.

"'Yes, sir; I belonged to a man in Kentucky.'

"'Was he unkind to you?'

"'No, sir; he was a good master.'

"'And was your mistress unkind to you?'

"'No, sir,--no! my mistress was always good to me.'"

Senator Bird learned that the master and mistress were in debt, and that a

creditor had a claim which could be discharged only by the sale of the

child. "Then it was," said the slave mother, "I took him and left my home

and came away."

Mrs. Stowe's knowledge of psychological values is shown in the means taken

to make it appear to Senator John Bird that it would be the natural thing

for him to defeat his own law, by driving the woman and her child seven

miles in the dead of night to a place of greater safety.

All sections of the country do not agree in regard to whether _Uncle Tom's

Cabin_ gives a fairly representative picture of slavery. This is a question

for the historian, not for the literary critic. We study _Macbeth_ for its

psychology, its revelation of human nature, its ethics, more than for its

accurate exposition of the Scottish history of the time. We read _Uncle

Tom's Cabin_ to find out how the pen of one woman proved stronger than the

fugitive slave laws of the United States, how it helped to render of no

avail the decrees of the courts, and to usher in a four years' war. We

decide that she achieved this result because the pictures, whether

representative or not, which she chose to throw on her screen, were such as

appealed to the most elemental principles of human nature, such as the

mother could not forget when she heard her own children say their evening

prayer, such as led her to consent to send her firstborn to the war, such

as to make _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ outsell every other book written by an

American, to cause it to be translated into more than thirty foreign

languages, to lead a lady of the Siamese court to free all her slaves in

1867, and to say that Mrs. Stowe "had taught her as even Buddha had taught

kings to respect the rights of her fellow creatures."

It may be noted in this connection that Mark Twain, who was of southern

descent and whose parents and relatives owned slaves, introduces in his

greatest work, _Huckleberry Finn_ (1884), a fugitive slave to arouse our

sympathies. The plot of _Pudd'nhead Wilson_ (1894) turns on one of Mrs.

Stowe's points of emphasis, the fear of the mother that her child would be

sold and taken away from her, down the river.

The story of _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ is intensely dramatic, and it accomplished

its author's purpose far beyond her expectations. When we study it merely

as a literary performance, we shall notice the effect of the handicap under

which Mrs. Stowe labored at the time of composition, as well as her

imperfect conception of the art technique of the modern novel. There are

faults of plot, style, and characterization. Modern fiction would call for

more differentiation in the dialogue of the different characters and for

more unity of structure, and yet there are stories with all these technical

excellencies which do not live a year. We may say with W. P. Trent, a

Virginian by birth, and a critic who has the southern point of view:

"_Uncle Tom's Cabin_ is alive with emotion, and the book that is alive with

emotion after the lapse of fifty years is a great book. The critic of today

cannot do better than to imitate George Sand when she reviewed the story on

its first appearance--waive its faults and affirm its almost unrivaled

emotional sincerity and strength."

ORATORY.--The orators of this period made their strongest speeches on

questions connected with human liberty and the preservation of the Union.

Most public speeches die with the success or the failure of the reforms

that they champion or the causes that they plead. A little more than half a

century ago, schoolboys declaimed the speeches of EDWARD EVERETT

(1794-1865), CHARLES SUMNER (1811-1874), and WENDELL PHILLIPS (1811-1884),

all born in Massachusetts, and all graduates of Harvard. But even the best

speeches of these men are gradually being forgotten, although a stray

sentence or paragraph may still occasionally be heard, such as Wendell

Phillips's reply to those who hissed his antislavery sentiments, "Truth

dropped into the pit of hell would make a noise just like that," or Edward

Everett's apostrophe to "that one solitary adventurous vessel, the

_Mayflower_ of a forlorn hope, freighted with the prospects of a future

state and bound across the unknown sea."

DANIEL WEBSTER (1782-1852).--New England furnished in Daniel Webster one of

the world's great orators. He was born in Salisbury, New Hampshire, and

educated at Dartmouth College. It was said half humorously that no one

could really be as great as he looked. Whittier called him

"New England's stateliest type of man,

In port and speech Olympian;

Whom no one met, at first, but took

A second awed and wondering look."

Before his death he was known as the best lawyer, the most noted statesman,

and the greatest orator in the country. He is still considered America's

greatest orator.

[Illustration: DANIEL WEBSTER]

A study of the way in which Webster schooled himself to become a speaker

will repay every one who wishes to use our spoken language effectively. In

Webster's youth, a stilted, unnatural style was popular for set speeches.

He was himself influenced by the prevailing fashion, and we find him

writing to a friend:--

"In my melancholy moments I presage the most dire calamities. I already

see in my imagination the time when the banner of civil war shall be

unfurled; when Discord's hydra form shall set up her hideous yell, and

from her hundred mouths shall howl destruction through our empire."

Such unnatural prose impresses us to-day as merely an insincere play with

words, but in those days many thought a stilted, ornate style as necessary

for an impressive occasion as Sunday clothes for church. An _Oratorical

Dictionary_ for the use of public speakers, was actually published in the

first part of the nineteenth century. This contained a liberal amount of

sonorous words derived from the Latin, such as "campestral," "lapidescent,"

"obnubilate," and "adventitious." Such words were supposed to give dignity

to spoken utterance.

Edward Everett, the most finished classical speaker of the time, loved to

introduce the "Muses of Hellas," and to make allusions to the fleets "of

Tyre, of Carthage, of Rome," and to Hannibal's slaughtering the Romans

"till the Aufidus ran blood." He painted Warren "moving resplendent over

the field of honor, with the rose of Heaven upon his cheek, and the fire of

liberty in his eye."

Webster was cured of such tendencies by an older lawyer, Jeremiah Mason,

who graduated at Yale about the time Webster was born. Mason, who was

frequently Webster's opponent, took pleasure in ridiculing all ornate

efforts and in pricking rhetorical bubbles. Webster says that Mason talked

to the jury "in a plain conversational way, in short sentences, and using

no word that was not level to the comprehension of the least educated man

on the panel. This led me to examine my own style, and I set about

reforming it altogether." Note the simplicity in the following sentences

from Webster's speech on _The Murder of Captain Joseph White_:--

"Deep sleep had fallen on the destined victim, and on all beneath his

roof. A healthful old man, to whom sleep was sweet, and the first sound

slumbers of the night held him in their soft but strong embrace.... The

face of the innocent sleeper is turned from the murderer, and the beams

of the moon, resting on the gray locks of his aged temple, show him where

to strike."

In his speech on _The Completion of the Bunker Hill Monument_, we find the

following paragraph, containing two sentences which present in simple

language one of the great facts in human history:--

"America has furnished to the world the character of Washington! And if

our American institutions had done nothing else, that alone would have

entitled them to the respect of mankind."

He knew when illustrations and figures of rhetoric could be used to

advantage to impress his hearers. In discussing the claim made by Senator

Calhoun of South Carolina that a state could nullify a national law,

Webster said:--

"To begin with nullification, with the avowed intent, nevertheless, not

to proceed to secession, dismemberment, and general revolution, is as if

one were to take the plunge of Niagara, and cry out that he would stop

half way down."

To show the moral bravery of our forefathers and the comparative greatness

of England, at that time, he said:--

"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 drumbeat,

following the sun, and keeping company with the hours, circles the earth

with one continuous and unbroken strain of the martial airs of England."

For nearly a generation prior to the Civil War, schoolboys had been

declaiming the peroration of his greatest speech, his _Reply to Hayne_

(1830):--

"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!"

This peroration brought Webster as an invisible presence into thousands of

homes in the North. The hearts of the listeners would beat faster as the

declaimer continued:--

"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, nor a single star obscured...."

When the irrepressible conflict came, it would be difficult to estimate how

many this great oration influenced to join the army to save the Union. The

closing words of that speech, "Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and

inseparable!" kept sounding like the voice of many thunders in the ear of

the young men, until they shouldered their muskets. His _Seventh of March

Speech_ (1850), which seemed to the North to make compromises with slavery,

put him under a cloud for awhile, but nothing could stop youth from

declaiming his _Reply to Hayne_.

Although the majority of orators famous in their day are usually forgotten

by the next generation, it is not improbable that three American orations

will be quoted hundreds of years hence. So long as the American retains his

present characteristics, we cannot imagine a time when he will forget

Patrick Henry's speech in 1775, or Daniel Webster's peroration in his

_Reply to Hayne_, or Abraham Lincoln's _Gettysburg Address_ (p. 344),

entrusting the American people with the task of seeing "that government of

the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the

earth."

