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GREAT 
 
 SPIRITUAL WRITERS 
 OF AMERICA 
 
WALT WHITMAN 
 
 ETCHED BY JACQUES REICH FROM WHITMAN S 
 
 LAST PHOTOGRAPH TAKEN BY THOMAS 
 
 EAKINS OF PHILADELPHIA 
 
GREAT 
 
 SPIRITUAL WRITERS 
 OF AMERICA 
 
 BY 
 
 GEORGE HAMLIN FITCH 
 
 AUTHOR OF 
 
 "COMFORT FOUND IN GOOD OLD BOOKS" 
 
 "MODERN ENGLISH BOOKS OF POWER" 
 
 "THE CRITIC IN THE OCCIDENT" 
 
 "THE CRITIC IN THE ORIENT" 
 
 Great men are they who see that spiritual 
 
 is stronger than any material force ; that thoughts 
 
 rule the world. Emerson: Progress of Culture. 
 
 ILLUSTRATED 
 
 PAUL ELDER AND COMPANY 
 PUBLISHERS SAN FRANCISCO 
 
Copyright, 
 
 by PAUL ELDER AND COMPANY 
 SAN FRANCISCO 
 
 For their assistance in the collection of the 
 illustrative matter in this volume, and their courtesy 
 in permitting its use, the Publishers gratefully acknowledge 
 their indebtedness to the following: University of 
 California Library; Doubleday, Page &? Company; 
 Harper &? Brothers; Houghton Mifflin Corn- 
 Company; Mitchell Kennerley; Little, 
 Brown 6? Company; G. P. Putnam s 
 Sons; Richard G. Badger, The 
 Gorham Press 
 
 
 
 
 
 -V 
 
 ,-V r *-> > A 
 
 
DEDICATED 
 
 TO ALL THOSE WHO 
 
 HAVE FOUND INSPIRATION IN 
 
 AMERICAN MEN OF 
 
 LETTERS 
 
 335660 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 INTRODUCTION . . ........... ix 
 
 SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE ....... xm 
 
 The Vita) Force found in the New Religion of Democ 
 racy Emerson, Whitman and Mark Twain its 
 Great Apostles. 
 EMERSON, THE LITERARY PIONEER ....... 3 
 
 His Essays, Full of Splendid Optimism, Stimulated 
 
 Whitman and many other American Writers. 
 WALT WHITMAN, THE PROPHET IN His SHIRT-SLEEVES . 12 
 Most Original of all American Writers He Defied 
 
 Conventionality and Paid the Full Penalty. 
 THE CHARM OF WASHINGTON IRVING ...... 21 
 
 Genial Author of fbt Sketch Book, the First American 
 
 to Gain an International Reputation. 
 ART OF EDGAR ALLAN POE ......... 28 
 
 Work of the Finest Short-Story Writer in America 
 His Poems and Tales Translated into Many Lan 
 guages. 
 HAWTHORNE S SOMBER PURITAN ROMANCES .... 37 
 
 The Scarlet Letter, The House of tbt Seven Gables and 
 Mosses Frjm an Old Manse Art in The Marble 
 Faun. 
 FENIMORE COOPER S ORIGINAL WORK ...... 48 
 
 His Tales of the Forest and the Sea Leatherstocking 
 
 and Long Tom Coffin Known Around the World. 
 
 LONGFELLOW, THE POET OF THE HOUSEHOLD ... 58 
 
 More Popular Abroad than any other American Writer 
 
 of Verse His Strong Sense of Nationality. 
 LOWELL AS POET, ESSAYIST AND CRITIC ..... 68 
 
 His Commemoration Ode, T"he Biglow Papers and His 
 
 Literary Essays His Best Work. 
 
 WIT AND HUMOR OF OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES ... 78 
 Wise and Tender Passages in The Autocrat of the 
 Breakfast fable Some of His Most Popular Poems. 
 
 fvl 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 WHITTIER, THE PURITAN SINGER 87 
 
 The Anti-Slavery Bard Whose Snow Bound, The 1"ent 
 on the Beach and Other Poems are Full of Spiritual 
 Fire. 
 
 THOREAU, THE PIONEER WRITER ABOUT NATURE . . 95 
 The Recluse of Walden Pond who First Showed the 
 World How to Live the Simple Life and How to 
 Enjoy Nature. 
 
 FRANCIS PARKMAN S HISTORICAL WORK 103 
 
 Although Half-Blind and an Invalid, He Described the 
 Long Struggle Between France and England for 
 Canada. 
 
 MARK. TWAIN, OUR FINEST HUMORIST in 
 
 Sprung from Poverty, He Won Fame by The Innocents 
 Abroad His best book, The Adventures of Huckle 
 berry Finn. 
 
 BRET HARTE S CALIFORNIA TALES AND POEMS . . . 119 
 Pioneer Life Among Gold Miners Mirrored by a Mas 
 ter of the Short Story One of the Great Artists 
 in Verse. 
 
 HOWELLS, FIRST OF LIVING AMERICAN NOVELISTS . . 127 
 A Genial Humorist who Has Painted Many Phases 
 
 of Our Social Life His Books of Travel. 
 MARKHAM, POET OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE . . . 136 
 Wallace Called Him "The Greatest Poet of the Social 
 Passion" Fame Came with The Man Witb the Hoe. 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 14? 
 
 Short Notes of Standard and Other Editions, with 
 Lives, Sketches, Reminiscences and References to 
 Magazine Articles. 
 INDEX 159 
 
 [VI] 
 
ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 FACING 
 PAGE 
 
 Walt Whitman Etched by Jacques Reich from Whitman s 
 last Photograph taken by Thomas Eakins of Philadelphia 
 Title 
 
 Ralph Waldo Emerson From a Daguerreotype taken for 
 Carlylein May, 1846 6 
 
 The Home of Ralph Waldo Emerson From a Photograph 
 by A. Hosmer 10 
 
 Walt Whitman From a Photograph by Gardner, Wash 
 ington In possession of Horace L. Traubel, Esq ... 14 
 
 Washington Irving, at the age of Twenty-seven An En 
 graving from the Original Picture by Jarvis .... 22 
 
 Sunnyside Home of Washington Irving From a Draw 
 ing by Julian Rix 0.6 
 
 Edgar Allan Poe From a Daugerreotype made at Rich 
 mond, by Pratt 28 
 
 Edgar Allan Poe s Cottage, Fordham After a Drawing 
 by Mie Pate 32 
 
 Nathaniel Hawthorne, at the Age of Thirty-six Etched by 
 S. A. Schoff, from a Painting made in 1840 by Charles 
 Osgood 40 
 
 Nathaniel Hawthorne This Excellent Likeness is from an 
 Oil Painting by Frances Osborne, Painted in 1893 from 
 Photographs Owned by the Essex Institute ... 44 
 
 J. Fenimore Cooper Engraved from the Painting by 
 C. L. Elliott 48 
 
 One of the Vignette Engravings reproducing the Illustra 
 tions by F. O. C. Darley, which Adorned the Early Edi 
 tions of Cooper s Works 52 
 
 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, in 1859 From a Photo 
 graph by Brady 60 
 
 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, in His Study From a 
 Photograph taken in 1876 64 
 
 [VII] 
 
ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 FACING 
 PAGE 
 
 James Russell Lowell, in 1857 From a Crayon Drawing 
 byS.W. Rowse 68 
 
 Elmwood The Home of James Russell Lowell at Cam 
 bridge From a Photograph by B. F. Mills ... 74 
 
 Oliver Wendell Holmes, in 1856 At the Age of Forty- 
 seven 78 
 
 The Home of Oliver Wendell Holmes in Cambridge, Built 
 in 1730 8a 
 
 John Greenleaf Whittier In His Amesbury Garden at the 
 Age of Seventy-nine From a Photograph taken in 1886 88 
 
 Facsimile of the Manuscript "My Triumph," by John 
 Greenleaf Whittier 90 
 
 Henry David Thoreau,in 1854 From the Crayon Draw 
 ing by S. W. Rowse in the Concord Public Library . 96 
 
 Thoreau s Cove, Walden Pond, showing Indian Path 
 Along Shore 100 
 
 Francis Parkman From a Daguerreotype taken about 
 1844 I0 4 
 
 Francis Parkman From a Photograph taken in 1882 
 Copyright 1897 by Little, Brown & Company . . 106 
 
 Mark Twain From a Photograph, Copyright 1905 by 
 Harper & Brothers 112 
 
 Mark Twain s Birthplace The House Built by Judge 
 Clemens in 1836 (now destroyed) was often pointed out 
 as the Birthplace of the Humorist 114 
 
 Bret Harte From a Photograph taken by Hollyer in 
 1896 120 
 
 Facsimile of a Page of the Manuscript of the Famous Poem 
 "The Heathen Chinee" by Bret Harte 122 
 
 William Dean Howells A Characteristic Portrait . .128 
 
 Studio of William Dean Howells The Interior of a Re 
 modeled Stable, a Single, Large, Sunny Room Copy 
 right 1911 by Harper & Brothers 132 
 
 Edwin Markham From a Favorite Photograph of Mr. 
 Markham Taken by W. E. Dassonville, San Fran 
 cisco 136 
 
 Facsimile of an Autograph Copy of a Quatrain from Edwin 
 Markham s "The Shoes of Happiness" 14 
 
 [ VIII 
 
Introduction 
 
 rtiis little book is intended to round out 
 and complete the studies in literature 
 already issued in "Comfort Found in Good 
 Old Books" and "Modern English Books of 
 Power" The first of these was written to 
 show that the only abiding solace in grief 
 is to be found in good old books, which as 
 consolers surpass even the oldest and truest 
 of friends. It was also written to demon 
 strate that real culture does not depend upon 
 a college education, but may be gained by 
 anyone who has a genuine love of good 
 literature, ^he second volume was designed 
 as a guide to those who wish to read the best 
 of the great modern English authors from 
 Macaulay to Hardy and Kipling. Its essen 
 tial feature was that no one should attempt 
 to read all the works of any author, but that 
 two or three of the most characteristic works 
 of an author are all that is necessary to give 
 a good estimate of his genius. Upon these 
 as a basis one may work until he has read 
 practically all that has been written by the 
 great modern English authors. 
 
 [IX] 
 
Introduction 
 
 In this third book I have selected repre 
 sentative American authors who in my judg 
 ment best illustrate the national gen ius. The 
 limits of the book make it imperative to 
 include only a few of the greatest writers. 
 Some critics have contended that there is no 
 real American literature, as most of our 
 writers have simply imitated English models. 
 Ground there may have been for such criti 
 cism in the early days of the nation, but 
 with Washington Irving began what may be 
 called a distinctive literature, and this was 
 enriched by a strong native genius like Walt 
 Whitman, a rare creative poet and romancer 
 like Poe, and a master of tragic spiritual 
 drama like Hawthorne. It may be literary 
 heresy, but to my mind Emerson is a jar 
 more stimulating literary force than Carlyle, 
 Cooper a finer story-teller than most of 
 his English contemporaries, while Lowell, 
 Holmes, Parkman, Bret Harte and Mark 
 Twain have a racy national quality and a 
 creative literary power that set them apart 
 and make them well worth study. Of these, 
 the next century will probably appraise 
 Mark Twain as the greatest, for aside from 
 being the finest humorist that America has 
 produced, he will also take rank among the 
 greatest story-tellers of all ages. 
 
 [x] 
 
Introduction 
 
 My aim in this book has been to arouse 
 interest in these great American writers who 
 are so little known to most readers and to 
 indicate their best works. Certainly no true 
 American can afford to be ignorant of the 
 writers who have made our literature known 
 to the world. And this is especially true in 
 these dark days, when the United States 
 stands alone as the only great civilized power 
 that is not striving to gain territory or some 
 other advantage from the nations now locked 
 fast in the most desperate and destructive war 
 of all history. 
 
 [XI] 
 
Spirit of 
 American Literature 
 
 Vital Force Found in the New Religion 
 Of Democracy Emerson, Whitman and 
 Mark Twain Its Great Apostles. 
 
 .AMERICAN literature has been hurt more 
 ^A- by its friends than by its enemies. 
 Jeffrey s sneering query, "Who reads an 
 American book?" was not so deadly as the 
 praise by historians of our literature of such 
 unreadable works as Judd s "Margaret. " In 
 dealing with literature, why waste time 
 or energy on books that have no claim as 
 real literature? Hundreds of books are 
 issued every year that serve their purpose as 
 text books and manuals of reference; other 
 hundreds serve to amuse readers; but if a 
 year sees the publication of a real book, full 
 of the genuine spiritual quality that ensures 
 immortality, then that year is worthy of being 
 marked in red letters. In the history of any 
 literature it is astonishing to find how few 
 are the books that may be called immortal. 
 
Spirit of American Literature 
 
 In Ms analysis of great American writers , 
 many readers may find that I have omitted 
 several of their favorite authors. Such omis 
 sions are unavoidable because among hun 
 dreds of contemporary writers, it is difficult 
 to select those who best represent the national 
 spirit. Of the great names in American 
 literature Emerson, Whitman, Irving, 
 Cooper, Poe, Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes, 
 Whittier, Hawthorne, ^Thoreau, Mark Twain, 
 Bret Harte and Howells not one can be 
 omitted. Of the others, some substantial 
 reasons are given for selecting Parkman and 
 Edwin Markham. 
 
 Every one of these authors gives ample 
 proof in his best works of that spiritual 
 quality which is the unfailing test of immor 
 tality. In this new world, where material 
 development claimed men s attention and 
 absorbed their energies for two centuries, the 
 wonder is that anything like an original 
 literature should have taken root even after 
 two hundred years. Only the influence of 
 the strong new thought germinated by the 
 Declaration of Independence wrought this 
 miracle of a genuine national literature. 
 Colonies do not produce literature, as may 
 be seen in the history of Australia and 
 Canada. Even republics, like those of South 
 
 [xiv] 
 
Spirit of American Literature 
 
 America, which are only oligarchies mas 
 querading under the symbols of freedom, 
 have proved sterile in real literature. 
 
