antedates the war; but the first complete set of words to the tune was

the _Yankee's Return from Camp_, which is apparently of the year 1775.

The most popular humorous ballad on the Whig side was the _Battle of

the Kegs_, founded on a laughable incident of the campaign at

Philadelphia. This was written by Francis Hopkinson, a Philadelphian,

and one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. Hopkinson

has some title to rank as one of the earliest American humorists.

Without the keen wit of _McFingal_ some of his _Miscellaneous Essays

and Occasional Writings_, published in 1792, have more geniality and

heartiness than Trumbull's satire. His _Letter on Whitewashing_ is a

bit of domestic humor that foretokens the _Danbury News_ man, and his

_Modern Learning_, 1784, a burlesque on college examinations, in which

a salt-box is described from the point of view of metaphysics, logic,

natural philosophy, mathematics, anatomy, surgery and chemistry, long

kept its place in school-readers and other collections. His son,

Joseph Hopkinson, wrote the song of _Hail Columbia_, which is saved

from insignificance only by the music to which it was married, {389}

the then popular air of "The President's March." The words were

written in 1798, on the eve of a threatened war with France, and at a

time when party spirit ran high. It was sung nightly by crowds in the

streets, and for a whole season by a favorite singer at the theater;

for by this time there were theaters in Philadelphia, in New York, and

even in Puritanic Boston. Much better than _Hail Columbia_ was the

_Star Spangled Banner_, the words of which were composed by Francis

Scott Key, a Marylander, during the bombardment by the British of Fort

McHenry, near Baltimore, in 1812. More pretentious than these was the

once celebrated ode of Robert Treat Paine, Jr., _Adams and Liberty_,

recited at an anniversary of the Massachusetts Charitable Fire Society.

The sale of this is said to have netted its author over $750, but it

is, notwithstanding, a very wooden performance. Paine was a young

Harvard graduate, who had married an actress playing at the old Federal

Street Theater, the first play-house opened in Boston, in 1794. His

name was originally Thomas, but this was changed for him by the

Massachusetts Legislature, because he did not wish to be confounded

with the author of the _Age of Reason_. "Dim are those names erstwhile

in battle loud," and many an old Revolutionary worthy who fought for

liberty with sword and pen is now utterly forgotten, or consigned to

the limbo of Duyckinck's _Cyclopedia_ and Griswold's _Poets of

America_. Here and there a line has, by accident, survived to do {390}

duty as a motto or inscription, while all its context is buried in

oblivion. Few have read any thing more of Jonathan M. Sewall's, for

example, than the couplet,

"No pent-up Utica contracts your powers,

But the whole boundless continent is yours,"

taken from his _Epilogue to Cato_, written in 1778.

Another Revolutionary poet was Philip Freneau; "that rascal Freneau,"

as Washington called him, when annoyed by the attacks upon his

administration in Freneau's _National Gazette_. He was of Huguenot

descent, was a classmate of Madison at Princeton College, was taken

prisoner by the British during the war, and when the war was over,

engaged in journalism, as an ardent supporter of Jefferson and the

Democrats. Freneau's patriotic verses and political lampoons are now

unreadable; but he deserves to rank as the first real American poet, by

virtue of his _Wild Honeysuckle_, _Indian Burying Ground_, _Indian

Student_, and a few other little pieces, which exhibit a grace and

delicacy inherited, perhaps, with his French blood.

Indeed, to speak strictly, all of the "poets" hitherto mentioned were

nothing but rhymers but in Freneau we meet with something of beauty and

artistic feeling; something which still keeps his verses fresh. In his

treatment of Indian themes, in particular, appear for the first time a

sense of the picturesque and poetic {391} elements in the character and

wild life of the red man, and that pensive sentiment which the fading

away of the tribes toward the sunset has left in the wake of their

retreating footsteps. In this Freneau anticipates Cooper and

Longfellow, though his work is slight compared with the

_Leatherstocking Tales_ or _Hiawatha_. At the time when the

Revolutionary War broke out the population of the colonies was over

three millions; Philadelphia had thirty thousand inhabitants, and the

frontier had retired to a comfortable distance from the sea-board. The

Indian had already grown legendary to town dwellers, and Freneau

fetches his _Indian Student_ not from the outskirts of the settlement,

but from the remote backwoods of the State:

"From Susquehanna's farthest springs,

Where savage tribes pursue their game

(His blanket tied with yellow strings),

A shepherd of the forest came."

Campbell "lifted"--in his poem _O'Conor's Child_--the last line of the

following stanza from Freneau's _Indian Burying Ground_:

"By midnight moons, o'er moistening dews,

In vestments for the chase arrayed,

The hunter still the deer pursues--

The hunter and the deer a shade."

And Walter Scott did Freneau the honor to borrow, in _Marmion_, the

final line of one of the {392} stanzas of his poem on the battle of

Eutaw Springs:

"They saw their injured country's woe,

The flaming town, the wasted field;

Then rushed to meet the insulting foe;

They took the spear, but left the shield."

Scott inquired of an American gentleman who wished him the authorship

of this poem, which he had by heart, and pronounced it as fine a thing

of the kind as there was in the language.

The American drama and American prose fiction had their beginnings

during the period now under review. A company of English players came

to this country in 1752 and made the tour of many of the principal

towns. The first play acted here by professionals on a public stage

was the _Merchant of Venice_, which was given by the English company at

Williamsburg, Va., in 1752. The first regular theater building was at

Annapolis, Md., where in the same year this troupe performed, among

other pieces, Farquhar's _Beaux' Stratagem_. In 1753 a theater was

built in New York, and one in 1759 in Philadelphia. The Quakers of

Philadelphia and the Puritans of Boston were strenuously opposed to the

acting of plays, and in the latter city the players were several times

arrested during the performances, under a Massachusetts law forbidding

dramatic performances. At Newport, R. I., on the other hand, which was

a health resort for planters from the Southern States and the West

Indies. {393} and the largest slave-market in the North, the actors

were hospitably received. The first play known to have been written by

an American was the _Prince of Parthia_, 1765, a closet drama, by

Thomas Godfrey, of Philadelphia. The first play by an American writer,

acted by professionals in a public theater, was Royal Tyler's

_Contrast_, performed in New York in 1786. The former of these was

very high tragedy, and the latter very low comedy; and neither of them

is otherwise remarkable than as being the first of a long line of

indifferent dramas. There is, in fact, no American dramatic literature

worth speaking of; not a single American play of even the second rank,

unless we except a few graceful parlor comedies, like Mr. Howell's

_Elevator_ and _Sleeping-Car_. Royal Tyler, the author of the

_Contrast_, cut quite a figure in his day as a wit and journalist, and

eventually became Chief Justice of Vermont. His comedy, the _Georgia

Spec_, 1797, had a great run in Boston, and his _Algerine Captive_,

published in the same year, was one of the earliest American novels.

It was a rambling tale of adventure, constructed somewhat upon the plan

of Smollett's novels and dealing with the piracies which led to the war

between the United States and Algiers in 1815.

Charles Brockden Brown, the first American novelist of any note, was

also the first professional man of letters in this country who

supported himself entirely by his pen. He was born in {394}

Philadelphia in 1771, lived a part of his life in New York and part in

his native city, where he started, in 1803, the _Literary Magazine and

American Register_. During the years 1798-1801 he published in rapid

succession six romances, _Wieland_, _Ormond_, _Arthur Mervyn_, _Edgar

Huntley_, _Clara Howard_, and _Jane Talbot_. Brown was an invalid and

something of a recluse, with a relish for the ghastly in incident and

the morbid in character. He was in some points a prophecy of Poe and

Hawthorne, though his art was greatly inferior to Poe's, and almost

infinitely so to Hawthorne's. His books belong more properly to the

contemporary school of fiction in England which preceded the "Waverley

Novels"--to the class that includes Beckford's _Vathek_, Godwin's

_Caleb Williams_ and _St. Leon_, Mrs. Shelley's _Frankenstein_, and

such "Gothic" romances as Lewis's _Monk_, Walpole's _Castle of

Otranto_, and Mrs. Radcliffe's _Mysteries of Udolpho_. A

distinguishing characteristic of this whole school is what we may call

the clumsy-horrible. Brown's romances are not wanting in inventive

power, in occasional situations that are intensely thrilling, and in

subtle analysis of character; but they are fatally defective in art.

The narrative is by turns abrupt and tiresomely prolix, proceeding not

so much by dialogue as by elaborate dissection and discussion of

motives and states of mind, interspersed with the author's reflections.

The wild improbabilities of plot and the unnatural and even monstrous

developments of character {395} are in startling contrast with the

old-fashioned preciseness of the language; the conversations, when

there are any, being conducted in that insipid dialect in which a fine

woman was called an "elegant female." The following is a sample

description of one of Brown's heroines, and is taken from his novel of

_Ormond_, the leading character in which--a combination of unearthly

intellect with fiendish wickedness--is thought to have been suggested

by Aaron Burr: "Helena Cleves was endowed with every feminine and

fascinating quality. Her features were modified by the most transient

sentiments and were the seat of a softness at all times blushful and

bewitching. All those graces of symmetry, smoothness and lustre, which

assemble in the imagination of the painter when he calls from the bosom

of her natal deep the Paphian divinity, blended their perfections in

the shade, complexion, and hair of this lady." But, alas! "Helena's

intellectual deficiencies could not be concealed. She was proficient

in the elements of no science. The doctrine of lines and surfaces was

as disproportionate with her intellects as with those of the mock-bird.

She had not reasoned on the principles of human action, nor examined

the structure of society.~.~.~. She could not commune in their native

dialect with the sages of Rome and Athens.~.~.~. The constitution of

nature, the attributes of its Author, the arrangement of the parts of

the external universe, and the substance, modes of operation, and

ultimate destiny of human {396} intelligence were enigmas unsolved and

insoluble by her."

Brown frequently raises a superstructure of mystery on a basis

ludicrously weak. Thus the hero of his first novel, _Wieland_ (whose

father anticipates "Old Krook," in Dickens's _Bleak House_, by dying of

spontaneous combustion), is led on by what he mistakes for spiritual

voices to kill his wife and children; and the voices turn out to be

produced by the ventriloquism of one Carwin, the villain of the story.

Similarly in _Edgar Huntley_, the plot turns upon the phenomena of

sleep-walking. Brown had the good sense to place the scene of his

romances in his own country, and the only passages in them which have

now a living interest are his descriptions of wilderness scenery in

_Edgar Huntley_, and his graphic account in _Arthur Mervyn_ of the

yellow-fever epidemic in Philadelphia in 1793. Shelley was an admirer

of Brown, and his experiments in prose fiction, such as _Zastrozzi_ and

_St. Irvyne the Rosicrucian_, are of the same abnormal and speculative

type.

Another book which falls within this period was the _Journal_, 1774, of

John Woolman, a New Jersey Quaker, which has received the highest

praise from Channing, Charles Lamb, and many others. "Get the writings

of John Woolman by heart," wrote Lamb, "and love the early Quakers."

The charm of this journal resides in its singular sweetness and

innocence cf feeling, the "deep inward stillness" peculiar to the

people called Quakers. {397} Apart from his constant use of certain

phrases peculiar to the Friends, Woolman's English is also remarkably

graceful and pure, the transparent medium of a soul absolutely sincere,

and tender and humble in its sincerity. When not working at his trade

as a tailor, Woolman spent his time in visiting and ministering to the

monthly, quarterly, and yearly meetings of Friends, traveling on

horseback to their scattered communities in the backwoods of Virginia

and North Carolina, and northward along the coast as far as Boston and

Nantucket. He was under a "concern" and a "heavy exercise" touching

the keeping of slaves, and by his writing and speaking did much to

influence the Quakers against slavery. His love went out, indeed, to

all the wretched and oppressed; to sailors, and to the Indians in

particular. One of his most perilous journeys was made to the

settlements of Moravian Indians in the wilderness of Western

Pennsylvania, at Bethlehem, and at Wehaloosing, on the Susquehanna.

Some of the scruples which Woolman felt, and the quaint _naivete_ with

which he expresses them, may make the modern reader smile--but it is a

smile which is very close to a tear. Thus, when in England--where he

died in 1772--he would not ride nor send a letter by mail-coach,

because the poor post-boys were compelled to ride long stages in winter

nights, and were sometimes frozen to death. "So great is the hurry in

the spirit of this world, that in aiming to do business quickly and to

gain wealth, {398} the creation at this day doth loudly groan." Again,

having reflected that war was caused by luxury in dress, etc., the use

of dyed garments grew uneasy to him, and he got and wore a hat of the

natural color of the fur. "In attending meetings, this singularity was

a trial to me~.~.~. and some Friends, who knew not from what motives I

wore it, grew shy of me.~.~.~. Those who spoke with me I generally

informed, in a few words, that I believed my wearing it was not in my

own will."

