 Part 2 Chapter 7 of a Brief History of English and American Literature. This the Brevox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Colinda. A Brief History of English and American Literature by Henry A. Beers. Part 2 Chapter 7. Literature since 1861. A generation has nearly passed since the outbreak of the Civil War and although public affairs are still mainly in the hands of men who had reached manhood before the conflict opened or who were old enough at that time to remember clearly its stirring events, the younger men who were daily coming forward to take their places know it only by tradition. It makes a definite break in the history of our literature and a number of new literary schools and tendencies have appeared since its close. As to the literature of the war itself, it was largely the work of writers who had already reached or passed middle age. All of the more important authors described in the last three chapters survived the rebellion except Poe, who died in 1849, Prescott, who died in 1859, and Thoreau and Hawthorne, who died in the second and fourth years of the war respectively. The final and authoritative history of the struggle has not yet been written and cannot be written for many years to come. Many partial and tentative accounts have, however, appeared, among which may be mentioned on the northern side, Horace Greeley's American Conflict, 1864-66, Vice President Wilson's Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America, and J. W. Draper's American Civil War, 1868-70. On the southern side, Alexander H. Stevens's Confederate States of America, Jefferson Davis's Rise and Fall of the Confederate States of America, and E. A. Pollard's Lost Cause. These, with the exception of Dr. Draper's philosophical narrative, have the advantage of being the work of actors in the political or military events which they describe, and the disadvantage of being their forepartisan, in some instances passionately partisan. A storehouse of materials for the coming historian is also at hand in Frank Moore's great collection The Rebellion Record. In numerous regimental histories, and histories of special armies, departments and battles, like W. Swinton's Army of the Potomac, in the autobiographies and recollections of Grant and Sherman and other military leaders, in the war papers, now publishing in the Century magazine, and in innumerable sketches and reminiscences by officers and privates on both sides. The war had its poetry, its humors, and its general literature, some of which have been mentioned in connection with Whittier, Lowell, Holmes, Whitman, and others, and some of which remain to be mentioned as the work of new writers, or of writers who had previously made little mark. There were war songs on both sides, few of which had much literary value, accepting perhaps James R. Randall's Southern ballad, Maryland, My Maryland, sung to the old college era of Lorriga Horatius, and the grand martial chorus of John Brown's body and old Methodist hymn to which the Northern armies beat time as they went marching on. Randall's song, though spirited, was marred by its fire-reading absurdities about vandals and minions and northern scum, the cheap insults of the Southern newspaper press. To furnish the John Brown chorus with words worthy of the music, Mrs. Julia Ward Howe wrote her Battle hymn of the Republic, a noble poem but rather too fine and literary for a song, and so never fully accepted by the soldiers. Among the many verses which voiced the anguish and the patriotism of that stern time, which told of partings and homecomings, of women waiting by desolate hearts in country homes for tidings of husbands and sons who had gone to war, or which celebrated individual deeds of heroism, or sang the thousand private tragedies and heartbreaks of the great conflict, by far the greater number were of too humble a grade to survive the feeling of the hour. Among the best, or the most popular of them, were Kate Putnam Osgoode's Driving Home the Cows, Mrs. Ethel Lynn Beers' All Quiet Along the Potomac, Forsythe Wilson's Old Sergeant, and John Jayme Payet's Riding to Vote. Of the poets whom the war brought out, or developed, the most noteworthy were Henry Timrod of South Carolina and Henry Howard Brownell of Connecticut. During the war, Timrod was with the Confederate Army of the West, as correspondent for the Charleston Mercury, and in 1864 he became assistant editor of the South Carolinian at Columbia. Sherman's March to the Sea broke up his business and he returned to Charleston. A complete edition of his poems was published in 1873, six years after his death. The prettiest of all Timrod's poems is Katey, but more to our present purpose are Charleston, written in the Time of the Blockade, and the Unknown Dead, which tells of nameless graves on battle planes washed by a single winter's rains, where some beneath Virginian hills and some by green Atlantic rills, some by the waters of the West, a myriad unknown heroes rest. When the war was over, a poet of New York State, F. M. Finch, sang of these and of other graves in his beautiful Decoration Day lyric, The Blue and the Gray, which spoke the word of reconciliation and consecration for North and South alike. Brownell, whose lyrics of a day and war lyrics were published respectively in 1864 and 1866, was private secretary to Farragut, on whose flagship the Hartford he was present at several great naval engagements, such as the passage of the forts below New Orleans, and the action-off-mobile described in his poem The Bay Fight. With some roughness and unevenness of execution, Brownell's poetry had a fire which places him next to Whittier as the coroner of the Civil War. In him especially, as in Whittier, is that Puritan sense of the righteousness of his cause which made the battle for the Union a holy war to the crusaders against slavery. Full red the furnace fires must glow that melt the oar of mortal kind. The mills of God are grinding slow, but how close they grind. Today the Dalgren and the drum are dread apostles of his name. His kingdom here can only come by chrism of blood and flame. One of the earliest martyrs of the war was Theodore Winthrop, hardly known as a writer until the publication in the Atlantic Monthly of his vivid sketches of Washington as a camp, describing the march of his regiment, the famous New York Seventh, and its first quarters in the capital at Washington. A tragic interest was given to these papers by Winthrop's gallant death in the action of Big Bethel, June 10, 1861. While this was still fresh in public recollection, his manuscript novels were published together with a collection of his stories and sketches reprinted from the magazines. His novels, though in parts crude and immature, have a dash and buoyancy and outdoor air about them, which give the reader a winning impression of Winthrop's personality. The best of them is perhaps Cecil Dream, a romance that reminds one a little of Hawthorne, and the scene of which is the New York University building on Washington Square, a locality that has been further celebrated in Henry James's novel of Washington Square. Another member of this same Seventh Regiment, Fitz James O'Brien, an Irishman by birth who died at Baltimore in 1862 from the effects of a wound received in a cavalry skirmish, had contributed to the magazines a number of poems and of brilliant, though fantastic, tales, among which The Diamond Lens and What Was It had something of Edgar A. Poe's quality. Another Irish-American, Charles G. Halpine, under the pen name of Miles O'Reilly, wrote a good many clever ballads of the war, partly serious and partly in comic broke. Pro's writers of note furnished the magazines with narratives of their experience at the seat of war, among papers of which kind may be mentioned, Dr. Holmes's My Search for the Captain in the Atlantic Monthly, and Colonel T. W. Higginson's Army Life in a Black Regiment, erected into a volume in 1870. Of the public oratory of the war, the foremost example is the ever-memorable address of Abraham Lincoln at the dedication of the National Cemetery at Gettysburg. The war had brought the nation to its intellectual majority. In the stress of that terrible fight, there was no room for buncombing verbiage, such as the newspapers and stump speakers used to dole out in antebellum days. Lincoln's speech is short. A few grave words which he turned aside for a moment in the midst of his task of saving the country. The speech is simple, naked of figures. Every sentence impressed with a sense of responsibility for the work yet to be done and with a stern determination to do it. In a larger sense it says, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated far above our poor power to attract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us, that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause they gave the last full measure of devotion, that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth. Here was eloquence of a different sort from the sonorous parorations of Webster or the polished climaxes of Everett. As we read the plain, strong language of this brief classic, with its solemnity, its restraint, its brave old wisdom of sincerity, we