 The man who drafted the Declaration of 
 Independence and his associates who helped 
 to make it a reality, laid broad and enduring 
 the foundations of American literature. 
 From it, as from the experiments that have 
 been made since this government was made 
 an actual fact, has sprung a literature dis 
 tinct from any that the world has ever known. 
 American ideals, although they have been 
 slow to be recognized by skeptical Europe, 
 are as distinct from anything found in the 
 Old World as American life is distinct from 
 that of England, France or Germany of today. 
 It is only within the memory of the present 
 generation that the United States has come 
 to be recognized as a world power. England 
 and Germany looked upon our experiment 
 in the Philippines as a bit of altruism which 
 would soon be changed to a regular selfish 
 colonial government like that of India or 
 Southwest Africa. They regarded our action 
 in returning the Boxer indemnity to China 
 and our refusal to seize any Chinese territory, 
 as national idealism, which was inconsistent 
 with real patriotism. The course of the 
 United States in this great European war is 
 
 [XV] 
 
Spirit of American Literature 
 
 not understood abroad. It is as great a 
 mystery as our generosity in feeding the 
 Belgians, This is not strange when we see 
 the astonishing spectacle of nations like Italy y 
 Greece and Roumania bargaining for terri 
 tory with both sides in the present conflict. 
 
 President Wilson has voiced in eloquent 
 words this new American doctrine of the 
 Golden Rule as applied to national affairs, 
 but in all the European chancelleries his 
 genuine idealism is regarded as mere rhetoric. 
 
 o o 
 
 Diplomats who have grown gray inventing 
 devices to overreach their opponents cannot 
 be made to believe that the doctrines of Christ 
 may be applied to the affairs of nations. In 
 fac^ they look upon American diplomacy 
 with that polite condescension which is more 
 annoying than open unbelief. Tet anyone 
 who knows American life accepts without 
 question the President s words as typical of 
 American public opinion. The course of 
 this government in the present war is simply 
 the natural development of that religion of 
 democracy preached by Emerson, Whitman 
 and Mark Twain the three greatest origi 
 nal forces in American literature. You will 
 not find any believers in that religion in the 
 Old World, except a few idealists who are 
 looked upon as dangerous cranks. Only one 
 
 [xvi] 
 
Spirit of American Literature 
 
 man with the real American spirit has come 
 to the front in the great emergency produced 
 by this war. That is Lloyd George, the 
 English Minister of Munitions, who has 
 upset all the cherished traditions of British 
 government, but has gained in influence and 
 popularity. He is the only public man who 
 has had the courage to warn the British nation 
 of its peril caused by incompetency among 
 its rulers. His is the only voice which has 
 denounced the incredible selfishness of the 
 British labor unions in checking the produc 
 tion of munitions and thus causing the waste 
 of thousands of brave soldiers and millions 
 of money. Lloyd George represents real 
 American democracy in its battle with the 
 long intrenched forces of a selfish oligarchy 
 of the privileged classes. 
 
 American literature, as seen in its great 
 spiritual writers, is simply the logical work 
 ing out of the forces that were first put into 
 eloquent words by Thomas Jefferson. The 
 warfare upon privilege, the throwing wide 
 open of the gates of opportunity to every man 
 who proves his capacity, no matter what his 
 birth or social station, the encouragement of 
 the poor boy to seek an education that will 
 lift him out of the ranks of the hewers of 
 wood and the drawers of water, the enforce- 
 
 \ xvn 1 
 
Spirit of * American Literature 
 
 went oftbe doctrine that manual labor brings 
 no shame or reproach and that a gentleman 
 may be a gentleman although he works with 
 his hands and wears no gloves these are 
 the vital) fundamental truths which all the 
 great American writers have preached in 
 their works, whether in prose or verse. And 
 their words have had potency and power 
 because they represent the convictions of 
 millions of plain Americans, whom wealth 
 cannot spoil. 
 
 Emerson was the first American writer to 
 put these great truths into words that have 
 everlasting life. His noteworthy address, 
 The American Scholar, has probably had 
 more direct influence upon young Americans 
 than any other single piece of our literature. 
 It aroused Walt Whitman and led to the 
 production of his "Leaves of Grass" and 
 his prose declaration of literary independence. 
 Whitman s utterances were denounced by 
 conservative critics, but many of the foremost 
 American and English writers of his day 
 welcomed his work as a strong, new note in 
 literature. 
 
 This religion of democracy, preached by 
 Emerson and Whitman, found one of its 
 most eloquent disciples in our day in Mark 
 Twain. Long regarded merely as a humor- 
 
 [ xvin ] 
 
Spirit of American Literature 
 
 isfy Mark Twain came into his own kingdom 
 more than twenty years ago, and today he is 
 recognized by the best critics as among the 
 foremost of American authors. Sprung from 
 the people, with no early advantages, his 
 literary genius forced him to abandon the 
 work of a Mississippi river pilot in which 
 he had achieved success, and to devote himself 
 to literary work. A hater of all social dis 
 tinctions, of all shams and pretences, Mark 
 Twain was the most eloquent advocate of 
 democracy of his age. His "Huckleberry 
 Finn " may be recognized by the next century 
 as the great American novel for which the 
 Wise Men of Literature have watched for so 
 many years. 
 
 All the authors whose works are discussed 
 in this volume are distinctly American. All 
 have the spiritual quality so strongly devel 
 oped that even the careless reader feels its 
 powerful influence behind their words. All 
 were passionate believers in the literature 
 which they helped to make famous. And 
 not one of them will fail to give rich results 
 in culture and enjoyment as the consequence 
 of the study of his work. 
 
 xix ] 
 
GREAT 
 
 SPIRITUAL WRITERS 
 OF AMERICA 
 
EMERSON 
 
 THE LITERARY 
 
 PIONEER 
 
 His ESSAYS, FULL OF SPLENDID OPTI 
 MISM, STIMULATED WHITMAN AND MANY 
 OTHER AMERICAN WRITERS. 
 
 RALPH WALDO EMERSON deserves the 
 first place in any survey of American 
 literature. Without him, American writ 
 ers would have continued for another 
 generation the imitation of English models. 
 He pronounced the declaration of American 
 literary independence as Jefferson drafted 
 the declaration of our political indepen 
 dence. Whitman acknowledged his debt 
 to Emerson, and Whitman, whatever his 
 faults, is still our most original man of 
 letters. Emerson also has had a more 
 vital influence on young readers and on 
 college students than any other American 
 writer. The years that have relegated so 
 many of his contemporaries to the top 
 
 [3] 
 
GPEAT SPIRITUAL WRITERS 
 
 shelf have not lessened his popularity. 
 His books still sell by the thousand and 
 they are read eagerly by young Americans 
 of all classes. To the young man or 
 woman, forced to work for a living and 
 struggling at night to get an education, 
 Emerson is a tower of strength. His words 
 are a stimulus which cannot be measured; 
 he gives spiritual comfort that girds up 
 the loins of the lonely student. 
 
 Above all, in this material age, Emerson 
 comes with a message which appeals power 
 fully to youth, which has not lost its ideals. 
 His has been the duty to keep alive the 
 high, unselfish purposes of the scholar in 
 these days when wealth and power seek to 
 seduce the ablest of young Americans. He 
 is the High Priest of the spiritual who passes 
 along the torch of culture to the hands of 
 the younger generations. 
 
 Emerson was one of the few American 
 authors whose mere presence impressed 
 any assembly. Though never given to 
 posing, so great was his personal force and 
 so high the distinction of his face and his 
 manner that all gave him homage. And 
 the wonder of this tribute was that the 
 man himself was absolutely detached from 
 the things of this world. As he himself so 
 
 [4] 
 
EMERSON, THE LITERARY PIONEER 
 
 well expressed it, he saw even the people 
 in his own household "as across a gulf/ 
 He had the detachment of great genius. 
 He had no intimates and he never made 
 any effort to cultivate friendships. His 
 indifference to the work of his contem 
 poraries of genius was profound and dis 
 concerting. Thus he never could read any 
 of Hawthorne s exquisite tales, and he 
 could not even appreciate he Scarlet 
 Letter, which, with some of his own essays. 
 has been given by critics the highest place 
 in the Pantheon of American literary 
 achievement. 
 
 To treat Emerson like the ordinary 
 writer of essays is to mistake his vocation. 
 He is a seer and a prophet; but above all 
 he is the greatest teacher and inspirer of 
 thought and work this country has ever 
 known. And it is as a teacher that his 
 fame will endure. His essays are merely 
 the elaboration of the lectures and addresses 
 which he delivered before college and 
 lyceum audiences, in an age when the 
 desire for culture was as eager as is now 
 the desire for money and pleasure. The 
 Puritan conscience had not lost its keen 
 edge when Emerson was in his prime, and 
 it was his great distinction that he could 
 
 [5] 
 
GREAT SPIRITUAL WRITERS 
 
 appeal to this conscience with a force and 
 a directness possessed by no other writer 
 or lecturer of his day. 
 
 Absolutely free from all religious restric 
 tions, Emerson yet laid down the moral 
 law with a power that moves one still, as 
 it once swayed and stimulated New Eng 
 land audiences. The men of today of 
 larger culture and greater literary skill 
 may marvel at Emerson s influence, but it 
 endures, and American school and college 
 youth of our day feel the force of Emerson s 
 vitalizing words, with almost the same 
 kindling power that moved those who sat 
 at his feet and looked upon his face when 
 visions came to him and were revealed to 
 those who had not his outlook upon the 
 Promised Land. 
 
 So Emerson is one of the few great 
 authors whose work must be tasted, not 
 eaten. He is like caviare to the great 
 reading public, because he is merely a 
 stimulus to thought. His essays must be 
 taken in small doses, lest one have a surfeit 
 of their richness of condensed thought. 
 To read Emerson continuously, as one 
 reads Macaulay or even Carlyle, is fatal; 
 as well try to digest the intellectual pemmi- 
 can of Bacon s essays. Emerson s essays, 
 
 [6] 
 
RALPH WALDO EMERSON 
 
 FROM A DAGUERREOTYPE TAKEN FOR CARLYLE 
 IN MAY, 1846 
 
EMERSON, THE LITERARY PIONEER 
 
 which, with Representative Men, contain 
 all his best work, are to be regarded as 
 stimulants to the intellectual life. They 
 are to be read by single pages, or, better, 
 by single passages. Oftentimes a single 
 sentence will give one food for thought. 
 And the remarkable feature of Emerson 
 is that he seems to have an answer for all 
 one s needs, just as the Bible has; for his 
 was a primitive nature that stripped away 
 all conventions and dared to look on life 
 with the eyes of a pagan, unafraid and 
 unashamed. He is as elemental as the 
 writer of the Book of Job. 
 
 Emerson lived an uneventful life, but it 
 is difficult to imagine the New England of 
 sixty years ago without his dominating 
 figure. He came of a family of preachers 
 and he was bred for the church. He 
 gained no distinction in college, which he 
 entered at the early age of fifteen years, 
 save that he won a second prize for Eng 
 lish composition in his senior year. He 
 attended a divinity school, but weakness 
 of the eyes excused him from taking notes 
 in class and from entering examinations. 
 As he remarked later in life, with dry 
 humor, "If they had examined me they 
 probably would not have let me preach at 
 
 [7] 
 
GREAT SPIRITUAL WRITERS 
 
 all." When twenty-three years old he was 
 authorized to preach, but weak lungs drove 
 him to the milder climate of South Carolina 
 and Florida. In Charleston he preached 
 several times, and on his return he was 
 ordained as colleague of Dr. Ware in the 
 Second Church of Boston. 
 
 Three years later Emerson caused a great 
 sensation by preaching a sermon in which 
 he expressed doubts of his right to admin 
 ister communion and his determination to 
 resign his pastorate. The following year 
 he went to Europe and saw many famous 
 literary men, notably Carlyle, whom he 
 visited for a week at his lonesome Scotch 
 retreat at Craigenputtock. In the follow 
 ing year he returned to Concord, Massa 
 chusetts, and began the career of lecturing 
 and writing which was to continue for 
 fifty years. 
 
 Emerson was among the first of the New 
 England lecturers who established the 
 lyceum system that endured for more than 
 half a century and was one of the most 
 important factors in popular education in 
 this country. Emerson s first le&ures were 
 on his experiences in Europe. Then he 
 took up the biographies of great men, 
 several of these lectures appearing after- 
 
EMERSON, THE LITERARY PIONEER 
 
 ward in Representative Men, a book that 
 is as vital and suggestive as Carlyle s 
 Heroes and Hero Worship. Then followed 
 a series of lectures before academies and 
 lyceums on such subjects as English Liter 
 ature^ The Philosophy of History and 
 Human Culture. 
 
 His first book, entitled Nature, appeared 
 anonymously in 1836 and was welcomed 
 by all scholars, but it was not until the 
 following year that Emerson gained great 
 vogue and was recognized as a leader of 
 American thought. The American Scholar, 
 his Phi Beta Kappa oration at Harvard 
 in August, 1837, was really the starting 
 point of his career. It may be read with 
 profit in these days, when the noble ideals 
 for which Emerson pleaded so eloquently 
 are apt to be forgotten in the fierce desire 
 for money and success. 
 
 From this period Emerson advanced 
 with strength and confidence. He con 
 tinued to deliver lectures that stimulated 
 while they puzzled his audiences, and the 
 seed thoughts of these lectures he put into 
 his books. Also he wrote poems full of 
 beautiful thoughts, cast in language which 
 is frequently not poetical. He was a 
 voluminous writer, and by 1850 he was 
 
 [9] 
 
GREAT SPIRITUAL WRITERS 
 
 firmly established as the foremost figure 
 in every American movement for free 
 thought and free speech. He preached the 
 doctrine of culture in an age when edu 
 cation was the hobby of most teachers, 
 and he laid down the law that no amount 
 of knowledge will ever bring culture. His 
 voice was always raised for the greatest 
 tolerance in religion and the largest liberty 
 in speech. 
 
