On July 10, 1584, Belthazer Gerard shot "Father William" in his own home, and he, falling, cried: "My God, have pity on my soul! I am sorely wounded! My God, have pity on my soul and this poor people!" and this, save his whispered "Yes" to his sister's eager inquiry if he trusted his soul to Jesus, were his last words, so that, as his country had been his thought through many turbulent years, so was it his last thought and love—a fitting word for a patriot such as he to leave on his dead lips. Let the historian's verdict stand as ours, "His life was a noble Christian epic."

A statesman is a man of his own and succeeding ages, and in him, therefore, is much anticipatory. He outruns his time. The vision William the Silent had, which outran the simple patriot in him, was the vision of religious tolerance. This might serve him for crown had he no other. What the world has learned to do, that this Dutch prince taught—virtually first of modern statesmen. In an utterly intolerant age and country, he apostled manly tolerance. In a later day, John of Barneveldt came to the block because he was an Arminian. Protestants, though never wholesale persecutors, had yet to learn this wise man's lesson. And this must rank among the underscored virtues of this old soldier of liberty, that he wished men to worship God without molestation. Nor did this tolerance grow out of indifference to religion. In youth he was careless of Divine matters, and thought little of religion. But so sagacious and so burdened a man as he grew to feel need of strength beyond the help of man. In his mature years he was from conviction a Christian in the Protestant Church, and his life walked on high levels to the end. God was to him as to innumerable souls, "a refuge and strength and a very present help in time of trouble;" and in death he committed his soul to God. By worth and service; by fortitude and patriotism; by long years of devotion to the task of breaking the scepter of tyranny; by genius burning as the light, and goodness purifying itself as years marched past,—by these attributes has William the Silent, Prince of Orange, earned a right to stand erect among the world's immortals.



V

The Romance of American Geography

In traveling over the undulating prairies of many States of the Union, huge granite boulders are seen lying solitary, as if dropped by some passing cloud, having no kindred in the rocky formations environing, but being absolute foreigners in a strange land. There they lie, prone, chiseled by some forgotten art, and so solitary as to bring a tinge of melancholy to the reflection of the thoughtful. In certain regions these boulders are so numerous and so various in size as to be used in building foundations, and sometimes entire habitations. These rocks were dropped in remote centuries by passing icebergs, and are solitary memorials of the ice-drift across our continent. The crafts on which they voyaged were wrecked long ago. They were passengers on

"Some shattered berg, that, pale and lone, Drifts from the white north to the tropic zone, And in the burning day Melts peak by peak away, Till on some rosy even It dies, with sunlight blessing it."

This instance may be taken as a parable, suggesting the history embodied in names of localities, lakes, straits, rivers, cities, hamlets, States. Those names are the debris of a dead era; and for one, I can not escape the wonder and the pathos of these shattered yesterdays, which have a voice, calling, as in hoarse whispers sad with tears, "We are not, but we were."

Though we are little given to so esteeming the study, there is romance in geography, learned by us when lads and lasses—not because we would, but because we must—and such study was difficult and unsavory. The catalogue of names we learned, perforce, was dreary as the alphabet; and not a memory of pleasure lingers about the book in which we studied, save that, in cramped, sprawling hand, upon the margin is written the name of some little sweetheart beside our own,—and dead long since. No, geography was not romantic. That was a possession we never suspected. But romance is ubiquitous, like flowers of spring, sheltering where we little anticipate.

To a lover of history, however, few studies will prove so fascinating as a study of names in geography. Finding a few at random, feel the thrill of the history they embody—history and reminiscence: Providence, Roger Williams named the city so when himself was a refugee; Fort Wayne, named for General "Mad Anthony" Wayne, who destroyed the Indian scourge in the Northwest Territory in 1792; Raleigh, so yclept for that chiefest friend of American colonization among Englishmen, Sir Walter Raleigh; Council Grove, because, in the Indian days, there, in a grove—rare in the prairie country of Kansas—the Red Men met for counsel; Astoria, bearing name of that famous fortune-maker in the fur country of the West and North; Buffalo Lake, reminding us that there the buffalo tramped in days seeming now so remote, when the buffalo rode, like a mad cavalry troop, across the wide interior plains of our continent; Eagle River, for here this royal bird used to love to linger as if it were his native stream. These are the scattered, miscellaneous reminiscences of men and acts, and things and achievements. In Kansas is a village called Lane, a name which, to the old settler in Kansas, is big with meaning, seeing it brings to life one of the strange, romantic, contradictory, and brilliant characters of the "Squatter Sovereignty" days, when Jim Lane wrought, with his weird and wonderful eloquence, his journeys oft, and his tireless industry, in championing the cause of State freedom. Him and his history, reading like a tale told by a campfire's fitful light, this name embodies. What an archive of history does such a name become! Portage is a name pregnant with memories of the old days of discovery, when America was still an unknown limit. "Grand Portage" you shall see on the map, neighboring the Great Lakes, whereby you see, as through a magic glass, the boats, loaded on the shoulders when navigation was no longer possible, and the journey made over the watershed till a stream was followed far enough to float the birch-bark canoe once more. Prairie is another word full of interest. Pampas is a word, Peruvian in origin, designating the prairies of South America; while prairie is a French word, meaning meadow. Pampas is the Peruvian word for field. The words are synonyms, but come from different hemispheres of the world. Does it not seem strange that a word descriptive of these treeless wildernesses of North America should be a gift, not of the Indian hunter who used to scurry across them swift as an arrow of death, but should really be the gift of those hardy and valorous French voyagers who had no purpose of fastening a name on the flower-sown, green meadows that swayed in the wind like some emerald sea? So the Incas have christened the plains of South America, and the French adventurer the plains of North America! Though, who that crosses our prairies, sweet with green, and lit with flowers like lamps of many-colored fires, thinks he is speaking the speech of the French trapper of long ago? Savannah is an Indian word, meaning meadow, and gives name to these dank meadowlands under warmer skies, where reeds and swamp-grasses grow; and the name of Savannah in Georgia is thus bestowed. How much we owe! Who has not helped us? Nor does the traveler through the castellated steeps of the "Bad Lands" know, nor probably does he care, that this caption came from the far-traveling French trapper, whose venturesome and tireless feet have made him at home in all places on our continent. How valuable, however, must be these names to one who cares to familiarize himself with the knowledge and romance of those pioneers of geography! Of like origin is "butte." The voyager saw those isolated peaks, too high to be called hills and too low to be called mountains, and said they are buttes (knolls)—names which cling to them as tenaciously as their shadows.

In a word, I have found this study a breath blown from far mountain ranges of history; and this breath upon the face has made an hour of life grow young and beautiful, for which reason I now write the story of my pleasure. The North American continent lends itself with peculiar grace to such a study as is here suggested, because its story lies under the eyes of history. 'Twas scarcely an hour ago, in the world's day, since Columbus found out this continent, and, with a giant's hand, swung its huge doors inward for the centuries to enter; and all those discoveries are our commonplace knowledge. What tribes were here, Prescott and Parkman have told us in thrilling narratives; and columns of eager colonists we have seen press their way along the seashore, into forests, over mountains, across deserts, never halting, save to catch breath as a climber of a mountain does,—on, on, till a continent is white with the tents of millions. But the Indian aborigine, for whom the tepee was portable habitation, and the stretch of plain and hill and lake and river, hunting-ground or battle-ground,—the Indian is mainly the reminiscence of an old man's straggling speech; and these names he has left, clinging to lake and river and hamlet, are his memorial. In Montezuma's empire, where once a barbaric splendor held court and set in tragic splendor, lurid even yet at these centuries' remove, what is left save a vocabulary or a broken idol lying black and foreboding in some mountain stream? Or those discoverers whose adventurous deeds are part of the world's chosen treasure, what but their names are written on the streams or hills? The import of these observations is this, that from American geography we may, with reasonable accuracy and detail, decipher this romantic history. In those newer parts of our continent names have too often lost the flavor of history; have, in truth, done so, save in isolated instances. The "Smithtons" and "Griggsby Stations" are monotonous and uninteresting, and the Tombstones are little short of sacrilege. In the crush of movers' wagons there appeared to be a scramble for names of any sort. Places multiply, imagination is asleep, and names nearest at hand are most readily laid hold of; yet, even in such a dearth of originality and poetry, scant names flash out which remind you of the morning names in our continent's history. A Springdale reminds you that colonists here found a dale, gladdened with living springs; or an Afton suggests how some exiled Scot salved his heart by keeping near his exile a name he loved. Our day will, in the main, attach names for simple convenience, as they put handles on shovels. Such names, of course, are meaningless. The day for inventing names is past, or seems so. We beg or borrow, as the surveyor who marched across the State of New York, with theodolite and chain and a classical atlas, and blazed his way with Rome, and Illyria, and Syracuse, and Ithaca,—a procedure at once meaningless and dense. Greece nor Rome feels at home among us, nor should they.