seem to see the president's homely features irradiated with the light of coming martyrdom, the kindly earnest, brave, foreseeing man, sagacious, patient, dreading praise, not blame, new birth of our new soil, the first American. Within the past quarter of a century the popular school of American humor has reached its culmination. Every man of genius who is a humorist at all is so in a way peculiar to himself. There is no lack of individuality in the humor of Irving and Hawthorne and the wit of Holmes and Lowell, but although they are new in subject and application, they are not new in kind. Irving, as we have seen, was the literary descendant of Addison. The character sketches in Bracebridge Hall are of the same family with Sir Roger DeCoverly and the other figures of the Spectator Club. Nickerbocker's history of New York, though purely American in its matter, is not distinctly American in its method, which is akin to the mock heroic of fielding and the irony of swift in the voyage to Lilliput. Irving's humor, like that of all the great English humorists, had its root in the perception of character, of the characteristic traits of men and classes of men as ground of amusement. It depended for its effect, therefore, upon its truthfulness, its dramatic insight and sympathy, as did the humor of Shakespeare, of Stern, Lamb, and Thackeray. This perception of the characteristic when pushed to excess issues in grotesque and caricature, as in some of Dickens' inferior creations, which are little more than personified single-tricks of manner, speech, feature, or dress. Hawthorne's rare humor differed from Irving's in temper, but not in substance, and belonged like Irving's to the English variety. Dr. Holmes, more pronouncedly comic-verse, does not differ specifically from the facetier of Thomas Hood, but his prominent trait is wit, which is the laughter of the head as humor is of the heart. The same is true with qualifications of Lowell, whose big low papers, though humor of an original sort, in their revelation of Yankee character, are essentially satirical. It is the cleverness, the shrewdness of the hits in the big low papers, their logical, that is witty, character, as distinguished from their drollery, that arrests the attention. They are funny, but they are not so funny as they are smart. In all these writers, humor was blend with more serious qualities, which gave fineness and literary value to their humorous writings. Their view of life was not exclusively comic, but there has been a class of gestures of professional humorists in America whose product is so indigenous and so different, if not in essence, yet at least in form and expression for many European humor, that it may be regarded as a unique addition to the comic literature of the world. It has been accepted as such in England, where Artemis Ward and Mark Twain are familiar to multitudes who have never read the One Haas Shea or the Courten. And though it would be ridiculous to maintain that either of these writers takes rank with Lowell and Holmes, or to deny that there is an amount of flatness and coarseness in many of their labored fulleries, which puts large portions of their writing below the line where real literature begins, still it will not do to ignore them as mere buffoons or even to predict that their humours will soon be forgotten. It is true that no literary fashion is more subject to change than the fashion of a jest, and the jokes that make one generation laugh seem insipid to the next. But there is something perennial in the fun of Rabelais, whom Bacon calls the great jester of France. And though the ponds of Shakespeare's clowns and the festival, the clowns themselves have not lost their power to amuse. The Americans are not a gay people, but they are fond of a joke. Lincoln's little stories were characteristically western, and it is doubtful whether he was more endeared to the masses by his solid virtues than by the humorous perception which made him one of them. The humor of which we are speaking now is a strictly popular and national possession. Though America has never, or not until lately, had a comic paper ranking with punch or caravari or the fliegen de blette. Every newspaper has had its funny column. Our humorists have been graduated from the journalist's desk and sometimes from the printing press, and now and then a local or country newspaper has ridden into sudden prosperity from the possession of a new humorist, as in the case of G. D. Prentice's Courier Journal, or more recently of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Danbury News, the Burlington Hawkeye, the Arkansas Traveler, the Texas Siftings, and numerous others. Nowadays there are even syndicates of humorists who cooperate to supply fun for certain groups of periodicals. Of course, the great majority of these manufacturers of jests for newspapers and comic almanacs are doomed to swift oblivion. But it is not so certain that the best of the class, like Clemens and Brown, will not long continue to be read as illustrative of one side of the American mind or that their best things will not survive as long as the mows of Sidney Smith, which are still as current as ever. One of the earliest of them was Seba Smith, who under the name of Major Jack Downing, did his best to make Jackson's administration ridiculous. B. P. Shilliber's Mrs. Parkington, a sort of American Mrs. Malaprop, enjoyed great vogue before the war. Of a somewhat higher kind were the Phoenixiana, 1855, and the Squibbob Papers, 1856, of Lieutenant George H. Derby. John Phoenix, one of the pioneers of literature on the Pacific Coast at the time of the California Gold Fever of 49. Derby's proposal for a new system of English grammar, his satirical account of the topographical survey of the two miles of road between San Francisco and the Mission Dolores, and his picture gallery made out of the conventional houses, steamboats, railcars, runaway Negroes, and other designs which used to figure in the advertising columns of the newspaper were all very ingenious and clever. But all these pale before Artemis Ward, Artemis the delicious, as Charles Reed called him, who first secured for this peculiarly American type of humor a hearing and reception abroad. Ever since the invention of Hosea Biglow, an imaginary person of some sort, under cover of whom the author might conceal his own identity, has seemed a necessity to our humorists. Artemis Ward was a traveling showman who went about the country exhibiting a collection of wax figures and whose experiences and reflections were reported in grammar and spelling of a most ingeniously eccentric kind. His inventor was Charles F. Brown, originally of Maine, a printer by trade, but a newspaper writer and editor at Boston, Toledo, and Cleveland, where his comicalities and the plain dealer first began to attract notice. In 1860 he came to New York and joined the staff of Vanity Fair, a comic weekly of much brightness which ran a short career and perished for want of capital. When Brown began to appear as a public lecturer, people who had formed an idea of him from his impersonation of the shrewd and vulgar old showman were surprised to find him a gentlemanly-looking young man who came upon the platform in correct evening dress and spoke his peace in a quiet and somewhat mournful manner, stopping in apparent surprise when anyone in the audience laughed at an uncommonly outrageous absurdity. In London, where he delivered his lecture on the Mormons in 1866, the gravity of his bearing at first imposed upon his hearers who had come to the hall in search of instructive information and were disappointed at the inadequate nature of the panorama which Brown had made to illustrate the lecture. Occasionally some hitch would occur in the machinery of this and the lecturer would leave the rostrum for a few minutes to work the moon that shone upon the Great Salt Lake, apologizing on his return on the ground that he was a man short and offering to pay a good salary to any respectable boy of good parentage and education who was a good moonist. When it gradually dawned upon the British intellect that these and similar devices of the lecturer, such as the soft music which he had the pianist play at pathetic passages, nay that the panorama and even the lecture itself were of a humorous intention, the joke began to take and Artemis's success in England became assured. He was employed as one of the editors of Punch but died at Southampton in the year following. Some of Artemis Ward's effects were produced by cacography or bad spelling but there was genius in the wildly erratic way in which he handled even this rather low order of humor. It is a curious commentary on the wretchedness of our English orthography that the phonetic spelling of a word, as for example was WUZ, for was, should be in itself an occasion of mirth. Other verbal effects of a different kind were among his devices, as in the passage where the seventeen widows of a deceased Mormon offered themselves to Artemis. And I said, why is this thus? What is the reason of this thusness? They hove a sigh, seventeen sighs of a different sighs. They said, oh, soon that will be gone asted away. I told them that