 Thus Emerson came to be the recognized 
 head of all the New England ethical move 
 ments that have fertilized thought in this 
 country and inspired high ideals. What 
 this country owes to him can never be 
 estimated. His statue should be placed in 
 every large American city, so that the 
 younger generation may see that the 
 people recognize Emerson as our greatest 
 apostle of free thought and the intellectual 
 life. 
 
 You cannot go amiss in reading his 
 essays. Begin with that immortal address 
 on The American Scholar, and then take 
 up any of the essays that appeals to you. 
 Read it by single pages, and look up any 
 references that are not clear. Think over 
 the things that Emerson lays down as 
 laws. You will find nearly every page full 
 
 [10] 
 
EMERSON, THE LITERARY PIONEER 
 
 of meat. But do not commit the folly of 
 attempting to read Emerson as you would 
 read Lowell or Whipple or Stedman. He 
 is not consecutive, and disgust will be 
 your portion. Take him as you would take 
 a tonic, in small doses, and you will find 
 him an extraordinary stimulant to work 
 and thought, better than any other writer, 
 unless it be Carlyle at his best. 
 
 And you will find that this man, who 
 apparently took no count of style, has a 
 style that is unrivaled for terseness, force 
 and beauty. As Lowell so well says, 
 "His eye for a fine, telling phrase that will 
 carry true is like that of a backwoodsman 
 for a rifle, and he will dredge up a choice 
 word from the mud of Cotton Mather 
 himself." Emerson charged every word 
 with meaning. He wrote with the con 
 densed force of the Latin, but he used the 
 simple words, the homespun phrases that 
 go straight to the American heart. 
 
WALT WHITMAN 
 
 THE PROPHET IN His 
 
 SHIRT-SLEEVES 
 
 MOST ORIGINAL OF ALL AMERICAN WRIT 
 ERS HE DEFIED CONVENTIONALITY 
 AND PAID THE FULL PENALTY. 
 
 WALT WHITMAN is the most original 
 of American authors in form, in 
 thought, and in expression. Yet he is a 
 fine instance of the prophet who is not 
 without honor save in his own country. 
 From the time that Whitman issued his 
 Leaves of Grass he had far more readers 
 and admirers in England than in this 
 country. It is only within the last few 
 years that interest in Whitman and his 
 work has extended in America beyond 
 mere curiosity. Even now it is rare to 
 find well-read Americans who have any 
 close acquaintance with Whitman s work, 
 especially with the prose sketches which 
 he wrote in his later years and which con- 
 
 [12] 
 
THE PROPHET IN His SHIRT-SLEEVES 
 
 tain some of his best thought. Most 
 Americans seem content to read articles 
 about Whitman instead of reading his 
 verse and prose. 
 
 Walt Whitman could have developed in 
 no other country than this. With small 
 school education, he labored for many 
 years to gather the curious information 
 which may be found scattered through his 
 works. He never could lay any claim to 
 scholarship, but he certainly gained as 
 thorough a knowledge of the great writers 
 of classical and modern times as any reader 
 of English alone could secure. And he 
 appraised all these writers in his own way, 
 uninfluenced by the opinions of critics or 
 admirers. From each he drew some meas 
 ure of stimulus or inspiration, and his 
 criticism of their literary value is always 
 well worth reading. 
 
 The development of Walt Whitman s 
 genius is one of the curiosities of literature. 
 Here was a stolid, lymphatic boy, of more 
 than ordinary physical strength, yet of 
 great deliberation of movement, who was 
 endowed with a high-strung nervous sys 
 tem. The result was that in early youth 
 he was swept by desires and sensations 
 which he could not understand. Often the 
 
 [13] 
 
GREAT SPIRITUAL WRITERS 
 
 presence of others could not be endured. 
 Then he would make trips to the woods 
 or the seashore, where in undisturbed soli 
 tude he was able to read and enjoy 
 the world s great masterpieces. Constant 
 brooding over the desire to produce a book 
 in which a real man s passion and thought 
 should be mirrored, induced a kind of 
 mystic state in which the body remained 
 inert, while the mind seemed to gain abso 
 lute freedom and to work in space. Some 
 thing of the same result is achieved by the 
 East Indian mystics after long cultivation 
 of the power of self-hypnosis. That much 
 of Whitman s first work was produced 
 under these conditions seems certain. In 
 no other way can one explain the sense of 
 exaltation that carries him along and that 
 gives to his long resounding lines some 
 thing of the rhythmical sweep of waves on 
 the seashore. 
 
 Nothing in Whitman s early life can 
 explain his curious mental development or 
 the first fruits of it Leaves of Grass. 
 Whitman was of mixed English and Dutch 
 stock; he spent most of his early years in 
 a peaceful village of Long Island; his early 
 impressions were of rural sights and sounds 
 and of the seashore, which always pro- 
 

 WALT WHITMAN 
 
 FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY GARDNER, WASHINGTON 
 IN POSSESSION OF HORACE L. TRAUBEL, ESQ. 
 
THE PROPHET IN His SHIRT-SLEEVES 
 
 foundly appealed to him. After a common 
 school education he became a printer and 
 for ten years either worked at the case or 
 wrote for various publications. In these 
 formative years he wrote many stories and 
 sketches which were merely imitations of 
 work that he had read. He varied his 
 literary occupations with teaching and 
 with work at his father s trade of carpen 
 tering; but through all these apprentice 
 years he was an eager devourer of books, 
 a constant attendant at the theater and 
 the opera, and a close student of the life 
 of New York streets, of which he never 
 tired. 
 
 At the mature age of thirty-five years, 
 he suddenly dropped all other activities 
 and devoted himself to writing his great 
 work, which was to be unique in the fact 
 that it included the cosmic life of man. 
 But Whitman did not don singing robes 
 and produce his poem out of the fulness of 
 thought and emotion. He labored over it 
 with painstaking care, rewriting most of it 
 no less than five times before it satisfied 
 him. He also wrote a long preface in 
 which he tried to demonstrate the prin 
 ciples of a national literature. He could 
 have rewritten this preface with profit, as 
 
GREAT SPIRITUAL WRITERS 
 
 many passages are so filled with the spirit 
 of a vague transcendentalism that it is 
 difficult to grasp their meaning. 
 
 Whitman wrought on additional poems 
 to his Leaves of Grass until the second year 
 of the war. Then the news that his 
 younger brother, who had volunteered, was 
 wounded, took him to Washington. He 
 found his brother only slightly hurt, but 
 the spectacle of the thousands of wounded 
 borne to improvised hospitals at the capital 
 profoundly moved Whitman. He deter 
 mined to stay in Washington and do some 
 thing to help these wounded soldier boys. 
 Many he found suffering from homesick 
 ness: these he cheered. Every day he 
 carried into the hospitals in a haversack 
 little necessaries and comforts, letter paper, 
 envelopes and stamps. When a man could 
 not write, Whitman wrote letters for him. 
 This service he continued for months, and 
 the testimony of many who witnessed his 
 work was that his mere presence, his mag 
 netic speech and touch, were far more effec 
 tive than medicines. Out of this work came 
 his truest book Drum Taps in which was 
 afterwards included his splendid tributes to 
 Lincoln, When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard 
 Bloomed and Captain, My Captain! 
 
 [16] 
 
THE PROPHET IN His SHIRT-SLEEVES 
 
 A desk in the Indian Bureau Whitman 
 secured early in 1865, and the salary 
 allowed him to carry on his work among 
 the soldiers. The unspeakable bigotry of 
 James Harlan, then Secretary of the 
 Interior, cost Whitman his position, as the 
 Secretary declared he would not keep in 
 office the author of an indecent book. 
 But the poet was immediately transferred 
 to the United States Attorney s depart 
 ment, and the incident would have been 
 forgotten but for the championship of 
 W. D. O Connor, a warm friend, who in a 
 pamphlet entitled The Good Gray Poet 
 defended Whitman and held Harlan up to 
 public scorn. The result was unfortunate 
 for Whitman, as it revived the discussion 
 of what was merely an incidental feature 
 of his poem. 
 
 His excessive work in the hospitals broke 
 down Whitman s health and a paralytic 
 stroke made him almost helpless for several 
 months. But his insistence upon living in 
 the open air and his sane methods of daily 
 exercise finally worked a cure. Out of his 
 close communion with Nature came a 
 collection of prose sketches, called Specimen 
 Days and Collect > which contains some of his 
 best work. 
 
 [17] 
 
GREAT SPIRITUAL WRITERS 
 
 Whitman s last years, when he was kept 
 indoors by a recurrence of paralysis, were 
 made memorable by the homage paid to 
 him by many famous men. His home in 
 Camden, New Jersey, was visited by hun 
 dreds, some of whom have left records of 
 the wonderful effect produced by the sim 
 ple inspiring presence of the aged poet. 
 Whitman retained his faculties to the end; 
 his death was serene, befitting the blame 
 less life he had led for years. 
 
 Whitman s own definition of his purpose 
 in writing Leaves of Grass was "to articu 
 late and faithfully express in literary or 
 poetic form, and uncompromisingly, my 
 own physical, emotional, moral, intellectual 
 and esthetic Personality, in the midst of, 
 and tallying, the momentous spirit and 
 facts of its immediate days and of Current 
 America." He also declares that he de 
 cided to omit all "stock poetical touches," 
 all references to other poems, all allusions 
 to the classics. He would admit any good 
 expressive slang if it fitted his meaning. 
 In a word, he proposed to write a poem 
 which should be absolutely original, vitally 
 American, and devoted to exploiting the 
 nature, the hopes and the ambitions of a 
 real man. 
 
 [18] 
 
THE PROPHET IN His SHIRT-SLEEVES 
 
 Judged by this standard, Leaves of Grass 
 was a success. But the American public 
 would have nothing of it and most of the 
 critics condemned it utterly. Only Emer 
 son, Edward Everett Hale, and a few other 
 wise critics saw the great merits of the 
 poem shining through its many defects. 
 Undismayed by lack of public appreciation, 
 Whitman soon got out a second and much 
 enlarged edition of the book. He refused 
 to soften or omit any of the passages filled 
 with sexual imagery which offended Emer 
 son and many of his friends. He declared 
 that these objections were prudish and 
 that he would rest his claim to fame on 
 the work as he had written it the full- 
 blooded, declamatory expression of a Man s 
 ideas of the universe. It is difficult to 
 give a few lines that will convey the sense 
 of the power of Love with which Whitman 
 has flooded this poem, but these verses 
 reveal him at his best as a lover of the 
 earth: 
 
 I am he that walks with the tender and growing night, 
 I call to the earth and sea half-held by the night. 
 Press close, bare-bosom d night press close, magnetic nour 
 ishing night! 
 
 Night of south winds night of the large few stars! 
 Still nodding night mad naked summer night. 
 
 Smile, O voluptuous cool-breath d earth! 
 Earth of the slumbering and liquid trees! 
 
 [19! 
 
GREAT SPIRITUAL WRITERS 
 
 Earth of departed sunset earth of the mountains misty- 
 top t! 
 
 Earth of the vitreous pour of the full moon just tinged with 
 blue! 
 
 Earth of shine and dark mottling the tide of the river! 
 
 Earth of the limpid gray of clouds brighter and clearer for 
 my sake! 
 
 Far-swooping elbow d earth rich apple-blossom d earth! 
 
 Smile, for your lover comes. 
 
 Prodigal, you have given me love therefore I to you give 
 
 love! 
 O unspeakable passionate love. 
 
 But Walt Whitman revealed himself 
 more truly in two minor books than in 
 Leaves of Grass. One is Drum-Taps, of 
 which Bliss Perry says it embodies "the 
 very spirit of the civil conflict, picturing 
 war with a poignant realism, a terrible and 
 tender beauty, such as only the great 
 masters of literature have been able to 
 compass." The other, Speciman Days and 
 Collect, is a collection of prose sketches 
 which reveal the lover of man and nature 
 without any rhetorical posing. 
 
 20] 
 
THE 
 
 CHARM OF 
 WASHINGTON IRVING 
 
 GENIAL AUTHOR OF "THE SKETCH BOOK," 
 THE FIRST AMERICAN TO GAIN AN 
 INTERNATIONAL REPUTATION. 
 
 MORE than a half century ago I was 
 a regular reader in the old Mercan 
 tile Library, then lodged over Platt s Hall, 
 on Montgomery street, in San Francisco. 
 One day the librarian showed me, with 
 much pride, a handsome library edition of 
 the works of Washington Irving, whose 
 recent death had called out many tributes 
 in the newspapers. He was unknown to 
 me then, but I took out ^he Sketch Book, 
 and, after devouring this with the keenest 
 pleasure, I read all of Irving except the 
 formidable seven-volume life of Washing 
 ton. He opened a new world to me, for 
 he made England real and he was the first 
 to make me feel the charm of Moorish 
 
 [21] 
 
GREAT SPIRITUAL WRITERS 
 
 Spain. He was also the first American 
 author who gave me a sense of a fine 
 literary style. A boy reads for matter, 
 not for style, and it proves Irving s great 
 qualities that he was able to impress a 
 young reader with the charm of his style. 
 
 Irving was the first to demonstrate to 
 Europe that in this new country had sprung 
 up a genuine national literature. Scott, 
 Byron and other competent critics declared 
 that Irving s work was worthy of a place 
 beside the best work of English authors. 
 Many critics even attributed to Scott the 
 authorship of The Sketch Eook y which first 
 appeared with Irving s identity concealed 
 under the pen name of Geoffrey Crayon. 
 Yet all admitted that here was a new note 
 in literature a note of simple, unstrained 
 pathos, of keen sympathy with grief and 
 suffering, of tenderness that is almost femi 
 nine in its intuition and charm, and of 
 humor that has in it no malice and no sting. 
 
