 Part 2 Chapter 3 of A Brief History of English and American Literature. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Colinda. A Brief History of English and American Literature by Henry A. Beers. Part 2 Chapter 3. 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 Nickerbocker'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 today in this year, 1887. Still, even within the limits of a single lifetime, 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 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 Northwest 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 7,000 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 immigration 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 acts 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 Alleghenies or followed the valley of the Mohawk. S. G. Goodrich, known in letters as Peter Parley in his recollections of a lifetime of 1856, describes the part of the movement which he had witnessed as a boy in Fairfield County, Connecticut. I remember very well the tide of immigration 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, grid irons, feather beds, crockery, and the family Bible, wats, psalms, and hymns, and Webster's spelling book, the lairs and pennants 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 agieu, which was then certain to attack the new settlers. It was, I think, in 1818 that I published a small tract entitled Tether Side of Aldo, 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 Alleghenies between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh were then rude, steep, and dangerous, and some of the more precipitous slopes were consequently strewn with the carcasses of wagons, carts, horses, oxen, which had made shipwreck in their perilous descents. But in spite of the hardships of the settlers' life, the spirit of that time, as reflected in its writings, was a hopeful and 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 were moved to the Western Reserve went there to better themselves, 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 frontiersmen 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, 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 18th 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 along the banks of the Great Lakes. But there still remained backwoods in New York and Pennsylvania, though the cities of New York and Philadelphia had each a population of more than 100,000 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 waterway, the Indian tribes, numbering now about 130,000 souls, were moving 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 rays 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 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 contrast to be seen in each mushroom town where civilization was encroaching on the raw edge of 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 today, if at all, not for its own sake, but for the light that it throws on the history of the national development, in such books as Paulding's Story of Westward Ho and his poem The Back Woodsman, 1818, or as Timothy Flint's Recollections, 1826, and his Geography and History of the Mississippi Valley, 1827. It was not an age of Greek 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 eaglism, 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 a pronunciamento of this aggressive democracy, and though the Federalists returned to power for a single term under John Quincy Adams, 1825 to 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 back woodsman who entered the White House, was born 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 to 1859, was the first American author whose books, as books, obtained recognition abroad, whose name was thought worthy of mention besides the names of English contemporary authors like Byron, Scott, and Coleridge. He was also the first American writer whose writings are still read for their own sake. We read Mathers Magnalia and Franklin's autobiography and Trumbull's McFingle, if we read them at all, as history and to learn about the times or the men. But we read the sketchbook and Knickerbocker's History of New York and the Conquest of Grenada for themselves and for the pleasure that they give us 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 Ducking'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 the 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 to 1815 had left between England and America. He was 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 yellow 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 to 6 occupied nearly two years. From 1815 to 1832 he was abroad continuously and his domicile, as the lawyers say, during these 17 years was really in England though a portion of his time was spent upon the continent for excessive 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 to 1832. From 1842 to 1846 he was again in Spain as American minister in 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 Chronicle, where, like Franklin's busy body, close imitations of the spectator. To the same family belonged his Selma Gundy papers, 1807, a series of town satires on New York society written in conjunction with his brother William and with James K. Paulding. The little tales, essays and sketches which composed the sketchbook were written in England and published in America in periodical numbers in 1819 to 1820. 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 or 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. Colonel 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 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 sketchbook and in later additions to the same realm of fiction such as Dolph Haliger in Bracebridge Hall The Money Diggers, Wulford Weber and Kid 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 Wulford'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 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 Göhler 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 the Centres. Its mock heroic intention is as transparent as in Fielding's parodies of Homer which it somewhat resembles, particularly in the delightfully absurd description of the mustering of the clans under Peter Stufizen 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, new in humor, original and vital. Walter Scott said that it reminded him closely of Swift and had his touches resembling Stern. 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 need 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 Communipah. 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 where his 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 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 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 Scots, 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 sketchbook 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 Boer's Head Tavern or sits beside him on the box of the old English stagecoach or shares with him the yuletide cheer at the ancient English country house, their interest is somewhat faded. The pathos of the broken heart and the pride of the village, the mild satire of the art of bookmaking, the rather obvious reflections in Westminster Abbey are not exactly to the taste of this generation. They are 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 pawl 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, which breeds 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 it is beautifully ordered by Providence, that woman, who is the mere dependent in 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 these two main 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 eloquent, 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 bellatrist-ish 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. Muhammad 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. 