THE NINETEENTH CENTURY (continued 5)

Oliver Wendell Holmes.—“The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table” has already given evidence that it will outlast “Elsie Venner” and “The Guardian Angel”; yet if the miscellanies of Dr. Holmes (1809–94) possess more vitality than his novels, this is in some measure due to the “Autocrat’s” occasional employment of verse. In the “Breakfast-Table” series appeared “The Chambered Nautilus” and “The Wonderful ‘One-Hoss Shay,’” which, with his youthful “Old Ironsides,” and “The Broomstick Train,” have retained the firmest hold on the popular memory. Holmes was pleased to trace his ancestry back to Anne Bradstreet, the first American poetess. His own poetry commenced with a schoolboy rendering into heroic couplets from Virgil, and hardly ended with his tribute to the memory of Whittier in 1892. In the standard edition of his works his poems occupy three volumes. Many of them, corresponding to his turn for the novel, are narrative; for story-telling he had a knack amounting to a high degree of talent. His sense of order and proportion is stronger than that of other members of the New England school, and he has a command of at least formal structure. One may not unreasonably attribute this command in part to his studies in human anatomy. At the same time Holmes is beset with the temptation to value manner and brilliancy rather than substance, and he will go out of his way for a fanciful conceit or a striking expression. In the use of odds and ends of recondite lore his cleverness is amazing. He had a tenacious memory and a habit of rapid association, so that as a punster he is almost without a match. However, his glance is not deeply penetrating; he sees fantastic resemblances between things that are really far removed from one another, not so often the fundamental similarities in things whether near or apart. One may in vain search through Holmes for anything so truly poetic as Thoreau’s comparison of sex in human beings and flowers. Accordingly, his mind may be classed as fanciful rather than imaginative. It ought not to be misunderstood, and will not be unduly detracting from his great excellence, if we say that the poetry of Holmes does not always evince the highest moral seriousness—a lack that is not fully supplied when he attempts moral subjects, as in “The Chambered Nautilus,” where, though the comparison of the growing mollusk with the expanding human soul is beautiful, the preaching is a little trite.

As regards the form of his poetry, Holmes is a survival of the eighteenth century. In his boyhood, he was a devoted admirer of Pope, but instead of abandoning the style of the Augustans, as Bryant and Lowell abandoned or outgrew it, he chose rather to perfect himself in it; until, somewhat more plastic than it was in his models, somewhat modernised and provincial, that style became his normal accent. Having Holmes’ purpose in view, one may add that no poet in America has acquired a surer control over his medium. Within this medium he was able to unite sparkle, humour, clearness, good sense, and oratorical emphasis. It is the opinion of several very able critics that no one in his century can vie with him in the art of writing verses for an occasion. Here is the source not only of his strength but also of his weakness. A large proportion of his verse is of mainly local or temporary interest. The poems which he offered year by year at the exercises of the Harvard Commencement will year by year engender less enthusiasm. A constructive criticism, however, will lay stress, not on his inheritance of New England provincialism or his slight tendency to be flippant, but on his kindliness, his inexhaustible good humour, his quick and darting intellectual curiosity, and on the appeal which his sprightly moralising makes to the young. It is not a little thing to say of a wit and a power of epigram like his that they were ever genial, and ever on the side of something better than a merely conventional morality.

John Greenleaf Whittier.—In so brief a section, it has seemed impossible to offer more than a few scattered remarks on the poetry that arose in both the North and the South in connection with slavery and the Civil War. Something has been said of Confederate writers, including Timrod and Lanier; more might be added on the patriotic verse of Lowell and Longfellow, Emerson and Holmes, and a throng of lesser men, who sang to the North of courage and consolation, or attacked those whom they considered the foes of the Republic at home or abroad. One poetess, yet living, Mrs. Julia Ward Howe (born in 1819), immortalised herself in 1862 by her “Battle-Hymn of the Republic,” a piece breathing the very essence of righteousness and love of country, and having a value out of all proportion to the rest of her work. Something similar must be said of Thomas B. Read (1822–72) and his popular “Sheridan’s Ride” (1865). The true bard of the battle-field and bivouac, of course, was Walt Whitman, who, as a nurse in the Union army, had actual experience of war. If, however, any one person is to be singled out from his century as the proclaimer of American freedom, this must be Whittier; and that too, it might almost be said, in spite of his heredity, his early hopes, and his natural bent. At least, his Quaker blood and his love for the peaceful ways of nature would not designate him for the office of poet militant. Furthermore, if Whittier’s art and sentiment in the progress of years elicit more and more admiration from qualified arbiters, such admiration will be mainly bestowed, not on his war lyrics or his denunciations of slavery, but on his hymns, his legends of New England, and his rustic idyls—above all, on “Snow Bound.”

He was born at Haverhill, Massachusetts, on December 17, 1807, springing from pious English stock, in a family that belonged to the Society of Friends. A minute and animated picture of his home and its inmates is given in “Snow Bound.” Whittier’s opportunities for regular schooling were slender. Though he did not inherit the rugged strength of his ancestors, his help was required on the farm; and his father, without absolutely discouraging the lad’s effort to win an education, was reluctant to see him busied with a useless or dangerous plaything such as their sect generally regarded poetry. The boy attended district school, read the few books that were in his home, and even managed to obtain copies of Burns and Shakespeare, and a novel, perused in secret, of Scott. His mother was inwardly gratified by the lines which he wrote under the inspiration of Burns. When his sister clandestinely forwarded one of his poems to The Free Press of Newburyport, and thus paved the way for an acquaintance between Whittier and the editor, William Lloyd Garrison, the trend of the young man’s life was determined. Thanks to the influence of Garrison, and by the strictest husbanding of his own means, Whittier was able to pass, in all, a year at the new Haverhill Academy. “Thus ended his school-days,” says his biographer, Pickard; “but this was only the beginning of his student life. By wide and well-chosen reading, he was constantly adding to his stores of information. While revelling in the fields of English literature, he became familiar through translations with ancient and current literature of other nations, and kept abreast of all political and reformatory movements.” In the development of his thought, he owed most to the Bible, to the tracts of the Friends, and to the poetry of Burns. The mainspring of his activity, whether as student, poet, politician, or anti-slavery agitator, was an intense desire to be useful to his kind, coupled with a burning belief in the sacredness of individual liberty. During his early manhood, he continued to write verse, sending it to various New England periodicals; and he became editor, successively of a Boston trade journal, of The Haverhill Gazette, and of The New England Magazine. Journalism helped him to enter politics, and in 1832 the Whigs of his native place seemed ready to elect him to Congress. After careful deliberation, he renounced his political aspirations, not without an inward struggle, and decided to lend his energies to the abolition of negro slavery, to assist the discredited and obscure band led by Garrison. “My lad,” so in after years he counselled a youth of fifteen, “if thou wouldst win success, join thyself to some unpopular but noble cause.” With all his idealism—let us rather say, on account of his thoroughgoing idealism—Whittier was thoroughly practical. He had keen insight into the characters of men, and knew how to turn their motives, both good and bad, to account; his political sagacity, which, with his untiring industry, made him one of the most capable workers on the side of Abolition, was largely responsible for the rise of Charles Sumner to a position of beneficent influence. Ever frail in health, yet labouring on, and subjected more than once to personal violence at the hands of opponents, Whittier had the satisfaction of seeing the movement which he championed emerge from persecution into triumph. Regarded superficially, his devotion delayed his own progress as an artist, and his best poetry came late. In a deeper sense, he could not have developed into the poet that he became without living the life that he did.

In a general way his work may be divided into two parts—that produced during his more active interest in journalism and politics, and that produced after his retirement. In 1831 he published his “Legends of New England in Prose and Verse,” a pamphlet, and in 1832, another pamphlet, “Moll Pitcher,” neither of them of much interest save in comparison with his better choice of subjects and better handling at a later date. A third pamphlet, “Justice and Expediency” (1833), published at his own expense and with a full consciousness of its probable effect, was the document that severed him from the dominant party and openly leagued him with the Abolitionists. “Mogg Megone” (1836), his first bound volume, which he afterward vainly tried to suppress, was published after he became a secretary of the American Anti-Slavery Society. The next year (1837), Isaac Knapp, without consulting Whittier, issued a collection of “Poems Written during the Progress of the Abolition Movement in America.” It was followed in 1838 by an authorised collection. The poet represented Haverhill in the Massachusetts Legislature in 1835; ill-health prevented his finishing a second term. In 1837 he went to Philadelphia to aid “the venerable anti-slavery pioneer Benjamin Lundy, who was editing The National Enquirer,” afterward called The Pennsylvania Freeman. In 1840 he retired to Amesbury, Massachusetts, taking up his abode with his mother and his sister Elizabeth. He never married. At Amesbury and at Danvers, in the same county, he spent the remainder of his life in quiet. The record is one of domestic peace and literary endeavour, whose first fruits were “Lays of my Home, and Other Poems” (1843). With this volume Whittier’s writings began to be remunerative. Some of the more noteworthy subsequent dates in his life are as follows: Of his prose works, “The Stranger in Lowell” appeared in 1845, “Supernaturalism in New England” in 1847, “Literary Recollections” in 1854. From the founding of The Atlantic Monthly, in 1857, Whittier was a most welcome contributor. He also edited John Woolman’s Journal, and in other ways displayed interest in the writings of the Friends. “Voices of Freedom” (1849) was the first comprehensive edition of his poems. He published “Songs of Labour” in 1850, “A Sabbath Scene” in 1853, “Home Ballads” in 1860, “National Lyrics” in 1865. After the war, his most important publications included “Snow Bound” (1866), “Maud Muller” (1867), “Ballads of New England” (1869), “Miriam and Other Poems” (1871), “Mabel Martin” (1874), “Hazel Blossoms” (1875), “Poems of Nature” (1885), “St. Gregory’s Quest, and Recent Poems” (1886). His last collection, “At Sundown” (1890), was dedicated to E. C. Stedman, and closed with a valediction to Dr. Holmes. Many of Whittier’s poems were first published in magazines; “Maud Muller” appeared in The National Era, in 1854.

