He was recalled from this service in 1885. The remainder of his life was spent teaching at Harvard, writing more poetry and editing his numerous works. His first volume of poems, A Year's Life, was published in 1841; his last volume, Heartsease and Rue, appeared almost half a century later, in 1888. That his death occurred in the same house in which he was born and in which he had spent the greater part of his life is an occurrence so rare in America that it deserves a poem of commemoration.

LOWELL'S POETRY. There are golden grains everywhere in Lowell's verse but never a continuous vein of metal. In other words, even his best work is notable for occasional lines rather than for sustained excellence. As a specific example study the "Commemoration Ode," one of the finest poems inspired by the Civil War. The occasion of this ode, to commemorate the college students who had given their lives for their country, was all that a poet might wish; the brilliant audience that gathered at Cambridge was most inspiring; and beyond that local audience stood a nation in mourning, a nation which had just lost a million of its sons in a mighty conflict. It was such an occasion as Lowell loved, and one who reads the story of his life knows how earnestly he strove to meet it. When the reading of his poem was finished his audience called it "a noble effort," and that is precisely the trouble with the famous ode; it is too plainly an effort. It does not sing, does not overflow from a full heart, does not speak the inevitable, satisfying word. In consequence (and perhaps this criticism applies to most ambitious odes) we are rather glad when the "effort" is at an end. Yet there are excellent passages in the poem, notably the sixth and the last stanzas, one with its fine tribute to Lincoln, the other expressive of deathless loyalty to one's native land.

[Sidenote: LYRICS]

The best of Lowell's lyrics may be grouped in two classes, the first dealing with his personal joy or grief, the second with the feelings of the nation. Typical of the former are "The First Snowfall" and a few other lyrics reflecting the poet's sorrow for the loss of a little daughter,—simple, human poems, in refreshing contrast with most others of Lowell, which strive for brilliancy. The best of the national lyrics is "The Present Crisis" (1844). This was at first a party poem, a ringing appeal issued during the turmoil occasioned by the annexation of Texas; but now, with the old party issues forgotten, we can all read it with pleasure as a splendid expression of the American heart and will in every crisis of our national history.

In the nature lyrics we have a double reflection, one of the external world, the other of a poet who could not be single-minded, and who was always confusing his own impressions of nature or humanity with those other impressions which he found reflected in poetry. Read the charming "To a Dandelion," for example, and note how Lowell cannot be content with his

Dear common flower that grow'st beside the way, Fringing the dusty road with harmless gold,

but must bring in Eldorado and twenty other poetic allusions to glorify a flower which has no need of external glory. Then for comparison read Bryant's "Fringed Gentian" and see how the elder poet, content with the flower itself, tells you very simply how its beauty appeals to him. Or read "An Indian-Summer Reverie" with its scattered lines of gold, and note how Lowell cannot say what he feels in his own heart but must search everywhere for poetic images; and then, because he cannot find exactly what he seeks or, more likely, because he finds a dozen tempting allusions where one is plenty, he goes on and on in a vain quest that ends by leaving himself and his reader unsatisfied.

[Sidenote: SIR LAUNFAL]

The most popular of Lowell's works is The Vision of Sir Launfal (1848), in which he invents an Arthurian kind of legend of the search for the Holy Grail. Most of his long poems are labored, but this seems to have been written in a moment of inspiration. The "Prelude" begins almost spontaneously, and when it reaches the charming passage "And what is so rare as a day in June?" the verse fairly begins to sing,—a rare occurrence with Lowell. Critical readers may reasonably object to the poet's moralizing, to his imperfect lines and to his setting of an Old World legend of knights and castles in a New World landscape; but uncritical readers rejoice in a moral feeling that is fine and true, and are content with a good story and a good landscape without inquiring whether the two belong together. Moreover, Sir Launfal certainly serves the first purpose of poetry in that it gives pleasure and so deserves its continued popularity among young readers.

[Sidenote: SATIRES]

Two satiric poems that were highly prized when they were first published, and that are still formally praised by historians who do not read them, are A Fable for Critics and The Biglow Papers. The former is a series of doggerel verses filled with grotesque puns and quips aimed at American authors who were prominent in 1848. The latter, written in a tortured, "Yankee" dialect, is made up of political satires and conceits occasioned by the Mexican and Civil wars. Both works contain occasional fine lines and a few excellent criticisms of literature or politics, but few young readers will have patience to sift out the good passages from the mass of glittering rubbish in which they are hidden.

Much more worthy of the reader's attention are certain neglected works, such as Lowell's sonnets, his "Prometheus," "Columbus," "Agassiz," "Portrait of Dante," "Washers of the Shroud," "Under the Old Elm" (with its noble tribute to Washington) and "Stanzas on Freedom," It is a pity that such poems, all of which contain memorable lines, should be kept from the wide audience they deserve, and largely because of the author's digressiveness. To examine them is to conclude that, like most of Lowell's works, they are not simple enough in feeling to win ordinary readers, like the poetry of Longfellow, and not perfect enough in form to excite the admiration of critics, like the best of Poe's melodies.



LOWELL'S PROSE. In brilliancy at least Lowell has no peer among American essayists, though others excel him in the better qualities of originality or charm or vigor. The best of his prose works are the scintillating essays collected in My Study Window and Among My Books. In his political essays he looked at humanity with his own eyes, but the titles of the volumes just named indicate his chief interest as a prose writer, which was to interpret the world's books rather than the world's throbbing life. For younger readers the most pleasing of the prose works are the comparatively simple sketches, "My Garden Acquaintance," "Cambridge Thirty Years Ago" and "On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners." In these sketches we meet the author at his best, alert, witty and so widely read that he cannot help giving literary flavor to whatever he writes. Among the best of his essays on literary subjects are those on Chaucer, Dante Keats, Walton and Emerson.

[Sidenote: QUALITY OF THE ESSAYS]

One who reads a typical collection of Lowell's essays is apt to be divided between open admiration and something akin to resentment. On the one hand they are brilliant, stimulating, filled with "good things"; on the other they are always digressive, sometimes fantastic and too often self-conscious; that is, they call our attention to the author rather than to his proper subject. When he writes of Dante he is concerned to reveal the soul of the Italian master; but when he writes of Milton he seems chiefly intent on showing how much more he knows than the English editor of Milton's works. When he presents Emerson he tries to make us know and admire the Concord sage; but when he falls foul of Emerson's friends, Thoreau and Carlyle, his personal prejudices are more in evidence than his impersonal judgment. In consequence, some of the literary essays are a better reflection of Lowell himself than of the men he wrote about.

An author must be finally measured, however, by his finest work, by his constant purpose rather than by his changing mood; and the finest work of Lowell, his critical studies of the elder poets and dramatists, are perhaps the most solid and the most penetrating that our country has to show. He certainly kept "the great tradition" in criticism, a tradition which enjoins us, in simple language, to seek only the best and to reverence it when we find it. As he wrote:

Great truths are portions of the soul of man; Great souls are portions of eternity; Each drop of blood that e'er through true heart ran With lofty message, ran for thee and me.

* * * * *

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES (1809-1894)

It is a sad fate for a writer to be known as a humorist; nobody will take him seriously ever afterward. Even a book suffers from such a reputation, the famous Don Quixote for example, which we read as a type of extravagant humor but which is in reality a tragedy, since it portrays the disillusionment of a man who believed the world to be like his own heart, noble and chivalrous, and who found it filled with villainy. Because Holmes (who was essentially a moralist and a preacher) could not repress the bubbling wit that was part of his nature, our historians must set him down as a humorist and name the "One-Hoss Shay" as his most typical work. Yet his best poems are as pathetic as "The Last Leaf," as sentimental as "The Voiceless," as patriotic as "Old Ironsides," as worshipful as the "Hymn of Trust," as nobly didactic as "The Chambered Nautilus"; his novels are studies of the obscure problems of heredity, and his most characteristic prose work, The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, is an original commentary on almost everything under the sun.

Evidently we prize a laugh above any other product of literature, and because there is a laugh or a smile hidden in many a work of Holmes he must still keep the place assigned to him as an "American" humorist. Even so, he is perhaps our most representative writer in this field; for he is as thoroughly American as a man can be, and his rare culture and kindness are in refreshing contrast to the crude horseplay or sensationalism that is unfortunately trumpeted abroad as New World humor.

A PLACID LIFE. Though Holmes never wrote a formal autobiography he left a very good reflection of himself in his works, and it is in these alone that we become acquainted with him,—a genial, witty, observant, kind-hearted and pure-hearted man whom it is good to know.

He belonged to what he called "the Brahmin caste" of intellectual aristocrats (as described in his novel, Elsie Venner), for he came from an old New England family extending back to Anne Bradstreet and the governors of the Bay Colony. He was born in Cambridge; he was educated at Andover and Harvard; he spent his life in Boston, a city which satisfied him so completely that he called it "the hub of the solar system." Most ambitious writers like a large field with plenty of change or variety, but Holmes was content with a small and very select circle with himself at the center of it.

