But all the time from his boyhood upward a great purpose had been growing and maturing in his mind. Nature was little more than a picture-gallery to him; the pleasures of the eye had all but absolute dominion; and he

"Roamed from hill to hill, from rock to rock, Still craving combinations of new forms, New pleasures, wide empire for the sight, Proud of her own endowments, and rejoiced To lay the inner faculties asleep."

But, though he had not yet found his distinctive aim as a poet, he was inwardly bent, all the time that his relatives saw in him only a wayward and unpromising aversion to work in any regular line, upon poetry as "his office upon earth."

In this determination he was strengthened by his sister Dorothy, who with rare devotion consecrated her life henceforward to his service. A timely legacy enabled them to carry their purpose into effect. A friend of his, whom he had nursed in a last illness, Raisley Calvert, son of the steward of the Duke of Norfolk, who had large estates in Cumberland, died early in 1795, leaving him a legacy of L900. And here it may be well to notice how opportunely, as De Quincey half-ruefully remarked, money always fell in to Wordsworth, enabling him to pursue his poetic career without distraction. Calvert's bequest came to him when he was on the point of concluding an engagement as a journalist in London. On it and other small resources he and his sister, thanks to her frugal management, contrived to live for nearly eight years. By the end of that time Lord Lonsdale, who owed Wordsworth's father a large sum for professional services, and had steadily refused to pay it, died, and his successor paid the debt with interest. His wife, Mary Hutchinson, whom he married in 1802, brought him some fortune; and in 1813, when, in spite of his plain living, his family began to press upon his income, he was appointed stamp-distributor for Westmoreland, with an income of L500, afterward nearly doubled by the increase of his district. By this succession of timely godsends, Wordsworth, though he did not escape some periods of sharp anxiety, was saved from the necessity of turning aside from his vocation.

To return, however, to the course of his life from the time when he resolved to labor with all his powers in the office of poet. The first two years, during which he lived with his self-sacrificing sister at Racedown, in Dorset, were spent in half-hearted and very imperfectly successful experiments—satires in imitation of Juvenal, the tragedy of "The Borderers," and a poem in the Spenserian stanza, the poem now entitled "Guilt and Sorrow." How much longer this time of doubtful, self-distrustful endeavor might have continued is a subject for curious speculation; an end was put to it by a fortunate incident, a visit from Coleridge, who had read his first publication, and seen in it, what none of the public critics had discerned, the advent of "an original poetic genius." It would be impossible to exaggerate the importance for Wordsworth of the arrival of this enthusiastic Columbus. Under his sister's genial influence he was groping his way doubtfully out of the labyrinth of poetic conventions, beginning to see a new pathos and sublimity in human life, but not yet convinced, except by fits and starts, of the rightness of his own vision. Stubborn and independent as Wordsworth was, he needed some friendly voice from the outer world to give him confidence in himself. Coleridge rendered him this indispensable service. He read to his visitor one of his experiments, the story of the ruined cottage, afterward introduced into the first book of "The Excursion." Coleridge, who had already seen original poetic genius in the poems published before, was enthusiastic in his praise of them as having "a character by books not hitherto reflected," and his praise gave new heart and hope to the poet, hitherto hesitating and uncertain.

June, 1797, was the date of this memorable visit. So pleasant was the companionship on both sides that, when Coleridge returned to Nether Stowey, in Somerset, Wordsworth, at his instance, changed his quarters to Alfoxden, within a mile and a half of Coleridge's temporary residence, and the two poets lived in almost daily intercourse for the next twelve months. During that period Wordsworth's powers rapidly expanded and matured; ideas that had been gathering in his mind for years, and lying there in dim confusion, felt the stir of a new life and ranged themselves in clearer shapes under the fresh, quickening breath of Coleridge's swift and discursive dialect. The radiant restless vitality of the more variously gifted man stirred the stiffer and more sluggish nature of the recluse to its depths, and Coleridge's quick and generous appreciation of his power gave him precisely the encouragement that he needed.

It is interesting to compare with what he actually accomplished, the plan of life-work with which Wordsworth finally settled at Grasmere, in the last month of the eighteenth century. The plan was definitely conceived as he left the German town of Goslar, during a trip on the Continent, in the spring of 1799. Tired of the wandering, unsettled life that he had led hitherto; dissatisfied also with the fragmentary, occasional, and disconnected character of his lyrical poems, he longed for a permanent home among his native hills, where he might, as one called and consecrated to the task, devote his powers continuously to the composition of a great philosophical poem on Man, Nature, and Society. The poem was to be called "The Recluse." He communicated the design to Coleridge, who gave him enthusiastic encouragement to proceed. In the first transport of the conception he felt as if he needed only solitude and leisure for the continuous execution of it. But, though he had still before him fifty years of peaceful life amid his beloved scenery, the work in the projected form at least was destined to remain incomplete. Doubts and misgivings soon arose, and favorable moments of felt inspiration delayed their coming. To sustain him in his resolution he thought of writing as an introduction, or, as he put it, an antechapel to the church which he proposed to build, a history of his own mind up to the time when he recognized the great mission of his life. It appears from a letter to his friend, Sir George Beaumont, that his health was far from robust, and in particular that he could not write without intolerable physical uneasiness. We should probably not be wrong in connecting his physical weakness with his rule of waiting for favorable moments. His next start with "The Prelude," in the spring of 1804, was more prosperous; he dropped it for several months, but, resuming again in the spring of 1805, he completed it in the summer of that year. But still the composition of the great work to which it was intended to be a portico proceeded by fits and starts. It was not till 1814 that the second of the three divisions of "The Recluse," ultimately named "The Excursion," was ready for publication; and he went no further in the execution of his great design.

We shall speak presently of the reception of the "The Excursion." Meantime, we must look elsewhere for the virtual accomplishment of the great design of "The Recluse." The purpose was not, after all, betrayed; it was really fulfilled, though not in the form intended, in his various occasional poems. In relation to the edifice that he aspired to construct, he likened these poems to little cells, oratories, and sepulchral recesses; they are really the completed work, much more firmly united by their common purpose than by any formal and visible nexus of words. Formally disconnected, they really, as we read and feel them, range themselves to spiritual music, as the component parts of a great poetic temple, finding a rendezvous amid the scenery of the district where the poet had his local habitation. The Lake District, as transfigured by Wordsworth's imagination, is the fulfilment of his ambition after an enduring memorial. The Poems, collected and published in 1807, compose in effect "a philosophical poem on Man, Nature, and Society," the title of which might fitly have been "The Recluse," "as having for its principal subject the sensations and opinions of a poet living in retirement." As a realization of the idea of "The Recluse," these poems are, from every poetical point of view, infinitely superior to the kind of thing that he projected and failed to complete.

The derisive fury with which "The Excursion" was assailed upon its first appearance has long been a stock example of critical blindness, conceit, and malignity. And yet, if we look at the position now claimed for "The Excursion" by competent authorities, the error of the first critics is seen to be not in their indictment of faults, but in the prominence they gave to the faults, and their generally disrespectful tone toward a poet of Wordsworth's greatness. Jeffrey's petulant "This will never do," uttered, professedly, at least, more in sorrow than in anger, because the poet would persist, in spite of all friendly counsel, in misapplying his powers, has become a byword of ridiculous critical cocksureness. But the curious thing is that "The Excursion" has not "done," and that the Wordsworthians who laugh at Jeffrey are in the habit of repeating the substance of his criticism, though in more temperate and becoming language.

There can be little doubt that adverse criticism had a depressing influence on Wordsworth's poetical powers, notwithstanding his nobly expressed defiance of it, and his determination to hold on in his own path undisturbed. Its effect in retarding the sale of his poems, and thus depriving him of the legitimate fruits of his industry, was a favorite topic with him in his later years; but the absence of general appreciation, and the ridicule of what he considered his best and most distinctive work, contributed in all probability to a still more unfortunate result—the premature depression and deadening of his powers. He schooled himself to stoical endurance, but he was not superhuman, and in the absence of sympathy not only was any possibility of development checked, but he ceased to write with the spontaneity and rapture of his earlier verse. His resolute industry was productive of many wise, impressive, and charitable reflections, and many casual felicities of diction, but the poet very seldom reached the highest level of his earlier inspirations.

Wordsworth was appointed poet-laureate on the death of Southey, in 1843. His only official composition was an ode on the installation of the prince consort as chancellor of Cambridge University, in 1847. This was his last writing in verse. He died at Rydal Mount, after a short illness, on April 23, 1850, and was buried in Grasmere Churchyard.