Whittier’s personality was one of indescribable attractiveness. He was gentle, yet full of repressed fire, an ardent nature that had steadily submitted to the Christian spirit of self-control. He had the inward beauty that springs from generous impulses under the habitual guidance of principle and forethought. Toward his opponents he showed no rancour; he strove against parties, not individuals; and he commanded the respect of his adversaries. If he had a foible, it was his delight in playful teasing. He never visited a theatre or a circus in his life. He is described in his early manhood as “tall, slight, and very erect,” of a distinguished presence, yet bashful—but never awkward. His eye was brilliant and expressive. In maturity, his face in repose was almost stern, but a smile would light up his entire countenance. “His voice in reading was of a quality entirely different from that in conversation—much fuller and deeper.” In later years, “while retaining a lively interest in all literary and political matters and keeping abreast of current events, he dwelt most intently ... upon the great spiritual and eternal realities of God. By the open fire in the evening he would talk for hours upon sacred themes, ever grateful for the rich blessings of his life and looking with reverent curiosity towards the future.... There was not the shadow of a doubt in his mind concerning the immortality of the soul.” He died after a stroke of paralysis, on September 7, 1892, and was buried at Amesbury.

In a recent and praiseworthy volume of “The Chief American Poets,” Dr. C. H. Page has included a longer list of selections from Whittier than from Longfellow, although the contributions representing Whittier occupy less space. This is significant. Whittier was mainly a writer of short poems. In the ballad he had a form suited to the general taste, and to his aim of stinging a sluggish populace into revolt against slavery. He painted that institution in its most repellent aspects, seeing nought of the glamour which Southern writers have shed over plantation life as it existed before the war. Living in the North, he saw something of escaping and recaptured negroes. His glance was very direct; he described matters simply; he accomplished the task that he set himself. Among his lyrics of the war, “Barbara Frietchie” is altogether the best known—not with complete justice to others, for example “The Watchers.” To his treatment of tales and legends of colonial New England Whittier brought an inveterate hatred of persecution and oppression in every shape. Accordingly, many of his narratives, like “Cassandra Southwick,” touch on wrongs attempted or inflicted upon the early Quakers. As an interpreter of colonial life Whittier comes second only to Hawthorne. As a herald of the beauty in flower and hill and stream, in “The Trailing Arbutus,” “Among the Hills,” “The Merrimac,” he is second to none in America. True, he does not always refrain from what Ruskin has called the pathetic fallacy, so that he descries in the face of nature moods that are really in the heart of man; but he does this more rarely than his contemporaries. In his revelation of humble and rustic types, “Maud Muller,” “The Barefoot Boy,” “The Huskers,” he is almost the equal of Burns or Wordsworth. He is not their rival in perfection of style. More frequently than they he suffers from a bad line; and his rhymes are often defective. Yet one must not conclude that he was inattentive to technique. On the contrary, Whittier was a born artist. But the nice discipline of the ear which so many English poets have owed to the cultivation of Greek and Latin prosody was not vouchsafed to him; and for his manner he missed the advantage of rigorous criticism. The positive excellence of Whittier’s verse is due to the harmonious blending and interworking in him of varied powers. His senses were alert and sure, his humour was fine, his intellect strong, his pathos firm. He was not afraid of a theme that was tragic. His realism might be compared to that of Crabbe, but it is more hopeful. In his religious poems there is a belief more satisfying than transcendental pantheism; and there is a quality of personal joy and optimism which, as we have previously observed, is not typical of American literature.

Such was Holmes’ eulogy of Whittier. With it we may take leave of New England.

Bayard Taylor.—A Quaker poet of a different stamp was the meteoric Bayard Taylor (1825–78). His boyhood was distinguished by a passion for roving and for collecting objects of natural history. His devotion to books and his distaste for labour on a Pennsylvania farm did not always please his father, who laughed boisterously, however, when a phrenologist said of the son: “You will never make a farmer of him to any great extent: you will never keep him home; that boy will ramble around the world, and furthermore, he has all the marks of a poet.” At the age of nineteen, having just published “Ximena: or The Battle of Sierra Morena, and Other Poems,” and armed with some introductions from N. P. Willis, Taylor engaged in a Byronic pilgrimage on the Continent. A half-year at Heidelberg rendered him fluent in German. By a circuitous route through northern Germany and Austria he proceeded on foot to Italy, and from Italy through France back to England, supporting himself by correspondence which he sent to The New York Tribune, The Saturday Evening Post, and The United States Gazette, and which on his return to America he collected in “Views Afoot” (1846). Our account of his life thus far gives a faint impression of his physical and mental activity. No adequate narrative may here be essayed of his wandering and eventful career throughout. “Views Afoot” made his reputation. By 1848 he had become head of the literary department of The New York Tribune. In 1849, as correspondent for The Tribune, he spent five months with the gold-diggers in California. In 1850 he married Miss Mary Agnew, who was dying of consumption, and who survived her wedding but two months. In 1851–53 he travelled in Egypt, Syria, Asia Minor, Ethiopia, Spain, India, and China. In 1856 he broke down from overwork in America—lecturing and writing—and he went to Europe again. In Germany (1857) he married the daughter of an eminent astronomer, P. A. Hansen. In 1857–58 he visited Greece. Two years later, at an expense of $17,000, he had built a home, near his birthplace, Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, calling his estate “Cedarcroft.” To settle down in affluence had been his cherished ambition; but this dream, and his haste to realise it, embarrassed him financially, cost him much peace of mind, and eventually cost him his life. He never succeeded in resting. In 1862–63 he was Secretary of the Legation at St. Petersburg. During other intervals, he lectured in America. Among his lectures may be mentioned those delivered at Cornell University in 1870, 1871, 1875, and 1877. A large part of his correspondence is at present housed in the Cornell University Library. His translation of Goethe’s “Faust,” Part First, appeared in 1870; nearly all of the first edition was sold in one day. The Second Part came out in 1871. Excessive labour, an irregular and not abstemious way of life, and, more especially, financial worry told upon his constitution. He was destined never to finish his projected “Life of Goethe.” He had barely entered upon his duties as Minister to Germany when the collapse came. His last words were, “I must be away.”

“Taylor,” says Albert H. Smyth, “wrote with such rapidity that he could complete a duodecimo volume in a fortnight.... In a night and a day, he read Victor Hugo’s voluminous ‘La Légende des Siècles,’ and wrote for The Tribune a review of it which fills eighteen pages of his ‘Essays and Literary Notes,’ and contains five considerable poems that are translations in the metre of the original.” His powers of memory are said to have been prodigious. He could repeat not only from his favourite authors but from the futile compositions of poetasters whose manuscripts he had read as an editor and rejected. He was in the habit of carrying his own poetry in his head until the process of correction was ended. Accordingly, the perfection of his “copy,” which was written in the neatest hand imaginable, has led various critics into the error of thinking that he did not revise. His poetry was much more carefully worked out than his prose, upon which he had no thought of building a reputation. He would spend hours on the chiselling of a single couplet. His style resounds with echoes of word and phrase from Byron and Shelley, indeed from the whole circle of his reading in both English and German. Nor is it deficient in individuality. Taylor has a pronounced cadence of his own. Nevertheless his poetry wants some quality or other that would make it lasting. Although in 1896 there was a cult of younger men that studied and imitated him, his immense vogue as a prose writer had already waned; and his eclipse as a poet is now almost complete. In the history of American literature there is nothing stranger than this eclipse. Taylor’s learning was wide and substantial. He shrank from no drudgery of preparation. At the age of fifty he was willing to begin the study of Greek. And it was not merely that he was in touch with his time on all sides, and able by brilliant arts to snare the popular fancy. When he wrote, he knew what he was talking about. His “Poems of the Orient” (1854), containing the Shelley-like “Bedouin Song,” show deep sympathy with the customs and passions of the East. “Ross Browne’s Syrian dragoman, when he listened to the reading of ‘Hassan to his Mare,’ ‘sprang up with tears in his eyes, and protested that the Arabs talked just that way to their horses.’” Taylor had the suffrages of educated critics too. “The Picture of St. John” (1866) Longfellow reckoned “a great poem”; while Lowell said that, except “The Golden Legend,” no American poem could match it in finish and sustained power. “The Masque of the Gods” (1872), an endeavour to combine the ideals of Christianity and Hellenism, also pleased Longfellow. “Lars, a Pastoral Poem” (1873), is a curious tale, with some historical basis; the unwonted background of Norwegian fiords makes part of the setting for a tragic romance among the Quakers. Of Taylor’s dramatic poems we shall hazard no discussion; besides “The Masque of the Gods,” he published “The Prophet” (1874), whose scene is laid among the Mormons, and “Prince Deukalion” (1877), a piece of symbolism in which the author tried to objectify his total conception of human life both here and hereafter. He felt as sure of the other world as of this. In such assurance he possessed the most vitalising belief that can inspire a poetic soul. Why, then, is his poetry now disregarded? Why is it that the production for which the present age is most ready to thank him is his version of Goethe’s “Faust”? A tentative explanation is this. Taylor’s life was full of disquiet. He never enjoyed the solitude necessary to the maturing of poetic sentiment. He was betrayed by temporal ambition into posting over land and ocean without rest. He was too determined to achieve fame. There are times for action, and there are times for a wise passiveness. They also serve who only stand and wait.