when I got ready to leave a place, I went asted. They said, doth not like us? I said, I doth, I doth. I also said, I hope your intentions are honourable for my child, my parents being far, far away. They then said, will doth marry us? I said, oh no, it cannot was. When they cried, oh cruel man, this is too much, oh too much, I told them that it was on account of the muchness that I declined. It is hard to define the difference between the humor of one writer and another, or of one nation and another. It can be felt, and can be illustrated by quoting examples scarcely described in general terms. It has been said of that class of American humorists, of which Artemis Ward is representative, that their peculiarity consists in extravagance, surprise, audacity, and irreverence. But all these qualities have characterised other schools of humor. There is the same element of surprise into Quincy's anti-climax. Many a man has dated his ruin from some murder or rather, which perhaps at the time he thought little of. Artemis is truism that a comic paper ought to publish a joke now and then. The violation of logic, which makes us laugh at an Irish bull, is likewise the source of the humor in Artemis's saying of Jeff Davis that it would have been better than ten dollars in his pocket if he had never been born. Or in his advice, always live within your income, even if you have to borrow money to do so. Or again, in his announcement that Mr. Ward will pay no debts of his own contracting. A kind of ludicrous confusion caused by an unusual collocation of words is also one of his favourite tricks, as when he says of Brigham Young, he's the most married man I ever saw in my life. Or when having been drafted at several hundred different places where he had been exhibiting his wax figures, he says that if he went on he should soon become a regiment and adds, I never knew that there was so many of me. With this, a whimsical understatement and an affectation of simplicity, as where he expresses his willingness to sacrifice even his wife's relations on the altar of patriotism. Or where, in delightful unconsciousness of his own sins against orthography, he pronounces that Chaucer was a great poet, but he couldn't spell. Or where he says of the feast of raw dog tendered him by the Indian chief, Walki Baki, it don't agree with me, I prefer simple food. On the whole, it may be said of original humour of this kind, as of other forms of originality and literature, that the elements of it are old, but the combinations are novel. Other humorists like Henry W. Shaw, Josh Billings, and David R. Locke, petroleum V. Nazby have used bad spelling as a part of their machinery, while Robert H. Newell, or Fias C. Kerr, Samuel L. Clemens, Mark Twain, and more recently Bill Nye, though belonging to the same school of low or broad comedy, have discarded cacography. Of these, the most eminent by all odds, is Mark Twain, who has probably made more people laugh than any other living writer. A Missourian by birth, 1835, he served the usual apprenticeship at typesetting and editing country newspapers, spent seven years as a pilot on a Mississippi steamboat, and seven years more mining and journalizing in Nevada, where he conducted the Virginia City Enterprise, finally drifted to San Francisco, and was associated with Bret Hart on the Californian, and in 1867, published his first book, The Jumping Frog. This was succeeded by the Innocence Abroad, 1869, Roughing It, 1872, a Tramp Abroad, 1880, and by others not so good. Mark Twain's drolleries have frequently the same air of innocence and surprise as Artemis Ward's, and there is like suddenness in his terms of expression, as where he speaks of the calm confidence of a Christian with four aces. If he did not originate, he at any rate employed very effectively that now familiar device of the newspaper Funnyman of putting a painful situation euphemistically, as when he says of a man who was hanged that he received injuries which terminated in his death. He uses to the full extent the American humorists' favorite resources of exaggeration and irreverence. An instance of the former quality may be seen in his famous description of a dog chasing a coyote in Roughing It, or in his interview with the lightning rod agent in Mark Twain's sketches, 1875. He is a shrewd observer, and his humor has a more satirical side than Artemis Ward's, sometimes passing into downright denunciation. He delights particularly in ridiculing sentimental humbug and moralizing cant. He runs a tilt, as has been said, at copybook texts, at the temperance reformer, the track distributor, and the women who send bouquets and sympathetic letters to interesting criminals. He gives a ludicrous turn to famous historical anecdotes, such as the story of George Washington and his little hatchet. Burlesque's the time-honored adventure of the starving crew casting lots in the longboat and spoils the dignity of antiquity by modern trivialities, saying of a discontented sailor on Columbus's ship, he wanted fresh shad. The fun of Innocence Abroad consists in this irreverent application of modern common sense, utilitarian democratic standards, to the memorable places and historic associations of Europe. Tried by this test, Abelard became laughable. Abelard was a precious scoundrel and the raptures of the guidebooks are parodied without mercy. The tourist weeps at the grave above Adam. At Genoa he drives the Ciceroanis to despair by pretending never to have heard of Christopher Columbus and inquiring innocently, is he dead? It is Europe vulgarized and stripped of its illusions, Europe seen by a western newspaper reporter without any historic imagination. The class of humorous is the opposite of Addison's or Irving's or Thackeray's. It does not amuse by the perception of the characteristic. It is not founded upon truth but upon incongruity, distortion, unexpectedness. Everything in life is reversed as in the opera bouff and turned topsy-turvy so that its paradox takes the place of the natural order of things. Nevertheless they have supplied a wholesome criticism upon sentimental excesses and a hardy laugh. In the Atlantic Monthly for December 1863 appeared a tale entitled The Man Without a Country which made a great sensation and did much to strengthen patriotic feeling in one of the darkest hours of the nation's history. It was the story of one Philip Nolan an army officer whose head had been turned by Aaron Burr and who having been censured by a court-martial for some minor offence exclaimed petulantly upon mention of the State of the United States Government damn the United States, I wish that I might never hear the United States mentioned again. Thereupon he was sentenced to have his wish and was kept all his life aboard the vessels of the Navy being sent off on long voyages and transferred from ship to ship with orders to those in charge that his country and its concerns should never be spoken of in his presence. Such an air of reality was given to the narrative by incidental references to actual persons that many believed it true and some were found who remembered Philip Nolan but had heard different versions of his career. The author of this clever hoax if hoax it may be called was Edward Everett Hale a Unitarian clergyman of Boston who published a collection of stories in 1868 under the fantastic title If, Yes, and Perhaps indicating thereby that some of the tales were possible some of them probable and others might even be regarded as essentially true. A similar collection His Level Best and Other Stories was published in 1873 and in the interval three volumes of a somewhat different kind the Ingham Papers and Siviris and Other Homes both in 1869 and ten times one is ten in 1871. The author shelters himself behind the imaginary figure of Captain Frederick Ingham pastor of the San Dominion Church at Nagua Davic and the same characters have a way of reappearing in his successive volumes as old friends of the reader which is pleasant at first but in the end a little tiresome. Mr. Hale is one of the most original and ingenuous of American story writers. The old device of making wildly improbable inventions appear like fact by a realistic treatment of details a device employed by Swift and Edgar Poe and more lately by Jules Verne became quite fresh and novel in his hands and was managed with a humor all his own. Some of his best stories are My Double and How He Undid Me describing how a busy clergyman found an Irishman who looked so much like himself that he trained him to pass as his duplicate and sent him to do duty in his stead at public meetings, dinners, etc. thereby escaping bores and getting time for real work. The Brick Moon a story of a projectile built and launched into space to revolve in a fixed meridian about the earth and serve mariners as a mark of longitude. A man and rag woman a tale of an impoverished couple who made a competence by saving the pamphlets, advertisements, wedding cards, etc. that came to them through the mail and developing a paper business on that basis. And the skeleton in the closet which shows how the fate of the Southern Confederacy was involved in the adventures of a certain hoop skirt built in the eclipse