 Irving, who was born in 1783 and died 
 in 1859, came f good Scotch and English 
 stock. He derived his fancy and his 
 literary tastes from his mother, the grand 
 daughter of an English curate. From his 
 tenth year he devoured books, having an 
 especial liking for travel, fiction and poetry. 
 
 [22] 
 
WASHINGTON IRVING 
 
 AT THE AGE OF TWENTY-SEVEN 
 
 AN ENGRAVING FROM THE ORIGINAL PICTURE 
 
 BY JARVIS 
 
THE CHARM OF WASHINGTON IRVING 
 
 He did not go to college, but he enjoyed 
 thorough legal training, although he never 
 practiced his profession. He was singu 
 larly fortunate in the possession of means, 
 so that when he was threatened with con 
 sumption he was able to take a European 
 tour, which, in the opening years of the 
 nineteenth century, was very expensive. 
 In Rome he became an ardent friend of 
 Washington Allston, the artist, and in 
 Paris and London he formed many friend 
 ships with famous men and women. On 
 his return to this country, in 1806, he began 
 to devote himself to literature. Three 
 years later he brought out Knickerbocker s 
 History of New Tork > which made a great 
 hit. 
 
 The death of Matilda Hoffman, the girl 
 he loved and was to marry, proved a great 
 shock, but he rallied after several months 
 and devoted himself to society and writing. 
 In 1815 he decided to go to Europe to see 
 his brother Peter, but he remained for 
 seventeen years, spending most of the time 
 in travel. He met all the great person 
 ages of London and he was entertained at 
 Abbottsford by Sir Walter Scott, of whom 
 he has given the best pi&ure in all liter 
 ature. In 1819 appeared The Sketch Book, 
 
GREAT SPIRITUAL WRITERS 
 
 which established Irving s reputation as an 
 essayist. To Irving s great surprise, it 
 had as notable a success in London as in 
 New York, and it opened all doors to the 
 handsome young American. Then fol 
 lowed in rapid succession Bracebridge Hall y 
 a volume of sketches of English country 
 life; Tales of a traveler, Life of Columbus, 
 The Conquest of Granada and The Albam- 
 bra. Irving was the first to bring out the 
 romance of the Moorish conquest of Spain, 
 and The Alhambra has been a classic for 
 three-quarters of a century. 
 
 It was one of the bits of good fortune 
 that are strung along the thread of Irving s 
 life that he should have secured a patron 
 in old John Jacob Astor. For this founder 
 of one of the greatest American fortunes 
 Irving wrote Astoria^ the record of an 
 unsuccessful attempt to found a fur-trading 
 post on the far Pacific, and the Adventures 
 of Captain Bonneville, written from the 
 talk of an old fur-trader and adventurer. 
 Irving also wrote the lives of Washington 
 and Mohammed, and he gathered material 
 for a history of Mexico, but generously 
 abandoned the project when he learned 
 that his friend Prescott had decided to 
 write of the conquest by Cortez. Irving 
 
THE CHARM OF WASHINGTON IRVING 
 
 filled several diplomatic posts, the most 
 noteworthy being that of American Min 
 ister to Spain from 1842 to 1846. He had 
 a long and happy life, filled with work that 
 he loved and with friendships that served 
 to help him forget his lifelong sorrow. 
 
 To one who has not read Irving the best 
 thing to take up first is The Sketch Book. 
 This volume includes, besides a number of 
 the most delightful essays and tales, two 
 of his best short stories, Rip Van Winkle 
 and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, either of 
 which would have made the reputation of 
 any American writer. Rip Van Winkle 
 was made familiar to every child in this 
 country, thirty years ago, by Joe Jeffer 
 son s remarkable performance of the play, 
 which he developed from the story. The 
 other story is not so well known, but the 
 picture of the headless horseman pursuing 
 the lean and terrified Ichabod Crane is one 
 which no reader will ever forget. In his 
 Sketch Book Irving gave reminiscences of his 
 early life, as well as many sketches of travel. 
 In its style it reminds one of Addison, 
 with a touch of warmth that the writer of 
 The Spectator seldom puts into his work. 
 The chapters, which range from a sketch 
 of the long ocean voyage to Europe to 
 
GREAT SPIRITUAL WRITERS 
 
 papers on Christmas and Stratford-on-Avon y 
 all breathe a spirit of mellow culture that 
 is rare in these strenuous days. Irving, by 
 his reading, his travels and his social inter 
 course, developed a style that is well-nigh 
 perfect in its limpid clearness, its varied 
 charm and its literary quality. The man 
 himself impresses one as finer and richer 
 than anything which may be found in his 
 books. 
 
 The other books which anyone wishing 
 to know the real Irving should read are 
 Bracebridge Halt, tfhe Alhambra and Knick 
 erbocker s History of New York. In the 
 first we get a series of superb pictures of 
 life in one of the old baronial halls of 
 England. In The Alhambra Irving has 
 not only given splendid pen pictures of 
 the finest remains of the Moorish conquest 
 of Spain, but he has told many legends 
 and stories that are full of charm. The 
 History of New Tork is the best piece of 
 sustained humor that has yet been pro 
 duced in this country. Some descendants 
 of the old Dutch Governors of New 
 Amsterdam have tried to show that Irving 
 has grossly maligned these worthies, but 
 through the air of convincing narration 
 which Irving adopted we may see gleams 
 
 [26] 
 
THE CHARM OF WASHINGTON IRVING 
 
 of fun emerging. It is rich in spontaneous 
 humor and free from malice. 
 
 It is well for us in these days of business 
 hustle and social activity to read Irving, 
 for he acts on the mind like a sedative. 
 His style exhales the aroma of a fine old 
 leisure that has become one of the lost 
 American arts. He is always unhurried, 
 always master of his materials, ever charm 
 ing, never dull or prosy. In a word, his 
 best works are the most agreeable com 
 panions, which entertain while they in 
 struct, and which never leave upon the 
 mental palate any of the evil taste of the 
 more highly seasoned literature of our day. 
 Blessed is the reader who can relish Irving, 
 for he will always have an unfailing 
 resource in time of trouble or depression. 
 
ART OF 
 
 EDGAR ALLEN 
 
 POE 
 
 WORK OF THE FINEST SHORT - STORY 
 WRITER IN AMERICA His POEMS AND 
 TALES TRANSLATED INTO MANY LAN 
 GUAGES. 
 
 THE ordinary rules in classifying writers 
 do not apply to Edgar Allan Poe. 
 Of all American writers he has probably 
 the widest international fame. Far more 
 French than American in his genius, he 
 was closer akin to Alfred de Musset or 
 Guy de Maupassant than any English 
 short-story writer. His was that pre 
 cision in style and that dramatic force in 
 plot which lends itself readily to trans 
 lation into French. In an age when the 
 writer was fond of asserting his presence, 
 Poe preserved an attitude of aloofness that 
 rivals that of Maupassant or Turgenieff. 
 All his genius is devoted to producing 
 
EDGAR ALLAN POE 
 
 FROM A DAGUERREOTYPE MADE AT RICHMOND 
 BY PRATT 
 
ART OF EDGAR ALLAN POE 
 
 certain dramatic effects and in this he 
 succeeds by the use of words and pictures 
 which fairly hypnotize the reader. It 
 never occurs to one to criticize any of 
 Poe s short stories or poems while reading 
 it. In fact, once under the spell of this 
 spiritual necromancer, the reader becomes 
 a captive and is borne swiftly to the climax 
 of tale or poem. 
 
 Poe had the greatest genius for literary 
 form of any American writer. In his 
 poems, as well as in his short stories, he 
 labored so carefully to perfect his style, 
 to secure the fitting word, that his fame 
 was secure long before his death. In the 
 final accounting of literary genius, say a 
 hundred years after a writer s birth, form 
 is the thing which assures permanent fame. 
 Of course, high literary form presupposes 
 thought or imagination behind it; but the 
 best thought, cast in awkward or slovenly 
 language, is not literature. 
 
 Poe is known as the writer of some of 
 the most perfectly conceived and highly 
 finished short stories in the language, as 
 well as the author of a number of poems 
 that are unique because of their melody 
 and their haunting charm. In both de 
 partments of American literature he was 
 
GREAT SPIRITUAL WRITERS 
 
 a pioneer. He first developed what has 
 come to be known as the detedtive story, 
 working out all the details with a subtle 
 originality that has never been sur 
 passed. He also was the first to make real 
 and convincing the mystery tale, drawn 
 from science, which Jules Verne later car 
 ried to such high success. Poe had 
 enormous patience in gathering scientific 
 data for such work, and his analytic mind 
 took keen satisfaction in deductions which 
 made clear and plain many bewildering 
 mysteries. Poe also developed to the 
 highest degree the cryptogram in such tales 
 as ^he Gold Bug, setting a standard which 
 no disciple has ever surpassed. And yet 
 in all his work there is an absence of the 
 man behind the artist, or, if he reveals 
 himself at all, his personality is not 
 pleasant. 
 
 It is the literary artist, not the man, 
 who interests the reader in all Poe s work, 
 whether in prose or in verse. As a poet 
 he had natural command of melodious 
 language, which has been surpassed in our 
 day only by Swinburne, while his concep 
 tions were so strange and unreal that they 
 stamp themselves ineffaceably on the 
 reader s mind. Poe s poetical genius 
 
ART OF EDGAR ALLAN POE 
 
 delighted in pictures of woe; it moved 
 with the greatest freedom when depicting 
 blighted love and ruined lives. It was 
 Byronic in its view of life, but it bore no 
 trace of the hard cynicism of Don Juan. 
 Even The Raven, which is Poe s master 
 piece, does not impress one as cynical. 
 The Bells is a superb performance in the 
 melody of words, while many of the shorter 
 poems, notably those scattered through his 
 short stories, are simply studies in words, 
 as purely sensuous in their appeal to the 
 ear as the music of Strauss. No thought 
 can be discovered in these poems; they are 
 merely variations on life and its lost illu 
 sions, in which Poe uses words instead of 
 musical notes. Supreme melody atones 
 for lack of thought or any real emotion. 
 As far as genuine human feeling is con 
 cerned, Browning s Pippa Passes has more 
 of real life in it than all of Poe s poems. 
 
 In common with the careers of other 
 men of literary genius, Poe s life was 
 uneventful. He came of a family of actors, 
 but when only two years of age he was left 
 an orphan and was adopted by Mrs. John 
 Allan of Richmond. The family soon 
 afterward went to London, and Edgar was 
 sent to a school at Stoke Newington, near 
 
GREAT SPIRITUAL WRITERS 
 
 London, which he described in his story, 
 William Wilson. Poe appears to have 
 been a highly imaginative boy, with a keen 
 taste for literature, but with none of the 
 usual boy s pleasure in rough sports. He 
 read widely and gained his intimate knowl 
 edge of the Bible from regular attendance 
 at church and other religious functions 
 with his foster mother. Allan, however, 
 had a materialistic bent, and from books 
 in his library Poe s natural inclination in 
 the same direction was probably strength 
 ened. Allan, who was a prosperous mer 
 chant, never liked the boy, and when Poe 
 reached the proper age he had the lad sent 
 to the University of Virginia. 
 
 As a student Poe excelled in literary 
 studies, but he gambled and drank, and 
 Allan soon refused to pay his debts. 
 Thereupon Poe arranged to work his way 
 to England, where he hoped to make his 
 living by his pen. He was disappointed, 
 but visited Paris and then returned to this 
 country. In these years he constantly 
 practiced writing verse, and in 1827 he 
 issued a first volume of poems through a 
 Boston publisher, entitled Tamerlane, but 
 it excited no comment. He enlisted in the 
 army and served two years, but his foster 
 
 [32] 
 
EDGAR ALLAN POE S COTTAGE, FORDHAM 
 AFTER A DRAWING BY MIE PATE 
 

ART OF EDGAR ALLAN POE 
 
 mother, learning of his occupation, induced 
 her husband to secure his discharge. 
 Allan was making arrangements to have 
 Poe enter West Point when his wife died. 
 With her ended all Poe s hopes of any 
 assistance from Allan. Poe was devoted 
 to literary work while preparing to enter 
 the academy and issued another book of 
 youthful verse, Al Aaraaf y Tamerlane and 
 Minor Poems. 
 
 By temperament and habit Poe was 
 unsuited to the military life and he spent 
 only one year at West Point. When he 
 came out he devoted himself to newspaper 
 work, writing many of his best tales and 
 poems for the newspaper or magazine 
 with which he happened to be associated. 
 His life from this time until his sudden 
 death in Baltimore was marked by many 
 vicissitudes. Although he worked hard 
 he received such poor pay for his services 
 that he was always in debt. Had he lived 
 in these days he would have commanded 
 a princely revenue from rival magazines, 
 which would have bid against one another 
 for his tales and poems. As it was, he was 
 unable to provide ordinary comforts for 
 the girl wife whom he loved devotedly. 
 His one weakness was a tendency to drink. 
 
 [33] 
 
GREAT SPIRITUAL WRITERS 
 
 One glass of wine or hard cider was suffi 
 cient to start him on a debauch that fre 
 quently cost him regular employment. It 
 was during one of these drinking periods 
 that he was seized by unscrupulous poli 
 ticians in Baltimore and taken from one 
 precinct to another to vote for their ticket. 
 Exposure and bad liquor broke down Poe s 
 enfeebled frame and his system could not 
 rally from the shock. Poe s fame was 
 clouded for years by exaggerated stories of 
 his drinking habits. The truth is that he 
 did an enormous amount of the best 
 literary work, and that, considering his 
 imagination and his lack of success, he 
 indulged in drink less than most men of 
 his temperament. 
 