RALPH WALDO EMERSON, 1803-1882

[Illustration: RALPH WALDO EMERSON]

LIFE.--Ralph Waldo Emerson, the most distinguished of New England

transcendentalists, came from a family of clergy. Peter Bulkeley, his

ancestor, was the first pastor of Concord in 1635. William Emerson, his

grandfather, was pastor in Concord at the opening of the Revolutionary War

and witnessed the fight of Concord Bridge from the window of the Old Manse,

that famous house which he had built and which Hawthorne afterwards

occupied. By that Bridge there stands a monument, commemorating the heroic

services of the men who there made the world-famous stand for freedom. On

the base of this monument are Ralph Waldo Emerson's lines:--

"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."

Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Boston in 1803. His father, who was pastor

of the First Church in Boston, died when Ralph Waldo was eight years old,

leaving in poverty a widow with six children under ten years of age. His

church promptly voted to pay his widow five hundred dollars a year, for

seven years, but even with this help the family was so poor that in cold

weather it was noticed that Ralph and his brother went to school on

alternate days. The boys divined the reason, and were cruel enough to call

out, "Whose turn is it to wear the coat to-day?" But the mother struggled

heroically with poverty, and gave her sons a good education. Ralph Waldo

entered Harvard in 1817. He saved the cost of his lodging by being

appointed "President's Freshman," as the official message bearer was

called, and earned most of his board by waiting on the table at the college

Commons.

Emerson was descended from such a long line of clergymen that it was

natural for him to decide to be a minister. After graduating at Harvard and

taking a course in theology, he received a call from Cotton Mather's (p.

46) church and preached there for a short time; but he soon resigned

because he could not conscientiously conform to some of the customs of the

church. Although he occasionally occupied pulpits for a few years after

this, the greater part of his time for the rest of his life was spent in

writing and lecturing.

When he was temporarily preaching in Concord, New Hampshire, in 1827, he

met Miss Ellen Tucker, then sixteen years old. This meeting was for two

reasons a noteworthy event in his life. In the first place, her inspiration

aided in the development of his poetical powers. He seemed to hear the

children of Nature say to her:--

"Thou shalt command us all,--

April's cowslip, summer's clover,

To the gentian in the fall,

Blue-eyed pet of blue-eyed lover."

[Illustration: ELLEN TUCKER]

His verses tell how the flower and leaf and berry and rosebud ripening into

rose had seemed to copy her. He married her in 1829 and wrote the

magnificent prophecy of their future happiness in the poem beginning:--

"And Ellen, when the graybeard years,"

a poem which he could not bear to have published in his lifetime, for Mrs.

Emerson lived but a few years after their marriage. In the second place, in

addition to stimulating his poetical activity, his wife's help did not end

with her death; for she left him a yearly income of twelve hundred dollars,

without which he might never have secured the leisure necessary to enable

him "to live in all the faculties of his soul" and to become famous in

American literature.

In the fall of 1833 he sailed for Europe, going by way of the

Mediterranean. Returning by way of England, he met Coleridge, Wordsworth,

and Carlyle, whose influence he had already felt. His visit to Carlyle led

to a lifelong friendship. Emerson helped to bring out an American edition

of the _Sartor Resartus_ (1836) before it was published in England.

[Illustration: EMERSON'S STUDY]

After returning from Europe, Emerson permanently settled at Concord,

Massachusetts, the most famous literary town of its size in the United

States. The appreciation of the Concord people for their home is shown by

the naive story, told by a member of Emerson's family, of a fellow townsman

who read of the rapidly rising price of building lots in Chicago, and

remarked, "Can't hardly believe that any lands can be worth so much money,

so far off." After Henry D. Thoreau (p. 194) had received a medal at school

for proficiency in geography, he went home and asked his mother if Boston

was located in Concord. It was to Concord that Emerson brought his second

wife, Lidian Jackson Emerson, whom he married in 1835. In Concord he wrote

his most famous _Essays_, and from there he set out on his various

lecturing tours. There he could talk daily to celebrities like Nathaniel

Hawthorne, Henry Thoreau, and Bronson Alcott. Louisa May Alcott relates

that when eight years old she was sent to the Emerson home to inquire about

the health of his oldest son, a boy of five. Emerson answered her knock,

and replied, "Child, he is dead!" Years later she wrote, "I never have

forgotten the anguish that made a familiar face so tragical, and gave those

few words more pathos than the sweet lamentation of the _Threnody_" Like

Milton and Tennyson, Emerson voiced his grief in an elegy, to which he gave

the title _Threnody_. In this poem the great teacher of optimism wrote:--

"For this losing is true dying;

This is lordly man's down-lying,

This his slow but sure reclining,

Star by star his world resigning."

Aside from domestic incidents, his life at Concord was uneventful. As he

was by nature averse to contests, he never took an extreme part in the

antislavery movement, although he voiced his feelings against slavery, even

giving antislavery lectures, when he thought the occasion required such

action. His gentleness and tenderness were inborn qualities. Oliver Wendell

Holmes said that Emerson removed men's "idols from their pedestals so

tenderly that it seemed like an act of worship."

He widened his influence by substituting the platform for the pulpit, and

year after year he enlarged his circle of hearers. He lectured in New

England, the South, and the West. Sometimes these lecture tours kept him

away from home the entire winter. In 1847 he lectured in England and

Scotland. He visited Carlyle again, and for four days listened to "the

great and constant stream" of his talk. On this second trip abroad, Emerson

met men like De Quincey, Macaulay, Thackeray, and Tennyson. Emerson gained

such fame in the mother country that, long after he had returned, he was

nominated for the Lord Rectorship of Glasgow University and received five

hundred votes against seven hundred for Disraeli, one of England's best

known statesmen.

Something of his character and personality may be learned from the accounts

of contemporary writers. James Russell Lowell, who used to go again and

again to hear him, even when the subject was familiar, said, "We do not go

to hear what Emerson says so much as to hear Emerson." Hawthorne wrote, "It

was good to meet him in the wood paths or sometimes in our avenue with that

pure intellectual gleam diffusing about his presence like the garment of a

shining one." Carlyle speaks of seeing him "vanish like an angel" from his

lonely Scotch home.

Emerson died in 1882 and was buried near Hawthorne, in Sleepy Hollow

cemetery at Concord, on the "hilltop hearsed with pines." Years before he

had said, "I have scarce a daydream on which the breath of the pines has

not blown and their shadow waved." The pines divide with an unhewn granite

boulder the honor of being his monument.

EARLY PROSE.--Before he was thirty-five, Emerson had produced some prose

which, so far as America is concerned, might be considered epoch-making in

two respects: (1) in a new philosophy of nature, not new to the world, but

new in the works of our authors and fraught with new inspiration to

Americans; and (2) in a new doctrine of self-reliance and intellectual

independence for the New World.

[Illustration: EMERSON'S GRAVE, CONCORD]

In 1836 he published a small volume entitled _Nature_, containing fewer

than a hundred printed pages, but giving in embryo almost all the peculiar,

idealistic philosophy that he afterwards elaborated. By "Nature" he

sometimes means everything that is not his own soul, but he also uses the

word in its common significance, and talks of the beauty in cloud, river,

forest, and flower. Although _Nature_ is written in prose, it is evident

that the author is a poet. He says:--

"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."

Emerson tried to make men feel that the beauty of the universe is the

property of every individual, but that the many divest themselves of their

heritage. When he undertook to tell Americans how to secure a warranty deed

to the beauties of nature, he specially emphasized the moral element in the

process. The student who fails to perceive that Emerson is one of the great

moral teachers has studied him to little purpose. To him all the processes

of nature "hint or thunder to man the laws of right and wrong, and echo the

Ten Commandments." In _Nature_, he says:--

"All things with which we deal, preach to us. What is a farm but a

mute gospel? The chaff and the wheat, weeds and plants, blight,

rain, insects, sun,--it is a sacred emblem from the first furrow of

spring to the last stack which the snow of winter overtakes in the

fields."

In _Nature_, Emerson sets forth his idealistic philosophy. "Idealism sees

the world in God" is with him an axiom. This philosophy seems to him to

free human beings from the tyranny of materialism, to enable them to use

matter as a mere symbol in the solution of the soul's problems, and to make

the world conformable to thought. His famous sentence in this connection

is, "The sensual man conforms thoughts to things; the poet conforms things

to his thoughts."

In _The American Scholar_, an address delivered at Cambridge in 1837,

Emerson announced what Oliver Wendell Holmes calls "our intellectual

Declaration of Independence." Tocqueville, a gifted Frenchman who visited

America in 1831, wrote: "I know no country in which there is so little

independence of opinion and freedom of discussion as in America.... If

great writers have not existed in America, the reason is very simply given

in the fact that there can be no literary genius without freedom of

opinion, and freedom of opinion does not exist in America." Harriet

Martineau, an English woman, who came to America in 1830, thought that the

subservience to opinion in and around Boston amounted to a sort of mania.

