CHAPTER XVIII

THE ESSAYISTS

In forms other than fiction and poetry the period was also voluminous.

The greater part of our historical writings has been produced since

1870 and the same is true of our biography. Literary quality, however,

has suffered. Emphasis has been placed upon material rather than upon

graces of style; upon matter, but little upon manner. Never before have

historian and biographer been so tireless in their search for sources:

the _Battles and Leaders of the Civil War_ is a veritable library of

materials; the Life of Lincoln by Nicolay and Hay contains one million

five hundred thousand words. It is as long as Bancroft's whole history

of the United States, it is twice as long as Green's _History of the

English People_, and it contains three hundred thousand words more

than Gibbon's _Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_. It has been a

development from the spirit of the era: the demand for actuality. Never

before such eagerness to uncover new facts, to present documents, to be

realistically true, but it has been at the expense of literary style.

A few books, like General Grant's _Memoirs_ and Captain Mahan's _The

Influence of Sea Power upon History_, have had the power of simplicity,

the impelling force that comes from consciousness only of the message

to be delivered. But all too often the material has been presented in

a colorless, journalistic form that bars it forever from consideration

as literature in the higher sense of that term. The most of it, even

the life of Lincoln, is to be placed in the same category as scientific

writings and all those other prose forms that are concerned only with

the presenting of positive knowledge. Parkman seems to have been the

last historian who was able to present his material with literary

distinction.

The essay has been voluminous all through the period, but it too has

changed its tone. More than any other literary form it has been the

medium through which we may trace the transition from the old period

to the new. American literature had begun with the essay, and we have

seen how the form, designated by the name of sketch, grew in the

hands of Irving and Hawthorne and Poe into what in the period of the

seventies became recognized as a distinct literary form with the name

of short story.

The literary essay is a classical form: to flourish, it needs the

atmosphere of old culture and established social traditions; it must

work in the materials of classic literature; it is leisurely in method,

discursive, gently sentimental. It was the dominating form, it will be

remembered, in the classical age of Addison, the age of manners and

mind. It was peculiarly fitted, too, to be the literary vehicle of the

later classical age in America, the Europe-centered period of Irving

and Emerson and Willis and Holmes. The early pilgrims to the holy land

of the Old World sent back their impressions and dreamings in the

form of essays: Longfellow's _Outre-Mer_, for example, and Willis's

_Pencillings by the Way_. On the same shelf with _The Sketch Book_

belong Willis's _Letters from Under a Bridge_, Dana's _The Idle Man_,

Donald G. Mitchell's _Reveries of a Bachelor_, Curtis's _Prue and I_,

and a great mass of similar work, enough indeed to give color and even

name to its period. This shelf more than any other marks the extent

of England's dominion over the literature of the first three quarters

of the nineteenth century: it was the most distinctive product of our

classical age. Until America has a rich background of her own with old

culture and traditions, with venerable native classics from which to

quote, and a long vista of romantic history down which to look, her

contemplative and strictly literary essays must necessarily be redolent

of the atmosphere of other lands.

I

The National Period, with its new breath of all-Americanism, its new

romantic spirit, its youthful exuberance, and its self-realization,

has been, therefore, not a period in which the essay of the old type

could find congenial soil. Instead of the Irving sketch there has been

the vivid, sharply cut short story; instead of the contemplative,

dreamy study of personalities and institutions--Irving's "The Broken

Heart," Longfellow's "Pere la Chaise"--there have been incisive,

analytical, clearly cut special studies, like Woodrow Wilson's _Mere

Literature and Other Essays_; instead of the delightful, discursive

personal tattle of a Charles Lamb and a Dr. Holmes there has been the

colorless editorial essay, all force and facts, or the undistinctive,

business-like special article, prosiest of all prose.

The transition figure in the history of the American essay was Charles

Dudley Warner, the last of the contemplative _Sketch Book_ essayists,

and, with Higginson, Burroughs, Maurice Thompson, and others, a leading

influence in the bringing in of the new freshness and naturalness and

journalistic abandon that gave character to the prose of the later

period. He was a New Englander, one of that small belated group born

in the twenties--Mitchell, Hale, Higginson, Norton, for example--that

found itself in a Janus-like position between the old school of Emerson

and Longfellow and the new school of non-New Englanders--Harte, Hay,

Howells, Mark Twain. Warner was peculiarly a transition figure. He

could collaborate with Mark Twain on that most distinctively latter-day

novel _The Gilded Age_, and be classed by his generation with the

humorists of the Burdette, Josh Billings group, yet at the death of

George William Curtis he could be chosen as without question the

only logical heir to the Editor's Easy Chair department of _Harper's

Magazine_.

Warner was born in 1829, the birth year of Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, and

his birthplace was a farm in western Massachusetts, where his ancestors

for generations had been sturdy Puritan yeomen. The atmosphere of this

home and the round of its life he has described with autobiographic

pen in _Being a Boy_, the most valuable of all his studies. Concerning

the rest of his life one needs only to record that he was graduated

from Hamilton College in 1851 and from the law department of the

University of Pennsylvania in 1857, and that after four years of legal

practice in Chicago he was invited by his classmate, Senator J. R.

Hawley, to remove to Hartford, Connecticut, to become associate editor

of the paper that was soon merged with the Hartford _Courant_. To

this paper either as its editor or as a contributor he gave the best

years of his life. He used his vacations for foreign travel, at one

time spending a year and a half abroad, and in his later years he saw

much of his own land, but always he traveled pen in hand, ready to

embody every observation and sentiment in a letter for the readers

at home. Travel letters of the older type they were, such as Taylor

wrote home from Germany and Curtis sent from the Nile and the Levant,

gently sentimental, humorous in a pervasive way, perfectly natural,

unconscious of style.

Warner was forty and a confirmed journalist before he published

anything in book form, and even this first volume was not written with

book intent. He had contributed a rambling series of papers to the

_Courant_, a sort of humorous echo of Greeley's _What I Know about

Farming_, careless, newspapery, funny in a chuckling sort of way,

and perfectly unconventional and free from effort. Naturalness was

its main charm. The period was ready for out-of-doors themes simply

presented, and it found an enthusiastic circle of readers who demanded

its publication in book form. Henry Ward Beecher was among them and

as an inducement he promised an introductory letter. The result was

_My Summer in a Garden_, 1870, a book that sprang into wide popularity

and that undoubtedly was one of the formative influences of the new

period. He followed it with _Backlog Studies_, a series of sketches of

the Donald G. Mitchell variety, and then with various travel books like

_Saunterings_ and _My Winter on the Nile_. Late in life he published

novels, _A Little Journey in the World_, _The Golden House_, and others

dealing with phases of life in New York City, and he served as editor

of several important series of books, notably The American Men of

Letters Series of biographies, to which he himself contributed the life

of Irving.

Time enough has elapsed to enable us to consider the work of Warner

apart from the charm of his personal presence, and it is seen now that

his generation overestimated his work. He was in no sense an inspired

soul; he had little to offer that was really new. He wrote like the

practical editor of a daily paper, fluently, copiously, unhesitatingly.

The style is that of the practised worker who dictates to his

stenographer. There is lack of incisiveness, sharpness of outline,

cohesion of thought. He lacks revision, flashes of insight, creative

moments when the pen is forgotten. He wrote on many topics, but there

are no passages that one is compelled to quote. He was a classicist who

wrote with perfect coolness, just as others had written before him. His

gentle spirit, his sentiment, his Puritan conscience, and a certain

serenity of view that whispered of high character and perfect breeding,

endeared him to his first readers. But his style of humor belonged

only to his own generation--it was not embodied at all in a humorous

character; and his ethical teachings seem trite now and conventional.

His influence at a critical period of American literature entitles him

to serious consideration, but he won for himself no permanent place. He

will live longest, perhaps, in a few of his shorter pieces: _Being a

Boy_, "How Spring Came in New England," "A-Hunting the Deer," and "Old

Mountain Phelps."

There are those who would rate his novels above his essays, those

indeed who would rate them even with the work of Howells. Not many,

however. That his fiction has about it a certain power can not

be denied. Its author had the journalistic sense of the value of

contemporary events, as well as the journalistic faculty for gathering

interesting facts. He had, too, what so many novelists lack, the power

to trace by almost imperceptible processes the gradual growth of a

character. _A Little Journey in the World_, for instance, is a study

of degeneration, skilfully done. A woman who has been reared among

humble yet ennobling surroundings removes to New York and marries a

very rich man and we are shown how little by little all that is really

fine at the heart of her life is eaten away though the surface remains

as beautiful as ever. There is a naturalness about it that is charming,

and there is evident everywhere an honesty of purpose and a depth of

experience that are unusual, but one may not say more. The novels came

from the critical impulse rather than from the creative. They are

humanitarian documents rather than creations breathing the breath of

life. They do not move us. To realize where they fail one has but to

compare his chapters in _The Gilded Age_ with Mark Twain's. It is like

looking from a still-life picture on a parlor wall out upon an actual

steamboat pulling showily up to a Mississippi wharf.

II

The opposite of Warner in every respect was Lafcadio Hearn, a

figure more picturesque even than Joaquin Miller and more puzzling

than Whitman. Instead of serene classicism, genius; instead of

Puritan inflexibility and reverence for the respectable, tumultuous

wanderings--a man without a country, without a religion, without

anything fixed save a restless love of the beautiful--emotional, a

bundle of nerves, moody, sudden, the gorgeous Gallic at eternal odds

with the florid, beauty-loving Hellenic; a man forever homeless, yet

forever pathetic with a nostalgia that finally broke his heart. His

personality was a strangely elusive one, and his biography, especially

in its earlier years, is as full of romantic conjecture as De Quincey's

early life or Byron's. His very name was romantic. His father,

member of an ancient Irish family, had accompanied his regiment as

surgeon-major into the East, and while stationed at Corfu had become

infatuated with a beautiful Grecian girl, Rosa Cerigote, and had

married her. Lafcadio they named their son from the island where he

was born, his mother's home, Leucadia, in modern Greek Lefcadia, the

Ionian island of Sappho. Here he spent his babyhood, how much of it we

do not know. Of his father, he has said nothing, and of his mother,

only this hint in a later bit of impressionism--elusive, suggestive,

characteristic:

I have memory of a place and a magical time, in which the

sun and the moon were larger and brighter than now. Whether

it was of this life or of some life before, I can not tell,

but I know the sky was very much more blue, and nearer to

the world--almost as it seems to become above the masts of a

steamer steaming into the equatorial summer.... Each day there

were new wonders and new pleasures for me, and all that country

and time were softly ruled by one who thought only of ways to

make me happy.... When day was done and there fell the great

hush of the light before moonrise, she would tell me stories

that made me tingle from head to foot with pleasure. I have

never heard any other stories half so beautiful. And when

the pleasure became too great, she would sing a weird little

song which always brought sleep. At last there came a parting

day; and she wept and told me of a charm she had given that I

must never, never lose, because it would keep me young, and

give me power to return. But I never returned. And the years

went; and one day I knew I had lost the charm, and had become

ridiculously old.

