In 1823, now twenty years of age, Emerson began his studies in theology. Though often attending lectures in Harvard Divinity College he never regularly entered there, but still sat at the feet of Channing, who took a deep personal interest in him. He was "approbated" by the Ministers' Association in 1826. His health having suffered by overwork he passed a winter in the South, and in the following year preached several Sundays at New Bedford, Mass., where he found some friends among the Quakers. He also preached for a time in Concord. In 1829 he was chosen minister of a large congregation in Boston. A venerable minister gave me an account of a sermon he heard from Emerson in those days, impressed on his memory by the vitality it infused in an old theme, and the simplicity with which it was delivered. The text was, "What is a man profited if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul?" The emphasis was on the word "own;" and the general theme was, that to every man the great end of existence was the preservation and culture of his individual mind and character. Each man must be saved by his own inward redeemer; and the whole world was for each but a plastic material through which the individual spirit was to realize itself. Aspiration and thought become clear and real only by action and life. If knowledge lead not to action, it passes away, being preserved only on the condition of being used. "The last thing," said my informant, "that any of us who heard him would have predicted of the youth, whose quiet simplicity and piety captivated all, was that he would become the religious revolutionist of America."

And, indeed, so softly did the old religious forms slip away from Emerson, that when he informed his congregation that he could not longer administer the sacrament to them, they could not associate any formidable heresy with his position. They were loath to part with him. In the three years of his ministry he had reflected honor upon their pulpit. He had been active in the philanthropic work of Boston, was chaplain of the Legislature, and on the School Board. A few months after his settlement in Boston he had married Ellen Louisa Tucker and a few months before he gave up his pulpit she died. Under these circumstances of depression Emerson came on his first visit to Europe. The record of his pilgrimage to Coleridge's house at Highgate, to Rydal Mount, and to Craigenputtock, is given in Emerson's "English Traits." He came, hoping to find light upon more serious questions than any that had arisen between him and his Boston congregation; he returned with but one thing made clearer, namely that he had begun an ascent which each must climb alone.

The Old Manse was built in 1767 for Emerson's grandfather, who had become minister of Concord church. Emerson's father was the first child born in it, and used to claim that he was "in arms" on the field when the British were repulsed, being six years old when the fight occurred close to the windows. In this house we now find Emerson, at the age of thirty-one, studying Plato and Plotinus, and the English mystics, but also, with Sarah Ripley, studying Goethe and savants of the new school, like Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire. Here was conceived his first book, "Nature." This essay was published in 1836, the same year in which he wrote the Concord hymn, since annually sung, with its line about "the shot heard round the world." The little book was not at once heard so far, but it proved also the first shot of a revolution. A writer in the Saturday Review speaks of "the great men whom America and England have jointly lost"—Emerson and Darwin—and remarks that "some of those who have been forward in taking up and advancing the impulse given by Darwin, not only on the general ground where it started, but as a source of energy in the wider application of scientific thought, have once and again openly declared that they owe not a little to Emerson." This just remark may be illustrated by Dr. Tyndall's words, in 1873: "The first time I ever knew Waldo Emerson was when, years ago, I picked up at a stall a copy of his 'Nature'; I read it with such delight, and I have never ceased to read it; and if anyone can be said to have given the impulse to my mind it is Emerson; whatever I have done the world owes him." But there is still more significance in this matter. In 1836, when Darwin returned from his voyage round the world, Emerson's "Nature" appeared, in which the new world discovered by the Englishman was ideally recognized by the American.

In 1835 Emerson was married to Lidian Jackson, sister of the late Dr. C. T. Jackson, well known in connection with the discovery of anaesthetics. The Concord house and farm were now purchased, and Emerson's mother came to reside with him. The first works of Emerson brought to his doors those strange pilgrims whom Hawthorne has described in his "Mosses from an old Manse." Lover of solitude as he was, the new teacher had never the heart to send empty from his door anyone of those dejected people groping for the light who sought him out. Mrs. Emerson, a lady of refined sensibilities and profoundly religious nature, must often have been severely tried by these throngs, but not even delicate health prevented her from exercising a large and beautiful hospitality to these spiritually lame, halt, and heart-sick who came to receive a healing touch. Though never ruffled, Emerson was not defenceless before boorish intruders. On one occasion a boisterous declaimer against "the conventionalities," who kept on his hat in the drawing-room after invitation to lay it aside, was told, "We will continue the conversation in the garden," and was genially taken out of doors to enter them no more. Few were the sane, as he told me, who visited him in those earlier days, but the unsane were pretty generally those whose first instinct under any new light is to get it into a tabernacle. Fortunately for Emerson and his household, some of his ablest friends conceived the idea of founding a new society on his principles at Brook Farm, near Boston; but, unfortunately for that community, the unsane folk flocked to it, and it was speedily brought to nought. Some able men, like George Ripley, George Curtis, and Charles Dana, belonged to that community in their youth, but probably Hawthorne wrote the experience of all of them when, just after leaving it, he entered in his note-book (1841), "Really I should judge it to be twenty years since I left Brook Farm.... It already looks like a dream behind me. The real Me was never a member of the community; there had been a spectral appearance there, sounding the horn at daybreak, and milking the cows, and hoeing the potatoes, and raking hay, toiling in the sun, and doing me the honor to assume my name. But this spectre was not myself." The Transcendental Club, too, which preceded this, and which met a few times at the house of Dr. Channing (who tried to comprehend the new ideas, and was always the friend of Emerson), failed. The quarterly magazine that was started, the Dial, did more. Four volumes of it appeared, and to this day they are so interesting that it is a wonder they have not been reprinted; but the serene hours thereon marked were speedily succeeded by days of strife and storm, in which the writers of that periodical were summoned to be leaders. Emerson remained in his home. He now and then visited Brook Farm, but was shrewd enough to foresee its catastrophe from the first. The child who sought her lost butterfly with tears, not knowing that it was softly perched upon her head, had a counterpart in the many enthusiasts, who continued to seek in communities or new sects the beauty which had floated before their eyes; but some there were who made the happier discovery that a quiet New England village, with its cultivated families, in whose Town Hall Emerson taught, was ideal enough. Gradually Prospero drew around him the spirits to which he was related, and Concord became the intellectual centre of the country.

Emerson, as has been stated, at the beginning of his career had assumed the truth of evolution in nature. More and more this idea became fruitful to him. His friend Agassiz, on the appearance of "The Vestiges of Creation," had committed himself warmly against it, but Emerson felt certain that the future of science belonged to that principle, which he had reached by his poetic intuition. Nearly thirty years ago, when I was a member of Divinity College, the theology taught was still a slightly rationalistic Unitarianism and the science qualified by it (though Agassiz would not admit miracle). Some of the students were finding their real professor in Concord. On one evening we went out, travelling the seventeen miles in sleighs, to hear a lecture that was to have been given by him; it had been unavoidably postponed, but Emerson, hearing of our arrival, invited us to his house, and we had no reason to feel any disappointment. Nevertheless, Emerson wrote me that if I would make the preparations he would read an essay in my room. On that occasion Emerson read a paper on "Poetry," in which he stated fully and clearly the doctrine of evolution. This was five years before the appearance of the papers of Darwin and Wallace in the journal of the Linnaean Society (1858), though I find in Emerson's essay as published ("Letters and Social Aims," Chatto & Windus, 1876) that Darwin is mentioned; otherwise that essay is precisely the same that was read to us in 1853. I well remember how we were startled that afternoon by Emerson's emphatic declaration—"There is one animal, one plant, one matter, and one force." He said also: "Science does not know its debt to imagination. Goethe did not believe that a great naturalist could exist without this faculty. He was himself conscious of that help, which made him a prophet among doctors. From this vision he gave grave hints to the geologist, the botanist, and the optician." The name of Emerson would now be set beside that of Goethe by every man of science in America. While as yet "The Vestiges of Creation" was trampled on by preachers and professors, Emerson affirmed its principle to be true, and during some years, in which no recognized man of science ventured to accept Darwin's hypothesis, he sustained its claim by references to the scientific authorities of Europe. For the rest, this essay, read to us at Divinity College, did for some who heard it very much the same that the generalization of Darwin has done for vast numbers of minds. The harmony of nature and thought was in it, clouds floated into light, and though poets were present, it appeared the truest New World poem that we were gathered there around the seer in whose vision the central identity in nature flowed through man's reason, gently did away with discords through their promise of larger harmonies. That which the Brahmans found in the far East, our little company there in the West knew also—"From the poisonous tree of the world two species of fruit are produced, sweet as the waters of life: Love, or the society of beautiful souls, and Poetry, whose taste is like the immortal juice Vishnu." When Emerson had finished there was a hush of silence, the usual applause of his listeners; it seemed hardly broken when Otto Dresel performed some "songs without words."

