 Part 2, Chapter 5 of A Brief History of English and American Literature. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Kalinda. A Brief History of English and American Literature by Henry A. Beers. Part 2, Chapter 5, The Cambridge Scholars, 1837-1861. With few exceptions, the men who have made American Literature what it is have been college graduates. And yet, our colleges have not commonly been, in themselves, literary centers. Most of them have been small and poor and situated in little towns or provincial cities. Their alumni scatter far and wide immediately after graduation. And even those of them who may feel drawn to a life of scholarship or letters find little to attract them at the home of their alma mater. And seek by preference the larger cities where periodicals and publishing houses offer some hope of support in a literary career. Even in the older and better equipped universities, the faculty is usually a core of working scholars. Each man intent upon his specialty and rather inclined to undervalue merely literary performance. In many cases, the fastidious and hypercritical turn of mind which besets the scholar, the timid conservatism which naturally characterizes an ancient seat of learning, and the spirit of theological conformity which suppresses free discussion have exerted their benumbing influence upon the originality and creative impulse of their inmates. Hence it happens that while the contributions of American college teachers to the exact sciences, to theology and philology, metaphysics, political philosophy, and the severer branches of learning have been honorable and important, they have as a class made little mark upon the general literature of the country. The professors of literature in our colleges are usually persons who have made no additions to literature, and the professors of rhetoric seem ordinarily to have been selected to teach students how to write for the reason that they themselves have never written anything that anyone has ever read. To these remarks, the Harvard College of some 50 years ago offers a striking exception. It was not the large and fashionable university that it has lately grown to be with its multiplied elective courses, its numerous faculty, and its somewhat motley crew of undergraduates, but a small school of the classics and mathematics with something of ethics, natural science, and the modern language added to its old-fashioned scholastic curriculum, and with a very homogeneous clientele drawn mainly from the Unitarian families of eastern Massachusetts. Nevertheless, a finer intellectual life in many respects was lived at Old Cambridge within the years covered by this chapter than nowadays at the same place or at any date in any other American university town. The neighborhood of Boston where the commercial life has never so entirely overlained the intellectual as in New York and Philadelphia has been a standing advantage to Harvard College. The recent upheaval in religious thought had secured toleration and made possible that free and even audacious interchange of ideas without which a literary atmosphere is impossible. From these, or from whatever causes, it happened that the old Harvard scholarship had an elegant and tasteful side to it so that the dry-area addition of the schools blossomed into a generous culture and there were men in the professor's chairs who were no less efficient as teachers because they were also poets, orators, wits, and men of the world. In the 17 years from 1821 to 1839, there were graduated from Harvard College, Emerson, Holmes, Sumner, Phillips, Motley, Thoreau, Lowell, and Edward Everett Hale, some of whom took up their residence at Cambridge, others at Boston, and others at Concord, which was quite as much a spiritual suburb of Boston as Cambridge was. In 1836, when Longfellow became professor of modern languages at Harvard, Sumner was lecturing in the law school. The following year, in which Thoreau took his bachelor's degree, witnessed the delivery of Emerson's Phi Beta Kappa lecture on the American scholar in the college chapel and Wendell Phillips' speech on the murder of Lovejoy in Fanuel Hall. Lowell, whose description of the impression produced by the former of these famous addresses has been quoted in a previous chapter, was an undergraduate at the time. He took his degree in 1838 and in 1855 succeeded Longfellow in the chair of modern languages. Holmes had been chosen in 1847 professor of anatomy and physiology in the medical school, a position that he held until 1882. The historians Prescott and Bancroft had been graduated in 1814 and 1817 respectively. The former's first important publication, Ferdinand and Isabella, appeared in 1837. Bancroft had been a tutor in the college in 1822 to 23, and the initial volume of his history of the United States was issued in 1835. Another of the Massachusetts School of Historical Writers, Francis Parkman, took his first degree at Harvard in 1844. Cambridge was still hardly more than a village, a rural outskirt of Boston, such as Lowell described it in his article, Cambridge 30 years ago, originally contributed to Putnam's monthly in 1853 and afterward reprinted in his fireside travels, 1864. The situation of a university scholar in Old Cambridge was thus an almost ideal one. Within easy reach of a great city with its literary and social clubs, its theaters, lecture courses, public meetings, dinner parties, etc. he yet lived withdrawn in an academic retirement among elm-shaded avenues and leafy gardens, the dome of the Boston State House looming distantly across the meadows, where the Charles laid its steel-blue sickle upon the variegated, plush-like ground of the wide marsh. There was, thus at all times, during the quarter of a century embraced between 1837 and 1861, a group of brilliant men resident in or about Cambridge and Boston, meeting frequently and intimately, and exerting upon one another a most stimulating influence. Some of the closer circles, all concentric to the university, of which this group was loosely composed, were laughed at by outsiders as mutual admiration societies. Such was, for instance, the five of clubs whose members were Longfellow, Sumner, C. C. Telen, professor of Greek at Harvard, and afterward president of the college, G. S. Hillard, a graceful lecturer, essayist, and poet of a somewhat amateurish kind, and Henry R. Cleveland of Jamaica Plain, a lover of books and a writer of them. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 1807-1882, the most widely read and loved of American poets, or indeed of all contemporary poets in England and America. Though identified with Cambridge for nearly fifty years, was a native of Portland, Maine, and a graduate of Bowdoin College, in the same class with Hawthorne. Since leaving college in 1825, he had studied and traveled for some years in Europe, and had held the professorship of modern languages at Bowdoin. He had published several textbooks, a number of articles on the romance languages and literatures in the North American Review, a thin volume of metrical translations from the Spanish, a few original poems in various periodicals, and the pleasant sketches of European travel, entitled Utremer. But Longfellow's fame began with the appearance in 1839 of his Voices of the Night. Accepting an earlier collection by Bryant, this was the first volume of real poetry published in New England, and it had more warmth and sweetness, and greater richness and variety than Bryant's work ever possessed. Longfellow's genius was almost feminine in its flexibility and its sympathetic quality. It readily took the color of its surroundings and opened itself eagerly to impressions of the beautiful from every quarter, but especially from books. This first volume contained a few things written during his student days at Bowdoin, one of which, a blank verse piece on autumn, clearly shows the influence of Bryant's Thanatopsis. Most of these juvenilia had nature for their theme, but they were not so sternly true to the New England landscape as Thoreau or Bryant. The skylark and the ivy appear among their scenic properties, and in the best of them, woods in winter, it is the English Hawthorne and not in the American tree through which the gale is made to blow. Just as later, Longfellow uses rooks instead of crows. The young poet's fancy was instinctively putting out feelers toward the storied lands of the Old World, and in his hymn of the Moravian nuns of Bethlehem, he transformed the rude church of the Moravian sisters to a cathedral with glimmering tapers, swinging sensors, chancel, altar, cowls, and dim, mysterious aisle. After his visit to Europe, Longfellow returned deeply imbued with the spirit of romance. It was his mission to refine our national taste by opening to American readers in their own vernacular New Springs of Beauty in the Literatures of Foreign Tongues. The fact that this mission was interpretative rather than creative hardly detracts from Longfellow's true originality. It merely indicates that his inspiration came to him in the first instance from other sources than the common life about him. He naturally began as a translator, and this first volume contained, among other things, exquisite renderings from the German of Uland, Sales, and Muller, from the Danish, French, Spanish, and Anglo-Saxon, and a few passages from Dante. Longfellow remained all his life a translator, and in subtler ways than by direct translation, he infused the fine essence of European poetry into his own. He loved tales that have the rhyme of age and chronicles of eld. The golden light of romance is shed upon his page, and it is his habit to borrow medieval and Catholic imagery from his favorite Middle Ages, even when writing of American subjects. To him the clouds are hooded friars that tell their beads in drops of rain. The midnight winds blowing through woods and mountain passes are chanting solemn masses for the repose of the dying year, and the strain ends with the prayer, Kyrie eleison, Christe eleison. In his journal he wrote characteristically, the black shadows lie upon the grass like engravings in a book. Autumn has written his rubric on the illuminated leaves. The wind turns them over and chants like a friar. This in Cambridge of a moonshiny night on the first day of the American October. But several of the pieces and voices of the night sprang more immediately from the poet's own inner experience. The hymn to the night, the Psalm of life, the reaper in the flowers, footsteps of angels, the light of stars, and the beleaguered city spoke of love, bereavement, comfort, patience, and faith. In these lovely songs and in many others of the same kind which he afterward wrote, Longfellow touched the hearts of all his countrymen. America is a country of homes, and Longfellow as the poet of sentiment and of the domestic affections became and remains far more general in his appeal than such a cosmic singer as Whitman, who is still practically unknown to the fierce democracy to which he has addressed himself. It would be hard to overestimate the influence for good exerted by the tender feeling and the pure and sweet morality which the hundreds of thousands of copies of Longfellow's writing that have been circulated among readers of all classes in America and England have brought with them. Three later collections, ballads and other poems, 1842, the Belfry of Bruges, 1846, and the Seaside and the Fireside, 1850, comprise most of what is noteworthy in Longfellow's minor poetry. The first of these embraced together with some renderings from the German and the Scandinavian languages, specimens of stronger original work than the author had yet put forth, namely the two powerful ballads of the Skeleton in Armor and the Wreck of the Hesperus. The former of these, written in the swift, leaping meter of draitons owed to the Cambro-Britons on their harp, was suggested by the digging up of a male clad skeleton at Fall River. The circumstance was the poet linked with the traditions about the round tower at Newport and gave to the whole the spirit of a Norse Viking song of war and of the sea. The Wreck of the Hesperus was occasioned by the news of shipwrecks on the coast near Gloucester, and by the name of a reef, Norman's Woe, where many of them took place. It was written one night between 12 and 3 and cost the poet, he said, hardly an effort. Indeed, it is the spontaneous ease and grace, the unfailing taste of Longfellow's lines, which are their best technical quality. There is nothing obscure or esoteric about his poetry. If there is little passion or intellectual depth, there is always genuine poetic feeling, often a very high order of imagination and almost invariably the choice of the right word. In this volume we also include the village blacksmith and Excelsior. The latter and the Psalm of life have had a damnable iteration which causes them to figure as Longfellow's most popular pieces. They are by no means, however, among his best. They are vigorously expressed common places of that hordatory kind which passes for poetry, the vague species of preaching. In the belfry of Bruges and the seaside and the fireside the translations were still kept up and among the original pieces were the occultation of Orion, the most imaginative of all Longfellow's poems, seaweed which has very noble stanzas, the favorite old clock on the stairs, the building of the ship with its magnificent closing apostrophe to the Union and the fire of driftwood, the subtlest in feeling of anything that he wrote. With these were verses of a more familiar quality such as the bridge, resignation and the day is done and many others all reflecting moods of gentle and pensive sentiment and drawing from analogies in nature or in legend lessons which, if somewhat obvious, were expressed with perfect art. Like Keats he apprehended everything on its beautiful side. Longfellow was all poet. Like Ophelia in Hamlet thought and affection, passion, hell itself, he turns to favor and to prettiness. He cared very little about the intellectual movement of the age. The transcendental ideas of Emerson passed over his head and left him undisturbed. For politics he had that gentlemanly distaste which the cultivated class in America had already begun to entertain. In 1842 he printed a small volume of poems on slavery which drew commendation from his friend Sumner, but had nothing of the fervor of wittier's or Lowell's utterances on the same subject. It is interesting to compare his journals with Hawthorne's American notebooks and to observe in what very different ways the two writers made prey of their daily experiences for literary material. A favorite haunt of Longfellow's was the bridge between Boston and Cambridgeport, the same which he put into verse in his poem The Bridge. I always stop on the bridge he writes in his journal. Tide waters are beautiful. From the ocean up into the land they go, like messengers, to ask why the tribute has not been paid. The Brooks and Rivers answer that there has been little harvest of snow and rain this year. Floating seaweed and kelp is carried up into the meadows as returning sailors bringing oranges and bandana handkerchiefs to friends in the country. And again, we leaned for a while on the wooden rail and enjoyed the silvery reflection on the sea, making sundry comparisons. Among other thoughts we had this cheering one that the whole sea was flashing with this heavenly light, though we saw it only in a single track. The dark waves are the dark providences of God, luminous though not to us and even to ourselves in another position. Walk on the bridge, both ends of which are lost in the fog, like human life midway between two eternities beginning and ending in mist. In Hawthorne an allegoric meaning is usually something deeper and subtler than this and seldom so openly expressed. Many of Longfellow's poems, the beleaguered city for example, may be definitely divided into two parts. In the first, a story is told or a natural phenomenon described. In the second, the spiritual application of the parable is formerly set forth. This method became with him almost a trick of style and his readers learned to look for the heck-fabular dot set at the end as a matter of course. As for the prevailing optimism in Longfellow's view of life, of which the above passage is an instance, it seemed to be in him an affair of temperament and not as in Emerson the result of philosophic insight. Perhaps however, in the last analysis, optimism and pessimism are subjective. The expression of temperament or individual experience, since the facts of life are the same, whether seen through Schopenhauer's eyes or through Emerson's. If there is any particular in which Longfellow's inspiration came to him at first hand and not through books, it is in respect to the aspects of the sea. On this theme, no American poet has written more beautifully and with a keener sympathy than the author of The Wreck of the Hesperus and of Seaweed. In 1847 was published the long poem of Evangeline, the story of the Acadian peasant girl who was separated from her lover in the dispersion of her people by the English troops, and after weary wanderings the search found him at last an old man dying in a Philadelphia hospital. Was told to Longfellow by the reverend H. L. Connolly who had previously suggested it to Hawthorne as a subject for a story. Longfellow, characteristically enough, got up the local color for his poem from Halliburton's account of the dispersion of the Grand Prey Acadians from Darby's geographical description of Louisiana and Watson's Annals of Philadelphia. He never needed to go much outside of his library for literary impulse and material. Whatever may be held as the Longfellow's inventive powers as a creator of characters or as an interpreter of American life, his originality as an artist is manifested by his successful domestication in Evangeline of the Dactylic Hexameter which no English poet had yet used with effect. The English poet, Harther Hugh Clough, who lived for her time in Cambridge, followed Longfellow's example in the use of hexameter in his Bothe of Tobernovolach so that we have now arrived at the time, a proud moment for American letters, when the works of our writers begin to react upon the literature of Europe. But the beauty of the descriptions in Evangeline and the Pathos, somewhat too drawn out of the story, made it dear to a multitude of readers who cared nothing about the technical disputes of Poe and other critics as to whether or not Longfellow's lines were sufficiently spondaic to truthfully represent the quantitative hexameters of Homer and Virgil. In 1855 appeared Hiawatha, Longfellow's most aboriginal and American book. The tripping Trochaic measure he borrowed from the Finnish epic Calavala. The vague childlike mythology of the Indian tribes, with its anthropomorphic sense of the brotherhood between men, animals, and the forms of inanimate nature, he took from Schoolcraft's Algic Researches 1839. Fixed forever in a skillfully chosen poetic form, the more inward and imaginative part of Indian character as Cooper had given permanence to its external and active side. Of Longfellow's dramatic experiments, the golden legend 1851 alone deserves mention here. This was in his chosen realm a tale taken from the ecclesiastical annals of the Middle Ages precious with martyr's blood and bathed in the rich twilight of the cloister. It contains some of his best work, but its merit is rather poetic than dramatic. Although, risk and praise it for the closeness with which it entered into the temper of the monk. Longfellow has pleased the people more than the critics. He gave freely what he had and the gift was beautiful. Those who have looked in his poetry for something else than poetry, or for poetry of some other kind, have not been slow to assert that he was a lady's poet. One who satisfied Callow youths and schoolgirls by uttering common places in graceful and musical shape but he offered no strong meat for men. Miss Fuller called his poetry thin and the poet himself a dandy pindar. This is not true of his poetry or of the best of it. But he had a singing and not a talking voice and in his prose one becomes sensible of a certain weakness. Hyperion, for example, published in 1839 a loitering fiction interspersed with descriptions of European travel is upon the whole a weak book over flowery indiction and sentimental in tone. The crown of Longfellow's achievements as a translator was his great version of Dante's Divina Comedia published between 1867 and 1870. It is a severely literal, almost a line-for-line rendering. The meter is preserved but the rhyme sacrificed. If not the best English poem constructed from Dante it is at all events the most faithful and scholarly paraphrase. The sonnets which accompanied it are among Longfellow's best work. He seems to have been raised by daily communion with the great Tuscan into a habit of deeper and more subtle thought than is elsewhere common in his poetry. Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1809 is a native of Cambridge and a graduate of Harvard in the class of 29. A class whose anniversary reunions he has celebrated in something like 40 distinct poems and songs. For sheer cleverness and versatility Dr. Holmes is perhaps unrivaled among American men of letters. He has been poet, wit, humorist, novelist, essayist, and a college lecturer and writer on medical topics. In all of these departments he has produced work which ranks high if not with the highest. His father Dr. Abiel Holmes was a graduate of Yale and an Orthodox minister of liberal temper. But the son early threw in his lot with the Unitarians and as was natural to a man of satiric turn and with a very human enjoyment of a fight whose youth was cast in an age of theological controversy he has always had his fling at Calvinism and has prolonged the slogans of old battles into a later generation sometimes perhaps insisting upon them rather weary-simly and beyond the limits of good taste. He had even as an undergraduate a reputation for cleverness at writing comic verses and many of his good things in this kind such as the Dorchester giant and the height of the ridiculous religion, a student's paper. But he first drew the attention of a wider public by his spirited ballad of old iron sides. I, tear her tattered ensign down composed about 1830 when it was proposed by the government to take to pieces the unseaworthy hulk of the famous old man of war constitution. Holmes' indignant protest which has been a favorite subject for schoolboy declamation had the effect of postponing the vessel's fate for a great many years. From 1830 to 35 the young poet was pursuing his medical studies in Boston and Paris contributing now and then some verses to the magazines. Of his life as a medical student in Paris there are many pleasant reminiscences in his autocrat and other writings as where he tells for instance of a dinner party of Americans in the French capital where one of the company brought tears of homesickness into the eyes of his sodals by saying that the young glasses reminded him of the cowbells in the rocky old pastures of New England. In 1836 he printed his first collection of poems. The volume contained among a number of pieces broadly comic like the September Gale the music grinders and the ballad of the Oystermen which at once became widely popular. A few poems of a finer and quieter temper in which there was a quaint blending of the humorous and the pathetic. Such were my aunt Leif which Abraham Lincoln found inexpressibly touching and which it is difficult to read without the double tribute of a smile and a tear. The volume contained also poetry a metrical essay read before the Harvard chapter of the Phi Beta Kappa Society which was the first of that long line of capital occasional poems which homes has been spinning for half a century with no sign of fatigue and with scarcely any falling off in freshness. Poems read or spoken or sung at all manner of gatherings public and private. At Harvard Commencements, Class days and other academic anniversaries, at inaugurations centennials, dedications of cemeteries meetings of medical associations mercantile libraries, Burns clubs and New England societies at rural festivals and city fairs openings of theaters, lanes of cornerstones birthday celebrations, jubilees funerals, commemoration services dinners of welcome or farewell to Dickens, Bryant, Everett, Whittier, Longfellow, Grant, Farragut, the Grand Duke Alexis, the Chinese Embassy and whatnot. Probably no poet of any age or climb has written so much and so well to order. He has been particularly happy in verses of a convivial kind toasts for big civic feasts or post-prandial rhymes for the petit comité, the snug little dinners of the chosen few. His, the quaint trick to cram the pithy line that cracks so crisply over bubbling wine. And although he could write on occasion a song for a temperance dinner, he has preferred to chant the praise of the punch-bowl and to feel the old convivial glow unaided or me-stealing the warm, champagne-y, old particular brandy punchy feeling. It would be impossible to enumerate the many good things of this sort which Holmes has written, full of wit and wisdom and of humor lightly dashed with sentiment and sparkling with droll analogies sudden puns and unexpected turns of rhyme and phrase. Among the best of them are Nook's post-coenetica, a modest request, owed for a social meeting, the boys, and Rip Van Winkle M.D. Holmes' favorite measure in his longer poems is the heroic couplet which Pope's example seems to have consecrated forever to satiric and didactic verse. He writes as easily in this meter as if it were prose and with much of Pope's epigrammatic neatness. He also manages with facility the anapestics of more and the ballad stanza which Hood had made the vehicle for his drolleries. It cannot be expected that verses manufactured to pop with the corks and fizz with the champagne at academic banquets should much outlive the occasion or that the habit of producing such verses on demand should foster in the producer that high seriousness which Matthew Arnold asserts to be one mark of all great poetry. Holmes' poetry is mostly on the colloquial level, excellent society verse, even in its serious moments too smart and too pretty to be taken very gravely, with a certain glitter, knowingness, and flippancy about it and an absence of that self-forgetfulness and intense absorption in its theme which characterize the work of the higher imagination. This is rather the product of fancy and wit. Wit indeed in the old sense of quickness in the perception of analogies is the staple of his mind. His resources in the way of figure, illustration, allusion, and anecdote are wonderful. Age cannot wither him nor custom stale his infinite variety and there is as much powder in his latest pyrotechnics as in the rockets which he sent up half a century ago. Yet, though the humorist in him rather outweighs the poet, he has written a few things like the chambered nodulus and homesick in heaven which are as purely and deeply poetic as the one-horse shea and the prologue are funny. Dr. Holmes is not of the stuff which idealists and enthusiasts are made. As a physician and a student of science, the facts of the material universe have counted for much with him. His clear, positive, alert intellect was always in patient of mysticism. He had the sharp eye of the satirist and the man of the world for oddities of dress, dialect, and manners. Naturally the transcendental movement struck him on its ludicrous side and in his after-dinner poem read at the Phi Beta Kappa dinner in 1943 he had his laugh at the orphic odes and runes of the bedlamite seer and bard of mystery who rides a beetle which he calls a sphinx and oh what questions asked in clubfoot rhyme of earth, the tongue-less, and the deaf mute time. Here babbling insight shouts in nature's ear his last conundrum on the orbs and spheres. There self-inspection sucks its little thumb with whence am I and wherefore did I come? Curiously enough the author of these lines lived to write an appreciative life of the poet who wrote the sphinx. There was a good deal of toriism or social conservatism in Holmes. He acknowledged a preference for the man with a pedigree, the man who owned family portraits had been brought up in familiarity with books and could pronounce view correctly. Readers unhappily not of the Brahmin caste of New England have sometimes resented as snobbishness Holmes harping on family and his perpetual application of certain chivalets to other people's ways of speech. The old woman who calculates is lost. Learning condemns beyond the reach of hope the careless lips that speak of soap for soap. Do put your accents in the proper spot. Don't let me beg you. Don't say how for what. The things named pants in certain documents, a word not made for gentlemen but gents. With the rest of society he was disposed to ridicule the abolition movement as a crotchet of the eccentric and the long haired. But when the civil war broke out, he lent his pen, his tongue, and his own flesh and blood to the cause of the union. The individuality of Holmes's writings comes in part from their local and provincial bias. He has been the Laureate of Harvard College in the bard of Boston City, an urban poet, with a cocknish fondness for old Boston ways and things. The Common and the Frogpond, Vanuil Hall and King's Chapel and the Old South, Bunker Hill, Long Wharf, the Tea Party, and the Town Crier. It was Holmes who invented the playful saying that Boston State House is the hub of the solar system. In 1857 was started The Atlantic Monthly, a magazine which has published a good share of the best work done by American writers within the past 30 years. Its immediate success was assured by Dr. Holmes's brilliant series of papers, The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, 1858, followed at once by the professor at The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, 1859, and later by the poet at The Breakfast Table, 1873. The Autocrat is its author's masterpiece and holds the fine quintessence of his humor, his scholarship, his satire, genial observation, and ripe experience of men and cities. The form is as unique and original as the contents being something between an essay and a drama, a succession of monologues or table talks at a typical American boarding house with a lot of story running through the hole. The variety of mood and thought is so great that these conversations never tire and the prose is interspersed with some of the author's choicest verse. The professor at The Breakfast Table followed too closely on the heels of The Autocrat and had less freshness. The third number of the series was better and was pleasantly reminiscent and slightly garrulous, Dr. Holmes being now 64 years old and entitled to the gossiping privilege of age. The personnel of The Breakfast Table series, such as the landlady and the landlady's daughter and her son, Benjamin Franklin, the schoolmistress, the young man named John, the divinity student, the cohenure, the sculpin, the scarabayus, and the old gentleman who sits opposite are not fully drawn characters but outlined figures lightly sketched, as as the autocrats want, by means of some trick of speech or dress or feature. But they are quite lifelike enough for their purpose, which is mainly to punish listeners and foils to the eloquence and wit of the chief talker. In 1860 and 1867, Holmes entered the field of fiction with two medicated novels, Elsie Venner and The Guardian Angel. The first of these was a singular tale whose heroine united with her very fascinating human attribute something of the nature of a serpent, her mother having been bitten by a rattlesnake a few months before the birth of the girl and kept alive, meanwhile, by the use of powerful antidotes. The heroine of The Guardian Angel inherited lawless instincts from a vein of Indian blood in her ancestry. These two books were studies of certain medical psychological problems. They preached Dr. Holmes's favorite doctrines of heredity and of the modified nature of moral responsibility by reason of transmitted tendencies which limit the freedom of the will. In Elsie Venner in particular, the weirdly imaginative and speculative character of the leading motive suggests Hawthorne's method in fiction, but the background and the subsidiary figures have a realism that is in abrupt contrast with this and gives a kind of doubleness and want of keeping to the whole. The Yankee characters in particular and the satirical pictures of New England country life are open to the charge of caricature. In The Guardian Angel, the figure of Biles Gridley, the old scholar, is drawn with thorough sympathy and though some of his acts are improbable, he is on the whole Holmes's most vital conception James Russell Lowell, 1819, the foremost of American critics and of living American poets, is like Holmes, a native of Cambridge and like Emerson and Holmes, a clergyman's son. In 1855, he succeeded Longfellow as professor of modern languages in Harvard College. Of late years, he has held important diplomatic posts like Everett, Irving, Bancroft, Motley, and other Americans distinguished in letters, having been United States minister to Spain and under two administrations to the court of St. James. Lowell is not so spontaneously and exclusively a poet as Longfellow. His fame has been of slower growth and his popularity with the average reader has never been so great. His appeal has been to the few rather than the many, to an audience of scholars and of the judicious rather than to the groundlings of the general public. Nevertheless, his verse, though without the evenness, instinctive grace and unerring good taste of Longfellow's has more energy in a stronger intellectual fiber, while in prose he is very greatly the superior. His first volume, A Year's Life, 1841, gave little promise. In 1843 he started a magazine, The Pioneer, which only reached his third number, though it counted among its contributors Hawthorne, Poe, Whittier, and Miss Barrett, afterward Mrs. Browning. A second volume of poems dated in 1844 showed a distinct advance, in such pieces as The Shepherd of King Edmetus, Rocus, a classical myth told in excellent blank verse, and the same in subject with one of Landor's polished intaglios, and The Legend of Brittany, a narrative poem which had fine passages but no firmness in the management of the story. As yet it was evident the young poet had not found his theme. This came with the outbreak of the Mexican war which was unpopular in New England in which the Free Soil Party, regarded as a slave-holders war, waged without provocation against a sister republic, and simply for the purpose of extending the area of slavery. In 1846, accordingly, the Big Low papers began to appear in the Boston Courier and were collected and published in book form in 1848. These were a series of rhyme satires upon the Government and the War Party written in the Yankee dialect and supposed to be the work of the Big Low, a home-spun genius in a down-east country town whose letters to the editor were endorsed and accompanied by the comments of the Reverend Homer Wilbur, A.M., pastor of the First Church in Jalam, and prospective member of many learned societies. The first paper was a derise of address to a recruiting sergeant with a denunciation of the nigger-driven states and the northern doe faces, a plain hint that the North would do better to secede than to continue doing dirty work and an expression of those universal peace doctrines which were then in the air and to which Longfellow gave serious utterance in his occultation of Orion. As for war, I call it murder. There you have it, plain and flat. I don't want to go no further than in my testament for that. God has said so plump and fairly, it's as long as it is broad and you've got to get up early if you want to take in God. The second number was a versified paraphrase of a letter received by Mr. Bird of Freedom Sawan, a young fellow of our town that was cussful enough to go a-trotten into mischief, art or a drum on a fife, and who finds when he gets to Mexico that this kind of soldier ain't a mite like our October training. Of the subsequent papers, the best was, perhaps, what Mr. Robinson thinks, an election ballad which caused universal laughter and was on everybody's tongue. The Big Low papers remain Lowell's most original contribution to American literature. They are, all in all, the best political satires in the language, and unequaled as portraitures of the Yankee character, with its cuteness, its homely wit and its latent poetry. Under the racy humor of the dialect which became in Lowell's hand a medium of literary expression almost as effective as Burns' Ayrshire Scotch burned that moral enthusiasm and that hatred of wrong and deification of duty, stern daughter of the voice of God of New England stock stands instead of the passion in the blood of the Southern races. Lowell's serious poems on political questions such as the present crisis, owed to freedom and the capture of fugitive slaves have the old Puritan fervor and such lines as they are slaves who dare not be in the right with two or three. And the passage beginning truth forever on the scaffold wrong forever on the throne became watchwords in the conflict Some of these were published in his volume of 1848 and the collected edition of his poems in two volumes issued in 1850. They also included his most ambitious narrative poem, The Vision of Sir Lanfall an allegorical and spiritual treatment of one of the legends of the Holy Grail. Lowell's genius was not epical but lyric and didactic. The merit of Sir Lanfall is not in the telling of the story, but in the beautiful descriptive episodes, one of which commencing And what is so rare as a day in June that if ever come perfect days it's as current as anything that he has written. It is significant of the lack of a natural impulse toward narrative invention in Lowell that unlike longfellow and homes he never tried his hand at a novel. One of the most important parts of a novelist's equipment he certainly possesses namely an insight into character and an ability to delineate it. This gift is seen especially in his sketch of Parson Wilbur who edited the Bigelow Papers with a delightfully pedantic introduction, glossary, and notes in the prose essay on a certain condescension in Foreigners and in the uncompleted poem Fitzadam's Story. See also the sketch of Captain Underhill in the essay on New England two centuries ago. The Bigelow Papers, when brought out in a volume, were prefaced by imaginary notices of the press including a capital parody of Carlisle and a reprint from the Jalaam independent Thunderbus of the first sketch. Afterward amplified and enriched of that perfect Yankee idol, the Corten. Between 1862 and 1865 a second series of Bigelow Papers appeared called out by the events of the Civil War. Some of these as for instance Jonathan to John a remonstrance with England for her unfriendly attitude toward the North were not inferior to anything in the earlier series. And others were even superior as poems equal indeed in pathos and intensity to anything that Lowell has written in his professedly serious verse. In such passages the dialect wears rather thin and there is a certain incongruity between the rustic spelling and the vivid beauty and power and the figurative cast of the phrase and stanzas like the following. What's words to them whose faith and truth on war's red touchstone rang true metal? Who ventured life and love and youth for the great prize of death and battle? To him who deadly hurt again flashed on before the charge's thunder tippin' with fire the bolt of men that rived the rebel line asunder. Charles Sumner a somewhat heavy person with little sense of humor wished that the author of the Bigelow Papers could have used good English. In the lines just quoted indeed the bad English adds nothing to the effect. In 1848 Lowell wrote a fable for critics, something after the style of Sir John Suckling's Session of the Poets. A piece of rollicking doggerel in which the artist, scattering about headlong fun, sharp satire and sound criticism in equal proportion. Never an industrious workman like Longfellow at the poetic craft but preferring to wait for the mood to seize him he allowed 18 years to go by from 1850 to 1868 before publishing another volume of verse. In the latter year appeared under the willows which contained some of his ripest and most perfect work. Notably a winter evening hymn to my fire with its noble and touching clothes suggested by, perhaps at any rate recalling, the dedication of Goethe's Faust. You're not Orchvide Schwankende gestalten. The subtle footpath and in the twilight the lovely little poems Auf Wiedersehen and After the Funeral and a number of spirited political pieces such as Villa Franca and The Washers of the Shroud. This volume contained also his ode recited at the Harvard Commemoration in 1865. This, although uneven, is one of the finest occasional poems in the language and the most important contribution which our civil war has made to song. It was charged with the grave emotion of one who not only shared the patriotic grief and exultation of his alma mater in the sacrifice of her sons but who felt a more personal sorrow in the loss of kindred of his own fallen in the front of the battle. Particularly noteworthy in this memorial ode are the tribute to Abraham Lincoln the Third Straff beginning Many Love Truth. The Exordium Oh beautiful, my country, ours once more and the close of the Eighth Straff where the poet chants of the youthful heroes who come transfigured back, secure from change in their high-hearted ways beautiful ever more and with the rays of mourn on their white shields of expectation. From 1857 to 1862 Lowell edited The Atlantic Monthly and from 1863 to 1872 The North American Review His prose beginning with an earlier volume of conversations on some of the old poets, 1844 has consisted mainly of critical essays on individual writers such as Dante, Chaucer, Spencer, Emerson, Shakespeare, Thoreau, Pope, Carlisle, etc. together with papers of a more miscellaneous kind like Witchcraft, New England Two Centuries ago, My Garden Acquaintance, A Good Word for Winter Abraham Lincoln, etc. etc. Two volumes of these were published in 1870 and 1876 under the title Among My Books and another My Study Windows in 1871. As a literary critic, Lowell ranks easily among the first of living writers. His scholarship is thorough his judgment sure and he pours out upon his page an unwithholding wealth of knowledge, humor, wit imagination from the fullness of an overflowing mind. His prose has not the chastened correctness and low tone of Matthew Arnold's. It is rich, exuberant and sometimes over fanciful running away into excesses of illusion or following the lead of a chanced pun so as sometimes to lay itself open to the charge of pedantry and bad taste. Lowell's resources in the way of illustration and comparison are endless and the readiness of his wit and his delight in using it put many temptations in him. Purists in style accordingly take offense at his saying that Milton is the only man who ever got much poetry out of a cataract and that was a cataract in his eye. Or of his speaking of a gentleman for whom the bottle before him reversed the wonder of the stereoscope and substituted the Gaston V for the B in binocular which is certainly a puzzling and roundabout fashion of telling us that he had drunk so much that he saw double. The critics also find fault with his coining such words as undisprivacid and with his writing such lines as the famous one from the cathedral, 1870 spume sliding down the baffled Decumen. It must be acknowledged that his style lacks the crowning grace of simplicity but it is precisely by reason of its elusive quality that scholarly readers take pleasure in it. They like addiction that has stuff in it and is woven thick and where a thing is said in such a way as to recall the things mentioned should be made in connection with this Cambridge circle of one writer who touched its surf conference briefly. This was Sylvester Judd, a graduate of Yale who entered the Harvard Divinity School in 1837 and in 1840 became minister of a Unitarian church in Augusta, Maine. Judd published several books but the only one of them at all memorable was Margaret, 1845, a novel of which Lowell said in A Fable for Critics that it was the first book with the soul of the down east in it. It was very imperfect in point of art and its second part a repsautical description of a sort of Unitarian utopia is quite unreadable. But in the delineation of the few chief characters and of the rude, wild life of an outlying New England township just after the close of the Revolutionary War as well as in the tragic power of the catastrophe there was a genius of high order. As the country has grown older and more populous and works in all parts of thought have multiplied it becomes necessary to draw more strictly the line between the literature of knowledge and the literature of power. Political history in and of itself scarcely falls within the limits of this sketch and yet it cannot be altogether dismissed for the historians art at its highest demands imagination, narrative skill and a sense of unity and proportion in the selection and arrangement of his facts, all of which are literary qualities. It is significant that many of our best historians have written authorship in the domain of imaginative literature. Bancroft with an early volume of poems. Motley with his historical romances Mary Mount and Morton's Hope and Parkman with a novel, Vassel Morton. The oldest of that modern group of writers that have given America an honorable position in the historical literature of the world was William Hickling Prescott, 1796 to 1859. Prescott chose for his theme the history of Spanish conquests in the New World, a subject full of romantic incident and susceptible of that glowing and perhaps slightly over-gorgeous coloring which he laid on with a liberal hand. His completed histories in their order are the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella 1837, the conquest of Mexico 1843, a topic which Irving has relinquished to him, and the conquest of Peru 1847. Prescott was fortunate in being born to leisure and fortune but he had difficulties of another kind to overcome. He was nearly blind and had to teach himself Spanish and look up authorities through the help of others and to write with a noctograph or by a manuensis. George Bancroft 1800, issued the first volume of his great history of the United States in 1834 and exactly half a century later the final volume of the work bringing the subject down to 1789. Bancroft had studied at Goettingen and imbibed from the German historian the scientific method of historical study. He had access to original sources in the nature of collections and state papers in the governmental archives of Europe of which no American had hitherto been able to avail himself. His history and thoroughness of treatment leaves nothing to be desired and has become the standard authority on the subject. As a literary performance merely it is somewhat wanting in flavor. Bancroft's manner being heavy and stiff when compared with moteliers or parkmans. The historian's services to his country have been publicly recognized by his successive appointments as secretary of the navy, minister to England and minister to Germany. The greatest on the whole of American historians was John Lothrop Motley 1814 to 1877 who like Bancroft was a student at Goettingen and United States minister to England. His rise of the Dutch Republic 1856 and history of the United Netherlands published in installments from 1861 to 1868. Equaled Bancroft's work in scientific thoroughness and philosophic grasp. And Prescott's in the picturesque brilliancy of the narrative, while it excelled them both in its masterly analysis of great historic characters reminding the reader in this particular of Macaulay's figure painting. The episodes of the Siege of Antwerp and the Sack of the Cathedral and of the defeat and the wreck of the Spanish Armada are as graphic as the description of Cortez's capture of the city of Mexico. While the elder historian has nothing to compare with Motley's vivid personal sketches of Queen Elizabeth Philip II Henry of Navarre and William the Silent. The life of John of Barnavald 1874 completed this series of studies upon the history of the Netherlands. A theme to which Motley was attracted because the heroic struggle of the Dutch for liberty offered in some respects a parallel to the growth of political communities and especially in his own America. The last of these Massachusetts historical writers whom we shall mention is Francis Parkman 1823 whose subject has the advantage of being thoroughly American. His Oregon Trail 1847 a series of sketches of Prairie and Rocky Mountain Life originally contributed to the Nickerbocker Magazine displays his early interest in the American Indians. In 1851 appeared his first historical work, the Conspiracy of Pontiac. This has been followed by the series entitled France and England in North America the six successive parts of which are as follows the pioneers of France in the New World the Jesuits in North America LaSalle and the Discovery of the Great West the old regime in Canada Count Frontenac and New France and Montcalme and Wolfe. These narratives have a wonderful vividness and a romantic interest not inferior to Cooper's novels. Parkman made himself personally familiar with the scenes which he described and some of the best descriptions of American woods and waters are to be found in his histories. If any faults to be found with his books indeed it is that their picturesqueness and fine writing are a little in excess. The political literature of the years from 1837 to 1861 hinged upon the anti-slavery struggle. In this irrepressible conflict Massachusetts led the van. Garrison had written in his liberator in 1830 I will be as harsh as truth and as uncompromising as justice I am in earnest I will not equivocate I will not excuse I will not retreat a single inch and I will be heard. But the Garrisonian abolitionists remained for a long time even in the north a small and despised faction. It was a great point gained when men of education and social standing like Wendell Phillips 1811 to 1884 and Charles Sumner 1811 to 1874 joined themselves to the cause. Both of these were graduates of Harvard and men of scholarly pursuits. They became the representative orators of the anti-slavery party Phillips on the platform and Sumner in the Senate. The former first came before the public in his fiery speech delivered in Faniel Hall December 8, 1837 before a meeting called to denounce the murder of Lovejoy who had been killed at Alton Illinois while defending his press against a pro-slavery mob. Thenceforth Phillips' voice was never idle in behalf of the slave. His eloquence was impassioned and direct and his English singularly pure, simple and nervous. He is perhaps nearer to the Demosthenes than any other American orator. He was a most fascinating platform speaker on themes outside of politics and his lecture on the lost arts was a favorite with audiences of all sorts. Sumner was a man of intellectual tastes who entered politics reluctantly and only in obedience to the resist list leading of his conscience. He was a student of literature and art a connoisseur of engravings, for example of which he made a valuable collection. He was fond of books, conversation and foreign travel and in Europe while still a young man had made a remarkable impression in society. But he left all this for public life and in 1851 was elected as Webster's successor to the Senate of the United States. Thereafter he remained the leader of the United States in Congress until slavery was abolished. His influence throughout the North was greatly increased by the brutal attack upon him in the Senate chamber in 1856 by Bully Brooks of South Carolina. Sumner's oratory was stately and somewhat labored while speaking he always seemed, as has been wittily said, to be surveying a broad landscape of his own convictions. His most impressive qualities as a speaker were his intense moral earnestness and his thorough knowledge of his subject. The most telling of his parliamentary speeches are perhaps his speech on the Kansas-Nebraska bill of February 3rd, 1854 and on the crime against Kansas May 9th and 20th, 1856. Of his platform addresses the oration on the true grandeur of nations. End of Part 2, Chapter 5 Recording by Kalinda in Lüneburg, Germany on March 15th, 2009 Part 2, Chapter 6 of a brief history of English and American literature. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Kalinda A brief history of English and American literature by Henry A. Beers. Part 2, Chapter 6 Literature in the Cities 1837 to 1861 Literature as a profession has hardly existed in the United States until very recently. Even now the number of those who support themselves by purely literary work is small. Although the growth of the reading public and the establishment of great magazines such as Harpers, The Century and The Atlantic have made a market for intellectual wares which 40 years ago would have seemed to God send to poorly paid bohemians like Poe or obscure men of genius like Hawthorne. About 1840, two Philadelphia magazines, Godi's Ladies Book and Graham's Monthly, began to pay their contributors $12 a page a price then thought wildly expensive. But the first magazine of the modern type was Harper's Monthly founded in 1850. American books have always suffered and still continue to suffer from the want of an international copyright which has flooded the country with cheap reprints and translations of foreign works with which the domestic product has been unable to contend on such uneven terms. With the first ocean steamers there started up a class of large paged weeklies in New York and elsewhere such as The World and The Corsair which furnished their readers with the freshest writings of Dickens and Bulwer and other British celebrities within a fortnight after their appearance in London. This still further restricted the profits of native authors and nearly drove them from the field of periodical literature. By special arrangement the novels of Thackeray and other English writers were printed in Harper's in installments simultaneously with their issue in English periodicals. The Atlantic was the first of our magazines which included the encouragement of home talent and which had a purely Yankee flavor. Journalism was the profession which naturally attracted men of letters as having most in common with their chosen work and as giving them a medium under their own control through which they could address the public. A few favored scholars like Prescott were made independent by the possession of private fortunes. Others like Holmes, Longfellow and Lowell gave to literature such a leisure as they could get in the intervals of college work. Still others like Emerson and Thoreau, by living in the country and making their modest competence eeked out in Emerson's case by lecturing here and there, suffice for their simple needs, secured themselves freedom from their restraints of any regular calling. But in defile of some such pusto our men of letters have usually sought the cities and allied themselves with the press. It will be remembered that Lowell started a short-lived magazine on his own account and that he afterward edited the Atlantic and the North American. Also, that Ripley and Charles A. Dana betook themselves to journalism after the breakup of the Brook Farm community. In the same way, William Cullen Bryant 1794 to 1878, the earliest American poet of importance, whose impulses drew him to the solitudes of nature, was compelled to gain a livelihood by conducting a daily newspaper, or as he himself puts it, was, forced to dredge from the dregs of men and scrawl strange words with a barbarous pen. Bryant was born at Cummington in Berkshire, the westernmost county of Massachusetts. After two years in Williams College he studied law and practiced for nine years as a country lawyer in Plainfield and Great Barrington. Following the line of the Housatonic Valley, the social and theological affiliations of Berkshire have always been closer with Connecticut and New York than with Boston and eastern Massachusetts. Accordingly, when in 1825 Bryant yielded to the actions of a literary career he but took himself to New York City, where after a brief experiment in conducting a monthly magazine, the New York Review and Athenaeum, he assumed the editorship of the Evening Post, a democratic and free trade journal with which he remained connected till his death. He already had a reputation as a poet when he entered the ranks of metropolitan journalism. In 1816 his Thanatopsis had been published in the North American Review and had attracted immediate and general admiration. It had been finished indeed two years before when the poet was only in his 19th year and was a wonderful instance of precocity. The thought in his stately hymn was not that of a young man but of a sage who has reflected long upon the universality, the necessity, and the majesty of death. Bryant's blank verse, when at its best as in Thanatopsis and the forest hymn is extremely noble. In gravity and dignity it is surpassed by no English blank verse of this century though in rich and various modulation it falls below Tennyson's Ulysses and Mort D'Arture. It was characteristic of Bryant's limitations that he came thus early into possession of his faculty. His range was always a narrow one and about his poetry as a whole there was a certain coldness, rigidity and solemnity. His fixed position among American poets is described in his own hymn to the North Star and thou dost see them rise star of the pole and thou dost see them set alone in thy cold skies thou keeps thy old unmoving station yet nor joins the dances of that glittering train nor dips thy virgin orb in the blue western main. In 1821 he read The Ages a didactic poem in 35 stanzas before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge and in the same year brought out his first volume of poems. A second collection appeared in 1832 which was printed in London under the auspices of Washington Irving. Bryant was the first American poet who had much of an audience in England and Wordsworth is said to have learned Thanatopsis by heart. Bryant was indeed in a measure a scholar of Wordsworth's school and his place among American poets corresponds roughly though not precisely to Wordsworth's among English poets. With no humor, with somewhat restricted sympathies with little flexibility or openness to new impressions but gifted with a high austere imagination Bryant became the meditative poet of nature. His best poems are those in which he draws lessons from nature or sings of its calming, purifying and bracing influences upon the human soul. His office in other words is the same which Matthew Arnold asserts to be the peculiar office of modern poetry the moral interpretation of nature. Poems of this class are Green River to a Waterfowl June The Death of the Flowers and the Evening Wind The song O'Farist of the Rural Maids which Poe pronounced his best poem has an obvious resemblance to Wordsworth's three years she grew in sun and shade and both of these nameless pieces might fitly be entitled as Wordsworth says in Mr. Polgrave's Golden Treasury, The Education of Nature. Although Bryant's career is identified with New York, his poetry is all of New England. His heart was always turning back fondly to the woods and streams of the Berkshire Hills. There was nothing of that urban strain in him which appears in Holmes and Willis. He was, in a special, the Poet of Autumn of the American October and the New England Indian Summer that season of dropping nuts and smoky light to whose subtle analogy with the decay of the young by the New England disease consumption he gave such tender expression in The Death of the Flowers and amid whose bright, late, quiet he wished himself to pass away. Bryant is our Poet of the Melancholy Days as Lowell is of June. If by chance he touches upon June it is not with the exultant gladness of Lowell in meadows full of bobble-links and in the summer day that is simply perfect from its own resource as to the bee the new Campanulas illuminates occlusion swung in the air. Rather, the stir of new life in the clod suggests to Bryant by contrast the thought of death and there is nowhere in his poetry a passage of deeper feeling than the closing stanzas of June in which he speaks of himself by anticipation as of one whose part in all the pomp that fills the circuit of the summer hills that his grave is green. Bryant is Par excellence the Poet of New England Wildflowers the Yellow Violet the Fringe Gentian to each of which he dedicated an entire poem the Orcus in the Golden Rod the Astor in the Wood and the Yellow Sunflower by the Brook. With these his name will be associated as Wordsworths with the Daffodil and the Lesser Selendine and Emerson's with the Rodora. Except when writing of nature the energetic lines in his purely reflective verse as these famous ones from the battlefield truth crushed to the earth shall rise again the eternal years of God are hers but error wounded rives in pain and dies among his worshipers he added but slowly to the number of his poems publishing a new collection in 1840 another in 1844 and 30 poems in 1864 his work at all ages was remarkably even Thanatopsis was as mature as anything that he wrote afterward and among his later pieces the planting of the apple tree and the flood of years were as fresh as anything he had written in the first flesh of youth Bryant's poetic style was always pure and correct without any tincture of affectation or extravagance his prose writings are not important consisting mainly of papers of the salmagundi variety contributed to the talisman an annual published in 1827 to 1830 some rather sketchy stories tales of the Glauber Spa 1832 and impressions of Europe entitled Letters of a Traveller issued in two series in 1849 and 1858 in 1869 and 1871 appeared his blank verse translations of the Iliad and Odyssey a remarkable achievement for a man of his age and not excelled upon the whole by any recent metrical version of Homer in the English tongue Bryant's half-century of service as the editor of a daily paper should not be overlooked the evening post under his management was always honest, gentlemanly and courageous and did much to raise the tone of journalism in New York another Massachusetts poet who was outside the Boston Coterie like Bryant and like him tried his hand at journalism was John Greenleaf Whittier 1807 he was born in a solitary farmhouse near Haverill in the valley of the Merrimack and his life has been passed mostly at his native place and at the neighboring town of Amesbury the local color which is very pronounced in his poetry is that of the Merrimack from the vicinity of Haverill to its mouth at Newburyport a region of hillside farms opening out below into wide marshes the low green prairies of the sea and the beaches of Hampton and Salisbury the scenery of the Merrimack is familiar to all readers of Whittier the cotton spinning towns along its banks with their factories and dams the sloping pastures and orchards of the back country the sands of Plum Island and the level reaches of water meadow between which glide the broad sailed gondolos a local corruption of gondolo laden with hay Whittier was a farmer lad and had only such education as the district schools could supply supplemented by two years at the Haverill Academy in his school days he gives a picture of the little old country schoolhouse as it used to be the only alma mater of so many distinguished Americans and to which many others who have afterward trodden the pavements of great universities look back so fondly as to their first wicket gate into the land of knowledge still sits the schoolhouse by the road a ragged beggar sunning around it still the sumac's grow and blackberry vines are running within the master's desk is seen deep scarred by rap's official the warping floor the battered seats the jackknives carved initial a copy of Burns awoke the slumbering instinct in the young poet and he began to contribute verses to garrison's free press published at Newburyport and to the Haverill Gazette then he went to Boston and became editor for a short time of the manufacturer next he edited the Essex Gazette at Haverill and in 1830 he took charge of George D. Prentice's paper the New England weekly review at Hartford Connecticut here he fell in with a young Connecticut poet of much promise J.G.C. Brainard editor of the Connecticut Mirror whose remains Whittier edited in 1832 at Hartford too he published his first book a volume of prose and verse titled Legends of New England 1831 which is not otherwise remarkable than as showing his early interest in Indian colonial traditions especially those which had a touch of the supernatural a mind which he afterward worked to good purpose in the bridal of Pennacook, the witch's daughter, and similar poems some of the legends testify to Brainard's influence and to the influence of Whittier's temporary residence at Hartford one of the prose pieces for example deals with the famous Mootus noises on the Connecticut River and one of the poems is the same in subject with Brainard's Black Fox of Salmon River after a year and a half at Hartford Whittier returned to Haverill and to farming the anti-slavery agitation was now beginning and into this he threw himself with all the ardor of his nature he became the poet of reform as Garrison was its apostle and Sumner in Phillips its speakers in 1833 he published Justice and Expediency a prose tract against slavery and in the same year he took part in the formation of the American Anti-Slavery Society at Philadelphia sitting in the convention as a delegate of the Boston abolitionists Whittier was a Quaker and that denomination influenced by the preaching of John Woolman and others had long since quietly abolished slavery within its own communion the Quakers of Philadelphia and elsewhere took an earnest though peaceful part in the Garrisonian movement but it was a strange irony of fate that had made Whittier a friend his poems against slavery and disunion have the martial ring of a Turteus or a Kerner added to the stern religious zeal of Cromwell's iron sides they are like the sound of the trumpet blown before the walls of Jericho or the Psalms of David denouncing woe upon the enemies of God's chosen people if there is any purely Puritan strain in American poetry it is in the war hymns of the Quaker hermit of Amesbury of these patriotic poems there were three principal collections voices of freedom 1849 the panorama and other poems 1856 and in wartime 1863 Whittier's work as the poet of freedom was done when on hearing the bells ring for the passage of the constitutional amendment abolishing slavery he wrote his splendid Laus Deo thrilling with the ancient Hebrew spirit loud and long lift the old exulting song sing with Miriam by the sea he has cast the mighty down horse and rider sink and drown he has triumphed gloriously of his poems distinctly relating to the events of the civil war the best or at all events the most popular is Barbara Fricci Ichabod expressing the indignation of the free soilers at Daniel Webster 7th of March speech in defense of the fugitive slave law is one of Whittier's best political poems and not altogether unworthy of comparison with Browning's lost leader the language of Whittier's war like many of his purely devotional pieces are religious poetry of a high order and have been included in numerous collections of hymns of his songs of faith and doubt the best are perhaps our master chapel of the hermits and eternal goodness one stands from the last of which is familiar I know not where his islands lift their fronded palms in air I only know I cannot drift beyond his love and care but from politics and war Whittier turned gladly to sing the only life of the New England countryside his rural ballads and idols are as genuinely American as anything that our poets have written and have been recommended as such to English working men by Whittier's co-religionist John Bright the most popular of these is probably Maude Muller whose closing couplet has passed into proverb Skipper Ierson's ride is also very current better than either of them as poetry is telling the bees but Whittier's master piece in work descriptive and reminiscent kind is Snowbound 1866 a New England fireside idol which in its truthfulness recalls the winter evening of Cowper's task and Burns Cotter's Saturday night but in sweetness and animation is superior to either of them although in some things a Puritan of the Puritans Whittier has never forgotten that he is also a friend and several of his ballads and songs have been upon the subject of the early Quaker persecutions in Massachusetts the most impressive of these is Cassandra Southwick the latest of them the King's Missive originally contributed to the memorial history of Boston in 1880 and reprinted the next year in a volume with other poems has been the occasion of a rather lively controversy the bridal of Pennecook 1848 and the tent on the beach 1867 which contains some of his best work were series of ballads told by different narrators after the fashion of long fellows tales of a wayside inn as an artist in verse Whittier is strong and fervid rather than delicate or rich he uses only a few metrical forms by preference the eight-syllable rhyming couplet Maude Muller on her summer's day raked the meadow sweet with hay etc and the emphatic tramp of this measure becomes very monotonous as do some of Whittier's mannerisms which proceed however never from affectation but from a lack of study and variety and so no doubt in part from the want of that academic culture and through technical equipment which Lowell and Longfellow enjoyed though his poems are not in dialect like Lowell's big low papers he knows how to make an artistic use of homely provincial words such as chore which gives his idols of the hearth and the barnyard a genuine Doric cast Whittier's prose is inferior to his verse the fluency which was a besetting sin of his poetry when released from the fetters of rhyme and meter ran into wordiness his prose writings were partly contributions to the slavery controversy partly biographical sketches of English and American reformers and partly studies of the scenery and folklore of the Merrimack Valley those of most literary interest were the supernaturalism of New England 1847 and some of the papers in literary recreations and miscellaneous 1854 while Massachusetts was creating an American literature other sections of the union were by no means idle the West indeed was as yet too raw to add anything of importance to the artistic product of the country the South was hampered by circumstances which will presently be described but in and about the seaboard cities of New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Richmond many pens were busy filling the columns of literary weeklies and monthlies and there was a considerable output such as it was of books of poetry fiction, travel and miscellaneous light literature time has already relegated most of these to the dusty top shelves to rehearse the names of numerous contributors to the old Knickerbocker magazine the Goaties and Grams and the New Mirror and the Southern Literary Messenger or to run over the list of authorlings and poet-tasters in prose papers on the Literati of New York would be very much like reading the inscriptions on the headstones of an old graveyard in the columns of these prehistoric magazines and in the book notices and reviews away back in the thirties and forties one encounters the handiwork and the names of Emerson, Holmes, Longfellow, Hawthorne and Lowell embodied in this mass of forgotten literature would have required a good deal of critical acumen at the time to predict that these and a few others would soon be thrown out into bold relief as the significant and permanent names in the literature of their generation while Paulding, Hearst, Fay Dawes, Mrs. Osgood and scores of others who figured beside them in the fashionable periodicals and filled quite as large a space in the public eye would sink into oblivion in less than thirty years some of these latter were clever enough people they entertained their contemporary public sufficiently but their work had no vitality or power of continuance the great majority of the writings of any period are necessarily ephemeral and time by a slow process of natural selection is constantly sifting out the few representative books which shall carry on the memory of the period to posterity now and then it may be predicted of some undoubted work of genius even at the moment that it sees the light that it is destined to endure but tastes and fashions change better calculated to inspire the literary critic with humility than to read the prophecies in old reviews and see how the future now become the present has quietly given them the lie from among the professional literatures of his day emerges with ever sharper distinctness as time goes on the name of Edgar Allen Pauld 1809 to 1849 by the irony of fate Pauld was born at Boston and his first volume, Tamerlane and other poems 1827 was printed in that city and bore upon its title page the words by a Bostonian but his parentage so far as it was anything was Southern his father was a Marilander who had gone upon the stage and married an actress herself the daughter of an actress and a native of England left an orphan by the early death of both parents Pauld was adopted by a Mr. Allen a wealthy merchant of Richmond, Virginia he was educated partly at an English school was student for a time at the University of Virginia afterwards a cadet in the Military Academy at West Point his youth was wild and irregular he gambled and drank, was proud, bitter and perverse finally quarreled with his guardian and adopted father by whom he was disowned and then betook himself to the life of a literary hack his brilliant but underpaid work for various periodicals soon brought him into notice and he was given the editorship of the Southern Literary Messenger published at Richmond and subsequently of the Gentleman's magazine in Philadelphia these and all other positions Pauld forfeited through his dissipated habits and wayward temper and finally in 1844 he drifted to New York where he found employment on the evening mirror and then on the Broadway Journal he died of delirium tremens at the Marine Hospital in Baltimore his life was one of the most wretched in literary history he was an extreme instance of what used to be called the eccentricity of genius he was popularly supposed to accompany the poetic temperament and was so insanely egotistic as to imagine that Longfellow and others were constantly plagiarizing from him the best side of Pauld's character came out in his domestic relations in which he displayed great tenderness, patience and fidelity his instincts were gentlemanly and his manner in conversation were often winning in the place of moral feeling he had the artistic conscience in his critical papers except where warped by passion or prejudice and neither fear nor favor denouncing bad work by the most illustrious hands and commending obscure merit the impudent literary cliques who puffed each other's books the feeble chirrapings of the bardlings who manufactured verses for the annuals and the twaddle of the genial incapables who praised them in flabby reviews all these Pau exposed with ferocious honesty nor, though his writings are un-moral can they be called in any sense immoral pure in its unearthliness as Bryant's in its austerity in 1831 Pau had published three thin books of verse none of which had attracted notice although the latest contained the drafts of a few of his more perfect poems such as Israfele, The Valley of Unrest The City in the Sea and one of the two pieces inscribed to Helen it was his habit to touch and retouch his work until it grew under his more practiced hand into a shape that satisfied his vestidious taste hence the same poem frequently reappears in different stages of development in successive editions Pau was a subtle artist in the realm of the weird and the fantastic in his intellectual nature there was a strange conjunction an imagination as spiritual as Shelley's though unlike Shelley's haunted perpetually with the shapes of fear and the imagery of ruin with this an analytic power a scientific exactness and a mechanical ingenuity more casual and more mathematician than a poet he studied carefully the mechanism of his verse and experimented endlessly with verbal and musical effects such as repetition and monotone and the selection of words in which the consonants alliterated and the vowels varied in his philosophy of composition he described how his best known poem The Raven was systematically built upon a preconceived plan in which the number of lines was first determined and the word never more selected as a starting point no one who knows the mood in which poetry is composed will believe that this ingenious piece of dissection really describes the way in which the Raven was conceived and written or that any such deliberate and self-conscious process could originate the associations from which a true poem springs but it flattered Pau's pride of intellect to assert that his cooler reason had control not only over the execution of his poetry but over the very well head of thought and emotion some of his most successful stories like the gold bug, the mystery of Marie Rojet the Perlon letter and the murders in the room or were applications of this analytic faculty to the solution of puzzles such as the finding of buried treasure or of a lost document or the ferreting out of a mysterious crime after the publication of the gold bug he received from all parts of the country specimens of cipher writing which he delighted to work out others of his tales were clever pieces of mystification like hands fall the story of a journey to the moon experiments at giving verisimilitude to wild improbabilities by the skillful introduction of scientific details as in the facts of the case of Monsieur Valdemar and von Kemplen's discovery in his narratives of this kind Pau anticipated the detective novels of Gaborio and Wilkie Collins the scientific hoaxes of Jules Verne and though in a less degree the artfully worked up likeness to fact in Edward Everett Hale's Man Without a Country and similar fictions while Dickens Barnaby Rudge was publishing in parts Pau showed his skill as a plot hunter by publishing a paper in Graham's magazine in which the very tangled intrigue of the novel was correctly raviled and the finale predicted in advance in his union of imagination and analytic power Pau resembled Coleridge who if anyone was his teacher in poetry and criticism Pau's verse often reminds one of Christabel and the ancient Mariner still oftener of Kubla Khan like Coleridge too he indulged at times in the opium habit but in Pau the artist predominated over everything else he began not with sentiment or thought but with technique with melody and color tricks of language and effects of verse it is curious to study the growth of his style in his successive volumes of poetry at first these are metrical experiments and vague images original and with a fascinating suggestiveness but with so little meaning that some of his earlier pieces are hardly removed from nonsense gradually like distant music drawing nearer and nearer his poetry becomes fuller of imagination and of an inward significance without ever losing however its mysterious aloofness from the real world of the senses it was a part of Pau's literary creed formed upon his own practice and his own limitations but set forth with a great display of a priori reasoning in his essay on the poetic principle and elsewhere that pleasure and not instruction and the literal exhortation was the end of poetry that beauty and not truth or goodness was its means and furthermore that the pleasure which it gave should be indefinite about his own poetry there was always this indefiniteness his imagination dwelt in a strange country of dream a ghoul haunted region of weir out of space out of time filled with unsubstantial landscapes and peopled by spectral shapes and yet there is a wonderful hidden significance in this uncanny scenery the reader feels that the wild phantasmal imagery is in itself a kind of language and that it in some way expresses a brooding thought or passion the terror and despair of a lost soul sometimes there is an obvious allegory as in the haunted palace which is the parable of a ruined mind or in the raven the most popular of all Pau's poems originally published in the American wig review for February 1845 sometimes the meaning is more obscure but it is still a little loom which to most people is quite incomprehensible and yet to all readers of poetic feeling is among the most characteristic and therefore the most fascinating of its author's creations now and then as in the beautiful ballad Annabelle Lee and to one in Paradise the poet emerges into the light of common human feeling and speaks a more intelligible language but in general his poetry is not the poetry of the heart and its passion is not the passion of the flesh in Pau the thought of death is always near and of the shadowy borderland between death and life the play is the tragedy man and its hero the conqueror worm the prose tale Ligia in which these verses are inserted is one of the most powerful of all Pau's writings and its theme is the power of the will to overcome death in that singularly impressive poem The Sleeper the morbid horror which invests the tomb springs from the same source the materiality of Pau's imagination which refuses to let the soul go free from the body this quality explains why Pau's tales of the grotesque and arabesque 1840 are on a lower plane than Hawthorne's romances to which a few of them like William Wilson and the Man of the Crowd have some resemblance the former of these in particular is in Hawthorne's peculiar province the allegory of the conscience but in general the tragedy in Hawthorne is a spiritual one which Pau calls in the aid of material forces the passion of physical fear or of superstitious horror is that which his writings most frequently excite these tales represent various grades of the frightful and the ghastly from the mere bugaboo story like the black cat which makes children afraid to go in the dark up to the breathless terror of the casque of a monteado or the red death Pau's masterpiece in this kind is the fateful tale of the fall of the house of Usher with its solemn and magnificent close his prose at its best often recalls in its richly imaginative cast the manner of de Quincy in such passages as his dream fugue or Our Lady's Sorrow indescriptive pieces like the domain of Arnheim and the stories of adventure like the descent into the maelstrom and his longed sea-tail the narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym 1838 he displayed a realistic inventiveness almost equal to swifts or defos he was not without a mocking irony but a constructive humor and his attempts at the facetious were mostly failures Pau's magical creations were rootless flowers he took no hold upon the life about him and cared nothing for the public concerns of his country his poems and tales might have been written in vacuo for anything American in them perhaps for this reason in part his fame has been so cosmopolitan in France especially his writings have been favorites Charles Baudelaire the author of The Fleur de Mal and a French and his own impressive but unhealthy poetry shows evidence of Pau's influence the defect in Pau was in character a defect which will make itself felt in art as in life if he had had the sweet home-feeling of long fellow or the moral fervor of Whittier he might have been a greater poet than either if I could dwell where Israfelle has dwelled and he were I he might not sing so wildly well a mortal melody while a bolder note than this came from my lyre within the sky though Pau was a southerner if not by birth, at least by race and breeding there was nothing distinctly southern about his peculiar genius and in his wandering life he was associated as much with Philadelphia and New York as with Baltimore and Richmond the conditions which had made the southern colonies unfruitful in literary and educational works before the revolution continued to act down to the time of the Civil War Eli Whitney's invention of the cotton gin in the closing years of the 19th century gave extension to slavery making it profitable to cultivate the new staple by enormous gangs of field hands working under the whip of the overseer in large plantations slavery became henceforth a business speculation in the states furthest south and not as in old Virginia and Kentucky a comparatively mild domestic system the necessity of defending its peculiar institution against the attacks of a growing faction in the north compelled the south to throw all its intellectual strength into politics which for that matter is the natural occupation and excitement of a social aristocracy meanwhile immigration sought the free states and there was no middle class at the south the poor whites were ignorant and degraded there were people of education in the cities and on some of the plantations but there was no great educated class from which a literature could proceed in the culture of the south such as it was was becoming old fashioned and local as the section was isolated more and more from the rest of the union and from the enlightened public opinion of Europe by its reactionary prejudices and its sensitiveness on the subject of slavery nothing can be imagined more ridiculously provincial than the sophomoreical editorials in the southern press just before the outbreak of the war or than the backward and ill-informed articles which passed for reviews in the poorly supported periodicals of the south in the general dearth of work of high and permanent value one or two southern authors may be mentioned but writings have at least done something to illustrate the life and scenery of their section when in 1833 the Baltimore Saturday visitor offered a prize of $100 for the best prose tale one of the committee who awarded the prize to Poe's first story the manuscript found in a bottle was John P. Kennedy a wig gentleman of Baltimore who afterward became secretary of the navy in Fillmore's administration the year before he had published Swallow Barn a series of agreeable sketches of country life in Virginia in 1835 and 1838 he published his two novels Horseshoe Robinson and Robb of the Bowl the former Astoria of the Revolutionary War in South Carolina the latter an historical tale of colonial Maryland these had sufficient success to warrant reprinting as late as 1852 but the most popular and voluminous of all southern writers of fiction was William Gilmore Sims a South Carolinian who died in 1870 he wrote over 30 novels mostly romances of revolutionary history southern life and wild adventure among the best of which were the Partisan 1835 and the YMSC Sims was an inferior Cooper with a difference his novels are good boys books but are crude and hasty in composition he was strongly southern in his sympathies though his newspaper the Charleston City Gazette took part against the Nellifiers his miscellaneous writings cultural histories and biographies political tracts addresses and critical papers contributed to southern magazines he also wrote numerous poems the most ambitious of which was Atlantis a Story of the Sea 1832 his poems have little value except as here and there illustrating local scenery and manners as in southern passages and pictures 1839 Mr. John Eston Cook's pleasant but not very strong Virginia comedians was perhaps in literary quality as southern novel produced before the Civil War when Poe came to New York the most conspicuous literary figure of the Metropolis with the possible exception of Bryant and Halleck was N. P. Willis one of the editors of the Evening Mirror upon which journal Poe was for a time engaged Willis had made a literary reputation when a student at Yale by his scripture poems written in smooth blank verse afterward he had edited the American Monthly in his native city of Boston and more recently he had published Pencilings By the Way 1835 pleasant record of European saunterings Inklings of Adventure 1836 a collection of dashing stories and sketches of American and foreign life and letters from Under a Bridge 1839 a series of charming rural letters from his country place at Oweego on the Susquehanna Willis's work always graceful and sparkling sometimes even brilliant though light and substance and jaunty had quickly raised him to the summit of popularity During the years from 1835 to 1850 he was the most successful American magazineist and even down to the day of his death in 1867 he retained his hold upon the attention of the fashionable public by his easy paragraphing and correspondence in the mirror and its successor the home journal which catered to the literary wants of the Beaumond Much of Willis's work was ephemeral though clever of its kind A few of his best tales and sketches such as F. Smith the ghost ball at Congress Hall Edith Lindsay and the lunatic Skate together with some of the letters from Under a Bridge are worthy of preservation not only as readable stories but as society studies of life at American watering places like Nahant and Saratoga and Boston Spa half a century ago A number of his simpler poems like Unseen Spirits Spring to M. from Abroad still retain a deserved place in collections and anthologies The senior editor of the mirror George P. Morris was once a very popular songwriter and his Woodman's Spare That Tree still survives Other residents of New York City who have written single famous pieces were Clement C. Moore a professor in the General Theological Seminary whose visit from St. Nicholas to us the night before Christmas etc is a favorite ballad in every nursery in the land No. Hoffman a novelist of reputation in his time but now remembered only as the author of the song Sparkling in Bright and the patriotic ballad of Monterey Robert H. Messenger a native of Boston but long resident in New York where he was a familiar figure in fashionable society who wrote Give Me the Old a fine ode with a choice Horatian flavor and William Allen Butler a lawyer and occasional writer whose capital satire of Nothing to Wear was published anonymously and had a great run of younger poets like Stoddard and Aldrich who formerly wrote for the mirror and who are still living and working in the maturity of their powers it is not within the limits and design of this sketch to speak but one of their contemporaries Byard Taylor who died American minister at Berlin in 1878 though a Pennsylvanian by birth and rearing may be reckoned among the literati of New York a farmer lad from Chester County who learned the printer's trade and printed a little volume of his juvenile verses in 1844 he came to New York shortly after with credentials from Dr. Griswold the editor of Grams and obtaining encouragement and aid from Willis Horace Greeley and others he set out to make the tour of Europe walking from town to town in Germany and getting employment now and then at his trade to help pay the expenses of the trip the story of these Wander Jahre he told in his views a foot 1846 this was the first of eleven books of travel written during the course of his life he was an inveterate nomad and his journeyings carried him to the remotest regions to California, India China, Japan and the Isles of the Sea to Central Africa and the Sudan Palestine, Egypt Iceland and the byways of Europe his headquarters at home were in New York where he did literary work for the Tribune he was a rapid and incessant worker throwing off many volumes of verse and prose fiction, essays, sketches translations and criticism mainly contributed in the first instance to the magazines his versatility was very marked and his poetry ranged from rhymes of travel 1848 and poems of the Orient 1854 to idols and home ballads of Pennsylvania life like the Quaker widow and the old Pennsylvania farmer and on the other side to ambitious and somewhat mystical poems like the Mask of the Gods 1872, written in four days and dramatic experiments like the Prophet 1874 and Prince Decalion 1878 he was a man of buoyant and eager nature with a great appetite for new experience a remarkable memory a talent for learning languages and a two great readiness to take the hue of his favorite books from his facility his openness to external impressions of scenery and costume and his habit of turning these at once into the service of his pen it results that there is something newspapery and superficial about most of his prose it is reporters work though reporting of a high order his poetry too though full of glow and picturesqueness is largely imitative suggesting Tennyson not unfrequently but more often Shelley his spirited Bedouin song for example has an echo of Shelley's lines to an Indian air from the desert I come to thee on a stallion shod with fire and the winds are left behind in the speed of my desire under thy window I stand in the midnight here's my cry I love thee, I love but thee with a love that shall not die the dangerous quickness with which he caught the manner of other poets made him an admirable paradist and translator his echo club 1876 contains some of the best travesties in the tongue and his great translation of Goethe's Faust 1870 to 71 with its wonderfully close reproduction of the original meters is one of the glories of American literature all in all Taylor may indicatingly be put first among our poets of the second generation the generation succeeding that of Longfellow and Lowell although the lack in him of original genius self determined to a peculiar sphere or the want of an inward fixity and concentration to resist the rich tumult of outward impressions has made him less significant in the history of our literary thought than some other writers less generously endowed Taylor's novels had the qualities of his verse they were profuse, eloquent and faulty John Godfrey's Fortune 1864 gave a picture of Bohemian life in New York Hannah Thurston 1863 and the story of Kennet 1866 introduced many incidents and persons from the old Quaker life of rural Pennsylvania as Taylor remembered it in his boyhood the former was like Hawthorne's Blythe Dale romance a satire on fanatics and reformers and a tarot in his a nobly conceived character though drawn with some exaggeration the story of Kennet which is largely autobiographic has a greater freshness and reality than the others and is full of personal recollections in these novels as in his short stories Taylor's pictorial skill is greater on the whole than his power of creating characters or inventing plots literature in the west now began to have an existence another young poet from Chester County, Pennsylvania namely Thomas Buchanan Reed went to Cincinnati and not to New York to study sculpture and painting about 1837 and one of his best known poems Pawn's Maximus was written on the occasion of the opening of the suspension bridge across the Ohio Reed came east to be sure in 1841 and spent many years in our seaboard cities and in Italy he was distinctly a minor poet but some of his Pennsylvania pastoral like the deserted road have a natural sweetness and his luxurious drifting which combines the methods of painting and poetry is justly popular Sheridan's ride and perhaps his most current piece is a rather forced production and has been over praised the two Ohio sister poets Alice and Phoebe Carey were attracted to New York in 1850 as soon as their literary success seemed assured they made that city their home for the remainder of their lives Poe praised Alice Carey's pictures of memory and Phoebe's nearer home has become a favorite hymn there is nothing peculiarly western about the verse of the Carey sisters it is the poetry of sentiment, memory and domestic affection entirely feminine rather tame and diffuse as a whole but tender and sweet cherished by many good women and dear to simple hearts a stronger smack of the soil is in the negro melodies like Uncle Ned Oh Susanna old folks at home way down south Nelly was a lady my old Kentucky home etc which were the work not of any southern poet but of Stephen C. Foster a native of Allegheny, Pennsylvania St. Sinadi and Pittsburgh he composed the words and music of these and many others of a similar kind during the years 1847 to 1861 taken together they form the most original and vital addition which this country has made to the salmody of the world and entitled Foster to the first rank among American songwriters as Foster's plaintive melodies carried the pathos and humor of the plantation all over the land so Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe's written in 1852 brought home to millions of readers the sufferings of the negroes in the black belt of the cotton growing states this is the most popular novel ever written in America hundreds of thousands of copies were sold in this country and in England and some 40 translations were made into foreign tongues in its dramatized form it still keeps the stage and the statistics of circulating libraries show that even now it is in greater demand than any other single book or any other literary agency to rouse the public conscience to a sense of the shame and horror of slavery more even than Garrison's Liberator more than the indignant poems of Whittier and Lowell or the orations of Sumner and Phillips it presented the thing concretely and dramatically and in particular it made the odious fugitive slave law forever impossible to enforce it was useless for the defenders of slavery to protest that the picture was exaggerated and that overseers likely agree were the exception the system under which such brutalities could happen and did sometimes happen was doomed it is now easy to point out defects of taste and art in this masterpiece to show that the tone is occasionally melodramatic that some of the characters are conventional and that the literary execution is in parts feeble and in others course in spite of all it remains true that Uncle Tom's Cabin is a great book the work of genius seizing instinctively upon its opportunity and uttering the thought of the time with the power that thrilled the heart of the nation and of the world Mrs. Stowe never repeated her first success some of her novels of New England life such as The Minister's Wooing, 1859 and The Pearl of Ores Island, 1862 have a mild kind of interest and contain truthful portraiture of provincial ways and traits while later fictions of a domestic type like Pink and White Tyranny and My Wife and I are really beneath criticism there were other Connecticut writers contemporary with Mrs. Stowe L. H. Sigourney for example a Hartford poetess formerly known as the Hemons of America but now quite obsolete and J. G. Percival of New Haven a shy and eccentric scholar whose geological work was of value and whose memory is preserved by one or two of his simpler poems still in circulation such as Teceneca Lake and the Coral Grove another Hartford poet Brainerd, already spoken of as an early friend of Whittier died young leaving a few pieces his gift was spontaneous and genuine but had received little cultivation a much younger writer than either of these Donald G. Mitchell of New Haven has a more lasting place in our literature by virtue of his charmingly written reveries of a bachelor, 1850 and dream life, 1852 stories which sketch themselves out in a series of reminiscences and lightly connected scenes and which always appeal freshly to young men because they have that dreamy outlook upon life but upon the whole the most important contribution made by Connecticut in that generation to the literary stock of America was the Beecher family Lyman Beecher had been an influential preacher and theologian and a sturdy defender of orthodoxy against Boston Unitarianism of his numerous sons and daughters all more or less noted for intellectual vigor and independence the most eminent were Mrs. Stow and Henry Ward Beecher the great pulpit orator of Brooklyn Mr. Beecher was too busy a man to give more than his spare moments to general literature his sermons, lectures, and addresses were reported for the daily papers and printed in part in book form but these lose greatly when divorced from the large warm and benignant personality of the man his volumes made up of articles in the independent and the ledger such as the Star Papers 1855 and Eyes and Ears 1862 contain many delightful more so upon country life and similar topics they are hardly wrought with sufficient closeness and care to take a permanent place in letters like Willis's Ephemere they are excellent literary journalism but hardly literature we may close our retrospect of American literature before 1861 with a brief notice of one of the most striking literary phenomena of the time The Leaves of Grass of Walt Whitman published at Brooklyn in 1855 the author, born at West Hills Long Island in 1819 had been printer, school teacher, editor, and builder he had scribbled a good deal of poetry of the ordinary kind which attracted little attention but finding conventional rhymes and meters too cramping a vehicle for his needs of expression he discarded them for a kind of rhythmic chant of which the following is a fair specimen the invention was not altogether a new one the English translation of the Psalms of David and some of the Prophets the Poems of Ocean and some of Matthew Arnold's unrhymed pieces especially the Strayed Reveler have an irregular rhythm of this kind to say nothing of the old Anglo-Saxon poems like Beowulf and the scripture paraphrases attributed to Cademon but this species of Oratio Saluta carried to the lengths to which Whitman carried it had an air of novelty which was displeasing to some while to others, weary of the familiar measures and jingling rhymes, it was refreshing in its boldness and freedom there is no consenting estimate of this poet many think that his so-called poems are not poems at all but simply a bad variety of prose that there is nothing to him beyond a combination of affectation and indecency and that the Whitman cult is a passing fad of a few literary men and especially of a number of English critics like Rosetti, Swinburne, Buchanan, etc who, being determined to have something unmistakably American that is different from anything else in writings from this side of the water before they will acknowledge any originality in them have been misled into discovering in Whitman the poet of democracy others maintain that he is the greatest of American poets or indeed of all modern poets that he is cosmic or universal and that he has put an end forever to peeling rhymes and lines chopped up into metrical feet whether Whitman's poetry is formally poetry at all or merely the raw material of poetry the chaotic and amorous impression which it makes on readers of conservative tastes results from his effort to take up into his verse elements which poetry has usually left out the ugly, the earthy and even the disgusting the underside of things which he holds not to be prosaic when apprehended with a strong masculine joy in life and nature seen in all their aspects the lack of these elements in the conventional poets seems to him and his disciples like leaving out the salt from the ocean making poetry merely pretty and blinking whole classes of facts hence the naturalism and animalism of some of the divisions in Leaves of Grass particularly that entitled Children of Adam which gave great offence by its immodesty or its outspokenness Whitman's holds that nakedness is chased that all the functions of the body and healthy exercise are equally clean that all in fact are divine and that matter is as divine as spirit the effort to get everything into his poetry to speak out his thought just as it comes to him accounts too for his way of cataloging objects without selection his single expressions are often unsurpassed for descriptive beauty and truth he speaks of the vitrious pore of the full moon just tipped with blue of the lisp of the plane of the prairies where herds of buffalo make a crawling spread of the square miles but if there is any eternal distinction between poetry and prose the most liberal canons of the poetic art will never agree to accept lines like these and I remember putting plasters on the galls of his neck and ankles and he stayed with me a week before he was recuperated and passed north Whitman is the spokesman of democracy and of the future full of brotherliness and hope loving the warm gregarious pressure of the crowd and the touch of his comrades elbow in the ranks he liked the people multitudes of people the swarm of life beheld from a Broadway omnibus or a Brooklyn ferry boat the rowdy and the negro truck driver were closer to his sympathy than the gentleman and the scholar I loaf and invite my soul he writes I sound my barbaric yop over the roofs of the world his poem Walt Whitman frankly egotistic simply describes himself as a typical average man the same as any other man and therefore not individual but universal he has great tenderness and hardiness the good gray poet and during the civil war he devoted himself inevitably to the wounded soldiers in the Washington hospitals and experience which he is related in the dresser and elsewhere it is characteristic of his rough and ready camaraderie to use slang and newspaper English in his poetry to call himself Walt instead of Walter and to have his picture taken in a slow chat and with a flannel shirt open at the throat his decriers allege that he poses for effect that he is simply a backward Eddie in the tide and significant only as a temporary reaction against emotion like the row though in a different way but with all his mistakes in art there is a healthy very tumultuous pulse of life in his lyric utterance and a great sweep of imagination in his panoramic view of times and countries one likes to read him because he feels so good enjoys so fully the play of his senses and has such a lusty confidence in his own immortality and in the prospects of the human race stripped of verbiage and repetition his ideas are not many his indebtedness to the person who wrote an introduction to the leaves of grass is manifest he sings of man and not men and the individual differences of character sentiment and passion the dramatic elements of life find small place in his system it is too early to say what will be his final position in literary history but it is noteworthy that the democratic masses have not accepted him yet as their poet Whittier and Longfellow the poets of conscience and feeling are the darlings of the American people the admiration and the knowledge of Whitman are mostly esoteric confined to the literary class it is also not without significance as to the ultimate reception of his innovations in verse that he has numerous parodists but no imitators the tendency among our younger poets is not toward the abandonment of rhyme and meter but toward the introduction of new stanza forms and an increasing carefulness and finish in the technique of their art it is observable too that in his most inspired passages Whitman the old forms of verse to blank verse for example in the man a war bird thou who has slept all night upon the storm waking renewed on thy prodigious pinions etc and elsewhere not infrequently to dactylic hexameters and pentameters earth of shine and dark modeling the tide of the river far swooping elbowed earth rich apple blossomed earth indeed Whitman's most popular poem my captain written after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln differs with little inform from ordinary verse as a stanza of it will show my captain does not answer his lips are pale and still my father does not feel my arm he has no pulse or will the ship is anchored safe and sound its voyage closed and done from fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object one exult oh shores and ring oh bells but I with mournful tread walk the deck my captain lies fallen cold and dead this is from drum taps a volume of poems of the civil war Whitman has also written prose having much the same quality as his poetry democratic vistas memoranda of the civil war and more recently specimen days his residence of late years has been at Camden, New Jersey where a centennial edition of his writings was published in 1876 end of part two chapter six recording by Calinda in Lunaburg Germany on March 14th 2009