Was it the Aegean island of his birth or was it the West Indian island

to which his father later was ordered with his regiment? We do not

know. We know, however, that the mother lived for a time in Ireland,

that another son was born, and then when the elder boy was seven she

went away to Smyrna never to return. The rest is conjecture, save for

the significant fact that both parents soon afterward married again.

The boy, unwelcome, forlorn, out of sympathy with his surroundings, was

sent to live with his aunt in Ireland, then later was put to school

in France in preparation for the priesthood. Two years in France,

formative years in which he learned among a myriad of other things the

fluent use of French, then in 1865 we find him in the Roman Catholic

college at Durham, England, where came to him the first great tragedy

of his life: an accident at play that left him blinded in one eye and

partly blinded in the other. Soon afterwards came the break with his

aunt--father and mother had passed out of his life--he refused to

become a priest, refused to live longer in any paths save his own, and

for the rest of his life he was a wanderer.

There is much in his life and temperament to suggest De Quincey. Hearn,

too, for a vague period--two or three years it may have been--wandered

in the lower strata of London, half dead with hunger and sickness,

aflame with imagination, restless, ambitious. At nineteen we find him

in New York, reading in the public library, eagerly, omnivorously,

despite his feeble vision, then suddenly, how we do not know, he is in

Cincinnati, Ohio, where he makes the whole city gasp with horror at

the story he writes of a murder in one of their narrow streets, and

secures a position on the _Enquirer_. In 1877 he has wandered as far

south as New Orleans, where for the first time in his life he finds

congenial atmosphere and where he supports himself by reporting for the

_Times-Democrat_.

Now it was that his French schooling had its effect. The Creole

_patois_ delighted him; he compiled a book of Creole proverbs, _Gombo

Zhebes_ he fantastically called it; and he fed his imagination with

the old French past of the city, wandering as Cable had done among its

ancient buildings, and, like Cable again, devouring its romantic old

chronicles. French novels he read interminably, eagerly, especially the

romantics--Hugo, Gautier, Baudelaire. How richly he read them we learn

from his letters, most of all from those written in his later life to

Professor Basil Hall Chamberlain and preserved in Elizabeth Bisland's

third volume. Few have read more discerningly or have voiced their

findings more brilliantly. This of Loti:

There is not much heart in Loti, but there is a fine brain.--To

me Loti seems for a space to have looked into Nature's whole

splendid burning fulgurant soul, and to have written under her

very deepest and strongest inspiration. He was young. Then the

color and the light faded, and only the worn-out blase nerves

remained; and the poet became--a little morbid modern affected

Frenchman.

Strange self-revealment. It was of himself he was speaking, had he but

realized it. He too began with power under the deepest and strongest

inspiration; he too had caught a vision, splendid, burning, fulgurant.

If there was an undoubted genius in our national period it was Hearn.

He poured his eager dreamings at first into the New Orleans papers:

"Fantastics," they have been called, by the editor who of late has

hunted them from their forgotten columns. Then came _Chita_, written

after a visit to Grande Isle in the Gulf of Mexico and published first

in the _Times-Democrat_ with the title _Torn Letters_, and then in

_Harper's Magazine_, April, 1888.

Here for the first time we get the measure of the man, his Celtic

imagination, fervor and intensity, his Greek passion for beauty. It

is not English at all: it is the dream of a Celtic Greek, who has

saturated himself with the French romantics and the color and the

profusion of the tropic gulf lands. It is not, as the magazine termed

it, a novelette; it is a loosely gathered bundle of fictional sketches,

lurid patches, "torn letters," indeed, written with torrential power

and blazing with color. Everywhere landscapes intense, drawn with

fewest strokes, impressions, suggestions. He would make you feel the

desolate shore on the gulf side of the island, but he selects only a

single detail:

The trees--where there are any trees--all bend away from

the sea; and even of bright hot days when the wind sleeps,

there is something grotesquely pathetic in their look of

agonized terror. A group of oaks at Grande Isle I remember

as especially suggestive: five stooping silhouettes in line

against the horizon, like fleeing women with streaming garments

and wind-blown hair--bowing grievously and thrusting out arms

desperately northward as to save themselves from falling.

And they are being pursued indeed--for the sea is devouring

the land. Many and many a mile of ground has yielded to the

tireless charging of Ocean's cavalry.

Always is he a colorist, and always does he use his colors daintily,

effectively, distinctively--one feels rather than sees:

The charm of a single summer day on these island shores is

something impossible to express, never to be forgotten. Rarely,

in the paler zones, do earth and heaven take such luminosity:

those will best understand me who have seen the splendor of

a West Indian sky. And yet there is a tenderness of tint,

a caress of color in these Gulf-days which is not of the

Antilles--a spirituality, as of eternal tropical spring.

It describes his own style; one need say no more.

When he would describe action there is in him a Byronic power that lays

hold on one and chokes and stifles. Who outside of _Don Juan_ has made

us feel so fearfully a tropic hurricane?

Then arose a frightful cry--the hoarse, hideous, indescribable

cry of hopeless fear--the despairing animal-cry man utters

when suddenly brought face to face with Nothingness, without

preparation, without consolation, without possibility of

respite. _Sauve qui peut!_ Some wrenched down the doors;

some clung to the heavy banquet tables, to the sofas, to the

billiard tables--during one terrible instant--against fruitless

heroisms, against futile generosities--raged all the frenzy

of selfishness, all the brutalities of panic. And then--then

came, thundering through the blackness, the giant swells, boom

on boom!--One crash!--the huge frame building rocks like a

cradle, seesaws, crackles. What are human shrieks now?--the

tornado is shrieking! Another!--chandeliers splinter; lights

are dashed out; a sweeping cataract hurls in: the immense hall

rises--oscillates--twirls as upon a pivot--crepitates--crumbles

into ruin. Crash again!--the swirling wreck dissolves into the

wallowing of another monster billow; and a hundred cottages

overturn, spin on sudden eddies, quiver, disjoint, and melt

into the seething.

So the Hurricane passed.

_Chita_, like all the rest of Hearn's work, is a thing of fragments.

It leaps and bounds, it chokes with tropic heat, it blazes with the

sunsets of the Mexican gulf, it stagnates with torrid siestas, it is

raucous with the voices of tropic insects and birds. It is incoherent,

rhapsodic, half picture, half suggestion--materials rather than final

structure. The style is wholly Gallic, like Cable's early style--sudden

breaks--dashes--sentences stripped to the bare nouns and adjectives,

swift shiftings of scenes, interjected exclamations, prayers:

Thou primordial Sea, the awfulness of whose antiquity hath

stricken all mythology dumb--thou most wrinkled living Sea, etc.

Then swiftly following:

Eighteen hundred and sixty-seven;--midsummer in the

pest-smitten city of New Orleans.

Heat motionless and ponderous. The steel-blue of the sky

bleached from the furnace-circle of the horizon;--the lukewarm

river yellow and noiseless as a torrent of fluid wax. The

nights began with a black heat;--there were hours when the

acrid air seemed to ferment for stagnation, and to burn the

bronchial tubing;--then, toward morning it would grow chill

with venomous vapors, with morbific dews--till the sun came

up to lift the torpid moisture, and to fill the buildings

with oven-heat. And the interminable procession of mourners

and hearses and carriages again began to circulate between

the centers of life and death;--and long trains of steamships

rushed from the port with heavy burden of fugitives.

Then terror that lays cold hands on the heart: Julian dying of

fever.

From New Orleans he went in 1887 to the Windward Islands for new

sensation, new color, new barbaric areas of human life. _Two Years

in the French West Indies_ is the literary result of it, a chaotic

book, flashlights, impressions, but no single completed impression, no

totality, but the soul of the West Indies none the less, revealed with

a rare, queer art that was individual. But no place, not even those

Circe islands which he paints as the dream and the ultimate of human

desire, could detain him long. Fickleness was in his blood, wandering

was his birthright. Again he is in New York, and then with a commission

from the Harpers he sails to Japan, where, in the rush and tumult of

new sensation, he forgets his commission and loses himself completely

in the new delicious world of impression.

For Hearn was as unpractical as Shelley and he was without Shelley's

ideals and altruistic dreams. He lived in a vague world of vision, of

sensation, of intangible beauty. He could say of himself:

Always having lived in hopes and imaginations, the smallest

practical matters that everybody should know, I don't know

anything about. Nothing, for example, about a boat, a horse, a

farm, an orchard, a watch, a garden. Nothing about what a man

ought to do under any possible circumstances. I know nothing

but sensation and books.

Though he was now forty, he entered this new world as one new born into

it. He adopted its costume, he slept with his head on a wooden pillow,

he acquired citizenship, he married a Japanese wife and established

a Japanese home, and he even went over completely to the Buddhist

religion.

The book _Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan_, 1894, marks the beginning

of his second literary period. Henceforth his writings center about

Japan. He wrote no treatise, no serious study of actual conditions;

he wrote impressions, fragmentary suggestions of the Japan that was

passing away, the romantic Japan of the ideal old regime, survivals

of which he found everywhere. Japanese art and Japanese romance found

in him a curious affinity. They mellowed and soothed the tumultuous

spirit of his first art period. His impressionism became more subtly

suggestive, more magically vague, more daintily colored. There had

always been within him a strong element of mysticism, legacy of his

Irish ancestry, and the subtly mystical side of Buddhism appealed to

it strongly. He was able to interpret it for occidental comprehension,

and he was able to make more comprehensible the subtle connotation of

Japanese art, and to catch the subtler inner consciousness of Japan

as no other of the Western world has ever caught it. In his first

enthusiasm he wrote:

This is a land where one can really enjoy the Inner Life. Every

one has an inner life of his own--which no other life can see,

and the great secrets of which are never revealed, though

occasionally when we create something beautiful we betray a

faint glimpse of it.

But the newness of this new world he had entered wore away at length.

He was a creature of enthusiastic moments and he needed swift changes

of sensation. He had reveled in the old, ideal Japan, but he found

himself unable to live in it. A new regime had begun. He was filled

with contempt at what he called "the frank selfishness, the apathetic

vanity, the shallow, vulgar skepticism of the new Japan that prates

its contempt about Tempo times, and ridicules the dear old men of the

premeiji era." His last years were bitter with financial embarrassment,

and full of feverish literary creation for the sake of his growing

family. The glow and fervor and genius of his first period faded more

and more from his work;--he himself faded out. He felt the gulf that

he had erected between himself and his race. To his sister he wrote:

"I feel myself in exile; and your letters and photographs only make me

homesick for English life." He died of his own vehemence, worn out by

oversensation, unnerved by restlessness and nostalgia and longing for

he knew not what.

The likeness of Hearn to De Quincey is almost complete. He had De

Quincey's irresoluteness, his jangling nerves, his dominating fancy,

his discursiveness, his gorgeous imagination, his oriental soul

hampered with the fetters of occidental science. He too was essentially

fragmentary in his literary output, a man of intense moods intensely

painted, a man of books but of no single, unified, compelling book. One

may not read essays like "Gothic Horror" or "The Nightmare Touch," or

a passage like this from "Vespertina Cognitio," and not think of the

great English opium-eater:

It must have been well after midnight when I felt the first

vague uneasiness--_the suspicion_--that precedes a nightmare.