History is a method of remembrance, and names are a method of remembrance also, the two conspiring to the same end. When the Saxon, sailing across seas, found a rude home in England, he named his new home Saxonland, and there are East and West and South Saxons; and so, Essex and Wessex and Sussex. In like manner, emigrants from various shores across the grim Atlantic kept the memory and names of that dear land from which they sailed; and by running your eyes over those earlier colonies, you shall see names—aboriginal and imported—and so learn, in an infallible way, who first pitched tents on that soil. This tracking dead races over seas by the local designations they have left has always fascinated my thought. Those names are verily planted in the earth, and grow like trees that refuse to die. Through centuries of turbulence and slaughter and racial transplanting, see how some Roman words stay and refuse to go, knowing as little of retreat as a Roman legion! "Chester" and "coin," as good old English terminals, are tense with interest, since they as plainly record history as did minstrels in old castle hall. Chester is the Roman "castra," camp, and where the name occurs across Britain, indicates with undeviating fidelity that there, in remote decades, Roman legions camped and the Roman argent eagle flashed back morning to the sun. Coin is a contraction for "colonia," indicating that at the place so designated a Roman colonia received honors at the hands of the Roman Senate. In other words, these locative terminals are as certainly bequeathed England by the Roman occupancy as is London Tower. "Ton" is historical too, but is footprint of another passing race—namely the Gaul, defeated of Caesar on many a bloody field—and is a contraction of "tuin," meaning garden, appearing in Ireland as "dun," meaning garrison, both indicating an inclosure, and so becoming a frequent terminal for names of cities, as Huntingtuin or tun, probably originally a hunting-tower or hamlet. A second form of "ton" is our ordinary "town," which, as often as we use, we are speaking the tongue of the Trans-Alpine Gauls, taking a syllable from the word of a half-forgotten people. From yet another source is the locative "ham." Chester is of Roman origin, tun is of Gaelic; but "ham" is Anglo-Saxon, and means village, whence the sweet word home. Witness the use of this suffix in Effingham and the like. "Stoke" and "beck" and "worth" are also Saxon. "Thorpe" and "by" are Danish, as in Althorp and Derby. These reminiscent instances from over seas will serve to illuminate the thought under discussion—the historical element embodied in the names of localities. As in these three locatives we track three distinct peoples through England, we may, by the same method, fall on the footprints of divers civilizations in our New World.

Thus far we have touched at random, as one does on a holiday. Now, seriously, as on a journey of discovery, may we take staff in hand to trace, if possible, the elusive march of populations by the ashes of their campfires, as Evangeline did the wanderings of Gabriel, her beloved.

The Dutch, more's the pity, have left scant memorials of their American empire. "Knickerbocker's History of New York" has effectually laughed them out of court; but, notwithstanding, they were mighty men, whose idiosyncrasies we readily catch at as a jest, but whose greatness breaks on us slowly, as great matters must. "Kill" was a Dutch word, meaning creek, a terminal appearing in many of the few words they have left us, such as Fishkill, Peekskill, Wynantskill, Catskill. Along the banks of streams, with names like these, one could see ragged Rip Van Winkle, with his dog and gun, with shambling hunter's gait, or come silently on solemn Dutch burghers, solemnly playing ninepins in the shadows. Brooklyn (Breuchelin) is Dutch, as are Orange, Rensselaer, Stuyvesant, Rhinebeck, Rhinecliff, Vanbrunt, Staatsburg, Rotterdam, Hague, Nassau, Walloonsack, Yonkers, and Zurich. Wallabout, a borough of Brooklyn (Waalbogt), means Walloon's Bay, thus having a religio-historical significance. Nor dare we omit that river, noble as an epic, named after a Dutch discoverer, who, first of Europeans, flung the swaying shadows of foreign sails on its beautiful waters. Hudson is a prince among triumphant and adventurous discoverers. And I never sail past the Palisades, by summer or gorgeous autumn, when all the hills are blood and flame, without reverting in thought to Hudson, who gave the stream to our geography and his name to the stream, nor forget that he was set adrift in the remote and spacious sea, which likewise bears his name; though well it may, for it is doubtless his grave; for, set adrift by mutineers, he was crushed by icefloes, or fell asleep in death in that winter sea. But Hudson River and Hudson Bay will make him as immortal as this continent. All men shall know by them that Heinrich Hudson hath sailed this way. So much, then, for following along dim paths once trod by a Dutch burgher's tramp of empire.

Of the Swedes, who, under their victorious king, Gustavus Adolphus, the Protestant, settled New Sweden (now known as New Jersey), are left only dim footprints, the path of them being all but lost, though, fortunately, sufficiently plain to trace the emigration of a race. These Swedish emigrants and founders of what they hoped would prove a State, never attained a supremacy, their enemies, who were their immediate neighbors and fellow-emigrants from Protestant States, so speedily overwhelming them—first the Dutch, succeeded by the inevitable Saxon. Bergen, the first Swedish settlement, in comparative isolation, still whispers the story of Gustavus Adolphus's statecraft and vision, and seems a solitary survivor of an old camp of emigrants voyaging by stream and plain, and all slain by famine and disease and Indian stealth and pioneer's hardship, save himself. Nordhoff and Stockholm and Pavonta are scattered reminders of an attempted sovereignty which is no more.

Protestantism made valorous attempt to preempt this New World of North America for civil and religious liberty and the Reformed faith. A look at their breadth of plan must be a benefit to us and a praise to those who planned so large things for the glory of God. That they acted independently of each other shows how wide-spread this thirst for liberty and this love for the kingdom of God. I know few things that stir me more. Swedish Lutherans settled New Sweden; the Dutch Walloons settled New Holland; the Baptists, Rhode Island; the Quakers, Pennsylvania; the Huguenots, the Carolinas; the Puritans, New England. The Anglican Church only incidentally, and not of intention, settled Virginia. Catholicism seized and holds South America, Central America, and Mexico, but in the United States was represented only by the colony of Maryland, planted by Lord Baltimore, and bears mark of his religious faith in naming his plantation after Mary, the Catholic queen, his own name appearing in the name of its present metropolis, Baltimore. In days when in England the Catholic was under ban, he founded this colony as a Canaan for Roman Catholics. Spanish Catholics worked their way along the Pacific Coast, and French Catholicism sailed up the St. Lawrence and down the Mississippi, though the latter territory now belongs to the Protestant faith. Admiral Coligny, an illustrious son of France, attempted planting the Huguenots in America, though this colonizing experiment has left scant memorial of Huguenot occupancy, because the destruction of this colony by Spanish Catholics was so sudden and so utter; yet the Carolinas are witness to this hazard and hope, bearing the name of the infamous King Charles IX. How terrible is the irony when we recall how this same ruler, after whom Coligny named his land of refuge for persecuted Protestants, was author of the most malignant religious massacre on record—the Massacre of St. Bartholomew! In Beaufort and Carteret may be discovered reminiscences of an expedition whose close was disastrous, yet heroic.

Everybody has contributed to giving names to the States; therefore attention to them as a class is fitting. England gave name to Maryland, as suggested in another paragraph; to New York, named in honor of the Duke of York, afterward known as James II, of evil memory; Virginia, so styled by Sir Walter Raleigh, that pattern of chivalry, in honor of his queen, Elizabeth; New Jersey, after Jersey, the island; Rhode Island, after the Island of Rhodes; Delaware, after Lord de la Warre, early governor of Virginia; Pennsylvania, after William Penn, the good; New Hampshire, after Hampshire, in England, as New England was, in love, called after the motherland; Georgia, named for George II, by philanthropic General Oglethorpe, who brought hither his colony of debtors,—such the contributions of England to our commonwealth of names. America has supplied one State a name, Washington; and who more or so worthy to write his name upon a State as George Washington, first Commander-in-chief and President? Spain has christened these Commonwealths: Florida, the land of flowers; California; Colorado, colored; Nevada. We must thank France for these: Maine, for a province in France; Vermont, green mountains; the Carolinas; Louisiana, a name attached by the valorous La Salle, in fealty to his prince, calling this province, at the mouth of the river he had followed to its entrance into the ocean, after Louis XIV, the then darling of the French people. Mexico is remembered in two instances: New Mexico and Texas. Italy has a memorial, bestowed in gratitude by America. The District of Columbia, with its capital, Washington, reminds men forever that Columbus discovered and Washington saved America. Besides this, to Italy's credit, or discredit—I know not which—must be charged the giving title to two continents. Amerigo Vespucci has lent his name to one hemisphere of the world. Other States bear Indian captions. Those wandering hunters have lost their hunting-grounds; but we can not forget whose hunting-grounds they were so long as the Indian name clings to the Territory where he is not, but his name shall remain as his monument. Indiana is generic, the land of the Indian. With this exception, the States are called after tribes or by some Indian name: Alabama, Tennessee, Illinois, Iowa, Ohio, Michigan, Nebraska, Kansas, the Dakotas (who will forget when Hiawatha passed to the land of the Dakotahs for his wooing?), Wyoming, Oregon, Idaho, and the like. With such names, we are once more sitting in the woodland, by the wigwam, as we did a century ago. The memory haunts us. Thus much for the racial element in cognomens of States.

Now again to set out on the journey on the trail of vanished peoples!