WASHINGTON IRVING

(1783-1859)



Washington Irving, the first American who obtained a European reputation merely as a man of letters, was born at New York, April 3, 1783. Both his parents were immigrants from Great Britain, his father, originally an officer in the merchant service, but at the time of Irving's birth a considerable merchant, having come from the Orkneys and his mother from Falmouth. Irving was intended for the legal profession, but his studies were interrupted by an illness necessitating a voyage to Europe, in the course of which he proceeded as far as Rome and made the acquaintance of Washington Allston. He was called to the Bar upon his return, but made little effort to practice, preferring to amuse himself with literary ventures. The first of these of any importance, a satirical miscellany entitled "Salmagundi," written in conjunction with his brother William and J. K. Paulding, gave ample proof of his talents as a humorist. These were still more conspicuously displayed in his next attempt, "Knickerbocker's History of New York" (1809). The satire of "Salmagundi" had been principally local, and the original design of "Knickerbocker's History" was only to burlesque a pretentious disquisition on the history of the city in a guide-book by Dr. Samuel Mitchell. The idea expanded as Irving proceeded, and he ended by not merely satirizing the pedantry of local antiquaries, but by creating a distinct literary type out of the solid Dutch burgher whose phlegm had long been an object of ridicule to the mercurial Americans. Though far from the most finished of Irving's productions, "Knickerbocker" manifests the most original power and is the most genuinely national in its quaintness and drollery. The very tardiness and prolixity of the story are skilfully made to heighten the humorous effect. The next few years were unproductive. Upon the death of his father, Irving had become a sleeping partner in his brother's commercial house, a branch of which was established at Liverpool. This, combined with the restoration of peace, induced him to visit England in 1815, when he found the stability of the firm seriously compromised. After some years of ineffectual struggle it became bankrupt. This misfortune compelled Irving to resume his pen as a means of subsistence. His reputation had preceded him to England, and the curiosity naturally excited by the then unwonted apparition of a successful American author procured him admission into the highest literary circles, where his popularity was insured by his amiable temper and polished manners. As an American, moreover, he aroused no jealousy and no competition, and stood aloof from the political and literary disputes which then divided England. Campbell, Jeffrey, Moore, Scott were counted among his friends, and the last-named zealously recommended him to the publisher Murray, who, after at first refusing, consented (1820) to bring out "Geoffrey Crayon's Sketch-book," which was already appearing in America in a periodical form. The most interesting part of this work is the description of an English Christmas, which displays a delicate humor not unworthy of the writer's evident model, Addison. Some stories and sketches on American themes contribute to give it variety; of these Rip Van Winkle is the most remarkable. It speedily obtained the greatest success on both sides of the Atlantic. "Bracebridge Hall," a work purely English in subject, followed in 1822, and showed to what account the American observer had turned his experience of English country life. The humor is, nevertheless, much more English than American. "Tales of a Traveller" appeared in 1824, and Irving, now in comfortable circumstances determined to enlarge his sphere of observation by a journey on the Continent. After a long course of travel he settled down at Madrid, in the house of the American consul, Rich. His intention at the time was to translate Navarrete's recently published work on Columbus. Finding, however, that this was rather a collection of valuable materials than a systematic biography, he determined to compose a biography of his own by its assistance, supplemented by independent researches in the Spanish archives. His work appeared in 1828 and obtained a merited success. It is a finished representation of Columbus from the point of view of the nineteenth century, affecting neither brilliancy nor originality, but a model of tasteful elegance, felicitous in every detail and adequate in every respect. "The Companions of Columbus" followed; and a prolonged residence in the south of Spain gave Irving materials for two highly picturesque books, "The Conquest of Granada," professedly derived from the MSS. of an imaginary Fray Antonio Agapida, and "The Alhambra." Previous to their appearance he had been appointed secretary to the embassy at London, an office as purely complimentary to his literary ability as the legal degree which he about the same time received from the University of Oxford. Returning to the United States in 1832, after seventeen years' absence, he found his name a household word, and himself universally honored as the first American who had won for his country recognition on equal terms in the literary republic. After the rush of fetes and public compliments had subsided, he undertook a tour in the Western prairies, and returning to the neighborhood of New York built for himself a delightful retreat on the Hudson, to which he gave the name of Sunnyside. His acquaintance with the New York millionaire, John Jacob Astor, prompted his next important work, "Astoria," a history of the fur-trading settlement founded by Astor in Oregon, deduced with singular literary ability from dry commercial records, and, without labored attempts at word-painting, evincing a remarkable faculty for bringing scenes and incidents vividly before the eye. "Captain Bonneville," based upon the unpublished memoirs of a veteran hunter, was another work of the same class. In 1842 Irving was appointed ambassador to Spain. He spent four years in the country, without this time turning his residence to literary account; and it was not until two years after his return that Forster's "Life of Goldsmith," by reminding him of a slight essay of his own which he now thought too imperfect by comparison to be included among his collected writings, stimulated him to the production of his own biography of his favorite author. Without pretensions to original research, the book displays an admirable talent for employing existing material to the best effect. The same may be said of "The Lives of Mahomet and his Successors," published two years subsequently. Here, as elsewhere, Irving has correctly discriminated the biographer's province from the historian's, and leaving the philosophical investigation of cause and effect to writers of Gibbon's calibre, has applied himself to represent the picturesque features of the age as embodied in the actions and utterances of its most characteristic representatives. His last days were devoted to a biography of Washington, undertaken in an enthusiastic spirit, but which the author found exhausting and his readers tame. His genius required a more poetical theme, and indeed the biographer of Washington must be at least a potential soldier and statesman. Irving just lived to complete this work, dying of heart disease at Sunnyside, on November 28, 1859.

Although one of the chief ornaments of American literature, Irving is not characteristically an American author. Like most of the transatlantic writers of his generation, he disappointed expectation by a scrupulous conformity to acknowledged European standards. The American vine had not then begun to produce the looked-for wild grapes. Irving, however, is one of the few authors of his period who really manifests traces of a vein of national peculiarity which might under other circumstances have been productive. "Knickerbocker's History of New York," although the air of mock solemnity which constitutes the staple of its humor is peculiar to no literature, manifests nevertheless, a power of producing a distinct national type. Had circumstances taken Irving to the West and placed him amid a society teeming with quaint and genial eccentricity, he might possibly have been the first Western humorist, and his humor might have gained in depth and richness. In England, on the other hand, everything encouraged his natural fastidiousness; he became a refined writer, but by no means a robust one. At the same time he is too essentially the man of his own age to pass for a paler Addison or a more decorous Sterne. He has far more of the poet than any of the writers of the eighteenth century, and his moralizing, unlike theirs, is unconscious and indirect. The same poetical feeling is shown in his biographies; his subject is invariably chosen for its picturesqueness, and whatever is unessential to portraiture is thrown into the background. The result is that his biographies, however deficient in research, bear the stamp of genuine artistic intelligence, equally remote from compilation and disquisition. In execution they are almost faultless; the narrative is easy, the style pellucid, and the writer's judgment nearly always in accordance with the general verdict of history. They will not, therefore, be easily superseded, and indeed Irving's productions are in general impressed with that signet of classical finish which guarantees the permanency of literary work more surely than direct utility or even intellectual power. This refinement is the more admirable for being in great part the reflection of his own moral nature. Without ostentation or affectation, he was exquisite in all things, a mirror of loyalty, courtesy, and good taste in all his literary connections, and exemplary in all the relations of domestic life which he was called upon to assume. He never married, remaining true to the memory of an early attachment blighted by death.



JAMES FENIMORE COOPER[12]

[Footnote 12: Copyright, 1894, by Selmar Hess.]

By PRESIDENT CHARLES F. THWING

(1789-1851)



In the churchyard of Christ's Church, in the town bearing his name, in the State of New York, rests all that is mortal of James Fenimore Cooper. It is now more than two score of years since he died. The spot is marked by a simple slab of marble. In the public cemetery of Cooperstown stands a noble monument to Leather Stocking. It is crowned with a figure of this immortal character. The personality of Cooper himself must, like the human body, gradually fade away; but certain personalities which he brought into literature are lasting. Cooper the man dies; Cooper the novelist lives.

Cooper the man and Cooper the author are singularly united and yet singularly distinct. His boyhood was spent in scenes which figure in his novels, and certain of the novels seem in certain respects to be only the projection of early experiences through which he passed or of which he constantly heard. Yet there are many qualities manifest in his writings which do not seem to belong to his personality and many elements exhibited in his personality which are not suggested by his stories.

Born in Burlington, N. J., September 15, 1789, he was taken, at the age of about a year, to that part of the State of New York which has since become lastingly associated with his life and work. His early home was one of a considerable degree of affluence. His father, near the close of the Revolution, had become possessed of large tracts of land about the sources of the Susquehanna, and on the borders of the endless forests of Central New York the Cooper family established a home. In this wilderness James Fenimore Cooper spent his boyhood. This settlement was not unlike the ordinary new settlements which are, at various stages of their history, found in many of the States of the American Union. It was picturesque in the richness and diversity of the gifts of nature. Game abounded in water and wood. The years he here lived deeply affected his character and influenced his career. It is reported that in later life he said "he might have chosen for his subject happier periods, more interesting events, and possibly more beauteous scenes, but he could not have taken any that would lie so close to his heart."[13] Apparently the education of books and of formal teachers was less influential than the education of nature. In the schools of Cooperstown and under the tuition of the rector of St. Peter's Church, Albany—a graduate of an English university—and at Yale College, he received whatever of intellectual training he received in his youth. A frontier town, however, offered few facilities in education, and his career at New Haven was cut short in the midst by his dismission for some sort of a college frolic, and even while he was at Yale he confesses that he played the first year and did not work much the rest of the time. The discipline he received, however, from his English master at Albany seems to have been one of the formative factors of his early life.

[Footnote 13: "James Fenimore Cooper," by Thomas R. Lounsbury, page 5. To this, the only biography of Cooper, and an admirable work, the writer acknowledges his great obligations. On his death-bed Cooper instructed his family to publish no life of himself.]