I was half-conscious, dream-conscious of the actual--knew

myself in that very room--wanted to get up. Immediately the

uneasiness grew into terror, because I found that I could not

move. Something unutterable in the air was mastering will.

I tried to cry out, and my utmost effort resulted only in a

whisper too low for any one to hear. Simultaneously I became

aware of a Step ascending the stair--a muffled heaviness; and

the real nightmare began--the horror of the ghastly magnetism

that held voice and limb--the hopeless will-struggle against

dumbness and impotence. The stealthy Step approached--but with

lentor malevolently measured--slowly, slowly, as if the stairs

were miles deep. It gained the threshold--waited. Gradually

then, and without sound, the locked door opened; and the Thing

entered, bending as it came--a thing robed--feminine--reaching

to the roof, not to be looked at! A floor-plank creaked as

It neared the bed;--and then--with a frantic effort--I woke,

bathed in sweat; my heart beating as if it were going to

burst. The shrine-light had died: in the blackness I could

see nothing; but I thought I heard that Step retreating.

I certainly heard the plank creak again. With the panic

still upon me, I was actually unable to stir. The wisdom of

striking a match occurred to me, but I dared not yet rise.

Presently, as I held my breath to listen, a new wave of black

fear passed through me; for I heard moanings--long nightmare

moanings--moanings that seemed to be answering each other from

two different rooms below. And then close to me my guide began

to moan--hoarsely, hideously. I cried to him:--

"Louis!--Louis!"

We both sat up at once.

Like De Quincey, he lingers over the flavor of words, gathering them

everywhere he may and gloating over them, tasting them with half-closed

eyes like an epicure, and using them ever delicately, suggestively,

inevitably.

For me words have color, form, character: they have faces,

ports, manners, gesticulations; they have moods, humors,

eccentricities;--they have tints, tones, personalities....

Surely I have never yet made, and never expect to make any

money. Neither do I expect to write ever for the multitude. I

write for beloved friends who can see color in words, can smell

the perfume of syllables in blossom, can be shocked with the

fine elfish electricity of words. And in the eternal order of

things, words will eventually have their rights recognized by

the people.

His essays, therefore, even as he has intimated, are for the few who

are attuned to them, who have sense for delicate suggestion, for "the

phosphorescing of words, the fragrance of words, the noisomeness

of words, the tenderness, the hardness, the dryness or juiciness

of words." Aside from his vision of beauty, his intensity, his

suggestiveness of style, he has brought not much. The romancers of

the period, a few of them, like Grace King, for example, have felt

his influence, but it has not been a large one. He stands almost an

isolated figure in his period, an intensely individual soul, a solitary

genius like Poe. His place is a secure one. His circle of readers will

never be large, but it will always be constant.

III

Another phase of French influence one finds in the work of Agnes

Repplier, perhaps the leading writer of "the light essay"--the term is

her own--in the later years of the period. Born of French parentage in

Philadelphia, educated at a convent where prevailed French language

and ideals, she was Gallic both by temperament and training. She was

not influenced as Cable undoubtedly was influenced and Hearn: there

is small trace in her essays of French style echoed consciously or

unconsciously. The influence was deeper, it was temperamental and

racial, manifesting itself spontaneously in the display of those

literary qualities that we associate with the word "French." Her

favorite reading was largely in the English. She read enormously

and she read note-book in hand. She added, moreover, culture and

impressions by much residence abroad, and when she began to write it

was with rich store of material. She began deliberately and she worked

like a true classicist, leisurely, with no genius, and no message to

urge her on. Her delight it was to talk about her reading, to add

entertaining episodes, to embroider with witty observation and pithy

quotation or epigram. Save for the autobiographical study "In Our

Convent Days," her writings mostly deal with the world of books.

Miss Repplier first came into notice in 1886 when one of her essays

came to Aldrich, who was delighted with it and who made haste to

introduce her to the _Atlantic_ circle. Two years later came her first

book, _Books and Men_, and since that time her essays, goodly in number

and scattered through many magazines, have become a well-known feature

of the times. Themes she takes to suit her fancy, apparently at random,

though more often phases of her beloved "happy half century": "A Short

Defense of Villains," "Benefits of Superstition," "The Deathless

Diary," "The Accursed Annual," "Marriage in Fiction," and all other

topics pertinent to Dr. Johnson's little world. She adds not much to

our knowledge, and she comes not often to any new conclusions, but she

is so companionable, so sparkling and witty, that we can but read on

with delight to the end. We are in an atmosphere somehow of old culture

and patrician grace, of courtliness and charm:

Thou mindest me of gentle folks--

Old gentlefolks are they--

Thou sayst an undisputed thing

In such a solemn way.

A little of feminine contrariness there may be, perhaps, at times. A

thing has been generally disparaged: she will defend it. Richardson's

Sir Charles Grandison may be mentioned: "I think, myself, that poor Sir

Charles has been unfairly handled," she will retort. "He is not half

such a prig as Daniel Deronda; but he develops his priggishness with

such ample detail through so many leisurely volumes." And her protest

becomes almost acrimonious if anything of the new be flippantly boasted

of as superior to the old:

"We have long ago ceased to be either surprised, grieved,

or indignant at anything the English say of us," writes Mr.

Charles Dudley Warner. "We have recovered our balance. We know

that since _Gulliver_ there has been no piece of original humor

produced in England equal to Knickerbocker's _New York_; that

not in this century has any English writer equaled the wit and

satire of the _Biglow Papers_."

Does this mean that Mr. Warner considers Washington Irving

to be the equal of Jonathan Swift; that he places the gentle

satire of the American alongside of those trenchant and

masterly pages which constitute the landmarks of literature?

"Swift," says Dr. Johnson, with reluctant truthfulness, "must

be allowed for a time to have dictated the political opinions

of the English nation." He is a writer whom we may be permitted

to detest, but not to undervalue. His star, red as Mars, still

flames fiercely in the horizon, while the genial luster of

Washington Irving grows dimmer year by year. We can never hope

to "recover our balance" by confounding values, a process of

self-deception which misleads no one but ourselves.

Realism, the new smartness of Western veritism, the cry that romance is

dead, and that Walter Scott is outworn, found in her no sympathy. Her

heart was in the eighteenth century rather than in what she has called

"this overestimated century of progress." And so thoroughly convinced

is she, it is impossible not to agree with her:

Lord Holland, when asked by Murray for his opinion of _Old

Mortality_, answered indignantly: "Opinion? We did not one

of us go to bed last night! Nothing slept but my gout." Yet

_Rokeby_ and _Childe Harold_ are both in sad disgrace with

modern critics and _Old Mortality_ stands gathering dust on

our book-shelves.... We read _The Bostonians_ and _The Rise

of Silas Lapham_ with a due appreciation of their minute

perfections; but we go to bed quite cheerfully at our usual

hour, and are content to wait an interval of leisure to resume

them. Could _Daisy Miller_ charm a gouty leg, or _Lemuel

Barker_ keep us awake till morning?

A paragraph like this may be said to contain all the various elements

of her style:

There are few things more wearisome in a fairly fatiguing

life than the monotonous repetition of a phrase which

catches and holds the public fancy by virtue of its total

lack of significance. Such a phrase--employed with tireless

irrelevance in journalism, and creeping into the pages of

what is, by courtesy, called literature--is the "new woman."

It has furnished inexhaustible jests to _Life_ and _Punch_,

and it has been received with all seriousness by those who

read the present with no light from the past, and so fail to

perceive that all femininity is as old as Lilith, and that the

variations of the type began when Eve arrived in the Garden

of Paradise to dispute the claims of her predecessor. "If the

fifteenth century discovered America," says a vehement advocate

of female progress, "it was reserved for the nineteenth century

to discover woman"; and this remarkable statement has been

gratefully applauded by people who have apparently forgotten

all about Judith and Zenobia, Cleopatra and Catherine de

Medici, Saint Theresa and Jeanne d'Arc, Catherine of Russia and

Elizabeth of England, who played parts of some importance, for

good and ill, in the fortunes of the world.

Here is the note of dissent from the widely accepted; the appeal to

antiquity; the pithy quotation; the allusion that takes for granted

a cultivated reader; the sprightly tripping of sentences; the witty

turn; and the atmosphere of feminine vivacity and brilliance. Apt

quotations sparkle from every paragraph. Often she opens breezily with

a quotation; she illustrates at every point with epigrams and witty

sayings from all known and unknown sources; and she ends smartly by

snapping the whip of a quotation in the final sentence or paragraph.

The bent of her work, taking it all in all, is critical, and often in

her criticism, especially her criticism of literature, she rises to the

point of distinction. One may quote paragraphs here and there that are

as illuminating as anything in American criticism. She is quick to see

fallacies and to press an absurd deduction to its ridiculous end. She

illumines a whole subject with a paragraph. This for example on Hamlin

Garland:

Mr. Hamlin Garland, whose leaden-hued sketches called--I think

unfairly--_Main-Traveled Roads_ have deprived most of us of

some cheerful hours, paints with an unfaltering hand a life

in which ennui sits enthroned. It is not the poverty of his

Western farmers that oppresses us. Real biting poverty, which

withers lesser evils with its deadly breath, is not known to

these people at all. They have roofs, fire, food, and clothing.

It is not the ceaseless labor, the rough fare, the gray skies,

the muddy barn-yards, which stand for the trouble in their

lives. It is the dreadful weariness of living. It is the burden

of a dull existence, clogged at every pore, and the hopeless

melancholy of which they have sufficient intelligence to

understand. Theirs is the ennui of emptiness, and the implied

reproach on every page is that a portion, and only a portion,

of mankind is doomed to walk along these shaded paths; while

happier mortals who abide in New York, or perhaps in Paris,

spend their days in a pleasant tumult of intellectual and

artistic excitation.

And few have put their criticism into more attractive form. It is

penetrating and true and in addition it has a sparkle and wit about

it that makes it anything but dry reading. Who has written more

sympathetically, more understandingly, more delightfully about Charles

Lamb than she if one takes her work all together. Here is a glimpse,

yet how illuminating:

Truest of all, is Charles Lamb who, more than any other

humorist, more than any other man of letters, belongs

exclusively to his own land, and is without trace or echo of

foreign influence. France was to Lamb, not a place where the

finest prose is written, but a place where he ate frogs--"the

nicest little delicate things--rabbity-flavored. Imagine a

Lilliputian rabbit." Germany was little or nothing, and America

was less. The child of London streets,

"Mother of mightier, nurse of none more dear,"

rich in the splendid literature of England, and faithful lover

both of the teeming city and the ripe old books, Lamb speaks to

English hearts in a language they can understand. And we, his

neighbors, whom he recked not of, hold him just as dear; for

his spleenless humor is an inheritance of our mother tongue,

one of the munificent gifts which England shares with us, and

for which no payment is possible save the frank and generous

recognition of a pleasure that is without a peer.

But critic in the sense that Paul Elmer More is a critic, she certainly

is not. She is temperamental rather than scientific. She makes

brilliant observations, but she has no system, no patient analytical

processes. She is, like Henry James, a critic by flashes, but those

flashes often illuminate the whole landscape.