and rigged with curses dark. Mr. Hale's historical scholarship and his exact habit of mind have aided him in the art of giving him absurdities. He is known in philanthropy as well as in letters and his tales have a cheerful, busy, practical way with them in consonance with his motto look up and not down look forward and not back look out and not in and lend a hand. It is too soon to sum up the literary history of the last quarter of a century. The writers who have given it shape are still writing and their work is therefore incomplete. But on the slightest review of it two facts become manifest. That New England has lost its long monopoly. And secondly that a marked feature of the period is the growth of realistic fiction. The electric tension of atmosphere for thirty years preceding the Civil War the storm and stress of great public contests and the intellectual stir produced by transcendentalism seem to have been more favorable to poetry and literary idealism than present conditions are. At all events there are no new poets who rank with Whittier, Longfellow, Lowell and others of the elder generation although George H. Boker in Philadelphia R. H. Stoddard and E. C. Stedman in New York and T. B. Aldrich first in New York and afterward in Boston have written creditable verse not to speak of younger writers whose work however for the most part has been more distinguished by delicacy of execution than by native impulse. Mention has been made of the establishment of Harper's Monthly Magazine which under the conduct of its accomplished editor of the Eucharist has provided the public with an abundance of good reading. The old Putnam's Monthly which ran from 1853 to 1858 and had a strong core of contributors was revived in 1868 and continued by that name until 1870 when it was succeeded by Scribner's Monthly under the editorship of Dr. J. G. Holland and this in 1881 by the Century an efficient rival of Harper's in circulation in literary excellence and in the beauty of wood engraving, the American school of which art these two great periodicals have done much to develop and encourage. Another New York Monthly the Galaxy ran from 1866 to 1878 and was edited by Richard Grant White. During the present year a new Scribner's Magazine has also taken the field. The Atlantic in Boston and Lippincots in Philadelphia are no unworthy competitors with these for public favor. During the forties began a new era of national expansion somewhat resembling that described in a former chapter and like that bearing fruit eventually in literature. The session of Florida to the United States in 1845 and the annexation of Texas in the same year were followed by the purchase of California in 1847 and its admission as a state in 1850. In 1849 came the great rush to the California gold fields. San Francisco at first a mere collection of tents and board shanties with a few adobe huts grew with incredible rapidity into a great city. The wicked and wonderful city apostrophized by Bret Hart in his poem San Francisco. Serene, indifferent of fate thou sittest at the western gate upon thy heights so lately won still slant the banners of the sun I know thy cunning and thy greed thy hard high lust and willful deed. The adventures of all lands and races on the Pacific coast found there a motley state of society between civilization and savagery. There were the relics of the old Mexican occupation the Spanish missions with their Christianized Indians the wild tribes of the plains Apaches, utes and Navajos the Chinese Coolies and Washermen all elements strange to the Atlantic seaboard and the states of the interior. The gold hunters crossed in stages or caravans enormous prairies, alkaline deserts dotted with sage brush and seamed by deep canyons and passes through gigantic mountain ranges. On the coast itself nature was unfamiliar the climate was sub-tropical fruits and vegetables grew to a mammoth size corresponding to the enormous redwoods in the Mariposa groves and the prodigious scale of the scenery in the valley of the Yosemite and the snow-capped peaks of the Sierras. At first there were few women and the men led a wild lawless existence in the mountain camps. Hard upon the heels of the prospector followed the dram shop, the gambling hall and the dance hall. Every man carried his colt and looked out for his own life and his claim. Crime went unpunished or was taken in hand when it got too rampant by vigilance committees. In the diggings shaggy frontiersmen and pikes from Missouri mingled with the scum of eastern cities and with broken-down businessmen and young college graduates seeking their fortune. Surveyors and geologists came of necessity. Speculators in mining stock and city lots set up their offices in the towns. Later came a sprinkling of schoolteachers and ministers. Fortunes were made in one day and lost the next at Pokeraloo. Today the lucky miner who had struck a good lead was drinking champagne out of pails and treating the town. Tomorrow he was busted and shouldered the pick for a new onslaught upon his luck. This strange, reckless life of a nation and highly picturesque and dramatic elements were present in it. It was, as Bret Hart says, an era replete with a certain heroic Greek poetry. And sooner or later it was sure to find its poet. During the war California remained loyal to the Union but was too far from the seat of conflict to experience any serious disturbance and went on independently developing its own resources and becoming daily more civilized. By 1868 San Francisco had a literary magazine, The Overland Monthly, which ran until 1875. It had a decided local flavor and the vignette on its title page was a happily chosen emblem representing a grizzly bear crossing a railway track. In an early number of The Overland was a story entitled The Luck of Roaring Camp by Francis Bret Hart, a native of Albany, New York, 1835 who had come to California at the age of 17 in time to catch the unique aspects of the life of the 49ers before their vagabond communities had settled down into the law abiding society of the present day. His first contribution was followed by other stories and sketches of a similar kind, such as the outcasts of Poker Flat, Miggles, and Tennessee's partner and by verses serious and humorous of which last, plain language from truthful James better known as the heave in Chinese made an immediate hit and carried its author's name into every corner of the English speaking world. In 1871 he published a collection of his tales another of his poems and a volume of very clever parodies condensed novels which rank with Thackeray's novels by imminent hands. Bret Hart's California stories were vivid, highly colored pictures of life in the mining camps and raw towns of the Pacific Coast. The pathetic and the grotesque went hand in hand in them to show how even in the desperate characters gathered together there the fortune hunters, gamblers, thieves, murderers drunkards and prostitutes the latent nobility of human nature asserted itself in acts of heroism magnanimity, self-sacrifice and touching fidelity. The same men who cheated at cards and shot each other down with tipsy curses were capable on occasion of the most romantic generosity and the most delicate chivalry. Critics were not wanting to hold that in the matter of dialect and manners and other details the narrator was not true to the facts. This was a comparatively unimportant charge but a more serious question was the doubt whether his characters were essentially true to human nature whether the wild soil of revenge and greed and dissolute living ever yield such flowers of devotion as blossom in Tennessee's partner and the outcasts of poker flat. However this may be there is no question as to Hart's power in the narrator. His short stories are skillfully constructed and effectively told. They never drag and are never overladen with description, reflection or other lumber. In his poems in dialect we find the same variety of types and nationalities characteristic of the Pacific Coast. The little Mexican maiden Pachita in the old mission garden the wicked Bill Nye who tries to cheat the heathen Chinese at Euker and to rob engine dick of his winning lottery ticket. The geological society of the Stanislav who settle their scientific debates with chunks of old red sandstone and skulls of mammoths. The unlucky Mr. Dau who finally strikes gold while digging a well and builds a house with a cupolo and Flynn of Virginia who saves his pard's life at the sacrifice of his own by holding up the timbers in the caving tunnel. These poems are mostly in monologue like Browning's dramatic lyrics exclamatory and abrupt in style and with a good deal of indicated action. As in Jim, where a minor comes into a bar room looking for his old chum learns that he is dead and is just turning away to hide his emotion when he recognizes Jim in his informant. Well there, goodbye. No more sir, I... What's that you say? Why Dernet, show. No. Yes, by Joe. Sold! Sold! Why you limb you ornery Dernet old long-legged Jim. Bret Hart had many imitators and not only did our newspaper poetry for a number of years abound in the properties of Californian life such as gulches, placers, divides, etc. but