1. Representative American Orations. Edited by Alexander Johnston.

New York; G. P. Putnam's Sons. 1884.

2. The Federalist. New York: Charles Scribner. 1863.

3. Notes on Virginia. By Thomas Jefferson. Boston. 1829.

4. Travels in New England and New York. By Timothy Dwight. New Haven.

1821.

5. McFingal: in Trumbull's Poetical Works. Hartford: 1820.

6. Joel Barlow's _Hasty Pudding_. Francis Hopkinson's _Modern

Learning_. Philip Freneau's _Indian Student_, _Indian Burying Ground_,

and _White Honeysuckle_: in Vol. I. of Duyckinck's Cyclopedia of

American Literature. New York: Charles Scribner. 1866.

7. Arthur Mervyn. By Charles Brockden Brown. Boston: S. G. Goodrich.

1827.

8. The Journal of John Woolman. With an {399} Introduction by John G.

Whittier. Boston: James R. Osgood & Co. 1871.

9. American Literature. By Charles F. Richardson. New York: G. P.

Putnam's Sons. 1887.

10. American Literature. By John Nichol. Edinburgh: Adam & Charles

Black. 1882.

{400}

CHAPTER III.

THE ERA OF NATIONAL EXPANSION.

1815-1837.

The attempt to preserve a strictly chronological order must here be

abandoned. About all the American literature in existence, that is of

any value _as literature_, is the product of the past three quarters of

a century, and the men who produced it, though older or younger, were

still contemporaries. Irving's _Knickerbocker's History of New York_,

1809, was published within the recollection of some yet living, and the

venerable poet, Richard H. Dana--Irving's junior by only four

years--survived to 1879, when the youngest of the generation of writers

that now occupy public attention had already won their spurs. Bryant,

whose _Thanatopsis_ was printed in 1816, lived down to 1878. He saw

the beginnings of our national literature, and he saw almost as much of

the latest phase of it as we see to-day in this year 1887. Still, even

within the limits of a single life-time, there have been progress and

change. And so, while it will happen that the consideration of writers

a part of whose work falls between the dates at the head of this

chapter may be postponed {401} to subsequent chapters, we may in a

general way follow the sequence of time.

The period between the close of the second war with England, in 1815,

and the great financial crash of 1837, has been called, in language

attributed to President Monroe, "the era of good feeling." It was a

time of peace and prosperity, of rapid growth in population and rapid

extension of territory. The new nation was entering upon its vast

estates and beginning to realize its manifest destiny. The peace with

Great Britain, by calling off the Canadian Indians and the other tribes

in alliance with England, had opened up the North-west to settlement.

Ohio had been admitted as a State in 1802; but at the time of President

Monroe's tour, in 1817, Cincinnati had only seven thousand inhabitants,

and half of the State was unsettled. The Ohio River flowed for most of

its course through an unbroken wilderness. Chicago was merely a fort.

Hitherto the emigration to the West had been sporadic; now it took on

the dimensions of a general and almost a concerted exodus. This

movement was stimulated in New England by the cold summer of 1816 and

the late spring of 1817, which produced a scarcity of food that

amounted in parts of the interior to a veritable famine. All through

this period sounded the axe of the pioneer clearing the forest about

his log cabin, and the rumble of the canvas-covered emigrant wagon over

the primitive highways which crossed the Alleghanies {402} or followed

the valley of the Mohawk. S. G. Goodrich, known in letters as "Peter

Parley," in his _Recollections of a Lifetime_, 1856, describes the part

of the movement which he had witnessed as a boy in Fairfield County,

Conn.: "I remember very well the tide of emigration through

Connecticut, on its way to the West, during the summer of 1817. Some

persons went in covered wagons--frequently a family consisting of

father, mother, and nine small children, with one at the breast--some

on foot, and some crowded together under the cover, with kettles,

gridirons, feather beds, crockery, and the family Bible, Watts's Psalms

and Hymns, and Webster's Spelling-book--the lares and penates of the

household. Others started in ox-carts, and trudged on at the rate of

ten miles a day. . . . Many of these persons were in a state of

poverty, and begged their way as they went. Some died before they

reached the expected Canaan; many perished after their arrival from

fatigue and privation; and others from the fever and ague, which was

then certain to attack the new settlers. It was, I think, in 1818 that

I published a small tract entitled _'Tother Side of Oldo_--that is, the

other view, in contrast to the popular notion that it was the paradise

of the world. It was written by Dr. Hand--a talented young physician

of Berlin--who had made a visit to the West about these days. It

consisted mainly of vivid but painful pictures of the accidents and

incidents attending this wholesale migration. The roads over the

Alleghanies, {403} between Philadelphia and Pittsburg, were then rude,

steep, and dangerous, and some of the more precipitous slopes were

consequently strewn with the carcases of wagons, carts, horses, oxen,

which had made shipwreck in their perilous descents."

But in spite of the hardships of the settler's life, the spirit of that

time, as reflected in its writings, was a hopeful and a light-hearted

one.

"Westward the course of empire takes its way,"

runs the famous line from Berkeley's poem on America. The New

Englanders who removed to the Western Reserve went there to better

themelves; and their children found themselves the owners of broad

acres of virgin soil, in place of the stony hill pastures of Berkshire

and Litchfield. There was an attraction, too, about the wild, free

life of the frontiersman, with all its perils and discomforts. The

life of Daniel Boone, the pioneer of Kentucky--that "dark and bloody

ground"--is a genuine romance. Hardly less picturesque was the old

river life of the Ohio boatmen, before the coming of steam banished

their queer craft from the water. Between 1810 and 1840 the center of

population in the United States had moved from the Potomac to the

neighborhood of Clarksburg, in West Virginia, and the population itself

had increased from seven to seventeen millions. The gain was made

partly in the East and South, but the general drift was westward.

During the years now under review, {404} the following new States were

admitted, in the order named: Indiana, Mississippi, Illinois, Alabama,

Maine, Missouri, Arkansas, Michigan. Kentucky and Tennessee had been

made States in the last years of the eighteenth century, and

Louisiana--acquired by purchase from France--in 1812.

The settlers, in their westward march, left large tracts of wilderness

behind them. They took up first the rich bottom lands along the river

courses, the Ohio and Miami and Licking, and later the valleys of the

Mississippi and Missouri, and the shores of the great lakes. But there

still remained back woods in New York and Pennsylvania, though the

cities of New York and Philadelphia had each a population of more than

one hundred thousand in 1815. When the Erie Canal was opened, in 1825,

it ran through a primitive forest. N. P. Willis, who went by canal to

Buffalo and Niagara in 1827, describes the houses and stores at

Rochester as standing among the burnt stumps left by the first

settlers. In the same year that saw the opening of this great water

way, the Indian tribes, numbering now about one hundred and thirty

thousand souls, were moved across the Mississippi. Their power had

been broken by General Harrison's victory over Tecumseh at the battle

of Tippecanoe, in 1811, and they were in fact mere remnants and

fragments of the race which had hung upon the skirts of civilization,

and disputed the advance of the white man for two centuries. It was

not until some years later than this that railroads began {405} to take

an important share in opening up new country.

The restless energy, the love of adventure, the sanguine anticipation

which characterized American thought at this time, the picturesque

contrasts to be seen in each mushroom town where civilization was

encroaching on the raw edge of the wilderness--all these found

expression, not only in such well-known books as Copper's _Pioneers_,

1823, and Irving's _Tour on the Prairies_, 1835, but in the minor

literature which is read to-day, if at all, not for its own sake, but

for the light that it throws on the history of national development: in

such books as Paulding's story of _Westward Ho!_ and his poem, _The

Backwoodsman_, 1818; or as Timothy Flint's _Recollections_, 1826, and

his _Geography and History of the Mississippi Valley_, 1827. It was

not an age of great books, but it was an age of large ideas and

expanding prospects. The new consciousness of empire uttered itself

hastily, crudely, ran into buncombe, "spread-eagleism," and other noisy

forms of patriotic exultation; but it was thoroughly democratic and

American. Though literature--or at least the best literature of the

time--was not yet emancipated from English models, thought and life, at

any rate, were no longer in bondage--no longer provincial. And it is

significant that the party in office during these years was the

Democratic, the party which had broken most completely with

conservative traditions. The famous "Monroe doctrine" was {406} a

pronunciamento of this aggressive democracy, and though the Federalists

returned to power for a single term, under John Quincy Adams

(1825-1829,) Andrew Jackson received the largest number of electoral

votes, and Adams was only chosen by the House of Representatives in the

absence of a majority vote for any one candidate. At the close of his

term "Old Hickory," the hero of the people, the most characteristically

democratic of our Presidents, and the first backwoodsman who entered

the White House, was borne into office on a wave of popular enthusiasm.

We have now arrived at the time when American literature, in the higher

and stricter sense of the term, really began to have an existence. S.

G. Goodrich, who settled at Hartford as a bookseller and publisher in

1818, says, in his _Recollections_: "About this time I began to think

of trying to bring out original American works. . . . The general

impression was that we had not, and could not have, a literature. It

was the precise point at which Sidney Smith had uttered that bitter

taunt in the _Edinburgh Review_, 'Who reads an American book?' . . .

It was positively injurious to the commercial credit of a bookseller to

undertake American works." Washington Irving (1783-1859) was the first

American author whose books, as _books_, obtained recognition abroad;

whose name was thought worthy of mention beside the names of English

contemporary authors, like Byron, Scott, and Coleridge. He was also

the first American writer whose writings are still read {407} for their

own sake. We read Mather's _Magnalia_, and Franklin's _Autobiography_,

and Trumbull's _McFingal_--if we read them at all--as history, and to

learn about the times or the men. But we read the _Sketch Book_, and

_Knickerbocker's History of New York_, and the _Conquest of Granada_

for themselves, and for the pleasure that they give as pieces of

literary art.

We have arrived, too, at a time when we may apply a more cosmopolitan

standard to the works of American writers, and may disregard many a

minor author whose productions would have cut some figure had they come

to light amid the poverty of our colonial age. Hundreds of these

forgotten names, with specimens of their unread writings, are consigned

to a limbo of immortality in the pages of Duyckinck's _Cyclopedia_, and

of Griswold's _Poets of America_ and _Prose Writers of America_. We

may select here for special mention, and as most representative of the

thought of their time, the names of Irving, Cooper, Webster, and

Channing.

A generation was now coming upon the stage who could recall no other

government in this country than the government of the United States,

and to whom the Revolutionary War was but a tradition. Born in the

very year of the peace, it was a part of Irving's mission, by the

sympathetic charm of his writings and by the cordial recognition which

he won in both countries, to allay the soreness which the second war,

of 1812-15, had left between England and America. He was {408} well

fitted for the task of mediator. Conservative by nature, early drawn

to the venerable worship of the Episcopal Church, retrospective in his

tastes, with a preference for the past and its historic associations

which, even in young America, led him to invest the Hudson and the

region about New York with a legendary interest, he wrote of American

themes in an English fashion, and interpreted to an American public the

mellow attractiveness that he found in the life and scenery of Old

England. He lived in both countries, and loved them both; and it is

hard to say whether Irving is more of an English or of an American

writer. His first visit to Europe, in 1804-6, occupied nearly two

years. From 1815 to 1832 he was abroad continuously, and his

"domicile," as the lawyers say, during these seventeen years was really

in England, though a portion of his time was spent upon the continent,

and several successive years in Spain, where he engaged upon the _Life

of Columbus_, the _Conquest of Granada_, the _Companions of Columbus_,

and the _Alhambra_, all published between 1828-32. From 1842 to 1846

he was again in Spain as American Minister at Madrid.

Irving was the last and greatest of the Addisonians. His boyish

letters, signed "Jonathan Oldstyle," contributed in 1802 to his

brother's newspaper, the _Morning Chronicle_, were, like Franklin's

_Busybody_, close imitations of the _Spectator_. To the same family

belonged his _Salmagundi_ papers, 1807, a series of town-satires on New

York society, written {409} in conjunction with his brother William and

with James K. Paulding. The little tales, essays, and sketches which

compose the _Sketch Book_ were written in England, and published in

America, in periodical numbers, in 1819-20. In this, which is in some

respects his best book, he still maintained that attitude of

observation and spectatorship taught him by Addison. The volume had a

motto taken from Burton, "I have no wife nor children, good or bad, to

provide for--a mere spectator of other men's fortunes," etc.; and "The

Author's Account of Himself" began in true Addisonian fashion: "I was

always fond of visiting new scenes and observing strange characters and

manners."