 In considering the best things among 
 Poe s many prose tales it is difficult to fix 
 on those stories which are best worth read 
 ing, so much depends upon the taste of 
 the reader. The finest thing in the domain 
 of sheer horror is The Fall of the House of 
 Usher, perhaps the most finished and con 
 sistent of all Poe s prose work. It is a 
 study in premature burial, and in all fiction 
 there is nothing more thrilling than the 
 sounds of the hollow reverberation of the 
 doors of the tomb of the Lady Madeline, 
 
 [34] 
 
ART OF EDGAR ALLAN POE 
 
 while the narrator is reading the old 
 chronicle of the champion Ethelred, and 
 of the final appearance of the enshrouded 
 figure at the door of the brother s chamber. 
 Next to this I would place The Cask of 
 Amontillado, a case of a jealous husband s 
 revenge, which is wrought out to its ter 
 rible end without a flaw. 
 
 Among mysteries of crime the first place 
 must be given to The Murders in the Rue 
 Morgue, a tale that is perfect until the 
 interest is abruptly ended by the discovery 
 that the murderer is not a human being. 
 The best tale dealing with a cryptogram 
 is The Gold Bug, the most popular of all 
 Poe s work, while stories which were the 
 forerunners of all the Jules Verne type of 
 romances are A Descent Into the Maelstrom 
 and The MS. Found in a Bottle. Both 
 these are tales of horror dealing with the 
 great maelstrom that was once popularly 
 supposed to be located at the poles, through 
 which the waters of the ocean rushed. 
 
 Criticism is powerless before Poe s best 
 poems, as it is before the melodies of the 
 great composers. The evident effort of 
 the poet was to appeal so thoroughly to 
 the ear that the mind would be satisfied 
 with the sheer melody. This is the case 
 
 [35] 
 
GREAT SPIRITUAL WRITERS 
 
 with The Raven, ^he Bells, To One in 
 Paradise, Annabel Lee and Ulalume. They 
 are simply variations in melody, executed 
 by one of the great masters of the music 
 of words. Poe wrought at these and other 
 poems all his life, changing a word here or 
 a bit of punctuation there, and all his 
 changes were in the line of greater melody. 
 Language under his hand became plastic, 
 and he worked miracles in rhythm and 
 rhyme. 
 
 It is difficult to make any extract from 
 Poe s poems without injuring the context, 
 but one may get an idea of the melody of 
 his verse from this stanza from AnnabelLee: 
 
 For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams 
 
 Of the beautiful Annabel Lee; 
 And the stars never rise but I see the bright eyes 
 
 Of the beautiful Annabel Lee; 
 And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side 
 Of my darling, my darling, my life and my bride, 
 
 In her sepulchre there by the sea 
 
 In her tomb by the sounding sea. 
 
 [36 
 
HAWTHORNE S 
 
 SOMBER PURITAN 
 
 ROMANCES 
 
 "THE SCARLET LETTER," "THE HOUSE 
 OF THE SEVEN GABLES" AND " MOSSES 
 FROM AN OLD MANSE" ART IN "THE 
 MARBLE FAUN." 
 
 Two of the foremost American critics, 
 William Dean Ho wells and Professor 
 William Lyon Phelps, unite in declaring 
 that Hawthorne was the greatest literary 
 artist this country has known, and that 
 his Scarlet Letter is the finest novel in 
 American literature. Yet it is safe to say 
 that those who follow eagerly the best 
 sellers of Chambers and McCutcheon have 
 never read any of Hawthorne s exquisite 
 tales of Puritan New England. 
 
 Of all American authors, Hawthorne has 
 been my favorite for many years, since as 
 a boy of sixteen I discovered his Mosses 
 From an Old Manse, and read again and 
 
 [371 
 
GREAT SPIRITUAL WRITERS 
 
 again those tales of Puritan New England 
 until something of their beauty and their 
 elusive charm passed into my mind. In 
 my estimation no other author who has 
 used the English language possesses a style 
 that will compare with Hawthorne s, or 
 has any other his power of investing ordi 
 nary life with the mingled terror and 
 charm of the supernatural. In sheer force 
 of imagination he surpasses all his contem 
 poraries, and when one compares his tales 
 of witchcraft with the work of Hoffman 
 and other German apostles of mysticism, 
 his stories make theirs appear thin and 
 amateurish. 
 
 Endowed with one of the vivid creative 
 minds, Hawthorne s rare gifts have failed 
 to impress many critics, who, like Henry 
 James, in that unhappy sketch in which 
 he revealed his own limitations, bewailed 
 the fact that the author of The Scarlet 
 Letter had no real historical background 
 for his tales. Fine literary artificer as he 
 is, I would give all of Henry James* work 
 for one of Hawthorne s tales like Roger 
 Malvin s Burial or Toung Goodman Brown. 
 No one has written any adequate estimate 
 of Hawthorne, because very few critics 
 have any idea of the service to American 
 
 [38] 
 
HAWTHORNE S SOMBER ROMANCES 
 
 literature rendered by this shy man of 
 genius, who at the same time was a pretty 
 hard-headed, sensible man of affairs. 
 
 Although his Scarlet Letter has been 
 widely read, much of Hawthorne s best 
 work has been neglected because few peo 
 ple appreciate the peculiar charm of his 
 tales and sketches. His imagination is so 
 fine, his humor so quiet, his cast of mind 
 so unusual that unless one has a strong 
 taste for solitude and for the study of the 
 spiritual, it is difficult to get into close 
 touch with Hawthorne and to feel the 
 singular power and lawlessness of his 
 genius. In all literature no one, in my 
 judgment, has approached him in the 
 uncanny power of moving with ease and 
 sureness in that spiritual world that seems 
 to lie so close to reality and yet which the 
 average author cannot make us see clearly. 
 
 In this intangible world, Hawthorne 
 seems to move as though he were an actual 
 resident. He passes in a moment from 
 the hard, practical New England life to 
 that borderland of witchcraft which terri 
 fied the souls of the superstitious and led 
 to the unspeakable horrors of the Salem 
 trials that hysteria of morbid minds 
 which was as cruel and vile as the cold 
 
 [39] 
 
GREAT SPIRITUAL WRITERS 
 
 savagery of the French women who 
 knitted in the shadow of the Paris guillo 
 tine and waited every day for the thrill 
 that tingled through their overwrought 
 nerves when one more head dropped into 
 the bloody basket. The historian s account 
 of the Salem witchcraft trials is poor and 
 colorless compared with Hawthorne s awful 
 picture of the young New England man 
 who stepped from his warm fireside into 
 the devilish riot of the foul-minded witches 
 who cackled obscene jests and blasphemed 
 all holy things from pure lust of wickedness. 
 
 Hawthorne s work cannot be appre 
 ciated without some knowledge of his 
 curious early life and its strange environ 
 ment that forced a shy, scholarly boy into 
 the habits of a recluse. The novelist 
 inherited his stalwart frame and his whole 
 some common sense from his seafaring 
 ancestors; his glorious imagination and all 
 his morbid traits came straight from his 
 mother. When the boy was four years 
 old he lost his father, while his mother, 
 smarting under the loss of her husband, 
 became a bitter recluse. 
 
 Upon sound and wholesome children the 
 influence of a mother who never took her 
 meals with her children, and who some- 
 
 [40] 
 
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 
 AT THE AGE OF THIRTY-SIX 
 
 ETCHED BY S. A. SCHOFF FROM A PAINTING MADE 
 IN 1840 BY CHARLES OSGOOD 
 
HAWTHORNE S SOMBER ROMANCES 
 
 times spent days of solitude in her cham 
 ber, could not fail to be evil. How much 
 greater was this influence when Nathaniel, 
 a strangely shy and thoughtful child, was 
 driven to solitude in his turn and to lose 
 himself in the great world of books. His 
 favorite books in those days were Pilgrim s 
 Progress and The Faerie Queene. From 
 these and the King James Bible he drew 
 that marvelous style which has been the 
 despair of all other writers. When four 
 teen years old his mother moved from 
 Salem, Massachusetts, where the boy was 
 born, to a little village near Lake Sebago, 
 in the Maine woods, where she owned 
 some land. There the boy led a very 
 unhealthy life, carrying his love of solitude 
 to the dangerous point of never going out 
 upon the road by daylight, lest he should 
 meet people, and frequently skating alone 
 on the somber lake until midnight or after. 
 Physically in those months Hawthorne 
 became a model of manly strength and 
 beauty, but mentally he received a twist 
 toward the morbid, from which he never 
 recovered. Also he seemed ever after to 
 be curiously detached from real life, to 
 look on the most vital things with the 
 eyes of a mere uninterested observer. 
 
GREAT SPIRITUAL WRITERS 
 
 This was probably seen in greatest measure 
 in the early days of the Civil War, when 
 Hawthorne could feel no stirrings of 
 patriotism, but regarded the tremendous 
 struggle for national life and honor as a 
 deplorable mistake, born of political feuds 
 and hatreds. There was something wrong 
 with a man who could, as George William 
 Curtis so well said, "write like a disem 
 bodied intelligence of events with which 
 his neighbors hearts were quivering." 
 
 Hawthorne went to Bowdoin College at 
 seventeen, and had as chums Longfellow, 
 Franklin Pierce, afterward President, and 
 Horatio Bridge. He gained no distinction 
 at college, and after graduation returned 
 to Salem, where his mother had established 
 her home. For twenty years in Salem he 
 wrought at literature, writing the stories 
 which were gathered in Mosses From an 
 Old Manse and Twice-Told Tales. Few 
 knew him, and he said bitterly after years 
 of work that he still remained the least 
 known of any American man of letters. 
 He married Sophia Peabody, a woman of 
 great purity of mind and spiritual fervor. 
 She proved an enormous stimulus and com 
 fort to the lonely, sensitive man, and helped 
 him to find himself. 
 
 [42] 
 
HAWTHORNE S SOMBER ROMANCES 
 
 After serving in the Custom-house at 
 Boston, and later in the Salem Custom 
 house, Hawthorne made his first literary 
 hit in 1849 w i tn Tb* ^carlet Letter , the 
 greatest tragedy of a guilty soul ever 
 written. He followed this with The House 
 of the Seven Gables, The Blithedale Romance 
 and The Marble Faun. These sum up his 
 best work, which is in a class by itself, set 
 apart from all other fiction by its sense of 
 spiritual power working out the problems 
 of remorse of soul and the inevitable atone 
 ment for sin. 
 
 The reader who is taking up Hawthorne 
 for the first time would do well to begin 
 with some of the short stories from Mosses 
 From an Old Manse. Perhaps the preface 
 to this book shows Hawthorne s style at 
 its best. Of the tales take Roger Makings 
 Burial, The Birthmark and Toung Goodman 
 Brown. One gives the somber Puritan 
 idea of the terrible expiation of sin that 
 must be made by everyone in this world. 
 In this tale the desertion of a comrade in 
 the wilderness costs a man the life of his 
 dearly beloved son, and the boy falls by 
 his father s hand in the shadow of a great 
 rock which he identifies as the very place 
 that witnessed his own treachery to his 
 
 [431 
 
GREAT SPIRITUAL WRITERS 
 
 dying comrade. he Birthmark illustrates 
 the foolish passion for perfection that led 
 an artist to sacrifice the woman he loved 
 in order to free her face from a minor 
 blemish. In the third story we have a 
 powerful picture of the evil influence of 
 witchcraft upon the soul of the Puritan. 
 Goodman Brown s one night in the forest 
 is a picture that no reader will ever forget. 
 Of all Hawthorne s romances, The Scarlet 
 Letter is the most finished and satisfactory. 
 It is a full-length study of the spiritual 
 influence of sin upon two highly sensitive 
 natures and the terrible effects of hate 
 upon old Roger Chillingworth. He was 
 the husband of Hester, who fled from him 
 for love of Arthur Dimmesdale, the elo 
 quent young preacher. In New England, 
 where the guilty couple sought a refuge, 
 the woman was condemned to wear the 
 scarlet letter A, a symbol of her shame, 
 on her breast, for she refused to divulge 
 the paternity of her child. No one except 
 the old husband knew that the preacher 
 was her lover and the father of the beau 
 tiful girl who is at once her mother s daily 
 torment and comfort. Sad but sweet are 
 the secret meetings of Dimmesdale and 
 Hester, but the little child, Pearl, serves 
 
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 
 THIS EXCELLENT LIKENESS is FROM AN OIL PAINTING 
 
 BY FRANCES OSBORNE, PAINTED IN 1893 FROM 
 PHOTOGRAPHS. OWNED BY THE ESSEX INSTITUTE 
 
HAWTHORNE S SOMBER ROMANCES 
 
 by her innocent questions to barb the 
 arrows that sting the soul of the two forlorn 
 lovers. The final scene, in which the 
 preacher denounces himself and his sin, is 
 one of the most tremendous in all literature, 
 but the irony of fate makes his devoted 
 hearers believe he has lost his mind, for 
 they cannot associate the breaking of the 
 moral law with the pure-minded ascetic 
 who has served as their model for so many 
 years. 
 
 "The House of the Seven Gables is the very 
 essence of mellow romance. The illusion 
 of old New England days is perfect, and 
 the figure of Judge Pyncheon, a hard 
 hearted but sanctimonious old Puritan, a 
 devourer of widows and orphans, whose 
 voice is yet loud in the tabernacle, is the 
 most impressive in the story. All the little 
 detail of Hepzibah s shop is beautifully 
 done, and pretty Phoebe is one of the 
 daintiest maidens in fidion. 
 