The Spanish invasion of America, now, as we recall its story, big with pathos and remorse, the pathos predominating, now that the last rag of a province has been torn from their feeble hands,—the evacuation of Havana, with its sorry pomp of exhuming Columbus's dust, is one of the saddest sights history has called men to look upon. Columbus, a foreigner, gave Spain a New World; and foreigners of still another blood have taken away what by right never belonged to Spanish sovereignty. Just as this fate is, we can but feel the immense pathos of the Spanish evacuation of the New World. French discoverers hugged the rivers, as by some deep affinity. Spaniards, conversely, made march without thought of riverways. They were accustomed to deserts in their own land, and feared them not in a remote hemisphere. They swarmed in the desert. Nothing daunted them. Spain's best blood poured into the New World, a fact which doubtless accounts, in part, for the devitalized energies and genius of this mother country of their birth and hopes and initiative. "Florida" is a Spanish tide-mark. "St. Augustine" is a gravestone of history, marking the mound where lies the dust of the first permanent colony planted in America. The Spaniard headed toward the southern provinces of America, as the Englishman to the east, and the Frenchman to the north and central provinces. Spain held southward. Though the colony of Florida was retained till, in the year 1819, the subtle diplomacy of John Quincy Adams added this peninsula of flowers to the Union of States, it had no aggressive value as a basis of discovery or colonization. The base of Spanish operations was Mexico, the fair land of their conquest. Spain exploited her energies in Mexico and Peru. She was mad with a lust for gold. Her galleons made these lands bankrupt. But Spaniards dared to lose themselves in desert or forests. The discovery and conquest of Peru is mad with turbulent courage and adventure. This we can not deny; and the discovery of the Amazon by a brother of Pizarro is a story to thrill a sluggard into a sleepless waking. We see these heroic days, and forgive much of Spanish misrule and avarice. De Soto, crowding through jungles of undergrowth and miasms, through tribes of hostile men, though stimulated by the wild lust for gold, is for all a brave chapter in the world's biography; and to see him buried in the massive river he discovered is to make other than the tender-hearted weep. To see on the map of the Union "Llano Estacado" is to give, as it were, the initials of heroic names. Spain, which staked these plains, will walk across them no more. They did this service for others. Were they fine-fibered enough to feel these losses, the sorrow we feel for their exit would be intensified; but their centuries of misrule have certified to their all but utter lack of any finer sentiment or sense of high responsibility. Give them what honor we may. Recall their departed glory, and let it light the sky, if only for a moment, like a flash of lightning. Spaniards were little less given to naming their settlements "Saint" than the French. From Mexico, up the long Pacific Coast, they affixed names which will remain perpetually as the sole memorial that once these banished dons held sway in the United States. These names cluster in the Southern United States, touching immediately on their chief dependency, Mexico; but are still in evidence farther away, though growing scanter, as footprints in a remote highway. Rio Grande, Del Norte, Andalusia, and the charming name affixed to a charming mountain range, Sierra Nevada,—how these names rehabilitate a past! Nevada and Andalusia! One needs little imagination to see the flush that gathered on the dusky cheek of the old Spanish discoverer when he calmed, in part, his homesickness by giving his wanderings the name of the dear home from which he came, and kindled his pride into a fire, like the conflagration of mountain pines, by telling the New World the names of his ancestral land. But his "San" and "Santa" are frequent as tents upon a battle-field when the battle is spent. "Corpus Christi"—how Spanish and Catholic that is! San Antonio, Santa Fe, Cape St. Lucas. In Florida: Rio San Juan, Ponce de Leon, Cape San Blas, Hernando, Punta Rosa, Cerro de Oro, are indicative of the growing communities in that peninsula after the invasion located at St. Augustine. But of all the parts of the United States, New Mexico is most honeycombed with Spanish locatives. Passing that way, one seems not to be in America, but in Spain. Spain is everywhere. Their names are here strewn thick as battle soldiers sleeping on the battle-field: Las Colonias, Arayo Salado, Don Carlos Hill, Cerillos, Dolores, San Pambo, Canon Largo, Magdalene Mountains, San Pedro. Thence these names creep up into Utah, though there they are never numerous: Santa Clara, Escalante Desert, Sierra Abaja; and farther north, reaching to all but hand-clasp with the French Du Chasne River, is San Rafael River. St. Xavier, San Miguel, Santa Monica, Santa Cruz, San Francisco, San Gabriel,—can you not in these names hear the Spanish languishing speech and see the Jesuit pioneer? Eldorado, Sacramento, El Paso, Los Angeles, are footprints of the Spanish discoverer. And Cape Blanco, in far-away Oregon, probably represents the farthest campfire of the Spanish march. In his area the don was indefatigable. De Soto marched like a conqueror. Coronado found his way into Missouri, Kansas, and Colorado. La Junta, in Kansas, may mark the subsidence of the wave of Spanish invasion, and Kansas was part of the kingdom of "Quivera." Eugene Ware, the Kansas poet, who, under the nom de plume of "Ironquill," has written graceful and musical poems, has told of Coronado's excursion into this now populous and fertile region:

QUIVERA

"In that half-forgotten era, With the avarice of old, Seeking cities he was told Had been paved with yellow gold, In the kingdom of Quivera—

Came the restless Coronado To the open Kansas plain, With his knights from sunny Spain; In an effort that, though vain, Thrilled with boldness and bravado.

League by league, in aimless marching, Knowing scarcely where or why, Crossed they uplands drear and dry, That an unprotected sky Had for centuries been parching.

But their expectations, eager, Found, instead of fruitful lands, Shallow streams and shifting sands, Where the buffalo in bands Roamed o'er deserts dry and meager.

Back to scenes more trite, yet tragic, Marched the knights with armor'd steeds; Not for them the quiet deeds; Not for them to sow the seeds From which empires grow like magic.

Never land so hunger-stricken Could a Latin race remold; They could conquer heat or cold— Die for glory or for gold— But not make a desert quicken.

Thus Quivera was forsaken; And the world forgot the place Through the lapse of time and space. Then the blue-eyed Saxon race Came and bade the desert waken."

In Colorado, El Moro, Las Animas, and Buena Vista are credentials of Spanish occupancy, the last-named place being, so far as I have been able to trace, the farthest camp marked by a name in the Colorado district. They all sought gold, and having failed to find the thing for which they made their quest, ran back, like a retiring wave. Coronado and Eldorado are suffused with Spanish life, like a woman's cheek with blushes when her lover comes. Over scorching deserts, and along the western coasts of America, the Spaniard toiled, nor halted till the soft Spanish speech mingled with the swift, ejaculatory utterance of the far French frontier. For this search of theirs we bless them, and shall always be glad they left their nomenclature to mind us of what this now wrecked people had achieved.

And our geography is sown thick with reminiscences of the French occupancy of America. Now he is a total foreigner in this realm he helped so largely to discover. Not Acadia was more bereft of the French after their sad banishment than our America is of French rule. New Orleans has its creole.

In Quebec, of all American cities, you seem most in the old French regime. The names above the business blocks would make you believe that what you had read of the battle of Quebec was a myth, and that Wolfe truly died and Montcalm lived to celebrate a victory; but when you climb to the fortress, it is the Englishman's speech you hear, and the English colors you see floating on the heights. The French empire is melted away like snows of winter in the month of June. But those now remote days, profligate of valor, when French trapper and discoverer, fearless as Eric the Bold, fought their way along lake and river, over plain and mountain, with fierce Indian and fiercer winter,—those remote days are on us once more, when we forget our history and read our geography. There may be no new France in contemporaneous American history, but in contemporaneous geography there is. The French discoverer fires the imagination. I confess to wishing I might have tramped by his side through the dense forests; have sailed in his canoe on lake and stream; have plodded with him, by oar or sail, over the Great Lakes; have joined with him in portage; have been boon companion with La Salle on his journey to the sea on the wide and majestic Mississippi; have consorted with Pere Marquette. Few American histories will do more to raise the temperature of one's blood than Parkman's story of the French occupancy of North America.