But though never violently "American," like some later writers who have

consciously sought to throw off the trammels of English tradition,

Irving was in a real way original. His most distinct addition to our

national literature was in his creation of what has been called "the

Knickerbocker legend." He was the first to make use, for literary

purposes, of the old Dutch traditions which clustered about the

romantic scenery of the Hudson. Col. T. W. Higginson, in his _History

of the United States_, tells how "Mrs. Josiah Quincy, sailing up that

river in 1786, when Irving was a child three years old, records that

the captain of the sloop had a legend, either supernatural or

traditional, for every scene, and not a mountain reared its head

unconnected with some marvelous {410} story.'" The material thus at

hand Irving shaped into his _Knickerbocker's History of New York_, into

the immortal story of _Rip Van Winkle_, and the _Legend of Sleepy

Hollow_ (both published in the _Sketch Book_), and in later additions

to the same realm of fiction, such as Dolph Heyliger in _Bracebridge

Hall_, the _Money Diggers_, _Wolfert Webber_, and _Kidd the Pirate_, in

the _Tales of a Traveler_, and in some of the miscellanies from the

_Knickerbocker Magazine_, collected into a volume, in 1855, under the

title of _Wolfert's Roost_.

The book which made Irving's reputation was his _Knickerbocker's

History of New York_, 1809, a burlesque chronicle, making fun of the

old Dutch settlers of New Amsterdam, and attributed, by a familiar and

now somewhat threadbare device,[1] to a little old gentleman named

Diedrich Knickerbocker, whose manuscript had come into the editor's

hands. The book was gravely dedicated to the New York Historical

Society, and it is said to have been quoted, as authentic history, by a

certain German scholar named Goeller, in a note on a passage in

Thucydides. This story, though well vouched, is hard of belief: for

_Knickerbocker_, though excellent fooling, has nothing of the grave

irony of Swift in his _Modest Proposal_ or of Defoe in his _Short Way

with Dissenters_. Its mock-heroic intention is as transparent as in

Fielding's parodies of Homer, which it somewhat resembles, {411}

particularly in the delightfully absurd description of the mustering of

the clans under Peter Stuyvesant and the attack on the Swedish Fort

Christina. _Knickerbocker's History of New York_ was a real addition

to the comic literature of the world; a work of genuine humor, original

and vital. Walter Scott said that it reminded him closely of Swift,

and had touches resembling Sterne. It is not necessary to claim for

Irving's little masterpiece a place beside _Gulliver's Travels_ and

_Tristram Shandy_. But it was, at least, the first American book in

the lighter departments of literature which needed no apology and stood

squarely on its own legs. It was written, too, at just the right time.

Although New Amsterdam had become New York as early as 1664, the

impress of its first settlers, with their quaint conservative ways, was

still upon it when Irving was a boy. The descendants of the Dutch

families formed a definite element not only in Manhattan, but all up

along the kills of the Hudson, at Albany, at Schenectady, in

Westchester County, at Hoboken, and Communipaw, localities made

familiar to him in many a ramble and excursion. He lived to see the

little provincial town of his birth grow into a great metropolis, in

which all national characteristics were blended together, and a tide of

immigration from Europe and New England flowed over the old landmarks

and obliterated them utterly.

Although Irving was the first to reveal to his countrymen the literary

possibilities of their early {412} history, it must be acknowledged

that with modern American life he had little sympathy. He hated

politics, and in the restless democratic movement of the time, as we

have described it, he found no inspiration. This moderate and placid

gentleman, with his distrust of all kinds of fanaticism, had no liking

for the Puritans or for their descendants, the New England Yankees, if

we may judge from his sketch of Ichabod Crane, in the _Legend of Sleepy

Hollow_. His genius was reminiscent, and his imagination, like

Scott's, was the historic imagination. In crude America his fancy took

refuge in the picturesque aspects of the past, in "survivals" like the

Knickerbocker Dutch and the Acadian peasants, whose isolated

communities on the lower Mississippi he visited and described. He

turned naturally to the ripe civilization of the Old World. He was our

first picturesque tourist, the first "American in Europe." He

rediscovered England, whose ancient churches, quiet landscapes,

memory-haunted cities, Christmas celebrations, and rural festivals had

for him an unfailing attraction. With pictures of these, for the most

part, he filled the pages of the _Sketch Book_ and _Bracebridge Hall_,

1822. Delightful as are these English sketches, in which the author

conducts his readers to Windsor Castle, or Stratford-on-Avon, or the

Boar's Head Tavern, or sits beside him on the box of the old English

stage-coach, or shares with him the Yuletide cheer at the ancient

English country house, their interest has somewhat faded. {413} The

pathos of the _Broken Heart_ and the _Pride of the Village_, the mild

satire of the _Art of Book Making_, the rather obvious reflections in

_Westminster Abbey_ are not exactly to the taste of this generation.

They are the literature of leisure and retrospection; and already

Irving's gentle elaboration, the refined and slightly artificial beauty

of his style, and his persistently genial and sympathetic attitude have

begun to pall upon readers who demand a more nervous and accented kind

of writing. It is felt that a little roughness, a little harshness,

even, would give relief to his pictures of life. There is, for

instance, something a little irritating in the old-fashioned

courtliness of his manner toward women; and one reads with a certain

impatience smoothly punctuated passages like the following: "As the

vine, which has long twined its graceful foliage about the oak, and

been lifted by it into sunshine, will, when the hardy plant is rifted

by the thunderbolt, cling round it with its caressing tendrils, and

bind up its shattered boughs, so is it beautifully ordered by

Providence that woman, who is the mere dependent and ornament of man in

his happier hours, should be his stay and solace when smitten with

sudden calamity; winding herself into the rugged recesses of his

nature, tenderly supporting the drooping head, and binding up the

broken heart."

Irving's gifts were sentiment and humor, with an imagination

sufficiently fertile, and an observation sufficiently acute to support

those two main {414} qualities, but inadequate to the service of strong

passion or subtle thinking, though his pathos, indeed, sometimes

reached intensity. His humor was always delicate and kindly; his

sentiment never degenerated into sentimentality. His diction was

graceful and elegant--too elegant, perhaps; and in his modesty he

attributed the success of his books in England to the astonishment of

Englishmen that an American could write good English.

In Spanish history and legend Irving found a still newer and richer

field for his fancy to work upon. He had not the analytic and

philosophical mind of a great historian, and the merits of his

_Conquest of Granada_ and _Life of Columbus_ are rather

_belletristisch_ than scientific. But he brought to these undertakings

the same eager love of the romantic past which had determined the

character of his writings in America and England, and the

result--whether we call it history or romance--is at all events

charming as literature. His _Life of Washington_--completed in

1859--was his _magnum opus_, and is accepted as standard authority.

_Mahomet and His Successors_, 1850, was comparatively a failure. But

of all Irving's biographies, his _Life of Oliver Goldsmith_, 1849, was

the most spontaneous and perhaps the best. He did not impose it upon

himself as a task, but wrote it from a native and loving sympathy with

his subject, and it is, therefore, one of the choicest literary memoirs

in the language.

{415}

When Irving returned to America, in 1832, he was the recipient of

almost national honors. He had received the medal of the Royal Society

of Literature and the degree of D.C.L. from Oxford University, and had

made American literature known and respected abroad. In his modest

home at Sunnyside, on the banks of the river over which he had been the

first to throw the witchery of poetry and romance, he was attended to

the last by the admiring affection of his countrymen. He had the love

and praises of the foremost English writers of his own generation and

the generation which followed--of Scott, Byron, Coleridge, Thackeray,

and Dickens, some of whom had been among his personal friends. He is

not the greatest of American authors, but the influence of his writings

is sweet and wholesome, and it is in many ways fortunate that the first

American man of letters who made himself heard in Europe should have

been in all particulars a gentleman.

Connected with Irving, at least by name and locality, were a number of

authors who resided in the city of New York and who are known as the

Knickerbocker writers, perhaps because they were contributors to the

_Knickerbocker Magazine_. One of these was James K. Paulding, a

connection of Irving by marriage, and his partner in the _Salmagundi

Papers_. Paulding became Secretary of the Navy under Van Buren, and

lived down to the year 1860. He was a {416} voluminous author, but his

writings had no power of continuance, and are already obsolete, with

the possible exception of his novel, the _Dutchman's Fireside_, 1831.

A finer spirit than Paulding was Joseph Rodman Drake, a young poet of

great promise, who died in 1820, at the age of twenty-five. Drake's

patriotic lyric, the _American Flag_, is certainly the most spirited

thing of the kind in our poetic literature, and greatly superior to

such national anthems as _Hail Columbia_ and the _Star Spangled

Banner_. His _Culprit Fay_, published in 1819, was the best poem that

had yet appeared in America, if we except Bryant's _Thanatopsis_, which

was three years the elder. The _Culprit Fay_ was a fairy story, in

which, following Irving's lead, Drake undertook to throw the glamour of

poetry about the Highlands of the Hudson. Edgar Poe said that the poem

was fanciful rather than imaginative; but it is prettily and even

brilliantly fanciful, and has maintained its popularity to the present

time. Such verse as the following--which seems to show that Drake had

been reading Coleridge's _Christabel_, published three years

before--was something new in American poetry:

"The winds are whist and the owl is still,

The bat in the shelvy rock is hid,

And naught is heard on the lonely hill,

But the cricket's chirp and the answer shrill,

Of the gauze-winged katydid,

And the plaint of the wailing whip-poor-will

{417}

Who moans unseen, and ceaseless sings

Ever a note of wail and woe,

Till morning spreads her rosy wings,

And earth and sky in her glances glow."

Here we have, at last, the whip-poor-will, an American bird, and not

the conventional lark or nightingale, although the elves of the Old

World seem scarcely at home on the banks of the Hudson. Drake's memory

has been kept fresh not only by his own poetry, but by the beautiful

elegy written by his friend Fitz-Greene Halleck, the first stanza of

which is universally known:

"Green be the turf above thee,

Friend of my better days;

None knew thee but to love thee,

Nor named thee but to praise."

Halleck was born in Guilford, Connecticut, whither he retired in 1849,

and resided there till his death in 1867. But his literary career is

identified with New York. He was associated with Drake in writing the

_Croaker Papers_, a series of humorous and satirical verses contributed

in 1814 to the _Evening Post_. These were of a merely local and

temporary interest; but Halleck's fine ode, _Marco Bozzaris_--though

declaimed until it has become hackneyed--gives him a sure title to a

remembrance; and his _Alnwick Castle_, a monody, half serious and half

playful on the contrasts between feudal associations and modern life,

has {418} much of that pensive lightness which characterizes Praed's

best _vers de societe_.

A friend of Drake and Halleck was James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851),

the first American novelist of distinction, and, if a popularity which

has endured for nearly three quarters of a century is any test, still

the most successful of all American novelists. Cooper was far more

intensely American than Irving, and his books reached an even wider

public. "They are published as soon as he produces them," said Morse,

the electrician, in 1833, "in thirty-four different places in Europe.

They have been seen by American travelers in the languages of Turkey

and Persia, in Constantinople, in Egypt, at Jerusalem, at Ispahan."

Cooper wrote altogether too much; he published, besides his fictions, a

_Naval History of the United States_, a series of naval biographies,

works of travel, and a great deal of controversial matter. He wrote

over thirty novels, the greater part of which are little better than

trash, and tedious trash at that. This is especially true of his

_tendenz_ novels and his novels of society. He was a man of strongly

marked individuality, fiery, pugnacious, sensitive to criticism, and

abounding in prejudices. He was embittered by the scurrilous attacks

made upon him by a portion of the American press, and spent a great

deal of time and energy in conducting libel suits against the

newspapers. In the same spirit he used fiction as a vehicle for attack

upon the abuses and follies of American life. Nearly all of {419} his

novels, written with this design, are worthless. Nor was Cooper well

equipped by nature and temperament for depicting character and passion

in social life. Even in his best romances his heroines and his

"leading juveniles"--to borrow a term from the amateur stage--are

insipid and conventional. He was no satirist, and his humor was not of

a high order. He was a rapid and uneven writer, and, unlike Irving, he

had no style.

Where Cooper was great was in the story, in the invention of incidents

and plots, in a power of narrative and description in tales of wild

adventure which keeps the reader in breathless excitement to the end of

the book. He originated the novel of the sea and the novel of the

wilderness. He created the Indian of literature; and in this, his

peculiar field, although he has had countless imitators, he has had no

equals. Cooper's experiences had prepared him well for the kingship of

this new realm in the world of fiction. His childhood was passed on

the borders of Otsego Lake, when central New York was still a

wilderness, with boundless forests stretching westward, broken only

here and there by the clearings of the pioneers. He was taken from

college (Yale) when still a lad, and sent to sea in a merchant vessel,

before the mast. Afterward he entered the navy and did duty on the

high seas and upon Lake Ontario, then surrounded by virgin forests. He

married and resigned his commission in 1811, just before the outbreak

of the war with England, so {420} that he missed the opportunity of

seeing active service in any of those engagements on the ocean and our

great lakes which were so glorious to American arms. But he always

retained an active interest in naval affairs.