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 DCL 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's 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 Knickerbocker magazine. One of these was James K. Paulding, who was a writer of his own marriage and his partner in the Salma Gundy papers. Paulding became Secretary of the Navy under Van Buren and lived down to the year 1860. He was a 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 of life. 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 Culpert Faye, published in 1819, was the best poem that had yet appeared in America if we accept Brian's Thanatopsis, which was three years the elder. The Culpert Faye was a fairy story in which, following Irving's story, he wrote 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 whisked and the owl is still, the bat in the shelvy covered on the lonely hill but the crickets chirp and the answer shrill of the gauze-winged catedid, and the plant of the whaling whipper-will. Who moans unseen and ceaseless sings ever a note of whale and woe till morning spreads her rosy wings and earth and sky in her glances glow. Here we have at least the whipper-will, an American bird, and not the conventional lark or nightingale, although the elves of the old world seemed scarcely at home on the banks of the Hudson. Drake's memory was kept fresh not only by his own poetry but by the beautiful elegy written by his friend Fitzgreen Halleck, the first stanza of which is universally known. Green be the turf above the friend of my better days, none knew thee but to love thee, nor named thee but to praise. Halleck was born in Guilford, Connecticut, with or 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 Croker 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 Alex Fine-Ode, Marco Bozaris, though declaimed until it has become Hackneyed, gives him a sure title to a remembrance, and as Alnwick Castle, a monody, half serious and half playful, on the contrast between feudal associations in modern life, has much of that pensive lightness which characterizes the great's best veo dissociatie. A friend of Drake and Halleck was James Fenimore Cooper, 1789 to 1851, the first American novelist of distinction and, if a popularity which has endured for nearly three quarters of a century is any tests, 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 edition in 1833, in 34 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 Ysafan. 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 30 novels, the greater part of which are little better and tedious trash at that. This is especially true of his tendence 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 casualties of American life. Nearly all of 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 of fiction. His childhood was passed on the borders of Otsigo 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. In 1811, just before the outbreak of the war with England, so 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 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, New York, where the author was then residing. His first work, The Birch, was one of the most skillfully drawn figures on his canvas. In 1823 he published The Pioneers, a work somewhat overlaid with the 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 Leather Stocking 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 Leather Stocking, was Cooper's one great creation in the spirit of character, his most original addition to the literature of the world in the way of a new human type. This backwards 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 were the various types of Indian character. In Chinga Chuk, Unkas, Hisst, 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 us, the solitary trapper, the reckless young frontiersmen, the officers and men of outpost garrisons. Whether Cooper's Indian was the real being or an idealized and rather melodramatic 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 leather-stocking novels and especially national 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. Clark 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 ending. There are good yarns for the foxel and the campfire 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 well-letra 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 Theatre and opera entitled Clarie, the libretto of which include 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 heir 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 accomplishment by birth, a gentleman of scholarly tastes and accomplishments who wrote a great deal on Italian literature and sat for several times in Congress as representative of the State of Georgia was the author of the favorite song My Life is Like the Summer Rose. Another Southerner and a member of a distinguished Southern family was Edward Cote Pinckney who served nine years in the Navy and died in 1828 at the age of 26, having published in 1825 a small volume of lyrical poems which had a fire and grace uncommon at the 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 to 29 was a man of culture and literary tastes. He published his lectures on rhetoric delivered during his tenure of the Boylston Professorship at Harvard in 1806 to 1809. 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' contentment so the very popular ballad of Grimes written about 1818 by Albert Gorton Greene an undergraduate of Brown University in Rhode Island is in some respects an anticipation of Holmes' quaintly pathetic last leaf. The political literature and public oratory of the United States during this period, although not absolutely of less importance than that which proceeded and followed the Declaration of Independence in the adoption of the Constitution demands less relative attention in a history of literature than the rest of other departments have thought. The age was a political one but no longer exclusively political. The debates of the time centered about the question of states' 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 a while by the Missouri Compromise of 1820 only to break more fiercely in the debates of the Wilmot Proviso Meanwhile, the abolition movement had been transferred to the press and the platform. Garrison started his liberator in 1830 and the Anti-Slavery 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 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 as 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 holes. 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 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 Hain on Mr. Foots' 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 7th, 1850 on the Constitution and the Union which gave so much offense to the extreme anti-slavery 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 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 descend into the fields of the Civil War armies of men animated with a stern resolution to fight till the last drop of blood was shed rather than allow the Union to be dissolved. The figure of this great senator is one of the most imposing in American annals. The masculine form of his personality impressed itself upon man of a very different stamp, upon the unworldly citizen and upon the captious Carlisle 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 swarvy and his black, deep-set eyes and her shaggy brows glowed with a smouldering fire. He was rather silent in society. His delivering 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 today 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 a far 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 is dotted over the surface of the whole globe with her possessions and military posts whose mourning drumbeat, following the sun and keeping company with the hours circles the earth with one continuous and unbroken strain of the martial heirs 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 everything 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 Chote, an eloquent pleader and like Webster a United States senator from Massachusetts. Some of his speeches though excessively rhetorical have under every 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 Hartford 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 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 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, slendered as was their performance in point of quantity, were better poets than the Boston Bards Charles Sprague whose Shakespeare Ode delivered at the Boston Theatre 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 ever done choked but his triumphs were won in the wider field of national politics. There was however a movement at the 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 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, Sosinianism 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 Edward's doctrine of necessity he emphasized the freedom of the will. He maintained that the Calvinistic dogmas of original sin, far ordination, 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 of 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 anti-slavery party. It expressed itself in his elaborate arraignment of Napoleon in the Unitarian organ, the Christian examiner for 1827 to 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 the text Milton's recently discovered treatise on Christian doctrine the tendency of which was anti-trinitarian but it began with a general defensive 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 reassert the dignity and usefulness of the beautiful arts was 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 based 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. End of Part 2 Chapter 3 Recording by Colinda in Lüneburg, Germany on March 8th, 2009 Part 2 Chapter 4 of a brief history of English and American Literature This LibriVox recording is in the public domain Recording by Colinda A brief history of English and American Literature by Henry A. Beers Part 2 Chapter 4 The Conquered Writers 1837 to 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 anti-slavery agitation and the enthusiasm 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 transcendency. It culminated about 1840 to 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 to 1882 was the prophet of the sect and conquered 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 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 descent 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, hygiene. New sects were formed like the Swedenborgans, 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 beasts in the apocalypse and still others in the reorganization of society and of the family on a different basis. New systems of education were tried suggested by the writings of the Swiss reformer Pestilotsi and others. The pseudosciences of mesmerism and of phrenology as taught by Gaul and Sperzheim 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 Saint Simon were translated and societies were established where cooperation and a community of goods should take the place of selfish competition. About the year 1840 there were some 30 of these phalansteries in America many of which had their organs in the shape of a weekly or monthly journals that advocated the principle of association. The best known of these was probably the Harbinger the mouthpiece of the famous Brook Farm community which was founded at West Roxbury, Massachusetts in 1841 and lasted until 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 Hawthorne and others not unknown to fame. The Harbinger which ran from 1845 to 1849 two years after the breakup 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 the younger men like G. W. Curtis and T. W. Higginson. A reader of today 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 fall in 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 Blythe Dale 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 notebooks wherein he speaks with a certain resentment of Miss Fuller's transcendental heifer which hooked the other cows and was evidently to Hawthorne's mind not unsymbolic in this respect of Miss Fuller herself. It was the day of seers and orfic 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 to think of our later terminology became a familiar one. He abounded at non-resistance conventions and meetings of universal peace societies and of women'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 in promptu 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 everything 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 have also been precipitated some crystals of poetry translucent, symmetrical, enduring. The immediate practical outcome was disappointing and the external history of the agitation was a record of failed experiments, spurious sciences, utopian philosophies, and sects founded only to dwindle away or be reabsorbed into some form of 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 characterized 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 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 in Theodore Parker, there was a natural and logical unfolding. Not logical in the sense that Channing adopted 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 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 people, 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 Massachusetts. They had a few churches in New York and in the largest 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 Stewart of Andover and Lyman Beecher of Connecticut. In the neighboring state of Connecticut, for example, there was until lately, for a period of several years, no distinctly Unitarian congregation worshipping 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 contrary-wise, 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 of 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, There is not an intelligible error but a mere absurdity to maintain 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 a large congregation or audience which assembled in the music hall to hear his sermons was stigmatized as a boisterous assembly, which came to hear Parker preach ear-religion. It has been said 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 Carlisle, 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 Carlisle'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 Estwight, 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 from the use of that term by Emmanuel 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. 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 experience as 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 without lying 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. We are in direct communication with the over soul, the infinite spirit. The soul in man is the background of our being and 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 into our mind. It is an ebb of the individual rivulet before the flowing surges of the sea of life. In moods of exultation and especially in the presence of nature this contact of the individual soul with the Absolute is felt. All mean egotsism 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, 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. Emerson's point of view, the 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 Man, 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 the American thought. It was because Emerson was a poet that he is R. Emerson and yet it would be impossible to disentangle his peculiar philosophical ideas from the body of his writings and to leave the latter to stand upon their own merits as literature merely. He is the poet of certain high abstractions and his religion is central to all his work accepting 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 Carlisle at Craig and Putoch and Landor at Florence. On his return he retired to his birthplace the village of Concord, Massachusetts and settled down among his books in 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 the past. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should we not have a poetry 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 form or parallel in our literary annals a scene to be always treasured in the memory of its picturesqueness and its inspiration. What crowded and breathless aisles what windows clustering with eager heads what grim silence of forgone descent. To conquer came many kindred spirits drawn by Emerson's magnetic attraction. Thither came from Connecticut Amos Bronson Elcott 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 who lived in unworldly simplicity the life of the soul. Elcott had taught school at Cheshire Connecticut 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 broke up his school. Elcott 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 orific sayings to the dial which were harder for the exoteric to understand than even Emerson's Brahma or the Oversoul. There 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, anti-slavery 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 Metzini having charge of one of the hospitals during the siege of the city by the French. In 1847 she married an impecunious Italian nobleman, the Marquis Ossolli. 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 Clark, T. W. Higginson and others who knew her as a personal influence. Her strenuous and rather overbearing individuality made an impression not altogether agreeable on 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 offence to her admirers. Such a determination to eat this huge universe was Carlisle'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 Mans 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 if he had come earlier. He appreciated the deep and subtle quality of Emerson's imagination but his own shy genius always jealously guarded its independence and resented two 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 afficitation 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 transcendentalist 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 Clark, 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 those contributions of Emerson and Thoreau. But even as a whole it is so unique a waymark in the history of our literature that all its four volumes, copies of which had become scarce, have been recently edited 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 theme of poems and 1865 May Day 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, Loewel, first cut the cable that bound us to English thought and gave us a chance at the dangers and the future. 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 Hemons of America, a well-worn critical tradition has coupled Emerson with Carlisle. That his mind received a nudge from Carlisle's early essays and from Sartor Rezartos is beyond a doubt. They were lifelong friends and a counterpart of Carlisle's hero worship. But in temper and style the two writers were widely different. Carlisle's pessimism and 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 lifetime The Fortune of the Republic contrasts strangely in its hopefulness with the desperation of Carlisle's later utterances. Even in presence of the doubt as to man's personal mentality, 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 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 and as the shadow of good. Hawthorne's interest in the problem of sin finds little place in Emerson's philosophy. Passion comes not nigh him, and Faust disturbs with its disagreeableness. Pessimism is to him the only skepticism. The greatest literature is that which is the most broadly human, or in other words that which will square best with all philosophies. But Emerson's 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 bad of human life. But idealism makes experience shadowy and subordinates action and contemplation. To it the cities of men with their frivolous populations are but sailing foam bells along thoughts causing stream. Shakespeare 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 philosophers to reduce variety to unity, it is the poet's task to detect the manifold under uniformity. In the great creative poets in Shakespeare 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 men 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 plough man, the plough 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 Brahman sings. 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 and philosophers like Schelling who give poetic expression to a system of thought. He belongs to the class of minds of which Sir Thomas Brown is the best English example. He set a high value upon Brown to whose style his own, though far away. Brown'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 and technique. Most of his pieces are more 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 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 and obtruded simplicity among his own poems are many that leave nothing to be desired in point of wording in a 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 everyone'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 Voluntary's so nigh is grandeur to our dust so near is God to man when duty whispers low thou must and 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 build it 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 the manufacturer 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 Merrimack Rivers appeared in 1849. From time to time he went farther afield and his journeys were reported in Cape Cod, the main 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 Lesson Your Denominator. He wished to reduce existence to its 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 seemed like an Anglo-Saxon reversion to the type of the red Indian. The most distinctive note in Thoreau is his inhumanity. He had a passion for the wild and seems like an Anglo-Saxon reversion to the type of the red 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 mountains for its secret, and saw beneath dim aisles and odorous beds the slight linea hang its twin-born heads. He tried to interpret the thought of Qatadan 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 literature. None of the feathered race has yet to realize 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 the evening in proportion as I advanced further into the darkness and solitude of the forest. Still less have I seen such strong and wild tints on any poet's string. 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 transcendentalist 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 must get acquit, repeats the music of the rain. But sweeter rivers pulsing flit through thee as though through conquered plain. Thou in thy narrow banks art pent the stream I love unbounded goes, through flood and sea infirmament, through light, through life it forward flows. 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 at Stoney shore and the breeze that passes o'er. Suddenly old time winked at me, oh 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 two microscopically the universal tablet. He was a close observer and accurate reporter of the ways of birds and plants and the minute aspects of life. He has had many followers who have produced much pleasant literature on outdoor 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 in the eye of a botanist, but his imagination did not stop short with the fact. The sound of a tree falling in the main 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 Isle and get as good a freezing there as anywhere on the northwest coast. He said that most of the phenomena described in Kane's voyage could be observed in Concord. The literature of transcendentalism was like the light of the stars in a winter night, heen and cold and high. It had the pale cast of thought and was almost too spiritual and remote to hit the sense of 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 blossom which compared with the warm, robust growths of English soil even as the delicate wind flower of the northern spring compares with the cow slips and daisies of old England. In 1842 Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1804 to 1864, the greatest American romance 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 paradisiacal years. A picture of this protracted honeymoon in this sequestered life as tranquil as the slow stream on whose bank 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 notebooks 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 Seaport town of Salem and partly at his grandfather's farm on Sebego 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 at a time Hawthorne kept to 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 seaside. Old Salem had much that was picturesque in its associations. It had been the scene of the witch trials in the 17th century and it abounded in ancient mansions, the homes of retired whalers and Indian 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 as in the pension family of Hawthorne's romance. In the preface to the marble fawn 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 anything but a commonplace prosperity in broad and simple daylight. And yet it may be doubted whether any environment could have been found more fitted to his peculiar than that 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 Nickerbocker magazine. Some of these attracted the attention of the judicious, but they were anonymous and signed by various nom-de-plume and their author was at this time in 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 vision 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 romance or teak and it is interesting to find confirmation of the stictome in passages of the American notebooks in which Hawthorne speaks of laboring over teak with a German dictionary. The Twice-Told Tales are the work of a recluse who makes guesses at life to 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 Brandt 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 wrongdoer makes for himself in the inevitable sequences of his crime. Hawthorne was strongly drawn towards 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 fawn, 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 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 man's, 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 that this office had brought him into contact in a way that gave some offence 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 more satiric edge to it. The book Last Named was written at Salem and published in 1850, just before its author's removal to Lennox, now a sort of inland Newport, but then an unfashionable resort among the Berkshire Hills. Whatever obscurity may have hung over the city of Newport, in 1850, Hawthorne hither too was effectually dissolved by this powerful tale, which was as vivid and 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 Reverend 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 Blythedale Romance and the Marble Fawn, there is the same Partie Carré or group of four characters. In the House of the Seven Gables there are two characters. 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 Blythedale 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 conquered 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 conquered 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 romance of the Marble Fawn, 1860, the longest 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 fawn, a creation as originalist Shakespeare's Caliban or Fouquet's Undine, and yet quite on this side the borderline 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 classic mythologies were retold, should also be mentioned in the list of Hawthorne's writings, as well as English and Italian notebooks, 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 dwelled 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 an 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 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 Minuteman, 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 a sleep-and-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. Chapter 4 Recording by Kalinda, in Lüneburg, Germany, on March 12, 2009.