writers further east applied this method to other conditions. Of these, by far the most successful was John Hay, a native of Indiana and private secretary to President Lincoln whose little breeches, Jim Bloodsoe and mystery of Gilgall have rivaled Bret Hart's own verses in popularity. In the last named piece the reader is given to feel that there is something rather cheerful and humorous in a bar room fight which results in the gals that winter as a rule going alone to the singing school. In the two former we have heroes of the Bret Hart type the same combination of superficial wickedness with inherent loyalty and tenderness the profane farmer of the south west who doesn't pan out on the profits and who has taught his little son to chaught or backer just to keep his milk teeth white but who believes in God and the angels ever since the miraculous recovery of the same little son when lost on the prairie in a blizzard and the unsaintly and bigomistic captain of the prairie bell who died like a hero holding the nozzle of his burning boat against the bank till the last galutes ashore. The manners and dialect of other classes and sections of the country have received abundant illustration of the leisure school master, 1871 and his other novels are pictures of rural life in the early days of Indiana. Western windows a volume of poems by John James Piat another native of Indiana had an unmistakable local coloring. Charles G. Leland of Philadelphia in his hands brightened ballads in dialect gave a humorous presentation of the German-American element in the cities. By the death in 1881 of Sidney Lanier and Georgian by birth the South lost a poet of rare promise whose original genius was somewhat hampered by his hesitation between two arts of expression music and verse and by his effort to coordinate them. His science of English verse 1880 was the most suggestive though hardly convincing statement of that theory of their relation which he was working out in his own practice. Some of his pieces like The Mockingbird and the song of the Chattahoochee was characteristically Southern poetry that has been written in America. Joel Chandler Harris his Uncle Remus stories in Negro dialect are transcripts from the folklore of the plantations. While his collection of stories at Teague Poteets together with Miss Murphrees in the Tennessee mountains and her other books have made the northern public familiar with the wildlife of the moonshiners who distill illicit whiskey in the mountains of Georgia, North Carolina and Tennessee. These tales are not only exciting and incident but strong and fresh in their delineations of character. Their descriptions of mountain scenery are also impressive though in the case of the last named writer frequently too prolonged. George W. Cable's sketches of French Creole life in New Orleans attracted attention by their freshness and quaintness when published in the magazines and reissued in book form as Old Creole Days in 1879. His first regular novel The Grand Decembs, 1880 was likewise a story of Creole life. It had the same winning qualities as his short stories and sketches but was an advance upon them in dramatic force especially in the intensely tragic and powerfully told episode of Brach Coupé. Mr. Cable has continued his studies of Louisiana types and ways in his later books but The Grand Decembs still remains his masterpiece. All in all he is thus far the most important literary figure of the New South but justness and delicacy of his representations of life speak volumes for the sobering and refining agency of the Civil War in the States whose cause was lost but whose true interests gained even more by the loss than did the interests of the victorious North. The four writers last mentioned have all come to the front within the past eight or ten years and in accordance with the plan of this sketch receive here a mere passing notice. It remains to close our review of the literary history of the period since the war with a somewhat more extended account of the two favorite novelists whose work has done more than anything else to shape the movement of recent fiction. These are Henry James Junior and William Dean Howells. Their writings though dissimilar in some respects are alike in this that they are analytic in method and realistic in spirit. Cooper was a romance or pure and simple. He wrote the romance of adventure and of external incident. Hawthorne went much deeper and with a finer spiritual insight dealt with the real passions of the heart and with men's inner experiences. This he did with truth and power. But although himself a keen observer of whatever passed before his eyes he was not careful to secure a photographic fidelity to the surface facts of speech, dress, manners, etc. Thus the talk of his characters is book talk and not the actual language of the parlor or the street with its slang its colloquial ease and the intonations and shadings of phrase and pronunciation which mark different sections of the country and different grades of society. His attempts at dialect for example were of the slenderest kind. His art is ideal and his romances certainly do not rank as novels of real life. But with the growth of a richer and more complicated society in America fiction has grown more social and more minute in its observation. It would not be fair to classify the novels of James and Howells as the fiction of manners merely. They are also the fiction of character but they aim to describe people not only as they are in their in most natures but also as they look and talk and dress. They try to express character through manners which is the way in which it is most often expressed in the daily existence of a conventional society. It is a principle of realism not to select exceptional persons or occurrences but to take average men and women and their average experiences. The realists protest that the moving incident is not their trade and that the stories have all been told. They want no plot and no hero. They will tell no rounded tale with a day new mont in which all the parts are distributed as in the fifth act of an old fashion comedy. But they will take a transcript from life and end when they get through without informing the reader what becomes of the characters. And they will try to interest this reader for real life with its foolish face. Their acknowledged masters are Balzac, George Elliot, Turgenev and Anthony Trollop. And they regard novels as studies in sociology, honest reports of the writer's impression which may not be without a certain scientific value even. Mr. James' peculiar province is the international novel, a field which he has created for himself but which he has occupied in company with Howells, Mrs. Burnett and many others. He was born into the best traditions of New England culture, his father being a resident of Cambridge and a forcible writer on philosophical subjects and his brother William James, a professor in Harvard University. The novelist received most of his schooling in Europe and has lived much abroad with the result that he has become half denationalized and has engrafted a cosmopolitan indifference upon his Yankee inheritance. He has made his constitution his opportunity. A close observer and a conscientious student of the literary art he has added to his intellectual equipment the advantage of a curious doubleness in his point of view. He looks at America with the eyes of a foreigner and at Europe with the eyes of an American. He has so far thrown himself out of relation with American life that he describes a Boston horse car or a New York hotel table with a sort of amused wonder. His starting point was in criticism and he has always maintained the critical attitude. He took up story writing in order to help himself by practical experiment in his chosen art of literary criticism and his volume on French poets and novelists 1878 is by no means the least valuable of his books. His short stories in the magazines were collected into a volume in 1875 with the title A Passionate Pilgrim and Other Stories. One or two of these as The Last of the Valery and The Madonna of the Future suggest Hawthorne a very unsympathetic study of whom James afterward contributed to the English Men of Letters series. But in the name story of the collection he was already in the line of his future development. This is the story of a middle aged invalid American who comes to England in search of health and finds too late in the mellow atmosphere of the mother country the repose and the congenial surroundings which he has all his life been longing for the pathos of his self-analysis and his confession of failure is subtly imagined the impressions which he and his far away English kinsfolk make on one another their mutual attraction and repulsion are described with that delicate perception of national differences which makes the humor and sometimes the tragedy of James's later books like The American Daisy Miller The Europeans and An International Episode His first novel was by Roderick Hudson 1876 not the most characteristic of his fictions but perhaps the most powerful in its grasp of elementary passion the analytic method and the critical attitude have their dangers