For his profession he chose medicine and studied it four years, the latter half of the time in Paris. At that period his foreign training was as rare in medicine as was Longfellow's in poetry. He practiced his profession in Boston and managed to make a success of it, though patients were a little doubtful of a doctor who wrote poetry and who opened his office with the remark that "small fevers" would be "gratefully received." Also he was for thirty-five years professor of anatomy at the Harvard Medical School. What with healing or teaching or learning, this doctor might have been very busy; but he seems to have found plenty of leisure for writing, and the inclination was always present. "Whoso has once tasted type" he said, "must indulge the taste to the end of his life."



[Sidenote: THE WRITER]

His literary work began at twenty-one, when he wrote "Old Ironsides" in protest against the order to dismantle the frigate Constitution, which had made naval history in the War of 1812. That first poem, which still rings triumphantly in our ears, accomplished two things: it saved the glorious old warship, and it gave Holmes a hold on public attention which he never afterward lost. During the next twenty-five years he wrote poetry, and was so much in demand to furnish verses for special occasions that he was a kind of poet-laureate of his college and city. He was almost fifty when the Atlantic Monthly was projected and Lowell demanded, as a condition of his editorship, that Holmes be engaged as the first contributor. Feeling in the mood for talk, as he commonly did, Holmes responded with The Autocrat. Thereafter he wrote chiefly in prose, making his greatest effort in fiction but winning more readers by his table talk in the form of essays. His last volume, Over the Teacups, appeared when he was past eighty years old.

[Sidenote: PET PREJUDICES]

We have spoken of the genial quality of Holmes as revealed in his work, but we would hardly be just to him did we fail to note his pet prejudices, his suspicion of reformers, his scorn of homeopathic doctors, his violent antipathy to Calvinism. Though he had been brought up in the Calvinistic faith (his father was an old-style clergyman), he seemed to delight in clubbing or satirizing or slinging stones at it. The very mildest he could do was to refer to "yon whey-faced brother" to express his opinion of those who still clung to puritanic doctrines. Curiously enough, he still honored his father and was proud of his godly ancestors, who were all stanch Puritans. The explanation is, of course, that Holmes never understood theology, not for a moment; he only disliked it, and was consequently sure that it must be wrong and that somebody ought to put an end to it. In later years he mellowed somewhat. One cannot truthfully say that he overcame his prejudice, but he understood men better and was inclined to include even reformers and Calvinists in what he called "the larger humanity into which I was born so long ago."

WORKS OF HOLMES. In the field of "occasional" poetry, written to celebrate births, dedications, feasts and festivals of every kind, Holmes has never had a peer among his countrymen. He would have made a perfect poet-laureate, for he seemed to rise to every occasion and have on his lips the right word to express the feeling of the moment, whether of patriotism or sympathy or sociability. In such happy poems as "The Boys," "Bill and Jo," "All Here" and nearly forty others written for his class reunions he reflects the spirit of college men who gather annually to live the "good old days" over again. [Footnote: It may add a bit of interest to these poems if we remember that among the members of the Class of '29 was Samuel Smith, author of "America," a poem that now appeals to a larger audience than the class poet ever dreamed of.] He wrote also some seventy other poems for special occasions, the quality of which may be judged from "Old Ironsides," "Under the Violets," "Grandmother's Story" and numerous appreciations of Lowell, Burns, Bryant, Whittier and other well-known poets.

Among poems of more general interest the best is "The Chambered Nautilus," which some read for its fine moral lesson and others for its beautiful symbolism or almost perfect workmanship. Others that deserve to be remembered are "The Last Leaf" (Lincoln's favorite), "Nearing the Snow Line," "Meeting of the Alumni," "Questions and Answers" and "The Voiceless,"—none great poems but all good and very well worth the reading.

[Sidenote: HUMOROUS POEMS]

"The Deacon's Masterpiece, or the Wonderful One-Hoss Shay" is the most popular of the humorous poems. Many readers enjoy this excellent skit without thinking what the author meant by calling it "a logical story." It is, in fact, the best pebble that he hurled from his sling against his bete noire; for the old "shay" which went to pieces all at once was a symbol of Calvinistic theology. That theology was called an iron chain of logic, every link so perfectly forged that it could not be broken at any point. Even so was the "shay" built, unbreakable in every single part; but when the deacon finds himself sprawling and dumfounded in the road beside the wrecked masterpiece the poet concludes:

End of the wonderful one-hoss shay. Logic is logic. That's all I say.

Other typical verses of the same kind are "The Height of the Ridiculous," "Daily Trials," "The Comet" and "Contentment." In the last-named poem Holmes may have been poking fun at the Brook Farmers and other enthusiasts who were preaching the simple life. Poets and preachers of this gospel in every age are apt to insist that to find simplicity one must return to nature or the farm, or else camp in the woods and eat huckleberries, as Thoreau did; but Holmes remembered that some people must live in the city, while others incomprehensibly prefer to do so, and wrote his "Contentment" to express their idea of the simple life:

Little I ask; my wants are few; I only wish a hut of stone (A very plain brown stone will do) That I may call my own; And close at hand is such a one, In yonder street that fronts the sun.

I care not much for gold or land; Give me a mortgage here and there, Some good bank-stock, some note of hand, Or trifling railroad share. I only ask that Fortune send A little more than I shall spend.

[Sidenote: THE AUTOCRAT]

The most readable of the prose works is The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858), a series of monologues in which Holmes, who was called the best talker of his age, transferred his talk in a very charming way to paper. As the book professes to record the conversation at the table of a certain Boston boarding-house, it has no particular subject; the author rambles pleasantly from one topic to another, illuminating each by his wisdom or humor or sympathy. Other books of the same series are The Professor at the Breakfast Table, The Poet at the Breakfast Table and Over the Teacups. Most critics consider The Autocrat the best and The Poet second best of the series; but there is a tender vein of sentiment and reminiscence in the final volume which is very attractive to older readers.

The slight story element in the breakfast-table books probably led Holmes to fiction, and he straightway produced three novels, Elsie Venner, The Guardian Angel and A Mortal Antipathy. These are studies of heredity, of the physical element in morals, of the influence of mind over matter and other subjects more suitable for essays than for fiction; but a few mature readers who care less for a story than for an observation or theory of life will find The Guardian Angel an interesting novel. And some will surely prize Elsie Venner for its pictures of New England life, its description of boarding school or evening party or social hierarchy, at a time when many a New England family had traditions to which it held as firmly and almost as proudly as any European court.



THE QUALITY OF HOLMES. The intensely personal quality of the works just mentioned is their most striking characteristic; for Holmes always looks at a subject with his own eyes, and measures its effect on the reader by a previous effect produced upon himself. "If I like this," he says in substance, "why, you must like it too; if it strikes me as absurd, you cannot take any other attitude; for are we not both human and therefore just alike?" It never occurred to Holmes that anybody could differ with him and still be normal; those who ventured to do so found the Doctor looking keenly at them to discover their symptoms. In an ordinary egoist or politician or theologian this would be insufferable; but strange to say it is one of the charms of Holmes, who is so witty and pleasant-spoken that we can enjoy his dogmatism without the bother of objecting to it. In one of his books he hints that talking to certain persons is like trying to pet a squirrel; if you are wise, you will not imitate that frisky little beast but assume the purring-kitten attitude while listening to the Autocrat.

[Sidenote: FIRST-HAND IMPRESSIONS]

Another interesting quality of Holmes is what we may call his rationalism, his habit of taking nothing for granted, of judging every matter by observation rather than by tradition or sentiment or imagination; and herein he is in marked contrast with Longfellow and other romantic writers of the period. We shall enjoy him better if we remember his bent of mind. As a boy he was fond of tools and machinery; as a man he was interested in photography, safety razors, inventions of every kind; as a physician he rebelled against drugs (then believed to have almost magical powers, and imposed on suffering stomachs in horrible doses) and observed his patients closely to discover what mentally ailed them; and as boy or man or physician he cared very little for books but a great deal for his own observation of life. Hence there is always a surprise in reading Holmes, which comes partly from his flashes of wit but more largely from his independent way of looking at things and recording his first-hand impressions. His Autocrat especially is a treasure and ranks with Thoreau's Walden among the most original books of American literature.

* * * * *

SIDNEY LANIER (1842-1881)

The name of Lanier is often associated with that of Timrod, and the two southern poets were outwardly alike in that they struggled against physical illness and mental depression; but where we see in Timrod the tragedy of a poet broken by pain and neglect, the tragedy of Lanier's life is forgotten in our wonder at his triumph. It is doubtful if any other poet ever raised so pure a song of joy out of conditions that might well have occasioned a wail of despair.



The joyous song of Lanier is appreciated only by the few. He is not popular with either readers or critics, and the difficulty of assigning him a place or rank may be judged from recent attempts. One history of American literature barely mentions Lanier in a slighting reference to "a small cult of poetry in parts of America"; [Footnote: Trent, History of American Literature (1913), p. 471.] another calls him the only southern poet who had a national horizon, and accords his work ample criticism; [Footnote: Moses, Literature of the South (1910), pp 358-383] a third describes him as "a true artist" having "a lyric power hardly to be found in any other American," but the brief record ends with the cutting criticism that his work is "hardly national." [Footnote: Wendell, Literary History of America (1911), pp 495-498.] And so with all other histories, one dismisses him as the author of a vague rhapsody called "The Marshes of Glynn," another exalts him as a poet who rivals Poe in melody and far surpasses him in thought or feeling. Evidently there is no settled criticism of Lanier, as of Bryant or Longfellow; he is not yet secure in his position among the elder poets, and what we record here is such a personal appreciation as any reader may formulate for himself.

