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+Project Gutenberg's Literary and Social Essays, by George William Curtis
+
+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: Literary and Social Essays
+
+Author: George William Curtis
+
+
+Release Date: May, 2005  [EBook #8108]
+This file was first posted on June 15, 2003
+Last Updated: May 27, 2013
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LITERARY AND SOCIAL ESSAYS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Eric Eldred, Marc D'Hooghe, Charles Franks,
+and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+LITERARY AND SOCIAL ESSAYS
+
+By George William Curtis
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+EMERSON _Homes of American Authors, 1854._
+
+HAWTHORNE _Homes of American Authors, 1854._
+
+THE WORKS OF NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE _North American Review_, Vol. XCIX.,
+1864.
+
+RACHEL _Putnam's Magazine_, Vol. VI., 1855.
+
+THACKERAY IN AMERICA _Putnam's Magazine_, Vol. I., 1853.
+
+SIR PHILIP SIDNEY Hitherto unpublished. Written in 1857.
+
+LONGFELLOW HARPER'S MAGAZINE, Vol. LXV., 1882.
+
+OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES HARPER'S MAGAZINE, Vol. LXXXIII., 1891.
+
+WASHINGTON IRVING Read at Ashfield, 1889. Printed by the Grolier Club,
+1892.
+
+
+
+
+EMERSON
+
+
+The village of Concord, Massachusetts, lies an hour's ride from Boston,
+upon the Great Northern Railway. It is one of those quiet New England
+towns, whose few white houses, grouped upon the plain, make but a slight
+impression upon the mind of the busy traveller hurrying to or from the
+city. As the conductor shouts "Concord!" the busy traveller has scarcely
+time to recall "Concord, Lexington, and Bunker Hill" before the town has
+vanished and he is darting through woods and fields as solitary as those
+he has just left in New Hampshire. Yet as it vanishes he may chance to
+"see" two or three spires, and as they rush behind the trees his eyes
+fall upon a gleaming sheet of water. It is Walden Pond--or Walden Water,
+as Orphic Alcott used to call it--whose virgin seclusion was a
+just image of that of the little village, until one afternoon, some
+half-dozen or more years since, a shriek, sharper than any that had
+rung from Walden woods since the last war-whoop of the last Indians
+of Musketaquid, announced to astonished Concord, drowsing in the river
+meadows, that the nineteenth century had overtaken it. Yet long before
+the material force of the age bound the town to the rest of the world,
+the spiritual force of a single mind in it had attracted attention to
+it, and made its lonely plains as dear to many widely scattered minds as
+the groves of the Academy or the vineyards of Vaucluse.
+
+Except in causing the erection of the railway buildings and several
+dwellings near it, steam has not much changed Concord. It is yet one of
+the quiet country towns whose charm is incredible to all but those who,
+by loving it, have found it worthy of love. The shire-town of the great
+agricultural county of Middlesex, it is not disturbed by the feverish
+throb of factories, nor by any roar of inexorable toil but the few puffs
+of the locomotive. One day, during the autumn, it is thronged with
+the neighboring farmers, who hold their high festival--the annual
+cattle-show--there. But the calm tenor of Concord life is not varied,
+even on that day, by anything more exciting than fat oxen and the
+cud-chewing eloquence of the agricultural dinner. The population of the
+region is composed of sturdy, sterling men, worthy representatives of
+the ancestors who sowed along the Concord shores, with their seed-corn
+and rye, the germs of a prodigious national greatness. At intervals
+every day the rattle, roar, and whistle of the swift shuttle darting to
+and from the metropolitan heart of New England, weaving prosperity upon
+the land, remind those farmers in their silent fields that the great
+world yet wags and wrestles. And the farmer-boy--sweeping with flashing
+scythe through the river meadows, whose coarse grass glitters, apt for
+mowing, in the early June morning--pauses as the whistle dies into the
+distance, and, wiping his brow and whetting his blade anew, questions
+the country-smitten citizen, the amateur Corydon struggling with
+imperfect stroke behind him, of the mystic romance of city life.
+
+The sluggish repose of the little river images the farmer-boy's life. He
+bullies his oxen, and trembles at the locomotive. His wonder and fancy
+stretch towards the great world beyond the barn-yard and the village
+church as the torpid stream tends towards the ocean. The river, in
+fact, seems the thread upon which all the beads of that rustic life
+are strung--the clew to its tranquil character. If it were an impetuous
+stream, dashing along as if it claimed and required the career to
+which every American river is entitled, a career it would have. Wheels,
+factories, shops, traders, factory-girls, boards of directors, dreary
+white lines of boarding-houses, all the signs that indicate the spirit
+of the age, and of the American age, would arise upon its margin.
+Some shaven magician from State Street would run up by rail, and, from
+proposals, maps, schedules of stock, etc., educe a spacious factory as
+easily as Aladdin's palace arose from nothing. Instead of a dreaming,
+pastoral poet of a village, Concord would be a rushing, whirling,
+bustling manufacturer of a town, like its thrifty neighbor Lowell.
+Many a fine equipage, flashing along city ways--many an
+Elizabethan-Gothic-Grecian rural retreat, in which State Street woos Pan
+and grows Arcadian in summer, would be reduced, in the last analysis,
+to the Concord mills. Yet if these broad river meadows grew factories
+instead of corn, they might perhaps lack another harvest, of which the
+poet's thought is the sickle.
+
+  "One harvest from your field
+     Homeward brought the oxen strong.
+   Another crop your acres yield,
+     Which I gather in a song,"
+
+sings Emerson, and again, as the afternoon light strikes pensive across
+his memory, as over the fields below him:
+
+  "Knows he who tills this lonely field,
+     To reap its scanty corn,
+   What mystic crops his acres yield,
+     At midnight and at morn?"
+
+The Concord River, upon whose winding shores the town has scattered its
+few houses--as if, loitering over the plain some fervent day, it had
+fallen asleep obedient to the slumberous spell, and had not since
+awakened--is a languid, shallow stream, that loiters through broad
+meadows, which fringe it with rushes and long grasses. Its sluggish
+current scarcely moves the autumn leaves showered upon it by a few
+maples that lean over the Assabet--as one of its branches is named.
+Yellow lily-buds and leathery lily-pads tessellate its surface, and the
+white water-lilies--pale, proud Ladies of Shalott--bare their virgin
+breasts to the sun in the seclusion of its distant reaches. Clustering
+vines of wild grape hang its wooded shores with a tapestry of the South
+and the Rhine. The pickerel-weed marks with blue spikes of flowers
+the points where small tributary brooks flow in, and along the dusky
+windings of those brooks cardinal-flowers with a scarlet splendor
+paint the tropics upon New England green. All summer long, from founts
+unknown, in the upper counties, from some anonymous pond or wooded
+hillside moist with springs, steals the gentle river through the plain,
+spreading at one point above the town into a little lake, called by the
+farmers "Fairhaven Bay", as if all its lesser names must share the
+sunny significance of Concord. Then, shrinking again, alarmed at its own
+boldness, it dreams on towards the Merrimac and the sea.
+
+The absence of factories has already implied its shallowness and
+slowness. In truth it is a very slow river, belonging much more to the
+Indian than to the Yankee; so much so, indeed, that until within a very
+few years there was an annual visit to its shores from a few sad heirs
+of its old masters, who pitched a group of tents in the meadows, and
+wove their tidy baskets and strung their beads in unsmiling silence. It
+was the same thing that I saw in Jerusalem among the Jews. Every Friday
+they repair to the remains of the old temple wall, and pray and wail,
+kneeling upon the pavement and kissing the stones. But that passionate
+Oriental regret was not more impressive than this silent homage of a
+waning race, who, as they beheld the unchanged river, knew that, unlike
+it, the last drops of their existence were gradually flowing away, and
+that for their tribes there shall be no ingathering.
+
+So shallow is the stream that the amateur Corydons who embark at morning
+to explore its remoter shores will, not infrequently in midsummer, find
+their boat as suddenly tranquil and motionless as the river, having
+placidly grounded upon its oozy bottom. Or, returning at evening, they
+may lean over the edge as they lie at length in the boat, and float
+with the almost imperceptible current, brushing the tips of the long
+water-grass and reeds below them in the stream--a river jungle, in which
+lurk pickerel and trout--with the sensation of a bird drifting upon
+soft evening air over the tree-tops. No available or profitable craft
+navigate these waters, and animated gentlemen from the city who run up
+for "a mouthful of fresh air" cannot possibly detect the final cause of
+such a river. Yet the dreaming idler has a place on maps and a name in
+history.
+
+Near the town it is crossed by three or four bridges. One is a massive
+structure to help the railroad over. The stern, strong pile readily
+betrays that it is part of good, solid stock, owned in the right
+quarter. Close by it is a little arched stone bridge, auxiliary to a
+great road leading to some vague region of the world called Acton upon
+guide-posts and on maps. Just beyond these bridges the river bends and
+forgets the railroad, but it is grateful to the graceful arch of the
+little stone bridge for making its curve more picturesque, and, as it
+muses towards the Old Manse, listlessly brushing the lilies, it wonders
+if Ellery Channing, who lives beyond, upon a hill-side sloping to the
+shore, wrote his poem of "The Bridge" to that particular one. There
+are two or three wooden bridges also, always combining well with the
+landscape, always making and suggesting pictures.
+
+The Concord, as I said, has a name in history. Near one of the wooden
+bridges you turn aside from the main road, close by the Old Mause--whose
+mosses of mystic hue were gathered by Hawthorne, who lived there for
+three years--and a few steps bring you to the river and to a small
+monument upon its brink. It is a narrow, grassy way; not a field nor a
+meadow, but of that shape and character which would perplex the animated
+stranger from the city, who would see, also, its unfitness for a
+building-lot. The narrow, grassy way is the old road, which in the month
+of April, 1775, led to a bridge that crossed the stream at this spot.
+And upon the river's margin, upon the bridge and the shore beyond, took
+place the sharp struggle between the Middlesex farmers and the scarlet
+British soldiers known in tradition as "Concord fight". The small
+monument records the day and the event. When it was erected Emerson
+wrote the following hymn for the ceremony:
+
+APRIL 19, 1836.
+
+ "By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
+    Their flag to April's breeze unfurled,
+  Here once the embattled farmers stood,
+    And fired the shot heard round the world.
+
+ "The foe long since in silence slept;
+    Alike the conqueror silent sleeps;
+  And Time the ruined bridge has swept
+    Down the dark stream that seaward creeps.
+
+ "On this green bank, by this soft stream,
+    We see to-day a votive stone,
+  That memory may their deed redeem,
+    When, like our sires, our sons are gone.
+
+ "Spirit that made these heroes dare
+    To die, or leave their children free,
+  Bid Time and Nature gently spare
+    The shaft we raise to them and Thee."
+
+Close under the rough stone wall at the left, which separates it from
+the little grassy orchard of the Manse, is a small mound of turf and a
+broken stone. Grave and headstone shrink from sight amid the grass and
+under the wall, but they mark the earthly bed of the first victims of
+that first fight. A few large trees overhang the ground, which Hawthorne
+thinks have been planted since that day, and he says that in the river
+he has seen mossy timbers of the old bridge, and on the farther bank,
+half hidden, the crumbling stone abutments that supported it. In an old
+house upon the main road, nearly opposite the entrance to this grassy
+way, I knew a hale old woman who well remembered the gay advance of the
+flashing soldiers, the terrible ring and crack of fire-arms, and the
+panic-stricken retreat of the regulars, blackened and bloody. But the
+placid river has long since overborne it all. The alarm, the struggle,
+the retreat, are swallowed up in its supreme tranquillity. The summers
+of more than seventy years have obliterated every trace of the road
+with thick grass, which seeks to bury the graves, as earth buried the
+victims. Let the sweet ministry of summer avail. Let its mild iteration
+even sap the monument and conceal its stones as it hides the abutment in
+foliage; for, still on the sunny slopes, white with the May blossoming
+of apple-orchards, and in the broad fields, golden to the marge of
+the river, and tilled in security and peace, survives the imperishable
+remembrance of that day and its results.
+
+The river is thus the main feature of the Concord landscape. It is
+surrounded by a wide plain, from which rise only three or four low
+hills. One is a wooded cliff over Fairhaven Bay, a mile from the town;
+one separates the main river from the Assabeth; and just beyond the
+battle-ground one rises, rich with orchards, to a fine wood which crowns
+it. The river meadows blend with broad, lonely fields. A wide horizon,
+like that of the prairie or the sea, is the grand charm of Concord. At
+night the stars are seen from the roads crossing the plain, as from a
+ship at sea. The landscape would be called tame by those who think
+no scenery grand but that of mountains or the sea-coast. But the wide
+solitude of that region is not so accounted by those who live there. To
+them it is rich and suggestive, as Emerson shows, by saying in the essay
+upon "Nature", "My house stands in low land, with limited outlook, and
+on the skirt of the village. But I go with my friend to the shore of
+our little river, and with one stroke of the paddle I leave the
+village politics and personalities, yes, and the world of villages
+and personalities behind, and pass into a delicate realm of sunset and
+moonlight, too bright almost for spotted man to enter without novitiate
+and probation. We penetrate bodily this incredible beauty; we dip our
+hands in this painted element; our eyes are bathed in these lights and
+forms. A holiday, a villeggiatura, a royal-revel, the proudest, most
+heart-rejoicing festival that valor and beauty, power and taste ever
+decked and enjoyed, establishes itself upon the instant". And again, as
+indicating where the true charm of scenery lies: "In every landscape the
+point to astonishment is the meeting of the sky and the earth, and
+that is seen from the first hillock, as well as from the top of the
+Alleghanies. The stars stoop down over the brownest, homeliest common,
+with all the spiritual magnificence which they shed on the Campagna or
+on the marble deserts of Egypt." He is speaking here, of course, of the
+spiritual excitement of Beauty, which crops up everywhere in nature,
+like gold in a rich region; but the quality of the imagery indicates the
+character of the scenery in which the essay was written.
+
+Concord is too far from Boston to rival in garden cultivation its
+neighbors, West Cambridge, Lexington, and Waltham; nor can it boast,
+with Brookline, Dorchester, and Cambridge, the handsome summer homes of
+city wealth. But it surpasses them all, perhaps, in a genuine country
+freshness and feeling, derived from its loneliness. If not touched by
+city elegance, neither is it infected by city meretriciousness; it is
+sweet, wholesome country. By climbing one of the hills, your eye sweeps
+a wide, wide landscape, until it rests upon graceful Wachuset, or,
+farther and mistier, Moriadnoc, the lofty outpost of New Hampshire
+hills. Level scenery is not tame. The ocean, the prairie, the desert,
+are not tame, although of monotonous surface. The gentle undulations
+which mark certain scenes--a rippling landscape, in which all sense of
+space, of breadth, and of height is lost--that is tame. It may be made
+beautiful by exquisite cultivation, as it often is in England and on
+parts of the Hudson shores, but it is, at best, rather pleasing than
+inspiring. For a permanent view the eye craves large and simple forms,
+as the body requires plain food for its best nourishment.
+
+The town of Concord is built mainly upon one side of the river. In
+its centre is a large open square, shaded by fine elms. A white wooden
+church, in the most classical style of Yankee-Greek, stands upon
+the square. The Court-house is upon one of the corners. In the old
+Courthouse, in the days when I knew Concord, many conventions were
+held for humane as well as merely political objects. One summer day I
+especially remember, when I did not envy Athens its forum, for Emerson
+and William Henry Channing spoke. In the speech of both burned the
+sacred fire of eloquence, but in Emerson it was light, and in Channing
+heat.
+
+From this square diverge four roads, like highways from a forum. One
+leads by the Courthouse and under stately sycamores to the Old Manse and
+the battle-ground, another goes directly to the river, and a third is
+the main avenue of the town. After passing the shops this third divides,
+and one branch forms a fair and noble street, spaciously and loftily
+arched with elms, the houses standing liberally apart, each with its
+garden-plot in front. The fourth avenue is the old Boston road, also
+dividing, at the edge of the village, into the direct route to the
+metropolis and the Lexington turnpike.
+
+The house of Mr. Emerson stands opposite this junction. It is a plain,
+square white dwelling-house, yet it has a city air and could not
+be mistaken for a farm-house. A quiet merchant, you would say,
+unostentatious and simple, has here hidden himself from town. But a
+thick grove of pine and fir trees, almost brushing the two windows upon
+the right of the door, and occupying the space between them and the
+road, suggests at least a peculiar taste in the retired merchant, or
+hints the possibility that he may have sold his place to a poet or
+philosopher--or to some old East India sea-captain, perhaps, who
+cannot sleep without the sound of waves, and so plants pines to rustle,
+surf-like, against his chamber window.
+
+The fact, strangely enough, partly supports your theory. In the year
+1828 Charles Coolidge, a brother of J. Templeman Coolidge, a merchant of
+repute in Boston and grandson of Joseph Coolidge, a patriarchal denizen
+of Bowdoin Square in that city, came to Concord and built this house.
+Gratefully remembering the lofty horse-chestnuts which shaded the city
+square, and which, perhaps, first inspired him with the wish to be a
+nearer neighbor of woods and fields, he planted a row of them along his
+lot, which this year ripen their twenty-fifth harvest. With the liberal
+hospitality of a New England merchant he did not forget the spacious
+cellars of the city, and, as Mr. Emerson writes, "he built the only good
+cellar that had then been built in Concord".
+
+Mr. Emerson bought the house in the year 1835. He found it a plain,
+convenient, and thoroughly built country residence. An amiable neighbor
+of Mr. Coolidge had placed a miserable old barn irregularly upon the
+edge of that gentleman's lot, which, for the sake of comeliness, he was
+forced to buy and set straight and smooth into a decent dependence of
+the mansion house. The estate, upon passing into Mr. Emerson's hands,
+comprised the house, barn, and two acres of land. He has enlarged house
+and barn, and the two acres have grown to nine. Our author is no farmer,
+except as every country gentleman is, yet the kindly slope from the
+rear of the house to a little brook, which, passing to the calm Concord
+beyond, washes the edge of his land, yields him at least occasional
+beans and pease--or some friend, agriculturally enthusiastic and
+an original Brook-Farmer, experiments with guano in the garden, and
+produces melons and other vines with a success that relieves Brook Farm
+from every slur of inadequate practical genius. Mr. Emerson has shaded
+his originally bare land with trees, and counts near a hundred apple and
+pear trees in his orchard. The whole estate is quite level, inclining
+only towards the little brook, and is well watered and convenient.
+
+The Orphic Alcott--or Plato Skimpole, as Aspasia called him--well known
+in the transcendental history of New England, designed and with his own
+hands erected a summer-house, which gracefully adorns the lawn, if I may
+so call the smooth grass-plot at the side of the house. Unhappily, this
+edifice promises no longer duration, not being "technically based and
+pointed". This is not a strange, although a disagreeable fact, to Mr.
+Emerson, who has been always the most faithful and appreciative of the
+lovers of Mr. Alcott. It is natural that the Orphic Alcott should build
+graceful summer-houses. There are even people who declare that he has
+covered the pleasant but somewhat misty lawns of ethical speculation
+with a thousand such edifices, which need only to be a little more
+"technically based and pointed" to be quite perfect. At present they
+whisper, the wind blows clean through them, and no figures of flesh and
+blood are ever seen there, but only pallid phantoms with large, calm
+eyes, eating uncooked grain, out of baskets, and discoursing in a
+sublime shibboleth of which mortals have no key. But how could Plato
+Skimpole, who goes down to Hingham on the sea, in a New England January,
+clad only in a suit of linen, hope to build immortal summer-houses?
+
+Mr. Emerson's library is the room at the right of the door upon entering
+the house. It is a simple square room, not walled with books like the
+den of a literary grub, nor merely elegant like the ornamental retreat
+of a dilettante. The books are arranged upon plain shelves, not
+in architectural bookcases, and the room is hung with a few choice
+engravings of the greatest men. There was a fair copy of Michael
+Angelo's "Fates", which, properly enough, imparted that grave serenity
+to the ornament of the room which is always apparent in what is
+written there. It is the study of a scholar. All our author's published
+writings, the essays, orations, and poems, date from this room, as much
+as they date from any place or moment. The villagers, indeed, fancy
+their philosophical contemporary affected by the novelist James's
+constancy of composition. They relate, with wide eyes, that he has
+a huge manuscript book, in which he incessantly records the ends of
+thoughts, bits of observation and experience, and facts of all kinds--a
+kind of intellectual and scientific ragbag, into which all shreds and
+remnants of conversations and reminiscences of wayside reveries are
+incontinently thrust. This work goes on, they aver, day and night, and
+when he travels the rag-bag travels too, and grows more plethoric
+with each mile of the journey. And a story, which will one day be a
+tradition, is perpetuated in the village, that one night, before his
+wife had become completely accustomed to his habits, she awoke suddenly,
+and hearing him groping about the room, inquired anxiously,
+
+"My dear, are you unwell?"
+
+"No, my love, only an idea."
+
+The library is not only the study of a scholar, it is the bower of a
+poet. The pines lean against the windows, and to the student deeply sunk
+in learned lore or soaring upon the daring speculations of an intrepid
+philosophy, they whisper a secret beyond that of the philosopher's
+stone, and sing of the springs of poetry.
+
+The site of the house is not memorable. There is no reasonable ground to
+suppose that so much as an Indian wigwam ever occupied the spot; nor has
+Henry Thoreau, a very faithful friend of Mr. Emerson's and of the woods
+and waters of his native Concord, ever found an Indian arrowhead upon
+the premises. Henry Thoreau's instinct is as sure towards the facts of
+nature as the witch-hazel towards treasure. If every quiet country town
+in New England had a son who, with a lore like Selborne's and an eye
+like Buffon's, had watched and studied its landscape and history, and
+then published the result, as Thoreau has done, in a book as redolent of
+genuine and perceptive sympathy with nature as a clover-field of honey,
+New England would seem as poetic and beautiful as Greece. Thoreau lives
+in the berry pastures upon a bank over Walden Pond, and in a little
+house of his own building. One pleasant summer afternoon a small party
+of us helped him raise it--a bit of life as Arcadian as any at Brook
+Farm. Elsewhere in the village he turns up arrowheads abundantly,
+and Hawthorne mentions that Thoreau initiated him into the mystery of
+finding them. But neither the Indians nor nature nor Thoreau can invest
+the quiet residence of our author with the dignity or even the suspicion
+of a legend. History stops short in that direction with Charles
+Coolidge, Esq., and the year 1828.
+
+There is little prospect from the house. Directly opposite a low bluff
+overhangs the Boston road and obstructs the view. Upon the other
+sides the level land stretches away. Towards Lexington it is a broad,
+half-marshy region, and between the brook behind and the river good
+farms lie upon the outskirts of the town. Pilgrims drawn to Concord by
+the desire of conversing with the man whose written or spoken eloquence
+has so profoundly charmed them, and who have placed him in some pavilion
+of fancy, some peculiar residence, find him in no porch of philosophy
+nor academic grove, but in a plain white house by the wayside, ready
+to entertain every comer as an ambassador from some remote Cathay of
+speculation whence the stars are more nearly seen. But the familiar
+reader of our author will not be surprised to find the "walking
+eye-ball" simply sheltered, and the "endless experimenter with no past
+at my back" housed without ornament. Such a reader will have felt the
+Spartan severity of this intellect, and have noticed that the realm of
+this imagination is rather sculpturesque than pictorial, more Greek than
+Italian. Therefore he will be pleased to alight at the little gate, and
+hear the breezy welcome of the pines and the no less cordial salutation
+of their owner. For if the visitor knows what he is about, he has come
+to this plain for bracing mountain air. These serious Concord reaches
+are no vale of Cashmere. Where Plato Skimpole is architect of the
+summer-house, you may imagine what is to be expected in the mansion
+itself. It is always morning within those doors. If you have nothing
+to say, if you are really not an envoy from some kingdom or colony of
+thought and cannot cast a gem upon the heaped pile, you had better pass
+by upon the other side. For it is the peculiarity of Emerson's mind to
+be always on the alert. He eats no lotus, but for-ever quaffs the waters
+which engender immortal thirst.
+
+If the memorabilia of his house could find their proper Xenophon, the
+want of antecedent arrowheads upon the premises would not prove very
+disastrous to the interest of the history. The fame of the philosopher
+attracts admiring friends and enthusiasts from every quarter, and
+the scholarly grace and urbane hospitality of the gentleman send them
+charmed away. Friendly foes, who altogether differ from Emerson, come to
+break a lance with him upon the level pastures of Concord, with all the
+cheerful and appreciative zeal of those who longed
+
+ "To drink delight of battle with their peers
+  Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy."
+
+It is not hazardous to say that the greatest questions of our day and
+of all days have been nowhere more amply discussed, with more poetic
+insight or profound conviction, than in the comely, square white house
+upon the edge of the Lexington turnpike. There have even been attempts
+at something more formal and club-like than the chance conversations of
+occasional guests, one of which will certainly be nowhere recorded but
+upon these pages.
+
+It was in the year 1845 that a circle of persons of various ages, and
+differing very much in everything but sympathy, found themselves in
+Concord. Towards the end of the autumn Mr. Emerson suggested that they
+should meet every Monday evening through the winter in his library.
+"Monsieur Aubepine", "Miles Coverdale", and other phantoms, since
+generally known as Nathaniel Hawthorne, who then occupied the Old Manse;
+the inflexible Henry Thoreau, a scholastic and pastoral Orson, then
+living among the blackberry pastures of Walden Pond; Plato Skimpole,
+then sublimely meditating impossible summer-houses in a little house
+upon the Boston road; the enthusiastic agriculturist and Brook-Farmer
+already mentioned, then an inmate of Mr. Emerson's house, who added
+the genial cultivation of a scholar to the amenities of the natural
+gentleman; a sturdy farmer neighbor, who had bravely fought his weary
+way through inherited embarrassments to the small success of a New
+England husbandman, and whose faithful wife had seven times merited well
+of her country; two city youths, ready for the fragments from the feast
+of wit and wisdom; and the host himself, composed this club. Ellery
+Channing, who had that winter harnessed his Pegasus to the New York
+_Tribune_, was a kind of corresponding member. The news of this world
+was to be transmitted through his eminently practical genius, as the
+club deemed itself competent to take charge of tidings from all other
+spheres.
+
+I went, the first Monday evening, very much as Ixion may have gone
+to his banquet. The philosophers sat dignified and erect. There was a
+constrained but very amiable silence, which had the impertinence of a
+tacit inquiry, seeming to ask, "Who will now proceed to say the
+finest thing that has ever been said?" It was quite involuntary and
+unavoidable, for the members lacked that fluent social genius without
+which a club is impossible. It was a congress of oracles on the one
+hand, and of curious listeners upon the other. I vaguely remember that
+the Orphic Alcott invaded the Sahara of silence with a solemn "saying",
+to which, after due pause, the honorable member for blackberry pastures
+responded by some keen and graphic observation; while the Olympian host,
+anxious that so much good material should be spun into something, beamed
+smiling encouragement upon all parties. But the conversation became more
+and more staccato. Miles Coverdale, a statue of night and silence, sat,
+a little removed, under a portrait of Dante, gazing imperturbably upon
+the group; and as he sat in the shadow, his dark hair and eyes and suit
+of sables made him, in that society, the black thread of mystery
+which he weaves into his stories, while the shifting presence of the
+Brook-Farmer played like heat-lightning around the room.
+
+I recall little else but a grave eating of russet apples by the erect
+philosophers, and a solemn disappearance into night. The club struggled
+through three Monday evenings. Plato was perpetually putting apples of
+gold in pictures of silver; for such was the rich ore of his thoughts,
+coined by the deep melody of his voice. Orson charmed us with the
+secrets won from his interviews with Pan in the Walden woods; while
+Emerson, with the zeal of an engineer trying to dam wild waters, sought
+to bind the wide-flying embroidery of discourse into a web of clear
+sweet sense. But still in vain. The oracular sayings were the unalloyed
+saccharine element; and every chemist knows how much else goes to
+practical food--how much coarse, rough, woody fibre is essential. The
+club struggled on valiantly, discoursing celestially, eating apples,
+and disappearing in the dark, until the third evening it vanished
+altogether. But I have since known clubs of fifty times its number,
+whose collective genius was not more than that of either one of the
+Dii Majores of our Concord coterie. The fault was its too great
+concentration. It was not relaxation, as a club should be, but tension.
+Society is a play, a game, a tournament; not a battle. It is the easy
+grace of undress; not an intellectual full-dress parade.
+
+I have already hinted this unbending intellectual alacrity of our
+author. His sport is serious--his humor is earnest. He stands like a
+sentinel. His look and manner and habit of thought cry "Who goes there?"
+and if he does not hear the countersign, he brings the intruder to
+a halt. It is for this surprising fidelity and integrity that his
+influence has been so deep and sure and permanent upon the intellectual
+life of the young men of New England; and of old England, too, where, in
+Manchester, there were regular weekly meetings at which his works were
+read. What he said long ago in his preface to the American edition of
+Carlyle's _Miscellanies_, that they were papers which had spoken to the
+young men of the time "with an emphasis that hindered them from sleep",
+is strikingly true of his own writings. His first slim, anonymous
+duodecimo, _Nature_, was as fair and fascinating to the royal young
+minds who met it in the course of their reading, as Egeria to Numa
+wandering in the grove. The essays, orations, and poems followed,
+developing and elaborating the same spiritual and heroic philosophy,
+applying it to life, history, and literature, with a vigor and richness
+so supreme that not only do many account him our truest philosopher, but
+others acknowledge him as our most characteristic poet.
+
+It would be a curious inquiry how much and what kind of influence the
+placid scenery of Concord has exercised upon his mind. "I chide society,
+I embrace solitude," he says; "and yet I am not so ungrateful as not
+to see the wise, the lovely, and the noble-minded, as from time to time
+they pass my gate." It is not difficult to understand his fondness for
+the spot. He has been always familiar with it, always more or less a
+resident of the village. Born in Boston upon the spot where the Chauncey
+Place Church now stands, part of his youth was passed in the Old Manse,
+which was built by his grandfather and in which his father was born; and
+there he wrote _Nature_. From the magnificent admiration of ancestral
+England he was glad to return two years since to quiet Concord and to
+acres which will not yield a single arrowhead. The Swiss sigh for their
+mountains; but the Nubians, also, pine for their desert plains. Those
+who are born by the sea long annually to return and to rest their eyes
+upon its living horizon. Is it because the earliest impressions, made
+when the mind is most plastic, are most durable? or because youth is
+that golden age bounding the confines of memory and floating forever--an
+alluring mirage as we recede farther from it?
+
+The imagination of the man who roams the solitary pastures of Concord,
+or floats, dreaming, down its river, will easily see its landscape upon
+Emerson's pages. "That country is fairest," he says, "which is inhabited
+by the noblest minds". And although that idler upon the river may have
+leaned over the Mediterranean from Genoese and Neapolitan villas, or
+have glanced down the steep green valley of Sicilian Enna, seeking
+"herself the fairest flower", or walked the shores where Cleopatra and
+Helen walked, yet the charm of a landscape which is felt rather than
+seen will be imperishable. "Travelling is a fool's paradise," says
+Emerson. But he passed its gates to learn that lesson. His writings,
+however, have no imported air. If there be something Oriental in his
+philosophy and tropical in his imagination, they have yet the strong
+flavor of his mother earth--the underived sweetness of the open Concord
+sky, and the spacious breadth of the Concord horizon.
+
+
+
+
+HAWTHORNE
+
+
+Hawthorne has himself drawn the picture of the Old Manse in Concord. He
+has given to it that quiet richness of coloring which ideally belongs
+to an old country mansion. It seemed so fitting a residence for one
+who loves to explore the twilight of antiquity--and the gloomier
+the better--that the visitor, among the felicities of whose life was
+included the freedom of the Manse, could not but fancy that our author's
+eyes first saw the daylight enchanted by the slumberous orchard behind
+the house, or tranquillized into twilight by the spacious avenue in
+front. The character of his imagination, and the golden gloom of its
+blossoming, completely harmonize with the rusty, gable-roofed old house
+upon the river-side, and the reader of his books would be sure that his
+boyhood and youth knew no other friends than the dreaming river and the
+melancholy meadows and drooping foliage of its vicinity.
+
+Since the reader, however, would greatly mistake if he fancied this,
+in good sooth, the ancestral halls of the Hawthornes--the genuine
+Hawthorne-den--he will be glad to save the credit of his fancy by
+learning that it was here our author's bridal tour--which commenced in
+Boston, then three hours away--ended, and his married life began. Here,
+also, his first child was born, and here those sad and silver mosses
+accumulated upon his fancy, from which he heaped so soft a bed for our
+dreaming. "Between two tall gate-posts of rough hewn stone (the gate
+itself having fallen from its hinges at some unknown epoch) we beheld
+the gray front of the old parsonage, terminating the vista of an avenue
+of black-ash trees." It was a pleasant spring day in the year 1843,
+and as they entered the house nosegays of fresh flowers, arranged by
+friendly hands, welcomed them to Concord and summer.
+
+The dark-haired man, who led his wife along the avenue that afternoon,
+had been recently an officer of the customs in Boston, before which he
+had led a solitary life in Salem. Graduated with Longfellow at Bowdoin
+College, in Maine, he had lived a hermit in respectable Salem, an
+absolute recluse even from his own family, walking out by night and
+writing wild tales by day, most of which were burnt in his bachelor
+fire, and some of which, in newspapers, magazines, and annuals, led a
+wandering, uncertain, and mostly unnoticed life.
+
+Those tales among this class which were attainable he collected into a
+small volume, and apprizing the world that they were "twice-told", sent
+them forth anew to make their own way, in the year 1841. But he piped to
+the world, and it did not sing. He wept to it, and it did not mourn. The
+book, however, as all good books do, made its way into various hearts.
+Yet the few penetrant minds which recognized a remarkable power and a
+method of strange fascination in the stories did not make the public nor
+influence the public mind. "I was," he says in the last edition of these
+tales, "the most unknown author in America". Full of glancing wit, of
+tender satire, of exquisite natural description, of subtle and strange
+analysis of human life, darkly passionate and weird, they yet floated
+unhailed barks upon the sea of publicity--unhailed, but laden and
+gleaming at every crevice with the true treasure of Cathay. Bancroft,
+then Collector in Boston, prompt to recognize and to honor talent, made
+the dreaming story-teller a surveyor in the custom-house, thus opening
+to him a new range of experience. From the society of phantoms he
+stepped upon Long Wharf and plumply confronted Captain Cuttle and Dirk
+Hatteraick. It was no less romance to our author. There is no greater
+error of those who are called "practical men" than the supposition that
+life is, or can be, other than a dream to a dreamer. Shut him up in a
+counting-room, barricade him with bales of merchandise, and limit his
+library to the ledger and cash-book and his prospect to the neighboring
+signs; talk "Bills receivable" and "Sundries Dr. to cash" to him
+forever, and you are only a very amusing or very annoying phantom to
+him. The merchant-prince might as well hope to make himself a poet, as
+the poet a practical or practicable man. He has laws to obey not at
+all the less stringent because men of a different temperament refuse
+to acknowledge them, and he is held to a loyalty quite beyond their
+conception.
+
+So Captain Cuttle and Dirk Hatteraick were as pleasant figures to our
+author in the picture of life as any others. He went daily upon the
+vessels, looked and listened and learned, was a favorite of the sailors
+as such men always are, did his work faithfully, and, having dreamed his
+dream upon Long Wharf, was married and slipped up to the Old Manse and
+a new chapter in the romance. It opened in "the most delightful little
+nook of a study that ever offered its snug seclusion to a scholar". Of
+the three years in the Old Manse the prelude to the _Mosses_ is the
+most perfect history, and of the quality of those years the _Mosses_
+themselves are sufficient proof. They were mostly written in the little
+study, and originally published in the _Democratic Review_, then edited
+by Hawthorne's friend O'Sullivan.
+
+To the inhabitants of Concord, however, our author was as much a phantom
+and a fable as the old pastor of the parish, dead half a century before,
+and whose faded portrait in the attic was gradually rejoining its
+original in native dust. The gate, fallen from its hinges in a remote
+antiquity, was never rehung. "The wheel-track leading to the door"
+remained still overgrown with grass. No bold villager ever invaded the
+sleep of "the glimmering shadows" in the avenue. At evening no lights
+gleamed from the windows. Scarce once in many months did the single old
+knobby-faced coachman at the railroad bring a fare to "Mr. Hawthorne's".
+"_Is_ there anybody in the old house?" sobbed the old ladies in despair,
+imbibing tea of a livid green. That knocker, which everybody had enjoyed
+the right of lifting to summon the good old pastor, no temerity now
+dared to touch. Heavens! what if the figure in the mouldy portrait
+should peer, in answer, over the eaves, and shake solemnly its decaying
+surplice! Nay, what if the mysterious man himself should answer the
+summons and come to the door! It is easy to summon spirits--but if they
+come? Collective Concord, moving in the river meadows, embraced the
+better part of valor and left the knocker untouched. A cloud of romance
+suddenly fell out of the heaven of fancy and enveloped the Old Manse:
+
+ "In among the bearded barley
+  The reaper reaping late and early"
+
+did not glance more wistfully towards the island of Shalott and its
+mysterious lady than the reapers of Concord rye looked at the Old Manse
+and wondered over its inmate.
+
+Sometimes in the forenoon a darkly clad figure was seen in the little
+garden-plot putting in corn or melon seed, and gravely hoeing. It was
+a brief apparition. The farmer passing towards town and seeing the
+solitary cultivator, lost his faith in the fact and believed he had
+dreamed when, upon returning, he saw no sign of life, except, possibly,
+upon some Monday, the ghostly skirt of a shirt flapping spectrally in
+the distant orchard. Day dawned and darkened over the lonely house.
+Summer with "buds and bird-voices" came singing in from the South, and
+clad the old ash-trees in deeper green, the Old Manse in profounder
+mystery. Gorgeous autumn came to visit the story-teller in his little
+western study, and, departing, wept rainbows among his trees. Winter
+impatiently swept down the hill opposite, rifling the trees of each
+last clinging bit of summer, as if thrusting aside opposing barriers and
+determined to search the mystery. But his white robes floated around
+the Old Manse, ghostly as the decaying surplice of the old pastor's
+portrait, and in the snowy seclusion of winter the mystery was as
+mysterious as ever.
+
+Occasionally Emerson or Ellery Channing or Henry Thoreau--some poet, as
+once Whittier, journeying to the Merrimac, or an old Brook-Farmer who
+remembered Miles Coverdale with Arcadian sympathy--went down the avenue
+and disappeared in the house. Sometimes a close observer, had he been
+ambushed among the long grasses of the orchard, might have seen the host
+and one of his guests emerging at the back door and, sauntering to the
+river-side, step into the boat, and float off until they faded in the
+shadow. The spectacle would not have lessened the romance. If it were
+afternoon--one of the spectrally sunny afternoons which often bewitch
+that region--he would be only the more convinced that there was
+something inexplicable in the whole matter of this man whom nobody knew,
+who was never once seen at town-meeting, and concerning whom it was
+whispered that he did not constantly attend church all day, although he
+occupied the reverend parsonage of the village and had unmeasured acres
+of manuscript sermons in his attic, besides the nearly extinct portrait
+of an utterly extinct clergyman. Mrs. Radcliffe and Monk Lewis were
+nothing to this, and the awe-stricken observer, if he could creep safely
+out of the long grass, did not fail to do so quietly, fortifying his
+courage by remembering stories of the genial humanity of the last old
+pastor who inhabited the Manse, and who for fifty years was the bland
+and beneficent Pope of Concord. A genial, gracious old man, whose memory
+is yet sweet in the village, and who, wedded to the grave traditions of
+New England theology, believed of his young relative Waldo Emerson, as
+Miss Flite, touching her forehead, said of her landlord, that he was
+"_m_, quite _m_", but was proud to love in him the hereditary integrity
+of noble ancestors.
+
+This old gentleman--an eminent figure in the history of the Manse and in
+all reminiscences of Concord--partook sufficiently of mundane weaknesses
+to betray his mortality. Hawthorne describes him watching the battle
+of Concord from his study window. But when the uncertainty of that
+dark moment had so happily resulted, and the first battle-ground of the
+Revolution had become a spot of hallowed and patriotic consideration,
+it was a pardonable pride in the good old man to order his servant,
+whenever there was company, to assist him in reaping the glory due
+to the owner of a spot so sacred. Accordingly, when some reverend or
+distinguished guest sat with the pastor in his little parlor, or, of
+a summer evening, at the hospitable door under the trees, Jeremiah or
+Nicodemus, the cow-boy, would deferentially approach and inquire,
+
+"Into what pasture shall I turn the cow tonight, sir?"
+
+And the old gentleman would audibly reply:
+
+"Into the battle-field, Nicodemus, into the battle-field."
+
+Then naturally followed wonder, inquiry, a walk in the twilight to the
+river-bank, the old gentleman's story, the corresponding respect of the
+listening visitor, and the consequent quiet complacency and harmless
+satisfaction in the clergyman's bosom. That throb of pride was the
+one drop of peculiar advantage which the pastor distilled from the
+Revolution. He could not but fancy that he had a hand in so famous
+a deed accomplished upon land now his own, and demeaned himself
+accordingly with continental dignity.
+
+The pulpit, however, was his especial sphere. There he reigned supreme;
+there he exhorted, rebuked, and advised, as in the days of Mather. There
+he inspired that profound reverence of which he was so proud, and which
+induced the matrons of the village, when he was coming to make a visit,
+to bedizen the children in their Sunday suits, to parade the best
+teapot, and to offer the most capacious chair. In the pulpit he
+delivered everything with the pompous cadence of the elder New England
+clergy, and a sly joke is told at the expense of his even temper, that
+on one occasion, when loftily reading the hymn, he encountered a blot
+upon the page quite obliterating the word; but without losing the
+cadence, although in a very vindictive tone at the truant word, or the
+culprit who erased it, he finished the reading as follows:
+
+ "He sits upon His throne above,
+    Attending angels bless,
+  While Justice, Mercy, Truth--and another word
+        which is blotted out--
+    Compose His princely dress."
+
+We linger around the Old Manse and its occupants as fondly as Hawthorne,
+but no more fondly than all who have been once within the influence of
+its spell. There glimmer in my memory a few hazy days, of a tranquil and
+half-pensive character, which I am conscious were passed in and around
+the house, and their pensiveness I know to be only that touch of
+twilight which inhered in the house and all its associations. Beside the
+few chance visitors I have named there were city friends occasionally,
+figures quite unknown to the village, who came preceded by the
+steam-shriek of the locomotive, were dropped at the gate-posts, and were
+seen no more. The owner was as much a vague name to me as to any one.
+
+During Hawthorne's first year's residence in Concord I had driven up
+with some friends to an aesthetic tea at Mr. Emerson's. It was in the
+winter, and a great wood-fire blazed upon the hospitable hearth. There
+were various men and women of note assembled, and I, who listened
+attentively to all the fine things that were said, was for some time
+scarcely aware of a man who sat upon the edge of the circle, a little
+withdrawn, his head slightly thrown forward upon his breast, and his
+bright eyes clearly burning under his black brow. As I drifted down the
+stream of talk, this person, who sat silent as a shadow, looked to me as
+Webster might have looked had he been a poet--a kind of poetic Webster.
+He rose and walked to the window, and stood quietly there for a long
+time, watching the dead white landscape. No appeal was made to him,
+nobody looked after him, the conversation flowed steadily on as if every
+one understood that his silence was to be respected. It was the same
+thing at table. In vain the silent man imbibed aesthetic tea. Whatever
+fancies it inspired did not flower at his lips. But there was a light
+in his eye which assured me that nothing was lost. So supreme was his
+silence that it presently engrossed me to the exclusion of everything
+else. There was very brilliant discourse, but this silence was much more
+poetic and fascinating. Fine things were said by the philosophers, but
+much finer things were implied by the dumbness of this gentleman with
+heavy brows and black hair. When he presently rose and went, Emerson,
+with the "slow, wise smile" that breaks over his face, like day over the
+sky, said, "Hawthorne rides well his horse of the night."
+
+Thus he remained in my memory, a shadow, a phantom, until more than a
+year afterwards. Then I came to live in Concord. Every day I passed his
+house, but when the villagers, thinking that perhaps I had some clew to
+the mystery, said, "Do you know this Mr. Hawthorne?" I said "No," and
+trusted to time.
+
+Time justified my confidence, and one day I, too, went down the avenue
+and disappeared in the house. I mounted those mysterious stairs to that
+apocryphal study. I saw "the cheerful coat of paint, and golden-tinted
+paper-hangings, lighting up the small apartment; while the shadow of a
+willow-tree, that swept against the overhanging eaves, attempered the
+cheery western sunshine." I looked from the little northern window
+whence the old pastor watched the battle, and in the small dining-room
+beneath it, upon the first floor, there were
+
+  "Dainty chicken, snow-white bread,"
+
+and the golden juices of Italian vineyards, which still feast insatiable
+memory.
+
+Our author occupied the Old Manse for three years. During that time he
+was not seen, probably, by more than a dozen of the villagers. His walks
+could easily avoid the town, and upon the river he was always sure of
+solitude. It was his favorite habit to bathe every evening in the river,
+after nightfall, and in that part of it over which the old bridge
+stood, at which the battle was fought. Sometimes, but rarely, his
+boat accompanied another up the stream, and I recall the silent and
+preternatural vigor with which, on one occasion, he wielded his paddle
+to counteract the bad rowing of a friend who conscientiously considered
+it his duty to do something and not let Hawthorne work alone; but who,
+with every stroke, neutralized all Hawthorne's efforts. I suppose he
+would have struggled until he fell senseless, rather than ask his
+friend to desist. His principle seemed to be, if a man cannot understand
+without talking to him, it is quite useless to talk, because it is
+immaterial whether such a man understands or not. His own sympathy was
+so broad and sure that although nothing had been said for hours his
+companion knew that not a thing had escaped his eye, nor had a single
+pulse of beauty in the day or scene or society failed to thrill his
+heart. In this way his silence was most social. Everything seemed to
+have been said. It was a Barmecide feast of discourse, from which a
+greater satisfaction resulted than from an actual banquet.
+
+When a formal attempt was made to desert this style of conversation, the
+result was ludicrous. Once Emerson and Thoreau arrived to pay a call.
+They were shown into the little parlor upon the avenue, and Hawthorne
+presently entered. Each of the guests sat upright in his chair like a
+Roman senator. "To them" Hawthorne, like a Dacian king. The call went
+on, but in a most melancholy manner. The host sat perfectly still, or
+occasionally propounded a question which Thoreau answered accurately,
+and there the thread broke short off. Emerson delivered sentences that
+only needed the setting of an essay to charm the world; but the whole
+visit was a vague ghost of the Monday-evening club at Mr. Emerson's--it
+was a great failure. Had they all been lying idly upon the river brink,
+or strolling in Thoreau's blackberry pastures, the result would have
+been utterly different. But imprisoned in the proprieties of a parlor,
+each a wild man in his way, with a necessity of talking inherent in the
+nature of the occasion, there was only a waste of treasure. This was the
+only "call" in which I ever knew Hawthorne to be involved.
+
+In Mr. Emerson's house, I said, it seemed always morning. But
+Hawthorne's black-ash trees and scraggy apple-boughs shaded
+
+                           "a land
+  In which it seemed always afternoon."
+
+I do not doubt that the lotus grew along the grassy marge of the Concord
+behind his house, and it was served, subtly concealed, to all his
+guests. The house, its inmates, and its life lay, dream-like, upon the
+edge of the little village. You fancied that they all came together
+and belonged together, and were glad that at length some idol of your
+imagination, some poet whose spell had held you and would hold you
+forever, was housed as such a poet should be.
+
+During the lapse of the three years since the bridal tour of twenty
+miles ended at the "two tall gate-posts of rough-hewn stone", a little
+wicker wagon had appeared at intervals upon the avenue, and a placid
+babe, whose eyes the soft Concord day had touched with the blue of its
+beauty, lay looking tranquilly up at the grave old trees, which sighed
+lofty lullabies over her sleep. The tranquillity of the golden-haired
+Una was the living and breathing type of the dreamy life of the Old
+Manse. Perhaps, that being attained, it was as well to go. Perhaps our
+author was not surprised nor displeased when the hints came, "growing
+more and more distinct, that the owner of the old house was pining for
+his native air". One afternoon I entered the study, and learned from its
+occupant that the last story he should ever write there was written. The
+son of the old pastor yearned for his homestead. The light of another
+summer would seek its poet in the Old Manse, but in vain.
+
+While Hawthorne had been quietly writing in the "most delightful little
+nook of a study", Mr. Polk had been elected President, and Mr. Bancroft,
+in the cabinet, did not forget his old friend, the surveyor in the
+custom-house. There came suggestions and offers of various attractions.
+Still loving New England, would he tarry there, or, as inspector of
+woods and forests in some far-away island of the southern sea, some
+hazy strip of distance seen from Florida, would he taste the tropics?
+He meditated all the chances, without immediately deciding. Gathering up
+his household gods, he passed out of the Old Manse as its heir entered,
+and before the end of summer was domesticated in the custom-house of his
+native town of Salem. This was in the year 1846. Upon leaving the
+Old Manse he published the _Mosses_, announcing that it was the
+last collection of tales he should put forth. Those who knew him and
+recognized his value to our literature trembled lest this was the last
+word from one who spoke only pearls and rubies. It was a foolish fear.
+The sun must shine, the sea must roll, the bird must sing, and the
+poet write. During his life in Salem, of which the introduction to _The
+Scarlet Letter_ describes the official aspect, he wrote that romance.
+It is inspired by the spirit of the place. It presents more vividly than
+any history the gloomy picturesqueness of early New England life. There
+is no strain in our literature so characteristic or more real than that
+which Hawthorne had successfully attempted in several of his earlier
+sketches, and of which _The Scarlet Letter_ is the great triumph. It
+became immediately popular, and directly placed the writer of stories
+for a small circle among the world's masters of romance.
+
+Times meanwhile changed, and presidents with them. General Taylor was
+elected, and the Salem collector retired. It is one of the romantic
+points of Hawthorne's quiet life that its changes have been so
+frequently determined by political events, which, more than all others,
+are the most entirely foreign to his tastes and habits. He retired
+to the hills of Berkshire, the eye of the world now regarding his
+movements. There he lived a year or two in a little red cottage upon the
+"Stockbridge Bowl", as a small lake near that town is called. In this
+retreat he wrote _The House of the Seven Gables_, which more deeply
+confirmed the literary position already acquired for him by the first
+romance. The scene is laid in Salem, as if he could not escape a strange
+fascination in the witch-haunted town of our early history. It is the
+same black canvas upon which plays the rainbow-flash of his fancy,
+never, in its brightest moment, more than illuminating the gloom. This
+marks all his writings. They have a terrible beauty, like the siren, and
+their fascination is as sure.
+
+After six years of absence Hawthorne returned to Concord, where he
+purchased a small house formerly occupied by Orphic Alcott. When that
+philosopher came into possession it was a miserable little house of
+two peaked gables. But the genius which recreated itself in devising
+graceful summer-houses, like that for Mr. Emerson, already noticed, soon
+smoothed the new residence into some kind of comeliness. It was an old
+house when Mr. Alcott entered it, but his tasteful finger touched it
+with picturesque grace.
+
+Not like a tired old drudge of a house, rusting into unhonored decay,
+but with a modest freshness that does not belie the innate sobriety of
+a venerable New England farm-house, the present residence of our author
+stands, withdrawn a few yards from the high-road to Boston, along which
+marched the British soldiers to Concord bridge. It lies at the foot of a
+wooded hill, a neat house of a "rusty olive hue", with a porch in
+front, and a central peak, and a piazza at each end. The genius for
+summer-houses has had full play upon the hill behind. Here, upon the
+homely steppes of Concord, is a strain of Persia. Mr. Alcott built
+terraces and arbors and pavilions of boughs and rough stems of trees,
+revealing--somewhat inadequately, perhaps--the hanging gardens of
+delight that adorn the Babylon of his orphic imagination. The hill-side
+is no unapt emblem of his intellectual habit, which garnishes the arid
+commonplaces of life with a cold poetic aurora, forgetting that it is
+the inexorable law of light to deform as well as adorn. Treating life as
+a grand epic poem, the philosophic Alcott forgets that Homer must nod
+or we should all fall asleep. The world would not be very beautiful nor
+interesting if it were all one huge summit of Mont Blanc.
+
+Unhappily, the terraced hill-side, like the summer-house upon Mr.
+Emerson's lawn, "lacks technical arrangement", and the wild winds play
+with these architectural toys of fancy, like lions with humming-birds.
+They are gradually falling, shattered, and disappearing. Fine
+locust-trees shade them and ornament the hill with perennial beauty.
+The hanging gardens of Semiramis were not more fragrant than Hawthorne's
+hill-side during the June blossoming of the locusts. A few young elms,
+some white-pines and young oaks, complete the catalogue of trees. A
+light breeze constantly fans the brow of the hill, making harps of the
+tree-tops and singing to our author, who, "with a book in my hand, or
+an unwritten book in my thoughts", lies stretched beneath them in the
+shade.
+
+From the height of the hill the eye courses, unrestrained, over the
+solitary landscape of Concord, broad and still, broken only by the
+slight wooded undulations of insignificant hillocks. The river is not
+visible, nor any gleam of lake. Walden Pond is just behind the wood in
+front, and not far away over the meadows sluggishly steals the river. It
+is the most quiet of prospects. Eight acres of good land lie in front of
+the house, across the road, and in the rear the estate extends a little
+distance over the brow of the hill.
+
+This latter is not good garden-ground, but it yields that other crop
+which the poet "gathers in a song". Perhaps the world will forgive
+our author that he is not a prize farmer, and makes but an indifferent
+figure at the annual cattle-show. We have seen that he is more nomadic
+than agricultural. He has wandered from spot to spot, pitching a
+temporary tent, then striking it for "fresh fields and pastures new".
+It is natural, therefore, that he should call his house "The Wayside"--a
+bench upon the road where he sits for a while before passing on. If
+the wayfarer finds him upon that bench he shall have rare pleasure in
+sitting with him, yet shudder while he stays. For the pictures of our
+poet have more than the shadows of Rembrandt. If you listen to his
+story, the lonely pastures and dull towns of our dear old homely New
+England shall become suddenly as radiant with grace and terrible with
+tragedy as any country and any time. The waning afternoon in Concord,
+in which the blue-frocked farmers are reaping and hoeing, shall set
+in pensive glory. The woods will forever after be haunted with strange
+forms. You will hear whispers and music "i' the air". In the softest
+morning you will suspect sadness; in the most fervent noon a nameless
+terror. It is because the imagination of our author treads the almost
+imperceptible line between the natural and the supernatural. We are all
+conscious of striking it sometimes. But we avoid it. We recoil and hurry
+away, nor dare to glance over our shoulders lest we should see phantoms.
+What are these tales of supernatural appearances, as well authenticated
+as any news of the day--and what is the sphere which they imply? What is
+the more subtle intellectual apprehension of fate and its influence
+upon imagination and life? Whatever it is, it is the mystery of the
+fascination of these tales. They converse with that dreadful realm as
+with our real world. The light of our sun is poured by genius upon the
+phantoms we did not dare to contemplate, and lo! they are ourselves,
+unmasked, and playing our many parts. An unutterable sadness seizes the
+reader as the inevitable black thread appears. For here genius assures
+us what we trembled to suspect, but could not avoid suspecting, that the
+black thread is inwoven with all forms of life, with all development of
+character.
+
+It is for this peculiarity, which harmonizes so well with ancient
+places, whose pensive silence seems the trance of memory musing over the
+young and lovely life that illuminated its lost years--that Hawthorne is
+so intimately associated with the Old Manse. Yet that was but the tent
+of a night for him. Already, with the _Blithedale Romance_, which
+is dated from Concord, a new interest begins to cluster around "The
+Wayside".
+
+I know not how I can more fitly conclude these reminiscences of Concord
+and Hawthorne, whose own stories have always a saddening close, than by
+relating an occurrence which blighted to many hearts the beauty of
+the quiet Concord river, and seemed not inconsistent with its lonely
+landscape. It has the further fitness of typifying the operation of our
+author's imagination: a tranquil stream, clear and bright with sunny
+gleams, crowned with lilies and graceful with swaying grass, yet doing
+terrible deeds inexorably, and therefore forever after of a shadowed
+beauty.
+
+Martha was the daughter of a plain Concord farmer, a girl of delicate
+and shy temperament, who excelled so much in study that she was sent
+to a fine academy in a neighboring town, and won all the honors of
+the course. She met at the school, and in the society of the place,
+a refinement and cultivation, a social gayety and grace, which were
+entirely unknown in the hard life she had led at home, and which by
+their very novelty, as well as because they harmonized with her own
+nature and dreams, were doubly beautiful and fascinating. She enjoyed
+this life to the full, while her timidity kept her only a spectator;
+and she ornamented it with a fresher grace, suggestive of the woods and
+fields, when she ventured to engage in the airy game. It was a sphere
+for her capacities and talents. She shone in it, and the consciousness
+of a true position and general appreciation gave her the full use of
+all her powers. She admired and was admired. She was surrounded by
+gratifications of taste, by the stimulants and rewards of ambition. The
+world was happy, and she was worthy to live in it. But at times a cloud
+suddenly dashed athwart the sun--a shadow stole, dark and chill, to the
+very edge of the charmed circle in which she stood. She knew well what
+it was and what it foretold, but she would not pause nor heed. The sun
+shone again; the future smiled; youth, beauty, and all gentle hopes and
+thoughts bathed the moment in lambent light.
+
+But school-days ended at last, and with the receding town in which they
+had been passed the bright days of life disappeared, and forever. It
+is probable that the girl's fancy had been fed, perhaps indiscreetly
+pampered, by her experience there. But it was no fairy-land. It was an
+academy town in New England, and the fact that it was so alluring is a
+fair indication of the kind of life from which she had emerged, and to
+which she now returned. What could she do? In the dreary round of petty
+details, in the incessant drudgery of a poor farmer's household, with no
+companions of any sympathy--for the family of a hard-working New England
+farmer are not the Chloes and Clarissas of pastoral poetry, nor are
+cow-boys Corydons--with no opportunity of retirement and cultivation,
+for reading and studying--which is always voted "stuff" under such
+circumstances--the light suddenly quenched out of life, what was she to
+do?
+
+"Adapt herself to her circumstances. Why had she shot from her sphere in
+this silly way?" demands unanimous common-sense in valiant heroics.
+
+The simple answer is, that she had only used all her opportunities, and
+that, although it was no fault of hers that the routine of her life
+was in every way repulsive, she did struggle to accommodate herself to
+it--and failed. When she found it impossible to drag on at home, she
+became an inmate of a refined and cultivated household in the village,
+where she had opportunity to follow her own fancies, and to associate
+with educated and attractive persons. But even here she could not escape
+the feeling that it was all temporary, that her position was one of
+dependence; and her pride, now grown morbid, often drove her from the
+very society which alone was agreeable to her. This was all genuine.
+There was not the slightest strain of the _femme incomprise_ in her
+demeanor. She was always shy and silent, with a touching reserve which
+won interest and confidence, but left also a vague sadness in the mind
+of the observer. After a few months she made another effort to rend the
+cloud which was gradually darkening around her, and opened a school for
+young children. But although the interest of friends secured for her a
+partial success, her gravity and sadness failed to excite the sympathy
+of her pupils, who missed in her the playful gayety always most winning
+to children. Martha, however, pushed bravely on, a figure of tragic
+sobriety to all who watched her course. The farmers thought her a
+strange girl, and wondered at the ways of a farmer's daughter who was
+not content to milk cows and churn butter and fry pork, without further
+hope or thought. The good clergyman of the town, interested in her
+situation, sought a confidence she did not care to bestow, and so,
+doling out a, b, c, to a wild group of boys and girls, she found that
+she could not untie the Gordian knot of her life, and felt, with terror,
+that it must be cut.
+
+One summer evening she left her father's house and walked into the
+fields alone. Night came, but Martha did not return. The family became
+anxious, inquired if any one had noticed the direction in which she
+went, learned from the neighbors that she was not visiting, that
+there was no lecture or meeting to detain her, and wonder passed into
+apprehension. Neighbors went into the adjacent woods and called, but
+received no answer. Every instant the awful shadow of some dread event
+solemnized the gathering groups. Every one thought what no one dared
+whisper, until a low voice suggested "the river". Then, with the
+swiftness of certainty, all friends, far and near, were roused, and
+thronged along the banks of the stream. Torches flashed in boats that
+put off in the terrible search. Hawthorne, then living in the Old Manse,
+was summoned, and the man whom the villagers had only seen at morning
+as a musing spectre in his garden, now appeared among them at night
+to devote his strong arm and steady heart to their service. The boats
+drifted slowly down the stream--the torches flared strangely upon
+the black repose of the water, and upon the long, slim grasses that,
+weeping, fringed the marge. Upon both banks silent and awe-stricken
+crowds hastened along, eager and dreading to find the slightest trace of
+what they sought. Suddenly they came upon a few articles of dress, heavy
+with the night-dew. No one spoke, for no one had doubted the result. It
+was clear that Martha had strayed to the river and quietly asked of its
+stillness the repose she sought. The boats gathered around the spot.
+With every implement that could be of service the melancholy search
+began. Long intervals of fearful silence ensued, but at length, towards
+midnight, the sweet face of the dead girl was raised more placidly to
+the stars than ever it had been to the sun.
+
+ "Oh! is it weed or fish or floating hair--
+  A tress o' golden hair,
+  O' drowned maiden's hair,
+    Above the nets at sea?
+  Was never salmon yet that shone so fair
+    Among the stakes on Dee."
+
+So ended a village tragedy. The reader may possibly find in it the
+original of the thrilling conclusion of the _Blithedale Romance_, and
+learn anew that dark as is the thread with which Hawthorne weaves his
+spells, it is no darker than those with which tragedies are spun, even
+in regions apparently so torpid as Concord.
+
+
+
+
+THE WORKS OF NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
+
+
+The traveller by the Eastern Railroad, from Boston, reaches in less than
+an hour the old town of Salem, Massachusetts. It is chiefly composed
+of plain wooden houses, but it has a quaint air of past provincial
+grandeur, and has indeed been an important commercial town. The first
+American ship for Calcutta and China sailed from this port; and Salem
+ships opened our trade with New Holland and the South Seas. But its
+glory has long since departed, with that of its stately and respectable
+neighbors, Newburyport and Portsmouth. There is still, however, a
+custom-house in Salem, there are wharves and chandlers' shops and a
+faint show of shipping and an air of marine capacity which no apparent
+result justifies. It sits upon the shore like an antiquated sea-captain,
+grave and silent, in tarpaulin and duck trousers, idly watching the
+ocean upon which he will never sail again.
+
+But this touching aspect of age and lost prosperity merely serves to
+deepen the peculiar impression of the old city, which is not derived
+from its former commercial importance, but from other associations.
+Salem village was a famous place in the Puritan annals. The tragedy of
+the witchcraft tortures and murders has cast upon it a ghostly spell,
+from which it seems never to have escaped; and even the sojourner of
+to-day, as he loiters along the shore in the sunniest morning of June,
+will sometimes feel an icy breath in the air, chilling the very marrow
+of his bones. Nor is he consoled by being told that it is only the east
+wind; for he cannot help believing that an invisible host of Puritan
+spectres have breathed upon him, revengeful, as he poached upon their
+ancient haunts.
+
+The Puritan spirit was neither gracious nor lovely, but nothing softer
+than its iron hand could have done its necessary work. The Puritan
+character was narrow, intolerant, and exasperating. The forefathers were
+very "sour" in the estimation of Morton and his merry company at Mount
+Wollaston. But for all that, Bradstreet and Carver and Winthrop were
+better forefathers than the gay Morton, and the Puritan spirit is
+doubtless the moral influence of modern civilization, both in Old and
+New England. By the fruit let the seed be judged. The State to whose
+rough coast the _Mayflower_ came, and in which the Pilgrim spirit
+has been most active, is to-day the chief of all human societies,
+politically, morally, and socially. It is the community in which the
+average of well-being is higher than in any State we know in history.
+Puritan though it be, it is more truly liberal and free than any large
+community in the world. But it had bleak beginnings. The icy shore,
+the sombre pines, the stealthy savages, the hard soil, the unbending
+religious austerity, the Scriptural severity, the arrogant virtues, the
+angry intolerance of contradiction--they all made a narrow strip of sad
+civilization between the pitiless sea and the remorseless forests. The
+moral and physical tenacity which is wrestling with the Rebellion
+was toughened among these flinty and forbidding rocks. The fig, the
+pomegranate, and the almond would not grow there, nor the nightingale
+sing; but nobler men than its children the sun never shone upon, nor has
+the heart of man heard sweeter music than the voices of James Otis and
+Samuel Adams. Think of Plymouth in 1620, and of Massachusetts to-day!
+Out of strength came forth sweetness.
+
+With some of the darkest passages in Puritan history this old town of
+Salem, which dozes apparently with the most peaceful conscience in the
+world, is identified, and while its Fourth of July bells were joyfully
+ringing sixty years ago Nathaniel Hathorne was born. He subsequently
+chose to write the name Hawthorne, because he thought he had discovered
+that it was the original spelling. In the introduction to _The Scarlet
+Letter_, Hawthorne speaks of his ancestors as coming from Europe in the
+seventeenth century, and establishing themselves in Salem, where they
+served the State and propitiated Heaven by joining in the persecution
+of Quakers and witches. The house known as the Witch House is still
+standing on the corner of Summer and Essex streets. It was built in 1642
+by Captain George Corwin, and here in 1692 many of the unfortunates who
+were palpably guilty of age and ugliness were examined by the Honorable
+Jonathan Curwin, Major Gedney, Captain John Higginson, and John Hathorn,
+Esquire.
+
+The name of this last worthy occurs in one of the first and most famous
+of the witch trials, that of "Goodwife Gory", in March, 1692, only a
+month after the beginning of the delusion at the house of the minister
+Parris. Goodwife Gory was accused by ten children, of whom Elizabeth
+Parris was one; they declared that they were pinched by her and
+strangled, and that she brought them a book to sign. "Mr. Hathorn,
+a magistrate of Salem", says Robert Calef, in _More Wonders of the
+Invisible World_, "asked her why she afflicted these children. She said
+she did not afflict them. He asked her who did then. She said, I do not
+know; how should I know? She said they were poor, distracted creatures,
+and no heed ought to be given to what they said. Mr. Hathorn and Mr.
+Noyes replied, that it was the judgment of all that were there present
+that they were bewitched, and only she (the accused) said they were
+distracted. She was accused by them that the _black man_ whispered to
+her in her ear now (while she was upon examination), and that she had a
+yellow bird that did use to suck between her fingers, and that the said
+bird did suck now in the assembly." John Hathorn and Jonathan
+Curwin were "the Assistants" of Salem village, and held most of the
+examinations and issued the warrants. Justice Hathorn was very swift in
+judgment, holding every accused person guilty in every particular.
+When poor Jonathan Gary of Charlestown attended his wife charged with
+witchcraft before Justice Hathorn, he requested that he might hold one
+of her hands, "but it was denied me. Then she desired me to wipe the
+tears from her eyes and the sweat from her face, which I did; then she
+desired that she might lean herself on me, saying she should faint.
+Justice Hathorn replied, she had strength enough to torment these
+persons, and she should have strength enough to stand. I speaking
+something against their cruel proceedings, they commanded me to be
+silent, or else I should be turned out of the room". What a piteous
+picture of the awful colonial inquisition and the village Torquemada!
+What a grim portrait of an ancestor to hang in your memory, and to trace
+your kindred to!
+
+Hawthorne's description of his ancestors in the Introduction to _The
+Scarlet Letter_ is very delightful. As their representative, he declares
+that he takes shame to himself for their sake, on account of these
+relentless persecutions; but he thinks them earnest and energetic.
+"From father to son, for above a hundred years, they followed the sea;
+a gray-headed ship-master, in each generation, retiring from the
+quarter-deck to the homestead, while a boy of fourteen took the
+hereditary place before the mast, confronting the salt spray and the
+gale, which had blustered against his sire and grand-sire. The boy
+also, in due time, passed from the forecastle to the cabin, spent a
+tempestuous manhood, and returned from his world-wanderings, to grow
+old, and die, and mingle his dust with the natal earth." Not all,
+however, for the last of the line of sailors, Captain Nathaniel
+Hathorne, who married Elizabeth Clarke Manning, died at Calcutta after
+the birth of three children, a boy and two girls. The house in which
+the boy was born is still standing upon Union Street, which leads to the
+Long Wharf, the chief seat of the old foreign trade of Salem. The next
+house, with a back entrance on Union Street, is the Manning house, where
+many years of the young Hawthorne's life were spent in the care of his
+uncle, Robert Manning. He lived often upon an estate belonging to his
+mother's family, in the town of Raymond, near Sebago Lake, in Maine. The
+huge house there was called Manning's Folly, and is now said to be used
+as a meeting-house. His uncle sent Hawthorne to Bowdoin College, where
+he graduated in 1825. A correspondent of the Boston _Daily Advertiser_,
+writing from Bowdoin at the late commencement, says that he had recently
+found "in an old drawer" some papers which proved to be the manuscript
+"parts" of the students at the Junior exhibition of 1824; among them was
+Hawthorne's "De Patribus Conscriptis Romanorum". "It is quite brief,"
+writes the correspondent, "but is really curious as perhaps the only
+college exercise in existence of the great tragic writer of our day
+(has there been a greater since Shakespeare?). The last sentence is
+as follows (note the words which I put in italics): 'Augustus equidem
+antiquam magnificentiam patribus reddidit, _sed fulgor tantum fuit
+sine fervore_. Nunquam in republica senatoribus potestas recuperata,
+postremum species etiam amissa est.' On the same occasion Longfellow had
+the salutatory oration in Latin--'Oratio Latina; Anglici Poetae.'"
+
+Hawthorne has given us a charming glimpse of himself as a college boy
+in the letter to his fellow-student, Horatio Bridge, of the Navy, whose
+_Journal of an African Cruiser_ he afterwards edited. "I know not whence
+your faith came; but while we were lads together at a country college,
+gathering blueberries, in study-hours, under those tall academic pines;
+or watching the great logs as they tumbled along the current of the
+Androscoggin; or shooting pigeons and gray squirrels in the woods; or
+bat-fowling in the summer twilight; or catching trouts in that shadowy
+little stream which, I suppose, is still wandering riverward through the
+forest--though you and I will never cast a line in it again--two idle
+lads, in short (as we need not fear to acknowledge now), doing a hundred
+things that the faculty never heard of, or else it had been the worse
+for us,--still it was your prognostic of your friend's destiny that he
+was to be a writer of fiction." From this sylvan university Hawthorne
+came home to Salem; "as if," he wrote later, "Salem were for me the
+inevitable centre of the universe."
+
+The old witch-hanging city had no weirder product than this dark-haired
+son. He has certainly given it an interest which it must otherwise have
+lacked; but he speaks of it with small affection, considering that his
+family had lived there for two centuries. "An unjoyous attachment," he
+calls it. And, to tell the truth, there was evidently little love lost
+between the little city and its most famous citizen. Stories still float
+in the social gossip of the town, which represent the shy author
+as inaccessible to all invitations to dinner and tea; and while
+the pleasant circle awaited his coming in the drawing-room, the
+impracticable man was--at least so runs the tale--quietly hobnobbing
+with companions to whom his fame was unknown. Those who coveted him as
+a phoenix could never get him, while he gave himself freely to those
+who saw in him only a placid barn-door fowl. The sensitive youth was a
+recluse, upon whose imagination had fallen the gloomy mystery of Puritan
+life and character. Salem was the inevitable centre of his universe
+more truly than he thought. The mind of Justice Hathorn's descendant
+was bewitched by the fascination of a certain devilish subtlety working
+under the comeliest aspects in human affairs. It overcame him with
+strange sympathy. It colored and controlled his intellectual life.
+
+Devoted all day to lonely reverie and musing upon the obscurer spiritual
+passages of the life whose monuments he constantly encountered, that
+musing became inevitably morbid. With the creative instinct of the
+artist, he wrote the wild fancies into form as stories, many of which,
+when written, he threw into the fire. Then, after nightfall, stealing
+out from his room into the silent streets of Salem, and shadowy as the
+ghosts with which to his susceptible imagination the dusky town was
+thronged, he glided beneath the house in which the witch-trials were
+held, or across the moonlit hill upon which the witches were hung, until
+the spell was complete. Nor can we help fancying that, after the murder
+of old Mr. White in Salem, which happened within a few years after
+his return from college, which drew from Mr. Webster his most famous
+criminal plea, and filled a shadowy corner of every museum in New
+England, as every shivering little man of that time remembers, with an
+awful reproduction of the scene in wax-figures, with real sheets on the
+bed, and the murderer, in a glazed cap, stooping over to deal the fatal
+blow--we cannot help fancying that the young recluse who walked by
+night, the wizard whom as yet none knew, hovered about the house, gazing
+at the windows of the fatal chamber, and listening in horror for the
+faint whistle of the confederate in another street.
+
+Three years after he graduated, in 1828, he published anonymously a
+slight romance with the motto from Southey, "Wilt thou go with me?"
+Hawthorne never acknowledged the book, and it is now seldom found; but
+it shows plainly the natural bent of his mind. It is a dim, dreamy tale,
+such as a Byron-struck youth of the time might have written, except for
+that startling self-possession of style and cold analysis of passion,
+rather than sympathy with it, which showed no imitation, but remarkable
+original power. The same lurid gloom overhangs it that shadows all his
+works. It is uncanny; the figures of the romance are not persons, they
+are passions, emotions, spiritual speculations. So the _Twice-told
+Tales_ that seem at first but the pleasant fancies of a mild recluse,
+gradually hold the mind with a Lamia-like fascination; and the author
+says truly of them, in the Preface of 1851, "Even in what purport to be
+pictures of actual life, we have allegory not always so warmly dressed
+in its habiliments of flesh and blood as to be taken into the reader's
+mind without a shiver." There are sunny gleams upon the pages, but a
+strange, melancholy chill pervades the book. In "The Wedding Knell",
+"The Minister's Black Veil", "The Gentle Boy", "Wakefield", "The
+Prophetic Pictures", "The Hollow of the Three Hills", "Dr. Heidegger's
+Experiment", "The Ambitious Guest", "The White Old Maid", "Edward
+Fane's Rose-bud", "The Lily's Quest"--or in the "Legends of the Province
+House", where the courtly provincial state of governors and ladies
+glitters across the small, sad New England world, whose very baldness
+jeers it to scorn--there is the same fateful atmosphere in which Goody
+Cloyse might at any moment whisk by upon her broomstick, and in which
+the startled heart stands still with unspeakable terror.
+
+The spell of mysterious horror which kindled Hawthorne's imagination
+was a test of the character of his genius. The mind of this child
+of witch-haunted Salem loved to hover between the natural and the
+supernatural, and sought to tread the almost imperceptible and doubtful
+line of contact. He instinctively sketched the phantoms that have the
+figures of men, but are not human; the elusive, shadowy scenery which,
+like that of Gustave Doré's pictures, is Nature sympathizing in her
+forms and aspects with the emotions of terror or awe which the tale
+excites. His genius broods entranced over the evanescent phantasmagoria
+of the vague debatable land in which the realities of experience blend
+with ghostly doubts and wonders.
+
+But from its poisonous flowers what a wondrous perfume he distilled!
+Through his magic reed, into what penetrating melody he blew that
+deathly air! His relentless fancy seemed to seek a sin that was
+hopeless, a cruel despair that no faith could throw off. Yet his naïve
+and well-poised genius hung over the gulf of blackness, and peered into
+the pit with the steady nerve and simple face of a boy. The mind of
+the reader follows him with an aching wonder and admiration, as the
+bewildered old mother forester watched Undine's gambols. As Hawthorne
+describes Miriam in _The Marble Faun_, so may the character of his
+genius be most truly indicated. Miriam, the reader will remember, turns
+to Hilda and Kenyon for sympathy. "Yet it was to little purpose that
+she approached the edge of the voiceless gulf between herself and them.
+Standing on the utmost verge of that dark chasm, she might stretch out
+her hand and never clasp a hand of theirs; she might strive to call out
+'Help, friends! help!' but, as with dreamers when they shout, her voice
+would perish inaudibly in the remoteness that seemed such a little way.
+This perception of an infinite, shivering solitude, amid which we cannot
+come close enough to human beings to be warmed by them, and where they
+turn to cold, chilly shapes of mist, is one of the most forlorn results
+of any accident, misfortune, crime, or peculiarity of character, that
+puts an individual ajar with the world."
+
+Thus it was because the early New England life made so much larger
+account of the supernatural element than any other modern civilized
+society, that the man whose blood had run in its veins instinctively
+turned to it. But beyond this alluring spell of its darker and obscurer
+individual experience, it seems neither to have touched his imagination
+nor even to have aroused his interest. To Walter Scott the romance of
+feudalism was precious for the sake of feudalism itself, in which
+he believed with all his soul, and for that of the heroic old feudal
+figures which he honored. He was a Tory in every particle of his
+frame, and his genius made him the poet of Toryism. But Hawthorne had
+apparently no especial political, religious, or patriotic affinity
+with the spirit which inspired him. It was solely a fascination of the
+intellect. And although he is distinctively the poet of the Puritans,
+although it is to his genius that we shall always owe that image of them
+which the power of The Scarlet Letter has imprinted upon literature,
+and doubtless henceforth upon historical interpretation, yet what an
+imperfect picture of that life it is! All its stern and melancholy
+romance is there--its picturesque gloom and intense passion; but upon
+those quivering pages, as in every passage of his stories drawn from
+that spirit, there seems to be wanting a deep, complete, sympathetic
+appreciation of the fine moral heroism, the spiritual grandeur, which
+overhung that gloomy life, as a delicate purple mist suffuses in summer
+twilights the bald crags of the crystal hills. It is the glare of the
+scarlet letter itself, and all that it luridly reveals and weirdly
+implies, which produced the tale. It was not beauty in itself nor
+deformity, not virtue nor vice, which engaged the author's deepest
+sympathy. It was the occult relation between the two. Thus while the
+Puritans were of all men pious, it was the instinct of Hawthorne's
+genius to search out and trace with terrible tenacity the dark and
+devious thread of sin in their lives.
+
+Human life and character, whether in New England two hundred years ago
+or in Italy to-day, interested him only as they were touched by this
+glamour of sombre spiritual mystery; and the attraction pursued him in
+every form in which it appeared. It is as apparent in the most perfect
+of his smaller tales, _Rappaccini's Daughter_, as in _The Scarlet
+Letter, The Blithedale Romance, The House of the Seven Gables_, and _The
+Marble Faun_. You may open almost at random, and you are as sure to find
+it as to hear the ripple in Mozart's music, or the pathetic minor in a
+Neapolitan melody. Take, for instance, The _Birth-Mark_, which we might
+call the best of the smaller stories, if we had not just said the
+same thing of _Rappaccini's Daughter_--for so even and complete is
+Hawthorne's power, that, with few exceptions, each work of his, like
+Benvenuto's, seems the most characteristic and felicitous. In this
+story, a scholar marries a beautiful woman, upon whose face is a mark
+which has hitherto seemed to be only a greater charm. Yet in one so
+lovely the husband declares that, although it is the slightest possible
+defect, it is yet the mark of earthly imperfection, and he proceeds to
+lavish all the resources of science to procure its removal. But it
+will not disappear; and at last he tells her that the crimson hand "has
+clutched its grasp" into her very being, and that there is mortal danger
+in trying the only means of removal that remains. She insists that
+it shall be tried. It succeeds; but it removes the stain and her life
+together. So in _Rappaccini's Daughter_. The old philosopher nourishes
+his beautiful child upon the poisonous breath of a flower. She loves,
+and her lover is likewise bewitched. In trying to break the spell,
+she drinks an antidote which kills her. The point of interest in both
+stories is the subtile connection, in the first, between the beauty
+of Georgiana and the taint of the birth-mark; and, in the second, the
+loveliness of Beatrice and the poison of the blossom.
+
+This, also, is the key of his last romance, _The Marble Faun_, one of
+the most perfect works of art in literature, whose marvellous spell
+begins with the very opening words: "Four individuals, in whose fortunes
+we should be glad to interest the reader, happened to be standing in one
+of the saloons of the sculpture-gallery in the Capitol at Rome." When
+these words are read, the mind familiar with Hawthorne is already
+enthralled. "What a journey is beginning, not a step of which is
+trodden, and yet the heart palpitates with apprehension! Through what
+delicate, rosy lights of love, and soft, shimmering humor, and hopes and
+doubts and vanishing delights, that journey will proceed, on and on into
+utter gloom." And it does so, although "Hilda had a hopeful soul, and
+saw sunlight on the mountain-tops". It does so, because Miriam and
+Donatello are the figures which interest us most profoundly, and they
+are both lost in the shadow. Donatello, indeed, is the true centre of
+interest, as he is one of the most striking creations of genius. But the
+perplexing charm of Donatello, what is it but the doubt that does not
+dare to breathe itself, the appalled wonder whether, if the breeze
+should lift those clustering locks a little higher, he would prove to be
+faun or man? It never does lift them; the doubt is never solved, but
+it is always suggested. The mystery of a partial humanity, morally
+irresponsible but humanly conscious, haunts the entrancing page. It
+draws us irresistibly on. But as the cloud closes around the lithe
+figure of Donatello, we hear again from its hidden folds the words of
+"The Birth-Mark": "Thus ever does the gross fatality of earth exult in
+its invariable triumph over the immortal essence, which, in this dim
+sphere of half-development, demands the completeness of a higher state".
+Or still more sadly, the mysterious youth, half vanishing from our
+sympathy, seems to murmur, with Beatrice Rappaccini, "And still as she
+spoke, she kept her hand upon her heart,--'Wherefore didst thou inflict
+this miserable doom upon thy child?'"
+
+We have left the story of Hawthorne's life sadly behind. But his
+life had no more remarkable events than holding office in the Boston
+Customhouse under Mr. Bancroft as collector; working for some time
+with the Brook--Farmers, from whom he soon separated, not altogether
+amicably; marrying and living in the Old Manse at Concord; returning
+to the Custom-house in Salem as surveyor; then going to Lenox, in
+Berkshire, where he lived in what he called "the ugliest little old
+red farm-house that you ever saw", and where the story is told of his
+shyness, that, if he saw anybody coming along the road whom he must
+probably pass, he would jump over the wall into the pasture, and so give
+the stranger a wide berth; back again to Concord; then to Liverpool as
+consul; travelling in Europe afterwards, and home at last and forever,
+to "The Wayside" under the Concord hill. "The hillside," he wrote to a
+friend in 1852, "is covered chiefly with locust-trees, which come into
+luxuriant blossom in the month of June, and look and smell very sweetly,
+intermixed with a few young elms and some white-pines and infant oaks,
+the whole forming rather a thicket than a wood. Nevertheless, there is
+some very good shade to be found there; I spend delectable hours there
+in the hottest part of the day, stretched out at my lazy length with
+a book in my hand or an unwritten book in my thoughts. There is almost
+always a breeze stirring along the side or the brow of the hill."
+
+It is not strange, certainly, that a man such as has been described, of
+a morbid shyness, the path of whose genius diverged always out of
+the sun into the darkest shade, and to whom human beings were merely
+psychological phenomena, should have been accounted ungenial,
+and sometimes even hard, cold, and perverse. From the bent of his
+intellectual temperament it happens that in his simplest and sweetest
+passages he still seems to be studying and curiously observing, rather
+than sympathizing. You cannot help feeling constantly that the author is
+looking askance both at his characters and you, the reader; and many a
+young and fresh mind is troubled strangely by his books, as if it
+were aware of a half-Mephistophelean smile upon the page. Nor is this
+impression altogether removed by the remarkable familiarity of his
+personal disclosures. There was never a man more shrinkingly retiring,
+yet surely never was an author more naively frank. He is willing that
+you should know all that a man may fairly reveal of himself. The great
+interior story he does not tell, of course, but the Introduction to the
+_Mosses from an Old Manse_, the opening chapter of _The Scarlet Letter_,
+and the _Consular Experiences_, with much of the rest of _Our Old Home_,
+are as intimate and explicit chapters of autobiography as can be found.
+Nor would it be easy to find anywhere a more perfect idyl than that
+introductory chapter of the _Mosses_. Its charm is perennial and
+indescribable; and why should it not be, since it was written at a
+time in which, as he says, "I was happy?" It is, perhaps, the most
+softly-hued and exquisite work of his pen. So the sketch of "The
+Custom-house", although prefatory to that most tragically powerful of
+romances,
+
+_The Scarlet Letter_, is an incessant play of the shyest and most airy
+humor. It is like the warbling of bobolinks before a thunder-burst. How
+many other men, however unreserved with the pen, would be likely to
+dare to paint, with the fidelity of Teniers and the simplicity of Fra
+Angelico, a picture of the office and the companions in which and with
+whom they did their daily work? The surveyor of customs in the port of
+Salem treated the town of Salem, in which he lived and discharged his
+daily task, as if it had been, with all its people, as vague and remote
+a spot as the town of which he was about to treat in the story. He
+commented upon the place and the people as modern travellers in Pompeii
+discuss the ancient town. It made a great scandal. He was accused of
+depicting with unpardonable severity worthy folks, whose friends were
+sorely pained and indignant. But he wrote such sketches as he wrote his
+stories. He treated his companions as he treated himself and all the
+personages in history or experience with which he dealt, merely as
+phenomena to be analyzed and described, with no more private malice or
+personal emotion than the sun, which would have photographed them, warts
+and all.
+
+Thus it was that the great currents of human sympathy never swept him
+away. The character of his genius isolated him, and he stood aloof from
+the common interests. Intent upon studying men in certain aspects, he
+cared little for man; and the high tides of collective emotion among
+his fellows left him dry and untouched. So he beholds and describes the
+generous impulse of humanity with sceptical courtesy rather than with
+hopeful cordiality.
+
+He does not chide you if you spend effort and life itself in the ardent
+van of progress, but he asks simply, "Is six so much better than half
+a dozen?" He will not quarrel with you if you expect the millennium
+to-morrow. He only says, with that glimmering smile, "So soon?" Yet in
+all this there was no shadow of spiritual pride. Nay, so far from this,
+that the tranquil and pervasive sadness of all Hawthorne's writings, the
+kind of heartache that they leave behind, seem to spring from the fact
+that his nature was related to the moral world, as his own Donatello was
+to the human. "So alert, so alluring, so noble", muses the heart as
+we climb the Apennines towards the tower of Monte Beni; "alas! is he
+human?" it whispers, with a pang of doubt.
+
+How this directed his choice of subjects, and affected his treatment of
+them, when drawn from early history, we have already seen. It is
+not, therefore, surprising, that the history into which he was born
+interested him only in the same way.
+
+When he went to Europe as consul, _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ was already
+published, and the country shook with the fierce debate which involved
+its life. Yet eight years later Hawthorne wrote with calm ennui, "No
+author, without a trial, can conceive of the difficulty of writing
+a romance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no
+mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a commonplace
+prosperity, in broad and simple daylight, as is happily the case with
+my dear native land." Is crime never romantic, then, until distance
+ennobles it? Or were the tragedies of Puritan life so terrible that the
+imagination could not help kindling, while the pangs of the plantation
+are superficial and commonplace? Charlotte Brontë, Dickens, and
+Thackeray were able to find a shadow even in "merrie England". But
+our great romancer looked at the American life of his time with these
+marvellous eyes, and could see only monotonous sunshine. That the devil,
+in the form of an elderly man clad in grave and decent attire, should
+lead astray the saints of Salem village, two centuries ago, and confuse
+right and wrong in the mind of Goodman Brown, was something that excited
+his imagination, and produced one of his weirdest stories. But that the
+same devil, clad in a sombre sophism, was confusing the sentiment of
+right and wrong in the mind of his own countrymen he did not even
+guess. The monotonous sunshine disappeared in the blackest storm. The
+commonplace prosperity ended in tremendous war. What other man of equal
+power, who was not intellectually constituted precisely as Hawthorne
+was, could have stood merely perplexed and bewildered, harassed by the
+inability of positive sympathy, in the vast conflict which tosses us all
+in its terrible vortex?
+
+In political theories and in an abstract view of war men may differ. But
+this war is not to be dismissed as a political difference. Here is an
+attempt to destroy the government of a country, not because it oppressed
+any man, but because its evident tendency was to secure universal
+justice under law. It is, therefore, a conspiracy against human nature.
+Civilization itself is at stake; and the warm blood of the noblest youth
+is everywhere flowing in as sacred a cause as history records--flowing
+not merely to maintain a certain form of government, but to vindicate
+the rights of human nature. Shall there not be sorrow and pain, if a
+friend is merely impatient or confounded by it--if he sees in it only
+danger or doubt, and not hope for the right--or if he seem to insinuate
+that it would have been better if the war had been avoided, even at
+that countless cost to human welfare by which alone the avoidance was
+possible?
+
+Yet, if the view of Hawthorne's mental constitution which has been
+suggested be correct, this attitude of his, however deeply it may be
+regretted, can hardly deserve moral condemnation. He knew perfectly well
+that if a man has no ear for music he had better not try to sing. But
+the danger with such men is that they are apt to doubt if music itself
+be not a vain delusion. This danger Hawthorne escaped. There is none of
+the shallow persiflage of the sceptic in his tone, nor any affectation
+of cosmopolitan superiority. Mr. Edward Dicey, in his interesting
+reminiscences of Hawthorne, published in _Macmillan's Magazine_,
+illustrates this very happily.
+
+   "To make his position intelligible, let me repeat an anecdote which
+    was told me by a very near friend of his and mine, who had heard it
+    from President Pierce himself. Frank Pierce had been, and was to the
+    day of Hawthorne's death, one of the oldest of his friends. At the
+    time of the Presidential election of 1856, Hawthorne, for once, took
+    part in politics, wrote a pamphlet in favor of his friend, and took
+    a most unusual interest in his success. When the result of the
+    nomination was known, and Pierce was President-elect, Hawthorne was
+    among the first to come and wish him joy. He sat down in the room
+    moodily and silently, as he was wont when anything troubled him; then,
+    without speaking a word, he shook Pierce warmly by the hand, and at
+    last remarked, 'Ah, Frank, what a pity!' The moment the victory was
+    won, that timid, hesitating mind saw the evils of the successful
+    course--the advantages of the one which had not been followed. So it
+    was always. Of two lines of action, he was perpetually in doubt which
+    was the best; and so, between the two, he always inclined to letting
+    things remain as they are.
+
+   "Nobody disliked slavery more cordially than he did; and yet the
+    difficulty of what was to be done with the slaves weighed constantly
+    upon his mind. He told me once that, while he had been consul at
+    Liverpool, a vessel arrived there with a number of negro sailors, who
+    had been brought from slave States, and would, of course, be enslaved
+    again on their return. He fancied that he ought to inform the men of
+    the fact, but then he was stopped by the reflection--who was to
+    provide for them if they became free? and, as he said, with a sigh,
+    'while I was thinking, the vessel sailed.' So, I recollect, on the old
+    battle-field of Manassas, in which I strolled in company with
+    Hawthorne, meeting a batch of runaway slaves--weary, foot-sore,
+    wretched, and helpless beyond conception; we gave them food and wine,
+    some small sums of money, and got them a lift upon a train going
+    northward; but not long afterwards Hawthorne turned to me with the
+    remark, 'I am not sure we were doing right after all. How can these
+    poor beings find food and shelter away from home?' Thus this ingrained
+    and inherent doubt incapacitated him from following any course
+    vigorously. He thought, on the whole, that Wendell Phillips and Lloyd
+    Garrison and the Abolitionists were in the right, but then he was
+    never quite certain that they were not in the wrong after all; so that
+    his advocacy of their cause was of a very uncertain character. He saw
+    the best, to alter slightly the famous Horatian line, but he never
+    could quite make up his mind whether he altogether approved of its
+    wisdom, and therefore followed it but falteringly.
+
+      "'Better to bear those ills we have,
+        Than fly to others that we know not of,'
+
+   "expressed the philosophy to which Hawthorne was thus borne
+    imperceptibly. Unjustly, but yet not unreasonably, he was looked upon
+    as a pro-slavery man, and suspected of Southern sympathies. In
+    politics he was always halting between two opinions; or, rather,
+    holding one opinion, he could never summon up his courage to adhere
+    to it and it only."
+
+The truth is that his own times and their people and their affairs were
+just as shadowy to him as those of any of his stories, and his mind
+held the same curious, half-wistful poise among all the conflicts of
+principle and passion around him, as among those of which he read and
+mused. If you ask why this was so--how it was that the tragedy of an old
+Italian garden, or the sin of a lonely Puritan parish, or the crime of
+a provincial judge, should so stimulate his imagination with romantic
+appeals and harrowing allegories, while either it did not see a Carolina
+slave-pen, or found in it only a tame prosperity--you must take your
+answer in the other question, why he did not weave into any of his
+stories the black and bloody thread of the Inquisition. His genius
+obeyed its law. When he wrote like a disembodied intelligence of
+events with which his neighbors' hearts were quivering--when the same
+half-smile flutters upon his lips in the essay _About War Matters_,
+sketched as it were upon the battle-field, as in that upon _Fire
+Worship_, written in the rural seclusion of the mossy Manse--ah me! it
+is Donatello, in his tower of Monte Beni, contemplating with doubtful
+interest the field upon which the flower of men are dying for an idea.
+Do you wonder, as you see him and hear him, that your heart, bewildered,
+asks and asks again, "Is he human? Is he a man?"
+
+Now that Hawthorne sleeps by the tranquil Concord, upon whose shores the
+Old Manse was his bridal bower, those who knew him chiefly there revert
+beyond the angry hour to those peaceful days. How dear the Old Manse was
+to him he has himself recorded; and in the opening of the _Tanglewood
+Tales_ he pays his tribute to that placid landscape, which will always
+be recalled with pensive tenderness by those who, like him, became
+familiar with it in happy hours. "To me," he writes, "there is a
+peculiar, quiet charm in these broad meadows and gentle eminences. They
+are better than mountains, because they do not stamp and stereotype
+themselves into the brain, and thus grow wearisome with the same strong
+impression, repeated day after day. A few summer weeks among mountains,
+a lifetime among green meadows and placid slopes, with outlines forever
+new, because continually fading out of the memory, such would be my
+sober choice." He used to say, in those days--when, as he was fond of
+insisting, he was the obscurest author in the world, because, although
+he had told his tales twice, nobody cared to listen--that he never
+knew exactly how he contrived to live. But he was then married, and the
+dullest eye could not fail to detect the feminine grace and taste that
+ordered the dwelling, and perceive the tender sagacity that made all
+things possible.
+
+Such was his simplicity and frugality that, when he was left alone for a
+little time in his Arcadia, lie would dismiss "the help", and, with some
+friend of other days who came to share his loneliness, he cooked the
+easy meal, and washed up the dishes. No picture is clearer in the memory
+of a certain writer than that of the magician, in whose presence he
+almost lost his breath, looking at him over a dinner-plate which he was
+gravely wiping in the kitchen, while the handy friend, who had been a
+Western settler, scoured the kettle at the door. Blithedale, where their
+acquaintance had begun, had not allowed either of them to forget how to
+help himself. It was amusing to one who knew this native independence of
+Hawthorne, to hear, some years afterwards, that he wrote the "campaign"
+_Life of Franklin Pierce_ for the sake of getting an office. That such a
+man should do such a work was possibly incomprehensible to those who did
+not know him upon any other supposition, until the fact was known
+that Mr. Pierce was an old and constant friend. Then it was explained.
+Hawthorne asked simply how he could help his friend, and he did the only
+thing he could do for that purpose. But although he passed some years
+in public office, he had neither taste nor talent for political life.
+He owed his offices to works quite other than political. His first and
+second appointments were virtually made by his friend Mr. Bancroft, and
+the third by his friend Mr. Pierce. His claims were perceptible enough
+to friendship, but would hardly have been so to a caucus.
+
+In this brief essay we have aimed only to indicate the general character
+of the genius of Hawthorne, and to suggest a key to his peculiar
+relation to his time. The reader will at once see that it is rather the
+man than the author who has been described; but this has been designedly
+done, for we confess a personal solicitude, shared, we are very sure, by
+many friends of Nathaniel Hawthorne, that there shall not be wanting to
+the future student of his works such light as acquaintance with the
+man may throw upon them, as well as some picture of the impression his
+personality made upon his contemporaries.
+
+Strongly formed, of dark, poetic gravity of aspect, lighted by the deep,
+gleaming eye that recoiled with girlish coyness from contact with your
+gaze; of rare courtesy and kindliness in personal intercourse, yet
+so sensitive that his look and manner can be suggested by the word
+"glimmering;" giving you a sense of restrained impatience to be away;
+mostly silent in society, and speaking always with an appearance of
+effort, but with a lambent light of delicate humor playing over all he
+said in the confidence of familiarity, and firm self-possession under
+all, as if the glimmering manner were only the tremulous surface of the
+sea, Hawthorne was personally known to few, and intimately to very few.
+But no one knew him without loving him, or saw him without remembering
+him; and the name Nathaniel Hawthorne, which, when it was first written,
+was supposed to be fictitious, is now one of the most enduring facts of
+English literature.
+
+
+
+
+RACHEL
+
+
+One evening in Paris, we were strolling through that most Parisian
+spot the Palais Royal, or, as it was called at that moment, the Palais
+National. It was after the revolution of February; but, although the
+place was full of associations with French revolutions, it seemed to
+have no special sympathy with the trouble of the moment, and was as gay
+as the youngest imagination conceives Paris to be. There was a constant
+throng loitering along the arcades; the cafes were lighted and crowded;
+men were smoking, sipping coffee, playing billiards, reading the
+newspapers, discussing the debates in the Chamber and the coming
+"Prophete" of Meyerbeer at the opera; women were chatting together in
+the boutiques, pretty grisettes hurrying home; little blanchisseuses,
+with their neatly-napkinned baskets, tripping among the crowd; strangers
+watched the gay groups, paused at the windows of tailors and jewellers,
+and felt the fascination of Paris. It was the moment of high-tide of
+Parisian life. It was an epitome of Paris, and Paris is an epitome of
+the time and of the world.
+
+At the corner of the Palais Royal is the Comédie Française, and to that
+we were going. There Rachel was playing. There she had recently recited
+the "Marseillaise" to frenzied Paris; and there, in the vestibule,
+genius of French comedy, of French intellect, and of French life, sits
+the wonderful Voltaire of Houdon, the statue which, for the first time,
+after the dreadful portraits which misrepresent him, gives the spectator
+some adequate idea of the personal appearance and impression of the man
+who moulded an age. You can scarcely see the statue without a shudder.
+It is remorseless intellect laid bare. The cold sweetness of the aspect,
+the subtle penetration of the brow, the passionless supremacy of
+a figure which is neither manly nor graceful, fill your mind with
+apprehension and with the conviction that the French Revolution you have
+seen is not the last.
+
+The curtain rises, and Paris and France roll away. A sad, solitary
+figure, like a dream of tragic Greece, glides across the scene. The air
+grows cold and thin, with a sense of the presence of lost antiquity.
+The feeling of fate, vast, resistless, and terrible, rises like a
+suffocating vapor; and the hopeless woe of the face, the pathetic
+dignity of the form, assure you, before she speaks, that this is indeed
+Rachel. The scenery is poor and hard; but its severe outlines and its
+conventional character serve to suggest Greece. The drapery which hangs
+upon Rachel is exquisitely studied from the most perfect statue. There
+is not a fold which is not Greek and graceful, and which does not seem
+obedient to the same law which touches her face with tragedy. As she
+slowly opens her thin lips, your own blanch; and from her melancholy
+eyes all smiles and possibility of joy have utterly passed away. Rachel
+stands alone, a solitary statue of fate and woe.
+
+When she speaks, the low, thrilling, distinct voice seems to proceed
+rather from her eyes than her mouth. It has a wan sound, if we may say
+so. It is the very tone you would have predicted as coming from that
+form, like the unearthly music which accompanies the speech of the
+Commendatore's statue in "Don Giovanni". That appearance and that voice
+are the key of the whole performance. Before she has spoken, you are
+filled with the spirit of an age infinitely remote, and only related
+to human sympathy now by the grandeur of suffering. The rest merely
+confirms that impression. The whole is simple and intense. It is
+conceived and fulfilled in the purest sense of Greek art.
+
+Of the early career and later life of Rachel such romantic stories are
+told and believed that only to see the heroine of her own life would
+be attraction enough to draw the world to Paris. Dr. Vernon, in his
+_Mémoires d'un Bourgeois_, has described her earliest appearance upon
+the Boulevards--her studies, her trials, and her triumph. That triumph
+has been unequalled in stage annals for enthusiasm and permanence. Other
+actors have achieved single successes as brilliant; but no other has
+held for so long the most fickle and fastidious nation thrall to her
+powers; owning no rival near the throne, and ruling with a sway whose
+splendor was only surpassed by its sternness.
+
+For Rachel has never sought to ally her genius to goodness, and has
+rather despised than courted the aid of noble character. Not a lady
+by birth or breeding, she is reported to have surpassed Messalina
+in debauchery and Semiramis in luxury. Paris teems with tales of her
+private life, which, while they are undoubtedly exaggerated, yet serve
+to show the kind of impression her career has produced. Those modern
+Sybarites, the princes and nobles of Russia, are the heroes of her
+private romances; and her sumptuous apartments, if not a Tour de Nesle,
+are at least a bower of Rosamond.
+
+As if to show the independent superiority of her art, she has been
+willing to appear, or she really is, avaricious, mean, jealous,
+passionate, false; and then, by her prodigious power, she has swayed the
+public that so judged her as the wind tosses a leaf. There has, alas,
+been disdain in her superiority. Perhaps Paris has found something
+fascinating in her very contempt, as in the _Mémoires du Diable_ the
+heroine confesses that she loved the ferocity of her lover. Nor is it
+a traditional fame that she has enjoyed; but whenever Rachel plays, the
+theatre is crowded, and the terror and the tears are what they were when
+she began.
+
+Rachel is the greatest of merely dramatic artists. Others are more
+beautiful; others are more stately and imposing; others have been fitted
+by external gifts of nature to personify characters of very marked
+features; others are more graceful and lovely and winning; most others
+mingle their own personality with the characters they assume, but Rachel
+has this final evidence of genius, that she is always superior to
+what she does; her mind presides over her own performances. It is the
+perfection of art. In describing this peculiar supremacy of genius, a
+scholar, in whose early death a poet and philosopher was lost, says of
+Shakespeare: "He sat pensive and alone above the hundred-handed play
+of his imagination." And Fanny Kemble, in her journal, describes a
+conversation upon the stage, in the tomb-scene of "Romeo and Juliet",
+where she, as Juliet, says to Mr. Romeo Keppel, "Where the devil is your
+dagger?" while all the tearful audience are lost in the soft woe of the
+scene.
+
+This is very much opposed to the general theory of acting, and the
+story is told with great gusto of a boy who was sent to see Garrick,
+we believe, and who was greatly delighted with the fine phrasing
+and swagger of a supernumerary, but could not understand why people
+applauded such an ordinary bumpkin as Garrick, who did not differ a whit
+from all the country boobies he had ever seen. It is insisted that the
+actor must persuade the spectator that he is what he seems to be, and
+this is gravely put as the first and final proof of good acting.
+
+This is, however, both a false view of art and a false interpretation
+and observation of experience. Shakespeare, through the mouth of
+Hamlet, tells the players to "hold the mirror up to nature"--that is, to
+represent nature. For what is the dramatic art, like all other arts, but
+a representation? If it aims to deceive the eye--if it tries to juggle
+the senses of the spectator--it is as trivial as if a painter should
+put real gold upon his canvas instead of representing gold by means of
+paint; or as if a sculptor should tinge the cheeks of his statue to make
+it more like a human face. We have seen tin pans so well represented in
+painting that the result was atrocious. For, if the object intended
+is really a tin pan, and not the pleasure produced by a conscious
+representation of one, then why not insert the veritable pan in the
+picture at once? If art is only a more or less successful imitation of
+natural objects, with a view to cheat the senses, it is an amusing game,
+but it is not a noble pursuit.
+
+It is an equally false observation of experience; because, if the
+spectator were really deceived, if the actor became, in the mind of the
+audience, truly identical with the character he represents, then, when
+that character was odious, the audience would revolt. If we cannot
+quietly sit and see one dog tear another, without interfering, could we
+gravely look on and only put our handkerchiefs to our eyes, when Othello
+puts the pillow to the mouth of Desdemona? If we really supposed him
+to be a murderous man, how instantly we should leap upon the stage and
+rescue "the gentle lady". The truth is, to state it boldly, we know the
+roaring lion to be only Snug, the joiner.
+
+All works of art must produce pleasure. Even the sternest and most
+repulsive subjects must be touched by art into a pensive beauty, or they
+fail to reach the height of great works. Goethe has shown this in the
+_Laocoon_, and every man feels it in constant experience. One of the
+grand themes of modern painting is the great tragedy of history, the
+Crucifixion. Materially it is repulsive, as the spectacle of a man in
+excruciating bodily torture; spiritually it is overwhelming, as the
+symbolized suffering of God for sin. If, now, the pictures which treat
+this subject were indeed only imitations of the scene, so that the
+spectator listened for the groans of agony and looked to see the blood
+drop from the brow crowned with thorns, how hideous and insupportable
+the sight would be! The mind is conscious as it contemplates the picture
+that it is a representation, and not a fact. The mere force of actuality
+is, therefore, destroyed, and thought busies itself with the moral
+significance of the scene. In the same way, in the tragedy of "Othello",
+conscious that there is not the actual physical suffering which there
+seems to be, the mind contemplates the real meaning which underlies that
+appearance, and curses jealousy and the unmanly passions.
+
+Even in a very low walk of art the same principle is manifested. A man
+might not care to adorn his parlor with the carcass of an ox or a hog,
+nor invite to his table boors muzzy with beer. But the most elegant
+of nations prizes the pictures of Teniers at extraordinary prices, and
+hangs its galleries with works minutely representing the shambles. Here,
+again, the explanation is this: that the mind, rejecting any idea of
+actuality in the picture, is charmed with the delicacy of detail, with
+lovely color, with tone, with tenderness, and all these are qualities
+inseparable from the picture, and do not belong by any necessity to the
+actual carcasses of animals. In the shambles, the sense of disgust and
+repulsion overcomes any pleasure in light and color. In the parlor, if
+the spectator were persuaded by the picture to hold his nose, the thing
+would be as unlovely as it is in nature. Imitation pleases only so
+far as it is known to be imitation. If deception by imitation were the
+object of art, then the material of the sculptor should be wax, and not
+marble. Every visitor mistakes the sitting figure of Cobbett, in Madame
+Tussaud's collection of wax-works, for a real man, and will very likely,
+as we did, speak to it. But who would accost the Moses of Michael
+Angelo, or believe the sitting Medici in his chapel to have speech?
+
+There is something unhandsomely derogatory to art in this common view.
+It is forgotten that art is not subsidiary nor auxiliary to nature, but
+it is a distinct ministry, and has a world of its own. They are not in
+opposition, nor do they clash. The cardinal fact of imitation in
+works of art is evident enough. The exquisite charm of art lies in the
+perfection of the imitation, coexisting with the consciousness of an
+absolute difference, so that the effect produced is not at all that
+which the object itself produces, but is an intellectual pleasure
+arising from the perception of the mingling of rational intention with
+the representation of the natural object. We can illustrate this by
+supposing a child bringing in a fresh rose, and a painter his picture of
+a rose. The pleasure derived from the picture is surely something better
+than wonder at the skill with which the form and color of the flower are
+imitated. Since imitation can never attain to the dignity and worth
+of the original, and since we live in the midst of nature, it would be
+folly to claim for its more or less successful copy the position and
+form of a great mental and moral influence.
+
+Of course we are not unmindful of the inevitable assertion that if
+certain forms are to be used for the expression of certain truths, the
+first condition is that those forms shall be accurately rendered. Hence
+arises the great stress laid by the modern schools upon a rigorous
+imitation of nature, and hence what is called the pre-Raphaelite spirit,
+with its marvellous detail. But mere imitation does not come any
+nearer to great art by being perfect. If it is not informed by a great
+intention, sculpture is only wax-work and painting a juggle.
+
+It is by her instinctive recognition of these fundamental principles
+that Rachel shows herself to be an artist. She is fully persuaded of the
+value of the modern spirit, and she belongs to the time by nothing more
+than by her instinctive and hearty adaptation of the principles of art
+which are illustrated in all other departments. There is nothing in
+Millais's or Hunt's paintings more purely pre-Raphaelite than Rachel's
+acting in the last scenes of "Adrienne Lecouvreur". It is the perfection
+of detail. It was studied, gasp by gasp, and groan by groan, in the
+hospital wards of Paris, where men were dying in agony. It is terrible,
+but it is true. We have seen a crowded theatre hanging in a suspense
+almost suffocating over that fearful scene. Men grew pale, women
+fainted, a spell of silence and awe held us enchanted. But it was all
+pure art. The actor was superior to the scene. It was the passion
+with which she threw herself into the representation, with a distinct
+conception of the whole, and a thorough knowledge of the means necessary
+to produce its effect, that secured the success. There was a sublimity
+of self-control in the spectacle, for, if she had allowed herself to be
+overwhelmed by the excitement, the play must have paused; real feeling
+would have invaded that which was represented, and we should, by a rude
+shock, have been staring in wonder at the weeping woman Rachel, instead
+of thrilling with the woes of the dying, despairing Adrienne. She seems
+to be what we know she is not.
+
+Rachel's earlier triumphs were in the plays of Racine. Certainly nothing
+could show the essential worth of the old Greek dramatic material more
+than the fact that it could be rendered into French rhyme without
+losing all its dignity. If a man should know Homer only through Pope's
+translations, he could hardly understand the real greatness and peculiar
+charm of Homer. And as most of us know him in no other way, we all
+understand that the eminence of Homer is conceded upon the force of
+tradition and the feeling of those who have read him in the original.
+So, to the reader of Racine, it is his knowledge of the outline of the
+grand old Greek stories that prevents their loss of charm and loftiness
+when they masquerade in French rhyme. They have lost their sublimity, so
+far as treatment can effect it, while they retain their general form of
+interest. But it is the splendid triumph of Rachel that she restores the
+original Greek grandeur to the drama. We no longer wonder at Racine's
+idea of Phèdre, but we are confronted with Phèdre herself. From the
+moment she appears, through every change and movement of the scene until
+the catastrophe, a sense of fate, the grim, remorseless, and inexorable
+destiny that presides over Greek story, is stamped upon every look and
+nod and movement of Rachel. It is stated that, since the enthusiasm
+produced in Paris by Ristori, Rachel's Italian rival, the sculptor
+Schlesinger has declared that his statue of Rachel which he had called
+Tragedy was only Melodrama after all. If the report be true, it does not
+prove that Rachel, but Schlesinger, is not a great artist.
+
+It is this simplicity and grandeur that make the excellence of Rachel in
+the characters of Racine. They cease to be French and become Greek. As
+a victim of fate, she moves, from the first scene to the last, as by a
+resistless impulse. Her voice has a low concentrated tone. Her movement
+is not vehement, but intense. If she smiles, it is a wan gleam of
+sadness, not of joy, as if the eyes that lighten for a moment saw all
+the time the finger of fate pointing over her shoulder. The thin form,
+graceful with intellectual dignity, not rounded with the ripeness of
+young womanhood, the statuesque simplicity and severity of the drapery,
+the pale cheek, the sad lips, the small eyes--these are accessory to the
+whole impression, the melancholy ornaments of the tragic scene. Her fine
+instinct avoids the romantic and melodramatic touches which, however
+seductive to an actor who aims at effect, would destroy at once that
+breadth and unity which characterize her best impersonations. Wherever
+the idea of fate inspires the tragedy, or can properly be introduced
+as the motive, there Rachel is unsurpassed and unapproachable. Her
+stillness, her solemnity, her intensity; the want of mouthing, of
+ranting, of all extravagance; the slight movement of the arms, and the
+subtle inflections of the voice which are more expressive than gestures,
+haunt the memory and float through the mind afterwards as the figure of
+Francesca di Rimini, in the exquisite picture of Ary Scheffer, sweeps,
+full of woe, which every line suggests, across the vision of Dante and
+his guide.
+
+There was, naturally, the greatest curiosity and a good deal of
+scepticism about Rachel's power in the modern drama, the melodrama of
+Victor Hugo, and the social drama of Scribe. But her appearance in the
+"Angelo" of Victor Hugo and in "Adrienne Lecouvreur" of Scribe satisfied
+the curiosity and routed the scepticism. It was pleasant after the vast
+and imposing forms, the tearless tragedy of Greek story, to see the
+mastery of this genius in the conditions of a life and spirit with
+which we were more familiar and sympathetic. It was clear that the same
+passionate intensity which, united with the most exquisite perceptions,
+enabled her so perfectly to restore the Greek spirit to the Greek form,
+would as adequately represent the voluptuous southern life. If in the
+old drama she was sculpture, so in the modern she was painting, not only
+with the flowing outline, but with all the purple, palpitating hues of
+passion.
+
+This is best manifested in the "Angelo", of which the scene is laid in
+old Padua and is, therefore, full of the mysterious spirit of mediaeval
+Italian, and especially Venetian life. Miss Cushman has played in an
+English version of this drama, called the "Actress of Padua". But it is
+hardly grandiose enough in its proportions to be very well adapted to
+the talent of Miss Cushman. It was remarkable how perfectly the genius
+which had, the evening before, adequately represented Phèdre, could
+impersonate the ablest finesse of Italian subtilty. The old Italian
+romances were made real in a moment. The dim chambers, the dusky
+passages, the sliding doors, the vivid contrast of gayety and gloom, the
+dance in the palace and the duel in the garden, the smile on the lip and
+the stab at the heart, the capricious feeling, the impetuous action, the
+picturesque costume of life and society--all the substance and the form
+of our ideas of characteristic Italian life, are comprised in Rachel's
+Thisbe and Angelo.
+
+There is one scene in that play not to be forgotten. The curtain rises
+and shows a vast, dim chamber in the castle, with a heavily-curtained
+bed, and massive carved furniture, and a deep bay-window. It is night; a
+candle burns upon the table, feebly flickering in the gloom of the great
+chamber. Angelo, whom Thisbe loves, and who pretends to love her, is
+sitting uneasily in the chamber with his mistress, whose name we have
+forgotten, but whom he really loves. Thisbe is suspicious of his want of
+faith, and burns with jealousy, but has had no proof.
+
+A gust of wind, the rustle of the tapestry, the creak of a bough in the
+garden, the note of a night bird, any slightest sound makes the lovers
+start and quiver, as if they stood upon the verge of an imminent peril.
