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diff --git a/21090.txt b/21090.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..07554f8 --- /dev/null +++ b/21090.txt @@ -0,0 +1,17680 @@ +The Project Gutenberg eBook, Brief History of English and American +Literature, by Henry A. Beers, et al + + +This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with +almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + + + + + +Title: Brief History of English and American Literature + + +Author: Henry A. Beers + + + +Release Date: April 15, 2007 [eBook #21090] + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII) + + +***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BRIEF HISTORY OF ENGLISH AND +AMERICAN LITERATURE*** + + +E-text prepared by Al Haines + + + +Transcriber's note: + + The volume from which this e-book was prepared contains two of + Beers' books, "An Outline Sketch of English Literature" and + "An Outline Sketch of American Literature," which start on + pages 7 and 317, respectively. + + Page numbers in this book are indicated by numbers enclosed in + curly braces, e.g. {99}, to facilitate use of the index. They + have been located where page breaks occurred in the original + book. For its Index, a page number has been placed only at the + start of that section. + + + + + +BRIEF HISTORY OF ENGLISH AND AMERICAN LITERATURE + +by + +HENRY A. BEERS + +Introduction and Supplementary Chapters on +the Religious and Theological Literature +of Great Britain and the United States + +by + +John Fletcher Hurst + + + + + + + +New York: Eaton & Mains +Cincinnati: Jennings & Pye + +Copyright, 1886, 1887, by +Phillips & Hunt +New York +Copyright, 1897, by +Eaton & Mains +New York + + + + +{3} + +INTRODUCTION. + +At the request of the publishers the undersigned has prepared this +Introduction and two Supplementary Chapters on the Religious and +Theological Literature of Great Britain and the United States. To the +preacher in his preparation for the pulpit, and also to the general +reader and student of religious history, the pursuit of the study of +literature is a necessity. The sermon itself is a part of literature, +must have its literary finish and proportions, and should give ample +proof of a familiarity with the masterpieces of the English tongue. + +The world of letters presents to even the casual reader a rich and +varied profusion of fascinating and luscious fruit. But to the earnest +student who explores with thorough research and sympathetic mind the +intellectual products of countries and times other than his own, the +infinite variety, so strikingly apparent to the superficial observer, +resolves itself into a beautiful and harmonious unity. Literature is +the record of the struggles and aspirations of man in the boundless +universe of thought. As in physics the correlation and conservation of +force bind all the material sciences together into one, so in the world +of intellect all the diverse departments of mental life and action find +their common bond in literature. Even the {4} signs and formulas of +the mathematician and the chemist are but abbreviated forms of +writing--the stenography of those exact sciences. The simple +chronicles of the annalist, the flowing verses of the poet, clothing +his thought with winged words, the abstruse propositions of the +philosopher, the smiting protests of the bold reformer, either in +Church or State, the impassioned appeal of the advocate at the bar of +justice, the argument of the legislator on behalf of his measures, the +very cry of inarticulate pain of those who suffer under the oppression +of cruelty, all have their literature. + +The minister of the Gospel, whose mission is to man in his highest and +holiest relations, must know the best that human thought has produced +if he would successfully reach and influence the thoughtful and +inquiring. Perhaps our best service here will be to suggest a method +of pursuing a course of study in literature, both English and American. +The following work of Professor Beers touches but lightly and scarcely +more than opens these broad and inviting fields, which are ever growing +richer and more fascinating. While man continues to think he will +weave the fabric of the mental loom into infinitely varied and +beautiful designs. + +In the general outlines of a plan of literary study which is to cover +the entire history of English and American literature, the following +directions, it is hoped, will be of value. + +1. Fix the great landmarks, the general periods--each {5} marked by +some towering leader, around whom other contemporary writers may be +grouped. In Great Britain the several and successive periods might +thus be well designated by such authors as Geoffrey Chaucer or John +Wiclif, Thomas More or Henry Howard, Edmund Spenser or Sir Walter +Raleigh, William Shakspere or Francis Bacon, John Milton or Jeremy +Taylor, John Dryden or John Locke, Joseph Addison or Joseph Butler, +Samuel Johnson or Oliver Goldsmith, William Cowper or John Wesley, +Walter Scott or Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth or Thomas +Chalmers, Alfred Tennyson, Thomas Carlyle, or William Makepeace +Thackeray. + +A similar list for American literature would place as leaders in +letters: Thomas Hooker or Thomas Shepard, Cotton Mather, Jonathan +Edwards, Benjamin Franklin, Philip Freneau, Noah Webster or James Kent, +James Fenimore Cooper or Washington Irving, Ralph Waldo Emerson or +Edward Everett, Joseph Addison Alexander or William Ellery Channing, +Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, or Nathaniel +Hawthorne. + +2. The prosecution of the study might be carried on in one or more of +several ways, according either to the purpose in view or the tastes of +the student. Attention might profitably be concentrated on the +literature of a given period and worked out in detail by taking up +individual authors, or by classifying all the writers of the period {6} +on the basis of the character of their writings, such as poetry, +history, belles-lettres, theology, essays, and the like. + +3. Again, the literature of a period might be studied with reference to +its influence on the religious, commercial, political, or social life +of the people among whom it has circulated; or as the result of certain +forces which have preceded its production. It is well worth the time +and effort to trace the influence of one author upon another or many +others, who, while maintaining their individuality, have been either in +style or method of production unconsciously molded by their _confreres_ +of the pen. The divisions of writers may, again, be made with +reference to their opinions and associations in the different +departments of life where they have wrought their active labors, such +as in politics, religion, moral reform, or educational questions. + +The influence of the great writers in the languages of the Continent +upon the literature of England and America affords another theme of +absorbing interest, and has its peculiarly good results in bringing the +student into close brotherhood with the fruitful and cultured minds of +every land. In fact, the possible applications of the study of +literature are so many and varied that the ingenuity of any earnest +student may devise such as the exigencies of his own work may require. + +JOHN F. HURST, + +_Washington_. + + + + +{7} + +PREFACE. + +In so brief a history of so rich a literature, the problem is how to +get room enough to give, not an adequate impression--that is +impossible--but any impression at all of the subject. To do this I +have crowded out everything but _belles-lettres_. Books in philosophy, +history, science, etc., however important in the history of English +thought, receive the merest incidental mention, or even no mention at +all. Again, I have omitted the literature of the Anglo-Saxon period, +which is written in a language nearly as hard for a modern Englishman +to read as German is, or Dutch. Caedmon and Cynewulf are no more a +part of English literature than Vergil and Horace are of Italian. I +have also left out {8} the vernacular literature of the Scotch before +the time of Burns. Up to the date of the union Scotland was a separate +kingdom, and its literature had a development independent of the +English, though parallel with it. + +In dividing the history into periods, I have followed, with some +modifications, the divisions made by Mr. Stopford Brooke in his +excellent little _Primer of English Literature_. A short reading +course is appended to each chapter. + +HENRY A. BEERS. + + + + +{9} + +CONTENTS. + + +CHAPTER + + I. FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER, 1066-1400 . . . . . 11 + II. FROM CHAUCER TO SPENSER, 1400-1599 . . . . . . . 42 + III. THE AGE OF SHAKSPERE, 1564-1616 . . . . . . . . . 76 + IV. THE AGE OF MILTON, 1608-1674 . . . . . . . . . . 125 + V. FROM THE RESTORATION TO THE DEATH OF + POPE, 1660-1744 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163 + VI. FROM THE DEATH OF POPE TO THE FRENCH + REVOLUTION, 1744-1789 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193 + VII. FROM THE FRENCH REVOLUTION TO THE DEATH + OF SCOTT, 1789-1832 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 222 + VIII. FROM THE DEATH OF SCOTT TO THE PRESENT + TIME, 1832-1886 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 266 + IX. THEOLOGICAL AND RELIGIOUS LITERATURE IN + GREAT BRITAIN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 299 + + + + +{11} + +OUTLINE SKETCH + +OF + +ENGLISH LITERATURE. + + +CHAPTER I. + +FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER. + +1066-1400. + +The Norman conquest of England, in the 11th century, made a break in +the natural growth of the English language and literature. The old +English or Anglo-Saxon had been a purely Germanic speech, with a +complicated grammar and a full set of inflections. For three hundred +years following the battle of Hastings this native tongue was driven +from the king's court and the courts of law, from parliament, school, +and university. During all this time there were two languages spoken +in England. Norman French was the birth-tongue of the upper classes +and English of the lower. When the latter finally got the better in +the struggle, and became, about the middle of the 14th century, the +national speech of all England, it was no longer the English of King +Alfred. It was a new language, a grammarless tongue, almost wholly +{12} stripped of its inflections. It had lost a half of its old words, +and had filled their places with French equivalents. The Norman +lawyers had introduced legal terms; the ladies and courtiers, words of +dress and courtesy. The knight had imported the vocabulary of war and +of the chase. The master-builders of the Norman castles and cathedrals +contributed technical expressions proper to the architect and the +mason. The art of cooking was French. The naming of the living +animals, _ox, swine, sheep, deer,_ was left to the Saxon churl who had +the herding of them, while the dressed meats, _beef, pork, mutton, +venison,_ received their baptism from the table-talk of his Norman +master. The four orders of begging friars, and especially the +Franciscans or Gray Friars, introduced into England in 1224, became +intermediaries between the high and the low. They went about preaching +to the poor, and in their sermons they intermingled French with +English. In their hands, too, was almost all the science of the day; +their _medicine_, _botany,_ and _astronomy_ displaced the old +nomenclature of _leechdom_, _wort-cunning,_ and _star-craft_. And, +finally, the translators of French poems often found it easier to +transfer a foreign word bodily than to seek out a native synonym, +particularly when the former supplied them with a rhyme. But the +innovation reached even to the commonest words in every-day use, so +that _voice_ drove out _steven_, _poor_ drove out _earm_, and _color_, +_use_, and _place_ made good their footing beside _hue,_ {13} _wont_, +and _stead_. A great part of the English words that were left were so +changed in spelling and pronunciation as to be practically new. +Chaucer stands, in date, midway between King Alfred and Alfred +Tennyson, but his English differs vastly more from the former's than +from the latter's. To Chaucer Anglo-Saxon was as much a dead language +as it is to us. + +The classical Anglo-Saxon, moreover, had been the Wessex dialect, +spoken and written at Alfred's capital, Winchester. When the French +had displaced this as the language of culture, there was no longer a +"king's English" or any literary standard. The sources of modern +standard English are to be found in the East Midland, spoken in +Lincoln, Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridge, and neighboring shires. Here the +old Anglian had been corrupted by the Danish settlers, and rapidly +threw off its inflections when it became a spoken and no longer a +written language, after the Conquest. The West Saxon, clinging more +tenaciously to ancient forms, sunk into the position of a local +dialect; while the East Midland, spreading to London, Oxford, and +Cambridge, became the literary English in which Chaucer wrote. + +The Normans brought in also new intellectual influences and new forms +of literature. They were a cosmopolitan people, and they connected +England with the continent. Lanfranc and Anselm, the first two Norman +archbishops of Canterbury, were learned and splendid prelates of a {14} +type quite unknown to the Anglo-Saxons. They introduced the scholastic +philosophy taught at the University of Paris, and the reformed +discipline of the Norman abbeys. They bound the English Church more +closely to Rome, and officered it with Normans. English bishops were +deprived of their sees for illiteracy, and French abbots were set over +monasteries of Saxon monks. Down to the middle of the 14th century the +learned literature of England was mostly in Latin, and the polite +literature in French. English did not at any time altogether cease to +be a written language, but the extant remains of the period from 1066 +to 1200 are few and, with one exception, unimportant. After 1200 +English came more and more into written use, but mainly in +translations, paraphrases, and imitations of French works. The native +genius was at school, and followed awkwardly the copy set by its master. + +The Anglo-Saxon poetry, for example, had been rhythmical and +alliterative. It was commonly written in lines containing four +rhythmical accents and with three of the accented syllables +alliterating. + + _R_este hine tha _r_um-heort; _r_eced hlifade + _G_eap and _g_old-fah, gaest inne swaef. + + Rested him then the great-hearted; the hall towered + Roomy and gold-bright, the guest slept within. + + +This rude energetic verse the Saxon _scop_ had sung to his harp or +_glee-beam_, dwelling on the {15} emphatic syllables, passing swiftly +over the others which were of undetermined number and position in the +line. It was now displaced by the smooth metrical verse with rhymed +endings, which the French introduced and which our modern poets use, a +verse fitted to be recited rather than sung. The old English +alliterative verse continued, indeed, in occasional use to the 16th +century. But it was linked to a forgotten literature and an obsolete +dialect, and was doomed to give way. Chaucer lent his great authority +to the more modern verse system, and his own literary models and +inspirers were all foreign, French or Italian. Literature in England +began to be once more English and truly national in the hands of +Chaucer and his contemporaries, but it was the literature of a nation +cut off from its own past by three centuries of foreign rule. + +The most noteworthy English document of the 11th and 12th centuries was +the continuation of the Anglo-Saxon chronicle. Copies of these annals, +differing somewhat among themselves, had been kept at the monasteries +in Winchester, Abingdon, Worcester, and elsewhere. The yearly entries +were mostly brief, dry records of passing events, though occasionally +they become full and animated. The fen country of Cambridge and +Lincolnshire was a region of monasteries. Here were the great abbeys +of Peterborough and Croyland and Ely minster. One of the earliest +English songs tells how the savage heart of the Danish {16} king Cnut +was softened by the singing of the monks in Ely. + + Merie sungen muneches binnen Ely + Tha Cnut chyning reu ther by; + Roweth, cnihtes, noer the land, + And here we thes muneches sang. + +It was among the dikes and marshes of this fen country that the bold +outlaw Hereward, "the last of the English," held out for some years +against the conqueror. And it was here, in the rich abbey of Burch or +Peterborough, the ancient Medeshamstede (meadow-homestead) that the +chronicle was continued for nearly a century after the Conquest, +breaking off abruptly in 1154, the date of King Stephen's death. +Peterborough had received a new Norman abbot, Turold, "a very stern +man," and the entry in the chronicle for 1170 tells how Hereward and +his gang, with his Danish backers, thereupon plundered the abbey of its +treasures, which were first removed to Ely, and then carried off by the +Danish fleet and sunk, lost, or squandered. The English in the later +portions of this Peterborough chronicle becomes gradually more modern, +and falls away more and more from the strict grammatical standards of +the classical Anglo-Saxon. It is a most valuable historical monument, +and some passages of it are written with great vividness, notably the +sketch of William the Conqueror put down in the year of his death +(1086) by one who had "looked upon him and at another time dwelt in his +court." {17} "He who was before a rich king, and lord of many a land, +he had not then of all his land but a piece of seven feet. . . . +Likewise he was a very stark man and a terrible, so that one durst do +nothing against his will. . . . Among other things is not to be +forgotten the good peace that he made in this land, so that a man might +fare over his kingdom with his bosom full of gold unhurt. He set up a +great deer preserve, and he laid laws therewith that whoso should slay +hart or hind, he should be blinded. As greatly did he love the tall +deer as if he were their father." + +With the discontinuance of the Peterborough annals, English history +written in English prose ceased for three hundred years. The thread of +the nation's story was kept up in Latin chronicles, compiled by writers +partly of English and partly of Norman descent. The earliest of these, +such as Ordericus Vitalis, Simeon of Durham, Henry of Huntingdon, and +William of Malmesbury, were contemporary with the later entries of the +Saxon chronicle. The last of them, Matthew of Westminster, finished +his work in 1273. About 1300 Robert, a monk of Gloucester, composed a +chronicle in English verse, following in the main the authority of the +Latin chronicles, and he was succeeded by other rhyming chroniclers in +the 14th century. In the hands of these the true history of the Saxon +times was overlaid with an ever-increasing mass of fable and legend. +All real knowledge of the period {18} dwindled away until in Capgrave's +_Chronicle of England_, written in prose in 1463-64, hardly any thing +of it is left. In history as in literature the English had forgotten +their past, and had turned to foreign sources. It is noteworthy that +Shakspere, who borrowed his subjects and his heroes sometimes from +authentic English history, sometimes from the legendary history of +ancient Britain, Denmark, and Scotland, as in Lear, Hamlet, and +Macbeth, ignores the Saxon period altogether. And Spenser, who gives +in his second book of the _Faerie Queene_, a _resume_ of the reigns of +fabulous British kings--the supposed ancestors of Queen Elizabeth, his +royal patron--has nothing to say of the real kings of early England. +So completely had the true record faded away that it made no appeal to +the imaginations of our most patriotic poets. The Saxon Alfred had +been dethroned by the British Arthur, and the conquered Welsh had +imposed their fictitious genealogies upon the dynasty of the +conquerors. In the _Roman de Rou_, a verse chronicle of the dukes of +Normandy, written by the Norman Wace, it is related that at the battle +of Hastings the French _jongleur_, Taillefer, spurred out before the +van of William's army, tossing his lance in the air and chanting of +"Charlemagne and of Roland, of Oliver and the peers who died at +Roncesvals." This incident is prophetic of the victory which Norman +song, no less than Norman arms, was to win over England. The lines +which Taillefer {19} sang were from the _Chanson de Roland_, the oldest +and best of the French hero sagas. The heathen Northmen, who had +ravaged the coasts of France in the 10th century, had become in the +course of one hundred and fifty years, completely identified with the +French. They had accepted Christianity, intermarried with the native +women, and forgotten their own Norse tongue. The race thus formed was +the most brilliant in Europe. The warlike, adventurous spirit of the +vikings mingled in its blood with the French nimbleness of wit and +fondness for display. The Normans were a nation of knights-errant, +with a passion for prowess and for courtesy. Their architecture was at +once strong and graceful. Their women were skilled in embroidery, a +splendid sample of which is preserved in the famous Bayeux tapestry, in +which the conqueror's wife, Matilda, and the ladies of her court +wrought the history of the Conquest. + +This national taste for decoration expressed itself not only in the +ceremonious pomp of feast and chase and tourney, but likewise in +literature. The most characteristic contribution of the Normans to +English poetry were the metrical romances or chivalry tales. These +were sung or recited by the minstrels, who were among the retainers of +every great feudal baron, or by the _jongleurs_, who wandered from +court to castle. There is a whole literature of these _romans d' +aventure_ in the Anglo-Norman dialect of French. Many of them are {20} +very long--often thirty, forty, or fifty thousand lines--written +sometimes in a strophic form, sometimes in long Alexandrines, but +commonly in the short, eight-syllabled rhyming couplet. Numbers of +them were turned into English verse in the 13th, 14th, and 15th +centuries. The translations were usually inferior to the originals. +The French _trouvere_ (finder or poet) told his story in a +straight-forward, prosaic fashion, omitting no details in the action +and unrolling endless descriptions of dresses, trappings, gardens, etc. +He invented plots and situations full of fine possibilities by which +later poets have profited, but his own handling of them was feeble and +prolix. Yet there was a simplicity about the old French language and a +certain elegance and delicacy in the diction of the _trouveres_ which +the rude, unformed English failed to catch. + +The heroes of these romances were of various climes: Guy of Warwick, +and Richard the Lion Heart of England, Havelok the Dane, Sir Troilus of +Troy, Charlemagne, and Alexander. But, strangely enough, the favorite +hero of English romance was that mythical Arthur of Britain, whom Welsh +legend had celebrated as the most formidable enemy of the Sassenach +invaders and their victor in twelve great battles. The language and +literature of the ancient Cymry or Welsh had made no impression on +their Anglo-Saxon conquerors. There are a few Welsh borrowings in the +English speech, such as _bard_ and _druid_; but in the old Anglo-Saxon +literature there are {21} no more traces of British song and story than +if the two races had been sundered by the ocean instead of being +borderers for over six hundred years. But the Welsh had their own +national traditions, and after the Norman Conquest these were set free +from the isolation of their Celtic tongue and, in an indirect form, +entered into the general literature of Europe. The French came into +contact with the old British literature in two places: in the Welsh +marches in England and in the province of Brittany in France, where the +population is of Cymric race and spoke, and still to some extent +speaks, a Cymric dialect akin to the Welsh. + +About 1140 Geoffrey of Monmouth, a Benedictine monk, seemingly of Welsh +descent, who lived at the court of Henry the First and became afterward +bishop of St. Asaph, produced in Latin a so-called _Historia Britonum_ +in which it was told how Brutus, the great grandson of Aeneas, came to +Britain, and founded there his kingdom called after him, and his city +of New Troy (Troynovant) on the site of the later London. An air of +historic gravity was given to this tissue of Welsh legends by an exact +chronology and the genealogy of the British kings, and the author +referred, as his authority, to an imaginary Welsh book given him, as he +said, by a certain Walter, archdeacon of Oxford. Here appeared that +line of fabulous British princes which has become so familiar to modern +readers in the plays of Shakspere and the poems of Tennyson: Lear and +his {22} three daughters; Cymbeline, Gorboduc, the subject of the +earliest regular English tragedy, composed by Sackville and acted in +1562; Locrine and his Queen Gwendolen, and his daughter Sabrina, who +gave her name to the river Severn, was made immortal by an exquisite +song in Milton's _Comus_, and became the heroine of the tragedy of +_Locrine_, once attributed to Shakspere; and above all, Arthur, the son +of Uther Pendragon, and the founder of the Table Round. In 1155 Wace, +the author of the _Roman de Rou_, turned Geoffrey's work into a French +poem entitled _Brut d' Angleterre_, "brut" being a Welsh word meaning +chronicle. About the year 1200 Wace's poem was Englished by Layamon, a +priest of Arley Regis, on the border stream of Severn. Layamon's +_Brut_ is in thirty thousand lines, partly alliterative and partly +rhymed, but written in pure Saxon English with hardly any French words. +The style is rude but vigorous, and, at times, highly imaginative. +Wace had amplified Geoffrey's chronicle somewhat, but Layamon made much +larger additions, derived, no doubt, from legends current on the Welsh +border. In particular the story of Arthur grew in his hands into +something like fullness. He tells of the enchantments of Merlin, the +wizard; of the unfaithfulness of Arthur's queen, Guenever; and the +treachery of his nephew, Modred. His narration of the last great +battle between Arthur and Modred; of the wounding of the king--"fifteen +fiendly wounds he had, one might in the least {23} three gloves +thrust--"; and of the little boat with "two women therein, wonderly +dight," which came to bear him away to Avalun and the Queen Argante, +"sheenest of all elves," whence he shall come again, according to +Merlin's prophecy, to rule the Britons; all this left little, in +essentials, for Tennyson to add in his _Death of Arthur_. This new +material for fiction was eagerly seized upon by the Norman romancers. +The story of Arthur drew to itself other stories which were afloat. +Walter Map, a gentleman of the Court of Henry II., in two French prose +romances, connected with it the church legend of the Sangreal, or holy +cup, from which Christ had drunk at his last supper, and which Joseph +of Arimathea had afterward brought to England. Then it miraculously +disappeared and became thenceforth the occasion of knightly quest, the +mystic symbol of the object of the soul's desire, an adventure only to +be achieved by the maiden knight, Galahad, the son of the great +Launcelot, who in the romances had taken the place of Modred in +Geoffrey's history, as the paramour of Queen Guenever. In like manner +the love-story of Tristan and Isolde was joined by other romancers to +the Arthur-Saga. This came probably from Brittany or Cornwall. Thus +there grew up a great epic cycle of Arthurian romance, with a fixed +shape and a unity and vitality which have prolonged it to our own day +and rendered it capable of a deeper and more spiritual treatment and a +more artistic {24} handling by such modern English poets as Tennyson in +his _Idyls of the King_, by Matthew Arnold, Swinburne, and many others. +There were innumerable Arthur romances in prose and verse, in +Anglo-Norman and continental French dialects, in English, in German, +and in other tongues. But the final form which the Saga took in +mediaeval England was the prose _Morte Dartur_ of Sir Thomas Malory, +composed at the close of the 15th century. This was a digest of the +earlier romances and is Tennyson's main authority. + +Beside the literature of the knight was the literature of the cloister. +There is a considerable body of religious writing in early English, +consisting of homilies in prose and verse, books of devotion, like the +_Ancren Riwle_ (Rule of Anchoresses), 1225; the _Ayenbite of Inwyt_ +(Remorse of Conscience), 1340, both in prose; the _Handlyng Sinne_, +1303; the _Cursor Mundi_, 1320; and the _Pricke of Conscience_, 1340, +in verse; metrical renderings of the Psalter, the Pater Noster, the +Creed, and the Ten Commandments, the Gospels for the Day, such as the +_Ormulum_, or Book of Orm, 1205; legends and miracles of saints; poems +in praise of virginity, on the contempt of the world, on the five joys +of the Virgin, the five wounds of Christ, the eleven pains of hell, the +seven deadly sins, the fifteen tokens of the coming judgment, and +dialogues between the soul and the body. These were the work not only +of the monks, but also of the begging friars, and in {25} smaller part +of the secular or parish clergy. They are full of the ascetic piety +and superstition of the Middle Age, the childish belief in the +marvelous, the allegorical interpretation of Scripture texts, the +grotesque material horrors of hell with its grisly fiends, the vileness +of the human body and the loathsome details of its corruption after +death. Now and then a single poem rises above the tedious and hideous +barbarism of the general level of this monkish literature, either from +a more intensely personal feeling in the poet, or from an occasional +grace or beauty in his verse. A poem so distinguished is, for example, +_A Luve Ron_ (A Love Counsel) by the Minorite friar, Thomas de Hales, +one stanza of which recalls the French poet Villon's _Balade of Dead +Ladies_, with its refrain. + + "Mais ou sont les neiges d'antan?" + "Where are the snows of yester year? + Where is Paris and Heleyne + That weren so bright and fair of blee[1] + Amadas, Tristan, and Ideyne + Yseude and alle the,[2] + Hector with his sharpe main, + And Caesar rich in worldes fee? + They beth ygliden out of the reign[3] + As the shaft is of the dee." [4] + +A few early English poems on secular subjects are also worthy of +mention, among others, _The Owl and the Nightingale_, generally +assigned to the reign of Henry III. (1216-1272), an _Estrif_, {26} or +dispute, in which the owl represents the ascetic and the nightingale +the aesthetic view of life. The debate is conducted with much +animation and a spirited use of proverbial wisdom. _The Land of +Cokaygne_ is an amusing little poem of some two hundred lines, +belonging to the class of _fabliaux_, short humorous tales or satirical +pieces in verse. It describes a lubber-land, or fool's paradise, where +the geese fly down all roasted on the spit, bringing garlic in the +bills for their dressing, and where there is a nunnery upon a river of +sweet milk, and an abbey of white monks and gray, whose walls, like the +hall of little King Pepin, are "of pie-crust and pastry crust," with +flouren cakes for the shingles and fat puddings for the pins. + +There are a few songs dating from about 1300, and mostly found in a +single collection (Harl, MS., 2253), which are almost the only English +verse before Chaucer that has any sweetness to a modern ear. They are +written in French strophic forms in the southern dialect, and sometimes +have an intermixture of French and Latin lines. They are musical, +fresh, simple, and many of them very pretty. They celebrate the +gladness of spring with its cuckoos and throstle-cocks, its daisies and +woodruff. + + "When the nightingale sings the woodes waxen green + Leaf and grass and blossom spring in Averil, I ween, + And love is to my herte gone with a spear so keen, + Night and day my blood it drinks my herte doth me tene."[5] + +{27} Others are love plaints to "Alysoun" or some other lady whose +"name is in a note of the nightingale;" whose eyes are as gray as +glass, and her skin as "red as rose on ris." [6] Some employ a burden +or refrain. + + "Blow, northern wind, + Blow thou me, my sweeting. + Blow, northern wind, blow, blow, blow!" + +Others are touched with a light melancholy at the coming of winter. + + "Winter wakeneth all my care + Now these leaves waxeth bare. + Oft I sigh and mourne sare + When it cometh in my thought + Of this worldes joy, how it goeth all to nought" + +Some of these poems are love songs to Christ or the Virgin, composed in +the warm language of earthly passion. The sentiment of chivalry united +with the ecstatic reveries of the cloister had produced Mariolatry and +the imagery of the Song of Solomon, in which Christ wooes the soul, had +made this feeling of divine love familiar. Toward the end of the 13th +century a collection of lives of saints, a sort of English _Golden +Legend_, was prepared at the great abbey of Gloucester for use on +saints' days. The legends were chosen partly from the hagiology of the +Church Catholic, as the lives of Margaret, Christopher, and Michael; +partly from the calendar of the English Church, as the {28} lives of +St. Thomas of Canterbury, of the Anglo-Saxons, Dunstan, Swithin--who is +mentioned by Shakspere--and Kenelm, whose life is quoted by Chaucer in +the _Nonne Presto's Tale_. The verse was clumsy and the style +monotonous, but an imaginative touch here and there has furnished a +hint to later poets. Thus the legend of St. Brandan's search for the +earthly paradise has been treated by Matthew Arnold and William Morris. + +About the middle of the 14th century there was a revival of the Old +English alliterative verse in romances like _William and the Werewolf_, +and _Sir Gawayne_, and in religious pieces such as _Clannesse_ +(purity), _Patience_ and _The Perle_, the last named a mystical poem of +much beauty, in which a bereaved father sees a vision of his daughter +among the glorified. Some of these employed rhyme as well as +alliteration. They are in the West Midland dialect, although Chaucer +implies that alliteration was most common in the north. "I am a +sotherne man," says the parson in the _Canterbury Tales_. "I cannot +geste rom, ram, ruf, by my letter." But the most important of the +alliterative poems was the _Vision of William concerning Piers the +Plowman_. In the second half of the 14th century French had ceased to +be the mother-tongue of any considerable part of the population of +England. By a statute of Edward III., in 1362, it was displaced from +the law courts. By 1386 English had taken its place in the schools. +The {29} Anglo-Norman dialect had grown corrupt, and Chaucer contrasts +the French of Paris with the provincial French spoken by his prioress, +"after the scole of Stratford-atte-Bowe." The native English genius +was also beginning to assert itself, roused in part, perhaps, by the +English victories in the wars of Edward III. against the French. It +was the bows of the English yeomanry that won the fight at Crecy, fully +as much as the prowess of the Norman baronage. But at home the times +were bad. Heavy taxes and the repeated visitations of the pestilence, +or Black Death, pressed upon the poor and wasted the land. The Church +was corrupt; the mendicant orders had grown enormously wealthy, and the +country was eaten up by a swarm of begging friars, pardoners, and +apparitors. The social discontent was fermenting among the lower +classes, which finally issued in the communistic uprising of the +peasantry, under Wat Tyler and Jack Straw. This state of things is +reflected in the _Vision of Piers Plowman_, written as early as 1362, +by William Langland, a tonsured clerk of the west country. It is in +form an allegory, and bears some resemblance to the later and more +famous allegory of the _Pilgrim's Progress_. The poet falls asleep on +the Malvern Hills, in Worcestershire, and has a vision of a "fair field +full of folk," representing the world with its various conditions of +men. There were pilgrims and palmers; hermits with hooked staves, who +went to Walsingham--and {30} their wenches after them--great lubbers +and long that were loth to work: friars glossing the Gospel for their +own profit; pardoners cheating the people with relics and indulgences; +parish priests who forsook their parishes--that had been poor since the +pestilence time--and went to London to sing there for simony; bishops, +archbishops, and deacons, who got themselves fat clerkships in the +Exchequer, or King's Bench; in short, all manner of lazy and corrupt +ecclesiastics. A lady, who represents holy Church, then appears to the +dreamer, explains to him the meaning of his vision, and reads him a +sermon the text of which is, "When all treasure is tried, truth is the +best." A number of other allegorical figures are next introduced, +Conscience, Reason, Meed, Simony, Falsehood, etc., and after a series +of speeches and adventures, a second vision begins in which the seven +deadly sins pass before the poet in a succession of graphic +impersonations, and finally all the characters set out on a pilgrimage +in search of St. Truth, finding no guide to direct them save Piers the +Plowman, who stands for the simple, pious laboring man, the sound heart +of the English common folk. The poem was originally in eight divisions +or "passus," to which was added a continuation in three parts, _Vita Do +Wel_, _Do Bet_, and _Do Best_. About 1377 the whole was greatly +enlarged by the author. + +_Piers Plowman_ was the first extended literary work after the Conquest +which was purely English in character. It owed nothing to France but +the {31} allegorical cast which the _Roman de la Rose_ had made +fashionable in both countries. But even here such personified +abstractions as Langland's Fair-speech and Work-when-time-is, remind us +less of the Fraunchise, Bel-amour, and Fals-semblaunt of the French +courtly allegories than of Bunyan's Mr. Worldly Wiseman, and even of +such Puritan names as Praise-God Barebones, and Zeal-of-the-land Busy. +The poem is full of English moral seriousness, of shrewd humor, the +hatred of a lie, the homely English love for reality. It has little +unity of plan, but is rather a series of episodes, discourses, +parables, and scenes. It is all astir with the actual life of the +time. We see the gossips gathered in the ale-house of Betun the +brewster, and the pastry cooks in the London streets crying "Hote pies, +hote! Good gees and grys. Go we dine, go we!" Had Langland not +linked his literary fortunes with an uncouth and obsolescent verse, and +had he possessed a finer artistic sense and a higher poetic +imagination, his book might have been, like Chaucer's, among the +lasting glories of our tongue. As it is, it is forgotten by all but +professional students of literature and history. Its popularity in its +own day is shown by the number of MSS. which are extant, and by +imitations, such as _Piers the Plowman's Crede_ (1394), and the +_Plowman's Tale_, for a long time wrongly inserted in the _Canterbury +Tales_. Piers became a kind of typical figure, like the French +peasant, _Jacques Bonhomme_, and was {32} appealed to as such by the +Protestant reformers of the 16th century. + +The attack upon the growing corruptions of the Church was made more +systematically, and from the stand-point of a theologian rather than of +a popular moralist and satirist, by John Wyclif, the rector of +Lutterworth and professor of Divinity in Baliol College, Oxford. In a +series of Latin and English tracts he made war against indulgences, +pilgrimages, images, oblations, the friars, the pope, and the doctrine +of transubstantiation. But his greatest service to England was his +translation of the Bible, the first complete version in the mother +tongue. This he made about 1380, with the help of Nicholas Hereford, +and a revision of it was made by another disciple, Purvey, some ten +years later. There was no knowledge of Hebrew or Greek in England at +that time, and the Wiclifite versions were made not from the original +tongues, but from the Latin Vulgate. In his anxiety to make his +rendering close, and mindful, perhaps, of the warning in the +Apocalypse, "If any man shall take away from the words of the book of +this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life," +Wiclif followed the Latin order of construction so literally as to make +rather awkward English, translating, for example, _Quid sibi vult hoc +somnium?_ by _What to itself wole this sweven?_ Purvey's revision was +somewhat freer and more idiomatic. In the reigns of Henry IV. and V. +it was forbidden to read or to have any {33} of Wiclif's writings. +Such of them as could be seized were publicly burned. In spite of +this, copies of his Bible circulated secretly in great numbers. +Forshall and Madden, in their great edition (1850), enumerate one +hundred and fifty MSS. which had been consulted by them. Later +translators, like Tyndale and the makers of the Authorized Version, or +"King James' Bible" (1611), followed Wiclif's language in many +instances; so that he was, in truth, the first author of our biblical +dialect and the founder of that great monument of noble English which +has been the main conservative influence in the mother-tongue, holding +it fast to many strong, pithy words and idioms that would else have +been lost. In 1415; some thirty years after Wiclif's death, by decree +of the Council of Constance, his bones were dug up from the soil of +Lutterworth chancel and burned, and the ashes cast into the Swift. +"The brook," says Thomas Fuller, in his _Church History_, "did convey +his ashes into Avon; Avon into Severn; Severn into the narrow seas; +they into the main ocean. And thus the ashes of Wiclif are the emblem +of his doctrine, which now is dispersed all the world over." + +Although the writings thus far mentioned are of very high interest to +the student of the English language, and the historian of English +manners and culture, they cannot be said to have much importance as +mere literature. But in Geoffrey Chaucer (died 1400) we meet with a +poet of the first rank, whose works are increasingly read and {34} will +always continue to be a source of delight and refreshment to the +general reader as well as a "well of English undefiled" to the +professional man of letters. With the exception of Dante, Chaucer was +the greatest of the poets of mediaeval Europe, and he remains one of +the greatest of English poets, and certainly the foremost of English +story-tellers in verse. He was the son of a London vintner, and was in +his youth in the service of Lionel, Duke of Clarence, one of the sons +of Edward III. He made a campaign in France in 1359-60, when he was +taken prisoner. Afterward he was attached to the court and received +numerous favors and appointments. He was sent on several diplomatic +missions by the king, three of them to Italy, where, in all +probability, he made the acquaintance of the new Italian literature, +the writings of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. He was appointed at +different times Comptroller of the Wool Customs, Comptroller of Petty +Customs, and Clerk of the Works. He sat for Kent in Parliament, and he +received pensions from three successive kings. He was a man of +business as well as books, and he loved men and nature no less than +study. He knew his world; he "saw life steadily and saw it whole." +Living at the center of English social and political life, and +resorting to the court of Edward III., then the most brilliant in +Europe, Chaucer was an eye-witness of those feudal pomps which fill the +high-colored pages of his contemporary, the French chronicler, {35} +Froissart. His description of a tournament in the _Knight's Tale_ is +unexcelled for spirit and detail. He was familiar with dances, feasts, +and state ceremonies, and all the life of the baronial castle, in bower +and hall, the "trompes with the loude minstralcie," the heralds, the +ladies, and the squires, + + "What hawkes sitten on the perch above, + What houndes liggen on the floor adown." + +But his sympathy reached no less the life of the lowly, the poor widow +in her narrow cottage, and that "trewe swynkere and a good," the +plowman whom Langland had made the hero of his vision. He is, more +than all English poets, the poet of the lusty spring, of "Aprille with +her showres sweet" and the "foules song," of "May with all her floures +and her greene," of the new leaves in the wood, and the meadows new +powdered with the daisy, the mystic Marguerite of his _Legend of Good +Women_. A fresh vernal air blows through all his pages. + +In Chaucer's earlier works, such as the translation of the _Romaunt of +the Rose_ (if that be his), the _Boke of the Duchesse_, the _Parlament +of Foules_, the _Hous of Fame_, as well as in the _Legend of Good +Women_, which was later, the inspiration of the French court poetry of +the 13th and 14th centuries is manifest. He retains in them the +mediaeval machinery of allegories and dreams, the elaborate +descriptions of palaces, {36} temples, portraitures, etc., which had +been made fashionable in France by such poems as Guillaume de Lorris's +_Roman de la Rose_, and Jean Machault's _La Fontaine Amoureuse_. In +some of these the influence of Italian poetry is also perceptible. +There are suggestions from Dante, for example, in the _Parlament of +Foules_ and the _Hous of Fame_, and _Troilus and Cresseide_ is a free +handling rather than a translation of Boccaccio's _Filostrato_. In all +of these there are passages of great beauty and force. Had Chaucer +written nothing else, he would still have been remembered as the most +accomplished English poet of his time, but he would not have risen to +the rank which he now occupies, as one of the greatest English poets of +all time. This position he owes to his masterpiece, the _Canterbury +Tales_. Here he abandoned the imitation of foreign models and the +artificial literary fashions of his age, and wrote of real life from +his own ripe knowledge of men and things. + +The _Canterbury Tales_ are a collection of stories written at different +times, but put together, probably, toward the close of his life. The +frame-work into which they are fitted is one of the happiest ever +devised. A number of pilgrims who are going on horseback to the shrine +of St. Thomas a Becket, at Canterbury, meet at the Tabard Inn, in +Southwark, a suburb of London. The jolly host of the Tabard, Harry +Bailey, proposes that on their way to Canterbury, each of the company +shall tell two tales, and two more on their way back, and {37} that the +one who tells the best shall have a supper at the cost of the rest when +they return to the inn. He himself accompanies them as judge and +"reporter." In the setting of the stories there is thus a constant +feeling of movement and the air of all outdoors. The little +"head-links" and "end-links" which bind them together, give incidents +of the journey and glimpses of the talk of the pilgrims, sometimes +amounting, as in the prologue of the _Wife of Bath_, to full and almost +dramatic character-sketches. The stories, too, are dramatically suited +to the narrators. The general prologue is a series of such +character-sketches, the most perfect in English poetry. The portraits +of the pilgrims are illuminated with the soft brilliancy and the minute +loving fidelity of the miniatures in the old missals, and with the same +quaint precision in traits of expression and in costume. The pilgrims +are not all such as one would meet nowadays at an English inn. The +presence of a knight, a squire, a yeoman archer, and especially of so +many kinds of ecclesiastics, a nun, a friar, a monk, a pardoner, and a +sompnour or apparitor, reminds us that the England of that day must +have been less like Protestant England, as we know it, than like the +Italy of some thirty years ago. But however the outward face of +society may have changed, the Canterbury pilgrims remain, in Chaucer's +description, living and universal types of human nature. The +_Canterbury Tales_ are twenty-four in number. There were {38} +thirty-two pilgrims, so that if finished as designed the whole +collection would have numbered one hundred and twenty-eight stories. + +Chaucer is the bright consummate flower of the English Middle Age. +Like many another great poet, he put the final touch to the various +literary forms that he found in cultivation. Thus his _Knight's Tale_, +based upon Boccaccio's _Teseide_, is the best of English mediaeval +romances. And yet the _Rime of Sir Thopas_, who goes seeking an elf +queen for his mate, and is encountered by the giant Sir Olifaunt, +burlesques these same romances with their impossible adventures and +their tedious rambling descriptions. The tales of the prioress and the +second nun are saints' legends. The _Monk's Tale_ is a set of dry, +moral apologues in the manner of his contemporary, the "moral Gower." +The stories told by the reeve, miller, friar, sompnour, shipman, and +merchant, belong to the class of _fabliaux_, a few of which existed in +English, such as _Dame Siriz_, the _Lay of the Ash_, and the _Land of +Cokaygne_, already mentioned. The _Nonne Preste's Tale_, likewise, +which Dryden modernized with admirable humor, was of the class of +_fabliaux_, and was suggested by a little poem in forty lines, _Dou Coc +et Werpil_, by Marie de France, a Norman poetess of the 13th century. +It belonged, like the early English poem of _The Fox and the Wolf_, to +the popular animal-saga of _Reynard the Fox_. The _Franklin's Tale_, +whose scene is Brittany, and the _Wife of Baths' {39} Tale_, which is +laid in the time of the British Arthur, belong to the class of French +_lais_, serious metrical tales shorter than the romance and of Breton +origin, the best representatives of which are the elegant and graceful +_lais_ of Marie de France. + +Chaucer was our first great master of laughter and of tears. His +serious poetry is full of the tenderest pathos. His loosest tales are +delightfully humorous and life-like. He is the kindliest of satirists. +The knavery, greed, and hypocrisy of the begging friars and the sellers +of indulgences are exposed by him as pitilessly as by Langland and +Wiclif, though his mood is not like theirs, one of stern, moral +indignation, but rather the good-natured scorn of a man of the world. +His charity is broad enough to cover even the corrupt sompnour of whom +he says, + + "And yet in sooth he was a good felawe." + +Whether he shared Wiclif's opinions is unknown, but John of Gaunt, the +Duke of Lancaster and father of Henry IV., who was Chaucer's life-long +patron, was likewise Wiclif's great upholder against the persecution of +the bishops. It is, perhaps, not without significance that the poor +parson in the _Canterbury Tales_, the only one of his ecclesiastical +pilgrims whom Chaucer treats with respect, is suspected by the host of +the Tabard to be a "loller," that is, a Lollard, or disciple of Wiclif, +and that because he objects to the jovial inn-keeper's swearing "by +Goddes bones." + +{40} Chaucer's English is nearly as easy for a modern reader as +Shakspere's, and few of his words have become obsolete. His verse, +when rightly read, is correct and melodious. The early English was, in +some respects, more "sweet upon the tongue" than the modern language. +The vowels had their broad Italian sounds, and the speech was full of +soft gutturals and vocalic syllables, like the endings en, es, and e, +which made feminine rhymes and kept the consonants from coming harshly +together. + +Great poet as Chaucer was, he was not quite free from the literary +weakness of his time. He relapses sometimes into the babbling style of +the old chroniclers and legend writers; cites "auctours" and gives long +catalogues of names and objects with a _naive_ display of learning; and +introduces vulgar details in his most exquisite passages. There is +something childish about almost all the thought and art of the Middle +Ages--at least outside of Italy, where classical models and traditions +never quite lost their hold. But Chaucer's artlessness is half the +secret of his wonderful ease in story-telling, and is so engaging that, +like a child's sweet unconsciousness, one would not wish it otherwise. + +The _Canterbury Tales_ had shown of what high uses the English language +was capable, but the curiously trilingual condition of literature still +continued. French was spoken in the proceedings of Parliament as late +as the reign of Henry {41} VI. (1422-1471). Chaucer's contemporary, +John Gower, wrote his _Vox Clamantis_ in Latin, his _Speculum +Meditantis_ (a lost poem), and a number of _ballades_ in Parisian +French, and his _Confessio Amantis_ (1393) in English. The last named +is a dreary, pedantic work, in some 15,000 smooth, monotonous, +eight-syllabled couplets, in which Grande Amour instructs the lover how +to get the love of Bel Pucell. + + +1. Early English Literature. By Bernhard ten Brink. Translated from +the German by H. M. Kennedy. New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1883. + +2. Morris and Skeat's Specimens of Early English. (Clarendon Press +Series.) Oxford. + +3. Langland's Vision of William concerning Piers the Plowman. Wright's +Edition; or Skeat's, in Early English Text Society publications. + +4. Chaucer: Canterbury Tales. Tyrwhitt's Edition; or Wright's, in +Percy Society publications. + +5. Complete Writings. Morris's Edition. 6 vols. (In Aldine Series.) + + + +[1] Hue. + +[2] Those. + +[3] Realm. + +[4] Bowstring. + +[5] Pain. + +[6] Branch. + + + + +{42} + +CHAPTER II. + +FROM CHAUCER TO SPENSER. + +1400-1599. + +The 15th century was a barren period in English literary history. It +was nearly two hundred years after Chaucer's death before any poet +came, whose name can be written in the same line with his. He was +followed at once by a number of imitators who caught the trick of his +language and verse, but lacked the genius to make any fine use of them. +The manner of a true poet may be learned, but his style, in the high +sense of the word, remains his own secret. Some of the poems which +have been attributed to Chaucer and printed in editions of his works, +as the _Court of Love_, the _Flower and the Leaf_, the _Cuckow and the +Nightingale_, are now regarded by many scholars as the work of later +writers. If not Chaucer's, they are of Chaucer's school, and the first +two, at least, are very pretty poems after the fashion of his minor +pieces, such as the _Boke of the Duchesse_ and the _Parlament of +Foules_. + +Among his professed disciples was Thomas Occleve, a dull rhymer, who, +in his _Governail of Princes_, a didactic poem translated from the +Latin {43} about 1413, drew, or caused to be drawn, on the margin of +his MS. a colored portrait of his "maister dere and fader reverent," + + "This londes verray tresour and richesse, + Dethe by thy dethe hath harm irreparable + Unto us done; hir vengeable duresse + Dispoiled hath this londe of the swetnesse + Of Rhetoryk." + + +Another versifier of this same generation was John Lydgate, a +Benedictine monk, of the Abbey of Bury St. Edmunds, in Suffolk, a very +prolix writer, who composed, among other things, the _Story of Thebes_, +as an addition to the _Canterbury Tales_. His ballad of _London +Lyckpenny_, recounting the adventures of a countryman who goes to the +law courts at Westminster in search of justice, + + "But for lack of mony I could not speede," + +is of interest for the glimpse that it gives us of London street life. + +Chaucer's influence wrought more fruitfully in Scotland, whither it was +carried by James I., who had been captured by the English when a boy of +eleven, and brought up at Windsor as a prisoner of State. There he +wrote during the reign of Henry V. (1413-1422) a poem in six cantos, +entitled the _King's Quhair_ (King's Book), in Chaucer's seven lined +stanza which had been employed by Lydgate in his _Falls of Princes_ +(from Boccaccio), and which was afterward called {44} the "rime royal," +from its use by King James, The _King's Quhair_ tells how the poet, on +a May morning, looks from the window of his prison chamber into the +castle garden full of alleys, hawthorn hedges, and fair arbors set with + + "The sharpe, greene, sweete juniper." + +He was listening to "the little sweete nightingale," when suddenly +casting down his eyes he saw a lady walking in the garden, and at once +his "heart became her thrall." The incident is precisely like +Palamon's first sight of Emily in Chaucer's _Knight's Tale_, and almost +in the very words of Palamon, the poet addresses his lady: + + "Ah, sweet, are ye a worldly creature + Or heavenly thing in likeness of nature? + Or are ye very Nature, the goddess, + That have depainted with your heavenly hand + This garden full of flowres as they stand?" + +Then, after a vision in the taste of the age, in which the royal +prisoner is transported in turn to the courts of _Venus_, _Minerva_, +and _Fortune_, and receives their instruction in the duties belonging +to Love's service, he wakes from sleep and a white turtle-dove brings +to his window a spray of red gillyflowers, whose leaves are inscribed, +in golden letters, with a message of encouragement. + +James I. may be reckoned among the English poets. He mentions Chaucer, +Gower, and Lydgate as his masters. His education was English, and so +was the dialect of his poem, although the {45} unique MS. of it is in +the Scotch spelling. The _King's Quhair_ is somewhat overladen with +ornament and with the fashionable allegorical devices, but it is, upon +the whole, a rich and tender love song, the best specimen of court +poetry between the time of Chaucer and the time of Spenser. The lady +who walked in the garden on that May morning was Jane Beaufort, niece +to Henry IV. She was married to her poet after his release from +captivity and became Queen of Scotland in 1424. Twelve years later +James was murdered by Sir Robert Graham and his Highlanders, and his +wife, who strove to defend him, was wounded by the assassins. The +story of the murder has been told of late by D. G. Rossetti, in his +ballad, _The King's Tragedy_. + +The whole life of this princely singer was, like his poem, in the very +spirit of romance. + +The effect of all this imitation of Chaucer was to fix a standard of +literary style, and to confirm the authority of the East-Midland +English in which he had written. Though the poets of the 15th century +were not overburdened with genius, they had, at least, a definite model +to follow. As in the 14th century, metrical romances continued to be +translated from the French, homilies and saints' legends and rhyming +chronicles were still manufactured. But the poems of Occleve and +Lydgate and James I. had helped to polish and refine the tongue and to +prolong the Chaucerian tradition. The literary English never again +slipped {46} back into the chaos of dialects which had prevailed before +Chaucer. + +In the history of every literature the development of prose is later +than that of verse. The latter being, by its very form, artificial, is +cultivated as a fine art, and its records preserved in an early stage +of society, when prose is simply the talk of men, and not thought +worthy of being written and kept. English prose labored under the +added disadvantage of competing with Latin, which was the cosmopolitan +tongue and the medium of communication between scholars of all +countries. Latin was the language of the Church, and in the Middle +Ages churchman and scholar were convertible terms. The word _clerk_ +meant either priest or scholar. Two of the _Canterbury Tales_ are in +prose, as is also the _Testament of Love_, formerly ascribed to +Chaucer, and the style of all these is so feeble, wandering, and +unformed that it is hard to believe that they were written by the same +man who wrote the _Knight's Tale_ and the story of _Griselda_. _The +Voiage and Travaile of Sir John Maundeville_--the forerunner of that +great library of Oriental travel which has enriched our modern +literature--was written, according to its author, first in Latin, then +in French, and, lastly, in the year 1356, translated into English for +the behoof of "lordes and knyghtes and othere noble and worthi men, +that conne not Latyn but litylle." The author professed to have spent +over thirty years in Eastern travel, to have penetrated as far {47} as +Farther India and the "iles that ben abouten Indi," to have been in the +service of the Sultan of Babylon in his wars against the Bedouins, and, +at another time, in the employ of the Great Khan of Tartary. But there +is no copy of the Latin version of his travels extant; the French seems +to be much later than 1356, and the English MS. to belong to the early +years of the fifteenth century, and to have been made by another hand. +Recent investigations make it probable that Maundeville borrowed his +descriptions of the remoter East from many sources, and particularly +from the narrative of Odoric, a Minorite friar of Lombardy, who wrote +about 1330. Some doubt is even cast upon the existence of any such +person as Maundeville. Whoever wrote the book that passes under his +name, however, would seem to have visited the Holy Land, and the part +of the "voiage" that describes Palestine and the Levant is fairly close +to the truth. The rest of the work, so far as it is not taken from the +tales of other travelers, is a diverting tissue of fables about +gryfouns that fly away with yokes of oxen, tribes of one-legged +Ethiopians who shelter themselves from the sun by using their monstrous +feet as umbrellas, etc. + +During the 15th century English prose was gradually being brought into +a shape fitting it for more serious uses. In the controversy between +the Church and the Lollards Latin was still mainly employed, but Wiclif +had written some of his tracts in English, and, in 1449, Reginald +Peacock, Bishop of {48} St. Asaph, contributed, in English, to the same +controversy, _The Represser of Overmuch Blaming of the Clergy_. Sir +John Fortescue, who was chief-justice of the king's bench from +1442-1460, wrote during the reign of Edward IV. a book on the +_Difference between Absolute and Limited Monarchy_, which may be +regarded as the first treatise on political philosophy and +constitutional law in the language. But these works hardly belong to +pure literature, and are remarkable only as early, though not very +good, examples of English prose in a barren time. The 15th century was +an era of decay and change. The Middle Age was dying, Church and State +were slowly disintegrating under the new intellectual influences that +were working secretly under ground. In England the civil wars of the +Red and White Roses were breaking up the old feudal society by +decimating and impoverishing the baronage, thus preparing the way for +the centralized monarchy of the Tudors. Toward the close of that +century, and early in the next, happened the four great events, or +series of events, which freed and widened men's minds, and, in a +succession of shocks, overthrew the mediaeval system of life and +thought. These were the invention of printing, the Renascence, or +revival of classical learning, the discovery of America, and the +Protestant Reformation. + +William Caxton, the first English printer, learned the art in Cologne. +In 1476 he set up his press and sign, a red pole, in the Almonry at +Westminster. Just before the introduction of printing the demand {49} +for MS. copies had grown very active, stimulated, perhaps, by the +coming into general use of linen paper instead of the more costly +parchment. The scriptoria of the monasteries were the places where the +transcribing and illuminating of MSS. went on, professional copyists +resorting to Westminster Abbey, for example, to make their copies of +books belonging to the monastic library. Caxton's choice of a spot +was, therefore, significant. His new art for multiplying copies began +to supersede the old method of transcription at the very head-quarters +of the MS. makers. The first book that bears his Westminster imprint +was the _Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers_, translated from the +French by Anthony Woodville, Lord Rivers, a brother-in-law of Edward +IV. The list of books printed by Caxton is interesting, as showing the +taste of the time, as he naturally selected what was most in demand. +The list shows that manuals of devotion and chivalry were still in +chief request, books like the _Order of Chivalry_, _Faits of Arms_, and +the _Golden Legend_, which last Caxton translated himself, as well as +_Reynard the Fox_, and a French version of the _Aeneid_. He also +printed, with continuations of his own, revisions of several early +chronicles, and editions of Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate. A translation +of _Cicero on Friendship_, made directly from the Latin, by Thomas +Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester, was printed by Caxton, but no edition of a +classical author in the original. The new learning of the Renascence +had not, as {50} yet, taken much hold in England. Upon the whole, the +productions of Caxton's press were mostly of a kind that may be +described as mediaeval, and the most important of them, if we except +his edition of Chaucer, was that "noble and joyous book," as Caxton +called it, _Le Morte Darthur_, written by Sir Thomas Malory in 1469, +and printed by Caxton in 1485. This was a compilation from French +Arthur romances, and was by far the best English prose that had yet +been written. It may be doubted, indeed, whether, for purposes of +simple story telling, the picturesque charm of Malory's style has been +improved upon. The episode which lends its name to the whole romance, +the death of Arthur, is most impressively told, and Tennyson has +followed Malory's narrative closely, even to such details of the scene +as the little chapel by the sea, the moonlight, and the answer which +Sir Bedwere made the wounded king, when bidden to throw Excalibur into +the water, "'What saw thou there?' said the king. 'Sir,' he said, 'I +saw nothing but the waters wap and the waves wan.'" + + "I heard the ripple washing in the reeds + And the wild water lapping on the crag." + +And very touching and beautiful is the oft-quoted lament of Sir Ector +over Launcelot, in Malory's final chapter: "'Ah, Launcelot,' he said, +'thou were head of all Christian knights; and now I dare say,' said Sir +Ector, 'thou, Sir Launcelot, there thou liest, that thou were never +matched of earthly {51} knight's hand; and thou were the courtiest +knight that ever bare shield; and thou were the truest friend to thy +lover that ever bestrode horse; and thou were the truest lover of a +sinful man that ever loved woman; and thou were the kindest man that +ever strake with sword; and thou were the goodliest person ever came +among press of knights; and thou were the meekest man and the gentlest +that ever ate in hall among ladies; and thou were the sternest knight +to thy mortal foe that ever put spear in the rest.'" + +Equally good, as an example of English prose narrative, was the +translation made by John Bourchier, Lord Berners, of that most +brilliant of the French chroniclers, Chaucer's contemporary, Sir John +Froissart. Lord Berners was the English governor of Calais, and his +version of Froissart's _Chronicles_ was made in 1523-25, at the request +of Henry VIII. In these two books English chivalry spoke its last +genuine word. In Sir Philip Sidney the character of the knight was +merged into that of the modern gentleman. And although tournaments +were still held in the reign of Elizabeth, and Spenser cast his _Faery +Queene_ into the form of a chivalry romance, these were but a +ceremonial survival and literary tradition from an order of things that +had passed away. How antagonistic the new classical culture was to the +vanished ideal of the Middle Age may be read in _Toxophilus_, a +treatise on archery published in 1545, by Roger Ascham, a Greek +lecturer in Cambridge, and the {52} tutor of the Princess Elizabeth and +of Lady Jane Grey. "In our forefathers' time, when Papistry as a +standing pool covered and overflowed all England, few books were read +in our tongue saving certain books of chivalry, as they said, for +pastime and pleasure, which, as some say, were made in monasteries by +idle monks or wanton canons: as one, for example, _Morte Arthure_, the +whole pleasure of which book standeth in two special points, in open +manslaughter and bold bawdry. This is good stuff for wise men to laugh +at or honest men to take pleasure at. Yet I know when God's Bible was +banished the Court, and _Morte Arthure_ received into the prince's +chamber." + +The fashionable school of courtly allegory, first introduced into +England by the translation of the _Romaunt of the Rose_, reached its +extremity in Stephen Hawes's _Passetyme of Pleasure_, printed by +Caxton's successor, Wynkyn de Worde, in 1517. This was a dreary and +pedantic poem, in which it is told how Graunde Amoure, after a long +series of adventures and instructions among such shadowy personages as +Verite, Observaunce, Falshed, and Good Operacion, finally won the love +of La Belle Pucel. Hawes was the last English poet of note whose +culture was exclusively mediaeval. His contemporary, John Skelton, +mingled the old fashions with the new classical learning. In his +_Bowge of Courte_ (Court Entertainment or Dole), and in others of his +earlier pieces, he used, like Hawes, Chaucer's seven-lined stanza. But +his later {53} poems were mostly written in a verse of his own +invention, called after him _Skeltonical_. This was a sort of +glorified doggerel, in short, swift, ragged lines, with occasional +intermixture of French and Latin. + + "Her beautye to augment. + Dame Nature hath her lent + A warte upon her cheke, + Who so lyst to seke + In her vysage a skar, + That semyth from afar + Lyke to the radyant star, + All with favour fret, + So properly it is set. + She is the vyolet, + The daysy delectable, + The columbine commendable, + The jelofer amyable; + For this most goodly floure, + This blossom of fressh colour, + So Jupiter me succour, + She florysheth new and new + In beaute and vertew; + _Hac claritate gemina, + O gloriosa femina, etc._" + +Skelton was a rude railing rhymer, a singular mixture of a true and +original poet with a buffoon; coarse as Rabelais, whimsical, obscure, +but always vivacious. He was the rector of Diss, in Norfolk, but his +profane and scurrilous wit seems rather out of keeping with his +clerical character. His _Tunnyng of Elynoure Rummyng_ is a study of +very low life, reminding one slightly of Burns's _Jolly {54} Beggars_. +His _Phyllyp Sparowe_ is a sportive, pretty, fantastic elegy on the +death of a pet bird belonging to Mistress Joanna Scroupe, of Carowe, +and has been compared to the Latin poet Catullus's elegy on Lesbia's +sparrow. In _Speke_, _Parrot_, and _Why Come ye not to Courte?_ he +assailed the powerful Cardinal Wolsey with the most ferocious satire, +and was, in consequence, obliged to take sanctuary at Westminster, +where he died in 1529. Skelton was a classical scholar, and at one +time tutor to Henry VIII. The great humanist, Erasmus, spoke of him as +the "one light and ornament of British letters." Caxton asserts that +he had read Virgil, Ovid, and Tully, and quaintly adds, "I suppose he +hath dronken of Elycon's well." + +In refreshing contrast with the artificial court poetry of the 15th and +first three quarters of the 16th century, was the folk-poetry, the +popular ballad literature which was handed down by oral tradition. The +English and Scotch ballads were narrative songs, written in a variety +of meters, but chiefly in what is known as the ballad stanza. + + "In somer, when the shawes[1] be sheyne,[2] + And leves be large and longe, + Hit is full merry in feyre forest + To here the foulys song. + + "To se the dere draw to the dale, + And leve the hilles hee,[3] + And shadow them in the leves grene, + Under the grene-wode tree." + + +[55] + +It is not possible to assign a definite date to these ballads. They +lived on the lips of the people, and were seldom reduced to writing +till many years after they were first composed and sung. Meanwhile +they underwent repeated changes, so that we have numerous versions of +the same story. They belonged to no particular author, but, like all +folk-lore, were handled freely by the unknown poets, minstrels, and +ballad reciters, who modernized their language, added to them, or +corrupted them, and passed them along. Coming out of an uncertain +past, based on some dark legend of heart-break or bloodshed, they bear +no poet's name, but are _ferae naturae_, and have the flavor of wild +game. In the forms in which they are preserved few of them are older +than the 17th century, or the latter part of the 16th century, though +many, in their original shape, are, doubtless, much older. A very few +of the Robin Hood ballads go back to the 15th century, and to the same +period is assigned the charming ballad of the _Nut Brown Maid_ and the +famous border ballad of _Chevy Chase_, which describes a battle between +the retainers of the two great houses of Douglas and Percy. It was +this song of which Sir Philip Sidney wrote, "I never heard the old song +of Percy and Douglas but I found myself more moved than by a trumpet; +and yet it is sung but by some blind crouder,[4] with no rougher voice +than rude style." But the style of the ballads was not always rude. +{56} In their compressed energy of expression, in the impassioned +abrupt, yet indirect way in which they tell their tale of grief and +horror, there reside often a tragic power and art superior to any +English poetry that had been written since Chaucer, superior even to +Chaucer in the quality of intensity. The true home of the ballad +literature was "the north country," and especially the Scotch border, +where the constant forays of moss-troopers and the raids and private +warfare of the lords of the marches supplied many traditions of +heroism, like those celebrated in the old poem of the _Battle of +Otterbourne_, and in the _Hunting of the Cheviot_, or _Chevy Chase_, +already mentioned. Some of these are Scotch and others English; the +dialect of Lowland Scotland did not, in effect, differ much from that +of Northumberland and Yorkshire, both descended alike from the old +Northumbrian of Anglo-Saxon times. Other ballads were shortened, +popular versions of the chivalry romances which were passing out of +fashion among educated readers in the 16th century, and now fell into +the hands of the ballad makers. Others preserved the memory of local +countryside tales, family feuds, and tragic incidents, partly +historical and partly legendary, associated often with particular +spots. Such are, for example, _The Dowie Dens of Yarrow_, _Fair Helen +of Kirkconnell_, _The Forsaken Bride_, and _The Twa Corbies_. Others, +again, have a coloring of popular superstition, like the beautiful +ballad concerning {57} _Thomas of Ersyldoune_, who goes in at Eldon +Hill with an Elf queen and spends seven years in fairy land. + +But the most popular of all the ballads were those which cluster about +the name of that good outlaw, Robin Hood, who, with his merry men, +hunted the forest of merry Sherwood, where he killed the king's deer +and waylaid rich travelers, but was kind to poor knights and honest +workmen. Robin Hood is the true ballad hero, the darling of the common +people, as Arthur was of the nobles. The names of his Confessor, Friar +Tuck; his mistress, Maid Marian; his companions, Little John, +Scathelock, and Much, the Miller's son, were as familiar as household +words. Langland, in the 14th century, mentions "rimes of Robin Hood," +and efforts have been made to identify him with some actual personage, +as with one of the dispossessed barons who had been adherents of Simon +de Montfort in his war against Henry III. But there seems to be +nothing historical about Robin Hood. He was a creation of the popular +fancy. The game laws under the Norman kings were very oppressive, and +there were, doubtless, dim memories still cherished among the Saxon +masses of Hereward and Edric the Wild, who had defied the power of the +Conqueror, as well as of later freebooters, who had taken to the woods +and lived by plunder. Robin Hood was a thoroughly national character. +He had the English love of fair-play, the English readiness to shake +hands and {58} make up, and keep no malice when worsted in a square +fight. He beat and plundered the rich bishops and abbots, who had more +than their share of wealth, but he was generous and hospitable to the +distressed, and lived a free and careless life in the good green wood. +He was a mighty archer, with those national weapons, the long-bow and +the cloth-yard-shaft. He tricked and baffled legal authority in the +person of the proud sheriff of Nottingham, thereby appealing to that +secret sympathy with lawlessness and adventure which marked the +free-born, vigorous yeomanry of England. And finally the scenery of +the forest gives a poetic background and a never-failing charm to the +exploits of "the old Robin Hood of England" and his merry men. + +The ballads came, in time, to have certain tricks of style, such as are +apt to characterize a body of anonymous folk-poetry. Such is their use +of conventional epithets; "the red, red gold," "the good, green wood," +"the gray goose wing." Such are certain recurring terms of phrase like, + + "But out and spak their stepmother." + +Such is, finally, a kind of sing-song repetition, which doubtless +helped the ballad singer to memorize his stock, as, for example, + + "She had'na pu'd a double rose, + A rose but only twae." + +{59} + +Or again, + + "And mony ane sings o' grass, o' grass, + And mony ane sings o' corn; + An mony ane sings o' Robin Hood, + Kens little whare he was born. + + It was na in the ha', the ha', + Nor in the painted bower; + But it was in the gude green wood, + Amang the lily flower." + +Copies of some of these old ballads were hawked about in the 16th +century, printed in black letter, "broad sides," or single sheets. +Wynkyn de Worde printed, in 1489, _A Lytell Geste of Robin Hood_, which +is a sort of digest of earlier ballads on the subject. In the 17th +century a few of the English popular ballads were collected in +miscellanies, called _Garlands_. Early in the 18th century the Scotch +poet, Allan Ramsay, published a number of Scotch ballads in the +_Evergreen_ and _Tea-Table Miscellany_. But no large and important +collection was put forth until Percy's _Reliques_, 1765, a book which +had a powerful influence upon Wordsworth and Walter Scott. In Scotland +some excellent ballads in the ancient manner were written in the 18th +century, such as Jane Elliott's _Lament for Flodden_, and the fine +ballad of Sir Patrick Spence. Walter Scott's _Proud Maisie is in the +Wood_, is a perfect reproduction of the pregnant, indirect method of +the old ballad makers. + +In 1453 Constantinople was taken by the Turks, {60} and many Greek +scholars, with their MSS., fled into Italy, where they began teaching +their language and literature, and especially the philosophy of Plato. +There had been little or no knowledge of Greek in western Europe during +the Middle Ages, and only a very imperfect knowledge of the Latin +classics. Ovid and Statius were widely read, and so was the late Latin +poet, Boethius, whose _De Consolatione Philosophiae_ had been +translated into English by King Alfred and by Chaucer. Little was +known of Vergil at first hand, and he was popularly supposed to have +been a mighty wizard, who made sundry works of enchantment at Rome, +such as a magic mirror and statue. Caxton's so-called translation of +the _Aeneid_ was in reality nothing but a version of a French romance +based on Vergil's epic. Of the Roman historians, orators, and +moralists, such as Livy, Tacitus, Caesar, Cicero, and Seneca, there was +an almost entire ignorance, as also of poets like Horace, Lucretius, +Juvenal, and Catullus. The gradual rediscovery of the remains of +ancient art and literature which took place in the 15th century, and +largely in Italy, worked an immense revolution in the mind of Europe. +MSS. were brought out of their hiding places, edited by scholars and +spread abroad by means of the printing-press. Statues were dug up and +placed in museums, and men became acquainted with a civilization far +more mature than that of the Middle Age, and with models of perfect +{61} workmanship in letters and the fine arts. In the latter years of +the 15th century a number of Englishmen learned Greek in Italy and +brought it back with them to England. William Grocyn and Thomas +Linacre, who had studied at Florence under the refugee, Demetrius +Chalcondylas, began teaching Greek, at Oxford, the former as early as +1491. A little later John Colet, Dean of St. Paul's and the founder of +St. Paul's School, and his friend, William Lily, the grammarian and +first master of St. Paul's (1500), also studied Greek abroad, Colet in +Italy, and Lily at Rhodes and in the city of Rome. Thomas More, +afterward the famous chancellor of Henry VIII., was among the pupils of +Grocyn and Linacre at Oxford. Thither also, in 1497, came in search of +the new knowledge, the Dutchman, Erasmus, who became the foremost +scholar of his time. From Oxford the study spread to the sister +university, where the first English Grecian of his day, Sir Jno. Cheke, +who "taught Cambridge and King Edward Greek," became the incumbent of +the new professorship founded about 1540. Among his pupils was Roger +Ascham, already mentioned, in whose time St. John's College, Cambridge, +was the chief seat of the new learning, of which Thomas Nash testifies +that it "was as an universitie within itself; having more candles light +in it, every winter morning before four of the clock, than the four of +clock bell gave strokes." Greek was not introduced at the universities +without violent {62} opposition from the conservative element, who were +nicknamed Trojans. The opposition came in part from the priests, who +feared that the new study would sow seeds of heresy. Yet many of the +most devout churchmen were friends of a more liberal culture, among +them Thomas More, whose Catholicism was undoubted and who went to the +block for his religion. Cardinal Wolsey, whom More succeeded as +chancellor, was also a munificent patron of learning and founded Christ +Church College, at Oxford. Popular education at once felt the impulse +of the new studies, and over twenty endowed grammar schools were +established in England in the first twenty years of the 16th century. +Greek became a passion even with English ladies. Ascham in his +_Schoolmaster_, a treatise on education, published in 1570, says, that +Queen Elisabeth "readeth here now at Windsor more Greek every day, than +some prebendarie of this Church doth read Latin in a whole week." And +in the same book he tells how calling once upon Lady Jane Grey, at +Brodegate, in Leicestershire, he "found her in her chamber reading +_Phaedon Platonis_ in Greek, and that with as much delite as some +gentlemen would read a merry tale in _Bocase_," and when he asked her +why she had not gone hunting with the rest, she answered, "I wisse, all +their sport in the park is but a shadow to that pleasure that I find in +Plato." Ascham's _Schoolmaster_, as well as his earlier book, +_Toxophilus_, a Platonic dialogue on archery, bristles with quotations +from the Greek and Latin {63} classics, and with that perpetual +reference to the authority of antiquity on every topic that he touches, +which remained the fashion in all serious prose down to the time of +Dryden. + +One speedy result of the new learning was fresh translations of the +Scriptures into English, out of the original tongues. In 1525 William +Tyndal printed at Cologne and Worms his version of the New Testament +from the Greek. Ten years later Miles Coverdale made, at Zurich, a +translation of the whole Bible from the German and the Latin. These +were the basis of numerous later translations, and the strong beautiful +English of Tyndal's _Testament_ is preserved for the most part in our +Authorized Version (1611). At first it was not safe to make or +distribute these early translations in England. Numbers of copies were +brought into the country, however, and did much to promote the cause of +the Reformation. After Henry VIII. had broken with the Pope the new +English Bible circulated freely among the people. Tyndal and Sir +Thomas More carried on a vigorous controversy in English upon some of +the questions at issue between the Church and the Protestants. Other +important contributions to the literature of the Reformation were the +homely sermons preached at Westminster and at Paul's Cross by Bishop +Hugh Latimer, who was burned at Oxford in the reign of Bloody Mary. +The English Book of Common Prayer was compiled in 1549-52. More was, +perhaps, the best {64} representative of a group of scholars who wished +to enlighten and reform the Church from inside, but who refused to +follow Henry VIII. in his breach with Rome. Dean Colet and John +Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, belonged to the same company, and Fisher +was beheaded in the same year (1535) with More, and for the same +offense, namely, refusing to take the oath to maintain the act +confirming the king's divorce from Catherine of Arragon and his +marriage with Anne Boleyn. More's philosophy is best reflected in his +_Utopia_, the description of an ideal commonwealth, modeled on Plato's +Republic, and printed in 1516. The name signifies "no place" +(_Outopos_), and has furnished an adjective to the language. The +_Utopia_ was in Latin, but More's _History of Edward V. and Richard +III._, written in 1513, though not printed till 1557, was in English. +It is the first example in the tongue of a history as distinguished +from a chronicle; that is, it is a reasoned and artistic presentation +of an historic period, and not a mere chronological narrative of events. + +The first three quarters of the 16th century produced no great original +work of literature in England. It was a season of preparation, of +education. The storms of the Reformation interrupted and delayed the +literary renascence through the reigns of Henry VIII., Edward VI., and +Queen Mary. When Elizabeth came to the throne, in 1558, a more settled +order of things began, and a period of great national prosperity and +{65} glory. Meanwhile the English mind had been slowly assimilating +the new classical culture, which was extended to all classes of readers +by the numerous translations of Greek and Latin authors. A fresh +poetic impulse came from Italy. In 1557 appeared _Tottel's +Miscellany_, containing songs and sonnets by a "new company of courtly +makers." Most of the pieces in the volume had been written years +before, by gentlemen of Henry VIII.'s court, and circulated in MS. The +two chief contributors were Sir Thomas Wiat, at one time English +embassador to Spain, and that brilliant noble, Henry Howard, the Earl +of Surrey, who was beheaded in 1547 for quartering the king's arms with +his own. Both of them were dead long before their work was printed. +The pieces in _Tottel's Miscellany_ show very clearly the influence of +Italian poetry. We have seen that Chaucer took subjects and something +more from Boccaccio and Petrarch. But the sonnet, which Petrarch had +brought to great perfection, was first introduced into England by Wiat. +There was a great revival of sonneteering in Italy in the 16th century, +and a number of Wiat's poems were adaptations of the sonnets and +_canzoni_ of Petrarch and later poets. Others were imitations of +Horace's satires and epistles. Surrey introduced the Italian blank +verse into English in his translation of two books of the _Aeneid_. +The love poetry of _Tottel's Miscellany_ is polished and artificial, +like the models which it followed. Dante's {66} Beatrice was a child, +and so was Petrarch's Laura. Following their example, Surrey addressed +his love complaints, by way of compliment, to a little girl of the +noble Irish family of Geraldine. The Amourists, or love sonneters, +dwelt on the metaphysics of the passion with a tedious minuteness, and +the conventional nature of their sighs and complaints may often be +guessed by an experienced reader from the titles of their poems: +"Description of the restless state of a lover, with suit to his lady to +rue on his dying heart;" "Hell tormenteth not the damned ghosts so sore +as unkindness the lover;" "The lover prayeth not to be disdained, +refused, mistrusted, nor forsaken," etc. The most genuine utterance of +Surrey was his poem written while imprisoned in Windsor--a cage where +so many a song-bird has grown vocal. And Wiat's little piece of eight +lines, "Of his Return from Spain," is worth reams of his amatory +affectations. Nevertheless the writers in _Tottel's Miscellany_ were +real reformers of English poetry. They introduced new models of style +and new metrical forms, and they broke away from the mediaeval +traditions which had hitherto obtained. The language had undergone +some changes since Chaucer's time, which made his scansion obsolete. +The accent of many words of French origin, like _nature_, _courage_, +_virtue_, _matere_, had shifted to the first syllable, and the _e_ of +the final syllables _es_, _en_, _ed_, and _e_, had largely disappeared. +But the language of poetry tends {67} to keep up archaisms of this +kind, and in Stephen Hawes, who wrote a century after Chaucer, we still +find such lines as these: + + "But he my strokes might right well endure, + He was so great and huge of puissance." [5] + +Hawes's practice is variable in this respect, and so is his +contemporary, Skelton's. But in Wiat and Surrey, who wrote only a few +years later, the reader first feels sure that he is reading verse +pronounced quite in the modern fashion. + +But Chaucer's example still continued potent. Spenser revived many of +his obsolete words, both in his pastorals and in his _Faery Queene_, +thereby imparting an antique remoteness to his diction, but incurring +Ben Jonson's censure, that he "writ no language." A poem that stands +midway between Spenser and late mediaeval work of Chaucer's +school--such as Hawes's _Passetyme of Pleasure_--was the _Induction_ +contributed by Thomas Sackville, Lord Buckhurst, in 1563 to a +collection of narrative poems called the _Mirrour for Magistrates_. +The whole series was the work of many hands, modeled upon Lydgate's +_Falls of Princes_ (taken from Boccaccio), and was designed as a +warning to great men of the fickleness of fortune. The _Induction_ is +the only noteworthy part of it. It was an allegory, written in +Chaucer's seven-lined stanza and described with a somber imaginative +power, the figure of Sorrow, her abode {68} in the "griesly lake" of +Avernus and her attendants, Remorse, Dread, Old Age, etc. Sackville +was the author of the first regular English tragedy, _Gorboduc_, and it +was at his request that Ascham wrote the _Schoolmaster_. + +Italian poetry also fed the genius of Edmund Spenser (1552-99). While +a student at Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, he had translated some of the +_Visions of Petrarch_, and the _Visions of Bellay_, a French poet, but +it was only in 1579 that the publication of his _Shepheard's Calendar_ +announced the coming of a great original poet, the first since Chaucer. +The _Shepheard's Calendar_ was a pastoral in twelve eclogues--one for +each month in the year. There had been a great revival of pastoral +poetry in Italy and France, but, with one or two insignificant +exceptions, Spenser's were the first bucolics in English. Two of his +eclogues were paraphrases from Clement Marot, a French Protestant poet, +whose psalms were greatly in fashion at the court of Francis I. The +pastoral machinery had been used by Vergil and by his modern imitators, +not merely to portray the loves of Strephon and Chloe, or the idyllic +charms of rustic life; but also as a vehicle of compliment, elegy, +satire, and personal allusion of many kinds. Spenser, accordingly, +alluded to his friends, Sidney and Harvey, as the shepherds, Astrophel +and Hobbinol, paid court to Queen Elizabeth as Cynthia, and introduced, +in the form of anagrams, names of the High-Church Bishop of London, +Aylmer, {69} and the Low-Church Archbishop Grindal. The conventional +pastoral is a somewhat delicate exotic in English poetry, and +represents a very unreal Arcadia. Before the end of the 17th century +the squeak of the oaten pipe had become a burden, and the only piece of +the kind which it is easy to read without some impatience is Milton's +wonderful _Lycidas_. The _Shepheard's Calendar_, however, though it +belonged to an artificial order of literature, had the unmistakable +stamp of genius in its style. There was a broad, easy mastery of the +resources of language, a grace, fluency, and music which were new to +English poetry. It was written while Spenser was in service with the +Earl of Leicester, and enjoying the friendship of his nephew, the +all-accomplished Sidney, and was, perhaps, composed at the latter's +country seat of Penshurst. In the following year Spenser went to +Ireland as private secretary to Arthur Lord Grey of Wilton, who had +just been appointed Lord Deputy of that kingdom. After filling several +clerkships in the Irish government, Spenser received a grant of the +castle and estate of Kilcolman, a part of the forfeited lands of the +rebel Earl of Desmond. Here, among landscapes richly wooded, like the +scenery of his own fairy land, "under the cooly shades of the green +alders by the Mulla's shore," Sir Walter Raleigh found him, in 1589, +busy upon his _Faery Queene_. In his poem, _Colin Clouts Come Home +Again_, Spenser tells, in pastoral language, how "the shepherd of the +{70} ocean" persuaded him to go to London, where he presented him to +the Queen, under whose patronage the first three books of his great +poem were printed, in 1590. A volume of minor poems, entitled +_Complaints_, followed in 1591, and the three remaining books of the +_Faery Queene_ in 1596. In 1595-96 he published also his _Daphnaida_, +_Prothalamion_, and the four hymns _On Love_ and _Beauty_, and _On +Heavenly Love_ and _Heavenly Beauty_. In 1598, in Tyrone's rebellion, +Kilcolman Castle was sacked and burned, and Spenser, with his family, +fled to London, where he died in January, 1599. + +The _Faery Queene_ reflects, perhaps, more fully than any other English +work, the many-sided literary influences of the renascence. It was the +blossom of a richly composite culture. Its immediate models were +Ariosto's _Orlando Furioso_, the first forty cantos of which were +published in 1515, and Tasso's _Gerusalemme Liberata_, printed in 1581. +Both of these were, in subject, romances of chivalry, the first based +upon the old Charlemagne epos--Orlando being identical with the hero of +the French _Chanson de Roland_--the second upon the history of the +first Crusade, and the recovery of the Holy City from the Saracen. But +in both of them there was a splendor of diction and a wealth of +coloring quite unknown to the rude mediaeval romances. Ariosto and +Tasso wrote with the great epics of Homer and Vergil constantly in +mind, and all about them was the brilliant light of Italian art, in its +early freshness {71} and power. The _Faery Queene_, too, was a tale of +knight-errantry. Its hero was King Arthur, and its pages swarm with +the familiar adventures and figures of Gothic romance; distressed +ladies and their champions, combats with dragons and giants, enchanted +castles, magic rings, charmed wells, forest hermitages, etc. But side +by side with these appear the fictions of Greek mythology and the +personified abstractions of fashionable allegory. Knights, squires, +wizards, hamadryads, satyrs, and river gods, Idleness, Gluttony, and +Superstition jostle each other in Spenser's fairy land. Descents to +the infernal shades, in the manner of Homer and Vergil, alternate with +descriptions of the Palace of Pride in the manner of the _Romaunt of +the Rose_. But Spenser's imagination was a powerful spirit, and held +all these diverse elements in solution. He removed them to an ideal +sphere "apart from place, withholding time," where they seem all alike +equally real, the dateless conceptions of the poet's dream. + +The poem was to have been "a continued allegory or dark conceit," in +twelve books, the hero of each book representing one of the twelve +moral virtues. Only six books and the fragment of a seventh were +written. By way of complimenting his patrons and securing contemporary +interest, Spenser undertook to make his allegory a double one, personal +and historical, as well as moral or abstract. Thus Gloriana, the Queen +of Faery, stands not only for Glory but for Elizabeth, {72} to whom the +poem was dedicated. Prince Arthur is Leicester, as well as +Magnificence. Duessa is Falsehood, but also Mary Queen of Scots. +Grantorto is Philip II. of Spain. Sir Artegal is Justice, but likewise +he is Arthur Grey de Wilton. Other characters shadow forth Sir Walter +Raleigh, Sir Philip Sidney, Henry IV. of France, etc.; and such public +events as the revolt of the Spanish Netherlands, the Irish rebellion, +the execution of Mary Stuart, and the rising of the northern Catholic +houses against Elizabeth are told in parable. In this way the poem +reflects the spiritual struggle of the time, the warfare of young +England against Popery and Spain. + +The allegory is not always easy to follow. It is kept up most +carefully in the first two books, but it sat rather lightly on +Spenser's conscience, and is not of the essence of the poem. It is an +ornament put on from the outside and detachable at pleasure. The +"Spenserian stanza," in which the _Faery Queene_ was written, was +adapted from the _ottava riwa_ of Ariosto. Spenser changed somewhat +the order of the rimes in the first eight lines and added a ninth line +of twelve syllables, thus affording more space to the copious +luxuriance of his style and the long-drawn sweetness of his verse. It +was his instinct to dilate and elaborate every image to the utmost, and +his similes, especially--each of which usually fills a whole +stanza--have the pictorial amplitude of Homer's. Spenser was, in fact, +a great painter. His poetry {73} is almost purely sensuous. The +personages in the _Faery Queene_ are not characters, but richly colored +figures, moving to the accompaniment of delicious music, in an +atmosphere of serene remoteness from the earth. Charles Lamb said that +he was the poet's poet, that is, he appealed wholly to the artistic +sense and to the love of beauty. Not until Keats did another English +poet appear so filled with the passion for all outward shapes of +beauty, so exquisitely alive to all impressions of the senses. Spenser +was, in some respects, more an Italian than an English poet. It is +said that the Venetian gondoliers still sing the stanzas of Tasso's +_Gerusalemme Liberata_. It is not easy to imagine the Thames bargees +chanting passages from the _Faery Queene_. Those English poets who +have taken strongest hold upon their public have done so by their +profound interpretation of our common life. But Spenser escaped +altogether from reality into a region of pure imagination. His aerial +creations resemble the blossoms of the epiphytic orchids, which have no +root in the soil, but draw their nourishment from the moisture of the +air. + + "_Their_ birth was of the womb of morning dew, + And _their_ conception of the glorious prime." + + +Among the minor poems of Spenser the most delightful were his +_Prothalamion_ and _Epithalamion_. The first was a "spousal verse," +made for the double wedding of the Ladies Catherine and {74} Elizabeth +Somerset, whom the poet figures as two white swans that come swimming +down the Thames, whose surface the nymphs strew with lilies, till it +appears "like a bride's chamber-floor." + + "Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song," + +is the burden of each stanza. The _Epithalamion_ was Spenser's own +marriage song, written to crown his series of _Amoretti_, or love +sonnets, and is the most splendid hymn of triumphant love in the +language. Hardly less beautiful than these was _Muiopotmos; or, the +Fate of the Butterfly_, an addition to the classical myth of Arachne, +the spider. The four hymns in praise of _Love_ and _Beauty_, _Heavenly +Love_ and _Heavenly Beauty_, are also stately and noble poems, but by +reason of their abstractness and the Platonic mysticism which they +express, are less generally pleasing than the others mentioned. +Allegory and mysticism had no natural affiliation with Spenser's +genius. He was a seer of visions, of _images_ full, brilliant, and +distinct, and not like Bunyan, Dante, or Hawthorne, a projector into +bodily shapes of _ideas_, typical and emblematic, the shadows which +haunt the conscience and the mind. + + +1. A First Sketch of English Literature. By Henry Morley. + +2. English Writers. By the same. Vol. iii. From Chaucer to Dunbar. + +{75} + +3. Skeat's Specimens of English Literature, 1594-1579. Clarendon Press +Series. + +4. Morte Darthur. Globe Edition. + +5. Child's English and Scottish Ballads. 