LIFE. America has had its Puritan and its Cavalier writers, but seldom one who combines the Puritan's stern devotion to duty with the Cavalier's joy in nature and romance and music. Lanier was such a poet, and he owed his rare quality to a mixed ancestry. He was descended on his mother's side from Scotch-Irish and Puritan forbears, and on his father's side from Huguenot (French) exiles who were musicians at the English court. One of his ancestors, Nicholas Lanier, is described as "a musician, painter and engraver" for Queen Elizabeth and King James, and as the composer of music for some of Ben Jonson's masques.

[Sidenote: EARLY TRAITS]

His boyhood was spent at Macon, Georgia, where he was born in 1842. A study of that boyhood reveals certain characteristics which reappear constantly in the poet's work. One was his rare purity of soul; another was his brave spirit; a third was his delight in nature; a fourth was his passion for music. At seven he made his first flute from a reed, and ever afterwards, though he learned to play many instruments, the flute was to him as a companion and a voice. With it he cheered many a weary march or hungry bivouac; through it he told all his heart to the woman he loved; by it he won a place when he had no other means of earning his bread. Hence in "The Symphony," a poem which fronts one of life's hard problems, it is the flute that utters the clearest and sweetest note.

[Sidenote: IN WAR TIME]

Lanier had finished his course in Oglethorpe University (a primitive little college in Midway, Georgia) and was tutoring there when the war came, and the college closed its doors because teachers and students were away at the first call to join the army. For four years he was a Confederate soldier, serving in the ranks with his brother and refusing the promotion offered him for gallant conduct in the field. There was a time during this period when he might have sung like the minstrels of old, for romance had come to him with the war. By day he was fighting or scouting with his life in his hand; but when camp fires were lighted he would take his flute and slip away to serenade the girl who "waited for him till the war was over."

We mention these small incidents with a purpose. There is a delicacy of feeling in Lanier's verse which might lead a reader to assume that the poet was effeminate, when in truth he was as manly as any Norse scald or Saxon scop who ever stood beside his chief in battle. Of the war he never sang; but we find some reflection of the girl who waited in the poem "My Springs."

[Sidenote: WAR'S AFTERMATH]

Lanier was at sea, as signal officer on a blockade runner, when his ship was captured by a Federal cruiser and he was sent to the military prison at Point Lookout (1864). A hard and bitter experience it was, and his only comfort was the flute which he had hidden in his ragged sleeve. When released the following year he set out on foot for his home, five hundred miles away, and reached it more dead than alive; for consumption had laid a heavy hand upon him. For weeks he was desperately ill, and during the illness his mother died of the same wasting disease; then he rose and set out bravely to earn a living,—no easy matter in a place that had suffered as Georgia had during the war.

[Sidenote: THE GLEAM]

We shall not enter into his struggle for bread, or into his wanderings in search of a place where he could breathe without pain. He was a law clerk in his father's office at Macon when, knowing that he had but a slender lease of life, he made his resolve. To the remonstrances of his father he closed his ears, saying that music and poetry were calling him and he must follow the call. The superb climax of Tennyson's "Merlin and the Gleam" was in his soul:

O young mariner, Down to the haven Call your companions, Launch your vessel And crowd your canvas, And, ere it vanishes Over the margin, After it, follow it, Follow the Gleam!

Thus bravely he went northward to Baltimore, taking his flute with him. He was evidently a wonderful artist, playing not by the score but making his instrument his voice, so that his audience seemed to hear a soul speaking in melody. His was a magic flute. Soon he was supporting himself by playing in the Peabody Orchestra, living joyously meanwhile in an atmosphere of music and poetry and books; for he was always a student, determined to understand as well as to practice his art. He wrote poems, stories, anything to earn an honest dollar; he gave lectures on music and literature; he planned a score of books that he did not and could not write, for he was living in a fever of mind and body. Music and poetry were surging within him for expression; but his strength was failing, his time short.

[Sidenote: THE STRUGGLE]

In 1879 he was appointed lecturer at Johns Hopkins University, and for the first time he had an assured income, small, indeed, but very heartening since it was enough to support his family. He began teaching with immense enthusiasm; but presently he was speaking in a whisper from an invalid's chair. Under such circumstances were uttered some of our most cheering words on art and poetry. Two years later he died in a tent among the hills, near Asheville, North Carolina, whither he had gone in a vain search for health.



There is in all Lanier's verse a fragmentariness, a sense of something left unsaid, which we may understand better if we remember that his heart was filled with the noblest emotions, but that when he strove to write them his pen failed for weariness. Read the daily miracle of dawn in "Sunrise," for example, and find there the waiting oaks, the stars, the tide, the marsh with its dreaming pools, light, color, fragrance, melody,—everything except that the hand which wrote the poem was too weak to guide the pencil. The rush of impressions and memories in "Sunrise," its tender beauty and vague incompleteness, as of something left unsaid, may be explained by the fact that it was Lanier's last song.

WORKS OF LANIER. Many readers have grown familiar with Lanier's name in connection with The Boy's Froissart, The Boy's King Arthur, The Boy's Mabinogion and The Boy's Percy, four books in which he retold in simple language some of the old tales that are forever young. His chief prose works, The English Novel and The Science of English Verse, are of interest chiefly to critics; they need not detain us here except to note that the latter volume is devoted to Lanier's pet theory that music and poetry are governed by the same laws. Of more general interest are his scattered "Notes," which contain suggestions for many a poem that was never written, intermingled with condensed criticisms. Of the poet Swinburne he says, "He invited me to eat; the service was silver and gold, but no food therein except salt and pepper." One might say less than that with more words, or read a whole book to arrive at this summary of Whitman's style and bottomless philosophy: "Whitman is poetry's butcher; huge raw collops slashed from the rump of poetry, and never mind the gristle, is what he feeds our souls with.... His argument seems to be that because the Mississippi is long, therefore every American is a god."

[Sidenote: HIS BEST POEMS]

Those who read Lanier's poems should begin with the simplest, with his love songs, "My Springs" and "In Absence," or his "Ballad of Trees and the Master," or his outdoor poems, such as "Tampa Robins," "Song of the Chattahoochee," "Mocking Bird," and "Evening Song." In the last-named lyrics he began the work (carried out more fully in his later poems) of interpreting in words the harmony which his sensitive ear detected in the manifold voices of nature.

Next in order are the poems in which is hidden a thought or an ideal not to be detected at first glance; for to Lanier poetry was like certain oriental idols which when opened are found to be filled with exquisite perfumes. "The Stirrup Cup" is one of the simplest of these allegories. It was a custom in olden days when a man was ready to journey, for one who loved him to bring a glass of wine which he drank in the saddle; and this was called the stirrup or parting cup. In the cup offered Lanier was a rare cordial, filled with "sweet herbs from all antiquity," and the name of the cordial was Death:

Then, Time, let not a drop be spilt: Hand me the cup whene'er thou wilt; 'T is thy rich stirrup cup to me; I'll drink it down right smilingly.

In four stanzas of "Night and Day" he compresses the tragedy of Othello, not the tragedy that Shakespeare wrote but the tragedy that was in the Moor's soul when Desdemona was gone. In "Life and Song" he sought to express the ideal of a poet, and the closing lines might well be the measure of his own heroic life:

His song was only living aloud, His work a singing with his hand.

In "How Love Looked for Hell" the lesson is hidden deeper; for the profound yet simple meaning of the poem is that, search high or low, Love can never find hell because he takes heaven with him wherever he goes. Another poem of the same class, but longer and more involved, is "The Symphony." Here Lanier faces one of the greatest problems of the age, the problem of industrialism with its false standards and waste of human happiness, and his answer is the same that Tennyson gave in his later poems; namely, that the familiar love in human hearts can settle every social question when left to its own unselfish way:

Vainly might Plato's brain revolve it, Plainly the heart of a child might solve it.

[Sidenote: MARSHES OF GLYNN]

The longer poems of Lanier are of uneven merit and are all more or less fragmentary. The chief impression from reading the "Psalm of the West," for example, is that it is the prelude to some greater work that was left unfinished. More finely wrought and more typical of Lanier's mood and method is "The Marshes of Glynn," his best-known work. It is a marvelous poem, one of the most haunting in our language; yet it is like certain symphonies in that it says nothing, being all feeling,—vague, inexpressible feeling. Some readers find no meaning or satisfaction in it; others hail it as a perfect interpretation of their own mood or emotion when they stand speechless before the sunrise or the afterglow or a landscape upon which the very spirit of beauty and peace is brooding.

THE QUALITY OF LANIER. In order to sympathize with Lanier, and so to understand him, it is necessary to keep in mind that he was a musician rather than a poet in our ordinary understanding of the term. In his verse he used words, exactly as he used the tones of his flute, not so much to express ideas as to call up certain emotions that find no voice save in music. As he said, "Music takes up the thread that language drops," which explains that beautiful but puzzling line which closes "The Symphony":

Music is Love in search of a word.