Emerson was the first man of high social position in America who openly took the anti-slavery position. On May 29, 1831, he admitted an abolitionist to lecture on the subject in his church, six years before even Channing had committed himself to that side. Garrison was at that time regarded as a vulgar street-preacher of notions too wild to excite more than a smile. The despised group on Boston Common was first sheltered by Emerson, and this action was more significant because Emerson was chaplain of the Massachusetts Legislature. Emerson first drew the sympathy of scholars to that side. The voices of the two popular orators, Channing and Phillips, soon followed, and Longfellow began to write the anti-slavery poems collected in 1842. Emerson could not throw himself into any organization, nor did he encourage the scholars around him to do so; he believed that to elevate character, to raise the ethical standard, to inspire courage in the intellect of the country, would speedily make its atmosphere too pure for a slave to breathe. Fearless in vindicating those whose convictions led them to enlist for this particular struggle, Emerson saw in slavery one among many symptoms of the moral disease of the time. "The timidity of our public opinion," he said, "is our disease; or, shall I say, the absence of private opinion. Good nature is plentiful, but we want justice with heart of steel to fight down the proud. The private mind has the access to the totality of goodness and truth, that it may be a balance to a corrupt society; and to stand for the private verdict against popular clamor is the office of the noble. If a humane measure is propounded in behalf of the slave, or of the Irishman, or the Catholic, or for the succor of the poor, that sentiment, that project, will have the homage of the hero. That is his nobility, his oath of knighthood, to succor the helpless and oppressed; always to throw himself on the side of weakness, of youth, of hope, on the liberal, on the expansive side; never on the conserving, the timorous, the lock-and-bolt system. More than our good-will we may not be able to give. We have our own affairs, our own genius, which chain us to our proper work. We cannot give our life to the cause of the debtor, of the slave, or the pauper, as another is doing; but to one thing we are bound, not to blaspheme the sentiment and the work of that man, not to throw stumbling-blocks in the way of the abolitionist, the philanthropist, as the organs of influence and opinion are swift to do." Emerson had as much practical sagacity as genius; when he spoke these words (in a lecture on "The Young American," in Boston, 1844) he had reached a commanding position, carrying with it gravest responsibilities; the destinies of hundreds of young men and women were determined by his lectures. But with reference to the anti-slavery movement, he did more than he exacted from others, and recognized it as a far more important reform than others When, in 1835, Harriet Martineau was nearly mobbed in Boston, personal violence being threatened and no prominent citizen venturing to her side, Emerson and his brother Charles hastened to her defence. "At the time of the hubbub against me in Boston," she writes in her autobiography, "Charles Emerson stood alone in a large company in defence of the right of free thought and speech, and declared that he had rather see Boston in ashes than that I, or anybody else, should be debarred in any way from perfectly free speech. His brother Waldo invited me to be his guest in the midst of my unpopularity."

In 1844, when Massachusetts citizen negroes had been taken to prison from ships in southern ports, Emerson delivered an oration on the anniversary of West Indian emancipation, and spoke sternly on the matter. "If such a damnable outrage can be committed on the person of a citizen with impunity, let the Governor break the broad seal of the State; he bears the sword in vain. The Governor of Massachusetts is a trifler, the State-House in Boston is a play-house; the General Court is a dishonored body, if they make laws which they cannot execute. The great-hearted Puritans have left no posterity." He demanded that the representatives of the State should demand of Congress the instant release, by force if necessary, of the imprisoned negro seamen, and their indemnification. As for dangers to the Union from such demands—"the Union is already at an end when the first citizen of Massachusetts is thus outraged." This address was a bugle, and it filled the anti-slavery ranks with fresh courage. The Herald of Freedom, reporting it at the time, says their eyes were filled with tears as this leader of New England literature came from his poetic solitude to join hands with them.

The service which students and literary men could render in those days was often the subject of anxious consultation, and Emerson never failed to counsel sacrifices for the public duty.

"When the ship is in a storm," he used to say, "the passengers must lend a hand, and even women tug at the ropes." When the Southern States began to secede, some frightened compromisers in the North hoped to soothe them by silencing the abolitionists; roughs were employed to fill the anti-slavery halls and drown every voice. Sometimes there was personal violence. During the war, in which many of his friends were slain, and his only son wounded, no man did better service than Emerson, with voice, pen, and means; and when it ended his counsels were of the utmost importance.

Emerson had a happy old age, and lived to see his golden sheaves around him. In the "Address" (1837), now historical, which brought the fulminations of the Unitarian pulpit and university upon him, in his thirty-fourth year, he admonished the American scholar that, "if the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him." And now America has, in his own history, the impressive confirmation of his faith. In just twenty-nine years from the time that sentence was uttered, the university which repudiated him made him an overseer and a doctor of laws, and a lecturer to the students, and he was the most universally beloved and honored man in America. Where he singly opened his church to abolitionists, he lived to see all churches anti-slavery and the slave set free. The white-robed sage lay in the church founded by his Puritan ancestors, enlarged by his own thought, above whose pulpit was a harp made of golden flowers, and on it an open book made of pinks, pansies, roses, with the word "Finis." Flowers were never more truly symbolical. His effective weapons against error and wrong were like those roses with which the angels, in Goethe's "Faust," drove away the demons, and his sceptre was made known by blossoming in his hand.

* * * * *

The following extract from a letter written by Emerson to one of his children, is reprinted from Cabot's "A Memoir of R. W. Emerson," by permission of the publisher, G. W. Dillingham.

"You are bound to be healthy and happy. I expect so much of you, of course, and neither allow for nor believe any rumors to the contrary. Please not to give the least countenance to any hobgoblin of the sick sort, but live out-of-doors and in the sea-bath and the sail-boat, and the saddle, and the wagon, and, best of all, in your shoes, so soon as they will obey you for a mile. For the great mother Nature will not quite tell her secret to the coach or the steamboat, but says, 'One to one, my dear, is my rule also, and I keep my enchantments and oracles for the religious soul coming alone, or as good as alone, in true love.'"



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW[15]

[Footnote 15: Copyright, 1894, by Selmar Hess]

By HEZEKIAH BUTTERWORTH

(1807-1882)



That was a memorable scene in the Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey, when the veil was lifted from the bust of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the first American upon whom England had conferred such distinguished honor. James Russell Lowell was there, and made the eulogy, and left in all minds the impression of these simple words; "The most beautiful character that I have ever known." Mr. Lowell knew men, and among the great spirits of the age with whom he had been associated, he perhaps had known no literary man more intimately than Longfellow. The original families of Lowell and Longfellow in America had grown side by side on the banks of the Merrimac. The younger poet had succeeded the elder in the professorship of literature at Harvard College; the two had lived side by side in historic houses in the old Cambridge neighborhood on the Charles, and there had shared the amenities of suburban life and had studied the world together. It was said that Longfellow came to live in a house "on the way to Mt. Auburn;" Lowell lived in a house on the same road, and the two poets sleep together there now in the loving shadows of Boston's "Field of God."

Since the days of Horace, friendship has found no more sympathetic and beautiful expression in verse than in the lines inscribed by Lowell to Longfellow and in the poems written by Longfellow in reference to Lowell.

Says Lowell in his lines to H. W. L——:

"Long days be his, and each as lusty-sweet As gracious natures find his song to be; May age steal on with softly-cadenced feet Falling in music, as for him were meet Whose choicest verse is harsher-toned than he!"

Says Longfellow of Lowell in the "Herons of Elmwood:"

"Sing to him, say to him, here at his gate, Where the boughs of the stately elms are meeting, Some one hath lingered to meditate, And send him unseen this friendly greeting;

"That many another hath done the same, Though not by a sound was the silence broken; The surest pledge of a deathless name Is the silent homage of thoughts unspoken."

The matchless lines in "The Two Angels," a poem that commemorates the events of the birth of a child to Longfellow and the death of the beautiful wife of Lowell on the same night, in which the poet sees an angel with amaranths go to the door of his neighbor, while an angel with asphodels comes to his own door, strikes the tenderest chords of life.