She is a suggestive writer, a writer who makes her reader think, who

restores him as the dynamo restores the battery. Her world is a small

one and it is not necessarily American, but it is intensely alive. In

her own "happy half century," quoting Dr. Johnson, discoursing of Fanny

Burney or Hannah More, or when telling of her cat or of the mystic lore

of cats quoting Montaigne and Loti, or of those still more feminine

topics: mirrors, spinsters, letters, the eternal feminine, she induces

"electrical tingles of hit after hit." Her work must be classed with

that of Lamb, of Loti, of Hearn, as work peculiarly personal, work that

makes its appeal largely on account of the surcharged individuality

behind it.

With Miss Repplier's essays may be classed those of Samuel McChord

Crothers (1857----), Edward S. Martin (1856----) and Louise Imogen

Guiney, who wrote for cultured people on topics for the most part

drawn from the world of books. The work of Dr. Crothers is the most

distinctive of the three. His wisdom, his delicate humor, his unfailing

sense of values have made his papers, the most of them published in

the _Atlantic_, a source of real delight and profit to an increasing

circle. His books, like those of Miss Repplier, may be safely placed

in the trunk when one starts on his summer's vacation and can take but

few. They are wise, still books that one may live with.

IV

The period has abounded in critics from the first. The best of Lowell's

prose came in the years following the war, and all of Stedman's was

written after 1870. The great multiplication of newspapers and the

increasing number of magazines led more and more to the production

of book reviews. The _North American Review_ no longer said the last

word about a book or an author. In 1865 Edwin L. Godkin (1831-1902)

founded the New York _Nation_ and contributed to it some of the most

fearless and discriminating work of the period; in 1880 Francis F.

Browne (1843-1913) founded the Chicago _Dial_ and made its reviews

among the best in America; and in 1881 Jeannette L. Gilder (1849-1916)

and her brother, Joseph B. Gilder (1858----), established the New York

_Critic_, a journal that for two decades exerted a formative influence

upon the period.

A few of the great numbers of book reviewers have done worthy work,

some of them even distinctive work, though most of it lies buried now

in the great ephemeral mass. Howells and Aldrich, Horace E. Scudder

(1838-1902) and Bliss Perry (1860----) in the _Atlantic_, Henry M.

Alden (1836----) in _Harper's_, Maurice Thompson (1844-1901) in the

_Independent_, and Hamilton W. Mabie (1846-1916) in the _Outlook_,

all did work that undoubtedly helped to shape the period, but not

much of it may rank as permanent literature. It has been too often

journalistic: hastily prepared, a thing of the day's work.

Much fine criticism has come sporadically from pens consecrated to

other literary tasks. Nearly all of the major poets of the period as

well as the novelists and essayists have at one time or another made

excursions into the field, sometimes producing only a brilliant bit of

temperamental impressionism, sometimes working out studies that are

systematic and complete. James, Howells, Whitman, Burroughs, Lanier,

Crawford, Torrey, John Fiske, Maurice F. Egan, Henry Van Dyke, George

E. Woodberry, James Brander Matthews have all added brilliant chapters

to the sum of American criticism, but none may be called a critic in

the sense Sainte-Beuve was a critic. Their work has been avocational,

fitful excursions rather than systematic exploration.

During the later years of the period there has been but one who may be

called a critic in the broader sense of the term--scholarly, leisurely

of method, systematic, detached, literary in style and finish--a critic

and only a critic, Paul Elmer More, whose _Shelburne Essays_ are our

nearest approach to those _Causeries du Lundi_ of an earlier age. His

birth and education in the West, in St. Louis, was an advantage at the

start: it took from his later criticism that New England-centered point

of view that is so evident in the work of critics like Richardson and

Barrett Wendell. The New England culture he got in due time at Harvard,

where he took two advanced degrees, and he broadened his outlook still

further by pursuing his studies in European universities, returning at

length to teach Sanscrit at Harvard and later at Bryn Mawr. Oriental

language was his specialty. One catches the spirit of his earlier

period by examining his first publications, among them _A Century

of Indian Epigram_, "Translations or paraphrases in English verse

of a hundred epigrams and precepts ascribed to a Hindu sage." This

early enthusiasm for things oriental gave him a singularly valuable

equipment for criticism. It broadened his view: it put into his hands

the two opposite poles of human thought. His essay on Lafcadio Hearn is

illuminating, not only of Hearn but of More himself. We can illustrate

only lamely with fragments:

Into the study of these by-ways of Oriental literature he

has carried a third element, the dominant idea of Occidental

science; and this element he has blended with Hindu religion

and Japanese aestheticism in a combination as bewildering as it

is voluptuous. In this triple union lies his real claim to high

originality....

Beauty itself, which forms the essence of Mr. Hearn's art,

receives a new content from this union of the East and the

West....

Is it not proper to say, after reading such passages as these,

that Mr. Hearn has introduced a new element of psychology into

literature? We are indeed living in the past, we who foolishly

cry out that the past is dead. In one remarkable study of

the emotions awakened by the baying of a gaunt white hound,

Mr. Hearn shows how even the very beasts whom we despise as

unreasoning and unremembering are filled with an articulate

sense of this dark backward and abysm of time, whose shadow

falls on their sensitive souls with the chill of a vague

dread--dread, I say, for it must begin to be evident that this

new psychology is fraught with meanings that may well trouble

and awe the student.

In the ghostly residuum of these psychological meditations we

may perceive a vision dimly foreshadowing itself which mankind

for centuries, nay, for thousands of years, has striven half

unwittingly to keep veiled. I do not know, but it seems to

me that the foreboding of this dreaded disclosure may account

for many things in the obscure history of the race, for the

long struggle of religion against the observations of science

which to-day we are wont to slur over as only a superficial

struggle after all. In the haunting fear of this disclosure

I seem to see an explanation, if not a justification, of the

obscurantism of the early church, of the bitter feud of Galileo

and the burning of Giordano Bruno, of the recent hostility to

Darwinism, and even of the present-day attempt to invalidate

the significance of this long contest.[164]

In another and a far more unusual way he qualified himself for his

high office of critic: he immured himself for two years in solitude,

with books as his chief companions, and it was in this wilderness that

the _Shelburne Essays_--Shelburne was the name of the town of his

hermitage--were born. His own account is illuminating:

In a secluded spot in the peaceful valley of the Androscoggin

I took upon myself to live two years as a hermit, after a

mild Epicurean fashion of my own. Three maiden aunts wagged

their heads ominously; my nearest friend inquired cautiously

whether there was any taint of insanity in the family; an old

gray-haired lady, a veritable saint, who had not been soured

by her many deeds of charity, admonished me on the utter

selfishness and godlessness of such a proceeding.... As for

the hermit ... having found it impossible to educe any meaning

from the tangled habits of mankind while he himself was whirled

about in the imbroglio, he had determined to try the efficiency

of undisturbed meditation at a distance. So deficient had been

his education that he was actually better acquainted with the

aspirations and emotions of the old dwellers on the Ganges than

with those of the modern toilers by the Hudson or the Potomac.

He had been deafened by the "Indistinguishable roar" of the

streets, and could make no sense of the noisy jargon of the

market place.[165]

The period gave him time to read, leisurely, thoughtfully, with no

nervous subconsciousness that the product of that reading was to be

marketable. When he wrote his first papers he wrote with no press

of need upon him. He had evolved his own notion of the function of

literature and of the critic. This was what he evolved: and it is

worthy of study:

There is a kind of criticism that limits itself to looking

at the thing in itself, or at the parts of a thing as they

successively strike the mind. This is properly the way of

sympathy, and those who choose this way are right in saying

that it is absurd or merely ill-tempered to dwell on what is

ugly in a work of art, or false, or incomplete. But there is

a place also for another kind of criticism, which is not so

much directed to the individual thing as to its relation with

other things, and to its place as cause or effect in a whole

group of tendencies. No criticism, to be sure, can follow one

or the other of these methods exclusively, as no product of

art can ever be entirely isolated in its genesis or altogether

merged in the current of the day. The highest criticism would

contrive to balance these methods in such manner that neither

the occasional merits of a work nor its general influence

would be unduly subordinated, and in so far as these essays

fail to strike such a balance--I wish this were their only

failure--they err sadly from the best model.[166]

In the eight volumes now issued there are eighty-five essays on topics

as varied as George Crabbe, Hawthorne, Swinburne, Walt Whitman, The

Bhagavad Gita, Pascal, Plato, Nietzsche. Nearly two-thirds of them

all deal with representative English writers; some fifteen have to do

with Americans. In the criticizing of them he has held steadfastly

to the contention that men of letters are to be viewed not alone

as individuals but as voices and as spiritual leaders in their

generations. The soul of literature is not art and it is not alone

beauty. For decadents like Swinburne he has small sympathy and he can

even rebuke Charles Lamb for "his persistent refusal to face, in words

at least, the graver issues of life." He takes his stand at a point so

elevated that only the great masters who have been the original voices

of the race are audible. He dares even to speak of "the jaunty optimism

of Emerson," and to suggest that his confidence and serenity were all

too often taken by his generation for original wisdom.

The foundation of his work is religious--religious in the fundamental,

the oriental, sense of the word. He has been consistent and he has been

courageous. That America has a critic with standards of criticism, an

official critic in the sense that Sainte-Beuve was official, and that

as editor of the leading critical review of America this critic has

a dominating clientele and a leader's authority, is one of the most

promising signs for that new literary era which already is overdue.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER. (1829-1900.) _My Summer in a Garden_,

1870; _Saunterings_, 1872; _Backlog Studies_, 1872; _The Gilded

Age_ [with Mark Twain], 1873; _Baddeck, and That Sort of Thing_,

1874; _My Winter on the Nile Among the Mummies and Moslems_,

1876; _In the Levant_, 1877; _Being a Boy_, 1877; _In the

Wilderness_, 1878; _Washington Irving_, 1881; _Captain John

Smith_, 1881; _A Roundabout Journey_, 1884; _Their Pilgrimage_,

1887; _On Horseback: a Tour in Virginia, North Carolina, and

Tennessee, with Notes on Travel in Mexico and California_, 1888;

_Studies in the South and West, with Comments on Canada_, 1889;

_A Little Journey in the World: a Novel_, 1889; _Our Italy_,

1891; _As We Were Saying_, 1891; _As We Go_, 1894; _The Golden

House_, 1895; _The People for Whom Shakespeare Wrote_, 1897; _The

Relation of Literature to Life_, 1897; _That Fortune: a Novel_,

1899; _Fashions in Literature and Other Essays_, 1902; _Complete

works_, 15 vols. Edited by T. R. Lounsbury, 1904; _Charles Dudley

Warner_, by Mrs. James T. Fields, 1904.