We have already seen how Cooper in his early days deferred to English taste

(p. 127), and how Andrew Jackson in his rough way proved something of a

corrective (p. 148).

Emerson proceeded to deal such subserviency a staggering blow. He denounced

this "timid, imitative, tame spirit," emphasized the new importance given

to the single person, and asked, "Is it not the chief disgrace in the world

not to be a unit;--not to be reckoned one character;--not to yield that

peculiar fruit which each man was created to bear; but to be reckoned in

the gross, in the hundred, or the thousand, of the party, the section, to

which we belong, and our opinion predicted geographically, as the North, or

the South?" Then followed his famous declaration to Americans, "We will

walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our

own minds."

No American author has done more to exalt the individual, to inspire him to

act according to his own intuitions and to mold the world by his own will.

Young Americans especially listened to his call, "O friend, never strike

sail to a fear! Come into port greatly, or sail with God the seas."

ESSAYS.--The bulk of Emerson's work consists of essays, made up in large

part from lectures. In 1841 he published a volume, known as _Essays, First

Series_, and in 1844, another volume, called _Essays, Second Series_. Other

volumes followed from time to time, such as _Miscellanies_ (1849),

_Representative Men_ (1850), _English Traits_ (1856), _The Conduct of Life_

(1860), _Society and Solitude_ (1870). While the _First Series_ of these

_Essays_ is the most popular, one may find profitable reading and even

inspiring passages scattered through almost all of his works, which

continued to appear for more than forty years.

When we examine his _Essays, First Series_, we find that the volume is

composed of short essays on such subjects as _History_, _Self-Reliance_,

_Friendship_, _Heroism_, and the _Over-Soul_. If we choose to read

_Self-Reliance_, one of his most typical essays, we shall find that the

sentences, or the clauses which take the place of sentences, are short,

vigorous, and intended to reach the attention through the ear. For

instance, he says in this essay:--

"There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the

conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that

he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion."

Before we have finished _Self-Reliance_, he has made us feel that, with the

exercise of self-trust, new powers will appear; that a man should not

postpone his life, but live now; that a man is weak if he expects aid from

others; that discontent is want of self-reliance.

We pick up another volume of essays, _Society and Solitude_, and wonder

whether we shall read _Success_, or _Books_, or _Civilization_, or any one

of nine others. While we are turning the pages, we see this sentence:--

"Hitch your wagon to a star,"

and we decide to read _Civilization_.

"Now that is the wisdom of a man, in every instance of his labor, to

hitch his wagon to a star, and see his chore done by the gods

themselves. ... We cannot bring the heavenly powers to us, but, if

we will only choose our jobs in directions in which they travel,

they will undertake them with the greatest pleasure.... Let us not

lie and steal. No god will help. We shall find all their teams going

the other way."

The youth is to be pitied if this does not quicken his determination to

choose his work in the direction in which the aiding forces of the universe

are traveling.

Some of Emerson's best social philosophy may be found in the essay,

_Considerations by the Way_, published in the volume called _The Conduct of

Life_. His _English Traits_ records in a vigorous, interesting,

common-sense way his impressions from his travels in the mother country.

The English find in this volume some famous sentences, which they love to

quote, such as,--

"That which lures a solitary American in the woods with the wish to

see England, is the moral peculiarity of the Saxon race,--its

commanding sense of right and wrong,--the love and devotion to

that,--this is the imperial trait which arms them with the sceptre

of the globe."

POETRY.--Emerson's verse is noteworthy for its exposition (1) of nature and

(2) of his transcendental philosophy. He produced a comparatively small

amount of poetry, but much more than he is popularly supposed to have

written. Some of his verse is of a high degree of excellence; in fact, his

nature poetry deserves to be ranked with the best that America has

produced. Like Bryant, Emerson loves the forest. He says:--

"I go to the god of the wood

To fetch his word to men."

In _The Poet_, we see how great he thought the poet's debt to communion

with nature:--

"The gods talk in the breath of the woods,

They talk in the shaken pine,

And fill the long reach of the old seashore

With dialogue divine;

And the poet who overhears

Some random word they say

Is the fated man of men

Whom the ages must obey."

Hawthorne saw Emerson one August day, wandering in Sleepy Hollow near

Concord, and wrote, "He appeared to have had a pleasant time; for he said

there were Muses in the woods to-day and whispers to be heard in the

breezes." When Emerson was twenty-four years old, he wrote the following

lines, which show the new feeling of mystic companionship with nature:--

"These trees and stones are audible to me,

These idle flowers, that tremble in the wind,

I understand their faery syllables."

His verses make us feel how nature enriches human life, increases its joys,

and lessens its sorrows. What modern lover of nature has voiced a more

heartfelt, unaffected appreciation of her ministrations than may be found

in these lines from Emerson's _Musketaquid_?--

"All my hurts

My garden spade can heal. A woodland walk,

A quest of river grapes, a mocking thrush,

A wild rose or rock-loving columbine,

Salve my worst wounds."

From reading his best nature poem, _Woodnotes_, first published in The

Dial, an appreciative person may find it easy to become

"Lover of all things alive,

Wonderer at all he meets,"

to feel that in the presence of nature, every day is the best day of the

year, and possibly even to sing with Emerson of any spring or summer day:--

"'Twas one of the charmed days

When the genius of God doth flow;

The wind may alter twenty ways,

A tempest cannot blow;

It may blow north, it still is warm;

Or south, it still is clear;

Or east, it smells like a clover farm;

Or west, no thunder fear."

All who love nature or who wish to become interested in her should read at

least his _Woodnotes_, _The Humble Bee_, _The Rhodora_, _Each and All_,

_The Snow Storm,_ and _To Ellen at the South_.

Some of his philosophy may be found in poems like _The Problem_ (1839),

_The Sphinx_ (1841), and _Brahma_ (1857). The immanence of God in

everything, in the sculptor's hand, for instance, is well expressed in

_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 Sphinx_ thus expresses one of Emerson's favorite thoughts:--

"To vision profounder,

Man's spirit must dive,"

and concludes with the Sphinx's thought-provoking statement:-

"Who telleth one of my meanings,

Is master of all I am."

This line in _Brahma_:--

"I am the doubter and the doubt,"

shows his belief in the unity of all things, his conviction that all

existence and action result from one underlying force. His own personal

philosophy, that which actuated him in dealing with his fellow-men, is

expressed in the following lines, which are worthy a place in the active

memory of every American:--

"Life is too short to waste

In critic peep or cynic bark,

Quarrel or reprimand:

'Twill soon be dark."

While we are enjoying his poetry, we feel its limitations. Having slight

ear for music, he often wrote halting lines. Sometimes his poetic flight is

marked by too sudden a descent, but we shall often find in his verse rare

jewels, such as:--

"When Duty whispers low, '_Thou must_,'

The youth replies, '_I can._'"

These lines seemed to Oliver Wendell Holmes, the moment he saw them, as if

they had been "carved on marble for a thousand years." Emerson's poetry

does not pulsate with warm human feeling, but it "follows the shining trail

of the ethereal," the ideal, and the eternal. His prose overshadows his

poetry, but no one without natural poetical ability of a high order could

have written the lines:--

"O tenderly the haughty day

Fills his blue urn with fire,"

or even have seen

"The frolic architecture of the snow."

GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS.--The central aim of Emerson's writing is moral

development. He is America's greatest ethical teacher. He thus voices his

fixed belief:--

"A breath of will blows eternally through the universe of

souls in the direction of the Right and Necessary."

This belief gives rise to his remarkable optimism for the future, to his

conviction that evil is but a stepping stone to good.

In a material age he is the great apostle of the spiritual. "Will you not

tolerate," he asks, "one or two solitary voices in the land, speaking for

thoughts not marketable or perishable?" To him "mind is the only reality,"

and his great man is never the one who can merely alter matter, but who can

change our state of mind. He believed in reaching truth, guided by

intuition. He would not argue to maintain his positions. He said that he

did not know what argument signified with reference to a thought. To him a

thought was just as natural a product as a rose and did not need argument

to prove or justify its existence. Much of his work is tinged with Plato's

philosophy.