His first successful novel was _The Spy_, 1821, a tale of the

Revolutionary War, the scene of which was laid in Westchester County,

N. Y., where the author was then residing. The hero of this story,

Harvey Birch, was one of the most skillfully drawn figures on his

canvas. In 1823 he published the _Pioneers_, a work somewhat overladen

with description, in which he drew for material upon his boyish

recollections of frontier life at Cooperstown. This was the first of

the series of five romances known as the _Leatherstocking Tales_. The

others were the _Last of the Mohicans_, 1826; the _Prairie_, 1827; the

_Pathfinder_, 1840; and the _Deerslayer_, 1841. The hero of this

series, Natty Bumpo, or "Leatherstocking," was Cooper's one great

creation in the sphere of character, his most original addition to the

literature of the world in the way of a new human type. This backwoods

philosopher--to the conception of whom the historic exploits of Daniel

Boone perhaps supplied some hints; unschooled, but moved by noble

impulses and a natural sense of piety and justice; passionately

attached to the wilderness, and following its westering edge even unto

the prairies--this man of the woods was the first real American in

fiction. Hardly less individual and vital {421} were the various types

of Indian character, in Chingachgook, Uncas, Hist, and the Huron

warriors. Inferior to these, but still vigorously though somewhat

roughly drawn, were the waifs and strays of civilization, whom duty, or

the hope of gain, or the love of adventure, or the outlawry of crime

had driven to the wilderness--the solitary trapper, the reckless young

frontiersman, the officers and men of out-post garrisons. Whether

Cooper's Indian was the real being, or an idealized and rather

melo-dramatic version of the truth, has been a subject of dispute.

However this be, he has taken his place in the domain of art, and it is

safe to say that his standing there is secure. No boy will ever give

him up.

Equally good with the _Leatherstocking_ novels, and especially

national, were Cooper's tales of the sea, or at least the two best of

them--the _Pilot_, 1823, founded upon the daring exploits of John Paul

Jones, and the _Red Rover_, 1828. But here, though Cooper still holds

the sea, he has had to admit competitors; and Britannia, who rules the

waves in song, has put in some claim to a share in the domain of

nautical fiction in the persons of Mr. W. Clarke Russell and others.

Though Cooper's novels do not meet the deeper needs of the heart and

the imagination, their appeal to the universal love of a story is

perennial. We devour them when we are boys, and if we do not often

return to them when we are men, that is perhaps only because we have

read them before, and "know the {422} ending." They are good yarns for

the forecastle and the camp-fire; and the scholar in his study, though

he may put the _Deerslayer_ or the _Last of the Mohicans_ away on the

top-shelf, will take it down now and again, and sit up half the night

over it.

Before dismissing the _belles-lettres_ writings of this period, mention

should be made of a few poems of the fugitive kind which seem to have

taken a permanent place in popular regard. John Howard Payne, a native

of Long Island, a wandering actor and playwright, who died American

Consul at Tunis in 1852, wrote about 1820 for Covent Garden Theater an

opera, entitled _Clari_, the libretto of which included the now famous

song of _Home, Sweet Home_. Its literary pretensions were of the

humblest kind, but it spoke a true word which touched the Anglo-Saxon

heart in its tenderest spot, and being happily married to a plaintive

air was sold by the hundred thousand, and is evidently destined to be

sung forever. A like success has attended the _Old Oaken Bucket_,

composed by Samuel Woodworth, a printer and journalist from

Massachusetts, whose other poems, of which two collections were issued

in 1818 and 1826, were soon forgotten. Richard Henry Wilde, an

Irishman by birth, a gentleman of scholarly tastes and accomplishments,

who wrote a great deal on Italian literature, and sat for several terms

in Congress as Representative of the State of Georgia, was the author

of the favorite song, _My Life is Like the Summer Rose_. Another {423}

Southerner, and a member of a distinguished Southern family, was Edward

Coate Pinkney, who served nine years in the navy, and died in 1828, at

the age of twenty-six, having published in 1825 a small volume of

lyrical poems which had a fire and a grace uncommon at that time in

American verse. One of these, _A Health_, beginning

"I fill this cup to one made up of loveliness alone,"

though perhaps somewhat overpraised by Edgar Poe, has rare beauty of

thought and expression. John Quincy Adams, sixth President of the

United States (1825-29), was a man of culture and of literary tastes.

He published his lectures on rhetoric delivered during his tenure of

the Boylston Professorship at Harvard in 1806-09; he left a voluminous

diary, which has been edited since his death in 1848; and among his

experiments in poetry is one of considerable merit, entitled the _Wants

of Man_, an ironical sermon on Goldsmith's text:

"Man wants but little here below

Nor wants that little long."

As this poem is a curiously close anticipation of Dr. Holmes's

_Contentment_, so the very popular ballad, _Old Grimes_, written about

1818, by Albert Gorton Greene, an undergraduate of Brown University in

Rhode Island, is in some respects an anticipation of Holmes's quaintly

pathetic _Last Leaf_.

The political literature and public oratory of {424} the United States

during this period, although not absolutely of less importance than

that which preceded and followed the Declaration of Independence and

the adoption of the Constitution, demands less relative attention in a

history of literature by reason of the growth of other departments of

thought. The age was a political one, but no longer exclusively

political. The debates of the time centered about the question of

"State Rights," and the main forum of discussion was the old Senate

chamber, then made illustrious by the presence of Clay, Webster, and

Calhoun. The slavery question, which had threatened trouble, was put

off for awhile by the Missouri Compromise of 1820, only to break out

more fiercely in the debates on the Wilmot Proviso, and the Kansas and

Nebraska Bill. Meanwhile the Abolition movement had been transferred

to the press and the platform. Garrison started his _Liberator_ in

1830, and the Antislavery Society was founded in 1833. The Whig party,

which had inherited the constitutional principles of the old Federal

party, advocated internal improvements at national expense and a high

protective tariff. The State Rights party, which was strongest at the

South, opposed these views, and in 1832 South Carolina claimed the

right to "nullify" the tariff imposed by the general government. The

leader of this party was John Caldwell Calhoun, a South Carolinian, who

in his speech in the United States Senate, on February 13, 1832, on

Nullification and the {425} Force Bill, set forth most authoritatively

the "Carolina doctrine." Calhoun was a great debater, but hardly a

great orator. His speeches are the arguments of a lawyer and a strict

constitutionalist, severely logical, and with a sincere conviction in

the soundness of his case. Their language is free from bad rhetoric;

the reasoning is cogent, but there is an absence of emotion and

imagination; they contain few quotable things, and no passages of

commanding eloquence, such as strew the orations of Webster and Burke.

They are not, in short, literature. Again, the speeches of Henry Clay,

of Kentucky, the leader of the Whigs, whose persuasive oratory is a

matter of tradition, disappoint in the reading. The fire has gone out

of them.

Not so with Daniel Webster, the greatest of American forensic orators,

if, indeed, he be not the greatest of all orators who have used the

English tongue. Webster's speeches are of the kind that have power to

move after the voice of the speaker is still. The thought and the

passion in them lay hold on feelings of patriotism more lasting than

the issues of the moment. It is, indeed, true of Webster's speeches,

as of all speeches, that they are known to posterity more by single

brilliant passages than as wholes. In oratory the occasion is of the

essence of the thing, and only those parts of an address which are

permanent and universal in their appeal take their place in literature.

But of such detachable passages there are happily {426} many in

Webster's orations. One great thought underlay all his public life,

the thought of the Union; of American nationality. What in Hamilton

had been a principle of political philosophy had become in Webster a

passionate conviction. The Union was his idol, and he was intolerant

of any faction which threatened it from any quarter, whether the

Nullifiers of South Carolina or the Abolitionists of the North. It is

this thought which gives grandeur and elevation to all his utterances,

and especially to the wonderful peroration of his reply to Hayne, on

Mr. Foot's resolution touching the sale of the public lands, delivered

in the Senate on January 26, 1830, whose closing words, "liberty and

union, now and forever, one and inseparable," became the rallying cry

of a great cause. Similar in sentiment was his famous speech of March

7, 1850, _On the Constitution and the Union_, which gave so much

offense to the extreme Antislavery party, who held with Garrison that a

Constitution which protected slavery was "a league with death and a

covenant with hell." It is not claiming too much for Webster to assert

that the sentences of these and other speeches, memorized and declaimed

by thousands of school-boys throughout the North, did as much as any

single influence to train up a generation in hatred of secession, and

to send into the fields of the civil war armies of men animated with

the stern resolution to fight till the last drop of blood was shed,

rather than allow the Union to be dissolved.

{427}

The figure of this great senator is one of the most imposing in

American annals. The masculine force of his personality impressed

itself upon men of a very different stamp--upon the unworldly Emerson,

and upon the captious Carlyle, whose respect was not willingly accorded

to any contemporary, much less to a representative of American

democracy. Webster's looks and manner were characteristic. His form

was massive, his skull and jaw solid, the underlip projecting, and the

mouth firmly and grimly shut; his complexion was swarthy, and his

black, deep set eyes, under shaggy brows, glowed with a smoldering

fire. He was rather silent in society; his delivery in debate was

grave and weighty, rather than fervid. His oratory was massive and

sometimes even ponderous. It may be questioned whether an American

orator of to-day, with intellectual abilities equal to Webster's--if

such a one there were--would permit himself the use of sonorous and

elaborate pictures like the famous period which follows: "On this

question of principle, while actual suffering was yet afar off, they

raised their flag against a power, to which, for purposes of foreign

conquest and subjugation, Rome, in the height of her glory, is not to

be compared; a power which has dotted over the surface of the whole

globe with her possessions and military posts, whose morning drum-beat,

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

with one continuous and unbroken strain of the {428} martial airs of

England." The secret of this kind of oratory has been lost. The

present generation distrusts rhetorical ornament, and likes something

swifter, simpler, and more familiar in its speakers. But every thing,

in declamation of this sort, depends on the way in which it is done.

Webster did it supremely well; a smaller man would merely have made

buncombe of it.

Among the legal orators of the time the foremost was Rufus Choate, an

eloquent pleader, and, like Webster, a United States Senator from

Massachusetts. Some of his speeches, though excessively rhetorical,

have literary quality, and are nearly as effective in print as

Webster's own. Another Massachusetts orator, Edward Everett, who in

his time was successively professor in Harvard College, Unitarian

minister in Boston, editor of the _North American Review_, member of

both houses of Congress, Minister to England, Governor of his State,

and President of Harvard, was a speaker of great finish and elegance.

His addresses were mainly of the memorial and anniversary kind, and

were rather lectures and Ph. B. K. prolusions than speeches. Everett

was an instance of careful culture bestowed on a soil of no very great

natural richness. It is doubtful whether his classical orations on

Washington, the Republic, Bunker Hill Monument, and kindred themes,

have enough of the breath of life in them to preserve them much longer

in recollection.

New England, during these years, did not take {429} that leading part

in the purely literary development of the country which it afterward

assumed. It had no names to match against those of Irving and Cooper.

Drake and Halleck--slender as was their performance in point of

quantity--were better poets than the Boston bards, Charles Sprague,

whose _Shakespere Ode_, delivered at the Boston theater in 1823, was

locally famous; and Richard Henry Dana, whose longish narrative poem,

the _Buccaneer_, 1827, once had admirers. But Boston has at no time

been without a serious intellectual life of its own, nor without a

circle of highly educated men of literary pursuits, even in default of

great geniuses. The _North American Review_, established in 1815,

though it has been wittily described as "ponderously revolving through

space" for a few years after its foundation, did not exist in an

absolute vacuum, but was scholarly, if somewhat heavy. Webster, to be

sure, was a Massachusetts man--as were Everett and Choate--but his

triumphs were won in the wider field of national politics. There was,

however, a movement at this time in the intellectual life of Boston and

Eastern Massachusetts, which, though not immediately contributory to

the finer kinds of literature, prepared the way, by its clarifying and

stimulating influences, for the eminent writers of the next generation.

This was the Unitarian revolt against Puritan orthodoxy, in which

William Ellery Channing was the principal leader. In a community so

intensely theological as New England it was natural that any {430} new

movement in thought should find its point of departure in the churches.

Accordingly, the progressive and democratic spirit of the age, which in

other parts of the country took other shapes, assumed in Massachusetts

the form of "liberal Christianity." Arminianism, Socinianism, and

other phases of anti-Trinitarian doctrine, had been latent in some of

the Congregational churches of Massachusetts for a number of years.