Longfellow was the poet of friendship, and he carried his heart friends wherever he went. The river Charles in his fancy made the letter C in its windings in the Brighton meadows before his door, and ever recalled three friends who had borne that name. One of the masterpieces of the work of his fading years is "Three Friends of Mine," in which he pictures Felton and Agassiz and the midnight parting with Charles Sumner at his door, and represents himself as one left to cover up the embers.

Henry W. Longfellow, the poet of "Hope, Home, and History," was a descendant of the family of William Longfellow, who came from England to Newbury, Mass., in 1675, and a son of Stephen Longfellow, an eminent lawyer and public man. He was born in Portland, Me., February 27, 1807. The family consisted of eight children, of which he was the second, and of which two were poets, the other being the Unitarian hymn writer, Rev. Samuel Longfellow.

He grew up a pure, loving boy in the schools of Portland, Me., fond of the woods, the hills, and the sea. "My Lost Youth" furnishes a delightful picture of this period of his life. It is said that his childhood fancy first found expression in the following rhymes:

"Mr. Finney had a turnip That grew behind the barn, And it grew and it grew, But never did any harm."

A member of the Longfellow family has denied that these luminous but not very promising lines were the first offering of his muse. If the anecdote be apocryphal, the boy Longfellow yet began to love poetry and to write it, and he became a newspaper poet, one of those common soldiers of literature, while a student. He read Irving at twelve, and was charmed with the matter and style of "Rip Van Winkle." He felt the charm of Horace a little later, and probably learned his first lesson in eloquent literature from the "Poetic Art" of the Augustine age of Rome in her glory. Says Horace: "He who writes what is useful with what is agreeable wins every vote: his book crosses the sea; it will enrich the booksellers, and win for him imperishable fame."

Longfellow learned to make what is useful, agreeable, and this principle was one of the great secrets of his success in literary life. His early poems that did useful and agreeable service in the poet's corner of the newspapers of the time were, so far as we know, never collected. A few of them, however, survive, among them "The Spirit of Poetry," "Sunrise on the Hills," and "The Hymn of the Moravian Nuns."

At the age of fourteen he was prepared for Bowdoin College, which he entered a year later as a sophomore, and became a member of one of the most distinguished classes in American history. Among his fellow-students were Nathaniel Hawthorne, his personal friend, John S. C. Abbott, George B. Cheever, William Pitt Fessenden, John P. Hale, Calvin E. Stone, and Franklin Pierce, afterward President of the United States. He was graduated the fourth in his class.

The ambition for authorship came to him among the shades of Bowdoin. He said while there, thus anticipating in prose the "Psalm of Life:" "Whatever I study I ought to engage in with all my soul, for I will be eminent in something."

His poems published in the newspapers, principally in the Boston Literary Gazette, during his college life made for him a name, and he was offered the professorship of modern languages in Bowdoin College, soon after his graduation. To better prepare himself for the chair he went abroad, in 1826, in his twentieth year. He studied in France, Spain, Italy, and Germany. He made himself master of the French, Spanish, German, and Italian languages and literature, and returned to America in the late summer of 1829, and entered upon the duties of his professorship at Bowdoin in the autumn. He married Miss Mary Potter, of Portland, Me., and went to live in an old house, which was shaded by a single great elm, the site of which is still shown, on a salary of $1,000 per year. He published "Outre Mer," and taught and wrote with such distinguished success that, on the resignation of George Ticknor, he was offered the chair of modern languages at Harvard. For the larger preparation which he found necessary for his work, he went to Europe again in 1835. In his first visit to Europe he had met Washington Irving in Spain; he now made the acquaintance of Carlyle and Browning. His wife died in Germany.

He became a professor in Harvard in the fall of 1836, making his residence at the Cragie House, an old colonial mansion, shaded by trees, which Washington had used for his headquarters in 1775-1776. He married a most beautiful and accomplished lady, a daughter of Hon. Nathan Appleton, of Boston, whom he had met abroad, and who is supposed to be described in his romance "Hyperion." Here, happy in his domestic life, surrounded by the most scholarly men of America, his literary life ripened, his fame as a poet grew, and his sympathy with life as expressed in his works won all hearts. His "Voices of the Night" made him the poet of the home; "Evangeline," which is the American book of Ruth, made him the singer of the fidelity of holy affections, and "Hiawatha," the voice of the dying traditions of the Indian race.

He was a lover of his family, and a great affliction came to him in the summer of 1861. One July day his wife was playing with some sealing-wax with her children, when her dress caught fire, and she was enveloped in the flames, and burned to death. The poet is said to have suddenly changed from a young man to an old man under his weight of grief; he appeared in the streets of Cambridge again, in a few weeks, but unlike his former self. His affection for his dead wife in his widowerhood is expressed in the "Cross of Snow," written many years after her death:

"In the long, sleepless watches of the night, A gentle face—the face of one long dead— Looks at me from the wall, where round its head The night-lamp casts a halo of pale light. Here in this room she died; and soul more white Never through martyrdom of fire was led To its repose; nor can in books be read The legend of a life more benedight. There is a mountain in the distant West That, sun-defying, in its deep ravines Displays a cross of snow upon its side. Such is the cross I wear upon my breast These eighteen years, through all the changing scenes And seasons, changeless since the day she died."

He would take a dear friend into the room where her portrait hung, point to it, and say "my dear wife," and turn away to weep. His loving dream of his first wife is pictured in "The Footsteps of Angels:"

"And with them the Being Beauteous, Who unto my youth was given, More than all things else to love me, And is now a saint in heaven.

"With a slow and noiseless footstep Comes that messenger divine, Takes the vacant chair beside me, Lays her gentle hand in mine.

"And she sits and gazes at me With those deep and tender eyes. Like the stars, so still and saint-like. Looking downward from the skies.

"Uttered not, yet comprehended, Is the spirit's voiceless prayer. Soft rebukes, in blessings ended. Breathing from her lips of air.

"Oh, though oft depressed and lonely All my fears are laid aside, If I but remember only Such as these have lived and died."

In 1868 he went to England with his family. His fame in England was as great now as that of any English poet. He was received in London with the greatest love and hospitality; he met the queen, and received a doctor's degree from the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. His reception by the literary classes was not more warm than the appreciative interest which was shown by the people. He had become the poet of the English homes, and was as greatly read as the Laureate.

I met the poet under most pleasant circumstances, in the beginning of his beautiful old age. I was a young editor; I was called to make an address before a church literary society on the historic places of Boston, and I wrote to Professor Longfellow in regard to the history of the poem "I Stood on the Bridge at Midnight." I received a note from him in his well-known hand, saying that if I would visit him some evening at his home, it would give him pleasure not only to give me the history of the writing of this poem, but of any of his poems in which I might take an interest. I accepted the invitation, and one misty February night found me at his door, feeling as poor Phillis Wheatly must have felt when she stood at the same door after the invitation from Washington.

I well recall the night. The slow opening of the door by the quiet servant, the dim hall that seemed haunted by the shadows of the past, the great reception-room walled with books and pictures!

The poet was alone—he was a lonely man in his old age. He rose from his table, and came to meet me, a kindly light in his face, his flowing hair as white as snow. He saw that I was awed by his presence, and his gracious dignity changed at once into a friendly sympathy. "I have here some things that may interest you," he said; "here is Coleridge's inkstand; there is Tom Moore's waste-paper basket; and there," he added, in a reverent tone, "is a piece of Dante's coffin." The last relic was enclosed in a solid glass, and he proceeded to tell the story of how he had received it.

"You express a kindly interest in the origin of my poems," he added, in substance. "I will tell you something about the writing of some of them. You see the screen yonder; it is Japanese; there is written upon it the 'Psalm of Life.' The poem was written at Cambridge when the orchards were bright with buds and blossoms, and the days were in the full tide of the year. I did not write it for publication but for myself. I felt an inspiration to express in words my one purpose in life. I carried it about with me for a long time, when I was asked for a poem for the Knickerbocker Magazine, then a popular periodical, and I sent it to the editor without any expectation of its success with the people. It has been translated into nearly all languages that have a literature.

"In London I received an invitation to visit the queen. On returning from the palace, the coach was stopped by the crowd of vehicles in the street. There stepped before the door of the carriage an English workman. 'Are you Mr. Longfellow?' he asked. 'I am,' I answered. 'Did you write the "Psalm of Life"?' 'I wrote that poem, my friend.' 'Pardon me, but would you be willing to take the hand of a workingman?' 'Certainly, my friend; it would give me pleasure.' He put his hand through the carriage window, and I shook hands with him. That," said Mr. Longfellow, with emphasis and feeling, "was the best compliment that I ever received in my life."