Of all American writers, he is the most inspiring teacher of the young. One

of his chief objects is, in his own phrase, "to help the young soul, add

energy, inspire hope, and blow the coals into a useful flame; to redeem

defeat by new thought, by firm action." John Tyndall, the eminent English

scientist, declared that the reading of two men, Carlyle and Emerson, had

made him what he was. He said to his students: "I never should have gone

through Analytical Geometry and Calculus, had it not been for these men. I

never should have become a physical investigator, and hence without them I

should not have been here to-day. They told me what I ought to do in a way

that caused me to do it, and all my consequent intellectual action is to be

traced to this purely moral force." After hearing one of Emerson's

lectures, James Russell Lowell wrote, "Were we enthusiasts? I hope and

believe we were, and am thankful to the man who made us worth something for

once in our lives."

Few authors, excepting Shakespeare, have more of the quality of

universality in their writings. Many things in Emerson will fit certain

stages of individual development as well a thousand years hence as to-day

and be as applicable to the moral improvement of the Chinese as of

Americans. If he is not as much read in the future, it will be largely due

to the fact that his most inspiring subject matter has been widely diffused

through modern thought.

Emerson's style is condensed. He spoke of his own paragraphs as

incompressible, "each sentence an infinitely repellent particle." Because

of this condensation, it is best not to read more than one essay at a time.

Years ago some joker said that Emerson's _Essays_ could be read as well

backward as forward, because there was no connection between the sentences.

The same observation could have been made with almost equal truth about

_Proverbs_, some of Bacon's _Essays_, Polonius's _Advice to Laertes_, parts

of Hamlet's _Soliloquy_, and, in general, about any condensed sentences

that endeavor to convey a complete, striking truth. Lowell remarks acutely:

"Did they say he was disconnected? So were the stars ... And were _they_

not knit together by a higher logic than our mere sense could master?" We

should look for unity and connection in Emerson's chosen subject matter and

trend of thought.

We must not forget that Emerson has in his prose as well as in his verse

many of the general characteristics of a poet. In his _Essays_, he

sometimes avails himself of the poetic license to be obscure and

contradictory and to present philosophy that will not walk on all fours.

When we examine some of the best passages on nature in his early prose

(_e.g._ p. 158), we shall find that they are highly poetical.

Much of his verse is filled with the charm of nature and shows here and

there remarkable power of putting great riches in a little room, although

there may be intervening waste spaces. Critics may say that his poetry

lacks deep feeling, that it is mostly intellectual; if so, it is nobly

intellectual. Both his poetry and prose, to use an Emersonian expression,

"sail the seas with God."

HENRY DAVID THOREAU, 1817-1862

[Illustration: HENRY DAVID THOREAU]

LIFE.--Henry David Thoreau, America's poet-naturalist, was born in 1817 at

Concord, Massachusetts. He was one of the youngest of the famous Concord

group of writers and the only one who could claim Concord as his birthplace

He was a lifelong student of nature, and he loved the district around

Concord. As a boy he knew its woods and streams because he had hunted and

fished in them. After his graduation from Harvard in 1837, he substituted

for the fishing rod and gun, the spyglass, microscope, measuring tape, and

surveying instruments, and continued his out-of-door investigations.

[Illustration: THOREAU'S SPY-GLASS, FLUTE, ETC.]

He taught school with his brother and lectured, but in order to add to his

slender income also did work unusual for a Harvard graduate, such as odd

jobs of carpentering, planting trees, and surveying. He also assisted his

father in his business of pencil making, and together they made the best

pencils in New England. Whatever he undertook, he did thoroughly. He had no

tolerance for the shoddy or for compromises. Exact workmanship was part of

his religion. "Drive a nail home," he writes in _Walden_, "and clinch it so

faithfully that you can wake up in the night and think of your work with

satisfaction."

Like so many of the transcendentalists, Thoreau desired to surround his

life with a "wide margin of leisure" in order that he might live in his

higher faculties and not be continuously dwarfed with the mere drudgery of

earning his sustenance. He determined to divest himself of as many of the

burdens of civilization as possible, to lead the simple life, and to waste

the least possible time in the making of mere money. The leisure thus

secured, he spent in studying birds, plants, trees, fish, and other objects

of nature, in jotting down a record of his experiences, and in writing

books.

[Illustration: SITE OF THOREAU'S HUT, WALDEN POND]

Since he did not marry and incur responsibilities for others, he was free

to choose his own manner of life. His regular habit was to reserve half of

every day for walking in the woods; but for two years and two months he

lived alone in the forest, in a small house that he himself built upon a

piece of Emerson's property beside Walden Pond, about a mile south of

Concord. Thoreau found that he could earn enough in six weeks to support

himself in this simple way for the rest of the year. He thus acquired the

leisure to write books that are each year read with increasing interest.

The record of his life at Walden forms the basis for his best known work. A

few people practice the return to nature for a short time, but Thoreau

spent his available life with nature.

He was a pronounced individualist, carrying out Emerson's doctrine by

becoming independent of others' opinions. What he thought right, he said or

did. He disapproved, for example, of slavery, and consequently refused to

pay his poll tax to a government that upheld slavery. When he was

imprisoned because of non-payment, Emerson visited him and asked, "Why are

you here, Henry?" Thoreau merely replied, "Why are you _not_ here?"

His intense individualism made him angular, and his transcendental love of

isolation caused him to declare that he had never found "the companion that

was so companionable as solitude"; but he was, nevertheless, spicy,

original, loyal to friends, a man of deep family affection, stoical in his

ability to stand privations, and Puritanic in his conviction about the

moral aim of life. His last illness, induced by exposure to cold, confined

him for months away from the out of doors that he loved. In 1862, at the

age of forty-five, he said, as he lay on his deathbed, "When I was a very

little boy, I learned that I must die, and I set that down, so, of course,

I am not disappointed now." He was buried not far from Emerson's lot in the

famous Sleepy Hollow cemetery at Concord.

WORKS.--Only two of his books were published during his lifetime. These

were _A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers_ (1849) and _Walden_

(1854). The first of these, usually referred to as _The Week_, is the

record of a week spent in a rowboat on the rivers mentioned in the title.

The clearness and exactness of the descriptions are remarkable. Whenever he

investigated nature, he took faithful notes so that when he came to write a

more extended description or a book, he might have something more definite

than vague memory impressions on which to rely. When he describes in _The

Week_ a mere patch of the river bank, this definiteness of observation is

manifest:--

"The dead limbs of the willow were rounded and adorned by the

climbing milkania, _Milkania scandens_, which filled every

crevice in the leafy bank, contrasting agreeably with the gray bark

of its supporter and the balls of the button-bush."

This book did not prove popular, and almost three fourths of the edition

were left on his hands. This unfortunate venture caused him to say, "I have

now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which

were written by myself."

_Walden_ is the book by which Thoreau is best known. It is crisper,

livelier, more concise and humorous, and less given to introspective

philosophizing than _The Week_. _Walden_, New England's _Utopia_, is the

record of Thoreau's experiment in endeavoring to live an ideal life in the

forest. This book differs from most of its kind in presenting actual life,

in not being mainly evolved from the inner consciousness on the basis of a

very little experience. He thus states the reason why he withdrew to the

forest:--

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front

only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what

it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had

not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so

dear."

[Illustration: FURNITURE FROM THOREAU'S CABIN, WALDEN POND]

His food during his twenty-six months of residence there cost him

twenty-seven cents a week. "I learned," he says, "from my two years'

experience that it would cost incredibly little trouble to obtain one's

necessary food, even in this latitude; that a man may use as simple a diet

as the animals, and yet retain health and strength.... I am convinced both

by faith and experience that to maintain one's self on this earth is not a

hardship, but a pastime." This book has, directly or indirectly, caused

more to desire the simple life and a return to nature than any other work

in American literature.

In _Walden_ he speaks of himself as a "self-appointed inspector of

snowstorms and rainstorms." His companionship with nature became so

intimate as to cause him to say, "Every little pine needle expanded and

swelled with sympathy and befriended me." When a sparrow alighted upon his

shoulder, he exclaimed, "I felt that I was more distinguished by that

circumstance than I should have been by any epaulet I could have worn."

When nature had some special celebration with the trees, such as decking

them with snow or ice or the first buds of spring, he frequently tramped

eight or ten miles "to keep an appointment with a beech-tree or a

yellow-birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines." It is amusing to

read how on such a walk he disturbed the daytime slumbers of a large owl,

how the bird opened its eyes wide, "but their lids soon fell again, and he

began to nod," and how a sympathetic hypnotization began to take effect on

Thoreau. "I too," he says, "felt a slumberous influence after watching him

half an hour, as he sat thus with his eyes half open, like a cat, winged

brother of the cat."

In spite of some Utopian philosophy and too much insistence on the

self-sufficiency of the individual, _Walden_ has proved a regenerative

force in the lives of many readers who have not passed the plastic stage.

The book develops a love for even commonplace natural objects, and, like

poetry, discloses a new world of enjoyment. _Walden_ is Thoreau's most

vital combination of his poetic apprehension of wild nature with his

philosophy and aggressive individualism.

Almost all of his work is autobiographical, a record of actual experience.

_The Maine Woods_ (1864), _Cape Cod_ (1865), and _A Yankee in Canada_

(1866) are records of his tramps in the places named in the titles-, but

these works do not possess the interest of _Walden_.

His voluminous manuscript _Journal_ is an almost daily record of his

observations of nature, mingled with his thoughts, from the time when he

left college until his last sickness. At periods for nearly fifty years

after his death, various works have been compiled from this _Journal_. The

volumes published under the titles, _Early Spring in Massachusetts_ (1881),

_Summer_ (1884), _Winter_ (1887), _Autumn_ (1892), and _Notes on New

England Birds_ (1910) were not arranged by him in their present form.

Editors searched his _Journal_ for entries dealing with the same season or

type of life, and put these in the same volume. Sometimes, as, for

instance, in _Winter_, paragraphs separated by an interval of nineteen

years in composition become neighbors. In spite of the somewhat fragmentary

nature of these works, lovers of Thoreau become intensely interested in

them. His _Journal_ in the form in which he left it was finally published

in 1906, in fourteen volumes containing 6811 printed pages. He differs from

the majority of writers because the interest in his work increases with the

passing of the years.

GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS.--Thoreau's object was to discover how to live a

rich, full life with a broad margin of leisure. Intimate companionship with

nature brought this secret to him, and he has taught others to increase the

joys of life from sympathetic observation of everyday occurrences.

A mere unimaginative naturalist may be a bore; but Thoreau regarded nature

with the eyes of a poet. His ear was thrilled with the vesper song of the

whippoorwill, the lisping of the chickadee among the evergreens, and the

slumber call of the toads. For him the bluebird "carries the sky on its

back." The linnets come to him "bearing summer in their natures." When he

asks, "Who shall stand godfather at the christening of the wild apples?"

his reply shows rare poetic appreciation of nature's work:--

"We should have to call in the sunrise and the sunset, the rainbow and

the autumn woods and the wild flowers, and the woodpecker and the purple

finch and the squirrel and the jay and the butterfly, the November

traveler and the truant boy, to our aid."

He is not only a poet-naturalist, but also a philosopher, who shows the

influence of the transcendental school, particularly of Emerson. Some of

Thoreau's philosophy is impractical and too unsocial, but it aims to

discover the underlying basis of enchantment. He thus sums up the

philosophy which his life at Walden taught him:--

"I learned this at least by my experiment--that if one advances

confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the

life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in

common hours.... If you have built castles in the air, your work need not

be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under

them."

The reason why he left Walden shows one of his pronounced transcendental

characteristics, a dread of repetition. He gives an account of only his

first year of life there, and adds, "the second year was similar to it." He

says:--

"I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed

to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more

time for that one. It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall

into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves. I had not

lived there a week before my feet wore a path from my door to the pond

side."

He does not demand that other human beings shall imitate him in devoting

their lives to a study of nature. He says, "Follow your genius closely

enough, and it will not fail to show you a fresh prospect every hour." He

thus expresses his conception of the fundamental basis of happiness in any

of the chosen avenues of life:--

"Our whole life is startlingly moral. There is never an instant's truce

between virtue and vice. Goodness is the only investment that never

fails."

His insistence on the necessity of a moral basis for a happy life is a

characteristic that he shared in common with the great authors of the New

England group, but he had his own individual way of impressing this truth.

He thought life too earnest a quest to tolerate the frivolous or the

dilettante, and he issued his famous warning that no one can "kill time

without injuring eternity." His aim in studying nature was not so much

scientific discovery as the revelation of nature's joyous moral message to

the spiritual life of man. He may have been unable to distinguish between

the song of the wood thrush and the hermit thrush. To him the most

important fact was that the thrush is a rare poet, singing of "the immortal

wealth and vigor that is in the forest." "The thrush sings," says Thoreau,

in his _Journal_, "to make men take higher and truer views of things."

The sterling honesty and directness of Thoreau's character are reflected in

his style. He says, "The one great rule of composition--and if I were a

professor of rhetoric I should insist on this--is to _speak the truth_."

This was his aim in presenting the results of the experience of his soul,

as well as of his senses. If he exaggerated the importance of a certain way

of regarding things, he did so only because he thought the exaggeration was

necessary to secure attention for that particular truth, which would even

then not be apprehended at its full value. His style has a peculiar flavor,

difficult to describe. Lowell's characterization of Thoreau's style has

hardly been surpassed. "His range was narrow, but to be a master is to be a

master. There are sentences of his as perfect as anything in the language,

and thoughts as clearly crystallized; his metaphors and images are always

fresh from the soil."

Thoreau's style shows remarkable power of description. No American has

surpassed him in unique description of the most varied incidents in the

procession of all the seasons. We shall find frequent illustrations of this

power scattered through his _Journal_:--

"_June_ 1, 1857. I hear the note of a bobolink concealed in the top of an

apple tree behind me.... He is just touching the strings of his theorbo,

his glassichord, his water organ, and one or two notes globe themselves

and fall in liquid bubbles from his teeming throat. It is as if he

touched his harp within a vase of liquid melody, and when he lifted it

out, the notes fell like bubbles from the trembling string ... the meadow

is all bespattered with melody. His notes fall with the apple blossoms,

in the orchard."

Even more characteristic is an entry in his _Journal_ for June 11, 1840,

where he tries to fathom the consciousness of the solitary bittern:--

"With its patient study by rocks and sandy capes, has it wrested the

whole of her secret from Nature yet? It has looked out from its dull eye

for so long, standing on one leg, on moon and stars sparkling through

silence and dark, and now what a rich experience is its! What says it of

stagnant pools, and reeds, and damp night fogs? It would be worth while

to look in the eye which has been open and seeing in such hours and in

such solitudes. When I behold that dull yellowish green, I wonder if my

own soul is not a bright invisible green. I would fain lay my eye side by

side with its and learn of it."

In this entry, which was probably never revised for publication, we note

three of his characteristics: his images "fresh from the soil," adding

vigor to his style; his mystic and poetic communion with nature; and the

peculiar transcendental desire to pass beyond human experience and to

supplement it with new revelations of the gospel of nature.

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, 1804-1864

[Illustration: NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE]

ANCESTRY AND EARLY YEARS.--William Hathorne, the ancestor of America's

greatest prose writer, sailed at the age of twenty-three from England on

the ship _Arbella_ with John Winthrop (p. 30), and finally settled at

Salem, Massachusetts. He brought with him a copy of Sir Philip Sidney's

_Arcadia_, a very unusual book for the library of a New England Puritan.

[Illustration: HAWTHORNES BIRTHPLACE, SALEM, MASSACHUSETTS]

John Hathorne, a son of the first settler, was a judge of the poor

creatures who were put to death as witches at Salem in 1692. The great

romance writer says that this ancestor "made himself so conspicuous in the

martyrdom of the witches, that their blood may fairly be said to have left

a stain upon him. ...I, the present writer, as their representative, hereby

take shame upon myself for their sakes, and pray that any curse incurred by

them--as I have heard, and as the dreary and unprosperous condition of the

race, for many a long year back, would argue to exist--may be now and

henceforth removed." Tradition says that the husband of one of the tortured

victims appealed to God to avenge her sufferings and murder. Probably the

ancestral curse hanging over _The House of the Seven Gables_ would not have

been so vividly conceived, if such a curse had not been traditional in the

Hawthorne family.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, the sixth in descent from the first New England

ancestor, and the first of his family to add a "w" to his name, was born in

Salem in 1804. His father, a sea captain, died of a fever at a foreign port

in 1808. Hawthorne's mother was twenty-seven years old at this time, and

for forty years after this sad event, she usually took her meals in her own

room away from her three children. Everybody in that household became

accustomed to loneliness. At the age of fourteen, the boy went to live for

a while on the shore of Sebago Lake, Maine. "I lived in Maine," he said,

"like a bird of the air, so perfect was the freedom I enjoyed. But it was

there I got my cursed habits of solitude." Shyness and aversion to meeting

people became marked characteristics.

His solitariness predisposed him to reading, and we are told that Bunyan's

_Pilgrim's Progress_ and Shakespeare's plays were special favorites.

Spenser's _Faerie Queene_ was the first book that he bought with his own

money. Bunyan and Spenser probably fostered his love of the allegorical

method of presenting truth, a method that is in evidence in the bulk of

Hawthorne's work. He even called his daughter Una, after one of Spenser's

allegorical heroines, and, following the suggestion in the _Faerie Queene_,

gave the name of "Lion" to the large cat that came to her as a playmate.