But about 1812 the heresy broke out openly, and within a few years from

that date most of the oldest and wealthiest church societies of Boston

and its vicinity had gone over to Unitarianism, and Harvard College had

been captured, too. In the controversy that ensued, and which was

carried on in numerous books, pamphlets, sermons, and periodicals,

there were eminent disputants on both sides. So far as this

controversy was concerned with the theological doctrine of the Trinity,

it has no place in a history of literature. But the issue went far

beyond that. Channing asserted the dignity of human nature against the

Calvinistic doctrine of innate depravity, and affirmed the rights of

human reason and man's capacity to judge of God. "We must start in

religion from our own souls," he said. And in his _Moral Argument

against Calvinism_, 1820, he wrote: "Nothing is gained to piety by

degrading human nature, for in the competency of this nature to know

and judge of God all piety has its foundation." In opposition to

Edwards's doctrine of necessity, he emphasized {431} the freedom of the

will. He maintained that the Calvinistic dogmas of original sin,

foreordination, election by grace, and eternal punishment were

inconsistent with the divine perfection, and made God a monster. In

Channing's view the great sanction of religious truth is the moral

sanction, is its agreement with the laws of conscience. He was a

passionate vindicator of the liberty of the individual not only as

against political oppression but against the tyranny of public opinion

over thought and conscience: "We were made for free action. This alone

is life, and enters into all that is good and great." This jealous

love of freedom inspired all that he did and wrote. It led him to join

the Antislavery party. It expressed itself in his elaborate

arraignment of Napoleon in the Unitarian organ, the _Christian

Examiner_, for 1827-28; in his _Remarks on Associations_, and his paper

_On the Character and Writings of John Milton_, 1826. This was his

most considerable contribution to literary criticism. It took for a

text Milton's recently discovered _Treatise on Christian Doctrine_--the

tendency of which was anti-Trinitarian--but it began with a general

defense of poetry against "those who are accustomed to speak of poetry

as light reading." This would now seem a somewhat superfluous

introduction to an article in any American review. But it shows the

nature of the milieu through which the liberal movement in Boston had

to make its way. To re-assert the dignity and usefulness of the

beautiful arts was, {432} perhaps, the chief service which the

Massachusetts Unitarians rendered to humanism. The traditional

prejudice of the Puritans against the ornamental side of life had to be

softened before polite literature could find a congenial atmosphere in

New England. In Channing's _Remarks on National Literature_, reviewing

a work published in 1823, he asks the question, "Do we possess what may

be called a national literature?" and answers it, by implication at

least, in the negative. That we do now possess a national literature

is in great part due to the influence of Channing and his associates,

although his own writings, being in the main controversial and,

therefore, of temporary interest, may not themselves take rank among

the permanent treasures of that literature.

1. Washington Irving. Knickerbocker's History of New York. The Sketch

Book. Bracebridge Hall. Tales of a Traveler. The Alhambra. Life of

Oliver Goldsmith.

2. James Fenimore Cooper. The Spy. The Pilot. The Red Rover. The

Leather-Stocking Tales.

3. Daniel Webster. Great Speeches and Orations. Boston: Little,

Brown, & Co. 1879.

4. William Ellery Channing. The Character and Writings of John Milton.

The Life and Character of Napoleon Bonaparte. Slavery. [Vols. I. and

II. of the Works of William E. Channing. Boston: James Munroe & Co.

1841.]

{433}

5. Joseph Rodman Drake. The Culprit Fay. The American Flag.

[Selected Poems. New York. 1835.]

6. Fitz-Greene Halleck. Marco Bozzaris. Alnwick Castle. On the

Death of Drake. [Poems. New York. 1827.]

[1] Compare Carlyle's Herr Diogenes Teufelsdroeckh, in _Sartor

Resartus_, the author of the famous "Clothes Philosophy."

{434}

CHAPTER IV.

THE CONCORD WRITERS.

1837-1861.

There has been but one movement in the history of the American mind

which has given to literature a group of writers having coherence

enough to merit the name of a school. This was the great humanitarian

movement, or series of movements, in New England, which, beginning in

the Unitarianism of Channing, ran through its later phase in

Transcendentalism, and spent its last strength in the antislavery

agitation and the enthusiasms of the Civil War. The second stage of

this intellectual and social revolt was Transcendentalism, of which

Emerson wrote, in 1842: "The history of genius and of religion in these

times will be the history of this tendency." It culminated about

1840-41 in the establishment of the _Dial_ and the Brook Farm

Community, although Emerson had given the signal a few years before in

his little volume entitled _Nature_, 1836, his Phi-Beta Kappa address

at Harvard on the _American Scholar_, 1837, and his address in 1838

before the Divinity School at Cambridge. Ralph Waldo Emerson

(1803-1882) was the prophet of the sect, and {435} Concord was its

Mecca; but the influence of the new ideas was not confined to the

little group of professed Transcendentalists; it extended to all the

young writers within reach, who struck their roots deeper into the soil

that it had loosened and freshened. We owe to it, in great measure,

not merely Emerson, Alcott, Margaret Fuller, and Thoreau, but

Hawthorne, Lowell, Whittier, and Holmes.

In its strictest sense Transcendentalism was a restatement of the

idealistic philosophy, and an application of its beliefs to religion,

nature, and life. But in a looser sense, and as including the more

outward manifestations which drew popular attention most strongly, it

was the name given to that spirit of dissent and protest, of universal

inquiry and experiment, which marked the third and fourth decades of

this century in America, and especially in New England. The movement

was contemporary with political revolutions in Europe and with the

preaching of many novel gospels in religion, in sociology, in science,

education, medicine, and hygiene. New sects were formed, like the

Swedenborgians, Universalists, Spiritualists, Millerites, Second

Adventists, Shakers, Mormons, and Come-outers, some of whom believed in

trances, miracles, and direct revelations from the divine Spirit;

others in the quick coming of Christ, as deduced from the opening of

the seals and the number of the beast in the Apocalypse; and still

others in the reorganization of society and {436} of the family on a

different basis. New systems of education were tried, suggested by the

writings of the Swiss reformer, Pestalozzi, and others. The

pseudo-sciences of mesmerism and of phrenology, as taught by Gall and

Spurzheim, had numerous followers. In medicine, homeopathy,

hydropathy, and what Dr. Holmes calls "kindred delusions," made many

disciples. Numbers of persons, influenced by the doctrines of Graham

and other vegetarians, abjured the use of animal food, as injurious not

only to health but to a finer spirituality. Not a few refused to vote

or pay taxes. The writings of Fourier and St. Simon were translated,

and societies were established where co-operation and a community of

goods should take the place of selfish competition.

About the year 1840 there were some thirty of these "phalansteries" in

America, many of which had their organs in the shape of weekly or

monthly journals, which advocated the principle of Association. The

best known of these was probably the _Harbinger_, the mouth-piece of

the famous Brook Farm Community, which was founded at West Roxbury,

Mass., in 1841, and lasted till 1847. The head man of Brook Farm was

George Ripley, a Unitarian clergyman, who had resigned his pulpit in

Boston to go into the movement, and who after its failure became and

remained for many years literary editor of the _New York Tribune_.

Among his associates were Charles A. Dana--now the editor of the

_Sun_--Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel {437} Hawthorne and others not

unknown to fame. The _Harbinger_, which ran from 1845 to 1849--two

years after the break up of the community--had among its contributors

many who were not Brook Farmers, but who sympathized more or less with

the experiment. Of the number were Horace Greeley, Dr. F. H.

Hedge--who did so much to introduce American readers to German

literature--J. S. Dwight, the musical critic, C. P. Cranch, the poet,

and younger men, like G. W. Curtis, and T. W. Higginson. A reader of

to-day, looking into an odd volume of the _Harbinger_, will find in it

some stimulating writing, together with a great deal of unintelligible

talk about "Harmonic Unity," "Love Germination," and other matters now

fallen silent. The most important literary result of this experiment

at "plain living and high thinking," with its queer mixture of culture

and agriculture, was Hawthorne's _Blithedale Romance_, which has for

its background an idealized picture of the community life, whose

heroine, Zenobia, has touches of Margaret Fuller; and whose hero, with

his hobby of prison reform, was a type of the one-idead philanthropists

that abounded in such an environment. Hawthorne's attitude was always

in part one of reserve and criticism, an attitude which is apparent in

the reminiscences of Brook Farm in his _American Note Books_, wherein

he speaks with a certain resentment of "Miss Fuller's transcendental

heifer," which hooked the other cows, and was evidently to Hawthorne's

{438} mind not unsymbolic in this respect of Miss Fuller herself.

It was the day of seers and "Orphic" utterances; the air was full of

the enthusiasm of humanity and thick with philanthropic projects and

plans for the regeneration of the universe. The figure of the

wild-eyed, long-haired reformer--the man with a panacea--the "crank" of

our later terminology--became a familiar one. He abounded at

non-resistance conventions and meetings of universal peace societies

and of woman's rights associations. The movement had its grotesque

aspects, which Lowell has described in his essay on Thoreau. "Bran had

its apostles and the pre-sartorial simplicity of Adam its martyrs,

tailored impromptu from the tar-pot. . . . Not a few impecunious

zealots abjured the use of money (unless earned by other people),

professing to live on the internal revenues of the spirit. . . .

Communities were established where every thing was to be common but

common sense."

This ferment has long since subsided and much of what was then seething

has gone off in vapor or other volatile products. But some very solid

matters also have been precipitated, some crystals of poetry

translucent, symmetrical, enduring. The immediate practical outcome

was disappointing, and the external history of the agitation is a

record of failed experiments, spurious sciences, Utopian philosophies,

and sects founded only to dwindle away or be reabsorbed into some form

of {439} orthodoxy. In the eyes of the conservative, or the

worldly-minded, or of the plain people who could not understand the

enigmatic utterances of the reformers, the dangerous or ludicrous sides

of transcendentalism were naturally uppermost. Nevertheless the

movement was but a new avatar of the old Puritan spirit; its moral

earnestness, its spirituality, its tenderness for the individual

conscience. Puritanism, too, in its day had run into grotesque

extremes. Emerson bore about the same relation to the absurder

outcroppings of transcendentalism that Milton bore to the New Lights,

Ranters, Fifth Monarchy Men, etc., of his time. There is in him that

mingling of idealism with an abiding sanity, and even a Yankee

shrewdness, which characterizes the race. The practical, inventive,

calculating, money-getting side of the Yankee has been made

sufficiently obvious. But the deep heart of New England is full of

dreams, mysticism, romance:

"And in the day of sacrifice,

When heroes piled the pyre,

The dismal Massachusetts ice

Burned more than others' fire."

The one element which the odd and eccentric developments of this

movement shared in common with the real philosophy of transcendentalism

was the rejection of authority and the appeal to the private

consciousness as the sole standard of truth and right. This principle

certainly lay in the ethical {440} systems of Kant and Fichte, the

great transcendentalists of Germany. It had been strongly asserted by

Channing. Nay, it was the starting point of Puritanism itself, which

had drawn away from the ceremonial religion of the English Church and

by its Congregational system had made each church society independent

in doctrine and worship. And although Puritan orthodoxy in New England

had grown rigid and dogmatic, it had never used the weapons of

obscurantism. By encouraging education to the utmost it had shown its

willingness to submit its beliefs to the fullest discussion and had put

into the hands of dissent the means with which to attack them.

In its theological aspect transcendentalism was a departure from

conservative Unitarianism, as that had been from Calvinism. From

Edwards to Channing, from Channing to Emerson and Theodore Parker,

there was a natural and logical unfolding. Not logical in the sense

that Channing accepted Edwards' premises and pushed them out to their

conclusions, or that Parker accepted all of Channing's premises, but in

the sense that the rigid pushing out of Edwards' premises into their

conclusions by himself and his followers had brought about a moral

_reductio ad absurdum_ and a state of opinion against which Channing

rebelled; and that Channing, as it seemed to Parker, stopped short in

the carrying out of his own principles. Thus the "Channing

Unitarians," while denying that Christ was God, had held that he was of

{441} divine nature, was the Son of God, and had existed before he came

into the world. While rejecting the doctrine of the "Vicarious

sacrifice" they maintained that Christ was a mediator and intercessor,

and that his supernatural nature was testified by miracles. For Parker

and Emerson it was easy to take the step to the assertion that Christ

was a good and great man, divine only in the sense that God possessed

him more fully than any other man known in history; that it was his

preaching and example that brought salvation to men, and not any

special mediation or intercession, and that his own words and acts, and

not miracles, are the only and the sufficient witness to his mission.