The last declaration, in which we think that we have quoted the poet's exact words, shows the heart and character of the man. It is a photograph of his soul.

He said that the poem "I Stood on the Bridge at Midnight" was written in the lonely hours of his widowerhood, when he used to visit Boston evenings and return over the bridge of the Charles. The bridge grew still as the night wore on, and the procession of the day became thin. There was a furnace at Brighton at that time, and the reflection of the red fire fell across the dark river. The bridge over the Charles is nearly the same now as then; it has been somewhat reconstructed, but the wooden piers are there; the drifting seaweed, the odor of the brine, and the processions of "care-encumbered men" vanishing into the night. An English nobleman who is a literary critic has pronounced this poem the most sympathetic in the language. Its popularity probably is due to the night scene and the spirit of self-renunciation. It is one of the most beautiful songs of the age as set to music by two English composers. We never tire of the message of sympathy.

"Excelsior," which has been greatly parodied, expresses in a simple way what Browning has more artistically illustrated in "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came." It was written one evening after the poet had received a letter from his beloved friend, Charles Sumner, full of lofty sentiments, expressed in the classic rhetoric of the time. As he dropped the letter the word "Excelsior" caught his eye, and the inspiration and the vision of the poem came. He wrote it on the back of the letter which contained the magic word.

It is said that the words "Cumnor Hall," in Meckle's ballad, so haunted the mind of Sir Walter Scott as to compel him to write "Kenilworth." "I was led, I think," said Longfellow, "to write the 'Wreck of the Hesperus' by the words 'Norman's Woe' I had been reading one dreary night of the disasters that had befallen the Gloucester fishing fleet, and my eye met the words 'Norman's Woe.' I went to bed, but the story haunted me. I arose and began to write, and the poem came to me in whole stanzas."

"The Old Clock on the Stairs" was suggested by an old farmhouse timepiece at the country house of Mr. Appleton, his father-in-law. While the house described was in the country, the description answers well to the poet's own residence, which also contained an eight-day clock which reached from floor to ceiling. Many people never so much as doubted that the Cragie House and its clock were meant in the poem. The clock in the Cambridge house was so old and antique that most visitors fancied that they saw in it the real "old clock on the stairs." The refrain was suggested by the French words "Toujours jamais, jamais toujours" in an elegant French quotation.

"Hiawatha" was pictured to the poet by the story which Abraham le Fort, an Onondaga chief, gave to Schoolcraft. The musical vocabulary in which the Indian words suggest their own meaning may be found in Schoolcraft. It is the one poem which commemorates the legends of the Indian races; it will doubtless outlive those races, and be their tradition in future ages. The Indian words, as in the instance of "Norman's Woe," must have suggested in many cases the scenes and incidents of the poet's creative fancy.

"The March of Miles Standish," which followed, repeats the old apocryphal Puritan story, which no one but a critic would care to question. We think, however, that the ancient fable of Europa is likely to have suggested the ride to Duxbury on the back of the bull, for at that time there were few cattle in the colonies.

"'The Tales of a Wayside Inn,'" said Mr. Longfellow, "received that name merely to give them locality. I had never been in the Wayside Inn, but once." (We think that he stopped there on his first return from Europe when travelling from Albany to Boston, on which road there were the White Horse, Red Horse (Wayside), and Black Horse Inns.) "I had written the stories in verse, and I wished to connect them with a sympathetic place and a company of story-tellers. My friends were accustomed to dine occasionally at the Wayside Inn, and it seemed a pleasing fancy to place my story-tellers there." The Poet of the company was Mr. Parsons, the Dante scholar; the Theologian, Mr. Wales; the Sicilian, Luigi Monte, an exile from Sicily, whom President Lincoln sent back in an official capacity, under the influence of Charles Sumner, when Sicily became free during the Italian revolution; the Jew was Edrika, an accomplished Boston merchant.

"Paul Revere's Ride" is perhaps the most popular, and the "Vision Beautiful" the most philosophical, of these many tales. The story of "Lady Wentworth" is a most charming story of old New England folk-lore, and wears the quaint and sympathetic colorings of colonial times.

"I have given up the theory," said Mr. Longfellow, "that the old stone tower at Newport is to be connected with the Norsemen. I feel certain now that it is merely a windmill. I have a model of just such a mill, which was a common sight on the coasts of the North Sea." His residence in Scandinavia as a student gave him a love of the literature of the North, and hence his tales from the Sagas.

The melodious and sympathetic qualities of Longfellow's verse meet well the wants of the composer. The songs of the poet are more and more being wedded to music. "The Bridge," "The Rainy Day," "The Day is Done," "The Legend of the Crossbill," "The Silent Land," "Allah," "The Sea Hath its Pearls" (translation), and many other poems have found expression in musical art as inspired and beautiful as themselves, and thus winged will long go singing through the world. The English composers have thus far been the best interpreters of his songs.

His view of literature at that time, when he had made his fame and stood in the ripeness of the harvest, was expressed in the words of Fitz Greene Halleck, which he quoted: "A little well written is immortality." He had always acted on Horace's advice as given in the "Poetic Art," and had chosen subjects that waited a voice, and made what was useful, agreeable. Every poem, even though an inspiration, had been carefully revised, until the best and most sympathetic, picturesque, and worthy expression was found. His poems grew in art with years. One of his earliest volumes was "Outre Mer," which was followed by "Hyperion" after some years; both prose works were filled with the spirit of poetry. In 1839 he published his first popular volume of verse under the title of "Voices of the Night;" in 1841, "Ballads and other Poems;" in 1842, "Poems on Slavery;" in 1843, "The Spanish Student;" in 1846, "The Belfry of Bruges;" and in 1847, "Evangeline," which established his fame. His other works were published after intervals of two or three years, with a long silence after the death of his wife in 1861. The last of his great poems was "Morituri Salutamus," read by him at the fiftieth reunion of his class at Bowdoin College. One of his most perfect poems, and perhaps the most elegant of its kind in any language, was produced at this period of the beginning of life's winter, "Three Friends of Mine."

One March day in 1882, a lad from one of the Boston schools came to me, and said that some pupils from the school wished to call on the poet, and asked me if I supposed that he would receive them and give them his autograph. I recalled that Longfellow had said to me that he always answered applications for autographs, adding, "Would it not be discourteous in me to refuse my name to one who took such an interest in anything which I had written as to write me for such a favor?" I replied that I had no doubt but that the poet would receive them kindly; that he loved young people, and advised them to make the call.

He received the lads with his usual kindness, showed them the historic associations of the old house, and then in their company looked over on the Brighton meadows and the Charles River with its now icy C, for the last time. The day was declining, the last March day that he would ever see in health. Illness came soon after this visit from the school-boys, and soon he who had lived on the way to Mt. Auburn, was borne to the calm city of the dead. His grave is near Spurzheim's, not far from the gate, on a beautiful knoll, and is marked by a simple stone with a plain inscription.

Longfellow was the poet of humanity and eternal hope, and his poetic scriptures are always sought and always will be by spirits seeking sympathy. He doubtless will live as the poet of the heart long after greater rhetoricians and more philosophical poets have lost their influence. It is the poet that is most human that has the greatest influence and the most enduring fame.

As the poet of eternal hope, his horizons ever lift. He could not have written Browning's "Lost Leader." His characters are all happy in the end; his ships of song all come to blue harbors and happy ports. Poems like Lowell's "Rhoecus," where opportunity is lost forever, find no expression in his muse, but rather the rainbow always that shines in the "Legend Beautiful." His Sordellos do not fail; they attain; the people of his fancy overcome even their sins and mount on them like ladders to heaven. Even old age in his view is full of opportunity, and all experiences have their kindly helps and opportunities. Though a translator of Dante, his own muse had no "Inferno," hut only a "Purgatorio."

He is the most loved poet of our own or of any age; the American Horace, whose pictures of all that is best in our early history will ever remain. To study him is to grow. He never gave to the world a soiled thought, or planted a seed in any mind whose flower and fruit were not good. "The most beautiful character I ever knew," said Lowell amid the shadows of the royal tombs of the Abbey, as his white bust was placed among the ghosts; and so felt those who laid him down to rest in the kindly earth of Mt. Auburn's fields and flowers, on the banks of the calm, rippling Charles; and so feel those who visit that simple spot, and rest in thought there amid the vines and roses under the trees.

He touched all life to make it better, and humanity will ever be grateful to the Heavens that he lived and sang.