LAFCADIO HEARN. (1850-1904.) _Stray Leaves from Strange

Literatures: Stories from the Anvari-Soheili, Baital-Packisi,

Mahabharata, etc._, 1884; _Gombo Zhebes_, 1885; _Some Chinese

Ghosts_, 1887; _Chita: a Memory of Last Island_, 1889; _Two Years

in the French West Indies_, 1890; _Youma: the Story of a West

Indian Slave_, 1890; _Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan_, 1894; _Out

of the East: Reveries and Studies in New Japan_, 1895; _Kokoro:

Hints and Echoes of Japanese Inner Life_, 1896; _Gleanings

in Buddha-fields: Studies of Hand and Soul in the Far East_,

1897; _Exotics and Retrospectives_, 1899; _In Ghostly Japan_,

1899; _Shadowings_, 1900; _Japanese Miscellany_, 1901; _Kotto:

Being Japanese Curios with Sundry Cobwebs_, 1902; _Japanese

Fairy Tales_, 1903; _Kwaidan_, 1904; _Japan: an Attempt at

Interpretation_, 1904; _The Romance of the Milky Way and Other

Studies_, 1905; _Letters from the Raven: the Correspondence

of Lafcadio Hearn with Henry Watkin_, 1905, 1907; _Life and

Letters of Lafcadio Hearn_, 2 vols., by Elizabeth Bisland,

1906; _Concerning Lafcadio Hearn_, with a Bibliography by Laura

Stedman, by G. M. Gould, 1908; _Japanese Letters of Lafcadio

Hearn_, edited by Elizabeth Bisland, 1910; _Leaves from the Diary

of an Impressionist: Early Writings_; with an Introduction by

Ferris Greenslet, 1911; _Lafcadio Hearn in Japan_, by Y. Noguchi,

1911; _Lafcadio Hearn_, by N. H. Kennard, 1912; _Lafcadio Hearn_,

by E. Thomas, 1912; _Fantastics and Other Fancies_, with an

Introduction by Dr. Charles W. Hutson, 1914.

AGNES REPPLIER. (1857----.) _Books and Men_, 1888; _Points of

View_, 1891; _Essays in Miniature_, 1892; _Essays in Idleness_,

1893; _In the Dozy Hours and Other Papers_, 1894; _Varia_, 1897;

_Philadelphia, the Place and the People_, 1898; _The Fireside

Sphinx_, 1901; _Compromises_, 1904; _In Our Convent Days_, 1905;

_A Happy Half Century_, 1908; _Americans and Others_, 1912; _The

Cat_, 1912.

PAUL ELMER MORE. (1864----.) _Helena, and Occasional Poems_,

1890; _The Great Refusal: Letters of a Dreamer in Gotham_, 1894;

_A Century of Indian Epigrams; Chiefly from the Sanscrit of

Bhartrihari_, 1898; _Shelburne Essays_, First series, 1904;

Second and Third series, 1905; Fourth series, 1906; Fifth series,

1908; Sixth series, 1909; Seventh series, 1910; Eighth series,

1913; _Nietzsche_, 1912.

INDEX

Abbott, C. C., 160, 161.

Addison, Joseph, 23.

"Adler, Max," see H. C. Clark.

Agassiz, Louis, 12.

_Airs from Arcady_, 322, 334.

Alcott, Bronson, 187, 350.

Alcott, Louisa M., 63, 220, 221.

Alden, Henry M., 300, 433.

Aldrich, Anne Reeve, 338.

Aldrich, Thomas Bailey, 10, 16, 21, 24, 51, 63, 66, 89, 119, 126-135,

142, 186, 231, 309.

_Alice of Old Vincennes_, 262, 404.

Allen, Elizabeth Akers, 220, 338.

Allen, James Lane, 15, 18, 365, 382.

_Amber Gods, The_, 225.

_American, The_, 192, 194.

American Anthology, An, 120, 321.

_American Men of Letters Series_, 419.

_Among the Isles of Shoals_, 340.

Andover Movement, 228.

Anthon, Charles, 356.

"Arp, Bill," see Smith, C. H.

Artemus Ward, see Browne, C. F.

Atherton, Gertrude, 410.

_Atlantic Monthly_, 21, 64, 74, 114, 126, 133, 204, 206, 227, 335, 372.

Austin, Jane G., 220.

_Backlog Studies_, 419.

Bailey, Florence M., 161.

Bailey, James Montgomery, 26, 32.

Balcony Stories, 363.

Balestier, Wolcott, 397.

Baldwin, Joseph G., 28, 84.

Balzac, 13, 192, 238.

Bancroft, George, 11.

Bangs, John K., 43, 335.

Barnard College, 350.

_Barriers Burned Away_, 387.

Barus, Clara, 161.

Baskerville's _Southern Writers_, 348.

Bates, Katharine Lee, 341.

Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, 416.

Bayou Folks, 364.

Beecher, Henry Ward, 8, 63.

Bellamy, Edward, 409, 414.

_Ben Hur_, 254, 388, 389.

Bennett, E. A., 402.

Bierce, Ambrose, 24, 321, 373, 379, 383.

"Billings, Josh," see Shaw, H. W.

Binns, H. B., 185.

Bisland, Elizabeth, 437.

Bjornsen, 83.

Blake, H. G. O., 138.

Boker, George Henry, 118, 120, 299.

Bolles, Frank, 162.

Bonner, Robert, 208, 385.

Boston, H., 62, 86, 212.

Boutwell, George S., 40.

Bowdoin College, 232.

Bowles, Samuel, 386.

Boyesen, H. H., 13, 409, 414.

Boynton, Henry W., 82.

_Bread-winners, The_, 88, 385, 409.

Bronte, Charlotte, 221, 226.

Brown, Alice, 24, 220, 221, 240-243, 321, 335.

Brown University, 88.

Browne, Charles Farrar, 25, 26, 31, 33-37, 43, 50, 51, 56.

Browne, Francis F., 433.

Browning, Mrs., 221.

Bryant, W. C., 10, 12, 19, 66, 118.

Bucke, R. M., 185.

Bulwer-Lytton, 186, 224.

Bunner, Henry C., 22, 24, 290, 322, 333, 353, 372, 379.

Burdette, Robert Jones, 26, 32.

Burgess, Gelett, 335.

Burke, T. A., 84.

Burnett, Frances Hodgson, 221, 388, 411.

Burnham, Clara Louise, 408, 413.

Burroughs, John, 18, 21, 22, 111, 141, 142, 144, 145, 146-154, 155,

156, 157, 158, 159, 161, 182, 185, 321.

_But Yet a Woman_, 408.

Cable, George W., 15, 18, 21, 23, 24, 79, 246-253, 269, 296.

Callaway, Morgan, 293.

Calvert, 13.

_Cape Cod Folks_, 23, 86.

Carleton, Will, 21, 86, 321-323, 326, 352.

Carlyle, Thos., 275.

Carman, Bliss, 354.

Carpenter, Edward, 185.

Carpenter, George Rice, 165.

Carroll, C. C., 293.

_Carvel, Richard_, 410.

Cary Sisters, 19.

_Castilian Days_, 13, 88, 203.

_Castle Nowhere_, 21, 221, 258.

Catherwood, Mary Hartwell, 21, 221, 258-262, 269.

Cawein, Madison, 322, 346-349, 351, 354.

Centennial, The, 19, 118, 120, 282, 285.

_Century of Dishonor, A._, 255.

_Century Magazine, The_, 42, 206, 207, 342.

Chambers, Robert W., 410.

_Chance Acquaintance, A._, 205.

Channing, W. E., 11.

_Choir Invisible, The_, 369.

Chopin, Kate, 318, 364-365, 382.

Churchill, Winston, 403, 410.

_Circuit Rider, The_, 93, 95.

Clark, Charles Heber, 26.

Clark, G. H., 293.

Clarke, James Freeman, 11.

Civil War, 3, 14, 18, 21, 25, 26, 40, 116, 137.

Clemens, John, 46.

Clemens, Samuel Langhorne, 6, 11, 18, 23, 24, 26, 31, 33, 45-62, 65,

76, 86, 91, 99, 112, 113, 142, 178, 191, 195, 217, 418.

Cleveland, Grover, 404.

Clough, Arthur Hugh, 344.

Cobb, Sylvanus, 217.

Collins, Wilkie, 64.

_Colonel Carter of Cartersville_, 269.

Cone, Helen G., 341.

Conway, Moncure D., 71.

Conwell, R. H., 135.

Cook, Rose Terry, 24, 209, 220, 227, 228, 229-231, 233, 241, 321, 335,

372.

Cooke, John Esten, 264, 269.

Coolbrith, Ina Donna, 322, 341.

Cooper, J. F., 12, 61, 62, 217, 258, 263.

_Country Doctor, A._, 232.

_Countryman, The_, 302.

"Craddock, Charles Egbert," see Murfree, Mary N.

Craik, Dinah Mulock, 64.

Cranch, C. P., 19.

Crane, Stephen, 397, 412.

Crawford, F. Marion, 381, 389-393, 411.

_Crisis, The_, 403.

_Critic, The_, 366, 433.

Crothers, Samuel M., 432.

_Crumbling Idols_, 373, 396, 401.

Curtis, G. W., 8, 12, 417, 418.

_Daisy Miller_, 192.

Dana, C. A., 330, 333.

Dana, R. H., 11, 417.

"Danbury News Man," see Bailey, J. M.

_Danbury News_, 32.

Dartmouth College, 344, 351.

_Dartmouth Magazine_, 350.

Daudet, 192.

_David Harum_, 389.

Davis, R. H., 372, 373, 380, 383, 397.

Day, Holman F., 86, 410.

_Deephaven_, 21, 86, 220, 355.

Deland, Margaretta Wade, 221, 335, 373, 389, 394-396, 411.

Deming, Philander, 24, 379, 383.

Densmore, Gilbert, 51.

De Quincey, Thomas, 421, 426, 427.

Derby, George Horatio, 28, 29, 30, 43.

_Dial, The_, 433.

Dialect, 16, 266, 306.

Dickens, Charles, 8, 23, 25, 35, 64, 71, 72, 73, 76, 77, 92, 95, 98,

186.

Dickinson, Emily, 220, 322, 340-341, 344.

Disraeli, 224.

_Doctor Johns_, 63.

_Dr. Sevier_, 251.

Dodge, Mary Abigail, 220.

Dodge, Mary Mapes, 335.

Donaldson, T., 185.

_Drum-Taps_, 172, 174.

Drummond, Dr., 22, 86, 328.

_Dukesborough Tales_, 294, 295, 300, 307.

_Durket Sperrit, The_, 316.

_East and West Poems_, 85.

_Easy Chair, The_, 210, 418.

Eddy, Mary Baker G., 167.

Edwards, Harry S., 298, 317, 320.

Egan, Maurice F., 345, 433.

Eggleston, Edward, 15, 18, 21, 23, 92-95, 295, 301.

Eggleston, George Cary, 98, 385.

Eliot, George, 186, 190, 192, 284, 309.

Elliott, Sarah B., 316, 320.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 5, 8, 11, 12, 13, 19, 21, 30, 118, 138, 142,

153, 159, 169, 172, 176, 177, 186.

_Europeans, The_, 192.

Everett, Edward, 11, 14.

_Fair God, The_, 21, 388.

_Fearful Responsibility, A._, 202.

Field, Eugene, 22, 86, 322, 325, 329-333, 353.

Field, Roswell M., 353.

Fields, James T., 342, 387.

Fields, Mrs. James T., 235, 243.

Fielding, Henry, 195.

Fiske, John, 433.

Fiske, Nathan W., 254.