[Sidenote: MUSIC AND POETRY]

We have spoken of "The Symphony" as an answer to the problem of industrial waste and sorrow, but it contains also Lanier's confession of faith; namely, that social evils arise among men because of their lack of harmony; and that spiritual harmony, the concord of souls which makes strife impossible, may be attained through music. The same belief appears in Tiger Lilies (a novel written by Lanier in his early days), in which a certain character makes these professions:

"To make a home out of a household, given the raw materials—to wit, wife, children, a friend or two and a house—two other things are necessary. These are a good fire and good music. And inasmuch as we can do without the fire for half the year, I may say music is the one essential."

"Late explorers say they have found some nations that have no God; but I have not read of any that had no music." "Music means harmony, harmony means love, love means—God!"

One may therefore summarize Lanier by saying that he was poet who used verbal rhythm, as a musician uses harmonious chords, to play upon our better feelings. His poems of nature give us no definite picture of the external world but are filled with murmurings, tremblings, undertones,—all the vague impressions which one receives when alone in the solitudes, as if the world were alive but inarticulate:

Ye marshes, how candid and simple and nothing-witholding and free Ye publish yourselves to the sky and offer yourselves to the sea! Tolerant plains, that suffer the sea and the rains and the sun, Ye spread and span like the catholic man that hath mightily won God out of knowledge and good out of infinite pain And sight out of blindness and purity out of a stain.

His poems of life have similar virtues and weaknesses: they are melodious; they are nobly inspired; they appeal to our finest feelings; but they are always vague in that they record no definite thought and speak no downright message.

[Sidenote: LANIER AND WHITTIER]

The criticism may be more clear if we compare Lanier with Whittier, a man equally noble, who speaks a language that all men understand. The poems of the two supplement each other, one reflecting the reality of life, the other its mysterious dreams. In Whittier's poetry we look upon a landscape and a people, and we say, "I have seen that rugged landscape with my own eyes; I have eaten bread with those people, and have understood and loved them." Then we read Lanier's poetry and say, "Yes, I have had those feelings at times; but I do not speak of them to others because I cannot tell what they mean to me." Both poets are good, and both fail of greatness in poetry, Whittier because he has no exalted imagination, Lanier because he lacks primitive simplicity and strength. One poet sings a song to cheer the day's labor, the other makes a melody to accompany our twilight reveries.

* * * * *

"WALT" WHITMAN (1819-1892)

Since Whitman insisted upon being called "Walt" instead of Walter, so let it be. The name accords with the free-and-easy style of his verse. If you can find some abridged selections from that verse, read them by all means; but if you must search the whole of it for the passages that are worth reading, then pass it cheerfully by; for such another vain display of egotism, vulgarity and rant never appeared under the name of poetry. Whitman was so absurdly fond of his "chants" and so ignorant of poetry that he preserved the whole of his work in a final edition, and his publishers still insist upon printing it, rubbish and all. The result is that the few rare verses which stamp him as a poet are apt to be overlooked in the multitudinous gabblings which, of themselves, might mark him as a mere freak or "sensation" in our modest literature.



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. Ordinarily when we read poetry we desire to know something of the man who wrote it, of his youth, his training, the circumstance of his work and the personal ideals which made him view life steadily in one light rather than in another. In dealing with Whitman it is advisable to leave such natural curiosity unsatisfied, and for two reasons: first, the man was far from admirable or upright, and to meet him at certain stages is to lose all desire to read his poetry; and second, he was so extremely secretive about himself, while professing boundless good-fellowship with all men, that we can seldom trust his own record, much less that of his admirers. There are great blanks in the story of his life; his real biography has not yet been written; and in the jungle of controversial writings which has grown up around him one loses sight of Whitman in a maze of extravagant or contradictory opinions. [Footnote: Of the many biographies of Whitman perhaps the best for beginners is Perry's Walt Whitman (1906), in American Men of Letters Series.]

[Sidenote: TRAITS AND INCIDENTS]

Let it suffice then to record, in catalogue fashion, that Whitman was born (1819) on Long Island, of stubborn farmer stock; that he spent his earliest years by the sea, which inspired his best verse; that he grew up in the streets of Brooklyn and was always fascinated by the restless tide of city life, as reflected in such poems as "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry"; that his education was scanty and of the "picked up" variety; that to the end of his life, though ignorant of what literary men regard as the a-b-c of knowledge, he was supremely well satisfied with himself; that till he was past forty he worked irregularly at odd jobs, but was by choice a loafer; that he was a man of superb physical health and gloried in his body, without much regard for moral standards; that his strength was broken by nursing wounded soldiers during the war, a beautiful and unselfish service; that he was then a government clerk in Washington until partly disabled by a paralytic stroke, and that the remainder of his life was spent at Camden, New Jersey. His Leaves of Grass (published first in 1855, and republished with additions many times) brought him very little return in money, and his last years were spent in a state of semipoverty, relieved by the gifts of a small circle of admirers.

WHITMAN'S VERSE. In a single book, Leaves of Grass, Whitman has collected all his verse. This book would be a chaos even had he left his works in the order in which they were written; but that is precisely what he did not do. Instead, he enlarged and rearranged the work ten different times, mixing up his worst and his best verses, so that it is now very difficult to trace his development as a poet. We may, however, tentatively arrange his work in three divisions: his early shouting to attract attention (as summarized in the line "I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world"), his war poems, and his later verse written after he had learned something of the discipline of life and poetry.

The quality of his early work may be judged from a few disjointed lines of his characteristic "Song of Myself":

Has any one supposed it lucky to be born? I hasten to inform him or her that it is just as lucky to die, and I know it.

I pass death with the dying and birth with the new-wash'd babe, and am not contain'd between my hat and boots, And peruse manifold objects, no two alike, and every one good, The earth good and the stars good, and their adjuncts all good.

The big doors of the country barn stand open and ready, The dried grass of the harvest-time loads the slow-drawn wagon, The clear light plays on the brown, gray and green intertinged, The armfuls are pack'd to the sagging mow. I am there, I help, I came stretch'd atop of the load, I felt its soft jolts, one leg reclined on the other, I jump from the cross-beams and seize the clover and timothy, And roll head over heels and tangle my hair full of wisps.

The boatmen and clam-diggers arose early and stopt for me, I tuck'd my trowser ends in my boots and went and had a good time; You should have been with us that day round the chowder-kettle.

Thus he rambles on, gabbing of every place or occupation or newspaper report that comes into his head. When he ends this grotesque "Song of Myself" after a thousand lines or more, he makes another just like it. We read a few words here and there, amazed that any publisher should print such rubbish; and then, when we are weary of Whitman's conceit or bad taste, comes a flash of insight, of imagination, of poetry:

Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road, Healthy, free, the world before me, The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose. These yearnings why are they? these thoughts in the darkness why are they? Why are there men and women that while they are nigh me the sunlight expands my blood? Why when they leave me do my pennants of joy sink flat and lank? Why are there trees I never walk under but large and melodious thoughts descend upon me?

There are, in short, hundreds of pages of such "chanting" with its grain of wheat hid in a bushel of chaff. We refer to it here not because it is worth reading but to record the curious fact that many European critics hail it as typical American poetry, even while we wonder why anybody should regard it as either American or poetic.

[Sidenote: FOREIGN OPINION]

The explanation is simple. Europeans have not yet rid themselves of the idea that America is the strange, wild land Cooper's Pioneers, and that any poetry produced here must naturally be uncouth, misshapen, defiant of all poetic laws or traditions. To such critics Whitman's crudity seems typical of a country where one is in nightly danger of losing his scalp, where arguments are settled by revolvers, and where a hungry man needs only to shoot a buffalo or a bear from his back door. Meanwhile America, the country that planted colleges and churches in a wilderness, that loves liberty because she honors law, that never saw a knight in armor but that has, even in her plainsmen and lumberjacks, a chivalry for woman that would adorn a Bayard,—that real America ignores the bulk of Whitman's work simply because she knows that, of all her poets, he is the least representative of her culture, her ideals, her heroic and aspiring life.

[Sidenote: DRUM TAPS]

The second division of Whitman's work is made up chiefly of verses written in war time, to some of which he gave the significant title, Drum Taps. In such poems as as "Beat, Beat, Drums," "Cavalry Crossing a Ford" and "By the Bivouac's Fitful Flame" he reflected the emotional excitement of '61 and the stern days that followed. Note, for example, the startling vigor of "Ethiopia Saluting the Colors," which depicts an old negro woman by the roadside, looking with wonder on the free flag which she sees for the first time aloft over marching men:

Who are you, dusky woman, so ancient, hardly human, With your woolly-white and turban'd head and bare bony feet? Why, rising by the roadside here, do you the colors greet?

Another side of the war is reflected in such poems as "Come up from the Fields, Father," an exquisite picture of an old mother and father receiving the news of their son's death on the battlefield. In the same class belong two fine tributes, "O Captain, My Captain" and "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed," written in moments of noble emotion when the news came that Lincoln was dead. The former tribute, with its rhythmic swing and lyric refrain, indicates what Whitman might have done in poetry had he been a more patient workman. So also does "Pioneers," a lyric that is wholly American and Western and exultant:

Have the elder races halted? Do they droop and end their lesson, wearied over there beyond the seas? We take up the task eternal, and the burden and the lesson, Pioneers! O Pioneers!