And one reason why Gilbert Parker's "An Adventurer of the North" and "Pierre and his People," books vivid with a boundless freedom and heroism, hold attention and gather force in one's spirit is, that they unconsciously, yet truly, carry us back to those bold days when such episodes were not the exception, but the rule. Pioneering appeals, in some degree, to us all; and in Frenchmen were such resiliency of spirit, such abandon to adventure, as that they stand as typical explorers. Who would not have been alongside Hennepin when he, on a snowy winter day, first of all Europeans, saw thunder-voiced Niagara? The English colonies seized, fortified, and held domain in small compass, and guarded it against the world; but this was not the French idea. They spread over a continent, as a sea might have done. The light step of Mercury belonged to the French colonizer. He loved to roam wherever untrod wastes beckoned. Englishmen in America did little discovering; Frenchmen did much. They crossed the continent, and would have done so had it been twice the breadth it was. I have already shown how some of our commonest words in Western speech are of this origin. While England hugged the Atlantic seaboard, Frenchmen had navigated the Great Lakes, had sailed the Mississippi to the Gulf, had set the seal of their names on the land they had traversed, had gone in to the shoreless interior of the Far West; and to this day you can track the old hunter to the Pacific Coast by the reminiscent names he has left behind. The continent was his home. To him we owe much more than we shall ever pay; but to recall the debt we owe him may serve to make a wider margin to our own life at least. The vast extent of this pioneer work of France may be seen by recalling that the battle of Quebec gave England undisputed sway over what is now known as British America, and what in the history of the United States was known as "the Territory of the Northwest." This came from those by a single treaty. One defeat cost them an empire. Nor was this all their territory. This treaty of 1763 gave England only French acquisitions east of the Mississippi and north of the Great Lakes, but left French America, west of that river and south of the lakes, intact, which shows how the common consent of nations accorded to French valor in exploration the bulk of the North American continent. Essentially chivalrous, the French explorer proved the knight-errant among American discoverers. By the treaty of 1803, Napoleon ceded 1,171,931 square miles to the United States, a tract eight times as large as France itself. France, by rights acquired by discoveries, owned about two-thirds of the continent of North America, and to-day owns not so much as would supply burial room for a child! Saxon as I am, I confess I can not go to Montreal or Quebec, nor look upon the regal St. Lawrence, without a sort of Indian Summer regret filling my sky. The French as explorers were magnificent.

And Frenchmen in those days of their discoveries were eminently devout, either in fact or in habits of thought—sometimes one, sometimes both—as may be inferred from the religiosity of the names they so often gave the places of their discovery. In some instances, this fact is to be explained by recalling that Jesuits were the explorers; but matters conspired to one effect, namely, starring the path of their discoveries by "saints," as with the Spaniards, as has been mentioned. From the St. Lawrence, which is the noblest stream on which my eyes have ever rested, to the old Saint Louis at the Mississippi's mouth, it seems a march of palmers; for at every halt they planted a fleur de lis and a cross. In this nomenclature, despite ourselves, is a witchery, under whose spell I plead guilty to falling. On the Atlantic side of Newfoundland is Notre Dame Bay, while beside the island northward the majestic St. Lawrence mingles the lakes with the sea. Toil your way up the river, as in the long ago the discoverers did, and see on either shore the sacred names: St. Charles, St. Johns, St. Paul's Bay, and on and on, across or through the continent, St. Mary's, St. Joseph, St. Paul, St. Louis. So the voyager made journey. Lake Champlain tells the inroad of a brave French discoverer. Au Sable chasm answers for it that here, on this black water, the ubiquitous voyager has floated. Vermont and Montpelier say, "Remember who has been here." Detroit (the strait) is a tollgate for the French highway. Marquette, Joliet, La Salle, wake from the dead a trinity of heroic discoverers. Than La Salle, America never had a more valorous and indefatigable explorer. Hennepin minds us of the discoverer of Niagara. Sault Ste. Marie, Eau Claire, St. Croix River, the Dalles, are old camp-grounds of these wanderers. In Indiana, Vincennes is one of the oldest French settlements; Terre Haute (high ground) and La Porte are sign-manuals of sunny France. St. Joseph, in Missouri, and Des Moines (swamp land), in Iowa, and the name of a beautiful river in Kansas, Marais des Cygnes (the river of swans), tell the trail of the old French trapper. Where has he not been? Going farther westward, find in Wyoming the Belle Fourche River; in Idaho are St. Joseph Creek, and Coeur d'Alene Lake, and Lake Pend d'Oreille; in Washington are The Little Dalles, and in Oregon, The Dalles; and in Utah, the Du Chasne River. Thus we have tracked the French across the continent, from the St. Lawrence to the Pacific. What travelers they were! But southward, along the great River, there we come, not into scattering communities, but into a veritable New France. Their names monopolize geography. Scan a map of Louisiana, and see how populous it is with French patronymic locatives. New Orleans (pronounce it New Or-le-ans, and hear French pride rising in the word) is there, and St. John Baptist; Baton Rouge, and Thibodeaux, and Prudhomme, and Assumption, and Calcasieu, and Saint Landry, and Grand Coteau, and scores besides, tell how surely Louisiana was a land peopled from the French kingdom and for the French king, and, as those who discovered and those who settled fondly thought, forever. So evanescent are the plans of men! The word "bayou," so common in the regions neighboring the Mississippi, is a French word. Prairie, butte, bayou, three terms in perpetual geography of this Western World, are bequests of a departed people. The farthest west and south I have tracked the French discoverer in a name is in Nebraska, where they are identified in the name of the River Platte. La Plata is the Spanish form, as will be seen to the south—say in Texas—and here in the north is the French imprint in Platte, that wide but shallow stream, flowing over its beds of shifting sands. Verily, the French regime in America was more than fiction. The names it left will keep an eternal remembrance.

And the English came, and seeded down a land with their ideas, language, laws, literature, political inclinations, and homestead names. Those early emigrants, though refugees from oppressive misrule, loved England notwithstanding. Of her they dreamed, to her they clung, from her they imported sedate and musical names for their new homes this side the sea. New England was the special bailiwick for such sowing, though Virginia partakes of this seed and harvest. The rich old English names, having in them so much history and memory,—how good to see them on our soil! Those early colonists were not original, nor particularly imaginative, but loyal lovers they were; and to give to their home here the name attaching to their home there was pledge of fidelity to dear old England. In Virginia, one will find what he can not find in New England, namely, assertions of loyalty to English princes; for the Puritans were never other than stanch friends of liberty, a thing which grew upon the citizens of the Old Dominion by degrees, and by slow degrees besides. They were loyalists and royalists. This, New England was not, and could not be. The Old Dominion's name, Virginia, and its first colony, Jamestown, bear attestation to this loyalty of which mention is made, though the State's name was given by that lover of Queen Elizabeth and lover of America, Sir Walter Raleigh. Berkeley recalls that querulous old loyalistic governor of Virginia, that fast believer in the divine right of kings and of himself; Westmoreland, Middlesex, New Kent, Sussex, Southampton, Surrey, Isle of Wight, King and Queen, Anne, Hanover, Caroline, King William, Princess, Prince George, Charles City, are names which tell of sturdy believers in kings. No such mark can be found in the English colonies to the north. To England they were attached, but not to English kings. Bath, York, Bedford, Essex, Warwick, and time would fail to tell this story through. In Maryland you may note this transplanted England too: Somerset, Saulsbury, Cecil, Annapolis, Calvert, and St. Mary's, betraying the Roman Catholic origin of the colony, as do Baltimore, Saulsbury, Northampton, and Marlborough. Who can doubt the maternity of such names as these?

Now turn face toward New England, and find old England again: Berwick, Shapleigh, Boston, Litchfield, Clearfield, Norfolk, Springfield, New Britain, Hampton, Middlesex, Fairfield, Windham, East Lynne, Roxbury, Kent, Cornwall, Bristol, Enfield, Stafford, Woodstock, Buckingham, Stonington, Fair Haven, Taunton, Barnstable, Falmouth, Middlebury, Bedford, Dartmouth, Pomfret, Abington,—but why extend the list, musical as it is with the home days and the home land? But name Plymouth, because it shows the tenacity of English loyalty to England; for though the Mayflower, with her Puritans, might not have an English port from which to set sail for a New World, they do yet name their landing-haven after the English harbor. Blood is thicker than water when the instincts are consulted. Seeing these names, we can not mistake where we are. This is as certainly English as the Pacific-coast line was Spanish and the Mississippi Valley French. These Englishmen imported names as well as populations. And I, for one, like them and their names; for they abound in suggestion. Who settled Connecticut and Massachusetts we know from these locatives we have read and for the names they brought; and for the liberty and religion they sailed with across the seas, we remember them and love them.

There are miscellaneous names, telling their tale, not of race occupancy, but of who or what has passed this way, of beast, or bird, or event, or man, which have left impress on geography,—things we do well to study, and which will always lend a sort of enchantment and vivacious interest to the pages of travel or geography. The villages along a railroad are thus often of captivating interest. The Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad, for instance, may illustrate this point. Its name has interest of no common sort. Atchison is named after a famous pro-slavery advocate, who came to Kansas, with his due quota of "border ruffians," for the avowed purpose of making Kansas a slave State. Topeka is an Indian name; Santa Fe is a Spanish landmark, tall as a lighthouse builded on a cliff. At the Missouri line is Kansas City, so named because this metropolis is created by Kansas. The metropolis is in Missouri; but is made rich and great by Kansas men and products. Kansas has not a large city in its borders, because this Kansas City has engrossed the great business interests of a great Commonwealth. The metropolis of Kansas, in other words, is in the State of Missouri, and the name is as strict a speaking of truth as an apostle could have commanded.