Flagg, Wilson, 144.

Flaubert, 235, 248.

_Flute and Violin_, 355, 366, 367.

_Flush Times_, 28, 84.

Foote, Mary Hallock, 221, 307, 407, 413.

Ford, Paul Leicester, 402, 403, 404, 412.

_Foregone Conclusion, A._, 202, 205, 208.

Foss, Sam Walter, 86, 328.

Fox, John, Jr., 319, 410.

Frederic, Harold, 397, 401, 402, 412.

Freeman, Mary E. Wilkins, 18, 24, 202, 220, 221, 235-240, 321, 335,

376.

Fremont, John C., 100.

French, Alice, 15, 24, 221, 278, 307, 372, 373, 377-379, 383.

Freneau, Philip, 121.

Frost, A. B., 304.

Fuller, Henry B., 409, 415.

Fuller, Margaret, 11, 221.

_Gabriel Conroy_, 69, 80, 246.

Garland, Hamlin, 24, 106, 307, 321, 372, 373-377, 383, 400, 431.

_Gates Ajar_, 63, 220, 222.

Gayarre, Charles, 363.

Georgia, 274, 297.

_Georgia Scenes_, 28, 84, 264, 297.

Gibson, William H., 160.

Gilder, Jeanette B., 433.

Gilder, Joseph B., 433.

Gilder, R. W., 18, 21, 290, 300, 321, 342-343, 353.

Gildersleeve, Basil, 275.

Gettysburg, 14.

Glasgow, Ellen, 319, 410.

_Godey's Lady's Book_, 20.

Godkin, Edwin L., 433.

Goodale, Dora Read, 341.

Gordon, Armistead C., 266, 290.

Gordon, John B., 297.

Gosse, Edmund, 334, 345.

Gould, George M., 136, 437.

Grady, Henry W., 297.

_Grandissimes, The_, 249.

Grant, Robert, 409, 414.

Grant, U. S., 41, 416.

_Graysons, The_, 95, 98.

Greeley, Horace, 12.

Greenslet, Ferris, 136, 437.

Griswold, Rufus, 8.

_Guardian Angel, The_, 63.

_Guenn_, 408.

_Guilded Age, The_, 59, 61, 418.

Guiney, Louise I., 243, 322, 341.

Gummere, F. B., 185.

"H. H.," see Helen Hunt Jackson.

_Habitant_ Ballads, 328.

Hadley, Professor, 124.

Hale, Edward E., 11, 299, 357.

Hamilton College, 418.

"Hamilton Gail," see Mary A. Dodge.

Hammond, William H., 281.

_Hans Breitmann Ballads_, 21.

Hardy, A. S., 408, 414.

Hardy, Thomas, 83, 195, 235, 244, 260, 298, 309, 311, 315, 369.

Harland, Henry, 397, 400.

"Harland, Marion," see Mary V. Terhune.

Harned, T. B., 185.

_Harper's Monthly_, 64, 65, 155, 210, 227, 433.

Harris, G. W., 15, 18, 24, 28, 83, 84.

Harris, Joel C., 250, 290, 291, 296, 297, 301-306, 319, 321, 372.

Harte, F. B., 15, 18, 21, 23, 24, 29, 51, 55, 63-82, 84, 86, 87-90,

91, 92, 98, 99, 187, 245.

Harvard University, 11, 189, 398, 434.

Hawley, J. R., 418.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 11, 12, 14, 45, 82, 215, 217, 233, 234, 245, 357.

Hawthorne, Julian, 408, 413.

Hay, John, 13, 18, 21, 85, 86, 87, 88, 90, 91, 99, 385, 409, 416.

Haygood, Atticus G., 297.

Hayne, Paul H., 10, 89, 271-274, 292.

Hearn, Lafcadio, 248, 364, 420-428, 432, 434, 437.

_Hearth and Home_, 92, 358, 374, 386.

Henley, W. E., 403.

Henry, O., 360, 373, 380.

Herford, Oliver, 335.

Herrick, Robert, 410.

Hibbard, George A., 372.

Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, 8, 11, 63, 138, 144-146, 340, 357.

Hill, Benjamin H., 297.

Hingston, E. P., 44.

Historical romance, 262, 403.

Hitchcock, Ripley, 135.

Hoar, Judge, 138.

Holland, J. G., 10, 16, 85, 163, 386, 410.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 11, 13, 19, 25, 42, 61, 63, 64, 129, 309.

_Honorable Peter Stirling, The_, 404.

_Hoosier Mosaics_, 16, 21, 86.

_Hoosier Schoolmaster, The_, 21, 86, 92, 374, 386.

Hovey, Richard, 322, 349, 354.

Howard, Blanche Willis, 220, 408, 414.

Howe, Herbert C., 102.

Howe, Julia Ward, 163, 390.

Howells, William Dean, 11, 12, 13, 18, 21, 87, 122, 178, 186, 191,

197-219, 227, 231, 234, 235, 244, 309, 323, 347, 348, 372.

_Huckleberry Finn_, 59, 308.

Hugh Wynne, 403, 404.

Hugo, V., 250.

_Humble Romance, A._, 236, 237.

_Hyperion_, 112, 277.

Ibsen, H., 244, 373.

_Independent, The_, 95, 114, 433.

_Indian Summer_, 206.

_Innocents Abroad_, 13, 20, 52-56.

_In Ole Virginia_, 266, 318, 355.

_In the Tennessee Mountains_, 86, 221, 294, 307, 309, 355.

_In the Wilderness_, 160.

_Iron Woman, The_, 394.

Irving, Washington, 8, 12, 25, 29, 66, 69, 76, 417.

"J. S. of Dale," see F. J. Stimson.

Jackson, Helen Hunt, 18, 21, 220, 221, 227, 245, 254-258, 267, 269,

336.

James, Henry, Jr., 21, 186-197, 199, 201, 207, 208, 209, 211, 213,

215, 307, 381.

James, Henry, Sr., 186-187, 193.

_Janice Meredith_, 403, 404.

Janvier, Thomas A., 372.

Jewett, Sarah Orne, 18, 21, 24, 220, 221, 228, 231-235, 238, 241, 353.

"Johnson, Benj. F.," see J. W. Riley.

Johnson, Robert U., 290.

Johnston, Mary, 319, 403, 410.

Johnston, Richard M., 21, 24, 295, 297, 299-301, 319.

Johns Hopkins University, 282.

_John Ward, Preacher_, 389, 394.

"Josh Billings," see H. W. Shaw.

_Judge_, 43.

Keats, John, 10, 119, 120.

Kendall, W. S., 51.

_Kentucky Cardinal, A._, 367, 368.

Kennedy, John P., 263.

"Kerr, Orpheus C.," see R. H. Newell.

King, Clarence, 188.

King, Edward, 247, 265.

King, General Charles, 407, 413.

King, Grace, 24, 221, 318, 362-364, 382, 428.

Kingsley, Charles, 186.

Kipling, Rudyard, 79, 307, 389, 397.

Kirkland, Joseph, 374.

_Knitters in the Sun_, 221, 307, 378.

Knox College, 329.

_Lady of the Aroostook, The_, 210, 213.

_Lady of Fort St. John_, 261.

_Lady, or the Tiger, The_, 359.

_Lamplighter, The_, 254.

Landon, Melvin D., 26, 32, 44.

Landor, W. S., 124, 153.

Lane, T. W., 84.

Lanier, Clifford, 279.

Lanier, Sidney, 21, 22, 63, 86, 271, 274-280, 293, 296, 300, 305, 349.

Lathrop, Rose H., 221.

Lazarus, Emma, 322, 336-338.

Learned, Walter, 335.

_Leaves of Grass_, 163, 172.

_Led Horse Claim, The_, 221.

Leland, C. G., 21.

Lewis, Charles B., 26, 32.

_Life_, 43, 335.

_Life on the Mississippi_, 58.

Lincoln, A., 26, 27, 89, 142.

_Lincoln, Life of_, by Nicolay and Hay, 88.

_Literary World, The_, 296, 318.

_Little Corporal, The_, 95.

_Little Lord Fauntleroy_, 388.

_Little Women_, 220.

Locke, David Ross, 26, 32, 37-40, 44.

London, Jack, 410.

Longfellow, Henry W., 8, 10, 11, 12, 18, 19, 52, 66, 118, 126, 127,

142, 153, 181, 186, 217, 277, 417.

Longstreet, Augustus B., 28, 84, 297, 300.

_Lorna Doone_, 402.

_Looking Backward_, 409.

Lowell, James Russell, 11, 12, 14, 19, 20, 22, 25, 120, 121, 124, 138,

139, 142, 153, 163, 167, 186, 228, 230, 433.

_Luck of Roaring Camp, The_, 21, 65, 73, 355, 357.

Ludlow, Fitzhugh, 51.

Lummis, Charles F., 106.

Lyceum, The, 8, 10.

Mabie, Hamilton W., 433.

M'Carthy, Justin, 64.

McConnel, J. L., 84.

MacDonald, George, 387.

Macon, J. A., 266.

_Madame Delphine_, 252.

Mahan, Capt., 416.

_Main-Traveled Roads_, 355, 374, 431.

_Major Jones's Chronicles_, 298.

_Malbone_, 63.

Major, Charles, 403.

Mark Twain, see Clemens, S. L.

Matthews, J. Brander, 333, 353, 372, 433.

"Marjorie Daw," 21, 360.

"Mars Chan," 265, 307.

Maupassant, 197, 235, 238, 244, 373.

Maynard, M. T., 185.

_Meadow Grass_, 240.

Melville, Herman, 163.

Menken, Adah Isaacs, 51.

Mercier College, 299.

Merwin, C. H., 66, 75, 82.

Methodism, 96.

Mifflin, Lloyd, 345.

Millet, 13.

Miller, Joaquin, 15, 18, 21, 22, 51, 61, 99-115.

Miller, Olive Thorne, 160.

Mims, Edwin, 293.

_Minister's Charge, The_, 206, 208, 209.

_Minister's Wooing, The_, 228.

Mitchell, Donald G., 63, 417.

Mitchell, S. Weir, 321, 345, 403, 404, 405-407, 412.

_Modern Instance, A._, 206, 209.

_Monsieur Beaucaire_, 262, 403.

"Monsieur Motte," 221, 362.

More, Paul Elmer, 432, 434-436, 437.

Morris, G. P., 12.

Motley, J. L., 11.

Moulton, Louise Chandler, 220, 336.

"M. Quad," see C. B. Lewis.

_Mr. Isaaes_, 389.

_Mrs. Partington's Carpet Bag_, 33.

Muir, John, 21, 61, 99, 108, 111, 113, 154-159, 161, 165, 182.

Mulford, Prentice, 51.

Munkittrick, R. K., 335.

Murfree, Mary Noailles, 15, 18, 21, 24, 221, 278, 307, 308-316, 319.

Murray, W. H. H., 160.

_My Study Windows_, 138.

_My Summer in a Garden_, 21, 419.

"Nasby, Petroleum V.," see D. R. Locke.

Nast, Thomas, 26, 40-41, 43, 44.

_Nation, The_, 433.

Newell, Robert Henry, 26, 32, 51.