[Sidenote: LATER POEMS]

In the third class of Whitman's works are the poems written late in life, when he had learned to suppress his blatant egotism and to pay some little attention to poetic form and melody. Though his lines are still crude and irregular, many of them move to a powerful rhythm, such as the impressive "With Husky-Haughty Lips, O Sea," which suggests the surge and beat of breakers on the shore. In others he gives finely imaginative expression to an ideal or a yearning, and his verse rises to high poetic levels. Note this allegory of the spider, an insect that, when adrift or in a strange place, sends out delicate filaments on the air currents until one thread takes hold of some solid substance and is used as a bridge over the unknown:

A noiseless patient spider, I mark'd where on a little promontory it stood isolated, Mark'd how to explore the vacant vast surrounding It launch'd forth filament, filament, filament out of itself, Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you, O my soul, where you stand, Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space, Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them, Till the bridge you will need be form'd, till the ductile anchor hold, Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul



Among the best of Whitman's works are his poems to death. "Joy, Shipmate, Joy," "Death's Valley," "Darest Thou Now, O Soul," "Last Invocation," "Good-Bye, My Fancy,"—in such haunting lyrics he reflects the natural view of death, not as a terrible or tragic or final event but as a confident going forth to meet new experiences. Other notable poems that well repay the reading are "The Mystic Trumpeter," "The Man-of-War Bird," "The Ox Tamer," "Thanks in Old Age" and "Aboard at a Ship's Helm."

In naming the above works our purpose is simply to lure the reader away from the insufferable Whitmanesque "chant" and to attract attention to a few poems that sound a new note in literature, a note of freedom, of joy, of superb confidence, which warms the heart when we hear it. When these poems are known others will suggest themselves: "Rise, O Days, from Your Fathomless Deeps," "I Hear America Singing," "There was a Boy Went Forth," "The Road Unknown," "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking." There is magic in such names; but unfortunately in most cases the reader will find only an alluring title and a few scattered lines of poetry; the rest is Whitman.

[Sidenote: DEMOCRACY]

The author of the "Song of Myself" proclaimed himself the poet of democracy and wrote many verses on his alleged subject; but those who read them will soon tire of one whose idea of democracy was that any man is as good, as wise, as godlike as any other. Perhaps his best work in this field is "Thou Mother with Thy Equal Brood," a patriotic poem read at "Commencement" time in Dartmouth College (1872). There is too much of vainglorious boasting in the poem (for America should be modest, and can afford to be modest), but it has enough of prophetic vision and exalted imagination to make us overlook its unworthy spread-eagleism.

[Sidenote: PRAYER OF COLUMBUS]

As a farewell to Whitman one should read what is perhaps his noblest single work, "The Prayer of Columbus." The poem is supposed to reflect the thought of Columbus when, as a worn-out voyager, an old man on his last expedition, he looked out over his wrecked ships to the lonely sea beyond; but the reader may see in it another picture, that of a broken old man in his solitary house at Camden, writing with a trembling hand the lines which reflect his unshaken confidence:

My terminus near, The clouds already closing in upon me, The voyage balk'd, the course disputed, lost, I yield my ships to Thee My hands, my limbs grow nerveless, My brain feels rack'd, bewilder'd; Let the old timbers part, I will not part, I will cling fast to Thee, O God, though the waves buffet me, Thee, Thee at least I know.

Is it the prophet's thought I speak, or am I raving? What do I know of life? what of myself? I know not even my own work past or present; Dim ever-shifting guesses of it spread before me, Of newer better worlds, their mighty parturition, Mocking, perplexing me.

And these things I see suddenly, what mean they? As if some miracle, some hand divine, unseal'd my eyes, Shadowy vast shapes smile through the air and sky, And on the distant waves sail countless ships, And anthems in new tongues I hear saluting me.

* * * * *

THE PROSE WRITERS

RALPH WALDO EMERSON (1803-1882)

Emerson is the mountaineer of our literature; to read him is to have the impression of being on the heights. It is solitary there, far removed from ordinary affairs; but the air is keen, the outlook grand, the heavens near. Our companions are the familiar earth by day or the mysterious stars by night, and these are good if only to recall the silent splendor of God's universe amid the pother of human inventions. There also the very spirit of liberty, which seems to have its dwelling among the hills, enters into us and makes us sympathize with Emerson's message of individual freedom.

It is still a question whether Emerson should be classed with the poets or prose writers, and our only reason for placing him with the latter is that his "Nature" seems more typical than his "Wood Notes," though in truth both works convey precisely the same message. He was a great man who used prose or verse as suited his mood at the moment; but he was never a great poet, and only on rare occasions was he a great prose writer.

LIFE. Emerson has been called "the winged Franklin," "the Yankee Shelley" and other contradictory names which strive to express the union of shrewd sense and lofty idealism that led him to write "Hitch your wagon to a star" and many another aphorism intended to bring heaven and earth close together. We shall indicate enough of his inheritance if we call him a Puritan of the Puritans, a moralist descended from seven generations of heroic ministers who had helped to make America a free nation, and who had practiced the love of God and man and country before preaching it to their congregations.



The quality of these ancestors entered into Emerson and gave him the granite steadfastness that is one of his marked characteristics. Meeting him in his serene old age one would hardly suspect him of heroism; but to meet him in childhood is to understand the kind of man he was, and must be. If you would appreciate the quality of that childhood, picture to yourself a bare house with an open fire and plenty of books, but little else of comfort. There are a mother and six children in the house, desperately poor; for the father is dead and has left his family nothing and everything,—nothing that makes life rich, everything in the way of ideals and blessed memories to make life wealthy. The mother works as only a poor woman can from morning till night. The children go to school by day; but instead of playing after school-hours they run errands for the neighbors, drive cows from pasture, shovel snow, pick huckleberries, earn an honest penny. In the evening they read together before the open fire. When they are hungry, as they often are, a Puritan aunt who shares their poverty tells them stories of human endurance. The circle narrows when an older brother goes to college; the rest reduce their meals and spare their pennies in order to help him. After graduation he teaches school and devotes his earnings to giving the next brother his chance. All the while they speak courteously to each other, remember their father's teaching that they are children of God, and view their hard life steadily in the light of that sublime doctrine.

[Sidenote: THE COLLEGE BOY]

The rest of the story is easily told. Emerson was born in Boston, then a straggling town, in 1803. When his turn came he went to Harvard, and largely supported himself there by such odd jobs as only a poor student knows how to find. Wasted time he called it; for he took little interest in college discipline or college fun and was given to haphazard reading, "sinfully strolling from book to book, from care to idleness," as he said. Later he declared that the only good thing he found in Harvard was a solitary chamber.

[Sidenote: THE PREACHER]

After leaving college he taught school and shared his earnings, according to family tradition. Then he began to study for the ministry; or perhaps we should say "read," for Emerson never really studied anything. At twenty-three he was licensed to preach, and three years later was chosen pastor of the Second Church in Boston. It was the famous Old North Church in which the Mathers had preached, and the Puritan divines must have turned in their graves when the young radical began to utter his heresies from the ancient pulpit. He was loved and trusted by his congregation, but presently he differed with them in the matter of the ritual and resigned his ministry.

Next he traveled in Europe, where he found as little of value as he had previously found in college. The old institutions, which roused the romantic enthusiasm of Irving and Longfellow, were to him only relics of barbarism. He went to Europe, he said, to see two men, and he found them in Wordsworth and Carlyle. His friendship with the latter and the letters which passed between "the sage of Chelsea" and "the sage of Concord" (as collected and published by Charles Eliot Norton in his Correspondence of Carlyle and Emerson) are the most interesting result of his pilgrimage.

[Sidenote: THE LECTURER]

On his return he settled in the village of Concord, which was to be his home for the remainder of his long life. He began to lecture, and so well was the "Lyceum" established at that time that he was soon known throughout the country. For forty years this lecturing continued, and the strange thing about it is that in all that time he hardly met one audience that understood him or that carried away any definite idea of what he had talked about. Something noble in the man seemed to attract people; as Lowell said, they did not go to hear what Emerson said but to hear Emerson.

[Sidenote: THE WRITER]

Meanwhile he was writing prose and poetry. His literary work began in college and consisted largely in recording such thoughts or quotations as seemed worthy of preservation. In his private Journal (now published in several volumes) may be found practically everything he put into the formal works which he sent forth from Concord. These had at first a very small circle of readers; but the circle widened steadily, and the phenomenon is more remarkable in view of the fact that the author avoided publicity and had no ambition for success. He lived contentedly in a country village; he cultivated his garden and his neighbors; he spent long hours alone with nature; he wrote the thoughts that came to him and sent them to make their own way in the world, while he himself remained, as he said, "far from fame behind the birch trees."

The last years of his life were as the twilight of a perfect day. His mental powers failed slowly; he seemed to drift out of the present world into another of pure memories; even his friends became spiritualized, lost the appearance of earth and assumed their eternal semblance. When he stood beside the coffin of Longfellow, looking intently into the poet's face, he was heard to murmur, "A sweet, a gracious personality, but I have forgotten his name." To the inevitable changes (the last came in 1882) he adapted himself with the same serenity which marked his whole life. He even smiled as he read the closing lines of his "Terminus":

As the bird trims her to the gale, I trim myself to the storm of time, I man the rudder, reef the sail, Obey the voice at eve obeyed at prime: "Lowly faithful, banish fear, Right onward drive unharmed; The port, well worth the cruise, is near, And every wave is charmed."