[Signature of the author.]



ALFRED TENNYSON[16]

[Footnote 16: Copyright, 1894, by Selmar Hess.]

By CLARENCE COOK

(1809-1892)



Few of the world's great poets have woven into their verse so much autobiographical material as the late Lord Tennyson, Poet Laureate of England. All his early poetry is suffused with tints, sombre or bright, and breathes of sounds that recall the landscape of the Lincolnshire in whose sunniest spot he was born, but in near neighborhood to "the level waste, the rounding gray" of "the dark fen," and within sight and sound of the "sandy tracts" and "the ocean roaring into cataracts." Later, we find in some of the poems that have made for themselves a place in the heart of all English-speaking people, vivid pictures in words or phrases, recalling his travels in Italy and Greece; and in the latter half of his life we follow him to the southern part of England, to Surrey and the Isle of Wight, where we find him in his "careless-ordered garden, close to the edge of a noble down," or "hear the magpie gossip garrulous under a roof of pine." But, to quote the lines that illustrate this autobiographic element in Tennyson's poetry, or that show his happy way of making use of his actual experiences, by which again we are able to get an impression of his way of life, and of the manner of man he was, would be to transfer a goodly portion of his verse to these pages.

Alfred Tennyson was born August 5, 1809, at Somersby, Lincolnshire, and was the third son in a family of five sons and seven daughters born to the Reverend George Clayton Tennyson, who was rector of Somersby, and held, besides, the livings of Beg-Enderby and Great Grimsby.

Tennyson's father was a man of various tastes and accomplishments, dabbling in poetry, painting, architecture, music, the study of language and mathematics, but doing nothing of note in any of these things. Even as a preacher he seems to have made but little impression, if we may judge by the answer made by one of his old parishioners to the question: "What sort of sermons did Mr. Tennyson preach?" "Eee read um from a paaper, an I didn't knaaw what um meant." But the father's versatility doubtless did his children good service; for in such a village as Somersby, the opportunities for general culture were few. Up to the age of seven, when he was sent to the grammar-school at Louth, Alfred was taught at home by his father. We are told that in the case of each of his boys, Mr. Tennyson was in the habit, before presenting them at the grammar-school, of making them commit to memory and recite every day one of the Odes of Horace, beginning with the Ode to Maecenas and ending with the "In Praise of Augustus"—the last Ode of the four Books. Alfred went to Louth, entering the grammar-school the Christmas after the battle of Waterloo. His brother Charles was already there, and the whole family moved to Louth from Somersby in order to make a home for the boys. In 1820, at the age of eleven, Alfred left the school, and returned with his family to the parsonage at Somersby. In 1828 he went to Cambridge, and the years that elapsed between his leaving the grammar-school and his entering the university were among the most important in the youth of the poet. His further instruction in preparation for college was carried on at home; but on the whole the teaching was desultory; although, judging from the results, what was done in the way of direct instruction was done thoroughly. As Mr. Graham tells us, there was not a clever man in the county who was not asked to give his assistance in the task. One tutor drilled Alfred in mathematics; another in music; and a Roman Catholic priest taught him and his brother linguistics with a view to the university; and Alfred was allowed to spend much time in wandering about the moors, or in the woods that covered the hills on whose skirts the village of Somersby stood. Carlyle writes to Emerson: "You see in Tennyson's verse that he is a native of moated grange and green flat pastures, not of mountains and their torrents," and this is true in part; but Mr. Graham tells us that the country about Somersby is not flat, but broken and hilly, and that the place is named Somersby, i.e., summer's town, because it abounds in birds and flowers; and, indeed, one may know by the frequent allusions to flowers and birds and the nice observation shown in these allusions, that these things must have made a strong impression on the youthful mind of the poet. He learned nature at first hand, and had his lesson by heart, unconsciously imbibing it from his walks alone, or with his dearly loved elder brother, Charles—elder by five years—over all the country-side; and there is no doubt that the wild and dreary side of that region, the flat expanse of the fens slowly rescuing from the ever threatening and invading sea, the long line of the coast with its beaches and ridged mounds of sand built by the winds, and strengthened by the bird-sown seeds of grass to be barriers against the ocean—that all these scenes made an impression on his mind strong to balance the sweet woodland pastoral note of the Somersby brooks and flowery hollows, no one can doubt who knows Tennyson's poetry. He had little love for the hardier sports of boys, but was not a retiring child either, nor over-contemplative, although he was described by one of the old Northern Farmers he has immortalized, as a boy who would "sit for hours on a gate gawmin about him!" But this indolence was a trait that he had in common with many men destined to greatness, and it clung to him all his life. It was no sign of an indolent mind, but rather evidence of, perhaps, an over-active one. His earliest volume of poems—made up of his own with contributions from his brothers, Charles and Frederick, and published when he was eighteen—though written all along the track of the preceding years, bears evidence of much youthful wrestling with the problems of life, mingled with much that witnesses to the boy's pure joy in living. He began to write poetry at a very early age, and he found in his family an audience by no means at one in their appreciation of his talent. After hearing some of his verses, his grandfather gave him a half-guinea, and prophesied that it would prove the first and the last of his earnings by that trade. Whether or not the old gentleman lived to hear of his getting a whole guinea a line for some of his work, as we think we remember to have heard was the case with "Sea Dreams," we do not know; but, with his probable taste in poetry, supposing him to have cared for the poetry of his time, he would doubtless have looked upon Alfred's success as another sign of the degeneracy of the age. As has been hinted, Mr. Tennyson was very careful of his money, and his boys were not allowed much spending money. Alfred and his brother Charles had the natural youthful desire to see their poetry in print, but they could not with all their savings raise the money to meet the expense of publication. An old nurse of the family, the wife of the coachman, is authority for the statement that it was her husband who first showed the boys a way out of the difficulty. "Why don't you make a book of some of these poems you are all the time writing, and sell it to a publisher?" Acting on this hint the boys offered their small collection to a publisher, who doubtless thinking that two families so well-placed in the county as the Tennysons and the Fytches would insure the success of their young offshoots' venture, assumed the expense of printing, and gave the budding poets ten pounds to boot. The "Poems by two Brothers" appeared in 1827. The news of its publication was greeted by one of the uncles with the remark: "I hear that my nephew has made a book. I wish it had been a wheelbarrow!" The thin volume has long ago passed into the domain of "books not to be had," and when by any chance a copy is brought to light the price it brings in the open market would have taken the uncle's breath away. The book has lately been reprinted, and in this form is now accessible.



At Cambridge, Tennyson entered Trinity College, and while there made the acquaintance of Arthur Henry Hallam, which soon ripened into the friendship that has been made immortal in the poem "In Memoriam." The only distinction Tennyson would seem to have gained at Cambridge was the Chancellor's gold medal awarded for the prize-poem "Timbuctoo," a curious production long consigned to oblivion but now included in the authorized edition of the poet's collected work.

In 1811 the Rev. Mr. Tennyson died, and on leaving Cambridge, Alfred returned to Somersby and lived with his mother and sisters. In 1830 he published "Poems chiefly Lyrical," in 1832 "Poems," and in 1842 "Poems," in two volumes, which first opened the eyes of the English public to the fact that a new planet had appeared in the heaven of poetry, and Tennyson's name soon became a household word. In 1845 he was awarded a pension of L200 per annum from the Civil List, and in 1850 he was made Poet Laureate, on the death of Wordsworth. In the same year he married Miss Emily Sellwood, whom he had long known at Somersby, the daughter of a lawyer, and niece of Sir John Franklin. In 1855 he received the honorary degree of Doctor of Civil Law from Oxford and in 1884, being then in his seventy-fifth year, he was raised to the peerage under the title of Baron Tennyson of Aldworth and Farringford.

Tennyson was an ardent lover of England, and seldom left his native country, and never for any long time. He had two residences, one at Freshwater, in the Isle of Wight, and the other at Aldworth on the top of Blackdown, in Surrey. He changed from one of these places to the other according to the seasons and led in both the same quiet family life, devoted to poetry, and enjoying to the full the delights of the country, caring little for other society than that of his intimate friends—a strong contrast in this respect to his great contemporary Browning, who delighted in the social life of London, as that life delighted in him. Mr. Edwin Arnold has given in a recent number of The Forum (1891) a very pleasant account of a day spent at Farringford in the company of the venerable poet and his only surviving son Hallam, named after the friend of his father's early years. Although Tennyson was averse to mingling in general society, and was difficult of access in his home, except to his intimate friends, yet those friends were among the elect spirits of England, and he has recorded his feeling for some of them—for Maurice, Fitzgerald, Spedding, Lear, among others—in poems that deserve a place among his best. His friendship for Carlyle grew out of his admiration for the genius of the man as well as his character, and Carlyle has left more than one sketch of his friend among his inimitable word-portraits of notable men.