_New Day, The_, 21, 342.

New England, 6, 7, 14, 63, 234.

_New England Nun, A_, 237, 355.

New England School, 220.

New Hampshire, 6.

_New York Ledger_, 205.

Nicholson, Meredith, 410.

Norris, Frank, 396, 398-400, 412.

Norris, W. E., 87.

_North American Review_, 7, 25, 32, 124, 138, 201, 244, 355, 433.

Norton, C. E., 11, 12, 18, 65.

_Novel, What It Is, The_, 392.

Nye, Bill, see E. W. Nye.

Nye, Edgar Wilson, 26, 32, 325, 352.

O'Brien, Fitz-James, 357.

O'Connor, W. D., 175, 185, 372.

Oglethorpe University, 275.

_Old Chester Tales_, 394.

_Old Creole Days_, 21, 86, 247, 294, 355.

_Oldtown Folks_, 63, 229.

_One Summer_, 220, 408.

O'Reilly, John Boyle, 21, 321, 345.

_Our Old Home_, 13.

_Outlook, The_, 433.

_Outing_, 160.

_Our National Parks_, 158.

_Outre-Mer_, 12, 52, 203, 417.

_Overland Monthly_, 55, 65, 67, 68, 69, 73, 84, 104, 155.

Page, Thomas Nelson, 15, 19, 24, 79, 83, 245, 265-269, 270, 291, 307,

321, 372.

Paine, A. B., 44, 62.

Parker, Theodore, 11.

Parkman, Francis, 11, 259, 416.

Parsons, T. W., 11, 19, 163, 350.

_Passionate Pilgrim, A._, 21.

Pater, Walter, 197.

"Paul, John," see C. H. Webb.

Paulding, J. K., 25.

_Pearl of Orr's Island, The_, 229, 231.

Peck, Samuel Minturn, 335.

_Pembroke_, 239.

_Pencillings by the Way_, 12, 52, 417.

Pemberton, T. Edgar, 71, 82.

"Perkins, Eli," see M. D. Landon.

Perry, Nora, 88, 220.

Perry, Bliss, 165, 185, 403, 410, 433.

Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart, see Ward.

Phillips, David Graham, 410.

Phillips, Wendell, 8, 11.

"Phoenix, John," see G. H. Derby.

_Phoenixiana_, 28, 84.

Piatt, J. J., 18, 200, 322, 323, 352.

Piatt, Sarah M., 352.

Pike County, 30, 46, 72, 83-98, 113, 115, 178.

_Pike County Ballads_, 21, 85, 321.

_Pit, The_, 399.

"Plain Language from Truthful James," 67, 84, 321.

Poe, Edgar Allan, 11, 118, 356, 357, 379.

_Poems of the Orient_, 127.

_Poems of Two Friends_, 200, 323.

Pond, Major, 40.

Prescott, W. H., 11.

Preston, Margaret J., 272, 292.

Price, Thomas R., 275.

Prince, Oliver H., 298.

_Puck_, 43, 333.

_Punch_, 43.

_Ramona_, 254.

Read, Opie, 26.

Read, Thomas Buchanan, 118, 120, 299.

Reade, Charles, 64, 224.

Realism, 17, 178, 184, 191, 208, 244, 298, 396, 401.

_Red Badge of Courage, The_, 397.

_Red Rock_, 267.

Reid, Whitelaw, 253.

_Reign of Law, The_, 369, 370.

Repplier, Agnes, 428-432, 437.

Rice, Alice Hegan, 410.

_Richard Carvel_, 403.

Richardson, Charles F., 9, 434.

Richardson, Samuel, 212, 213, 215, 429.

Rickett, A., 185.

Riggs, Kate Douglas Wiggin, 220, 335.

Riley, James Whitcomb, 18, 22, 86, 307, 324-328, 352.

Rives, Amelie, 318.

_Rise of Silas Lapham, The_, 206, 209.

Robertson, T. W., 44.

Robinson, Rowland E., 231, 379, 383.

Roche, James J., 335.

_Roderick Hudson_, 192.

_Rodman the Keeper_, 294, 317.

Roe, E. P., 323, 386, 387-389, 410.

_Romance of Dollard_, 261.

Romanticism, 18, 245, 402.

Ross, Clinton, 372.

Rossetti, D. G., 21.

Rossetti, W. M., 105, 111.

_Roughing It_, 56, 58.

_Round Table, The_, 271.

_Rudder Grange_, 21, 359.

Russell, Irwin, 18, 21, 83, 85, 265, 279, 288-290, 293, 305, 322.

Ryan, Abram J., 345.

_St. Elmo_, 225, 228, 264, 268.

_St. Nicholas_, 95, 358.

_Sam Lawson's Fireside Stories_, 86.

_Saracinesca_, 390.

Saturday Club, 11.

Saxe, John G., 25, 335.

_Saxe Hohm Stories_, 21, 220, 254.

_Science and Health_, 170.

_Science of English Verse_, 284.

Scollard, Clinton, 322, 335, 347.

Scott, Sir Walter, 207.

_Scribner's Monthly_, 9, 19, 20, 21, 64, 114, 155, 265, 342, 358, 386.

Scudder, Horace E., 135, 264, 433.

Service, Robert W., 86.

Shaw, Henry Wheeler, 16, 18, 26, 27, 31, 41-42, 44, 56.

_Shelburne Essays_, 434, 435.

Shelley, P. B., 119.

Sheppard, Elizabeth, 224.

Sherman, Frank Dempster, 345.

Shillaber, P. B., 25, 33.

_Short Sixes_, 334, 379.

Short Story, The, 79, 355-382.

Sill, E. R., 89, 322, 342, 343-345, 354.

Simms, W. G., 263.

_Singular Life, A_, 223.

_Sketch-Book, The_, 12, 417.

Slosson, Anne Trumbull, 220, 231.

Smith, Charles Henry, 26, 32, 298.

Smith, Francis Hopkinson, 15, 18, 269, 373, 409, 415.

Smith, F. S., 44.

Smith, Seba, 25.

Smith, Sol, 84.

Smyth, A. H., 135.

_Songs of the Sierras_, 21, 105, 321.

_Songs of the Southern Seas_, 21.

South, The Old, 262.

Southern literature, 294.

_Southern Magazine, The_, 299.

Spofford, Harriet, Prescott, 220, 222, 225-228, 230, 235, 335.

_Springfield Republican_, 386.

Stedman, Edmund C., 9, 10, 16, 18, 22, 31, 32, 66, 89, 119, 120, 121,

122-126, 133, 153, 160, 175, 343.

Stedman, Laura, 136, 437.

Stevenson, R. L., 10, 138, 240, 403.

Stimson, Frederic J., 409, 415.

Stockton, Frank R., 18, 21, 23, 24, 358-361, 372, 382.

Stoddard, C. W., 10, 13, 16, 51, 66, 67, 89, 103, 106, 117, 118, 345.

Stoddard. R. H., 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 126, 128, 135, 140, 152.

Stone, Melville E., 330.

Story, W. W., 120, 163, 299.

_Story of a Bad Boy_, 63.

Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 11, 12, 62, 63, 186, 221, 222, 228, 229, 233.

Stowe, Charles E., 242.

Sumner, Charles, 11, 44.

_Sut Lovengood's Yarns_, 84.

Swedenborg, 8, 186, 198.

Sweet, Alexander E., 26, 32.

Swinburne, A. C., 21.

Symonds, J. Addington, 21, 185.

Tabb, John B., 276, 322, 343.

Taine, H., 92.

Tarkington, Booth, 403, 410.

Taylor, Bayard, 8, 10, 12, 16, 19, 31, 32, 52, 63, 66, 84, 110, 117,

118, 119, 120, 121, 126, 140, 142, 152, 217.

Taylor, Marie Hansen, 135.

_Temple, Charlotte_, 8.

Terhune, Mary V., 269.

Tensas, Madison, 84.

Thackeray, W. M., 64.

"Thanet, Octave," see Alice French.

_That Lass o' Lowrie's_, 21, 221, 388.

Thaxter, Celia, 18, 21, 220, 321, 338-340, 353.

_Their Wedding Journey_, 21, 204.

Thomas, Edith M., 221, 322, 341-342, 353.

Thompson, Denman, 326.

Thompson, Maurice, 16, 21, 159-160, 324, 401, 403, 418, 433.

Thompson, Slason, 353.

Thompson, William T., 298.

Thoreau, Henry D., 11, 21, 99, 137, 144, 145, 147, 149, 150, 151, 155,

157, 158, 161, 163, 165, 171, 178, 181, 182, 321.

Ticknor, Caroline, 98.

Ticknor, Francis O., 272, 298.

Ticknor, George, 11.

_Tiger-Lilies_, 277.

_Timothy Titcomb Letters_, 387.

Timrod, Henry, 272, 292.

_To Have and to Hold_, 403.

_Token, The_, 8, 244.

Tolstoy, 13, 83, 195, 210, 244, 373, 409.

_Tory Lover, The_, 234.

Torrey, Bradford, 160, 161, 433.

Tourgee, Albion W., 21, 294, 317.

Tourgenieff, 83, 195.

Townsend, Edward W., 380.

Transcendentalists, 186.

Traubel, Horace, 165, 185.

_Tribune Primer, The_, 329.

Triggs, O. L., 185.

Trollope, A., 64.

Trollope, Mrs. T. A., 64.

Trowbridge, J. T., 63.

Turner, J. A., 302.

_Uncle Remus, His Songs and Sayings_, 304.

_Uncle Tom's Cabin_, 67, 228, 250, 257, 386.

University of California, 398.

University of Missouri, 329.

University of Pennsylvania, 405, 418.

University of Virginia, 265.

Van Dyke, Henry, 342, 433.

_Venetian Life_, 13, 203.

_Venner, Elsie_, 63, 228.

_Vers de Societe_, 334, 335.

_Views Afoot_, 12, 203.

Wallace, Lew, 21, 253-254, 321, 388.

_Walden_, 137.

_Wake-Robin_, 21, 144, 148.

"Ward, Artemus," see C. F. Browne.

Ward, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, 63, 65, 220, 221, 236, 321, 335, 372.

Ward, William Hayes, 293.

Warner, Charles Dudley, 18, 21, 160, 418-420, 429, 437.

Webb, Charles Henry, 26, 32, 51, 67.

Webster, Daniel, 11.

_Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers_, 137.

Wells, Carolyn, 335.

Wendell, Barrett, 11, 434.

Wesleyan Female College, 298.

Wharton, Edith, 410.

_When Knighthood Was in Flower_, 403.

Whipple, E. P., 163.

Whitcomb's _Chronological Outlines_, 63.

White, Greenough, 9.

White, Stewart E., 410.

Whitman, Mrs., 88.

Whitman, Walt, 18, 21, 22, 99, 139, 142, 147, 152, 163-185, 217.

Whittier, John G., 11, 12, 19, 186.

Wilcox, Ella Wheeler, 338.

Wiggin, Kate Douglas, see Riggs.

Wilkins, Mary E., see Freeman.

Williams College, 329, 387.

Willis, N. P., 8, 12, 52, 66, 118, 126, 417.

Wilson, Augusta J. Evans, 225.