In the view of the transcendentalists Christ was as human as Buddha,

Socrates or Confucius, and the Bible was but one among the "Ethnical

Scriptures" or sacred writings of the peoples, passages from which were

published in the transcendental organ, the _Dial_. As against these

new views Channing Unitarianism occupied already a conservative

position. The Unitarians as a body had never been very numerous

outside of Eastern Massachusets. They had a few churches in New York

and in the larger cities and towns elsewhere, but the sect, as such,

was a local one. Orthodoxy made a sturdy fight against the heresy,

under leaders like Leonard Woods and Moses Stuart, of Andover, and

Lyman Beecher, of Connecticut. In the neighboring State of

Connecticut, for example, there was until lately, for {442} a period of

several years, no distinctly Unitarian congregation worshiping in a

church edifice of its own. On the other hand, the Unitarians claimed,

with justice, that their opinions had to a great extent modified the

theology of the orthodox churches. The writings of Horace Bushnell, of

Hartford, one of the most eminent Congregational divines, approach

Unitarianism in their interpretation of the doctrine of the Atonement;

and the "progressive orthodoxy" of Andover is certainly not the

Calvinism of Thomas Hooker or of Jonathan Edwards. But it seemed to

the transcendentalists that conservative Unitarianism was too negative

and "cultured," and Margaret Fuller complained of the coldness of the

Boston pulpits. While contrariwise the central thought of

transcendentalism, that the soul has an immediate connection with God,

was pronounced by Dr. Channing a "crude speculation." This was the

thought of Emerson's address in 1838 before the Cambridge Divinity

School, and it was at once made the object of attack by conservative

Unitarians like Henry Ware and Andrews Norton. The latter in an

address before the same audience, on the _Latest Form of Infidelity_,

said: "Nothing is left that can be called Christianity if its

miraculous character be denied. . . . There can be no intuition, no

direct perception of the truth of Christianity." And in a pamphlet

supporting the same side of the question he added: "It is not an

intelligible error but a mere absurdity to maintain {443} that we are

conscious, or have an intuitive knowledge, of the being of God, of our

own immortality . . . or of any other fact of religion." Ripley and

Parker replied in Emerson's defense; but Emerson himself would never be

drawn into controversy. He said that he could not argue. He announced

truths; his method was that of the seer, not of the disputant. In 1832

Emerson, who was a Unitarian clergyman, and descended from eight

generations of clergymen, had resigned the pastorate of the Second

Church of Boston because he could not conscientiously administer the

sacrament of the communion--which he regarded as a mere act of

commemoration--in the sense in which it was understood by his

parishioners. Thenceforth, though he sometimes occupied Unitarian

pulpits, and was, indeed, all his life a kind of "lay preacher," he

never assumed the pastorate of a church. The representative of

transcendentalism in the pulpit was Theodore Parker, an eloquent

preacher, an eager debater and a prolific writer on many subjects,

whose collected works fill fourteen volumes. Parker was a man of

strongly human traits, passionate, independent, intensely religious,

but intensely radical, who made for himself a large personal following.

The more advanced wing of the Unitarians were called, after him,

"Parkerites." Many of the Unitarian churches refused to "fellowship"

with him; and the large congregation, or audience, which assembled in

Music Hall to hear his sermons was {444} stigmatized as a "boisterous

assembly" which came to hear Parker preach irreligion.

It has been said that, on its philosophical side, New England

transcendentalism was a restatement of idealism. The impulse came from

Germany, from the philosophical writings of Kant, Fichte, Jacobi, and

Schelling, and from the works of Coleridge and Carlyle, who had

domesticated German thought in England. In Channing's _Remarks on a

National Literature_, quoted in our last chapter, the essayist urged

that our scholars should study the authors of France and Germany as one

means of emancipating American letters from a slavish dependence on

British literature. And in fact German literature began, not long

after, to be eagerly studied in New England. Emerson published an

American edition of Carlyle's _Miscellanies_, including his essays on

German writers that had appeared in England between 1822 and 1830. In

1838 Ripley began to publish _Specimens of Foreign Standard

Literature_, which extended to fourteen volumes. In his work of

translating and supplying introductions to the matter selected he was

helped by Ripley, Margaret Fuller, John S. Dwight and others who had

more or less connection with the transcendental movement.

The definition of the new faith given by Emerson in his lecture on the

_Transcendentalist_, 1842, is as follows: "What is popularly called

transcendentalism among us is idealism. . . . The idealism of the

present day acquired the name of transcendental {445} from the use of

that term by Immanuel Kant, who replied to the skeptical philosophy of

Locke, which insisted that there was nothing in the intellect which was

not previously in the experience of the senses, by showing that there

was a very important class of ideas, or imperative forms, which did not

come by experience, but through which experience was acquired; that

these were intuitions of the mind itself, and he denominated them

_transcendental_ forms." Idealism denies the independent existence of

matter. Transcendentalism claims for the innate ideas of God and the

soul a higher assurance of reality than for the knowledge of the

outside world derived through the senses. Emerson shares the "noble

doubt" of idealism. He calls the universe a shade, a dream, "this

great apparition." "It is a sufficient account of that appearance we

call the world," he wrote in _Nature_, "that God will teach a human

mind, and so makes it the receiver of a certain number of congruent

sensations which we call sun and moon, man and woman, house and trade.

In my utter impotence to test the authenticity of the report of my

senses, to know whether the impressions on me correspond with outlying

objects, what difference does it make whether Orion is up there in

heaven or some god paints the image in the firmament of the soul?" On

the other hand our evidence of the existence of God and of our own

souls, and our knowledge of right and wrong, are immediate, and are

independent of the senses. {446} We are in direct communication with

the "Oversoul," the infinite Spirit. "The soul in man is the

background of our being--an immensity not possessed, that cannot be

possessed." "From within or from behind a light shines through us upon

things, and makes us aware that we are nothing, but the light is all."

Revelation is "an influx of the Divine mind into our mind. It is an

ebb of the individual rivulet before the flowing surges of the sea of

life." In moods of exaltation, and especially in the presence of

nature, this contact of the individual soul with the absolute is felt.

"All mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am

nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate

through me; I am part and particle of God." The existence and

attributes of God are not deducible from history or from natural

theology, but are thus directly given us in consciousness. In his

essay on the _Transcendentalist_, Emerson says: "His experience

inclines him to behold the procession of facts you call the world

as flowing perpetually outward from an invisible, unsounded center

in himself; center alike of him and of them and necessitating

him to regard all things as having a subjective or relative

existence--relative to that aforesaid Unknown Center of him. There is

no bar or wall in the soul where man, the effect, ceases, and God, the

cause, begins. We lie open on one side to the deeps of spiritual

nature, to the attributes of God."

{447}

Emerson's point of view, though familiar to students of philosophy, is

strange to the popular understanding, and hence has arisen the

complaint of his obscurity. Moreover, he apprehended and expressed

these ideas as a poet, in figurative and emotional language, and not as

a metaphysician, in a formulated statement. His own position in

relation to systematic philosophers is described in what he says of

Plato, in his series of sketches entitled _Representative Men_, 1850:

"He has not a system. The dearest disciples and defenders are at

fault. He attempted a theory of the universe, and his theory is not

complete or self-evident. One man thinks he means this, and another

that; he has said one thing in one place, and the reverse of it in

another place." It happens, therefore, that, to many students of more

formal philosophies Emerson's meaning seems elusive, and he appears to

write from temporary moods and to contradict himself. Had he attempted

a reasoned exposition of the transcendental philosophy, instead of

writing essays and poems, he might have added one more to the number of

system-mongers; but he would not have taken that significant place

which he occupies in the general literature of the time, nor exerted

that wide influence upon younger writers which has been one of the

stimulating forces in American thought. It was because Emerson was a

poet that he is our Emerson. And yet it would be impossible to

disentangle his peculiar philosophical ideas from the body of his {448}

writings and to leave the latter to stand upon their merits as

literature merely. He is the poet of certain high abstractions, and

his religion is central to all his work--excepting, perhaps, his

_English Traits_, 1856, an acute study of national characteristics, and

a few of his essays and verses, which are independent of any particular

philosophical standpoint.

When Emerson resigned his parish in 1832 he made a short trip to

Europe, where he visited Carlyle at Craigenputtoch, and Landor at

Florence. On his return he retired to his birthplace, the village of

Concord, Massachusetts, and settled down among his books and his

fields, becoming a sort of "glorified farmer," but issuing frequently

from his retirement to instruct and delight audiences of thoughtful

people at Boston and at other points all through the country. Emerson

was the perfection of a lyceum lecturer. His manner was quiet but

forcible; his voice of charming quality, and his enunciation clean cut

and refined. The sentence was his unit in composition. His lectures

seemed to begin anywhere and to end anywhere, and to resemble strings

of exquisitely polished sayings rather than continuous discourses. His

printed essays, with unimportant exceptions, were first written and

delivered as lectures. In 1836 he published his first book, _Nature_,

which remains the most systematic statement of his philosophy. It

opened a fresh spring-head in American thought, and the words of its

introduction announced that its author had broken with {449} the past.

"Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?

Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of

tradition, and a religion by revelation to us and not the history of

theirs?"

It took eleven years to sell five hundred copies of this little book.

But the year following its publication the remarkable Phi Beta Kappa

address at Cambridge, on the _American Scholar_, electrified the little

public of the university. This is described by Lowell as "an event

without any former parallel in our literary annals, a scene to be

always treasured in the memory for its picturesqueness and its

inspiration. What crowded and breathless aisles, what windows

clustering with eager heads, what grim silence of foregone dissent!"

To Concord came many kindred spirits, drawn by Emerson's magnetic

attraction. Thither came, from Connecticut, Amos Bronson Alcott, born

a few years before Emerson, whom he outlived; a quaint and benignant

figure, a visionary and a mystic even among the transcendentalists

themselves, and one who lived in unworldly simplicity the life of the

soul. Alcott had taught school at Cheshire, Conn., and afterward at

Boston on an original plan--compelling his scholars, for example, to

flog _him_, when they did wrong, instead of taking a flogging

themselves. The experiment was successful until his _Conversations on

the Gospels_, in Boston, and his insistence upon admitting colored

children to his benches, offended conservative opinion and {450} broke

up his school. Alcott renounced the eating of animal food in 1835. He

believed in the union of thought and manual labor, and supported

himself for some years by the work of his hands, gardening, cutting

wood, etc. He traveled into the West and elsewhere, holding

conversations on philosophy, education, and religion. He set up a

little community at the village of Harvard, which was rather less

successful than Brook Farm, and he contributed _Orphic Sayings_ to the

_Dial_, which were harder for the exoteric to understand than even

Emerson's _Brahma_ or the _Over-soul_.

Thither came, also, Sarah Margaret Fuller, the most intellectual woman

of her time in America, an eager student of Greek and German literature

and an ardent seeker after the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. She

threw herself into many causes--temperance, antislavery, and the higher

education of women. Her brilliant conversation classes in Boston

attracted many "minds" of her own sex. Subsequently, as literary

editor of the _New York Tribune_, she furnished a wider public with

reviews and book-notices of great ability. She took part in the Brook

Farm experiment, and she edited the _Dial_ for a time, contributing to

it the papers afterward expanded into her most considerable book,

_Woman in the Nineteenth Century_. In 1846 she went abroad, and at

Rome took part in the revolutionary movement of Mazzini, having charge

of one of the hospitals during the siege of the city by the {451}

French. In 1847 she married an impecunious Italian nobleman, the

Marquis Ossoli. In 1850 the ship on which she was returning to

America, with her husband and child, was wrecked on Fire Island beach

and all three were lost. Margaret Fuller's collected writings are

somewhat disappointing, being mainly of temporary interest. She lives

less through her books than through the memoirs of her friends,

Emerson, James Freeman Clarke, T. W. Higginson, and others who knew her

as a personal influence. Her strenuous and rather overbearing

individuality made an impression not altogether agreeable upon many of

her contemporaries. Lowell introduced a caricature of her as "Miranda"

into his _Fable for Critics_, and Hawthorne's caustic sketch of her,

preserved in the biography written by his son, has given great offense

to her admirers. "Such a determination to _eat_ this huge universe!"

was Carlyle's characteristic comment on her appetite for knowledge and

aspirations after perfection.

To Concord also came Nathaniel Hawthorne, who took up his residence

there first at the "Old Manse," and afterward at "The Wayside." Though

naturally an idealist, he said that he came too late to Concord to fall

decidedly under Emerson's influence. Of that he would have stood in

little danger even had he come earlier. He appreciated the deep and

subtle quality of Emerson's imagination, but his own shy genius always

jealously guarded its independence and {452} resented the too close

approaches of an alien mind. Among the native disciples of Emerson at

Concord the most noteworthy were Henry Thoreau, and his friend and

biographer, William Ellery Channing, Jr., a nephew of the great

Channing. Channing was a contributor to the _Dial_, and he published a

volume of poems which elicited a fiercely contemptuous review from

Edgar Poe. Though disfigured by affectation and obscurity, many of

Channing's verses were distinguished by true poetic feeling, and the

last line of his little piece, _A Poet's Hope_,

"If my bark sink 'tis to another sea,"

has taken a permanent place in the literature of transcendentalism.