In the autumn of 1806, at the age of seventeen, Cooper found himself a seaman before the mast in the ship Sterling, endeavoring to secure the training necessary for entering the United States Navy; for to this career it was decided he should devote himself. His entrance to the navy as midshipman in 1808, his marriage to a Miss De Lancey at Mamaroneck, Westchester County, N. Y., in 1811, his retirement from the navy a few months after his marriage, and a somewhat migratory life distinguished by a "gentlemanly" and unprofitable pursuit of agriculture for eight years, represent the chief facts and conditions of his career from the age of nineteen to the age of thirty. Describing the last years of this period Professor Lounsbury says: "His thoughts were principally directed to improving the little estate that had come into his possession. (His father died in 1809.) He planted trees, he built fences, he drained swamps, he planned a lawn. The one thing which he did not do was to write."

On November 10, 1820, in New York, was published a novel in two volumes, bearing the title "Precaution." Its author was James Fenimore Cooper. He was thirty-one years old. He had had no special literary training. But this novel was the beginning of the career of one of the most prolific of American authors. Accident brought this career to this apparently rather unsuccessful man. Reading to his wife one day a novel dealing with English society, and displeased by it, he made the remark, "I believe I could write a better story myself." His wife challenged him; the challenge he accepted; the book followed.

There were no novelists at the close of the second and the beginning of the third decade of our century. Hawthorne was a shy youth fitting for college. John P. Kennedy, by whose side Cooper appears in the picture of Washington Irving and his friends, was entering the Maryland House of Delegates, and twelve years were to elapse before the issue of his story of Virginia country life, "Swallow Barn." Irving and Paulding were writing sketches. Charles B. Brown was dead. Cooper was alone as a novelist.

Destiny thus found Cooper rather than Cooper his destiny. In the next thirty years he wrote no less than seventy books, or important review articles, and not a few of the books were published in two volumes. So prolific a power of authorship is unique enough, and when considered in the light of the absence of literary associations of the first half of his life seems absolutely unique in the history of men of letters. It is, of course, in and through this latter half of his life that Cooper, both as a man and as an author, made his contribution to the common possessions of mankind.

The larger part of this period he lived in either New York or Cooperstown. Seven years of it (1826-1833), however, were spent in Europe with his family. The whole of it was, till at least the last years, a pretty stormy time to Cooper personally, as well as a busy one in his writing. From the memory of most people now living the recollection of the lawsuits in which Cooper became involved has faded. They were about as numerous as the books he wrote, and they were of an irritating character which would have wearied out a man less bold and enduring. Of this sort of defence and offence he had had a foretaste during his European residence, when he was often called on to defend his native country from an ignorant and depreciative criticism, which was sixty years ago far more common than now. But he who was the defender of his country when abroad, seems to have become the severe critic of his country when at home. "Condescension in foreigners" is bad enough, but condescension in a native who has lived abroad is far worse. On returning Cooper found an America, as he believed, vastly deteriorated. Morals had become base; manners coarse; commerce fallen into speculation. He was not the man to keep his sentiments locked up in his heart. He wrote, and wrote with fulness and severity of his country and of his countrymen. Thurlow Weed, in 1841, wrote of him: "He has disparaged American lakes, ridiculed American scenery, burlesqued American coin, and even satirized the American flag." He also was so foolish as to reply to certain adverse criticisms made on "The Bravo," and in seeking to bring down the lightning on the head of his reviewer, he brought down both thunder and lightning on his own head and about his ears. It must be added, too, that he did not live at peace with his neighbors. Discussion and litigation as to a piece of land which the people of Cooperstown believed had been given by Cooper's father for public uses was peculiarly exasperating. The citizens, in a public meeting, resolved, "That we recommend and request the trustees of the Franklin Library, in this village, to remove all books of which Cooper is the author from said library." That Cooper was legally right did not at all lessen the bitterness. He attacked the newspapers and the newspapers attacked him. Libel suits followed, which, too, he usually won. Criticism of his "History of the United States Navy" aroused his indignation, and a trial which is a cause celebre was the result. A time of storm all these years were for Cooper.

All this gives the impression of a man who was constantly "spoiling for a fight." The impression is hardly just, however. He was not quarrelsome; but he was proud, possessed of strong passions and of a deep sense of his own rights. Whenever, therefore, what he regarded as his rights were struck at, he struck back. For one blow received another was given, till what was simply a continued litigation seemed to be his normal condition. But these troublesome scenes have to be read in the books, and are not lingering in the minds of his few remaining contemporaries.

In this period he was constantly engaged in writing. Not only was the number of volumes he produced great, but the variety of subject and treatment was no less great. He even wrote a drama. Yet it is to his novels that one turns as the most precious result of these years. Cooper is, above all other Americans, the writer of the novel of adventure. In his own day, at home and abroad, he was often called the American Scott. The metaphor is true in several senses, besides the one point of both the American and the Scotchman standing for the story of objective life and daring. Like Scott, Cooper wrote a tremendous amount; like Scott, he wrote with great rapidity; like Scott, he burdened his books with long introductions; like Scott, he was careless in literary expression; like Scott, too, into the novel of adventure he put a mighty literary power. It must be said that, unlike the Waverley Novels, Cooper's romances have little of development, and that to the cultivated reader Scott is more attractive. One cannot forbear saying that the women of Cooper's creation are far inferior to Scott's—they are women usually narrow in knowledge, weak in brain and heart, and gentle, if not even insipid, in character. They are as proper as well-draped statues, and almost as lifeless. When Cooper, however, passes from this point of weakness to nature herself, he shows himself a master. His descriptions of nature represent his finest work, and are among the finest to be found anywhere. His sea tales are properly named; they are rather tales of the sea than tales of seamen. The closer, too, is the association of his characters with the scenes of nature the more life-like are they. No one has painted the Indian character, with all its varieties of intellectual and emotional contrasts, with its honor and shame, its tenderness and its severity, as has the author of "The Last of the Mohicans." No one has created a character in American fiction more original, more certain of immortality, or combining more elements worthy of the novelist's best skill than Leather-Stocking.

Among his many stories is large range of excellence. It is usually considered that of his sea tales "The Red Rover" is the best, the product of his early career, and that of the Indian stories "The Pathfinder" and "The Deerslayer" represent his highest achievement, as they are the work of the last years. But in thus distinguishing certain books, no one can forget that in "The Spy," his second work, or "The Pioneers," or "The Pilot," or "The Last of the Mohicans," Cooper has written books which are among the most popular and most powerful of their kind.

James Fenimore Cooper, both as a man and as an author, has entered largely into American life and literature. He was thoroughly human. He was strong, and strength with eccentricities—and Cooper had these—is more attractive and moving than mild weakness attended by the graces of propriety. He was proud without vanity; a good hater, yet beloved to devotion in his home; severe, yet holding himself to a high standard of justice; of mighty passions, yet also of mighty will for their control; loyal to what he would esteem right principle; patriotic though the severest critic of his country; a Puritan in character though condemning the Puritan character of New England; frank, fearless, truthful. He lacked tact, and for the lack he paid the penalty of obloquy; there was little of the compromising or conciliatory in his nature. But he had what men of tact are in peril of lacking—the heroic qualities of mind and heart and will and conscience. He was a faithful husband, a loving father. So scrupulously careful was he of the interests of his children that his own daughter says she was not permitted to read her father's books before she was eighteen. His influence is ever in favor of simple truth and simple righteousness. As Mr. James Russell Lowell says: "I can conceive of no healthier reading for a boy, or girl either, than Scott's novels, or Cooper's, to speak only of the dead. I have found them very good reading, at least, for one young man, for one middle-aged man, and for one who is growing old. No, no—banish the Antiquary, banish Leather-Stocking, and banish all the world! Let us not go about to make life duller than it is."

[Signature of the author.]



WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT[14]

[Footnote 14: Reprinted by permission from Appletons' Journal.]

By RICHARD HENRY STODDARD

(1794-1878)

The life of William Cullen Bryant covers what to me is the most interesting period in the history of American letters. We cannot be said to have had a literature when he was born (certainly nothing worthy of the name), and if we have one now, we owe whatever is of value therein to three or four writers, among whom he will always stand first. We were waiting for it, as the English were waiting for a new-growth in their literature, and it came at last, though later to us than to them. The same seed blossomed in both countries, only it was native there, being first sown in "Percy's Reliques," while here it was transplanted at second-hand from the pages of a new race of English poets, particularly Wordsworth. They returned to nature in literature; we, who had no literature, discovered it in nature. That both the English and ourselves have gone astray after other gods is certain, but all is not lost yet; Greek atheism will no more satisfy them forever, than the "barbaric yawp" of the rough will satisfy us.

William Cullen Bryant was born at Cummington, Mass., on November 3, 1794. He was happy in his parentage, his father, who was a physician, being a studious and thoughtful man, while his mother was a woman of strong understanding. The infant poet is said to have been remarkable for an immense head, which was not pleasing in the sight of his father, who ordered him to be ducked every morning in a spring near the house. He resisted the treatment, as what child of tender years would not? but to no purpose—he was predestined to be ducked. Whether the cold water arrested the cerebral development, we are not told, but it strengthened his frail physique, and made him a hardy little lad. He began early to write verses, a pursuit in which he was encouraged by his father, who directed him to what were then considered the best models, taught him the value of correctness of expression and condensation of statement, and pointed out the difference between true and false eloquence in verse. The father of Pope is said to have performed the same good offices for his rickety little son: "These be good rhymes, Alexander;" or the reverse, when his couplets were unfinished. Allibone states that Master Bryant's first effusions were translations from some of the Latin poets, but, as these were written and printed in his tenth year, the account is scarcely credible. He began at ten years of age to write verses (says another authority), which were printed in the Northampton newspaper of that day—the Hampshire Gazette.