Walt Whitman.—His belief in immortality, in the absolute and eternal value of each individual person and thing, constitutes the main element of permanence in the writings of Walt (= Walter) Whitman. He too had in his veins a strain of blood from the Quakers; though he was born (May 31, 1819) in a family that took little cognisance of religion. His mother, Louisa Van Velsor, was of mingled Dutch and Welsh descent, illiterate, but in the eyes of her second child, the poet, always “perfect.” When this child was four years old, his father and name-sake, a good carpenter and of honest Connecticut ancestry, but a slipshod householder, removed from West Hills, Huntington Township, Long Island, to the “village,” as it then was, of Brooklyn; not before the impresses of rural life had entered unawares into the heart of the child; and not too late for the life of the future metropolis to become an imperishable part of his experience. The poet’s formative years were passed in the midst of the growing population centred at New York. He attended the public schools of Brooklyn until he was thirteen, then, with a scanty knowledge of reading, writing, and arithmetic, entered a lawyer’s office as errand-boy, his employers giving him access during free hours “to a big circulating library.” “Up to that time,” he says, “this was the signal event of my life.” “For a time I now revel’d in romance-reading of all kinds; first the ‘Arabian Nights,’ all the volumes, an amazing treat. Then, with sorties in very many other directions, took in Walter Scott’s novels, one after another, and his poetry.” From errand-boy he became typesetter, varying his desultory labours for The Patriot, and The Star, by excursions on Long Island, by contributing “sentimental bits” to local newspapers, and by active participation in several debating societies. At eighteen he turned country schoolmaster; and shifting from that, he set up as editor of The Long Islander, hiring some help, but himself doing most of the work, including the distribution of his weekly sheet to its patrons. In 1841 he returned to New York, became editor of The Daily Aurora, wrote for The Tattler, and published stories in The Democratic Review. In later years it was his “serious wish to have all these crude and boyish pieces quietly dropp’d in oblivion.” Meanwhile he attended the theatre, continued his observation of the crowds at the Brooklyn ferries and in the streets of New York, and his study of nature on the shores of Long Island, read newspapers, “went over thoroughly the Old and New Testaments, and absorbed ... Shakespeare, Ossian, the best translations [available] of Homer, Æschylus, Sophocles, the old German Nibelungen, the ancient Hindoo poems, and one or two other masterpieces, Dante’s among them.” A brief connection with The Brooklyn Eagle was terminated by Whitman’s falling out with the radical faction of the Democrats; whereupon he seized “a good chance to go down to New Orleans on the staff of The Crescent, a daily to be started there.” Accompanied by his younger brother, “Jeff,” he crossed the Alleghanies, and took steamer down the Ohio and the Mississippi—“a leisurely journey and working expedition”; then “after a time plodded back northward, up the Mississippi, and around to and by way of the Great Lakes, ... to Niagara Falls and Lower Canada, finally returning through central New York and down the Hudson; travelling altogether probably 8000 miles this trip, to and fro.” In the experiences of his life up to this point lay the materials for his “Leaves of Grass,” which he published at his own expense in 1855, having done part of the typesetting himself. A copy sent to Emerson elicited from him a letter in which the book was characterised as “the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed.” The next year Whitman brought out a second and amplified edition, printing Emerson’s laudatory letter and his own answer in the Preface, and on the back the quotation, “I greet you at the beginning of a great career,” with Emerson’s name beneath. This act of questionable taste failed to augment the sale of the volume; nor was the edition of 1860 more successful. In 1862, Whitman’s younger brother having been wounded during service in the Union Army, the poet was brought into contact with the army hospitals. He continued his ministrations to the sick and suffering almost uninterruptedly until the hospitals in Washington were closed. “From cot to cot they called him, often in tremulous tones or in whispers; they embraced him, they touched his hand, they gazed at him. To one he gave a few words of cheer, for another he wrote a letter home, ... to another, some special friend, very low, he would give a manly farewell kiss. He did the things for them which no nurse or doctor could do, and he seemed to leave a benediction at every cot as he passed along.” By sheer personal magnetism he saved many lives. The record of his connection with the war is to be found in his “Specimen Days,” in the posthumous collection of letters entitled “The Wound-Dresser” (1898), in “Drum Taps,” published in 1865, and in the “Sequel to Drum Taps,” which contained his poems on Lincoln (among them the threnody, “O Captain! My Captain!”), published later in the same year. Shortly after the war was over, Whitman, who had found a place as clerk in the Department of the Interior, was discharged by Secretary Harlan, Harlan having discovered the authorship of “Leaves of Grass,” in his opinion “an indecent book.” The poet quickly received another position, in the office of the Attorney-General; and his enthusiastic friend and champion, W. D. O’Connor, brought out a defence of Whitman, written in terms of exaggerated praise, under the famous title of “The Good Grey Poet.” A fourth edition of “Leaves of Grass,” revised, and supplemented by “Drum Taps,” was published in 1867; a fifth, including the “Passage to India,” in 1871. The sixth and seventh editions appeared in 1876 and 1881–1882; the eighth (1888–1889) contained in addition “November Boughs,” and the ninth (1891–1892) “Good-bye my Fancy.” In 1873, Whitman, disabled by a stroke of paralysis, gave up his position in Washington and removed to Camden, New Jersey, where he lived with George Whitman until 1879. By this time he had so far recovered that he could make a journey to the West, followed by another, the next year, to Canada. In 1881, the sale of his works allowed him to settle, at Camden, in a home of his own. Here he lived in comparative comfort, the object of a good deal of curiosity, receiving visitors, some of them very distinguished, and, as his strength allowed, adding to his stock of verse. In 1888, he had a second stroke of paralysis, but he lived on, preserving his courage and mental alertness, until 1892. He died on March 26th of that year. If we can credit his statement made in 1890, he was probably survived by four out of six children that were not born in wedlock.

In many ways, Whitman corresponds to the ideal presented in the “natural man” of Rousseau; if space allowed, a profitable comparison might be made between “the good grey poet” and the French forerunner of American democracy. At the outset, the excessive sentimentalism of Rousseau would constitute a patent difference. But Whitman’s assumption of equality among individuals, in so far as they are not spoiled by what he deems a false and artificial education, is nothing new to the reader of Rousseau; and his preference of the “powerful, uneducated,” raw material of humanity has its counterpart in the sympathetic attitude of Rousseau toward the burgher and peasant classes which formed the part of society that he really understood. Moreover, both of these authors demand an individual standard—which is no standard—of judgment. Both desire to be appreciated, yet refuse to be appraised according to standards which the cumulative wisdom of mankind in the past, of the greatest democracy, has attained to and approved. Both try to regard organisation and the subordination of one person or thing to another as unnatural. In the case of Whitman at least, it is for want of philosophical standards, and for want of a consistent effort to determine what is meant by nature and natural, that the so-called literature of democracy has been so hard to measure.

In the first place, then, if we are to measure Whitman at all, we must make certain postulates. For example, we must postulate that restraint in literature, as in life, is a law of nature. This, Whitman is not disposed to admit. In private life, it is true, he was more temperate and continent than certain passages in “Leaves of Grass” led casual readers to surmise. But he saw fit to beget children, out of wedlock, without assuming the responsibility of their nurture and education. Are the duties which modern society lays upon parents less natural than the alleged practice of Rousseau, or are they more? Again, Whitman decides to address the public in the guise of a poet. Now in practice, be it observed, he is much truer to the demands of a poetic ear than are many of our conventional versifiers; and though he has a predilection for colloquial diction and syntax, he is in his own way not unscrupulous in the matter of technique. The changes that he made in successive editions of his main work, “Leaves of Grass,” are of deep interest to the student of poetic art. At the same time, he repudiates literary convention, and recognizes no law as binding upon one who contracts to write for his fellow men, save the law of his individual being. There is, however, no law, or science, or art, of the individual as such. Poetry, according to the deepest thinkers on this subject, is the rhythmical utterance of the individual in harmony with universal law; and criticism has for its province the recognition of that universal law in the particular poet. In so far, then, as Whitman’s irregularly trained personality succeeds in expressing what is true for all men, or for many, or for representative and typical men, uttering that truth in terms that are both choice and generally intelligible,—in so far as he actually conforms to the best conventions—he is a great poet, perhaps our greatest native poet. He succeeds often. It is to be noted that he is most successful when, as in his lament for Lincoln, he adopts a regular metrical form.

On Whitman’s achievement as spokesman of modern democracy perhaps too much stress has already been laid. Following his own lead, his interpreters have been inclined to associate his idiosyncrasies, his departures from the normal, his lapses from good taste in referring to the physiology of sex, too closely with the nature of this achievement. In dealing with the “poetry of democracy,” it seems to have escaped observation that an age of popular freedom and republican ideals may produce a literature of high refinement and perfect balance between literary tradition and the impulses of the individual author. It is well to remember that the masterpieces of art which ennobled Athens under Pericles were the expression of—for Greece—an age of democracy; and that the epics of Milton, however conventional in one sense, were the outpourings of a nobler champion of liberty than Whitman. Referring to the practice of studying his illustrious predecessors, Whitman has said: “Now, if eligible, O that the great masters might return and study me!” Something like this is sure to take place. In order to appreciate him rightly, we must confront him, full of the spirit of those authors, Sophocles, Dante, Milton, and their peers, by the standard of whom one is bound to estimate poetry. If thus confronted, Whitman’s lustre, so bright in the eyes of his cult, begins to wane; still, the tributes paid him by W. M. Rossetti, Freiligrath, Dowden, Björnson, Symonds, may not lightly be set aside. Taken at its best, his poetry, as Emerson said, “has the best merits, namely, of fortifying and encouraging.” His prose works ought not to be dismissed so summarily as must here be the case; being less subject to suspicious innovation than his verse, conforming naturally to expected canons, his prose, in particular his prose criticism, is well worth study. It is direct. Genius, said Whitman, is almost one hundred per cent directness.

Bret Harte, Joaquin Miller, Edward Rowland Sill.—We turn to the poetry of the Far West. Francis Bret Harte (1839–1902), born at Albany, New York, after a varied youth in California won a sudden renown through his “Heathen Chinee” and “Condensed Novels.” His later success as a prolific writer of short stories tended to obscure his talent as a humourist in verse; and even in the present decade, when his death has called fresh attention to the value of his literary work as a whole, his poetry is hardly known as it should be. Probably in the course of years his “East and West Poems” (1871) and “Echoes of the Foothills” (1874) will entertain more readers than they now do in comparison with “The Luck of Roaring Camp.” There is likely to come a time when pioneer life among the gold-mines will appeal less than it does to the present generation; whereas the permanent aspects of external nature, as Harte has caught them in “Crotalus,” can never cease to interest. The details of his life are recounted in another part of this volume.