The interest of Tennyson's life really centres in his early days spent in his father's parish of Somersby; his later life has flowed on in a stream rarely interrupted by any events with which the public was concerned, or that can be said to have greatly influenced his poetry. He was no doubt the product of his time, and took a deep interest in what was going on in the world, especially in so much of it as affected England. But his strong conservatism made him unsympathetic with much that is called progress, and which at any rate is change; and change of any sort was little welcome to Tennyson. He was not born to be a reformer, and was ill-fitted by his temper to lead public opinion. But his lofty moral character, the noble purity and elevation of his life, and his singleness of aim, joined with his extraordinary powers as a poet, as a wielder of the English language—and no poet since the great days has had such a varied power over all chords of the lyre—these elements combined to make the name of Tennyson without a doubt the greatest of his time among the poets of the English-speaking race. He died at Aldworth House, in Surrey, October 6, 1892.

[Signature of the author.]



CHARLES DICKENS

By WALTER BESANT

(1812-1870)



Charles Dickens was born at Landport, now a great town, but then a little suburb of Portsmouth, or Portsea, lying half a mile outside of the town walls. The date of his birth was Friday, February 7, 1812. His father was John Dickens, a clerk in the navy pay-office, and at that time attached to the Portsmouth dockyard. The familiarity which the novelist shows with sea-ports and sailors is not, however, due to his birthplace, because his father, in the year 1814, was recalled to London, and in 1816 went to Chatham. They still show the room in the dockyard where the elder Dickens worked, and where his son often came to visit him. The family lived in Ordnance Place, Chatham, and the boy was sent to a school kept in Gibraltar Place, New Road, by one William Giles. As a child he is said to have been a great reader, and very early began to attempt original writing. In 1821, Charles being then nine years of age, the family fell into trouble; reforms in the Admiralty deprived the father of his post, and the greater part of his income. They had to leave Chatham and removed to London, where a mean house in a shabby street of Camden Town received them. But not for long. The unfortunate father was presently arrested for debt and consigned to the Marshalsea, and Charles, then only ten years of age, and small for his age, was placed in a blacking factory at Hungerford Market, where all he could do was to put the labels on the blacking-bottles, with half a dozen rough and rude boys. The degradation and misery of this occupation sunk deep into the boy's soul. He could never dare to speak of this time; it was never mentioned in his presence. Not only were his days passed in this wretched work, but the child was left entirely to himself at night, when he made his way home from Hungerford Market to Camden Town, a distance of four miles, to his lonely bedroom. On Sundays he visited his father in the prison. Of course such a neglected way of living could not continue. They presently found a lodging for him in Lant Street, close to the Marshalsea, where at least he was near his parents, and his father shortly afterward recovering his liberty, they all went back to Camden Town, and the boy was sent to school again. It was to a private school in the Hampstead Road, where he remained for three or four years of quiet work. It must have been then, one suspects, rather than at Chatham, that he became so great a devourer of books. But he was never a scholar in any sense, and the books that he read were novels and plays. That the family fortunes were still low is proved by the fact that, when he was taken from school, no better place could be found for him than a stool at the desk of a solicitor. Meantime his father had obtained a post as reporter for the Morning Herald, and Charles, feeling small love for the hopeless drudgery of a lawyer's office, resolved also to attempt the profession of journalist. He taught himself shorthand with the resolution—even the rage—which he always threw into everything he undertook; and he frequented the British Museum daily in order to supplement some of the shortcomings of his reading. In his seventeenth year he became a reporter at Doctors' Commons. At this period all his ambitions were for the stage. He would be an actor. All his life, indeed, he loved acting and the theatre above all things. As an actor, one feels certain that he would have succeeded. He would have made an excellent comedian. Fortunately, he was saved for better work.

It was not until he was two-and-twenty that he succeeded in getting permanent employment on the staff of a London paper, as a reporter. In this capacity he was sent about the country to do work which is now mainly supplied by local reporters. It must be remembered that there were as yet no railways. He had to travel by stage-coach, by post, by any means that offered. "I have been upset," he said years afterward, speaking of this time, "in almost every description of vehicle used in this country."

About this time he began the real work of his life. In December, 1833, the Monthly Magazine published his first original paper, called "A Dinner at Poplar Walk." Other papers followed, but produced nothing for the contributor except the gratification of seeing them in print, because the magazine could not afford to pay for anything. However, they did the writer the best service possible, in enabling him to prove his power, and he presently made an arrangement with the editor of the Evening Chronicle to contribute papers and sketches regularly, continuing to act as reporter for the Morning Chronicle, and getting his salary increased from five guineas to seven guineas a week. To be making an income of nearly four hundred pounds a year at the age of two or three and twenty, would be considered fortunate in any line of life. Sixty years ago, such an income represented a much more solid success than would now be the case. The sketches were collected and published in the beginning of the year 1836, the author receiving a hundred and fifty pounds for the copyright. He afterward bought it back for eleven times that amount. In the last week of March in the same year appeared the first number of the "Pickwick Papers;" three days afterward Dickens married the daughter of his friend, George Hogarth, editor of the Evening Chronicle, and his early struggles were finished.

No article, however short, treating of Charles Dickens, can avoid entering into the details of his early history with a fulness which would be out of all proportion to what follows, but for the remarkable fact that the events of his childhood and his youth impressed his imagination and influenced the whole of his literary career so profoundly, that to the very end of his life there is not a single work in which some of the characters, some of the places, are not derived from his early recollections. Many other writers there are who have passed their childish days among the petites gens, but none who have so remembered their ways, their speech, and their mode of thought. The Marshalsea prison of Little Dorrit is the place where for two years he went in and out. The Queen's Bench and its Rules were close to the Marshalsea; Bob Sawyer's lodgings in Lant Street were his own; David Copperfield, the friendless lad in the dingy warehouse, was himself; the cathedral of Edwin Drood was that in whose shadow he had lived; Mrs. Pipehin is his old landlady of Camden Town; the most delightful features in Mr. Micawber are borrowed from his own father; the experiences of Doctors' Commons, the solicitor's clerks, the life in chambers, are all his own; while of individual characters, the list of those which are known to be portraits more or less true to nature might be indefinitely extended. And yet, while he was early drawing on these early recollections, while they constantly furnished him with scenes and characters, he could not bear to speak of them, and no one except his friend and biographer, Forster, ever knew that he was himself, with all the shabby, mean surroundings in early life, exactly such as David Copperfield.

The rest of Dickens's life has the interest which belongs to success after success. It was a long, triumphal march. He had no failures; he suffered no defeats. There were times when his hand was not at his best, but never a time when his hand lost its power. This indeed seems the crowning happiness of a successful and singularly happy life, that when he was cut off—he died June 6, 1870—after fifty-eight years of continuous work, his brain was still as vigorous, his eye as keen, his hand as sure as in the first fresh running of his youth. It was indeed more than literary success which he achieved; he conquered the whole English-speaking world. This world, which now numbers nigh upon a hundred millions, loves him; all who can read his books love him. This love cheered him in his life, and will keep his memory green. Of the solid wealth which he acquired, the honor he enjoyed, the friends who gathered round him, and the brave and resolute front which he always showed, there is no space here to speak.