When he was fourteen he had verse enough on hand to make a little pamphlet volume, which was published (we are not told where) in 1808. A second edition, corrected and enlarged, was brought out at Boston in the ensuing year. It was entitled "The Embargo; or, Sketches of the Times—a Satire," and is described as being a reflection, in heroic measure, of the anti-Jeffersonian Federalism of New England. "If the young bard," said the Aristarchus of the Monthly Anthology for June, 1808; "if the young bard has received no assistance in the composition of this poem, he certainly bids fair, should he continue to cultivate his talents, to gain a respectable station on the Parnassian mount, and to reflect credit on the literature of his country." Besides the "Embargo," the volume contained an "Ode to Connecticut," and a copy of verses entitled "Drought," written in his thirteenth year.

In 1810 the young poet entered Williams College, a sophomore, and remained two years. He is said to have distinguished himself greatly, and we can readily believe it. We can believe anything of the youth who conceived "Thanatopsis." When this noble poem was written is variously stated; one account says in 1812, and another 1813. It is of no great consequence, however, whether Bryant was eighteen or nineteen at the time. No other poet ever wrote so profound a poem at so early an age. In whatever light we consider it, "Thanatopsis" is without a parallel in the history of literature. The train of thought it awakens is the most universal with which the soul of man can be touched, belonging to no age and no clime, but to all climes and ages, and embracing all that pertains to him on earth. It is his life-hymn and his death-anthem. It is mortality. Poets from immemorial time have brooded over life and death, but none with the seriousness and grandeur of this young American. There are moments in the life of man when he stands face to face with nature, and sees her as she is, and himself as he is, and the relation of everything in the universe. Such a moment is fixed for all time in "Thanatopsis."

It would be interesting to know what authors the youthful student read with most avidity and attention. The influence of Pope is visible in "The Embargo," as the influence of Wordsworth is visible in "Thanatopsis." But between the writing of these poems—a space of four or five years—other poets than those named must have stimulated his thoughts and colored his style. Cowper, we imagine, was one, and Akenside, perhaps, another. He may have read Scott, and Southey, and Coleridge, although there are no traces of either in anything that he has written. That Wordsworth was more to him at this period than any other English poet, we have the testimony of the elder Dana. "I shall never forget," he writes, "with what feeling my friend Bryant, some years ago, described to me the effect upon him of his meeting for the first time with Wordsworth's ballads. He lived, when quite young, where but few works of poetry were to be had; at a period, too, when Pope was still the great idol of the Temple of Art. He said that, upon opening Wordsworth, a thousand springs seemed to gush up at once in his heart, and the face of nature, of a sudden, to change into a strange freshness and life." Wordsworth may have been the master of Bryant, but it was only as Ramsay was the master of Burns, and Chaucer of Keats, and Keats himself of Tennyson. That is to say, the disciple found in the master a kindred spirit. The eyes with which Bryant looked on nature were his own. Wordsworth never imparted to him "the vision and the faculty divine." It should be observed, also, that he was favorably situated in his youth; not like so many poets, in the heart of a great city, but in the quiet of the country, amid green fields and woods, in sight of rivers and mountains, and beneath a sky which was nowhere obstructed by man. The scenery around Cummington is said to be beautiful, and, immediately around the Bryant homestead, of a rich pastoral character. It haunted him like a passion from the beginning, and appeared again and again in his poetry, always with a fresh and added charm.

After leaving Williams College, Mr. Bryant studied law, first with Judge Howe, of Washington, and afterward with Mr. William Baylies, of Bridgewater. Admitted to the bar at Plymouth in 1815, he practised one year at Plainfield, and then removed to Great Barrington, where, in 1821, he married Miss Frances Fairchild. Of this lady, who survived until within a few years, there are several graceful and touching memorials in the poetry of her husband. She was the ideal celebrated in the poem beginning, "Oh, fairest of the rural maids;" and it is to her that "The Future Life" and "The Life that Is" are addressed. Whether Mr. Bryant was a successful lawyer, we are not told; but, as he lived at Great Barrington nine years in the practice of law, it is to be supposed that he was. However this may be, he still cultivated his poetry, which was now bringing him into notice. "Thanatopsis" was published in 1816 in the North American Review, though not precisely as we have it now; as was also the "Inscription for the Entrance to a Wood"—a study from nature, at Cummington, and the well-known lines "To a Water-fowl," which were written while he was studying his profession at Bridgewater.

The next four or five years of Mr. Bryant's life were comparatively unproductive; at least, we hear of nothing from his pen until 1821, when he delivered "The Ages" before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge. It was published there during the same year, at the suggestion of some of his friends, in a little volume which contained, in addition to the three poems already mentioned, the pleasant pastoral, "Green River," previously contributed to Dana's "Idle Man." That law had by this time become distasteful to him, we gather from its concluding stanza:

"Though forced to drudge for the dregs of men, And scrawl strange words with the barbarous pen."

In 1824 we find him writing for the Literary Gazette, a favorite weekly published at Boston, and edited by Theophilus Parsons. His contributions to this journal were "The Murdered Traveller," "The Old Mans' Funeral," "The Forest Hymn," and the spirited lyric "March." The next year he removed to New York, and became one of the editors of the New York Review and Athenaeum Magazine. It was the wisest step that he could have taken, although New York, at that time, was of less importance in the literary world than Boston or Philadelphia. The Review was not a success, so it was merged, in 1826, in a work of similar character, The United States Review and Literary Gazette, which closed with the second volume in September, 1827. Mr. Bryant's brief residence in New York had enlarged his circle of friends, among whom were Robert C. Sands, who was associated with him in the New York Review, Fitz-Greene Halleck, Gulian C. Verplanck, and others; and it had added to his popularity as a writer, the excellence and variety of his poems embracing a wider range of subjects than he had hitherto chosen. The most noticeable of these were "The African Chief," "The Disinterred Warrior," "The Indian Girl's Lament," and "The Death of the Flowers." It is not too much to say of the last that it is the most exquisite poem of the kind in the language—as perfect, in its way, as Keats' "Ode to Autumn," which it resembles in grace and delicacy of conception, and surpasses in fidelity and picturesqueness of description. It is interesting, also, from the light which it sheds upon a painful incident in the life of the poet—the early death of a beloved and beautiful sister:

"In the cold, moist earth we laid her, when the forests cast the leaf, And we wept that one so lovely should have a life so brief: Yet not unmeet it was that one, like that young friend of ours, So gentle and so beautiful, should perish with the flowers."

There are other allusions to this "fair, meek blossom" in Mr. Bryant's poems. The sonnet, "Consumption," was addressed to her; and she mingled with his solemn musings in "The Past."

The United States Review ceased, as we have seen, in 1827. Its editor seems to have foreseen its fate in advance, and provided for it; for, before it happened, he had become connected with the Evening Post. This was in 1826, from which time dates Mr. Bryant's connection with American journalism—a connection which he never relinquished, and which, while it may have lessened his poetic productiveness, undoubtedly added largely to his influence with his countrymen. The Evening Post had just completed the first quarter of a century of its existence, and stood foremost among the journals of New York. Perhaps it was the foremost, all things considered. But, however this may be, it was a journal for which a gentleman could write. It was respectable and dignified, and it was able and sarcastic. The age of personalities, through which the American press is now passing, had not commenced. Editors were neither horsewhipped in the streets, nor deserved to be, and that impertinent eavesdropper and babbler, the interviewer, was unknown. Happy age for editors—and readers!

The lives of editors, like the lives of most men of letters, are not very interesting to the world, whatever they may be to themselves and their friends. They are passed in a routine from which there is no escape, and, if they are now and then enlivened by warfare, it is not usually of the kind to attract the sympathy of indifferent spectators. For the most part, the life editorial is a waste of the brain, and a weariness of the flesh. That it did not prove so in Mr. Bryant's case is owing, no doubt, to his love of literature, an inherent and unconquerable love, which never forsook him, even in the busiest years of journalism. While still a young man, and we may suppose not an affluent one, for his first position on the Evening Post was that of assistant editor, he wrote largely for The Talisman, the entire contents of which were furnished by himself and his friends Sands and Verplanck. It was the best annual ever brought out in America, equal, it is said, to the best of the English annuals, which is not saying much of those of a later date, but is high praise as regards the earlier volumes, to which even Scott did not disdain to contribute. Besides editing and writing for The Talisman, which was published for three years (1827-29-30), Mr. Bryant furnished several papers for "Tales of the Glauber Spa," a collection of entertaining stories, the work of Sands, Verplanck, Paulding, Leggett, Miss Sedgwick, and himself. This was published in 1832, as was also the first collected edition of his poems. In 1834 he took a vacation from his editorial labors, and sailed with his family for Europe, leaving the Evening Post in charge of Leggett. He resided in Italy and Germany, which were not so overrun with travelling Americans as at present, and were all the more pleasant to a quiet family on that account. It was his intention to remain abroad three years, but the sudden illness of Leggett, which threatened to result disastrously to the Evening Post, compelled him to return in 1836.

In 1840 Mr. Bryant published a new collection of his poetical writings—"The Fountain, and other Poems," and, during the next year, visited the Southern States, and lived for a time in East Florida. "The White-footed Deer, and other Poems," appeared in 1844. A year later, he visited England and Scotland for the first time. That the mother-land impressed him, we may be sure; yet it is worthy of remark that nothing which he saw there—no place which he visited, and no association it awakened—is recorded in his verse. We have Italian poems from him, or poems in which Italian localities are indicated, and we have, if not German poems, several spirited translations from German song. But we recall nothing, in his verse, of which England alone was the inspiration. Yet he was, and is, admired in the land of his fathers. A proof of this fact is contained in the second volume of Beattie's "Life of Campbell." "I went with him one evening," says the writer (May 29, 1841), "to the opening of the Exhibition, in Suffolk Place. It had been arranged that he should read something, and he chose the 'Thanatopsis' of Bryant. A deep silence followed; the audience crowded round him; but when he came to the closing paragraph, his admiration almost choked his voice: 'Nothing finer had ever been written!'"