Passing along the line, find Holliday, so named from the projector of a part of this railroad line; on is De Soto, always thrillingly historic; farther is Eudora (a word of Greek genesis, and meaning a good gift, though likely enough he who christened this village may have known as little of Greek as a kitten); on is Lawrence, named for a famous anti-slavery agitator and philanthropist of Massachusetts—for Lawrence is a New England colony, as is Manhattan, farther up the Kansas River, familiarly known as the "Kaw," which is the leading river of Kansas; here is Lecompton, which keeps alive the memory of Lecompte, the Indian chief; then comes Tecumseh, as clearly an Indian name as the former; then Topeka, the capital of Kansas, and wearing an Indian sobriquet; then comes Wakarusa (Indian, meaning "hip deep," the depth of the stream in crossing); then Carbondale, so called because of the coal deposits which created the village; then Burlingame, a beautiful hamlet, wearing a famous name; then Emporia, a city of traffic, so dubbed for reason of thinking it a famous trade center in the earlier days; Barclay, named for the famous Quaker apologist, because this village is a Quaker colony; Nickerson, for one of the original promoters of this railroad; Great Bend, referring to a great bend the Arkansas River makes at this place; Pawnee Rock, from a local rallying-point of the Pawnees when this was an Indian hunting-ground; Garden City, so named because, by irrigation, this locality was redeemed from comparative barrenness; Granada, and Las Animas, and La Junta, reminiscent words from the Spanish march into Kansas; Puebla, clearly designating that strange people whose cliff dwellings are at this hour one of the rarest studies in American archaeology. On another branch of this same road: Olathe, an Indian name; Ottawa; Algonquin, for "trader," Chanute, from an Indian chief, who was a local celebrity; Elk Falls, referring to those days when this river (the Elk) was famous for that species of graceful motion called the elk; farther are Indian Chief and White Deer, names of evident paternity. I have taken this time to run along this railroad line so as to show the possibilities in this direction anywhere. To learn to read history from the stations as we pass is surely an art worth learning. In passing across the continent I have found it as if a guide had prepared that way before us. The natural history of a region may thus be read without resorting to a book. Count the fauna: Eagle River, Bald Eagle, Buffalo Lake, Great Bear Lake, Salmon Falls, Snake River, Wolf Creek, White Fish River, Leech Lake, Beaver Bay, Carp River, Pigeon Falls, Elkhorn, Wolverine, Crane Hill, Rabbit Butte, Owl, Rattlesnake, Curlew, Little Crow, Mullet Lake, Clam Lake, Turtle Creek, Deerfield, Porcupine Tail, Pelican Lake, Kingfisher, Ravens' Spring, Deer Ears, Bee Hill, Fox Creek, White Rabbit—can any one mistake the animals haunting these places in earlier days? Trapper's Grove tells a story we feel, but need not rehearse. So, descriptive words in vegetation, or person, or characteristic, what volumes are contained in them! Crystal River, Little Muddy, Elm Creek, Mission Creek (a stream on which was an Indian mission), Calumet, Table Rock, Crab Orchard, Elm Creek, Lost River (the river lost in the sand), Soldier Creek, Battle Creek, Corn Creek, Spring Lake, Hackberry, Cottonwood Falls, Sand Hills, Poplar Hill, Cold Springs, Oak Hill, Cavalry Creek, Bluff Creek, Peace Creek, Cedar Bluff, Council Bluffs, Punished Woman's Lake, Highbank Creek, Big Knife, Black River, Cypress Creek, Black Raven, Brier Creek, Big Lick, Laurel, Hurricane Inlet, Dead Man's Bay, Pine Hill, Magnolia, Mountain Meadow, Medicine Woods, Rush Creek, Salt Plain, Saline River, Lava Bed, Wild Horse, Sinking Creek, Nameless, Grassy Trail (in the desert), Azure Cliffs, Miry Bottom, Sand Dune Plateau, Grouse Creek,—these are names as communicative of secrets as a child. Heath, Rock Lake, Wood Lake, Grand Prairie, Lily Creek, Swift Falls, Calamus River, Evergreen Lake, Lone Tree (a prairie locality), Spring Bank, Fort Defiance, Pontiac, Smoky Hill River (these hills are always as if smoky),—what a light these names shed on the region in which they occur!

And you can recapitulate American history in its most salient details from a reading of our geography. Great names stay, and will not be gone. As moss clings to the rock, so do great memories cling to localities. Nature conspires to keep illustrious men from death. Witness such names as follows: Lincoln (General Lincoln of Revolutionary fame), Madison, Pulaski (the brave Pole who fought for our freedom), Webster, Sumner, Henry (Patrick), Jackson (doughty general and President), Breckinridge, Hancock (signer of the Declaration of Independence), Lafayette, Clay, Pocahontas, Calhoun, Randolph, Monroe, Franklin, Jefferson, Clark (the explorer), Douglas (the "Little Giant"), Adams, Whitman (the Presbyterian missionary, who saved to the United States Washington and Oregon, by a heroic episode which deserves the perpetual gratitude of those States), Custer (the general slain in Indian warfare), Union (to commemorate the preservation of our Union), Benton (Thomas H., of Missouri, whose daughter was wife of General John C. Fremont), Lewis and Clark (discoverers), Garfield, Kane (Arctic explorer), Lincoln (the emancipator), Polk, Houston, Lee (General Robert E.), Tyler, Van Buren, Scott (General Winfield, of the Mexican War), Pike (the discoverer of Pike's Peak), Marshall (Chief-Justice), Berkely, Hamilton (Alexander, our first lord of the Treasury), Gadsden (he of "the Gadsden Purchase"), Marion, Sumter (both of Revolutionary fame), Carteret, Columbus, Stanton, Colfax, Greeley, Chase, Sherman, Seward, Fillmore, Harlan (Senator), Butler (Ben), Johnson (obstreperous "Andy"), Grant (our chiefest military hero), Polk (General), Brown (John Brown, of Ossawatomie), Thomas (General), Sheridan, Wallace (General), St. John (Prohibitionist, Republican governor of Kansas), Lane (Jim Lane, of Kansas), McPherson and Sedgewick (both Union generals), Case, Dallas, Boone, DeKalb, McDonough, Schuyler, DeWitt, Putnam, Kossuth, Hancock, Palo Alto, Cerro Gordo (reminders of the Mexican War), Clayton (of the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty), Emmet, Fremont, Taylor (President), Warren (General), Clinton (DeWitt), Audubon, Story (Chief-Justice), Buchanan, St. Clair, Montcalm, Kosciusko, Steuben, Tippecanoe,—to be acquainted with these names is to possess knowledge of the virtual makers of America in the range of statesmanship and military achievement.

One other item completes this tabulation. The aborigine of America, the Indian, has left "his mark" across and through this Nation. He never, in any true sense, owned this continent. He hunted and fought across it. He swept by, like gusts of winter wind. He staid here, he did not live here. Possession implies more than occupancy; it implies improvement, industry, habitations, cities, destiny, as worked out by sweat of toil. But this American Indian, who, in honor, never possessed the territory, and has left no ruins of cities built by his cunning and perseverance, nor codes, nor literature, has left us names of lake, and stream, and mountain, and city. This stolid Indian, though you would scarcely think it of him, had, in common with other nomad and untutored peoples, poetic instincts. Their names, like those of the Hebrews, had meanings, and were picturesque and beautiful, sometimes, oftentimes, bewitchingly so. Some words have a music, liquid as the whip-poor-will's notes heard in woodlands climbing a mountain side. Minnehaha, "laughing water"—does not the word seem laughing, like a falling stream? I once heard a distinguished philologist say that, of all the rhythmic words he had hit upon in any tongue, Winona was most exquisite. Surely it is not musical, but music. See the pomp of names, like an Indian war march begun: Athabasca, Wyoming, Tahoe, Niobrara, Mohawk, Sioux City, Nemaha, Hiawatha, Seneca, Chippewa, Chicago, Saskatchewan, Pepacton ("meeting of waters"), Winnepeg, Cheyenne, Manitoba, Penobscot, Narragansett, Chicopee, Manhattan, and a host besides, a numberless procession. Indian names cling with peculiar tenacity to lakes and rivers; for those hunters knew all waters, and hunted beside all streams and lakes. They were not seamen, and have left scant memorials of themselves in names that fringe the sea; but to lakes they cling with tireless tenacity.

Let these words suffice. As one who journeys in circles finds no end of journeying, so I. This theme runs on, nor stops to catch breath. I make an end, therefore, not because the subject is exhausted, but because it is dismissed. But this study in geography is journeying among dead peoples as certainly as it the land were crowded with obelisk and tomb. To those who were and are not, say, Vale! Vale!

"Ye who love the haunts of Nature, Love the sunshine of the meadow, Love the shadow of the forest, Love the wind among the branches, And the rain-shower and the snowstorm, And the rushing of great rivers Through their palisades of pine-trees, And the thunder in the mountains, Whose innumerable echoes Flap like eagles in their eyries,— Listen to these wild traditions. Ye who love a nation's legends, Love the ballads of a people, That like voices from afar off Call to us to pause and listen, Speak in tones so plain and childlike, Scarcely can the ear distinguish Whether they are sung or spoken,— Listen to this Indian Legend. Ye whose hearts are fresh and simple, Who have faith in God and nature, Who believe that in all ages Every human heart is human, That in even savage bosoms There are longings, yearnings, strivings, For the good they comprehend not, That the feeble hands and helpless, Groping blindly in the darkness, Touch God's right hand in that darkness, And are lifted up and strengthened,— Listen to this simple story. Ye, who sometimes, in your rambles Through the green lanes of the country, Where the tangled barberry-bushes Hang their tufts of crimson berries Over stone walls gray with mosses, Pause by some neglected graveyard, For awhile to muse, and ponder On a half-effaced inscription, Written with little skill of song-craft, Homely phrases, but each letter Full of hope and yet of heart-break, Full of all the tender pathos Of the Here and the Hereafter,— Stay, and read this rude inscription."