8 vols. + +6. Hale's edition of Spenser. Globe. + +7. "A Royal Poet." Irving's Sketch-Book. + + + +[1] Woods. + +[2] Bright. + +[3] High. + +[4] Fiddler. + +[5] Trisyllable--like _creature_, _neighebour_, etc, in Chaucer. + + + + +{76} + +CHAPTER III. + +THE AGE OF SHAKSPERE. + +1564-1616. + +The great age of English poetry opened with the publication of +Spenser's _Shepheard's Calendar_, in 1579, and closed with the printing +of Milton's _Samson Agonistes_, in 1671. Within this period of little +less than a century English thought passed through many changes, and +there were several successive phases of style in our imaginative +literature. Milton, who acknowledged Spenser as his master, and who +was a boy of eight years at Shakspere's death, lived long enough to +witness the establishment of an entirely new school of poets, in the +persons of Dryden and his contemporaries. But, roughly speaking, the +dates above given mark the limits of one literary epoch, which may not +improperly be called the Elisabethan. In strictness the Elisabethan +age ended with the queen's death, in 1603. But the poets of the +succeeding reigns inherited much of the glow and splendor which marked +the diction of their forerunners; and "the spacious times of great +Elisabeth" have been, by courtesy, prolonged to the year of the +Restoration (1660). There is a certain likeness {77} in the +intellectual products of the whole period, a largeness of utterance, +and a high imaginative cast of thought which stamp them all alike with +the queen's seal. + +Nor is it by any undue stretch of the royal prerogative that the name +of the monarch has attached itself to the literature of her reign and +of the reigns succeeding hers. The expression "Victorian poetry" has a +rather absurd sound when one considers how little Victoria counts for +in the literature of her time. But in Elisabethan poetry the maiden +queen is really the central figure. She is Cynthia, she is Thetis, +great queen of shepherds and of the sea; she is Spenser's Gloriana, and +even Shakspere, the most impersonal of poets, paid tribute to her in +_Henry VIII_., and, in a more delicate and indirect way, in the little +allegory introduced into _Midsummer Night's Dream_. + + "That very time I marked--but thou could'st not-- + Flying between the cold moon and the earth, + Cupid all armed. A certain aim he took + At a fair vestal throned by the west, + And loosed his love-shaft smartly from his bow + As he would pierce a hundred thousand hearts. + But I might see young Cupid's fiery dart + Quenched in the chaste beams of the watery moon, + And the imperial votaress passed on + In maiden meditation, fancy free"-- + +an allusion to Leicester's unsuccessful suit for Elisabeth's hand. + +The praises of the queen, which sound through {78} all the poetry of +her time, seem somewhat overdone to a modern reader. But they were not +merely the insipid language of courtly compliment. England had never +before had a female sovereign, except in the instance of the gloomy and +bigoted Mary. When she was succeeded by her more brilliant sister, the +gallantry of a gallant and fantastic age was poured at the latter's +feet, the sentiment of chivalry mingling itself with loyalty to the +crown. The poets idealized Elisabeth. She was to Spenser, to Sidney, +and to Raleigh, not merely a woman and a virgin queen, but the champion +of Protestantism, the lady of young England, the heroine of the +conflict against popery and Spain. Moreover Elisabeth was a great +woman. In spite of the vanity, caprice, and ingratitude which +disfigured her character, and the vacillating, tortuous policy which +often distinguished her government, she was at bottom a sovereign of +large views, strong will, and dauntless courage. Like her father, she +"loved a _man_," and she had the magnificent tastes of the Tudors. She +was a patron of the arts, passionately fond of shows and spectacles, +and sensible to poetic flattery. In her royal progresses through the +kingdom, the universities and the nobles and the cities vied with one +another in receiving her with plays, revels, masques, and triumphs, in +the mythological taste of the day. "When the queen paraded through a +country town," says Warton, the historian of English poetry, "almost +every {79} pageant was a pantheon. When she paid a visit at the house +of any of her nobility, at entering the hall she was saluted by the +Penates. In the afternoon, when she condescended to walk in the +garden, the lake was covered with tritons and nereids; the pages of the +family were converted into wood-nymphs, who peeped from every bower; +and the footmen gamboled over the lawns in the figure of satyrs. When +her majesty hunted in the park she was met by Diana who, pronouncing +our royal prude to be the brightest paragon of unspotted chastity, +invited her to groves free from the intrusions of Acteon." The most +elaborate of these entertainments of which we have any notice, were, +perhaps, the games celebrated in her honor by the Earl of Leicester, +when she visited him at Kenilworth, in 1575. An account of these was +published by a contemporary poet, George Gascoigne, _The Princely +Pleasures at the Court of Kenilworth_, and Walter Scott has made them +familiar to modern readers in his novel of _Kenilworth_. Sidney was +present on this occasion, and, perhaps, Shakspere, then a boy of +eleven, and living at Stratford, not far off, may have been taken to +see the spectacle, may have seen Neptune, riding on the back of a huge +dolphin in the castle lake, speak the copy of verses in which he +offered his trident to the empress of the sea, and may have + + "heard a mermaid on a dolphin's back, + Utter such dulcet and harmonious breath, + That the rude sea grew civil at the sound." + + +{80} But in considering the literature of Elisabeth's reign it will be +convenient to speak first of the prose. While following up Spenser's +career to its close (1599), we have, for the sake of unity of +treatment, anticipated somewhat the literary history of the twenty +years preceding. In 1579 appeared a book which had a remarkable +influence on English prose. This was John Lyly's _Euphues, the Anatomy +of Wit_. It was in form a romance, the history of a young Athenian who +went to Naples to see the world and get an education; but it is in +substance nothing but a series of dialogues on love, friendship, +religion, etc., written in language which, from the title of the book, +has received the name of _Euphuism_. This new English became very +fashionable among the ladies, and "that beauty in court which could not +parley Euphuism," says a writer of 1632, "was as little regarded as she +which now there speaks not French." + +Walter Scott introduced a Euphuist into his novel the _Monastery_, but +the peculiar jargon which Sir Piercie Shafton is made to talk is not at +all like the real Euphuism. That consisted of antithesis, +alliteration, and the profuse illustration of every thought by +metaphors borrowed from a kind of fabulous natural history. "Descend +into thine own conscience and consider with thyself the great +difference between staring and stark-blind, wit and wisdom, love and +lust; be merry, but with modesty; be sober, but not too sullen; {81} be +valiant, but not too venturous." "I see now that, as the fish +_Scolopidus_ in the flood _Araxes_ at the waxing of the moon is as +white as the driven snow, and at the waning as black as the burnt coal; +so Euphues, which at the first increasing of our familiarity was very +zealous, is now at the last cast become most faithless." Besides the +fish _Scolopidus_, the favorite animals of Lyly's menagerie are such as +the chameleon, which, "though he have most guts draweth least breath;" +the bird _Piralis_, "which sitting upon white cloth is white, upon +green, green;" and the serpent _Porphirius_, which, "though he be full +of poison, yet having no teeth, hurteth none but himself." + +Lyly's style was pithy and sententious, and his sentences have the air +of proverbs or epigrams. The vice of Euphuism was its monotony. On +every page of the book there was something pungent, something quotable; +but many pages of such writing became tiresome. Yet it did much to +form the hitherto loose structure of English prose, by lending it point +and polish. His carefully balanced periods were valuable lessons in +rhetoric, and his book became a manual of polite conversation and +introduced that fashion of witty repartee, which is evident enough in +Shakspere's comic dialogue. In 1580 appeared the second part, _Euphues +and his England_, and six editions of the whole work were printed +before 1598. Lyly had many imitators. In Stephen Gosson's _School +{82} of Abuse_, a tract directed against the stage and published about +four months later than the first part of Euphues, the language is +distinctly Euphuistic. The dramatist, Robert Greene, published, in +1587, his _Menaphon; Camilla's Alarum to Slumbering Euphues_, and his +_Euphues's Censure to Philautus_. His brother dramatist, Thomas Lodge, +published; in 1590, _Rosalynde: Euphues's Golden Legacy_, from which +Shakspere took the plot of _As You Like It_. Shakspere and Ben Jonson +both quote from _Euphues_ in their plays, and Shakspere was really +writing Euphuism, when he wrote such a sentence as "Tis true, 'tis +pity; pity 'tis 'tis true." + +That knightly gentleman, Philip Sidney, was a true type of the lofty +aspiration and manifold activity of Elizabethan England. He was +scholar, poet, courtier, diplomatist, statesman, soldier, all in one. +Educated at Oxford and then introduced at court by his uncle, the Earl +of Leicester, he had been sent to France when a lad of eighteen, with +the embassy which went to treat of the queen's proposed marriage to the +Duke of Alencon, and was in Paris at the time of the Massacre of St. +Bartholomew, in 1572. Afterward he had traveled through Germany, +Italy, and the Netherlands, had gone as embassador to the Emperor's +Court, and every-where won golden opinions. In 1580, while visiting +his sister Mary, Countess of Pembroke, at Wilton, he wrote, for her +pleasure, the _Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia_, which {83} remained in +MS. till 1590. This was a pastoral romance, after the manner of the +Italian _Arcadia_ of Sanazzaro, and the _Diana Enamorada_ of +Montemayor, a Portuguese author. It was in prose, but intermixed with +songs and sonnets, and Sidney finished only two books and a portion of +a third. It describes the adventures of two cousins, Musidorus and +Pyrocles, who are wrecked on the coast of Sparta. The plot is very +involved and is full of the stock episodes of romance: disguises, +surprises, love intrigues, battles, jousts and single combats. +Although the insurrection of the Helots against the Spartans forms a +part of the story, the Arcadia is not the real Arcadia of the Hellenic +Peloponnesus, but the fanciful country of pastoral romance, an unreal +clime, like the Faery Land of Spenser. + +Sidney was our first writer of poetic prose. The poet Drayton says +that he + + "did first reduce + Our tongue from Lyly's writing, then in use, + Talking of stones, stars, plants, of fishes, flies, + Playing with words and idle similes." + +Sidney was certainly no Euphuist, but his style was as "Italianated" as +Lyly's, though in a different way. His English was too pretty for +prose. His "Sidneian showers of sweet discourse" sowed every page of +the _Arcadia_ with those flowers of conceit, those sugared fancies +which his contemporaries loved, but which the taste of a severer {84} +age finds insipid. This splendid vice of the Elisabethan writers +appears in Sidney, chiefly in the form of an excessive personification. +If he describes a field full of roses, he makes "the roses add such a +ruddy show unto it, as though the field were bashful at his own +beauty." If he describes ladies bathing in a stream, he makes the +water break into twenty bubbles, as "not content to have the picture of +their face in large upon him, but he would in each of those bubbles set +forth the miniature of them." And even a passage which should be +tragic, such as the death of his heroine, Parthenia, he embroiders with +conceits like these: "For her exceeding fair eyes having with continued +weeping got a little redness about them, her round sweetly swelling +lips a little trembling, as though they kissed their neighbor Death; in +her cheeks the whiteness striving by little and little to get upon the +rosiness of them; her neck, a neck indeed of alabaster, displaying the +wound which with most dainty blood labored to drown his own beauties; +so as here was a river of purest red, there an island of perfectest +white," etc. + +The _Arcadia_, like _Euphues_, was a lady's book. It was the favorite +court romance of its day, but it surfeits a modern reader with its +sweetness, and confuses him with its tangle of adventures. The lady +for whom it was written was the mother of that William Herbert, Earl of +Pembroke, to whom Shakspere's sonnets are thought to have been {85} +dedicated. And she was the subject of Ben Jonson's famous epitaph. + + "Underneath this sable herse + Lies the subject of all verse, + Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother; + Death, ere thou hast slain another + Learn'd and fair and good as she, + Time shall throw a dart at thee." + + +Sidney's _Defense of Poesy_, composed in 1581, but not printed till +1595, was written in manlier English than the _Arcadia_, and is one of +the very few books of criticism belonging to a creative and uncritical +time. He was also the author of a series of love sonnets, _Astrophel +and Stella_, in which he paid Platonic court to the Lady Penelope Rich +(with whom he was not at all in love), according to the conventional +usage of the amourists. + +Sidney died in 1586, from a wound received in a cavalry charge at +Zutphen, where he was an officer in the English contingent, sent to +help the Dutch against Spain. The story has often been told of his +giving his cup of water to a wounded soldier with the words, "Thy +necessity is yet greater than mine." Sidney was England's darling, and +there was hardly a poet in the land from whom his death did not obtain +"the meed of some melodious tear." Spenser's _Ruins of Time_ were +among the number of these funeral songs; but the best of them all was +by one Matthew Royden, concerning whom little is known. + +{86} Another typical Englishman of Elisabeth's reign was Walter +Raleigh, who was even more versatile than Sidney, and more +representative of the restless spirit of romantic adventure, mixed with +cool, practical enterprise that marked the times. He fought against +the Queen's enemies by land and sea in many quarters of the globe; in +the Netherlands and in Ireland against Spain, with the Huguenot Army +against the League in France. Raleigh was from Devonshire, the great +nursery of English seamen. He was half-brother to the famous +navigator, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, and cousin to another great captain, +Sir Richard Grenville. He sailed with Gilbert on one of his voyages +against the Spanish treasure fleet, and in 1591 he published a report +of the fight, near the Azores, between Grenville's ship, the Revenue, +and fifteen great ships of Spain, an action, said Francis Bacon, +"memorable even beyond credit, and to the height of some heroical +fable." Raleigh was active in raising a fleet against the Spanish +Armada of 1588. He was present in 1596 at the brilliant action in +which the Earl of Essex "singed the Spanish king's beard," in the +harbor of Cadiz. The year before he had sailed to Guiana, in search of +the fabled El Dorado, destroying on the way the Spanish town of San +Jose, in the West Indies; and on his return he published his _Discovery +of the Empire of Guiana_. In 1597 he captured the town of Fayal, in +the Azores. He took a prominent part in colonizing {87} Virginia, and +he introduced tobacco and the potato plant into Europe. + +America was still a land of wonder and romance, full of rumors, +nightmares, and enchantments. In 1580, when Francis Drake, "the +Devonshire Skipper," had dropped anchor in Plymouth harbor, after his +voyage around the world, the enthusiasm of England had been mightily +stirred. These narratives of Raleigh, and the similar accounts of the +exploits of the bold sailors, Davis, Hawkins, Frobisher, Gilbert, and +Drake; but especially the great cyclopedia of nautical travel, +published by Richard Hakluyt, in 1589, _The Principal Navigations, +Voyages, and Discoveries made by the English Nation_, worked powerfully +on the imaginations of the poets. We see the influence of this +literature of travel in the _Tempest_, written undoubtedly after +Shakspere had been reading the narrative of Sir George Somers's +shipwreck on the Bermudas or "Isles of Devils." + +Raleigh was not in favor with Elizabeth's successor, James I. He was +sentenced to death on a trumped-up charge of high treason. The +sentence hung over him until 1618, when it was revived against him and +he was beheaded. Meanwhile, during his twelve years' imprisonment in +the Tower, he had written his _magnum opus_, the _History of the +World_. This is not a history, in the modern sense, but a series of +learned dissertations on law, government, theology, magic, war, etc. A +chapter with such a caption as the following {88} would hardly be found +in a universal history nowadays: "Of their opinion which make Paradise +as high as the moon; and of others which make it higher than the middle +region of the air." The preface and conclusion are noble examples of +Elisabethan prose, and the book ends with an oft-quoted apostrophe to +Death. "O eloquent, just: and mighty Death! Whom none could advise, +thou has persuaded; what none hath dared, thou hast done; and whom all +the world hath flattered, thou only hast cast out of the world and +despised; thou hast drawn together all the far-fetched greatness, all +the pride, cruelty, and ambition of man, and covered it all over with +these two narrow words, _hic jacet_." + +Although so busy a man, Raleigh found time to be a poet. Spenser calls +him "the summer's nightingale," and George Puttenham, in his _Art of +English Poesy_ (1589), finds his "vein most lofty, insolent, and +passionate." Puttenham used _insolent_ in its old sense, _uncommon_; +but this description is hardly less true, if we accept the word in its +modern meaning. Raleigh's most notable verses, _The Lie_, are a +challenge to the world, inspired by indignant pride and the weariness +of life--the _saeva indignatio_ of Swift. The same grave and caustic +melancholy, the same disillusion marks his quaint poem, _The +Pilgrimage_. It is remarkable how many of the verses among his few +poetical remains are asserted in the MSS. or by tradition to have been +"made by Sir Walter {89} Raleigh the night before he was beheaded." Of +one such poem the assertion is probably true, namely, the lines "found +in his Bible in the gate-house at Westminster." + + "Even such is Time, that takes in trust, + Our youth, our joys, our all we have, + And pays as but with earth and dust; + Who in the dark and silent grave, + When we have wandered all our ways, + Shuts up the story of our days; + But from this earth, this grave, this dust, + My God shall raise me up, I trust!" + + +The strictly _literary_ prose of the Elisabethan period bore a small +proportion to the verse. Many entire departments of prose literature +were as yet undeveloped. Fiction was represented--outside of the +_Arcadia_ and _Euphues_ already mentioned--chiefly by tales translated +or imitated from Italian _novelle_. George Turberville's _Tragical +Tales_ (1566) was a collection of such stories, and William Paynter's +_Palace of Pleasure_ (1576-1577) a similar collection from Boccaccio's +_Decameron_ and the novels of Bandello. These translations are mainly +of interest, as having furnished plots to the English dramatists. +Lodge's _Rosalind_ and Robert Greene's _Pandosto_, the sources +respectively of Shakspere's _As You Like It_ and _Winter's Tale_, are +short pastoral romances, not without prettiness in their artificial +way. The satirical pamphlets of Thomas Nash and his fellows, against +"Martin Marprelate," an anonymous writer, or {90} company of writers, +who attacked the bishops, are not wanting in wit, but are so cumbered +with fantastic whimsicalities, and so bound up with personal quarrels, +that oblivion has covered them. The most noteworthy of them were +Nash's _Piers Penniless's Supplication to the Devil_, Lyly's _Pap with +a Hatchet_, and Greene's _Groat's Worth of Wit_. Of books which were +not so much literature as the material of literature, mention may be +made of the _Chronicle of England_, compiled by Ralph Holinshed in +1577. This was Shakspere's English history, and its strong Lancastrian +bias influenced Shakspere in his representation of Richard III. and +other characters in his historical plays. In his Roman tragedies +Shakspere followed closely Sir Thomas North's translation of Plutarch's +_Lives_, made in 1579 from the French version of Jacques Amyot. + +Of books belonging to other departments than pure literature, the most +important was Richard Hooker's _Ecclesiastical Polity_, the first four +books of which appeared in 1594. This was a work on the philosophy of +law and a defense, as against the Presbyterians, of the government of +the English Church by bishops. No work of equal dignity and scope had +yet been published in English prose. It was written in sonorous, +stately and somewhat involved periods, in a Latin rather than an +English idiom, and it influenced strongly the diction of later writers, +such as Milton and Sir Thomas Browne. Had the _Ecclesiastical Polity_ +been written one hundred, or perhaps even fifty, {91} years earlier, it +would doubtless have been written in Latin. + +The life of Francis Bacon, "the father of inductive philosophy," as he +has been called--better, the founder of inductive logic--belongs to +English history, and the bulk of his writings, in Latin and English, to +the history of English philosophy. But his volume of _Essays_ was a +contribution to general literature. In their completed form they +belong to the year 1625, but the first edition was printed in 1597 and +contained only ten short essays, each of them rather a string of +pregnant maxims--the text for an essay--than that developed treatment +of a subject which we now understand by the word essay. They were, +said their author, "as grains of salt that will rather give you an +appetite than offend you with satiety." They were the first essays +so-called in the language. "The word," said Bacon, "is late, but the +thing is ancient." The word he took from the French _essais_ of +Montaigne, the first two books of which had been published in 1592. +Bacon testified that his essays were the most popular of his writings +because they "came home to men's business and bosoms." Their alternate +title explains their character: _Counsels Civil and Moral_, that is, +pieces of advice touching the conduct of life, "of a nature whereof men +shall find much in experience, little in books." The essays contain +the quintessence of Bacon's practical wisdom, his wide knowledge of the +world of {92} men. The truth and depth of his sayings, and the extent +of ground which they cover, as well as the weighty compactness of his +style, have given many of them the currency of proverbs. "Revenge is a +kind of wild justice." "He that hath wife and children hath given +hostages to fortune." "There is no excellent beauty that hath not some +strangeness in the proportion." Bacon's reason was illuminated by a +powerful imagination, and his noble English rises now and then, as in +his essay _On Death_, into eloquence--the eloquence of pure thought, +touched gravely and afar off by emotion. In general, the atmosphere of +his intellect is that _lumen siccum_ which he loved to commend, "not +drenched or bloodied by the affections." Dr. Johnson said that the +wine of Bacon's writings was a dry wine. + +A popular class of books in the 17th century were "characters" or +"witty descriptions of the properties of sundry persons," such as the +Good Schoolmaster, the Clown, the Country Magistrate; much as in some +modern _Heads of the People_ where Douglas Jerrold or Leigh Hunt +sketches the Medical Student, the Monthly Nurse, etc. A still more +modern instance of the kind is George Eliot's _Impressions of +Theophrastus Such_, which derives its title from the Greek philosopher, +Theophrastus, whose character-sketches were the original models of this +kind of literature. The most popular character-book in Europe in the +17th century was La Bruyere's _Caracteres_. But {93} this was not +published till 1588. In England the fashion had been set in 1614, by +the _Characters_ of Sir Thomas Overbury, who died by poison the year +before his book was printed. One of Overbury's sketches--the _Fair and +Happy Milkmaid_--is justly celebrated for its old-world sweetness and +quaintness. "Her breath is her own, which scents all the year long of +June, like a new-made hay-cock. She makes her hand hard with labor, +and her heart soft with pity; and when winter evenings fall early, +sitting at her merry wheel, she sings defiance to the giddy wheel of +fortune. She bestows her year's wages at next fair, and, in choosing +her garments, counts no bravery in the world like decency. The garden +and bee-hive are all her physic and surgery, and she lives the longer +for it. She dares go alone and unfold sheep in the night, and fears no +manner of ill, because she means none; yet to say truth, she is never +alone, but is still accompanied with old songs, honest thoughts and +prayers, but short ones. Thus lives she, and all her care is she may +die in the spring-time, to have store of flowers stuck upon her +winding-sheet." + +England was still merry England in the times of good Queen Bess, and +rang with old songs, such as kept this milkmaid company; songs, said +Bishop Joseph Hall, which were "sung to the wheel and sung unto the +pail." Shakspere loved their simple minstrelsy; he put some of them +into the mouth of Ophelia, and scattered snatches of {94} them through +his plays, and wrote others like them himself: + + "Now, good Cesario, but that piece of song, + That old and antique song we heard last night, + Methinks it did relieve my passion much, + More than light airs and recollected terms + Of these most brisk and giddy-paced times. + Mark it, Cesario, it is old and plain. + The knitters and the spinners in the sun + And the free maids that weave their threads with bones + Do use to chant it; it is silly sooth + And dallies with the innocence of love + Like the old age." + + +Many of these songs, so natural, fresh, and spontaneous, together with +sonnets and other more elaborate forms of lyrical verse, were printed +in miscellanies, such as the _Passionate Pilgrim_, _England's Helicon_, +and Davison's _Poetical Rhapsody_. Some were anonymous, or were by +poets of whom little more is known than their names. Others were by +well-known writers, and others, again, were strewn through the plays of +Lyly, Shakspere, Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher, and other dramatists. +Series of love sonnets, like Spenser's _Amoretti_ and Sidney's +_Astrophel and Stella_, were written by Shakspere, Daniel, Drayton, +Drummond, Constable, Watson, and others, all dedicated to some mistress +real or imaginary. Pastorals, too, were written in great number, such +as William Browne's _Britannia's Pastorals_ and _Shephera's Pipe_ +(1613-1616) and Marlowe's charmingly rococo little idyl, {95} _The +Passionate Shepherd to his Love_, which Shakspere quoted in the _Merry +Wives of Windsor_, and to which Sir Walter Raleigh wrote a reply. +There were love stories in verse, like Arthur Brooke's _Romeo and +Juliet_ (the source of Shakspere's tragedy), Marlowe's fragment, _Hero +and Leander_, and Shakspere's _Venus and Adonis_, and _Rape of +Lucrece_, the first of these on an Italian and the other three on +classical subjects, though handled in any thing but a classical manner. +Wordsworth said finely of Shakspere, that he "could not have written an +epic: he would have died of a plethora of thought." Shakspere's two +narrative poems, indeed, are by no means models of their kind. The +current of the story is choked at every turn, though it be with golden +sand. It is significant of his dramatic habit of mind that dialogue +and soliloquy usurp the place of narration, and that, in the _Rape of +Lucrece_ especially, the poet lingers over the analysis of motives and +feelings, instead of hastening on with the action, as Chaucer, or any +born story-teller, would have done. + +In Marlowe's poem there is the same spendthrift fancy, although not the +same subtlety. In the first two divisions of the poem the story does, +in some sort, get forward; but in the continuation, by George Chapman +(who wrote the last four "sestiads"), the path is utterly lost, "with +woodbine and the gadding vine o'ergrown." + +One is reminded that modern poetry, if it has {96} lost in richness, +has gained in directness, when one compares any passage in Marlowe and +Chapman's _Hero and Leander_ with Byron's ringing lines: + + "The wind is high on Helle's wave, + As on that night of stormy water, + When Love, who sent, forgot to save + The young, the beautiful, the brave, + The lonely hope of Sestos' daughter." + +Marlowe's continuator, Chapman, wrote a number of plays, but he is best +remembered by his royal translation of Homer, issued in parts from +1598-1615. This was not so much a literal translation of the Greek, as +a great Elisabethan poem, inspired by Homer. It has Homer's fire, but +not his simplicity; the energy of Chapman's fancy kindling him to run +beyond his text into all manner of figures and conceits. It was +written, as has been said, as Homer would have written if he had been +an Englishman of Chapman's time. Certainly all later versions--Pope's +and Cowper's and Lord Derby's and Bryant's--seem pale against the +glowing exuberance of Chapman's English. His verse was not the heroic +line of ten syllables, chosen by most of the standard translators, but +the long fourteen-syllabled measure, which degenerates easily into +sing-song in the hands of a feeble metrist. In Chapman it is often +harsh, but seldom tame, and in many passages it reproduces wonderfully +the ocean-like roll of Homer's hexameters. + +{97} + + "From his bright helm and shield did burn a most unwearied fire, + Like rich Autumnus' golden lamp, whose brightness men admire, + Past all the other host of stars when, with his cheerful face, + Fresh washed in lofty ocean waves, he doth the sky enchase." + + +Keats's fine ode, _On First Looking into Chapman's Homer_, is +well-known. Fairfax's version of Tasso's _Jerusalem Delivered_ (1600) +is one of the best metrical translations in the language. + +The national pride in the achievements of Englishmen, by land and sea, +found expression, not only in prose chronicles and in books, like +Stow's _Survey of London_, and Harrison's _Description of England_ +(prefixed to Holinshed's _Chronicle_), but in long historical and +descriptive poems, like William Warner's _Albion's England_, 1586; +Samuel Daniel's _History of the Civil Wars_, 1595-1602; Michael +Drayton's _Baron's Wars_, 1596, _England's Heroical Epistles_, 1598, +and _Polyolbion_, 1613. The very plan of these works was fatal to +their success. It is not easy to digest history and geography into +poetry. Drayton was the most considerable poet of the three, but his +_Polyolbion_ was nothing more than "a gazeteer in rime," a +topographical survey of England and Wales, with tedious +personifications of rivers, mountains, and valleys, in thirty books and +nearly one hundred thousand lines. It was Drayton who said of Marlowe, +that he "had in him those brave translunary things that the first poets +had;" and there are brave {98} things in Drayton, but they are only +occasional passages, oases among dreary wastes of sand. His +_Agincourt_ is a spirited war-song, and his _Nymphidia; or, Court of +Faery_, is not unworthy of comparison with Drake's _Culprit Fay_, and +is interesting as bringing in Oberon and Robin Goodfellow, and the +popular fairy lore of Shakspere's _Midsummer Night's Dream_. + +The "well-languaged Daniel," of whom Ben Jonson said that he was "a +good honest man, but no poet," wrote, however, one fine meditative +piece, his _Epistle to the Countess of Cumberland_, a sermon apparently +on the text of the Roman poet Lucretius's famous passage in praise of +philosophy, + + "Suave mari magno, turbantibus aequora ventis," etc. + +But the Elisabethan genius found its fullest and truest expression in +the drama. It is a common phenomenon in the history of literature that +some old literary form or mold will run along for centuries without +having any thing poured into it worth keeping, until the moment comes +when the genius of the time seizes it and makes it the vehicle of +immortal thought and passion. Such was in England the fortune of the +stage play. At a time when Chaucer was writing character-sketches that +were really dramatic, the formal drama consisted of rude miracle plays +that had no literary quality whatever. These were taken from the Bible +and acted at first by the priests as illustrations of Scripture history +and additions to the {99} church service on feasts and saints' days. +Afterward the town guilds, or incorporated trades, took hold of them +and produced them annually on scaffolds in the open air. In some +English cities, as Coventry and Chester, they continued to be performed +almost to the close of the 16th century. And in the celebrated Passion +Play, at Oberammergau, in Bavaria, we have an instance of a miracle +play that has survived to our own day. These were followed by the +moral plays, in which allegorical characters, such as Clergy, Lusty +Juventus, Riches, Folly, and Good Demeanaunce, were the persons of the +drama. The comic character in the miracle plays had been the Devil, +and he was retained in some of the moralities side by side with the +abstract vice, who became the clown or fool of Shaksperian comedy. The +"formal Vice, Iniquity," as Shakspere calls him, had it for his +business to belabor the roaring Devil with his wooden sword + + . . "with his dagger of lath + In his rage and his wrath + Cries 'Aha!' to the Devil, + 'Pare your nails, Goodman Evil!'" + +He survives also in the harlequin of the pantomimes, and in Mr. Punch, +of the puppet shows, who kills the Devil and carries him off on his +back, when the latter is sent to fetch him to hell for his crimes. + +Masques and interludes--the latter a species of {100} short farce--were +popular at the Court of Henry VIII. Elisabeth was often entertained at +the universities or at the inns of court with Latin plays, or with +translations from Seneca, Euripides, and Ariosto. Original comedies +and tragedies began to be written, modeled upon Terence, and Seneca, +and chronicle histories founded on the annals of English kings. There +was a Master of the Revels at court, whose duty it was to select plays +to be performed before the queen, and these were acted by the children +of the Royal Chapel, or by the choir boys of St. Paul's Cathedral. +These early plays are of interest to students of the history of the +drama, and throw much light upon the construction of later plays, like +Shakspere's; but they are rude and inartistic, and without any literary +quality. + +There were also private companies of actors maintained by wealthy +noblemen, like the Earl of Leicester, and bands of strolling players, +who acted in inn-yards and bear-gardens. It was not until stationary +theaters were built and stock companies of actors regularly licensed +and established, that any plays were produced which deserve the name of +literature. In 1576 the first play-house was built in London. This +was the _Black Friars_, which was located within the liberties of the +dissolved monastery of the Black Friars, in order to be outside of the +jurisdiction of the Mayor and Corporation, who were Puritan, and +determined in their opposition to the stage. For the same reason the +{101} _Theater_ and the _Curtain_ were built in the same year, outside +the city walls in Shoreditch. Later the _Rose_, the _Globe_, and the +_Swan_, were erected on the Bankside, across the Thames, and play-goers +resorting to them were accustomed to "take boat." + +These early theaters were of the rudest construction. The six-penny +spectators, or "groundlings," stood in the yard, or pit, which had +neither floor nor roof. The shilling spectators sat on the stage, +where they were accommodated with stools and tobacco pipes, and whence +they chaffed the actors or the "opposed rascality" in the yard. There +was no scenery, and the female parts were taken by boys. Plays were +acted in the afternoon. A placard, with the letters "Venice," or +"Rome," or whatever, indicated the place of the action. With such rude +appliances must Shakspere bring before his audience the midnight +battlements of Elsinore and the moonlit garden of the Capulets. The +dramatists had to throw themselves upon the imagination of their +public, and it says much for the imaginative temper of the public of +that day, that it responded to the appeal. It suffered the poet to +transport it over wide intervals of space and time, and "with aid of +some few foot and half-foot words, fight over York and Lancaster's long +jars." Pedantry undertook, even at the very beginnings of the +Elisabethan drama, to shackle it with the so-called rules of Aristotle, +or classical unities of time and place, {102} to make it keep violent +action off the stage and comedy distinct from tragedy. But the +playwrights appealed from the critics to the truer sympathies of the +audience, and they decided for freedom and action, rather than +restraint and recitation. Hence our national drama is of Shakspere, +and not of Racine. By 1603 there were twelve play-houses in London in +full blast, although the city then numbered only one hundred and fifty +thousand inhabitants. + +Fresh plays were produced every year. The theater was more to the +Englishman of that time than it has ever been before or since. It was +his club, his novel, his newspaper all in one. No great drama has ever +flourished apart from a living stage, and it was fortunate that the +Elisabethan dramatists were, almost all of them, actors and familiar +with stage effect. Even the few exceptions, like Beaumont and +Fletcher, who were young men of good birth and fortune, and not +dependent on their pens, were probably intimate with the actors, lived +in a theatrical atmosphere, and knew practically how plays should be +put on. + +It had now become possible to earn a livelihood as an actor and +playwright. Richard Burbage and Edward Alleyn, the leading actors of +their generation, made large fortunes. Shakspere himself made enough +from his share in the profits of the _Globe_ to retire with a +competence, some seven years before his death, and purchase a handsome +{103} property in his native Stratford. Accordingly, shortly after +1580, a number of men of real talent began to write for the stage as a +career. These were young graduates of the universities, Marlowe, +Greene, Peele, Kyd, Lyly, Lodge, and others, who came up to town and +led a Bohemian life as actors and playwrights. Most of them were wild +and dissipated, and ended in wretchedness. Peele died of a disease +brought on by his evil courses; Greene, in extreme destitution, from a +surfeit of Rhenish wine and pickled herring; and Marlowe was stabbed in +a tavern brawl. + +The Euphuist Lyly produced eight plays from 1584 to 1601. They were +written for court entertainments, in prose and mostly on mythological +subjects. They have little dramatic power, but the dialogue is brisk +and vivacious, and there are several pretty songs in them. All the +characters talk Euphuism. The best of these was _Alexander and +Campaspe_, the plot of which is briefly as follows. Alexander has +fallen in love with his beautiful captive, Campaspe, and employs the +artist Apelles to paint her portrait. During the sittings, Apelles +becomes enamored of his subject and declares his passion, which is +returned. Alexander discovers their secret, but magnanimously forgives +the treason and joins the lovers' hands. The situation is a good one, +and capable of strong treatment in the hands of a real dramatist. But +Lyly slips smoothly over the crisis of the action and, in place of +passionate scenes, gives {104} us clever discourses and soliloquies, +or, at best, a light interchange of question and answer, full of +conceits, repartees, and double meanings. For example: + + "_Apel_. Whom do you love best in the world? + + "_Camp_. He that made me last in the world. + + "_Apel_. That was a God. + + "_Camp_. I had thought it had been a man," etc. + + +Lyly's service to the drama consisted in his introduction of an easy +and sparkling prose as the language of high comedy, and Shakspere's +indebtedness to the fashion thus set is seen in such passages as the +wit combats between Benedict and Beatrice in _Much Ado about Nothing_, +greatly superior as they are to any thing of the kind in Lyly. + +The most important of the dramatists, who were Shakspere's forerunners, +or early contemporaries, was Christopher or--as he was familiarly +called--Kit Marlowe. Born in the same year with Shakspere (1564), he +died in 1593, at which date his great successor is thought to have +written no original plays, except the _Comedy of Errors_ and _Love's +Labour's Lost_. Marlowe first popularized blank verse as the language +of tragedy in his _Tamburlaine_, written before 1587, and in subsequent +plays he brought it to a degree of strength and flexibility which left +little for Shakspere to do but to take it as he found it. +_Tamburlaine_ was a crude, violent piece, full of exaggeration and +bombast, but with passages here and there of splendid {105} +declamation, justifying Ben Jonson's phrase, "Marlowe's mighty line." +Jonson, however, ridiculed, in his _Discoveries_, the "scenical +strutting and furious vociferation" of Marlowe's hero; and Shakspere +put a quotation from Tamburlaine into the mouth of his ranting Pistol. +Marlowe's _Edward II._ was the most regularly constructed and evenly +written of his plays. It was the best historical drama on the stage +before Shakspere, and not undeserving of the comparison which it has +provoked with the latter's _Richard II_. But the most interesting of +Marlowe's plays, to a modern reader, is the _Tragical History of Doctor +Faustus_. The subject is the same as in Goethe's _Faust_, and Goethe, +who knew the English play, spoke of it as greatly planned. The opening +of Marlowe's _Faustus_ is very similar to Goethe's. His hero, wearied +with unprofitable studies, and filled with a mighty lust for knowledge +and the enjoyment of life, sells his soul to the Devil in return for a +few years of supernatural power. The tragic irony of the story might +seem to lie in the frivolous use which Faustus makes of his dearly +bought power, wasting it in practical jokes and feats of legerdemain; +but of this Marlowe was probably unconscious. The love story of +Margaret, which is the central point of Goethe's drama, is entirely +wanting in Marlowe's, and so is the subtle conception of Goethe's +Mephistophiles. Marlowe's handling of the supernatural is +materialistic and downright, as befitted an age which believed in +witchcraft. The {106} greatest part of the English _Faustus_ is the +last scene, in which the agony and terror of suspense with which the +magician awaits the stroke of the clock that signals his doom are +powerfully drawn. + + "_O lente, lente currile, noctis equi!_ + The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike. + O soul, be changed into little water-drops, + And fall into the ocean, ne'er be found!" + +Marlowe's genius was passionate and irregular. He had no humor, and +the comic portions of _Faustus_ are scenes of low buffoonery. + +George Peele's masterpiece, _David and Bethsabe_, was also, in many +respects, a fine play, though its beauties were poetic rather than +dramatic, consisting not in the characterization--which is feeble--but +in the eastern luxuriance of the imagery. There is one noble chorus-- + + "O proud revolt of a presumptuous man," etc. + +which reminds one of passages in Milton's _Samson Agonistes_, and +occasionally Peele rises to such high Aeschylean audacities as this: + + "At him the thunder shall discharge his bolt, + And his fair spouse, with bright and fiery wings, + Sit ever burning on his hateful bones." + + +Robert Greene was a very unequal writer. His plays are slovenly and +careless in construction, and he puts classical allusions into the +mouths of milkmaids and serving boys, with the grotesque pedantry and +want of keeping common among the {107} playwrights of the early stage. +He has, notwithstanding, in his comedy parts, more natural lightness +and grace than either Marlowe or Peele. In his _Friar Bacon and Friar +Bungay_, and his _Pinner of Wakefield_, there is a fresh breath, as of +the green English country, in such passages as the description of +Oxford, the scene at Harleston Fair, and the picture of the dairy in +the keeper's lodge at merry Fressingfield. + +In all these ante-Shaksperian dramatists there was a defect of art +proper to the first comers in a new literary departure. As compared +not only with Shakspere, but with later writers, who had the +inestimable advantage of his example, their work was full of +imperfection, hesitation, experiment. Marlowe was probably, in native +genius, the equal at least of Fletcher or Webster, but his plays, as a +whole, are certainly not equal to theirs. They wrote in a more +developed state of the art. But the work of this early school settled +the shape which the English drama was to take. It fixed the practice +and traditions of the national theater. It decided that the drama was +to deal with the whole of life, the real and the ideal, tragedy and +comedy, prose and verse, in the same play, without limitations of time, +place, and action. It decided that the English play was to be an +action, and not a dialogue, bringing boldly upon the mimic scene +feasts, dances, processions, hangings, riots, plays within plays, +drunken revels, beatings, battle, murder, and sudden death. It +established blank verse, {108} with occasional riming couplets at the +close of a scene or of a long speech, as the language of the tragedy +and high comedy parts, and prose as the language of the low comedy and +"business" parts. And it introduced songs, a feature of which +Shakspere made exquisite use. Shakspere, indeed, like all great poets, +invented no new form of literature, but touched old forms to finer +purposes, refining every thing, discarding nothing. Even the old +chorus and dumb show he employed, though sparingly, as also the old +jig, or comic song, which the clown used to give between the acts. + +Of the life of William Shakspere, the greatest dramatic poet of the +world, so little is known that it has been possible for ingenious +persons to construct a theory--and support it with some show of +reason--that the plays which pass under his name were really written by +Bacon or some one else. There is no danger of this paradox ever making +serious headway, for the historical evidence that Shakspere wrote +Shakspere's plays, though not overwhelming, is sufficient. But it is +startling to think that the greatest creative genius of his day, or +perhaps of all time, was suffered to slip out of life so quietly that +his title to his own works could even be questioned only two hundred +and fifty years after the event. That the single authorship of the +Homeric poems should be doubted is not so strange, for Homer is almost +prehistoric. But Shakspere was a modern Englishman, and at the time of +his death the first English colony in {109} America was already nine +years old. The important known facts of his life can be told almost in +a sentence. He was born at Stratford-on-Avon in 1564, married when he +was eighteen, went to London probably in 1587, and became an actor, +playwriter, and stockholder in the company which owned the Blackfriars +and the Globe Theaters. He seemingly prospered in his calling and +retired about 1609 to Stratford, where he lived in the house that he +had bought some years before, and where he died in 1616. His _Venus +and Adonis_ was printed in 1593, the _Rape of Lucrece_ in 1594, and his +_Sonnets_ in 1609. So far as is known, only eighteen of the +thirty-seven plays generally attributed to Shakspere were printed +during his life-time. These were printed singly, in quarto shape, and +were little more than stage books, or librettos. The first collected +edition of his works was the so-called "First Folio" of 1623, published +by his fellow-actors, Heming and Condell. No contemporary of Shakspere +thought it worth while to write a life of the stage-player. There are +a number of references to him in the literature of the time; some +generous, as in Ben Jonson's well-known verses; others singularly +unappreciative, like Webster's mention of "the right happy and copious +industry of Master Shakspere." But all these together do not begin to +amount to the sum of what was said about Spenser, or Sidney, or +Raleigh, or Ben Jonson. There is, indeed, nothing to show that his +contemporaries understood what a man they had {110} among them in the +person of "Our English Terence, Mr. Will Shakespeare!" The age, for +the rest, was not a self-conscious one, nor greatly given to review +writing and literary biography. Nor is there enough of self-revelation +in Shakspere's plays to aid the reader in forming a notion of the man. +He lost his identity completely in the characters of his plays, as it +is the duty of a dramatic writer to do. His sonnets have been examined +carefully in search of internal evidence as to his character and life, +but the speculations founded upon them have been more ingenious than +convincing. + +Shakspere probably began by touching up old plays. _Henry VI._ and the +bloody tragedy of _Titus Andronicus_, if Shakspere's at all, are +doubtless only his revision of pieces already on the stage. The +_Taming of the Shrew_ seems to be an old play worked over by Shakspere +and some other dramatist, and traces of another hand are thought to be +visible in parts of _Henry VIII._, _Pericles_, and _Timon of Athens_. +Such partnerships were common among the Elisabethan dramatists, the +most illustrious example being the long association of Beaumont and +Fletcher. The plays in the First Folio were divided into histories, +comedies, and tragedies, and it will be convenient to notice them +briefly in that order. + +It was a stirring time when the young adventurer came to London to try +his fortune. Elisabeth had finally thrown down the gage of battle to +Catholic Europe, by the execution of Mary Stuart, in 1587. {111} The +following year saw the destruction of the colossal Armada, which Spain +had sent to revenge Mary's death, and hard upon these events followed +the gallant exploits of Grenville, Essex, and Raleigh. + +That Shakspere shared the exultant patriotism of the times, and the +sense of their aloofness from the continent of Europe, which was now +born in the breasts of Englishmen, is evident from many a passage in +his plays. + + "This happy breed of men, this little world, + This precious stone set in a silver sea, + This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England, + This land of such dear souls, this dear, dear land, + England, bound in with the triumphant sea!" + + +His English histories are ten in number. Of these _King John_ and +_Henry VIII._ are isolated plays. The others form a consecutive +series, in the following order: _Richard III._, the two parts of _Henry +IV._, _Henry V._, the three parts of _Henry VI._, and _Richard III_. +This series may be divided into two, each forming a tetralogy, or group +of four plays. In the first the subject is the rise of the house of +Lancaster. But the power of the Red Rose was founded in usurpation. +In the second group, accordingly, comes the Nemesis, in the civil wars +of the Roses, reaching their catastrophe in the downfall of both +Lancaster and York, and the tyranny of Gloucester. The happy +conclusion is finally reached in the last play of the series, when this +new usurper is overthrown in turn, and Henry {112} VII., the first +Tudor sovereign, ascends the throne, and restores the Lancastrian +inheritance, purified, by bloody atonement, from the stain of Richard +II.'s murder. These eight plays are, as it were, the eight acts of one +great drama; and if such a thing were possible, they should be +represented on successive nights, like the parts of a Greek trilogy. +In order of composition, the second group came first. _Henry VI._ is +strikingly inferior to the others. _Richard III._ is a good acting +play, and its popularity has been sustained by a series of great +tragedians, who have taken the part of the king. But, in a literary +sense, it is unequal to _Richard II._, or the two parts of _Henry IV_. +The latter is unquestionably Shakspere's greatest historical tragedy, +and it contains his master-creation in the region of low comedy, the +immortal Falstaff. + +The constructive art with which Shakspere shaped history into drama is +well seen in comparing his King John with the two plays on that +subject, which were already on the stage. These, like all the other +old "Chronicle histories," such as _Thomas Lord Cromwell_ and the +_Famous Victories of Henry V._, follow a merely chronological, or +biographical, order, giving events loosely, as they occurred, without +any unity of effect, or any reference to their bearing on the +catastrophe. Shakspere's order was logical. He compressed and +selected, disregarding the fact of history oftentimes, in favor of the +higher truth of fiction; bringing together a crime and its punishment, +as cause and effect, even {113} though they had no such relation in the +chronicle, and were separated, perhaps, by many years. + +Shakspere's first two comedies were experiments. _Love's Labour's +Lost_ was a play of manners, with hardly any plot. It brought together +a number of humors, that is, oddities and affectations of various +sorts, and played them off on one another, as Ben Jonson afterward did +in his comedies of humor. Shakspere never returned to this type of +play, unless, perhaps, in the _Taming of the Shrew_. There the story +turned on a single "humor," Katherine's bad temper, just as the story +in Jonson's _Silent Woman_ turned on Morose's hatred of noise. The +_Taming of the Shrew_ is, therefore, one of the least Shaksperian of +Shakspere's plays; a _bourgeois_, domestic comedy, with a very narrow +interest. It belongs to the school of French comedy, like Moliere's +_Malade Imaginaire_, not to the romantic comedy of Shakspere and +Fletcher. + +The _Comedy of Errors_ was an experiment of an exactly opposite kind. +It was a play, purely of incident; a farce, in which the main +improbability being granted, namely, that the twin Antipholi and twin +Dromios are so alike that they cannot be distinguished, all the amusing +complications follow naturally enough. There is little +character-drawing in the play. Any two pairs of twins, in the same +predicament, would be equally droll. The fun lies in the situation. +This was a comedy of the Latin school, and resembled the _Menaechmi_ of +Plautus. Shakspere never returned to this type of {114} play, though +there is an element of "errors" in _Midsummer Night's Dream_. In the +_Two Gentlemen of Verona_ he finally hit upon that species of romantic +comedy which he may be said to have invented or created out of the +scattered materials at hand in the works of his predecessors. In this +play, as in the _Merchant of Venice_, _Midsummer Night's Dream_, _Much +Ado about Nothing_, _As You Like It_, _Twelfth Night_, _Winters Tale_, +_All's Well that Ends Well_, _Measure for Measure_, and the _Tempest_, +the plan of construction is as follows. There is one main intrigue +carried out by the high comedy characters, and a secondary intrigue, or +underplot, by the low comedy characters. The former is by no means +purely comic, but admits the presentation of the noblest motives, the +strongest passions, and the most delicate graces of romantic poetry. +In some of the plays it has a prevailing lightness and gayety, as in +_As You Like It_ and _Twelfth Night_. In others, like _Measure for +Measure_, it is barely saved from becoming tragedy by the happy close. +Shylock certainly remains a tragic figure, even to the end, and a play +like _Winter's Tale_, in which the painful situation is prolonged for +years, is only technically a comedy. Such dramas, indeed, were called, +on many of the title-pages of the time, "tragi-comedies." The low +comedy interlude, on the other hand, was broadly comic. It was +cunningly interwoven with the texture of the play, sometimes loosely, +and by way of variety or relief, as in the episode of {115} Touchstone +and Audrey, in _As You Like It_; sometimes closely, as in the case of +Dogberry and Verges, in _Much Ado about Nothing_, where the blundering +of the watch is made to bring about the _denouement_ of the main +action. The _Merry Wives of Windsor_ is an exception to this plan of +construction. It is Shakspere's only play of contemporary, +middle-class English life, and is written almost throughout in prose. +It is his only pure comedy, except the _Taming of the Shrew_. + +Shakspere did not abandon comedy when writing tragedy, though he turned +it to a new account. The two species graded into one another. Thus +_Cymbeline_ is, in its fortunate ending, really as much of a comedy as +_Winter's Tale_--to which its plot bears a resemblance--and is only +technically a tragedy, because it contains a violent death. In some of +the tragedies, as _Macbeth_ and _Julius Caesar_, the comedy element is +reduced to a minimum. But in others, as _Romeo and Juliet_, and +_Hamlet_, it heightens the tragic feeling by the irony of contrast. +Akin to this is the use to which Shakspere put the old Vice, or Clown, +of the moralities. The Fool in _Lear_, Touchstone in _As You Like It_, +and Thersites in _Troilus and Cressida_, are a sort of parody of the +function of the Greek chorus, commenting the action of the drama with +scraps of bitter, or half-crazy, philosophy, and wonderful gleams of +insight into the depths of man's nature. + +The earliest of Shakspere's tragedies, unless _Titus Andronicus_ be +his, was, doubtless, _Romeo and {116} Juliet_, which is full of the +passion and poetry of youth and of first love. It contains a large +proportion of riming lines, which is usually a sign in Shakspere of +early work. He dropped rime more and more in his later plays, and his +blank verse grew freer and more varied in its pauses and the number of +its feet. _Romeo and Juliet_ is also unique, among his tragedies, in +this respect, that the catastrophe is brought about by a fatality, as +in the Greek drama. It was Shakspere's habit to work out his tragic +conclusions from within, through character, rather than through +external chances. This is true of all the great tragedies of his +middle life, _Hamlet_, _Othello_, _Lear_, _Macbeth_, in every one of +which the catastrophe is involved in the character and actions of the +hero. This is so, in a special sense, in _Hamlet_, the subtlest of all +Shakspere's plays, and if not his masterpiece, at any rate the one +which has most attracted and puzzled the greatest minds. It is +observable that in Shakspere's comedies there is no one central figure, +but that, in passing into tragedy, he intensified and concentrated the +attention upon a single character. This difference is seen, even in +the naming of the plays; the tragedies always take their titles from +their heroes, the comedies never. + +Somewhat later, probably, than the tragedies already mentioned, were +the three Roman plays, _Julius Caesar_, _Coriolanus_, and _Antony and +Cleopatra_. It is characteristic of Shakspere that he invented the +plot of none of his plays, but took {117} material that he found at +hand. In these Roman tragedies, he followed Plutarch closely, and yet, +even in so doing, gave, if possible, a greater evidence of real +creative power than when he borrowed a mere outline of a story from +some Italian novelist. It is most instructive to compare _Julius +Caesar_ with Ben Jonson's _Catiline and Sejanus_. Jonson was careful +not to go beyond his text. In _Catiline_ he translates almost +literally the whole of Cicero's first oration against Catiline. +Sejanus is a mosaic of passages, from Tacitus and Suetonius. There is +none of this dead learning in Shakspere's play. Having grasped the +conception of the characters of Brutus, Cassius, and Mark Anthony, as +Plutarch gave them, he pushed them out into their consequences in every +word and act, so independently of his original, and yet so harmoniously +with it, that the reader knows that he is reading history, and needs no +further warrant for it than Shakspere's own. _Timon of Athens_ is the +least agreeable and most monotonous of Shakspere's undoubted tragedies, +and _Troilus and Cressida_, said Coleridge, is the hardest to +characterize. The figures of the old Homeric world fare but hardly +under the glaring light of modern standards of morality which Shakspere +turns upon them. Ajax becomes a stupid bully, Ulysses a crafty +politician, and swift-footed Achilles a vain and sulky chief of +faction. In losing their ideal remoteness, the heroes of the _Iliad_ +lose their poetic quality, and the lover of Homer experiences an +unpleasant disenchantment. + +{118} + +It was customary in the 18th century to speak of Shakspere as a rude +though prodigious genius. Even Milton could describe him as "warbling +his native wood-notes wild." But a truer criticism, beginning in +England with Coleridge, has shown that he was also a profound artist. +It is true that he wrote for his audiences, and that his art is not +every-where and at all points perfect. But a great artist will +contrive, as Shakspere did, to reconcile practical exigencies, like +those of the public stage, with the finer requirements of his art. +Strained interpretations have been put upon this or that item in +Shakspere's plays; and yet it is generally true that some deeper reason +can be assigned for his method in a given case than that "the audience +liked puns," or, "the audience liked ghosts." Compare, for example, +his delicate management of the supernatural with Marlowe's procedure in +_Faustus_. Shakspere's age believed in witches, elves, and +apparitions; and yet there is always something shadowy or allegorical +in his use of such machinery. The ghost in _Hamlet_ is merely an +embodied suspicion. Banquo's wraith, which is invisible to all but +Macbeth, is the haunting of an evil conscience. The witches in the +same play are but the promptings of ambition, thrown into a human +shape, so as to become actors in the drama. In the same way, the +fairies in _Midsummer Night's Dream_ are the personified caprices of +the lovers, and they are unseen by the human characters, whose likes +and dislikes they control, save in the instance where {119} Bottom is +"translated" (that is, becomes mad) and has sight of the invisible +world. So in the _Tempest_, Ariel is the spirit of the air and Caliban +of the earth, ministering, with more or less of unwillingness, to man's +necessities. + +Shakspere is the most universal of writers. He touches more men at +more points than Homer, or Dante, or Goethe. The deepest wisdom, the +sweetest poetry, the widest range of character, are combined in his +plays. He made the English language an organ of expression unexcelled +in the history of literature. Yet he is not an English poet simply, +but a world-poet. Germany has made him her own, and the Latin races, +though at first hindered in a true appreciation of him by the canons of +classical taste, have at length learned to know him. An ever-growing +mass of Shaksperian literature, in the way of comment and +interpretation, critical, textual, historical, or illustrative, +testifies to the durability and growth of his fame. Above all, his +plays still keep, and probably always will keep, the stage. It is +common to speak of Shakspere and the other Elisabethan dramatists as if +they stood, in some sense, on a level. But in truth there is an almost +measureless distance between him and all his contemporaries. The rest +shared with him in the mighty influences of the age. Their plays are +touched here and there with the power and splendor of which they were +all joint heirs. But, as a whole, they are obsolete. They live in +books, but not in the hearts and on the tongues of men. The {120} most +remarkable of the dramatists contemporary with Shakspere was Ben +Jonson, whose robust figure is in striking contrast with the other's +gracious impersonality. Jonson was nine years younger than Shakspere. +He was educated at Westminster School, served as a soldier in the low +countries, became an actor in Henslowe's company, and was twice +imprisoned--once for killing a fellow-actor in a duel, and once for his +part in the comedy of _Eastward Hoe_, which gave offense to King James. +He lived down to the times of Charles I. (1635), and became the +acknowledged arbiter of English letters and the center of convivial wit +combats at the _Mermaid_, the _Devil_, and other famous London taverns. + + "What things have we seen + Done at the Mermaid; heard words that have been + So nimble and so full of subtle flame, + As if that every one from whom they came + Had meant to put his whole wit in a jest, + And had resolved to live a fool the rest + Of his dull life." [1] + +The inscription on his tomb, in Westminster Abbey, is simply + + "O rare Ben Jonson!" + + +Jonson's comedies were modeled upon the _vetus comaedia_ of +Aristophanes, which was satirical in purpose, and they belonged to an +entirely different school from Shakspere's. They were classical and +not romantic, and were pure comedies, admitting {121} no admixture of +tragic motives. There is hardly one lovely or beautiful character in +the entire range of his dramatic creations. They were comedies not of +character, in the high sense of the word, but of manners or humors. +His design was to lash the follies and vices of the day, and his +_dramatis persona_ consisted for the most part of gulls, impostors, +fops, cowards, swaggering braggarts, and "Pauls men." In his first +play, _Every Man in his Humor_ (acted in 1598), in _Every Man Out of +his Humor_, _Bartholomew Fair_, and indeed, in all of his comedies, his +subject was the "spongy humors of the time," that is, the fashionable +affectations, the whims, oddities, and eccentric developments of London +life. His procedure was to bring together a number of these fantastic +humorists, to play them off upon each other, involve them in all manner +of comical misadventures, and render them utterly ridiculous and +contemptible. There was thus a perishable element in his art, for +manners change; and however effective this exposure of contemporary +affectations may have been, before an audience of Jonson's day, it is +as hard for a modern reader to detect his points as it will be for a +reader two hundred years hence to understand the satire upon the +aesthetic craze in such pieces of the present day, as _Patience_ or the +_Colonel_. Nevertheless, a patient reader, with the help of copious +foot-notes, can gradually put together for himself an image of that +world of obsolete humors in which Jonson's comedy dwells, and can +admire the dramatist's solid good {122} sense, his great learning, his +skill in construction, and the astonishing fertility of his invention. +His characters are not revealed from within, like Shakspere's, but +built up painfully from outside by a succession of minute, laborious +particulars. The difference will be plainly manifest if such a +character as Slender, in the _Merry Wives of Windsor_, be compared with +any one of the inexhaustible variety of idiots in Jonson's plays; with +Master Stephen, for example, in _Every Man in his Humor_; or, if +Falstaff be put side by side with Captain Bobadil, in the same comedy, +perhaps Jonson's masterpiece in the way of comic caricature. +_Cynthia's Revels_ was a satire on the courtiers and the _Poetaster_ on +Jonson's literary enemies. The _Alchemist_ was an exposure of +quackery, and is one of his best comedies, but somewhat overweighted +with learning. _Volpone_ is the most powerful of all his dramas, but +is a harsh and disagreeable piece; and the state of society which it +depicts is too revolting for comedy. The _Silent Woman_ is, perhaps, +the easiest of all Jonson's plays for a modern reader to follow and +appreciate. There is a distinct plot to it, the situation is extremely +ludicrous, and the emphasis is laid upon single humor or eccentricity, +as in some of Moliere's lighter comedies, like _Le Malade Imaginaire_, +or _Le Medecin malgre lui_. + +In spite of his heaviness in drama, Jonson had a light enough touch in +lyric poetry. His songs have not the careless sweetness of +Shakspere's, but they have a grace of their own. Such pieces as his +{123} _Love's Triumph_, _Hymn to Diana_, _The Noble Mind_, and the +adaptation from _Philostratus_, + + "Drink to me only with thine eyes," + +and many others entitle their author to rank among the first English +lyrists. Some of these occur in his two collections of miscellaneous +verse, the _Forest_ and _Underwoods_; others in the numerous masques +which he composed. These were a species of entertainment, very popular +at the court of James I., combining dialogue with music, intricate +dances, and costly scenery. Jonson left an unfinished pastoral drama, +the _Sad Shepherd_, which, though not equal to Fletcher's _Faithful +Shepherdess_, contains passages of great beauty, one, especially, +descriptive of the shepherdess + + "Earine, + Who had her very being and her name + With the first buds and breathings of the spring, + Born with the primrose and the violet + And earliest roses blown." + + + +1. Ward's History of English Dramatic Literature. + +2. Palgrave's Golden Treasury of Songs and Lyrics. + +3. The Courtly Poets from Raleigh to Montrose. Edited by J. Hannah. + +4. Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia. (First and Second Books.) + +5. Bacon's Essays. Edited by W. Aldis Wright + +{124} + +6. The Cambridge Shakspere. [Clark & Wright.] + +7. Charles Lamb's Specimens of English Dramatic Poets. + +8. Ben Jonson's Volpone and Silent Woman. (Cunningham's or Gifford's +Edition.) + + + +[1] Francis Beaumont. _Letter to Ben Jonson_. + + + + +{125} + +CHAPTER IV. + +THE AGE OF MILTON. + +1608-1674. + +The Elisabethan age proper closed with the death of the queen, and the +accession of James I., in 1603, but the literature of the fifty years +following was quite as rich as that of the half-century that had passed +since she came to the throne, in 1557. The same qualities of thought +and style which had marked the writers of her reign, prolonged +themselves in their successors, through the reigns of the first two +Stuart kings and the Commonwealth. Yet there was a change in _spirit_. +Literature is only one of the many forms in which the national mind +expresses itself. In periods of political revolution, literature, +leaving the serene air of fine art, partakes the violent agitation of +the times. There were seeds of civil and religious discord in +Elisabethan England. As between the two parties in the Church there +was a compromise and a truce rather than a final settlement. The +Anglican doctrine was partly Calvinistic and partly Arminian. The form +of government was Episcopal, but there was a large body of +Presbyterians in the Church who desired a change. In {126} the ritual +and ceremonies many "rags of popery" had been retained, which the +extreme reformers wished to tear away. But Elisabeth was a +worldly-minded woman, impatient of theological disputes. Though +circumstances had made her the champion of Protestantism in Europe, she +kept many Catholic notions, disapproved, for example, of the marriage +of priests, and hated sermons. She was jealous of her prerogative in +the State, and in the Church she enforced uniformity. The authors of +the _Martin Marprelate_ pamphlets against the bishops, were punished by +death or imprisonment. While the queen lived things were kept well +together and England was at one in face of the common foe. Admiral +Howard, who commanded the English naval forces against the Armada, was +a Catholic. + +But during the reigns of James I. (1603-1625) and Charles I. +(1625-1649) Puritanism grew stronger through repression. "England," +says the historian Green, "became the people of a book, and that book +the Bible." The power of the king was used to impose the power of the +bishops upon the English and Scotch Churches until religious discontent +became also political discontent, and finally overthrew the throne. +The writers of this period divided more and more into two hostile +camps. On the side of Church and king was the bulk of the learning and +genius of the time. But on the side of free religion and the +Parliament were the stern conviction, the fiery zeal, the excited +imagination of English Puritanism. The {127} spokesman of this +movement was Milton, whose great figure dominates the literary history +of his generation, as Shakspere's does of the generation preceding. + +The drama went on in the course marked out for it by Shakspere's +example, until the theaters were closed, by Parliament, in 1642. Of +the Stuart dramatists, the most important were Beaumont and Fletcher, +all of whose plays were produced during the reign of James I. These +were fifty-three in number, but only thirteen of them were joint +productions. Francis Beaumont was twenty years younger than Shakspere, +and died a few years before him. He was the son of a judge of the +Common Pleas. His collaborator, John Fletcher, a son of the bishop of +London, was five years older than Beaumont, and survived him nine +years. He was much the more prolific of the two and wrote alone some +forty plays. Although the life of one of these partners was +conterminous with Shakspere's, their works exhibit a later phase of the +dramatic art. The Stuart dramatists followed the lead of Shakspere +rather than of Ben Jonson. Their plays, like the former's, belong to +the romantic drama. They present a poetic and idealized version of +life, deal with the highest passions and the wildest buffoonery, and +introduce a great variety of those daring situations and incidents +which we agree to call romantic. But while Shakspere seldom or never +overstepped the modesty of nature, his successors ran into every +license. They {128} sought to stimulate the jaded appetite of their +audience by exhibiting monstrosities of character, unnatural lusts, +subtleties of crime, virtues and vices both in excess. + +Beaumont and Fletcher's plays are much easier and more agreeable +reading than Ben Jonson's. Though often loose in their plots and +without that consistency in the development of their characters which +distinguished Jonson's more conscientious workmanship, they are full of +graceful dialogue and beautiful poetry. Dryden said that after the +Restoration two of their plays were acted for one of Shakspere's or +Jonson's throughout the year, and he added, that they "understood and +imitated the conversation of _gentlemen_ much better, whose wild +debaucheries and quickness of wit in repartees no poet can ever paint +as they have done." Wild debauchery was certainly not the mark of a +gentleman in Shakspere, nor was it altogether so in Beaumont and +Fletcher. Their gentlemen are gallant and passionate lovers, gay +cavaliers, generous, courageous, courteous--according to the fashion of +their times--and sensitive on the point of honor. They are far +superior to the cold-blooded rakes of Dryden and the Restoration +comedy. Still the manners and language in Beaumont and Fletcher's +plays are extremely licentious, and it is not hard to sympathize with +the objections to the theater expressed by the Puritan writer, William +Prynne, who, after denouncing the long hair of the cavaliers in his +tract, _The {129} Unloveliness of Lovelocks_, attacked the stage, in +1633, with _Histrio-mastix: the Player's Scourge_; an offense for which +he was fined, imprisoned, pilloried, and had his ears cropped. +Coleridge said that Shakspere was coarse, but never gross. He had the +healthy coarseness of nature herself. But Beaumont and Fletcher's +pages are corrupt. Even their chaste women are immodest in language +and thought. They use not merely that frankness of speech which was a +fashion of the times, but a profusion of obscene imagery which could +not proceed from a pure mind. Chastity with them is rather a bodily +accident than a virtue of the heart, says Coleridge. + +Among the best of their light comedies are _The Chances_, _The Scornful +Lady_, _The Spanish Curate_, and _Rule a Wife and Have a Wife_. But +far superior to these are their tragedies and tragi-comedies, _The +Maia's Tragedy_, _Philaster_, _A King and No King_--all written +jointly--and _Valentinian_ and _Thierry and Theodoret_, written by +Fletcher alone, but perhaps, in part, sketched out by Beaumont. The +tragic masterpiece of Beaumont and Fletcher is _The Maid's Tragedy_, a +powerful but repulsive play, which sheds a singular light not only upon +its authors' dramatic methods, but also upon the attitude toward +royalty favored by the doctrine of the divine right of kings, which +grew up under the Stuarts. The heroine, Evadne, has been in secret a +mistress of the king, who marries her to Amintor, a gentleman of his +court, {130} because, as she explains to her bridegroom, on the wedding +night, + + "I must have one + To father children, and to bear the name + Of husband to me, that my sin may be + More honorable." + + +This scene is, perhaps, the most affecting and impressive in the whole +range of Beaumont and Fletcher's drama. Yet when Evadne names the king +as her paramour, Amintor exclaims: + + "O thou hast named a word that wipes away + All thoughts revengeful. In that sacred name + 'The king' there lies a terror. What frail man + Dares lift his hand against it? Let the gods + Speak to him when they please; till when, let us + Suffer and wait." + +And the play ends with the words + + "On lustful kings, + Unlooked-for sudden deaths from heaven are sent, + But cursed is he that is their instrument." + + +Aspatia, in this tragedy, is a good instance of Beaumont and Fletcher's +pathetic characters. She is troth-plight wife to Amintor, and after +he, by the king's command, has forsaken her for Evadne, she disguises +herself as a man, provokes her unfaithful lover to a duel, and dies +under his sword, blessing the hand that killed her. This is a common +type in Beaumont and Fletcher, and was drawn originally from +Shakspere's _Ophelia_. All their good women have the instinctive +fidelity of a dog, and a superhuman patience and devotion, {131} a +"gentle forlornness" under wrongs, which is painted with an almost +feminine tenderness. In _Philaster, or Love Lies Bleeding_, Euphrasia, +conceiving a hopeless passion for Philaster--who is in love with +Arethusa--puts on the dress of a page and enters his service. He +employs her to carry messages to his lady-love, just as Viola, in +_Twelfth Night_, is sent by the Duke to Olivia. Philaster is persuaded +by slanderers that his page and his lady have been unfaithful to him, +and in his jealous fury he wounds Euphrasia with his sword. Afterward, +convinced of the boy's fidelity, he asks forgiveness, whereto Euphrasia +replies, + + "Alas, my lord, my life is not a thing + Worthy your noble thoughts. 'Tis not a life, + 'Tis but a piece of childhood thrown away." + +Beaumont and Fletcher's love-lorn maids wear the willow very sweetly, +but in all their piteous passages there is nothing equal to the natural +pathos--the pathos which arises from the deep springs of character--of +that one brief question and answer in _King Lear_. + + "_Lear_. So young and so untender? + + "_Cordelia_. So young, my lord, and true." + + +The disguise of a woman in man's apparel is a common incident in the +romantic drama; and the fact, that on the Elisabethan stage the female +parts were taken by boys, made the deception easier. Viola's situation +in _Twelfth Night_ is precisely similar to Euphrasia's, but there is a +{132} difference in the handling of the device which is characteristic +of a distinction between Shakspere's art and that of his +contemporaries. The audience in _Twelfth Night_ is taken into +confidence and made aware of Viola's real nature from the start, while +Euphrasia's _incognito_ is preserved till the fifth act, and then +disclosed by an accident. This kind of mystification and surprise was +a trick below Shakspere. In this instance, moreover, it involved a +departure from dramatic probability. Euphrasia could, at any moment, +by revealing her identity, have averted the greatest sufferings and +dangers from Philaster, Arethusa, and herself, and the only motive for +her keeping silence is represented to have been a feeling of maidenly +shame at her position. Such strained and fantastic motives are too +often made the pivot of the action in Beaumont and Fletcher's +tragi-comedies. Their characters have not the depth and truth of +Shakspere's, nor are they drawn so sharply. One reads their plays with +pleasure and remembers here and there a passage of fine poetry, or a +noble or lovely trait. But their characters, as wholes, leave a fading +impression. Who, even after a single reading or representation, ever +forgets Falstaff, or Shylock, or King Lear? + +The moral inferiority of Beaumont and Fletcher is well seen in such a +play as _A King and No King_. Here Arbaces falls in love with his +sister, and, after a furious conflict in his own mind, finally succumbs +to his guilty passion. He is rescued from {133} the consequences of +his weakness by the discovery that Panthea is not, in fact, his sister. +But this is to cut the knot and not to untie it. It leaves the +_denouement_ to chance, and not to those moral forces through which +Shakspere always wrought his conclusions. Arbaces has failed, and the +piece of luck which keeps his failure innocent is rejected by every +right-feeling spectator. In one of John Ford's tragedies, the +situation which in _A King and No King_ is only apparent, becomes real, +and incest is boldly made the subject of the play. Ford pushed the +morbid and unnatural in character and passion into even wilder extremes +than Beaumont and Fletcher. His best play, the _Broken Heart_, is a +prolonged and unrelieved torture of the feelings. + +Fletcher's _Faithful Shepherdess_ is the best English pastoral drama. +Its choral songs are richly and sweetly modulated, and the influence of +the whole poem upon Milton is very apparent in his _Comus_. _The +Knight of the Burning Pestle_, written by Beaumont and Fletcher +jointly, was the first burlesque comedy in the language, and is +excellent fooling. Beaumont and Fletcher's blank verse is musical, but +less masculine than Marlowe's or Shakspere's, by reason of their +excessive use of extra syllables and feminine endings. + +In John Webster the fondness for the abnormal and sensational themes, +which beset the Stuart stage, showed itself in the exaggeration of the +terrible into the horrible. Fear, in Shakspere--as in {134} the great +murder scene in _Macbeth_--is a pure passion; but in Webster it is +mingled with something physically repulsive. Thus his _Duchess of +Malfi_ is presented in the dark with a dead man's hand, and is told +that it is the hand of her murdered husband. She is shown a dance of +madmen and, "behind a traverse, the artificial figures of her children, +appearing as if dead." Treated in this elaborate fashion, that +"terror," which Aristotle said it was one of the objects of tragedy to +move, loses half its dignity. Webster's images have the smell of the +charnel house about them. + + "She would not after the report keep fresh + As long as flowers on graves." + "We are only like dead walls or vaulted graves, + That, ruined, yield no echo. + O this gloomy world! + In what a shadow or deep pit of darkness + Doth womanish and fearful mankind live!" + + +Webster had an intense and somber genius. In diction he was the most +Shaksperian of the Elisabethan dramatists, and there are sudden gleams +of beauty among his dark horrors, which light up a whole scene with +some abrupt touch of feeling. + + "Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle; she died young," + +says the brother of the Duchess, when he has procured her murder and +stands before the corpse. _Vittoria Corombona_ is described in the old +editions as "a night-piece," and it should, indeed, be {135} acted by +the shuddering light of torches, and with the cry of the screech-owl to +punctuate the speeches. The scene of Webster's two best tragedies was +laid, like many of Ford's, Cyril Tourneur's, and Beaumont and +Fletcher's, in Italy--the wicked and splendid Italy of the Renaissance, +which had such a fascination for the Elisabethan imagination. It was +to them the land of the Borgias and the Cenci; of families of proud +nobles, luxurious, cultivated, but full of revenges and ferocious +cunning; subtle poisoners, who killed with a perfumed glove or fan; +parricides, atheists, committers of unnamable crimes, and inventors of +strange and delicate varieties of sin. + +But a very few have here been mentioned of the great host of dramatists +who kept the theaters busy through the reigns of Elisabeth, James I., +and Charles I. The last of the race was James Shirley, who died in +1666, and whose thirty-eight plays were written during the reign of +Charles I. and the Commonwealth. + +In the miscellaneous prose and poetry of this period there is lacking +the free, exulting, creative impulse of the elder generation, but there +is a soberer feeling and a certain scholarly choiceness which commend +themselves to readers of bookish tastes. Even that quaintness of +thought, which is a mark of the Commonwealth writers, is not without +its attraction for a nice literary palate. Prose became now of greater +relative importance than ever before. Almost every distinguished +writer of {136} the time lent his pen to one or the other party in the +great theological and political controversy of the time. There were +famous theologians, like Hales, Chillingworth, and Baxter; historians +and antiquaries, like Selden, Knolles, and Cotton; philosophers, such +as Hobbes, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, and More, the Platonist; and +writers in rural science--which now entered upon its modern, +experimental phase, under the stimulus of Bacon's writings--among whom +may be mentioned Wallis, the mathematician; Boyle, the chemist, and +Harvey, the discoverer of the circulation of the blood. These are +outside of our subject, but in the strictly literary prose of the time, +the same spirit of roused inquiry is manifest, and the same disposition +to a thorough and exhaustive treatment of a subject which is proper to +the scientific attitude of mind. The line between true and false +science, however, had not yet been drawn. The age was pedantic, and +appealed too much to the authority of antiquity. Hence we have such +monuments of perverse and curious erudition as Robert Burton's _Anatomy +of Melancholy_, 1621; and Sir Thomas Browne's _Pseudodoxia Epidemica_, +or _Inquiries into Vulgar and Common Errors_, 1646. The former of +these was the work of an Oxford scholar, an astrologer, who cast his +own horoscope, and a victim himself of the atrabilious humor, from +which he sought relief in listening to the ribaldry of barge-men, and +in compiling this _Anatomy_, in which the causes, symptoms, +prognostics, and cures of {137} melancholy are considered in numerous +partitions, sections, members, and subsections. The work is a mosaic +of quotations. All literature is ransacked for anecdotes and +instances, and the book has thus become a mine of out-of-the-way +learning, in which later writers have dug. Lawrence Sterne helped +himself freely to Burton's treasures, and Dr. Johnson said that the +_Anatomy_ was the only book that ever took him out of bed two hours +sooner than he wished to rise. + +The vulgar and common errors which Sir Thomas Browne set himself to +refute, were such as these: That dolphins are crooked, that Jews stink, +that a man hath one rib less than a woman, that Xerxes's army drank up +rivers, that cicades are bred out of cuckoo-spittle, that Hannibal +split Alps with vinegar, together with many similar fallacies touching +Pope Joan, the Wandering Jew, the decuman or tenth wave, the blackness +of negroes, Friar Bacon's brazen head, etc. Another book in which +great learning and ingenuity were applied to trifling ends, was the +same author's _Garden of Cyrus; or, the Quincuncial Lozenge or Network +Plantations of the Ancients_, in which a mystical meaning is sought in +the occurrence throughout nature and art of the figure of the quincunx +or lozenge. Browne was a physician of Norwich, where his library, +museum, aviary, and botanic garden were thought worthy of a special +visit by the Royal Society. He was an antiquary and a naturalist, and +deeply read in the schoolmen and the Christian fathers. He was {138} a +mystic, and a writer of a rich and peculiar imagination, whose thoughts +have impressed themselves upon many kindred minds, like Coleridge, De +Quincey, and Emerson. Two of his books belong to literature, _Religio +Medici_, published in 1642, and _Hydriotaphia; or, Urn Burial_, 1658, a +discourse upon rites of burial and incremation, suggested by some Roman +funeral urns, dug up in Norfolk. Browne's style, though too highly +Latinized, is a good example of Commonwealth prose, that stately, +cumbrous, brocaded prose, which had something of the flow and measure +of verse, rather than the quicker, colloquial movement of modern +writing. Browne stood aloof from the disputes of his time, and in his +very subjects there is a calm and meditative remoteness from the daily +interests of men. His _Religio Medici_ is full of a wise tolerance and +a singular elevation of feeling. "At the sight of a cross, or +crucifix, I can dispense with my hat, but scarce with the thought or +memory of my Saviour." "They only had the advantage of a bold and +noble faith, who lived before his coming." "They go the fairest way to +heaven, that would serve God without a hell." "All things are +artificial, for Nature is the art of God." The last chapter of the +_Urn Burial_ is an almost rithmical descant on mortality and oblivion. +The style kindles slowly into a somber eloquence. It is the most +impressive and extraordinary passage in the prose literature of the +time. Browne, like Hamlet, loved to "consider too curiously." His +subtlety {139} led him to "pose his apprehension with those involved +enigmas and riddles of the Trinity--with incarnation and resurrection;" +and to start odd inquiries; "what song the Syrens sang, or what name +Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women;" or whether, after +Lazarus was raised from the dead, "his heir might lawfully detain his +inheritance." The quaintness of his phrase appears at every turn. +"Charles the Fifth can never hope to live within two Methuselahs of +Hector." "Generations pass, while some trees stand, and old families +survive not three oaks." "Mummy is become merchandise; Mizraim cures +wounds, and Pharaoh is sold for balsams." + +One of the pleasantest of old English humorists is Thomas Fuller, who +was a chaplain in the royal army during the civil war, and wrote, among +other things, a _Church History of Britain_; a book of religious +meditations, _Good Thoughts in Bad Times_, and a "character" book, _The +Holy and Profane State_. His most important work, the _Worthies of +England_, was published in 1662, the year after his death. This was a +description of every English county; its natural commodities, +manufactures, wonders, proverbs, etc., with brief biographies of its +memorable persons. Fuller had a well-stored memory, sound piety, and +excellent common sense. Wit was his leading intellectual trait, and +the quaintness which he shared with his contemporaries appears in his +writings in a fondness for puns, droll turns of expressions, and bits +of eccentric {140} suggestion. His prose, unlike Browne's, Milton's, +and Jeremy Taylor's, is brief, simple, and pithy. His dry vein of +humor was imitated by the American Cotton Mather, in his _Magnalia_, +and by many of the English and New England divines of the 17th century. + +Jeremy Taylor was also a chaplain in the king's army, was several times +imprisoned for his opinions, and was afterward made, by Charles II., +Bishop of Down and Connor. He is a devotional rather than a +theological writer, and his _Holy Living_ and _Holy Dying_ are +religious classics. Taylor, like Sidney, was a "warbler of poetic +prose." He has been called the prose Spenser, and his English has the +opulence, the gentle elaboration, the "linked sweetness long drawn out" +of the poet of the _Faery Queene_. In fullness and resonance, Taylor's +diction resembles that of the great orators, though it lacks their +nervous energy. His pathos is exquisitely tender, and his numerous +similes have Spenser's pictorial amplitude. Some of them have become +commonplaces for admiration, notably his description of the flight of +the skylark, and the sentence in which he compares the gradual +awakening of the human faculties to the sunrise, which "first opens a +little eye of heaven, and sends away the spirits of darkness, and gives +light to a cock, and calls up the lark to matins, and by and by gilds +the fringes of a cloud, and peeps over the eastern hills." Perhaps the +most impressive single passage of Taylor's is the concluding chapter in +{141} _Holy Dying_. From the midst of the sickening paraphernalia of +death which he there accumulates, rises that delicate image of the +fading rose, one of the most perfect things in its wording, in all our +prose literature: "But so have I seen a rose newly springing from the +clefts of its hood, and at first it was as fair as the morning, and +full with the dew of heaven as a lamb's fleece; but when a ruder breath +had forced open its virgin modesty, and dismantled its too youthful and +unripe retirements, it began to put on darkness and to decline to +softness and the symptoms of a sickly age; it bowed the head and broke +its stock; and at night, having lost some of its leaves and all its +beauty, it fell into the portion of weeds and outworn faces." + +With the progress of knowledge and discussion many kinds of prose +literature, which were not absolutely new, now began to receive wider +extension. Of this sort are the _Letters from Italy_, and other +miscellanies included in the _Reliquiae Wottonianae_, or remains of Sir +Henry Wotton, English embassador at Venice in the reign of James I., +and subsequently Provost of Eton College. Also the _Table Talk_--full +of incisive remarks--left by John Selden, whom Milton pronounced the +first scholar of his age, and who was a distinguished authority in +legal antiquities and international law, furnished notes to Drayton's +_Polyolbion_, and wrote upon Eastern religions, and upon the Arundel +marbles. Literary biography was represented by the charming little +_Lives_ of good old Izaak Walton, the first {142} edition of whose +_Compleat Angler_ was printed in 1653. The lives were five in number, +of Hooker, Wotton, Donne, Herbert, and Sanderson. Several of these +were personal friends of the author, and Sir Henry Wotton was a brother +of the angle. The _Compleat Angler_, though not the first piece of +sporting literature in English, is unquestionably the most popular, and +still remains a favorite with "all that are lovers of virtue, and dare +trust in providence, and be quiet, and go a-angling." As in Ascham's +_Toxophilus_, the instruction is conveyed in dialogue form, but the +technical part of the book is relieved by many delightful digressions. +_Piscator_ and his pupil _Venator_ pursue their talk under a +honeysuckle hedge or a sycamore tree during a passing shower. They +repair, after the day's fishing, to some honest ale-house, with +lavender in the window, and a score of ballads stuck about the wall, +where they sing catches--"old-fashioned poetry but choicely +good"--composed by the author or his friends, drink barley wine, and +eat their trout or chub. They encounter milkmaids, who sing to them +and give them a draft of the red cow's milk, and they never cease their +praises of the angler's life, of rural contentment among the cowslip +meadows, and the quiet streams of Thames, or Lea, or Shawford Brook. + +The decay of a great literary school is usually signalized by the +exaggeration of its characteristic traits. The manner of the +Elisabethan poets was {143} pushed into mannerism by their successors. +That manner, at its best, was hardly a simple one, but in the Stuart +and Commonwealth writers it became mere extravagance. Thus Phineas +Fletcher--a cousin of the dramatist--composed a long Spenserian +allegory, the _Purple Island_, descriptive of the human body. George +Herbert and others made anagrams and verses shaped like an altar, a +cross, or a pair of Easter wings. This group of poets was named, by +Dr. Johnson, in his life of Cowley, the metaphysical school. Other +critics have preferred to call them the fantastic or conceited school, +the later Euphuists, or the English Marinists and Gongorists, after the +poets Marino and Gongora, who brought this fashion to its extreme in +Italy and in Spain. The English _conceptistas_ were mainly clergymen +of the established Church, Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, Quarles, and +Herrick. But Crashaw was a Roman Catholic, and Cowley--the latest of +them--a layman. + +The one who set the fashion was Dr. John Donne. Dean of St. Paul's, +whom Dryden pronounced a great wit, but not a great poet, and whom Ben +Jonson esteemed the best poet in the world for some things, but likely +to be forgotten for want of being understood. Besides satires and +epistles in verse, he composed amatory poems in his youth, and divine +poems in his age, both kinds distinguished by such subtle obscurity, +and far-fetched ingenuities, that they read like a series of puzzles. +When this poet has occasion to write a valediction {144} to his +mistress upon going into France, he compares their temporary separation +to that of a pair of compasses: + + "Such wilt thou be to me, who must, + Like the other foot obliquely run; + Thy firmness makes my circle just, + And makes me end where I begun." + +If he would persuade her to marriage he calls her attention to a flea-- + + "Me it sucked first and now sucks thee, + And in this flea our two bloods mingled be." + +He says that the flea is their marriage-temple, and bids her forbear to +kill it lest she thereby commit murder, suicide, and sacrilege all in +one. Donne's figures are scholastic and smell of the lamp. He +ransacked cosmography, astrology, alchemy, optics, the canon law, and +the divinity of the schoolmen for ink-horn terms and similes. He was +in verse what Browne was in prose. He loved to play with distinctions, +hyperboles, paradoxes, the very casuistry and dialectics of love or +devotion. + + "Thou canst not every day give me thy heart: + If thou canst give it then thou never gav'st it; + Love's riddles are that though thy heart depart, + It stays at home and thou with losing sav'st it." + + +Donne's verse is usually as uncouth as his thought. But there is a +real passion slumbering under these ashy heaps of conceit, and +occasionally {145} a pure flame darts up, as in the justly admired +lines: + + "Her pure and eloquent blood + Spoke in her cheek and so divinely wrought + That one might almost say her body thought." + + +This description of Donne is true, with modifications, of all the +metaphysical poets. They had the same forced and unnatural style. The +ordinary laws of the association of ideas were reversed with them. It +was not the nearest, but the remotest, association that was called up. +"Their attempts," said Johnson, "were always analytic: they broke every +image into fragments." The finest spirit among them was "holy George +Herbert," whose _Temple_ was published in 1631. The titles in this +volume were such as the following: Christmas, Easter, Good Friday, Holy +Baptism, The Cross, The Church Porch, Church Music, The Holy +Scriptures, Redemption, Faith, Doomsday. Never since, except, perhaps, +in Keble's _Christian Year_, have the ecclesiastic ideals of the +Anglican Church--the "beauty of holiness"--found such sweet expression +in poetry. The verses entitled _Virtue_-- + + "Sweet day so cool, so calm, so bright," etc. + +are known to most readers, as well as the line, + + "Who sweeps a room, as for thy laws, makes that + and the action fine." + +The quaintly named pieces, the _Elixir_, the _Collar_, the _Pulley_, +are full of deep thought and spiritual {146} feeling. But Herbert's +poetry is constantly disfigured by bad taste. Take this passage from +_Whitsunday_, + + "Listen, sweet dove, unto my song, + And spread thy golden wings on me, + Hatching my tender heart so long, + Till it get wing and fly away with thee," + +which is almost as ludicrous as the epitaph, written by his +contemporary, Carew, on the daughter of Sir Thomas Wentworth, whose soul + + . . . "grew so fast within + It broke the outward shell of sin, + And so was hatched a cherubin." + + +Another of these Church poets was Henry Vaughan, "the Silurist," or +Welshman, whose fine piece, the _Retreat_, has been often compared with +Wordsworth's _Ode on the Intimations of Immortality_. Francis Quarles' +_Divine Emblems_ long remained a favorite book with religious readers, +both in Old and New England. Emblem books, in which engravings of a +figurative design were accompanied with explanatory letterpress in +verse, were a popular class of literature in the 17th century. The +most famous of them all were Jacob Catt's Dutch emblems. + +One of the most delightful of English lyric poets is Robert Herrick, +whose _Hesperides_, 1648 has lately received such sympathetic +illustration from the pencil of an American artist, Mr. E. A. Abbey. +Herrick was a clergyman of the English Church, {147} and was expelled +by the Puritans from his living, the vicarage of Dean Prior, in +Devonshire. The most quoted of his religious poems is, _How to Keep a +True Lent_. But it may be doubted whether his tastes were prevailingly +clerical; his poetry certainly was not. He was a disciple of Ben +Jonson and his boon companion at + + . . . "those lyric feasts + Made at the Sun, + The Dog, the Triple Tun; + Where we such clusters had + As made us nobly wild, not mad. + And yet each verse of thine + Outdid the meat, outdid the frolic wine." + + +Herrick's _Noble Numbers_ seldom rises above the expression of a +cheerful gratitude and contentment. He had not the subtlety and +elevation of Herbert, but he surpassed him in the grace, melody, +sensuous beauty, and fresh lyrical impulse of his verse. The conceits +of the metaphysical school appear in Herrick only in the form of an +occasional pretty quaintness. He is the poet of English parish +festivals and of English flowers, the primrose, the whitethorn, the +daffodil. He sang the praises of the country life, love songs to +"Julia," and hymns of thanksgiving for simple blessings. He has been +called the English Catullus, but he strikes rather the Horatian note of +_Carpe diem_, and regret at the shortness of life and youth in many of +his best-known poems, such as {148} _Gather ye Rose-buds while ye may_, +and _To Corinna, To Go a Maying_. + +Abraham Cowley is now less remembered for his poetry than for his +pleasant volume of Essays, published after the Restoration; but he was +thought in his own time a better poet than Milton. His collection of +love songs--the _Mistress_--is a mass of cold conceits, in the +metaphysical manner; but his elegies on Crashaw and Harvey have much +dignity and natural feeling. He introduced the Pindaric ode into +English, and wrote an epic poem on a biblical subject--the +_Davideis_--now quite unreadable. Cowley was a royalist and followed +the exiled court to France. Side by side with the Church poets were +the cavaliers--Carew, Waller, Lovelace, Suckling, L'Estrange, and +others--gallant courtiers and officers in the royal army, who mingled +love and loyalty in their strains. Colonel Richard Lovelace, who lost +every thing in the king's service and was several times imprisoned, +wrote two famous songs--_To Lucasta on going to the Wars_--in which +occur the lines, + + "I could not love thee, dear, so much, + Loved I not honor more." + +and _To Althaea from Prison_, in which he sings "the sweetness, mercy, +majesty, and glories of his king," and declares that "stone walls do +not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage." Another of the cavaliers was +sir John Suckling, who formed a plot to rescue the Earl of Stratford, +raised a troop of horse {149} for Charles I., was impeached by the +Parliament and fled to France. He was a man of wit and pleasure, who +penned a number of gay trifles, but has been saved from oblivion +chiefly by his exquisite _Ballad upon a Wedding_. Thomas Carew and +Edmund Waller were poets of the same stamp--graceful and easy, but +shallow in feeling. Waller, who followed the court to Paris, was the +author of two songs, which are still favorites, _Go, Lovely Rose_, and +_On a Girdle_, and he first introduced the smooth correct manner of +writing in couplets, which Dryden and Pope carried to perfection. +Gallantry rather than love was the inspiration of these courtly +singers. In such verses as Carew's _Encouragements to a Lover_, and +George Wither's _The Manly Heart_-- + + "If she be not so to me, + What care I how fair she be?" + +we see the revolt against the high, passionate, Sidneian love of the +Elisabethan sonneteers, and the note of _persiflage_ that was to mark +the lyrical verse of the Restoration. But the poetry of the cavaliers +reached its high-water mark in one fiery-hearted song by the noble and +unfortunate James Graham, Marquis of Montrose, who invaded Scotland in +the interest of Charles II., and was taken prisoner and put to death at +Edinburgh in 1650. + + "My dear and only love, I pray + That little world of thee + Be governed by no other sway + Than purest monarchy." + +{150} In language borrowed from the politics of the time, he cautions +his mistress against _synods_ or _committees_ in her heart; swears to +make her glorious by his pen and famous by his sword; and with that +fine recklessness which distinguished the dashing troopers of Prince +Rupert, he adds, in words that have been often quoted, + + "He either fears his fate too much, + Or his deserts are small, + That dares not put it to the touch + To gain or lose it all." + + +John Milton, the greatest English poet except Shakspere, was born in +London in 1608. His father was a scrivener, an educated man, and a +musical composer of some merit. At his home Milton was surrounded with +all the influences of a refined and well ordered Puritan household of +the better class. He inherited his father's musical tastes, and during +the latter part of his life, he spent a part of every afternoon in +playing the organ. No poet has written more beautifully of music than +Milton. One of his sonnets was addressed to Henry Lawes, the composer, +who wrote the airs to the songs in _Comus_. Milton's education was +most careful and thorough. He spent seven years at Cambridge where, +from his personal beauty and fastidious habits, he was called "The lady +of Christ's." At Horton, in Buckinghamshire, where his father had a +country seat, he passed five years more, perfecting himself in his +studies, and then traveled for fifteen months, {151} mainly in Italy, +visiting Naples and Rome, but residing at Florence. Here he saw +Galileo, a prisoner of the Inquisition "for thinking otherwise in +astronomy than his Dominican and Franciscan licensers thought." Milton +is the most scholarly and the most truly classical of English poets. +His Latin verse, for elegance and correctness, ranks with Addison's; +and his Italian poems were the admiration of the Tuscan scholars. But +his learning appears in his poetry only in the form of a fine and +chastened result, and not in laborious allusion and pedantic citation, +as too often in Ben Jonson, for instance. "My father," he wrote, +"destined me, while yet a little child, for the study of humane +letters." He was also destined for the ministry, but, "coming to some +maturity of years and perceiving what tyranny had invaded the +Church, . . . I thought it better to prefer a blameless silence, before +the sacred office of speaking, bought and begun with servitude and +forswearing." Other hands than a bishop's were laid upon his head. +"He who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter," he +says, "ought himself to be a true poem." And he adds that his "natural +haughtiness" saved him from all impurity of living. Milton had a +sublime self-respect. The dignity and earnestness of the Puritan +gentleman blended in his training with the culture of the Renaissance. +Born into an age of spiritual conflict, he dedicated his gift to the +service of Heaven, and he became, like Heine, a valiant soldier in the +war for {152} liberation. He was the poet of a cause, and his song was +keyed to + + "The Dorian mood + Of flutes and soft recorders such as raised + To heighth of noblest temper, heroes old + Arming to battle." + +On comparing Milton with Shakspere, with his universal sympathies and +receptive imagination, one perceives a loss in breadth, but a gain in +intense personal conviction. He introduced a new note into English +poetry, the passion for truth and the feeling of religious sublimity. +Milton's was an heroic age, and its song must be lyric rather than +dramatic; its singer must be in the fight and of it. + +Of the verses which he wrote at Cambridge, the most important was his +splendid ode _On the Morning of Christ's Nativity_. At Horton he +wrote, among other things, the companion pieces, _L'Allegro_ and _Il +Penseroso_, of a kind quite new in English, giving to the landscape an +expression in harmony with two contrasted moods. _Comus_, which +belongs to the same period, was the perfection of the Elisabethan court +masque, and was presented at Ludlow Castle in 1634, on the occasion of +the installation of the Earl of Bridgewater as Lord President of Wales. +Under the guise of a skillful addition to the Homeric allegory of +Circe, with her cup of enchantment, it was a Puritan song in praise of +chastity and temperance. _Lycidas_, in like manner, was the perfection +of the Elisabethan {153} pastoral elegy. It was contributed to a +volume of memorial verses on the death of Edward King, a Cambridge +friend of Milton's, who was drowned in the Irish Channel in 1637. In +one stern strain, which is put into the mouth of St. Peter, the author +"foretells the ruin of our corrupted clergy, then at their height." + + "But that two-handed engine at the door + Stands ready to smite once and smite no more." + +This was Milton's last utterance in English verse before the outbreak +of the civil war, and it sounds the alarm of the impending struggle. +In technical quality _Lycidas_ is the most wonderful of all Milton's +poems. The cunningly intricate harmony of the verse, the pressed and +packed language with its fullness of meaning and allusion make it +worthy of the minutest study. In these early poems, Milton, merely as +a poet, is at his best. Something of the Elisabethan style still +clings to them; but their grave sweetness, their choice wording, their +originality in epithet, name, and phrase, were novelties of Milton's +own. His English masters were Spenser, Fletcher, and Sylvester, the +translator of Du Bartas's _La Sepmaine_, but nothing of Spenser's +prolixity, or Fletcher's effeminacy, or Sylvester's quaintness is found +in Milton's pure, energetic diction. He inherited their beauties, but +his taste had been tempered to a finer edge by his studies in Greek and +Hebrew poetry. He was the last of the Elisabethans, and {154} his +style was at once the crown of the old and a departure into the new. +In masque, elegy, and sonnet, he set the seal to the Elisabethan +poetry, said the last word, and closed one great literary era. + +In 1639 the breach between Charles I. and his Parliament brought Milton +back from Italy. "I thought it base to be traveling at my ease for +amusement, while my fellow-countrymen at home were fighting for +liberty." For the next twenty years he threw himself into the contest, +and poured forth a succession of tracts, in English and Latin, upon the +various public questions at issue. As a political thinker, Milton had +what Bacon calls "the humor of a scholar." In a country of endowed +grammar schools and universities hardly emerged from a mediaeval +discipline and curriculum, he wanted to set up Greek gymnasia and +philosophical schools, after the fashion of the Porch and the Academy. +He would have imposed an Athenian democracy upon a people trained in +the traditions of monarchy and episcopacy. At the very moment when +England had grown tired of the Protectorate and was preparing to +welcome back the Stuarts, he was writing _An Easy and Ready Way to +Establish a Free Commonwealth_. Milton acknowledged that in prose he +had the use of his left hand only. There are passages of fervid +eloquence, where the style swells into a kind of lofty chant, with a +rithmical rise and fall to it, as in parts of the English Book of +Common Prayer. But in {155} general his sentences are long and +involved, full of inventions and latinized constructions. Controversy +at that day was conducted on scholastic lines. Each disputant, instead +of appealing at once to the arguments of expediency and common sense, +began with a formidable display of learning, ransacking Greek and Latin +authors and the fathers of the Church for opinions in support of his +own position. These authorities he deployed at tedious length and +followed them up with heavy scurrilities and "excusations," by way of +attack and defense. The dispute between Milton and Salmasius over the +execution of Charles I. was like a duel between two knights in full +armor striking at each other with ponderous maces. The very titles of +these pamphlets are enough to frighten off a modern reader: _A +Confutation of the Animadversions upon a Defense of a Humble +Remonstrance against a Treatise, entitled Of Reformation_. The most +interesting of Milton's prose tracts is his _Areopagitica: A Speech for +the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing_, 1644. The arguments in this are +of permanent force; but if the reader will compare it, or Jeremy +Taylor's _Liberty of Prophesying_, with Locke's _Letters on +Toleration_, he will see how much clearer and more convincing is the +modern method of discussion, introduced by writers like Hobbes and +Locke and Dryden. Under the Protectorate Milton was appointed Latin +Secretary to the Council of State. In the diplomatic correspondence +which was his official duty, and in the composition of his tract, {156} +_Defensio pro Populo Anglicano_, he overtasked his eyes, and in 1654 +became totally blind. The only poetry of Milton's belonging to the +years 1640-1660 are a few sonnets of the pure Italian form, mainly +called forth by public occasions. By the Elisabethans the sonnet had +been used mainly in love poetry. In Milton's hands, said Wordsworth, +"the thing became a trumpet." Some of his were addressed to political +leaders, like Fairfax, Cromwell, and Sir Henry Vane; and of these the +best is, perhaps, the sonnet written on the massacre of the Vaudois +Protestants--"a collect in verse," it has been called--which has the +fire of a Hebrew prophet invoking the divine wrath upon the oppressors +of Israel. Two were on his own blindness, and in these there is not +one selfish repining, but only a regret that the value of his service +is impaired-- + + "Will God exact day labor, light denied?" + + +After the restoration of the Stuarts, in 1660, Milton was for a while +in peril, by reason of the part that he had taken against the king. But + + "On evil days though fallen, and evil tongues, + In darkness and with dangers compassed round + And solitude," + +he bated no jot of heart or hope. Henceforth he becomes the most +heroic and affecting figure in English literary history. Years before +he had planned an epic poem on the subject of King {157} Arthur, and +again a sacred tragedy on man's fall and redemption. These experiments +finally took shape in _Paradise Lost_, which was given to the world in +1667. This is the epic of English Puritanism and of Protestant +Christianity. It was Milton's purpose to + + "assert eternal Providence + And justify the ways of God to men," + +or, in other words, to embody his theological system in verse. This +gives a doctrinal rigidity and even dryness to parts of the _Paradise +Lost_, which injure its effect as a poem. His "God the father turns a +school divine:" his Christ, as has been wittily said, is "God's good +boy:" the discourses of Raphael to Adam are scholastic lectures: Adam +himself is too sophisticated for the state of innocence, and Eve is +somewhat insipid. The real protagonist of the poem is Satan, upon +whose mighty figure Milton unconsciously bestowed something of his own +nature, and whose words of defiance might almost have come from some +Republican leader when the Good Old Cause went down. + + "What though the field be lost? + All is not lost, the unconquerable will + And study of revenge, immortal hate, + And courage never to submit or yield." + +But when all has been said that can be said in disparagement or +qualification, _Paradise Lost_ remains the foremost of English poems +and the {158} sublimest of all epics. Even in those parts where +theology encroaches most upon poetry, the diction, though often heavy, +is never languid. Milton's blank verse in itself is enough to bear up +the most prosaic theme, and so is his epic English, a style more +massive and splendid than Shakspere's, and comparable, like +Tertullian's Latin, to a river of molten gold. Of the countless single +beauties that sow his page + + "Thick as autumnal leaves that strew the brooks + In Valombrosa," + +there is no room to speak, nor of the astonishing fullness of substance +and multitude of thoughts which have caused the _Paradise Lost_ to be +called the book of universal knowledge. "The heat of Milton's mind," +said Dr. Johnson, "might be said to sublimate his learning and throw +off into his work the spirit of science, unmingled with its grosser +parts." The truth of this remark is clearly seen upon a comparison of +Milton's description of the creation, for example, with corresponding +passages in Sylvester's _Divine Weeks and Works_ (translated from the +Huguenot poet, Du Bartas), which was, in some sense, his original. But +the most heroic thing in Milton's heroic poem is Milton. There are no +strains in _Paradise Lost_ so absorbing as those in which the poet +breaks the strict epic bounds and speaks directly of himself, as in the +majestic lament over his own blindness, and in the invocation to +Urania, which open the third and seventh {159} books. Every-where, +too, one reads between the lines. We think of the dissolute cavaliers, +as Milton himself undoubtedly was thinking of them, when we read of +"the sons of Belial flown with insolence and wine," or when the Puritan +turns among the sweet landscapes of Eden, to denounce + + "court amours + Mixed dance, or wanton mask, or midnight ball, + Or serenade which the starved lover sings + To his proud fair, best quitted with disdain." + +And we think of Milton among the triumphant royalists when we read of +the Seraph Abdiel "faithful found among the faithless." + + "Nor number nor example with him wrought + To swerve from truth or change his constant mind, + Though single. From amidst them forth he passed, + Long way through hostile scorn, which he sustained + Superior, nor of violence feared aught: + And with retorted scorn his back he turned + On those proud towers to swift destruction doomed." + + +_Paradise Regained_ and _Samson Agonistes_ were published in 1671. The +first of these treated in four books Christ's temptation in the +wilderness, a subject that had already been handled in the Spenserian +allegorical manner by Giles Fletcher, a brother of the Purple Islander, +in his _Christ's Victory and Triumph_, 1610. The superiority of +_Paradise Lost_ to its sequel is not without significance. The +Puritans were Old Testament men. Their God was the Hebrew Jehovah, +whose single divinity the Catholic mythology had overlaid with the +{160} figures of the Son, the Virgin Mary, and the saints. They +identified themselves in thought with his chosen people, with the +militant theocracy of the Jews. Their sword was the sword of the Lord +and of Gideon. "To your tents, O Israel," was the cry of the London +mob when the bishops were committed to the Tower. And when the fog +lifted, on the morning of the battle of Dunbar, Cromwell exclaimed, +"Let God arise and let his enemies be scattered: like as the sun +riseth, so shalt thou drive them away." + +_Samson Agonistes_, though Hebrew in theme and in spirit, was in form a +Greek tragedy. It had chorus and semi-chorus, and preserved the +so-called dramatic unities; that is, the scene was unchanged, and there +were no intervals of time between the acts. In accordance with the +rules of the Greek theater, but two speakers appeared upon the stage at +once, and there was no violent action. The death of Samson is related +by a messenger. Milton's reason for the choice of this subject is +obvious. He himself was Samson, shorn of his strength, blind, and +alone among enemies; given over + + "to the unjust tribunals, under change of times, + And condemnation of the ungrateful multitude." + +As Milton grew older he discarded more and more the graces of poetry, +and relied purely upon the structure and the thought. In _Paradise +Lost_, although there is little resemblance to Elisabethan work--such +as one notices in _Comus_ and the {161} Christmas hymn--yet the style +is rich, especially in the earlier books. But in _Paradise Regained_ +it is severe to bareness, and in _Samson_, even to ruggedness. Like +Michelangelo, with whose genius he had much in common, Milton became +impatient of finish or of mere beauty. He blocked out his work in +masses, left rough places and surfaces not filled in, and inclined to +express his meaning by a symbol, rather than work it out in detail. It +was a part of his austerity, his increasing preference for structural +over decorative methods, to give up rime for blank verse. His latest +poem, _Samson Agonistes_, a metrical study of the highest interest. + +Milton was not quite alone among the poets of his time in espousing the +popular cause. Andrew Marvell, who was his assistant in the Latin +secretaryship and sat in Parliament for Hull, after the Restoration, +was a good Republican, and wrote a fine _Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's +Return from Ireland_. There is also a rare imaginative quality in his +_Song of the Exiles in Bermuda_, _Thoughts in a Garden_, and _The Girl +Describes her Fawn_. George Wither, who was imprisoned for his +satires, also took the side of the Parliament, but there is little that +is distinctively Puritan in his poetry. + + +1. Milton's Poetical Works. Edited by David Masson. Macmillan. + +2. Selections from Milton's Prose. Edited by F. D. Myers. (Parchment +Series.) + +{162} + +3. England's Antiphon. By George Macdonald. + +4. Robert Herrick's Hesperides. + +5. Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici and Hydriotaphia. Edited by +Willis Bund. Sampson Low & Co., 1873. + +6. Thomas. Fuller's Good Thoughts in Bad Times. + +7. Izaak Walton's Compleat Angler. + + + + +{163} + +CHAPTER V. + +FROM THE RESTORATION TO THE DEATH OF POPE. + +1660-1744. + +The Stuart Restoration was a period of descent from poetry to prose, +from passion and imagination to wit and understanding. The serious, +exalted mood of the Civil War and the Commonwealth had spent itself and +issued in disillusion. There followed a generation of wits, logical, +skeptical, and prosaic, without earnestness, as without principle. The +characteristic literature of such a time is criticism, satire, and +burlesque, and such, indeed, continued to be the course of English +literary history for a century after the return of the Stuarts. The +age was not a stupid one, but one of active inquiry. The Royal +Society, for the cultivation of the natural sciences, was founded in +1662. There were able divines in the pulpit and at the +universities--Barrow, Tillotson, Stillingfleet, South, and others: +scholars, like Bentley; historians, like Clarendon and Burnet; +scientists, like Boyle and Newton; philosophers, like Hobbes and Locke. +But of poetry, in any high sense of the word, there was little between +the time of Milton and the time of Goldsmith and Gray. + +{164} The English writers of this period were strongly influenced by +the contemporary literature of France, by the comedies of Moliere, the +tragedies of Corneille and Racine, and the satires, epistles, and +versified essays of Boileau. Many of the Restoration writers--Waller, +Cowley, Davenant, Wycherley, Villiers, and others--had been in France +during the exile, and brought back with them French tastes. John +Dryden (1631-1700), who is the great literary figure of his generation, +has been called the first of the moderns. From the reign of Charles +II., indeed, we may date the beginnings of modern English life. What +we call "society" was forming, the town, the London world. "Coffee, +which makes the politician wise," had just been introduced, and the +ordinaries of Ben Jonson's time gave way to coffee-houses, like Will's +and Button's, which became the head-quarters of literary and political +gossip. The two great English parties, as we know them to-day, were +organized: the words _Whig_ and _Tory_ date from this reign. French +etiquette and fashions came in and French phrases of convenience--such +as _coup de grace_, _bel esprit_, etc.--began to appear in English +prose. Literature became intensely urban and partisan. It reflected +city life, the disputes of faction, and the personal quarrels of +authors. The politics of the Great Rebellion had been of heroic +proportions, and found fitting expression in song. Rut in the +Revolution of 1688 the issues were constitutional and to be settled by +the arguments of lawyers. Measures were in {165} question rather than +principles, and there was little inspiration to the poet in Exclusion +Bills and Acts of Settlement. + +Court and society, in the reign of Charles II. and James II., were +shockingly dissolute, and in literature, as in life, the reaction +against Puritanism went to great extremes. The social life of the time +is faithfully reflected in the diary of Samuel Pepys. He was a +simple-minded man, the son of a London tailor, and became, himself, +secretary to the admiralty. His diary was kept in cipher, and +published only in 1825. Being written for his own eye, it is +singularly outspoken; and its naive, gossipy, confidential tone makes +it a most diverting book, as it is, historically, a most valuable one. + +Perhaps the most popular book of its time was Samuel Butler's +_Hudibras_ (1663-64), a burlesque romance in ridicule of the Puritans. +The king carried a copy of it in his pocket, and Pepys testifies that +it was quoted and praised on all sides. Ridicule of the Puritans was +nothing new. Zeal-of-the-land Busy, in Ben Jonson's _Bartholomew +Fair_, is an early instance of the kind. There was nothing laughable +about the earnestness of men like Cromwell, Milton, Algernon Sidney, +and Sir Henry Vane. But even the French Revolution had its humors; and +as the English Puritan Revolution gathered head and the extremer +sectaries pressed to the front--Quakers, New Lights, Fifth Monarchy +Men, Ranters, etc.