 Hawthorne s The Marble Faun is the 
 only romance in which the background is 
 rich in a storied past. Into it he has put 
 all his passion for the things in Rome that 
 appealed to his imagination, but these 
 historic buildings and the magnificent 
 works of art that he describes do not move 
 
 [451 
 
GREAT SPIRITUAL WRITERS 
 
 him like the homely things of New Eng 
 land that he has preserved in the amber 
 of his incomparable style. In Donatello, 
 the faun, Hawthorne has drawn a figure 
 that, seen in the vivid Roman sunlight, 
 appears to be simply a light-hearted young 
 man, but in a moment, shifted to the 
 shadows of the half-light, he is a wild 
 creature of the woods, and we look for the 
 faun s ears under his curly hair. It is a 
 fine conception, wrought with all the skill 
 of a great artist and with an atmosphere of 
 mingled mystery and expectation that 
 serves to bring every figure into bold relief. 
 Hawthorne did much good work aside 
 from these novels. His articles on English 
 life, gathered under the title Our Old Home, 
 have never been equaled for shrewd insight 
 and descriptive skill. His note-books, 
 edited by his widow, are filled with good 
 things, and on many pages one sees a 
 sentence which has served as the germ of 
 a story. Hawthorne also wrote some of the 
 most delightful letters, and his love letters 
 reveal the tender heart and the quick 
 sympathies of the man who seemed so 
 cold to mere acquaintances. No author, 
 in my opinion, will repay careful study so 
 richly as Hawthorne. You may read him 
 
HAWTHORNE S SOMBER ROMANCES 
 
 many times, yet every fresh perusal reveals 
 new beauties. As a study in style his 
 books excel those of any American or 
 English author. 
 
 [47] 
 
FENIMORE 
 
 COOPERS ORIGINAL 
 
 WORK 
 
 His TALES OF THE FOREST AND THE 
 SEA LEATHERSTOCKING AND LONG 
 TOM COFFIN KNOWN AROUND THE 
 WORLD. 
 
 FENIMORE COOPER is better known 
 abroad than any other American 
 writer except Poe. Perhaps this is due 
 in great measure to his magnificent descrip 
 tions of wild nature, which appeal strongly 
 to readers who live in an old and well- 
 cultivated country, as well as to his vivid 
 pictures of the North American Indian 
 before the white man s vices debased and 
 ruined him. Cooper s field was his own 
 and it has remained his exclusive posses 
 sion, for none of his imitators has proved 
 worthy of a place with the master. The 
 only other American writer who has util 
 ized his knowledge of Indian life and 
 
*r- . f? 1 f / -* rr 
 
 J. FENIMORE COOPER 
 ENGRAVED FROM THE PAINTING BY C. L. ELLIOTT 
 
FENIMORE COOPER S ORIGINAL WORK 
 
 character is the historian Parkman, whose 
 sketches of the adventures of Pontiac and 
 other chiefs are as interesting as any work 
 of fiction. 
 
 Cooper shares with Irving and Poe the 
 credit of making American literature known 
 to Europe. Washington Irving was the 
 pioneer literary man in this country whose 
 work was recognized as the equal of the 
 work of any European writer. After him 
 came Poe, whose short stories and poems 
 were received with far greater favor in 
 France than in his own country. Cooper 
 probably ranks third, because, despite his 
 remarkable creative ability, he did not 
 possess the faculty for literary style. He 
 wrote carelessly, and much of his best work 
 is disfigured by a prolix style that injures 
 one s appreciation of his stories. Like 
 Scott, whom he resembles in many ways, 
 Cooper was so intent upon his tale that he 
 neglected the manner of telling it. He 
 wrote as he talked, simply, fluently, but 
 with no heed for literary expression, and 
 with none of that careful revision which 
 would have omitted many redundant 
 words and phrases. Cooper always im 
 presses one as a man who never wrote 
 himself out. He always had a large 
 
 [49] 
 
GREAT SPIRITUAL WRITERS 
 
 reserve of knowledge and impressions to 
 draw upon. Breadth of conception, ease 
 in writing and a certain joy in the use of 
 his great creative powers these are the 
 traits that give much of its vitality to all 
 Coopers best work. He had no sense of 
 literary artistry as Stevenson had, and per 
 haps that is one of the reasons why so much 
 more of his work will endure than that 
 of the greatest stylist of the last century. 
 
 Cooper is popularly known only by his 
 Leaders foe king tales, yet his stories of the 
 sea are as true to nature, as full of fine 
 characters and as crowded with thrilling 
 incidents as any of the romances that 
 center about the enchanted borders of his 
 favorite Otsego lake. Long Tom Coffin, 
 the old man-of-war s man, is as fine a 
 character as Leatherstocking, and the 
 stories that record his adventures are clas 
 sics that will endure. Cooper had received 
 training at sea and he knew how to handle 
 a ship, so his sea stories show that easy 
 mastery of sails and spars and ropes that 
 makes the reader captive from the outset. 
 
 In the same way Cooper s knowledge of 
 woodcraft and of the ways of the Indian 
 and the white hunter and trapper makes 
 one accept as real not only Leatherstock- 
 
FENIMORE COOPER S ORIGINAL WORK 
 
 ing, but Uncas, Chingachgook, Hardheart, 
 and all the other red men in his immortal 
 romances. Not one of Cooper s imitators, 
 however, equaled him in giving to the novel 
 reader that sense of the mystery and the 
 ever-lurking danger that attended the 
 white hunter in the great woods of this 
 country when the Indian tribes were a 
 constant menace to any stranger. There 
 are chapters in The Deer slayer and The 
 Last of the Mohicans that move with the 
 breathless interest of Scott at his best in 
 Ivanhoe or Quentin Durward. And Coop 
 er s genius is the more remarkable from 
 the fact that he had no historical back 
 ground to lend force and color to his char 
 acters. All he had was this great trackless 
 wilderness, which he depicted with such 
 power as to make Balzac declare, "If 
 Cooper had succeeded in the painting of 
 character as well as he did in the painting 
 of the phenomena of nature he would 
 have uttered the last word of our art." 
 
 Cooper was far more English in his 
 character and mind than American, but 
 he had no narrow prejudices, for he had 
 traveled widely and seen much of life. 
 His early training in the navy was of great 
 benefit when he came to write of the sea, 
 
GREAT SPIRITUAL WRITERS 
 
 and his life for years on the shores of 
 Otsego lake gave him a rare chance to 
 study the primeval wilderness and the 
 Indian as he existed before he was cor 
 rupted by the white man s vices. It has 
 become a stock subject for comment among 
 many writers that Cooper idealized the 
 Indian in such types as Uncas, but any 
 careful reader of the Leather stocking tales 
 knows that Cooper s Indians are not only 
 real and genuine, but they are as true to 
 life as Natty Bumpo. 
 
 Cooper showed that while his Indians 
 always remembered a favor, they never 
 failed to revenge an injury, although they 
 might wait years for this satisfaction of an 
 old grudge. They are never "good" 
 Indians in the sense of being converts to 
 Christianity or of thinking or acting like 
 white men. After years of association 
 with the whites they remain as primitive 
 savages as the true Chinese today remains 
 a consistent pagan after a lifetime in the 
 service of an American family. The blood 
 lust is easily aroused in Cooper s Indians, 
 and it is never sated without the scalp of 
 an enemy. 
 
 Cooper came of the best English Quaker 
 stock, mixed on his mother s side with a 
 
ONE OF THE VIGNETTE ENGRAVINGS REPRODUCING 
 THE ILLUSTRATIONS BY F. O. C. DARLEY, 
 WHICH ADORNED THE EARLY EDITIONS 
 OF COOPER S WORKS 
 
FENIMORE COOPER S ORIGINAL WORK 
 
 Swedish strain, also Quaker. Though born 
 in New Jersey, he was taken when a baby 
 to his father s estate near Otsego lake, in 
 Central New York, where the city of 
 Cooperstown had been laid out. There 
 he spent his boyhood in a wild country 
 over which Indian bands still roamed, and 
 he saw much of Indian life, which pro 
 foundly colored his imagination. At four 
 teen he entered Yale, but he was expelled 
 in his junior year because of neglect of his 
 studies. Desiring to enter naval life, he 
 was forced, because of the lack of a naval 
 academy, to spend sixteen months in the 
 merchant service before he received a 
 midshipman s commission. After three 
 years of varied experience he resigned and 
 took up farming in Westchester county 
 on the estate of his wife. There he began 
 authorship by writing a novel, to see 
 whether he could not tell a better story 
 than one which he had been reading to his 
 wife. His first attempt was a failure, as 
 he dealt with English aristocratic life, but 
 his second story, The Spy, proved to be 
 one of the best of the romances of the 
 Revolutionary War. Its success gave 
 Cooper confidence, and he turned to his 
 recollections of Indian life and produced 
 
 [53] 
 
GREAT SPIRITUAL WRITERS 
 
 The Pioneers, one of the Leatherstocking 
 tales. He showed his versatility by writ 
 ing in the following year The Pilot, one of 
 the finest of his sea stories. From this 
 time, 1824, until 1850, the year before he 
 died, Cooper averaged more than one 
 novel every year. 
 
 In reading Cooper it is well to begin 
 with The Deer slayer and The Last of the 
 Mohicans, and to follow the course of 
 Hawkeye from his splendid youth in the 
 first of these tales down through The 
 Pathfinder, to his vigorous old age in The 
 Pioneers and The Prairie. No other books 
 in any language give one so fine a pano 
 rama of savage life as these Leatherstock 
 ing tales. Through them move the supple 
 and treacherous Indians, masters of wood 
 craft and of all the methods of savage 
 warfare that is as picturesque as the fight 
 ing of the Greeks in Homer s great epic, 
 and the small band of white hunters and 
 trappers led by Leatherstocking himself, 
 whose bravery, simplicity and mastery of 
 Indian lore were reproduced in our own> 
 day in Kit Carson and" Buffalo Bill " Cod^. ^ 
 
 These stories are full of thrilling inciv 
 dent, of pursuit by the relentless Indian^ . 
 of narrow escapes from death by torture 
 
 [54] 
 
FENIMORE COOPER S ORIGINAL WORK 
 
 at the stake, of splendid shooting with the 
 old long squirrel rifle that proved so 
 deadly at New Orleans to Pakenham s 
 veterans, and of many superb descriptions 
 of the great forest that clothed upper New 
 York State and the whole country that 
 fringes the Great Lakes from the head of 
 the St. Lawrence river to the western 
 border of Lake Superior. It is difficult to 
 conceive of this now densely populated 
 country as once covered by unbroken 
 forest, but thirty years ago men were living 
 in Western New York who remembered 
 as boys the cutting of roads through the 
 dense timber in that State to allow their 
 wagons to pass on the way to the Northern 
 Reserve of Ohio. 
 
 Cooper knew the Adirondack region and 
 its lower fringe that included Otsego lake, 
 the Glimmerglass of Leather stocking^ as a 
 man knows his own hand. Every foot of 
 it he had tramped over; he had camped 
 by its beautiful mountain lakes and fished 
 in its ice-cold streams. And the joy of 
 this free, savage life had entered into his 
 blood so that he could picture it in his 
 stories with a passionate ardor that warms 
 the heart of the reader. In these days of 
 the Boy Scout movement and the revival 
 
 issi 
 
GREAT SPIRITUAL WRITERS 
 
 of interest in life in the open air. Cooper s 
 Leather stocking stories should come in for 
 careful reading. Any healthy boy or girl 
 will bless you for making known these tales 
 of Cooper s, that tell of the golden age of 
 adventure in the pathless woods, when 
 physical strength, courage, coolness, endu 
 rance and skill with the old muzzle-loading 
 rifle were pitted against Indian craft and 
 the instinct for following the trail and 
 divining the movements of an enemy at 
 a great distance. The younger generation 
 can never hope to see again the forest 
 primeval, but the next thing to seeing it 
 with one s own eyes is to see it in Cooper s 
 word pictures, as it was before the ax of 
 the lumberman laid it in ruins. 
 
 Of Cooper s sea stories, the best is The 
 Pilot, which tells in graphic style of the 
 exploits of John Paul Jones in English 
 waters. It introduces Long Tom Coffin, 
 Cooper s other great creation, as original 
 as Leatherstocking, a Yankee sailor who 
 showed the same qualities at sea that the 
 hunter revealed in the forest. This tale 
 demonstrated Cooper s command of the 
 lore of the sea, which he afterward proved 
 in such fine sea stories as Wing and Wing 
 and Afloat and Ashore. 
 
 [56] 
 
FENIMORE COOPER S ORIGINAL WORK 
 
 Cooper was intensely unpopular during 
 his best years because he had the courage 
 to criticise many unlovely traits of his 
 countrymen. The Americans whose man 
 ners Dickens and Mrs. Trollope satirized 
 had a wonderfully thin skin, and Cooper 
 had an unfortunate genius for irritating 
 his home public. He was lampooned in 
 the newspapers, and he promptly brought 
 libel suits, argued the cases himself, and 
 invariably recovered damages. Not satis 
 fied with this, he exploited his opinions on 
 many subjects in his novels, with the result 
 that his great abilities were not recognized 
 until after his death. 
 
 The controversies which embittered 
 Cooper s last years seem almost childish 
 to us now. Nothing remains but the real 
 work done by Cooper, who has added one 
 supremely fine character to the world s 
 gallery of great personages in fiction. It 
 is to his credit also that he did such good 
 work when he was pestered by malignant 
 detractors. To have created Leather- 
 stocking is a passport to enduring fame; 
 yet Cooper added to this typical American 
 backwoodsman Long Tom Coffin, the 
 shrewd Yankee sailor, and a long line of 
 other original characters. 
 
 [57] 
 
LONGFELLOW 
 
 THE POET OF THE 
 
 HOUSEHOLD 
 
 MORE POPULAR ABROAD THAN ANY 
 OTHER AMERICAN WRITER OF VERSE 
 His STRONG SENSE OF NATIONALITY. 
 
 LONGFELLOW cannot be classed among 
 the world s greatest poets with 
 Shakespeare, Browning, Tennyson, or Vic 
 tor Hugo but he is probably more 
 widely read than any of these poets of the 
 first rank. Thomas Wentworth Higginson 
 quotes from Professor Grovesnor of Am- 
 herst College an anecdote which shows the 
 worldwide popularity of the author of 
 Evangeline and Hiawatha. The professor 
 was one of a party traveling from Constan 
 tinople to Marseilles when the talk at table 
 turned upon poetry, and no less than six 
 persons of six different nationalities re 
 peated poems of Longfellow and declared 
 that he was their favorite poet. The 
 
 [58] 
 
THE POET OF THE HOUSEHOLD 
 
 Russian lady who started the discussion, 
 aptly ended it with this wise remark: 
 "Do you suppose there is any other poet 
 of any country, living or dead, from whom 
 so many of us could have quoted? Not 
 one. Not even Shakespeare, or Victor 
 Hugo, or Homer." 
 