Cincinnatus Hiner Miller (born 1841), another celebrity of the West, was reared in a log-cabin in Indiana. After a few years of life on a farm in Oregon, he went to the gold-fields of California. When he had met almost every kind of experience imaginable, he studied law, and practised in Oregon. In 1870 he brought out a small volume of poems, one of them entitled “Joaquin,” the name of a Mexican brigand, Joaquin Murietta, in whose defence he had already written, and henceforth his pen-name. His volume, “Songs of the Sierras,” for which he at first vainly tried to find a publisher, produced, when finally accepted and issued, a sensation that recalled the days of Byron. His vogue has since declined, though he is still read, a collective edition of his poems having been published in 1897.

Much less famous than either Harte or Miller, not having the virility of the former, yet possessing a finer sensibility than the latter, was Edward Rowland Sill (1841–1887), a third poet of the Far West. Sprung from a family in Connecticut, a teacher in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, finally professor of English literature in the University of California, Sill, in “Hermione, and Other Poems,” “The Hermitage, and Later Poems” (1867), “The Venus of Milo, and Other Poems,” published (1888) after his death, sent forth a rill of poetry, slender but pure. In the opinion of his friends and many besides, Sill’s death cut short a poetic career of unusual promise. His poems were collected in 1902, in a single volume, and again in 1906; in the latter edition they are arranged chronologically.

Miscellaneous and Later Poets.—Under this heading must be gathered a handful of writers whom the classification thus far adopted has not accounted for, some of whom would not easily admit of classification. However, it is not the purpose of this Manual to consider in detail the current writers of verse throughout America, among whom distinctions of value can rarely be established.

Hans Breitmann.—Charles Godfrey Leland (1824–1903) might be associated with Bayard Taylor. He is said to have neglected mathematics at Princeton for Carlyle and Spinoza; he studied abroad, returned to Philadelphia to engage in the practice of law, but gave this up for work as an editor. During the Civil War his pen was active in defence of the Union. Afterward he became popular through his “Hans Breitmann Ballads,” in picturesque dialect displaying the humour of the shrewd jovial German immigrant before the war. Leland made himself an authority on gypsy lore, and was busy in several fields as a translator. During his long residence abroad, he enjoyed an acquaintance with many distinguished men of letters in Europe. Besides his ballads in dialect and translations from J. V. Scheffel, he wrote verse of serious intent; for example, “The Music Lesson of Confucius, and Other Poems,” in which, like Taylor, he desired to unite the ideals of Christianity with those of Hellenism. The deaths of Leland, Stoddard, Aldrich, and Stedman within the last five years took almost the last survivors of an elder generation in American letters.

Richard Henry Stoddard.—In the year of his death, 1903, R. H. Stoddard was called by his friend, E. C. Stedman, “the most distinguished of living American poets.” He was born in Hingham, Massachusetts, July 2, 1825. Educated in the schools of New York City, he supplemented by private reading his brief opportunities for regular study, and from worker in a foundry became connected with Bayard Taylor as a journalist. In 1853, Hawthorne aided him in securing a position in the New York Custom-House. From 1860 to 1870 he was literary editor of the New York World; in 1880 he took a similar post on The Mail and Express. His first volume of poetry, “Footprints” (1849), was afterwards suppressed; his second, “Poems” (1852), secured him an audience. “Songs of Summer” (1857) was a collection of poems that had been printed in various magazines. The latter part of his life was marked by great activity as an editor and biographer, somewhat after the fashion of Stedman. Most of his poetry subsequent to the collective edition of 1880 is included in “The Lion’s Cub, with Other Verse” (1890). He preserved his lyrical quality to a great age. Like several of our leading poets, Stoddard reached his highest level in dealing with the theme of Abraham Lincoln.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich.—With his “Ballad of Babie Bell” (1855) in the New York Journal of Commerce, Aldrich (1836–1907) began a career whose high-water mark was the editorship of The Atlantic Monthly from 1881 to 1890. His initial volume of poetry, published in 1854, was “The Bells,” which was succeeded in 1858 by “The Ballad of Babie Bell, and Other Poems.” Of his numerous later poetical works, “Pampinea, and Other Poems” (1861), “Cloth of Gold, and Other Poems” (1874), “Flower and Thorn” (1876), etc., perhaps the tragedy of “Mercedes” (“Mercedes, and Later Lyrics,” 1884) deserves particular notice, having been successfully staged, a test which few dramas by American poets have been able to endure. Aldrich was a master of his craft. Deep in his reverence for Tennyson, whom he ranks third in English poetry—after Shakespeare and Milton,—he sometimes exercises an almost Tennysonian harmony in the selection of detail; witness the Oriental luxury and splendour in “When the Sultan Goes to Ispahan.”

Edmund Clarence Stedman.—Stedman’s services to literature as a critic and anthologist are doubtless of much greater importance than his own poetry; but neither the one nor the other may be disparaged. He was born at Hartford, Connecticut, in 1833, his mother (by her second marriage Mrs. J. C. Kinney, the friend of the Brownings) being a woman of educated taste and herself a poet. Entering Yale at the age of fifteen, Stedman showed ability in Greek and in English composition, and shortly gained a prize by his poem on “Westminster Abbey.” On account of a boyish prank he was compelled to leave college before the end of the course. Prior to the Civil War he was connected with The Norwich Tribune and Winsted Herald, and for a time with The New York Tribune; in this he printed his “Tribune Lyrics” (among them “Osawatomie Brown”). From 1861 to 1863 he was war correspondent of the New York World; later he was assistant to Edward Bates, Attorney-General under Lincoln. His interest in the first Pacific railroad brought him into relations with Wall Street, where, in 1869, he became an active member of the New York Stock Exchange. Here he remained until 1900, an influential man of affairs, respected by financiers as well as literary men, amassing and enjoying the means which he desired for the pursuits of literature. He was a thorough patriot, an earnest advocate of international copyright, above all a steady labourer for the education of public taste. His lectures on “The Nature and Elements of Poetry,” delivered first at Johns Hopkins University, subsequently at the University of Pennsylvania, and again at Columbia, unfolded the dignity of a subject that is often regarded as a matter of indifference. By his “Victorian Anthology” (1895) he gave further evidence of the powers of selection displayed in “A Library of American Literature” (1888–1889), on which he collaborated with Ellen M. Hutchinson. His “American Anthology” (1901, etc.), several times reissued, contains selections from about six hundred American poets, with brief biographies, and is, to say the least, an indispensable volume to the general student of our literature. The present section of this Manual is much indebted to Stedman’s “Anthology.” One would hardly make too liberal an assertion in saying of Stedman that he was the most thoroughly read man of his time in the poetry of his own nation. It is possible that he was over generous in his recognition of the work of inferior authors; but let us not impute this to him as too serious a fault. Of the fifteen poems of his own to which he allowed admission in the “American Anthology” (sixteen, counting the “Prelude” to the volume), the best known are “The Discoverer,” “Pan in Wall Street,” and “The Hand of Lincoln.” He died on January 18, 1908.

James Whitcomb Riley.—This artist in the “Hoosier” dialect of Indiana (born 1853), though still in middle life, seems to belong with the older rather than the younger generation of American poets. Unwilling to follow his father’s profession of attorney, he early betook himself to a wandering life, gaining experience of the world as a vendor of patent medicines, sign-painter, actor, and the like. Settling at Indianapolis, he became known by his contributions to various newspapers, and when his reputation was established, won additional success by public readings from his poetry. His verse is bright and crisp, and he has pathos, humour, and good powers of description and narrative. He has an unusually keen understanding for the experiences of country life, particularly of youth and boyhood in rural villages and on the farm. “The Old Swimmin’-Hole, and ’Leven More Poems” (1883) was his first notable venture. “Afterwhiles” appeared in 1888. Within ten years or so he then published “Old-Fashioned Roses” (1888), “Pipes o’ Pan at Zekesbury” (1889), “Rhymes of Childhood” (1890), “Neighbourly Poems” (1891), and, among other volumes, “A Child-World” (1896), and the “Rubaiyat of Doc Sifers” (1899). As a writer of dialect in verse, he falls not very far short of Lowell. His allusions to nature, to insect life for example, are simple and true. If but a bird or butterfly sit down beside him, he is as happy as if the same were a maiden-queen.

* * * * *

Space forbids any delay upon George Henry Boker (1823–1890), diplomat and dramatist, and his metrical drama, “Francesca da Rimini” (1856); or Francis Miles Finch (1827–1907), professor in Cornell University, and his celebrated poem “The Blue and the Gray” (in The Atlantic Monthly, 1867), a gift of healing from the North to the South; or John Hay (1838–1905), whose manifold services to his country were roofed and crowned with an abiding interest in literature (“Pike County Ballads,” published in The New York Tribune); or Richard Watson Gilder (born 1844), editor of The Century Magazine, social reformer, and author of several volumes of finished verse; or Stephen Collins Foster (1836–1864), composer, whose songs, “The Old Folks at Home,” “The Suwanee River,” “My Old Kentucky Home,” familiar the country over, are significant of the influence which the negroes have exerted on the language and art of the whites; or Will H. Thompson (born 1848), and “The High Tide at Gettysburg”; or John Townsend Trowbridge (born 1827), one of the original contributors to The Atlantic Monthly, author of “The Vagabonds” (1863), and steeped in the spirit of New England; or John Boyle O’Reilly (1844–1890), the Fenian, who escaped from imprisonment in Australia, and became a journalist in Boston (“Songs, Legends, and Ballads,” “Songs of the Southern Seas,” etc.); or Eugene Field (1850–1895), witty, eccentric, friend and student of children; or Richard Hovey (1864–1900), cut off in the flower of his promise (“Taliesin: a Masque,” 1899); or Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872–1906), the negro poet, dead before his time, who wrote good and stirring English as well as pathetic dialect; or William Vaughn Moody, professor in the University of Chicago (“The Masque of Judgment,” 1900); or Bliss Carman (born 1861) and Clinton Scollard (born 1860). All these and many more must pass with insufficient notice or none; otherwise the page would contain only a meaningless enumeration of names and dates. As was implied at the beginning, very few American writers who have won distinction in other ways have refrained from publishing a volume of lyrics “and other poems.” Also, in spite of the slender encouragement from publishers to new authors of original verse, the occasional volume from the hitherto and hereafter unknown poetaster, who foots the bill for printing, continues to emerge and sink again at the present day.

The immediate outlook for poetry in the United States is not bright. It does not appear that with the material growth of the country we have developed a unified national spirit capable of expression at the hands of a great poet, were he to arise. It does not appear that we have among the younger men a first-class poet capable of expressing the national soul, were this more unified and precise. Furthermore, the type of humanistic education which fostered our elder poets of New England is generally discredited, and seems to be passing away without leaving any hope of a popular training in the near future worthy to succeed it. Simplicity, rigour, precision, and accuracy, all of them friendly to the poetic spirit, and among its necessary conditions, have fewer and fewer champions in the schools. Many subjects are studied, and almost nothing is mastered and retained. Memory, the mother of the Muses, is not in esteem. “Literature” is taught—though not learned; yet the children know no poetry. Worst of all, and a primary cause of much of the evil, the reading of standard works within the family is becoming less and less common. In particular, though there is much talk about the Bible, the Bible, like the classics, is becoming unfamiliar, to the great detriment of popular thought and style.

On the other hand, to offset the deficiency of our secondary schools and the decay of culture in the home, the last thirty years have witnessed an immense expansion in advanced scholarship, most notable, perhaps, in the investigation of the vernacular and related literatures. Graduate study of English, and of the literatures from which English literature has sprung, offers a refuge to such persons as have a serious and abiding interest in belles-lettres; it is undoubtedly developing the personalities of investigators to the highest point of efficiency possible under present conditions, and making ready for another generation, more fortunate, whose poetry shall find root in the fields that are to-day so thoroughly cultivated; working downward, it is already tending to bring about salutary changes here and there in the procedure of the schools, and hence eventually to have an influence in the home. A generation of scholars to clear the way, as in the beginning of the Renaissance—to produce the literary atmosphere which now is wanting—may be regarded as a hopeful sign of a generation of poets to come. Finally, if American poetry now seems moribund, we must yet remember the eternal power that the true poet is always in alliance with; the power that at any time can make the poet say of any literature: The maid is not dead, but sleepeth.21

IV. THE ESSAYISTS AND THE HUMOURISTS.

English Influences on American Letters.—Springing from a common stock, the two branches of eighteenth-century English literature showed many similarities. The charge of imitation and even of plagiarism has been brought against the American writers of that period; but it seems in no way unsafe to point to the single origin as the probable cause of the same characteristics appearing in the literature produced here, and that produced in the mother-country. No one can deny, of course, that not a few of our authors went to school to Englishmen, but the assertion that America until recently has produced nothing but pinchbeck literature is as false as it is absurd. That like produces like may be a trite saying, but its frequent repetition does not impair its truth. The English mind, whether expressing itself at home or in the colonies, naturally put forth the same kind of shoots: that their development was not in all respects equally rapid, that in time they became so much unlike as to appear unrelated, can be traced, no doubt, to the unsheltered fortune of the American scion in early days, and to the complete removal of the slip from the parent stem in after-years.

With this thought in mind, the most thorough-going American may admit, without apologetic reserve, that the essayists of eighteenth-century England have counterparts in Irving and certain of his contemporaries, and that those of a slightly later date have much in common with Emerson and Thoreau. Should one feel, however, that excusable pride is to be taken only in those authors who exhibit qualities indigenous to America, one may triumphantly mention Warner, and Lowell, and Margaret Fuller; for, although these essayists show the racial instinct of English writers, they are none the less emphatically American in thought, tone, and expression. In passing, it is perhaps well to notice that a large number of American writers have tried their hands at more than one form of literature. For this reason Irving is discussed as an essayist, although he might be placed with the humourists, or perhaps better still, with fiction-writers, since he has the right to dispute with Poe the claim to be regarded as the progenitor of the American short story. Again, Emerson, like George Eliot, felt that his fame would eventually rest upon his poetry, but his readers almost always think and speak of him as an essayist. Lowell, Longfellow, and Whittier, on the other hand, are properly reviewed at large as poets, despite the fact that their prose work is not inconsiderable nor unimportant and must therefore receive some attention in even a rapid survey of the American essay.

Washington Irving.—Washington Irving (1783–1859), the first essayist of importance in the National Period of American Literature, was born in New York City. Unable on account of ill-health to continue his education, Irving went abroad in 1804. Returning two years later, he was admitted to the bar, but he never engaged in the actual practice of law. In 1815 Irving again went to Europe, this time upon matters connected with the cutlery business in which, as silent partner, he was engaged with his brothers. It was seventeen years before he again set foot upon his native soil, but when he did come back, he was widely known, both for his writings and for his diplomatic service as member of the American legations, first at Madrid (1826–1829) and later at London (1829–1831). During the next decade, Irving was in this country, living quietly at Sunnyside, as he called his home at Tarrytown-on-the-Hudson. In 1842, accepting an appointment as Minister to Spain, he went to Europe for a third time and remained abroad four years. Upon his return home, he gave himself up entirely to writing, finishing his monumental work upon Washington but a short time before his death. He is buried in the Tarrytown Sleepy-Hollow Cemetery—within sight of the road down which one of his characters, Ichabod Crane, made his precipitous flight in mad endeavour to escape the headless horseman.

Irving’s first book, “A History of New York,” published as from the pen of “Diedrich Knickerbocker,” appeared in 1809. It attracted immediate attention and established its author’s reputation as a humourist; but unfortunately its fun at the expense of the ancestors of certain American families roused not a little rancour. Irving’s next work, “The Sketch Book,” was published, first in parts in 1819, and then in two volumes in the following year. This book and “Bracebridge Hall, or The Humourists” (1822), “Tales of a Traveller” (1824), “The Alhambra” (1832), and “Wolfert’s Roost” (1855), are all miscellaneous collections of sketches, short stories, and character studies, of which one volume is not inferior to another. The first of them received cordial recognition from Scott, who arranged for its publication in London; and the last had a wide circulation both in America and in England.

During Irving’s first visit to Spain, he became interested in certain biographical and historical material there easily accessible, and put it to use when he was writing “The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus” (1828), “The Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada” (1829), “The Voyages of the Companions of Columbus” (1831), “The Alhambra,” already mentioned, and “The Life of Mahomet” (1849). Upon Irving’s return to America his interest in the same kind of material continued, and led him to publish “The Life of Goldsmith” (1849), and “The Life of Washington” in six volumes (1855–1859). Irving’s other works are “A Tour on the Prairies” (1835), “Astoria” (1836), and “The Adventures of Captain Bonneville” (1837).

Irving was the first American writer to gain literary reputation abroad; nor was the interest which he awakened there merely that of curiosity wondering what would come out of a wilderness. It may be that the great bulk of his work is not widely read at present, but such stories as “Rip Van Winkle,” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” such sketches as “The Stout Gentleman” and “Moonlight on the Alhambra” are perennial. Irving was hardly skilful in his use of pathos, degenerating not infrequently into the sentimental and even into the maudlin; yet the buoyancy of his fascinating and delicate humour has seldom been matched by any other American writer. His graceful, almost faultless style is akin to that of the writers of The Spectator, although it savours now and then of Goldsmith, and has, according to Scott, a dash of Swift. Perhaps Lowell best summed up the matter of Irving and his style in “A Fable for Critics”:

Bryant and Others.—William Cullen Bryant (1794–1878) is generally thought of as a poet, but his prose was not inconsiderable either in amount or in value. During his long connection with the New York Evening Post, from 1826 until the end of his life, he wrote daily editorials of high literary quality, contributed to many other journals, and delivered frequent orations upon various subjects. A collection of Bryant’s prose works in two volumes was published in 1894: one who reads them is convinced that their author was possessed of a clear, smooth style, an accurate, careful judgment, and good common sense. Whittier (1807–1892) and Longfellow (1807–1882) may not improperly be mentioned here, although, like Bryant, they also are best known as poets. Whittier was closely associated with William Lloyd Garrison in the Abolition movement and contributed much to its literature. Controversial writing, however, seldom lives, and Whittier’s has not proved an exception to the rule. In addition to one or two attempts at novel-writing, Whittier published “Supernaturalism in New England” (1847), “Old Portraits and Modern Sketches” (1850), and “Literary Recreations” (1854); but these works are not important in style or in matter. The demands of metre and rhyme upon Whittier seem to have prevented the appearance, in his poetry, of certain crudities which sadly mar his prose. Longfellow’s prose, on the other hand, is more important. It is marked by a delicacy and refinement which would go far towards keeping it well known, if the author’s greater fame as a poet did not eclipse his renown as a prose writer. In addition to two romances, he published “Outre Mer” (1825), a volume in aim and content somewhat like Irving’s “Sketch Book”; and under the title of “Drift Wood” he included in the first edition of his “Complete Prose Works” (1857) a collection of stray essays and book reviews originally contributed to various periodicals.

Edgar Allan Poe.—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1869), like the three authors just mentioned, was a poet, yet to his own time he was perhaps even better known as a short story writer and essayist. Opinions about the value of his literary work have been as various as those respecting his character; but it is safe to claim for him no mean place among writers of criticism. In this department of literature he undertook to bring about a reform among American authors who had passed from timid deference to English opinion into the stage of noisy and indiscriminate praise of every piece of writing produced in this country. From a study of Coleridge, Poe had come to the conclusion that poetry was a matter of “intellectual happiness”; its soul was the imagination. A person of metaphysical acumen, therefore, by noting how poetic moods are excited, could produce a finer poem than one who, lacking the analytical faculty, could only feel the emotions he desired to arouse in his readers. Poe laid great stress, too, on perfection of form as of the utmost importance in producing an effect; truth was a secondary matter, except in detail, and as a means of securing assent to a conclusion which might be essentially untruthful. The object of poetry, he thought, is to arouse a subtle, indefinite pleasure; this was imparted by music; hence the necessity of melody, of the refrain.

As a critic, Poe was often savage in the extreme; but it must be remembered, as we look back upon him, that the urbanity of the modern book reviewer was then a thing unknown. Poe’s literary judgments have in the main been justified, although some of his unsparing attacks in “The Literati of New York” arouse resentment even at this late day, while his equally unrestrained laudation of certain of his now wholly forgotten contemporaries leads one near to contemptuous amusement. Poe’s most important contribution to the theory of writing are two essays usually reprinted with his poems; of these “The Philosophy of Composition” first appeared in Graham’s Magazine for April, 1846, and “The Poetic Principle,” originally a lecture, was printed in Sartain’s Magazine for October, 1850. Perhaps an essay “On Critics and Criticism” ought also to be mentioned; it was first published in Graham’s Magazine for January, 1850.

Ralph Waldo Emerson.—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), serious, high-minded, and well balanced, affords a striking contrast in almost every way to Poe. Born in Boston, he was graduated from Harvard College at the age of nineteen. After teaching school for a time, he became minister of the Old North Church in his native city, but in 1835 withdrew from his charge because of his aversion to the rite of the Lord’s Supper. Taking up his residence at Concord, Massachusetts, he spent the rest of his years in writing and lecturing. While engaged in the latter work he went as far west as California and made two visits abroad. During the first, Emerson met Wordsworth, Coleridge, Landor, and De Quincey, who received him graciously, George Eliot, who referred to him as “the first man she had ever seen,” and Carlyle, who found in the visitor a hero well worthy of sincere admiration. Dignified and simple in manner, deep and kindly in thought, he found contentment in an uneventful career; sympathising strongly with those who would live the life of the spirit, he supported in theory the Brook Farm experiment; advocating anti-slavery ideas, he opened his church to Abolition agitators; but objecting on principle to war, he proposed to buy the slaves and educate them morally. He went down to his grave loved by his neighbours and honoured by many who knew him only through his works.

Emerson made his earliest appearance as a writer in a book entitled “Nature” (1836), but he first attracted real attention by his Phi Beta Kappa oration before Harvard College in 1837. This address, now published in his collected works as “The American Scholar,” made so strong an appeal to his listeners to break away from the influence of England in matters of authorship that Holmes with his usual felicity termed it “our literary Declaration of Independence.” For three or four years, beginning in 1840, Emerson was editor of The Dial. In 1841 he published his first collection of “Essays”; and three years later his second. From then on at irregular intervals other volumes of like content appeared; of these the most important, in all probability, are “Representative Men” (1850), “The Conduct of Life” (1860), and “Society and Solitude” (1870). There is no need of an enumeration of Emerson’s books, since they are all similar in form, content, and purpose. While Emerson is in no true sense a philosopher, he did project a theory of life. Sincerity he regarded as fundamental, and his belief in the formative influence of great men was almost identical with that held by Carlyle. By the possession of “transcendental reason,” man, according to Emerson, becomes intuitively aware of the truth. This truth or doctrine has been reduced by some critic to three propositions: (1) God is in all things and all things are in God. (2) Each created existence is essential to every other created existence. (3) Nothing which has once existed ever ceases to exist. To the average reader these ideas are bewildering and have been collectively designated as “a new philosophy maintaining that nothing is everything in general, and everything is nothing in particular.” It is related as a fact, that after an address by Emerson before a college society, the minister in charge of the meeting devoutly prayed that the hearers might be preserved from ever again being compelled to listen to such transcendental nonsense. At the close of the meeting Emerson imperturbably remarked that the gentleman seemed a very conscientious, plain-spoken man.

The distance between Emerson’s thought and that of most men laid him open to the charge of obscurity, an accusation which is still widely repeated by those who do not trouble themselves to read or to think. It cannot be denied that Emerson is often mystical, and that he must find spiritual insight and almost poetic imagination in those who would penetrate to the heart of his teachings; but it is unfair to give the impression that, save to the initiated, he is nearly always incomprehensible. Page after page of his writings offers no difficulty whatever to the most cursory reader, and his work as a whole is within the ken of any serious and unprejudiced reader. In style Emerson is sometimes forbidding through a strong tendency to condensation of expression; but the beauty of his thought frequently draws to itself a diction and order which transform his prose into veritable poetry. His strong, earnest spirituality is never fanatical, his perfect trust in what he called the Over-Soul is never sentimental, his full confidence that the world is making for ultimate good is never unpractical. Looking upon the universe as “one vast symbol of God,” he escaped pantheism on one hand and materialism on the other. As a teacher uttering his uplifting thought through literature, Emerson, it may be confidently said, stands without a rival among American writers.

Henry David Thoreau.—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) is by many readers coupled with Emerson. Born in Concord, Massachusetts, he spent the greater part of his life in his native town and its vicinity. He was graduated at Harvard College in 1837, although he refused his diploma on the ground that it was not worth five dollars. He gave occasional lectures and wrote many books: of these he himself published but two, “A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers” (1849) and “Walden, or Life in the Woods” (1854). To these have been added from time to time since Thoreau’s death several volumes entitled “Excursions in Field and Forest” (1863), “The Maine Woods” (1864), “Cape Cod” (1865), and “A Yankee in Canada” (1866). The greater part of his voluminous journal was published in 1906 and 1907, though extensive selections had been previously printed in four volumes bearing respectively the names of the four seasons of the year. More than any other well-known American author, Thoreau strove to get at Nature’s inmost heart. Withdrawing to Walden Pond, he spent the larger part of his time for two years in reading and meditation; feeling then that his object had been accomplished, he returned to town life. For a brief period, Thoreau lived as an inmate of Emerson’s household and became an unconscious disciple of the man who entertained him. A transcendentalist imbued with a strong spirit of otherworldliness, he may perhaps be best summed up in Emerson’s words. “He was bred to no profession; he never married; he lived alone; he never went to church; he never voted; he refused to pay a tax to the state; he ate no flesh; he drank no wine; he never knew the use of tobacco; and though a naturalist he used neither rod nor gun.” Thomas Wentworth Higginson has pointed out that Thoreau’s fame has survived two of the greatest dangers that can beset reputation—a brilliant satirist for critic (Lowell), and an injudicious friend for biographer (Channing).

Minor Transcendentalists.—Minor transcendentalists, and connected therefore with Emerson and Thoreau, were Amos Bronson Alcott (1799–1888), and Sarah Margaret Fuller (1810–1850). Both, like Emerson, were contributors to The Dial but unlike him did not hold aloof from the Brook Farm experiment. Alcott’s chief works were “Tablets” (1868), “Concord Days” (1872), and “Table Talk” (1877); Margaret Fuller’s, “A Summer on the Lakes” (1843), “Woman in the Nineteenth Century” (1844), and “Papers on Literature and Art” (1846). Other essayists who may be mentioned as identifying themselves with the Brook Farm movement or with the Transcendental Club out of which it grew, were three noted clergymen, William Ellery Channing (1780–1842), the founder of the club; Theodore Parker (1810–1860), the pulpit representative of its theories, and James Freeman Clarke (1810–1888), a frequent contributor to its organ, The Dial. In later years each of these men published works which are still occasionally read. Channing’s numerous writings were brought together in five volumes in 1841, and, under the title “The Perfect Life,” a selection from them was made in 1872. He must not be confused with a younger William Ellery Channing (1818–1901), his brother’s son, the author of a monograph on “Thoreau, the Poet Naturalist” (1873) and of “Conversations from Rome” (1902). Parker’s chief works aside from his sermons were “Miscellaneous Writings” (1843) and “Historic Americans” (1870); Clarke’s, “Orthodoxy, its Truths and Errors” (1866) and “Ten Great Religions” (1871).

The Transcendental Movement appealed to all sorts and conditions of men: philosophers exchanged ideas with journalists, and ministers with writers of fiction. Of the members who later became known as editors the most important were George Ripley (1802–1880), Charles Anderson Dana (1819–1897), and George William Curtis (1824–1892), all of whom at some time or other were upon the staff of The New York Tribune. Ripley and Dana were joint editors of “The American Encyclopedia” (1857–1863); but they also worked independently, the former putting together fourteen volumes entitled “Specimens of Foreign Standard Literature” (1838–1842), the latter making that still famous collection “The Household Book of Poetry and Song” (1857). Curtis’ interests were so many and so various that he has been classified as journalist, orator, publicist, and author. His most important works were “Lotus Eating” (1852), “Potiphar Papers” (1853), and “Essays from the Easy Chair” (1891), the last a collection of brief papers originally contributed to Harper’s Magazine.

Oliver Wendell Holmes.—Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–1894) stands in some contrast to the chief writers of the Transcendental School. On the whole they were marked by deliberate seriousness, but he possessed a clear, crisp spontaneity which often broke forth into sparkling fun. Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a member of what he facetiously styled “The Brahmin Caste” of New England, he counted among his ancestors more than one English governor of the Colonial period and that famous woman of her time, Anne Bradstreet, “the Tenth Muse.” After being graduated from Harvard College in 1829, he studied law for a year and then turned to medicine. Completing his education in Paris, Holmes returned to America in 1835 to enter upon the practice of his profession, but in 1839 accepted a professorship of anatomy at Dartmouth College, in New Hampshire. The following year he entered upon a similar position in the Harvard Medical School, and remained there until 1882. In 1886, Holmes visited Europe and received honorary degrees from Edinburgh, Oxford, and Cambridge. The eight remaining years of his life he spent quietly at his home in Boston, graciously receiving even strangers, who felt that they had not really seen that city unless they had shaken Dr. Holmes by the hand.

Of Holmes’ prose work his “Breakfast Table” series best defends his right to claim a permanent place of fame. “The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table,” after appearing serially in the first and second volumes of The Atlantic Monthly (1857–1858), was immediately republished in book form, and was succeeded by “The Professor at the Breakfast Table” (1859), “The Poet at the Breakfast Table” (1872), and “Over the Tea-Cups” (1891). These works, which have been rather aptly characterised as “a cross between an essay and a drama,” contain comments on almost everything in the heavens above, the earth beneath, and the waters under the earth. The books are at times delightfully whimsical and scintillatingly witty, at others deeply serious and minutely analytic, and at still others tenderly generous and movingly pathetic. Holmes’ other important works in prose are two volumes of biography, a “Memoir of John Lothrop Motley” (1879) and a “Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson” (1884); one book of essays, “Pages from an Odd Volume of Life” (1883); and one diary of travel, “Our Hundred Days in Europe” (1887).

Willis, Mitchell, and Warner.—Nathaniel Parker Willis (1806–1867), Donald Grant Mitchell (born in 1822), and Charles Dudley Warner (1829–1900) are suggested by the mention of Holmes, for they, like him, were writers of the “genial” essay. Willis was born in Portland, Maine, and was graduated from Yale at the age of twenty-one. Entering upon a journalistic career in 1828, he spent a considerable number of years abroad, whence he sent home for the periodicals of his day frequent accounts of his foreign travel and experiences. His complete works have been collected into thirteen volumes, but the best of his writing may be found in two books published during his lifetime, “Pencillings by the Way” (1835) and “Letters from Under a Bridge” (1840). Willis wrote with most painstaking care. It has been left upon record by James Parton that Willis “bestowed upon everything he did the most careful labour, making endless erasures and emendations. On an average he blotted one line out of every three that he wrote, and on one page of his editorial writing there were but three lines left unaltered.” It may be added, in passing, that Willis’ father in 1827 founded the well known and widely read Youth’s Companion. Mitchell, for many years better known as “Ik Marvel,” was, like Willis, a New Englander by birth and a graduate of Yale College. He, also, spent a few years abroad, acting, in fact, as United States Consul at Venice in 1853–1855. His works were many, but he is best known as the author of “Reveries of a Bachelor” (1850) and “Dream Life” (1851). Warner was in many respects the strongest writer of this group. A New Englander by birth, he was graduated at Hamilton College, Clinton, New York, then studied law at the University of Pennsylvania, and finally began the practice of his profession in Chicago. In 1860 he was called to Hartford, Connecticut, as editor of a daily paper, and from then on gave himself up to journalism and other literary interests. His works were many and varied; the most important are “My Summer in a Garden” (1870), “Backlog Studies” (1872), “My Winter on the Nile” (1876), and a “Life of Washington Irving” (1881).

Some Travellers.—Bayard Taylor’s experiences abroad found their expression in a number of books; but, readable as they all are, the first, “Views Afoot” (1846), is the best. It is a work to be compared with Irving’s “Sketch Book” and Longfellow’s “Outre Mer”; it may not be far wrong to assign it to a place between the two, inferior to the first, superior to the second. From Taylor’s numerous works in other departments of pure literature, “Studies in German Literature” (1879) and “Essays and Notes” (1880) may be chosen for mention.

At the risk of departing somewhat from chronological order, one may mention at this point a few authors who, like Taylor, left records of their travels and adventures. The earliest of these, an older man in fact than Taylor, was Elisha Kent Kane (1820–1857), the Arctic explorer, who related in “The Grinnell Expeditions” (1854–1856), the story of the two unsuccessful attempts to find Sir John Franklin. Much nearer to our time were Henry M. Stanley (1841–1890) and George Kennan (born in 1845). Stanley was born in Wales, it is true, and was knighted by Queen Victoria in 1890; but his explorations in Africa were made while he was a citizen of the United States. His best-known work is his first, “How I Found Livingston” (1872). Kennan experienced adventures in still another part of the world. Sent to Siberia by the American Telegraph Association to superintend the construction of lines, he published, in 1870, “Tent Life in Siberia.” Several years later he returned to the same country as correspondent of The Century Magazine to investigate social and political conditions there. He published the results of his observations in “Siberia and the Exile System” (1891).

Holland, Lowell, and Others.—The essay of travel, it will have to be admitted, has carried us pretty well out of the realm of pure literature and brought us down to very recent times. If we have seemed to ignore certain writers, some less and some greater, it was but to return to them for fuller mention. Josiah Gilbert Holland (1819–1881) was born in Belchertown, Massachusetts, and while still a young man became associate editor of The Springfield Republican. In 1870 he assisted in the foundation of Scribner’s Monthly and became its editor-in-chief. He tried his hand at various forms of literature and at one time was not far from being the most popular writer in the United States. To this day there is hardly an American household unprovided with a copy of one of the early editions of “Timothy Titcomb’s Letters” (1858), “Gold Foil” (1859), or “Plain Talks on Familiar Subjects” (1865). James Russell Lowell (1819–1891) contributed many articles to The Atlantic and The North American Review; some of this work has not yet been collected, but the best of it may be found scattered through the seven volumes of his complete prose works (1890–1891). During his lifetime Lowell published several collections of essays; the most valuable are “Fireside Travels” (1864), “Among my Books” (1870), and “My Study Windows” (1871). As one looks over their contents, one is surprised at the versatility of their writer. The essay of reminiscence, “A Moosehead Journal” or “Cambridge Thirty Years Ago,” balances the essay of travel, “At Sea” or “A Few Bits of Roman Mosaic”; the historical essay, “New England Two Centuries Ago,” is matched by the nature study, “My Garden Acquaintance”; the purely literary sketch, “Shakespeare Once More,” stands beside the book review “Witchcraft” or “A Great Public Character”; and the political speech, “Democracy” or “Tariff Reform,” adds a certain virility to the notes of a response to the toast “Our Literature” or to the address on “Books and Reading” delivered at the opening of a free public library. Lowell is ironical in “On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners,” witty in “A Good Word for Winter,” genial in “A Library of Old Authors,” sympathetic in “Emerson the Lecturer,” just in “Thoreau,” firm in “Reconstruction” and “Abraham Lincoln,” thoughtful in “The Rebellion: Its Causes and Consequences,” and scholarly in “Chaucer” and “Dante.” Aristocratic in the best sense of that much abused term, cultured in manner, robust and vigorous in thought, clean and fresh in mind, Lowell still stands forth as America’s finest representative man of letters.

The greatness of Lowell has by no means dimmed the renown of certain of his lesser contemporaries. Edward Everett Hale (born in 1822), Thomas Wentworth Higginson (born in 1823), and Charles Eliot Norton (1827–1908) deserve at least passing mention, although the first two are better known for contributions to magazines than for books, and the last has gained attention mainly through his biographical work and his translation of Dante. Owing to the popularity of a story, “The Man Without a Country,” Dr. Hale has unfortunately become known as an author of one book, but his “Puritan Politics in England and New England” (1869) is valuable, and his “Franklin in France” (1887), written with the assistance of his son, is interesting and trustworthy. Mr. Higginson has tried his hand at biography, historical memoranda, criticism, and fiction: probably his best work is found in “Outdoor Papers” (1863), “Atlantic Essays” (1871), and “The New World and the New Book” (1891). Of the three authors here mentioned, Dr. Norton is the most important; he is more than a writer; he is in addition a scholar. Knowing intimately all of the foremost writers of this country, he was hardly less well acquainted with the most important English authors of the middle and later Victorian period. In addition to his monumental prose translation of Dante’s “New Life” (1858) and “Divine Comedy” (1892), he has edited such books as “The Early Letters of Thomas Carlyle” (1886), “The Letters of James Russell Lowell” (1893), and “The Letters of John Ruskin” (1904). His chief original works are “Notes of Travel and Study in Italy” (1859) and “Historical Studies of Church-Building in the Middle Ages” (1880). The scholarship of Dr. Norton immediately suggests that of other men. George Ticknor (1791–1887) by the date of his birth seems to belong to a period slightly earlier than that of Norton; in fact he immediately preceded Longfellow as professor of belles-lettres at Harvard. His chief work was “A History of Spanish Literature” (1849). As a valuable piece of criticism, it has not been superseded, and even in Spain is accepted as authoritative. Somewhat later than Ticknor in point of time was Francis James Child (1825–1896). Educated at Harvard College, he was a professor there for nearly half a century. Devoting himself to the study of the ballad as a literary form, he published the results of his work in eight volumes under the title “English and Scottish Popular Ballads” (1857–1859). Closely connected with these several authors was James Thomas Fields (1817–1881). Founder of The Atlantic Monthly and member of a famous publishing house, he was acquainted more or less intimately with every important American writer of the last half of the nineteenth century. He was not without literary skill himself, publishing among other works “Yesterdays with Authors” (1872) and “Underbrush” (1881). His wife, Annie Adams Fields (born in 1834), has written a number of books in a similar vein: the most valuable, perhaps, are “A Shelf of Old Books” and “Authors and Friends,” both published in 1896.

Shakespearean Scholars.—Harking back to Norton and Ticknor as representative American students of foreign literatures, one naturally takes pleasure in seeing that the field of Shakespearean scholarship has been by no means neglected in this country. Henry Norman Hudson (1814–1886) may be said to have been the first American to turn a furrow; for, after publishing “Lectures on Shakespeare” (1848), he devoted himself to a critical study of the plays and finally produced a work still mentioned with respect, “Shakespeare: His Life, Art, and Characters” (1872). Meanwhile Richard Grant White (1822–1885) had published “The Authorship of the Three Parts of Henry VI.” (1859) and “Memoirs of the Life of Shakespeare” (1865). Interested in other subjects for a time, he wrote “Words and Their Uses” (1870) and “England Without and Within” (1881); then, returning to his early interests, he produced “Studies in Shakespeare” (1885). Perhaps Edwin Percy Whipple (1819–1886) deserves mention at this place, for after writing “Essays and Reviews” (1849), and “Character and Characteristic Men” (1866), he published “The Literature of the Age of Elizabeth” (1869). Nor is it possible to overlook Thomas Raynesford Lounsbury (born in 1838), who added to his extensive “Studies in Chaucer” (1892) a trilogy of studies entitled “Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist” (1901), “Shakespeare and Voltaire” (1902), and “The Text of Shakespeare” (1906). But easily the foremost Shakespearean scholar in America is Horace Howard Furness (born in 1833), whose “Variorum Shakespeare” as a painstaking and authoritative work stands unsurpassed in any language. Recently Mr. Furness has associated his son with him in his investigations, and we may therefore expect with some confidence that a study of Shakespeare on the largest scale up to this time attempted may be completed according to the traditions with which it was begun.

Literary Historians.—Widely interested as the scholars of this country have been in the greater writers and the more important literature of other lands, there has been no dearth of attention to our own. Moses Coit Tyler (1835–1900), sometime professor of American history at Cornell University, was the author of two valuable works, “History of American Literature during the Colonial Times” (1878) and “Literary History of the American Revolution” (1897). Charles Francis Richardson (born in 1851), professor of English in Dartmouth College, has covered the whole range of our literary history down to 1885 in his “American Literature” (1887); and Barrett Wendell (born in 1855) of Harvard University, in his “Literary History of America” (1901), has brought his treatment of the same topic down to the beginning of the present century. Professor Wendell has written upon other American topics in “Stelligeri” (1893), and “A Life of Cotton Mather” (1891). More recently he has published two works, both the result of his residence abroad as a lecturing professor: the substance of the first, “The Temper of the Seventeenth Century in English Literature” (1904), was delivered before Trinity College, Cambridge; that of the second, “The France of To-Day” (1907) was gathered while he was giving a course of lectures in Paris.

Members of other American college faculties have given evidence of minute research and strong inspiration in books not a few. James Brander Matthews (born in 1852) of Columbia University, and George Edward Woodberry (born in 1855), for many years connected with the same university, have both written books that have gained popular approval; of the former, “French Dramatists of the Nineteenth Century” (1881) and “The Historical Novel” (1901) certainly deserve mention; of the latter, “The Life of Poe” (1885) and “The Appreciation of Literature” (1907). No less significant than these men are Felix Emmanuel Schelling (born in 1858) of the University of Pennsylvania, whose latest work is “The Elizabethan Drama” (1908), and Vida Dutton Scudder (born in 1861) of Wellesley College, who cannot be left unnoticed, so thorough and satisfactory are her “Life of the Spirit in the Modern English Poets” (1895) and “Social Ideals in English Letters” (1898). Woodrow Wilson, president of Princeton University, has spared time from his political and historical studies to write an interesting volume of essays called “Mere Literature” (1896); President Wilson’s former colleague, Bliss Perry (born in 1860), now editor of The Atlantic Monthly and professor of belles-lettres at Harvard, has published a valuable “Study of Prose Fiction” (1902), and another Princeton professor, Henry Jackson Van Dyke (born in 1852), has written an especially useful study called “The Poetry of Tennyson” (1889), and has also shown himself a master of the leisurely essay in “Little Rivers” (1895) and “Fisherman’s Luck” (1899).

The Nature Writers.—Professor Van Dyke’s “outdoor essays,” as they are sometimes called, carry us back to the earlier nature writers, for between him and Thoreau there is no wide hiatus. John Burroughs (born in 1837) has written a considerable number of books dealing with his observations out of doors, although he has by no means neglected the purely literary topic. The mention of his earlier works gives an adequate index of all his subject-matter. “Wake-Robin” appeared in 1870, “Birds and Poets” in 1875, and “Whitman, a Study” in 1896. To be closely associated with Mr. Burroughs is Bradford Torrey (born in 1843); his chief works are “Birds in the Bush” (1885), “The Footpath Way” (1892), and “A World of Green Hills” (1898). Nor can Olive Thorne Miller (born in 1831) be overlooked: she began to write studies of birds about 1880, and among other works, all of considerable interest, she has published “In Nesting Time” (1888), “A Bird-Lover in the West” (1894), and “Under the Tree-Tops” (1897). The writers just mentioned are not to be regarded, of course, as scientists or even as scientific writers in the commonly accepted sense of those terms. They look upon nature with the loving rather than the analytic eye, and register their appreciative feelings rather than their minute observations. They have much in common, therefore, with the purely literary essayists whose names are not far from legion. Although unable to mention all who have recently attracted attention, we must not forget William Winter (born in 1836), whose best prose works date back but a quarter of a century: he published “Shakespeare’s England” in 1888, “Gray Days and Gold” in 1891, and “The Life and Art of Edwin Booth” in 1894. Neither can we ignore Hamilton Wright Mabie (born in 1845), literary editor of The Outlook. His books are many and widely popular: probably the series of three volumes called “My Study Fire” (1890, 1894, and 1899) and “Shakespeare: Poet, Dramatist, and Man” (1900) are best known. Not less significant is Paul Elmer More (born in 1864) of the editorial staff of The Nation. In addition to translations from Sanskrit and from Greek, he has published five books all bearing the title “Shelburne Essays” (1904–1908).

Other Essayists.—Finally, so far as essayists are concerned, some rapid review must be made of the novelists and the later poets who have not restricted themselves to the fields of their chief labour. This takes us back as far as Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864), whose “Our Old Home” (1863) is a collection of valuable essays on various English topics. The saying “Like father, like son” was exemplified when Julian Hawthorne (born in 1846) brought out “Saxon Studies” (1876), a book of like purport with his father’s. The mention of more than one writer in a family suggests the elder Henry James (1811–1882) and his two sons, William and Henry. The father is best remembered as a theological and philosophical writer through his “Moralism and Christianity” (1852) and “Lectures and Miscellanies” (1852). The elder son, William James (born in 1842), for many years professor of psychology in Harvard University, besides being the author of several technical works in the science to which he is devoted, has written “The Will to Believe, and Other Essays” (1897), “Is Life Worth Living?” (1898), and “Pragmatism” (1906). The younger Henry James (born in 1843), in addition to being a novelist, is also the author of “A Little Tour in France” (1884), “Partial Portraits” (1888), and “Essays in London and Elsewhere” (1893). For some reason not strongly apparent, William Dean Howells (born in 1837) is almost always associated in the minds of readers with Henry James the novelist. Editor for a time of The Atlantic Monthly, and later connected first with the staff of Harper’s Magazine, and afterwards with that of The Cosmopolitan, he has made many books of essays. The best are “Venetian Life” (1866), “Italian Journeys” (1867), and “Criticism and Fiction” (1895). Belonging by birth to a later decade, Francis Marion Crawford (born in 1854) is near to being America’s most prolific writer. His most important work, outside the domain of the novel, is a small volume connected in content with the art which he chiefly affects, “The Novel, What It Is” (1903). It attracted much attention upon its appearance, and is still often quoted. Mr. Crawford is also the author of “The Rulers of the South” (1900) and “Gleanings from Venetian History” (1905). The woman novelists cannot be ignored as writers of essays, for not only do they possess powers of penetration and insight, but two of them, at least, have swayed public opinion to no inappreciable extent. Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896) in addition to her many books of fiction wrote a very much discussed study entitled “Lady Byron Vindicated” (1870) and “The American Woman’s Home” (1869), at one time thought to be the final word upon domestic questions. A writer of hardly less importance was Helen Hunt Jackson (1831–1885), still popularly known by her pseudonym of “H. H.” Her most valuable study was “A Century of Dishonour” (1881), in which she laid bare the ill-treatment accorded the American Indians; she succeeded through its pages in doing much to ameliorate their unfortunate condition. Mrs. Jackson’s “Bits of Travel” (1873) and “Between Whiles” (1887) are interesting and readable.

The more important later poets who have contributed to essay literature are led by that erratic but remarkable genius, Walt Whitman (1819–1892). His collected “Prose Works,” published in the year of his death, contain much more true common sense than his writings are popularly assumed to show. The main titles included in the contents are those of small volumes printed at various intervals: “Specimen Days” (1882), “November Boughs” (1888), and “Good-Bye, My Fancy” (1891). Edmund Clarence Stedman (1833–1908) and Thomas Bailey Aldrich (1836–1907), who in their poetry followed the traditions established by Longfellow and Lowell, were the authors of not unimportant prose works. The former wrote three valuable books: “Victorian Poets” (1875), “Poets of America” (1885), and “The Nature and Elements of Poetry” (1892); the latter author produced two volumes of travel and reminiscence: “From Ponkapog to Pesth” (1883) and “An Old Town by the Sea” (1893). Possibly allied rather with Whitman than with the other poets just mentioned, Sidney Lanier (1842–1881) may justly stand at the close of our list of American critical writers. He subjected the methods of metrical composition to minute scrutiny, and published the results of his investigations as “The Science of English Verse” (1881). Turning then to a study of fiction, he wrote an important work entitled “The English Novel and Its Development” (1885). Since Lanier’s death, his executors have brought together many of his lectures and papers under the titles of “Music and Poetry” (1898), and “Shakspere and his Forerunners” (1902).

The Humourists.—It is a far cry from the serious thought of Sidney Lanier to the ludicrous perversities of Mark Twain; yet between these two lies an extensive territory freely admitted by foreign critics to be distinctly and perhaps typically American. The humour of this country is different from that found anywhere else in the world. At times, it is true, it exhibits the sparkling characteristics of the Irishman’s wit, at others the keen shrewdness of the Frenchman’s bon-mot; certainly it is never less sprightly than the work of the English joker, nor less spontaneous than that of the German jester. In fact it may savour of any one, or of all the qualities just mentioned, and even of many others. The truth of the matter is, composite as a nation, we preserve in our humour the best traits of the elements out of which we are formed, and pretty generally add to the mixture a flavour indigenous to the soil upon which we flourish.