+Suddenly they both start at a low noise, apparently in the wall. Angelo
+rises and looks about, his mistress shivers and shrinks, but they
+discover nothing. The night deepens around them. The sense of calamity
+and catastrophe rises in the spectator's mind. They start again. This
+time they hear a louder noise, and glance helplessly around and feebly
+try to scoff away their terror. The sound dies away, and they converse
+in appalled and fragmentary whispers. But again a low, cautious, sliding
+noise arrests them. Angelo springs up, runs for his hat and cloak, blows
+out the candle upon the table, and escapes from the room, while his
+mistress totters to the bed and throws herself upon it, feigning sleep.
+The stage is left unoccupied, while the just-extinguished candle still
+smokes upon the table, and the sidelights and footlights, being lowered,
+wrap the vast chamber in deeper gloom.
+
+At this moment a small secret door in the wall at the bottom of the
+stage slips aside, and Thisbe, still wearing her ball-dress, and with
+a head-dress of gold sequins flashing in her black hair, is discovered
+crouching in the aperture, holding an antique lamp in one hand, a little
+raised, and with the other softly putting aside the door, while, bending
+forward with a cat-like stillness, she glares around the chamber with
+eager eyes, that flash upon everything at once. The picture is perfect.
+The light falls from the raised lamp upon this jewelled figure crouching
+in the darkness at the bottom of the stage. Judith was not more
+terrible; Lucrezia Borgia not more superb. But, magnificent as it is,
+it is a moment of such intense interest that applause is suspended. The
+house is breathless, for it is but the tiger's crouch that precedes
+the spring. The next instant she is upon the floor of the chamber, and,
+still bending slightly forward to express the eager concentration of
+her mind, she glances at the bed and the figure upon it with a scornful
+sneer, that indicates how clearly she sees the pretence of sleep, and
+how evidently somebody has been there, or something has happened which
+justifies all her suspicion, and then, with panther-like celerity, she
+darts about the chamber to find some trace of the false lover--a hat,
+a glove, a plume, a cloak--to make assurance doubly sure. But there
+is nothing upon the floor, nothing upon the table, nothing in the
+bay-window, nothing upon the sofa, nor in the huge carved chairs; there
+is nothing that proves the treachery she suspects. But her restless eye
+leads her springing foot from one corner of the chamber to the other.
+Speed increases with the lessening chance of proof; the eye flashes
+more and more fiercely; the breast heaves; the hand clinches; the cheek
+burns, until, suddenly, in the very moment of despair, having as yet
+spoken no word, she comes to the table, sees the candle, which still
+smokes, and drawing herself up with fearful calmness, her cheeks grow
+pallid, the lips livid, the hands relax, the eye deadens as with a
+blow, and, with the despairing conviction that she is betrayed, her
+heart-break sighs itself out in a cold whisper, "_Elle fume encore_".
+
+In this she is as purely dramatic as in other plays she is classical.
+But neither in the one nor the other is there a look, or a gesture, or
+a word, which is not harmonious with the spirit of the style and the
+character of the person represented.
+
+This is pure passion as the other is implacable fate. There is something
+so tearfully human in it that you are touched as by a picture of the
+Magdalen. Every representation of Rachel is preserved in your memory
+with the first sights of the great statues and the famous pictures.
+
+In the French translation of Schiller's "Mary Stuart", a character which
+may be supposed especially to interest Americans and English, Rachel is
+not less excellent. The sad grace, the tender resignation, the poetic
+enthusiasm, the petulant caprice, the wilful, lovely womanliness of the
+lovely queen, are made tragically real by her representation. Perhaps it
+is not the Mary of Mignet nor of history. But Mary Queen of Scots is one
+of the characters which the imagination has chosen to take from history
+and decorate with immortal grace. It cares less for what the woman
+Mary was, than to have a figure standing upon the fact of history, but
+radiant with the beauty of poetry. It has invested her with a loveliness
+that is perhaps unreal, with a tenderness and sweetness that were
+possibly foreign to her character, and with a general fascination and
+good intention which a contemporary might not have discovered.
+
+It has made her the ideal of unfortunate womanhood. For it seemed that a
+fate so tragic deserved a fame so fair. Perhaps the weakness which Mary
+had, and which Lady Jane Grey had not, have been the very reasons why
+the unfortunate, unhappy Queen Mary is dearer to our human sympathies
+than the unfortunate Lady Jane. Perhaps because it was a woman
+who pursued her, the instinct of men has sought to restore, by the
+canonization of Mary, the womanly ideal injured by Elizabeth.
+
+But, whatever be the reason, there is no question that we judge Mary
+Queen of Scots more by the imagination than by historical rigor; and it
+is Mary, as the mind insists upon having her, that Rachel represents.
+She conspires with the imagination to complete the ideal of Mary. It is
+a story told in sad music to which we listen; it is a mournful panorama,
+unfolding itself scene by scene, upon which we gaze. Lost in soft
+melancholy, the figures of the drama move before us as in a tragic
+dream. But after seeing Rachel's Mary we can see no other. If we meet
+her in history or romance, it is always that figure, those pensive eyes,
+forecasting a fearful doom, that voice whose music is cast in a hopeless
+minor. It is thus that dramatic genius creates, and poetry disputes with
+history.
+
+Jules Janin says that Rachel is best in those parts of this play where
+the anger of the Queen is more prominent than the grief of the woman.
+
+This is true to a certain extent. It was not difficult to see that the
+fierceness was more natural than the tenderness to the woman Rachel, and
+that, therefore, those parts had a reality which the tenderness had not.
+But the performance was symmetrical, and, so far as the mere acting was
+concerned, the woman was as well rendered as the Queen. The want of the
+spectacle was this, and it is, we fully grant, the defect of all her
+similar personations: you felt that it was only intellect feigning
+heart, though with perfect success. The tenderness and caprice of the
+woman, and the pride and dignity of the Queen, are all there. She would
+not be the consummate artist she is if she could not give them. But even
+through your tears you see that it is art. It is, indeed, concealed
+by its own perfection, but it is not lost in the loveliness of the
+character it suggests, as might be the case with a greatly inferior
+artist. You are half sure, as you own the excellence, that much of the
+tender effect arises from your feeling that Rachel, as she represents a
+woman so different from herself, regards her rôle with sad longing and
+vague regret. When we say that she is the ideal Mary, we mean strictly
+the artistic ideal.
+
+The late Charlotte Brontë, in her novel of _Villette_, has described
+Rachel with a splendor of rhetoric that is very unusual with the author
+of _Jane Eyre_. But in the style of the description it is very easy
+to see the influence of the thing described. It has a picturesque
+stateliness, a grave grace and musical pomp, which all belong to the
+genius of Rachel. Even the soft gloom of her eyes is in it; a gloom
+and a fire which no one could more subtly feel than Miss Brontë. Her
+description is the best that we have seen of what is, in its nature,
+after all indescribable.
+
+As the fame of an actor or singer is necessarily traditional, and
+rapidly perishes, it is not easy to compare one with another when they
+are not contemporaries, for you find yourself only comparing vague
+impressions and reports. Of Roscius and Betterton we must accept the
+names and allow the fame. We can see Reynolds's pictures, we can hear
+Handel's music, we can read Goldsmith's and Johnson's books; but of
+Garrick what can we have but a name, and somebody's account of what he
+thought of Garrick? The touch of Shakespeare we can feel as well as did
+our ancestors, and our great-grandchildren's great-grandchildren will
+feel it as fully as we. But the voice of Malibran lingers in only a few
+happy memories, and we know Mrs. Siddons better by Sir Joshua's portrait
+than by her own glories.
+
+It is, therefore, impossible to decide what relative rank among
+actresses Rachel occupies. Mrs. Jameson, in her _Common-Place Book of
+Thoughts, Memories, and Fancies_, says some sharp things of her, and
+Mrs. Jameson is a critic of too delicate a mind not to be heeded. The
+general view she takes of Rachel is, that she is not a great artist in
+the true sense of the word. She is a finished actress, but not an artist
+fine enough to conceal her art. The last scene of "Adrienne Lecouvreur"
+seems to Mrs. Jameson a mistake and a failure--so beyond the limits
+of art, a mere imitation of a repulsive physical fact; and finally
+she pronounces that Rachel has talent but not genius; while it is the
+"entire absence of the high poetic element which distinguishes Rachel
+as an actress, and places her at such an immeasurable distance from Mrs.
+Siddons, that it shocks me to hear their names together".
+
+It may be fairly questioned, whether a woman so refined and cultivated
+as Mrs. Jameson may not have judged Rachel rather by her wants as a
+woman than by her excellence as an artist. That the terrible last scene
+of "Adrienne" is a harrowing imitation of nature we have conceded. The
+play is, in truth, a mere melodrama. It is a vaudeville of costume,
+with a frightful catastrophe appended. But as an artist she seems to us
+perfectly to render the part. She does not make it more than it is, but
+she makes it just what it is--a proud, injured, and betrayed actress.
+Whether the accuracy of her imitation is not justified by the intention,
+which alone can redeem imitation, will remain a question to each
+spectator. Mrs. Jameson also insists that Rachel's power is extraneous,
+and excites only the senses and the intellect, and that she has become a
+hard mannerist.
+
+In our remarks upon this celebrated actress we have viewed her simply
+as an artist, and not as a woman. She appeals to the public only in that
+way. Perhaps the sinister stories that are told of her private career
+only serve to confirm and deepen the feeling of the intensity of her
+nature, she so skilfully represents the most fearful passions, not
+from the perception of genius alone, but from the knowledge of actual
+experience. Certainly no woman's character has been more freely
+discussed, and no public performer of any kind ever sought so little
+to propitiate her audience. She has seemed to scorn the world she
+fascinated; and like a superb snake, with glittering eyes and cold
+crest, to gloat over the terror which held her captives thrall. Hence it
+is not surprising to one who has seen her a great deal, and has felt the
+peculiarity of her power, to find in Lehmann's portrait of her--which
+is, perhaps, the most characteristic of all that have been taken--a
+subtle resemblance to a serpent, which is at once fascinating and
+startling. Mrs. Jameson mentions that when she first saw her in
+Hermione, she was reminded of a Lamia, or serpent nature in woman's
+form. As you look at Lehmann's portrait this feeling is irresistible.
+The head bends slightly forward, with a darting, eager movement, yet
+with a fine, lithe grace. The keen, bright eyes glance a little askance,
+with a want of free confidence. There are a slim smoothness, a silent
+alertness, in the general impression--a nervous, susceptible intentness,
+united with undeniable beauty, that recall the deadly nightshade among
+flowers and Keats's "Lamia" among poems. The portrait would fully
+interpret the poem, She looked the lovely Lamia upon the verge of
+flight, at the instant when she felt the calm, inexorable eye of
+criticism and detection. In a moment, while you gaze, that form will be
+prone, those bright, cold eyes malignant, that wily grace will undulate
+into motion and glide away. You feel that there is no human depravity
+that Rachel could not adequately represent. Perhaps you doubt if she
+could be Desdemona or Imogen.
+
+Rachel is great, but there is something greater. It is not an entirely
+satisfactory display of human power, even in its own way. Her triumph
+is that of an actress. It is only an intellectual success. For however
+subtly dramatic genius may seize and represent the forms of human
+emotion, yet the representation is most perfect--not, indeed, as art,
+but as a satisfaction of the heart--when the personal character of the
+artist interests those emotions to himself, and thus sympathetically
+affects the audience. Rachel's Mary is a perfect portrait of Mary;
+but it is only a picture, after all, that expresses the difference in
+feeling between the impression of her personation and that which will
+be derived from another woman. The fiercer and darker passions of human
+nature are depicted by her with terrible force-power. They throb with
+reality; but in the soft, superior shades you still feel that it is
+emotion, intellectually discerned.
+
+Such facts easily explain the present defection of Paris from Rachel.
+Ristori has come up from Italy, and with one woman's smile, "full of the
+warm South", she has lured Paris to her feet. There is no more sudden
+and entire desertion of a favorite recorded in all the annals of popular
+caprice. The feuilletonists, who are a power in Paris, have gone over in
+a body to the beautiful Italian. They describe her triumphs precisely as
+they described Rachel's. The old ecstasies are burnished up for the new
+occasion. In a country like ours, where there is no theatre, and where
+the dramatic differences only creep into an advertisement, such an
+excitement as Paris feels, from such a cause and at such a time, is
+simply incredible. It is, possibly, as real and dignified an excitement
+as that which New York experienced upon the decease of the late lamented
+William Poole.
+
+There are various explanations of this fall of Rachel, without resorting
+to the theory of superior genius in Ristori. Undoubtedly Paris loves
+novelty, and has been impatient of the disdainful sway of Rachel. Her
+reputed avarice and want of courtesy and generosity, her total failure
+to charm as a woman while she fascinated as an artist, have, naturally
+enough, after many years, fatigued the patience and disappointed
+the humane sympathies of a public whose mere curiosity had been long
+satisfied. Rachel seemed only more Parisian than Paris.
+
+But when over the Alps came Ristori, lovely as a woman and eminent as
+an artist, then there was a new person who could make Paris weep at her
+greatness upon the stage, and her goodness away from it; who, in the
+plenitude of her first success, could shame the reported avarice of her
+fallen rival by offers of the sincerest generosity. When Ristori came,
+who seemed to have a virtue for every vice of Rachel, Paris, with one
+accord, hurried with hymns and incense to the new divinity. We regard it
+as a homage to the woman no less than a tribute to the artist. We regard
+it as saying to Rachel that if, being humane and lovely, she chose, from
+pride, to rule by scornful superiority, she has greatly erred; or if,
+being really unlovely, she has held this crown only by her genius, she
+has yet to see human nature justify itself by preferring a humane to an
+inhuman power. The most splendid illustration of this kind of homage was
+the career of Jenny Lind in America. It was rather the fashion among
+the _dilettanti_ to undervalue her excellence as an artist. A popular
+superficial criticism was fond of limiting her dramatic power to
+inferior rôles. She was denied passion and great artistic skill; she was
+accused of tricks. But, even had these things been true, what a career
+it was! It was unprecedented, and can never be repeated. Yet it was,
+at bottom, the success of a saint rather than that of a singer. Had she
+been a worse or better artist the homage would have been the same. If
+the public--and it is a happy fact--can love the woman even more than it
+admires the artist, her triumph is assured.
+
+We look upon the enthusiasm for Ristori by no means as an unmingled
+tribute to superior genius. We make no question of her actual womanly
+charms. Even if appearance of generosity, of simplicity, and sweetness
+were only deep Italian wile, and assumed, upon profound observation and
+consideration of human nature and the circumstances of Rachel's position
+in Paris, merely for the purpose of exciting applause, that applause
+would still be genuine, and would prove the loyalty of the public mind
+to what is truly lovely. It was our good-fortune to see Ristori in
+Italy, where, for the last ten years, she has been accounted the first
+Italian actress. She has there been seen by all the travelling world of
+Europe and America. It is not possible that so great a talent, as the
+Parisians consider it, could have been so long overlooked. We well
+remember Ristori as a charming, natural, simple actress; but of the
+surpassing power which Paris has discovered probably very few of us
+retain any recollection.
+
+
+
+
+THACKERAY IN AMERICA
+
+
+Mr. Thackeray's visit at least demonstrates that if we are unwilling
+to pay English authors for their books, we are ready to reward them
+handsomely for the opportunity of seeing and hearing them. If Mr.
+Dickens, instead of dining at other people's expense, and making
+speeches at his own, when he came to see us, had devoted an evening
+or two in the week to lecturing, his purse would have been fuller, his
+feelings sweeter, and his fame fairer. It was a Quixotic crusade, that
+of the Copyright, and the excellent Don has never forgiven the windmill
+that broke his spear.
+
+Undoubtedly, when it was ascertained that Mr. Thackeray was coming, the
+public feeling on this side of the sea was very much divided as to his
+probable reception. "He'll come and humbug us, eat our dinners,
+pocket our money, and go home and abuse us, like that unmitigated snob
+Dickens," said Jonathan, chafing with the remembrance of that grand ball
+at the Park Theatre and the Boz tableaux, and the universal wining and
+dining, to which the distinguished Dickens was subject while he was our
+guest.
+
+"Let him have his say," said others, "and we will have our look. We will
+pay a dollar to hear him, if we can see him at the same time; and as
+for the abuse, why, it takes even more than two such cubs of the roaring
+British Lion to frighten the American Eagle. Let him come, and give him
+fair play."
+
+He did come, and had fair play, and returned to England with a
+comfortable pot of gold holding $12.000, and with the hope and promise
+of seeing us again in September, to discourse of something not less
+entertaining than the witty men and sparkling times of Anne. We think
+there was no disappointment with his lectures. Those who knew his books
+found the author in the lecturer. Those who did not know his books
+were charmed in the lecturer by what is charming in the author--the
+unaffected humanity, the tenderness, the sweetness, the genial play of
+fancy, and the sad touch of truth, with that glancing stroke of satire
+which, lightning-like, illumines while it withers. The lectures were
+even more delightful than the books, because the tone of the voice and
+the appearance of the man, the general personal magnetism, explained and
+alleviated so much that would otherwise have seemed doubtful or unfair.
+For those who had long felt in the writings of Thackeray a reality quite
+inexpressible, there was a secret delight in finding it justified in
+his speaking; for he speaks as he writes--simply, directly, without
+flourish, without any cant of oratory, commending what he says by its
+intrinsic sense, and the sympathetic and humane way in which it was
+spoken. Thackeray is the kind of "stump orator" that would have pleased
+Carlyle. He never thrusts himself between you and his thought. If his
+conception of the time and his estimate of the men differ from your
+own, you have at least no doubt what his view is, nor how sincere and
+necessary it is to him. Mr. Thackeray considers Swift a misanthrope;
+he loves Goldsmith and Steele and Harry Fielding; he has no love
+for Sterne, great admiration for Pope, and alleviated admiration for
+Addison. How could it be otherwise? How could Thackeray not think Swift
+a misanthrope and Sterne a factitious sentimentalist? He is a man of
+instincts, not of thoughts: he sees and feels. He would be Shakespeare's
+call-boy, rather than dine with the Dean of St. Patrick's. He would take
+a pot of ale with Goldsmith, rather than a glass of burgundy with the
+"Reverend Mr. Sterne", and that simply because he is Thackeray. He
+would have done it as Fielding would have done it, because he values one
+genuine emotion above the most dazzling thought; because he is, in fine,
+a Bohemian, "a minion of the moon", a great, sweet, generous heart.
+
+We say this with more unction now that we have personal proof of it in
+his public and private intercourse while he was here.
+
+The popular Thackeray-theory, before his arrival, was of a severe
+satirist, who concealed scalpels in his sleeves and carried probes in
+his waistcoat pockets; a wearer of masks; a scoffer and sneerer, and
+general infidel of all high aims and noble character. Certainly we are
+justified in saying that his presence among us quite corrected this
+idea. We welcomed a friendly, genial man; not at all convinced that
+speech is heaven's first law, but willing to be silent when there is
+nothing to say; who decidedly refused to be lionized--not by sulking,
+but by stepping off the pedestal and challenging the common sympathies
+of all he met; a man who, in view of the thirty-odd editions of Martin
+Farquhar Tupper, was willing to confess that every author should "think
+small-beer of himself". Indeed, he has this rare quality, that his
+personal impression deepens, in kind, that of his writings. The quiet
+and comprehensive grasp of the fact, and the intellectual impossibility
+of holding fast anything but the fact, is as manifest in the essayist
+upon the wits as in the author of _Henry Esmond_ and _Vanity Fair_.
+Shall we say that this is the sum of his power, and the secret of
+his satire? It is not what might be, nor what we or other persons of
+well-regulated minds might wish, but it is the actual state of things
+that he sees and describes. How, then, can he help what we call satire,
+if he accept Mrs. Rawdon Crawley's invitation and describe her party?
+There was no more satire in it, so far as he is concerned, than in
+painting lilies white. A full-length portrait of the fair Lady Beatrix,
+too, must needs show a gay and vivid figure, superbly glittering across
+the vista of those stately days. Then, should Dab and Tab, the eminent
+critics, step up and demand that her eyes be a pale blue, and her
+stomacher higher around the neck? Do Dab and Tab expect to gather pears
+from peach-trees? Or, because their theory of dendrology convinces
+them that an ideal fruit-tree would supply any fruit desired upon
+application, do they denounce the non-pear-bearing peach-tree in the
+columns of their valuable journal? This is the drift of the fault found
+with Thackeray. He is not Fénélon, he is not Dickens, he is not Scott;
+he is not poetical, he is not ideal, he is not humane; he is not Tit,
+he is not Tat, complain the eminent Dabs and Tabs. Of course he is not,
+because he is Thackeray--a man who describes what he sees, motives as
+well as appearances--a man who believes that character is better
+than talent--that there is a worldly weakness superior to worldly
+wisdom--that Dick Steele may haunt the ale-house and be carried home
+muzzy, and yet be a more commendable character than the reverend Dean
+of St. Patrick's, who has genius enough to illuminate a century, but not
+sympathy enough to sweeten a drop of beer. And he represents this in
+a way that makes us see it as he does, and without exaggeration; for
+surely nothing could be more simple than his story of the life of
+"honest Dick Steele". If he allotted to that gentleman a consideration
+disproportioned to the space he occupies in literary history, it only
+showed the more strikingly how deeply the writer-lecturer's sympathy was
+touched by Steele's honest humanity.
+
+An article in our April number complained that the tendency of his view
+of Anne's times was to a social laxity, which might be very exhilarating
+but was very dangerous; that the lecturer's warm commendation of
+fermented drinks, taken at a very early hour of the morning in
+tavern-rooms and club houses, was as deleterious to the moral health of
+enthusiastic young readers disposed to the literary life as the beverage
+itself to their physical health.
+
+But this is not a charge to be brought against Thackeray. It is a
+quarrel with history and with the nature of literary life. Artists and
+authors have always been the good fellows of the world. That mental
+organization which predisposes a man to the pursuit of literature
+and art is made up of talent combined with ardent social sympathy,
+geniality, and passion, and leads him to taste every cup and try every
+experience. There is certainly no essential necessity that this class
+should be a dissipated and disreputable class, but by their very
+susceptibility to enjoyment they will always be the pleasure lovers and
+seekers. And here is the social compensation to the literary man for the
+surrender of those chances of fortune which men of other pursuits enjoy.
+If he makes less money, he makes more juice out of what he does make. If
+he cannot drink Burgundy he can quaff the nut-brown ale; while the most
+brilliant wit, the most salient fancy, the sweetest sympathy, the most
+genial culture, shall sparkle at his board more radiantly than a silver
+service, and give him the spirit of the tropics and the Rhine, whose
+fruits are on other tables. The golden light that transfigures talent
+and illuminates the world, and which we call genius, is erratic and
+erotic; and while in Milton it is austere, and in Wordsworth cool,
+and in Southey methodical, in Shakespeare it is fervent, with all the
+results of fervor; in Raphael lovely, with all the excesses of love; in
+Dante moody, with all the whims of caprice. The old quarrel of Lombard
+Street with Grub Street is as profound as that of Osiris and Typho--it
+is the difference of sympathy. The Marquis of Westminster will take good
+care that no superfluous shilling escapes. Oliver Goldsmith will still
+spend his last shilling upon a brave and unnecessary banquet to his
+friends.
+
+Whether this be a final fact of human organization or not, it is
+certainly a fact of history. Every man instinctively believes that
+Shakespeare stole deer, just as he disbelieves that Lord-mayor
+Whittington ever told a lie; and the secret of that instinct is the
+consciousness of the difference in organization. "Knave, I have the
+power to hang ye," says somebody in one of Beaumont and Fletcher's
+plays. "And I do be hanged and scorn ye," is the airy answer. "I had a
+pleasant hour the other evening," said a friend to us, "over my cigar
+and a book." "What book was that?" "A treatise conclusively proving
+the awful consequences of smoking." De Quincey came up to London and
+declared war upon opium; but during a little amnesty, in which he lapsed
+into his old elysium, he wrote his best book depicting its horrors.
+
+Our readers will not imagine that we are advocating the claims of
+drunkenness nor defending social excess. We are only recognizing a fact
+and stating an obvious tendency. The most brilliant illustrations of
+every virtue are to be found in the literary guild, as well as the
+saddest beacons of warning; yet it will often occur that the last in
+talent and the first in excess of a picked company will be a man around
+whom sympathy most kindly lingers. We love Goldsmith more at the head of
+an ill-advised feast than Johnson and his friends leaving it, thoughtful
+and generous as their conduct was. The heart despises prudence.
+
+In the single-hearted regard we know that pity has a larger share.
+Yet it is not so much that pity is commiseration for misfortune
+and deficiency, as that which is recognition of a necessary worldly
+ignorance. The literary class is the most innocent of all. The contempt
+of practical men for the poets is based upon a consciousness that they
+are not bad enough for a bad world. To a practical man nothing is so
+absurd as the lack of worldly shrewdness. The very complaint of the
+literary life that it does not amass wealth and live in palaces is the
+scorn of the practical man, for he cannot understand that intellectual
+opacity which prevents the literary man from seeing the necessity of the
+different pecuniary condition. It is clear enough to the publisher who
+lays up fifty thousand a year why the author ends the year in debt.
+But the author is amazed that he who deals in ideas can only dine upon
+occasional chops, while the man who merely binds and sells ideas sits
+down to perpetual sirloin. If they should change places, fortune would
+change with them. The publisher turned author would still lay up his
+thousands; the publishing author would still directly lose thousands. It
+is simply because it is a matter of prudence, economy, and knowledge of
+the world. Thomas Hood made his ten thousand dollars a year, but if
+he lived at the rate of fifteen thousand he would hardly die rich. Mr.
+Jerdan, a gentleman who, in his _Autobiography_, advises energetic youth
+to betake themselves to the highway rather than to literature, was, we
+understand, in the receipt of an easy income, and was a welcome guest in
+pleasant houses; but living in a careless, shiftless, extravagant way,
+he was presently poor, and, instead of giving his memoirs the motto,
+_peccavi_, and inditing a warning, he dashes off a truculent defiance.
+Practical publishers and practical men of all sorts invest their
+earnings in Michigan Central or Cincinnati and Dayton instead, in steady
+works and devoted days, and reap a pleasant harvest of dividends. Our
+friends the authors invest in prime Havanas, Rhenish, in oyster suppers,
+love and leisure, and divide a heavy percentage of headache, dyspepsia,
+and debt.
+
+This is as true a view, from another point, as the one we have already
+taken. If the literary life has the pleasures of freedom, it has also
+its pains. It may be willing to resign the queen's drawing-room, with
+the illustrious galaxy of stars and garters, for the chamber with a
+party nobler than the nobility. The author's success is of a wholly
+different kind from that of the publisher, and he is thoughtless who
+demands both. Mr. Roe, who sells sugar, naturally complains that Mr.
+Doe, who sells molasses, makes money more rapidly. But Mr. Tennyson,
+who writes poems, can hardly make the same complaint of Mr. Moxon, who
+publishes them, as was very fairly shown in a number of the _Westminster
+Review_, when noticing Mr. Jordan's book.
+
+What we have said is strictly related to Mr. Thackeray's lectures, which
+discuss literature. All the men he commemorated were illustrations and
+exponents of the career of letters. They all, in various ways, showed
+the various phenomena of the temperament. And when in treating of them
+the critic came to Steele, he found one who was one of the most striking
+illustrations of one of the most universal aspects of literary life--the
+simple-hearted, unsuspicious, gay gallant and genial gentleman;
+ready with his sword or his pen, with a smile or a tear, the fair
+representative of the social tendency of his life. It seems to us that
+the Thackeray theory--the conclusion that he is a man who loves to
+depict madness, and has no sensibilities to the finer qualities of
+character--crumbled quite away before that lecture upon Steele. We know
+that it was not considered the best; we know that many of the delighted
+audience were not sufficiently familiar with literary history fully to
+understand the position of the man in the lecturer's review; but, as a
+key to Thackeray, it was, perhaps, the most valuable of all. We know in
+literature of no more gentle treatment; we have not often encountered in
+men of the most rigorous and acknowledged virtue such humane tenderness;
+we have not often heard from the most clerical lips words of such
+genuine Christianity. Steele's was a character which makes weakness
+amiable: it was a weakness, if you will, but it was certainly
+amiability, and it was a combination more attractive than many
+full-panoplied excellences. It was not presented as a model. Captain
+Steele in the tap-room was not painted as the ideal of virtuous manhood;
+but it certainly was intimated that many admirable things were consonant
+with a free use of beer. It was frankly stated that if, in that
+character, virtue abounded, cakes and ale did much more abound. Captain
+Richard Steele might have behaved much better than he did, but we should
+then have never heard of him. A few fine essays do not float a man into
+immortality, but the generous character, the heart sweet in all excesses
+and under all chances, is a spectacle too beautiful and too rare to be
+easily forgotten. A man is better than many books. Even a man who is not
+immaculate may have more virtuous influence than the discreetest saint.
+Let us remember how fondly the old painters lingered round the story of
+Magdalen, and thank Thackeray for his full-length Steele.
+
+We conceive this to be the chief result of Thackeray's visit, that he
+convinced us of his intellectual integrity; he showed us how impossible
+it is for him to see the world and describe it other than he does. He
+does not profess cynicism, nor satirize society with malice; there is no
+man more humble, none more simple; his interests are human and concrete,
+not abstract. We have already said that he looks through and through at
+the fact. It is easy enough, and at some future time it will be done, to
+deduce the peculiarity of his writings from the character of his mind.
+There is no man who masks so little as he in assuming the author.
+His books are his observations reduced to writing. It seems to us as
+singular to demand that Dante should be like Shakespeare as to quarrel
+with Thackeray's want of what is called ideal portraiture. Even if you
+thought, from reading his _Vanity Fair_, that he had no conception
+of noble women, certainly after the lecture upon Swift, after all the
+lectures, in which every allusion to women was so manly and delicate and
+sympathetic, you thought so no longer. It is clear that his sympathy
+is attracted to women--to that which is essentially womanly, feminine.
+Qualities common to both sexes do not necessarily charm him because
+he finds them in women. A certain degree of goodness must always be
+assumed. It is only the rare flowering that inspires special praise.
+You call Amelia's fondness for George Osborne foolish, fond idolatry.
+Thackeray smiles, as if all love were not idolatry of the fondest
+foolishness. What was Hero's--what was Francesco di Rimini's--what was
+Juliet's? They might have been more brilliant women than Amelia, and
+their idols of a larger mould than George, but the love was the same old
+foolish, fond idolatry. The passion of love and a profound and sensible
+knowledge, regard based upon prodigious knowledge of character and
+appreciation of talent, are different things. What is the historic and
+poetic splendor of love but the very fact, which constantly appears
+in Thackeray's stories, namely, that it is a glory which dazzles and
+blinds. Men rarely love the women they ought to love, according to the
+ideal standards. It is this that makes the plot and mystery of life. Is
+it not the perpetual surprise of all Jane's friends that she should
+love Timothy instead of Thomas? and is not the courtly and accomplished
+Thomas sure to surrender to some accidental Lucy without position,
+wealth, style, worth, culture--without anything but heart? This is the
+fact, and it reappears in Thackeray, and it gives his books that air of
+reality which they possess beyond all modern story.
+
+And it is this single perception of the fact which, simple as it is, is
+the rarest intellectual quality that made his lectures so interesting.
+The sun rose again upon the vanished century, and lighted those historic
+streets. The wits of Queen Anne ruled the hour, and we were bidden to
+their feast. Much reading of history and memoirs had not so sent the
+blood into those old English cheeks, and so moved those limbs in proper
+measure, as these swift glances through the eyes of genius. It was
+because, true to himself, Thackeray gave us his impression of those wits
+as men rather than authors. For he loves character more than thought.
+He is a man of the world, and not a scholar. He interprets the author
+by the man. When you are made intimate with young Swift, Sir William
+Temple's saturnine secretary, you more intelligently appreciate the Dean
+of St. Patrick's. When the surplice of Mr. Sterne is raised a little,
+more is seen than the reverend gentleman intends. Hogarth, the bluff
+Londoner, necessarily depicts a bluff, coarse, obvious morality. The
+hearty Fielding, the cool Addison, the genial Goldsmith, these are the
+figures that remain in memory, and their works are valuable as they
+indicate the man.
+
+Mr. Thackeray's success was very great. He did not visit the West, nor
+Canada. He went home without seeing Niagara Falls. But wherever he
+did go he found a generous and social welcome, and a respectful and
+sympathetic hearing. He came to fulfil no mission, but he certainly knit
+more closely our sympathy with Englishmen. Heralded by various romantic
+memoirs, he smiled at them, stoutly asserted that he had been always
+able to command a good dinner, and to pay for it; nor did he seek to
+disguise that he hoped his American tour would help him to command and
+pay for more. He promised not to write a book about us, but we hope he
+will, for we can ill spare the criticism of such an observer. At least,
+we may be sure that the material gathered here will be worked up in some
+way. He found that we were not savages nor bores. He found that there
+were a hundred here for every score in England who knew well and loved
+the men of whom he spoke. He found that the same red blood colors all
+the lips that speak the language he so nobly praised. He found friends
+instead of critics. He found those who, loving the author, loved the man
+more. He found a quiet welcome from those who are waiting to welcome him
+again and as sincerely.
+
+
+
+
+SIR PHILIP SIDNEY
+
+
+Wearied of the world and saddened by the ruin of his fortunes, the
+Italian Count Maddalo turned from the street, which rang with tales of
+disaster and swarmed with melancholy faces, into his palace. Perplexed
+and anxious, he passed through the stately rooms in which hung the
+portraits of generations of ancestors. The day was hot; his blood was
+feverish, but the pictures seemed to him cool and remote in a holy calm.
+He looked at them earnestly; he remembered the long history of which
+his fathers were parts, he recalled their valor and their patience, and
+asked himself whether, after all, their manhood was not their patent of
+nobility; and stretching out his hands towards them, exclaimed: "Let me
+feel that I am indeed your son by sharing that manhood which made you
+noble."
+
+We Americans laugh at ancestors; and if the best of them came back
+again, we should be as likely to laugh at his wig as listen to his
+wisdom. And in our evanescent houses and uneasy life we would no more
+have ancient ranges of family pictures than Arabs in their tents. Yet
+we are constantly building and visiting the greatest portrait gallery of
+all in the histories we write and read; and the hour is never lost which
+we give to it. It may teach a maid humility to know that her mother was
+fairer. It may make a youth more modest to know that his grandsire was
+braver. For if the pictures of history show us that deformity is as
+old as grace, and that virtue was always martyred, they also show that
+crime, however prosperous for a time, is at last disastrous, and that
+there can be no permanent peace without justice and freedom.
+
+Those pictures teach us also that character is inherited like name
+and treasure, and that all of us may have famous or infamous ancestors
+perhaps without knowing it. The melancholy poet, eating his own heart
+out in a city garret, is the child of Tasso. Grinding Ralph Nickleby,
+the usurer, is Shylock's grandson. The unjust judge, who declares that
+some men have no rights which others are bound to respect, is a later
+Jeffries on his bloody assizes, or dooming Algernon Sidney to the block
+once more for loving liberty; while he whose dull heart among the new
+duties of another time is never quickened with public spirit, and who
+as a citizen aims only at his own selfish advantage, is a later Benedict
+Arnold whom every generous heart despises.
+
+From this lineage of character arises this great convenience--that as it
+is bad manners to criticise our neighbors by name, we may hit them many
+a sly rap over the shoulders of their ancestors who wore turbans, or
+helmets, or bagwigs, and lived long ago in other countries. The Church
+especially finds great comfort in this resource, and the backs of the
+whole Hebrew race must be sore with the scorings they get for the sins
+of Christian congregations. The timid Peter, the foolish Virgins, the
+wicked Herod, are pilloried every Sunday in the pulpit, to the great
+satisfaction of the Peters, Virgins, and Herods dozing in the pews. But
+when some ardent preacher, heading out of his metaphors, and jumping
+from Judea and the first century into the United States and the
+nineteenth, disturbs Peter's enjoyment of his ancestor's castigation by
+saying vehemently to his face with all the lightning of the law in his
+eye, and its thunders in his voice, "Thou art the man!" Peter recoils
+with decorous horror, begs his pastor to remember that he and Herod
+are sheep who were to be led by still waters; warns him not to bring
+politics into the pulpit, to talk not of living people, but of old
+pictures. So the poor shepherd is driven back to his pictures, and
+cudgels Peter once more from behind a metaphor.
+
+But the fairest use of these old pictures is to make us feel our common
+humanity, and to discover that what seems to us a hopelessly romantic
+ideal of character is a familiar fact of every day. Heroism is always
+the same, however the fashion of a hero's clothes may alter. Every hero
+in history is as near to a man as his neighbor, and if we should tell
+the simple truth of some of our neighbors, it would sound like poetry.
+Sir Philip Sidney wore doublet and hose, and died in Flanders three
+hundred years ago. His name is the synonym of manly honor, of generous
+scholarship, of the finest nobility, of the spiritual light that most
+irradiates human nature. Look at his portrait closely; it is no stranger
+that you see; it is no far-off Englishman. It is your friend, your son,
+your brother, your lover. Whoever knew Wendell Phillips knew Philip
+Sidney. It is the same spirit in a thousand forms; a perpetual presence,
+a constant benediction: Look at his portrait and
+
+ "The night shall be filled with music,
+    And the cares that infest the day
+  Shall fold their tents like the Arabs,
+    And as silently steal away."
+
+The gray walls, the red and peaked roof of the old house of Penshurst,
+stand in the pleasant English valley of the Medway, in soft and showery
+Kent. Kent is all garden, and there, in November, 1554, Philip Sidney
+was born. His father, Sir Henry Sidney, was a wise and honest man. Bred
+at court, his sturdy honor was never corrupted. King Edward died in his
+arms, and Queen Mary confirmed all his honors and offices three weeks
+before the birth of his oldest son, whom, in gratitude, he named Philip,
+for the queen's new Spanish husband. Philip's mother was Mary Dudley,
+daughter of the Duke of Northumberland, sister of the famous Earl of
+Leicester, sister also of Lord Guildford Dudley and sister-in-law of
+Lady Jane Grey. The little Philip was born into a sad household. Within
+fifteen months his grandfather and uncle had been beheaded for treason;
+and his sorrowing mother, a truly noble and tender woman, had been the
+victim of small-pox, and hid her grieving heart and poor scarred face in
+the silence and seclusion of Penshurst. On the south side of the house
+was the old garden or plaisance, sloping down to the Medway, where, in
+those English summers of three hundred years ago, when the cruel fires
+of Mary were busily burning at Smithfield, the lovely boy Philip,
+fair-featured, with a high forehead and ruddy brown hair, almost
+red--the same color as that of his nephew Algernon--walked with his shy
+mother, picking daisies and chasing butterflies, and calling to her in
+a soft, musical voice; while within the house the grave father, when he
+was not away in Wales, of which he was lord-president, mused upon great
+events that were stirring in Europe--the abdication of Charles V., the
+fall of Calais, and the accession of Queen Elizabeth to the throne of
+England. The lordly banqueting-hall, in which the politics of three
+centuries ago were discussed at Penshurst, is still standing. You may
+still sit upon the wooden benches where Burleigh, Spenser, Ben Jonson,
+James I., and his son Prince Charles have sat, and where, a little
+later, the victim of Prince Charles's cruel son, Algernon Sidney,
+dreamed of noble manhood and went forth a noble man; while in those
+shady avenues of beech and oak outside, smooth Edmund Waller bowed and
+smirked, and sighed compliments to his Sacharissa, as he called Dorothy
+Sidney, Algernon's sister.
+
+At the age of eleven Master Sidney was put to school at Shrewsbury, on
+the borders of Wales, of which country his father was lord-president.
+His fond friend, Fulke Greville, who was here at school with him, and
+afterwards wrote his life, says that even the masters found something in
+him to observe and learn. Study probably cost him little effort and
+few tears. We may be sure he stood at the head of his class, and was a
+grave, good boy--not good as calves and blanc-mange are, but like wine
+and oak saplings. "My little Philip," as his mother tenderly calls him,
+was no Miss Nancy. When he was older he wrote to his brother Robert,
+then upon his travels, that "if there were any good wars he should go
+to them". So, at Shrewsbury he doubtless went to all the good wars among
+his school-mates, while during the short intervals of peace he mastered
+his humanities, and at last, when not yet fifteen years old, he was
+entered at Christ Church, Oxford.
+
+Great good-fortune is the most searching test of character. If a man
+have fine friends, fine family, fine talents, and fine prospects, they
+are very likely to be the sirens in whose sweet singing he forgets
+everything but the pleasure of listening to it. If most of us had come
+of famous ancestry--if our father were a vice-regal governor--if the
+sovereign's favorite were our uncle, who intended us for his heir--if
+a marriage were proposed with the beautiful daughter of the
+prime-minister, and we were ourselves young, handsome, and
+accomplished--and all this were three hundred years ago, before the
+rights of men and the dignity of labor had been much discussed, we
+should probably have come up to Oxford, of which our famous uncle was
+chancellor, in a state of what would be called at Oxford to-day extreme
+bumptiousness. But Philip Sidney was too true a gentleman not to be
+a simple-hearted man; and although he was even then one of the most
+accomplished as well as fortunate youths in England, he writes to
+Lord Burleigh to confess with "heavy grief" that in scholarship he can
+neither satisfy Burleigh's expectation nor his own desire.
+
+In the month of May, 1572, Philip Sidney left Oxford, and after staying
+a short time with his parents, following the fashion of young gentlemen
+of rank, he crossed over into France in the train of the Earl of
+Lincoln, who was Queen Elizabeth's extraordinary ambassador upon the
+subject of her marriage with the brother of Charles IX. of France. The
+young king immediately made Sidney a gentleman of the bedchamber, and
+Henry of Navarre found him a fit companion for a future king. The Paris
+that Sidney saw had then twice as many inhabitants as Boston has to-day.
+Montaigne called it the most beautiful city in the world, and it had
+a delusive air of peace. But the witch Catherine de' Medici sat in the
+smooth-tongued court like a spider in its web, spinning and spinning the
+meshes in which the hope of liberty was to be entangled. The gay city
+filled and glittered with the wedding guests of Henry and the king's
+sister Margaret--among others, the hero of St. Quentin,
+
+Admiral Coligny. Gayer and gayer grew the city--smoother and smoother
+the court--faster and faster spun the black Italian spider--until on the
+23d of August, the Eve of St. Bartholomew, the bloodiest deed in all
+the red annals of that metropolis was done, and the young Sidney looked
+shuddering from Walsingham House upon the streets reeking with the blood
+of his fellow Huguenots.
+
+That night made Philip Sidney a man. He heard the applause of the
+Romish party ring through Europe--he heard the commendation of Philip of
+Spain--he knew that the most eloquent orator of the Church, Muretus, had
+congratulated the pope upon this signal victory of the truth. He knew
+that medals were stamped in commemoration of the brutal massacre, and
+he remembered that the same spirit that had struck at the gray head of
+Coligny had also murdered Egmont and Home in the Netherlands; had calmly
+gazed in the person of Philip upon De Sezo perishing in the fire, and by
+the hand of Philip had denounced death against all who wrote, sold, or
+read Protestant books; and he knew that the same spirit, in the most
+thriving and intelligent country of Europe, the Netherlands, was
+blotting out prosperity in blood, and had driven at least a hundred
+thousand exiles into England.
+
+Pondering these things, Sidney left Paris, and at Frankfort met Hubert
+Languet. Languet was not only a Protestant, but, at heart, a Republican.
+He was the friend of Melanethon and of William of Orange, in whose
+service he died. One of the most accomplished scholars and shrewdest
+statesmen in Europe, honored and trusted by all the Protestant leaders,
+this wise man of fifty-four was so enamoured of the English youth of
+eighteen that they became life-long friends with the ardor of lovers,
+and Languet left his employment, as Fulke Greville says, "to become a
+nurse of knowledge to this hopeful young gentleman".
+
+As they travelled by easy stages across Germany, where the campaign of
+Protestantism had begun, they knew that the decisive battle was yet to
+be fought. Europe was silent. The tumult of Charles V.'s reign was
+over, and that great monarch marched and countermarched no more from the
+Baltic to the Mediterranean. Charles had been victorious so long as he
+fought kings with words of steel. But the monk Martin Luther drew the
+sword of the spirit, and the conqueror quailed. Luther challenged the
+Church of Rome at its own door. The Vatican rained anathemas. It might
+as well have tried to blow out the stars; and all the fires of the
+furious popes who followed Leo were not sharp enough to consume the
+colossal heresy of free thought. But king and emperor and pope fed
+the fire. The reign of terror blasted the Netherlands, and when it had
+succeeded there, when Italy, Austria, and Holland surrounded the states
+of Germany, Philip knew it would be the smothering coil of the serpent
+around the cradle of religious liberty. But the young Hercules of free
+thought throttled the serpent, and leaped forth to win his victorious
+and immortal race.
+
+We can see it now, but Sidney could not know it. To him the future was
+as inscrutable as our own to the eyes of thirty years ago. Yet he and
+Languet must have discussed the time with curious earnestness as they
+passed through Germany until they reached Vienna. There Sidney devoted
+himself to knightly games, to tennis, to music, and especially to
+horsemanship, which he studied with Pagliono, who, in praise of the
+horse, became such a poet that in the _Defence of Poesy_ Sidney says
+that if he had not been a piece of a logician before he came to him,
+Pagliono would have persuaded him to wish himself a horse.
+
+At Vienna Philip parted with Languet, and arrived in Venice in the year
+1573. The great modern days of Italy were passed. The golden age of
+the Medici was gone. Lorenzo the Magnificent had died nearly a century
+before, in the same year that Columbus had discovered America. His son,
+Pope Leo X., had eaten his last ortolan, had flown his last falcon, had
+listened to his last comedy, and hummed his last tune, in the frescoed
+corridors of the Vatican. Upon its shining walls the fatal finger of
+Martin Luther, stretching out of Germany, had written "Mene, Mene."
+Beneath the terrible spell the walls were cracking and the earth was
+shaking, but the splendid pope, in his scarlet cloud of cardinals, saw
+only the wild beauty of Raphael's Madonnas and the pleasant pages of the
+recovered literature of pagan Greece. When Sidney stepped for the first
+time into his gondola at Venice, the famous Italian cathedrals and
+stately palaces were already built, and the great architects were gone.
+Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch, who had created Italian literature, lived
+about as long before Sidney as we live after him. Cimabue and Giotto had
+begun; Raphael and Michel Angelo had perfected that art in which they
+have had no rivals--and they were gone. Andrea Doria steered the galleys
+of Genoa no more, and since the discovery of the Cape of Good Hope and
+the West Indies, the spices of the Indian sea were brought by Portuguese
+ships into the Baltic instead of the Adriatic. The glory of the
+Lombards, who were the first merchants of Europe, had passed away to the
+descendants of their old correspondents of Bruges and Ghent, until, with
+its five hundred ships daily coming and going, and on market days eight
+and nine hundred; with its two thousand heavy wagons creaking every week
+through the gates from France and Germany and Lorraine, Antwerp reigned
+in the place of Venice, and the long twilight that has never been broken
+was settling upon the Italy that Sidney saw.
+
+But the soft splendor of its decline was worthy its prime. The
+universities of Bologna and Padua, of Salerno and Pisa, had fallen from
+the days when at Bologna alone there were twenty thousand students; but
+they were still thronged with pupils, and taught by renowned professors.
+When the young Sidney came to Venice, Titian was just tottering into the
+grave, nearly a hundred years old, but still holding the pencil which
+Charles V. had picked up and handed to him in his studio. Galileo was a
+youth of twenty, studying mathematics at Pisa. The melancholy Tasso
+was completing his _Jerusalem Delivered_ under the cypress trees of the
+Villa d'Este. Palestrina was composing the masses which reformed church
+music, and the Christian charity of Charles Borromeo was making him a
+saint before he was canonized. Clad in the silk and velvet of Genoa,
+the young Englishman went to study geometry at Padua, where twenty years
+later Galileo would have been his teacher, and Sidney writes to Languet
+that he was perplexed whether to sit to Paul Veronese or to Tintoretto
+for his portrait.
+
+But he had a shrewd eye for the follies of travellers, and speaks of
+their tendency to come home "full of disguisements not only of apparel
+but of our countenances, as though the credit of a traveller stood all
+upon his outside". He then adds a curious prophecy, which Shakespeare
+made haste to fulfil to the very letter. Sidney says, writing in 1578,
+"I think, ere it be long, like the mountebanks in Italy, we travellers
+shall be made sport of in comedies." Twenty years afterwards,
+Shakespeare makes Rosalind say in "As You Like It", "Farewell, Monsieur
+Traveller. Look you; lisp, and wear strange suits. Disable all the
+benefits of your own country. Be out of love with your nativity, and
+almost chide God for making you that countenance you are, or I will
+scarce think you have swam in a gondola."
+
+But in all the gayeties and graces of his travel, Philip Sidney was not
+content to be merely an elegant lounger. He never forgot for a moment
+that all his gifts and accomplishments were only weapons to be kept
+burnished for his country's service. He was a boy of twenty, but
+his boy's warmth was tempered by the man's wisdom. "You are not over
+cheerful by nature," Languet writes to him; and when Sidney sat to
+Paul Veronese, and sent his friend the portrait, Languet replies: "The
+painter has represented you sad and thoughtful."
+
+He had reason to be so. He had seen the Massacre of St. Bartholomew,
+as many a young Sidney among ourselves saw the horrors of Kansas thirty
+years ago. He did not believe that a little timely patting on the back
+was statesmanship. If Spain were crushing the Netherlands, and hung upon
+the southern horizon of Europe a black and threatening cloud, he did not
+believe that the danger would be averted by gagging those who said the
+storm was coming. He did not hold the thermometer responsible for the
+weather. "I cannot think," he wrote in May, 1574, "there is any man
+possessed of common understanding who does not see to what these rough
+storms are driving by which all Christendom has been agitated now these
+many years." He did not suppose, as so many of us in our ignoble days,
+that while men were the same, the tragical differences which had been
+washed out with blood in all other ages could be drowned in milk and
+water in his own.
+
+In 1575 Sidney returned to England. Every author who writes of this
+period breaks out into the most glowing praises of him. Indeed, he is
+the choice darling of English history. The only discordant note in the
+chorus of praise came long afterwards in the voice of the pedantic dandy
+Horace Walpole, who called Goldsmith "an inspired idiot". This is not
+surprising, for the earnestness and heroic simplicity of Sidney were as
+incomprehensible to the affected trifler of Strawberry Hill as the
+fresh enthusiasm of his nephew Arthur to Major Pendennis. The Earl of
+Leicester, who seemed to love his nephew more than anything except his
+own ambition, presented his brilliant young relative to the queen, who
+made him her cup-bearer. Sidney was now twenty-one years old--the finest
+gentleman, and one of the most accomplished scholars in England. His
+learning was mainly in the classics and in languages; yet he confesses
+that he could never learn German, which was then hardly worth learning,
+and in his correspondence with Languet is very distrustful of the Latin,
+in which language they wrote. But in urging him to grapple with the
+German, Languet says to him, and it is a striking proof of the exquisite
+finish of Sidney's accomplishment, "I have watched you closely when
+speaking my own language (he was a Burgundian), but I hardly ever
+detected you pronouncing a single syllable wrongly."
+
+In Sidney's time the classics had few rivals. After reading Dante,
+Petrarch, Ariosto, Boccaccio, with Sanazzaro's _Arcadia_, in Italian;
+Rabelais, Froissart, and Comines, in French; Chaucer, Gower, and the
+_Mirror for Magistrates_ in English, what remained for an ardent young
+student to devour? When Sidney came home, Montaigne--whom he probably
+saw at the French court--was just writing his _Essays_ at his chateau
+in the Gironde. The Portuguese Camoens had only just published his great
+poem, to which his own country would not listen, and of which no other
+had heard. The Italian Tasso's _Jerusalem_ was still in manuscript, and
+the Spanish Ponce de Leon was little known to Europe. All was yet
+to come. In Spain, Cervantes, Lope de Vega, and Calderon; in France,
+Corneille and Racine and Moliere, Fenelon and Bossuet, Rousseau and
+Voltaire; in Germany, everything except the Niebelungen and Hans Sachs's
+rhymes. When Philip Sidney kissed Elizabeth's hand as her cup-bearer,
+William Shakespeare, a boy of eleven, was grinding out his trousers
+on the restless seats of the free grammar-school at Stratford; young
+Francis Bacon, a youth of sixteen, was studying in France; a poor
+scholar at Cambridge, Edmund Spenser was just finishing his studies,
+and the younger brother of an old Devonshire family, Walter Raleigh, had
+just returned from campaigning in France; indeed, all the literature
+of modern times was subsequent to Philip Sidney. The young man shone at
+court, fascinating men and women, courtiers, scholars, and divines; and
+in a few months was made special ambassador to condole with the Austrian
+emperor upon the death of his father. Upon this embassy he departed in
+great state. His mission, was supposed to be purely complimentary;
+but he was really the beautiful eye with which England and Elizabeth,
+becoming the head of the Protestant movement, watched the disposition
+of the Protestant princes. On his way home, Sidney passed into the Low
+Countries to see William of Orange. He came, resplendent with chivalric
+magnificence, accompanied by the flower of English nobility, and met the
+grave William, who had been the richest citizen in the Netherlands, clad
+in an old serge cloak, and surrounded by plain Dutch burghers. But
+it was a meeting of men of one mind and heart in the great cause, and
+neither was disturbed by the tailoring of the other. The interview was
+the beginning of a faithful friendship, and among all the compliments
+Sidney received, none is so lofty and touching as that of William, the
+greatest man in Europe, who called him in their correspondence, "Philip,
+my master."
+
+In 1577 Sidney was home again. He had a right to expect conspicuous
+advancement, but he got nothing. This was the more disagreeable,
+because living at Elizabeth's court was an expensive luxury for a poor
+gentleman's son who had magnificent tastes. His father, Lord Henry
+Sidney, was lord-deputy of Ireland, but he was also an honest man, and,
+like most honest men in high public office, he was not rich. He wrote to
+Philip, begging him to remember whose son, not whose nephew, he was; for
+Philip's companions, the golden youth of the court, blazed in silks
+and velvets and jewels, until the government had to impose laws, as the
+subjects had brought luxury from Venice, and Elizabeth, who died the
+happy owner of three thousand dresses, issued a solemn proclamation
+against extravagance in dress.
+
+At such a time, the brilliant nephew of Uncle Leicester would have been
+a quickly ruined man if he had not been Philip Sidney. He bowed and
+flirted at court, but he chafed under inaction. A marriage was planned
+for him with Penelope Devereux, sister of the famous Earl of Essex, one
+of the thousand fair and unfortunate women who flit across the page of
+history leaving only a name, and that written in tears. But Philip's
+father grew cool in the negotiation, and Philip himself was perfectly
+passive. Yet when a few years afterwards the lady was married to Lord
+Rich, who abused her, Sidney loved her, and wrote the sonnets to Stella,
+which are his best poetry, and which Charles Lamb so affectionately
+praised.
+
+But while he loitered at court, beating all the courtiers with their
+own weapons in wit, in riding, in games, at tournament, the tales of
+American discovery shed a wondrous glamour upon the new continent.
+Nothing was too beautiful for belief, and the fiery feet of youth
+burned the English soil with eagerness to tread the unutterable Tropics.
+Francis Drake sailed from Plymouth to follow Magellan around the
+world, and he went in a manner consonant with the popular fancy of the
+countless riches that rewarded such adventures. His cooking-vessels were
+of silver; his table-plate of exquisite workmanship. The queen knighted
+him, gave him a sword, and said, "Whoever striketh at you, Drake,
+striketh at us." A band of musicians accompanied the fleet, and the
+English sailor went to circumnavigate the globe with the same nonchalant
+magnificence with which in other days the gorgeous Alcibiades, with
+flutes and soft recorders blowing under silken sails, came idling home
+from victory.
+
+Philip Sidney, his heart alive to all romance, and longing to be his
+companion, saw him sail away. But he turned and saw the black Italian
+spider, whose sting he had seen on Bartholomew's Eve in Paris, still
+weaving her stealthy web, and seeking to entangle Elizabeth into a match
+with the Duke of Anjou. The queen was forty-six, and Mounseer, as the
+English called him, twenty-three; and while she was coaxing herself to
+say the most fatal yes that ever woman said--when Burleigh, Leicester,
+Walsingham, all the safe, sound, conservative old gentlemen and
+counsellors were just ceasing to dissuade her--Philip Sidney, a youth of
+twenty-five, who knew that he had a country as well as a queen, that the
+hope of that country lay in the triumph of Protestantism, and that
+to marry Mounseer was to abandon that hope, and for the time betray
+mankind--Philip Sidney, a youth who did not believe that he could
+write gravely of sober things because he had written gayly of ladies'
+eyebrows, knowing as the true-hearted gentleman always knows that to-day
+it may be a man's turn to sit at a desk in an office, or bend over a
+book in college, or fashion a horseshoe at the forge, or toss flowers to
+some beauty at her window, and to-morrow to stand firm against a
+cruel church or a despotic court, a brutal snob or an ignorant public
+opinion--this youth, this immortal gentleman, wrote the letter which
+dissuaded her from the marriage, and which was as noble a triumph for
+Protestantism and human liberty as the defeat of the Spanish Armada.
+
+I cannot follow this lovely life in detail, nor linger, as I would, upon
+his literary retirement.
+
+The very name of Sidney's _Arcadia_ is aromatic in the imagination, and
+its traditional place in our literature is unquestioned. In our day it
+is very little read, nor is it a very interesting story. But under its
+quaint and courtly conceit its tone is so pure and lofty, its courtesy
+and appreciation of women so hearty and honorable; it has so fine
+a moral atmosphere, such noble thoughts, such stately and beautiful
+descriptions, that to read it is like conversing with a hero. So there
+is no better reading than the _Defence of Poesy_, that noble hymn of
+loyalty to intellectual beauty. Hallam well calls Sidney "the first
+good prose writer" in our language, and scarcely had he finished in his
+_Defence_ an exquisite criticism of English poetry to that time than the
+full choir of Elizabethan poets burst into
+
+                 "the songs that fill
+  The spacious times of great Elizabeth
+          With sounds that echo still."
+
+In 1582 Philip Sidney married the daughter of Walsingham, but in his
+retirement, whether steadfastly watching the great struggle upon the
+Continent or listening to the alluring music of far-off seas, he knew
+that the choice days of his life were passing, and if a career were not
+opened for him by the queen, he must make one for himself. William of
+Orange had been murdered; Elizabeth promptly succeeded him as the active
+head of the Protestant world; Philip of Spain was the great enemy.
+Strike him at home, said Sidney; strike him at sea, but strike him
+everywhere; and he arranged with Drake a descent upon Spanish America.
+He hurried privately to Plymouth to embark, but at the last moment a
+peer of the realm arrived from the queen forbidding his departure. The
+loyal gentleman bowed and obeyed.
+
+But two months after his fleet sailed, on the 7th of November, 1585
+(about the time that William Shakespeare first came to London),
+Elizabeth appointed Sidney governor of Flushing, in the Netherlands. He
+went thither gladly on the 18th, with three thousand men, to strike for
+the cause in which he believed. He had already told the queen that the
+spirit of the Netherlands was the spirit of God, and was invincible. His
+uncle, the Earl of Leicester, followed him as commander-in-chief. The
+earl was handsome at tournaments, but not fit for battle-fields,
+and Sidney was annoyed by his uncle's conduct; but he writes to his
+father-in-law, Walsingham, in a strain full of the music of a noble
+soul, and fitly precluding his end: "I think a wise and constant man
+ought never to grieve while he doth play, as a man may say, his own part
+truly."
+
+For that he was always ready. In the misty dawn of the 22d of September,
+1586, a force of three thousand Spaniards stole silently along to
+the relief of Zutphen, on the river Isel. Sidney, at the head of five
+hundred cavalry, rode forward to meet them. In the obscurity the battle
+was sharp and confused. Seeing his friend Lord Willoughby in special
+danger, Sidney spurred to the rescue. His horse was shot under him and
+fell. Springing upon another, he dashed forward again and succored his
+friend, but at the instant a shot struck him below the knee, glancing
+upward. His furious horse became unmanageable, and Sir Philip was
+obliged to leave the field. But as he passed slowly along to the rear of
+the soldiers, he felt faint with bleeding, and called for water. A cup
+was brought to him, but as he was lifting it to his month he saw a dying
+soldier staring at it with burning eyes. Philip Sidney paused before
+tasting it, leaned from the saddle, and handed it to the soldier, saying
+to him in the same soft, musical voice with which the boy called to his
+mother in the sunny garden at Penshurst, "Friend, thy necessity is yet
+greater than mine."
+
+He was borne on to Araheim, and lived in suffering for twenty-six days.
+He conversed pleasantly and called for music, and said at last to his
+brother, whom he had loved as brothers seldom love: "Love my memory;
+cherish my friends. Their faith to me may assure you they are honest.
+But, above all, govern your will and affections by the will and word
+of your Creator, in me beholding the end of this world with all her
+vanities." "And so," says old Stowe, with fond particularity, "he died,
+the 17th day of October, between two and three of the clock in the
+afternoon."
+
+ "The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,
+    And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave,
+  Await alike the inevitable hour.
+    The paths of glory lead but to the grave."
+
+This is the story of Philip Sidney. A letter, a book, a battle. How
+little to justify his unique fame! How invisible his performance among
+the illustrious events of his prodigious age! Yet is not the instinct of
+the human heart true; and in the stately society of his time, if Bacon
+were the philosopher, Shakespeare the poet, Burleigh the counsellor,
+Raleigh the soldier, Drake the sailor, Hooker the theologian, Essex
+the courtier, and Gresham the merchant, was not Philip Sidney as
+distinctively the gentleman? Heroes stood beside him in clusters, poets
+in constellations; all the illustrious men of the age achieved more
+tangible results than he, yet none of them has carved his name upon
+history more permanently and with a more diamond point; for he had
+that happy harmony of mind and temper, of enthusiasm and good sense, of
+accomplishment and capacity, which is described by that most exquisite
+and most abused word, gentleman. His guitar hung by a ribbon at
+his side, but his sword hung upon leather beneath it. His knee bent
+gallantly to the queen, but it knelt reverently also to his Maker. And
+it was the crown of the gentleman that he was neither ashamed of the
+guitar nor of the sword; neither of the loyalty nor the prayer. For a
+gentleman is not an idler, a trifler, a dandy; he is not a scholar only,
+a soldier, a mechanic, a merchant; he is the flower of men, in whom the
+accomplishment of the scholar, the bravery of the soldier, the skill
+of the mechanic, the sagacity of the merchant, all have their part
+and appreciation. A sense of duty is his main-spring, and like a watch
+crusted with precious stones, his function is not to look prettily, but
+to tell the time of day. Philip Sidney was not a gentleman because his
+grandfather was the Duke of Northumberland and his father lord-deputy of
+Ireland, but because he was himself generous, simple, truthful, noble,
+refined. He was born with a gold spoon in his mouth, but the gold is
+only the test. In the mouths of the base it becomes brass and iron.
+George IV., called with bitter irony the first gentleman in Europe, was
+born with the gold spoon, but his acrid humors turned it to the basest
+metal, betraying his mean soul. George Stephenson was born with the
+pewter spoon in his mouth, but the true temper of his soul turned it
+into pure gold. The test of a gentleman is his use, not his uselessness;
+whether that use be direct or indirect, whether it be actual service or
+only inspiring and aiding action. "To what purpose should our thoughts
+be directed to various kinds of knowledge," wrote Philip Sidney in 1578,
+"unless room be afforded for putting it into practice so that public
+advantage may be the result?" And Algernon Sidney said, nearly a century
+later: "I have ever had it in my mind that when God cast me into such a
+condition as that I cannot save my life but by doing an indecent thing,
+he shows me the time has come wherein I should resign it." And when that
+time came he did resign it; for every gentleman instinctively serves
+justice and liberty. He feels himself personally disgraced by an insult
+to humanity, for he, too, is only a man; and however stately his house
+may be and murmurous with music, however glowing with pictures and
+graceful with statues and reverend with books--however his horses may
+out-trot other horses, and his yachts outsail all yachts--the gentleman
+is king and master of these and not their servant; he wears them
+for ornament, like the ring upon his finger or the flower in his
+button-hole, and if they go the gentleman remains. He knows that all
+their worth came from human genius and human training; and loving man
+more than the works of man, he instinctively shuns whatever in the shape
+of man is degraded, outraged, and forsaken. He does not make the poverty
+of others the reason for robbing them; he does not make the oppression
+of others the reason for oppressing them, for his gentility is his
+religion; and therefore with simple truth and tender audacity the old
+English dramatist Dekkar calls Him who gave the name to our religion,
+and who destroyed the plea that might makes right, "the first true
+gentleman, that ever breathed".
+
+But not only is Philip Sidney's story the poem of a gentleman, it is
+that of a young man. It was the age of young men. No man was thought
+flippant, whatever his years, who could say a good thing well, or do a
+brave thing successfully, or give the right advice at the right moment.
+The great men of the day were all young. At sixteen Bacon had already
+sketched his _Philosophy_. At seventeen Walter Raleigh had gone to find
+some good wars. At seventeen Edmund Spenser had first published. Before
+he was twenty, Alexander Farnese, Prince of Parma, and the greatest
+general of Sidney's time, had revealed his masterly genius. At
+twenty-one Don John of Austria had been commander-in-chief against the
+Moors. The Prince of Condé and Henry of Navarre were leaders while they
+were yet boys. At twenty Francis Drake sailed, a captain, with John
+Hawkins; and at twenty-one the Washington of European history, to whom
+an American has for the first time paid just homage with an enthusiasm
+and eloquence of Sidney describing his friend--at twenty-one William of
+Orange commanded an army of Charles V.
+
+When England wanted leaders in those tremendous days that shaped her
+destiny, it did just what America did in those recent perilous hours
+that determined hers--she sent young men with faith in their hearts
+and fire in their veins--not old men with feathers in their hats; and
+everywhere it is the young men who have made history. At thirty-two
+Alexander wept for another world to conquer. On his thirty-seventh
+birthday Raphael lay dead beneath his last picture. At thirty-six Mozart
+had sung his swan-song. At twenty-five Hannibal was commander-in-chief
+of the Carthaginian armies. At thirty-three Turenne was marshal of
+France. At twenty-seven Bonaparte was triumphant in Italy. At forty-five
+Wellington had conquered Bonaparte, and at forty-eight retired from
+active military service. At forty-three Washington was chief of the
+Continental army. On his forty-fifth birthday Sherman was piercing the
+heart of the American Rebellion; and before he was forty-three Grant had
+"fought it out on this line" to perfect victory. Young men! Of course
+they were young men. Youth is the main-spring of the world. The
+experience of age is wise in action only when it is electrified by the
+enthusiasm of youth. Show me a land in which the young men are cold and
+sceptical and prematurely wise; which in polite indifference is called
+political wisdom, contempt for ideas common-sense, and honesty in
+politics Sunday-school statesmanship--show me a land in which the young
+men are more anxious about doing well than about doing right--and I will
+show you a country in which public corruption and ruin overtakes private
+infidelity and cowardice, and in which, if there were originally a hope
+for mankind, a faith in principle, and a conquering enthusiasm, that
+faith, hope, and enthusiasm are expiring like the deserted camp-fires of
+a retiring army. "Woe to a man when his heart grows old! Woe to a nation
+when its young men shuffle in the gouty shoes and limp on the untimely
+crutches of age, instead of leaping along the course of life with
+the jubilant spring of their years and the sturdy play of their own
+muscles!" Sir Philip Sidney's was the age of young men: and wherever
+there are self-reliance, universal human sympathy, and confidence in
+God, there is the age of youth and national triumph; just as whenever
+Joan of Arc leads the army, or Molly Stark dares to be a widow, or Rosa
+Bonheur paints, or Hattie Hosmer carves, or Jenny Lind sings, or Mrs.
+Patten steers the wrecked ship to port, or Florence Nightingale walks
+the midnight hospital--these are the age and the sphere of woman. Queen
+Elizabeth's was the age of young men; but so it is always when there are
+young men who can make an age.
+
+And ours is such an age. We live in a country which has been saved by
+its young men. Before us opens a future which is to be secured by the
+young men. I have not held up Sir Philip Sidney as a reproach, but only
+for his brothers to admire--only that we may scatter the glamour of the
+past and of history, and understand that we do not live in the lees of
+time and the world's decrepitude. There is no country so fair that ours
+is not fairer; there is no age so heroic that ours is not as noble;
+there is no youth in history so romantic and beloved that in a thousand
+American homes you may not find his peer to-day. It is the Sidneys we
+have known who interpret this Philip of three hundred years ago. Dear,
+noble gentleman! he does not move alone in our imaginations, for our own
+memories supply his splendid society. We too have seen, how often
+and how often, the bitter fight of the misty morning on the Isel--the
+ringing charge, the fatal fall. A thousand times we saw the same
+true Sidney heart that, dying, gave the cup of cold water to a
+fellow-soldier. And we, for whom the Sidneys died, let us thank God for
+showing us in our own experience, as in history, that the noblest traits
+of human character are still spanned by the rainbow of perfect beauty;
+and that human love and faith and fidelity, like day and night, like
+seed-time and harvest, shall never, never fail.
+
+
+
+
+LONGFELLOW
+
+
+In the school readers of half a century ago there were two poems which
+every boy and girl read and declaimed and remembered. How much of that
+old literature has disappeared! How much that stirred the hearts and
+touched the fancies of those boys and girls, their children have never
+heard of! Willis's "Saturday Afternoon" and "Burial of Arnold" have
+floated away, almost out of sight, with Pierpont's "Bunker Hill" and
+Sprague's Fourth-of-July oration. The relentless winds of oblivion
+incessantly blow. Scraps of verse and rhetoric once so familiar are
+caught up, wafted noiselessly away, and lodged in neglected books and
+in the dark corners of fading memories, gradually vanish from familiar
+knowledge. But the two little poems of which we speak have survived. One
+of them was Bryant's "March", and the other was Longfellow's "April",
+and the names of the two poets singing of spring were thus associated
+in the spring-time of our poetry, as the fathers of which they will be
+always honored.
+
+Both poems originally appeared in the _United States Literary Gazette_,
+and were included in the modest volume of selections from that journal
+which was published in Boston in 1826. The chief names in this little
+book are those of Bryant, Longfellow, Percival, Mellen, Dawes, and
+Jones. Percival has already become a name only; Dawes, and Greenville
+Mellen, who, like Longfellow, was a son of Maine, are hardly known
+to this generation, and Jones does not even appear in Duyckinck's
+Cyclopaedia. But in turning over the pages it is evident that Time has
+dealt justly with the youthful bards, and that the laurel rests upon the
+heads of the singers whose earliest strains fitly preluded the music
+of their prime. Longfellow was nineteen years old when the book was
+published. He had graduated at Bowdoin College the year before, and the
+verses had been written and printed in the _Gazette_ while he was still
+a student.
+
+The glimpses of the boy that we catch through the recollections of
+his old professor, Packard, and of his college mates, are of the same
+character as at every period of his life. They reveal a modest, refined,
+manly youth, devoted to study, of great personal charm and gentle
+manners. It is the boy that the older man suggested. To look back upon
+him is to trace the broad and clear and beautiful river far up the green
+meadows to the limpid rill.
+
+His poetic taste and faculty were already apparent, and it is related
+that a version of an ode of Horace which he wrote in his Sophomore
+year so impressed one of the members of the examining board that when
+afterwards a chair of modern languages was established in the college,
+he proposed as its incumbent the young Sophomore whose fluent verse he
+remembered. The impression made by the young Longfellow is doubtlessly
+accurately described by one of his famous classmates, Hawthorne, for the
+class of '25 is a proud tradition of Bowdoin. In "P.'s Correspondence",
+one of the _Mosses from an Old Manse_, a quaint fancy of a letter from
+"my unfortunate friend P.", whose wits were a little disordered, there
+are grotesque hints of the fate of famous persons. P. talks with Burns
+at eighty-seven; Byron, grown old and fat, wears a wig and spectacles;
+Shelley is reconciled to the Church of England; Coleridge finishes
+"Christabel"; Keats writes a religious epic on the millennium; and
+George Canning is a peer. On our side of the sea, Dr. Channing had just
+published a volume of verses; Whittier had been lynched ten years before
+in South Carolina; and, continues P., "I remember, too, a lad just from
+college, Longfellow by name, who scattered some delicate verses to
+the winds, and went to Germany, and perished, I think, of intense
+application, at the University of Göttingen." Longfellow, in turn,
+recalled his classmate Hawthorne--a shy, dark-haired youth flitting
+across the college grounds in a coat with bright buttons.
+
+Among these delicate verses was the poem to "An April Day". As the work
+of a very young man it is singularly restrained and finished. It has the
+characteristic elegance and flowing melody of his later verse, and its
+half-pensive tone is not excessive nor immature. It is not, however, for
+this that it is most interesting, but because, with Bryant's "March",
+it is the fresh and simple note of a truly American strain. Perhaps the
+curious reader, enlightened by the observation of subsequent years, may
+find in the "March" a more vigorous love of nature, and in the "April"
+a tenderer tone of tranquil sentiment. But neither of the poems is the
+echo of a foreign music, nor an exercise of remembered reading. They
+both deal with the sights and sounds and suggestions of the American,
+landscape in the early spring. In Longfellow's "April" there are none of
+the bishops' caps and foreign ornament of illustration to which Margaret
+Fuller afterwards objected in his verse. But these early associated
+poems, both of the younger and of the older singer, show an original
+movement of American literary genius, and, like the months which they
+celebrate, they foretold a summer.
+
+That summer bad been long awaited. In 1809, Buckminster said in his Phi
+Beta Kappa oration at Harvard College: "Oar poets and historians, our
+critics and orators, the men of whom posterity are to stand in awe, and
+by whom they are to be instructed, are yet to appear among us." Happily,
+however, the orator thought that he beheld the promise of their coming,
+although he does not say where. But even as he spoke they were at
+hand. Irving's _Knickerbocker_ was published in 1809, and Bryant's
+"Thanatopsis" was written in 1812. The _North American Review_, an
+enterprise of literary men in Boston and Cambridge, was begun in 1815,
+and Bryant and Longfellow were both contributors. But it was in the year
+1821, the year in which Longfellow entered college, that the beginning
+of a distinctive American literature became most evident. There were
+signs of an independent intellectual movement both in the choice of
+subjects and in the character of treatment. This was the year of the
+publication of Bryant's first slim volume, and of Cooper's _Spy_, and
+of Dana's _Idle Man_. Irving's _Sketch Book_ was already finished, Miss
+Sedgwick's _Hope Leslie_ and Percival's first volume had been issued,
+and Halleck's and Drake's "Croakers" were already popular. In these
+works, as in all others of that time, there was indeed no evidence of
+great creative genius.
+
+The poet and historian whom Buckminster foresaw, and who were to strike
+posterity with awe, had not yet appeared, but in the same year the
+voice of the orator whom he anticipated was heard upon Plymouth Rock in
+cadences massive and sonorous as the voice of the sea. In the year 1821
+there was the plain evidence of an awakening original literary activity.
+
+Longfellow was the youngest of the group in which he first appeared. His
+work was graceful, tender, pensive, gentle, melodious, the strain of a
+troubadour. When he went to Europe in 1826 to fit himself more fully
+for his professorship, he had but "scattered some delicate verses to
+the winds". When he returned, and published in 1833 his translations of
+"Coplas de Manrique" and other Spanish poems, he had apparently done
+no more. There was plainly shown an exquisite literary artist, a very
+Benvenuto of grace and skill. But he would hardly have been selected
+as the poet who was to take the strongest hold of the hearts of his
+countrymen, the singer whose sweet and hallowing spell was to be so deep
+and universal that at last it would be said in another country that to
+it also his death was a national loss.
+
+The qualities of these early verses, however, were never lost. The
+genius of the poet steadily and beautifully developed, flowering
+according to its nature. The most urbane and sympathetic of men, never
+aggressive, nor vehement, nor self-asserting, he was yet thoroughly
+independent, and the individuality of his genius held its tranquil way
+as surely as the river Charles, whose placid beauty he so often sang,
+wound through the meadows calm and free. When Longfellow came to
+Cambridge, the impulse of Transcendentalism in New England was deeply
+affecting scholarship and literature. It was represented by the most
+original of American thinkers and the typical American scholar, Emerson,
+and its elevating, purifying, and emancipating influences are memorable
+in our moral and intellectual history. Longfellow lived in the very
+heart of the movement. Its leaders were his cherished friends. He too
+was a scholar and a devoted student of German literature, who had drunk
+deeply also of the romance of German life. Indeed, his first important
+works stimulated the taste for German studies and the enjoyment of its
+literature more than any other impulse in this country. But he remained
+without the charmed Transcendental circle, serene and friendly and
+attentive. There are those whose career was wholly moulded by the
+intellectual revival of that time. But Longfellow was untouched by it,
+except as his sympathies were attracted by the vigor and purity of its
+influence. His tastes, his interests, his activities, his career, would
+have been the same had that great light never shone. If he had been the
+ductile, echoing, imitative nature that the more ardent disciples of the
+faith supposed him to be, he would have been absorbed and swept away by
+the flood. But he was as untouched by it as Charles Lamb by the wars of
+Napoleon.
+
+It was in the first flush of the Transcendental epoch that Longfellow's
+first important works appeared. In 1839, his prose-romance of _Hyperion_
+was published, following the sketches of travel, called _Outre-Mer_. He
+was living in Cambridge, in the famous house in which he died, and in
+which _Hyperion_ and all of his familiar books were written. Under
+the form of a slight love tale, _Hyperion_ is the diary of a poet's
+wandering in a storied and picturesque land, the hearty, home-like
+genius of whose life and literature is peculiarly akin to his own. The
+book bubbles and sings with snatches of the songs of the country;
+it reproduces the tone and feeling of the landscape, the grandeur of
+Switzerland, the rich romance of the Rhine; it decorates itself with a
+quaint scholarship, and is so steeped in the spirit of the country, so
+glowing with the palpitating tenderness of passion, that it is still
+eagerly bought at the chief points which it commemorates, and is
+cherished by young hearts as no prose romance was ever cherished before.
+
+_Hyperion_, indeed, is a poet's and lover's romance. It is full of deep
+feeling, of that intense and delighted appreciation of nature in her
+grander forms, and of scenes consecrated by poetic tradition, which
+belongs to a singularly fine, sensitive, and receptive nature, when
+exalted by pure and lofty affection; and it has the fulness and swing of
+youth, saddened by experience indeed, yet rising with renewed hope, like
+a field of springing grain in May bowed by the west wind, and touched
+with the shadow of a cloud, but presently lifting itself again to
+heaven. A clear sweet humor and blitheness of heart blend in this
+romance. What is called its artificial tone is not insincerity; it is
+the play of an artist conscious of his skill and revelling in it, even
+while his hand and his heart are deeply in earnest. _Werther_ is a
+romance, Disraeli's _Wondrous Tale of Alroy_ is a romance, but they
+belong to the realm of Beverley and Julia in Sheridan's _Rivals_. In
+_Hyperion_, with all its elaborate picturesqueness, its spicy literary
+atmosphere, and imaginative outline, there is a breezy freshness and
+simplicity and healthiness of feeling which leaves it still unique.
+
+In the same year with _Hyperion_ came the _Voices of the Night_,
+a volume of poems which contained the "Coplas de Manrique" and the
+translations, with a selection from the verses of the _Literary
+Gazette_, which the author playfully reclaims in a note from
+their vagabond and precarious existence in the corners of
+newspapers--gathering his children from wanderings in lanes and alleys,
+and introducing them decorously to the world. A few later poems were
+added, and these, with the _Hyperion_, showed a new and distinctive
+literary talent. In both of these volumes there is the purity of spirit,
+the elegance of form, the romantic tone, the airy grace, which
+were already associated with Longfellow's name. But there are other
+qualities. The boy of nineteen, the poet of Bowdoin, has become a
+scholar and a traveller. The teeming hours, the ample opportunities of
+youth, have not been neglected or squandered, but, like a golden-banded
+bee, humming as he sails, the young poet has drained all the flowers
+of literature of their nectar, and has built for himself a hive of
+sweetness. More than this, he had proved in his own experience the truth
+of Irving's tender remark, that an early sorrow is often the truest
+benediction for the poet.
+
+Through all the romantic grace and elegance of the _Voices of the Night_
+and _Hyperion_, however, there is a moral earnestness which is even more
+remarkable in the poems than in the romance. No volume of poems ever
+published in the country was so popular. Severe critics indeed, while
+acknowledging its melody and charm, thought it too morally didactic, the
+work of a student too fondly enamoured of foreign literatures. But while
+they conceded taste and facility, two of the poems at least--the "Psalm
+of Life" and the "Footsteps of Angels"--penetrated the common heart at
+once, and have held it ever since. A young Scotchman saw them reprinted
+in some paper or magazine, and, meeting a literary lady in London,
+repeated them to her, and then to a literary assembly at her house; and
+the presence of a new poet was at once acknowledged. If the "Midnight
+Mass for the Dying Year" in its form and phrase and conception recalled
+a land of cathedrals and a historic religious ritual, and had but a
+vague and remote charm for the woodman in the pine forests of Maine and
+the farmer on the Illinois prairie, yet the "Psalm of Life" was the very
+heart-beat of the American conscience, and the "Footsteps of Angels" was
+a hymn of the fond yearning of every loving heart.
+
+During the period of more than forty years from the publication of the
+_Voices of the Night_ to his death, the fame of Longfellow constantly
+increased. It was not because his genius, like that of another scholarly
+poet, Gray, seldom blossomed in song, so that his renown rested upon
+a few gem-like verses. He was not intimidated by his own fame. During
+those forty years he wrote and published constantly. Other great fames
+arose around him. New poets began to sing. Popular historians took
+their places. But still with Bryant the name of Longfellow was always
+associated at the head of American singers, and far beyond that of any
+other American author was his name known through all the reading world.
+The volume of _Voices of the Night_ was followed by similar collections,
+then by _The Spanish Student_, _Evangeline_, _The Golden Legend_,
+_Hiawatha_, _The Courtship of Miles Standish_, _The Tales of a Wayside
+Inn_, _The New England Tragedies_, _The Masque of Pandora_, _The Hanging
+of the Crane_, the _Morituri Salutarnus_, the _Kéramos_. But all of
+these, like stately birds
+
+ "Sailing with supreme dominion
+  Through the upper realms of air,"
+
+were attended by shorter poems, sonnets, "birds of passage", as the poet
+called his swallow flights of song. In all these larger poems, while
+the characteristics of the earlier volumes were more amply developed
+and illustrated, and the subtle beauty of the skill became even more
+exquisite, the essential qualities of the work remain unchanged, and the
+charm of a poet and his significance in the literature and development
+of his country were never more readily defined.
+
+Child of New England, and trained by her best influences; of a
+temperament singularly sweet and serene, and with the sturdy rectitude
+of his race; refined and softened by wide contact with other lands
+and many men; born in prosperity, accomplished in all literatures, and
+himself a literary artist of consummate elegance, he was the fine
+flower of the Puritan stock under its changed modern conditions. Out of
+strength had come forth sweetness. The grim iconoclast, "humming a surly
+hymn", had issued in the Christian gentleman. Captain Miles Standish
+had risen into Sir Philip Sidney. The austere morality that relentlessly
+ruled the elder New England reappeared in the genius of this singer in
+the most gracious and captivating form. The grave nature of Bryant
+in his early secluded life among the solitary hills of Western
+Massachusetts had been tinged by them with their own sobriety. There
+was something of the sombre forest, of the gray rocky face of stern New
+England in his granitic verse. But what delicate wild-flowers nodded in
+the clefts! What scent of the pine-tree, what music of gurgling water,
+filled the cool air! What bird high poised upon its solitary way through
+heaven-taught faith to him who pursued his way alone!
+
+But while the same moral tone in the poetry both of Bryant and of
+Longfellow shows them to be children of the same soil and tradition, and
+shows also that they saw plainly, what poets of the greatest genius have
+often not seen at all, that in the morality of human life lies its true
+beauty, the different aspect of Puritan development which they displayed
+was due to difference of temperament and circumstance. The foundations
+of our distinctive literature were largely laid in New England, and they
+rest upon morality. Literary New England had never a trace of literary
+Bohemia. The most illustrious group, and the earliest, of American
+authors and scholars and literary men, the Boston and Cambridge group of
+the last generation--Channing, the two Danas, Sparks, Everett, Bancroft,
+Ticknor, Prescott, Norton, Ripley, Palfrey, Emerson, Parker, Hawthorne,
+Longfellow, Holmes, Whittier, Agassiz, Lowell, Motley--have been all
+sober and industrious citizens of whom Judge Sewall would have approved.
+Their lives as well as their works have ennobled literature. They have
+illustrated the moral sanity of genius.
+
+Longfellow shares this trait with them all. It is the moral purity of
+his verse which at once charms the heart, and in his first most famous
+poem, the "Psalm of Life", it is the direct inculcation of a moral
+purpose. Those who insist that literary art, like all other art, should
+not concern itself positively with morality, must reflect that the
+heart of this age has been touched as truly by Longfellow, however
+differently, as that of any time by its master-poet. This, indeed, is
+his peculiar distinction. Among the great poetic names of the century
+in English literature, Burns, in a general way, is the poet of love;
+Wordsworth, of lofty contemplation of nature; Byron, of passion;
+Shelley, of aspiration; Keats, of romance; Scott, of heroic legend;
+and not less, and quite as distinctively, Longfellow, of the domestic
+affections. He is the poet of the household, of the fireside, of the
+universal home feeling. The infinite tenderness and patience, the
+pathos, and the beauty of daily life, of familiar emotion, and the
+common scene, these are the significance of that verse whose beautiful
+and simple melody, softly murmuring for more than forty years, made the
+singer the most widely beloved of living men.
+
+Longfellow's genius was not a great creative force. It burst into no
+tempests of mighty passion. It did not wrestle with the haughtily veiled
+problems of fate and free-will absolute. It had no dramatic movement and
+variety, no eccentricity and grotesqueness and unexpectedness. It
+was not Lear, nor Faust, nor Manfred, nor Romeo. A carnation is not a
+passion-flower. Indeed, no poet of so universal and sincere a popularity
+ever sang so little of love as a passion. None of his smaller poems are
+love poems; and _Evangeline_ is a tale, not of fiery romance, but of
+affection "that hopes and endures and is patient", of the unwasting
+"beauty and strength of woman's devotion", of the constantly tried and
+tested virtue that makes up the happiness of daily life. No one has
+described so well as Longfellow himself the character and influence of
+his own poetry:
+
+ "Come read to me some poem,
+  Some simple and heart-felt lay,
+  That shall soothe this restless feeling,
+  And banish the thoughts of day.
+
+ "Hot from the grand old masters,
+  Not from the bards sublime,
+  Whose distant footsteps echo
+  Through the corridors of Time.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+ "Such songs have power to quiet
+  The restless pulse of care,
+  And come like the benediction
+  That follows after prayer."
+
+This was the office of Longfellow in literature, and how perfectly it
+was fulfilled! It was not a wilful purpose, but he carefully guarded the
+fountain of his song from contamination or diversion, and this was its
+natural overflow. During the long period of his literary activity there
+were many "schools" and styles and fashions of poetry. The influence
+first of Byron, then of Keats, is manifest in the poetry of the last
+generation, and in later days a voluptuous vagueness and barbaric
+splendor, as of the lower empire in literature, have corroded the vigor
+of much modern verse. But no perfumed blandishment of doubtful goddesses
+won Longfellow from his sweet and domestic Muse. The clear thought, the
+true feeling, the pure aspiration, is expressed with limpid simplicity:
+
+  "Strong without rage; without o'erflowing, full."
+
+The most delightful picture in Goldsmith's life is that of the youth
+wandering through rural Europe, stopping at the little villages in the
+peaceful summer sunset, and sweetly playing melodies upon his flute
+for the lads and lasses to dance upon the green. Who that reads "The
+Traveller" and "The Deserted Village" does not hear in their pensive
+music the far-away fluting of that kind-hearted wanderer, and see the
+lovely idyl of that simple life? So sings this poet to the young men and
+maidens in the soft summer air. They follow his measures with fascinated
+hearts, for they hear in them their own hearts singing; they catch
+the music of their dearest hope, of their best endeavor; they hear
+the voices of the peaceful joy that hallows faithful affection, of the
+benediction that belongs to self-sacrifice and devotion. And now that
+the singer is gone, and his voice is silent, those hushed hearts recall
+the words of Father Felicien, Evangeline's pastor:
+
+  "Forty years of my life have I labored among you, and
+  taught you
+  Not in word alone, but in deed, to love one another."
+
+It is this fidelity of his genius to itself, the universal feeling
+to which he gives expression, and the perfection of his literary
+workmanship, which is sure to give Longfellow a permanent place in
+literature. His poems are apples of gold in pictures of silver. There
+is nothing in them excessive, nothing overwrought, nothing strained into
+turgidity, obscurity, and nonsense. There is sometimes, indeed, a fine
+stateliness, as in the "Arsenal at Springfield", and even a resounding
+splendor of diction, as in "Sandalphon". But when the melody is most
+delicate it is simple. The poet throws nothing into the mist to make it
+large. How purely melodious his verse can be without losing the thought
+or its most transparent expression is seen in "The Evening Star" and
+"Snow-Flakes".
+
+The literary decoration of his style, the aroma and color and richness,
+so to speak, which it derives from his ample accomplishment in
+literature, are incomparable. His verse is embroidered with allusions
+and names and illustrations wrought with a taste so true and a skill so
+rare that the robe, though it be cloth of gold, is as finely flexible as
+linen, and still beautifully reveals, not conceals, the living form.
+
+This scholarly allusion and literary tone were at one time criticised as
+showing that Longfellow's genius was really an exotic grown under glass,
+or a smooth-throated mocking-bird warbling a foreign melody. A recent
+admirable paper in the _Evening Post_ intimates that the kindly poet
+took the suggestion in good part, and modified his strain. But there
+was never any interruption or change in the continuity of his work.
+_Evangeline_ and _Hiawatha_ and _The Courtship of Miles Standish_
+blossom as naturally out of his evident and characteristic taste and
+tendency as _The Golden Legend_ or the _Masque of Pandora_. In the
+_Tales of a Wayside Inn_ the "Ride of Paul Revere" is as natural a
+play of his power as "King Robert of Sicily". The various aspect and
+character of nature upon the American continent is nowhere so fully,
+beautifully, and accurately portrayed as in _Evangeline_. The scenery
+of the poem is the vast American landscape, boundless prairie and wooded
+hill, brimming river and green valley, sparkling savanna and broad
+bayou, city and village, camp and wigwam, peopled with the children
+of many races, and all the blended panorama seen in the magic light
+of imagination. So, too, the poetic character of the Indian legend is
+preserved with conscientious care and fit monotony of rippling music in
+_Hiawatha_. But this is an accident and an incident. It is not the theme
+which determines the poet. All Scotland, indeed, sings and glows in the
+verse of Burns, but very little of England is seen or heard in that of
+Byron.
+
+In no other conspicuous figure in literary history are the man and the
+poet more indissolubly blended than in Longfellow. The poet was the man,
+and the man the poet. What he was to the stranger reading in distant
+lands, by
+
+    "The long wash of Australasian seas,"
+
+that he was to the most intimate of his friends. His life and character
+were perfectly reflected in his books. There is no purity or grace or
+feeling or spotless charm in his verse which did not belong to the man.
+There was never an explanation to be offered for him; no allowance was
+necessary for the eccentricity or grotesqueness or wilfulness or humor
+of genius. Simple, modest, frank, manly, he was the good citizen, the
+self-respecting gentleman, the symmetrical man.
+
+He lived in an interesting historic house in a venerable university
+town, itself the suburb of a great city; the highway running by his gate
+and dividing the smooth grass and modest green terraces about the house
+from the fields and meadows that sloped gently to the placid Charles,
+and the low range of distant hills that made the horizon. Through the
+little gate passed an endless procession of pilgrims of every degree and
+from every country to pay homage to their American friend. Every
+morning came the letters of those who could not come in person, and
+with infinite urbanity and sympathy and patience the master of the
+house received them all, and his gracious hospitality but deepened the
+admiration and affection of the guests. His nearer friends sometimes
+remonstrated at his sweet courtesy to such annoying "devastators of
+the day". But to an urgent complaint of his endless favor to a flagrant
+offender, Longfellow only answered, good-humoredly, "If I did not speak
+kindly to him, there is not a man in the world who would." On the day
+that he was taken ill, six days only before his death, three schoolboys
+came out from Boston on their Saturday holiday to ask his autograph. The
+benign lover of children welcomed them heartily, showed them a hundred
+interesting objects in his house, then wrote his name for them, and for
+the last time.
+
+Few men had known deeper sorrow. But no man ever mounted upon his sorrow
+more surely to higher things. Blessed and beloved, the singer is gone,
+but his song remains, and its pure and imperishable melody is the song
+of the lark in the morning of our literature:
+
+  "Type of the wise who soar but never roam,
+   True to the kindred points of heaven and home."
+
+
+
+
+OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
+
+
+In 1817 Bryant's "Thanatopsis" was published in the _North American
+Review_. Richard Henry Dana, the elder, who was then one of the editors,
+said that it could not be an American poem, for there was no American
+who could have written it. But it does not seem to have produced a
+remarkable impression upon the public mind. The planet rose silently and
+unobserved. Ten years afterwards, in 1827, Dana's own "Buccaneer" was
+published, and Christopher North, in _Blackwood_, saluted it as "by far
+the most original and powerful of American poetical compositions". But
+it produced in this country no general effect which is remembered. Nine
+years later, in 1836, Holmes's "Metrical Essay" was delivered before the
+Phi Beta Kappa Society at Harvard College, and was as distinct an event
+in literary circles as Edward Everett's oration before the same society
+in 1824, or Ralph Waldo Emerson's in 1837, or Horace Bushnell's in 1848,
+or Wendell Phillips's in 1881. Holmes was then twenty-seven years old,
+and had just returned from his professional studies in Europe, where, as
+in his college days at Cambridge, where he was born, he had toyed with
+many Muses, yet still, with native Yankee prudence, held fast the hand
+of Aesculapius. His poem, like the address of Emerson in the next
+year, showed how completely the modern spirit of refined and exquisite
+literary cultivation and of free and undaunted thought had superseded
+the uncouth literary form and stern and rigid Calvinism of the Mathers
+and early Boston.
+
+The melody and grace of Goldsmith's line, but with a fresh local spirit,
+have not been more perfectly reproduced, nor with a more distinct
+revelation of a new spirit, than in this poem. It is retrospective and
+contemplative, but it is also full of the buoyancy of youth, of the
+consciousness of poetic skill, and of blithe anticipation. Its tender
+reminiscence and occasional fond elegiac strain are but clouds of the
+morning. Its literary form is exquisite, and its general impression is
+that of bright, elastic, confident power. It was by no means, however, a
+first work, nor was the poet unknown in his own home. But the "Metrical
+Essay" introduced him to a larger public, while the fugitive pieces
+already known were the assurance that the more important poem was not
+a happy chance, but the development of a quality already proved. Seven
+years before, in 1829, the year he graduated at Harvard, Holmes began to
+contribute to _The Collegian_, a college magazine. Two years later, in
+1831, appeared the _New England Magazine_, in which the young writer,
+as he might himself say, took the road with his double team of verse
+and prose, holding the ribbons with unsurpassed lightness and grace
+and skill, now for two generations guiding those fleet and well-groomed
+coursers, which still show their heels to panting rivals, the prancing
+team behind which we have all driven and are still driving with constant
+and undiminished delight.
+
+Mr. F. B. Sanborn, whose tribute to Holmes on his eightieth birthday
+shows how thorough was his research for that labor of love, tells us
+that his first contribution to the _New England Magazine_ was published
+in the third or September number of the first year, 1831. It was a copy
+of verses of an unpromising title--"To an Insect". But that particular
+insect, seemingly the creature of a day, proved to be immortal, for it
+was the katydid, whose voice is perennial:
+
+  "Thou sayest an undisputed thing
+   In such a solemn way."
+
+In the contributions of the young graduate the high spirits of a
+frolicsome fancy effervesce and sparkle. But their quality of a new
+literary tone and spirit is very evident. The ease and fun of these
+bright prolusions, without impudence or coarseness, the poetic touch and
+refinement, were as unmistakable as the brisk pungency of the gibe. The
+stately and scholarly Boston of Channing, Dana, Everett, and Ticknor
+might indeed have looked askance at the literary claims of such lines
+as these "Thoughts in Dejection" of a poet wondering if the path to
+Parnassus lay over Charlestown or Chelsea bridge:
+
+ "What is a poet's fame?
+    Sad hints about his reason,
+  And sadder praise from gazetteers,
+    To be returned in season.
+
+ "For him the future holds
+    No civic wreath above him;
+  Nor slated roof nor varnished chair,
+    Nor wife nor child to love him.
+
+ "Maid of the village inn,
+    Who workest woe on satin,
+  The grass in black, the graves in green,
+    The epitaph in Latin,
+
+ "Trust not to them who say
+    In stanzas they adore thee;
+  Oh, rather sleep in church-yard clay,
+    With maudlin cherubs o'er thee!"
+
+The lines to the katydid, with "L'Inconnue"--
+
+ "Is thy name Mary, maiden fair?"--
+
+published in the magazine at about the same time, disclose Holmes's
+natural melody and his fine instinct for literary form. But his
+lyrical fervor finds its most jubilant expression at this time in "Old
+Ironsides", written at the turning-point in the poet's life, when he had
+renounced the study of the law, and was deciding upon medicine as his
+profession. The proposal to destroy the frigate Constitution, fondly and
+familiarly known as "Old Ironsides", kindled a patriotic frenzy in the
+sensitive Boston boy, which burst forth into the noble lyric,
+
+  "Ay, tear her tattered ensign down!"
+
+There had been no American poetry with a truer lilt of song than these
+early verses, and there has been none since. Two years later, in 1833,
+Holmes went to complete his medical studies in Paris, and the lines to a
+grisette--
+
+  "Ah, Clemence, when I saw thee last
+   Trip down the Rue de Seine!"--
+
+published upon his return in his first volume of verse, are a charming
+illustration of his lyrical genius. His limpid line never flowed more
+clearly than in this poem. It has the pensive tone of all his best poems
+of the kind, but it is the half-happy sadness of youth.
+
+All these early verses have an assured literary form. The scope and
+strain were new, but their most significant quality was not melody nor
+pensive grace, but humor. This was ingrained and genuine. Sometimes it
+was rollicking, as in "The Height of the Ridiculous" and "The September
+Gale". Sometimes it was drolly meditative, as in "Evening, by a Tailor".
+Sometimes it was a tearful smile of the deepest feeling, as in the most
+charming and perfect of these poems, "The Last Leaf", in which delicate
+and searching pathos is exquisitely fused with tender gayety. The
+haunting music and meaning of the lines,
+
+  "The mossy marbles rest
+   On the lips that he has pressed
+     In their bloom,
+   And the names he loved to hear
+   Have been carved for many a year
+     On the tomb",
+
+lingered always in the memory of Lincoln, whose simple sincerity and
+native melancholy would instinctively have rejected any false note. It
+is in such melody as that of the "Last Leaf" that we feel how truly the
+grim old Puritan strength has become sweetness.
+
+To this poetic grace and humor and music, which at that time were
+unrivalled, although the early notes of a tuneful choir of awakening
+songsters were already heard, the young Holmes added the brisk and crisp
+and sparkling charm of his prose. From the beginning his coursers were
+paired, and with equal pace they have constantly held the road. In the
+_New England Magazine_ for November in the same year, 1831, a short
+paper was published called the "Autocrat of the Breakfast Table". The
+tone of placid dogmatism and infallible finality with which the bulls of
+the domestic pope are delivered is delightfully familiar. This earliest
+one has perhaps more of the cardinal's preliminary scarlet than of the
+mature papal white, but in its first note the voice of the Autocrat is
+unmistakable:
+
+   "Somebody was rigmarolling the other day about the artificial
+    distinctions of society.
+   'Madam,' said I, 'society is the same in all large places. I divide
+    it thus:
+    1. People of cultivation who live in large houses.
+    2. People of cultivation who live in small houses.
+    3. People without cultivation who live in large houses.
+    4. People without cultivation who live in small houses.
+    5. Scrubs.'
+    An individual at the upper end of the table turned pale and left the
+    room as I finished with the monosyllable."
+
+"'Tis sixty years since", but that drop is of the same characteristic
+transparency and sparkle as in the latest Tea-Cup.
+
+The time in which the _New England Magazine_ was published, and these
+firstlings of Holmes's muse appeared, was one of prophetic literary
+stir in New England. There were other signs than those in letters of
+the breaking-up of the long Puritan winter. A more striking and extreme
+reaction from the New England tradition could not well be imagined
+than that which was offered by Nathaniel Parker Willis, of whom Holmes
+himself says "that he was at the time something between a remembrance of
+Count D'Orsay and an anticipation of Oscar Wilde". Willis was a kindly
+saunterer, the first Boston dandy, who began his literary career with
+grotesque propriety as a sentimentalizer of Bible stories, a performance
+which Lowell gayly called inspiration and water. In what now seems a
+languid, Byronic way, he figured as a Yankee Pelham or Vivian Grey. Yet
+in his prose and verse there was a tacit protest against the old order,
+and that it was felt is shown by the bitterness of ridicule and taunt
+and insult with which, both publicly and privately, this most amiable
+youth was attacked, who, at that time, had never said an ill-natured
+word of anybody, and who was always most generous in his treatment of
+his fellow authors.
+
+The epoch of Willis and the _New England Magazine_ is very notable in
+the history of American literature. The traditions of that literature
+were grave and even sombre. Irving, indeed, in his Knickerbocker and Rip
+Van Winkle and Ichabod Crane, and in the general gayety of his literary
+touch, had emancipated it from strict allegiance to the solemnity of its
+precedents, and had lighted it with a smile. He supplied a quality
+of grace and cheerfulness which it had lacked, and without unduly
+magnifying his charming genius, it had a natural, fresh, and smiling
+spirit, which, amid the funereal, theologic gloom, suggests the
+sweetness and brightness of morning. In its effect it is a breath of
+Chaucer. When Knickerbocker was published, Joel Barlow's "Hasty-Pudding"
+was the chief achievement of American literary humor. Mark Twain and
+Charles Dudley Warner were not yet "the wits of Hartford". Those
+who bore that name held it by brevet. Indeed, the humor of our early
+literature is pathetic. In no State was the ecclesiastical dominance
+more absolute than in Connecticut, and nothing shows more truly how
+absolute and grim it was than the fact that the performances of the
+"wits" in that State were regarded--gravely, it must have been--as
+humor.
+
+For a long time there was no vital response in New England to the chord
+touched by Irving. Yet Boston was then unquestionably the chief seat of
+American letters. Dennie had established his _Portfolio_ in Philadelphia
+in 1801, but in 1805 the _Monthly Anthology_, which was subsequently
+reproduced in the _North American Review_, appeared in Boston, and
+was the organ or illustration of the most important literary and
+intellectual life of the country at that time. The opening of the
+century saw the revolt against the supremacy of the old Puritan Church
+of New England--a revolt within its own pale. This clerical protest
+against the austere dogmas of Calvinism in its ancient seat was
+coincident with the overthrow in the national government of Federalism
+and the political triumph of Jefferson and his party. Simultaneously
+also with the religious and political disturbance was felt the new
+intellectual and literary impulse of which the _Anthology_ was the
+organ. But the religious and literary movements were not in sympathy
+with the political revolution, although they were all indications
+of emancipation from the dominance of old traditions, the mental
+restlessness of a people coming gradually to national consciousness.
+
+Mr. Henry Adams, in remarking upon this situation in his history of
+Madison's administration, points out that leaders of the religious
+protest which is known as the Unitarian Secession in New England were
+also leaders in the intellectual and literary awakening of the time, but
+had no sympathy with Jefferson or admiration of France. Bryant's father
+was a Federalist; the club that conducted the _Anthology_ and the
+_North American Review_ was composed of Federalists; and the youth
+whose "Thanatopsis" is the chief distinction of the beginning of that
+_Review_, and the morning star of American poetry, was, as a boy of
+thirteen, the author of the "Embargo", a performance in which the
+valiant Jack gave the giant Jefferson no quarter. The religious
+secession took its definite form in Dr. Channing's sermon at the
+ordination of Jared Sparks in Baltimore in 1819, which powerfully
+arraigned the dominant theology of the time. This was the year in which
+Irving's _Sketch Book_ was published. Bryant's first volume followed a
+year or two later, and our distinctive literary epoch opened.
+
+Ten years afterwards, when Bryant had left New England, Dr. Channing
+was its most dignified and characteristic name in literature. But he was
+distinctively a preacher, and his serene and sweet genius never unbent
+into a frolicsome mood. As early as 1820 a volume of Robert Burns's
+poems fell into Whittier's hands like a spark into tinder, and the
+flame that has so long illuminated and cheered began to blaze. It was,
+however, a softened ray, not yet the tongue of lyric fire which it
+afterwards became. But none of the poets smiled as they sang. The Muse
+of New England was staid and stately--or was she, after all, not a true
+daughter of Jove, but a tenth Muse, an Anne Bradstreet? The rollicking
+laugh of Knickerbocker was a solitary sound in the American air until
+the blithe carol of Holmes returned a kindred echo.
+
+Willis was the sign of the breaking spell. But his light touch could not
+avail. The Puritan spell could be broken only by Puritan force, and
+it is the lineal descendants of Puritanism, often the sons of
+clergymen--Emerson and Holmes and Longfellow and Hawthorne and
+Whittier--who emancipated our literature from its Puritan subjection.
+In 1829 Willis, as editor of _Peter Parley's Token_ and the _American
+Monthly Magazine_, was aided by Longfellow and Hawthorne and Motley and
+Hildreth and Mrs. Child and Mrs. Sigourney, and the elder Bishop Doane,
+Park Benjamin and George B. Cheever, Albert Pike and Rufus Dawes, as
+contributors. Willis himself was a copious writer, and in the _American
+Monthly_ first appeared the titles of "Inkling of Adventure" and
+"Pencillings by the Way", which he afterwards reproduced for some of his
+best literary work. The _Monthly_ failed, and in 1831, the year that the
+_New England Magazine_ began, it was merged in the New York _Mirror_, of
+which Willis became associate editor, leaving his native city forever,
+and never forgiving its injustice towards him. In the heyday of his
+happy social career in England he wrote to his mother, "The mines of
+Golconda would not tempt me to return and live in Boston."
+
+This was the literary situation when Holmes was preluding in the
+magazine. The acknowledged poets in Boston were Dana, Sprague, and
+Pierpont. Are these names familiar to the readers of this essay? How
+much of their poetry can those readers repeat? No one knows more surely
+than he who writes of a living author how hard it is to forecast fame,
+and how dangerous is prophecy. When Edward Everett saluted Percival's
+early volume as the harbinger of literary triumphs, and Emerson greeted
+Walt Whitman at "the opening of a great career", they generalized a
+strong personal impression. They identified their own preference with
+the public taste. On the other hand, Hawthorne says truly of himself
+that he was long the most obscure man of letters in America. Yet he had
+already published the _Twice-told Tales_ and the _Mosses from an Old
+Manse_, the two series of stories in which the character and quality
+of his genius are fully disclosed. But although Longfellow hailed the
+publication of the first collection as the rising of a new star, the
+tone of his comment is not that of the discoverer of a planet shining
+for all, but of an individual poetic pleasure. The prescience of fame is
+very infrequent. The village gazes in wonder at the return of the famous
+man who was born on the farm under the hill, and whose latent greatness
+nobody suspected; while the youth who printed verses in the corner of
+the county paper, and drew the fascinated glances of palpitating maidens
+in the meetinghouse, and seemed to the farmers to have associated
+himself at once with Shakespeare and Tupper and the great literary or
+"littery folks", never emerges from the poet's department in the paper
+in which unconsciously and forever he has been cornered. It would be a
+grim Puritan jest if that department had been named from the corner of
+the famous dead in Westminster Abbey.
+
+If the Boston of sixty years ago had ventured to prophesy for itself
+literary renown, it is easy to see upon what reputations of the time
+it would have rested its claims. But if the most familiar names of
+that time are familiar no longer, if Kettell and poems from the _United
+States Gazette_ seem to be cemeteries of departed reputations, the fate
+of the singers need not be deplored as if Fame had forgotten them. Fame
+never knew them. Fame does not retain the name of every minstrel
+who passes singing. But to say that Fame does not know them is not
+dispraise. They sang for the hearers of their day, as the players
+played. Is it nothing to please those who listen, because those who
+are out of hearing do not stop and applaud? If we recall the names most
+eminent in our literature, whether they were destined for a longer or
+shorter date, we shall see that they are undeniably illustrations of the
+survival of the fittest. Turning over the noble volumes of Stedman
+and Miss Hutchinson, in which, as on a vast plain, the whole line of
+American literature is drawn up for inspection and review, and marches
+past like the ghostly midnight columns of Napoleon's grand army, we
+cannot quarrel with the verdict of time, nor feel that injustice has
+been done to Thamis or to Cawdor. There are singers of a day, but not
+less singers because they are of a day. The insect that flashes in the
+sunbeam does not survive like the elephant. The splendor of the most
+gorgeous butterfly does not endure with the faint hue of the hills that
+gives Athens its Pindaric name. And there are singers who do not sing.
+What says Holmes, with eager sympathy and pity, in one of his most
+familiar and most beautiful lyrics?--
+
+ "We count the broken lyres that rest
+    Where the sweet waiting singers slumber,
+  But o'er their silent sister's breast
+    The wild flowers who will stoop to number?
+  A few can touch the magic string,
+    And noisy fame is proud to win them;
+  Alas, for those that never sing,
+    And die with all their music in them!"
+
+But as he says also that the capacities of listeners at lectures differ
+widely, some holding a gallon, others a quart, and others only a pint or
+a gill, so of the singers who are not voiceless, their voices differ in
+volume. Some are organs that fill the air with glorious and continuous
+music; some are trumpets blowing a ringing peal, then sinking into
+silence; some are harps of melancholy but faint vibration; still others
+are flutes and pipes, whose sweet or shrill note has a dying fall. Some
+are heard as the wind or sea is heard; some like the rustle of leaves;
+some like the chirp of birds. Some are heard long and far away; others
+across the field; others hardly across the street. Fame is perhaps
+but the term of a longer or shorter fight with oblivion; but it is the
+warrior who "drinks delight of battle with his peers", and holds his
+own in the fray, who finally commands the eye and the heart. There were
+poets pleasantly singing to our grandfathers whose songs we do not hear,
+but the unheeded voice of the youngest songster of that time is a voice
+we heed to-day. Holmes wrote but two "Autocrat" papers in the _New
+England Magazine_--one in November, 1831, and the other in February,
+1832. The year after the publication of the second paper he went to
+Paris, where for three years he studied medicine, not as a poet, but
+as a physician, and he returned in 1836 an admirably trained and highly
+accomplished professional man. But the Phi Beta Kappa poem of that year,
+like the tender lyric to Clemence upon leaving Paris, shows not
+only that the poet was not dead, but that he did not even sleep. The
+"Metrical Essay" was the serious announcement that the poet was not
+lost in the man of science, an announcement which was followed by the
+publication in the same year (1836) of his first volume of poems. This
+was three years before the publication of Longfellow's first volume of
+verses, _The Voices of the Night_.
+
+Holmes's devotion to the two Muses of science and letters was uniform
+and untiring, as it was also to the two literary forms of verse and
+prose. But although a man of letters, like the other eminent men of
+letters in New England, he had no trace of the Bohemian. Willis was the
+only noted literary figure that ever mistook Boston for a seaport in
+Bohemia, and he early discovered his error. The fraternity which has
+given to Boston its literary primacy has been always distinguished
+not only for propriety of life and respectability in its true sense
+of worthiness and respect, but for the possession of the virtues of
+fidelity, industry, and good sense, which have carried so far both
+the influence and the renown of New England. Nowhere has the Bohemian
+tradition been more happily and completely shattered than in the circle
+to which Holmes returned from his European studies to take his place.
+American citizenship in its most attractive aspect has been signally
+illustrated in that circle, and it is not without reason that
+the government has so often selected from it our chief American
+representatives in other countries.
+
+Dr. Holmes, as he was now called, and has continued to be called,
+practised his profession in Boston; but whether because of some lurking
+popular doubt of a poet's probable skill as a physician, or from some
+lack of taste on his part for the details of professional practice, like
+his kinsman, Wendell Phillips, and innumerable other young beginners, he
+sometimes awaited a professional call longer than was agreeable. But he
+wrote medical papers, and was summoned to lecture to the medical school
+at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, and later at Pittsfield in
+Massachusetts, while his unfailing charm as an occasional poet gave
+him a distinctive name. Holmes's felicity in occasional poems is
+extraordinary. The "Metrical Essay" was the first and chief of the long
+series of such verses, among which the songs of '29, the poems
+addressed year after year to his college classmates of that year, have a
+delightful and endless grace, tenderness, wit, and point. Pegasus
+draws well in harness the triumphant chariot of '29, in which the lucky
+classmates of the poet move to a unique and happy renown.
+
+As a reader, Holmes was the permanent challenge of Mrs. Browning's
+sighing regret that poets never read their own verses to their worth.
+Park Benjamin, who heard the Phi Beta Kappa poem, said of its delivery:
+"A brilliant, airy, and _spirituelle_ manner varied with striking
+flexibility to the changing sentiment of the poem, now deeply
+impassioned, now gayly joyous and nonchalant, and anon springing up into
+almost an actual flight of rhapsody, rendered the delivery of this poem
+a rich, nearly a dramatic entertainment." This was no less true in later
+years when he read some of his poems in New York at Bishop Potter's,
+then rector of Grace Church, or of the reading of the poem at the
+doctors' dinner given to him by the physicians of New York a little
+later.
+
+Holmes's readings were like improvisations. The poems were expressed and
+interpreted by the whole personality of the poet. The most subtle
+touch of thought, the melody of fond regret, the brilliant passage
+of description, the culmination of latent fun exploding in a keen and
+resistless jest, all these were vivified in the sensitive play of manner
+and modulation of tone of the reader, so that a poem by Holmes at the
+Harvard Commencement dinner was one of the anticipated delights which
+never failed. This temperament implied an oratorical power which
+naturally drew the poet into the lecture lyceum when it was in its
+prime, in the decade between 1850 and 1860. During that time the popular
+lecture was a distinct and effective public force, and not the least
+of its services was its part in instructing and training the public
+conscience for the great contest of the Civil War.
+
+The year 1831, in which Holmes's literary activity began, was also
+the year on whose first day the first number of Garrison's _Liberator_
+appeared, and the final period of the slavery controversy opened. But
+neither this storm of agitation nor the transcendental mist that a few
+years later overhung intellectual New England greatly affected the poet.
+
+In the first number of the "Autocrat" there is a passage upon puns,
+which, crackling with fun, shows his sensitive scepticism. The
+"Autocrat" says: "In a case lately decided before Miller, J., Doe
+presented Roe a subscription paper, and urged the claims of suffering
+humanity. Roe replied by asking when charity was like a top. It was in
+evidence that Doe preserved a dignified silence. Roe then said, 'When
+it begins to hum.' There are temperaments of a refined suspiciousness
+to which, when the plea of reform is urged, the claims of suffering
+humanity at once begin to hum. The very word reform irritates a peculiar
+kind of sensibility, as a red flag stirs the fury of a bull. A noted
+party leader said, with inexpressible scorn, 'When Dr. Johnson defined
+the word patriotism as the last refuge of a scoundrel, he had not
+learned the infinite possibilities of the word refa-a-r-m.'"
+
+The acridity of this jest is wholly unknown to the "Autocrat", who
+has moved always with reform, if not always with reformers, and whose
+protest against bigotry is as searching as it is sparkling. Not only has
+his ear been quick to detect the hum of Mr. Honeythunder's loud appeal,
+but his eye to catch the often ludicrous aspect of honest whimsey.
+During all the early years of his literary career he flew his flashing
+darts at all the "isms", and he fell under the doubt and censure of
+those earnest children of the time whom the gay and clever sceptics
+derided as apostles of the newness. When Holmes appeared upon the
+lecture platform it was to discourse of literature or science, or to
+treat some text of social manners or morals with a crisp Poor Richard
+sense and mother wit, and a brilliancy of illustration, epigram, and
+humor that fascinated the most obdurate "come-outer". Holmes's lectures
+on the English poets at the Lowell Institute were among the most noted
+of that distinguished platform, and everywhere the poet was one of
+the most popular of "attractions". There were not wanting those who
+maintained that his use of the platform was the correct one, and that
+the orators who, often by happy but incisive indirection, fought the
+good fight of the hour abused their opportunity.
+
+It was while Holmes was still a professor, but still also touching the
+lyre and writing scientific essays and charming the great audiences of
+the lecture lyceum, that in the first number of the _Atlantic Monthly_,
+in November, 1857, the "Autocrat of the Breakfast Table" remarked,
+"I was just going to say, when I was interrupted," and resumed the
+colloquies of the _New England Magazine_. He had been interrupted
+twenty-two years before. But as he began again it was plain that it was
+the same voice, yet fuller, stronger, richer, and that we were listening
+to one of the wisest of wits and sharpest of observers. Emerson warns us
+that superlatives are to be avoided. But it will not be denied that the
+"Autocrat" belongs in the highest rank of modern magazine or periodical
+literature, of which the essays of "Elia" are the type. The form of the
+"Autocrat"--a semi-dramatic, conversational, descriptive monologue--is
+not peculiar to Holmes's work, but the treatment of it is absolutely
+original. The manner is as individual and unmistakable as that of Elia
+himself. It would be everywhere recognized as the Autocrat's. During
+the intermission of the papers the more noted Macaulay flowers of
+literature, as the Autocrat calls them, had bloomed; Carlyle's _Sartor
+Resartus_ and reviews, Christopher North's _Noctes_ (now fallen into
+ancient night), Thackeray's _Roundabout Papers_, Lowell's _Hosea
+Biglow_--a whole library of magazine and periodical literature of the
+first importance had appeared. But the Autocrat began again, after a
+quarter of a century, musical with so rich a chorus, and his voice was
+clear, penetrating, masterful, and distinctively his own.
+
+The cadet branch of English literature--the familiar colloquial
+periodical essay, a comment upon men and manners and life--is a
+delightful branch of the family, and traces itself back to Dick Steele
+and Addison. Hazlitt, who belonged to it, said that he preferred the
+_Tatler_ to the _Spectator_; and Thackeray, who consorted with it
+proudly, although he was of the elder branch, restored Sir Richard,
+whose habits had cost him a great deal of his reputation, to general
+favor. The familiar essay is susceptible, as the eighteenth and
+nineteenth centuries show, of great variety and charm of treatment. What
+would the Christian Hero, writing to his Prue that he would be with her
+in a pint of wine's time, have said to "Blakesmoor" and "Oxford in the
+Vacation"? Yet Lamb and Steele are both consummate masters of the essay,
+and Holmes, in the "Autocrat", has given it a new charm. The little
+realm of the Autocrat, his lieges of the table, the persons of
+the drama, are at once as definitely outlined as Sir Roger's club.
+Unconsciously and resistlessly we are drawn within the circle; we are
+admitted _ad eundem_, and become the targets of the wit, the irony,
+the shrewd and sharp epigram, the airy whim, the sparkling fancy,
+the curious and recondite thought, the happy allusion, the felicitous
+analogy, of the sovereign master of the feast.
+
+The index of the _Autocrat_ is in itself a unique work. It reveals the
+whimsical discursiveness of the book; the restless hovering of that
+brilliant talk over every topic, fancy, feeling, fact; a humming-bird
+sipping the one honeyed drop from every flower; or a huma, to use its
+own droll and capital symbol of the lyceum lecturer, the bird that never
+lights. There are few books that leave more distinctly the impression of
+a mind teeming with riches of many kinds. It is, in the Yankee phrase,
+thoroughly wideawake. There is no languor, and it permits none in the
+reader, who must move along the page warily, lest in the gay profusion
+of the grove, unwittingly defrauding himself of delight, he miss
+some flower half hidden, some gem chance-dropped, some darting bird.
+Howells's _Letters_ was called a chamber-window book, a book supplying
+in solitude the charm of the best society. We could all name a few such
+in our own literature. Would any of them, or many, take precedence of
+the _Autocrat of the Breakfast Table?_
+
+It is in this book that the value of the scientific training to the
+man of letters is illustrated, not only in furnishing noble and strong
+analogies, but in precision of observation and accuracy of statement. In
+Holmes's style, the definiteness of form and the clearness of expression
+are graces and virtues which are due to his exact scientific study, as
+well as to the daylight quality of his mind.
+
+The delicate apprehension of the finer and tenderer feelings which
+is disclosed in the little passages of narrative in the record of the
+Autocrat and of his legitimate brothers, the Professor and the Poet,
+at the Breakfast Table, gives a grace and a sweetness to the work which
+naturally flow into the music of the poems with which the diary of a
+conversation often ends. These traits in the Autocrat suggested that he
+would yet tell a distinct story, which indeed came while the trilogy
+of the Breakfast Table was yet proceeding. _Elsie_ _Venner_ and the
+_Guardian Angel_, the two novels of Holmes's, are full of the same
+briskness and acuteness of observation, the same effusiveness of humor
+and characteristic Americanism, as the _Autocrat_. Certain aspects
+of New England life and character are treated in these stories with
+incomparable vivacity and insight. Holmes's picture is of a later New
+England than Hawthorne's, but it is its lineal descendant. It is another
+facet of the Puritan diamond which flashes with different light in the
+genius of Hawthorne, Emerson, Lowell, Whittier, Longfellow, Holmes, and
+Judd in _Margaret_. For, with all his lyrical instinct and rollicking
+humor, Holmes is essentially a New-Englander, and one of the most
+faithful and shrewd interpreters of New England.
+
+The colloquial habit of the Autocrat is not lost in the stories, and it
+is so marked generally in Holmes's writings as to be called distinctive.
+It is a fascinating gift, when it is so restrained by taste and
+instinctive refinement as not to become what is known as bumptiousness.
+Thackeray, even in his novels, is apt to drop into this vein, to talk
+about the persons of his drama with his reader, instead of leaving them
+to play out their part alone. This trait offends some of Thackeray's
+audience, to whom it seems like the manager's hand thrust into the
+box to help out the play of the puppets. They resent not "the damnable
+faces" of the actors, but the damnable sermonizing of the author, and
+exhort him to permit the play to begin. Thackeray frankly acknowledged
+his tendency to preach, as he called it. But it was part of the man.
+Without the private personal touch of the essayist in his stories they
+would not be his. This colloquial habit is very winning when governed by
+a natural delicacy and an exquisite literary instinct. It is the quality
+of all the authors who are distinctly beloved as persons by their
+readers, and it is to this class that Holmes especially belongs.
+
+It is not a quality which is easily analyzed, but it blends a power of
+sympathetic observation and appreciation both of the thing observed and
+the reader to whom the observation is addressed. The Autocrat, as he
+converses, brightens with his own clear thought, with the happy quip,
+the airy fancy. He is sure of your delight, not only in the thought, but
+in its deft expression. He in turn is delighted with your delight. He
+warms to the responsive mind and heart, and feels the mutual joy. The
+personal relation is established, and the Autocrat's audience become
+his friends, to whom he describes with infinite glee the effect of his
+remarks upon his lieges at table. No other author takes the reader into
+his personal confidence more closely than Holmes, and none reveals his
+personal temperament more clearly. This confidential relation becomes
+even more simple and intimate as time chastens the eagerness of youth
+and matures the keen brilliancy of the blossom into the softer bloom of
+the fruit. The colloquies of the Autocrat under the characteristic
+title of "Over the Tea-Cups" are full of the same shrewd sense and wise
+comment and tender thought. The kindly mentor takes the reader by the
+button or lays his hand upon his shoulder, not with the rude familiarity
+of the bully or the boor, but with the courtesy of Montaigne, the
+friendliness of John Aubrey, or the wise cheer of Selden. The reader
+glows with the pleasure of an individual greeting, and a wide diocese
+of those whom the Autocrat never saw plume themselves proudly upon his
+personal acquaintance.
+
+In this discursive talk about one of the American authors who have
+vindicated the position of American letters in the literature of the
+language we have not mentioned all his works. It is the quality rather
+than the quantity with which we are concerned, the upright, honorable,
+pure quality of the poet, the wit, the scholar, for whom the most
+devoted reader is called to make no plea, no apology. The versatility of
+his power is obvious, but scarcely less so the uniformity of his work.
+
+It is a power which was early mature. For many a year he has dwelt upon
+a high table-land where the air is equable and inspiring, yet, as we
+have hinted, ever softer and sweeter. The lyric of today glows with the
+same ardor as the fervent apostrophe to "Old Ironsides" or the tripping
+salutation to the remembered and regretted Clemence; it is only less
+eager. The young Autocrat who remarked that the word "scrub" dismissed
+from table a fellow-boarder who turned pale, now with the same smiling
+acuteness remarks the imprudent politeness which tries to assure him
+that it is no matter if he is a little older. Did anybody say so? The
+easy agility with which he cleared "the seven-barred gate" has carried
+him over the eight bars, and we are all in hot pursuit. For just sixty
+years since his first gay and tender note was heard, Holmes has been
+fulfilling the promise of his matin song. He has become a patriarch of
+our literature, and all his countrymen are his lovers.
+
+
+
+
+WASHINGTON IRVING
+
+
+Forty years ago, upon a pleasant afternoon, you might have seen tripping
+with an elastic step along Broadway, in New York, a figure which even
+then would have been called quaint. It was a man of about sixty-six or
+sixty-seven years old, of a rather solid frame, wearing a Talma, as a
+short cloak of the time was called, that hung from the shoulders, and
+low shoes, neatly tied, which were observable at a time when boots were
+generally worn. The head was slightly declined to one side, the face was
+smoothly shaven, and the eyes twinkled with kindly humor and shrewdness.
+There was a chirping, cheery, old-school air in the whole appearance,
+an undeniable Dutch aspect, which, in the streets of New Amsterdam,
+irresistibly recalled Diedrich Knickerbocker. The observer might easily
+have supposed that he saw some later descendant of the renowned Wouter
+Van Twiller refined into a nineteenth-century gentleman. The occasional
+start of interest as the figure was recognized by some one in the
+passing throng, the respectful bow, and the sudden turn to scan him more
+closely, indicated that he was not unknown. Indeed, he was the American
+of his time universally known. This modest and kindly man was the
+creator of Diedrich Knickerbocker and Rip Van Winkle. He was the father
+of our literature, and at that time its patriarch. He was Washington
+Irving.
+
+At the same time you might have seen another man, of slight figure and
+rustic aspect, with an air of seriousness, if not severity, moving with
+the crowd, but with something remote and reserved in his air, as if in
+the city he bore with him another atmosphere, and were still secluded
+among solitary hills. In the bright and busy street of the city which
+was always cosmopolitan, and in which there lingers a tradition,
+constantly renewed, of good-natured banter of the losel Yankee, this
+figure passed like the grave genius of New England. By a little play of
+fancy the first figure might have seemed the smiling spirit of genial
+cheerfulness and humor, of kindly sympathy even with the foibles and
+weaknesses of poor human nature; and the other the mentor of its earnest
+endeavor and serious duty. For he was the first of our poets, whose
+"Thanatopsis" was the hymn of his meditations among the primeval forests
+of his native hills, and who, in his last years, sat at the door of his
+early home and looked across the valley of the Westfield to the
+little town of Plainfield upon the wooded heights beyond, whose chief
+distinction is that there he wrote the "Waterfowl"; for this graver
+figure was the poet Bryant.
+
+If in the same walk you had passed those two figures, you would have
+seen not only the first of our famous prose writers and the first of our
+acknowledged poets, but also the representatives of the two fundamental
+and distinctive qualities of our American literature, as of all
+literature--its grave, reflective, earnest character, and its sportive,
+genial, and humorous genius.
+
+At the time of which I speak another figure also was familiar in
+Broadway, but less generally recognized as it passed than either of the
+others, although, perhaps, even more widely known to fame than they.
+This was Cooper, who gave us so many of the heroes of our childhood's
+delight, but who at this time was himself the hero of innumerable
+lawsuits, undertaken to chastise the press for what he believed to be
+unjust and libelous comments upon himself. Now that the uproar of that
+litigation is silent, and its occasion forgotten, it seems comical that
+a man for whom fame had already rendered a favorable judgment should
+be busily seeking the opinion of local courts upon transitory newspaper
+opinions of him-self and his writings. It is as if Dickens, when the
+whole English-reading world--judges on the bench and bishops in their
+studies, cobblers in their stalls and grooms in the stables--were all
+laughing over Pickwick, should have sued the _Eatanswill Gazette_ for
+calling him a clown. Thackeray pronounces Cooper's Long Tom Coffin
+one of the prizemen of fiction. That is a final judgment by the
+chief-justice. But who knows what was the verdict in Cooper's lawsuits
+to vindicate himself, and who cares? When Cooper died there was a great
+commemorative meeting in New York. Daniel Webster presided, and praised
+the storyteller; Bryant read a discourse upon him, while Irving sat by
+his side. One of the triumvirate of our early literature was gone, and
+two remained to foresee their own future in the honors paid to him.
+Indeed, it was to see them, quite as much as to hear of their dead
+comrade, that the multitude assembled that evening; and the one who was
+seen with the most interest was Irving, the one in whom the city of New
+York naturally feels a peculiar right and pride, as the most renowned of
+her children.
+
+If I say that he made personally the same impression that his works
+make, you can easily see the man. As you read the story of his life you
+feel its constant gayety and cheerfulness. It was the life of a literary
+man and a man of society--a life without events, or only the events
+of all our lives, except that it lacks the great event of marriage. In
+place of it there is a tender and pathetic romance. Irving lived to be
+seventy-six years old. At twenty-six he was engaged to a beautiful girl,
+who died. He never married; but after his death, in a little box of
+which he always kept the key, was found the miniature of a lovely girl,
+and with it a braid of fair hair, and a slip of paper on which was
+written the name Matilda Hoffman, with some pages upon which the writing
+was long since faded. That fair face Irving kept all his life in a more
+secret and sacred shrine. It looks out, now and then, with unchanged
+loveliness from some pensive passage, which he seems to write with
+wistful melancholy of remembrance. That fond and immortal presence
+constantly renewed the gentle humanity, the tenderness of feeling, the
+sweet healthfulness and generous sympathy which never failed in his life
+and writings.
+
+He was born in the city of New York in 1783, the year in which the
+Revolution ended in the acknowledgment of American independence. The
+British army marched out of the city, and the American army, with
+Washington at the head, marched in. "The patriot's work is ended just as
+my boy is born," said the patriotic mother, "and the boy shall be named
+Washington". Six years later, when Washington returned to New York to be
+inaugurated President, he was one day going into a shop when the boy's
+Scotch nurse democratically stopped the new republican chief magistrate
+and said to him, "Please your honor, here's a bairn was named for you".
+The great man turned and looked kindly on his little namesake, laid his
+hand upon his head, and blessed his future biographer.
+
+The name of no other American has been so curiously confused with
+Washington's as that of Irving. Many a young fellow puzzles over the
+connection which the name seems vaguely to imply, and in other lands the
+identity of the men is confounded. When Irving first went to Europe, a
+very young man, well-educated, courteous, with great geniality of manner
+and charm of conversation, he was received by Prince Torlonia, the
+banker, in Rome, with unusual and flattering civility. His travelling
+companion, who had been treated by the prince with entire indifference,
+was perplexed at the warmth of Irving's welcome. Irving laughingly said
+that it only proved the prince's remarkable discrimination. But the
+young travellers laughed still more when the prince unconsciously
+revealed the secret of his attentions by taking his guest aside, and
+asking him how nearly he was related to General Washington.
+
+Many years afterwards, when he had become famous, an English lady and
+her daughter paused in an Italian gallery before a bust of Washington.
+"And who was Washington, mamma?" asked the daughter. "Why, my dear, I am
+surprised at your ignorance," answered the mother, "he was the author of
+the _Sketch Book_." Long ago in Berlin I was talking with some American
+friends one evening at a café, and observed a German intently listening
+to our conversation as if trying his ability to understand the language.
+Presently he said to me, politely, "You are English, no?" But when
+I replied "No, we are Americans"--"Americans!" he exclaimed
+enthusiastically, grasping my hand and shaking it warmly, "Americans,
+ach! we all know your great General Washington Irving."
+
+Irving's father was a Presbyterian deacon, in whose heart the sterner
+traditions of the Covenanters lingered. He tried hard to teach his son
+to contemn amusement, and to impale his youth upon the five points of
+Calvinism, rather than to play ball. But it was John Knox trying to curb
+the tricksy Ariel. Perhaps from some bright maternal ancestor the boy
+had derived his sweet gayety of nature which nothing could repress.
+His airy spirits bubbled like a sunny fountain in that somewhat arid
+household. He read at ten a translation of the _Orlando Furioso_, and
+his father's yard, doubtless trim and well kept as beseemed a deacon's
+yard, became at once a field of chivalry. Candles were forbidden him in
+his chamber, but when he made the acquaintance of _Robinson Crusoe_
+and _Sindbad the Sailor_, he secreted lights to illuminate his innocent
+revels with those immortal playmates.
+
+The amusements which were permitted were of too depressing a character
+to be tolerated by the healthy boy, who, like the duck taking to the
+water from under the wing of the astonished hen, sometimes escaped from
+the serious house at night by dropping from a window, and with a delight
+that must have torn his father's heart with anguish had he known it,
+tasted the forbidden fruit of the theatre. It was a Presbyterian boy
+who tasted it then; but in the same city many years afterwards it was a
+Quaker boy whom I knew who was also enamoured of the play. "John," said
+his grieved father, "is this dreadful thing true that I hear of thee?
+Has thee ever been to see the play-actress Frances Kemble?" "Yes,
+father," answered the heroic John. "I hope thee has not been more than
+once, John," said the afflicted father. "Yes, father," replied John,
+resolved to make a clean breast of his sins, "more than thirty times."
+It is useless to try to prevent blue-birds from flying in the spring.
+The blithe creatures made to soar and sing will not be restrained.
+The same kind Providence that made Calvin made Shakespeare. The sun
+is higher than the clouds, and smiles are as heaven-born as tears. In
+Emerson's poem the squirrel says to the mountain:
+
+ "You're not so small as I,
+  And not half so spry;
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+ "If I cannot carry forests on my back
+  Neither can you crack a nut."
+
+
+It was in vain to try to thwart the young Irving's genius. Yet the
+boy who a little later was to light with rosy cheer the air which, as
+Wendell Phillips said, was still black with sermons; who was to give to
+our literature its first distinctly humorous strain, and innocently to
+amuse the world, was somehow or other, as he said, "taught to feel that
+everything pleasant was wicked".
+
+If that were so, what a sinner Washington Irving was! If to make life
+easier by making it pleasanter, if to outwit trouble by gay banter,
+if with satire that smiles but never stings to correct foibles and to
+quicken good impulses; if to deepen and strengthen human sympathy, is
+not to be a human benefactor, what makes one? When Dr. Johnson said of
+Garrick that his death eclipsed the gayety of nations, he did not mean
+merely that the player would no longer make men laugh, but that he
+could no longer make them better. "If, however," said Irving--and Willis
+selected the words for the motto of his second volume of verse published
+in 1827--"I can by a lucky chance, in these days of evil, rub out one
+wrinkle from the brow of care, or beguile the heavy heart of one moment
+of sadness; if I can, now and then, penetrate the gathering film of
+misanthropy, prompt a benevolent view of human nature, and make my
+reader more in good-humor with his fellow-beings and himself, surely,
+surely I shall not then have written entirely in vain."
+
+That cannot be said to have been the spirit of any American author
+before Irving. Our colonial literature was mainly political and
+theological. You have only to return to the early New England days in
+the stories of Hawthorne, the magician who restores with a shuddering
+spell that old, sombre life, to understand the character of its reading.
+The books that were not treatises upon special topics all seemed to say
+with one of the grim bards of Calvinism:
+
+    "My thoughts on awful subjects roll,
+            Damnation and the dead."
+
+Literature, in its proper sense, there was none. There was no
+imaginative creation, no play of fancy and humor, no subtle charm of the
+ideal life, no grace and delight of expression, which are essential to
+literature. The perpetual twilight and chill of the New England Puritan
+world were an arctic winter in which no flower of poesy bloomed and
+no bird sang. One of the French players who came to this country with
+Rachel says, in his journal, with a startled air, as if he had remarked
+in Americans a universal touch of lunacy, that he was invited to take a
+pleasure-drive to Greenwood Cemetery. Evidently he was not familiar with
+Froissart's epigram nor with the annals of the Puritan fathers, or he
+would have known that their favorite pleasure-ground was the graveyard.
+Judge Sewell's Journal, the best picture of daily New England life in
+the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, is a portrait framed in black
+and hung with thick crape. It is a register of funerals--a book which
+seems to require a suit of sables for its proper reading.
+
+The early Christians dwelt so often and so long in the catacombs that
+when they emerged, accustomed to associate life with the tomb, they
+doubtless regarded the whole world as a cemetery. The American Puritans
+inherited the disposition from their early confessors, and so powerful
+was the tendency that it laid its sombre spirit upon the earliest
+enduring poem in our literature, and the fresh and smiling nature of the
+new world was first depicted by our literary art as a tomb:
+
+                                        "The hills,
+  Rock-ribbed and ancient as the sun; the vales
+  Stretching in pensive quietness between;
+  The venerable woods; rivers that move
+  In majesty; and the complaining brooks
+  That make the meadows green; and, poured round all,
+  Old ocean's gray and melancholy waste,
+  Are but the solemn decorations all
+  Of the great tomb of man."
+
+"Thanatopsis" is the swan-song of Puritanism. Indeed, when New England
+Puritanism could sing, as for the first time it did in the verse of
+Bryant, the great change was accomplished. Out of strength had come
+forth sweetness. I am not decrying the Puritans. They were the stern
+builders of the modern world, the unconscious heralds of wider liberty,
+and a kindlier future for mankind. But
+
+ "God works in a mysterious way
+  His wonders to perform,"
+
+and never more mysteriously than when he chose as the pioneers of
+religious liberty in the New World those who hung Quakers, and as the
+founders of civil equality those who permitted only members of their own
+Church to vote.
+
+Irving was not a studious boy. He did not go to college. He read some
+law at sixteen, but he read much more literature, and sauntered in the
+country about New York with his gun and fishing-rod. He sailed up the
+Hudson, and explored for the first time the realm that was presently to
+be his forever by the right of eminent domain of the imagination. New
+York was a snug little city in those days. At the beginning of the
+century it was all below the present City Hall, and the young fellow,
+who was born a cosmopolitan, greatly enjoyed the charms of the modest
+society in which the Dutch and the English circles were still somewhat
+separated, and in which such literary cultivation as there was was
+necessarily foreign. But while he enjoyed he observed, and his literary
+instinct began to stir.
+
+Under the name of "Jonathan Oldstyle", the young Irving printed in his
+brother's newspaper essays in the style of the _Spectator_, discussing
+topics of the town, and the modest theatre in John Street and its chance
+actors, as if it had been Drury Lane with Garrick and Mrs. Siddons. The
+little town kindly smiled upon the lively efforts of the Presbyterian
+deacon's son; and its welcome of his small essays, the provincial echo
+of the famous Queen Anne's men in London, is a touching revelation of
+our scant and spare native literary talent. The essays are forgotten
+now, but they were enough to bring Charles Brockden Brown to find the
+young author, and to tempt him, but in vain, to write for _The Literary
+Magazine and American Register_, which the novelist was just beginning
+in Philadelphia, a pioneer of American literary magazines, which Brown
+sustained for five years.
+
+The youthful Addison of New Amsterdam was a delicate lad, and when he
+came of age he sailed for France and the Mediterranean, and passed two
+years in travelling. Napoleon Bonaparte was emperor, and at war with
+England, and the young American, despite his passport, was everywhere
+believed to be an Englishman. Travelling was hard work in those days of
+war, but the cheery youth proved the truth of the proverb that a light
+heart and a whole pair of breeches go round the world. At Messina, in
+Sicily, he saw Nelson's fleet pass through the strait, looking for the
+French ships; and before the year ended the famous battle of Trafalgar
+had been fought, and at Greenwich in England Irving saw the body of the
+great sailor lying in state, wrapped in his flag of victory. At Rome he
+made the acquaintance of Washington Allston, and almost resolved to be a
+painter. In Paris he saw Madame de Staël, who overwhelmed him with eager
+questions about his remote and unknown country, and in London he was
+enchanted by Mrs. Siddons. Some years afterwards, when the _Sketch Book_
+had made him famous, he was presented to Mrs. Siddons, and the great
+actress said to him, in her deepest voice and with her stateliest
+manner, "You've made me weep." The modest young author was utterly
+abashed, and could say nothing. After the publication of his
+_Bracebridge_ Hall he was once more presented to her, and again with
+gloomy grandeur she said to him, "You've made me weep again." This time
+Irving received the solemn salute with more composure, and doubtless
+retorted with a compliment magnificent enough even for the sovereign
+Queen of Tragedy, who, as her niece Mrs. Fanny Kemble said of her, never
+laid aside her great manner, and at the dinner-table brandished her fork
+and stabbed the potatoes.
+
+Irving returned from this tour with established health--a refined,
+agreeable, exceedingly handsome and charming gentleman; with a confirmed
+taste for society, and a delightful store of interesting recollection
+and anecdote. With a group of cultivated and lively friends of his own
+age he dined and supped and enjoyed the town, and a little anecdote
+which he was fond of telling shows that the good old times were not
+unlike the good new times: One morning, after a gay dinner, Irving met
+one of his fellow-revellers, who told him that on the way home, after
+draining the parting bumper, he had fallen through a grating in the
+sidewalk, which had been carelessly left open, into the vault beneath.
+It was impossible to climb out, and at first the solitude was rather
+dismal, he said; but several of the other guests fell in, in the course
+of the evening, and, on the whole, they had quite a pleasant time of it.
+
+In the midst of this frolicking life, and growing out of it, Irving's
+real literary career began. With his brother William, and his friend
+James K. Paulding, who afterwards wrote the _Dutchman's Fireside_, and
+was one of the recognized American authors of fifty years ago, he issued
+every fortnight a periodical, which ran for twenty numbers, and stopped
+in the midst of its success. It was modelled upon the _Spectator_ and
+Goldsmith's _Citizen of the World_, describing and criticising the
+manners and morals of the town with extravagant humor and pungency,
+and a rollicking independence which must have been both startling and
+stimulating.
+
+Perhaps, also, the town was secretly pleased to discover that it was
+sufficiently important to be worthy of such bright raillery and humorous
+reproof. _Salmagundi_ was only a lively _jeu d'esprit_, and Irving was
+never proud of it. "I know," said Paulding, writing to him in later
+life, "you consider old Sal as a sort of saucy, flippant trollope,
+belonging to nobody, and not worth fathering." But, nevertheless,
+Irving's genius was trying its wings in it, and pluming itself for
+flight. _Salmagundi_ undoubtedly, to a later taste, is rather crude and
+cumbrous fun, but it is interesting as the immediate forerunner of our
+earliest work of sustained humor, and of the wit of Holmes and Lowell at
+a later date. When it was discontinued, at the beginning of 1808, Irving
+and his brother began the _History of New York_, which was originally
+designed to be a parody of a particular book. But the work was
+interrupted by the business difficulties of the brother, and at last
+Irving resumed it alone, recast it entirely, and as he finished it the
+engagement with Matilda Hoffman ended with her death, and the long arid
+secret romance of his life began.
+
+Knickerbocker's _History_ was published just before Christmas, 1809,
+and made a merry Christmas for our grandfathers and grandmothers eighty
+years ago. The fun began before the book was published. In October the
+curiosity of the town of eighty thousand inhabitants was awakened by
+a series of skilful paragraphs in the _Evening Post_. The art of
+advertising was never more ingeniously illustrated. Mr. Fulkerson
+himself would have paid homage to the artist. One day the quid-nuncs
+found this paragraph in the paper, It was headed,
+
+   "DISTRESSING.
+
+   "Left his lodgings, some time since, and has not since been heard
+    of, a small elderly gentleman, dressed in an old black coat and
+    cocked hat, by the name of Knickerbocker. As there are some reasons
+    for believing that he is not entirely in his right mind, and, as
+    great anxiety is entertained about him, any information concerning
+    him left either at the Columbian Hotel, Mulberry Street, or at the
+    office of this paper, will be thankfully received.
+
+   "P. S.--Printers of newspapers would be aiding the cause of humanity
+    by giving an insertion to the above.
+
+   "_October 25th._"
+
+This was followed within a fortnight by another ingenious lure:
+
+   "_To the Editor of the Evening Post:_
+
+   "Sir,--Having read in your paper of the 26th October last a paragraph
+    respecting an old gentleman by the name of Knickerbocker, who was
+    missing from his lodgings, if it would be any relief to his friends,
+    or furnish them with any clue to discover where he is, you may inform
+    them that a person answering the description was seen by the passengers
+    of the Albany stage early in the morning, about four or five weeks ago,
+    resting himself by the side of the road, a little above Kingsbridge.
+    He had in his hands a small bundle, tied in a red bandana handkerchief.
+    He appeared to be travelling northward, and was very much fatigued and
+    exhausted.
+
+   "_November 6._                             A Traveller."
+
+Ten days after came a letter signed by Seth Handaside, landlord of the
+Independent Handaside:
+
+   "Columbian Hotel, Mulberry Street.
+
+   "Sir,--You have been kind enough to publish in your paper a paragraph
+    about Mr. Diedrich Knickerbocker, who was missing so strangely from his
+    lodgings some time since. Nothing satisfactory has been heard from the
+    old gentleman since, but a very curious written Book has been found in
+    his room in his own handwriting. Now, I wish you to notice him, if he
+    is still alive, that if he does not return and pay off his bill for
+    board and lodging, I shall have to dispose of his Book to satisfy me
+    for the same."
+
+This is very simple jesting, but at that time it was very effective in
+a town that enjoyed the high spirits of _Salmagundi_. Moreover, the book
+which was announced in this lively strain was as unprecedented as the
+announcement. It was a very serious time and country, and the work of
+the small elderly gentleman who carried a little bundle tied in a
+red bandana handkerchief appeared in the midst of the sober and dry
+effusions of our Puritan literature, and of an eager and energetic life
+still engrossed with the subjection of a continent and the establishment
+of a new nation. It was the work of a young man of twenty-six, who lived
+fifty years afterwards with constantly increasing fame, making many
+and admirable contributions to literature. But nothing that followed
+surpassed the joyous brilliancy and gay felicity of his first book,
+which was at once acknowledged as the wittiest book that America had
+produced.
+
+Knickerbocker's _History_ is a prolonged and elaborate and audacious
+burlesque of the early annals of New Amsterdam. The undaunted Goth of
+the legend who plucked the Roman senator by the beard was not a more
+ruthless iconoclast than this son of New Amsterdam, who drew its grave
+ancestors from venerable obscurity by flooding them with the cheerful
+light of blameless fun. To pass the vague and venerable traditions of
+the austere and heroic founders of the city through the alembic of
+a youth's hilarious creative humor, and to turn them out in forms
+resistlessly grotesque, but with their identity unimpaired, was a stroke
+as daring as it was successful. But the skill and power with which this
+is done can be best appreciated by those who are most familiar with the
+history which the gleeful genius burlesques.
+
+Irving follows the actual story closely, and the characters that
+he develops faithfully, although with rollicking caricature, are
+historical. Indeed, the fidelity is so absolute that the fiction is
+welded with the fact. The days of the Dutch ascendency in New York are
+inextricably associated with this ludicrous narrative. It is impossible
+not to think of the forefathers of New Amsterdam as Knickerbocker
+describes them. The Wouter Van Twiller, the Wilhemus Kieft, the Peter
+Stuyvesant, who are familiarly and popularly known, are not themselves,
+but the figures drawn by Diedrich Knickerbocker. In comical despair,
+the historian Grahame, whose _Colonial History_ is still among the
+best, says of Knickerbocker: "If Sancho Panza had been a real governor,
+misrepresented by the wit of Cervantes, his future historian would have
+found it no easy matter to bespeak a grave attention to the annals of
+his administration."
+
+The gayety of this blithe genius bursting in upon our staid literature
+is irresistible. Irving's temperament, his travels, his humor, gave him
+a cosmopolitan point of view; and his little native city, with its local
+sense of importance, and its droll aristocratic traditions springing
+from Dutch burgomasters and traders, impressed his merry genius like
+a complacent Cranford or Tarascon taking itself with a provincial
+seriousness, which, to his sympathetic fancy, was an exhaustless
+fountain of fun. Part of the fun to us, and perhaps to Irving, was the
+indignation with which it was received by the descendants of the Dutch
+families in the city and State. The excited drawing-rooms denounced
+it as scandalous satire and ridicule. Even Irving's friend, Gulian
+Verplanck, nine years afterwards, deepening the comedy of his remark by
+his evident unconsciousness of the drollery of his gravity, grieved that
+the author's exuberance of genuine humor should be wasted on a coarse
+caricature. Irving, who was then in Europe, saw Verplanck's strictures
+just as he had written _Rip Van Winkle_, and he wrote to a friend at
+home that he could not help laughing at Verplanck's outburst of filial
+feeling for his ancestors, adding, in the true Knickerbocker vein,
+"Remember me heartily to him, and tell him that I mean to grow wiser
+and better and older every day, and to lay the castigation he has given
+seriously to heart."
+
+The success of Knickerbocker's _History_ was immediate, and it was the
+first American work of literature which arrested attention in Europe.
+
+Sir Walter Scott, who was then the most famous of English poets, and was
+about to publish the first of the Waverley Novels, was delighted with a
+humor which he thought recalled Swift's, and a sentiment that seemed
+to him as tender as Sterne's. He wrote a generous acknowledgment to
+the American friend who had sent him the book, and in later years he
+welcomed Diedrich Knickerbocker at Abbotsford, and the American has
+given a charming and vivid picture of Scott's home and its master.
+
+But the success of his book did not at once determine Irving's choice
+of a career. He was still a gilded youth who enjoyed the gay idleness of
+society, and who found in writing only another and pleasant recreation.
+He had been bred in the conservative tradition which looked upon
+livelihood by literature as the deliberate choice of Grub Street, and
+the wretchedness of Goldsmith as the necessary and natural fate of
+authors; but it is droll that, although he recoiled from the uncertainty
+of support by literary labor, he was willing to try the very doubtful
+chances of office-holding as a means of securing leisure for literary
+pursuits. He offered himself as a candidate for appointment as the clerk
+of a court in the city. By tradition and sympathy he was a Federalist,
+but he had taken no active part in politics, and his chance was slight.
+He went to Albany, however, and in a lively letter he paints a familiar
+picture of the crowd of office-hunters who, he says, "like a cloud of
+locusts, have descended upon the city to devour every plant and herb and
+every green thing." He was sick with a cold, and stifled in rooms heated
+by stoves, and was utterly disgusted, as he says, "by the servility
+and duplicity and rascality I have witnessed among the swarms of scrub
+politicians who crawl about the great metropolis of our State like so
+many vermin about the head of the body politic."
+
+Again the good old times were apparently very much like the good new
+times. Thirty-nine years after Irving's discomfiture in trying to get a
+public office, Hawthorne was turned out of one that he held, and wrote
+to a friend: "It seems to me that an inoffensive man of letters, having
+obtained a pitiful little office on no other plea than his pitiful
+little literature, ought not to be left at the mercy of these
+thick-skulled and no-hearted ruffians." The language is strong, but the
+epithets are singularly well-chosen. The distinctive qualities of the
+ringleaders, whether of high or low degree, in the degradation of public
+trusts into private and party spoils, have never been more accurately
+or effectively described than by the words "thick-skulled" and
+"no-hearted".
+
+The story of the sturdy beggar who asked General Jackson to give him the
+mission to France, and finally came down to a request for an old coat,
+well illustrates a system which regards public office not as a public
+trust, but as private alms. The service of the State, whether military
+or civil, is an object of high and generous ambition, because it
+involves the leadership of men. But if Irving and Hawthorne thought
+that what is called office-seeking is disgusting, it was not because
+the public service is not noble and dignified, but because we choose to
+allow it to be so often dependent, not upon fitness and character,
+but upon the personal or political favor of the "thick-skulled" and
+"no-hearted".
+
+But the problem of a career was soon solved. In the year 1810 Irving
+formed a business connection with two of his brothers, and the next five
+years were passed in New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, forming
+various literary plans, looking out for his business interests,
+sparkling in society; and when war with England began, serving upon the
+governor's military staff as Colonel Washington Irving. In the spring
+of 1815 he sailed to roam again through Europe, but the illness of his
+brother compelled him to remain in England in charge of the business.
+"London," as a shrewd and celebrated American recently said, "was then
+as it is now, the social centre of the world." Irving saw famous men and
+women, and his charming sweetness and humor opened all doors and hearts.
+But the business fell into distress, then into disaster, and in the
+beginning of 1818 the house failed. He was now thrown wholly upon his
+literary resources, which did _not_ fail, and in the spring of 1819,
+when he was thirty-six years old, the first number of the _Sketch Book_
+was issued in New York.
+
+The merry, exuberant, satirical Diedrich Knickerbocker was transformed
+into the genial, urbane, and tender-hearted Geoffrey Crayon. Our fathers
+and grandfathers knew him well. They had been bred upon Addison and
+Goldsmith, the essayists and the poets of the eighteenth century, and
+in Geoffrey Crayon they recognized and welcomed another member of that
+delightful literary society. He was all the more welcome that he was an
+American--one of themselves. The bland and courteous Geoffrey, indeed,
+had few rivals among his countrymen. In our little American world of
+letters at that time he came and conquered. Bryant's "Thanatopsis", had
+been published only two years before; Halleck's and Drake's lively but
+strictly local "Croakers" were still appearing, and Edward Everett had
+just hailed Percival's first volume as authorizing great expectations.
+
+But prophecy is always dangerous. The year before, Sydney Smith had
+said, in the _Edinburgh Review_, "Literature the Americans have none--no
+native literature we mean. It is all imported. They had a Franklin,
+indeed, and may afford to live half a century on his fame. There is,
+or was, a Mr. Dwight, who wrote some poems, and his baptismal name was
+Timothy. There is also a small account of Virginia by Jefferson, and
+an epic poem by Mr. Joel Barlow, and some pieces of pleasantry by Mr.
+Irving. But why should Americans write books, when a six weeks' passage
+brings them, in their own tongue, _our_ sense, science, and genius, on
+bales and hogsheads? Prairies, steamboats, grist-mills are their natural
+objects for centuries to come. Then, when they have got to the Pacific
+Ocean, epic poems, plays, pleasures of memory, and all the elegant
+gratifications of an ancient people who have tamed the wild earth,
+and sat down to amuse themselves. This is the natural march of human
+affairs." As the sarcastic Yorkshire canon, sitting on the Edinburgh
+Olympus, wiped his pen, the _Sketch Book_ was published. The good canon
+was right as to our small literary product, but even an _Edinburgh
+Review_ could not wisely play the prophet.
+
+This Mr. Everett also discovered, for his "great expectations" of
+Percival were not fulfilled. A desponding student of our poetry recently
+sighs that Percival is a forgotten poet, and then, seizing a promiscuous
+assortment of names, exclaims that Charles Sprague, William Wirt,
+Washington Irving, and Jack Downing may be referred to as forgotten
+authors. But this is the luxury of woe. Why should not Percival be a
+forgotten poet? That is to say, what is there in the verse of Percival
+that should command interest and attention to-day? He was a remarkably
+accomplished man and a most excellent gentleman, and his name is very
+familiar in the reading-books of the time when grandfathers of to-day
+were going to school. But he was a noted poet not because he took rank
+with his contemporaries--with Byron and Scott and Keats and Shelley and
+Coleridge and Wordsworth--but because there were very few Americans who
+wrote verses, and our fathers patriotically stood by them.
+
+Yet because the note of a singer of another day is not heard by us, it
+does not follow that he did not touch the heart of his time. Grenville
+Mellen is a forgotten poet also, and Rufus Dawes and John Neal and James
+G. Eastburn. If the gentle reader will turn to the pages of Kettell,
+or any early American anthology, he will seem to himself to be walking
+among tombs. Upon each page might be suitably inscribed, "Sacred to the
+memory" of almost every one of the singers. But can we say with honest
+reproach, "forgotten poets"? The loiterer in the wood hears the song
+of the wood-thrush, but is the hermit-bird wronged, or is his song less
+sweet, because it is not echoed round the world? Is Fame to be held
+responsible for not retaining the name of every minstrel who loiters by
+and touches his harp lightly, and sings a sweet song as he passes on? Is
+it a hard fate to give pleasure to those who listen because those out of
+hearing do not applaud?
+
+Many an author may have a tone and a touch which please the ear and
+taste of his own day, and which, as characteristic of a time, may be
+only curious to a later taste, like the costumes and dances of our
+great-grandmothers. But young America, sauntering at the club and at
+Newport, would not willingly wear the boots of Beau Nash, nor even the
+cloak of Beau Brummel. The law which provides that nothing shall be
+lost is equally observable in the realm of literary fame. Is anything of
+literature lost that deserves longer remembrance? or, more properly, can
+it be lost? A fair answer to the question can be found in the reply to
+another, whether delving in Kettell, or in any other anthology, reveals
+treasures dropped by Fame as precious as those she carries.
+
+There are two ways in which authors survive: one by the constant reading
+of his works, the other by his name. Is Milton a forgotten author? But
+how much is he read, compared with the contemporary singers? Is Plato
+forgotten? Yet how many know him except by name? Irving thus far holds
+both. Time, like a thrifty husbandman, winnows its wheat, blowing away
+much chaff, but the golden grain remains. This is true not only of the
+whole multitude of authors, but of the works of each author. How many
+of them really survive in the anthology only? _Astoria_ and _Captain
+Bonneville_ and _Mahomet_ and other books of Irving will disappear; but
+_Knickerbocker_ and _Rip Van Winkle_ still buffet the relentless wave of
+oblivion, and their buoyancy is undiminished.
+
+As for Sprague--a mild, genial, charming gentleman, who carried his
+simple freshness of nature and of manner to the end, and about whose
+venerable head in State Street always shone the faint halo of early
+poetic renown--his literary talent was essentially for a day, not for
+all time. But what then? On Christmas Eve we hear the passing music
+in the street that supplies for us the song of the waits. Distant and
+melodious, it pensively recalls the days and the faces and the voices
+that are no more. But the singers are not the same waits that we heard
+long ago; still less are they those that the youth of a century ago
+heard with the same musing melancholy. But the substance of the
+song, and the emotion which it awakens, and the tender pathos of
+association--these are all the same. Sprague was a wait of yesterday, of
+last year, of fifty years ago. Others sing in the street the song that
+he sang, and, singing, they pass on, and the sweet strain grows fainter,
+softer, and fainter and fainter, and the echoes answer, "Dying, dying,
+dying," and it is gone.
+
+See how tenderly Mr. Stedman speaks of the troubadours who are singing
+for us now, whose names are familiar, who trill and twitter in the
+magazines, and in tasteful and delicate volumes, which seem to tempt
+the stream of time to suffer such light and graceful barks to slip along
+unnoted to future ages. But the kindly critic's tone forecasts the fate
+of the sparkling ventures.
+
+Moore tells us of the Indian maids upon the banks of the Ganges who
+light a tiny taper, and, on a frail little chip, set it afloat upon the
+river. It twinkles and dwindles, and flashes and expires. Mr. Stedman
+watches the minor poets trimming their tapers and carefully launching
+their chips upon the brimming river. "Pleasant journey," he cries
+cheerily from the shore, as if he were speaking to hearty Captain Cook
+going up the side of his great ship, and shaking out his mighty canvas
+to circumnavigate the globe. "Pleasant journey," cries the cheery
+critic; but there is a wistful something in his tone that betrays a
+consciousness of the swift extinction of the pretty perfumed flickering
+flame.
+
+So scant, indeed, was the blossom of our literature when the _Sketch
+Book_ was published, that even twenty years later, when Emerson
+described the college Commencement Day as the only tribute of a
+country too busy to give to letters any more, Geoffrey Crayon, with the
+exception of Cooper, had really no American competitors. Long afterwards
+I met Mr. Irving one morning at the office of Mr. Putnam, his publisher,
+and in his cordial way, with a twinkle in his eye, and in his pleasant
+husky voice, he said, "You young literary fellows to-day have a harder
+time than we old fellows had. You trip over each other's heels; there
+are so many of you. We had it all our own way. But the account is
+square, for you can make as much by a lecture as we made by a book."
+Then, laughing slyly, he added, "A pretty figure I should make lecturing
+in this voice." Indeed, his modesty forbade him to risk that voice in
+public addresses.
+
+Irving, I think, made but one speech. It was at the dinner given to
+him upon his return from Europe in 1832, after his absence of seventeen
+years. Like other distinguished Americans who have felt the fascination
+of the old home of their ancestors, and who have not thought that a
+narrow heart and a barbaric disdain of everything foreign attested the
+truest patriotism, he was suspected of some alienation from his country.
+His speech was full of emotion, and his protestation of love for his
+native land was received with boundless acclamation. But he could not
+overcome his aversion to speech-making. When Dickens came, and the great
+dinner was given to him in New York, Irving was predestined to preside.
+Nobody else could be even mentioned. He was himself conscious of it, and
+was filled with melancholy forebodings. Professor Felton, of Harvard,
+compared Irving's haunting terror and dismay at the prospect of this
+speech to that of Mr. Pickwick at the prospect of leading that dreadful
+horse all day.
+
+Poor Irving went about muttering, "I shall certainly break down. I know
+I shall break down." At last the day, the hour, and the very moment
+itself arrived, and he rose to propose the health of Dickens. He began
+pleasantly and smoothly in two or three sentences, then hesitated,
+stammered, smiled, and stopped; tried in vain to begin again, then
+gracefully gave it up, announced the toast--"Charles Dickens, the
+guest of the nation"--then sank into his chair amid immense applause,
+whispering to his neighbor, "There, I told you I should break down, and
+I've done it."
+
+When Thackeray came, Irving consented to preside at a dinner if speeches
+were absolutely forbidden. The condition was faithfully observed, but it
+was the most extraordinary instance of American self-command on record.
+Whenever two or three Americans are gathered together, somebody must
+make a speech; and no wonder, because somebody always speaks so well.
+The custom is now so confirmed that it is foolish and useless to oppose
+it.
+
+I remember a few years since that a dinner was given to a famous
+American artist long resident abroad, and, as the condition of the
+attendance of a distinguished guest whose presence was greatly desired,
+the same agreement was made that Irving required at the Thackeray
+dinner. It was a company of exceedingly clever and brilliant men, but
+the gayety of the feast was extinguished by the general consciousness
+that the situation was abnormal. It was a fruit without flavor, a flower
+without fragrance, a symphony without melody, a dinner without speeches.
+But the dinner of which I speak, when the condition of Irving's presence
+was that there should be no speeches, was the great exception. It was
+the only dinner of the kind that I have ever known. But Irving's cheery
+anecdote and gayety, the songs and banter of the company, the happy chat
+and sparkling wit, took the place of eloquence, and I recall no dinner
+more delightful.
+
+However scant was our literature when the _Sketch Book_ appeared, it is
+a mistake to suppose that Irving owes his success to English admiration.
+That was, undoubtedly, very agreeable to him and to his countrymen. But
+it is well to correct a misapprehension which is still cherished. Many
+years ago an English critic said that Irving was much more relished
+and admired in England than in his own country, and added: "It is only
+recently critics on the lookout for a literature have elevated him
+to his proper and almost more than his proper place. This docility to
+English guidance in the case of their best, or almost their best, prose
+writer, may perhaps be followed by a similar docility in the case of
+their best, or almost their best, poet, Poe, whom also England had
+preceded the United States in recognizing." This comical patron is all
+the more amusing from his comparative estimate of Poe.
+
+If it were true that Irving's countrymen had not recognized and honored
+him from the first, it might be suspected that it was because they were
+descendants of the people who showed little contemporaneous appreciation
+of Shakespeare. But it is certainly creditable to the literary England
+which was busy idolizing Scott and Byron, that it recognized also the
+charming genius of Irving, and that Leslie, the painter, could truly
+write of him, "Geoffrey Crayon is the most fashionable fellow of the
+day."
+
+But while the English appreciation of Irving is very creditable to
+England, English conceit must not go so far as to suppose that it was
+that appreciation which commended him to his own countrymen. At the time
+when Sydney Smith wrote the article from which we have quoted there
+was apparently an almost literary sterility in this country, and
+the professional critics of the critical journals were, as Professor
+Lounsbury says in his admirable _Life of Cooper_, undoubtedly greatly
+affected by English opinion. But there was an American reading public
+independent of the few literary periodicals, as was shown when Cooper's
+_Spy_ was published at the end of 1821, the year in which Bryant's first
+volume of poems and Dana's _Idle Man_ appeared. Cooper had published
+his _Precaution_ in 1819, a book which Professor Lounsbury is one of the
+very few men who are known to have read. He was an unknown author. But
+the _Spy_ was instantly successful. Some of the timid English journals
+awaited the English opinion, for Murray had declined, upon Gifford's
+advice, to publish the book. But a publisher was found, and England
+and Europe followed America in their approval. Cooper always said,
+and truly, that it was to his countrymen alone that he owed his first
+success, and his biographer concedes that the success of the _Spy_ was
+determined before the opinion of Europe was known.
+
+Nearly three years before, in May, 1819, the first number of Irving's
+_Sketch Book_ was published. He sent the manuscript to his brother, who
+had regretted Irving's refusal of a government place in the Navy Board,
+and to whom he wrote, "My talents are merely literary, and all my habits
+of thinking, reading, etc., have been in a different direction from that
+required for the active politician.... In fact, I consider myself at
+present as making a literary experiment, in the course of which I only
+care to be kept in bread and cheese. Should it not succeed--should my
+writings not acquire critical applause--I am content to throw up the
+pen, and that to any commonplace employment. But if they should succeed,
+it would repay me for a world of care and privation to be placed among
+the established authors of my country, and to win the affection of my
+countrymen."
+
+The first number of the _Sketch Book_ was published simultaneously
+in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. Its success was
+immediate. In September, 1819, Irving wrote: "The manner in which the
+work has been received, and the eulogiums that have been passed upon it
+in the American papers and periodical works, have quite overwhelmed me
+... I feel almost appalled by such success." The echo of the acclamation
+reached England. Murray at first declined to publish it, as he had at
+first declined Cooper's _Spy_. But when England ascertained that the
+American judgment was correct, and that it was a popular work, Murray
+was willing to publish it.
+
+The delightful genius which his country had recognized with joy it never
+ceased proudly and tenderly to honor. When, in 1832, he returned to his
+native land, as his latest biographer, Mr. Warner, records, "America
+greeted her most famous literary man with a spontaneous outburst of love
+and admiration." It was in his own country that he had published his
+works. It was his own countrymen whose applause apprised England of the
+charm of the new author; and it is a humorous mentor who now teaches us
+that it was our happy docility to English guidance which enabled us to
+recognize and honor him.
+
+Was it docility to the same beneficent guidance which enabled us to
+perceive the genius of Carlyle, whose works we first collected, and
+taught England to read and admire? Did it enable us, also, to inform
+England that in Robert Browning she had another poet? Was it the
+same docility which enabled us to reveal to England one of her most
+philosophic observers in Herbert Spencer, and to offer to Darwin his
+most appreciative correspondents and interpreters in Chauncey Wright,
+John Fiske, and Professors Gray and Wyman? There are many offences to
+be scored against us, but failure to know our own literary genius is not
+one of them.
+
+Indeed, there is not one great literary fame in America that was not
+first recognized here. Not to one of them has docility to English
+literary opinion conducted us, as is often believed. Bryant and Cooper
+and Irving, Bancroft and Prescott and Motley, Emerson and Channing,
+Longfellow, Hawthorne, Lowell, Whittier, and Holmes were authors whom
+we were content to admire and love without knowing or asking whether
+England had heard of them, or what she thought of them. The "greatness"
+of Poe England may have preceded us in recognizing. That is an assertion
+which we are not disposed to dispute. But Walter Scott was not more
+immediately popular and beloved in England than was Washington Irving
+in America; and American guidance led England to Scott quite as much as
+English guidance drew America to Irving.
+
+The first number of the _Sketch Book_ contained the tale of _Rip Van
+Winkle_, one of the most charming and suggestive of legends, whose hero
+is an exceedingly pathetic creation. It is, indeed, a mere sketch, a
+hint, a suggestion; but the imagination readily completes it. It is the
+more remarkable and interesting because, although the first American
+literary creation, it is not in the least characteristic of American
+life, but, on the contrary, is a quiet and delicate satire upon it. The
+kindly vagabond asserts the charm of loitering idleness in the sweet
+leisure of woods and fields against the characteristic American
+excitement of the overflowing crowd and crushing competition of the
+city, its tremendous energy and incessant devotion to money-getting.
+
+It is not necessary to defend poor Rip, or to justify the morality of
+his example. It is the imagination that interprets him; and how soothing
+to those who give their lives to the furious accumulation of the means
+of living to behold that figure stretched by the brook, or finding nuts
+with the children, or sauntering homeward at sunset! Later figures of
+our literature allure us--Hester Prynne, wrapped in her cloak of Nersus,
+the Scarlet Letter, Hosea Biglow, Evangeline, Uncle Tom, and Topsy--but
+the charm of this figure is unfading. The new writers introduce us to
+their worlds, and with pleasure we make the acquaintance of new friends.
+The new standards of another literary spirit are raised, a fresh
+literary impulse surrounds us; but it is not thunder that we hear in
+the Kaatskills on a still summer afternoon it is the distant game of
+Hendrick Hudson and his men; and on the shore of our river, rattling
+and roaring with the frenzied haste and endless activity of prosperous
+industry, still Rip Van Winkle lounges idly by, an unwasted figure of
+the imagination, the constant and unconscious satirist of American life.
+
+He seems to me peculiarly congenial with the temperament of Irving. He,
+too, was essentially a loiterer. He had the same freshness of sympathy,
+the same gentleness of nature, the same taste for leisure and repose.
+His genius was reminiscent, and, as with all humorists, its climate
+was that of April. The sun and the shower chased each other. Irving's
+intellectual habit was emotional rather than thoughtful. In politics
+and public affairs he took no part, although office was often urged
+upon him, as when the friends of General Jackson wished him to go as
+representative to Congress, or President Van Buren offered him the
+secretaryship of the navy, or Tammany Hall, in New York, unanimously and
+vociferously nominated him for mayor, an incident in the later annals
+of the city which transcends the most humorous touch in _Knickerbocker's
+History_. He was appointed secretary of legation in England in 1829, and
+in 1842, when Daniel Webster was secretary of state, minister to Spain.
+
+But what we call practical politics was always distasteful to him. The
+spirit which I once heard laugh at a young man new in politics because
+he treated "the boys" with his own good cigars instead of buying bad
+ones at the saloon--the spirit which I once heard assure a man of public
+ability and fitness that he could never reach political office unless
+he pushed himself, and paid agents to buy votes, because no man could
+expect an office to be handed to him on a gold plate--the spirit which,
+to my knowledge, displayed a handful of bank-notes in the anteroom of
+a legislature, and exclaimed, "That's what makes the laws!"--this was a
+spirit which, like other honorable men and patriotic Americans, Irving
+despised.
+
+He was a gentleman of manly feeling and of moral refinement, who had had
+glimpses of what is called "the inside" of politics; and, as he believed
+these qualities would make participation in politics uncomfortable, he
+abstained. To those of us who are wiser than he, who know that simple
+honesty and public spirit and self-respect and contempt of sneaking
+and fawning and bribery and crawling are the conditions of political
+preferment, Irving, in not perceiving this, must naturally seem to be a
+queer, wrong-headed, and rather super-celestial American, who had
+lived too much in the heated atmosphere of European aristocracies and
+altogether too little in the pure and bracing air of American ward
+politics and caucuses and conventions. To use an old New York phrase,
+Irving preferred to stroll and fish and chat with Rip Van Winkle rather
+than to "run wid der machine".
+
+The _Sketch Book_ made Irving famous, and with its predecessor,
+_Knickerbocker_, and its successor, _Bracebridge Hall_, disclosed the
+essential quality of his genius. But all these books performed another
+and greater service than that of winning the world to read an American
+book: this was the restoration of a kindlier feeling between the two
+countries which, by all ties, should be the two most friendly countries
+on the globe. The books were written when our old bitterness of feeling
+against England had been renewed by the later war. In the thirty years
+since the Revolution ended we had patriotically fostered the quarrel
+with John Bull. Our domestic politics had turned largely upon that
+feeling, and the game of French and English was played almost as
+fiercely upon our side of the ocean as upon their own.
+
+The great epoch of our extraordinary material development and prosperity
+had not opened, and, even had John Bull been friendlier than he was, it
+would have been the very flattery of falsehood had he complimented our
+literature, our science, our art. Sydney Smith's question, "Who reads
+an American book?" was contemptuous and exasperating. But here was an
+American who wrote books which John Bull was delighted to read, and
+was compelled to confess that they depicted-the most characteristic and
+attractive aspects of his own life with more delicate grace than that of
+any living Englishman.
+
+It was Irving who recalled the old English Christmas. It was his cordial
+and picturesque description of the great holiday of Christendom which
+preceded and stimulated Dickens's _Christmas Carols_ and Thackeray's
+_Holiday Tales_. It was the genial spirit of Christmas, native to his
+gentle heart and his happy temperament, which made Irving, as Thackeray
+called him, a peacemaker between the mother-country and her proud and
+sensitive offspring of the West. He showed John Bull that England is
+ours as well as his.
+
+"Old fellow," he said, "you cannot help yourself. It is the same blood
+that flows in our veins, the same language that we speak, the same
+traditions that we cherish. If you love liberty, so do we; if you will
+see fair play, so will we. It is natural to you, so it is to us. We
+cannot escape our blood. Shakespeare is not your poet more than ours.
+If your ancestors danced round the Maypole, so did our ancestors in your
+ancestors' shoes. If Old England cherished Christmas and New England did
+not, Bradford and Endicott and Cotton were Englishmen, not Americans. If
+old English life and customs and traditions are dear to you, listen
+to my story, and judge whether they are less dear to us." Then, with
+a merry smile, the young stranger holds out his hand to John Bull, and
+exclaims, "Behold, here is my arm! I bare it before your eyes, and here
+it is--it is the strawberry-mark; come to my bosom, I am your long-lost
+brother."
+
+It was an incalculable service which Irving rendered in renewing a
+common feeling between England and America. It was involuntary, because
+in writing he had no such purpose. He was only following the bent of his
+own taste, and his works reflected only his individual sympathies. But
+it was this very fact--it was the English instinct in the American, the
+appreciation native in the heart of the Western stranger of the true
+poetic charm of England--which was the spell of the magician. Irving had
+the same imaginative enthusiasm for traditional and poetic England that
+Burke had for political England. Indeed, it is an England which never
+actually existed except in the English and American imagination. The
+coarse, mercenary, material England which Lecky photographs in his
+history of the eighteenth century was the same England in which Burke
+lived, and which his glowing imagination exalted into the magnificent
+image of constitutional liberty before which he bowed his great head. So
+with the old England that Irving drew. He saw with poetic fancy a
+rural Arcadia, and reproduced the vision with airy grace and called it
+England. No wonder that John Bull was delighted with an artist who could
+paint so fascinating a picture, and write under it John Bull's portrait.
+
+To change a word in Marvell's noble lines, when Irving was in England
+
+ "He nothing common saw or mean
+  Upon that memorable scene."
+
+Only an American could have seen England as he described it, and
+invested it with an enchantment which the mass of Englishmen had
+neither suspected nor perceived. Irving's instinct was that of Hawthorne
+afterwards, who called England "Our Old Home". There is a foolish
+American habit growing patriotically out of our old contentions with
+England, and politically out of our desire to conciliate the Irish vote
+in this country, of branding as servile and un-American the natural
+susceptibility of people of English descent, but natives of another
+land, to the charm of their ancestral country. But the American is
+greatly to be pitied who thinks to prove the purity of his patriotism by
+flouting the land in which he has a legitimate right, the land of Alfred
+and Runnymede, of Chaucer and Shakespeare and Milton, of Hampden and
+Cromwell, of Newton and Bunyan, of Somers and Chatham and Edmund Burke,
+the cradle of constitutional liberty and parliamentary government. If
+the great body of the literature of our language in which we delight,
+if the sources of our law and politics, if the great exploits of
+contemporary scholarship and science, are largely beyond our boundaries,
+yet are legitimately ours as well as all that we have ourselves
+achieved, why should we spurn any of our just and hereditary share in
+the great English traditions of civilization and freedom?
+
+Irving returned to America in 1832, and here he afterwards remained,
+except during his absence as minister in Spain. In an earlier visit
+to that country he had felt the spell of its romantic history, and
+had written the _Life of Columbus_, the _Conquest of Granada_, and the
+_Chronicles of the Alhambra_. During all his later years he was busy
+with his pen, and, while the modest author had risen to the chief place
+in American literature, its later constellation was rising into the
+heavens.
+
+But his intrinsic modesty never disappeared either from the works or the
+character of the benign writer. In the height of his renown there was no
+kind of presumption or conceit in his simple and generous breast. Some
+time after his return from his long absence in Europe, and before Putnam
+became his publisher, Irving found some disinclination upon the part of
+publishers to issue new editions of his books, and he expressed, with
+entire good humor, the belief that he had had his day.
+
+It is doubtless true, as _Blackwood_ remarked, with what we may call
+_Blackwood_ courtesy, when Mr. Lowell was American minister in England,
+that Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Addison, Pope, and so many more "will
+not be replaced by Mr. Washington Irving and Mr. Lowell". But it is
+equally true that, since Swift, _Blackwood_ cannot find in English
+literature political satire more trenchant, humorous, forcible, and
+effective than the _Biglow Papers_, and nothing in Swift more original.
+It is said that it is ludicrous to compare the mild humor of Rip
+Van Winkle with the "robustious fun of Swift". But this is a curious
+"derangement of epitaphs". Swift has wit, and satiric power, and burning
+invective, and ribaldry, and caustic, scornful humor; but fun, in any
+just sense, he has not. He is too fierce to be funny. The tender and
+imaginative play of Rip Van Winkle are wholly beyond the reach of Swift.
+
+Irving and other American writers are not the rivals of their British
+associates in the literature of the English language--they are worthy
+comrades. Wordsworth and Byron are not Shakespeare and Milton, but they
+are nevertheless Wordsworth and Byron, and their place is secure. So the
+brows of Irving and Cooper, of Bryant and Longfellow, and of Lowell, of
+Emerson and Hawthorne do not crave the laurels of any other master. The
+perturbed spirit of _Blackwood_ may rest in the confident assurance that
+no generous and intelligent student of our literature admires Gibbon
+less because he enjoys Macaulay, or depreciates Bacon because he
+delights in Emerson, or denies the sting of Gulliver because he feels
+the light touch of Knickerbocker. It is with good fame as with true
+love:
+
+  "True love in this differs from gold and clay,
+   That to divide is not to take away."
+
+In the year that Irving published the _Sketch Book_, Cooper published
+his first novel, and two years before Bryant's _Thanatopsis_ had been
+published. When, forty years afterwards, in the last year of his life,
+the last volume of the _Life of Washington_ was issued, Irving and
+Bryant and Cooper were no longer the solitary chiefs of our literature.
+An illustrious company had received the torch unextinguished from
+their hands--Whittier, Hawthorne, Emerson, Longfellow, Holmes, Lowell,
+Bancroft, Prescott, Motley, Parkman, Mrs. Stowe, had all taken their
+places, yet all gladly and proudly acknowledged Irving as the patriarch.
+It is our happy fortune that these names, of which we are all proud, are
+not those of men of letters only, but of typical American citizens.
+The old traditions of the literary life, the mad roystering, the
+dissipation, Grub Street, the sponging-house, the bailiff, the garret,
+and the jail, genius that fawns for place and flatters for hire, the
+golden talent wrapped in a napkin, and often a dirty and ragged
+napkin, have vanished in our American annals of letters. Pure, upright,
+faithful, industrious, honorable, and honored, there is scarcely one
+American author of eminence who may not be counted as a good and
+useful citizen of the Republic of the Union, and a shining light of the
+Republic of Letters.
+
+Of Washington Irving, as of so many of this noble company, it is
+especially true that the author was the man. The healthy fun and merry
+satire of Diedrich Knickerbocker, the sweet humor and quick sympathy
+and simple pathos of Geoffrey Crayon, were those of the modest master
+of Sunnyside. Every literary man of Irving's time, whether old or
+young, had nothing but affectionate praise of his artless urbanity and
+exhaustless good-nature. These qualities are delightfully reflected in
+Thackeray's stories of him in the _Roundabout Papers_ upon Irving and
+Macaulay, "the Goldsmith and the Gibbon of our time".
+
+"He came to one of my lectures in Washington," Thackeray says, "and the
+retiring President, Mr. Fillmore, and his successor, Mr. Pierce, were
+present. 'Two kings of Brentford smelling at one rose,' said Irving,
+with his good-natured smile. In his little bower of a home at Sunnyside
+he was always accessible. One English newspaper man came and introduced
+himself, and partook of luncheon with the family, and, while the host
+fell into a little doze, as was his habit, the wary Englishman took
+a swift inventory of everything in the house, and served up the
+description to the British public, including the nap of his entertainer.
+At another time, Irving said, 'Two persons came to me, and one held me
+in conversation while the other miscreant took my portrait.'" Thackeray
+tells these little stories with admiring sympathy. His manly heart
+always grew tender over his fellow-authors who had no acrid drop in
+their humor, and Irving's was as sweet as dew.
+
+It is late for a fresh compliment to be paid to him, but the London
+_Spectator_ paid it in 1883, the year of his centenary, by saying,
+"Since the time of Pope more than one hundred essayists have attempted
+to excel or to equal the _Tatler_ and _Spectator_. One alone, in a
+few of his best efforts, may be said to have rivalled them, and he is
+Washington Irving." The _Spectator_ adds that one has surpassed them,
+"the incomparable Elia".
+
+Irving's temperament, however, was much more congenial with that of the
+early essayists than Charles Lamb's, and his pictures of English country
+life in _Bracebridge Hall_ have just the delicate, imaginative touch
+of the sketches of Sir Roger de Coverley. But in treating distinctively
+English topics, however airy and vivid his touch may be, Irving is
+manifestly enthralled by his admiration for the literary masters of
+the Anne time, and by the spirit of their writing. It is in the
+Knickerbocker world that he is characteristically at home. Indeed, it is
+his humorous and graphic fancy more than the sober veracity of history
+which has given popular and perpetual form to the early life of New
+York, and it is Irving who has enriched it with romantic tradition such
+as suffuses the story of no other State.
+
+The bay, the river, the city, the Kaatskill Mountains, as Choate said
+of Faneuil Hall and Webster, breathe and burn of him. He has charmed the
+Hudson with a peculiar spell. The quaint life of its old Dutch villages,
+the droll legend of Sleepy Hollow, the pathetic fate of Rip Van Winkle,
+the drowsy wisdom of Communipaw, the marvellous municipality of New
+Amsterdam, and the Nose of Anthony guarding the Highlands, with the
+myriad sly and graphic allusions and descriptions strewn all through his
+books, have made the river Irving's river, and the state Irving's state,
+and the city Irving's city, so that the first instinctive question of
+every lover of Irving from beyond the state, as he enters Central Park
+and beholds its memorial statues, is, "Where is the statue of Irving?"
+
+Unhappily, echo, and not the park guide-book, answers. There is, indeed,
+a bust, and, in a general sense, "Si monumentum" may serve for a reply.
+From that point of view, indeed, Westminster Abbey, as the monument of
+English heroes in letters and arms, in the Church and the State, would
+be superfluous. But the abbey is a shrine of pilgrimage because of the
+very fact that it is the burial-place of famous Englishmen. The Central
+Park, in New York, is already a Walhalla of famous men, and the statue
+that would first suggest itself as peculiarly fitting for the Park is
+of the New-Yorker who first made New York distinctively famous in
+literature--the New-Yorker whose kindly genius first made American
+literature respected by the world.
+
+Reversing the question, "Where be the bad people buried?" the wondering
+pilgrim in the Park asks, "Where be Irving and Bryant and Cooper?" They
+were not Americans only, but, by birth or choice, New-Yorkers, and the
+three distinctive figures of our early literature. It was very touching
+to see the venerable Bryant, in the soft May sunshine, when the statue
+of Halleck was unveiled, standing with bare head and speaking of his old
+friend and comrade. But who that listened could not see, through tender
+mists of years, the grave and reverend form of the speaker himself,
+transformed to marble or bronze, sitting serene forever beneath the
+shadowing trees, side by side with the poet of Faust and the worshipper
+of Highland Mary?
+
+But Bryant would have been the first to name Washington Irving as
+the most renowned distinctively American man of letters whose figure,
+reproduced characteristically and with simple quaintness, should
+decorate the Park. To a statue of Washington Irving all the gates should
+open, as every heart would open, in welcome. That half-humorous turn of
+the head and almost the twinkling eye, that brisk and jaunty air, that
+springing step, that modest and gentle and benign presence, all these
+could be suggested by the artist, and in their happy combination the
+pleased loiterer would perceive old Diedrich Knickerbocker and the
+summer dreamer of the Hudson legends, the charming biographer of
+Columbus and of Goldsmith, the cheerful gossip of Wolfert's Roost, and
+the mellow and courteous Geoffrey Crayon, who first taught incredulous
+Europe that beyond the sea there were men also, and that at last all the
+world must read an American book.
+
+Irving was seventy-six years old when he died, late in 1859. Born in the
+year in which the Revolution ended, he died on the eve of the civil war.
+His life exactly covered the period during which the American republic
+was an experiment. It ended just as the invincible power of free
+institutions was to be finally demonstrated. His life had been one of
+singular happiness, both of temperament and circumstance. His nature
+was too simple and gentle to breed rivalries or to tolerate animosities.
+Through the sharpest struggles of our politics he passed without
+bitterness of feeling and with universal respect, and his eyes happily
+closed before seeing a civil war which, although the most righteous of
+all wars, would have broken his heart. The country was proud of him: the
+older authors knew in him not a rival, but a friend, the younger loved
+him as a father. Such love, I think, is better than fame. On the day of
+his burial in the ground overlooking the Hudson and the valley of Sleepy
+Hollow, unable to reach Tarrytown in time for the funeral, I came down
+the shore of the river which he loved and immortalized. As the train
+hastened and wound along, I saw the Catskills draped in autumnal
+mist, not concealing, but irradiating them with lingering and pathetic
+splendor. Far away towards the south the river-bank on which his home
+lay was Sunnyside still, for the sky was cloudless and soft with serene
+sunshine. I could not but remember his last words to me, more than a
+year before, when his book was finished and his health was failing: "I
+am getting ready to go; I am shutting up my doors and windows", and
+I could not but feel that they were all open now, and bright with the
+light of eternal morning.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Literary and Social Essays, by
+George William Curtis
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+<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>
+
+<!DOCTYPE html
+   PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
+   "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd" >
+
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en">
+  <head>
+    <title>
+      Literary and Social Essays, by George William Curtis
+    </title>
+    <style type="text/css" xml:space="preserve">
+
+    body { margin:5%; background:#faebd0; text-align:justify}
+    P { text-indent: 1em; margin-top: .25em; margin-bottom: .25em; }
+    H1,H2,H3,H4,H5,H6 { text-align: center; margin-left: 15%; margin-right: 15%; }
+    hr  { width: 50%; text-align: center;}
+    .foot { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; text-indent: -3em; font-size: 90%; }
+    blockquote {font-size: 97%; font-style: italic; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%;}
+    .mynote    {background-color: #DDE; color: #000; padding: .5em; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 95%;}
+    .toc       { margin-left: 10%; margin-bottom: .75em;}
+    .toc2      { margin-left: 20%;}
+    div.fig    { display:block; margin:0 auto; text-align:center; }
+    div.middle { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; }
+    .figleft   {float: left; margin-left: 0%; margin-right: 1%;}
+    .figright  {float: right; margin-right: 0%; margin-left: 1%;}
+    .pagenum   {display:inline; font-size: 70%; font-style:normal;
+               margin: 0; padding: 0; position: absolute; right: 1%;
+               text-align: right;}
+    .side      { float: right; font-size: 75%; width: 25%; padding-left: 0.8em;
+               border-left: dashed thin; margin-left: 0.8em; text-align: left;
+               text-indent: 0; font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;
+               font-weight: bold; color: black; background: #eeeeee; border: solid 1px;}
+    pre        {font-family: Times New Roman; font-size: 100%; margin-left: 10%;}
+
+</style>
+  </head>
+  <body>
+
+
+<pre>
+
+Project Gutenberg's Literary and Social Essays, by George William Curtis
+
+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: Literary and Social Essays
+
+Author: George William Curtis
+
+
+Release Date: May, 2005  [EBook #8108]
+This file was first posted on June 15, 2003
+Last Updated: May 27, 2013
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LITERARY AND SOCIAL ESSAYS ***
+
+
+
+
+Text file produced by Eric Eldred, Marc D'Hooghe, Charles Franks,
+and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+HTML file produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+    <div style="height: 8em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h1>
+      LITERARY AND SOCIAL ESSAYS
+    </h1>
+    <h2>
+      By George William Curtis
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <b>CONTENTS</b>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0001"> EMERSON </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0002"> HAWTHORNE </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0003"> THE WORKS OF NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0004"> RACHEL </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0005"> THACKERAY IN AMERICA </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0006"> SIR PHILIP SIDNEY </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0007"> LONGFELLOW </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0008"> OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0009"> WASHINGTON IRVING </a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0001" id="link2H_4_0001"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      EMERSON
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The village of Concord, Massachusetts, lies an hour's ride from Boston,
+      upon the Great Northern Railway. It is one of those quiet New England
+      towns, whose few white houses, grouped upon the plain, make but a slight
+      impression upon the mind of the busy traveller hurrying to or from the
+      city. As the conductor shouts "Concord!" the busy traveller has scarcely
+      time to recall "Concord, Lexington, and Bunker Hill" before the town has
+      vanished and he is darting through woods and fields as solitary as those
+      he has just left in New Hampshire. Yet as it vanishes he may chance to
+      "see" two or three spires, and as they rush behind the trees his eyes fall
+      upon a gleaming sheet of water. It is Walden Pond&mdash;or Walden Water,
+      as Orphic Alcott used to call it&mdash;whose virgin seclusion was a just
+      image of that of the little village, until one afternoon, some half-dozen
+      or more years since, a shriek, sharper than any that had rung from Walden
+      woods since the last war-whoop of the last Indians of Musketaquid,
+      announced to astonished Concord, drowsing in the river meadows, that the
+      nineteenth century had overtaken it. Yet long before the material force of
+      the age bound the town to the rest of the world, the spiritual force of a
+      single mind in it had attracted attention to it, and made its lonely
+      plains as dear to many widely scattered minds as the groves of the Academy
+      or the vineyards of Vaucluse.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Except in causing the erection of the railway buildings and several
+      dwellings near it, steam has not much changed Concord. It is yet one of
+      the quiet country towns whose charm is incredible to all but those who, by
+      loving it, have found it worthy of love. The shire-town of the great
+      agricultural county of Middlesex, it is not disturbed by the feverish
+      throb of factories, nor by any roar of inexorable toil but the few puffs
+      of the locomotive. One day, during the autumn, it is thronged with the
+      neighboring farmers, who hold their high festival&mdash;the annual
+      cattle-show&mdash;there. But the calm tenor of Concord life is not varied,
+      even on that day, by anything more exciting than fat oxen and the
+      cud-chewing eloquence of the agricultural dinner. The population of the
+      region is composed of sturdy, sterling men, worthy representatives of the
+      ancestors who sowed along the Concord shores, with their seed-corn and
+      rye, the germs of a prodigious national greatness. At intervals every day
+      the rattle, roar, and whistle of the swift shuttle darting to and from the
+      metropolitan heart of New England, weaving prosperity upon the land,
+      remind those farmers in their silent fields that the great world yet wags
+      and wrestles. And the farmer-boy&mdash;sweeping with flashing scythe
+      through the river meadows, whose coarse grass glitters, apt for mowing, in
+      the early June morning&mdash;pauses as the whistle dies into the distance,
+      and, wiping his brow and whetting his blade anew, questions the
+      country-smitten citizen, the amateur Corydon struggling with imperfect
+      stroke behind him, of the mystic romance of city life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The sluggish repose of the little river images the farmer-boy's life. He
+      bullies his oxen, and trembles at the locomotive. His wonder and fancy
+      stretch towards the great world beyond the barn-yard and the village
+      church as the torpid stream tends towards the ocean. The river, in fact,
+      seems the thread upon which all the beads of that rustic life are strung&mdash;the
+      clew to its tranquil character. If it were an impetuous stream, dashing
+      along as if it claimed and required the career to which every American
+      river is entitled, a career it would have. Wheels, factories, shops,
+      traders, factory-girls, boards of directors, dreary white lines of
+      boarding-houses, all the signs that indicate the spirit of the age, and of
+      the American age, would arise upon its margin. Some shaven magician from
+      State Street would run up by rail, and, from proposals, maps, schedules of
+      stock, etc., educe a spacious factory as easily as Aladdin's palace arose
+      from nothing. Instead of a dreaming, pastoral poet of a village, Concord
+      would be a rushing, whirling, bustling manufacturer of a town, like its
+      thrifty neighbor Lowell. Many a fine equipage, flashing along city ways&mdash;many
+      an Elizabethan-Gothic-Grecian rural retreat, in which State Street woos
+      Pan and grows Arcadian in summer, would be reduced, in the last analysis,
+      to the Concord mills. Yet if these broad river meadows grew factories
+      instead of corn, they might perhaps lack another harvest, of which the
+      poet's thought is the sickle.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  "One harvest from your field
+     Homeward brought the oxen strong.
+   Another crop your acres yield,
+     Which I gather in a song,"
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      sings Emerson, and again, as the afternoon light strikes pensive across
+      his memory, as over the fields below him:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  "Knows he who tills this lonely field,
+     To reap its scanty corn,
+   What mystic crops his acres yield,
+     At midnight and at morn?"
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      The Concord River, upon whose winding shores the town has scattered its
+      few houses&mdash;as if, loitering over the plain some fervent day, it had
+      fallen asleep obedient to the slumberous spell, and had not since awakened&mdash;is
+      a languid, shallow stream, that loiters through broad meadows, which
+      fringe it with rushes and long grasses. Its sluggish current scarcely
+      moves the autumn leaves showered upon it by a few maples that lean over
+      the Assabet&mdash;as one of its branches is named. Yellow lily-buds and
+      leathery lily-pads tessellate its surface, and the white water-lilies&mdash;pale,
+      proud Ladies of Shalott&mdash;bare their virgin breasts to the sun in the
+      seclusion of its distant reaches. Clustering vines of wild grape hang its
+      wooded shores with a tapestry of the South and the Rhine. The
+      pickerel-weed marks with blue spikes of flowers the points where small
+      tributary brooks flow in, and along the dusky windings of those brooks
+      cardinal-flowers with a scarlet splendor paint the tropics upon New
+      England green. All summer long, from founts unknown, in the upper
+      counties, from some anonymous pond or wooded hillside moist with springs,
+      steals the gentle river through the plain, spreading at one point above
+      the town into a little lake, called by the farmers "Fairhaven Bay", as if
+      all its lesser names must share the sunny significance of Concord. Then,
+      shrinking again, alarmed at its own boldness, it dreams on towards the
+      Merrimac and the sea.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The absence of factories has already implied its shallowness and slowness.
+      In truth it is a very slow river, belonging much more to the Indian than
+      to the Yankee; so much so, indeed, that until within a very few years
+      there was an annual visit to its shores from a few sad heirs of its old
+      masters, who pitched a group of tents in the meadows, and wove their tidy
+      baskets and strung their beads in unsmiling silence. It was the same thing
+      that I saw in Jerusalem among the Jews. Every Friday they repair to the
+      remains of the old temple wall, and pray and wail, kneeling upon the
+      pavement and kissing the stones. But that passionate Oriental regret was
+      not more impressive than this silent homage of a waning race, who, as they
+      beheld the unchanged river, knew that, unlike it, the last drops of their
+      existence were gradually flowing away, and that for their tribes there
+      shall be no ingathering.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So shallow is the stream that the amateur Corydons who embark at morning
+      to explore its remoter shores will, not infrequently in midsummer, find
+      their boat as suddenly tranquil and motionless as the river, having
+      placidly grounded upon its oozy bottom. Or, returning at evening, they may
+      lean over the edge as they lie at length in the boat, and float with the
+      almost imperceptible current, brushing the tips of the long water-grass
+      and reeds below them in the stream&mdash;a river jungle, in which lurk
+      pickerel and trout&mdash;with the sensation of a bird drifting upon soft
+      evening air over the tree-tops. No available or profitable craft navigate
+      these waters, and animated gentlemen from the city who run up for "a
+      mouthful of fresh air" cannot possibly detect the final cause of such a
+      river. Yet the dreaming idler has a place on maps and a name in history.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Near the town it is crossed by three or four bridges. One is a massive
+      structure to help the railroad over. The stern, strong pile readily
+      betrays that it is part of good, solid stock, owned in the right quarter.
+      Close by it is a little arched stone bridge, auxiliary to a great road
+      leading to some vague region of the world called Acton upon guide-posts
+      and on maps. Just beyond these bridges the river bends and forgets the
+      railroad, but it is grateful to the graceful arch of the little stone
+      bridge for making its curve more picturesque, and, as it muses towards the
+      Old Manse, listlessly brushing the lilies, it wonders if Ellery Channing,
+      who lives beyond, upon a hill-side sloping to the shore, wrote his poem of
+      "The Bridge" to that particular one. There are two or three wooden bridges
+      also, always combining well with the landscape, always making and
+      suggesting pictures.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Concord, as I said, has a name in history. Near one of the wooden
+      bridges you turn aside from the main road, close by the Old Mause&mdash;whose
+      mosses of mystic hue were gathered by Hawthorne, who lived there for three
+      years&mdash;and a few steps bring you to the river and to a small monument
+      upon its brink. It is a narrow, grassy way; not a field nor a meadow, but
+      of that shape and character which would perplex the animated stranger from
+      the city, who would see, also, its unfitness for a building-lot. The
+      narrow, grassy way is the old road, which in the month of April, 1775, led
+      to a bridge that crossed the stream at this spot. And upon the river's
+      margin, upon the bridge and the shore beyond, took place the sharp
+      struggle between the Middlesex farmers and the scarlet British soldiers
+      known in tradition as "Concord fight". The small monument records the day
+      and the event. When it was erected Emerson wrote the following hymn for
+      the ceremony:
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      APRIL 19, 1836.
+    </h3>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+ "By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
+    Their flag to April's breeze unfurled,
+  Here once the embattled farmers stood,
+    And fired the shot heard round the world.
+
+ "The foe long since in silence slept;
+    Alike the conqueror silent sleeps;
+  And Time the ruined bridge has swept
+    Down the dark stream that seaward creeps.
+
+ "On this green bank, by this soft stream,
+    We see to-day a votive stone,
+  That memory may their deed redeem,
+    When, like our sires, our sons are gone.
+
+ "Spirit that made these heroes dare
+    To die, or leave their children free,
+  Bid Time and Nature gently spare
+    The shaft we raise to them and Thee."
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Close under the rough stone wall at the left, which separates it from the
+      little grassy orchard of the Manse, is a small mound of turf and a broken
+      stone. Grave and headstone shrink from sight amid the grass and under the
+      wall, but they mark the earthly bed of the first victims of that first
+      fight. A few large trees overhang the ground, which Hawthorne thinks have
+      been planted since that day, and he says that in the river he has seen
+      mossy timbers of the old bridge, and on the farther bank, half hidden, the
+      crumbling stone abutments that supported it. In an old house upon the main
+      road, nearly opposite the entrance to this grassy way, I knew a hale old
+      woman who well remembered the gay advance of the flashing soldiers, the
+      terrible ring and crack of fire-arms, and the panic-stricken retreat of
+      the regulars, blackened and bloody. But the placid river has long since
+      overborne it all. The alarm, the struggle, the retreat, are swallowed up
+      in its supreme tranquillity. The summers of more than seventy years have
+      obliterated every trace of the road with thick grass, which seeks to bury
+      the graves, as earth buried the victims. Let the sweet ministry of summer
+      avail. Let its mild iteration even sap the monument and conceal its stones
+      as it hides the abutment in foliage; for, still on the sunny slopes, white
+      with the May blossoming of apple-orchards, and in the broad fields, golden
+      to the marge of the river, and tilled in security and peace, survives the
+      imperishable remembrance of that day and its results.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The river is thus the main feature of the Concord landscape. It is
+      surrounded by a wide plain, from which rise only three or four low hills.
+      One is a wooded cliff over Fairhaven Bay, a mile from the town; one
+      separates the main river from the Assabeth; and just beyond the
+      battle-ground one rises, rich with orchards, to a fine wood which crowns
+      it. The river meadows blend with broad, lonely fields. A wide horizon,
+      like that of the prairie or the sea, is the grand charm of Concord. At
+      night the stars are seen from the roads crossing the plain, as from a ship
+      at sea. The landscape would be called tame by those who think no scenery
+      grand but that of mountains or the sea-coast. But the wide solitude of
+      that region is not so accounted by those who live there. To them it is
+      rich and suggestive, as Emerson shows, by saying in the essay upon
+      "Nature", "My house stands in low land, with limited outlook, and on the
+      skirt of the village. But I go with my friend to the shore of our little
+      river, and with one stroke of the paddle I leave the village politics and
+      personalities, yes, and the world of villages and personalities behind,
+      and pass into a delicate realm of sunset and moonlight, too bright almost
+      for spotted man to enter without novitiate and probation. We penetrate
+      bodily this incredible beauty; we dip our hands in this painted element;
+      our eyes are bathed in these lights and forms. A holiday, a villeggiatura,
+      a royal-revel, the proudest, most heart-rejoicing festival that valor and
+      beauty, power and taste ever decked and enjoyed, establishes itself upon
+      the instant". And again, as indicating where the true charm of scenery
+      lies: "In every landscape the point to astonishment is the meeting of the
+      sky and the earth, and that is seen from the first hillock, as well as
+      from the top of the Alleghanies. The stars stoop down over the brownest,
+      homeliest common, with all the spiritual magnificence which they shed on
+      the Campagna or on the marble deserts of Egypt." He is speaking here, of
+      course, of the spiritual excitement of Beauty, which crops up everywhere
+      in nature, like gold in a rich region; but the quality of the imagery
+      indicates the character of the scenery in which the essay was written.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Concord is too far from Boston to rival in garden cultivation its
+      neighbors, West Cambridge, Lexington, and Waltham; nor can it boast, with
+      Brookline, Dorchester, and Cambridge, the handsome summer homes of city
+      wealth. But it surpasses them all, perhaps, in a genuine country freshness
+      and feeling, derived from its loneliness. If not touched by city elegance,
+      neither is it infected by city meretriciousness; it is sweet, wholesome
+      country. By climbing one of the hills, your eye sweeps a wide, wide
+      landscape, until it rests upon graceful Wachuset, or, farther and mistier,
+      Moriadnoc, the lofty outpost of New Hampshire hills. Level scenery is not
+      tame. The ocean, the prairie, the desert, are not tame, although of
+      monotonous surface. The gentle undulations which mark certain scenes&mdash;a
+      rippling landscape, in which all sense of space, of breadth, and of height
+      is lost&mdash;that is tame. It may be made beautiful by exquisite
+      cultivation, as it often is in England and on parts of the Hudson shores,
+      but it is, at best, rather pleasing than inspiring. For a permanent view
+      the eye craves large and simple forms, as the body requires plain food for
+      its best nourishment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The town of Concord is built mainly upon one side of the river. In its
+      centre is a large open square, shaded by fine elms. A white wooden church,
+      in the most classical style of Yankee-Greek, stands upon the square. The
+      Court-house is upon one of the corners. In the old Courthouse, in the days
+      when I knew Concord, many conventions were held for humane as well as
+      merely political objects. One summer day I especially remember, when I did
+      not envy Athens its forum, for Emerson and William Henry Channing spoke.
+      In the speech of both burned the sacred fire of eloquence, but in Emerson
+      it was light, and in Channing heat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From this square diverge four roads, like highways from a forum. One leads
+      by the Courthouse and under stately sycamores to the Old Manse and the
+      battle-ground, another goes directly to the river, and a third is the main
+      avenue of the town. After passing the shops this third divides, and one
+      branch forms a fair and noble street, spaciously and loftily arched with
+      elms, the houses standing liberally apart, each with its garden-plot in
+      front. The fourth avenue is the old Boston road, also dividing, at the
+      edge of the village, into the direct route to the metropolis and the
+      Lexington turnpike.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The house of Mr. Emerson stands opposite this junction. It is a plain,
+      square white dwelling-house, yet it has a city air and could not be
+      mistaken for a farm-house. A quiet merchant, you would say, unostentatious
+      and simple, has here hidden himself from town. But a thick grove of pine
+      and fir trees, almost brushing the two windows upon the right of the door,
+      and occupying the space between them and the road, suggests at least a
+      peculiar taste in the retired merchant, or hints the possibility that he
+      may have sold his place to a poet or philosopher&mdash;or to some old East
+      India sea-captain, perhaps, who cannot sleep without the sound of waves,
+      and so plants pines to rustle, surf-like, against his chamber window.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The fact, strangely enough, partly supports your theory. In the year 1828
+      Charles Coolidge, a brother of J. Templeman Coolidge, a merchant of repute
+      in Boston and grandson of Joseph Coolidge, a patriarchal denizen of
+      Bowdoin Square in that city, came to Concord and built this house.
+      Gratefully remembering the lofty horse-chestnuts which shaded the city
+      square, and which, perhaps, first inspired him with the wish to be a
+      nearer neighbor of woods and fields, he planted a row of them along his
+      lot, which this year ripen their twenty-fifth harvest. With the liberal
+      hospitality of a New England merchant he did not forget the spacious
+      cellars of the city, and, as Mr. Emerson writes, "he built the only good
+      cellar that had then been built in Concord".
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Emerson bought the house in the year 1835. He found it a plain,
+      convenient, and thoroughly built country residence. An amiable neighbor of
+      Mr. Coolidge had placed a miserable old barn irregularly upon the edge of
+      that gentleman's lot, which, for the sake of comeliness, he was forced to
+      buy and set straight and smooth into a decent dependence of the mansion
+      house. The estate, upon passing into Mr. Emerson's hands, comprised the
+      house, barn, and two acres of land. He has enlarged house and barn, and
+      the two acres have grown to nine. Our author is no farmer, except as every
+      country gentleman is, yet the kindly slope from the rear of the house to a
+      little brook, which, passing to the calm Concord beyond, washes the edge
+      of his land, yields him at least occasional beans and pease&mdash;or some
+      friend, agriculturally enthusiastic and an original Brook-Farmer,
+      experiments with guano in the garden, and produces melons and other vines
+      with a success that relieves Brook Farm from every slur of inadequate
+      practical genius. Mr. Emerson has shaded his originally bare land with
+      trees, and counts near a hundred apple and pear trees in his orchard. The
+      whole estate is quite level, inclining only towards the little brook, and
+      is well watered and convenient.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Orphic Alcott&mdash;or Plato Skimpole, as Aspasia called him&mdash;well
+      known in the transcendental history of New England, designed and with his
+      own hands erected a summer-house, which gracefully adorns the lawn, if I
+      may so call the smooth grass-plot at the side of the house. Unhappily,
+      this edifice promises no longer duration, not being "technically based and
+      pointed". This is not a strange, although a disagreeable fact, to Mr.
+      Emerson, who has been always the most faithful and appreciative of the
+      lovers of Mr. Alcott. It is natural that the Orphic Alcott should build
+      graceful summer-houses. There are even people who declare that he has
+      covered the pleasant but somewhat misty lawns of ethical speculation with
+      a thousand such edifices, which need only to be a little more "technically
+      based and pointed" to be quite perfect. At present they whisper, the wind
+      blows clean through them, and no figures of flesh and blood are ever seen
+      there, but only pallid phantoms with large, calm eyes, eating uncooked
+      grain, out of baskets, and discoursing in a sublime shibboleth of which
+      mortals have no key. But how could Plato Skimpole, who goes down to
+      Hingham on the sea, in a New England January, clad only in a suit of
+      linen, hope to build immortal summer-houses?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Emerson's library is the room at the right of the door upon entering
+      the house. It is a simple square room, not walled with books like the den
+      of a literary grub, nor merely elegant like the ornamental retreat of a
+      dilettante. The books are arranged upon plain shelves, not in
+      architectural bookcases, and the room is hung with a few choice engravings
+      of the greatest men. There was a fair copy of Michael Angelo's "Fates",
+      which, properly enough, imparted that grave serenity to the ornament of
+      the room which is always apparent in what is written there. It is the
+      study of a scholar. All our author's published writings, the essays,
+      orations, and poems, date from this room, as much as they date from any
+      place or moment. The villagers, indeed, fancy their philosophical
+      contemporary affected by the novelist James's constancy of composition.
+      They relate, with wide eyes, that he has a huge manuscript book, in which
+      he incessantly records the ends of thoughts, bits of observation and
+      experience, and facts of all kinds&mdash;a kind of intellectual and
+      scientific ragbag, into which all shreds and remnants of conversations and
+      reminiscences of wayside reveries are incontinently thrust. This work goes
+      on, they aver, day and night, and when he travels the rag-bag travels too,
+      and grows more plethoric with each mile of the journey. And a story, which
+      will one day be a tradition, is perpetuated in the village, that one
+      night, before his wife had become completely accustomed to his habits, she
+      awoke suddenly, and hearing him groping about the room, inquired
+      anxiously,
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "My dear, are you unwell?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "No, my love, only an idea."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The library is not only the study of a scholar, it is the bower of a poet.
+      The pines lean against the windows, and to the student deeply sunk in
+      learned lore or soaring upon the daring speculations of an intrepid
+      philosophy, they whisper a secret beyond that of the philosopher's stone,
+      and sing of the springs of poetry.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The site of the house is not memorable. There is no reasonable ground to
+      suppose that so much as an Indian wigwam ever occupied the spot; nor has
+      Henry Thoreau, a very faithful friend of Mr. Emerson's and of the woods
+      and waters of his native Concord, ever found an Indian arrowhead upon the
+      premises. Henry Thoreau's instinct is as sure towards the facts of nature
+      as the witch-hazel towards treasure. If every quiet country town in New
+      England had a son who, with a lore like Selborne's and an eye like
+      Buffon's, had watched and studied its landscape and history, and then
+      published the result, as Thoreau has done, in a book as redolent of
+      genuine and perceptive sympathy with nature as a clover-field of honey,
+      New England would seem as poetic and beautiful as Greece. Thoreau lives in
+      the berry pastures upon a bank over Walden Pond, and in a little house of
+      his own building. One pleasant summer afternoon a small party of us helped
+      him raise it&mdash;a bit of life as Arcadian as any at Brook Farm.
+      Elsewhere in the village he turns up arrowheads abundantly, and Hawthorne
+      mentions that Thoreau initiated him into the mystery of finding them. But
+      neither the Indians nor nature nor Thoreau can invest the quiet residence
+      of our author with the dignity or even the suspicion of a legend. History
+      stops short in that direction with Charles Coolidge, Esq., and the year
+      1828.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is little prospect from the house. Directly opposite a low bluff
+      overhangs the Boston road and obstructs the view. Upon the other sides the
+      level land stretches away. Towards Lexington it is a broad, half-marshy
+      region, and between the brook behind and the river good farms lie upon the
+      outskirts of the town. Pilgrims drawn to Concord by the desire of
+      conversing with the man whose written or spoken eloquence has so
+      profoundly charmed them, and who have placed him in some pavilion of
+      fancy, some peculiar residence, find him in no porch of philosophy nor
+      academic grove, but in a plain white house by the wayside, ready to
+      entertain every comer as an ambassador from some remote Cathay of
+      speculation whence the stars are more nearly seen. But the familiar reader
+      of our author will not be surprised to find the "walking eye-ball" simply
+      sheltered, and the "endless experimenter with no past at my back" housed
+      without ornament. Such a reader will have felt the Spartan severity of
+      this intellect, and have noticed that the realm of this imagination is
+      rather sculpturesque than pictorial, more Greek than Italian. Therefore he
+      will be pleased to alight at the little gate, and hear the breezy welcome
+      of the pines and the no less cordial salutation of their owner. For if the
+      visitor knows what he is about, he has come to this plain for bracing
+      mountain air. These serious Concord reaches are no vale of Cashmere. Where
+      Plato Skimpole is architect of the summer-house, you may imagine what is
+      to be expected in the mansion itself. It is always morning within those
+      doors. If you have nothing to say, if you are really not an envoy from
+      some kingdom or colony of thought and cannot cast a gem upon the heaped
+      pile, you had better pass by upon the other side. For it is the
+      peculiarity of Emerson's mind to be always on the alert. He eats no lotus,
+      but for-ever quaffs the waters which engender immortal thirst.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If the memorabilia of his house could find their proper Xenophon, the want
+      of antecedent arrowheads upon the premises would not prove very disastrous
+      to the interest of the history. The fame of the philosopher attracts
+      admiring friends and enthusiasts from every quarter, and the scholarly
+      grace and urbane hospitality of the gentleman send them charmed away.
+      Friendly foes, who altogether differ from Emerson, come to break a lance
+      with him upon the level pastures of Concord, with all the cheerful and
+      appreciative zeal of those who longed
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+ "To drink delight of battle with their peers
+  Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy."
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      It is not hazardous to say that the greatest questions of our day and of
+      all days have been nowhere more amply discussed, with more poetic insight
+      or profound conviction, than in the comely, square white house upon the
+      edge of the Lexington turnpike. There have even been attempts at something
+      more formal and club-like than the chance conversations of occasional
+      guests, one of which will certainly be nowhere recorded but upon these
+      pages.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was in the year 1845 that a circle of persons of various ages, and
+      differing very much in everything but sympathy, found themselves in
+      Concord. Towards the end of the autumn Mr. Emerson suggested that they
+      should meet every Monday evening through the winter in his library.
+      "Monsieur Aubepine", "Miles Coverdale", and other phantoms, since
+      generally known as Nathaniel Hawthorne, who then occupied the Old Manse;
+      the inflexible Henry Thoreau, a scholastic and pastoral Orson, then living
+      among the blackberry pastures of Walden Pond; Plato Skimpole, then
+      sublimely meditating impossible summer-houses in a little house upon the
+      Boston road; the enthusiastic agriculturist and Brook-Farmer already
+      mentioned, then an inmate of Mr. Emerson's house, who added the genial
+      cultivation of a scholar to the amenities of the natural gentleman; a
+      sturdy farmer neighbor, who had bravely fought his weary way through
+      inherited embarrassments to the small success of a New England husbandman,
+      and whose faithful wife had seven times merited well of her country; two
+      city youths, ready for the fragments from the feast of wit and wisdom; and
+      the host himself, composed this club. Ellery Channing, who had that winter
+      harnessed his Pegasus to the New York <i>Tribune</i>, was a kind of
+      corresponding member. The news of this world was to be transmitted through
+      his eminently practical genius, as the club deemed itself competent to
+      take charge of tidings from all other spheres.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I went, the first Monday evening, very much as Ixion may have gone to his
+      banquet. The philosophers sat dignified and erect. There was a constrained
+      but very amiable silence, which had the impertinence of a tacit inquiry,
+      seeming to ask, "Who will now proceed to say the finest thing that has
+      ever been said?" It was quite involuntary and unavoidable, for the members
+      lacked that fluent social genius without which a club is impossible. It
+      was a congress of oracles on the one hand, and of curious listeners upon
+      the other. I vaguely remember that the Orphic Alcott invaded the Sahara of
+      silence with a solemn "saying", to which, after due pause, the honorable
+      member for blackberry pastures responded by some keen and graphic
+      observation; while the Olympian host, anxious that so much good material
+      should be spun into something, beamed smiling encouragement upon all
+      parties. But the conversation became more and more staccato. Miles
+      Coverdale, a statue of night and silence, sat, a little removed, under a
+      portrait of Dante, gazing imperturbably upon the group; and as he sat in
+      the shadow, his dark hair and eyes and suit of sables made him, in that
+      society, the black thread of mystery which he weaves into his stories,
+      while the shifting presence of the Brook-Farmer played like heat-lightning
+      around the room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I recall little else but a grave eating of russet apples by the erect
+      philosophers, and a solemn disappearance into night. The club struggled
+      through three Monday evenings. Plato was perpetually putting apples of
+      gold in pictures of silver; for such was the rich ore of his thoughts,
+      coined by the deep melody of his voice. Orson charmed us with the secrets
+      won from his interviews with Pan in the Walden woods; while Emerson, with
+      the zeal of an engineer trying to dam wild waters, sought to bind the
+      wide-flying embroidery of discourse into a web of clear sweet sense. But
+      still in vain. The oracular sayings were the unalloyed saccharine element;
+      and every chemist knows how much else goes to practical food&mdash;how
+      much coarse, rough, woody fibre is essential. The club struggled on
+      valiantly, discoursing celestially, eating apples, and disappearing in the
+      dark, until the third evening it vanished altogether. But I have since
+      known clubs of fifty times its number, whose collective genius was not
+      more than that of either one of the Dii Majores of our Concord coterie.
+      The fault was its too great concentration. It was not relaxation, as a
+      club should be, but tension. Society is a play, a game, a tournament; not
+      a battle. It is the easy grace of undress; not an intellectual full-dress
+      parade.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I have already hinted this unbending intellectual alacrity of our author.
+      His sport is serious&mdash;his humor is earnest. He stands like a
+      sentinel. His look and manner and habit of thought cry "Who goes there?"
+      and if he does not hear the countersign, he brings the intruder to a halt.
+      It is for this surprising fidelity and integrity that his influence has
+      been so deep and sure and permanent upon the intellectual life of the
+      young men of New England; and of old England, too, where, in Manchester,
+      there were regular weekly meetings at which his works were read. What he
+      said long ago in his preface to the American edition of Carlyle's <i>Miscellanies</i>,
+      that they were papers which had spoken to the young men of the time "with
+      an emphasis that hindered them from sleep", is strikingly true of his own
+      writings. His first slim, anonymous duodecimo, <i>Nature</i>, was as fair
+      and fascinating to the royal young minds who met it in the course of their
+      reading, as Egeria to Numa wandering in the grove. The essays, orations,
+      and poems followed, developing and elaborating the same spiritual and
+      heroic philosophy, applying it to life, history, and literature, with a
+      vigor and richness so supreme that not only do many account him our truest
+      philosopher, but others acknowledge him as our most characteristic poet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It would be a curious inquiry how much and what kind of influence the
+      placid scenery of Concord has exercised upon his mind. "I chide society, I
+      embrace solitude," he says; "and yet I am not so ungrateful as not to see
+      the wise, the lovely, and the noble-minded, as from time to time they pass
+      my gate." It is not difficult to understand his fondness for the spot. He
+      has been always familiar with it, always more or less a resident of the
+      village. Born in Boston upon the spot where the Chauncey Place Church now
+      stands, part of his youth was passed in the Old Manse, which was built by
+      his grandfather and in which his father was born; and there he wrote <i>Nature</i>.
+      From the magnificent admiration of ancestral England he was glad to return
+      two years since to quiet Concord and to acres which will not yield a
+      single arrowhead. The Swiss sigh for their mountains; but the Nubians,
+      also, pine for their desert plains. Those who are born by the sea long
+      annually to return and to rest their eyes upon its living horizon. Is it
+      because the earliest impressions, made when the mind is most plastic, are
+      most durable? or because youth is that golden age bounding the confines of
+      memory and floating forever&mdash;an alluring mirage as we recede farther
+      from it?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The imagination of the man who roams the solitary pastures of Concord, or
+      floats, dreaming, down its river, will easily see its landscape upon
+      Emerson's pages. "That country is fairest," he says, "which is inhabited
+      by the noblest minds". And although that idler upon the river may have
+      leaned over the Mediterranean from Genoese and Neapolitan villas, or have
+      glanced down the steep green valley of Sicilian Enna, seeking "herself the
+      fairest flower", or walked the shores where Cleopatra and Helen walked,
+      yet the charm of a landscape which is felt rather than seen will be
+      imperishable. "Travelling is a fool's paradise," says Emerson. But he
+      passed its gates to learn that lesson. His writings, however, have no
+      imported air. If there be something Oriental in his philosophy and
+      tropical in his imagination, they have yet the strong flavor of his mother
+      earth&mdash;the underived sweetness of the open Concord sky, and the
+      spacious breadth of the Concord horizon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0002" id="link2H_4_0002"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      HAWTHORNE
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Hawthorne has himself drawn the picture of the Old Manse in Concord. He
+      has given to it that quiet richness of coloring which ideally belongs to
+      an old country mansion. It seemed so fitting a residence for one who loves
+      to explore the twilight of antiquity&mdash;and the gloomier the better&mdash;that
+      the visitor, among the felicities of whose life was included the freedom
+      of the Manse, could not but fancy that our author's eyes first saw the
+      daylight enchanted by the slumberous orchard behind the house, or
+      tranquillized into twilight by the spacious avenue in front. The character
+      of his imagination, and the golden gloom of its blossoming, completely
+      harmonize with the rusty, gable-roofed old house upon the river-side, and
+      the reader of his books would be sure that his boyhood and youth knew no
+      other friends than the dreaming river and the melancholy meadows and
+      drooping foliage of its vicinity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Since the reader, however, would greatly mistake if he fancied this, in
+      good sooth, the ancestral halls of the Hawthornes&mdash;the genuine
+      Hawthorne-den&mdash;he will be glad to save the credit of his fancy by
+      learning that it was here our author's bridal tour&mdash;which commenced
+      in Boston, then three hours away&mdash;ended, and his married life began.
+      Here, also, his first child was born, and here those sad and silver mosses
+      accumulated upon his fancy, from which he heaped so soft a bed for our
+      dreaming. "Between two tall gate-posts of rough hewn stone (the gate
+      itself having fallen from its hinges at some unknown epoch) we beheld the
+      gray front of the old parsonage, terminating the vista of an avenue of
+      black-ash trees." It was a pleasant spring day in the year 1843, and as
+      they entered the house nosegays of fresh flowers, arranged by friendly
+      hands, welcomed them to Concord and summer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The dark-haired man, who led his wife along the avenue that afternoon, had
+      been recently an officer of the customs in Boston, before which he had led
+      a solitary life in Salem. Graduated with Longfellow at Bowdoin College, in
+      Maine, he had lived a hermit in respectable Salem, an absolute recluse
+      even from his own family, walking out by night and writing wild tales by
+      day, most of which were burnt in his bachelor fire, and some of which, in
+      newspapers, magazines, and annuals, led a wandering, uncertain, and mostly
+      unnoticed life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Those tales among this class which were attainable he collected into a
+      small volume, and apprizing the world that they were "twice-told", sent
+      them forth anew to make their own way, in the year 1841. But he piped to
+      the world, and it did not sing. He wept to it, and it did not mourn. The
+      book, however, as all good books do, made its way into various hearts. Yet
+      the few penetrant minds which recognized a remarkable power and a method
+      of strange fascination in the stories did not make the public nor
+      influence the public mind. "I was," he says in the last edition of these
+      tales, "the most unknown author in America". Full of glancing wit, of
+      tender satire, of exquisite natural description, of subtle and strange
+      analysis of human life, darkly passionate and weird, they yet floated
+      unhailed barks upon the sea of publicity&mdash;unhailed, but laden and
+      gleaming at every crevice with the true treasure of Cathay. Bancroft, then
+      Collector in Boston, prompt to recognize and to honor talent, made the
+      dreaming story-teller a surveyor in the custom-house, thus opening to him
+      a new range of experience. From the society of phantoms he stepped upon
+      Long Wharf and plumply confronted Captain Cuttle and Dirk Hatteraick. It
+      was no less romance to our author. There is no greater error of those who
+      are called "practical men" than the supposition that life is, or can be,
+      other than a dream to a dreamer. Shut him up in a counting-room, barricade
+      him with bales of merchandise, and limit his library to the ledger and
+      cash-book and his prospect to the neighboring signs; talk "Bills
+      receivable" and "Sundries Dr. to cash" to him forever, and you are only a
+      very amusing or very annoying phantom to him. The merchant-prince might as
+      well hope to make himself a poet, as the poet a practical or practicable
+      man. He has laws to obey not at all the less stringent because men of a
+      different temperament refuse to acknowledge them, and he is held to a
+      loyalty quite beyond their conception.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So Captain Cuttle and Dirk Hatteraick were as pleasant figures to our
+      author in the picture of life as any others. He went daily upon the
+      vessels, looked and listened and learned, was a favorite of the sailors as
+      such men always are, did his work faithfully, and, having dreamed his
+      dream upon Long Wharf, was married and slipped up to the Old Manse and a
+      new chapter in the romance. It opened in "the most delightful little nook
+      of a study that ever offered its snug seclusion to a scholar". Of the
+      three years in the Old Manse the prelude to the <i>Mosses</i> is the most
+      perfect history, and of the quality of those years the <i>Mosses</i>
+      themselves are sufficient proof. They were mostly written in the little
+      study, and originally published in the <i>Democratic Review</i>, then
+      edited by Hawthorne's friend O'Sullivan.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To the inhabitants of Concord, however, our author was as much a phantom
+      and a fable as the old pastor of the parish, dead half a century before,
+      and whose faded portrait in the attic was gradually rejoining its original
+      in native dust. The gate, fallen from its hinges in a remote antiquity,
+      was never rehung. "The wheel-track leading to the door" remained still
+      overgrown with grass. No bold villager ever invaded the sleep of "the
+      glimmering shadows" in the avenue. At evening no lights gleamed from the
+      windows. Scarce once in many months did the single old knobby-faced
+      coachman at the railroad bring a fare to "Mr. Hawthorne's". "<i>Is</i>
+      there anybody in the old house?" sobbed the old ladies in despair,
+      imbibing tea of a livid green. That knocker, which everybody had enjoyed
+      the right of lifting to summon the good old pastor, no temerity now dared
+      to touch. Heavens! what if the figure in the mouldy portrait should peer,
+      in answer, over the eaves, and shake solemnly its decaying surplice! Nay,
+      what if the mysterious man himself should answer the summons and come to
+      the door! It is easy to summon spirits&mdash;but if they come? Collective
+      Concord, moving in the river meadows, embraced the better part of valor
+      and left the knocker untouched. A cloud of romance suddenly fell out of
+      the heaven of fancy and enveloped the Old Manse:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+ "In among the bearded barley
+  The reaper reaping late and early"
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      did not glance more wistfully towards the island of Shalott and its
+      mysterious lady than the reapers of Concord rye looked at the Old Manse
+      and wondered over its inmate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sometimes in the forenoon a darkly clad figure was seen in the little
+      garden-plot putting in corn or melon seed, and gravely hoeing. It was a
+      brief apparition. The farmer passing towards town and seeing the solitary
+      cultivator, lost his faith in the fact and believed he had dreamed when,
+      upon returning, he saw no sign of life, except, possibly, upon some
+      Monday, the ghostly skirt of a shirt flapping spectrally in the distant
+      orchard. Day dawned and darkened over the lonely house. Summer with "buds
+      and bird-voices" came singing in from the South, and clad the old
+      ash-trees in deeper green, the Old Manse in profounder mystery. Gorgeous
+      autumn came to visit the story-teller in his little western study, and,
+      departing, wept rainbows among his trees. Winter impatiently swept down
+      the hill opposite, rifling the trees of each last clinging bit of summer,
+      as if thrusting aside opposing barriers and determined to search the
+      mystery. But his white robes floated around the Old Manse, ghostly as the
+      decaying surplice of the old pastor's portrait, and in the snowy seclusion
+      of winter the mystery was as mysterious as ever.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Occasionally Emerson or Ellery Channing or Henry Thoreau&mdash;some poet,
+      as once Whittier, journeying to the Merrimac, or an old Brook-Farmer who
+      remembered Miles Coverdale with Arcadian sympathy&mdash;went down the
+      avenue and disappeared in the house. Sometimes a close observer, had he
+      been ambushed among the long grasses of the orchard, might have seen the
+      host and one of his guests emerging at the back door and, sauntering to
+      the river-side, step into the boat, and float off until they faded in the
+      shadow. The spectacle would not have lessened the romance. If it were
+      afternoon&mdash;one of the spectrally sunny afternoons which often bewitch
+      that region&mdash;he would be only the more convinced that there was
+      something inexplicable in the whole matter of this man whom nobody knew,
+      who was never once seen at town-meeting, and concerning whom it was
+      whispered that he did not constantly attend church all day, although he
+      occupied the reverend parsonage of the village and had unmeasured acres of
+      manuscript sermons in his attic, besides the nearly extinct portrait of an
+      utterly extinct clergyman. Mrs. Radcliffe and Monk Lewis were nothing to
+      this, and the awe-stricken observer, if he could creep safely out of the
+      long grass, did not fail to do so quietly, fortifying his courage by
+      remembering stories of the genial humanity of the last old pastor who
+      inhabited the Manse, and who for fifty years was the bland and beneficent
+      Pope of Concord. A genial, gracious old man, whose memory is yet sweet in
+      the village, and who, wedded to the grave traditions of New England
+      theology, believed of his young relative Waldo Emerson, as Miss Flite,
+      touching her forehead, said of her landlord, that he was "<i>m</i>, quite
+      <i>m</i>", but was proud to love in him the hereditary integrity of noble
+      ancestors.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This old gentleman&mdash;an eminent figure in the history of the Manse and
+      in all reminiscences of Concord&mdash;partook sufficiently of mundane
+      weaknesses to betray his mortality. Hawthorne describes him watching the
+      battle of Concord from his study window. But when the uncertainty of that
+      dark moment had so happily resulted, and the first battle-ground of the
+      Revolution had become a spot of hallowed and patriotic consideration, it
+      was a pardonable pride in the good old man to order his servant, whenever
+      there was company, to assist him in reaping the glory due to the owner of
+      a spot so sacred. Accordingly, when some reverend or distinguished guest
+      sat with the pastor in his little parlor, or, of a summer evening, at the
+      hospitable door under the trees, Jeremiah or Nicodemus, the cow-boy, would
+      deferentially approach and inquire,
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Into what pasture shall I turn the cow tonight, sir?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And the old gentleman would audibly reply:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Into the battle-field, Nicodemus, into the battle-field."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then naturally followed wonder, inquiry, a walk in the twilight to the
+      river-bank, the old gentleman's story, the corresponding respect of the
+      listening visitor, and the consequent quiet complacency and harmless
+      satisfaction in the clergyman's bosom. That throb of pride was the one
+      drop of peculiar advantage which the pastor distilled from the Revolution.
+      He could not but fancy that he had a hand in so famous a deed accomplished
+      upon land now his own, and demeaned himself accordingly with continental
+      dignity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The pulpit, however, was his especial sphere. There he reigned supreme;
+      there he exhorted, rebuked, and advised, as in the days of Mather. There
+      he inspired that profound reverence of which he was so proud, and which
+      induced the matrons of the village, when he was coming to make a visit, to
+      bedizen the children in their Sunday suits, to parade the best teapot, and
+      to offer the most capacious chair. In the pulpit he delivered everything
+      with the pompous cadence of the elder New England clergy, and a sly joke
+      is told at the expense of his even temper, that on one occasion, when
+      loftily reading the hymn, he encountered a blot upon the page quite
+      obliterating the word; but without losing the cadence, although in a very
+      vindictive tone at the truant word, or the culprit who erased it, he
+      finished the reading as follows:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+ "He sits upon His throne above,
+    Attending angels bless,
+  While Justice, Mercy, Truth&mdash;and another word
+        which is blotted out&mdash;
+    Compose His princely dress."
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      We linger around the Old Manse and its occupants as fondly as Hawthorne,
+      but no more fondly than all who have been once within the influence of its
+      spell. There glimmer in my memory a few hazy days, of a tranquil and
+      half-pensive character, which I am conscious were passed in and around the
+      house, and their pensiveness I know to be only that touch of twilight
+      which inhered in the house and all its associations. Beside the few chance
+      visitors I have named there were city friends occasionally, figures quite
+      unknown to the village, who came preceded by the steam-shriek of the
+      locomotive, were dropped at the gate-posts, and were seen no more. The
+      owner was as much a vague name to me as to any one.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      During Hawthorne's first year's residence in Concord I had driven up with
+      some friends to an aesthetic tea at Mr. Emerson's. It was in the winter,
+      and a great wood-fire blazed upon the hospitable hearth. There were
+      various men and women of note assembled, and I, who listened attentively
+      to all the fine things that were said, was for some time scarcely aware of
+      a man who sat upon the edge of the circle, a little withdrawn, his head
+      slightly thrown forward upon his breast, and his bright eyes clearly
+      burning under his black brow. As I drifted down the stream of talk, this
+      person, who sat silent as a shadow, looked to me as Webster might have
+      looked had he been a poet&mdash;a kind of poetic Webster. He rose and
+      walked to the window, and stood quietly there for a long time, watching
+      the dead white landscape. No appeal was made to him, nobody looked after
+      him, the conversation flowed steadily on as if every one understood that
+      his silence was to be respected. It was the same thing at table. In vain
+      the silent man imbibed aesthetic tea. Whatever fancies it inspired did not
+      flower at his lips. But there was a light in his eye which assured me that
+      nothing was lost. So supreme was his silence that it presently engrossed
+      me to the exclusion of everything else. There was very brilliant
+      discourse, but this silence was much more poetic and fascinating. Fine
+      things were said by the philosophers, but much finer things were implied
+      by the dumbness of this gentleman with heavy brows and black hair. When he
+      presently rose and went, Emerson, with the "slow, wise smile" that breaks
+      over his face, like day over the sky, said, "Hawthorne rides well his
+      horse of the night."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thus he remained in my memory, a shadow, a phantom, until more than a year
+      afterwards. Then I came to live in Concord. Every day I passed his house,
+      but when the villagers, thinking that perhaps I had some clew to the
+      mystery, said, "Do you know this Mr. Hawthorne?" I said "No," and trusted
+      to time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Time justified my confidence, and one day I, too, went down the avenue and
+      disappeared in the house. I mounted those mysterious stairs to that
+      apocryphal study. I saw "the cheerful coat of paint, and golden-tinted
+      paper-hangings, lighting up the small apartment; while the shadow of a
+      willow-tree, that swept against the overhanging eaves, attempered the
+      cheery western sunshine." I looked from the little northern window whence
+      the old pastor watched the battle, and in the small dining-room beneath
+      it, upon the first floor, there were
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  "Dainty chicken, snow-white bread,"
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      and the golden juices of Italian vineyards, which still feast insatiable
+      memory.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Our author occupied the Old Manse for three years. During that time he was
+      not seen, probably, by more than a dozen of the villagers. His walks could
+      easily avoid the town, and upon the river he was always sure of solitude.
+      It was his favorite habit to bathe every evening in the river, after
+      nightfall, and in that part of it over which the old bridge stood, at
+      which the battle was fought. Sometimes, but rarely, his boat accompanied
+      another up the stream, and I recall the silent and preternatural vigor
+      with which, on one occasion, he wielded his paddle to counteract the bad
+      rowing of a friend who conscientiously considered it his duty to do
+      something and not let Hawthorne work alone; but who, with every stroke,
+      neutralized all Hawthorne's efforts. I suppose he would have struggled
+      until he fell senseless, rather than ask his friend to desist. His
+      principle seemed to be, if a man cannot understand without talking to him,
+      it is quite useless to talk, because it is immaterial whether such a man
+      understands or not. His own sympathy was so broad and sure that although
+      nothing had been said for hours his companion knew that not a thing had
+      escaped his eye, nor had a single pulse of beauty in the day or scene or
+      society failed to thrill his heart. In this way his silence was most
+      social. Everything seemed to have been said. It was a Barmecide feast of
+      discourse, from which a greater satisfaction resulted than from an actual
+      banquet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When a formal attempt was made to desert this style of conversation, the
+      result was ludicrous. Once Emerson and Thoreau arrived to pay a call. They
+      were shown into the little parlor upon the avenue, and Hawthorne presently
+      entered. Each of the guests sat upright in his chair like a Roman senator.
+      "To them" Hawthorne, like a Dacian king. The call went on, but in a most
+      melancholy manner. The host sat perfectly still, or occasionally
+      propounded a question which Thoreau answered accurately, and there the
+      thread broke short off. Emerson delivered sentences that only needed the
+      setting of an essay to charm the world; but the whole visit was a vague
+      ghost of the Monday-evening club at Mr. Emerson's&mdash;it was a great
+      failure. Had they all been lying idly upon the river brink, or strolling
+      in Thoreau's blackberry pastures, the result would have been utterly
+      different. But imprisoned in the proprieties of a parlor, each a wild man
+      in his way, with a necessity of talking inherent in the nature of the
+      occasion, there was only a waste of treasure. This was the only "call" in
+      which I ever knew Hawthorne to be involved.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In Mr. Emerson's house, I said, it seemed always morning. But Hawthorne's
+      black-ash trees and scraggy apple-boughs shaded
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+                           "a land
+  In which it seemed always afternoon."
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      I do not doubt that the lotus grew along the grassy marge of the Concord
+      behind his house, and it was served, subtly concealed, to all his guests.
+      The house, its inmates, and its life lay, dream-like, upon the edge of the
+      little village. You fancied that they all came together and belonged
+      together, and were glad that at length some idol of your imagination, some
+      poet whose spell had held you and would hold you forever, was housed as
+      such a poet should be.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      During the lapse of the three years since the bridal tour of twenty miles
+      ended at the "two tall gate-posts of rough-hewn stone", a little wicker
+      wagon had appeared at intervals upon the avenue, and a placid babe, whose
+      eyes the soft Concord day had touched with the blue of its beauty, lay
+      looking tranquilly up at the grave old trees, which sighed lofty lullabies
+      over her sleep. The tranquillity of the golden-haired Una was the living
+      and breathing type of the dreamy life of the Old Manse. Perhaps, that
+      being attained, it was as well to go. Perhaps our author was not surprised
+      nor displeased when the hints came, "growing more and more distinct, that
+      the owner of the old house was pining for his native air". One afternoon I
+      entered the study, and learned from its occupant that the last story he
+      should ever write there was written. The son of the old pastor yearned for
+      his homestead. The light of another summer would seek its poet in the Old
+      Manse, but in vain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      While Hawthorne had been quietly writing in the "most delightful little
+      nook of a study", Mr. Polk had been elected President, and Mr. Bancroft,
+      in the cabinet, did not forget his old friend, the surveyor in the
+      custom-house. There came suggestions and offers of various attractions.
+      Still loving New England, would he tarry there, or, as inspector of woods
+      and forests in some far-away island of the southern sea, some hazy strip
+      of distance seen from Florida, would he taste the tropics? He meditated
+      all the chances, without immediately deciding. Gathering up his household
+      gods, he passed out of the Old Manse as its heir entered, and before the
+      end of summer was domesticated in the custom-house of his native town of
+      Salem. This was in the year 1846. Upon leaving the Old Manse he published
+      the <i>Mosses</i>, announcing that it was the last collection of tales he
+      should put forth. Those who knew him and recognized his value to our
+      literature trembled lest this was the last word from one who spoke only
+      pearls and rubies. It was a foolish fear. The sun must shine, the sea must
+      roll, the bird must sing, and the poet write. During his life in Salem, of
+      which the introduction to <i>The Scarlet Letter</i> describes the official
+      aspect, he wrote that romance. It is inspired by the spirit of the place.
+      It presents more vividly than any history the gloomy picturesqueness of
+      early New England life. There is no strain in our literature so
+      characteristic or more real than that which Hawthorne had successfully
+      attempted in several of his earlier sketches, and of which <i>The Scarlet
+      Letter</i> is the great triumph. It became immediately popular, and
+      directly placed the writer of stories for a small circle among the world's
+      masters of romance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Times meanwhile changed, and presidents with them. General Taylor was
+      elected, and the Salem collector retired. It is one of the romantic points
+      of Hawthorne's quiet life that its changes have been so frequently
+      determined by political events, which, more than all others, are the most
+      entirely foreign to his tastes and habits. He retired to the hills of
+      Berkshire, the eye of the world now regarding his movements. There he
+      lived a year or two in a little red cottage upon the "Stockbridge Bowl",
+      as a small lake near that town is called. In this retreat he wrote <i>The
+      House of the Seven Gables</i>, which more deeply confirmed the literary
+      position already acquired for him by the first romance. The scene is laid
+      in Salem, as if he could not escape a strange fascination in the
+      witch-haunted town of our early history. It is the same black canvas upon
+      which plays the rainbow-flash of his fancy, never, in its brightest
+      moment, more than illuminating the gloom. This marks all his writings.
+      They have a terrible beauty, like the siren, and their fascination is as
+      sure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After six years of absence Hawthorne returned to Concord, where he
+      purchased a small house formerly occupied by Orphic Alcott. When that
+      philosopher came into possession it was a miserable little house of two
+      peaked gables. But the genius which recreated itself in devising graceful
+      summer-houses, like that for Mr. Emerson, already noticed, soon smoothed
+      the new residence into some kind of comeliness. It was an old house when
+      Mr. Alcott entered it, but his tasteful finger touched it with picturesque
+      grace.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Not like a tired old drudge of a house, rusting into unhonored decay, but
+      with a modest freshness that does not belie the innate sobriety of a
+      venerable New England farm-house, the present residence of our author
+      stands, withdrawn a few yards from the high-road to Boston, along which
+      marched the British soldiers to Concord bridge. It lies at the foot of a
+      wooded hill, a neat house of a "rusty olive hue", with a porch in front,
+      and a central peak, and a piazza at each end. The genius for summer-houses
+      has had full play upon the hill behind. Here, upon the homely steppes of
+      Concord, is a strain of Persia. Mr. Alcott built terraces and arbors and
+      pavilions of boughs and rough stems of trees, revealing&mdash;somewhat
+      inadequately, perhaps&mdash;the hanging gardens of delight that adorn the
+      Babylon of his orphic imagination. The hill-side is no unapt emblem of his
+      intellectual habit, which garnishes the arid commonplaces of life with a
+      cold poetic aurora, forgetting that it is the inexorable law of light to
+      deform as well as adorn. Treating life as a grand epic poem, the
+      philosophic Alcott forgets that Homer must nod or we should all fall
+      asleep. The world would not be very beautiful nor interesting if it were
+      all one huge summit of Mont Blanc.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Unhappily, the terraced hill-side, like the summer-house upon Mr.
+      Emerson's lawn, "lacks technical arrangement", and the wild winds play
+      with these architectural toys of fancy, like lions with humming-birds.
+      They are gradually falling, shattered, and disappearing. Fine locust-trees
+      shade them and ornament the hill with perennial beauty. The hanging
+      gardens of Semiramis were not more fragrant than Hawthorne's hill-side
+      during the June blossoming of the locusts. A few young elms, some
+      white-pines and young oaks, complete the catalogue of trees. A light
+      breeze constantly fans the brow of the hill, making harps of the tree-tops
+      and singing to our author, who, "with a book in my hand, or an unwritten
+      book in my thoughts", lies stretched beneath them in the shade.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From the height of the hill the eye courses, unrestrained, over the
+      solitary landscape of Concord, broad and still, broken only by the slight
+      wooded undulations of insignificant hillocks. The river is not visible,
+      nor any gleam of lake. Walden Pond is just behind the wood in front, and
+      not far away over the meadows sluggishly steals the river. It is the most
+      quiet of prospects. Eight acres of good land lie in front of the house,
+      across the road, and in the rear the estate extends a little distance over
+      the brow of the hill.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This latter is not good garden-ground, but it yields that other crop which
+      the poet "gathers in a song". Perhaps the world will forgive our author
+      that he is not a prize farmer, and makes but an indifferent figure at the
+      annual cattle-show. We have seen that he is more nomadic than
+      agricultural. He has wandered from spot to spot, pitching a temporary
+      tent, then striking it for "fresh fields and pastures new". It is natural,
+      therefore, that he should call his house "The Wayside"&mdash;a bench upon
+      the road where he sits for a while before passing on. If the wayfarer
+      finds him upon that bench he shall have rare pleasure in sitting with him,
+      yet shudder while he stays. For the pictures of our poet have more than
+      the shadows of Rembrandt. If you listen to his story, the lonely pastures
+      and dull towns of our dear old homely New England shall become suddenly as
+      radiant with grace and terrible with tragedy as any country and any time.
+      The waning afternoon in Concord, in which the blue-frocked farmers are
+      reaping and hoeing, shall set in pensive glory. The woods will forever
+      after be haunted with strange forms. You will hear whispers and music "i'
+      the air". In the softest morning you will suspect sadness; in the most
+      fervent noon a nameless terror. It is because the imagination of our
+      author treads the almost imperceptible line between the natural and the
+      supernatural. We are all conscious of striking it sometimes. But we avoid
+      it. We recoil and hurry away, nor dare to glance over our shoulders lest
+      we should see phantoms. What are these tales of supernatural appearances,
+      as well authenticated as any news of the day&mdash;and what is the sphere
+      which they imply? What is the more subtle intellectual apprehension of
+      fate and its influence upon imagination and life? Whatever it is, it is
+      the mystery of the fascination of these tales. They converse with that
+      dreadful realm as with our real world. The light of our sun is poured by
+      genius upon the phantoms we did not dare to contemplate, and lo! they are
+      ourselves, unmasked, and playing our many parts. An unutterable sadness
+      seizes the reader as the inevitable black thread appears. For here genius
+      assures us what we trembled to suspect, but could not avoid suspecting,
+      that the black thread is inwoven with all forms of life, with all
+      development of character.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is for this peculiarity, which harmonizes so well with ancient places,
+      whose pensive silence seems the trance of memory musing over the young and
+      lovely life that illuminated its lost years&mdash;that Hawthorne is so
+      intimately associated with the Old Manse. Yet that was but the tent of a
+      night for him. Already, with the <i>Blithedale Romance</i>, which is dated
+      from Concord, a new interest begins to cluster around "The Wayside".
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I know not how I can more fitly conclude these reminiscences of Concord
+      and Hawthorne, whose own stories have always a saddening close, than by
+      relating an occurrence which blighted to many hearts the beauty of the
+      quiet Concord river, and seemed not inconsistent with its lonely
+      landscape. It has the further fitness of typifying the operation of our
+      author's imagination: a tranquil stream, clear and bright with sunny
+      gleams, crowned with lilies and graceful with swaying grass, yet doing
+      terrible deeds inexorably, and therefore forever after of a shadowed
+      beauty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Martha was the daughter of a plain Concord farmer, a girl of delicate and
+      shy temperament, who excelled so much in study that she was sent to a fine
+      academy in a neighboring town, and won all the honors of the course. She
+      met at the school, and in the society of the place, a refinement and
+      cultivation, a social gayety and grace, which were entirely unknown in the
+      hard life she had led at home, and which by their very novelty, as well as
+      because they harmonized with her own nature and dreams, were doubly
+      beautiful and fascinating. She enjoyed this life to the full, while her
+      timidity kept her only a spectator; and she ornamented it with a fresher
+      grace, suggestive of the woods and fields, when she ventured to engage in
+      the airy game. It was a sphere for her capacities and talents. She shone
+      in it, and the consciousness of a true position and general appreciation
+      gave her the full use of all her powers. She admired and was admired. She
+      was surrounded by gratifications of taste, by the stimulants and rewards
+      of ambition. The world was happy, and she was worthy to live in it. But at
+      times a cloud suddenly dashed athwart the sun&mdash;a shadow stole, dark
+      and chill, to the very edge of the charmed circle in which she stood. She
+      knew well what it was and what it foretold, but she would not pause nor
+      heed. The sun shone again; the future smiled; youth, beauty, and all
+      gentle hopes and thoughts bathed the moment in lambent light.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But school-days ended at last, and with the receding town in which they
+      had been passed the bright days of life disappeared, and forever. It is
+      probable that the girl's fancy had been fed, perhaps indiscreetly
+      pampered, by her experience there. But it was no fairy-land. It was an
+      academy town in New England, and the fact that it was so alluring is a
+      fair indication of the kind of life from which she had emerged, and to
+      which she now returned. What could she do? In the dreary round of petty
+      details, in the incessant drudgery of a poor farmer's household, with no
+      companions of any sympathy&mdash;for the family of a hard-working New
+      England farmer are not the Chloes and Clarissas of pastoral poetry, nor
+      are cow-boys Corydons&mdash;with no opportunity of retirement and
+      cultivation, for reading and studying&mdash;which is always voted "stuff"
+      under such circumstances&mdash;the light suddenly quenched out of life,
+      what was she to do?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Adapt herself to her circumstances. Why had she shot from her sphere in
+      this silly way?" demands unanimous common-sense in valiant heroics.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The simple answer is, that she had only used all her opportunities, and
+      that, although it was no fault of hers that the routine of her life was in
+      every way repulsive, she did struggle to accommodate herself to it&mdash;and
+      failed. When she found it impossible to drag on at home, she became an
+      inmate of a refined and cultivated household in the village, where she had
+      opportunity to follow her own fancies, and to associate with educated and
+      attractive persons. But even here she could not escape the feeling that it
+      was all temporary, that her position was one of dependence; and her pride,
+      now grown morbid, often drove her from the very society which alone was
+      agreeable to her. This was all genuine. There was not the slightest strain
+      of the <i>femme incomprise</i> in her demeanor. She was always shy and
+      silent, with a touching reserve which won interest and confidence, but
+      left also a vague sadness in the mind of the observer. After a few months
+      she made another effort to rend the cloud which was gradually darkening
+      around her, and opened a school for young children. But although the
+      interest of friends secured for her a partial success, her gravity and
+      sadness failed to excite the sympathy of her pupils, who missed in her the
+      playful gayety always most winning to children. Martha, however, pushed
+      bravely on, a figure of tragic sobriety to all who watched her course. The
+      farmers thought her a strange girl, and wondered at the ways of a farmer's
+      daughter who was not content to milk cows and churn butter and fry pork,
+      without further hope or thought. The good clergyman of the town,
+      interested in her situation, sought a confidence she did not care to
+      bestow, and so, doling out a, b, c, to a wild group of boys and girls, she
+      found that she could not untie the Gordian knot of her life, and felt,
+      with terror, that it must be cut.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One summer evening she left her father's house and walked into the fields
+      alone. Night came, but Martha did not return. The family became anxious,
+      inquired if any one had noticed the direction in which she went, learned
+      from the neighbors that she was not visiting, that there was no lecture or
+      meeting to detain her, and wonder passed into apprehension. Neighbors went
+      into the adjacent woods and called, but received no answer. Every instant
+      the awful shadow of some dread event solemnized the gathering groups.
+      Every one thought what no one dared whisper, until a low voice suggested
+      "the river". Then, with the swiftness of certainty, all friends, far and
+      near, were roused, and thronged along the banks of the stream. Torches
+      flashed in boats that put off in the terrible search. Hawthorne, then
+      living in the Old Manse, was summoned, and the man whom the villagers had
+      only seen at morning as a musing spectre in his garden, now appeared among
+      them at night to devote his strong arm and steady heart to their service.
+      The boats drifted slowly down the stream&mdash;the torches flared
+      strangely upon the black repose of the water, and upon the long, slim
+      grasses that, weeping, fringed the marge. Upon both banks silent and
+      awe-stricken crowds hastened along, eager and dreading to find the
+      slightest trace of what they sought. Suddenly they came upon a few
+      articles of dress, heavy with the night-dew. No one spoke, for no one had
+      doubted the result. It was clear that Martha had strayed to the river and
+      quietly asked of its stillness the repose she sought. The boats gathered
+      around the spot. With every implement that could be of service the
+      melancholy search began. Long intervals of fearful silence ensued, but at
+      length, towards midnight, the sweet face of the dead girl was raised more
+      placidly to the stars than ever it had been to the sun.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+ "Oh! is it weed or fish or floating hair&mdash;
+  A tress o' golden hair,
+  O' drowned maiden's hair,
+    Above the nets at sea?
+  Was never salmon yet that shone so fair
+    Among the stakes on Dee."
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      So ended a village tragedy. The reader may possibly find in it the
+      original of the thrilling conclusion of the <i>Blithedale Romance</i>, and
+      learn anew that dark as is the thread with which Hawthorne weaves his
+      spells, it is no darker than those with which tragedies are spun, even in
+      regions apparently so torpid as Concord.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0003" id="link2H_4_0003"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      THE WORKS OF NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The traveller by the Eastern Railroad, from Boston, reaches in less than
+      an hour the old town of Salem, Massachusetts. It is chiefly composed of
+      plain wooden houses, but it has a quaint air of past provincial grandeur,
+      and has indeed been an important commercial town. The first American ship
+      for Calcutta and China sailed from this port; and Salem ships opened our
+      trade with New Holland and the South Seas. But its glory has long since
+      departed, with that of its stately and respectable neighbors, Newburyport
+      and Portsmouth. There is still, however, a custom-house in Salem, there
+      are wharves and chandlers' shops and a faint show of shipping and an air
+      of marine capacity which no apparent result justifies. It sits upon the
+      shore like an antiquated sea-captain, grave and silent, in tarpaulin and
+      duck trousers, idly watching the ocean upon which he will never sail
+      again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But this touching aspect of age and lost prosperity merely serves to
+      deepen the peculiar impression of the old city, which is not derived from
+      its former commercial importance, but from other associations. Salem
+      village was a famous place in the Puritan annals. The tragedy of the
+      witchcraft tortures and murders has cast upon it a ghostly spell, from
+      which it seems never to have escaped; and even the sojourner of to-day, as
+      he loiters along the shore in the sunniest morning of June, will sometimes
+      feel an icy breath in the air, chilling the very marrow of his bones. Nor
+      is he consoled by being told that it is only the east wind; for he cannot
+      help believing that an invisible host of Puritan spectres have breathed
+      upon him, revengeful, as he poached upon their ancient haunts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Puritan spirit was neither gracious nor lovely, but nothing softer
+      than its iron hand could have done its necessary work. The Puritan
+      character was narrow, intolerant, and exasperating. The forefathers were
+      very "sour" in the estimation of Morton and his merry company at Mount
+      Wollaston. But for all that, Bradstreet and Carver and Winthrop were
+      better forefathers than the gay Morton, and the Puritan spirit is
+      doubtless the moral influence of modern civilization, both in Old and New
+      England. By the fruit let the seed be judged. The State to whose rough
+      coast the <i>Mayflower</i> came, and in which the Pilgrim spirit has been
+      most active, is to-day the chief of all human societies, politically,
+      morally, and socially. It is the community in which the average of
+      well-being is higher than in any State we know in history. Puritan though
+      it be, it is more truly liberal and free than any large community in the
+      world. But it had bleak beginnings. The icy shore, the sombre pines, the
+      stealthy savages, the hard soil, the unbending religious austerity, the
+      Scriptural severity, the arrogant virtues, the angry intolerance of
+      contradiction&mdash;they all made a narrow strip of sad civilization
+      between the pitiless sea and the remorseless forests. The moral and
+      physical tenacity which is wrestling with the Rebellion was toughened
+      among these flinty and forbidding rocks. The fig, the pomegranate, and the
+      almond would not grow there, nor the nightingale sing; but nobler men than
+      its children the sun never shone upon, nor has the heart of man heard
+      sweeter music than the voices of James Otis and Samuel Adams. Think of
+      Plymouth in 1620, and of Massachusetts to-day! Out of strength came forth
+      sweetness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With some of the darkest passages in Puritan history this old town of
+      Salem, which dozes apparently with the most peaceful conscience in the
+      world, is identified, and while its Fourth of July bells were joyfully
+      ringing sixty years ago Nathaniel Hathorne was born. He subsequently chose
+      to write the name Hawthorne, because he thought he had discovered that it
+      was the original spelling. In the introduction to <i>The Scarlet Letter</i>,
+      Hawthorne speaks of his ancestors as coming from Europe in the seventeenth
+      century, and establishing themselves in Salem, where they served the State
+      and propitiated Heaven by joining in the persecution of Quakers and
+      witches. The house known as the Witch House is still standing on the
+      corner of Summer and Essex streets. It was built in 1642 by Captain George
+      Corwin, and here in 1692 many of the unfortunates who were palpably guilty
+      of age and ugliness were examined by the Honorable Jonathan Curwin, Major
+      Gedney, Captain John Higginson, and John Hathorn, Esquire.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The name of this last worthy occurs in one of the first and most famous of
+      the witch trials, that of "Goodwife Gory", in March, 1692, only a month
+      after the beginning of the delusion at the house of the minister Parris.
+      Goodwife Gory was accused by ten children, of whom Elizabeth Parris was
+      one; they declared that they were pinched by her and strangled, and that
+      she brought them a book to sign. "Mr. Hathorn, a magistrate of Salem",
+      says Robert Calef, in <i>More Wonders of the Invisible World</i>, "asked
+      her why she afflicted these children. She said she did not afflict them.
+      He asked her who did then. She said, I do not know; how should I know? She
+      said they were poor, distracted creatures, and no heed ought to be given
+      to what they said. Mr. Hathorn and Mr. Noyes replied, that it was the
+      judgment of all that were there present that they were bewitched, and only
+      she (the accused) said they were distracted. She was accused by them that
+      the <i>black man</i> whispered to her in her ear now (while she was upon
+      examination), and that she had a yellow bird that did use to suck between
+      her fingers, and that the said bird did suck now in the assembly." John
+      Hathorn and Jonathan Curwin were "the Assistants" of Salem village, and
+      held most of the examinations and issued the warrants. Justice Hathorn was
+      very swift in judgment, holding every accused person guilty in every
+      particular. When poor Jonathan Gary of Charlestown attended his wife
+      charged with witchcraft before Justice Hathorn, he requested that he might
+      hold one of her hands, "but it was denied me. Then she desired me to wipe
+      the tears from her eyes and the sweat from her face, which I did; then she
+      desired that she might lean herself on me, saying she should faint.
+      Justice Hathorn replied, she had strength enough to torment these persons,
+      and she should have strength enough to stand. I speaking something against
+      their cruel proceedings, they commanded me to be silent, or else I should
+      be turned out of the room". What a piteous picture of the awful colonial
+      inquisition and the village Torquemada! What a grim portrait of an
+      ancestor to hang in your memory, and to trace your kindred to!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Hawthorne's description of his ancestors in the Introduction to <i>The
+      Scarlet Letter</i> is very delightful. As their representative, he
+      declares that he takes shame to himself for their sake, on account of
+      these relentless persecutions; but he thinks them earnest and energetic.
+      "From father to son, for above a hundred years, they followed the sea; a
+      gray-headed ship-master, in each generation, retiring from the
+      quarter-deck to the homestead, while a boy of fourteen took the hereditary
+      place before the mast, confronting the salt spray and the gale, which had
+      blustered against his sire and grand-sire. The boy also, in due time,
+      passed from the forecastle to the cabin, spent a tempestuous manhood, and
+      returned from his world-wanderings, to grow old, and die, and mingle his
+      dust with the natal earth." Not all, however, for the last of the line of
+      sailors, Captain Nathaniel Hathorne, who married Elizabeth Clarke Manning,
+      died at Calcutta after the birth of three children, a boy and two girls.
+      The house in which the boy was born is still standing upon Union Street,
+      which leads to the Long Wharf, the chief seat of the old foreign trade of
+      Salem. The next house, with a back entrance on Union Street, is the
+      Manning house, where many years of the young Hawthorne's life were spent
+      in the care of his uncle, Robert Manning. He lived often upon an estate
+      belonging to his mother's family, in the town of Raymond, near Sebago
+      Lake, in Maine. The huge house there was called Manning's Folly, and is
+      now said to be used as a meeting-house. His uncle sent Hawthorne to
+      Bowdoin College, where he graduated in 1825. A correspondent of the Boston
+      <i>Daily Advertiser</i>, writing from Bowdoin at the late commencement,
+      says that he had recently found "in an old drawer" some papers which
+      proved to be the manuscript "parts" of the students at the Junior
+      exhibition of 1824; among them was Hawthorne's "De Patribus Conscriptis
+      Romanorum". "It is quite brief," writes the correspondent, "but is really
+      curious as perhaps the only college exercise in existence of the great
+      tragic writer of our day (has there been a greater since Shakespeare?).
+      The last sentence is as follows (note the words which I put in italics):
+      'Augustus equidem antiquam magnificentiam patribus reddidit, <i>sed fulgor
+      tantum fuit sine fervore</i>. Nunquam in republica senatoribus potestas
+      recuperata, postremum species etiam amissa est.' On the same occasion
+      Longfellow had the salutatory oration in Latin&mdash;'Oratio Latina;
+      Anglici Poetae.'"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Hawthorne has given us a charming glimpse of himself as a college boy in
+      the letter to his fellow-student, Horatio Bridge, of the Navy, whose <i>Journal
+      of an African Cruiser</i> he afterwards edited. "I know not whence your
+      faith came; but while we were lads together at a country college,
+      gathering blueberries, in study-hours, under those tall academic pines; or
+      watching the great logs as they tumbled along the current of the
+      Androscoggin; or shooting pigeons and gray squirrels in the woods; or
+      bat-fowling in the summer twilight; or catching trouts in that shadowy
+      little stream which, I suppose, is still wandering riverward through the
+      forest&mdash;though you and I will never cast a line in it again&mdash;two
+      idle lads, in short (as we need not fear to acknowledge now), doing a
+      hundred things that the faculty never heard of, or else it had been the
+      worse for us,&mdash;still it was your prognostic of your friend's destiny
+      that he was to be a writer of fiction." From this sylvan university
+      Hawthorne came home to Salem; "as if," he wrote later, "Salem were for me
+      the inevitable centre of the universe."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The old witch-hanging city had no weirder product than this dark-haired
+      son. He has certainly given it an interest which it must otherwise have
+      lacked; but he speaks of it with small affection, considering that his
+      family had lived there for two centuries. "An unjoyous attachment," he
+      calls it. And, to tell the truth, there was evidently little love lost
+      between the little city and its most famous citizen. Stories still float
+      in the social gossip of the town, which represent the shy author as
+      inaccessible to all invitations to dinner and tea; and while the pleasant
+      circle awaited his coming in the drawing-room, the impracticable man was&mdash;at
+      least so runs the tale&mdash;quietly hobnobbing with companions to whom
+      his fame was unknown. Those who coveted him as a phoenix could never get
+      him, while he gave himself freely to those who saw in him only a placid
+      barn-door fowl. The sensitive youth was a recluse, upon whose imagination
+      had fallen the gloomy mystery of Puritan life and character. Salem was the
+      inevitable centre of his universe more truly than he thought. The mind of
+      Justice Hathorn's descendant was bewitched by the fascination of a certain
+      devilish subtlety working under the comeliest aspects in human affairs. It
+      overcame him with strange sympathy. It colored and controlled his
+      intellectual life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Devoted all day to lonely reverie and musing upon the obscurer spiritual
+      passages of the life whose monuments he constantly encountered, that
+      musing became inevitably morbid. With the creative instinct of the artist,
+      he wrote the wild fancies into form as stories, many of which, when
+      written, he threw into the fire. Then, after nightfall, stealing out from
+      his room into the silent streets of Salem, and shadowy as the ghosts with
+      which to his susceptible imagination the dusky town was thronged, he
+      glided beneath the house in which the witch-trials were held, or across
+      the moonlit hill upon which the witches were hung, until the spell was
+      complete. Nor can we help fancying that, after the murder of old Mr. White
+      in Salem, which happened within a few years after his return from college,
+      which drew from Mr. Webster his most famous criminal plea, and filled a
+      shadowy corner of every museum in New England, as every shivering little
+      man of that time remembers, with an awful reproduction of the scene in
+      wax-figures, with real sheets on the bed, and the murderer, in a glazed
+      cap, stooping over to deal the fatal blow&mdash;we cannot help fancying
+      that the young recluse who walked by night, the wizard whom as yet none
+      knew, hovered about the house, gazing at the windows of the fatal chamber,
+      and listening in horror for the faint whistle of the confederate in
+      another street.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Three years after he graduated, in 1828, he published anonymously a slight
+      romance with the motto from Southey, "Wilt thou go with me?" Hawthorne
+      never acknowledged the book, and it is now seldom found; but it shows
+      plainly the natural bent of his mind. It is a dim, dreamy tale, such as a
+      Byron-struck youth of the time might have written, except for that
+      startling self-possession of style and cold analysis of passion, rather
+      than sympathy with it, which showed no imitation, but remarkable original
+      power. The same lurid gloom overhangs it that shadows all his works. It is
+      uncanny; the figures of the romance are not persons, they are passions,
+      emotions, spiritual speculations. So the <i>Twice-told Tales</i> that seem
+      at first but the pleasant fancies of a mild recluse, gradually hold the
+      mind with a Lamia-like fascination; and the author says truly of them, in
+      the Preface of 1851, "Even in what purport to be pictures of actual life,
+      we have allegory not always so warmly dressed in its habiliments of flesh
+      and blood as to be taken into the reader's mind without a shiver." There
+      are sunny gleams upon the pages, but a strange, melancholy chill pervades
+      the book. In "The Wedding Knell", "The Minister's Black Veil", "The Gentle
+      Boy", "Wakefield", "The Prophetic Pictures", "The Hollow of the Three
+      Hills", "Dr. Heidegger's Experiment", "The Ambitious Guest", "The White
+      Old Maid", "Edward Fane's Rose-bud", "The Lily's Quest"&mdash;or in the
+      "Legends of the Province House", where the courtly provincial state of
+      governors and ladies glitters across the small, sad New England world,
+      whose very baldness jeers it to scorn&mdash;there is the same fateful
+      atmosphere in which Goody Cloyse might at any moment whisk by upon her
+      broomstick, and in which the startled heart stands still with unspeakable
+      terror.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The spell of mysterious horror which kindled Hawthorne's imagination was a
+      test of the character of his genius. The mind of this child of
+      witch-haunted Salem loved to hover between the natural and the
+      supernatural, and sought to tread the almost imperceptible and doubtful
+      line of contact. He instinctively sketched the phantoms that have the
+      figures of men, but are not human; the elusive, shadowy scenery which,
+      like that of Gustave Doré's pictures, is Nature sympathizing in her forms
+      and aspects with the emotions of terror or awe which the tale excites. His
+      genius broods entranced over the evanescent phantasmagoria of the vague
+      debatable land in which the realities of experience blend with ghostly
+      doubts and wonders.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But from its poisonous flowers what a wondrous perfume he distilled!
+      Through his magic reed, into what penetrating melody he blew that deathly
+      air! His relentless fancy seemed to seek a sin that was hopeless, a cruel
+      despair that no faith could throw off. Yet his naïve and well-poised
+      genius hung over the gulf of blackness, and peered into the pit with the
+      steady nerve and simple face of a boy. The mind of the reader follows him
+      with an aching wonder and admiration, as the bewildered old mother
+      forester watched Undine's gambols. As Hawthorne describes Miriam in <i>The
+      Marble Faun</i>, so may the character of his genius be most truly
+      indicated. Miriam, the reader will remember, turns to Hilda and Kenyon for
+      sympathy. "Yet it was to little purpose that she approached the edge of
+      the voiceless gulf between herself and them. Standing on the utmost verge
+      of that dark chasm, she might stretch out her hand and never clasp a hand
+      of theirs; she might strive to call out 'Help, friends! help!' but, as
+      with dreamers when they shout, her voice would perish inaudibly in the
+      remoteness that seemed such a little way. This perception of an infinite,
+      shivering solitude, amid which we cannot come close enough to human beings
+      to be warmed by them, and where they turn to cold, chilly shapes of mist,
+      is one of the most forlorn results of any accident, misfortune, crime, or
+      peculiarity of character, that puts an individual ajar with the world."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thus it was because the early New England life made so much larger account
+      of the supernatural element than any other modern civilized society, that
+      the man whose blood had run in its veins instinctively turned to it. But
+      beyond this alluring spell of its darker and obscurer individual
+      experience, it seems neither to have touched his imagination nor even to
+      have aroused his interest. To Walter Scott the romance of feudalism was
+      precious for the sake of feudalism itself, in which he believed with all
+      his soul, and for that of the heroic old feudal figures which he honored.
+      He was a Tory in every particle of his frame, and his genius made him the
+      poet of Toryism. But Hawthorne had apparently no especial political,
+      religious, or patriotic affinity with the spirit which inspired him. It
+      was solely a fascination of the intellect. And although he is
+      distinctively the poet of the Puritans, although it is to his genius that
+      we shall always owe that image of them which the power of The Scarlet
+      Letter has imprinted upon literature, and doubtless henceforth upon
+      historical interpretation, yet what an imperfect picture of that life it
+      is! All its stern and melancholy romance is there&mdash;its picturesque
+      gloom and intense passion; but upon those quivering pages, as in every
+      passage of his stories drawn from that spirit, there seems to be wanting a
+      deep, complete, sympathetic appreciation of the fine moral heroism, the
+      spiritual grandeur, which overhung that gloomy life, as a delicate purple
+      mist suffuses in summer twilights the bald crags of the crystal hills. It
+      is the glare of the scarlet letter itself, and all that it luridly reveals
+      and weirdly implies, which produced the tale. It was not beauty in itself
+      nor deformity, not virtue nor vice, which engaged the author's deepest
+      sympathy. It was the occult relation between the two. Thus while the
+      Puritans were of all men pious, it was the instinct of Hawthorne's genius
+      to search out and trace with terrible tenacity the dark and devious thread
+      of sin in their lives.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Human life and character, whether in New England two hundred years ago or
+      in Italy to-day, interested him only as they were touched by this glamour
+      of sombre spiritual mystery; and the attraction pursued him in every form
+      in which it appeared. It is as apparent in the most perfect of his smaller
+      tales, <i>Rappaccini's Daughter</i>, as in <i>The Scarlet Letter, The
+      Blithedale Romance, The House of the Seven Gables</i>, and <i>The Marble
+      Faun</i>. You may open almost at random, and you are as sure to find it as
+      to hear the ripple in Mozart's music, or the pathetic minor in a
+      Neapolitan melody. Take, for instance, The <i>Birth-Mark</i>, which we
+      might call the best of the smaller stories, if we had not just said the
+      same thing of <i>Rappaccini's Daughter</i>&mdash;for so even and complete
+      is Hawthorne's power, that, with few exceptions, each work of his, like
+      Benvenuto's, seems the most characteristic and felicitous. In this story,
+      a scholar marries a beautiful woman, upon whose face is a mark which has
+      hitherto seemed to be only a greater charm. Yet in one so lovely the
+      husband declares that, although it is the slightest possible defect, it is
+      yet the mark of earthly imperfection, and he proceeds to lavish all the
+      resources of science to procure its removal. But it will not disappear;
+      and at last he tells her that the crimson hand "has clutched its grasp"
+      into her very being, and that there is mortal danger in trying the only
+      means of removal that remains. She insists that it shall be tried. It
+      succeeds; but it removes the stain and her life together. So in <i>Rappaccini's
+      Daughter</i>. The old philosopher nourishes his beautiful child upon the
+      poisonous breath of a flower. She loves, and her lover is likewise
+      bewitched. In trying to break the spell, she drinks an antidote which
+      kills her. The point of interest in both stories is the subtile
+      connection, in the first, between the beauty of Georgiana and the taint of
+      the birth-mark; and, in the second, the loveliness of Beatrice and the
+      poison of the blossom.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This, also, is the key of his last romance, <i>The Marble Faun</i>, one of
+      the most perfect works of art in literature, whose marvellous spell begins
+      with the very opening words: "Four individuals, in whose fortunes we
+      should be glad to interest the reader, happened to be standing in one of
+      the saloons of the sculpture-gallery in the Capitol at Rome." When these
+      words are read, the mind familiar with Hawthorne is already enthralled.
+      "What a journey is beginning, not a step of which is trodden, and yet the
+      heart palpitates with apprehension! Through what delicate, rosy lights of
+      love, and soft, shimmering humor, and hopes and doubts and vanishing
+      delights, that journey will proceed, on and on into utter gloom." And it
+      does so, although "Hilda had a hopeful soul, and saw sunlight on the
+      mountain-tops". It does so, because Miriam and Donatello are the figures
+      which interest us most profoundly, and they are both lost in the shadow.
+      Donatello, indeed, is the true centre of interest, as he is one of the
+      most striking creations of genius. But the perplexing charm of Donatello,
+      what is it but the doubt that does not dare to breathe itself, the
+      appalled wonder whether, if the breeze should lift those clustering locks
+      a little higher, he would prove to be faun or man? It never does lift
+      them; the doubt is never solved, but it is always suggested. The mystery
+      of a partial humanity, morally irresponsible but humanly conscious, haunts
+      the entrancing page. It draws us irresistibly on. But as the cloud closes
+      around the lithe figure of Donatello, we hear again from its hidden folds
+      the words of "The Birth-Mark": "Thus ever does the gross fatality of earth
+      exult in its invariable triumph over the immortal essence, which, in this
+      dim sphere of half-development, demands the completeness of a higher
+      state". Or still more sadly, the mysterious youth, half vanishing from our
+      sympathy, seems to murmur, with Beatrice Rappaccini, "And still as she
+      spoke, she kept her hand upon her heart,&mdash;'Wherefore didst thou
+      inflict this miserable doom upon thy child?'"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We have left the story of Hawthorne's life sadly behind. But his life had
+      no more remarkable events than holding office in the Boston Customhouse
+      under Mr. Bancroft as collector; working for some time with the Brook&mdash;Farmers,
+      from whom he soon separated, not altogether amicably; marrying and living
+      in the Old Manse at Concord; returning to the Custom-house in Salem as
+      surveyor; then going to Lenox, in Berkshire, where he lived in what he
+      called "the ugliest little old red farm-house that you ever saw", and
+      where the story is told of his shyness, that, if he saw anybody coming
+      along the road whom he must probably pass, he would jump over the wall
+      into the pasture, and so give the stranger a wide berth; back again to
+      Concord; then to Liverpool as consul; travelling in Europe afterwards, and
+      home at last and forever, to "The Wayside" under the Concord hill. "The
+      hillside," he wrote to a friend in 1852, "is covered chiefly with
+      locust-trees, which come into luxuriant blossom in the month of June, and
+      look and smell very sweetly, intermixed with a few young elms and some
+      white-pines and infant oaks, the whole forming rather a thicket than a
+      wood. Nevertheless, there is some very good shade to be found there; I
+      spend delectable hours there in the hottest part of the day, stretched out
+      at my lazy length with a book in my hand or an unwritten book in my
+      thoughts. There is almost always a breeze stirring along the side or the
+      brow of the hill."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is not strange, certainly, that a man such as has been described, of a
+      morbid shyness, the path of whose genius diverged always out of the sun
+      into the darkest shade, and to whom human beings were merely psychological
+      phenomena, should have been accounted ungenial, and sometimes even hard,
+      cold, and perverse. From the bent of his intellectual temperament it
+      happens that in his simplest and sweetest passages he still seems to be
+      studying and curiously observing, rather than sympathizing. You cannot
+      help feeling constantly that the author is looking askance both at his
+      characters and you, the reader; and many a young and fresh mind is
+      troubled strangely by his books, as if it were aware of a
+      half-Mephistophelean smile upon the page. Nor is this impression
+      altogether removed by the remarkable familiarity of his personal
+      disclosures. There was never a man more shrinkingly retiring, yet surely
+      never was an author more naively frank. He is willing that you should know
+      all that a man may fairly reveal of himself. The great interior story he
+      does not tell, of course, but the Introduction to the <i>Mosses from an
+      Old Manse</i>, the opening chapter of <i>The Scarlet Letter</i>, and the
+      <i>Consular Experiences</i>, with much of the rest of <i>Our Old Home</i>,
+      are as intimate and explicit chapters of autobiography as can be found.
+      Nor would it be easy to find anywhere a more perfect idyl than that
+      introductory chapter of the <i>Mosses</i>. Its charm is perennial and
+      indescribable; and why should it not be, since it was written at a time in
+      which, as he says, "I was happy?" It is, perhaps, the most softly-hued and
+      exquisite work of his pen. So the sketch of "The Custom-house", although
+      prefatory to that most tragically powerful of romances,
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>The Scarlet Letter</i>, is an incessant play of the shyest and most
+      airy humor. It is like the warbling of bobolinks before a thunder-burst.
+      How many other men, however unreserved with the pen, would be likely to
+      dare to paint, with the fidelity of Teniers and the simplicity of Fra
+      Angelico, a picture of the office and the companions in which and with
+      whom they did their daily work? The surveyor of customs in the port of
+      Salem treated the town of Salem, in which he lived and discharged his
+      daily task, as if it had been, with all its people, as vague and remote a
+      spot as the town of which he was about to treat in the story. He commented
+      upon the place and the people as modern travellers in Pompeii discuss the
+      ancient town. It made a great scandal. He was accused of depicting with
+      unpardonable severity worthy folks, whose friends were sorely pained and
+      indignant. But he wrote such sketches as he wrote his stories. He treated
+      his companions as he treated himself and all the personages in history or
+      experience with which he dealt, merely as phenomena to be analyzed and
+      described, with no more private malice or personal emotion than the sun,
+      which would have photographed them, warts and all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thus it was that the great currents of human sympathy never swept him
+      away. The character of his genius isolated him, and he stood aloof from
+      the common interests. Intent upon studying men in certain aspects, he
+      cared little for man; and the high tides of collective emotion among his
+      fellows left him dry and untouched. So he beholds and describes the
+      generous impulse of humanity with sceptical courtesy rather than with
+      hopeful cordiality.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He does not chide you if you spend effort and life itself in the ardent
+      van of progress, but he asks simply, "Is six so much better than half a
+      dozen?" He will not quarrel with you if you expect the millennium
+      to-morrow. He only says, with that glimmering smile, "So soon?" Yet in all
+      this there was no shadow of spiritual pride. Nay, so far from this, that
+      the tranquil and pervasive sadness of all Hawthorne's writings, the kind
+      of heartache that they leave behind, seem to spring from the fact that his
+      nature was related to the moral world, as his own Donatello was to the
+      human. "So alert, so alluring, so noble", muses the heart as we climb the
+      Apennines towards the tower of Monte Beni; "alas! is he human?" it
+      whispers, with a pang of doubt.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      How this directed his choice of subjects, and affected his treatment of
+      them, when drawn from early history, we have already seen. It is not,
+      therefore, surprising, that the history into which he was born interested
+      him only in the same way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When he went to Europe as consul, <i>Uncle Tom's Cabin</i> was already
+      published, and the country shook with the fierce debate which involved its
+      life. Yet eight years later Hawthorne wrote with calm ennui, "No author,
+      without a trial, can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance about
+      a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no
+      picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a commonplace prosperity,
+      in broad and simple daylight, as is happily the case with my dear native
+      land." Is crime never romantic, then, until distance ennobles it? Or were
+      the tragedies of Puritan life so terrible that the imagination could not
+      help kindling, while the pangs of the plantation are superficial and
+      commonplace? Charlotte Brontë, Dickens, and Thackeray were able to find a
+      shadow even in "merrie England". But our great romancer looked at the
+      American life of his time with these marvellous eyes, and could see only
+      monotonous sunshine. That the devil, in the form of an elderly man clad in
+      grave and decent attire, should lead astray the saints of Salem village,
+      two centuries ago, and confuse right and wrong in the mind of Goodman
+      Brown, was something that excited his imagination, and produced one of his
+      weirdest stories. But that the same devil, clad in a sombre sophism, was
+      confusing the sentiment of right and wrong in the mind of his own
+      countrymen he did not even guess. The monotonous sunshine disappeared in
+      the blackest storm. The commonplace prosperity ended in tremendous war.
+      What other man of equal power, who was not intellectually constituted
+      precisely as Hawthorne was, could have stood merely perplexed and
+      bewildered, harassed by the inability of positive sympathy, in the vast
+      conflict which tosses us all in its terrible vortex?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In political theories and in an abstract view of war men may differ. But
+      this war is not to be dismissed as a political difference. Here is an
+      attempt to destroy the government of a country, not because it oppressed
+      any man, but because its evident tendency was to secure universal justice
+      under law. It is, therefore, a conspiracy against human nature.
+      Civilization itself is at stake; and the warm blood of the noblest youth
+      is everywhere flowing in as sacred a cause as history records&mdash;flowing
+      not merely to maintain a certain form of government, but to vindicate the
+      rights of human nature. Shall there not be sorrow and pain, if a friend is
+      merely impatient or confounded by it&mdash;if he sees in it only danger or
+      doubt, and not hope for the right&mdash;or if he seem to insinuate that it
+      would have been better if the war had been avoided, even at that countless
+      cost to human welfare by which alone the avoidance was possible?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yet, if the view of Hawthorne's mental constitution which has been
+      suggested be correct, this attitude of his, however deeply it may be
+      regretted, can hardly deserve moral condemnation. He knew perfectly well
+      that if a man has no ear for music he had better not try to sing. But the
+      danger with such men is that they are apt to doubt if music itself be not
+      a vain delusion. This danger Hawthorne escaped. There is none of the
+      shallow persiflage of the sceptic in his tone, nor any affectation of
+      cosmopolitan superiority. Mr. Edward Dicey, in his interesting
+      reminiscences of Hawthorne, published in <i>Macmillan's Magazine</i>,
+      illustrates this very happily.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+   "To make his position intelligible, let me repeat an anecdote which
+    was told me by a very near friend of his and mine, who had heard it
+    from President Pierce himself. Frank Pierce had been, and was to the
+    day of Hawthorne's death, one of the oldest of his friends. At the
+    time of the Presidential election of 1856, Hawthorne, for once, took
+    part in politics, wrote a pamphlet in favor of his friend, and took
+    a most unusual interest in his success. When the result of the
+    nomination was known, and Pierce was President-elect, Hawthorne was
+    among the first to come and wish him joy. He sat down in the room
+    moodily and silently, as he was wont when anything troubled him; then,
+    without speaking a word, he shook Pierce warmly by the hand, and at
+    last remarked, 'Ah, Frank, what a pity!' The moment the victory was
+    won, that timid, hesitating mind saw the evils of the successful
+    course&mdash;the advantages of the one which had not been followed. So it
+    was always. Of two lines of action, he was perpetually in doubt which
+    was the best; and so, between the two, he always inclined to letting
+    things remain as they are.
+
+   "Nobody disliked slavery more cordially than he did; and yet the
+    difficulty of what was to be done with the slaves weighed constantly
+    upon his mind. He told me once that, while he had been consul at
+    Liverpool, a vessel arrived there with a number of negro sailors, who
+    had been brought from slave States, and would, of course, be enslaved
+    again on their return. He fancied that he ought to inform the men of
+    the fact, but then he was stopped by the reflection&mdash;who was to
+    provide for them if they became free? and, as he said, with a sigh,
+    'while I was thinking, the vessel sailed.' So, I recollect, on the old
+    battle-field of Manassas, in which I strolled in company with
+    Hawthorne, meeting a batch of runaway slaves&mdash;weary, foot-sore,
+    wretched, and helpless beyond conception; we gave them food and wine,
+    some small sums of money, and got them a lift upon a train going
+    northward; but not long afterwards Hawthorne turned to me with the
+    remark, 'I am not sure we were doing right after all. How can these
+    poor beings find food and shelter away from home?' Thus this ingrained
+    and inherent doubt incapacitated him from following any course
+    vigorously. He thought, on the whole, that Wendell Phillips and Lloyd
+    Garrison and the Abolitionists were in the right, but then he was
+    never quite certain that they were not in the wrong after all; so that
+    his advocacy of their cause was of a very uncertain character. He saw
+    the best, to alter slightly the famous Horatian line, but he never
+    could quite make up his mind whether he altogether approved of its
+    wisdom, and therefore followed it but falteringly.
+
+      "'Better to bear those ills we have,
+        Than fly to others that we know not of,'
+
+   "expressed the philosophy to which Hawthorne was thus borne
+    imperceptibly. Unjustly, but yet not unreasonably, he was looked upon
+    as a pro-slavery man, and suspected of Southern sympathies. In
+    politics he was always halting between two opinions; or, rather,
+    holding one opinion, he could never summon up his courage to adhere
+    to it and it only."
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      The truth is that his own times and their people and their affairs were
+      just as shadowy to him as those of any of his stories, and his mind held
+      the same curious, half-wistful poise among all the conflicts of principle
+      and passion around him, as among those of which he read and mused. If you
+      ask why this was so&mdash;how it was that the tragedy of an old Italian
+      garden, or the sin of a lonely Puritan parish, or the crime of a
+      provincial judge, should so stimulate his imagination with romantic
+      appeals and harrowing allegories, while either it did not see a Carolina
+      slave-pen, or found in it only a tame prosperity&mdash;you must take your
+      answer in the other question, why he did not weave into any of his stories
+      the black and bloody thread of the Inquisition. His genius obeyed its law.
+      When he wrote like a disembodied intelligence of events with which his
+      neighbors' hearts were quivering&mdash;when the same half-smile flutters
+      upon his lips in the essay <i>About War Matters</i>, sketched as it were
+      upon the battle-field, as in that upon <i>Fire Worship</i>, written in the
+      rural seclusion of the mossy Manse&mdash;ah me! it is Donatello, in his
+      tower of Monte Beni, contemplating with doubtful interest the field upon
+      which the flower of men are dying for an idea. Do you wonder, as you see
+      him and hear him, that your heart, bewildered, asks and asks again, "Is he
+      human? Is he a man?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now that Hawthorne sleeps by the tranquil Concord, upon whose shores the
+      Old Manse was his bridal bower, those who knew him chiefly there revert
+      beyond the angry hour to those peaceful days. How dear the Old Manse was
+      to him he has himself recorded; and in the opening of the <i>Tanglewood
+      Tales</i> he pays his tribute to that placid landscape, which will always
+      be recalled with pensive tenderness by those who, like him, became
+      familiar with it in happy hours. "To me," he writes, "there is a peculiar,
+      quiet charm in these broad meadows and gentle eminences. They are better
+      than mountains, because they do not stamp and stereotype themselves into
+      the brain, and thus grow wearisome with the same strong impression,
+      repeated day after day. A few summer weeks among mountains, a lifetime
+      among green meadows and placid slopes, with outlines forever new, because
+      continually fading out of the memory, such would be my sober choice." He
+      used to say, in those days&mdash;when, as he was fond of insisting, he was
+      the obscurest author in the world, because, although he had told his tales
+      twice, nobody cared to listen&mdash;that he never knew exactly how he
+      contrived to live. But he was then married, and the dullest eye could not
+      fail to detect the feminine grace and taste that ordered the dwelling, and
+      perceive the tender sagacity that made all things possible.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Such was his simplicity and frugality that, when he was left alone for a
+      little time in his Arcadia, lie would dismiss "the help", and, with some
+      friend of other days who came to share his loneliness, he cooked the easy
+      meal, and washed up the dishes. No picture is clearer in the memory of a
+      certain writer than that of the magician, in whose presence he almost lost
+      his breath, looking at him over a dinner-plate which he was gravely wiping
+      in the kitchen, while the handy friend, who had been a Western settler,
+      scoured the kettle at the door. Blithedale, where their acquaintance had
+      begun, had not allowed either of them to forget how to help himself. It
+      was amusing to one who knew this native independence of Hawthorne, to
+      hear, some years afterwards, that he wrote the "campaign" <i>Life of
+      Franklin Pierce</i> for the sake of getting an office. That such a man
+      should do such a work was possibly incomprehensible to those who did not
+      know him upon any other supposition, until the fact was known that Mr.
+      Pierce was an old and constant friend. Then it was explained. Hawthorne
+      asked simply how he could help his friend, and he did the only thing he
+      could do for that purpose. But although he passed some years in public
+      office, he had neither taste nor talent for political life. He owed his
+      offices to works quite other than political. His first and second
+      appointments were virtually made by his friend Mr. Bancroft, and the third
+      by his friend Mr. Pierce. His claims were perceptible enough to
+      friendship, but would hardly have been so to a caucus.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In this brief essay we have aimed only to indicate the general character
+      of the genius of Hawthorne, and to suggest a key to his peculiar relation
+      to his time. The reader will at once see that it is rather the man than
+      the author who has been described; but this has been designedly done, for
+      we confess a personal solicitude, shared, we are very sure, by many
+      friends of Nathaniel Hawthorne, that there shall not be wanting to the
+      future student of his works such light as acquaintance with the man may
+      throw upon them, as well as some picture of the impression his personality
+      made upon his contemporaries.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Strongly formed, of dark, poetic gravity of aspect, lighted by the deep,
+      gleaming eye that recoiled with girlish coyness from contact with your
+      gaze; of rare courtesy and kindliness in personal intercourse, yet so
+      sensitive that his look and manner can be suggested by the word
+      "glimmering;" giving you a sense of restrained impatience to be away;
+      mostly silent in society, and speaking always with an appearance of
+      effort, but with a lambent light of delicate humor playing over all he
+      said in the confidence of familiarity, and firm self-possession under all,
+      as if the glimmering manner were only the tremulous surface of the sea,
+      Hawthorne was personally known to few, and intimately to very few. But no
+      one knew him without loving him, or saw him without remembering him; and
+      the name Nathaniel Hawthorne, which, when it was first written, was
+      supposed to be fictitious, is now one of the most enduring facts of
+      English literature.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0004" id="link2H_4_0004"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      RACHEL
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      One evening in Paris, we were strolling through that most Parisian spot
+      the Palais Royal, or, as it was called at that moment, the Palais
+      National. It was after the revolution of February; but, although the place
+      was full of associations with French revolutions, it seemed to have no
+      special sympathy with the trouble of the moment, and was as gay as the
+      youngest imagination conceives Paris to be. There was a constant throng
+      loitering along the arcades; the cafes were lighted and crowded; men were
+      smoking, sipping coffee, playing billiards, reading the newspapers,
+      discussing the debates in the Chamber and the coming "Prophete" of
+      Meyerbeer at the opera; women were chatting together in the boutiques,
+      pretty grisettes hurrying home; little blanchisseuses, with their
+      neatly-napkinned baskets, tripping among the crowd; strangers watched the
+      gay groups, paused at the windows of tailors and jewellers, and felt the
+      fascination of Paris. It was the moment of high-tide of Parisian life. It
+      was an epitome of Paris, and Paris is an epitome of the time and of the
+      world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the corner of the Palais Royal is the Comédie Française, and to that we
+      were going. There Rachel was playing. There she had recently recited the
+      "Marseillaise" to frenzied Paris; and there, in the vestibule, genius of
+      French comedy, of French intellect, and of French life, sits the wonderful
+      Voltaire of Houdon, the statue which, for the first time, after the
+      dreadful portraits which misrepresent him, gives the spectator some
+      adequate idea of the personal appearance and impression of the man who
+      moulded an age. You can scarcely see the statue without a shudder. It is
+      remorseless intellect laid bare. The cold sweetness of the aspect, the
+      subtle penetration of the brow, the passionless supremacy of a figure
+      which is neither manly nor graceful, fill your mind with apprehension and
+      with the conviction that the French Revolution you have seen is not the
+      last.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The curtain rises, and Paris and France roll away. A sad, solitary figure,
+      like a dream of tragic Greece, glides across the scene. The air grows cold
+      and thin, with a sense of the presence of lost antiquity. The feeling of
+      fate, vast, resistless, and terrible, rises like a suffocating vapor; and
+      the hopeless woe of the face, the pathetic dignity of the form, assure
+      you, before she speaks, that this is indeed Rachel. The scenery is poor
+      and hard; but its severe outlines and its conventional character serve to
+      suggest Greece. The drapery which hangs upon Rachel is exquisitely studied
+      from the most perfect statue. There is not a fold which is not Greek and
+      graceful, and which does not seem obedient to the same law which touches
+      her face with tragedy. As she slowly opens her thin lips, your own blanch;
+      and from her melancholy eyes all smiles and possibility of joy have
+      utterly passed away. Rachel stands alone, a solitary statue of fate and
+      woe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When she speaks, the low, thrilling, distinct voice seems to proceed
+      rather from her eyes than her mouth. It has a wan sound, if we may say so.
+      It is the very tone you would have predicted as coming from that form,
+      like the unearthly music which accompanies the speech of the
+      Commendatore's statue in "Don Giovanni". That appearance and that voice
+      are the key of the whole performance. Before she has spoken, you are
+      filled with the spirit of an age infinitely remote, and only related to
+      human sympathy now by the grandeur of suffering. The rest merely confirms
+      that impression. The whole is simple and intense. It is conceived and
+      fulfilled in the purest sense of Greek art.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of the early career and later life of Rachel such romantic stories are
+      told and believed that only to see the heroine of her own life would be
+      attraction enough to draw the world to Paris. Dr. Vernon, in his <i>Mémoires
+      d'un Bourgeois</i>, has described her earliest appearance upon the
+      Boulevards&mdash;her studies, her trials, and her triumph. That triumph
+      has been unequalled in stage annals for enthusiasm and permanence. Other
+      actors have achieved single successes as brilliant; but no other has held
+      for so long the most fickle and fastidious nation thrall to her powers;
+      owning no rival near the throne, and ruling with a sway whose splendor was
+      only surpassed by its sternness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For Rachel has never sought to ally her genius to goodness, and has rather
+      despised than courted the aid of noble character. Not a lady by birth or
+      breeding, she is reported to have surpassed Messalina in debauchery and
+      Semiramis in luxury. Paris teems with tales of her private life, which,
+      while they are undoubtedly exaggerated, yet serve to show the kind of
+      impression her career has produced. Those modern Sybarites, the princes
+      and nobles of Russia, are the heroes of her private romances; and her
+      sumptuous apartments, if not a Tour de Nesle, are at least a bower of
+      Rosamond.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As if to show the independent superiority of her art, she has been willing
+      to appear, or she really is, avaricious, mean, jealous, passionate, false;
+      and then, by her prodigious power, she has swayed the public that so
+      judged her as the wind tosses a leaf. There has, alas, been disdain in her
+      superiority. Perhaps Paris has found something fascinating in her very
+      contempt, as in the <i>Mémoires du Diable</i> the heroine confesses that
+      she loved the ferocity of her lover. Nor is it a traditional fame that she
+      has enjoyed; but whenever Rachel plays, the theatre is crowded, and the
+      terror and the tears are what they were when she began.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rachel is the greatest of merely dramatic artists. Others are more
+      beautiful; others are more stately and imposing; others have been fitted
+      by external gifts of nature to personify characters of very marked
+      features; others are more graceful and lovely and winning; most others
+      mingle their own personality with the characters they assume, but Rachel
+      has this final evidence of genius, that she is always superior to what she
+      does; her mind presides over her own performances. It is the perfection of
+      art. In describing this peculiar supremacy of genius, a scholar, in whose
+      early death a poet and philosopher was lost, says of Shakespeare: "He sat
+      pensive and alone above the hundred-handed play of his imagination." And
+      Fanny Kemble, in her journal, describes a conversation upon the stage, in
+      the tomb-scene of "Romeo and Juliet", where she, as Juliet, says to Mr.
+      Romeo Keppel, "Where the devil is your dagger?" while all the tearful
+      audience are lost in the soft woe of the scene.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This is very much opposed to the general theory of acting, and the story
+      is told with great gusto of a boy who was sent to see Garrick, we believe,
+      and who was greatly delighted with the fine phrasing and swagger of a
+      supernumerary, but could not understand why people applauded such an
+      ordinary bumpkin as Garrick, who did not differ a whit from all the
+      country boobies he had ever seen. It is insisted that the actor must
+      persuade the spectator that he is what he seems to be, and this is gravely
+      put as the first and final proof of good acting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This is, however, both a false view of art and a false interpretation and
+      observation of experience. Shakespeare, through the mouth of Hamlet, tells
+      the players to "hold the mirror up to nature"&mdash;that is, to represent
+      nature. For what is the dramatic art, like all other arts, but a
+      representation? If it aims to deceive the eye&mdash;if it tries to juggle
+      the senses of the spectator&mdash;it is as trivial as if a painter should
+      put real gold upon his canvas instead of representing gold by means of
+      paint; or as if a sculptor should tinge the cheeks of his statue to make
+      it more like a human face. We have seen tin pans so well represented in
+      painting that the result was atrocious. For, if the object intended is
+      really a tin pan, and not the pleasure produced by a conscious
+      representation of one, then why not insert the veritable pan in the
+      picture at once? If art is only a more or less successful imitation of
+      natural objects, with a view to cheat the senses, it is an amusing game,
+      but it is not a noble pursuit.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is an equally false observation of experience; because, if the
+      spectator were really deceived, if the actor became, in the mind of the
+      audience, truly identical with the character he represents, then, when
+      that character was odious, the audience would revolt. If we cannot quietly
+      sit and see one dog tear another, without interfering, could we gravely
+      look on and only put our handkerchiefs to our eyes, when Othello puts the
+      pillow to the mouth of Desdemona? If we really supposed him to be a
+      murderous man, how instantly we should leap upon the stage and rescue "the
+      gentle lady". The truth is, to state it boldly, we know the roaring lion
+      to be only Snug, the joiner.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All works of art must produce pleasure. Even the sternest and most
+      repulsive subjects must be touched by art into a pensive beauty, or they
+      fail to reach the height of great works. Goethe has shown this in the <i>Laocoon</i>,
+      and every man feels it in constant experience. One of the grand themes of
+      modern painting is the great tragedy of history, the Crucifixion.
+      Materially it is repulsive, as the spectacle of a man in excruciating
+      bodily torture; spiritually it is overwhelming, as the symbolized
+      suffering of God for sin. If, now, the pictures which treat this subject
+      were indeed only imitations of the scene, so that the spectator listened
+      for the groans of agony and looked to see the blood drop from the brow
+      crowned with thorns, how hideous and insupportable the sight would be! The
+      mind is conscious as it contemplates the picture that it is a
+      representation, and not a fact. The mere force of actuality is, therefore,
+      destroyed, and thought busies itself with the moral significance of the
+      scene. In the same way, in the tragedy of "Othello", conscious that there
+      is not the actual physical suffering which there seems to be, the mind
+      contemplates the real meaning which underlies that appearance, and curses
+      jealousy and the unmanly passions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Even in a very low walk of art the same principle is manifested. A man
+      might not care to adorn his parlor with the carcass of an ox or a hog, nor
+      invite to his table boors muzzy with beer. But the most elegant of nations
+      prizes the pictures of Teniers at extraordinary prices, and hangs its
+      galleries with works minutely representing the shambles. Here, again, the
+      explanation is this: that the mind, rejecting any idea of actuality in the
+      picture, is charmed with the delicacy of detail, with lovely color, with
+      tone, with tenderness, and all these are qualities inseparable from the
+      picture, and do not belong by any necessity to the actual carcasses of
+      animals. In the shambles, the sense of disgust and repulsion overcomes any
+      pleasure in light and color. In the parlor, if the spectator were
+      persuaded by the picture to hold his nose, the thing would be as unlovely
+      as it is in nature. Imitation pleases only so far as it is known to be
+      imitation. If deception by imitation were the object of art, then the
+      material of the sculptor should be wax, and not marble. Every visitor
+      mistakes the sitting figure of Cobbett, in Madame Tussaud's collection of
+      wax-works, for a real man, and will very likely, as we did, speak to it.
+      But who would accost the Moses of Michael Angelo, or believe the sitting
+      Medici in his chapel to have speech?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is something unhandsomely derogatory to art in this common view. It
+      is forgotten that art is not subsidiary nor auxiliary to nature, but it is
+      a distinct ministry, and has a world of its own. They are not in
+      opposition, nor do they clash. The cardinal fact of imitation in works of
+      art is evident enough. The exquisite charm of art lies in the perfection
+      of the imitation, coexisting with the consciousness of an absolute
+      difference, so that the effect produced is not at all that which the
+      object itself produces, but is an intellectual pleasure arising from the
+      perception of the mingling of rational intention with the representation
+      of the natural object. We can illustrate this by supposing a child
+      bringing in a fresh rose, and a painter his picture of a rose. The
+      pleasure derived from the picture is surely something better than wonder
+      at the skill with which the form and color of the flower are imitated.
+      Since imitation can never attain to the dignity and worth of the original,
+      and since we live in the midst of nature, it would be folly to claim for
+      its more or less successful copy the position and form of a great mental
+      and moral influence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of course we are not unmindful of the inevitable assertion that if certain
+      forms are to be used for the expression of certain truths, the first
+      condition is that those forms shall be accurately rendered. Hence arises
+      the great stress laid by the modern schools upon a rigorous imitation of
+      nature, and hence what is called the pre-Raphaelite spirit, with its
+      marvellous detail. But mere imitation does not come any nearer to great
+      art by being perfect. If it is not informed by a great intention,
+      sculpture is only wax-work and painting a juggle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is by her instinctive recognition of these fundamental principles that
+      Rachel shows herself to be an artist. She is fully persuaded of the value
+      of the modern spirit, and she belongs to the time by nothing more than by
+      her instinctive and hearty adaptation of the principles of art which are
+      illustrated in all other departments. There is nothing in Millais's or
+      Hunt's paintings more purely pre-Raphaelite than Rachel's acting in the
+      last scenes of "Adrienne Lecouvreur". It is the perfection of detail. It
+      was studied, gasp by gasp, and groan by groan, in the hospital wards of
+      Paris, where men were dying in agony. It is terrible, but it is true. We
+      have seen a crowded theatre hanging in a suspense almost suffocating over
+      that fearful scene. Men grew pale, women fainted, a spell of silence and
+      awe held us enchanted. But it was all pure art. The actor was superior to
+      the scene. It was the passion with which she threw herself into the
+      representation, with a distinct conception of the whole, and a thorough
+      knowledge of the means necessary to produce its effect, that secured the
+      success. There was a sublimity of self-control in the spectacle, for, if
+      she had allowed herself to be overwhelmed by the excitement, the play must
+      have paused; real feeling would have invaded that which was represented,
+      and we should, by a rude shock, have been staring in wonder at the weeping
+      woman Rachel, instead of thrilling with the woes of the dying, despairing
+      Adrienne. She seems to be what we know she is not.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rachel's earlier triumphs were in the plays of Racine. Certainly nothing
+      could show the essential worth of the old Greek dramatic material more
+      than the fact that it could be rendered into French rhyme without losing
+      all its dignity. If a man should know Homer only through Pope's
+      translations, he could hardly understand the real greatness and peculiar
+      charm of Homer. And as most of us know him in no other way, we all
+      understand that the eminence of Homer is conceded upon the force of
+      tradition and the feeling of those who have read him in the original. So,
+      to the reader of Racine, it is his knowledge of the outline of the grand
+      old Greek stories that prevents their loss of charm and loftiness when
+      they masquerade in French rhyme. They have lost their sublimity, so far as
+      treatment can effect it, while they retain their general form of interest.
+      But it is the splendid triumph of Rachel that she restores the original
+      Greek grandeur to the drama. We no longer wonder at Racine's idea of
+      Phèdre, but we are confronted with Phèdre herself. From the moment she
+      appears, through every change and movement of the scene until the
+      catastrophe, a sense of fate, the grim, remorseless, and inexorable
+      destiny that presides over Greek story, is stamped upon every look and nod
+      and movement of Rachel. It is stated that, since the enthusiasm produced
+      in Paris by Ristori, Rachel's Italian rival, the sculptor Schlesinger has
+      declared that his statue of Rachel which he had called Tragedy was only
+      Melodrama after all. If the report be true, it does not prove that Rachel,
+      but Schlesinger, is not a great artist.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is this simplicity and grandeur that make the excellence of Rachel in
+      the characters of Racine. They cease to be French and become Greek. As a
+      victim of fate, she moves, from the first scene to the last, as by a
+      resistless impulse. Her voice has a low concentrated tone. Her movement is
+      not vehement, but intense. If she smiles, it is a wan gleam of sadness,
+      not of joy, as if the eyes that lighten for a moment saw all the time the
+      finger of fate pointing over her shoulder. The thin form, graceful with
+      intellectual dignity, not rounded with the ripeness of young womanhood,
+      the statuesque simplicity and severity of the drapery, the pale cheek, the
+      sad lips, the small eyes&mdash;these are accessory to the whole
+      impression, the melancholy ornaments of the tragic scene. Her fine
+      instinct avoids the romantic and melodramatic touches which, however
+      seductive to an actor who aims at effect, would destroy at once that
+      breadth and unity which characterize her best impersonations. Wherever the
+      idea of fate inspires the tragedy, or can properly be introduced as the
+      motive, there Rachel is unsurpassed and unapproachable. Her stillness, her
+      solemnity, her intensity; the want of mouthing, of ranting, of all
+      extravagance; the slight movement of the arms, and the subtle inflections
+      of the voice which are more expressive than gestures, haunt the memory and
+      float through the mind afterwards as the figure of Francesca di Rimini, in
+      the exquisite picture of Ary Scheffer, sweeps, full of woe, which every
+      line suggests, across the vision of Dante and his guide.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was, naturally, the greatest curiosity and a good deal of scepticism
+      about Rachel's power in the modern drama, the melodrama of Victor Hugo,
+      and the social drama of Scribe. But her appearance in the "Angelo" of
+      Victor Hugo and in "Adrienne Lecouvreur" of Scribe satisfied the curiosity
+      and routed the scepticism. It was pleasant after the vast and imposing
+      forms, the tearless tragedy of Greek story, to see the mastery of this
+      genius in the conditions of a life and spirit with which we were more
+      familiar and sympathetic. It was clear that the same passionate intensity
+      which, united with the most exquisite perceptions, enabled her so
+      perfectly to restore the Greek spirit to the Greek form, would as
+      adequately represent the voluptuous southern life. If in the old drama she
+      was sculpture, so in the modern she was painting, not only with the
+      flowing outline, but with all the purple, palpitating hues of passion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This is best manifested in the "Angelo", of which the scene is laid in old
+      Padua and is, therefore, full of the mysterious spirit of mediaeval
+      Italian, and especially Venetian life. Miss Cushman has played in an
+      English version of this drama, called the "Actress of Padua". But it is
+      hardly grandiose enough in its proportions to be very well adapted to the
+      talent of Miss Cushman. It was remarkable how perfectly the genius which
+      had, the evening before, adequately represented Phèdre, could impersonate
+      the ablest finesse of Italian subtilty. The old Italian romances were made
+      real in a moment. The dim chambers, the dusky passages, the sliding doors,
+      the vivid contrast of gayety and gloom, the dance in the palace and the
+      duel in the garden, the smile on the lip and the stab at the heart, the
+      capricious feeling, the impetuous action, the picturesque costume of life
+      and society&mdash;all the substance and the form of our ideas of
+      characteristic Italian life, are comprised in Rachel's Thisbe and Angelo.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is one scene in that play not to be forgotten. The curtain rises and
+      shows a vast, dim chamber in the castle, with a heavily-curtained bed, and
+      massive carved furniture, and a deep bay-window. It is night; a candle
+      burns upon the table, feebly flickering in the gloom of the great chamber.
+      Angelo, whom Thisbe loves, and who pretends to love her, is sitting
+      uneasily in the chamber with his mistress, whose name we have forgotten,
+      but whom he really loves. Thisbe is suspicious of his want of faith, and
+      burns with jealousy, but has had no proof.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A gust of wind, the rustle of the tapestry, the creak of a bough in the
+      garden, the note of a night bird, any slightest sound makes the lovers
+      start and quiver, as if they stood upon the verge of an imminent peril.
+      Suddenly they both start at a low noise, apparently in the wall. Angelo
+      rises and looks about, his mistress shivers and shrinks, but they discover
+      nothing. The night deepens around them. The sense of calamity and
+      catastrophe rises in the spectator's mind. They start again. This time
+      they hear a louder noise, and glance helplessly around and feebly try to
+      scoff away their terror. The sound dies away, and they converse in
+      appalled and fragmentary whispers. But again a low, cautious, sliding
+      noise arrests them. Angelo springs up, runs for his hat and cloak, blows
+      out the candle upon the table, and escapes from the room, while his
+      mistress totters to the bed and throws herself upon it, feigning sleep.
+      The stage is left unoccupied, while the just-extinguished candle still
+      smokes upon the table, and the sidelights and footlights, being lowered,
+      wrap the vast chamber in deeper gloom.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At this moment a small secret door in the wall at the bottom of the stage
+      slips aside, and Thisbe, still wearing her ball-dress, and with a
+      head-dress of gold sequins flashing in her black hair, is discovered
+      crouching in the aperture, holding an antique lamp in one hand, a little
+      raised, and with the other softly putting aside the door, while, bending
+      forward with a cat-like stillness, she glares around the chamber with
+      eager eyes, that flash upon everything at once. The picture is perfect.
+      The light falls from the raised lamp upon this jewelled figure crouching
+      in the darkness at the bottom of the stage. Judith was not more terrible;
+      Lucrezia Borgia not more superb. But, magnificent as it is, it is a moment
+      of such intense interest that applause is suspended. The house is
+      breathless, for it is but the tiger's crouch that precedes the spring. The
+      next instant she is upon the floor of the chamber, and, still bending
+      slightly forward to express the eager concentration of her mind, she
+      glances at the bed and the figure upon it with a scornful sneer, that
+      indicates how clearly she sees the pretence of sleep, and how evidently
+      somebody has been there, or something has happened which justifies all her
+      suspicion, and then, with panther-like celerity, she darts about the
+      chamber to find some trace of the false lover&mdash;a hat, a glove, a
+      plume, a cloak&mdash;to make assurance doubly sure. But there is nothing
+      upon the floor, nothing upon the table, nothing in the bay-window, nothing
+      upon the sofa, nor in the huge carved chairs; there is nothing that proves
+      the treachery she suspects. But her restless eye leads her springing foot
+      from one corner of the chamber to the other. Speed increases with the
+      lessening chance of proof; the eye flashes more and more fiercely; the
+      breast heaves; the hand clinches; the cheek burns, until, suddenly, in the
+      very moment of despair, having as yet spoken no word, she comes to the
+      table, sees the candle, which still smokes, and drawing herself up with
+      fearful calmness, her cheeks grow pallid, the lips livid, the hands relax,
+      the eye deadens as with a blow, and, with the despairing conviction that
+      she is betrayed, her heart-break sighs itself out in a cold whisper, "<i>Elle
+      fume encore</i>".
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In this she is as purely dramatic as in other plays she is classical. But
+      neither in the one nor the other is there a look, or a gesture, or a word,
+      which is not harmonious with the spirit of the style and the character of
+      the person represented.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This is pure passion as the other is implacable fate. There is something
+      so tearfully human in it that you are touched as by a picture of the
+      Magdalen. Every representation of Rachel is preserved in your memory with
+      the first sights of the great statues and the famous pictures.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the French translation of Schiller's "Mary Stuart", a character which
+      may be supposed especially to interest Americans and English, Rachel is
+      not less excellent. The sad grace, the tender resignation, the poetic
+      enthusiasm, the petulant caprice, the wilful, lovely womanliness of the
+      lovely queen, are made tragically real by her representation. Perhaps it
+      is not the Mary of Mignet nor of history. But Mary Queen of Scots is one
+      of the characters which the imagination has chosen to take from history
+      and decorate with immortal grace. It cares less for what the woman Mary
+      was, than to have a figure standing upon the fact of history, but radiant
+      with the beauty of poetry. It has invested her with a loveliness that is
+      perhaps unreal, with a tenderness and sweetness that were possibly foreign
+      to her character, and with a general fascination and good intention which
+      a contemporary might not have discovered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It has made her the ideal of unfortunate womanhood. For it seemed that a
+      fate so tragic deserved a fame so fair. Perhaps the weakness which Mary
+      had, and which Lady Jane Grey had not, have been the very reasons why the
+      unfortunate, unhappy Queen Mary is dearer to our human sympathies than the
+      unfortunate Lady Jane. Perhaps because it was a woman who pursued her, the
+      instinct of men has sought to restore, by the canonization of Mary, the
+      womanly ideal injured by Elizabeth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But, whatever be the reason, there is no question that we judge Mary Queen
+      of Scots more by the imagination than by historical rigor; and it is Mary,
+      as the mind insists upon having her, that Rachel represents. She conspires
+      with the imagination to complete the ideal of Mary. It is a story told in
+      sad music to which we listen; it is a mournful panorama, unfolding itself
+      scene by scene, upon which we gaze. Lost in soft melancholy, the figures
+      of the drama move before us as in a tragic dream. But after seeing
+      Rachel's Mary we can see no other. If we meet her in history or romance,
+      it is always that figure, those pensive eyes, forecasting a fearful doom,
+      that voice whose music is cast in a hopeless minor. It is thus that
+      dramatic genius creates, and poetry disputes with history.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jules Janin says that Rachel is best in those parts of this play where the
+      anger of the Queen is more prominent than the grief of the woman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This is true to a certain extent. It was not difficult to see that the
+      fierceness was more natural than the tenderness to the woman Rachel, and
+      that, therefore, those parts had a reality which the tenderness had not.
+      But the performance was symmetrical, and, so far as the mere acting was
+      concerned, the woman was as well rendered as the Queen. The want of the
+      spectacle was this, and it is, we fully grant, the defect of all her
+      similar personations: you felt that it was only intellect feigning heart,
+      though with perfect success. The tenderness and caprice of the woman, and
+      the pride and dignity of the Queen, are all there. She would not be the
+      consummate artist she is if she could not give them. But even through your
+      tears you see that it is art. It is, indeed, concealed by its own
+      perfection, but it is not lost in the loveliness of the character it
+      suggests, as might be the case with a greatly inferior artist. You are
+      half sure, as you own the excellence, that much of the tender effect
+      arises from your feeling that Rachel, as she represents a woman so
+      different from herself, regards her rôle with sad longing and vague
+      regret. When we say that she is the ideal Mary, we mean strictly the
+      artistic ideal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The late Charlotte Brontë, in her novel of <i>Villette</i>, has described
+      Rachel with a splendor of rhetoric that is very unusual with the author of
+      <i>Jane Eyre</i>. But in the style of the description it is very easy to
+      see the influence of the thing described. It has a picturesque
+      stateliness, a grave grace and musical pomp, which all belong to the
+      genius of Rachel. Even the soft gloom of her eyes is in it; a gloom and a
+      fire which no one could more subtly feel than Miss Brontë. Her description
+      is the best that we have seen of what is, in its nature, after all
+      indescribable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As the fame of an actor or singer is necessarily traditional, and rapidly
+      perishes, it is not easy to compare one with another when they are not
+      contemporaries, for you find yourself only comparing vague impressions and
+      reports. Of Roscius and Betterton we must accept the names and allow the
+      fame. We can see Reynolds's pictures, we can hear Handel's music, we can
+      read Goldsmith's and Johnson's books; but of Garrick what can we have but
+      a name, and somebody's account of what he thought of Garrick? The touch of
+      Shakespeare we can feel as well as did our ancestors, and our
+      great-grandchildren's great-grandchildren will feel it as fully as we. But
+      the voice of Malibran lingers in only a few happy memories, and we know
+      Mrs. Siddons better by Sir Joshua's portrait than by her own glories.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is, therefore, impossible to decide what relative rank among actresses
+      Rachel occupies. Mrs. Jameson, in her <i>Common-Place Book of Thoughts,
+      Memories, and Fancies</i>, says some sharp things of her, and Mrs. Jameson
+      is a critic of too delicate a mind not to be heeded. The general view she
+      takes of Rachel is, that she is not a great artist in the true sense of
+      the word. She is a finished actress, but not an artist fine enough to
+      conceal her art. The last scene of "Adrienne Lecouvreur" seems to Mrs.
+      Jameson a mistake and a failure&mdash;so beyond the limits of art, a mere
+      imitation of a repulsive physical fact; and finally she pronounces that
+      Rachel has talent but not genius; while it is the "entire absence of the
+      high poetic element which distinguishes Rachel as an actress, and places
+      her at such an immeasurable distance from Mrs. Siddons, that it shocks me
+      to hear their names together".
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It may be fairly questioned, whether a woman so refined and cultivated as
+      Mrs. Jameson may not have judged Rachel rather by her wants as a woman
+      than by her excellence as an artist. That the terrible last scene of
+      "Adrienne" is a harrowing imitation of nature we have conceded. The play
+      is, in truth, a mere melodrama. It is a vaudeville of costume, with a
+      frightful catastrophe appended. But as an artist she seems to us perfectly
+      to render the part. She does not make it more than it is, but she makes it
+      just what it is&mdash;a proud, injured, and betrayed actress. Whether the
+      accuracy of her imitation is not justified by the intention, which alone
+      can redeem imitation, will remain a question to each spectator. Mrs.
+      Jameson also insists that Rachel's power is extraneous, and excites only
+      the senses and the intellect, and that she has become a hard mannerist.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In our remarks upon this celebrated actress we have viewed her simply as
+      an artist, and not as a woman. She appeals to the public only in that way.
+      Perhaps the sinister stories that are told of her private career only
+      serve to confirm and deepen the feeling of the intensity of her nature,
+      she so skilfully represents the most fearful passions, not from the
+      perception of genius alone, but from the knowledge of actual experience.
+      Certainly no woman's character has been more freely discussed, and no
+      public performer of any kind ever sought so little to propitiate her
+      audience. She has seemed to scorn the world she fascinated; and like a
+      superb snake, with glittering eyes and cold crest, to gloat over the
+      terror which held her captives thrall. Hence it is not surprising to one
+      who has seen her a great deal, and has felt the peculiarity of her power,
+      to find in Lehmann's portrait of her&mdash;which is, perhaps, the most
+      characteristic of all that have been taken&mdash;a subtle resemblance to a
+      serpent, which is at once fascinating and startling. Mrs. Jameson mentions
+      that when she first saw her in Hermione, she was reminded of a Lamia, or
+      serpent nature in woman's form. As you look at Lehmann's portrait this
+      feeling is irresistible. The head bends slightly forward, with a darting,
+      eager movement, yet with a fine, lithe grace. The keen, bright eyes glance
+      a little askance, with a want of free confidence. There are a slim
+      smoothness, a silent alertness, in the general impression&mdash;a nervous,
+      susceptible intentness, united with undeniable beauty, that recall the
+      deadly nightshade among flowers and Keats's "Lamia" among poems. The
+      portrait would fully interpret the poem, She looked the lovely Lamia upon
+      the verge of flight, at the instant when she felt the calm, inexorable eye
+      of criticism and detection. In a moment, while you gaze, that form will be
+      prone, those bright, cold eyes malignant, that wily grace will undulate
+      into motion and glide away. You feel that there is no human depravity that
+      Rachel could not adequately represent. Perhaps you doubt if she could be
+      Desdemona or Imogen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rachel is great, but there is something greater. It is not an entirely
+      satisfactory display of human power, even in its own way. Her triumph is
+      that of an actress. It is only an intellectual success. For however subtly
+      dramatic genius may seize and represent the forms of human emotion, yet
+      the representation is most perfect&mdash;not, indeed, as art, but as a
+      satisfaction of the heart&mdash;when the personal character of the artist
+      interests those emotions to himself, and thus sympathetically affects the
+      audience. Rachel's Mary is a perfect portrait of Mary; but it is only a
+      picture, after all, that expresses the difference in feeling between the
+      impression of her personation and that which will be derived from another
+      woman. The fiercer and darker passions of human nature are depicted by her
+      with terrible force-power. They throb with reality; but in the soft,
+      superior shades you still feel that it is emotion, intellectually
+      discerned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Such facts easily explain the present defection of Paris from Rachel.
+      Ristori has come up from Italy, and with one woman's smile, "full of the
+      warm South", she has lured Paris to her feet. There is no more sudden and
+      entire desertion of a favorite recorded in all the annals of popular
+      caprice. The feuilletonists, who are a power in Paris, have gone over in a
+      body to the beautiful Italian. They describe her triumphs precisely as
+      they described Rachel's. The old ecstasies are burnished up for the new
+      occasion. In a country like ours, where there is no theatre, and where the
+      dramatic differences only creep into an advertisement, such an excitement
+      as Paris feels, from such a cause and at such a time, is simply
+      incredible. It is, possibly, as real and dignified an excitement as that
+      which New York experienced upon the decease of the late lamented William
+      Poole.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There are various explanations of this fall of Rachel, without resorting
+      to the theory of superior genius in Ristori. Undoubtedly Paris loves
+      novelty, and has been impatient of the disdainful sway of Rachel. Her
+      reputed avarice and want of courtesy and generosity, her total failure to
+      charm as a woman while she fascinated as an artist, have, naturally
+      enough, after many years, fatigued the patience and disappointed the
+      humane sympathies of a public whose mere curiosity had been long
+      satisfied. Rachel seemed only more Parisian than Paris.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But when over the Alps came Ristori, lovely as a woman and eminent as an
+      artist, then there was a new person who could make Paris weep at her
+      greatness upon the stage, and her goodness away from it; who, in the
+      plenitude of her first success, could shame the reported avarice of her
+      fallen rival by offers of the sincerest generosity. When Ristori came, who
+      seemed to have a virtue for every vice of Rachel, Paris, with one accord,
+      hurried with hymns and incense to the new divinity. We regard it as a
+      homage to the woman no less than a tribute to the artist. We regard it as
+      saying to Rachel that if, being humane and lovely, she chose, from pride,
+      to rule by scornful superiority, she has greatly erred; or if, being
+      really unlovely, she has held this crown only by her genius, she has yet
+      to see human nature justify itself by preferring a humane to an inhuman
+      power. The most splendid illustration of this kind of homage was the
+      career of Jenny Lind in America. It was rather the fashion among the <i>dilettanti</i>
+      to undervalue her excellence as an artist. A popular superficial criticism
+      was fond of limiting her dramatic power to inferior rôles. She was denied
+      passion and great artistic skill; she was accused of tricks. But, even had
+      these things been true, what a career it was! It was unprecedented, and
+      can never be repeated. Yet it was, at bottom, the success of a saint
+      rather than that of a singer. Had she been a worse or better artist the
+      homage would have been the same. If the public&mdash;and it is a happy
+      fact&mdash;can love the woman even more than it admires the artist, her
+      triumph is assured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We look upon the enthusiasm for Ristori by no means as an unmingled
+      tribute to superior genius. We make no question of her actual womanly
+      charms. Even if appearance of generosity, of simplicity, and sweetness
+      were only deep Italian wile, and assumed, upon profound observation and
+      consideration of human nature and the circumstances of Rachel's position
+      in Paris, merely for the purpose of exciting applause, that applause would
+      still be genuine, and would prove the loyalty of the public mind to what
+      is truly lovely. It was our good-fortune to see Ristori in Italy, where,
+      for the last ten years, she has been accounted the first Italian actress.
+      She has there been seen by all the travelling world of Europe and America.
+      It is not possible that so great a talent, as the Parisians consider it,
+      could have been so long overlooked. We well remember Ristori as a
+      charming, natural, simple actress; but of the surpassing power which Paris
+      has discovered probably very few of us retain any recollection.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0005" id="link2H_4_0005"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      THACKERAY IN AMERICA
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Thackeray's visit at least demonstrates that if we are unwilling to
+      pay English authors for their books, we are ready to reward them
+      handsomely for the opportunity of seeing and hearing them. If Mr. Dickens,
+      instead of dining at other people's expense, and making speeches at his
+      own, when he came to see us, had devoted an evening or two in the week to
+      lecturing, his purse would have been fuller, his feelings sweeter, and his
+      fame fairer. It was a Quixotic crusade, that of the Copyright, and the
+      excellent Don has never forgiven the windmill that broke his spear.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Undoubtedly, when it was ascertained that Mr. Thackeray was coming, the
+      public feeling on this side of the sea was very much divided as to his
+      probable reception. "He'll come and humbug us, eat our dinners, pocket our
+      money, and go home and abuse us, like that unmitigated snob Dickens," said
+      Jonathan, chafing with the remembrance of that grand ball at the Park
+      Theatre and the Boz tableaux, and the universal wining and dining, to
+      which the distinguished Dickens was subject while he was our guest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Let him have his say," said others, "and we will have our look. We will
+      pay a dollar to hear him, if we can see him at the same time; and as for
+      the abuse, why, it takes even more than two such cubs of the roaring
+      British Lion to frighten the American Eagle. Let him come, and give him
+      fair play."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He did come, and had fair play, and returned to England with a comfortable
+      pot of gold holding $12.000, and with the hope and promise of seeing us
+      again in September, to discourse of something not less entertaining than
+      the witty men and sparkling times of Anne. We think there was no
+      disappointment with his lectures. Those who knew his books found the
+      author in the lecturer. Those who did not know his books were charmed in
+      the lecturer by what is charming in the author&mdash;the unaffected
+      humanity, the tenderness, the sweetness, the genial play of fancy, and the
+      sad touch of truth, with that glancing stroke of satire which,
+      lightning-like, illumines while it withers. The lectures were even more
+      delightful than the books, because the tone of the voice and the
+      appearance of the man, the general personal magnetism, explained and
+      alleviated so much that would otherwise have seemed doubtful or unfair.
+      For those who had long felt in the writings of Thackeray a reality quite
+      inexpressible, there was a secret delight in finding it justified in his
+      speaking; for he speaks as he writes&mdash;simply, directly, without
+      flourish, without any cant of oratory, commending what he says by its
+      intrinsic sense, and the sympathetic and humane way in which it was
+      spoken. Thackeray is the kind of "stump orator" that would have pleased
+      Carlyle. He never thrusts himself between you and his thought. If his
+      conception of the time and his estimate of the men differ from your own,
+      you have at least no doubt what his view is, nor how sincere and necessary
+      it is to him. Mr. Thackeray considers Swift a misanthrope; he loves
+      Goldsmith and Steele and Harry Fielding; he has no love for Sterne, great
+      admiration for Pope, and alleviated admiration for Addison. How could it
+      be otherwise? How could Thackeray not think Swift a misanthrope and Sterne
+      a factitious sentimentalist? He is a man of instincts, not of thoughts: he
+      sees and feels. He would be Shakespeare's call-boy, rather than dine with
+      the Dean of St. Patrick's. He would take a pot of ale with Goldsmith,
+      rather than a glass of burgundy with the "Reverend Mr. Sterne", and that
+      simply because he is Thackeray. He would have done it as Fielding would
+      have done it, because he values one genuine emotion above the most
+      dazzling thought; because he is, in fine, a Bohemian, "a minion of the
+      moon", a great, sweet, generous heart.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We say this with more unction now that we have personal proof of it in his
+      public and private intercourse while he was here.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The popular Thackeray-theory, before his arrival, was of a severe
+      satirist, who concealed scalpels in his sleeves and carried probes in his
+      waistcoat pockets; a wearer of masks; a scoffer and sneerer, and general
+      infidel of all high aims and noble character. Certainly we are justified
+      in saying that his presence among us quite corrected this idea. We
+      welcomed a friendly, genial man; not at all convinced that speech is
+      heaven's first law, but willing to be silent when there is nothing to say;
+      who decidedly refused to be lionized&mdash;not by sulking, but by stepping
+      off the pedestal and challenging the common sympathies of all he met; a
+      man who, in view of the thirty-odd editions of Martin Farquhar Tupper, was
+      willing to confess that every author should "think small-beer of himself".
+      Indeed, he has this rare quality, that his personal impression deepens, in
+      kind, that of his writings. The quiet and comprehensive grasp of the fact,
+      and the intellectual impossibility of holding fast anything but the fact,
+      is as manifest in the essayist upon the wits as in the author of <i>Henry
+      Esmond</i> and <i>Vanity Fair</i>. Shall we say that this is the sum of
+      his power, and the secret of his satire? It is not what might be, nor what
+      we or other persons of well-regulated minds might wish, but it is the
+      actual state of things that he sees and describes. How, then, can he help
+      what we call satire, if he accept Mrs. Rawdon Crawley's invitation and
+      describe her party? There was no more satire in it, so far as he is
+      concerned, than in painting lilies white. A full-length portrait of the
+      fair Lady Beatrix, too, must needs show a gay and vivid figure, superbly
+      glittering across the vista of those stately days. Then, should Dab and
+      Tab, the eminent critics, step up and demand that her eyes be a pale blue,
+      and her stomacher higher around the neck? Do Dab and Tab expect to gather
+      pears from peach-trees? Or, because their theory of dendrology convinces
+      them that an ideal fruit-tree would supply any fruit desired upon
+      application, do they denounce the non-pear-bearing peach-tree in the
+      columns of their valuable journal? This is the drift of the fault found
+      with Thackeray. He is not Fénélon, he is not Dickens, he is not Scott; he
+      is not poetical, he is not ideal, he is not humane; he is not Tit, he is
+      not Tat, complain the eminent Dabs and Tabs. Of course he is not, because
+      he is Thackeray&mdash;a man who describes what he sees, motives as well as
+      appearances&mdash;a man who believes that character is better than talent&mdash;that
+      there is a worldly weakness superior to worldly wisdom&mdash;that Dick
+      Steele may haunt the ale-house and be carried home muzzy, and yet be a
+      more commendable character than the reverend Dean of St. Patrick's, who
+      has genius enough to illuminate a century, but not sympathy enough to
+      sweeten a drop of beer. And he represents this in a way that makes us see
+      it as he does, and without exaggeration; for surely nothing could be more
+      simple than his story of the life of "honest Dick Steele". If he allotted
+      to that gentleman a consideration disproportioned to the space he occupies
+      in literary history, it only showed the more strikingly how deeply the
+      writer-lecturer's sympathy was touched by Steele's honest humanity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      An article in our April number complained that the tendency of his view of
+      Anne's times was to a social laxity, which might be very exhilarating but
+      was very dangerous; that the lecturer's warm commendation of fermented
+      drinks, taken at a very early hour of the morning in tavern-rooms and club
+      houses, was as deleterious to the moral health of enthusiastic young
+      readers disposed to the literary life as the beverage itself to their
+      physical health.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But this is not a charge to be brought against Thackeray. It is a quarrel
+      with history and with the nature of literary life. Artists and authors
+      have always been the good fellows of the world. That mental organization
+      which predisposes a man to the pursuit of literature and art is made up of
+      talent combined with ardent social sympathy, geniality, and passion, and
+      leads him to taste every cup and try every experience. There is certainly
+      no essential necessity that this class should be a dissipated and
+      disreputable class, but by their very susceptibility to enjoyment they
+      will always be the pleasure lovers and seekers. And here is the social
+      compensation to the literary man for the surrender of those chances of
+      fortune which men of other pursuits enjoy. If he makes less money, he
+      makes more juice out of what he does make. If he cannot drink Burgundy he
+      can quaff the nut-brown ale; while the most brilliant wit, the most
+      salient fancy, the sweetest sympathy, the most genial culture, shall
+      sparkle at his board more radiantly than a silver service, and give him
+      the spirit of the tropics and the Rhine, whose fruits are on other tables.
+      The golden light that transfigures talent and illuminates the world, and
+      which we call genius, is erratic and erotic; and while in Milton it is
+      austere, and in Wordsworth cool, and in Southey methodical, in Shakespeare
+      it is fervent, with all the results of fervor; in Raphael lovely, with all
+      the excesses of love; in Dante moody, with all the whims of caprice. The
+      old quarrel of Lombard Street with Grub Street is as profound as that of
+      Osiris and Typho&mdash;it is the difference of sympathy. The Marquis of
+      Westminster will take good care that no superfluous shilling escapes.
+      Oliver Goldsmith will still spend his last shilling upon a brave and
+      unnecessary banquet to his friends.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Whether this be a final fact of human organization or not, it is certainly
+      a fact of history. Every man instinctively believes that Shakespeare stole
+      deer, just as he disbelieves that Lord-mayor Whittington ever told a lie;
+      and the secret of that instinct is the consciousness of the difference in
+      organization. "Knave, I have the power to hang ye," says somebody in one
+      of Beaumont and Fletcher's plays. "And I do be hanged and scorn ye," is
+      the airy answer. "I had a pleasant hour the other evening," said a friend
+      to us, "over my cigar and a book." "What book was that?" "A treatise
+      conclusively proving the awful consequences of smoking." De Quincey came
+      up to London and declared war upon opium; but during a little amnesty, in
+      which he lapsed into his old elysium, he wrote his best book depicting its
+      horrors.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Our readers will not imagine that we are advocating the claims of
+      drunkenness nor defending social excess. We are only recognizing a fact
+      and stating an obvious tendency. The most brilliant illustrations of every
+      virtue are to be found in the literary guild, as well as the saddest
+      beacons of warning; yet it will often occur that the last in talent and
+      the first in excess of a picked company will be a man around whom sympathy
+      most kindly lingers. We love Goldsmith more at the head of an ill-advised
+      feast than Johnson and his friends leaving it, thoughtful and generous as
+      their conduct was. The heart despises prudence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the single-hearted regard we know that pity has a larger share. Yet it
+      is not so much that pity is commiseration for misfortune and deficiency,
+      as that which is recognition of a necessary worldly ignorance. The
+      literary class is the most innocent of all. The contempt of practical men
+      for the poets is based upon a consciousness that they are not bad enough
+      for a bad world. To a practical man nothing is so absurd as the lack of
+      worldly shrewdness. The very complaint of the literary life that it does
+      not amass wealth and live in palaces is the scorn of the practical man,
+      for he cannot understand that intellectual opacity which prevents the
+      literary man from seeing the necessity of the different pecuniary
+      condition. It is clear enough to the publisher who lays up fifty thousand
+      a year why the author ends the year in debt. But the author is amazed that
+      he who deals in ideas can only dine upon occasional chops, while the man
+      who merely binds and sells ideas sits down to perpetual sirloin. If they
+      should change places, fortune would change with them. The publisher turned
+      author would still lay up his thousands; the publishing author would still
+      directly lose thousands. It is simply because it is a matter of prudence,
+      economy, and knowledge of the world. Thomas Hood made his ten thousand
+      dollars a year, but if he lived at the rate of fifteen thousand he would
+      hardly die rich. Mr. Jerdan, a gentleman who, in his <i>Autobiography</i>,
+      advises energetic youth to betake themselves to the highway rather than to
+      literature, was, we understand, in the receipt of an easy income, and was
+      a welcome guest in pleasant houses; but living in a careless, shiftless,
+      extravagant way, he was presently poor, and, instead of giving his memoirs
+      the motto, <i>peccavi</i>, and inditing a warning, he dashes off a
+      truculent defiance. Practical publishers and practical men of all sorts
+      invest their earnings in Michigan Central or Cincinnati and Dayton
+      instead, in steady works and devoted days, and reap a pleasant harvest of
+      dividends. Our friends the authors invest in prime Havanas, Rhenish, in
+      oyster suppers, love and leisure, and divide a heavy percentage of
+      headache, dyspepsia, and debt.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This is as true a view, from another point, as the one we have already
+      taken. If the literary life has the pleasures of freedom, it has also its
+      pains. It may be willing to resign the queen's drawing-room, with the
+      illustrious galaxy of stars and garters, for the chamber with a party
+      nobler than the nobility. The author's success is of a wholly different
+      kind from that of the publisher, and he is thoughtless who demands both.
+      Mr. Roe, who sells sugar, naturally complains that Mr. Doe, who sells
+      molasses, makes money more rapidly. But Mr. Tennyson, who writes poems,
+      can hardly make the same complaint of Mr. Moxon, who publishes them, as
+      was very fairly shown in a number of the <i>Westminster Review</i>, when
+      noticing Mr. Jordan's book.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What we have said is strictly related to Mr. Thackeray's lectures, which
+      discuss literature. All the men he commemorated were illustrations and
+      exponents of the career of letters. They all, in various ways, showed the
+      various phenomena of the temperament. And when in treating of them the
+      critic came to Steele, he found one who was one of the most striking
+      illustrations of one of the most universal aspects of literary life&mdash;the
+      simple-hearted, unsuspicious, gay gallant and genial gentleman; ready with
+      his sword or his pen, with a smile or a tear, the fair representative of
+      the social tendency of his life. It seems to us that the Thackeray theory&mdash;the
+      conclusion that he is a man who loves to depict madness, and has no
+      sensibilities to the finer qualities of character&mdash;crumbled quite
+      away before that lecture upon Steele. We know that it was not considered
+      the best; we know that many of the delighted audience were not
+      sufficiently familiar with literary history fully to understand the
+      position of the man in the lecturer's review; but, as a key to Thackeray,
+      it was, perhaps, the most valuable of all. We know in literature of no
+      more gentle treatment; we have not often encountered in men of the most
+      rigorous and acknowledged virtue such humane tenderness; we have not often
+      heard from the most clerical lips words of such genuine Christianity.
+      Steele's was a character which makes weakness amiable: it was a weakness,
+      if you will, but it was certainly amiability, and it was a combination
+      more attractive than many full-panoplied excellences. It was not presented
+      as a model. Captain Steele in the tap-room was not painted as the ideal of
+      virtuous manhood; but it certainly was intimated that many admirable
+      things were consonant with a free use of beer. It was frankly stated that
+      if, in that character, virtue abounded, cakes and ale did much more
+      abound. Captain Richard Steele might have behaved much better than he did,
+      but we should then have never heard of him. A few fine essays do not float
+      a man into immortality, but the generous character, the heart sweet in all
+      excesses and under all chances, is a spectacle too beautiful and too rare
+      to be easily forgotten. A man is better than many books. Even a man who is
+      not immaculate may have more virtuous influence than the discreetest
+      saint. Let us remember how fondly the old painters lingered round the
+      story of Magdalen, and thank Thackeray for his full-length Steele.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We conceive this to be the chief result of Thackeray's visit, that he
+      convinced us of his intellectual integrity; he showed us how impossible it
+      is for him to see the world and describe it other than he does. He does
+      not profess cynicism, nor satirize society with malice; there is no man
+      more humble, none more simple; his interests are human and concrete, not
+      abstract. We have already said that he looks through and through at the
+      fact. It is easy enough, and at some future time it will be done, to
+      deduce the peculiarity of his writings from the character of his mind.
+      There is no man who masks so little as he in assuming the author. His
+      books are his observations reduced to writing. It seems to us as singular
+      to demand that Dante should be like Shakespeare as to quarrel with
+      Thackeray's want of what is called ideal portraiture. Even if you thought,
+      from reading his <i>Vanity Fair</i>, that he had no conception of noble
+      women, certainly after the lecture upon Swift, after all the lectures, in
+      which every allusion to women was so manly and delicate and sympathetic,
+      you thought so no longer. It is clear that his sympathy is attracted to
+      women&mdash;to that which is essentially womanly, feminine. Qualities
+      common to both sexes do not necessarily charm him because he finds them in
+      women. A certain degree of goodness must always be assumed. It is only the
+      rare flowering that inspires special praise. You call Amelia's fondness
+      for George Osborne foolish, fond idolatry. Thackeray smiles, as if all
+      love were not idolatry of the fondest foolishness. What was Hero's&mdash;what
+      was Francesco di Rimini's&mdash;what was Juliet's? They might have been
+      more brilliant women than Amelia, and their idols of a larger mould than
+      George, but the love was the same old foolish, fond idolatry. The passion
+      of love and a profound and sensible knowledge, regard based upon
+      prodigious knowledge of character and appreciation of talent, are
+      different things. What is the historic and poetic splendor of love but the
+      very fact, which constantly appears in Thackeray's stories, namely, that
+      it is a glory which dazzles and blinds. Men rarely love the women they
+      ought to love, according to the ideal standards. It is this that makes the
+      plot and mystery of life. Is it not the perpetual surprise of all Jane's
+      friends that she should love Timothy instead of Thomas? and is not the
+      courtly and accomplished Thomas sure to surrender to some accidental Lucy
+      without position, wealth, style, worth, culture&mdash;without anything but
+      heart? This is the fact, and it reappears in Thackeray, and it gives his
+      books that air of reality which they possess beyond all modern story.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And it is this single perception of the fact which, simple as it is, is
+      the rarest intellectual quality that made his lectures so interesting. The
+      sun rose again upon the vanished century, and lighted those historic
+      streets. The wits of Queen Anne ruled the hour, and we were bidden to
+      their feast. Much reading of history and memoirs had not so sent the blood
+      into those old English cheeks, and so moved those limbs in proper measure,
+      as these swift glances through the eyes of genius. It was because, true to
+      himself, Thackeray gave us his impression of those wits as men rather than
+      authors. For he loves character more than thought. He is a man of the
+      world, and not a scholar. He interprets the author by the man. When you
+      are made intimate with young Swift, Sir William Temple's saturnine
+      secretary, you more intelligently appreciate the Dean of St. Patrick's.
+      When the surplice of Mr. Sterne is raised a little, more is seen than the
+      reverend gentleman intends. Hogarth, the bluff Londoner, necessarily
+      depicts a bluff, coarse, obvious morality. The hearty Fielding, the cool
+      Addison, the genial Goldsmith, these are the figures that remain in
+      memory, and their works are valuable as they indicate the man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Thackeray's success was very great. He did not visit the West, nor
+      Canada. He went home without seeing Niagara Falls. But wherever he did go
+      he found a generous and social welcome, and a respectful and sympathetic
+      hearing. He came to fulfil no mission, but he certainly knit more closely
+      our sympathy with Englishmen. Heralded by various romantic memoirs, he
+      smiled at them, stoutly asserted that he had been always able to command a
+      good dinner, and to pay for it; nor did he seek to disguise that he hoped
+      his American tour would help him to command and pay for more. He promised
+      not to write a book about us, but we hope he will, for we can ill spare
+      the criticism of such an observer. At least, we may be sure that the
+      material gathered here will be worked up in some way. He found that we
+      were not savages nor bores. He found that there were a hundred here for
+      every score in England who knew well and loved the men of whom he spoke.
+      He found that the same red blood colors all the lips that speak the
+      language he so nobly praised. He found friends instead of critics. He
+      found those who, loving the author, loved the man more. He found a quiet
+      welcome from those who are waiting to welcome him again and as sincerely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0006" id="link2H_4_0006"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      SIR PHILIP SIDNEY
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Wearied of the world and saddened by the ruin of his fortunes, the Italian
+      Count Maddalo turned from the street, which rang with tales of disaster
+      and swarmed with melancholy faces, into his palace. Perplexed and anxious,
+      he passed through the stately rooms in which hung the portraits of
+      generations of ancestors. The day was hot; his blood was feverish, but the
+      pictures seemed to him cool and remote in a holy calm. He looked at them
+      earnestly; he remembered the long history of which his fathers were parts,
+      he recalled their valor and their patience, and asked himself whether,
+      after all, their manhood was not their patent of nobility; and stretching
+      out his hands towards them, exclaimed: "Let me feel that I am indeed your
+      son by sharing that manhood which made you noble."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We Americans laugh at ancestors; and if the best of them came back again,
+      we should be as likely to laugh at his wig as listen to his wisdom. And in
+      our evanescent houses and uneasy life we would no more have ancient ranges
+      of family pictures than Arabs in their tents. Yet we are constantly
+      building and visiting the greatest portrait gallery of all in the
+      histories we write and read; and the hour is never lost which we give to
+      it. It may teach a maid humility to know that her mother was fairer. It
+      may make a youth more modest to know that his grandsire was braver. For if
+      the pictures of history show us that deformity is as old as grace, and
+      that virtue was always martyred, they also show that crime, however
+      prosperous for a time, is at last disastrous, and that there can be no
+      permanent peace without justice and freedom.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Those pictures teach us also that character is inherited like name and
+      treasure, and that all of us may have famous or infamous ancestors perhaps
+      without knowing it. The melancholy poet, eating his own heart out in a
+      city garret, is the child of Tasso. Grinding Ralph Nickleby, the usurer,
+      is Shylock's grandson. The unjust judge, who declares that some men have
+      no rights which others are bound to respect, is a later Jeffries on his
+      bloody assizes, or dooming Algernon Sidney to the block once more for
+      loving liberty; while he whose dull heart among the new duties of another
+      time is never quickened with public spirit, and who as a citizen aims only
+      at his own selfish advantage, is a later Benedict Arnold whom every
+      generous heart despises.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From this lineage of character arises this great convenience&mdash;that as
+      it is bad manners to criticise our neighbors by name, we may hit them many
+      a sly rap over the shoulders of their ancestors who wore turbans, or
+      helmets, or bagwigs, and lived long ago in other countries. The Church
+      especially finds great comfort in this resource, and the backs of the
+      whole Hebrew race must be sore with the scorings they get for the sins of
+      Christian congregations. The timid Peter, the foolish Virgins, the wicked
+      Herod, are pilloried every Sunday in the pulpit, to the great satisfaction
+      of the Peters, Virgins, and Herods dozing in the pews. But when some
+      ardent preacher, heading out of his metaphors, and jumping from Judea and
+      the first century into the United States and the nineteenth, disturbs
+      Peter's enjoyment of his ancestor's castigation by saying vehemently to
+      his face with all the lightning of the law in his eye, and its thunders in
+      his voice, "Thou art the man!" Peter recoils with decorous horror, begs
+      his pastor to remember that he and Herod are sheep who were to be led by
+      still waters; warns him not to bring politics into the pulpit, to talk not
+      of living people, but of old pictures. So the poor shepherd is driven back
+      to his pictures, and cudgels Peter once more from behind a metaphor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But the fairest use of these old pictures is to make us feel our common
+      humanity, and to discover that what seems to us a hopelessly romantic
+      ideal of character is a familiar fact of every day. Heroism is always the
+      same, however the fashion of a hero's clothes may alter. Every hero in
+      history is as near to a man as his neighbor, and if we should tell the
+      simple truth of some of our neighbors, it would sound like poetry. Sir
+      Philip Sidney wore doublet and hose, and died in Flanders three hundred
+      years ago. His name is the synonym of manly honor, of generous
+      scholarship, of the finest nobility, of the spiritual light that most
+      irradiates human nature. Look at his portrait closely; it is no stranger
+      that you see; it is no far-off Englishman. It is your friend, your son,
+      your brother, your lover. Whoever knew Wendell Phillips knew Philip
+      Sidney. It is the same spirit in a thousand forms; a perpetual presence, a
+      constant benediction: Look at his portrait and
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+ "The night shall be filled with music,
+    And the cares that infest the day
+  Shall fold their tents like the Arabs,
+    And as silently steal away."
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      The gray walls, the red and peaked roof of the old house of Penshurst,
+      stand in the pleasant English valley of the Medway, in soft and showery
+      Kent. Kent is all garden, and there, in November, 1554, Philip Sidney was
+      born. His father, Sir Henry Sidney, was a wise and honest man. Bred at
+      court, his sturdy honor was never corrupted. King Edward died in his arms,
+      and Queen Mary confirmed all his honors and offices three weeks before the
+      birth of his oldest son, whom, in gratitude, he named Philip, for the
+      queen's new Spanish husband. Philip's mother was Mary Dudley, daughter of
+      the Duke of Northumberland, sister of the famous Earl of Leicester, sister
+      also of Lord Guildford Dudley and sister-in-law of Lady Jane Grey. The
+      little Philip was born into a sad household. Within fifteen months his
+      grandfather and uncle had been beheaded for treason; and his sorrowing
+      mother, a truly noble and tender woman, had been the victim of small-pox,
+      and hid her grieving heart and poor scarred face in the silence and
+      seclusion of Penshurst. On the south side of the house was the old garden
+      or plaisance, sloping down to the Medway, where, in those English summers
+      of three hundred years ago, when the cruel fires of Mary were busily
+      burning at Smithfield, the lovely boy Philip, fair-featured, with a high
+      forehead and ruddy brown hair, almost red&mdash;the same color as that of
+      his nephew Algernon&mdash;walked with his shy mother, picking daisies and
+      chasing butterflies, and calling to her in a soft, musical voice; while
+      within the house the grave father, when he was not away in Wales, of which
+      he was lord-president, mused upon great events that were stirring in
+      Europe&mdash;the abdication of Charles V., the fall of Calais, and the
+      accession of Queen Elizabeth to the throne of England. The lordly
+      banqueting-hall, in which the politics of three centuries ago were
+      discussed at Penshurst, is still standing. You may still sit upon the
+      wooden benches where Burleigh, Spenser, Ben Jonson, James I., and his son
+      Prince Charles have sat, and where, a little later, the victim of Prince
+      Charles's cruel son, Algernon Sidney, dreamed of noble manhood and went
+      forth a noble man; while in those shady avenues of beech and oak outside,
+      smooth Edmund Waller bowed and smirked, and sighed compliments to his
+      Sacharissa, as he called Dorothy Sidney, Algernon's sister.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the age of eleven Master Sidney was put to school at Shrewsbury, on the
+      borders of Wales, of which country his father was lord-president. His fond
+      friend, Fulke Greville, who was here at school with him, and afterwards
+      wrote his life, says that even the masters found something in him to
+      observe and learn. Study probably cost him little effort and few tears. We
+      may be sure he stood at the head of his class, and was a grave, good boy&mdash;not
+      good as calves and blanc-mange are, but like wine and oak saplings. "My
+      little Philip," as his mother tenderly calls him, was no Miss Nancy. When
+      he was older he wrote to his brother Robert, then upon his travels, that
+      "if there were any good wars he should go to them". So, at Shrewsbury he
+      doubtless went to all the good wars among his school-mates, while during
+      the short intervals of peace he mastered his humanities, and at last, when
+      not yet fifteen years old, he was entered at Christ Church, Oxford.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Great good-fortune is the most searching test of character. If a man have
+      fine friends, fine family, fine talents, and fine prospects, they are very
+      likely to be the sirens in whose sweet singing he forgets everything but
+      the pleasure of listening to it. If most of us had come of famous ancestry&mdash;if
+      our father were a vice-regal governor&mdash;if the sovereign's favorite
+      were our uncle, who intended us for his heir&mdash;if a marriage were
+      proposed with the beautiful daughter of the prime-minister, and we were
+      ourselves young, handsome, and accomplished&mdash;and all this were three
+      hundred years ago, before the rights of men and the dignity of labor had
+      been much discussed, we should probably have come up to Oxford, of which
+      our famous uncle was chancellor, in a state of what would be called at
+      Oxford to-day extreme bumptiousness. But Philip Sidney was too true a
+      gentleman not to be a simple-hearted man; and although he was even then
+      one of the most accomplished as well as fortunate youths in England, he
+      writes to Lord Burleigh to confess with "heavy grief" that in scholarship
+      he can neither satisfy Burleigh's expectation nor his own desire.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the month of May, 1572, Philip Sidney left Oxford, and after staying a
+      short time with his parents, following the fashion of young gentlemen of
+      rank, he crossed over into France in the train of the Earl of Lincoln, who
+      was Queen Elizabeth's extraordinary ambassador upon the subject of her
+      marriage with the brother of Charles IX. of France. The young king
+      immediately made Sidney a gentleman of the bedchamber, and Henry of
+      Navarre found him a fit companion for a future king. The Paris that Sidney
+      saw had then twice as many inhabitants as Boston has to-day. Montaigne
+      called it the most beautiful city in the world, and it had a delusive air
+      of peace. But the witch Catherine de' Medici sat in the smooth-tongued
+      court like a spider in its web, spinning and spinning the meshes in which
+      the hope of liberty was to be entangled. The gay city filled and glittered
+      with the wedding guests of Henry and the king's sister Margaret&mdash;among
+      others, the hero of St. Quentin,
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Admiral Coligny. Gayer and gayer grew the city&mdash;smoother and smoother
+      the court&mdash;faster and faster spun the black Italian spider&mdash;until
+      on the 23d of August, the Eve of St. Bartholomew, the bloodiest deed in
+      all the red annals of that metropolis was done, and the young Sidney
+      looked shuddering from Walsingham House upon the streets reeking with the
+      blood of his fellow Huguenots.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That night made Philip Sidney a man. He heard the applause of the Romish
+      party ring through Europe&mdash;he heard the commendation of Philip of
+      Spain&mdash;he knew that the most eloquent orator of the Church, Muretus,
+      had congratulated the pope upon this signal victory of the truth. He knew
+      that medals were stamped in commemoration of the brutal massacre, and he
+      remembered that the same spirit that had struck at the gray head of
+      Coligny had also murdered Egmont and Home in the Netherlands; had calmly
+      gazed in the person of Philip upon De Sezo perishing in the fire, and by
+      the hand of Philip had denounced death against all who wrote, sold, or
+      read Protestant books; and he knew that the same spirit, in the most
+      thriving and intelligent country of Europe, the Netherlands, was blotting
+      out prosperity in blood, and had driven at least a hundred thousand exiles
+      into England.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Pondering these things, Sidney left Paris, and at Frankfort met Hubert
+      Languet. Languet was not only a Protestant, but, at heart, a Republican.
+      He was the friend of Melanethon and of William of Orange, in whose service
+      he died. One of the most accomplished scholars and shrewdest statesmen in
+      Europe, honored and trusted by all the Protestant leaders, this wise man
+      of fifty-four was so enamoured of the English youth of eighteen that they
+      became life-long friends with the ardor of lovers, and Languet left his
+      employment, as Fulke Greville says, "to become a nurse of knowledge to
+      this hopeful young gentleman".
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As they travelled by easy stages across Germany, where the campaign of
+      Protestantism had begun, they knew that the decisive battle was yet to be
+      fought. Europe was silent. The tumult of Charles V.'s reign was over, and
+      that great monarch marched and countermarched no more from the Baltic to
+      the Mediterranean. Charles had been victorious so long as he fought kings
+      with words of steel. But the monk Martin Luther drew the sword of the
+      spirit, and the conqueror quailed. Luther challenged the Church of Rome at
+      its own door. The Vatican rained anathemas. It might as well have tried to
+      blow out the stars; and all the fires of the furious popes who followed
+      Leo were not sharp enough to consume the colossal heresy of free thought.
+      But king and emperor and pope fed the fire. The reign of terror blasted
+      the Netherlands, and when it had succeeded there, when Italy, Austria, and
+      Holland surrounded the states of Germany, Philip knew it would be the
+      smothering coil of the serpent around the cradle of religious liberty. But
+      the young Hercules of free thought throttled the serpent, and leaped forth
+      to win his victorious and immortal race.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We can see it now, but Sidney could not know it. To him the future was as
+      inscrutable as our own to the eyes of thirty years ago. Yet he and Languet
+      must have discussed the time with curious earnestness as they passed
+      through Germany until they reached Vienna. There Sidney devoted himself to
+      knightly games, to tennis, to music, and especially to horsemanship, which
+      he studied with Pagliono, who, in praise of the horse, became such a poet
+      that in the <i>Defence of Poesy</i> Sidney says that if he had not been a
+      piece of a logician before he came to him, Pagliono would have persuaded
+      him to wish himself a horse.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At Vienna Philip parted with Languet, and arrived in Venice in the year
+      1573. The great modern days of Italy were passed. The golden age of the
+      Medici was gone. Lorenzo the Magnificent had died nearly a century before,
+      in the same year that Columbus had discovered America. His son, Pope Leo
+      X., had eaten his last ortolan, had flown his last falcon, had listened to
+      his last comedy, and hummed his last tune, in the frescoed corridors of
+      the Vatican. Upon its shining walls the fatal finger of Martin Luther,
+      stretching out of Germany, had written "Mene, Mene." Beneath the terrible
+      spell the walls were cracking and the earth was shaking, but the splendid
+      pope, in his scarlet cloud of cardinals, saw only the wild beauty of
+      Raphael's Madonnas and the pleasant pages of the recovered literature of
+      pagan Greece. When Sidney stepped for the first time into his gondola at
+      Venice, the famous Italian cathedrals and stately palaces were already
+      built, and the great architects were gone. Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch, who
+      had created Italian literature, lived about as long before Sidney as we
+      live after him. Cimabue and Giotto had begun; Raphael and Michel Angelo
+      had perfected that art in which they have had no rivals&mdash;and they
+      were gone. Andrea Doria steered the galleys of Genoa no more, and since
+      the discovery of the Cape of Good Hope and the West Indies, the spices of
+      the Indian sea were brought by Portuguese ships into the Baltic instead of
+      the Adriatic. The glory of the Lombards, who were the first merchants of
+      Europe, had passed away to the descendants of their old correspondents of
+      Bruges and Ghent, until, with its five hundred ships daily coming and
+      going, and on market days eight and nine hundred; with its two thousand
+      heavy wagons creaking every week through the gates from France and Germany
+      and Lorraine, Antwerp reigned in the place of Venice, and the long
+      twilight that has never been broken was settling upon the Italy that
+      Sidney saw.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But the soft splendor of its decline was worthy its prime. The
+      universities of Bologna and Padua, of Salerno and Pisa, had fallen from
+      the days when at Bologna alone there were twenty thousand students; but
+      they were still thronged with pupils, and taught by renowned professors.
+      When the young Sidney came to Venice, Titian was just tottering into the
+      grave, nearly a hundred years old, but still holding the pencil which
+      Charles V. had picked up and handed to him in his studio. Galileo was a
+      youth of twenty, studying mathematics at Pisa. The melancholy Tasso was
+      completing his <i>Jerusalem Delivered</i> under the cypress trees of the
+      Villa d'Este. Palestrina was composing the masses which reformed church
+      music, and the Christian charity of Charles Borromeo was making him a
+      saint before he was canonized. Clad in the silk and velvet of Genoa, the
+      young Englishman went to study geometry at Padua, where twenty years later
+      Galileo would have been his teacher, and Sidney writes to Languet that he
+      was perplexed whether to sit to Paul Veronese or to Tintoretto for his
+      portrait.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But he had a shrewd eye for the follies of travellers, and speaks of their
+      tendency to come home "full of disguisements not only of apparel but of
+      our countenances, as though the credit of a traveller stood all upon his
+      outside". He then adds a curious prophecy, which Shakespeare made haste to
+      fulfil to the very letter. Sidney says, writing in 1578, "I think, ere it
+      be long, like the mountebanks in Italy, we travellers shall be made sport
+      of in comedies." Twenty years afterwards, Shakespeare makes Rosalind say
+      in "As You Like It", "Farewell, Monsieur Traveller. Look you; lisp, and
+      wear strange suits. Disable all the benefits of your own country. Be out
+      of love with your nativity, and almost chide God for making you that
+      countenance you are, or I will scarce think you have swam in a gondola."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But in all the gayeties and graces of his travel, Philip Sidney was not
+      content to be merely an elegant lounger. He never forgot for a moment that
+      all his gifts and accomplishments were only weapons to be kept burnished
+      for his country's service. He was a boy of twenty, but his boy's warmth
+      was tempered by the man's wisdom. "You are not over cheerful by nature,"
+      Languet writes to him; and when Sidney sat to Paul Veronese, and sent his
+      friend the portrait, Languet replies: "The painter has represented you sad
+      and thoughtful."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had reason to be so. He had seen the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, as
+      many a young Sidney among ourselves saw the horrors of Kansas thirty years
+      ago. He did not believe that a little timely patting on the back was
+      statesmanship. If Spain were crushing the Netherlands, and hung upon the
+      southern horizon of Europe a black and threatening cloud, he did not
+      believe that the danger would be averted by gagging those who said the
+      storm was coming. He did not hold the thermometer responsible for the
+      weather. "I cannot think," he wrote in May, 1574, "there is any man
+      possessed of common understanding who does not see to what these rough
+      storms are driving by which all Christendom has been agitated now these
+      many years." He did not suppose, as so many of us in our ignoble days,
+      that while men were the same, the tragical differences which had been
+      washed out with blood in all other ages could be drowned in milk and water
+      in his own.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In 1575 Sidney returned to England. Every author who writes of this period
+      breaks out into the most glowing praises of him. Indeed, he is the choice
+      darling of English history. The only discordant note in the chorus of
+      praise came long afterwards in the voice of the pedantic dandy Horace
+      Walpole, who called Goldsmith "an inspired idiot". This is not surprising,
+      for the earnestness and heroic simplicity of Sidney were as
+      incomprehensible to the affected trifler of Strawberry Hill as the fresh
+      enthusiasm of his nephew Arthur to Major Pendennis. The Earl of Leicester,
+      who seemed to love his nephew more than anything except his own ambition,
+      presented his brilliant young relative to the queen, who made him her
+      cup-bearer. Sidney was now twenty-one years old&mdash;the finest
+      gentleman, and one of the most accomplished scholars in England. His
+      learning was mainly in the classics and in languages; yet he confesses
+      that he could never learn German, which was then hardly worth learning,
+      and in his correspondence with Languet is very distrustful of the Latin,
+      in which language they wrote. But in urging him to grapple with the
+      German, Languet says to him, and it is a striking proof of the exquisite
+      finish of Sidney's accomplishment, "I have watched you closely when
+      speaking my own language (he was a Burgundian), but I hardly ever detected
+      you pronouncing a single syllable wrongly."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In Sidney's time the classics had few rivals. After reading Dante,
+      Petrarch, Ariosto, Boccaccio, with Sanazzaro's <i>Arcadia</i>, in Italian;
+      Rabelais, Froissart, and Comines, in French; Chaucer, Gower, and the <i>Mirror
+      for Magistrates</i> in English, what remained for an ardent young student
+      to devour? When Sidney came home, Montaigne&mdash;whom he probably saw at
+      the French court&mdash;was just writing his <i>Essays</i> at his chateau
+      in the Gironde. The Portuguese Camoens had only just published his great
+      poem, to which his own country would not listen, and of which no other had
+      heard. The Italian Tasso's <i>Jerusalem</i> was still in manuscript, and
+      the Spanish Ponce de Leon was little known to Europe. All was yet to come.
+      In Spain, Cervantes, Lope de Vega, and Calderon; in France, Corneille and
+      Racine and Moliere, Fenelon and Bossuet, Rousseau and Voltaire; in
+      Germany, everything except the Niebelungen and Hans Sachs's rhymes. When
+      Philip Sidney kissed Elizabeth's hand as her cup-bearer, William
+      Shakespeare, a boy of eleven, was grinding out his trousers on the
+      restless seats of the free grammar-school at Stratford; young Francis
+      Bacon, a youth of sixteen, was studying in France; a poor scholar at
+      Cambridge, Edmund Spenser was just finishing his studies, and the younger
+      brother of an old Devonshire family, Walter Raleigh, had just returned
+      from campaigning in France; indeed, all the literature of modern times was
+      subsequent to Philip Sidney. The young man shone at court, fascinating men
+      and women, courtiers, scholars, and divines; and in a few months was made
+      special ambassador to condole with the Austrian emperor upon the death of
+      his father. Upon this embassy he departed in great state. His mission, was
+      supposed to be purely complimentary; but he was really the beautiful eye
+      with which England and Elizabeth, becoming the head of the Protestant
+      movement, watched the disposition of the Protestant princes. On his way
+      home, Sidney passed into the Low Countries to see William of Orange. He
+      came, resplendent with chivalric magnificence, accompanied by the flower
+      of English nobility, and met the grave William, who had been the richest
+      citizen in the Netherlands, clad in an old serge cloak, and surrounded by
+      plain Dutch burghers. But it was a meeting of men of one mind and heart in
+      the great cause, and neither was disturbed by the tailoring of the other.
+      The interview was the beginning of a faithful friendship, and among all
+      the compliments Sidney received, none is so lofty and touching as that of
+      William, the greatest man in Europe, who called him in their
+      correspondence, "Philip, my master."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In 1577 Sidney was home again. He had a right to expect conspicuous
+      advancement, but he got nothing. This was the more disagreeable, because
+      living at Elizabeth's court was an expensive luxury for a poor gentleman's
+      son who had magnificent tastes. His father, Lord Henry Sidney, was
+      lord-deputy of Ireland, but he was also an honest man, and, like most
+      honest men in high public office, he was not rich. He wrote to Philip,
+      begging him to remember whose son, not whose nephew, he was; for Philip's
+      companions, the golden youth of the court, blazed in silks and velvets and
+      jewels, until the government had to impose laws, as the subjects had
+      brought luxury from Venice, and Elizabeth, who died the happy owner of
+      three thousand dresses, issued a solemn proclamation against extravagance
+      in dress.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At such a time, the brilliant nephew of Uncle Leicester would have been a
+      quickly ruined man if he had not been Philip Sidney. He bowed and flirted
+      at court, but he chafed under inaction. A marriage was planned for him
+      with Penelope Devereux, sister of the famous Earl of Essex, one of the
+      thousand fair and unfortunate women who flit across the page of history
+      leaving only a name, and that written in tears. But Philip's father grew
+      cool in the negotiation, and Philip himself was perfectly passive. Yet
+      when a few years afterwards the lady was married to Lord Rich, who abused
+      her, Sidney loved her, and wrote the sonnets to Stella, which are his best
+      poetry, and which Charles Lamb so affectionately praised.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But while he loitered at court, beating all the courtiers with their own
+      weapons in wit, in riding, in games, at tournament, the tales of American
+      discovery shed a wondrous glamour upon the new continent. Nothing was too
+      beautiful for belief, and the fiery feet of youth burned the English soil
+      with eagerness to tread the unutterable Tropics. Francis Drake sailed from
+      Plymouth to follow Magellan around the world, and he went in a manner
+      consonant with the popular fancy of the countless riches that rewarded
+      such adventures. His cooking-vessels were of silver; his table-plate of
+      exquisite workmanship. The queen knighted him, gave him a sword, and said,
+      "Whoever striketh at you, Drake, striketh at us." A band of musicians
+      accompanied the fleet, and the English sailor went to circumnavigate the
+      globe with the same nonchalant magnificence with which in other days the
+      gorgeous Alcibiades, with flutes and soft recorders blowing under silken
+      sails, came idling home from victory.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Philip Sidney, his heart alive to all romance, and longing to be his
+      companion, saw him sail away. But he turned and saw the black Italian
+      spider, whose sting he had seen on Bartholomew's Eve in Paris, still
+      weaving her stealthy web, and seeking to entangle Elizabeth into a match
+      with the Duke of Anjou. The queen was forty-six, and Mounseer, as the
+      English called him, twenty-three; and while she was coaxing herself to say
+      the most fatal yes that ever woman said&mdash;when Burleigh, Leicester,
+      Walsingham, all the safe, sound, conservative old gentlemen and
+      counsellors were just ceasing to dissuade her&mdash;Philip Sidney, a youth
+      of twenty-five, who knew that he had a country as well as a queen, that
+      the hope of that country lay in the triumph of Protestantism, and that to
+      marry Mounseer was to abandon that hope, and for the time betray mankind&mdash;Philip
+      Sidney, a youth who did not believe that he could write gravely of sober
+      things because he had written gayly of ladies' eyebrows, knowing as the
+      true-hearted gentleman always knows that to-day it may be a man's turn to
+      sit at a desk in an office, or bend over a book in college, or fashion a
+      horseshoe at the forge, or toss flowers to some beauty at her window, and
+      to-morrow to stand firm against a cruel church or a despotic court, a
+      brutal snob or an ignorant public opinion&mdash;this youth, this immortal
+      gentleman, wrote the letter which dissuaded her from the marriage, and
+      which was as noble a triumph for Protestantism and human liberty as the
+      defeat of the Spanish Armada.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I cannot follow this lovely life in detail, nor linger, as I would, upon
+      his literary retirement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The very name of Sidney's <i>Arcadia</i> is aromatic in the imagination,
+      and its traditional place in our literature is unquestioned. In our day it
+      is very little read, nor is it a very interesting story. But under its
+      quaint and courtly conceit its tone is so pure and lofty, its courtesy and
+      appreciation of women so hearty and honorable; it has so fine a moral
+      atmosphere, such noble thoughts, such stately and beautiful descriptions,
+      that to read it is like conversing with a hero. So there is no better
+      reading than the <i>Defence of Poesy</i>, that noble hymn of loyalty to
+      intellectual beauty. Hallam well calls Sidney "the first good prose
+      writer" in our language, and scarcely had he finished in his <i>Defence</i>
+      an exquisite criticism of English poetry to that time than the full choir
+      of Elizabethan poets burst into
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+                 "the songs that fill
+  The spacious times of great Elizabeth
+          With sounds that echo still."
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      In 1582 Philip Sidney married the daughter of Walsingham, but in his
+      retirement, whether steadfastly watching the great struggle upon the
+      Continent or listening to the alluring music of far-off seas, he knew that
+      the choice days of his life were passing, and if a career were not opened
+      for him by the queen, he must make one for himself. William of Orange had
+      been murdered; Elizabeth promptly succeeded him as the active head of the
+      Protestant world; Philip of Spain was the great enemy. Strike him at home,
+      said Sidney; strike him at sea, but strike him everywhere; and he arranged
+      with Drake a descent upon Spanish America. He hurried privately to
+      Plymouth to embark, but at the last moment a peer of the realm arrived
+      from the queen forbidding his departure. The loyal gentleman bowed and
+      obeyed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But two months after his fleet sailed, on the 7th of November, 1585 (about
+      the time that William Shakespeare first came to London), Elizabeth
+      appointed Sidney governor of Flushing, in the Netherlands. He went thither
+      gladly on the 18th, with three thousand men, to strike for the cause in
+      which he believed. He had already told the queen that the spirit of the
+      Netherlands was the spirit of God, and was invincible. His uncle, the Earl
+      of Leicester, followed him as commander-in-chief. The earl was handsome at
+      tournaments, but not fit for battle-fields, and Sidney was annoyed by his
+      uncle's conduct; but he writes to his father-in-law, Walsingham, in a
+      strain full of the music of a noble soul, and fitly precluding his end: "I
+      think a wise and constant man ought never to grieve while he doth play, as
+      a man may say, his own part truly."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For that he was always ready. In the misty dawn of the 22d of September,
+      1586, a force of three thousand Spaniards stole silently along to the
+      relief of Zutphen, on the river Isel. Sidney, at the head of five hundred
+      cavalry, rode forward to meet them. In the obscurity the battle was sharp
+      and confused. Seeing his friend Lord Willoughby in special danger, Sidney
+      spurred to the rescue. His horse was shot under him and fell. Springing
+      upon another, he dashed forward again and succored his friend, but at the
+      instant a shot struck him below the knee, glancing upward. His furious
+      horse became unmanageable, and Sir Philip was obliged to leave the field.
+      But as he passed slowly along to the rear of the soldiers, he felt faint
+      with bleeding, and called for water. A cup was brought to him, but as he
+      was lifting it to his month he saw a dying soldier staring at it with
+      burning eyes. Philip Sidney paused before tasting it, leaned from the
+      saddle, and handed it to the soldier, saying to him in the same soft,
+      musical voice with which the boy called to his mother in the sunny garden
+      at Penshurst, "Friend, thy necessity is yet greater than mine."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was borne on to Araheim, and lived in suffering for twenty-six days. He
+      conversed pleasantly and called for music, and said at last to his
+      brother, whom he had loved as brothers seldom love: "Love my memory;
+      cherish my friends. Their faith to me may assure you they are honest. But,
+      above all, govern your will and affections by the will and word of your
+      Creator, in me beholding the end of this world with all her vanities."
+      "And so," says old Stowe, with fond particularity, "he died, the 17th day
+      of October, between two and three of the clock in the afternoon."
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+ "The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,
+    And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave,
+  Await alike the inevitable hour.
+    The paths of glory lead but to the grave."
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      This is the story of Philip Sidney. A letter, a book, a battle. How little
+      to justify his unique fame! How invisible his performance among the
+      illustrious events of his prodigious age! Yet is not the instinct of the
+      human heart true; and in the stately society of his time, if Bacon were
+      the philosopher, Shakespeare the poet, Burleigh the counsellor, Raleigh
+      the soldier, Drake the sailor, Hooker the theologian, Essex the courtier,
+      and Gresham the merchant, was not Philip Sidney as distinctively the
+      gentleman? Heroes stood beside him in clusters, poets in constellations;
+      all the illustrious men of the age achieved more tangible results than he,
+      yet none of them has carved his name upon history more permanently and
+      with a more diamond point; for he had that happy harmony of mind and
+      temper, of enthusiasm and good sense, of accomplishment and capacity,
+      which is described by that most exquisite and most abused word, gentleman.
+      His guitar hung by a ribbon at his side, but his sword hung upon leather
+      beneath it. His knee bent gallantly to the queen, but it knelt reverently
+      also to his Maker. And it was the crown of the gentleman that he was
+      neither ashamed of the guitar nor of the sword; neither of the loyalty nor
+      the prayer. For a gentleman is not an idler, a trifler, a dandy; he is not
+      a scholar only, a soldier, a mechanic, a merchant; he is the flower of
+      men, in whom the accomplishment of the scholar, the bravery of the
+      soldier, the skill of the mechanic, the sagacity of the merchant, all have
+      their part and appreciation. A sense of duty is his main-spring, and like
+      a watch crusted with precious stones, his function is not to look
+      prettily, but to tell the time of day. Philip Sidney was not a gentleman
+      because his grandfather was the Duke of Northumberland and his father
+      lord-deputy of Ireland, but because he was himself generous, simple,
+      truthful, noble, refined. He was born with a gold spoon in his mouth, but
+      the gold is only the test. In the mouths of the base it becomes brass and
+      iron. George IV., called with bitter irony the first gentleman in Europe,
+      was born with the gold spoon, but his acrid humors turned it to the basest
+      metal, betraying his mean soul. George Stephenson was born with the pewter
+      spoon in his mouth, but the true temper of his soul turned it into pure
+      gold. The test of a gentleman is his use, not his uselessness; whether
+      that use be direct or indirect, whether it be actual service or only
+      inspiring and aiding action. "To what purpose should our thoughts be
+      directed to various kinds of knowledge," wrote Philip Sidney in 1578,
+      "unless room be afforded for putting it into practice so that public
+      advantage may be the result?" And Algernon Sidney said, nearly a century
+      later: "I have ever had it in my mind that when God cast me into such a
+      condition as that I cannot save my life but by doing an indecent thing, he
+      shows me the time has come wherein I should resign it." And when that time
+      came he did resign it; for every gentleman instinctively serves justice
+      and liberty. He feels himself personally disgraced by an insult to
+      humanity, for he, too, is only a man; and however stately his house may be
+      and murmurous with music, however glowing with pictures and graceful with
+      statues and reverend with books&mdash;however his horses may out-trot
+      other horses, and his yachts outsail all yachts&mdash;the gentleman is
+      king and master of these and not their servant; he wears them for
+      ornament, like the ring upon his finger or the flower in his button-hole,
+      and if they go the gentleman remains. He knows that all their worth came
+      from human genius and human training; and loving man more than the works
+      of man, he instinctively shuns whatever in the shape of man is degraded,
+      outraged, and forsaken. He does not make the poverty of others the reason
+      for robbing them; he does not make the oppression of others the reason for
+      oppressing them, for his gentility is his religion; and therefore with
+      simple truth and tender audacity the old English dramatist Dekkar calls
+      Him who gave the name to our religion, and who destroyed the plea that
+      might makes right, "the first true gentleman, that ever breathed".
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But not only is Philip Sidney's story the poem of a gentleman, it is that
+      of a young man. It was the age of young men. No man was thought flippant,
+      whatever his years, who could say a good thing well, or do a brave thing
+      successfully, or give the right advice at the right moment. The great men
+      of the day were all young. At sixteen Bacon had already sketched his <i>Philosophy</i>.
+      At seventeen Walter Raleigh had gone to find some good wars. At seventeen
+      Edmund Spenser had first published. Before he was twenty, Alexander
+      Farnese, Prince of Parma, and the greatest general of Sidney's time, had
+      revealed his masterly genius. At twenty-one Don John of Austria had been
+      commander-in-chief against the Moors. The Prince of Condé and Henry of
+      Navarre were leaders while they were yet boys. At twenty Francis Drake
+      sailed, a captain, with John Hawkins; and at twenty-one the Washington of
+      European history, to whom an American has for the first time paid just
+      homage with an enthusiasm and eloquence of Sidney describing his friend&mdash;at
+      twenty-one William of Orange commanded an army of Charles V.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When England wanted leaders in those tremendous days that shaped her
+      destiny, it did just what America did in those recent perilous hours that
+      determined hers&mdash;she sent young men with faith in their hearts and
+      fire in their veins&mdash;not old men with feathers in their hats; and
+      everywhere it is the young men who have made history. At thirty-two
+      Alexander wept for another world to conquer. On his thirty-seventh
+      birthday Raphael lay dead beneath his last picture. At thirty-six Mozart
+      had sung his swan-song. At twenty-five Hannibal was commander-in-chief of
+      the Carthaginian armies. At thirty-three Turenne was marshal of France. At
+      twenty-seven Bonaparte was triumphant in Italy. At forty-five Wellington
+      had conquered Bonaparte, and at forty-eight retired from active military
+      service. At forty-three Washington was chief of the Continental army. On
+      his forty-fifth birthday Sherman was piercing the heart of the American
+      Rebellion; and before he was forty-three Grant had "fought it out on this
+      line" to perfect victory. Young men! Of course they were young men. Youth
+      is the main-spring of the world. The experience of age is wise in action
+      only when it is electrified by the enthusiasm of youth. Show me a land in
+      which the young men are cold and sceptical and prematurely wise; which in
+      polite indifference is called political wisdom, contempt for ideas
+      common-sense, and honesty in politics Sunday-school statesmanship&mdash;show
+      me a land in which the young men are more anxious about doing well than
+      about doing right&mdash;and I will show you a country in which public
+      corruption and ruin overtakes private infidelity and cowardice, and in
+      which, if there were originally a hope for mankind, a faith in principle,
+      and a conquering enthusiasm, that faith, hope, and enthusiasm are expiring
+      like the deserted camp-fires of a retiring army. "Woe to a man when his
+      heart grows old! Woe to a nation when its young men shuffle in the gouty
+      shoes and limp on the untimely crutches of age, instead of leaping along
+      the course of life with the jubilant spring of their years and the sturdy
+      play of their own muscles!" Sir Philip Sidney's was the age of young men:
+      and wherever there are self-reliance, universal human sympathy, and
+      confidence in God, there is the age of youth and national triumph; just as
+      whenever Joan of Arc leads the army, or Molly Stark dares to be a widow,
+      or Rosa Bonheur paints, or Hattie Hosmer carves, or Jenny Lind sings, or
+      Mrs. Patten steers the wrecked ship to port, or Florence Nightingale walks
+      the midnight hospital&mdash;these are the age and the sphere of woman.
+      Queen Elizabeth's was the age of young men; but so it is always when there
+      are young men who can make an age.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And ours is such an age. We live in a country which has been saved by its
+      young men. Before us opens a future which is to be secured by the young
+      men. I have not held up Sir Philip Sidney as a reproach, but only for his
+      brothers to admire&mdash;only that we may scatter the glamour of the past
+      and of history, and understand that we do not live in the lees of time and
+      the world's decrepitude. There is no country so fair that ours is not
+      fairer; there is no age so heroic that ours is not as noble; there is no
+      youth in history so romantic and beloved that in a thousand American homes
+      you may not find his peer to-day. It is the Sidneys we have known who
+      interpret this Philip of three hundred years ago. Dear, noble gentleman!
+      he does not move alone in our imaginations, for our own memories supply
+      his splendid society. We too have seen, how often and how often, the
+      bitter fight of the misty morning on the Isel&mdash;the ringing charge,
+      the fatal fall. A thousand times we saw the same true Sidney heart that,
+      dying, gave the cup of cold water to a fellow-soldier. And we, for whom
+      the Sidneys died, let us thank God for showing us in our own experience,
+      as in history, that the noblest traits of human character are still
+      spanned by the rainbow of perfect beauty; and that human love and faith
+      and fidelity, like day and night, like seed-time and harvest, shall never,
+      never fail.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0007" id="link2H_4_0007"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      LONGFELLOW
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      In the school readers of half a century ago there were two poems which
+      every boy and girl read and declaimed and remembered. How much of that old
+      literature has disappeared! How much that stirred the hearts and touched
+      the fancies of those boys and girls, their children have never heard of!
+      Willis's "Saturday Afternoon" and "Burial of Arnold" have floated away,
+      almost out of sight, with Pierpont's "Bunker Hill" and Sprague's
+      Fourth-of-July oration. The relentless winds of oblivion incessantly blow.
+      Scraps of verse and rhetoric once so familiar are caught up, wafted
+      noiselessly away, and lodged in neglected books and in the dark corners of
+      fading memories, gradually vanish from familiar knowledge. But the two
+      little poems of which we speak have survived. One of them was Bryant's
+      "March", and the other was Longfellow's "April", and the names of the two
+      poets singing of spring were thus associated in the spring-time of our
+      poetry, as the fathers of which they will be always honored.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Both poems originally appeared in the <i>United States Literary Gazette</i>,
+      and were included in the modest volume of selections from that journal
+      which was published in Boston in 1826. The chief names in this little book
+      are those of Bryant, Longfellow, Percival, Mellen, Dawes, and Jones.
+      Percival has already become a name only; Dawes, and Greenville Mellen,
+      who, like Longfellow, was a son of Maine, are hardly known to this
+      generation, and Jones does not even appear in Duyckinck's Cyclopaedia. But
+      in turning over the pages it is evident that Time has dealt justly with
+      the youthful bards, and that the laurel rests upon the heads of the
+      singers whose earliest strains fitly preluded the music of their prime.
+      Longfellow was nineteen years old when the book was published. He had
+      graduated at Bowdoin College the year before, and the verses had been
+      written and printed in the <i>Gazette</i> while he was still a student.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The glimpses of the boy that we catch through the recollections of his old
+      professor, Packard, and of his college mates, are of the same character as
+      at every period of his life. They reveal a modest, refined, manly youth,
+      devoted to study, of great personal charm and gentle manners. It is the
+      boy that the older man suggested. To look back upon him is to trace the
+      broad and clear and beautiful river far up the green meadows to the limpid
+      rill.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His poetic taste and faculty were already apparent, and it is related that
+      a version of an ode of Horace which he wrote in his Sophomore year so
+      impressed one of the members of the examining board that when afterwards a
+      chair of modern languages was established in the college, he proposed as
+      its incumbent the young Sophomore whose fluent verse he remembered. The
+      impression made by the young Longfellow is doubtlessly accurately
+      described by one of his famous classmates, Hawthorne, for the class of '25
+      is a proud tradition of Bowdoin. In "P.'s Correspondence", one of the <i>Mosses
+      from an Old Manse</i>, a quaint fancy of a letter from "my unfortunate
+      friend P.", whose wits were a little disordered, there are grotesque hints
+      of the fate of famous persons. P. talks with Burns at eighty-seven; Byron,
+      grown old and fat, wears a wig and spectacles; Shelley is reconciled to
+      the Church of England; Coleridge finishes "Christabel"; Keats writes a
+      religious epic on the millennium; and George Canning is a peer. On our
+      side of the sea, Dr. Channing had just published a volume of verses;
+      Whittier had been lynched ten years before in South Carolina; and,
+      continues P., "I remember, too, a lad just from college, Longfellow by
+      name, who scattered some delicate verses to the winds, and went to
+      Germany, and perished, I think, of intense application, at the University
+      of Göttingen." Longfellow, in turn, recalled his classmate Hawthorne&mdash;a
+      shy, dark-haired youth flitting across the college grounds in a coat with
+      bright buttons.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Among these delicate verses was the poem to "An April Day". As the work of
+      a very young man it is singularly restrained and finished. It has the
+      characteristic elegance and flowing melody of his later verse, and its
+      half-pensive tone is not excessive nor immature. It is not, however, for
+      this that it is most interesting, but because, with Bryant's "March", it
+      is the fresh and simple note of a truly American strain. Perhaps the
+      curious reader, enlightened by the observation of subsequent years, may
+      find in the "March" a more vigorous love of nature, and in the "April" a
+      tenderer tone of tranquil sentiment. But neither of the poems is the echo
+      of a foreign music, nor an exercise of remembered reading. They both deal
+      with the sights and sounds and suggestions of the American, landscape in
+      the early spring. In Longfellow's "April" there are none of the bishops'
+      caps and foreign ornament of illustration to which Margaret Fuller
+      afterwards objected in his verse. But these early associated poems, both
+      of the younger and of the older singer, show an original movement of
+      American literary genius, and, like the months which they celebrate, they
+      foretold a summer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That summer bad been long awaited. In 1809, Buckminster said in his Phi
+      Beta Kappa oration at Harvard College: "Oar poets and historians, our
+      critics and orators, the men of whom posterity are to stand in awe, and by
+      whom they are to be instructed, are yet to appear among us." Happily,
+      however, the orator thought that he beheld the promise of their coming,
+      although he does not say where. But even as he spoke they were at hand.
+      Irving's <i>Knickerbocker</i> was published in 1809, and Bryant's
+      "Thanatopsis" was written in 1812. The <i>North American Review</i>, an
+      enterprise of literary men in Boston and Cambridge, was begun in 1815, and
+      Bryant and Longfellow were both contributors. But it was in the year 1821,
+      the year in which Longfellow entered college, that the beginning of a
+      distinctive American literature became most evident. There were signs of
+      an independent intellectual movement both in the choice of subjects and in
+      the character of treatment. This was the year of the publication of
+      Bryant's first slim volume, and of Cooper's <i>Spy</i>, and of Dana's <i>Idle
+      Man</i>. Irving's <i>Sketch Book</i> was already finished, Miss Sedgwick's
+      <i>Hope Leslie</i> and Percival's first volume had been issued, and
+      Halleck's and Drake's "Croakers" were already popular. In these works, as
+      in all others of that time, there was indeed no evidence of great creative
+      genius.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The poet and historian whom Buckminster foresaw, and who were to strike
+      posterity with awe, had not yet appeared, but in the same year the voice
+      of the orator whom he anticipated was heard upon Plymouth Rock in cadences
+      massive and sonorous as the voice of the sea. In the year 1821 there was
+      the plain evidence of an awakening original literary activity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Longfellow was the youngest of the group in which he first appeared. His
+      work was graceful, tender, pensive, gentle, melodious, the strain of a
+      troubadour. When he went to Europe in 1826 to fit himself more fully for
+      his professorship, he had but "scattered some delicate verses to the
+      winds". When he returned, and published in 1833 his translations of
+      "Coplas de Manrique" and other Spanish poems, he had apparently done no
+      more. There was plainly shown an exquisite literary artist, a very
+      Benvenuto of grace and skill. But he would hardly have been selected as
+      the poet who was to take the strongest hold of the hearts of his
+      countrymen, the singer whose sweet and hallowing spell was to be so deep
+      and universal that at last it would be said in another country that to it
+      also his death was a national loss.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The qualities of these early verses, however, were never lost. The genius
+      of the poet steadily and beautifully developed, flowering according to its
+      nature. The most urbane and sympathetic of men, never aggressive, nor
+      vehement, nor self-asserting, he was yet thoroughly independent, and the
+      individuality of his genius held its tranquil way as surely as the river
+      Charles, whose placid beauty he so often sang, wound through the meadows
+      calm and free. When Longfellow came to Cambridge, the impulse of
+      Transcendentalism in New England was deeply affecting scholarship and
+      literature. It was represented by the most original of American thinkers
+      and the typical American scholar, Emerson, and its elevating, purifying,
+      and emancipating influences are memorable in our moral and intellectual
+      history. Longfellow lived in the very heart of the movement. Its leaders
+      were his cherished friends. He too was a scholar and a devoted student of
+      German literature, who had drunk deeply also of the romance of German
+      life. Indeed, his first important works stimulated the taste for German
+      studies and the enjoyment of its literature more than any other impulse in
+      this country. But he remained without the charmed Transcendental circle,
+      serene and friendly and attentive. There are those whose career was wholly
+      moulded by the intellectual revival of that time. But Longfellow was
+      untouched by it, except as his sympathies were attracted by the vigor and
+      purity of its influence. His tastes, his interests, his activities, his
+      career, would have been the same had that great light never shone. If he
+      had been the ductile, echoing, imitative nature that the more ardent
+      disciples of the faith supposed him to be, he would have been absorbed and
+      swept away by the flood. But he was as untouched by it as Charles Lamb by
+      the wars of Napoleon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was in the first flush of the Transcendental epoch that Longfellow's
+      first important works appeared. In 1839, his prose-romance of <i>Hyperion</i>
+      was published, following the sketches of travel, called <i>Outre-Mer</i>.
+      He was living in Cambridge, in the famous house in which he died, and in
+      which <i>Hyperion</i> and all of his familiar books were written. Under
+      the form of a slight love tale, <i>Hyperion</i> is the diary of a poet's
+      wandering in a storied and picturesque land, the hearty, home-like genius
+      of whose life and literature is peculiarly akin to his own. The book
+      bubbles and sings with snatches of the songs of the country; it reproduces
+      the tone and feeling of the landscape, the grandeur of Switzerland, the
+      rich romance of the Rhine; it decorates itself with a quaint scholarship,
+      and is so steeped in the spirit of the country, so glowing with the
+      palpitating tenderness of passion, that it is still eagerly bought at the
+      chief points which it commemorates, and is cherished by young hearts as no
+      prose romance was ever cherished before.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Hyperion</i>, indeed, is a poet's and lover's romance. It is full of
+      deep feeling, of that intense and delighted appreciation of nature in her
+      grander forms, and of scenes consecrated by poetic tradition, which
+      belongs to a singularly fine, sensitive, and receptive nature, when
+      exalted by pure and lofty affection; and it has the fulness and swing of
+      youth, saddened by experience indeed, yet rising with renewed hope, like a
+      field of springing grain in May bowed by the west wind, and touched with
+      the shadow of a cloud, but presently lifting itself again to heaven. A
+      clear sweet humor and blitheness of heart blend in this romance. What is
+      called its artificial tone is not insincerity; it is the play of an artist
+      conscious of his skill and revelling in it, even while his hand and his
+      heart are deeply in earnest. <i>Werther</i> is a romance, Disraeli's <i>Wondrous
+      Tale of Alroy</i> is a romance, but they belong to the realm of Beverley
+      and Julia in Sheridan's <i>Rivals</i>. In <i>Hyperion</i>, with all its
+      elaborate picturesqueness, its spicy literary atmosphere, and imaginative
+      outline, there is a breezy freshness and simplicity and healthiness of
+      feeling which leaves it still unique.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the same year with <i>Hyperion</i> came the <i>Voices of the Night</i>,
+      a volume of poems which contained the "Coplas de Manrique" and the
+      translations, with a selection from the verses of the <i>Literary Gazette</i>,
+      which the author playfully reclaims in a note from their vagabond and
+      precarious existence in the corners of newspapers&mdash;gathering his
+      children from wanderings in lanes and alleys, and introducing them
+      decorously to the world. A few later poems were added, and these, with the
+      <i>Hyperion</i>, showed a new and distinctive literary talent. In both of
+      these volumes there is the purity of spirit, the elegance of form, the
+      romantic tone, the airy grace, which were already associated with
+      Longfellow's name. But there are other qualities. The boy of nineteen, the
+      poet of Bowdoin, has become a scholar and a traveller. The teeming hours,
+      the ample opportunities of youth, have not been neglected or squandered,
+      but, like a golden-banded bee, humming as he sails, the young poet has
+      drained all the flowers of literature of their nectar, and has built for
+      himself a hive of sweetness. More than this, he had proved in his own
+      experience the truth of Irving's tender remark, that an early sorrow is
+      often the truest benediction for the poet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Through all the romantic grace and elegance of the <i>Voices of the Night</i>
+      and <i>Hyperion</i>, however, there is a moral earnestness which is even
+      more remarkable in the poems than in the romance. No volume of poems ever
+      published in the country was so popular. Severe critics indeed, while
+      acknowledging its melody and charm, thought it too morally didactic, the
+      work of a student too fondly enamoured of foreign literatures. But while
+      they conceded taste and facility, two of the poems at least&mdash;the
+      "Psalm of Life" and the "Footsteps of Angels"&mdash;penetrated the common
+      heart at once, and have held it ever since. A young Scotchman saw them
+      reprinted in some paper or magazine, and, meeting a literary lady in
+      London, repeated them to her, and then to a literary assembly at her
+      house; and the presence of a new poet was at once acknowledged. If the
+      "Midnight Mass for the Dying Year" in its form and phrase and conception
+      recalled a land of cathedrals and a historic religious ritual, and had but
+      a vague and remote charm for the woodman in the pine forests of Maine and
+      the farmer on the Illinois prairie, yet the "Psalm of Life" was the very
+      heart-beat of the American conscience, and the "Footsteps of Angels" was a
+      hymn of the fond yearning of every loving heart.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      During the period of more than forty years from the publication of the <i>Voices
+      of the Night</i> to his death, the fame of Longfellow constantly
+      increased. It was not because his genius, like that of another scholarly
+      poet, Gray, seldom blossomed in song, so that his renown rested upon a few
+      gem-like verses. He was not intimidated by his own fame. During those
+      forty years he wrote and published constantly. Other great fames arose
+      around him. New poets began to sing. Popular historians took their places.
+      But still with Bryant the name of Longfellow was always associated at the
+      head of American singers, and far beyond that of any other American author
+      was his name known through all the reading world. The volume of <i>Voices
+      of the Night</i> was followed by similar collections, then by <i>The
+      Spanish Student</i>, <i>Evangeline</i>, <i>The Golden Legend</i>, <i>Hiawatha</i>,
+      <i>The Courtship of Miles Standish</i>, <i>The Tales of a Wayside Inn</i>,
+      <i>The New England Tragedies</i>, <i>The Masque of Pandora</i>, <i>The
+      Hanging of the Crane</i>, the <i>Morituri Salutarnus</i>, the <i>Kéramos</i>.
+      But all of these, like stately birds
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+ "Sailing with supreme dominion
+  Through the upper realms of air,"
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      were attended by shorter poems, sonnets, "birds of passage", as the poet
+      called his swallow flights of song. In all these larger poems, while the
+      characteristics of the earlier volumes were more amply developed and
+      illustrated, and the subtle beauty of the skill became even more
+      exquisite, the essential qualities of the work remain unchanged, and the
+      charm of a poet and his significance in the literature and development of
+      his country were never more readily defined.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Child of New England, and trained by her best influences; of a temperament
+      singularly sweet and serene, and with the sturdy rectitude of his race;
+      refined and softened by wide contact with other lands and many men; born
+      in prosperity, accomplished in all literatures, and himself a literary
+      artist of consummate elegance, he was the fine flower of the Puritan stock
+      under its changed modern conditions. Out of strength had come forth
+      sweetness. The grim iconoclast, "humming a surly hymn", had issued in the
+      Christian gentleman. Captain Miles Standish had risen into Sir Philip
+      Sidney. The austere morality that relentlessly ruled the elder New England
+      reappeared in the genius of this singer in the most gracious and
+      captivating form. The grave nature of Bryant in his early secluded life
+      among the solitary hills of Western Massachusetts had been tinged by them
+      with their own sobriety. There was something of the sombre forest, of the
+      gray rocky face of stern New England in his granitic verse. But what
+      delicate wild-flowers nodded in the clefts! What scent of the pine-tree,
+      what music of gurgling water, filled the cool air! What bird high poised
+      upon its solitary way through heaven-taught faith to him who pursued his
+      way alone!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But while the same moral tone in the poetry both of Bryant and of
+      Longfellow shows them to be children of the same soil and tradition, and
+      shows also that they saw plainly, what poets of the greatest genius have
+      often not seen at all, that in the morality of human life lies its true
+      beauty, the different aspect of Puritan development which they displayed
+      was due to difference of temperament and circumstance. The foundations of
+      our distinctive literature were largely laid in New England, and they rest
+      upon morality. Literary New England had never a trace of literary Bohemia.
+      The most illustrious group, and the earliest, of American authors and
+      scholars and literary men, the Boston and Cambridge group of the last
+      generation&mdash;Channing, the two Danas, Sparks, Everett, Bancroft,
+      Ticknor, Prescott, Norton, Ripley, Palfrey, Emerson, Parker, Hawthorne,
+      Longfellow, Holmes, Whittier, Agassiz, Lowell, Motley&mdash;have been all
+      sober and industrious citizens of whom Judge Sewall would have approved.
+      Their lives as well as their works have ennobled literature. They have
+      illustrated the moral sanity of genius.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Longfellow shares this trait with them all. It is the moral purity of his
+      verse which at once charms the heart, and in his first most famous poem,
+      the "Psalm of Life", it is the direct inculcation of a moral purpose.
+      Those who insist that literary art, like all other art, should not concern
+      itself positively with morality, must reflect that the heart of this age
+      has been touched as truly by Longfellow, however differently, as that of
+      any time by its master-poet. This, indeed, is his peculiar distinction.
+      Among the great poetic names of the century in English literature, Burns,
+      in a general way, is the poet of love; Wordsworth, of lofty contemplation
+      of nature; Byron, of passion; Shelley, of aspiration; Keats, of romance;
+      Scott, of heroic legend; and not less, and quite as distinctively,
+      Longfellow, of the domestic affections. He is the poet of the household,
+      of the fireside, of the universal home feeling. The infinite tenderness
+      and patience, the pathos, and the beauty of daily life, of familiar
+      emotion, and the common scene, these are the significance of that verse
+      whose beautiful and simple melody, softly murmuring for more than forty
+      years, made the singer the most widely beloved of living men.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Longfellow's genius was not a great creative force. It burst into no
+      tempests of mighty passion. It did not wrestle with the haughtily veiled
+      problems of fate and free-will absolute. It had no dramatic movement and
+      variety, no eccentricity and grotesqueness and unexpectedness. It was not
+      Lear, nor Faust, nor Manfred, nor Romeo. A carnation is not a
+      passion-flower. Indeed, no poet of so universal and sincere a popularity
+      ever sang so little of love as a passion. None of his smaller poems are
+      love poems; and <i>Evangeline</i> is a tale, not of fiery romance, but of
+      affection "that hopes and endures and is patient", of the unwasting
+      "beauty and strength of woman's devotion", of the constantly tried and
+      tested virtue that makes up the happiness of daily life. No one has
+      described so well as Longfellow himself the character and influence of his
+      own poetry:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+ "Come read to me some poem,
+  Some simple and heart-felt lay,
+  That shall soothe this restless feeling,
+  And banish the thoughts of day.
+
+ "Hot from the grand old masters,
+  Not from the bards sublime,
+  Whose distant footsteps echo
+  Through the corridors of Time.
+
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+ "Such songs have power to quiet
+  The restless pulse of care,
+  And come like the benediction
+  That follows after prayer."
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      This was the office of Longfellow in literature, and how perfectly it was
+      fulfilled! It was not a wilful purpose, but he carefully guarded the
+      fountain of his song from contamination or diversion, and this was its
+      natural overflow. During the long period of his literary activity there
+      were many "schools" and styles and fashions of poetry. The influence first
+      of Byron, then of Keats, is manifest in the poetry of the last generation,
+      and in later days a voluptuous vagueness and barbaric splendor, as of the
+      lower empire in literature, have corroded the vigor of much modern verse.
+      But no perfumed blandishment of doubtful goddesses won Longfellow from his
+      sweet and domestic Muse. The clear thought, the true feeling, the pure
+      aspiration, is expressed with limpid simplicity:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  "Strong without rage; without o'erflowing, full."
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      The most delightful picture in Goldsmith's life is that of the youth
+      wandering through rural Europe, stopping at the little villages in the
+      peaceful summer sunset, and sweetly playing melodies upon his flute for
+      the lads and lasses to dance upon the green. Who that reads "The
+      Traveller" and "The Deserted Village" does not hear in their pensive music
+      the far-away fluting of that kind-hearted wanderer, and see the lovely
+      idyl of that simple life? So sings this poet to the young men and maidens
+      in the soft summer air. They follow his measures with fascinated hearts,
+      for they hear in them their own hearts singing; they catch the music of
+      their dearest hope, of their best endeavor; they hear the voices of the
+      peaceful joy that hallows faithful affection, of the benediction that
+      belongs to self-sacrifice and devotion. And now that the singer is gone,
+      and his voice is silent, those hushed hearts recall the words of Father
+      Felicien, Evangeline's pastor:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  "Forty years of my life have I labored among you, and
+  taught you
+  Not in word alone, but in deed, to love one another."
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      It is this fidelity of his genius to itself, the universal feeling to
+      which he gives expression, and the perfection of his literary workmanship,
+      which is sure to give Longfellow a permanent place in literature. His
+      poems are apples of gold in pictures of silver. There is nothing in them
+      excessive, nothing overwrought, nothing strained into turgidity,
+      obscurity, and nonsense. There is sometimes, indeed, a fine stateliness,
+      as in the "Arsenal at Springfield", and even a resounding splendor of
+      diction, as in "Sandalphon". But when the melody is most delicate it is
+      simple. The poet throws nothing into the mist to make it large. How purely
+      melodious his verse can be without losing the thought or its most
+      transparent expression is seen in "The Evening Star" and "Snow-Flakes".
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The literary decoration of his style, the aroma and color and richness, so
+      to speak, which it derives from his ample accomplishment in literature,
+      are incomparable. His verse is embroidered with allusions and names and
+      illustrations wrought with a taste so true and a skill so rare that the
+      robe, though it be cloth of gold, is as finely flexible as linen, and
+      still beautifully reveals, not conceals, the living form.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This scholarly allusion and literary tone were at one time criticised as
+      showing that Longfellow's genius was really an exotic grown under glass,
+      or a smooth-throated mocking-bird warbling a foreign melody. A recent
+      admirable paper in the <i>Evening Post</i> intimates that the kindly poet
+      took the suggestion in good part, and modified his strain. But there was
+      never any interruption or change in the continuity of his work. <i>Evangeline</i>
+      and <i>Hiawatha</i> and <i>The Courtship of Miles Standish</i> blossom as
+      naturally out of his evident and characteristic taste and tendency as <i>The
+      Golden Legend</i> or the <i>Masque of Pandora</i>. In the <i>Tales of a
+      Wayside Inn</i> the "Ride of Paul Revere" is as natural a play of his
+      power as "King Robert of Sicily". The various aspect and character of
+      nature upon the American continent is nowhere so fully, beautifully, and
+      accurately portrayed as in <i>Evangeline</i>. The scenery of the poem is
+      the vast American landscape, boundless prairie and wooded hill, brimming
+      river and green valley, sparkling savanna and broad bayou, city and
+      village, camp and wigwam, peopled with the children of many races, and all
+      the blended panorama seen in the magic light of imagination. So, too, the
+      poetic character of the Indian legend is preserved with conscientious care
+      and fit monotony of rippling music in <i>Hiawatha</i>. But this is an
+      accident and an incident. It is not the theme which determines the poet.
+      All Scotland, indeed, sings and glows in the verse of Burns, but very
+      little of England is seen or heard in that of Byron.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In no other conspicuous figure in literary history are the man and the
+      poet more indissolubly blended than in Longfellow. The poet was the man,
+      and the man the poet. What he was to the stranger reading in distant
+      lands, by
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    "The long wash of Australasian seas,"
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      that he was to the most intimate of his friends. His life and character
+      were perfectly reflected in his books. There is no purity or grace or
+      feeling or spotless charm in his verse which did not belong to the man.
+      There was never an explanation to be offered for him; no allowance was
+      necessary for the eccentricity or grotesqueness or wilfulness or humor of
+      genius. Simple, modest, frank, manly, he was the good citizen, the
+      self-respecting gentleman, the symmetrical man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He lived in an interesting historic house in a venerable university town,
+      itself the suburb of a great city; the highway running by his gate and
+      dividing the smooth grass and modest green terraces about the house from
+      the fields and meadows that sloped gently to the placid Charles, and the
+      low range of distant hills that made the horizon. Through the little gate
+      passed an endless procession of pilgrims of every degree and from every
+      country to pay homage to their American friend. Every morning came the
+      letters of those who could not come in person, and with infinite urbanity
+      and sympathy and patience the master of the house received them all, and
+      his gracious hospitality but deepened the admiration and affection of the
+      guests. His nearer friends sometimes remonstrated at his sweet courtesy to
+      such annoying "devastators of the day". But to an urgent complaint of his
+      endless favor to a flagrant offender, Longfellow only answered,
+      good-humoredly, "If I did not speak kindly to him, there is not a man in
+      the world who would." On the day that he was taken ill, six days only
+      before his death, three schoolboys came out from Boston on their Saturday
+      holiday to ask his autograph. The benign lover of children welcomed them
+      heartily, showed them a hundred interesting objects in his house, then
+      wrote his name for them, and for the last time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Few men had known deeper sorrow. But no man ever mounted upon his sorrow
+      more surely to higher things. Blessed and beloved, the singer is gone, but
+      his song remains, and its pure and imperishable melody is the song of the
+      lark in the morning of our literature:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  "Type of the wise who soar but never roam,
+   True to the kindred points of heaven and home."
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0008" id="link2H_4_0008"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      In 1817 Bryant's "Thanatopsis" was published in the <i>North American
+      Review</i>. Richard Henry Dana, the elder, who was then one of the
+      editors, said that it could not be an American poem, for there was no
+      American who could have written it. But it does not seem to have produced
+      a remarkable impression upon the public mind. The planet rose silently and
+      unobserved. Ten years afterwards, in 1827, Dana's own "Buccaneer" was
+      published, and Christopher North, in <i>Blackwood</i>, saluted it as "by
+      far the most original and powerful of American poetical compositions". But
+      it produced in this country no general effect which is remembered. Nine
+      years later, in 1836, Holmes's "Metrical Essay" was delivered before the
+      Phi Beta Kappa Society at Harvard College, and was as distinct an event in
+      literary circles as Edward Everett's oration before the same society in
+      1824, or Ralph Waldo Emerson's in 1837, or Horace Bushnell's in 1848, or
+      Wendell Phillips's in 1881. Holmes was then twenty-seven years old, and
+      had just returned from his professional studies in Europe, where, as in
+      his college days at Cambridge, where he was born, he had toyed with many
+      Muses, yet still, with native Yankee prudence, held fast the hand of
+      Aesculapius. His poem, like the address of Emerson in the next year,
+      showed how completely the modern spirit of refined and exquisite literary
+      cultivation and of free and undaunted thought had superseded the uncouth
+      literary form and stern and rigid Calvinism of the Mathers and early
+      Boston.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The melody and grace of Goldsmith's line, but with a fresh local spirit,
+      have not been more perfectly reproduced, nor with a more distinct
+      revelation of a new spirit, than in this poem. It is retrospective and
+      contemplative, but it is also full of the buoyancy of youth, of the
+      consciousness of poetic skill, and of blithe anticipation. Its tender
+      reminiscence and occasional fond elegiac strain are but clouds of the
+      morning. Its literary form is exquisite, and its general impression is
+      that of bright, elastic, confident power. It was by no means, however, a
+      first work, nor was the poet unknown in his own home. But the "Metrical
+      Essay" introduced him to a larger public, while the fugitive pieces
+      already known were the assurance that the more important poem was not a
+      happy chance, but the development of a quality already proved. Seven years
+      before, in 1829, the year he graduated at Harvard, Holmes began to
+      contribute to <i>The Collegian</i>, a college magazine. Two years later,
+      in 1831, appeared the <i>New England Magazine</i>, in which the young
+      writer, as he might himself say, took the road with his double team of
+      verse and prose, holding the ribbons with unsurpassed lightness and grace
+      and skill, now for two generations guiding those fleet and well-groomed
+      coursers, which still show their heels to panting rivals, the prancing
+      team behind which we have all driven and are still driving with constant
+      and undiminished delight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. F. B. Sanborn, whose tribute to Holmes on his eightieth birthday shows
+      how thorough was his research for that labor of love, tells us that his
+      first contribution to the <i>New England Magazine</i> was published in the
+      third or September number of the first year, 1831. It was a copy of verses
+      of an unpromising title&mdash;"To an Insect". But that particular insect,
+      seemingly the creature of a day, proved to be immortal, for it was the
+      katydid, whose voice is perennial:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  "Thou sayest an undisputed thing
+   In such a solemn way."
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      In the contributions of the young graduate the high spirits of a
+      frolicsome fancy effervesce and sparkle. But their quality of a new
+      literary tone and spirit is very evident. The ease and fun of these bright
+      prolusions, without impudence or coarseness, the poetic touch and
+      refinement, were as unmistakable as the brisk pungency of the gibe. The
+      stately and scholarly Boston of Channing, Dana, Everett, and Ticknor might
+      indeed have looked askance at the literary claims of such lines as these
+      "Thoughts in Dejection" of a poet wondering if the path to Parnassus lay
+      over Charlestown or Chelsea bridge:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+ "What is a poet's fame?
+    Sad hints about his reason,
+  And sadder praise from gazetteers,
+    To be returned in season.
+
+ "For him the future holds
+    No civic wreath above him;
+  Nor slated roof nor varnished chair,
+    Nor wife nor child to love him.
+
+ "Maid of the village inn,
+    Who workest woe on satin,
+  The grass in black, the graves in green,
+    The epitaph in Latin,
+
+ "Trust not to them who say
+    In stanzas they adore thee;
+  Oh, rather sleep in church-yard clay,
+    With maudlin cherubs o'er thee!"
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      The lines to the katydid, with "L'Inconnue"&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+ "Is thy name Mary, maiden fair?"&mdash;
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      published in the magazine at about the same time, disclose Holmes's
+      natural melody and his fine instinct for literary form. But his lyrical
+      fervor finds its most jubilant expression at this time in "Old Ironsides",
+      written at the turning-point in the poet's life, when he had renounced the
+      study of the law, and was deciding upon medicine as his profession. The
+      proposal to destroy the frigate Constitution, fondly and familiarly known
+      as "Old Ironsides", kindled a patriotic frenzy in the sensitive Boston
+      boy, which burst forth into the noble lyric,
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  "Ay, tear her tattered ensign down!"
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      There had been no American poetry with a truer lilt of song than these
+      early verses, and there has been none since. Two years later, in 1833,
+      Holmes went to complete his medical studies in Paris, and the lines to a
+      grisette&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  "Ah, Clemence, when I saw thee last
+   Trip down the Rue de Seine!"&mdash;
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      published upon his return in his first volume of verse, are a charming
+      illustration of his lyrical genius. His limpid line never flowed more
+      clearly than in this poem. It has the pensive tone of all his best poems
+      of the kind, but it is the half-happy sadness of youth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All these early verses have an assured literary form. The scope and strain
+      were new, but their most significant quality was not melody nor pensive
+      grace, but humor. This was ingrained and genuine. Sometimes it was
+      rollicking, as in "The Height of the Ridiculous" and "The September Gale".
+      Sometimes it was drolly meditative, as in "Evening, by a Tailor".
+      Sometimes it was a tearful smile of the deepest feeling, as in the most
+      charming and perfect of these poems, "The Last Leaf", in which delicate
+      and searching pathos is exquisitely fused with tender gayety. The haunting
+      music and meaning of the lines,
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  "The mossy marbles rest
+   On the lips that he has pressed
+     In their bloom,
+   And the names he loved to hear
+   Have been carved for many a year
+     On the tomb",
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      lingered always in the memory of Lincoln, whose simple sincerity and
+      native melancholy would instinctively have rejected any false note. It is
+      in such melody as that of the "Last Leaf" that we feel how truly the grim
+      old Puritan strength has become sweetness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To this poetic grace and humor and music, which at that time were
+      unrivalled, although the early notes of a tuneful choir of awakening
+      songsters were already heard, the young Holmes added the brisk and crisp
+      and sparkling charm of his prose. From the beginning his coursers were
+      paired, and with equal pace they have constantly held the road. In the <i>New
+      England Magazine</i> for November in the same year, 1831, a short paper
+      was published called the "Autocrat of the Breakfast Table". The tone of
+      placid dogmatism and infallible finality with which the bulls of the
+      domestic pope are delivered is delightfully familiar. This earliest one
+      has perhaps more of the cardinal's preliminary scarlet than of the mature
+      papal white, but in its first note the voice of the Autocrat is
+      unmistakable:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+   "Somebody was rigmarolling the other day about the artificial
+    distinctions of society.
+   'Madam,' said I, 'society is the same in all large places. I divide
+    it thus:
+    1. People of cultivation who live in large houses.
+    2. People of cultivation who live in small houses.
+    3. People without cultivation who live in large houses.
+    4. People without cultivation who live in small houses.
+    5. Scrubs.'
+    An individual at the upper end of the table turned pale and left the
+    room as I finished with the monosyllable."
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      "'Tis sixty years since", but that drop is of the same characteristic
+      transparency and sparkle as in the latest Tea-Cup.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The time in which the <i>New England Magazine</i> was published, and these
+      firstlings of Holmes's muse appeared, was one of prophetic literary stir
+      in New England. There were other signs than those in letters of the
+      breaking-up of the long Puritan winter. A more striking and extreme
+      reaction from the New England tradition could not well be imagined than
+      that which was offered by Nathaniel Parker Willis, of whom Holmes himself
+      says "that he was at the time something between a remembrance of Count
+      D'Orsay and an anticipation of Oscar Wilde". Willis was a kindly
+      saunterer, the first Boston dandy, who began his literary career with
+      grotesque propriety as a sentimentalizer of Bible stories, a performance
+      which Lowell gayly called inspiration and water. In what now seems a
+      languid, Byronic way, he figured as a Yankee Pelham or Vivian Grey. Yet in
+      his prose and verse there was a tacit protest against the old order, and
+      that it was felt is shown by the bitterness of ridicule and taunt and
+      insult with which, both publicly and privately, this most amiable youth
+      was attacked, who, at that time, had never said an ill-natured word of
+      anybody, and who was always most generous in his treatment of his fellow
+      authors.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The epoch of Willis and the <i>New England Magazine</i> is very notable in
+      the history of American literature. The traditions of that literature were
+      grave and even sombre. Irving, indeed, in his Knickerbocker and Rip Van
+      Winkle and Ichabod Crane, and in the general gayety of his literary touch,
+      had emancipated it from strict allegiance to the solemnity of its
+      precedents, and had lighted it with a smile. He supplied a quality of
+      grace and cheerfulness which it had lacked, and without unduly magnifying
+      his charming genius, it had a natural, fresh, and smiling spirit, which,
+      amid the funereal, theologic gloom, suggests the sweetness and brightness
+      of morning. In its effect it is a breath of Chaucer. When Knickerbocker
+      was published, Joel Barlow's "Hasty-Pudding" was the chief achievement of
+      American literary humor. Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner were not yet
+      "the wits of Hartford". Those who bore that name held it by brevet.
+      Indeed, the humor of our early literature is pathetic. In no State was the
+      ecclesiastical dominance more absolute than in Connecticut, and nothing
+      shows more truly how absolute and grim it was than the fact that the
+      performances of the "wits" in that State were regarded&mdash;gravely, it
+      must have been&mdash;as humor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For a long time there was no vital response in New England to the chord
+      touched by Irving. Yet Boston was then unquestionably the chief seat of
+      American letters. Dennie had established his <i>Portfolio</i> in
+      Philadelphia in 1801, but in 1805 the <i>Monthly Anthology</i>, which was
+      subsequently reproduced in the <i>North American Review</i>, appeared in
+      Boston, and was the organ or illustration of the most important literary
+      and intellectual life of the country at that time. The opening of the
+      century saw the revolt against the supremacy of the old Puritan Church of
+      New England&mdash;a revolt within its own pale. This clerical protest
+      against the austere dogmas of Calvinism in its ancient seat was coincident
+      with the overthrow in the national government of Federalism and the
+      political triumph of Jefferson and his party. Simultaneously also with the
+      religious and political disturbance was felt the new intellectual and
+      literary impulse of which the <i>Anthology</i> was the organ. But the
+      religious and literary movements were not in sympathy with the political
+      revolution, although they were all indications of emancipation from the
+      dominance of old traditions, the mental restlessness of a people coming
+      gradually to national consciousness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Henry Adams, in remarking upon this situation in his history of
+      Madison's administration, points out that leaders of the religious protest
+      which is known as the Unitarian Secession in New England were also leaders
+      in the intellectual and literary awakening of the time, but had no
+      sympathy with Jefferson or admiration of France. Bryant's father was a
+      Federalist; the club that conducted the <i>Anthology</i> and the <i>North
+      American Review</i> was composed of Federalists; and the youth whose
+      "Thanatopsis" is the chief distinction of the beginning of that <i>Review</i>,
+      and the morning star of American poetry, was, as a boy of thirteen, the
+      author of the "Embargo", a performance in which the valiant Jack gave the
+      giant Jefferson no quarter. The religious secession took its definite form
+      in Dr. Channing's sermon at the ordination of Jared Sparks in Baltimore in
+      1819, which powerfully arraigned the dominant theology of the time. This
+      was the year in which Irving's <i>Sketch Book</i> was published. Bryant's
+      first volume followed a year or two later, and our distinctive literary
+      epoch opened.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ten years afterwards, when Bryant had left New England, Dr. Channing was
+      its most dignified and characteristic name in literature. But he was
+      distinctively a preacher, and his serene and sweet genius never unbent
+      into a frolicsome mood. As early as 1820 a volume of Robert Burns's poems
+      fell into Whittier's hands like a spark into tinder, and the flame that
+      has so long illuminated and cheered began to blaze. It was, however, a
+      softened ray, not yet the tongue of lyric fire which it afterwards became.
+      But none of the poets smiled as they sang. The Muse of New England was
+      staid and stately&mdash;or was she, after all, not a true daughter of
+      Jove, but a tenth Muse, an Anne Bradstreet? The rollicking laugh of
+      Knickerbocker was a solitary sound in the American air until the blithe
+      carol of Holmes returned a kindred echo.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Willis was the sign of the breaking spell. But his light touch could not
+      avail. The Puritan spell could be broken only by Puritan force, and it is
+      the lineal descendants of Puritanism, often the sons of clergymen&mdash;Emerson
+      and Holmes and Longfellow and Hawthorne and Whittier&mdash;who emancipated
+      our literature from its Puritan subjection. In 1829 Willis, as editor of
+      <i>Peter Parley's Token</i> and the <i>American Monthly Magazine</i>, was
+      aided by Longfellow and Hawthorne and Motley and Hildreth and Mrs. Child
+      and Mrs. Sigourney, and the elder Bishop Doane, Park Benjamin and George
+      B. Cheever, Albert Pike and Rufus Dawes, as contributors. Willis himself
+      was a copious writer, and in the <i>American Monthly</i> first appeared
+      the titles of "Inkling of Adventure" and "Pencillings by the Way", which
+      he afterwards reproduced for some of his best literary work. The <i>Monthly</i>
+      failed, and in 1831, the year that the <i>New England Magazine</i> began,
+      it was merged in the New York <i>Mirror</i>, of which Willis became
+      associate editor, leaving his native city forever, and never forgiving its
+      injustice towards him. In the heyday of his happy social career in England
+      he wrote to his mother, "The mines of Golconda would not tempt me to
+      return and live in Boston."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This was the literary situation when Holmes was preluding in the magazine.
+      The acknowledged poets in Boston were Dana, Sprague, and Pierpont. Are
+      these names familiar to the readers of this essay? How much of their
+      poetry can those readers repeat? No one knows more surely than he who
+      writes of a living author how hard it is to forecast fame, and how
+      dangerous is prophecy. When Edward Everett saluted Percival's early volume
+      as the harbinger of literary triumphs, and Emerson greeted Walt Whitman at
+      "the opening of a great career", they generalized a strong personal
+      impression. They identified their own preference with the public taste. On
+      the other hand, Hawthorne says truly of himself that he was long the most
+      obscure man of letters in America. Yet he had already published the <i>Twice-told
+      Tales</i> and the <i>Mosses from an Old Manse</i>, the two series of
+      stories in which the character and quality of his genius are fully
+      disclosed. But although Longfellow hailed the publication of the first
+      collection as the rising of a new star, the tone of his comment is not
+      that of the discoverer of a planet shining for all, but of an individual
+      poetic pleasure. The prescience of fame is very infrequent. The village
+      gazes in wonder at the return of the famous man who was born on the farm
+      under the hill, and whose latent greatness nobody suspected; while the
+      youth who printed verses in the corner of the county paper, and drew the
+      fascinated glances of palpitating maidens in the meetinghouse, and seemed
+      to the farmers to have associated himself at once with Shakespeare and
+      Tupper and the great literary or "littery folks", never emerges from the
+      poet's department in the paper in which unconsciously and forever he has
+      been cornered. It would be a grim Puritan jest if that department had been
+      named from the corner of the famous dead in Westminster Abbey.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If the Boston of sixty years ago had ventured to prophesy for itself
+      literary renown, it is easy to see upon what reputations of the time it
+      would have rested its claims. But if the most familiar names of that time
+      are familiar no longer, if Kettell and poems from the <i>United States
+      Gazette</i> seem to be cemeteries of departed reputations, the fate of the
+      singers need not be deplored as if Fame had forgotten them. Fame never
+      knew them. Fame does not retain the name of every minstrel who passes
+      singing. But to say that Fame does not know them is not dispraise. They
+      sang for the hearers of their day, as the players played. Is it nothing to
+      please those who listen, because those who are out of hearing do not stop
+      and applaud? If we recall the names most eminent in our literature,
+      whether they were destined for a longer or shorter date, we shall see that
+      they are undeniably illustrations of the survival of the fittest. Turning
+      over the noble volumes of Stedman and Miss Hutchinson, in which, as on a
+      vast plain, the whole line of American literature is drawn up for
+      inspection and review, and marches past like the ghostly midnight columns
+      of Napoleon's grand army, we cannot quarrel with the verdict of time, nor
+      feel that injustice has been done to Thamis or to Cawdor. There are
+      singers of a day, but not less singers because they are of a day. The
+      insect that flashes in the sunbeam does not survive like the elephant. The
+      splendor of the most gorgeous butterfly does not endure with the faint hue
+      of the hills that gives Athens its Pindaric name. And there are singers
+      who do not sing. What says Holmes, with eager sympathy and pity, in one of
+      his most familiar and most beautiful lyrics?&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+ "We count the broken lyres that rest
+    Where the sweet waiting singers slumber,
+  But o'er their silent sister's breast
+    The wild flowers who will stoop to number?
+  A few can touch the magic string,
+    And noisy fame is proud to win them;
+  Alas, for those that never sing,
+    And die with all their music in them!"
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      But as he says also that the capacities of listeners at lectures differ
+      widely, some holding a gallon, others a quart, and others only a pint or a
+      gill, so of the singers who are not voiceless, their voices differ in
+      volume. Some are organs that fill the air with glorious and continuous
+      music; some are trumpets blowing a ringing peal, then sinking into
+      silence; some are harps of melancholy but faint vibration; still others
+      are flutes and pipes, whose sweet or shrill note has a dying fall. Some
+      are heard as the wind or sea is heard; some like the rustle of leaves;
+      some like the chirp of birds. Some are heard long and far away; others
+      across the field; others hardly across the street. Fame is perhaps but the
+      term of a longer or shorter fight with oblivion; but it is the warrior who
+      "drinks delight of battle with his peers", and holds his own in the fray,
+      who finally commands the eye and the heart. There were poets pleasantly
+      singing to our grandfathers whose songs we do not hear, but the unheeded
+      voice of the youngest songster of that time is a voice we heed to-day.
+      Holmes wrote but two "Autocrat" papers in the <i>New England Magazine</i>&mdash;one
+      in November, 1831, and the other in February, 1832. The year after the
+      publication of the second paper he went to Paris, where for three years he
+      studied medicine, not as a poet, but as a physician, and he returned in
+      1836 an admirably trained and highly accomplished professional man. But
+      the Phi Beta Kappa poem of that year, like the tender lyric to Clemence
+      upon leaving Paris, shows not only that the poet was not dead, but that he
+      did not even sleep. The "Metrical Essay" was the serious announcement that
+      the poet was not lost in the man of science, an announcement which was
+      followed by the publication in the same year (1836) of his first volume of
+      poems. This was three years before the publication of Longfellow's first
+      volume of verses, <i>The Voices of the Night</i>.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Holmes's devotion to the two Muses of science and letters was uniform and
+      untiring, as it was also to the two literary forms of verse and prose. But
+      although a man of letters, like the other eminent men of letters in New
+      England, he had no trace of the Bohemian. Willis was the only noted
+      literary figure that ever mistook Boston for a seaport in Bohemia, and he
+      early discovered his error. The fraternity which has given to Boston its
+      literary primacy has been always distinguished not only for propriety of
+      life and respectability in its true sense of worthiness and respect, but
+      for the possession of the virtues of fidelity, industry, and good sense,
+      which have carried so far both the influence and the renown of New
+      England. Nowhere has the Bohemian tradition been more happily and
+      completely shattered than in the circle to which Holmes returned from his
+      European studies to take his place. American citizenship in its most
+      attractive aspect has been signally illustrated in that circle, and it is
+      not without reason that the government has so often selected from it our
+      chief American representatives in other countries.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Dr. Holmes, as he was now called, and has continued to be called,
+      practised his profession in Boston; but whether because of some lurking
+      popular doubt of a poet's probable skill as a physician, or from some lack
+      of taste on his part for the details of professional practice, like his
+      kinsman, Wendell Phillips, and innumerable other young beginners, he
+      sometimes awaited a professional call longer than was agreeable. But he
+      wrote medical papers, and was summoned to lecture to the medical school at
+      Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, and later at Pittsfield in
+      Massachusetts, while his unfailing charm as an occasional poet gave him a
+      distinctive name. Holmes's felicity in occasional poems is extraordinary.
+      The "Metrical Essay" was the first and chief of the long series of such
+      verses, among which the songs of '29, the poems addressed year after year
+      to his college classmates of that year, have a delightful and endless
+      grace, tenderness, wit, and point. Pegasus draws well in harness the
+      triumphant chariot of '29, in which the lucky classmates of the poet move
+      to a unique and happy renown.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As a reader, Holmes was the permanent challenge of Mrs. Browning's sighing
+      regret that poets never read their own verses to their worth. Park
+      Benjamin, who heard the Phi Beta Kappa poem, said of its delivery: "A
+      brilliant, airy, and <i>spirituelle</i> manner varied with striking
+      flexibility to the changing sentiment of the poem, now deeply impassioned,
+      now gayly joyous and nonchalant, and anon springing up into almost an
+      actual flight of rhapsody, rendered the delivery of this poem a rich,
+      nearly a dramatic entertainment." This was no less true in later years
+      when he read some of his poems in New York at Bishop Potter's, then rector
+      of Grace Church, or of the reading of the poem at the doctors' dinner
+      given to him by the physicians of New York a little later.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Holmes's readings were like improvisations. The poems were expressed and
+      interpreted by the whole personality of the poet. The most subtle touch of
+      thought, the melody of fond regret, the brilliant passage of description,
+      the culmination of latent fun exploding in a keen and resistless jest, all
+      these were vivified in the sensitive play of manner and modulation of tone
+      of the reader, so that a poem by Holmes at the Harvard Commencement dinner
+      was one of the anticipated delights which never failed. This temperament
+      implied an oratorical power which naturally drew the poet into the lecture
+      lyceum when it was in its prime, in the decade between 1850 and 1860.
+      During that time the popular lecture was a distinct and effective public
+      force, and not the least of its services was its part in instructing and
+      training the public conscience for the great contest of the Civil War.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The year 1831, in which Holmes's literary activity began, was also the
+      year on whose first day the first number of Garrison's <i>Liberator</i>
+      appeared, and the final period of the slavery controversy opened. But
+      neither this storm of agitation nor the transcendental mist that a few
+      years later overhung intellectual New England greatly affected the poet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the first number of the "Autocrat" there is a passage upon puns, which,
+      crackling with fun, shows his sensitive scepticism. The "Autocrat" says:
+      "In a case lately decided before Miller, J., Doe presented Roe a
+      subscription paper, and urged the claims of suffering humanity. Roe
+      replied by asking when charity was like a top. It was in evidence that Doe
+      preserved a dignified silence. Roe then said, 'When it begins to hum.'
+      There are temperaments of a refined suspiciousness to which, when the plea
+      of reform is urged, the claims of suffering humanity at once begin to hum.
+      The very word reform irritates a peculiar kind of sensibility, as a red
+      flag stirs the fury of a bull. A noted party leader said, with
+      inexpressible scorn, 'When Dr. Johnson defined the word patriotism as the
+      last refuge of a scoundrel, he had not learned the infinite possibilities
+      of the word refa-a-r-m.'"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The acridity of this jest is wholly unknown to the "Autocrat", who has
+      moved always with reform, if not always with reformers, and whose protest
+      against bigotry is as searching as it is sparkling. Not only has his ear
+      been quick to detect the hum of Mr. Honeythunder's loud appeal, but his
+      eye to catch the often ludicrous aspect of honest whimsey. During all the
+      early years of his literary career he flew his flashing darts at all the
+      "isms", and he fell under the doubt and censure of those earnest children
+      of the time whom the gay and clever sceptics derided as apostles of the
+      newness. When Holmes appeared upon the lecture platform it was to
+      discourse of literature or science, or to treat some text of social
+      manners or morals with a crisp Poor Richard sense and mother wit, and a
+      brilliancy of illustration, epigram, and humor that fascinated the most
+      obdurate "come-outer". Holmes's lectures on the English poets at the
+      Lowell Institute were among the most noted of that distinguished platform,
+      and everywhere the poet was one of the most popular of "attractions".
+      There were not wanting those who maintained that his use of the platform
+      was the correct one, and that the orators who, often by happy but incisive
+      indirection, fought the good fight of the hour abused their opportunity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was while Holmes was still a professor, but still also touching the
+      lyre and writing scientific essays and charming the great audiences of the
+      lecture lyceum, that in the first number of the <i>Atlantic Monthly</i>,
+      in November, 1857, the "Autocrat of the Breakfast Table" remarked, "I was
+      just going to say, when I was interrupted," and resumed the colloquies of
+      the <i>New England Magazine</i>. He had been interrupted twenty-two years
+      before. But as he began again it was plain that it was the same voice, yet
+      fuller, stronger, richer, and that we were listening to one of the wisest
+      of wits and sharpest of observers. Emerson warns us that superlatives are
+      to be avoided. But it will not be denied that the "Autocrat" belongs in
+      the highest rank of modern magazine or periodical literature, of which the
+      essays of "Elia" are the type. The form of the "Autocrat"&mdash;a
+      semi-dramatic, conversational, descriptive monologue&mdash;is not peculiar
+      to Holmes's work, but the treatment of it is absolutely original. The
+      manner is as individual and unmistakable as that of Elia himself. It would
+      be everywhere recognized as the Autocrat's. During the intermission of the
+      papers the more noted Macaulay flowers of literature, as the Autocrat
+      calls them, had bloomed; Carlyle's <i>Sartor Resartus</i> and reviews,
+      Christopher North's <i>Noctes</i> (now fallen into ancient night),
+      Thackeray's <i>Roundabout Papers</i>, Lowell's <i>Hosea Biglow</i>&mdash;a
+      whole library of magazine and periodical literature of the first
+      importance had appeared. But the Autocrat began again, after a quarter of
+      a century, musical with so rich a chorus, and his voice was clear,
+      penetrating, masterful, and distinctively his own.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The cadet branch of English literature&mdash;the familiar colloquial
+      periodical essay, a comment upon men and manners and life&mdash;is a
+      delightful branch of the family, and traces itself back to Dick Steele and
+      Addison. Hazlitt, who belonged to it, said that he preferred the <i>Tatler</i>
+      to the <i>Spectator</i>; and Thackeray, who consorted with it proudly,
+      although he was of the elder branch, restored Sir Richard, whose habits
+      had cost him a great deal of his reputation, to general favor. The
+      familiar essay is susceptible, as the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
+      show, of great variety and charm of treatment. What would the Christian
+      Hero, writing to his Prue that he would be with her in a pint of wine's
+      time, have said to "Blakesmoor" and "Oxford in the Vacation"? Yet Lamb and
+      Steele are both consummate masters of the essay, and Holmes, in the
+      "Autocrat", has given it a new charm. The little realm of the Autocrat,
+      his lieges of the table, the persons of the drama, are at once as
+      definitely outlined as Sir Roger's club. Unconsciously and resistlessly we
+      are drawn within the circle; we are admitted <i>ad eundem</i>, and become
+      the targets of the wit, the irony, the shrewd and sharp epigram, the airy
+      whim, the sparkling fancy, the curious and recondite thought, the happy
+      allusion, the felicitous analogy, of the sovereign master of the feast.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The index of the <i>Autocrat</i> is in itself a unique work. It reveals
+      the whimsical discursiveness of the book; the restless hovering of that
+      brilliant talk over every topic, fancy, feeling, fact; a humming-bird
+      sipping the one honeyed drop from every flower; or a huma, to use its own
+      droll and capital symbol of the lyceum lecturer, the bird that never
+      lights. There are few books that leave more distinctly the impression of a
+      mind teeming with riches of many kinds. It is, in the Yankee phrase,
+      thoroughly wideawake. There is no languor, and it permits none in the
+      reader, who must move along the page warily, lest in the gay profusion of
+      the grove, unwittingly defrauding himself of delight, he miss some flower
+      half hidden, some gem chance-dropped, some darting bird. Howells's <i>Letters</i>
+      was called a chamber-window book, a book supplying in solitude the charm
+      of the best society. We could all name a few such in our own literature.
+      Would any of them, or many, take precedence of the <i>Autocrat of the
+      Breakfast Table?</i>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is in this book that the value of the scientific training to the man of
+      letters is illustrated, not only in furnishing noble and strong analogies,
+      but in precision of observation and accuracy of statement. In Holmes's
+      style, the definiteness of form and the clearness of expression are graces
+      and virtues which are due to his exact scientific study, as well as to the
+      daylight quality of his mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The delicate apprehension of the finer and tenderer feelings which is
+      disclosed in the little passages of narrative in the record of the
+      Autocrat and of his legitimate brothers, the Professor and the Poet, at
+      the Breakfast Table, gives a grace and a sweetness to the work which
+      naturally flow into the music of the poems with which the diary of a
+      conversation often ends. These traits in the Autocrat suggested that he
+      would yet tell a distinct story, which indeed came while the trilogy of
+      the Breakfast Table was yet proceeding. <i>Elsie</i> <i>Venner</i> and the
+      <i>Guardian Angel</i>, the two novels of Holmes's, are full of the same
+      briskness and acuteness of observation, the same effusiveness of humor and
+      characteristic Americanism, as the <i>Autocrat</i>. Certain aspects of New
+      England life and character are treated in these stories with incomparable
+      vivacity and insight. Holmes's picture is of a later New England than
+      Hawthorne's, but it is its lineal descendant. It is another facet of the
+      Puritan diamond which flashes with different light in the genius of
+      Hawthorne, Emerson, Lowell, Whittier, Longfellow, Holmes, and Judd in <i>Margaret</i>.
+      For, with all his lyrical instinct and rollicking humor, Holmes is
+      essentially a New-Englander, and one of the most faithful and shrewd
+      interpreters of New England.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The colloquial habit of the Autocrat is not lost in the stories, and it is
+      so marked generally in Holmes's writings as to be called distinctive. It
+      is a fascinating gift, when it is so restrained by taste and instinctive
+      refinement as not to become what is known as bumptiousness. Thackeray,
+      even in his novels, is apt to drop into this vein, to talk about the
+      persons of his drama with his reader, instead of leaving them to play out
+      their part alone. This trait offends some of Thackeray's audience, to whom
+      it seems like the manager's hand thrust into the box to help out the play
+      of the puppets. They resent not "the damnable faces" of the actors, but
+      the damnable sermonizing of the author, and exhort him to permit the play
+      to begin. Thackeray frankly acknowledged his tendency to preach, as he
+      called it. But it was part of the man. Without the private personal touch
+      of the essayist in his stories they would not be his. This colloquial
+      habit is very winning when governed by a natural delicacy and an exquisite
+      literary instinct. It is the quality of all the authors who are distinctly
+      beloved as persons by their readers, and it is to this class that Holmes
+      especially belongs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is not a quality which is easily analyzed, but it blends a power of
+      sympathetic observation and appreciation both of the thing observed and
+      the reader to whom the observation is addressed. The Autocrat, as he
+      converses, brightens with his own clear thought, with the happy quip, the
+      airy fancy. He is sure of your delight, not only in the thought, but in
+      its deft expression. He in turn is delighted with your delight. He warms
+      to the responsive mind and heart, and feels the mutual joy. The personal
+      relation is established, and the Autocrat's audience become his friends,
+      to whom he describes with infinite glee the effect of his remarks upon his
+      lieges at table. No other author takes the reader into his personal
+      confidence more closely than Holmes, and none reveals his personal
+      temperament more clearly. This confidential relation becomes even more
+      simple and intimate as time chastens the eagerness of youth and matures
+      the keen brilliancy of the blossom into the softer bloom of the fruit. The
+      colloquies of the Autocrat under the characteristic title of "Over the
+      Tea-Cups" are full of the same shrewd sense and wise comment and tender
+      thought. The kindly mentor takes the reader by the button or lays his hand
+      upon his shoulder, not with the rude familiarity of the bully or the boor,
+      but with the courtesy of Montaigne, the friendliness of John Aubrey, or
+      the wise cheer of Selden. The reader glows with the pleasure of an
+      individual greeting, and a wide diocese of those whom the Autocrat never
+      saw plume themselves proudly upon his personal acquaintance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In this discursive talk about one of the American authors who have
+      vindicated the position of American letters in the literature of the
+      language we have not mentioned all his works. It is the quality rather
+      than the quantity with which we are concerned, the upright, honorable,
+      pure quality of the poet, the wit, the scholar, for whom the most devoted
+      reader is called to make no plea, no apology. The versatility of his power
+      is obvious, but scarcely less so the uniformity of his work.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is a power which was early mature. For many a year he has dwelt upon a
+      high table-land where the air is equable and inspiring, yet, as we have
+      hinted, ever softer and sweeter. The lyric of today glows with the same
+      ardor as the fervent apostrophe to "Old Ironsides" or the tripping
+      salutation to the remembered and regretted Clemence; it is only less
+      eager. The young Autocrat who remarked that the word "scrub" dismissed
+      from table a fellow-boarder who turned pale, now with the same smiling
+      acuteness remarks the imprudent politeness which tries to assure him that
+      it is no matter if he is a little older. Did anybody say so? The easy
+      agility with which he cleared "the seven-barred gate" has carried him over
+      the eight bars, and we are all in hot pursuit. For just sixty years since
+      his first gay and tender note was heard, Holmes has been fulfilling the
+      promise of his matin song. He has become a patriarch of our literature,
+      and all his countrymen are his lovers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0009" id="link2H_4_0009"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      WASHINGTON IRVING
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Forty years ago, upon a pleasant afternoon, you might have seen tripping
+      with an elastic step along Broadway, in New York, a figure which even then
+      would have been called quaint. It was a man of about sixty-six or
+      sixty-seven years old, of a rather solid frame, wearing a Talma, as a
+      short cloak of the time was called, that hung from the shoulders, and low
+      shoes, neatly tied, which were observable at a time when boots were
+      generally worn. The head was slightly declined to one side, the face was
+      smoothly shaven, and the eyes twinkled with kindly humor and shrewdness.
+      There was a chirping, cheery, old-school air in the whole appearance, an
+      undeniable Dutch aspect, which, in the streets of New Amsterdam,
+      irresistibly recalled Diedrich Knickerbocker. The observer might easily
+      have supposed that he saw some later descendant of the renowned Wouter Van
+      Twiller refined into a nineteenth-century gentleman. The occasional start
+      of interest as the figure was recognized by some one in the passing
+      throng, the respectful bow, and the sudden turn to scan him more closely,
+      indicated that he was not unknown. Indeed, he was the American of his time
+      universally known. This modest and kindly man was the creator of Diedrich
+      Knickerbocker and Rip Van Winkle. He was the father of our literature, and
+      at that time its patriarch. He was Washington Irving.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the same time you might have seen another man, of slight figure and
+      rustic aspect, with an air of seriousness, if not severity, moving with
+      the crowd, but with something remote and reserved in his air, as if in the
+      city he bore with him another atmosphere, and were still secluded among
+      solitary hills. In the bright and busy street of the city which was always
+      cosmopolitan, and in which there lingers a tradition, constantly renewed,
+      of good-natured banter of the losel Yankee, this figure passed like the
+      grave genius of New England. By a little play of fancy the first figure
+      might have seemed the smiling spirit of genial cheerfulness and humor, of
+      kindly sympathy even with the foibles and weaknesses of poor human nature;
+      and the other the mentor of its earnest endeavor and serious duty. For he
+      was the first of our poets, whose "Thanatopsis" was the hymn of his
+      meditations among the primeval forests of his native hills, and who, in
+      his last years, sat at the door of his early home and looked across the
+      valley of the Westfield to the little town of Plainfield upon the wooded
+      heights beyond, whose chief distinction is that there he wrote the
+      "Waterfowl"; for this graver figure was the poet Bryant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If in the same walk you had passed those two figures, you would have seen
+      not only the first of our famous prose writers and the first of our
+      acknowledged poets, but also the representatives of the two fundamental
+      and distinctive qualities of our American literature, as of all literature&mdash;its
+      grave, reflective, earnest character, and its sportive, genial, and
+      humorous genius.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the time of which I speak another figure also was familiar in Broadway,
+      but less generally recognized as it passed than either of the others,
+      although, perhaps, even more widely known to fame than they. This was
+      Cooper, who gave us so many of the heroes of our childhood's delight, but
+      who at this time was himself the hero of innumerable lawsuits, undertaken
+      to chastise the press for what he believed to be unjust and libelous
+      comments upon himself. Now that the uproar of that litigation is silent,
+      and its occasion forgotten, it seems comical that a man for whom fame had
+      already rendered a favorable judgment should be busily seeking the opinion
+      of local courts upon transitory newspaper opinions of him-self and his
+      writings. It is as if Dickens, when the whole English-reading world&mdash;judges
+      on the bench and bishops in their studies, cobblers in their stalls and
+      grooms in the stables&mdash;were all laughing over Pickwick, should have
+      sued the <i>Eatanswill Gazette</i> for calling him a clown. Thackeray
+      pronounces Cooper's Long Tom Coffin one of the prizemen of fiction. That
+      is a final judgment by the chief-justice. But who knows what was the
+      verdict in Cooper's lawsuits to vindicate himself, and who cares? When
+      Cooper died there was a great commemorative meeting in New York. Daniel
+      Webster presided, and praised the storyteller; Bryant read a discourse
+      upon him, while Irving sat by his side. One of the triumvirate of our
+      early literature was gone, and two remained to foresee their own future in
+      the honors paid to him. Indeed, it was to see them, quite as much as to
+      hear of their dead comrade, that the multitude assembled that evening; and
+      the one who was seen with the most interest was Irving, the one in whom
+      the city of New York naturally feels a peculiar right and pride, as the
+      most renowned of her children.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If I say that he made personally the same impression that his works make,
+      you can easily see the man. As you read the story of his life you feel its
+      constant gayety and cheerfulness. It was the life of a literary man and a
+      man of society&mdash;a life without events, or only the events of all our
+      lives, except that it lacks the great event of marriage. In place of it
+      there is a tender and pathetic romance. Irving lived to be seventy-six
+      years old. At twenty-six he was engaged to a beautiful girl, who died. He
+      never married; but after his death, in a little box of which he always
+      kept the key, was found the miniature of a lovely girl, and with it a
+      braid of fair hair, and a slip of paper on which was written the name
+      Matilda Hoffman, with some pages upon which the writing was long since
+      faded. That fair face Irving kept all his life in a more secret and sacred
+      shrine. It looks out, now and then, with unchanged loveliness from some
+      pensive passage, which he seems to write with wistful melancholy of
+      remembrance. That fond and immortal presence constantly renewed the gentle
+      humanity, the tenderness of feeling, the sweet healthfulness and generous
+      sympathy which never failed in his life and writings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was born in the city of New York in 1783, the year in which the
+      Revolution ended in the acknowledgment of American independence. The
+      British army marched out of the city, and the American army, with
+      Washington at the head, marched in. "The patriot's work is ended just as
+      my boy is born," said the patriotic mother, "and the boy shall be named
+      Washington". Six years later, when Washington returned to New York to be
+      inaugurated President, he was one day going into a shop when the boy's
+      Scotch nurse democratically stopped the new republican chief magistrate
+      and said to him, "Please your honor, here's a bairn was named for you".
+      The great man turned and looked kindly on his little namesake, laid his
+      hand upon his head, and blessed his future biographer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The name of no other American has been so curiously confused with
+      Washington's as that of Irving. Many a young fellow puzzles over the
+      connection which the name seems vaguely to imply, and in other lands the
+      identity of the men is confounded. When Irving first went to Europe, a
+      very young man, well-educated, courteous, with great geniality of manner
+      and charm of conversation, he was received by Prince Torlonia, the banker,
+      in Rome, with unusual and flattering civility. His travelling companion,
+      who had been treated by the prince with entire indifference, was perplexed
+      at the warmth of Irving's welcome. Irving laughingly said that it only
+      proved the prince's remarkable discrimination. But the young travellers
+      laughed still more when the prince unconsciously revealed the secret of
+      his attentions by taking his guest aside, and asking him how nearly he was
+      related to General Washington.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Many years afterwards, when he had become famous, an English lady and her
+      daughter paused in an Italian gallery before a bust of Washington. "And
+      who was Washington, mamma?" asked the daughter. "Why, my dear, I am
+      surprised at your ignorance," answered the mother, "he was the author of
+      the <i>Sketch Book</i>." Long ago in Berlin I was talking with some
+      American friends one evening at a café, and observed a German intently
+      listening to our conversation as if trying his ability to understand the
+      language. Presently he said to me, politely, "You are English, no?" But
+      when I replied "No, we are Americans"&mdash;"Americans!" he exclaimed
+      enthusiastically, grasping my hand and shaking it warmly, "Americans, ach!
+      we all know your great General Washington Irving."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Irving's father was a Presbyterian deacon, in whose heart the sterner
+      traditions of the Covenanters lingered. He tried hard to teach his son to
+      contemn amusement, and to impale his youth upon the five points of
+      Calvinism, rather than to play ball. But it was John Knox trying to curb
+      the tricksy Ariel. Perhaps from some bright maternal ancestor the boy had
+      derived his sweet gayety of nature which nothing could repress. His airy
+      spirits bubbled like a sunny fountain in that somewhat arid household. He
+      read at ten a translation of the <i>Orlando Furioso</i>, and his father's
+      yard, doubtless trim and well kept as beseemed a deacon's yard, became at
+      once a field of chivalry. Candles were forbidden him in his chamber, but
+      when he made the acquaintance of <i>Robinson Crusoe</i> and <i>Sindbad the
+      Sailor</i>, he secreted lights to illuminate his innocent revels with
+      those immortal playmates.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The amusements which were permitted were of too depressing a character to
+      be tolerated by the healthy boy, who, like the duck taking to the water
+      from under the wing of the astonished hen, sometimes escaped from the
+      serious house at night by dropping from a window, and with a delight that
+      must have torn his father's heart with anguish had he known it, tasted the
+      forbidden fruit of the theatre. It was a Presbyterian boy who tasted it
+      then; but in the same city many years afterwards it was a Quaker boy whom
+      I knew who was also enamoured of the play. "John," said his grieved
+      father, "is this dreadful thing true that I hear of thee? Has thee ever
+      been to see the play-actress Frances Kemble?" "Yes, father," answered the
+      heroic John. "I hope thee has not been more than once, John," said the
+      afflicted father. "Yes, father," replied John, resolved to make a clean
+      breast of his sins, "more than thirty times." It is useless to try to
+      prevent blue-birds from flying in the spring. The blithe creatures made to
+      soar and sing will not be restrained. The same kind Providence that made
+      Calvin made Shakespeare. The sun is higher than the clouds, and smiles are
+      as heaven-born as tears. In Emerson's poem the squirrel says to the
+      mountain:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+ "You're not so small as I,
+  And not half so spry;
+
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+ "If I cannot carry forests on my back
+  Neither can you crack a nut."
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      It was in vain to try to thwart the young Irving's genius. Yet the boy who
+      a little later was to light with rosy cheer the air which, as Wendell
+      Phillips said, was still black with sermons; who was to give to our
+      literature its first distinctly humorous strain, and innocently to amuse
+      the world, was somehow or other, as he said, "taught to feel that
+      everything pleasant was wicked".
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If that were so, what a sinner Washington Irving was! If to make life
+      easier by making it pleasanter, if to outwit trouble by gay banter, if
+      with satire that smiles but never stings to correct foibles and to quicken
+      good impulses; if to deepen and strengthen human sympathy, is not to be a
+      human benefactor, what makes one? When Dr. Johnson said of Garrick that
+      his death eclipsed the gayety of nations, he did not mean merely that the
+      player would no longer make men laugh, but that he could no longer make
+      them better. "If, however," said Irving&mdash;and Willis selected the
+      words for the motto of his second volume of verse published in 1827&mdash;"I
+      can by a lucky chance, in these days of evil, rub out one wrinkle from the
+      brow of care, or beguile the heavy heart of one moment of sadness; if I
+      can, now and then, penetrate the gathering film of misanthropy, prompt a
+      benevolent view of human nature, and make my reader more in good-humor
+      with his fellow-beings and himself, surely, surely I shall not then have
+      written entirely in vain."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That cannot be said to have been the spirit of any American author before
+      Irving. Our colonial literature was mainly political and theological. You
+      have only to return to the early New England days in the stories of
+      Hawthorne, the magician who restores with a shuddering spell that old,
+      sombre life, to understand the character of its reading. The books that
+      were not treatises upon special topics all seemed to say with one of the
+      grim bards of Calvinism:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    "My thoughts on awful subjects roll,
+            Damnation and the dead."
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Literature, in its proper sense, there was none. There was no imaginative
+      creation, no play of fancy and humor, no subtle charm of the ideal life,
+      no grace and delight of expression, which are essential to literature. The
+      perpetual twilight and chill of the New England Puritan world were an
+      arctic winter in which no flower of poesy bloomed and no bird sang. One of
+      the French players who came to this country with Rachel says, in his
+      journal, with a startled air, as if he had remarked in Americans a
+      universal touch of lunacy, that he was invited to take a pleasure-drive to
+      Greenwood Cemetery. Evidently he was not familiar with Froissart's epigram
+      nor with the annals of the Puritan fathers, or he would have known that
+      their favorite pleasure-ground was the graveyard. Judge Sewell's Journal,
+      the best picture of daily New England life in the seventeenth and
+      eighteenth centuries, is a portrait framed in black and hung with thick
+      crape. It is a register of funerals&mdash;a book which seems to require a
+      suit of sables for its proper reading.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The early Christians dwelt so often and so long in the catacombs that when
+      they emerged, accustomed to associate life with the tomb, they doubtless
+      regarded the whole world as a cemetery. The American Puritans inherited
+      the disposition from their early confessors, and so powerful was the
+      tendency that it laid its sombre spirit upon the earliest enduring poem in
+      our literature, and the fresh and smiling nature of the new world was
+      first depicted by our literary art as a tomb:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+                                        "The hills,
+  Rock-ribbed and ancient as the sun; the vales
+  Stretching in pensive quietness between;
+  The venerable woods; rivers that move
+  In majesty; and the complaining brooks
+  That make the meadows green; and, poured round all,
+  Old ocean's gray and melancholy waste,
+  Are but the solemn decorations all
+  Of the great tomb of man."
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      "Thanatopsis" is the swan-song of Puritanism. Indeed, when New England
+      Puritanism could sing, as for the first time it did in the verse of
+      Bryant, the great change was accomplished. Out of strength had come forth
+      sweetness. I am not decrying the Puritans. They were the stern builders of
+      the modern world, the unconscious heralds of wider liberty, and a kindlier
+      future for mankind. But
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+ "God works in a mysterious way
+  His wonders to perform,"
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      and never more mysteriously than when he chose as the pioneers of
+      religious liberty in the New World those who hung Quakers, and as the
+      founders of civil equality those who permitted only members of their own
+      Church to vote.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Irving was not a studious boy. He did not go to college. He read some law
+      at sixteen, but he read much more literature, and sauntered in the country
+      about New York with his gun and fishing-rod. He sailed up the Hudson, and
+      explored for the first time the realm that was presently to be his forever
+      by the right of eminent domain of the imagination. New York was a snug
+      little city in those days. At the beginning of the century it was all
+      below the present City Hall, and the young fellow, who was born a
+      cosmopolitan, greatly enjoyed the charms of the modest society in which
+      the Dutch and the English circles were still somewhat separated, and in
+      which such literary cultivation as there was was necessarily foreign. But
+      while he enjoyed he observed, and his literary instinct began to stir.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Under the name of "Jonathan Oldstyle", the young Irving printed in his
+      brother's newspaper essays in the style of the <i>Spectator</i>,
+      discussing topics of the town, and the modest theatre in John Street and
+      its chance actors, as if it had been Drury Lane with Garrick and Mrs.
+      Siddons. The little town kindly smiled upon the lively efforts of the
+      Presbyterian deacon's son; and its welcome of his small essays, the
+      provincial echo of the famous Queen Anne's men in London, is a touching
+      revelation of our scant and spare native literary talent. The essays are
+      forgotten now, but they were enough to bring Charles Brockden Brown to
+      find the young author, and to tempt him, but in vain, to write for <i>The
+      Literary Magazine and American Register</i>, which the novelist was just
+      beginning in Philadelphia, a pioneer of American literary magazines, which
+      Brown sustained for five years.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The youthful Addison of New Amsterdam was a delicate lad, and when he came
+      of age he sailed for France and the Mediterranean, and passed two years in
+      travelling. Napoleon Bonaparte was emperor, and at war with England, and
+      the young American, despite his passport, was everywhere believed to be an
+      Englishman. Travelling was hard work in those days of war, but the cheery
+      youth proved the truth of the proverb that a light heart and a whole pair
+      of breeches go round the world. At Messina, in Sicily, he saw Nelson's
+      fleet pass through the strait, looking for the French ships; and before
+      the year ended the famous battle of Trafalgar had been fought, and at
+      Greenwich in England Irving saw the body of the great sailor lying in
+      state, wrapped in his flag of victory. At Rome he made the acquaintance of
+      Washington Allston, and almost resolved to be a painter. In Paris he saw
+      Madame de Staël, who overwhelmed him with eager questions about his remote
+      and unknown country, and in London he was enchanted by Mrs. Siddons. Some
+      years afterwards, when the <i>Sketch Book</i> had made him famous, he was
+      presented to Mrs. Siddons, and the great actress said to him, in her
+      deepest voice and with her stateliest manner, "You've made me weep." The
+      modest young author was utterly abashed, and could say nothing. After the
+      publication of his <i>Bracebridge</i> Hall he was once more presented to
+      her, and again with gloomy grandeur she said to him, "You've made me weep
+      again." This time Irving received the solemn salute with more composure,
+      and doubtless retorted with a compliment magnificent enough even for the
+      sovereign Queen of Tragedy, who, as her niece Mrs. Fanny Kemble said of
+      her, never laid aside her great manner, and at the dinner-table brandished
+      her fork and stabbed the potatoes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Irving returned from this tour with established health&mdash;a refined,
+      agreeable, exceedingly handsome and charming gentleman; with a confirmed
+      taste for society, and a delightful store of interesting recollection and
+      anecdote. With a group of cultivated and lively friends of his own age he
+      dined and supped and enjoyed the town, and a little anecdote which he was
+      fond of telling shows that the good old times were not unlike the good new
+      times: One morning, after a gay dinner, Irving met one of his
+      fellow-revellers, who told him that on the way home, after draining the
+      parting bumper, he had fallen through a grating in the sidewalk, which had
+      been carelessly left open, into the vault beneath. It was impossible to
+      climb out, and at first the solitude was rather dismal, he said; but
+      several of the other guests fell in, in the course of the evening, and, on
+      the whole, they had quite a pleasant time of it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the midst of this frolicking life, and growing out of it, Irving's real
+      literary career began. With his brother William, and his friend James K.
+      Paulding, who afterwards wrote the <i>Dutchman's Fireside</i>, and was one
+      of the recognized American authors of fifty years ago, he issued every
+      fortnight a periodical, which ran for twenty numbers, and stopped in the
+      midst of its success. It was modelled upon the <i>Spectator</i> and
+      Goldsmith's <i>Citizen of the World</i>, describing and criticising the
+      manners and morals of the town with extravagant humor and pungency, and a
+      rollicking independence which must have been both startling and
+      stimulating.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Perhaps, also, the town was secretly pleased to discover that it was
+      sufficiently important to be worthy of such bright raillery and humorous
+      reproof. <i>Salmagundi</i> was only a lively <i>jeu d'esprit</i>, and
+      Irving was never proud of it. "I know," said Paulding, writing to him in
+      later life, "you consider old Sal as a sort of saucy, flippant trollope,
+      belonging to nobody, and not worth fathering." But, nevertheless, Irving's
+      genius was trying its wings in it, and pluming itself for flight. <i>Salmagundi</i>
+      undoubtedly, to a later taste, is rather crude and cumbrous fun, but it is
+      interesting as the immediate forerunner of our earliest work of sustained
+      humor, and of the wit of Holmes and Lowell at a later date. When it was
+      discontinued, at the beginning of 1808, Irving and his brother began the
+      <i>History of New York</i>, which was originally designed to be a parody
+      of a particular book. But the work was interrupted by the business
+      difficulties of the brother, and at last Irving resumed it alone, recast
+      it entirely, and as he finished it the engagement with Matilda Hoffman
+      ended with her death, and the long arid secret romance of his life began.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Knickerbocker's <i>History</i> was published just before Christmas, 1809,
+      and made a merry Christmas for our grandfathers and grandmothers eighty
+      years ago. The fun began before the book was published. In October the
+      curiosity of the town of eighty thousand inhabitants was awakened by a
+      series of skilful paragraphs in the <i>Evening Post</i>. The art of
+      advertising was never more ingeniously illustrated. Mr. Fulkerson himself
+      would have paid homage to the artist. One day the quid-nuncs found this
+      paragraph in the paper, It was headed,
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+   "DISTRESSING.
+
+   "Left his lodgings, some time since, and has not since been heard
+    of, a small elderly gentleman, dressed in an old black coat and
+    cocked hat, by the name of Knickerbocker. As there are some reasons
+    for believing that he is not entirely in his right mind, and, as
+    great anxiety is entertained about him, any information concerning
+    him left either at the Columbian Hotel, Mulberry Street, or at the
+    office of this paper, will be thankfully received.
+
+   "P. S.&mdash;Printers of newspapers would be aiding the cause of humanity
+    by giving an insertion to the above.
+
+   "<i>October 25th.</i>"
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      This was followed within a fortnight by another ingenious lure:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+   "<i>To the Editor of the Evening Post:</i>
+
+   "Sir,&mdash;Having read in your paper of the 26th October last a paragraph
+    respecting an old gentleman by the name of Knickerbocker, who was
+    missing from his lodgings, if it would be any relief to his friends,
+    or furnish them with any clue to discover where he is, you may inform
+    them that a person answering the description was seen by the passengers
+    of the Albany stage early in the morning, about four or five weeks ago,
+    resting himself by the side of the road, a little above Kingsbridge.
+    He had in his hands a small bundle, tied in a red bandana handkerchief.
+    He appeared to be travelling northward, and was very much fatigued and
+    exhausted.
+
+   "<i>November 6.</i>                             A Traveller."
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Ten days after came a letter signed by Seth Handaside, landlord of the
+      Independent Handaside:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+   "Columbian Hotel, Mulberry Street.
+
+   "Sir,&mdash;You have been kind enough to publish in your paper a paragraph
+    about Mr. Diedrich Knickerbocker, who was missing so strangely from his
+    lodgings some time since. Nothing satisfactory has been heard from the
+    old gentleman since, but a very curious written Book has been found in
+    his room in his own handwriting. Now, I wish you to notice him, if he
+    is still alive, that if he does not return and pay off his bill for
+    board and lodging, I shall have to dispose of his Book to satisfy me
+    for the same."
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      This is very simple jesting, but at that time it was very effective in a
+      town that enjoyed the high spirits of <i>Salmagundi</i>. Moreover, the
+      book which was announced in this lively strain was as unprecedented as the
+      announcement. It was a very serious time and country, and the work of the
+      small elderly gentleman who carried a little bundle tied in a red bandana
+      handkerchief appeared in the midst of the sober and dry effusions of our
+      Puritan literature, and of an eager and energetic life still engrossed
+      with the subjection of a continent and the establishment of a new nation.
+      It was the work of a young man of twenty-six, who lived fifty years
+      afterwards with constantly increasing fame, making many and admirable
+      contributions to literature. But nothing that followed surpassed the
+      joyous brilliancy and gay felicity of his first book, which was at once
+      acknowledged as the wittiest book that America had produced.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Knickerbocker's <i>History</i> is a prolonged and elaborate and audacious
+      burlesque of the early annals of New Amsterdam. The undaunted Goth of the
+      legend who plucked the Roman senator by the beard was not a more ruthless
+      iconoclast than this son of New Amsterdam, who drew its grave ancestors
+      from venerable obscurity by flooding them with the cheerful light of
+      blameless fun. To pass the vague and venerable traditions of the austere
+      and heroic founders of the city through the alembic of a youth's hilarious
+      creative humor, and to turn them out in forms resistlessly grotesque, but
+      with their identity unimpaired, was a stroke as daring as it was
+      successful. But the skill and power with which this is done can be best
+      appreciated by those who are most familiar with the history which the
+      gleeful genius burlesques.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Irving follows the actual story closely, and the characters that he
+      develops faithfully, although with rollicking caricature, are historical.
+      Indeed, the fidelity is so absolute that the fiction is welded with the
+      fact. The days of the Dutch ascendency in New York are inextricably
+      associated with this ludicrous narrative. It is impossible not to think of
+      the forefathers of New Amsterdam as Knickerbocker describes them. The
+      Wouter Van Twiller, the Wilhemus Kieft, the Peter Stuyvesant, who are
+      familiarly and popularly known, are not themselves, but the figures drawn
+      by Diedrich Knickerbocker. In comical despair, the historian Grahame,
+      whose <i>Colonial History</i> is still among the best, says of
+      Knickerbocker: "If Sancho Panza had been a real governor, misrepresented
+      by the wit of Cervantes, his future historian would have found it no easy
+      matter to bespeak a grave attention to the annals of his administration."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The gayety of this blithe genius bursting in upon our staid literature is
+      irresistible. Irving's temperament, his travels, his humor, gave him a
+      cosmopolitan point of view; and his little native city, with its local
+      sense of importance, and its droll aristocratic traditions springing from
+      Dutch burgomasters and traders, impressed his merry genius like a
+      complacent Cranford or Tarascon taking itself with a provincial
+      seriousness, which, to his sympathetic fancy, was an exhaustless fountain
+      of fun. Part of the fun to us, and perhaps to Irving, was the indignation
+      with which it was received by the descendants of the Dutch families in the
+      city and State. The excited drawing-rooms denounced it as scandalous
+      satire and ridicule. Even Irving's friend, Gulian Verplanck, nine years
+      afterwards, deepening the comedy of his remark by his evident
+      unconsciousness of the drollery of his gravity, grieved that the author's
+      exuberance of genuine humor should be wasted on a coarse caricature.
+      Irving, who was then in Europe, saw Verplanck's strictures just as he had
+      written <i>Rip Van Winkle</i>, and he wrote to a friend at home that he
+      could not help laughing at Verplanck's outburst of filial feeling for his
+      ancestors, adding, in the true Knickerbocker vein, "Remember me heartily
+      to him, and tell him that I mean to grow wiser and better and older every
+      day, and to lay the castigation he has given seriously to heart."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The success of Knickerbocker's <i>History</i> was immediate, and it was
+      the first American work of literature which arrested attention in Europe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sir Walter Scott, who was then the most famous of English poets, and was
+      about to publish the first of the Waverley Novels, was delighted with a
+      humor which he thought recalled Swift's, and a sentiment that seemed to
+      him as tender as Sterne's. He wrote a generous acknowledgment to the
+      American friend who had sent him the book, and in later years he welcomed
+      Diedrich Knickerbocker at Abbotsford, and the American has given a
+      charming and vivid picture of Scott's home and its master.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But the success of his book did not at once determine Irving's choice of a
+      career. He was still a gilded youth who enjoyed the gay idleness of
+      society, and who found in writing only another and pleasant recreation. He
+      had been bred in the conservative tradition which looked upon livelihood
+      by literature as the deliberate choice of Grub Street, and the
+      wretchedness of Goldsmith as the necessary and natural fate of authors;
+      but it is droll that, although he recoiled from the uncertainty of support
+      by literary labor, he was willing to try the very doubtful chances of
+      office-holding as a means of securing leisure for literary pursuits. He
+      offered himself as a candidate for appointment as the clerk of a court in
+      the city. By tradition and sympathy he was a Federalist, but he had taken
+      no active part in politics, and his chance was slight. He went to Albany,
+      however, and in a lively letter he paints a familiar picture of the crowd
+      of office-hunters who, he says, "like a cloud of locusts, have descended
+      upon the city to devour every plant and herb and every green thing." He
+      was sick with a cold, and stifled in rooms heated by stoves, and was
+      utterly disgusted, as he says, "by the servility and duplicity and
+      rascality I have witnessed among the swarms of scrub politicians who crawl
+      about the great metropolis of our State like so many vermin about the head
+      of the body politic."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Again the good old times were apparently very much like the good new
+      times. Thirty-nine years after Irving's discomfiture in trying to get a
+      public office, Hawthorne was turned out of one that he held, and wrote to
+      a friend: "It seems to me that an inoffensive man of letters, having
+      obtained a pitiful little office on no other plea than his pitiful little
+      literature, ought not to be left at the mercy of these thick-skulled and
+      no-hearted ruffians." The language is strong, but the epithets are
+      singularly well-chosen. The distinctive qualities of the ringleaders,
+      whether of high or low degree, in the degradation of public trusts into
+      private and party spoils, have never been more accurately or effectively
+      described than by the words "thick-skulled" and "no-hearted".
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The story of the sturdy beggar who asked General Jackson to give him the
+      mission to France, and finally came down to a request for an old coat,
+      well illustrates a system which regards public office not as a public
+      trust, but as private alms. The service of the State, whether military or
+      civil, is an object of high and generous ambition, because it involves the
+      leadership of men. But if Irving and Hawthorne thought that what is called
+      office-seeking is disgusting, it was not because the public service is not
+      noble and dignified, but because we choose to allow it to be so often
+      dependent, not upon fitness and character, but upon the personal or
+      political favor of the "thick-skulled" and "no-hearted".
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But the problem of a career was soon solved. In the year 1810 Irving
+      formed a business connection with two of his brothers, and the next five
+      years were passed in New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, forming
+      various literary plans, looking out for his business interests, sparkling
+      in society; and when war with England began, serving upon the governor's
+      military staff as Colonel Washington Irving. In the spring of 1815 he
+      sailed to roam again through Europe, but the illness of his brother
+      compelled him to remain in England in charge of the business. "London," as
+      a shrewd and celebrated American recently said, "was then as it is now,
+      the social centre of the world." Irving saw famous men and women, and his
+      charming sweetness and humor opened all doors and hearts. But the business
+      fell into distress, then into disaster, and in the beginning of 1818 the
+      house failed. He was now thrown wholly upon his literary resources, which
+      did <i>not</i> fail, and in the spring of 1819, when he was thirty-six
+      years old, the first number of the <i>Sketch Book</i> was issued in New
+      York.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The merry, exuberant, satirical Diedrich Knickerbocker was transformed
+      into the genial, urbane, and tender-hearted Geoffrey Crayon. Our fathers
+      and grandfathers knew him well. They had been bred upon Addison and
+      Goldsmith, the essayists and the poets of the eighteenth century, and in
+      Geoffrey Crayon they recognized and welcomed another member of that
+      delightful literary society. He was all the more welcome that he was an
+      American&mdash;one of themselves. The bland and courteous Geoffrey,
+      indeed, had few rivals among his countrymen. In our little American world
+      of letters at that time he came and conquered. Bryant's "Thanatopsis", had
+      been published only two years before; Halleck's and Drake's lively but
+      strictly local "Croakers" were still appearing, and Edward Everett had
+      just hailed Percival's first volume as authorizing great expectations.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But prophecy is always dangerous. The year before, Sydney Smith had said,
+      in the <i>Edinburgh Review</i>, "Literature the Americans have none&mdash;no
+      native literature we mean. It is all imported. They had a Franklin,
+      indeed, and may afford to live half a century on his fame. There is, or
+      was, a Mr. Dwight, who wrote some poems, and his baptismal name was
+      Timothy. There is also a small account of Virginia by Jefferson, and an
+      epic poem by Mr. Joel Barlow, and some pieces of pleasantry by Mr. Irving.
+      But why should Americans write books, when a six weeks' passage brings
+      them, in their own tongue, <i>our</i> sense, science, and genius, on bales
+      and hogsheads? Prairies, steamboats, grist-mills are their natural objects
+      for centuries to come. Then, when they have got to the Pacific Ocean, epic
+      poems, plays, pleasures of memory, and all the elegant gratifications of
+      an ancient people who have tamed the wild earth, and sat down to amuse
+      themselves. This is the natural march of human affairs." As the sarcastic
+      Yorkshire canon, sitting on the Edinburgh Olympus, wiped his pen, the <i>Sketch
+      Book</i> was published. The good canon was right as to our small literary
+      product, but even an <i>Edinburgh Review</i> could not wisely play the
+      prophet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This Mr. Everett also discovered, for his "great expectations" of Percival
+      were not fulfilled. A desponding student of our poetry recently sighs that
+      Percival is a forgotten poet, and then, seizing a promiscuous assortment
+      of names, exclaims that Charles Sprague, William Wirt, Washington Irving,
+      and Jack Downing may be referred to as forgotten authors. But this is the
+      luxury of woe. Why should not Percival be a forgotten poet? That is to
+      say, what is there in the verse of Percival that should command interest
+      and attention to-day? He was a remarkably accomplished man and a most
+      excellent gentleman, and his name is very familiar in the reading-books of
+      the time when grandfathers of to-day were going to school. But he was a
+      noted poet not because he took rank with his contemporaries&mdash;with
+      Byron and Scott and Keats and Shelley and Coleridge and Wordsworth&mdash;but
+      because there were very few Americans who wrote verses, and our fathers
+      patriotically stood by them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yet because the note of a singer of another day is not heard by us, it
+      does not follow that he did not touch the heart of his time. Grenville
+      Mellen is a forgotten poet also, and Rufus Dawes and John Neal and James
+      G. Eastburn. If the gentle reader will turn to the pages of Kettell, or
+      any early American anthology, he will seem to himself to be walking among
+      tombs. Upon each page might be suitably inscribed, "Sacred to the memory"
+      of almost every one of the singers. But can we say with honest reproach,
+      "forgotten poets"? The loiterer in the wood hears the song of the
+      wood-thrush, but is the hermit-bird wronged, or is his song less sweet,
+      because it is not echoed round the world? Is Fame to be held responsible
+      for not retaining the name of every minstrel who loiters by and touches
+      his harp lightly, and sings a sweet song as he passes on? Is it a hard
+      fate to give pleasure to those who listen because those out of hearing do
+      not applaud?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Many an author may have a tone and a touch which please the ear and taste
+      of his own day, and which, as characteristic of a time, may be only
+      curious to a later taste, like the costumes and dances of our
+      great-grandmothers. But young America, sauntering at the club and at
+      Newport, would not willingly wear the boots of Beau Nash, nor even the
+      cloak of Beau Brummel. The law which provides that nothing shall be lost
+      is equally observable in the realm of literary fame. Is anything of
+      literature lost that deserves longer remembrance? or, more properly, can
+      it be lost? A fair answer to the question can be found in the reply to
+      another, whether delving in Kettell, or in any other anthology, reveals
+      treasures dropped by Fame as precious as those she carries.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There are two ways in which authors survive: one by the constant reading
+      of his works, the other by his name. Is Milton a forgotten author? But how
+      much is he read, compared with the contemporary singers? Is Plato
+      forgotten? Yet how many know him except by name? Irving thus far holds
+      both. Time, like a thrifty husbandman, winnows its wheat, blowing away
+      much chaff, but the golden grain remains. This is true not only of the
+      whole multitude of authors, but of the works of each author. How many of
+      them really survive in the anthology only? <i>Astoria</i> and <i>Captain
+      Bonneville</i> and <i>Mahomet</i> and other books of Irving will
+      disappear; but <i>Knickerbocker</i> and <i>Rip Van Winkle</i> still buffet
+      the relentless wave of oblivion, and their buoyancy is undiminished.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As for Sprague&mdash;a mild, genial, charming gentleman, who carried his
+      simple freshness of nature and of manner to the end, and about whose
+      venerable head in State Street always shone the faint halo of early poetic
+      renown&mdash;his literary talent was essentially for a day, not for all
+      time. But what then? On Christmas Eve we hear the passing music in the
+      street that supplies for us the song of the waits. Distant and melodious,
+      it pensively recalls the days and the faces and the voices that are no
+      more. But the singers are not the same waits that we heard long ago; still
+      less are they those that the youth of a century ago heard with the same
+      musing melancholy. But the substance of the song, and the emotion which it
+      awakens, and the tender pathos of association&mdash;these are all the
+      same. Sprague was a wait of yesterday, of last year, of fifty years ago.
+      Others sing in the street the song that he sang, and, singing, they pass
+      on, and the sweet strain grows fainter, softer, and fainter and fainter,
+      and the echoes answer, "Dying, dying, dying," and it is gone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      See how tenderly Mr. Stedman speaks of the troubadours who are singing for
+      us now, whose names are familiar, who trill and twitter in the magazines,
+      and in tasteful and delicate volumes, which seem to tempt the stream of
+      time to suffer such light and graceful barks to slip along unnoted to
+      future ages. But the kindly critic's tone forecasts the fate of the
+      sparkling ventures.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Moore tells us of the Indian maids upon the banks of the Ganges who light
+      a tiny taper, and, on a frail little chip, set it afloat upon the river.
+      It twinkles and dwindles, and flashes and expires. Mr. Stedman watches the
+      minor poets trimming their tapers and carefully launching their chips upon
+      the brimming river. "Pleasant journey," he cries cheerily from the shore,
+      as if he were speaking to hearty Captain Cook going up the side of his
+      great ship, and shaking out his mighty canvas to circumnavigate the globe.
+      "Pleasant journey," cries the cheery critic; but there is a wistful
+      something in his tone that betrays a consciousness of the swift extinction
+      of the pretty perfumed flickering flame.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So scant, indeed, was the blossom of our literature when the <i>Sketch
+      Book</i> was published, that even twenty years later, when Emerson
+      described the college Commencement Day as the only tribute of a country
+      too busy to give to letters any more, Geoffrey Crayon, with the exception
+      of Cooper, had really no American competitors. Long afterwards I met Mr.
+      Irving one morning at the office of Mr. Putnam, his publisher, and in his
+      cordial way, with a twinkle in his eye, and in his pleasant husky voice,
+      he said, "You young literary fellows to-day have a harder time than we old
+      fellows had. You trip over each other's heels; there are so many of you.
+      We had it all our own way. But the account is square, for you can make as
+      much by a lecture as we made by a book." Then, laughing slyly, he added,
+      "A pretty figure I should make lecturing in this voice." Indeed, his
+      modesty forbade him to risk that voice in public addresses.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Irving, I think, made but one speech. It was at the dinner given to him
+      upon his return from Europe in 1832, after his absence of seventeen years.
+      Like other distinguished Americans who have felt the fascination of the
+      old home of their ancestors, and who have not thought that a narrow heart
+      and a barbaric disdain of everything foreign attested the truest
+      patriotism, he was suspected of some alienation from his country. His
+      speech was full of emotion, and his protestation of love for his native
+      land was received with boundless acclamation. But he could not overcome
+      his aversion to speech-making. When Dickens came, and the great dinner was
+      given to him in New York, Irving was predestined to preside. Nobody else
+      could be even mentioned. He was himself conscious of it, and was filled
+      with melancholy forebodings. Professor Felton, of Harvard, compared
+      Irving's haunting terror and dismay at the prospect of this speech to that
+      of Mr. Pickwick at the prospect of leading that dreadful horse all day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Poor Irving went about muttering, "I shall certainly break down. I know I
+      shall break down." At last the day, the hour, and the very moment itself
+      arrived, and he rose to propose the health of Dickens. He began pleasantly
+      and smoothly in two or three sentences, then hesitated, stammered, smiled,
+      and stopped; tried in vain to begin again, then gracefully gave it up,
+      announced the toast&mdash;"Charles Dickens, the guest of the nation"&mdash;then
+      sank into his chair amid immense applause, whispering to his neighbor,
+      "There, I told you I should break down, and I've done it."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When Thackeray came, Irving consented to preside at a dinner if speeches
+      were absolutely forbidden. The condition was faithfully observed, but it
+      was the most extraordinary instance of American self-command on record.
+      Whenever two or three Americans are gathered together, somebody must make
+      a speech; and no wonder, because somebody always speaks so well. The
+      custom is now so confirmed that it is foolish and useless to oppose it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I remember a few years since that a dinner was given to a famous American
+      artist long resident abroad, and, as the condition of the attendance of a
+      distinguished guest whose presence was greatly desired, the same agreement
+      was made that Irving required at the Thackeray dinner. It was a company of
+      exceedingly clever and brilliant men, but the gayety of the feast was
+      extinguished by the general consciousness that the situation was abnormal.
+      It was a fruit without flavor, a flower without fragrance, a symphony
+      without melody, a dinner without speeches. But the dinner of which I
+      speak, when the condition of Irving's presence was that there should be no
+      speeches, was the great exception. It was the only dinner of the kind that
+      I have ever known. But Irving's cheery anecdote and gayety, the songs and
+      banter of the company, the happy chat and sparkling wit, took the place of
+      eloquence, and I recall no dinner more delightful.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      However scant was our literature when the <i>Sketch Book</i> appeared, it
+      is a mistake to suppose that Irving owes his success to English
+      admiration. That was, undoubtedly, very agreeable to him and to his
+      countrymen. But it is well to correct a misapprehension which is still
+      cherished. Many years ago an English critic said that Irving was much more
+      relished and admired in England than in his own country, and added: "It is
+      only recently critics on the lookout for a literature have elevated him to
+      his proper and almost more than his proper place. This docility to English
+      guidance in the case of their best, or almost their best, prose writer,
+      may perhaps be followed by a similar docility in the case of their best,
+      or almost their best, poet, Poe, whom also England had preceded the United
+      States in recognizing." This comical patron is all the more amusing from
+      his comparative estimate of Poe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If it were true that Irving's countrymen had not recognized and honored
+      him from the first, it might be suspected that it was because they were
+      descendants of the people who showed little contemporaneous appreciation
+      of Shakespeare. But it is certainly creditable to the literary England
+      which was busy idolizing Scott and Byron, that it recognized also the
+      charming genius of Irving, and that Leslie, the painter, could truly write
+      of him, "Geoffrey Crayon is the most fashionable fellow of the day."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But while the English appreciation of Irving is very creditable to
+      England, English conceit must not go so far as to suppose that it was that
+      appreciation which commended him to his own countrymen. At the time when
+      Sydney Smith wrote the article from which we have quoted there was
+      apparently an almost literary sterility in this country, and the
+      professional critics of the critical journals were, as Professor Lounsbury
+      says in his admirable <i>Life of Cooper</i>, undoubtedly greatly affected
+      by English opinion. But there was an American reading public independent
+      of the few literary periodicals, as was shown when Cooper's <i>Spy</i> was
+      published at the end of 1821, the year in which Bryant's first volume of
+      poems and Dana's <i>Idle Man</i> appeared. Cooper had published his <i>Precaution</i>
+      in 1819, a book which Professor Lounsbury is one of the very few men who
+      are known to have read. He was an unknown author. But the <i>Spy</i> was
+      instantly successful. Some of the timid English journals awaited the
+      English opinion, for Murray had declined, upon Gifford's advice, to
+      publish the book. But a publisher was found, and England and Europe
+      followed America in their approval. Cooper always said, and truly, that it
+      was to his countrymen alone that he owed his first success, and his
+      biographer concedes that the success of the <i>Spy</i> was determined
+      before the opinion of Europe was known.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nearly three years before, in May, 1819, the first number of Irving's <i>Sketch
+      Book</i> was published. He sent the manuscript to his brother, who had
+      regretted Irving's refusal of a government place in the Navy Board, and to
+      whom he wrote, "My talents are merely literary, and all my habits of
+      thinking, reading, etc., have been in a different direction from that
+      required for the active politician.... In fact, I consider myself at
+      present as making a literary experiment, in the course of which I only
+      care to be kept in bread and cheese. Should it not succeed&mdash;should my
+      writings not acquire critical applause&mdash;I am content to throw up the
+      pen, and that to any commonplace employment. But if they should succeed,
+      it would repay me for a world of care and privation to be placed among the
+      established authors of my country, and to win the affection of my
+      countrymen."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The first number of the <i>Sketch Book</i> was published simultaneously in
+      New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. Its success was immediate.
+      In September, 1819, Irving wrote: "The manner in which the work has been
+      received, and the eulogiums that have been passed upon it in the American
+      papers and periodical works, have quite overwhelmed me ... I feel almost
+      appalled by such success." The echo of the acclamation reached England.
+      Murray at first declined to publish it, as he had at first declined
+      Cooper's <i>Spy</i>. But when England ascertained that the American
+      judgment was correct, and that it was a popular work, Murray was willing
+      to publish it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The delightful genius which his country had recognized with joy it never
+      ceased proudly and tenderly to honor. When, in 1832, he returned to his
+      native land, as his latest biographer, Mr. Warner, records, "America
+      greeted her most famous literary man with a spontaneous outburst of love
+      and admiration." It was in his own country that he had published his
+      works. It was his own countrymen whose applause apprised England of the
+      charm of the new author; and it is a humorous mentor who now teaches us
+      that it was our happy docility to English guidance which enabled us to
+      recognize and honor him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Was it docility to the same beneficent guidance which enabled us to
+      perceive the genius of Carlyle, whose works we first collected, and taught
+      England to read and admire? Did it enable us, also, to inform England that
+      in Robert Browning she had another poet? Was it the same docility which
+      enabled us to reveal to England one of her most philosophic observers in
+      Herbert Spencer, and to offer to Darwin his most appreciative
+      correspondents and interpreters in Chauncey Wright, John Fiske, and
+      Professors Gray and Wyman? There are many offences to be scored against
+      us, but failure to know our own literary genius is not one of them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Indeed, there is not one great literary fame in America that was not first
+      recognized here. Not to one of them has docility to English literary
+      opinion conducted us, as is often believed. Bryant and Cooper and Irving,
+      Bancroft and Prescott and Motley, Emerson and Channing, Longfellow,
+      Hawthorne, Lowell, Whittier, and Holmes were authors whom we were content
+      to admire and love without knowing or asking whether England had heard of
+      them, or what she thought of them. The "greatness" of Poe England may have
+      preceded us in recognizing. That is an assertion which we are not disposed
+      to dispute. But Walter Scott was not more immediately popular and beloved
+      in England than was Washington Irving in America; and American guidance
+      led England to Scott quite as much as English guidance drew America to
+      Irving.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The first number of the <i>Sketch Book</i> contained the tale of <i>Rip
+      Van Winkle</i>, one of the most charming and suggestive of legends, whose
+      hero is an exceedingly pathetic creation. It is, indeed, a mere sketch, a
+      hint, a suggestion; but the imagination readily completes it. It is the
+      more remarkable and interesting because, although the first American
+      literary creation, it is not in the least characteristic of American life,
+      but, on the contrary, is a quiet and delicate satire upon it. The kindly
+      vagabond asserts the charm of loitering idleness in the sweet leisure of
+      woods and fields against the characteristic American excitement of the
+      overflowing crowd and crushing competition of the city, its tremendous
+      energy and incessant devotion to money-getting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is not necessary to defend poor Rip, or to justify the morality of his
+      example. It is the imagination that interprets him; and how soothing to
+      those who give their lives to the furious accumulation of the means of
+      living to behold that figure stretched by the brook, or finding nuts with
+      the children, or sauntering homeward at sunset! Later figures of our
+      literature allure us&mdash;Hester Prynne, wrapped in her cloak of Nersus,
+      the Scarlet Letter, Hosea Biglow, Evangeline, Uncle Tom, and Topsy&mdash;but
+      the charm of this figure is unfading. The new writers introduce us to
+      their worlds, and with pleasure we make the acquaintance of new friends.
+      The new standards of another literary spirit are raised, a fresh literary
+      impulse surrounds us; but it is not thunder that we hear in the Kaatskills
+      on a still summer afternoon it is the distant game of Hendrick Hudson and
+      his men; and on the shore of our river, rattling and roaring with the
+      frenzied haste and endless activity of prosperous industry, still Rip Van
+      Winkle lounges idly by, an unwasted figure of the imagination, the
+      constant and unconscious satirist of American life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He seems to me peculiarly congenial with the temperament of Irving. He,
+      too, was essentially a loiterer. He had the same freshness of sympathy,
+      the same gentleness of nature, the same taste for leisure and repose. His
+      genius was reminiscent, and, as with all humorists, its climate was that
+      of April. The sun and the shower chased each other. Irving's intellectual
+      habit was emotional rather than thoughtful. In politics and public affairs
+      he took no part, although office was often urged upon him, as when the
+      friends of General Jackson wished him to go as representative to Congress,
+      or President Van Buren offered him the secretaryship of the navy, or
+      Tammany Hall, in New York, unanimously and vociferously nominated him for
+      mayor, an incident in the later annals of the city which transcends the
+      most humorous touch in <i>Knickerbocker's History</i>. He was appointed
+      secretary of legation in England in 1829, and in 1842, when Daniel Webster
+      was secretary of state, minister to Spain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But what we call practical politics was always distasteful to him. The
+      spirit which I once heard laugh at a young man new in politics because he
+      treated "the boys" with his own good cigars instead of buying bad ones at
+      the saloon&mdash;the spirit which I once heard assure a man of public
+      ability and fitness that he could never reach political office unless he
+      pushed himself, and paid agents to buy votes, because no man could expect
+      an office to be handed to him on a gold plate&mdash;the spirit which, to
+      my knowledge, displayed a handful of bank-notes in the anteroom of a
+      legislature, and exclaimed, "That's what makes the laws!"&mdash;this was a
+      spirit which, like other honorable men and patriotic Americans, Irving
+      despised.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was a gentleman of manly feeling and of moral refinement, who had had
+      glimpses of what is called "the inside" of politics; and, as he believed
+      these qualities would make participation in politics uncomfortable, he
+      abstained. To those of us who are wiser than he, who know that simple
+      honesty and public spirit and self-respect and contempt of sneaking and
+      fawning and bribery and crawling are the conditions of political
+      preferment, Irving, in not perceiving this, must naturally seem to be a
+      queer, wrong-headed, and rather super-celestial American, who had lived
+      too much in the heated atmosphere of European aristocracies and altogether
+      too little in the pure and bracing air of American ward politics and
+      caucuses and conventions. To use an old New York phrase, Irving preferred
+      to stroll and fish and chat with Rip Van Winkle rather than to "run wid
+      der machine".
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The <i>Sketch Book</i> made Irving famous, and with its predecessor, <i>Knickerbocker</i>,
+      and its successor, <i>Bracebridge Hall</i>, disclosed the essential
+      quality of his genius. But all these books performed another and greater
+      service than that of winning the world to read an American book: this was
+      the restoration of a kindlier feeling between the two countries which, by
+      all ties, should be the two most friendly countries on the globe. The
+      books were written when our old bitterness of feeling against England had
+      been renewed by the later war. In the thirty years since the Revolution
+      ended we had patriotically fostered the quarrel with John Bull. Our
+      domestic politics had turned largely upon that feeling, and the game of
+      French and English was played almost as fiercely upon our side of the
+      ocean as upon their own.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The great epoch of our extraordinary material development and prosperity
+      had not opened, and, even had John Bull been friendlier than he was, it
+      would have been the very flattery of falsehood had he complimented our
+      literature, our science, our art. Sydney Smith's question, "Who reads an
+      American book?" was contemptuous and exasperating. But here was an
+      American who wrote books which John Bull was delighted to read, and was
+      compelled to confess that they depicted-the most characteristic and
+      attractive aspects of his own life with more delicate grace than that of
+      any living Englishman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was Irving who recalled the old English Christmas. It was his cordial
+      and picturesque description of the great holiday of Christendom which
+      preceded and stimulated Dickens's <i>Christmas Carols</i> and Thackeray's
+      <i>Holiday Tales</i>. It was the genial spirit of Christmas, native to his
+      gentle heart and his happy temperament, which made Irving, as Thackeray
+      called him, a peacemaker between the mother-country and her proud and
+      sensitive offspring of the West. He showed John Bull that England is ours
+      as well as his.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Old fellow," he said, "you cannot help yourself. It is the same blood
+      that flows in our veins, the same language that we speak, the same
+      traditions that we cherish. If you love liberty, so do we; if you will see
+      fair play, so will we. It is natural to you, so it is to us. We cannot
+      escape our blood. Shakespeare is not your poet more than ours. If your
+      ancestors danced round the Maypole, so did our ancestors in your
+      ancestors' shoes. If Old England cherished Christmas and New England did
+      not, Bradford and Endicott and Cotton were Englishmen, not Americans. If
+      old English life and customs and traditions are dear to you, listen to my
+      story, and judge whether they are less dear to us." Then, with a merry
+      smile, the young stranger holds out his hand to John Bull, and exclaims,
+      "Behold, here is my arm! I bare it before your eyes, and here it is&mdash;it
+      is the strawberry-mark; come to my bosom, I am your long-lost brother."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was an incalculable service which Irving rendered in renewing a common
+      feeling between England and America. It was involuntary, because in
+      writing he had no such purpose. He was only following the bent of his own
+      taste, and his works reflected only his individual sympathies. But it was
+      this very fact&mdash;it was the English instinct in the American, the
+      appreciation native in the heart of the Western stranger of the true
+      poetic charm of England&mdash;which was the spell of the magician. Irving
+      had the same imaginative enthusiasm for traditional and poetic England
+      that Burke had for political England. Indeed, it is an England which never
+      actually existed except in the English and American imagination. The
+      coarse, mercenary, material England which Lecky photographs in his history
+      of the eighteenth century was the same England in which Burke lived, and
+      which his glowing imagination exalted into the magnificent image of
+      constitutional liberty before which he bowed his great head. So with the
+      old England that Irving drew. He saw with poetic fancy a rural Arcadia,
+      and reproduced the vision with airy grace and called it England. No wonder
+      that John Bull was delighted with an artist who could paint so fascinating
+      a picture, and write under it John Bull's portrait.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To change a word in Marvell's noble lines, when Irving was in England
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+ "He nothing common saw or mean
+  Upon that memorable scene."
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Only an American could have seen England as he described it, and invested
+      it with an enchantment which the mass of Englishmen had neither suspected
+      nor perceived. Irving's instinct was that of Hawthorne afterwards, who
+      called England "Our Old Home". There is a foolish American habit growing
+      patriotically out of our old contentions with England, and politically out
+      of our desire to conciliate the Irish vote in this country, of branding as
+      servile and un-American the natural susceptibility of people of English
+      descent, but natives of another land, to the charm of their ancestral
+      country. But the American is greatly to be pitied who thinks to prove the
+      purity of his patriotism by flouting the land in which he has a legitimate
+      right, the land of Alfred and Runnymede, of Chaucer and Shakespeare and
+      Milton, of Hampden and Cromwell, of Newton and Bunyan, of Somers and
+      Chatham and Edmund Burke, the cradle of constitutional liberty and
+      parliamentary government. If the great body of the literature of our
+      language in which we delight, if the sources of our law and politics, if
+      the great exploits of contemporary scholarship and science, are largely
+      beyond our boundaries, yet are legitimately ours as well as all that we
+      have ourselves achieved, why should we spurn any of our just and
+      hereditary share in the great English traditions of civilization and
+      freedom?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Irving returned to America in 1832, and here he afterwards remained,
+      except during his absence as minister in Spain. In an earlier visit to
+      that country he had felt the spell of its romantic history, and had
+      written the <i>Life of Columbus</i>, the <i>Conquest of Granada</i>, and
+      the <i>Chronicles of the Alhambra</i>. During all his later years he was
+      busy with his pen, and, while the modest author had risen to the chief
+      place in American literature, its later constellation was rising into the
+      heavens.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But his intrinsic modesty never disappeared either from the works or the
+      character of the benign writer. In the height of his renown there was no
+      kind of presumption or conceit in his simple and generous breast. Some
+      time after his return from his long absence in Europe, and before Putnam
+      became his publisher, Irving found some disinclination upon the part of
+      publishers to issue new editions of his books, and he expressed, with
+      entire good humor, the belief that he had had his day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is doubtless true, as <i>Blackwood</i> remarked, with what we may call
+      <i>Blackwood</i> courtesy, when Mr. Lowell was American minister in
+      England, that Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Addison, Pope, and so many more
+      "will not be replaced by Mr. Washington Irving and Mr. Lowell". But it is
+      equally true that, since Swift, <i>Blackwood</i> cannot find in English
+      literature political satire more trenchant, humorous, forcible, and
+      effective than the <i>Biglow Papers</i>, and nothing in Swift more
+      original. It is said that it is ludicrous to compare the mild humor of Rip
+      Van Winkle with the "robustious fun of Swift". But this is a curious
+      "derangement of epitaphs". Swift has wit, and satiric power, and burning
+      invective, and ribaldry, and caustic, scornful humor; but fun, in any just
+      sense, he has not. He is too fierce to be funny. The tender and
+      imaginative play of Rip Van Winkle are wholly beyond the reach of Swift.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Irving and other American writers are not the rivals of their British
+      associates in the literature of the English language&mdash;they are worthy
+      comrades. Wordsworth and Byron are not Shakespeare and Milton, but they
+      are nevertheless Wordsworth and Byron, and their place is secure. So the
+      brows of Irving and Cooper, of Bryant and Longfellow, and of Lowell, of
+      Emerson and Hawthorne do not crave the laurels of any other master. The
+      perturbed spirit of <i>Blackwood</i> may rest in the confident assurance
+      that no generous and intelligent student of our literature admires Gibbon
+      less because he enjoys Macaulay, or depreciates Bacon because he delights
+      in Emerson, or denies the sting of Gulliver because he feels the light
+      touch of Knickerbocker. It is with good fame as with true love:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  "True love in this differs from gold and clay,
+   That to divide is not to take away."
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      In the year that Irving published the <i>Sketch Book</i>, Cooper published
+      his first novel, and two years before Bryant's <i>Thanatopsis</i> had been
+      published. When, forty years afterwards, in the last year of his life, the
+      last volume of the <i>Life of Washington</i> was issued, Irving and Bryant
+      and Cooper were no longer the solitary chiefs of our literature. An
+      illustrious company had received the torch unextinguished from their hands&mdash;Whittier,
+      Hawthorne, Emerson, Longfellow, Holmes, Lowell, Bancroft, Prescott,
+      Motley, Parkman, Mrs. Stowe, had all taken their places, yet all gladly
+      and proudly acknowledged Irving as the patriarch. It is our happy fortune
+      that these names, of which we are all proud, are not those of men of
+      letters only, but of typical American citizens. The old traditions of the
+      literary life, the mad roystering, the dissipation, Grub Street, the
+      sponging-house, the bailiff, the garret, and the jail, genius that fawns
+      for place and flatters for hire, the golden talent wrapped in a napkin,
+      and often a dirty and ragged napkin, have vanished in our American annals
+      of letters. Pure, upright, faithful, industrious, honorable, and honored,
+      there is scarcely one American author of eminence who may not be counted
+      as a good and useful citizen of the Republic of the Union, and a shining
+      light of the Republic of Letters.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of Washington Irving, as of so many of this noble company, it is
+      especially true that the author was the man. The healthy fun and merry
+      satire of Diedrich Knickerbocker, the sweet humor and quick sympathy and
+      simple pathos of Geoffrey Crayon, were those of the modest master of
+      Sunnyside. Every literary man of Irving's time, whether old or young, had
+      nothing but affectionate praise of his artless urbanity and exhaustless
+      good-nature. These qualities are delightfully reflected in Thackeray's
+      stories of him in the <i>Roundabout Papers</i> upon Irving and Macaulay,
+      "the Goldsmith and the Gibbon of our time".
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "He came to one of my lectures in Washington," Thackeray says, "and the
+      retiring President, Mr. Fillmore, and his successor, Mr. Pierce, were
+      present. 'Two kings of Brentford smelling at one rose,' said Irving, with
+      his good-natured smile. In his little bower of a home at Sunnyside he was
+      always accessible. One English newspaper man came and introduced himself,
+      and partook of luncheon with the family, and, while the host fell into a
+      little doze, as was his habit, the wary Englishman took a swift inventory
+      of everything in the house, and served up the description to the British
+      public, including the nap of his entertainer. At another time, Irving
+      said, 'Two persons came to me, and one held me in conversation while the
+      other miscreant took my portrait.'" Thackeray tells these little stories
+      with admiring sympathy. His manly heart always grew tender over his
+      fellow-authors who had no acrid drop in their humor, and Irving's was as
+      sweet as dew.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is late for a fresh compliment to be paid to him, but the London <i>Spectator</i>
+      paid it in 1883, the year of his centenary, by saying, "Since the time of
+      Pope more than one hundred essayists have attempted to excel or to equal
+      the <i>Tatler</i> and <i>Spectator</i>. One alone, in a few of his best
+      efforts, may be said to have rivalled them, and he is Washington Irving."
+      The <i>Spectator</i> adds that one has surpassed them, "the incomparable
+      Elia".
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Irving's temperament, however, was much more congenial with that of the
+      early essayists than Charles Lamb's, and his pictures of English country
+      life in <i>Bracebridge Hall</i> have just the delicate, imaginative touch
+      of the sketches of Sir Roger de Coverley. But in treating distinctively
+      English topics, however airy and vivid his touch may be, Irving is
+      manifestly enthralled by his admiration for the literary masters of the
+      Anne time, and by the spirit of their writing. It is in the Knickerbocker
+      world that he is characteristically at home. Indeed, it is his humorous
+      and graphic fancy more than the sober veracity of history which has given
+      popular and perpetual form to the early life of New York, and it is Irving
+      who has enriched it with romantic tradition such as suffuses the story of
+      no other State.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The bay, the river, the city, the Kaatskill Mountains, as Choate said of
+      Faneuil Hall and Webster, breathe and burn of him. He has charmed the
+      Hudson with a peculiar spell. The quaint life of its old Dutch villages,
+      the droll legend of Sleepy Hollow, the pathetic fate of Rip Van Winkle,
+      the drowsy wisdom of Communipaw, the marvellous municipality of New
+      Amsterdam, and the Nose of Anthony guarding the Highlands, with the myriad
+      sly and graphic allusions and descriptions strewn all through his books,
+      have made the river Irving's river, and the state Irving's state, and the
+      city Irving's city, so that the first instinctive question of every lover
+      of Irving from beyond the state, as he enters Central Park and beholds its
+      memorial statues, is, "Where is the statue of Irving?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Unhappily, echo, and not the park guide-book, answers. There is, indeed, a
+      bust, and, in a general sense, "Si monumentum" may serve for a reply. From
+      that point of view, indeed, Westminster Abbey, as the monument of English
+      heroes in letters and arms, in the Church and the State, would be
+      superfluous. But the abbey is a shrine of pilgrimage because of the very
+      fact that it is the burial-place of famous Englishmen. The Central Park,
+      in New York, is already a Walhalla of famous men, and the statue that
+      would first suggest itself as peculiarly fitting for the Park is of the
+      New-Yorker who first made New York distinctively famous in literature&mdash;the
+      New-Yorker whose kindly genius first made American literature respected by
+      the world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Reversing the question, "Where be the bad people buried?" the wondering
+      pilgrim in the Park asks, "Where be Irving and Bryant and Cooper?" They
+      were not Americans only, but, by birth or choice, New-Yorkers, and the
+      three distinctive figures of our early literature. It was very touching to
+      see the venerable Bryant, in the soft May sunshine, when the statue of
+      Halleck was unveiled, standing with bare head and speaking of his old
+      friend and comrade. But who that listened could not see, through tender
+      mists of years, the grave and reverend form of the speaker himself,
+      transformed to marble or bronze, sitting serene forever beneath the
+      shadowing trees, side by side with the poet of Faust and the worshipper of
+      Highland Mary?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But Bryant would have been the first to name Washington Irving as the most
+      renowned distinctively American man of letters whose figure, reproduced
+      characteristically and with simple quaintness, should decorate the Park.
+      To a statue of Washington Irving all the gates should open, as every heart
+      would open, in welcome. That half-humorous turn of the head and almost the
+      twinkling eye, that brisk and jaunty air, that springing step, that modest
+      and gentle and benign presence, all these could be suggested by the
+      artist, and in their happy combination the pleased loiterer would perceive
+      old Diedrich Knickerbocker and the summer dreamer of the Hudson legends,
+      the charming biographer of Columbus and of Goldsmith, the cheerful gossip
+      of Wolfert's Roost, and the mellow and courteous Geoffrey Crayon, who
+      first taught incredulous Europe that beyond the sea there were men also,
+      and that at last all the world must read an American book.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Irving was seventy-six years old when he died, late in 1859. Born in the
+      year in which the Revolution ended, he died on the eve of the civil war.
+      His life exactly covered the period during which the American republic was
+      an experiment. It ended just as the invincible power of free institutions
+      was to be finally demonstrated. His life had been one of singular
+      happiness, both of temperament and circumstance. His nature was too simple
+      and gentle to breed rivalries or to tolerate animosities. Through the
+      sharpest struggles of our politics he passed without bitterness of feeling
+      and with universal respect, and his eyes happily closed before seeing a
+      civil war which, although the most righteous of all wars, would have
+      broken his heart. The country was proud of him: the older authors knew in
+      him not a rival, but a friend, the younger loved him as a father. Such
+      love, I think, is better than fame. On the day of his burial in the ground
+      overlooking the Hudson and the valley of Sleepy Hollow, unable to reach
+      Tarrytown in time for the funeral, I came down the shore of the river
+      which he loved and immortalized. As the train hastened and wound along, I
+      saw the Catskills draped in autumnal mist, not concealing, but irradiating
+      them with lingering and pathetic splendor. Far away towards the south the
+      river-bank on which his home lay was Sunnyside still, for the sky was
+      cloudless and soft with serene sunshine. I could not but remember his last
+      words to me, more than a year before, when his book was finished and his
+      health was failing: "I am getting ready to go; I am shutting up my doors
+      and windows", and I could not but feel that they were all open now, and
+      bright with the light of eternal morning.
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 6em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
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+Project Gutenberg's Literary and Social Essays, by George William Curtis
+
+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: Literary and Social Essays
+
+Author: George William Curtis
+
+
+Release Date: May, 2005  [EBook #8108]
+This file was first posted on June 15, 2003
+Last Updated: May 27, 2013
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LITERARY AND SOCIAL ESSAYS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Eric Eldred, Marc D'Hooghe, Charles Franks,
+and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+LITERARY AND SOCIAL ESSAYS
+
+By George William Curtis
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+EMERSON _Homes of American Authors, 1854._
+
+HAWTHORNE _Homes of American Authors, 1854._
+
+THE WORKS OF NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE _North American Review_, Vol. XCIX.,
+1864.
+
+RACHEL _Putnam's Magazine_, Vol. VI., 1855.
+
+THACKERAY IN AMERICA _Putnam's Magazine_, Vol. I., 1853.
+
+SIR PHILIP SIDNEY Hitherto unpublished. Written in 1857.
+
+LONGFELLOW HARPER'S MAGAZINE, Vol. LXV., 1882.
+
+OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES HARPER'S MAGAZINE, Vol. LXXXIII., 1891.
+
+WASHINGTON IRVING Read at Ashfield, 1889. Printed by the Grolier Club,
+1892.
+
+
+
+
+EMERSON
+
+
+The village of Concord, Massachusetts, lies an hour's ride from Boston,
+upon the Great Northern Railway. It is one of those quiet New England
+towns, whose few white houses, grouped upon the plain, make but a slight
+impression upon the mind of the busy traveller hurrying to or from the
+city. As the conductor shouts "Concord!" the busy traveller has scarcely
+time to recall "Concord, Lexington, and Bunker Hill" before the town has
+vanished and he is darting through woods and fields as solitary as those
+he has just left in New Hampshire. Yet as it vanishes he may chance to
+"see" two or three spires, and as they rush behind the trees his eyes
+fall upon a gleaming sheet of water. It is Walden Pond--or Walden Water,
+as Orphic Alcott used to call it--whose virgin seclusion was a
+just image of that of the little village, until one afternoon, some
+half-dozen or more years since, a shriek, sharper than any that had
+rung from Walden woods since the last war-whoop of the last Indians
+of Musketaquid, announced to astonished Concord, drowsing in the river
+meadows, that the nineteenth century had overtaken it. Yet long before
+the material force of the age bound the town to the rest of the world,
+the spiritual force of a single mind in it had attracted attention to
+it, and made its lonely plains as dear to many widely scattered minds as
+the groves of the Academy or the vineyards of Vaucluse.
+
+Except in causing the erection of the railway buildings and several
+dwellings near it, steam has not much changed Concord. It is yet one of
+the quiet country towns whose charm is incredible to all but those who,
+by loving it, have found it worthy of love. The shire-town of the great
+agricultural county of Middlesex, it is not disturbed by the feverish
+throb of factories, nor by any roar of inexorable toil but the few puffs
+of the locomotive. One day, during the autumn, it is thronged with
+the neighboring farmers, who hold their high festival--the annual
+cattle-show--there. But the calm tenor of Concord life is not varied,
+even on that day, by anything more exciting than fat oxen and the
+cud-chewing eloquence of the agricultural dinner. The population of the
+region is composed of sturdy, sterling men, worthy representatives of
+the ancestors who sowed along the Concord shores, with their seed-corn
+and rye, the germs of a prodigious national greatness. At intervals
+every day the rattle, roar, and whistle of the swift shuttle darting to
+and from the metropolitan heart of New England, weaving prosperity upon
+the land, remind those farmers in their silent fields that the great
+world yet wags and wrestles. And the farmer-boy--sweeping with flashing
+scythe through the river meadows, whose coarse grass glitters, apt for
+mowing, in the early June morning--pauses as the whistle dies into the
+distance, and, wiping his brow and whetting his blade anew, questions
+the country-smitten citizen, the amateur Corydon struggling with
+imperfect stroke behind him, of the mystic romance of city life.
+
+The sluggish repose of the little river images the farmer-boy's life. He
+bullies his oxen, and trembles at the locomotive. His wonder and fancy
+stretch towards the great world beyond the barn-yard and the village
+church as the torpid stream tends towards the ocean. The river, in
+fact, seems the thread upon which all the beads of that rustic life
+are strung--the clew to its tranquil character. If it were an impetuous
+stream, dashing along as if it claimed and required the career to
+which every American river is entitled, a career it would have. Wheels,
+factories, shops, traders, factory-girls, boards of directors, dreary
+white lines of boarding-houses, all the signs that indicate the spirit
+of the age, and of the American age, would arise upon its margin.
+Some shaven magician from State Street would run up by rail, and, from
+proposals, maps, schedules of stock, etc., educe a spacious factory as
+easily as Aladdin's palace arose from nothing. Instead of a dreaming,
+pastoral poet of a village, Concord would be a rushing, whirling,
+bustling manufacturer of a town, like its thrifty neighbor Lowell.
+Many a fine equipage, flashing along city ways--many an
+Elizabethan-Gothic-Grecian rural retreat, in which State Street woos Pan
+and grows Arcadian in summer, would be reduced, in the last analysis,
+to the Concord mills. Yet if these broad river meadows grew factories
+instead of corn, they might perhaps lack another harvest, of which the
+poet's thought is the sickle.
+
+  "One harvest from your field
+     Homeward brought the oxen strong.
+   Another crop your acres yield,
+     Which I gather in a song,"
+
+sings Emerson, and again, as the afternoon light strikes pensive across
+his memory, as over the fields below him:
+
+  "Knows he who tills this lonely field,
+     To reap its scanty corn,
+   What mystic crops his acres yield,
+     At midnight and at morn?"
+
+The Concord River, upon whose winding shores the town has scattered its
+few houses--as if, loitering over the plain some fervent day, it had
+fallen asleep obedient to the slumberous spell, and had not since
+awakened--is a languid, shallow stream, that loiters through broad
+meadows, which fringe it with rushes and long grasses. Its sluggish
+current scarcely moves the autumn leaves showered upon it by a few
+maples that lean over the Assabet--as one of its branches is named.
+Yellow lily-buds and leathery lily-pads tessellate its surface, and the
+white water-lilies--pale, proud Ladies of Shalott--bare their virgin
+breasts to the sun in the seclusion of its distant reaches. Clustering
+vines of wild grape hang its wooded shores with a tapestry of the South
+and the Rhine. The pickerel-weed marks with blue spikes of flowers
+the points where small tributary brooks flow in, and along the dusky
+windings of those brooks cardinal-flowers with a scarlet splendor
+paint the tropics upon New England green. All summer long, from founts
+unknown, in the upper counties, from some anonymous pond or wooded
+hillside moist with springs, steals the gentle river through the plain,
+spreading at one point above the town into a little lake, called by the
+farmers "Fairhaven Bay", as if all its lesser names must share the
+sunny significance of Concord. Then, shrinking again, alarmed at its own
+boldness, it dreams on towards the Merrimac and the sea.
+
+The absence of factories has already implied its shallowness and
+slowness. In truth it is a very slow river, belonging much more to the
+Indian than to the Yankee; so much so, indeed, that until within a very
+few years there was an annual visit to its shores from a few sad heirs
+of its old masters, who pitched a group of tents in the meadows, and
+wove their tidy baskets and strung their beads in unsmiling silence. It
+was the same thing that I saw in Jerusalem among the Jews. Every Friday
+they repair to the remains of the old temple wall, and pray and wail,
+kneeling upon the pavement and kissing the stones. But that passionate
+Oriental regret was not more impressive than this silent homage of a
+waning race, who, as they beheld the unchanged river, knew that, unlike
+it, the last drops of their existence were gradually flowing away, and
+that for their tribes there shall be no ingathering.
+
+So shallow is the stream that the amateur Corydons who embark at morning
+to explore its remoter shores will, not infrequently in midsummer, find
+their boat as suddenly tranquil and motionless as the river, having
+placidly grounded upon its oozy bottom. Or, returning at evening, they
+may lean over the edge as they lie at length in the boat, and float
+with the almost imperceptible current, brushing the tips of the long
+water-grass and reeds below them in the stream--a river jungle, in which
+lurk pickerel and trout--with the sensation of a bird drifting upon
+soft evening air over the tree-tops. No available or profitable craft
+navigate these waters, and animated gentlemen from the city who run up
+for "a mouthful of fresh air" cannot possibly detect the final cause of
+such a river. Yet the dreaming idler has a place on maps and a name in
+history.
+
+Near the town it is crossed by three or four bridges. One is a massive
+structure to help the railroad over. The stern, strong pile readily
+betrays that it is part of good, solid stock, owned in the right
+quarter. Close by it is a little arched stone bridge, auxiliary to a
+great road leading to some vague region of the world called Acton upon
+guide-posts and on maps. Just beyond these bridges the river bends and
+forgets the railroad, but it is grateful to the graceful arch of the
+little stone bridge for making its curve more picturesque, and, as it
+muses towards the Old Manse, listlessly brushing the lilies, it wonders
+if Ellery Channing, who lives beyond, upon a hill-side sloping to the
+shore, wrote his poem of "The Bridge" to that particular one. There
+are two or three wooden bridges also, always combining well with the
+landscape, always making and suggesting pictures.
+
+The Concord, as I said, has a name in history. Near one of the wooden
+bridges you turn aside from the main road, close by the Old Mause--whose
+mosses of mystic hue were gathered by Hawthorne, who lived there for
+three years--and a few steps bring you to the river and to a small
+monument upon its brink. It is a narrow, grassy way; not a field nor a
+meadow, but of that shape and character which would perplex the animated
+stranger from the city, who would see, also, its unfitness for a
+building-lot. The narrow, grassy way is the old road, which in the month
+of April, 1775, led to a bridge that crossed the stream at this spot.
+And upon the river's margin, upon the bridge and the shore beyond, took
+place the sharp struggle between the Middlesex farmers and the scarlet
+British soldiers known in tradition as "Concord fight". The small
+monument records the day and the event. When it was erected Emerson
+wrote the following hymn for the ceremony:
+
+APRIL 19, 1836.
+
+ "By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
+    Their flag to April's breeze unfurled,
+  Here once the embattled farmers stood,
+    And fired the shot heard round the world.
+
+ "The foe long since in silence slept;
+    Alike the conqueror silent sleeps;
+  And Time the ruined bridge has swept
+    Down the dark stream that seaward creeps.
+
+ "On this green bank, by this soft stream,
+    We see to-day a votive stone,
+  That memory may their deed redeem,
+    When, like our sires, our sons are gone.
+
+ "Spirit that made these heroes dare
+    To die, or leave their children free,
+  Bid Time and Nature gently spare
+    The shaft we raise to them and Thee."
+
+Close under the rough stone wall at the left, which separates it from
+the little grassy orchard of the Manse, is a small mound of turf and a
+broken stone. Grave and headstone shrink from sight amid the grass and
+under the wall, but they mark the earthly bed of the first victims of
+that first fight. A few large trees overhang the ground, which Hawthorne
+thinks have been planted since that day, and he says that in the river
+he has seen mossy timbers of the old bridge, and on the farther bank,
+half hidden, the crumbling stone abutments that supported it. In an old
+house upon the main road, nearly opposite the entrance to this grassy
+way, I knew a hale old woman who well remembered the gay advance of the
+flashing soldiers, the terrible ring and crack of fire-arms, and the
+panic-stricken retreat of the regulars, blackened and bloody. But the
+placid river has long since overborne it all. The alarm, the struggle,
+the retreat, are swallowed up in its supreme tranquillity. The summers
+of more than seventy years have obliterated every trace of the road
+with thick grass, which seeks to bury the graves, as earth buried the
+victims. Let the sweet ministry of summer avail. Let its mild iteration
+even sap the monument and conceal its stones as it hides the abutment in
+foliage; for, still on the sunny slopes, white with the May blossoming
+of apple-orchards, and in the broad fields, golden to the marge of
+the river, and tilled in security and peace, survives the imperishable
+remembrance of that day and its results.
+
+The river is thus the main feature of the Concord landscape. It is
+surrounded by a wide plain, from which rise only three or four low
+hills. One is a wooded cliff over Fairhaven Bay, a mile from the town;
+one separates the main river from the Assabeth; and just beyond the
+battle-ground one rises, rich with orchards, to a fine wood which crowns
+it. The river meadows blend with broad, lonely fields. A wide horizon,
+like that of the prairie or the sea, is the grand charm of Concord. At
+night the stars are seen from the roads crossing the plain, as from a
+ship at sea. The landscape would be called tame by those who think
+no scenery grand but that of mountains or the sea-coast. But the wide
+solitude of that region is not so accounted by those who live there. To
+them it is rich and suggestive, as Emerson shows, by saying in the essay
+upon "Nature", "My house stands in low land, with limited outlook, and
+on the skirt of the village. But I go with my friend to the shore of
+our little river, and with one stroke of the paddle I leave the
+village politics and personalities, yes, and the world of villages
+and personalities behind, and pass into a delicate realm of sunset and
+moonlight, too bright almost for spotted man to enter without novitiate
+and probation. We penetrate bodily this incredible beauty; we dip our
+hands in this painted element; our eyes are bathed in these lights and
+forms. A holiday, a villeggiatura, a royal-revel, the proudest, most
+heart-rejoicing festival that valor and beauty, power and taste ever
+decked and enjoyed, establishes itself upon the instant". And again, as
+indicating where the true charm of scenery lies: "In every landscape the
+point to astonishment is the meeting of the sky and the earth, and
+that is seen from the first hillock, as well as from the top of the
+Alleghanies. The stars stoop down over the brownest, homeliest common,
+with all the spiritual magnificence which they shed on the Campagna or
+on the marble deserts of Egypt." He is speaking here, of course, of the
+spiritual excitement of Beauty, which crops up everywhere in nature,
+like gold in a rich region; but the quality of the imagery indicates the
+character of the scenery in which the essay was written.
+
+Concord is too far from Boston to rival in garden cultivation its
+neighbors, West Cambridge, Lexington, and Waltham; nor can it boast,
+with Brookline, Dorchester, and Cambridge, the handsome summer homes of
+city wealth. But it surpasses them all, perhaps, in a genuine country
+freshness and feeling, derived from its loneliness. If not touched by
+city elegance, neither is it infected by city meretriciousness; it is
+sweet, wholesome country. By climbing one of the hills, your eye sweeps
+a wide, wide landscape, until it rests upon graceful Wachuset, or,
+farther and mistier, Moriadnoc, the lofty outpost of New Hampshire
+hills. Level scenery is not tame. The ocean, the prairie, the desert,
+are not tame, although of monotonous surface. The gentle undulations
+which mark certain scenes--a rippling landscape, in which all sense of
+space, of breadth, and of height is lost--that is tame. It may be made
+beautiful by exquisite cultivation, as it often is in England and on
+parts of the Hudson shores, but it is, at best, rather pleasing than
+inspiring. For a permanent view the eye craves large and simple forms,
+as the body requires plain food for its best nourishment.
+
+The town of Concord is built mainly upon one side of the river. In
+its centre is a large open square, shaded by fine elms. A white wooden
+church, in the most classical style of Yankee-Greek, stands upon
+the square. The Court-house is upon one of the corners. In the old
+Courthouse, in the days when I knew Concord, many conventions were
+held for humane as well as merely political objects. One summer day I
+especially remember, when I did not envy Athens its forum, for Emerson
+and William Henry Channing spoke. In the speech of both burned the
+sacred fire of eloquence, but in Emerson it was light, and in Channing
+heat.
+
+From this square diverge four roads, like highways from a forum. One
+leads by the Courthouse and under stately sycamores to the Old Manse and
+the battle-ground, another goes directly to the river, and a third is
+the main avenue of the town. After passing the shops this third divides,
+and one branch forms a fair and noble street, spaciously and loftily
+arched with elms, the houses standing liberally apart, each with its
+garden-plot in front. The fourth avenue is the old Boston road, also
+dividing, at the edge of the village, into the direct route to the
+metropolis and the Lexington turnpike.
+
+The house of Mr. Emerson stands opposite this junction. It is a plain,
+square white dwelling-house, yet it has a city air and could not
+be mistaken for a farm-house. A quiet merchant, you would say,
+unostentatious and simple, has here hidden himself from town. But a
+thick grove of pine and fir trees, almost brushing the two windows upon
+the right of the door, and occupying the space between them and the
+road, suggests at least a peculiar taste in the retired merchant, or
+hints the possibility that he may have sold his place to a poet or
+philosopher--or to some old East India sea-captain, perhaps, who
+cannot sleep without the sound of waves, and so plants pines to rustle,
+surf-like, against his chamber window.
+
+The fact, strangely enough, partly supports your theory. In the year
+1828 Charles Coolidge, a brother of J. Templeman Coolidge, a merchant of
+repute in Boston and grandson of Joseph Coolidge, a patriarchal denizen
+of Bowdoin Square in that city, came to Concord and built this house.
+Gratefully remembering the lofty horse-chestnuts which shaded the city
+square, and which, perhaps, first inspired him with the wish to be a
+nearer neighbor of woods and fields, he planted a row of them along his
+lot, which this year ripen their twenty-fifth harvest. With the liberal
+hospitality of a New England merchant he did not forget the spacious
+cellars of the city, and, as Mr. Emerson writes, "he built the only good
+cellar that had then been built in Concord".
+
+Mr. Emerson bought the house in the year 1835. He found it a plain,
+convenient, and thoroughly built country residence. An amiable neighbor
+of Mr. Coolidge had placed a miserable old barn irregularly upon the
+edge of that gentleman's lot, which, for the sake of comeliness, he was
+forced to buy and set straight and smooth into a decent dependence of
+the mansion house. The estate, upon passing into Mr. Emerson's hands,
+comprised the house, barn, and two acres of land. He has enlarged house
+and barn, and the two acres have grown to nine. Our author is no farmer,
+except as every country gentleman is, yet the kindly slope from the
+rear of the house to a little brook, which, passing to the calm Concord
+beyond, washes the edge of his land, yields him at least occasional
+beans and pease--or some friend, agriculturally enthusiastic and
+an original Brook-Farmer, experiments with guano in the garden, and
+produces melons and other vines with a success that relieves Brook Farm
+from every slur of inadequate practical genius. Mr. Emerson has shaded
+his originally bare land with trees, and counts near a hundred apple and
+pear trees in his orchard. The whole estate is quite level, inclining
+only towards the little brook, and is well watered and convenient.
+
+The Orphic Alcott--or Plato Skimpole, as Aspasia called him--well known
+in the transcendental history of New England, designed and with his own
+hands erected a summer-house, which gracefully adorns the lawn, if I may
+so call the smooth grass-plot at the side of the house. Unhappily, this
+edifice promises no longer duration, not being "technically based and
+pointed". This is not a strange, although a disagreeable fact, to Mr.
+Emerson, who has been always the most faithful and appreciative of the
+lovers of Mr. Alcott. It is natural that the Orphic Alcott should build
+graceful summer-houses. There are even people who declare that he has
+covered the pleasant but somewhat misty lawns of ethical speculation
+with a thousand such edifices, which need only to be a little more
+"technically based and pointed" to be quite perfect. At present they
+whisper, the wind blows clean through them, and no figures of flesh and
+blood are ever seen there, but only pallid phantoms with large, calm
+eyes, eating uncooked grain, out of baskets, and discoursing in a
+sublime shibboleth of which mortals have no key. But how could Plato
+Skimpole, who goes down to Hingham on the sea, in a New England January,
+clad only in a suit of linen, hope to build immortal summer-houses?
+
+Mr. Emerson's library is the room at the right of the door upon entering
+the house. It is a simple square room, not walled with books like the
+den of a literary grub, nor merely elegant like the ornamental retreat
+of a dilettante. The books are arranged upon plain shelves, not
+in architectural bookcases, and the room is hung with a few choice
+engravings of the greatest men. There was a fair copy of Michael
+Angelo's "Fates", which, properly enough, imparted that grave serenity
+to the ornament of the room which is always apparent in what is
+written there. It is the study of a scholar. All our author's published
+writings, the essays, orations, and poems, date from this room, as much
+as they date from any place or moment. The villagers, indeed, fancy
+their philosophical contemporary affected by the novelist James's
+constancy of composition. They relate, with wide eyes, that he has
+a huge manuscript book, in which he incessantly records the ends of
+thoughts, bits of observation and experience, and facts of all kinds--a
+kind of intellectual and scientific ragbag, into which all shreds and
+remnants of conversations and reminiscences of wayside reveries are
+incontinently thrust. This work goes on, they aver, day and night, and
+when he travels the rag-bag travels too, and grows more plethoric
+with each mile of the journey. And a story, which will one day be a
+tradition, is perpetuated in the village, that one night, before his
+wife had become completely accustomed to his habits, she awoke suddenly,
+and hearing him groping about the room, inquired anxiously,
+
+"My dear, are you unwell?"
+
+"No, my love, only an idea."
+
+The library is not only the study of a scholar, it is the bower of a
+poet. The pines lean against the windows, and to the student deeply sunk
+in learned lore or soaring upon the daring speculations of an intrepid
+philosophy, they whisper a secret beyond that of the philosopher's
+stone, and sing of the springs of poetry.
+
+The site of the house is not memorable. There is no reasonable ground to
+suppose that so much as an Indian wigwam ever occupied the spot; nor has
+Henry Thoreau, a very faithful friend of Mr. Emerson's and of the woods
+and waters of his native Concord, ever found an Indian arrowhead upon
+the premises. Henry Thoreau's instinct is as sure towards the facts of
+nature as the witch-hazel towards treasure. If every quiet country town
+in New England had a son who, with a lore like Selborne's and an eye
+like Buffon's, had watched and studied its landscape and history, and
+then published the result, as Thoreau has done, in a book as redolent of
+genuine and perceptive sympathy with nature as a clover-field of honey,
+New England would seem as poetic and beautiful as Greece. Thoreau lives
+in the berry pastures upon a bank over Walden Pond, and in a little
+house of his own building. One pleasant summer afternoon a small party
+of us helped him raise it--a bit of life as Arcadian as any at Brook
+Farm. Elsewhere in the village he turns up arrowheads abundantly,
+and Hawthorne mentions that Thoreau initiated him into the mystery of
+finding them. But neither the Indians nor nature nor Thoreau can invest
+the quiet residence of our author with the dignity or even the suspicion
+of a legend. History stops short in that direction with Charles
+Coolidge, Esq., and the year 1828.
+
+There is little prospect from the house. Directly opposite a low bluff
+overhangs the Boston road and obstructs the view. Upon the other
+sides the level land stretches away. Towards Lexington it is a broad,
+half-marshy region, and between the brook behind and the river good
+farms lie upon the outskirts of the town. Pilgrims drawn to Concord by
+the desire of conversing with the man whose written or spoken eloquence
+has so profoundly charmed them, and who have placed him in some pavilion
+of fancy, some peculiar residence, find him in no porch of philosophy
+nor academic grove, but in a plain white house by the wayside, ready
+to entertain every comer as an ambassador from some remote Cathay of
+speculation whence the stars are more nearly seen. But the familiar
+reader of our author will not be surprised to find the "walking
+eye-ball" simply sheltered, and the "endless experimenter with no past
+at my back" housed without ornament. Such a reader will have felt the
+Spartan severity of this intellect, and have noticed that the realm of
+this imagination is rather sculpturesque than pictorial, more Greek than
+Italian. Therefore he will be pleased to alight at the little gate, and
+hear the breezy welcome of the pines and the no less cordial salutation
+of their owner. For if the visitor knows what he is about, he has come
+to this plain for bracing mountain air. These serious Concord reaches
+are no vale of Cashmere. Where Plato Skimpole is architect of the
+summer-house, you may imagine what is to be expected in the mansion
+itself. It is always morning within those doors. If you have nothing
+to say, if you are really not an envoy from some kingdom or colony of
+thought and cannot cast a gem upon the heaped pile, you had better pass
+by upon the other side. For it is the peculiarity of Emerson's mind to
+be always on the alert. He eats no lotus, but for-ever quaffs the waters
+which engender immortal thirst.
+
+If the memorabilia of his house could find their proper Xenophon, the
+want of antecedent arrowheads upon the premises would not prove very
+disastrous to the interest of the history. The fame of the philosopher
+attracts admiring friends and enthusiasts from every quarter, and
+the scholarly grace and urbane hospitality of the gentleman send them
+charmed away. Friendly foes, who altogether differ from Emerson, come to
+break a lance with him upon the level pastures of Concord, with all the
+cheerful and appreciative zeal of those who longed
+
+ "To drink delight of battle with their peers
+  Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy."
+
+It is not hazardous to say that the greatest questions of our day and
+of all days have been nowhere more amply discussed, with more poetic
+insight or profound conviction, than in the comely, square white house
+upon the edge of the Lexington turnpike. There have even been attempts
+at something more formal and club-like than the chance conversations of
+occasional guests, one of which will certainly be nowhere recorded but
+upon these pages.
+
+It was in the year 1845 that a circle of persons of various ages, and
+differing very much in everything but sympathy, found themselves in
+Concord. Towards the end of the autumn Mr. Emerson suggested that they
+should meet every Monday evening through the winter in his library.
+"Monsieur Aubepine", "Miles Coverdale", and other phantoms, since
+generally known as Nathaniel Hawthorne, who then occupied the Old Manse;
+the inflexible Henry Thoreau, a scholastic and pastoral Orson, then
+living among the blackberry pastures of Walden Pond; Plato Skimpole,
+then sublimely meditating impossible summer-houses in a little house
+upon the Boston road; the enthusiastic agriculturist and Brook-Farmer
+already mentioned, then an inmate of Mr. Emerson's house, who added
+the genial cultivation of a scholar to the amenities of the natural
+gentleman; a sturdy farmer neighbor, who had bravely fought his weary
+way through inherited embarrassments to the small success of a New
+England husbandman, and whose faithful wife had seven times merited well
+of her country; two city youths, ready for the fragments from the feast
+of wit and wisdom; and the host himself, composed this club. Ellery
+Channing, who had that winter harnessed his Pegasus to the New York
+_Tribune_, was a kind of corresponding member. The news of this world
+was to be transmitted through his eminently practical genius, as the
+club deemed itself competent to take charge of tidings from all other
+spheres.
+
+I went, the first Monday evening, very much as Ixion may have gone
+to his banquet. The philosophers sat dignified and erect. There was a
+constrained but very amiable silence, which had the impertinence of a
+tacit inquiry, seeming to ask, "Who will now proceed to say the
+finest thing that has ever been said?" It was quite involuntary and
+unavoidable, for the members lacked that fluent social genius without
+which a club is impossible. It was a congress of oracles on the one
+hand, and of curious listeners upon the other. I vaguely remember that
+the Orphic Alcott invaded the Sahara of silence with a solemn "saying",
+to which, after due pause, the honorable member for blackberry pastures
+responded by some keen and graphic observation; while the Olympian host,
+anxious that so much good material should be spun into something, beamed
+smiling encouragement upon all parties. But the conversation became more
+and more staccato. Miles Coverdale, a statue of night and silence, sat,
+a little removed, under a portrait of Dante, gazing imperturbably upon
+the group; and as he sat in the shadow, his dark hair and eyes and suit
+of sables made him, in that society, the black thread of mystery
+which he weaves into his stories, while the shifting presence of the
+Brook-Farmer played like heat-lightning around the room.
+
+I recall little else but a grave eating of russet apples by the erect
+philosophers, and a solemn disappearance into night. The club struggled
+through three Monday evenings. Plato was perpetually putting apples of
+gold in pictures of silver; for such was the rich ore of his thoughts,
+coined by the deep melody of his voice. Orson charmed us with the
+secrets won from his interviews with Pan in the Walden woods; while
+Emerson, with the zeal of an engineer trying to dam wild waters, sought
+to bind the wide-flying embroidery of discourse into a web of clear
+sweet sense. But still in vain. The oracular sayings were the unalloyed
+saccharine element; and every chemist knows how much else goes to
+practical food--how much coarse, rough, woody fibre is essential. The
+club struggled on valiantly, discoursing celestially, eating apples,
+and disappearing in the dark, until the third evening it vanished
+altogether. But I have since known clubs of fifty times its number,
+whose collective genius was not more than that of either one of the
+Dii Majores of our Concord coterie. The fault was its too great
+concentration. It was not relaxation, as a club should be, but tension.
+Society is a play, a game, a tournament; not a battle. It is the easy
+grace of undress; not an intellectual full-dress parade.
+
+I have already hinted this unbending intellectual alacrity of our
+author. His sport is serious--his humor is earnest. He stands like a
+sentinel. His look and manner and habit of thought cry "Who goes there?"
+and if he does not hear the countersign, he brings the intruder to
+a halt. It is for this surprising fidelity and integrity that his
+influence has been so deep and sure and permanent upon the intellectual
+life of the young men of New England; and of old England, too, where, in
+Manchester, there were regular weekly meetings at which his works were
+read. What he said long ago in his preface to the American edition of
+Carlyle's _Miscellanies_, that they were papers which had spoken to the
+young men of the time "with an emphasis that hindered them from sleep",
+is strikingly true of his own writings. His first slim, anonymous
+duodecimo, _Nature_, was as fair and fascinating to the royal young
+minds who met it in the course of their reading, as Egeria to Numa
+wandering in the grove. The essays, orations, and poems followed,
+developing and elaborating the same spiritual and heroic philosophy,
+applying it to life, history, and literature, with a vigor and richness
+so supreme that not only do many account him our truest philosopher, but
+others acknowledge him as our most characteristic poet.
+
+It would be a curious inquiry how much and what kind of influence the
+placid scenery of Concord has exercised upon his mind. "I chide society,
+I embrace solitude," he says; "and yet I am not so ungrateful as not
+to see the wise, the lovely, and the noble-minded, as from time to time
+they pass my gate." It is not difficult to understand his fondness for
+the spot. He has been always familiar with it, always more or less a
+resident of the village. Born in Boston upon the spot where the Chauncey
+Place Church now stands, part of his youth was passed in the Old Manse,
+which was built by his grandfather and in which his father was born; and
+there he wrote _Nature_. From the magnificent admiration of ancestral
+England he was glad to return two years since to quiet Concord and to
+acres which will not yield a single arrowhead. The Swiss sigh for their
+mountains; but the Nubians, also, pine for their desert plains. Those
+who are born by the sea long annually to return and to rest their eyes
+upon its living horizon. Is it because the earliest impressions, made
+when the mind is most plastic, are most durable? or because youth is
+that golden age bounding the confines of memory and floating forever--an
+alluring mirage as we recede farther from it?
+
+The imagination of the man who roams the solitary pastures of Concord,
+or floats, dreaming, down its river, will easily see its landscape upon
+Emerson's pages. "That country is fairest," he says, "which is inhabited
+by the noblest minds". And although that idler upon the river may have
+leaned over the Mediterranean from Genoese and Neapolitan villas, or
+have glanced down the steep green valley of Sicilian Enna, seeking
+"herself the fairest flower", or walked the shores where Cleopatra and
+Helen walked, yet the charm of a landscape which is felt rather than
+seen will be imperishable. "Travelling is a fool's paradise," says
+Emerson. But he passed its gates to learn that lesson. His writings,
+however, have no imported air. If there be something Oriental in his
+philosophy and tropical in his imagination, they have yet the strong
+flavor of his mother earth--the underived sweetness of the open Concord
+sky, and the spacious breadth of the Concord horizon.
+
+
+
+
+HAWTHORNE
+
+
+Hawthorne has himself drawn the picture of the Old Manse in Concord. He
+has given to it that quiet richness of coloring which ideally belongs
+to an old country mansion. It seemed so fitting a residence for one
+who loves to explore the twilight of antiquity--and the gloomier
+the better--that the visitor, among the felicities of whose life was
+included the freedom of the Manse, could not but fancy that our author's
+eyes first saw the daylight enchanted by the slumberous orchard behind
+the house, or tranquillized into twilight by the spacious avenue in
+front. The character of his imagination, and the golden gloom of its
+blossoming, completely harmonize with the rusty, gable-roofed old house
+upon the river-side, and the reader of his books would be sure that his
+boyhood and youth knew no other friends than the dreaming river and the
+melancholy meadows and drooping foliage of its vicinity.
+
+Since the reader, however, would greatly mistake if he fancied this,
+in good sooth, the ancestral halls of the Hawthornes--the genuine
+Hawthorne-den--he will be glad to save the credit of his fancy by
+learning that it was here our author's bridal tour--which commenced in
+Boston, then three hours away--ended, and his married life began. Here,
+also, his first child was born, and here those sad and silver mosses
+accumulated upon his fancy, from which he heaped so soft a bed for our
+dreaming. "Between two tall gate-posts of rough hewn stone (the gate
+itself having fallen from its hinges at some unknown epoch) we beheld
+the gray front of the old parsonage, terminating the vista of an avenue
+of black-ash trees." It was a pleasant spring day in the year 1843,
+and as they entered the house nosegays of fresh flowers, arranged by
+friendly hands, welcomed them to Concord and summer.
+
+The dark-haired man, who led his wife along the avenue that afternoon,
+had been recently an officer of the customs in Boston, before which he
+had led a solitary life in Salem. Graduated with Longfellow at Bowdoin
+College, in Maine, he had lived a hermit in respectable Salem, an
+absolute recluse even from his own family, walking out by night and
+writing wild tales by day, most of which were burnt in his bachelor
+fire, and some of which, in newspapers, magazines, and annuals, led a
+wandering, uncertain, and mostly unnoticed life.
+
+Those tales among this class which were attainable he collected into a
+small volume, and apprizing the world that they were "twice-told", sent
+them forth anew to make their own way, in the year 1841. But he piped to
+the world, and it did not sing. He wept to it, and it did not mourn. The
+book, however, as all good books do, made its way into various hearts.
+Yet the few penetrant minds which recognized a remarkable power and a
+method of strange fascination in the stories did not make the public nor
+influence the public mind. "I was," he says in the last edition of these
+tales, "the most unknown author in America". Full of glancing wit, of
+tender satire, of exquisite natural description, of subtle and strange
+analysis of human life, darkly passionate and weird, they yet floated
+unhailed barks upon the sea of publicity--unhailed, but laden and
+gleaming at every crevice with the true treasure of Cathay. Bancroft,
+then Collector in Boston, prompt to recognize and to honor talent, made
+the dreaming story-teller a surveyor in the custom-house, thus opening
+to him a new range of experience. From the society of phantoms he
+stepped upon Long Wharf and plumply confronted Captain Cuttle and Dirk
+Hatteraick. It was no less romance to our author. There is no greater
+error of those who are called "practical men" than the supposition that
+life is, or can be, other than a dream to a dreamer. Shut him up in a
+counting-room, barricade him with bales of merchandise, and limit his
+library to the ledger and cash-book and his prospect to the neighboring
+signs; talk "Bills receivable" and "Sundries Dr. to cash" to him
+forever, and you are only a very amusing or very annoying phantom to
+him. The merchant-prince might as well hope to make himself a poet, as
+the poet a practical or practicable man. He has laws to obey not at
+all the less stringent because men of a different temperament refuse
+to acknowledge them, and he is held to a loyalty quite beyond their
+conception.
+
+So Captain Cuttle and Dirk Hatteraick were as pleasant figures to our
+author in the picture of life as any others. He went daily upon the
+vessels, looked and listened and learned, was a favorite of the sailors
+as such men always are, did his work faithfully, and, having dreamed his
+dream upon Long Wharf, was married and slipped up to the Old Manse and
+a new chapter in the romance. It opened in "the most delightful little
+nook of a study that ever offered its snug seclusion to a scholar". Of
+the three years in the Old Manse the prelude to the _Mosses_ is the
+most perfect history, and of the quality of those years the _Mosses_
+themselves are sufficient proof. They were mostly written in the little
+study, and originally published in the _Democratic Review_, then edited
+by Hawthorne's friend O'Sullivan.
+
+To the inhabitants of Concord, however, our author was as much a phantom
+and a fable as the old pastor of the parish, dead half a century before,
+and whose faded portrait in the attic was gradually rejoining its
+original in native dust. The gate, fallen from its hinges in a remote
+antiquity, was never rehung. "The wheel-track leading to the door"
+remained still overgrown with grass. No bold villager ever invaded the
+sleep of "the glimmering shadows" in the avenue. At evening no lights
+gleamed from the windows. Scarce once in many months did the single old
+knobby-faced coachman at the railroad bring a fare to "Mr. Hawthorne's".
+"_Is_ there anybody in the old house?" sobbed the old ladies in despair,
+imbibing tea of a livid green. That knocker, which everybody had enjoyed
+the right of lifting to summon the good old pastor, no temerity now
+dared to touch. Heavens! what if the figure in the mouldy portrait
+should peer, in answer, over the eaves, and shake solemnly its decaying
+surplice! Nay, what if the mysterious man himself should answer the
+summons and come to the door! It is easy to summon spirits--but if they
+come? Collective Concord, moving in the river meadows, embraced the
+better part of valor and left the knocker untouched. A cloud of romance
+suddenly fell out of the heaven of fancy and enveloped the Old Manse:
+
+ "In among the bearded barley
+  The reaper reaping late and early"
+
+did not glance more wistfully towards the island of Shalott and its
+mysterious lady than the reapers of Concord rye looked at the Old Manse
+and wondered over its inmate.
+
+Sometimes in the forenoon a darkly clad figure was seen in the little
+garden-plot putting in corn or melon seed, and gravely hoeing. It was
+a brief apparition. The farmer passing towards town and seeing the
+solitary cultivator, lost his faith in the fact and believed he had
+dreamed when, upon returning, he saw no sign of life, except, possibly,
+upon some Monday, the ghostly skirt of a shirt flapping spectrally in
+the distant orchard. Day dawned and darkened over the lonely house.
+Summer with "buds and bird-voices" came singing in from the South, and
+clad the old ash-trees in deeper green, the Old Manse in profounder
+mystery. Gorgeous autumn came to visit the story-teller in his little
+western study, and, departing, wept rainbows among his trees. Winter
+impatiently swept down the hill opposite, rifling the trees of each
+last clinging bit of summer, as if thrusting aside opposing barriers and
+determined to search the mystery. But his white robes floated around
+the Old Manse, ghostly as the decaying surplice of the old pastor's
+portrait, and in the snowy seclusion of winter the mystery was as
+mysterious as ever.
+
+Occasionally Emerson or Ellery Channing or Henry Thoreau--some poet, as
+once Whittier, journeying to the Merrimac, or an old Brook-Farmer who
+remembered Miles Coverdale with Arcadian sympathy--went down the avenue
+and disappeared in the house. Sometimes a close observer, had he been
+ambushed among the long grasses of the orchard, might have seen the host
+and one of his guests emerging at the back door and, sauntering to the
+river-side, step into the boat, and float off until they faded in the
+shadow. The spectacle would not have lessened the romance. If it were
+afternoon--one of the spectrally sunny afternoons which often bewitch
+that region--he would be only the more convinced that there was
+something inexplicable in the whole matter of this man whom nobody knew,
+who was never once seen at town-meeting, and concerning whom it was
+whispered that he did not constantly attend church all day, although he
+occupied the reverend parsonage of the village and had unmeasured acres
+of manuscript sermons in his attic, besides the nearly extinct portrait
+of an utterly extinct clergyman. Mrs. Radcliffe and Monk Lewis were
+nothing to this, and the awe-stricken observer, if he could creep safely
+out of the long grass, did not fail to do so quietly, fortifying his
+courage by remembering stories of the genial humanity of the last old
+pastor who inhabited the Manse, and who for fifty years was the bland
+and beneficent Pope of Concord. A genial, gracious old man, whose memory
+is yet sweet in the village, and who, wedded to the grave traditions of
+New England theology, believed of his young relative Waldo Emerson, as
+Miss Flite, touching her forehead, said of her landlord, that he was
+"_m_, quite _m_", but was proud to love in him the hereditary integrity
+of noble ancestors.
+
+This old gentleman--an eminent figure in the history of the Manse and in
+all reminiscences of Concord--partook sufficiently of mundane weaknesses
+to betray his mortality. Hawthorne describes him watching the battle
+of Concord from his study window. But when the uncertainty of that
+dark moment had so happily resulted, and the first battle-ground of the
+Revolution had become a spot of hallowed and patriotic consideration,
+it was a pardonable pride in the good old man to order his servant,
+whenever there was company, to assist him in reaping the glory due
+to the owner of a spot so sacred. Accordingly, when some reverend or
+distinguished guest sat with the pastor in his little parlor, or, of
+a summer evening, at the hospitable door under the trees, Jeremiah or
+Nicodemus, the cow-boy, would deferentially approach and inquire,
+
+"Into what pasture shall I turn the cow tonight, sir?"
+
+And the old gentleman would audibly reply:
+
+"Into the battle-field, Nicodemus, into the battle-field."
+
+Then naturally followed wonder, inquiry, a walk in the twilight to the
+river-bank, the old gentleman's story, the corresponding respect of the
+listening visitor, and the consequent quiet complacency and harmless
+satisfaction in the clergyman's bosom. That throb of pride was the
+one drop of peculiar advantage which the pastor distilled from the
+Revolution. He could not but fancy that he had a hand in so famous
+a deed accomplished upon land now his own, and demeaned himself
+accordingly with continental dignity.
+
+The pulpit, however, was his especial sphere. There he reigned supreme;
+there he exhorted, rebuked, and advised, as in the days of Mather. There
+he inspired that profound reverence of which he was so proud, and which
+induced the matrons of the village, when he was coming to make a visit,
+to bedizen the children in their Sunday suits, to parade the best
+teapot, and to offer the most capacious chair. In the pulpit he
+delivered everything with the pompous cadence of the elder New England
+clergy, and a sly joke is told at the expense of his even temper, that
+on one occasion, when loftily reading the hymn, he encountered a blot
+upon the page quite obliterating the word; but without losing the
+cadence, although in a very vindictive tone at the truant word, or the
+culprit who erased it, he finished the reading as follows:
+
+ "He sits upon His throne above,
+    Attending angels bless,
+  While Justice, Mercy, Truth--and another word
+        which is blotted out--
+    Compose His princely dress."
+
+We linger around the Old Manse and its occupants as fondly as Hawthorne,
+but no more fondly than all who have been once within the influence of
+its spell. There glimmer in my memory a few hazy days, of a tranquil and
+half-pensive character, which I am conscious were passed in and around
+the house, and their pensiveness I know to be only that touch of
+twilight which inhered in the house and all its associations. Beside the
+few chance visitors I have named there were city friends occasionally,
+figures quite unknown to the village, who came preceded by the
+steam-shriek of the locomotive, were dropped at the gate-posts, and were
+seen no more. The owner was as much a vague name to me as to any one.
+
+During Hawthorne's first year's residence in Concord I had driven up
+with some friends to an aesthetic tea at Mr. Emerson's. It was in the
+winter, and a great wood-fire blazed upon the hospitable hearth. There
+were various men and women of note assembled, and I, who listened
+attentively to all the fine things that were said, was for some time
+scarcely aware of a man who sat upon the edge of the circle, a little
+withdrawn, his head slightly thrown forward upon his breast, and his
+bright eyes clearly burning under his black brow. As I drifted down the
+stream of talk, this person, who sat silent as a shadow, looked to me as
+Webster might have looked had he been a poet--a kind of poetic Webster.
+He rose and walked to the window, and stood quietly there for a long
+time, watching the dead white landscape. No appeal was made to him,
+nobody looked after him, the conversation flowed steadily on as if every
+one understood that his silence was to be respected. It was the same
+thing at table. In vain the silent man imbibed aesthetic tea. Whatever
+fancies it inspired did not flower at his lips. But there was a light
+in his eye which assured me that nothing was lost. So supreme was his
+silence that it presently engrossed me to the exclusion of everything
+else. There was very brilliant discourse, but this silence was much more
+poetic and fascinating. Fine things were said by the philosophers, but
+much finer things were implied by the dumbness of this gentleman with
+heavy brows and black hair. When he presently rose and went, Emerson,
+with the "slow, wise smile" that breaks over his face, like day over the
+sky, said, "Hawthorne rides well his horse of the night."
+
+Thus he remained in my memory, a shadow, a phantom, until more than a
+year afterwards. Then I came to live in Concord. Every day I passed his
+house, but when the villagers, thinking that perhaps I had some clew to
+the mystery, said, "Do you know this Mr. Hawthorne?" I said "No," and
+trusted to time.
+
+Time justified my confidence, and one day I, too, went down the avenue
+and disappeared in the house. I mounted those mysterious stairs to that
+apocryphal study. I saw "the cheerful coat of paint, and golden-tinted
+paper-hangings, lighting up the small apartment; while the shadow of a
+willow-tree, that swept against the overhanging eaves, attempered the
+cheery western sunshine." I looked from the little northern window
+whence the old pastor watched the battle, and in the small dining-room
+beneath it, upon the first floor, there were
+
+  "Dainty chicken, snow-white bread,"
+
+and the golden juices of Italian vineyards, which still feast insatiable
+memory.
+
+Our author occupied the Old Manse for three years. During that time he
+was not seen, probably, by more than a dozen of the villagers. His walks
+could easily avoid the town, and upon the river he was always sure of
+solitude. It was his favorite habit to bathe every evening in the river,
+after nightfall, and in that part of it over which the old bridge
+stood, at which the battle was fought. Sometimes, but rarely, his
+boat accompanied another up the stream, and I recall the silent and
+preternatural vigor with which, on one occasion, he wielded his paddle
+to counteract the bad rowing of a friend who conscientiously considered
+it his duty to do something and not let Hawthorne work alone; but who,
+with every stroke, neutralized all Hawthorne's efforts. I suppose he
+would have struggled until he fell senseless, rather than ask his
+friend to desist. His principle seemed to be, if a man cannot understand
+without talking to him, it is quite useless to talk, because it is
+immaterial whether such a man understands or not. His own sympathy was
+so broad and sure that although nothing had been said for hours his
+companion knew that not a thing had escaped his eye, nor had a single
+pulse of beauty in the day or scene or society failed to thrill his
+heart. In this way his silence was most social. Everything seemed to
+have been said. It was a Barmecide feast of discourse, from which a
+greater satisfaction resulted than from an actual banquet.
+
+When a formal attempt was made to desert this style of conversation, the
+result was ludicrous. Once Emerson and Thoreau arrived to pay a call.
+They were shown into the little parlor upon the avenue, and Hawthorne
+presently entered. Each of the guests sat upright in his chair like a
+Roman senator. "To them" Hawthorne, like a Dacian king. The call went
+on, but in a most melancholy manner. The host sat perfectly still, or
+occasionally propounded a question which Thoreau answered accurately,
+and there the thread broke short off. Emerson delivered sentences that
+only needed the setting of an essay to charm the world; but the whole
+visit was a vague ghost of the Monday-evening club at Mr. Emerson's--it
+was a great failure. Had they all been lying idly upon the river brink,
+or strolling in Thoreau's blackberry pastures, the result would have
+been utterly different. But imprisoned in the proprieties of a parlor,
+each a wild man in his way, with a necessity of talking inherent in the
+nature of the occasion, there was only a waste of treasure. This was the
+only "call" in which I ever knew Hawthorne to be involved.
+
+In Mr. Emerson's house, I said, it seemed always morning. But
+Hawthorne's black-ash trees and scraggy apple-boughs shaded
+
+                           "a land
+  In which it seemed always afternoon."
+
+I do not doubt that the lotus grew along the grassy marge of the Concord
+behind his house, and it was served, subtly concealed, to all his
+guests. The house, its inmates, and its life lay, dream-like, upon the
+edge of the little village. You fancied that they all came together
+and belonged together, and were glad that at length some idol of your
+imagination, some poet whose spell had held you and would hold you
+forever, was housed as such a poet should be.
+
+During the lapse of the three years since the bridal tour of twenty
+miles ended at the "two tall gate-posts of rough-hewn stone", a little
+wicker wagon had appeared at intervals upon the avenue, and a placid
+babe, whose eyes the soft Concord day had touched with the blue of its
+beauty, lay looking tranquilly up at the grave old trees, which sighed
+lofty lullabies over her sleep. The tranquillity of the golden-haired
+Una was the living and breathing type of the dreamy life of the Old
+Manse. Perhaps, that being attained, it was as well to go. Perhaps our
+author was not surprised nor displeased when the hints came, "growing
+more and more distinct, that the owner of the old house was pining for
+his native air". One afternoon I entered the study, and learned from its
+occupant that the last story he should ever write there was written. The
+son of the old pastor yearned for his homestead. The light of another
+summer would seek its poet in the Old Manse, but in vain.
+
+While Hawthorne had been quietly writing in the "most delightful little
+nook of a study", Mr. Polk had been elected President, and Mr. Bancroft,
+in the cabinet, did not forget his old friend, the surveyor in the
+custom-house. There came suggestions and offers of various attractions.
+Still loving New England, would he tarry there, or, as inspector of
+woods and forests in some far-away island of the southern sea, some
+hazy strip of distance seen from Florida, would he taste the tropics?
+He meditated all the chances, without immediately deciding. Gathering up
+his household gods, he passed out of the Old Manse as its heir entered,
+and before the end of summer was domesticated in the custom-house of his
+native town of Salem. This was in the year 1846. Upon leaving the
+Old Manse he published the _Mosses_, announcing that it was the
+last collection of tales he should put forth. Those who knew him and
+recognized his value to our literature trembled lest this was the last
+word from one who spoke only pearls and rubies. It was a foolish fear.
+The sun must shine, the sea must roll, the bird must sing, and the
+poet write. During his life in Salem, of which the introduction to _The
+Scarlet Letter_ describes the official aspect, he wrote that romance.
+It is inspired by the spirit of the place. It presents more vividly than
+any history the gloomy picturesqueness of early New England life. There
+is no strain in our literature so characteristic or more real than that
+which Hawthorne had successfully attempted in several of his earlier
+sketches, and of which _The Scarlet Letter_ is the great triumph. It
+became immediately popular, and directly placed the writer of stories
+for a small circle among the world's masters of romance.
+
+Times meanwhile changed, and presidents with them. General Taylor was
+elected, and the Salem collector retired. It is one of the romantic
+points of Hawthorne's quiet life that its changes have been so
+frequently determined by political events, which, more than all others,
+are the most entirely foreign to his tastes and habits. He retired
+to the hills of Berkshire, the eye of the world now regarding his
+movements. There he lived a year or two in a little red cottage upon the
+"Stockbridge Bowl", as a small lake near that town is called. In this
+retreat he wrote _The House of the Seven Gables_, which more deeply
+confirmed the literary position already acquired for him by the first
+romance. The scene is laid in Salem, as if he could not escape a strange
+fascination in the witch-haunted town of our early history. It is the
+same black canvas upon which plays the rainbow-flash of his fancy,
+never, in its brightest moment, more than illuminating the gloom. This
+marks all his writings. They have a terrible beauty, like the siren, and
+their fascination is as sure.
+
+After six years of absence Hawthorne returned to Concord, where he
+purchased a small house formerly occupied by Orphic Alcott. When that
+philosopher came into possession it was a miserable little house of
+two peaked gables. But the genius which recreated itself in devising
+graceful summer-houses, like that for Mr. Emerson, already noticed, soon
+smoothed the new residence into some kind of comeliness. It was an old
+house when Mr. Alcott entered it, but his tasteful finger touched it
+with picturesque grace.
+
+Not like a tired old drudge of a house, rusting into unhonored decay,
+but with a modest freshness that does not belie the innate sobriety of
+a venerable New England farm-house, the present residence of our author
+stands, withdrawn a few yards from the high-road to Boston, along which
+marched the British soldiers to Concord bridge. It lies at the foot of a
+wooded hill, a neat house of a "rusty olive hue", with a porch in
+front, and a central peak, and a piazza at each end. The genius for
+summer-houses has had full play upon the hill behind. Here, upon the
+homely steppes of Concord, is a strain of Persia. Mr. Alcott built
+terraces and arbors and pavilions of boughs and rough stems of trees,
+revealing--somewhat inadequately, perhaps--the hanging gardens of
+delight that adorn the Babylon of his orphic imagination. The hill-side
+is no unapt emblem of his intellectual habit, which garnishes the arid
+commonplaces of life with a cold poetic aurora, forgetting that it is
+the inexorable law of light to deform as well as adorn. Treating life as
+a grand epic poem, the philosophic Alcott forgets that Homer must nod
+or we should all fall asleep. The world would not be very beautiful nor
+interesting if it were all one huge summit of Mont Blanc.
+
+Unhappily, the terraced hill-side, like the summer-house upon Mr.
+Emerson's lawn, "lacks technical arrangement", and the wild winds play
+with these architectural toys of fancy, like lions with humming-birds.
+They are gradually falling, shattered, and disappearing. Fine
+locust-trees shade them and ornament the hill with perennial beauty.
+The hanging gardens of Semiramis were not more fragrant than Hawthorne's
+hill-side during the June blossoming of the locusts. A few young elms,
+some white-pines and young oaks, complete the catalogue of trees. A
+light breeze constantly fans the brow of the hill, making harps of the
+tree-tops and singing to our author, who, "with a book in my hand, or
+an unwritten book in my thoughts", lies stretched beneath them in the
+shade.
+
+From the height of the hill the eye courses, unrestrained, over the
+solitary landscape of Concord, broad and still, broken only by the
+slight wooded undulations of insignificant hillocks. The river is not
+visible, nor any gleam of lake. Walden Pond is just behind the wood in
+front, and not far away over the meadows sluggishly steals the river. It
+is the most quiet of prospects. Eight acres of good land lie in front of
+the house, across the road, and in the rear the estate extends a little
+distance over the brow of the hill.
+
+This latter is not good garden-ground, but it yields that other crop
+which the poet "gathers in a song". Perhaps the world will forgive
+our author that he is not a prize farmer, and makes but an indifferent
+figure at the annual cattle-show. We have seen that he is more nomadic
+than agricultural. He has wandered from spot to spot, pitching a
+temporary tent, then striking it for "fresh fields and pastures new".
+It is natural, therefore, that he should call his house "The Wayside"--a
+bench upon the road where he sits for a while before passing on. If
+the wayfarer finds him upon that bench he shall have rare pleasure in
+sitting with him, yet shudder while he stays. For the pictures of our
+poet have more than the shadows of Rembrandt. If you listen to his
+story, the lonely pastures and dull towns of our dear old homely New
+England shall become suddenly as radiant with grace and terrible with
+tragedy as any country and any time. The waning afternoon in Concord,
+in which the blue-frocked farmers are reaping and hoeing, shall set
+in pensive glory. The woods will forever after be haunted with strange
+forms. You will hear whispers and music "i' the air". In the softest
+morning you will suspect sadness; in the most fervent noon a nameless
+terror. It is because the imagination of our author treads the almost
+imperceptible line between the natural and the supernatural. We are all
+conscious of striking it sometimes. But we avoid it. We recoil and hurry
+away, nor dare to glance over our shoulders lest we should see phantoms.
+What are these tales of supernatural appearances, as well authenticated
+as any news of the day--and what is the sphere which they imply? What is
+the more subtle intellectual apprehension of fate and its influence
+upon imagination and life? Whatever it is, it is the mystery of the
+fascination of these tales. They converse with that dreadful realm as
+with our real world. The light of our sun is poured by genius upon the
+phantoms we did not dare to contemplate, and lo! they are ourselves,
+unmasked, and playing our many parts. An unutterable sadness seizes the
+reader as the inevitable black thread appears. For here genius assures
+us what we trembled to suspect, but could not avoid suspecting, that the
+black thread is inwoven with all forms of life, with all development of
+character.
+
+It is for this peculiarity, which harmonizes so well with ancient
+places, whose pensive silence seems the trance of memory musing over the
+young and lovely life that illuminated its lost years--that Hawthorne is
+so intimately associated with the Old Manse. Yet that was but the tent
+of a night for him. Already, with the _Blithedale Romance_, which
+is dated from Concord, a new interest begins to cluster around "The
+Wayside".
+
+I know not how I can more fitly conclude these reminiscences of Concord
+and Hawthorne, whose own stories have always a saddening close, than by
+relating an occurrence which blighted to many hearts the beauty of
+the quiet Concord river, and seemed not inconsistent with its lonely
+landscape. It has the further fitness of typifying the operation of our
+author's imagination: a tranquil stream, clear and bright with sunny
+gleams, crowned with lilies and graceful with swaying grass, yet doing
+terrible deeds inexorably, and therefore forever after of a shadowed
+beauty.
+
+Martha was the daughter of a plain Concord farmer, a girl of delicate
+and shy temperament, who excelled so much in study that she was sent
+to a fine academy in a neighboring town, and won all the honors of
+the course. She met at the school, and in the society of the place,
+a refinement and cultivation, a social gayety and grace, which were
+entirely unknown in the hard life she had led at home, and which by
+their very novelty, as well as because they harmonized with her own
+nature and dreams, were doubly beautiful and fascinating. She enjoyed
+this life to the full, while her timidity kept her only a spectator;
+and she ornamented it with a fresher grace, suggestive of the woods and
+fields, when she ventured to engage in the airy game. It was a sphere
+for her capacities and talents. She shone in it, and the consciousness
+of a true position and general appreciation gave her the full use of
+all her powers. She admired and was admired. She was surrounded by
+gratifications of taste, by the stimulants and rewards of ambition. The
+world was happy, and she was worthy to live in it. But at times a cloud
+suddenly dashed athwart the sun--a shadow stole, dark and chill, to the
+very edge of the charmed circle in which she stood. She knew well what
+it was and what it foretold, but she would not pause nor heed. The sun
+shone again; the future smiled; youth, beauty, and all gentle hopes and
+thoughts bathed the moment in lambent light.
+
+But school-days ended at last, and with the receding town in which they
+had been passed the bright days of life disappeared, and forever. It
+is probable that the girl's fancy had been fed, perhaps indiscreetly
+pampered, by her experience there. But it was no fairy-land. It was an
+academy town in New England, and the fact that it was so alluring is a
+fair indication of the kind of life from which she had emerged, and to
+which she now returned. What could she do? In the dreary round of petty
+details, in the incessant drudgery of a poor farmer's household, with no
+companions of any sympathy--for the family of a hard-working New England
+farmer are not the Chloes and Clarissas of pastoral poetry, nor are
+cow-boys Corydons--with no opportunity of retirement and cultivation,
+for reading and studying--which is always voted "stuff" under such
+circumstances--the light suddenly quenched out of life, what was she to
+do?
+
+"Adapt herself to her circumstances. Why had she shot from her sphere in
+this silly way?" demands unanimous common-sense in valiant heroics.
+
+The simple answer is, that she had only used all her opportunities, and
+that, although it was no fault of hers that the routine of her life
+was in every way repulsive, she did struggle to accommodate herself to
+it--and failed. When she found it impossible to drag on at home, she
+became an inmate of a refined and cultivated household in the village,
+where she had opportunity to follow her own fancies, and to associate
+with educated and attractive persons. But even here she could not escape
+the feeling that it was all temporary, that her position was one of
+dependence; and her pride, now grown morbid, often drove her from the
+very society which alone was agreeable to her. This was all genuine.
+There was not the slightest strain of the _femme incomprise_ in her
+demeanor. She was always shy and silent, with a touching reserve which
+won interest and confidence, but left also a vague sadness in the mind
+of the observer. After a few months she made another effort to rend the
+cloud which was gradually darkening around her, and opened a school for
+young children. But although the interest of friends secured for her a
+partial success, her gravity and sadness failed to excite the sympathy
+of her pupils, who missed in her the playful gayety always most winning
+to children. Martha, however, pushed bravely on, a figure of tragic
+sobriety to all who watched her course. The farmers thought her a
+strange girl, and wondered at the ways of a farmer's daughter who was
+not content to milk cows and churn butter and fry pork, without further
+hope or thought. The good clergyman of the town, interested in her
+situation, sought a confidence she did not care to bestow, and so,
+doling out a, b, c, to a wild group of boys and girls, she found that
+she could not untie the Gordian knot of her life, and felt, with terror,
+that it must be cut.
+
+One summer evening she left her father's house and walked into the
+fields alone. Night came, but Martha did not return. The family became
+anxious, inquired if any one had noticed the direction in which she
+went, learned from the neighbors that she was not visiting, that
+there was no lecture or meeting to detain her, and wonder passed into
+apprehension. Neighbors went into the adjacent woods and called, but
+received no answer. Every instant the awful shadow of some dread event
+solemnized the gathering groups. Every one thought what no one dared
+whisper, until a low voice suggested "the river". Then, with the
+swiftness of certainty, all friends, far and near, were roused, and
+thronged along the banks of the stream. Torches flashed in boats that
+put off in the terrible search. Hawthorne, then living in the Old Manse,
+was summoned, and the man whom the villagers had only seen at morning
+as a musing spectre in his garden, now appeared among them at night
+to devote his strong arm and steady heart to their service. The boats
+drifted slowly down the stream--the torches flared strangely upon
+the black repose of the water, and upon the long, slim grasses that,
+weeping, fringed the marge. Upon both banks silent and awe-stricken
+crowds hastened along, eager and dreading to find the slightest trace of
+what they sought. Suddenly they came upon a few articles of dress, heavy
+with the night-dew. No one spoke, for no one had doubted the result. It
+was clear that Martha had strayed to the river and quietly asked of its
+stillness the repose she sought. The boats gathered around the spot.
+With every implement that could be of service the melancholy search
+began. Long intervals of fearful silence ensued, but at length, towards
+midnight, the sweet face of the dead girl was raised more placidly to
+the stars than ever it had been to the sun.
+
+ "Oh! is it weed or fish or floating hair--
+  A tress o' golden hair,
+  O' drowned maiden's hair,
+    Above the nets at sea?
+  Was never salmon yet that shone so fair
+    Among the stakes on Dee."
+
+So ended a village tragedy. The reader may possibly find in it the
+original of the thrilling conclusion of the _Blithedale Romance_, and
+learn anew that dark as is the thread with which Hawthorne weaves his
+spells, it is no darker than those with which tragedies are spun, even
+in regions apparently so torpid as Concord.
+
+
+
+
+THE WORKS OF NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
+
+
+The traveller by the Eastern Railroad, from Boston, reaches in less than
+an hour the old town of Salem, Massachusetts. It is chiefly composed
+of plain wooden houses, but it has a quaint air of past provincial
+grandeur, and has indeed been an important commercial town. The first
+American ship for Calcutta and China sailed from this port; and Salem
+ships opened our trade with New Holland and the South Seas. But its
+glory has long since departed, with that of its stately and respectable
+neighbors, Newburyport and Portsmouth. There is still, however, a
+custom-house in Salem, there are wharves and chandlers' shops and a
+faint show of shipping and an air of marine capacity which no apparent
+result justifies. It sits upon the shore like an antiquated sea-captain,
+grave and silent, in tarpaulin and duck trousers, idly watching the
+ocean upon which he will never sail again.
+
+But this touching aspect of age and lost prosperity merely serves to
+deepen the peculiar impression of the old city, which is not derived
+from its former commercial importance, but from other associations.
+Salem village was a famous place in the Puritan annals. The tragedy of
+the witchcraft tortures and murders has cast upon it a ghostly spell,
+from which it seems never to have escaped; and even the sojourner of
+to-day, as he loiters along the shore in the sunniest morning of June,
+will sometimes feel an icy breath in the air, chilling the very marrow
+of his bones. Nor is he consoled by being told that it is only the east
+wind; for he cannot help believing that an invisible host of Puritan
+spectres have breathed upon him, revengeful, as he poached upon their
+ancient haunts.
+
+The Puritan spirit was neither gracious nor lovely, but nothing softer
+than its iron hand could have done its necessary work. The Puritan
+character was narrow, intolerant, and exasperating. The forefathers were
+very "sour" in the estimation of Morton and his merry company at Mount
+Wollaston. But for all that, Bradstreet and Carver and Winthrop were
+better forefathers than the gay Morton, and the Puritan spirit is
+doubtless the moral influence of modern civilization, both in Old and
+New England. By the fruit let the seed be judged. The State to whose
+rough coast the _Mayflower_ came, and in which the Pilgrim spirit
+has been most active, is to-day the chief of all human societies,
+politically, morally, and socially. It is the community in which the
+average of well-being is higher than in any State we know in history.
+Puritan though it be, it is more truly liberal and free than any large
+community in the world. But it had bleak beginnings. The icy shore,
+the sombre pines, the stealthy savages, the hard soil, the unbending
+religious austerity, the Scriptural severity, the arrogant virtues, the
+angry intolerance of contradiction--they all made a narrow strip of sad
+civilization between the pitiless sea and the remorseless forests. The
+moral and physical tenacity which is wrestling with the Rebellion
+was toughened among these flinty and forbidding rocks. The fig, the
+pomegranate, and the almond would not grow there, nor the nightingale
+sing; but nobler men than its children the sun never shone upon, nor has
+the heart of man heard sweeter music than the voices of James Otis and
+Samuel Adams. Think of Plymouth in 1620, and of Massachusetts to-day!
+Out of strength came forth sweetness.
+
+With some of the darkest passages in Puritan history this old town of
+Salem, which dozes apparently with the most peaceful conscience in the
+world, is identified, and while its Fourth of July bells were joyfully
+ringing sixty years ago Nathaniel Hathorne was born. He subsequently
+chose to write the name Hawthorne, because he thought he had discovered
+that it was the original spelling. In the introduction to _The Scarlet
+Letter_, Hawthorne speaks of his ancestors as coming from Europe in the
+seventeenth century, and establishing themselves in Salem, where they
+served the State and propitiated Heaven by joining in the persecution
+of Quakers and witches. The house known as the Witch House is still
+standing on the corner of Summer and Essex streets. It was built in 1642
+by Captain George Corwin, and here in 1692 many of the unfortunates who
+were palpably guilty of age and ugliness were examined by the Honorable
+Jonathan Curwin, Major Gedney, Captain John Higginson, and John Hathorn,
+Esquire.
+
+The name of this last worthy occurs in one of the first and most famous
+of the witch trials, that of "Goodwife Gory", in March, 1692, only a
+month after the beginning of the delusion at the house of the minister
+Parris. Goodwife Gory was accused by ten children, of whom Elizabeth
+Parris was one; they declared that they were pinched by her and
+strangled, and that she brought them a book to sign. "Mr. Hathorn,
+a magistrate of Salem", says Robert Calef, in _More Wonders of the
+Invisible World_, "asked her why she afflicted these children. She said
+she did not afflict them. He asked her who did then. She said, I do not
+know; how should I know? She said they were poor, distracted creatures,
+and no heed ought to be given to what they said. Mr. Hathorn and Mr.
+Noyes replied, that it was the judgment of all that were there present
+that they were bewitched, and only she (the accused) said they were
+distracted. She was accused by them that the _black man_ whispered to
+her in her ear now (while she was upon examination), and that she had a
+yellow bird that did use to suck between her fingers, and that the said
+bird did suck now in the assembly." John Hathorn and Jonathan
+Curwin were "the Assistants" of Salem village, and held most of the
+examinations and issued the warrants. Justice Hathorn was very swift in
+judgment, holding every accused person guilty in every particular.
+When poor Jonathan Gary of Charlestown attended his wife charged with
+witchcraft before Justice Hathorn, he requested that he might hold one
+of her hands, "but it was denied me. Then she desired me to wipe the
+tears from her eyes and the sweat from her face, which I did; then she
+desired that she might lean herself on me, saying she should faint.
+Justice Hathorn replied, she had strength enough to torment these
+persons, and she should have strength enough to stand. I speaking
+something against their cruel proceedings, they commanded me to be
+silent, or else I should be turned out of the room". What a piteous
+picture of the awful colonial inquisition and the village Torquemada!
+What a grim portrait of an ancestor to hang in your memory, and to trace
+your kindred to!
+
+Hawthorne's description of his ancestors in the Introduction to _The
+Scarlet Letter_ is very delightful. As their representative, he declares
+that he takes shame to himself for their sake, on account of these
+relentless persecutions; but he thinks them earnest and energetic.
+"From father to son, for above a hundred years, they followed the sea;
+a gray-headed ship-master, in each generation, retiring from the
+quarter-deck to the homestead, while a boy of fourteen took the
+hereditary place before the mast, confronting the salt spray and the
+gale, which had blustered against his sire and grand-sire. The boy
+also, in due time, passed from the forecastle to the cabin, spent a
+tempestuous manhood, and returned from his world-wanderings, to grow
+old, and die, and mingle his dust with the natal earth." Not all,
+however, for the last of the line of sailors, Captain Nathaniel
+Hathorne, who married Elizabeth Clarke Manning, died at Calcutta after
+the birth of three children, a boy and two girls. The house in which
+the boy was born is still standing upon Union Street, which leads to the
+Long Wharf, the chief seat of the old foreign trade of Salem. The next
+house, with a back entrance on Union Street, is the Manning house, where
+many years of the young Hawthorne's life were spent in the care of his
+uncle, Robert Manning. He lived often upon an estate belonging to his
+mother's family, in the town of Raymond, near Sebago Lake, in Maine. The
+huge house there was called Manning's Folly, and is now said to be used
+as a meeting-house. His uncle sent Hawthorne to Bowdoin College, where
+he graduated in 1825. A correspondent of the Boston _Daily Advertiser_,
+writing from Bowdoin at the late commencement, says that he had recently
+found "in an old drawer" some papers which proved to be the manuscript
+"parts" of the students at the Junior exhibition of 1824; among them was
+Hawthorne's "De Patribus Conscriptis Romanorum". "It is quite brief,"
+writes the correspondent, "but is really curious as perhaps the only
+college exercise in existence of the great tragic writer of our day
+(has there been a greater since Shakespeare?). The last sentence is
+as follows (note the words which I put in italics): 'Augustus equidem
+antiquam magnificentiam patribus reddidit, _sed fulgor tantum fuit
+sine fervore_. Nunquam in republica senatoribus potestas recuperata,
+postremum species etiam amissa est.' On the same occasion Longfellow had
+the salutatory oration in Latin--'Oratio Latina; Anglici Poetae.'"
+
+Hawthorne has given us a charming glimpse of himself as a college boy
+in the letter to his fellow-student, Horatio Bridge, of the Navy, whose
+_Journal of an African Cruiser_ he afterwards edited. "I know not whence
+your faith came; but while we were lads together at a country college,
+gathering blueberries, in study-hours, under those tall academic pines;
+or watching the great logs as they tumbled along the current of the
+Androscoggin; or shooting pigeons and gray squirrels in the woods; or
+bat-fowling in the summer twilight; or catching trouts in that shadowy
+little stream which, I suppose, is still wandering riverward through the
+forest--though you and I will never cast a line in it again--two idle
+lads, in short (as we need not fear to acknowledge now), doing a hundred
+things that the faculty never heard of, or else it had been the worse
+for us,--still it was your prognostic of your friend's destiny that he
+was to be a writer of fiction." From this sylvan university Hawthorne
+came home to Salem; "as if," he wrote later, "Salem were for me the
+inevitable centre of the universe."
+
+The old witch-hanging city had no weirder product than this dark-haired
+son. He has certainly given it an interest which it must otherwise have
+lacked; but he speaks of it with small affection, considering that his
+family had lived there for two centuries. "An unjoyous attachment," he
+calls it. And, to tell the truth, there was evidently little love lost
+between the little city and its most famous citizen. Stories still float
+in the social gossip of the town, which represent the shy author
+as inaccessible to all invitations to dinner and tea; and while
+the pleasant circle awaited his coming in the drawing-room, the
+impracticable man was--at least so runs the tale--quietly hobnobbing
+with companions to whom his fame was unknown. Those who coveted him as
+a phoenix could never get him, while he gave himself freely to those
+who saw in him only a placid barn-door fowl. The sensitive youth was a
+recluse, upon whose imagination had fallen the gloomy mystery of Puritan
+life and character. Salem was the inevitable centre of his universe
+more truly than he thought. The mind of Justice Hathorn's descendant
+was bewitched by the fascination of a certain devilish subtlety working
+under the comeliest aspects in human affairs. It overcame him with
+strange sympathy. It colored and controlled his intellectual life.
+
+Devoted all day to lonely reverie and musing upon the obscurer spiritual
+passages of the life whose monuments he constantly encountered, that
+musing became inevitably morbid. With the creative instinct of the
+artist, he wrote the wild fancies into form as stories, many of which,
+when written, he threw into the fire. Then, after nightfall, stealing
+out from his room into the silent streets of Salem, and shadowy as the
+ghosts with which to his susceptible imagination the dusky town was
+thronged, he glided beneath the house in which the witch-trials were
+held, or across the moonlit hill upon which the witches were hung, until
+the spell was complete. Nor can we help fancying that, after the murder
+of old Mr. White in Salem, which happened within a few years after
+his return from college, which drew from Mr. Webster his most famous
+criminal plea, and filled a shadowy corner of every museum in New
+England, as every shivering little man of that time remembers, with an
+awful reproduction of the scene in wax-figures, with real sheets on the
+bed, and the murderer, in a glazed cap, stooping over to deal the fatal
+blow--we cannot help fancying that the young recluse who walked by
+night, the wizard whom as yet none knew, hovered about the house, gazing
+at the windows of the fatal chamber, and listening in horror for the
+faint whistle of the confederate in another street.
+
+Three years after he graduated, in 1828, he published anonymously a
+slight romance with the motto from Southey, "Wilt thou go with me?"
+Hawthorne never acknowledged the book, and it is now seldom found; but
+it shows plainly the natural bent of his mind. It is a dim, dreamy tale,
+such as a Byron-struck youth of the time might have written, except for
+that startling self-possession of style and cold analysis of passion,
+rather than sympathy with it, which showed no imitation, but remarkable
+original power. The same lurid gloom overhangs it that shadows all his
+works. It is uncanny; the figures of the romance are not persons, they
+are passions, emotions, spiritual speculations. So the _Twice-told
+Tales_ that seem at first but the pleasant fancies of a mild recluse,
+gradually hold the mind with a Lamia-like fascination; and the author
+says truly of them, in the Preface of 1851, "Even in what purport to be
+pictures of actual life, we have allegory not always so warmly dressed
+in its habiliments of flesh and blood as to be taken into the reader's
+mind without a shiver." There are sunny gleams upon the pages, but a
+strange, melancholy chill pervades the book. In "The Wedding Knell",
+"The Minister's Black Veil", "The Gentle Boy", "Wakefield", "The
+Prophetic Pictures", "The Hollow of the Three Hills", "Dr. Heidegger's
+Experiment", "The Ambitious Guest", "The White Old Maid", "Edward
+Fane's Rose-bud", "The Lily's Quest"--or in the "Legends of the Province
+House", where the courtly provincial state of governors and ladies
+glitters across the small, sad New England world, whose very baldness
+jeers it to scorn--there is the same fateful atmosphere in which Goody
+Cloyse might at any moment whisk by upon her broomstick, and in which
+the startled heart stands still with unspeakable terror.
+
+The spell of mysterious horror which kindled Hawthorne's imagination
+was a test of the character of his genius. The mind of this child
+of witch-haunted Salem loved to hover between the natural and the
+supernatural, and sought to tread the almost imperceptible and doubtful
+line of contact. He instinctively sketched the phantoms that have the
+figures of men, but are not human; the elusive, shadowy scenery which,
+like that of Gustave Dore's pictures, is Nature sympathizing in her
+forms and aspects with the emotions of terror or awe which the tale
+excites. His genius broods entranced over the evanescent phantasmagoria
+of the vague debatable land in which the realities of experience blend
+with ghostly doubts and wonders.
+
+But from its poisonous flowers what a wondrous perfume he distilled!
+Through his magic reed, into what penetrating melody he blew that
+deathly air! His relentless fancy seemed to seek a sin that was
+hopeless, a cruel despair that no faith could throw off. Yet his naive
+and well-poised genius hung over the gulf of blackness, and peered into
+the pit with the steady nerve and simple face of a boy. The mind of
+the reader follows him with an aching wonder and admiration, as the
+bewildered old mother forester watched Undine's gambols. As Hawthorne
+describes Miriam in _The Marble Faun_, so may the character of his
+genius be most truly indicated. Miriam, the reader will remember, turns
+to Hilda and Kenyon for sympathy. "Yet it was to little purpose that
+she approached the edge of the voiceless gulf between herself and them.
+Standing on the utmost verge of that dark chasm, she might stretch out
+her hand and never clasp a hand of theirs; she might strive to call out
+'Help, friends! help!' but, as with dreamers when they shout, her voice
+would perish inaudibly in the remoteness that seemed such a little way.
+This perception of an infinite, shivering solitude, amid which we cannot
+come close enough to human beings to be warmed by them, and where they
+turn to cold, chilly shapes of mist, is one of the most forlorn results
+of any accident, misfortune, crime, or peculiarity of character, that
+puts an individual ajar with the world."
+
+Thus it was because the early New England life made so much larger
+account of the supernatural element than any other modern civilized
+society, that the man whose blood had run in its veins instinctively
+turned to it. But beyond this alluring spell of its darker and obscurer
+individual experience, it seems neither to have touched his imagination
+nor even to have aroused his interest. To Walter Scott the romance of
+feudalism was precious for the sake of feudalism itself, in which
+he believed with all his soul, and for that of the heroic old feudal
+figures which he honored. He was a Tory in every particle of his
+frame, and his genius made him the poet of Toryism. But Hawthorne had
+apparently no especial political, religious, or patriotic affinity
+with the spirit which inspired him. It was solely a fascination of the
+intellect. And although he is distinctively the poet of the Puritans,
+although it is to his genius that we shall always owe that image of them
+which the power of The Scarlet Letter has imprinted upon literature,
+and doubtless henceforth upon historical interpretation, yet what an
+imperfect picture of that life it is! All its stern and melancholy
+romance is there--its picturesque gloom and intense passion; but upon
+those quivering pages, as in every passage of his stories drawn from
+that spirit, there seems to be wanting a deep, complete, sympathetic
+appreciation of the fine moral heroism, the spiritual grandeur, which
+overhung that gloomy life, as a delicate purple mist suffuses in summer
+twilights the bald crags of the crystal hills. It is the glare of the
+scarlet letter itself, and all that it luridly reveals and weirdly
+implies, which produced the tale. It was not beauty in itself nor
+deformity, not virtue nor vice, which engaged the author's deepest
+sympathy. It was the occult relation between the two. Thus while the
+Puritans were of all men pious, it was the instinct of Hawthorne's
+genius to search out and trace with terrible tenacity the dark and
+devious thread of sin in their lives.
+
+Human life and character, whether in New England two hundred years ago
+or in Italy to-day, interested him only as they were touched by this
+glamour of sombre spiritual mystery; and the attraction pursued him in
+every form in which it appeared. It is as apparent in the most perfect
+of his smaller tales, _Rappaccini's Daughter_, as in _The Scarlet
+Letter, The Blithedale Romance, The House of the Seven Gables_, and _The
+Marble Faun_. You may open almost at random, and you are as sure to find
+it as to hear the ripple in Mozart's music, or the pathetic minor in a
+Neapolitan melody. Take, for instance, The _Birth-Mark_, which we might
+call the best of the smaller stories, if we had not just said the
+same thing of _Rappaccini's Daughter_--for so even and complete is
+Hawthorne's power, that, with few exceptions, each work of his, like
+Benvenuto's, seems the most characteristic and felicitous. In this
+story, a scholar marries a beautiful woman, upon whose face is a mark
+which has hitherto seemed to be only a greater charm. Yet in one so
+lovely the husband declares that, although it is the slightest possible
+defect, it is yet the mark of earthly imperfection, and he proceeds to
+lavish all the resources of science to procure its removal. But it
+will not disappear; and at last he tells her that the crimson hand "has
+clutched its grasp" into her very being, and that there is mortal danger
+in trying the only means of removal that remains. She insists that
+it shall be tried. It succeeds; but it removes the stain and her life
+together. So in _Rappaccini's Daughter_. The old philosopher nourishes
+his beautiful child upon the poisonous breath of a flower. She loves,
+and her lover is likewise bewitched. In trying to break the spell,
+she drinks an antidote which kills her. The point of interest in both
+stories is the subtile connection, in the first, between the beauty
+of Georgiana and the taint of the birth-mark; and, in the second, the
+loveliness of Beatrice and the poison of the blossom.
+
+This, also, is the key of his last romance, _The Marble Faun_, one of
+the most perfect works of art in literature, whose marvellous spell
+begins with the very opening words: "Four individuals, in whose fortunes
+we should be glad to interest the reader, happened to be standing in one
+of the saloons of the sculpture-gallery in the Capitol at Rome." When
+these words are read, the mind familiar with Hawthorne is already
+enthralled. "What a journey is beginning, not a step of which is
+trodden, and yet the heart palpitates with apprehension! Through what
+delicate, rosy lights of love, and soft, shimmering humor, and hopes and
+doubts and vanishing delights, that journey will proceed, on and on into
+utter gloom." And it does so, although "Hilda had a hopeful soul, and
+saw sunlight on the mountain-tops". It does so, because Miriam and
+Donatello are the figures which interest us most profoundly, and they
+are both lost in the shadow. Donatello, indeed, is the true centre of
+interest, as he is one of the most striking creations of genius. But the
+perplexing charm of Donatello, what is it but the doubt that does not
+dare to breathe itself, the appalled wonder whether, if the breeze
+should lift those clustering locks a little higher, he would prove to be
+faun or man? It never does lift them; the doubt is never solved, but
+it is always suggested. The mystery of a partial humanity, morally
+irresponsible but humanly conscious, haunts the entrancing page. It
+draws us irresistibly on. But as the cloud closes around the lithe
+figure of Donatello, we hear again from its hidden folds the words of
+"The Birth-Mark": "Thus ever does the gross fatality of earth exult in
+its invariable triumph over the immortal essence, which, in this dim
+sphere of half-development, demands the completeness of a higher state".
+Or still more sadly, the mysterious youth, half vanishing from our
+sympathy, seems to murmur, with Beatrice Rappaccini, "And still as she
+spoke, she kept her hand upon her heart,--'Wherefore didst thou inflict
+this miserable doom upon thy child?'"
+
+We have left the story of Hawthorne's life sadly behind. But his
+life had no more remarkable events than holding office in the Boston
+Customhouse under Mr. Bancroft as collector; working for some time
+with the Brook--Farmers, from whom he soon separated, not altogether
+amicably; marrying and living in the Old Manse at Concord; returning
+to the Custom-house in Salem as surveyor; then going to Lenox, in
+Berkshire, where he lived in what he called "the ugliest little old
+red farm-house that you ever saw", and where the story is told of his
+shyness, that, if he saw anybody coming along the road whom he must
+probably pass, he would jump over the wall into the pasture, and so give
+the stranger a wide berth; back again to Concord; then to Liverpool as
+consul; travelling in Europe afterwards, and home at last and forever,
+to "The Wayside" under the Concord hill. "The hillside," he wrote to a
+friend in 1852, "is covered chiefly with locust-trees, which come into
+luxuriant blossom in the month of June, and look and smell very sweetly,
+intermixed with a few young elms and some white-pines and infant oaks,
+the whole forming rather a thicket than a wood. Nevertheless, there is
+some very good shade to be found there; I spend delectable hours there
+in the hottest part of the day, stretched out at my lazy length with
+a book in my hand or an unwritten book in my thoughts. There is almost
+always a breeze stirring along the side or the brow of the hill."
+
+It is not strange, certainly, that a man such as has been described, of
+a morbid shyness, the path of whose genius diverged always out of
+the sun into the darkest shade, and to whom human beings were merely
+psychological phenomena, should have been accounted ungenial,
+and sometimes even hard, cold, and perverse. From the bent of his
+intellectual temperament it happens that in his simplest and sweetest
+passages he still seems to be studying and curiously observing, rather
+than sympathizing. You cannot help feeling constantly that the author is
+looking askance both at his characters and you, the reader; and many a
+young and fresh mind is troubled strangely by his books, as if it
+were aware of a half-Mephistophelean smile upon the page. Nor is this
+impression altogether removed by the remarkable familiarity of his
+personal disclosures. There was never a man more shrinkingly retiring,
+yet surely never was an author more naively frank. He is willing that
+you should know all that a man may fairly reveal of himself. The great
+interior story he does not tell, of course, but the Introduction to the
+_Mosses from an Old Manse_, the opening chapter of _The Scarlet Letter_,
+and the _Consular Experiences_, with much of the rest of _Our Old Home_,
+are as intimate and explicit chapters of autobiography as can be found.
+Nor would it be easy to find anywhere a more perfect idyl than that
+introductory chapter of the _Mosses_. Its charm is perennial and
+indescribable; and why should it not be, since it was written at a
+time in which, as he says, "I was happy?" It is, perhaps, the most
+softly-hued and exquisite work of his pen. So the sketch of "The
+Custom-house", although prefatory to that most tragically powerful of
+romances,
+
+_The Scarlet Letter_, is an incessant play of the shyest and most airy
+humor. It is like the warbling of bobolinks before a thunder-burst. How
+many other men, however unreserved with the pen, would be likely to
+dare to paint, with the fidelity of Teniers and the simplicity of Fra
+Angelico, a picture of the office and the companions in which and with
+whom they did their daily work? The surveyor of customs in the port of
+Salem treated the town of Salem, in which he lived and discharged his
+daily task, as if it had been, with all its people, as vague and remote
+a spot as the town of which he was about to treat in the story. He
+commented upon the place and the people as modern travellers in Pompeii
+discuss the ancient town. It made a great scandal. He was accused of
+depicting with unpardonable severity worthy folks, whose friends were
+sorely pained and indignant. But he wrote such sketches as he wrote his
+stories. He treated his companions as he treated himself and all the
+personages in history or experience with which he dealt, merely as
+phenomena to be analyzed and described, with no more private malice or
+personal emotion than the sun, which would have photographed them, warts
+and all.
+
+Thus it was that the great currents of human sympathy never swept him
+away. The character of his genius isolated him, and he stood aloof from
+the common interests. Intent upon studying men in certain aspects, he
+cared little for man; and the high tides of collective emotion among
+his fellows left him dry and untouched. So he beholds and describes the
+generous impulse of humanity with sceptical courtesy rather than with
+hopeful cordiality.
+
+He does not chide you if you spend effort and life itself in the ardent
+van of progress, but he asks simply, "Is six so much better than half
+a dozen?" He will not quarrel with you if you expect the millennium
+to-morrow. He only says, with that glimmering smile, "So soon?" Yet in
+all this there was no shadow of spiritual pride. Nay, so far from this,
+that the tranquil and pervasive sadness of all Hawthorne's writings, the
+kind of heartache that they leave behind, seem to spring from the fact
+that his nature was related to the moral world, as his own Donatello was
+to the human. "So alert, so alluring, so noble", muses the heart as
+we climb the Apennines towards the tower of Monte Beni; "alas! is he
+human?" it whispers, with a pang of doubt.
+
+How this directed his choice of subjects, and affected his treatment of
+them, when drawn from early history, we have already seen. It is
+not, therefore, surprising, that the history into which he was born
+interested him only in the same way.
+
+When he went to Europe as consul, _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ was already
+published, and the country shook with the fierce debate which involved
+its life. Yet eight years later Hawthorne wrote with calm ennui, "No
+author, without a trial, can conceive of the difficulty of writing
+a romance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no
+mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a commonplace
+prosperity, in broad and simple daylight, as is happily the case with
+my dear native land." Is crime never romantic, then, until distance
+ennobles it? Or were the tragedies of Puritan life so terrible that the
+imagination could not help kindling, while the pangs of the plantation
+are superficial and commonplace? Charlotte Bronte, Dickens, and
+Thackeray were able to find a shadow even in "merrie England". But
+our great romancer looked at the American life of his time with these
+marvellous eyes, and could see only monotonous sunshine. That the devil,
+in the form of an elderly man clad in grave and decent attire, should
+lead astray the saints of Salem village, two centuries ago, and confuse
+right and wrong in the mind of Goodman Brown, was something that excited
+his imagination, and produced one of his weirdest stories. But that the
+same devil, clad in a sombre sophism, was confusing the sentiment of
+right and wrong in the mind of his own countrymen he did not even
+guess. The monotonous sunshine disappeared in the blackest storm. The
+commonplace prosperity ended in tremendous war. What other man of equal
+power, who was not intellectually constituted precisely as Hawthorne
+was, could have stood merely perplexed and bewildered, harassed by the
+inability of positive sympathy, in the vast conflict which tosses us all
+in its terrible vortex?
+
+In political theories and in an abstract view of war men may differ. But
+this war is not to be dismissed as a political difference. Here is an
+attempt to destroy the government of a country, not because it oppressed
+any man, but because its evident tendency was to secure universal
+justice under law. It is, therefore, a conspiracy against human nature.
+Civilization itself is at stake; and the warm blood of the noblest youth
+is everywhere flowing in as sacred a cause as history records--flowing
+not merely to maintain a certain form of government, but to vindicate
+the rights of human nature. Shall there not be sorrow and pain, if a
+friend is merely impatient or confounded by it--if he sees in it only
+danger or doubt, and not hope for the right--or if he seem to insinuate
+that it would have been better if the war had been avoided, even at
+that countless cost to human welfare by which alone the avoidance was
+possible?
+
+Yet, if the view of Hawthorne's mental constitution which has been
+suggested be correct, this attitude of his, however deeply it may be
+regretted, can hardly deserve moral condemnation. He knew perfectly well
+that if a man has no ear for music he had better not try to sing. But
+the danger with such men is that they are apt to doubt if music itself
+be not a vain delusion. This danger Hawthorne escaped. There is none of
+the shallow persiflage of the sceptic in his tone, nor any affectation
+of cosmopolitan superiority. Mr. Edward Dicey, in his interesting
+reminiscences of Hawthorne, published in _Macmillan's Magazine_,
+illustrates this very happily.
+
+   "To make his position intelligible, let me repeat an anecdote which
+    was told me by a very near friend of his and mine, who had heard it
+    from President Pierce himself. Frank Pierce had been, and was to the
+    day of Hawthorne's death, one of the oldest of his friends. At the
+    time of the Presidential election of 1856, Hawthorne, for once, took
+    part in politics, wrote a pamphlet in favor of his friend, and took
+    a most unusual interest in his success. When the result of the
+    nomination was known, and Pierce was President-elect, Hawthorne was
+    among the first to come and wish him joy. He sat down in the room
+    moodily and silently, as he was wont when anything troubled him; then,
+    without speaking a word, he shook Pierce warmly by the hand, and at
+    last remarked, 'Ah, Frank, what a pity!' The moment the victory was
+    won, that timid, hesitating mind saw the evils of the successful
+    course--the advantages of the one which had not been followed. So it
+    was always. Of two lines of action, he was perpetually in doubt which
+    was the best; and so, between the two, he always inclined to letting
+    things remain as they are.
+
+   "Nobody disliked slavery more cordially than he did; and yet the
+    difficulty of what was to be done with the slaves weighed constantly
+    upon his mind. He told me once that, while he had been consul at
+    Liverpool, a vessel arrived there with a number of negro sailors, who
+    had been brought from slave States, and would, of course, be enslaved
+    again on their return. He fancied that he ought to inform the men of
+    the fact, but then he was stopped by the reflection--who was to
+    provide for them if they became free? and, as he said, with a sigh,
+    'while I was thinking, the vessel sailed.' So, I recollect, on the old
+    battle-field of Manassas, in which I strolled in company with
+    Hawthorne, meeting a batch of runaway slaves--weary, foot-sore,
+    wretched, and helpless beyond conception; we gave them food and wine,
+    some small sums of money, and got them a lift upon a train going
+    northward; but not long afterwards Hawthorne turned to me with the
+    remark, 'I am not sure we were doing right after all. How can these
+    poor beings find food and shelter away from home?' Thus this ingrained
+    and inherent doubt incapacitated him from following any course
+    vigorously. He thought, on the whole, that Wendell Phillips and Lloyd
+    Garrison and the Abolitionists were in the right, but then he was
+    never quite certain that they were not in the wrong after all; so that
+    his advocacy of their cause was of a very uncertain character. He saw
+    the best, to alter slightly the famous Horatian line, but he never
+    could quite make up his mind whether he altogether approved of its
+    wisdom, and therefore followed it but falteringly.
+
+      "'Better to bear those ills we have,
+        Than fly to others that we know not of,'
+
+   "expressed the philosophy to which Hawthorne was thus borne
+    imperceptibly. Unjustly, but yet not unreasonably, he was looked upon
+    as a pro-slavery man, and suspected of Southern sympathies. In
+    politics he was always halting between two opinions; or, rather,
+    holding one opinion, he could never summon up his courage to adhere
+    to it and it only."
+
+The truth is that his own times and their people and their affairs were
+just as shadowy to him as those of any of his stories, and his mind
+held the same curious, half-wistful poise among all the conflicts of
+principle and passion around him, as among those of which he read and
+mused. If you ask why this was so--how it was that the tragedy of an old
+Italian garden, or the sin of a lonely Puritan parish, or the crime of
+a provincial judge, should so stimulate his imagination with romantic
+appeals and harrowing allegories, while either it did not see a Carolina
+slave-pen, or found in it only a tame prosperity--you must take your
+answer in the other question, why he did not weave into any of his
+stories the black and bloody thread of the Inquisition. His genius
+obeyed its law. When he wrote like a disembodied intelligence of
+events with which his neighbors' hearts were quivering--when the same
+half-smile flutters upon his lips in the essay _About War Matters_,
+sketched as it were upon the battle-field, as in that upon _Fire
+Worship_, written in the rural seclusion of the mossy Manse--ah me! it
+is Donatello, in his tower of Monte Beni, contemplating with doubtful
+interest the field upon which the flower of men are dying for an idea.
+Do you wonder, as you see him and hear him, that your heart, bewildered,
+asks and asks again, "Is he human? Is he a man?"
+
+Now that Hawthorne sleeps by the tranquil Concord, upon whose shores the
+Old Manse was his bridal bower, those who knew him chiefly there revert
+beyond the angry hour to those peaceful days. How dear the Old Manse was
+to him he has himself recorded; and in the opening of the _Tanglewood
+Tales_ he pays his tribute to that placid landscape, which will always
+be recalled with pensive tenderness by those who, like him, became
+familiar with it in happy hours. "To me," he writes, "there is a
+peculiar, quiet charm in these broad meadows and gentle eminences. They
+are better than mountains, because they do not stamp and stereotype
+themselves into the brain, and thus grow wearisome with the same strong
+impression, repeated day after day. A few summer weeks among mountains,
+a lifetime among green meadows and placid slopes, with outlines forever
+new, because continually fading out of the memory, such would be my
+sober choice." He used to say, in those days--when, as he was fond of
+insisting, he was the obscurest author in the world, because, although
+he had told his tales twice, nobody cared to listen--that he never
+knew exactly how he contrived to live. But he was then married, and the
+dullest eye could not fail to detect the feminine grace and taste that
+ordered the dwelling, and perceive the tender sagacity that made all
+things possible.
+
+Such was his simplicity and frugality that, when he was left alone for a
+little time in his Arcadia, lie would dismiss "the help", and, with some
+friend of other days who came to share his loneliness, he cooked the
+easy meal, and washed up the dishes. No picture is clearer in the memory
+of a certain writer than that of the magician, in whose presence he
+almost lost his breath, looking at him over a dinner-plate which he was
+gravely wiping in the kitchen, while the handy friend, who had been a
+Western settler, scoured the kettle at the door. Blithedale, where their
+acquaintance had begun, had not allowed either of them to forget how to
+help himself. It was amusing to one who knew this native independence of
+Hawthorne, to hear, some years afterwards, that he wrote the "campaign"
+_Life of Franklin Pierce_ for the sake of getting an office. That such a
+man should do such a work was possibly incomprehensible to those who did
+not know him upon any other supposition, until the fact was known
+that Mr. Pierce was an old and constant friend. Then it was explained.
+Hawthorne asked simply how he could help his friend, and he did the only
+thing he could do for that purpose. But although he passed some years
+in public office, he had neither taste nor talent for political life.
+He owed his offices to works quite other than political. His first and
+second appointments were virtually made by his friend Mr. Bancroft, and
+the third by his friend Mr. Pierce. His claims were perceptible enough
+to friendship, but would hardly have been so to a caucus.
+
+In this brief essay we have aimed only to indicate the general character
+of the genius of Hawthorne, and to suggest a key to his peculiar
+relation to his time. The reader will at once see that it is rather the
+man than the author who has been described; but this has been designedly
+done, for we confess a personal solicitude, shared, we are very sure, by
+many friends of Nathaniel Hawthorne, that there shall not be wanting to
+the future student of his works such light as acquaintance with the
+man may throw upon them, as well as some picture of the impression his
+personality made upon his contemporaries.
+
+Strongly formed, of dark, poetic gravity of aspect, lighted by the deep,
+gleaming eye that recoiled with girlish coyness from contact with your
+gaze; of rare courtesy and kindliness in personal intercourse, yet
+so sensitive that his look and manner can be suggested by the word
+"glimmering;" giving you a sense of restrained impatience to be away;
+mostly silent in society, and speaking always with an appearance of
+effort, but with a lambent light of delicate humor playing over all he
+said in the confidence of familiarity, and firm self-possession under
+all, as if the glimmering manner were only the tremulous surface of the
+sea, Hawthorne was personally known to few, and intimately to very few.
+But no one knew him without loving him, or saw him without remembering
+him; and the name Nathaniel Hawthorne, which, when it was first written,
+was supposed to be fictitious, is now one of the most enduring facts of
+English literature.
+
+
+
+
+RACHEL
+
+
+One evening in Paris, we were strolling through that most Parisian
+spot the Palais Royal, or, as it was called at that moment, the Palais
+National. It was after the revolution of February; but, although the
+place was full of associations with French revolutions, it seemed to
+have no special sympathy with the trouble of the moment, and was as gay
+as the youngest imagination conceives Paris to be. There was a constant
+throng loitering along the arcades; the cafes were lighted and crowded;
+men were smoking, sipping coffee, playing billiards, reading the
+newspapers, discussing the debates in the Chamber and the coming
+"Prophete" of Meyerbeer at the opera; women were chatting together in
+the boutiques, pretty grisettes hurrying home; little blanchisseuses,
+with their neatly-napkinned baskets, tripping among the crowd; strangers
+watched the gay groups, paused at the windows of tailors and jewellers,
+and felt the fascination of Paris. It was the moment of high-tide of
+Parisian life. It was an epitome of Paris, and Paris is an epitome of
+the time and of the world.
+
+At the corner of the Palais Royal is the Comedie Francaise, and to that
+we were going. There Rachel was playing. There she had recently recited
+the "Marseillaise" to frenzied Paris; and there, in the vestibule,
+genius of French comedy, of French intellect, and of French life, sits
+the wonderful Voltaire of Houdon, the statue which, for the first time,
+after the dreadful portraits which misrepresent him, gives the spectator
+some adequate idea of the personal appearance and impression of the man
+who moulded an age. You can scarcely see the statue without a shudder.
+It is remorseless intellect laid bare. The cold sweetness of the aspect,
+the subtle penetration of the brow, the passionless supremacy of
+a figure which is neither manly nor graceful, fill your mind with
+apprehension and with the conviction that the French Revolution you have
+seen is not the last.
+
+The curtain rises, and Paris and France roll away. A sad, solitary
+figure, like a dream of tragic Greece, glides across the scene. The air
+grows cold and thin, with a sense of the presence of lost antiquity.
+The feeling of fate, vast, resistless, and terrible, rises like a
+suffocating vapor; and the hopeless woe of the face, the pathetic
+dignity of the form, assure you, before she speaks, that this is indeed
+Rachel. The scenery is poor and hard; but its severe outlines and its
+conventional character serve to suggest Greece. The drapery which hangs
+upon Rachel is exquisitely studied from the most perfect statue. There
+is not a fold which is not Greek and graceful, and which does not seem
+obedient to the same law which touches her face with tragedy. As she
+slowly opens her thin lips, your own blanch; and from her melancholy
+eyes all smiles and possibility of joy have utterly passed away. Rachel
+stands alone, a solitary statue of fate and woe.
+
+When she speaks, the low, thrilling, distinct voice seems to proceed
+rather from her eyes than her mouth. It has a wan sound, if we may say
+so. It is the very tone you would have predicted as coming from that
+form, like the unearthly music which accompanies the speech of the
+Commendatore's statue in "Don Giovanni". That appearance and that voice
+are the key of the whole performance. Before she has spoken, you are
+filled with the spirit of an age infinitely remote, and only related
+to human sympathy now by the grandeur of suffering. The rest merely
+confirms that impression. The whole is simple and intense. It is
+conceived and fulfilled in the purest sense of Greek art.
+
+Of the early career and later life of Rachel such romantic stories are
+told and believed that only to see the heroine of her own life would
+be attraction enough to draw the world to Paris. Dr. Vernon, in his
+_Memoires d'un Bourgeois_, has described her earliest appearance upon
+the Boulevards--her studies, her trials, and her triumph. That triumph
+has been unequalled in stage annals for enthusiasm and permanence. Other
+actors have achieved single successes as brilliant; but no other has
+held for so long the most fickle and fastidious nation thrall to her
+powers; owning no rival near the throne, and ruling with a sway whose
+splendor was only surpassed by its sternness.
+
+For Rachel has never sought to ally her genius to goodness, and has
+rather despised than courted the aid of noble character. Not a lady
+by birth or breeding, she is reported to have surpassed Messalina
+in debauchery and Semiramis in luxury. Paris teems with tales of her
+private life, which, while they are undoubtedly exaggerated, yet serve
+to show the kind of impression her career has produced. Those modern
+Sybarites, the princes and nobles of Russia, are the heroes of her
+private romances; and her sumptuous apartments, if not a Tour de Nesle,
+are at least a bower of Rosamond.
+
+As if to show the independent superiority of her art, she has been
+willing to appear, or she really is, avaricious, mean, jealous,
+passionate, false; and then, by her prodigious power, she has swayed the
+public that so judged her as the wind tosses a leaf. There has, alas,
+been disdain in her superiority. Perhaps Paris has found something
+fascinating in her very contempt, as in the _Memoires du Diable_ the
+heroine confesses that she loved the ferocity of her lover. Nor is it
+a traditional fame that she has enjoyed; but whenever Rachel plays, the
+theatre is crowded, and the terror and the tears are what they were when
+she began.
+
+Rachel is the greatest of merely dramatic artists. Others are more
+beautiful; others are more stately and imposing; others have been fitted
+by external gifts of nature to personify characters of very marked
+features; others are more graceful and lovely and winning; most others
+mingle their own personality with the characters they assume, but Rachel
+has this final evidence of genius, that she is always superior to
+what she does; her mind presides over her own performances. It is the
+perfection of art. In describing this peculiar supremacy of genius, a
+scholar, in whose early death a poet and philosopher was lost, says of
+Shakespeare: "He sat pensive and alone above the hundred-handed play
+of his imagination." And Fanny Kemble, in her journal, describes a
+conversation upon the stage, in the tomb-scene of "Romeo and Juliet",
+where she, as Juliet, says to Mr. Romeo Keppel, "Where the devil is your
+dagger?" while all the tearful audience are lost in the soft woe of the
+scene.
+
+This is very much opposed to the general theory of acting, and the
+story is told with great gusto of a boy who was sent to see Garrick,
+we believe, and who was greatly delighted with the fine phrasing
+and swagger of a supernumerary, but could not understand why people
+applauded such an ordinary bumpkin as Garrick, who did not differ a whit
+from all the country boobies he had ever seen. It is insisted that the
+actor must persuade the spectator that he is what he seems to be, and
+this is gravely put as the first and final proof of good acting.
+
+This is, however, both a false view of art and a false interpretation
+and observation of experience. Shakespeare, through the mouth of
+Hamlet, tells the players to "hold the mirror up to nature"--that is, to
+represent nature. For what is the dramatic art, like all other arts, but
+a representation? If it aims to deceive the eye--if it tries to juggle
+the senses of the spectator--it is as trivial as if a painter should
+put real gold upon his canvas instead of representing gold by means of
+paint; or as if a sculptor should tinge the cheeks of his statue to make
+it more like a human face. We have seen tin pans so well represented in
+painting that the result was atrocious. For, if the object intended
+is really a tin pan, and not the pleasure produced by a conscious
+representation of one, then why not insert the veritable pan in the
+picture at once? If art is only a more or less successful imitation of
+natural objects, with a view to cheat the senses, it is an amusing game,
+but it is not a noble pursuit.
+
+It is an equally false observation of experience; because, if the
+spectator were really deceived, if the actor became, in the mind of the
+audience, truly identical with the character he represents, then, when
+that character was odious, the audience would revolt. If we cannot
+quietly sit and see one dog tear another, without interfering, could we
+gravely look on and only put our handkerchiefs to our eyes, when Othello
+puts the pillow to the mouth of Desdemona? If we really supposed him
+to be a murderous man, how instantly we should leap upon the stage and
+rescue "the gentle lady". The truth is, to state it boldly, we know the
+roaring lion to be only Snug, the joiner.
+
+All works of art must produce pleasure. Even the sternest and most
+repulsive subjects must be touched by art into a pensive beauty, or they
+fail to reach the height of great works. Goethe has shown this in the
+_Laocoon_, and every man feels it in constant experience. One of the
+grand themes of modern painting is the great tragedy of history, the
+Crucifixion. Materially it is repulsive, as the spectacle of a man in
+excruciating bodily torture; spiritually it is overwhelming, as the
+symbolized suffering of God for sin. If, now, the pictures which treat
+this subject were indeed only imitations of the scene, so that the
+spectator listened for the groans of agony and looked to see the blood
+drop from the brow crowned with thorns, how hideous and insupportable
+the sight would be! The mind is conscious as it contemplates the picture
+that it is a representation, and not a fact. The mere force of actuality
+is, therefore, destroyed, and thought busies itself with the moral
+significance of the scene. In the same way, in the tragedy of "Othello",
+conscious that there is not the actual physical suffering which there
+seems to be, the mind contemplates the real meaning which underlies that
+appearance, and curses jealousy and the unmanly passions.
+
+Even in a very low walk of art the same principle is manifested. A man
+might not care to adorn his parlor with the carcass of an ox or a hog,
+nor invite to his table boors muzzy with beer. But the most elegant
+of nations prizes the pictures of Teniers at extraordinary prices, and
+hangs its galleries with works minutely representing the shambles. Here,
+again, the explanation is this: that the mind, rejecting any idea of
+actuality in the picture, is charmed with the delicacy of detail, with
+lovely color, with tone, with tenderness, and all these are qualities
+inseparable from the picture, and do not belong by any necessity to the
+actual carcasses of animals. In the shambles, the sense of disgust and
+repulsion overcomes any pleasure in light and color. In the parlor, if
+the spectator were persuaded by the picture to hold his nose, the thing
+would be as unlovely as it is in nature. Imitation pleases only so
+far as it is known to be imitation. If deception by imitation were the
+object of art, then the material of the sculptor should be wax, and not
+marble. Every visitor mistakes the sitting figure of Cobbett, in Madame
+Tussaud's collection of wax-works, for a real man, and will very likely,
+as we did, speak to it. But who would accost the Moses of Michael
+Angelo, or believe the sitting Medici in his chapel to have speech?
+
+There is something unhandsomely derogatory to art in this common view.
+It is forgotten that art is not subsidiary nor auxiliary to nature, but
+it is a distinct ministry, and has a world of its own. They are not in
+opposition, nor do they clash. The cardinal fact of imitation in
+works of art is evident enough. The exquisite charm of art lies in the
+perfection of the imitation, coexisting with the consciousness of an
+absolute difference, so that the effect produced is not at all that
+which the object itself produces, but is an intellectual pleasure
+arising from the perception of the mingling of rational intention with
+the representation of the natural object. We can illustrate this by
+supposing a child bringing in a fresh rose, and a painter his picture of
+a rose. The pleasure derived from the picture is surely something better
+than wonder at the skill with which the form and color of the flower are
+imitated. Since imitation can never attain to the dignity and worth
+of the original, and since we live in the midst of nature, it would be
+folly to claim for its more or less successful copy the position and
+form of a great mental and moral influence.
+
+Of course we are not unmindful of the inevitable assertion that if
+certain forms are to be used for the expression of certain truths, the
+first condition is that those forms shall be accurately rendered. Hence
+arises the great stress laid by the modern schools upon a rigorous
+imitation of nature, and hence what is called the pre-Raphaelite spirit,
+with its marvellous detail. But mere imitation does not come any
+nearer to great art by being perfect. If it is not informed by a great
+intention, sculpture is only wax-work and painting a juggle.
+
+It is by her instinctive recognition of these fundamental principles
+that Rachel shows herself to be an artist. She is fully persuaded of the
+value of the modern spirit, and she belongs to the time by nothing more
+than by her instinctive and hearty adaptation of the principles of art
+which are illustrated in all other departments. There is nothing in
+Millais's or Hunt's paintings more purely pre-Raphaelite than Rachel's
+acting in the last scenes of "Adrienne Lecouvreur". It is the perfection
+of detail. It was studied, gasp by gasp, and groan by groan, in the
+hospital wards of Paris, where men were dying in agony. It is terrible,
+but it is true. We have seen a crowded theatre hanging in a suspense
+almost suffocating over that fearful scene. Men grew pale, women
+fainted, a spell of silence and awe held us enchanted. But it was all
+pure art. The actor was superior to the scene. It was the passion
+with which she threw herself into the representation, with a distinct
+conception of the whole, and a thorough knowledge of the means necessary
+to produce its effect, that secured the success. There was a sublimity
+of self-control in the spectacle, for, if she had allowed herself to be
+overwhelmed by the excitement, the play must have paused; real feeling
+would have invaded that which was represented, and we should, by a rude
+shock, have been staring in wonder at the weeping woman Rachel, instead
+of thrilling with the woes of the dying, despairing Adrienne. She seems
+to be what we know she is not.
+
+Rachel's earlier triumphs were in the plays of Racine. Certainly nothing
+could show the essential worth of the old Greek dramatic material more
+than the fact that it could be rendered into French rhyme without
+losing all its dignity. If a man should know Homer only through Pope's
+translations, he could hardly understand the real greatness and peculiar
+charm of Homer. And as most of us know him in no other way, we all
+understand that the eminence of Homer is conceded upon the force of
+tradition and the feeling of those who have read him in the original.
+So, to the reader of Racine, it is his knowledge of the outline of the
+grand old Greek stories that prevents their loss of charm and loftiness
+when they masquerade in French rhyme. They have lost their sublimity, so
+far as treatment can effect it, while they retain their general form of
+interest. But it is the splendid triumph of Rachel that she restores the
+original Greek grandeur to the drama. We no longer wonder at Racine's
+idea of Phedre, but we are confronted with Phedre herself. From the
+moment she appears, through every change and movement of the scene until
+the catastrophe, a sense of fate, the grim, remorseless, and inexorable
+destiny that presides over Greek story, is stamped upon every look and
+nod and movement of Rachel. It is stated that, since the enthusiasm
+produced in Paris by Ristori, Rachel's Italian rival, the sculptor
+Schlesinger has declared that his statue of Rachel which he had called
+Tragedy was only Melodrama after all. If the report be true, it does not
+prove that Rachel, but Schlesinger, is not a great artist.
+
+It is this simplicity and grandeur that make the excellence of Rachel in
+the characters of Racine. They cease to be French and become Greek. As
+a victim of fate, she moves, from the first scene to the last, as by a
+resistless impulse. Her voice has a low concentrated tone. Her movement
+is not vehement, but intense. If she smiles, it is a wan gleam of
+sadness, not of joy, as if the eyes that lighten for a moment saw all
+the time the finger of fate pointing over her shoulder. The thin form,
+graceful with intellectual dignity, not rounded with the ripeness of
+young womanhood, the statuesque simplicity and severity of the drapery,
+the pale cheek, the sad lips, the small eyes--these are accessory to the
+whole impression, the melancholy ornaments of the tragic scene. Her fine
+instinct avoids the romantic and melodramatic touches which, however
+seductive to an actor who aims at effect, would destroy at once that
+breadth and unity which characterize her best impersonations. Wherever
+the idea of fate inspires the tragedy, or can properly be introduced
+as the motive, there Rachel is unsurpassed and unapproachable. Her
+stillness, her solemnity, her intensity; the want of mouthing, of
+ranting, of all extravagance; the slight movement of the arms, and the
+subtle inflections of the voice which are more expressive than gestures,
+haunt the memory and float through the mind afterwards as the figure of
+Francesca di Rimini, in the exquisite picture of Ary Scheffer, sweeps,
+full of woe, which every line suggests, across the vision of Dante and
+his guide.
+
+There was, naturally, the greatest curiosity and a good deal of
+scepticism about Rachel's power in the modern drama, the melodrama of
+Victor Hugo, and the social drama of Scribe. But her appearance in the
+"Angelo" of Victor Hugo and in "Adrienne Lecouvreur" of Scribe satisfied
+the curiosity and routed the scepticism. It was pleasant after the vast
+and imposing forms, the tearless tragedy of Greek story, to see the
+mastery of this genius in the conditions of a life and spirit with
+which we were more familiar and sympathetic. It was clear that the same
+passionate intensity which, united with the most exquisite perceptions,
+enabled her so perfectly to restore the Greek spirit to the Greek form,
+would as adequately represent the voluptuous southern life. If in the
+old drama she was sculpture, so in the modern she was painting, not only
+with the flowing outline, but with all the purple, palpitating hues of
+passion.
+
+This is best manifested in the "Angelo", of which the scene is laid in
+old Padua and is, therefore, full of the mysterious spirit of mediaeval
+Italian, and especially Venetian life. Miss Cushman has played in an
+English version of this drama, called the "Actress of Padua". But it is
+hardly grandiose enough in its proportions to be very well adapted to
+the talent of Miss Cushman. It was remarkable how perfectly the genius
+which had, the evening before, adequately represented Phedre, could
+impersonate the ablest finesse of Italian subtilty. The old Italian
+romances were made real in a moment. The dim chambers, the dusky
+passages, the sliding doors, the vivid contrast of gayety and gloom, the
+dance in the palace and the duel in the garden, the smile on the lip and
+the stab at the heart, the capricious feeling, the impetuous action, the
+picturesque costume of life and society--all the substance and the form
+of our ideas of characteristic Italian life, are comprised in Rachel's
+Thisbe and Angelo.
+
+There is one scene in that play not to be forgotten. The curtain rises
+and shows a vast, dim chamber in the castle, with a heavily-curtained
+bed, and massive carved furniture, and a deep bay-window. It is night; a
+candle burns upon the table, feebly flickering in the gloom of the great
+chamber. Angelo, whom Thisbe loves, and who pretends to love her, is
+sitting uneasily in the chamber with his mistress, whose name we have
+forgotten, but whom he really loves. Thisbe is suspicious of his want of
+faith, and burns with jealousy, but has had no proof.
+
+A gust of wind, the rustle of the tapestry, the creak of a bough in the
+garden, the note of a night bird, any slightest sound makes the lovers
+start and quiver, as if they stood upon the verge of an imminent peril.
+Suddenly they both start at a low noise, apparently in the wall. Angelo
+rises and looks about, his mistress shivers and shrinks, but they
+discover nothing. The night deepens around them. The sense of calamity
+and catastrophe rises in the spectator's mind. They start again. This
+time they hear a louder noise, and glance helplessly around and feebly
+try to scoff away their terror. The sound dies away, and they converse
+in appalled and fragmentary whispers. But again a low, cautious, sliding
+noise arrests them. Angelo springs up, runs for his hat and cloak, blows
+out the candle upon the table, and escapes from the room, while his
+mistress totters to the bed and throws herself upon it, feigning sleep.
+The stage is left unoccupied, while the just-extinguished candle still
+smokes upon the table, and the sidelights and footlights, being lowered,
+wrap the vast chamber in deeper gloom.
+
+At this moment a small secret door in the wall at the bottom of the
+stage slips aside, and Thisbe, still wearing her ball-dress, and with
+a head-dress of gold sequins flashing in her black hair, is discovered
+crouching in the aperture, holding an antique lamp in one hand, a little
+raised, and with the other softly putting aside the door, while, bending
+forward with a cat-like stillness, she glares around the chamber with
+eager eyes, that flash upon everything at once. The picture is perfect.
+The light falls from the raised lamp upon this jewelled figure crouching
+in the darkness at the bottom of the stage. Judith was not more
+terrible; Lucrezia Borgia not more superb. But, magnificent as it is,
+it is a moment of such intense interest that applause is suspended. The
+house is breathless, for it is but the tiger's crouch that precedes
+the spring. The next instant she is upon the floor of the chamber, and,
+still bending slightly forward to express the eager concentration of
+her mind, she glances at the bed and the figure upon it with a scornful
+sneer, that indicates how clearly she sees the pretence of sleep, and
+how evidently somebody has been there, or something has happened which
+justifies all her suspicion, and then, with panther-like celerity, she
+darts about the chamber to find some trace of the false lover--a hat,
+a glove, a plume, a cloak--to make assurance doubly sure. But there
+is nothing upon the floor, nothing upon the table, nothing in the
+bay-window, nothing upon the sofa, nor in the huge carved chairs; there
+is nothing that proves the treachery she suspects. But her restless eye
+leads her springing foot from one corner of the chamber to the other.
+Speed increases with the lessening chance of proof; the eye flashes
+more and more fiercely; the breast heaves; the hand clinches; the cheek
+burns, until, suddenly, in the very moment of despair, having as yet
+spoken no word, she comes to the table, sees the candle, which still
+smokes, and drawing herself up with fearful calmness, her cheeks grow
+pallid, the lips livid, the hands relax, the eye deadens as with a
+blow, and, with the despairing conviction that she is betrayed, her
+heart-break sighs itself out in a cold whisper, "_Elle fume encore_".
+
+In this she is as purely dramatic as in other plays she is classical.
+But neither in the one nor the other is there a look, or a gesture, or
+a word, which is not harmonious with the spirit of the style and the
+character of the person represented.
+
+This is pure passion as the other is implacable fate. There is something
+so tearfully human in it that you are touched as by a picture of the
+Magdalen. Every representation of Rachel is preserved in your memory
+with the first sights of the great statues and the famous pictures.
+
+In the French translation of Schiller's "Mary Stuart", a character which
+may be supposed especially to interest Americans and English, Rachel is
+not less excellent. The sad grace, the tender resignation, the poetic
+enthusiasm, the petulant caprice, the wilful, lovely womanliness of the
+lovely queen, are made tragically real by her representation. Perhaps it
+is not the Mary of Mignet nor of history. But Mary Queen of Scots is one
+of the characters which the imagination has chosen to take from history
+and decorate with immortal grace. It cares less for what the woman
+Mary was, than to have a figure standing upon the fact of history, but
+radiant with the beauty of poetry. It has invested her with a loveliness
+that is perhaps unreal, with a tenderness and sweetness that were
+possibly foreign to her character, and with a general fascination and
+good intention which a contemporary might not have discovered.
+
+It has made her the ideal of unfortunate womanhood. For it seemed that a
+fate so tragic deserved a fame so fair. Perhaps the weakness which Mary
+had, and which Lady Jane Grey had not, have been the very reasons why
+the unfortunate, unhappy Queen Mary is dearer to our human sympathies
+than the unfortunate Lady Jane. Perhaps because it was a woman
+who pursued her, the instinct of men has sought to restore, by the
+canonization of Mary, the womanly ideal injured by Elizabeth.
+
+But, whatever be the reason, there is no question that we judge Mary
+Queen of Scots more by the imagination than by historical rigor; and it
+is Mary, as the mind insists upon having her, that Rachel represents.
+She conspires with the imagination to complete the ideal of Mary. It is
+a story told in sad music to which we listen; it is a mournful panorama,
+unfolding itself scene by scene, upon which we gaze. Lost in soft
+melancholy, the figures of the drama move before us as in a tragic
+dream. But after seeing Rachel's Mary we can see no other. If we meet
+her in history or romance, it is always that figure, those pensive eyes,
+forecasting a fearful doom, that voice whose music is cast in a hopeless
+minor. It is thus that dramatic genius creates, and poetry disputes with
+history.
+
+Jules Janin says that Rachel is best in those parts of this play where
+the anger of the Queen is more prominent than the grief of the woman.
+
+This is true to a certain extent. It was not difficult to see that the
+fierceness was more natural than the tenderness to the woman Rachel, and
+that, therefore, those parts had a reality which the tenderness had not.
+But the performance was symmetrical, and, so far as the mere acting was
+concerned, the woman was as well rendered as the Queen. The want of the
+spectacle was this, and it is, we fully grant, the defect of all her
+similar personations: you felt that it was only intellect feigning
+heart, though with perfect success. The tenderness and caprice of the
+woman, and the pride and dignity of the Queen, are all there. She would
+not be the consummate artist she is if she could not give them. But even
+through your tears you see that it is art. It is, indeed, concealed
+by its own perfection, but it is not lost in the loveliness of the
+character it suggests, as might be the case with a greatly inferior
+artist. You are half sure, as you own the excellence, that much of the
+tender effect arises from your feeling that Rachel, as she represents a
+woman so different from herself, regards her role with sad longing and
+vague regret. When we say that she is the ideal Mary, we mean strictly
+the artistic ideal.
+
+The late Charlotte Bronte, in her novel of _Villette_, has described
+Rachel with a splendor of rhetoric that is very unusual with the author
+of _Jane Eyre_. But in the style of the description it is very easy
+to see the influence of the thing described. It has a picturesque
+stateliness, a grave grace and musical pomp, which all belong to the
+genius of Rachel. Even the soft gloom of her eyes is in it; a gloom
+and a fire which no one could more subtly feel than Miss Bronte. Her
+description is the best that we have seen of what is, in its nature,
+after all indescribable.
+
+As the fame of an actor or singer is necessarily traditional, and
+rapidly perishes, it is not easy to compare one with another when they
+are not contemporaries, for you find yourself only comparing vague
+impressions and reports. Of Roscius and Betterton we must accept the
+names and allow the fame. We can see Reynolds's pictures, we can hear
+Handel's music, we can read Goldsmith's and Johnson's books; but of
+Garrick what can we have but a name, and somebody's account of what he
+thought of Garrick? The touch of Shakespeare we can feel as well as did
+our ancestors, and our great-grandchildren's great-grandchildren will
+feel it as fully as we. But the voice of Malibran lingers in only a few
+happy memories, and we know Mrs. Siddons better by Sir Joshua's portrait
+than by her own glories.
+
+It is, therefore, impossible to decide what relative rank among
+actresses Rachel occupies. Mrs. Jameson, in her _Common-Place Book of
+Thoughts, Memories, and Fancies_, says some sharp things of her, and
+Mrs. Jameson is a critic of too delicate a mind not to be heeded. The
+general view she takes of Rachel is, that she is not a great artist in
+the true sense of the word. She is a finished actress, but not an artist
+fine enough to conceal her art. The last scene of "Adrienne Lecouvreur"
+seems to Mrs. Jameson a mistake and a failure--so beyond the limits
+of art, a mere imitation of a repulsive physical fact; and finally
+she pronounces that Rachel has talent but not genius; while it is the
+"entire absence of the high poetic element which distinguishes Rachel
+as an actress, and places her at such an immeasurable distance from Mrs.
+Siddons, that it shocks me to hear their names together".
+
+It may be fairly questioned, whether a woman so refined and cultivated
+as Mrs. Jameson may not have judged Rachel rather by her wants as a
+woman than by her excellence as an artist. That the terrible last scene
+of "Adrienne" is a harrowing imitation of nature we have conceded. The
+play is, in truth, a mere melodrama. It is a vaudeville of costume,
+with a frightful catastrophe appended. But as an artist she seems to us
+perfectly to render the part. She does not make it more than it is, but
+she makes it just what it is--a proud, injured, and betrayed actress.
+Whether the accuracy of her imitation is not justified by the intention,
+which alone can redeem imitation, will remain a question to each
+spectator. Mrs. Jameson also insists that Rachel's power is extraneous,
+and excites only the senses and the intellect, and that she has become a
+hard mannerist.
+
+In our remarks upon this celebrated actress we have viewed her simply
+as an artist, and not as a woman. She appeals to the public only in that
+way. Perhaps the sinister stories that are told of her private career
+only serve to confirm and deepen the feeling of the intensity of her
+nature, she so skilfully represents the most fearful passions, not
+from the perception of genius alone, but from the knowledge of actual
+experience. Certainly no woman's character has been more freely
+discussed, and no public performer of any kind ever sought so little
+to propitiate her audience. She has seemed to scorn the world she
+fascinated; and like a superb snake, with glittering eyes and cold
+crest, to gloat over the terror which held her captives thrall. Hence it
+is not surprising to one who has seen her a great deal, and has felt the
+peculiarity of her power, to find in Lehmann's portrait of her--which
+is, perhaps, the most characteristic of all that have been taken--a
+subtle resemblance to a serpent, which is at once fascinating and
+startling. Mrs. Jameson mentions that when she first saw her in
+Hermione, she was reminded of a Lamia, or serpent nature in woman's
+form. As you look at Lehmann's portrait this feeling is irresistible.
+The head bends slightly forward, with a darting, eager movement, yet
+with a fine, lithe grace. The keen, bright eyes glance a little askance,
+with a want of free confidence. There are a slim smoothness, a silent
+alertness, in the general impression--a nervous, susceptible intentness,
+united with undeniable beauty, that recall the deadly nightshade among
+flowers and Keats's "Lamia" among poems. The portrait would fully
+interpret the poem, She looked the lovely Lamia upon the verge of
+flight, at the instant when she felt the calm, inexorable eye of
+criticism and detection. In a moment, while you gaze, that form will be
+prone, those bright, cold eyes malignant, that wily grace will undulate
+into motion and glide away. You feel that there is no human depravity
+that Rachel could not adequately represent. Perhaps you doubt if she
+could be Desdemona or Imogen.
+
+Rachel is great, but there is something greater. It is not an entirely
+satisfactory display of human power, even in its own way. Her triumph
+is that of an actress. It is only an intellectual success. For however
+subtly dramatic genius may seize and represent the forms of human
+emotion, yet the representation is most perfect--not, indeed, as art,
+but as a satisfaction of the heart--when the personal character of the
+artist interests those emotions to himself, and thus sympathetically
+affects the audience. Rachel's Mary is a perfect portrait of Mary;
+but it is only a picture, after all, that expresses the difference in
+feeling between the impression of her personation and that which will
+be derived from another woman. The fiercer and darker passions of human
+nature are depicted by her with terrible force-power. They throb with
+reality; but in the soft, superior shades you still feel that it is
+emotion, intellectually discerned.
+
+Such facts easily explain the present defection of Paris from Rachel.
+Ristori has come up from Italy, and with one woman's smile, "full of the
+warm South", she has lured Paris to her feet. There is no more sudden
+and entire desertion of a favorite recorded in all the annals of popular
+caprice. The feuilletonists, who are a power in Paris, have gone over in
+a body to the beautiful Italian. They describe her triumphs precisely as
+they described Rachel's. The old ecstasies are burnished up for the new
+occasion. In a country like ours, where there is no theatre, and where
+the dramatic differences only creep into an advertisement, such an
+excitement as Paris feels, from such a cause and at such a time, is
+simply incredible. It is, possibly, as real and dignified an excitement
+as that which New York experienced upon the decease of the late lamented
+William Poole.
+
+There are various explanations of this fall of Rachel, without resorting
+to the theory of superior genius in Ristori. Undoubtedly Paris loves
+novelty, and has been impatient of the disdainful sway of Rachel. Her
+reputed avarice and want of courtesy and generosity, her total failure
+to charm as a woman while she fascinated as an artist, have, naturally
+enough, after many years, fatigued the patience and disappointed
+the humane sympathies of a public whose mere curiosity had been long
+satisfied. Rachel seemed only more Parisian than Paris.
+
+But when over the Alps came Ristori, lovely as a woman and eminent as
+an artist, then there was a new person who could make Paris weep at her
+greatness upon the stage, and her goodness away from it; who, in the
+plenitude of her first success, could shame the reported avarice of her
+fallen rival by offers of the sincerest generosity. When Ristori came,
+who seemed to have a virtue for every vice of Rachel, Paris, with one
+accord, hurried with hymns and incense to the new divinity. We regard it
+as a homage to the woman no less than a tribute to the artist. We regard
+it as saying to Rachel that if, being humane and lovely, she chose, from
+pride, to rule by scornful superiority, she has greatly erred; or if,
+being really unlovely, she has held this crown only by her genius, she
+has yet to see human nature justify itself by preferring a humane to an
+inhuman power. The most splendid illustration of this kind of homage was
+the career of Jenny Lind in America. It was rather the fashion among
+the _dilettanti_ to undervalue her excellence as an artist. A popular
+superficial criticism was fond of limiting her dramatic power to
+inferior roles. She was denied passion and great artistic skill; she was
+accused of tricks. But, even had these things been true, what a career
+it was! It was unprecedented, and can never be repeated. Yet it was,
+at bottom, the success of a saint rather than that of a singer. Had she
+been a worse or better artist the homage would have been the same. If
+the public--and it is a happy fact--can love the woman even more than it
+admires the artist, her triumph is assured.
+
+We look upon the enthusiasm for Ristori by no means as an unmingled
+tribute to superior genius. We make no question of her actual womanly
+charms. Even if appearance of generosity, of simplicity, and sweetness
+were only deep Italian wile, and assumed, upon profound observation and
+consideration of human nature and the circumstances of Rachel's position
+in Paris, merely for the purpose of exciting applause, that applause
+would still be genuine, and would prove the loyalty of the public mind
+to what is truly lovely. It was our good-fortune to see Ristori in
+Italy, where, for the last ten years, she has been accounted the first
+Italian actress. She has there been seen by all the travelling world of
+Europe and America. It is not possible that so great a talent, as the
+Parisians consider it, could have been so long overlooked. We well
+remember Ristori as a charming, natural, simple actress; but of the
+surpassing power which Paris has discovered probably very few of us
+retain any recollection.
+
+
+
+
+THACKERAY IN AMERICA
+
+
+Mr. Thackeray's visit at least demonstrates that if we are unwilling
+to pay English authors for their books, we are ready to reward them
+handsomely for the opportunity of seeing and hearing them. If Mr.
+Dickens, instead of dining at other people's expense, and making
+speeches at his own, when he came to see us, had devoted an evening
+or two in the week to lecturing, his purse would have been fuller, his
+feelings sweeter, and his fame fairer. It was a Quixotic crusade, that
+of the Copyright, and the excellent Don has never forgiven the windmill
+that broke his spear.
+
+Undoubtedly, when it was ascertained that Mr. Thackeray was coming, the
+public feeling on this side of the sea was very much divided as to his
+probable reception. "He'll come and humbug us, eat our dinners,
+pocket our money, and go home and abuse us, like that unmitigated snob
+Dickens," said Jonathan, chafing with the remembrance of that grand ball
+at the Park Theatre and the Boz tableaux, and the universal wining and
+dining, to which the distinguished Dickens was subject while he was our
+guest.
+
+"Let him have his say," said others, "and we will have our look. We will
+pay a dollar to hear him, if we can see him at the same time; and as
+for the abuse, why, it takes even more than two such cubs of the roaring
+British Lion to frighten the American Eagle. Let him come, and give him
+fair play."
+
+He did come, and had fair play, and returned to England with a
+comfortable pot of gold holding $12.000, and with the hope and promise
+of seeing us again in September, to discourse of something not less
+entertaining than the witty men and sparkling times of Anne. We think
+there was no disappointment with his lectures. Those who knew his books
+found the author in the lecturer. Those who did not know his books
+were charmed in the lecturer by what is charming in the author--the
+unaffected humanity, the tenderness, the sweetness, the genial play of
+fancy, and the sad touch of truth, with that glancing stroke of satire
+which, lightning-like, illumines while it withers. The lectures were
+even more delightful than the books, because the tone of the voice and
+the appearance of the man, the general personal magnetism, explained and
+alleviated so much that would otherwise have seemed doubtful or unfair.
+For those who had long felt in the writings of Thackeray a reality quite
+inexpressible, there was a secret delight in finding it justified in
+his speaking; for he speaks as he writes--simply, directly, without
+flourish, without any cant of oratory, commending what he says by its
+intrinsic sense, and the sympathetic and humane way in which it was
+spoken. Thackeray is the kind of "stump orator" that would have pleased
+Carlyle. He never thrusts himself between you and his thought. If his
+conception of the time and his estimate of the men differ from your
+own, you have at least no doubt what his view is, nor how sincere and
+necessary it is to him. Mr. Thackeray considers Swift a misanthrope;
+he loves Goldsmith and Steele and Harry Fielding; he has no love
+for Sterne, great admiration for Pope, and alleviated admiration for
+Addison. How could it be otherwise? How could Thackeray not think Swift
+a misanthrope and Sterne a factitious sentimentalist? He is a man of
+instincts, not of thoughts: he sees and feels. He would be Shakespeare's
+call-boy, rather than dine with the Dean of St. Patrick's. He would take
+a pot of ale with Goldsmith, rather than a glass of burgundy with the
+"Reverend Mr. Sterne", and that simply because he is Thackeray. He
+would have done it as Fielding would have done it, because he values one
+genuine emotion above the most dazzling thought; because he is, in fine,
+a Bohemian, "a minion of the moon", a great, sweet, generous heart.
+
+We say this with more unction now that we have personal proof of it in
+his public and private intercourse while he was here.
+
+The popular Thackeray-theory, before his arrival, was of a severe
+satirist, who concealed scalpels in his sleeves and carried probes in
+his waistcoat pockets; a wearer of masks; a scoffer and sneerer, and
+general infidel of all high aims and noble character. Certainly we are
+justified in saying that his presence among us quite corrected this
+idea. We welcomed a friendly, genial man; not at all convinced that
+speech is heaven's first law, but willing to be silent when there is
+nothing to say; who decidedly refused to be lionized--not by sulking,
+but by stepping off the pedestal and challenging the common sympathies
+of all he met; a man who, in view of the thirty-odd editions of Martin
+Farquhar Tupper, was willing to confess that every author should "think
+small-beer of himself". Indeed, he has this rare quality, that his
+personal impression deepens, in kind, that of his writings. The quiet
+and comprehensive grasp of the fact, and the intellectual impossibility
+of holding fast anything but the fact, is as manifest in the essayist
+upon the wits as in the author of _Henry Esmond_ and _Vanity Fair_.
+Shall we say that this is the sum of his power, and the secret of
+his satire? It is not what might be, nor what we or other persons of
+well-regulated minds might wish, but it is the actual state of things
+that he sees and describes. How, then, can he help what we call satire,
+if he accept Mrs. Rawdon Crawley's invitation and describe her party?
+There was no more satire in it, so far as he is concerned, than in
+painting lilies white. A full-length portrait of the fair Lady Beatrix,
+too, must needs show a gay and vivid figure, superbly glittering across
+the vista of those stately days. Then, should Dab and Tab, the eminent
+critics, step up and demand that her eyes be a pale blue, and her
+stomacher higher around the neck? Do Dab and Tab expect to gather pears
+from peach-trees? Or, because their theory of dendrology convinces
+them that an ideal fruit-tree would supply any fruit desired upon
+application, do they denounce the non-pear-bearing peach-tree in the
+columns of their valuable journal? This is the drift of the fault found
+with Thackeray. He is not Fenelon, he is not Dickens, he is not Scott;
+he is not poetical, he is not ideal, he is not humane; he is not Tit,
+he is not Tat, complain the eminent Dabs and Tabs. Of course he is not,
+because he is Thackeray--a man who describes what he sees, motives as
+well as appearances--a man who believes that character is better
+than talent--that there is a worldly weakness superior to worldly
+wisdom--that Dick Steele may haunt the ale-house and be carried home
+muzzy, and yet be a more commendable character than the reverend Dean
+of St. Patrick's, who has genius enough to illuminate a century, but not
+sympathy enough to sweeten a drop of beer. And he represents this in
+a way that makes us see it as he does, and without exaggeration; for
+surely nothing could be more simple than his story of the life of
+"honest Dick Steele". If he allotted to that gentleman a consideration
+disproportioned to the space he occupies in literary history, it only
+showed the more strikingly how deeply the writer-lecturer's sympathy was
+touched by Steele's honest humanity.
+
+An article in our April number complained that the tendency of his view
+of Anne's times was to a social laxity, which might be very exhilarating
+but was very dangerous; that the lecturer's warm commendation of
+fermented drinks, taken at a very early hour of the morning in
+tavern-rooms and club houses, was as deleterious to the moral health of
+enthusiastic young readers disposed to the literary life as the beverage
+itself to their physical health.
+
+But this is not a charge to be brought against Thackeray. It is a
+quarrel with history and with the nature of literary life. Artists and
+authors have always been the good fellows of the world. That mental
+organization which predisposes a man to the pursuit of literature
+and art is made up of talent combined with ardent social sympathy,
+geniality, and passion, and leads him to taste every cup and try every
+experience. There is certainly no essential necessity that this class
+should be a dissipated and disreputable class, but by their very
+susceptibility to enjoyment they will always be the pleasure lovers and
+seekers. And here is the social compensation to the literary man for the
+surrender of those chances of fortune which men of other pursuits enjoy.
+If he makes less money, he makes more juice out of what he does make. If
+he cannot drink Burgundy he can quaff the nut-brown ale; while the most
+brilliant wit, the most salient fancy, the sweetest sympathy, the most
+genial culture, shall sparkle at his board more radiantly than a silver
+service, and give him the spirit of the tropics and the Rhine, whose
+fruits are on other tables. The golden light that transfigures talent
+and illuminates the world, and which we call genius, is erratic and
+erotic; and while in Milton it is austere, and in Wordsworth cool,
+and in Southey methodical, in Shakespeare it is fervent, with all the
+results of fervor; in Raphael lovely, with all the excesses of love; in
+Dante moody, with all the whims of caprice. The old quarrel of Lombard
+Street with Grub Street is as profound as that of Osiris and Typho--it
+is the difference of sympathy. The Marquis of Westminster will take good
+care that no superfluous shilling escapes. Oliver Goldsmith will still
+spend his last shilling upon a brave and unnecessary banquet to his
+friends.
+
+Whether this be a final fact of human organization or not, it is
+certainly a fact of history. Every man instinctively believes that
+Shakespeare stole deer, just as he disbelieves that Lord-mayor
+Whittington ever told a lie; and the secret of that instinct is the
+consciousness of the difference in organization. "Knave, I have the
+power to hang ye," says somebody in one of Beaumont and Fletcher's
+plays. "And I do be hanged and scorn ye," is the airy answer. "I had a
+pleasant hour the other evening," said a friend to us, "over my cigar
+and a book." "What book was that?" "A treatise conclusively proving
+the awful consequences of smoking." De Quincey came up to London and
+declared war upon opium; but during a little amnesty, in which he lapsed
+into his old elysium, he wrote his best book depicting its horrors.
+
+Our readers will not imagine that we are advocating the claims of
+drunkenness nor defending social excess. We are only recognizing a fact
+and stating an obvious tendency. The most brilliant illustrations of
+every virtue are to be found in the literary guild, as well as the
+saddest beacons of warning; yet it will often occur that the last in
+talent and the first in excess of a picked company will be a man around
+whom sympathy most kindly lingers. We love Goldsmith more at the head of
+an ill-advised feast than Johnson and his friends leaving it, thoughtful
+and generous as their conduct was. The heart despises prudence.
+
+In the single-hearted regard we know that pity has a larger share.
+Yet it is not so much that pity is commiseration for misfortune
+and deficiency, as that which is recognition of a necessary worldly
+ignorance. The literary class is the most innocent of all. The contempt
+of practical men for the poets is based upon a consciousness that they
+are not bad enough for a bad world. To a practical man nothing is so
+absurd as the lack of worldly shrewdness. The very complaint of the
+literary life that it does not amass wealth and live in palaces is the
+scorn of the practical man, for he cannot understand that intellectual
+opacity which prevents the literary man from seeing the necessity of the
+different pecuniary condition. It is clear enough to the publisher who
+lays up fifty thousand a year why the author ends the year in debt.
+But the author is amazed that he who deals in ideas can only dine upon
+occasional chops, while the man who merely binds and sells ideas sits
+down to perpetual sirloin. If they should change places, fortune would
+change with them. The publisher turned author would still lay up his
+thousands; the publishing author would still directly lose thousands. It
+is simply because it is a matter of prudence, economy, and knowledge of
+the world. Thomas Hood made his ten thousand dollars a year, but if
+he lived at the rate of fifteen thousand he would hardly die rich. Mr.
+Jerdan, a gentleman who, in his _Autobiography_, advises energetic youth
+to betake themselves to the highway rather than to literature, was, we
+understand, in the receipt of an easy income, and was a welcome guest in
+pleasant houses; but living in a careless, shiftless, extravagant way,
+he was presently poor, and, instead of giving his memoirs the motto,
+_peccavi_, and inditing a warning, he dashes off a truculent defiance.
+Practical publishers and practical men of all sorts invest their
+earnings in Michigan Central or Cincinnati and Dayton instead, in steady
+works and devoted days, and reap a pleasant harvest of dividends. Our
+friends the authors invest in prime Havanas, Rhenish, in oyster suppers,
+love and leisure, and divide a heavy percentage of headache, dyspepsia,
+and debt.
+
+This is as true a view, from another point, as the one we have already
+taken. If the literary life has the pleasures of freedom, it has also
+its pains. It may be willing to resign the queen's drawing-room, with
+the illustrious galaxy of stars and garters, for the chamber with a
+party nobler than the nobility. The author's success is of a wholly
+different kind from that of the publisher, and he is thoughtless who
+demands both. Mr. Roe, who sells sugar, naturally complains that Mr.
+Doe, who sells molasses, makes money more rapidly. But Mr. Tennyson,
+who writes poems, can hardly make the same complaint of Mr. Moxon, who
+publishes them, as was very fairly shown in a number of the _Westminster
+Review_, when noticing Mr. Jordan's book.
+
+What we have said is strictly related to Mr. Thackeray's lectures, which
+discuss literature. All the men he commemorated were illustrations and
+exponents of the career of letters. They all, in various ways, showed
+the various phenomena of the temperament. And when in treating of them
+the critic came to Steele, he found one who was one of the most striking
+illustrations of one of the most universal aspects of literary life--the
+simple-hearted, unsuspicious, gay gallant and genial gentleman;
+ready with his sword or his pen, with a smile or a tear, the fair
+representative of the social tendency of his life. It seems to us that
+the Thackeray theory--the conclusion that he is a man who loves to
+depict madness, and has no sensibilities to the finer qualities of
+character--crumbled quite away before that lecture upon Steele. We know
+that it was not considered the best; we know that many of the delighted
+audience were not sufficiently familiar with literary history fully to
+understand the position of the man in the lecturer's review; but, as a
+key to Thackeray, it was, perhaps, the most valuable of all. We know in
+literature of no more gentle treatment; we have not often encountered in
+men of the most rigorous and acknowledged virtue such humane tenderness;
+we have not often heard from the most clerical lips words of such
+genuine Christianity. Steele's was a character which makes weakness
+amiable: it was a weakness, if you will, but it was certainly
+amiability, and it was a combination more attractive than many
+full-panoplied excellences. It was not presented as a model. Captain
+Steele in the tap-room was not painted as the ideal of virtuous manhood;
+but it certainly was intimated that many admirable things were consonant
+with a free use of beer. It was frankly stated that if, in that
+character, virtue abounded, cakes and ale did much more abound. Captain
+Richard Steele might have behaved much better than he did, but we should
+then have never heard of him. A few fine essays do not float a man into
+immortality, but the generous character, the heart sweet in all excesses
+and under all chances, is a spectacle too beautiful and too rare to be
+easily forgotten. A man is better than many books. Even a man who is not
+immaculate may have more virtuous influence than the discreetest saint.
+Let us remember how fondly the old painters lingered round the story of
+Magdalen, and thank Thackeray for his full-length Steele.
+
+We conceive this to be the chief result of Thackeray's visit, that he
+convinced us of his intellectual integrity; he showed us how impossible
+it is for him to see the world and describe it other than he does. He
+does not profess cynicism, nor satirize society with malice; there is no
+man more humble, none more simple; his interests are human and concrete,
+not abstract. We have already said that he looks through and through at
+the fact. It is easy enough, and at some future time it will be done, to
+deduce the peculiarity of his writings from the character of his mind.
+There is no man who masks so little as he in assuming the author.
+His books are his observations reduced to writing. It seems to us as
+singular to demand that Dante should be like Shakespeare as to quarrel
+with Thackeray's want of what is called ideal portraiture. Even if you
+thought, from reading his _Vanity Fair_, that he had no conception
+of noble women, certainly after the lecture upon Swift, after all the
+lectures, in which every allusion to women was so manly and delicate and
+sympathetic, you thought so no longer. It is clear that his sympathy
+is attracted to women--to that which is essentially womanly, feminine.
+Qualities common to both sexes do not necessarily charm him because
+he finds them in women. A certain degree of goodness must always be
+assumed. It is only the rare flowering that inspires special praise.
+You call Amelia's fondness for George Osborne foolish, fond idolatry.
+Thackeray smiles, as if all love were not idolatry of the fondest
+foolishness. What was Hero's--what was Francesco di Rimini's--what was
+Juliet's? They might have been more brilliant women than Amelia, and
+their idols of a larger mould than George, but the love was the same old
+foolish, fond idolatry. The passion of love and a profound and sensible
+knowledge, regard based upon prodigious knowledge of character and
+appreciation of talent, are different things. What is the historic and
+poetic splendor of love but the very fact, which constantly appears
+in Thackeray's stories, namely, that it is a glory which dazzles and
+blinds. Men rarely love the women they ought to love, according to the
+ideal standards. It is this that makes the plot and mystery of life. Is
+it not the perpetual surprise of all Jane's friends that she should
+love Timothy instead of Thomas? and is not the courtly and accomplished
+Thomas sure to surrender to some accidental Lucy without position,
+wealth, style, worth, culture--without anything but heart? This is the
+fact, and it reappears in Thackeray, and it gives his books that air of
+reality which they possess beyond all modern story.
+
+And it is this single perception of the fact which, simple as it is, is
+the rarest intellectual quality that made his lectures so interesting.
+The sun rose again upon the vanished century, and lighted those historic
+streets. The wits of Queen Anne ruled the hour, and we were bidden to
+their feast. Much reading of history and memoirs had not so sent the
+blood into those old English cheeks, and so moved those limbs in proper
+measure, as these swift glances through the eyes of genius. It was
+because, true to himself, Thackeray gave us his impression of those wits
+as men rather than authors. For he loves character more than thought.
+He is a man of the world, and not a scholar. He interprets the author
+by the man. When you are made intimate with young Swift, Sir William
+Temple's saturnine secretary, you more intelligently appreciate the Dean
+of St. Patrick's. When the surplice of Mr. Sterne is raised a little,
+more is seen than the reverend gentleman intends. Hogarth, the bluff
+Londoner, necessarily depicts a bluff, coarse, obvious morality. The
+hearty Fielding, the cool Addison, the genial Goldsmith, these are the
+figures that remain in memory, and their works are valuable as they
+indicate the man.
+
+Mr. Thackeray's success was very great. He did not visit the West, nor
+Canada. He went home without seeing Niagara Falls. But wherever he
+did go he found a generous and social welcome, and a respectful and
+sympathetic hearing. He came to fulfil no mission, but he certainly knit
+more closely our sympathy with Englishmen. Heralded by various romantic
+memoirs, he smiled at them, stoutly asserted that he had been always
+able to command a good dinner, and to pay for it; nor did he seek to
+disguise that he hoped his American tour would help him to command and
+pay for more. He promised not to write a book about us, but we hope he
+will, for we can ill spare the criticism of such an observer. At least,
+we may be sure that the material gathered here will be worked up in some
+way. He found that we were not savages nor bores. He found that there
+were a hundred here for every score in England who knew well and loved
+the men of whom he spoke. He found that the same red blood colors all
+the lips that speak the language he so nobly praised. He found friends
+instead of critics. He found those who, loving the author, loved the man
+more. He found a quiet welcome from those who are waiting to welcome him
+again and as sincerely.
+
+
+
+
+SIR PHILIP SIDNEY
+
+
+Wearied of the world and saddened by the ruin of his fortunes, the
+Italian Count Maddalo turned from the street, which rang with tales of
+disaster and swarmed with melancholy faces, into his palace. Perplexed
+and anxious, he passed through the stately rooms in which hung the
+portraits of generations of ancestors. The day was hot; his blood was
+feverish, but the pictures seemed to him cool and remote in a holy calm.
+He looked at them earnestly; he remembered the long history of which
+his fathers were parts, he recalled their valor and their patience, and
+asked himself whether, after all, their manhood was not their patent of
+nobility; and stretching out his hands towards them, exclaimed: "Let me
+feel that I am indeed your son by sharing that manhood which made you
+noble."
+
+We Americans laugh at ancestors; and if the best of them came back
+again, we should be as likely to laugh at his wig as listen to his
+wisdom. And in our evanescent houses and uneasy life we would no more
+have ancient ranges of family pictures than Arabs in their tents. Yet
+we are constantly building and visiting the greatest portrait gallery of
+all in the histories we write and read; and the hour is never lost which
+we give to it. It may teach a maid humility to know that her mother was
+fairer. It may make a youth more modest to know that his grandsire was
+braver. For if the pictures of history show us that deformity is as
+old as grace, and that virtue was always martyred, they also show that
+crime, however prosperous for a time, is at last disastrous, and that
+there can be no permanent peace without justice and freedom.
+
+Those pictures teach us also that character is inherited like name
+and treasure, and that all of us may have famous or infamous ancestors
+perhaps without knowing it. The melancholy poet, eating his own heart
+out in a city garret, is the child of Tasso. Grinding Ralph Nickleby,
+the usurer, is Shylock's grandson. The unjust judge, who declares that
+some men have no rights which others are bound to respect, is a later
+Jeffries on his bloody assizes, or dooming Algernon Sidney to the block
+once more for loving liberty; while he whose dull heart among the new
+duties of another time is never quickened with public spirit, and who
+as a citizen aims only at his own selfish advantage, is a later Benedict
+Arnold whom every generous heart despises.
+
+From this lineage of character arises this great convenience--that as it
+is bad manners to criticise our neighbors by name, we may hit them many
+a sly rap over the shoulders of their ancestors who wore turbans, or
+helmets, or bagwigs, and lived long ago in other countries. The Church
+especially finds great comfort in this resource, and the backs of the
+whole Hebrew race must be sore with the scorings they get for the sins
+of Christian congregations. The timid Peter, the foolish Virgins, the
+wicked Herod, are pilloried every Sunday in the pulpit, to the great
+satisfaction of the Peters, Virgins, and Herods dozing in the pews. But
+when some ardent preacher, heading out of his metaphors, and jumping
+from Judea and the first century into the United States and the
+nineteenth, disturbs Peter's enjoyment of his ancestor's castigation by
+saying vehemently to his face with all the lightning of the law in his
+eye, and its thunders in his voice, "Thou art the man!" Peter recoils
+with decorous horror, begs his pastor to remember that he and Herod
+are sheep who were to be led by still waters; warns him not to bring
+politics into the pulpit, to talk not of living people, but of old
+pictures. So the poor shepherd is driven back to his pictures, and
+cudgels Peter once more from behind a metaphor.
+
+But the fairest use of these old pictures is to make us feel our common
+humanity, and to discover that what seems to us a hopelessly romantic
+ideal of character is a familiar fact of every day. Heroism is always
+the same, however the fashion of a hero's clothes may alter. Every hero
+in history is as near to a man as his neighbor, and if we should tell
+the simple truth of some of our neighbors, it would sound like poetry.
+Sir Philip Sidney wore doublet and hose, and died in Flanders three
+hundred years ago. His name is the synonym of manly honor, of generous
+scholarship, of the finest nobility, of the spiritual light that most
+irradiates human nature. Look at his portrait closely; it is no stranger
+that you see; it is no far-off Englishman. It is your friend, your son,
+your brother, your lover. Whoever knew Wendell Phillips knew Philip
+Sidney. It is the same spirit in a thousand forms; a perpetual presence,
+a constant benediction: Look at his portrait and
+
+ "The night shall be filled with music,
+    And the cares that infest the day
+  Shall fold their tents like the Arabs,
+    And as silently steal away."
+
+The gray walls, the red and peaked roof of the old house of Penshurst,
+stand in the pleasant English valley of the Medway, in soft and showery
+Kent. Kent is all garden, and there, in November, 1554, Philip Sidney
+was born. His father, Sir Henry Sidney, was a wise and honest man. Bred
+at court, his sturdy honor was never corrupted. King Edward died in his
+arms, and Queen Mary confirmed all his honors and offices three weeks
+before the birth of his oldest son, whom, in gratitude, he named Philip,
+for the queen's new Spanish husband. Philip's mother was Mary Dudley,
+daughter of the Duke of Northumberland, sister of the famous Earl of
+Leicester, sister also of Lord Guildford Dudley and sister-in-law of
+Lady Jane Grey. The little Philip was born into a sad household. Within
+fifteen months his grandfather and uncle had been beheaded for treason;
+and his sorrowing mother, a truly noble and tender woman, had been the
+victim of small-pox, and hid her grieving heart and poor scarred face in
+the silence and seclusion of Penshurst. On the south side of the house
+was the old garden or plaisance, sloping down to the Medway, where, in
+those English summers of three hundred years ago, when the cruel fires
+of Mary were busily burning at Smithfield, the lovely boy Philip,
+fair-featured, with a high forehead and ruddy brown hair, almost
+red--the same color as that of his nephew Algernon--walked with his shy
+mother, picking daisies and chasing butterflies, and calling to her in
+a soft, musical voice; while within the house the grave father, when he
+was not away in Wales, of which he was lord-president, mused upon great
+events that were stirring in Europe--the abdication of Charles V., the
+fall of Calais, and the accession of Queen Elizabeth to the throne of
+England. The lordly banqueting-hall, in which the politics of three
+centuries ago were discussed at Penshurst, is still standing. You may
+still sit upon the wooden benches where Burleigh, Spenser, Ben Jonson,
+James I., and his son Prince Charles have sat, and where, a little
+later, the victim of Prince Charles's cruel son, Algernon Sidney,
+dreamed of noble manhood and went forth a noble man; while in those
+shady avenues of beech and oak outside, smooth Edmund Waller bowed and
+smirked, and sighed compliments to his Sacharissa, as he called Dorothy
+Sidney, Algernon's sister.
+
+At the age of eleven Master Sidney was put to school at Shrewsbury, on
+the borders of Wales, of which country his father was lord-president.
+His fond friend, Fulke Greville, who was here at school with him, and
+afterwards wrote his life, says that even the masters found something in
+him to observe and learn. Study probably cost him little effort and
+few tears. We may be sure he stood at the head of his class, and was a
+grave, good boy--not good as calves and blanc-mange are, but like wine
+and oak saplings. "My little Philip," as his mother tenderly calls him,
+was no Miss Nancy. When he was older he wrote to his brother Robert,
+then upon his travels, that "if there were any good wars he should go
+to them". So, at Shrewsbury he doubtless went to all the good wars among
+his school-mates, while during the short intervals of peace he mastered
+his humanities, and at last, when not yet fifteen years old, he was
+entered at Christ Church, Oxford.
+
+Great good-fortune is the most searching test of character. If a man
+have fine friends, fine family, fine talents, and fine prospects, they
+are very likely to be the sirens in whose sweet singing he forgets
+everything but the pleasure of listening to it. If most of us had come
+of famous ancestry--if our father were a vice-regal governor--if the
+sovereign's favorite were our uncle, who intended us for his heir--if
+a marriage were proposed with the beautiful daughter of the
+prime-minister, and we were ourselves young, handsome, and
+accomplished--and all this were three hundred years ago, before the
+rights of men and the dignity of labor had been much discussed, we
+should probably have come up to Oxford, of which our famous uncle was
+chancellor, in a state of what would be called at Oxford to-day extreme
+bumptiousness. But Philip Sidney was too true a gentleman not to be
+a simple-hearted man; and although he was even then one of the most
+accomplished as well as fortunate youths in England, he writes to
+Lord Burleigh to confess with "heavy grief" that in scholarship he can
+neither satisfy Burleigh's expectation nor his own desire.
+
+In the month of May, 1572, Philip Sidney left Oxford, and after staying
+a short time with his parents, following the fashion of young gentlemen
+of rank, he crossed over into France in the train of the Earl of
+Lincoln, who was Queen Elizabeth's extraordinary ambassador upon the
+subject of her marriage with the brother of Charles IX. of France. The
+young king immediately made Sidney a gentleman of the bedchamber, and
+Henry of Navarre found him a fit companion for a future king. The Paris
+that Sidney saw had then twice as many inhabitants as Boston has to-day.
+Montaigne called it the most beautiful city in the world, and it had
+a delusive air of peace. But the witch Catherine de' Medici sat in the
+smooth-tongued court like a spider in its web, spinning and spinning the
+meshes in which the hope of liberty was to be entangled. The gay city
+filled and glittered with the wedding guests of Henry and the king's
+sister Margaret--among others, the hero of St. Quentin,
+
+Admiral Coligny. Gayer and gayer grew the city--smoother and smoother
+the court--faster and faster spun the black Italian spider--until on the
+23d of August, the Eve of St. Bartholomew, the bloodiest deed in all
+the red annals of that metropolis was done, and the young Sidney looked
+shuddering from Walsingham House upon the streets reeking with the blood
+of his fellow Huguenots.
+
+That night made Philip Sidney a man. He heard the applause of the
+Romish party ring through Europe--he heard the commendation of Philip of
+Spain--he knew that the most eloquent orator of the Church, Muretus, had
+congratulated the pope upon this signal victory of the truth. He knew
+that medals were stamped in commemoration of the brutal massacre, and
+he remembered that the same spirit that had struck at the gray head of
+Coligny had also murdered Egmont and Home in the Netherlands; had calmly
+gazed in the person of Philip upon De Sezo perishing in the fire, and by
+the hand of Philip had denounced death against all who wrote, sold, or
+read Protestant books; and he knew that the same spirit, in the most
+thriving and intelligent country of Europe, the Netherlands, was
+blotting out prosperity in blood, and had driven at least a hundred
+thousand exiles into England.
+
+Pondering these things, Sidney left Paris, and at Frankfort met Hubert
+Languet. Languet was not only a Protestant, but, at heart, a Republican.
+He was the friend of Melanethon and of William of Orange, in whose
+service he died. One of the most accomplished scholars and shrewdest
+statesmen in Europe, honored and trusted by all the Protestant leaders,
+this wise man of fifty-four was so enamoured of the English youth of
+eighteen that they became life-long friends with the ardor of lovers,
+and Languet left his employment, as Fulke Greville says, "to become a
+nurse of knowledge to this hopeful young gentleman".
+
+As they travelled by easy stages across Germany, where the campaign of
+Protestantism had begun, they knew that the decisive battle was yet to
+be fought. Europe was silent. The tumult of Charles V.'s reign was
+over, and that great monarch marched and countermarched no more from the
+Baltic to the Mediterranean. Charles had been victorious so long as he
+fought kings with words of steel. But the monk Martin Luther drew the
+sword of the spirit, and the conqueror quailed. Luther challenged the
+Church of Rome at its own door. The Vatican rained anathemas. It might
+as well have tried to blow out the stars; and all the fires of the
+furious popes who followed Leo were not sharp enough to consume the
+colossal heresy of free thought. But king and emperor and pope fed
+the fire. The reign of terror blasted the Netherlands, and when it had
+succeeded there, when Italy, Austria, and Holland surrounded the states
+of Germany, Philip knew it would be the smothering coil of the serpent
+around the cradle of religious liberty. But the young Hercules of free
+thought throttled the serpent, and leaped forth to win his victorious
+and immortal race.
+
+We can see it now, but Sidney could not know it. To him the future was
+as inscrutable as our own to the eyes of thirty years ago. Yet he and
+Languet must have discussed the time with curious earnestness as they
+passed through Germany until they reached Vienna. There Sidney devoted
+himself to knightly games, to tennis, to music, and especially to
+horsemanship, which he studied with Pagliono, who, in praise of the
+horse, became such a poet that in the _Defence of Poesy_ Sidney says
+that if he had not been a piece of a logician before he came to him,
+Pagliono would have persuaded him to wish himself a horse.
+
+At Vienna Philip parted with Languet, and arrived in Venice in the year
+1573. The great modern days of Italy were passed. The golden age of
+the Medici was gone. Lorenzo the Magnificent had died nearly a century
+before, in the same year that Columbus had discovered America. His son,
+Pope Leo X., had eaten his last ortolan, had flown his last falcon, had
+listened to his last comedy, and hummed his last tune, in the frescoed
+corridors of the Vatican. Upon its shining walls the fatal finger of
+Martin Luther, stretching out of Germany, had written "Mene, Mene."
+Beneath the terrible spell the walls were cracking and the earth was
+shaking, but the splendid pope, in his scarlet cloud of cardinals, saw
+only the wild beauty of Raphael's Madonnas and the pleasant pages of the
+recovered literature of pagan Greece. When Sidney stepped for the first
+time into his gondola at Venice, the famous Italian cathedrals and
+stately palaces were already built, and the great architects were gone.
+Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch, who had created Italian literature, lived
+about as long before Sidney as we live after him. Cimabue and Giotto had
+begun; Raphael and Michel Angelo had perfected that art in which they
+have had no rivals--and they were gone. Andrea Doria steered the galleys
+of Genoa no more, and since the discovery of the Cape of Good Hope and
+the West Indies, the spices of the Indian sea were brought by Portuguese
+ships into the Baltic instead of the Adriatic. The glory of the
+Lombards, who were the first merchants of Europe, had passed away to the
+descendants of their old correspondents of Bruges and Ghent, until, with
+its five hundred ships daily coming and going, and on market days eight
+and nine hundred; with its two thousand heavy wagons creaking every week
+through the gates from France and Germany and Lorraine, Antwerp reigned
+in the place of Venice, and the long twilight that has never been broken
+was settling upon the Italy that Sidney saw.
+
+But the soft splendor of its decline was worthy its prime. The
+universities of Bologna and Padua, of Salerno and Pisa, had fallen from
+the days when at Bologna alone there were twenty thousand students; but
+they were still thronged with pupils, and taught by renowned professors.
+When the young Sidney came to Venice, Titian was just tottering into the
+grave, nearly a hundred years old, but still holding the pencil which
+Charles V. had picked up and handed to him in his studio. Galileo was a
+youth of twenty, studying mathematics at Pisa. The melancholy Tasso
+was completing his _Jerusalem Delivered_ under the cypress trees of the
+Villa d'Este. Palestrina was composing the masses which reformed church
+music, and the Christian charity of Charles Borromeo was making him a
+saint before he was canonized. Clad in the silk and velvet of Genoa,
+the young Englishman went to study geometry at Padua, where twenty years
+later Galileo would have been his teacher, and Sidney writes to Languet
+that he was perplexed whether to sit to Paul Veronese or to Tintoretto
+for his portrait.
+
+But he had a shrewd eye for the follies of travellers, and speaks of
+their tendency to come home "full of disguisements not only of apparel
+but of our countenances, as though the credit of a traveller stood all
+upon his outside". He then adds a curious prophecy, which Shakespeare
+made haste to fulfil to the very letter. Sidney says, writing in 1578,
+"I think, ere it be long, like the mountebanks in Italy, we travellers
+shall be made sport of in comedies." Twenty years afterwards,
+Shakespeare makes Rosalind say in "As You Like It", "Farewell, Monsieur
+Traveller. Look you; lisp, and wear strange suits. Disable all the
+benefits of your own country. Be out of love with your nativity, and
+almost chide God for making you that countenance you are, or I will
+scarce think you have swam in a gondola."
+
+But in all the gayeties and graces of his travel, Philip Sidney was not
+content to be merely an elegant lounger. He never forgot for a moment
+that all his gifts and accomplishments were only weapons to be kept
+burnished for his country's service. He was a boy of twenty, but
+his boy's warmth was tempered by the man's wisdom. "You are not over
+cheerful by nature," Languet writes to him; and when Sidney sat to
+Paul Veronese, and sent his friend the portrait, Languet replies: "The
+painter has represented you sad and thoughtful."
+
+He had reason to be so. He had seen the Massacre of St. Bartholomew,
+as many a young Sidney among ourselves saw the horrors of Kansas thirty
+years ago. He did not believe that a little timely patting on the back
+was statesmanship. If Spain were crushing the Netherlands, and hung upon
+the southern horizon of Europe a black and threatening cloud, he did not
+believe that the danger would be averted by gagging those who said the
+storm was coming. He did not hold the thermometer responsible for the
+weather. "I cannot think," he wrote in May, 1574, "there is any man
+possessed of common understanding who does not see to what these rough
+storms are driving by which all Christendom has been agitated now these
+many years." He did not suppose, as so many of us in our ignoble days,
+that while men were the same, the tragical differences which had been
+washed out with blood in all other ages could be drowned in milk and
+water in his own.
+
+In 1575 Sidney returned to England. Every author who writes of this
+period breaks out into the most glowing praises of him. Indeed, he is
+the choice darling of English history. The only discordant note in the
+chorus of praise came long afterwards in the voice of the pedantic dandy
+Horace Walpole, who called Goldsmith "an inspired idiot". This is not
+surprising, for the earnestness and heroic simplicity of Sidney were as
+incomprehensible to the affected trifler of Strawberry Hill as the
+fresh enthusiasm of his nephew Arthur to Major Pendennis. The Earl of
+Leicester, who seemed to love his nephew more than anything except his
+own ambition, presented his brilliant young relative to the queen, who
+made him her cup-bearer. Sidney was now twenty-one years old--the finest
+gentleman, and one of the most accomplished scholars in England. His
+learning was mainly in the classics and in languages; yet he confesses
+that he could never learn German, which was then hardly worth learning,
+and in his correspondence with Languet is very distrustful of the Latin,
+in which language they wrote. But in urging him to grapple with the
+German, Languet says to him, and it is a striking proof of the exquisite
+finish of Sidney's accomplishment, "I have watched you closely when
+speaking my own language (he was a Burgundian), but I hardly ever
+detected you pronouncing a single syllable wrongly."
+
+In Sidney's time the classics had few rivals. After reading Dante,
+Petrarch, Ariosto, Boccaccio, with Sanazzaro's _Arcadia_, in Italian;
+Rabelais, Froissart, and Comines, in French; Chaucer, Gower, and the
+_Mirror for Magistrates_ in English, what remained for an ardent young
+student to devour? When Sidney came home, Montaigne--whom he probably
+saw at the French court--was just writing his _Essays_ at his chateau
+in the Gironde. The Portuguese Camoens had only just published his great
+poem, to which his own country would not listen, and of which no other
+had heard. The Italian Tasso's _Jerusalem_ was still in manuscript, and
+the Spanish Ponce de Leon was little known to Europe. All was yet
+to come. In Spain, Cervantes, Lope de Vega, and Calderon; in France,
+Corneille and Racine and Moliere, Fenelon and Bossuet, Rousseau and
+Voltaire; in Germany, everything except the Niebelungen and Hans Sachs's
+rhymes. When Philip Sidney kissed Elizabeth's hand as her cup-bearer,
+William Shakespeare, a boy of eleven, was grinding out his trousers
+on the restless seats of the free grammar-school at Stratford; young
+Francis Bacon, a youth of sixteen, was studying in France; a poor
+scholar at Cambridge, Edmund Spenser was just finishing his studies,
+and the younger brother of an old Devonshire family, Walter Raleigh, had
+just returned from campaigning in France; indeed, all the literature
+of modern times was subsequent to Philip Sidney. The young man shone at
+court, fascinating men and women, courtiers, scholars, and divines; and
+in a few months was made special ambassador to condole with the Austrian
+emperor upon the death of his father. Upon this embassy he departed in
+great state. His mission, was supposed to be purely complimentary;
+but he was really the beautiful eye with which England and Elizabeth,
+becoming the head of the Protestant movement, watched the disposition
+of the Protestant princes. On his way home, Sidney passed into the Low
+Countries to see William of Orange. He came, resplendent with chivalric
+magnificence, accompanied by the flower of English nobility, and met the
+grave William, who had been the richest citizen in the Netherlands, clad
+in an old serge cloak, and surrounded by plain Dutch burghers. But
+it was a meeting of men of one mind and heart in the great cause, and
+neither was disturbed by the tailoring of the other. The interview was
+the beginning of a faithful friendship, and among all the compliments
+Sidney received, none is so lofty and touching as that of William, the
+greatest man in Europe, who called him in their correspondence, "Philip,
+my master."
+
+In 1577 Sidney was home again. He had a right to expect conspicuous
+advancement, but he got nothing. This was the more disagreeable,
+because living at Elizabeth's court was an expensive luxury for a poor
+gentleman's son who had magnificent tastes. His father, Lord Henry
+Sidney, was lord-deputy of Ireland, but he was also an honest man, and,
+like most honest men in high public office, he was not rich. He wrote to
+Philip, begging him to remember whose son, not whose nephew, he was; for
+Philip's companions, the golden youth of the court, blazed in silks
+and velvets and jewels, until the government had to impose laws, as the
+subjects had brought luxury from Venice, and Elizabeth, who died the
+happy owner of three thousand dresses, issued a solemn proclamation
+against extravagance in dress.
+
+At such a time, the brilliant nephew of Uncle Leicester would have been
+a quickly ruined man if he had not been Philip Sidney. He bowed and
+flirted at court, but he chafed under inaction. A marriage was planned
+for him with Penelope Devereux, sister of the famous Earl of Essex, one
+of the thousand fair and unfortunate women who flit across the page of
+history leaving only a name, and that written in tears. But Philip's
+father grew cool in the negotiation, and Philip himself was perfectly
+passive. Yet when a few years afterwards the lady was married to Lord
+Rich, who abused her, Sidney loved her, and wrote the sonnets to Stella,
+which are his best poetry, and which Charles Lamb so affectionately
+praised.
+
+But while he loitered at court, beating all the courtiers with their
+own weapons in wit, in riding, in games, at tournament, the tales of
+American discovery shed a wondrous glamour upon the new continent.
+Nothing was too beautiful for belief, and the fiery feet of youth
+burned the English soil with eagerness to tread the unutterable Tropics.
+Francis Drake sailed from Plymouth to follow Magellan around the
+world, and he went in a manner consonant with the popular fancy of the
+countless riches that rewarded such adventures. His cooking-vessels were
+of silver; his table-plate of exquisite workmanship. The queen knighted
+him, gave him a sword, and said, "Whoever striketh at you, Drake,
+striketh at us." A band of musicians accompanied the fleet, and the
+English sailor went to circumnavigate the globe with the same nonchalant
+magnificence with which in other days the gorgeous Alcibiades, with
+flutes and soft recorders blowing under silken sails, came idling home
+from victory.
+
+Philip Sidney, his heart alive to all romance, and longing to be his
+companion, saw him sail away. But he turned and saw the black Italian
+spider, whose sting he had seen on Bartholomew's Eve in Paris, still
+weaving her stealthy web, and seeking to entangle Elizabeth into a match
+with the Duke of Anjou. The queen was forty-six, and Mounseer, as the
+English called him, twenty-three; and while she was coaxing herself to
+say the most fatal yes that ever woman said--when Burleigh, Leicester,
+Walsingham, all the safe, sound, conservative old gentlemen and
+counsellors were just ceasing to dissuade her--Philip Sidney, a youth of
+twenty-five, who knew that he had a country as well as a queen, that the
+hope of that country lay in the triumph of Protestantism, and that
+to marry Mounseer was to abandon that hope, and for the time betray
+mankind--Philip Sidney, a youth who did not believe that he could
+write gravely of sober things because he had written gayly of ladies'
+eyebrows, knowing as the true-hearted gentleman always knows that to-day
+it may be a man's turn to sit at a desk in an office, or bend over a
+book in college, or fashion a horseshoe at the forge, or toss flowers to
+some beauty at her window, and to-morrow to stand firm against a
+cruel church or a despotic court, a brutal snob or an ignorant public
+opinion--this youth, this immortal gentleman, wrote the letter which
+dissuaded her from the marriage, and which was as noble a triumph for
+Protestantism and human liberty as the defeat of the Spanish Armada.
+
+I cannot follow this lovely life in detail, nor linger, as I would, upon
+his literary retirement.
+
+The very name of Sidney's _Arcadia_ is aromatic in the imagination, and
+its traditional place in our literature is unquestioned. In our day it
+is very little read, nor is it a very interesting story. But under its
+quaint and courtly conceit its tone is so pure and lofty, its courtesy
+and appreciation of women so hearty and honorable; it has so fine
+a moral atmosphere, such noble thoughts, such stately and beautiful
+descriptions, that to read it is like conversing with a hero. So there
+is no better reading than the _Defence of Poesy_, that noble hymn of
+loyalty to intellectual beauty. Hallam well calls Sidney "the first
+good prose writer" in our language, and scarcely had he finished in his
+_Defence_ an exquisite criticism of English poetry to that time than the
+full choir of Elizabethan poets burst into
+
+                 "the songs that fill
+  The spacious times of great Elizabeth
+          With sounds that echo still."
+
+In 1582 Philip Sidney married the daughter of Walsingham, but in his
+retirement, whether steadfastly watching the great struggle upon the
+Continent or listening to the alluring music of far-off seas, he knew
+that the choice days of his life were passing, and if a career were not
+opened for him by the queen, he must make one for himself. William of
+Orange had been murdered; Elizabeth promptly succeeded him as the active
+head of the Protestant world; Philip of Spain was the great enemy.
+Strike him at home, said Sidney; strike him at sea, but strike him
+everywhere; and he arranged with Drake a descent upon Spanish America.
+He hurried privately to Plymouth to embark, but at the last moment a
+peer of the realm arrived from the queen forbidding his departure. The
+loyal gentleman bowed and obeyed.
+
+But two months after his fleet sailed, on the 7th of November, 1585
+(about the time that William Shakespeare first came to London),
+Elizabeth appointed Sidney governor of Flushing, in the Netherlands. He
+went thither gladly on the 18th, with three thousand men, to strike for
+the cause in which he believed. He had already told the queen that the
+spirit of the Netherlands was the spirit of God, and was invincible. His
+uncle, the Earl of Leicester, followed him as commander-in-chief. The
+earl was handsome at tournaments, but not fit for battle-fields,
+and Sidney was annoyed by his uncle's conduct; but he writes to his
+father-in-law, Walsingham, in a strain full of the music of a noble
+soul, and fitly precluding his end: "I think a wise and constant man
+ought never to grieve while he doth play, as a man may say, his own part
+truly."
+
+For that he was always ready. In the misty dawn of the 22d of September,
+1586, a force of three thousand Spaniards stole silently along to
+the relief of Zutphen, on the river Isel. Sidney, at the head of five
+hundred cavalry, rode forward to meet them. In the obscurity the battle
+was sharp and confused. Seeing his friend Lord Willoughby in special
+danger, Sidney spurred to the rescue. His horse was shot under him and
+fell. Springing upon another, he dashed forward again and succored his
+friend, but at the instant a shot struck him below the knee, glancing
+upward. His furious horse became unmanageable, and Sir Philip was
+obliged to leave the field. But as he passed slowly along to the rear of
+the soldiers, he felt faint with bleeding, and called for water. A cup
+was brought to him, but as he was lifting it to his month he saw a dying
+soldier staring at it with burning eyes. Philip Sidney paused before
+tasting it, leaned from the saddle, and handed it to the soldier, saying
+to him in the same soft, musical voice with which the boy called to his
+mother in the sunny garden at Penshurst, "Friend, thy necessity is yet
+greater than mine."
+
+He was borne on to Araheim, and lived in suffering for twenty-six days.
+He conversed pleasantly and called for music, and said at last to his
+brother, whom he had loved as brothers seldom love: "Love my memory;
+cherish my friends. Their faith to me may assure you they are honest.
+But, above all, govern your will and affections by the will and word
+of your Creator, in me beholding the end of this world with all her
+vanities." "And so," says old Stowe, with fond particularity, "he died,
+the 17th day of October, between two and three of the clock in the
+afternoon."
+
+ "The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,
+    And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave,
+  Await alike the inevitable hour.
+    The paths of glory lead but to the grave."
+
+This is the story of Philip Sidney. A letter, a book, a battle. How
+little to justify his unique fame! How invisible his performance among
+the illustrious events of his prodigious age! Yet is not the instinct of
+the human heart true; and in the stately society of his time, if Bacon
+were the philosopher, Shakespeare the poet, Burleigh the counsellor,
+Raleigh the soldier, Drake the sailor, Hooker the theologian, Essex
+the courtier, and Gresham the merchant, was not Philip Sidney as
+distinctively the gentleman? Heroes stood beside him in clusters, poets
+in constellations; all the illustrious men of the age achieved more
+tangible results than he, yet none of them has carved his name upon
+history more permanently and with a more diamond point; for he had
+that happy harmony of mind and temper, of enthusiasm and good sense, of
+accomplishment and capacity, which is described by that most exquisite
+and most abused word, gentleman. His guitar hung by a ribbon at
+his side, but his sword hung upon leather beneath it. His knee bent
+gallantly to the queen, but it knelt reverently also to his Maker. And
+it was the crown of the gentleman that he was neither ashamed of the
+guitar nor of the sword; neither of the loyalty nor the prayer. For a
+gentleman is not an idler, a trifler, a dandy; he is not a scholar only,
+a soldier, a mechanic, a merchant; he is the flower of men, in whom the
+accomplishment of the scholar, the bravery of the soldier, the skill
+of the mechanic, the sagacity of the merchant, all have their part
+and appreciation. A sense of duty is his main-spring, and like a watch
+crusted with precious stones, his function is not to look prettily, but
+to tell the time of day. Philip Sidney was not a gentleman because his
+grandfather was the Duke of Northumberland and his father lord-deputy of
+Ireland, but because he was himself generous, simple, truthful, noble,
+refined. He was born with a gold spoon in his mouth, but the gold is
+only the test. In the mouths of the base it becomes brass and iron.
+George IV., called with bitter irony the first gentleman in Europe, was
+born with the gold spoon, but his acrid humors turned it to the basest
+metal, betraying his mean soul. George Stephenson was born with the
+pewter spoon in his mouth, but the true temper of his soul turned it
+into pure gold. The test of a gentleman is his use, not his uselessness;
+whether that use be direct or indirect, whether it be actual service or
+only inspiring and aiding action. "To what purpose should our thoughts
+be directed to various kinds of knowledge," wrote Philip Sidney in 1578,
+"unless room be afforded for putting it into practice so that public
+advantage may be the result?" And Algernon Sidney said, nearly a century
+later: "I have ever had it in my mind that when God cast me into such a
+condition as that I cannot save my life but by doing an indecent thing,
+he shows me the time has come wherein I should resign it." And when that
+time came he did resign it; for every gentleman instinctively serves
+justice and liberty. He feels himself personally disgraced by an insult
+to humanity, for he, too, is only a man; and however stately his house
+may be and murmurous with music, however glowing with pictures and
+graceful with statues and reverend with books--however his horses may
+out-trot other horses, and his yachts outsail all yachts--the gentleman
+is king and master of these and not their servant; he wears them
+for ornament, like the ring upon his finger or the flower in his
+button-hole, and if they go the gentleman remains. He knows that all
+their worth came from human genius and human training; and loving man
+more than the works of man, he instinctively shuns whatever in the shape
+of man is degraded, outraged, and forsaken. He does not make the poverty
+of others the reason for robbing them; he does not make the oppression
+of others the reason for oppressing them, for his gentility is his
+religion; and therefore with simple truth and tender audacity the old
+English dramatist Dekkar calls Him who gave the name to our religion,
+and who destroyed the plea that might makes right, "the first true
+gentleman, that ever breathed".
+
+But not only is Philip Sidney's story the poem of a gentleman, it is
+that of a young man. It was the age of young men. No man was thought
+flippant, whatever his years, who could say a good thing well, or do a
+brave thing successfully, or give the right advice at the right moment.
+The great men of the day were all young. At sixteen Bacon had already
+sketched his _Philosophy_. At seventeen Walter Raleigh had gone to find
+some good wars. At seventeen Edmund Spenser had first published. Before
+he was twenty, Alexander Farnese, Prince of Parma, and the greatest
+general of Sidney's time, had revealed his masterly genius. At
+twenty-one Don John of Austria had been commander-in-chief against the
+Moors. The Prince of Conde and Henry of Navarre were leaders while they
+were yet boys. At twenty Francis Drake sailed, a captain, with John
+Hawkins; and at twenty-one the Washington of European history, to whom
+an American has for the first time paid just homage with an enthusiasm
+and eloquence of Sidney describing his friend--at twenty-one William of
+Orange commanded an army of Charles V.
+
+When England wanted leaders in those tremendous days that shaped her
+destiny, it did just what America did in those recent perilous hours
+that determined hers--she sent young men with faith in their hearts
+and fire in their veins--not old men with feathers in their hats; and
+everywhere it is the young men who have made history. At thirty-two
+Alexander wept for another world to conquer. On his thirty-seventh
+birthday Raphael lay dead beneath his last picture. At thirty-six Mozart
+had sung his swan-song. At twenty-five Hannibal was commander-in-chief
+of the Carthaginian armies. At thirty-three Turenne was marshal of
+France. At twenty-seven Bonaparte was triumphant in Italy. At forty-five
+Wellington had conquered Bonaparte, and at forty-eight retired from
+active military service. At forty-three Washington was chief of the
+Continental army. On his forty-fifth birthday Sherman was piercing the
+heart of the American Rebellion; and before he was forty-three Grant had
+"fought it out on this line" to perfect victory. Young men! Of course
+they were young men. Youth is the main-spring of the world. The
+experience of age is wise in action only when it is electrified by the
+enthusiasm of youth. Show me a land in which the young men are cold and
+sceptical and prematurely wise; which in polite indifference is called
+political wisdom, contempt for ideas common-sense, and honesty in
+politics Sunday-school statesmanship--show me a land in which the young
+men are more anxious about doing well than about doing right--and I will
+show you a country in which public corruption and ruin overtakes private
+infidelity and cowardice, and in which, if there were originally a hope
+for mankind, a faith in principle, and a conquering enthusiasm, that
+faith, hope, and enthusiasm are expiring like the deserted camp-fires of
+a retiring army. "Woe to a man when his heart grows old! Woe to a nation
+when its young men shuffle in the gouty shoes and limp on the untimely
+crutches of age, instead of leaping along the course of life with
+the jubilant spring of their years and the sturdy play of their own
+muscles!" Sir Philip Sidney's was the age of young men: and wherever
+there are self-reliance, universal human sympathy, and confidence in
+God, there is the age of youth and national triumph; just as whenever
+Joan of Arc leads the army, or Molly Stark dares to be a widow, or Rosa
+Bonheur paints, or Hattie Hosmer carves, or Jenny Lind sings, or Mrs.
+Patten steers the wrecked ship to port, or Florence Nightingale walks
+the midnight hospital--these are the age and the sphere of woman. Queen
+Elizabeth's was the age of young men; but so it is always when there are
+young men who can make an age.
+
+And ours is such an age. We live in a country which has been saved by
+its young men. Before us opens a future which is to be secured by the
+young men. I have not held up Sir Philip Sidney as a reproach, but only
+for his brothers to admire--only that we may scatter the glamour of the
+past and of history, and understand that we do not live in the lees of
+time and the world's decrepitude. There is no country so fair that ours
+is not fairer; there is no age so heroic that ours is not as noble;
+there is no youth in history so romantic and beloved that in a thousand
+American homes you may not find his peer to-day. It is the Sidneys we
+have known who interpret this Philip of three hundred years ago. Dear,
+noble gentleman! he does not move alone in our imaginations, for our own
+memories supply his splendid society. We too have seen, how often
+and how often, the bitter fight of the misty morning on the Isel--the
+ringing charge, the fatal fall. A thousand times we saw the same
+true Sidney heart that, dying, gave the cup of cold water to a
+fellow-soldier. And we, for whom the Sidneys died, let us thank God for
+showing us in our own experience, as in history, that the noblest traits
+of human character are still spanned by the rainbow of perfect beauty;
+and that human love and faith and fidelity, like day and night, like
+seed-time and harvest, shall never, never fail.
+
+
+
+
+LONGFELLOW
+
+
+In the school readers of half a century ago there were two poems which
+every boy and girl read and declaimed and remembered. How much of that
+old literature has disappeared! How much that stirred the hearts and
+touched the fancies of those boys and girls, their children have never
+heard of! Willis's "Saturday Afternoon" and "Burial of Arnold" have
+floated away, almost out of sight, with Pierpont's "Bunker Hill" and
+Sprague's Fourth-of-July oration. The relentless winds of oblivion
+incessantly blow. Scraps of verse and rhetoric once so familiar are
+caught up, wafted noiselessly away, and lodged in neglected books and
+in the dark corners of fading memories, gradually vanish from familiar
+knowledge. But the two little poems of which we speak have survived. One
+of them was Bryant's "March", and the other was Longfellow's "April",
+and the names of the two poets singing of spring were thus associated
+in the spring-time of our poetry, as the fathers of which they will be
+always honored.
+
+Both poems originally appeared in the _United States Literary Gazette_,
+and were included in the modest volume of selections from that journal
+which was published in Boston in 1826. The chief names in this little
+book are those of Bryant, Longfellow, Percival, Mellen, Dawes, and
+Jones. Percival has already become a name only; Dawes, and Greenville
+Mellen, who, like Longfellow, was a son of Maine, are hardly known
+to this generation, and Jones does not even appear in Duyckinck's
+Cyclopaedia. But in turning over the pages it is evident that Time has
+dealt justly with the youthful bards, and that the laurel rests upon the
+heads of the singers whose earliest strains fitly preluded the music
+of their prime. Longfellow was nineteen years old when the book was
+published. He had graduated at Bowdoin College the year before, and the
+verses had been written and printed in the _Gazette_ while he was still
+a student.
+
+The glimpses of the boy that we catch through the recollections of
+his old professor, Packard, and of his college mates, are of the same
+character as at every period of his life. They reveal a modest, refined,
+manly youth, devoted to study, of great personal charm and gentle
+manners. It is the boy that the older man suggested. To look back upon
+him is to trace the broad and clear and beautiful river far up the green
+meadows to the limpid rill.
+
+His poetic taste and faculty were already apparent, and it is related
+that a version of an ode of Horace which he wrote in his Sophomore
+year so impressed one of the members of the examining board that when
+afterwards a chair of modern languages was established in the college,
+he proposed as its incumbent the young Sophomore whose fluent verse he
+remembered. The impression made by the young Longfellow is doubtlessly
+accurately described by one of his famous classmates, Hawthorne, for the
+class of '25 is a proud tradition of Bowdoin. In "P.'s Correspondence",
+one of the _Mosses from an Old Manse_, a quaint fancy of a letter from
+"my unfortunate friend P.", whose wits were a little disordered, there
+are grotesque hints of the fate of famous persons. P. talks with Burns
+at eighty-seven; Byron, grown old and fat, wears a wig and spectacles;
+Shelley is reconciled to the Church of England; Coleridge finishes
+"Christabel"; Keats writes a religious epic on the millennium; and
+George Canning is a peer. On our side of the sea, Dr. Channing had just
+published a volume of verses; Whittier had been lynched ten years before
+in South Carolina; and, continues P., "I remember, too, a lad just from
+college, Longfellow by name, who scattered some delicate verses to
+the winds, and went to Germany, and perished, I think, of intense
+application, at the University of Goettingen." Longfellow, in turn,
+recalled his classmate Hawthorne--a shy, dark-haired youth flitting
+across the college grounds in a coat with bright buttons.
+
+Among these delicate verses was the poem to "An April Day". As the work
+of a very young man it is singularly restrained and finished. It has the
+characteristic elegance and flowing melody of his later verse, and its
+half-pensive tone is not excessive nor immature. It is not, however, for
+this that it is most interesting, but because, with Bryant's "March",
+it is the fresh and simple note of a truly American strain. Perhaps the
+curious reader, enlightened by the observation of subsequent years, may
+find in the "March" a more vigorous love of nature, and in the "April"
+a tenderer tone of tranquil sentiment. But neither of the poems is the
+echo of a foreign music, nor an exercise of remembered reading. They
+both deal with the sights and sounds and suggestions of the American,
+landscape in the early spring. In Longfellow's "April" there are none of
+the bishops' caps and foreign ornament of illustration to which Margaret
+Fuller afterwards objected in his verse. But these early associated
+poems, both of the younger and of the older singer, show an original
+movement of American literary genius, and, like the months which they
+celebrate, they foretold a summer.
+
+That summer bad been long awaited. In 1809, Buckminster said in his Phi
+Beta Kappa oration at Harvard College: "Oar poets and historians, our
+critics and orators, the men of whom posterity are to stand in awe, and
+by whom they are to be instructed, are yet to appear among us." Happily,
+however, the orator thought that he beheld the promise of their coming,
+although he does not say where. But even as he spoke they were at
+hand. Irving's _Knickerbocker_ was published in 1809, and Bryant's
+"Thanatopsis" was written in 1812. The _North American Review_, an
+enterprise of literary men in Boston and Cambridge, was begun in 1815,
+and Bryant and Longfellow were both contributors. But it was in the year
+1821, the year in which Longfellow entered college, that the beginning
+of a distinctive American literature became most evident. There were
+signs of an independent intellectual movement both in the choice of
+subjects and in the character of treatment. This was the year of the
+publication of Bryant's first slim volume, and of Cooper's _Spy_, and
+of Dana's _Idle Man_. Irving's _Sketch Book_ was already finished, Miss
+Sedgwick's _Hope Leslie_ and Percival's first volume had been issued,
+and Halleck's and Drake's "Croakers" were already popular. In these
+works, as in all others of that time, there was indeed no evidence of
+great creative genius.
+
+The poet and historian whom Buckminster foresaw, and who were to strike
+posterity with awe, had not yet appeared, but in the same year the
+voice of the orator whom he anticipated was heard upon Plymouth Rock in
+cadences massive and sonorous as the voice of the sea. In the year 1821
+there was the plain evidence of an awakening original literary activity.
+
+Longfellow was the youngest of the group in which he first appeared. His
+work was graceful, tender, pensive, gentle, melodious, the strain of a
+troubadour. When he went to Europe in 1826 to fit himself more fully
+for his professorship, he had but "scattered some delicate verses to
+the winds". When he returned, and published in 1833 his translations of
+"Coplas de Manrique" and other Spanish poems, he had apparently done
+no more. There was plainly shown an exquisite literary artist, a very
+Benvenuto of grace and skill. But he would hardly have been selected
+as the poet who was to take the strongest hold of the hearts of his
+countrymen, the singer whose sweet and hallowing spell was to be so deep
+and universal that at last it would be said in another country that to
+it also his death was a national loss.
+
+The qualities of these early verses, however, were never lost. The
+genius of the poet steadily and beautifully developed, flowering
+according to its nature. The most urbane and sympathetic of men, never
+aggressive, nor vehement, nor self-asserting, he was yet thoroughly
+independent, and the individuality of his genius held its tranquil way
+as surely as the river Charles, whose placid beauty he so often sang,
+wound through the meadows calm and free. When Longfellow came to
+Cambridge, the impulse of Transcendentalism in New England was deeply
+affecting scholarship and literature. It was represented by the most
+original of American thinkers and the typical American scholar, Emerson,
+and its elevating, purifying, and emancipating influences are memorable
+in our moral and intellectual history. Longfellow lived in the very
+heart of the movement. Its leaders were his cherished friends. He too
+was a scholar and a devoted student of German literature, who had drunk
+deeply also of the romance of German life. Indeed, his first important
+works stimulated the taste for German studies and the enjoyment of its
+literature more than any other impulse in this country. But he remained
+without the charmed Transcendental circle, serene and friendly and
+attentive. There are those whose career was wholly moulded by the
+intellectual revival of that time. But Longfellow was untouched by it,
+except as his sympathies were attracted by the vigor and purity of its
+influence. His tastes, his interests, his activities, his career, would
+have been the same had that great light never shone. If he had been the
+ductile, echoing, imitative nature that the more ardent disciples of the
+faith supposed him to be, he would have been absorbed and swept away by
+the flood. But he was as untouched by it as Charles Lamb by the wars of
+Napoleon.
+
+It was in the first flush of the Transcendental epoch that Longfellow's
+first important works appeared. In 1839, his prose-romance of _Hyperion_
+was published, following the sketches of travel, called _Outre-Mer_. He
+was living in Cambridge, in the famous house in which he died, and in
+which _Hyperion_ and all of his familiar books were written. Under
+the form of a slight love tale, _Hyperion_ is the diary of a poet's
+wandering in a storied and picturesque land, the hearty, home-like
+genius of whose life and literature is peculiarly akin to his own. The
+book bubbles and sings with snatches of the songs of the country;
+it reproduces the tone and feeling of the landscape, the grandeur of
+Switzerland, the rich romance of the Rhine; it decorates itself with a
+quaint scholarship, and is so steeped in the spirit of the country, so
+glowing with the palpitating tenderness of passion, that it is still
+eagerly bought at the chief points which it commemorates, and is
+cherished by young hearts as no prose romance was ever cherished before.
+
+_Hyperion_, indeed, is a poet's and lover's romance. It is full of deep
+feeling, of that intense and delighted appreciation of nature in her
+grander forms, and of scenes consecrated by poetic tradition, which
+belongs to a singularly fine, sensitive, and receptive nature, when
+exalted by pure and lofty affection; and it has the fulness and swing of
+youth, saddened by experience indeed, yet rising with renewed hope, like
+a field of springing grain in May bowed by the west wind, and touched
+with the shadow of a cloud, but presently lifting itself again to
+heaven. A clear sweet humor and blitheness of heart blend in this
+romance. What is called its artificial tone is not insincerity; it is
+the play of an artist conscious of his skill and revelling in it, even
+while his hand and his heart are deeply in earnest. _Werther_ is a
+romance, Disraeli's _Wondrous Tale of Alroy_ is a romance, but they
+belong to the realm of Beverley and Julia in Sheridan's _Rivals_. In
+_Hyperion_, with all its elaborate picturesqueness, its spicy literary
+atmosphere, and imaginative outline, there is a breezy freshness and
+simplicity and healthiness of feeling which leaves it still unique.
+
+In the same year with _Hyperion_ came the _Voices of the Night_,
+a volume of poems which contained the "Coplas de Manrique" and the
+translations, with a selection from the verses of the _Literary
+Gazette_, which the author playfully reclaims in a note from
+their vagabond and precarious existence in the corners of
+newspapers--gathering his children from wanderings in lanes and alleys,
+and introducing them decorously to the world. A few later poems were
+added, and these, with the _Hyperion_, showed a new and distinctive
+literary talent. In both of these volumes there is the purity of spirit,
+the elegance of form, the romantic tone, the airy grace, which
+were already associated with Longfellow's name. But there are other
+qualities. The boy of nineteen, the poet of Bowdoin, has become a
+scholar and a traveller. The teeming hours, the ample opportunities of
+youth, have not been neglected or squandered, but, like a golden-banded
+bee, humming as he sails, the young poet has drained all the flowers
+of literature of their nectar, and has built for himself a hive of
+sweetness. More than this, he had proved in his own experience the truth
+of Irving's tender remark, that an early sorrow is often the truest
+benediction for the poet.
+
+Through all the romantic grace and elegance of the _Voices of the Night_
+and _Hyperion_, however, there is a moral earnestness which is even more
+remarkable in the poems than in the romance. No volume of poems ever
+published in the country was so popular. Severe critics indeed, while
+acknowledging its melody and charm, thought it too morally didactic, the
+work of a student too fondly enamoured of foreign literatures. But while
+they conceded taste and facility, two of the poems at least--the "Psalm
+of Life" and the "Footsteps of Angels"--penetrated the common heart at
+once, and have held it ever since. A young Scotchman saw them reprinted
+in some paper or magazine, and, meeting a literary lady in London,
+repeated them to her, and then to a literary assembly at her house; and
+the presence of a new poet was at once acknowledged. If the "Midnight
+Mass for the Dying Year" in its form and phrase and conception recalled
+a land of cathedrals and a historic religious ritual, and had but a
+vague and remote charm for the woodman in the pine forests of Maine and
+the farmer on the Illinois prairie, yet the "Psalm of Life" was the very
+heart-beat of the American conscience, and the "Footsteps of Angels" was
+a hymn of the fond yearning of every loving heart.
+
+During the period of more than forty years from the publication of the
+_Voices of the Night_ to his death, the fame of Longfellow constantly
+increased. It was not because his genius, like that of another scholarly
+poet, Gray, seldom blossomed in song, so that his renown rested upon
+a few gem-like verses. He was not intimidated by his own fame. During
+those forty years he wrote and published constantly. Other great fames
+arose around him. New poets began to sing. Popular historians took
+their places. But still with Bryant the name of Longfellow was always
+associated at the head of American singers, and far beyond that of any
+other American author was his name known through all the reading world.
+The volume of _Voices of the Night_ was followed by similar collections,
+then by _The Spanish Student_, _Evangeline_, _The Golden Legend_,
+_Hiawatha_, _The Courtship of Miles Standish_, _The Tales of a Wayside
+Inn_, _The New England Tragedies_, _The Masque of Pandora_, _The Hanging
+of the Crane_, the _Morituri Salutarnus_, the _Keramos_. But all of
+these, like stately birds
+
+ "Sailing with supreme dominion
+  Through the upper realms of air,"
+
+were attended by shorter poems, sonnets, "birds of passage", as the poet
+called his swallow flights of song. In all these larger poems, while
+the characteristics of the earlier volumes were more amply developed
+and illustrated, and the subtle beauty of the skill became even more
+exquisite, the essential qualities of the work remain unchanged, and the
+charm of a poet and his significance in the literature and development
+of his country were never more readily defined.
+
+Child of New England, and trained by her best influences; of a
+temperament singularly sweet and serene, and with the sturdy rectitude
+of his race; refined and softened by wide contact with other lands
+and many men; born in prosperity, accomplished in all literatures, and
+himself a literary artist of consummate elegance, he was the fine
+flower of the Puritan stock under its changed modern conditions. Out of
+strength had come forth sweetness. The grim iconoclast, "humming a surly
+hymn", had issued in the Christian gentleman. Captain Miles Standish
+had risen into Sir Philip Sidney. The austere morality that relentlessly
+ruled the elder New England reappeared in the genius of this singer in
+the most gracious and captivating form. The grave nature of Bryant
+in his early secluded life among the solitary hills of Western
+Massachusetts had been tinged by them with their own sobriety. There
+was something of the sombre forest, of the gray rocky face of stern New
+England in his granitic verse. But what delicate wild-flowers nodded in
+the clefts! What scent of the pine-tree, what music of gurgling water,
+filled the cool air! What bird high poised upon its solitary way through
+heaven-taught faith to him who pursued his way alone!
+
+But while the same moral tone in the poetry both of Bryant and of
+Longfellow shows them to be children of the same soil and tradition, and
+shows also that they saw plainly, what poets of the greatest genius have
+often not seen at all, that in the morality of human life lies its true
+beauty, the different aspect of Puritan development which they displayed
+was due to difference of temperament and circumstance. The foundations
+of our distinctive literature were largely laid in New England, and they
+rest upon morality. Literary New England had never a trace of literary
+Bohemia. The most illustrious group, and the earliest, of American
+authors and scholars and literary men, the Boston and Cambridge group of
+the last generation--Channing, the two Danas, Sparks, Everett, Bancroft,
+Ticknor, Prescott, Norton, Ripley, Palfrey, Emerson, Parker, Hawthorne,
+Longfellow, Holmes, Whittier, Agassiz, Lowell, Motley--have been all
+sober and industrious citizens of whom Judge Sewall would have approved.
+Their lives as well as their works have ennobled literature. They have
+illustrated the moral sanity of genius.
+
+Longfellow shares this trait with them all. It is the moral purity of
+his verse which at once charms the heart, and in his first most famous
+poem, the "Psalm of Life", it is the direct inculcation of a moral
+purpose. Those who insist that literary art, like all other art, should
+not concern itself positively with morality, must reflect that the
+heart of this age has been touched as truly by Longfellow, however
+differently, as that of any time by its master-poet. This, indeed, is
+his peculiar distinction. Among the great poetic names of the century
+in English literature, Burns, in a general way, is the poet of love;
+Wordsworth, of lofty contemplation of nature; Byron, of passion;
+Shelley, of aspiration; Keats, of romance; Scott, of heroic legend;
+and not less, and quite as distinctively, Longfellow, of the domestic
+affections. He is the poet of the household, of the fireside, of the
+universal home feeling. The infinite tenderness and patience, the
+pathos, and the beauty of daily life, of familiar emotion, and the
+common scene, these are the significance of that verse whose beautiful
+and simple melody, softly murmuring for more than forty years, made the
+singer the most widely beloved of living men.
+
+Longfellow's genius was not a great creative force. It burst into no
+tempests of mighty passion. It did not wrestle with the haughtily veiled
+problems of fate and free-will absolute. It had no dramatic movement and
+variety, no eccentricity and grotesqueness and unexpectedness. It
+was not Lear, nor Faust, nor Manfred, nor Romeo. A carnation is not a
+passion-flower. Indeed, no poet of so universal and sincere a popularity
+ever sang so little of love as a passion. None of his smaller poems are
+love poems; and _Evangeline_ is a tale, not of fiery romance, but of
+affection "that hopes and endures and is patient", of the unwasting
+"beauty and strength of woman's devotion", of the constantly tried and
+tested virtue that makes up the happiness of daily life. No one has
+described so well as Longfellow himself the character and influence of
+his own poetry:
+
+ "Come read to me some poem,
+  Some simple and heart-felt lay,
+  That shall soothe this restless feeling,
+  And banish the thoughts of day.
+
+ "Hot from the grand old masters,
+  Not from the bards sublime,
+  Whose distant footsteps echo
+  Through the corridors of Time.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+ "Such songs have power to quiet
+  The restless pulse of care,
+  And come like the benediction
+  That follows after prayer."
+
+This was the office of Longfellow in literature, and how perfectly it
+was fulfilled! It was not a wilful purpose, but he carefully guarded the
+fountain of his song from contamination or diversion, and this was its
+natural overflow. During the long period of his literary activity there
+were many "schools" and styles and fashions of poetry. The influence
+first of Byron, then of Keats, is manifest in the poetry of the last
+generation, and in later days a voluptuous vagueness and barbaric
+splendor, as of the lower empire in literature, have corroded the vigor
+of much modern verse. But no perfumed blandishment of doubtful goddesses
+won Longfellow from his sweet and domestic Muse. The clear thought, the
+true feeling, the pure aspiration, is expressed with limpid simplicity:
+
+  "Strong without rage; without o'erflowing, full."
+
+The most delightful picture in Goldsmith's life is that of the youth
+wandering through rural Europe, stopping at the little villages in the
+peaceful summer sunset, and sweetly playing melodies upon his flute
+for the lads and lasses to dance upon the green. Who that reads "The
+Traveller" and "The Deserted Village" does not hear in their pensive
+music the far-away fluting of that kind-hearted wanderer, and see the
+lovely idyl of that simple life? So sings this poet to the young men and
+maidens in the soft summer air. They follow his measures with fascinated
+hearts, for they hear in them their own hearts singing; they catch
+the music of their dearest hope, of their best endeavor; they hear
+the voices of the peaceful joy that hallows faithful affection, of the
+benediction that belongs to self-sacrifice and devotion. And now that
+the singer is gone, and his voice is silent, those hushed hearts recall
+the words of Father Felicien, Evangeline's pastor:
+
+  "Forty years of my life have I labored among you, and
+  taught you
+  Not in word alone, but in deed, to love one another."
+
+It is this fidelity of his genius to itself, the universal feeling
+to which he gives expression, and the perfection of his literary
+workmanship, which is sure to give Longfellow a permanent place in
+literature. His poems are apples of gold in pictures of silver. There
+is nothing in them excessive, nothing overwrought, nothing strained into
+turgidity, obscurity, and nonsense. There is sometimes, indeed, a fine
+stateliness, as in the "Arsenal at Springfield", and even a resounding
+splendor of diction, as in "Sandalphon". But when the melody is most
+delicate it is simple. The poet throws nothing into the mist to make it
+large. How purely melodious his verse can be without losing the thought
+or its most transparent expression is seen in "The Evening Star" and
+"Snow-Flakes".
+
+The literary decoration of his style, the aroma and color and richness,
+so to speak, which it derives from his ample accomplishment in
+literature, are incomparable. His verse is embroidered with allusions
+and names and illustrations wrought with a taste so true and a skill so
+rare that the robe, though it be cloth of gold, is as finely flexible as
+linen, and still beautifully reveals, not conceals, the living form.
+
+This scholarly allusion and literary tone were at one time criticised as
+showing that Longfellow's genius was really an exotic grown under glass,
+or a smooth-throated mocking-bird warbling a foreign melody. A recent
+admirable paper in the _Evening Post_ intimates that the kindly poet
+took the suggestion in good part, and modified his strain. But there
+was never any interruption or change in the continuity of his work.
+_Evangeline_ and _Hiawatha_ and _The Courtship of Miles Standish_
+blossom as naturally out of his evident and characteristic taste and
+tendency as _The Golden Legend_ or the _Masque of Pandora_. In the
+_Tales of a Wayside Inn_ the "Ride of Paul Revere" is as natural a
+play of his power as "King Robert of Sicily". The various aspect and
+character of nature upon the American continent is nowhere so fully,
+beautifully, and accurately portrayed as in _Evangeline_. The scenery
+of the poem is the vast American landscape, boundless prairie and wooded
+hill, brimming river and green valley, sparkling savanna and broad
+bayou, city and village, camp and wigwam, peopled with the children
+of many races, and all the blended panorama seen in the magic light
+of imagination. So, too, the poetic character of the Indian legend is
+preserved with conscientious care and fit monotony of rippling music in
+_Hiawatha_. But this is an accident and an incident. It is not the theme
+which determines the poet. All Scotland, indeed, sings and glows in the
+verse of Burns, but very little of England is seen or heard in that of
+Byron.
+
+In no other conspicuous figure in literary history are the man and the
+poet more indissolubly blended than in Longfellow. The poet was the man,
+and the man the poet. What he was to the stranger reading in distant
+lands, by
+
+    "The long wash of Australasian seas,"
+
+that he was to the most intimate of his friends. His life and character
+were perfectly reflected in his books. There is no purity or grace or
+feeling or spotless charm in his verse which did not belong to the man.
+There was never an explanation to be offered for him; no allowance was
+necessary for the eccentricity or grotesqueness or wilfulness or humor
+of genius. Simple, modest, frank, manly, he was the good citizen, the
+self-respecting gentleman, the symmetrical man.
+
+He lived in an interesting historic house in a venerable university
+town, itself the suburb of a great city; the highway running by his gate
+and dividing the smooth grass and modest green terraces about the house
+from the fields and meadows that sloped gently to the placid Charles,
+and the low range of distant hills that made the horizon. Through the
+little gate passed an endless procession of pilgrims of every degree and
+from every country to pay homage to their American friend. Every
+morning came the letters of those who could not come in person, and
+with infinite urbanity and sympathy and patience the master of the
+house received them all, and his gracious hospitality but deepened the
+admiration and affection of the guests. His nearer friends sometimes
+remonstrated at his sweet courtesy to such annoying "devastators of
+the day". But to an urgent complaint of his endless favor to a flagrant
+offender, Longfellow only answered, good-humoredly, "If I did not speak
+kindly to him, there is not a man in the world who would." On the day
+that he was taken ill, six days only before his death, three schoolboys
+came out from Boston on their Saturday holiday to ask his autograph. The
+benign lover of children welcomed them heartily, showed them a hundred
+interesting objects in his house, then wrote his name for them, and for
+the last time.
+
+Few men had known deeper sorrow. But no man ever mounted upon his sorrow
+more surely to higher things. Blessed and beloved, the singer is gone,
+but his song remains, and its pure and imperishable melody is the song
+of the lark in the morning of our literature:
+
+  "Type of the wise who soar but never roam,
+   True to the kindred points of heaven and home."
+
+
+
+
+OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
+
+
+In 1817 Bryant's "Thanatopsis" was published in the _North American
+Review_. Richard Henry Dana, the elder, who was then one of the editors,
+said that it could not be an American poem, for there was no American
+who could have written it. But it does not seem to have produced a
+remarkable impression upon the public mind. The planet rose silently and
+unobserved. Ten years afterwards, in 1827, Dana's own "Buccaneer" was
+published, and Christopher North, in _Blackwood_, saluted it as "by far
+the most original and powerful of American poetical compositions". But
+it produced in this country no general effect which is remembered. Nine
+years later, in 1836, Holmes's "Metrical Essay" was delivered before the
+Phi Beta Kappa Society at Harvard College, and was as distinct an event
+in literary circles as Edward Everett's oration before the same society
+in 1824, or Ralph Waldo Emerson's in 1837, or Horace Bushnell's in 1848,
+or Wendell Phillips's in 1881. Holmes was then twenty-seven years old,
+and had just returned from his professional studies in Europe, where, as
+in his college days at Cambridge, where he was born, he had toyed with
+many Muses, yet still, with native Yankee prudence, held fast the hand
+of Aesculapius. His poem, like the address of Emerson in the next
+year, showed how completely the modern spirit of refined and exquisite
+literary cultivation and of free and undaunted thought had superseded
+the uncouth literary form and stern and rigid Calvinism of the Mathers
+and early Boston.
+
+The melody and grace of Goldsmith's line, but with a fresh local spirit,
+have not been more perfectly reproduced, nor with a more distinct
+revelation of a new spirit, than in this poem. It is retrospective and
+contemplative, but it is also full of the buoyancy of youth, of the
+consciousness of poetic skill, and of blithe anticipation. Its tender
+reminiscence and occasional fond elegiac strain are but clouds of the
+morning. Its literary form is exquisite, and its general impression is
+that of bright, elastic, confident power. It was by no means, however, a
+first work, nor was the poet unknown in his own home. But the "Metrical
+Essay" introduced him to a larger public, while the fugitive pieces
+already known were the assurance that the more important poem was not
+a happy chance, but the development of a quality already proved. Seven
+years before, in 1829, the year he graduated at Harvard, Holmes began to
+contribute to _The Collegian_, a college magazine. Two years later, in
+1831, appeared the _New England Magazine_, in which the young writer,
+as he might himself say, took the road with his double team of verse
+and prose, holding the ribbons with unsurpassed lightness and grace
+and skill, now for two generations guiding those fleet and well-groomed
+coursers, which still show their heels to panting rivals, the prancing
+team behind which we have all driven and are still driving with constant
+and undiminished delight.
+
+Mr. F. B. Sanborn, whose tribute to Holmes on his eightieth birthday
+shows how thorough was his research for that labor of love, tells us
+that his first contribution to the _New England Magazine_ was published
+in the third or September number of the first year, 1831. It was a copy
+of verses of an unpromising title--"To an Insect". But that particular
+insect, seemingly the creature of a day, proved to be immortal, for it
+was the katydid, whose voice is perennial:
+
+  "Thou sayest an undisputed thing
+   In such a solemn way."
+
+In the contributions of the young graduate the high spirits of a
+frolicsome fancy effervesce and sparkle. But their quality of a new
+literary tone and spirit is very evident. The ease and fun of these
+bright prolusions, without impudence or coarseness, the poetic touch and
+refinement, were as unmistakable as the brisk pungency of the gibe. The
+stately and scholarly Boston of Channing, Dana, Everett, and Ticknor
+might indeed have looked askance at the literary claims of such lines
+as these "Thoughts in Dejection" of a poet wondering if the path to
+Parnassus lay over Charlestown or Chelsea bridge:
+
+ "What is a poet's fame?
+    Sad hints about his reason,
+  And sadder praise from gazetteers,
+    To be returned in season.
+
+ "For him the future holds
+    No civic wreath above him;
+  Nor slated roof nor varnished chair,
+    Nor wife nor child to love him.
+
+ "Maid of the village inn,
+    Who workest woe on satin,
+  The grass in black, the graves in green,
+    The epitaph in Latin,
+
+ "Trust not to them who say
+    In stanzas they adore thee;
+  Oh, rather sleep in church-yard clay,
+    With maudlin cherubs o'er thee!"
+
+The lines to the katydid, with "L'Inconnue"--
+
+ "Is thy name Mary, maiden fair?"--
+
+published in the magazine at about the same time, disclose Holmes's
+natural melody and his fine instinct for literary form. But his
+lyrical fervor finds its most jubilant expression at this time in "Old
+Ironsides", written at the turning-point in the poet's life, when he had
+renounced the study of the law, and was deciding upon medicine as his
+profession. The proposal to destroy the frigate Constitution, fondly and
+familiarly known as "Old Ironsides", kindled a patriotic frenzy in the
+sensitive Boston boy, which burst forth into the noble lyric,
+
+  "Ay, tear her tattered ensign down!"
+
+There had been no American poetry with a truer lilt of song than these
+early verses, and there has been none since. Two years later, in 1833,
+Holmes went to complete his medical studies in Paris, and the lines to a
+grisette--
+
+  "Ah, Clemence, when I saw thee last
+   Trip down the Rue de Seine!"--
+
+published upon his return in his first volume of verse, are a charming
+illustration of his lyrical genius. His limpid line never flowed more
+clearly than in this poem. It has the pensive tone of all his best poems
+of the kind, but it is the half-happy sadness of youth.
+
+All these early verses have an assured literary form. The scope and
+strain were new, but their most significant quality was not melody nor
+pensive grace, but humor. This was ingrained and genuine. Sometimes it
+was rollicking, as in "The Height of the Ridiculous" and "The September
+Gale". Sometimes it was drolly meditative, as in "Evening, by a Tailor".
+Sometimes it was a tearful smile of the deepest feeling, as in the most
+charming and perfect of these poems, "The Last Leaf", in which delicate
+and searching pathos is exquisitely fused with tender gayety. The
+haunting music and meaning of the lines,
+
+  "The mossy marbles rest
+   On the lips that he has pressed
+     In their bloom,
+   And the names he loved to hear
+   Have been carved for many a year
+     On the tomb",
+
+lingered always in the memory of Lincoln, whose simple sincerity and
+native melancholy would instinctively have rejected any false note. It
+is in such melody as that of the "Last Leaf" that we feel how truly the
+grim old Puritan strength has become sweetness.
+
+To this poetic grace and humor and music, which at that time were
+unrivalled, although the early notes of a tuneful choir of awakening
+songsters were already heard, the young Holmes added the brisk and crisp
+and sparkling charm of his prose. From the beginning his coursers were
+paired, and with equal pace they have constantly held the road. In the
+_New England Magazine_ for November in the same year, 1831, a short
+paper was published called the "Autocrat of the Breakfast Table". The
+tone of placid dogmatism and infallible finality with which the bulls of
+the domestic pope are delivered is delightfully familiar. This earliest
+one has perhaps more of the cardinal's preliminary scarlet than of the
+mature papal white, but in its first note the voice of the Autocrat is
+unmistakable:
+
+   "Somebody was rigmarolling the other day about the artificial
+    distinctions of society.
+   'Madam,' said I, 'society is the same in all large places. I divide
+    it thus:
+    1. People of cultivation who live in large houses.
+    2. People of cultivation who live in small houses.
+    3. People without cultivation who live in large houses.
+    4. People without cultivation who live in small houses.
+    5. Scrubs.'
+    An individual at the upper end of the table turned pale and left the
+    room as I finished with the monosyllable."
+
+"'Tis sixty years since", but that drop is of the same characteristic
+transparency and sparkle as in the latest Tea-Cup.
+
+The time in which the _New England Magazine_ was published, and these
+firstlings of Holmes's muse appeared, was one of prophetic literary
+stir in New England. There were other signs than those in letters of
+the breaking-up of the long Puritan winter. A more striking and extreme
+reaction from the New England tradition could not well be imagined
+than that which was offered by Nathaniel Parker Willis, of whom Holmes
+himself says "that he was at the time something between a remembrance of
+Count D'Orsay and an anticipation of Oscar Wilde". Willis was a kindly
+saunterer, the first Boston dandy, who began his literary career with
+grotesque propriety as a sentimentalizer of Bible stories, a performance
+which Lowell gayly called inspiration and water. In what now seems a
+languid, Byronic way, he figured as a Yankee Pelham or Vivian Grey. Yet
+in his prose and verse there was a tacit protest against the old order,
+and that it was felt is shown by the bitterness of ridicule and taunt
+and insult with which, both publicly and privately, this most amiable
+youth was attacked, who, at that time, had never said an ill-natured
+word of anybody, and who was always most generous in his treatment of
+his fellow authors.
+
+The epoch of Willis and the _New England Magazine_ is very notable in
+the history of American literature. The traditions of that literature
+were grave and even sombre. Irving, indeed, in his Knickerbocker and Rip
+Van Winkle and Ichabod Crane, and in the general gayety of his literary
+touch, had emancipated it from strict allegiance to the solemnity of its
+precedents, and had lighted it with a smile. He supplied a quality
+of grace and cheerfulness which it had lacked, and without unduly
+magnifying his charming genius, it had a natural, fresh, and smiling
+spirit, which, amid the funereal, theologic gloom, suggests the
+sweetness and brightness of morning. In its effect it is a breath of
+Chaucer. When Knickerbocker was published, Joel Barlow's "Hasty-Pudding"
+was the chief achievement of American literary humor. Mark Twain and
+Charles Dudley Warner were not yet "the wits of Hartford". Those
+who bore that name held it by brevet. Indeed, the humor of our early
+literature is pathetic. In no State was the ecclesiastical dominance
+more absolute than in Connecticut, and nothing shows more truly how
+absolute and grim it was than the fact that the performances of the
+"wits" in that State were regarded--gravely, it must have been--as
+humor.
+
+For a long time there was no vital response in New England to the chord
+touched by Irving. Yet Boston was then unquestionably the chief seat of
+American letters. Dennie had established his _Portfolio_ in Philadelphia
+in 1801, but in 1805 the _Monthly Anthology_, which was subsequently
+reproduced in the _North American Review_, appeared in Boston, and
+was the organ or illustration of the most important literary and
+intellectual life of the country at that time. The opening of the
+century saw the revolt against the supremacy of the old Puritan Church
+of New England--a revolt within its own pale. This clerical protest
+against the austere dogmas of Calvinism in its ancient seat was
+coincident with the overthrow in the national government of Federalism
+and the political triumph of Jefferson and his party. Simultaneously
+also with the religious and political disturbance was felt the new
+intellectual and literary impulse of which the _Anthology_ was the
+organ. But the religious and literary movements were not in sympathy
+with the political revolution, although they were all indications
+of emancipation from the dominance of old traditions, the mental
+restlessness of a people coming gradually to national consciousness.
+
+Mr. Henry Adams, in remarking upon this situation in his history of
+Madison's administration, points out that leaders of the religious
+protest which is known as the Unitarian Secession in New England were
+also leaders in the intellectual and literary awakening of the time, but
+had no sympathy with Jefferson or admiration of France. Bryant's father
+was a Federalist; the club that conducted the _Anthology_ and the
+_North American Review_ was composed of Federalists; and the youth
+whose "Thanatopsis" is the chief distinction of the beginning of that
+_Review_, and the morning star of American poetry, was, as a boy of
+thirteen, the author of the "Embargo", a performance in which the
+valiant Jack gave the giant Jefferson no quarter. The religious
+secession took its definite form in Dr. Channing's sermon at the
+ordination of Jared Sparks in Baltimore in 1819, which powerfully
+arraigned the dominant theology of the time. This was the year in which
+Irving's _Sketch Book_ was published. Bryant's first volume followed a
+year or two later, and our distinctive literary epoch opened.
+
+Ten years afterwards, when Bryant had left New England, Dr. Channing
+was its most dignified and characteristic name in literature. But he was
+distinctively a preacher, and his serene and sweet genius never unbent
+into a frolicsome mood. As early as 1820 a volume of Robert Burns's
+poems fell into Whittier's hands like a spark into tinder, and the
+flame that has so long illuminated and cheered began to blaze. It was,
+however, a softened ray, not yet the tongue of lyric fire which it
+afterwards became. But none of the poets smiled as they sang. The Muse
+of New England was staid and stately--or was she, after all, not a true
+daughter of Jove, but a tenth Muse, an Anne Bradstreet? The rollicking
+laugh of Knickerbocker was a solitary sound in the American air until
+the blithe carol of Holmes returned a kindred echo.
+
+Willis was the sign of the breaking spell. But his light touch could not
+avail. The Puritan spell could be broken only by Puritan force, and
+it is the lineal descendants of Puritanism, often the sons of
+clergymen--Emerson and Holmes and Longfellow and Hawthorne and
+Whittier--who emancipated our literature from its Puritan subjection.
+In 1829 Willis, as editor of _Peter Parley's Token_ and the _American
+Monthly Magazine_, was aided by Longfellow and Hawthorne and Motley and
+Hildreth and Mrs. Child and Mrs. Sigourney, and the elder Bishop Doane,
+Park Benjamin and George B. Cheever, Albert Pike and Rufus Dawes, as
+contributors. Willis himself was a copious writer, and in the _American
+Monthly_ first appeared the titles of "Inkling of Adventure" and
+"Pencillings by the Way", which he afterwards reproduced for some of his
+best literary work. The _Monthly_ failed, and in 1831, the year that the
+_New England Magazine_ began, it was merged in the New York _Mirror_, of
+which Willis became associate editor, leaving his native city forever,
+and never forgiving its injustice towards him. In the heyday of his
+happy social career in England he wrote to his mother, "The mines of
+Golconda would not tempt me to return and live in Boston."
+
+This was the literary situation when Holmes was preluding in the
+magazine. The acknowledged poets in Boston were Dana, Sprague, and
+Pierpont. Are these names familiar to the readers of this essay? How
+much of their poetry can those readers repeat? No one knows more surely
+than he who writes of a living author how hard it is to forecast fame,
+and how dangerous is prophecy. When Edward Everett saluted Percival's
+early volume as the harbinger of literary triumphs, and Emerson greeted
+Walt Whitman at "the opening of a great career", they generalized a
+strong personal impression. They identified their own preference with
+the public taste. On the other hand, Hawthorne says truly of himself
+that he was long the most obscure man of letters in America. Yet he had
+already published the _Twice-told Tales_ and the _Mosses from an Old
+Manse_, the two series of stories in which the character and quality
+of his genius are fully disclosed. But although Longfellow hailed the
+publication of the first collection as the rising of a new star, the
+tone of his comment is not that of the discoverer of a planet shining
+for all, but of an individual poetic pleasure. The prescience of fame is
+very infrequent. The village gazes in wonder at the return of the famous
+man who was born on the farm under the hill, and whose latent greatness
+nobody suspected; while the youth who printed verses in the corner of
+the county paper, and drew the fascinated glances of palpitating maidens
+in the meetinghouse, and seemed to the farmers to have associated
+himself at once with Shakespeare and Tupper and the great literary or
+"littery folks", never emerges from the poet's department in the paper
+in which unconsciously and forever he has been cornered. It would be a
+grim Puritan jest if that department had been named from the corner of
+the famous dead in Westminster Abbey.
+
+If the Boston of sixty years ago had ventured to prophesy for itself
+literary renown, it is easy to see upon what reputations of the time
+it would have rested its claims. But if the most familiar names of
+that time are familiar no longer, if Kettell and poems from the _United
+States Gazette_ seem to be cemeteries of departed reputations, the fate
+of the singers need not be deplored as if Fame had forgotten them. Fame
+never knew them. Fame does not retain the name of every minstrel
+who passes singing. But to say that Fame does not know them is not
+dispraise. They sang for the hearers of their day, as the players
+played. Is it nothing to please those who listen, because those who
+are out of hearing do not stop and applaud? If we recall the names most
+eminent in our literature, whether they were destined for a longer or
+shorter date, we shall see that they are undeniably illustrations of the
+survival of the fittest. Turning over the noble volumes of Stedman
+and Miss Hutchinson, in which, as on a vast plain, the whole line of
+American literature is drawn up for inspection and review, and marches
+past like the ghostly midnight columns of Napoleon's grand army, we
+cannot quarrel with the verdict of time, nor feel that injustice has
+been done to Thamis or to Cawdor. There are singers of a day, but not
+less singers because they are of a day. The insect that flashes in the
+sunbeam does not survive like the elephant. The splendor of the most
+gorgeous butterfly does not endure with the faint hue of the hills that
+gives Athens its Pindaric name. And there are singers who do not sing.
+What says Holmes, with eager sympathy and pity, in one of his most
+familiar and most beautiful lyrics?--
+
+ "We count the broken lyres that rest
+    Where the sweet waiting singers slumber,
+  But o'er their silent sister's breast
+    The wild flowers who will stoop to number?
+  A few can touch the magic string,
+    And noisy fame is proud to win them;
+  Alas, for those that never sing,
+    And die with all their music in them!"
+
+But as he says also that the capacities of listeners at lectures differ
+widely, some holding a gallon, others a quart, and others only a pint or
+a gill, so of the singers who are not voiceless, their voices differ in
+volume. Some are organs that fill the air with glorious and continuous
+music; some are trumpets blowing a ringing peal, then sinking into
+silence; some are harps of melancholy but faint vibration; still others
+are flutes and pipes, whose sweet or shrill note has a dying fall. Some
+are heard as the wind or sea is heard; some like the rustle of leaves;
+some like the chirp of birds. Some are heard long and far away; others
+across the field; others hardly across the street. Fame is perhaps
+but the term of a longer or shorter fight with oblivion; but it is the
+warrior who "drinks delight of battle with his peers", and holds his
+own in the fray, who finally commands the eye and the heart. There were
+poets pleasantly singing to our grandfathers whose songs we do not hear,
+but the unheeded voice of the youngest songster of that time is a voice
+we heed to-day. Holmes wrote but two "Autocrat" papers in the _New
+England Magazine_--one in November, 1831, and the other in February,
+1832. The year after the publication of the second paper he went to
+Paris, where for three years he studied medicine, not as a poet, but
+as a physician, and he returned in 1836 an admirably trained and highly
+accomplished professional man. But the Phi Beta Kappa poem of that year,
+like the tender lyric to Clemence upon leaving Paris, shows not
+only that the poet was not dead, but that he did not even sleep. The
+"Metrical Essay" was the serious announcement that the poet was not
+lost in the man of science, an announcement which was followed by the
+publication in the same year (1836) of his first volume of poems. This
+was three years before the publication of Longfellow's first volume of
+verses, _The Voices of the Night_.
+
+Holmes's devotion to the two Muses of science and letters was uniform
+and untiring, as it was also to the two literary forms of verse and
+prose. But although a man of letters, like the other eminent men of
+letters in New England, he had no trace of the Bohemian. Willis was the
+only noted literary figure that ever mistook Boston for a seaport in
+Bohemia, and he early discovered his error. The fraternity which has
+given to Boston its literary primacy has been always distinguished
+not only for propriety of life and respectability in its true sense
+of worthiness and respect, but for the possession of the virtues of
+fidelity, industry, and good sense, which have carried so far both
+the influence and the renown of New England. Nowhere has the Bohemian
+tradition been more happily and completely shattered than in the circle
+to which Holmes returned from his European studies to take his place.
+American citizenship in its most attractive aspect has been signally
+illustrated in that circle, and it is not without reason that
+the government has so often selected from it our chief American
+representatives in other countries.
+
+Dr. Holmes, as he was now called, and has continued to be called,
+practised his profession in Boston; but whether because of some lurking
+popular doubt of a poet's probable skill as a physician, or from some
+lack of taste on his part for the details of professional practice, like
+his kinsman, Wendell Phillips, and innumerable other young beginners, he
+sometimes awaited a professional call longer than was agreeable. But he
+wrote medical papers, and was summoned to lecture to the medical school
+at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, and later at Pittsfield in
+Massachusetts, while his unfailing charm as an occasional poet gave
+him a distinctive name. Holmes's felicity in occasional poems is
+extraordinary. The "Metrical Essay" was the first and chief of the long
+series of such verses, among which the songs of '29, the poems
+addressed year after year to his college classmates of that year, have a
+delightful and endless grace, tenderness, wit, and point. Pegasus
+draws well in harness the triumphant chariot of '29, in which the lucky
+classmates of the poet move to a unique and happy renown.
+
+As a reader, Holmes was the permanent challenge of Mrs. Browning's
+sighing regret that poets never read their own verses to their worth.
+Park Benjamin, who heard the Phi Beta Kappa poem, said of its delivery:
+"A brilliant, airy, and _spirituelle_ manner varied with striking
+flexibility to the changing sentiment of the poem, now deeply
+impassioned, now gayly joyous and nonchalant, and anon springing up into
+almost an actual flight of rhapsody, rendered the delivery of this poem
+a rich, nearly a dramatic entertainment." This was no less true in later
+years when he read some of his poems in New York at Bishop Potter's,
+then rector of Grace Church, or of the reading of the poem at the
+doctors' dinner given to him by the physicians of New York a little
+later.
+
+Holmes's readings were like improvisations. The poems were expressed and
+interpreted by the whole personality of the poet. The most subtle
+touch of thought, the melody of fond regret, the brilliant passage
+of description, the culmination of latent fun exploding in a keen and
+resistless jest, all these were vivified in the sensitive play of manner
+and modulation of tone of the reader, so that a poem by Holmes at the
+Harvard Commencement dinner was one of the anticipated delights which
+never failed. This temperament implied an oratorical power which
+naturally drew the poet into the lecture lyceum when it was in its
+prime, in the decade between 1850 and 1860. During that time the popular
+lecture was a distinct and effective public force, and not the least
+of its services was its part in instructing and training the public
+conscience for the great contest of the Civil War.
+
+The year 1831, in which Holmes's literary activity began, was also
+the year on whose first day the first number of Garrison's _Liberator_
+appeared, and the final period of the slavery controversy opened. But
+neither this storm of agitation nor the transcendental mist that a few
+years later overhung intellectual New England greatly affected the poet.
+
+In the first number of the "Autocrat" there is a passage upon puns,
+which, crackling with fun, shows his sensitive scepticism. The
+"Autocrat" says: "In a case lately decided before Miller, J., Doe
+presented Roe a subscription paper, and urged the claims of suffering
+humanity. Roe replied by asking when charity was like a top. It was in
+evidence that Doe preserved a dignified silence. Roe then said, 'When
+it begins to hum.' There are temperaments of a refined suspiciousness
+to which, when the plea of reform is urged, the claims of suffering
+humanity at once begin to hum. The very word reform irritates a peculiar
+kind of sensibility, as a red flag stirs the fury of a bull. A noted
+party leader said, with inexpressible scorn, 'When Dr. Johnson defined
+the word patriotism as the last refuge of a scoundrel, he had not
+learned the infinite possibilities of the word refa-a-r-m.'"
+
+The acridity of this jest is wholly unknown to the "Autocrat", who
+has moved always with reform, if not always with reformers, and whose
+protest against bigotry is as searching as it is sparkling. Not only has
+his ear been quick to detect the hum of Mr. Honeythunder's loud appeal,
+but his eye to catch the often ludicrous aspect of honest whimsey.
+During all the early years of his literary career he flew his flashing
+darts at all the "isms", and he fell under the doubt and censure of
+those earnest children of the time whom the gay and clever sceptics
+derided as apostles of the newness. When Holmes appeared upon the
+lecture platform it was to discourse of literature or science, or to
+treat some text of social manners or morals with a crisp Poor Richard
+sense and mother wit, and a brilliancy of illustration, epigram, and
+humor that fascinated the most obdurate "come-outer". Holmes's lectures
+on the English poets at the Lowell Institute were among the most noted
+of that distinguished platform, and everywhere the poet was one of
+the most popular of "attractions". There were not wanting those who
+maintained that his use of the platform was the correct one, and that
+the orators who, often by happy but incisive indirection, fought the
+good fight of the hour abused their opportunity.
+
+It was while Holmes was still a professor, but still also touching the
+lyre and writing scientific essays and charming the great audiences of
+the lecture lyceum, that in the first number of the _Atlantic Monthly_,
+in November, 1857, the "Autocrat of the Breakfast Table" remarked,
+"I was just going to say, when I was interrupted," and resumed the
+colloquies of the _New England Magazine_. He had been interrupted
+twenty-two years before. But as he began again it was plain that it was
+the same voice, yet fuller, stronger, richer, and that we were listening
+to one of the wisest of wits and sharpest of observers. Emerson warns us
+that superlatives are to be avoided. But it will not be denied that the
+"Autocrat" belongs in the highest rank of modern magazine or periodical
+literature, of which the essays of "Elia" are the type. The form of the
+"Autocrat"--a semi-dramatic, conversational, descriptive monologue--is
+not peculiar to Holmes's work, but the treatment of it is absolutely
+original. The manner is as individual and unmistakable as that of Elia
+himself. It would be everywhere recognized as the Autocrat's. During
+the intermission of the papers the more noted Macaulay flowers of
+literature, as the Autocrat calls them, had bloomed; Carlyle's _Sartor
+Resartus_ and reviews, Christopher North's _Noctes_ (now fallen into
+ancient night), Thackeray's _Roundabout Papers_, Lowell's _Hosea
+Biglow_--a whole library of magazine and periodical literature of the
+first importance had appeared. But the Autocrat began again, after a
+quarter of a century, musical with so rich a chorus, and his voice was
+clear, penetrating, masterful, and distinctively his own.
+
+The cadet branch of English literature--the familiar colloquial
+periodical essay, a comment upon men and manners and life--is a
+delightful branch of the family, and traces itself back to Dick Steele
+and Addison. Hazlitt, who belonged to it, said that he preferred the
+_Tatler_ to the _Spectator_; and Thackeray, who consorted with it
+proudly, although he was of the elder branch, restored Sir Richard,
+whose habits had cost him a great deal of his reputation, to general
+favor. The familiar essay is susceptible, as the eighteenth and
+nineteenth centuries show, of great variety and charm of treatment. What
+would the Christian Hero, writing to his Prue that he would be with her
+in a pint of wine's time, have said to "Blakesmoor" and "Oxford in the
+Vacation"? Yet Lamb and Steele are both consummate masters of the essay,
+and Holmes, in the "Autocrat", has given it a new charm. The little
+realm of the Autocrat, his lieges of the table, the persons of
+the drama, are at once as definitely outlined as Sir Roger's club.
+Unconsciously and resistlessly we are drawn within the circle; we are
+admitted _ad eundem_, and become the targets of the wit, the irony,
+the shrewd and sharp epigram, the airy whim, the sparkling fancy,
+the curious and recondite thought, the happy allusion, the felicitous
+analogy, of the sovereign master of the feast.
+
+The index of the _Autocrat_ is in itself a unique work. It reveals the
+whimsical discursiveness of the book; the restless hovering of that
+brilliant talk over every topic, fancy, feeling, fact; a humming-bird
+sipping the one honeyed drop from every flower; or a huma, to use its
+own droll and capital symbol of the lyceum lecturer, the bird that never
+lights. There are few books that leave more distinctly the impression of
+a mind teeming with riches of many kinds. It is, in the Yankee phrase,
+thoroughly wideawake. There is no languor, and it permits none in the
+reader, who must move along the page warily, lest in the gay profusion
+of the grove, unwittingly defrauding himself of delight, he miss
+some flower half hidden, some gem chance-dropped, some darting bird.
+Howells's _Letters_ was called a chamber-window book, a book supplying
+in solitude the charm of the best society. We could all name a few such
+in our own literature. Would any of them, or many, take precedence of
+the _Autocrat of the Breakfast Table?_
+
+It is in this book that the value of the scientific training to the
+man of letters is illustrated, not only in furnishing noble and strong
+analogies, but in precision of observation and accuracy of statement. In
+Holmes's style, the definiteness of form and the clearness of expression
+are graces and virtues which are due to his exact scientific study, as
+well as to the daylight quality of his mind.
+
+The delicate apprehension of the finer and tenderer feelings which
+is disclosed in the little passages of narrative in the record of the
+Autocrat and of his legitimate brothers, the Professor and the Poet,
+at the Breakfast Table, gives a grace and a sweetness to the work which
+naturally flow into the music of the poems with which the diary of a
+conversation often ends. These traits in the Autocrat suggested that he
+would yet tell a distinct story, which indeed came while the trilogy
+of the Breakfast Table was yet proceeding. _Elsie_ _Venner_ and the
+_Guardian Angel_, the two novels of Holmes's, are full of the same
+briskness and acuteness of observation, the same effusiveness of humor
+and characteristic Americanism, as the _Autocrat_. Certain aspects
+of New England life and character are treated in these stories with
+incomparable vivacity and insight. Holmes's picture is of a later New
+England than Hawthorne's, but it is its lineal descendant. It is another
+facet of the Puritan diamond which flashes with different light in the
+genius of Hawthorne, Emerson, Lowell, Whittier, Longfellow, Holmes, and
+Judd in _Margaret_. For, with all his lyrical instinct and rollicking
+humor, Holmes is essentially a New-Englander, and one of the most
+faithful and shrewd interpreters of New England.
+
+The colloquial habit of the Autocrat is not lost in the stories, and it
+is so marked generally in Holmes's writings as to be called distinctive.
+It is a fascinating gift, when it is so restrained by taste and
+instinctive refinement as not to become what is known as bumptiousness.
+Thackeray, even in his novels, is apt to drop into this vein, to talk
+about the persons of his drama with his reader, instead of leaving them
+to play out their part alone. This trait offends some of Thackeray's
+audience, to whom it seems like the manager's hand thrust into the
+box to help out the play of the puppets. They resent not "the damnable
+faces" of the actors, but the damnable sermonizing of the author, and
+exhort him to permit the play to begin. Thackeray frankly acknowledged
+his tendency to preach, as he called it. But it was part of the man.
+Without the private personal touch of the essayist in his stories they
+would not be his. This colloquial habit is very winning when governed by
+a natural delicacy and an exquisite literary instinct. It is the quality
+of all the authors who are distinctly beloved as persons by their
+readers, and it is to this class that Holmes especially belongs.
+
+It is not a quality which is easily analyzed, but it blends a power of
+sympathetic observation and appreciation both of the thing observed and
+the reader to whom the observation is addressed. The Autocrat, as he
+converses, brightens with his own clear thought, with the happy quip,
+the airy fancy. He is sure of your delight, not only in the thought, but
+in its deft expression. He in turn is delighted with your delight. He
+warms to the responsive mind and heart, and feels the mutual joy. The
+personal relation is established, and the Autocrat's audience become
+his friends, to whom he describes with infinite glee the effect of his
+remarks upon his lieges at table. No other author takes the reader into
+his personal confidence more closely than Holmes, and none reveals his
+personal temperament more clearly. This confidential relation becomes
+even more simple and intimate as time chastens the eagerness of youth
+and matures the keen brilliancy of the blossom into the softer bloom of
+the fruit. The colloquies of the Autocrat under the characteristic
+title of "Over the Tea-Cups" are full of the same shrewd sense and wise
+comment and tender thought. The kindly mentor takes the reader by the
+button or lays his hand upon his shoulder, not with the rude familiarity
+of the bully or the boor, but with the courtesy of Montaigne, the
+friendliness of John Aubrey, or the wise cheer of Selden. The reader
+glows with the pleasure of an individual greeting, and a wide diocese
+of those whom the Autocrat never saw plume themselves proudly upon his
+personal acquaintance.
+
+In this discursive talk about one of the American authors who have
+vindicated the position of American letters in the literature of the
+language we have not mentioned all his works. It is the quality rather
+than the quantity with which we are concerned, the upright, honorable,
+pure quality of the poet, the wit, the scholar, for whom the most
+devoted reader is called to make no plea, no apology. The versatility of
+his power is obvious, but scarcely less so the uniformity of his work.
+
+It is a power which was early mature. For many a year he has dwelt upon
+a high table-land where the air is equable and inspiring, yet, as we
+have hinted, ever softer and sweeter. The lyric of today glows with the
+same ardor as the fervent apostrophe to "Old Ironsides" or the tripping
+salutation to the remembered and regretted Clemence; it is only less
+eager. The young Autocrat who remarked that the word "scrub" dismissed
+from table a fellow-boarder who turned pale, now with the same smiling
+acuteness remarks the imprudent politeness which tries to assure him
+that it is no matter if he is a little older. Did anybody say so? The
+easy agility with which he cleared "the seven-barred gate" has carried
+him over the eight bars, and we are all in hot pursuit. For just sixty
+years since his first gay and tender note was heard, Holmes has been
+fulfilling the promise of his matin song. He has become a patriarch of
+our literature, and all his countrymen are his lovers.
+
+
+
+
+WASHINGTON IRVING
+
+
+Forty years ago, upon a pleasant afternoon, you might have seen tripping
+with an elastic step along Broadway, in New York, a figure which even
+then would have been called quaint. It was a man of about sixty-six or
+sixty-seven years old, of a rather solid frame, wearing a Talma, as a
+short cloak of the time was called, that hung from the shoulders, and
+low shoes, neatly tied, which were observable at a time when boots were
+generally worn. The head was slightly declined to one side, the face was
+smoothly shaven, and the eyes twinkled with kindly humor and shrewdness.
+There was a chirping, cheery, old-school air in the whole appearance,
+an undeniable Dutch aspect, which, in the streets of New Amsterdam,
+irresistibly recalled Diedrich Knickerbocker. The observer might easily
+have supposed that he saw some later descendant of the renowned Wouter
+Van Twiller refined into a nineteenth-century gentleman. The occasional
+start of interest as the figure was recognized by some one in the
+passing throng, the respectful bow, and the sudden turn to scan him more
+closely, indicated that he was not unknown. Indeed, he was the American
+of his time universally known. This modest and kindly man was the
+creator of Diedrich Knickerbocker and Rip Van Winkle. He was the father
+of our literature, and at that time its patriarch. He was Washington
+Irving.
+
+At the same time you might have seen another man, of slight figure and
+rustic aspect, with an air of seriousness, if not severity, moving with
+the crowd, but with something remote and reserved in his air, as if in
+the city he bore with him another atmosphere, and were still secluded
+among solitary hills. In the bright and busy street of the city which
+was always cosmopolitan, and in which there lingers a tradition,
+constantly renewed, of good-natured banter of the losel Yankee, this
+figure passed like the grave genius of New England. By a little play of
+fancy the first figure might have seemed the smiling spirit of genial
+cheerfulness and humor, of kindly sympathy even with the foibles and
+weaknesses of poor human nature; and the other the mentor of its earnest
+endeavor and serious duty. For he was the first of our poets, whose
+"Thanatopsis" was the hymn of his meditations among the primeval forests
+of his native hills, and who, in his last years, sat at the door of his
+early home and looked across the valley of the Westfield to the
+little town of Plainfield upon the wooded heights beyond, whose chief
+distinction is that there he wrote the "Waterfowl"; for this graver
+figure was the poet Bryant.
+
+If in the same walk you had passed those two figures, you would have
+seen not only the first of our famous prose writers and the first of our
+acknowledged poets, but also the representatives of the two fundamental
+and distinctive qualities of our American literature, as of all
+literature--its grave, reflective, earnest character, and its sportive,
+genial, and humorous genius.
+
+At the time of which I speak another figure also was familiar in
+Broadway, but less generally recognized as it passed than either of the
+others, although, perhaps, even more widely known to fame than they.
+This was Cooper, who gave us so many of the heroes of our childhood's
+delight, but who at this time was himself the hero of innumerable
+lawsuits, undertaken to chastise the press for what he believed to be
+unjust and libelous comments upon himself. Now that the uproar of that
+litigation is silent, and its occasion forgotten, it seems comical that
+a man for whom fame had already rendered a favorable judgment should
+be busily seeking the opinion of local courts upon transitory newspaper
+opinions of him-self and his writings. It is as if Dickens, when the
+whole English-reading world--judges on the bench and bishops in their
+studies, cobblers in their stalls and grooms in the stables--were all
+laughing over Pickwick, should have sued the _Eatanswill Gazette_ for
+calling him a clown. Thackeray pronounces Cooper's Long Tom Coffin
+one of the prizemen of fiction. That is a final judgment by the
+chief-justice. But who knows what was the verdict in Cooper's lawsuits
+to vindicate himself, and who cares? When Cooper died there was a great
+commemorative meeting in New York. Daniel Webster presided, and praised
+the storyteller; Bryant read a discourse upon him, while Irving sat by
+his side. One of the triumvirate of our early literature was gone, and
+two remained to foresee their own future in the honors paid to him.
+Indeed, it was to see them, quite as much as to hear of their dead
+comrade, that the multitude assembled that evening; and the one who was
+seen with the most interest was Irving, the one in whom the city of New
+York naturally feels a peculiar right and pride, as the most renowned of
+her children.
+
+If I say that he made personally the same impression that his works
+make, you can easily see the man. As you read the story of his life you
+feel its constant gayety and cheerfulness. It was the life of a literary
+man and a man of society--a life without events, or only the events
+of all our lives, except that it lacks the great event of marriage. In
+place of it there is a tender and pathetic romance. Irving lived to be
+seventy-six years old. At twenty-six he was engaged to a beautiful girl,
+who died. He never married; but after his death, in a little box of
+which he always kept the key, was found the miniature of a lovely girl,
+and with it a braid of fair hair, and a slip of paper on which was
+written the name Matilda Hoffman, with some pages upon which the writing
+was long since faded. That fair face Irving kept all his life in a more
+secret and sacred shrine. It looks out, now and then, with unchanged
+loveliness from some pensive passage, which he seems to write with
+wistful melancholy of remembrance. That fond and immortal presence
+constantly renewed the gentle humanity, the tenderness of feeling, the
+sweet healthfulness and generous sympathy which never failed in his life
+and writings.
+
+He was born in the city of New York in 1783, the year in which the
+Revolution ended in the acknowledgment of American independence. The
+British army marched out of the city, and the American army, with
+Washington at the head, marched in. "The patriot's work is ended just as
+my boy is born," said the patriotic mother, "and the boy shall be named
+Washington". Six years later, when Washington returned to New York to be
+inaugurated President, he was one day going into a shop when the boy's
+Scotch nurse democratically stopped the new republican chief magistrate
+and said to him, "Please your honor, here's a bairn was named for you".
+The great man turned and looked kindly on his little namesake, laid his
+hand upon his head, and blessed his future biographer.
+
+The name of no other American has been so curiously confused with
+Washington's as that of Irving. Many a young fellow puzzles over the
+connection which the name seems vaguely to imply, and in other lands the
+identity of the men is confounded. When Irving first went to Europe, a
+very young man, well-educated, courteous, with great geniality of manner
+and charm of conversation, he was received by Prince Torlonia, the
+banker, in Rome, with unusual and flattering civility. His travelling
+companion, who had been treated by the prince with entire indifference,
+was perplexed at the warmth of Irving's welcome. Irving laughingly said
+that it only proved the prince's remarkable discrimination. But the
+young travellers laughed still more when the prince unconsciously
+revealed the secret of his attentions by taking his guest aside, and
+asking him how nearly he was related to General Washington.
+
+Many years afterwards, when he had become famous, an English lady and
+her daughter paused in an Italian gallery before a bust of Washington.
+"And who was Washington, mamma?" asked the daughter. "Why, my dear, I am
+surprised at your ignorance," answered the mother, "he was the author of
+the _Sketch Book_." Long ago in Berlin I was talking with some American
+friends one evening at a cafe, and observed a German intently listening
+to our conversation as if trying his ability to understand the language.
+Presently he said to me, politely, "You are English, no?" But when
+I replied "No, we are Americans"--"Americans!" he exclaimed
+enthusiastically, grasping my hand and shaking it warmly, "Americans,
+ach! we all know your great General Washington Irving."
+
+Irving's father was a Presbyterian deacon, in whose heart the sterner
+traditions of the Covenanters lingered. He tried hard to teach his son
+to contemn amusement, and to impale his youth upon the five points of
+Calvinism, rather than to play ball. But it was John Knox trying to curb
+the tricksy Ariel. Perhaps from some bright maternal ancestor the boy
+had derived his sweet gayety of nature which nothing could repress.
+His airy spirits bubbled like a sunny fountain in that somewhat arid
+household. He read at ten a translation of the _Orlando Furioso_, and
+his father's yard, doubtless trim and well kept as beseemed a deacon's
+yard, became at once a field of chivalry. Candles were forbidden him in
+his chamber, but when he made the acquaintance of _Robinson Crusoe_
+and _Sindbad the Sailor_, he secreted lights to illuminate his innocent
+revels with those immortal playmates.
+
+The amusements which were permitted were of too depressing a character
+to be tolerated by the healthy boy, who, like the duck taking to the
+water from under the wing of the astonished hen, sometimes escaped from
+the serious house at night by dropping from a window, and with a delight
+that must have torn his father's heart with anguish had he known it,
+tasted the forbidden fruit of the theatre. It was a Presbyterian boy
+who tasted it then; but in the same city many years afterwards it was a
+Quaker boy whom I knew who was also enamoured of the play. "John," said
+his grieved father, "is this dreadful thing true that I hear of thee?
+Has thee ever been to see the play-actress Frances Kemble?" "Yes,
+father," answered the heroic John. "I hope thee has not been more than
+once, John," said the afflicted father. "Yes, father," replied John,
+resolved to make a clean breast of his sins, "more than thirty times."
+It is useless to try to prevent blue-birds from flying in the spring.
+The blithe creatures made to soar and sing will not be restrained.
+The same kind Providence that made Calvin made Shakespeare. The sun
+is higher than the clouds, and smiles are as heaven-born as tears. In
+Emerson's poem the squirrel says to the mountain:
+
+ "You're not so small as I,
+  And not half so spry;
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+ "If I cannot carry forests on my back
+  Neither can you crack a nut."
+
+
+It was in vain to try to thwart the young Irving's genius. Yet the
+boy who a little later was to light with rosy cheer the air which, as
+Wendell Phillips said, was still black with sermons; who was to give to
+our literature its first distinctly humorous strain, and innocently to
+amuse the world, was somehow or other, as he said, "taught to feel that
+everything pleasant was wicked".
+
+If that were so, what a sinner Washington Irving was! If to make life
+easier by making it pleasanter, if to outwit trouble by gay banter,
+if with satire that smiles but never stings to correct foibles and to
+quicken good impulses; if to deepen and strengthen human sympathy, is
+not to be a human benefactor, what makes one? When Dr. Johnson said of
+Garrick that his death eclipsed the gayety of nations, he did not mean
+merely that the player would no longer make men laugh, but that he
+could no longer make them better. "If, however," said Irving--and Willis
+selected the words for the motto of his second volume of verse published
+in 1827--"I can by a lucky chance, in these days of evil, rub out one
+wrinkle from the brow of care, or beguile the heavy heart of one moment
+of sadness; if I can, now and then, penetrate the gathering film of
+misanthropy, prompt a benevolent view of human nature, and make my
+reader more in good-humor with his fellow-beings and himself, surely,
+surely I shall not then have written entirely in vain."
+
+That cannot be said to have been the spirit of any American author
+before Irving. Our colonial literature was mainly political and
+theological. You have only to return to the early New England days in
+the stories of Hawthorne, the magician who restores with a shuddering
+spell that old, sombre life, to understand the character of its reading.
+The books that were not treatises upon special topics all seemed to say
+with one of the grim bards of Calvinism:
+
+    "My thoughts on awful subjects roll,
+            Damnation and the dead."
+
+Literature, in its proper sense, there was none. There was no
+imaginative creation, no play of fancy and humor, no subtle charm of the
+ideal life, no grace and delight of expression, which are essential to
+literature. The perpetual twilight and chill of the New England Puritan
+world were an arctic winter in which no flower of poesy bloomed and
+no bird sang. One of the French players who came to this country with
+Rachel says, in his journal, with a startled air, as if he had remarked
+in Americans a universal touch of lunacy, that he was invited to take a
+pleasure-drive to Greenwood Cemetery. Evidently he was not familiar with
+Froissart's epigram nor with the annals of the Puritan fathers, or he
+would have known that their favorite pleasure-ground was the graveyard.
+Judge Sewell's Journal, the best picture of daily New England life in
+the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, is a portrait framed in black
+and hung with thick crape. It is a register of funerals--a book which
+seems to require a suit of sables for its proper reading.
+
+The early Christians dwelt so often and so long in the catacombs that
+when they emerged, accustomed to associate life with the tomb, they
+doubtless regarded the whole world as a cemetery. The American Puritans
+inherited the disposition from their early confessors, and so powerful
+was the tendency that it laid its sombre spirit upon the earliest
+enduring poem in our literature, and the fresh and smiling nature of the
+new world was first depicted by our literary art as a tomb:
+
+                                        "The hills,
+  Rock-ribbed and ancient as the sun; the vales
+  Stretching in pensive quietness between;
+  The venerable woods; rivers that move
+  In majesty; and the complaining brooks
+  That make the meadows green; and, poured round all,
+  Old ocean's gray and melancholy waste,
+  Are but the solemn decorations all
+  Of the great tomb of man."
+
+"Thanatopsis" is the swan-song of Puritanism. Indeed, when New England
+Puritanism could sing, as for the first time it did in the verse of
+Bryant, the great change was accomplished. Out of strength had come
+forth sweetness. I am not decrying the Puritans. They were the stern
+builders of the modern world, the unconscious heralds of wider liberty,
+and a kindlier future for mankind. But
+
+ "God works in a mysterious way
+  His wonders to perform,"
+
+and never more mysteriously than when he chose as the pioneers of
+religious liberty in the New World those who hung Quakers, and as the
+founders of civil equality those who permitted only members of their own
+Church to vote.
+
+Irving was not a studious boy. He did not go to college. He read some
+law at sixteen, but he read much more literature, and sauntered in the
+country about New York with his gun and fishing-rod. He sailed up the
+Hudson, and explored for the first time the realm that was presently to
+be his forever by the right of eminent domain of the imagination. New
+York was a snug little city in those days. At the beginning of the
+century it was all below the present City Hall, and the young fellow,
+who was born a cosmopolitan, greatly enjoyed the charms of the modest
+society in which the Dutch and the English circles were still somewhat
+separated, and in which such literary cultivation as there was was
+necessarily foreign. But while he enjoyed he observed, and his literary
+instinct began to stir.
+
+Under the name of "Jonathan Oldstyle", the young Irving printed in his
+brother's newspaper essays in the style of the _Spectator_, discussing
+topics of the town, and the modest theatre in John Street and its chance
+actors, as if it had been Drury Lane with Garrick and Mrs. Siddons. The
+little town kindly smiled upon the lively efforts of the Presbyterian
+deacon's son; and its welcome of his small essays, the provincial echo
+of the famous Queen Anne's men in London, is a touching revelation of
+our scant and spare native literary talent. The essays are forgotten
+now, but they were enough to bring Charles Brockden Brown to find the
+young author, and to tempt him, but in vain, to write for _The Literary
+Magazine and American Register_, which the novelist was just beginning
+in Philadelphia, a pioneer of American literary magazines, which Brown
+sustained for five years.
+
+The youthful Addison of New Amsterdam was a delicate lad, and when he
+came of age he sailed for France and the Mediterranean, and passed two
+years in travelling. Napoleon Bonaparte was emperor, and at war with
+England, and the young American, despite his passport, was everywhere
+believed to be an Englishman. Travelling was hard work in those days of
+war, but the cheery youth proved the truth of the proverb that a light
+heart and a whole pair of breeches go round the world. At Messina, in
+Sicily, he saw Nelson's fleet pass through the strait, looking for the
+French ships; and before the year ended the famous battle of Trafalgar
+had been fought, and at Greenwich in England Irving saw the body of the
+great sailor lying in state, wrapped in his flag of victory. At Rome he
+made the acquaintance of Washington Allston, and almost resolved to be a
+painter. In Paris he saw Madame de Stael, who overwhelmed him with eager
+questions about his remote and unknown country, and in London he was
+enchanted by Mrs. Siddons. Some years afterwards, when the _Sketch Book_
+had made him famous, he was presented to Mrs. Siddons, and the great
+actress said to him, in her deepest voice and with her stateliest
+manner, "You've made me weep." The modest young author was utterly
+abashed, and could say nothing. After the publication of his
+_Bracebridge_ Hall he was once more presented to her, and again with
+gloomy grandeur she said to him, "You've made me weep again." This time
+Irving received the solemn salute with more composure, and doubtless
+retorted with a compliment magnificent enough even for the sovereign
+Queen of Tragedy, who, as her niece Mrs. Fanny Kemble said of her, never
+laid aside her great manner, and at the dinner-table brandished her fork
+and stabbed the potatoes.
+
+Irving returned from this tour with established health--a refined,
+agreeable, exceedingly handsome and charming gentleman; with a confirmed
+taste for society, and a delightful store of interesting recollection
+and anecdote. With a group of cultivated and lively friends of his own
+age he dined and supped and enjoyed the town, and a little anecdote
+which he was fond of telling shows that the good old times were not
+unlike the good new times: One morning, after a gay dinner, Irving met
+one of his fellow-revellers, who told him that on the way home, after
+draining the parting bumper, he had fallen through a grating in the
+sidewalk, which had been carelessly left open, into the vault beneath.
+It was impossible to climb out, and at first the solitude was rather
+dismal, he said; but several of the other guests fell in, in the course
+of the evening, and, on the whole, they had quite a pleasant time of it.
+
+In the midst of this frolicking life, and growing out of it, Irving's
+real literary career began. With his brother William, and his friend
+James K. Paulding, who afterwards wrote the _Dutchman's Fireside_, and
+was one of the recognized American authors of fifty years ago, he issued
+every fortnight a periodical, which ran for twenty numbers, and stopped
+in the midst of its success. It was modelled upon the _Spectator_ and
+Goldsmith's _Citizen of the World_, describing and criticising the
+manners and morals of the town with extravagant humor and pungency,
+and a rollicking independence which must have been both startling and
+stimulating.
+
+Perhaps, also, the town was secretly pleased to discover that it was
+sufficiently important to be worthy of such bright raillery and humorous
+reproof. _Salmagundi_ was only a lively _jeu d'esprit_, and Irving was
+never proud of it. "I know," said Paulding, writing to him in later
+life, "you consider old Sal as a sort of saucy, flippant trollope,
+belonging to nobody, and not worth fathering." But, nevertheless,
+Irving's genius was trying its wings in it, and pluming itself for
+flight. _Salmagundi_ undoubtedly, to a later taste, is rather crude and
+cumbrous fun, but it is interesting as the immediate forerunner of our
+earliest work of sustained humor, and of the wit of Holmes and Lowell at
+a later date. When it was discontinued, at the beginning of 1808, Irving
+and his brother began the _History of New York_, which was originally
+designed to be a parody of a particular book. But the work was
+interrupted by the business difficulties of the brother, and at last
+Irving resumed it alone, recast it entirely, and as he finished it the
+engagement with Matilda Hoffman ended with her death, and the long arid
+secret romance of his life began.
+
+Knickerbocker's _History_ was published just before Christmas, 1809,
+and made a merry Christmas for our grandfathers and grandmothers eighty
+years ago. The fun began before the book was published. In October the
+curiosity of the town of eighty thousand inhabitants was awakened by
+a series of skilful paragraphs in the _Evening Post_. The art of
+advertising was never more ingeniously illustrated. Mr. Fulkerson
+himself would have paid homage to the artist. One day the quid-nuncs
+found this paragraph in the paper, It was headed,
+
+   "DISTRESSING.
+
+   "Left his lodgings, some time since, and has not since been heard
+    of, a small elderly gentleman, dressed in an old black coat and
+    cocked hat, by the name of Knickerbocker. As there are some reasons
+    for believing that he is not entirely in his right mind, and, as
+    great anxiety is entertained about him, any information concerning
+    him left either at the Columbian Hotel, Mulberry Street, or at the
+    office of this paper, will be thankfully received.
+
+   "P. S.--Printers of newspapers would be aiding the cause of humanity
+    by giving an insertion to the above.
+
+   "_October 25th._"
+
+This was followed within a fortnight by another ingenious lure:
+
+   "_To the Editor of the Evening Post:_
+
+   "Sir,--Having read in your paper of the 26th October last a paragraph
+    respecting an old gentleman by the name of Knickerbocker, who was
+    missing from his lodgings, if it would be any relief to his friends,
+    or furnish them with any clue to discover where he is, you may inform
+    them that a person answering the description was seen by the passengers
+    of the Albany stage early in the morning, about four or five weeks ago,
+    resting himself by the side of the road, a little above Kingsbridge.
+    He had in his hands a small bundle, tied in a red bandana handkerchief.
+    He appeared to be travelling northward, and was very much fatigued and
+    exhausted.
+
+   "_November 6._                             A Traveller."
+
+Ten days after came a letter signed by Seth Handaside, landlord of the
+Independent Handaside:
+
+   "Columbian Hotel, Mulberry Street.
+
+   "Sir,--You have been kind enough to publish in your paper a paragraph
+    about Mr. Diedrich Knickerbocker, who was missing so strangely from his
+    lodgings some time since. Nothing satisfactory has been heard from the
+    old gentleman since, but a very curious written Book has been found in
+    his room in his own handwriting. Now, I wish you to notice him, if he
+    is still alive, that if he does not return and pay off his bill for
+    board and lodging, I shall have to dispose of his Book to satisfy me
+    for the same."
+
+This is very simple jesting, but at that time it was very effective in
+a town that enjoyed the high spirits of _Salmagundi_. Moreover, the book
+which was announced in this lively strain was as unprecedented as the
+announcement. It was a very serious time and country, and the work of
+the small elderly gentleman who carried a little bundle tied in a
+red bandana handkerchief appeared in the midst of the sober and dry
+effusions of our Puritan literature, and of an eager and energetic life
+still engrossed with the subjection of a continent and the establishment
+of a new nation. It was the work of a young man of twenty-six, who lived
+fifty years afterwards with constantly increasing fame, making many
+and admirable contributions to literature. But nothing that followed
+surpassed the joyous brilliancy and gay felicity of his first book,
+which was at once acknowledged as the wittiest book that America had
+produced.
+
+Knickerbocker's _History_ is a prolonged and elaborate and audacious
+burlesque of the early annals of New Amsterdam. The undaunted Goth of
+the legend who plucked the Roman senator by the beard was not a more
+ruthless iconoclast than this son of New Amsterdam, who drew its grave
+ancestors from venerable obscurity by flooding them with the cheerful
+light of blameless fun. To pass the vague and venerable traditions of
+the austere and heroic founders of the city through the alembic of
+a youth's hilarious creative humor, and to turn them out in forms
+resistlessly grotesque, but with their identity unimpaired, was a stroke
+as daring as it was successful. But the skill and power with which this
+is done can be best appreciated by those who are most familiar with the
+history which the gleeful genius burlesques.
+
+Irving follows the actual story closely, and the characters that
+he develops faithfully, although with rollicking caricature, are
+historical. Indeed, the fidelity is so absolute that the fiction is
+welded with the fact. The days of the Dutch ascendency in New York are
+inextricably associated with this ludicrous narrative. It is impossible
+not to think of the forefathers of New Amsterdam as Knickerbocker
+describes them. The Wouter Van Twiller, the Wilhemus Kieft, the Peter
+Stuyvesant, who are familiarly and popularly known, are not themselves,
+but the figures drawn by Diedrich Knickerbocker. In comical despair,
+the historian Grahame, whose _Colonial History_ is still among the
+best, says of Knickerbocker: "If Sancho Panza had been a real governor,
+misrepresented by the wit of Cervantes, his future historian would have
+found it no easy matter to bespeak a grave attention to the annals of
+his administration."
+
+The gayety of this blithe genius bursting in upon our staid literature
+is irresistible. Irving's temperament, his travels, his humor, gave him
+a cosmopolitan point of view; and his little native city, with its local
+sense of importance, and its droll aristocratic traditions springing
+from Dutch burgomasters and traders, impressed his merry genius like
+a complacent Cranford or Tarascon taking itself with a provincial
+seriousness, which, to his sympathetic fancy, was an exhaustless
+fountain of fun. Part of the fun to us, and perhaps to Irving, was the
+indignation with which it was received by the descendants of the Dutch
+families in the city and State. The excited drawing-rooms denounced
+it as scandalous satire and ridicule. Even Irving's friend, Gulian
+Verplanck, nine years afterwards, deepening the comedy of his remark by
+his evident unconsciousness of the drollery of his gravity, grieved that
+the author's exuberance of genuine humor should be wasted on a coarse
+caricature. Irving, who was then in Europe, saw Verplanck's strictures
+just as he had written _Rip Van Winkle_, and he wrote to a friend at
+home that he could not help laughing at Verplanck's outburst of filial
+feeling for his ancestors, adding, in the true Knickerbocker vein,
+"Remember me heartily to him, and tell him that I mean to grow wiser
+and better and older every day, and to lay the castigation he has given
+seriously to heart."
+
+The success of Knickerbocker's _History_ was immediate, and it was the
+first American work of literature which arrested attention in Europe.
+
+Sir Walter Scott, who was then the most famous of English poets, and was
+about to publish the first of the Waverley Novels, was delighted with a
+humor which he thought recalled Swift's, and a sentiment that seemed
+to him as tender as Sterne's. He wrote a generous acknowledgment to
+the American friend who had sent him the book, and in later years he
+welcomed Diedrich Knickerbocker at Abbotsford, and the American has
+given a charming and vivid picture of Scott's home and its master.
+
+But the success of his book did not at once determine Irving's choice
+of a career. He was still a gilded youth who enjoyed the gay idleness of
+society, and who found in writing only another and pleasant recreation.
+He had been bred in the conservative tradition which looked upon
+livelihood by literature as the deliberate choice of Grub Street, and
+the wretchedness of Goldsmith as the necessary and natural fate of
+authors; but it is droll that, although he recoiled from the uncertainty
+of support by literary labor, he was willing to try the very doubtful
+chances of office-holding as a means of securing leisure for literary
+pursuits. He offered himself as a candidate for appointment as the clerk
+of a court in the city. By tradition and sympathy he was a Federalist,
+but he had taken no active part in politics, and his chance was slight.
+He went to Albany, however, and in a lively letter he paints a familiar
+picture of the crowd of office-hunters who, he says, "like a cloud of
+locusts, have descended upon the city to devour every plant and herb and
+every green thing." He was sick with a cold, and stifled in rooms heated
+by stoves, and was utterly disgusted, as he says, "by the servility
+and duplicity and rascality I have witnessed among the swarms of scrub
+politicians who crawl about the great metropolis of our State like so
+many vermin about the head of the body politic."
+
+Again the good old times were apparently very much like the good new
+times. Thirty-nine years after Irving's discomfiture in trying to get a
+public office, Hawthorne was turned out of one that he held, and wrote
+to a friend: "It seems to me that an inoffensive man of letters, having
+obtained a pitiful little office on no other plea than his pitiful
+little literature, ought not to be left at the mercy of these
+thick-skulled and no-hearted ruffians." The language is strong, but the
+epithets are singularly well-chosen. The distinctive qualities of the
+ringleaders, whether of high or low degree, in the degradation of public
+trusts into private and party spoils, have never been more accurately
+or effectively described than by the words "thick-skulled" and
+"no-hearted".
+
+The story of the sturdy beggar who asked General Jackson to give him the
+mission to France, and finally came down to a request for an old coat,
+well illustrates a system which regards public office not as a public
+trust, but as private alms. The service of the State, whether military
+or civil, is an object of high and generous ambition, because it
+involves the leadership of men. But if Irving and Hawthorne thought
+that what is called office-seeking is disgusting, it was not because
+the public service is not noble and dignified, but because we choose to
+allow it to be so often dependent, not upon fitness and character,
+but upon the personal or political favor of the "thick-skulled" and
+"no-hearted".
+
+But the problem of a career was soon solved. In the year 1810 Irving
+formed a business connection with two of his brothers, and the next five
+years were passed in New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, forming
+various literary plans, looking out for his business interests,
+sparkling in society; and when war with England began, serving upon the
+governor's military staff as Colonel Washington Irving. In the spring
+of 1815 he sailed to roam again through Europe, but the illness of his
+brother compelled him to remain in England in charge of the business.
+"London," as a shrewd and celebrated American recently said, "was then
+as it is now, the social centre of the world." Irving saw famous men and
+women, and his charming sweetness and humor opened all doors and hearts.
+But the business fell into distress, then into disaster, and in the
+beginning of 1818 the house failed. He was now thrown wholly upon his
+literary resources, which did _not_ fail, and in the spring of 1819,
+when he was thirty-six years old, the first number of the _Sketch Book_
+was issued in New York.
+
+The merry, exuberant, satirical Diedrich Knickerbocker was transformed
+into the genial, urbane, and tender-hearted Geoffrey Crayon. Our fathers
+and grandfathers knew him well. They had been bred upon Addison and
+Goldsmith, the essayists and the poets of the eighteenth century, and
+in Geoffrey Crayon they recognized and welcomed another member of that
+delightful literary society. He was all the more welcome that he was an
+American--one of themselves. The bland and courteous Geoffrey, indeed,
+had few rivals among his countrymen. In our little American world of
+letters at that time he came and conquered. Bryant's "Thanatopsis", had
+been published only two years before; Halleck's and Drake's lively but
+strictly local "Croakers" were still appearing, and Edward Everett had
+just hailed Percival's first volume as authorizing great expectations.
+
+But prophecy is always dangerous. The year before, Sydney Smith had
+said, in the _Edinburgh Review_, "Literature the Americans have none--no
+native literature we mean. It is all imported. They had a Franklin,
+indeed, and may afford to live half a century on his fame. There is,
+or was, a Mr. Dwight, who wrote some poems, and his baptismal name was
+Timothy. There is also a small account of Virginia by Jefferson, and
+an epic poem by Mr. Joel Barlow, and some pieces of pleasantry by Mr.
+Irving. But why should Americans write books, when a six weeks' passage
+brings them, in their own tongue, _our_ sense, science, and genius, on
+bales and hogsheads? Prairies, steamboats, grist-mills are their natural
+objects for centuries to come. Then, when they have got to the Pacific
+Ocean, epic poems, plays, pleasures of memory, and all the elegant
+gratifications of an ancient people who have tamed the wild earth,
+and sat down to amuse themselves. This is the natural march of human
+affairs." As the sarcastic Yorkshire canon, sitting on the Edinburgh
+Olympus, wiped his pen, the _Sketch Book_ was published. The good canon
+was right as to our small literary product, but even an _Edinburgh
+Review_ could not wisely play the prophet.
+
+This Mr. Everett also discovered, for his "great expectations" of
+Percival were not fulfilled. A desponding student of our poetry recently
+sighs that Percival is a forgotten poet, and then, seizing a promiscuous
+assortment of names, exclaims that Charles Sprague, William Wirt,
+Washington Irving, and Jack Downing may be referred to as forgotten
+authors. But this is the luxury of woe. Why should not Percival be a
+forgotten poet? That is to say, what is there in the verse of Percival
+that should command interest and attention to-day? He was a remarkably
+accomplished man and a most excellent gentleman, and his name is very
+familiar in the reading-books of the time when grandfathers of to-day
+were going to school. But he was a noted poet not because he took rank
+with his contemporaries--with Byron and Scott and Keats and Shelley and
+Coleridge and Wordsworth--but because there were very few Americans who
+wrote verses, and our fathers patriotically stood by them.
+
+Yet because the note of a singer of another day is not heard by us, it
+does not follow that he did not touch the heart of his time. Grenville
+Mellen is a forgotten poet also, and Rufus Dawes and John Neal and James
+G. Eastburn. If the gentle reader will turn to the pages of Kettell,
+or any early American anthology, he will seem to himself to be walking
+among tombs. Upon each page might be suitably inscribed, "Sacred to the
+memory" of almost every one of the singers. But can we say with honest
+reproach, "forgotten poets"? The loiterer in the wood hears the song
+of the wood-thrush, but is the hermit-bird wronged, or is his song less
+sweet, because it is not echoed round the world? Is Fame to be held
+responsible for not retaining the name of every minstrel who loiters by
+and touches his harp lightly, and sings a sweet song as he passes on? Is
+it a hard fate to give pleasure to those who listen because those out of
+hearing do not applaud?
+
+Many an author may have a tone and a touch which please the ear and
+taste of his own day, and which, as characteristic of a time, may be
+only curious to a later taste, like the costumes and dances of our
+great-grandmothers. But young America, sauntering at the club and at
+Newport, would not willingly wear the boots of Beau Nash, nor even the
+cloak of Beau Brummel. The law which provides that nothing shall be
+lost is equally observable in the realm of literary fame. Is anything of
+literature lost that deserves longer remembrance? or, more properly, can
+it be lost? A fair answer to the question can be found in the reply to
+another, whether delving in Kettell, or in any other anthology, reveals
+treasures dropped by Fame as precious as those she carries.
+
+There are two ways in which authors survive: one by the constant reading
+of his works, the other by his name. Is Milton a forgotten author? But
+how much is he read, compared with the contemporary singers? Is Plato
+forgotten? Yet how many know him except by name? Irving thus far holds
+both. Time, like a thrifty husbandman, winnows its wheat, blowing away
+much chaff, but the golden grain remains. This is true not only of the
+whole multitude of authors, but of the works of each author. How many
+of them really survive in the anthology only? _Astoria_ and _Captain
+Bonneville_ and _Mahomet_ and other books of Irving will disappear; but
+_Knickerbocker_ and _Rip Van Winkle_ still buffet the relentless wave of
+oblivion, and their buoyancy is undiminished.
+
+As for Sprague--a mild, genial, charming gentleman, who carried his
+simple freshness of nature and of manner to the end, and about whose
+venerable head in State Street always shone the faint halo of early
+poetic renown--his literary talent was essentially for a day, not for
+all time. But what then? On Christmas Eve we hear the passing music
+in the street that supplies for us the song of the waits. Distant and
+melodious, it pensively recalls the days and the faces and the voices
+that are no more. But the singers are not the same waits that we heard
+long ago; still less are they those that the youth of a century ago
+heard with the same musing melancholy. But the substance of the
+song, and the emotion which it awakens, and the tender pathos of
+association--these are all the same. Sprague was a wait of yesterday, of
+last year, of fifty years ago. Others sing in the street the song that
+he sang, and, singing, they pass on, and the sweet strain grows fainter,
+softer, and fainter and fainter, and the echoes answer, "Dying, dying,
+dying," and it is gone.
+
+See how tenderly Mr. Stedman speaks of the troubadours who are singing
+for us now, whose names are familiar, who trill and twitter in the
+magazines, and in tasteful and delicate volumes, which seem to tempt
+the stream of time to suffer such light and graceful barks to slip along
+unnoted to future ages. But the kindly critic's tone forecasts the fate
+of the sparkling ventures.
+
+Moore tells us of the Indian maids upon the banks of the Ganges who
+light a tiny taper, and, on a frail little chip, set it afloat upon the
+river. It twinkles and dwindles, and flashes and expires. Mr. Stedman
+watches the minor poets trimming their tapers and carefully launching
+their chips upon the brimming river. "Pleasant journey," he cries
+cheerily from the shore, as if he were speaking to hearty Captain Cook
+going up the side of his great ship, and shaking out his mighty canvas
+to circumnavigate the globe. "Pleasant journey," cries the cheery
+critic; but there is a wistful something in his tone that betrays a
+consciousness of the swift extinction of the pretty perfumed flickering
+flame.
+
+So scant, indeed, was the blossom of our literature when the _Sketch
+Book_ was published, that even twenty years later, when Emerson
+described the college Commencement Day as the only tribute of a
+country too busy to give to letters any more, Geoffrey Crayon, with the
+exception of Cooper, had really no American competitors. Long afterwards
+I met Mr. Irving one morning at the office of Mr. Putnam, his publisher,
+and in his cordial way, with a twinkle in his eye, and in his pleasant
+husky voice, he said, "You young literary fellows to-day have a harder
+time than we old fellows had. You trip over each other's heels; there
+are so many of you. We had it all our own way. But the account is
+square, for you can make as much by a lecture as we made by a book."
+Then, laughing slyly, he added, "A pretty figure I should make lecturing
+in this voice." Indeed, his modesty forbade him to risk that voice in
+public addresses.
+
+Irving, I think, made but one speech. It was at the dinner given to
+him upon his return from Europe in 1832, after his absence of seventeen
+years. Like other distinguished Americans who have felt the fascination
+of the old home of their ancestors, and who have not thought that a
+narrow heart and a barbaric disdain of everything foreign attested the
+truest patriotism, he was suspected of some alienation from his country.
+His speech was full of emotion, and his protestation of love for his
+native land was received with boundless acclamation. But he could not
+overcome his aversion to speech-making. When Dickens came, and the great
+dinner was given to him in New York, Irving was predestined to preside.
+Nobody else could be even mentioned. He was himself conscious of it, and
+was filled with melancholy forebodings. Professor Felton, of Harvard,
+compared Irving's haunting terror and dismay at the prospect of this
+speech to that of Mr. Pickwick at the prospect of leading that dreadful
+horse all day.
+
+Poor Irving went about muttering, "I shall certainly break down. I know
+I shall break down." At last the day, the hour, and the very moment
+itself arrived, and he rose to propose the health of Dickens. He began
+pleasantly and smoothly in two or three sentences, then hesitated,
+stammered, smiled, and stopped; tried in vain to begin again, then
+gracefully gave it up, announced the toast--"Charles Dickens, the
+guest of the nation"--then sank into his chair amid immense applause,
+whispering to his neighbor, "There, I told you I should break down, and
+I've done it."
+
+When Thackeray came, Irving consented to preside at a dinner if speeches
+were absolutely forbidden. The condition was faithfully observed, but it
+was the most extraordinary instance of American self-command on record.
+Whenever two or three Americans are gathered together, somebody must
+make a speech; and no wonder, because somebody always speaks so well.
+The custom is now so confirmed that it is foolish and useless to oppose
+it.
+
+I remember a few years since that a dinner was given to a famous
+American artist long resident abroad, and, as the condition of the
+attendance of a distinguished guest whose presence was greatly desired,
+the same agreement was made that Irving required at the Thackeray
+dinner. It was a company of exceedingly clever and brilliant men, but
+the gayety of the feast was extinguished by the general consciousness
+that the situation was abnormal. It was a fruit without flavor, a flower
+without fragrance, a symphony without melody, a dinner without speeches.
+But the dinner of which I speak, when the condition of Irving's presence
+was that there should be no speeches, was the great exception. It was
+the only dinner of the kind that I have ever known. But Irving's cheery
+anecdote and gayety, the songs and banter of the company, the happy chat
+and sparkling wit, took the place of eloquence, and I recall no dinner
+more delightful.
+
+However scant was our literature when the _Sketch Book_ appeared, it is
+a mistake to suppose that Irving owes his success to English admiration.
+That was, undoubtedly, very agreeable to him and to his countrymen. But
+it is well to correct a misapprehension which is still cherished. Many
+years ago an English critic said that Irving was much more relished
+and admired in England than in his own country, and added: "It is only
+recently critics on the lookout for a literature have elevated him
+to his proper and almost more than his proper place. This docility to
+English guidance in the case of their best, or almost their best, prose
+writer, may perhaps be followed by a similar docility in the case of
+their best, or almost their best, poet, Poe, whom also England had
+preceded the United States in recognizing." This comical patron is all
+the more amusing from his comparative estimate of Poe.
+
+If it were true that Irving's countrymen had not recognized and honored
+him from the first, it might be suspected that it was because they were
+descendants of the people who showed little contemporaneous appreciation
+of Shakespeare. But it is certainly creditable to the literary England
+which was busy idolizing Scott and Byron, that it recognized also the
+charming genius of Irving, and that Leslie, the painter, could truly
+write of him, "Geoffrey Crayon is the most fashionable fellow of the
+day."
+
+But while the English appreciation of Irving is very creditable to
+England, English conceit must not go so far as to suppose that it was
+that appreciation which commended him to his own countrymen. At the time
+when Sydney Smith wrote the article from which we have quoted there
+was apparently an almost literary sterility in this country, and
+the professional critics of the critical journals were, as Professor
+Lounsbury says in his admirable _Life of Cooper_, undoubtedly greatly
+affected by English opinion. But there was an American reading public
+independent of the few literary periodicals, as was shown when Cooper's
+_Spy_ was published at the end of 1821, the year in which Bryant's first
+volume of poems and Dana's _Idle Man_ appeared. Cooper had published
+his _Precaution_ in 1819, a book which Professor Lounsbury is one of the
+very few men who are known to have read. He was an unknown author. But
+the _Spy_ was instantly successful. Some of the timid English journals
+awaited the English opinion, for Murray had declined, upon Gifford's
+advice, to publish the book. But a publisher was found, and England
+and Europe followed America in their approval. Cooper always said,
+and truly, that it was to his countrymen alone that he owed his first
+success, and his biographer concedes that the success of the _Spy_ was
+determined before the opinion of Europe was known.
+
+Nearly three years before, in May, 1819, the first number of Irving's
+_Sketch Book_ was published. He sent the manuscript to his brother, who
+had regretted Irving's refusal of a government place in the Navy Board,
+and to whom he wrote, "My talents are merely literary, and all my habits
+of thinking, reading, etc., have been in a different direction from that
+required for the active politician.... In fact, I consider myself at
+present as making a literary experiment, in the course of which I only
+care to be kept in bread and cheese. Should it not succeed--should my
+writings not acquire critical applause--I am content to throw up the
+pen, and that to any commonplace employment. But if they should succeed,
+it would repay me for a world of care and privation to be placed among
+the established authors of my country, and to win the affection of my
+countrymen."
+
+The first number of the _Sketch Book_ was published simultaneously
+in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. Its success was
+immediate. In September, 1819, Irving wrote: "The manner in which the
+work has been received, and the eulogiums that have been passed upon it
+in the American papers and periodical works, have quite overwhelmed me
+... I feel almost appalled by such success." The echo of the acclamation
+reached England. Murray at first declined to publish it, as he had at
+first declined Cooper's _Spy_. But when England ascertained that the
+American judgment was correct, and that it was a popular work, Murray
+was willing to publish it.
+
+The delightful genius which his country had recognized with joy it never
+ceased proudly and tenderly to honor. When, in 1832, he returned to his
+native land, as his latest biographer, Mr. Warner, records, "America
+greeted her most famous literary man with a spontaneous outburst of love
+and admiration." It was in his own country that he had published his
+works. It was his own countrymen whose applause apprised England of the
+charm of the new author; and it is a humorous mentor who now teaches us
+that it was our happy docility to English guidance which enabled us to
+recognize and honor him.
+
+Was it docility to the same beneficent guidance which enabled us to
+perceive the genius of Carlyle, whose works we first collected, and
+taught England to read and admire? Did it enable us, also, to inform
+England that in Robert Browning she had another poet? Was it the
+same docility which enabled us to reveal to England one of her most
+philosophic observers in Herbert Spencer, and to offer to Darwin his
+most appreciative correspondents and interpreters in Chauncey Wright,
+John Fiske, and Professors Gray and Wyman? There are many offences to
+be scored against us, but failure to know our own literary genius is not
+one of them.
+
+Indeed, there is not one great literary fame in America that was not
+first recognized here. Not to one of them has docility to English
+literary opinion conducted us, as is often believed. Bryant and Cooper
+and Irving, Bancroft and Prescott and Motley, Emerson and Channing,
+Longfellow, Hawthorne, Lowell, Whittier, and Holmes were authors whom
+we were content to admire and love without knowing or asking whether
+England had heard of them, or what she thought of them. The "greatness"
+of Poe England may have preceded us in recognizing. That is an assertion
+which we are not disposed to dispute. But Walter Scott was not more
+immediately popular and beloved in England than was Washington Irving
+in America; and American guidance led England to Scott quite as much as
+English guidance drew America to Irving.
+
+The first number of the _Sketch Book_ contained the tale of _Rip Van
+Winkle_, one of the most charming and suggestive of legends, whose hero
+is an exceedingly pathetic creation. It is, indeed, a mere sketch, a
+hint, a suggestion; but the imagination readily completes it. It is the
+more remarkable and interesting because, although the first American
+literary creation, it is not in the least characteristic of American
+life, but, on the contrary, is a quiet and delicate satire upon it. The
+kindly vagabond asserts the charm of loitering idleness in the sweet
+leisure of woods and fields against the characteristic American
+excitement of the overflowing crowd and crushing competition of the
+city, its tremendous energy and incessant devotion to money-getting.
+
+It is not necessary to defend poor Rip, or to justify the morality of
+his example. It is the imagination that interprets him; and how soothing
+to those who give their lives to the furious accumulation of the means
+of living to behold that figure stretched by the brook, or finding nuts
+with the children, or sauntering homeward at sunset! Later figures of
+our literature allure us--Hester Prynne, wrapped in her cloak of Nersus,
+the Scarlet Letter, Hosea Biglow, Evangeline, Uncle Tom, and Topsy--but
+the charm of this figure is unfading. The new writers introduce us to
+their worlds, and with pleasure we make the acquaintance of new friends.
+The new standards of another literary spirit are raised, a fresh
+literary impulse surrounds us; but it is not thunder that we hear in
+the Kaatskills on a still summer afternoon it is the distant game of
+Hendrick Hudson and his men; and on the shore of our river, rattling
+and roaring with the frenzied haste and endless activity of prosperous
+industry, still Rip Van Winkle lounges idly by, an unwasted figure of
+the imagination, the constant and unconscious satirist of American life.
+
+He seems to me peculiarly congenial with the temperament of Irving. He,
+too, was essentially a loiterer. He had the same freshness of sympathy,
+the same gentleness of nature, the same taste for leisure and repose.
+His genius was reminiscent, and, as with all humorists, its climate
+was that of April. The sun and the shower chased each other. Irving's
+intellectual habit was emotional rather than thoughtful. In politics
+and public affairs he took no part, although office was often urged
+upon him, as when the friends of General Jackson wished him to go as
+representative to Congress, or President Van Buren offered him the
+secretaryship of the navy, or Tammany Hall, in New York, unanimously and
+vociferously nominated him for mayor, an incident in the later annals
+of the city which transcends the most humorous touch in _Knickerbocker's
+History_. He was appointed secretary of legation in England in 1829, and
+in 1842, when Daniel Webster was secretary of state, minister to Spain.
+
+But what we call practical politics was always distasteful to him. The
+spirit which I once heard laugh at a young man new in politics because
+he treated "the boys" with his own good cigars instead of buying bad
+ones at the saloon--the spirit which I once heard assure a man of public
+ability and fitness that he could never reach political office unless
+he pushed himself, and paid agents to buy votes, because no man could
+expect an office to be handed to him on a gold plate--the spirit which,
+to my knowledge, displayed a handful of bank-notes in the anteroom of
+a legislature, and exclaimed, "That's what makes the laws!"--this was a
+spirit which, like other honorable men and patriotic Americans, Irving
+despised.
+
+He was a gentleman of manly feeling and of moral refinement, who had had
+glimpses of what is called "the inside" of politics; and, as he believed
+these qualities would make participation in politics uncomfortable, he
+abstained. To those of us who are wiser than he, who know that simple
+honesty and public spirit and self-respect and contempt of sneaking
+and fawning and bribery and crawling are the conditions of political
+preferment, Irving, in not perceiving this, must naturally seem to be a
+queer, wrong-headed, and rather super-celestial American, who had
+lived too much in the heated atmosphere of European aristocracies and
+altogether too little in the pure and bracing air of American ward
+politics and caucuses and conventions. To use an old New York phrase,
+Irving preferred to stroll and fish and chat with Rip Van Winkle rather
+than to "run wid der machine".
+
+The _Sketch Book_ made Irving famous, and with its predecessor,
+_Knickerbocker_, and its successor, _Bracebridge Hall_, disclosed the
+essential quality of his genius. But all these books performed another
+and greater service than that of winning the world to read an American
+book: this was the restoration of a kindlier feeling between the two
+countries which, by all ties, should be the two most friendly countries
+on the globe. The books were written when our old bitterness of feeling
+against England had been renewed by the later war. In the thirty years
+since the Revolution ended we had patriotically fostered the quarrel
+with John Bull. Our domestic politics had turned largely upon that
+feeling, and the game of French and English was played almost as
+fiercely upon our side of the ocean as upon their own.
+
+The great epoch of our extraordinary material development and prosperity
+had not opened, and, even had John Bull been friendlier than he was, it
+would have been the very flattery of falsehood had he complimented our
+literature, our science, our art. Sydney Smith's question, "Who reads
+an American book?" was contemptuous and exasperating. But here was an
+American who wrote books which John Bull was delighted to read, and
+was compelled to confess that they depicted-the most characteristic and
+attractive aspects of his own life with more delicate grace than that of
+any living Englishman.
+
+It was Irving who recalled the old English Christmas. It was his cordial
+and picturesque description of the great holiday of Christendom which
+preceded and stimulated Dickens's _Christmas Carols_ and Thackeray's
+_Holiday Tales_. It was the genial spirit of Christmas, native to his
+gentle heart and his happy temperament, which made Irving, as Thackeray
+called him, a peacemaker between the mother-country and her proud and
+sensitive offspring of the West. He showed John Bull that England is
+ours as well as his.
+
+"Old fellow," he said, "you cannot help yourself. It is the same blood
+that flows in our veins, the same language that we speak, the same
+traditions that we cherish. If you love liberty, so do we; if you will
+see fair play, so will we. It is natural to you, so it is to us. We
+cannot escape our blood. Shakespeare is not your poet more than ours.
+If your ancestors danced round the Maypole, so did our ancestors in your
+ancestors' shoes. If Old England cherished Christmas and New England did
+not, Bradford and Endicott and Cotton were Englishmen, not Americans. If
+old English life and customs and traditions are dear to you, listen
+to my story, and judge whether they are less dear to us." Then, with
+a merry smile, the young stranger holds out his hand to John Bull, and
+exclaims, "Behold, here is my arm! I bare it before your eyes, and here
+it is--it is the strawberry-mark; come to my bosom, I am your long-lost
+brother."
+
+It was an incalculable service which Irving rendered in renewing a
+common feeling between England and America. It was involuntary, because
+in writing he had no such purpose. He was only following the bent of his
+own taste, and his works reflected only his individual sympathies. But
+it was this very fact--it was the English instinct in the American, the
+appreciation native in the heart of the Western stranger of the true
+poetic charm of England--which was the spell of the magician. Irving had
+the same imaginative enthusiasm for traditional and poetic England that
+Burke had for political England. Indeed, it is an England which never
+actually existed except in the English and American imagination. The
+coarse, mercenary, material England which Lecky photographs in his
+history of the eighteenth century was the same England in which Burke
+lived, and which his glowing imagination exalted into the magnificent
+image of constitutional liberty before which he bowed his great head. So
+with the old England that Irving drew. He saw with poetic fancy a
+rural Arcadia, and reproduced the vision with airy grace and called it
+England. No wonder that John Bull was delighted with an artist who could
+paint so fascinating a picture, and write under it John Bull's portrait.
+
+To change a word in Marvell's noble lines, when Irving was in England
+
+ "He nothing common saw or mean
+  Upon that memorable scene."
+
+Only an American could have seen England as he described it, and
+invested it with an enchantment which the mass of Englishmen had
+neither suspected nor perceived. Irving's instinct was that of Hawthorne
+afterwards, who called England "Our Old Home". There is a foolish
+American habit growing patriotically out of our old contentions with
+England, and politically out of our desire to conciliate the Irish vote
+in this country, of branding as servile and un-American the natural
+susceptibility of people of English descent, but natives of another
+land, to the charm of their ancestral country. But the American is
+greatly to be pitied who thinks to prove the purity of his patriotism by
+flouting the land in which he has a legitimate right, the land of Alfred
+and Runnymede, of Chaucer and Shakespeare and Milton, of Hampden and
+Cromwell, of Newton and Bunyan, of Somers and Chatham and Edmund Burke,
+the cradle of constitutional liberty and parliamentary government. If
+the great body of the literature of our language in which we delight,
+if the sources of our law and politics, if the great exploits of
+contemporary scholarship and science, are largely beyond our boundaries,
+yet are legitimately ours as well as all that we have ourselves
+achieved, why should we spurn any of our just and hereditary share in
+the great English traditions of civilization and freedom?
+
+Irving returned to America in 1832, and here he afterwards remained,
+except during his absence as minister in Spain. In an earlier visit
+to that country he had felt the spell of its romantic history, and
+had written the _Life of Columbus_, the _Conquest of Granada_, and the
+_Chronicles of the Alhambra_. During all his later years he was busy
+with his pen, and, while the modest author had risen to the chief place
+in American literature, its later constellation was rising into the
+heavens.
+
+But his intrinsic modesty never disappeared either from the works or the
+character of the benign writer. In the height of his renown there was no
+kind of presumption or conceit in his simple and generous breast. Some
+time after his return from his long absence in Europe, and before Putnam
+became his publisher, Irving found some disinclination upon the part of
+publishers to issue new editions of his books, and he expressed, with
+entire good humor, the belief that he had had his day.
+
+It is doubtless true, as _Blackwood_ remarked, with what we may call
+_Blackwood_ courtesy, when Mr. Lowell was American minister in England,
+that Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Addison, Pope, and so many more "will
+not be replaced by Mr. Washington Irving and Mr. Lowell". But it is
+equally true that, since Swift, _Blackwood_ cannot find in English
+literature political satire more trenchant, humorous, forcible, and
+effective than the _Biglow Papers_, and nothing in Swift more original.
+It is said that it is ludicrous to compare the mild humor of Rip
+Van Winkle with the "robustious fun of Swift". But this is a curious
+"derangement of epitaphs". Swift has wit, and satiric power, and burning
+invective, and ribaldry, and caustic, scornful humor; but fun, in any
+just sense, he has not. He is too fierce to be funny. The tender and
+imaginative play of Rip Van Winkle are wholly beyond the reach of Swift.
+
+Irving and other American writers are not the rivals of their British
+associates in the literature of the English language--they are worthy
+comrades. Wordsworth and Byron are not Shakespeare and Milton, but they
+are nevertheless Wordsworth and Byron, and their place is secure. So the
+brows of Irving and Cooper, of Bryant and Longfellow, and of Lowell, of
+Emerson and Hawthorne do not crave the laurels of any other master. The
+perturbed spirit of _Blackwood_ may rest in the confident assurance that
+no generous and intelligent student of our literature admires Gibbon
+less because he enjoys Macaulay, or depreciates Bacon because he
+delights in Emerson, or denies the sting of Gulliver because he feels
+the light touch of Knickerbocker. It is with good fame as with true
+love:
+
+  "True love in this differs from gold and clay,
+   That to divide is not to take away."
+
+In the year that Irving published the _Sketch Book_, Cooper published
+his first novel, and two years before Bryant's _Thanatopsis_ had been
+published. When, forty years afterwards, in the last year of his life,
+the last volume of the _Life of Washington_ was issued, Irving and
+Bryant and Cooper were no longer the solitary chiefs of our literature.
+An illustrious company had received the torch unextinguished from
+their hands--Whittier, Hawthorne, Emerson, Longfellow, Holmes, Lowell,
+Bancroft, Prescott, Motley, Parkman, Mrs. Stowe, had all taken their
+places, yet all gladly and proudly acknowledged Irving as the patriarch.
+It is our happy fortune that these names, of which we are all proud, are
+not those of men of letters only, but of typical American citizens.
+The old traditions of the literary life, the mad roystering, the
+dissipation, Grub Street, the sponging-house, the bailiff, the garret,
+and the jail, genius that fawns for place and flatters for hire, the
+golden talent wrapped in a napkin, and often a dirty and ragged
+napkin, have vanished in our American annals of letters. Pure, upright,
+faithful, industrious, honorable, and honored, there is scarcely one
+American author of eminence who may not be counted as a good and
+useful citizen of the Republic of the Union, and a shining light of the
+Republic of Letters.
+
+Of Washington Irving, as of so many of this noble company, it is
+especially true that the author was the man. The healthy fun and merry
+satire of Diedrich Knickerbocker, the sweet humor and quick sympathy
+and simple pathos of Geoffrey Crayon, were those of the modest master
+of Sunnyside. Every literary man of Irving's time, whether old or
+young, had nothing but affectionate praise of his artless urbanity and
+exhaustless good-nature. These qualities are delightfully reflected in
+Thackeray's stories of him in the _Roundabout Papers_ upon Irving and
+Macaulay, "the Goldsmith and the Gibbon of our time".
+
+"He came to one of my lectures in Washington," Thackeray says, "and the
+retiring President, Mr. Fillmore, and his successor, Mr. Pierce, were
+present. 'Two kings of Brentford smelling at one rose,' said Irving,
+with his good-natured smile. In his little bower of a home at Sunnyside
+he was always accessible. One English newspaper man came and introduced
+himself, and partook of luncheon with the family, and, while the host
+fell into a little doze, as was his habit, the wary Englishman took
+a swift inventory of everything in the house, and served up the
+description to the British public, including the nap of his entertainer.
+At another time, Irving said, 'Two persons came to me, and one held me
+in conversation while the other miscreant took my portrait.'" Thackeray
+tells these little stories with admiring sympathy. His manly heart
+always grew tender over his fellow-authors who had no acrid drop in
+their humor, and Irving's was as sweet as dew.
+
+It is late for a fresh compliment to be paid to him, but the London
+_Spectator_ paid it in 1883, the year of his centenary, by saying,
+"Since the time of Pope more than one hundred essayists have attempted
+to excel or to equal the _Tatler_ and _Spectator_. One alone, in a
+few of his best efforts, may be said to have rivalled them, and he is
+Washington Irving." The _Spectator_ adds that one has surpassed them,
+"the incomparable Elia".
+
+Irving's temperament, however, was much more congenial with that of the
+early essayists than Charles Lamb's, and his pictures of English country
+life in _Bracebridge Hall_ have just the delicate, imaginative touch
+of the sketches of Sir Roger de Coverley. But in treating distinctively
+English topics, however airy and vivid his touch may be, Irving is
+manifestly enthralled by his admiration for the literary masters of
+the Anne time, and by the spirit of their writing. It is in the
+Knickerbocker world that he is characteristically at home. Indeed, it is
+his humorous and graphic fancy more than the sober veracity of history
+which has given popular and perpetual form to the early life of New
+York, and it is Irving who has enriched it with romantic tradition such
+as suffuses the story of no other State.
+
+The bay, the river, the city, the Kaatskill Mountains, as Choate said
+of Faneuil Hall and Webster, breathe and burn of him. He has charmed the
+Hudson with a peculiar spell. The quaint life of its old Dutch villages,
+the droll legend of Sleepy Hollow, the pathetic fate of Rip Van Winkle,
+the drowsy wisdom of Communipaw, the marvellous municipality of New
+Amsterdam, and the Nose of Anthony guarding the Highlands, with the
+myriad sly and graphic allusions and descriptions strewn all through his
+books, have made the river Irving's river, and the state Irving's state,
+and the city Irving's city, so that the first instinctive question of
+every lover of Irving from beyond the state, as he enters Central Park
+and beholds its memorial statues, is, "Where is the statue of Irving?"
+
+Unhappily, echo, and not the park guide-book, answers. There is, indeed,
+a bust, and, in a general sense, "Si monumentum" may serve for a reply.
+From that point of view, indeed, Westminster Abbey, as the monument of
+English heroes in letters and arms, in the Church and the State, would
+be superfluous. But the abbey is a shrine of pilgrimage because of the
+very fact that it is the burial-place of famous Englishmen. The Central
+Park, in New York, is already a Walhalla of famous men, and the statue
+that would first suggest itself as peculiarly fitting for the Park is
+of the New-Yorker who first made New York distinctively famous in
+literature--the New-Yorker whose kindly genius first made American
+literature respected by the world.
+
+Reversing the question, "Where be the bad people buried?" the wondering
+pilgrim in the Park asks, "Where be Irving and Bryant and Cooper?" They
+were not Americans only, but, by birth or choice, New-Yorkers, and the
+three distinctive figures of our early literature. It was very touching
+to see the venerable Bryant, in the soft May sunshine, when the statue
+of Halleck was unveiled, standing with bare head and speaking of his old
+friend and comrade. But who that listened could not see, through tender
+mists of years, the grave and reverend form of the speaker himself,
+transformed to marble or bronze, sitting serene forever beneath the
+shadowing trees, side by side with the poet of Faust and the worshipper
+of Highland Mary?
+
+But Bryant would have been the first to name Washington Irving as
+the most renowned distinctively American man of letters whose figure,
+reproduced characteristically and with simple quaintness, should
+decorate the Park. To a statue of Washington Irving all the gates should
+open, as every heart would open, in welcome. That half-humorous turn of
+the head and almost the twinkling eye, that brisk and jaunty air, that
+springing step, that modest and gentle and benign presence, all these
+could be suggested by the artist, and in their happy combination the
+pleased loiterer would perceive old Diedrich Knickerbocker and the
+summer dreamer of the Hudson legends, the charming biographer of
+Columbus and of Goldsmith, the cheerful gossip of Wolfert's Roost, and
+the mellow and courteous Geoffrey Crayon, who first taught incredulous
+Europe that beyond the sea there were men also, and that at last all the
+world must read an American book.
+
+Irving was seventy-six years old when he died, late in 1859. Born in the
+year in which the Revolution ended, he died on the eve of the civil war.
+His life exactly covered the period during which the American republic
+was an experiment. It ended just as the invincible power of free
+institutions was to be finally demonstrated. His life had been one of
+singular happiness, both of temperament and circumstance. His nature
+was too simple and gentle to breed rivalries or to tolerate animosities.
+Through the sharpest struggles of our politics he passed without
+bitterness of feeling and with universal respect, and his eyes happily
+closed before seeing a civil war which, although the most righteous of
+all wars, would have broken his heart. The country was proud of him: the
+older authors knew in him not a rival, but a friend, the younger loved
+him as a father. Such love, I think, is better than fame. On the day of
+his burial in the ground overlooking the Hudson and the valley of Sleepy
+Hollow, unable to reach Tarrytown in time for the funeral, I came down
+the shore of the river which he loved and immortalized. As the train
+hastened and wound along, I saw the Catskills draped in autumnal
+mist, not concealing, but irradiating them with lingering and pathetic
+splendor. Far away towards the south the river-bank on which his home
+lay was Sunnyside still, for the sky was cloudless and soft with serene
+sunshine. I could not but remember his last words to me, more than a
+year before, when his book was finished and his health was failing: "I
+am getting ready to go; I am shutting up my doors and windows", and
+I could not but feel that they were all open now, and bright with the
+light of eternal morning.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Literary and Social Essays, by
+George William Curtis
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