EMERSON'S POETRY. There is a ruggedness in Emerson's verse which attracts some readers while it repels others by its unmelodious rhythm. It may help us to measure that verse if we recall the author's criticism thereof. In 1839 he wrote:

"I am naturally keenly susceptible to the pleasures of rhythm, and cannot believe but one day I shall attain to that splendid dialect, so ardent is my wish; and these wishes, I suppose, are ever only the buds of power; but up to this hour I have never had a true success in such attempts."

One must be lenient with a poet who confesses that he cannot attain the "splendid dialect," especially so since we are inclined to agree with him. In the following passage from "Each and All" we may discover the reason for his lack of success:

Little thinks, in the field, yon red-cloaked clown Of thee from the hill-top looking down; The heifer that lows in the upland farm, Far-heard, lows not thine ear to charm; The sexton, tolling his bell at noon, Deems not that great Napoleon Stops his horse, and lists with delight, Whilst his files sweep round yon Alpine height; Nor knowest thou what argument Thy life to thy neighbor's creed has lent. All are needed by each one; Nothing is fair or good alone. I thought the sparrow's note from heaven, Singing at dawn on the alder bough; I brought him home in his nest at even; He sings the song, but it cheers not now, For I did not bring home the river and sky: He sang to my ear; they sang to my eye. The delicate shells lay on the shore; The bubbles of the latest wave Fresh pearls to their enamel gave, And the bellowing of the savage sea Greeted their safe escape to me. I wiped away the weeds and foam, I fetched my sea-born treasures home; But the poor, unsightly, noisome things Had left their beauty on the shore With the sun and the sand and the wild uproar.

Our first criticism is that the poem contains both fine and faulty lines, and that the total impression is an excellent one. Next, we note that the verse is labored; for Emerson was not a natural singer, like Whittier, and was hampered by his tendency to think too much instead of giving free expression to his emotion. [Footnote: Most good poems are characterized by both thought and feeling, and by a perfection of form that indicates artistic workmanship. With Emerson the thought is the main thing; feeling or emotion is subordinate or lacking, and he seldom has the patience to work over his thought until it assumes beautiful or perfect expression.] Finally, he is didactic; that is, he is teaching the lesson that you must not judge a thing by itself, as if it had no history or connections, but must consider it in its environment, as a part of its own world.

As in "Each and All" so in most of his verse Emerson is too much of a teacher or moralist to be a poet. In "The Rhodora," one of his most perfect poems, he proclaims that "Beauty is its own excuse for being"; but straightway he forgets the word and devotes his verse not to beauty but to some ethical lesson. Very rarely does he break away from this unpoetic habit, as when he interrupts the moralizing of his "World Soul" to write a lyric that we welcome for its own sake:

Spring still makes spring in the mind When sixty years are told; Love wakes anew this throbbing heart, And we are never old. Over the winter glaciers I see the summer glow, And through the wide-piled snowdrift The warm rosebuds below.

[Sidenote: TYPICAL POEMS]

The most readable of Emerson's poems are those in which he reflects his impressions of nature, such as "Seashore," "The Humble-Bee," "The Snow-Storm," "Days," "Fable," "Forbearance," "The Titmouse" and "Wood-Notes." In another class are his philosophical poems devoted to transcendental doctrines. The beginner will do well to skip these, since they are more of a puzzle than a source of pleasure. In a third class are poems of more personal interest, such as the noble "Threnody," a poem of grief written after the death of Emerson's little boy; "Good-Bye," in which the poet bids farewell to fame as he hies him to the country; "To Ellen," which half reveals his love story; "Written in Rome," which speaks of the society he found in solitude; and the "Concord Hymn," written at the dedication of Battle Monument, with its striking opening lines:

By the rude bridge that arched the flood, Their flag to April's breeze unfurled, Here once the embattled farmers stood, And fired the shot heard round the world.

PROSE WORKS. Perhaps the most typical of Emerson's prose works is his first book, to which he gave the name Nature (1836). In this he records not his impressions of bird or beast or flower, as his neighbor Thoreau was doing in Walden, but rather his philosophy of the universe. "Nature always wears the colors of the spirit"; "Every animal function, from the sponge up to Hercules, shall hint or thunder to man the laws of right and wrong, and echo the ten commandments"; "The foundations of man are not in matter but in spirit, and the element of spirit is eternity,"—scores of such expressions indicate that Emerson deals with the soul of things, not with their outward appearance. Does a flower appeal to him? Its scientific name and classification are of no consequence; like Wordsworth, he would understand what thought of God the flower speaks. To him nature is a mirror in which the Almighty reflects his thought; again it is a parable, a little story written in trees or hills or stars; frequently it is a living presence, speaking melodiously in winds or waters; and always it is an inspiration to learn wisdom at first hand:

"Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, criticisms. The foregoing generations beheld God and Nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight, and not of tradition?"

The last quotation might well be an introduction to Emerson's second work, The American Scholar (1837), which was a plea for laying aside European models and fronting life as free men in a new world. Holmes called this work "our intellectual Declaration of Independence," and it was followed by a succession of volumes—Essays, Representative Men, Conduct of Life, Society and Solitude and several others—all devoted to the same two doctrines of idealism and individuality.

[Sidenote: REPRESENTATIVE MEN]

Among these prose works the reader must make his own selection. All are worth reading; none is easy to read; even the best of them is better appreciated in brief instalments, since few can follow Emerson long without wearying. English Traits is a keen but kindly criticism of "our cousins" overseas, which an American can read with more pleasure than an Englishman. Representative Men is a series of essays on Plato, Shakespeare, Napoleon and other world figures, which may well be read in connection with Carlyle's Heroes and Hero Worship, since the two books reflect the same subject from widely different angles. Carlyle was in theory an aristocrat and a force-worshiper, Emerson a democrat and a believer in ideals. One author would relate us to his heroes in the attitude of slave to master, the other in the relation of brothers and equals.

[Sidenote: THE ESSAYS]

Of the shorter prose works, collected in various volumes of Essays, we shall name only a few in two main groups, which we may call the ideal and the practical. In the first group are such typical works as "The Over-Soul," "Compensation," "Spiritual Laws" and "History"; in the latter are "Heroism," "Self-Reliance," "Literary Ethics" (an address to young collegians), "Character" and "Manners."

It is difficult to criticize such writings, which have a daring originality of thought and a springlike freshness of expression that set them apart from all other essays ancient or modern. They are the most quotable, the fittest to "point a moral or adorn a tale" that have ever appeared in our literature; but they are also disjointed, oracular, hard to follow; and the explanation is found in the manner of their production. When Emerson projected a new lecture or essay he never thought his subject out or ordered it from beginning to end. That would have been another man's way of doing it. He collected from his notebooks such thoughts as seemed to bear upon his subject, strung them together, and made an end when he had enough. The connection or relation between his thoughts is always frail and often invisible; some compare it with the thread which holds the pearls of a necklace together; others quote with a smile the epigram of Goldwin Smith, who said that he found an Emersonian essay about as coherent as a bag of marbles. And that suggests a fair criticism of all Emerson's prose; namely, that it is a series of expressions excellent in themselves but having so little logical sequence that a paragraph from one essay may be placed at the beginning, middle or end of any other, where it seems to be equally at home.

THE DOCTRINE OF EMERSON. Since we constantly hear of "idealism" in connection with Emerson, let us understand the word if we can; or rather the fact, for idealism is the most significant quality of humanity. The term will be better understood if we place it beside "materialism," which expresses an opposite view of life. The difference may be summarized in the statement that the idealist is a man of spirit, or idea, in that he trusts the evidence of the soul; while the materialist is a man of flesh, or sense, in that he believes only what is evident to the senses. One judges the world by himself; the other judges himself by the world.

To illustrate our meaning: the materialist, looking outward, sees that the world is made up of force-driven matter, of gas, carbon and mineral; and he says, "Even so am I made up." He studies an object, sees that it has its appointed cycle of growth and decay, and concludes, "Even so do I appear and vanish." To him the world is the only reality, and the world perishes, and man is but a part of the world.

[Sidenote: THE IDEALIST]

The idealist, looking first within, perceives that self-consciousness is the great fact of life, and that consciousness expresses itself in words or deeds; then he looks outward, and is aware of another Consciousness that expresses itself in the lowly grass or in the stars of heaven. Looking inward he finds that he is governed by ideas of truth, beauty, goodness and duty; looking outward he everywhere finds evidence of truth and beauty and moral law in the world. He sees, moreover, that while his body changes constantly his self remains the same yesterday, to-day and forever; and again his discovery is a guide to the outer world, with its seedtime and harvest, which is but the symbol or garment of a Divine Self that abides without shadow of change in a constantly changing universe. To him the only reality is spirit, and spirit cannot be harmed by fire or flood; neither can it die or be buried, for it is immortal and imperishable.