 Higginson follows this with figures from 
 the British Museum catalogue of 1901, 
 which gives under each author s name the 
 record of every memoir, criticism, parody 
 or translation of his works. In this test 
 Longfellow stands first among American 
 poets with 357 titles and the others follow 
 in this order: Emerson (158), Holmes 
 (135), Lowell (114), Whittier (104), Poe 
 (103) and Whitman (64). Again in the 
 first balloting by the hundred judges for 
 candidates for the new Hall of Fame in 
 the New York University, only 39 names 
 secured a majority of these, and Long 
 fellow was tenth in rank, the only American 
 man of letters who exceeded him in votes 
 being Emerson. These are all definite 
 proofs of Longfellow s worldwide popu 
 larity. 
 
 Since Poe, in jealous rage over the 
 superior popularity of Longfellow s work, 
 lampooned his poems and derided his 
 
 [59] 
 
GREAT SPIRITUAL WRITERS 
 
 poetic ability, many critics have had their 
 fling at the New England bard. It has 
 been said that he had no genuine poetic 
 inspiration; that many of his most popular 
 poems are purely ethical and have no claim 
 to rank as true poetry; that he was an 
 imitator of many foreign poets and at best 
 simply a wonderfully skilful adapter of 
 other men s thoughts. Yet, in spite of all 
 these attacks, which Longfellow never 
 deigned to notice, his poems continued to 
 be translated into foreign languages, while 
 edition after edition was demanded in 
 English-speaking countries. An editor of 
 one of the great London weekly papers 
 said not many years ago: "A stranger 
 can hardly have an idea how familiar 
 many of our working people, especially 
 women, are with Longfellow. Thousands 
 can repeat some of his poems who have 
 never read a line of Tennyson and prob 
 ably never heard of Browning." And the 
 visitor to Westminster Abbey is impressed 
 by the fact that in Poet s Corner, on a 
 bracket near the tomb of Chaucer and 
 between the memorials to Cowley and 
 Dryden, stands a fine marble bust of Long 
 fellow, the gift of English and American 
 admirers. Lowell, then our minister to 
 
 [60] 
 
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW 
 
 IN 1859 
 FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY BRADY 
 
THE POET OF THE HOUSEHOLD 
 
 England, was the chief speaker at the 
 unveiling of this bust and in eloquent 
 words, paid his tribute to Longfellow, the 
 poet and the man. 
 
 Longfellow came of good old Yorkshire 
 stock and he could trace his descent to 
 four of the Mayflower pilgrims. He was 
 born in Portland, Maine, in 1807, and he 
 learned his letters at the early age of 
 three. At thirteen, while a student in the 
 Portland Academy, he composed his first 
 poem, Venice^ an Italian Song, and a little 
 later his first verses appeared in print in 
 the local newspaper. The youthful poet 
 chose an American theme, The Battle of 
 Lowell s Pondy and the verse would do 
 credit to a maturer hand. Longfellow 
 went to Bowdoin College, where he had 
 Hawthorne for a classmate. There, while 
 he did not excel in studies, he was an 
 omnivorous reader and he showed keen 
 interest in poetry and in books about the 
 American Indian. One of his college exer 
 cises was a plea for the Indians, while his 
 commencement oration was on Our Native 
 Writers. Some critics have seen in this 
 youthful appeal for the Red Man the 
 germ of Hiawatha. During his college 
 course Longfellow contributed a number 
 
 [61] 
 
GREAT SPIRITUAL WRITERS 
 
 of poems to the UNITED STATES LITERARY 
 GAZETTE, a new semi-monthly literary 
 periodical, and after graduation many of 
 his poems will be found in the GAZETTE 
 with the early verses of Bryant. 
 
 It is seldom that a young man enters 
 college with a definite plan for life, but 
 Longfellow had decided at this early age 
 that he would choose a literary career. 
 Law, medicine, theology did not appeal 
 to him; but his father would not listen to 
 his literary plans. Instead he insisted 
 upon his studying law in his own office. 
 There the youth of nineteen was offered 
 the new position of professor of modern 
 languages in Bowdoin College, with the 
 privilege of a year s study in Europe. He 
 gladly accepted it, but his stay abroad 
 was prolonged to three years. One year 
 he devoted to France, Spain and Italy; 
 the remainder to study in Germany. He 
 entered upon his duties at Bowdoin College 
 when only twenty-two years of age. The 
 results of Longfellow s European studies 
 may be found in Outre-Mer y a series of 
 prose sketches of his travels written in 
 the style of Washington Irving. It is a 
 remarkable fact that all his early work 
 was in prose, Outre -Mer being followed by 
 
THE POET OF THE HOUSEHOLD 
 
 Hyperion^ a rhetorical romance of a young 
 lover s visit to Europe. This second prose 
 work seemed to stimulate his long dormant 
 poetical faculty and he wrote the poems 
 which appeared in his first book of verse, 
 Voices of the Night. 
 
 Longfellow at this time was established 
 as Professor of Modern Languages at 
 Harvard College. He made his home in 
 the historic Craigie House at Cambridge, 
 where he lived for the remainder of his life. 
 After eighteen years of service as professor 
 he retired and devoted himself entirely to 
 literature. His home life was ideal but 
 marked by two tragedies. His first wife 
 died suddenly during his second visit to 
 Europe, while his second wife was fatally 
 burned at her own fireside. Longfellow 
 kept open house for years at Cambridge, 
 entertaining everyone of note who visited 
 the city. Howells in his Literary Friends 
 and Acquaintance gives a very attrac 
 tive pidhire of Longfellow s life in his 
 later years at Cambridge an old age 
 full of "honor, love, obedience, troops of 
 friends." On his last visit to Europe he 
 was given the Doctor s degree by Cam 
 bridge and Oxford and all London paid 
 him high honors. 
 
 [63] 
 
GREAT SPIRITUAL WRITERS 
 
 Anyone who takes up Longfellow s 
 poems is sure to be impressed by the 
 number of striking lines that he has con 
 tributed to our literature. He seemed to 
 have the faculty of putting a fine thought 
 into quotable form, and his early verses 
 yield a richer harvest of these things than 
 his later and maturer poems. In reading 
 Voices of the Night, his first volume of 
 verse, one comes upon a remarkable collec 
 tion of lines which have passed into the 
 body of current American speech. John 
 Bartlett in his Familiar Quotations gives 
 eight pages to selections from Emerson 
 and eleven pages to extracts from Long 
 fellow. Into his early poems, written with 
 the enthusiasm of young manhood, he put 
 so much of spiritual force that they are 
 stamped upon the reader s memory. Here, 
 for instance, is A Psalm of Life, with its 
 splendid optimism cast in lines that have 
 become household words, and here tfhe 
 Reaper and the Flowers or a Psalm of 
 Death. Then follow the ballads, The Skele 
 ton in Armor, with its superb vision of a 
 Norse Viking s storm life, and the pathos 
 of The Wreck of the Hesperus. Here also 
 are fhe Village Blacksmith, Excelsior and 
 Maidenhood. Four years later appeared 
 
THE POET OF THE HOUSEHOLD 
 
 a group of poems of which The Belfry of 
 Bruges, The Arsenal at Springfield and 
 ^he Old Clock on the Stairs were the most 
 noteworthy. The Springfield Arsenal Long 
 fellow inspected in company with Charles 
 Sumner, and the poem that resulted from 
 this visit is an eloquent plea for peace. 
 These verses, which sum up the poet s 
 creed, have special force at this time when 
 more than half the civilized world is 
 engaged in the most destructive war ever 
 known : 
 
 Were half the power, that fills the world with terror, 
 
 Were half the wealth bestowed on camps and courts, 
 
 Given to redeem the human mind from error, 
 There were no need of arsenals or forts: 
 
 The warrior s name would be a name abhorred! 
 
 And every nation, that should lift again 
 Its head against a brother, on its forehead 
 
 Would wear forevermore the curse of Cain! 
 
 Of all Longfellow s shorter poems the 
 one which has probably had the widest 
 appeal is that entitled Resignation, written 
 after the death of his little daughter 
 Fanny. In no other poem with which I 
 am familiar is found the same pathos over 
 the loss of a dear one, the same assurance 
 of meeting in a better world the child who 
 has gone before. Though almost as famil 
 iar as the best Psalms, two verses are 
 
 [65] 
 
GREAT SPIRITUAL WRITERS 
 
 quoted here to show the simplicity of 
 Longfellow s methods: 
 
 There is no flock, however watched and tended, 
 
 But one dead lamb is there! 
 There is no fireside, howsoe er defended, 
 
 But has one vacant chair! 
 * * * 
 
 There is no Death! What seems so is transition; 
 
 This life of mortal breath 
 
 Is but a suburb of the life Elysian 
 
 Whose portal we call Death. 
 
 Three of Longfellow s longer poems are 
 worth notice, not only because of their 
 many beauties of thought and form but 
 because they are distinctively American. 
 These are Evangeline, Hiawatba and The 
 Courtship of Miles Standisb. The pathetic 
 romance of the Acadian lovers, which 
 Longfellow immortalized in hexameters in 
 Evangeline, was suggested by a story told 
 by a Catholic priest to Hawthorne and by 
 him repeated to Longfellow, who begged 
 permission to make a poem of it. It is 
 the most perfect thing that Longfellow ever 
 wrote. ke Song of Hiawatha^ perhaps, 
 has had a greater vogue, as it pictures the 
 life, the customs and the religious rites of 
 the American Indian. The poet drew his 
 materials from legends of the Ojibway 
 tribe and he cast it in the form of the 
 Kavalera, which gave great freedom of 
 
 [66] 
 
THE POET OF THE HOUSEHOLD 
 
 expression and free play of alliteration. 
 The Courtship of Miles Standisb, also told 
 in hexameters, is full of fine pictures of 
 Colonial life. 
 
 It is one of the ironies of the literary 
 life that the poem on which Longfellow 
 spent the most effort and regarded as his 
 best made little impression on the great 
 world of readers. This was Christus, a 
 series of eloquent pictures of the life of 
 the Savior. Another work on which Long 
 fellow lavished much pains was a metrical 
 translation of Dante which shared the fate 
 of Cbristus. 
 
 Longfellow was a master of many forms 
 of the poetical art, but he was especially 
 skilful in handling the sonnet. Especially 
 fine are the six sonnets on The Divine 
 Comedy of Dante and the sonnet on The 
 Cross of Snow a tribute to his wife, 
 who met the cruelest of deaths by her 
 own fireside. 
 
 Perhaps the best summing up of Long 
 fellow s influence is found in these lines by 
 Thomas Wentworth Higginson: "He will 
 never be read for the profoundest stirring, 
 or for the unlocking of the deepest mys 
 teries; he will always be read for invigo- 
 ration, for comfort, for content." 
 
LOWELL 
 
 As POET, ESSAYIST 
 AND CRITIC 
 
 His "COMMEMORATION ODE," "THE BIG- 
 LOW PAPERS " AND His LITERARY 
 ESSAYS His BEST WORK. 
 
 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL S place as poet, 
 essayist and critic is not clearly 
 defined. He came very near greatness as 
 both poet and essayist, but he missed, 
 a place in the first rank, largely through 
 a certain frostiness of temperament. As 
 a critic he has been assailed recently 
 by Dr. Joseph J. Reilly, formerly of the 
 College of the City of New York, who 
 declares that he has no claim to the name 
 of a scientific literary critic of the class of 
 Sainte-Beuve or Matthew Arnold; but 
 over against this must be placed the dictum 
 of William Dean Howells, who says of 
 Lowell: "In his lectures on the English 
 poets he has proved himself easily the 
 
 [68] 
 
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 
 
 IN 1857 
 FROM A CRAYON DRAWING BY S. W. ROWSE 
 
LOWELL, POET, ESSAYIST AND CRITIC 
 
 wisest and finest critic in our language." 
 Certainly in the quality of literary stimulus 
 Lowell s essays must be given a foremost 
 place. Even about Shakespeare he has 
 something novel and illuminating to say, 
 and upon the lesser writers of the Eliza 
 bethan era he pours a flood of light. He 
 makes all these old worthies very real and 
 human, as though they were of our own 
 time. Lowell was hurt also by the fact 
 that he was what Dr. Oliver Wendell 
 Holmes called a New England Brahmin. 
 He was a natural aristocrat, who believed 
 that a long and well-defined strain of good 
 blood was necessary for a man to accom 
 plish much in this world. It was this 
 strong strain of the aristocrat in him, 
 joined to his great ability as an after- 
 dinner speaker, that made Lowell so 
 popular in England when he was American 
 Minister to St. James. Another trait of 
 Lowell s that has repelled many readers is 
 the strong school-masterish tendency that 
 leads him to lecture his readers frequently 
 and to go into tedious detail on many 
 subjects. 
 
 But with all these drawbacks Lowell has 
 fairly held his own, and he probably has 
 more readers today than when he was 
 
GREAT SPIRITUAL WRITERS 
 
 before the public as our Minister to Eng 
 land. His poetry fills five good-sized 
 volumes, but all that will live may be 
 squeezed into less than one volume. His 
 greatest poem is the magnificent Commem 
 oration Ode, written to celebrate the 
 dedication of the noble Memorial Hall at 
 Harvard, erected in memory of those of 
 the New England university s sons who 
 fell in the Civil War. It sounds the 
 heights and the depths of American 
 patriotism, and it contains in a few lines 
 the finest portrait of Lincoln that has ever 
 been drawn. The poems also include ^he 
 Biglow Papers, which are supreme as the 
 best version of the Yankee dialect in our 
 literature, as well as some of the keenest 
 satire on the pretensions of the Southern 
 pro-slavery party that brought on the 
 Mexican War. 
 