At the age of seventeen, Hawthorne went to Bowdoin College, Maine, where he

met such students as Longfellow, Franklin Pierce, and Horatio Bridge, in

after years a naval officer, who published in 1893 a delightful volume

called _Personal Reminiscences of Nathaniel Hawthorne_. These friends

changed the course of Hawthorne's life. In his dedication of _The Snow

Image_ to Bridge in 1850, Hawthorne says, "If anybody is responsible for my

being at this day an author, it is yourself."

LITERARY APPRENTICESHIP.--After leaving college, Milton spent nearly six

years in studious retirement; but Hawthorne after graduating at Bowdoin, in

1825, passed in seclusion at Salem a period twice as long. Here he lived

the life of a recluse, frequently postponing his walks until after dark. He

was busy serving his apprenticeship as an author. In 1828 he paid one

hundred dollars for the publication of _Fanshawe_, an unsuccessful short

romance. In mortification he burned the unsold copies, and his rejected

short stories often shared the same fate. He was so depressed that in 1836

his friend Bridge went quietly to a publisher and by guaranteeing him

against loss induced him to bring out Hawthorne's volume entitled

_Twice--Told Tales_.

[Illustration: MISS PEABODYS DRAWING FOR "THE GENTLE BOY"]

The Peabodys of Salem then invited the author to their home, where he met

the artistic Miss Sophia Peabody, who made an illustration for his fine

historical story, _The Gentle Boy_. Of her he wrote, "She is a flower to be

worn in no man's bosom, but was lent from Heaven to show the possibilities

of the human soul." We find that not long after he wrote in his _American

Note-Books_:--

"All that seems most real about us is but the thinnest substance of a

dream,--till the heart be touched. That touch creates us,--then we begin

to be,--thereby we are beings of reality and inheritors of eternity."

He was thinking of Sophia Peabody's creative touch, for he had become

engaged to her.

[Illustration: 'THE OLD MANSE,' HAWTHORNE'S FIRST CONCORD HOME]

Fired with the ambition of making enough money to enable him to marry, he

secured a subordinate position in the Boston customhouse, from which the

spoils system was soon responsible for his discharge. He then invested in

Brook Farm a thousand dollars which he had saved, thinking that this would

prove a home to which he could bring his future wife and combine work and

writing in an ideal way. A year's trial of this life convinced him of his

mistake. He was then thirty eight, and much poorer for his last experiment;

but he withdrew and in a few months married Miss Peabody and took her to

live in the famous Old Manse at Concord. The first entry in his _American

Note-Books_ after this transforming event is:--

"And what is there to write about? Happiness has no succession of events,

because it is a part of eternity, and we have been living in eternity

ever since we came to this old manse. Like Enoch we seem to have been

translated to the other state of being, without having passed through

death."

The history of American literature can record no happier marriage and no

more idyllic life than this couple lived for nearly four years in the Old

Manse. While residing here, Hawthorne wrote another volume, known as

_Mosses from an Old Manse_ (1846). The only serpent to enter that Eden was

poverty. Hawthorne's pen could not support his family. He found himself in

debt before he had finished his fourth year in Concord. Moncure D. Conway,

writing Hawthorne's _Life_ in 1890, the year before American authors were

protected by international copyright, says, "In no case has literature,

pure and simple, ever supported an American author, unless, possibly, if he

were a bachelor." Hawthorne's college friends, Bridge and Pierce, came to

his assistance, and used their influence with President Polk to secure for

Hawthorne the position of surveyor of customs at Salem, with a yearly

salary of twelve hundred dollars.

HIS PRIME AND LATER YEARS.--He kept his position as head customs officer at

Salem for three years. Soon after President Taylor was inaugurated in 1849,

the spoils system again secured Hawthorne's removal. When he came home

dejected with this news, his wife smiled and said, "Oh, then you can write

your book!" _The Scarlet Letter_, published in 1850, was the result. The

publisher printed five thousand copies, all that he had ever expected to

sell, and then ordered the type to be distributed at once. Finding in ten

days, however, that every copy had been sold, he gave the order to have the

type reset and permanent plates made. Hawthorne had at last, at the age of

forty-six, become one of the greatest writers of English prose romance.

From this time he wrote but few short tales.

He left Salem in the year of the publication of _The Scarlet Letter_, never

again to return to it as a place of residence, although his pen continued

to help immortalize his birthplace.

In 1852 he bought of Bronson Alcott in Concord a house since known as the

"Wayside." This was to be Hawthorne's American home during his remaining

years. Here he had a tower room so constructed as to be well-nigh

inaccessible to visitors, and he also had a romantic study bower built in

the pine trees on a hill back of his house.

[Illustration: HAWTHORNE'S PINE STUDY, CONCORD]

His college friend, Pierce, was inaugurated President of the United States

in 1853, and he appointed Hawthorne consul at Liverpool. This consulship

then netted the holder between $5000 and $7000 a year. After nearly four

years' service in this position, he resigned and traveled in Europe with

his family. They lived in Rome sufficiently long for him to absorb the

local color for his romance of _The Marble Faun_. He remained abroad for

seven years. The record of his travels and impressions may be found in his

_English Note-Books_ and in his _French and Italian Note-Books_. _Our Old

Home_, a volume based on his _English Note-Books_, is a more finished

account of his thoughts and experiences in England.

In 1860 he returned quietly to his Concord home. His health was failing,

but he promised to write for the _Atlantic Monthly_ another romance, called

_The Dolliver Romance_. This, however, was never finished, and _The Marble

Faun_ remains the last of his great romances. His health continued to fail,

and in May, 1864, Pierce, thinking that a trip might prove beneficial,

started with him on a journey to the White Mountains. Hawthorne retired for

the night at the hotel in Plymouth, New Hampshire, and the next morning

Pierce found that Hawthorne's wish of dying unawares in his sleep had been

gratified. He had passed away before the completion of his fifty-ninth

year. He was buried underneath the pines in the Sleepy Hollow cemetery at

Concord. His classmate, Longfellow, wrote:--

"There in seclusion and remote from men,

The wizard hand lies cold."

"TWICE TOLD TALES" AND "MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE."--Many do not realize

that these two volumes contain eighty-two tales or sketches and that they

represent the most of Hawthorne's surviving literary work for the first

forty-five years of his life. The title for _Twice-Told Tales_ (1837) was

probably suggested by the line from Shakespeare's _King John:_ "Life is as

tedious as a twice-told tale." The second volume, _Mosses from an Old

Manse_ (1846), took its name from Hawthorne's first Concord home. His last

collection is called _The Snow Image and Other Twice-Told Tales_ (1851).

Each one of these volumes contains some of his short-story masterpieces,

although, taken as a whole, the collection in _Mosses from an Old Manse_

shows the greatest power and artistic finish.

The so-called tales in these volumes are of several different types. (1)

There is the story which presents chiefly allegorical or symbolic truth,

such as _Rappacini's Daughter, The Great Stone Face, The Birthmark, The

Artist of the Beautiful, and The Snow Image._ The last story, one of the

greatest of this class, relates how two children make a companion out of a

snow image, how Jack Frost and the pure west wind endow this image with

life and give them a little "snow sister." She grows more vigorous with

every life-giving breath inhaled from the west wind. She extends her hands

to the snow-birds, and they joyously flock to her. The father of these

children is a deadly literal man. No tale of fairy, no story of dryad, of

Aladdin's lamp, or of winged sandal had ever carried magical meaning to his

unimaginative literal mind, and he proceeds to disenchant the children.

Like Nathan the prophet, Hawthorne wished to say, "Thou art the man," to

some tens of thousands of stupid destroyers of those ideals which bring

something of Eden back to our everyday lives. This story, like so many of

the others, was written with a moral purpose. There are to-day people who

measure their acquaintances by their estimates of this allegorical story.

(2) Another type of Hawthorne's stories illustrates the history of New

England. Such are _The Gentle Boy_, _The Maypole of Merry Mount_,

_Endicotts Red Cross_, and _Lady Eleanore's Mantle_. We may even include in

this list _Young Goodman Brown_, in one sense an unreal and fantastic tale,

but in another, historically true to the Puritanic idea of the orgies of

witches in a forest. If we wish, for instance, to supplement the cold page

of history with a tale that breathes the very atmosphere of the Quaker

persecution of New England, let us open _The Twice-Told Tales_ and read the

story of _The Gentle Boy_, a Quaker child of six, found sobbing on his

father's newly-made grave beside the scaffold under the fir tree. Let us

enter the solemn meeting house, hear the clergyman inveigh against the

Quakers, and sit petrified when, at the end of the sermon, that boy's

mother, like a Daniel entering the lion's den, ascends the pulpit, and

invokes woe upon the Puritans.