Such, in simple words, was the idealism of Emerson, an idealism that was born in him and that governed him long before he became involved in transcendentalism, with its scraps of borrowed Hindu philosophy. It gave message or meaning to his first work, Nature, and to all the subsequent essays or poems in which he pictured the world as a symbol or visible expression of a spiritual reality. In other words, nature was to Emerson the Book of the Lord, and the chief thing of interest was not the book but the idea that was written therein.

[Sidenote: THE INDIVIDUALIST]

Having read the universe and determined its spiritual quality, Emerson turned his eyes on humanity. Presently he announced that a man's chief glory is his individuality; that he is a free being, different from every other; that his business is to obey his individual genius; that he should, therefore, ignore the Past with its traditions, and learn directly "from the Divine Soul which inspires all men." Having announced that doctrine, he spent the rest of his life in illustrating or enlarging it; and the sum of his teaching was, "Do not follow me or any other master; follow your own spirit. Never mind what history says, or philosophy or tradition or the saints and sages. The same inspiration which led the prophets is yours for the taking, and you have your work to do as they had theirs. Revere your own soul; trust your intuition; and whatever you find in your heart to do, do it without doubt or fear, though all the world thunder in your ears that you must do otherwise. As for the voice of authority, 'Let not a man quit his belief that a popgun is a popgun, though the anointed and honorable of the earth affirm it to be the crack of doom.'"



Such was Emerson's pet doctrine of individualism. It appeared with startling vigor in The American Scholar at a time when our writers were prone to imitate English poetry, German sentimentality or some other imported product. It came also with good grace from one whose life was noble, but it had a weak or dangerous or grotesque side that Emerson overlooked. Thus, every crank or fanatic or rainbow-chaser is also an individualist, and most of them believe as strongly as Emerson in the Over-Soul. The only difference is that they do not have his sense or integrity or humor to balance their individualism. While Emerson exalted individual liberty he seemed to forget that America is a country devoted to "liberty under law," and that at every period of her history she has had need to emphasize the law rather than the liberty. Moreover, individualism is a quality that takes care of itself, being finest in one who is least conscious of his own importance; and to study any strongly individual character, a Washington or a Lincoln for example, is to discover that he strove to be true to his race and traditions as well as to himself. Hence Emerson's doctrine, to live in the Present and have entire confidence in yourself, needs to be supplemented by another: to revere the Past with its immortal heroes, who by their labor and triumph have established some truths that no sane man will ever question.

[Sidenote: A NEW WORLD WRITER]

There are other interesting qualities of Emerson, his splendid optimism, for instance, which came partly from his spiritual view of the universe and partly from his association with nature; for the writer who is in daily contact with sunshine or rain and who trusts his soul's ideals of truth and beauty has no place for pessimism or despair; even in moments of darkness he looks upward and reads his lesson:

Teach me your mood, O patient stars, Who climb each night the ancient sky, Leaving on space no shade, no scars, No trace of age, no fear to die!

Though he was and still is called a visionary, there is a practical quality in his writing which is better than anything you will find in Poor Richard's Almanac. Thus the burden of Franklin's teaching was the value of time, a lesson which the sage of Concord illuminates as with celestial light in his poem "Days," and to which he brings earth's candle in his prose essay "Work and Days." [Footnote: The two works should be read in connection as an interesting example of Emerson's use of prose and verse to reflect the same idea. Holmes selects the same two works to illustrate the essential difference between prose and poetry. See Holmes, Ralph Waldo Emerson, p. 310.] Indeed, the more one reads Emerson the more is one convinced that he is our typical New World writer, a rare genius who combines the best qualities of Franklin and Edwards, having the practical sense of the one and the spiritual insight of the other. [Footnote: In 1830 Channing published an essay, "National Literature," in which he said that Benjamin Franklin and Jonathan Edwards were the only writers up to that time who had worthily presented the American mind, with its practical and ideal sides, to foreign readers.] With his idealism and individuality, his imagination that soars to heaven but is equally at home on solid earth, his sound judgment to balance his mysticism, his forceful style that runs from epigram to sustained eloquence, his straight-fibered manhood in which criticism finds nothing to pardon or regret,—with all these sterling qualities he is one of the most representative writers that America has ever produced.

* * * * *

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE (1804-1864)

Some great writers belong to humanity, others to their own land or people. Hawthorne is in the latter class apparently, for ever since Lowell rashly characterized him as "the greatest imaginative genius since Shakespeare" our critics commonly speak of him in superlatives. Meanwhile most European critics (who acclaim such unequal writers as Cooper and Poe, Whitman and Mark Twain) either leave Hawthorne unread or else wonder what Americans find in him to stir their enthusiasm.

The explanation is that Hawthorne's field was so intensely local that only those who are familiar with it can appreciate him. Almost any reader can enjoy Cooper, since he deals with adventurous men whom everybody understands; but Hawthorne deals with the New England Puritan of the seventeenth century, a very peculiar hero, and to enjoy the novelist one must have some personal or historic interest in his subject. Moreover, he alienates many readers by presenting only the darker side of Puritanism. He is a man who never laughs and seldom smiles in his work; he passes over a hundred normal and therefore cheerful homes to pitch upon some gloomy habitation of sin or remorse, and makes that the burden of his tale. In no other romancer do we find genius of such high order at work in so barren a field.

LIFE. There is an air of reserve about Hawthorne which no biography has ever penetrated. A schoolmate who met him daily once said, "I love Hawthorne; I admire him; but I do not know him. He lives in a mysterious world of thought and imagination which he never permits me to enter." That characterization applies as well to-day as when it was first spoken, almost a century ago. To his family and to a very few friends Hawthorne was evidently a genial man, [Footnote: Intimate but hardly trustworthy pictures of Hawthorne and his family are presented by his son, Julian Hawthorne, in Nathaniel Hawthorne and his Wife. A dozen other memoirs have appeared; but Hawthorne did not want his biography written, and there are many unanswered questions in the story of his life.] but from the world and its affairs he always held aloof, wrapped in his mantle of mystery.

A study of his childhood may help us to understand the somber quality of all his work. He was descended from the Puritans who came to Boston with John Winthrop, and was born in the seaport of Salem, Massachusetts, in 1804. He was only four years old when his father, a sea captain, died in a foreign port; whereupon the mother draped herself in weeds, retired from the sight of neighbors, and for the next forty years made life as funereal as possible. Besides the little boy there were two sisters in the family, and the elder took her meals in her own room, as did the mother. The others went about the darkened house on tiptoe, or peeped out at the world through closed shutters.



The shadow of that unnatural home was upon Hawthorne to the end of his life; it accounts in part for his shyness, his fear of society, his lack of interest in his own age or nation.

[Sidenote: SECLUSION AT SALEM]

At seventeen Hawthorne went to Bowdoin College, where Longfellow was his classmate and Franklin Pierce (later President of the United States) one of his friends. His college life seems to have been happy, even gay at times; but when he graduated (1825) and his classmates scattered to find work in the world he returned to his Salem home and secluded himself as if he had no interest in humanity. It was doubtful, he said afterwards, whether a dozen people knew of his existence in as many years.

All the while he was writing, gathering material for his romances or patiently cultivating his fine style. For days he would brood over a subject; then he would compose a story or parable for the magazines. The stamp of originality was on all these works, but they were seldom accepted. When they returned to him, having found no appreciative editor, he was apt to burn them and complain that he was neglected. Studying the man as he reveals himself at this time in his Note-Books (published in a garbled edition by the Hawthorne family), one has the impression that he was a shy, sensitive genius, almost morbidly afraid of the world. From a distance he sent out his stories as "feelers", when these were ignored he shrank into himself more deeply than before.



Love brought him out of his retreat, as it has accomplished many another miracle. When he became engaged his immediate thought was to find work, and one of his friends secured a position for him in the Boston customhouse, where he weighed coal until he was replaced by a party spoilsman. [Footnote: Hawthorne profited three times by the spoils system. When his Boston experience was repeated at Salem he took his revenge in the opening chapter of The Scarlet Letter, which ridicules those who received political jobs from the other party.] There were no civil-service rules in those days. Hoping to secure a home, he invested his savings in Brook Farm, worked there for a time with the reformers, detested them, lost his money and gained the experience which he used later in his Blithedale Romance. Then he married, and lived in poverty and great happiness for four years in the "Old Manse" at Concord. Another friend obtained for him political appointment as surveyor of the Salem customhouse; again he was replaced by a spoilsman, and again he complained bitterly. The loss proved a blessing, however, since it gave him leisure to write The Scarlet Letter, a novel which immediately placed Hawthorne in the front rank of American writers.

[Sidenote: FAREWELL GREATNESS]

He was now before an appreciative world, and in the flush of fine feeling that followed his triumph he wrote The House of the Seven Gables, A Wonder Book and The Snow Image. Literature was calling him most hopefully when, at the very prime of life, he turned his back on fortune. His friend Pierce had been nominated by the Democrats (1852), and he was asked to write the candidate's biography for campaign purposes. It was hardly a worthy task, but he accepted it and did it well. When Pierce was elected he "persuaded" Hawthorne to accept the office of consul at Liverpool. The emoluments, some seven thousand dollars a year, seemed enormous to one who had lived straitly, and in the four years of Pierce's administration our novelist saved a sum which, with the income from his books, placed him above the fear of want. Then he went for a long vacation to Italy, where he collected the material for his Marble Faun. But he wrote nothing more of consequence.