The private organ of the transcendentalists was the _Dial_, a quarterly

magazine, published from 1840 to 1844, and edited by Emerson and

Margaret Fuller. Among its contributors, besides those already

mentioned, were Ripley, Thoreau, Parker, James Freeman Clarke, Charles

A. Dana, John S. Dwight, C. P. Cranch, Charles Emerson and William H.

Channing, another nephew of Dr. Channing. It contained, along with a

good deal of rubbish, some of the best poetry and prose that have been

published in America. The most lasting part of its contents were the

contributions of Emerson and Thoreau. But even as a whole, it is so

unique a way-mark in the history of our literature that all its four

volumes--copies of which {453} had become scarce--have been recently

reprinted in answer to a demand certainly very unusual in the case of

an extinct periodical.

From time to time Emerson collected and published his lectures under

various titles. A first series of _Essays_ came out in 1841, and a

second in 1844; the _Conduct of Life_ in 1860, _Society and Solitude_

in 1870, _Letters and Social Aims_, in 1876, and the _Fortune of the

Republic_ in 1878. In 1847 he issued a volume of _Poems_, and 1865

_Mayday and Other Poems_. These writings, as a whole, were variations

on a single theme, expansions and illustrations of the philosophy set

forth in _Nature_, and his early addresses. They were strikingly

original, rich in thought, filled with wisdom, with lofty morality and

spiritual religion. Emerson, said Lowell, first "cut the cable that

bound us to English thought and gave us a chance at the dangers and

glories of blue water." Nevertheless, as it used to be the fashion to

find an English analogue for every American writer, so that Cooper was

called the American Scott, and Mrs. Sigourney was described as the

Hemans of America, a well-worn critical tradition has coupled Emerson

with Carlyle. That his mind received a nudge from Carlyle's early

essays and from _Sartor Resartus_ is beyond a doubt. They were

life-long friends and correspondents, and Emerson's _Representative

Men_ is, in some sort, a counterpart of Carlyle's _Hero Worship_. But

in temper and style the two writers were widely different. Carlyle's

pessimism and {454} dissatisfaction with the general drift of things

gained upon him more and more, while Emerson was a consistent optimist

to the end. The last of his writings published during his life-time,

the _Fortune of the Republic_, contrasts strangely in its hopefulness

with the desperation of Carlyle's later utterances. Even in presence

of the doubt as to man's personal immortality he takes refuge in a high

and stoical faith. "I think all sound minds rest on a certain

preliminary conviction, namely: that if it be best that conscious

personal life shall continue it will continue, and if not best, then it

will not; and we, if we saw the whole, should of course see that it was

better so." It is this conviction that gives to Emerson's writings

their serenity and their tonic quality at the same time that it narrows

the range of his dealings with life. As the idealist declines to

cross-examine those facts which he regards as merely phenomenal, and

looks upon this outward face of things as upon a mask not worthy to

dismay the fixed soul, so the optimist turns away his eyes from the

evil which he disposes of as merely negative, as the shadow of the

good. Hawthorne's interest in the problem of sin finds little place in

Emerson's philosophy. Passion comes not nigh him and _Faust_ disturbs

him with its disagreeableness. Pessimism is to him "the only

skepticism."

The greatest literature is that which is most broadly human, or, in

other words, that which will square best with all philosophies. But

Emerson's {455} genius was interpretive rather than constructive. The

poet dwells in the cheerful world of phenomena. He is most the poet

who realizes most intensely the good and the bad of human life. But

Idealism makes experience shadowy and subordinates action to

contemplation. To it the cities of men, with their "frivolous

populations,"

". . . are but sailing foam-bells

Along thought's causing stream."

Shakespere does not forget that the world will one day vanish "like the

baseless fabric of a vision," and that we ourselves are "such stuff as

dreams are made on;" but this is not the mood in which he dwells.

Again: while it is for the philosopher to reduce variety to unity, it

is the poet's task to detect the manifold under uniformity. In the

great creative poets, in Shakespere and Dante and Goethe, how infinite

the swarm of persons, the multitude of forms! But with Emerson the

type is important, the common element. "In youth we are mad for

persons. But the larger experience of man discovers the identical

nature appearing through them all." "The same--the same!" he exclaims

in his essay on _Plato_. "Friend and foe are of one stuff; the

plowman, the plow and the furrow are of one stuff." And this is the

thought in _Brahma_:

"They reckon ill who leave me out;

When me they fly I am the wings:

I am the doubter and the doubt,

And I the hymn the Brahmin sings."

{456} It is not easy to fancy a writer who holds this altitude toward

"persons" descending to the composition of a novel or a play. Emerson

showed, indeed, a fine power of character analysis in his _English

Traits_ and _Representative Men_ and in his memoirs of Thoreau and

Margaret Fuller. There is even a sort of dramatic humor in his

portrait of Socrates. But upon the whole he stands midway between

constructive artists, whose instinct it is to tell a story or sing a

song, ami philosophers, like Schelling, who give poetic expression to a

system of thought. He belongs to the class of minds of which Sir

Thomas Browne is the best English example. He set a high value upon

Browne, to whose style his own, though far more sententious, bears a

resemblance. Browne's saying, for example, "All things are artificial,

for nature is the art of God," sounds like Emerson, whose workmanship,

for the rest, in his prose essays was exceedingly fine and close. He

was not afraid to be homely and racy in expressing thought of the

highest spirituality. "Hitch your wagon to a star" is a good instance

of his favorite manner.

Emerson's verse often seems careless in technique. Most of his pieces

are scrappy and have the air of runic rimes, or little oracular

"voicings"--as they say in Concord--in rhythmic shape, of single

thoughts on "Worship," "Character," "Heroism," "Art," "Politics,"

"Culture," etc. The content is the important thing, and the form is

too frequently awkward or bald. Sometimes, indeed, in the {457}

clear-obscure of Emerson's poetry the deep wisdom of the thought finds

its most natural expression in the imaginative simplicity of the

language. But though this artlessness in him became too frequently in

his imitators, like Thoreau and Ellery Channing, an obtruded

simplicity, among his own poems are many that leave nothing to be

desired in point of wording and of verse. His _Hymn Sung at the

Completion of the Concord Monument_, in 1836, is the perfect model of

an occasional poem. Its lines were on every one's lips at the time of

the centennial celebrations in 1876, and "the shot heard round the

world" has hardly echoed farther than the song which chronicled it.

Equally current is the stanza from _Voluntaries_:

"So nigh is grandeur to our dust,

So near is God to man,

When Duty whispers low, 'Thou must,'

The youth replies, 'I can.'"

So, too, the famous lines from the _Problem_:

"The hand that rounded Peter's dome,

And groined the aisles of Christian Rome,

Wrought in a sad sincerity.

Himself from God he could not free;

He builded better than he knew;

The conscious stone to beauty grew."

The most noteworthy of Emerson's pupils was Henry David Thoreau, "the

poet-naturalist." After his graduation from Harvard College, in 1837,

Thoreau engaged in school teaching and in {458} the manufacture of

lead-pencils, but soon gave up all regular business and devoted himself

to walking, reading, and the study of nature. He was at one time

private tutor in a family on Staten Island, and he supported himself

for a season by doing odd jobs in land surveying for the farmers about

Concord. In 1845 he built, with his own hands, a small cabin on the

banks of Walden Pond, near Concord, and lived there in seclusion for

two years. His expenses during these years were nine cents a day, and

he gave an account of his experiment in his most characteristic book,

_Walden_, published in 1854. His _Week on the Concord and Merrimac

Rivers_ appeared in 1849. From time to time he went farther afield,

and his journeys were reported in _Cape Cod_, the _Maine Woods_,

_Excursions_, and a _Yankee in Canada_, all of which, as well as a

volume of _Letters_ and _Early Spring in Massachusetts_, have been

given to the public since his death, which happened in 1862. No one

has lived so close to nature, and written of it so intimately, as

Thoreau. His life was a lesson in economy and a sermon on Emerson's

text, "Lessen your denominator." He wished to reduce existence to the

simplest terms--to

"live all alone

Close to the bone,

And where life is sweet

Constantly eat."

He had a passion for the wild, and seems like an Anglo-Saxon reversion

to the type of the Red {459} Indian. The most distinctive note in

Thoreau is his inhumanity. Emerson spoke of him as a "perfect piece of

stoicism." "Man," said Thoreau, "is only the point on which I stand."

He strove to realize the objective life of nature--nature in its

aloofness from man; to identify himself, with the moose and the

mountain. He listened, with his ear close to the ground, for the voice

of the earth. "What are the trees saying?" he exclaimed. Following

upon the trail of the lumberman he asked the primeval wilderness for

its secret, and

"saw beneath dim aisles, in odorous beds,

The slight linnaea hang its twin-born heads."

He tried to interpret the thought of Ktaadn and to fathom the meaning

of the billows on the back of Cape Cod, in their indifference to the

shipwrecked bodies that they rolled ashore. "After sitting in my

chamber many days, reading the poets, I have been out early on a foggy

morning and heard the cry of an owl in a neighboring wood as from a

nature behind the common, unexplored by science or by literature. None

of the feathered race has yet realized my youthful conceptions of the

woodland depths. I had seen the red election-birds brought from their

recesses on my comrade's string, and fancied that their plumage would

assume stranger and more dazzling colors, like the tints of evening, in

proportion as I advanced farther into the darkness and solitude of the

forest. Still less have I seen such strong and wild tints on any

poet's string."

{460}

It was on the mystical side that Thoreau apprehended transcendentalism.

Mysticism has been defined as the soul's recognition of its identity

with nature. This thought lies plainly in Schelling's philosophy, and

he illustrated it by his famous figure of the magnet. Mind and nature

are one; they are the positive and negative poles of the magnet. In

man, the Absolute--that is, God--becomes conscious of himself; makes of

himself, as nature, an object to himself as mind. "The souls of men,"

said Schelling, "are but the innumerable individual eyes with which our

infinite World-Spirit beholds himself." This thought is also clearly

present in Emerson's view of nature, and has caused him to be accused

of pantheism. But if by pantheism is meant the doctrine that the

underlying principle of the universe is matter or force, none of the

transcendentalists was a pantheist. In their view nature was divine.

Their poetry is always haunted by the sense of a spiritual reality

which abides beyond the phenomena. Thus in Emerson's _Two Rivers_:

"Thy summer voice, Musketaquit,[1]

Repeats the music of the rain,

But sweeter rivers pulsing flit

Through thee as thou through Concord plain.

"Thou in thy narrow banks art pent:

The stream I love unbounded goes;

Through flood and sea and firmament,

Through light, through life, it forward flows.

{461}

"I see the inundation sweet,

I hear the spending of the stream,

Through years, through men, through nature fleet,

Through passion, thought, through power and dream."

This mood occurs frequently in Thoreau. The hard world of matter

becomes suddenly all fluent and spiritual, and he sees himself in

it--sees God. "This earth," he cries, "which is spread out like a map

around me, is but the lining of my inmost soul exposed." "In _me_ is

the sucker that I see;" and, of Walden Pond,

"I am its stony shore,

And the breeze that passes o'er."

"Suddenly old Time winked at me--ah, you know me, you rogue--and news

had come that IT was well. That ancient universe is in such capital

health, I think, undoubtedly, it will never die. . . . I see, smell,

taste, hear, feel that everlasting something to which we are allied, at

once our maker, our abode, our destiny, our very selves." It was

something ulterior that Thoreau sought in nature. "The other world,"

he wrote, "is all my art: my pencils will draw no other: my jackknife

will cut nothing else." Thoreau did not scorn, however, like Emerson,

to "examine too microscopically the universal tablet." He was a close

observer and accurate reporter of the ways of birds and plants and the

minuter aspects of nature. He has had many followers, who have

produced much pleasant literature on out-door {462} life. But in none

of them is there that unique combination of the poet, the naturalist

and the mystic which gives his page its wild original flavor. He had

the woodcraft of a hunter and the eye of a botanist, but his

imagination did not stop short with the fact. The sound of a tree

falling in the Maine woods was to him "as though a door had shut

somewhere in the damp and shaggy wilderness." He saw small things in

cosmic relations. His trip down the tame Concord has for the reader

the excitement of a voyage of exploration into far and unknown regions.