in imaginative literature in proportion as this writer's faculty of minute observation and his realistic objectivity have increased upon him the uncomfortable coldness which is felt in his youthful work has become actually disagreeable and his art growing constantly finer and shoreer in matters of detail has seemed to dwell more and more in the region of mere manners and less in the higher realm of character and passion in most of his writings the heart somehow is left out we've seen that Irving from his knowledge of England and America and his long residence in both countries became the mediator between the two great branches of the Anglo-Saxon race this he did by the power of his sympathy with each Henry James has likewise interpreted the two nations to one another in a subtler but less genial fashion than Irving and not through sympathy but through contrast by bringing into relief the opposing ideals of life and society which have developed under different institutions in his novel The American 1877 he has shown the actual misery which may result from the clashing of opposed social systems in such clever sketches as Daisy Miller 1879 the pension borpas and bundle of letters he has exhibited types of the American girl the American businessman the aesthetic feebling from Boston and the Europeanized or would-be denationalized American campaigners in the old world and has set forth the ludicrous incongruities perplexities and misunderstandings which result from contradictory standards of conventional morality and behavior in the Europeans 1879 and an international episode 1878 he has reversed the process bringing old world standards to the test of American ideas by transferring his dramatist persona to Republican soil the last named of these illustrates how slender a plot realism requires for its purposes it is nothing more than the history of an English girl of good family who marries an American gentleman and undertakes to live in America but finds herself so uncomfortable in strange social conditions while contrary wise the heroine's sister is so taken with the freedom of these very conditions that she elopes with another American and goes west James is a keen observer of the physiognomy of cities as well as of men and his portraits of places 1884 is among the most delightful contributions to the literature of foreign travel Mr. Howell's writings are not without international touches in a foregone conclusion and the lady of the heuristic and others of his novels the contrasted points of view in American and European life are introduced and especially those variations in feeling, custom, dialect, etc which make the modern Englishman and the modern American such objects of curiosity to each other and which have been dwelt upon of late even unto satiety but in general he finds his subjects at home and if he does not know his own countrymen and countrywomen more intimately than Mr. James he will notice them better there is a warmer sentiment in his fictions too his men are better fellows and his women are more lovable Howell's was born in Ohio his early life was that of a western country editor in 1860 he published jointly with his friend Payet a book of verse poems of two friends in 1861 he was sent as consul to Venice and the literary results of his sojourn there appeared in his sketches in 1865 and Italian journeys 1867 in 1871 he became editor of the Atlantic Monthly and in the same year published his suburban sketches all of these early volumes showed a quick eye for the picturesque and unusual power of description and humor of the most delicate quality but as yet there was little approach to narrative their wedding journey was a revelation to the public of the interest that may lie an ordinary bridal trip across the state of New York when a close and sympathetic observation is brought to bear upon the characteristics of American life as it appears at railway stations and hotels on steamboats and in the streets of very common place towns a chance acquaintance 1873 was Howell's first novel though even yet the story was set against a background of travel pictures, a holiday trip on the St. Lawrence and the Saguenay falls of Montmorency etc. rather predominated over the narrative thus gradually and by a natural process complete characters and realistic novels such as a modern instance 1882 and Indian summer evolved themselves from truthful sketches of places and persons seen by the way the incompatibility existing between European and American views of life which makes the comedy or the tragedy of Henry James's international fictions is replaced in Howell's novels by the repulsion between differing social grades in the same country the adjustment of these subtle distinctions forms a part of the problem of life in all complicated societies thus in a chance acquaintance the heroine is a bright and pretty western girl who becomes engaged during a pleasure tour to an irreproachable but offensively priggish young gentleman from Boston and the engagement is broken by her in consequence of an unintended slight the betrayal on the hero's part of a shade of mortification when he and his betrothed are suddenly brought into the presence of some fashionable ladies belonging to his own Monde the little comedy out of the question deals with the same adjustment of social scales and in many of Howell's other novels such as Silas Lapham and the Lady of Aristic one of the main motives may be described to be the contact of the man who eats with his fork with the man who eats with his knife and the shock thereby ensuing in Indian summer the complications arise from the difference in age between the hero and heroine and not from a difference in station or social antecedents in all of these fictions the misunderstandings come from an incompatibility of manner rather than of character and if anything were to be objected to the probability of the story it is that the climax hinges on delicacies and subtleties which in real life when there is an opportunity for explanations are readily brushed aside but in a modern instance Howell's touch the deeper springs of action in this his strongest work the catastrophe is brought about as in George Elliott's great novels by the reaction of characters upon one another and the story is realistic in a higher sense than any mere study of manners can be his nearest approach to romance is in the undiscovered country 1880 which deals with the spiritualists and the shakers and in its study of problems that hover on the borders of supernatural in its out of the way personages and adventures and in a certain ideal poetic flavor about the whole book has a strong resemblance to Hawthorne especially to Hawthorne in the Blithe Dale romance where he comes closer to common ground with other romances it is interesting to compare undiscovered country with Henry James's Bostonians the latest and one of the cleverest of his fictions which is likewise a study of the clairvoyance, mediums women's rights advocates of cranks reformers and patrons of causes for whom Boston has long been notorious a most unlovely race of people they become under the cold scrutiny of Mr. James's cosmopolitan eyes which see more clearly the charlatanism narrow mindedness mistaken fanaticism morbid self-consciousness disagreeable nervous intensity and vulgar or ridiculous outside peculiarities of the humanitarians than the nobility and moral enthusiasm which underlie the surface Howells is almost the only successful American dramatist and this is in the field of parlor comedy his little farces the elevator, the register the parlor car, etc have a lightness and grace with an exquisitely absurd situation which remind us more of the comédie proverbe of Alfred de Musée or the many agreeable dialogues and monologues of the French domestic stage than of any work of English or American hands his softly ironical yet affectionate treatment of feminine ways is especially admirable in his numerous types of sweetly illogical, inconsistent and inconsequent womanhood he is perpetuated with a nicer art than Dickens what Thackeray calls that great discovery, Mrs. Nickelby End of Part 2 Chapter 7 Recording by Kalinda in Lüneborg, Germany on March 20th, 2009 Part 2 Chapter 8 of a brief history of English and American literature this LibriVox recording is in the public domain Recording by Kalinda a brief history of English and American literature by Henry A. Beers Part 2 Chapter 8 Theological and Religious Literature in America by John Fletcher Hearst The important field of theology and religion in America has yielded many and rich additions to the storehouse of letters The Bay Psalm Book published in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1640 was the first book printed in the English colonies in America its leading authors were Richard Mather, 1596-1669 of Dorchester father of increase and grandfather of the still more famous Cotton Mather Thomas Weld and John Elliott both of Roxbury the book was a few years later revised by Henry Dunster for the first 27 editions While it was both printed and used in England and Scotland by dissenting churches it was a constant companion in private and public worship in the Calvinistic churches