Only saying, Read not the "Song of Hiawatha," but the story of dead peoples by the ashes of their campfires,—these names they have left, clinging to places like blue to distant hills.



VI

Iconoclasm in Nineteenth Century Literature.

That history repeats itself is an apothegm which has descended to us from a dateless antiquity. It has been made to serve so often as to become trite; and yet its use is a necessity, inasmuch as it embodies a verity, which to ignore were ignorance and folly linked together; and as we stand on our eminence and scan the way humanity has worn with its multitudinous feet, as the events of the world pass in review before us, some so closely resemble others as that the one seems the echo of the other; and there appears reason for that fascinating generalization of the ancient philosopher, that the epochs and events of the physical realm and history were a fixed and limited quantity, which, revolving in a vast cycle, would bring from time to time the reiteration of the facts or doings of an ancient era. There was no new thing thinkable, only a reintroduction of the old. To illustrate this fact in brief, we have but to note the history of philosophy. You read the names of those who figure as founders of philosophical systems, and those systems seem many. Read the systems as founded, and you find an old-time philosophy, rejuvenated with some little addition of cap or bell better to adapt it to the modern time. The much-lauded Hegelian philosophy is the system of Democritus, with the addition of a little more absurdity in the assertion of the identity of contradictories. The multitudinous philosophies may thus be reduced to a single quaternion, and the reputed inaugurator of a new philosophy is like to be a charlatan. So history seems but a plagiarist.

There is an epoch in ecclesiastical history known as the War of the Iconoclast; but that was only an embodiment of what had transpired before, and what has occurred often since. Iconoclasm is a bias of humanity. It grows out of the constitution of man. He is by heredity a breaker of images. If this view be not fictitious, we must not be surprised if there are developments of this spirit in our era or any era. It is a perennial reappearance. Whether it come in religion, statecraft, economic science, or literature, can be of little moment. The fact is the matter of paramount importance. Christianity was the iconoclast which broke in pieces the images of decrepit polytheism, and hewed out a way where progress might march to fulfill her splendid destiny. Luther was the iconoclast whose giant strokes demolished the castle doors of Romish superstition, and broke to fragments the images of Mariolatry. The practical induction of Bacon, Earl of Verulam, was the death-warrant of the fruitless deductive philosophy which had culminated in the vagaries of Scholasticism. The Declaration of Independence and the Federation of the States were the iconoclast which slew the phantom of the divine necessity of kings. It is thus evident that iconoclasm abounds, and there will be no marvel if it have a place in literature.

Innovation is a practical synonym of iconoclasm; for an innovation is putting the new in the place of the old. In ancient literature and literatures, prose was an innovation as regards poetry; and later, rhyme was an innovation in the domain of poesy, and an innovation of such a sort that against it the master-poet, Milton, lifted up his voice in solemn protest, and the solitary epic in English literature is a perpetual protestation against the custom. Shakespeare was an innovator of the laws of the drama when he violated unities of time and place; and in a sense the drama was an innovation on narrative poetry, and the novel an iconoclast in its attitude to the drama.

The iconoclasm in literature in our time is objective rather than subjective; and attention to the spirit of the age will give a practical comprehension of this iconoclastic spirit.

It must be observed that the literature of an age is largely the product of that age. Times create literatures. The literature of any period, in an emphatic sense, will be directly and easily traceable to something in that age for its peculiarity.

The Iliad and Odyssey were necessities of the age which gave them birth. In so far as a literature is purely human, in so far will it be stamped with the seal of the times, customs, and thoughts in the midst of which it bloomed into beauty. In early Greek times an epic without its gods and demigods, without resounding battle-shout and din of mighty conflict, had been an anachronism for which there could have been offered no apology. The splendid era of Pericles demanded the tragedy, and such a tragedy as only Aeschylus and Sophocles could originate; while the foibles of an earlier era made the comedy imperative. On like principles, the writings of Lucretius are not enigmatical, but easy of explanation.

The age which made possible the revels of Kenilworth, made possible also the splendor, like that of setting suns, which characterizes the "Faerie Queen." And the prowess, the achievement, the discovery, the colonization, the high tide of life, which ran like lightning through the Nation's arteries, made the drama, not only a possibility, but a fact. It was the embodiment of the mighty activities of a mighty age. The tragedy, to use the splendid figure of Milton, "rose like an exhalation." A solitary lifetime brought it from sunrise to high noon; and from that hour what could the sun do but sink?

Our century is one of general iconoclasm. It is the Ishmael among the ages. Its hand is against every man. It has reversed the old-time order, that what was believed by our fathers and received by them should be received by us. It takes no truth second-hand. It goes to sources. Its motto is, "I came, I saw, I investigated." It found many things believed of old, which were founded on the sand. Physical science discovered the vast domain of physical law, and that science began to legislate for the universe, forgetting sometimes that it was not a law enactor, but a law discoverer. Investigation found that many ideas and systems of ideas, supposed philosophies and sciences, were false and unsubstantial as the "baseless fabric of a vision." Things received as truths from time immemorial were shown to be untrue. The tendency of the human intellect is to generalize; and finding many previously received systems and facts to be without evidence sufficient to substantiate them, there arose the unwilled generalization that all these systems are likewise false. I do not say that man has formulated this thought into speech, but that the trend of the intellect in our century has been such as is explicable only on this theory. In many instances the motto of investigation in the domain of history, criticism, and science has been, "Believe all things false until you prove them true." If such is the spirit of the age, and if literature be colored with the light of the century which produces it, shall we wonder if the nineteenth-century literature is distinctively an iconoclastic one?

All about us is the battle of the books. War rages along the entire line. No work of antiquity is free from this belligerency. Mars has the field. The investigation has been crucial. In so far as it has been learning coupled with wisdom, this is well. Truth never flinches before the charge of a wise investigation. But no truth can stand as such before a system of inquiry the canons of which are empirical, fallacious, and false. The task of demolition is a fascinating one. It possesses a charm impossible to explain, and impossible to fail to perceive. When one has a taste, it is much as with the tiger which has tasted blood. Such procedure seems to open vistas before men. Here are open doors, from behind which seems to come a voice crying, "Enter."

It will be chronologically accurate if we shall first notice the iconoclastic spirit as exemplified in the attack on the unity of the Iliad; and I class this with the nineteenth-century doings because it belongs to the spirit of that century, and was almost within its borders. The Iliad had been the glory of international literature for centuries. Greece held it in veneration from the beginning of its authentic history; and that work had blazed with a solar luster out of the Stygian darkness of prehistoric times. The book had made an epoch in literature. The cyclic poets, who, for centuries after the appearance of the Iliad and Odyssey, were the only Greek bards, were confessedly disciples of one Homer, the reputed author of the poems which embody the fact of the war of the races. The judgment of antiquity was: (a) These two works were ascribed to a single author. (b) This author was the master at whose wave of wand these revels had begun. In other words, Homer wrote the books which bear his name. However much they might discuss the location of the half-fabled Ilium, or marvel over the battles fought "far on the ringing plains of windy Troy," it was not doubted that a sublime and solitary bard conceived and wrought the wondrous work ascribed to him. It is not shown that this question was even mooted in the former times. Cities contended for the honor of having given this man birth. He was as much a verity as Pericles. Such was the status of the case when our century beheld it first. Bentley had hinted at the probability or possibility of separate authorship; but it remained for German criticism, in the person of Wolf, to make the onslaught on the time-honored belief. The attack was as impetuous as the charge of the Greeks across the plain of the Scamander. It astonished the world. It abashed scholarship. Grave philosophers and gifted poets were carried away in the rush of the attack. Goethe gave and Schiller withheld allegiance. The Atomist and Separatist for a time held the field. Wolf showed, by reasoning which he deemed irrefutable, that the Iliad could not have been composed by a single man. Writing did not exist. The story had many repetitions, contradictions, and inferiorities. Later, the philological argument was used against it. These statements summarize the Wolfian theory. The contrariety in dialect form was thought to be an invulnerable argument against the unity of authorship; and for a time the epic of the ancient world was declared to be the work of many hands, the ballads sung by rhapsodists of many names; and the Iliad, with its astonishing display of genius, was declared to be authorless. Less than a century has elapsed since the theory was propounded. The subject has received a wealth of attention and study unknown before. Discoveries have been made in philology which have practically raised it to the rank of a science; and to-day the atomistic theory of Wolf is not received. Grote and Mahaffy have theories which vary markedly from the great original; and the result of a century of investigation is, that scholars do now generally believe that some one author, or two at most, did give shape to the great epic of the Greek people. Wolf, Lachmann, and Bert have shown the follies of men of genius when pursuing a line of evidence to prove a favorite theory. Their assumptions are often absurd, and their conclusions, once admitting their premises, are a logical necessity. The spirit of iconoclasm rested, not with the authority of the book, but assailed the geographic and topographical features. Troy was declared a dream. The Trojan War had never been. But Schliemann has proven to virtual demonstration the existence of, not only a Troy, but the Troy about which Hector and Achilles fought.

This iconoclasm has nowhere more fully displayed itself than in its attitude toward the Bible. That book comes properly under the head of literature, for the reason that the general line of attack during this century has been made from a literary standpoint. Of course, there has always been, whether easily discoverable or not, an undertone of skepticism of the rank sort. Oftentimes the battle has been avowedly against the book as a professed inspiration. Strauss and Renan made no cloak for their deed. But in many instances the method of procedure has been to study, as under a calcium light, the literary style, the linguistic peculiarities, the whole work as a literary composition. In this regard the method of criticism was such as was used in dissecting Homer's works. Each author laid down canons of criticism by which to measure the book in question. He cut the work into fragments. He stated such and such parts were the work of an early writer, while certain others were the additions of men unknown, far removed in time and place. For the most part these assumptions were wholly arbitrary, as may be seen by reading the authors on the various books. The thing which is the most observable is their lack of agreement, while the method used is the dogmatic. They all agree that the book is not of the date nor authorship usually assigned to it; but what the date and who the author, is very seldom agreed between any two. The criticism is largely of the ipse dixit sort, and the grounds of attack are, though rationalistic, seldom rationally taken. In the vaunted name of reason, the most monstrous absurdities are perpetrated. The line of argument professed to be used is inductive; but in reality the inductive element in this criticism stands second, and the deductive element has the chief seat in the synagogue. The assumption in the case, the a priori, sine qua non ("without which nothing")—these are the all-important elements in the discussion. It is the Homeric argument restated. Each man professes to find his hypothesis in the structure and language of the book. In fact, the author usually began with his hypothesis, and seeks to find proofs for the staying his assumptions up. The Scriptures are open to investigation. They challenge it. No one need offer an objection to the most scrutinizing inquiry. The book is here, and must stand upon its merits. Its high claims need not deter scholarship from its investigation. Only, to use the language of Bishop Butler in regard to another matter, "Let reason be kept to." If we are to be regaled with flights of imagination, let them be thus denominated; but let men not profess to be following the leadership of scholarship and scientific candor, when they are in reality dealing in imagination and scientific dogmatism, and appealing to philology to give them much needed support. After these years of attack from a literary standpoint, the books of the Bible are less affected than the Iliad. The Atomist has signally failed to make a single case. Iconoclasm has performed its task as best it could, and finds its labor lost. The criticism of to-day is, even in Germany, professedly in favor of the integrity of the Scripture.

But I pass to another part of the literary field. From the Bible to Shakespeare. This, at first thought, may seem a long journey. There appears but little congruity between the two. The only needed connection is the similarity of attack. The same spirit has whetted its sword against each; but the lack of similarity is more apparent than real. The Bible is God's exhibit of human nature and its relation to the Divine personality and plans. Shakespeare is man's profoundest exhibit of man in his relation to present and future. The fields are the same. They differ in extent. The profoundness of Shakespeare seems a shoreward shallow when viewed alongside the Bible. The Bible and Shakespeare have a further similarity, not one of character, but of results.

Each has been a potential factor in the stability of the English language. They each present the noble possibilities of the speech of the Anglo-Saxon. Each has left its indelible impress on speech and literature. Kossuth's mastery of English is by him attributed to the Bible, Shakespeare, and Webster's Dictionary. These were his sole masters, and sufficed to give him a command of language which ranks him among the princes of our English speech. That the authorship of the Iliad and the books of the Bible should be attacked is cause for little surprise. They were works of antiquity. It is an observable tendency of the mind to doubt a thing far removed in time. We lose sight of evidence. We dispense with the leadership of reason, and let inclination and imagination guide. This is a bias which antiquity must meet and, if it may, master. If the Iliad and the Bible were vulnerable in this regard, Shakespeare was not. He was a modern. His thought is neither ancient nor mediaeval. He has the characteristics of modern life, begotten of the hot-blooded era in which he lived. The modern Shakespeare is a target for the iconoclast. It seems but a stone's-cast from our time to the reign of Elizabeth and the day of the English drama. The time was one of action in every department of society. Conquest, colonization, literature, were beginning to render the Saxon name illustrious. It was the epoch of chivalry and chivalrous procedure, such as to create a species of literature and bring it to a perfection which half-wrested the scepter of supremacy from the hand of the Attic tragedy. In this literature there is a name which dwarfs all others. Otway, Ford, Massinger, Webster, Ben Jonson, Green, and Marlowe (some of these men of surprising genius) must take a lower place, for the master of revels is come. William Shakespeare is here. His life is not lengthily but plainly writ. He might have said, as did Tennyson's Ulysses, "I am become a name." It would seem that a man at such a time, with such a reputation, would have naught to fear from iconoclasm, however fierce. He, in a sense, was known as Raleigh or Essex were not. He has put himself into human history, and made the world his debtor. The existence of a man whose personality was admitted by his contemporaries must be believed in. Stories concerning him haunted the byways of London and literature. Ben Jonson paid him a tardy tribute. Men received him as they received Chaucer. But the spirit of the age finds him vulnerable. Delia Bacon, Smith, O'Connor, Holmes, and Donnelly are leaders who deny Shakespeare's identity. I may note Donnelly, an American gentleman of research and painstaking which would be creditable to a German scholar. He must be allowed to be a man of ingenuity. His method of discovering that Shakespeare was not himself has all the flavor of an invention. It glitters, not with generalities, but ingenuities. A sample page of his folio, covered with hieroglyphics which mark the progress of finding the cipher which he thinks the plays contain—such sample page is certainly a marvel, even to the generation which has read with avidity "Robert Elsmere" and "Looking Backward." A peculiarity in it all is, that his explanation makes marvelous doubly so. To believe that a man should have hidden his authorship of such works as the plays of Shakespeare makes a draft on the credulity of men too great to be borne. Why Junius should not have revealed himself is not difficult to discover. His life was at stake. But why the author of "The Tempest," or "King Lear," or "The Merchant of Venice," should have concealed his personality so carefully that three centuries have elapsed before men could discover it—this is an enigma no man can solve. In general, it is objected by non-believers in Shakespeare that it is impossible to conceive of a man whose rearing possessed so few advantages as did that of Shakespeare, having written the plays attributed to him. This is really the strong point in the whole discussion. All other arguments are subordinate. It is admitted that it does seem impossible for the poacher and wild country lad to become the poet pre-eminent in English literature. But this question is not to be decided by a priori reasoning. The genius displayed in the dramatic works under consideration is little less than miraculous. This all concede. Now, history has shown that to genius there is a sense in which "all things are possible." Genius can cross the Alps, can conquer Europe, can dumfound the world. Genius knows no rules. Once allow genius, and the problem is solved. It is conceded that for a common man, or even for one of exceptional ability, to have acquired without help the learning which characterizes the works of Shakespeare is impossible. But the man who wrote Hamlet was no mediocre, be he Bacon or Shakespeare. He was a superlative genius. This fact admitted, we need have no difficulty with the problem. It becomes a question a child can answer. The "myriad-minded Shakespeare" could do what to an ordinary, or even extraordinary, man would be an absolute impossibility. One critic discovers Shakespeare to be a musician; another, a classical scholar; and so he has been claimed in almost every field. He was not all. So critics confound us. They also confound themselves. The genius which could write the plays could master all these, though he squandered his youth. Let the history of genius guide from this labyrinth. Was not Caesar orator, general, historian? Was not Napoleon the same? Does not genius destroy all demonstrations with reference to itself? Do not Pascal, Euler, Da Vinci, and Angelo confound us? How dare we dogmatize as to the doings of genius? Read Shakespeare, and find you can not discover the characteristic of the man. You can not in his writings read his interior life. David Copperfield may display Dickens, and Byron's poems may give us the author's autobiography, and Shelley's writings may give a photograph of his intellectual self; but Shakespeare's plays give no clew to his character. He is all. He grovels in Falstaff; he towers in Prospero. He smites all strings that have music in them. He baffles us like a spirit, hiding himself in darkness. To attribute the authorship of the plays to Bacon is, to my thought, not to rid us of our difficulty, but rather to increase difficulty. Bacon we know. He was jurist, statesman, natural philosopher. Add to these the possibility of his having written Shakespeare, and the magnificence of his achievement would dwarf that of Shakespeare. Space forbids dwelling on this longer, though the theme is fascinating to any lover of letters. The thought in this paper (and that goes without the saying) is, not to discuss thoroughly these various phases of literary iconoclasm, but rather to call attention to them and to co-ordinate them.

I desire to show that these phases of criticism are not difficult of explanation. These are natural, and are the outgrowth of an image-making age. Study the age, understand it thoroughly, and the literature of that period can hardly be a puzzling question. The nineteenth century will stand in history as the chiefest iconoclast which has arisen in the world's first six thousand years. And its science, statecraft, art, and literature will be looked upon as segments of the one circle, and that circle the century.



VII

Tennyson the Dreamer

My earliest recollections of Alfred Tennyson are associated with the old Harper's volume, green-bound, large-paged, and frontispieced with two pictures of the poet—one of them, a face bearded, thoughtful, with eyes seeming not to see the near, but the remote; a head well-poised and noble, with hair tangled as if matted by the wind; the face, as I a lad thought, of a dreamer and a poet; and my first impressions, I think, were right, since the years are confirmatory of this first conviction. The second portrait pictured the poet wrapped in his cloak, standing, lost in thought, alone upon a cliff, gazing solitary at the sea, and listening. If I do not mistake, these pictures caught the poet's spirit in so far as pictures can portray spirit. Tennyson was always alone beside a sea, looking, listening, dreaming; and as dreamer this article purposes portraying him.

Tennyson was, his life through, a recluse. He dwelt apart. He was as one who stands afar oft and listens to the shock of battle, hears the echo of cannon's roar, and so conceives a remote picture of the tragedy of onset. English poetry began with Chaucer, outrider to a king, associate with State affairs, participant in those turbulencies recorded in Froissart's voluble "Chronicles." He was a courtier. Camp and king's antechamber and embassage and battle made the arsis and thesis of his poetry, and his poems are a picture of Edward III's age, accurate as if a king's pageant passing flung shadow in a stream along whose bank it marched. Spenser was a recluse, looking on the world's movement as an Oriental woman watches the street from her latticed window. Shakespeare was bon vivant, a player, therefore a brief chronicler of that time and of all times. He floated in people as birds in air. Dramatists have need to study men and women as a sculptor does anatomy. Seclusions are not the qualifications for dramatic art. Dryden was court follower and sycophant and a literary debauchee. Milton was publicist. Burns, loving and longing for courts and society, was enforced in his seclusion, and therefore angry at it. Wordsworth dwelt apart from men, as one who lives far from a public thoroughfare, where neither the dust nor bustle of travel can touch his bower of quiet; in its quality of isolation, Grasmere was an island in remote seas. Keats was a lad, dreaming in some dim Greek temple, listening to a fountain's plash at midnight which never whitened into dawn.

Nor does there seem to be reasonable room for doubt that poetry, aside from the drama, gains by seclusion and solitude. Much of Bayard Taylor's verse has a delicious flavor of poetry. He could write dreamily, as witness "The Metempsychosis of the Pine" and "Hylas," or he brings us into an Arab's tent as fellow-guest with him; but he belonged too much to the world. Traveler, newspaper correspondent, translator, ambassador, he was all these, and his varied exploits and attrition of the crowded world hindered the cadences of his poetry. William Cullen Bryant lost as poet by being journalist, his vocation drying up the fountains of his poetry. America's representative poet, James Russell Lowell, was editor, essayist, diplomat, poet,—in every department distinguished. His essay on Dante ranks him among the great expositors of that melancholy Florentine. Yet who of us has not wished he might have consecrated himself to poetry as priest to the altar? We gained in the publicist and essayist, but lost from the poet. And our ultimate loss out-topped our gain; for essayists and ambassadors are more numerous than poets. Had Lowell been a man of one service, and that service poetry, what might he not have left us as a poet's bequest? Would he had lived in some forest primeval, from whose shadows mountains climbed to meet the dawns, and streams stood in silver pools or broke into laughter on the stones, and where winds among the pines were constant ministrants of melody! Solitudes minister to poets. You can hear a fountain best at midnight, because then quiet rules.

Tennyson was a solitary. Hallam Tennyson's biography of the laureate resents the opinion that his father was unsocial, but really leaves the commonly-received opinion unrefuted. Tennyson's reticence and love of contemplation and aloneness amounted to a passion. He was not a man of the people. He fled from tourists as if they brought a plague with them. He did nothing but dream. You might as easily catch the whip-poor-will, whose habitation changes at an approaching step, as Tennyson. His was not in the widest sense a companionable nature. He cared to be alone and to be let dream, and resented intrusion and a disturbance of his solitude. Some have dreamless sleep, like the princess in "The Sleeping Beauty;" others sleep to dream, and to wake them by a hand's touch or a voice, however loved, would be to break the sweet continuity of their dreams. Seeing Tennyson was as he was, his solitude helped him. I think moonlight was wine to his spirit, and the dim voices of rolling breakers heard afar woke his passion and his poetry. The

"Break, break, break, On thy cold, gray stones, O sea!"

was what his spirit needed as qualification to

"Utter the thoughts that arise in me."

A dramatist needs the touching of living hands and sound of living human voices, the uproar of the human sea; for is he not poet of street and court and market-place and holiday? But there is a poetry which needs these accessories as little as a lover needs a throng to keep him company. Tennyson's poetry was such. We are not to conceive him as Lord Tennyson and inhabitant of the House of Lords. He did not belong there save as a recognition of splendid ability. If we are to get a clew to his genius, he must always be conceived as a recluse, who truly heard the world's words, but at a dim remove. There is remoteness in his poetry. The long ago was the day whose sunlight flooded his path. The illustrious Greek era and the Mediaeval Age were fields where his hosts mustered for battle. Consider how little of Tennyson's noblest poetry belongs to his own era. "The May Queen;" "Locksley Hall," and its complement, "Sixty Years After;" "In a Hospital Ward;" "The Grandmother;" his patriotic effusions; "Maud;" and "In Memoriam," sum up the modern contributions; nor is all of this impregnated with a genuinely modern spirit. "Enoch Arden" might have belonged to a lustrum of centuries ago, and "The May Queen" to remote decades. He writes in the nineteenth century, rarely of it, though, as is inevitable, he colors his thoughts of long-ago yesterdays with the colors of to-day. He is not strictly a contemporaneous poet. "Dora," "The Gardener's Daughter," and others of the sort, have no time ear-marks. "The Princess" discusses a living problem, but from the artistic background of a knightly era. "Locksley Hall," earlier and later, "Maud" and "In Memoriam" are about the only genuinely contemporaneous poems. My suggestion is, Tennyson hugs the shadows of yesterdays; nor need we go far to find the philosophy of this seizure of the past. Romance gathers in twilights. It is hard to persuade ourselves that those heroisms which make souls mighty as the gods, belong to here and now. Imagination fixes this golden age in what Tennyson would call "the underworld" of time. Greek mythology was the essential poetry of nature, and mediaevalism the essential poetry of manhood. Nothing, as appears to me, was more accurate and in keeping with Tennysonian genius than this choosing Greek antiquity and mediaevalism as the theater for his poetry; for he was the chief romance poet since Edmund Spenser. Spenser and Tennyson are the poets laureate of chivalry. What Spenser did in his age, that Tennyson did in his. So recall the chronological location of Tennyson's poetry. "Tithonus," "Oenone," "Ulysses," "Tiresias," "Amphion," "The Hesperides," "The Merman," "Demeter and Persephone." Do we not seem rather reading titles from some classic poet than from a poet of the nineteenth century?

The historical trilogy belongs to the mediaeval centuries; "Harold," "a Becket," and "Queen Mary" are of yesterday. Tennyson reached backward, as a child reaches over toward its mother. "Boadicea" belongs to a still earlier age of English history; and certainly "The Idyls of the King" "Sir Galahad," "St. Simeon Stylites," "St. Agnes," "The Mystic," "Merlin and the Gleam," belong to the romantic, half-hidden era of history and of thought. "Sir John Oldcastle" and "Columbus" belong to the visible historic era, while in his wonderful "Rizpah" the poet has knit the present to dim centuries of the remotest past; and the tragic "Lucretius" takes us once more into the classic period. To the purely romantic belong "Recollections of the Arabian Nights," "The Lotos-Eaters," "The Talking Oak," "A Dream of Fair Women," and "Godiva." Now subtract these poems and their kin from the bulk of Tennyson's poetry, and the remainder will appear comparatively small. Certainly we may affirm with safety that Tennyson was poet of the past.

You can get the poetry of the Alhambra only by moonlight; and to a mind so wholly poetic as Tennyson's it seemed possible to get the poetry of conduct only by seeing it in the moonlight of departed years. To-day is matter-of-fact in dress and design; mediaevalism was fanciful, picturesque, romantic. Chivalry was the poetry of the Christ in civilization; and the knight warring to recover the tomb of God was the poem among soldiers, and in entire consonance with his nature, Tennyson's poetic genius flits back into the poetic days, as I have seen birds flit back into a forest. In Tennyson's poetry two things are clear. They are mediaeval in location; they are modern in temper. Their geography is yesterday, their spirit is to-day; and so we have the questions and thoughts of our era as themes for Tennyson's voice and lute. His treatment is ancient: his theme is recent. He has given diagnosis and alleviation of present sickness, but hides face and voice behind morion and shield.