(3) We shall occasionally find in these volumes what eighteenth-century

readers of the _Spectator_ would have called a "paper," that is, a

delightful bit of mixed description and narration, "a narrative essay" or

"a sketch," as some prefer to call it. In this class we may include _The

Old Manse_, _The Old Apple-Dealer_, _Sights from a Steeple_, _A Rill from

the Town Pump_, and the masterly _Introduction to The Scarlet Letter_.

_The Old Manse_, the first paper in _Mosses from an Old Manse_, is

excellent. Hawthorne succeeds in taking his readers with him up the

Assabeth River, in a boat made by Thoreau. We agree with Hawthorne that a

lovelier river "never flowed on earth,--nowhere indeed except to lave the

interior regions of a poet's imagination." When we return with him at the

end of that day's excursion, we are almost tempted to say that we can never

again be enslaved as before. We feel that we can say with him:--

"We were so free to-day that it was impossible to be slaves again

tomorrow. When we crossed the threshold of the house or trod the thronged

pavements of a city, still the leaves of the trees that overhang the

Assabeth were whispering to us, 'Be free! Be free.'"

These volumes entitle Hawthorne to be ranked among the greatest of

short-story writers. Like Irving, Hawthorne did not take the air line

directness of narration demanded by the modern short story; but the moral

truth and beauty of his tales will long prove their elixir of life, after

the passing of many a modern short story which has divested itself of

everything except the mere interest in narration.

CHILDREN'S STORIES.--Hawthorne's _Grandfather's Chair_ (1841) is a series

of simple stories of New England history, from the coming of the Mayflower

to the death of Samuel Adams in 1803. Hawthorne's greatest success in

writing for children is to be found in his _A Wonder Book_ (1851) and

_Tanglewood Tales_ (1853). In these volumes he has adapted the old

classical myths to the tastes of American children. His unusual version of

these myths meets two supreme tests. Children like it, and are benefited by

it. Many would rejoice to be young enough again to hear for the first time

the story of _The Golden Touch_,--how Midas prized gold above all things,

how he secured the golden touch, and how the flies that alighted on his

nose fell off little nuggets of gold. What a fine thing we thought the

golden touch until he touched his beautiful little daughter, Marygold! No

sermon could better have taught us that gold is not the thing above all to

be desired.

[Illustration: THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES]

Hawthorne stands in the front rank of a very small number whose writings

continue to appeal to the children of succeeding generations. He loved and

understood children and shared their experiences. He was one of those whose

sixteenth amendment to the Constitution reads, "The rights and caprices of

children in the United States shall not be denied or abridged on account of

age, sex, or formal condition of tutelage."

GREAT ROMANCES.--Hawthorne wrote four long romances: _The Scarlet Letter_

(1850), the scene of which is laid in Boston in Governor Winthrop's time,

_The House of the Seven Gables_ (1851), with the scene laid in Salem, _The

Marble Faun_ (1860), in Rome, and _The Blithedale Romance_ (1852), in an

ideal community similar to Brook Farm. The first three of these works have

a great moral truth to present. Accordingly, the details of scene, plot,

description, and conversation are handled so as to emphasize this central

truth.

_The Scarlet Letter_ was written to show that the consequences of a sin

cannot be escaped and that many different lives are influenced by one wrong

deed. The lives of Hester Prynne, Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, and Roger

Chillingworth are wrecked by the crime in _The Scarlet Letter_. Roger

Chillingworth is transformed into a demon of revenge. So malevolent does he

become that Hester wonders "whether the tender grass of early spring would

not be blighted beneath him." She would not be surprised to see him "spread

bat's wings and flee away." The penalty paid by Arthur Dimmesdale is to

appear to be what he is not, and this is a terrible punishment to his

sensitive nature. The slow steps by which his soul is tortured and darkened

are followed with wonderful clearness, and the agony of his soul alone with

God is presented with an almost Shakespearean pen. The third sufferer is

the beautiful Hester Prynne. Her fate is the most terrible because she not

only writhes under a severe punishment inflicted by the authorities, but

also suffers from daily, even hourly, remorse. To help assuage her grief,

and to purify her soul, Hester becomes the self-effacing good Samaritan of

the village. Her uncomplaining courage, noble beauty, and self-sacrifice

make her the center of this tragic story.

[Illustration: CUSTOMERS OF ONE CENT SHOP, "HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES"]

Shakespeare proposed no harder problem than the one in _The Scarlet

Letter_,--the problem of the expiation of sin. The completeness with which

everything is subordinated to the moral question involved, and the

intensity with which this question is treated, show the Puritanic

temperament and the imaginative genius of the author. Hawthorne is Puritan

in the earnestness of his purpose, but he is wholly the artist in carrying

out his design. Such a combination of Puritan and artist has given to

American literature in _The Scarlet Letter_ a masterpiece, somber yet

beautiful, ethical yet poetic, incorporating both the spirit of a past time

and the lessons of an eternal present. This incomparable romance is unified

in conception, symmetrical in form, and nobly simple in expression.

Far less somber than _The Scarlet Letter_ is _The House of the Seven

Gables_. This has been called a romance of heredity, because the story

shows the fulfillment of a curse upon the distant descendants of the

wrongdoer, old Judge Pyncheon. The present inhabitants of the Pyncheon

mansion, who are among the worst sufferers, are Hepzibah Pyncheon and her

brother Clifford. Hawthorne's pages contain nothing more pathetic than the

picture of helplessness presented by these two innocent souls, bearing a

burden of crime not their own. The brightness of the story comes through

the simple, joyous, home-making nature of Phoebe Pyncheon. She it is who

can bring a smile to Clifford's face and can attract custom to Hepzibah's

cent shop. Hawthorne never loses sight of his purpose. The curse finds its

last victim, and the whole story is a slow preparation for this event. The

scenes, however, in which Phoebe, that "fair maker of sunshine," reigns as

queen, are so peaceful and attractive, the cent shop, which Hepzibah is

forced to open for support, offers so many opportunities for comic as well

as pathetic incidents, and the outcome of the story is so satisfactory that

it is the brightest of all Hawthorne's long romances.

In _The Marble Faun_, Hawthorne's last complete romance, the Puritan

problem of sin is transplanted to Italian soil. The scene is laid in Rome,

where the art of Michael Angelo and Raphael, the secret orders of the

Church, the tragic history of the eternal city, with its catacombs and

ruins, furnish a rich and varied background for the story. So faithfully

indeed are the galleries, churches, and historic corners of Rome described,

that _The Marble Faun_ has served as a guide for the cultured visitor. This

expression of opinion by the late A. P. Stanley (1815-1881), a well-known

author and dean of Westminster Abbey, is worth remembering: "I have read it

seven times. I read it when it appeared, as I read everything from that

English master. I read it again when I expected to visit Rome, then when on

the way to Rome, again while in Rome, afterwards to revive my impressions

of Rome. Recently I read it again because I wanted to." In this historic

setting, Hawthorne places four characters: Donatello, the faun, Miriam, the

beautiful and talented young artist, Kenyon, the American sculptor, and

Hilda, the Puritan maid who tends the lamp of the Virgin in her tower among

the doves and makes true copies of the old masters. From the beginning of

the story some mysterious evil power is felt, and this power gains fuller

and fuller ascendency over the characters. What that is the author does not

say. It seems the very spirit of evil itself that twines its shadow about

human beings and crushes them if they are not strong enough to resist.

[Illustration: HILDA'S TOWER, VIA PORTOGHESE, ROME]

In _The Scarlet Letter_ it was shown that the moral law forces evildoers to

pay the last farthing of the debt of sinning. _In The Marble Faun_ the

effect of sin in developing character is emphasized, and Donatello, the

thoughtless creature of the woods is portrayed in his stages of growth

after his moral nature has first been roused by a great crime. The question

is raised, Can the soul be developed and strengthened by sin? The problem

is handled with Hawthorne's usual moral earnestness of purpose, and is

expressed in his easiest and most flexible style. Nevertheless this work

has not the suppressed intensity, completeness of outline, and artistic

symmetry possessed by _The Scarlet Letter_. The chief defects of _The

Marble Faun_ are a vagueness of form, a distracting variety of scene, and a

lack of the convincing power of reality. The continued popularity of this

romance, however, is justly due to its poetic conception, its atmosphere of

ancient mystery, and its historic Roman background.

_The Blithedale Romance_ and the cooperative settlement described in it

were suggested to Hawthorne by his Brook Farm experience, although he

disclaims any attempt to present an actual picture of that community. The

idea of the division of labor, the transcendental conversations, and many

of the incidents owe their origin to his sojourn at Brook Farm (p. 166).