of the colonies The early colonial writers on theology included Charles Chauncey 1589-1672 the second president of Harvard College who wrote a treatise on justification Samuel Willard 1640-1707 whose complete body of divinity was the first folio publication in America Solomon Studdard 1643-1729 whose most celebrated work was The Doctrine of Instituted Churches in which he advocated the converting power of the Lord Supper Charles Chauncey 1705-1787 a great grandson of President Chauncey celebrated as a stickler for great plainness in writing and speech and one of the founders of universalism in New England whose seasonable thoughts was in opposition to the preaching of Whitefield and Aaron Burr 1716-1757 father of the political opponent and slayer of Alexander Hamilton and author of the supreme deity of our Lord Jesus Christ James Blair 1656-1743 of Virginia the virtual founder and first president of William & Mary College in the South, containing 117 sermons the two tenants Gilbert 1703-1764 and William 1705-1777 Samuel Finley 1717-1764 and Samuel Davies 1723-1761 were pulpit orators whose sermons still hold high rank in the homiletic world others of the colonial period distinguished for their ability are John Davenport 1597-1670 of New Haven author of the saint's anchor hold Edward Johnson died 1682 of Woburn author of the wonder-working providence of Zion's savior in New England Jonathan Dickinson 1688-1747 the first president of the College of New Jersey Princeton University who published familiar letters upon important subjects in religion Samuel Johnson 1696-1777 a distinguished advocate of Episcopacy in Connecticut Thomas Clap 1703-1767 president of Yale College who was the author of the religious condition of colleges Samuel Mather 1706-1785 a son of Cotton Mather among whose works was an attempt to show that America was known to the ancients and Thomas Chalkley 1675-1749 and John Wolmans 1720-1772 both belonging to the friends and whose journals are admirable specimens of the Quaker spirit and simplicity some of the leading writers on theology whose activity was greatest about the time of the American Revolution are worthy of study they are John Witherspoon 1722-1794 who while he is better known as the sixth president of Episcopacy and a political writer of the Revolution was also the author of Ecclesiastical Characteristics a satirical work aimed at the moderate party of the Church of Scotland and written before he left that country for America Charles Thompson 1729-1824 who was for 15 years the secretary of the Continental Congress and published a translation of the Bible Elias Boudinot 1740-1821 the president of the American Bible Society and a leading philanthropist of his time who wrote The Age of Revelation a reply to Payne's Age of Reason Nathan Strong 1748-1816 the editor of the Connecticut Evangelical magazine and pastor of First Church Hartford Isaac Bacchus 1724-1806 the author of the well-known history of New England with particular reference to the Baptists Ezra Stiles 1727-1795 president of Yale College who published many discourses and wrote an Ecclesiastical History of New England which was not completed and never published William White 1748-1836 Bishop of Pennsylvania for 50 years who wrote several works on Episcopacy one of which was Memoir of the Episcopal Church in the United States and William Lynn 1752-1808 who published sermons on the leading personages of Scripture history belonging also to the revolutionary period these should be noted Mather Biles 1706-1788 a wit and punster of loyalist leanings some of whose sermons have been many times printed and who was a kinsman of the Mathers Jonathan May Hugh 1720-1766 whose sermon on the repeal of the Stamp Act was the most famous of his stirring addresses on the political issues already prominent at the time of his death William Smith 1727-1803 provost of the University of Pennsylvania who was, not to speak of his other works the author of several meritorious sermons Samuel Seabury 1729-1796 the first Protestant Episcopal Bishop and author of two volumes of sermons and Jacob Duchet 1739-1798 rector of the Episcopal Church and author of two volumes of sermons and Jacob Duchet 1739-1798 rector of the Episcopal Church and author of two volumes of sermons and Jacob Duchet 1739-1798 rector of Christ Church Philadelphia who abandoned the American cause but whose sermons were highly prized a quartet of those who gained distinction as writers on doctrine are Joseph Bellamy 1719-1790 an influential divine of the Edwardian school and author of the True Religion delineated Samuel Hopkins 1721-1803 the advocate of disinterested benevolence the cardinal principle of theology and author of the system of doctrines contained in divine revelation Jonathan Edwards the Younger 1745-1801 president of Union College and author of several discourses the most celebrated of which are the three on the necessity of atonement and its consistency with free grace in forgiveness these sermons are the basis of what has since been named the Edwardian theory and Elhanan Winchester 1751-1797 the universalist preacher one of whose chief works was the universal restoration in the earlier group of theological authorship of the present century or the national period taking conspicuous place as doctrinal writers are Nathaniel Emmons 1745-1840 one of the foremost of the new school of Calvinistic theology whose works on the important discussion lasting through half a century are marked by a peculiar force and point Samuel Stanhope Smith 1750-1819 president of the college of New Jersey and author of evidences of the Christian religion his successor in office Ashbel Green 1762-1848 whose chief literary labor was bestowed on the Christian advocate a religious monthly which he edited for 12 years and who wrote lectures on the shorter catechism Henry Ware 1764-1845 the acknowledged head of the Unitarians prior to the experience of Channing professor of divinity in Harvard and author of the letters to Trinitarians and Calvinists Leonard Woods 1774-1854 professor in Andover for 38 years author of several able books on the Unitarian controversy and Wilbur Fisk 1792-1839 the distinguished preacher and educator and author of the Calvinistic controversy other theological lights of the early years of the republic are also John Mitchell Mason 1770-1829 provost of Columbia College later president of Dickinson College a prime mover in the founding of Union Theological Seminary and author of many sermons of a high order Edward Payson 1783-1827 whose sermons are noted for the same ardent spirituality and beauty that marked his life as a pastorate at Portland, Maine John Summerfield 1798-1825 a volume of whose strangely eloquent sermons were published after his early death Ebenezer Porter 1772-1834 professor in Andover whose lectures on revivals of religion are still worthy of consultation Ella Fallot Knott 1773-1866 president of Union College for 62 years whose lectures on temperance are accounted among the best literature on that great reform John Henry Hobart 1775-1830 Bishop of the Diocese of New York who was the author of Festivals and Fasts and one of the founders of the General Theological Seminary in New York Nathan Bangs 1778-1862 a leading Methodist divine who wrote a history of the Methodist Episcopal Church and Errors of Hoskinsianism and Leonard Withington 1789-1885 author of Solomon's song translated and explained a valuable exegetical work in a second group of leading writers on religion coming nearer the middle of the 19th century we find as doctrinal authors Archibald Alexander 1772-1851 author of Evidences of Christianity Hosea Balu 1771-1852 the Universalist Preacher and author of a new book The Universalist Preacher and author of an examination of the Doctrine of Future Retribution Nathaniel W. Taylor 1786-1859 the author of Lectures on the Moral Government of God in which there is a marked divergence from the strict school of Calvinistic theologians Gardener Spring 1785-1873 a tower of strength in the pulpit of New York for over 50 years and author of The Bible Knot of Man Alexander Campbell 1788-1865 whose public debates contain the record of his distinguished career as a controversialist and mark the formation of the religious society called Disciples of Christ Robert J. Breckenridge 1800-1871 whose work on the knowledge of God objectively and subjectively considered gave him great distinction George W. Bethune 1805-1862 who besides several hymns wrote Lectures on the Heidelberg Catechism and James H. Thornwell 1811-1862 of the Southern Presbyterians who left an able systematic theology Those whose works were of a more practical nature are Samuel Miller 1769-1850 whose most telling book was Letters on Clerical Habits and Manors Lyman Beecher 1775-1863 the celebrated father of his more celebrated son and author of Sermons on Temperance Thomas H. Skinner 1791-1871 Professor in Andover and later in Union Theological Seminary who wrote Aids to Preaching and Hearing and translated and edited Vinay's Homiletics and Pastoral Theology Charles G. Finney 1792-1875 of Oberlin whose lectures on revivals embody the principles on which he himself conducted his celebrated