Wilson, Robert B., 322, 346-347, 354.

Wilson, Woodrow, 262, 418.

Winter, William, 123.

Wister, Owen, 410.

_Woman's Reason, A._, 12, 306.

Women in literature, 335.

Woodberry, George E., 322, 342, 343, 433.

Woolson, Constance Fenimore, 21, 24, 221, 258, 296, 317-318, 319, 321,

335.

Wordsworth, William, 22.

Yale University, 122, 343.

Zola, 212, 397.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] _The Gilded Age_, uniform edition, 200.

[2] Sanborn's _New Hampshire_, 317.

[3] _North American Review_, 104:301.

[4] _Scribner's Monthly_, i: 220.

[5] _Poets of America_, 437.

[6] _Primer of American Literature_, revised edition, 77.

[7] _Philosophy of American Literature_, 65.

[8] Longfellow's _Henry Wadsworth Longfellow_, ii: 308.

[9] Woodberry's _Hawthorne_, 281.

[10] _Life and Letters of E. C. Stedman_, i: 477.

[11] _Life and Letters of Bayard Taylor_, ii: 588.

[12] _Scribner's Monthly_, xi: 432.

[13] Norton's _Letters of James Russell Lowell_, ii: 169.

[14] Vol. 102:586.

[15] Lamon's _Life of Abraham Lincoln_, 480.

[16] Chauncey M. Depew, quoted in Hapgood's _Abraham Lincoln_, 118.

[17] _Life and Letters of E. C. Stedman_, i: 466.

[18] _Ibid._, i: 477.

[19] Vol. 102:588.

[20] Haweis's _American Humorists_, 122.

[21] Quoted by Ruthrauff in "Artemus Ward at Cleveland," _Scribner's

Monthly_, 16:784.

[22] Memories of the Lyceum.

[23] Paine's _Thomas Nast: His Period and His Pictures_.

[24] No attempt has been made to make the bibliographies in this volume

exhaustive or to transcribe title pages.

[25] _Old Times on the Mississippi_, Chap. I.

[26] Paine, _Mark Twain, a Biography_, i: 128.

[27] Paine, _Mark Twain, a Biography_, i: 146.

[28] _Ibid._, i: 155.

[29] _Artemus Ward, His Travels._

[30] Paine's _Mark Twain_, i: 260.

[31] Paine's _Mark Twain_, i: 260.

[32] Greenslet's _Thomas Bailey Aldrich_, 98.

[33] Paine's _Mark Twain_, i: 393.

[34] _Overland Monthly_, i: 101.

[35] Paine's _Mark Twain_, ii: 894.

[36] _American Literature_, i: 396, 521.

[37] _Letters of Charles Eliot Norton_, ii: 36.

[38] Harte. Introduction to the _Collected Works_.

[39] _Life of Bret Harte_, 17.

[40] _Exits and Entrances_, 241.

[41] Harte's General Introduction to his Works.

[42] _The Right Eye of the Commander._

[43] _Letters of Charles Dickens_, 667.

[44] _The Life of Bret Harte_, 166.

[45] _Harper's Magazine_, 41:610.

[46] _Life of Bret Harte_, 286.

[47] General Introduction to his Works.

[48] _Overland Monthly_, 1:191.

[49] Pemberton's _Life of Bret Harte_, 298.

[50] _At Home and Abroad_, Second Series, 51.

[51] _Scribner's Monthly_, 2:430.

[52] _Harper's Weekly_, 49:530.

[53] _North American Review_, 181:343.

[54] _Century Magazine_, 78:444.

[55] _Scribner's Monthly_, 7:736.

[56] _A Poet in Exile. Early Letters of John Hay._ Caroline Ticknor, 18.

[57] _Ibid._, 24.

[58] George Cary Eggleston's _The First of the Hoosiers_, 297.

[59] _Forum_, 10:286.

[60] _The Circuit Rider_, Chap. XX.

[61] Preface to _The Circuit Rider_.

[62] _Exits and Entrances_, 223.

[63] _Songs of the Sierras_, Bear edition, 133.

[64] _Exits and Entrances_, 231.

[65] "My _Life Among the Modocs_, _Unwritten History_, _Paquita_,

_My Life Among the Indians_, _My Own Story_, or whatever other name

enterprising or piratical publishers, Europe or America, may have

chosen to give the one prose book Mulford and I put out in London

during the Modoc War."--Bear edition, iv: 169.

[66] Bear edition, ii: 91.

[67] _The Independent_, June, 1879.

[68] Bear Edition, iii: 33.

[69] _Life and Letters of Bayard Taylor_, i:35.

[70] _Life and Letters of Bayard Taylor_, 1:119.

[71] R. H. Stoddard in _The Atlantic Monthly_, February, 1879.

[72] _An American Anthology._ Introduction, xxvi.

[73] _Life and Letters of Edmund Clarence Stedman_, i: 242.

[74] _Life and Letters of Edmund Clarence Stedman_, i: 384.

[75] _Life and Letters of Edmund Clarence Stedman_, i: 372.

[76] Greenslet's _Thomas Bailey Aldrich_, 64.

[77] Greenslet's _Thomas Bailey Aldrich_, 210.

[78] _Ibid._, 156.

[79] Greenslet's _Thomas Bailey Aldrich_, 200.

[80] Greenslet's _Thomas Bailey Aldrich_, 178.

[81] _Notes on Walt Whitman_, 1867.

[82] _Birds and Poets._ "A Bird Melody."

[83] _Literary Values_, "Poetry and National Life," 184.

[84] _The Witchery of Archery_, 1878.

[85] _Specimen Days._

[86] _Specimen Days._

[87] Works, i: 361.

[88] _The Wound-Dresser._

[89] _November Boughs._

[90] _A Backward Glance o'er Travel'd Roads._

[91] _Preface to Good-by My Fancy._

[92] James's chief works are _Society the Redeemed Form of Man_,

_Remarks on the Gospels_, _Moralism and Christianity_, _The Nature

of Evil_, _Substance and Shadows_, _The Secret of Swedenborg_, _What

is the State?_ _The Church of Christ_, _Christianity the Lyric of

Creation_, and _Literary Remains_, edited by William James.

[93] _A Small Boy and Others._

[94] _A Small Boy and Others._

[95] _Notes of a Son and Brother._

[96] _A Small Boy and Others._

[97] _Partial Portraits_, 1894 ed., 207.

[98] _My Literary Passions._ 4.

[99] _My Literary Passions._

[100] _Literary Friends and Acquaintance._

[101] October, 1865.

[102] _My Literary Passions_, 154.

[103] _An Imperative Duty._

[104] _Chapters from a Life._

[105] _Chapters from a Life._

[106] _Atlantic_, June, 1862.

[107] Stowe's _Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe_, 334.

[108] Fields's _Authors and Friends_, 200.

[109] _Letters of S. O. Jewett_, 47.

[110] _Deephaven_, 84.

[111] _The Twelfth Guest._

[112] _Christmas Jenny._

[113] _Amanda and Love._

[114] _North American Review_, 115:373.

[115] "Scenes of Cable's Romances," _Century_, 5:40.

[116] _The Nation_, August 20, 1885.

[117] _The Atlantic Monthly_, 86:713.

[118] _Ramona_, Chap. 11.

[119] Woodrow Wilson, _Division and Reunion_, 106.

[120] F. E. Chadwick, _Causes of the Civil War_, 32.

[121] _Atlantic Monthly_, 46:828.

[122] _The Southern Poets._ Weber, xxv.

[123] Preface to _Red Rock_.

[124] _Sidney Lanier_, Mims, 29.

[125] Mims's Sidney Lanier, 122.

[126] Quoted by William Hayes Ward, 1884, edition of the _Poems_.

[127] Quoted by William Hayes Ward, 1884, edition of the _Poems_.

[128] _Letters of Sidney Lanier, 162._

[129] _The Critic_, November 3, 1888.

[130] Introduction to Russell's Poems.

[131] _Library of Southern Literature_, 4663.

[132] Introduction to Russell's Poems.

[133] Boston _Literary World_, June 28, 1882.

[134] Mims's _Sidney Lanier_, 284.

[135] Letter to the Author, December, 1914.

[136] _Autobiography_, 72.

[137] Mims's _Sidney Lanier_, 297.

[138] See _Riverside Magazine_, November, 1868, and March, 1869; also

_Independent_, September 2, 1875.

[139] _The Forum_, 1888.

[140] _Atlantic Monthly_, 41:313.

[141] _McClure's Magazine_, 2:222.

[142] _Life of Stedman_, ii:208.

[143] Thompson's _Eugene Field_, ii:236.

[144] Thompson, _Eugene Field_, i: 193.

[145] Brander Matthews, _The Historical Novel_, 173.

[146] _Among the Isles of Shoals_, 111.

[147] _Ibid._, 141.

[148] _The Poems of Madison Cawein._ Vol. I. Introduction.

[149] _Harper's Monthly_, May, 1888.

[150] _Southern Writers_, Vol. II, p. 355.

[151] _Dartmouth Magazine_, Vol. XX, p. 95.

[152] _Collier's_, May 9, 1914.

[153] _The First of the Hoosiers_, 343. See also the editorial on

novel-reading _Scribner's Mo._, 4:493.

[154] Roe's _E. P. Roe_. _Reminiscences of His Life_, 127.

[155] See E. P. Roe's "The Element of Life in Fiction." _Forum_, 5:226.

[156] _The Novel: What It Is._ 17.

[157] _The Novel: What It Is._ 22, 49.

[158] The _Independent_, 52:1182.

[159] The _Bookman_, 8:330.

[160] The _Atlantic_, 80:720.

[161] E. A. Bennett, _Fame and Fiction_, page 163.

[162] Halsey, _Our Literary Deluge_, page 24.

[163] _Dr. North and His Friends._ Chapter 16.

[164] _Shelburne Essays_, Second Series.

[165] "A Hermit's Note on Thoreau." _Shelburne Essays_, First Series.

[166] _Shelburne Essays_, Eighth Series. Preface.

* * * * *

Transcriber's note:

Simple typographical errors were corrected.

Punctuation and spelling variations within quotations likely are due

to having been written by different people, in some cases for literary

effect, and have not been changed. Such variations within the author's

own text have been regularized when a predominant preference was found,

and otherwise have not been changed.

Preface, last line "State College, Pennsylvania,": this edition omitted

the date that appears on the next line in another edition: "July 31,

1915."

Page 30: Transcriber added a closing quotation mark after the end of

the last line of poetry on the page.

Page 42: "wanted local color." probably was meant to end with a comma,

not with a full stop.

Page 89: "Sketch Book, "Castilian Days" refers to John Hay's "Castilian

Days," which has been likened to a sketch book in other books.

Page 165: footnote anchor following "globe affords." has no matching

reference in the source. Based on content of nearby pages, it has been

matched to the same reference as the first footnote anchor on the same

page and appears here as [86].

Chapter XV contains two Section "V"'s, and the following sections are

identified in the sequence beginning "VI".

Page 441: Index entry referring to "H. C. Clark" should be "Clark,

C. H." Some other index references do not exactly match their targets.

Index entries and references have not been verified.