Although _The Blithedale Romance_ does not equal the three romances already

described, it contains one character, Zenobia, who is the most original and

dramatic of Hawthorne's men and women, and some scenes which are as

powerful as any drawn by him.

GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS.--Hawthorne gave the Puritan to literature. This

achievement suggests Irving's canonization of the Knickerbockers and

Cooper's of the pioneer and the Indian. Himself a Unitarian and out of

sympathy with the Puritans' creed, Hawthorne nevertheless says, "And yet,

let them scorn me as they will, strong traits of their nature have

intertwined themselves with mine." He and they had the same favorite

subject,--the human soul in its relation to the judgment day. He could no

more think of sin unrelated to the penalty, than of a serpent without shape

or color. Unlike many modern novelists, his work never wanders beyond a

world where the Ten Commandments rule. Critics have well said that he never

painted a so-called man of the world, because such a man, by Hawthorne's

definition, would really be a man out of the great moral world, which to

Hawthorne seemed the only real world.

He is preeminently a writer of romance. He was always powerfully influenced

by such romantic materials as may be found in the world of witchcraft and

the supernatural, or such as are suggested by dim foreshadowings of evil

and by the many mysteries for which human philosophy does not account. For

this reason, his works are removed from the commonplace and enveloped in an

imaginative atmosphere. He subjects his use of these romantic

materials--the unusual, the improbable, and the supernatural--to only one

touchstone. He is willing to avail himself of these, so long as he does

not, in his own phrase, "swerve aside from the truth of the human heart."

His stories are frequently symbolic. He selects some object, token, or

utterance, in harmony with his purpose, and uses it as a symbol to

prefigure some moral action or result. The symbol may be an embroidered

mantle, indicative of pride; a butterfly, typical of emergence from a dead

chrysalis to a state of ideal beauty; or the words of a curse, which

prophesy a ghastly death. His choice of scene, plot, and character is in

harmony with the moral purpose indicated by the symbol. Sometimes this

purpose is dimly veiled in allegory, but even when his stories are sermons

in allegory, like _The Snow Image_, he so invests them with poetic fancy or

spiritual beauty as to make them works of art. His extensive use of

symbolism and allegory has been severely criticized. It is unfortunate that

he did not learn earlier in life what _The Scarlet Letter_ should have

taught him, that he did not need to rely on these supports. He becomes one

of the great masters when he paints character from the inside with a touch

so vivid and compelling that the symbolism and the allegory vanish like a

dissolving picture and reveal human forms. When he has breathed into them

the creator's breath of life, he walks with them hand in hand in this lost

Eden. He ascends the pillory with Hester Prynne, and writhes with Arthur

Dimmesdale's agony. He plays on the seashore with little Pearl. He shares

Hepzibah Pyncheon's solitude and waits on the customers in the cent shop

with Phoebe. He eats two dromedaries and a gingerbread locomotive with

little Ned Higgins.

Hawthorne did not care much for philosophical systems, and never concerned

himself with the intricacies of transcendentalism. Yet he was affected by

that philosophy, as is shown by his personal isolation and that of his

characters. His intense belief in individuality is also a transcendental

doctrine. He holds that the individual is his own jailer, his own

liberator, the preserver or loser of his own Eden. Moral regeneration seems

to him an individual, not a social, affair.

His style is easy, exact, flowing, and it shows the skill of a literary

artist. He never strains after effect, never uses excessive ornament, never

appears hurried. There was not another nineteenth-century prose master on

either side of the Atlantic who could in fewer words or simpler language

have secured the effect produced by _The Scarlet Letter_. He wished to be

impressive in describing Phoebe, that sunbeam in _The House of the Seven

Gables_, but he says simply:--

"She was like a prayer, offered up in the homeliest beauty of one's

mother tongue."

Sincerity is the marked characteristic of this simplicity in style, and it

makes an impression denied to the mere striver after effect, however

cunning his art.

A writer of imperishable romances, a sympathetic revealer of the soul, a

great moralist, a master of style, Hawthorne is to be classed with the

greatest masters of English fiction. His artist's hand

"Wrought in a sad sincerity;

Himself from God he could not free."

HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW, 1807-1882

[Illustration: HENRY W. LONGFELLOW]

LIFE--Longfellow, the most widely read of American poets, was born in

Portland, Maine, in 1807. His father was a Harvard graduate, and his

mother, like Bryant's, was descended from John and Priscilla Alden of

Plymouth. Longfellow, when three years old, began to go to school, and,

like Bryant, he published at the ripe age of thirteen his first poem,

_Battle of Lovell's Pond_, which appeared in the _Portland Gazette_.

Portland made a great impression on the boy. To his early life there is due

the love of the sea, which colors so much of his poetry. In his poem, _My

Lost Youth_, he says:--

"I remember the black wharves and the slips,

And the sea tides tossing free;

And Spanish sailors with bearded lips,

And the beauty and mystery of the ships,

And the magic of the sea."

He went to Bowdoin College, Maine, where he had Nathaniel Hawthorne for a

classmate. In his senior year Longfellow wrote to his father, "I most

eagerly aspire after future eminence in literature; my whole soul burns

most ardently for it, and every earthly thought centers in it." His father

replied, "There is not enough wealth in this country to afford

encouragement and patronage to merely literary men. And as you have not had

the fortune ... to be born rich, you must adopt a profession which will

afford you subsistence as well as reputation." The son then chose the law,

saying, "This will support my real existence; literature, my ideal one."

Bowdoin College, however, came to the rescue, and offered him the

professorship of modern languages on condition that he would go abroad for

study. He accepted the offer, and remained abroad three years. His travel

sketches on this trip were published in book form in 1835, under the title

of _Outre-Mer: A Pilgrimage beyond the Sea_. This is suggestive of the

_Sketch Book_ (p. 119), the earliest book which he remembered reading.

After five years' service at Bowdoin, he accepted Harvard's offer of the

professorship of modern languages and again went abroad. This journey was

saddened by the death of his first wife. His prose romance; _Hyperion_, was

one of the fruits of this sojourn abroad. The second Mrs. Longfellow, whose

real name was Frances Appleton, appears in this book under the name of Mary

Ashburton. Her father bought the Craigie House, which had been Washington's

headquarters in Cambridge, and gave it to Longfellow as a residence. In

1854, after eighteen years' teaching at Harvard, he resigned, for his means

were then ample to enable him to devote his full time to literature.

[Illustration: LONGFELLOW'S HOME, CRAIGIE HOUSE, CAMBRIDGE]

From 1854 until 1861 he lived in reality the ideal existence of his

youthful dreams. In 1861 his wife's summer dress caught fire, and although

he struggled heroically to save her, she died the next day, and he himself

was so severely burned that he could not attend her funeral. Years

afterwards he wrote:--

"Here in this room she died; and soul more white

Never through martyrdom of fire was led

To its repose."

Like Bryant, he sought refuge in translating. Longfellow chose Dante, and

gave the world the fine rendering of his _Divine Comedy_ (1867).

Outside of these domestic sorrows, Longfellow's life was happy and

prosperous. His home was blessed with attractive children. Loved by

friends, honored by foreigners, possessed of rare sweetness and lovableness

of disposition, he became the most popular literary man in America. He

desired freedom from turmoil and from constant struggling for daily bread,

and this freedom came to him in fuller measure than to most men.

The children of the country felt that he was their own special poet. The

public schools of the United States celebrated his seventy-fifth birthday,

February 27, 1882. Less than a month later he died, and was laid to rest in

Mount Auburn cemetery, Cambridge.

[Illustration: LONGFELLOW AS A YOUNG MAN]

"LAUREATE OF THE COMMON HUMAN HEART."--"God must love the common people,"

said President Lincoln, "because he has made so many of them." Longfellow

wrote for "the common human heart." In him the common people found a poet

who could gild the commonplace things of life and make them seem more

attractive, more easily borne, more important, more full of meaning.

In his first published volume of poems, _Voices of the Night_ (1839), he

shows his aim distinctly in such poems as _A Psalm of Life_. Its lines are

the essence of simplicity, but they have instilled patience and noble

purpose into many a humble human soul. The two stanzas beginning

"Life is real! Life is earnest,"

and

"Lives of great men all remind us,"

can be repeated by many who know but little poetry, and these very stanzas,

as well as many others like them, have affected the lives of large numbers

of people. Those born a generation ago not infrequently say that the

following stanza from _The Ladder of St. Augustine_ (1850) has been the

stepping-stone to their success in life:--

"The heights by great men reached and kept

Were not attained by sudden flight,

But they, while their companions slept,

Were toiling upward in the night."