evangelistic labors Francis Weyland 1796-1865 the Baptist Divine and author of a textbook on Moral Science who also wrote The Moral Dignity of the Missionary Enterprise Ichabod S. Spencer 1798-1854 whose pastor's sketches have a perennial interest Theodore Dwight Wolsey 1801-1889 and his other books on the Classics and Law published The Religion of the Present and the Future Bella Bates Edwards 1802-1852 of Andover whose chief work was that bestowed upon the quarterly observer, later the Biblical Repository and still later as editor of Bibliotheca Sacra James Waddle Alexander 1804-1859 author of Consolation or Discourses to the Suffering Children of God George B. Cheever 1807-1890 who wrote several popular books on temperance one being Deacon Giles's Distillery A group of noted writers whose books have special bearing on the Bible are Moses Stewart 1780-1852 the Distinguished Hebrist and author of several commentaries and of a Hebrew grammar whose scholarship was one of the chief attractions at Andover Samuel H. Turner 1790-1861 the Distinguished Commentator on Romans, Hebrews, Ephesians and Galatians Edward Robinson 1794-1863 whose Biblical Researches and New Testament lexicon mark him as one of the foremost scholars of the century George Bush 1796-1860 known chiefly as the author of commentaries on the early parts of the Old Testament Albert Barnes 1798-1870 his notes on the scriptures still have a large place among the more popular works of exegesis Stephen Olin 1797-1851 and John Price Durbin 1800-1876 both distinguished as educators and pulpit orators of the Methodist Episcopal Church who each wrote on travels in Palestine and adjoining countries William M. Thompson 1806-1894 the Missionary and Author of the Land and the Book a work of perpetual value Joseph Addison Alexander 1809-1860 the famous philologist and author of valuable commentaries and a work on New Testament literature and George Burgess 1809-1866 who wrote the Book of Psalms in English first those who employed their pens in the field of history are William Mead 1789-1862 author of Old Churches, Ministers and Families of Virginia George Junkin 1790-1868 who wrote The Vindication which gives an account of the trial of Albert Barnes from the old school point of view William B. Sprague 1795-1876 whose Annals of the American Pulpit form a lasting monument to his literary ability Robert Baird 1798-1863 author of A View of a Religion in America Francis L. Hawks 1798-1866 who published The History of the Protestant Episcopal Church in Maryland and Virginia Morris J. Raffhaal 1798-1868 a prolific Jewish writer whose post biblical history of the Jews is a valuable book Thomas C. Appem 1799-1871 professor in Bowdoin College and author of Mental Philosophy who also wrote The Life and Religious Experience of Madame Guillaume William H. Furness 1802-1896 long the leader of Unitarians in Philadelphia from whose imaginative pen came a peculiar book A History of Jesus J. Daniel Rapp born 1803 who wrote A History of the Religious Denominations in the United States and Abel Stevens 1815-1897 author of The History of Methodism and also of A History of the Methodist Episcopal Church John Nettleton 1784-1844 best known as an evangelist published a popular collection of village hymns Henry U. Onderdonk 1789-1858 and John Henry Hopkins 1792-1868 each wrote on the Episcopacy Samuel Hanson Cox 1793-1880 a vigorous and original preacher of the New School Presbyterians was the author of Interviews Memorable and Useful Henry B. Baskham 1796-1850 whose sermons and lectures were a vigorous thought but florid style was very popular for many years Nicholas Murray 1802-1861 under the nom de plume of Kierwan wrote the celebrated letters to Archbishop Hughes on the Catholic question and Edward Thompson 1810-1870 Bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church was author of Moral and Religious Essays and Other Works Among the American singers of sacred lyrics are Samuel Davies 1724-1761 Timothy Dwight 1752-1817 Mrs. Phoebe H. Brown 1783-1861 Thomas Hastings 1784-1872 John Pierpont 1785-1866 Mrs. Lydia H. Sigourney 1791-1865 William B. Tappen 1794-1849 William A. Mullenberg 1796-1877 George W. Doan 1799-1859 Ray Palmer 1808-1887 Samuel F. Smith 1808-1895 Edmund H. Sears 1810-1876 William Hunter 1811-1877 George Duffield 1818-1888 Arthur Cleveland Cox 1818-1896 Samuel Longfellow 1819-1892 and Alice 1820-1871 and Phoebe Carey 1824-1871 From the large number of writers of the latter half of this century whose productions have been added to the treasures of thought for coming generations and are worthy of generous attention we name Charles Hodge 1797-1878 known best by his systematic theology and his son Archibald Alexander Hodge 1823-1886 author of Outlines of Theology Charles P. McIlvane 1798-1873 whose evidences of Christianity are widely known and read from 1880-1882 to 1887 who gave the world the law of love and love as a law Edwards A. Park born 1808 whose leading work was on the atonement Albert Taylor Bledsoe 1809-1877 whose theodicy was his chief work James McCosh 1811-1894 whose later years were given to America and whose Christianity and positivism and religious aspects of evolution Davis W. Clark 1812-1871 author of Man All Immortal John Miley 1813-1896 who was the author of a clear and able systematic theology of the Armenian type Thomas O. Summers 1812-1882 who was a prolific author and whose systematic theology has been published since his death and Lorenzo D. Maccabee 1815-1897 who wrote on the foreknowledge of God those who have devoted their talent to the exposition of the scriptures are Thomas J. Conant 1802-1891 a biblical scholar and author of historical books of the Old Testament Daniel D. Whedon 1808-1885 who wrote Freedom of the Will and was the author of a valuable commentary on the New Testament Horatio B. Hackett 1808-1875 whose exegetical works on the Acts Mellon and Philippians have great merit Taylor Lewis 1809-1877 the Nestor of Classic Linguistics whose six days of creation and the divine human in the scriptures are among his best books Melanchthon W. Jacobus 1816-1876 whose commentaries on the Gospels Acts and Genesis unite critical ability and popular style Ezra Abbott 1818-1884 whose work on the authorship of the Fourth Gospel Howard Crosby 1826-1891 the vigorous preacher and author of The Seven Churches of Asia William M. Taylor 1829-1895 whose works include excellent studies on several prominent Bible characters Moses David Daniel and Joseph Henry Martin Harmon 1822-1897 the author of An Introduction to the Study of the Holy Scriptures and Henry B. Ridgoway 1830-1895 who wrote The Lord's Land a work based on his personal observations during an Oriental tour Those who have treated historical themes include Charles Elliot 1792-1869 whose ablest work was the delineation of Roman Catholicism Francis P. Kenrick 1797-1863 who besides being the author of a version of the scriptures with commentary also wrote a work on the supremacy of a pope Matthew Simpson 1810-1884 the eloquent bishop who wrote A Cyclopedia of Methodism and A Hundred Years of Methodism James Freeman Clark 1810-1888 author of The Ten Great Religions of the World Henry B. Smith 1815-1877 whose history of the Church of Christ in chronological tables is much admired for its conciseness, accuracy and thoroughness William H. Odenheimer 1817-1879 author of The Origin and Compilation of the Prayer Book Philip Schaff 1819-1893 the author of A Learned History of the Christian Church and Creeds of Christendom and editor of the English translation of Lang's commentary William G. T. Shed 1820-1894 who besides other works wrote A History of Christian Doctrine Charles Forrest Deems 1820-1893 who wrote A Work on the Life of Christ Henry Martin Dexter 1821-1890 author of The Congregationalism of the Last 300 Years George R. Crooks 1822-1897 who besides other labors in the fields of classics wrote The Life of Bishop Matthew Simpson Charles Porterfield Krauth 1823-1883 author of The Conservative Reformation and Its Theology Holland N. MacTair 1824-1890 and John Gilmary Shea 1824-1892 who wrote many books on early American history connected with the Indians one being A History of the French and Spanish Missions among the Indian Tribes of the United States John MacLintock 1814-1870 the scholarly, methodist, divine and first president of Drew Theological Seminary left a monument to his name in the great Cyclopean Church of Biblical, Theological and Ecclesiastical Literature projected by him and his co-laborer James Strong 1822-1894 who completed the Herculane task and added yet other works notably his exhaustive concordance of the Bible Daniel Currie 1809-1887 the keen editor and debater has a gathered chief of his various addresses in platform papers Austin Phelps 1819-1820 wrote The Still Hour and The Theory of Preaching which are fine specimens of his thoughtful work and Phillips Brooks 1835-1893 the renowned preacher left sermons and addresses which still breathed the earnest and catholic spirit of their cultured author End of Part 2 Chapter 8 Recording by Kalinda in Lüneburg, Germany on March 14, 2009 End of A Brief History of English and American Literature by Henry A. Beers