The first illustrated edition of Mr. Bryant's poetical works was published in 1846, at Philadelphia. It was a creditable piece of art work, considering the then condition of art in America—the designs being drawn by Leutz, an accomplished academician of the Duesseldorf school, who strove to make up in vigor and picturesqueness what he lacked in sentiment and feeling. A second illustrated edition was issued a few years later in New York. The illustrations were drawn on wood, many by Birket Foster, and the engraving and printing were done in England. This method of producing a fine edition of a favorite American writer would hardly suit a protectionist, but, then, Mr. Bryant was not a protectionist—as who is in literature?

The last twenty-five years of Mr. Bryant's life differed but little from those which preceded them. That is to say, they were spent in journalism, diversified, now and then, by the publication of a new volume of poems, and by several journeys on the Continent. The result of these journeys was given to the public in the shape of letters in the Evening Post, which letters have been collected in two or three volumes. Mr. Bryant's prose is admirable—a model of good English, simple, manly, felicitous. That its excellence has not been universally recognized and—what generally follows recognition in this country—imitated, is owing to several circumstances; as that it originally appeared in the crowded columns of a daily journal; that the American's appetite for works of travel demands more stimulating food than Mr. Bryant chose to give it, and that his poetry has overshadowed everything else that he did. Few believe that a poet can write well in prose, and those who do, prefer his poetry to his prose. The preference is a just one, but it proves nothing, for literary history shows that a good poet is always a good prose-writer.

Mr. Bryant's last great labor—it is almost superfluous to state—was a new translation of Homer. The task was worthy of him; for, though it has been performed many times, it has never been performed so well before. Scores have tried their hands at it, from Chapman down; but all have failed in some important particular—Pope, perhaps, most of all. Lord Derby's version of the "Iliad" was the best before Mr. Bryant's; it is second best now, and will soon be as antiquated as Pope's, or Cowper's, or Chapman's. No English poet ever undertook and performed so great a task as this of Mr. Bryant's so late in life. It is like Homer himself singing in his old age.



THOMAS CARLYLE

By W. WALLACE

(1795-1881)



Thomas Carlyle was born December 4, 1795, at Ecclesfechan, in the parish of Hoddam, Annandale, Dumfriesshire, a small Scottish market-town, the Entipfuhl of "Sartor Resartus," six miles inland from the Solway, and about sixteen by road from Carlisle. He was the second son of James Carlyle, stone-mason, but his first son by his second wife, Margaret Aitken. James Carlyle, who came of a family which, although in humble circumstances, was an offshoot of a Border clan, was a man of great physical and moral strength, of fearless independence, and of, in his son's opinion, "a natural faculty" equal to that of Burns; and Margaret Aitken was "a woman of the fairest descent, that of the pious, the just, and the wise." Frugal, abstemious, prudent, though not niggardly, James Carlyle was prosperous according to the times, the conditions of his trade, and the standard of Ecclesfechan. He was able, therefore, to give such of his sons (he had a family of ten children in all, five sons and five daughters) as showed an aptitude for culture an excellent Scottish education. Thomas seems to have been taught his letters and elementary reading by his mother, and arithmetic by his father. His home-teaching was supplemented by attendance at the Ecclesfechan school, where he was "reported complete in English" at about seven, made satisfactory progress in arithmetic, and took to Latin with enthusiasm. Thence he proceeded, in 1805, to Annan Academy, where he learned to read Latin and French fluently, "some geometry, algebra, arithmetic thoroughly well, vague outlines of geography, Greek to the extent of the alphabet mainly." His first two years at Annan Academy were among the most miserable in his life, from his being bullied by some of his fellow-pupils, whom he describes as "coarse, unguided, tyrannous cubs." But he "revolted against them, and gave them shake for shake." In his third year, Carlyle had his first glimpse of Edward Irving, who was five years his senior, and had been a pupil at Annan Academy, but was then attending classes at Edinburgh University. In November, 1809, Carlyle himself entered that university, travelling on foot all the way, a hundred miles, between Ecclesfechan and the Scottish capital. Except in one department, Carlyle's college curriculum was not remarkable. In "the classical field" he describes himself "truly as nothing," and learned to read Homer in the original with difficulty. He preferred Homer and Aeschylus to all other classical authors, found Tacitus and Virgil "really interesting," Horace "egotistical, leichtfertig," and Cicero "a windy person, and a weariness." Nor did he take much to metaphysics or moral philosophy. In geometry, however, he excelled, perhaps because Professor (subsequently Sir John) Leslie, "alone of my professors had some genius in his business, and awoke a certain enthusiasm in me." But even in the mathematical class he took no prize.

In 1813 Carlyle's attendance at the Arts course in Edinburgh University came to an end, and he began formal, though fitful, preparation for the ministry of the Church of Scotland by enrolling himself, on November 16th of the same year, as a student at its Divinity Hall. In the summer of 1814 he competed successfully at Dumfries for the mathematical mastership of Annan Academy. The post was worth only between L60 and L70 a year; but it enabled Carlyle, who was as frugal as his parents, to relieve his father of the expense of his support, and to save a few pounds. Meanwhile he read widely, and wrote of his reading at great length, and with considerable power of satiric characterization, to some of his college friends. But he found himself "abundantly lonesome, uncomfortable, and out of place" in Annan, and from the first disliked teaching; while his "sentiments on the clerical profession" were "mostly of the unfavorable kind."

In 1816 Carlyle accepted the post of assistant to the teacher of the parish (or grammar) school of Kirkcaldy, with "an emolument rated about a hundred a year," and all actual scholastic duties to perform. This change brought him into intimate relations with Edward Irving, who, having acquired a reputation as a teacher in Haddington, had been induced by the patrons of an adventure school, in Kirkcaldy, to undertake the management of it. The two, though professionally rivals, became fast friends, and read and made excursions into different parts of Scotland together. Carlyle was also introduced by Irving to various Kirkcaldy families, including that of Mr. Martin, the parish minister, one of whose daughters his friend subsequently married. He himself became attached to an ex-pupil of Irving's, a Miss Margaret Gordon, with some of whose graces he afterward endowed the dark and fickle Blumine, of "Sartor Resartus." She reciprocated Carlyle's affection, but the aunt with whom she lived put a stop to some talk of an engagement.

Carlyle found the people of Kirkcaldy more to his mind than those of Annan; but in two years the work of teaching became altogether intolerable to him, although he did it conscientiously. Successful opposition sprung up to Irving and himself, moreover, in the shape of a third school. Irving resolved to leave Kirkcaldy, and, in September, 1818, Carlyle wrote to his father, who had now given up business in Ecclesfechan and taken the farm of Mainhill, about two miles distant, that, having saved about L70, he purposed removing to Edinburgh, where he thought he "could," perhaps, find private teaching to support him, till he could fall into some other way of doing. He had now totally abandoned all thoughts of entering the ministry.

Carlyle removed to Edinburgh in November, 1818. His prospects were for some time dubious; he even entertained the idea of emigrating to America. Ultimately, however, he obtained fairly regular and well-paid private teaching. An introduction to Dr. (afterward Sir David) Brewster, the editor of the "Edinburgh Encyclopaedia," led to his writing articles, chiefly biographical and geographical, for that work, at "bread-and-butter wages," and subsequently to his translating Legendre's "Elements of Geometry" from the French for L50. At the beginning of the session of 1819, he enrolled in the class of Scots Law, with the intention of becoming an advocate. But he found law as uncongenial a study as divinity. Till 1822 he lived in various lodgings in Edinburgh, finding his chief relief from tutorial drudgery in visits to his parents in Dumfriesshire. His health, which had suffered from too close application to study, was at times "most miserable;" he was in a low fever for two weeks, "was harassed by sleeplessness," and began to be tortured by his life-long foe, dyspepsia. At the same time his mind was perplexed with doubt on religious matters, regarding which he seems to have unburdened himself solely to Irving, who was then assistant to Dr. Chalmers, in Glasgow. For a period he was "totally irreligious." This struggle terminated in June, 1821, "all at once," and when he was walking along Leith Walk (the Rue St. Thomas de l'Enfer of "Sartor Resartus"), in what he regarded as his "spiritual new birth." He was now absorbed in German literature, especially the writings of Schiller and Goethe. The latter, indeed, had a more abiding influence on him than any other author.

In June, 1821, also, occurred his introduction, through Irving, to Miss Jane Baillie Welsh (1801-66), only daughter of Dr. John Welsh, medical practitioner in Haddington, who had died two years before, leaving his daughter sole heiress of the small estate of Craigenputtock, sixteen miles from the town of Dumfries. Miss Welsh, who was descended through her father from John Knox, was then living in Haddington with her mother, who claimed kindred with the patriot Wallace, and, according to Carlyle, "narrowly missed being a woman of genius." Miss Welsh had been the private pupil of Irving when he was a teacher in Haddington, and the result of the acquaintance thus brought about was a passionate attachment. They would, indeed, have been married, but for Irving's engagement to Miss Martin. The introduction of Carlyle to Miss Welsh, then twenty years of age, led to a correspondence between them on literary matters. After a time, Carlyle attempted to adopt the tone of a lover. This, however, she peremptorily forbade, although she refused other suitors.