The river just above Sherman's Bridge, in time of flood "when the wind

blows freshly on a raw March day, heaving up the surface into dark and

sober billows," was like Lake Huron, "and you may run aground on

Cranberry Island," and "get as good a freezing there as anywhere on the

North-west coast." He said that most of the phenomena described in

Kane's voyages could be observed in Concord.

The literature of transcendentalism was like the light of the stars in

a winter night, keen and cold and high. It had the pale cast of

thought, and was almost too spiritual and remote to "hit the sense of

mortal sight." But it was at least indigenous. If not an American

literature--not national and not inclusive of all sides of American

life--it was, at all events, a genuine New England literature and true

to the spirit of its section. The tough Puritan stock had at last put

forth a {463} blossom which compared with the warm, robust growths of

English soil even as the delicate wind flower of the northern spring

compares with the cowslips and daisies of old England.

In 1842 Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) the greatest American romancer,

came to Concord. He had recently left Brook Farm, had just been

married, and with his bride he settled down in the "Old Manse" for

three paradisaical years. A picture of this protracted honeymoon and

this sequestered life, as tranquil as the slow stream on whose banks it

was passed, is given in the introductory chapter to his _Mosses from an

Old Manse_, 1846, and in the more personal and confidential records of

his _American Note Books_, posthumously published. Hawthorne was

thirty-eight when he took his place among the Concord literati. His

childhood and youth had been spent partly at his birthplace, the old

and already somewhat decayed sea-port town of Salem, and partly at his

grandfather's farm on Sebago Lake, in Maine, then on the edge of the

primitive forest. Maine did not become a State, indeed, until 1820,

the year before Hawthorne entered Bowdoin College, whence he was

graduated in 1825, in the same class with Henry W. Longfellow and one

year behind Franklin Pierce, afterward President of the United States.

After leaving college Hawthorne buried himself for years in the

seclusion of his home at Salem. His mother, who was early widowed, had

withdrawn entirely from the world. For months {464} at a time

Hawthorne kept his room, seeing no other society than that of his

mother and sisters, reading all sorts of books and writing wild tales,

most of which he destroyed as soon as he had written them. At twilight

he would emerge from the house for a solitary ramble through the

streets of the town or along the sea-side. Old Salem had much that was

picturesque in its associations. It had been the scene of the witch

trials in the seventeenth century, and it abounded in ancient mansions,

the homes of retired whalers and India merchants. Hawthorne's father

had been a ship captain, and many of his ancestors had followed the

sea. One of his forefathers, moreover, had been a certain Judge

Hawthorne, who in 1691 had sentenced several of the witches to death.

The thought of this affected Hawthorne's imagination with a pleasing

horror and he utilized it afterward in his _House of the Seven Gables_.

Many of the old Salem houses, too, had their family histories, with now

and then the hint of some obscure crime or dark misfortune which

haunted posterity with its curse till all the stock died out, or fell

into poverty and evil ways, as in the Pyncheon family of Hawthorne's

romance. In the preface to the _Marble Faun_ Hawthorne wrote: "No

author without a trial can conceive of the difficulty of writing a

romance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no

mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor any thing but a

commonplace prosperity in broad and simple daylight." And yet it may

{465} be doubted whether any environment could have been found more

fitted to his peculiar genius than this of his native town, or any

preparation better calculated to ripen the faculty that was in him than

these long, lonely years of waiting and brooding thought. From time to

time he contributed a story or a sketch to some periodical, such as S.

G. Goodrich's Annual, the _Token_, or the _Knickerbocker Magazine_.

Some of these attracted the attention of the judicious; but they were

anonymous and signed by various _noms de plume_, and their author was

at this time--to use his own words--"the obscurest man of letters in

America." In 1828 he had issued anonymously and at his own expense a

short romance, entitled _Fanshawe_. It had little success, and copies

of the first edition are now exceedingly rare. In 1837 he published a

collection of his magazine pieces under the title, _Twice Told Tales_.

The book was generously praised in the _North American Review_ by his

former classmate, Longfellow; and Edgar Poe showed his keen critical

perception by predicting that the writer would easily put himself at

the head of imaginative literature in America if he would discard

allegory, drop short stories and compose a genuine romance. Poe

compared Hawthorne's work with that of the German romancer, Tieck, and

it is interesting to find confirmation of this dictum in passages of

the _American Note Books_, in which Hawthorne speaks of laboring over

Tieck with a German dictionary. The {466} _Twice Told Tales_ are the

work of a recluse, who makes guesses at life from a knowledge of his

own heart, acquired by a habit of introspection, but who has had little

contact with men. Many of them were shadowy and others were morbid and

unwholesome. But their gloom was of an interior kind, never the

physically horrible of Poe. It arose from weird psychological

situations like that of _Ethan Brand_ in his search for the

unpardonable sin. Hawthorne was true to the inherited instinct of

Puritanism; he took the conscience for his theme, and in these early

tales he was already absorbed in the problem of evil, the subtle ways

in which sin works out its retribution, and the species of fate or

necessity that the wrong-doer makes for himself in the inevitable

sequences of his crime. Hawthorne was strongly drawn toward symbols

and types, and never quite followed Poe's advice to abandon allegory.

The _Scarlet Letter_ and his other romances are not, indeed, strictly

allegories, since the characters are men and women and not mere

personifications of abstract qualities. Still they all have a certain

allegorical tinge. In the _Marble Faun_, for example, Hilda, Kenyon,

Miriam and Donatello have been ingeniously explained as

personifications respectively of the conscience, the reason, the

imagination and the senses. Without going so far as this, it is

possible to see in these and in Hawthorne's other creations something

typical and representative. He uses his characters like algebraic

symbols to work {467} out certain problems with: they are rather more

and yet rather less than flesh and blood individuals. The stories in

_Twice Told Tales_ and in the second collection, _Mosses from an Old

Manse_, 1846, are more openly allegorical than his later work. Thus

the _Minister's Black Veil_ is a sort of anticipation of Arthur

Dimmesdale in the _Scarlet Letter_. From 1846 to 1849 Hawthorne held

the position of Surveyor of the Custom House of Salem. In the preface

to the _Scarlet Letter_ he sketched some of the government officials

with whom this office had brought him into contact in a way that gave

some offense to the friends of the victims and a great deal of

amusement to the public. Hawthorne's humor was quiet and fine, like

Irving's, but less genial and with a more satiric edge to it. The book

last named was written at Salem and published in 1850, just before its

author's removal to Lenox, now a sort of inland Newport, but then an

unfashionable resort among the Berkshire hills. Whatever obscurity may

have hung over Hawthorne hitherto was effectually dissolved by this

powerful tale, which was as vivid in coloring as the implication of its

title. Hawthorne chose for his background the somber life of the early

settlers in New England. He had always been drawn toward this part of

American history, and in _Twice Told Tales_ had given some

illustrations of it in _Endicott's Red Cross_ and _Legends of the

Province House_. Against this dark foil moved in strong relief the

figures of Hester {468} Prynne, the woman taken in adultery, her

paramour, the Rev. Arthur Dimmesdale, her husband, old Roger

Chillingworth, and her illegitimate child. In tragic power, in its

grasp of the elementary passions of human nature and its deep and

subtle insight into the inmost secrets of the heart, this is

Hawthorne's greatest book. He never crowded his canvas with figures.

In the _Blithedale Romance_ and the _Marble Faun_ there is the same

_parti carre_ or group of four characters. In the _House of the Seven

Gables_ there are five. The last mentioned of these, published in

1852, was of a more subdued intensity than the _Scarlet Letter_, but

equally original and, upon the whole, perhaps equally good. The

_Blithedale Romance_, published in the same year, though not strikingly

inferior to the others, adhered more to conventional patterns in its

plot and in the sensational nature of its ending. The suicide of the

heroine by drowning, and the terrible scene of the recovery of her

body, were suggested to the author by an experience of his own on

Concord River, the account of which, in his own words, may be read in

Julian Hawthorne's _Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife_. In 1852

Hawthorne returned to Concord and bought the "Wayside" property, which

he retained until his death. But in the following year his old college

friend Pierce, now become President, appointed him Consul to Liverpool,

and he went abroad for seven years. The most valuable fruit of his

foreign residence was the {469} romance of the _Marble Faun_, 1860; the

longest of his fictions and the richest in descriptive beauty. The

theme of this was the development of the soul through the experience of

sin. There is a haunting mystery thrown about the story, like a soft

veil of mist, veiling the beginning and the end. There is even a

delicate teasing suggestion of the preternatural in Donatello, the

Faun, a creation as original as Shakspere's Caliban, or Fouque's

Undine, and yet quite on this side the border-line of the human. _Our

Old Home_, a book of charming papers on England, was published in 1863.

Manifold experience of life and contact with men, affording scope for

his always keen observation, had added range, fullness, warmth to the

imaginative subtlety which had manifested itself even in his earliest

tales. Two admirable books for children, the _Wonder Book_ and

_Tanglewood Tales_, in which the classical mythologies were retold;

should also be mentioned in the list of Hawthorne's writings, as well

as the _American_, _English_, and _Italian Note Books_, the first of

which contains the seed thoughts of some of his finished works,

together with hundreds of hints for plots, episodes, descriptions,

etc., which he never found time to work out. Hawthorne's style, in his

first sketches and stories a little stilted and "bookish," gradually

acquired an exquisite perfection, and is as well worth study as that of

any prose classic in the English tongue.

Hawthorne was no transcendentalist. He dwelt {470} much in a world of

ideas, and he sometimes doubted whether the tree on the bank or its

image in the stream were the more real. But this had little in common

with the philosophical idealism of his neighbors. He reverenced

Emerson, and he held kindly intercourse--albeit a silent man and easily

bored--with Thoreau and Ellery Channing, and even with Margaret Fuller.

But his sharp eyes saw whatever was whimsical or weak in the apostles

of the new faith. He had little enthusiasm for causes or reforms, and

among so many Abolitionists he remained a Democrat, and even wrote a

campaign life of his friend Pierce.

The village of Concord has perhaps done more for American literature

than the city of New York. Certainly there are few places where

associations, both patriotic and poetic, cluster so thickly. At one

side of the grounds of the Old Manse--which has the river at its

back--runs down a shaded lane to the Concord monument and the figure of

the Minute Man and the successor of "the rude bridge that arched the

flood." Scarce two miles away, among the woods, is little

Walden--"God's drop." The men who made Concord famous are asleep in

Sleepy Hollow, yet still their memory prevails to draw seekers after

truth to the Concord Summer School of Philosophy, which meets every

year, to reason high of "God, Freedom, and Immortality," next-door to

the "Wayside," and under the hill on whose ridge Hawthorne wore a path,

as he paced up and down beneath the hemlocks.

{471}

1. Ralph Waldo Emerson. Nature. The American Scholar. Literary

Ethics. The Transcendentalist. The Over-soul. Address before the

Cambridge Divinity School. English Traits. Representative Men. Poems.

2. Henry David Thoreau. Excursions. Walden. A Week on the Concord

and Merrimac Rivers. Cape Cod. The Maine Woods.

3. Nathaniel Hawthorne. Mosses from an Old Manse. The Scarlet Letter.

The House of the Seven Gables. The Blithedale Romance. The Marble

Faun. Our Old Home.

4. Transcendentalism in New England. By O. B. Frothingham. New York:

G. P. Putnam's Sons. 1875.

[1] The Indian name of Concord River.

{472}

CHAPTER V.

THE CAMBRIDGE SCHOLARS.

1837-1861.

With few exceptions, the men who have made American literature what it

is have been college graduates. And yet our colleges have not commonly

been, in themselves, literary centers. Most of them have been small

and poor, and situated in little towns or provincial cities. Their

alumni scatter far and wide immediately after graduation, and even

those of them who may feel drawn to a life of scholarship or letters

find little to attract them at the home of their alma mater, and seek,

by preference, the large cities where periodicals and publishing houses

offer some hope of support in a literary career. Even in the older and

better equipped universities the faculty is usually a corps of working

scholars, each man intent upon his specialty and rather inclined to

undervalue merely "literary" performance. In many cases the fastidious

and hypercritical turn of mind which besets the scholar, the timid

conservatism which naturally characterizes an ancient seat of learning

and the spirit of theological conformity which suppresses free

discussion have exerted their {473} benumbing influence upon the

originality and creative impulse of their inmates. Hence it happens

that, while the contributions of American college teachers to the exact

sciences, to theology and philology, metaphysics, political philosophy

and the severer branches of learning have been honorable and important,

they have as a class made little mark upon the general literature of

the country. The professors of literature in our colleges are usually

persons who have made no additions to literature, and the professors of

rhetoric seem ordinarily to have been selected to teach students how to

write, for the reason that they themselves have never written any thing

that any one has ever read.