--its grotesque sides came uppermost. Butler's hero +is a Presbyterian Justice of the Peace {166} who sallies forth with his +secretary, Ralpho--an Independent and Anabaptist--like Don Quixote with +Sancho Panza, to suppress May games and bear-baitings. (Macaulay, it +will be remembered, said that the Puritans disapproved of bear-baiting, +not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to +the spectators.) The humor of _Hudibras_ is not of the finest. The +knight and squire are discomfited in broadly comic adventures, hardly +removed from the rough, physical drolleries of a pantomime or a circus. +The deep heart-laughter of Cervantes, the pathos on which his humor +rests, is, of course, not to be looked for in Butler. But he had wit +of a sharp, logical kind, and his style surprises with all manner of +verbal antics. He is almost as great a phrase-master as Pope, though +in a coarser kind. His verse is a smart doggerel, and his poem has +furnished many stock sayings, as, for example, + + "'Tis strange what difference there can be + 'Twixt tweedle-dum and tweedle-dee." + +_Hudibras_ has had many imitators, not the least successful of whom was +the American John Trumbull, in his revolutionary satire _M'Fingal_, +some couplets of which are generally quoted as Butler's, as, for +example, + + "No man e'er felt the halter draw + With good opinion of the law." + + +The rebound against Puritanism is seen no less plainly in the drama of +the Restoration, and the {167} stage now took vengeance for its +enforced silence under the Protectorate. Two theaters were opened +under the patronage, respectively, of the king and of his brother, the +Duke of York. The manager of the latter, Sir William Davenant--who had +fought on the king's side, been knighted for his services, escaped to +France, and was afterward captured and imprisoned in England for two +years--had managed to evade the law against stage plays as early as +1656, by presenting his _Siege of Rhodes_ as an "opera," with +instrumental music and dialogue in recitative, after a fashion newly +sprung up in Italy. This he brought out again in 1661, with the +dialogue recast into riming couplets in the French fashion. Movable +painted scenery was now introduced from France, and actresses took the +female parts formerly played by boys. This last innovation was said to +be at the request of the king, one of whose mistresses, the famous Nell +Gwynne, was the favorite actress at the King's Theater. + +Upon the stage, thus reconstructed, the so-called "classical" rules of +the French theater were followed, at least in theory. The Louis XIV. +writers were not purely creative, like Shakspere and his contemporaries +in England, but critical and self-conscious. The Academy had been +formed in 1636, for the preservation of the purity of the French +language, and discussion abounded on the principles and methods of +literary art. Corneille not only wrote tragedies, but essays on +tragedy, and {168} one in particular on the _Three Unities_. Dryden +followed his example in his _Essay of Dramatic Poesie_ (1667), in which +he treated of the unities, and argued for the use of rime in tragedy in +preference to blank verse. His own practice varied. Most of his +tragedies were written in rime, but in the best of them, _All for +Love_, 1678, founded on Shakspere's _Antony and Cleopatra_, he returned +to blank verse. One of the principles of the classical school was to +keep comedy and tragedy distinct. The tragic dramatists of the +Restoration, Dryden, Howard, Settle, Crowne, Lee, and others, composed +what they called "heroic plays," such as the _Indian Emperor_, the +_Conquest of Granada_, the _Duke of Lerma_, the _Empress of Morocco_, +the _Destruction of Jerusalem_, _Nero_, and the _Rival Queens_. The +titles of these pieces indicate their character. Their heroes were +great historic personages. Subject and treatment were alike remote +from nature and real life. The diction was stilted and artificial, and +pompous declamation took the place of action and genuine passion. The +tragedies of Racine seem chill to an Englishman brought up on +Shakspere, but to see how great an artist Racine was, in his own +somewhat narrow way, one has but to compare his _Phedre_, or +_Iphigenie_, with Dryden's ranting tragedy of _Tyrannic Love_. These +bombastic heroic plays were made the subject of a capital burlesque, +the _Rehearsal_, by George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, acted in 1671 +at the King's Theater. The indebtedness of {169} the English stage to +the French did not stop with a general adoption of its dramatic +methods, but extended to direct imitation and translation. Dryden's +comedy, _An Evening's Love_, was adapted from Thomas Corneille's _Le +Feint Astrologue_, and his _Sir Martin Mar-all_, from Moliere's _L' +Etourdi_. Shadwell borrowed his _Miser_ from Moliere, and Otway made +versions of Racine's _Berenice_ and Moliere's _Fourberies de Scapin_. +Wycherley's _Country Wife_ and _Plain Dealer_, although not +translations, were based, in a sense, upon Moliere's _Ecole des Femmes_ +and _Le Misanthrope_. The only one of the tragic dramatists of the +Restoration who prolonged the traditions of the Elisabethan stage, was +Otway, whose _Venice Preserved_, written in blank verse, still keeps +the boards. There are fine passages in Dryden's heroic plays, passages +weighty in thought and nobly sonorous in language. There is one great +scene (between Antony and Ventidius) in his _All for Love_. And one, +at least, of his comedies, the _Spanish Friar_, is skillfully +constructed. But his nature was not pliable enough for the drama, and +he acknowledged that, in writing for the stage, he "forced his genius." + +In sharp contrast with these heroic plays was the comic drama of the +Restoration, the plays of Wycherley, Killigrew, Etherege, Farquhar, Van +Brugh, Congreve, and others; plays like the _Country Wife_, the +_Parson's Wedding_, _She Would if She Could_, the _Beaux' Stratagem_, +the _Relapse_, and the _Way of the World_. These were in prose, and +represented {170} the gay world and the surface of fashionable life. +Amorous intrigue was their constantly recurring theme. Some of them +were written expressly in ridicule of the Puritans. Such was the +_Committee_ of Dryden's brother-in-law, Sir Robert Howard, the hero of +which is a distressed gentleman, and the villain a London cit, and +president of the committee appointed by Parliament to sit upon the +sequestration of the estates of royalists. Such were also the +_Roundheads_ and the _Banished Cavaliers_ of Mrs. Aphra Behn, who was a +female spy in the service of Charles II., at Antwerp, and one of the +coarsest of the Restoration comedians. The profession of piety had +become so disagreeable that a shameless cynicism was now considered the +mark of a gentleman. The ideal hero of Wycherley or Etherege was the +witty young profligate, who had seen life, and learned to disbelieve in +virtue. His highest qualities were a contempt for cant, physical +courage, a sort of spendthrift generosity, and a good-natured readiness +to back up a friend in a quarrel, or an amour. Virtue was +_bourgeois_--reserved for London trades-people. A man must be either a +rake or a hypocrite. The gentlemen were rakes, the city people were +hypocrites. Their wives, however, were all in love with the gentlemen, +and it was the proper thing to seduce them, and to borrow their +husbands' money. For the first and last time, perhaps, in the history +of the English drama, the sympathy of the audience was deliberately +sought for the seducer and the rogue, and the laugh {171} turned +against the dishonored husband and the honest man. (Contrast this with +Shakspere's _Merry Wives of Windsor_.) The women were represented as +worse than the men--scheming, ignorant, and corrupt. The dialogue in +the best of these plays was easy, lively, and witty; the situations in +some of them audacious almost beyond belief. Under a thin varnish of +good breeding, the sentiments and manners were really brutal. The +loosest gallants of Beaumont and Fletcher's theater retain a fineness +of feeling and that _politesse de coeur_--which marks the gentleman. +They are poetic creatures, and own a capacity for romantic passion. +But the Manlys and Homers of the Restoration comedy have a prosaic, +cold-blooded profligacy that disgusts. Charles Lamb, in his ingenious +essay on "The Artificial Comedy of the Last Century," apologized for +the Restoration stage, on the ground that it represented a world of +whim and unreality in which the ordinary laws of morality had no +application. + +But Macaulay answered truly, that at no time has the stage been closer +in its imitation of real life. The theater of Wycherley and Etherege +was but the counterpart of that social condition which we read of in +Pepys's _Diary_, and in the _Memoirs_ of the Chevalier de Grammont. +This prose comedy of manners was not, indeed, "artificial" at all, in +the sense in which the contemporary tragedy--the "heroic play"--was +artificial. It was, on the contrary, far more natural, and, +intellectually, of {172} much higher value. In 1698 Jeremy Collier, a +non-juring Jacobite clergyman, published his _Short View of the +Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage_, which did much toward +reforming the practice of the dramatists. The formal characteristics, +without the immorality, of the Restoration comedy, re-appeared briefly +in Goldsmith's _She Stoops to Conquer_, 1772, and Sheridan's _Rival_, +_School for Scandal_, and _Critic_, 1775-9, our last strictly +"classical" comedies. None of this school of English comedians +approached their model, Moliere. He excelled his imitators not only in +his French urbanity--the polished wit and delicate grace of his +style--but in the dexterous unfolding of his plot, and in the wisdom +and truth of his criticism of life, and his insight into character. It +is a symptom of the false taste of the age that Shakspere's plays were +rewritten for the Restoration stage. Davenant made new versions of +_Macbeth_ and _Julius Caasar_, substituting rime for blank verse. In +conjunction with Dryden, he altered the _Tempest_, complicating the +intrigue by the introduction of a male counterpart to Miranda--a youth +who had never seen a woman. Shadwell "improved" _Timon of Athens_, and +Nahum Tate furnished a new fifth act to _King Lear_, which turned the +play into a comedy! In the prologue to his doctored version of +_Troilus and Cressida_, Dryden made the ghost of Shakspere speak of +himself as + + "Untaught, unpracticed in a barbarous age." + +{172} Thomas Rymer, whom Pope pronounced a good critic, was very severe +upon Shakspere in his _Remarks on the Tragedies of the Last Age_; and +in his _Short View of Tragedy_, 1693, he said, "In the neighing of a +horse or in the growling of a mastiff, there is more humanity than, +many times, in the tragical flights of Shakspere." "To Deptford by +water," writes Pepys, in his diary for August 20, 1666, "reading +Othello, Moor of Venice; which I ever heretofore esteemed a mighty good +play; but, having so lately read the _Adventures of Five Hours_, it +seems a mean thing." + +In undramatic poetry the new school, both in England and in France, +took its point of departure in a reform against the extravagances of +the Marinists, or conceited poets, specially represented in England by +Donne and Cowley. The new poets, both in their theory and practice, +insisted upon correctness, clearness, polish, moderation, and good +sense. Boileau's _L' Art Poetique_, 1673, inspired by Horace's _Ars +Poetica_, was a treatise in verse upon the rules of correct +composition, and it gave the law in criticism for over a century, not +only in France, but in Germany and England. It gave English poetry a +didactic turn and started the fashion of writing critical essays in +riming couplets. The Earl of Mulgrave published two "poems" of this +kind, an _Essay on Satire_, and an _Essay on Poetry_. The Earl of +Roscommon--who, said Addison, "makes even rules a noble poetry"--made a +metrical version of Horace's _Ars Poetica_, {174} and wrote an original +_Essay on Translated Verse_. Of the same kind were Addison's epistle +to Sacheverel, entitled _An Account of the Greatest English Poets_, and +Pope's _Essay on Criticism_, 1711, which was nothing more than +versified maxims of rhetoric, put with Pope's usual point and +brilliancy. The classicism of the 18th century, it has been said, was +a classicism in red heels and a periwig. It was Latin rather than +Greek; it turned to the least imaginative side of Latin literature and +found its models, not in Vergil, Catullus, and Lucretius, but in the +satires, epistles, and didactic pieces of Juvenal, Horace, and Persius. + +The chosen medium of the new poetry was the heroic couplet. This had, +of course, been used before by English poets as far back as Chaucer. +The greater part of the _Canterbury Tales_ was written in heroic +couplets. But now a new strength and precision were given to the +familiar measure by imprisoning the sense within the limit of the +couplet, and by treating each line as also a unit in itself. Edmund +Waller had written verse of this kind as early as the reign of Charles +I. He, said Dryden, "first showed us to conclude the sense most +commonly in distichs, which, in the verse of those before him, runs on +for so many lines together that the reader is out of breath to overtake +it." Sir John Denham, also, in his _Cooper's Hill_, 1643, had written +such verse as this: + + "O, could I flow like thee, and make thy stream + My great example as it is my theme! + {175} + Though deep yet clear, though gentle yet not dull, + Strong without rage, without o'erflowing full." + +Here we have the regular flow, and the nice balance between the first +and second member of each couplet, and the first and second part of +each line, which characterized the verse of Dryden and Pope. + + "Waller was smooth, but Dryden taught to join + The varying verse, the full resounding line, + The long resounding march and energy divine." + +Thus wrote Pope, using for the nonce the triplet and alexandrine by +which Dryden frequently varied the couplet. Pope himself added a +greater neatness and polish to Dryden's verse and brought the system to +such monotonous perfection that he "made poetry a mere mechanic art." + +The lyrical poetry of this generation was almost entirely worthless. +The dissolute wits of Charles the Second's court, Sedley, Rochester, +Sackville, and the "mob of gentlemen who wrote with ease" threw off a +few amatory trifles; but the age was not spontaneous or sincere enough +for genuine song. Cowley introduced the Pindaric ode, a highly +artificial form of the lyric, in which the language was tortured into a +kind of spurious grandeur, and the meter teased into a sound and fury, +signifying nothing. Cowley's Pindarics were filled with something +which passed for fire, but has now utterly gone out. Nevertheless, the +fashion spread, and "he who could do nothing else," said Dr. Johnson, +{176} "could write like Pindar." The best of these odes was Dryden's +famous _Alexander's Feast_, written for a celebration of St. Cecilia's +day by a musical club. To this same fashion, also, we owe Gray's two +fine odes, the _Progress of Poesy_ and the _Bard_, written a +half-century later. + +Dryden was not so much a great poet, as a solid thinker, with a +splendid mastery of expression, who used his energetic verse as a +vehicle for political argument and satire. His first noteworthy poem, +_Annus Mirabilis_, 1667, was a narrative of the public events of the +year 1666, namely: the Dutch war and the great fire of London. The +subject of _Absalom and Ahitophel_--the first part of which appeared in +1681--was the alleged plot of the Whig leader, the Earl of Shaftesbury, +to defeat the succession of the Duke of York, afterward James II., by +securing the throne to Monmouth, a natural son of Charles II. The +parallel afforded by the story of Absalom's revolt against David was +wrought out by Dryden with admirable ingenuity and keeping. He was at +his best in satirical character-sketches, such as the brilliant +portraits in this poem of Shaftesbury, as the false counselor, +Ahitophel, and of the Duke of Buckingham as Zimri. The latter was +Dryden's reply to the _Rehearsal_. _Absalom and Ahitophel_ was +followed by the _Medal_, a continuation of the same subject, and _Mac +Flecknoe_, a personal onslaught on the "true blue Protestant poet," +Thomas Shadwell, a political and literary foe of Dryden. Flecknoe, an +{177} obscure Irish poetaster, being about to retire from the throne of +duncedom, resolved to settle the succession upon his son, Shadwell, +whose claims to the inheritance are vigorously asserted. + + "The rest to some faint meaning make pretense, + But Shadwell never deviates into sense. . . . + The midwife laid her hand on his thick skull + With this prophetic blessing--Be thou dull." + + +Dryden is our first great satirist. The formal satire had been written +in the reign of Elisabeth by Donne, and by Joseph Hall, Bishop of +Exeter, and subsequently by Marston, the dramatist, by Wither, Marvell, +and others; but all of these failed through an over violence of +language, and a purpose too pronouncedly moral. They had no lightness +of touch, no irony and mischief. They bore down too hard, imitated +Juvenal, and lashed English society in terms befitting the corruption +of Imperial Rome. They denounced, instructed, preached, did every +thing but satirize. The satirist must raise a laugh. Donne and Hall +abused men in classes: priests were worldly, lawyers greedy, courtiers +obsequious, etc. But the easy scorn of Dryden and the delightful +malice of Pope gave a pungent personal interest to their sarcasm, +infinitely more effective than these commonplaces of satire. Dryden +was as happy in controversy as in satire, and is unexcelled in the +power to reason in verse. His _Religio Laici_, 1682, was a poem in +defense of the {178} English Church. But when James II. came to the +throne Dryden turned Catholic and wrote the _Hind and Panther_, 1687, +to vindicate his new belief. Dryden had the misfortune to be dependent +upon royal patronage and upon a corrupt stage. He sold his pen to the +court, and in his comedies he was heavily and deliberately lewd, a sin +which he afterward acknowledged and regretted. Milton's "soul was like +a star and dwelt apart," but Dryden wrote for the trampling multitude. +He had a coarseness of moral fiber, but was not malignant in his +satire, being of a large, careless, and forgetting nature. He had that +masculine, enduring cast of mind which gathers heat and clearness from +motion, and grows better with age. His _Fables_--modernizations from +Chaucer and translations from Boccaccio--written the year before he +died, are among his best works. + +Dryden is also our first critic of any importance. His critical essays +were mostly written as prefaces or dedications to his poems and plays. +But his _Essay on Dramatic Poesie_, which Dr. Johnson called our "first +regular and valuable treatise on the art of writing," was in the shape +of a Platonic dialogue. When not misled by the French classicism of +his day, Dryden was an admirable critic, full of penetration and sound +sense. He was the earliest writer, too, of modern literary prose. If +the imitation of French models was an injury to poetry it was a benefit +to prose. The best modern prose is French, and it was the essayists of +the {179} Gallicised Restoration age--Cowley, Sir William Temple, and, +above all, Dryden--who gave modern English prose that simplicity, +directness, and colloquial air, which marks it off from the more +artificial diction of Milton, Taylor, and Browne. + +A few books whose shaping influences lay in the past belong by their +date to this period. John Bunyan, a poor tinker, whose reading was +almost wholly in the Bible and Fox's _Book of Martyrs_, imprisoned for +twelve years in Bedford jail for preaching at conventicles, wrote and, +in 1678, published his _Pilgrim's Progress_, the greatest of religious +allegories. Bunyan's spiritual experiences were so real to him that +they took visible concrete shape in his imagination as men, women, +cities, landscapes. It is the simplest, the most transparent of +allegories. Unlike the _Faery Queene_, the story of _Pilgrim's +Progress_ has no reason for existing apart from its inner meaning, and +yet its reality is so vivid that children read of Vanity Fair and the +Slough of Despond and Doubting Castle and the Valley of the Shadow of +Death with the same belief with which they read of Crusoe's cave or +Aladdin's palace. + +It is a long step from the Bedford tinker to the cultivated poet of +_Paradise Lost_. They represent the poles of the Puritan party. Yet +it may admit of a doubt, whether the Puritan epic is, in essentials, as +vital and original a work as the Puritan allegory. They both came out +quietly and made little noise at first. But the _Pilgrim's Progress_ +got at once {180} into circulation, and not even a single copy of the +first edition remains. Milton, too--who received 10 pounds for the +copyright of _Paradise Lost_--seemingly found that "fit audience though +few" for which he prayed, as his poem reached its second impression in +five years (1672). Dryden visited him in his retirement and asked +leave to turn it into rime and put it on the stage as an opera. "Ay," +said Milton, good humoredly, "you may tag my verses." And accordingly +they appeared, duly tagged, in Dryden's operatic masque, the _State of +Innocence_. In this startling conjunction we have the two ages in a +nut-shell: the Commonwealth was an epic, the Restoration an opera. + +The literary period covered by the life of Pope, 1688-1744, is marked +off by no distinct line from the generation before it. Taste continued +to be governed by the precepts of Boileau and the French classical +school. Poetry remained chiefly didactic and satirical, and satire in +Pope's hands was more personal even than in Dryden's, and addressed +itself less to public issues. The literature of the "Augustan age" of +Queen Anne (1702-1714) was still more a literature of the town and of +fashionable society than that of the Restoration had been. It was also +closely involved with party struggles of Whig and Tory, and the ablest +pens on either side were taken into alliance by the political leaders. +Swift was in high favor with the Tory ministers, Oxford and +Bolingbroke, and his pamphlets, the _Public Spirit of the Whigs_ and +the {181} _Conduct of the Allies_, were rewarded with the deanery of +St. Patrick's, Dublin. Addison became Secretary of State under a Whig +government. Prior was in the diplomatic service. Daniel De Foe, the +author of _Robinson Crusoe_, 1719, was a prolific political writer, +conducted his _Review_ in the interest of the Whigs and was imprisoned +and pilloried for his ironical pamphlet, _The Shortest Way with the +Dissenters_. Steele, who was a violent writer on the Whig side, held +various public offices, such as Commissioner of Stamps and Commissioner +for Forfeited Estates, and sat in Parliament. After the Revolution of +1688 the manners and morals of English society were somewhat on the +mend. The court of William and Mary, and of their successor, Queen +Anne, set no such example of open profligacy as that of Charles II. +But there was much hard drinking, gambling, dueling, and intrigue in +London, and vice was fashionable till Addison partly preached and +partly laughed it down in the _Spectator_. The women were mostly +frivolous and uneducated, and not unfrequently fast. They are spoken +of with systematic disrespect by nearly every writer of the time, +except Steele. "Every woman," wrote Pope, "is at heart a rake." The +reading public had now become large enough to make letters a +profession. Dr. Johnson said that Pope was the first writer in whose +case the book-seller took the place of the patron. His translation of +Homer, published by subscription, brought him between eight and nine +thousand {182} pounds and made him independent. But the activity of +the press produced a swarm of poorly-paid hack-writers, penny-a-liners, +who lived from hand to mouth and did small literary jobs to order. +Many of these inhabited Grub Street, and their lampoons against Pope +and others of their more successful rivals called out Pope's _Dunciad_, +or epic of the dunces, by way of retaliation. The politics of the time +were sordid and consisted mainly of an ignoble scramble for office. +The Whigs were fighting to maintain the Act of Succession in favor of +the House of Hanover, and the Tories were secretly intriguing with the +exiled Stuarts. Many of the leaders, such as the great Whig champion, +John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, were without political principle +or even personal honesty. The Church, too, was in a condition of +spiritual deadness. Bishoprics and livings were sold and given to +political favorites. Clergymen, like Swift and Lawrence Sterne, were +worldly in their lives and immoral in their writings, and were +practically unbelievers. The growing religious skepticism appeared in +the Deist controversy. Numbers of men in high position were Deists; +the Earl of Shaftesbury, for example, and Pope's brilliant friend, +Henry St. John, Lord Bolingbroke, the head of the Tory ministry, whose +political writings had much influence upon his young French +acquaintance, Voltaire. Pope was a Roman Catholic, though there is +little to show it in his writings, and the underlying thought of his +famous _Essay {183} on Man_ was furnished him by Bolingbroke. The +letters of the cold-hearted Chesterfield to his son were accepted as a +manual of conduct, and La Rochefoucauld's cynical maxims were quoted as +authority on life and human nature. Said Swift: + + "As Rochefoucauld his maxims drew + From nature, I believe them true. + They argue no corrupted mind + In him; the fault is in mankind." + + +The succession which Dryden had willed to Congreve was taken up by +Alexander Pope. He was a man quite unlike Dryden, sickly, deformed, +morbidly precocious, and spiteful; nevertheless he joined on to and +continued Dryden. He was more careful in his literary workmanship than +his great forerunner, and in his _Moral Essays_ and _Satires_ he +brought the Horatian epistle in verse, the formal satire and that +species of didactic poem of which Boileau had given the first example, +to an exquisite perfection of finish and verbal art. Dryden had +translated Vergil, and so Pope translated Homer. The throne of the +dunces, which Dryden had conferred upon Shadwell, Pope, in his +_Dunciad_, passed on to two of his own literary foes, Theobald and +Colley Cibber. There is a great waste of strength in this elaborate +squib, and most of the petty writers, whose names it has preserved, as +has been said, like flies in amber, are now quite unknown. But, +although we have to read it with notes, to get the point of its +allusions, it is easy to {184} see what execution it must have done at +the time, and it is impossible to withhold admiration from the wit, the +wickedness, the triumphant mischief of the thing. The sketch of +Addison--who had offended Pope by praising a rival translation of +Homer--as "Atticus," is as brilliant as any thing of the kind in +Dryden. Pope's very malignity made his sting sharper than Dryden's. +He secreted venom, and worked out his revenges deliberately, bringing +all the resources of his art to bear upon the question of how to give +the most pain most cleverly. + +Pope's masterpiece is, perhaps, the _Rape of the Lock_, a mock heroic +poem, a "dwarf Iliad," recounting, in five cantos, a society quarrel, +which arose from Lord Petre's cutting a lock of hair from the head of +Mrs. Arabella Fermor. Boileau, in his _Lutrin_, had treated, with the +same epic dignity, a dispute over the placing of the reading desk in a +parish church. Pope was the Homer of the drawing-room, the boudoir, +the tea-urn, the omber-party, the sedan-chair, the parrot cage, and the +lap-dogs. This poem, in its sparkle and airy grace, is the topmost +blossom of a highly artificial society, the quintessence of whatever +poetry was possible in those + + "Teacup times of hood and hoop, + And when the patch was worn," + +with whose decorative features, at least, the recent Queen Anne revival +has made this generation familiar. It may be said of it, as Thackeray +said of {185} Gay's pastorals: "It is to poetry what charming little +Dresden china figures are to sculpture, graceful, minikin, fantastic, +with a certain beauty always accompanying them." The _Rape of the +Lock_, perhaps, stops short of beauty, but it attains elegance and +prettiness in a supreme degree. In imitation of the gods and goddesses +in the Iliad, who intermeddle for or against the human characters, Pope +introduced the Sylphs of the Rosicrucian philosophy. We may measure +the distance between imagination and fancy, if we will compare these +little filagree creatures with Shakspere's elves, whose occupation it +was + + "To tread the ooze of the salt deep, + Or run upon the sharp wind of the north, . . . + Or on the beached margent of the sea, + To dance their ringlets to the whispering wind." + + +Very different were the offices of Pope's fays: + + "Our humble province is to tend the fair; + Not a less pleasing, though less glorious, care; + To save the powder from too rude a gale, + Nor let the imprisoned essences exhale. . . . + Nay oft in dreams invention we bestow + To change a flounce or add a furbelow." + + +Pope was not a great poet; it has been doubted whether he was a poet at +all. He does not touch the heart, or stimulate the imagination, as the +true poet always does. In the poetry of nature, and the poetry of +passion, he was altogether impotent. {186} His _Windsor Forest_ and +his _Pastorals_ are artificial and false, not written with "the eye +upon the object." His epistle of _Eloisa to Abelard_ is declamatory +and academic, and leaves the reader cold. The only one of his poems +which is at all possessed with feeling is his pathetic _Elegy to the +Memory of an Unfortunate Lady_. But he was a great literary artist. +Within the cramped and starched regularity of the heroic couplet, which +the fashion of the time and his own habit of mind imposed upon him, he +secured the largest variety of modulation and emphasis of which that +verse was capable. He used antithesis, periphrasis, and climax with +great skill. His example dominated English poetry for nearly a +century, and even now, when a poet like Dr. Holmes, for example, would +write satire or humorous verse of a dignified kind, he turns +instinctively to the measure and manner of Pope. He was not a +consecutive thinker, like Dryden, and cared less about the truth of his +thought than about the pointedness of its expression. His language was +closer-grained than Dryden's. His great art was the art of putting +things. He is more quoted than any other English poet, but Shakspere. +He struck the average intelligence, the common sense of English +readers, and furnished it with neat, portable formulas, so that it no +longer needed to "vent its observation in mangled terms," but could +pour itself out compactly, artistically, in little, ready-made molds. +But his high-wrought brilliancy, this unceasing point, soon fatigue. +His {187} poems read like a series of epigrams; and every line has a +hit or an effect. + +From the reign of Queen Anne date the beginnings of the periodical +essay. Newspapers had been published since the time of the Civil War; +at first irregularly, and then regularly. But no literature of +permanent value appeared in periodical form until Richard Steele +started the _Tatler_, in 1709. In this he was soon joined by his +friend, Joseph Addison and in its successor the _Spectator_, the first +number of which was issued March 1, 1711, Addison's contributions +outnumbered Steele's. The _Tatler_ was published on three, the +_Spectator_ on six, days of the week. The _Tatler_ gave political +news, but each number of the _Spectator_ consisted of a single essay. +The object of these periodicals was to reflect the passing humors of +the time, and to satirize the follies and minor immoralities of the +town. "I shall endeavor," wrote Addison, in the tenth paper of the +_Spectator_, "to enliven morality with wit, and to temper wit with +morality. . . . It was said of Socrates that he brought Philosophy +down from Heaven to inhabit among men; and I shall be ambitious to have +it said of me that I have brought Philosophy out of closets and +libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell in clubs and assemblies, at +tea-tables and in coffee-houses." Addison's satire was never personal. +He was a moderate man, and did what he could to restrain Steele's +intemperate party zeal. His character was dignified and pure, and his +strongest emotion seems to have {188} been his religious feeling. One +of his contemporaries called him "a parson in a tie wig," and he wrote +several excellent hymns. His mission was that of censor of the public +taste. Sometimes he lectures and sometimes he preaches, and in his +Saturday papers, he brought his wide reading and nice scholarship into +service for the instruction of his readers. Such was the series of +essays, in which he gave an elaborate review of _Paradise Lost_. Such +also was his famous paper, the _Vision of Mirza_, an oriental allegory +of human life. The adoption of this slightly pedagogic tone was +justified by the prevalent ignorance and frivolity of the age. But the +lighter portions of the _Spectator_ are those which have worn the best. +Their style is at once correct and easy, and it is as a humorist, a sly +observer of manners, and above all, a delightful talker, that Addison +is best known to posterity. In the personal sketches of the members of +the Spectator Club, of Will Honeycomb, Captain Sentry, Sir Andrew +Freeport, and, above all, Sir Roger de Coverley, the quaint and honest +country gentleman, may be found the nucleus of the modern prose fiction +of character. Addison's humor is always a trifle grave. There is no +whimsy, no frolic in it, as in Sterne or Lamb. "He thinks justly," +said Dr. Johnson, "but he thinks faintly." The _Spectator_ had a host +of followers, from the somewhat heavy _Rambler_ and _Idler_ of Johnson, +down to the _Salmagundi_ papers of our own Irving, who was, perhaps, +Addison's latest and {189} best literary descendant. In his own age +Addison made some figure as a poet and dramatist. His _Campaign_, +celebrating the victory of Blenheim, had one much-admired couplet, in +which Marlborough was likened to the angel of tempest, who + + "Pleased the Almighty's orders to perform, + Rides in the whirlwind and directs the storm." + +His stately, classical tragedy, _Cato_, which was acted at Drury Lane +Theater in 1712, with immense applause, was pronounced by Dr. Johnson +"unquestionably the noblest production of Addison's genius." It is, +notwithstanding, cold and tedious, as a whole, though it has some fine +declamatory passages--in particular the soliloquy of Cato in the fifth +act-- + + "It must be so: Plato, thou reasonest well," etc. + + +The greatest of the Queen Anne wits, and one of the most savage and +powerful satirists that ever lived, was Jonathan Swift. As secretary +in the family of Sir William Temple, and domestic chaplain to the Earl +of Berkeley, he had known in youth the bitterness of poverty and +dependence. Afterward he wrote himself into influence with the Tory +ministry, and was promised a bishopric, but was put off with the +deanery of St. Patrick's, and retired to Ireland to "die like a +poisoned rat in a hole." His life was made tragical by the forecast of +the madness which finally overtook him. "The stage darkened," said +Scott, "ere the curtain fell." Insanity {190} deepened into idiocy and +a hideous silence, and for three years before his death he spoke hardly +ever a word. He had directed that his tombstone should bear the +inscription, _Ubi saeva indignatio cor ulterius lacerare nequit_. "So +great a man he seems to me," wrote Thackeray, "that thinking of him is +like thinking of an empire falling." Swift's first noteworthy +publication was his _Tale of a Tub_, 1704, a satire on religious +differences. But his great work was _Gulliver's Travels_, 1726, the +book in which his hate and scorn of mankind, and the long rage of +mortified pride and thwarted ambition found their fullest expression. +Children read the voyages to Lilliput and Brobdingnag, to the flying +island of Laputa and the country of the Houyhnhnms, as they read +_Robinson Crusoe_, as stories of wonderful adventure. Swift had all of +De Foe's realism, his power of giving veri-similitude to his narrative +by the invention of a vast number of small, exact, consistent details. +But underneath its fairy tales, _Gulliver's Travels_ is a satire, far +more radical than any of Dryden's or Pope's, because directed, not +against particular parties or persons, but against human nature. In +his account of Lilliput and Brobdingnag, Swift tries to show--looking +first through one end of the telescope and then through the other--that +human greatness, goodness, beauty disappear if the scale be altered a +little. If men were six inches high instead of six feet--such is the +logic of his tale--their wars, governments, science, religion--all +their institutions, {191} in fine, and all the courage, wisdom, and +virtue by which these have been built up, would appear laughable. On +the other hand, if they were sixty feet high instead of six, they would +become disgusting. The complexion of the finest ladies would show +blotches, hairs, excrescences, and an overpowering effluvium would +breathe from the pores of the skin. Finally, in his loathsome +caricature of mankind, as Yahoos, he contrasts them to their shame with +the beasts, and sets instinct above reason. + +The method of Swift's satire was grave irony. Among his minor writings +in this kind are his _Argument against Abolishing Christianity_, his +_Modest Proposal_ for utilizing the surplus population of Ireland by +eating the babies of the poor, and his _Predictions of Isaac +Bickerstaff_. In the last he predicted the death of one Partridge, an +almanac maker, at a certain day and hour. When the time set was past, +he published a minute account of Partridge's last moments; and when the +subject of this excellent fooling printed an indignant denial of his +own death, Swift answered very temperately, proving that he was dead +and remonstrating with him on the violence of his language. "To call a +man a fool and villain, an impudent fellow, only for differing from him +in a point merely speculative, is, in my humble opinion, a very +improper style for a person of his education." Swift wrote verses as +well as prose, but their motive was the reverse of poetical. His gross +and cynical humor vulgarized whatever it touched. He leaves us no +illusions, {192} and not only strips his subject, but flays it and +shows the raw muscles beneath the skin. He delighted to dwell upon the +lowest bodily functions of human nature. "He saw bloodshot," said +Thackeray. + + +1. Macaulay's Essay, The Comic Dramatists of the Restoration. + +2. The Poetical Works of John Dryden. Globe Edition. Macmillan & Co. + +3. Thackeray's English Humorists of the Last Century. + +4. Sir Roger de Coverley. New York: Harper, 1878. + +5. Swift's Tale of a Tub, Gulliver's Travels, Directions to Servants, +Polite Conversation, The Great Question Debated, Verses on the Death of +Dean Swift. + +6. The Poetical Works of Alexander Pope. Globe Edition. Macmillan & +Co. + + + + +{193} + +CHAPTER VI. + +FROM THE DEATH OF POPE TO THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. + +1744-1789. + +Pope's example continued potent for fifty years after his death. +Especially was this so in satiric and didactic poetry. Not only Dr. +Johnson's adaptations from _Juvenal_, London, 1738, and the _Vanity of +Human Wishes_, 1749, but Gifford's _Baviad_, 1791, and _Maeviad_, 1795, +and Byron's _English Bards and Scotch Reviewers_, 1809, were in the +verse and manner of Pope. In Johnson's _Lives of the Poets_, 1781, +Dryden and Pope are treated as the two greatest English poets. But +long before this a revolution in literary taste had begun, a movement +which is variously described as The Return to Nature, or The Rise of +the New Romantic School. + +For nearly a hundred years poetry had dealt with manners and the life +of towns, the gay, prosaic life of Congreve or of Pope. The sole +concession to the life of nature was the old pastoral, which, in the +hands of cockneys, like Pope and Ambrose Philips, who merely repeated +stock descriptions at second or third hand, became even more artificial +than a _Beggar's Opera_ or a _Rape of the {194} Lock_. These, at +least, were true to their environment, and were natural, just _because_ +they were artificial. But the _Seasons_ of James Thomson, published in +installments from 1726-30, had opened a new field. Their theme was the +English landscape, as varied by the changes of the year, and they were +written by a true lover and observer of nature. Mark Akenside's +_Pleasures of Imagination_, 1744, published the year of Pope's death, +was written like the _Seasons_, in blank verse; and although its +language had much of the formal, didactic cast of the Queen Anne poets, +it pointed unmistakably in the new direction. Thomson had painted the +soft beauties of a highly cultivated land--lawns, gardens, +forest-preserves, orchards, and sheep-walks. But now a fresh note was +struck in the literature, not of England alone, but of Germany and +France--romanticism, the chief element in which was a love of the wild. +Poets turned from the lameness of modern existence to savage nature and +the heroic simplicity of life among primitive tribes. In France, +Rousseau introduced the idea of the natural man, following his +instincts in disregard of social conventions. In Germany Bodmer +published, in 1753, the first edition of the old German epic, the +_Nibelungen Lied_. Works of a similar tendency in England were the +odes of William Collins and Thomas Gray, published between 1747-57, +especially Collins's _Ode on the Superstitions of the Highlands_, and +Gray's _Bard_, a pindaric, in which the last survivor of the Welsh +bards invokes vengeance on {195} Edward I., the destroyer of his guild. +Gray and Mason, his friend and editor, made translations from the +ancient Welsh and Norse poetry. Thomas Percy's _Reliques of Ancient +English Poetry_, 1765, aroused a taste for old ballads. Richard Hurd's +_Letters on Chivalry and Romance_, Thomas Warton's _History of English +Poetry_, 1774-78, Tyrwhitt's critical edition of Chaucer, and Horace +Walpole's Gothic romance, the _Castle of Otranto_, 1765, stimulated +this awakened interest in the picturesque aspects of feudal life, and +contributed to the fondness for supernatural and mediaeval subjects. +James Beattie's _Minstrel_, 1771, described the educating influence of +Scottish mountain scenery upon the genius of a young poet. But the +most remarkable instances of this passion for wild nature and the +romantic past were the _Poems of Ossian_ and Thomas Chatterton's +literary forgeries. + +In 1762 James Macpherson published the first installment of what +professed to be a translation of the poems of Ossian, a Gaelic bard, +whom tradition placed in the 3d century. Macpherson said that he made +his version--including two complete epics, _Fingal_ and _Temora_, from +Gaelic MSS., which he had collected in the Scottish Highlands. A +fierce controversy at once sprang up over the genuineness of these +remains. Macpherson was challenged to produce his originals, and when, +many years after, he published the Gaelic text, it was asserted that +this was nothing but a translation of his own English into modern +Gaelic. Of {196} the MSS. which he professed to have found not a scrap +remained: the Gaelic text was printed from transcriptions in +Macpherson's handwriting or in that of his secretaries. + +But whether these poems were the work of Ossian or of Macpherson, they +made a deep impression upon the time. Napoleon admired them greatly, +and Goethe inserted passages from the "Songs of Selma" in his _Sorrows +of Werther_. Macpherson composed--or translated--them in an abrupt, +rhapsodical prose, resembling the English version of Job or of the +prophecies of Isaiah. They filled the minds of their readers with +images of vague sublimity and desolation; the mountain torrent, the +mist on the hills, the ghosts of heroes half seen by the setting moon, +the thistle in the ruined courts of chieftains, the grass whistling on +the windy heath, the gray rock by the blue stream of Lutha, and the +cliffs of sea-surrounded Gormal. + +"A tale of the times of old!" + +"Why, thou wanderer unseen! Thou bender of the thistle of Lora; why, +thou breeze of the valley, hast thou left mine ear? I hear no distant +roar of streams! No sound of the harp from the rock! Come, thou +huntress of Lutha, Malvina, call back his soul to the bard. I look +forward to Lochlin of lakes, to the dark billowy bay of U-thorno, where +Fingal descends from Ocean, from the roar of winds. Few are the heroes +of Morven in a land unknown." + +Thomas Chatterton, who died by his own hand {197} in 1770, at the age +of seventeen, is one of the most wonderful examples of precocity in the +history of literature. His father had been sexton of the ancient +Church of St. Mary Redcliff, in Bristol, and the boy's sensitive +imagination took the stamp of his surroundings. He taught himself to +read from a black-letter Bible. He drew charcoal sketches of churches, +castles, knightly tombs, and heraldic blazonry. When only eleven years +old, he began the fabrication of documents in prose and verse, which he +ascribed to a fictitious Thomas Rowley, a secular priest at Bristol in +the 15th century. Chatterton pretended to have found these among the +contents of an old chest in the muniment room of St. Mary Redcliff's. +The Rowley poems included two tragedies, _Aella_ and _Goddwyn_, two +cantos of a long poem on the _Battle of Hastings_, and a number of +ballads and minor pieces. Chatterton had no precise knowledge of early +English, or even of Chaucer. His method of working was as follows: He +made himself a manuscript glossary of the words marked as archaic in +Bailey's and Kersey's English dictionaries, composed his poems first in +modern language, and then turned them into ancient spelling, and +substituted here and there the old words in his glossary for their +modern equivalents. Naturally he made many mistakes, and though Horace +Walpole, to whom he sent some of his pieces, was unable to detect the +forgery, his friends, Gray and Mason, to whom he submitted them, at +once pronounced them {198} spurious. Nevertheless there was a +controversy over Rowley, hardly less obstinate than that over Ossian, a +controversy made possible only by the then almost universal ignorance +of the forms, scansion, and vocabulary of early English poetry. +Chatterton's poems are of little value in themselves, but they are the +record of an industry and imitative quickness, marvelous in a mere +child, and they show how, with the instinct of genius, he threw himself +into the main literary current of his time. Discarding the couplet of +Pope, the poets now went back for models to the Elisabethan writers. +Thomas Warton published, in 1753, his _Observations on the Faerie +Queene_. Beattie's _Minstrel_, Thomson's _Castle of Indolence_, +William Shenstone's _Schoolmistress_, and John Dyer's _Fleece_, were +all written in the Spenserian stanza. Shenstone gave a partly humorous +effect to his poem by imitating Spenser's archaisms, and Thomson +reproduced in many passages the copious harmony and luxuriant imagery +of the _Faerie Queene_. The _Fleece_ was a poem on English +wool-growing, after the fashion of Vergil's _Georgics_. The subject +was unfortunate, for, as Dr. Johnson said, it is impossible to make +poetry out of serges and druggets. Dyer's _Grongar Hill_, which +mingles reflection with natural description in the manner of Gray's +_Elegy written in a Country Churchyard_, was composed in the +octosyllabic verse of Milton's _L'Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_. +Milton's minor poems, which had hitherto been neglected, {199} +exercised a great influence on Collins and Gray. Collins's _Ode to +Simplicity_ was written in the stanza of Milton's _Nativity_, and his +exquisite unrimed _Ode to Evening_ was a study in versification, after +Milton's translation of Horace's _Ode to Pyrrha_, in the original +meters. Shakspere began to to be studied more reverently: numerous +critical editions of his plays were issued, and Garrick restored his +pure text to the stage. Collins was an enthusiastic student of +Shakspere, and one of his sweetest poems, the _Dirge in Cymbeline_, was +inspired by the tragedy of _Cymbeline_. The verse of Gray, Collins, +and the Warton brothers, abounds in verbal reminiscences of Shakspere; +but their genius was not allied to his, being exclusively lyrical, and +not at all dramatic. The Muse of this romantic school was Fancy rather +than Passion. A thoughtful melancholy, a gentle, scholarly +pensiveness, the spirit of Milton's _Il Penseroso_, pervades their +poetry. Gray was a fastidious scholar, who produced very little, but +that little of the finest quality. His famous _Elegy_, expressing a +meditative mood in language of the choicest perfection, is the +representative poem of the second half of the 18th century, as the +_Rape of the Lock_ is of the first. The romanticists were quietists, +and their scenery is characteristic. They loved solitude and evening, +the twilight vale, the mossy hermitage, ruins, glens, and caves. Their +style was elegant and academic, retaining a little of the stilted +poetic diction of their classical {200} forerunners. Personification +and periphrasis were their favorite mannerisms: Collins's Odes were +largely addressed to abstractions, such as Fear, Pity, Liberty, Mercy, +and Simplicity. A poet in their dialect was always a "bard;" a +countryman was "the untutored swain," and a woman was a "nymph" or "the +fair," just as in Dryden and Pope. Thomson is perpetually mindful of +Vergil, and afraid to speak simply. He uses too many Latin epithets, +like _amusive_ and _precipitant_, and calls a fish-line + + "The floating line snatched from the hoary steed." + +They left much for Cowper and Wordsworth to do in the way of infusing +the new blood of a strong, racy English into our exhausted poetic +diction. Their poetry is impersonal, bookish, literary. It lacks +emotional force, except now and then in Gray's immortal _Elegy_, in his +_Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College_, in Collins's lines, _On +the Death of Thomson_, and his little ode beginning, "How sleep the +brave?" + +The new school did not lack critical expounders of its principles and +practice. Joseph Warton published, in 1756, the first volume of his +_Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope_, an elaborate review of +Pope's writings _seriatim_, doing him certainly full justice, but +ranking him below Shakspere, Spenser, and Milton. "Wit and satire," +wrote Warton, "are transitory and perishable, but nature and passion +are eternal. . . . He stuck to {201} describing modern manners; but +those manners, because they are familiar, artificial, and polished, +are, in their very nature, unfit for any lofty effort of the Muse. +Whatever poetical enthusiasm he actually possessed he withheld and +stifled. Surely it is no narrow and niggardly encomium to say, he is +the great Poet of Reason, the first of Ethical authors in verse." +Warton illustrated his critical positions by quoting freely not only +from Spenser and Milton, but from recent poets, like Thomson, Gray, +Collins, and Dyer. He testified that the Seasons had "been very +instrumental in diffusing a general taste for the beauties of nature +and landscape." It was symptomatic of the change in literary taste +that the natural or English school of landscape gardening now began to +displace the French and Dutch fashion of clipped hedges, regular +parterres, etc., and that Gothic architecture came into repute. Horace +Walpole was a virtuoso in Gothic art, and in his castle, at Strawberry +Hill, he made a collection of ancient armor, illuminated MSS., and +bric-a-brac of all kinds. Gray had been Walpole's traveling companion +in France and Italy, and the two had quarreled and separated, but were +afterward reconciled. From Walpole's private printing-press, at +Strawberry Hill, Gray's two "sister odes," the _Bard_ and the _Progress +of Poesy_, were first printed, in 1757. Both Gray and Walpole were +good correspondents, and their printed letters are among the most +delightful literature of the kind. + +{202} The central figure among the English men of letters of that +generation was Samuel Johnson (1709-84), whose memory has been +preserved less by his own writings than by James Boswell's famous _Life +of Johnson_, published in 1791. Boswell was a Scotch laird and +advocate, who first met Johnson in London, when the latter was +fifty-four years old. Boswell was not a very wise or witty person, but +he reverenced the worth and intellect which shone through his subject's +uncouth exterior. He followed him about, note-book in hand, bore all +his snubbings patiently, and made the best biography ever written. It +is related that the doctor once said that if he thought Boswell meant +to write _his_ life, he should prevent it by taking _Boswell's_. And +yet Johnson's own writings and this biography of him have changed +places in relative importance so completely, that Carlyle predicted +that the former would soon be reduced to notes on the latter; and +Macaulay said that the man who was known to his contemporaries as a +great writer was known to posterity as an agreeable companion. + +Johnson was one of those rugged, eccentric, self-developed characters, +so common among the English. He was the son of a Lichfield +book-seller, and after a course at Oxford, which was cut short by +poverty, and an unsuccessful career as a school-master, he had come up +to London, in 1737, where he supported himself for many years as a +book-seller's hack. Gradually his great learning {203} and abilities, +his ready social wit and powers as a talker, caused his company to be +sought at the tables of those whom he called "the great." He was a +clubbable man, and he drew about him at the tavern a group of the most +distinguished intellects of the time, Edmund Burke, the orator and +statesman, Oliver Goldsmith, Sir Joshua Reynolds, the portrait painter, +and David Garrick, the great actor, who had been a pupil in Johnson's +school, near Lichfield. Johnson was the typical John Bull of the last +century. His oddities, virtues, and prejudices were thoroughly +English. He hated Frenchmen, Scotchmen, and Americans, and had a +cockneyish attachment to London. He was a high Tory, and an orthodox +churchman; he loved a lord in the abstract, and yet he asserted a +sturdy independence against any lord in particular. He was deeply +religious, but had an abiding fear of death. He was burly in person, +and slovenly in dress, his shirt-frill always covered with snuff. He +was a great diner out, an inordinate tea-drinker, and a voracious and +untidy feeder. An inherited scrofula, which often took the form of +hypochondria and threatened to affect his brain, deprived him of +control over the muscles of his face. Boswell describes how his +features worked, how he snorted, grunted, whistled, and rolled about in +his chair when getting ready to speak. He records his minutest traits, +such as his habit of pocketing the orange peels at the club, and his +superstitious way of {204} touching all the posts between his house and +the Mitre Tavern, going back to do it, if he skipped one by chance. +Though bearish in his manners and arrogant in dispute, especially when +talking "for victory," Johnson had a large and tender heart. He loved +his ugly, old wife--twenty-one years his senior--and he had his house +full of unfortunates--a blind woman, an invalid surgeon, a destitute +widow, a negro servant--whom he supported for many years, and bore with +all their ill-humors patiently. + +Among Johnson's numerous writings the ones best entitled to remembrance +are, perhaps, his _Dictionary of the English Language_, 1755; his moral +tale, _Rasselas_, 1759; the introduction to his _Edition of Shakspere_, +1765; and his _Lives of the Poets_, 1781. Johnson wrote a sonorous, +cadenced prose, full of big Latin words and balanced clauses. Here is +a sentence, for example, from his _Visit to the Hebrides_: "We were now +treading that illustrious island which was once the luminary of the +Caledonian regions, whence savage clans and roving barbarians derived +the benefits of knowledge and the blessings of religion. To abstract +the mind from all local emotion would be impossible, if it were +endeavored, and would be foolish, if it were possible." The difference +between his colloquial style and his book style is well illustrated in +the instance cited by Macaulay. Speaking of Villier's _Rehearsal_, +Johnson said, "It has not wit enough to keep it sweet;" then paused and +{205} added--translating English into Johnsonese--"it has not vitality +sufficient to preserve it from putrefaction." There is more of this in +Johnson's _Rambler_ and _Idler papers_ than in his latest work, the +_Lives of the Poets_. In this he showed himself a sound and judicious +critic, though with decided limitations. His understanding was solid, +but he was a thorough classicist, and his taste in poetry was formed on +Pope. He was unjust to Milton and to his own contemporaries, Gray, +Collins, Shenstone, and Dyer. He had no sense of the higher and +subtler graces of romantic poetry, and he had a comical indifference to +the "beauties of nature." When Boswell once ventured to remark that +poor Scotland had, at least, some "noble, wild prospects," the doctor +replied that the noblest prospect a Scotchman ever saw was the road +that led to London. + +The English novel of real life had its origin at this time. Books like +De Foe's _Robinson Crusoe_, _Captain Singleton_, _Journal of the +Plague_, etc., were tales of incident and adventure rather than novels. +The novel deals primarily with character and with the interaction of +characters upon one another, as developed by a regular plot. The first +English novelist, in the modern sense of the word, was Samuel +Richardson, a printer, who began authorship in his fiftieth year with +his _Pamela_, the story of a young servant girl, who resisted the +seductions of her master, and finally, as the reward of her virtue, +became his wife. _Clarissa Harlowe_, {206} 1748, was the tragical +history of a high spirited young lady, who being driven from home by +her family, because she refused to marry the suitor selected for her, +fell into the toils of Lovelace, an accomplished rake. After +struggling heroically against every form of artifice and violence, she +was at last drugged and ruined. She died of a broken heart, and +Lovelace, borne down by remorse, was killed in a duel by a cousin of +Clarissa. Sir _Charles Grandison_, 1753, was Richardson's portrait of +an ideal fine gentleman, whose stately doings fill eight volumes, but +who seems to the modern reader a bore and a prig. All of these novels +were written in the form of letters passing between the characters, a +method which fitted Richardson's subjective cast of mind. He knew +little of life, but he identified himself intensely with his principal +character and produced a strong effect by minute, accumulated touches. +_Clarissa Harlowe_ is his masterpiece, though even in that the +situation is painfully prolonged, the heroine's virtue is +self-conscious and rhetorical, and there is something almost +ludicrously unnatural in the copiousness with which she pours herself +out in gushing epistles to her female correspondent at the very moment +when she is beset with dangers, persecuted, agonized, and driven nearly +mad. In Richardson's novels appears, for the first time, that +sentimentalism which now began to infect European literature. _Pamela_ +was translated into French and German, and fell in with that current +{207} of popular feeling which found fullest expression in Rousseau's +_Nouvelle Heloise_, 1759, and Goethe's _Leiden des Jungen Werther_, +which set all the world a-weeping in 1774. + +Coleridge said that to pass from Richardson's books to those of Henry +Fielding was like going into the fresh air from a close room heated by +stoves. Richardson, it has been affirmed, knew _man_, but Fielding +knew _men_. The latter's first novel, _Joseph Andrews_, 1742, was +begun as a travesty of _Pamela_. The hero, a brother of Pamela, was a +young footman in the employ of Lady Booby, from whom his virtue +suffered a like assault to that made upon Pamela's by her master. This +reversal of the natural situation was in itself full of laughable +possibilities, had the book gone on simply as a burlesque. But the +exuberance of Fielding's genius led him beyond his original design. +This hero, leaving Lady Booby's service, goes traveling with good +Parson Adams, and is soon engaged in a series of comical and rather +boisterous adventures. + +Fielding had seen life, and his characters were painted from the life +with a bold, free hand. He was a gentleman by birth, and had made +acquaintance with society and the town in 1727, when he was a handsome, +stalwart young fellow, with high animal spirits and a great appetite +for pleasure. He soon ran himself into debt and began writing for the +stage; married, and spent his wife's fortune, living for awhile in much +splendor as a {208} country gentleman, and afterward in a reduced +condition as a rural justice with a salary of 500 pounds of "the +dirtiest money on earth." Fielding's masterpiece was _Tom Jones_, +1749, and it remains one of the best of English novels. Its hero is +very much after Fielding's own heart, wild, spendthrift, warm-hearted, +forgiving, and greatly in need of forgiveness. The same type of +character, with the lines deepened, re-appears in Captain Booth, in +_Amelia_, 1751, the heroine of which is a portrait of Fielding's wife. +With Tom Jones is contrasted Blifil, the embodiment of meanness, +hypocrisy, and cowardice. Sophia Western, the heroine, is one of +Fielding's most admirable creations. For the regulated morality of +Richardson, with its somewhat old-grannified air, Fielding substituted +instinct. His virtuous characters are virtuous by impulse only, and +his ideal of character is manliness. In _Jonathan Wild_ the hero is a +highwayman. This novel is ironical, a sort of prose mock-heroic, and +is one of the strongest, though certainly the least pleasing, of +Fielding's writings. + +Tobias Smollett was an inferior Fielding with a difference. He was a +Scotch ship-surgeon and had spent some time in the West Indies. He +introduced into fiction the now familiar figure of the British tar, in +the persons of Tom Bowling and Commodore Trunnion, as Fielding had +introduced, in Squire Western, the equally national type of the +hard-swearing, deep-drinking, fox-hunting Tory squire. Both Fielding +and Smollett were of the {209} hearty British "beef-and-beer" school; +their novels are downright, energetic, coarse, and high-blooded; low +life, physical life, runs riot through their pages--tavern brawls, the +breaking of pates, and the off-hand courtship of country wenches. +Smollett's books, such as _Roderick Random_, 1748, _Peregrine Pickle_, +1751, and _Ferdinand Count Fathom_, 1752, were more purely stories of +broadly comic adventure than Fielding's. The latter's view of life was +by no means idyllic; but with Smollett this English realism ran into +vulgarity and a hard Scotch literalness, and character was pushed to +caricature. "The generous wine of Fielding," says Taine, "in +Smollett's hands becomes brandy of the dram-shop." A partial exception +to this is to be found in his last and best novel, _Humphrey Clinker_, +1770. The influence of Cervantes and of the French novelist, Le Sage, +who finished his _Adventures of Gil Blas_ in 1735, are very perceptible +in Smollett. + +A genius of much finer mold was Lawrence Sterne, the author of +_Tristram Shandy_, 1759-67, and the _Sentimental Journey_, 1768. +_Tristram Shandy_ is hardly a novel: the story merely serves to hold +together a number of characters, such as Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim, +conceived with rare subtlety and originality. Sterne's chosen province +was the whimsical, and his great model was Rabelais. His books are +full of digressions, breaks, surprises, innuendoes, double meanings, +mystifications, and all manner of odd turns. {210} Coleridge and +Carlyle unite in pronouncing him a great humorist. Thackeray says that +he was only a great jester. Humor is the laughter of the heart, and +Sterne's pathos is closely interwoven with his humor. He was the +foremost of English sentimentalists, and he had that taint of +insincerity which distinguishes sentimentalism from genuine sentiment, +like Goldsmith's, for example. Sterne, in life, was selfish, +heartless, and untrue. A clergyman, his worldliness and vanity and the +indecency of his writings were a scandal to the Church, though his +sermons were both witty and affecting. He enjoyed the titilation of +his own emotions, and he had practiced so long at detecting the latent +pathos that lies in the expression of dumb things and of poor, patient +animals, that he could summon the tear of sensibility at the thought of +a discarded postchaise, a dead donkey, a starling in a cage, or of +Uncle Toby putting a house fly out of the window, and saying, "There is +room enough in the world for thee and me." It is a high proof of his +cleverness that he generally succeeds in raising the desired feeling in +his readers even from such trivial occasions. He was a minute +philosopher, his philosophy was kindly, and he taught the delicate art +of making much out of little. Less coarse than Fielding, he is far +more corrupt. Fielding goes bluntly to the point; Sterne lingers among +the temptations and suspends the expectation to tease and excite it. +Forbidden fruit had a relish for him, and his pages {211} seduce. He +is full of good sayings, both tender and witty. It was Sterne, for +example, who wrote, "God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb." + +A very different writer was Oliver Goldsmith, whose _Vicar of +Wakefield_, 1766, was the earliest, and is still one of the best, +novels of domestic and rural life. The book, like its author, was +thoroughly Irish, full of bulls and inconsistencies. Very improbable +things happened in it with a cheerful defiance of logic. But its +characters are true to nature, drawn with an idyllic sweetness and +purity, and with touches of a most loving humor. Its hero, Dr. +Primrose, was painted after Goldsmith's father, a poor clergyman of the +English Church in Ireland, and the original, likewise, of the country +parson in Goldsmith's _Deserted Village_, 1770, who was "passing rich +on forty pounds a year." This poem, though written in the fashionable +couplet of Pope, and even containing a few verses contributed by Dr. +Johnson--so that it was not at all in line with the work of the +romanticists--did, perhaps, as much as any thing of Gray or of Collins +to recall English poetry to the simplicity and freshness of country +life. + +Except for the comedies of Sheridan and Goldsmith, and, perhaps, a few +other plays, the stage had now utterly declined. The novel, which is +dramatic in essence, though not in form, began to take its place, and +to represent life, though less intensely, yet more minutely, than the +theater could do. In the novelists of the 18th century, the life {212} +of the people, as distinguished from "society" or the upper classes, +began to invade literature. + +Richardson was distinctly a bourgeois writer, and his +contemporaries--Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, and Goldsmith--ranged over +a wide variety of ranks and conditions. This is one thing which +distinguishes the literature of the second half of the 18th century +from that of the first, as well as in some degree from that of all +previous centuries. Among the authors of this generation whose +writings belonged to other departments of thought than pure literature +may be mentioned, in passing, the great historian, Edward Gibbon, whose +_Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_ was published from 1776-88, and +Edmund Burke, whose political speeches and pamphlets possess a true +literary quality. The romantic poets had addressed the imagination +rather than the heart. It was reserved for two men--a contrast to one +another in almost every respect--to bring once more into British song a +strong individual feeling, and with it a new warmth and directness of +speech. These were William Cowper (1731-1800) and Robert Burns +(1759-96). Cowper spoke out of his own life experience, his agony, his +love, his worship and despair; and straightway the varnish that had +glittered over all our poetry since the time of Dryden melted away. +Cowper had scribbled verses when he was a young law student at the +Middle Temple in London, and he had contributed to the _Olney Hymns_, +published in 1779 by his friend and pastor, the Rev. John Newton; but +{213} he only began to write poetry in earnest when he was nearly fifty +years old. In 1782, the date of his first volume, he said, in a letter +to a friend, that he had read but one English poet during the past +twenty years. Perhaps, therefore, of all English poets of equal +culture, Cowper owed the least impulse to books and the most to the +need of uttering his inmost thoughts and feelings. Cowper had a most +unhappy life. As a child, he was shy, sensitive, and sickly, and +suffered much from bullying and fagging at a school whither he was sent +after his mother's death. This happened when he was six years old; and +in his affecting lines written _On Receipt of My Mother's Picture_, he +speaks of himself as a + + "Wretch even then, life's journey just begun." + +In 1763 he became insane and was sent to an asylum, where he spent a +year. Judicious treatment restored him to sanity, but he came out a +broken man and remained for the rest of his life an invalid, unfitted +for any active occupation. His disease took the form of religious +melancholy. He had two recurrences of madness, and both times made +attempts upon his life. At Huntingdon, and afterward at Olney, in +Buckinghamshire, he found a home with the Unwin family, whose kindness +did all which the most soothing and delicate care could do to heal his +wounded spirit. His two poems _To Mary Unwin_, together with the lines +on his mother's picture, were almost the first examples of deep {214} +and tender sentiment in the lyrical poetry of the last century. Cowper +found relief from the black thoughts that beset him only in an ordered +round of quiet household occupations. He corresponded indefatigably, +took long walks through the neighborhood, read, sang, and conversed +with Mrs. Unwin and his friend, Lady Austin; and amused himself with +carpentry, gardening, and raising pets, especially hares, of which +gentle animals he grew very fond. All these simple tastes, in which he +found for a time a refuge and a sheltered happiness, are reflected in +his best poem, _The Task_, 1785. Cowper is the poet of the family +affections, of domestic life, and rural retirement; the laureate of the +fireside, the tea-table, the evening lamp, the garden, the green-house, +and the rabbit-coop. He draws with elegance and precision a chair, a +clock, a harpsichord, a barometer, a piece of needle-work. But Cowper +was an out-door as well as an in-door man. The Olney landscape was +tame, a fat, agricultural region, where the sluggish Ouse wound between +plowed fields and the horizon was bounded by low hills. Nevertheless +Cowper's natural descriptions are at once more distinct and more +imaginative than Thomson's. _The Task_ reflects, also, the new +philanthropic spirit, the enthusiasm of humanity, the feeling of the +brotherhood of men to which Rousseau had given expression in France and +which issued in the French Revolution. In England this was the time of +Wilberforce, the antislavery agitator; of Whitefield, the eloquent +revival preacher; {215} of John and Charles Wesley, and of the +Evangelical and Methodist movements which gave new life to the English +Church. John Newton, the curate of Olney and the keeper of Cowper's +conscience, was one of the leaders of the Evangelicals; and Cowper's +first volume of _Table Talk_ and other poems, 1782, written under +Newton's inspiration, was a series of sermons in verse, somewhat +intolerant of all worldly enjoyments, such as hunting, dancing, and +theaters. "God made the country and man made the town," he wrote. He +was a moralizing poet, and his morality was sometimes that of the +invalid and the recluse. Byron called him a "coddled poet." And, +indeed, there is a suspicion of gruel and dressing-gowns about him. He +lived much among women, and his sufferings had refined him to a +feminine delicacy. But there is no sickliness in his poetry, and he +retained a charming playful humor--displayed in his excellent comic +ballad, _John Gilpin_; and Mrs. Browning has sung of him, + + "How when one by one sweet sounds and wandering lights departed + He bore no less a loving face, because so broken-hearted." + + +At the close of the year 1786 a young Scotchman, named Samuel Rose, +called upon Cowper at Olney, and left with him a small volume, which +had appeared at Edinburgh during the past summer, entitled _Poems +chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, by Robert Burns_. Cowper read the +book through {216} twice, and, though somewhat bothered by the dialect, +pronounced it a "very extraordinary production." This momentary flash, +as of an electric spark, marks the contact not only of the two chief +British poets of their generation, but of two literatures. Scotch +poets, like Thomson and Beattie, had written in Southern English, and, +as Carlyle said, _in vacuo_, that is, with nothing specially national +in their work. Burns's sweet though rugged Doric first secured the +vernacular poetry of his country a hearing beyond the border. He had, +to be sure, a whole literature of popular songs and ballads behind him, +and his immediate models were Allan Ramsay and Robert Ferguson; but +these remained provincial, while Burns became universal. + +He was born in Ayrshire, on the banks of "bonny Doon," in a clay biggin +not far from "Alloway's auld haunted kirk," the scene of the witch +dance in _Tam O'Shanter_. His father was a hard-headed, God-fearing +tenant farmer, whose life and that of his sons was a harsh struggle +with poverty. The crops failed; the landlord pressed for his rent; for +weeks at a time the family tasted no meat; yet this life of toil was +lightened by love and homely pleasures. In the _Cotter's Saturday +Night_, Burns has drawn a beautiful picture of his parents' household, +the rest that came at the week's end, and the family worship about the +"wee bit ingle, blinkin' bonnily." Robert was handsome, wild, and +witty. He was universally susceptible, and his first songs, like his +last, were of "the lasses." His head had been {217} stuffed, in +boyhood, with "tales and songs concerning devils, ghosts, fairies, +brownies, witches, warlocks, spunkies, kelpies, elf-candles, +dead-lights," etc., told him by one Jenny Wilson, an old woman who +lived in the family. His ear was full of ancient Scottish tunes, and +as soon as he fell in love he began to make poetry as naturally as a +bird sings. He composed his verses while following the plow or working +in the stack-yard; or, at evening, balancing on two legs of his chair +and watching the light of a peat fire play over the reeky walls of the +cottage. Burns's love songs are in many keys, ranging from strains of +the most pure and exalted passion, like _Ae Fond Kiss_ and _To Mary in +Heaven_, to such loose ditties as _When Januar' Winds_ and _Green Grow +the Rashes O_. + +Burns liked a glass almost as well as a lass, and at Mauchline, where +he carried on a farm with his brother Gilbert, after their father's +death, he began to seek a questionable relief from the pressure of +daily toil and unkind fates, in the convivialities of the tavern. +There, among the wits of the Mauchline Club, farmers' sons, shepherds +from the uplands, and the smugglers who swarmed over the west coast, he +would discuss politics and farming, recite his verses, and join in the +singing and ranting, while + + "Bousin o'er the nappy, + And gettin' fou and unco happy." + + +To these experiences we owe not only those excellent drinking songs, +_John Barleycorn_ and _Willie {218} Brewed a Peck o' Maut_, but the +headlong fun of _Tam O'Shanter_, and the visions, grotesquely terrible, +of _Death and Dr. Hornbook_, and the dramatic humor of the _Jolly +Beggars_. Cowper had celebrated "the cup which cheers but not +inebriates." Burns sang the praises of _Scotch Drink_. Cowper was a +stranger to Burns's high animal spirits, and his robust enjoyment of +life. He had affections, but no passions. At Mauchline, Burns, whose +irregularities did not escape the censure of the kirk, became involved, +through his friendship with Gavin Hamilton, in the controversy between +the Old Light and New Light clergy. His _Holy Fair_, _Holy Tulzie_, +_Two Herds_, _Holy Willie's Prayer_, and _Address to the Unco Gude_, +are satires against bigotry and hypocrisy. But in spite of the +rollicking profanity of his language, and the violence of his rebound +against the austere religion of Scotland, Burns was at bottom deeply +impressible by religious ideas, as may be seen from his _Prayer under +the Pressure of Violent Anguish_, and _Prayer in Prospect of Death_. + +His farm turned out a failure, and he was on the eve of sailing for +Jamaica, when the favor with which his volume of poems was received, +stayed his departure, and turned his steps to Edinburgh. There the +peasant poet was lionized for a winter season by the learned and polite +society of the Scotch capital, with results in the end not altogether +favorable to Burns's best interests. For when society finally turned +the cold shoulder on {219} him, he had to go back to farming again, +carrying with him a bitter sense of injustice and neglect. He leased a +farm in Ellisland, in 1788, and some friends procured his appointment +as exciseman for his district. But poverty, disappointment, irregular +habits, and broken health clouded his last years, and brought him to an +untimely death at the age of thirty-seven. He continued, however, to +pour forth songs of unequaled sweetness and force. "The man sank," +said Coleridge, "but the poet was bright to the last." + +Burns is the best of British song-writers. His songs are singable; +they are not merely lyrical poems. They were meant to be sung, and +they are sung. They were mostly set to old Scottish airs, and +sometimes they were built up from ancient fragments of anonymous, +popular poetry, a chorus, or stanza, or even a single line. Such are, +for example, _Auld Lang Syne_, _My Heart's in the Highlands_, and +_Landlady, Count the Lawin_. Burns had a great, warm heart. His sins +were sins of passion, and sprang from the same generous soil that +nourished his impulsive virtues. His elementary qualities as a poet +were sincerity, a healthy openness to all impressions of the beautiful, +and a sympathy which embraced men, animals, and the dumb objects of +nature. His tenderness toward flowers and the brute creation may be +read in his lines _To a Mountain Daisy_, _To a Mouse_, and _The Auld +Farmer's New Year's Morning Salutation to his Auld Mare Maggie_. Next +after love and good {220} fellowship, patriotism is the most frequent +motive of his song. Of his national anthem, _Scots wha hae wi' Wallace +bled_, Carlyle said: "So long as there is warm blood in the heart of +Scotchman, or man, it will move in fierce thrills under this war ode." + +Burns's politics were a singular mixture of sentimental toryism with +practical democracy. A romantic glamour was thrown over the fortunes +of the exiled Stuarts, and to have been "out" in '45 with the Young +Pretender was a popular thing in parts of Scotland. To this purely +poetic loyalty may be attributed such Jacobite ballads of Burns as +_Over the Water to Charlie_. But his sober convictions were on the +side of liberty and human brotherhood, and are expressed in the _Twa +Dogs_, the _First Epistle to Davie_, and _A Man's a Man for a' that_. +His sympathy with the Revolution led him to send four pieces of +ordnance, taken from a captured smuggler, as a present to the French +Convention, a piece of bravado which got him into difficulties with his +superiors in the excise. The poetry which Burns wrote, not in dialect, +but in the classical English, is in the stilted manner of his century, +and his prose correspondence betrays his lack of culture by his +constant lapse into rhetorical affectation and fine writing. + + +1. T. S. Perry's English Literature in the Eighteenth Century. + +2. James Thomson. The Castle of Indolence. + +3. The Poems of Thomas Gray. + +{221} + +4. William Collins. Odes. + +5. The Six Chief Lives from Johnson's Lives of the Poets. Edited by +Matthew Arnold. Macmillan, 1878. + +6. Boswell's Life of Johnson [abridged]. Henry Holt & Co., 1878. + +7. Samuel Richardson. Clarissa Harlowe. + +8. Henry Fielding. Tom Jones. + +9. Tobias Smollett. Humphrey Clinker. + +10. Lawrence Sterne. Tristram Shandy. + +11. Oliver Goldsmith. Vicar of Wakefield and Deserted Village. + +12. William Cowper. The Task and John Gilpin. + +13. The Poems and Songs of Robert Burns. + + + + +{222} + +CHAPTER VII. + +FROM THE FRENCH REVOLUTION TO THE DEATH OF SCOTT. + +1789-1832. + +The burst of creative activity at the opening of the 19th century has but +one parallel in English literary history, namely, the somewhat similar +flowering out of the national genius in the time of Elisabeth and the +first two Stuart kings. The later age gave birth to no supreme poets, +like Shakspere and Milton. It produced no _Hamlet_ and no _Paradise +Lost_; but it offers a greater number of important writers, a higher +average of excellence, and a wider range and variety of literary work +than any preceding era. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, Byron, Shelley, +and Keats are all great names; while Southey, Landor, Moore, Lamb, and De +Quincey would be noteworthy figures at any period, and deserve a fuller +mention than can be here accorded them. But in so crowded a generation, +selection becomes increasingly needful, and in the present chapter, +accordingly, the emphasis will be laid upon the first-named group as not +only the most important, but the most representative of the various +tendencies of their time. + +{223} + +The conditions of literary work in this century have been almost unduly +stimulating. The rapid advance in population, wealth, education, and the +means of communication has vastly increased the number of readers. Every +one who has any thing to say can say it in print, and is sure of some +sort of a hearing. A special feature of the time is the multiplication +of periodicals. The great London dailies, like the _Times_ and the +_Morning Post_, which were started during the last quarter of the 18th +century, were something quite new in journalism. The first of the modern +reviews, the _Edinburgh_, was established in 1802, as the organ of the +Whig party in Scotland. This was followed by the _London Quarterly_, in +1808, and by _Blackwood's Magazine_, in 1817, both in the Tory interest. +The first editor of the _Edinburgh_ was Francis Jeffrey, who assembled +about him a distinguished corps of contributors, including the versatile +Henry Brougham, afterward a great parliamentary orator and +lord-chancellor of England, and the Rev. Sydney Smith, whose witty +sayings are still current. The first editor of the _Quarterly_ was +William Gifford, a satirist, who wrote the _Baviad_ and _Maeviad_ in +ridicule of literary affectations. He was succeeded in 1824 by James +Gibson Lockhart, the son-in-law of Walter Scott, and the author of an +excellent _Life of Scott_. _Blackwood's_ was edited by John Wilson, +Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Edinburgh, who, under +the pen-name of "Christopher North," contributed to his magazine a series +{224} of brilliant, imaginary dialogues between famous characters of the +day, entitled _Noctes Ambrosianae_, because they were supposed to take +place at Ambrose's tavern in Edinburgh. These papers were full of a +profuse, headlong eloquence, of humor, literary criticism, and +personalities interspersed with songs expressive of a roystering and +convivial Toryism and an uproarious contempt for Whigs and cockneys. +These reviews and magazines, and others which sprang up beside them, +became the _nuclei_ about which the wit and scholarship of both parties +gathered. Political controversy under the Regency and the reign of +George IV. was thus carried on more regularly by permanent organs, and no +longer so largely by privateering, in the shape of pamphlets, like +Swift's _Public Spirit of the Whigs_, Johnson's _Taxation No Tyranny_, +and Burke's _Reflections on the Revolution in France_. Nor did politics +by any means usurp the columns of the reviews. Literature, art, science, +the whole circle of human effort and achievement passed under review. +_Blackwood's_, _Fraser's_, and the other monthlies, published stories, +poetry, criticism, and correspondence--every thing, in short, which +enters into the make-up of our magazines to-day, except illustrations. + +Two main influences, of foreign origin, have left their trace in the +English writers of the first thirty years of the 19th century, the one +communicated by contact with the new German literature of the latter half +of the 18th century, and in particular {225} with the writings of Goethe, +Schiller, and Kant; the other springing from the events of the French +Revolution. The influence of German upon English literature in the 19th +century was more intellectual and less formal than that of the Italian in +the 16th and of the French in the 18th. In other words, the German +writers furnished the English with ideas and ways of feeling rather than +with models of style. Goethe and Schiller did not become subjects for +literary imitation as Moliere, Racine, and Boileau had become in Pope's +time. It was reserved for a later generation and for Thomas Carlyle to +domesticate the diction of German prose. But the nature and extent of +this influence can, perhaps, best be noted when we come to take up the +authors of the time one by one. + +The excitement caused by the French Revolution was something more obvious +and immediate. When the Bastile fell, in 1789, the enthusiasm among the +friends of liberty and human progress in England was hardly less intense +than in France. It was the dawn of a new day: the shackles were stricken +from the slave; all men were free and all men were brothers, and radical +young England sent up a shout that echoed the roar of the Paris mob. +Wordsworth's lines on the _Fall of the Bastile_, Coleridge's _Fall of +Robespierre_ and _Ode to France_, and Southey's revolutionary drama, _Wat +Tyler_, gave expression to the hopes and aspirations of the English +democracy. In after life Wordsworth, looking back regretfully to those +years of promise, {226} wrote his poem on the _French Revolution as it +appeared to Enthusiasts at its Commencement_. + + "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, + But to be young was very heaven. Oh times + In which the meager, stale, forbidding ways + Of custom, law, and statute took at once + The attraction of a country in romance." + +Those were the days in which Wordsworth, then an under-graduate at +Cambridge, spent a college vacation in tramping through France, landing +at Calais on the eve of the very day (July 14, 1790) on which Louis XVI. +signalized the anniversary of the fall of the Bastile by taking the oath +of fidelity to the new Constitution. In the following year Wordsworth +revisited France, where he spent thirteen months, forming an intimacy +with the republican general, Beaupuis, at Orleans, and reaching Paris not +long after the September massacres of 1792. Those were the days, too, in +which young Southey and young Coleridge, having married sisters at +Bristol, were planning a "Pantisocracy," or ideal community, on the banks +of the Susquehannah, and denouncing the British government for going to +war with the French Republic. This group of poets, who had met one +another first in the south of England, came afterward to be called the +Lake Poets, from their residence in the mountainous lake country of +Westmoreland and Cumberland, with which their names, and that of +Wordsworth, especially, are forever associated. The so-called "Lakers" +{227} did not, properly speaking, constitute a school of poetry. They +differed greatly from one another in mind and art. But they were +connected by social ties and by religious and political sympathies. The +excesses of the French Revolution, and the usurpation of Napoleon +disappointed them, as it did many other English liberals, and drove them +into the ranks of the reactionaries. Advancing years brought +conservatism, and they became in time loyal Tories and orthodox Churchmen. + +William Wordsworth (1770-1850), the chief of the three, and, perhaps, on +the whole, the greatest English poet since Milton, published his _Lyrical +Ballads_ in 1798. The volume contained a few pieces by his friend +Coleridge--among them the _Ancient Mariner_--and its appearance may +fairly be said to mark an epoch in the history of English poetry. +Wordsworth regarded himself as a reformer of poetry; and in the preface +to the second volume of _Lyrical Ballads_, he defended the theory on +which they were composed. His innovations were twofold, in +subject-matter, and in diction. "The principal object which I proposed +to myself in these poems," he said, "was to choose incidents and +situations from common life. Low and rustic life was generally chosen, +because, in that condition, the essential passions of the heart find a +better soil in which they can attain their maturity . . . and are +incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature." +Wordsworth discarded, in theory, the poetic diction of his predecessors, +{228} and professed to use "a selection of the real language of men in a +state of vivid sensation." He adopted, he said, the language of men in +rustic life, "because such men hourly communicate with the best objects +from which the best part of language is originally derived." + +In the matter of poetic diction Wordsworth did not, in his practice, +adhere to the doctrine of this preface. Many of his most admired poems, +such as the _Lines written near Tintern Abbey_, the great _Ode on the +Intimations of Immortality_, the _Sonnets_, and many parts of his longest +poems, _The Excursion_ and _The Prelude_, deal with philosophic thought +and highly intellectualized emotions. In all of these and in many others +the language is rich, stately, involved, and as remote from the "real +language" of Westmoreland shepherds, as is the epic blank verse of +Milton. On the other hand, in those of his poems which were consciously +written in illustration of his theory, the affectation of simplicity, +coupled with a defective sense of humor, sometimes led him to the +selection of vulgar and trivial themes, and the use of language which is +bald, childish, or even ludicrous. His simplicity is too often the +simplicity of Mother Goose rather than of Chaucer. Instances of this +occur in such poems as _Peter Bell_, the _Idiot Boy_, _Goody Blake and +Harry Gill_, _Simon Lee_, and the _Wagoner_. But there are multitudes of +Wordsworth's ballads and lyrics which are simple without being silly, and +which, in their homeliness and clear {229} profundity, in their +production of the strongest effects by the fewest strokes, are among the +choicest modern examples of _pure_, as distinguished from decorated, art. +Such are (out of many) _Ruth_, _Lucy_, _A Portrait, To a Highland Girl_, +_The Reverie of Poor Susan_, _To the Cuckoo_, _The Reaper_, _We Are +Seven_, _The Pet Lamb_, _The Fountain_, _The Two April Mornings_, _The +Leech Gatherer_, _The Thorn_, and _Yarrow Revisited_. + +Wordsworth was something of a Quaker in poetry, and loved the sober drabs +and grays of life. Quietism was his literary religion, and the +sensational was to him not merely vulgar, but almost wicked. "The human +mind," he wrote, "is capable of being excited without the application of +gross and violent stimulants." He disliked the far-fetched themes and +high-colored style of Scott and Byron. He once told Landor that all of +Scott's poetry together was not worth sixpence. From action and passion +he turned away to sing the inward life of the soul and the outward life +of Nature. He said: + + "To me the meanest flower that blows can give + Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears." + +And again: + + "Long have I loved what I behold, + The night that calms, the day that cheers; + The common growth of mother earth + Suffices me--her tears, her mirth, + Her humblest mirth and tears." + + +Wordsworth's life was outwardly uneventful. The companionship of the +mountains and of his {230} own thoughts; the sympathy of his household; +the lives of the dalesmen and cottagers about him furnished him with all +the stimulus that he required. + + "Love had he found in huts where poor men lie: + His only teachers had been woods and rills, + The silence that is in the starry sky, + The sleep that is among the lonely hills." + +He read little, but reflected much, and made poetry daily, composing, by +preference, out of doors, and dictating his verses to some member of his +family. His favorite amanuensis was his sister Dorothy, a woman of fine +gifts, to whom Wordsworth was indebted for some of his happiest +inspirations. She was the subject of the poem beginning "Her eyes are +wild," and her charming _Memorials of a Tour in the Scottish Highlands_ +records the origin of many of her brother's best poems. Throughout life +Wordsworth was remarkably self-centered. The ridicule of the reviewers, +against which he gradually made his way to public recognition, never +disturbed his serene belief in himself, or in the divine message which he +felt himself commissioned to deliver. He was a slow and serious person, +a preacher as well as a poet, with a certain rigidity, not to say +narrowness, of character. That plastic temperament which we associate +with poetic genius Wordsworth either did not possess, or it hardened +early. Whole sides of life were beyond the range of his sympathies. He +{231} touched life at fewer points than Byron and Scott, but touched it +more profoundly. It is to him that we owe the phrase "plain living and +high thinking," as also a most noble illustration of it in his own +practice. His was the wisest and deepest spirit among the English poets +of his generation, though hardly the most poetic. He wrote too much, +and, attempting to make every petty incident or reflection the occasion +of a poem, he finally reached the point of composing verses _On Seeing a +Harp in the shape of a Needle Case_, and on other themes more worthy of +Mrs. Sigourney. In parts of his long blank-verse poems, _The Excursion_, +1814, and _The Prelude_--which was printed after his death in 1850, +though finished as early as 1806--the poetry wears very thin and its +place is taken by prosaic, tedious didacticism. These two poems were +designed as portions of a still more extended work, _The Recluse_, which +was never completed. _The Excursion_ consists mainly of philosophical +discussions on nature and human life between a school-master, a solitary, +and an itinerant peddler. _The Prelude_ describes the development of +Wordsworth's own genius. In parts of _The Excursion_ the diction is +fairly Shaksperian. + + "The good die first, + And they whose hearts are dry as summer dust + Burn to the socket." + +A passage not only beautiful in itself, but dramatically true, in the +mouth of the bereaved mother {232} who utters it, to that human instinct +which generalizes a private sorrow into a universal law. Much of _The +Prelude_ can hardly be called poetry at all, yet some of Wordsworth's +loftiest poetry is buried among its dreary wastes, and now and then, in +the midst of commonplaces, comes a flash of Miltonic splendor--like + + "Golden cities ten months' journey deep + Among Tartarian wilds." + + +Wordsworth is, above all things, the poet of Nature. In this province he +was not without forerunners. To say nothing of Burns and Cowper, there +was George Crabbe, who had published his _Village_ in 1783--fifteen years +before the _Lyrical Ballads_--and whose last poem, _Tales of the Hall_, +came out in 1819, five years after _The Excursion_. Byron called Crabbe +"Nature's sternest painter, and her best." He was a minutely accurate +delineator of the harsher aspects of rural life. He photographs a Gypsy +camp; a common, with its geese and donkey; a salt marsh, a shabby village +street, or tumble-down manse. But neither Crabbe nor Cowper has the +imaginative lift of Wordsworth, + + "The light that never was on sea or land + The consecration and the poet's dream." + + +In a note on a couplet in one of his earliest poems, descriptive of an +oak tree standing dark against the sunset, Wordsworth says: "I recollect +distinctly the very spot where this struck me. {233} The moment was +important in my poetical history, for I date from it my consciousness of +the infinite variety of natural appearances which had been unnoticed by +the poets of any age or country, and I made a resolution to supply, in +some degree, the deficiency." In later life he is said to have been +impatient of any thing spoken or written by another about mountains, +conceiving himself to have a monopoly of "the power of hills." But +Wordsworth did not stop with natural description. Matthew Arnold has +said that the office of modern poetry is the "moral interpretation of +Nature." Such, at any rate, was Wordsworth's office. To him Nature was +alive and divine. He felt, under the veil of phenomena, + + "A presence that disturbs me with the joy + Of elevated thought: a sense sublime + Of something far more deeply interfused." + +He approached, if he did not actually reach, the view of Pantheism, which +identifies God with Nature; and the mysticism of the Idealists, who +identify Nature with the soul of man. This tendency was not inspired in +Wordsworth by German philosophy. He was no metaphysician. In his +rambles with Coleridge about Nether Stowey and Alfoxden, when both were +young, they had, indeed, discussed Spinoza. And in the autumn of 1798, +after the publication of the _Lyrical Ballads_, the two friends went +together to Germany, where Wordsworth spent half a year. But the +literature {234} and philosophy of Germany made little direct impression +upon Wordsworth. He disliked Goethe, and he quoted with approval the +saying of the poet Klopstock, whom he met at Hamburg, that he placed the +romanticist Burger above both Goethe and Schiller. + +It was through Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), who was pre-eminently +the _thinker_ among the literary men of his generation, that the new +German thought found its way into England. During the fourteen months +which he spent in Germany--chiefly at Ratzburg and Goettingen--he had +familiarized himself with the transcendental philosophy of Immanuel Kant +and of his continuators, Fichte and Schelling, as well as with the +general literature of Germany. On his return to England, he published, +in 1800, a free translation of Schiller's _Wallenstein_, and through his +writings, and more especially through his conversations, he became the +conductor by which German philosophic ideas reached the English literary +class. + +Coleridge described himself as being from boyhood a book-worm and a +day-dreamer. He remained through life an omnivorous, though +unsystematic, reader. He was helpless in practical affairs, and his +native indolence and procrastination were increased by his indulgence in +the opium habit. On his return to England, in 1800, he went to reside at +Keswick, in the Lake Country, with his brother-in-law, Southey, whose +industry supported both families. During his last nineteen {235} years +Coleridge found an asylum under the roof of Mr. James Gilman, of +Highgate, near London, whither many of the best young men in England were +accustomed to resort to listen to Coleridge's wonderful talk. Talk, +indeed, was the medium through which he mainly influenced his generation. +It cost him an effort to put his thoughts on paper. His _Table +Talk_--crowded with pregnant paragraphs--was taken down from his lips by +his nephew, Henry Coleridge. His criticisms of Shakspere are nothing but +notes, made here and there, from a course of lectures delivered before +the Royal Institute, and never fully written out. Though only hints and +suggestions, they are, perhaps, the most penetrative and helpful +Shaksperian criticism in English. He was always forming projects and +abandoning them. He projected a great work on Christian philosophy, +which was to have been his _magnum opus_, but he never wrote it. He +projected an epic poem on the fall of Jerusalem. "I schemed it at +twenty-five," he said, "but, alas! _venturum expectat_." What bade fair +to be his best poem, _Christabel_, is a fragment. Another strangely +beautiful poem, _Kubla Khan_--which came to him, he said, in sleep--is +even more fragmentary. And the most important of his prose remains, his +_Biographia Literaria_, 1817, a history of his own opinions, breaks off +abruptly. + +It was in his suggestiveness that Coleridge's great service to posterity +resided. He was what J. S. Mill called a "seminal mind," and his thought +{236} had that power of stimulating thought in others, which is the mark +and the privilege of original genius. Many a man has owed to some +sentence of Coleridge's, if not the awakening in himself of a new +intellectual life, at least the starting of fruitful trains of reflection +which have modified his whole view of certain great subjects. On every +thing that he left is set the stamp of high mental authority. He was +not, perhaps, primarily, he certainly was not exclusively, a poet. In +theology, in philosophy, in political thought, and literary criticism, he +set currents flowing which are flowing yet. The terminology of +criticism, for example, is in his debt for many of those convenient +distinctions--such as that between genius and talent, between wit and +humor, between fancy and imagination--which are familiar enough now, but +which he first introduced, or enforced. His definitions and apothegms we +meet every-where. Such are, for example, the sayings: "Every man is born +an Aristotelian or a Platonist." "Prose is words in their best order; +poetry, the best words in the best order." And among the bits of subtle +interpretation, that abound in his writings, may be mentioned his +estimate of Wordsworth, in the _Biographia Literaria_, and his sketch of +Hamlet's character--one with which he was personally in strong +sympathy--in the _Lectures on Shakspere_. + +The Broad-Church party, in the English Church, among whose most eminent +exponents have been Frederic Robertson, Arnold of Rugby, {237} F. D. +Maurice, Charles Kingsley, and the late Dean Stanley, traces its +intellectual origin to Coleridge's _Aids to Reflection_; to his writings +and conversations in general, and particularly to his ideal of a national +Clerisy, as set forth in his essay on _Church and State_. In politics, +as in religion, Coleridge's conservatism represents the reaction against +the destructive spirit of the eighteenth century and the French +revolution. To this root-and-branch democracy he opposed the view, that +every old belief, or institution, such as the throne or the Church, had +served some need, and had a rational idea at the bottom of it, to which +it might be again recalled, and made once more a benefit to society, +instead of a curse and an anachronism. + +As a poet, Coleridge has a sure, though slender, hold upon immortal fame. +No English poet has "sung so wildly well" as the singer of _Christabel_ +and the _Ancient Mariner_. The former of these is, in form, a romance in +a variety of meters, and in substance, a tale of supernatural possession, +by which a lovely and innocent maiden is brought under the control of a +witch. Though unfinished and obscure in intention, it haunts the +imagination with a mystic power. Byron had seen _Christabel_ in MS., and +urged Coleridge to publish it. He hated all the "Lakers," but when, on +parting from Lady Byron, he wrote his song, + + "Fare thee well, and if forever, + Still forever fare thee well," + +{238} he prefixed to it the noble lines from Coleridge's poem, beginning + + "Alas! they had been friends in youth." + + +In that weird ballad, the _Ancient Mariner_, the supernatural is handled +with even greater subtlety than in _Christabel_. The reader is led to +feel that amid the loneliness of the tropic sea, the line between the +earthly and the unearthly vanishes, and the poet leaves him to discover +for himself whether the spectral shapes that the mariner saw were merely +the visions of the calenture, or a glimpse of the world of spirits. +Coleridge is one of our most perfect metrists. The poet Swinburne--than +whom there can be no higher authority on this point (though he is rather +given to exaggeration)--pronounces _Kubla Khan_, "for absolute melody and +splendor, the first poem in the language." + +Robert Southey, the third member of this group, was a diligent worker and +one of the most voluminous of English writers. As a poet, he was lacking +in inspiration, and his big Oriental epics, _Thalaba_, 1801, and the +_Curse of Kehama_, 1810, are little better than wax-work. Of his +numerous works in prose, the _Life of Nelson_ is, perhaps, the best, and +is an excellent biography. + +Several other authors were more or less closely associated with the Lake +Poets by residence or social affiliation. John Wilson, the editor of +_Blackwood's_, lived for some time, when a young man, at Elleray, on the +banks of Windermere. He was an {239} athletic man of out-door habits, an +enthusiastic sportsman, and a lover of natural scenery. His admiration +of Wordsworth was thought to have led him to imitation of the latter, in +his _Isle of Palms_, 1812, and his other poetry. + +One of Wilson's companions, in his mountain walks, was Thomas De Quincey, +who had been led by his reverence for Wordsworth and Coleridge to take up +his residence, in 1808, at Grasmere, where he occupied for many years the +cottage from which Wordsworth had removed to Allan Bank. De Quincey was +a shy, bookish little man, of erratic, nocturnal habits, who impresses +one, personally, as a child of genius, with a child's helplessness and a +child's sharp observation. He was, above all things, a magazinist. All +his writings, with one exception, appeared first in the shape of +contributions to periodicals; and his essays, literary criticisms, and +miscellaneous papers are exceedingly rich and varied. The most famous of +them was his _Confessions of an English Opium Eater_, published as a +serial in the _London Magazine_, in 1821. He had begun to take opium, as +a cure for the toothache, when a student at Oxford, where he resided from +1803 to 1808. By 1816 he had risen to eight thousand drops of laudanum a +day. For several years after this he experienced the acutest misery, and +his will suffered an entire paralysis. In 1821 he succeeded in reducing +his dose to a comparatively small allowance, and in shaking off his +torpor so as to become capable of literary work. {240} The most +impressive effect of the opium habit was seen in his dreams, in the +unnatural expansion of space and time, and the infinite repetition of the +same objects. His sleep was filled with dim, vast images; measureless +cavalcades deploying to the sound of orchestral music; an endless +succession of vaulted halls, with staircases climbing to heaven, up which +toiled eternally the same solitary figure. "Then came sudden alarms, +hurrying to and fro; trepidations of innumerable fugitives; darkness and +light; tempest and human faces." Many of De Quincey's papers were +autobiographical, but there is always something baffling in these +reminiscences. In the interminable wanderings of his pen--for which, +perhaps, opium was responsible--he appears to lose all trace of facts or +of any continuous story. Every actual experience of his life seems to +have been taken up into a realm of dream, and there distorted till the +reader sees not the real figures, but the enormous, grotesque shadows of +them, executing wild dances on a screen. An instance of this process is +described by himself in his _Vision of Sudden Death_. But his +unworldliness and faculty of vision-seeing were not inconsistent with the +keenness of judgment and the justness and delicacy of perception +displayed in his _Biographical Sketches_ of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and +other contemporaries: in his critical papers on _Pope, Milton, Lessing, +Homer and the Homeridae_: his essay on _Style_; and his _Brief Appraisal +of the Greek Literature_. His curious scholarship is seen in his +articles on the _Toilet of a {241} Hebrew Lady_, and the _Casuistry of +Roman Meals_; his ironical and somewhat elaborate humor in his essay on +_Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts_. Of his narrative pieces the +most remarkable is his _Revolt of the Tartars_, describing the flight of +a Kalmuck tribe of six hundred thousand souls from Russia to the Chinese +frontier: a great hegira or anabasis, which extended for four thousand +miles over desert steppes infested with foes; occupied six months' time, +and left nearly half of the tribe dead upon the way. The subject was +suited to De Quincey's imagination. It was like one of his own opium +visions, and he handled it with a dignity and force which make the +history not altogether unworthy of comparison with Thucydides's great +chapter on the Sicilian Expedition. + +An intimate friend of Southey was Walter Savage Landor, a man of kingly +nature, of a leonine presence, with a most stormy and unreasonable +temper, and yet with the courtliest graces of manner and with--said +Emerson--a "wonderful brain, despotic, violent, and inexhaustible." He +inherited wealth, and lived a great part of his life at Florence, where +he died, in 1864, in his ninetieth year. Dickens, who knew him at Bath, +in the latter part of his life, made a kindly caricature of him as +Lawrence Boythom, in _Bleak House_, whose "combination of superficial +ferocity and inherent tenderness," testifies Henry Crabb Robinson, in his +_Diary_, was true to the life. Landor is the most purely classical of +English writers. Not merely his themes {242} but his whole way of +thinking was pagan and antique. He composed, indifferently, in English +or Latin, preferring the latter, if any thing, in obedience to his +instinct for compression and exclusiveness. Thus portions of his +narrative poem, _Gebir_, 1798, were written originally in Latin, and he +added a Latin version, _Gebirius_, to the English edition. In like +manner his _Hellenics_, 1847, were mainly translations from his Latin +_Idyllia Heroica_, written years before. The Hellenic clearness and +repose which were absent from his life, Landor sought in his art. His +poems, in their restraint, their objectivity, their aloofness from modern +feeling, have something chill and artificial. The verse of poets like +Byron and Wordsworth is alive; the blood runs in it. But Landor's +polished, clean-cut _intaglios_ have been well described as "written in +marble." He was a master of fine and solid prose. His _Pericles and +Aspasia_ consists of a series of letters passing between the great +Athenian demagogue, the hetaira, Aspasia, her friend, Cleone of Miletus, +Anaxagorus, the philosopher, and Pericles's nephew, Alcibiades. In this +masterpiece the intellectual life of Athens, at its period of highest +refinement, is brought before the reader with singular vividness, and he +is made to breathe an atmosphere of high-bred grace, delicate wit, and +thoughtful sentiment, expressed in English "of Attic choice." The +_Imaginary Conversations_, 1824-1846, were Platonic dialogues between a +great variety of historical characters; between, for example, Dante and +Beatrice, Washington {243} and Franklin, Queen Elisabeth and Cecil, +Xenophon and Cyrus the Younger, Bonaparte and the President of the +Senate. Landor's writings have never been popular; they address an +aristocracy of scholars; and Byron--whom Landor disliked and considered +vulgar--sneered at the latter as a writer who "cultivated much private +renown in the shape of Latin verses." He said of himself that he "never +contended with a contemporary, but walked alone on the far eastern +uplands, meditating and remembering." + +A schoolmate of Coleridge, at Christ's Hospital, and his friend and +correspondent through life, was Charles Lamb, one of the most charming of +English essayists. He was an old bachelor, who lived alone with his +sister Mary a lovable and intellectual woman, but subject to recurring +attacks of madness. Lamb was "a notched and cropped scrivener, a votary +of the desk," a clerk, that is, in the employ of the East India Company. +He was of antiquarian tastes, an ardent play-goer, a lover of whist and +of the London streets; and these tastes are reflected in his _Essays of +Elia_, contributed to the _London Magazine_ and reprinted in book form in +1823. From his mousing among the Elisabethan dramatists and such old +humorists as Burton and Fuller, his own style imbibed a peculiar +quaintness and pungency. His _Specimens of English Dramatic Poets_, +1808, is admirable for its critical insight. In 1802 he paid a visit to +Coleridge at Keswick, in the Lake Country; but he felt or {244} affected +a whimsical horror of the mountains, and said, "Fleet Street and the +Strand are better places to live in." Among the best of his essays are +_Dream Children_, _Poor Relations_, _The Artificial Comedy of the Last +Century_, _Old China_, _Roast Pig_, _A Defense of Chimney-sweeps_, _A +Complaint of the Decay of Beggars in the Metropolis_, and _The Old +Benchers of the Inner Temple_. + +The romantic movement, preluded by Gray, Collins, Chatterton, Macpherson, +and others, culminated in Walter Scott (1771-1832). His passion for the +medieval was first excited by reading Percy's _Reliques_, when he was a +boy; and in one of his school themes he maintained that Ariosto was a +greater poet than Homer. He began early to collect manuscript ballads, +suits of armor, pieces of old plate, border-horns, and similar relics. +He learned Italian in order to read the romancers--Ariosto, Tasso, Pulci, +and Boiardo, preferring them to Dante. He studied Gothic architecture, +heraldry, and the art of fortification, and made drawings of famous ruins +and battle-fields. In particular he read eagerly every thing that he +could lay hands on relating to the history, legends, and antiquities of +the Scottish border--the vale of Tweed, Teviotdale, Ettrick Forest, and +the Yarrow, of all which land he became the laureate, as Burns had been +of Ayrshire and the "West Country." Scott, like Wordsworth, was an +out-door poet. He spent much time in the saddle, and was fond of horses, +dogs, hunting, and salmon-fishing. He had a keen {245} eye for the +beauties of natural scenery, though "more especially," he admits, "when +combined with ancient ruins or remains of our forefathers' piety or +splendor." He had the historic imagination, and, in creating the +historical novel, he was the first to throw a poetic glamour over +European annals. In 1803 Wordsworth visited Scott at Lasswade, near +Edinburgh; and Scott afterward returned the visit at Grasmere. +Wordsworth noted that his guest was "full of anecdote and averse from +disquisition." The Englishman was a moralist and much given to +"disquisition," while the Scotchman was, above all things, a _raconteur_, +and, perhaps, on the whole, the foremost of British story-tellers. +Scott's Toryism, too, was of a different stripe from Wordsworth's, being +rather the result of sentiment and imagination than of philosophy and +reflection. His mind struck deep root in the past; his local attachments +and family pride were intense. Abbotsford was his darling, and the +expenses of this domain and of the baronial hospitality which he there +extended to all comers were among the causes of his bankruptcy. The +enormous toil which he exacted of himself, to pay off the debt of 117,000 +pounds, contracted by the failure of his publishers, cost him his life. +It is said that he was more gratified when the Prince Regent created him +a baronet, in 1820, than by all the public recognition that he acquired +as the author of the Waverley Novels. + +Scott was attracted by the romantic side of {246} German literature. His +first published poem was a translation made in 1796 from Burger's wild +ballad, _Leonora_. He followed this up with versions of the same poet's +_Wilde Jaeger_, of Goethe's violent drama of feudal life, _Goetz Van +Berlichingen_, and with other translations from the German, of a similar +class. On his horseback trips through the border, where he studied the +primitive manners of the Liddesdale people, and took down old ballads +from the recitation of ancient dames and cottagers, he amassed the +materials for his _Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border_, 1802. But the +first of his original poems was the _Lay of the Last Minstrel_, published +in 1805, and followed, in quick succession, by _Marmion_, the _Lady of +the Lake_, _Rokeby_, the _Lord of the Isles_, and a volume of ballads and +lyrical pieces, all issued during the years 1806-1814. The popularity +won by this series of metrical romances was immediate and wide-spread. +Nothing so fresh, or so brilliant, had appeared in English poetry for +nearly two centuries. The reader was hurried along through scenes of +rapid action, whose effect was heightened by wild landscapes and +picturesque manners. The pleasure was a passive one. There was no deep +thinking to perplex, no subtler beauties to pause upon; the feelings were +stirred pleasantly, but not deeply; the effect was on the surface. The +spell employed was novelty--or, at most, wonder--and the chief emotion +aroused was breathless interest in the progress of the story. Carlyle +said that Scott's genius was _in extenso_, {247} rather than _in +intenso_, and that its great praise was its healthiness. This is true of +his verse, but not altogether so of his prose, which exhibits deeper +qualities. Some of Scott's most perfect poems, too, are his shorter +ballads, like _Jock o' Hazeldean_, and _Proud Maisie is in the Wood_, +which have a greater intensity and compression than his metrical tales. + +From 1814 to 1831 Scott wrote and published the _Waverley_ novels, some +thirty in number; if we consider the amount of work done, the speed with +which it was done, and the general average of excellence maintained, +perhaps the most marvelous literary feat on record. The series was +issued anonymously, and takes its name from the first number, _Waverley, +or 'Tis Sixty Years Since_. This was founded upon the rising of the +clans, in 1745, in support of the Young Pretender, Charles Edward Stuart, +and it revealed to the English public that almost foreign country which +lay just across their threshold, the Scottish Highlands. The _Waverley_ +novels remain, as a whole, unequaled as historical fiction, although, +here and there a single novel, like George Eliot's _Romola_, or +Thackeray's _Henry Esmond_, or Kingsley's _Hypatia_, may have attained a +place beside the best of them. They were a novelty when they appeared. +English prose fiction had somewhat declined since the time of Fielding +and Goldsmith. There were truthful, though rather tame, delineations of +provincial life, like Jane Austen's _Sense and Sensibility_, 1811, and +{248} _Pride and Prejudice_, 1813; or Maria Edgeworth's _Popular Tales_, +1804. On the other hand, there were Gothic romances, like the _Monk_ of +Matthew Gregory Lewis, to whose _Tales of Wonder_ some of Scott's +translations from the German had been contributed; or like Anne +Radcliffe's _Mysteries of Udolpho_. The great original of this school of +fiction was Horace Walpole's _Castle of Otranto_, 1765, an absurd tale of +secret trap-doors, subterranean vaults, apparitions of monstrous mailed +figures and colossal helmets, pictures that descend from their frames, +and hollow voices that proclaim the ruin of ancient families. + +Scott used the machinery of romance, but he was not merely a romancer, or +a historical novelist even, and it is not, as Carlyle implies, the +buff-belts and jerkins which principally interest us in his heroes. +_Ivanhoe_ and _Kenilworth_ and the _Talisman_ are, indeed, romances pure +and simple, and very good romances at that. But, in novels such as _Rob +Roy_, the _Antiquary_, the _Heart of Midlothian_, and the _Bride of +Lammermoor_, Scott drew from contemporary life, and from his intimate +knowledge of Scotch character. The story is there, with its entanglement +of plot and its exciting adventures, but there are also, as truly as in +Shakspere, though not in the same degree, the observation of life, the +knowledge of men, the power of dramatic creation. No writer awakens in +his readers a warmer personal affection than Walter Scott, the brave, +honest, kindly gentleman, the noblest {249} figure among the literary men +of his generation. + +Another Scotch poet was Thomas Campbell, whose _Pleasures of Hope_, 1799, +was written in Pope's couplet, and in the stilted diction of the +eighteenth century. _Gertrude of Wyoming_, 1809, a long narrative poem +in Spenserian stanza, is untrue to the scenery and life of Pennsylvania, +where its scene is laid. But Campbell turned his rhetorical manner and +his clanking, martial verse to fine advantage in such pieces as +_Hohenlinden_, _Ye Mariners of England_, and the _Battle of the Baltic_. +These have the true lyric fire, and rank among the best English war-songs. + +When Scott was asked why he had left off writing poetry, he answered, +"Byron _bet_ me." George Gordon Byron (1788-1824) was a young man of +twenty-four, when, on his return from a two years' sauntering through +Portugal, Spain, Albania, Greece, and the Levant, he published, in the +first two cantos of _Childe Harold_, 1812, a sort of poetic itinerary of +his experiences and impressions. The poem took, rather to its author's +surprise, who said that he woke one morning and found himself famous. +_Childe Harold_ opened a new field to poetry, the romance of travel, the +picturesque aspects of foreign scenery, manners, and costumes. It is +instructive of the difference between the two ages, in poetic sensibility +to such things, to compare Byron's glowing imagery with Addison's tame +_Letter from Italy_, written a century before. _Childe {250} Harold_ was +followed by a series of metrical tales, the _Giaour_, the _Bride of +Abydos_, the _Corsair_, _Lara_, the _Siege of Corinth_, _Parasina_, and +_Prisoner of Chillon_, all written in the years 1813-1816. These poems +at once took the place of Scott's in popular interest, dazzling a public +that had begun to weary of chivalry romances, with pictures of Eastern +life, with incidents as exciting as Scott's, descriptions as highly +colored, and a much greater intensity of passion. So far as they +depended for this interest upon the novelty of their accessories, the +effect was a temporary one. Seraglios, divans, bulbuls, Gulistans, +Zuleikas, and other Oriental properties, deluged English poetry for a +time, and then subsided; even as the tide of moss-troopers, sorcerers, +hermits, and feudal castles had already had its rise and fall. + +But there was a deeper reason for the impression made by Byron's poetry +upon his contemporaries. He laid his finger right on the sore spot in +modern life. He had the disease with which the time was sick, the +world-weariness, the desperation which proceeded from "passion incapable +of being converted into action." We find this tone in much of the +literature which followed the failure of the French Revolution and the +Napoleonic wars. From the irritations of that period, the disappointment +of high hopes for the future of the race, the growing religious +disbelief, and the revolt of democracy and free thought against +conservative reaction, sprang what Southey called the "Satanic {251} +school," which spoke its loudest word in Byron. Titanic is the better +word, for the rebellion was not against God, but Jupiter, that is, +against the State, Church, and society of Byron's day; against George +III., the Tory cabinet of Lord Castlereigh, the Duke of Wellington, the +bench of Bishops, London gossip, the British Constitution, and British +cant. In these poems of Byron, and in his dramatic experiments, +_Manfred_ and _Cain_, there is a single figure--the figure of Byron under +various masks--and one pervading mood, a restless and sardonic gloom, a +weariness of life, a love of solitude, and a melancholy exaltation in the +presence of the wilderness and the sea. Byron's hero is always +represented as a man originally noble, whom some great wrong, by others, +or some mysterious crime of his own, has blasted and embittered, and who +carries about the world a seared heart and a somber brow. Harold--who +may stand as a type of all his heroes--has run "through sin's labyrinth" +and feeling the "fullness of satiety," is drawn abroad to roam, "the +wandering exile of his own dark mind." The loss of a capacity for pure, +unjaded emotion is the constant burden of Byron's lament. + + "No more, no more, O never more on me + The freshness of the heart shall fall like dew." + +and again, + + "O could I feel as I have felt--or be what I have been, + Or weep as I could once have wept, o'er many a vanished scene; + {252} + As springs in deserts found seem sweet, all brackish tho' they be, + So, midst the withered waste of life, those tears would flow to me." + +This mood was sincere in Byron; but by cultivating it, and posing too +long in one attitude, he became self-conscious and theatrical, and much +of his serious poetry has a false ring. His example infected the minor +poetry of the time, and it was quite natural that Thackeray--who +represented a generation that had a very different ideal of the +heroic--should be provoked into describing Byron as "a big, sulky dandy." + +Byron was well fitted by birth and temperament to be the spokesman of +this fierce discontent. He inherited from his mother a haughty and +violent temper, and profligate tendencies from his father. He was +through life a spoiled child, whose main characteristic was willfulness. +He liked to shock people by exaggerating his wickedness, or by perversely +maintaining the wrong side of a dispute. But he had traits of bravery +and generosity. Women loved him, and he made strong friends. There was +a careless charm about him which fascinated natures as unlike each other +as Shelley and Scott. By the death of the fifth Lord Byron without +issue, Byron came into a title and estates at the age of ten. Though a +liberal in politics he had aristocratic feelings, and was vain of his +rank as he was of his beauty. He was educated at Harrow and at Trinity +College, Cambridge, where he was idle and {253} dissipated, but did a +great deal of miscellaneous reading. He took some of his Cambridge +set--Hobhouse, Matthews, and others--to Newstead Abbey, his ancestral +seat, where they filled the ancient cloisters with eccentric orgies. +Byron was strikingly handsome. His face had a spiritual paleness and a +classic regularity, and his dark hair curled closely to his head. A +deformity in one of his feet was a mortification to him, though it did +not greatly impair his activity, and he prided himself upon his powers as +a swimmer. + +In 1815, when at the height of his literary and social _eclat_ in London, +he married. In February of the following year he was separated from Lady +Byron, and left England forever, pursued by the execrations of outraged +respectability. In this chorus of abuse there was mingled a share of +cant; but Byron got, on the whole, what he deserved. From Switzerland, +where he spent a summer by Lake Leman, with the Shelleys; from Venice, +Ravenna, Pisa, and Rome, scandalous reports of his intrigues and his wild +debaucheries were wafted back to England, and with these came poem after +poem, full of burning genius, pride, scorn, and anguish, and all hurling +defiance at English public opinion. The third and fourth cantos of +_Childe Harold_, 1816-1818, were a great advance upon the first two, and +contain the best of Byron's serious poetry. He has written his name all +over the continent of Europe, and on a hundred memorable spots has made +the scenery his own. On the field of Waterloo, on "the castled {254} +crag of Drachenfels," "by the blue rushing of the arrowy Rhone," in +Venice, on the Bridge of Sighs, in the Coliseum at Rome, and among the +"Isles of Greece," the tourist is compelled to see with Byron's eyes and +under the associations of his pilgrimage. In his later poems, such as +_Beppo_, 1818, and _Don Juan_, 1819-1823, he passed into his second +manner, a mocking cynicism gaining ground upon the somewhat stagy gloom +of his early poetry--Mephistophiles gradually elbowing out Satan. _Don +Juan_, though morally the worst, is intellectually the most vital and +representative of Byron's poems. It takes up into itself most fully the +life of the time; exhibits most thoroughly the characteristic +alternations of Byron's moods and the prodigal resources of wit, passion, +and understanding, which--rather than imagination--were his prominent +qualities as a poet. The hero, a graceless, amorous, stripling, goes +wandering from Spain to the Greek islands and Constantinople, thence to +St. Petersburg, and finally to England. Every-where his seductions are +successful, and Byron uses him as a means of exposing the weakness of the +human heart and the rottenness of society in all countries. In 1823, +breaking away from his life of selfish indulgence in Italy, Byron threw +himself into the cause of Grecian liberty, which he had sung so +gloriously in the _Isles of Greece_. He died at Missolonghi, in the +following year, of a fever contracted by exposure and overwork. + +Byron was a great poet but not a great literary {255} artist. He wrote +negligently and with the ease of assured strength, his mind gathering +heat as it moved, and pouring itself forth in reckless profusion. His +work is diffuse and imperfect; much of it is melodrama or speech-making +rather than true poetry. But on the other hand, much, very much of it, +is unexcelled as the direct, strong, sincere utterance of personal +feeling. Such is the quality of his best lyrics, like _When We Two +Parted_, the _Elegy on Thyrza_, _Stanzas to Augusta_, _She Walks in +Beauty_, and of innumerable passages, lyrical and descriptive, in his +longer poems. He had not the wisdom of Wordsworth, nor the rich and +subtle imagination of Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats when they were at +their best. But he had greater body and motive force than any of them. +He is the strongest personality among English poets since Milton, though +his strength was wasted by want of restraint and self-culture. In Milton +the passion was there, but it was held in check by the will and the +artistic conscience, made subordinate to good ends, ripened by long +reflection, and finally uttered in forms of perfect and harmonious +beauty. Byron's love of Nature was quite different in kind from +Wordsworth's. Of all English poets he has sung most lyrically of that +national theme, the sea, as witness among many other passages, the famous +apostrophe to the ocean, which closes _Childe Harold_, and the opening of +the third canto in the same poem, + + "Once more upon the waters," etc. + +{256} He had a passion for night and storm, because they made him forget +himself. + + "Most glorious night! + Thou wert not sent for slumber! Let me be + A sharer in thy fierce and far delight, + A portion of the tempest and of thee!" + + +Byron's literary executor and biographer was the Irish poet, Thomas +Moore, a born song-writer, whose _Irish Melodies_, set to old native +airs, are, like Burns's, genuine, spontaneous, singing, and run naturally +to music. Songs such as the _Meeting of the Waters_, _The Harp of Tara_, +_Those Evening Bells_, the _Light of Other Days_, _Araby's Daughter_, and +the _Last Rose of Summer_ were, and still are, popular favorites. +Moore's Oriental romance, _Lalla Rookh_, 1817, is overladen with ornament +and with a sugary sentiment that clogs the palate. He had the quick +Irish wit, sensibility rather than passion, and fancy rather than +imagination. + +Byron's friend, Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), was also in fiery +revolt against all conventions and institutions, though his revolt +proceeded not, as in Byron's case, from the turbulence of passions which +brooked no restraint, but rather from an intellectual impatience of any +kind of control. He was not, like Byron, a sensual man, but temperate +and chaste. He was, indeed, in his life and in his poetry, as nearly a +disembodied spirit as a human creature can be. The German poet, Heine, +said that liberty was the religion of this century, {257} and of this +religion Shelley was a worshiper. His rebellion against authority began +early. He refused to fag at Eton, and was expelled from Oxford for +publishing a tract on the _Necessity of Atheism_. At nineteen, he ran +away with Harriet Westbrook, and was married to her in Scotland. Three +years later he deserted her for Mary Godwin, with whom he eloped to +Switzerland. Two years after this his first wife drowned herself in the +Serpentine, and Shelley was then formally wedded to Mary Godwin. All +this is rather startling, in the bare statement of it, yet it is not +inconsistent with the many testimonies that exist, to Shelley's singular +purity and beauty of character, testimonies borne out by the evidence of +his own writings. Impulse with him took the place of conscience. Moral +law, accompanied by the sanction of power, and imposed by outside +authority, he rejected as a form of tyranny. His nature lacked +robustness and ballast. Byron, who was at bottom intensely practical, +said that Shelley's philosophy was too spiritual and romantic. Hazlitt, +himself a Radical, wrote of Shelley: "He has a fire in his eye, a fever +in his blood, a maggot in his brain, a hectic flutter in his speech, +which mark out the philosophic fanatic. He is sanguine complexioned and +shrill voiced." It was, perhaps, with some recollection of this +last-mentioned trait of Shelley the man, that Carlyle wrote of Shelley +the poet, that "the sound of him was shrieky," and that he had "filled +the earth with an inarticulate wailing." + +{258} + +His career as a poet began characteristically enough, with the +publication, while at Oxford, of a volume of political rimes, entitled +_Margaret Nicholson's Remains_, Margaret Nicholson being the crazy woman +who tried to stab George III. His boyish poem, _Queen Mab_, was +published in 1813; _Alastor_ in 1816, and the _Revolt of Islam_--his +longest--in 1818, all before he was twenty-one. These were filled with +splendid, though unsubstantial, imagery, but they were abstract in +subject, and had the faults of incoherence and formlessness which make +Shelley's longer poems wearisome and confusing. They sought to embody +his social creed of Perfectionism, as well as a certain vague Pantheistic +system of belief in a spirit of love in nature and man, whose presence is +a constant source of obscurity in Shelley's verse. In 1818 he went to +Italy, where the last four years of his life were passed, and where, +under the influences of Italian art and poetry, his writing became deeper +and stronger. He was fond of yachting, and spent much of his time upon +the Mediterranean. In the summer of 1822, his boat was swamped in a +squall off the Gulf of Spezzia, and Shelley's drowned body was washed +ashore, and burned in the presence of Byron and Leigh Hunt. The ashes +were entombed in the Protestant cemetery at Rome, with the epitaph, _Cor +cordium_. + +Shelley's best and maturest work, nearly all of which was done in Italy, +includes his tragedy, _The Cenci_, 1819, and his lyrical drama, +_Prometheus {259} Unbound_, 1821. The first of these has a unity, and a +definiteness of contour unusual with Shelley, and is, with the exception +of some of Robert Browning's, the best English tragedy since Otway. +_Prometheus_ represented to Shelley's mind the human spirit fighting +against divine oppression, and in his portrayal of this figure, he kept +in mind not only the _Prometheus_ of Aeschylus, but the Satan of +_Paradise Lost_. Indeed, in this poem, Shelley came nearer to the +sublime than any English poet since Milton. Yet it is in lyrical, rather +than in dramatic, quality that _Prometheus Unbound_ is great. If Shelley +be not, as his latest editor, Mr. Forman, claims him to be, the foremost +of English lyrical poets, he is at least the most lyrical of them. He +had, in a supreme degree, the "lyric cry." His vibrant nature trembled +to every breath of emotion, and his nerves craved ever newer shocks; to +pant, to quiver, to thrill, to grow faint in the spasm of intense +sensation. The feminine cast observable in Shelley's portrait is borne +out by this tremulous sensibility in his verse. It is curious how often +he uses the metaphor of wings: of the winged spirit, soaring, like his +skylark, till lost in music, rapture, light, and then falling back to +earth. Three successive moods--longing, ecstasy, and the revulsion of +despair--are expressed in many of his lyrics; as in the _Hymn to the +Spirit of Nature_, in _Prometheus_, in the ode _To a Skylark_, and in the +_Lines to an Indian Air_--Edgar Poe's favorite. His passionate desire to +lose {260} himself in Nature, to become one with that spirit of love and +beauty in the universe, which was to him in place of God, is expressed in +the _Ode to the West Wind_, his most perfect poem: + + "Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is; + What if my leaves are falling like its own! + The tumult of thy mighty harmonies + Will take from both a deep autumnal tone. + Sweet, though in sadness, be thou, Spirit fierce, + My spirit! be thou me, impetuous one!" + +In the lyrical pieces already mentioned, together with _Adonais_, the +lines _Written in the Euganean Hills_, _Epipsychidion_, _Stanzas Written +in Dejection near Naples_, _A Dream of the Unknown_, and many others, +Shelley's lyrical genius reaches a rarer loveliness and a more faultless +art than Byron's ever attained, though it lacks the directness and +momentum of Byron. + +In Shelley's longer poems, intoxicated with the music of his own singing, +he abandons himself wholly to the guidance of his imagination, and the +verse seems to go on of itself, like the enchanted boat in _Alastor_, +with no one at the helm. Vision succeeds vision in glorious but +bewildering profusion; ideal landscapes and cities of cloud "pinnacled +dim in the intense inane." These poems are like the water-falls in the +Yosemite, which, tumbling from a height of several thousand feet, are +shattered into foam by the air, and waved about over the valley. Very +beautiful is this descending spray, and the rainbow dwells in its {261} +bosom; but there is no longer any stream, nothing but an irridescent +mist. The word _etherial_, best expresses the quality of Shelley's +genius. His poetry is full of atmospheric effects; of the tricks which +light plays with the fluid elements of water and air; of stars, clouds, +rain, dew, mist, frost, wind, the foam of seas, the phases of the moon, +the green shadows of waves, the shapes of flames, the "golden lightning +of the setting sun." Nature, in Shelley, wants homeliness and relief. +While poets like Wordsworth and Burns let in an ideal light upon the +rough fields of earth, Shelley escapes into a "moonlight-colored" realm +of shadows and dreams, among whose abstractions the heart turns cold. +One bit of Wordsworth's mountain turf is worth them all. + +By the death of John Keats (1796-1821), whose elegy Shelley sang in +_Adonais_, English poetry suffered an irreparable loss. His _Endymion_, +1818, though disfigured by mawkishness and by some affectations of +manner, was rich in promise. Its faults were those of youth, the faults +of exuberance and of a tremulous sensibility, which time corrects. +_Hyperion_, 1820, promised to be his masterpiece, but he left it +unfinished--"a Titanic torso"--because, as he said, "there were too many +Miltonic inversions in it." The subject was the displacement, by Phoebus +Apollo, of the ancient sun-god, Hyperion, the last of the Titans who +retained his dominion. It was a theme of great capabilities, and the +poem was begun by Keats, {262} with a strength of conception which leads +to the belief that here was once more a really epic genius, had fate +suffered it to mature. The fragment, as it stands--"that inlet to severe +magnificence"--proves how rapidly Keats's diction was clarifying. He had +learned to string up his looser chords. There is nothing maudlin in +_Hyperion_; all there is in whole tones and in the grand manner, "as +sublime as Aeschylus," said Byron, with the grave, antique simplicity, +and something of modern sweetness interfused. + +Keats's father was a groom in a London livery-stable. The poet was +apprenticed at fifteen to a surgeon. At school he had studied Latin, but +not Greek. He, who of all English poets had the most purely Hellenic +spirit, made acquaintance with Greek literature and art only through the +medium of classical dictionaries, translations, and popular mythologies; +and later through the marbles and casts in the British Museum. His +friend, the artist Haydon, lent him a copy of Chapman's Homer, and the +impression that it made upon him he recorded in his sonnet, _On First +Looking into Chapman's Homer_. Other poems of the same inspiration are +his three sonnets, _To Homer_, _On Seeing the Elgin Marbles_, _On a +Picture of Leander_, _Lamia_, and the beautiful _Ode on a Grecian Urn_. +But Keats's art was retrospective and eclectic, the blossom of a double +root; and "golden-tongued Romance with serene lute" had her part in him, +as well as the classics. In his seventeenth year he {263} had read the +_Faery Queene_, and from Spenser he went on to a study of Chaucer, +Shakspere, and Milton. Then he took up Italian and read _Ariosto_. The +influence of these studies is seen in his poem, _Isabella, or the Pot of +Basil_, taken from a story of Boccaccio; in his wild ballad, _La Belle +Dame sans Merci_; and in his love tale, the _Eve of Saint Agnes_, with +its wealth of medieval adornment. In the _Ode to Autumn_, and _Ode to a +Nightingale_, the Hellenic choiceness is found touched with the warmer +hues of romance. + +There is something deeply tragic in the short story of Keats's life. The +seeds of consumption were in him; he felt the stirrings of a potent +genius, but knew that he could not wait for it to unfold, but must die + + "Before high-piled books, in charactry + Hold like rich garners the full-ripened grain." + +His disease was aggravated, possibly, by the stupid brutality with which +the reviewers had treated _Endymion_; and certainly by the hopeless love +which devoured him. "The very thing which I want to live most for," he +wrote, "will be a great occasion of my death. If I had any chance of +recovery, this passion would kill me." In the autumn of 1820, his +disease gaining apace, he went on a sailing vessel to Italy, accompanied +by a single friend, a young artist named Severn. The change was of no +avail, and he died at Rome a few weeks after, in his twenty-sixth year. + +{264} + +Keats was, above all things, the _artist_, with that love of the +beautiful and that instinct for its reproduction which are the artist's +divinest gifts. He cared little about the politics and philosophy of his +day, and he did not make his poetry the vehicle of ideas. It was +sensuous poetry, the poetry of youth and gladness. But if he had lived, +and if, with wider knowledge of men and deeper experience of life, he had +attained to Wordsworth's spiritual insight and to Byron's power of +passion and understanding, he would have become a greater poet than +either. For he had a style--a "natural magic"--which only needed the +chastening touch of a finer culture to make it superior to any thing in +modern English poetry and to force us back to Milton or Shakspere for a +comparison. His tombstone, not far from Shelley's, bears the inscription +of his own choosing: "Here lies one whose name was writ in water." But +it would be within the limits of truth to say that it is written in large +characters on most of our contemporary poetry. "Wordsworth," says +Lowell, "has influenced most the ideas of succeeding poets; Keats their +forms." And he has influenced these out of all proportion to the amount +which he left, or to his intellectual range, by virtue of the exquisite +quality of his technique. + + +1. Wordsworth's Poems. Chosen and edited by Matthew Arnold. London, +1879. + +2. Poetry of Byron. Chosen and arranged by Matthew Arnold. London, 1881. + +{265} + +3. Shelley. Julian and Maddalo, Prometheus Unbound, The Cenci, Lyrical +Pieces. + +4. Landor. Pericles and Aspasia. + +5. Coleridge. Table Talk, Notes on Shakspere, The Ancient Mariner, +Christabel, Love, Ode to France, Ode to the Departing Year, Kubla Khan, +Hymn before Sunrise in the Vale of Chamouni, Youth and Age, Frost at +Midnight. + +6. De Quincey. Confessions of an English Opium Eater, Flight of a Tartar +Tribe, Biographical Sketches. + +7. Scott. Waverley, Heart of Midlothian, Bride of Lammermoor, Rob Roy, +Antiquary, Marmion, Lady of the Lake. + +8. Keats. Hyperion, Eve of St. Agnes, Lyrical Pieces. + +9. Mrs. Oliphant's Literary History of England, 18th-19th Centuries. + + + + +{266} + +CHAPTER VIII. + +FROM THE DEATH OF SCOTT TO THE PRESENT TIME. + +1832-1886. + +The literature of the past fifty years is too close to our eyes to +enable the critic to pronounce a final judgment, or the literary +historian to get a true perspective. Many of the principal writers of +the time are still living, and many others have been dead but a few +years. This concluding chapter, therefore, will be devoted to the +consideration of the few who stand forth, incontestably, as the leaders +of literary thought, and who seem likely, under all future changes of +fashion and taste, to remain representative of their generation. As +regards _form_, the most striking fact in the history of the period +under review is the immense preponderance in its imaginative literature +of prose fiction, of the novel of real life. The novel has become to +the solitary reader of to-day what the stage play was to the audiences +of Elisabeth's reign, or the periodical essay, like the _Tatlers_ and +_Spectators_, to the clubs and breakfast-tables of Queen Anne's. And, +if its criticism of life is less concentrated and brilliant than the +drama gives, it is far {267} more searching and minute. No period has +ever left in its literary records so complete a picture of its whole +society as the period which is just closing. At any other time than +the present, the names of authors like Charlotte Bronte, Charles +Kingsley, and Charles Reade--names which are here merely mentioned in +passing--besides many others which want of space forbids us even to +mention--would be of capital importance. As it is, we must limit our +review to the three acknowledged masters of modern English fiction, +Charles Dickens (1812-1870), William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863), +and "George Eliot" (Mary Ann Evans, 1819-1880). + +It is sometimes helpful to reduce a great writer to his lowest term, in +order to see what the prevailing bent of his genius is. This lowest +term may often be found in his early work, before experience of the +world has overlaid his original impulse with foreign accretions. +Dickens was much more than a humorist, Thackeray than a satirist, and +George Eliot than a moralist; but they had their starting-points +respectively in humor, in burlesque, and in strong ethical and +religious feeling. Dickens began with a broadly comic series of +papers, contributed to the _Old Magazine_ and the _Evening Chronicle_, +and reprinted in book form, in 1836, as _Sketches by Boz_. The success +of these suggested to a firm of publishers the preparation of a number +of similar sketches of the misadventures of cockney sportsmen, to +accompany plates by the {268} comic draughtsman, Mr. R. Seymour. This +suggestion resulted in the _Pickwick Papers_, published in monthly +installments, in 1836-1837. The series grew, under Dickens's hand, +into a continuous, though rather loosely strung narrative of the doings +of a set of characters, conceived with such exuberant and novel humor +that it took the public by storm, and raised its author at once to +fame. _Pickwick_ is by no means Dickens's best, but it is his most +characteristic, and most popular, book. At the time that he wrote +these early sketches he was a reporter for the _Morning Chronicle_. +His naturally acute powers of observation had been trained in this +pursuit to the utmost efficiency, and there always continued to be +about his descriptive writing a reportorial and newspaper air. He had +the eye for effect, the sharp fidelity to detail, the instinct for +rapidly seizing upon and exaggerating the salient point, which are +developed by the requirements of modern journalism. Dickens knew +London as no one else has ever known it, and, in particular, he knew +its hideous and grotesque recesses, with the strange developments of +human nature that abide there; slums like Tom-all-Alone's, in _Bleak +House_; the river-side haunts of Rogue Riderhood, in _Our Mutual +Friend_; as well as the old inns, like the "White Hart," and the "dusky +purlieus of the law." As a man, his favorite occupation was walking +the streets, where, as a child, he had picked up the most valuable part +of his education. His tramps about London--often after {269} +nightfall--sometimes extended to fifteen miles in a day. He knew, too, +the shifts of poverty. His father--some traits of whom are preserved +in Mr. Micawber--was imprisoned for debt in the Marshalsea prison, +where his wife took lodging with him, while Charles, then a boy of ten, +was employed at six shillings a week to cover blacking-pots in Warner's +blacking warehouse. The hardships and loneliness of this part of his +life are told under a thin disguise in Dickens's masterpiece, _David +Copperfield_, the most autobiographical of his novels. From these +young experiences he gained that insight into the lives of the lower +classes, and that sympathy with children and with the poor which shine +out in his pathetic sketches of Little Nell, in _The Old Curiosity +Shop_, of Paul Dombey, of Poor Jo, in _Bleak House_, of "the +Marchioness," and a hundred other figures. + +In _Oliver Twist_, contributed, during 1837-1838, to _Bentley's +Miscellany_, a monthly magazine of which Dickens was editor, he +produced his first regular novel. In this story of the criminal +classes the author showed a tragic power which he had not hitherto +exhibited. Thenceforward his career was a series of dazzling +successes. It is impossible here to particularize his numerous novels, +sketches, short tales, and "Christmas Stories"--the latter a fashion +which he inaugurated, and which has produced a whole literature in +itself. In _Nicholas Nickleby_, 1839; _Master Humphrey's Clock_, 1840; +_Martin Chuzzlewit_, 1844; _Dombey and Son_, 1848; {270} _David +Copperfield_, 1850; and _Bleak House_, 1853, there is no falling off in +strength. The last named was, in some respects, and especially in the +skillful construction of the plot, his best novel. In some of his +latest books, as _Great Expectations_, 1861, and _Our Mutual Friend_, +1865, there are signs of a decline. This showed itself in an unnatural +exaggeration of characters and motives, and a painful straining after +humorous effects; faults, indeed, from which Dickens was never wholly +free. There was a histrionic side to him, which came out in his +fondness for private theatricals, in which he exhibited remarkable +talent, and in the dramatic action which he introduced into the +delightful public readings from his works that he gave before vast +audiences all over the United Kingdom, and in his two visits to +America. It is not surprising, either, to learn that upon the stage +his preference was for melodrama and farce. His own serious writing +was always dangerously close to the melodramatic, and his humor to the +farcical. There is much false art, bad taste, and even vulgarity in +Dickens. He was never quite a gentleman, and never succeeded well in +drawing gentlemen or ladies. In the region of low comedy he is easily +the most original, the most inexhaustible, the most wonderful of modern +humorists. Creations such as Mrs. Nickleby, Mr. Micawber, Sam Weller, +Sairy Gamp, take rank with Falstaff and Dogberry; while many others, +like Dick Swiveller, Stiggins, Chadband, Mrs. Jellyby, and Julia Mills +are almost {271} equally good. In the innumerable swarm of minor +characters with which he has enriched our comic literature, there is no +indistinctness. Indeed, the objection that has been made to him is +that his characters are too distinct--that he puts labels on them; that +they are often mere personifications of a single trick of speech or +manner, which becomes tedious and unnatural by repetition; thus, +Grandfather Smallweed is always settling down into his cushion, and +having to be shaken up; Mr. Jellyby is always sitting with his head +against the wall; Peggotty is always bursting her buttons off, etc., +etc. As Dickens's humorous characters tend perpetually to run into +caricatures and grotesques, so his sentiment, from the same excess, +slops over too frequently into "gush," and into a too deliberate and +protracted attack upon the pity. A favorite humorous device in his +style is a stately and roundabout way of telling a trivial incident as +where, for example, Mr. Roker "muttered certain unpleasant invocations +concerning his own eyes, limbs, and circulating fluids;" or where the +drunken man who is singing comic songs in the Fleet received from Mr. +Smangle "a gentle intimation, through the medium of the water-jug, that +his audience were not musically disposed." This manner was original +with Dickens, though he may have taken a hint of it from the mock +heroic language of _Jonathan Wild_; but as practiced by a thousand +imitators, ever since, it has gradually become a burden. + +It would not be the whole truth to say that the {272} difference +between the humor of Thackeray and Dickens is the same as between that +of Shakspere and Ben Jonson. Yet it is true that the "humors" of Ben +Jonson have an analogy with the extremer instances of Dickens's +character sketches in this respect, namely: that they are both studies +of the eccentric, the abnormal, the whimsical, rather than of the +typical and universal--studies of manners, rather than of whole +characters. And it is easily conceivable that, at no distant day, the +oddities of Captain Cuttle, Deportment Turveydrop, Mark Tapley, and +Newman Noggs will seem as far-fetched and impossible as those of +Captain Otter, Fastidious Brisk, and Sir Amorous La-Foole. + +When Dickens was looking about for some one to take Seymour's place as +illustrator of Pickwick, Thackeray applied for the job, but without +success. He was then a young man of twenty-five, and still hesitating +between art and literature. He had begun to draw caricatures with his +pencil when a schoolboy at the Charter House, and to scribble them with +his pen when a student at Cambridge, editing _The Snob_, a weekly +under-graduate paper, and parodying the prize poem _Timbuctoo_ of his +contemporary at the university, Alfred Tennyson. Then he went abroad +to study art, passing a season at Weimar, where he met Goethe and +filled the albums of the young Saxon ladies with caricatures; afterward +living, in the Latin Quarter at Paris, a Bohemian existence, studying +art in a desultory way, and seeing men and cities; {273} accumulating +portfolios full of sketches, but laying up stores of material to be +used afterward to greater advantage when he should settle upon his true +medium of expression. By 1837, having lost his fortune of 500 pounds a +year in speculation and gambling, he began to contribute to _Fraser's_, +and thereafter to the _New Monthly_, _Cruikshank's Comic Almanac_, +_Punch_, and other periodicals, clever burlesques, art criticisms by +"Michael Angelo Titmarsh," _Yellow Plush Papers_, and all manner of +skits, satirical character sketches, and humorous tales, like the +_Great Hoggarty Diamond_ and the _Luck of Barry Lyndon_. Some of these +were collected in the _Paris Sketch-Book_, 1840, and the _Irish +Sketch-Book_, 1843; but Thackeray was slow in winning recognition, and +it was not until the publication of his first great novel, _Vanity +Fair_, in monthly parts, during 1846-1848, that he achieved any thing +like the general reputation which Dickens had reached at a bound. +_Vanity Fair_ described itself, on its title-page, as "a novel without +a hero." It was also a novel without a plot--in the sense in which +_Bleak House_ or _Nicholas Nickleby_ had a plot--and in that respect it +set the fashion for the latest school of realistic fiction, being a +transcript of life, without necessary beginning or end. Indeed, one of +the pleasantest things to a reader of Thackeray is the way which his +characters have of re-appearing, as old acquaintances, in his different +books; just as, in real life, people drop out of mind and then turn +{274} up again in other years and places. _Vanity Fair_ is Thackeray's +masterpiece, but it is not the best introduction to his writings. +There are no illusions in it, and, to a young reader fresh from Scott's +romances or Dickens's sympathetic extravagances, it will seem hard and +repellant. But men who, like Thackeray, have seen life and tasted its +bitterness and felt its hollowness, know how to prize it. Thackeray +does not merely expose the cant, the emptiness, the self-seeking, the +false pretenses, flunkeyism, and snobbery--the "mean admiration of mean +things"--in the great world of London society: his keen, unsparing +vision detects the base alloy in the purest natures. There are no +"heroes" in his books, no perfect characters. Even his good women, +such as Helen and Laura Pendennis, are capable of cruel injustice +toward less fortunate sisters, like little Fanny; and Amelia Sedley is +led, by blind feminine instinct, to snub and tyrannize over poor +Dobbin. The shabby miseries of life, the numbing and belittling +influences of failure and poverty upon the most generous natures, are +the tragic themes which Thackeray handles by preference. He has been +called a cynic, but the boyish playfulness of his humor and his kindly +spirit are incompatible with cynicism. Charlotte Bronte said that +Fielding was the vulture and Thackeray the eagle. The comparison would +have been truer if made between Swift and Thackeray. Swift was a +cynic; his pen was driven by hate, but Thackeray's by love, and it was +not {275} in bitterness but in sadness that the latter laid bare the +wickedness of the world. He was himself a thorough man of the world, +and he had that dislike for a display of feeling which characterizes +the modern Englishman. But behind his satiric mask he concealed the +manliest tenderness, and a reverence for every thing in human nature +that is good and true. Thackeray's other great novels are _Pendennis_, +1849; _Henry Esmond_, 1852; and _The Newcomes_, 1855--the last of which +contains his most lovable character, the pathetic and immortal figure +of Colonel Newcome, a creation worthy to stand, in its dignity and its +sublime weakness, by the side of Don Quixote. It was alleged against +Thackeray that he made all his good characters, like Major Dobbin and +Amelia Sedley and Colonel Newcome, intellectually feeble, and his +brilliant characters, like Becky Sharp and Lord Steyne and Blanche +Amory, morally bad. This is not entirely true, but the other +complaint--that his women are inferior to his men--is true in a general +way. Somewhat inferior to his other novels were _The Virginians_, +1858, and _The Adventures of Philip_, 1862. All of these were stories +of contemporary life, except _Henry Esmond_ and its sequel, _The +Virginians_, which, though not precisely historical fictions, +introduced historical figures, such as Washington and the Earl of +Peterborough. Their period of action was the 18th century, and the +dialogue was a cunning imitation of the language of that time. +Thackeray was strongly {276} attracted by the 18th century. His +literary teachers were Addison, Swift, Steele, Gay, Johnson, +Richardson, Goldsmith, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne, and his special +master and model was Fielding. He projected a history of the century, +and his studies in this kind took shape in his two charming series of +lectures on _The English Humorists_ and _The Four Georges_. These he +delivered in England and in America, to which country he, like Dickens, +made two several visits. + +Thackeray's genius was, perhaps, less astonishing than Dickens's, less +fertile, spontaneous, and inventive; but his art is sounder, and his +delineation of character more truthful. After one has formed a taste +for his books, Dickens's sentiment will seem overdone, and much of his +humor will have the air of buffoonery. Thackeray had the advantage in +another particular: he described the life of the upper classes, and +Dickens of the lower. It may be true that the latter offers richer +material to the novelist, in the play of elementary passions and in +strong, native developments of character. It is true, also, that +Thackeray approached "society" rather to satirize it than to set forth +its agreeableness. Yet, after all, it is "the great world" which he +describes, that world upon which the broadening and refining processes +of a high civilization have done their utmost, and which, consequently, +must possess an intellectual interest superior to any thing in the life +of London thieves, traveling showmen, and coachees. Thackeray is {277} +the equal of Swift as a satirist, of Dickens as a humorist, and of +Scott as a novelist. The one element lacking in him--and which Scott +had in a high degree---is the poetic imagination. "I have no brains +above my eyes," he said; "I describe what I see." Hence there is +wanting in his creations that final charm which Shakspere's have. For +what the eyes see is not all. + +The great woman who wrote under the pen-name of George Eliot was a +humorist, too. She had a rich, deep humor of her own, and a wit that +crystallized into sayings which are not epigrams, only because their +wisdom strikes more than their smartness. But humor was not, as with +Thackeray and Dickens, her point of view. A country girl, the daughter +of a land agent and surveyor at Nuneaton, in Warwickshire, her early +letters and journals exhibit a Calvinistic gravity and moral severity. +Later, when her truth to her convictions led her to renounce the +Christian belief, she carried into Positivism the same religious +earnestness, and wrote the one English hymn of the religion of humanity: + + "O, let me join the choir invisible," etc. + + +Her first published work was a translation of Strauss's _Leben Jesu_, +1846. In 1851 she went to London and became one of the editors of the +Radical organ, the _Westminster Review_. Here she formed a +connection--a marriage in all but the name--with George Henry Lewes, +who was, like {278} herself, a freethinker, and who published, among +other things, a _Biographical History of Philosophy_. Lewes had also +written fiction, and it was at his suggestion that his wife undertook +story writing. Her _Scenes of Clerical Life_ were contributed to +_Blackwood's Magazine_ for 1857, and published in book form in the +following year. _Adam Bede_ followed in 1859, the _Mill on the Floss_ +in 1860, _Silas Marner_ in 1861, _Romola_ in 1863, _Felix Holt_ in +1866, and _Middlemarch_ in 1872. All of these, except _Romola_, are +tales of provincial, and largely of domestic, life in the midland +counties. _Romola_ is a historical novel, the scene of which is +Florence, in the 15th century, the Florence of Macchiavelli and of +Savonarola. George Eliot's method was very different from that of +Thackeray or Dickens. She did not crowd her canvas with the swarming +life of cities. Her figures are comparatively few, and they are +selected from the middle-class families of rural parishes or small +towns, amid that atmosphere of "fine old leisure," whose disappearance +she lamented. Her drama is a still life drama, intensely and +profoundly inward. Character is the stuff that she works in, and she +deals with it more subtly than Thackeray. With him the tragedy is +produced by the pressure of society and its false standards upon the +individual; with her, by the malign influence of individuals upon one +another. She watches "the stealthy convergence of human fates," the +intersection at various angles of the planes of character, the power +{279} that the lower nature has to thwart, stupefy, or corrupt the +higher, which has become entangled with it in the mesh of destiny. At +the bottom of every one of her stories, there is a problem of the +conscience or the intellect. In this respect she resembles Hawthorne, +though she is not, like him, a romancer, but a realist. + +There is a melancholy philosophy in her books, most of which are tales +of failure or frustration. The _Mill on the Floss_ contains a large +element of autobiography, and its heroine, Maggie Tulliver, is, +perhaps, her idealized self. Her aspirations after a fuller and nobler +existence are condemned to struggle against the resistance of a narrow, +provincial environment, and the pressure of untoward fates. She is +tempted to seek an escape even through a desperate throwing off of +moral obligations, and is driven back to her duty only to die by a +sudden stroke of destiny. "Life is a bad business," wrote George +Eliot, in a letter to a friend, "and we must make the most of it." +_Adam Bede_ is, in construction, the most perfect of her novels, and +Silas Marner of her shorter stories. Her analytic habit gained more +and more upon her as she wrote. _Middlemarch_, in some respects her +greatest book, lacks the unity of her earlier novels, and the story +tends to become subordinate to the working out of character stories and +social problems. The philosophic speculations, which she shared with +her husband, were seemingly unfavorable to her artistic growth, a +circumstance which {280} comes apparent in her last novel, _Daniel +Deronda_, 1877. Finally in the _Impressions of Theophrastus Such_, +1879, she abandoned narrative altogether, and recurred to that type of +"character" books which we have met, as a flourishing department of +literature in the 17th century, represented by such works as Earle's +_Microcosmographie_ and Fuller's _Holy and Profane State_. The moral +of George Eliot's writings is not obtruded. She never made the +artistic mistake of writing a novel of purpose, or what the Germans +call a _tendenz-roman_; as Dickens did, for example, when he attacked +imprisonment for debt, in _Pickwick_; the poor laws, in _Oliver Twist_; +the Court of Chancery, in _Bleak House_; and the Circumlocution office, +in _Little Dorrit_. + +Next to the novel, the essay has been the most overflowing literary +form used by the writers of this generation--a form, characteristic, it +may be, of an age which "lectures, not creates." It is not the essay +of Bacon, nor yet of Addison, nor of Lamb, but attempts a complete +treatment. Indeed, many longish books, like Carlyle's _Heroes and Hero +Worship_ and Ruskin's _Modern Painters_, are, in spirit, rather +literary essays than formal treatises. The most popular essayist and +historian of his time was Thomas Babington Macaulay, (1800-1859), an +active and versatile man, who won splendid success in many fields of +labor. He was prominent in public life as one of the leading orators +and writers of the Whig party. He sat many times in the House of +Commons, as member for Calne, for Leeds, and {281} for Edinburgh, and +took a distinguished part in the debates on the Reform bill of 1832. +He held office in several Whig governments, and during his four years' +service in British India, as member of the Supreme Council of Calcutta, +he did valuable work in promoting education in that province, and in +codifying the Indian penal law. After his return to England, and +especially after the publication of his _History of England from The +Accession of James II._, honors and appointments of all kinds were +showered upon him. In 1857 he was raised to the peerage as Baron +Macaulay of Rothley. + +Macaulay's equipment, as a writer on historical and biographical +subjects, was, in some points, unique. His reading was prodigious, and +his memory so tenacious, that it was said, with but little +exaggeration, that he never forgot any thing that he had read. He +could repeat the whole of _Paradise Lost_ by heart, and thought it +probable that he could rewrite _Sir Charles Grandison_ from memory. In +his books, in his speeches in the House of Commons, and in private +conversation--for he was an eager and fluent talker, running on often +for hours at a stretch--he was never at a loss to fortify and +illustrate his positions by citation after citation of dates, names, +facts of all kinds, and passages quoted _verbatim_ from his +multifarious reading. The first of Macaulay's writings to attract +general notice was his article on _Milton_, printed in the August +number of the _Edinburgh Review_, for 1825. The editor, Lord Jeffrey, +in {282} acknowledging the receipt of the MS., wrote to his new +contributor, "The more I think, the less I can conceive where you +picked up that style." That celebrated style--about which so much has +since been written--was an index to the mental character of its owner. +Macaulay was of a confident, sanguine, impetuous nature. He had great +common sense, and he saw what he saw quickly and clearly, but he did +not see very far below the surface. He wrote with the conviction of an +advocate, and the easy omniscience of a man whose learning is really +nothing more than "general information," raised to a very high power, +rather than with the subtle penetration of an original or truly +philosophic intellect, like Coleridge's or De Quincey's. He always had +at hand explanations of events or of characters, which were admirably +easy and simple--too simple, indeed, for the complicated phenomena +which they professed to explain. His style was clear, animated, showy, +and even its faults were of an exciting kind. It was his habit to give +piquancy to his writing by putting things concretely. Thus, instead of +saying, in general terms--as Hume or Gibbon might have done--that the +Normans and Saxons began to mingle about 1200, he says: "The great +grandsons of those who had fought under William and the great grandsons +of those who had fought under Harold began to draw near to each other." +Macaulay was a great scene painter, who neglected delicate truths of +detail for exaggerated distemper effects. He used the {283} rhetorical +machinery of climax and hyperbole for all that it was worth, and he +"made points"--as in his essay on _Bacon_--by creating antithesis. In +his _History of England_, he inaugurated the picturesque method of +historical writing. The book was as fascinating as any novel. +Macaulay, like Scott, had the historic imagination, though his method +of turning history into romance was very different from Scott's. Among +his essays, the best are those which, like the ones on _Lord Clive_, +_Warren Hastings_, and _Frederick the Great_, deal with historical +subjects; or those which deal with literary subjects under their public +historic relations, such as the essays on _Addison_, _Bunyan_, and _The +Comic Dramatists of the Restoration_. "I have never written a page of +criticism on poetry, or the fine arts," wrote Macaulay, "which I would +not burn if I had the power." Nevertheless his own _Lays of Ancient +Rome_, 1842, are good, stirring verse of the emphatic and declamatory +kind, though their quality may be rather rhetorical than poetic. + +Our critical time has not forborne to criticize itself, and perhaps the +writer who impressed himself most strongly upon his generation was the +one who railed most desperately against the "spirit of the age." +Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) was occupied between 1822 and 1830 chiefly +in imparting to the British public a knowledge of German literature. +He published, among other things, a _Life of Schiller_, a translation +of Goethe's _Wilhelm Meister_, and two volumes of translations from the +German {284} romancers--Tieck, Hoffmann, Richter, and Fouque, and +contributed to the _Edinburgh_ and _Foreign Review_, articles on +Goethe, Werner, Novalis, Richter, German playwrights, the _Nibelungen +Lied_, etc. His own diction became more and more tinctured with +Germanisms. There was something Gothic in his taste, which was +attracted by the lawless, the grotesque, and the whimsical in the +writings of Jean Paul Richter. His favorite among English humorists +was Sterne, who has a share of these same qualities. He spoke +disparagingly of "the sensuous literature of the Greeks," and preferred +the Norse to the Hellenic mythology. Even in his admirable critical +essays on Burns, on Richter, on Scott, Diderot, and Voltaire, +which are free from his later mannerism--written in English, and +not in Carlylese--his sense of spirit is always more lively than +his sense of form. He finally became so impatient of art as to +maintain--half-seriously--the paradox that Shakspere would have +done better to write in prose. In three of these early essays--on +the _Signs of the Times_, 1829; on _History_, 1830; and on +_Characteristics_, 1831--are to be found the germs of all his later +writings. The first of these was an arraignment of the mechanical +spirit of the age. In every province of thought he discovered too +great a reliance upon systems, institutions, machinery, instead of upon +men. Thus, in religion, we have Bible Societies, "machines for +converting the heathen." "In defect of Raphaels and Angelos and +Mozarts, we have royal {285} academies of painting, sculpture, music." +In like manner, he complains, government is a machine. "Its duties and +faults are not those of a father, but of an active parish-constable." +Against the "police theory," as distinguished from the "paternal" +theory of government, Carlyle protested with ever-shriller iteration. +In _Chartism_, 1839; _Past and Present_, 1843; and _Latter-day +Pamphlets_, 1850, he denounced this _laissez faire_ idea. The business +of government, he repeated, is to govern; but this view makes it its +business to refrain from governing. He fought most fiercely against +the conclusions of political economy, "the dismal science," which, he +said, affirmed that men were guided exclusively by their stomachs. He +protested, too, against the Utilitarians, followers of Bentham and +Mill, with their "greatest happiness principle," which reduced virtue +to a profit-and-loss account. Carlyle took issue with modern +liberalism; he ridiculed the self-gratulation of the time, all the talk +about progress of the species, unexampled prosperity, etc. But he was +reactionary without being conservative. He had studied the French +Revolution, and he saw the fateful, irresistible approach of democracy. +He had no faith in government "by counting noses," and he hated talking +parliaments; but neither did he put trust in an aristocracy that spent +its time in "preserving the game." What he wanted was a great +individual ruler, a real king or hero; and this doctrine he set forth +afterward most fully in _Hero Worship_, 1841, and {286} illustrated in +his lives of representative heroes, such as his _Cromwell's Letters and +Speeches_, 1845, and his great _History of Frederick the Great_, +1858-1865. Cromwell and Frederick were well enough; but as Carlyle +grew older, his admiration for mere force grew, and his latest hero was +none other than that infamous Dr. Francia, the South American dictator, +whose career of bloody and crafty crime horrified the civilized world. + +The essay on _History_ was a protest against the scientific view of +history which attempts to explain away and account for the wonderful. +"Wonder," he wrote in _Sartor Resartus_, "is the basis of all worship." +He defined history as "the essence of innumerable biographies." "Mr. +Carlyle," said the Italian patriot, Mazzini, "comprehends only the +individual. The nationality of Italy is, in his eyes, the glory of +having produced Dante and Christopher Columbus." This trait comes out +in his greatest book, _The French Revolution_, 1837, which is a mighty +tragedy, enacted by a few leading characters, Mirabeau, Danton, +Napoleon. He loved to emphasize the superiority of history over +fiction as dramatic material. The third of the three essays mentioned +was a Jeremiad on the morbid self-consciousness of the age, which shows +itself in religion and philosophy, as skepticism and introspective +metaphysics; and in literature, as sentimentalism, and "view-hunting." + +But Carlyle's epoch-making book was _Sartor Resartus_ (The Tailor +Retailored), published in _Fraser's {287} Magazine_ for 1833-1834, and +first reprinted in book form in America. This was a satire upon shams, +conventions, the disguises which overlie the most spiritual realities +of the soul. It purported to be the life and "clothes-philosophy" of a +certain Diogenes Teufelsdroeckh, Professor der Allerlei Wissenschaft--of +things in general--in the University of Weissnichtwo. "Society," said +Carlyle, "is founded upon cloth," following the suggestions of Lear's +speech to the naked bedlam beggar: "Thou art the thing itself: +unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as +thou art;" and borrowing also, perhaps, an ironical hint from a +paragraph in Swift's _Tale of a Tub_: "A sect was established who held +the universe to be a large suit of clothes. . . . If certain ermines +or furs be placed in a certain position, we style them a judge; and so +an apt conjunction of lawn and black satin we entitle a bishop." In +_Sartor Resartus_ Carlyle let himself go. It was willful, uncouth, +amorphous, titanic. There was something monstrous in the combination, +the hot heart of the Scot married to the transcendental dream of +Germany. It was not English, said the reviewers; it was not sense; it +was disfigured by obscurity and "mysticism." Nevertheless even the +thin-witted and the dry-witted had to acknowledge the powerful beauty +of many chapters and passages, rich with humor, eloquence, poetry, +deep-hearted tenderness, or passionate scorn. + +Carlyle was a voracious reader, and the plunder {288} of whole +literatures is strewn over his pages. He flung about the resources of +the language with a giant's strength, and made new words at every turn. +The concreteness and the swarming fertility of his mind are evidenced +by his enormous vocabulary, computed greatly to exceed Shakspere's, or +any other single writer's in the English tongue. His style lacks the +crowning grace of simplicity and repose. It astonishes, but it also +fatigues. + +Carlyle's influence has consisted more in his attitude than in any +special truth which he has preached. It has been the influence of a +moralist, of a practical, rather than a speculative, philosopher. "The +end of man," he wrote, "is an action, not a thought." He has not been +able to persuade the time that it is going wrong, but his criticisms +have been wholesomely corrective of its self-conceit. In a democratic +age he has insisted upon the undemocratic virtues of obedience, +silence, and reverence. _Ehrfurcht_--reverence--the text of his +address to the students of Edinburgh University, in 1866, is the last +word of his philosophy. + +In 1830 Alfred Tennyson (1809- ----), a young graduate of Cambridge, +published a thin duodecimo of 154 pages, entitled _Poems, Chiefly +Lyrical_. The pieces in this little volume, like the _Sleeping +Beauty_, _Ode to Memory_, and _Recollections of the Arabian Nights_, +were full of color, fragrance, melody; but they had a dream-like +character, and were without definite theme, resembling an artist's +studies, or {289} exercises in music--a few touches of the brush, a few +sweet chords, but no aria. A number of them--_Claribel_, _Lilian_, +_Adeline_, _Isabel_, _Mariana_, _Madeline_--were sketches of women; not +character portraits, like Browning's _Men and Women_, but impressions +of temperament, of delicately, differentiated types of feminine beauty. +In _Mariana_, expanded from a hint of the forsaken maid, in Shakspere's +_Measure for Measure_, "Mariana at the moated grange," the poet showed +an art then peculiar, but since grown familiar, of heightening the +central feeling by landscape accessories. The level waste, the +stagnant sluices, the neglected garden, the wind in the single poplar, +re-enforce, by their monotonous sympathy, the loneliness, the hopeless +waiting and weariness of life in the one human figure of the poem. In +_Mariana_, the _Ode to Memory_, and the _Dying Swan_, it was the fens +of Cambridge and of his native Lincolnshire that furnished Tennyson's +scenery. + + "Stretched wide and wild, the waste enormous marsh, + Where from the frequent bridge, + Like emblems of infinity, + The trenched waters run from sky to sky." + + +A second collection, published in 1833, exhibited a greater scope and +variety, but was still in his earlier manner. The studies of feminine +types were continued in _Margaret_, _Fatima_, _Eleanore_, _Mariana in +the South_, and _A Dream of Fair Women_, suggested by Chaucer's _Legend +of Good {290} Women_. In the _Lady of Shalott_, the poet first touched +the Arthurian legends. The subject is the same as that of _Elaine_, in +the _Idylls of the King_, but the treatment is shadowy, and even +allegorical. In _Oenone_ and the _Lotus Eaters_, he handled Homeric +subjects, but in a romantic fashion, which contrasts markedly with the +style of his later pieces, _Ulysses_ and _Tithonus_. These last have +the true classic severity, and are among the noblest specimens of +weighty and sonorous blank verse in modern poetry. In general, +Tennyson's art is unclassical. It is rich, ornate, composite, not +statuesque, so much as picturesque. He is a great painter, and the +critics complain that in passages calling for movement and action--a +battle, a tournament, or the like--his figures stand still as in a +tableau; and they contrast such passages unfavorably with scenes of the +same kind in Scott, and with Browning's spirited ballad, _How we +brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix_. In the _Palace of Art_, +these elaborate pictorial effects were combined with allegory; in the +_Lotus Eaters_, with that expressive treatment of landscape, noted in +_Mariana_; the lotus land, "in which it seemed always afternoon," +reflecting and promoting the enchanted indolence of the heroes. Two of +the pieces in this 1833 volume, the _May Queen_ and the _Miller's +Daughter_, were Tennyson's first poems of the affections, and as +ballads of simple, rustic life, they anticipated his more perfect idyls +in blank verse, such as _Dora_, the _Brook_, _Edwin Morris_, and {291} +the _Gardener's Daughter_. The songs in the _Miller's Daughter_ had a +more spontaneous, lyrical movement than any thing that he had yet +published, and foretokened the lovely songs which interlude the +divisions of the _Princess_, the famous _Bugle Song_, the no-less +famous _Cradle Song_, and the rest. In 1833 Tennyson's friend, Arthur +Hallam, died, and the effect of this great sorrow upon the poet was to +deepen and strengthen the character of his genius. It turned his mind +in upon itself, and set it brooding over questions which his poetry had +so far left untouched; the meaning of life and death, the uses of +adversity, the future of the race, the immortality of the soul, and the +dealings of God with mankind. + + "Thou madest Death; and, lo, thy foot + Is on the skull which thou hast made." + + +His elegy on Hallam, _In Memoriam_, was not published till 1850. He +kept it by him all those years, adding section after section, gathering +up into it whatever reflections crystallized about its central theme. +It is his most intellectual and most individual work, a great song of +sorrow and consolation. In 1842 he published a third collection of +poems, among which were _Locksley Hall_, displaying a new strength of +passion; _Ulysses_, suggested by a passage in Dante: pieces of a +speculative cast, like the _Two Voices_ and the _Vision of Sin_; the +song _Break, Break, Break_, which preluded _In Memoriam_; and, lastly, +some additional {292} gropings toward the subject of the Arthurian +romance, such as _Sir Galahad_, _Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere_ and +_Morte d' Arthur_. The last was in blank verse, and, as afterward +incorporated in the _Passing of Arthur_, forms one of the best passages +in the _Idylls of the King_. The _Princess, a Medley_, published in +1849, represents the eclectic character of Tennyson's art; a medieval +tale with an admixture of modern sentiment, and with the very modern +problem of woman's sphere for its theme. The first four _Idylls of the +King_, 1859, with those since added, constitute, when taken together, +an epic poem on the old story of King Arthur. Tennyson went to +Malory's _Morte d' Arthur_ for his material, but the outline of the +first idyl, _Enid_, was taken from Lady Charlotte Guest's translation +of the Welsh _Mabinogion_. In the idyl of _Guinevere_ Tennyson's +genius reached its high-water mark. The interview between Arthur and +his fallen queen is marked by a moral sublimity and a tragic intensity +which move the soul as nobly as any scene in modern literature. Here, +at least, the art is pure and not "decorated;" the effect is produced +by the simplest means, and all is just, natural, and grand. _Maud_--a +love novel in verse--published in 1855, and considerably enlarged in +1856, had great sweetness and beauty, particularly in its lyrical +portions, but it was uneven in execution, imperfect in design, and +marred by lapses into mawkishness and excesses in language. Since 1860 +Tennyson has added little of permanent {293} value to his work. His +dramatic experiments, like _Queen Mary_, are not, on the whole, +successful, though it would be unjust to deny dramatic power to the +poet who has written, upon one hand, _Guinevere_ and the _Passing of +Arthur_, and upon the other the homely, dialectic monologue of the +_Northern Farmer_. + +When we tire of Tennyson's smooth perfection, of an art that is over +exquisite, and a beauty that is well-nigh too beautiful, and crave a +rougher touch, and a meaning that will not yield itself too readily, we +turn to the thorny pages of his great contemporary, Robert Browning +(1812- ----). Dr. Holmes says that Tennyson is white meat and Browning +is dark meat. A masculine taste, it is inferred, is shown in a +preference for the gamier flavor. Browning makes us think; his poems +are puzzles, and furnish business for "Browning Societies." There are +no Tennyson societies, because Tennyson is his own interpreter. +Intellect in a poet may display itself quite as properly in the +construction of his poem as in its content; we value a building for its +architecture, and not entirely for the amount of timber in it. +Browning's thought never wears so thin as Tennyson's sometimes does in +his latest verse, where the trick of his style goes on of itself with +nothing behind it. Tennyson, at his worst, is weak. Browning, when +not at his best, is hoarse. Hoarseness, in itself, is no sign of +strength. In Browning, however, the failure is in art, not in thought. + +{294} + +He chooses his subjects from abnormal character types, such as are +presented, for example, in _Caliban upon Setebos_, the _Grammarian's +Funeral_, _My Last Duchess_, and _Mr. Sludge, the Medium_. These are +all psychological studies, in which the poet gets into the inner +consciousness of a monster, a pedant, a criminal, and a quack, and +gives their point of view. They are dramatic soliloquies; but the +poet's self-identification with each of his creations, in turn, remains +incomplete. His curious, analytic observation, his way of looking at +the soul from outside, gives a doubleness to the monologues in his +_Dramatic Lyrics_, 1845, _Men and Women_, 1855, _Dramatis Personae_, +1864, and other collections of the kind. The words are the words of +Caliban or Mr. Sludge; but the voice is the voice of Robert Browning. +His first complete poem, _Paracelsus_, 1835, aimed to give the true +inwardness of the career of the famous 16th century doctor, whose name +became a synonym with charlatan. His second, _Sordello_, 1840, traced +the struggles of an Italian poet who lived before Dante, and could not +reconcile his life with his art. _Paracelsus_ was hard, but _Sordello_ +was incomprehensible. Mr. Browning has denied that he is ever +perversely crabbed or obscure. Every great artist must be allowed to +say things in his own way, and obscurity has its artistic uses, as the +Gothic builders knew. But there are two kinds of obscurity in +literature. One is inseparable from the subtlety and difficulty of the +thought or the compression {295} and pregnant indirectness of the +phrase. Instances of this occur in the clear deeps of Dante, +Shakspere, and Goethe. The other comes from a vice of style, a +willfully enigmatic and unnatural way of expressing thought. Both +kinds of obscurity exist in Browning. He is a deep and subtle thinker; +but he is also a very eccentric writer, abrupt, harsh, disjointed. It +has been well said that the reader of Browning learns a new dialect. +But one need not grudge the labor that is rewarded with an intellectual +pleasure so peculiar and so stimulating. The odd, grotesque impression +made by his poetry arises, in part, from his desire to use the artistic +values of ugliness, as well as of obscurity; to avoid the shallow +prettiness that comes from blinking the disagreeable truth: not to +leave the saltness out of the sea. Whenever he emerges into clearness, +as he does in hundreds of places, he is a poet of great qualities. +There are a fire and a swing in his _Cavalier Tunes_, and in pieces +like the _Glove and the Lost Leader_; and humor in such ballads as the +_Pied Piper of Hamelin_ and the _Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister_, +which appeal to the most conservative reader. He seldom deals directly +in the pathetic, but now and then, as in _Evelyn Hope_, the _Last Ride +Together_, or the _Incident of the French Camp_, a tenderness comes +over the strong verse + + "as sheathes + A film the mother eagle's eye, + When her bruised eaglet breathes." + +{296} Perhaps the most astonishing example of Browning's mental vigor +is the huge composition, entitled _The Ring and the Book_, 1868, a +narrative poem in twenty-one thousand lines, in which the same story is +repeated eleven times in eleven different ways. It is the story of a +criminal trial which occurred at Rome about 1700, the trial of one +Count Guido for the murder of his young wife. First the poet tells the +tale himself; then he tells what one-half of the world says and what +the other; then he gives the deposition of the dying girl, the +testimony of witnesses, the speech made by the count in his own +defense, the arguments of counsel, etc., and, finally, the judgment of +the pope. So wonderful are Browning's resources in casuistry, and so +cunningly does he ravel the intricate motives at play in this tragedy +and lay bare the secrets of the heart, that the interest increases at +each repetition of the tale. He studied the Middle Age carefully, not +for its picturesque externals, its feudalisms, chivalries, and the +like; but because he found it a rich quarry of spiritual monstrosities, +strange outcroppings of fanaticism, superstition, and moral and mental +distortion of all shapes. It furnished him especially with a great +variety of ecclesiastical types, such as are painted in _Fra Lippo +Lippi_, _Bishop Blougram's Apology_, and _The Bishop Orders his Tomb in +St. Praxed's Church_. + +Browning's dramatic instinct has always attracted him to the stage. +His tragedy, _Stratford_ (1837), {297} was written for Macready, and +put on at Covent Garden Theater, but without pronounced success. He +has written many fine dramatic poems, like _Pippa Passes_, _Colombo's +Birthday_, and _In a Balcony_; and at least two good acting plays, +_Luria_ and _A Blot in the Scutcheon_. The last named has recently +been given to the American public, with Lawrence Barrett's careful and +intelligent presentation of the leading role. The motive of the +tragedy is somewhat strained and fantastic, but it is, notwithstanding, +very effective on the stage. It gives one an unwonted thrill to listen +to a play, by a living English writer, which is really literature. One +gets a faint idea of what it must have been to assist at the first +night of _Hamlet_. + + +1. Dickens. Pickwick Papers, Nicholas Nickleby, David Copperfield, +Bleak House, Tale of Two Cities. + +2. Thackeray. Vanity Fair, Pendennis, Henry Esmond, The Newcomes, The +Four Georges. + +3. George Eliot. Scenes of Clerical Life, Mill on the Floss, Silas +Marner, Romola, Adam Bede, Middlemarch. + +4. Macaulay. Essays, Lays of Ancient Rome. + +5. Carlyle. Sartor Resartus, French Revolution, Essays on History, +Signs of the Times, Characteristics, Burns, Scott, Voltaire, and Goethe. + +6. The Works of Alfred Tennyson (6 vols.). London: Strahan & Co., 1872. + +{298} + +7. Selections from the Poetical Works of Robert Browning. (2 vols.) +London: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1880. + +8. E. C. Stedman's Victorian Poets. + +9. Henry Morley's English Literature in the Reign of Victoria. +(Tauchnitz Series.) + + + + +{299} + +CHAPTER IX. + +THEOLOGICAL AND RELIGIOUS LITERATURE IN GREAT BRITAIN. + +BY JOHN FLETCHER HURST. + +Miracle plays, rude dramatic representations of the chief events in +Scripture history, were used for popular instruction before the invention +of printing. In England they began as early as the twelfth century. +Moral plays, or moralities, were of the same origin, though dating from +the fifteenth century. These were somewhat more refined than the miracle +plays, and usually set forth the excellence of the virtues, such as +truth, mercy, and the like. Both miracle and moral plays were under the +conduct of the clergy. + +John Bale (1495-1563) was Bishop of Ossory, and wrote much for popular +reform. He was the author of nineteen miracle plays. Lord Edward +Herbert, of Cherbury (1581-1648), wrote a deistical work, _De Religione +Gentilium_, the first of that school of writers which later appeared in +Bolingbroke. John Spotiswood (1565-1639), Archbishop of St. Andrews and +afterward Chancellor of Scotland, wrote a voluminous _History of the +Church of Scotland_. George Sandys (1577-1643), {300} distinguished also +as one of the earliest literary characters in America, wrote metrical +versions of several of the poetical books of the Bible, and also a +tragedy called _Christ's Passion_. + +John Knox (1505-1572), the great Scotch reformer and polemic, while more +prominent as the preacher and spokesman of the Scotch Reformation, wrote +_First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regimen of Women_ +(1558), and the _Historie of the Reformation of Religion within the +Realme of Scotland_, published after his death. John Jewel (1522-1571) +wrote in Latin his _Apologia Ecclesiae Anglicanae_. William Whittingham +(1524-1589), who succeeded Knox as pastor of the English Church at +Geneva, aided in making the Genevan Version of the Bible and also +co-operated in the Sternhold and Hopkins translation of the Psalms. + +John Fox (1517-1587) was the author of the _Book of Martyrs_, whose full +title was _Acts and Monuments of these Latter and Perilous Days, Touching +Matters of the Church_. An abridgment of the work has had a very wide +circulation. John Aylmer (1521-1594) replied to Knox's _First Blast of +the Trumpet_ in a work called _An Harbor for Faithful and True Subjects_. +Nicholas Sanders (1527-1580), a Roman Catholic professor of Oxford, wrote +_The Rock of the Church_, a defense of the primacy of Peter and the +Bishops of Rome. Robert Parsons (1546-1610), a Jesuit, wrote several +works in advocacy of Roman Catholicism and some political tracts. + +{301} + +John Rainolds (1549-1607), a learned Hebraist of Oxford, wrote many +ecclesiastical works in Latin and English. He was a chief promoter of +King James's Version of the Bible. Miles Smith, (died 1624), Thomas +Bilson (1536-1616), John Boys (1560-1643), and George Abbot (1562-1633), +Archbishop of Canterbury, were all co-workers on the King James +translation of the Scriptures. + +Next in importance to the English Bible in its effect upon literature +stands the English Prayer Book, which is the rich mosaic of many minds. +It came through _The Prymer_ of the fourteenth century, and contained the +more fundamental and familiar portions of the _Book of Common Prayer_, +such as the Ten Commandments, the Lord's Prayer, the Litany, and the +Apostles' Creed. This compilation differed in form and somewhat in +content in the different dioceses in England, and was partly in Latin and +partly in English. In 1542 an attempt was made to produce a common form +for all England and to have it entirely in English. The Committee of +Convocation, who had the work in charge, were prevented from making it +complete through the refusal of Henry VIII to continue the approval which +he had given to the appointment of the committee. However, under Edward +VI a commission, headed by Archbishop Cranmer, carried their work +through, and it was accepted and its use made compulsory by Parliament. +It was published in 1549 as the _First Prayer Book of Edward VI_. Three +years later the _Second Prayer {302} Book of Edward VI_ was issued, it +being a revision of the First, also under the shaping hand of Cranmer. +The _Prayer Book_ received its final revision and substantially its +present form in the reign of Elizabeth, in 1559, although in 1662 there +was added to the Morning and Evening Prayer a Collection of Prayers and +Thanksgivings upon Several Occasions. Gathering thus through three +centuries the choice treasures of confession and devotion of the strong +and reverent English nation, it has been a large element in the literary +training, not only of communicants in the Anglican, the Episcopal, and +the Methodist Churches, but, in a measure, also of those who have +received their religious instruction and have worshiped in other branches +of the Protestant Church. + +The work of the Assembly of Divines at Westminster (1643-1649), +particularly the _Confession of Faith_, and the _Shorter Catechism_, +became, as specimens of strong and pure English, potent factors in the +intellectual and literary discipline of the Presbyterians in all parts of +the world. + +The modern psalms and hymns, or the simplified and popularized forms of +the earlier and mediaeval worship, have had vastly to do with the daily +thought and education of the people into whose life they have brought not +only increase of lofty devotion but also a positive and stimulative +culture. + +Foremost of these collections was that made by Thomas Sternhold, John +Hopkins, and others, and {303} known as the _Psalter of Sternhold and +Hopkins_, published in 1562. Francis Rouse made a version in 1645, +which, after revision, was adopted in 1649, and largely used by the +Scotch Church. A new version was that by Nahum Tate and Nicholas Brady, +which appeared in 1696, and has since been called the _Psalter of Tate +and Brady_. The first English hymn book adapted for public worship was +that of Isaac Watts, appearing about 1709, although several minor +collections and individual productions had preceded Watts, among which +should be mentioned those of Joseph Stennett, John Mason, and the fine +hymns of Bishop Ken and Joseph Addison. + +A little later the prolific and spiritual Charles Wesley, aided by the +somewhat stricter taste of his more celebrated brother, John, began +(1739) his wonderful series of published hymns, which, together with +those of Watts, have since formed the larger portion of the Protestant +hymnody of the world. Others of the eighteenth century who have made +contributions to the sacred lyrics of the Church are John Byrom +(1691-1763), Philip Doddridge (1702-1751), Joseph Hart (1712-1768), Anne +Steele (1716-1778), Benjamin Beddome (1717-1795), John Cennick +(1717-1755), Thomas Olivers (1725-1799), Joseph Grigg (1728-1768), +Augustus M. Toplady (1740-1778), and Edward Perronet (died 1792). + +Approaching our own time, the ranks of our hymn writers include James +Montgomery {304} (1771-1854), whose _Christian Psalmist_ was published in +1825, Thomas Kelly, of Dublin (1769-1855); Harriet Auber (1773-1832), +Reginald Heber (1783-1826), Sir Robert Grant (1785-1838), Josiah Conder +(1789-1855), Charlotte Elliott (1789-1871), Sir John Bowring (1792-1872), +Henry Francis Lyte (1793-1847), John Keble (1792-1866), whose _Christian +Year_ came out in 1827; John H. Newman (1801-1890), Sarah Flower Adams +(1805-1849), and Horatius Bonar (1808-1869). + +Richard Mant (1776-1848), Henry Alford (1810-1871), F. W. Faber +(1815-1863), John Mason Neale (1818-1866), Miss Catherine Winkworth (born +1829), and some others, have given many beautiful and stirring +translations from the Latin and German hymns of the ancient and mediaeval +periods. + +Theological writers of the middle of the seventeenth century are +numerous. Chief of those belonging to the Anglican Church may be named +Joseph Hall, Bishop of Norwich (1574-1656), whose _Episcopacy by Divine +Right_ was replied to in _Smectymnus_, the joint production of five +dissenting divines: Stephen Marshal, Edward Calamy, Thomas Young, Matthew +Newcomer, and William Spurston; James Ussher (1580-1656), a man of vast +literary learning and most known by his _Sacred Chronology_, published +after his death; Thomas Fuller and Jeremy Taylor, mentioned in a previous +chapter; John Cosin (1594-1672), who wrote chiefly devotional treatises; +William Chillingworth {305} (1602-1664), whose _Religion of Protestants_ +has had a wide circulation; John Pearson (1612-1686), whose _Exposition +of the Creed_ became a standard; Ralph Cudworth (1617-1688), whose +_Intellectual System of the Universe_ dealt a stunning blow to the +atheism of his day, and Isaac Barrow (1630-1677), the learned +vice-chancellor of Cambridge, wit, mathematician, and theologian all in +one, who left a rich legacy in his _Sermons_. + +Of the Non-conforming authors deserving notice Richard Baxter (1615-1691) +is the most voluminous, if not also the most luminous. Controversy +engaged his pen almost constantly, but his most permanent works were his +_Call to the Unconverted_ and _The Saints' Everlasting Rest_. John Owen +(1616-1683) was a leading Puritan writer, and under Cromwell was +vice-chancellor of Oxford University. His _Commentary on the Epistle to +the Hebrews_ and his book on _The Holy Spirit_ are still in use and +highly prized. His pen was strong rather than elegant. John Bunyan's +immortal allegory throws a halo on universal literature. John Howe +(1630-1705), the chief author among the Puritans, wrote many strong +works, among which of special note are _The Living Temple_ and _The +Office and Work of the Holy Spirit_. He was Cromwell's chaplain. + +The spiritual writings of Samuel Rutherford (1600-1661), the Scotch +divine; the _Annotations on the Psalms_ by Henry Ainsworth (died 1662), +an Independent, who was an exile in Holland for {306} conscience' sake; +the expository writings of Thomas Manton (1620-1677); the _Synopsis_ of +Matthew Poole (1624-1679), later abridged into his celebrated +_Annotations upon the Bible_; the sermons of Stephen Charnock +(1628-1680), particularly the one on "The Divine Attributes;" and _An +Alarm to Unconverted Sinners_, by Joseph Alleine (1633-1688), which has +had an immense circulation, form a galaxy in the theological firmament of +the time of Milton. + +A later group of theological writers in the latter part of the +seventeenth century contains the commanding figures of Symon Patrick +(1626-1707), bishop and author of a _Commentary on the Old Testament_; +John Flavel (1627-1691) and his works on practical piety; John Tillotson +(1630-1694), the Anglican archbishop, whose eloquent sermons are still +held in high repute; Robert South (1633-1716), the great pulpit orator, +whose discourses are an ornament to the English tongue; Edward +Stillingfleet (1635-1699), from whose prolific pen came several valuable +treatises, one of which was _The Antiquities of the British Churches_; +and William Beveridge (1637-1708), whose _Private Thoughts upon Religion_ +is still in much esteem. To these we may add Thomas Ken (1637-1710), the +good bishop now best known as the author of _Praise God, from Whom all +Blessings Flow_; Benjamin Keach (1640-1704), a Baptist preacher of much +note and author of _Gospel Mysteries Opened_, which, like his other +writings, is marred by an {307} excessive use of figures; Gilbert Burnet +(1643-1709), the writer and bishop, who mingled freely in the political +affairs of the day and wrote much on a variety of subjects, one being a +_History of the Reformation of the Church of England_; William Wall +(1646-1728), the prominent defender of infant baptism; Humphrey Prideaux +(1648-1724), who wrote the _Connection of the Old and New Testaments_; +and Matthew Henry (1662-1714), still valued for his quaint and suggestive +_Commentary on the Scriptures_. + +Here, too, belong George Fox (1624-1690) and Robert Barclay (1648-1690), +the heroic founder and the learned champion of the Society of Friends, +the former's _Journal_ and the latter's _Apology for the True Christian +Divinity_ being worthy of special note. William Penn (1644-1718), more +eminent as the chief colonizer of Pennsylvania, also wrote many powerful +works in advocacy of Quaker teachings; and William Sewel's (1650-1726) +_History of the Quakers_ is a notable contribution to the literature of +that much-misunderstood and persecuted people. + +Among those who graced the first half of the eighteenth century we find +the Irish man of letters, Charles Leslie (1650-1722), who gave among +others a celebrated treatise on _A Short and Easy Method with the +Deists_; Francis Atterbury (1662-1732), Bishop of Rochester, whose +_Sermons_ still survive; William Wollaston (1659-1724), known as the +author of _The Religion of Nature_, a plea for truth; Samuel Clarke +(1675-1729), the {308} philosophical writer of _The Demonstration of the +Being and Attributes of God_; Matthew Tindal (1657-1733), the leading +deist of his day, whose chief work was _Christianity as Old as Creation_; +Robert Wodrow (1679-1734), a Scotch preacher who wrote a _History of the +Sufferings of the Church of Scotland_; and Thomas Wilson (1663-1755), +Bishop of Sodor and Man for fifty-seven years and the author of many +useful works on the Scriptures and Christianity. Bishop Joseph Butler +(1692-1752) appeared as the champion of Christianity and successfully +answered the deistical tendency of Tindal and others by his _Analogy of +Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of +Nature_, which, though obscure in style, is still in high repute for its +massive thought and mighty logic. + +Thomas Stackhouse (1680-1752) and his _History of the Bible_; John +Bampton (1689-1751), whose estate still speaks at Oxford in defense of +Christianity in the annual lectures on Divinity; Daniel Waterland +(1683-1740), in his defense of the divinity of Christ; and Joseph Bingham +(1668-1723), in his learned treatise on _The Antiquities of the Christian +Church_, are also in the front rank of this period. Daniel Neal +(1678-1743), in his _History of the Puritans_; John Leland (1691-1766), +the Dublin preacher, in his _View of the Deistical Writers_; and Philip +Doddridge (1702-1751), in his _Family Expositor_ and his briefer and more +famous _Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul_, furnished valuable +contributions to theological literature. + +{309} + +The latter half of the eighteenth century was prolific of letters. +Noteworthy among those who wrote on religious themes are the following: +Nathaniel Lardner (1684-1768), who wrote _The Credibility of the Gospel +History_; William Law (1687-1761), whose _Serious Call to a Holy Life_ +and _Christian Perfection_ are still powerful works; Richard Challoner +(1691-1781), a Roman Catholic author of many practical and devotional +works and of a _Version of the Bible_, much prized in his own Church; +Alban Butler (1700-1773), who compiled _The Lives of the Saints_; William +Warburton (1698-1779), in his _Divine Legation of Moses_; Alexander +Cruden (1701-1770), the Scotch author of the famous _Concordance to the +Holy Scriptures_; and Lord George Lyttleton (1708-1773), the author of +_Observations on the Conversion and Apostleship of St. Paul_. + +In the same category belong: Robert Lowth (1710-1787), whose book on +_Hebrew Poetry_ is still consulted; James Hervey (1713-1758), whose +_Meditations_ became very popular; Hugh Blair (1718-1800), the Scotchman +whose _Sermons_ for many years rivaled his _Lectures on Rhetoric_ in +popularity; Joseph Priestley (1733-1804), illustrious in the annals of +chemical discovery, who wrote _Institutes of Natural and Revealed +Religion_, and is one of the most distinguished Socinian writers; and +William Paley (1743-1805), whose _Natural Theology_ and _Horae Paulinae_ +are still standard works. + +During this period also came the great impulse {310} to the literature of +the common people through the tireless pen of John Wesley (1703-1791), +whose _Sermons and Notes on the New Testament_ have had a powerful +influence wherever the Wesleyan revival has spread. James McKnight +(1721-1800), the scholarly commentator and harmonist; John Fletcher +(1729-1785), the sweet-souled defender of Methodism and author of _Checks +to Antinomianism_; Bishop Richard Watson (1737-1816), the learned +apologist; Augustus M. Toplady (1740-1778); the hymnist and polemic; +Joseph Milner (1744-1797), the Church historian; Thomas Coke (1747-1814), +in his _Commentary on the Old and New Testaments_; and Andrew Fuller +(1754-1815) were authors of marked force and ability. + +Belonging to the first quarter of the nineteenth century the leading +theological productions are _The Immateriality and Immortality of the +Soul_, by Samuel Drew (1765-1833); the _Translation of the Book of Job_, +by John Mason Good (1764-1827); the popular _Commentaries on the Bible_ +by Thomas Scott (1747-1821), Adam Clarke (1762-1832), and Joseph Benson +(1748-1821); the _Sermons_ of Robert Hall (1764-1831), the great Baptist +preacher; the _Introduction to the Literary History of the Bible_, by +James Townley (died 1833); the missionary narratives of Henry Martyn +(1781-1812), William Ward (1769-1822) and John Williams (1796-1839); and +the pathetic story of _The Dairyman's Daughter_, by Legh Richmond +(1772-1827). A little later in this century the first ranks {311} of +theological scholarship include the Wordsworths--Christopher (1774-1846), +the brother of the poet, and his two sons, Charles (1806-1892) and +Christopher, Jr. (1809-1885). + +_Tracts for the Times_, written by a group of men styling themselves +Anglo-Catholics, whose leaders were Edward B. Pusey (1800-1882), John H. +Newman (1801-1890), John Keble (1792-1866), Richard H. Froude and others, +began in 1833, and for several years continued to be published, reaching +ninety in number. Their main purpose was a discussion and defense of the +character and work of the Established Church, but a large result was that +several of the leading spirits, with about two hundred clergymen and the +same number of prominent laymen, became Roman Catholics. This +High-Church series of writings was followed in 1860 by _Essays and +Reviews_, a volume containing seven articles, whose authors were +Frederick Temple (born 1821), Rowland Williams (1817-1870), Baden Powell +(1796-1860), Henry B. Wilson (born 1804), C. W. Goodwin, Mark Pattison +(1813-1884), and Benjamin Jowett (1817-1893). The purpose of these men +was to liberalize the thought of the Church. They accomplished this +result, and with it the overthrow of the faith of some. + +Thomas Chalmers (1780-1847), the great Scotch preacher, left much fruit +of his pen, the most celebrated being _Astronomical Discourses_. Other +distinguished books are: _A Practical View of {312} Christianity_, by +William Wilberforce (1759-1833); _Horae Homileticae_, by Charles Simeon +(1759-1836); _The Lives of Knox and Melville_, by Thomas McCrie +(1772-1835); _Horae Mosaicae_, by George Stanley Faber (1773-1854); _The +Scripture Testimony to the Messiah_, by John Pye Smith (1774-1851); +_Theological Institutes_, by the Wesleyan theologian, Richard Watson +(1781-1833); the _Histories of the Jews_ and _of Christianity_, by Henry +Hart Milman (1791-1868); the _Cyclopaedia of Biblical Literature_, by +John Kitto (1804-1854); _Mammon_, by John Harris (1804-1856); the +_Theological Essays_ of John Frederick Denison Maurice (1805-1872); +_Missions the Chief End of the Christian Church_, by Alexander Duff +(1806-1878); the _Sermons_ of Frederick William Robertson (1816-1853); +and _The Life and Epistles of Paul_, by William J. Conybeare (1815-1857) +and John S. Howson (1816-1885). + +The latter half of the present century has been marked by many strong and +profound theological publications, of which we may name as worthy of +particular notice: _The Introduction to the Study of the Holy +Scriptures_, by Thomas Hartwell Horne (1780-1862); _Historic Doubts +Relative to Napoleon Bonaparte_, by Richard Whately (1787-1863); +_Apologia pro Vita Sua_ of John H. Newman (1801-1890); _The Typology of +Scripture_, by Patrick Fairbairn (1805-1892); _The Eclipse of Faith_, by +Henry Rogers (1806-1877); the _Notes on the Parables and Miracles_, by +Richard Chenevix Trench (1807-1886); {313} _The Temporal Mission of the +Holy Ghost_, by Henry Edward Manning (1808-1892); the series of lectures +on the Scriptures, by John Gumming (1810-1881); the _Greek New +Testament_, edited by Henry Alford (1810-1871); and the same by Samuel +Prideaux Tregelles (1813-1875); the historical works of Arthur Penrhyn +Stanley (1815-1881); _Hypatia, or Old Foes with a New Face_, by Charles +Kingsley (1819-1875); _Ecce Homo_, by John Robert Seeley (1834-1895); the +_Sermons_ of Charles Haddon Spurgeon (1834-1892); and _Natural Law in the +Spiritual World_, the brilliant venture of the beloved and lamented Henry +Drummond (1851-1897), whose _Greatest Thing in the World_ bids fair to +become a Christian classic. + + + + +{317} + +AMERICAN LITERATURE. + + + +PREFACE. + +This little volume is intended as a companion to the _Outline Sketch of +English Literature_, published last year for the Chautauqua Circle. In +writing it I have followed the same plan, aiming to present the subject +in a sort of continuous essay rather than in the form of a "primer" or +elementary manual. I have not undertaken to describe or even to +mention every American author or book of importance, but only those +which seemed to me of most significance. Nevertheless I believe that +the sketch contains enough detail to make it of some use as a +guide-book to our literature. Though meant to be mainly a history of +American _belles-lettres_ it makes some mention of historical and +political writings, {318} but hardly any of philosophical, scientific, +and technical works. + +A chronological rather than a topical order has been followed, although +the fact that our best literature is of recent growth has made it +impossible to adhere as closely to a chronological plan as in the +English sketch. In the reading courses appended to the different +chapters I have named a few of the most important authorities in +American literary history, such as Duyckinck, Tyler, Stedman, and +Richardson. + +HENRY A. BEERS. + + + + +{319} + +CONTENTS. + + +CHAPTER PAGE + + I. THE COLONIAL PERIOD, 1607-1765 . . . . . . . . . 321 + II. THE REVOLUTIONARY PERIOD, 1765-1815 . . . . . . 365 + III. THE ERA OF NATIONAL EXPANSION, 1815-1837 . . . . 400 + IV. THE CONCORD WRITERS, 1837-1861 . . . . . . . . . 434 + V. THE CAMBRIDGE SCHOLARS, 1837-1861 . . . . . . . 472 + VI. LITERATURE IN THE CITIES, 1837-1861 . . . . . . 511 + VII. LITERATURE SINCE 1861 . . . . . . . . . . . . . 554 + VIII. THEOLOGICAL AND RELIGIOUS LITERATURE IN + AMERICA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 594 + INDEX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 609 + + + + +{321} + +OUTLINE SKETCH OF AMERICAN LITERATURE. + + +CHAPTER I. + +THE COLONIAL PERIOD. + +1607-1765. + +The writings of our colonial era have a much greater importance as +history than as literature. It would be unfair to judge of the +intellectual vigor of the English colonists in America by the books +that they wrote; those "stern men with empires in their brains" had +more pressing work to do than the making of books. The first settlers, +indeed, were brought face to face with strange and exciting +conditions--the sea, the wilderness, the Indians, the flora and fauna +of a new world--things which seem stimulating to the imagination, and +incidents and experiences which might have lent themselves easily to +poetry or romance. Of all these they wrote back to England reports +which were faithful and sometimes vivid, but which, upon the whole, +hardly rise into the region of literature. "New England," said +Hawthorne, "was then in a {322} state incomparably more picturesque +than at present." But to a contemporary that old New England of the +seventeenth century doubtless seemed any thing but picturesque, filled +with grim, hard, worky-day realities. The planters both of Virginia +and Massachusetts were decimated by sickness and starvation, constantly +threatened by Indian wars, and troubled by quarrels among themselves +and fears of disturbance from England. The wrangles between the royal +governors and the House of Burgesses in the Old Dominion, and the +theological squabbles in New England, which fill our colonial records, +are petty and wearisome to read of. At least, they would be so did we +not bear in mind to what imperial destinies these conflicts were slowly +educating the little communities which had hardly as yet secured a +foothold on the edge of the raw continent. + +Even a century and a half after the Jamestown and Plymouth settlements, +when the American plantations had grown strong and flourishing, and +commerce was building up large towns, and there were wealth and +generous living and fine society, the "good old colony days when we +lived under the king," had yielded little in the way of literature that +is of any permanent interest. There would seem to be something in the +relation of a colony to the mother country which dooms the thought and +art of the former to a hopeless provincialism. Canada and Australia +are great provinces, wealthier and more populous than the {323} +thirteen colonies at the time of their separation from England. They +have cities whose inhabitants number hundreds of thousands, well +equipped universities, libraries, cathedrals, costly public buildings, +all the outward appliances of an advanced civilization; and yet what +have Canada and Australia contributed to British literature? + +American literature had no infancy. That engaging _naivete_ and that +heroic rudeness which give a charm to the early popular tales and songs +of Europe find, of course, no counterpart on our soil. Instead of +emerging from the twilight of the past, the first American writings +were produced under the garish noon of a modern and learned age. +Decrepitude rather than youthfulness is the mark of a colonial +literature. The poets, in particular, instead of finding a challenge +to their imagination in the new life about them, are apt to go on +imitating the cast off literary fashions of the mother country. +America was settled by Englishmen who were contemporary with the +greatest names in English literature. Jamestown was planted in 1607, +nine years before Shakspeare's death, and the hero of that enterprize, +Captain John Smith, may not improbably have been a personal +acquaintance of the great dramatist. "They have acted my fatal +tragedies on the stage," wrote Smith. Many circumstances in _The +Tempest_ were doubtless suggested by the wreck of the _Sea Venture_ on +"the still vext Bermoothes," as described by William Strachey in his +_True Repertory of the Wrack and {324} Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates_, +written at Jamestown, and published at London in 1510. Shakspere's +contemporary, Michael Drayton, the poet of the _Polyolbion_, addressed +a spirited valedictory ode to the three shiploads of "brave, heroic +minds" who sailed from London in 1606 to colonize Virginia; an ode +which ended with the prophecy of a future American literature: + + "And as there plenty grows + Of laurel every-where,-- + Apollo's sacred tree-- + You it may see + A poet's brows + To crown, that may sing there." + + +Another English poet, Samuel Daniel, the author of the _Civil Wars_, +had also prophesied in a similar strain: + + "And who in time knows whither we may vent + The treasure of our tongue, to what strange shores~.~.~. + What worlds in the yet unformed Occident + May come refined with accents that are ours." + + +It needed but a slight movement in the balances of fate, and Walter +Raleigh might have been reckoned among the poets of America. He was +one of the original promoters of the Virginia colony, and he made +voyages in person to Newfoundland and Guiana. And more unlikely things +have happened than that when John Milton left Cambridge in 1632, he +should have been tempted to follow Winthrop and the colonists of +Massachusetts Bay, {325} who had sailed two years before. Sir Henry +Vane, the younger, who was afterward Milton's friend-- + + "Vane, young in years, but in sage counsel old"-- + +came over in 1635, and was for a short time Governor of Massachusetts. +These are idle speculations, and yet, when we reflect that Oliver +Cromwell was on the point of embarking for America when he was +prevented by the king's officers, we may, for the nonce, "let our frail +thoughts dally with false surmise," and fancy by how narrow a chance +_Paradise Lost_ missed being written in Boston. But, as a rule, the +members of the literary guild are not quick to emigrate. They like the +feeling of an old and rich civilization about them, a state of society +which America has only begun to reach during the present century. + +Virginia and New England, says Lowell, were the "two great distributing +centers of the English race." The men who colonized the country +between the Capes of Virginia were not drawn, to any large extent, from +the literary or bookish classes in the Old Country. Many of the first +settlers were gentlemen--too many, Captain Smith thought, for the good +of the plantation. Some among these were men of worth and spirit, "of +good means and great parentage." Such was, for example, George Percy, +a younger brother of the Earl of Northumberland, who was one of the +original adventurers, and the author of _A Discourse of the Plantation +of the Southern Colony of Virginia_, {326} which contains a graphic +narrative of the fever and famine summer of 1607 at Jamestown. But +many of these gentlemen were idlers, "unruly gallants, packed thither +by their friends to escape ill destinies;" dissipated younger sons, +soldiers of fortune, who came over after the gold which was supposed to +abound in the new country, and who spent their time in playing bowls +and drinking at the tavern as soon as there was any tavern. With these +was a sprinkling of mechanics and farmers, indented servants, and the +off-scourings of the London streets, fruit of press gangs and jail +deliveries, sent over to "work in the plantations." + +Nor were the conditions of life afterward in Virginia very favorable to +literary growth. The planters lived isolated on great estates, which +had water fronts on the rivers that flow into the Chesapeake. There +the tobacco, the chief staple of the country, was loaded directly upon +the trading vessels that tied up to the long, narrow wharves of the +plantations. Surrounded by his slaves, and visited occasionally by a +distant neighbor, the Virginia country gentleman lived a free and +careless life. He was fond of fox-hunting, horse-racing, and +cock-fighting. There were no large towns, and the planters met each +other mainly on occasion of a county court or the assembling of the +Burgesses. The court-house was the nucleus of social and political +life in Virginia as the town-meeting was in New England. In such a +state of society schools were necessarily few, and popular education +did {327} not exist. Sir William Berkeley, who was the royal governor +of the colony from 1641 to 1677, said, in 1670, "I thank God there are +no free schools nor printing, and I hope we shall not have these +hundred years." In the matter of printing, this pious wish was +well-nigh realized. The first press set up in the colony, about 1681, +was soon suppressed, and found no successor until the year 1729. From +that date until some ten years before the Revolution one printing-press +answered the needs of Virginia, and this was under official control. +The earliest newspaper in the colony was the _Virginia Gazette_, +established in 1736. + +In the absence of schools the higher education naturally languished. +Some of the planters were taught at home by tutors, and others went to +England and entered the universities. But these were few in number, +and there was no college in the colony until more than half a century +after the foundation of Harvard in the younger province of +Massachusetts. The college of William and Mary was established at +Williamsburg chiefly by the exertions of the Rev. James Blair, a Scotch +divine, who was sent by the Bishop of London as "commissary" to the +Church in Virginia. The college received its charter in 1693, and held +its first commencement in 1700. It is perhaps significant of the +difference between the Puritans of New England and the so-called +"Cavaliers" of Virginia, that while the former founded and supported +Harvard College in 1636, and Yale in 1701, of {328} their own motion, +and at their own expense, William and Mary received its endowment from +the crown, being provided for in part by a deed of lands and in part by +a tax of a penny a pound on all tobacco exported from the colony. In +return for this royal grant the college was to present yearly to the +king two copies of Latin verse. It is reported of the young Virginian +gentlemen who resorted to the new college that they brought their +plantation manners with them, and were accustomed to "keep race-horses +at the college, and bet at the billiard or other gaming tables." +William and Mary College did a good work for the colony, and educated +some of the great Virginians of the Revolutionary era, but it has never +been a large or flourishing institution, and has held no such relation +to the intellectual development of its section as Harvard and Yale have +held in the colonies of Massachusetts and Connecticut. Even after the +foundation of the University of Virginia, in which Jefferson took a +conspicuous part, southern youths were commonly sent to the North for +their education, and at the time of the outbreak of the civil war there +was a large contingent of southern students in several northern +colleges, notably in Princeton and Yale. + +Naturally, the first books written in America were descriptions of the +country and narratives of the vicissitudes of the infant settlements, +which were sent home to be printed for the information of the English +public and the encouragement of {329} further immigration. Among books +of this kind produced in Virginia the earliest and most noteworthy were +the writings of that famous soldier of fortune, Captain John Smith. +The first of these was his _True Relation_, namely, "of such +occurrences and accidents of note as hath happened in Virginia since +the first planting of that colony," printed at London in 1608. Among +Smith's other books, the most important is perhaps his _General History +of Virginia_ (London, 1624), a compilation of various narratives by +different hands, but passing under his name. Smith was a man of a +restless and daring spirit, full of resource, impatient of +contradiction, and of a somewhat vainglorious nature, with an appetite +for the marvelous and a disposition to draw the long bow. He had seen +service in many parts of the world, and his wonderful adventures lost +nothing in the telling. It was alleged against him that the evidence +of his prowess rested almost entirely on his own testimony. His +truthfulness in essentials has not, perhaps, been successfully +impugned, but his narratives have suffered by the embellishments with +which he has colored them, and, in particular, the charming story of +Pocohontas saving his life at the risk of her own--the one romance of +early Virginian history--has passed into the realm of legend. + +Captain Smith's writings have small literary value apart from the +interest of the events which they describe, and the diverting but +forcible {330} personality which they unconsciously display. They are +the rough-hewn records of a busy man of action, whose sword was +mightier than his pen. As Smith returned to England after two years in +Virginia, and did not permanently cast in his lot with the settlement +of which he had been for a time the leading spirit, he can hardly be +claimed as an American author. No more can Mr. George Sandys, who came +to Virginia in the train of Governor Wyat, in 1621, and completed his +excellent metrical translation of Ovid on the banks of the James, in +the midst of the Indian massacre of 1622, "limned" as he writes "by +that imperfect light which was snatched from the hours of night and +repose, having wars and tumults to bring it to light instead of the +muses." Sandys went back to England for good, probably as early as +1625, and can, therefore, no more be reckoned as the first American +poet, on the strength of his paraphrase of the _Metamorphoses_, than he +can be reckoned the earliest Yankee inventor, because he "introduced +the first water-mill into America." + +The literature of colonial Virginia, and of the southern colonies which +took their point of departure from Virginia, is almost wholly of this +historical and descriptive kind. A great part of it is concerned with +the internal affairs of the province, such as "Bacon's Rebellion," in +1676, one of the most striking episodes in our ante-revolutionary +annals, and of which there exist a number of narratives, some of them +anonymous, and only rescued {331} from a manuscript condition a hundred +years after the event. Another part is concerned with the explorations +of new territory. Such were the "Westover Manuscripts," left by +Colonel William Byrd, who was appointed in 1729 one of the +commissioners to fix the boundary between Virginia and North Carolina, +and gave an account of the survey in his _History of the Dividing +Line_, which was only printed in 1841. Colonel Byrd is one of the most +brilliant figures of colonial Virginia, and a type of the Old Virginia +gentleman. He had been sent to England for his education, where he was +admitted to the bar of the Middle Temple, elected a Fellow of the Royal +Society, and formed an intimate friendship with Charles Boyle, the Earl +of Orrery. He held many offices in the government of the colony, and +founded the cities of Richmond and Petersburg. His estates were large, +and at Westover--where he had one of the finest private libraries in +America--he exercised a baronial hospitality, blending the usual +profusion of plantation life with the elegance of a traveled scholar +and "picked man of countries." Colonel Byrd was rather an amateur in +literature. His _History of the Dividing Line_ is written with a +jocularity which rises occasionally into real humor, and which gives to +the painful journey through the wilderness the air of a holiday +expedition. Similar in tone were his diaries of _A Progress to the +Mines_ and _A Journey to the Land of Eden_ in North Carolina. + +{332} The first formal historian of Virginia was Robert Beverley, "a +native and inhabitant of the place," whose History of Virginia was +printed at London in 1705. Beverley was a rich planter and large slave +owner, who, being in London in 1703, was shown by his bookseller the +manuscript of a forthcoming work, Oldmixon's _British Empire in +America_. Beverley was set upon writing his history by the +inaccuracies in this, and likewise because the province "has been so +misrepresented to the common people of England as to make them believe +that the servants in Virginia are made to draw in cart and plow, and +that the country turns all people black," an impression which lingers +still in parts of Europe. The most original portions of the book are +those in which the author puts down his personal observations of the +plants and animals of the New World, and particularly the account of +the Indians, to which his third book is devoted, and which is +accompanied by valuable plates. Beverley's knowledge of these matters +was evidently at first hand, and his descriptions here are very fresh +and interesting. The more strictly historical part of his work is not +free from prejudice and inaccuracy. A more critical, detailed, and +impartial, but much less readable, work was William Stith's _History of +the First Discovery and Settlement of Virginia_, 1747, which brought +the subject down only to the year 1624. Stith was a clergyman, and at +one time a professor in William and Mary College. + +{333} + +The Virginians were stanch royalists and churchmen. The Church of +England was established by law, and non-conformity was persecuted in +various ways. Three missionaries were sent to the colony in 1642 by +the Puritans of New England, two from Braintree, Massachusetts, and one +from New Haven. They were not suffered to preach, but many resorted to +them in private houses, until, being finally driven out by fines and +imprisonments, they took refuge in Catholic Maryland. The Virginia +clergy were not, as a body, very much of a force in education or +literature. Many of them, by reason of the scattering and dispersed +condition of their parishes, lived as domestic chaplains with the +wealthier planters, and partook of their illiteracy and their passion +for gaming and hunting. Few of them inherited the zeal of Alexander +Whitaker, the "Apostle of Virginia," who came over in 1611 to preach to +the colonists and convert the Indians, and who published in furtherance +of those ends _Good News from Virginia_, in 1613, three years before +his death by drowning in James River. + +The conditions were much more favorable for the production of a +literature in New England than in the southern colonies. The free and +genial existence of the "Old Dominion" had no counterpart among the +settlers of Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay, and the Puritans must have +been rather unpleasant people to live with for persons of a different +way of thinking. But their {334} intensity of character, their respect +for learning, and the heroic mood which sustained them through the +hardships and dangers of their great enterprise are amply reflected in +their own writings. If these are not so much literature as the raw +materials of literature, they have at least been fortunate in finding +interpreters among their descendants, and no modern Virginian has done +for the memory of the Jamestown planters what Hawthorne, Whittier, +Longfellow, and others have done in casting the glamour of poetry and +romance over the lives of the founders of New England. + +Cotton Mather, in his _Magnalia_, quotes the following passage from one +of those election sermons, delivered before the General Court of +Massachusetts, which formed for many years the great annual +intellectual event of the colony: "The question was often put unto our +predecessors, _What went ye out into the wilderness to see_? And the +answer to it is not only too excellent but too notorious to be +dissembled.~.~.~. We came hither because we would have our posterity +settled under the pure and full dispensations of the gospel, defended +by rulers that should be of ourselves." The New England colonies were, +in fact, theocracies. Their leaders were clergymen or laymen, whose +zeal for the faith was no whit inferior to that of the ministers +themselves. Church and State were one. The freeman's oath was only +administered to Church members, and there was no place in the social +system for unbelievers or {335} dissenters. The Pilgrim fathers +regarded their transplantation to the New World as an exile, and +nothing is more touching in their written records than the repeated +expressions of love and longing toward the old home which they had +left, and even toward that Church of England from which they had +sorrowfully separated themselves. It was not in any light or +adventurous spirit that they faced the perils of the sea and the +wilderness. "This howling wilderness," "these ends of the earth," +"these goings down of the sun," are some of the epithets which they +constantly applied to the land of their exile. Nevertheless they had +come to stay, and, unlike Smith and Percy and Sandys, the early +historians and writers of New England cast in their lots permanently +with the new settlements. A few, indeed, went back after 1640--Mather +says some ten or twelve of the ministers of the first "classis" or +immigration were among them--when the victory of the Puritanic party in +Parliament opened a career for them in England, and made their presence +there seem in some cases a duty. The celebrated Hugh Peters, for +example, who was afterward Oliver Cromwell's chaplain, and was beheaded +after the Restoration, went back in 1641, and in 1647 Nathaniel Ward, +the minister of Ipswich, Massachusetts, and author of a quaint book +against toleration, entitled _The Simple Cobbler of Agawam_, written in +America and published shortly after its author's arrival in England. +The Civil War, too, put a stop to {336} further emigration from England +until after the Restoration in 1660. + +The mass of the Puritan immigration consisted of men of the middle +class, artisans and husbandmen, the most useful members of a new +colony. But their leaders were clergymen educated at the universities, +and especially at Emanuel College, Cambridge, the great Puritan +college; their civil magistrates were also in great part gentlemen of +education and substance, like the elder Winthrop, who was learned in +the law, and Theophilus Eaton, first governor of New Haven, who was a +London merchant of good estate. It is computed that there were in New +England during the first generation as many university graduates as in +any community of equal population in the old country. Almost the first +care of the settlers was to establish schools. Every town of fifty +families was required by law to maintain a common school, and every +town of a hundred families a grammar or Latin school. In 1636, only +sixteen years after the landing of the Pilgrims on Plymouth Rock, +Harvard College was founded at Newtown, whose name was thereupon +changed to Cambridge, the General Court held at Boston on September 8, +1680, having already advanced 400 pounds "by way of essay towards the +building of something to begin a college." "An university," says +Mather, "which hath been to these plantations, for the good literature +there cultivated, _sal Gentium_~.~.~. and a river, without the streams +whereof these regions would {337} have been mere unwatered places for +the devil." By 1701 Harvard had put forth a vigorous offshoot, Yale +College, at New Haven, the settlers of New Haven and Connecticut +plantations having increased sufficiently to need a college at their +own doors. A printing press was set up at Cambridge in 1639, which was +under the oversight of the university authorities, and afterwards of +licensers appointed by the civil power. The press was no more free in +Massachusetts than in Virginia, and that "liberty of unlicensed +printing," for which the Puritan Milton had pleaded in his +_Areopagitica_, in 1644, was unknown in Puritan New England until some +twenty years before the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. "The +Freeman's Oath" and an almanac were issued from the Cambridge press in +1639, and in 1640 the first English book printed in America, a +collection of the psalms in meter, made by various ministers, and known +as the _Bay Psalm Book_. The poetry of this version was worse, if +possible, than that of Sternhold and Hopkins's famous rendering; but it +is noteworthy that one of the principal translators was that devoted +"Apostle to the Indians," the Rev. John Eliot, who, in 1661-63, +translated the Bible into the Algonkin tongue. Eliot hoped and toiled +a lifetime for the conversion of those "salvages," "tawnies," +"devil-worshipers," for whom our early writers have usually nothing but +bad words. They have been destroyed instead of converted; but his (so +entitled) _Mamusse Wunneetupanatamwe {338} Up-Biblum God naneeswe +Nukkone Testament kah wonk Wusku Testament_--the first Bible printed in +America--remains a monument of missionary zeal and a work of great +value to students of the Indian languages. + +A modern writer has said that, to one looking back on the history of +old New England, it seems as though the sun shone but dimly there, and +the landscape was always dark and wintry. Such is the impression which +one carries away from the perusal of books like Bradford's and +Winthrop's _Journals_, or Mather's _Wonders of the Invisible World_: an +impression of gloom, of night and cold, of mysterious fears besieging +the infant settlements, scattered in a narrow fringe "between the +groaning forest and the shore." The Indian terror hung over New +England for more than half a century, or until the issue of King +Philip's War, in 1676, relieved the colonists of any danger of a +general massacre. Added to this were the perplexities caused by the +earnest resolve of the settlers to keep their New English Eden free +from the intrusion of the serpent in the shape of heretical sects in +religion. The Puritanism of Massachusetts was an orthodox and +conservative Puritanism. The later and more grotesque out-crops of the +movement in the old England found no toleration in the new. But these +refugees for conscience' sake were compelled in turn to persecute +Antinomians, Separatists, Familists, Libertines, Anti-pedobaptists, and +later, Quakers, and still {339} later, Enthusiasts, who swarmed into +their precincts and troubled the Churches with "prophesyings" and novel +opinions. Some of these were banished, others were flogged or +imprisoned, and a few were put to death. Of the exiles the most +noteworthy was Roger Williams, an impetuous, warm-hearted man, who was +so far in advance of his age as to deny the power of the civil +magistrate in cases of conscience, or who, in other words, maintained +the modern doctrine of the separation of Church and State. Williams +was driven away from the Massachusetts colony--where he had been +minister of the Church at Salem--and with a few followers fled into the +southern wilderness, and settled at Providence. There and in the +neighboring plantation of Rhode Island, for which he obtained a +charter, he established his patriarchal rule, and gave freedom of +worship to all comers. Williams was a prolific writer on theological +subjects, the most important of his writings being, perhaps, his +_Bloody Tenent of Persecution_, 1644, and a supplement to the same +called out by a reply to the former work from the pen of Mr. John +Cotton, minister of the First Church at Boston, entitled _The Bloody +Tenent Washed and made White in the Blood of the Lamb_. Williams was +also a friend to the Indians, whose lands, he thought, should not be +taken from them without payment, and he anticipated Eliot by writing, +in 1643, a _Key into the Language of America_. Although at odds with +the theology of {340} Massachusetts Bay, Williams remained in +correspondence with Winthrop and others in Boston, by whom he was +highly esteemed. He visited England in 1643 and 1652, and made the +acquaintance of John Milton. + +Besides the threat of an Indian war and their anxious concern for the +purity of the Gospel in their Churches, the colonists were haunted by +superstitious forebodings of the darkest kind. It seemed to them that +Satan, angered by the setting up of the kingdom of the saints in +America, had "come down in great wrath," and was present among them, +sometimes even in visible shape, to terrify and tempt. Special +providences and unusual phenomena, like earthquakes, mirages, and the +northern lights, are gravely recorded by Winthrop and Mather and others +as portents of supernatural persecutions. Thus Mrs. Anne Hutchinson, +the celebrated leader of the Familists, having, according to rumor, +been delivered of a monstrous birth, the Rev. John Cotton, in open +assembly, at Boston, upon a lecture day, "thereupon gathered that it +might signify her error in denying inherent righteousness." "There +will be an unusual range of the devil among us," wrote Mather, "a +little before the second coming of our Lord. The evening wolves will +be much abroad when we are near the evening of the world." This belief +culminated in the horrible witchcraft delusion at Salem in 1692, that +"spectral puppet play," which, beginning with the malicious pranks of a +few children who {341} accused certain uncanny old women and other +persons of mean condition and suspected lives of having tormented them +with magic, gradually drew into its vortex victims of the highest +character, and resulted in the judicial murder of over nineteen people. +Many of the possessed pretended to have been visited by the apparition +of a little black man, who urged them to inscribe their names in a red +book which he carried--a sort of muster-roll of those who had forsworn +God's service for the devil's. Others testified to having been present +at meetings of witches in the forest. It is difficult now to read +without contempt the "evidence" which grave justices and learned +divines considered sufficient to condemn to death men and women of +unblemished lives. It is true that the belief in witchcraft was +general at that time all over the civilized world, and that sporadic +cases of witch-burnings had occurred in different parts of America and +Europe. Sir Thomas Browne, in his _Religio Medici_, 1635, affirmed his +belief in witches, and pronounced those who doubted of them "a sort of +atheist." But the superstition came to a head in the Salem trials and +executions, and was the more shocking from the general high level of +intelligence in the community in which these were held. It would be +well if those who lament the decay of "faith" would remember what +things were done in New England in the name of faith less than two +hundred years ago. It is not wonderful that, to the Massachusetts +Puritans of {342} the seventeenth century, the mysterious forest held +no beautiful suggestion; to them it was simply a grim and hideous +wilderness, whose dark aisles were the ambush of prowling savages and +the rendezvous of those other "devil-worshipers" who celebrated there a +kind of vulgar Walpurgis night. + +The most important of original sources for the history of the +settlement of New England are the journals of William Bradford, first +governor of Plymouth, and John Winthrop, the second governor of +Massachusetts, which hold a place corresponding to the writings of +Captain John Smith in the Virginia colony, but are much more sober and +trustworthy. Bradford's _History of Plymouth Plantation_ covers the +period from 1620 to 1646. The manuscript was used by later annalists, +but remained unpublished, as a whole, until 1855, having been lost +during the war of the revolution and recovered long afterward in +England. Winthrop's Journal, or _History of New England_, begun on +shipboard in 1630, and extending to 1649, was not published entire +until 1826. It is of equal authority with Bradford's, and perhaps, on +the whole, the more important of the two, as the colony of +Massachusetts Bay, whose history it narrates, greatly outwent Plymouth +in wealth and population, though not in priority of settlement. The +interest of Winthrop's Journal lies in the events that it records +rather than in any charm in the historian's manner of recording them. +His style is pragmatic, {343} and some of the incidents which he +gravely notes are trivial to the modern mind, though instructive as to +our forefathers' way of thinking. For instance, of the year 1632: "At +Watertown there was (in the view of divers witnesses) a great combat +between a mouse and a snake, and after a long fight the mouse prevailed +and killed the snake. The pastor of Boston, Mr. Wilson, a very +sincere, holy man, hearing of it, gave this interpretation: that the +snake was the devil, the mouse was a poor, contemptible people, which +God had brought hither, which should overcome Satan here and dispossess +him of his kingdom." The reader of Winthrop's _Journal_ comes +every-where upon hints which the imagination has since shaped into +poetry and romance. The germs of many of Longfellow's _New England +Tragedies_, of Hawthorne's _Maypole of Merrymount_, of _Endicott's Red +Cross_, and of Whittier's _John Underhill_ and _The Familists' Hymn_ +are all to be found in some dry, brief entry of the old Puritan +diarist. "Robert Cole, having been oft punished for drunkenness, was +now ordered to wear a red D about his neck for a year" to wit, the year +1633, and thereby gave occasion to the greatest American romance, _The +Scarlet Letter_. The famous apparition of the phantom ship in New +Haven harbor, "upon the top of the poop a man standing with one hand +akimbo under his left side, and in his right hand a sword stretched out +toward the sea," was first chronicled by Winthrop under the year 1648. +This meterological {344} phenomenon took on the dimensions of a +full-grown myth some forty years later, as related, with many +embellishments, by Rev. James Pierpont, of New Haven, in a letter to +Cotton Mather. Winthrop put great faith in special providences, and +among other instances narrates, not without a certain grim +satisfaction, how "the _Mary Rose_, a ship of Bristol, of about 200 +tons," lying before Charleston, was blown in pieces with her own +powder, being twenty-one barrels, wherein the judgment of God appeared, +"for the master and company were many of them profane scoffers at us +and at the ordinances of religion here." Without any effort at +dramatic portraiture or character sketching, Winthrop managed in all +simplicity, and by the plain relation of facts, to leave a clear +impression of many of the prominent figures in the first Massachusetts +immigration. In particular there gradually arises from the entries in +his diary a very distinct and diverting outline of Captain John +Underhill, celebrated in Whittier's poem. He was one of the few +professional soldiers who came over with the Puritan fathers, such as +John Mason, the hero of the Pequot War, and Miles Standish, whose +_Courtship_ Longfellow sang. He had seen service in the Low Countries, +and in pleading the privilege of his profession "he insisted much upon +the liberty which all States do allow to military officers for free +speech, etc., and that himself had spoken sometimes as freely to Count +Nassau." Captain Underhill gave the colony no end of {345} trouble, +both by his scandalous living and his heresies in religion. Having +been seduced into Familistical opinions by Mrs. Anne Hutchinson, who +was banished for her beliefs, he was had up before the General Court +and questioned, among other points, as to his own report of the manner +of his conversion. "He had lain under a spirit of bondage and a legal +way for years, and could get no assurance, till, at length, as he was +taking a pipe of tobacco, the Spirit set home an absolute promise of +free grace with such assurance and joy as he never since doubted of his +good estate, neither should he, though he should fall into sin.~.~.~. +The Lord's day following he made a speech in the assembly, showing that +as the Lord was pleased to convert Paul as he was in persecuting, etc., +so he might manifest himself to him as he was taking the moderate use +of the creature called tobacco." The gallant captain, being banished +the colony, betook himself to the falls of the Piscataquack (Exeter, N. +H.), where the Rev. John Wheelwright, another adherent of Mrs. +Hutchinson, had gathered a congregation. Being made governor of this +plantation, Underhill sent letters to the Massachusetts magistrates, +breathing reproaches and imprecations of vengeance. But meanwhile it +was discovered that he had been living in adultery at Boston with a +young woman whom he had seduced, the wife of a cooper, and the captain +was forced to make public confession, which he did with great unction +and in a manner highly dramatic. "He came {346} in his worst clothes +(being accustomed to take great pride in his bravery and neatness), +without a band, in a foul linen cap, and pulled close to his eyes, and +standing upon a form, he did, with many deep sighs and abundance of +tears, lay open his wicked course." There is a lurking humor in the +grave Winthrop's detailed account of Underhill's doings. Winthrop's +own personality comes out well in his _Journal_. He was a born leader +of men, a _conditor imperii_, just, moderate, patient, wise, and his +narrative gives, upon the whole, a favorable impression of the general +prudence and fair-mindedness of the Massachusetts settlers in their +dealings with one another, with the Indians, and with the neighboring +plantations. + +Considering our forefathers' errand and calling into this wilderness, +it is not strange that their chief literary staples were sermons and +tracts in controversial theology. Multitudes of these were written and +published by the divines of the first generation, such as John Cotton, +Thomas Shepard, John Norton, Peter Bulkley, and Thomas Hooker, the +founder of Hartford, of whom it was finely said that "when he was doing +his Master's business he would put a king into his pocket." Nor were +their successors in the second or the third generation any less +industrious and prolific. They rest from their labors and their works +do follow them. Their sermons and theological treatises are not +literature, they are for the most part dry, heavy, and dogmatic, but +they exhibit great learning, {347} logical acuteness, and an +earnestness which sometimes rises into eloquence. The pulpit ruled New +England, and the sermon was the great intellectual engine of the time. +The serious thinking of the Puritans was given almost exclusively to +religion; the other world was all their art. The daily secular events +of life, the aspects of nature, the vicissitude of the seasons, were +important enough to find record in print only in so far as they +manifested God's dealings with his people. So much was the sermon +depended upon to furnish literary food that it was the general custom +of serious minded laymen to take down the words of the discourse in +their note-books. Franklin, in his _Autobiography_, describes this as +the constant habit of his grandfather, Peter Folger; and Mather, in his +life of the elder Winthrop, says that "tho' he wrote not after the +preacher, yet such was his _attention_ and such his _retention_ in +hearing, that he repeated unto his family the sermons which he had +heard in the congregation." These discourses were commonly of great +length; twice, or sometimes thrice, the pulpit hour-glass was silently +inverted while the orator pursued his theme even unto _n_'thly. + +The book which best sums up the life and thought of this old New +England of the seventeenth century is Cotton Mather's _Magnalia Christi +Americana_. Mather was by birth a member of that clerical aristocracy +which developed later into Dr. Holmes's "Brahmin Caste of New England." +His maternal grandfather was John Cotton. His {348} father was +Increase Mather, the most learned divine of his generation in New +England, minister of the North Church of Boston, President of Harvard +College, and author, _inter alia_, of that characteristically Puritan +book, _An Essay for the Recording of Illustrious Providences_. Cotton +Mather himself was a monster of erudition and a prodigy of diligence. +He was graduated from Harvard at fifteen. He ordered his daily life +and conversation by a system of minute observances. He was a +book-worm, whose life was spent between his library and his pulpit, and +his published works number upward of three hundred and eighty. Of +these the most important is the _Magnalia_, 1702, an ecclesiastical +history of New England from 1620 to 1698, divided into seven parts: I. +Antiquities; II. Lives of the Governors; III. Lives of Sixty Famous +Divines; IV. A History of Harvard College, with biographies of its +eminent graduates; V. Acts and Monuments of the Faith; VI. Wonderful +Providences; VII. The Wars of the Lord, that is, an account of the +Afflictions and Disturbances of the Churches and the Conflicts with the +Indians. The plan of the work thus united that of Fuller's _Worthies +of England_ and _Church History_ with that of Wood's _Athenae +Oxonienses_ and Fox's _Book of Martyrs_. + +Mather's prose was of the kind which the English Commonwealth writers +used. He was younger by a generation than Dryden; but as literary +fashions are slower to change in a colony than in the {349} mother +country, that nimble English which Dryden and the Restoration essayists +introduced had not yet displaced in New England the older manner. +Mather wrote in the full and pregnant style of Taylor, Milton, Browne, +Fuller, and Burton, a style ponderous with learning and stiff with +allusions, digressions, conceits, anecdotes, and quotations from the +Greek and the Latin. A page of the _Magnalia_ is almost as richly +mottled with italics as one from the _Anatomy of Melancholy_, and the +quaintness which Mather caught from his favorite Fuller disports itself +in textual pun and marginal anagram and the fantastic sub-titles of his +books and chapters. He speaks of Thomas Hooker as having "_angled_ +many scores of souls into the kingdom of heaven," anagrammatizes Mrs. +Hutchinson's surname into "the non-such;" and having occasion to speak +of Mr. Urian Oaks's election to the presidency of Harvard College, +enlarges upon the circumstance as follows: + +"We all know that Britain knew nothing more famous than their ancient +sect of DRUIDS; the philosophers, whose order, they say, was instituted +by one _Samothes_, which is in English as much as to say, _an heavenly +man_. The _Celtic_ name _Deru_, for an _Oak_ was that from whence they +received their denomination; as at this very day the _Welch_ call this +tree _Drew_, and this order of men _Derwyddon_. But there are no small +antiquaries who derive this _oaken religion_ and _philosophy_ from the +_Oaks of Mamre_, where the Patriarch _Abraham_ {350} had as well a +dwelling as an _altar_. That _Oaken-Plain_ and the eminent OAK under +which _Abraham_ lodged was extant in the days of _Constantine_, as +_Isidore_, _Jerom_, and _Sozomen_ have assured us. Yea, there are +shrewd probabilities that _Noah_ himself had lived in this very +_Oak-plain_ before him; for this very place was called _Oyye_, which +was the name of _Noah_, so styled from the _Oggyan_ (_subcineritiis +panibus_) sacrifices, which he did use to offer in this renowned +_Grove_. And it was from this example that the ancients and +particularly that the Druids of the nations, chose _oaken_ retirements +for their studies. Reader, let us now, upon another account, behold +the students of _Harvard College_, as a rendezvous of happy _Druids_, +under the influences of so rare a president. But, alas! our joy must +be short-lived, for on _July_ 25, 1681, the stroke of a sudden death +felled the _tree_, + + "Qui tantum inter caput extulit omnes + Quantum lenta solent inter viberna cypressi. + +"Mr. _Oakes_ thus being transplanted into the better world, the +presidentship was immediately tendered unto _Mr. Increase Mather_." + +This will suffice as an example of the bad taste and laborious pedantry +which disfigured Mather's writing. In its substance the book is a +perfect thesaurus; and inasmuch as nothing is unimportant in the +history of the beginnings of such a nation as this is and is destined +to be, the _Magnalia_ will always remain a valuable and interesting +work. {351} Cotton Mather, born in 1663, was of the second generation +of Americans, his grandfather being of the immigration, but his father +a native of Dorchester, Mass. A comparison of his writings and of the +writings of his contemporaries with the works of Bradford, Winthrop, +Hooker, and others of the original colonists, shows that the simple and +heroic faith of the Pilgrims had hardened into formalism and doctrinal +rigidity. The leaders of the Puritan exodus, notwithstanding their +intolerance of errors in belief, were comparatively broad-minded men. +They were sharers in a great national movement, and they came over when +their cause was warm with the glow of martyrdom and on the eve of its +coming triumph at home. After the Restoration, in 1660, the currents +of national feeling no longer circulated so freely through this distant +member of the body politic, and thought in America became more +provincial. The English dissenters, though socially at a disadvantage +as compared with the Church of England, had the great benefit of living +at the center of national life, and of feeling about them the pressure +of vast bodies of people who did not think as they did. In New +England, for many generations, the dominant sect had things all its own +way, a condition of things which is not healthy for any sect or party. +Hence Mather and the divines of his time appear in their writings very +much like so many Puritan bishops, jealous of their prerogatives, +magnifying their apostolate, and careful to maintain their {352} +authority over the laity. Mather had an appetite for the marvelous, +and took a leading part in the witchcraft trials, of which he gave an +account in his _Wonders of the Invisible World_, 1693. To the quaint +pages of the Magnalia our modern authors have resorted as to a +collection of romances or fairy tales. Whittier, for example, took +from thence the subject of his poem _The Garrison of Cape Anne_; and +Hawthorne embodied in _Grandfather's Chair_ the most elaborate of +Mather's biographies. This was the life of Sir William Phipps, who, +from being a poor shepherd boy in his native province of Maine, rose to +be the royal governor of Massachusetts, and the story of whose +wonderful adventures in raising the freight of a Spanish treasure ship, +sunk on a reef near Port de la Plata, reads less like sober fact than +like some ancient fable, with talk of the Spanish main, bullion, and +plate and jewels and "pieces of eight." + +Of Mather's generation was Samuel Sewall, Chief Justice of +Massachusetts, a singularly gracious and venerable figure, who is +intimately known through his Diary kept from 1673 to 1729. This has +been compared with the more famous diary of Samuel Pepys, which it +resembles in its confidential character and the completeness of its +self-revelation, but to which it is as much inferior in historic +interest as "the petty province here" was inferior in political and +social importance to "Britain far away." For the most part it is a +chronicle of small beer, the diarist jotting down the minutiae {353} of +his domestic life and private affairs, even to the recording of such +haps as this: "March 23, I had my hair cut by G. Barret." But it also +affords instructive glimpses of public events, such as King Philip's +War, the Quaker troubles, the English Revolution of 1688, etc. It +bears about the same relation to New England history at the close of +the seventeenth century as Bradford's and Winthrop's journals bear to +that of the first generation. Sewall was one of the justices who +presided at the trial of the Salem witches; but for the part which he +took in that wretched affair he made such atonement as was possible, by +open confession of his mistake and his remorse in the presence of the +Church. Sewall was one of the first writers against African slavery, +in his brief tract, _The Selling of Joseph_, printed at Boston in 1700. +His _Phenomena Quaedam Apocalyptica_, a mystical interpretation of +prophecies concerning the New Jerusalem, which he identifies with +America, is remembered only because Whittier, in his _Prophecy of +Samuel Sewall_, has paraphrased one poetic passage, which shows a +loving observation of nature very rare in our colonial writers. + +Of poetry, indeed, or, in fact, of pure literature, in the narrower +sense--that is, of the imaginative representation of life--there was +little or none in the colonial period. There were no novels, no plays, +no satires, and--until the example of the _Spectator_ had begun to work +on this side the water--no experiments even at the lighter forms {354} +of essay writing, character sketches, and literary criticism. There +was verse of a certain kind, but the most generous stretch of the term +would hardly allow it to be called poetry. Many of the early divines +of New England relieved their pens, in the intervals of sermon writing, +of epigrams, elegies, eulogistic verses, and similar grave trifles +distinguished by the crabbed wit of the so-called "metaphysical poets," +whose manner was in fashion when the Puritans left England; the manner +of Donne and Cowley, and those darlings of the New English muse, the +_Emblems_ of Quarles and the _Divine Week_ of Du Bartas, as translated +by Sylvester. The _Magnalia_ contains a number of these things in +Latin and English, and is itself well bolstered with complimentary +introductions in meter by the author's friends. For example: + + COTTONIUS MATHERUS. + + ANAGRAM. + + _Tuos Tecum Ornasti_. + + "While thus the dead in thy rare pages rise + _Thine, with thyself, thou dost immortalise_, + To view the odds thy learned lives invite + 'Twixt Eleutherian and Edomite. + But all succeeding ages shall despair + A fitting monument for thee to _rear_. + Thy own rich pen (peace, silly Momus, peace!) + Hath given them a lasting _writ of ease_." + + +The epitaphs and mortuary verses were especially ingenious in the +matter of puns, anagrams, {355} and similar conceits. The death of the +Rev. Samuel Stone, of Hartford, afforded an opportunity of this sort +not to be missed, and his threnodist accordingly celebrated him as a +"whetstone," a "loadstone," an "Ebenezer"-- + + "A stone for kingly David's use so fit + As would not fail Goliah's front to hit," etc. + + +The most characteristic, popular, and widely circulated poem of +colonial New England was Michael Wigglesworth's _Day of Doom_ (1662), a +kind of doggerel _Inferno_, which went through nine editions, and "was +the solace," says Lowell, "of every fireside, the flicker of the +pine-knots by which it was conned perhaps adding a livelier relish to +its premonitions of eternal combustion." Wigglesworth had not the +technical equipment of a poet. His verse is sing-song, his language +rude and monotonous, and the lurid horrors of his material hell are +more likely to move mirth than fear in a modern reader. But there are +an unmistakable vigor of imagination and a sincerity of belief in his +gloomy poem which hold it far above contempt, and easily account for +its universal currency among a people like the Puritans. One stanza +has been often quoted for its grim concession to unregenerate infants +of "the easiest room in hell"--a _limbus infantum_ which even Origen +need not have scrupled at. + +The most authoritative expounder of New England Calvinism was Jonathan +Edwards {356} (1703-1758), a native of Connecticut, and a graduate of +Yale, who was minister for more than twenty years over the Church in +Northampton, Mass., afterward missionary to the Stockbridge Indians, +and at the time of his death had just been inaugurated president of +Princeton College. By virtue of his _Inquiry into the Freedom of the +Will_, 1754, Edwards holds rank as the subtlest metaphysician of his +age. This treatise was composed to justify, on philosophical grounds, +the Calvinistic doctrines of foreordination and election by grace, +though its arguments are curiously coincident with those of the +scientific necessitarians, whose conclusions are as far asunder from +Edwards's "as from the center thrice to the utmost pole." His writings +belong to theology rather than to literature, but there is an intensity +and a spiritual elevation about them, apart from the profundity and +acuteness of the thought, which lift them here and there into the finer +ether of purely emotional or imaginative art. He dwelt rather upon the +terrors than the comfort of the word, and his chosen themes were the +dogmas of predestination, original sin, total depravity, and eternal +punishment. The titles of his sermons are significant: _Men Naturally +God's Enemies, Wrath upon the Wicked to the Uttermost, The Final +Judgment_, etc. "A natural man," he wrote in the first of these +discourses, "has a heart like the heart of a devil.~.~.~. The heart of +a natural man is as destitute of love to God as a dead, stiff, cold +corpse is of vital heat." Perhaps the most {357} famous of Edwards's +sermons was _Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God_, preached at +Enfield, Conn., July 8, 1741, "at a time of great awakenings," and upon +the ominous text, _Their foot shall slide in due time_. "The God that +holds you over the pit of hell" runs an oft-quoted passage from this +powerful denunciation of the wrath to come, "much as one holds a spider +or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully +provoked.~.~.~. You are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes +than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours.~.~.~. You hang by a +slender thread, with the flames of divine wrath flashing about +it.~.~.~. If you cry to God to pity you, he will be so far from +pitying you in your doleful case that he will only tread you under +foot.~.~.~. He will crush out your blood and make it fly, and it shall +be sprinkled on his garments so as to stain all his raiment." But +Edwards was a rapt soul, possessed with the love as well as the fear of +the God, and there are passages of sweet and exalted feeling in his +_Treatise Concerning Religious Affections_, 1746. Such is his portrait +of Sarah Pierpont, "a young lady in New Haven," who afterward became +his wife, and who "will sometimes go about from place to place singing +sweetly, and no one knows for what. She loves to be alone, walking in +the fields and groves, and seems to have some one invisible always +conversing with her." Edwards's printed works number thirty-six +titles. A complete edition of them in ten volumes was published in +1829 by his {358} great-grandson, Sereno Dwight. The memoranda from +Edwards's note-books, quoted by his editor and biographer, exhibit a +remarkable precocity. Even as a school-boy and a college student he +had made deep guesses in physics as well as metaphysics, and, as might +have been predicted of a youth of his philosophical insight and ideal +cast of mind, he had early anticipated Berkeley in denying the +existence of matter. In passing from Mather to Edwards, we step from +the seventeenth to the eighteenth century. There is the same +difference between them in style and turn of thought as between Milton +and Locke, or between Fuller and Dryden. The learned digressions, the +witty conceits, the perpetual interlarding of the text with scraps of +Latin, have fallen off, even as the full-bottomed wig and the clerical +gown and bands have been laid aside for the undistinguishing dress of +the modern minister. In Edwards's English all is simple, precise, +direct, and business-like. + +Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), who was strictly contemporary with +Edwards, was a contrast to him in every respect. As Edwards represents +the spirituality and other-worldliness of Puritanism, Franklin stands +for the worldly and secular side of American character, and he +illustrates the development of the New England Englishman into the +modern Yankee. Clear rather than subtle, without ideality or romance +or fineness of emotion or poetic lift, intensely practical and +utilitarian, broad-minded, inventive, shrewd, versatile, Franklin's +sturdy figure {359} became typical of his time and his people. He was +the first and the only man of letters in colonial America who acquired +a cosmopolitan fame, and impressed his characteristic Americanism upon +the mind of Europe. He was the embodiment of common sense and of the +useful virtues; with the enterprise but without the nervousness of his +modern compatriots, uniting the philosopher's openness of mind with the +sagacity and quickness of resource of the self-made business man. He +was representative also of his age, an age of _aufklaerung_, +_eclaircissement_, or "clearing up." By the middle of the eighteenth +century a change had taken place in American society. Trade had +increased between the different colonies; Boston, New York, and +Philadelphia were considerable towns; democratic feeling was spreading; +over forty newspapers were published in America at the outbreak of the +Revolution; politics claimed more attention than formerly, and theology +less. With all this intercourse and mutual reaction of the various +colonies upon one another, the isolated theocracy of New England +naturally relaxed somewhat of its grip on the minds of the laity. When +Franklin was a printer's apprentice in Boston, setting type on his +brother's _New England Courant_, the fourth American newspaper, he got +hold of an odd volume of the _Spectator_, and formed his style upon +Addison, whose manner he afterward imitated in his _Busy-Body_ papers +in the Philadelphia _Weekly Mercury_. He also read Locke and the +English deistical {360} writers, Collins and Shaftesbury, and became +himself a deist and free-thinker; and subsequently when practicing his +trade in London, in 1724-26, he made the acquaintance of Dr. +Mandeville, author of the _Fable of the Bees_, at a pale-ale house in +Cheapside, called "The Horns," where the famous free-thinker presided +over a club of wits and boon companions. Though a native of Boston, +Franklin is identified with Philadelphia, whither he arrived in 1723, a +runaway 'prentice boy, "whose stock of cash consisted of a Dutch dollar +and about a shilling in copper." The description in his +_Autobiography_ of his walking up Market Street munching a loaf of +bread, and passing his future wife, standing on her father's doorstep, +has become almost as familiar as the anecdote about Whittington and his +cat. + +It was in the practical sphere that Franklin was greatest, as an +originator and executor of projects for the general welfare. The list +of his public services is almost endless. He organized the +Philadelphia fire department and street cleaning service, and the +colonial postal system which grew into the United States Post Office +Department. He started the Philadelphia public library, the American +Philosophical Society, the University of Pennsylvania, and the first +American magazine, _The General Magazine and Historical Chronicle_; so +that he was almost singly the father of whatever intellectual life the +Pennsylvania colony could boast of. In 1754, when commissioners from +the colonies met at Albany, Franklin proposed a plan, which was {361} +adopted, for the union of all the colonies under one government. But +all these things, as well as his mission to England in 1757, on behalf +of the Pennsylvania Assembly in its dispute with the proprietaries; his +share in the Declaration of Independence--of which he was one of the +signers--and his residence in France as Embassador of the United +Colonies, belong to the political history of the country; to the +history of American science belong his celebrated experiments in +electricity, and his benefits to mankind in both of these departments +were aptly summed up in the famous epigram of the French statesman +Turgot: + + "_Erupuit coelo fulmen sceptrumque tyrannis_." + +Franklin's success in Europe was such as no American had yet achieved, +as few Americans since him have achieved. Hume and Voltaire were among +his acquaintances and his professed admirers. In France he was fairly +idolized, and when he died Mirabeau announced, "The genius which has +freed America and poured a flood of light over Europe has returned to +the bosom of the Divinity." + +Franklin was a great man, but hardly a great writer, though as a +writer, too, he had many admirable and some great qualities. Among +these were the crystal clearness and simplicity of his style. His more +strictly literary performances, such as his essays after the +_Spectator_, hardly rise above mediocrity, and are neither better nor +worse than other {362} imitations of Addison. But in some of his +lighter bagatelles there are a homely wisdom and a charming playfulness +which have won them enduring favor. Such are his famous story of the +_Whistle_, his _Dialogue between Franklin and the Gout_, his letters to +Madame Helvetius, and his verses entitled _Paper_. The greater portion +of his writings consists of papers on general politics, commerce, and +political economy, contributions to the public questions of his day. +These are of the nature of journalism rather than of literature, and +many of them were published in his newspaper, the _Pennsylvania +Gazette_, the medium through which for many years he most strongly +influenced American opinion. The most popular of his writings were his +_Autobiography_ and _Poor Richard's Almanac_. The former of these was +begun in 1771, resumed in 1788, but never completed. It has remained +the most widely current book in our colonial literature. _Poor +Richard's Almanac_, begun in 1732 and continued for about twenty-five +years, had an annual circulation of ten thousand copies. It was filled +with proverbial sayings in prose and verse, inculcating the virtues of +industry, honesty, and frugality.[1] Some of these were original with +Franklin, others were selected from the proverbial wisdom of the ages, +but a new force was given {363} them by pungent turns of expression. +Poor Richard's saws were such as these: "Little strokes fell great +oaks;" "Three removes are as bad as a fire;" "Early to bed and early to +rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise;" "Never leave that till +to-morrow which you can do to-day;" "What maintains one vice would +bring up two children;" "It is hard for an empty bag to stand upright." + +Now and then there are truths of a higher kind than these in Franklin, +and Sainte Beuve, the great French critic, quotes, as an example of his +occasional finer moods, the saying, "Truth and sincerity have a certain +distinguishing native luster about them which cannot be counterfeited; +they are like fire and flame that cannot be painted." But the sage who +invented the Franklin stove had no disdain of small utilities; and in +general the last word of his philosophy is well expressed in a passage +of his _Autobiography_: "Human felicity is produced not so much by +great pieces of good fortune, that seldom happen, as by little +advantages that occur every day; thus, if you teach a poor young man to +shave himself and keep his razor in order, you may contribute more to +the happiness of his life than in giving him a thousand guineas." + + +1. Captain John Smith. A True Relation of Virginia. Deane's edition. +Boston: 1866. + +2. Cotton Mather. Magnalia Christi Americana. Hartford: 1820. + +{364} + +3. Samuel Sewall. Diary. Massachusetts Historical Collections. Fifth +Series. Vols. v, vi, and vii. Boston: 1878. + +4. Jonathan Edwards. Eight Sermons on Various Occasions. Vol. vii. of +Edwards's Words. Edited by Sereno Dwight. New York: 1829. + +5. Benjamin Franklin. Autobiography. Edited by John Bigelow. +Philadelphia: 1869. [J. B. Lippincott & Co.] + +6. Essays and Bagatelles. Vol. ii. of Franklin's Works. Edited by +David Sparks. Boston: 1836. + +7. Moses Coit Tyler. A History of American Literature. 1607-1765. +New York: 1878. [G. P. Putnam's Sons.] + + + +[1] _The Way to Wealth, Plan for Saving One Hundred Thousand Pounds, +Rules of Health, Advice to a Young Tradesman, The Way to Make Money +Plenty in Every Man's Pocket, etc_. + + + + +{365} + +CHAPTER II. + +THE REVOLUTIONARY PERIOD. + +1765-1815. + +It will be convenient to treat the fifty years which elapsed between +the meeting at New York, in 1765, of a Congress of delegates from nine +colonies, to protest against the Stamp Act, and the close of the second +war with England, in 1815, as, for literary purposes, a single period. +This half century was the formative era of the American nation. +Historically it is divisible into the years of revolution and the years +of construction. But the men who led the movement for independence +were also, in great part, the same who guided in shaping the +Constitution of the new republic, and the intellectual impress of the +whole period is one and the same. The character of the age was as +distinctly political as that of the colonial era--in New England at +least--was theological; and literature must still continue to borrow +its interest from history. Pure literature, or what, for want of a +better term we call _belles lettres_, was not born in America until the +nineteenth century was well under way. It is true that the Revolution +had its humor, its poetry, and even its fiction; but these {366} were +strictly for the home market. They hardly penetrated the consciousness +of Europe at all, and are not to be compared with the contemporary work +of English authors like Cowper and Sheridan and Burke. Their +importance for us to-day is rather antiquarian than literary, though +the most noteworthy of them will be mentioned in due course in the +present chapter. It is also true that one or two of Irving's early +books fall within the last years of the period now under consideration. +But literary epochs overlap one another at the edges, and these +writings may best be postponed to a subsequent chapter. + +Among the most characteristic products of the intellectual stir that +preceded and accompanied the revolutionary movement, were the speeches +of political orators like Samuel Adams, James Otis, and Josiah Quincy +in Massachusetts, and Patrick Henry in Virginia. Oratory is the art of +a free people, and as in the forensic assemblies of Greece and Rome, +and in the Parliament of Great Britain, so in the conventions and +congresses of revolutionary America it sprang up and flourished +naturally. The age, moreover, was an eloquent, not to say a rhetorical +age; and the influence of Johnson's orotund prose, of the declamatory +_Letters of Junius_, and of the speeches of Burke, Fox, Sheridan, and +the elder Pitt is perceptible in the debates of our early congresses. +The fame of a great orator, like that of a great actor, is largely +traditionary. The spoken word transferred to the printed page loses +{367} the glow which resided in the man and the moment. A speech is +good if it attains its aim, if it moves the hearers to the end which is +sought. But the fact that this end is often temporary and occasional, +rather than universal and permanent explains why so few speeches are +really literature. + +If this is true, even where the words of an orator are preserved +exactly as they were spoken, it is doubly true when we have only the +testimony of contemporaries as to the effect which the oration +produced. The fiery utterances of Adams, Otis, and Quincy were either +not reported at all or very imperfectly reported, so that posterity can +judge of them only at second hand. Patrick Henry has fared better, +many of his orations being preserved in substance, if not in the +letter, in Wirt's biography. Of these the most famous was the defiant +speech in the Convention of Delegates, March 28, 1775, throwing down +the gauge of battle to the British ministry. The ringing sentences of +this challenge are still declaimed by school boys, and many of them +remain as familiar as household words. "I have but one lamp by which +my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience. I know of no +way of judging of the future but by the past.~.~.~. Gentlemen may cry +peace, peace, but there is no peace.~.~.~. Is life so dear, or peace +so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery! +Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take, but +as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!" The {368} eloquence of +Patrick Henry was fervid rather than weighty or rich. But if such +specimens of the oratory of the American patriots as have come down to +us fail to account for the wonderful impression that their words are +said to have produced upon their fellow-countrymen, we should remember +that they are at a disadvantage when read instead of heard. The +imagination should supply all those accessories which gave them +vitality when first pronounced: the living presence and voice of the +speaker; the listening Senate; the grave excitement of the hour and of +the impending conflict. The wordiness and exaggeration; the highly +latinized diction; the rhapsodies about freedom which hundreds of +Fourth-of-July addresses have since turned into platitudes--all these +coming hot from the lips of men whose actions in the field confirmed +the earnestness of their speech--were effective enough in the crisis +and for the purpose to which they were addressed. + +The press was an agent in the cause of liberty no less potent than the +platform, and patriots such as Adams, Otis, Quincy, Warren, and Hancock +wrote constantly for the newspapers essays and letters on the public +questions of the time signed "Vindex," "Hyperion," "Independent," +"Brutus," "Cassius," and the like, and couched in language which to the +taste of to-day seems rather over rhetorical. Among the most important +of these political essays were the _Circular Letter to each Colonial +Legislature_, published by Adams {369} and Otis in 1768; Quincy's +_Observations on the Boston Port Bill_, 1774, and Otis's _Rights of the +British Colonies_, a pamphlet of one hundred and twenty pages, printed +in 1764. No collection of Otis's writings has ever been made. The +life of Quincy, published by his son, preserves for posterity his +journals and correspondence, his newspaper essays, and his speeches at +the bar, taken from the Massachusetts law reports. + +Among the political literature which is of perennial interest to the +American people are such State documents as the Declaration of +Independence, the Constitution of the United States, and the messages, +inaugural addresses, and other writings of our early presidents. +Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States, and the +father of the Democratic party, was the author of the Declaration of +Independence, whose opening sentences have become commonplaces in the +memory of all readers. One sentence in particular has been as a +shibboleth, or war-cry, or declaration of faith among Democrats of all +shades of opinion: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all +men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with +certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the +pursuit of happiness." Not so familiar to modern readers is the +following, which an English historian of our literature calls "the most +eloquent clause of that great document," and "the most interesting +suppressed passage in American literature." Jefferson {370} was a +southerner, but even at that early day the South had grown sensitive on +the subject of slavery, and Jefferson's arraignment of King George for +promoting the "peculiar institution" was left out from the final draft +of the Declaration in deference to southern members. + +"He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most +sacred rights of life and liberty, in the persons of a distant people +who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in +another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation +thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is +the warfare of the Christian king of Great Britain. Determined to keep +open a market where men should be bought and sold, he has prostituted +his negative by suppressing every legislative attempt to restrain this +execrable commerce. And, that this assemblage of horrors might want no +fact of distinguished dye, he is now exciting those very people to rise +in arms against us, and purchase that liberty of which he deprived them +by murdering the people upon whom he obtruded them, and thus paying off +former crimes committed against the liberties of one people by crimes +which he urges them to commit against the lives of another." + +The tone of apology or defense which Calhoun and other southern +statesmen afterward adopted on the subject of slavery was not taken by +the men of Jefferson's generation. Another famous {371} Virginian, +John Randolph of Roanoke, himself a slaveholder, in his speech on the +militia bill in the House of Representatives, December 10, 1811, said: +"I speak from facts when I say that the night-bell never tolls for fire +in Richmond that the mother does not hug her infant more closely to her +bosom." This was said _apropos_ of the danger of a servile +insurrection in the event of a war with England--a war which actually +broke out in the year following, but was not attended with the slave +rising which Randolph predicted. Randolph was a thorough-going "States +rights" man, and though opposed to slavery on principle, he cried hands +off to any interference by the General Government with the domestic +institutions of the States. His speeches _read_ better than most of +his contemporaries. They are interesting in their exhibit of a bitter +and eccentric individuality, witty, incisive, and expressed in a +pungent and familiar style which contrasts refreshingly with the +diplomatic language and glittering generalities of most congressional +oratory, whose verbiage seems to keep its subject always at arm's +length. + +Another noteworthy writing of Jefferson's was his Inaugural Address of +March 4, 1801, with its programme of "equal and exact justice to all +men, of whatever state or persuasion, religious or political; peace, +commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances +with none; the support of the State governments in all their +rights;~.~.~. absolute acquiescence in the decisions {372} of the +majority;~.~.~. the supremacy of the civil over the military authority; +economy in the public expense; freedom of religion, freedom of the +press, and freedom of person under the protection of the _habeas +corpus_, and trial by juries impartially selected." + +During his six years' residence in France, as American Minister, +Jefferson had become indoctrinated with the principles of French +democracy. His main service and that of his party--the Democratic or, +as it was then called, the Republican party--to the young republic was +in its insistence upon toleration of all beliefs and upon the freedom +of the individual from all forms of governmental restraint. Jefferson +has some claims, to rank as an author in general literature. Educated +at William and Mary College in the old Virginia capital, Williamsburg, +he became the founder of the University of Virginia, in which he made +special provision for the study of Anglo-Saxon, and in which the +liberal scheme of instruction and discipline was conformed, in theory +at least, to the "university idea." His _Notes on Virginia_ are not +without literary quality, and one description, in particular, has been +often quoted--the passage of the Potomac through the Blue Ridge--in +which is this poetically imaginative touch: "The mountain being cloven +asunder, she presents to your eye, through the cleft, a small catch of +smooth blue horizon, at an infinite distance in the plain country, +inviting you, as it were, from the riot and {373} tumult roaring +around, to pass through the breach and participate of the calm below." + +After the conclusion of peace with England, in 1783, political +discussion centered about the Constitution, which in 1788 took the +place of the looser Articles of Confederation adopted in 1778. The +Constitution as finally ratified was a compromise between two +parties--the Federalists, who wanted a strong central government, and +the Anti-Federals (afterward called Republicans, or Democrats), who +wished to preserve State sovereignty. The debates on the adoption of +the Constitution, both in the General Convention of the States, which +met at Philadelphia in 1787, and in the separate State Conventions +called to ratify its action, form a valuable body of comment and +illustration upon the instrument itself. One of the most notable of +the speeches in opposition was Patrick Henry's address before the +Virginia Convention. "That this is a consolidated government," he +said, "is demonstrably clear; and the danger of such a government is, +to my mind, very striking." The leader of the Federal party was +Alexander Hamilton, the ablest constructive intellect among the +statesmen of our revolutionary era, of whom Talleyrand said that he +"had never known his equal;" whom Guizot classed with "the men who have +best known the vital principles and fundamental conditions of a +government worthy of its name and mission." Hamilton's speech _On the +Expediency of Adopting the Federal Constitution_, delivered in {374} +the Convention of New York, June 24, 1788, was a masterly statement of +the necessity and advantages of the Union. But the most complete +exposition of the constitutional philosophy of the Federal party was +the series of eighty-five papers entitled the _Federalist_, printed +during the years 1787-88, and mostly in the _Independent Journal_ of +New York, over the signature "_Publius_." These were the work of +Hamilton, of John Jay, afterward Chief Justice, and of James Madison, +afterward President of the United States. The _Federalist_ papers, +though written in a somewhat ponderous diction, are among the great +landmarks of American history, and were in themselves a political +education to the generation that read them. Hamilton was a brilliant +and versatile figure, a persuasive orator, a forcible writer, and as +Secretary of the Treasury under Washington the foremost of American +financiers. He was killed, in a duel, by Aaron Burr, at Hoboken, in +1804. + +The Federalists were victorious, and under the provisions of the new +Constitution George Washington was inaugurated first President of the +United States, on March 4, 1789. Washington's writings have been +collected by Jared Sparks. They consist of journals, letters, +messages, addresses, and public documents, for the most part plain and +business-like in manner, and without any literary pretensions. The +most elaborate and the best known of them is his _Farewell Address_, +issued on his retirement from the presidency in 1796. In {375} the +composition of this he was assisted by Madison, Hamilton, and Jay. It +is wise in substance and dignified, though somewhat stilted in +expression. The correspondence of John Adams, second President of the +United States, and his diary, kept from 1755-85, should also be +mentioned as important sources for a full knowledge of this period. + +In the long life-and-death struggle of Great Britain against the French +Republic and its successor, Napoleon Bonaparte, the Federalist party in +this country naturally sympathized with England, and the Jeffersonian +Democracy with France. The Federalists, who distrusted the sweeping +abstractions of the French Revolution, and clung to the conservative +notions of a checked and balanced freedom, inherited from English +precedent, were accused of monarchical and aristocratic leanings. On +their side they were not slow to accuse their adversaries of French +atheism and French Jacobinism. By a singular reversal of the natural +order of things the strength of the Federalist party was in New +England, which was socially democratic, while the strength of the +Jeffersonians was in the South, whose social structure--owing to the +system of slavery--was intensely aristocratic. The war of 1812 with +England was so unpopular in New England, by reason of the injury which +it threatened to inflict on its commerce, that the Hartford Convention +of 1814 was more than suspected of a design to bring about the +secession of New England from the Union. A good deal of oratory was +called {376} out by the debates on the commercial treaty with Great +Britain, negotiated by Jay in 1795, by the Alien and Sedition Law of +1798, and by other pieces of Federalist legislation, previous to the +downfall of that party and the election of Jefferson to the presidency +in 1800. The best of the Federalist orators during those years was +Fisher Ames, of Massachusetts, and the best of his orations was, +perhaps, his speech on the British treaty in the House of +Representatives, April 18, 1796. The speech was, in great measure, a +protest against American chauvinism and the violation of international +obligations. "It has been said the world ought to rejoice if Britain +was sunk in the sea; if where there are now men and wealth and laws and +liberty, there was no more than a sand bank for sea-monsters to fatten +on; space for the storms of the ocean to mingle in conflict.~.~.~. +What is patriotism? Is it a narrow affection for the spot where a man +was born? Are the very clods where we tread entitled to this ardent +preference because they are greener?~.~.~. I see no exception to the +respect that is paid among nations to the law of good faith.~.~.~. It +is observed by barbarians--a whiff of tobacco smoke or a string of +beads gives not merely binding force but sanctity to treaties. Even in +Algiers a truce may be bought for money, but, when ratified, even +Algiers is too wise or too just to disown and annul its obligation." +Ames was a scholar, and his speeches are more finished and thoughtful, +more _literary_, in a way, than those {377} of his contemporaries. His +eulogiums on Washington and Hamilton are elaborate tributes, rather +excessive, perhaps, in laudation and in classical allusions. In all +the oratory of the revolutionary period there is nothing equal in deep +and condensed energy of feeling to the single clause in Lincoln's +Gettysburg Address, "that we here highly resolve that these dead shall +not have died in vain." + +A prominent figure during and after the War of the Revolution was +Thomas Paine, or, as he was somewhat disrespectfully called, "Tom +Paine." He was a dissenting minister who, conceiving himself ill +treated by the British Government, came to Philadelphia in 1774 and +threw himself heart and soul into the colonial cause. His pamphlet, +_Common Sense_, issued in 1776, began with the famous words: "These are +the times that try men's souls." This was followed by the _Crisis_, a +series of political essays advocating independence and the +establishment of a republic, published in periodical form, though at +irregular intervals. Paine's rough and vigorous advocacy was of great +service to the American patriots. His writings were popular and his +arguments were of a kind easily understood by plain people, addressing +themselves to the common sense, the prejudices and passions of +unlettered readers. He afterward went to France and took an active +part in the popular movement there, crossing swords with Burke in his +_Rights of Man_, 1791-92, written in defense of the French Revolution. +He {378} was one of the two foreigners who sat in the Convention; but +falling under suspicion during the days of the terror, he was committed +to the prison of the Luxembourg and only released upon the fall of +Robespierre July 27, 1794. While in prison he wrote a portion of his +best known work, the _Age of Reason_. This appeared in two parts in +1794 and 1795, the manuscript of the first part having been intrusted +to Joel Barlow, the American poet, who happened to be in Paris when +Paine was sent to prison. + +The _Age of Reason_ damaged Paine's reputation in America, where the +name of "Tom Paine" became a stench in the nostrils of the godly and a +synonym for atheism and blasphemy. His book was denounced from a +hundred pulpits, and copies of it were carefully locked away from the +sight of "the young," whose religious beliefs it might undermine. It +was, in effect, a crude and popular statement of the Deistic argument +against Christianity. What the cutting logic and persiflage--the +_sourire hideux_--of Voltaire had done in France, Paine, with coarser +materials, essayed to do for the English-speaking populations. Deism +was in the air of the time; Franklin, Jefferson, Ethan Alien, Joel +Barlow, and other prominent Americans were openly or unavowedly +deistic. Free thought, somehow, went along with democratic opinions, +and was a part of the liberal movement of the age. Paine was a man +without reverence, imagination, or religious feeling. He was no +scholar, and he was {379} not troubled by any perception of the deeper +and subtler aspects of the questions which he touched. In his +examination of the Old and New Testaments, he insisted that the Bible +was an imposition and a forgery, full of lies, absurdities, and +obscenities. Supernatural Christianity, with all its mysteries and +miracles, was a fraud practiced by priests upon the people, and +churches were instruments of oppression in the hands of tyrants. This +way of accounting for Christianity would not now be accepted by even +the most "advanced" thinkers. The contest between skepticism and +revelation has long since shifted to other grounds. Both the +philosophy and the temper of the _Age of Reason_ belong to the +eighteenth century. But Paine's downright pugnacious method of attack +was effective with shrewd, half-educated doubters, and in America +well-thumbed copies of his book passed from hand to hand in many a +rural tavern or store, where the village atheist wrestled in debate +with the deacon or the school-master. Paine rested his argument +against Christianity upon the familiar grounds of the incredibility of +miracles, the falsity of prophecy, the cruelty or immorality of Moses +and David and other Old Testament worthies, the disagreement of the +evangelists in their gospels, etc. The spirit of his book and his +competence as a critic are illustrated by his saying of the New +Testament: "Any person who could tell a story of an apparition, or of a +man's walking, could have made such books, for the story is most +wretchedly told. {380} The sum total of a parson's learning is a b, +ab, and hic, haec, hoc, and this is more than sufficient to have +enabled them, had they lived at the time, to have written all the books +of the New Testament." + +When we turn from the political and controversial writings of the +Revolution to such lighter literature as existed, we find little that +would deserve mention in a more crowded period. The few things in this +kind that have kept afloat on the current of time--_rari nantes in +gurgite vasto_--attract attention rather by reason of their fewness +than of any special excellence that they have. During the eighteenth +century American literature continued to accommodate itself to changes +of caste in the old country. The so-called classical or Augustan +writers of the reign of Queen Anne replaced other models of style: the +_Spectator_ set the fashion of almost all of our lighter prose, from +Franklin's _Busybody_ down to the time of Irving, who perpetuated the +Addisonian tradition later than any English writer. The influence of +Locke, of Dr. Johnson, and of the Parliamentary orators has already +been mentioned. In poetry the example of Pope was dominant, so that we +find, for example, William Livingston, who became governor of New +Jersey and a member of the Continental Congress, writing in 1747 a poem +on _Philosophic Solitude_ which reproduces the trick of Pope's +antitheses and climaxes with the imagery of the _Rape of the Lock_, and +the didactic morality of the _Imitations_ from Horace and the _Moral +Essays_: + +{381} + + "Let ardent heroes seek renown in arms, + Pant after fame and rush to war's alarms; + To shining palaces let fools resort + And dunces cringe to be esteemed at court. + Mine be the pleasure of a rural life, + From noise remote and ignorant of strife, + Far from the painted belle and white-gloved beau, + The lawless masquerade and midnight show; + From ladies, lap-dogs, courtiers, garters, stars, + Fops, fiddlers, tyrants, emperors, and czars." + + +The most popular poem of the Revolutionary period was John Trumbull's +_McFingal_, published in part at Philadelphia in 1775, and in complete +shape at Hartford in 1782. It went through more than thirty editions +in America, and was several times reprinted in England. _McFingal_ was +a satire in four cantos, directed against the American Loyalists, and +modeled quite closely upon Butler's mock heroic poem, _Hudibras_. As +Butler's hero sallies forth to put down May games and bear-baitings, so +the tory McFingal goes out against the liberty-poles and bon-fires of +the patriots, but is tarred and feathered, and otherwise ill entreated, +and finally takes refuge in the camp of General Gage at Boston. The +poem is written with smartness and vivacity, attains often to drollery +and sometimes to genuine humor. It remains one of the best of American +political satires, and unquestionably the most successful of the many +imitations of _Hudibras_, whose manner it follows so closely that some +of its lines, which {382} have passed into currency as proverbs, are +generally attributed to Butler. For example: + + "No man e'er felt the halter draw + With good opinion of the law." + +Or this: + + "For any man with half an eye + What stands before him may espy; + But optics sharp it needs, I ween, + To see what is not to be seen." + + +Trumbull's wit did not spare the vulnerable points of his own +countrymen, as in his sharp skit at slavery in the couplet about the +newly adopted flag of the Confederation: + + "Inscribed with inconsistent types + Of Liberty and thirteen stripes." + + +Trumbull was one of a group of Connecticut literati, who made much +noise in their time as the "Hartford Wits." The other members of the +group were Lemuel Hopkins, David Humphreys, Joel Barlow, Elihu Smith, +Theodore Dwight, and Richard Alsop. Trumbull, Humphreys, and Barlow +had formed a friendship and a kind of literary partnership at Yale, +where they were contemporaries of each other and of Timothy Dwight. +During the war they served in the army in various capacities, and at +its close they found themselves again together for a few years at +Hartford, where they formed a club that met weekly for social and +literary purposes. Their presence lent a sort of {383} _eclat_ to the +little provincial capital, and their writings made it for a time an +intellectual center quite as important as Boston or Philadelphia or New +York. The Hartford Wits were staunch Federalists, and used their pens +freely in support of the administrations of Washington and Adams, and +in ridicule of Jefferson and the Democrats. In 1786-87 Trumbull, +Hopkins, Barlow, and Humphreys published in the _New Haven Gazette_ a +series of satirical papers entitled the _Anarchiad,_ suggested by the +English _Rolliad_, and purporting to be extracts from an ancient epic +on "the Restoration of Chaos and Substantial Night." These papers were +an effort to correct, by ridicule, the anarchic condition of things +which preceded the adoption of the Federal Constitution in 1789. It +was a time of great confusion and discontent, when, in parts of the +country, Democratic mobs were protesting against the vote of five +years' pay by the Continental Congress to the officers of the American +army. The _Anarchiad_ was followed by the _Echo_ and the _Political +Green House_, written mostly by Alsop and Theodore Dwight, and similar +in character and tendency to the earlier series. Time has greatly +blunted the edge of these satires, but they were influential in their +day, and are an important part of the literature of the old Federalist +party. + +Humphreys became afterward distinguished in the diplomatic service, and +was, successively, embassador to Portugal and to Spain, whence he {384} +introduced into America the breed of merino sheep. He had been on +Washington's staff during the war, and was several times an inmate of +his house at Mount Vernon, where he produced, in 1785, the best known +of his writings, _Mount Vernon_, an ode of a rather mild description, +which once had admirers. Joel Barlow cuts a larger figure in +contemporary letters. After leaving Hartford, in 1788, he went to +France, where he resided for seventeen years, made a fortune in +speculations, and became imbued with French principles, writing a song +in praise of the Guillotine, which gave great scandal to his old +friends at home. In 1805 he returned to America, and built a fine +residence near Washington, which he called Kalorama. Barlow's literary +fame, in his own generation, rested upon his prodigious epic, the +_Columbiad_. The first form of this was the _Vision of Columbus_, +published at Hartford in 1787. This he afterward recast and enlarged +into the _Columbiad_, issued in Philadelphia in 1807, and dedicated to +Robert Fulton, the inventor of the steamboat. This was by far the most +sumptuous piece of book-making that had then been published in America, +and was embellished with plates executed by the best London engravers. + +The _Columbiad_ was a grandiose performance, and has been the theme of +much ridicule by later writers. Hawthorne suggested its being +dramatized, and put on to the accompaniment of artillery {385} and +thunder and lightning; and E. P. Whipple declared that "no critic in +the last fifty years had read more than a hundred lines of it." In its +ambitiousness and its length it was symptomatic of the spirit of the +age which was patriotically determined to create, by _tour de force_, a +national literature of a size commensurate with the scale of American +nature and the destinies of the republic. As America was bigger than +Argos and Troy, we ought to have a bigger epic than the _Iliad_. +Accordingly, Barlow makes Hesper fetch Columbus from his prison to a +"hill of vision," where he unrolls before his eye a panorama of the +history of America, or, as our bards then preferred to call it, +Columbia. He shows him the conquest of Mexico by Cortez; the rise and +fall of the kingdom of the Incas in Peru; the settlements of the +English Colonies in North America; the old French and Indian Wars; the +Revolution, ending with a prophecy of the future greatness of the +new-born nation. The machinery of the _Vision_ was borrowed from the +11th and 12th books of _Paradise Lost_. Barlow's verse was the +ten-syllabled rhyming couplet of Pope, and his poetic style was +distinguished by the vague, glittering imagery and the false sublimity +which marked the epic attempts of the Queen Anne poets. Though Barlow +was but a masquerader in true heroic, he showed himself a true poet in +mock heroic. His _Hasty Pudding_, written in Savoy in 1793, and +dedicated to Mrs. Washington, was thoroughly American, in subject at +least, and its humor, though {386} over-elaborate, is good. One +couplet in particular has prevailed against oblivion: + + "E'en in thy native regions how I blush + To hear the Pennsylvanians call thee _Mush_!" + + +Another Connecticut poet--one of the seven who were fondly named "The +Pleiads of Connecticut"--was Timothy Dwight, whose _Conquest of +Canaan_, written shortly after his graduation from college, but not +published till 1785, was, like the _Columbiad_, an experiment toward +the domestication of the epic muse in America. It was written like +Barlow's poem, in rhymed couplets, and the patriotic impulse of the +time shows oddly in the introduction of our Revolutionary War, by way +of episode, among the wars of Israel. _Greenfield Hill_, 1794, was an +idyllic and moralizing poem, descriptive of a rural parish in +Connecticut of which the author was for a time the pastor. It is not +quite without merit; shows plainly the influence of Goldsmith, Thomson, +and Beattie, but as a whole is tedious and tame. Byron was amused that +there should have been an American poet christened Timothy, and it is +to be feared that amusement would have been the chief emotion kindled +in the breast of the wicked Voltaire had he ever chanced to see the +stern dedication to himself of the same poet's _Triumph of Infidelity_, +1788. Much more important than Dwight's poetry was his able _Theology +Explained and Defended_, 1794, a restatement, with modifications, of +the Calvinism of Jonathan {387} Edwards, which was accepted by the +Congregational churches of New England as an authoritative exponent of +the orthodoxy of the time. His _Travels in New England and New York_, +including descriptions of Niagara, the White Mountains, Lake George, +the Catskills, and other passages of natural scenery, not so familiar +then as now, was published posthumously in 1821, was praised by +Southey, and is still readable. As President of Yale College from 1795 +to 1817, Dwight, by his learning and ability, his sympathy with young +men, and the force and dignity of his character, exerted a great +influence in the community. + +The strong political bias of the time drew into its vortex most of the +miscellaneous literature that was produced. A number of ballads, +serious and comic, Whig and Tory, dealing with the battles and other +incidents of the long war, enjoyed a wide circulation in the +newspapers, or were hawked about in printed broadsides. Most of these +have no literary merit, and are now mere antiquarian curiosities. A +favorite piece on the Tory side was the _Cow Chase_, a cleverish parody +on _Chevy Chase_, written by the gallant and unfortunate Major Andre, +at the expense of "Mad" Anthony Wayne. The national song _Yankee +Doodle_ was evolved during the Revolution, and, as is the case with +_John Brown's Body_ and many other popular melodies, some obscurity +hangs about its origin. The air was an old one, and the words of the +chorus seem to have been adapted or {388} corrupted from a Dutch song, +and applied in derision to the Provincials by the soldiers of the +British army as early as 1755. Like many another nickname, the term +Yankee Doodle was taken up by the nicknamed and proudly made their own. +The stanza, + + "Yankee Doodle came to town," etc., + +antedates the war; but the first complete set of words to the tune was +the _Yankee's Return from Camp_, which is apparently of the year 1775. +The most popular humorous ballad on the Whig side was the _Battle of +the Kegs_, founded on a laughable incident of the campaign at +Philadelphia. This was written by Francis Hopkinson, a Philadelphian, +and one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. Hopkinson +has some title to rank as one of the earliest American humorists. +Without the keen wit of _McFingal_ some of his _Miscellaneous Essays +and Occasional Writings_, published in 1792, have more geniality and +heartiness than Trumbull's satire. His _Letter on Whitewashing_ is a +bit of domestic humor that foretokens the _Danbury News_ man, and his +_Modern Learning_, 1784, a burlesque on college examinations, in which +a salt-box is described from the point of view of metaphysics, logic, +natural philosophy, mathematics, anatomy, surgery and chemistry, long +kept its place in school-readers and other collections. His son, +Joseph Hopkinson, wrote the song of _Hail Columbia_, which is saved +from insignificance only by the music to which it was married, {389} +the then popular air of "The President's March." The words were +written in 1798, on the eve of a threatened war with France, and at a +time when party spirit ran high. It was sung nightly by crowds in the +streets, and for a whole season by a favorite singer at the theater; +for by this time there were theaters in Philadelphia, in New York, and +even in Puritanic Boston. Much better than _Hail Columbia_ was the +_Star Spangled Banner_, the words of which were composed by Francis +Scott Key, a Marylander, during the bombardment by the British of Fort +McHenry, near Baltimore, in 1812. More pretentious than these was the +once celebrated ode of Robert Treat Paine, Jr., _Adams and Liberty_, +recited at an anniversary of the Massachusetts Charitable Fire Society. +The sale of this is said to have netted its author over $750, but it +is, notwithstanding, a very wooden performance. Paine was a young +Harvard graduate, who had married an actress playing at the old Federal +Street Theater, the first play-house opened in Boston, in 1794. His +name was originally Thomas, but this was changed for him by the +Massachusetts Legislature, because he did not wish to be confounded +with the author of the _Age of Reason_. "Dim are those names erstwhile +in battle loud," and many an old Revolutionary worthy who fought for +liberty with sword and pen is now utterly forgotten, or consigned to +the limbo of Duyckinck's _Cyclopedia_ and Griswold's _Poets of +America_. Here and there a line has, by accident, survived to do {390} +duty as a motto or inscription, while all its context is buried in +oblivion. Few have read any thing more of Jonathan M. Sewall's, for +example, than the couplet, + + "No pent-up Utica contracts your powers, + But the whole boundless continent is yours," + +taken from his _Epilogue to Cato_, written in 1778. + +Another Revolutionary poet was Philip Freneau; "that rascal Freneau," +as Washington called him, when annoyed by the attacks upon his +administration in Freneau's _National Gazette_. He was of Huguenot +descent, was a classmate of Madison at Princeton College, was taken +prisoner by the British during the war, and when the war was over, +engaged in journalism, as an ardent supporter of Jefferson and the +Democrats. Freneau's patriotic verses and political lampoons are now +unreadable; but he deserves to rank as the first real American poet, by +virtue of his _Wild Honeysuckle_, _Indian Burying Ground_, _Indian +Student_, and a few other little pieces, which exhibit a grace and +delicacy inherited, perhaps, with his French blood. + +Indeed, to speak strictly, all of the "poets" hitherto mentioned were +nothing but rhymers but in Freneau we meet with something of beauty and +artistic feeling; something which still keeps his verses fresh. In his +treatment of Indian themes, in particular, appear for the first time a +sense of the picturesque and poetic {391} elements in the character and +wild life of the red man, and that pensive sentiment which the fading +away of the tribes toward the sunset has left in the wake of their +retreating footsteps. In this Freneau anticipates Cooper and +Longfellow, though his work is slight compared with the +_Leatherstocking Tales_ or _Hiawatha_. At the time when the +Revolutionary War broke out the population of the colonies was over +three millions; Philadelphia had thirty thousand inhabitants, and the +frontier had retired to a comfortable distance from the sea-board. The +Indian had already grown legendary to town dwellers, and Freneau +fetches his _Indian Student_ not from the outskirts of the settlement, +but from the remote backwoods of the State: + + "From Susquehanna's farthest springs, + Where savage tribes pursue their game + (His blanket tied with yellow strings), + A shepherd of the forest came." + + +Campbell "lifted"--in his poem _O'Conor's Child_--the last line of the +following stanza from Freneau's _Indian Burying Ground_: + + "By midnight moons, o'er moistening dews, + In vestments for the chase arrayed, + The hunter still the deer pursues-- + The hunter and the deer a shade." + + +And Walter Scott did Freneau the honor to borrow, in _Marmion_, the +final line of one of the {392} stanzas of his poem on the battle of +Eutaw Springs: + + "They saw their injured country's woe, + The flaming town, the wasted field; + Then rushed to meet the insulting foe; + They took the spear, but left the shield." + + +Scott inquired of an American gentleman who wished him the authorship +of this poem, which he had by heart, and pronounced it as fine a thing +of the kind as there was in the language. + +The American drama and American prose fiction had their beginnings +during the period now under review. A company of English players came +to this country in 1752 and made the tour of many of the principal +towns. The first play acted here by professionals on a public stage +was the _Merchant of Venice_, which was given by the English company at +Williamsburg, Va., in 1752. The first regular theater building was at +Annapolis, Md., where in the same year this troupe performed, among +other pieces, Farquhar's _Beaux' Stratagem_. In 1753 a theater was +built in New York, and one in 1759 in Philadelphia. The Quakers of +Philadelphia and the Puritans of Boston were strenuously opposed to the +acting of plays, and in the latter city the players were several times +arrested during the performances, under a Massachusetts law forbidding +dramatic performances. At Newport, R. I., on the other hand, which was +a health resort for planters from the Southern States and the West +Indies. {393} and the largest slave-market in the North, the actors +were hospitably received. The first play known to have been written by +an American was the _Prince of Parthia_, 1765, a closet drama, by +Thomas Godfrey, of Philadelphia. The first play by an American writer, +acted by professionals in a public theater, was Royal Tyler's +_Contrast_, performed in New York in 1786. The former of these was +very high tragedy, and the latter very low comedy; and neither of them +is otherwise remarkable than as being the first of a long line of +indifferent dramas. There is, in fact, no American dramatic literature +worth speaking of; not a single American play of even the second rank, +unless we except a few graceful parlor comedies, like Mr. Howell's +_Elevator_ and _Sleeping-Car_. Royal Tyler, the author of the +_Contrast_, cut quite a figure in his day as a wit and journalist, and +eventually became Chief Justice of Vermont. His comedy, the _Georgia +Spec_, 1797, had a great run in Boston, and his _Algerine Captive_, +published in the same year, was one of the earliest American novels. +It was a rambling tale of adventure, constructed somewhat upon the plan +of Smollett's novels and dealing with the piracies which led to the war +between the United States and Algiers in 1815. + +Charles Brockden Brown, the first American novelist of any note, was +also the first professional man of letters in this country who +supported himself entirely by his pen. He was born in {394} +Philadelphia in 1771, lived a part of his life in New York and part in +his native city, where he started, in 1803, the _Literary Magazine and +American Register_. During the years 1798-1801 he published in rapid +succession six romances, _Wieland_, _Ormond_, _Arthur Mervyn_, _Edgar +Huntley_, _Clara Howard_, and _Jane Talbot_. Brown was an invalid and +something of a recluse, with a relish for the ghastly in incident and +the morbid in character. He was in some points a prophecy of Poe and +Hawthorne, though his art was greatly inferior to Poe's, and almost +infinitely so to Hawthorne's. His books belong more properly to the +contemporary school of fiction in England which preceded the "Waverley +Novels"--to the class that includes Beckford's _Vathek_, Godwin's +_Caleb Williams_ and _St. Leon_, Mrs. Shelley's _Frankenstein_, and +such "Gothic" romances as Lewis's _Monk_, Walpole's _Castle of +Otranto_, and Mrs. Radcliffe's _Mysteries of Udolpho_. A +distinguishing characteristic of this whole school is what we may call +the clumsy-horrible. Brown's romances are not wanting in inventive +power, in occasional situations that are intensely thrilling, and in +subtle analysis of character; but they are fatally defective in art. +The narrative is by turns abrupt and tiresomely prolix, proceeding not +so much by dialogue as by elaborate dissection and discussion of +motives and states of mind, interspersed with the author's reflections. +The wild improbabilities of plot and the unnatural and even monstrous +developments of character {395} are in startling contrast with the +old-fashioned preciseness of the language; the conversations, when +there are any, being conducted in that insipid dialect in which a fine +woman was called an "elegant female." The following is a sample +description of one of Brown's heroines, and is taken from his novel of +_Ormond_, the leading character in which--a combination of unearthly +intellect with fiendish wickedness--is thought to have been suggested +by Aaron Burr: "Helena Cleves was endowed with every feminine and +fascinating quality. Her features were modified by the most transient +sentiments and were the seat of a softness at all times blushful and +bewitching. All those graces of symmetry, smoothness and lustre, which +assemble in the imagination of the painter when he calls from the bosom +of her natal deep the Paphian divinity, blended their perfections in +the shade, complexion, and hair of this lady." But, alas! "Helena's +intellectual deficiencies could not be concealed. She was proficient +in the elements of no science. The doctrine of lines and surfaces was +as disproportionate with her intellects as with those of the mock-bird. +She had not reasoned on the principles of human action, nor examined +the structure of society.~.~.~. She could not commune in their native +dialect with the sages of Rome and Athens.~.~.~. The constitution of +nature, the attributes of its Author, the arrangement of the parts of +the external universe, and the substance, modes of operation, and +ultimate destiny of human {396} intelligence were enigmas unsolved and +insoluble by her." + +Brown frequently raises a superstructure of mystery on a basis +ludicrously weak. Thus the hero of his first novel, _Wieland_ (whose +father anticipates "Old Krook," in Dickens's _Bleak House_, by dying of +spontaneous combustion), is led on by what he mistakes for spiritual +voices to kill his wife and children; and the voices turn out to be +produced by the ventriloquism of one Carwin, the villain of the story. +Similarly in _Edgar Huntley_, the plot turns upon the phenomena of +sleep-walking. Brown had the good sense to place the scene of his +romances in his own country, and the only passages in them which have +now a living interest are his descriptions of wilderness scenery in +_Edgar Huntley_, and his graphic account in _Arthur Mervyn_ of the +yellow-fever epidemic in Philadelphia in 1793. Shelley was an admirer +of Brown, and his experiments in prose fiction, such as _Zastrozzi_ and +_St. Irvyne the Rosicrucian_, are of the same abnormal and speculative +type. + +Another book which falls within this period was the _Journal_, 1774, of +John Woolman, a New Jersey Quaker, which has received the highest +praise from Channing, Charles Lamb, and many others. "Get the writings +of John Woolman by heart," wrote Lamb, "and love the early Quakers." +The charm of this journal resides in its singular sweetness and +innocence cf feeling, the "deep inward stillness" peculiar to the +people called Quakers. {397} Apart from his constant use of certain +phrases peculiar to the Friends, Woolman's English is also remarkably +graceful and pure, the transparent medium of a soul absolutely sincere, +and tender and humble in its sincerity. When not working at his trade +as a tailor, Woolman spent his time in visiting and ministering to the +monthly, quarterly, and yearly meetings of Friends, traveling on +horseback to their scattered communities in the backwoods of Virginia +and North Carolina, and northward along the coast as far as Boston and +Nantucket. He was under a "concern" and a "heavy exercise" touching +the keeping of slaves, and by his writing and speaking did much to +influence the Quakers against slavery. His love went out, indeed, to +all the wretched and oppressed; to sailors, and to the Indians in +particular. One of his most perilous journeys was made to the +settlements of Moravian Indians in the wilderness of Western +Pennsylvania, at Bethlehem, and at Wehaloosing, on the Susquehanna. +Some of the scruples which Woolman felt, and the quaint _naivete_ with +which he expresses them, may make the modern reader smile--but it is a +smile which is very close to a tear. Thus, when in England--where he +died in 1772--he would not ride nor send a letter by mail-coach, +because the poor post-boys were compelled to ride long stages in winter +nights, and were sometimes frozen to death. "So great is the hurry in +the spirit of this world, that in aiming to do business quickly and to +gain wealth, {398} the creation at this day doth loudly groan." Again, +having reflected that war was caused by luxury in dress, etc., the use +of dyed garments grew uneasy to him, and he got and wore a hat of the +natural color of the fur. "In attending meetings, this singularity was +a trial to me~.~.~. and some Friends, who knew not from what motives I +wore it, grew shy of me.~.~.~. Those who spoke with me I generally +informed, in a few words, that I believed my wearing it was not in my +own will." + + +1. Representative American Orations. Edited by Alexander Johnston. +New York; G. P. Putnam's Sons. 1884. + +2. The Federalist. New York: Charles Scribner. 1863. + +3. Notes on Virginia. By Thomas Jefferson. Boston. 1829. + +4. Travels in New England and New York. By Timothy Dwight. New Haven. +1821. + +5. McFingal: in Trumbull's Poetical Works. Hartford: 1820. + +6. Joel Barlow's _Hasty Pudding_. Francis Hopkinson's _Modern +Learning_. Philip Freneau's _Indian Student_, _Indian Burying Ground_, +and _White Honeysuckle_: in Vol. I. of Duyckinck's Cyclopedia of +American Literature. New York: Charles Scribner. 1866. + +7. Arthur Mervyn. By Charles Brockden Brown. Boston: S. G. Goodrich. +1827. + +8. The Journal of John Woolman. With an {399} Introduction by John G. +Whittier. Boston: James R. Osgood & Co. 1871. + +9. American Literature. By Charles F. Richardson. New York: G. P. +Putnam's Sons. 1887. + +10. American Literature. By John Nichol. Edinburgh: Adam & Charles +Black. 1882. + + + + +{400} + +CHAPTER III. + +THE ERA OF NATIONAL EXPANSION. + +1815-1837. + +The attempt to preserve a strictly chronological order must here be +abandoned. About all the American literature in existence, that is of +any value _as literature_, is the product of the past three quarters of +a century, and the men who produced it, though older or younger, were +still contemporaries. Irving's _Knickerbocker's History of New York_, +1809, was published within the recollection of some yet living, and the +venerable poet, Richard H. Dana--Irving's junior by only four +years--survived to 1879, when the youngest of the generation of writers +that now occupy public attention had already won their spurs. Bryant, +whose _Thanatopsis_ was printed in 1816, lived down to 1878. He saw +the beginnings of our national literature, and he saw almost as much of +the latest phase of it as we see to-day in this year 1887. Still, even +within the limits of a single life-time, there have been progress and +change. And so, while it will happen that the consideration of writers +a part of whose work falls between the dates at the head of this +chapter may be postponed {401} to subsequent chapters, we may in a +general way follow the sequence of time. + +The period between the close of the second war with England, in 1815, +and the great financial crash of 1837, has been called, in language +attributed to President Monroe, "the era of good feeling." It was a +time of peace and prosperity, of rapid growth in population and rapid +extension of territory. The new nation was entering upon its vast +estates and beginning to realize its manifest destiny. The peace with +Great Britain, by calling off the Canadian Indians and the other tribes +in alliance with England, had opened up the North-west to settlement. +Ohio had been admitted as a State in 1802; but at the time of President +Monroe's tour, in 1817, Cincinnati had only seven thousand inhabitants, +and half of the State was unsettled. The Ohio River flowed for most of +its course through an unbroken wilderness. Chicago was merely a fort. +Hitherto the emigration to the West had been sporadic; now it took on +the dimensions of a general and almost a concerted exodus. This +movement was stimulated in New England by the cold summer of 1816 and +the late spring of 1817, which produced a scarcity of food that +amounted in parts of the interior to a veritable famine. All through +this period sounded the axe of the pioneer clearing the forest about +his log cabin, and the rumble of the canvas-covered emigrant wagon over +the primitive highways which crossed the Alleghanies {402} or followed +the valley of the Mohawk. S. G. Goodrich, known in letters as "Peter +Parley," in his _Recollections of a Lifetime_, 1856, describes the part +of the movement which he had witnessed as a boy in Fairfield County, +Conn.: "I remember very well the tide of emigration through +Connecticut, on its way to the West, during the summer of 1817. Some +persons went in covered wagons--frequently a family consisting of +father, mother, and nine small children, with one at the breast--some +on foot, and some crowded together under the cover, with kettles, +gridirons, feather beds, crockery, and the family Bible, Watts's Psalms +and Hymns, and Webster's Spelling-book--the lares and penates of the +household. Others started in ox-carts, and trudged on at the rate of +ten miles a day. . . . Many of these persons were in a state of +poverty, and begged their way as they went. Some died before they +reached the expected Canaan; many perished after their arrival from +fatigue and privation; and others from the fever and ague, which was +then certain to attack the new settlers. It was, I think, in 1818 that +I published a small tract entitled _'Tother Side of Oldo_--that is, the +other view, in contrast to the popular notion that it was the paradise +of the world. It was written by Dr. Hand--a talented young physician +of Berlin--who had made a visit to the West about these days. It +consisted mainly of vivid but painful pictures of the accidents and +incidents attending this wholesale migration. The roads over the +Alleghanies, {403} between Philadelphia and Pittsburg, were then rude, +steep, and dangerous, and some of the more precipitous slopes were +consequently strewn with the carcases of wagons, carts, horses, oxen, +which had made shipwreck in their perilous descents." + +But in spite of the hardships of the settler's life, the spirit of that +time, as reflected in its writings, was a hopeful and a light-hearted +one. + + "Westward the course of empire takes its way," + +runs the famous line from Berkeley's poem on America. The New +Englanders who removed to the Western Reserve went there to better +themelves; and their children found themselves the owners of broad +acres of virgin soil, in place of the stony hill pastures of Berkshire +and Litchfield. There was an attraction, too, about the wild, free +life of the frontiersman, with all its perils and discomforts. The +life of Daniel Boone, the pioneer of Kentucky--that "dark and bloody +ground"--is a genuine romance. Hardly less picturesque was the old +river life of the Ohio boatmen, before the coming of steam banished +their queer craft from the water. Between 1810 and 1840 the center of +population in the United States had moved from the Potomac to the +neighborhood of Clarksburg, in West Virginia, and the population itself +had increased from seven to seventeen millions. The gain was made +partly in the East and South, but the general drift was westward. +During the years now under review, {404} the following new States were +admitted, in the order named: Indiana, Mississippi, Illinois, Alabama, +Maine, Missouri, Arkansas, Michigan. Kentucky and Tennessee had been +made States in the last years of the eighteenth century, and +Louisiana--acquired by purchase from France--in 1812. + +The settlers, in their westward march, left large tracts of wilderness +behind them. They took up first the rich bottom lands along the river +courses, the Ohio and Miami and Licking, and later the valleys of the +Mississippi and Missouri, and the shores of the great lakes. But there +still remained back woods in New York and Pennsylvania, though the +cities of New York and Philadelphia had each a population of more than +one hundred thousand in 1815. When the Erie Canal was opened, in 1825, +it ran through a primitive forest. N. P. Willis, who went by canal to +Buffalo and Niagara in 1827, describes the houses and stores at +Rochester as standing among the burnt stumps left by the first +settlers. In the same year that saw the opening of this great water +way, the Indian tribes, numbering now about one hundred and thirty +thousand souls, were moved across the Mississippi. Their power had +been broken by General Harrison's victory over Tecumseh at the battle +of Tippecanoe, in 1811, and they were in fact mere remnants and +fragments of the race which had hung upon the skirts of civilization, +and disputed the advance of the white man for two centuries. It was +not until some years later than this that railroads began {405} to take +an important share in opening up new country. + +The restless energy, the love of adventure, the sanguine anticipation +which characterized American thought at this time, the picturesque +contrasts to be seen in each mushroom town where civilization was +encroaching on the raw edge of the wilderness--all these found +expression, not only in such well-known books as Copper's _Pioneers_, +1823, and Irving's _Tour on the Prairies_, 1835, but in the minor +literature which is read to-day, if at all, not for its own sake, but +for the light that it throws on the history of national development: in +such books as Paulding's story of _Westward Ho!_ and his poem, _The +Backwoodsman_, 1818; or as Timothy Flint's _Recollections_, 1826, and +his _Geography and History of the Mississippi Valley_, 1827. It was +not an age of great books, but it was an age of large ideas and +expanding prospects. The new consciousness of empire uttered itself +hastily, crudely, ran into buncombe, "spread-eagleism," and other noisy +forms of patriotic exultation; but it was thoroughly democratic and +American. Though literature--or at least the best literature of the +time--was not yet emancipated from English models, thought and life, at +any rate, were no longer in bondage--no longer provincial. And it is +significant that the party in office during these years was the +Democratic, the party which had broken most completely with +conservative traditions. The famous "Monroe doctrine" was {406} a +pronunciamento of this aggressive democracy, and though the Federalists +returned to power for a single term, under John Quincy Adams +(1825-1829,) Andrew Jackson received the largest number of electoral +votes, and Adams was only chosen by the House of Representatives in the +absence of a majority vote for any one candidate. At the close of his +term "Old Hickory," the hero of the people, the most characteristically +democratic of our Presidents, and the first backwoodsman who entered +the White House, was borne into office on a wave of popular enthusiasm. +We have now arrived at the time when American literature, in the higher +and stricter sense of the term, really began to have an existence. S. +G. Goodrich, who settled at Hartford as a bookseller and publisher in +1818, says, in his _Recollections_: "About this time I began to think +of trying to bring out original American works. . . . The general +impression was that we had not, and could not have, a literature. It +was the precise point at which Sidney Smith had uttered that bitter +taunt in the _Edinburgh Review_, 'Who reads an American book?' . . . +It was positively injurious to the commercial credit of a bookseller to +undertake American works." Washington Irving (1783-1859) was the first +American author whose books, as _books_, obtained recognition abroad; +whose name was thought worthy of mention beside the names of English +contemporary authors, like Byron, Scott, and Coleridge. He was also +the first American writer whose writings are still read {407} for their +own sake. We read Mather's _Magnalia_, and Franklin's _Autobiography_, +and Trumbull's _McFingal_--if we read them at all--as history, and to +learn about the times or the men. But we read the _Sketch Book_, and +_Knickerbocker's History of New York_, and the _Conquest of Granada_ +for themselves, and for the pleasure that they give as pieces of +literary art. + +We have arrived, too, at a time when we may apply a more cosmopolitan +standard to the works of American writers, and may disregard many a +minor author whose productions would have cut some figure had they come +to light amid the poverty of our colonial age. Hundreds of these +forgotten names, with specimens of their unread writings, are consigned +to a limbo of immortality in the pages of Duyckinck's _Cyclopedia_, and +of Griswold's _Poets of America_ and _Prose Writers of America_. We +may select here for special mention, and as most representative of the +thought of their time, the names of Irving, Cooper, Webster, and +Channing. + +A generation was now coming upon the stage who could recall no other +government in this country than the government of the United States, +and to whom the Revolutionary War was but a tradition. Born in the +very year of the peace, it was a part of Irving's mission, by the +sympathetic charm of his writings and by the cordial recognition which +he won in both countries, to allay the soreness which the second war, +of 1812-15, had left between England and America. He was {408} well +fitted for the task of mediator. Conservative by nature, early drawn +to the venerable worship of the Episcopal Church, retrospective in his +tastes, with a preference for the past and its historic associations +which, even in young America, led him to invest the Hudson and the +region about New York with a legendary interest, he wrote of American +themes in an English fashion, and interpreted to an American public the +mellow attractiveness that he found in the life and scenery of Old +England. He lived in both countries, and loved them both; and it is +hard to say whether Irving is more of an English or of an American +writer. His first visit to Europe, in 1804-6, occupied nearly two +years. From 1815 to 1832 he was abroad continuously, and his +"domicile," as the lawyers say, during these seventeen years was really +in England, though a portion of his time was spent upon the continent, +and several successive years in Spain, where he engaged upon the _Life +of Columbus_, the _Conquest of Granada_, the _Companions of Columbus_, +and the _Alhambra_, all published between 1828-32. From 1842 to 1846 +he was again in Spain as American Minister at Madrid. + +Irving was the last and greatest of the Addisonians. His boyish +letters, signed "Jonathan Oldstyle," contributed in 1802 to his +brother's newspaper, the _Morning Chronicle_, were, like Franklin's +_Busybody_, close imitations of the _Spectator_. To the same family +belonged his _Salmagundi_ papers, 1807, a series of town-satires on New +York society, written {409} in conjunction with his brother William and +with James K. Paulding. The little tales, essays, and sketches which +compose the _Sketch Book_ were written in England, and published in +America, in periodical numbers, in 1819-20. In this, which is in some +respects his best book, he still maintained that attitude of +observation and spectatorship taught him by Addison. The volume had a +motto taken from Burton, "I have no wife nor children, good or bad, to +provide for--a mere spectator of other men's fortunes," etc.; and "The +Author's Account of Himself" began in true Addisonian fashion: "I was +always fond of visiting new scenes and observing strange characters and +manners." + +But though never violently "American," like some later writers who have +consciously sought to throw off the trammels of English tradition, +Irving was in a real way original. His most distinct addition to our +national literature was in his creation of what has been called "the +Knickerbocker legend." He was the first to make use, for literary +purposes, of the old Dutch traditions which clustered about the +romantic scenery of the Hudson. Col. T. W. Higginson, in his _History +of the United States_, tells how "Mrs. Josiah Quincy, sailing up that +river in 1786, when Irving was a child three years old, records that +the captain of the sloop had a legend, either supernatural or +traditional, for every scene, and not a mountain reared its head +unconnected with some marvelous {410} story.'" The material thus at +hand Irving shaped into his _Knickerbocker's History of New York_, into +the immortal story of _Rip Van Winkle_, and the _Legend of Sleepy +Hollow_ (both published in the _Sketch Book_), and in later additions +to the same realm of fiction, such as Dolph Heyliger in _Bracebridge +Hall_, the _Money Diggers_, _Wolfert Webber_, and _Kidd the Pirate_, in +the _Tales of a Traveler_, and in some of the miscellanies from the +_Knickerbocker Magazine_, collected into a volume, in 1855, under the +title of _Wolfert's Roost_. + +The book which made Irving's reputation was his _Knickerbocker's +History of New York_, 1809, a burlesque chronicle, making fun of the +old Dutch settlers of New Amsterdam, and attributed, by a familiar and +now somewhat threadbare device,[1] to a little old gentleman named +Diedrich Knickerbocker, whose manuscript had come into the editor's +hands. The book was gravely dedicated to the New York Historical +Society, and it is said to have been quoted, as authentic history, by a +certain German scholar named Goeller, in a note on a passage in +Thucydides. This story, though well vouched, is hard of belief: for +_Knickerbocker_, though excellent fooling, has nothing of the grave +irony of Swift in his _Modest Proposal_ or of Defoe in his _Short Way +with Dissenters_. Its mock-heroic intention is as transparent as in +Fielding's parodies of Homer, which it somewhat resembles, {411} +particularly in the delightfully absurd description of the mustering of +the clans under Peter Stuyvesant and the attack on the Swedish Fort +Christina. _Knickerbocker's History of New York_ was a real addition +to the comic literature of the world; a work of genuine humor, original +and vital. Walter Scott said that it reminded him closely of Swift, +and had touches resembling Sterne. It is not necessary to claim for +Irving's little masterpiece a place beside _Gulliver's Travels_ and +_Tristram Shandy_. But it was, at least, the first American book in +the lighter departments of literature which needed no apology and stood +squarely on its own legs. It was written, too, at just the right time. +Although New Amsterdam had become New York as early as 1664, the +impress of its first settlers, with their quaint conservative ways, was +still upon it when Irving was a boy. The descendants of the Dutch +families formed a definite element not only in Manhattan, but all up +along the kills of the Hudson, at Albany, at Schenectady, in +Westchester County, at Hoboken, and Communipaw, localities made +familiar to him in many a ramble and excursion. He lived to see the +little provincial town of his birth grow into a great metropolis, in +which all national characteristics were blended together, and a tide of +immigration from Europe and New England flowed over the old landmarks +and obliterated them utterly. + +Although Irving was the first to reveal to his countrymen the literary +possibilities of their early {412} history, it must be acknowledged +that with modern American life he had little sympathy. He hated +politics, and in the restless democratic movement of the time, as we +have described it, he found no inspiration. This moderate and placid +gentleman, with his distrust of all kinds of fanaticism, had no liking +for the Puritans or for their descendants, the New England Yankees, if +we may judge from his sketch of Ichabod Crane, in the _Legend of Sleepy +Hollow_. His genius was reminiscent, and his imagination, like +Scott's, was the historic imagination. In crude America his fancy took +refuge in the picturesque aspects of the past, in "survivals" like the +Knickerbocker Dutch and the Acadian peasants, whose isolated +communities on the lower Mississippi he visited and described. He +turned naturally to the ripe civilization of the Old World. He was our +first picturesque tourist, the first "American in Europe." He +rediscovered England, whose ancient churches, quiet landscapes, +memory-haunted cities, Christmas celebrations, and rural festivals had +for him an unfailing attraction. With pictures of these, for the most +part, he filled the pages of the _Sketch Book_ and _Bracebridge Hall_, +1822. Delightful as are these English sketches, in which the author +conducts his readers to Windsor Castle, or Stratford-on-Avon, or the +Boar's Head Tavern, or sits beside him on the box of the old English +stage-coach, or shares with him the Yuletide cheer at the ancient +English country house, their interest has somewhat faded. {413} The +pathos of the _Broken Heart_ and the _Pride of the Village_, the mild +satire of the _Art of Book Making_, the rather obvious reflections in +_Westminster Abbey_ are not exactly to the taste of this generation. +They are the literature of leisure and retrospection; and already +Irving's gentle elaboration, the refined and slightly artificial beauty +of his style, and his persistently genial and sympathetic attitude have +begun to pall upon readers who demand a more nervous and accented kind +of writing. It is felt that a little roughness, a little harshness, +even, would give relief to his pictures of life. There is, for +instance, something a little irritating in the old-fashioned +courtliness of his manner toward women; and one reads with a certain +impatience smoothly punctuated passages like the following: "As the +vine, which has long twined its graceful foliage about the oak, and +been lifted by it into sunshine, will, when the hardy plant is rifted +by the thunderbolt, cling round it with its caressing tendrils, and +bind up its shattered boughs, so is it beautifully ordered by +Providence that woman, who is the mere dependent and ornament of man in +his happier hours, should be his stay and solace when smitten with +sudden calamity; winding herself into the rugged recesses of his +nature, tenderly supporting the drooping head, and binding up the +broken heart." + +Irving's gifts were sentiment and humor, with an imagination +sufficiently fertile, and an observation sufficiently acute to support +those two main {414} qualities, but inadequate to the service of strong +passion or subtle thinking, though his pathos, indeed, sometimes +reached intensity. His humor was always delicate and kindly; his +sentiment never degenerated into sentimentality. His diction was +graceful and elegant--too elegant, perhaps; and in his modesty he +attributed the success of his books in England to the astonishment of +Englishmen that an American could write good English. + +In Spanish history and legend Irving found a still newer and richer +field for his fancy to work upon. He had not the analytic and +philosophical mind of a great historian, and the merits of his +_Conquest of Granada_ and _Life of Columbus_ are rather +_belletristisch_ than scientific. But he brought to these undertakings +the same eager love of the romantic past which had determined the +character of his writings in America and England, and the +result--whether we call it history or romance--is at all events +charming as literature. His _Life of Washington_--completed in +1859--was his _magnum opus_, and is accepted as standard authority. +_Mahomet and His Successors_, 1850, was comparatively a failure. But +of all Irving's biographies, his _Life of Oliver Goldsmith_, 1849, was +the most spontaneous and perhaps the best. He did not impose it upon +himself as a task, but wrote it from a native and loving sympathy with +his subject, and it is, therefore, one of the choicest literary memoirs +in the language. + +{415} + +When Irving returned to America, in 1832, he was the recipient of +almost national honors. He had received the medal of the Royal Society +of Literature and the degree of D.C.L. from Oxford University, and had +made American literature known and respected abroad. In his modest +home at Sunnyside, on the banks of the river over which he had been the +first to throw the witchery of poetry and romance, he was attended to +the last by the admiring affection of his countrymen. He had the love +and praises of the foremost English writers of his own generation and +the generation which followed--of Scott, Byron, Coleridge, Thackeray, +and Dickens, some of whom had been among his personal friends. He is +not the greatest of American authors, but the influence of his writings +is sweet and wholesome, and it is in many ways fortunate that the first +American man of letters who made himself heard in Europe should have +been in all particulars a gentleman. + +Connected with Irving, at least by name and locality, were a number of +authors who resided in the city of New York and who are known as the +Knickerbocker writers, perhaps because they were contributors to the +_Knickerbocker Magazine_. One of these was James K. Paulding, a +connection of Irving by marriage, and his partner in the _Salmagundi +Papers_. Paulding became Secretary of the Navy under Van Buren, and +lived down to the year 1860. He was a {416} voluminous author, but his +writings had no power of continuance, and are already obsolete, with +the possible exception of his novel, the _Dutchman's Fireside_, 1831. + +A finer spirit than Paulding was Joseph Rodman Drake, a young poet of +great promise, who died in 1820, at the age of twenty-five. Drake's +patriotic lyric, the _American Flag_, is certainly the most spirited +thing of the kind in our poetic literature, and greatly superior to +such national anthems as _Hail Columbia_ and the _Star Spangled +Banner_. His _Culprit Fay_, published in 1819, was the best poem that +had yet appeared in America, if we except Bryant's _Thanatopsis_, which +was three years the elder. The _Culprit Fay_ was a fairy story, in +which, following Irving's lead, Drake undertook to throw the glamour of +poetry about the Highlands of the Hudson. Edgar Poe said that the poem +was fanciful rather than imaginative; but it is prettily and even +brilliantly fanciful, and has maintained its popularity to the present +time. Such verse as the following--which seems to show that Drake had +been reading Coleridge's _Christabel_, published three years +before--was something new in American poetry: + + "The winds are whist and the owl is still, + The bat in the shelvy rock is hid, + And naught is heard on the lonely hill, + But the cricket's chirp and the answer shrill, + Of the gauze-winged katydid, + And the plaint of the wailing whip-poor-will + {417} + Who moans unseen, and ceaseless sings + Ever a note of wail and woe, + Till morning spreads her rosy wings, + And earth and sky in her glances glow." + + +Here we have, at last, the whip-poor-will, an American bird, and not +the conventional lark or nightingale, although the elves of the Old +World seem scarcely at home on the banks of the Hudson. Drake's memory +has been kept fresh not only by his own poetry, but by the beautiful +elegy written by his friend Fitz-Greene Halleck, the first stanza of +which is universally known: + + "Green be the turf above thee, + Friend of my better days; + None knew thee but to love thee, + Nor named thee but to praise." + + +Halleck was born in Guilford, Connecticut, whither he retired in 1849, +and resided there till his death in 1867. But his literary career is +identified with New York. He was associated with Drake in writing the +_Croaker Papers_, a series of humorous and satirical verses contributed +in 1814 to the _Evening Post_. These were of a merely local and +temporary interest; but Halleck's fine ode, _Marco Bozzaris_--though +declaimed until it has become hackneyed--gives him a sure title to a +remembrance; and his _Alnwick Castle_, a monody, half serious and half +playful on the contrasts between feudal associations and modern life, +has {418} much of that pensive lightness which characterizes Praed's +best _vers de societe_. + +A friend of Drake and Halleck was James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851), +the first American novelist of distinction, and, if a popularity which +has endured for nearly three quarters of a century is any test, still +the most successful of all American novelists. Cooper was far more +intensely American than Irving, and his books reached an even wider +public. "They are published as soon as he produces them," said Morse, +the electrician, in 1833, "in thirty-four different places in Europe. +They have been seen by American travelers in the languages of Turkey +and Persia, in Constantinople, in Egypt, at Jerusalem, at Ispahan." +Cooper wrote altogether too much; he published, besides his fictions, a +_Naval History of the United States_, a series of naval biographies, +works of travel, and a great deal of controversial matter. He wrote +over thirty novels, the greater part of which are little better than +trash, and tedious trash at that. This is especially true of his +_tendenz_ novels and his novels of society. He was a man of strongly +marked individuality, fiery, pugnacious, sensitive to criticism, and +abounding in prejudices. He was embittered by the scurrilous attacks +made upon him by a portion of the American press, and spent a great +deal of time and energy in conducting libel suits against the +newspapers. In the same spirit he used fiction as a vehicle for attack +upon the abuses and follies of American life. Nearly all of {419} his +novels, written with this design, are worthless. Nor was Cooper well +equipped by nature and temperament for depicting character and passion +in social life. Even in his best romances his heroines and his +"leading juveniles"--to borrow a term from the amateur stage--are +insipid and conventional. He was no satirist, and his humor was not of +a high order. He was a rapid and uneven writer, and, unlike Irving, he +had no style. + +Where Cooper was great was in the story, in the invention of incidents +and plots, in a power of narrative and description in tales of wild +adventure which keeps the reader in breathless excitement to the end of +the book. He originated the novel of the sea and the novel of the +wilderness. He created the Indian of literature; and in this, his +peculiar field, although he has had countless imitators, he has had no +equals. Cooper's experiences had prepared him well for the kingship of +this new realm in the world of fiction. His childhood was passed on +the borders of Otsego Lake, when central New York was still a +wilderness, with boundless forests stretching westward, broken only +here and there by the clearings of the pioneers. He was taken from +college (Yale) when still a lad, and sent to sea in a merchant vessel, +before the mast. Afterward he entered the navy and did duty on the +high seas and upon Lake Ontario, then surrounded by virgin forests. He +married and resigned his commission in 1811, just before the outbreak +of the war with England, so {420} that he missed the opportunity of +seeing active service in any of those engagements on the ocean and our +great lakes which were so glorious to American arms. But he always +retained an active interest in naval affairs. + +His first successful novel was _The Spy_, 1821, a tale of the +Revolutionary War, the scene of which was laid in Westchester County, +N. Y., where the author was then residing. The hero of this story, +Harvey Birch, was one of the most skillfully drawn figures on his +canvas. In 1823 he published the _Pioneers_, a work somewhat overladen +with description, in which he drew for material upon his boyish +recollections of frontier life at Cooperstown. This was the first of +the series of five romances known as the _Leatherstocking Tales_. The +others were the _Last of the Mohicans_, 1826; the _Prairie_, 1827; the +_Pathfinder_, 1840; and the _Deerslayer_, 1841. The hero of this +series, Natty Bumpo, or "Leatherstocking," was Cooper's one great +creation in the sphere of character, his most original addition to the +literature of the world in the way of a new human type. This backwoods +philosopher--to the conception of whom the historic exploits of Daniel +Boone perhaps supplied some hints; unschooled, but moved by noble +impulses and a natural sense of piety and justice; passionately +attached to the wilderness, and following its westering edge even unto +the prairies--this man of the woods was the first real American in +fiction. Hardly less individual and vital {421} were the various types +of Indian character, in Chingachgook, Uncas, Hist, and the Huron +warriors. Inferior to these, but still vigorously though somewhat +roughly drawn, were the waifs and strays of civilization, whom duty, or +the hope of gain, or the love of adventure, or the outlawry of crime +had driven to the wilderness--the solitary trapper, the reckless young +frontiersman, the officers and men of out-post garrisons. Whether +Cooper's Indian was the real being, or an idealized and rather +melo-dramatic version of the truth, has been a subject of dispute. +However this be, he has taken his place in the domain of art, and it is +safe to say that his standing there is secure. No boy will ever give +him up. + +Equally good with the _Leatherstocking_ novels, and especially +national, were Cooper's tales of the sea, or at least the two best of +them--the _Pilot_, 1823, founded upon the daring exploits of John Paul +Jones, and the _Red Rover_, 1828. But here, though Cooper still holds +the sea, he has had to admit competitors; and Britannia, who rules the +waves in song, has put in some claim to a share in the domain of +nautical fiction in the persons of Mr. W. Clarke Russell and others. +Though Cooper's novels do not meet the deeper needs of the heart and +the imagination, their appeal to the universal love of a story is +perennial. We devour them when we are boys, and if we do not often +return to them when we are men, that is perhaps only because we have +read them before, and "know the {422} ending." They are good yarns for +the forecastle and the camp-fire; and the scholar in his study, though +he may put the _Deerslayer_ or the _Last of the Mohicans_ away on the +top-shelf, will take it down now and again, and sit up half the night +over it. + +Before dismissing the _belles-lettres_ writings of this period, mention +should be made of a few poems of the fugitive kind which seem to have +taken a permanent place in popular regard. John Howard Payne, a native +of Long Island, a wandering actor and playwright, who died American +Consul at Tunis in 1852, wrote about 1820 for Covent Garden Theater an +opera, entitled _Clari_, the libretto of which included the now famous +song of _Home, Sweet Home_. Its literary pretensions were of the +humblest kind, but it spoke a true word which touched the Anglo-Saxon +heart in its tenderest spot, and being happily married to a plaintive +air was sold by the hundred thousand, and is evidently destined to be +sung forever. A like success has attended the _Old Oaken Bucket_, +composed by Samuel Woodworth, a printer and journalist from +Massachusetts, whose other poems, of which two collections were issued +in 1818 and 1826, were soon forgotten. Richard Henry Wilde, an +Irishman by birth, a gentleman of scholarly tastes and accomplishments, +who wrote a great deal on Italian literature, and sat for several terms +in Congress as Representative of the State of Georgia, was the author +of the favorite song, _My Life is Like the Summer Rose_. Another {423} +Southerner, and a member of a distinguished Southern family, was Edward +Coate Pinkney, who served nine years in the navy, and died in 1828, at +the age of twenty-six, having published in 1825 a small volume of +lyrical poems which had a fire and a grace uncommon at that time in +American verse. One of these, _A Health_, beginning + + "I fill this cup to one made up of loveliness alone," + +though perhaps somewhat overpraised by Edgar Poe, has rare beauty of +thought and expression. John Quincy Adams, sixth President of the +United States (1825-29), was a man of culture and of literary tastes. +He published his lectures on rhetoric delivered during his tenure of +the Boylston Professorship at Harvard in 1806-09; he left a voluminous +diary, which has been edited since his death in 1848; and among his +experiments in poetry is one of considerable merit, entitled the _Wants +of Man_, an ironical sermon on Goldsmith's text: + + "Man wants but little here below + Nor wants that little long." + + +As this poem is a curiously close anticipation of Dr. Holmes's +_Contentment_, so the very popular ballad, _Old Grimes_, written about +1818, by Albert Gorton Greene, an undergraduate of Brown University in +Rhode Island, is in some respects an anticipation of Holmes's quaintly +pathetic _Last Leaf_. + +The political literature and public oratory of {424} the United States +during this period, although not absolutely of less importance than +that which preceded and followed the Declaration of Independence and +the adoption of the Constitution, demands less relative attention in a +history of literature by reason of the growth of other departments of +thought. The age was a political one, but no longer exclusively +political. The debates of the time centered about the question of +"State Rights," and the main forum of discussion was the old Senate +chamber, then made illustrious by the presence of Clay, Webster, and +Calhoun. The slavery question, which had threatened trouble, was put +off for awhile by the Missouri Compromise of 1820, only to break out +more fiercely in the debates on the Wilmot Proviso, and the Kansas and +Nebraska Bill. Meanwhile the Abolition movement had been transferred +to the press and the platform. Garrison started his _Liberator_ in +1830, and the Antislavery Society was founded in 1833. The Whig party, +which had inherited the constitutional principles of the old Federal +party, advocated internal improvements at national expense and a high +protective tariff. The State Rights party, which was strongest at the +South, opposed these views, and in 1832 South Carolina claimed the +right to "nullify" the tariff imposed by the general government. The +leader of this party was John Caldwell Calhoun, a South Carolinian, who +in his speech in the United States Senate, on February 13, 1832, on +Nullification and the {425} Force Bill, set forth most authoritatively +the "Carolina doctrine." Calhoun was a great debater, but hardly a +great orator. His speeches are the arguments of a lawyer and a strict +constitutionalist, severely logical, and with a sincere conviction in +the soundness of his case. Their language is free from bad rhetoric; +the reasoning is cogent, but there is an absence of emotion and +imagination; they contain few quotable things, and no passages of +commanding eloquence, such as strew the orations of Webster and Burke. +They are not, in short, literature. Again, the speeches of Henry Clay, +of Kentucky, the leader of the Whigs, whose persuasive oratory is a +matter of tradition, disappoint in the reading. The fire has gone out +of them. + +Not so with Daniel Webster, the greatest of American forensic orators, +if, indeed, he be not the greatest of all orators who have used the +English tongue. Webster's speeches are of the kind that have power to +move after the voice of the speaker is still. The thought and the +passion in them lay hold on feelings of patriotism more lasting than +the issues of the moment. It is, indeed, true of Webster's speeches, +as of all speeches, that they are known to posterity more by single +brilliant passages than as wholes. In oratory the occasion is of the +essence of the thing, and only those parts of an address which are +permanent and universal in their appeal take their place in literature. +But of such detachable passages there are happily {426} many in +Webster's orations. One great thought underlay all his public life, +the thought of the Union; of American nationality. What in Hamilton +had been a principle of political philosophy had become in Webster a +passionate conviction. The Union was his idol, and he was intolerant +of any faction which threatened it from any quarter, whether the +Nullifiers of South Carolina or the Abolitionists of the North. It is +this thought which gives grandeur and elevation to all his utterances, +and especially to the wonderful peroration of his reply to Hayne, on +Mr. Foot's resolution touching the sale of the public lands, delivered +in the Senate on January 26, 1830, whose closing words, "liberty and +union, now and forever, one and inseparable," became the rallying cry +of a great cause. Similar in sentiment was his famous speech of March +7, 1850, _On the Constitution and the Union_, which gave so much +offense to the extreme Antislavery party, who held with Garrison that a +Constitution which protected slavery was "a league with death and a +covenant with hell." It is not claiming too much for Webster to assert +that the sentences of these and other speeches, memorized and declaimed +by thousands of school-boys throughout the North, did as much as any +single influence to train up a generation in hatred of secession, and +to send into the fields of the civil war armies of men animated with +the stern resolution to fight till the last drop of blood was shed, +rather than allow the Union to be dissolved. + +{427} + +The figure of this great senator is one of the most imposing in +American annals. The masculine force of his personality impressed +itself upon men of a very different stamp--upon the unworldly Emerson, +and upon the captious Carlyle, whose respect was not willingly accorded +to any contemporary, much less to a representative of American +democracy. Webster's looks and manner were characteristic. His form +was massive, his skull and jaw solid, the underlip projecting, and the +mouth firmly and grimly shut; his complexion was swarthy, and his +black, deep set eyes, under shaggy brows, glowed with a smoldering +fire. He was rather silent in society; his delivery in debate was +grave and weighty, rather than fervid. His oratory was massive and +sometimes even ponderous. It may be questioned whether an American +orator of to-day, with intellectual abilities equal to Webster's--if +such a one there were--would permit himself the use of sonorous and +elaborate pictures like the famous period which follows: "On this +question of principle, while actual suffering was yet afar off, they +raised their flag against a power, to which, for purposes of foreign +conquest and subjugation, Rome, in the height of her glory, is not to +be compared; a power which has dotted over the surface of the whole +globe with her possessions and military posts, whose morning drum-beat, +following the sun and keeping company with the hours, circles the earth +with one continuous and unbroken strain of the {428} martial airs of +England." The secret of this kind of oratory has been lost. The +present generation distrusts rhetorical ornament, and likes something +swifter, simpler, and more familiar in its speakers. But every thing, +in declamation of this sort, depends on the way in which it is done. +Webster did it supremely well; a smaller man would merely have made +buncombe of it. + +Among the legal orators of the time the foremost was Rufus Choate, an +eloquent pleader, and, like Webster, a United States Senator from +Massachusetts. Some of his speeches, though excessively rhetorical, +have literary quality, and are nearly as effective in print as +Webster's own. Another Massachusetts orator, Edward Everett, who in +his time was successively professor in Harvard College, Unitarian +minister in Boston, editor of the _North American Review_, member of +both houses of Congress, Minister to England, Governor of his State, +and President of Harvard, was a speaker of great finish and elegance. +His addresses were mainly of the memorial and anniversary kind, and +were rather lectures and Ph. B. K. prolusions than speeches. Everett +was an instance of careful culture bestowed on a soil of no very great +natural richness. It is doubtful whether his classical orations on +Washington, the Republic, Bunker Hill Monument, and kindred themes, +have enough of the breath of life in them to preserve them much longer +in recollection. + +New England, during these years, did not take {429} that leading part +in the purely literary development of the country which it afterward +assumed. It had no names to match against those of Irving and Cooper. +Drake and Halleck--slender as was their performance in point of +quantity--were better poets than the Boston bards, Charles Sprague, +whose _Shakespere Ode_, delivered at the Boston theater in 1823, was +locally famous; and Richard Henry Dana, whose longish narrative poem, +the _Buccaneer_, 1827, once had admirers. But Boston has at no time +been without a serious intellectual life of its own, nor without a +circle of highly educated men of literary pursuits, even in default of +great geniuses. The _North American Review_, established in 1815, +though it has been wittily described as "ponderously revolving through +space" for a few years after its foundation, did not exist in an +absolute vacuum, but was scholarly, if somewhat heavy. Webster, to be +sure, was a Massachusetts man--as were Everett and Choate--but his +triumphs were won in the wider field of national politics. There was, +however, a movement at this time in the intellectual life of Boston and +Eastern Massachusetts, which, though not immediately contributory to +the finer kinds of literature, prepared the way, by its clarifying and +stimulating influences, for the eminent writers of the next generation. +This was the Unitarian revolt against Puritan orthodoxy, in which +William Ellery Channing was the principal leader. In a community so +intensely theological as New England it was natural that any {430} new +movement in thought should find its point of departure in the churches. +Accordingly, the progressive and democratic spirit of the age, which in +other parts of the country took other shapes, assumed in Massachusetts +the form of "liberal Christianity." Arminianism, Socinianism, and +other phases of anti-Trinitarian doctrine, had been latent in some of +the Congregational churches of Massachusetts for a number of years. +But about 1812 the heresy broke out openly, and within a few years from +that date most of the oldest and wealthiest church societies of Boston +and its vicinity had gone over to Unitarianism, and Harvard College had +been captured, too. In the controversy that ensued, and which was +carried on in numerous books, pamphlets, sermons, and periodicals, +there were eminent disputants on both sides. So far as this +controversy was concerned with the theological doctrine of the Trinity, +it has no place in a history of literature. But the issue went far +beyond that. Channing asserted the dignity of human nature against the +Calvinistic doctrine of innate depravity, and affirmed the rights of +human reason and man's capacity to judge of God. "We must start in +religion from our own souls," he said. And in his _Moral Argument +against Calvinism_, 1820, he wrote: "Nothing is gained to piety by +degrading human nature, for in the competency of this nature to know +and judge of God all piety has its foundation." In opposition to +Edwards's doctrine of necessity, he emphasized {431} the freedom of the +will. He maintained that the Calvinistic dogmas of original sin, +foreordination, election by grace, and eternal punishment were +inconsistent with the divine perfection, and made God a monster. In +Channing's view the great sanction of religious truth is the moral +sanction, is its agreement with the laws of conscience. He was a +passionate vindicator of the liberty of the individual not only as +against political oppression but against the tyranny of public opinion +over thought and conscience: "We were made for free action. This alone +is life, and enters into all that is good and great." This jealous +love of freedom inspired all that he did and wrote. It led him to join +the Antislavery party. It expressed itself in his elaborate +arraignment of Napoleon in the Unitarian organ, the _Christian +Examiner_, for 1827-28; in his _Remarks on Associations_, and his paper +_On the Character and Writings of John Milton_, 1826. This was his +most considerable contribution to literary criticism. It took for a +text Milton's recently discovered _Treatise on Christian Doctrine_--the +tendency of which was anti-Trinitarian--but it began with a general +defense of poetry against "those who are accustomed to speak of poetry +as light reading." This would now seem a somewhat superfluous +introduction to an article in any American review. But it shows the +nature of the milieu through which the liberal movement in Boston had +to make its way. To re-assert the dignity and usefulness of the +beautiful arts was, {432} perhaps, the chief service which the +Massachusetts Unitarians rendered to humanism. The traditional +prejudice of the Puritans against the ornamental side of life had to be +softened before polite literature could find a congenial atmosphere in +New England. In Channing's _Remarks on National Literature_, reviewing +a work published in 1823, he asks the question, "Do we possess what may +be called a national literature?" and answers it, by implication at +least, in the negative. That we do now possess a national literature +is in great part due to the influence of Channing and his associates, +although his own writings, being in the main controversial and, +therefore, of temporary interest, may not themselves take rank among +the permanent treasures of that literature. + + +1. Washington Irving. Knickerbocker's History of New York. The Sketch +Book. Bracebridge Hall. Tales of a Traveler. The Alhambra. Life of +Oliver Goldsmith. + +2. James Fenimore Cooper. The Spy. The Pilot. The Red Rover. The +Leather-Stocking Tales. + +3. Daniel Webster. Great Speeches and Orations. Boston: Little, +Brown, & Co. 1879. + +4. William Ellery Channing. The Character and Writings of John Milton. +The Life and Character of Napoleon Bonaparte. Slavery. [Vols. I. and +II. of the Works of William E. Channing. Boston: James Munroe & Co. +1841.] + +{433} + +5. Joseph Rodman Drake. The Culprit Fay. The American Flag. +[Selected Poems. New York. 1835.] + +6. Fitz-Greene Halleck. Marco Bozzaris. Alnwick Castle. On the +Death of Drake. [Poems. New York. 1827.] + + + +[1] Compare Carlyle's Herr Diogenes Teufelsdroeckh, in _Sartor +Resartus_, the author of the famous "Clothes Philosophy." + + + + +{434} + +CHAPTER IV. + +THE CONCORD WRITERS. + +1837-1861. + +There has been but one movement in the history of the American mind +which has given to literature a group of writers having coherence +enough to merit the name of a school. This was the great humanitarian +movement, or series of movements, in New England, which, beginning in +the Unitarianism of Channing, ran through its later phase in +Transcendentalism, and spent its last strength in the antislavery +agitation and the enthusiasms of the Civil War. The second stage of +this intellectual and social revolt was Transcendentalism, of which +Emerson wrote, in 1842: "The history of genius and of religion in these +times will be the history of this tendency." It culminated about +1840-41 in the establishment of the _Dial_ and the Brook Farm +Community, although Emerson had given the signal a few years before in +his little volume entitled _Nature_, 1836, his Phi-Beta Kappa address +at Harvard on the _American Scholar_, 1837, and his address in 1838 +before the Divinity School at Cambridge. Ralph Waldo Emerson +(1803-1882) was the prophet of the sect, and {435} Concord was its +Mecca; but the influence of the new ideas was not confined to the +little group of professed Transcendentalists; it extended to all the +young writers within reach, who struck their roots deeper into the soil +that it had loosened and freshened. We owe to it, in great measure, +not merely Emerson, Alcott, Margaret Fuller, and Thoreau, but +Hawthorne, Lowell, Whittier, and Holmes. + +In its strictest sense Transcendentalism was a restatement of the +idealistic philosophy, and an application of its beliefs to religion, +nature, and life. But in a looser sense, and as including the more +outward manifestations which drew popular attention most strongly, it +was the name given to that spirit of dissent and protest, of universal +inquiry and experiment, which marked the third and fourth decades of +this century in America, and especially in New England. The movement +was contemporary with political revolutions in Europe and with the +preaching of many novel gospels in religion, in sociology, in science, +education, medicine, and hygiene. New sects were formed, like the +Swedenborgians, Universalists, Spiritualists, Millerites, Second +Adventists, Shakers, Mormons, and Come-outers, some of whom believed in +trances, miracles, and direct revelations from the divine Spirit; +others in the quick coming of Christ, as deduced from the opening of +the seals and the number of the beast in the Apocalypse; and still +others in the reorganization of society and {436} of the family on a +different basis. New systems of education were tried, suggested by the +writings of the Swiss reformer, Pestalozzi, and others. The +pseudo-sciences of mesmerism and of phrenology, as taught by Gall and +Spurzheim, had numerous followers. In medicine, homeopathy, +hydropathy, and what Dr. Holmes calls "kindred delusions," made many +disciples. Numbers of persons, influenced by the doctrines of Graham +and other vegetarians, abjured the use of animal food, as injurious not +only to health but to a finer spirituality. Not a few refused to vote +or pay taxes. The writings of Fourier and St. Simon were translated, +and societies were established where co-operation and a community of +goods should take the place of selfish competition. + +About the year 1840 there were some thirty of these "phalansteries" in +America, many of which had their organs in the shape of weekly or +monthly journals, which advocated the principle of Association. The +best known of these was probably the _Harbinger_, the mouth-piece of +the famous Brook Farm Community, which was founded at West Roxbury, +Mass., in 1841, and lasted till 1847. The head man of Brook Farm was +George Ripley, a Unitarian clergyman, who had resigned his pulpit in +Boston to go into the movement, and who after its failure became and +remained for many years literary editor of the _New York Tribune_. +Among his associates were Charles A. Dana--now the editor of the +_Sun_--Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel {437} Hawthorne and others not +unknown to fame. The _Harbinger_, which ran from 1845 to 1849--two +years after the break up of the community--had among its contributors +many who were not Brook Farmers, but who sympathized more or less with +the experiment. Of the number were Horace Greeley, Dr. F. H. +Hedge--who did so much to introduce American readers to German +literature--J. S. Dwight, the musical critic, C. P. Cranch, the poet, +and younger men, like G. W. Curtis, and T. W. Higginson. A reader of +to-day, looking into an odd volume of the _Harbinger_, will find in it +some stimulating writing, together with a great deal of unintelligible +talk about "Harmonic Unity," "Love Germination," and other matters now +fallen silent. The most important literary result of this experiment +at "plain living and high thinking," with its queer mixture of culture +and agriculture, was Hawthorne's _Blithedale Romance_, which has for +its background an idealized picture of the community life, whose +heroine, Zenobia, has touches of Margaret Fuller; and whose hero, with +his hobby of prison reform, was a type of the one-idead philanthropists +that abounded in such an environment. Hawthorne's attitude was always +in part one of reserve and criticism, an attitude which is apparent in +the reminiscences of Brook Farm in his _American Note Books_, wherein +he speaks with a certain resentment of "Miss Fuller's transcendental +heifer," which hooked the other cows, and was evidently to Hawthorne's +{438} mind not unsymbolic in this respect of Miss Fuller herself. + +It was the day of seers and "Orphic" utterances; the air was full of +the enthusiasm of humanity and thick with philanthropic projects and +plans for the regeneration of the universe. The figure of the +wild-eyed, long-haired reformer--the man with a panacea--the "crank" of +our later terminology--became a familiar one. He abounded at +non-resistance conventions and meetings of universal peace societies +and of woman's rights associations. The movement had its grotesque +aspects, which Lowell has described in his essay on Thoreau. "Bran had +its apostles and the pre-sartorial simplicity of Adam its martyrs, +tailored impromptu from the tar-pot. . . . Not a few impecunious +zealots abjured the use of money (unless earned by other people), +professing to live on the internal revenues of the spirit. . . . +Communities were established where every thing was to be common but +common sense." + +This ferment has long since subsided and much of what was then seething +has gone off in vapor or other volatile products. But some very solid +matters also have been precipitated, some crystals of poetry +translucent, symmetrical, enduring. The immediate practical outcome +was disappointing, and the external history of the agitation is a +record of failed experiments, spurious sciences, Utopian philosophies, +and sects founded only to dwindle away or be reabsorbed into some form +of {439} orthodoxy. In the eyes of the conservative, or the +worldly-minded, or of the plain people who could not understand the +enigmatic utterances of the reformers, the dangerous or ludicrous sides +of transcendentalism were naturally uppermost. Nevertheless the +movement was but a new avatar of the old Puritan spirit; its moral +earnestness, its spirituality, its tenderness for the individual +conscience. Puritanism, too, in its day had run into grotesque +extremes. Emerson bore about the same relation to the absurder +outcroppings of transcendentalism that Milton bore to the New Lights, +Ranters, Fifth Monarchy Men, etc., of his time. There is in him that +mingling of idealism with an abiding sanity, and even a Yankee +shrewdness, which characterizes the race. The practical, inventive, +calculating, money-getting side of the Yankee has been made +sufficiently obvious. But the deep heart of New England is full of +dreams, mysticism, romance: + + "And in the day of sacrifice, + When heroes piled the pyre, + The dismal Massachusetts ice + Burned more than others' fire." + + +The one element which the odd and eccentric developments of this +movement shared in common with the real philosophy of transcendentalism +was the rejection of authority and the appeal to the private +consciousness as the sole standard of truth and right. This principle +certainly lay in the ethical {440} systems of Kant and Fichte, the +great transcendentalists of Germany. It had been strongly asserted by +Channing. Nay, it was the starting point of Puritanism itself, which +had drawn away from the ceremonial religion of the English Church and +by its Congregational system had made each church society independent +in doctrine and worship. And although Puritan orthodoxy in New England +had grown rigid and dogmatic, it had never used the weapons of +obscurantism. By encouraging education to the utmost it had shown its +willingness to submit its beliefs to the fullest discussion and had put +into the hands of dissent the means with which to attack them. + +In its theological aspect transcendentalism was a departure from +conservative Unitarianism, as that had been from Calvinism. From +Edwards to Channing, from Channing to Emerson and Theodore Parker, +there was a natural and logical unfolding. Not logical in the sense +that Channing accepted Edwards' premises and pushed them out to their +conclusions, or that Parker accepted all of Channing's premises, but in +the sense that the rigid pushing out of Edwards' premises into their +conclusions by himself and his followers had brought about a moral +_reductio ad absurdum_ and a state of opinion against which Channing +rebelled; and that Channing, as it seemed to Parker, stopped short in +the carrying out of his own principles. Thus the "Channing +Unitarians," while denying that Christ was God, had held that he was of +{441} divine nature, was the Son of God, and had existed before he came +into the world. While rejecting the doctrine of the "Vicarious +sacrifice" they maintained that Christ was a mediator and intercessor, +and that his supernatural nature was testified by miracles. For Parker +and Emerson it was easy to take the step to the assertion that Christ +was a good and great man, divine only in the sense that God possessed +him more fully than any other man known in history; that it was his +preaching and example that brought salvation to men, and not any +special mediation or intercession, and that his own words and acts, and +not miracles, are the only and the sufficient witness to his mission. +In the view of the transcendentalists Christ was as human as Buddha, +Socrates or Confucius, and the Bible was but one among the "Ethnical +Scriptures" or sacred writings of the peoples, passages from which were +published in the transcendental organ, the _Dial_. As against these +new views Channing Unitarianism occupied already a conservative +position. The Unitarians as a body had never been very numerous +outside of Eastern Massachusets. They had a few churches in New York +and in the larger cities and towns elsewhere, but the sect, as such, +was a local one. Orthodoxy made a sturdy fight against the heresy, +under leaders like Leonard Woods and Moses Stuart, of Andover, and +Lyman Beecher, of Connecticut. In the neighboring State of +Connecticut, for example, there was until lately, for {442} a period of +several years, no distinctly Unitarian congregation worshiping in a +church edifice of its own. On the other hand, the Unitarians claimed, +with justice, that their opinions had to a great extent modified the +theology of the orthodox churches. The writings of Horace Bushnell, of +Hartford, one of the most eminent Congregational divines, approach +Unitarianism in their interpretation of the doctrine of the Atonement; +and the "progressive orthodoxy" of Andover is certainly not the +Calvinism of Thomas Hooker or of Jonathan Edwards. But it seemed to +the transcendentalists that conservative Unitarianism was too negative +and "cultured," and Margaret Fuller complained of the coldness of the +Boston pulpits. While contrariwise the central thought of +transcendentalism, that the soul has an immediate connection with God, +was pronounced by Dr. Channing a "crude speculation." This was the +thought of Emerson's address in 1838 before the Cambridge Divinity +School, and it was at once made the object of attack by conservative +Unitarians like Henry Ware and Andrews Norton. The latter in an +address before the same audience, on the _Latest Form of Infidelity_, +said: "Nothing is left that can be called Christianity if its +miraculous character be denied. . . . There can be no intuition, no +direct perception of the truth of Christianity." And in a pamphlet +supporting the same side of the question he added: "It is not an +intelligible error but a mere absurdity to maintain {443} that we are +conscious, or have an intuitive knowledge, of the being of God, of our +own immortality . . . or of any other fact of religion." Ripley and +Parker replied in Emerson's defense; but Emerson himself would never be +drawn into controversy. He said that he could not argue. He announced +truths; his method was that of the seer, not of the disputant. In 1832 +Emerson, who was a Unitarian clergyman, and descended from eight +generations of clergymen, had resigned the pastorate of the Second +Church of Boston because he could not conscientiously administer the +sacrament of the communion--which he regarded as a mere act of +commemoration--in the sense in which it was understood by his +parishioners. Thenceforth, though he sometimes occupied Unitarian +pulpits, and was, indeed, all his life a kind of "lay preacher," he +never assumed the pastorate of a church. The representative of +transcendentalism in the pulpit was Theodore Parker, an eloquent +preacher, an eager debater and a prolific writer on many subjects, +whose collected works fill fourteen volumes. Parker was a man of +strongly human traits, passionate, independent, intensely religious, +but intensely radical, who made for himself a large personal following. +The more advanced wing of the Unitarians were called, after him, +"Parkerites." Many of the Unitarian churches refused to "fellowship" +with him; and the large congregation, or audience, which assembled in +Music Hall to hear his sermons was {444} stigmatized as a "boisterous +assembly" which came to hear Parker preach irreligion. + +It has been said that, on its philosophical side, New England +transcendentalism was a restatement of idealism. The impulse came from +Germany, from the philosophical writings of Kant, Fichte, Jacobi, and +Schelling, and from the works of Coleridge and Carlyle, who had +domesticated German thought in England. In Channing's _Remarks on a +National Literature_, quoted in our last chapter, the essayist urged +that our scholars should study the authors of France and Germany as one +means of emancipating American letters from a slavish dependence on +British literature. And in fact German literature began, not long +after, to be eagerly studied in New England. Emerson published an +American edition of Carlyle's _Miscellanies_, including his essays on +German writers that had appeared in England between 1822 and 1830. In +1838 Ripley began to publish _Specimens of Foreign Standard +Literature_, which extended to fourteen volumes. In his work of +translating and supplying introductions to the matter selected he was +helped by Ripley, Margaret Fuller, John S. Dwight and others who had +more or less connection with the transcendental movement. + +The definition of the new faith given by Emerson in his lecture on the +_Transcendentalist_, 1842, is as follows: "What is popularly called +transcendentalism among us is idealism. . . . The idealism of the +present day acquired the name of transcendental {445} from the use of +that term by Immanuel Kant, who replied to the skeptical philosophy of +Locke, which insisted that there was nothing in the intellect which was +not previously in the experience of the senses, by showing that there +was a very important class of ideas, or imperative forms, which did not +come by experience, but through which experience was acquired; that +these were intuitions of the mind itself, and he denominated them +_transcendental_ forms." Idealism denies the independent existence of +matter. Transcendentalism claims for the innate ideas of God and the +soul a higher assurance of reality than for the knowledge of the +outside world derived through the senses. Emerson shares the "noble +doubt" of idealism. He calls the universe a shade, a dream, "this +great apparition." "It is a sufficient account of that appearance we +call the world," he wrote in _Nature_, "that God will teach a human +mind, and so makes it the receiver of a certain number of congruent +sensations which we call sun and moon, man and woman, house and trade. +In my utter impotence to test the authenticity of the report of my +senses, to know whether the impressions on me correspond with outlying +objects, what difference does it make whether Orion is up there in +heaven or some god paints the image in the firmament of the soul?" On +the other hand our evidence of the existence of God and of our own +souls, and our knowledge of right and wrong, are immediate, and are +independent of the senses. {446} We are in direct communication with +the "Oversoul," the infinite Spirit. "The soul in man is the +background of our being--an immensity not possessed, that cannot be +possessed." "From within or from behind a light shines through us upon +things, and makes us aware that we are nothing, but the light is all." +Revelation is "an influx of the Divine mind into our mind. It is an +ebb of the individual rivulet before the flowing surges of the sea of +life." In moods of exaltation, and especially in the presence of +nature, this contact of the individual soul with the absolute is felt. +"All mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am +nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate +through me; I am part and particle of God." The existence and +attributes of God are not deducible from history or from natural +theology, but are thus directly given us in consciousness. In his +essay on the _Transcendentalist_, Emerson says: "His experience +inclines him to behold the procession of facts you call the world +as flowing perpetually outward from an invisible, unsounded center +in himself; center alike of him and of them and necessitating +him to regard all things as having a subjective or relative +existence--relative to that aforesaid Unknown Center of him. There is +no bar or wall in the soul where man, the effect, ceases, and God, the +cause, begins. We lie open on one side to the deeps of spiritual +nature, to the attributes of God." + +{447} + +Emerson's point of view, though familiar to students of philosophy, is +strange to the popular understanding, and hence has arisen the +complaint of his obscurity. Moreover, he apprehended and expressed +these ideas as a poet, in figurative and emotional language, and not as +a metaphysician, in a formulated statement. His own position in +relation to systematic philosophers is described in what he says of +Plato, in his series of sketches entitled _Representative Men_, 1850: +"He has not a system. The dearest disciples and defenders are at +fault. He attempted a theory of the universe, and his theory is not +complete or self-evident. One man thinks he means this, and another +that; he has said one thing in one place, and the reverse of it in +another place." It happens, therefore, that, to many students of more +formal philosophies Emerson's meaning seems elusive, and he appears to +write from temporary moods and to contradict himself. Had he attempted +a reasoned exposition of the transcendental philosophy, instead of +writing essays and poems, he might have added one more to the number of +system-mongers; but he would not have taken that significant place +which he occupies in the general literature of the time, nor exerted +that wide influence upon younger writers which has been one of the +stimulating forces in American thought. It was because Emerson was a +poet that he is our Emerson. And yet it would be impossible to +disentangle his peculiar philosophical ideas from the body of his {448} +writings and to leave the latter to stand upon their merits as +literature merely. He is the poet of certain high abstractions, and +his religion is central to all his work--excepting, perhaps, his +_English Traits_, 1856, an acute study of national characteristics, and +a few of his essays and verses, which are independent of any particular +philosophical standpoint. + +When Emerson resigned his parish in 1832 he made a short trip to +Europe, where he visited Carlyle at Craigenputtoch, and Landor at +Florence. On his return he retired to his birthplace, the village of +Concord, Massachusetts, and settled down among his books and his +fields, becoming a sort of "glorified farmer," but issuing frequently +from his retirement to instruct and delight audiences of thoughtful +people at Boston and at other points all through the country. Emerson +was the perfection of a lyceum lecturer. His manner was quiet but +forcible; his voice of charming quality, and his enunciation clean cut +and refined. The sentence was his unit in composition. His lectures +seemed to begin anywhere and to end anywhere, and to resemble strings +of exquisitely polished sayings rather than continuous discourses. His +printed essays, with unimportant exceptions, were first written and +delivered as lectures. In 1836 he published his first book, _Nature_, +which remains the most systematic statement of his philosophy. It +opened a fresh spring-head in American thought, and the words of its +introduction announced that its author had broken with {449} the past. +"Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? +Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of +tradition, and a religion by revelation to us and not the history of +theirs?" + +It took eleven years to sell five hundred copies of this little book. +But the year following its publication the remarkable Phi Beta Kappa +address at Cambridge, on the _American Scholar_, electrified the little +public of the university. This is described by Lowell as "an event +without any former parallel in our literary annals, a scene to be +always treasured in the memory for its picturesqueness and its +inspiration. What crowded and breathless aisles, what windows +clustering with eager heads, what grim silence of foregone dissent!" +To Concord came many kindred spirits, drawn by Emerson's magnetic +attraction. Thither came, from Connecticut, Amos Bronson Alcott, born +a few years before Emerson, whom he outlived; a quaint and benignant +figure, a visionary and a mystic even among the transcendentalists +themselves, and one who lived in unworldly simplicity the life of the +soul. Alcott had taught school at Cheshire, Conn., and afterward at +Boston on an original plan--compelling his scholars, for example, to +flog _him_, when they did wrong, instead of taking a flogging +themselves. The experiment was successful until his _Conversations on +the Gospels_, in Boston, and his insistence upon admitting colored +children to his benches, offended conservative opinion and {450} broke +up his school. Alcott renounced the eating of animal food in 1835. He +believed in the union of thought and manual labor, and supported +himself for some years by the work of his hands, gardening, cutting +wood, etc. He traveled into the West and elsewhere, holding +conversations on philosophy, education, and religion. He set up a +little community at the village of Harvard, which was rather less +successful than Brook Farm, and he contributed _Orphic Sayings_ to the +_Dial_, which were harder for the exoteric to understand than even +Emerson's _Brahma_ or the _Over-soul_. + +Thither came, also, Sarah Margaret Fuller, the most intellectual woman +of her time in America, an eager student of Greek and German literature +and an ardent seeker after the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. She +threw herself into many causes--temperance, antislavery, and the higher +education of women. Her brilliant conversation classes in Boston +attracted many "minds" of her own sex. Subsequently, as literary +editor of the _New York Tribune_, she furnished a wider public with +reviews and book-notices of great ability. She took part in the Brook +Farm experiment, and she edited the _Dial_ for a time, contributing to +it the papers afterward expanded into her most considerable book, +_Woman in the Nineteenth Century_. In 1846 she went abroad, and at +Rome took part in the revolutionary movement of Mazzini, having charge +of one of the hospitals during the siege of the city by the {451} +French. In 1847 she married an impecunious Italian nobleman, the +Marquis Ossoli. In 1850 the ship on which she was returning to +America, with her husband and child, was wrecked on Fire Island beach +and all three were lost. Margaret Fuller's collected writings are +somewhat disappointing, being mainly of temporary interest. She lives +less through her books than through the memoirs of her friends, +Emerson, James Freeman Clarke, T. W. Higginson, and others who knew her +as a personal influence. Her strenuous and rather overbearing +individuality made an impression not altogether agreeable upon many of +her contemporaries. Lowell introduced a caricature of her as "Miranda" +into his _Fable for Critics_, and Hawthorne's caustic sketch of her, +preserved in the biography written by his son, has given great offense +to her admirers. "Such a determination to _eat_ this huge universe!" +was Carlyle's characteristic comment on her appetite for knowledge and +aspirations after perfection. + +To Concord also came Nathaniel Hawthorne, who took up his residence +there first at the "Old Manse," and afterward at "The Wayside." Though +naturally an idealist, he said that he came too late to Concord to fall +decidedly under Emerson's influence. Of that he would have stood in +little danger even had he come earlier. He appreciated the deep and +subtle quality of Emerson's imagination, but his own shy genius always +jealously guarded its independence and {452} resented the too close +approaches of an alien mind. Among the native disciples of Emerson at +Concord the most noteworthy were Henry Thoreau, and his friend and +biographer, William Ellery Channing, Jr., a nephew of the great +Channing. Channing was a contributor to the _Dial_, and he published a +volume of poems which elicited a fiercely contemptuous review from +Edgar Poe. Though disfigured by affectation and obscurity, many of +Channing's verses were distinguished by true poetic feeling, and the +last line of his little piece, _A Poet's Hope_, + + "If my bark sink 'tis to another sea," + +has taken a permanent place in the literature of transcendentalism. + +The private organ of the transcendentalists was the _Dial_, a quarterly +magazine, published from 1840 to 1844, and edited by Emerson and +Margaret Fuller. Among its contributors, besides those already +mentioned, were Ripley, Thoreau, Parker, James Freeman Clarke, Charles +A. Dana, John S. Dwight, C. P. Cranch, Charles Emerson and William H. +Channing, another nephew of Dr. Channing. It contained, along with a +good deal of rubbish, some of the best poetry and prose that have been +published in America. The most lasting part of its contents were the +contributions of Emerson and Thoreau. But even as a whole, it is so +unique a way-mark in the history of our literature that all its four +volumes--copies of which {453} had become scarce--have been recently +reprinted in answer to a demand certainly very unusual in the case of +an extinct periodical. + +From time to time Emerson collected and published his lectures under +various titles. A first series of _Essays_ came out in 1841, and a +second in 1844; the _Conduct of Life_ in 1860, _Society and Solitude_ +in 1870, _Letters and Social Aims_, in 1876, and the _Fortune of the +Republic_ in 1878. In 1847 he issued a volume of _Poems_, and 1865 +_Mayday and Other Poems_. These writings, as a whole, were variations +on a single theme, expansions and illustrations of the philosophy set +forth in _Nature_, and his early addresses. They were strikingly +original, rich in thought, filled with wisdom, with lofty morality and +spiritual religion. Emerson, said Lowell, first "cut the cable that +bound us to English thought and gave us a chance at the dangers and +glories of blue water." Nevertheless, as it used to be the fashion to +find an English analogue for every American writer, so that Cooper was +called the American Scott, and Mrs. Sigourney was described as the +Hemans of America, a well-worn critical tradition has coupled Emerson +with Carlyle. That his mind received a nudge from Carlyle's early +essays and from _Sartor Resartus_ is beyond a doubt. They were +life-long friends and correspondents, and Emerson's _Representative +Men_ is, in some sort, a counterpart of Carlyle's _Hero Worship_. But +in temper and style the two writers were widely different. Carlyle's +pessimism and {454} dissatisfaction with the general drift of things +gained upon him more and more, while Emerson was a consistent optimist +to the end. The last of his writings published during his life-time, +the _Fortune of the Republic_, contrasts strangely in its hopefulness +with the desperation of Carlyle's later utterances. Even in presence +of the doubt as to man's personal immortality he takes refuge in a high +and stoical faith. "I think all sound minds rest on a certain +preliminary conviction, namely: that if it be best that conscious +personal life shall continue it will continue, and if not best, then it +will not; and we, if we saw the whole, should of course see that it was +better so." It is this conviction that gives to Emerson's writings +their serenity and their tonic quality at the same time that it narrows +the range of his dealings with life. As the idealist declines to +cross-examine those facts which he regards as merely phenomenal, and +looks upon this outward face of things as upon a mask not worthy to +dismay the fixed soul, so the optimist turns away his eyes from the +evil which he disposes of as merely negative, as the shadow of the +good. Hawthorne's interest in the problem of sin finds little place in +Emerson's philosophy. Passion comes not nigh him and _Faust_ disturbs +him with its disagreeableness. Pessimism is to him "the only +skepticism." + +The greatest literature is that which is most broadly human, or, in +other words, that which will square best with all philosophies. But +Emerson's {455} genius was interpretive rather than constructive. The +poet dwells in the cheerful world of phenomena. He is most the poet +who realizes most intensely the good and the bad of human life. But +Idealism makes experience shadowy and subordinates action to +contemplation. To it the cities of men, with their "frivolous +populations," + + ". . . are but sailing foam-bells + Along thought's causing stream." + + +Shakespere does not forget that the world will one day vanish "like the +baseless fabric of a vision," and that we ourselves are "such stuff as +dreams are made on;" but this is not the mood in which he dwells. +Again: while it is for the philosopher to reduce variety to unity, it +is the poet's task to detect the manifold under uniformity. In the +great creative poets, in Shakespere and Dante and Goethe, how infinite +the swarm of persons, the multitude of forms! But with Emerson the +type is important, the common element. "In youth we are mad for +persons. But the larger experience of man discovers the identical +nature appearing through them all." "The same--the same!" he exclaims +in his essay on _Plato_. "Friend and foe are of one stuff; the +plowman, the plow and the furrow are of one stuff." And this is the +thought in _Brahma_: + + "They reckon ill who leave me out; + When me they fly I am the wings: + I am the doubter and the doubt, + And I the hymn the Brahmin sings." + +{456} It is not easy to fancy a writer who holds this altitude toward +"persons" descending to the composition of a novel or a play. Emerson +showed, indeed, a fine power of character analysis in his _English +Traits_ and _Representative Men_ and in his memoirs of Thoreau and +Margaret Fuller. There is even a sort of dramatic humor in his +portrait of Socrates. But upon the whole he stands midway between +constructive artists, whose instinct it is to tell a story or sing a +song, ami philosophers, like Schelling, who give poetic expression to a +system of thought. He belongs to the class of minds of which Sir +Thomas Browne is the best English example. He set a high value upon +Browne, to whose style his own, though far more sententious, bears a +resemblance. Browne's saying, for example, "All things are artificial, +for nature is the art of God," sounds like Emerson, whose workmanship, +for the rest, in his prose essays was exceedingly fine and close. He +was not afraid to be homely and racy in expressing thought of the +highest spirituality. "Hitch your wagon to a star" is a good instance +of his favorite manner. + +Emerson's verse often seems careless in technique. Most of his pieces +are scrappy and have the air of runic rimes, or little oracular +"voicings"--as they say in Concord--in rhythmic shape, of single +thoughts on "Worship," "Character," "Heroism," "Art," "Politics," +"Culture," etc. The content is the important thing, and the form is +too frequently awkward or bald. Sometimes, indeed, in the {457} +clear-obscure of Emerson's poetry the deep wisdom of the thought finds +its most natural expression in the imaginative simplicity of the +language. But though this artlessness in him became too frequently in +his imitators, like Thoreau and Ellery Channing, an obtruded +simplicity, among his own poems are many that leave nothing to be +desired in point of wording and of verse. His _Hymn Sung at the +Completion of the Concord Monument_, in 1836, is the perfect model of +an occasional poem. Its lines were on every one's lips at the time of +the centennial celebrations in 1876, and "the shot heard round the +world" has hardly echoed farther than the song which chronicled it. +Equally current is the stanza from _Voluntaries_: + + "So nigh is grandeur to our dust, + So near is God to man, + When Duty whispers low, 'Thou must,' + The youth replies, 'I can.'" + + +So, too, the famous lines from the _Problem_: + + "The hand that rounded Peter's dome, + And groined the aisles of Christian Rome, + Wrought in a sad sincerity. + Himself from God he could not free; + He builded better than he knew; + The conscious stone to beauty grew." + + +The most noteworthy of Emerson's pupils was Henry David Thoreau, "the +poet-naturalist." After his graduation from Harvard College, in 1837, +Thoreau engaged in school teaching and in {458} the manufacture of +lead-pencils, but soon gave up all regular business and devoted himself +to walking, reading, and the study of nature. He was at one time +private tutor in a family on Staten Island, and he supported himself +for a season by doing odd jobs in land surveying for the farmers about +Concord. In 1845 he built, with his own hands, a small cabin on the +banks of Walden Pond, near Concord, and lived there in seclusion for +two years. His expenses during these years were nine cents a day, and +he gave an account of his experiment in his most characteristic book, +_Walden_, published in 1854. His _Week on the Concord and Merrimac +Rivers_ appeared in 1849. From time to time he went farther afield, +and his journeys were reported in _Cape Cod_, the _Maine Woods_, +_Excursions_, and a _Yankee in Canada_, all of which, as well as a +volume of _Letters_ and _Early Spring in Massachusetts_, have been +given to the public since his death, which happened in 1862. No one +has lived so close to nature, and written of it so intimately, as +Thoreau. His life was a lesson in economy and a sermon on Emerson's +text, "Lessen your denominator." He wished to reduce existence to the +simplest terms--to + + "live all alone + Close to the bone, + And where life is sweet + Constantly eat." + +He had a passion for the wild, and seems like an Anglo-Saxon reversion +to the type of the Red {459} Indian. The most distinctive note in +Thoreau is his inhumanity. Emerson spoke of him as a "perfect piece of +stoicism." "Man," said Thoreau, "is only the point on which I stand." +He strove to realize the objective life of nature--nature in its +aloofness from man; to identify himself, with the moose and the +mountain. He listened, with his ear close to the ground, for the voice +of the earth. "What are the trees saying?" he exclaimed. Following +upon the trail of the lumberman he asked the primeval wilderness for +its secret, and + + "saw beneath dim aisles, in odorous beds, + The slight linnaea hang its twin-born heads." + +He tried to interpret the thought of Ktaadn and to fathom the meaning +of the billows on the back of Cape Cod, in their indifference to the +shipwrecked bodies that they rolled ashore. "After sitting in my +chamber many days, reading the poets, I have been out early on a foggy +morning and heard the cry of an owl in a neighboring wood as from a +nature behind the common, unexplored by science or by literature. None +of the feathered race has yet realized my youthful conceptions of the +woodland depths. I had seen the red election-birds brought from their +recesses on my comrade's string, and fancied that their plumage would +assume stranger and more dazzling colors, like the tints of evening, in +proportion as I advanced farther into the darkness and solitude of the +forest. Still less have I seen such strong and wild tints on any +poet's string." + +{460} + +It was on the mystical side that Thoreau apprehended transcendentalism. +Mysticism has been defined as the soul's recognition of its identity +with nature. This thought lies plainly in Schelling's philosophy, and +he illustrated it by his famous figure of the magnet. Mind and nature +are one; they are the positive and negative poles of the magnet. In +man, the Absolute--that is, God--becomes conscious of himself; makes of +himself, as nature, an object to himself as mind. "The souls of men," +said Schelling, "are but the innumerable individual eyes with which our +infinite World-Spirit beholds himself." This thought is also clearly +present in Emerson's view of nature, and has caused him to be accused +of pantheism. But if by pantheism is meant the doctrine that the +underlying principle of the universe is matter or force, none of the +transcendentalists was a pantheist. In their view nature was divine. +Their poetry is always haunted by the sense of a spiritual reality +which abides beyond the phenomena. Thus in Emerson's _Two Rivers_: + + "Thy summer voice, Musketaquit,[1] + Repeats the music of the rain, + But sweeter rivers pulsing flit + Through thee as thou through Concord plain. + + "Thou in thy narrow banks art pent: + The stream I love unbounded goes; + Through flood and sea and firmament, + Through light, through life, it forward flows. + +{461} + + "I see the inundation sweet, + I hear the spending of the stream, + Through years, through men, through nature fleet, + Through passion, thought, through power and dream." + + +This mood occurs frequently in Thoreau. The hard world of matter +becomes suddenly all fluent and spiritual, and he sees himself in +it--sees God. "This earth," he cries, "which is spread out like a map +around me, is but the lining of my inmost soul exposed." "In _me_ is +the sucker that I see;" and, of Walden Pond, + + "I am its stony shore, + And the breeze that passes o'er." + + +"Suddenly old Time winked at me--ah, you know me, you rogue--and news +had come that IT was well. That ancient universe is in such capital +health, I think, undoubtedly, it will never die. . . . I see, smell, +taste, hear, feel that everlasting something to which we are allied, at +once our maker, our abode, our destiny, our very selves." It was +something ulterior that Thoreau sought in nature. "The other world," +he wrote, "is all my art: my pencils will draw no other: my jackknife +will cut nothing else." Thoreau did not scorn, however, like Emerson, +to "examine too microscopically the universal tablet." He was a close +observer and accurate reporter of the ways of birds and plants and the +minuter aspects of nature. He has had many followers, who have +produced much pleasant literature on out-door {462} life. But in none +of them is there that unique combination of the poet, the naturalist +and the mystic which gives his page its wild original flavor. He had +the woodcraft of a hunter and the eye of a botanist, but his +imagination did not stop short with the fact. The sound of a tree +falling in the Maine woods was to him "as though a door had shut +somewhere in the damp and shaggy wilderness." He saw small things in +cosmic relations. His trip down the tame Concord has for the reader +the excitement of a voyage of exploration into far and unknown regions. +The river just above Sherman's Bridge, in time of flood "when the wind +blows freshly on a raw March day, heaving up the surface into dark and +sober billows," was like Lake Huron, "and you may run aground on +Cranberry Island," and "get as good a freezing there as anywhere on the +North-west coast." He said that most of the phenomena described in +Kane's voyages could be observed in Concord. + +The literature of transcendentalism was like the light of the stars in +a winter night, keen and cold and high. It had the pale cast of +thought, and was almost too spiritual and remote to "hit the sense of +mortal sight." But it was at least indigenous. If not an American +literature--not national and not inclusive of all sides of American +life--it was, at all events, a genuine New England literature and true +to the spirit of its section. The tough Puritan stock had at last put +forth a {463} blossom which compared with the warm, robust growths of +English soil even as the delicate wind flower of the northern spring +compares with the cowslips and daisies of old England. + +In 1842 Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) the greatest American romancer, +came to Concord. He had recently left Brook Farm, had just been +married, and with his bride he settled down in the "Old Manse" for +three paradisaical years. A picture of this protracted honeymoon and +this sequestered life, as tranquil as the slow stream on whose banks it +was passed, is given in the introductory chapter to his _Mosses from an +Old Manse_, 1846, and in the more personal and confidential records of +his _American Note Books_, posthumously published. Hawthorne was +thirty-eight when he took his place among the Concord literati. His +childhood and youth had been spent partly at his birthplace, the old +and already somewhat decayed sea-port town of Salem, and partly at his +grandfather's farm on Sebago Lake, in Maine, then on the edge of the +primitive forest. Maine did not become a State, indeed, until 1820, +the year before Hawthorne entered Bowdoin College, whence he was +graduated in 1825, in the same class with Henry W. Longfellow and one +year behind Franklin Pierce, afterward President of the United States. +After leaving college Hawthorne buried himself for years in the +seclusion of his home at Salem. His mother, who was early widowed, had +withdrawn entirely from the world. For months {464} at a time +Hawthorne kept his room, seeing no other society than that of his +mother and sisters, reading all sorts of books and writing wild tales, +most of which he destroyed as soon as he had written them. At twilight +he would emerge from the house for a solitary ramble through the +streets of the town or along the sea-side. Old Salem had much that was +picturesque in its associations. It had been the scene of the witch +trials in the seventeenth century, and it abounded in ancient mansions, +the homes of retired whalers and India merchants. Hawthorne's father +had been a ship captain, and many of his ancestors had followed the +sea. One of his forefathers, moreover, had been a certain Judge +Hawthorne, who in 1691 had sentenced several of the witches to death. +The thought of this affected Hawthorne's imagination with a pleasing +horror and he utilized it afterward in his _House of the Seven Gables_. +Many of the old Salem houses, too, had their family histories, with now +and then the hint of some obscure crime or dark misfortune which +haunted posterity with its curse till all the stock died out, or fell +into poverty and evil ways, as in the Pyncheon family of Hawthorne's +romance. In the preface to the _Marble Faun_ Hawthorne wrote: "No +author without a trial can conceive of the difficulty of writing a +romance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no +mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor any thing but a +commonplace prosperity in broad and simple daylight." And yet it may +{465} be doubted whether any environment could have been found more +fitted to his peculiar genius than this of his native town, or any +preparation better calculated to ripen the faculty that was in him than +these long, lonely years of waiting and brooding thought. From time to +time he contributed a story or a sketch to some periodical, such as S. +G. Goodrich's Annual, the _Token_, or the _Knickerbocker Magazine_. +Some of these attracted the attention of the judicious; but they were +anonymous and signed by various _noms de plume_, and their author was +at this time--to use his own words--"the obscurest man of letters in +America." In 1828 he had issued anonymously and at his own expense a +short romance, entitled _Fanshawe_. It had little success, and copies +of the first edition are now exceedingly rare. In 1837 he published a +collection of his magazine pieces under the title, _Twice Told Tales_. +The book was generously praised in the _North American Review_ by his +former classmate, Longfellow; and Edgar Poe showed his keen critical +perception by predicting that the writer would easily put himself at +the head of imaginative literature in America if he would discard +allegory, drop short stories and compose a genuine romance. Poe +compared Hawthorne's work with that of the German romancer, Tieck, and +it is interesting to find confirmation of this dictum in passages of +the _American Note Books_, in which Hawthorne speaks of laboring over +Tieck with a German dictionary. The {466} _Twice Told Tales_ are the +work of a recluse, who makes guesses at life from a knowledge of his +own heart, acquired by a habit of introspection, but who has had little +contact with men. Many of them were shadowy and others were morbid and +unwholesome. But their gloom was of an interior kind, never the +physically horrible of Poe. It arose from weird psychological +situations like that of _Ethan Brand_ in his search for the +unpardonable sin. Hawthorne was true to the inherited instinct of +Puritanism; he took the conscience for his theme, and in these early +tales he was already absorbed in the problem of evil, the subtle ways +in which sin works out its retribution, and the species of fate or +necessity that the wrong-doer makes for himself in the inevitable +sequences of his crime. Hawthorne was strongly drawn toward symbols +and types, and never quite followed Poe's advice to abandon allegory. +The _Scarlet Letter_ and his other romances are not, indeed, strictly +allegories, since the characters are men and women and not mere +personifications of abstract qualities. Still they all have a certain +allegorical tinge. In the _Marble Faun_, for example, Hilda, Kenyon, +Miriam and Donatello have been ingeniously explained as +personifications respectively of the conscience, the reason, the +imagination and the senses. Without going so far as this, it is +possible to see in these and in Hawthorne's other creations something +typical and representative. He uses his characters like algebraic +symbols to work {467} out certain problems with: they are rather more +and yet rather less than flesh and blood individuals. The stories in +_Twice Told Tales_ and in the second collection, _Mosses from an Old +Manse_, 1846, are more openly allegorical than his later work. Thus +the _Minister's Black Veil_ is a sort of anticipation of Arthur +Dimmesdale in the _Scarlet Letter_. From 1846 to 1849 Hawthorne held +the position of Surveyor of the Custom House of Salem. In the preface +to the _Scarlet Letter_ he sketched some of the government officials +with whom this office had brought him into contact in a way that gave +some offense to the friends of the victims and a great deal of +amusement to the public. Hawthorne's humor was quiet and fine, like +Irving's, but less genial and with a more satiric edge to it. The book +last named was written at Salem and published in 1850, just before its +author's removal to Lenox, now a sort of inland Newport, but then an +unfashionable resort among the Berkshire hills. Whatever obscurity may +have hung over Hawthorne hitherto was effectually dissolved by this +powerful tale, which was as vivid in coloring as the implication of its +title. Hawthorne chose for his background the somber life of the early +settlers in New England. He had always been drawn toward this part of +American history, and in _Twice Told Tales_ had given some +illustrations of it in _Endicott's Red Cross_ and _Legends of the +Province House_. Against this dark foil moved in strong relief the +figures of Hester {468} Prynne, the woman taken in adultery, her +paramour, the Rev. Arthur Dimmesdale, her husband, old Roger +Chillingworth, and her illegitimate child. In tragic power, in its +grasp of the elementary passions of human nature and its deep and +subtle insight into the inmost secrets of the heart, this is +Hawthorne's greatest book. He never crowded his canvas with figures. +In the _Blithedale Romance_ and the _Marble Faun_ there is the same +_parti carre_ or group of four characters. In the _House of the Seven +Gables_ there are five. The last mentioned of these, published in +1852, was of a more subdued intensity than the _Scarlet Letter_, but +equally original and, upon the whole, perhaps equally good. The +_Blithedale Romance_, published in the same year, though not strikingly +inferior to the others, adhered more to conventional patterns in its +plot and in the sensational nature of its ending. The suicide of the +heroine by drowning, and the terrible scene of the recovery of her +body, were suggested to the author by an experience of his own on +Concord River, the account of which, in his own words, may be read in +Julian Hawthorne's _Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife_. In 1852 +Hawthorne returned to Concord and bought the "Wayside" property, which +he retained until his death. But in the following year his old college +friend Pierce, now become President, appointed him Consul to Liverpool, +and he went abroad for seven years. The most valuable fruit of his +foreign residence was the {469} romance of the _Marble Faun_, 1860; the +longest of his fictions and the richest in descriptive beauty. The +theme of this was the development of the soul through the experience of +sin. There is a haunting mystery thrown about the story, like a soft +veil of mist, veiling the beginning and the end. There is even a +delicate teasing suggestion of the preternatural in Donatello, the +Faun, a creation as original as Shakspere's Caliban, or Fouque's +Undine, and yet quite on this side the border-line of the human. _Our +Old Home_, a book of charming papers on England, was published in 1863. +Manifold experience of life and contact with men, affording scope for +his always keen observation, had added range, fullness, warmth to the +imaginative subtlety which had manifested itself even in his earliest +tales. Two admirable books for children, the _Wonder Book_ and +_Tanglewood Tales_, in which the classical mythologies were retold; +should also be mentioned in the list of Hawthorne's writings, as well +as the _American_, _English_, and _Italian Note Books_, the first of +which contains the seed thoughts of some of his finished works, +together with hundreds of hints for plots, episodes, descriptions, +etc., which he never found time to work out. Hawthorne's style, in his +first sketches and stories a little stilted and "bookish," gradually +acquired an exquisite perfection, and is as well worth study as that of +any prose classic in the English tongue. + +Hawthorne was no transcendentalist. He dwelt {470} much in a world of +ideas, and he sometimes doubted whether the tree on the bank or its +image in the stream were the more real. But this had little in common +with the philosophical idealism of his neighbors. He reverenced +Emerson, and he held kindly intercourse--albeit a silent man and easily +bored--with Thoreau and Ellery Channing, and even with Margaret Fuller. +But his sharp eyes saw whatever was whimsical or weak in the apostles +of the new faith. He had little enthusiasm for causes or reforms, and +among so many Abolitionists he remained a Democrat, and even wrote a +campaign life of his friend Pierce. + +The village of Concord has perhaps done more for American literature +than the city of New York. Certainly there are few places where +associations, both patriotic and poetic, cluster so thickly. At one +side of the grounds of the Old Manse--which has the river at its +back--runs down a shaded lane to the Concord monument and the figure of +the Minute Man and the successor of "the rude bridge that arched the +flood." Scarce two miles away, among the woods, is little +Walden--"God's drop." The men who made Concord famous are asleep in +Sleepy Hollow, yet still their memory prevails to draw seekers after +truth to the Concord Summer School of Philosophy, which meets every +year, to reason high of "God, Freedom, and Immortality," next-door to +the "Wayside," and under the hill on whose ridge Hawthorne wore a path, +as he paced up and down beneath the hemlocks. + +{471} + +1. Ralph Waldo Emerson. Nature. The American Scholar. Literary +Ethics. The Transcendentalist. The Over-soul. Address before the +Cambridge Divinity School. English Traits. Representative Men. Poems. + +2. Henry David Thoreau. Excursions. Walden. A Week on the Concord +and Merrimac Rivers. Cape Cod. The Maine Woods. + +3. Nathaniel Hawthorne. Mosses from an Old Manse. The Scarlet Letter. +The House of the Seven Gables. The Blithedale Romance. The Marble +Faun. Our Old Home. + +4. Transcendentalism in New England. By O. B. Frothingham. New York: +G. P. Putnam's Sons. 1875. + + + +[1] The Indian name of Concord River. + + + + +{472} + +CHAPTER V. + +THE CAMBRIDGE SCHOLARS. + +1837-1861. + +With few exceptions, the men who have made American literature what it +is have been college graduates. And yet our colleges have not commonly +been, in themselves, literary centers. Most of them have been small +and poor, and situated in little towns or provincial cities. Their +alumni scatter far and wide immediately after graduation, and even +those of them who may feel drawn to a life of scholarship or letters +find little to attract them at the home of their alma mater, and seek, +by preference, the large cities where periodicals and publishing houses +offer some hope of support in a literary career. Even in the older and +better equipped universities the faculty is usually a corps of working +scholars, each man intent upon his specialty and rather inclined to +undervalue merely "literary" performance. In many cases the fastidious +and hypercritical turn of mind which besets the scholar, the timid +conservatism which naturally characterizes an ancient seat of learning +and the spirit of theological conformity which suppresses free +discussion have exerted their {473} benumbing influence upon the +originality and creative impulse of their inmates. Hence it happens +that, while the contributions of American college teachers to the exact +sciences, to theology and philology, metaphysics, political philosophy +and the severer branches of learning have been honorable and important, +they have as a class made little mark upon the general literature of +the country. The professors of literature in our colleges are usually +persons who have made no additions to literature, and the professors of +rhetoric seem ordinarily to have been selected to teach students how to +write, for the reason that they themselves have never written any thing +that any one has ever read. + +To these remarks the Harvard College of some fifty years ago offers a +striking exception. It was not the large and fashionable university +that it has lately grown to be, with its multiplied elective courses, +its numerous faculty and its somewhat motley collection of +undergraduates; but a small school of the classics and mathematics, +with something of ethics, natural science and the modern languages +added to its old-fashioned, scholastic curriculum, and with a very +homogeneous _clientele_, drawn mainly from the Unitarian families of +Eastern Massachusetts. Nevertheless a finer intellectual life, in many +respects, was lived at old Cambridge within the years covered by this +chapter than nowadays at the same place, or at any date in any other +American university town. The {474} neighborhood of Boston, where the +commercial life has never so entirely overlain the intellectual as in +New York and Philadelphia, has been a standing advantage to Harvard +College. The recent upheaval in religious thought had secured +toleration, and made possible that free and even audacious interchange +of ideas without which a literary atmosphere is impossible. From +these, or from whatever causes, it happened that the old Harvard +scholarship had an elegant and tasteful side to it, so that the dry +erudition of the schools blossomed into a generous culture, and there +were men in the professors' chairs who were no less efficient as +teachers because they were also poets, orators, wits and men of the +world. In the seventeen years from 1821 to 1839 there were graduated +from Harvard College Emerson, Holmes, Sumner, Phillips, Motley, +Thoreau, Lowell, and Edward Everett Hale, some of whom took up their +residence at Cambridge, others at Boston and others at Concord, which +was quite as much a spiritual suburb of Boston as Cambridge was. In +1836, when Longfellow became Professor of Modern Languages at Harvard, +Sumner was lecturing in the Law School. The following year--in which +Thoreau took his bachelor's degree--witnessed the delivery of Emerson's +Phi Beta Kappa lecture on the _American Scholar_ in the college chapel +and Wendell Phillips's speech on the _Murder of Lovejoy_ in Faneuil +Hall. Lowell, whose description of the impression produced by {475} +the former of these famous addresses has been quoted in a previous +chapter, was an undergraduate at the time. He took his degree in 1838 +and in 1855 succeeded Longfellow in the chair of Modern Languages. +Holmes had been chosen in 1847 Professor of Anatomy and Physiology in +the Medical School--a position which he held until 1882. The +historians, Prescott and Bancroft, had been graduated in 1814 and 1817 +respectively. The former's first important publication, _Ferdinand and +Isabella_, appeared in 1837. Bancroft had been a tutor in the college +in 1822-23 and the initial volume of his _History of the United States_ +was issued in 1835. Another of the Massachusetts school of historical +writers, Francis Parkman, took his first degree at Harvard in 1844. +Cambridge was still hardly more than a village, a rural outskirt of +Boston, such as Lowell described it in his article, _Cambridge Thirty +Years Ago_, originally contributed to _Putnam's Monthly_ in 1853, and +afterward reprinted in his _Fireside Travels_, 1864. The situation of +a university scholar in old Cambridge was thus an almost ideal one. +Within easy reach of a great city, with its literary and social clubs, +its theaters, lecture courses, public meetings, dinner parties, etc., +he yet lived withdrawn in an academic retirement among elm-shaded +avenues and leafy gardens, the dome of the Boston State-house looming +distantly across the meadows where the Charles laid its "steel blue +sickle" upon the variegated, plush-like ground of the wide marsh. +There was {476} thus, at all times during the quarter of a century +embraced between 1837 and 1861, a group of brilliant men resident in or +about Cambridge and Boston, meeting frequently and intimately, and +exerting upon one another a most stimulating influence. Some of the +closer circles--all concentric to the university--of which this group +was loosely composed were laughed at by outsiders as "Mutual Admiration +Societies." Such was, for instance, the "Five of Clubs," whose members +were Longfellow, Sumner, C. C. Tellon, Professor of Greek at Harvard, +and afterward president of the college; G. S. Hillard, a graceful +lecturer, essayist and poet, of a somewhat amateurish kind; and Henry +R. Cleveland, of Jamaica Plain, a lover of books and a writer of them. + +Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) the most widely read and loved +of American poets--or indeed, of all contemporary poets in England and +America--though identified with Cambridge for nearly fifty years was a +native of Portland, Maine, and a graduate of Bowdoin College, in the +same class with Hawthorne. Since leaving college, in 1825, he had +studied and traveled for some years in Europe, and had held the +professorship of modern languages at Bowdoin. He had published several +text books, a number of articles on the Romance languages and +literatures in the _North American Review_, a thin volume of metrical +translations from the Spanish, a few original poems in various +periodicals, and the pleasant sketches of European {477} travel +entitled _Outre Mer_. But Longfellow's fame began with the appearance +in 1839 of his _Voices of the Night_. Excepting an earlier collection +by Bryant this was the first volume of real poetry published in New +England, and it had more warmth and sweetness, a greater richness and +variety than Bryant's work ever possessed. Longfellow's genius was +almost feminine in its flexibility and its sympathetic quality. It +readily took the color of its surroundings and opened itself eagerly to +impressions of the beautiful from every quarter, but especially from +books. This first volume contained a few things written during his +student days at Bowdoin, one of which, a blank verse piece on _Autumn_, +clearly shows the influence of Bryant's _Thanatopsis_. Most of these +_juvenilia_ had nature for their theme, but they were not so sternly +true to the New England landscape as Thoreau or Bryant. The skylark +and the ivy appear among their scenic properties, and in the best of +them, _Woods in Winter_, it is the English "hawthorn" and not any +American tree, through which the gale is made to blow, just as later +Longfellow uses "rooks" instead of crows. The young poet's fancy was +instinctively putting out feelers toward the storied lands of the Old +World, and in his _Hymn of the Moravian Nuns of Bethlehem_ he +transformed the rude church of the Moravian sisters to a cathedral with +"glimmering tapers," swinging censers, chancel, altar, cowls and "dim +mysterious aisle." After his visit to Europe, {478} Longfellow +returned deeply imbued with the spirit of romance. It was his mission +to refine our national taste by opening to American readers, in their +own vernacular, new springs of beauty in the literatures of foreign +tongues. The fact that this mission was interpretative, rather than +creative, hardly detracts from Longfellow's true originality. It +merely indicates that his inspiration came to him in the first instance +from other sources than the common life about him. He naturally began +as a translator, and this first volume contained, among other things, +exquisite renderings from the German of Uhland, Salis, and Mueller, from +the Danish, French, Spanish and Anglo-Saxon, and a few passages from +Dante. Longfellow remained all his life a translator, and in subtler +ways than by direct translation he infused the fine essence of European +poetry into his own. He loved-- + + "Tales that have the rime of age + And chronicles of eld." + +The golden light of romance is shed upon his page, and it is his habit +to borrow mediaeval and Catholic imagery from his favorite middle ages, +even when writing of American subjects. To him the clouds are hooded +friars, that "tell their beads in drops of rain;" the midnight winds +blowing through woods and mountain passes are chanting solemn masses +for the repose of the dying year, and the strain ends with the prayer-- + + "Kyrie, eleyson, + Christe, eleyson." + +{479} In his journal he wrote characteristically: "The black shadows +lie upon the grass like engravings in a book. Autumn has written his +rubric on the illuminated leaves, the wind turns them over and chants +like a friar." This in Cambridge, of a moonshiny night, on the first +day of the American October. But several of the pieces in _Voices of +the Night_ sprang more immediately from the poet's own inner +experience. The _Hymn to the Night_, the _Psalm of Life_, the _Reaper +and the Flowers_, _Footsteps of Angels_, the _Light of Stars_, and the +_Beleaguered City_ spoke of love, bereavement, comfort, patience and +faith. In these lovely songs and in many others of the same kind which +he afterward wrote, Longfellow touched the hearts of all his +countrymen. America is a country of homes, and Longfellow, as the poet +of sentiment and of the domestic affections, became and remains far +more general in his appeal than such a "cosmic" singer as Whitman, who +is still practically unknown to the "fierce democracy" to which he has +addressed himself. It would be hard to over-estimate the influence for +good exerted by the tender feeling and the pure and sweet morality +which the hundreds of thousands of copies of Longfellow's writings, +that have been circulated among readers of all classes in America and +England, have brought with them. + +Three later collections, _Ballads and Other Poems_, 1842; the _Belfry +of Bruges_, 1846; and the _Seaside and the Fireside_, 1850, comprise +most of what is {480} noteworthy in Longfellow's minor poetry. The +first of these embraced, together with some renderings from the German +and the Scandinavian languages, specimens of stronger original work +than the author had yet put forth; namely, the two powerful ballads of +the _Skeleton in Armor_ and the _Wreck of the Hesperus_. The former of +these, written in the swift leaping meter of Drayton's _Ode to the +Cambro Britons on their Harp_, was suggested by the digging up of a +mail-clad skeleton at Fall River--a circumstance which the poet linked +with the traditions about the Round Tower at Newport and gave to the +whole the spirit of a Norse viking song of war and of the sea. The +_Wreck of the Hesperus_ was occasioned by the news of shipwrecks on the +coast near Gloucester and by the name of a reef--"Norman's Woe"--where +many of them took place. It was written one night between twelve and +three, and cost the poet, he said, "hardly an effort." Indeed, it is +the spontaneous ease and grace, the unfailing taste of Longfellow's +lines, which are their best technical quality. There is nothing +obscure or esoteric about his poetry. If there is little passion or +intellectual depth, there is always genuine poetic feeling, often a +very high order of imagination and almost invariably the choice of the +right word. In this volume were also included the _Village Blacksmith_ +and _Excelsior_. The latter, and the _Psalm of Life_, have had a +"damnable iteration" which causes them to figure as Longfellow's most +popular {481} pieces. They are by no means, however, among his best. +They are vigorously expressed commonplaces of that hortatory kind which +passes for poetry, but is, in reality, a vague species of preaching. + +In the _Belfry of Bruges_ and the _Seaside and the Fireside_, the +translations were still kept up, and among the original pieces were the +_Occultation of Orion_--the most imaginative of all Longfellow's poems; +_Seaweed_, which has very noble stanzas, the favorite _Old Clock on the +Stairs_, the _Building of the Ship_, with its magnificent closing +apostrophe to the Union, and the _Fire of Driftwood_, the subtlest in +feeling of any thing that the poet ever wrote. With these were verses +of a more familiar quality, such as the _Bridge_, _Resignation_, and +the _Day Is Done_, and many others, all reflecting moods of gentle and +pensive sentiment, and drawing from analogies in nature or in legend +lessons which, if somewhat obvious, were expressed with perfect art. +Like Keats, he apprehended every thing on its beautiful side. +Longfellow was all poet. Like Ophelia in _Hamlet_, + + "Thought and affection, passion, hell itself, + _He_ turns to favor and to prettiness." + +He cared very little about the intellectual movement of the age. The +transcendental ideas of Emerson passed over his head and left him +undisturbed. For politics he had that gentlemanly distaste which the +cultivated class in America had {482} already begun to entertain. In +1842 he printed a small volume of _Poems on Slavery_, which drew +commendation from his friend Sumner, but had nothing of the fervor of +Whittier's or Lowell's utterances on the same subject. It is +interesting to compare his journals with Hawthorne's _American Note +Books_ and to observe in what very different ways the two writers made +prey of their daily experiences for literary material. A favorite +haunt of Longfellow's was the bridge between Boston and Cambridgeport, +the same which he put into verse in his poem, the _Bridge_. "I always +stop on the bridge," he writes in his journal; "tide waters are +beautiful. From the ocean up into the land they go, like messengers, +to ask why the tribute has not been paid. The brooks and rivers answer +that there has been little harvest of snow and rain this year. +Floating sea-weed and kelp is carried up into the meadows, as returning +sailors bring oranges in bandanna handkerchiefs to friends in the +country." And again: "We leaned for awhile on the wooden rail and +enjoyed the silvery reflection on the sea, making sundry comparisons. +Among other thoughts we had this cheering one, that the whole sea was +flashing with this heavenly light, though we saw it only in a single +track; the dark waves are the dark providences of God; luminous, though +not to us; and even to ourselves in another position." "Walk on the +bridge, both ends of which are lost in the fog, like human life midway +between two eternities; {483} beginning and ending in mist." In +Hawthorne an allegoric meaning is usually something deeper and subtler +than this, and seldom so openly expressed. Many of Longfellow's +poems--the _Beleaguered City_, for example--may be definitely divided +into two parts; in the first, a story is told or a natural phenomenon +described; in the second, the spiritual application of the parable is +formally set forth. This method became with him almost a trick of +style, and his readers learned to look for the _haec fabula docet_ at +the end as a matter of course. As for the prevailing optimism in +Longfellow's view of life--of which the above passage is an +instance--it seemed to be in him an affair of temperament, and not, as +in Emerson, the result of philosophic insight. Perhaps, however, in +the last analysis optimism and pessimism are subjective--the expression +of temperament or individual experience, since the facts of life are +the same, whether seen through Schopenhauer's eyes or through +Emerson's. If there is any particular in which Longfellow's +inspiration came to him at first hand and not through books, it is in +respect to the aspects of the sea. On this theme no American poet has +written more beautifully and with a keener sympathy than the author of +the _Wreck of the Hesperus_ and of _Seaweed_. + +In 1847 was published the long poem of _Evangeline_. The story of the +Acadian peasant girl, who was separated from her lover in the +dispersion of her people by the English troops, and after weary +wanderings and a life-long search found him at last, {484} an old man +dying in a Philadelphia hospital, was told to Longfellow by the Rev. H. +L. Conolly, who had previously suggested it to Hawthorne as a subject +for a story. Longfellow, characteristically enough, "got up" the local +color for his poem from Haliburton's account of the dispersion of the +Grand-Pre Acadians, from Darby's _Geographical Description of +Louisiana_ and Watson's _Annals of Philadelphia_. He never needed to +go much outside of his library for literary impulse and material. +Whatever may be held as to Longfellow's inventive powers as a creator +of characters or an interpreter of American life, his originality as an +artist is manifested by his successful domestication in _Evangeline_ of +the dactylic hexameter, which no English poet had yet used with effect. +The English poet, Arthur Hugh Clough, who lived for a time in +Cambridge, followed Longfellow's example in the use of hexameter in his +_Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich_, so that we have now arrived at the +time--a proud moment for American letters--when the works of our +writers began to react upon the literature of Europe. But the beauty +of the descriptions in _Evangeline_ and the pathos--somewhat too drawn +out--of the story made it dear to a multitude of readers who cared +nothing about the technical disputes of Poe and other critics as to +whether or not Longfellow's lines were sufficiently "spondaic" to +truthfully represent the quantitative hexameters of Homer and Vergil. + +In 1855 appeared _Hiawatha_, Longfellow's most {485} aboriginal and +"American" book. The tripping trochaic measure he borrowed from the +Finnish epic _Kalevala_. The vague, childlike mythology of the Indian +tribes, with its anthropomorphic sense of the brotherhood between men, +animals, and the forms of inanimate nature, he took from Schoolcraft's +_Algic Researches_, 1839. He fixed forever, in a skillfully chosen +poetic form, the more inward and imaginative part of Indian character, +as Cooper had given permanence to its external and active side. Of +Longfellow's dramatic experiments the _Golden Legend_, 1851, alone +deserves mention here. This was in his chosen realm; a tale taken from +the ecclesiastical annals of the middle ages, precious with martyrs' +blood and bathed in the rich twilight of the cloister. It contains +some of his best work, but its merit is rather poetic than dramatic; +although Ruskin praised it for the closeness with which it entered into +the temper of the monk. + +Longfellow has pleased the people more than the critics. He gave +freely what he had, and the gift was beautiful. Those who have looked +in his poetry for something else than poetry, or for poetry of some +other kind, have not been slow to assert that he was a lady's poet; one +who satisfied callow youths and school-girls by uttering commonplaces +in graceful and musical shape, but who offered no strong meat for men. +Miss Fuller called his poetry thin and the poet himself a "dandy +Pindar." This is not true of his poetry, {486} or of the best of it. +But he had a singing and not a talking voice, and in his prose one +becomes sensible of a certain weakness. _Hyperion_, for example, +published in 1839, a loitering fiction, interspersed with descriptions +of European travel, is, upon the whole, a weak book, over flowery in +diction and sentimental in tone. + +The crown of Longfellow's achievements as a translator was his great +version of Dante's _Divina Commedia_, published between 1867 and 1870. +It is a severely literal, almost a line for line, rendering. The meter +is preserved, but the rhyme sacrificed. If not the best English poem +constructed from Dante, it is at all events the most faithful and +scholarly paraphrase. The sonnets which accompanied it are among +Longfellow's best work. He seems to have been raised by daily +communion with the great Tuscan into a habit of deeper and more subtle +thought than is elsewhere common in his poetry. + +Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809- ) is a native of Cambridge and a graduate +of Harvard in the class of '29; a class whose anniversary reunions he +has celebrated in something like forty distinct poems and songs. For +sheer cleverness and versatility Dr. Holmes is, perhaps, unrivaled +among American men of letters. He has been poet, wit, humorist, +novelist, essayist and a college lecturer and writer on medical topics. +In all of these departments he has produced work which ranks high, if +not with the highest. His father, {487} Dr. Abiel Holmes, was a +graduate of Yale and an orthodox minister of liberal temper, but the +son early threw in his lot with the Unitarians; and, as was natural to +a man of a satiric turn and with a very human enjoyment of a fight, +whose youth was cast in an age of theological controversy, he has +always had his fling at Calvinism and has prolonged the slogans of old +battles into a later generation; sometimes, perhaps, insisting upon +them rather wearisomely and beyond the limits of good taste. He had, +even as an undergraduate, a reputation for cleverness at writing comic +verses, and many of his good things in this kind, such as the +_Dorchester Giant_ and the _Height of the Ridiculous_, were contributed +to the _Collegian_, a students' paper. But he first drew the attention +of a wider public by his spirited ballad of _Old Ironsides_-- + + "Ay! Tear her tattered ensign down!"-- + +composed about 1830, when it was proposed by the government to take to +pieces the unseaworthy hulk of the famous old man-of-war, +"Constitution." Holmes's indignant protest--which has been a favorite +subject for school-boy declamation--had the effect of postponing the +vessel's fate for a great many years. From 1830-35 the young poet was +pursuing his medical studies in Boston and Paris, contributing now and +then some verses to the magazines. Of his life as a medical student in +Paris there are many pleasant reminiscences in his _Autocrat_ and other +writings, as where he tells, for {488} instance, of a dinner party of +Americans in the French capital, where one of the company brought tears +of home-sickness into the eyes of his _sodales_ by saying that the +tinkle of the ice in the champagne-glasses reminded him of the cowbells +in the rocky old pastures of New England. In 1836 he printed his first +collection of poems. The volume contained among a number of pieces +broadly comic, like the _September Gale_, the _Music Grinders_, and the +_Ballad of the Oysterman_--which at once became widely popular--a few +poems of a finer and quieter temper, in which there was a quaint +blending of the humorous and the pathetic. Such were _My Aunt_ and the +_Last Leaf_--which Abraham Lincoln found "inexpressibly touching," and +which it is difficult to read without the double tribute of a smile and +a tear. The volume contained also _Poetry: A Metrical Essay_, read +before the Harvard Chapter of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, which was the +first of that long line of capital occasional poems which Holmes has +been spinning for half a century with no sign of fatigue and with +scarcely any falling off in freshness; poems read or spoken or sung at +all manner of gatherings, public and private; at Harvard commencements, +class days, and other academic anniversaries; at inaugurations, +centennials, dedications of cemeteries, meetings of medical +associations, mercantile libraries, Burns clubs and New England +societies; at rural festivals and city fairs; openings of theaters, +layings of corner stones, {489} birthday celebrations, jubilees, +funerals, commemoration services, dinners of welcome or farewell to +Dickens, Bryant, Everett, Whittier, Longfellow, Grant, Farragut, the +Grand Duke Alexis, the Chinese Embassy and what not. Probably no poet +of any age or clime has written so much and so well to order. He has +been particularly happy in verses of a convivial kind, toasts for big +civic feasts, or post-prandial rhymes for the _petit comite_--the snug +little dinners of the chosen few. His + + "The quaint trick to cram the pithy line + That cracks so crisply over bubbling wine." + +And although he could write on occasion a _Song for a Temperance +Dinner_, he has preferred to chant the praise of the punch bowl and to + + "feel the old convivial glow (unaided) o'er me stealing, + The warm, champagny, old-particular-brandy-punchy feeling." + +It would be impossible to enumerate the many good things of this sort +which Holmes has written, full of wit and wisdom, and of humor lightly +dashed with sentiment and sparkling with droll analogies, sudden puns, +and unexpected turns of rhyme and phrase. Among the best of them are +_Nux Postcoenatica_, _A Modest Request_, _Ode for a Social Meeting_, +_The Boys_, and _Rip Van Winkle, M.D._ Holmes's favorite measure, in +his longer poems, is the heroic couplet which Pope's example seems to +have consecrated forever to satiric and didactic verse. He writes as +easily in this {490} meter as if it were prose, and with much of Pope's +epigrammatic neatness. He also manages with facility the anapaestics +of Moore and the ballad stanza which Hood had made the vehicle for his +drolleries. It cannot be expected that verses manufactured to pop with +the corks and fizz with the champagne at academic banquets should much +outlive the occasion; or that the habit of producing such verses on +demand should foster in the producer that "high seriousness" which +Matthew Arnold asserts to be one mark of all great poetry. Holmes's +poetry is mostly on the colloquial level, excellent society-verse, but +even in its serious moments too smart and too pretty to be taken very +gravely; with a certain glitter, knowingness and flippancy about it and +an absence of that self-forgetfulness and intense absorption in its +theme which characterize the work of the higher imagination. This is +rather the product of fancy and wit. Wit, indeed, in the old sense of +quickness in the perception of analogies is the staple of his mind. +His resources in the way of figure, illustration, allusion and anecdote +are wonderful. Age cannot wither him nor custom stale his infinite +variety, and there is as much powder in his latest pyrotechnics as in +the rockets which he sent up half a century ago. Yet, though the +humorist in him rather outweighs the poet, he has written a few things, +like the _Chambered Nautilus_ and _Homesick in Heaven_, which are as +purely and deeply poetic as the _One-Hoss Shay_ and the _Prologue_ are +funny. {491} Dr. Holmes is not of the stuff of which idealists and +enthusiasts are made. As a physician and a student of science, the +facts of the material universe have counted for much with him. His +clear, positive, alert intellect was always impatient of mysticism. He +had the sharp eye of the satirist and the man of the world for oddities +of dress, dialect and manners. Naturally the transcendental movement +struck him on its ludicrous side, and in his _After-Dinner Poem_, read +at the Phi Beta Kappa dinner at Cambridge in 1843, he had his laugh at +the "Orphic odes" and "runes" of the bedlamite seer and bard of mystery + + "Who rides a beetle which he calls a 'sphinx,' + And O what questions asked in club-foot rhyme + Of Earth the tongueless, and the deaf-mute Time! + Here babbling 'Insight' shouts in Nature's ears + His last conundrum on the orbs and spheres; + There Self-inspection sucks its little thumb, + With 'Whence am I?' and 'Wherefore did I come?'" + + +Curiously enough, the author of these lines lived to write an +appreciative life of the poet who wrote the _Sphinx_. There was a good +deal of toryism or social conservatism in Holmes. He acknowledged a +preference for the man with a pedigree, the man who owned family +portraits, had been brought up in familiarity with books, and could +pronounce "view" correctly. Readers unhappily not of the "Brahmin +caste of New England" have sometimes resented as snobbishness Holmes's +harping {492} on "family," and his perpetual application of certain +favorite shibboleths to other people's ways of speech. "The woman who +calc'lates is lost." + + "Learning condemns beyond the reach of hope + The careless lips that speak of soap for soap. . . . + Do put your accents in the proper spot; + Don't, let me beg you, don't say 'How?' for 'What?' + The things named 'pants' in certain documents, + A word not made for gentlemen, but 'gents.'" + +With the rest of "society" he was disposed to ridicule the abolition +movement as a crotchet of the eccentric and the long-haired. But when +the civil war broke out he lent his pen, his tongue, and his own flesh +and blood to the cause of the Union. The individuality of Holmes's +writings comes in part from their local and provincial bias. He has +been the laureate of Harvard College and the bard of Boston city, an +urban poet, with a cockneyish fondness for old Boston ways and +things--the Common and the Frog Pond, Faneuil Hall and King's Chapel +and the Old South, Bunker Hill, Long Wharf, the Tea Party, and the town +crier. It was Holmes who invented the playful saying that "Boston +State House is the hub of the solar system." + +In 1857 was started the _Atlantic Monthly_, a magazine which has +published a good share of the best work done by American writers within +the past thirty years. Its immediate success was assured by Dr. +Holmes's brilliant series of papers, the {493} _Autocrat of the +Breakfast Table_, 1858, followed at once by the _Professor at the +Breakfast Table_, 1859, and later by the _Poet at the Breakfast Table_, +1873. The _Autocrat_ is its author's masterpiece, and holds the fine +quintessence of his humor, his scholarship, his satire, genial +observation, and ripe experience of men and cities. The form is as +unique and original as the contents, being something between an essay +and a drama; a succession of monologues or table-talks at a typical +American boarding-house, with a thread of story running through the +whole. The variety of mood and thought is so great that these +conversations never tire, and the prose is interspersed with some of +the author's choicest verse. The _Professor at the Breakfast Table_ +followed too closely on the heels of the _Autocrat_, and had less +freshness. The third number of the series was better, and was +pleasantly reminiscent and slightly garrulous, Dr. Holmes being now +(1873) sixty-four years old, and entitled to the gossiping privilege of +age. The _personnel_ of the _Breakfast Table_ series, such as the +landlady and the landlady's daughter and her son, Benjamin Franklin; +the schoolmistress, the young man named John, the Divinity Student, the +Kohinoor, the Sculpin, the Scarabaeus and the Old Gentleman who sits +opposite, are not fully drawn characters, but outlined figures, lightly +sketched--as is the Autocrat's wont--by means of some trick of speech, +or dress, or feature, but they are quite life-like enough for their +purpose, which is mainly to {494} furnish listeners and foils to the +eloquence and wit of the chief talker. + +In 1860 and 1867 Holmes entered the field of fiction with two +"medicated novels," _Elsie Venner_ and the _Guardian Angel_. The first +of these was a singular tale, whose heroine united with her very +fascinating human attributes something of the nature of a serpent; her +mother having been bitten by a rattlesnake a few months before the +birth of the girl, and kept alive meanwhile by the use of powerful +antidotes. The heroine of the _Guardian Angel_ inherited lawless +instincts from a vein of Indian blood in her ancestry. These two books +were studies of certain medico-psychological problems. They preached +Dr. Holmes's favorite doctrines of heredity and of the modified nature +of moral responsibility by reason of transmitted tendencies which limit +the freedom of the will. In _Elsie Venner_, in particular, the weirdly +imaginative and speculative character of the leading motive suggests +Hawthorne's method in fiction, but the background and the subsidiary +figures have a realism that is in abrupt contrast with this, and gives +a kind of doubleness and want of keeping to the whole. The Yankee +characters, in particular, and the satirical pictures of New England +country life are open to the charge of caricature. In the _Guardian +Angel_ the figure of Byles Gridley, the old scholar, is drawn with +thorough sympathy, and though some of his acts are improbable he is, on +the whole, Holmes's most {495} vital conception in the region of +dramatic creation. + +James Russell Lowell (1819- ), the foremost of American critics and of +living American poets is, like Holmes, a native of Cambridge, and, like +Emerson and Holmes, a clergyman's son. In 1855 he succeeded Longfellow +as Professor of Modern Languages in Harvard College. Of late years he +has held important diplomatic posts, like Everett, Irving, Bancroft, +Motley, and other Americans distinguished in letters, having been +United States Minister to Spain, and, under two administrations, to the +Court of St. James. Lowell is not so spontaneously and exclusively a +poet as Longfellow. His fame has been of slower growth, and his +popularity with the average reader has never been so great. His appeal +has been to the few rather than the many, to an audience of scholars +and of the judicious rather than to the "groundlings" of the general +public. Nevertheless his verse, though without the evenness, +instinctive grace, and unerring good taste of Longfellow's, has more +energy and a stronger intellectual fiber; while in prose he is very +greatly the superior. His first volume, _A Year's Life_, 1841, gave +little promise. In 1843 he started a magazine, the _Pioneer_, which +only reached its third number, though it counted among its contributors +Hawthorne, Poe, Whittier, and Miss Barrett (afterward Mrs. Browning). +A second volume of poems, printed in 1844, showed a distinct advance, +in such {496} pieces as the _Shepherd of King Admetus_, _Rhoecus_, a +classical myth, told in excellent blank verse, and the same in subject +with one of Landor's polished intaglios; and the _Legend of Britanny_, +a narrative poem, which had fine passages, but no firmness in the +management of the story. As yet, it was evident, the young poet had +not found his theme. This came with the outbreak of the Mexican War, +which was unpopular in New England, and which the Free Soil party +regarded as a slaveholders' war waged without provocation against a +sister republic, and simply for the purpose of extending the area of +slavery. + +In 1846, accordingly, the _Biglow Papers_ began to appear in the +_Boston Courier_, and were collected and published in book form in +1848. These were a series of rhymed satires upon the government and +the war party, written in the Yankee dialect, and supposed to be the +work of Hosea Biglow, a home-spun genius in a down-east country town, +whose letters to the editor were indorsed and accompanied by the +comments of the Rev. Homer Wilbur, A.M., pastor of the First Church in +Jaalam, and (prospective) member of many learned societies. The first +paper was a derisive address to a recruiting sergeant, with a +denunciation of the "nigger-drivin' States" and the "northern +dough-faces," a plain hint that the North would do better to secede +than to continue doing dirty work for the South, and an expression of +those universal peace doctrines which were then in the air, and to +which {497} Longfellow gave serious utterance in his _Occultation of +Orion_. + + "Ez for war, I call it murder-- + There you hev it plain an' flat: + I don't want to go no furder + Than my Testyment for that; + God hez said so plump an' fairly, + It's ez long as it is broad, + An' you've gut to git up airly + Ef you want to take in God." + +The second number was a versified paraphrase of a letter received from +Mr. Birdofredom Sawin, "a yung feller of our town that wuz cussed fool +enuff to goe atrottin inter Miss Chiff arter a drum and fife," and who +finds when he gets to Mexico that + + "This kind o' sogerin' aint a mite like our October trainin'." + +Of the subsequent papers the best was, perhaps, _What Mr. Robinson +Thinks_, an election ballad, which caused universal laughter, and was +on every body's tongue. + +The _Biglow Papers_ remain Lowell's most original contribution to +American literature. They are, all in all, the best political satires +in the language, and unequaled as portraitures of the Yankee character, +with its 'cuteness, its homely wit, and its latent poetry. Under the +racy humor of the dialect--which became in Lowell's hands a medium of +literary expression almost as effective as {498} Burns's Ayrshire +Scotch--burned that moral enthusiasm and that hatred of wrong and +deification of duty--"Stern daughter of the voice of God"--which, in +the tough New England stock, stands instead of the passion in the blood +of southern races. Lowell's serious poems on political questions, such +as the _Present Crisis_, _Ode to Freedom_, and the _Capture of Fugitive +Slaves_, have the old Puritan fervor, and such lines as + + "They are slaves who dare not be + In the right with two or three," + +and the passage beginning + + "Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne," + +became watchwords in the conflict against slavery and disunion. Some +of these were published in his volume of 1848 and the collected edition +of his poems, in two volumes, issued in 1850. These also included his +most ambitious narrative poem, the _Vision of Sir Launfal_, an +allegorical and spiritual treatment of one of the legends of the Holy +Grail. Lowell's genius was not epical, but lyric and didactic. The +merit of _Sir Launfal_ is not in the telling of the story, but in the +beautiful descriptive episodes, one of which, commencing, + + "And what is so rare as a day in June? + Then if ever come perfect days;" + +is as current as any thing that he has written. It is significant of +the lack of a natural impulse {499} toward narrative invention in +Lowell, that, unlike Longfellow and Holmes, he never tried his hand at +a novel. One of the most important parts of a novelist's equipment he +certainly possesses; namely, an insight into character, and an ability +to delineate it. This gift is seen especially in his sketch of Parson +Wilbur, who edited the _Biglow Papers_ with a delightfully pedantic +introduction, glossary, and notes; in the prose essay _On a Certain +Condescension in Foreigners_, and in the uncompleted poem, _Fitz-Adam's +Story_. See also the sketch of Captain Underhill in the essay on _New +England Two Centuries Ago_. + +The _Biglow Papers_ when brought out in a volume were prefaced by +imaginary notices of the press, including a capital parody of Carlyle, +and a reprint from the "Jaalam Independent Blunderbuss," of the first +sketch--afterward amplified and enriched--of that perfect Yankee idyl, +the _Courtin'_. Between 1862 and 1865 a second series of _Biglow +Papers_ appeared, called out by the events of the civil war. Some of +these, as, for instance, _Jonathan to John_, a remonstrance with +England for her unfriendly attitude toward the North, were not inferior +to any thing in the earlier series; and others were even superior as +poems, equal indeed, in pathos and intensity to any thing that Lowell +has written in his professedly serious verse. In such passages the +dialect wears rather thin, and there is a certain incongruity between +the rustic spelling and the vivid beauty and power {500} and the +figurative cast of the phrase in stanzas like the following: + + "Wut's words to them whose faith an' truth + On war's red techstone rang true metal, + Who ventered life an' love an' youth + For the gret prize o' death in battle? + To him who, deadly hurt, agen + Flashed on afore the charge's thunder, + Tippin' with fire the bolt of men + That rived the rebel line asunder?" + + +Charles Sumner, a somewhat heavy person, with little sense of humor, +wished that the author of the _Biglow Papers_ "could have used good +English." In the lines just quoted, indeed, the bad English adds +nothing to the effect. In 1848 Lowell wrote _A Fable for Critics_, +something after the style of Sir John Suckling's _Session of the +Poets_; a piece of rollicking doggerel in which he surveyed the +American Parnassus, scattering about headlong fun, sharp satire and +sound criticism in equal proportion. Never an industrious workman, +like Longfellow, at the poetic craft, but preferring to wait for the +mood to seize him, he allowed eighteen years to go by, from 1850 to +1868, before publishing another volume of verse. In the latter year +appeared _Under the Willows_, which contains some of his ripest and +most perfect work; notably _A Winter Evening Hymn to my Fire_, with its +noble and touching close--suggested by, perhaps, at any rate recalling, +the dedication of Goethe's _Faust_, + + "Ihr naht euch wieder, schwankende Gestalten;" + +{501} the subtle _Footpath_ and _In the Twilight_, the lovely little +poems _Auf Wiedersehen_ and _After the Funeral_, and a number of +spirited political pieces, such as _Villa Franca_, and the _Washers of +the Shroud_. This volume contained also his _Ode Recited at the +Harvard Commemoration_ in 1865. This, although uneven, is one of the +finest occasional poems in the language, and the most important +contribution which our civil war has made to song. It was charged with +the grave emotion of one who not only shared the patriotic grief and +exultation of his _alma mater_ in the sacrifice of her sons, but who +felt a more personal sorrow in the loss of kindred of his own, fallen +in the front of battle. Particularly noteworthy in this memorial ode +are the tribute to Abraham Lincoln, the third strophe, beginning, "Many +loved Truth:" the exordium--"O Beautiful! my Country! ours once more!" +and the close of the eighth strophe, where the poet chants of the +youthful heroes who + + "Come transfigured back, + Secure from change in their high-hearted ways, + Beautiful evermore and with the rays + Of morn on their white Shields of Expectation." + +From 1857 to 1862 Lowell edited the _Atlantic Monthly_, and from 1863 +to 1872 the _North American Review_. His prose, beginning with an +early volume of _Conversations on Some of the Old Poets_, 1844, has +consisted mainly of critical essays on individual writers, such as +Dante, Chaucer, Spenser, {502} Emerson, Shakespere, Thoreau, Pope, +Carlyle, etc., together with papers of a more miscellaneous kind, like +_Witchcraft_, _New England Two Centuries Ago_, _My Garden +Acquaintance_, _A Good Word for Winter_, _Abraham Lincoln_, etc., etc. +Two volumes of these were published in 1870 and 1876, under the title +_Among My Books_, and another, _My Study Windows_, in 1871. As a +literary critic Lowell ranks easily among the first of living writers. +His scholarship is thorough, his judgment sure, and he pours out upon +his page an unwithholding wealth of knowledge, humor, wit and +imagination from the fullness of an overflowing mind. His prose has +not the chastened correctness and "low tone" of Matthew Arnold's. It +is rich, exuberant, and sometimes over fanciful, running away into +excesses of allusion or following the lead of a chance pun so as +sometimes to lay itself open to the charge of pedantry and bad taste. +Lowell's resources in the way of illustration and comparison are +endless, and the readiness of his wit and his delight in using it put +many temptations in his way. Purists in style accordingly take offense +at his saying that "Milton is the only man who ever got much poetry out +of a cataract, and that was a cataract in his eye;" or of his speaking +of "a gentleman for whom the bottle before him reversed the wonder of +the stereoscope and substituted the Gaston _v_ for the _b_ in +binocular," which is certainly a puzzling and roundabout fashion of +telling us that he had drunk so much {503} that he saw double. The +critics also find fault with his coining such words as "undisprivacied" +and with his writing such lines as the famous one--from the +_Cathedral_, 1870-- + + "Spume-sliding down the baffled decuman." + +It must be acknowledged that his style lacks the crowning grace of +simplicity, but it is precisely by reason of its allusive quality that +scholarly readers take pleasure in it. They like a diction that has +stuff in it and is woven thick, and where a thing is said in such a way +as to recall many other things. + +Mention should be made, in connection with this Cambridge circle, of +one writer who touched its circumference briefly. This was Sylvester +Judd, a graduate of Yale, who entered the Harvard Divinity School in +1837 and in 1840 became minister of a Unitarian church in Augusta, +Maine. Judd published several books, but the only one of them at all +rememberable was _Margaret_, 1845, a novel of which Lowell said in _A +Fable for Critics_ that it was "the first Yankee book with the soul of +Down East in it." It was very imperfect in point of art, and its +second part--a rhapsodical description of a sort of Unitarian +Utopia--is quite unreadable. But in the delineation of the few chief +characters and of the rude, wild life of an outlying New England +township just after the close of the revolutionary war, as well as in +the tragic power of the catastrophe, there was genius of a high order. + +{504} + +As the country has grown older and more populous, and works in all +departments of thought have multiplied, it becomes necessary to draw +more strictly the line between the literature of knowledge and the +literature of power. Political history, in and of itself, scarcely +falls within the limits of this sketch, and yet it cannot be altogether +dismissed; for the historian's art at its highest demands imagination, +narrative skill, and a sense of unity and proportion in the selection +and arrangement of his facts, all of which are literary qualities. It +is significant that many of our best historians have begun authorship +in the domain of imaginative literature: Bancroft with an early volume +of poems; Motley with his historical romances _Merry Mount_ and +_Morton's Hope_; and Parkman with a novel, _Vassall Morton_. The +oldest of that modern group of writers that have given America an +honorable position in the historical literature of the world was +William Hickling Prescott (1796-1859.) Prescott chose for his theme +the history of the Spanish conquests in the New World, a subject full +of romantic incident and susceptible of that glowing and perhaps +slightly over gorgeous coloring which he laid on with a liberal hand. +His completed histories, in their order, are the _Reign of Ferdinand +and Isabella_, 1837; the _Conquest of Mexico_, 1843--a topic which +Irving had relinquished to him; and the _Conquest of Peru_, 1847. +Prescott was fortunate in being born to leisure and fortune, but he had +difficulties of {505} another kind to overcome. He was nearly blind, +and had to teach himself Spanish and look up authorities through the +help of others and to write with a noctograph or by amanuenses. + +George Bancroft (1800- ) issued the first volume of his great _History +of the United States_ in 1834, and exactly half a century later the +final volume of the work, bringing the subject down to 1789. Bancroft +had studied at Goettingen and imbibed from the German historian Heeren +the scientific method of historical study. He had access to original +sources, in the nature of collections and state papers in the +governmental archives of Europe, of which no American had hitherto been +able to avail himself. His history in thoroughness of treatment leaves +nothing to be desired, and has become the standard authority on the +subject. As a literary performance merely, it is somewhat wanting in +flavor, Bancroft's manner being heavy and stiff when compared with +Motley's or Parkman's. The historian's services to his country have +been publicly recognized by his successive appointments as Secretary of +the Navy, Minister to England, and Minister to Germany. + +The greatest, on the whole, of American historians was John Lothrop +Motley (1814-1877), who, like Bancroft, was a student at Goettingen and +United States Minister to England. His _Rise of the Dutch Republic_, +1856, and _History of the United Netherlands_, published in +installments from 1861 to {506} 1868, equaled Bancroft's work in +scientific thoroughness and philosophic grasp, and Prescott's in the +picturesque brilliancy of the narrative, while it excelled them both in +its masterly analysis of great historic characters, reminding the +reader, in this particular, of Macaulay's figure painting. The +episodes of the siege of Antwerp and the sack of the cathedral, and of +the defeat and wreck of the Spanish Armada, are as graphic as +Prescott's famous description of Cortez's capture of the city of +Mexico; while the elder historian has nothing to compare with Motley's +vivid personal sketches of Queen Elizabeth, Philip the Second, Henry of +Navarre, and William the Silent. The _Life of John of Barneveld_, +1874, completed this series of studies upon the history of the +Netherlands, a theme to which Motley was attracted because the heroic +struggle of the Dutch for liberty offered, in some respects, a parallel +to the growth of political independence in Anglo-Saxon communities, and +especially in his own America. + +The last of these Massachusetts historical writers whom we shall +mention is Francis Parkman (1823- ), whose subject has the advantage of +being thoroughly American. His _Oregon Trail_, 1847, a series of +sketches of prairie and Rocky Mountain life, originally contributed to +the _Knickerbocker Magazine_, displays his early interest in the +American Indians. In 1851 appeared his first historical work, the +_Conspiracy of Pontiac_. This has been followed by the series entitled +_France and England {507} in North America_, the six successive parts +of which are as follows: the _Pioneers of France in the New World_; the +_Jesuits in North America_; _La Salle and the Discovery of the Great +West_; the _Old Regime in Canada_; _Count Frontenac and New France_; +and _Montcalm and Wolfe_. These narratives have a wonderful vividness, +and a romantic interest not inferior to Cooper's novels. Parkman made +himself personally familiar with the scenes which he described, and +some of the best descriptions of American woods and waters are to be +found in his histories. If any fault is to be found with his books, +indeed, it is that their picturesqueness and "fine writing" are a +little in excess. + +The political literature of the years from 1837 to 1861 hinged upon the +antislavery struggle. In this "irrepressible conflict" Massachusetts +led the van. Garrison had written in his _Liberator_, in 1830, "I will +be as harsh as truth and as uncompromising as justice. I am in +earnest; I will not equivocate; I will not excuse; I will not retreat a +single inch; and I will be heard." But the Garrisonian abolitionists +remained for a long time, even in the North, a small and despised +faction. It was a great point gained when men of education and social +standing like Wendell Phillips (1811-1884), and Charles Sumner +(1811-1874), joined themselves to the cause. Both of these were +graduates of Harvard and men of scholarly pursuits. They became the +representative orators of the antislavery party, Phillips on the +platform {508} and Sumner in the Senate. The former first came before +the public in his fiery speech, delivered in Faneuil Hall December 8, +1837, before a meeting called to denounce the murder of Lovejoy, who +had been killed at Alton, Ill., while defending his press against a +pro-slavery mob. Thenceforth Phillips's voice was never idle in behalf +of the slave. His eloquence was impassioned and direct, and his +English singularly pure, simple, and nervous. He is perhaps nearer to +Demosthenes than any other American orator. He was a most fascinating +platform speaker on themes outside of politics, and his lecture on the +_Lost Arts_ was a favorite with audiences of all sorts. + +Sumner was a man of intellectual tastes, who entered politics +reluctantly, and only in obedience to the resistless leading of his +conscience. He was a student of literature and art; a connoisseur of +engravings, for example, of which he made a valuable collection. He +was fond of books, conversation, and foreign travel, and in Europe, +while still a young man, had made a remarkable impression in society. +But he left all this for public life, and in 1851 was elected, as +Webster's successor, to the Senate of the United States. Thereafter he +remained the leader of the Abolitionists in Congress until slavery was +abolished. His influence throughout the North was greatly increased by +the brutal attack upon him in the Senate chamber in 1856 by "Bully +Brooks" of South Carolina. {509} Sumner's oratory was stately and +somewhat labored. While speaking he always seemed, as has been wittily +said, to be surveying a "broad landscape of his own convictions." His +most impressive qualities as a speaker were his intense moral +earnestness and his thorough knowledge of his subject. The most +telling of his parliamentary speeches are perhaps his speech _On the +Kansas-Nebraska Bill_, of February 3, 1854, and _On the Crime against +Kansas_, May 19 and 20, 1856; of his platform addresses, the oration on +the _True Grandeur of Nations_. + + +1. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Voices of the Night. The Skeleton in +Armor. The Wreck of the Hesperus. The Village Blacksmith. The Belfry +of Bruges and Other Poems (1846). By the Seaside. Hiawatha. Tales of +a Wayside Inn. + +2. Oliver Wendell Holmes. Autocrat of the Breakfast Table. Elsie +Venner. Old Ironsides. The Last Leaf. My Aunt. The Music-Grinders. +On Lending a Punch Bowl. Nux Postcoenatica. A Modest Request. The +Living Temple. Meeting of the Alumni of Harvard College. Homesick in +Heaven. Epilogue to the Breakfast Table Series. The Boys. Dorothy. +The Iron Gate. + +3. James Russell Lowell. The Biglow Papers (two series). Under the +Willows and Other Poems. 1868. Rhoecus. The Shepherd of King +Admetus. The Vision of Sir Launfal. The {510} Present Crisis. The +Dandelion. The Birch Tree. Beaver Brook. Essays on Chaucer: +Shakspere Once More: Dryden: Emerson; the Lecturer: Thoreau: My Garden +Acquaintance: A Good Word for Winter: A Certain Condescension in +Foreigners. + +4. William Hickling Prescott. The Conquest of Mexico. + +5. John Lothrop Motley. The United Netherlands. + +6. Francis Parkman. The Oregon Trail. The Jesuits in North America. + +7. Representative American Orations; volume v. Edited by Alexander +Johnston. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. 1884. + + + + +{511} + +CHAPTER VI. + +LITERATURE IN THE CITIES. + +1837-1861. + +Literature as a profession has hardly existed in the United States +until very recently. Even now the number of those who support +themselves by purely literary work is small, although the growth of the +reading public and the establishment of great magazines, such as +_Harper's_, the _Century_, and the _Atlantic_, have made a market for +intellectual wares which forty years ago would have seemed a godsend to +poorly paid Bohemians like Poe or obscure men of genius like Hawthorne. +About 1840 two Philadelphia magazines--_Godey's Lady's Book_ and +_Graham's Monthly_--began to pay their contributors twelve dollars a +page, a price then thought wildly munificent. But the first magazine +of the modern type was _Harper's Monthly_, founded in 1850. American +books have always suffered, and still continue to suffer, from the want +of an international copyright, which has flooded the country with cheap +reprints and translations of foreign works, with which the domestic +product has been unable to contend on such uneven terms. With the +first ocean steamers there {512} started up a class of large-paged +weeklies in New York and elsewhere, such as _Brother Jonathan_, the +_New World_, and the _Corsair_, which furnished their readers with the +freshest writings of Dickens and Bulwer and other British celebrities +within a fortnight after their appearance in London. This still +further restricted the profits of native authors and nearly drove them +from the field of periodical literature. By special arrangement the +novels of Thackeray and other English writers were printed in +_Harper's_ in installments simultaneously with their issue in English +periodicals. The _Atlantic_ was the first of our magazines which was +founded expressly for the encouragement of home talent, and which had a +purely Yankee flavor. Journalism was the profession which naturally +attracted men of letters, as having most in common with their chosen +work and as giving them a medium, under their own control, through +which they could address the public. A few favored scholars, like +Prescott, were made independent by the possession of private fortunes. +Others, like Holmes, Longfellow, and Lowell, gave to literature such +leisure as they could get in the intervals of an active profession or +of college work. Still others, like Emerson and Thoreau, by living in +the country and making their modest competence--eked out in Emerson's +case by lecturing here and there--suffice for their simple needs, +secured themselves freedom from the restraints of any regular calling. +But in default of some such _pou sto_ our men of {513} letters have +usually sought the cities and allied themselves with the press. It +will be remembered that Lowell started a short-lived magazine on his +own account, and that he afterward edited the _Atlantic_ and the _North +American_. Also that Ripley and Charles A. Dana betook themselves to +journalism after the break up of the Brook Farm Community. + +In the same way William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878), the earliest +American poet of importance, whose impulses drew him to the solitudes +of nature, was compelled to gain a livelihood by conducting a daily +newspaper; or, as he himself puts it, was + + "Forced to drudge for the dregs of men, + And scrawl strange words with the barbarous pen." + +Bryant was born at Cummington, in Berkshire, the westernmost county of +Massachusetts. After two years in Williams College he studied law, and +practiced for nine years as a country lawyer in Plainfield and Great +Barrington. Following the line of the Housatonic Valley, the social +and theological affiliations of Berkshire have always been closer with +Connecticut and New York than with Boston and Eastern Massachusetts. +Accordingly, when, in 1825, Bryant yielded to the attractions of a +literary career, he betook himself to New York city, where, after a +brief experiment in conducting a monthly magazine, the _New York Review +and Athenaeum_, he assumed the editorship of the {514} _Evening Post_, +a Democratic and Free-trade journal, with which he remained connected +till his death. He already had a reputation as a poet when he entered +the ranks of metropolitan journalism. In 1816 his _Thanatopsis_ had +been published in the _North American Review_, and had attracted +immediate and general admiration. It had been finished, indeed, two +years before, when the poet was only in his nineteenth year, and was a +wonderful instance of precocity. The thought in this stately hymn was +not that of a young man, but of a sage who has reflected long upon the +universality, the necessity, and the majesty of death. Bryant's blank +verse when at its best, as in _Thanatopsis_ and the _Forest Hymn_, is +extremely noble. In gravity and dignity it is surpassed by no English +blank verse of this century, though in rich and various modulation it +falls below Tennyson's _Ulysses_ and _Morte d'Arthur_. It was +characteristic of Bryant's limitations that he came thus early into +possession of his faculty. His range was always a narrow one, and +about his poetry, as a whole, there is a certain coldness, rigidity, +and solemnity. His fixed position among American poets is described in +his own _Hymn to the North Star_: + + "And thou dost see them rise, + Star of the pole! and thou dost see them set. + Alone, in thy cold skies, + Thou keep'st thy old, unmoving station yet, + Nor join'st the dances of that glittering train, + Nor dipp'st thy virgin orb in the blue western main." + + +{515} + +In 1821 he read the _Ages_, a didactic poem in thirty-five stanzas, +before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge, and in the same year +brought out his first volume of poems. A second collection appeared in +1832, which was printed in London under the auspices of Washington +Irving. Bryant was the first American poet who had much of an audience +in England, and Wordsworth is said to have learned _Thanatopsis_ by +heart. Bryant was, indeed, in a measure, a scholar of Wordsworth's +school, and his place among American poets corresponds roughly, though +not precisely, to Wordsworth's among English poets. With no humor, +with somewhat restricted sympathies, with little flexibility or +openness to new impressions, but gifted with a high, austere +imagination, Bryant became the meditative poet of nature. His best +poems are those in which he draws lessons from nature, or sings of its +calming, purifying, and bracing influences upon the human soul. His +office, in other words, is the same which Matthew Arnold asserts to be +the peculiar office of modern poetry, "the moral interpretation of +nature." Poems of this class are _Green River_, _To a Waterfowl_, +_June_, the _Death of the Flowers_, and the _Evening Wind_. The song, +"O fairest of the Rural Maids," which has more fancy than is common in +Bryant, and which Poe pronounced his best poem, has an obvious +resemblance to Wordsworth's "Three years she grew in sun and shade," +and both of these nameless pieces might fitly be {516} entitled--as +Wordsworth's is in Mr. Palgrave's _Golden Treasury_--"The Education of +Nature." + +Although Bryant's career is identified with New York, his poetry is all +of New England. His heart was always turning back fondly to the woods +and streams of the Berkshire hills. There was nothing of that urban +strain in him which appears in Holmes and Willis. He was, in especial, +the poet of autumn, of the American October and the New England Indian +Summer, that season of "dropping nuts" and "smoky light," to whose +subtle analogy with the decay of the young by the New England disease, +consumption, he gave such tender expression in the _Death of the +Flowers_; and amid whose "bright, late quiet," he wished himself to +pass away. Bryant is our poet of "the melancholy days," as Lowell is +of June. If, by chance, he touches upon June, it is not with the +exultant gladness of Lowell in meadows full of bobolinks, and in the +summer day that is + + "--simply perfect from its own resource + As to the bee the new campanula's + Illuminate seclusion swung in air." + +Rather, the stir of new life in the clod suggests to Bryant by contrast +the thought of death; and there is nowhere in his poetry a passage of +deeper feeling than the closing stanzas of _June_, in which he speaks +of himself, by anticipation, as of one + + "Whose part in all the pomp that fills + The circuit of the summer hills + Is--that his grave is green." + +{517} Bryant is, _par excellence_, the poet of New England wild +flowers, the yellow violet, the fringed gentian--to each of which he +dedicated an entire poem--the orchis and the golden rod, "the aster in +the wood and the yellow sunflower by the brook." With these his name +will be associated as Wordsworth's with the daffodil and the lesser +celandine, and Emerson's with the rhodora. + +Except when writing of nature he was apt to be commonplace, and there +are not many such energetic lines in his purely reflective verse as +these famous ones from the _Battle Field_: + + "Truth crushed to earth shall rise again; + The eternal years of God are hers; + But Error, wounded, writhes in pain, + And dies among his worshipers." + +He added but slowly to the number of his poems, publishing a new +collection in 1840, another in 1844, and _Thirty Poems_ in 1864. His +work at all ages was remarkably even. _Thanatopsis_ was as mature as +any thing that he wrote afterward, and among his later pieces, the +_Planting of the Apple Tree_ and the _Flood of Years_ were as fresh as +any thing that he had written in the first flush of youth. Bryant's +poetic style was always pure and correct, without any tincture of +affectation or extravagance. His prose writings are not important, +consisting mainly of papers of the _Salmagundi_ variety contributed to +the _Talisman_, an annual published in 1827-30; some rather sketchy +stories, _Tales of the {518} Glauber Spa_, 1832; and impressions of +Europe, entitled, _Letters of a Traveler_, issued in two series, in +1849 and 1858. In 1869 and 1871 appeared his blank-verse translations +of the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_, a remarkable achievement for a man of his +age, and not excelled, upon the whole, by any recent metrical version +of Homer in the English tongue. Bryant's half century of service as +the editor of a daily paper should not be overlooked. The _Evening +Post_, under his management, was always honest, gentlemanly, and +courageous, and did much to raise the tone of journalism in New York. + +Another Massachusetts poet, who was outside the Boston coterie, like +Bryant, and, like him, tried his hand at journalism, was John Greenleaf +Whittier (1807- ). He was born in a solitary farmhouse near Haverhill, +in the valley of the Merrimack, and his life has been passed mostly at +his native place and at the neighboring town of Amesbury. The local +color, which is very pronounced in his poetry, is that of the Merrimack +from the vicinity of Haverhill to its mouth at Newburyport, a region of +hillside farms, opening out below into wide marshes--"the low, green +prairies of the sea," and the beaches of Hampton and Salisbury. The +scenery of the Merrimack is familiar to all readers of Whittier: the +cotton-spinning towns along its banks, with their factories and dams, +the sloping pastures and orchards of the back country, the sands of +Plum Island and the level reaches of water meadow between which glide +the broad-sailed "gundalows"--a {519} local corruption of +gondola--laden with hay. Whittier was a farmer lad, and had only such +education as the district school could supply, supplemented by two +years at the Haverhill Academy. In his _School Days_ he gives a +picture of the little old country school-house as it used to be, the +only _alma mater_ of so many distinguished Americans, and to which many +others who have afterward trodden the pavements of great universities +look back so fondly as to their first wicket gate into the land of +knowledge. + + "Still sits the school-house by the road, + A ragged beggar sunning; + Around it still the sumachs grow + And blackberry vines are running. + + "Within, the master's desk is seen, + Deep-scarred by raps official; + The warping floor, the battered seats, + The jack-knife's carved initial." + + +A copy of Burns awoke the slumbering instinct in the young poet, and he +began to contribute verses to Garrison's _Free Press_, published at +Newburyport, and to the _Haverhill Gazette_. Then he went to Boston, +and became editor for a short time of the _Manufacturer_. Next he +edited the _Essex Gazette_, at Haverhill, and in 1830 he took charge of +George D. Prentice's paper, the _New England Weekly Review_, at +Hartford, Conn. Here he fell in with a young Connecticut poet of much +promise, J. G. C. Brainard, editor of the {520} _Connecticut Mirror_, +whose "Remains" Whittier edited in 1832. At Hartford, too, he +published his first book, a volume of prose and verse, entitled +_Legends of New England_, 1831, which is not otherwise remarkable than +as showing his early interest in Indian colonial traditions--especially +those which had a touch of the supernatural--a mine which he afterward +worked to good purpose in the _Bridal of Pennacook_, the _Witch's +Daughter_, and similar poems. Some of the _Legends_ testify to +Brainard's influence and to the influence of Whittier's temporary +residence at Hartford. One of the prose pieces, for example, deals +with the famous "Moodus Noises" at Haddam, on the Connecticut River, +and one of the poems is the same in subject with Brainard's _Black Fox +of Salmon River_. After a year and a half at Hartford, Whittier +returned to Haverhill and to farming. + +The antislavery agitation was now beginning, and into this he threw +himself with all the ardor of his nature. He became the poet of the +reform as Garrison was its apostle, and Sumner and Phillips its +speakers. In 1833 he published _Justice and Expediency_, a prose tract +against slavery, and in the same year he took part in the formation of +the American Antislavery Society at Philadelphia, sitting in the +convention as a delegate of the Boston Abolitionists. Whittier was a +Quaker, and that denomination, influenced by the preaching of John +Woolman and others, had long since quietly abolished slavery within its +own communion. The {521} Quakers of Philadelphia and elsewhere took an +earnest though peaceful part in the Garrisonian movement. But it was a +strange irony of fate that had made the fiery-hearted Whittier a +Friend. His poems against slavery and disunion have the martial ring +of a Tyrtaeus or a Koerner, added to the stern religious zeal of +Cromwell's Ironsides. They are like the sound of the trumpet blown +before the walls of Jericho, or the Psalms of David denouncing woe upon +the enemies of God's chosen people. If there is any purely Puritan +strain in American poetry it is in the war-hymns of the Quaker "Hermit +of Amesbury." Of these patriotic poems there were three principal +collections: _Voices of Freedom_, 1849; the _Panorama and Other Poems_, +1856; and _In War Time_, 1863; Whittier's work as the poet of freedom +was done when, on hearing the bells ring for the passage of the +constitutional amendment abolishing slavery, he wrote his splendid +_Laus Deo_, thrilling with the ancient Hebrew spirit: + + "Loud and long + Lift the old exulting song, + Sing with Miriam by the sea-- + He has cast the mighty down, + Horse and rider sink and drown, + He hath triumphed gloriously." + +Of his poems distinctly relating to the events of the civil war, the +best, or at all events the most popular, is _Barbara Frietchie_. +_Ichabod_, expressing the indignation of the Free Soilers at Daniel +Webster's seventh of March speech in defense of the {522} Fugitive +Slave Law, is one of Whittier's best political poems, and not +altogether unworthy of comparison with Browning's _Lost Leader_. The +language of Whittier's warlike lyrics is biblical, and many of his +purely devotional pieces are religious poetry of a high order and have +been included in numerous collections of hymns. Of his songs of faith +and doubt, the best are perhaps _Our Master_, _Chapel of the Hermits_, +and _Eternal Goodness_; one stanza from the last of which is familiar: + + "I know not where His islands lift + Their fronded palms in air, + I only know I cannot drift + Beyond His love and care." + +But from politics and war Whittier turned gladly to sing the homely +life of the New England country side. His rural ballads and idyls are +as genuinely American as any thing that our poets have written, and +have been recommended, as such, to English working-men by Whittier's +co-religionist, John Bright. The most popular of these is probably +_Maud Muller_, whose closing couplet has passed into proverb. _Skipper +Ireson's Ride_ is also very current. Better than either of them, as +poetry, is _Telling the Bees_. But Whittier's masterpiece in work of a +descriptive and reminiscent kind is _Snow Bound_, 1866, a New England +fireside idyl which in its truthfulness recalls the _Winter Evening_ of +Cowper's _Task_ and Burns's _Cotter's Saturday Night_, but in sweetness +and animation is superior to either of them. Although in {523} some +things a Puritan of the Puritans, Whittier has never forgotten that he +is also a Friend, and several of his ballads and songs have been upon +the subject of the early Quaker persecutions in Massachusetts. The +most impressive of these is _Cassandra Southwick_. The latest of them, +the _King's Missive_, originally contributed to the _Memorial History +of Boston_ in 1880, and reprinted the next year in a volume with other +poems, has been the occasion of a rather lively controversy. The +_Bridal of Pennacook_, 1848, and the _Tent on the Beach_, 1867, which +contain some of his best work, were series of ballads told by different +narrators, after the fashion of Longfellow's _Tales of a Wayside Inn_. +As an artist in verse Whittier is strong and fervid, rather than +delicate or rich. He uses only a few metrical forms--by preference the +eight-syllabled rhyming couplet + + --"Maud Muller on a summer's day + Raked the meadow sweet with hay," etc.-- + +and the emphatic tramp of this measure becomes very monotonous, as do +some of Whittier's mannerisms; which proceed, however, never from +affectation, but from a lack of study and variety, and so, no doubt, in +part from the want of that academic culture and thorough technical +equipment which Lowell and Longfellow enjoyed. Though his poems are +not in dialect, like Lowell's _Biglow Papers_, he knows how to make an +artistic use of homely provincial words, such as "chore," {524} which +give his idyls of the hearth and the barnyard a genuine Doric cast. +Whittier's prose is inferior to his verse. The fluency which was a +besetting sin of his poetry when released from the fetters of rhyme and +meter ran into wordiness. His prose writings were partly contributions +to the slavery controversy, partly biographical sketches of English and +American reformers, and partly studies of the scenery and folk-lore of +the Merrimack Valley. Those of most literary interest were the +_Supernaturalism of New England_, 1847, and some of the papers in +_Literary Recreations and Miscellanies_, 1854. + +While Massachusetts was creating an American literature, other sections +of the Union were by no means idle. The West, indeed, was as yet too +raw to add any thing of importance to the artistic product of the +country. The South was hampered by circumstances which will presently +be described. But in and about the seaboard cities of New York, +Philadelphia, Baltimore and Richmond, many pens were busy filling the +columns of literary weeklies and monthlies; and there was a +considerable output, such as it was, of books of poetry, fiction, +travel, and miscellaneous light literature. Time has already relegated +most of these to the dusty top-shelves. To rehearse the names of the +numerous contributors to the old _Knickerbocker Magazine_, to +_Godey's_, and _Graham's_, and the _New Mirror_, and the _Southern +Literary Messenger_, or to run over the list of authorlings and +poetasters in Poe's papers on {525} the _Literati of New York_, would +be very much like reading the inscriptions on the head-stones of an old +grave-yard. In the columns of these prehistoric magazines and in the +book notices and reviews away back in the thirties and forties, one +encounters the handiwork and the names of Emerson, Holmes, Longfellow, +Hawthorne, and Lowell, embodied in this mass of forgotten literature. +It would have required a good deal of critical acumen, at the time, to +predict that these and a few others would soon be thrown out into bold +relief, as the significant and permanent names in the literature of +their generation, while Paulding, Hirst, Fay, Dawes, Mrs. Osgood, and +scores of others who figured beside them in the fashionable +periodicals, and filled quite as large a space in the public eye, would +sink into oblivion in less than thirty years. Some of these latter +were clever enough people; they entertained their contemporary public +sufficiently, but their work had no vitality or "power of continuance." +The great majority of the writings of any period are necessarily +ephemeral, and time by a slow process of natural selection is +constantly sifting out the few representative books which shall carry +on the memory of the period to posterity. Now and then it may be +predicted of some undoubted work of genius, even at the moment that it +sees the light, that it is destined to endure. But tastes and fashions +change, and few things are better calculated to inspire the literary +critic with humility than to read {526} the prophecies in old reviews +and see how the future, now become the present, has quietly given them +the lie. + +From among the professional _litterateurs_ of his day emerges, with +ever sharper distinctness as time goes on, the name of Edgar Allan Poe +(1809-1849.) By the irony of fate Poe was born at Boston, and his +first volume, _Tamerlane and Other Poems_, 1827, was printed in that +city and bore upon its title page the words, "By a Bostonian." But his +parentage, so far as it was any thing, was southern. His father was a +Marylander who had gone upon the stage and married an actress, herself +the daughter of an actress and a native of England. Left an orphan by +the early death of both parents, Poe was adopted by a Mr. Allan, a +wealthy merchant of Richmond, Va. He was educated partly at an English +school, was student for a time in the University of Virginia and +afterward a cadet in the Military Academy at West Point. His youth was +wild and irregular: he gambled and drank, was proud, bitter and +perverse; finally quarreled with his guardian and adopted father--by +whom he was disowned--and then betook himself to the life of a literary +hack. His brilliant but underpaid work for various periodicals soon +brought him into notice, and he was given the editorship of the +_Southern Literary Messenger_, published at Richmond, and subsequently +of the _Gentlemen's_--afterward _Graham's_--_Magazine_ in Philadelphia. +These and all other positions Poe forfeited through his {527} +dissipated habits and wayward temper, and finally, in 1844, he drifted +to New York, where he found employment on the _Evening Mirror_ and then +on the _Broadway Journal_. He died of delirium tremens at the Marine +Hospital in Baltimore. His life was one of the most wretched in +literary history. He was an extreme instance of what used to be called +the "eccentricity of genius." He had the irritable vanity which is +popularly supposed to accompany the poetic temperament, and was so +insanely egotistic as to imagine that Longfellow and others were +constantly plagiarizing from him. The best side of Poe's character +came out in his domestic relations, in which he displayed great +tenderness, patience and fidelity. His instincts were gentlemanly, and +his manner and conversation were often winning. In the place of moral +feeling he had the artistic conscience. In his critical papers, except +where warped by passion or prejudice, he showed neither fear nor favor, +denouncing bad work by the most illustrious hands and commending +obscure merit. The "impudent literary cliques" who puffed each other's +books; the feeble chirrupings of the bardlings who manufactured verses +for the "Annuals;" and the twaddle of the "genial" incapables who +praised them in flabby reviews--all these Poe exposed with ferocious +honesty. Nor, though his writings are _un_moral, can they be called in +any sense _im_moral. His poetry is as pure in its unearthliness as +Bryant's in its austerity. + +{528} + +By 1831 Poe had published three thin books of verse, none of which had +attracted notice, although the latest contained the drafts of a few of +his most perfect poems, such as _Israfel_, the _Valley of Unrest_, the +_City in the Sea_, and one of the two pieces inscribed _To Helen_. It +was his habit to touch and retouch his work until it grew under his +more practiced hand into a shape that satisfied his fastidious taste. +Hence the same poem frequently reappears in different stages of +development in successive editions. Poe was a subtle artist in the +realm of the weird and the fantastic. In his intellectual nature there +was a strange conjunction; an imagination as spiritual as Shelley's, +though, unlike Shelley's, haunted perpetually with shapes of fear and +the imagery of ruin; with this, an analytic power, a scientific +exactness, and a mechanical ingenuity more usual in a chemist or a +mathematician than in a poet. He studied carefully the mechanism of +his verse and experimented endlessly with verbal and musical effects, +such as repetition, and monotone, and the selection of words in which +the consonants alliterated and the vowels varied. In his _Philosophy +of Composition_ he described how his best known poem, the _Raven_, was +systematically built up on a preconceived plan in which the number of +lines was first determined and the word "nevermore" selected as a +starting point. No one who knows the mood in which poetry is composed +will believe that this ingenious piece of dissection really describes +the way in {529} which the _Raven_ was conceived and written, or that +any such deliberate and self-conscious process could _originate_ the +associations from which a true poem springs. But it flattered Poe's +pride of intellect to assert that his cooler reason had control not +only over the execution of his poetry, but over the very well-head of +thought and emotion. Some of his most successful stories, like the +_Gold Bug_, the _Mystery of Marie Roget_, the _Purloined Letter_, and +the _Murders in the Rue Morgue_, were applications of this analytic +faculty to the solution of puzzles, such as the finding of buried +treasure or of a lost document, or the ferreting out of a mysterious +crime. After the publication of the _Gold Bug_ he received from all +parts of the country specimens of cipher writing, which he delighted to +work out. Others of his tales were clever pieces of mystification, +like _Hans Pfaall_, the story of a journey to the moon, or experiments +at giving verisimilitude to wild improbabilities by the skillful +introduction of scientific details, as in the _Facts in the Case of M. +Valdemar_ and _Von Kempelen's Discovery_. In his narratives of this +kind Poe anticipated the detective novels of Gaboriau and Wilkie +Collins, the scientific hoaxes of Jules Verne, and, though in a less +degree, the artfully worked up likeness to fact in Edward Everett +Hale's _Man Without a Country_, and similar fictions. While Dickens's +_Barnaby Rudge_ was publishing in parts, Poe showed his skill as a plot +hunter by publishing a paper in _Graham's Magazine_ in which the very +{530} tangled intrigue of the novel was correctly raveled and the +_finale_ predicted in advance. + +In his union of imagination and analytic power Poe resembled Coleridge, +who, if any one, was his teacher in poetry and criticism. Poe's verse +often reminds one of _Christabel_ and the _Ancient Mariner_, still +oftener of _Kubla Khan_. Like Coleridge, too, he indulged at times in +the opium habit. But in Poe the artist predominated over every thing +else. He began not with sentiment or thought, but with technique, with +melody and color, tricks of language, and effects of verse. It is +curious to study the growth of his style in his successive volumes of +poetry. At first these are metrical experiments and vague images, +original, and with a fascinating suggestiveness, but with so little +meaning that some of his earlier pieces are hardly removed from +nonsense. Gradually, like distant music drawing nearer and nearer, his +poetry becomes fuller of imagination and of an inward significance, +without ever losing, however, its mysterious aloofness from the real +world of the senses. It was a part of Poe's literary creed--formed +upon his own practice and his own limitations, but set forth with a +great display of _a priori_ reasoning in his essay on the _Poetic +Principle_ and elsewhere--that pleasure and not instruction or moral +exhortation was the end of poetry; that beauty and not truth or +goodness was its means; and, furthermore, that the pleasure which it +gave should be _indefinite_. About his own poetry there was always +this {531} indefiniteness. His imagination dwelt in a strange country +of dream--a "ghoul-haunted region of Weir," "out of space, out of +time"--filled with unsubstantial landscapes, and peopled by spectral +shapes. And yet there is a wonderful, hidden significance in this +uncanny scenery. The reader feels that the wild, fantasmal imagery is +in itself a kind of language, and that it in some way expresses a +brooding thought or passion, the terror and despair of a lost soul. +Sometimes there is an obvious allegory, as in the _Haunted Palace_, +which is the parable of a ruined mind, or in the _Raven_, the most +popular of all Poe's poems, originally published in the _American Whig +Review_ for February, 1845. Sometimes the meaning is more obscure, as +in _Ulalume_, which, to most people, is quite incomprehensible, and yet +to all readers of poetic feeling is among the most characteristic, and, +therefore, the most fascinating, of its author's creations. + +Now and then, as in the beautiful ballad, _Annabel Lee_, and _To One in +Paradise_, the poet emerges into the light of common human feeling and +speaks a more intelligible language. But in general his poetry is not +the poetry of the heart, and its passion is not the passion of flesh +and blood. In Poe the thought of death is always near, and of the +shadowy borderland between death and life. + + "The play is the tragedy 'Man,' + And its hero the Conqueror Worm," + + +{532} + +The prose tale, _Ligeia_, in which these verses are inserted, is one of +the most powerful of all Poe's writings, and its theme is the power of +the will to overcome death. In that singularly impressive poem, the +_Sleeper_, the morbid horror which invests the tomb springs from the +same source, the materiality of Poe's imagination, which refuses to let +the soul go free from the body. + +This quality explains why Poe's _Tales of the Grotesque_ and +_Arabesque_, 1840, are on a lower plane than Hawthorne's romances, to +which a few of them, like _William Wilson_ and the _Man of the Crowd_, +have some resemblance. The former of these, in particular, is in +Hawthorne's peculiar province, the allegory of the conscience. But in +general the tragedy in Hawthorne is a spiritual one, while Poe calls in +the aid of material forces. The passion of physical fear or of +superstitious horror is that which his writings most frequently excite. +These tales represent various grades of the frightful and the ghastly, +from the mere bug-a-boo story like the _Black Cat_, which makes +children afraid to go in the dark, up to the breathless terror of the +_Cask of Amontillado_, or the _Red Death_. Poe's masterpiece in this +kind is the fateful tale of the _Fall of the House of Usher_, with its +solemn and magnificent close. His prose, at its best, often recalls, +in its richly imaginative cast, the manner of De Quincey in such +passages as his _Dream Fugue_, or _Our Ladies of Sorrow_. In {533} +descriptive pieces like the _Domain of Arnheim_, and stories of +adventure like the _Descent into the Maelstrom_, and his long sea tale, +_The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym_, 1838, he displayed a realistic +inventiveness almost equal to Swift's or De Foe's. He was not without +a mocking irony, but he had no constructive humor, and his attempts at +the facetious were mostly failures. + +Poe's magical creations were rootless flowers. He took no hold upon +the life about him, and cared nothing for the public concerns of his +country. His poems and tales might have been written _in vacuo_ for +any thing American in them. Perhaps for this reason, in part, his fame +has been so cosmopolitan. In France especially his writings have been +favorites. Charles Baudelaire, the author of the _Fleurs du Mal_, +translated them into French, and his own impressive but unhealthy +poetry shows evidence of Poe's influence. The defect in Poe was in +character, a defect which will make itself felt in art as in life. If +he had had the sweet home feeling of Longfellow or the moral fervor of +Whittier he might have been a greater poet than either. + + "If I could dwell + Where Israfel + Hath dwelt, and he where I, + He might not sing so wildly well + A mortal melody, + While a bolder note than this might swell + From my lyre within the sky!" + + +{534} + +Though Poe was a southerner, if not by birth, at least by race and +breeding, there was nothing distinctly southern about his peculiar +genius, and in his wandering life he was associated as much with +Philadelphia and New York as with Baltimore and Richmond. The +conditions which had made the southern colonies unfruitful in literary +and educational works before the Revolution continued to act down to +the time of the civil war. Eli Whitney's invention of the cotton gin +in the closing years of the last century gave extension to slavery, +making it profitable to cultivate the new staple by enormous gangs of +field hands working under the whip of the overseer in large +plantations. Slavery became henceforth a business speculation in the +States furthest south, and not, as in Old Virginia and Kentucky, a +comparatively mild domestic system. The necessity of defending its +peculiar institution against the attacks of a growing faction in the +North compelled the South to throw all its intellectual strength into +politics, which, for that matter, is the natural occupation and +excitement of a social aristocracy. Meanwhile immigration sought the +free States, and there was no middle class at the South. The "poor +whites" were ignorant and degraded. There were people of education in +the cities and on some of the plantations, but there was no great +educated class from which a literature could proceed. And the culture +of the South, such as it was, was becoming old-fashioned and local, as +the section was isolated {535} more and more from the rest of the Union +and from the enlightened public opinion of Europe by its reactionary +prejudices and its sensitiveness on the subject of slavery. Nothing +can be imagined more ridiculously provincial than the sophomorical +editorials in the southern press just before the outbreak of the war, +or than the backward and ill-informed articles which passed for reviews +in the poorly supported periodicals of the South. + +In the general dearth of work of high and permanent value, one or two +southern authors may be mentioned whose writings have at least done +something to illustrate the life and scenery of their section. When in +1833 the Baltimore _Saturday Visitor_ offered a prize of a hundred +dollars for the best prose tale, one of the committee who awarded the +prize to Poe's first story, the MS. _Found in a Bottle_, was John P. +Kennedy, a Whig gentleman of Baltimore, who afterward became Secretary +of the Navy in Fillmore's administration. The year before he had +published _Swallow Barn_, a series of agreeable sketches of country +life in Virginia. In 1835 and 1838 he published his two novels, +_Horse-Shoe Robinson_ and _Rob of the Bowl_, the former a story of the +Revolutionary War in South Carolina; the latter an historical tale of +colonial Maryland. These had sufficient success to warrant reprinting +as late as 1852. But the most popular and voluminous of all Southern +writers of fiction was William Gilmore Simms, a South Carolinian, who +died in 1870. He wrote over thirty {536} novels, mostly romances of +Revolutionary history, southern life and wild adventure, among the best +of which were the _Partisan_, 1835, and the _Yemassee_. Simms was an +inferior Cooper, with a difference. His novels are good boys' books, +but are crude and hasty in composition. He was strongly southern in +his sympathies, though his newspaper, the _Charleston City Gazette_, +took part against the Nullifiers. His miscellaneous writings include +several histories and biographies, political tracts, addresses and +critical papers contributed to southern magazines. He also wrote +numerous poems, the most ambitious of which was _Atlantis, a Story of +the Sea_, 1832. His poems have little value except as here and there +illustrating local scenery and manners, as in _Southern Passages and +Pictures_, 1839. Mr. John Esten Cooke's pleasant but not very strong +_Virginia Comedians_ was, perhaps, in literary quality the best +southern novel produced before the civil war. + +When Poe came to New York, the most conspicuous literary figure of the +metropolis, with the possible exception of Bryant and Halleck, was N. +P. Willis, one of the editors of the _Evening Mirror_, upon which +journal Poe was for a time engaged. Willis had made a literary +reputation, when a student at Yale, by his _Scripture Poems_, written +in smooth blank verse. Afterward he had edited the _American Monthly_ +in his native city of Boston, and more recently he had published +_Pencillings by the Way_, 1835, a pleasant record of {537} European +saunterings; _Inklings of Adventure_, 1836, a collection of dashing +stories and sketches of American and foreign life; and _Letters from +Under a Bridge_, 1839, a series of charming rural letters from his +country place at Owego, on the Susquehanna. Willis's work, always +graceful and sparkling, sometimes even brilliant, though light in +substance and jaunty in style, had quickly raised him to the summit of +popularity. During the years from 1835 to 1850 he was the most +successful American magazinist, and even down to the day of his death, +in 1867, he retained his hold upon the attention of the fashionable +public by his easy paragraphing and correspondence in the _Mirror_ and +its successor, the _Home Journal_, which catered to the literary wants +of the _beau monde_. Much of Willis's work was ephemeral, though +clever of its kind, but a few of his best tales and sketches, such as +_F. Smith_, _The Ghost Ball at Congress Hall_, _Edith Linsey_, and the +_Lunatic's Skate_, together with some of the _Letters from Under a +Bridge_, are worthy of preservation, not only as readable stories, but +as society studies of life at American watering places like Nahant and +Saratoga and Ballston Spa half a century ago. A number of his simpler +poems, like _Unseen Spirits_, _Spring_, _To M---- from Abroad_, and +_Lines on Leaving Europe_, still retain a deserved place in collections +and anthologies. + +The senior editor of the _Mirror_, George P. Morris, was once a very +popular song writer, and {538} his _Woodman, Spare that Tree_, still +survives. Other residents of New York City who have written single +famous pieces were Clement C. Moore, a professor in the General +Theological Seminary, whose _Visit from St. Nicholas_--"'Twas the Night +Before Christmas," etc.--is a favorite ballad in every nursery in the +land; Charles Fenno Hoffman, a novelist of reputation in his time, but +now remembered only as the author of the song, _Sparkling and Bright_, +and the patriotic ballad of _Monterey_; Robert H. Messinger, a native +of Boston, but long resident in New York, where he was a familiar +figure in fashionable society, who wrote _Give Me the Old_, a fine ode +with a choice Horatian flavor; and William Allen Butler, a lawyer and +occasional writer, whose capital satire of _Nothing to Wear_ was +published anonymously and had a great run. Of younger poets, like +Stoddard and Aldrich, who formerly wrote for the _Mirror_ and who are +still living and working in the maturity of their powers, it is not +within the limits and design of this sketch to speak. But one of their +contemporaries, Bayard Taylor, who died, American Minister at Berlin, +in 1878, though a Pennsylvanian by birth and rearing, may be reckoned +among the "literati of New York." A farmer lad from Chester County, +who had learned the printer's trade and printed a little volume of his +juvenile verses in 1844, he came to New York shortly after with +credentials from Dr. Griswold, the editor of _Graham's_, and obtaining +encouragement and aid {539} from Willis, Horace Greeley and others, he +set out to make the tour of Europe, walking from town to town in +Germany and getting employment now and then at his trade to help pay +the expenses of the trip. The story of these _Wanderjahre_ he told in +his _Views Afoot_, 1846. This was the first of eleven books of travel +written during the course of his life. He was an inveterate nomad, and +his journeyings carried him to the remotest regions--to California, +India, China, Japan and the isles of the sea, to Central Africa and the +Soudan, Palestine, Egypt, Iceland and the "by-ways of Europe." His +head-quarters at home were in New York, where he did literary work for +the _Tribune_. He was a rapid and incessant worker, throwing off many +volumes of verse and prose, fiction, essays, sketches, translations and +criticism, mainly contributed in the first instance to the magazines. +His versatility was very marked, and his poetry ranged from _Rhymes of +Travel_, 1848, and _Poems of the Orient_, 1854, to idyls and home +ballads of Pennsylvania life, like the _Quaker Widow_ and the _Old +Pennsylvania Farmer_, and, on the other side, to ambitious and somewhat +mystical poems, like the _Masque of the Gods_, 1872--written in four +days--and dramatic experiments like the _Prophet_, 1874, and _Prince +Deukalion_, 1878. He was a man of buoyant and eager nature, with a +great appetite for new experience, a remarkable memory, a talent for +learning languages, and a too great readiness to take the hue of his +favorite books. From {540} his facility, his openness to external +impressions of scenery and costume and his habit of turning these at +once into the service of his pen, it results that there is something +"newspapery" and superficial about most of his prose. It is reporter's +work, though reporting of a high order. His poetry, too, though full +of glow and picturesqueness, is largely imitative, suggesting Tennyson +not unfrequently, but more often Shelley. His spirited _Bedouin Song_, +for example, has an echo of Shelley's _Lines to an Indian Air_: + + "From the desert I come to thee + On a stallion shod with fire; + And the winds are left behind + In the speed of my desire. + Under thy window I stand + And the midnight hears my cry; + I love thee, I love but thee + With a love that shall not die." + +The dangerous quickness with which he caught the manner of other poets +made him an admirable parodist and translator. His _Echo Club_, 1876, +contains some of the best travesties in the tongue, and his great +translation of Goethe's _Faust_, 1870-71--with its wonderfully close +reproduction of the original meters--is one of the glories of American +literature. All in all, Taylor may unhesitatingly be put first among +our poets of the second generation--the generation succeeding that of +Longfellow and Lowell--although the lack in him of original genius +self-determined to a {541} peculiar sphere, or the want of an inward +fixity and concentration to resist the rich tumult of outward +impressions, has made him less significant in the history of our +literary thought than some other writers less generously endowed. + +Taylor's novels had the qualities of his verse. They were profuse, +eloquent and faulty. _John Godfrey's Fortune_, 1864, gave a picture of +bohemian life in New York. _Hannah Thurston_, 1863, and the _Story of +Kennett_, 1866, introduced many incidents and persons from the old +Quaker life of rural Pennsylvania, as Taylor remembered it in his +boyhood. The former was like Hawthorne's _Blithedale Romance_, a +satire on fanatics and reformers, and its heroine is a nobly conceived +character, though drawn with some exaggeration. The _Story of +Kennett_, which is largely autobiographic, has a greater freshness and +reality than the others and is full of personal recollections. In +these novels, as in his short stories, Taylor's pictorial skill is +greater on the whole than his power of creating characters or inventing +plots. + +Literature in the West now began to have an existence. Another young +poet from Chester County, Pa., namely, Thomas Buchanan Read, went to +Cincinnati, and not to New York, to study sculpture and painting, about +1837, and one of his best-known poems, _Pons Maximus_, was written on +the occasion of the opening of the suspension bridge across the Ohio. +Read came East, to be sure, in 1841, and spent many years in our {542} +seaboard cities and in Italy. He was distinctly a minor poet, but some +of his Pennsylvania pastorals, like the _Deserted Road_, have a natural +sweetness; and his luxurious _Drifting_, which combines the methods of +painting and poetry, is justly popular. _Sheridan's Ride_--perhaps his +most current piece--is a rather forced production and has been +over-praised. The two Ohio sister poets, Alice and Phoebe Cary, were +attracted to New York in 1850, as soon as their literary success seemed +assured. They made that city their home for the remainder of their +lives. Poe praised Alice Cary's _Pictures of Memory_, and Phoebe's +_Nearer Home_ has become a favorite hymn. There is nothing peculiarly +Western about the verse of the Cary sisters. It is the poetry of +sentiment, memory, and domestic affection, entirely feminine, rather +tame and diffuse as a whole, but tender and sweet, cherished by many +good women and dear to simple hearts. + +A stronger smack of the soil is in the negro melodies like _Uncle Ned_, +_O Susanna_, _Old Folks at Home_, _Way Down South_, _Nelly was a Lady_, +_My Old Kentucky Home_, etc., which were the work not of any southern +poet, but of Stephen C. Foster, a native of Allegheny, Pa., and a +resident of Cincinnati and Pittsburg. He composed the words and music +of these, and many others of a similar kind, during the years 1847 to +1861. Taken together they form the most original and vital addition +which this country has made to the psalmody {543} of the world, and +entitle Foster to the first rank among American song writers. + +As Foster's plaintive melodies carried the pathos and humor of the +plantation all over the land, so Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe's _Uncle +Tom's Cabin_, 1852, brought home to millions of readers the sufferings +of the negroes in the "black belt" of the cotton-growing States. This +is the most popular novel ever written in America. Hundreds of +thousands of copies were sold in this country and in England, and some +forty translations were made into foreign tongues. In its dramatized +form it still keeps the stage, and the statistics of circulating +libraries show that even now it is in greater demand than any other +single book. It did more than any other literary agency to rouse the +public conscience to a sense of the shame and horror of slavery; more +even than Garrison's _Liberator_; more than the indignant poems of +Whittier and Lowell or the orations of Sumner and Phillips. It +presented the thing concretely and dramatically, and in particular it +made the odious Fugitive Slave Law forever impossible to enforce. It +was useless for the defenders of slavery to protest that the picture +was exaggerated and that overseers like Legree were the exception. The +system under which such brutalities could happen, and did sometimes +happen, was doomed. It is easy now to point out defects of taste and +art in this masterpiece, to show that the tone is occasionally +melodramatic, that some of the characters are {544} conventional, and +that the literary execution is in parts feeble and in others coarse. +In spite of all it remains true that _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ is a great +book, the work of genius seizing instinctively upon its opportunity and +uttering the thought of the time with a power that thrilled the heart +of the nation and of the world. Mrs. Stowe never repeated her first +success. Some of her novels of New England life, such as the +_Minister's Wooing_, 1859, and the _Pearl of Orr's Island_, 1862, have +a mild kind of interest, and contain truthful portraiture of provincial +ways and traits; while later fictions of a domestic type, like _Pink +and White Tyranny_, and _My Wife and I_, are really beneath criticism. + +There were other Connecticut writers contemporary with Mrs. Stowe: Mrs. +L. H. Sigourney, for example, a Hartford poetess, formerly known as +"the Hemans of America," but now quite obsolete; and J. G. Percival of +New Haven, a shy and eccentric scholar, whose geological work was of +value, and whose memory is preserved by one or two of his simpler +poems, still in circulation, such as _To Seneca Lake_ and the _Coral +Grove_. Another Hartford poet, Brainard--already spoken of as an early +friend of Whittier--died young, leaving a few pieces which show that +his lyrical gift was spontaneous and genuine but had received little +cultivation. A much younger writer than either of these, Donald G. +Mitchell, of New Haven, has a more lasting place in our literature, by +virtue of his charmingly written _Reveries of a Bachelor_, {545} 1850, +and _Dream Life_, 1852, stories which sketch themselves out in a series +of reminiscences and lightly connected scenes, and which always appeal +freshly to young men because they have that dreamy outlook upon life +which is characteristic of youth. But, upon the whole, the most +important contribution made by Connecticut in that generation to the +literary stock of America was the Beecher family. Lyman Beecher had +been an influential preacher and theologian, and a sturdy defender of +orthodoxy against Boston Unitarianism. Of his numerous sons and +daughters, all more or less noted for intellectual vigor and +independence, the most eminent were Mrs. Stowe and Henry Ward Beecher, +the great pulpit orator of Brooklyn. Mr. Beecher was too busy a man to +give more than his spare moments to general literature. His sermons, +lectures, and addresses were reported for the daily papers and printed +in part in book form; but these lose greatly when divorced from the +large, warm, and benignant personality of the man. His volumes made up +of articles in the _Independent_ and the _Ledger_, such as _Star +Papers_, 1855, and _Eyes and Ears_, 1862, contain many delightful +_morceaux_ upon country life and similar topics, though they are hardly +wrought with sufficient closeness and care to take a permanent place in +letters. Like Willis's _Ephemerae_, they are excellent literary +journalism, but hardly literature. + +We may close our retrospect of American {546} literature before 1861 +with a brief notice of one of the most striking literary phenomena of +the time--the _Leaves of Grass_ of Walt Whitman, published at Brooklyn +in 1855. The author, born at West Hills, Long Island, in 1819, had +been printer, school-teacher, editor, and builder. He had scribbled a +good deal of poetry of the ordinary kind, which attracted little +attention, but finding conventional rhymes and meters too cramping a +vehicle for his need of expression, he discarded them for a kind of +rhythmic chant, of which the following is a fair specimen: + + "Press close, bare bosom'd night! Press close, magnetic, + nourishing night! + Night of south winds! night of the few large stars! + Still, nodding night! mad, naked, summer night!" + +The invention was not altogether a new one. The English translation of +the Psalms of David and of some of the Prophets, the _Poems of Ossian_, +and some of Matthew Arnold's unrhymed pieces, especially the _Strayed +Reveller_, have an irregular rhythm of this kind, to say nothing of the +old Anglo-Saxon poems, like _Beowulf_, and the Scripture paraphrases +attributed to Caedmon. But this species of _oratio soluta_, carried to +the lengths to which Whitman carried it, had an air of novelty which +was displeasing to some, while to others, weary of familiar measures +and jingling rhymes, it was refreshing in its boldness and freedom. +There is no consenting estimate of this poet. {547} Many think that +his so-called poems are not poems at all, but simply a bad variety of +prose; that there is nothing to him beyond a combination of affectation +and indecency; and that the Whitman _culte_ is a passing "fad" of a few +literary men, and especially of a number of English critics like +Rossetti, Swinburne, Buchanan, etc., who, being determined to have +something unmistakably American--that is, different from any thing +else--in writings from this side of the water before they will +acknowledge any originality in them, have been misled into discovering +in Whitman "the poet of Democracy." Others maintain that he is the +greatest of American poets, or, indeed, of all modern poets; that he is +"cosmic," or universal, and that he has put an end forever to puling +rhymes and lines chopped up into metrical feet. Whether Whitman's +poetry is formally poetry at all or merely the raw material of poetry, +the chaotic and amorphous impression which it makes on readers of +conservative tastes results from his effort to take up into his verse +elements which poetry has usually left out--the ugly, the earthy, and +even the disgusting; the "under side of things," which he holds not to +be prosaic when apprehended with a strong, masculine joy in life and +nature seen in all their aspects. The lack of these elements in the +conventional poets seems to him and his disciples like leaving out the +salt from the ocean, making poetry merely pretty and blinking whole +classes of facts. Hence the naturalism and animalism of some of the +{548} divisions in _Leaves of Grass_, particularly that entitled +_Children of Adam_, which gave great offense by its immodesty, or its +outspokenness. Whitman holds that nakedness is chaste; that all the +functions of the body in healthy exercise are equally clean; that all, +in fact, are divine; and that matter is as divine as spirit. The +effort to get every thing into his poetry, to speak out his thought +just as it comes to him, accounts, too, for his way of cataloguing +objects without selection. His single expressions are often +unsurpassed for descriptive beauty and truth. He speaks of "the +vitreous pour of the full moon, just tinged with blue," of the "lisp" +of the plane, of the prairies, "where herds of buffalo make a crawling +spread of the square miles." But if there is any eternal distinction +between poetry and prose the most liberal canons of the poetic art will +never agree to accept lines like these: + + "And [I] remember putting plasters on the galls of his neck + and ankles; + He stayed with me a week before he was recuperated, and + passed north." + +Whitman is the spokesman of Democracy and of the future; full of +brotherliness and hope, loving the warm, gregarious pressure of the +crowd and the touch of his comrade's elbow in the ranks. He liked the +people--multitudes of people; the swarm of life beheld from a Broadway +omnibus or a Brooklyn ferry-boat. The rowdy and the Negro {549} +truck-driver were closer to his sympathy than the gentleman and the +scholar. "I loafe and invite my soul," he writes: "I sound my barbaric +yawp over the roofs of the world." His poem _Walt Whitman_, frankly +egotistic, simply describes himself as a typical, average man--the same +as any other man, and therefore not individual but universal. He has +great tenderness and heartiness--"the good gray poet;" and during the +civil war he devoted himself unreservedly to the wounded soldiers in +the Washington hospitals--an experience which he has related in the +_Dresser_ and elsewhere. It is characteristic of his rough and ready +_camaraderie_ to use slang and newspaper English in his poetry, to call +himself Walt instead of Walter, and to have his picture taken in a +slouch hat and with a flannel shirt open at the throat. His decriers +allege that he poses for effect; that he is simply a backward eddy in +the tide, and significant only as a temporary reaction against ultra +civilization--like Thoreau, though in a different way. But with all +his mistakes in art there is a healthy, virile, tumultuous pulse of +life in his lyric utterance and a great sweep of imagination in his +panoramic view of times and countries. One likes to read him because +he feels so good, enjoys so fully the play of his senses, and has such +a lusty confidence in his own immortality and in the prospects of the +human race. Stripped of verbiage and repetition, his ideas are not +many. His indebtedness to Emerson--who wrote an introduction to {550} +the _Leaves of Grass_--is manifest. He sings of man and not men, and +the individual differences of character, sentiment, and passion, the +_dramatic_ elements of life, find small place in his system. It is too +early to say what will be his final position in literary history. But +it is noteworthy that the democratic masses have not accepted him yet +as their poet. Whittier and Longfellow, the poets of conscience and +feeling, are the darlings of the American people. The admiration, and +even the knowledge of Whitman, are mostly esoteric, confined to the +literary class. It is also not without significance as to the ultimate +reception of his innovations in verse that he has numerous parodists, +but no imitators. The tendency among our younger poets is not toward +the abandonment of rhyme and meter, but toward the introduction of new +stanza forms and an increasing carefulness and finish in the +_technique_ of their art. It is observable, too, that in his most +inspired passages Whitman reverts to the old forms of verse; to blank +verse, for example, in the _Man-o'-War-Bird_: + + "Thou who hast slept all night upon the storm, + Waking renewed on thy prodigious pinions," etc., + +and elsewhere not infrequently to dactylic hexameters and pentameters: + + "Earth of shine and dark, mottling the tide of the river! . . . + Far-swooping, elbowed earth! rich, apple-blossomed earth." + +{551} Indeed, Whitman's most popular poem, _My Captain_, written after +the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, differs little in form from +ordinary verse, as a stanza of it will show: + + "My captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still; + My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will; + The ship is anchored safe and sound, its voyage closed and done; + From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won. + Exult, O shores, and ring, O bells! + But I, with mournful tread, + Walk the deck, my captain lies + Fallen, cold and dead." + +This is from _Drum Taps_, a volume of poems of the civil war. Whitman +has also written prose having much the same quality as his poetry: +_Democratic Vistas_, _Memoranda of the Civil War_, and more recently, +_Specimen Days_. His residence of late years has been at Camden, New +Jersey, where a centennial edition of his writings was published in +1876. + + +1. William Cullen Bryant. Thanatopsis. To a Waterfowl. Green River. +Hymn to the North Star. A Forest Hymn. "O Fairest of the Rural +Maids." June. The Death of the Flowers. The Evening Wind. The +Battle Field. The Planting of the Apple-tree. The Flood of Years. + +2. John Greenleaf Whittier. Cassandra {552} Southwick. The New Wife +and the Old. The Virginia Slave Mother. Randolph of Roanoke. Barclay +of Ary. The Witch of Wenham. Skipper Ireson's Ride. Marguerite. +Maud Muller. Telling the Bees. My Playmate. Barbara Frietchie. +Ichabod. Laus Deo. Snow Bound. + +3. Edgar Allan Poe. The Raven. The Bells. Israfel. Ulalume. To +Helen. The City in the Sea. Annabel Lee. To One in Paradise. The +Sleeper. The Valley of Unrest. The Fall of the House of Usher. +Ligeia. William Wilson. The Cask of Amontillado. The Assignation. +The Masque of the Red Death. Narrative of A. Gordon Pym. + +4. N. P. Willis. Select Prose Writings. New York: Charles Scribner's +Sons. 1886. + +5. Mrs. H. B. Stowe. Uncle Tom's Cabin. Oldtown Folks. + +6. W. G. Simms. The Partisan. The Yemassee. + +7. Bayard Taylor. A Bacchic Ode. Hylas. Kubleh. The Soldier and the +Pard. Sicilian Wine. Taurus. Serapion. The Metempsychosis of the +Pine. The Temptation of Hassan Ben Khaled. Bedouin Song. Euphorion. +The Quaker Widow. John Reid. Lars. Views Afoot. By-ways of Europe. +The Story of Kennett. The Echo Club. + +8. Walt Whitman. My Captain. "When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard +Bloomed." "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking." Pioneers, {553} O +Pioneers. The Mystic Trumpeter. A Woman at Auction. Sea-shore +Memoirs. Passage to India. Mannahatta. The Wound Dresser. Longings +for Home. + +9. Poets of America. By E. C. Stedman. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & +Co. 1885. + + + + +{554} + +CHAPTER VII. + +LITERATURE SINCE 1861. + +A generation has nearly passed since the outbreak of the civil war, and +although public affairs are still mainly in the hands of men who had +reached manhood before the conflict opened, or who were old enough at +that time to remember clearly its stirring events, the younger men who +are daily coming forward to take their places know it only by tradition. +It makes a definite break in the history of our literature, and a number +of new literary schools and tendencies have appeared since its close. As +to the literature of the war itself, it was largely the work of writers +who had already reached or passed middle age. All of the more important +authors described in the last three chapters survived the Rebellion, +except Poe, who died in 1849, Prescott, who died in 1859, and Thoreau and +Hawthorne, who died in the second and fourth years of the war, +respectively. The final and authoritative history of the struggle has +not yet been written, and cannot be written for many years to come. Many +partial and tentative accounts have, however, appeared, among which may +be mentioned, on the northern side, {555} Horace Greeley's _American +Conflict_, 1864-66; Vice-president Wilson's _Rise and Fall of the Slave +Power in America_, and J. W. Draper's _American Civil War_, 1868-70; on +the southern side Alexander H. Stephens's _Confederate States of +America_, Jefferson Davis's _Rise and Fall of the Confederate States of +America_, and E. A. Pollard's _Lost Cause_. These, with the exception of +Dr. Draper's philosophical narrative, have the advantage of being the +work of actors in the political or military events which they describe, +and the disadvantage of being, therefore, partisan--in some instances +passionately partisan. A storehouse of materials for the coming +historian is also at hand in Frank Moore's great collection, the +_Rebellion Record_; in numerous regimental histories and histories of +special armies, departments, and battles, like W. Swinton's _Army of the +Potomac_; in the autobiographies and recollections of Grant and Sherman +and other military leaders; in the "war papers," now publishing in the +_Century_ magazine, and in innumerable sketches and reminiscences by +officers and privates on both sides. + +The war had its poetry, its humors and its general literature, some of +which have been mentioned in connection with Whittier, Lowell, Holmes, +Whitman, and others; and some of which remain to be mentioned, as the +work of new writers, or of writers who had previously made little mark. +There were war songs on both sides, few of which had much literary value +excepting, perhaps, James {556} R. Randall's southern ballad, _Maryland, +My Maryland_, sung to the old college air of _Lauriger Horatius_, and the +grand martial chorus of _John Brown's Body_, an old Methodist hymn, to +which the northern armies beat time as they went "marching on." +Randall's song, though spirited, was marred by its fire-eating +absurdities about "vandals" and "minions" and "northern scum," the cheap +insults of the southern newspaper press. To furnish the _John Brown_ +chorus with words worthy of the music, Mrs. Julia Ward Howe wrote her +_Battle Hymn of the Republic_, a noble poem, but rather too fine and +literary for a song, and so never fully accepted by the soldiers. Among +the many verses which voiced the anguish and the patriotism of that stern +time, which told of partings and homecomings, of women waiting by +desolate hearths, in country homes, for tidings of husbands and sons who +had gone to the war, or which celebrated individual deeds of heroism or +sang the thousand private tragedies and heart-breaks of the great +conflict, by far the greater number were of too humble a grade to survive +the feeling of the hour. Among the best or the most popular of them were +Kate Putnam Osgood's _Driving Home the Cows_, Mrs. Ethel Lynn Beers's +_All Quiet Along the Potomac_, Forceythe Willson's _Old Sergeant_, and +John James Piatt's _Riding to Vote_. Of the poets whom the war brought +out, or developed, the most noteworthy were Henry Timrod, of South +Carolina, and Henry Howard Brownell, of Connecticut. During the {557} +war Timrod was with the Confederate Army of the West, as correspondent +for the _Charleston Mercury_, and in 1864 he became assistant editor of +the _South Carolinian_, at Columbia. Sherman's "march to the sea" broke +up his business, and he returned to Charleston. A complete edition of +his poems was published in 1873, six years after his death. The +prettiest of all Timrod's poems is _Katie_, but more to our present +purpose are _Charleston_--written in the time of blockade--and the +_Unknown Dead_, which tells + + "Of nameless graves on battle plains, + Wash'd by a single winter's rains, + Where, some beneath Virginian hills, + And some by green Atlantic rills, + Some by the waters of the West, + A myriad unknown heroes rest." + + +When the war was over a poet of New York State, F. M. Finch, sang of +these and of other graves in his beautiful Decoration Day lyric, _The +Blue and the Gray_, which spoke the word of reconciliation and +consecration for North and South alike. + +Brownell, whose _Lyrics of a Day_ and _War Lyrics_ were published +respectively in 1864 and 1866, was private secretary to Farragut, on +whose flag-ship, the _Hartford_, he was present at several great naval +engagements, such as the "Passage of the Forts" below New Orleans, and +the action off Mobile, described in his poem, the _Bay Fight_. {558} +With some roughness and unevenness of execution, Brownell's poetry had a +fire which places him next to Whittier as the Koerner of the civil war. +In him, especially, as in Whittier, is that Puritan sense of the +righteousness of his cause which made the battle for the Union a holy war +to the crusaders against slavery: + + "Full red the furnace fires must glow + That melt the ore of mortal kind: + The mills of God are grinding slow, + But ah, how close they grind! + + "To-day the Dahlgren and the drum + Are dread apostles of his name; + His kingdom here can only come + By chrism of blood and flame." + + +One of the earliest martyrs of the war was Theodore Winthrop, hardly +known as a writer until the publication in the _Atlantic Monthly_ of his +vivid sketches of _Washington as a Camp_, describing the march of his +regiment, the famous New York Seventh, and its first quarters in the +Capitol at Washington. A tragic interest was given to these papers by +Winthrop's gallant death in the action of Big Bethel, June 10, 1861. +While this was still fresh in public recollection his manuscript novels +were published, together with a collection of his stories and sketches +reprinted from the magazines. His novels, though in parts crude and +immature, have a dash and buoyancy--an out-door air about them--which +give the reader a winning impression {559} of Winthrop's personality. +The best of them is, perhaps, _Cecil Dreeme_, a romance that reminds one +a little of Hawthorne, and the scene of which is the New York University +building on Washington Square, a locality that has been further +celebrated in Henry James's novel of _Washington Square_. + +Another member of this same Seventh Regiment, Fitz James O'Brien, an +Irishman by birth, who died at Baltimore, in 1862, from the effects of a +wound received in a cavalry skirmish, had contributed to the magazines a +number of poems and of brilliant though fantastic tales, among which the +_Diamond Lens_ and _What Was It?_ had something of Edgar A. Poe's +quality. Another Irish-American, Charles G. Halpine, under the pen-name +of "Miles O'Reilly," wrote a good many clever ballads of the war, partly +serious and partly in comic brogue. Prose writers of note furnished the +magazines with narratives of their experience at the seat of war, among +papers of which kind may be mentioned Dr. Holmes's _My Search for the +Captain_, in the _Atlantic Monthly_, and Colonel T. W. Higginson's _Army +Life in a Black Regiment_, collected into a volume in 1870. + +Of the public oratory of the war the foremost example is the +ever-memorable address of Abraham Lincoln at the dedication of the +National Cemetery at Gettysburg. The war had brought the nation to its +intellectual majority. In the stress of that terrible fight there was no +room for {560} buncombe and verbiage, such as the newspapers and +stump-speakers used to dole out in _ante bellum_ days. Lincoln's speech +is short--a few grave words which he turned aside for a moment to speak +in the midst of his task of saving the country. The speech is simple, +naked of figures, every sentence impressed with a sense of responsibility +for the work yet to be done and with a stern determination to do it. "In +a larger sense," it says, "we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we +cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled +here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The +world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can +never forget what they did here. It is for us, the living, rather to be +dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have +thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to +the great task remaining before us; that from these honored dead we take +increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full +measure of devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead shall +not have died in vain: that this nation, under God, shall have a new +birth of freedom; and that government of the people, by the people, for +the people, shall not perish from the earth." Here was eloquence of a +different sort from the sonorous perorations of Webster or the polished +climaxes of Everett. As we read the plain, strong language of this brief +classic, with its solemnity, its restraint, {561} its "brave old wisdom +of sincerity," we seem to see the president's homely features irradiated +with the light of coming martyrdom-- + + "The kindly-earnest, brave, foreseeing man, + Sagacious, patient, dreading praise, not blame, + New birth of our new soil, the first American." + + +Within the past quarter of a century the popular school of American humor +has reached its culmination. Every man of genius who is a humorist at +all is so in a way peculiar to himself. There is no lack of +individuality in the humor of Irving and Hawthorne and the wit of Holmes +and Lowell, but although they are new in subject and application they are +not new in kind. Irving, as we have seen, was the literary descendant of +Addison. The character sketches in _Bracebridge Hall_ are of the same +family with Sir Roger de Coverley and the other figures of the Spectator +Club. _Knickerbocker's History of New York_, though purely American in +its matter, is not distinctly American in its method, which is akin to +the mock heroic of Fielding and the irony of Swift in the _Voyage to +Lilliput_. Irving's humor, like that of all the great English humorists, +had its root in the perception of character--of the characteristic traits +of men and classes of men, as ground of amusement. It depended for its +effect, therefore, upon its truthfulness, its dramatic insight and +sympathy, as did the humor of Shakspere, of Sterne, Lamb, and Thackeray. +This perception of the characteristic, {562} when pushed to excess, +issues in grotesque and caricature, as in some of Dickens's inferior +creations, which are little more than personified single tricks of +manner, speech, feature, or dress. Hawthorne's rare humor differed from +Irving's in temper but not in substance, and belonged, like Irving's, to +the English variety. Dr. Holmes's more pronouncedly comic verse does not +differ specifically from the _facetiae_ of Thomas Hood, but his prominent +trait is wit, which is the laughter of the head as humor is of the heart. +The same is true, with qualifications, of Lowell, whose _Biglow Papers_, +though humor of an original sort in their revelation of Yankee character, +are essentially satirical. It is the cleverness, the shrewdness of the +hits in the _Biglow Papers_, their logical, that is, _witty_ character, +as distinguished from their drollery, that arrests the attention. They +are funny, but they are not so funny as they are smart. In all these +writers humor was blent with more serious qualities, which gave fineness +and literary value to their humorous writings. Their view of life was +not exclusively comic. But there has been a class of jesters, of +professional humorists in America, whose product is so indigenous, so +different, if not in essence, yet at least in form and expression, from +any European humor, that it may be regarded as a unique addition to the +comic literature of the world. It has been accepted as such in England, +where Artemus Ward and Mark Twain are familiar to multitudes who have +never read the _One-Hoss-Shay_ or the _Courtin'_. And though it {563} +would be ridiculous to maintain that either of these writers takes rank +with Lowell and Holmes, or to deny that there is an amount of flatness +and coarseness in many of their labored fooleries which puts large +portions of their writings below the line where real literature begins, +still it will not do to ignore them as mere buffoons, or even to predict +that their humors will soon be forgotten. It is true that no literary +fashion is more subject to change than the fashion of a jest, and that +jokes that make one generation laugh seem insipid to the next. But there +is something perennial in the fun of Rabelais, whom Bacon called "the +great jester of France;" and though the puns of Shakspere's clowns are +detestable the clowns themselves have not lost their power to amuse. + +The Americans are not a gay people, but they are fond of a joke. +Lincoln's "little stories" were characteristically Western, and it is +doubtful whether he was more endeared to the masses by his solid virtues +than by the humorous perception which made him one of them. The humor of +which we are speaking now is a strictly popular and national possession. +Though America has never, or not until lately, had a comic paper ranking +with _Punch_ or _Charivari_ or the _Fliegende Blaetter_, every newspaper +has had its funny column. Our humorists have been graduated from the +journalist's desk and sometimes from the printing-press, and now and then +a local or country newspaper has risen into sudden prosperity from the +possession of a {564} new humorist, as in the case of G. D. Prentice's +_Courier-Journal_, or more recently of the _Cleveland Plain Dealer_, the +_Danbury News_, the _Burlington Hawkeye_, the _Arkansaw Traveller_, the +_Texas Siftings_ and numerous others. Nowadays there are even syndicates +of humorists, who co-operate to supply fun for certain groups of +periodicals. Of course the great majority of these manufacturers of +jests for newspapers and comic almanacs are doomed to swift oblivion. +But it is not so certain that the best of the class, like Clemens and +Browne, will not long continue to be read as illustrative of one side of +the American mind, or that their best things will not survive as long as +the mots of Sydney Smith, which are still as current as ever. One of the +earliest of them was Seba Smith, who, under the name of Major Jack +Downing, did his best to make Jackson's administration ridiculous. B. P. +Shillaber's "Mrs. Partington"--a sort of American Mrs. Malaprop--enjoyed +great vogue before the war. Of a somewhat higher kind were the +_Phoenixiana_, 1855, and _Squibob Papers_, 1856, of Lieutenant George H. +Derby, "John Phoenix," one of the pioneers of literature on the Pacific +coast at the time of the California gold fever of '49. Derby's proposal +for _A New System of English Grammar_, his satirical account of the +topographical survey of the two miles of road between San Francisco and +the Mission Dolores, and his picture gallery made out of the conventional +houses, steam-boats, rail-cars, runaway negroes {565} and other designs +which used to figure in the advertising columns of the newspapers, were +all very ingenious and clever. But all these pale before Artemus +Ward--"Artemus the delicious," as Charles Reade called him--who first +secured for this peculiarly American type of humor a hearing and +reception abroad. Ever since the invention of Hosea Biglow, an imaginary +personage of some sort, under cover of whom the author might conceal his +own identity, has seemed a necessity to our humorists. Artemus Ward was +a traveling showman who went about the country exhibiting a collection of +wax "figgers" and whose experiences and reflections were reported in +grammar and spelling of a most ingeniously eccentric kind. His inventor +was Charles F. Browne, originally of Maine, a printer by trade and +afterward a newspaper writer and editor at Boston, Toledo and Cleveland, +where his comicalities in the _Plaindealer_ first began to attract +notice. In 1860 he came to New York and joined the staff of _Vanity +Fair_, a comic weekly of much brightness, which ran a short career and +perished for want of capital. When Browne began to appear as a public +lecturer people who had formed an idea of him from his impersonation of +the shrewd and vulgar old showman were surprised to find him a +gentlemanly-looking young man, who came upon the platform in correct +evening dress, and "spoke his piece" in a quiet and somewhat mournful +manner, stopping in apparent surprise when any one in the {566} audience +laughed at any uncommonly outrageous absurdity. In London, where he +delivered his _Lecture on the Mormons_, in 1866, the gravity of his +bearing at first imposed upon his hearers, who had come to the hall in +search of instructive information and were disappointed at the inadequate +nature of the panorama which Browne had had made to illustrate his +lecture. Occasionally some hitch would occur in the machinery of this +and the lecturer would leave the rostrum for a few moments to "work the +moon" that shone upon the Great Salt Lake, apologizing on his return on +the ground that he was "a man short" and offering "to pay a good salary +to any respectable boy of good parentage and education who is a good +moonist." When it gradually dawned upon the British intellect that these +and similar devices of the lecturer--such as the soft music which he had +the pianist play at pathetic passages--nay, that the panorama and even +the lecture itself were of a humorous intention, the joke began to take, +and Artemus's success in England became assured. He was employed as one +of the editors of _Punch_, but died at Southampton in the year following. + +Some of Artemus Ward's effects were produced by cacography or bad +spelling, but there was genius in the wildly erratic way in which he +handled even this rather low order of humor. It is a curious commentary +on the wretchedness of our English orthography that the phonetic spelling +of a word, as for example, _wuz_ for _was_, should be {567} in itself an +occasion of mirth. Other verbal effects of a different kind were among +his devices, as in the passage where the seventeen widows of a deceased +Mormon offered themselves to Artemus. + +"And I said, 'Why is this thus? What is the reason of this thusness?' +They hove a sigh--seventeen sighs of different size. They said-- + +"'O, soon thou will be gonested away.' + +"I told them that when I got ready to leave a place I wentested.' + +"They said, 'Doth not like us?' + +"I said, 'I doth--I doth.' + +"I also said, 'I hope your intentions are honorable, as I am a lone +child--my parents being far--far away.' + +"They then said, 'Wilt not marry us?' + +"I said, 'O no, it cannot was.' + +"When they cried, 'O cruel man! this is too much!--O! too much,' I told +them that it was on account of the muchness that I declined." + +It is hard to define the difference between the humor of one writer and +another, or of one nation and another. It can be felt and can be +illustrated by quoting examples, but scarcely described in general terms. +It has been said of that class of American humorists of which Artemus +Ward is a representative that their peculiarity consists in extravagance, +surprise, audacity and irreverence. But all these qualities have +characterized other schools of humor. There is the same element of +surprise in De Quincey's {568} anticlimax, "Many a man has dated his ruin +from some murder or other which, perhaps, at the time he thought little +of," as in Artemus's truism that "a comic paper ought to publish a joke +now and then." The violation of logic which makes us laugh at an Irish +bull is likewise the source of the humor in Artemus's saying of Jeff +Davis, that "it would have been better than ten dollars in his pocket if +he had never been born." Or in his advice, "Always live within your +income, even if you have to borrow money to do so;" or, again, in his +announcement that, "Mr. Ward will pay no debts of his own contracting." +A kind of ludicrous confusion, caused by an unusual collocation of words, +is also one of his favorite tricks, as when he says of Brigham Young, +"He's the most married man I ever saw in my life;" or when, having been +drafted at several hundred different places where he had been exhibiting +his wax figures, he says that if he went on he should soon become a +regiment, and adds, "I never knew that there was so many of me." With +this a whimsical under-statement and an affectation of simplicity, as +where he expresses his willingness to sacrifice "even his wife's +relations" on the altar of patriotism; or, where, in delightful +unconsciousness of his own sins against orthography, he pronounces that +"Chaucer was a great poet, but he couldn't spell," or where he says of +the feast of raw dog, tendered him by the Indian chief, Wocky-bocky, "It +don't agree with me. I prefer simple food." On the {569} whole, it may +be said of original humor of this kind, as of other forms of originality +in literature, that the elements of it are old, but the combinations are +novel. Other humorists, like Henry W. Shaw ("Josh Billings"), and David +R. Locke, ("Petroleum V. Nasby"), have used bad spelling as a part of +their machinery; while Robert H. Newell, ("Orpheus C. Kerr"), Samuel L. +Clemens, ("Mark Twain"), and more recently "Bill Nye," though belonging +to the same school of low or broad comedy, have discarded cacography. Of +these the most eminent, by all odds, is Mark Twain, who has probably made +more people laugh than any other living writer. A Missourian by birth +(1835), he served the usual apprenticeship at type-setting and editing +country newspapers; spent seven years as a pilot on a Mississippi +steam-boat, and seven years more mining and journalizing in Nevada, where +he conducted the Virginia City _Enterprise_, finally drifted to San +Francisco, and was associated with Bret Harte on the _Californian_, and +in 1867 published his first book, the _Jumping Frog_. This was succeeded +by the _Innocents Abroad_, 1869; _Roughing It_, 1872; _A Tramp Abroad_, +1880, and by others not so good. + +Mark Twain's drolleries have frequently the same air of innocence and +surprise as Artemus Ward's, and there is a like suddenness in his turns +of expression, as where he speaks of "the calm confidence of a Christian +with four aces." If he did not originate, he at any rate employed very +{570} effectively that now familiar device of the newspaper "funny man," +of putting a painful situation euphemistically, as when he says of a man +who was hanged that he "received injuries which terminated in his death." +He uses to the full extent the American humorist's favorite resources of +exaggeration and irreverence. An instance of the former quality may be +seen in his famous description of a dog chasing a coyote, in _Roughing +It_, or in his interview with the lightning-rod agent in _Mark Twain's +Sketches_, 1875. He is a shrewd observer, and his humor has a more +satirical side than Artemus Ward's, sometimes passing into downright +denunciation. He delights particularly in ridiculing sentimental humbug +and moralizing cant. He runs a tilt, as has been said, at "copy-book +texts," at the temperance reformer, the tract distributor, the Good Boy +of Sunday-school literature, and the women who send bouquets and +sympathetic letters to interesting criminals. He gives a ludicrous turn +to famous historical anecdotes, such as the story of George Washington +and his little hatchet; burlesques the time-honored adventure, in +nautical romances, of the starving crew casting lots in the long boat, +and spoils the dignity of antiquity by modern trivialities, saying of a +discontented sailor on Columbus's ship, "He wanted fresh shad." The fun +of _Innocents Abroad_ consists in this irreverent application of modern, +common sense, utilitarian, democratic standards to the memorable places +and historic associations of {571} Europe. Tried by this test the Old +Masters in the picture galleries become laughable. Abelard was a +precious scoundrel, and the raptures of the guide books are parodied +without mercy. The tourist weeps at the grave of Adam. At Genoa he +drives the cicerone to despair by pretending never to have heard of +Christopher Columbus, and inquiring innocently, "Is he dead?" It is +Europe vulgarized and stripped of its illusions--Europe seen by a Western +newspaper reporter without any "historic imagination." + +The method of this whole class of humorists is the opposite of Addison's +or Irving's or Thackeray's. It does not amuse by the perception of the +characteristic. It is not founded upon truth, but upon incongruity, +distortion, unexpectedness. Everything in life is reversed, as in opera +bouffe, and turned topsy turvy, so that paradox takes the place of the +natural order of things. Nevertheless they have supplied a wholesome +criticism upon sentimental excesses, and the world is in their debt for +many a hearty laugh. + +In the _Atlantic Monthly_ for December, 1863, appeared a tale entitled +the _Man Without a Country_, which made a great sensation, and did much +to strengthen patriotic feeling in one of the darkest hours of the +nation's history. It was the story of one Philip Nolan, an army officer, +whose head had been turned by Aaron Burr, and who, having been censured +by a court-martial for some minor offense, exclaimed, petulantly, upon +{572} mention being made of the United States Government, "Damn the +United States! I wish that I might never hear the United States +mentioned again." Thereupon he was sentenced to have his wish, and was +kept all his life aboard the vessels of the navy, being sent off on long +voyages and transferred from ship to ship, with orders to those in charge +that his country and its concerns should never be spoken of in his +presence. Such an air of reality, was given to the narrative by +incidental references to actual persons and occurrences that many +believed it true, and some were found who remembered Philip Nolan, but +had heard different versions of his career. The author of this clever +hoax--if hoax it may be called--was Edward Everett Hale, a Unitarian +clergyman of Boston, who published a collection of stories in 1868, under +the fantastic title, _If, Yes, and Perhaps_, indicating thereby that some +of the tales were possible, some of them probable, and others might even +be regarded as essentially true. A similar collection, _His Level Best +and Other Stories_ was published in 1873, and in the interval three +volumes of a somewhat different kind, the _Ingham Papers_ and _Sybaris +and Other Homes_, both in 1869, and _Ten Times One Is Ten_, in 1871. The +author shelters himself behind the imaginary figure of Captain Frederic +Ingham, pastor of the Sandemanian Church at Naguadavick, and the same +characters have a way of re-appearing in his successive volumes as old +friends of the reader, which is pleasant at first, but in the end a {573} +little tiresome. Mr. Hale is one of the most original and ingenious of +American story writers. The old device of making wildly improbable +inventions appear like fact by a realistic treatment of details--a device +employed by Swift and Edgar Poe, and more lately by Jules Verne--became +quite fresh and novel in his hands, and was managed with a humor all his +own. Some of his best stories are _My Double and How He Undid Me_, +describing how a busy clergyman found an Irishman who looked so much like +himself that he trained him to pass as his duplicate, and sent him to do +duty in his stead at public meetings, dinners, etc., thereby escaping +bores and getting time for real work; the _Brick Moon_, a story of a +projectile built and launched into space, to revolve in a fixed meridian +about the earth and serve mariners as a mark of longitude; the _Rag Man +and Rag Woman_, a tale of an impoverished couple who made a competence by +saving the pamphlets, advertisements, wedding cards, etc., that came to +them through the mail, and developing a paper business on that basis; and +the _Skeleton in the Closet_, which shows how the fate of the Southern +Confederacy was involved in the adventures of a certain hoop-skirt, +"built in the eclipse and rigged with curses dark." Mr. Hale's +historical scholarship and his exact habit of mind have aided him in the +art of giving _vraisemblance_ to absurdities. He is known in +philanthropy as well as in letters, and his tales have a cheerful, busy, +{574} practical way with them in consonance with his motto, "Look up and +not down, look forward and not back, look out and not in, and lend a +hand." + +It is too soon to sum up the literary history of the last quarter of a +century. The writers who have given it shape are still writing, and +their work is therefore incomplete. But on the slightest review of it +two facts become manifest: first, that New England has lost its long +monopoly; and, secondly, that a marked feature of the period is the +growth of realistic fiction. The electric tension of the atmosphere for +thirty years preceding the civil war, the storm and stress of great +public contests, and the intellectual stir produced by transcendentalism +seem to have been more favorable to poetry and literary idealism than +present conditions are. At all events there are no new poets who rank +with Whittier, Longfellow, Lowell, and others of the elder generation, +although George H. Boker, in Philadelphia, R. H. Stoddard and E. C. +Stedman, in New York, and T. B. Aldrich, first in New York and afterward +in Boston, have written creditable verse; not to speak of younger +writers, whose work, however, for the most part, has been more +distinguished by delicacy of execution than by native impulse. Mention +has been made of the establishment of _Harper's Monthly Magazine_, which, +under the conduct of its accomplished editor, George W. Curtis, has +provided the public with an abundance of good reading. The {575} old +_Putnam's Monthly_, which ran from 1853 to 1858, and had a strong corps +of contributors, was revived in 1868, and continued by that name till +1870, when it was succeeded by _Scribner's Monthly_, under the editorship +of Dr. J. G. Holland, and this in 1881 by the _Century_, an efficient +rival of _Harper's_ in circulation, in literary excellence, and in the +beauty of its wood engraving, the American school of which art these two +great periodicals have done much to develop and encourage. Another New +York monthly, the _Galaxy_, ran from 1866 to 1878, and was edited by +Richard Grant White. During the present year a new _Scribner's Magazine_ +has also taken the field. The _Atlantic_, in Boston, and _Lippincott's_, +in Philadelphia, are no unworthy competitors with these for public favor. + +During the forties began a new era of national expansion, somewhat +resembling that described in a former chapter, and, like that, bearing +fruit eventually in literature. The cession of Florida to the United +States in 1845, and the annexation of Texas in the same year, were +followed by the purchase of California in 1847, and its admission as a +State in 1850. In 1849 came the great rush to the California gold +fields. San Francisco, at first a mere collection of tents and board +shanties, with a few adobe huts, grew with incredible rapidity into a +great city; the wicked and wonderful city apostrophized by Bret Harte in +his poem, _San Francisco_: + +{576} + + "Serene, indifferent of Fate, + Thou sittest at the Western Gate; + Upon thy heights so lately won + Still slant the banners of the sun. . . . + I know thy cunning and thy greed, + Thy hard, high lust and willful deed." + +The adventurers of all lands and races who flocked to the Pacific coast +found there a motley state of society between civilization and savagery. +There were the relics of the old Mexican occupation, the Spanish +missions, with their Christianized Indians; the wild tribes of the +plains--Apaches, Utes, and Navajoes; the Chinese coolies and washermen, +all elements strange to the Atlantic seaboard and the States of the +interior. The gold-hunters crossed, in stages or caravans, enormous +prairies, alkaline deserts dotted with sage brush and seamed by deep +canons, and passes through gigantic mountain ranges. On the coast itself +nature was unfamiliar: the climate was sub-tropical; fruits and +vegetables grew to a mammoth size, corresponding to the enormous redwoods +in the Mariposa groves and the prodigious scale of the scenery in the +valley of the Yo Semite and the snow-capped peaks of the Sierras. At +first there were few women, and the men led a wild, lawless existence in +the mining camps. Hard upon the heels of the prospector followed the +dram-shop, the gambling-hell, and the dance-hall. Every man carried his +"Colt," and looked out for his own life and his "claim." Crime went +unpunished or was taken in hand, {577} when it got too rampant, by +vigilance committees. In the diggings, shaggy frontiersmen and "pikes" +from Missouri mingled with the scum of eastern cities and with +broken-down business men and young college graduates seeking their +fortune. Surveyors and geologists came of necessity, speculators in +mining stock and city lots set up their offices in the towns; later came +a sprinkling of school-teachers and ministers. Fortunes were made in one +day and lost the next at poker or loo. To-day the lucky miner who had +struck a good "lead" was drinking champagne out of pails and treating the +town; to-morrow he was "busted," and shouldered the pick for a new +onslaught upon his luck. This strange, reckless life, was not without +fascination, and highly picturesque and dramatic elements were present in +it. It was, as Bret Harte says, "an era replete with a certain heroic +Greek poetry," and sooner or later it was sure to find its poet. During +the war California remained loyal to the Union, but was too far from the +seat of conflict to experience any serious disturbance, and went on +independently developing its own resources and becoming daily more +civilized. By 1868 San Francisco had a literary magazine, the _Overland +Monthly_, which ran until 1875. It had a decided local flavor, and the +vignette on its title-page was a happily chosen emblem, representing a +grizzly bear crossing a railway track. In an early number of the +_Overland_ was a story entitled the _Luck of Roaring Camp_, by Francis +Bret Harte, a {578} native of Albany, N. Y., 1835, who had come to +California at the age of seventeen, in time to catch the unique aspects +of the life of the Forty-niners, before their vagabond communities had +settled down into the law-abiding society of the present day. His first +contribution was followed by other stories and sketches of a similar +kind, such as the _Outcasts of Poker Flat_, _Miggles_, and _Tennessee's +Partner_, and by verses, serious and humorous, of which last, _Plain +Language from Truthful James_, better known as the _Heathen Chinee_, made +an immediate hit, and carried its author's name into every corner of the +English-speaking world. In 1871 he published a collection of his tales, +another of his poems, and a volume of very clever parodies, _Condensed +Novels_, which rank with Thackeray's _Novels by Eminent Hands_. Bret +Harte's California stories were vivid, highly-colored pictures of life in +the mining camps and raw towns of the Pacific coast. The pathetic and +the grotesque went hand in hand in them, and the author aimed to show how +even in the desperate characters gathered together there--the fortune +hunters, gamblers, thieves, murderers, drunkards, and prostitutes--the +latent nobility of human nature asserted itself in acts of heroism, +magnanimity, self-sacrifice, and touching fidelity. The same men who +cheated at cards and shot each another down with tipsy curses were +capable on occasion of the most romantic generosity and the most delicate +chivalry. Critics were not wanting who held that, in the matter of +dialect {579} and manners and other details, the narrator was not true to +the facts. This was a comparatively unimportant charge; but a more +serious question was the doubt whether his characters were essentially +true to human nature, whether the wild soil of revenge and greed and +dissolute living ever yields such flowers of devotion as blossom in +_Tennessee's Partner_ and the _Outcasts of Poker Flat_. However this may +be, there is no question as to Harte's power as a narrator. His short +stories are skillfully constructed and effectively told. They never +drag, and are never overladen with description, reflection, or other +lumber. + +In his poems in dialect we find the same variety of types and +nationalities characteristic of the Pacific coast: the little Mexican +maiden, Pachita, in the old mission garden; the wicked Bill Nye, who +tries to cheat the Heathen Chinee at euchre and to rob Injin Dick of his +winning lottery ticket; the geological society on the Stanislaw who +settle their scientific debates with chunks of old red sandstone and the +skulls of mammoths; the unlucky Mr. Dow, who finally strikes gold while +digging a well, and builds a house with a "coopilow;" and Flynn, of +Virginia, who saves his "pard's" life, at the sacrifice of his own, by +holding up the timbers in the caving tunnel. These poems are mostly in +monologue, like Browning's dramatic lyrics, exclamatory and abrupt in +style, and with a good deal of indicated action, as in _Jim_, where a +miner comes into a bar-room, looking for his old {580} chum, learns that +he is dead, and is just turning away to hide his emotion, when he +recognizes Jim in his informant: + + "Well, thar--Good-by-- + No more, sir--I-- + Eh? + What's that you say?-- + Why, dern it!--sho!-- + No? Yes! By Jo! + Sold! + Sold! Why, you limb; + You ornery, + Derned old + Long-legged Jim!" + +Bret Harte had many imitators, and not only did our newspaper poetry for +a number of years abound in the properties of Californian life, such as +gulches, placers, divides, etc., but writers further east applied his +method to other conditions. Of these by far the most successful was John +Hay, a native of Indiana and private secretary to President Lincoln, +whose _Little Breeches_, _Jim Bludso_, and _Mystery of Gilgal_ have +rivaled Bret Harte's own verses in popularity. In the last-named piece +the reader is given to feel that there is something rather cheerful and +humorous in a bar-room fight which results in "the gals that winter, as a +rule," going "alone to the singing school." In the two former we have +heroes of the Bret Harte type, the same combination of superficial +wickedness with inherent loyalty and tenderness. The profane farmer +{581} of the South-west, who "doesn't pan out on the prophets," and who +had taught his little son "to chaw terbacker, just to keep his milk-teeth +white," but who believes in God and the angels ever since the miraculous +recovery of the same little son when lost on the prairie in a blizzard; +and the unsaintly and bigamistic captain of the _Prairie Belle_, who died +like a hero, holding the nozzle of his burning boat against the bank + + "Till the last galoot's ashore." + + +The manners and dialect of other classes and sections of the country have +received abundant illustration of late years. Edward Eggleston's +_Hoosier Schoolmaster_, 1871, and his other novels are pictures of rural +life in the early days of Indiana. _Western Windows_, a volume of poems +by John James Piatt, another native of Indiana, had an unmistakable local +coloring. Charles G. Leland, of Philadelphia, in his _Hans Breitmann_ +ballads, in dialect, gave a humorous presentation of the German-American +element in the cities. By the death, in 1881, of Sidney Lanier, a +Georgian by birth, the South lost a poet of rare promise, whose original +genius was somewhat hampered by his hesitation between two arts of +expression, music and verse, and by his effort to co-ordinate them. His +_Science of English Verse_, 1880, was a most suggestive, though hardly +convincing, statement of that theory of their relation which he was +working out in his practice. Some of his pieces, {582} like the _Mocking +Bird_ and the _Song of the Chattahoochie_, are the most +characteristically Southern poetry that has been written in America. +Joel Chandler Harris's _Uncle Remus_ stories, in Negro dialect, are +transcripts from the folk-lore of the plantations, while his collection +of stories, _At Teague Poteet's_, together with Miss Murfree's _In the +Tennessee Mountains_ and her other books have made the Northern public +familiar with the wild life of the "moonshiners," who distill illicit +whiskey in the mountains of Georgia, North Carolina, and Tennessee. +These tales are not only exciting in incident, but strong and fresh in +their delineations of character. Their descriptions of mountain scenery +are also impressive, though, in the case of the last named writer, +frequently too prolonged. George W. Cable's sketches of French Creole +life in New Orleans attracted attention by their freshness and quaintness +when published in the magazines and re-issued in book form as _Old Creole +Days_, in 1879. His first regular novel, the _Grandissimes_, 1880, was +likewise a story of Creole life. It had the same winning qualities as +his short stories and sketches, but was an advance upon them in dramatic +force, especially in the intensely tragic and powerfully told episode of +"Bras Coupe." Mr. Cable has continued his studies of Louisiana types and +ways in his later books, but the _Grandissimes_ still remains his +master-piece. All in all, he is, thus far, the most important literary +figure of the New South, and the justness and {583} delicacy of his +representations of life speak volumes for the sobering and refining +agency of the civil war in the States whose "cause" was "lost," but whose +true interests gained even more by the loss than did the interests of the +victorious North. + +The four writers last mentioned have all come to the front within the +past eight or ten years, and, in accordance with the plan of this sketch, +receive here a mere passing notice. It remains to close our review of +the literary history of the period since the war with a somewhat more +extended account of the two favorite novelists whose work has done more +than any thing else to shape the movement of recent fiction. These are +Henry James, Jr., and William Dean Howells. Their writings, though +dissimilar in some respects, are alike in this, that they are analytic in +method and realistic in spirit. Cooper was a romancer pure and simple; +he wrote the romance of adventure and of external incident. Hawthorne +went much deeper, and with a finer spiritual insight dealt with the real +passions of the heart and with men's inner experiences. This he did with +truth and power; but, although himself a keen observer of whatever passed +before his eyes, he was not careful to secure a photographic fidelity to +the surface facts of speech, dress, manners, etc. Thus the talk of his +characters is book talk, and not the actual language of the parlor or the +street, with its slang, its colloquial ease and the intonations and +shadings of phrase {584} and pronunciation which mark different sections +of the country and different grades of society. His attempts at dialect, +for example, were of the slenderest kind. His art is ideal, and his +romances certainly do not rank as novels of real life. But with the +growth of a richer and more complicated society in America fiction has +grown more social and more minute in its observation. It would not be +fair to classify the novels of James and Howells as the fiction of +manners merely; they are also the fiction of character, but they aim to +describe people not only as they are, in their inmost natures, but also +as they look and talk and dress. They try to express character through +manners, which is the way in which it is most often expressed in the +daily existence of a conventional society. It is a principle of realism +not to select exceptional persons or occurrences, but to take average men +and women and their average experiences. The realists protest that the +moving incident is not their trade, and that the stories have all been +told. They want no plot and no hero. They will tell no rounded tale +with a _denouement_, in which all the parts are distributed, as in the +fifth act of an old-fashioned comedy; but they will take a transcript +from life and end when they get through, without informing the reader +what becomes of the characters. And they will try to interest this +reader in "poor real life" with its "foolish face." Their acknowledged +masters are Balzac, George Eliot, Turgenieff, and Anthony {585} Trollope, +and they regard novels as studies in sociology, honest reports of the +writer's impressions, which may not be without a certain scientific value +even. + +Mr. James's peculiar province is the international novel; a field which +he created for himself, but which he has occupied in company with +Howells, Mrs. Burnett, and many others. He was born into the best +traditions of New England culture, his father being a resident of +Cambridge, and a forcible writer on philosophical subjects, and his +brother, William James, a professor in Harvard University. The novelist +received most of his schooling in Europe, and has lived much abroad, with +the result that he has become half denationalized and has engrafted a +cosmopolitan indifference upon his Yankee inheritance. This, indeed, has +constituted his opportunity. A close observer and a conscientious +student of the literary art, he has added to his intellectual equipment +the advantage of a curious doubleness in his point of view. He looks at +America with the eyes of a foreigner and at Europe with the eyes of an +American. He has so far thrown himself out of relation with American +life that he describes a Boston horsecar or a New York hotel table with a +sort of amused wonder. His starting-point was in criticism, and he has +always maintained the critical attitude. He took up story-writing in +order to help himself, by practical experiment, in his chosen art of +literary criticism, and his volume on {586} _French Poets and Novelists_, +1878, is by no means the least valuable of his books. His short stories +in the magazines were collected into a volume in 1875, with the title, _A +Passionate Pilgrim and Other Stories_. One or two of these, as the _Last +of the Valerii_ and the _Madonna of the Future_, suggest Hawthorne, a +very unsympathetic study of whom James afterward contributed to the +"English Men of Letters" series. But in the name-story of the collection +he was already in the line of his future development. This is the story +of a middle-aged invalid American, who comes to England in search of +health, and finds, too late, in the mellow atmosphere of the mother +country, the repose and the congenial surroundings which he has all his +life been longing for in his raw America. The pathos of his +self-analysis and his confession of failure is subtly imagined. The +impressions which he and his far-away English kinsfolk make on one +another, their mutual attraction and repulsion, are described with that +delicate perception of national differences which makes the humor and +sometimes the tragedy of James's later books, like the _American_, _Daisy +Miller_, the _Europeans_, and _An International Episode_. His first +novel was _Roderick Hudson_, 1876, not the most characteristic of his +fictions, but perhaps the most powerful in its grasp of elementary +passion. The analytic method and the critical attitude have their +dangers in imaginative literature. In proportion as this writer's +faculty of minute observation and his realistic objectivity {587} have +increased upon him, the uncomfortable coldness which is felt in his +youthful work has become actually disagreeable, and his art--growing +constantly finer and surer in matters of detail--has seemed to dwell more +and more in the region of mere manners and less in the higher realm of +character and passion. In most of his writings the heart, somehow, is +left out. We have seen that Irving, from his knowledge of England and +America, and his long residence in both countries, became the mediator +between the two great branches of the Anglo-Saxon race. This he did by +the power of his sympathy with each. Henry James has likewise +interpreted the two nations to one another in a subtler but less genial +fashion than Irving, and not through sympathy, but through contrast, by +bringing into relief the opposing ideals of life and society which have +developed under different institutions. In his novel, the _American_, +1877, he has shown the actual misery which may result from the clashing +of opposed social systems. In such clever sketches as _Daisy Miller_, +1879, the _Pension Beaurepas_, and _A Bundle of Letters_, he has +exhibited types of the American girl, the American business man, the +aesthetic feebling from Boston, and the Europeanized or would-be +denationalized American campaigners in the Old World, and has set forth +the ludicrous incongruities, perplexities, and misunderstandings which +result from contradictory standards of conventional morality and +behavior. In the _Europeans_, 1879, and an {588} _International +Episode_, 1878, he has reversed the process, bringing Old Word +[Transcriber's note: World?] standards to the test of American ideas by +transferring his _dramatis personae_ to republican soil. The last-named +of these illustrates how slender a plot realism requires for its +purposes. It is nothing more than the history of an English girl of good +family who marries an American gentleman and undertakes to live in +America, but finds herself so uncomfortable in strange social conditions +that she returns to England for life, while, contrariwise, the heroine's +sister is so taken with the freedom of these very conditions that she +elopes with another American and "goes West." James is a keen observer +of the physiognomy of cities as well as of men, and his _Portraits of +Places_, 1884, is among the most delightful contributions to the +literature of foreign travel. + +Mr. Howells's writings are not without "international" touches. In _A +Foregone Conclusion_ and the _Lady of the Aroostook_, and others of his +novels, the contrasted points of view in American and European life are +introduced, and especially those variations in feeling, custom, dialect, +etc., which make the modern Englishman and the modern American such +objects of curiosity to each other, and which have been dwelt upon of +late even unto satiety. But in general he finds his subjects at home, +and if he does not know his own countrymen and countrywomen more +intimately than Mr. James, at least {589} he loves them better. There is +a warmer sentiment in his fictions, too; his men are better fellows and +his women are more lovable. Howells was born in Ohio. His early life +was that of a western country editor. In 1860 he published, jointly with +his friend Piatt, a book of verse--_Poems of Two Friends_. In 1861 he +was sent as consul to Venice, and the literary results of his sojourn +there appeared in his sketches _Venetian Life_, 1865, and _Italian +Journeys_, 1867. In 1871 he became editor of the _Atlantic Monthly_, and +in the same year published his _Suburban Sketches_. All of these early +volumes showed a quick eye for the picturesque, an unusual power of +description, and humor of the most delicate quality; but as yet there was +little approach to narrative. _Their Wedding Journey_ was a revelation +to the public of the interest that may lie in an ordinary bridal trip +across the State of New York, when a close and sympathetic observation is +brought to bear upon the characteristics of American life as it appears +at railway stations and hotels, on steam-boats and in the streets of very +commonplace towns. _A Chance Acquaintance_, 1873, was Howells's first +novel, though even yet the story was set against a background of +travel--pictures, a holiday trip on the St. Lawrence and the Saguenay; +and descriptions of Quebec and the Falls of Montmorenci, etc., rather +predominated over the narrative. Thus, gradually and by a natural +process, complete characters and realistic novels, such as _A Modern +{590} Instance_, 1882, and _Indian Summer_, evolved themselves from +truthful sketches of places and persons seen by the way. + +The incompatibility existing between European and American views of life, +which makes the comedy or the tragedy of Henry James's international +fictions, is replaced in Howells's novels by the repulsion between +differing social grades in the same country. The adjustment of these +subtle distinctions forms a part of the problem of life in all +complicated societies. Thus in _A Chance Acquaintance_ the heroine is a +bright and pretty Western girl, who becomes engaged during a pleasure +tour to an irreproachable but offensively priggish young gentleman from +Boston, and the engagement is broken by her in consequence of an +unintended slight--the betrayal on the hero's part of a shade of +mortification when he and his betrothed are suddenly brought into the +presence of some fashionable ladies belonging to his own _monde_. The +little comedy, _Out of the Question_, deals with this same adjustment of +social scales; and in many of Howells's other novels, such as _Silas +Lapham_ and the _Lady of the Aroostook_, one of the main motives may be +described to be the contact of the man who eats with his fork with the +man who eats with his knife, and the shock thereby ensuing. In _Indian +Summer_ the complications arise from the difference in age between the +hero and heroine, and not from a difference in station or social +antecedents. In all of these fictions the {591} misunderstandings come +from an incompatibility of manner rather than of character, and, if any +thing were to be objected to the probability of the story, it is that the +climax hinges on delicacies and subtleties which, in real life, when +there is opportunity for explanations, are readily brushed aside. But in +_A Modern Instance_ Howells touched the deeper springs of action. In +this, his strongest work, the catastrophe is brought about, as in George +Eliot's great novels, by the reaction of characters upon one another, and +the story is realistic in a higher sense than any mere study of manners +can be. His nearest approach to romance is in the _Undiscovered +Country_, 1880, which deals with the Spiritualists and the Shakers, and +in its study of problems that hover on the borders of the supernatural, +in its out-of-the-way personages and adventures, and in a certain ideal +poetic flavor about the whole book, has a strong resemblance to +Hawthorne, especially to Hawthorne in the _Blithedale Romance_, where he +comes closer to common ground with other romancers. It is interesting to +compare _Undiscovered Country_ with Henry James's _Bostonians_, the +latest and one of the cleverest of his fictions, which is likewise a +study of the clairvoyants, mediums, woman's rights' advocates, and all +varieties of cranks, reformers, and patrons of "causes," for whom Boston +has long been notorious. A most unlovely race of people they become +under the cold scrutiny of Mr. James's cosmopolitan eyes, which see more +clearly the {592} charlatanism, narrow-mindedness, mistaken fanaticism, +morbid self-consciousness, disagreeable nervous intensity, and vulgar or +ridiculous outside peculiarities of the humanitarians, than the nobility +and moral enthusiasm which underlie the surface. + +Howells is almost the only successful American dramatist, and this in the +field of parlor comedy. His little farces, the _Elevator_, the +_Register_, the _Parlor Car_, etc., have a lightness and grace, with an +exquisitely absurd situation, which remind us more of the _Comedies et +Proverbes_ of Alfred de Musset, or the many agreeable dialogues and +monologues of the French domestic stage, than of any work of English or +American hands. His softly ironical yet affectionate treatment of +feminine ways is especially admirable. In his numerous types of sweetly +illogical, inconsistent, and inconsequent womanhood he has perpetuated +with a nicer art than Dickens what Thackeray calls "that great +discovery," Mrs. Nickleby. + + +1. Theodore Winthrop. Life in the Open Air. Cecil Dreeme. + +2. Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Life in a Black Regiment. + +3. Poetry of the Civil War. Edited by Richard Grant White. New York: +1866. + +4. Charles Farrar Browne. Artemus Ward--His Book. Lecture on the +Mormons. Artemus Ward in London. + +{593} + +5. Samuel Langhorne Clemens. The Jumping Frog. Roughing It. The +Mississippi Pilot. + +6. Charles Godfrey Leland. Hans Breitmann's Ballads. + +7. Edward Everett Hale. If, Yes, and Perhaps. His Level Best and Other +Stories. + +8. Francis Bret Harte. Outcasts of Poker Flat and Other Stories. +Condensed Novels. Poems in Dialect. + +9. Sidney Lanier. Nirvana. Resurrection. The Harlequin of Dreams. +Song of the Chattahoochie. The Mocking Bird. The Stirrup-Cup. Tampa +Robins. The Bee. The Revenge of Hamish. The Ship of Earth. The +Marshes of Glynn. Sunrise. + +10. Henry James, Jr. A Passionate Pilgrim. Roderick Hudson. Daisy +Miller. Pension Beaurepas. A Bundle of Letters. An International +Episode. The Bostonians. Portraits of Places. + +11. William Dean Howells. Their Wedding Journey. Suburban Sketches. A +Chance Acquaintance. A Foregone Conclusion. The Undiscovered Country. +A Modern Instance. + +12. George W. Cable. Old Creole Days. Madam Delphine. The Grandissimes. + +13. Joel Chandler Harris. Uncle Remus. Mingo and Other Sketches. + +14. Charles Egbert Craddock (Miss Murfree). In the Tennessee Mountains. + + + + +{594} + +CHAPTER VIII. + +THEOLOGICAL AND RELIGIOUS LITERATURE IN AMERICA. + +BY JOHN FLETCHER HURST. + +The important field of theology and religion in America has yielded many +and rich additions to the storehouse of letters. + +The _Bay Psalm Book_, published in Cambridge, Mass., in 1640, was the +first book printed in the English colonies in America. Its leading +authors were Richard Mather (1596-1669), of Dorchester, father of +Increase and grandfather of the still more famous Cotton Mather, Thomas +Welde and John Eliot, both of Roxbury. The book was a few years later +revised by Henry Dunster and passed through as many as twenty-seven +editions. While it was both printed and used in England and Scotland by +dissenting churches, it was a constant companion in private and public +worship in the Calvinistic churches of the Colonies. + +The early colonial writers on theology include Charles Chauncy +(1589-1672), the second president of Harvard College, who wrote a +treatise on _Justification_, Samuel Willard (1640-1707), whose _Complete +Body of Divinity_ was the first folio {595} publication in America; +Solomon Stoddard (1643-1729), whose most celebrated work was _The +Doctrine of Instituted Churches_, in which he advocated the converting +power of the Lord's Supper; Charles Chauncy (1705-1787), a great-grandson +of President Chauncy, celebrated as a stickler for great plainness in +writing and speech, and one of the founders of Universalism in New +England, whose _Seasonable Thoughts_ was in opposition to the preaching +of Whitefield; and Aaron Burr (1716-1757), father of the political +opponent and slayer of Alexander Hamilton, and author of _The Supreme +Deity of Our Lord Jesus Christ_. James Blair (1656-1743), of Virginia, +the virtual founder and first president of William and Mary College, +wrote _Our Saviour's Sermon on the Mount_, containing one hundred and +seventeen sermons. The two Tennents, Gilbert (1703-1764) and William +(1705-1777), Samuel Finley (1717-1764), and Samuel Davies (1723-1761) +were pulpit orators whose sermons still hold high rank in the homiletic +world. + +Others of the colonial period distinguished for their ability are: John +Davenport (1597-1670), of New Haven, author of _The Saint's Anchor Hold_; +Edward Johnson (died 1682), of Woburn, author of _The Wonder Working +Providence of Sion's Saviour in New England_; Jonathan Dickinson +(1688-1747), the first president of the College of New Jersey (Princeton +University), who published _Familiar Letters upon Important Subjects in +Religion_, Samuel Johnson (1696-1772), a {596} distinguished advocate of +Episcopacy in Connecticut; Thomas Clap (1703-1767), president of Yale +College, who was the author of the _Religious Condition of Colleges_; +Samuel Mather (1706-1785), a son of Cotton Mather, among whose works was +_An Attempt to Show that America was Known to the Ancients_; and Thomas +Chalkley (1675-1749), and John Woolman (1720-1772), both belonging to the +Friends, and whose _Journals_ are admirable specimens of the Quaker +spirit and simplicity. + +Some of the leading writers on theology whose activity was greatest about +the time of the American Revolution are worthy of study. They are John +Witherspoon (1722-1794) who, while he is better known as the sixth +president of the College of New Jersey and a political writer of the +Revolution, was also the author of _Ecclesiastical Characteristics_, a +satirical work aimed at the Moderate party of the Church of Scotland, and +written before he left that country for America; Charles Thomson +(1729-1824), who was for fifteen years the secretary of the Continental +Congress and published a _Translation of the Bible_; Elias Boudinot +(1740-1821), the first president of the American Bible Society and a +leading philanthropist of his time, who wrote _The Age of Revelation_, a +reply to Paine's _Age of Reason_; Nathan Strong (1748-1816), the editor +of _The Connecticut Evangelical Magazine_ and pastor of First Church, +Hartford; Isaac Backus (1724-1806), the author of the well-known _History +of New England with Particular {597} Reference to the Baptists_; Ezra +Stiles (1727-1795), president of Yale College, who published many +discourses and wrote _An Ecclesiastical History of New England_, which +was not completed and never published; William White (1748-1836), Bishop +of Pennsylvania for fifty years, who wrote several works on Episcopacy, +one of which was _Memoir of the Episcopal Church in the United States_; +and William Linn (1752-1808), who published sermons on the _Leading +Personages of Scripture History_. + +Belonging also to the Revolutionary period these should be noted: Mather +Byles (1706-1788), a wit and punster of loyalist leanings, some of whose +sermons have been many times printed, and who was a kinsman of the +Mathers; Jonathan Mayhew (1720-1766), whose _Sermon on the Repeal of the +Stamp Act_ was the most famous of his stirring addresses on the political +issues already prominent at the time of his death; William Smith +(1727-1803), provost of the University of Pennsylvania, who was, not to +speak of his other works, the author of several meritorious sermons; +Samuel Seabury (1729-1796), the first Protestant Episcopal bishop and +author of two volumes of sermons; and Jacob Duche (1739-1798), rector of +Christ Church, Philadelphia, who abandoned the American cause, but whose +sermons were highly prized. + +A quartet of those who gained distinction as writers on doctrine are: +Joseph Bellamy (1719-1790), an influential divine of the Edwardean +school, and author of _The True Religion {598} Delineated_; Samuel +Hopkins (1721-1803), the advocate of disinterested benevolence as a +cardinal principle of theology and author of _The System of Doctrines +Contained in Divine Revelation_; Jonathan Edwards the Younger +(1745-1801), president of Union College and author of several discourses, +the most celebrated of which are the three on the "Necessity of the +Atonement and its Consistency with Free Grace in Forgiveness" (these +sermons are the basis of what has since been named the Edwardean theory); +and Elhanan Winchester (1751-1797), the Universalist preacher, one of +whose chief works was _The Universal Restoration_. + +In the earlier group of theological authorship of the present century, or +the national period, taking conspicuous place as doctrinal writers, are: +Nathaniel Emmons (1745-1840), one of the foremost of the New School of +Calvinistic theology, whose works on the important discussion lasting +through a half century are marked by a peculiar force and point; Samuel +Stanhope Smith (1750-1819), president of the College of New Jersey and +author of _Evidences of the Christian Religion_; his successor in office, +Ashbel Green (1762-1848), whose chief literary labor was bestowed on _The +Christian Advocate_, a religious monthly which he edited for twelve +years, and who wrote _Lectures on the Shorter Catechism_; Henry Ware +(1764-1845), the acknowledged head of the Unitarians prior to the +appearance of Channing, professor of divinity in Harvard, and author of +_Letters to Trinitarians and {599} Calvinists_; Leonard Woods +(1774-1854), professor in Andover for thirty-eight years, author of +several able books on the Unitarian controversy; and Wilbur Fisk +(1792-1839), the distinguished preacher and educator, and author of _The +Calvinistic Controversy_. + +Other theological lights of the early years of the republic are also: +John Mitchell Mason (1770-1829), provost of Columbia College, later +president of Dickinson College, a prime mover in the founding of Union +Theological Seminary, and author of many sermons of a high order; Edward +Payson (1783-1827), whose sermons are noted for the same ardent +spirituality and beauty that marked his life and pastorate at Portland, +Me.; John Summerfield (1798-1825), a volume of whose strangely eloquent +sermons was published after his early death; Ebenezer Porter (1772-1834), +professor in Andover, whose _Lectures on Revivals of Religion_ are still +worthy of consultation; Eliphalet Nott (1773-1866), president of Union +College for sixty-two years, whose _Lectures on Temperance_ are accounted +among the best literature on that great reform; John Henry Hobart +(1775-1830), bishop of the diocese of New York, who was the author of +_Festivals and Fasts_, and one of the founders of the General Theological +Seminary in New York; Nathan Bangs (1778-1862), a leading Methodist +divine, who wrote a _History of the Methodist Episcopal Church_ and +_Errors of Hofkinsianism_; and Leonard {600} Withington (1789-1885), +author of _Solomon's Song Translated and Explained_, a valuable +exegetical work. + +In a second group of leading writers on religion, coming nearer the +middle of the nineteenth century we find as doctrinal authors: Archibald +Alexander (1772-1851), author of _Evidences of Christianity_; Hosea +Ballou (1771-1852), the Universalist preacher and author of _An +Examination of the Doctrine of Future Retribution_; Nathaniel W. Taylor +(1786-1859), the author of _Lectures on the Moral Government of God_, in +which there is a marked divergence from the strict school of Calvinistic +theologians; Gardiner Spring (1785-1873), a tower of strength in the +pulpit of New York for over fifty years, and author of _The Bible Not of +Man_; Alexander Campbell (1788-1865), whose _Public Debates_ contain the +record of his distinguished career as a controversialist and mark the +formation of the religious society called Disciples of Christ; Robert J. +Breckenridge (1800-1871), whose work on _The Knowledge of God Objectively +and Subjectively Considered_ gave him great distinction; George W. +Bethune (1805-1862), who, besides several hymns, wrote _Lectures on the +Heidelberg Catechism_; and James H. Thornwell (1811-1862), of the +Southern Presbyterians, who left an able _Systematic Theology_. + +Those whose works were of a more practical nature are: Samuel Miller +(1769-1850), whose most telling book was _Letters on Clerical Habits and +Manners_; Lyman Beecher (1775-1863), the {601} celebrated father of his +more celebrated son, and author of _Sermons on Temperance_; Thomas H. +Skinner (1791-1871), professor in Andover and later in Union Theological +Seminary, who wrote _Aids to Preaching and Hearing_, and translated and +edited Vinet's _Homiletics and Pastoral Theology_; Charles G. Finney +(1792-1875), of Oberlin, whose _Lectures on Revivals_ embody the +principles on which he himself conducted his celebrated evangelistic +labors; Francis Wayland (1796-1865), the Baptist divine and author of a +text-book on _Moral Science_, who also wrote _The Moral Dignity of the +Missionary Enterprise_; Ichabod S. Spencer (1798-1854), whose _Pastor's +Sketches_ have a perennial interest; Theodore Dwight Woolsey (1801-1889), +who, besides other books on the classics and law, published _The Religion +of the Present and the Future_; Bela Bates Edwards (1802-1852), of +Andover, whose chief work was that bestowed upon the _Quarterly +Observer_, later the _Biblical Repository_, and still later as editor of +_Bibliotheca Sacra_; James Waddell Alexander (1804-1859), author of +_Consolation; or, Discourses to the Suffering Children of God_; and +George B. Cheever (1807-1890), who wrote several popular books on +temperance, one being _Deacon Giles's Distillery_. + +A group of noted writers whose books have special bearing on the Bible +are: Moses Stuart (1780-1852), the distinguished Hebraist and author of +several commentaries and of a Hebrew {602} Grammar, whose scholarship was +one of the chief attractions at Andover; Samuel H. Turner (1790-1861), +the distinguished commentator on Romans, Hebrews, Ephesians, and +Galatians; Edward Robinson (1794-1863), whose _Biblical Researches and +New Testament Lexicon_ mark him as one of the foremost scholars of the +century; George Bush (1796-1860), known chiefly as the author of +_Commentaries_ on the earlier parts of the Old Testament; Albert Barnes +(1798-1870), whose _Notes_ on the Scriptures still have a large place +among the more popular works of exegesis; Stephen Olin (1797-1851) and +John Price Durbin (1800-1876), both distinguished as educators and pulpit +orators of the Methodist Episcopal Church, who each wrote on travels in +Palestine and adjoining countries; William M. Thomson (1806-1894), the +missionary and author of _The Land and the Book_, a work of perpetual +value; Joseph Addison Alexander (1809-1860), the famous philologist and +author of valuable commentaries and a work on _New Testament Literature_; +and George Burgess (1809-1866), who wrote _The Book of Psalms in English +Verse_. + +Those who employed their pens in the field of history are; William Meade +(1789-1862), author of _Old Churches, Ministers, and Families of +Virginia_; George Junkin (1790-1868), who wrote _The Vindication_, which +gives an account of the trial of Albert Barnes, from the Old School point +of view; William B. Sprague (1795-1876), whose _Annals {603} of the +American Pulpit_ form a lasting monument to his literary ability; Robert +Baird (1798-1863), author of _A View of Religion in America_; Francis L. +Hawks (1798-1866), who published the _History of the Protestant Episcopal +Church in Maryland and Virginia_; Morris J. Raphall (1798-1868), a +prolific Jewish writer, whose _Post-Biblical History of the Jews_ is a +valuable book; Thomas C. Upham (1799-1871), professor in Bowdoin College +and author of _Mental Philosophy_, who also wrote the _Life and Religious +Experience of Madame Guyon_; William H. Furness (1802-1896), long the +leader of Unitarians in Philadelphia, from whose imaginative pen came a +peculiar book, _A History of Jesus_; J. Daniel Rupp (born 1803), who +wrote a _History of the Religious Denominations in the United States_; +and Abel Stevens (1815-1897), author of _The History of Methodism_ and +also of a _History of the Methodist Episcopal Church_. + +Asahel Nettleton (1784-1844), best known as an evangelist, published a +popular collection of _Village Hymns_. Henry U. Onderdonk (1789-1858) +and John Henry Hopkins (1792-1868) each wrote on the Episcopacy. Samuel +Hanson Cox (1793-1880), a vigorous and original preacher of the New +School Presbyterians, was the author of _Interviews Memorable and +Useful_. Henry B. Bascom (1796-1850), whose _Sermons and Lectures_ were +of vigorous thought but florid style, was very popular for many years; +Nicholas Murray (1802-1861) under the _nom-de-plume_ of "Kirwan" {604} +wrote the celebrated _Letters_ to Archbishop Hughes on the Catholic +Question; and Edward Thomson (1810-1870), bishop of the Methodist +Episcopal Church, was author of _Moral and Religious Essays_, and other +works. + +Among the American singers of sacred lyrics are Samuel Davies +(1724-1761), Timothy Dwight. (1752-1817), Mrs. Phoebe H. Brown +(1783-1861), Thomas Hastings (1784-1872), John Pierpont (1785-1866), Mrs. +Lydia H. Sigourney (1791-1865), William B. Tappan (1794-1849), William A. +Muhlenberg (1796-1877), George W. Doane (1799-1859), Ray Palmer +(1808-1887), Samuel F. Smith (1808-1895), Edmund H. Sears (1810-1876), +William Hunter (1811-1877), George Duffield (1818-1888), Arthur Cleveland +Coxe (1818-1896), Samuel Longfellow (1819-1892), and Alice (1820-1871) +and Phoebe Cary (1824-1871). + +From the large number of writers of the latter half of this century whose +productions have been added to the treasures of thought for coming +generations and are worthy of generous attention we name: Charles Hodge +(1797-1878), known best by his _Systematic Theology_; and his son, +Archibald Alexander Hodge (1823-1886), author of _Outlines of Theology_; +Charles P. McIlvaine (1798-1873), whose _Evidences of Christianity_ are +widely known and read; Mark Hopkins (1802-1887), who gave the world _The +Law of Love and Love as a Law_; Edwards A. Park (born 1808), whose +leading work was on the _Atonement_; Albert {605} Taylor Bledsoe +(1809-1877), whose _Theodicy_ was his chief work; James McCosh +(1811-1894), whose later years were given to America, and whose +_Christianity and Positivism_ and _Religious Aspects of Evolution_ were +written in this country; Davis W. Clark (1812-1871), author of _Man All +Immortal_; John Miley (1813-1896), who was the author of a clear and able +_Systematic Theology_ of the Arminian type; Thomas O. Summers +(1812-1882), who was a prolific author and whose _Systematic Theology_ +has been published since his death; and Lorenzo D. McCabe (1815-1897), +who wrote on the _Foreknowledge of God_. + +Those who have devoted their talent to the exposition of the Scriptures +are: Thomas J. Conant (1802-1891), a biblical scholar and author of +_Historical Books of the Old Testament_; Daniel D. Whedon (1808-1885), +who wrote _Freedom of the Will_ and was the author of a valuable +_Commentary on the New Testament_; Horatio B. Hackett (1808-1875), whose +exegetical works on Acts, Philemon, and Philippians have great merit; +Tayler Lewis (1809-1877), the Nestor of classic linguistics, whose _Six +Days of Creation_ and the _Divine-Human in the Scriptures_ are among his +best books; Melanchthon W. Jacobus (1816-1876), whose _Commentaries on +the Gospels, Acts, and Genesis_ unite critical ability and popular style; +Ezra Abbot (1818-1884), author of a critical work on the _Authorship of +the Fourth Gospel_; Howard Crosby (1826-1891), the vigorous preacher and +{606} author of _The Seven Churches of Asia_; William M. Taylor +(1829-1895), whose works include excellent studies on several prominent +Bible characters--Moses, David, Daniel, and Joseph; Henry Martyn Harman +(1822-1897), the author of _An Introduction to the Study of the Holy +Scriptures;_ and Henry B. Ridgaway (1830-1895), who wrote _The Lord's +Land_, a work based on his personal observations during an Oriental tour. + +Those who have treated historical themes include: Charles Elliot +(1792-1869), whose ablest work was _The Delineation of Roman +Catholicism_; Francis P. Kenrick (1797-1863), who, besides being the +author of a _Version of the Scriptures with Commentary_, also wrote a +work on _The Supremacy of the Pope_; Matthew Simpson (1810-1884), the +eloquent bishop, who wrote _A Cyclopaedia of Methodism_ and _A Hundred +Years of Methodism_; James Freeman Clarke (1810-1888), author of _The Ten +Great Religions of the World_; Henry B. Smith (1815-1877), whose _History +of the Church of Christ in Chronological Tables_ is much admired for its +conciseness, accuracy, and thoroughness; William H. Odenheimer +(1817-1879), author of _The Origin and Compilation of the Prayer Book_; +Philip Schaff (1819-1893), the author of a learned _History of the +Christian Church_ and _Creeds of Christendom_, and editor of the English +translation of _Lange's Commentary_; William G. T. Shedd (1820-1894), +who, besides other works, wrote _A History of Christian Doctrine_; +Charles Force Deems (1820-1893), who {607} wrote a work on _The Life of +Christ_; Henry Martyn Dexter (1821-1890), author of The +_Congregationalism of the Last Three Hundred Years_; George R. Crooks +(1822-1897), who, besides other labors in the field of the classics, +wrote _The Life of Bishop Matthew Simpson_; Charles Porterfield Krauth +(1823-1883), author of _The Conservative Reformation and its Theology_; +Holland N. McTyeire (1824-1889), whose chief literary work was _The +History of Methodism_; and John Gilmary Shea (1824-1892), who wrote many +books on early American history connected with the Indians, one being a +_History of the French and Spanish Missions among the Indian Tribes of +the United States_. + +John McClintock (1814-1870), the scholarly Methodist divine and first +president of Drew Theological Seminary, left a monument to his name in +the great _Cyclopaedia of Biblical, Theological, and Ecclesiastical +Literature_ projected by him and his colaborer, James Strong (1822-1894), +who completed the herculean task and added yet other works, notably his +_Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible_. Daniel Curry (1809-1887), the +keen editor and debater, has a gathered sheaf of his various addresses in +_Platform Papers_. Austin Phelps (1820-1890) wrote _The Still Hour_ and +_The Theory of Preaching_, which are fine specimens of his thoughtful +work; and Phillips Brooks (1835-1893), the renowned preacher, left +_Sermons_ and _Addresses_, which still breathe the earnest and catholic +spirit of their cultured author. + + + + +{609} + +INDEX TO AUTHORS, WRITINGS, AND PERIODICALS. + + A Man's a Man for a' That, 220. + Abbey, E. A., 146. + Abbot, Ezra, 605. + Abbot, George, 301. + Abraham Lincoln, 502. + Absalom and Ahitophel, 176. + Acts and Monuments of these Latter and Perilous Days + Touching Matters of the Church, 300. + Adam Bede, 278, 279. + Adams and Liberty, 389. + Adams, John, 375, 383. + Adams, John Quincy, 406, 423. + Adams, Samuel, 366, 367, 368. + Adams, Sarah Flower, 304. + Addison, Joseph, 151, 173, 174, 181, 184, 187-189, 249, + 276, 280, 283, 303, 359, 362, 409, 561, 571. + Adeline, 289. + Adonais, 260, 261. + Adventures of Five Hours, 173. + Adventures of Gil Blas, 209. + Adventures of Philip, The, 275. + Advice to a Young Tradesman, 362. + Ae Fond Kiss, 217. + Aella, 197. + Aeneid, 49, 60, 65. + Aeschylus, 259, 262. + After-dinner Poem, 491. + After the Funeral, 501. + Age of Reason, The, 378-380, 389, 596. + Age of Revelation, The, 596. + Ages, The, 515. + Agincourt, 98. + Aids to Preaching and Hearing, 601. + Aids to Reflection, 237. + Ainsworth, Henry, 305. + Akenside, Mark, 194. + Alarm to Unconverted Sinners, 306. + Alastor, 258, 260. + Albion's England, 97. + Alchemist, The, 122. + Alcott, A. B., 435, 449, 450. + Aldrich, Thomas Bailey, 538, 574. + Alexander and Campaspe, 103, 104. + Alexander, Archibald, 600. + Alexander, James Waddell, 601. + Alexander, Joseph Addison, 602. + Alexander's Feast, 176. + Alford, Henry, 304, 313. + Alfred the Great, 11, 13, 18, 60. + Algerine Captive, The, 393. + Algic Researches, 485. + Alhambra, The, 408. + All for Love, 168, 169. + All Quiet Along the Potomac, 556. + Alleine, Joseph, 306. + Allen, Ethan. 378. + All's Well that Ends Well, 114. + Alnwick Castle, 417. + Alsop, Richard, 382, 383. + Althea, To, from Prison, 148. + Amelia, 208. + American, The, 586, 587. + American Civil War, The, 555. + American Conflict, The, 555. + American Flag, The, 416. + American Literature, Cyclopaedia of, 389, 407. + American Monthly, The, 536. + American Note Books, 437, 463, 465, 469, 482. + American Scholar, The, 434, 449, 474. + American Whig Review, 531. + Ames, Fisher, 376, 377. + Among My Books, 502. + Amoretti, 94. + Amyot, Jacques, 90. + Analogy of Religion, 308. + Anarchiad, The, 383. + Anatomy of Melancholy, 136, 137, 349. + Ancient Mariner, The, 227, 237, 238, 530. + Ancren Riwle, 24. + Andre, Major, 387. + Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, 15. + Annabel Lee, 531. + Annals of Philadelphia, 484. + Annals of the American Pulpit, 602. + Annotations on the Psalms, 305. + Annotations upon the Bible, 306. + Annas Mirabilis, 176. + Antiquary, The, 248. + Antony and Cleopatra, 116, 168. + Anselm, 13. + Antiphon, England's, 162. + Apologia Ecclesiae Anglicanae, 300. + Apologia pro Vita Sua, 312. + Apology for the True Christian Divinity, 307. + Araby's Daughter, 256. + Arcadia, 83, 123. + Areopagitica, 155, 337. + Argument against Abolishing Christianity, 191. + Ariosto, Ludovico, 70, 72, 100, 244, 263. + Aristotle, 101, 134. + Aristophanes, 120. + Arkansaw Traveller, The, 564. + Army Life in a Black Regiment, 559. + Army of the Potomac, 555. + Arnold, Matthew, 24, 28, 233, 490, 502, 515, 546. + Arnold, Thomas, 236. + Ars Poetica, 173. + Art of Book Making, 403. + Art of English Poesy, 88. + Art Poetique, L', 173. + "Artemus Ward," 562, 565-569, 570. + Arthur Mervyn, 394, 396. + Arthur, King, 18, 20, 22, 24, 39, 57, 71, 157, 290, + 292. Death of, 23, 50, 52, 75, 292. + Artificial Comedy of the Last Century, 171, 244. + As You Like It, 82, 89, 114, 115. + Ascham, Roger, 51, 61, 62, 68, 142. + Associations, Remarks on, 431. + Astronomical Discourses, 311. + Astrophel and Stella, 85, 94. + At Teague Poteet's, 582. + Athenae Oxonienses, 348. + Atlantic Monthly, The, 492, 501, 511-513, 558, 559, + 571, 575, 589. + Atlantis, 536. + Atonement, The, 604. + Attempt to Show that America was Known to the Ancients, 596. + Atterbury, Francis, 307. + Auber, Harriet, 304. + Auf Wiedersehen, 501. + Augusta, Stanzas to, 255. + Auld, Farmer's New Year's Morning Salutation to + his Auld Mare Maggie, The, 219. + Auld Lang Syne, 219. + Austen, Jane, 247. + Authorship of the Fourth Gospel, The, 605. + Autobiography, Franklin's, 347, 360, 362, 363,407. + Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, 487, 493. + Autumn, Longfellow's, 477. + Autumn, Ode to, 263. + Ayenbite of Inwyt, 24. + Aylmer, John, 300. + + Backus, Isaac, 596. + Backwoodsman, The, 405. + Bacon, Francis, 86, 91, 92, 108, 123, 136, 280, 283, 563. + Bailey, Harry, 36. + Bailey, Nathan, 197. + Baird, Robert, 603. + Balade of Dead Ladies, 25. + Balcony, In a, 297. + Bale, John, 299. + Ballad of the Oysterman, 488. + Ballads, English and Scottish, 75. + Ballads, Longfellow's, 479. + Ballou, Hosea, 600. + Baltimore Saturday Visitor, 535. + Balzac, Honore de, 584. + Bampton, John, 308. + Bancroft, George, 475, 495, 504, 505, 506. + Bandello, 89. + Bangs, Nathan, 599. + Banished Cavaliers, The, 170. + Baptists, History of New England + with Particular Reference to the, 596. + Barbara Frietchie, 521. + Barclay, Robert, 307. + Bard, The, 176, 194, 201. + Barlow, Joel, 378, 382, 383, 384-386. + Barnaby Rudge, 529. + Barnes, Albert, 602. + Bascom, Henry B., 603. + Baron's Wars, 97. + Barrow, Isaac, 163, 305. + Bartholomew Fair, 121, 165. + Battle Field, The, 517, + Battle Hymn of the Republic, 556. + Battle of Hastings, 197. + Battle of Otterbourne, 56. + Battle of the Baltic, 249. + Battle of the Kegs, 388. + Baudelaire, Charles, 533. + Baviad, 193, 223. + Baxter, Richard, 136, 305. + Bay Fight, The, 557. + Bay Psalm Book, The, 337, 594. + Beattie, James, 195, 198, 216, 386. + Beaufort, Jane, 45. + Beaumont, Francis, 94, 102, 110, 127, 128-133, 135, 171. + Beauty, On, 70, 74. + Beaux' Stratagem, The, 169, 392. + Beckford, William, 394. + Beddome, Benjamin, 303. + Bedouin Song, 540. + Beecher, Henry Ward, 545. + Beecher, Lyman, 441, 545, 600. + Beers, Ethel Lynn, 556. + Beggar's Opera, 193. + Behn, Mrs. Aphra, 170. + Beleaguered City, The, 479, 483. + Belfry of Bruges, The, 479, 481. + Bellamy, Joseph, 597. + Belle Dame Sans Merci, La, 263. + Benson, Joseph, 310. + Bentham, Jeremy, 285. + Bentley, Richard, 163. + Bentley's Miscellany, 269. + Beowulf, 546. + Beppo, 254. + Berenice, 169. + Berkeley, George, 358, 403. + Bethune, George W., 600. + Beverley, Robert, 332. + Beveridge, William, 306. + Bible, Challoner's Version of the, 309. + Bible, Eliot's Indian, 337. + Bible, Genevan Version of the, 300. + Bible, History of the, 308. + Bible, Introduction to the Literary History of the, 310. + Bible Not of Man, The, 600. + Bible, Translations of the, 32, 33, 63, 301, 309, 596. + Biblical Literature, Cyclopaedia of, 312, 607. + Biblical Repository, The, 601. + Biblical Researches, 602. + Bibliotheca Sacra, 601. + Biglow Papers, The, 496, 497, 499, 500, 523, 562. + "Bill Nye," 569. + Bilson, Thomas, 301. + Bingham, Joseph, 308. + Biographia Literaria, 235, 236. + Biographical History of Philosophy, 278. + Biographical Sketches, De Quincey's, 240. + Bishop Blougram's Apology, 296. + Bishop, Orders his Tomb in St. Praxed's Church, The, 296. + Black Cat, The, 532. + Black Fox of Salmon River, The, 520. + Blackwood's Magazine, 223, 224, 238, 278. + Blair, Hugh, 309. + Blair, James, 327, 595. + Bleak House, 241, 268, 269, 270, 273, 280, 396. + Bledsoe, Albert Taylor, 605. + Blithedale Romance, The, 437, 468, 541, 591. + Bloody Tenent of Persecution, The, 339. + Bloody Tenent Washed, The, 339. + Blot in the Scutcheon, A, 297. + Blue and the Gray, The, 557. + Boccaccio, Giovanni, 34, 36, 38, 43, 65, 67, 89, 178, 263. + Bodmer, Johann J., 194. + Boethius, 60. + Boiardo, Matteo, 244. + Boileau, Nicolas, 164, 173, 180, 183, 184, 225. + Boke of the Duchesse, 35, 42. + Boker, George H., 574. + Bolingbroke, Lord, 182, 183, 299. + Bonaparte, Historic Doubts Relative to Napoleon, 312. + Bonar, Horatius, 304. + Book of Common Prayer, 63, 154, 301, 302. + Book of Martyrs, 179, 300, 348. + Book of Psalms in English Verse, 602. + Boston Courier, 496. + Boston Port Bill, Observations on the, 369. + Bostonians, The, 591. + Boswell, James, 202, 205. + Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich, 484. + Boudinot, Elias, 596. + Bourchlir, John, 51. + Bowge of Courte, 52. + Bowring, Sir John, 304. + Boyle, Robert, 136, 163. + Boys, John, 301. + Boys, The, 489. + Bracebridge Hall, 410, 412, 561. + Bradford, William, 338, 342, 351, 353. + Brady, Nicholas, 303. + Brahma, 450, 455. + Brainard, J. G. C., 519, 520, 544. + Break, Break, Break, 291. + Breckenridge, Robert J., 600. + Brick Moon, The, 573. + Bridal of Pennacook, 520, 523. + Bride of Abydos, 250. + Bride of Lammermoor, 248. + Bridge, The, 481, 482. + Bright, John, 522. + Britannia's Pastorals, 94. + British Churches, Antiquities of the, 306. + British Empire in America, 332. + Broadway Journal, 527. + Broken Heart, The, 133, 413. + Bronte, Charlotte, 267, 274. + Brook, The, 290. + Brooke, Arthur, 85. + Brooks, Phillips, 607. + Brother Jonathan, 512. + Brougham, Henry, 223. + Brown, Charles Brockden, 393-396. + Brown, Mrs. Phoebe H., 604. + Browne, Charles F., 564, 565-569. + Browne, Sir Thomas, 90, 136, 137-139, 140, 144, 162, + 179, 341, 456. + Browne, William, 94. + Brownell, Henry Howard, 556, 557, 558. + Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 215, 495. + Browning, Robert, 259, 289, 290, 293-297, 522, 579. + Brut d' Angleterre, 22. + Bryant, William Cullen, 96, 400, 416, 477, 489, + 513-518, 527, 536 + Buccaneer, The, 429. + Buchanan, Robert W., 547. + Bugle Song, The, 291. + Building of the Ship, The, 481. + Bulkley, Peter, 346. + Bulwer, Edward G., 512. + Bund, Willis, 162. + Bundle of Letters, A, 587. + Bunyan, John, 31, 74, 179, 283, 305. + Buerger, Gottfried A., 234, 246. + Burgess, George, 602. + Burke, Edmund, 203, 212, 224, 366, 377, 425. + Burlington Hawkeye, The, 564. + Burnet, Gilbert, 163, 307. + Burnett, Mrs. Frances Hodgson, 585. + Burns, Robert, 53, 212, 215-220, 232, 244, 256, 261, 284, + 488, 498, 519, 522. + Burr, Aaron, 595. + Burton, Robert, 136, 137, 243, 349, 409. + Bush, George, 602. + Bushnell, Horace, 442. + Busybody Papers, 359, 380, 408. + Butler, Alban, 309. + Butler, Joseph, 308. + Butler, Samuel, 165, 166, 381, 382. + Butler, William Alken, 538. + Byles, Mather, 597. + Byrd, William, 331. + Byrom, John, 303. + Byron, George Gordon, 96, 193, 215, 222, 229, 231, 232, + 237, 242, 243, 249-256, 257, 258, 260, 262, 263, 386, + 406, 415. + + Cable, George W., 582, 583. + Caedmon, 546. + Cain, 251. + Calamy, Edward, 304. + Caleb Williams, 394. + Calhoun, John C., 370, 424, 425. + Caliban upon Setebos, 294. + Californian, The, 569. + Call to the Unconverted, 305. + Calvinistic Controversy, The, 599. + Cambridge Thirty Years Ago, 475. + Camilla's Alarum to Slumbering Euphues, 82. + Campaign, The, 189. + Campbell, Alexander, 600, + Campbell, Thomas, 249, 391. + Canterbury Tales, 28, 31, 36-41, 43, 46, 174. + Cape Cod, 458. + Capgrave, John, 18. + Captain Singleton, 205. + Capture of Fugitive Slaves, The, 498. + Caracteres, 92. + Carew, Thomas, 146, 148, 149. + Carlyle, Thomas, 202, 210, 216, 220, 225, 246, 248, 257, + 280, 283-288, 410, 427, 444, 448, 451, 453, 454, 499, 502. + Cary, Alice, 542, 604. + Cary, Phoebe, 542, 604. + Cask of Amontillado, 532. + Cassandra Southwick, 523. + Castle of Indolence, 198. + Castle of Otranto, 195, 248, 394. + Casuistry of Roman Meals, 241. + Catechism, Lectures on the Heidelberg, 600. + Catechism, The Shorter, 302. + Catechism, Lectures on the Shorter, 598. + Cathedral, The, 503. + Catiline, 117. + Cato, 189. + Catt, Jacob, 146. + Catullus, 54, 60, 147, 174. + Cavalier Tunes, 295. + Caxton, William, 48, 49, 50, 52, 60. + Cecil Dreeme, 559. + Cenci, The, 258. + Cennick, John, 303. + Century Magazine, The, 511, 555, 575. + Certain Condescension in Foreigners, On a, 499. + Cervantes, M., 166, 209. + Chalcondylas, Demetrius, 61. + Chalkley, Thomas, 596. + Challoner, Richard, 309. + Chalmers, Thomas, 311. + Chambered Nautilus, The, 490. + Chance Acquaintance, A, 589, 590. + Chances, The, 129. + Channing, William Ellery, 396, 407, 429-432, 434, 440, + 442, 444, 452, 598. + Channing, William E., Jr., 452, 457, 470. + Channing, William H., 452. + Chanson de Roland, 19, 70. + Chapel of the Hermits, 522. + Chapman, George, 95, 96, 97, 262. + Character and Writings of John Milton, 431. + Characteristics, Carlyle's, 284. + Characters, Overbury's, 93. + Charivari, 563. + Charleston, 557. + Charleston City Gazette, 536. + Charleston Mercury, 557. + Charnock, Stephen, 306. + Chartism, 285. + Chatterton, Thomas, 195, 196, 197, 198, 244. + Chaucer, Geoffrey, 13, 28, 29, 33-46, 49, 50, 56, + 60, 65, 66, 67, 68, 95, 98, 174, 178, 195, 197, + 228, 263, 289, 501, 568. + Chauncy, Charles, 595. + Chauncy, Charles (President), 594, 595. + Checks to Antinomianism, 310. + Cheever, George B., 601. + Cheke, Sir John, 61. + Chesterfield, Lord, 183. + Chevy Chase, 55, 56, 387. + Childe Harold, 249, 253, 255. + Children of Adam, 548. + Chillingworth, William, 136, 304. + Choate, Rufus, 428, 429. + Christ, Divinity of, 308, 310. + Christ, Life of, 607. + Christ, Poems to, 27. + Christabel, 235, 237, 238, 416, 530. + Christian Advocate, The, 598. + Christian Church, Antiquities of the, 308. + Christian Church, History of the, 606. + Christian Doctrine, History of, 606. + Christian Examiner, 431. + Christian Perfection, 309. + Christian Psalmist, The, 304. + Christian Religion, Evidences of the, 598. + Christian Year, 145, 304. + Christianity, A Practical View of, 311. + Christianity and Positivism, 605. + Christianity as Old as Creation, 308. + Christianity, Evidences of, 600, 604. + Christianity, History of, 312. + Christmas Stories, 269. + "Christopher North", 223. + Christ's Passion, 300. + Christ's Victory and Triumph, 159. + Chronicle of England, 18, 90, 97. + Chronicles of Froissart, 51. + Church and State, 237. + Church History, Fuller's, 33, 348. + Church History of Britain, 139. + Church of Christ, History of the, in Chronological Tables, 606. + Church of England, History of the Reformation of the, 307. + Church of Scotland, History of the, 299. + Church of Scotland, History of the Sufferings of the, 308. + Churches, Doctrine of Instituted, 595. + Cibber, Colley, 183. + Cicero, 49, 60, 117. + Circular Letter to each Colonial Legislature, 368. + City in the Sea, The, 528. + Civil Wars, History of the, 97, 324. + Clannesse, 28. + Clap, Thomas, 596. + Clara Howard, 394. + Clarendon, Edward Hyde, 163. + Clari, 422. + Claribel, 289. + Clarissa Harlowe, 205, 206. + Clark, Davis W., 605. + Clarke, Adam, 310. + Clarke, James Freeman, 451, 452, 606. + Clarke, Samuel, 307. + Clay, Henry, 424, 425. + Clemens, Samuel L., 564, 569. + Clerical Habits and Manners, Letters on, 600. + Cleveland, Henry R., 476. + Cleveland Plain Dealer, 564, 565. + Clough, Arthur Hugh, 484. + Clown, The, 92. + Coke, Thomas, 310. + Coleridge, Henry N., 235. + Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 117, 118, 129, 138, 207, 210, + 219, 222, 225, 226, 227, 233, 234-238, 239, 240, 243, + 255, 282, 406, 415, 416, 444, 530. + Colet, John, 61, 64. + Colin Clout's Come Home Again, 69. + Colleges, Religious Condition of, 596. + Collier, Jeremy, 172. + Collins, Anthony, 360. + Collins, Wilkie, 529. + Collins, William, 194, 199, 200, 201, 205, 211, 244. + Colombe's Birthday, 297. + Colonel, The, 121. + Columbiad, The, 384, 386. + Columbus, Life of, 408, 414. + Comedies et Proverbes, 592. + Comedy of Errors, 104, 113. + Comic Almanac, Cruikshank's, 273. + Comic Dramatists of the Restoration, 192, 283. + Committee, The, 170. + Common Sense, 377. + Companions of Columbus, 408. + Complaint of the Decay of Beggars in the Metropolis, A, 244. + Complaints, 70. + Compleat Angler, The, 142, 162. + Complete Body of Divinity, 594. + Comus, 22, 133, 150, 152, 160. + Conant, Thomas J., 605. + Concordance of the Bible, Exhaustive, 607. + Concordance to the Scriptures, 309. + Condensed Novels, 578. + Conder, Josiah, 304. + Conduct of Life, 453. + Conduct of the Allies, 180. + Confederate States of America, 555. + Confessio Amantis, 41. + Confession of Faith, Westminster, 302. + Confessions of an English Opium Eater, 239. + Confutation, of the Animadversions upon a Defense of a + Humble Remonstrance against a Treatise, entitled Of + Reformation, A, 155. + Congregationalists of the Last Three Hundred Years, The, 607. + Congreve, William, 169, 183, 193. + Connecticut Evangelical Magazine, 590. + Connecticut Mirror, 519. + Connection of the Old and New Testaments, 307. + Conquest of Canaan, 386. + Conquest of Granada, 168, 407, 408. + Conquest of Mexico, 504. + Conquest of Peru, 504. + Conservative Reformation and its Theology, The, 607. + Consolation, 601. + Consolatione Philosophiae, De, 60. + Conspiracy of Pontiac, The, 506. + Constable, Henry, 94. + Constitution and the Union, On the, 426. + Constitution of the United States, 369, 373. + Contentment, 423. + Contrast, The, 393. + Conversations on Some of the Old Poets, 501. + Conversations on the Gospels, 449. + Conybeare, William J., 312. + Cooke, John Esten, 536. + Cooper, James Fenimore, 391, 405, 407, 418-422, 429, 453, + 485, 507, 536, 583. + Cooper's Hill, 174. + Coral Grove, 544. + Corinna, To, to Go a Maying, 148. + Coriolanus, 116. + Corneille, Pierre, 164, 167, 168. + Corneille, Thomas, 169. + Corsair, The, 250, 512. + Cosin, John, 304. + Cotter's Saturday Night, 216, 522. + Cotton, John, 136, 339, 340, 346, 347. + Counsels Civil and Moral, 91. + Count Frontenac and New France, 507. + Countess of Cumberland, Epistle to the, 98. + Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia, 82, 83, 84, 85, 89. + Country Magistrate, The, 92. + Country Wife, 169. + Courier-Journal, 564. + Court of Love, 42. + Courtin', The, 499, 562. + Courtly Poets from Raleigh to Montrose, The, 123. + Courtship of Miles Standish, The, 344. + Coverdale, Miles, 63. + Cow Chase, The, 387. + Cowley, Abraham, 143, 148, 164, 173, 175, 179, 354. + Cowper, William, 96, 200, 212-215, 218, 232, 366, 522. + Cox, Samuel Hanson, 603. + Coxe, Arthur Cleveland, 604. + Crabbe, George, 232. + Cradle Song, The, 291. + Cranch, Christopher P., 437, 452. + Cranmer, Archbishop, 301, 302. + Crashaw, Richard, 143, 148. + Credibility of the Gospel History, 304. + Creed, Exposition of the, 305. + Creeds of Christendom, 606. + Crime against Kansas, On the, 509. + Crisis, The, 377. + Critic, The, 172. + Croaker Papers, The, 417. + Cromwell's Letters and Speeches, 286. + Crooks, George R., 607. + Crosby, Howard, 605. + Crowne, John, 168. + Cruden, Alexander, 309. + Cuckoo, To the, 229. + Cuckow and the Nightingale, The, 42. + Cudworth, Ralph, 305. + Culprit Fay, The, 98, 416. + Cumming, John, 313. + Curse of Kehama, 238. + Cursor Mundi, 24. + Curtis, George William, 437, 574. + Cymbeline, 22, 115, 199. + Cynthia's Revels, 122. + + Dairyman's Daughter, The, 310. + Daisy Miller, 586, 587. + Dame Siriz, 38. + Dana, Charles A., 436, 452, 513. + Dana, Richard H., 400, 429. + Danbury News, 388, 564. + Daniel Deronda, 280. + Daniel, Samuel, 94, 97, 98, 324. + Dante, 34, 36, 65, 74, 119, 242, 244, 286, 291, 294, + 295, 455, 478, 486, 501. + Daphnaida, 70. + Darby, William, 484. + Davenant, Sir William, 164, 167, 172. + Davenport, John, 595. + David and Bethsabe, 106. + David Copperfield, 269, 270. + Davideis, The, 148. + Davies, Samuel, 595, 604. + Davis, Jefferson, 555. + Davison, Francis, 94. + Dawes, Rufus, 525. + Day is Done, 481. + Day of Doom, 355. + Deacon Giles's Distillery, 601. + Death and Dr. Hornbook, 218. + Death of the Flowers, The, 515, 516. + Death of Thomson, On the, 200. + Decameron, 89. + Declaration of Independence, 369. + Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 212. + Deems, Charles Force, 606. + Deerslayer, The, 420, 422. + Defense of Chimney-sweeps, 244. + Defense of Poesy, 85. + Defensio pro Populo Anglicano, 156. + De Foe, Daniel, 181, 190, 205, 410, 533. + Deistical Writers, View of the, 308. + Deists, Short and Easy Method with the, 307. + Deity of our Lord Jesus Christ, The Supreme, 595. + Dejection near Naples, Stanzas Written in, 260. + Delineation of Roman Catholicism, 606. + Democratic Vistas, 551. + Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God, 308. + Demosthenes, 508. + Denham, Sir John, 174. + Denominations in the United States, A History + of Religious, 603. + De Quincey, Thomas, 138, 222, 239-241, 282, 532, 567. + Derby, George H., 564. + Derby, Lord, 96. + Descent into the Maelstrom, The, 533. + Description of England, 97. + Deserted Road, The, 542. + Deserted Village, The, 211. + Destruction of Jerusalem, 168. + Dexter, Henry Martyn, 607. + Dial, The, 434, 441, 450, 452. + Dialogue between Franklin and the Gout, 362. + Diamond Lens, 559. + Diana Enamorada, 83. + Diana, Hymn to, 123. + Diary, Henry Crabb Robinson's, 241. + Diary, Samuel Sewall's, 352, 353. + Diary, Pepys's, 165, 171, 173, 352. + Dickens, Charles, 241, 267-272, 273, 274, 276, 277, 278, + 280, 396, 415, 489, 512, 529, 562, 592. + Dickinson, Jonathan, 595. + Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers, 49. + Dictionary of the English Language, Johnson's, 204. + Diderot, Denis, 284. + Difference between Absolute and Limited Monarchy, 48. + Directions to Servants, 192. + Dirge in Cymbeline, 199. + Discoveries, Ben Jonson's, 105. + Discovery of the Empire of Guiana, 86. + Dividing Line, History of the, 331. + Divina Commedia, 486. + Divine Attributes, The, 306. + Divine Emblems, 146, 354. + Divine-Human in the Scriptures, The, 605. + Divine Legation of Moses, 309. + Divine Weeks and Works, 158, 354. + Divinity, Complete Body of, 594. + Doane, George W., 604. + Doctrine of Instituted Churches, 595. + Doddridge, Philip, 303, 308. + Dolph Heyliger, 410. + Domain of Arnheim, 533. + Dombey and Son, 269. + Don Juan, 254. + Don Quixote, 166, 275, + Donne, John, 142, 143-145, 173, 177, 354. + Dora, 290. + Dorchester Giant, The, 487 + Dou Coc et Werpil, 38. + Dowie Dens of Yarrow, 56. + Drake, James Rodman, 98, 416, 417, 418, 429. + Dramatic Lyrics, 294. + Dramatic Poets, Specimens of English, 243. + Dramatis Personae, 294. + Draper, J. W., 555. + Drayton, Michael, 83, 94, 97, 98, 141, 324. + Dream Children, 244. + Dream Fugue, 532. + Dream Life, 545. + Dream of Fair Women, 289. + Dream of the Unknown, A, 260. + Dresser, The, 549. + Drew, Samuel, 310. + Drifting, 542. + Driving Home the Cows, 556. + Drum Taps, 551. + Drummond, Henry, 313. + Drummond, William, 94. + Dryden, John, 38, 76, 128, 143, 149, 155, 164, 168, 169, + 170, 172, 174, 175, 176-179, 180, 183, 184, 186, 190, + 192, 193, 200, 212, 348, 349, 358. + Du Bartas, Gillaume, 153, 158, 354. + Duche, Jacob, 597. + Duchess of Malfi, 134. + Duff, Alexander, 312. + Duffield, George, 604. + Duke of Lerma, 168. + Dunbar, William, 74. + Dunciad, The, 182, 183, 184. + Dunstan, Saint, 28. + Dunster, Henry, 594. + Durbin, John Price, 602. + Dutchman's Fireside, The, 416. + Duycinck, E. A., 318, 389, 407. + Duycinck, G. L., 318, 389, 407. + Dwight, John S., 437, 444. + Dwight, Sereno, 358. + Dwight, Theodore, 382, 383. + Dwight, Timothy, 382, 386, 387, 452, 604. + Dyer, John, 198, 201, 205. + Dying Swan, The, 289. + + Earle, John, 280. + Early Spring in Massachusetts, 458. + Eastward Hoe, 120. + Easy and Ready Way to Establish a Commonwealth, An, 154. + Ecce Homo, 313. + Ecclesiastical Characteristics, 596. + Ecclesiastical History of New England, 597. + Ecclesiastical Polity, 90, 91. + Echo, The, 383. + Echo Club, The, 540. + Eclipse of Faith, The, 312. + Ecole des Femmes, 169. + Edgar Huntley, 394, 396. + Edgeworth, Maria, 248. + Edinburgh Review, 223, 281, 284, 406. + Edith Linsey, 537. + Education of Nature, The, 516. + Edward II., 105. + Edward V. and Richard III., History of, 64. + Edward VI., Prayer Books of, 301, 302. + Edwards, Bela Bates, 601. + Edwards, Jonathan, 355-358, 386, 430, 440, 442. + Edwards, Jonathan, the Younger, 598. + Edwin Morris, 290. + Eggleston, Edward, 581. + Elaine, 290. + Eleanore, 289. + Elegy on Thyrza, 255. + Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady, 186. + Elegy written in a Country Churchyard, 198, 200. + Elevator, The, 393, 592. + Elgin Marbles, On Seeing the, 262. + Eliot, John, 337, 339, 594. + Elliott, Charles, 606. + Elliott, Charlotte, 304. + Elliott, Jane, 59. + Eloisa to Abelard, 186. + Elsie Venner, 494. + Emerson, Charles, 452. + Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 138, 241, 427, 434, 435, 439, 440, + 441, 442, 443, 444-450, 451, 452, 453-457, 458, 459, 460, + 461, 470, 474, 481, 483, 495, 502, 512, 517, 525, 549. + Emmons, Nathaniel, 598. + Empress of Morocco, 168. + Encouragements to a Lover, 149. + Endicott's Red Cross, 343, 467. + Endymion, 261, 263. + England's Greatest Poets, An Account of, 174. + England, History of, from the Accession of James II., 281, 283. + England's Helicon, 94. + England's Heroical Epistles, 97. + English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, 193. + English Note Book, 469. + English Poetry, History of, 195. + English Traits, 448, 456. + Enid, 292. + Ephemerae, 545. + Epipsychidion, 260. + Epilogue to Cato, 390. + Episcopacy, 596, 597, 603. + Episcopacy by Divine Right, 304. + Episcopal Church in the United States, Memoir of the, 597. + Epithalamion, 73, 74. + Erasmus, Desiderius, 61. + Errors of Hopkinsianism, 599. + Essay on Criticism, 174. + Essay on Dramatic Poesie, 168, 178. + Essay on Man, 182. + Essay on Poetry, 173. + Essay on Satire, 173. + Essay on Translated Verse, 174. + Essays and Reviews, 311. + Essays, Bacon's, 91, 92, 123. + Essays, Cowley's, 148. + Essays, Emerson's, 453. + Essays of Elia, 243. + Essex Gazette, 519. + Eton College, Ode on a Distant Prospect of, 200. + Eternal Goodness, The, 522. + Ethan Brand, 466. + Etherege, George, 169, 170, 171. + Euganean Hills, Written in the, 260. + Euphues and his England, 81. + Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit, 80, 81, 82, 84, 89. + Euphues's Censure to Philautus, 82. + Euripides, 100. + Europeans, The, 586. + Evangeline, 483, 484. + Evans, Mary Ann, 267. + Eve of St. Agnes, 263. + Evelyn Hope, 295. + Evening Chronicle, 267. + Evening Mirror, 527, 536, 537, 538. + Evening Post, 417, 513, 518. + Evening Wind, The, 515. + Evening, Ode to, 199. + Evening's Love, An, 169. + Everett, Edward, 428, 429, 489, 495, 560. + Evergreen, 59. + Every Man in his Humor, 121, 122. + Every Man out of his Humor, 121. + Evolution, Religious Aspects of, 605. + Examination of the Doctrine of + Future Retribution, An, 600. + Excelsior, 480. + Excursion, The, 228, 231, 232. + Excursions, Thoreau's, 458. + Exiles in Bermuda, Song of the, 161. + Eyes and Ears, 545. + + F. Smith, 537. + Faber, F. W., 304. + Faber, George Stanley, 312. + Fable for Critics, A, 451, 500, 503. + Fable of the Bees, 360. + Fables, Dryden's, 178. + Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar, 529. + Faerie Queene, 18, 51, 67, 70-73, 140, 179, 198, 263. + Fair and Happy Milkmaid, 93. + Fair Helen of Kirkconnell, 56. + Fairbairn, Patrick, 312, + Fairfax, Edward, 97. + Faithful Shepherdess, 123, 133. + Faits of Arms, 49. + Fall of Robespierre, 225. + Fall of the Bastile, 225, + Fall of the House of Usher, 532. + Falls of Princes, 43, 67. + Familiar Letters upon Important Subjects in Religion, 595. + Familists' Hymn, The, 343. + Family Expositor, 308. + Famous Victories of Henry V., 112. + Fanshawe, 465. + Farewell Address, 374. + Farquhar, George, 169, 392. + Fatima, 289. + Faust, 105, 454, 500, 540. + Faustus, Tragical History of Doctor, 105, 106, 118. + Fay, Theodore S., 525. + Federal Constitution, On the Expediency of Adopting the, 373. + Federalist, The, 374. + Feint Astrologue, Le, 169. + Felix Holt, 278. + Felton, Cornelius C., 476. + Ferdinand and Isabella, 475, 504. + Ferdinand Count Fathom, 209. + Ferguson, Robert, 216. + Festivals and Fasts, 599. + Fichte, Johann G., 234, 440, 444. + Fielding, Henry, 207, 208, 210, 212, 247, 274, 276, 410, 561. + Filostrato, 36. + Final Judgment, The, 356. + Finch, Francis M., 557. + Fingal, 195. + Finley, Samuel, 595. + Finney, Charles G., 601. + Fire of Driftwood, 481. + Fireside Travels, 475. + First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment + of Women, 300. + First Epistle to Davie, 220. + First Looking into Chapman's Homer, On, 97, 262. + Fisher, John, 64. + Fisk, Wilbur, 599. + Fitz-Adam's Story, 490. + Flavel, John, 306. + Fleece, The, 198. + Fletcher, Giles, 159. + Fletcher, John, 94, 102, 107, 110, 113, 123, 127, + 128-133, 135, 153, 171. + Fletcher, John (of Madeley), 310. + Fletcher, Phineas, 143. + Fleurs de Mal, 533. + Fliegende Blaetter, 563. + Flint, Timothy, 405. + Flood of Years, The, 517. + Flower and the Leaf, The, 42. + Folk Poetry, 54. + Fontaine Amoureuse, La, 36. + Footpath, The, 501. + Footsteps of Angels, 479. + Ford, John, 133, 135. + Foregone Conclusion, A, 588. + Foreign Review, The, 284. + Foreknowledge of God, The, 605. + Forest, The, 123. + Forest Hymn, The, 514. + Forsaken Bride, The, 56. + Fortescue, Sir John, 48. + Fortune of the Republic, 453, 454. + Foster, Stephen C., 542, 543. + Fountain, The, 229. + Fouque, Friedrich H. K., 284, 469. + Fourberies de Scapin, 169. + Fourier, J. P. J., 436. + Fourth Gospel, Authorship of the, 605. + Fox, Charles James, 366. + Fox, George, 307. + Fox, John, 179, 300, 148. + Fox and the Wolf, The, 38. + Fra Lippo Lippi, 296, + France and England in North America, 506. + France, Ode to, 225. + Frankenstein, 394. + Franklin, Benjamin, 243, 347, 358-363, 378, 380, 407, 408. + Franklin's Tale, The, 38. + Fraser's Magazine, 224, 273, 286. + Frederick the Great, History of, 283, 286. + Free Press, 519. + Freedom, Ode to, 498. + Freedom of the Will, 356, 605. + Freeman's Oath, The, 337. + French and Spanish Missions Among the Indian Tribes + of the United States, 607. + French Poets and Novelists, 586. + French Revolution, The, 286._ + French Revolution, The, as it Appeared to Enthusiasts + at its Commencement, 226. + Freneau, Philip, 399-392. + Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, 107. + Friends, 596. + Friendship, Cicero on, 49. + Froissart, Sir John, 35, 51. + Froude, Richard H., 311. + Fuller, Andrew, 310. + Fuller, Sarah Margaret, 435, 436, 437, 438, 442, 444, + 450, 451, 452, 456, 471, 485. + Fuller, Thomas, 33, 139, 140, 162, 243, 280, 304, 348, 358. + Furness, William H., 603. + + Gaboriau, Emile, 529. + Galahad, Sir, 23, 292. + Galaxy, The, 575. + Galileo, 151. + Gall, Franz J., 436. + Garden of Cyrus, 137. + Gardener's Daughter, The, 291. + Garlands, 59. + Garrick, David, 199, 203. + Garrison of Cape Anne, The, 352. + Garrison, William Lloyd, 424, 426, 507, 519, 520, 543. + Gascoigne, George, 79. + Gather ye Rosebuds while ye may, 148. + Gawayne, Sir, 28. + Gay, John, 185, 276. + Gebir, 242. + General Magazine and Historical Chronicle, The, 360. + Genius and Writings of Pope, Essay on, 200. + Gentlemen's Magazine, The, 526. + Geoffrey of Monmouth, 21, 22, 23. + Geographical Description of Louisiana, 484. + Geography and History of the Mississippi Valley, 405. + "George Eliot," 92, 247, 267, 277-280, 584, 591. + Georges, The Four, 270. + Georgia Spec, The, 393. + Georgics, 198. + Gertrude of Wyoming, 249. + Gerusalemme Liberata, 70, 73. + Gettysburg Address, Lincoln's, 560. + Ghost Ball at Congress Hall, The, 537. + Giaour, The, 250. + Gibbon, Edward, 212, 282. + Gifford, William, 193, 223. + Gillaume de Lorris, 36. + Girdle, On a, 149. + Girl Describes her Fawn, The, 161. + Give Me the Old, 538. + Glove, The, 295. + Go, Lovely Rose, 149. + Goddwyn, 197. + Godey's Lady's Book, 511, 524. + Godfrey, Thomas, 393. + Godwin, William, 394. + Goethe, Johann W., 105, 119, 196, 207, 225, 234, 246, + 272, 283, 284, 295, 455, 500, 540. + Goetz Von Berlichingen, 246. + Gold Bug, The, 529. + Golden Legend, 49, 485. + Golden Treasury of Songs and Lyrics, 123, 516. + Goldsmith, Oliver, 163, 172, 203, 210, 211, 212, 247, + 276, 386, 414, 423. + Gongora, 143 + Good, John Mason, 310. + Good News from Virginia, 333. + Good Schoolmaster, The, 92. + Good Thoughts in Bad Times, 139, 162. + Good Word for Winter, A, 502. + Goodrich, S. G., 402, 406, 465. + Goodwin, C. W., 311. + Goody Blake and Harry Gill, 228. + Gordobuc, 22, 68. + Gospel Mysteries Opened, 306. + Gospels for the Day, The, 24. + Gosson, Stephen, 81. + Governail of Princes, 42. + Gower, John, 38, 41, 44, 49. + Graham, James, 149, 150. + Graham, Sylvester, 436. + Graham's Monthly, 511, 524, 526, 529, 538. + Grammarian's Funeral, The, 294. + Grammont, Chevalier de, 171. + Grandfather's Chair, 352. + Grandissimes, The, 582. + Grant, Sir Robert, 304. + Grant, Ulysses S., 555. + Gray, Thomas, 163, 176, 194, 195, 197, 198, 199, 200, + 201, 205, 211, 244. + Great Expectations, 270. + Great Hoggarty Diamond, 273. + Great Question Debated, The, 192. + Greatest Thing in the World, The, 313. + Grecian Urn, Ode on a, 262. + Greek Literature, Brief Appraisal of the, 240. + Greek New Testament, 313. + Greeley, Horace, 437, 539, 555. + Green, Ashbel, 598. + Green Grow the Rashes O, 217. + Green, John Richard, 126. + Green River, 515. + Greene, Albert Gordon, 423. + Greene, Robert, 82, 89, 90, 103, 106, 107. + Greenfield, Hill, 386. + Grigg, Joseph, 303. + Griselda, 46. + Griswold, Rufus Wilmot, 389, 407, 538. + Groat's Worth of Wit, 90. + Grocyn, William, 61. + Grongar Hill, 198. + Guardian Angel, The, 494. + Guest, Lady Charlotte, 292. + Guinevere, 22, 23, 292, 293. + Guizot, F. P. G., 373. + Gulliver's Travels, 190, 192, 411. + Guyon, Life and Religious Experience of Madame, 603. + + Hackett, Horatio B., 605. + Hail Columbia, 388, 389, 416. + Hakluyt, Richard, 87. + Hale, Edward Everett, 474, 529, 572-574. + Hales, John, 136. + Haliburton, Thomas C., 484. + Hall, Joseph, 93, 177, 304. + Hall, Robert, 310. + Halleck, Fitz-Greene, 417, 418, 429, 536. + Halpine, Charles G., 559. + Hamilton, Alexander, 373, 374, 375, 377, 426, 595. + Hamlet, 115, 116, 118, 222, 236, 297, 481. + Hancock, John, 368. + Handlyng Sinne, 24. + Hannah Thurston, 541. + Huns Breitmann Ballads, 581. + Hans Pfaall, 529. + Harbinger, The, 436, 437. + Harbor for the Faithful and True Subjects, 300. + Harman, Henry Martyn, 606. + Harp of Tara, The, 256. + Harpers' Monthly, 511, 512, 574, 575. + Harris, Joel Chandler, 582. + Harris, John, 312. + Harrison, William, 97. + Hart, Joseph, 303. + Harte, Francis Bret, 569, 575-580. + Harvard Commemoration, Ode Recited at the, 501. + Harvey Gabriel, 68, 148. + Harvey, William, 136. + Hastings, Thomas, 604. + Hasty Pudding, The, 385, 386. + Haunted Palace, The, 531. + Haverhill Gazette, 519. + Hawes, Stephen, 52, 67. + Hawks, Francis L., 603. + Hawthorne, Julian, 468. + Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 74, 279, 321, 334, 343, 352, 384, + 394, 435, 437, 451, 454, 463-470, 476, 482, 483, 484, + 494, 495, 511, 525, 532, 541, 554, 559, 561, 562, 583, + 584, 586, 591. + Hay, John, 580. + Hazlitt, William, 257. + Heads of the People, 92. + Health, A, 423. + Heart of Midlothian, 248. + Heathen Chinee, 578. + Heavenly Beauty, On, 70, 74. + Heavenly Love, On, 70, 74. + Heber, Reginald, 304. + Hebrew Poetry, 309. + Hebrews, Commentary on the Epistle to the, 305. + Hedge, F. H., 437. + Heeren, Arnold H. L., 505. + Heidelberg Catechism, Lectures on the, 600. + Height of the Ridiculous, The, 487. + Heine, Heinrich, 151, 256. + Helen, To, 528. + Hellenics, 242. + Hemans, Mrs. Felicia D., 453, 544. + Henry Esmond, 247, 275. + Henry, Matthew, 307. + Henry of Huntingdon, 17. + Henry, Patrick, 366, 367, 368, 373. + Henry IV., 111, 112. + Henry V., 111. + Henry VI., 110, 111, 112. + Henry VIII., 77, 110, 111. + Her Eyes Are Wild, 230. + Herbert, George, 142, 143, 145, 146, 147. + Herbert, Lord, of Cherbury, 136, 299. + Hereford, Nicholas, 32. + Hero and Leander, 95, 96. + Heroes and Hero Worship, 280, 285, 453. + Herrick, Robert, 143, 146-148, 162. + Hervey, James, 309. + Hesperides, 146, 162. + Hiawatha, 391, 484. + Higginson, Thomas W., 409, 437, 451, 559. + Highland Girl, To a, 229. + Highlands, Ode on the Superstitions of the, 194. + Hillard, George S., 476, + Hind and Panther, The, 178. + Hirst, Henry B., 525. + His Level Best, 572. + Historia Britonum, 21. + History, Carlyle on, 284, 286. + Histrio-mastix: the Player's Scourge, 129. + Hobart, John Henry, 599. + Hobbes, Thomas, 136, 155, 163. + Hodge, Archibald Alexander, 604. + Hodge, Charles, 604. + Hoffman, Charles Fenno, 538. + Hoffman, Ernst T. W., 284. + Hohenlinden, 249. + Holinshed, Ralph, 90, 97. + Holland, Josiah G., 575. + Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 186, 293, 347, 423, 435, 436, 474, + 475, 486-495, 499, 512, 516, 525, 555, 559, 561, 562, 563. + Holy and Profane State, The, 139. + Holy Dying, 140, 141. + Holy Fair, 218. + Holy Ghost, The Temporal Mission of the, 313. + Holy Living, 140. + Holy Spirit, The, 305. + Holy Spirit, The Office and Work of the, 305. + Holy Tulzie, 218. + Holy Willie's Prayer, 218. + Home Journal, The, 537. + Home, Sweet Home, 422. + Homer, 70, 71, 72, 96, 108, 117, 119, 181, 183, 184, 244, + 262, 410, 484, 518. + Homer and the Homeridae, 240. + Homesick in Heaven, 490. + Homiletics, 601. + Hood, Thomas, 490, 562. + Hooker, Richard, 90, 142. + Hooker, Thomas, 346, 349, 351, 442. + Hoosier Schoolmaster, The, 581. + Hopkins, John, 302. + Hopkins, John Henry, 603. + Hopkins, Lemuel, 382, 383. + Hopkins, Mark, 604. + Hopkins, Samuel, 598. + Hopkinson, Francis, 388. + Hopkinson, Joseph, 388. + Horace, 60, 65, 147, 173, 174, 183, 199. + Horae Homileticae, 312. + Horae Mosaicae, 312. + Horae Paulinae, 309. + Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland, 161. + Horne, Thomas Hartwell, 312. + Horse-Shoe Robinson, 535. + "Hosea Biglow," 565. + Hous of Fame, 35, 36. + House of the Seven Gables, 464, 468. + How Sleep the Brave? 200. + How to Keep a True Lent, 147. + How we Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix, 290. + Howard, Henry, 65, 66, 67. + Howard, Robert, 168, 170. + Howe, John, 305. + Howe, Julia Ward, 556. + Howells, William D., 393, 583-585, 588-592. + Howson, John S., 312. + Hudibras, 165, 166, 381. + Hume, David, 282, 361. + Humorists of the Last Century, The English, 192, 276. + Humphrey Clinker, 209. + Humphreys, David, 382, 383. + Hundred Years of Methodism, A, 606. + Hunt, Leigh, 92, 258. + Hunter, William, 604. + Hunting of the Cheviot, 56. + Hurd, Richard, 195. + Hydriotaphia, 138, 162. + Hymn of the Moravian Nuns of Bethlehem, 477. + Hymn on Completion of Concord Monument, 457. + Hymns, American Writers of, 604. + Hymns, English Writers of, 303, 304. + Hymns, Village, 603. + Hypatia, 247, 313. + Hyperion, 261, 486. + + Ichabod, 521. + Idiot Boy, The, 228. + Idler, The, 188, 205. + Idyllia Heroica, 242. + Idylls of the King, 24, 290, 292. + If, Yes, and Perhaps, 572. + Il Penseroso, 152, 198, 199. + Iliad, The, 117, 184, 185, 385, 518. + Illustrious Providences, An Essay for the Recording of, 348. + Imaginary Conversations, 242. + Imitations from Horace, 380. + Immateriality and Immortality of the Soul, 370. + Impressions of Theophrastus Such, 92, 280. + In Memoriam, 291. + In the Tennessee Mountains, 582. + Incident of the French Camp, 295. + Independent, The, 545. + Independent Journal, 374. + Indian Air, Lines to an, 259, 540. + Indian Burying Ground, 390, 391. + Indian Emperor, 168. + Indian Student, 390, 391. + Indian Summer, 590. + Indian Tribes of the United States, History of the French + and Spanish Missions among the, 607. + Induction, The, 67. + Infant Baptism, 307. + Ingham Papers, The, 572. + Inklings of Adventure, 537. + Innocents Abroad, 569, 570. + Inquiries into Vulgar and Common Errors, 136. + Institutes of Natural and Revealed Religion, 309. + Intellectual System of the Universe, 305. + International Episode, An, 586, 587. + Interviews Memorable and Useful, 603. + Intimations of Immortality, Ode on the, 146, 228. + Introduction to the Study of the Holy Scriptures, 312, 606. + Iphigenie, 168. + Irish Melodies, 256. + Irish Sketch-Book, 273. + Irving, Washington, 75, 188, 366, 380, 400, 405, 406-415, + 416, 418, 419, 429, 467, 495, 504, 515, 561, 562, 571, 587. + Irving, William, 408, 409. + Isabel, 289. + Isabella, or The Pot of Basil, 263. + Isaiah, 196. + Isle of Psalms, 239. + Isles of Greece, 254. + Israfel, 528, 533. + Italian Journeys, 589. + Italian Note Book, 469. + Ivanhoe, 248. + + Jacobi, Friedrich H., 444. + Jacobus, Melanchthon W., 605. + James, Henry, Jr., 559, 582-591. + James, William, 585. + James I., 43, 44, 45. + Jane Talbot, 394. + Jay, John, 374, 375, 376. + Jefferson, Thomas, 369-373, 376, 378, 383, 390. + Jeffrey, Francis, 223, 281. + Jerrold, Douglas, 92. + Jerusalem Delivered, 97. + Jesuits in North America, The, 507 + Jesus, A History of, 603. + Jewel, John, 300. + Jews, History of the, 314, 603. + Jim, 579, 580. + Jim Bludso, 580. + Job, 196, 310. + Jock o' Hazeldean, 247. + John Barleycorn, 217. + John Brown's Body, 387, 556. + John Gilpin, 215. + John Godfrey's Fortune, 541. + John of Barneveld, Life of, 506. + John of Gaunt, 39. + "John Phoenix," 564. + John Underhill, 343, 344, 345, 346. + Johnson, Edward, 595. + Johnson, Samuel, 92, 137, 143, 145, 158, 175, 178, 181, + 188, 189, 193, 198, 202-205, 211, 224, 276, 366, 380. + Johnson, Samuel (of Conn.), 595. + Jolly Beggars, 53, 54, 218. + "Jonathan Oldstyle," 408. + Jonathan to John, 499. + Jonathan Wild, 208, 271. + Jonson, Ben, 67, 82, 85, 94, 98, 105, 109, 113, 117, + 120-123, 124, 127, 128, 143, 147, 151, 164, 165. + Joseph Andrews, 207. + "Josh Billings," 569. + Journal, Bradford's, 338, 342, 353. + Journal, Chalkley's, 596. + Journal, George Fox's, 307. + Journal of the Plague, 205. + Journal, Winthrop's, 338, 342, 343, 346, 353. + Journal, Woolman's, 396-398, 596. + Journey to the Land of Eden, A, 331. + Jowett, Benjamin, 311. + Judd, Sylvester, 503. + Julius Caesar, 60, 115, 116, 117, 172. + Jumping Frog, The, 569. + June, 515, 516. + Junius, Letters of, 366. + Junkin, George, 602. + Justice and Expediency, 520. + Justification, 594. + Juvenal, 60, 174, 177, 193. + + Kalevala, 485. + Kane, Elisha Kent, 462. + Kansas-Nebraska Bill, On the, 509. + Kant, Immanuel, 225, 234, 440, 444, 445. + Katie, 557. + Keach, Benjamin, 306. + Keats, John, 73, 97, 222, 255, 261-264, 481. + Keble, John, 145, 304, 311. + Kelly, Thomas, 303, 306. + Ken, Thomas, 303, 306. + Kenelm, 28. + Kenilworth, 79, 248. + Kennedy, John P., 335. + Kenrick, Thomas P., 606. + Kersey, John, 197. + Key, Francis Scott, 389. + Key into the Language of America, 339. + Kidd the Pirate, 410. + Killigrew, William, 169. + King and No King, A, 129, 132, 133. + King James' Bible, 33, 301. + King John, 111, 112. + King's Missive, The, 523. + King's Quhair, 43, 44, 45. + King's Tragedy, The, 45. + Kingsley, Charles, 237, 247, 267, 313. + "Kirwan," 603. + Kitto, John, 312. + Klopstock, Friedrich G., 234. + Knickerbocker's History of New York, 400, 407, 410, 411, 561. + Knickerbocker's Magazine, 410, 415, 465, 506, 524. + Knight of the Burning Pestle, 133. + Knight's Tale, 35, 38, 44, 46. + Knowledge of God, The, 600. + Knolles, Richard, 136. + Knox, John, 300, 312. + Koerner, Karl Theodor, 521, 558. + Krauth, Charles Porterfield, 607. + Kubla Khan, 235, 238, 530. + Kyd, Thomas, 103. + + La Bruyere, 92. + Lady of Shalott, 290. + Lady of the Aroostook, The, 588, 590. + Lady of the Lake, 247. + Lake Poets, The, 226, 227. + Lalla Rookh, 256. + L'Allegro, 152, 198. + Lamb, Charles, 73, 124, 171, 188, 222, 243, 244, 280, 396, 561. + Lament for Flodden, 59. + Lamia, 262. + Land and the Book, The, 602. + Land of Cokaygne, 26, 38. + Landlady, Count the Lawin, 219. + Landor, Walter Savage, 222, 229, 241-243, 448, 496. + Lanfranc, 13. + Langland, William, 29, 31, 35, 39, 41, 57. + Lanier, Sidney, 581. + Lara, 250. + Lardner, Nathaniel, 309. + La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West, 507. + Last Leaf, The, 423, 488. + Last of the Mohicans, 420, 422. + Last of the Valerii, 586. + Last Ride Together, 295. + Last Rose of Summer, 256. + Latest Form of Infidelity, 442. + Latimer, Hugh, 63. + Latter-day Pamphlets, 285. + Launcelot, Sir, and Queen Guinevere, 292. + Laus Deo, 521. + Law of Love and Love as a Law, The, 604. + Law, William, 309. + Lawes, Henry, 150. + Lay of the Ash, 38. + Lay of the Last Minstrel, 246. + Lays of Ancient Rome, 283. + Layamon, 22. + Leading Personages of Scripture History, 597. + Leander, On a Picture of, 262. + Lear, King, 21, 115, 116, 131, 172, 287. + Leather Stocking Tales, 391, 420, 421. + Leaves of Grass, 546, 548, 550. + Leaving Europe, Lines on, 537. + Leben Jesu, 277. + Lecture on the Mormons, 566. + Lectures on Shakespere, 236. + Lee, Nathaniel, 168. + Legend of Britanny, 496. + Legend of Good Women, 35, 289. + Legend of Sleepy Hollow, 410, 412. + Legends of New England, 520. + Legends of the Province House, 467. + Leiden des Jungen Werther, 207. + Leland, Charles G., 581. + Leland, John, 308. + Leonora, 246. + Le Sage, Alain Rene, 209. + Leslie, Charles, 307. + Lessing, Gotthold E., 240. + L'Estrange, Sir Roger, 148. + L'Etourdi, 169. + Letter from Italy, 249. + Letters and Social Aims, 453. + Letters from Italy, 141. + Letters from Under a Bridge, 537. + Letters of a Traveler, 518. + Letters of "Kirwan," 604. + Letters on Chivalry and Romance, 195. + Letters on Toleration, 155. + Letters, Thoreau's, 458. + Letters to Trinitarians and Calvinists, 598. + Lewes, George Henry, 277, 278. + Lewis, Matthew Gregory, 248, 394. + Lewis, Tayler, 605. + Liberator, The, 424, 507, 543. + Liberty of Prophesying, 155. + Lie, The, 88. + Ligeia, 532. + Light of Other Days, 256. + Light of Stars, 479. + Lilian, 289. + Lily, William, 61. + Linacre, Thomas, 61. + Lincoln, Abraham, 377, 559-561, 563. + Linn, William, 597. + Lippincott's Magazine, 575. + Literary Magazine and American Register, 394. + Literary Recreations and Miscellanies, 524. + Literati of New York, 525. + Little Breeches, 580. + Little Dorrit, 280. + Living Temple, The, 305. + Livingston, William, 380. + Livy, 60. + Locke, David R., 569. + Locke, John, 155, 163, 358, 359, 380, 445. + Lockhart, James Gibson, 223. + Locksley Hall, 291. + Locrine, 22, + Lodge, Thomas, 82, 89, 103. + London (Johnson's), 193. + London Lyckpenny, 43. + London Magazine, 239, 243. + Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 334, 343, 344, 391, 463, 465, + 474, 475, 476-486, 489, 495, 497, 499, 500, 512, 523, + 525, 527, 533, 540, 550, 574. + Longfellow, Samuel, 604. + Lord Clive, 283. + Lord of the Isles, 246. + Lord's Land, The, 606. + Lost Arts, The, 508. + Lost Cause, The, 555. + Lost Leader, The, 295, 522. + Lotus Eaters, 290. + Love, On, 70, 74. + Lovelace, Richard, 148. + Love's Labor Lost, 104, 113. + Love's Triumph, 123. + Lowell, James Russell, 264, 325, 355, 435, 438, 449, 451, + 453, 474, 482, 495-503, 512, 513, 516, 523, 525, 540, + 543, 555, 561, 562, 563, 574. + Lowth, Robert, 309. + Lucasta, To, on Going to the Wars, 148. + Luck of Barry Lyndon, 273. + Luck of Roaring Camp, 577. + Lucretius, 60, 98, 174. + Lucy, 229. + Lunatic Skate, The, 537. + Luria, 297. + Lutrin, 184. + Luve Ron, A, 25. + Lycidas, 69, 152, 153. + Lydgate, John, 43, 44, 45, 49, 67. + Lyly, John, 80, 81, 83, 90, 94, 103, 104, + Lyrical Ballads, 227, 232, 233. + Lyrics of a Day, 557. + Lyte, Henry Francis, 304. + Lyttleton, Lord George, 309. + + M---- from Abroad, To, 537. + Mabinogion, 292. + Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 171, 192, 202, 204, 280-283, 506. + Macbeth, 115, 116, 118, 134, 172. + McCabe, Lorenzo P., 605. + McClintock, John, 607. + McCosh, James, 605. + McCrie, Thomas, 312. + Macdonald, George, 162. + M'Fingal, 166, 381, 388, 407. + MacFlecknoe, 176. + Machault, Jean, 36. + McIlvaine, Charles P., 604. + McKnight, James, 310. + Macpherson, James, 195, 196, 244. + McTyeire, Holland N., 607. + Madeline, 289. + Madison, James, 374, 375, 390. + Madonna of the Future, The, 586. + Maeviad, 193, 223. + Magnalia Christi Americana, 140, 347-352, 354, 407. + Mahomet and his Successors, 414. + Maid's Tragedy, The, 129, 130. + Maine Woods, 458. + "Major Jack Downing," 564. + Malade Imaginaire, Le, 113, 122. + Malory, Sir Thomas, 24, 50, 292. + Mammon, 312. + Mamusse Wimneetupanatamwe up-Biblium God, 337. + Man All Immortal, 605. + Man of the Crowd, The, 532. + Man-of-War-Bird, 550. + Man Without a Country, The, 529, 571, 572. + Mandeville, Bernard de, 360. + Manfred, 251. + Manly Heart, The, 149. + Manning, Henry Edward, 313. + Mant, Richard, 304. + Manton, Thomas, 306. + Manufacturer, The, 519. + MS. Found in a Bottle, 535. + Map, Walter, 23. + Marble Faun, The, 464, 466, 468, 469. + Marco Bozzaris, 417. + Margaret, 289, 503. + Margaret Nicholson's Remains, 258. + Mariana, 289, 290. + Mariana in the South, 289. + Marie de France, 38, 39. + Marino, 143, 173. + "Mark Twain," 562, 569-571. + Mark Twain's Sketches, 570. + Marlowe, Christopher, 94, 95, 96, 97, 103, 104-106, 107, + 118, 133. + Marmion, 246, 391. + Marot, Clement, 68. + Marshal, Stephen, 304. + Marston, John, 177. + Martin Chuzzlewit, 269. + "Martin Marprelate," 89, 90, 126. + Martyn, Henry, 310. + Marvell, Andrew, 161, 177. + Mary in Heaven, To, 217. + Mary Unwin, To, 213. + Maryland, History of the Protestant Episcopal Church in, 603. + Maryland, My Maryland, 556. + Mason, John, 303. + Mason, John Mitchell, 599. + Mason, William, 195, 197. + Masque of the Gods, The, 539. + Masson, David, 161. + Master Humphrey's Clock, 269. + Mather, Cotton, 140, 334, 335, 336, 338, 340, 344, 347-352, + 354, 358, 407, 594, 596. + Mather, Increase, 348, 350, 594. + Mather, Richard, 594. + Mather, Samuel, 596. + Matthew of Westminster, 17. + Maud, 292. + Maud Muller, 522, 523. + Maundeville, Sir John, 46, 47. + Maurice, J. Frederick Denison, 237, 312 + May Day, 453. + May Queen, 290. + Mayhew, Jonathan, 597. + Maypole of Merrymount, 343. + Meade, William, 602. + Measure for Measure, 114, 289. + Medal, The, 176. + Medecin malgre lui, Le, 122. + Medical Student, The, 92. + Meditations, Hervey's, 309. + Meeting of the Waters, 256. + Melville, Life of, 312. + Memoirs, De Grammont's, 171, 172. + Memoranda of the Civil War, 551. + Memorial History of Boston, 523. + Memory, Ode to, 288. + Men and Women, 289, 294. + Men Naturally God's Enemies, 356. + Menaphon, 82. + Menaechmi, 113. + Mental Philosophy, 603. + Merchant of Venice, 114, 392. + Mercury, Philadelphia Weekly, 359. + Merry Mount, 504. + Merry Wives of Windsor, 95, 115, 122, 171. + Messiah, The Scriptural Testimony to the, 312. + Messinger, Robert H., 538. + Metamorphoses, 330. + Methodism, A Hundred Years of, 606. + Methodism, Cyclopaedia of, 606. + Methodism, History of, 603, 607. + Methodist Episcopal Church, History of the, 599, 603. + "Michael Angelo Titmarsh," 273. + Microcosmographie, 280. + Middlemarch, 278, 279. + Midsummer Night's Dream, 77, 98, 114, 118, 119. + Miggles, 578. + "Miles O'Reilly," 559. + Miley, John, 605. + Mill, John Stuart, 235, 285. + Mill on the Floss, 278, 279. + Miller, Samuel, 600. + Miller's Daughter, The, 290, 291. + Milman, Henry Hart, 312. + Milner, Joseph, 310. + Milton, John, 22, 69, 76, 90, 106, 118, 140, 141, 148, + 150-162, 163, 165, 178, 179, 180, 198, 199, 200, 201, + 205, 222, 227, 228, 240, 255, 259, 263, 264, 281, 306, + 324, 337, 340, 349, 358, 431, 439, 502. + Minister's Black Veil, The, 467. + Minister's Wooing, The, 544. + Minstrel, The, 195, 198. + Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, 246. + Mirabeau, H. G. R., 361. + Miracle Plays, 98, 99, 299. + Miracles, Notes on the, 312. + Mirrour for Magistrates, 67. + Misantrope, The, 169. + Miscellaneous Essays and Occasional Writings, Hopkinson's, 388. + Miscellanies, Carlyle's, 444. + Miser, The, 169. + Missionary Enterprise, The Moral Dignity of the, 601. + Missions the Chief End of the Christian Church, 312. + Mr. Sludge, the Medium, 294. + "Mrs. Partington," 564. + Mistress, The, 148. + Mitchell, Donald G., 544, 545. + Mocking Bird, The, 582. + Modern Instance, A, 589, 591. + Modern Learning, 388. + Modern Painters, 280. + Modest Proposal, 191, 410. + Modest Request, A, 489. + Moliere, Jean B. P., 113, 122, 164, 169, 172, 225. + Monastery, The, 80. + Money Diggers, The, 410. + Monk, The, 248, 394. + Monk's Tale, 38. + Montaigne, Michel E., 91. + Momcalm and Wolfe, 507. + Montemayor, Jorge de, 83. + Monterey, 538. + Montgomery, James, 303. + Monthly Nurse, The, 92. + Moore, Clement C., 538. + Moore, Frank, 555. + Moore, Thomas, 222, 256, 490. + Moral and Religious Essays, 604. + Moral Argument Against Calvinism, 430. + Moral Essays, 183, 380. + Moral Government of God, Lectures on the, 600. + Moral Plays, 99, 299. + Moral Science, 601. + More, Thomas, 61, 62, 63, 64, 136. + Morning Chronicle, 268, 408. + Morning of Christ's Nativity, On the, 152, 161, 199. + Morning Post, London, 223. + Morris, George P., 537. + Morris, William, 28. + Morte d' Arthur, 24, 50, 52, 75, 292, 514. + Morton's Hope, 504. + Mosses from an Old Manse, 463, 467. + Mother's Picture, On Receipt of My, 213. + Motley, John Lathrop, 474, 495, 504, 505. + Mount Vernon, 384. + Mountain Daisy, To a, 219. + Mouse, To a, 219. + Much Ado About Nothing, 104, 114, 115. + Muhlenberg, William A., 604. + Muiopotmos; or, the Fate of the Butterfly, 74. + Mulgrave, Earl of, 173. + Mueller, Wilhelm, 478. + Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts, 241. + Murder of Lovejoy, 474, 508. + Murders in the Rue Morgue, 529. + Murfree, Miss Mary Noailles, 582. + Murray, Nicholas, 603. + Music Grinders, 488. + Musset, Alfred de, 592. + My Aunt, 488. + My Captain, 551. + My Double and How He Undid Me, 573. + My Garden Acquaintance, 502. + My Heart's in the Highlands, 219. + My Last Duchess, 294. + My Life is Like the Summer Rose, 422. + My Old Kentucky Home, 542. + My Search for the Captain, 559. + My Study Windows, 502. + My Wife and I, 544. + Myers, F. D., 161. + Mysteries of Udolpho, 248, 394. + Mystery of Gilgal, 580. + Mystery of Marie Roget, The, 529. + + Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, 533. + Nash, Thomas, 61, 89, 90. + Nathaniel Hawthorne and his Wife, 468. + National Gazette, 390. + National Literature, Remarks on, 432, 444. + Natural Law in the Spiritual World, 313. + Natural Theology, 309. + Nature, 434, 445, 448, 453. + Nature, The Religion of, 307. + Naval History of the United States, 418. + Neal, Daniel, 308. + Neale, John Mason, 304. + Nearer Home, 542. + Necessity of Atheism, 257. + Necessity of the Atonement, 598. + Nelly was a Lady, 542. + Nelson, Life of, 238. + Nero, 168. + Nettleton, Asahel, 603. + New England Courant, 359. + New England, History of, 342, 596, 597. + New England, The Wonder Working Providence of Sion's + Saviour in, 595. + New England Tragedies, 343. + New England Two Centuries Ago, 499, 502. + New England Weekly Review, 519. + New Haven Gazette, 383. + New Mirror, 524. + New Monthly, 273. + New System of English Grammar, A, 564. + New Testament, Commentary on the, 605. + New Testament, Greek, 313. + New Testament Lexicon, 602. + New Testament Literature, 602. + New Testament, Notes on the, 310. + New World, 512. + Newcomer, Matthew, 304. + Newcomes, The, 275. + Newell, Robert H., 569. + Newman, John H., 304, 311. + Newton, Isaac, 163. + Newton, John, 212, 215. + New York Ledger, The, 545. + New York Review and Athenaeum, 513. + New York Sun, 436. + New York Tribune, 436, 450, 539. + Nibelungen Lied, 194, 284. + Nicholas Nickleby, 269, 273. + Night, Hymn to the, 479. + Nightingale, Ode to a, 263. + Noble Mind, The, 123. + Noble Numbers, 147. + Noctes Ambrosianae, 224. + Nonne Preste's Tale, 28, 38. + North American Review, 428, 429, 465, 476, 501, 513, 514. + North, Sir Thomas, 90. + North Star, Hymn to the, 514. + Northern Farmer, 293. + Norton, Andrews, 442. + Norton, John, 346. + Notes on the Scriptures, 602. + Nothing to Wear, 538. + Nott, Eliphalet, 599. + Nouvelle Heloise, 207. + "Novalis," 284. + Novels by Eminent Hands, 578. + Nut Brown Maid, 55. + Nux Postcoenatica, 489. + Nymphidia; or, Court of Faery, 98. + + O Fairest of the Rural Maids, 515. + O Susanna, 542. + O'Brien, Fitz James, 559. + Observations on the Faerie Queene, 198. + Occleve, Thomas, 42, 45. + Occultation of Orion, 481, 497. + O'Conor's Child, 391. + Odenheimer, William H., 606. + Odoric, 47. + Odyssey, The, 518. + Oenone, 290. + Old and New Testament, Connection of the, 307. + Old and New Testaments, Commentary on the, 310. + Old Benchers of the Inner Temple, 244. + Old China, 244. + Old Churches, Ministers, and Families of Virginia, 602. + Old Clock on the Stairs, 481. + Old Creole Days, 582. + Old Curiosity Shop, 269. + Old Folks at Home, 542. + Old Grimes, 423. + Old Ironsides, 487. + Old Magazine, 267. + Old Oaken Bucket, 422. + Old Pennsylvania Farmer, The, 539. + Old Regime in Canada, The, 507. + Old Sergeant, 556. + Old Testament, Commentary on the, 306. + Old Testament, Historical Books of the, 605. + Oldmixon, John, 332. + Olin, Stephen, 602. + Oliver Goldsmith, Life of, 414. + Oliver Twist, 269, 280. + Olivers, Thomas, 303. + Olney Hymns, 212. + Onderdonk, Henry U., 603. + One Hoss Shay, 490, 562. + One in Paradise, To, 531. + Order of Chivalry, 49. + Ordericus Vitalis, 17. + Oregon Trail, 506. + Origin and Compilation of the Prayer Book, 606. + Orlando Furioso, 70. + Ormond, 394, 395. + Ormulum, The, 24. + "Orpheus C. Kerr," 569. + Orphic Sayings, 450. + Osgood, Kate Putnam, 556. + Osgood, Mrs. Frances S., 525. + Ossian, Poems of, 195, 196, 198, 546. + Othello, 116, 173. + Otis, James, 366, 367, 368, 369. + Otway, Thomas, 169, 259. + Our Ladies of Sorrow, 532. + Our Master, 522. + Our Mutual Friend, 268, 270. + Our Old Home, 469. + Our Saviour's Sermon on the Mount, 595. + Out of the Question, 590. + Outcasts of Poker Flat, 578, 579. + Outlines of Theology, 604. + Outre Mer, 477. + Over the Water to Charlie, 220. + Overbury, Sir Thomas, 93. + Overland Monthly, The, 577. + Over-soul, The, 450. + Ovid, 60, 330. + Owen, John, 305. + Owl and the Nightingale, The, 25. + + Paine, Robert Treat, Jr., 389. + Paine, Thomas, 377-380, 596. + Palace of Art, 290. + Palace of Pleasure, 89. + Paley, William, 309. + Palgrave, Francis Turner, 516. + Palmer, Ray, 604. + Pamela, 205, 206, 207. + Pandosto, 89. + Panorama, The, 521. + Pap with a Hatchet, 90. + Paper, Franklin's, 362. + Parables, Notes on the, 312. + Paracelsus, 294. + Paradise Lost, 157-159, 160, 179, 180, 188, 222, 259, + 281, 325, 385. + Paradise Regained, 159, 161. + Parasina, 250. + Paris Sketch-Book, 273. + Park, Edwards A., 604. + Parker, Theodore, 440, 441, 443, 444, 452. + Parkman, Francis, 475, 504, 505, 506, 507. + Parlament of Foules, 35, 36, 42. + Parlor Car, The, 592. + Parsons, Robert, 300. + Parson's Wedding, 169. + Partisan, The, 536. + Passetyme of Pleasure, 52, 67. + Passing of Arthur, 292, 293. + Passion-Play, 99. + Passionate Pilgrim, 94, 586. + Passionate Shepherd to his Love, The, 95. + Past and Present, 285. + Pastoral Theology, 601. + Pastorals, Pope's, 186. + Pastor's Sketches, A, 601. + Pathfinder, The, 420. + Patience, 28, 121. + Patrick, Symon, 306. + Pattison, Mark, 311. + Paul, Life and Epistles of, 312. + Paul, Saint, Observations on the Conversion and + Apostleship of, 309. + Paulding, James K., 405, 409, 415, 416, 525. + Payne, John Howard, 422. + Paynter, William, 89. + Payson, Edward, 303. + Peacock, Reginald, 47. + Pearl of Orr's Island, The, 544. + Pearson, John, 305. + Peele, George, 103, 106, 107. + Pencillings by the Way, 536. + Pendennis, 275. + Penn, William, 307. + Pennsylvania Gazette, The, 362. + Pension Beaurepas, The, 587. + Pepys, Samuel, 165, 171, 173, 352. + Percival, J. G.,544. + Percy, George, 325, 335. + Percy, Thomas, 59, 244. + Peregrine Pickle, 209. + Pericles, 110. + Pericles and Aspasia, 242. + Periodical Literature, 187, 188. + Perle, The, 28. + Perronet, Edward, 303. + Persius, 174. + Pestalozzi, J. H., 436. + Pet Lamb, The, 229. + Peter Bell, 228. + "Peter Parley," 402. + Petrarch, 34, 65, 66. + "Petroleum V. Nasby," 569. + Phedre, 168. + Phelps, Austin, 607. + Phenomena Quaedam Apocalyptica, 353. + Philaster, 129, 131. + Philips, Ambrose, 193. + Phillips, Wendell, 474, 507, 508, 520, 543. + Philosophic Solitude, 380. + Philosophy of Composition, 528. + Philostratus, 123. + Phoenixiana, 564. + Phyllyp Sparowe, 54. + Piatt, John James, 556, 581, 589. + Pickwick Papers, 268, 272, 280. + Pictures of Memory, 542. + Pied Piper of Hamelin, 295. + Pierpont, John, 604. + Piers Penniless's Supplication to the Devil, 90. + Piers Plowman, Vision of, 28, 29-31. + Piers the Plowman's Crede, 31. + Pilgrimage, The, 88. + Pilgrim's Progress, 29, 179. + Pilot, The, 421. + Pindar, 176, 485. + Pink and White Tyranny, 544. + Pinkney, Edward Coate, 423. + Pinner of Wakefield, 107. + Pioneer, The, 495. + Pioneers of France in the New World, 507. + Pioneers, The, 405, 420. + Pippa Passes, 297. + Pitt, William, 366. + Plain Dealer, 169. + Plain Language from Truthful James, 578. + Plan for Saving One Hundred Thousand Pounds, 362. + Plantation of Virginia, A Discourse of the, 325. + Planting of the Apple Tree, The, 517. + Plato, 60, 62, 64, 447, 455. + Plautus, 113. + Pleasures of Hope, 249. + Pleasures of Imagination, 194. + Plowman's Tale, 31. + Plutarch's Lives, 90, 117. + Plymouth Plantation, History of, 342. + Poe, Edgar A., 259, 394, 416, 423, 452, 465, 466, 484, + 495, 511, 515, 524, 526-535, 536, 542, 554, 559, 573. + Poems chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, 215. + Poems chiefly Lyrical, 288. + Poems, Emerson's, 453. + Poems of the Orient, 539. + Poems of Two Friends, 589. + Poet at the Breakfast Table, The, 493. + Poetaster, The, 122. + Poetic Principle, The, 530. + Poetical Rhapsody, 94. + Poetry: A Metrical Essay, 488. + Poet's Hope, A, 452. + Poets, Lives of the, 192, 204, 205. + Poets of America, 389, 407. + Polite Conversation, 192. + Political Green House, The, 383. + Pollard, E. A., 555. + Polyolbion, 97, 141, 324. + Pons Maximus, 541. + Poole, Matthew, 306. + Poor Relations, 244. + Poor Richard's Almanac, 362, 363. + Pope, Alexander, 96, 149, 166, 173, 174, 175, 177, 180, + 181, 182, 183-187, 190, 192, 198, 200, 205, 211, 225, + 240, 249, 380, 385, 489, 490, 502. + Pope, The Supremacy of the, 606. + Popular Tales, 248. + Porter, Ebenezer, 599. + Portrait, A, 229. + Portraits of Places, 588. + Positivism, Christianity and, 605. + Powell, Baden, 311. + Practical View of Christianity, A, 311. + Praed, Winthrop M., 418. + Prairie, The, 420. + Prairie Belle, The, 581. + Prayer Book, Origin and Compilation of, 606. + Prayer Book, The, 63, 154, 301, 302. + Prayer in Prospect of Death, 218. + Prayer under the Pressure of Violent Anguish, 218. + Preaching and Hearing, Aids to, 601. + Preaching, The Theory of, 607. + Predictions of Isaac Bickerstaff, 191. + Prelude, The, 228, 231, 232. + Prentice, George D., 519, 564. + Prescott, William H., 475, 504, 506, 512, 554. + Present Crisis, The, 498. + Pricke of Conscience, 24. + Pride and Prejudice, 248. + Pride of the Village, The, 413. + Prideaux, Humphrey, 307. + Priestley, Joseph, 309. + Prince Deukalion, 539. + Prince of Parthia, 393. + Princely Pleasures at the Court of Kenilworth, 79. + Princess, The, 291, 292. + Principal Navigations, Voyages, and Discoveries made + by the English Nation, 87. + Prior, Matthew, 181. + Prisoner of Chillon, 250. + Private Thoughts upon Religion, 306. + Problem, The, 457. + Professor at the Breakfast Table, The, 493. + Progress of Poesy, 176, 201. + Progress to the Mines, A, 331. + Prologue, The, 490. + Prometheus Unbound, 258, 259. + Prophecy of Samuel Sewall, 353. + Prophet, The, 539. + Prose Writers of America, 407. + Prothalamion, 70, 73, 74. + Proud Maisie is in the Wood, 59, 247. + Prymer, The, 301. + Prynne, William, 128. + Psalm of Life, 479, 480. + Psalms, Annotations on the, 305. + Psalms, Sternhold and Hopkins's Translation of the, 300, 303. + Psalms, The Book of, in English Verse, 602. + Psalms and Hymns, 302, 402. + Psalms in English Verse, 602. + Psalter, The, 24. + Psalter of Tate and Brady, The, 303. + Pseudodoxia Epidemica, 136. + Public Debates, 600. + Public Spirit of the Whigs, 180, 224. + Pulci, Luigi, 244. + Punch, 273, 563, 566. + Puritans, History of the, 308. + Purloined Letter, The, 529. + Purple Island, The, 143. + Purvey, Richard, 32. + Pusey, Edward B., 311. + Putnam's Monthly, 475, 575. + Puttenham, George, 88. + Pyrrha, Ode to, 199. + + Quaker Widow, The, 539. + Quakers, 307, 596. + Quarles, Francis John, 143, 146, 354. + Quarterly Observer, The, 601. + Quarterly Review, London, 223. + Queen Mab, 258. + Queen Mary, 293. + Quincy, Josiah, 366, 367, 368, 369. + Quincuncial Lozenge or Network Plantations of the Ancients, 137. + + Rabelais, Francois, 209, 563. + Racine, Jean B., 102, 164, 168, 169, 225. + Radcliffe, Anne, 248, 394. + Rag Man and Rag Woman, The, 573. + Rainolds, John, 301. + Raleigh, Sir Walter, 69, 72, 78, 86-89, 95, 109, 111, 324. + Rambler, The, 188, 205. + Ramsay, Allan, 59, 216. + Randall, James R., 556. + Randolph, John, 371. + Rape of Lucrece, 95, 109. + Rape of the Lock, 184, 185, 193, 199, 380. + Raphall, Morris J., 603. + Rasselas, 204. + Raven, The, 528, 529, 531. + Read, Thomas Buchanan, 541, 542. + Reade, Charles, 267, 565. + Reaper, The, 229. + Reaper and the Flowers, The, 479. + Rebellion Record, 555. + Recluse, The, 231. + Recollections, Flint's, 405. + Recollections of a Lifetime, 402, 406. + Recollections of the Arabian Nights, 288. + Red Death, The, 532. + Red Rover, 421. + Reflections on the Revolution in France, 224. + Reformation in Scotland, 300. + Reformation, The Conservative, 607. + Register, The, 592. + Rehearsal, The, 168, 176, 204. + Relapse, The, 169. + Religio Laici, 177. + Religio Medici, 138, 162, 341. + Religion Delineated, The True, 597. + Religion in America, A View of, 603. + Religion of Protestants, The, 305. + Religion of the Present and the Future, The, 601. + Religione Gentilium, De, 299. + Religions, The Ten Great, 606. + Religious Affections, Treatise Concerning, 357. + Religious Aspects of Evolution, 605. + Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, 59, 195, 244. + Reliquiae Wottonianae, 141. + Remains, Brainard's, 520. + Representative Men, 447, 453, 456. + Repressor of Overmuch Blaming of the Clergy, The, 48. + Republic, Plato's, 64. + Resignation, 481. + Retreat, The, 146. + Retribution, Future, 600. + Revelation, The System of Doctrine Contained in Divine, 598. + Reverie of Poor Susan, 229. + Reveries of a Bachelor, 544. + Review, The (De Foe's), 181. + Revivals of Religion, Lectures on, 599, 601. + Revolt of Islam, 258. + Revolt of the Tartars, 241. + Reynard the Fox, 38, 49. + Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 203. + Rhetoric, Lectures on, 309. + Rhoecus, 496. + Rhymes of Travel, 539. + Richard II., 105, 112. + Richard III., 111, 112. + Richardson, C. F., 318. + Richardson, Samuel, 205-207, 208, 212, 276. + Richmond, Legh, 310. + Richter, Jean Paul F., 284. + Ridgaway, Henry B., 606. + Riding to Vote, 556. + Rights of Man, 377. + Rights of the British Colonies, 369. + Rime of Sir Thopas, 38. + Ring and the Book, The, 296. + Rip Van Winkle, 410. + Rip Van Winkle, M.D., 489. + Ripley, George, 436, 443, 444, 452, 513. + Rise and Fall of the Confederate States of America, 555. + Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America, 555. + Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul, 308. + Rise of the Dutch Republic, 505. + Rival, The, 172. + Rival Queens, 168. + Roast Pig, 244. + Rob of the Bowl, 535. + Rob Roy, 248. + Robert of Gloucester, 17. + Robertson, Frederick William, 236, 312. + Robin Hood, A Lytell Geste of, 59. + Robinson Crusoe, 179, 181, 190, 205. + Robinson, Edward, 602. + Robinson, Henry Crabb, 241. + Rochefoucauld, Francois La, 183. + Rochester, John Wilmot, 175. + Rock of the Church, The, 300. + Roderick Hudson, 586. + Roderick Random, 209. + Rogers, Henry, 312. + Rokeby, 246. + Rolliad, 383. + Roman Catholicism, 606. + Roman de la Rose, 31, 36. + Roman de Rou, 18, 22. + Romaunt of the Rose, 35, 52, 71. + Romeo and Juliet, 95, 115, 116. + Romola, 247, 278. + Rosalynde: Euphues's Golden Legacy, 82, 89. + Roscommon, Earl of, 173. + Rosetti, D. G., 45, 547. + Roughing It, 569, 570. + Roundheads, The, 170. + Rouse, Francis, 303. + Rousseau, Jean J., 194, 206, 214. + Rowley, Thomas, 197, 198. + Royal Poet, A, 75. + Royden, Matthew, 85. + Ruins of Time, 85. + Rule a Wife and Have a Wife, 129. + Rules of Health, 362. + Rupp, J. Daniel, 603. + Ruskin, John, 280, 485. + Russell, W. Clark, 421. + Ruth, 229. + Rutherford, Samuel, 305. + Rymer, Thomas, 173. + + Sackville, Charles, 175 + Sackville, Thomas, 22, 67, 68. + Sacred Chronology, 304. + Sad Shepherd, The, 123. + St. Irvyne the Rosicrucian, 396. + Saint John, Henry, 182. + St. Leon, 394. + St. Simon, Louis de R., 436. + Sainte-Beuve, C. A., 363. + Saints, Lives of the, 309. + Saints' Anchor Hold, The, 595. + Saints' Everlasting Rest, The, 305. + Salis, Johann G. von, 478. + Salmagundi, 188, 408, 415, 517. + Salmasius, Claudius, 155. + Samson Agonistes, 76, 106, 159, 160, 161. + Sanazzaro, Jacopo, 83. + Sanders, Nicholas, 300. + Sanderson, Robert, 142. + Sandys, George, 299, 330, 335. + San Francisco, 575. + Sartor Resartus, 286, 287, 410, 453. + Satires, Pope's, 183. + Scarlet Letter, The, 343, 466, 467, 468. + Scenes of Clerical Life, 278. + Schaff, Philip, 606. + Schelling, Friedrich W. J., 234, 444, 456, 460. + Schiller, Johann C. P., 225, 234, 283. + School Days, 519. + School for Scandal, 172. + School of Abuse, 81. + Schoolcraft, Henry Rowe, 485. + Schoolmaster, 62, 68. + Schoolmistress, 198. + Schopenhauer, Arthur, 483. + Science of English Verse, 581. + Scornful Lady, The, 129. + Scotch Drink, 218. + Scots wha hae wi' Wallace bled, 220. + Scott, Sir Walter, 59, 79, 80, 189, 222, 223, 229, 231, + 244-249, 250, 252, 274, 277, 283, 284, 290, 391, 392, + 406, 411, 412, 415, 453. + Scott, Thomas, 310. + Scribner's Monthly, 575. + Scripture History, Leading Personages of, 597. + Scripture Poems, 536. + Scriptures, Commentary on the, 307. + Scriptures, Notes on the, 602. + Scriptures, with Commentary, Version of the, 606. + Seabury, Samuel, 597. + Sears, Edmund H., 604. + Seaside and the Fireside, The, 479, 481. + Seasonable Thoughts, 595. + Seasons, The, 194, 201. + Seaweed, 481, 483. + Sedley, Charles, 175. + Seeing a Harp in the shape of a Needle Case, On, 231. + Seeley, John Robert, 313. + Sejanus, 117. + Selden, John, 136. + Selling of Joseph, The, 353. + Seneca, 60, 100. + Seneca Lake, 544. + Sense and Sensibility, 247. + Sepmaine, Le, 153. + September Gale, 488. + Serious Call to a Holy Life, 309. + Sermon on the Mount, 595. + Session of the Poets, 500. + Settle, Elkanah, 168. + Seven Churches of Asia, The, 606. + Sewall, Jonathan M., 390. + Sewall, Samuel, 352, 353. + Sewel, William, 307. + Shadwell, Thomas, 169, 172, 176, 177, 183. + Shaftesbury, Earl of, 182, 360. + Shakespere Ode, 429. + Shakspere, 18, 21, 22, 28, 40, 76-124, 127, 128, 129, + 130, 132, 133, 150, 152, 158, 167, 168, 171, 172, 173, + 185, 186, 199, 200, 204, 222, 235, 248, 263, 264, 277, + 284, 288, 289, 295, 322, 324, 455, 469, 502, 561, 562. + Shaw, Henry W., 569. + She Stoops to Conquer, 172. + She Walks in Beauty, 255. + She Would if She Could, 169. + Shea, John Gilmary, 607. + Shedd, William G. T., 606. + Shelley, Mrs. Mary W., 394. + Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 222, 252, 253, 255, 256-261, 264, + 396, 528, 540. + Shenstone, William, 198, 205. + Shepard, Thomas, 346. + Shepheard's Calendar, 68, 69, 76. + Shepherd of King Admetus, 496. + Shepherd's Pipe, 94. + Sheridan, Richard H., 172, 211, 366. + Sheridan's Ride, 542. + Sherman, William T., 555. + Shillaber, Benjamin P., 564. + Shirley, James, 135. + Short and Easy Method with the Deists, 307. + Shorter Catechism, Lectures on the, 598. + Shortest Way with the Dissenters, 181, 410. + Sidney, Sir Philip, 51, 55, 68, 69, 72, 78, 79, 82-86, + 94, 109, 123, 140. + Siege of Corinth, 250. + Siege of Rhodes, The, 167. + Signs of the Times, 284. + Sigourney, Lydia Huntley, 231, 453, 544, 604. + Silas Lapham, 590. + Silas Marner, 278, 279. + Silent Woman, The, 111, 122, 124. + Simeon, Charles, 312. + Simeon of Durham, 17. + Simms, William Gilmore, 535, 536. + Simon Lee, 228. + Simple Cobbler of Agawam, 335. + Simplicity, Ode to, 199. + Simpson, Matthew, 606, 607. + Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, 357. + Sir Charles Grandison, 206, 281. + Sir Martin Mar-all, 169. + Sir Patrick Spence, 59. + Sir Troilus of Troy, 20. + Six Days of Creation, 605. + Skeleton in Armor, The, 480. + Skeleton in the Closet, The, 573. + Skelton, John, 52, 53, 54, 67. + Sketch Book, 75, 407, 409, 410, 412. + Sketches by Boz, 267. + Skinner, Thomas H., 601. + Skipper Ireson's Ride, 522. + Skylark, To a, 259. + Shivery, Poems on, 482. + Sleeper, The, 532. + Sleeping Beauty, 288. + Sleeping Car, The, 393. + Smectymnus, 304. + Smith, Captain John, 323, 325, 329, 330, 335, 342. + Smith, Elihu, 382. + Smith, Henry B., 606. + Smith, John Pye, 312. + Smith, Miles, 301. + Smith, Samuel F., 604. + Smith, Samuel Stanhope, 598. + Smith, Seba, 564. + Smith, Sydney, 223, 406, 564. + Smith, William, 597. + Smollett, Tobias, 208, 209, 212, 276, 393. + Snob, The, 272. + Snow Bound, 522. + Social Meeting, Ode for a, 489. + Society and Solitude, 453. + Socrates, 187, 441, 456. + Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister, 295. + Solomon's Song Translated and Explained, 600. + Somers, Sir George, 87. + Song of the Chattahoochie, 582. + Song for a Temperance Dinner, 489. + Sonnets of Shakspere, 109. + Sonnets of Wordsworth, 228. + Sordello, 294. + Sorrows of Werther, 196. + South Carolinian, The, 557. + South, Robert, 163, 306. + Southern Literary Messenger, 524, 526. + Southern Passages and Pictures, 536. + Southey, Robert, 222, 225, 226, 234, 238, 241, 250, 387. + Spanish Curate, The, 129. + Spanish Friar, The, 169. + Sparkling and Bright, 538. + Sparks, Jared, 374. + Specimen Days, 551. + Specimens of Foreign Standard Literature, 444. + Spectator, The, 181, 187, 188, 266, 353, 359, 361, 380, 408. + Speculum Meditantis, 41. + Speke, Parrot, 54. + Spelling Book, Webster's, 402. + Spencer, Ichabod S., 601. + Spenser, Edmund, 18, 51, 67, 68-75, 76, 77, 78, 80, 83, + 85, 88, 94, 109, 140, 153, 198, 200, 201, 263, 501. + Sphinx, The, 491. + Spinoza, Benedict, 233. + Spirit of Nature, Hymn to the, 259. + Spotiswood, John, 299. + Sprague, Charles, 429. + Sprague, William B., 602. + Spring, 537. + Spring, Gardiner, 600. + Spurgeon, Charles Haddon, 313. + Spurston, William, 304. + Spurzheim, Kaspar, 436. + Spy, The, 420. + Squibob Papers, 564. + Stackhouse, Thomas, 308. + Stage, A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness + of the English, 172. + Stamp Act, Sermon on the Repeal of the, 597. + Stanley, Arthur Penrhyn, 237, 313. + Star Papers, 545. + Star Spangled Banner, 389, 416. + State of Innocence, 180. + Statius, 60. + Stedman, E. C., 318, 574. + Steele, Anne, 303. + Steele, Richard, 181, 187, 276. + Stennett, Joseph, 303. + Stephens, Alexander H., 555. + Sterne, Lawrence, 137, 182, 188, 209-211, 212, 276, 284, + 411, 561. + Sternhold and Hopkins Psalter, 300, 303, 337. + Sternhold, Thomas, 302. + Stevens, Abel, 603. + Stiles, Ezra, 597. + Still Hour, The, 607. + Stillingfleet, Edward, 163, 306. + Stith, William, 332. + Stoddard, Richard H., 538, 574. + Stoddard, Solomon, 595. + Story of Kennett, 541. + Story of Thebes, 43. + Stow, John, 97. + Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 543, 544, 545. + Strachey, William, 323. + Strafford, 296. + Strauss, David F., 277. + Strayed Reveller, The, 546. + Strong, James, 607. + Strong, Nathan, 596. + Stuart, Moses, 441, 601. + Style, De Quincey on, 240. + Suburban Sketches, 589. + Suckling, John, 148, 149, 500. + Suetonius, 117. + Suffering Children of God, Discourses to the, 601. + Summerfield, John, 599. + Summers, Thomas O., 605. + Sumner, Charles, 474, 476, 482, 500, 507, 508, 509, 520, 543. + Supernaturalism of New England, 524. + Supremacy of the Pope, The, 606. + Survey of London, 97. + Swallow Barn, 535. + Swift, Jonathan, 88, 180, 182, 183, 189-192, 224, 274, + 276, 277, 287, 410, 411, 533, 561, 573. + Swinburne, Charles A., 24, 238, 547. + Swinton, William, 555. + Swithin, Saint, 28. + Sybaris and Other Homes, 572. + Sylvester, Joshua, 153, 158, 354. + Synopsis, Poole's, 306. + + Table Talk, 141, 235. + Tacitus, 60, 117. + Taine, H. A., 209. + Tale of a Tub, 190, 192, 287. + Tales of a Traveler, 410. + Tales of a Wayside Inn, 523. + Tales of the Glauber Spa, 517. + Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, 532. + Tales of the Hall, 232. + Tales of Wonder, 248. + Talisman, The, 248, 517. + Talleyrand, C. M., 373. + Tam O'Shanter, 216, 218. + Tamburlaine, 104, 105. + Tamerlane, 526. + Taming of the Shrew, 110, 113, 115. + Tanglewood Tales, 469. + Tappan, William B., 604. + Task, The, 214, 522. + Tasso, Torquato, 70, 73, 97, 244. + Tate and Brady, Psalter of, 303. + Tate, Nahum, 172, 303. + Tattler, The, 187, 266. + Taxation No Tyranny, 224. + Taylor, Bayard, 538-541. + Taylor, Jeremy, 140, 141, 155, 179, 304, 349. + Taylor, Nathaniel W., 600. + Taylor, William M., 606. + Tea-Table Miscellany, 59. + Telling the Bees, 522. + Temora, 195. + Temperance, Lectures on, 599. + Temperance, Sermons on, 601. + Tempest, The, 87, 114, 119, 172, 323. + Temple, Frederick, 311. + Temple, Sir William, 179, 189. + Temple, The, 145. + Temporal Mission of the Holy Ghost, 313. + Ten Commandments, The, 24. + Ten Great Religions of the World, The, 606. + Ten Times One is Ten, 572. + Tennent, Gilbert, 595. + Tennent, William, 281, 595. + Tennessee's Partner, 578, 579. + Tennyson, Alfred, 13, 21, 23, 24, 50, 272, 288-293, 514, 540. + Tent on the Beach, The, 523. + Terence, 100, 110. + Tertullian, 158. + Teseide, 38. + Testament of Love, 46. + Texas Siftings, 564. + Thackeray, William Makepeace, 184, 190, 192, 210, 247, + 252, 267, 272-277, 278, 415, 512, 561, 571, 578, 592. + Thalaba, 238. + Thanatopsis, 400, 416, 477, 514, 515, 517. + Theaters, First, in America, 392, 393. + Theaters, First, in England, 100, 101. + Their Wedding Journey, 589. + Theobald, Lewis, 183. + Theodicy, 605. + Theological Essays, 312. + Theological Institutes, 312. + Theology Explained and Defended, 386. + Theology, Outlines of, 604. + Theophrastus, 92. + Theory of Preaching, 607. + Thierry and Theodoret, 129. + Thirty Poems, 517. + Thomas a Becket, 36. + Thomas de Hales, 25. + Thomas Lord Cromwell, 112. + Thomas of Canterbury, 28. + Thomas of Ersyldoune, 57. + Thomson, Charles, 596. + Thomson, Edward, 604. + Thomson, James, 194, 198, 200, 201, 214, 216, 386. + Thomson, William M., 602. + Thoreau, H. D., 435, 438, 452, 456, 457-462, 470, 474, + 477, 502, 512, 549, 554. + Thorn, The, 229. + Thornwcll, James H., 600. + Those Evening Bells, 256. + Thoughts in a Garden, 161. + Three Unities, The, 168. + Three Years She Grew in Sun and Shade, 515. + Thucydides, 241, 410. + Tieck, Ludwig, 284, 465. + Tillotson, John, 163, 306. + Timbuctoo, 272. + Times, London, 223. + Timon of Athens, 110, 117, 172. + Timrod, Henry, 556, 557. + Tindal, Matthew, 308. + Tintern Abbey, Lines Written Near, 228. + Tiptoft, Thomas, 49. + Tithonus, 290. + Titus Andronicus, 110, 115. + Toilet of a Hebrew Lady, 240. + Token, The, 465. + Tom Jones, 208. + Toplady, Augustus M., 303, 310. + T'other Side of Ohio, 402. + Tottel's Miscellany, 65, 66. + Tour in the Scottish Highlands, Memorials of, 230. + Tour on the Prairies, 405. + Tourneur, Cyril, 135. + Townley, James, 310. + Toxophilus, 51, 62, 142. + Tracts for the Times, 311. + Tragedies of the Last Age, Remarks on the, 173. + Tragedy, A Short View of, 173. + Tragical History of Dr. Faustus, 105. + Tragical Tales, 85. + Tramp Abroad, A, 569. + Transcendentalist, The, 444, 446. + Travels in New England and New York, 387. + Treatise on Christian Doctrine, 431. + Tregelles, Samuel Prideaux, 313. + Trench, Richard Chenevix, 312. + Trinitarians and Calvinists, Letters to, 598. + Tristan and Isolde, 23. + Tristram Shandy, 209,411. + Triumph of Infidelity, 386. + Troilus and Cresseide, 36. + Troilus and Cressida, 115, 117, 172. + Trollope, Anthony, 584. + Trouveres, The French, 19, 20. + True Grandeur of Nations, The, 509. + True Relation, Smith's, 329. + True Religion Delineated, The, 597. + True Repertory of the Wrack and Redemption of Sir + Thomas Gates, 323. + Trumbull, John, 166, 381-383, 388, 407. + Tunnyng of Elynoure Rummyng, 53. + Turberville, George, 89. + Turgenieff, Ivan S., 584. + Turgot, A. R. J., 361. + Turner, Samuel H., 602. + Twa Corbies, The, 56. + Twa Dogs, The, 220. + Twa Herds, 218. + Twelfth Night; or, What You Will, 114, 131, 132. + Twice Told Tales, 465, 466, 467. + Twilight, In the, 501. + Two April Mornings, 229. + Two Gentlemen of Verona, 114. + Two Rivers, 460. + Two Voices, The, 291. + Tyler, Moses Coit, 318. + Tyler, Royal, 393. + Tyndale, William, 33, 63. + Typology of Scripture, The, 312. + Tyrannic Love, 168. + Tyrtaeus, 521. + Tyrwhitt, Thomas, 195. + + Uhland, Ludwig, 478. + Ulalume, 531. + Ulysses, 290, 291, 514. + Uncle Ned, 542. + Uncle Remus Stories, 582. + Uncle Tom's Cabin, 543, 544. + Unco Gude, Address to the, 218. + Under the Willows, 500. + Underwoods, 123. + Undiscovered Country, The, 591. + United Netherlands, History of the, 505. + United States, History of the, 409, 475, 505 + Universal Restoration, The, 598. + Unknown Dead, The, 557. + Unloveliness of Lovelocks, The, 128. + Unseen Spirits, 537. + Upham, Thomas C., 603. + Urn Burial, 138. + Ussher, James, 304. + Utopia, 64. + + Valentinian, 129. + Valley of Unrest, The, 528. + Van Brugh, John, 169. + Vanity Fair, 273, 274, 565. + Vanity of Human Wishes, 193. + Vassall Morton, 504, + Vathek, 394. + Vaughan, Henry, 143, 146. + Venetian Life, 589. + Venice Preserved, 169. + Venus and Adonis, 95, 109. + Vergil, 60, 68, 70, 71, 174, 183, 198, 200, 484. + Verne, Jules, 529, 573. + Vicar of Wakefield, 211. + View of Religion in America, A, 603. + Views Afoot, 539. + Villa Franca, 501. + Village Blacksmith, The, 480. + Village Hymns, 603. + Village, The, 232. + Villiers, George, 164, 168, 204. + Villon, Francois, 25. + Vindication, The, 602. + Vinet, Alexander, 601. + Virgin Mary, Poems to, 27. + Virginia, General History of, 329. + Virginia, History of, 332. + Virginia, History of the First Discovery and Settlement of, 332. + Virginia, History of the Protestant Episcopal Church in, 603. + Virginia, Notes on, 372. + Virginia, Old Churches, Ministers, and Families of, 602. + Virginia City Enterprise, 569. + Virginia Comedians, The, 536. + Virginia Gazette, The, 327. + Virginians, The, 275. + Vision of Columbus, 384, 385. + Vision of Mirza, 188. + Vision of Sin, 291. + Vision of Sir Launfal, 498. + Vision of Sudden Death, 240. + Vision of William concerning Piers the Plowman, 28, 41. + Visions of Bellay, 68. + Visions of Petrarch, 68. + Visit from St. Nicholas, 538. + Visit to the Hebrides, 204. + Vittoria Corombona, 134, 135. + Voiage and Travaile of Sir John Maundeville, The, 46. + Voices of Freedom, 521. + Voices of the Night, 477, 479. + Volpone, 122, 124. + Voltaire, Francois M. A., 182, 284, 361, 378, 386. + Voluntaries, 457. + Von Kempelen's Discovery, 529. + Vox Clamantis, 41. + Voyage to Lilliput, 561. + + Wace, Richard, 18, 22. + Wagoner, The, 228. + Walden, 458. + Wall, William, 307. + Wallenstein, 234. + Waller, Edmund, 148, 149, 164, 174, 175. + Wallis, John, 136. + Walpole, Horace, 195, 197, 201, 248, 394. + Walton, Izaak, 141, 142, 162. + Walton's Lives, 141, 142. + Wants of Man, 423. + War Lyrics, 557. + War Time, In, 521. + Warburton, William, 309. + Ward, Nathaniel, 335. + Ward, William, 310. + Ware, Henry, 442, 598. + Warner, William, 97. + Warren Hastings, 283. + Warren, Mercy, 368. + Warton, Joseph, 199, 200, 201. + Warton, Thomas, 78, 79, 195, 198, 199. + Washers of the Shroud, The, 501. + Washington, George, 242, 275, 374, 375, 377, 383, 384, + 390, 428, 570. + Washington, Life of, 414. + Washington as a Camp, 558. + Washington Square, 559. + Wat Tyler, 225. + Waterfowl, To a, 515. + Waterland, Daniel, 308. + Watson, John F., 484. + Watson, Richard (Bishop), 310. + Watson, Richard, 312. + Watson, Thomas, 94. + Watts, Isaac, 303, 402. + Waverley, 247. + Way Down South, 542. + Way of the World, The, 169. + Way to Make Money Plenty in Every Man's Pocket, 362. + Way to Wealth, The, 362. + Wayland, Francis, 601. + We Are Seven, 229, + Webster, Daniel, 407, 424, 425-428, 429, 508, 560. + Webster, John, 107, 109, 133-135. + Webster, Noah, 402. + Wedding, Ballad upon a, 149. + Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers, 458. + Welde, Thomas, 594. + Werner, Friedrich L. Z., 284. + Wesley, Charles, 215, 303. + Wesley, John, 215, 303, 310. + West Wind, Ode to the, 260. + Western Windows, 581. + Westminster Abbey, 413. + Westminster Assembly, 302. + Westminster Review, 277. + Westover MSS., 331. + Westward, Ho! 405. + What Mr. Robinson Thinks, 497. + What Was it? 559. + Whately, Richard, 312. + Whedon, Daniel D., 605. + When Januar Winds, 217. + When We Two Parted, 255. + Whipple, E. P., 385. + Whistle, The, 362. + Whitaker: Alexander, 333. + White, Richard Grant, 575. + White, William, 597. + Whitefield, George, 214, 595. + Whitewashing, Letter on, 388. + Whitman, Walt, 479, 546-551, 555. + Whittier, John Greenleaf, 334, 343, 344, 352, 353, 435, 482, + 489, 495, 518-524, 533, 543, 544, 550, 555, 558, 574. + Whittingham, William, 300. + Why Come Ye Not to Courte? 54. + Wiat, Sir Thomas, 65, 66, 67. + Wiclif, John, 32, 33, 39,47. + Wieland, 394, 396. + Wife of Bath, 37. + Wife of Bath's Tale, 38. + Wigglesworth, Michael, 355. + Wilberforce, William, 214, 312. + Wild Honeysuckle, 390. + Wilde Jaeger, 246. + Wilde, Richard Henry, 422. + Wilhelm Meister, 283. + Will, Freedom of the, 356, 605. + Willard, Samuel, 594. + William and the Werewolf, 28. + William of Malmesbury, 17. + William the Conqueror, Sketch of, 16, 17, + William Wilson, 532. + Williams, John, 312. + Williams, Roger, 339, 340. + Williams, Rowland, 311. + Willie Brewed a Peck o' Maut, 218. + Willis, Nathaniel P., 404, 516, 536, 537, 539, 545. + Willson, Forceythe, 556. + Wilson, Henry, 555. + Wilson, Henry B., 311. + Wilson, John, 223, 238, 239. + Wilson, Thomas, 308. + Winchester, Elhanan, 598. + Windsor Forest, 186. + Winkworth, Catherine, 304. + Winter Evening, 522. + Winter Evening Hymn to My Fire, A, 500. + Winter's Tale, 89, 114, 115. + Winthrop, John, 324, 336, 338, 340, 342, 343, 344, 346, + 347, 351, 353. + Winthrop, Theodore, 558, 559. + Wirt, William, 367. + Witchcraft, 502. + Witch's Daughter, 520. + Wither, George, 149, 161, 177. + Witherspoon, John, 596. + Withington, Leonard, 599. + Woodrow, Robert, 308. + Wolfert Webber, 410. + Wolfert's Roost, 410. + Wollaston, William, 307. + Woman in the Nineteenth Century, 450. + Wonder Book, The, 469. + Wonder Working Providence of Sion's Saviour + in New England, 595. + Wonders of the Invisible World, 338, 352. + Wood, Anthony, 348. + Woodman, Spare That Tree, 538. + Woods in Winter, 477. + Woods, Leonard, 441, 599. + Woodville, Anthony, 49. + Woodworth, Samuel, 422. + Woolman, John, 396-398, 520, 596. + Woolsey, Theodore Dwight, 601. + Wordsworth, Charles, 311. + Wordsworth, Christopher, 311. + Wordsworth, Christopher, Jr., 311. + Wordsworth, Dorothy, 230. + Wordsworth, William, 59, 95, 146, 156, 200, 222, 225, 226, + 227-234, 236, 239, 240, 242, 244, 245, 255, 261, 264, + 515, 516, 517. + World, History of the, 87, 88. + Worthies of England, 139, 348, 349. + Wotton, Sir Henry, 141, 142. + Wrath upon the Wicked, 356. + Wreck of the Hesperus, The, 480, 483. + Wycherley, William, 164, 169, 170, 171. + Wynkyn de Worde, 52, 59. + + Xenophon, 243. + + Yankee Doodle, 387, 388. + Yankee in Canada, A, 458. + Yankee's Return from Camp, 388. + Yarrow Revisited, 229. + Ye Mariners of England, 249. + Year's Life, A, 495. + Yellow Plush Papers, 273. + Yemassee, The, 536. + Young, Thomas, 304. + + Zastrossi, 396. + + + +***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BRIEF HISTORY OF ENGLISH AND +AMERICAN LITERATURE*** + + +******* This file should be named 21090.txt or 21090.zip ******* + + +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: +http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/2/1/0/9/21090 + + + +Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions +will be renamed. + +Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no +one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation +(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without +permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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