The following is the list of Dickens' works, in their order of appearance omitting certain farces and pamphlets which belong to a more extended notice:

"Sketches by Boz" (1836), "The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club" (1837), "Oliver Twist" (1838), "Nicholas Nickleby" (1839), "The Old Curiosity Shop" (1840-41), "Barnaby Rudge" (1841), "American Notes" (1842), "Martin Chuzzlewit" (1843), "The Christmas Tales"—viz., "The Christmas Carol," "The Chimes," "The Cricket on the Hearth," "The Battle of Life," "The Haunted Man," and "The Ghost's Bargain"—(1843, 1846, 1848), "Pictures from Italy" (1845), "Dombey and Son" (1846-48), "David Copperfield" (1849-50), "Bleak House" (1852-53), "The Child's History of England" (1854), "Hard Times" (1854), "Little Dorrit" (1855-57), "A Tale of Two Cities" (1859), "The Uncommercial Traveller" (1861), the "Christmas Numbers" in Household Words and All the Year Round, "Great Expectations" (1860-61), "Our Mutual Friend" (1864-65), "The Mystery of Edwin Drood" (unfinished). This long roll by no means represents the whole work of this most active of mankind. Public readings both in this country and in America, private theatricals, speeches, letters innumerable, journeys many, pamphlets, plays, the conduct of a popular magazine—first called Household Words, and then All the Year Round—and an ever-present readiness to enjoy the society of his friends, fill up the space when he was not actually writing. That he could do so much was mainly due to his orderly and methodical habits, to his clearness of mind, and to a capacity for business as wonderful as his genius for fiction. He knew no rest from the day when he first attacked shorthand, to the day when he fell from his chair in the fit from which he never recovered. He was incomparably the most active man, the hardest-working-man of his age. In the history of letters there are many who have produced more work in bulk; there is not one who led a life so varied, so full, so constantly busy, so active, and so rich.

It is as yet too early to speak with certainty as to the lasting popularity of his work as a whole. Very much of it owed its general success to the faithful delineation of manners already passed away. He was the prophet of the middle class, and the manners of that great section of the community have greatly changed since the days when Charles Dickens lived among them and observed them. With the decay of these manners some part of present popularity must certainly pass out of his work; already a generation has appeared to whom a great deal of Dickens' work proves of no interest, because it portrays manners with which they are not familiar. They do not laugh with those who laughed fifty, forty, twenty years ago, because the people depicted have vanished. But when the second quarter of this century shall belong so truly to the past, that not one survives who can remember it, then these books will become a precious storehouse for the study and the recovery of part, and that a large part, of its life and manners.

Again, it is the essential quality of genius to create the type. In this Dickens has been more successful than any other novelist, ancient or modern. With him every leading character stands for his class. Squeers is the representative of the schoolmaster, then too common, ignorant, brutal, and grasping; Winkle is the Cockney sportsman; it is impossible to think of red tape without naming Mr. Tite Barnacle; and so on through all the books. If he sometimes too plainly labels his characters with their qualities and defects, it is a fault caused by his own clearness of conception and of execution. It is another note of genius to suffer every character to work out its own fate without weakness or pity, and though Dickens deals seldom with the greater tragedies of the world in his domestic dramas, necessity pursues his characters as grimly and certainly as in real life. The villain Quilp and his tool make us forget, in the amusement which they cause, their own baseness. But their creator is not deceived. He makes them bring their own ruin upon their heads. To be true, not only to the outward presentment and speech and thought of a character, but also to the laws which surround him, and to the consequences of his actions, is a rare thing indeed with those who practise the art of fiction. Further, in this art there are permissible certain exaggerations, as upon the stage. There is exaggeration of feature, exaggeration of talk, exaggeration in action. There are degrees of exaggeration, by which one passes through tragedy, comedy, farce, and burlesque; but in all there must be an exaggeration. Dickens was master of exaggeration—if he sometimes carried it too far, he produced farce, but never burlesque. As for selection, which is perhaps the most important point after exaggeration, it came to him by instinct; he knew from the very outset how to select. It is by selection that the novelist maintains the interest of his story and develops his characters. There are countless things that are said and done in the progress of the history which have little interest and small bearing on the things which have to be told; and it is the first mark of the bad novelist that he does not know how to suppress irrelevant scenes. In the constructive branch of his art Dickens continually advanced. His earlier stories seem, like the "Pickwick Papers," to be made up of scenes. "Nicholas Nickleby" is a long series of scenes brilliantly drawn, in which new characters are always appearing and playing their disconnected part and disappearing. But as he grew older his conceptions of the story itself grew clearer, and his arrangement more artistic. It is, however, in description that Dickens proved himself so great a master. He laid his hand by instinct upon the salient and characteristic features, and he never failed in finding the right—the only—words fit for their illustration. In description he is never conventional, always real, and yet he allows himself, here as in his scenes of character and dialogue, a certain exaggeration which produces the happiest effects. In the hands of his imitators it becomes grotesque and intolerable.

As to his great and splendid gallery of portraits, it is difficult to speak briefly. The whole of London life—the life of the streets, of the city, of the middle class—seems at first sight depicted in this gallery. Here are merchant, shopkeeper and clerk, lawyer and client, money-lender and victim, dressmaker, actor—one knows not what. Yet there are great omissions. The scholar, the divine, the statesman, the country gentleman, are absent, partly because Dickens had no knowledge of them, and partly because he forbore to hold them up to the ridicule which he loved to pour over his characters. His methods imposed upon him certain limitations; he aimed at commanding his reader's attention by compelling laughter and tears, but especially laughter. He who can command neither the one nor the other is no true artist in fiction. But in his laughter and in his tears one feels always the kindly heart as well as the skilful hand. It is for the former—for the deeply human heart—even more than for the latter, that the world will continue to love the memory of Charles Dickens.



ROBERT BROWNING

(1812-1889)



Robert Browning was born in 1812, at Camberwell, England. His father was a clerk highly placed in the house of Rothschild, and there are still living those who remember the excitement of the elder man and of his friends in New Court, when the time came for the son's first play to be produced at Covent Garden. He was a Dissenter, and for this reason his son's education did not proceed on the ordinary English lines. The training which Robert Browning received was more individual, and his reading was wider and less accurate, than would have been the case had he gone to Eton or Winchester. Thus, though to the end he read Greek with the deepest interest, he never could be called a Greek scholar. His poetic turn declared itself rather early, and in 1835 he had a poem, "Pauline," ready for the press. But publication costs money, and his business-like father did not see any chance of returns from poetry. A kind aunt, however, came to the rescue, and presented the young poet with the cost of printing the little book, L30. It was published at the price of a few shillings, and of course did not sell; but the author had the curious satisfaction of seeing a copy of this original edition bring twenty-five guineas under the hammer a few years ago. "Pauline" was not reprinted till the issue of the six-volume edition of Mr. Browning's works, in 1869. It was followed by the more ambitious "Paracelsus," a striking attempt to fill a mediaeval outline with a compact body of modern thought; but in spite of the lovely lyric, "Over the sea our galleys went," and in spite of other beauties, the public did not heed the book, and it had no success except with a very small circle. It must be remembered that those days were days of poetic exhaustion. Shelley, Byron, and Scott were dead; the year before, Coleridge had followed them to the grave; Wordsworth was old, and his muse no longer spoke with her accents of an earlier day. Amid a mass of "keepsake" literature, affectations, and mediocrity, the still, small voice of the "Poems by Two Brothers" was heard by few, and that of "Paracelsus" was heard by fewer still.

Two years later the young poet came forward with the historical play of "Strafford," which was produced at Covent Garden with Macready in the title-part. It was not exactly a failure, but though the play itself and Macready's acting attracted the admiration of the critics, it was at once seen that the drama contained too much psychology and too little movement for a popular success. Mr. Browning, however, did not, for a long time to come, cease to be a "writer of plays," though it was not till eleven years after that another drama of his, "A Blot on the Scutcheon," was performed on the stage. The interval, however, was full of poetic activity. The energetic search of the members of the Browning Society, and especially of its founder, Mr. Furnivall, has succeeded in putting on record the place of first publication of several scattered poems of about this date. Four of them, including "Porphyria," and "Johannes Agricola," appeared in the Monthly Repository, edited by W. J. Fox, the Unitarian minister who was afterward so well known for his eloquent speeches against the Corn Laws. In 1840 came a small volume, bound, after the fashion of the time, in gray paper boards, and called "Sordello," after the Provencal poet mentioned in the "Purgatory" of Dante. The book appeared without preface or dedication, but in the collected edition of 1863 it bears a note addressed by Mr. Browning to his friend Monsieur Milsand, of Dijon, which contains the characteristic expressions, "I wrote it twenty-five years ago for only a few.... My stress lay on the incidents in the development of a soul; little else is worth study. I, at least, always thought so." "Sordello" in its original form is very rare and valuable now, as all the early editions of Mr. Browning's poetry have become; but on its first appearance nobody cared for it—it was regarded as nothing but a hopeless puzzle by a bewildered and defeated public. Even now, when Mr. Browning has long since formed his own public, "Sordello" is probably less read than any other work of his; it is too obscure and confused both in plot and in thought. But all the same, there are many interesting things in "Sordello," and among them, especially at this moment, are the references to the place which, for fifty yours, has fascinated the poet. Only the other day he wrote "Asolando,"' and half a century ago we find him writing:

"Lo, on a healthy, brown, and nameless hill By sparkling Asolo, in mist and chill, Morning just up, higher and higher runs A child, bare-foot and rosy."