Early in 1822, Irving, who was on the point of entering on the pastorate of the Caledonian Chapel, in Hatton Garden, London, recommended Carlyle as tutor to the three sons of Mr. Buller, a retired Anglo-Indian. The salary offered was L200 a year. Carlyle, who had previously declined the editorship of a Dundee newspaper, accepted the offer; and two of the three, Charles Duller and Arthur, came to Edinburgh in the spring, to be under his care while attending classes at the university. Carlyle found his duties pleasant, and was now able to give substantial pecuniary aid to his family, particularly as regarded the education of his younger brother John, who subsequently became a physician, but is better known as the translator of Dante's "Inferno" (1849). Carlyle, after contemplating a history of the British commonwealth, and a novel in association with Miss Welsh, arranged to write a "Life of Schiller" for Mr. Taylor, the proprietor of the London Magazine, and a translation of the "Wilhelm Meister" of Goethe for Mr. Boyd, an Edinburgh publisher. These two enterprises fully occupied his leisure while he was engaged as a tutor to the Bullers, whose parents, after spending the winter of 1822 in Edinburgh, removed in the following spring to Kinnaird House, near Dunkeld, on the Tay.

Carlyle paid his first visit to London in June, 1824, whither the Bullers had gone, and although his engagement with them was abruptly broken off, he remained there till March, 1825, superintending the publication in book form of his "Life of Schiller." At this time he received the first of a series of letters from Goethe and made the acquaintance of Coleridge, Thomas Campbell, Allan Cunningham, Proctor, and other literary notabilities. On March 26, 1825, he removed to the farm of Hoddam Hill, about two miles from Mainhill, which he had leased; his brother Alexander doing the practical work of farming, while he himself translated German romances. Miss Welsh now consented to become his wife, after a lengthened correspondence. In 1826 he quarrelled with his landlord, his father gave up his farm, and both removed to Scotsbrig, another farm in the vicinity of Ecclesfechan. The marriage between Carlyle and Miss Welsh took place on October 17, 1826, at her grandfather's house at Templand, Dumfriesshire, and they at once settled in 21 Comely Bank, Edinburgh. Here Carlyle completed four volumes of translations from Tieck, Musaeus, and Richter, which were published under the title of "German Romance," and commenced a didactic novel, but burned his manuscript. An introduction from Proctor to Jeffrey led to his becoming a contributor to the Edinburgh Review, his first article, on Jean Paul Richter, appearing in June, 1827. The same year he failed in his candidature for the chair of moral philosophy in the University of St. Andrews, in succession to Dr. Chalmers. Various subsequent attempts to obtain an academic position for Carlyle met with no better success.

In May, 1828, the Carlyles removed to Mrs. Carlyle's little property of Craigenputtock, which, in a letter to Goethe, he described as "the loneliest nook in Britain, six miles removed from anyone likely to visit me," and there they lived for about six years. Carlyle subsisted during this period by writing for a number of reviews, including the Edinburgh, the Westminster, the Foreign Quarterly, and Fraser's Magazine. The chief of the essays which he produced at Craigenputtock are those on Burns, Samuel Johnson, Goethe, Voltaire, Diderot, and Schiller. He also wrote a "History of German Literature," the best parts of which were subsequently published in the form of essays; and in 1833-34 there appeared, by instalments in Fraser's Magazine, "Sartor Resartus," his most characteristic work, the fantastic hero of which, Diogenes Teufelsdroeckh, illustrates in his life and opinions the mystical and grotesque "Philosophy of Clothes." "Sartor Resartus" is notable in the literary history of Carlyle as revealing the Germanization of his mind, and his abandonment of the comparatively simple diction of his earlier essays for the thoroughly individual style of his later works—eruptive, ejaculatory, but always powerful, and often rising to an epic sublimity. Life at Craigenputtock was varied on the part of Carlyle by occasional visits to Edinburgh, in one of which the idea of writing his "French Revolution" occurred to him; by a residence of six months in London, during which he made the acquaintance of John Stuart Mill and John Sterling; and by visits from old friends like Jeffrey, and new admirers like Emerson. In 1830 Carlyle was reduced to great straits; and he had to borrow L50 from Jeffrey for the expenses of his journey to London, although he declined to accept an annuity of L100 from the same source.

Having by 1834 again saved L200, Carlyle resolved to try his fortune in London, and on June 10th established himself in the house, 5 Cheyne Row, Chelsea, in which he lived till the day of his death. Here he settled down to the writing of his "French Revolution," which appeared in 1837. This enterprise was also put an end to in 1835, owing to the destruction, by a servant-girl, of all but four or five leaves of the manuscript of the first volume, which had been lent to John Stuart Mill. Carlyle accepted L100 from Mill as compensation for his loss.



In the years 1837, 1838, 1839, and 1840, Carlyle lectured to considerable, yet select, audiences on "German Literature," "The Successive Periods of European Culture," "The Revolutions of Modern Europe," and "Heroes, Hero-worship, and the Heroic in History." Carlyle's yearly earnings from these lectures, the last series of which had been published, varied between L135 and L300, and maintained him and his wife till the "French Revolution" not only established his reputation as a literary genius of the highest order, and as, in Goethe's phrase, "a new moral force," but placed him beyond the possibility of want. Yet, until late in life, his annual income from literature was not more than L400. In 1838 appeared "Sartor Resartus" in book form, and the first edition of his "Miscellanies." The following year, Carlyle, who was at one time averse to the idea of becoming a personal force in politics, published the first of a series of attacks on the shams and corruptions of modern society, under the title of "Chartism." This he followed in 1843 with "Past and Present," and in 1850 with "Latter-day Pamphlets," which proved among other things that, if he did not quite approve of slavery, he disapproved of the manner in which it had been abolished in the British dominions. In 1845 appeared "Cromwell's Letters and Speeches," perhaps the most successful of all his works, inasmuch as it completely revolutionized the public estimate of its subject. In 1851 he published a biography of his friend, John Sterling. From this time Carlyle gave himself up entirely to his largest work, "The History of Frederick II., commonly called Frederick the Great," the first two volumes of which were published in 1858, and which was concluded in 1865. The preparation of this book led Carlyle to make two excursions to the Continent, which, with a yachting trip to Ostend, two tours in Ireland (on which he intended to write a book based on a diary that was published after his death), and regular visits to his kindred and friends in Scotland, formed the chief distractions from his literary labors. Among the few public movements with which Carlyle identified himself was that which resulted in the establishment of the London Library, in 1839. In August, 1866, he also allowed himself to be elected chairman of the committee for the defence of Mr. Eyre, who had been recalled from his post of Governor of Jamaica on the ground of his having shown unnecessary severity in suppressing a negro insurrection which had broken out in October of the previous year, or, as Carlyle put it, for having "saved the West Indies and hanged one incendiary mulatto, well worth the gallows."

On November 11, 1865, Carlyle was elected lord rector of Edinburgh University, by a majority of 657 votes over 310 recorded for Mr. Disraeli. On April 2, 1866, the ceremony of his installation took place amid extraordinary demonstrations of enthusiasm, when he delivered an address in which he embodied his moral experiences in the form of advice to the younger members of his audience. The success attending this visit to Edinburgh was quite obliterated by the news, which reached him in Dumfries, of the death, on April 21st, of Mrs. Carlyle, as she was driving in her carriage in Hyde Park. Carlyle's grief developed into remorse when he discovered, from certain of her letters, and from a journal which she kept, that during a period of her married life his irritability of temper and unconscious want of consideration for her wishes, had caused her much misery and even ill-health, which she studiously concealed from him. It has also been demonstrated, by the letters and memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle, that in the years 1855 and 1856 they were somewhat estranged, owing to Carlyle's liking for the society of Harriet, Lady Ashburton. After the death of Lady Ashburton, there were no differences between them, except such as might be expected in the case of two persons of irritable and high-strung natures, and of uncompromising veracity. These memorials are also of note as proving Mrs. Carlyle to have been one of the keenest critics, most brilliant letter-writers, and most accomplished of women of her time.

Carlyle wrote no important work after his wife's death, although after a visit to Mentone in 1867, where he partially composed his "Personal Reminiscences," he settled down to his old life in London. In August, 1867, there appeared in Macmillan's Magazine his view of British democracy, under the title of "Shooting Niagara." He prepared a special edition of his collected works, and added to them, in 1875, a fresh volume containing "The Early Kings of Norway" and an essay on the "Portraits of John Knox." On November 18, 1870, he wrote a letter to the Times on the "Franco German Question," defending the attitude of Germany. He expressed privately strong opposition to the Irish policy of Mr. Gladstone. In February, 1874, he was offered and accepted the Prussian Order of Merit in recognition of his having written the "Life of Frederick the Great," who founded the Order. Toward the end of the same year Mr. Disraeli offered him the Grand Cross of the Bath (with the alternative of a baronetcy) and a pension of "an amount equal to a good fellowship," but he declined both.

His eightieth birthday, December 4, 1875, brought Carlyle many tributes of respect, including a gold medal from a number of Scottish admirers, and "a noble and most unexpected" note from Prince Bismarck. On May 5, 1877, he published a short letter in the Times, referring to a rumor that Mr. Disraeli, as Premier, meditated forcing on a "Philo-Turk war against Russia," and protesting against any such design. This was his last public act. On February 5, 1881, he died at his house in Chelsea. A burial in Westminster Abbey was offered, but in accordance with his own wish, he was laid in the churchyard of Ecclesfechan, beside his kindred.

The time has not yet come for the passing of a final judgment on Carlyle's position in British literature. He was, above all things, a prophet in the guise of a man of letters, who predicted the reverse of smooth things for his country and for the world; and it has yet to be seen if his predictions will be fulfilled. But it may be said even now, and without risk of contradiction, that, for good or evil, he exerted a greater influence on British literature during the middle of the nineteenth century, and, through that literature, on the ethical, religious, and political beliefs of his time, than any of his contemporaries; that, as a humorist, using humor seriously and as a weapon for the enforcement of his opinions, he has no superior, combining in himself what is best in Dunbar, Burns, Rabelais, and Swift; that, as a master of the graphic in style, he has no rival and no second—showing an equal facility in photographing nature, and in grasping and presenting in appropriate phraseology the salient points of personal character as exhibited in expression, habits, features, build, and dress.

Of Carlyle as a man, it is also permissible to say that, irritable, impatient, intolerant, fiercely proud, occasionally hasty in his judgments though he was, preserving to the last, nor caring to get rid of, certain Scottish and Annandale rusticities of manner and mental attitude, no one was ever more essentially self-controlled, patient, and humble than he, or ever faced the real misfortunes of life with a calmer courage; that he was as incapable of conscious injustice, unkindliness, or vindictiveness, as he was of insincerity or impurity; that in pecuniary straits, even in despair, he never wrote a line that he did not believe, never swerved by a hair's breadth from the noble purposes which dominated his life and extinguished all selfish ambition.

* * * * *

The following letter was written by Carlyle, in 1876, to a young man who had asked his advice on the choice of a profession:

"Dear Sir,—I respect your conscientious scruples in regard to choosing a profession, and wish much I had the power of giving you advice that would be of the least service. But that, I fear, in my total ignorance of yourself and the posture of your affairs, is pretty nearly impossible. The profession of the law is in many respects a most honorable one, and has this to recommend it, that a man succeeds there, if he succeeds at all, in an independent and manful manner, by force of his own talent and behavior, without needing to seek patronage from anybody. As to ambition, that is, no doubt, a thing to be carefully discouraged in oneself; but it does not necessarily inhere in the barrister's profession more than in many others, and I have known one or two who, by quiet fidelity in promoting justice, and by keeping down litigation, had acquired the epithet of the 'honest lawyer,' which appeared to me altogether human and beautiful.

"Literature, as a profession, is what I would counsel no faithful man to be concerned with, except when absolutely forced into it, under penalty, as it were, of death. The pursuit of culture, too, is in the highest degree recommendable to every human soul, and may be successfully achieved in almost any honest employment that has wages paid for it. No doubt, too, the church seems to offer facilities in this respect; but I will by no means advise you to overcome your reluctance against seeking refuge there. On the whole, there is nothing strikes me likelier for one of your disposition than the profession of teacher, which is rising into higher request every day, and has scope in it for the grandest endowments of human faculties (could such hitherto be got to enter it), and of all useful and fruitful employments may be defined as the usefullest, fruitfullest, and also indispensablest in these days of ours.

"Regretting much that I can help you so infinitely little, bidding you take pious and patient counsel with your own soul, and wishing you with great truth a happy result, I remain, dear sir,

"Faithfully yours,

"T. CARLYLE."



VICTOR HUGO

By MARGARET O. W. OLIPHANT

(1802-1885)



The greatest of literary Frenchmen, the greatest man of genius whom this century has known, the Altissimo Poeta, the most splendid romancist of his age, has accomplished his great career. He was the last survivor of a great period in French literature—the last member of one of the greatest literary brotherhoods which has ever existed; and he carried with him to the very portals of the grave a lamp of genius scarcely dimmed, and a personal power and influence which every year increased. Not very long ago, all Europe gathered round him to offer congratulations on his hale and hearty old age; since then, with more than the hands full of flowers of the classic tradition, with honors and praises from every quarter of the earth, he has been carried to his grave. The very sight of a man so distinguished, the consciousness of his honored existence as the representative of the noblest and most all-embracing of the arts—that which depends for its effects upon the simplest and most universal of instincts—was an advantage to the world. The extravagances of hero-worship are inevitable, and in nothing is the ridiculous so tremblingly near to the sublime; but allowing for all that, and for what is worse, the almost equally inevitable foolishness which adulation creates, the position of Victor Hugo was of itself an advantage to the world. In a soberer pose altogether, and with a noble modesty which we may claim as belonging to our race, Walter Scott occupied a somewhat similar position—which would have been all the greater had he lived to Hugo's age, an element which must necessarily be taken into consideration; but, save in this one case, there has been no parallel to the eminence of the great Frenchman in the estimation of his country and of the world.

It is not now that the critic requires to step forth to establish the foundations of this great fame, or decide upon its reality or lasting character. This has been done in the poet's lifetime by a hundred voices, favorable and otherwise; no need to wait for death to give the final decision, as in some cases has been necessary. It is scarcely possible to imagine that, after so long a time, any discovery can be made, or any change of taste occur, which would interfere with the supreme position of Victor Hugo. A new generation has been born in the faith which to their elders is a matter of assured and triumphant conviction. But it is a grateful office to go over again some of the noblest productions which human genius has ever given forth, and to contemplate in their unity the many works of a life as much longer than that of ordinary men as its inspiration was above theirs.



It seems sad and strange, as well as laughable and ludicrous, that the great poet should be regarded by a vast number of his countrymen, and perhaps by the majority of the Paris mob which paid him the last honors in so characteristic a way, as a revolutionary politician and a democratic leader. We will take the privilege of the foreigner to leave out that side of his life as much as may be practicable. "Napoleon le Petit" and the "Histoire d'un Crime" are works but little worthy of his genius. Political animosities, sharpened by personal grievances, have in many cases an immense immediate effect in literature, but they pay for this easy success by speedy collapse; and scarcely even the magnificent rhetoric and splendid vituperation of "Les Chatiments" will keep them living when the world has forgotten the lesser Napoleon, as it already begins to do. His patriotic fury, the impassioned utterances of his exile, the tremendous force of feeling with which he flung himself into the struggles of France, took up a large share of Victor Hugo's life, and will procure him a certain place in the historical records of his period. But when all the commotion and the din have died away, as indeed in a great measure they have already done, these fiery diatribes, these burning lava-streams, will be of little more importance than the dustiest "memoires pour servir"—materials from which the historian, with much smoothing down and apologies for the pyrotechnics of a past age, will take here and there a vivid touch to illustrate his theories or brighten his narrative. They will retain, too, a certain importance as autobiography. But fortunately the great mass of the work which Victor Hugo has left behind him can be separated from the polemics of his troubled age and fiery temper. It is not in any sense a peaceful literature. Conflict is its very inspiration. The struggle of human misery with all the confusing and overbearing forces of life; of poverty with the requirements and oppressions of wealth; of the small with the great; of the people with tyrants; of Man with Fate—these are his subjects, and he is never an impartial historian. He is on the side of the weak in every combat, the partisan of the oppressed. But this does not detract from his work when his opponents are the oppressors of the past, or the still more subtle, veiled, and unassailable forces of Destiny. The poet's region is there: he is born, if not to set right the times which are out of joint, at least to read to the world the high and often terrible lesson of the ages. But it vulgarizes his work when he is seen, tooth and nail, in violent personal conflict with foemen unworthy of his steel, embalming in poetry the trivial or the uncompleted incidents of contemporary warfare. It becomes almost ludicrous, indeed, when we find him pouring forth page after page of vehement and burning complaint in respect to the personal sufferings inflicted on himself, when we know that throughout his career Hugo never knew what the cold shock of failure was, and that, from the moment when Chateaubriand adopted him into the ranks of the poets as l'enfant sublime, until the moment when all Paris conducted him to his last resting-place, no man has had a more enthusiastic following, or accomplished a more triumphant career.

Victor Hugo was a son of the Revolution. He was born, as it were, between the two camps, at a moment when France was the theatre of the greatest popular struggle in modern history, of a mother who was a Breton and a Legitimist, and a father who was a Republican general—an extraordinary combination. This does not seem, however, to have made, as we might think, family life impossible, for Madame Hugo and her children followed the drum, and, notwithstanding all differences of opinion, found it possible to keep together. He was educated, it would appear, under his mother's influence rather than that of the soldier-father, and did not, till his mind was quite mature, throw himself into the revolutionary opinions which afterward influenced him so greatly. A Royalist in the Restoration period, an observant but not excited spectator of public affairs from 1830 to 1848, it was not till the coup d'etat and the beginning of the reign of the third Napoleon that he was seized with the passion of political life. That great betrayal seems to have stung him to a frenzied resistance and put poison in his veins. His country was cheated and betrayed; the liberty for which she had made so many exertions, both heroic and fantastical, taken from her; and his own personal liberty and safety threatened. Victor Hugo's soul then burst into feu et flamme. He caught fire like a volcano long silent, a burning mountain that had simulated quiet unawares, and clothed itself with vineyards and villages. In the tranquil days when Louis-Philippe plotted and pottered, and France lay dormant, amusing her restrained spirit with the outbreak of the romantic against the classical, and taking pleasure in the burst of genius which had arisen suddenly and unawares in her midst, the poet was so little dissatisfied with the bourgeois regime that he accepted the title of "pair de France." Montalembert had received it some time before. There must have been something soothing, not inharmonious to the poetical mind, in the slumbrous reign which gradually became intolerable to the commonalty and got itself into contempt with all the world. The young poets of the time were peaceful, not discontented. Full of energy as they were, they took no part in the gathering storm. Hugo, a peer, tranquil in the superior chamber; young De Musset, a courtier of the Duke of Orleans, and hoping for the king's notice of his verses. The eruption was preparing, the subterranean fires alight; but the sons of genius took no notice. When the tremendous awakening came, it must, in the case of Hugo at least, have gained additional force from the long restraint. He was in the height of life, a man of forty-six, the leader of the romantic school, which by that time had overcome opposition and won the freedom for which it contended, the author of "Hernani" and the other great plays which form one of his chief titles to fame, and of volumes of lyrics which had taken the very heart of the French people, and given a new development to the language. And it was also during this peaceful period that he had taken in another direction a first step of unexampled power and brilliancy in the romance of "Notre Dame." Even among men of acknowledged genius, few have done so much in a lifetime as Victor Hugo had done up to this break in his career. We are so accustomed to the attitude of demagogue which he took afterward, to the violent revolutionary, the furious exile, the denunciatory prophet of the "Chatiments," that it is strange to realize that his later aspect was prefaced by a long, peaceful, and prosperous beginning. France had never seen a more magnificent band than that which surrounded him, and which has made the reign of the Roi-bourgeois illustrious in spite of itself; and it is curious to mark that these great intelligences did not object to their ruler nor to his ways, but lived like good citizens, with but an occasional fling at semi-sentimental politics. Hugo was the champion of abstract right in all the discussions in which he took part. He it was who proposed, among other things, that the Bonaparte family should be permitted to return to France. Perhaps, had he been less abstract and logical, and more moved by the laws of expediency, it might have been better both for France and for himself.

The plays which he produced in this time of prosperous calm and apparent peace are without question the most remarkable dramatic works of this century, and several of them will, we have no doubt, take their place permanently among the few of all ages and countries which the world will not willingly let die.

While these plays were being written, and the mind of their author reaching its full development, the fountains of pure poetry, those outbursts of song which are often the most delightful and dear of all the utterances of the poet, were flowing forth, refreshing and fertilizing French literature, and giving a noble utterance to the new thought and rising energy of the times. His youth gave forth some uncertain notes, his fancy roaming from Bourbon to Bonaparte. But that his imagination should have been seized by the recollection of the great Napoleon is so natural, so inevitable, one would suppose, for every young Frenchman, and especially for the son of a Bonapartist general, that there would have been something lacking in him had he escaped that enthusiasm. Apart from these waves of national sentiment, and from the vague music of the "Orientales" and other such preludes and symphonies, there is poetry enough in the various volumes which followed each other at uncertain intervals, to have fully furnished one man of genius with fame enough for what we call immortality. Hugo has enough and to spare for all subjects that occurred to him. A sunset, a landscape, a love song, alternate in his pages with a philosophical discussion, or a brief and brilliant scene snatched from history, from contemporary life, from his own inner existence, all clothed in the noblest verse of which the French language is capable. His power over that language is boundless, the wealth of an utterance which never pauses for a word, which disregards all rules yet glorifies them, which is ready for every suggestion, and finds nothing too terrible, nothing too tender for the tongue which, at his bidding, leaps into blazing eloquence, or rolls in clouds and thunder, or murmurs with the accent of a dove. Never had there been so great a gamut, a compass so extended.

It is not, however, upon his poetry, either in the form of drama, lyric, or narrative, that his fame out of France, or at least in England, is founded. There is no more usual deliverance of superficial criticism than that which declares French poetry in general to be either nought—which is still a not uncommon notion—or at least not great enough to be worth the study which alone could make it comprehensible. There are many good people who dare to say this, yet live, audacious, and unconscious of their folly. We have, however, to consider Victor Hugo on a ground which no one ventures to dispute. The great romances—for which we should like to invent another name—which we cannot call novels, and which are too majestic even for the title of romance, though that means something more than the corresponding word in English—are in their kind and period the greatest works produced in his time.



RALPH WALDO EMERSON

By MONCURE D. CONWAY

(1803-1882)



On the 30th day of April, 1882, Ralph Waldo Emerson was "gathered to his fathers," at Concord, Mass. The simple Hebrew phrase was never more appropriate, for his ancestors had founded the town and been foremost at every period of its remarkable history. More than two hundred and fifty years ago John Eliot, who had gone from the University of Cambridge, England, to be the "Apostle of the Indians," found on the banks of the Musketaquid a settlement of natives, into whose language he translated the New Testament. In 1634, the Rev. Peter Bulkeley, of Bedfordshire, whose Puritan proclivities brought him under the ban of Laud, migrated with a number of his parishioners to New England; these settled themselves at Musketaquid, which they named Concord. In the next year went, from County Durham probably, Thomas Emerson, whose son married a Bulkeley, and his grandson Rebecca Waldo, descendant of a family of the Waldenses. It was at Concord that the soldiers of George III. first met with resistance. Along the road where many Englishmen have walked with Emerson and Hawthorne, the retreat took place, and wounded soldiers were taken into homes they had invaded to learn the meaning of love to enemies. Some of these brave men never again left the village where they were so kindly nursed. Concord, with its thirteen hundred inhabitants, supplied Washington's army with wood and hay, and suffering Boston with grain and money, with a generosity that shines in American annals. Washington's headquarters were at Craigie House, so long the home of Longfellow, and the Harvard buildings being used as barracks, the university was transferred to Concord.

No mere literary estimate of Emerson's writings can adequately report the man or his work. The value placed upon him by Americans appears strangely exaggerated beside the contemporary English criticism. It were, indeed, easy to cite from European thinkers—Carlyle, Quinet, John Sterling, Arthur Clough, Tyndall, Herman Grimm—words concerning Emerson glowing as those of Margaret Fuller, Hawthorne, Curtis, Lowell, and other American authors; but if such tributes from individual minds are universally felt in America alone, to be simplest truth and soberness, it is because Emerson cannot be seen detached from the cumulative tendencies summed up in him, and from the indefinable revolution in which they found, and still find, expression.

The father of Emerson was a Unitarian preacher of fine culture, melodious voice, handsome person, and especially noted for his paramount interest in the ethical and universal element of religion. He died in 1811, at the age of forty-two, leaving his five sons, of whom Waldo, then eight years old, was the second, to the care of his young wife, who had been Ruth Haskins, of Boston. Emerson's early growth was under the fostering care of good and refined women. His mother has been described by one who knew her, the late Dr. Frothingham, as "of a discerning spirit, and a most courteous bearing; one who knew how to guide the affairs of her own house, as long as she was responsible for that, with the sweetest authority. Both her mind and character were of a superior order, and they set their stamp upon manners of peculiar softness and natural grace and quiet dignity." She was assisted in bringing up her family by her sister-in-law, Mary Emerson, a scholarly woman, well read in theology and philosophy, whose original ideas and sayings marked her as "a character." Another woman who exercised a great influence upon him was Sarah Bradford, afterward married to his relative, Samuel Ripley. She was as thorough a Greek scholar as any person in America, a good mathematician, and a diligent student of science. Many a Harvard student has she coached in that Old Manse where she resided until her death (1867), and where the writer of this has often listened with admiration to her extraordinary conversation. At the same time nothing could have exceeded the practical wisdom and tact with which her household was regulated. "She was absolutely without pedantry," said Emerson. "Nobody ever heard of her learning until a necessity came for its use, and then nothing could be more simple than her solution of the problem proposed to her." At eleven years of age, when Emerson was in the Latin school at Boston, he used to send his translations, generally poetic, to Sarah Bradford for criticism. The "Fates" of Michael Angelo, a large copy of which hung in Emerson's study, must sometimes have softened to the faces of the Ruth and Mary and Sarah, who spun for him the fine golden thread of destiny. Mrs. Emerson had the happiness of seeing four of her sons distinguished for their ability; indeed, it seemed for a time doubtful whether William, Waldo, Edward, or Charles promised the more brilliant career. When the two elder had graduated at Harvard University, they taught at school in order to aid the two younger in completing their course; but these two died prematurely. William was to have been the preacher of the family, but, while pursuing his studies in Germany, he found that he could not honestly follow his father's profession—albeit Goethe, whom he knew, sought to persuade him otherwise. He afterward became an eminent lawyer. His mother's disappointment at this probably led to Emerson's adoption of the profession that his brother had declined. He graduated at eighteen, with a reputation for classical knowledge, general literary culture, and elocution. He had won the Boylston prize for "declamation," and was chosen by his class to deliver the usual poem at graduation. I have heard him say that it was then his ambition to become a teacher of elocution, and that he still regarded it as a less humble aspiration than it might seem. Those who have sat under the spell of Emerson's discourse would certainly never associate anything commonly called rhetoric with him; but I derived, from conversation with him, that his discontent with conventionalisms of thought first took this form of dissatisfaction with the conventional oratory. He thought there might be taught an art of putting things so that they could not be gainsaid. But a man must really hold that which he is to state successfully. He startled me by saying, "I believe that a really eloquent man, though an atheist, or whatever his opinions, would be listened to by any educated congregation in Boston." No one, he said, could discover the charm of Channing's preaching by reading his sermons; there was the heart that rose up to meet him: here was something sufficient, and the multitude went off radiant, fed, satisfied. But Emerson was to teach the new art of eloquence by example.