[Sidenote: THE UNFINISHED STORY]

The remainder of his life was passed in a pleasant kind of hermitage in Emerson's village of Concord. His habits of solitude and idleness ("cursed habits," he called them) were again upon him; though he began several romances—Dr. Grimshawe's Secret, Septimius Felton, The Ancestral Footstep and The Dolliver Romance—he never made an end of them. In his work he was prone to use some symbol of human ambition, and the symbol of his own later years might well have been the unfinished manuscript which lay upon the coffin when his body was laid under the pines in the old Concord burying ground (1864). His friend Longfellow has described the scene in his beautiful poem "Hawthorne."

SHORT STORIES AND SKETCHES. Many young people become familiar with Hawthorne as a teller of bedtime stories long before they meet him in the role of famous novelist. In his earlier days he wrote Grandfather's Chair (modeled on a similar work by Scott), dealing with Colonial legends, and broadened his field in Biographical Stories for Children. Other and better works belonging to the same juvenile class are A Wonder Book (1851) and Tanglewood Tales (1853), which are modern versions of the classic myths and stories that Greek mothers used to tell their children long ago.

[Sidenote: PICTURES OF THE PAST]

The best of Hawthorne's original stories are collected in Twice-Told Tales, Mosses from an Old Manse and The Snow Image and Other Twice-Told Tales. As the bulk of this work is rather depressing we select a few typical tales, arranging them in three groups. In the first are certain sketches, as Hawthorne called them, which aim not to tell a story but to give an impression of the past. "The Old Manse" (in Mosses from an Old Manse) is an excellent introduction to this group. Others in which the author comes out from the gloom to give his humor a glimpse of pale sunshine are "A Rill from the Town Pump," "Main Street," "Little Annie's Ramble," "Sights from a Steeple" and, as suggestive of Hawthorne's solitary outings, "Footprints on the Seashore."

[Sidenote: ALLEGORIES]

In the second group are numerous allegories and symbolical stories. To understand Hawthorne's method of allegory [Footnote: An allegory is a figure of speech (in rhetoric) or a story (in literature) in which an external object is described in such a way that we apply the description to our own inner experience. Many proverbs, such as "People who live in glass houses should not throw stones," are condensed allegories. So also are fables and parables, such as the fable of the fox and the grapes, or the parable of the lost sheep. Bunyan's famous allegory, The Pilgrim's Progress, describes a journey from one city to another, but in reading it we are supposed to think of a Christian's experience in passing through this world to the next.] read "The Snow Image," which is the story of a snowy figure that became warm, living and companionable to some children until it was spoiled by a hard-headed person, without imagination or real sense, who forgot that he was ever a child himself or that there is such a beautiful and precious thing as a child-view of the universe.

In his constant symbolism (that is, in his use of an outward sign or token to represent an idea) Hawthorne reflected a trait that is common to humanity in all ages. Thus, every nation has its concrete symbol, its flag or eagle or lion; a great religion is represented by a cross or a crescent; in art and poetry the sword stands for war and the dove for peace; an individual has his horseshoe or rabbit's foot or "mascot" as the simple expression of an idea that may be too complex for words. Among primitive people such symbols were associated with charms, magic, baleful or benignant influences; and Hawthorne accepted this superstitious idea in many of his works, though he was apt to hint, as in "Lady Eleanor's Mantle," that the magic of his symbol might have a practical explanation. In this story the lady's gorgeous mantle is a symbol of pride; its blighting influence may be due to the fact that,—but to tell the secret is to spoil the story, and that is not fair to Hawthorne or the reader.

[Sidenote: THE BLACK VEIL]

Some of these symbolic tales are too vague or shadowy to be convincing; in others the author makes artistic use of some simple object, such as a flower or an ornament, to suggest the mystery that broods over every life. In "The Minister's Black Veil," for example, a clergyman startles his congregation by appearing with a dark veil over his face. The veil itself is a familiar object; on a woman or a bonnet it would pass unnoticed; but on the minister it becomes a portentous thing, at once fascinating and repellent. Yesterday they knew the man as a familiar friend; to-day he is a stranger, and they fear him with a vague, nameless fear. Forty years he wears the mysterious thing, dies and is buried with it, and in all that time they never have a glimpse of his face. Though there is a deal of nonsense in the story, and a hocus-pocus instead of a mystery, we must remember that veil as a striking symbol of the loneliness of life, of the gulf that separates a human soul from every other.

Another and better symbolic tale is "The Great Stone Face," which appeals strongly to younger readers, especially to those who have lived much out of doors and who cherish the memory of some natural object, some noble tree or mossy cliff or singing brook, that is forever associated with their thoughts of childhood. To others the tale will have added interest in that it is supposed to portray the character of Emerson as Hawthorne knew him.

[Sidenote: LEGENDARY TALES]

In the third group are numerous stories dealing with Colonial history, and of these "The Gray Champion" and "The Gentle Boy" are fairly typical. Hawthorne has been highly praised in connection with these tales as "the artist who created the Puritan in literature." Most readers will gladly recognize the "artist," since every tale has its line or passage of beauty; but some will murmur at the "creation." The trouble with Hawthorne was that in creating his Puritan he took scant heed of the man whom the Almighty created. He was not a scholar or even a reader; his custom was to brood over an incident of the past (often a grotesque incident, such as he found in Winthrop's old Journal), and from his brooding he produced an imaginary character, some heartless fanatic or dismal wretch who had nothing of the Puritan except the label. Of the real Puritan, who knew the joy and courtesy as well as the stern discipline of life, our novelist had only the haziest notion. In consequence his "Gentle Boy" and parts also of his Scarlet Letter leave an unwarranted stain on the memory of his ancestors. [Footnote: Occasionally, as in "The Gray Champion" and "Endicott and the Red Cross," Hawthorne paints the stern courage of the Puritan, but never his gentle or humane qualities. His typical tale presents the Puritan in the most unlovely guise. In "The Maypole of Merrymount," for example, Morton and his men are represented as inoffensive, art-loving people who were terrorized by the "dismal wretches" of a near-by colony of Puritans. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Morton's crew were a lawless set and a scandal to New England; but they were tolerated until they put all the settlements in danger by debauching the Indians and selling them rum, muskets and gunpowder. The "dismal wretches" were the Pilgrims of Plymouth,—gentle, heroic men, lovers of learning and liberty, who profoundly influenced the whole subsequent history of America.]

THE FOUR ROMANCES. The romances of Hawthorne are all studies of the effects of sin on human development. If but one of these romances is to be read, let it be The House of the Seven Gables (1851), which is a pleasanter story than Hawthorne commonly tells, and which portrays one character that he knew by experience rather than by imagination. Many of Hawthorne's stories run to a text, and the text here is, "The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge." The characters are represented as "under a curse"; [Foonote: This is a reflection of a family tradition. An ancestor of Hawthorne was judge at the Salem witch trials, in 1692. One of the poor creatures condemned to death is said to have left a curse on the judge's family. In his Note Books Hawthorne makes mention of the traditional curse, and analyzes its possible effect on his own character.] that is, they are bearing the burden and sorrow of some old iniquity committed before they were born; but the affliction is banished in a satisfactory way without leaving us in the haze of mystery that envelops so much of Hawthorne's work. His humor is also in evidence, his interest in life overcomes for a time his absorption in shadowy symbols, and his whole story is brightened by his evident love of Phoebe Pyncheon, the most natural and winsome of all his characters.



The other romances deal with the same general theme, the blighting effect of sin, but vary greatly in their scenes and characters. The Marble Faun (published in England as Transformation, 1860) is the most popular, possibly because its scene is laid in Rome, a city to which all travelers go, or aspire to go, before they die; but though it moves in "an atmosphere of art," among the studios of "the eternal city," it is the least artistic of all the author's works. [Footnote: The Marble Faun ends in a fog, as if the author did not know what to do with his characters. It has the amateurish fault of halting the narrative to talk with the reader; and it moralizes to such an extent that the heroine (who is pictured as of almost angelic virtue) eventually becomes a prig and a preacher,—two things that a woman must never be. Nevertheless, the romance has a host of enthusiastic readers, and to criticize it adversely is to bring a storm about one's ears.] In The Blithedale Romance (1852) Hawthorne deals with the present rather than the past and apparently makes use of his observation, since his scenes and characters are strongly suggestive of the Brook Farm community of reformers, among whom he spent one critical and unhappy year. The Scarlet Letter (1850) is not only the most original and powerful of the romances but is commonly ranked by our critics at the head of American fiction. The scene is laid in Boston, in the old Puritan days; the main characters are vividly drawn, and the plot moves to its gloomy but impressive climax as if Wyrd or Fate were at the bottom of it.

CHARACTERISTICS OF HAWTHORNE. Almost the first thing we notice in Hawthorne is his style, a smooth, leisurely, "classic" style which moves along, like a meadow brook, without hurry or exertion. Gradually as we read we become conscious of the novelist's characters, whom he introduces with a veil of mystery around them. They are interesting, as dreams and other mysterious things always are, but they are seldom real or natural or lifelike. At times we seem to be watching a pantomime of shadows, rather than a drama of living men and women.