Asolo appears again very soon afterward in the lovely opening of the play "Pippa Passes." This came first in the series which appeared in the years 1841-46, under the odd title of "Bells and Pomegranates." There were eight numbers of this publication—thin, yellow-covered pamphlets, printed in double columns of small type, by Mr. Moxon; surely us unattractive a way as a poet ever attempted of bringing his wares before the world. Doubtless it was done in order that the low price might appeal to a large audience, but we doubt whether the sale of "Bells and Pomegranates" was ever large. The series is exceedingly rare now, and the curious who prefer to read those noble poems in this unsightly form have to pay L10 or L12 for the privilege of possessing them. In this first series appeared all the author's plays except "Strafford," namely, "Pippa Passes," "King Victor and King Charles," "The Return of the Druses," "A Blot on the Scutcheon," "Colombe's Birthday," "Luria," and "A Soul's Tragedy." But, alternating with these, appealed many of the shorter poems which have long since passed into the common treasure-house of all who care for poetry throughout the English-speaking world. One of the numbers contains the set called "Dramatic Lyrics," including "In a Gondola," "Waring," and "The Pied Piper of Hamelin." Another number contained "Dramatic Romances and Lyrics," among which are to be found such favorite poems as "How they Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix," and "Saul." In this group of poems were also to be found the celebrated lines called "The Lost Leader." People at the time supposed that these indignant verses were aimed at the Tory backsliding of Wordsworth; and, indeed, though Mr. Browning in after-years denied their special applicability to the old Laureate, there can be no doubt that when he wrote them he had Wordsworth more or less in his mind.

In 1846 there happened to Mr. Browning something much more important than the publication of this or that poem; for it was then, on September 12th, in Marylebone parish church, that he was married to the poetess, Elizabeth Barrett. Their union was the direct result, in the first instance, of poetic and intellectual sympathy, and it was to the admiration which Miss Barrett, then an invalid, felt for the author of "Bells and Pomegranates," that they owed their first introduction. For the greater part of their married life Mr. and Mrs. Browning lived almost entirely in Italy, and especially at that house in Florence, close by the Porta Romana, which now bears a tablet with her name, and which gave its title to one of her best-known volumes of poetry. They had one child, born in 1849, Robert Barrett Browning, favorably known as a painter and a sculptor After just fifteen years' marriage, Mrs. Browning died, in 1861; the frail body almost literally burnt up by the fiery soul within. Of the closeness of their union Mr. Browning, of course, never spoke, except to his intimate friends; but that it was of a degree of happiness to which it is seldom given to poor humanity to attain was made evident to the world when he wrote the splendid invocation to his "Lyric Love" at the opening of "The Ring and the Book."

During the first years of married life, Mr. Browning wrote little, but he read widely and deeply, and in 1849 he published, in two reasonable-sized volumes, "Paracelsus" and "Bells and Pomegranates," under the title of "Poems, by Robert Browning." Next year followed his most definitely Christian poem, "Christmas Eve and Easter Day"—a small volume in which the mysteries of the Christian religion were handled in their relations with the modern world. Then, in 1852, followed a prose publication, which was, unfortunately, founded upon a mistake, and which was at once suppressed and not brought to light until the Browning Society reprinted it years afterward. This was the celebrated introductory essay to a volume purporting to consist of letters from Shelley. The letters were soon discovered to be fabrications, but Mr. Browning's essay was quite independent of their genuineness, being really a very interesting discussion on subjective and objective poetry, and of Shelley's writings as a type of the former. In 1855 came the two volumes called "Men and Women," and in their pages were to be found many of the poems best worth reading of all Mr. Browning's productions, and many of those that are best remembered at the present day.

It is only somewhat exasperating to the student, to find that in subsequent collected editions of his works, Mr. Browning has allowed his fondness for renaming and rearrangement to break up these volumes, and to distribute the greater part of their contents under other titles. In "Men and Women" the intensely dramatic quality of his genius found its best scope, for here are to be found such masterpieces as "Karshish," "The Arab Physician," "Fra Lippo Lippi," "Bishop Blougram," and "Cleon." It is amusing to note, if the authority of the bibliographers is to be trusted, that these volumes were reviewed, in the Roman Catholic paper called The Rambler, by no less a person than Cardinal Wiseman, who was extremely complimentary to "Bishop Blougram," and did not by any means despair of the writer's conversion. After "Men and Women" the poet was silent for a long time. His wife's health was failing, though at the time of the war in Lombardy her burning energy burst out in the "Poems before Congress," and though she watched the course of the struggle with never-ceasing excitement.

In 1861 the great grief of his life fell upon Mr. Browning, and he published nothing new till 1864, when there appeared the volume called "Dramatis Personae." It is pretty safe, however, to declare that in this volume, with "The Ring and the Book," which was published in 1868, he reached his greatest height of performance. It is enough to recall to the memory of readers that "Dramatis Personae" contains "James Lea's Wife," "Rabbi Ben Ezra," and "Prospice." Then, four years later, as we have said, appeared four volumes of that marvellous performance, "The Ring and the Book," a poetic and psychological grappling with the question suggested to the poet by the account of a Roman trial that took place a couple of centuries ago. Whether anyone else in any country has ever before ventured to publish a poem in four simultaneous volumes, we cannot say; but, in spite of its length and difficulty, "The Ring and the Book" was and is one of the most successful of the author's works. It has every right to be so, for nowhere does he exhibit in a manner so sustained, and yet so varied, his own extraordinary insight into characters and motives entirely dissimilar.

Since that remarkable work was given to the world, Mr. Browning has attempted nothing approaching it in magnitude, or in the demand it made upon the sustained exertion of high intellectual powers. But he left his admirers no room to complain of diminished fecundity or of decaying vigor. "Balaustion's Adventure," including a transcript from Euripides, appeared in 1871, to prove his undiminished insight and inexhaustible interest in spiritual analysis. It was followed by "Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, Saviour of Society," a book suggested by the collapse of the French Empire, and recalling the scathing satire with which he lashed the impostures of spiritualism in "Sludge the Medium." In 1872 he published "Fifine at the Fair," to the delight of those who loved him, and, as usual, to the irritation of those who did not. "Red Cotton Nightcap Country" appeared in the following year; and, after an interval of two years, was followed by "Aristophanes' Apology." Again, after a similar interval, he gave us "The Agamemnon of Aeschylus Transcribed." In 1879 came "Dramatic Idylls," with the stirring ballad of "Herve Riel," which, as some think, roused the Laureate to emulative effort. "Jocoseria," published in 1883, reclaimed many of his earlier admirers, who had been estranged by what they regarded as the extravagance and whimsicality, not to speak of the obscurity and ruggedness, of so many of his later works. "Jocoseria," in fact, recalls "Men and Women" rather than the "Fifines," the "Hohenstiel-Schwangaus," and the "Red Cotton Nightcap Countries" of a later and less happily-inspired period. "Ferishtah's Fancies and Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in their Day" was the rather cumbrous title of a still later volume; and last of all appeared "Asolando," a work which displays all the old qualities, the old fire, and the old audacity, apparently untouched by advancing years, or even by imminent death. He died the same month that it appeared, December, 1889.

It has been Mr. Browning's fate to divide the reading world into two hostile camps. There are no lukewarm friends on his side; and from those who have never acquired a taste for the strong wine of his muse, it is sometimes difficult to extort recognition of the vigor, the insight, the tenderness, and the variety of intellectual sympathy which characterize the man, even, if we make abstraction of the poet. An industrious and enthusiastic society devoted itself during his lifetime to the promotion of a taste for his writings, but even that singular tribute to the strength of his personality does not shut the mouth of the sceptic. Those who love the poets of prettinesses, of artificial measures, and dainty trifles have at the present day an almost embarrassing wealth of choice. But Mr. Browning in his own sphere had no rival and no imitator. No other so boldly faces the problems of life and death, no other like him braces the reader as with the breath of a breeze from the hills, and no other gives like him the assurance that we have to do with a man. His last public words are the fit description of his strenuous attitude through all his literary work:

"Strive and thrive!" cry "Speed—fight on, fare ever There as here!"



OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

By FRANCES H. UNDERWOOD

(1809-1894)



Abraham Lincoln, it is said, was one day talking with a friend about favorite poems, and repeated with deep feeling the well-known classic stanza: