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HISTORY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE

BY REUBEN POST HALLECK, M.A. (YALE) AUTHOR OF "HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE"

[Illustration: THE RETURN OF RIP VAN WINKLE]

PREFACE

The wide use of the author's History of English Literature, the favor with which it has been received in all parts of the United States, and the number of earnest requests for a History of American Literature on the same plan, have led to the writing of this book. It has not appeared sooner because the author has followed his rule of making a careful first-hand study, not only of all the matter discussed, but also of a far greater amount, which, although it must be omitted from a condensed textbook, is, nevertheless, necessary as a background for judgment and selection.

The following chapters describe the greatest achievements in American literature from the earliest times until the present. Many pupils fail to obtain a clear idea of great American authors and literary movements because textbook writers and teachers ignore the element of truth in the old adage, "The half is greater than the whole," and dwell too much on minor authors and details, which could reasonably be expected to interest only a specialist. In the following pages especial attention has been paid, not only to the individual work of great authors, but also to literary movements, ideals, and animating principles, and to the relation of all these to English literature.

The author has further aimed to make this work both interesting and suggestive. He has endeavored to present the subject in a way that necessitates the comparison of authors and movements, and leads to stimulating thinking. He has tried to communicate enough of the spirit of our literature to make students eager for a first-hand acquaintance with it, to cause them to investigate for themselves this remarkable American record of spirituality, initiative, and democratic accomplishment. As a guide to such study, there have been placed at the end of each chapter Suggested Readings and still further hints, called Questions and Suggestions. In A Glance Backward, the author emphasizes in brief compass the most important truths that American literature teaches, truths that have resulted in raising the ideals of Americans and in arousing them to greater activity.

Any one who makes an original study of American literature will not be a mere apologist for it. He will marvel at the greatness of the moral lesson, at the fidelity of the presentation of the thought which has molded this nation, and at the peculiar aptness which its great authors have displayed in ministering to the special needs and aspirations of Americans. He will realize that the youth who stops with the indispensable study of English literature is not prepared for American citizenship, because our literature is needed to present the ideals of American life. There may be greater literatures, but none of them can possibly take the place of ours for citizens of this democracy.

The moral element, the most impressive quality in American literature, is continuous from the earliest colonial days until the present. Teachers should be careful not to obscure this quality. As the English scientist, John Tyndall, has shown in the case of Emerson, this moral stimulus is capable of adding immeasurably to the achievement of the young.

The temptation to slight the colonial period should be resisted. It has too often been the fashion to ask, Why should the student not begin the study of American literature with Washington Irving, the first author read for pure pleasure? The answer is that the student would not then comprehend the stages of growth of the new world ideals, that he would not view our later literature through the proper atmosphere, and that he would lack certain elements necessary for a sympathetic comprehension of the subject.

The seven years employed in the preparation of this work would have been insufficient, had not the author been assisted by his wife, to whom he is indebted not only for invaluable criticism but also for the direct authorship of some of the best matter in this book.

R. P. H.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I COLONIAL LITERATURE

CHAPTER II THE EMERGENCE OF A NATION

CHAPTER III THE NEW YORK GROUP

CHAPTER IV THE NEW ENGLAND GROUP

CHAPTER V SOUTHERN LITERATURE

CHAPTER VI WESTERN LITERATURE

CHAPTER VII THE EASTERN REALISTS A GLANCE BACKWARD

* * * * *

SUPPLEMENTARY LIST OF AUTHORS AND THEIR CHIEF WORKS

INDEX

[Transcriber's note:
Index not included in this electronic version.]

HISTORY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE

CHAPTER I

COLONIAL LITERATURE

RELATION TO ENGLISH LITERATURE.—The literature produced in that part of America known as the United States did not begin as an independent literature. The early colonists were Englishmen who brought with them their own language, books, and modes of thought. England had a world-famous literature before her sons established a permanent settlement across the Atlantic. Shakespeare had died four years before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth. When an American goes to Paris he can neither read the books, nor converse with the citizens, if he knows no language but his own. Let him cross to London, and he will find that, although more than three hundred years have elapsed since the first colonists came to America, he immediately feels at home, so far as the language and literature are concerned.

For nearly two hundred years after the first English settlements in America, the majority of the works read there were written by English authors. The hard struggle necessary to obtain a foothold in a wilderness is not favorable to the early development of a literature. Those who remained in England could not clear away the forest, till the soil, and conquer the Indians, but they could write the books and send them across the ocean. The early settlers were for the most part content to allow English authors to do this. For these reasons it would be surprising if early American literature could vie with that produced in England during the same period.

When Americans began to write in larger numbers, there was at first close adherence to English models. For a while it seemed as if American literature would be only a feeble imitation of these models, but a change finally came, as will be shown in later chapters. It is to be hoped, however, that American writers of the future will never cease to learn from Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Bunyan, and Wordsworth.

AMERICAN LITERATURE AN IMPORTANT STUDY.—We should not begin the study of American literature in an apologetic spirit. There should be no attempt to minimize the debt that America owes to English literature, nor to conceal the fact that American literature is young and has not had time to produce as many masterpieces as England gave to the world during a thousand years. However, it is now time also to record the fact that the literature of England gained something from America. Cultivated Englishmen to-day willingly admit that without a study of Cooper, Poe, and Hawthorne no one could give an adequate account of the landmarks of achievement in fiction, written in our common tongue. French critics have even gone so far as to canonize Poe. In a certain field he and Hawthorne occupy a unique place in the world's achievement. Again, men like Bret Harte and Mark Twain are not common in any literature. Foreigners have had American books translated into all the leading languages of the world. It is now more than one hundred years since Franklin, the great American philosopher of the practical, died, and yet several European nations reprint nearly every year some of his sayings, which continue to influence the masses. English critics, like John Addington Symonds, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Edward Dowden, have testified to the power of the democratic element in our literature and have given the dictum that it cannot be neglected.

Some of the reasons why American literature developed along original lines and thus conveyed a message of its own to the world are to be found in the changed environment and the varying problems and ideals of American life. Even more important than the changed ways of earning a living and the difference in climate, animals, and scenery were the struggles leading to the Revolutionary War, the formation and guidance of the Republic, and the Civil War. All these combined to give individuality to American thought and literature.

Taken as a whole, American literature has accomplished more than might reasonably have been expected. Its study is especially important for us, since the deeds associated with our birthplace must mean more to us than more remarkable achievements of men born under other skies. Our literature, even in its humble beginnings, contains a lesson that no American can afford to miss. Unless we know its ideals and moral aims and are swayed by them, we cannot keep our heritage.

WHY VIRGINIA WAS COLONIZED.—In 1607 the first permanent English colony within the present limits of the United States was planted at Jamestown in Virginia. The colony was founded for commercial reasons by the London Company, an organization formed to secure profits from colonization. The colonists and the company that furnished their ship and outfit expected large profits from the gold mines and the precious stones which were believed to await discovery. Of course, the adventurers were also influenced by the honor and the romantic interest which they thought would result from a successful settlement.

When the expedition sailed from England in December, 1606, Michael Drayton, an Elizabethan poet, wrote verses dedicated "To the Virginian Voyage." These stanzas show the reason for sending the colonizers to Virginia:—

"You brave heroic minds,
Worthy your country's name,
That honor still pursue,
Whilst loit'ring hinds
Lurk here at home with shame,
Go and subdue.
* * * * *
And cheerfully at sea,
Success you still entice,
To get the pearl and gold;
And ours to hold
Virginia,
Earth's only paradise."

The majority of the early Virginian colonists were unfit for their task. Contemporary accounts tell of the "many unruly gallants, packed hither by their friends to escape ill destinies." Beggars, vagabonds, indentured servants, kidnapped girls, even convicts, were sent to Jamestown and became the ancestors of some of the "poor white trash" of the South. After the execution of Charles I. in 1649, and the setting up of the Puritan Commonwealth, many of the royalists, or Cavaliers, as they were called, came to Virginia to escape the obnoxious Puritan rule. They became the ancestors of Presidents and statesmen, and of many of the aristocratic families of the South.

The ideals expressed by Captain John Smith, the leader and preserver of the Jamestown colony, are worthy to rank beside those of the colonizers of New England. Looking back at his achievement in Virginia, he wrote, "Then seeing we are not born for ourselves but each to help other … Seeing honor is our lives' ambition … and seeing by no means would we be abated of the dignities and glories of our predecessors; let us imitate their virtues to be worthily their successors."

WHY THE PURITANS COLONIZED NEW ENGLAND.—During the period from 1620 to 1640, large numbers of Englishmen migrated to that part of America now known as New England. These emigrants were not impelled by hope of wealth, or ease, or pleasure. They were called Puritans because they wished to purify the Church of England from what seemed to them great abuses; and the purpose of these men in emigrating to America was to lay the foundations of a state built upon their religious principles. These people came for an intangible something—liberty of conscience, a fuller life of the spirit—which has never commanded a price on any stock exchange in the world. They looked beyond

"Things done that took the eye and had the price;
O'er which, from level stand,
The low world laid its hand,
Found straightway to its mind, could value in a trice."

These Puritans had been more than one century in the making. We hear of them in the time of Wycliffe (1324-1384). Their religion was a constant command to put the unseen above the seen, the eternal above the temporal, to satisfy the aspiration of the spirit. James I. (reign, 1603-1625) told them that he would harry them out of the kingdom unless they conformed to the rites of the Established Church. His son and successor Charles I. (reign, 1625-1649) called to his aid Archbishop Laud (1573-1645), a bigoted official of that church. Laud hunted the dissenting clergy like wild beasts, threw them into prison, whipped them in the pillory, branded them, slit their nostrils, and mutilated their ears. JOHN COTTON, pastor of the church of Boston, England, was told that if he had been guilty only of an infraction of certain of the Ten Commandments, he might have been pardoned, but since his crime was Puritanism, he must suffer. He had great trouble in escaping on a ship bound for the New England Boston.

[Illustration: JOHN COTTON]

Professor Tyler says: "New England has perhaps never quite appreciated its great obligations to Archbishop Laud. It was his overmastering hate of nonconformity, it was the vigilance and vigor and consecrated cruelty with which he scoured his own diocese and afterward all England, and hunted down and hunted out the ministers who were committing the unpardonable sin of dissent, that conferred upon the principal colonies of New England their ablest and noblest men."

It should be noted that the Puritan colonization of New England took place in a comparatively brief space of time, during the twenty years from 1620 to 1640. Until 1640 persecution drove the Puritans to New England in multitudes, but in that year they suddenly stopped coming. "During the one hundred and twenty-five years following that date, more persons, it is supposed, went back from the New to the Old England than came from the Old England to the New," says Professor Tyler. The year 1640 marks the assembling of the Long Parliament, which finally brought to the block both Archbishop Laud (1645) and King Charles I. (1649), and chose the great Puritan, Oliver Cromwell, to lead the Commonwealth.

ELIZABETHAN TRAITS.—The leading men in the colonization of Virginia and New England were born in the reign of Queen Elizabeth (1558-1603), and they and their descendants showed on this side of the Atlantic those characteristics which made the Elizabethan age preeminent.

In the first place, the Elizabethans possessed initiative. This power consists, first, in having ideas, and secondly, in passing from the ideas to the suggested action. Some people merely dream. The Elizabethans dreamed glorious dreams, which they translated into action. They defeated the Spanish Armada; they circumnavigated the globe; they made it possible for Shakespeare's pen to mold the thought and to influence the actions of the world.

If we except those indentured servants and apprentices who came to America merely because others brought them, we shall find not only that the first colonists were born in an age distinguished for its initiative, but also that they came because they possessed this characteristic in a greater degree than those who remained behind. It was easier for the majority to stay with their friends; hence England was not depopulated. The few came, those who had sufficient initiative to cross three thousand miles of unknown sea, who had the power to dream dreams of a new commonwealth, and the will to embody those dreams in action.

In the second place, the Elizabethans were ingenious, that is, they were imaginative and resourceful. Impelled by the mighty forces of the Reformation and the Revival of Learning which the England of Elizabeth alone felt at one and the same time, the Elizabethans craved and obtained variety of experience, which kept the fountainhead of ingenuity filled. It is instructive to follow the lives of Elizabethans as different as Sir Philip Sidney, William Shakespeare, Sir Walter Raleigh, Captain John Smith, and John Winthrop, and to note the varied experiences of each. Yankee ingenuity had an Elizabethan ancestry. The hard conditions of the New World merely gave an opportunity to exercise to the utmost an ingenuity which the colonists brought with them.

In the third place, the Elizabethans were unusually democratic; that is, the different classes mingled together in a marked degree, more than in modern England, more even than in the United States to-day. This intermingling was due in part to increased travel, to the desire born of the New Learning to live as varied and as complete a life as possible, and to the absence of overspecialization among individuals. This chance for varied experience with all sorts and conditions of men enabled Shakespeare to speak to all humanity. All England was represented in his plays. When the Rev. Thomas Hooker, born in the last half of Elizabeth's reign, was made pastor at Hartford, Connecticut, he suggested to his flock a democratic form of government much like that under which we now live.

Let us remember that American life and literature owe their most interesting traits to these three Elizabethan qualities—initiative, ingenuity, and democracy. Let us not forget that the Cambridge University graduate, the cooper, cloth-maker, printer, and blacksmith had the initiative to set out for the New World, the ingenuity to deal with its varied exigencies, and the democratic spirit that enabled them to work side by side, no matter how diverse their former trades, modes of life, and social condition.

CAPTAIN JOHN SMITH, 1579-1631

[Illustration: JOHN SMITH]

The hero of the Jamestown colony, and its savior during the first two years, was Captain John Smith, born in Willoughby, Lincolnshire, in 1579, twenty-four years before the death of Elizabeth and thirty-seven before the death of Shakespeare. Smith was a man of Elizabethan stamp,—active, ingenious, imaginative, craving new experiences. While a mere boy, he could not stand the tediousness of ordinary life, and so betook himself to the forest where he could hunt and play knight.

In the first part of his young manhood he crossed the Channel, voyaged in the Mediterranean, fought the Turks, killing three of them in single combat, was taken prisoner and enslaved by the Tartars, killed his inhuman master, escaped into Russia, went thence through Europe to Africa, was in desperate naval battles, returned to England, sailing thence for Virginia, which he reached at the age of twenty-eight.

He soon became president of the Jamestown colony and labored strenuously for its preservation. The first product of his pen in America was A True Relation of Virginia, written in 1608, the year in which John Milton was born. The last work written by Smith in America is entitled: A Map of Virginia, with a Description of the Country, the Commodities, People, Government, and Religion. His description of the Indians shows his capacity for quickly noting their traits:—

"They are inconstant in everything, but what fear constraineth them to keep. Crafty, timorous, quick of apprehension and very ingenious. Some are of disposition fearful, some bold, most cautious, all savage. Generally covetous of copper, beads, and such like trash. They are soon moved to anger, and so malicious that they seldom forget an injury: they seldom steal one from another, lest their conjurors should reveal it, and so they be pursued and punished. That they are thus feared is certain, but that any can reveal their offences by conjuration I am doubtful."

Smith has often been accused of boasting, and some have said that he was guilty of great exaggeration or something worse, but it is certain that he repeatedly braved hardships, extreme dangers, and captivity among the Indians to provide food for the colony and to survey Virginia. After carefully editing Captain John Smith's Works in a volume of 983 pages, Professor Edwin Arber says: "For [our] own part, beginning with doubtfulness and wariness we have gradually come to the unhesitating conviction, not only of Smith's truthfulness, but also that, in regard to all personal matters, he systematically understates rather than exaggerates anything he did."

Although by far the greater part of Smith's literary work was done after he returned to England, yet his two booklets written in America entitle him to a place in colonial literature. He had the Elizabethan love of achievement, and he records his admiration for those whose 'pens writ what their swords did.' He was not an artist with his pen, but our early colonial literature is the richer for his rough narrative and for the description of Virginia and the Indians.

In one sense he gave the Indian to literature, and that is his greatest achievement in literary history. Who has not heard the story of his capture by the Indians, of his rescue from torture and death, by the beautiful Indian maiden, Pocahontas, of her risking her life to save him a second time from Indian treachery, of her bringing corn and preserving the colony from famine, of her visit to England in 1616, a few weeks after the death of Shakespeare, of her royal reception as a princess, the daughter of an Indian king, of Smith's meeting her again in London, where their romantic story aroused the admiration of the court and the citizens for the brown-eyed princess? It would be difficult to say how many tales of Indian adventure this romantic story of Pocahontas has suggested. It has the honor of being the first of its kind written in the English tongue.

Did Pocahontas actually rescue Captain Smith? In his account of his adventures, written in Virginia in 1608, he does not mention this rescue, but in his later writings he relates it as an actual occurrence. When Pocahontas visited London, this story was current, and there is no evidence that she denied it. Professor Arber says, "To deny the truth of the Pocahontas incident is to create more difficulties than are involved in its acceptance." But literature does not need to ask whether the story of Hamlet or of Pocahontas is true. If this unique story of American adventure is a product of Captain Smith's creative imagination, the literary critic must admit the captain's superior ability in producing a tale of such vitality. If the story is true, then our literature does well to remember whose pen made this truth one of the most persistent of our early romantic heritages. He is as well known for the story of Pocahontas as for all of his other achievements. The man who saved the Virginia colony and who first suggested a new field to the writer of American romance is rightly considered one of the most striking figures in our early history, even if he did return to England in less than three years and end his days there in 1631.

LITERARY ACTIVITY IN VIRGINIA COLONY

A POSSIBLE SUGGESTION FOR SHAKESPEARE'S TEMPEST.—WILLIAM STRACHEY, a contemporary of Shakespeare and secretary of the Virginian colony, wrote at Jamestown and sent to London in 1610 the manuscript of A True Repertory of the Wrack and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates, Kt., upon and from the Islands of the Bermudas. This is a story of shipwreck on the Bermudas and of escape in small boats. The book is memorable for the description of a storm at sea, and it is possible that it may even have furnished suggestions to Shakespeare for The Tempest. If so, it is interesting to compare these with what they produced in Shakespeare's mind. Strachey tells how "the sea swelled above the clouds and gave battle unto heaven." He speaks of "an apparition of a little round light, like a faint star, trembling and streaming along with a sparkling blaze, half the height upon the main mast, and shooting sometimes from shroud to shroud." Ariel says to Prospero:—

"I boarded the king's ship; now on the beak,
Now in the waist, the deck, in every cabin,
I flam'd amazement: Sometimes I'ld divide,
And burn in many places; on the topmast,
The yards, and bowsprit, would I flame distinctly,
Then meet and join."

Strachey voices the current belief that the Bermudas were harassed by tempests, devils, wicked spirits, and other fearful objects. Shakespeare has Ferdinand with fewer words intensify Strachey's picture:—

"Hell is empty,
And all the devils are here."

The possibility that incidents arising out of Virginian colonization may have turned Shakespeare's attention to "the still vex'd Bermoothes" and given him suggestions for one of his great plays lends added interest to Strachey's True Repertory. But, aside from Shakespeare, this has an interest of its own. It has the Anglo-Saxon touch in depicting the wrath of the sea, and it shows the character of the early American colonists who braved a wrath like this.

[Illustration: GEORGE SANDYS]

POETRY IN THE VIRGINIA COLONY.—GEORGE SANDYS (1577-1644), during his stay in the colony as its treasurer, translated ten books of Ovid's Metamorphoses, sometimes working by the light of a pine knot. This work is rescued from the class of mere translation by its literary art and imaginative interpretation, and it possesses for us an additional interest because of its nativity amid such surroundings. Two lines telling how Philemon

"Took down a flitch of bacon with a prung,
That long had in the smoky chimney hung,"

show that his environment aided him somewhat in the translation. He himself says of this version that it was "bred in the new world, whereof it cannot but participate, especially having wars and tumults to bring it to light, instead of the muses." He was read by both Dryden and Pope in their boyhood, and the form of their verse shows his influence.

The only original poem which merits our attention in the early Virginian colony was found soon after the Revolutionary War in a collection of manuscripts, known as the Burwell Papers. This poem is an elegy on the death of Nathaniel Bacon (1676), a young Virginian patriot and military hero, who resisted the despotic governor, Sir William Berkeley. It was popularly believed that Bacon's mysterious death was due to poison. An unknown friend wrote the elegy in defense of Bacon and his rebellion. These lines from that elegy show a strength unusual in colonial poetry:—

"Virginia's foes,
To whom, for secret crimes, just vengeance owes
Deserved plagues, dreading their just desert,
Corrupted death by Paracelsian art,
Him to destroy . . .
Our arms, though ne'er so strong,
Will want the aid of his commanding tongue,
Which conquered more than Caesar."

DESCRIPTIONS OF VIRGINIA.—ROBERT BEVERLY, clerk of the Council of Virginia, published in London in 1705 a History and Present State of Virginia. This is today a readable account of the colony and its people in the first part of the eighteenth century. This selection shows that in those early days Virginians were noted for what has come to be known as southern hospitality:—

"The inhabitants are very courteous to travellers, who need no other recommendation, but the being human creatures. A stranger has no more to do, but to inquire upon the road where any gentleman or good housekeeper lives, and there he may depend upon being received with hospitality. This good nature is so general among their people, that the gentry, when they go abroad, order their principal servant to entertain all visitors with everything the plantation affords. And the poor planters who have but one bed, will very often sit up, or lie upon a form or couch all night, to make room for a weary traveller to repose himself after his journey."

[Illustration: WILLIAM BYRD]

COLONEL WILLIAM BYRD (1674-1744), a wealthy Virginian, wrote a History of the Dividing Line run in the Year 1728. He was commissioned by the Virginian colony to run a line between it and North Carolina. This book is a record of personal experiences, and is as interesting as its title is forbidding. This selection describes the Dismal Swamp, through which the line ran:—

"Since the surveyors had entered the Dismal they had laid eyes on no living creature; neither bird nor beast, insect nor reptile came in view. Doubtless the eternal shade that broods over this mighty bog and hinders the sunbeams from blessing the ground, makes it an uncomfortable habitation for anything that has life. Not so much as a Zealand frog could endure so aguish a situation. It had one beauty, however, that delighted the eye, though at the expense of all the other senses: the moisture of the soil preserves a continual verdure, and makes every plant an evergreen, but at the same time the foul damps ascend without ceasing, corrupt the air, and render it unfit for respiration. Not even a turkey buzzard will venture to fly over it, no more than the Italian vultures will fly over the filthy lake Avernus or the birds in the Holy Land over the salt sea where Sodom and Gomorrah formerly stood.

"In these sad circumstances the kindest thing we could do for our suffering friends was to give them a place in the Litany. Our chaplain for his part did his office and rubbed us up with a seasonable sermon. This was quite a new thing to our brethren of North Carolina, who live in a climate where no clergyman can breathe, any more than spiders in Ireland."

These two selections show that American literature, even before the Revolution, came to be something more than an imitation of English literature. They are the product of our soil, and no critic could say that they might as well have been written in London as in Virginia. They also show how much eighteenth-century prose had improved in form. Even in England, modern prose may almost be said to begin with John Dryden, who died at the beginning of the eighteenth century. In addition to improvement in form, we may note the appearance of a new quality—humor. Our earliest writers have few traces of humor because colonization was a serious life and death affair to them.

DIFFERENT LINES OF DEVELOPMENT OF VIRGINIA AND NEW ENGLAND.—As we now go back more than a hundred years to the founding of the Plymouth colony in 1620, we may note that Virginia and New England developed along different lines. We shall find more dwellers in towns, more democracy and mingling of all classes, more popular education, and more literature in New England. The ruling classes of Virginia were mostly descendants of the Cavaliers who had sympathized with monarchy, while the Puritans had fought the Stuart kings and had approved a Commonwealth. In Virginia a wealthy class of landed gentry came to be an increasing power in the political history of the country. The ancestors of George Washington and many others who did inestimable service to the nation were among this class. It was long the fashion for this aristocracy to send their children to England to be educated, while the Puritans trained theirs at home.

[Illustration: EARLY PRINTING PRESS]

New England started a printing press, and was printing books by 1640. In 1671 Sir William Berkeley, governor of Virginia, wrote, "I thank God there are no free schools, nor printing, and I hope we shall not have these hundred years; for learning has brought disobedience and heresy and sects into the world, and printing has developed them."

Producers of literature need the stimulus of town life. The South was chiefly agricultural. The plantations were large, and the people lived in far greater isolation than in New England, where not only the town, but more especially the church, developed a close social unit.

One other reason served to make it difficult for a poet of the plowman type, like Robert Burns, or for an author from the general working class, like Benjamin Franklin, to arise in the South. Labor was thought degrading, and the laborer did not find the same chance as at the North to learn from close association with the intelligent class.

The reason for this is given by Colonel William Byrd, from whom we have quoted in the preceding section. He wrote in 1736 of the leading men of the South:—

"They import so many negroes hither, that I fear this Colony will some time or other be confirmed by the name of New Guinea. I am sensible of many bad consequences of multiplying these Ethiopians amongst us. They blow up the pride and ruin the industry of our white people, who seeing a rank of poor creatures below them, detest work, for fear it should make them look like slaves."

WILLIAM BRADFORD, 1590-1657

William Bradford was born in 1590 in the Pilgrim district of England, in the Yorkshire village of Austerfield, two miles north of Scrooby. While a child, he attended the religious meetings of the Puritans. At the age of eighteen he gave up a good position in the post service of England, and crossed to Holland to escape religious persecution. His History of Plymouth Plantation is not a record of the Puritans as a whole, but only of that branch known as the Pilgrims, who left England for Holland in 1607 and 1608, and who, after remaining there for nearly twelve years, had the initiative to be the first of their band to come to the New World, and to settle at Plymouth in 1620.

For more than thirty years he was governor of the Plymouth colony, and he managed its affairs with the discretion of a Washington and the zeal of a Cromwell. His History tells the story of the Pilgrim Fathers from the time of the formation of their two congregations in England, until 1647.

[Illustration: FACSIMILE OF FIRST PARAGRAPH OF BRADFORD'S "HISTORY OF
PLYMOUTH PLANTATION">[

In 1897 the United States for the first time came into possession of the manuscript of this famous History of Plymouth Plantation, which had in some mysterious manner been taken from Boston in colonial times and had found its way into the library of the Lord Bishop of London. Few of the English seem to have read it. Even its custodian miscalled it The Log of the Mayflower, although after the ship finally cleared from England, only five incidents of the voyage are briefly mentioned: the death of a young seaman who cursed the Pilgrims on the voyage and made sport of their misery; the cracking of one of the main beams of the ship; the washing overboard in a storm of a good young man who was providentially saved; the death of a servant; and the sight of Cape Cod. On petition, the Lord Bishop of London generously gave this manuscript of 270 pages to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. In a speech at the time of its formal reception, Senator Hoar eloquently summed up the subject matter of the volume as follows:—

"I do not think many Americans will gaze upon it without a little trembling of the lips and a little gathering of mist in the eyes, as they think of the story of suffering, of sorrow, of peril, of exile, of death, and of lofty triumph which that book tells,—which the hand of the great leader and founder of America has traced on those pages. There is nothing like it in human annals since the story of Bethlehem. These Englishmen and English women going out from their homes in beautiful Lincoln and York, wife separated from husband and mother from child in that hurried embarkation for Holland, pursued to the beach by English horsemen; the thirteen years of exile; the life at Amsterdam, 'in alley foul and lane obscure'; the dwelling at Leyden; the embarkation at Delfthaven; the farewell of Robinson; the terrible voyage across the Atlantic; the compact in the harbor; the landing on the rock; the dreadful first winter; the death roll of more than half the number; the days of suffering and of famine; the wakeful night, listening for the yell of wild beast and the war whoop of the savage; the building of the State on those sure foundations which no wave or tempest has ever shaken; the breaking of the new light; the dawning of the new day; the beginning of the new life; the enjoyment of peace with liberty,—of all these things this is the original record by the hand of our beloved father and founder."

In addition to giving matter of unique historical importance, Bradford entertains his readers with an account of Squanto, the Pilgrims' tame Indian, of Miles Standish capturing the "lord of misrule" at Merrymount, and of the failure of an experiment in tilling the soil in common. Bradford says that there was immediate improvement when each family received the full returns from working its own individual plot of ground. He thus philosophizes about this social experiment of the Pilgrims:—

"The experience that was had in this common course and condition, tried sundry years, and that amongst godly and sober men, may well evince the vanity of that conceit of Plato's and other ancients, applauded by some of later times;——that the taking away of property and bringing in community into a common wealth would make them happy and flourishing…. Let none object this is men's corruption, and nothing to the course itself. I answer, seeing all men have this corruption in them, God in his wisdom saw another course fitter for them."

America need not be ashamed of either the form or the subject matter of her early colonial prose in comparison with that produced in England at the same time.

JOHN WINTHROP, 1588-1649

[Illustration: JOHN WINTHROP]

On March 29, 1630, John Winthrop made the first entry in his Journal on board the ship Arbella, before she left the Isle of Wight for Massachusetts Bay. This Journal was to continue until a few months before his death in 1649, and was in after times to receive the dignified name of History of New England, although it might more properly still be called his Journal, as its latest editor does indeed style it.

John Winthrop was born in the County of Suffolk, England, in 1588, the year of the defeat of the Spanish Armada. He was a wealthy, well-educated Puritan, the owner of broad estates. As he paced the deck of the Arbella, the night before he sailed for Massachusetts, he knew that he was leaving comfort, home, friends, position, all for liberty of conscience. Few men have ever voluntarily abandoned more than Winthrop, or clung more tenaciously to their ideals.

After a voyage lasting more than two months, he settled with a large number of Puritans on the site of modern Boston. For the principal part of the time from his arrival in 1630 until his death in 1649, he served as governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Not many civil leaders of any age have shown more sagacity, patriotism, and tireless devotion to duty than John Winthrop.

His Journal is a record of contemporaneous events from 1630 to 1648. The early part of this work might with some justice have been called the Log of the Arbella.

[Illustration: FACSIMILE OF BEGINNING OF MS. OF WINTHROP'S "JOURNAL">[

TRANSLITERATION OF FACSIMILE OF WINTHROP'S "JOURNAL"

"ANNO DOMINI 1630, MARCH 29, MONDAY. "EASTER MONDAY.

"Riding at the Cowes, near the Isle of Wight, in the Arbella, a ship of 350 tons, whereof Capt. Peter Milborne was master, being manned with 52 seamen, and 28 pieces of ordnance, (the wind coming to the N. by W. the evening before,) in the morning there came aboard us Mr. Cradock, the late governor, and the masters of his 2 ships, Capt. John Lowe, master of the Ambrose, and Mr. Nicholas Hurlston, master of the Jewel, and Mr. Thomas Beecher, master of the Talbot."

The entry for Monday, April 12, 1630, is:—

"The wind more large to the N. a stiff gale, with fair weather. In the afternoon less wind, and our people began to grow well again. Our children and others, that were sick and lay groaning in the cabins, we fetched out, and having stretched a rope from the steerage to the main-mast, we made them stand, some of one side and some of the other, and sway it up and down till they were warm, and by this means they soon grew well and merry."

The following entry for June 5, 1644, reflects an interesting side light on the government of Harvard, our first American college:—

"Two of our ministers' sons, being students in the college, robbed two dwelling houses in the night of some fifteen pounds. Being found out, they were ordered by the governors of the college to be there whipped, which was performed by the president himself—yet they were about twenty years of age; and after they were brought into the court and ordered to twofold satisfaction, or to serve so long for it. We had yet no particular punishment for burglary."

Another entry for 1644 tells of one William Franklin, condemned for causing the death of his apprentice:—

"The case was this. He had taken to apprentice one Nathaniel Sewell, one of those children sent over the last year for the country; the boy had the scurvy and was withal very noisome, and otherwise ill disposed. His master used him with continual rigour and unmerciful correction, and exposed him many times to much cold and wet in the winter season, and used divers acts of rigour towards him, as hanging him in the chimney, etc., and the boy being very poor and weak, he tied him upon an horse and so brought him (sometimes sitting and sometimes hanging down) to Boston, being five miles off, to the magistrates, and by the way the boy calling much for water, would give him none, though he came close by it, so as the boy was near dead when he came to Boston, and died within a few hours after."

Winthrop relates how Franklin appealed the case when he was found guilty, and how the Puritans inflicted the death penalty on him after searching the Bible for a rule on which to base their decision. The most noticeable qualities of this terrible story are its simplicity, its repression, its lack of striving after effect. Winthrop, Bradford, and Bunyan had learned from the 1611 version of the Bible to be content to present any situation as simply as possible and to rely on the facts themselves to secure the effect.

Winthrop's finest piece of prose, Concerning Liberty, appears in an entry for the year 1645. He defines liberty as the power "to do that which is good, just, and honest. This liberty you are to stand for, with the hazard, not only of your goods, but of your lives, if need be." Winthrop saw clearly what many since his day have failed to see, that a government conducted by the people could not endure, if liberty meant more than this.

Winthrop's Journal records almost anything which seemed important to the colonists. Thus, he tells about storms, fires, peculiar deaths of animals, crimes, trials, Indians, labor troubles, arrival of ships, trading expeditions, troubles with England about the charter, politics, church matters, events that would point a moral, like the selfish refusal of the authorities to loan a quantity of gunpowder to the Plymouth colony and the subsequent destruction of that same powder by an explosion, or the drowning of a child in the well while the parents were visiting on Sunday. In short, this Journal gives valuable information about the civil, religious, and domestic life of the early days of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The art of modern prose writing was known neither in England nor in America in Winthrop's time. The wonder is that he told the story of this colony in such good form and that he still holds the interest of the reader so well.

THE RELIGIOUS IDEAL

William Bradford and John Winthrop were governors of two religious commonwealths. We must not forget that the Puritans came to America to secure a higher form of spiritual life. In the reign of Elizabeth, it was thought that the Revival of Learning would cure all ills and unlock the gates of happiness. This hope had met with disappointment. Then Puritanism came, and ushered in a new era of spiritual aspiration for something better, nobler, and more satisfying than mere intellectual attainments or wealth or earthly power had been able to secure.

The Puritans chose the Bible as the guidebook to their Promised Land. The long sermons to which they listened were chiefly biblical expositions. The Puritans considered the saving of the soul the most important matter, and they neglected whatever form of culture did not directly tend toward that result. They thought that entertaining reading and other forms of amusement were contrivances of the devil to turn the soul's attention away from the Bible. Even beauty and art were considered handmaids of the Evil One. The Bible was read, reread, and constantly studied, and it took the place of secular poetry and prose.

The New England Puritan believed in the theology of John Calvin, who died in 1564. His creed, known as Calvinism, emphasized the importance of the individual, of life's continuous moral struggle, which would land each soul in heaven or hell for all eternity. In the New England Primer, the children were taught the first article of belief, as they learned the letter A:—

[Illustration: LETTER "A" IN NEW ENGLAND PRIMER">[

"In Adam's fall,
We sinned all."

Calvinism stressed the doctrine of foreordination, that certain ones, "the elect," had been foreordained to be saved. THOMAS SHEPHARD (1605-1649), one of the great Puritan clergy, fixed the mathematical ratio of the damned to the elect as "a thousand to one." On the physical side, scientists have pointed out a close correspondence between Calvin's creed and the theory of evolution, which emphasizes the desperate struggle resulting from the survival of the fittest. The "fittest" are the "elect"; those who perish in the contest, the "damned." In the evolutionary struggle, only the few survive, while untold numbers of the unfit, no matter whether seeds of plants, eggs of fish, human beings, or any other form of life, go to the wall.

In spite of the apparent contradiction between free will and foreordination, each individual felt himself fully responsible for the saving of his soul. A firm belief in this tremendous responsibility made each one rise the stronger to meet the other responsibilities of life. Civil responsibility seemed easier to one reared in this school. The initiative bequeathed by Elizabethan times was increased by the Puritans' religion.

Although there were probably as many university men in proportion to the population in early colonial Massachusetts as in England, the strength and direction of their religious ideals helped to turn their energy into activities outside the field of pure literature. In course of time, however, Nathaniel Hawthorne appeared to give lasting literary expression to this life.

THE NEW ENGLAND CLERGY.—The clergy occupied a leading place in both the civil and religious life of New England. They were men of energy and ability, who could lead their congregations to Holland or to the wilds of New England. For the purpose in hand the world has never seen superior leaders. Many of them were graduates of Cambridge University, England. Their great authority was based on character, education, and natural ability. A contemporary historian said of John Cotton, who came as pastor from the old to the new Boston in 1633, that whatever he "delivered in the pulpit was soon put into an order of court … or set up as a practice in the church."

The sermons, from two to four hours long, took the place of magazines, newspapers, and modern musical and theatrical entertainments. The church members were accustomed to hard thinking and they enjoyed it as a mental exercise. Their minds had not been rendered flabby by such a diet of miscellaneous trash or sensational matter as confronts modern readers. Many of the congregation went with notebooks to record the different heads and the most striking thoughts in the sermon, such, for instance, as the following on the dangers of idleness:—

"Whilst the stream keeps running, it keeps clear; but let it stand still, it breeds frogs and toads and all manner of filth. So while you keep going, you keep clear."

The sermons were often doctrinal, metaphysical, and extremely dry, but it is a mistake to conclude that the clergy did not speak on topics of current interest. Winthrop in his Journal for 1639 relates how the Rev. John Cotton discussed whether a certain shopkeeper, who had been arraigned before the court for extortion, for having taken "in some small things, above two for one," was guilty of sin and should be excommunicated from the church, or only publicly admonished. Cotton prescribed admonition and he laid down a code of ethics for the guidance of sellers.

With the exception of Roger Williams (1604?-1683), who had the modern point of view in insisting on complete "soul liberty," on the right of every man to think as he pleased on matters of religion, the Puritan clergy were not tolerant of other forms of worship. They said that they came to New England in order to worship God as they pleased. They never made the slightest pretense of establishing a commonwealth where another could worship as he pleased, because they feared that such a privilege might lead to a return of the persecution from which they had fled. If those came who thought differently about religion, they were told that there was sufficient room elsewhere, in Rhode Island, for instance, whither Roger Williams went after he was banished from Salem. The history of the Puritan clergy would have been more pleasing had they been more tolerant, less narrow, more modern, like Roger Williams. Yet perhaps it is best not to complain overmuch of the strange and somewhat repellent architecture of the bridge which bore us over the stream dividing the desert of royal and ecclesiastical tyranny from the Promised Land of our Republic. Let us not forget that the clergy insisted on popular education; that wherever there was a clergyman, there was almost certain to be a school, even if he had to teach it himself, and that the clergy generally spoke and acted as if they would rather be "free among the dead than slaves among the living."

POETRY

The trend of Puritan theology and the hard conditions of life did not encourage the production of poetry. The Puritans even wondered if singing in church was not an exercise which turned the mind from God. The Rev. John Cotton investigated the question carefully under four main heads and six subheads, and he cited scriptural authority to show that Paul and Silas (Acts, xvi., 25) had sung a Psalm in the prison. Cotton therefore concluded that the Psalms might be sung in church.

[Illustration: FACSIMILE OF TITLE-PAGE TO "BAY PSALM BOOK">[

BAY PSALM BOOK.—"The divines in the country" joined to translate "into English metre" the whole book of Psalms from the original Hebrew, and they probably made the worst metrical translation in existence. In their preface to this work, known as the Bay Psalm Book (1640), the first book of verse printed in the British American colonies, they explained that they did not strive for a more poetic translation because "God's altar needs not our polishings." The following verses from Psalm cxxxvii. are a sample of the so-called metrical translation which the Puritans sang:—

"1. The rivers on of Babilon
there-when wee did sit downe:
yea even then wee mourned, when
wee remembred Sion.

"2. Our Harps wee did it hang amid,
upon the willow tree.

"3. Because there they that us away
led in captivitee,
Requir'd of us a song, & thus
askt mirth: us waste who laid,
sing us among a Sion's song,
unto us then they said."

MICHAEL WIGGLESWORTH (1631-1705).—This Harvard graduate and Puritan preacher published in 1662 a poem setting forth some of the tenets of Calvinistic theology. This poem, entitled The Day of Doom, or a Poetical Description of the Great and Last Judgment, had the largest circulation of any colonial poem. The following lines represent a throng of infants at the left hand of the final Judge, pleading against the sentence of infant damnation:—

"'Not we, but he ate of the tree,
whose fruit was interdicted;
Yet on us all of his sad fall
the punishment's inflicted.
How could we sin that had not been,
or how is his sin our,
Without consent, which to prevent
we never had the pow'r?'"

Wigglesworth represents the Almighty as replying:—

"'You sinners are, and such a share
as sinners may expect;
Such you shall have, for I do save
none but mine own Elect.
Yet to compare your sin with their
who liv'd a longer time,
I do confess yours is much less,
though every sin's a crime.

"'A crime it is, therefore in bliss
you may not hope to dwell;
But unto you I shall allow
the easiest room in Hell.'"

When we read verse like this, we realize how fortunate the Puritanism of Old England was to have one great poet schooled in the love of both morality and beauty. John Milton's poetry shows not only his sublimity and high ideals, but also his admiration for beauty, music, and art. Wigglesworth's verse is inferior to much of the ballad doggerel, but it has a swing and a directness fitted to catch the popular ear and to lodge in the memory. While some of his work seems humorous to us, it would not have made that impression on the early Puritans. At the same time, we must not rely on verse like this for our understanding of their outlook on life and death. Beside Wigglesworth's lines we should place the epitaph, "Reserved for a Glorious Resurrection," composed by the great orthodox Puritan clergyman, Cotton Mather (p. 46), for his own infant, which died unbaptized when four days old. It is well to remember that both the Puritans and their clergy had a quiet way of believing that God had reserved to himself the final interpretation of his own word.

ANNE BRADSTREET (1612-1672).—Colonial New England's best poet, or "The Tenth Muse," as she was called by her friends, was a daughter of the Puritan governor, Thomas Dudley, and became the wife of another Puritan governor, Simon Bradstreet, with whom she came to New England in 1630. Although she was born before the death of Shakespeare, she seems never to have studied the works of that great dramatist. Her models were what Milton called the "fantastics," a school of poets who mistook for manifestations of poetic power, far-fetched and strained metaphors, oddities of expression, remote comparisons, conceits, and strange groupings of thought. She had especially studied Sylvester's paraphrase of The Divine Weeks and Works of the French poet Du Bartas, and probably also the works of poets like George Herbert (1593-1633), of the English fantastic school. This paraphrase of Du Bartas was published in a folio of 1215 pages, a few years before Mrs. Bradstreet came to America. This book shows the taste which prevailed in England in the latter part of the first third of the seventeenth century, before Milton came into the ascendency. The fantastic comparison between the "Spirit Eternal," brooding upon chaos, and a hen, is shown in these lines from Du Bartas:—

"Or as a Hen that fain would hatch a brood
(Some of her own, some of adoptive blood)
Sits close thereon, and with her lively heat,
Of yellow-white balls, doth live birds beget:
Even in such sort seemed the Spirit Eternal
To brood upon this Gulf with care paternal."

A contemporary critic thought that he was giving her early work high praise when he called her "a right Du Bartas girl." One of her early poems is The Four Elements, where Fire, Air, Earth, and Water

"… did contest
Which was the strongest, noblest, and the best,
Who was of greatest use and mightiest force."

Such a debate could never be decided, but the subject was well suited to the fantastic school of poets because it afforded an opportunity for much ingenuity of argument and for far-fetched comparisons, which led nowhere.

Late in life, in her poem, Contemplations, she wrote some genuine poetry, little marred by imitation of the fantastic school. Spenser seems to have become her master in later years. No one without genuine poetic ability could have written such lines as:—

"I heard the merry grasshopper then sing,
The black-clad cricket bear a second part,
They kept one tune, and played on the same string,
Seeming to glory in their little art."

These lines show both poetic ease and power:—

"The mariner that on smooth waves doth glide
Sings merrily, and steers his bark with ease,
As if he had command of wind and tide,
And now become great master of the seas."

The comparative excellence of her work in such an atmosphere and amid the domestic cares incident to rearing eight children is remarkable.

NATHANIEL WARD, 1578?-1652

[Illustration: FACSIMILE OF TITLE PAGE TO WARD'S
"SIMPLE COBBLER OF AGAWAM">[

In 1647 Nathaniel Ward, who had been educated for the law, but who afterward became a clergyman, published a strange work known as The Simple Cobbler of Agawam, in America "willing," as the sub-title continues, "to help mend his native country, lamentably tattered, both in the upper leather and sole, with all the honest stitches he can take." He had been assistant pastor at Agawam (Ipswich) until ill health caused him to resign. He then busied himself in compiling a code of laws and in other writing before he returned to England in 1647. The following two sentences from his unique book show two points of the religious faith of the Puritans: (1) the belief in a personal devil always actively seeking the destruction of mankind, and (2) the assumption that the vitals of the "elect" are safe from the mortal sting of sin.

"Satan is now in his passions, he feels his passion approaching, he loves to fish in roiled waters. Though that dragon cannot sting the vitals of the elect mortally, yet that Beelzebub can fly-blow their intellectuals miserably."

He is often a bitter satirist, a sort of colonial Carlyle, as this attack on woman shows:—

"I honor the woman that can honor herself with her attire; a good text always deserves a fair margent; I am not much offended if I see a trim far trimmer than she that wears it. In a word, whatever Christianity or civility will allow, I can afford with London measure: but when I hear a nugiperous gentledame inquire what dress the Queen is in this week: what the nudiustertian fashion of the Court; I mean the very newest; with egg to be in it in all haste, whatever it be; I look at her as the very gizzard of a trifle, the product of a quarter of a cipher, the epitome of nothing, fitter to be kicked, if she were of a kickable substance, than either honored or humored."

He does not hesitate to coin a word. The preceding short selection introduces us to "nugiperous" and "nudiustertian." Next, he calls the women's tailor-made gowns "the very pettitoes of infirmity, the giblets of perquisquilian toys."

The spirit of a reformer always sees work to be done, and Ward emphasized three remedies for mid-seventeenth-century ills: (1) Stop toleration of departure from religious truth; (2) banish the frivolities of women and men; and (3) bring the civil war in England to a just end. In proportion to the population, his Simple Cobbler, designed to mend human ways, was probably as widely read as Carlyle's Sartor Resartus in later days.

In criticism, Ward deserves to be remembered for these two lines:—

"Poetry's a gift wherein but few excel;
He doth very ill that doth not passing well."

SAMUEL SEWALL, 1652-1730

There was born in 1652 at Bishopstoke, Hampshire, England, a boy who sailed for New England when he was nine years old, and who became our greatest colonial diarist. This was Samuel Sewall, who graduated from Harvard in 1671 and finally became chief justice of Massachusetts.

[Illustration: SAMUEL SEWALL]

His Diary runs with some breaks from 1673 to 1729, the year before his death. Good diaries are scarce in any literature. Those who keep them seldom commit to writing many of the most interesting events and secrets of their lives. This failing makes the majority of diaries and memoirs very dry, but this fault cannot be found with Samuel Sewall. His Diary will more and more prove a mine of wealth to the future writers of our literature, to our dramatists, novelists, poets, as well as to our historians. The early chronicles and stories on which Shakespeare founded many of his plays were no more serviceable to him than this Diary may prove to a coming American writer with a genius like Hawthorne's.

In Sewall's Diary we at once feel that we are close to life. The following entry brings us face to face with the children in a Puritan household:—

"Nov. 6, 1692. Joseph threw a knop of brass and hit his sister Betty on the forehead so as to make it bleed and swell; upon which, and for his playing at Prayer-time, and eating when Return Thanks, I whipped him pretty smartly. When I first went in (called by his Grandmother) he sought to shadow and hide himself from me behind the head of the cradle: which gave me the sorrowful remembrance of Adam's carriage."

Sewall was one of the seven judges who sentenced nineteen persons to be put to death for witchcraft at Salem. After this terrible delusion had passed, he had the manliness to rise in church before all the members, and after acknowledging "the blame and shame of his decision," call for "prayers that God who has an unlimited authority would pardon that sin."

Sewall's Diary is best known for its faithful chronicle of his courtship of Mrs. Catharine Winthrop. Both had been married twice before, and both had grown children. He was sixty-nine and she fifty-six. No record of any other Puritan courtship so unique as this has been given to the world. He began his formal courtship of Mrs. Winthrop, October 1, 1720. His Diary contains records of each visit, of what they said to each other, of the Sermons, cake, and gingerbread that he gave her, of the healths that he drank to her, the lump of sugar that she gave him, of how they "went into the best room, and clos'd the shutters."

"Nov. 2. Gave her about 1/2 pound of sugar almonds, cost 3 shillings per [pound]. Carried them on Monday. She seem'd pleas'd with them, ask'd what they cost. Spake of giving her a hundred pounds per annum if I died before her. Ask'd her what sum she would give me, if she should die first?"

"Monday, Nov. 7. I went to Mad. Winthrop; found her rocking her little Katy in the cradle. I excused my coming so late (near eight). She set me an arm'd chair and cushion; and so the cradle was between her arm'd chair and mine. Gave her the remnant of my almonds. She did not eat of them as before…. The fire was come to one short brand besides the block, which brand was set up in end; at last it fell to pieces and no recruit was made…. Took leave of her…. Her dress was not so clean as sometime it had been. Jehovah jireh!"

Acute men have written essays to account for the aristocratic Mrs. Winthrop's refusal of Chief-Justice Sewall. Some have said that it was due to his aversion to slavery and to his refusal to allow her to keep her slaves. This episode is only a small part of a rich storehouse. The greater part of the Diary contains only the raw materials of literature, yet some of it is real literature, and it ranks among the great diaries of the world.

COTTON MATHER, 1663-1728

[Illustration: COTTON MATHER]

LIFE AND PERSONALITY.—Cotton Mather, grandson of the Rev. John Cotton (p. 14), and the most distinguished of the old type of Puritan clergymen, was born in Boston and died in his native city, without ever having traveled a hundred miles from it. He entered Harvard at the age of eleven, and took the bachelor's degree at fifteen. His life shows such an overemphasis of certain Puritan traits as almost to presage the coming decline of clerical influence. He says that at the age of only seven or eight he not only composed forms of prayer for his schoolmates, but also obliged them to pray, although some of them cuffed him for his pains. At fourteen he began a series of fasts to crucify the flesh, increase his holiness, and bring him nearer to God.

He endeavored never to waste a minute. In his study, where he often worked sixteen hours a day, he had in large letters the sign, "BE SHORT," to greet the eyes of visitors. The amount of writing which he did almost baffles belief. His published works, numbering about four hundred, include sermons, essays, and books. During all of his adult life, he also preached in the North Church of Boston.

He was a religious "fantastic" (p. 40), that is, he made far-fetched applications of religious truth. A tall man suggested to him high attainments in Christianity; washing his hands, the desirability of a clean heart.

Although Cotton Mather became the most famous clergyman of colonial New England, he was disappointed in two of his life's ambitions. He failed to become president of Harvard and to bring New England back in religious matters to the first halcyon days of the colony. On the contrary, he lived to see Puritan theocracy suffer a great decline. His fantastic and strained application of religious truth, his overemphasis of many things, and especially his conduct in zealously aiding and abetting the Salem witchcraft murders, were no mean factors in causing that decline.

His intentions were certainly good. He was an apostle of altruism, and he tried to improve each opportunity for doing good in everyday life. He trained his children to do acts of kindness for other children. His Essays to Do Good were a powerful influence on the life of Benjamin Franklin. Cotton Mather would not have lived in vain if he had done nothing else except to help mold Franklin for the service of his country; but this is only one of Mather's achievements. We must next pass to his great work in literature.

THE MAGNALIA.—This "prose epic of New England Puritanism," the most famous of Mather's many works, is a large folio volume entitled Magnalia Christi Americana: or the Ecclesiastical History of New England. It was published in London in 1702, two years after Dryden's death.

The book is a remarkable compound of whatever seemed to the author most striking in early New England history. His point of view was of course religious. The work contains a rich store of biography of the early clergy, magistrates, and governors, of the lives of eleven of the clerical graduates of Harvard, of the faith, discipline, and government of the New England churches, of remarkable manifestations of the divine providence, and of the "Way of the Lord" among the churches and the Indians.

We may to-day turn to the Magnalia for vivid accounts of early New
England life. Mather has a way of selecting and expressing facts in such a
way as to cause them to lodge in the memory. These two facts about John
Cotton give us a vivid impression of the influence of the early clergy:—

"The keeper of the inn where he did use to lodge, when he came to Derby,
would profanely say to his companions, that he wished Mr. Cotton were
gone out of his house, for he was not able to swear while that man was
under his roof….

"The Sabbath he began the evening before, for which keeping of the
Sabbath from evening to evening he wrote arguments before his coming to
New England; and I suppose 'twas from his reason and practice that the
Christians of New England have generally done so too."

We read that the daily vocation of Thomas Shepard, the first pastor at Cambridge, Massachusetts, was, to quote Mather's noble phrase, "A Trembling Walk with God" He speaks of the choleric disposition of Thomas Hooker, the great Hartford clergyman, and says it was "useful unto him," because "he had ordinarily as much government of his choler as a man has of a mastiff dog in a chain; he 'could let out his dog, and pull in his dog, as he pleased.'" Some of Mather's prose causes modern readers to wonder if he was not a humorist. He says that a fire in the college buildings in some mysterious way influenced the President of Harvard to shorten one of his long prayers, and gravely adds, "that if the devotions had held three minutes longer, the Colledge had been irrecoverably laid in ashes." One does not feel sure that Mather saw the humor in this demonstration of practical religion. It is also doubtful whether he is intentionally humorous in his most fantastic prose, such, for instance, as his likening the Rev. Mr. Partridge to the bird of that name, who, because he "had no defence neither of beak nor claw," took "a flight over the ocean" to escape his ecclesiastical hunters, and finally "took wing to become a bird of paradise, along with the winged seraphim of heaven."

Such fantastic conceits, which for a period blighted the literature of the leading European nations, had their last great exponent in Cotton Mather. Minor writers still indulge in these conceits, and find willing readers among the uneducated, the tired, and those who are bored when they are required to do more than skim the surface of things. John Seccomb, a Harvard graduate of 1728, the year in which Mather died, then gained fame from such lines as:—

"A furrowed brow,
Where corn might grow,"

but the best prose and poetry have for a long time won their readers for other qualities. Even the taste of the next generation showed a change, for Cotton Mather's son, Samuel, noted as a blemish his father's "straining for far-fetched and dear-bought hints." Cotton Mather's most repellent habit to modern readers is his overloading his pages with quotations in foreign languages, especially in Latin. He thus makes a pedantic display of his wide reading.

He is not always accurate in his presentation of historical or biographical matter, but in spite of all that can be said against the Magnalia, it is a vigorous presentation of much that we should not willingly let die. In fact, when we read the early history of New England, we are frequently getting from the Magnalia many things in changed form without ever suspecting the source.

JONATHAN EDWARDS, 1703-1758

LIFE AND WRITINGS.—Jonathan Edwards, who ranks among the world's greatest theologians and metaphysicians, was born in 1703 in East Windsor, Connecticut. Like Cotton Mather, Edwards was precocious, entering Yale before he was thirteen. The year previous to his going to college, he wrote a paper on spiders, showing careful scientific observation and argument. This paper has been called "one of the rarest specimens of precocious scientific genius on record." At fourteen, he read Locke's Essay on the Human Understanding, receiving from it, he says, higher pleasure "than the most greedy miser finds when gathering up handfuls of silver and gold from some newly discovered treasure." Before he was seventeen, he had graduated from Yale, and he had become a tutor there before he was twenty-one.

Like Dante, he had a Beatrice. Thinking of her, he wrote this prose hymn of a maiden's love for the Divine Power:—

"They say there is a young lady in New Haven who is beloved of that great Being who made and rules the world, and there are certain seasons in which this great Being, in some way or other invisible, comes to her and fills her mind with exceeding sweet delight, and that she hardly cares for anything except to meditate on Him, that she expects after a while to be received up where He is, to be raised up out of the world and caught up into heaven, being assured that He loves her too well to let her remain at a distance from Him always. She will sometimes go about from place to place singing sweetly, and seems to be always full of joy and pleasure, and no one knows for what. She loves to be alone, walking in the fields and groves, and seems to have some one invisible always conversing with her"

[Illustration: MEMORIAL TABLET TO JONATHAN EDWARDS
(First Church, Northampton, Mass)]

Jonathan Edwards thus places before us Sarah Pierrepont, a New England
Puritan maiden. To note the similarity of thought between the Old Puritan
England and the New, let us turn to the maiden in Milton's Comus:—

"A thousand liveried angels lackey her,
Driving far off each thing of sin and guilt,
And in clear dream and solemn vision,
Tell her of things that no gross ear can hear,
Till oft converse with heav'nly habitants
Begin to cast a beam on th'outward shape,
The unpolluted temple of the mind,
And turns it by degrees to the soul's essence,
Till all be made immortal."

Unlike Dante, Edwards married his Beatrice at the age of seventeen. In 1727, the year of his marriage, he became pastor of the church in Northampton, Massachusetts. With the aid of his wife, he inaugurated the greatest religious revival of the century, known as the "Great Awakening," which spread to other colonial churches, crossed the ocean, and stimulated Wesley to call sinners to repentance.

Early in life, Edwards formed a series of resolutions, three of which are:—

"To live with all my might, while I do live."

"Never to do anything, which, if I should see in another, I should count a just occasion to despise him for, or to think any way the more meanly of him."

"Never, henceforward, till I die, to act as if I were any way my own, but entirely and altogether God's."

He earnestly tried to keep these resolutions until the end. After a successful pastorate of twenty-three years at Northampton, the church dismissed him for no fault of his own.

Like Dante, he was driven into exile, and he went from Northampton to the frontier town of Stockbridge, where he remained for seven years as a missionary to the Indians. His wife and daughters did their utmost to add to the family income, and some contributions were sent him from Scotland, but he was so poor that he wrote his books on the backs of letters and on the blank margins cut from newspapers. His fame was not swallowed up in the wilderness. Princeton College called him to its presidency in 1757. He died in that office in 1758, after less than three months' service in his new position. His wife was still in Stockbridge when he passed away. "Tell her," he said to his daughter, "that the uncommon union which has so long subsisted between us has been of such a nature as I trust is spiritual, and therefore will continue forever." In September of the same year she came to lie beside him in the graveyard at Princeton.

In 1900, the church that had dismissed him one hundred and fifty years before placed on its walls a bronze tablet in his memory, with the noble inscription from Malachi ii., 6.

As a writer, Jonathan Edwards won fame in three fields. He is (1) America's greatest metaphysician, (2) her greatest theologian, and (3) a unique poetic interpreter of the universe as a manifestation of the divine love.

His best known metaphysical work is The Freedom of the Will (1754). The central point of this work is that the will is determined by the strongest motive, that it is "repugnant to reason that one act of the will should come into existence without a cause." He boldly says that God is free to do only what is right. Edwards emphasizes the higher freedom, gained through repeated acts of the right kind, until both the inclination and the power to do wrong disappear.

As a theologian, America has not yet produced his superior. His Treatise concerning the Religious Affections, his account of the Great Awakening, called Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God, and Thoughts on the Revival, as well as his more distinctly technical theological works, show his ability in this field. Unfortunately, he did not rise superior to the Puritan custom of preaching about hell fire. He delivered on that subject a sermon which causes modern readers to shudder; but this, although the most often quoted, is the least typical of the man and his writings. Those in search of really typical statements of his theology will find them in such specimens as, "God and real existence is the same. God is and there is nothing else." He was a theological idealist, believing that all the varied phenomena of the universe are "constantly proceeding from God, as light from the sun." Such statements suggest Shelley's lines, which tell how

"… the one Spirit's plastic stress Sweeps through the dull dense world compelling there All new successions to the forms they wear."

Dr. Allen, Edwards's biographer and critic, and a careful student of his unpublished, as well as of his published, writings, says, "He was at his best and greatest, most original and creative, when he described the divine love." Such passages as the following, and also the one quoted on page 51, show this quality:—

"When we behold the fragrant rose and lily, we see His love and purity.
So the green trees and fields and singing of birds are the emanations of
His infinite joy and benignity. The easiness and naturalness of trees and
vines are shadows of His beauty and loveliness."

His favorite text was, "I am the Rose of Sharon and the Lily of the valleys," and his favorite words were "sweet and bright."

ENGLISH LITERATURE OF THE PERIOD

The great English writers between the colonization of Jamestown in 1607 and the outbreak of the French and Indian War in 1754 are: (1) JOHN MILTON (1608-1674), the great poetic spokesman of Puritan England, whose Comus is addressed to those, who:—

"… by due steps aspire To lay their just hands on that golden key That opes the palace of eternity,"

whose Sonnets breathe a purposeful prayer to live this life as ever in his great Taskmaster's eye, and whose Paradise Lost is the colossal epic of the loss of Eden through sin; (2) JOHN BUNYAN (1628-1688), whose Pilgrim's Progress addressed itself in simple, earnest English to each individual human being, telling him what he must do to escape the City of Destruction and to reach the City of All Delight; (3) JOHN DRYDEN (1631-1700), a master in the field of satiric and didactic verse and one of the pioneers in the field of modern prose criticism; (4) ALEXANDER POPE (1688-1744), another poet of the satiric and didactic school, who exalted form above matter, and wrote polished couplets which have been models for so many inferior poets; (5) the essayists, RICHARD STEELE (1672-1729) and JOSEPH ADDISON (1672-1719), the latter being especially noted for the easy, flowing prose of his papers in the Spectator; (6) JONATHAN SWIFT (1667-1745), a master of prose satire, whose Gulliver's Travels has not lost its fascination; (7) DANIEL DEFOE (1661?-1731) whose Robinson Crusoe continues to increase in popularity; (8) SAMUEL RICHARDSON (1689-1761), and HENRY FIELDING (1707-1754), the two great mid-eighteenth-century novelists.

The colonial literature of this period was influenced only in a very minor degree by the work of these men, for a generation usually passed before the influence of contemporary English authors appeared in American literature. In the next chapter, we shall see evidences of the influence of Pope. Benjamin Franklin will tell us how Bunyan and Addison were his teachers, and the early fiction will show its indebtedness to the work of Samuel Richardson.

LEADING HISTORICAL FACTS

Virginia and Massachusetts produced the most of our colonial literature. There were, however, thirteen colonies stretched along the seaboard from Georgia (1733), the last to be founded, to Canada. Although these colonies were established under different grants or charters, and although some had more liberty and suffered less from the interference of England than others, it is nevertheless true that every colony was a school for a self-governing democracy. No colonies elsewhere in the world had the same amount of liberty. This period was a necessary preparation for the coming republic.

We must not suppose that there was complete liberty in those days. Such a state has not been reached even in the twentieth century. The early government of Virginia was largely aristocratic; that of Massachusetts, theocratic. Virginia persecuted the Puritans. The early settlers of Massachusetts drove out Roger Williams and hanged Quakers. New York persecuted those who did not join the Church of England. The central truth, however, is that these thirteen colonies were making the greatest of all world experiments in democracy and liberty.

The important colony of New Netherland (New York) was settled by the Dutch early in the seventeenth century. They established an aristocracy with great landed estates along the Hudson. The student of literature is specially interested in this colony because Washington Irving (p. 112) has invested it with a halo of romance. He shows us the sturdy Knickerbockers, the Van Cortlands, the Van Dycks, the Van Wycks, and other chivalrous Dutch burghers, sitting in perfect silence, puffing their pipes, and thinking of nothing for hours together in those "days of simplicity and sunshine." For literary reasons it is well that this was not made an English colony until the Duke of York took possession of it in 1664.

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the colonists in the middle and northern part of the country divided their energies almost equally between trade and agriculture. At the South, agriculture was the chief occupation and tobacco and rice were the two leading staples. These were produced principally by the labor of negro slaves. There were also many indentured servants at the South, where the dividing lines between the different classes were most strongly marked.

Up to 1700 the history of each colony is practically that of a separate unit. Almost all the colonies had trouble with Indians and royal governors. Pirates, rapacious politicians, religious matters, or witchcraft were sometimes sources of disturbance. All knew the hard labor and the privations involved in subduing the wilderness and making permanent settlements in a new land. History tells of the abandonment of many other colonies and of the subjugation of many other races, but no difficulty and no foe daunted this Anglo-Saxon stock.

In 1700 the population of New England was estimated at about one hundred and ten thousand. In 1754, the beginning of the French and Indian War, Connecticut alone had that number, while all New England probably had at this time nearly four hundred thousand. The middle colonies began the eighteenth century with about fifty-nine thousand and grew by the middle of the century to about three hundred and fifty-five thousand. During the same period, the southern group increased from about ninety thousand to six hundred thousand. By 1750 the thirteen colonies probably had a total population of nearly fourteen hundred thousand. Since no census was taken until 1790, these figures are only approximately correct.

Such development serves to show the trend of coming events. This remarkable increase in population soon caused numbers to go farther west. This movement resulted in collision with the French, who were at this time holding the central part of the country, from the Gulf into Canada. One other result followed. The colonies began to seem valuable to England because they furnished a market for English manufactures and a carrying trade for English ships. The previous comparative insignificance of the colonies and the trouble in England had served to protect them, but their trade had now assumed a proportion that made the mother country realize what a valuable commercial asset she would have if she regulated the colonies in her own interest.

SUMMARY

In this chapter we have traced the history of American colonial literature from the foundation of the Jamestown Colony until 1754. Before 1607 Chaucer, Spenser, and Shakespeare had written, and before 1620 the King James version of the Bible had been produced. England had, therefore, a wonderful literature before her colonies came to America. They were the heirs of all that the English race had previously accomplished; and they brought to these shores an Elizabethan initiative, ingenuity, and democratic spirit.

The Virginia colony was founded, as colonies usually are, for a commercial reason. The Virginians and the other southern colonists lived more by agriculture, were more widely scattered, had fewer schools, more slaves, and less town life than the New Englanders. Under the influence of a commanding clergy, common schools, and the stimulus of town life, the New England colony produced more literature.

The chief early writers of Virginia are: (1) Captain John Smith, who described the country and the Indians, and gave to literature the story of Pocahontas, thereby disclosing a new world to the imagination of writers; (2) William Strachey, who outranks contemporary colonial writers in describing the wrath of the sea, and who may even have furnished a suggestion to Shakespeare for The Tempest; (3) two poets, (a) George Sandys, who translated part of Ovid, and (b) the unknown author of the elegy on Nathaniel Bacon; and (4) Robert Beverly and William Byrd, who gave interesting descriptions of early Virginia.

The chief colonial writers of New England are: (1) William Bradford, whose History of Plymouth Plantation tells the story of the first Pilgrim colony; (2) John Winthrop, who wrote in his Journal the early history of the Massachusetts Bay Colony; (3) the poets, including (a) the translators of the Bay Psalm Book, the first volume of so-called verse printed in the British American colonies, (b) Wigglesworth, whose Day of Doom, was a poetic exposition of Calvinistic theology, (c) Anne Bradstreet, who wrote a small amount of genuine poetry, after she had passed from the influence of the "fantastic" school of poets; (4) Nathaniel Ward, the author of The Simple Cobbler of Agawam, an attempt to mend human ways; (5) Samuel Sewall, New England's greatest colonial diarist; (6) Cotton Mather, the most famous clerical writer, whose Magnalia is a compound of early colonial history and biography, sometimes written in a "fantastic" style; (7) Jonathan Edwards, America's greatest metaphysician and theologian, who maintained that the action of the human will is determined by the strongest motive, that the substance of this universe is nothing but "the divine Idea," communicated to human consciousness, and who could invest spiritual truth with the beauty of the Rose of Sharon and the Lily of the valleys.

The New England colonist came to America because of religious feeling. His religion was to him a matter of eternal life or eternal death. From the modern point of view, this religion may seem too inflexibly stern, too little illumined by the spirit of love, too much darkened by the shadow of eternal punishment, but unless that religion had communicated something of its own dominating inflexibility to the colonist, he would never have braved the ocean, the wilderness, the Indians; he would never have flung the gauntlet down to tyranny at Lexington and Concord.

The greatest lesson taught by colonial literature, by men like Bradford, Winthrop, Edwards, and the New England clergy in general, is moral heroism, the determination to follow the shining path of the Eternal over the wave and through the forest to a new temple of human liberty. Their aspiration, endeavor, suffering, accomplishment, should strengthen our faith in the worth of those spiritual realities which are not quoted in the markets of the world, but which alone possess imperishable value.

REFERENCES FOR FURTHER STUDY

HISTORICAL

ENGLISH HISTORY.—In either Gardiner's Students' History of England, Walker's Essentials in English History, Andrews's History of England, or Cheney's Short History of England, read the chapters dealing with the time of Elizabeth, James I., Charles I., the Commonwealth, Charles II., James II., William and Mary, Anne, George I. and II. A work like Halleck's History of English Literature, covering these periods, should be read.

AMERICAN HISTORY.—Read the account from the earliest times to the outbreak of the French and Indian War in any of the following:—

Thwaites's The Colonists, 1492-1750.

Fisher's Colonial Era.

Lodge's A Short History of the English Colonies in America.

Doyle's The English in America.

Hart's Essentials in American History.

Channing's A Students' History of the United States.

Eggleston's A Larger History of the United States of America.

James and Sanford's American History.

For an account of special colonies, consult the volumes in American
Commonwealths series, and also,

Fiske's Beginnings of New England, The Dutch and Quaker Colonies in
America, Old Virginia and Her Neighbors.

LITERARY

Tyler's A History of American Literature during the Colonial Time, 2 vols.

Otis's American Verse, 1625-1807.

Richardson's American Literature, 2 vols.

Trent's A History of American Literature, 1607-1865.

Wendell's History of Literature in America.

Narratives of Early Virginia, edited by Tyler.

Bradford's History of Plymouth Plantation. New edition, edited by Davis.
(Scribner, 1908.)

Winthrop's Journal ("History of New England"). New edition, edited by
Hosmer, 2 vols., (Scribner, 1908.)

Chamberlain's Samuel Sewall and the World He Lived in.

Lodge's "A Puritan Pepys" (Sewall) in Studies in History.

Campbell's Anne Bradstreet and her Time.

Twichell's John Winthrop.

Walker's Thomas Hooker.

Wendell's Life of Cotton Mather.

Allen's Life of Jonathan Edwards.

Gardiner's Jonathan Edwards, a Retrospect.

SUGGESTED READINGS

The following volumes of selections from American Literature will be referred to either by the last name of the author, or, if there are more authors than one, by the initials of the last names:—

Cairns's Selections from Early American Writers, 1607-1800. (Macmillan.)

Trent and Wells's Colonial Prose and Poetry, 3 vols., 1607-1775.
(Crowell.)

Stedman and Hutchinson's A Library of American Literature, 1608-1890, 11 vols. (Benjamin.)

Carpenter's American Prose Selections. (Macmillan.)

Trent's Southern Writers: Selections in Prose and Verse. (Macmillan.)

At least one of the selections indicated for each author should be read.

JOHN SMITH.—The Beginnings of Jamestown (from A True Relation of
Virginia, 1608); The Religious Observances of the Indians (from A Map of
Virginia, published in 1612), Cairns, pp. 2-4, 10-14; The Romance of
Pocahontas (from The General History of Virginia, 1624), S. & H., Vol.
I., pp. 10-17; T. & W., Vol. I., pp. 12-22.

WILLIAM STRACHEY.—Read the selection from A True Repertory of the Wrack and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates, in Cairns, 19-26.

POETRY IN THE VIRGINIA COLONY.—For George Sandys, see pp. 51-58 in Vol. I. of Tyler's A History of American Literature during the Colonial Time.

For the elegy on the death of Nathaniel Bacon, see Tyler, Vol. I., 78, 79;
Cairns, 185-188; T. & W., II., 166-169; S. & H., I., 456-458; Trent, 12-14.

DESCRIPTIONS OF VIRGINIA.—The best selection from Beverly's History and
Present State of Virginia may be found in T. & W., II., 354-360. See also
Trent, 16-18; S. & H., II., 270-272.

For selections from Byrd's History of the Dividing Line, see Cairns, passim, 259-272; Trent, 19-22; T. & W., III., 23-32; S. & H., II., 302-305.

WILLIAM BRADFORD.—The Voyage of the Mayflower, Cairns, 31-35; Early
Difficulties of the Pilgrim Fathers, T. & W., I., 42-45; The Communal
System Abandoned, T. & W., I., 46-49; The Landing of the Pilgrims and their
Settlement at Plymouth, S. & H., L, 124-130.

JOHN WINTHROP.—Twenty-five entries from his Journal or History of New
England are given in Cairns, 44-48, and fourteen in T. & W., I., 99-105.

His famous speech on Liberty may be found in T. & W., I., 106-116; in S. & H., I., 302-303; and in Cairns, 50-53.

EARLY NEW ENGLAND VERSE.—The selection in the text (p. 38) from the Bay
Psalm Book is sufficient.

For Wigglesworth's Day of Doom, see Cairns, 166-177; T. & W., II., 54-60;
S. & H., passim, II., 3-16.

Anne Bradstreet's best poem, Contemplations, may be found in Cairns, 154-162; T. & W., I., 280-283; S. & H., I., 314, 315.

WARD'S SIMPLE COBBLER OF AGAWAM.—His view of religious toleration is given in Cairns, 113-118, and T. & W., I., 253-259. For the satiric essay on women's fashions, see Cairns, 119-124; T. & W., I., 260-266; S. & H. I., 276-280.

SAMUEL SEWALL.—Cairns, 240-243, gives from the Diary the events of a month. Notes on the Witchcraft Persecution and his prayer of repentance for "the blame and shame of it" may be found in T. & W., II., 294-296. The record of his courtship of Madam Winthrop is given in Cairns, 245-249; T. & W., II., 304-319; and S. & H., II., 192-200. For his early anti-slavery tract, see T. & W., II., 320-326; S. & H., II., 189-192.

COTTON MATHER.—His fantastic life of Mr. Ralph Partridge from the Magnalia is given in Cairns, 228, 229. The interesting story of the New England argonaut, Sir William Phips, may be found in T. & W., II., 257-266, and in S. & H., II., 143-149. One of his best biographies is that of Thomas Hooker, S. & H., II., 149-156.

JONATHAN EDWARDS.—For a specimen of an almost poetic exposition of the divine love, read the selection in Cairns, 280, 281; T. & W., III., 148, 149; S. & H., II., 374; and Carpenter, 16, 17, beginning, "I am the Rose of Sharon and the Lily of the valleys." Selections from his Freedom of the Will are given in Cairns. 291-294; T. & W., III., 185-187; and S. & H., II., 404-407 (the best).

QUESTIONS AND SUGGESTIONS

Is Captain John Smith more remarkable for chronicling what passed before his senses or for explaining what he saw? How does his account of the Indians (p. 18 of this text) compare with modern accounts? Is he apparently a novice, or somewhat skilled in writing prose? Does he seem to you to be a romancer or a narrator of a plain unvarnished tale?

Compare Strachey's storm at sea with Act I. of Shakespeare's Tempest. In what part of this Act and under what circumstances does he mention "the still-vex'd Bermoothes"?

Compare the ability of the three great early colonizers, Smith, Bradford, and Winthrop, in writing narrative prose. Smith's story of Pocahontas is easily accessible. Those who can find the complete works of Bradford and Winthrop may select from Bradford for comparison his story of Squanto, the Pilgrims' tame Indian. Winthrop's Journal contains many specimens of brief narrative, such as the story of the voyage across the Atlantic from March 29 to June 14, 1630; of Winthrop's losing himself in the wood, October 11, 1631; of shipwreck on the Isle of Shoals, August 16, 1635; of an indentured servant, March 8, 1636; of an adventure with Indians, July 20-30, August 24, and October 8, 1636. Those without opportunity to consult the works of Bradford and Winthrop will find in the books of selections sufficient material for comparison.

Is brevity or prolixity a quality of these early narrators? What English prose written before 1640 is superior to the work of these three men? Why is it especially important for Americans to know something of their writings? What advance in prose narrative do you find in Beverly and Byrd?

What characteristic of a famous English prose writer of the nineteenth century is noticeable in Ward's essay on fashions?

Why could fine poetry not be reasonably expected in early Virginia and New
England? What are some of the Calvinistic tenets expounded in
Wigglesworth's Day of Doom? Choose the best two short selections of
colonial poetry.

What are some of the qualifications of a good diarist? Which of these do you find in the Diary of Samuel Sewall?

Point out some of the fantastic prose expressions of Cotton Mather. Compare his narrative of Captain Phips with the work of Smith, Bradford, and Winthrop, on the one hand, and of Beverly and Byrd, on the other.

Compare the theology in Edwards's "Rose of Sharon" selection (p. 54) with that in Wigglesworth's Day of Doom. Why may this selection from Edwards be called a "poetic exposition of the divine love"? What is his view of the freedom of the will?

CHAPTER II

THE EMERGENCE OF A NATION

PROGRESS TOWARD NATIONALITY.—The French and Indian War, which began in 1754, served its purpose in making the colonists feel that they were one people. At this time most of them were living on the seacoast from Georgia to Maine, and had not yet even crossed the great Appalachian range of mountains. The chief men of one colony knew little of the leaders in the other colonies. This war made George Washington known outside of Virginia. There was not much interchange of literature between the two leading colonies, Virginia and Massachusetts. Prior to this time, the other colonies had not produced much that had literary value. No national literature could be written until the colonists were welded together.

The French and Indian War, which decided whether France or England was to be supreme in America, exposed the colonists to a common danger. They fought side by side against the French and Indians, and learned that the defeat of one was the defeat of all. After a desperate struggle France lost, and the Anglo-Saxon race was dominant on the new continent. By the treaty of Paris, signed in 1763, England became the possessor of Canada and the land east of the Mississippi River.

THE REVOLUTION.—All of the colonies had been under English rule, although they had in large part managed in one way or another to govern themselves. At the close of the French and Indian War, the colonists had not thought of breaking away from England, although they had learned the lesson of union against a common foe. George III. came to the throne in 1760. By temperament he was unusually adapted to play his part in changing the New World's history. He was determined to rule according to his own personal inclinations. He dominated his cabinet and controlled Parliament by bribery. He decided that the American colonies should feel the weight of his authority, and in 1763 his prime minister, George Grenville, undertook to execute measures in restraint of colonial trade. Numbers of commodities, like tobacco, for instance, could not be traded with France or Spain or Holland, but must be sent to England. If there was any profit to be made in selling goods to foreign nations, England would make that profit. He also planned to tax the colonists and to quarter British troops among them. These measures aroused the colonies to armed resistance and led to the Revolutionary War, which began in 1775.

Freneau (p. 96), a poet of the Revolution, thus expresses in verse some of these events:—

"When a certain great king, whose initial is G,
Shall force stamps upon paper and folks to drink tea;
When these folks burn his tea and stampt paper like stubble,
You may guess that this king is then coming to trouble."

THE ESSAYISTS

The pen helped to prepare the way for the sword and to arouse and prolong the enthusiasm of those who had taken arms. Before the battle of Lexington (1775), writers were busy on both sides of the dispute, for no great movement begins without opposition. Many colonists did not favor resistance to England. Even at the time of the first battle, comparatively few wished absolute separation from the mother country.

THOMAS PAINE (1737-1809) was an Englishman who came to America in 1774 and speedily made himself master of colonial thought and feeling. Early in 1776 he published a pamphlet entitled Common Sense, which advocated complete political independence of England. The sledge hammer blows which he struck hastened the Declaration of Independence. Note the energy, the directness, and the employment of the concrete method in the following:—

[Illustration: THOMAS PAINE]

"But Britain is the parent country, say some. Then the more shame upon her conduct. Even brutes do not devour their young, nor savages make war upon their families; wherefore, the assertion, if true, turns to her reproach…. This new world hath been the asylum for the persecuted lovers of civil and religious liberty from every part of Europe. Hither have they fled, not from the tender embraces of the mother, but from the cruelty of the monster; and it is so far true of England, that the same tyranny which drove the first emigrants from home, pursues their descendants still."

In the latter part of 1776 Washington wrote, "If every nerve is not strained to recruit the new army with all possible expedition, I think the game is pretty nearly up." In those gloomy days, sharing the privations of the army, Thomas Paine wrote the first number of an irregularly issued periodical, known as the Crisis, beginning:—

"These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman."

Some have said that the pen of Thomas Paine was worth more to the cause of liberty than twenty thousand men. In the darkest hours he inspired the colonists with hope and enthusiasm. Whenever the times seemed to demand another number of the Crisis, it was forthcoming. Sixteen of these appeared during the progress of the struggle for liberty. He had an almost Shakespearean intuition of what would appeal to the exigencies of each case. After the Americans had triumphed, he went abroad to aid the French, saying, "Where Liberty is not, there is my home." He died in America in 1809. He is unfortunately more remembered for his skeptical Age of Reason than for his splendid services to the cause of liberty.

[Illustration: THOMAS JEFFERSON]

THOMAS JEFFERSON (1743-1826), the third President of the United States, wrote much political prose and many letters, which have been gathered into ten large volumes. Ignoring these, he left directions that the words, "Author of the Declaration of American Independence," should immediately follow his name on his monument. No other American prose writer has, in an equal number of words, yet surpassed this Declaration of Independence. Its influence has encircled the world and modified the opinions of nations as widely separated as the French and the Japanese.

Jefferson may have borrowed some of his ideas from Magna Charta (1215) and the Petition of Right (1628); he may have incorporated in this Declaration the yearnings that thousands of human souls had already felt, but he voiced those yearnings so well that his utterances have become classic. It has been said that he "poured the soul of the continent" into that Declaration, but he did more than that. He poured into it the soul of all freedom-loving humanity, and he was accepted as the spokesman of the dweller on the Seine as enthusiastically as of the revolutionists in America. Those who have misconstrued the meaning of his famous expression, "All men are created equal" have been met with the adequate reply, "No intelligent man has ever misconstrued it except intentionally."

America has no Beowulf celebrating the slaying of land-devastating monsters, but she has in this Declaration a deathless battle song against the monsters that would throttle Liberty. Outside of Holy Writ, what words are more familiar to our ears than these?—

"We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."

Every student will find his comprehension of American literature aided by a careful study of this Declaration. This trumpet-tongued declaration of the fact that every man has an equal right with every other man to his own life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness has served as an ideal to inspire some of the best things in our literature. This ideal has not yet been completely reached, but it is finding expression in every effort for the social and moral improvements of our population. Jefferson went a step beyond the old Puritans in maintaining that happiness is a worthy object of pursuit. Modern altruists are also working on this line, demanding a fuller moral and industrial liberty, and endeavoring to develop a more widespread capacity for happiness.

ALEXANDER HAMILTON (1757-1804), because of his wonderful youthful precocity, reminds us of Jonathan Edwards (p. 50). In 1774, at the age of seventeen, Hamilton wrote in answer to a Tory who maintained that England had given New York no charter of rights, and that she could not complain that her rights had been taken away:—

"The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the Divinity itself, and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power."

[Illustration: ALEXANDER HAMILTON]

A profound student of American constitutional history says of Hamilton's pamphlets: "They show great maturity, a more remarkable maturity than has ever been exhibited by any other person, at so early an age, in the same department of thought."

After the Americans were victorious in the war, Hamilton suggested that a constitutional convention be called. For seven years this suggestion was not followed, but in 1787 delegates met from various states and framed a federal constitution to be submitted to the states for ratification. Hamilton was one of the leading delegates. After the convention had completed its work, it seemed probable that the states would reject the proposed constitution. To win its acceptance, Hamilton, in collaboration with JAMES MADISON (1751-1836) and JOHN JAY (1745-1829), wrote the famous Federalist papers. There were eighty-five of these, but Hamilton wrote more than both of his associates together. These papers have been collected into a volume, and to this day they form a standard commentary on our Constitution. This work and Hamilton's eloquence before the New York convention for ratification helped to carry the day for the Constitution and to terminate a period of dissension which was tending toward anarchy.

THE ORATORS

There are times in the history of a nation when there is unusual need for the orator to persuade, to arouse, and to encourage his countrymen. Many influential colonists disapproved of the Revolution; they wrote against it and talked against it. When the war progressed slowly, entailing not only severe pecuniary loss but also actual suffering to the revolutionists, many lost their former enthusiasm and were willing to have peace at any price. At this period in our history the orator was as necessary as the soldier. Orators helped to launch the Revolution, to continue the war, and, after it was finished, to give the country united constitutional government. It will be instructive to make the acquaintance of some of these orators and to learn the secret of their power.

JAMES OTIS (1725-1783) was born in Massachusetts and educated at Harvard. He studied literature for two years after he graduated and then became a lawyer. He was appointed to the position of king's advocate-general, a high-salaried office. There came an order from England, allowing the king's officers to search the houses of Americans at any time on mere suspicion of the concealment of smuggled goods. Otis resigned his office and took the side of the colonists, attacking the constitutionality of a law that allowed the right of unlimited search and that was really designed to curtail the trade of the colonies. He had the advantage of many modern orators in having something to say on his subject, in feeling deeply interested in it, and in talking to people who were also interested in the same thing. Without these three essentials, there cannot be oratory of the highest kind. We can imagine the voice of Otis trembling with feeling as he said in 1761:—

[Illustration: JAMES OTIS]

"Now one of the most essential branches of English liberty is the freedom of one's house. A man's house is his castle; and whilst he is quiet, he is as well guarded as a prince in his castle. This writ, if it should be declared legal, would totally annihilate this privilege. Custom-house officers may enter our houses, when they please; we are commanded to permit their entry. Their menial servants may enter, may break locks, bars, and everything in their way; and whether they break through malice or revenge, no man, no court, can inquire."

We may to-day be more interested in other things than in the homes and unrestricted trade of our colonial ancestors, but Otis was willing to give up a lucrative office to speak for the rights of the humblest cottager. He, like the majority of the orators of the Revolution, also possessed another quality, often foreign to the modern orator. What this quality is will appear in this quotation from his speech:—

"Let the consequences be what they will, I am determined to proceed. The only principles of public conduct that are worthy of a gentleman or a man are to sacrifice estate, ease, health, and applause, and even life, to the sacred calls of his country. These manly sentiments, in private life, make the good citizen; in public life, the patriot and the hero."

John Adams, who became the second President of the United States, listened to this speech for five hours, and called Otis "a flame of fire." "Then and there," said Adams, with pardonable exaggeration, "the child Independence was born."

PATRICK HENRY (1736-1799), a young Virginia lawyer, stood before the First
Continental Congress, in 1774, saying:—

[Illustration: PATRICK HENRY]

"Where are your landmarks, your boundaries of Colonies? The distinctions between Virginians, New Yorkers, and New Englanders are no more. I am not a Virginian, but an American."

These words had electrical effect on the minds of his listeners, and helped to weld the colonies together. In 1775 we can hear him again speaking before a Virginian Convention of Delegates:—

"Mr. President, it is natural to man to indulge in the illusions of hope.
We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth, and listen to the
song of that siren, till she transforms us into beasts….

"I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided; and that is the lamp of experience. I know of no way of judging of the future but by the past. And judging by the past, I wish to know what there has been in the conduct of the British ministry for the last ten years, to justify those hopes with which gentlemen have been pleased to solace themselves and the House? …

"Why stand we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death."

It is hardly too much to say that these words have communicated to the entire American nation an intenser desire for liberty, that their effect has not yet passed away, and that they may during the coming centuries serve to awaken Americans in many a crisis.

SAMUEL ADAMS (1722-1803), a Bostonian and graduate of Harvard, probably gave his time in fuller measure to the cause of independence than any other writer or speaker. For nine years he was a member of the Continental Congress. When there was talk of peace between the colonies and the mother country, he had the distinction of being one of two Americans for whom England proclaimed in advance that there would be no amnesty granted. We can seem to hear him in 1776 in the Philadelphia State House, replying to the argument that the colonists should obey England, since they were her children:—

[Illustration: SAMUEL ADAMS]

"Who among you, my countrymen, that is a father, would claim authority to
make your child a slave because you had nourished him in his infancy?"

After he had signed the Declaration of Independence, he spoke to the
Pennsylvanians like a Puritan of old:—

"We have explored the temple of royalty, and found that the idol we have bowed down to has eyes which see not, ears that hear not our prayer, and a heart like the nether millstone. We have this day restored the Sovereign, to whom alone men ought to be obedient. He reigns in heaven, and with a propitious eye beholds His subjects assuming that freedom of thought and dignity of self-direction which He bestowed on them."

These sentences plainly show the influence of biblical thought and diction. A century before, this compound of patriot, politician, orator, and statesman would also have been a clergyman.

An examination of these three typical orators of the Revolution will show that they gained their power (1) from intense interest in their subject matter, (2) from masterful knowledge of that matter, due either to first-hand acquaintance with it or to liberal culture or to both, (3) from the fact that the subject of their orations appealed forcibly to the interest of that special time, (4) from their character and personality. Most of what they said makes dry reading to-day, but we shall occasionally find passages, like Patrick Henry's apotheosis of liberty, which speak to the ear of all time and which have in them something of a Homeric or Miltonic ring.

INCREASING INFLUENCE OF THE LEGAL PROFESSION.—Not one of the great orators of the Revolution was a clergyman. The power of the clergy in political affairs was declining, while the legal profession was becoming more and more influential. James Otis, Patrick Henry, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay (p. 71) were lawyers. Life was becoming more diversified, and there were avenues other than theology attractive to the educated man. At the same time, we must remember that the clergy have never ceased to be a mighty power in American life. They were not silent or uninfluential during the Revolution. Soon after the battle of Bunker Hill, John Adams wrote from Philadelphia to his wife in Boston, asking, "Does Mr. Wibird preach against oppression and other cardinal vices of the time? Tell him the clergy here of every denomination, not excepting the Episcopalian, thunder and lighten every Sabbath."

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, 1706-1790

[Illustration: BENJAMIN FRANKLIN]

AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND LIFE.—Franklin's Autobiography stands first among works of its kind in American literature. The young person who does not read it misses both profit and entertainment. Some critics have called it "the equal of Robinson Crusoe, one of the few everlasting books in the English language." In this small volume, begun in 1771, Franklin tells us that he was born in Boston in 1706, one of the seventeen children of a poor tallow chandler, that his branch of the Franklin family had lived for three hundred years or more in the village of Ecton, Northamptonshire, where the head of the family, in Queen Mary's reign, read from an English Bible concealed under a stool, while a child watched for the coming of the officers. He relates how he attended school from the age of eight to ten, when he had to leave to help his father mold and wick candles. His meager schooling was in striking contrast to the Harvard education of Cotton Mather and the Yale training of Jonathan Edwards, who was only three years Franklin's senior. But no man reaches Franklin's fame without an education. His early efforts to secure this are worth giving in his own language:—

"From a child I was fond of reading, and all the little money that came into my hands was ever laid out in books. Pleased with the Pilgrim's Progress, my first collection was of John Bunyan's works in separate little volumes…. Plutarch's Lives there was in which I read abundantly, and I still think that time spent to great advantage. There was also a book of De Foe's, called an Essay on Projects, and another of Dr. Mather's, called Essays to do Good, which perhaps gave me a turn of thinking that had an influence on some of the principal future events of my life…. Often I sat up in my room reading the greatest part of the night."

He relates how he taught himself to write by reading and reproducing in his own language the papers from Addison's Spectator. Franklin says that the "little ability" in writing, developed through his self-imposed tasks, was a principal means of his advancement in after life.

He learned the printer's trade in Boston, and ran away at the age of seventeen to Philadelphia, where he worked at the same trade. Keith, the proprietary governor, took satanic pleasure in offering to purchase a printing outfit for the eighteen-year-old boy, to make him independent. Keith sent the boy to London to purchase this outfit, assuring him that the proper letters to defray the cost would be sent on the same ship. No such letters were ever written, and the boy found himself without money three thousand miles from home. By working at the printer's trade he supported himself for eighteen months in London. He relates how his companions at the press drank six pints of strong beer a day, while he proved that the "Water-American," as he was called, was stronger than any of them. The workmen insisted that he should contribute to the general fund for drink. He refused, but so many things happened to his type whenever he left the room that he came to the following conclusion: "Notwithstanding the master's protection, I found myself oblig'd to comply and pay the money, convinc'd of the folly of being on ill terms with those one is to live with continually." Such comments on the best ways of dealing with human nature are frequent in the Autobiography.

At the age of twenty, he returned to Philadelphia, much wiser for his experience. Here he soon had a printing establishment of his own. By remarkable industry he had at the age of forty-two made sufficient money to be able to retire from the active administration of this business. He defined leisure as "time for doing something useful." When he secured this leisure, he used it principally for the benefit of others. For this reason, he could write in his Autobiography at the age of seventy-six:—

"… were it offered to my choice, I should have no objection to a repetition of the same life from its beginning, only asking the advantages authors have in a second edition, to correct some faults of the first. So I might, besides correcting the faults, change some sinister accidents and events of it for others more favorable. But though this were denied, I should still accept the offer. Since such a repetition is not to be expected, the next thing like living one's life over again seems to be a recollection of that life."

The twentieth century shows an awakened sense of civic responsibility, and yet it would be difficult to name a man who has done more for his commonwealth than Franklin. He started the first subscription library, organized the first fire department, improved the postal service, helped to pave and clean the streets, invented the Franklin stove, for which he refused to take out a patent, took decided steps toward improving education and founding the University of Pennsylvania, and helped establish a needed public hospital. The Autobiography shows his pleasure at being told that there was no such thing as carrying through a public-spirited project unless he was concerned in it.

His electrical discoveries, especially his identification of lightning with electricity, gained him world-wide fame. Harvard and Yale gave him honorary degrees. England made him a Fellow of the Royal Society and awarded him the Copley Medal. The foremost scientists in France gave him enthusiastic praise.

The Autobiography, ending with 1757, does not tell how he won his fame as a statesman. In 1764 he went to England as colonial agent to protest against the passage of the Stamp Act. All but two and one half of the next twenty years he spent abroad, in England and France. The report of his examination in the English House of Commons, relative to the repeal of the Stamp Act, impressed both Europe and America with his wonderful capacity. Never before had an American given Europe such an exhibition of knowledge, powers of argument, and shrewdness, tempered with tact and good humor. In 1773 he increased his reputation as a writer and threw more light on English colonial affairs by publishing, in London, Rules for Reducing a Great Empire to a Small One, and An Edict by the King of Prussia.

In 1776, at the age of seventy, he became commissioner to the court of France, where he remained until 1785. Every student of American history knows the part he played there in popularizing the American Revolution, until France aided us with her money and her navy. It is doubtful if any man has ever been more popular away from home than Franklin was in France. The French regarded him as "the personification of the rights of man." They followed him on the streets, gave him almost frantic applause when he appeared in public, put his portrait in nearly every house and on almost every snuff box, and bought a Franklin stove for their houses.

He returned to Philadelphia in 1785, revered by his country. He was the only man who had signed four of the most famous documents in American history: the Declaration of Independence, the treaty of alliance with France, the treaty of peace with England at the close of the Revolution, and the Constitution of the United States. He had also become, as he remains to-day, America's most widely read colonial writer. When he died in 1790, the American Congress and the National Assembly of France went into mourning.

[Illustration: FACSIMILE OF THE TITLE-PAGE TO "POOR RICHARD'S ALMANAC" FOR 1733]

GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS.—As an author, Franklin is best known for his philosophy of the practical and the useful. Jonathan Edwards turned his attention to the next world; Franklin, to this world. The gulf is as vast between these two men as if they had lived on different planets. To the end of his life, Franklin's energies were bent toward improving the conditions of this mundane existence. He advises honesty, not because an eternal spiritual law commands it, but because it is the best policy. He needs to be supplemented by the great spiritual teachers. He must not be despised for this reason, for the great spiritual forces fail when they neglect the material foundations imposed on mortals. Franklin was as necessary as Jonathan Edwards. Franklin knew the importance of those foundation habits, without which higher morality is not possible. He impressed on men the necessity of being regular, temperate, industrious, saving, of curbing desire, and of avoiding vice. The very foundations of character rest on regularity, on good habits so inflexibly formed that it is painful to break them. Franklin's success in laying these foundations was phenomenal. His Poor Richard's Almanac, begun in 1733, was one of his chief agencies in reaching the common people. They read, reread, and acted on such proverbs as the following, which he published in this Almanac from year to year:—

[Footnote: The figures in parenthesis indicate the year of publication.]

"He has changed his one ey'd horse for a blind one" (1733).

"Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead" (1735).

"Wealth is not his that has it, but his that enjoys it" (1736).

"Fly pleasures and they'll follow you" (1738).

"Have you somewhat to do to-morrow; do it to-day" (1742).

"Tart words make no friends: a spoonful of honey will catch more flies than a gallon of vinegar" (1744).

In 1757 Franklin gathered together what seemed to him the most striking of these proverbs and published them as a preface to the Almanac for 1758. This preface, the most widely read of all his writings, has since been known as The Way to Wealth. It had been translated into nearly all European languages before the end of the nineteenth century. It is still reprinted in whole or part almost every year by savings banks and societies in France and England, as well as in the United States. "Dost thou love life?" asks Poor Richard in The Way to Wealth. "Then," he continues, "do not squander time, for that's the stuff life is made of." Franklin modestly disclaimed much originality in the selection of these proverbs, but it is true that he made many of them more definite, incisive, and apt to lodge in the memory. He has influenced, and he still continues to influence, the industry and thrift of untold numbers. In one of our large cities, a branch library, frequented by the humble and unlearned, reports that in one year his Autobiography was called for four hundred times, and a life of him, containing many of Poor Richard's sayings, was asked for more than one thousand times.

He is the first American writer to show a keen sense of humor. There may be traces of humor in The Simple Cobbler of Agawam (p. 41) and in Cotton Mather (p. 46), but Franklin has a rich vein. He used this with fine effect when he was colonial agent in England. He determined to make England see herself from the American point of view, and so he published anonymously in a newspaper An Edict of the King of Prussia. This Edict proclaimed that it was a matter of common knowledge that Britain had been settled by Hengist and Horsa and other German colonists, and that, in consequence of this fact, the King of Prussia had the right to regulate the commerce, manufactures, taxes, and laws of the English. Franklin gave in this Edict the same reasons and embodied the same restrictions, which seemed so sensible to George III. and the Tories. Franklin was the guest of an English Lord, when a man burst into the room with the newspaper containing the Edict, saying, "Here's news for ye! Here's the King of Prussia claiming a right to this kingdom!"

In writing English prose, Franklin was fortunate in receiving instruction from Bunyan and Addison. The pleasure of reading Franklin's Autobiography is increased by his simple, easy, natural way of relating events. Simplicity, practicality, suggestiveness, common sense, were his leading attributes. His sense of humor kept him from being tiresome and made him realize that the half may be greater than the whole. The two people most useful to the age in which they lived were George Washington and Benjamin Franklin.

JOHN WOOLMAN, 1720-1772

A GREAT ALTRUIST.—This Quaker supplements Franklin in teaching that the great aim in life should be to grow more capable of seeing those spiritual realities which were before invisible. Life's most beautiful realities can never be seen with the physical eye. The Journal of John Woolman will help one to increase his range of vision for what is best worth seeing. It will broaden the reader's sympathies and develop a keener sense of responsibility for lessening the misery of the world and for protecting even the sparrow from falling. It will cultivate precisely that side of human nature which stands most in need of development. To emphasize these points, Charles Lamb said, "Get the writings of John Woolman by heart," and Whittier wrote of Woolman's Journal, which he edited and made easily accessible, "I have been awed and solemnized by the presence of a serene and beautiful spirit redeemed of the Lord from all selfishness, and I have been made thankful for the ability to recognize and the disposition to love him."

John Woolman was born of Quaker parentage in Northampton, New Jersey. He never received much education. Early in life he became a shopkeeper's clerk and then a tailor. This lack of early training and broad experience affects his writings, which are not remarkable for ease of expression or for imaginative reach; but their moral beauty and intensity more than counterbalance such deficiencies.

A part of his time he spent traveling as an itinerant preacher. He tried to get Quakers to give up their slaves, and he refused to write wills that bequeathed slaves. He pleaded for compassion for overworked oxen and horses. He journeyed among the Indians, and endeavored to improve their condition. It cut him to the quick to see traders try to intoxicate them so as to get their skins and furs for almost nothing. He took passage for England in the steerage, and learned the troubles of the sailors. From this voyage he never returned, but died in York in 1772.

In the year of his death, he made in his Journal the following entry, which is typical of his gentle, loving spirit:

"So great is the hurry in the spirit of this world, that in aiming to do business quickly and to gain wealth, the creation at this day doth loudly groan."

When a former president of Harvard issued a list of books for actual reading, he put Franklin's Autobiography first and John Woolman's Journal second. Franklin looked steadily at this world, Woolman at the next. Each record is supplementary to the other.

EARLY AMERICAN FICTION

THE FIRST ATTEMPTS.—MRS. SARAH MORTON published in Boston in 1789 a novel entitled The Power of Sympathy. This is probably the first American novel to appear in print. The reason for such a late appearance of native fiction may be ascribed to the religious character of the early colonists and to the ascendency of the clergy, who would not have tolerated novel reading by members of their flocks. Jonathan Edwards complained that some of his congregation were reading forbidden books, and he gave from the pulpit the names of the guilty parties. These books were probably English novels. Sir Leslie Stephen thinks that Richardson's Pamela (1740) may have been one of the books under the ban. There is little doubt that a Puritan church member would have been disciplined if he had been known to be a reader of some of Fielding's works, like Joseph Andrews (1742). The Puritan clergy, even at a later period, would not sanction the reading of novels unless they were of the dry, vapid type, like the earliest Sunday school books. Jonathan Edwards wrote the story of one of his youthful experiences, but it was "the story of a spiritual experience so little involved with the earth, that one might fancy it the story of a soul that had missed being born."

Timothy Dwight (p. 92), who became president of Yale in 1795, said that there is a great gulf fixed between novels and the Bible. Even later than 1800 there was a widespread feeling that the reading of novels imperiled the salvation of the soul. To-day we know that certain novels are as dangerous to the soul as leprosy to the body, but we have become more discriminating. We have learned that the right type of fiction, read in moderation, cultivates the imagination, broadens the sympathetic powers, and opens up a new, interesting, and easily accessible land of enjoyment.

A quarter of a century before the Declaration of Independence, the great eighteenth-century English writers of fiction had given a new creation to the literature of England. Samuel Richardson (1689-1761) had published Pamela in 1740 and Clarissa Harlowe in 1748. Henry Fielding (1707-1754) had given his immortal Tom Jones to the world in 1749.

Mrs. Morton's Power of Sympathy, a novel written with a moral purpose, is a poorly constructed story of characters whom we fortunately do not meet outside of books. One of these characters, looking at some flowers embroidered by the absent object of his affections, says, "It shall yield more fragrance to my soul than all the bouquets in the universe."

The majority of the early novels, in aiming to teach some lesson, show the influence of Samuel Richardson, the father of English fiction. This didactic spirit appears in sober statement of the most self-evident truths. "Death, my dear Maria, is a serious event," says the heroine of one of these novels. Another characteristic is tepid or exaggerated sentimentality. The heroine of The Power of Sympathy dies of a broken heart "in a lingering graceful manner."

At least twenty-two American novels had been published between 1789 and the appearance of Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland 1798. Only an antiquary need linger over these. We must next study the causes that led to a pronounced change in fiction.

DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE CLASSIC AND THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL.—The next step in fiction will show a breaking away from the classic or didactic school of Samuel Richardson and a turning toward the new Gothic or romantic school. To understand these terms, we must know something of the English influences that led to this change.

For the first two thirds of the eighteenth century, English literature shows the dominating influence of the classic school. Alexander Pope (1688-1744) in poetry and Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) in prose were the most influential of this school. They are called classicists because they looked to the old classic authors for their guiding rules. Horace, more than any other classic writer, set the standard for poetry. Pope and his followers cared more for the excellence of form than for the worth of the thought. Their keynote was:—

"True Wit is Nature to advantage dress'd,
What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed."

[Footnote: Pope's Essay on Criticism, lines 297-8.]

In poetry the favorite form was a couplet, that is, two lines which rhymed and usually made complete sense. This was not inaptly termed "rocking horse meter." The prose writers loved the balanced antithetical sentences used by Dr. Johnson in his comparison of Pope and Dryden:—

"If the flights of Dryden, therefore, are higher, Pope continues longer on the wing…. Dryden is read with frequent astonishment and Pope with perpetual delight."

Such overemphasis placed on mere form tended to draw the attention of the writer away from the matter. The American poetry of this period suffered more than the prose from this formal influence.

Since the motto of the classicists was polished regularity, they avoided the romantic, irregular, and improbable, and condemned the Arabian Nights, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Tempest, and other "monstrous irregularities of Shakespeare." This school loved to teach and to point out shortcomings, hence the terms "didactic" and "satiric" are often applied to it.

The last part of the eighteenth century showed a revolt against the classicists. Victory came to the new romantic school, which included authors like Wordsworth (1770-1850), Coleridge (1772-1834), Shelley (1792-1822), and Keats (1795-1821). The terms "romantic" and "imaginative" were at first in great measure synonymous. The romanticists maintained that a reality of the imagination might be as satisfying and as important as a reality of the prosaic reason, since the human mind had the power of imagining as well as of thinking.

The term "Gothic" was first applied to fiction by Horace Walpole (1717-1797), who gave to his famous romance the title of "The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Romance" (1764). "Gothic" is here used in the same sense as "romantic." Gothic architecture seemed highly imaginative and overwrought in comparison with the severe classic order. In attempting to avoid the old classic monotony, the Gothic school of fiction was soon noted for its lavish use of the unusual, the mysterious, and the terrible. Improbability, or the necessity for calling in the supernatural to untie some knot, did not seriously disturb this school. The standard definition of "Gothic" in fiction soon came to include an element of strangeness added to terror. When the taste for the extreme Gothic declined, there ensued a period of modified romanticism, which demanded the unusual and occasionally the impossible. This influence persisted in the fiction of the greatest writers, until the coming of the realistic school (p. 367). We are now better prepared to understand the work of Charles Brockden Brown, the first great American writer of romance, and to pass from him to Cooper, Hawthorne, and Poe.

CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN, 1771-1810

[Illustration: CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN]

Philadelphia has the honor of being the birthplace of Brown, who was the first professional man of letters in America. Franklin is a more famous writer than Brown, but, unlike Brown, he did not make literature the business of his life. Descended from ancestors who came over on the ship with William Penn, Brown at the age of ten had read, with Quaker seriousness, every book that he could find. He did not go to college, but studied law, which he soon gave up for literature as a profession.

Depression from ill health and the consciousness that he would probably die young colored all his romances. He has the hero of one of his tales say, "We are exposed, in common with the rest of mankind, to innumerable casualties; but, if these be shunned, we are unalterably fated to die of consumption." In 1810, before he had reached forty, he fell a victim to that disease. Near the end of his days, he told his wife that he had not known what health was longer than a half hour at a time.

Brown deserves a place in the history of American literature for his four romances: Wieland, Ormond, Arthur Mervyn, and Edgar Huntly. These were all published within the space of three years from 1798, the date of the publication of Wieland. These romances show a striking change from the American fiction which had preceded them. They are no longer didactic and sentimental, but Gothic or romantic. Working under English influence, Brown gave to America her first great Gothic romances. The English romance which influenced him the most was Caleb Williams (1794), the work of William Godwin (1756-1836), the father-in-law of the poet Shelley.

Wieland is considered the strongest of Brown's Gothic romances, but it does not use as distinctively American materials as his three other stories of this type, Ormond, Arthur Mervyn, or Memoirs of the Year 1793, and Edgar Huntly. The results of his own experience with the yellow fever plague in Philadelphia give an American touch to Ormond and Arthur Mervyn, and at the same time add the Gothic element of weirdness and horror. Arthur Mervyn is far the better of the two.

Edgar Huntly, or Memoirs of a Sleep Walker, shows a Gothic characteristic in its very title. This book is noteworthy in the evolution of American fiction, not because of the strange actions of the sleep walker, but for the reason that Brown here deliberately determines, as he states in his prefatory note To the Public to give the romance an American flavor, by using "the incidents of Indian hostility and the perils of the Western wilderness." If we assume that John Smith's story of Pocahontas is not fiction, then to Brown belongs the honor of first recognizing in the Indian a valuable literary asset from the Gothic romancer's point of view. In Chapter XVI., he reverses Captain Smith's story and has Edgar Huntly rescue a young girl from torture and kill an Indian. In the next two chapters, the hero kills four Indians. The English recognized this introduction of a new element of strangeness added to terror and gave Brown the credit of developing an "Americanized" Gothic. He disclosed to future writers of fiction, like James Fenimore Cooper (p. 125), a new mine of American materials. This romance has a second distinguishing characteristic, for Brown surpassed contemporary British novelists in taking his readers into the open air, which forms the stage setting for the adventures of Edgar Huntly. The hero of that story loves to observe the birds, the squirrels, and the old Indian woman "plucking the weeds from among her corn, bruising the grain between two stones, and setting her snares for rabbits and opossums." He takes us where we can feel the exhilaration from "a wild heath, whistled over by October blasts meagerly adorned with the dry stalks of scented shrubs and the bald heads of the sapless mullein."

Brown's place in the history of fiction is due to the fact that he introduced the Gothic romance to American literature. He loved to subject the weird, the morbid, the terrible, to a psychological analysis. In this respect he suggests Hawthorne, although there are more points of difference than of likeness between him and the great New England romancer. In weird subject matter, but not in artistic ability, he reminds us of Poe. Brown could devise striking incidents, but he lacked the power to weave them together in a well-constructed plot. He sometimes forgot that important incidents needed further elaboration or reference, and he occasionally left them suspended in mid-air. His lack of humor was too often responsible for his imposing too much analysis and explanation on his readers. Although he did not hesitate to use the marvelous in his plots, his realistic mind frequently impelled him to try to explain the wonderful occurrences. He thus attempted to bring in ventriloquism to account for the mysterious voices which drove Wieland to kill his wife and children.

It is, however, not difficult for a modern reader to become so much interested in the first volume of Arthur Mervyn as to be unwilling to leave it unfinished. Brown will probably be longest remembered for his strong pictures of the yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia, his use of the Indian in romance, and his introduction of the outdoor world of the wilderness and the forest.

POETRY—THE HARTFORD WITS

The Americans were slow to learn that political independence could be far more quickly gained than literary independence. A group of poets, sometimes known as the Hartford Wits, determined to take the kingdom of poetry by violence. The chief of these were three Yale graduates, Timothy Dwight, Joel Barlow, and John Trumbull.

TIMOTHY DWIGHT (1752-1817).—Before he became president of Yale, Dwight determined to immortalize himself by an epic poem. He accordingly wrote the Conquest of Canaan in 9671 lines, beginning:—

"The Chief, whose arms to Israel's chosen band
Gave the fair empire of the promis'd land,
Ordain'd by Heaven to hold the sacred sway,
Demands my voice, and animates the lay."

[Illustration: TIMOTHY DWIGHT]

This poem is written in the rocking horse couplets of Pope, and it is well-nigh unreadable to-day. It is doubtful if twenty-five people in our times have ever read it through. Even where the author essays fine writing, as in the lines:—

"On spicy shores, where beauteous morning reigns,
Or Evening lingers o'er her favorite plains,"

there is nothing to awaken a single definite image, nothing but glittering generalities. Dwight's best known poetry is found in his song, Columbia, composed while he was a chaplain in the Revolutionary War:—

"Columbia, Columbia, to glory arise,
The queen of the world, and the child of the skies."

JOEL BARLOW (1755-1812) was, like Dwight, a chaplain in the war, but he became later a financier and diplomat, as well as a poet. He determined in The Vision of Columbus (1787), afterwards expanded into the ponderous Columbiad, to surpass Homer and all preceding epics. Barlow's classical couplets thus present a general in the Revolution, ordering a cannonade:—

"When at his word the carbon cloud shall rise,
And well-aim'd thunders rock the shores and skies."

[Illustration: JOEL BARLOW]

Hawthorne ironically suggested that the Columbiad should be dramatized and set to the accompaniment of cannon and thunder and lightning. Barlow, like many others, certainly did not understand that bigness is not necessarily greatness. He is best known by some lines from his less ambitious Hasty Pudding:—

"E'en in thy native regions, how I blush
To hear the Pennsylvanians call thee Mush!"

JOHN TRUMBULL (1750-1831).—The greatest of the Hartford wits was John Trumbull. His father, a Congregational clergyman living at Waterbury, Connecticut, prepared boys for college. In 1757 he sent two candidates to Yale to be examined, one pupil of nineteen, the other of seven. Commenting on this, the Connecticut Gazette of September 24, 1757, says, "the Son of Rev'd. Mr. Trumble of Waterbury … passed a good Examination, altho but little more than seven years of age; but on account of his Youth his father does not intend he shall at present continue at College." This boy waited until he was thirteen to enter Yale, where he graduated in due course. After teaching for two years in that college, he became a lawyer by profession. Although he did not die until 1831, the literary work by which he is known was finished early.

Trumbull occupied the front rank of the satiric writers of that age. Early in his twenties he satirized in classical couplets the education of the day, telling how the students:—

"Read ancient authors o'er in vain,
Nor taste one beauty they contain,
And plodding on in one dull tone,
Gain ancient tongues and lose their own."

[Illustration: JOHN TRUMBULL]

His masterpiece was a satire on British sympathizers. He called this poem M'Fingal, after a Scotch Tory. The first part was published in 1775 and it gave a powerful impetus to the Continental cause. It has been said that the poem "is to be considered as one of the forces of the Revolution, because as a satire on the Tories it penetrated into every farmhouse, and sent the rustic volunteers laughing into the ranks of Washington and Greene."

One cannot help thinking of Butler's Hudibras (1663), when reading M'Fingal. Of course the satiric aim is different in the two poems. Butler ridiculed the Puritans and upheld the Royalists, while Trumbull discharged his venomed shafts at the adherents of the king. In M'Fingal, a Tory bent on destroying a liberty pole drew his sword on a Whig, who had no arms except a spade. The Whig, however, employed his weapon with such good effect on the Tory that:—

"His bent knee fail'd, and void of strength,
Stretch'd on the ground his manly length.
Like ancient oak, o'erturn'd, he lay,
Or tower to tempests fall'n a prey,
Or mountain sunk with all his pines,
Or flow'r the plough to dust consigns,
And more things else—but all men know 'em,
If slightly versed in epic poem."

Some of the incisive lines from M'Fingal have been wrongly ascribed to
Butler's Hudibras. The following are instances:—

"No man e'er felt the halter draw
With good opinion of the law."

"For any man with half an eye
What stands before him may espy;
But optics sharp it needs, I ween,
To see what is not to be seen."

Trumbull's M'Fingal is a worthy predecessor of Lowell's Biglow Papers. Trumbull wrote his poem as a "weapon of warfare." The first part of M'Fingal passed through some forty editions, many of them printed without the author's consent. This fact is said to have led Connecticut to pass a copyright law in 1783, and to have thus constituted a landmark in American literary history.

PHILIP FRENEAU, 1752-1832

[Illustration: PHILIP FRENEAU]

New York City was the birthplace of Freneau, the greatest poet born in America before the Revolutionary War. He graduated at Princeton in 1771, and became a school teacher, sea captain, poet, and editor.

The Revolution broke out when he was a young man, and he was moved to write satiric poetry against the British. Tyler says that "a running commentary on his Revolutionary satires would be an almost complete commentary on the whole Revolutionary struggle; nearly every important emergency and phase of which are photographed in his keen, merciless, and often brilliant lines." In one of these satires Freneau represents Jove investigating the records of Fate:—

"And first on the top of a column he read—
Of a king with a mighty soft place in his head,
Who should join in his temper the ass and the mule,
The Third of his name and by far the worst fool."

We can imagine the patriotic colonists singing as a refrain:—

"… said Jove with a smile, Columbia shall never be ruled by an isle,"

or this:—

"The face of the Lion shall then become pale,
He shall yield fifteen teeth and be sheared of his tail,"

but Freneau's satiric verse is not his best, however important it may be to historians.

His best poems are a few short lyrics, remarkable for their simplicity, sincerity, and love of nature. His lines:—

"A hermit's house beside a stream
With forests planted round,"

are suggestive of the romantic school of Wordsworth and Coleridge, as is also The Wild Honeysuckle, which begins as follows:—

"Fair flower, that dost so comely grow,
Hid in this silent, dull retreat,
Untouched thy honied blossoms blow,
Unseen thy little branches greet.

"By Nature's self in white arrayed,
She bade thee shun the vulgar eye,
And planted here the guardian shade,
And sent soft waters murmuring by."

Although Freneau's best poems are few and short, no preceding American poet had equaled them. The following will repay careful reading: The Wild Honeysuckle, The Indian Burying Ground, and To a Honey Bee.

He died in 1832, and was buried near his home at Mount Pleasant, Monmouth
County, New Jersey.

ENGLISH LITERATURE OF THE PERIOD

The great prose representatives of the first half of the eighteenth century, Swift, Addison, Steele, and Defoe, had passed away before the middle of the century. The creators of the novel, Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding, had done their best work by 1750.

The prose writers of the last half of the century were OLIVER GOLDSMITH (1728-1774), who published the Vicar of Wakefield in 1766; EDWARD GIBBON (1737-1794), who wrote The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; EDMUND BURKE (1729-1797), best known to-day for his Speech on Conciliation with America; and SAMUEL JOHNSON (1709-1784), whose Lives of the Poets is the best specimen of eighteenth-century classical criticism.

The most noteworthy achievement of the century was the victory of romanticism (p. 88) over classicism. Pope's polished satiric and didactic verse, neglecting the primrose by the river's brim, lacking deep feeling, high ideals, and heaven-climbing imagination, had long been the model that inspired cold intellectual poetry. In the latter part of the century, romantic feeling and imagination won their battle and came into their own heritage in literature. ROBERT BURNS (1759-1796) wrote poetry that touched the heart. A classicist like Dr. Johnson preferred the town to the most beautiful country scenes, but WILLIAM COWPER (1731-1800) says:—

"God made the country, and man made the town."

Romantic poetry culminated in the work of WILLIAM WORDSWORTH and SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE, whose Lyrical Ballads (1798) included the wonderful romantic poem of The Ancient Mariner, and poems by Wordsworth, which brought to thousands of human souls a new sense of companionship with nature, a new feeling

"… that every flower Enjoys the air it breathes,"

and that all nature is anxious to share its joy with man and to introduce him to a new world. The American poets of this age, save Freneau in a few short lyrics, felt but little of this great impulse; but in the next period we shall see that William Cullen Bryant heard the call and sang:—

"Scarce less the cleft-born wild-flower seems to enjoy
Existence than the winged plunderer
That sucks its sweets."

The romantic prose was not of as high an order as the poetry. Writers of romances like WALPOLE'S Castle of Otranto and GODWIN'S Caleb Williams did not allow their imaginations to be fettered by either the probable or the possible. In America the romances of Charles Brockden Brown show the direct influence of this school.

LEADING HISTORICAL FACTS

The French and Indian War accomplished two great results. In the first place, it made the Anglo-Saxon race dominant in North America. Had the French won, this book would have been chiefly a history of French literature. In the second place, the isolated colonies learned to know one another and their combined strength.

Soon after the conclusion of this war, the English began active interference with colonial imports and exports, laid taxes on certain commodities, passed the Stamp Act, and endeavored to make the colonists feel that they were henceforth to be governed in fact as well as in name by England. The most independent men that the world has ever produced came to America to escape tyranny at home. The descendants of these men started the American Revolution, signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776, and, led by George Washington (1732-1799), one of the greatest heroes of the ages, won their independence. They had the assistance of the French, and it was natural that the treaty of peace with England should be signed at Paris in 1783.

Then followed a period nearly as trying as that of the Revolution, an era called by John Fiske "The Critical Period of American History, 1783-1789." Because of the jealousy of the separate states and the fear that tyranny at home might threaten liberty, there was no central government vested with adequate power. Sometimes there was a condition closely bordering on anarchy. The wisest men feared that the independence so dearly bought would be lost. Finally, the separate states adopted a Constitution which united them, and in 1789 they chose Washington as the president of this Union. His Farewell Address, issued to the American people toward the end of his administration, breathes the prayer "that your union and brotherly affection may be perpetual; that the free constitution which is the work of your hands, may be sacredly maintained; that its administration in every part may be stamped with wisdom and virtue." A leading thought from this great Address shows that the Virginian agreed with the New Englander in regard to the chief cornerstone of this Republic:—

"Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity,
Religion and Morality are indispensable supports."

The student of political rather than of literary history is interested in the administrations of John Adams (1797-1801), Thomas Jefferson (1801-1809), and James Madison (1809-1817). The acquisition in 1803 of the vast central territory, known as the Louisiana Purchase, affected the entire subsequent development of the country and its literature. Thomas Jefferson still exerts an influence on our literature and institutions; for he championed the democratic, as opposed to the aristocratic, principle of government. His belief in the capacity of the common people for progress and self-government still helps to mold public opinion.

Next in importance to the victorious struggle of the Revolution and the adoption of the Constitution, is the wonderful pioneer movement toward the West. Francis A. Walker, in his Making of the Nation, 1783-1817, says:—

"During the period of thirty-four years covered by this narrative, a movement had been in continuous progress for the westward extension of population, which far transcended the limits of any of the great migrations of mankind upon the older continents…. From 1790 to 1800, the mean population of the period being about four and a half millions, sixty-five thousand square miles were brought within the limits of settlement; crossed with rude roads and bridges; built up with rude houses and barns; much of it, also, cleared of primeval forests.

"In the next ten years, the mean population of the decade being about six and a half millions, the people of the United States extended settlement over one hundred and two thousand square miles of absolutely new territory…. No other people could have done this. No: nor the half of it. Any other of the great migratory races—Tartar, Slav, or German—would have broken hopelessly down in an effort to compass such a field in such a term of years."

SUMMARY

The early essays of the period, Paine's Common Sense and the Crisis, Jefferson's Declaration of Independence, Hamilton's pamphlets and papers, all champion human liberty and show the influence of the Revolution. The orators, James Otis, Patrick Henry, and Samuel Adams, were inspired by the same cause. The words of Patrick Henry, "Give me liberty or give me death," have in them the essence of immortality because they voice the supreme feeling of one of the critical ages in the world's history.

Benjamin Franklin was the greatest writer of the period. His Autobiography has a value possessed by no other work of the kind. This and his Poor Richard's Almanac have taught generations of Americans the duty of self-culture, self-reliance, thrift, and the value of practical common sense. He was the first of our writers to show a balanced sense of humor and to use it as an agent in impressing truth on unwilling listeners. He is an equally great apostle of the practical and the altruistic, although he lacked the higher spirituality of the old Puritans and of the Quaker, John Woolman. This age is marked by a comparative decline in the influence of the clergy. Not a single clerical name appears on the list of the most prominent writers.

This period shows the beginning of American fiction, dominated by English writers, like Samuel Richardson. The early novels, like Mrs. Morton's The Power of Sympathy, were usually prosy, didactic, and as dull as the Sunday school books of three quarters of a century ago. The victory of the English school of romanticists influenced Charles Brockden Brown, the first professional American author, to throw off the yoke of classical didacticism and regularity and to write a group of Gothic romances, in which the imagination was given a freer rein than the intellect. While he freely employed the imported Gothic elements of "strangeness added to terror," he nevertheless managed to give a distinctively American coloring to his work by showing the romantic use to which the Indian and the forest could be put.

Authors struggled intensely to write poetry. "The Hartford Wits," Dwight,
Barlow, and Trumbull, wrote a vast quantity of verse. The most of this is
artificial, and reveals the influence of the classical school of Alexander
Pope. Freneau wrote a few short lyrics which suggest the romantic school of
Wordsworth.

The American literature of this period shows in the main the influence of the older English classical school. America produced no authors who can rank with the contemporary school of English writers, such as Burns, Wordsworth, and Coleridge. Of all the writers of this age, Franklin alone shows an undiminished popularity with readers of the twentieth century.

Three events in the history of the period are epoch-making in the world's history; (a) the securing of independence through the Revolutionary War, (b) the adoption of a constitution and the formation of a republic, and (c) the magnitude of the work of the pioneer settlers, who advanced steadily west from the coast, and founded commonwealths beyond the Alleghanies.

REFERENCES FOR FURTHER STUDY

HISTORICAL

The course of English events (reign of George III.) may be traced in any of the English histories mentioned on p. 60. For the English literature of the period; see the author's History of English Literature.

Valuable works dealing with special periods of the American history of the time are:—

Hart's Formation of the Union.

Parkman's Half Century of Conflict and Montcalm and Wolfe, 2 vols.
(French and Indian War.)

Fiske's American Revolution, 2 vols.

Fiske's Critical Period of American History.

Walker's The Making of the Nation.

Johnston's History of American Politics.

Schouler's History of the United States of America under the
Constitution, 6 vols.

The works by Hart, Channing, and James and Sanford, referred to on p. 61, will give the leading events in brief compass. An account of much of the history of the period is given in the biographies of Washington by Lodge, of Franklin by Morse, of Hamilton by Lodge, and of Jefferson by Morse. (American Statesmen Series.)

LITERARY

Tyler's The Literary History of the American Revolution, 2 vols.

Richardson's American Literature, 2 vols.

Wendell's Literary History of America.

Trent's A History of American Literature.

McMaster's Benjamin Franklin.

Ford's The Many-Sided Franklin.

Erskine's Leading American Novelists, pp. 3-49, on Charles Brockden
Brown.

Loshe's The Early American Novel.

SUGGESTED READINGS

The Essayists.—Selections from Thomas Paine's Common Sense,—Cairns,
[Footnote: For full titles see p. 62.] 344-347; Carpenter, 66-70; S. & H.,
III., 219-221. From the Crisis,—Cairns, 347-352; Carpenter, 70, 71; S. &
H., III., 222-225.

Jefferson's Declaration of Independence—which may be found in Carpenter, 79-83; S. & H., III, 286-289; and in almost all the histories of the United States—should be read several times until the very atmosphere or spirit of those days comes to the reader.

Selections from Alexander Hamilton, including a paper from the Federalist, may be found in Cairns, 363-369; S. & H., IV., 113-116.

THE ORATORS.—A short selection from Otis is given in this work, p. 72. A longer selection may be found in Vol. I. of Johnston's American Orations, 11-17. For Patrick Henry's most famous speech, see Cairns, 335-338; S. & H., III., 214-218; Johnston, I., 18-23. The speech of Samuel Adams on American Independence is given in Johnston, I., 24-38, and in Moore's American Eloquence, Vol. I.

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN.—Every one should read his Autobiography. Selections may be found in Carpenter, 31-36; Cairns, 322-332; T. & W., III., 192-201; S. & H., III., 3-13.

Read his Way to Wealth either in the various editions of Poor Richard's
Almanac or in Cairns, 315-319; Carpenter, 36-43; T. & W., III., 202-213;
S. & H., III., 17-21.

JOHN WOOLMAN.—Cairns, 307-313; S. & H., III., 78-80, 82-85.

CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN.—The first volume of Arthur Mervyn with its account of the yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia is not uninteresting reading. Chaps. XVI., XVII., and XVIII. of Edgar Huntly show the hero of that romance rescuing a girl from torture and killing Indians. These and the following chapters, especially XIX., XX., and XXI, give some vigorous out-of-door life.

Selections giving incidents of the yellow fever plague may be found in Cairns, 482-488; Carpenter, 97-100. For Indian adventures or out-of-door life in Edgar Huntly, see Cairns, 488-493; Carpenter, 89-97; S. & H., IV., 273-292.

POETRY.—Selections from Dwight, Barlow, and Trumbull may be found in
Cairns, 395-430; S. & H., III., 403-413, 426-429, IV., 47-55. For Freneau's
best lyrics, see Cairns, 440, 441, 447; S. & H., III., 452, 453, 456;
Stedman, An American Anthology, 4, 7, 8.

QUESTIONS AND SUGGESTIONS

PROSE.—After reading some of the papers of Thomas Paine, state why they were unusually well suited to the occasion. Why is the Declaration of Independence likened to the old battle songs of the Anglo-Saxon race? What is remarkable about Jefferson's power of expression? In the orations of Otis, Patrick Henry, and Samuel Adams, what do you find to account for their influence? To what must an orator owe his power?

Contrast the writings of Benjamin Franklin with those of Jonathan Edwards and John Woolman. What are some of the most useful suggestions and records of experience to be found in Franklin's Autobiography? In what ways are his writings still useful to humanity? Select the best four maxims from The Way to Wealth. What are some of the qualities of Franklin's style? Compare it with Woolman's style.

Why are Brown's romances called "Gothic"? What was the general type of
American fiction preceding him? Specify three strong or unusual incidents
in the selections read from Brown. What does he introduce to give an
American color to his work?

POETRY.—In the selections read from Dwight, Barlow, and Trumbull, what general characteristics impress you? Do these poets belong to the classic or the romantic school? What English influences are manifest? What qualities in Freneau's lyrics show a distinct advance in American poetry?

CHAPTER III

THE NEW YORK GROUP

A NEW LITERARY CENTER.—We have seen that Massachusetts supplied the majority of the colonial writers before the French and Indian War. During the next period, Philadelphia came to the front with Benjamin Franklin and Charles Brockden Brown. In this third period, New York forged ahead, both in population and in the number of her literary men. Although in 1810 she was smaller than Philadelphia, by 1820 she had a population of 123,706, which was 15,590 more than Philadelphia, and 80,408 more than Boston.

This increase in urban population rapidly multiplied the number of readers of varied tastes and developed a desire for literary entertainment, as well as for instruction. Works like those of Irving and Cooper gained wide circulation only because of the new demands, due to the increasing population, to the decline in colonial provincialism, and to the growth of the new national spirit. Probably no one would have been inspired, twenty-five years earlier, to write a work like Irving's Knickerbocker's History of New York. Even if it had been produced earlier, the country would not have been ready to receive it. This remarkable book was published in New York in 1809, and more than a quarter of a century had passed before Massachusetts could produce anything to equal that work.

In the New York group there were three great writers whom we shall discuss separately: Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, and William Cullen Bryant. Before we begin to study them, however, we may glance at two of the minor writers, who show some of the characteristics of the age.

DRAKE AND HALLECK

[Illustration: JOSEPH RODMAN DRAKE]

Two friends, who in their early youth styled themselves "The Croakers," were Joseph Rodman Drake (1795-1820) and Fitz-Greene Halleck (1790-1867), "the Damon and Pythias of American poets." Drake was born in New York City in the same year as the English poet, John Keats, in London. Both Drake and Keats studied medicine, and both died of consumption at the age of twenty-five. Halleck was born in Guilford, Connecticut, but moved to New York in early youth, where he became a special accountant for John Jacob Astor. Although Halleck outlived Drake forty-seven years, trade seems to have sterilized Halleck's poetic power in his later life.

The early joint productions of Drake and Halleck were poems known as The Croakers, published in 1819, in the New York Evening Post. This stanza from The Croakers will show the character of the verse and its avowed object:—

"There's fun in everything we meet,
The greatest, worst, and best;
Existence is a merry treat,
And every speech a jest:
Be't ours to watch the crowds that pass
Where Mirth's gay banner waves;
To show fools through a quizzing-glass
And bastinade the knaves."

This was written by Drake, but he and Halleck together "croaked" the following lines, which show that New York life at the beginning of the nineteenth century had something of the variety of London in the time of Queen Anne, at the beginning of the eighteenth century:—

"The horse that twice a week I ride
At Mother Dawson's eats his fill;
My books at Goodrich's abide,
My country seat is Weehawk hill;
My morning lounge is Eastburn's shop,
At Poppleton's I take my lunch,
Niblo prepares my mutton chop,
And Jennings makes my whiskey punch."

[Illustration: FITZ GREENE HALLECK]

Such work indicates not only a diversified circle of readers, who were not subject to the religious and political stress of earlier days, but it also shows a desire to be entertained, which would have been promptly discouraged in Puritan New England. We should not be surprised to find that the literature of this period was swayed by the new demands, that it was planned to entertain as well as to instruct, and that all the writers of this group, with the exception of Bryant, frequently placed the chief emphasis on the power to entertain.

Fortunately instruction often accompanies entertainment, as the following lines from The Croakers show:—

"The man who frets at worldly strife
Grows sallow, sour, and thin;
Give us the lad whose happy life
Is one perpetual grin,
He, Midas-like, turns all to gold."

Drake's best poem, which is entirely his own work, is The Culprit Fay, written in 1816 when he was twenty-one years of age. This shows the influence of the English romantic school, and peoples the Hudson River with fairies. Before the appearance of this poem, nothing like these lines could have been found in American verse:—

"The winds are whist, and the owl is still,
The bat in the shelvy rock is hid;
And naught is heard on the lonely hill
But the cricket's chirp and the answer shrill
Of the gauze-winged katydid;
And the plaint of the wailing whip-poor-will,
Who moans unseen, and ceaseless sings,
Ever a note of wail and woe,
Till morning spreads her rosy wings
And earth and sky in her glances glow."

Although The Culprit Fay shows the influence of Coleridge's Christabel, yet this American poem could not have been written by an English poet. Drake did not sing the praises of the English lark and the nightingale; but chose instead an American bird, the whippoorwill, and a native insect, the katydid, and in writing of them showed the enjoyment of a true poet.

Drake's best known poem, The American Flag, which was signed "Croaker & Co.," because Halleck wrote the last four lines, is a good specimen of rhetorical verse, but lacks the poetic feeling of The Culprit Fay. Fitz-Greene Halleck's best known poem is Marco Bozzaris (1827), an elegy on the death of a Grecian leader, killed in 1823. America's sympathies went out to Greece in her struggles for independence against the Turks. In celebrating the heroic death of Bozzaris, Halleck chose a subject that was naturally fitted to appeal to all whose liberties were threatened. This poem has been honored with a place in almost all American anthologies. Middle-aged people can still remember the frequency with which the poem was declaimed. At one time these lines were perhaps as often heard as any in American verse:—

"Strike—till the last armed foe expires;
Strike—for your altars and your fires;
Strike—for the green graves of your sires;
God—and your native land!"

Fifty years ago the readers of this poem would have been surprised to be told that interest in it would ever wane, but it was fitted to arouse the enthusiasm, not of all time, but of an age,—an age that knew from first-hand experience the meaning of a struggle for hearth fires and freedom. Most critics to-day prefer Halleck's lines On the Death of Joseph Rodman Drake:—

"Green be the turf above thee,
Friend of my better days!
None knew thee but to love thee,
Nor named thee but to praise."

This poem is simpler, less rhetorical, and the vehicle of more genuine feeling than Marco Bozzaris.

The work of Drake and Halleck shows an advance in technique and imaginative power. Their verse, unlike the satires of Freneau and Trumbull, does not use the maiming cudgel, nor is it ponderous like Barlow's Columbiad or Dwight's Conquest of Canaan.

WASHINGTON IRVING, 1783-1859

[Illustration: WASHINGTON IRVING]

LIFE.—Irving was born in New York City in 1783, the year in which Benjamin Franklin signed at Paris the treaty of peace with England after the Revolutionary War. Irving's father, a Scotchman from the Orkney Islands, was descended from De Irwyn, armor bearer to Robert Bruce. Irving's mother was born in England, and the English have thought sufficiently well of her son to claim that he belonged to England as much as to America. In fact, he sometimes seemed to them to be more English than American, especially after he had written something unusually good.

When Irving was a boy, the greater part of what is now New York City was picturesque country. He mingled with the descendants of the Dutch, passed daily by their old-style houses, and had excellent opportunities for hearing the traditions and learning the peculiarities of Manhattan's early settlers, whom he was afterwards to immortalize in American literature. On his way to school he looked at the stocks and the whipping post, which had a salaried official to attend to the duties connected with it. He could have noticed two prisons, one for criminals and the other for debtors. He could scarcely have failed to see the gallows, in frequent use for offenses for which the law to-day prescribes only a short term of imprisonment. Notwithstanding the twenty-two churches, the pious complained that the town was so godless as to allow the theaters to be open on Saturday night.

Instead of going to bed after the family prayers, Irving sometimes climbed through a window, gained the alley, and went to the theater. In school he devoured as many travels and tales as possible, and he acquired much early skill in writing compositions for boys in return for their assistance in solving his arithmetical problems—a task that he detested.

At the age of fifteen he was allowed to take his gun and explore the Sleepy Hollow region, which became the scene of one of his world-famous stories. When he was seventeen, he sailed slowly up the Hudson River on his own voyage of discovery. Hendrick Hudson's exploration of this river gave it temporarily to the Dutch; but Irving annexed it for all time to the realm of the romantic imagination. The singers and weavers of legends were more than a thousand years in giving to the Rhine its high position in that realm; but Irving in a little more than a decade made the Hudson almost its peer.

[Illustration: IRVING AT THE AGE OF TWENTY TWO]

In such unique environment, Irving passed his boyhood. Unlike his brothers, he did not go to Columbia College, but like Charles Brockden Brown studied law, and like him never seriously practiced the profession. Under the pen name of "Jonathan Oldstyle," he was writing, at the age of nineteen, newspaper letters, modeled closely after Addison's Spectator. Ill health drove Irving at twenty-one to take a European trip, which lasted two years. His next appearance in literature after his return was in connection with his brother, William Irving, and James K. Paulding. The three started a semi-monthly periodical called Salmagundi, fashioned after Addison's Spectator and Goldsmith's Citizen of the World. The first number was published January 24, 1807, and the twentieth and last, January 25, 1808. "In Irving's contributions to it," says his biographer, "may be traced the germs of nearly everything he did afterwards."

The year 1809 was the most important in Irving's young life. In that year Matilda Hoffman, to whom he was engaged, died in her eighteenth year. Although he outlived her fifty years, he remained a bachelor, and he carried her Bible with him wherever he traveled in Europe or America. In the same year he finished one of his masterpieces, Diedrich Knickerbocker's History of New York. Even at this time he had not decided to follow literature as a profession.

In 1815 he went to England to visit his brother, who was in business there. It was not, however, until the failure of his brother's firm in 1818 that Irving determined to make literature his life work. While in London he wrote the Sketch Book (1819), which added to his fame on both sides of the Atlantic. This visit abroad lasted seventeen years. Before he returned, in 1832, he had finished the greater part of the literary work of his life. Besides the Sketch Book, he had written Bracebridge Hall, Tales of a Traveller, Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, The Conquest of Granada, The Companions of Columbus, and The Alhambra. He had been secretary of the American legation at Madrid and at London. He had actually lived in the Alhambra.

Soon after his return, he purchased a home at Tarrytown (now Irvington) in the Sleepy Hollow district on the Hudson. He named his new home "Sunnyside." With the exception of four years (1842-1846), when he served as minister to Spain, Irving lived here, engaged in literary work, for the remainder of his life. When he died in 1859, he was buried in the Sleepy Hollow cemetery, near his home.

Long before his death he was known on both sides of the Atlantic as America's greatest author. Englishmen who visited this country expressed a desire to see its two wonders, Niagara Falls and Irving. His English publishers alone paid him over $60,000 for copyright sales of his books in England. Before he died, he had earned more than $200,000 with his pen.

Irving's personality won him friends wherever he went. He was genial and kindly, and his biographer adds that it was never Irving's habit to stroke the world the wrong way. One of his maxims was, "When I cannot get a dinner to suit my taste, I endeavor to get a taste to suit my dinner."

[Illustration: SUNNYSIDE, IRVING'S HOME AT TARRYTOWN]

KNICKERBOCKER'S HISTORY OF NEW YORK.—The New York Evening Post for December 28, 1809, said: "This work was found in the chamber of Mr. Diedrich Knickerbocker, the old gentleman whose sudden and mysterious disappearance has been noticed. It is published in order to discharge certain debts he has left behind." This disguise, however, was too thin to deceive the public, and the work was soon popularly called Irving's Knickerbocker's History of New York.

Two hundred years before its publication, Hendrick Hudson, an explorer in the service of Holland, had sailed into New York Bay and discovered Manhattan Island and the Hudson River for the Dutch. They founded the city of New Amsterdam and held it until the English captured it in 1664. Irving wrote the history of this settlement during the Dutch occupation. He was led to choose this subject, because, as he tells us, few of his fellow citizens were aware that New York had ever been called New Amsterdam, and because the subject, "poetic from its very obscurity," was especially available for an American author, since it gave him a chance to adorn it with legend and fable. He states that his object was "to embody the traditions of our city in an amusing form" and to invest it "with those imaginative and whimsical associations so seldom met with in our country, but which live like charms and spells about the cities of the old world."

[Illustration: THE OFFICIAL WEIGHT]

[Illustration: A ONE-PIPE JOURNEY]

Irving achieved his object and produced an entertaining compound of historical fact, romantic sentiment, exaggeration, and humor. He shows us the contemplative Dutchmen on their first voyage in the Half Moon, sailing into New York Bay, prohibited by Hudson "from wearing more than five jackets and six pair of breeches." We see the scrupulously "honest" Dutch traders buying furs from the Indians, using an invariable scale of avoirdupois weights, a Dutchman's hand in the scale opposite the furs weighing one pound, his foot two pounds. We watch the puzzled Indians trying to account for the fact that the largest bundle of furs never weighed more than two pounds. We attend a council of burghers at Communipaw, called to devise means to protect their town from an English expedition. While they are thoughtfully smoking, the English sail by without seeing the smoke-enveloped town. Irving shows us the Dutchmen estimating their distances and time by the period consumed in smoking a pipe,—Hartford, Connecticut, being two hundred pipes distant. He allows us to watch a housewife emptying her pocket in her search for a wooden ladle and filling two corn baskets with the contents. He takes us to a tea party attended by "the higher classes or noblesse, that is to say such as kept their own cows and drove their own wagons," where we can see the damsels knitting their own woolen stockings and the vrouws serving big apple pies, bushels of doughnuts, and pouring tea out of a fat Delft teapot. He draws this picture of Wouter Van Twiller, Governor of New Amsterdam:—

"The person of this illustrious old gentleman was formed and proportioned as though it had been moulded by the hands of some cunning Dutch statuary, as a model of majesty and lordly grandeur. He was exactly five feet six inches in height, and six feet five inches in circumference. His head was a perfect sphere….

"His habits were as regular as his person. He daily took his four stated meals, appropriating exactly an hour to each; he smoked and doubted eight hours, and he slept the remaining twelve of the four-and-twenty."

[Illustration: WOUTER VAN TWILLER]

THE SKETCH BOOK GROUP.—The only one of his productions to which Irving gave the name of The Sketch Book was finished in 1820, the year in which Scott's Ivanhoe, Keats's Eve of St. Agnes, and Shelley's Prometheus Unbound appeared. Of the same general order as The Sketch Book are Irving's Bracebridge Hall (1822) and Tales of a Traveller (1824). These volumes all contain short stories, essays, or sketches, many of which are suggestive of Addison's Spectator. The Sketch Book is the most famous of Irving's works of this class. While it contains some excellent essays or descriptions, such as those entitled Westminster Abbey and Stratford-on-Avon, the book lives to-day because of two short stories, Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. These were not equaled by Addison, and they have not been surpassed by any English writers of the nineteenth century. Both stories take their rise from the "Knickerbocker Legend," and they are thoroughly American in coloring and flavor, even if they did happen to be written in England. No story in our literature is better known than that of Rip Van Winkle watching Hendrick Hudson and his ghostly crew playing ninepins in the Catskill Mountains and quaffing the magic liquor which caused him to sleep for twenty years.

[Illustration: ICHABOD CRANE]

For nearly one hundred years Ichabod Crane's courtship of Katrina Van Tassel, in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, has continued to amuse its readers. The Indian summer haze is still resting on Sleepy Hollow, our American Utopia, where we can hear the quail whistling, see the brook bubbling along among alders and dwarf willows, over which amber clouds float forever in the sky; where the fragrant buckwheat fields breathe the odor of the beehive; where the slapjacks are "well buttered and garnished with honey or treacle, by the delicate little dimpled hand of Katrina Van Tassel," where a greeting awaits us from the sucking pigs already roasted and stuffed with pudding; where the very tea tables of the Dutch housewives welcome us with loads of crisp crumbling crullers, honey cakes, and "the whole family of cakes," surrounded by pies, preserves, roast chicken, bowls of cream, all invested with a halo from the spout of the motherly Dutch teapot.

The Alhambra, a book of tales of the old Moorish palace in Granada, Spain, has been aptly termed "The Spanish Sketch Book." This has preserved the romance of departed Moorish glory almost as effectively as the Knickerbocker sketches and stories have invested the early Dutch settlers of New York with something like Homeric immortality. A traveler in Spain writes of The Alhambra: "Not Ford, nor Murray, nor Hare has been able to replace it. The tourist reads it within the walls it commemorates as conscientiously as the devout read Ruskin in Florence." [Footnote: Introduction to Pennell's illustrated edition of The Alhambra.]

In his three works, The Sketch Book, The Tales of a Traveller, and The Alhambra, Irving proved himself the first American master of the short tale or sketch, yet he is not the father of the modern short story, which aims to avoid every sentence unless it directly advances the narrative or heightens the desired impression. His description and presentation of incident do not usually tend to one definite goal, after the fashion theoretically prescribed by the art of the modern short story. The author of a modern short tale would need to feel the dire necessity of recording the sage observation of a Dutch housewife, that "ducks and geese are foolish things, and must be looked after, but girls can take care of themselves." Irving, however, in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, has sufficient leisure to make this observation and to stop to listen to "the pensive whistle of the quail," or to admire "great fields of Indian corn, with its golden ears peeping from their leafy coverts, and holding out the promise of cakes and hasty puddings."

Some have even proposed that his stories be called "narrative-essays," but they show a step beyond Addison in the evolution of the short story because they contain less essay and more story. It is true that Irving writes three pages of essay before beginning the real story in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, but the most of this preliminary matter is very interesting description. The quiet valley with its small brook, the tapping woodpecker, the drowsy shade of the trees, the spots haunted by the headless Hessian,—all fascinate us and provide an atmosphere which the modern short-story teller too seldom secures. The novice in modern short-story writing should know at the outset that it takes more genius to succeed with a story like The Legend of Sleepy Hollow than with a tale where the writer relies on the more strait-laced narration of events to arouse interest.

HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY.—Of The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (1828), Irving said "it cost me more toil and trouble than all my other productions." While the method of scientific historical study has completely changed since his time, no dry-as-dust historian has yet equaled Irving in presenting the human side of Columbus, his ideals, his dreams, and his mastery of wind and wave and human nature in the greatest voyage of the ages. Others have written of him as a man who once lived but who died so very long ago that he now has no more life than the portraits of those old masters who made all their figures look like paralytics. Irving did not write this work as if he were imagining a romance. He searched for his facts in all the musty records which he could find in Spain, but he then remembered that they dealt with a living, enthusiastic human being, sometimes weak, and sometimes invested with more than the strength of all the generations that had died without discovering the New World. It was this work which, more than any other, brought Irving the degree of D.C.L. from Oxford University. And yet, when he appeared to take his degree, the undergraduates of Oxford voiced the judgment of posterity by welcoming him with shouts of "Diedrich Knickerbocker!" "Ichabod Crane!" "Rip Van Winkle!"

The Conquest of Granada (1829) is a thrilling narrative of the subjugation by Ferdinand and Isabella of the last kingdom of the Moors in Spain. In this account, royal leaders, chivalrous knights, single-handed conflicts, and romantic assaults make warfare seem like a carnival instead of a tragedy.

The life of Oliver Goldsmith (1849) ranks among the best biographies yet written by an American, not because of its originality, but for its exquisitely sympathetic portraiture of an English author with whom Irving felt close kinship.

His longest work, the Life of George Washington (1855-1859), lacks the imaginative enthusiasm of youth, but it does justice to "the magnificent patience, the courage to bear misconstruction, the unfailing patriotism, the practical sagacity, the level balance of judgment combined with the wisest toleration, the dignity of mind, and the lofty moral nature," which made George Washington the one man capable of leading a forlorn army in the Revolution, of presiding over the destinies of the young Republic, and of taking a sure place among the few great heroes of all time. This work is also an almost complete history of the Revolutionary War. It is unfortunate that the great length of this Life (eight volumes) has resulted in such a narrowing of its circle of readers.

GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS.—Washington Irving is the earliest American whose most popular works are read for pure pleasure and not for some historical or educational significance. His most striking qualities are humor and restrained sentiment. The work by which he will be longest known is his creation of the "Knickerbocker Legend" in the History of New York and his two most famous short stories, Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Although he is not the father of the modern short story, which travels like an airship by the shortest line to its destination, he is yet one of the great nineteenth-century story tellers. Some of his essays or papers, like Westminster Abbey, Stratford-on-Avon, and Christmas do not suffer by comparison with Addison's writings.

Much of Irving's historical work and many of his essays do not show great depth or striking originality. He did some hack writing, dealing with our great West, but the work by which he is best known is so original that no other American writers can for a moment compare with him in his special field. He gave us our own Homeric age and peopled it with Knickerbockers, who are as entertaining as Achilles, Priam, or Circe.

[Illustration: IRVING'S GRAVE IN THE SLEEPY HOLLOW CEMETERY]

His best work is a product of the romantic imagination, but his romanticism is of a finer type than that of Charles Brockden Brown and the English Gothic school (p. 88), for Irving's fondness for Addison and Goldsmith, in conjunction with his own keen sense of humor, taught him restraint, balance, and the adaptation of means to ends.

Irving has an unusual power of investing his subjects with the proper atmosphere. In this he resembles the greatest landscape painters. If he writes of early settlers of New York, we are in a Dutch atmosphere. If he tells the legends of the Alhambra, the atmosphere is Moorish. If he takes us to the Hudson or the Catskills or Sleepy Hollow or Granada, he adds to our artistic enjoyment by enveloping everything in its own peculiar atmosphere.

His clear, simple, smooth prose conceals its artistic finish so well and serves as the vehicle for so much humor, that readers often pass a long time in his company without experiencing fatigue. His style has been criticized for lack of vigor and for resemblance to Goldsmith's. Irving's style, however, is his own, and it is the style natural to a man of his placid, artistic temperament.

America takes special pride in Washington Irving, because he was the first author to invest her brief history with the enduring fascination of romance. We shall the better appreciate our debt to him, if we imagine that some wizard has the power to subtract from our literature the inimitable Knickerbocker, Rip Van Winkle, Sleepy Hollow, and our national romantic river, the storied Hudson.

JAMES FENIMORE COOPER, 1789-1851

[Illustration: JAMES FENIMORE COOPER]

YOUTH.—Cooper's place in American literature is chiefly based on his romantic stories of the pioneer and the Indian. We have seen how Captain John Smith won the ear of the world by his early story of Indian adventure, how Charles Brockden Brown in Edgar Huntly deliberately selected the Indian and the life of the wilderness as good material for an American writer of romance. Cooper chose these very materials and used them with a success attained by no other writer. Let us see how his early life fitted him to write of the Indian, the pioneer, the forest, and the sea.

He was born in Burlington, New Jersey, in 1789, the year made memorable by the French Revolution. While he was still an infant, the Cooper family moved to the southeastern shore of Otsego Lake and founded the village of Cooperstown, at the point where the Susquehanna River furnishes an outlet for the lake. In this romantic place he passed the most impressionable part of his boyhood.

At the close of the eighteenth century, Cooperstown was one of the outposts of civilization. Few clearings had been made in the vast mysterious forests, which appealed so deeply to the boy's imagination, and which still sheltered deer, bear, and Indians. The most vivid local story which his young ears heard was the account of the Cherry Valley massacre, which had taken place a few miles from Cooperstown only eleven years before he was born. Cooper himself felt the fascination of the trackless forests before he communicated it to his readers.

He entered Yale in 1802, but he did not succeed in eradicating his love of outdoor life and of the unfettered habits of the pioneer, and did not remain to graduate. The faculty dismissed him in his junior year. It was unfortunate that he did not study more and submit to the restraints and discipline of regular college life; for his prose often shows in its carelessness of construction and lack of restraint his need for that formal discipline which was for the moment so grievous to him.

After Cooper had left college, his father decided to have him prepare for the navy. As there was no naval academy, he adopted the usual course of having the boy serve a year on a merchant vessel. After this apprenticeship, Cooper entered the navy as a midshipman. From such experiences he gained sufficient knowledge of the ocean and ships to enable him to become the author of some of our best tales of the sea. He resigned from the navy, however, in 1811, when he married.

BECOMES AN AUTHOR.—Cooper had reached the age of thirty without even attempting to write a book. In 1820 he remarked one day to his wife that he thought he could write a better novel than the one which he was then reading to her. She immediately challenged him to try, and he promptly wrote the novel called Precaution. He chose to have this deal with English life because the critics of his time considered American subjects commonplace and uninteresting. As he knew nothing of English life at first hand, he naturally could not make the pages of Precaution vivid with touches of local color.

This book was soon forgotten, and Cooper might never have written another, had not some sensible friends insisted that it was his patriotic duty to make American subjects fashionable. A friend related to him the story of a spy of Westchester County, New York, who during the Revolution served the American cause with rare fidelity and sagacity. Cooper was then living in this very county, and, being attracted by the subject, he soon completed the first volume of The Spy, which was at once printed. As he still doubted, however, whether his countrymen would read "a book that treated of their own familiar interests," he delayed writing the second volume for several months. When he did start to write it, his publisher feared that it might be too long to pay, so before Cooper had thought out the intervening chapters, he wrote the last chapter and had it printed and paged to satisfy the publisher. When The Spy was published in 1821, it immediately sold well in America, although such was the bondage to English standards of criticism that many who read the book hesitated to express an opinion until they had heard the verdict from England. When the English received the book, however, they fairly devoured it, and it became one of the most widely read tales of the early nineteenth century. Harvey Birch, the hero of the story, is one of the great characters of our early fiction.

[Illustration: OTSEGO HALL, COOPERSTOWN]

Cooper now adopted writing as a profession. In less than thirty years, he wrote more than thirty romances, in most cases of two volumes each. When he went to Europe in 1826, the year of the publication of The Last of the Mohicans, he found that his work was as well known abroad as at home. Sir Walter Scott, who met Cooper in Paris, mentions in his diary for November 6, 1826, a reception by a French princess, and adds the note, "Cooper was there, so the American and Scotch lions took the field together."

LATER YEARS.—After Cooper's return from Europe in 1833, he spent the most of the remaining seventeen years of his life in writing books at his early home, known as Otsego Hall, in Cooperstown. Here in the summer of 1837 there occurred an unfortunate incident which embittered the rest of his life and for a while made him the most unpopular of American authors. Some of his townspeople cut down one of his valuable trees and otherwise misused the picnic grounds on a part of his estate fronting the lake. When he remonstrated, the public denounced him and ordered his books removed from the local library. He then forbade the further use of his grounds by the public. Many of the newspapers throughout the state misrepresented his action, and he foolishly sued them for libel. From that time the press persecuted him. He sued the Albany Evening Journal, edited by Thurlow Weed, and received four hundred dollars damage. Weed thereupon wrote in the New York Tribune:—

"The value of Mr. Cooper's character has been judicially determined. It is worth exactly four hundred dollars."

Cooper promptly sued The Tribune, and was awarded two hundred dollars. In the heat of this controversy Thurlow Weed incautiously opened Cooper's The Pathfinder, which had just appeared, and sat up all night to finish the book. During the progress of these suits, Cooper unfortunately wrote a novel, Home as Found, satirizing, from a somewhat European point of view, the faults of his countrymen. A friend, trying to dissuade him from publishing such matter, wrote, "You lose hold on the American public by rubbing down their shins with brickbats, as you do." Cooper, however, published the book in 1838, and then there was a general rush to attack him. A critic of his History of the Navy of the United States of America (1839), a work which is still an authority for the time of which it treats, abused the book and made reflections on Cooper's veracity. The author brought suit for libel, and won his case in a famous trial in which he was his own lawyer. These unfortunate incidents, which would have been avoided by a man like Benjamin Franklin, diminished the circulation of Cooper's books in America during the rest of his life.

[Illustration: STATUE OF LEATHERSTOCKING OVERLOOKING OTSEGO LAKE]

Even on his deathbed he thought of the unjust criticism from which he had suffered, and asked his family not to aid in the preparation of any account of his life. He died in 1851 at the age of sixty-two, and was buried at Cooperstown. Lounsbury thus concludes an excellent biography of this great writer of romance:—

"America has had among her representatives of the irritable race of writers many who have shown far more ability to get on pleasantly with their fellows than Cooper…. But she counts on the scanty roll of her men of letters the name of no one who acted from purer patriotism or loftier principle. She finds among them all no manlier nature and no more heroic soul."

GREATEST ROMANCES.—Cooper's greatest achievement is the series known as The Leatherstocking Tales. These all have as their hero Leatherstocking, a pioneer variously known as Hawkeye, La Longue Carabine (The Long Rifle), and Natty Bumppo. A statue of this great original creation of American fiction now overlooks Otsego Lake. Leatherstocking embodies the fearlessness, the energy, the rugged honesty, of the worthiest of our pioneers, of those men who opened up our vast inland country and gave it to us to enjoy. Ulysses is no more typically Grecian than Leatherstocking is American.

The Leatherstocking Tales are five in number. The order in which they should be read to follow the hero from youth to old age is as follows:—

[Footnote: The figures in parenthesis refer to the date of publication.]

The Deerslayer; or The First War Path (1841).

The Last of the Mohicans; a Narrative of 1757 (1826).

The Pathfinder; or the Inland Sea (1840).

The Pioneers; or the Sources of the Susquehanna (1823).

The Prairie; a Tale (1827)

[Illustration: LEATHERSTOCKING]

This sequence may be easily remembered from the fact that the first chief words in the titles, "Deerslayer," "Mohicans," "Pathfinder," "Pioneers," and "Prairie," are arranged in alphabetical order. These books are the prose Iliad and Odyssey of the eighteenth-century American pioneer. Instead of relating the fall of Ilium, Cooper tells of the conquest of the wilderness. The wanderings or Leatherstocking in the forest and the wilderness are substituted for those of Ulysses on the sea. This story could not have been related with much of the vividness of an eye-witness of the events, if it had been postponed beyond Cooper's day. Before that time had forever passed, he fixed in living romance one remarkable phase of our country's development. The persons of this romantic drama were the Pioneer and the Indian; the stage was the trackless forest and the unbroken wilderness.

[Illustration: COOPER AT THE AGE OF FORTY FIVE]

The Last of the Mohicans has been the favorite of the greatest number of readers. In this story Chingachgook, the Indian, and Uncas, his son, share with Hawkeye our warmest admiration. The American boy longs to enter the fray to aid Uncas. Cooper knew that the Indian had good traits, and he embodied them in these two red men. Scott took the same liberty of presenting the finer aspects of chivalry and neglecting its darker side. Cooper, however, does show an Indian fiend in Magua.

Cooper's work in this series brings us face to face with the activities of nature and man in God's great out of doors. Cooper makes us realize that the life of the pioneer was not without its elemental spirit of poetry. We may feel something of this spirit in the reply of Leatherstocking to the trembling Cora, when she asked him at midnight what caused a certain fearful sound:—

"'Lady,' returned the scout, solemnly, 'I have listened to all the sounds of the woods for thirty years, as a man will listen, whose life and death depend so often on the quickness of his ears. There is no whine of the panther, no whistle of the catbird, nor any invention of the devilish Mingos, that can cheat me. I have heard the forest moan like mortal men in their affliction; often and again have I listened to the wind playing its music in the branches of the girdled trees; and I have heard the lightning cracking in the air, like the snapping of blazing brush, as it spitted forth sparks and forked flames; but never have I thought that I heard more than the pleasure of him, who sported with the things of his hand. But neither the Mohicans, nor I, who am a white man without a cross, can explain the cry just heard.'"

In addition to the five Leatherstocking Tales, three other romances show special power. They are:—

The Spy; a Tale of the Neutral Ground (1821).

The Pilot; a Tale of the Sea (1824).

The Red Rover; a Tale (1828).

The last two show Cooper's mastery in telling stories of the sea. Tom
Coffin, in The Pilot, is a fine creation.

Some of the more than thirty works of fiction that Cooper wrote are almost unreadable, and some appeal more to special students than to general readers. Satanstoe (1845), for instance, gives vivid pictures of mid-eighteenth century colonial life in New York.

The English critic's query, "Who reads an American book?" could have received the answer in 1820, "The English public is reading Irving." In 1833, Morse, the inventor of the electric telegraph, had another answer ready—"Europe is reading Cooper." He said that as soon as Cooper's works were finished they were published in thirty-four different places in Europe. American literature was commanding attention for its original work.

GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS.—Cooper's best romances are masterpieces of action and adventure in the forest and on the sea. No other writer has so well told the story of the pioneer. He is not a successful novelist of the drawing-room. His women are mediocre and conventional, of the type described in the old Sunday school books. But when he leaves the haunts of men and enters the forest, power comes naturally to his pen. His greatest stage of action is the forest. He loved wild nature and the sea.

He often availed himself of the Gothic license of improbability, his characters being frequently rescued from well-nigh impossible situations. His plots were not carefully planned in advance; they often seem to have been suggested by an inspiration of the moment. He wrote so rapidly that he was careless about the construction of his sentences, which are sometimes not even grammatical.

It is easy, however, to exaggerate Cooper's faults, which do not, after all, seriously interfere with the enjoyment of his works. A teacher, who was asked to edit critically The Last of the Mohicans, said that the first time he read it, the narrative carried him forward with such a rush, and bound him with such a spell, that he did not notice a single blemish in plot or style. A boy reading the same book obeyed the order to retire at eleven, but having reached the point where Uncas was taken prisoner by the Hurons, found the suspense too great, and quietly got the book and read the next four chapters in bed. Cooper has in a pre-eminent degree the first absolutely necessary qualification of the writer of fiction—the power to hold the interest. In some respects he resembles Scott, but although the "Wizard of the North" has a far wider range of excellence, Leatherstocking surpasses any single one of Scott's creations and remains a great original character added to the literature of the world. These romances have strong ethical influence over the young. They are as pure as mountain air, and they teach a love for manly, noble, and brave deeds. "He fought for a principle," says Cooper's biographer, "as desperately as other men fight for life."

WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT, 1794-1878

[Illustration: WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT]

LIFE.-The early environment of each of the three great members of the New York group determined to an unusual degree the special literary work for which each became famous. Had Irving not been steeped in the legends of the early Dutch settlers of Manhattan, hunted squirrels in Sleepy Hollow, and voyaged up the Hudson past the Catskills, he would have had small chance of becoming famous as the author of the "Knickerbocker Legend." Had Cooper not spent his boyhood on the frontier, living in close touch with the forest and the pioneer, we should probably not have had The Leatherstocking Tales. Had it not been for Bryant's early Puritan training and his association with a peculiar type of nature, he might have ended his days as a lawyer.

Bryant was born in Cummington, among the hills of western Massachusetts. In her diary, his mother thus records his birth:—

"Nov. 3, 1794. Stormy, wind N. E. Churned. Seven in the evening a son
born."

His poetry will be better understood, if we emphasize two main facts in his early development. In the first place, he was descended from John and Priscilla Alden of Mayflower stock and reared in strict Puritan fashion. Bryant's religious training determined the general attitude of all his poetry toward nature. His parents expected their children to know the Bible in a way that can scarcely be comprehended in the twentieth century. Before completing his fourth year, his older brother "had read the Scriptures through from beginning to end." At the age of nine, the future poet turned the first chapter of Job into classical couplets, beginning:—

"Job, good and just, in Uz had sojourned long,
He feared his God and shunned the way of wrong.
Three were his daughters and his sons were seven,
And large the wealth bestowed on him by heaven."

Another striking fact is that the prayers which he heard from the Puritan clergy and from his father and grandfather in family worship gave him a turn toward noble poetic expression. He said that these prayers were often "poems from beginning to end," and he cited such expressions from them as, "Let not our feet stumble on the dark mountains of eternal death." From the Puritan point of view, the boy made in his own prayers one daring variation from the petitions based on scriptural sanction. He prayed that he "might receive the gift of poetic genius, and write verses that might endure." His early religious training was responsible for investing his poetry with the dignity, gravity, and simplicity of the Hebraic Scriptures.

[Illustration: BRYANT AS A YOUNG MAN]

In the second place, he passed his youth in the fine scenery of western Massachusetts, which is in considerable measure the counterpart of the Lake Country which bred Wordsworth. The glory of this region reappears in his verse; the rock-ribbed hills, the vales stretching in pensive quietness between them, the venerable woods of ash, beech, birch, hemlock, and maple, the complaining brooks that make the valleys green, the rare May days:—

"When beechen buds begin to swell,
And woods the blue bird's warble know."

[Footnote: Bryant: The Yellow Violet.]

His association with such scenes determined the subject matter of his poetry, and his Puritan training prescribed the form of treatment.

He had few educational advantages,—a little district schooling, some private tutoring by a clergyman, seven month's stay in Williams College, which at the time of his entrance in 1810 had a teaching staff of one professor and two tutors, besides the president. Bryant left Williams, intending to enter Yale; but his father, a poor country physician who had to ride vast distances for small fees, was unable to give him any further college training.

Bryant, at about the age of eighteen, soon after leaving Williams, wrote Thanatopsis,—with the exception of the opening and the closing parts. He had already written at the age of thirteen a satiric poem, The Embargo, which had secured wide circulation in New England. Keenly disappointed at not being able to continue his college education, he regretfully began the study of law in order to earn his living as soon as possible. He celebrated his admission to the bar by writing one of his greatest short poems, To a Waterfowl (1815). When he was a lawyer practicing in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, he met Miss Fanny Fairchild, to whom he addressed the poem,—

"O fairest of the rural maids!"

[Illustration: FACSIMILE OF RECORD OF BRYANT'S MARRIAGE]

Religious in all things, he prepared this betrothal prayer, which they repeated together before they were married in the following year—

"May Almighty God mercifully take care of our happiness here and hereafter. May we ever continue constant to each other, and mindful of our mutual promises of attachment and truth. In due time, if it be the will of Providence, may we become more nearly connected with each other, and together may we lead a long, happy, and innocent life, without any diminution of affection till we die."

In 1821, the year in which Cooper published The Spy and Shelley wrote his Adonais lamenting the death of Keats, Bryant issued the first volume of his verse, which contained eight poems, Thanatopsis, The Inscription for Entrance to a Wood, To a Waterfowl, The Ages, The Fragment from Simonides, The Yellow Violet, The Song, and Green River. This was an epoch-making volume for American poetry. Freneau's best lyrics were so few that they had attracted little attention, but Bryant's 1821 volume of verse furnished a new standard of excellence, below which poets who aspired to the first rank could not fall. During the five years after its publication, the sales of this volume netted him a profit of only $14.92, but a Boston editor soon offered him two hundred dollars a year for an average of one hundred lines of verse a month. Bryant accepted the offer, and wrote poetry in connection with the practice of law.

Unlike Irving and Charles Brockden Brown, Bryant attended to his legal work doggedly and conscientiously for nine years, but he never liked the law, and he longed to be a professional author. In 1825 he abandoned the law and went to New York City. Here he managed to secure a livelihood for awhile on the editorial force of short-lived periodicals. In 1827, however, he became assistant editor, and in 1829 editor-in-chief, of The New York Evening Post—a position which he held for nearly fifty years, until his death.

The rest of his life is more political and journalistic than literary. He made The Evening Post a power in the development of the nation, but his work as editor interfered with his poetry, although he occasionally wrote verse to the end of his life.

In middle life he began a series of trips abroad, and wrote many letters describing his travels. To occupy his attention after his wife died in 1866, he translated Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, at the nearly uniform rate of forty lines a day. This work still remains one of the standard poetic translations of Homer.

[Illustration: BRYANT'S HOME, ROSLYN, L.I.]

As the years passed, he became New York's representative citizen, noted for high ideals in journalism and for incorruptible integrity, as well as for the excellence of his poetry. He died in 1878, at the age of eighty four, and was buried at Roslyn, Long Island, beside his wife.

POETRY.—Thanatopsis, probably written in 1811, was first published in 1817 in The North American Review, a Boston periodical. One of the editors said to an associate, "You have been imposed upon. No one on this side of the Atlantic is capable of writing such verses." The associate insisted that Dr. Bryant, the author, had left them at the office, and that the Doctor was at that moment sitting in the State Senate, representing his county. The editor at once dashed away to the State House, took a long look at the Doctor, and reported, "It is a good head, but I do not see Thanatopsis in it." When the father was aware of the misunderstanding, he corrected it, but there were for a long time doubts whether a boy could have written a poem of this rank. In middle age the poet wrote the following to answer a question in regard to the time of the composition of Thanatopsis:—

"It was written when I was seventeen or eighteen years old—I have not now at hand the memorandums which would enable me to be precise—and I believe it was composed in my solitary rambles in the woods. As it was first committed to paper, it began with the half line—'Yet a few days, and thee'—and ended with the beginning of another line with the words—'And make their bed with thee.' The rest of the poem—the introduction and the close—was added some years afterward, in 1821."

Thanatopsis remains to-day Bryant's most famous production. It is a stately poem upon death, and seems to come directly from the lips of Nature:—

"… from all around—
Earth and her waters and the depth of air—
Comes a still voice.—
Yet a few days, and thee
The all-beholding sun shall see no more …"

No other poem presents "all-including death" on a scale of such vastness. The majestic solemnity of the poem and the fine quality of its blank verse may be felt in this selection:—

"… The hills
Rock-ribbed and ancient as the sun,—the vales
Stretching in pensive quietness between;
The venerable woods—rivers that move
In majesty, and the complaining brooks
That make the meadows green; and, poured round all,
Old Ocean's gray and melancholy waste,—
Are but the solemn decorations all
Of the great tomb of man."

Thanatopsis shows the old Puritan tendency to brood on death, but the Inscription for Entrance to a Wood, written in 1815 and published in the same number of The North American Review as his first great poem, takes us where

"… the thick roof Of green and stirring branches is alive And musical with birds."

The gladness of the soft winds, the blue sky, the rivulet, the mossy rocks, the cleft-born wild-flower, the squirrels, and the insects,—all focus our attention on the "deep content" to be found in "the haunts of Nature," and suggest Wordsworth's philosophy of the conscious enjoyment of the flower, the grass, the mountains, the bird, and the stream, voicing their "thousand blended notes."

We may say of Bryant what was true of Cooper, that when he enters a forest, power seems to come unbidden to his pen. Bryant's Forest Hymn (1825) finds God in those green temples:—

"Thou art in the soft winds
That run along the summit of these trees
In music."

He points out the divinity that shapes our ends in:—

"That delicate forest flower,
With scented breath and look so like a smile."

No Puritan up to this time had represented God in a guise more pleasing than the smile of a forest flower. This entire Hymn seems like a great prayer rooted deep in those earlier prayers to which the boy used to listen.

Although Bryant lived to be eighty-four, he wrote less poetry than Keats, who died at the age of twenty-five, and about one third as much as Shelley, who was scarcely thirty when he was drowned. It is not length of days that makes a poet. Had Bryant died in his thirtieth year, his excellence and limitations would be fairly well shown in his work finished at that time. At this age, in addition to the five poems in his 1821 volume (p. 139), he had written The Winter Piece, A Forest Hymn, and The Death of the Flowers. These and a number of other poems, written before he had finished his thirtieth year, would have entitled him to approximately the same rank that he now holds in the history of American poetry. It is true that if he had then passed away, we should have missed his exquisite call to The Evening Wind (1829), and some of his other fine productions, such as To the Fringed Gentian (1829), The Prairies (1832), The Battle-Field (1837), with its lines which are a keynote to Bryant's thought and action:—

"Truth, crushed to earth, shall rise again,
Th' eternal years of God are hers."

We are thankful for the ideals voiced in The Poet (1863), and we listen respectfully to The Flood of Years (1876), as the final utterance of a poet who has had the experience of fourscore years.

GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS.—Bryant is the first great American poet. His poetry is chiefly reflective and descriptive, and it is remarkable for its elevation, simplicity, and moral earnestness. He lacks dramatic power and skill in narration. Calmness and restraint, the lack of emotional intensity, are also evident in his greatest work. His depths of space are vast, but windless. In The Poet he says that verse should embody:—

"… feelings of calm power and mighty sweep, Like currents journeying through the windless deep."

His chosen field is describing and interpreting nature. He has been called an American Wordsworth. In the following lines Bryant gives poetic expression to his feeling that a certain maiden's heart and face reflected the beauty of the natural scenes amid which she was reared:—

"… all the beauty of the place
Is in thy heart and on thy face.
The twilight of the trees and rocks
Is in the light shade of thy locks."

[Footnote: "O Fairest of the Rural Maids." (1820.)]

With these lines compare Wordsworth's Three Years She Grew in Sun and
Shower (1799):—

"… she shall lean her ear
In many a secret place
Where rivulets dance their wayward round,
And beauty born of murmuring sound
Shall pass into her face."

Bryant himself says that under the influence of Wordsworth, nature suddenly changed "into a strange freshness and life." It is no discredit to him to have been Wordsworth's pupil or to have failed to equal the magic of England's greatest poet of nature.

Bryant's range was narrow for a great poet, and his later verse usually repeated his earlier successes. As a rule, he presented the sky, forest, flower, stream, animal, and the composite landscape, only as they served to illumine the eternal verities, and the one verity toward which nature most frequently pointed was death. His heart, unlike Wordsworth's, did not dance with the daffodils waving in the breeze, for the mere pleasure of the dancing.

The blank verse of his Thanatopsis has not been surpassed since Milton. In everything that he did, Bryant was a careful workman. Painters have noticed his skill in the use of his poetic canvas and his power to suggest subjects to them, such as:—

"… croft and garden and orchard, That bask in the mellow light."

Three vistas from To a Waterfowl,—"the plashy brink of weedy lake," "marge of river wide," and "the chafed ocean side,"—long ago furnished the suggestion for three paintings.

Bryant's Puritan ancestry and training laid a heavy hand upon him. Thoughts of "the last bitter hour" are constantly recurring in his verse. The third line of even his poem June brings us to the grave. His great poems are often like a prayer accompanied by the subdued tones of a mighty organ. Nothing foul or ignoble can be found in his verse. He has the lofty ideals of the Puritans.

ENGLISH LITERATURE OF THE PERIOD

As we saw in the preceding chapter, WORDSWORTH and COLERIDGE at the close of the last century began to exert a new influence on literature. Wordsworth's new philosophy of nature (p. 99) can be traced in the work of Bryant. The other poets of this age belong to the romantic school. BYRON (1788-1824), the poet of revolt against the former world, shows the same influences that manifest themselves in the American and the French Revolution. He voices the complaints, and, to some extent, the aspirations of Europe. He shows his influence in Fitz-Greene Halleck's Marco Bozzaris. Shelley, who also belongs to the school of revolt, has a peculiar position as a poet of ethereal, evanescent, and spirit-like beauty. He is heard in the voice of the West Wind, the Cloud, the unseen Skylark, the "Spirit of Night," and "the white radiance of Eternity." Bryant's call in The Evening Wind (1829) to

"… rouse
The wide old wood from his majestic rest,
Summoning from the innumerable boughs
The strange, deep harmonies that haunt his breast,"

may even have been suggested by Shelley's Ode to the West Wind (1819)

"Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
What if my leaves are falling like its own?
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies
Will take from both a deep autumnal tone."

In the early part of this period, Wordsworth and Shelley were both making these harmonies of nature audible to ears which had hitherto not heard them. KEATS (1795-1821) is the poet of beauty, and he makes more of an appeal to the senses than Shelley. The favorite creed of Keats was:—

"A thing of beauty is a joy forever."

His influence will gradually extend to later American verse.

SIR WALTER SCOTT was the great prose writer of the age preceding the Victorian. The first of his series of Waverley novels was published in 1814, and he continued until his death in 1832 to delight the world with his genius as a writer of romances. His influence may be traced in Cooper's work, although the American author occupies an original field. Readers are still charmed with the exquisite flavor and humor in the essays of CHARLES LAMB (1775-1834). The essays of DE QUINCEY (1785-1859) are remarkable for precision, stateliness, and harmony.

LEADING HISTORICAL FACTS, 1809-1849.

During these forty years, the facts most important for the student of literature are connected with the expansion and social ideals of the country. Progress was specially manifest in two ways: in "the manufacture of farms" and in the introduction and use of steam. At the time of the inauguration of Washington in 1789, the center of population of the entire country was thirty miles east of Baltimore. The progress of settlements westward, which had already begun in the last period, became in an increasing degree one of the remarkable events in the history of the world.

We may observe that the second war with England (1812) resulted in welding the Union more closely together and in giving it more prestige abroad. We should next note the unparalleled material development of the country; the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, the rapid extension of steamboats on rivers, the trial of the first steam locomotive in 1828, the increased westward movement of population, which reached California in 1849, several hundred years ahead of schedule time, as those thought who prophesied before the introduction of steam. The story of the material progress of the country sounds like a new Arabian Nights' Tale.

The administration of Andrew Jackson (1829-1837) is really the beginning of the modern history of the United States. The change during these years was due more to steam than to any other single cause. At the beginning of his administration, there were no steam railroads, but fifteen hundred miles were in operation before the end of his second term. His predecessor in the presidential chair was John Quincy Adams, a Harvard graduate and an aristocrat. Jackson was illiterate, a man of the people. There was an extension of the social democratic feeling.

All classes, the poor as well as the rich, spoke their minds more freely on every subject. Even Jackson's messages relating to foreign nations were sometimes not couched in very diplomatic terms. Every one felt that he was as good as anybody else, and in the new settlements all mingled on terms of equality. When Cooper came back to the United States in 1833, after an absence of six years in Europe, he found that he had returned to a new country, where "everybody was everywhere," and nobody was anywhere, and where the chase for the dollar seemed to have grown more absorbing than ever before.

Slavery had become one of the leading questions of the day. To keep the balance between the North and the South, states were often admitted in pairs, one free and one slave state. In 1845 there were in the Union thirteen free and fourteen slave states. The decade between 1840 and 1850 witnessed the war with Mexico and the acquisition from her of our vast southwestern territory,—Texas, California, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, and some interior lands to the north of these. The South was chiefly instrumental in bringing about this extension of our boundaries, hoping that this additional territory would be open for the employment of slaves and would tend to make more nearly even the influence of each section in the national government.

SUMMARY

With the publication of Irving's Knickerbocker's History of New York in 1809, the literary center of the United States shifted to New York, then the second city in the country. Drake and Halleck, two minor poets, calling themselves "The Croakers," issued a series of poems with the principal object of entertaining readers. Drake wrote a fine romantic poem called The Culprit Fay. Halleck's best works are the poems on the death of Drake and Marco Bozzaris.

Washington Irving's chief fame is based on his original creation of the "Knickerbocker Legend" in his History of New York, Rip Van Winkle, and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. He is an unusually successful writer of short stories, of essays like those in Addison's Spectator, and of popular history and biography. He is the first American writer whose works are still read for pure pleasure. Humor and restrained sentiment are two of his pronounced qualities. While the subject matter of his best work is romantic, in his treatment of that matter he shows the restraint of the classical school. His style is simple and easy-flowing but not remarkable for vigor.

James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales recreate in a romantic way the life of the pioneer in the forest and the wilderness. The Indian figures more largely in these Tales than in those of any preceding writer. Leatherstocking deserves a place in the world's temple of fame as a great original character in fiction. Cooper is also our greatest writer of stories of the sea. The Pilot and The Red Rover still fascinate readers with the magic of the ocean. The scenes of all of his best stories are laid out of doors. His style is often careless, and he sometimes does not take the trouble to correct positive errors, but his power of arousing interest is so great that these are seldom noticed. His romances are pure, and they inspire a love for what is noble and manly. Irving was almost as popular in England as in the United States, but Cooper was the first American author to be read widely throughout Europe.

William Cullen Bryant is the first great American poet. He belongs to Wordsworth's school of nature poets. Bryant's verse, chiefly reflective and descriptive, is characterized by elevation, simplicity, and moral earnestness. His range is narrow. His communion with nature often leads him to the grave, but no other American poet invests it with as much majesty as is found in Thanatopsis. His strict Puritan training causes him to present the eternal verities in his poetry. Unlike Irving, Cooper, and the minor writers, his object is not entertainment.

The influence of steam, the more rapid emigration westward, the increase of the democratic spirit, and the beginning of the modern era with its strenuous materialistic trend in the administration of Andrew Jackson marked a great change in the development of the nation. The taking of our vast southwest territory from Mexico was an event second only in importance to the Louisiana Purchase.

REFERENCES FOR FURTHER STUDY

HISTORICAL

In addition to the American and English histories suggested on pp. 60, 61,
the following may be consulted: Burgess's The Middle Period, 1817-1858;
Coman's The Industrial History of the United States, Chaps. VI. and VII.;
Bogart's Economic History of the United States, Chap. XIV; Sparks's The
Expansion of the American People.

LITERARY

Richardson's American Literature.

Trent's A History of American Literature.

Wendell's History of Literature in America.

Stanton's A Manual of American Literature.

Herford's The Age of Wordsworth.

Stedman's Poets of America. (Drake, Halleck, Bryant.)

The Croakers, pp. 255-385, in The Poetical Writings of Fitz-Greene Halleck, edited by James Grant Wilson.

Wilson's Fitz-Greene Halleck's Life and Letters.

Irving's, Pierre M.: Life and Letters of Washington Irving, 4 vols.

Warner's The Work of Washington Irving (60 pages, excellent).

Warner's Washington Irving (304 pages, American Men of Letters).

Payne's Leading American Essayists, pp. 43-134. (Irving.)

Canby's The Short Story in English, pp. 218-226. (Irving.)

Lounsbury's James Fenimore Cooper. (American Men of Letters; excellent.)

Clymer's James Fenimore Cooper. (Beacon Biographies.)

Brownell's American Prose Masters. (Cooper.)

Erskine's Leading American Novelists, pp. 51-129. (Cooper.)

Cooper's Last of the Mohicans, edited with Introduction by Halleck.

Godwin's A Biography of William Cullen Bryant, with Extracts from his
Private Correspondence, 2 vols. (The standard authority.)

Godwin's The Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant, 2 vols.

Bigelow's William Cullen Bryant. (American Men of Letters.)

Bradley's William Cullen Bryant. (English Men of Letters, American
Series.)

Chadwick's The Origin of a Great Poem (Thanatopsis), Harper's Magazine,
September, 1894,

SUGGESTED READINGS

MINOR WRITERS.—The Croakers, in Wilson's edition of Halleck's Poetical
Writings.

Selections from the poetry of Drake and Halleck may be found in Stedman's American Anthology, pp. 36-47, and in S. & H., Vol. V.

IRVING.—His Knickerbocker's History of New York begins with somewhat tiresome matter, condensed from chapters which he and his brother had jointly written on a different plan. The first part may well be omitted, but Books III., V., VI., VII. should at least be read.

Read his best two short stories, Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Lovers of Irving will also wish to read some tales from The Alhambra, and some of his essays: e.g. Westminster Abbey and Stratford-on-Avon. For selections from his various works, see Carpenter, 124-134; S. & H., V., 41-62.

COOPER.—One of his Leather stocking Tales (p. 131), e.g. The Last of the Mohicans, which is deservedly the most popular, should be read. If a tale of the sea is desired, read either The Pilot or The Red Rover. Selections may be found in Carpenter, 124-134; S. & H., V., 138-183.

Bryant.—Read Thanatopsis, To a Waterfowl, O Fairest of the Rural Maids, A Forest Hymn, The Death of the Flowers, The Evening Wind, To the Fringed Gentian, and The Poet. All of these are accessible in Bryant's poetical works, and almost all may be found in Page's The Chief American Poets. Selections are given in Stedman's American Anthology; S. & H., Vol. V.; and Long's American Poems, 1776-1900.

QUESTIONS AND SUGGESTIONS

What are some of the chief qualities in the poetry of "The Croakers"? What do these qualities indicate in the readers of contemporary New York? Do you find a genuine romantic element in Drake's Culprit Fay? Compare Halleck's Marco Bozzaris with his lines on the death of Drake, and give reasons for your preference.

Select what you consider the best three specimens of humor in Irving's Knickerbocker's History of New York. How is the humorous effect secured? Why does it not make us dislike the Dutch? Why is this History an original work? Why have Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow been such general favorites? Compare these with any of Addison's Sir Roger de Coverley Papers and with any modern short story. Is Irving a romantic writer? Compare his style with Addison's and with Goldsmith's in The Vicar of Wakefield.

Why does Cooper deserve to rank as an original American author? What is his chosen field? In what does his special power consist? Who before him made use of the Indian in literature? Can you find any point of similarity between his work and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow? What are the most striking points of dissimilarity? How does his use of the romantic element differ from Irving's? What blemishes have you actually noticed in Cooper?

What lines in Bryant's Thanatopsis are the keynote of the entire poem? What are its general qualities? What are the finest thoughts in A Forest Hymn? What do these suggest in regard to Bryant's early training and the cast of his mind? Of all Bryant's poems indicated for reading, which do you prefer? Which of his references to nature do you like best? Compare his poem: O fairest of the rural maids! with Wordsworth's: Three years she grew in sun and shower. In Bryant's The Poet, what noteworthy poetical ideals do you find?

CHAPTER IV

THE NEW ENGLAND GROUP

CHANGE IN RELIGIOUS THOUGHT.—Since the death of Jonathan Edwards in the middle of the seventeenth century, New England had done little to sustain her former literary reputation. As the middle of the nineteenth century approaches, however, we shall find a remarkable group of writers in Boston and its vicinity. The causes of this wonderful literary awakening are in some respects similar to those which produced the Elizabethan age. In the sixteenth century the Reformation and the Revival of Learning exerted their joint force on England. In the nineteenth century, New England also had its religious reformation and intellectual awakening. We must remember that "re-formation" strictly means "forming again" or "forming in a different way." It is not the province of a history of literature to state whether a change in religious belief is for the better or the worse, but it is necessary to ascertain how such a change affects literature.

The old Puritan religion taught the total depravity of man, the eternal damnation of the overwhelming majority, of all but the "elect." A man's election to salvation depended on God's foreordination. If the man was not elected, he was justly treated, for he merely received his deserts. Even Jonathan Edwards, in spite of his sweet nature, felt bound to preach hell fire in terms of the old Puritan theology. In one of his sermons, he says:—

"The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect, over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked; his wrath toward you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else but to be cast into the fire."

This quotation was not given when we discussed the works of Edwards, because it misrepresents his most often recurring idea of God. But the fact that even he felt impelled to preach such a sermon shows most emphatically that Puritan theology exerted its influence by presenting more vivid pictures of God's wrath than of his love.

A tremendous reaction from such beliefs came in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. William Ellery Channing (1780-1842), pastor of the Federal Street Church in Boston and one of the greatest leaders of this religious reform, wrote in 1809 of the old Puritan creed:—

"A man of plain sense, whose spirit has not been broken to this creed by education or terror, will think that it is not necessary for us to travel to heathen countries, to learn how mournfully the human mind may misrepresent the Deity."

He maintained that human nature, made in the image of God, is not totally depraved, that the current doctrine of original sin, election, and eternal punishment "misrepresents the Deity" and makes him a monster. This view was speedily adopted by the majority of cultivated people in and around Boston. The Unitarian movement rapidly developed and soon became dominant at Harvard College. Unitarianism was embraced by the majority of Congregational churches in Boston, including the First Church, and the Second Church, where the great John Cotton (see p. 14.) and Cotton Mather (p. 46.) had preached the sternest Puritan theology. Nearly all of the prominent writers mentioned in this chapter adopted liberal religious views. The recoil had been violent, and in the long run recoil will usually be found proportional to the strength of the repression. Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes even called the old theology largely "diabology." The name of one of his poems is Homesick in Heaven. Had he in the early days chosen such a title, he would either, like Roger Williams, have been exiled, or, like the Quakers, have suffered a worse fate.

Many adopted more liberal religious beliefs without embracing Unitarianism. Perhaps these three lines voice most briefly the central thought in man's new creed and his changed attitude toward God:—

"For Thou and I are next of kin;
The pulses that are strong within,
From the deep Infinite heart begin."

THE NEW ENGLAND RENAISSANCE.—The stern theology of the Puritans may have been absolutely necessary to make them work with a singleness and an inflexibility of purpose to lay the foundations of a mighty republic; but this very singleness of aim had led to a narrowness of culture which had starved the emotional and aesthetic nature. Art, music, literature, and the love of beauty in general had seemed reprehensible because it was thought that they took away the attention from a matter of far graver import, the salvation of the immortal soul. Now there gradually developed the conviction that these agencies not only helped to save the soul, but made it more worth saving. People began to search for the beautiful and to enjoy it in both nature and art. Emerson says:—

"… if eyes were made for seeing, Then Beauty is its own excuse for being."

The first half of the nineteenth century saw the New Englanders engaged in a systematic attempt at self-culture, to an extent never before witnessed in America and rarely elsewhere. Many with an income barely sufficient for comfortable living set aside a fund for purchasing books before anything else. Emerson could even write to Carlyle that all the bright girls in New England wanted something better than morning calls and evening parties, and that a life of mere trade did not promise satisfaction to the boys.

In 1800 there were few foreign books in Boston, but the interest in them developed to such an extent that Hawthorne's father-in-law and sister-in-law, Dr. and Miss Peabody, started a foreign bookstore and reading room. Longfellow made many beautiful translations from foreign poetry. In 1840 Emerson said that he had read in the original fifty-five volumes of Goethe. Emerson superintended the publication in America of Carlyle's early writings, which together with some of Coleridge's works introduced many to German philosophy and idealism.

In this era, New England's recovery from emotional and aesthetic starvation was rapid. Her poets and prose writers produced a literature in which beauty, power, and knowledge were often combined, and they found a cultivated audience to furnish a welcome.

THE TRANSCENDENTAL PHILOSOPHY.—The literature and thought of New England were profoundly modified by the transcendental philosophy. Ralph Waldo Emerson (p. 178) was the most celebrated expounder of this school of thought. The English philosopher, Locke, had maintained that intellectual action is limited to the world of the senses. The German metaphysician, Kant, claimed that the soul has ideas which are not due to the activity of any of the senses: that every one has an idea of time and space although no one has ever felt, tasted, seen, eaten, or smelled time or space. He called such an idea an intuition or transcendental form.

The student of literature need not worry himself greatly about the metaphysical significance of transcendentalism, but he must understand its influence on literary thought. It is enough for him to realize that there are two great classes of fact confronting every human being. There are the ordinary phenomena of life, which are apparent to the senses and which are the only things perceived by the majority of human beings. But behind all these appearances are forces and realities which the senses do not perceive. One with the bodily eye can see the living forms moving around him, but not the meaning of life. It is something more than the bodily hand that gropes in the darkness and touches God's hand. To commune with a Divine Power, we must transcend the experience of the senses. We are now prepared to understand what a transcendentalist like Thoreau means when he says:—

"I hear beyond the range of sound,
I see beyond the range of sight."

The transcendentalists, therefore, endeavored to transcend, that is, to pass beyond, the range of human sense and experience. We are all in a measure transcendentalists when we try to pierce the unseen, to explain existence, to build a foundation of meaning under the passing phenomena of life. To the old Puritan, the unseen was always fraught with deeper meaning than the seen. Sarah Pierrepont and Jonathan Edwards (p. 51) were in large measure transcendentalists. The trouble was that the former Puritan philosophy of the unseen was too rigid and limited to satisfy the widening aspirations of the soul.

It should be noted that in this period the term "transcendentalist" is extended beyond its usual meaning and loosely applied to those thinkers who (1) preferred to rely on their own intuitions rather than on the authority of any one, (2) exalted individuality, (3) frowned on imitation and repetition, (4) broke with the past, (5) believed that a new social and spiritual renaissance was necessary and forthcoming, (6) insisted on the importance of culture, on "plain living and high thinking," and (7) loved isolation and solitude. An excellent original exposition of much of this philosophy may be found in Emerson's Nature (1836) and in his lecture on The Transcendentalist (1842).

THE ECSTASY OF THE TRANSCENDENTALISTS.—Any age that accomplishes great things is necessarily enthusiastic. According to Emerson, one of the articles of the transcendental creed was a belief "in inspiration and ecstasy." With this went an overmastering consciousness of newly discovered power. "Do you think me the child of circumstances?" asked the transcendentalist, and he answered in almost the same breath, "I make my circumstance."

The feeling of ecstasy, due to the belief that he was really a part of an infinite Divine Power, made Emerson say:—

"I see the spectacle of morning from the hill-top over against my house, from daybreak to sunrise, with emotions which an angel might share. The long slender bars of cloud float like fishes in the sea of crimson light. From the earth, as a shore, I look out into that silent sea. I seem to partake its rapid transformations; the active enchantment reaches my dust, and I dilate and conspire with the morning wind."

The greatest of the women transcendentalists, MARGARET FULLER (1810-1850), a distinguished early pleader for equal rights for her sex, believed that when it was fashionable for women to bring to the home "food and fire for the mind as well as for the body," an ecstatic "harmony of the spheres would ensue."

To her, as to Emerson, Nature brought an inspiring message. On an early May day she wrote:—

"The trees were still bare, but the little birds care not for that; they revel and carol and wildly tell their hopes, while the gentle voluble south wind plays with the dry leaves, and the pine trees sigh with their soul-like sounds for June. It was beauteous; and care and routine fled away, and I was as if they had never been."

[Illustration: MARGARET FULLER]

The transcendentalist, while voicing his ecstasy over life, has put himself on record as not wishing to do anything more than once. For him God has enough new experiences, so that repetition is unnecessary. He dislikes routine. "Everything," Emerson says, "admonishes us how needlessly long life is," that is, if we walk with heroes and do not repeat. Let a machine add figures while the soul moves on. He dislikes seeing any part of a universe that he does not use. Shakespeare seemed to him to have lived a thousand years as the guest of a great universe in which most of us never pass beyond the antechamber.

[Illustration: AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT]

Critics were not wanting to point out the absurdity of many transcendental ecstasies. AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT (1799-1888), one of the leading transcendentalists, wrote a peculiar poem called The Seer's Rations, in which he speaks of

"Bowls of sunrise for breakfast,
Brimful of the East."

His neighbors said that this was the diet which he provided for his hungry family. His daughter, Louisa May, the author of that fine juvenile work, Little Women (1868), had a sad struggle with poverty while her father was living in the clouds. The extreme philosophy of the intangible was soon called "transcendental moonshine." The tenets of Bronson Alcott's transcendental philosophy required him to believe that human nature is saturated with divinity. He therefore felt that a misbehaving child in school would be most powerfully affected by seeing the suffering which his wrongdoing brought to others. He accordingly used to shake a good child for the bad deeds of others. Sometimes when the class had offended, he would inflict corporal punishment on himself. His extreme applications of the new principle show that lack of balance which many of this school displayed, and yet his reliance on sympathy instead of on the omnipresent rod marks a step forward in educational practice. Emerson was far-seeing enough to say of those who carried the new philosophy to an extreme, "What if they eat clouds and drink wind, they have not been without service to the race of man."

[Illustration: ORCHARD HOUSE, HOME OF THE ALCOTTS]

THE NEW VIEW OF NATURE.—To the old Puritan, nature seemed to groan under the weight of sin and to bear the primal curse. To the transcendentalist, nature was a part of divinity. The question was sometimes asked whether nature had any real existence outside of God, whether it was not God's thoughts. Emerson, being an idealist, doubted whether nature had any more material existence than a thought.

The majority of the writers did not press this idealistic conception of nature, but much of the nature literature of this group shows a belief in the soul's mystic companionship with the bird, the flower, the cloud, the ocean, and the stars. Emerson says:—

"The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable. I am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me, and I to them."

Hawthorne exclaims:—

"O, that I could run wild!—that is, that I could put myself into a true relation with Nature, and be on friendly terms with all congenial elements."

Thoreau (p. 194) often enters Nature's mystic shrine and dilates with a sense of her companionship. Of the song of the wood thrush, he says:—

"Whenever a man hears it, he is young, and Nature is in her spring. Whenever he hears it, it is a new world and a free country, and the gates of heaven are not shut against him…. It changes all hours to an eternal morning. It banishes all trivialness. It reinstates me in my dominion, makes me the lord of creation, is chief musician of my court. This minstrel sings in a time, a heroic age, with which no event in the village can be contemporary."

Thoreau could converse with the Concord River and hear the sound of the rain in its "summer voice." Hiawatha talked with the reindeer, the beaver, and the rabbit, as with his brothers. In dealing with nature, Whittier caught something of Wordsworth's spirituality, and Lowell was impressed with the yearnings of a clod of earth as it

"Climbs to a soul in grass and flowers."

One of the chief glories of this age was the fuller recognition of the companionship that man bears to every child of nature. This phase of the literature has reacted on the ideals of the entire republic. Flowers, trees, birds, domestic animals, and helpless human beings have received more sympathetic treatment as a result. In what previous time have we heard an American poet ask, as Emerson did in his poem Forbearance (1842):—

"Hast thou named all the birds without a gun?
Loved the wood-rose, and left it on its stalk?"

[Illustration: MARGARET FULLER'S COTTAGE, BROOK FARM]

THE DIAL.—Transcendentalism had for its organ a magazine called The Dial, which was published quarterly for four years, from 1840 to 1844. Margaret Fuller, its first editor, was a woman of wide reading and varied culture, and she had all the enthusiasm of the Elizabethans. Carlyle said of her, "Such a predetermination to eat this big Universe as her oyster or her egg, and to be absolute empress of all height and glory in it that her heart could conceive, I have not before seen in any human soul." She was determined to do her part in ushering in a new social and spiritual world, and it seemed to her that The Dial would be a mighty lever in accomplishing this result. She struggled for two years to make the magazine a success. Then ill health and poverty compelled her to turn the editorship over to Emerson, who continued the struggle for two years longer.

Some of Emerson's best poems were first published in The Dial, as were his lecture on The Transcendentalist and many other articles by him. Thoreau wrote for almost every number. Some of the articles were dull, not a few were vague, but many were an inspiration to the age, and their resultant effect is still felt in our life and literature. Much of the minor poetry was good and stimulating. William Channing (1818-1901) published in The Dial his Thoughts, in which we find lines that might serve as an epitaph for a life approved by a transcendentalist:—

"It flourished in pure willingness;
Discovered strongest earnestness;
Was fragrant for each lightest wind;
Was of its own particular kind;—
Nor knew a tone of discord sharp;
Breathed alway like a silver harp;
And went to immortality."

While turning the pages of The Dial, we shall often meet with sentiments as full of meaning to us as to the people of that time. Among such we may instance:—

"Rest is not quitting
The busy career;
Rest is the fitting
Of self to its sphere."

Occasionally we shall find an expression fit to become a fireside motto:—

"I slept, and dreamed that life was beauty;
I woke, and found that life was duty."

The prose in The Dial reflects the new spirit. In the first volume we may note such expressions of imaginative enthusiasm as:—

"The reason why Homer is to me like dewy morning is because I too lived while Troy was and sailed in the hollow ships of the Grecians…. And Shakespeare in King John does but recall me to myself in the dress of another age, the sport of new accidents. I, who am Charles, was sometime Romeo. In Hamlet I pondered and doubted. We forget that we have been drugged with the sleepy bowl of the Present."

In the same volume we find some of Alcott's famous Orphic Sayings, of which the following is a sample:—

"Engage in nothing that cripples or degrades you. Your first duty is self-culture, self-exaltation: you may not violate this high trust. Yourself is sacred, profane it not. Forge no chains wherewith to shackle your own members. Either subordinate your vocation to your life or quit it forever."

A writer on Ideals of Every Day Life in The Dial for January, 1841, suggested a thought that is finding an echo in the twentieth century:—

"No one has a right to live merely to get a living. And this is what is
meant by drudgery."

Two lines in the last volume voice the new spirit of growth and action:—

"I am never at anchor, I never shall be;
I am sailing the glass of infinity's sea."

The Dial afforded an outlet for the enthusiasms, the aspirations, the ideals of life, during a critical period in New England's renaissance. No other periodical during an equal time has exerted more influence on the trend of American literature.

BROOK FARM.—In 1841 a number of people, headed by GEORGE RIPLEY (1802-1880), a Unitarian clergyman, purchased a tract of land of about two hundred acres at West Roxbury, nine miles from Boston. This was known as Brook Farm, and it became the home of a group who wished to exemplify in real life some of the principles that The Dial and other agencies of reform were advocating.

[Illustration: POOL AT BROOK FARM]

In The Dial for January, 1842, we may find a statement of the aims of the Brook Farm community. The members especially wanted "leisure to live in all the faculties of the soul" and they determined to combine manual and mental labor in such a way as to achieve this result. Probably the majority of Americans are in sympathy with such an aim. Many have striven to find sufficient release from their hard, unimproving routine work to enable them to escape its dwarfing effects and to live a fuller life on a higher plane.

The Brook Farm settlement included such people as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Charles A. Dana (1819-1897), afterward editor of the New York Sun, George Ripley, in later times distinguished as the literary critic of the New York Tribune, and GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS (1824-1892), who became a well-known essayist, magazine editor, and civil service reformer. The original pioneers numbered about twenty; but the membership increased to nearly one hundred and fifty. Brook Farm had an influence, however, that could not be measured by the number of its inmates. In one year more than four thousand visitors came to see this new social settlement.

Hawthorne, the most famous literary member of the Brook Farm group, has recorded many of his experiences during his residence there in 1841:—

"April 13. I have not yet taken my first lesson in agriculture, except that I went to see our cows foddered, yesterday afternoon. We have eight of our own; and the number is now increased by a transcendental heifer belonging to Miss Margaret Fuller. She is very fractious, I believe, and apt to kick over the milk pail…. April 16. I have milked a cow!!! … May 3. The whole fraternity eat together, and such a delectable way of life has never been seen on earth since the days of the early Christians…. May 4…. there is nothing so unseemly and disagreeable in this sort of toil as you could think. It defiles the hands, indeed, but not the soul."

Unfortunately, in order to earn a living, it was found necessary to work ten hours a day in the summer time, and this toil was so fatiguing that the mind could not work clearly at the end of the day. We find Hawthorne writing on June 1 of the same year:—

"It is my opinion that a man's soul may be buried and perish … in a furrow of the field, just as well as under a pile of money."

On August 12, he asks:—

"Is it a praiseworthy matter that I have spent five golden months in providing food for cows and horses? It is not so."

On October 9, he says:—

"Our household, being composed in great measure of children and young people, is generally a cheerful one enough, even in gloomy weather…. It would be difficult to conceive beforehand how much can be added to the enjoyment of a household by mere sunniness of temper and liveliness of disposition…."

Hawthorne remained at Brook Farm for only one of the six years of its existence. An important building, on which there was no insurance, burned in 1846, and the next year the association was forced for financial reasons to disband. This was probably the most ideal of a series of social settlements, every one of which failed. The problem of securing sufficient leisure to live in all the faculties of the soul has not yet been solved, but attempts toward a satisfactory solution have not yet been abandoned.

The influence of Brook Farm on our literature survives in Hawthorne's Blithedale Romance (p. 219), in his American Note Books, in Emerson's miscellaneous writings, and in many books and hundreds of articles by less well-known people. Almost all of those who participated in this social experiment spoke of it in after years with strong affection.

IDEALS OF THE NEW ENGLAND AUTHORS.—When we examine with closest scrutiny the lives of the chief New England authors, of Emerson and Thoreau, Longfellow and Whittier, Holmes and Lowell, we find that all were men of the highest ideals and character. Not one could be accused of double dealing and intentional misrepresentation, like Alexander Pope; not one was intemperate, like Robert Burns or Edgar Allan Poe; not one was dissolute, like Byron; not one uttered anything base, like many a modern novelist and dramatist.

The mission of all the great New England writers of this age was to make individuals freer, more cultivated, more self-reliant, more kindly, more spiritual. Puritan energy and spirituality spoke through them all. Nearly all could trace their descent from the early Puritans. It is not an infusion of new blood that has given America her greatest writers, but an infusion of new ideals. Some of these ideals were illusions, but a noble illusion has frequently led humanity upward. The transcendentalists could not fathom the unknowable, but their attempts in this direction enabled them to penetrate deeper into spiritual realities.

The New Englander demanded a cultivated intellect as the servant of the spirit. He still looked at the world from the moral point of view. For the most part he did not aim to produce a literature of pleasure, but of spiritual power, which he knew would incidentally bring pleasure of the highest type. Even Holmes, the genial humorist, wished to be known to posterity by his trumpet call to the soul to build itself more stately mansions.

THE INFLUENCE OF SLAVERY.—The question of human slavery profoundly modified the thought and literature of the nation. In these days we often make the mistake of thinking that all of the people of New England disapproved of slavery at the end of the first half of the nineteenth century. The truth is that many of the most influential people in that section agreed with the South on the question of slavery. Not a few of the most cultivated people at the North thought that an antislavery movement would lead to an attack on other forms of property and that anarchy would be the inevitable result.

Opposition to slavery developed naturally as a result of the new spirit in religion and human philosophy. This distinctly affirmed the right of the individual to develop free from any trammels. The Dial and Brook Farm were both steps toward fuller individuality and more varied life and both were really protests against all kinds of slavery. This new feeling in the air speedily passed beyond the color line, and extended to the animals.

One of the earliest to advocate the abolition of slavery was WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON (1805-1879), a printer at Newburyport, Massachusetts. In 1831 he founded The Liberator, which became the official organ of the New England abolitionists. He influenced the Quaker poet Whittier to devote the best years of his life to furthering the cause of abolition. Emerson and Thoreau spoke forcibly against slavery. Lowell attacked it with his keenest poetic shafts.

HARRIET BEECHER STOWE (1811-1896).—It was, however, left for the daughter of an orthodox Congregational clergyman of New England to surpass every other antislavery champion in fanning into a flame the sentiment against enslaving human beings. Harriet Beecher, the sister of Henry Ward Beecher, the greatest pulpit orator of anti-slavery days, was born in Litchfield, Connecticut. When she was twenty-one, she went with her father, Lyman Beecher, to Cincinnati. Her new home was on the borderland of slavery, and she often saw fugitive slaves and heard their stories at first hand. In 1833 she made a visit to a slave plantation in Kentucky and obtained additional material for her most noted work.

[Illustration: HARRIET BEECHER STOWE]

In 1836 she married Calvin E. Stowe, a colleague of her father in the Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati. During the next twelve years she had six children to rear.

In 1850 Professor Stowe and his family moved to Bowdoin College, in Brunswick, Maine. This year saw the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, which required the citizens of free states to aid in catching and returning escaped slaves. This Act roused Mrs. Stowe, and she began Uncle Tom's Cabin, which was published in book form in 1852.

Perhaps no other American book of note has been written under so great a handicap. When Mrs. Stowe began this work, one of her large family of children was not a year old, and the others were a constant care. Nevertheless, she persevered with her epoch-making story. One of her friends has given us a picture of the difficulties in her way, the baby on her knee, the new hired girl asking whether the pork should be put on top of the beans, and whether the gingerbread should stay longer in the oven.

In Uncle Tom's Cabin Mrs. Stowe endeavored to translate into concrete form certain phases of the institution of slavery, which had been merely an abstraction to the North. Of Senator John Bird, who believed in stringent laws for the apprehension of fugitive slaves, she wrote:—

"… his idea of a fugitive was only an idea of the letters that spell the word,—or, at the most, the image of a little newspaper picture of a man with a stick and bundle, with 'Ran away from the subscriber' under it. The magic of the real presence of distress,—the imploring human eye, the frail, trembling human hand, the despairing appeal of helpless agony,—these he had never tried. He had never thought that a fugitive might be a hapless mother, a defenceless child…."

In chapters of intense dramatic power, Mrs. Stowe shows a slave mother and her child escaping on the floating ice across the Ohio. They come for refuge to the home of Senator Bird.

"'Were you a slave?' said Mr. Bird.

"'Yes, sir; I belonged to a man in Kentucky.'

"'Was he unkind to you?'

"'No, sir; he was a good master.'

"'And was your mistress unkind to you?'

"'No, sir,—no! my mistress was always good to me.'"

Senator Bird learned that the master and mistress were in debt, and that a creditor had a claim which could be discharged only by the sale of the child. "Then it was," said the slave mother, "I took him and left my home and came away."

Mrs. Stowe's knowledge of psychological values is shown in the means taken to make it appear to Senator John Bird that it would be the natural thing for him to defeat his own law, by driving the woman and her child seven miles in the dead of night to a place of greater safety.

All sections of the country do not agree in regard to whether Uncle Tom's Cabin gives a fairly representative picture of slavery. This is a question for the historian, not for the literary critic. We study Macbeth for its psychology, its revelation of human nature, its ethics, more than for its accurate exposition of the Scottish history of the time. We read Uncle Tom's Cabin to find out how the pen of one woman proved stronger than the fugitive slave laws of the United States, how it helped to render of no avail the decrees of the courts, and to usher in a four years' war. We decide that she achieved this result because the pictures, whether representative or not, which she chose to throw on her screen, were such as appealed to the most elemental principles of human nature, such as the mother could not forget when she heard her own children say their evening prayer, such as led her to consent to send her firstborn to the war, such as to make Uncle Tom's Cabin outsell every other book written by an American, to cause it to be translated into more than thirty foreign languages, to lead a lady of the Siamese court to free all her slaves in 1867, and to say that Mrs. Stowe "had taught her as even Buddha had taught kings to respect the rights of her fellow creatures."

It may be noted in this connection that Mark Twain, who was of southern descent and whose parents and relatives owned slaves, introduces in his greatest work, Huckleberry Finn (1884), a fugitive slave to arouse our sympathies. The plot of Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894) turns on one of Mrs. Stowe's points of emphasis, the fear of the mother that her child would be sold and taken away from her, down the river.

The story of Uncle Tom's Cabin is intensely dramatic, and it accomplished its author's purpose far beyond her expectations. When we study it merely as a literary performance, we shall notice the effect of the handicap under which Mrs. Stowe labored at the time of composition, as well as her imperfect conception of the art technique of the modern novel. There are faults of plot, style, and characterization. Modern fiction would call for more differentiation in the dialogue of the different characters and for more unity of structure, and yet there are stories with all these technical excellencies which do not live a year. We may say with W. P. Trent, a Virginian by birth, and a critic who has the southern point of view: "Uncle Tom's Cabin is alive with emotion, and the book that is alive with emotion after the lapse of fifty years is a great book. The critic of today cannot do better than to imitate George Sand when she reviewed the story on its first appearance—waive its faults and affirm its almost unrivaled emotional sincerity and strength."

ORATORY.—The orators of this period made their strongest speeches on questions connected with human liberty and the preservation of the Union. Most public speeches die with the success or the failure of the reforms that they champion or the causes that they plead. A little more than half a century ago, schoolboys declaimed the speeches of EDWARD EVERETT (1794-1865), CHARLES SUMNER (1811-1874), and WENDELL PHILLIPS (1811-1884), all born in Massachusetts, and all graduates of Harvard. But even the best speeches of these men are gradually being forgotten, although a stray sentence or paragraph may still occasionally be heard, such as Wendell Phillips's reply to those who hissed his antislavery sentiments, "Truth dropped into the pit of hell would make a noise just like that," or Edward Everett's apostrophe to "that one solitary adventurous vessel, the Mayflower of a forlorn hope, freighted with the prospects of a future state and bound across the unknown sea."

DANIEL WEBSTER (1782-1852).—New England furnished in Daniel Webster one of the world's great orators. He was born in Salisbury, New Hampshire, and educated at Dartmouth College. It was said half humorously that no one could really be as great as he looked. Whittier called him

"New England's stateliest type of man,
In port and speech Olympian;
Whom no one met, at first, but took
A second awed and wondering look."

Before his death he was known as the best lawyer, the most noted statesman, and the greatest orator in the country. He is still considered America's greatest orator.

[Illustration: DANIEL WEBSTER]

A study of the way in which Webster schooled himself to become a speaker will repay every one who wishes to use our spoken language effectively. In Webster's youth, a stilted, unnatural style was popular for set speeches. He was himself influenced by the prevailing fashion, and we find him writing to a friend:—

"In my melancholy moments I presage the most dire calamities. I already see in my imagination the time when the banner of civil war shall be unfurled; when Discord's hydra form shall set up her hideous yell, and from her hundred mouths shall howl destruction through our empire."

Such unnatural prose impresses us to-day as merely an insincere play with words, but in those days many thought a stilted, ornate style as necessary for an impressive occasion as Sunday clothes for church. An Oratorical Dictionary for the use of public speakers, was actually published in the first part of the nineteenth century. This contained a liberal amount of sonorous words derived from the Latin, such as "campestral," "lapidescent," "obnubilate," and "adventitious." Such words were supposed to give dignity to spoken utterance.

Edward Everett, the most finished classical speaker of the time, loved to introduce the "Muses of Hellas," and to make allusions to the fleets "of Tyre, of Carthage, of Rome," and to Hannibal's slaughtering the Romans "till the Aufidus ran blood." He painted Warren "moving resplendent over the field of honor, with the rose of Heaven upon his cheek, and the fire of liberty in his eye."

Webster was cured of such tendencies by an older lawyer, Jeremiah Mason, who graduated at Yale about the time Webster was born. Mason, who was frequently Webster's opponent, took pleasure in ridiculing all ornate efforts and in pricking rhetorical bubbles. Webster says that Mason talked to the jury "in a plain conversational way, in short sentences, and using no word that was not level to the comprehension of the least educated man on the panel. This led me to examine my own style, and I set about reforming it altogether." Note the simplicity in the following sentences from Webster's speech on The Murder of Captain Joseph White:—

"Deep sleep had fallen on the destined victim, and on all beneath his roof. A healthful old man, to whom sleep was sweet, and the first sound slumbers of the night held him in their soft but strong embrace…. The face of the innocent sleeper is turned from the murderer, and the beams of the moon, resting on the gray locks of his aged temple, show him where to strike."

In his speech on The Completion of the Bunker Hill Monument, we find the following paragraph, containing two sentences which present in simple language one of the great facts in human history:—

"America has furnished to the world the character of Washington! And if
our American institutions had done nothing else, that alone would have
entitled them to the respect of mankind."

He knew when illustrations and figures of rhetoric could be used to
advantage to impress his hearers. In discussing the claim made by Senator
Calhoun of South Carolina that a state could nullify a national law,
Webster said:—

"To begin with nullification, with the avowed intent, nevertheless, not
to proceed to secession, dismemberment, and general revolution, is as if
one were to take the plunge of Niagara, and cry out that he would stop
half way down."

To show the moral bravery of our forefathers and the comparative greatness of England, at that time, he said:—

"On this question of principle, while actual suffering was yet afar off, they raised their flag against a power, to which, for purposes of foreign conquest and subjugation, Rome, in the height of her glory, is not to be compared; a power which has dotted over the surface of the whole globe with her possessions and military posts, whose morning drumbeat, following the sun, and keeping company with the hours, circles the earth with one continuous and unbroken strain of the martial airs of England."

For nearly a generation prior to the Civil War, schoolboys had been declaiming the peroration of his greatest speech, his Reply to Hayne (1830):—

"When my eyes shall be turned to behold for the last time the sun in heaven, may I not see him shining on the broken and dishonored fragments of a once glorious Union; on States dissevered, discordant, belligerent; on a land rent with civil feuds, or drenched, it may be, in fraternal blood!"

This peroration brought Webster as an invisible presence into thousands of homes in the North. The hearts of the listeners would beat faster as the declaimer continued:—

"Let their last feeble and lingering glance rather behold the gorgeous ensign of the republic, now known and honored throughout the earth, still full high advanced, its arms and trophies streaming in their original luster, not a stripe erased or polluted, nor a single star obscured…."

When the irrepressible conflict came, it would be difficult to estimate how many this great oration influenced to join the army to save the Union. The closing words of that speech, "Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable!" kept sounding like the voice of many thunders in the ear of the young men, until they shouldered their muskets. His Seventh of March Speech (1850), which seemed to the North to make compromises with slavery, put him under a cloud for awhile, but nothing could stop youth from declaiming his Reply to Hayne.

Although the majority of orators famous in their day are usually forgotten by the next generation, it is not improbable that three American orations will be quoted hundreds of years hence. So long as the American retains his present characteristics, we cannot imagine a time when he will forget Patrick Henry's speech in 1775, or Daniel Webster's peroration in his Reply to Hayne, or Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address (p. 344), entrusting the American people with the task of seeing "that government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth."

RALPH WALDO EMERSON, 1803-1882

[Illustration: RALPH WALDO EMERSON]

LIFE.—Ralph Waldo Emerson, the most distinguished of New England transcendentalists, came from a family of clergy. Peter Bulkeley, his ancestor, was the first pastor of Concord in 1635. William Emerson, his grandfather, was pastor in Concord at the opening of the Revolutionary War and witnessed the fight of Concord Bridge from the window of the Old Manse, that famous house which he had built and which Hawthorne afterwards occupied. By that Bridge there stands a monument, commemorating the heroic services of the men who there made the world-famous stand for freedom. On the base of this monument are Ralph Waldo Emerson's lines:—

"By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April's breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood,
And fired the shot heard round the world."

Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Boston in 1803. His father, who was pastor of the First Church in Boston, died when Ralph Waldo was eight years old, leaving in poverty a widow with six children under ten years of age. His church promptly voted to pay his widow five hundred dollars a year, for seven years, but even with this help the family was so poor that in cold weather it was noticed that Ralph and his brother went to school on alternate days. The boys divined the reason, and were cruel enough to call out, "Whose turn is it to wear the coat to-day?" But the mother struggled heroically with poverty, and gave her sons a good education. Ralph Waldo entered Harvard in 1817. He saved the cost of his lodging by being appointed "President's Freshman," as the official message bearer was called, and earned most of his board by waiting on the table at the college Commons.

Emerson was descended from such a long line of clergymen that it was natural for him to decide to be a minister. After graduating at Harvard and taking a course in theology, he received a call from Cotton Mather's (p. 46) church and preached there for a short time; but he soon resigned because he could not conscientiously conform to some of the customs of the church. Although he occasionally occupied pulpits for a few years after this, the greater part of his time for the rest of his life was spent in writing and lecturing.

When he was temporarily preaching in Concord, New Hampshire, in 1827, he met Miss Ellen Tucker, then sixteen years old. This meeting was for two reasons a noteworthy event in his life. In the first place, her inspiration aided in the development of his poetical powers. He seemed to hear the children of Nature say to her:—

"Thou shalt command us all,—
April's cowslip, summer's clover,
To the gentian in the fall,
Blue-eyed pet of blue-eyed lover."

[Illustration: ELLEN TUCKER]

His verses tell how the flower and leaf and berry and rosebud ripening into rose had seemed to copy her. He married her in 1829 and wrote the magnificent prophecy of their future happiness in the poem beginning:—

"And Ellen, when the graybeard years,"

a poem which he could not bear to have published in his lifetime, for Mrs. Emerson lived but a few years after their marriage. In the second place, in addition to stimulating his poetical activity, his wife's help did not end with her death; for she left him a yearly income of twelve hundred dollars, without which he might never have secured the leisure necessary to enable him "to live in all the faculties of his soul" and to become famous in American literature.

In the fall of 1833 he sailed for Europe, going by way of the Mediterranean. Returning by way of England, he met Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Carlyle, whose influence he had already felt. His visit to Carlyle led to a lifelong friendship. Emerson helped to bring out an American edition of the Sartor Resartus (1836) before it was published in England.

[Illustration: EMERSON'S STUDY]

After returning from Europe, Emerson permanently settled at Concord, Massachusetts, the most famous literary town of its size in the United States. The appreciation of the Concord people for their home is shown by the naive story, told by a member of Emerson's family, of a fellow townsman who read of the rapidly rising price of building lots in Chicago, and remarked, "Can't hardly believe that any lands can be worth so much money, so far off." After Henry D. Thoreau (p. 194) had received a medal at school for proficiency in geography, he went home and asked his mother if Boston was located in Concord. It was to Concord that Emerson brought his second wife, Lidian Jackson Emerson, whom he married in 1835. In Concord he wrote his most famous Essays, and from there he set out on his various lecturing tours. There he could talk daily to celebrities like Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Thoreau, and Bronson Alcott. Louisa May Alcott relates that when eight years old she was sent to the Emerson home to inquire about the health of his oldest son, a boy of five. Emerson answered her knock, and replied, "Child, he is dead!" Years later she wrote, "I never have forgotten the anguish that made a familiar face so tragical, and gave those few words more pathos than the sweet lamentation of the Threnody" Like Milton and Tennyson, Emerson voiced his grief in an elegy, to which he gave the title Threnody. In this poem the great teacher of optimism wrote:—

"For this losing is true dying;
This is lordly man's down-lying,
This his slow but sure reclining,
Star by star his world resigning."

Aside from domestic incidents, his life at Concord was uneventful. As he was by nature averse to contests, he never took an extreme part in the antislavery movement, although he voiced his feelings against slavery, even giving antislavery lectures, when he thought the occasion required such action. His gentleness and tenderness were inborn qualities. Oliver Wendell Holmes said that Emerson removed men's "idols from their pedestals so tenderly that it seemed like an act of worship."

He widened his influence by substituting the platform for the pulpit, and year after year he enlarged his circle of hearers. He lectured in New England, the South, and the West. Sometimes these lecture tours kept him away from home the entire winter. In 1847 he lectured in England and Scotland. He visited Carlyle again, and for four days listened to "the great and constant stream" of his talk. On this second trip abroad, Emerson met men like De Quincey, Macaulay, Thackeray, and Tennyson. Emerson gained such fame in the mother country that, long after he had returned, he was nominated for the Lord Rectorship of Glasgow University and received five hundred votes against seven hundred for Disraeli, one of England's best known statesmen.

Something of his character and personality may be learned from the accounts of contemporary writers. James Russell Lowell, who used to go again and again to hear him, even when the subject was familiar, said, "We do not go to hear what Emerson says so much as to hear Emerson." Hawthorne wrote, "It was good to meet him in the wood paths or sometimes in our avenue with that pure intellectual gleam diffusing about his presence like the garment of a shining one." Carlyle speaks of seeing him "vanish like an angel" from his lonely Scotch home.

Emerson died in 1882 and was buried near Hawthorne, in Sleepy Hollow cemetery at Concord, on the "hilltop hearsed with pines." Years before he had said, "I have scarce a daydream on which the breath of the pines has not blown and their shadow waved." The pines divide with an unhewn granite boulder the honor of being his monument.

EARLY PROSE.—Before he was thirty-five, Emerson had produced some prose which, so far as America is concerned, might be considered epoch-making in two respects: (1) in a new philosophy of nature, not new to the world, but new in the works of our authors and fraught with new inspiration to Americans; and (2) in a new doctrine of self-reliance and intellectual independence for the New World.

[Illustration: EMERSON'S GRAVE, CONCORD]

In 1836 he published a small volume entitled Nature, containing fewer than a hundred printed pages, but giving in embryo almost all the peculiar, idealistic philosophy that he afterwards elaborated. By "Nature" he sometimes means everything that is not his own soul, but he also uses the word in its common significance, and talks of the beauty in cloud, river, forest, and flower. Although Nature is written in prose, it is evident that the author is a poet. He says:—

"How does Nature deify us with a few and cheap elements! Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous. The dawn is my Assyria; the sunset and moonrise my Paphos, and unimaginable realms of faerie; broad noon shall be my England of the senses and the understanding; the night shall be my Germany of mystic philosophy and dreams."

Emerson tried to make men feel that the beauty of the universe is the property of every individual, but that the many divest themselves of their heritage. When he undertook to tell Americans how to secure a warranty deed to the beauties of nature, he specially emphasized the moral element in the process. The student who fails to perceive that Emerson is one of the great moral teachers has studied him to little purpose. To him all the processes of nature "hint or thunder to man the laws of right and wrong, and echo the Ten Commandments." In Nature, he says:—

"All things with which we deal, preach to us. What is a farm but a mute gospel? The chaff and the wheat, weeds and plants, blight, rain, insects, sun,—it is a sacred emblem from the first furrow of spring to the last stack which the snow of winter overtakes in the fields."

In Nature, Emerson sets forth his idealistic philosophy. "Idealism sees the world in God" is with him an axiom. This philosophy seems to him to free human beings from the tyranny of materialism, to enable them to use matter as a mere symbol in the solution of the soul's problems, and to make the world conformable to thought. His famous sentence in this connection is, "The sensual man conforms thoughts to things; the poet conforms things to his thoughts."

In The American Scholar, an address delivered at Cambridge in 1837, Emerson announced what Oliver Wendell Holmes calls "our intellectual Declaration of Independence." Tocqueville, a gifted Frenchman who visited America in 1831, wrote: "I know no country in which there is so little independence of opinion and freedom of discussion as in America…. If great writers have not existed in America, the reason is very simply given in the fact that there can be no literary genius without freedom of opinion, and freedom of opinion does not exist in America." Harriet Martineau, an English woman, who came to America in 1830, thought that the subservience to opinion in and around Boston amounted to a sort of mania. We have already seen how Cooper in his early days deferred to English taste (p. 127), and how Andrew Jackson in his rough way proved something of a corrective (p. 148).

Emerson proceeded to deal such subserviency a staggering blow. He denounced this "timid, imitative, tame spirit," emphasized the new importance given to the single person, and asked, "Is it not the chief disgrace in the world not to be a unit;—not to be reckoned one character;—not to yield that peculiar fruit which each man was created to bear; but to be reckoned in the gross, in the hundred, or the thousand, of the party, the section, to which we belong, and our opinion predicted geographically, as the North, or the South?" Then followed his famous declaration to Americans, "We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds."

No American author has done more to exalt the individual, to inspire him to act according to his own intuitions and to mold the world by his own will. Young Americans especially listened to his call, "O friend, never strike sail to a fear! Come into port greatly, or sail with God the seas."

ESSAYS.—The bulk of Emerson's work consists of essays, made up in large part from lectures. In 1841 he published a volume, known as Essays, First Series, and in 1844, another volume, called Essays, Second Series. Other volumes followed from time to time, such as Miscellanies (1849), Representative Men (1850), English Traits (1856), The Conduct of Life (1860), Society and Solitude (1870). While the First Series of these Essays is the most popular, one may find profitable reading and even inspiring passages scattered through almost all of his works, which continued to appear for more than forty years.

When we examine his Essays, First Series, we find that the volume is composed of short essays on such subjects as History, Self-Reliance, Friendship, Heroism, and the Over-Soul. If we choose to read Self-Reliance, one of his most typical essays, we shall find that the sentences, or the clauses which take the place of sentences, are short, vigorous, and intended to reach the attention through the ear. For instance, he says in this essay:—

"There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion."

Before we have finished Self-Reliance, he has made us feel that, with the exercise of self-trust, new powers will appear; that a man should not postpone his life, but live now; that a man is weak if he expects aid from others; that discontent is want of self-reliance.

We pick up another volume of essays, Society and Solitude, and wonder whether we shall read Success, or Books, or Civilization, or any one of nine others. While we are turning the pages, we see this sentence:—

"Hitch your wagon to a star,"

and we decide to read Civilization.

"Now that is the wisdom of a man, in every instance of his labor, to hitch his wagon to a star, and see his chore done by the gods themselves. … We cannot bring the heavenly powers to us, but, if we will only choose our jobs in directions in which they travel, they will undertake them with the greatest pleasure…. Let us not lie and steal. No god will help. We shall find all their teams going the other way."

The youth is to be pitied if this does not quicken his determination to choose his work in the direction in which the aiding forces of the universe are traveling.

Some of Emerson's best social philosophy may be found in the essay, Considerations by the Way, published in the volume called The Conduct of Life. His English Traits records in a vigorous, interesting, common-sense way his impressions from his travels in the mother country. The English find in this volume some famous sentences, which they love to quote, such as,—

"That which lures a solitary American in the woods with the wish to see England, is the moral peculiarity of the Saxon race,—its commanding sense of right and wrong,—the love and devotion to that,—this is the imperial trait which arms them with the sceptre of the globe."

POETRY.—Emerson's verse is noteworthy for its exposition (1) of nature and (2) of his transcendental philosophy. He produced a comparatively small amount of poetry, but much more than he is popularly supposed to have written. Some of his verse is of a high degree of excellence; in fact, his nature poetry deserves to be ranked with the best that America has produced. Like Bryant, Emerson loves the forest. He says:—

"I go to the god of the wood
To fetch his word to men."

In The Poet, we see how great he thought the poet's debt to communion with nature:—

"The gods talk in the breath of the woods,
They talk in the shaken pine,
And fill the long reach of the old seashore
With dialogue divine;
And the poet who overhears
Some random word they say
Is the fated man of men
Whom the ages must obey."

Hawthorne saw Emerson one August day, wandering in Sleepy Hollow near Concord, and wrote, "He appeared to have had a pleasant time; for he said there were Muses in the woods to-day and whispers to be heard in the breezes." When Emerson was twenty-four years old, he wrote the following lines, which show the new feeling of mystic companionship with nature:—

"These trees and stones are audible to me,
These idle flowers, that tremble in the wind,
I understand their faery syllables."

His verses make us feel how nature enriches human life, increases its joys, and lessens its sorrows. What modern lover of nature has voiced a more heartfelt, unaffected appreciation of her ministrations than may be found in these lines from Emerson's Musketaquid?—

"All my hurts
My garden spade can heal. A woodland walk,
A quest of river grapes, a mocking thrush,
A wild rose or rock-loving columbine,
Salve my worst wounds."

From reading his best nature poem, Woodnotes, first published in The
Dial, an appreciative person may find it easy to become

"Lover of all things alive,
Wonderer at all he meets,"

to feel that in the presence of nature, every day is the best day of the year, and possibly even to sing with Emerson of any spring or summer day:—

"'Twas one of the charmed days
When the genius of God doth flow;
The wind may alter twenty ways,
A tempest cannot blow;
It may blow north, it still is warm;
Or south, it still is clear;
Or east, it smells like a clover farm;
Or west, no thunder fear."

All who love nature or who wish to become interested in her should read at least his Woodnotes, The Humble Bee, The Rhodora, Each and All, The Snow Storm, and To Ellen at the South.

Some of his philosophy may be found in poems like The Problem (1839), The Sphinx (1841), and Brahma (1857). The immanence of God in everything, in the sculptor's hand, for instance, is well expressed in The Problem:—

"The hand that rounded Peter's dome
And groined the aisles of Christian Rome
Wrought in a sad sincerity;
Himself from God he could not free;
He builded better than he knew;—
The conscious stone to beauty grew."

The Sphinx thus expresses one of Emerson's favorite thoughts:—

"To vision profounder,
Man's spirit must dive,"

and concludes with the Sphinx's thought-provoking statement:-

"Who telleth one of my meanings,
Is master of all I am."

This line in Brahma:—

"I am the doubter and the doubt,"

shows his belief in the unity of all things, his conviction that all existence and action result from one underlying force. His own personal philosophy, that which actuated him in dealing with his fellow-men, is expressed in the following lines, which are worthy a place in the active memory of every American:—

"Life is too short to waste
In critic peep or cynic bark,
Quarrel or reprimand:
'Twill soon be dark."

While we are enjoying his poetry, we feel its limitations. Having slight ear for music, he often wrote halting lines. Sometimes his poetic flight is marked by too sudden a descent, but we shall often find in his verse rare jewels, such as:—

"When Duty whispers low, 'Thou must,'
The youth replies, 'I can.'"

These lines seemed to Oliver Wendell Holmes, the moment he saw them, as if they had been "carved on marble for a thousand years." Emerson's poetry does not pulsate with warm human feeling, but it "follows the shining trail of the ethereal," the ideal, and the eternal. His prose overshadows his poetry, but no one without natural poetical ability of a high order could have written the lines:—

"O tenderly the haughty day
Fills his blue urn with fire,"

or even have seen

"The frolic architecture of the snow."

GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS.—The central aim of Emerson's writing is moral development. He is America's greatest ethical teacher. He thus voices his fixed belief:—

"A breath of will blows eternally through the universe of
souls in the direction of the Right and Necessary."

This belief gives rise to his remarkable optimism for the future, to his conviction that evil is but a stepping stone to good.

In a material age he is the great apostle of the spiritual. "Will you not tolerate," he asks, "one or two solitary voices in the land, speaking for thoughts not marketable or perishable?" To him "mind is the only reality," and his great man is never the one who can merely alter matter, but who can change our state of mind. He believed in reaching truth, guided by intuition. He would not argue to maintain his positions. He said that he did not know what argument signified with reference to a thought. To him a thought was just as natural a product as a rose and did not need argument to prove or justify its existence. Much of his work is tinged with Plato's philosophy.

Of all American writers, he is the most inspiring teacher of the young. One of his chief objects is, in his own phrase, "to help the young soul, add energy, inspire hope, and blow the coals into a useful flame; to redeem defeat by new thought, by firm action." John Tyndall, the eminent English scientist, declared that the reading of two men, Carlyle and Emerson, had made him what he was. He said to his students: "I never should have gone through Analytical Geometry and Calculus, had it not been for these men. I never should have become a physical investigator, and hence without them I should not have been here to-day. They told me what I ought to do in a way that caused me to do it, and all my consequent intellectual action is to be traced to this purely moral force." After hearing one of Emerson's lectures, James Russell Lowell wrote, "Were we enthusiasts? I hope and believe we were, and am thankful to the man who made us worth something for once in our lives."

Few authors, excepting Shakespeare, have more of the quality of universality in their writings. Many things in Emerson will fit certain stages of individual development as well a thousand years hence as to-day and be as applicable to the moral improvement of the Chinese as of Americans. If he is not as much read in the future, it will be largely due to the fact that his most inspiring subject matter has been widely diffused through modern thought.

Emerson's style is condensed. He spoke of his own paragraphs as incompressible, "each sentence an infinitely repellent particle." Because of this condensation, it is best not to read more than one essay at a time. Years ago some joker said that Emerson's Essays could be read as well backward as forward, because there was no connection between the sentences. The same observation could have been made with almost equal truth about Proverbs, some of Bacon's Essays, Polonius's Advice to Laertes, parts of Hamlet's Soliloquy, and, in general, about any condensed sentences that endeavor to convey a complete, striking truth. Lowell remarks acutely: "Did they say he was disconnected? So were the stars … And were they not knit together by a higher logic than our mere sense could master?" We should look for unity and connection in Emerson's chosen subject matter and trend of thought.

We must not forget that Emerson has in his prose as well as in his verse many of the general characteristics of a poet. In his Essays, he sometimes avails himself of the poetic license to be obscure and contradictory and to present philosophy that will not walk on all fours. When we examine some of the best passages on nature in his early prose (e.g. p. 158), we shall find that they are highly poetical.

Much of his verse is filled with the charm of nature and shows here and there remarkable power of putting great riches in a little room, although there may be intervening waste spaces. Critics may say that his poetry lacks deep feeling, that it is mostly intellectual; if so, it is nobly intellectual. Both his poetry and prose, to use an Emersonian expression, "sail the seas with God."

HENRY DAVID THOREAU, 1817-1862

[Illustration: HENRY DAVID THOREAU]

LIFE.—Henry David Thoreau, America's poet-naturalist, was born in 1817 at Concord, Massachusetts. He was one of the youngest of the famous Concord group of writers and the only one who could claim Concord as his birthplace He was a lifelong student of nature, and he loved the district around Concord. As a boy he knew its woods and streams because he had hunted and fished in them. After his graduation from Harvard in 1837, he substituted for the fishing rod and gun, the spyglass, microscope, measuring tape, and surveying instruments, and continued his out-of-door investigations.

[Illustration: THOREAU'S SPY-GLASS, FLUTE, ETC.]

He taught school with his brother and lectured, but in order to add to his slender income also did work unusual for a Harvard graduate, such as odd jobs of carpentering, planting trees, and surveying. He also assisted his father in his business of pencil making, and together they made the best pencils in New England. Whatever he undertook, he did thoroughly. He had no tolerance for the shoddy or for compromises. Exact workmanship was part of his religion. "Drive a nail home," he writes in Walden, "and clinch it so faithfully that you can wake up in the night and think of your work with satisfaction."

Like so many of the transcendentalists, Thoreau desired to surround his life with a "wide margin of leisure" in order that he might live in his higher faculties and not be continuously dwarfed with the mere drudgery of earning his sustenance. He determined to divest himself of as many of the burdens of civilization as possible, to lead the simple life, and to waste the least possible time in the making of mere money. The leisure thus secured, he spent in studying birds, plants, trees, fish, and other objects of nature, in jotting down a record of his experiences, and in writing books.

[Illustration: SITE OF THOREAU'S HUT, WALDEN POND]

Since he did not marry and incur responsibilities for others, he was free to choose his own manner of life. His regular habit was to reserve half of every day for walking in the woods; but for two years and two months he lived alone in the forest, in a small house that he himself built upon a piece of Emerson's property beside Walden Pond, about a mile south of Concord. Thoreau found that he could earn enough in six weeks to support himself in this simple way for the rest of the year. He thus acquired the leisure to write books that are each year read with increasing interest. The record of his life at Walden forms the basis for his best known work. A few people practice the return to nature for a short time, but Thoreau spent his available life with nature.

He was a pronounced individualist, carrying out Emerson's doctrine by becoming independent of others' opinions. What he thought right, he said or did. He disapproved, for example, of slavery, and consequently refused to pay his poll tax to a government that upheld slavery. When he was imprisoned because of non-payment, Emerson visited him and asked, "Why are you here, Henry?" Thoreau merely replied, "Why are you not here?"

His intense individualism made him angular, and his transcendental love of isolation caused him to declare that he had never found "the companion that was so companionable as solitude"; but he was, nevertheless, spicy, original, loyal to friends, a man of deep family affection, stoical in his ability to stand privations, and Puritanic in his conviction about the moral aim of life. His last illness, induced by exposure to cold, confined him for months away from the out of doors that he loved. In 1862, at the age of forty-five, he said, as he lay on his deathbed, "When I was a very little boy, I learned that I must die, and I set that down, so, of course, I am not disappointed now." He was buried not far from Emerson's lot in the famous Sleepy Hollow cemetery at Concord.

WORKS.—Only two of his books were published during his lifetime. These were A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers (1849) and Walden (1854). The first of these, usually referred to as The Week, is the record of a week spent in a rowboat on the rivers mentioned in the title. The clearness and exactness of the descriptions are remarkable. Whenever he investigated nature, he took faithful notes so that when he came to write a more extended description or a book, he might have something more definite than vague memory impressions on which to rely. When he describes in The Week a mere patch of the river bank, this definiteness of observation is manifest:—

"The dead limbs of the willow were rounded and adorned by the climbing milkania, Milkania scandens, which filled every crevice in the leafy bank, contrasting agreeably with the gray bark of its supporter and the balls of the button-bush."

This book did not prove popular, and almost three fourths of the edition were left on his hands. This unfortunate venture caused him to say, "I have now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which were written by myself."

Walden is the book by which Thoreau is best known. It is crisper, livelier, more concise and humorous, and less given to introspective philosophizing than The Week. Walden, New England's Utopia, is the record of Thoreau's experiment in endeavoring to live an ideal life in the forest. This book differs from most of its kind in presenting actual life, in not being mainly evolved from the inner consciousness on the basis of a very little experience. He thus states the reason why he withdrew to the forest:—

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear."

[Illustration: FURNITURE FROM THOREAU'S CABIN, WALDEN POND]

His food during his twenty-six months of residence there cost him twenty-seven cents a week. "I learned," he says, "from my two years' experience that it would cost incredibly little trouble to obtain one's necessary food, even in this latitude; that a man may use as simple a diet as the animals, and yet retain health and strength…. I am convinced both by faith and experience that to maintain one's self on this earth is not a hardship, but a pastime." This book has, directly or indirectly, caused more to desire the simple life and a return to nature than any other work in American literature.

In Walden he speaks of himself as a "self-appointed inspector of snowstorms and rainstorms." His companionship with nature became so intimate as to cause him to say, "Every little pine needle expanded and swelled with sympathy and befriended me." When a sparrow alighted upon his shoulder, he exclaimed, "I felt that I was more distinguished by that circumstance than I should have been by any epaulet I could have worn." When nature had some special celebration with the trees, such as decking them with snow or ice or the first buds of spring, he frequently tramped eight or ten miles "to keep an appointment with a beech-tree or a yellow-birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines." It is amusing to read how on such a walk he disturbed the daytime slumbers of a large owl, how the bird opened its eyes wide, "but their lids soon fell again, and he began to nod," and how a sympathetic hypnotization began to take effect on Thoreau. "I too," he says, "felt a slumberous influence after watching him half an hour, as he sat thus with his eyes half open, like a cat, winged brother of the cat."

In spite of some Utopian philosophy and too much insistence on the self-sufficiency of the individual, Walden has proved a regenerative force in the lives of many readers who have not passed the plastic stage. The book develops a love for even commonplace natural objects, and, like poetry, discloses a new world of enjoyment. Walden is Thoreau's most vital combination of his poetic apprehension of wild nature with his philosophy and aggressive individualism.

Almost all of his work is autobiographical, a record of actual experience. The Maine Woods (1864), Cape Cod (1865), and A Yankee in Canada (1866) are records of his tramps in the places named in the titles-, but these works do not possess the interest of Walden.

His voluminous manuscript Journal is an almost daily record of his observations of nature, mingled with his thoughts, from the time when he left college until his last sickness. At periods for nearly fifty years after his death, various works have been compiled from this Journal. The volumes published under the titles, Early Spring in Massachusetts (1881), Summer (1884), Winter (1887), Autumn (1892), and Notes on New England Birds (1910) were not arranged by him in their present form. Editors searched his Journal for entries dealing with the same season or type of life, and put these in the same volume. Sometimes, as, for instance, in Winter, paragraphs separated by an interval of nineteen years in composition become neighbors. In spite of the somewhat fragmentary nature of these works, lovers of Thoreau become intensely interested in them. His Journal in the form in which he left it was finally published in 1906, in fourteen volumes containing 6811 printed pages. He differs from the majority of writers because the interest in his work increases with the passing of the years.

GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS.—Thoreau's object was to discover how to live a rich, full life with a broad margin of leisure. Intimate companionship with nature brought this secret to him, and he has taught others to increase the joys of life from sympathetic observation of everyday occurrences.

A mere unimaginative naturalist may be a bore; but Thoreau regarded nature with the eyes of a poet. His ear was thrilled with the vesper song of the whippoorwill, the lisping of the chickadee among the evergreens, and the slumber call of the toads. For him the bluebird "carries the sky on its back." The linnets come to him "bearing summer in their natures." When he asks, "Who shall stand godfather at the christening of the wild apples?" his reply shows rare poetic appreciation of nature's work:—

"We should have to call in the sunrise and the sunset, the rainbow and the autumn woods and the wild flowers, and the woodpecker and the purple finch and the squirrel and the jay and the butterfly, the November traveler and the truant boy, to our aid."

He is not only a poet-naturalist, but also a philosopher, who shows the influence of the transcendental school, particularly of Emerson. Some of Thoreau's philosophy is impractical and too unsocial, but it aims to discover the underlying basis of enchantment. He thus sums up the philosophy which his life at Walden taught him:—

"I learned this at least by my experiment—that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours…. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them."

The reason why he left Walden shows one of his pronounced transcendental characteristics, a dread of repetition. He gives an account of only his first year of life there, and adds, "the second year was similar to it." He says:—

"I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one. It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves. I had not lived there a week before my feet wore a path from my door to the pond side."

He does not demand that other human beings shall imitate him in devoting their lives to a study of nature. He says, "Follow your genius closely enough, and it will not fail to show you a fresh prospect every hour." He thus expresses his conception of the fundamental basis of happiness in any of the chosen avenues of life:—

"Our whole life is startlingly moral. There is never an instant's truce between virtue and vice. Goodness is the only investment that never fails."

His insistence on the necessity of a moral basis for a happy life is a characteristic that he shared in common with the great authors of the New England group, but he had his own individual way of impressing this truth. He thought life too earnest a quest to tolerate the frivolous or the dilettante, and he issued his famous warning that no one can "kill time without injuring eternity." His aim in studying nature was not so much scientific discovery as the revelation of nature's joyous moral message to the spiritual life of man. He may have been unable to distinguish between the song of the wood thrush and the hermit thrush. To him the most important fact was that the thrush is a rare poet, singing of "the immortal wealth and vigor that is in the forest." "The thrush sings," says Thoreau, in his Journal, "to make men take higher and truer views of things."

The sterling honesty and directness of Thoreau's character are reflected in his style. He says, "The one great rule of composition—and if I were a professor of rhetoric I should insist on this—is to speak the truth." This was his aim in presenting the results of the experience of his soul, as well as of his senses. If he exaggerated the importance of a certain way of regarding things, he did so only because he thought the exaggeration was necessary to secure attention for that particular truth, which would even then not be apprehended at its full value. His style has a peculiar flavor, difficult to describe. Lowell's characterization of Thoreau's style has hardly been surpassed. "His range was narrow, but to be a master is to be a master. There are sentences of his as perfect as anything in the language, and thoughts as clearly crystallized; his metaphors and images are always fresh from the soil."

Thoreau's style shows remarkable power of description. No American has surpassed him in unique description of the most varied incidents in the procession of all the seasons. We shall find frequent illustrations of this power scattered through his Journal:—

"June 1, 1857. I hear the note of a bobolink concealed in the top of an apple tree behind me…. He is just touching the strings of his theorbo, his glassichord, his water organ, and one or two notes globe themselves and fall in liquid bubbles from his teeming throat. It is as if he touched his harp within a vase of liquid melody, and when he lifted it out, the notes fell like bubbles from the trembling string … the meadow is all bespattered with melody. His notes fall with the apple blossoms, in the orchard."

Even more characteristic is an entry in his Journal for June 11, 1840, where he tries to fathom the consciousness of the solitary bittern:—

"With its patient study by rocks and sandy capes, has it wrested the whole of her secret from Nature yet? It has looked out from its dull eye for so long, standing on one leg, on moon and stars sparkling through silence and dark, and now what a rich experience is its! What says it of stagnant pools, and reeds, and damp night fogs? It would be worth while to look in the eye which has been open and seeing in such hours and in such solitudes. When I behold that dull yellowish green, I wonder if my own soul is not a bright invisible green. I would fain lay my eye side by side with its and learn of it."

In this entry, which was probably never revised for publication, we note three of his characteristics: his images "fresh from the soil," adding vigor to his style; his mystic and poetic communion with nature; and the peculiar transcendental desire to pass beyond human experience and to supplement it with new revelations of the gospel of nature.

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, 1804-1864

[Illustration: NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE]

ANCESTRY AND EARLY YEARS.—William Hathorne, the ancestor of America's greatest prose writer, sailed at the age of twenty-three from England on the ship Arbella with John Winthrop (p. 30), and finally settled at Salem, Massachusetts. He brought with him a copy of Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia, a very unusual book for the library of a New England Puritan.

[Illustration: HAWTHORNES BIRTHPLACE, SALEM, MASSACHUSETTS]

John Hathorne, a son of the first settler, was a judge of the poor creatures who were put to death as witches at Salem in 1692. The great romance writer says that this ancestor "made himself so conspicuous in the martyrdom of the witches, that their blood may fairly be said to have left a stain upon him. …I, the present writer, as their representative, hereby take shame upon myself for their sakes, and pray that any curse incurred by them—as I have heard, and as the dreary and unprosperous condition of the race, for many a long year back, would argue to exist—may be now and henceforth removed." Tradition says that the husband of one of the tortured victims appealed to God to avenge her sufferings and murder. Probably the ancestral curse hanging over The House of the Seven Gables would not have been so vividly conceived, if such a curse had not been traditional in the Hawthorne family.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, the sixth in descent from the first New England ancestor, and the first of his family to add a "w" to his name, was born in Salem in 1804. His father, a sea captain, died of a fever at a foreign port in 1808. Hawthorne's mother was twenty-seven years old at this time, and for forty years after this sad event, she usually took her meals in her own room away from her three children. Everybody in that household became accustomed to loneliness. At the age of fourteen, the boy went to live for a while on the shore of Sebago Lake, Maine. "I lived in Maine," he said, "like a bird of the air, so perfect was the freedom I enjoyed. But it was there I got my cursed habits of solitude." Shyness and aversion to meeting people became marked characteristics.

His solitariness predisposed him to reading, and we are told that Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress and Shakespeare's plays were special favorites. Spenser's Faerie Queene was the first book that he bought with his own money. Bunyan and Spenser probably fostered his love of the allegorical method of presenting truth, a method that is in evidence in the bulk of Hawthorne's work. He even called his daughter Una, after one of Spenser's allegorical heroines, and, following the suggestion in the Faerie Queene, gave the name of "Lion" to the large cat that came to her as a playmate.

At the age of seventeen, Hawthorne went to Bowdoin College, Maine, where he met such students as Longfellow, Franklin Pierce, and Horatio Bridge, in after years a naval officer, who published in 1893 a delightful volume called Personal Reminiscences of Nathaniel Hawthorne. These friends changed the course of Hawthorne's life. In his dedication of The Snow Image to Bridge in 1850, Hawthorne says, "If anybody is responsible for my being at this day an author, it is yourself."

LITERARY APPRENTICESHIP.—After leaving college, Milton spent nearly six years in studious retirement; but Hawthorne after graduating at Bowdoin, in 1825, passed in seclusion at Salem a period twice as long. Here he lived the life of a recluse, frequently postponing his walks until after dark. He was busy serving his apprenticeship as an author. In 1828 he paid one hundred dollars for the publication of Fanshawe, an unsuccessful short romance. In mortification he burned the unsold copies, and his rejected short stories often shared the same fate. He was so depressed that in 1836 his friend Bridge went quietly to a publisher and by guaranteeing him against loss induced him to bring out Hawthorne's volume entitled Twice—Told Tales.

[Illustration: MISS PEABODYS DRAWING FOR "THE GENTLE BOY">[

The Peabodys of Salem then invited the author to their home, where he met the artistic Miss Sophia Peabody, who made an illustration for his fine historical story, The Gentle Boy. Of her he wrote, "She is a flower to be worn in no man's bosom, but was lent from Heaven to show the possibilities of the human soul." We find that not long after he wrote in his American Note-Books:—

"All that seems most real about us is but the thinnest substance of a dream,—till the heart be touched. That touch creates us,—then we begin to be,—thereby we are beings of reality and inheritors of eternity."

He was thinking of Sophia Peabody's creative touch, for he had become engaged to her.

[Illustration: 'THE OLD MANSE,' HAWTHORNE'S FIRST CONCORD HOME]

Fired with the ambition of making enough money to enable him to marry, he secured a subordinate position in the Boston customhouse, from which the spoils system was soon responsible for his discharge. He then invested in Brook Farm a thousand dollars which he had saved, thinking that this would prove a home to which he could bring his future wife and combine work and writing in an ideal way. A year's trial of this life convinced him of his mistake. He was then thirty eight, and much poorer for his last experiment; but he withdrew and in a few months married Miss Peabody and took her to live in the famous Old Manse at Concord. The first entry in his American Note-Books after this transforming event is:—

"And what is there to write about? Happiness has no succession of events, because it is a part of eternity, and we have been living in eternity ever since we came to this old manse. Like Enoch we seem to have been translated to the other state of being, without having passed through death."

The history of American literature can record no happier marriage and no more idyllic life than this couple lived for nearly four years in the Old Manse. While residing here, Hawthorne wrote another volume, known as Mosses from an Old Manse (1846). The only serpent to enter that Eden was poverty. Hawthorne's pen could not support his family. He found himself in debt before he had finished his fourth year in Concord. Moncure D. Conway, writing Hawthorne's Life in 1890, the year before American authors were protected by international copyright, says, "In no case has literature, pure and simple, ever supported an American author, unless, possibly, if he were a bachelor." Hawthorne's college friends, Bridge and Pierce, came to his assistance, and used their influence with President Polk to secure for Hawthorne the position of surveyor of customs at Salem, with a yearly salary of twelve hundred dollars.

HIS PRIME AND LATER YEARS.—He kept his position as head customs officer at Salem for three years. Soon after President Taylor was inaugurated in 1849, the spoils system again secured Hawthorne's removal. When he came home dejected with this news, his wife smiled and said, "Oh, then you can write your book!" The Scarlet Letter, published in 1850, was the result. The publisher printed five thousand copies, all that he had ever expected to sell, and then ordered the type to be distributed at once. Finding in ten days, however, that every copy had been sold, he gave the order to have the type reset and permanent plates made. Hawthorne had at last, at the age of forty-six, become one of the greatest writers of English prose romance. From this time he wrote but few short tales.

He left Salem in the year of the publication of The Scarlet Letter, never again to return to it as a place of residence, although his pen continued to help immortalize his birthplace.

In 1852 he bought of Bronson Alcott in Concord a house since known as the "Wayside." This was to be Hawthorne's American home during his remaining years. Here he had a tower room so constructed as to be well-nigh inaccessible to visitors, and he also had a romantic study bower built in the pine trees on a hill back of his house.

[Illustration: HAWTHORNE'S PINE STUDY, CONCORD]

His college friend, Pierce, was inaugurated President of the United States in 1853, and he appointed Hawthorne consul at Liverpool. This consulship then netted the holder between $5000 and $7000 a year. After nearly four years' service in this position, he resigned and traveled in Europe with his family. They lived in Rome sufficiently long for him to absorb the local color for his romance of The Marble Faun. He remained abroad for seven years. The record of his travels and impressions may be found in his English Note-Books and in his French and Italian Note-Books. Our Old Home, a volume based on his English Note-Books, is a more finished account of his thoughts and experiences in England.

In 1860 he returned quietly to his Concord home. His health was failing, but he promised to write for the Atlantic Monthly another romance, called The Dolliver Romance. This, however, was never finished, and The Marble Faun remains the last of his great romances. His health continued to fail, and in May, 1864, Pierce, thinking that a trip might prove beneficial, started with him on a journey to the White Mountains. Hawthorne retired for the night at the hotel in Plymouth, New Hampshire, and the next morning Pierce found that Hawthorne's wish of dying unawares in his sleep had been gratified. He had passed away before the completion of his fifty-ninth year. He was buried underneath the pines in the Sleepy Hollow cemetery at Concord. His classmate, Longfellow, wrote:—

"There in seclusion and remote from men,
The wizard hand lies cold."

"TWICE TOLD TALES" AND "MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE."—Many do not realize that these two volumes contain eighty-two tales or sketches and that they represent the most of Hawthorne's surviving literary work for the first forty-five years of his life. The title for Twice-Told Tales (1837) was probably suggested by the line from Shakespeare's King John: "Life is as tedious as a twice-told tale." The second volume, Mosses from an Old Manse (1846), took its name from Hawthorne's first Concord home. His last collection is called The Snow Image and Other Twice-Told Tales (1851). Each one of these volumes contains some of his short-story masterpieces, although, taken as a whole, the collection in Mosses from an Old Manse shows the greatest power and artistic finish.

The so-called tales in these volumes are of several different types. (1) There is the story which presents chiefly allegorical or symbolic truth, such as Rappacini's Daughter, The Great Stone Face, The Birthmark, The Artist of the Beautiful, and The Snow Image. The last story, one of the greatest of this class, relates how two children make a companion out of a snow image, how Jack Frost and the pure west wind endow this image with life and give them a little "snow sister." She grows more vigorous with every life-giving breath inhaled from the west wind. She extends her hands to the snow-birds, and they joyously flock to her. The father of these children is a deadly literal man. No tale of fairy, no story of dryad, of Aladdin's lamp, or of winged sandal had ever carried magical meaning to his unimaginative literal mind, and he proceeds to disenchant the children. Like Nathan the prophet, Hawthorne wished to say, "Thou art the man," to some tens of thousands of stupid destroyers of those ideals which bring something of Eden back to our everyday lives. This story, like so many of the others, was written with a moral purpose. There are to-day people who measure their acquaintances by their estimates of this allegorical story.

(2) Another type of Hawthorne's stories illustrates the history of New England. Such are The Gentle Boy, The Maypole of Merry Mount, Endicotts Red Cross, and Lady Eleanore's Mantle. We may even include in this list Young Goodman Brown, in one sense an unreal and fantastic tale, but in another, historically true to the Puritanic idea of the orgies of witches in a forest. If we wish, for instance, to supplement the cold page of history with a tale that breathes the very atmosphere of the Quaker persecution of New England, let us open The Twice-Told Tales and read the story of The Gentle Boy, a Quaker child of six, found sobbing on his father's newly-made grave beside the scaffold under the fir tree. Let us enter the solemn meeting house, hear the clergyman inveigh against the Quakers, and sit petrified when, at the end of the sermon, that boy's mother, like a Daniel entering the lion's den, ascends the pulpit, and invokes woe upon the Puritans.

(3) We shall occasionally find in these volumes what eighteenth-century readers of the Spectator would have called a "paper," that is, a delightful bit of mixed description and narration, "a narrative essay" or "a sketch," as some prefer to call it. In this class we may include The Old Manse, The Old Apple-Dealer, Sights from a Steeple, A Rill from the Town Pump, and the masterly Introduction to The Scarlet Letter.

The Old Manse, the first paper in Mosses from an Old Manse, is excellent. Hawthorne succeeds in taking his readers with him up the Assabeth River, in a boat made by Thoreau. We agree with Hawthorne that a lovelier river "never flowed on earth,—nowhere indeed except to lave the interior regions of a poet's imagination." When we return with him at the end of that day's excursion, we are almost tempted to say that we can never again be enslaved as before. We feel that we can say with him:—