 Lowell as a poet seldom gave the public 
 an imperfect line. He was a master of 
 his craft. His wide study and reading and 
 his command of many tongues made the 
 technical part of the poet s work as easy 
 for him as it was for Byron or Swinburne. 
 Melodious is the term which best applies 
 to all his verse, but he had something more 
 than melody and sweetness. He had the 
 
LOWELL, POET, ESSAYIST AND CRITIC 
 
 faculty, which Emerson lacked, of making 
 the reader see and feel the charm of the 
 New England seasons and the beauty of 
 the common flowers of the garden and the 
 field. 
 
 To Lowell all nature appealed with new 
 force and beauty every morning, as though 
 he were born again each day, with unjaded 
 senses, eager to savor the perfume of the 
 flowers, keen to note the beauty of clouds 
 and trees, of green sloping meadows and 
 of lakes flashing in the clear sunlight. 
 When he touches on nature you feel the 
 poet let himself go; he warms your soul 
 with his passionate love of the woods, the 
 fields and the sea. 
 
 Into his essays Lowell poured out the 
 wealth of his learning, while at the same 
 time he indulged his strong taste for many 
 intellectual and critical hobbies. He pre 
 faced a new edition of ^he Biglow Papers 
 with a hundred-page dissertation on the 
 New England dialect, which he proved by 
 hundreds of examples was derived straight 
 from the English of Cromwell s time. 
 Scores of words which are now obsolete 
 in England are preserved in the quaint 
 dialect, the curious clipped speech of Hosea 
 Biglow, Birdofredum Sawin and other 
 
GREAT SPIRITUAL WRITERS 
 
 characters in these famous satires in verse. 
 Lowell shows keen enjoyment in dredging 
 up these old, forgotten words and proving 
 that they are far more expressive than the 
 more decorous terms that have taken their 
 place in the common speech. 
 
 In such essays as those on Dante, 
 Chaucer and Shakespeare, Lowell reveals 
 a range of reading and a niceness of critical 
 art that can be found in the work of no 
 other American essayist. Hazlitt and 
 Froude at their best do not surpass him 
 here on his chosen ground. And one is 
 struck on nearly every page by some 
 homely simile or metaphor, some home 
 spun example, that shows how well an 
 chored Lowell was to " the stern and rock- 
 bound coast" that colored his genius while 
 it chilled his temperament. 
 
 Lowell differs from nearly every other 
 American writer in his training and his 
 life. Born of a family of Congregational 
 preachers, he showed no fondness for reli 
 gion, but early developed a strong love for 
 poetry and general literature. Everything 
 was made easy for him by ample means 
 when a youth, and he lived his whole life 
 at Elmwood, the stately home in Cam 
 bridge, where he was born. Save for tern- 
 
 [72] 
 
LOWELL, POET, ESSAYIST AND CRITIC 
 
 porary financial straits in his early man 
 hood, he always had a modest competence 
 and he was able to select the work which 
 he loved. Like Emerson, he entered Har 
 vard at the early age of fifteen years, but 
 gained no distinction in scholarship. He 
 studied law, but soon gave this up and 
 devoted himself to poetry. 
 
 Through his marriage he came into close 
 contact with the anti-slavery leaders, and 
 this association fired his genius. In The 
 Biglow Papers, written to voice the senti 
 ment of New England on the unjust 
 Mexican War, which was carried out in the 
 interest of the Southern slaveholders, he 
 first put the Yankee dialect into literature. 
 The racy humor of these sketches in prose 
 and verse met a warm response at home 
 and abroad, and they first made Lowell 
 known to his countrymen. This period 
 also witnessed the writing of many anti- 
 slavery poems, among which the most 
 notable are those on Garrison, Freedom, 
 The Parting of the Ways and The Washers 
 of the Shroud. 
 
 At the age of thirty-six Lowell, who had 
 made a reputation as a critic by a series 
 of lectures on the English poets before the 
 Lowell Institute, accepted the chair of 
 
 [73] 
 
GREAT SPIRITUAL WRITERS 
 
 French and Spanish literature at Harvard, 
 which had been occupied by Ticknor and 
 Longfellow before him. He held this pro 
 fessorship for seventeen years, during 
 which he did a large anount of work in 
 verse and prose. In 1872 he resigned his 
 chair at Harvard and devoted himself to 
 literary work. He made frequent trips to 
 Europe, and he acquired in this way an 
 intimate knowledge of France, Spain and 
 Italy. 
 
 Public honors came to him in 1877, when 
 he was appointed Minister to Spain, and 
 three years later, when he was made 
 United States Minister to England. Lowell 
 was the most popular American Minister 
 to the court of St. James, his ability as an 
 after-dinner speaker contributing largely 
 to his success. He served five years before 
 he was relieved by President Cleveland. 
 Five years later he died at his old Elmwood 
 home, full of years and honors. 
 
 Of Lowell s poems the Commemoration 
 Ode is his best work. It is unmatched in 
 American literature for its lofty patriotism. 
 Here Lowell s genius seemed to move with 
 out hindrance; it reached the climax of 
 eloquence in the famous portrait of Lincoln, 
 of which these are noteworthy lines: 
 
 [74] 
 
LOWELL, POET, ESSAYIST AND CRITIC 
 
 Here was a type of the true elder race, 
 
 And one of Plutarch s men talked with us face to face. 
 
 * * * 
 
 Great captains, with their guns and drums, 
 
 Disturb our judgment for the hour, 
 But at last silence comes; 
 
 These all are gone, and, standing like a tower, 
 Our children shall behold his fame, 
 
 The kindly-earnest, brave, forseeing man, 
 Sagacious, patient, dreading praise, not blame, 
 
 New birth of our new soil, the first American. 
 
 And here is the climax of his splendid 
 apostrophe to his country: 
 
 O Beautiful! My Country! Ours once more, 
 Smoothing thy gold of war-disheveled hair 
 O er such sweet brows as never other wore, 
 
 And letting thy set lips, 
 
 Freed from wrath s pale eclipse, 
 The rosy edges of their smile lay bare. 
 
 * * * 
 
 What were our lives without thee? 
 
 What all our lives to save thee? 
 
 We reck not what we gave thee; 
 
 We will not dare to doubt thee, 
 
 But ask whatever else, and we will dare! 
 
 Other fine poems are The Vision of Sir 
 Launfal y with its impressive lesson in 
 genuine Christianity; The Washers of the 
 Shroud^ one of the best of the poems pro 
 duced by the sweat and agony of the Civil 
 War, and the pathetic little poems on the 
 death of his daughter and of his wife. 
 After the Burial is one of the finest bits of 
 verse in the language. Of course, *The 
 Biglow Papers are full of good things, as 
 
 [75] 
 
GREAT SPIRITUAL WRITERS 
 
 well as A Fable for Critics, a series of bril 
 liant pen pictures of American authors, and 
 Under the Willows, a rhapsody on June in 
 New England. 
 
 Lowell s best prose work may be found 
 in My Study Windows and the three vol 
 umes of Among My Books. Above every 
 thing else, Lowell was the scholar, and his 
 essays reveal this quality in excess. He 
 had the nicest sense of language, and 
 especially in discussing the old English 
 worthies like Chaucer, Shakespeare, Mil 
 ton and Dryden, this faculty was allowed 
 free range. The essays on these English 
 poets are well worth reading, as Lowell 
 brings to bear on his subject a mass of 
 material, gathered from wide reading and 
 critical study. His style is very brilliant, 
 but at the same time it often seems almost 
 colloquial, so easy was it for this master 
 of expression to develop his thought. 
 
 Wit and humor play over all his work 
 and make it a delight to read. The drollest 
 conceits occur to him, and he gives them 
 free play; his fancy invents many novel 
 ideas, and he takes the keenest delight 
 even in making puns. Among American 
 critics no one has ever equaled Lowell in 
 his capacity for making even a heavy sub- 
 
 [76] 
 
LOWELL, POET, ESSAYIST AND CRITIC 
 
 jecl: as interesting as a novel. And behind 
 all this sparkle of wit was the man who was 
 greater as a talker than a writer. Scores 
 of famous men have borne witness to 
 Lowell s rare charm in conversation a 
 charm that made men like Carlyle and 
 Thackeray and Froude remain silent when 
 he held forth at table. Lowell wrote much 
 which the world may well forget, but his 
 best verse and his best prose are worth a 
 place even on a five-foot shelf of the world s 
 great books. 
 
 [77] 
 
WIT AND HUMOR 
 
 OF OLIVER WENDELL 
 
 HOLMES 
 
 WISE AND TENDER PASSAGES IN "THE 
 AUTOCRAT OF THE BREAKFAST TABLE" 
 SOME OF His MOST POPULAR POEMS. 
 
 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES was an Amer 
 ican Admirable Crichton. He was a 
 man who could do a half-dozen things as 
 well as a specialist in each. As a poet he 
 will be remembered longest by The One- 
 Hoss Sbay, The Last Leaf and Old Iron 
 sides; as an essayist he gained immortality 
 by fbe Autocrat of the Breakfast Table; 
 as a novelist he produced that wonderful 
 study in heredity, Elsie Venner; as a writer 
 of occasional verses he was acknowledged 
 to be without an equal; as a physician he 
 took high rank, and many of his medical 
 papers have become classics; as a literary 
 critic he was both feared and admired, as 
 he had the faculty of almost uncanny 
 
 [78] 
 
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 
 
 IN 1856 
 AT THE AGE OF FORTY-SEVEN 
 
WIT AND HUMOR OF HOLMES 
 
 insight and an incisive style that pierced 
 all pretense; as an after-dinner speaker he 
 was without a superior in his day. He is 
 lighter in his touch than Lamb, but his 
 pathos is as true as Elia s or Tom Hood s. 
 
 What impresses the reader in all Holmes 
 work is the abounding vitality of the man, 
 the quickness of his fancy, the readiness 
 of his wit and the felicity with which he 
 always chooses the right word, whether in 
 verse or in prose. 
 
 Although of purest New England strain, 
 Holmes had few of the genuine Yankee 
 traits. In an age which was marked by 
 religious intolerance, he early showed the 
 greatest liberality in thought. Among 
 men who were noted for their Puritan 
 gravity, he saw the amusing side of every 
 question, and knew how to extract all the 
 fun that was in it. Among a prosaic race, 
 he revealed a sensitive instinct for poetical 
 form that makes his verse a delight to 
 read. When other writers were given to 
 expounding their views in the orthodox 
 way, Holmes devised the art of getting 
 into close touch with his readers by means 
 of his colloquial gifts. Much of the charm 
 of the Autocrat lies in his familiar talks 
 with the reader, his letting down the bars of 
 
 [79] 
 
GREAT SPIRITUAL WRITERS 
 
 reserve so that you see the kindly nature 
 of the man, even when you hear the sharp 
 words with which he castigates folly or 
 vice. In this lies the great charm of 
 Holmes, whose books can never become 
 old-fashioned or tiresome. It seems easy, 
 this colloquialism bristling with epigram, 
 repartee and quaint conceit, but try to 
 imitate it, and you will soon see how diffi 
 cult it is. 
 
 Many have been the writers who have 
 followed Holmes in this attractive path 
 which he first blazed in the Autocrat, but 
 not one has equaled the master. And 
 although more than fifty years have passed 
 since these delightful essays first saw the 
 light in the ATLANTIC MONTHLY, they are 
 as fresh, as true and as stimulating as 
 when they were written. Considering the 
 remarkable advance in all the physical 
 sciences, upon which Holmes drew largely 
 for his apt illustrations, his skill in striking 
 the modern note is simply miraculous. 
 While much of the work of his contem 
 poraries has been rendered obsolete, his 
 remains as full of piquancy and truth as 
 it was a half-century ago. 
 
 Dr. Holmes was born in Cambridge, 
 Massachusetts, in 1809, and he lived until 
 
 [80] 
 
WIT AND HUMOR OF HOLMES 
 
 1894, reaching the great age of eighty-five 
 years, with most of his senses unimpaired. 
 Even to the last he impressed every-one 
 by the youthfulness and buoyancy of his 
 spirits and his keen interest in all the con 
 cerns of life. His father was a preacher, 
 but Holmes very early learned to look 
 upon life with the eyes of a philosopher. 
 He showed at preparatory school a pretty 
 skill in the translation of Virgil into 
 English verse, and at college he delivered 
 a metrical essay before Phi Beta Kappa 
 at his commencement. 
 
 At the age of twenty-four he went to 
 Europe to continue his medical studies, 
 and spent three years in London and Paris. 
 This experience was invaluable in enlarging 
 his point of view. He devoted his leisure 
 to writing verse, and in 1836 he published 
 his first volume of poems, which included 
 Old Ironsides, that noble plea to save the 
 frigate Constitution, which still has power 
 to stir the blood of any patriotic American. 
 Holmes was active in his profession for 
 eleven years, when he accepted the Har 
 vard chair of anatomy, which he held for 
 thirty-five years, when he was retired as 
 emeritus professor, a position which he 
 held until his death. He was regarded as 
 
 [81] 
 
GREAT SPIRITUAL WRITERS 
 
 one of the best medical authorities in this 
 country, while at the same time he came 
 to be known as the wittiest after-dinner 
 speaker in Boston and one of the cleverest 
 writers of verses of occasion. 
 
 It was in 1858, when the ATLANTIC 
 MONTHLY was founded, that Holmes first 
 showed his rare ability as an essayist. He 
 contributed to the first number the initial 
 paper of The Autocrat of the Breakfast 
 Table, a series of talks on all kinds of 
 subjects, strung on a thread of amusing 
 fiction. The sage who delivers these mono 
 logues is the central figure at a typical 
 boarding-house table, and the other char 
 acters, like the young fellow John, the 
 poetess, the landlady and her boy, Ben 
 Franklin, all serve to add reality and point 
 to the amusing talks. 
 
 It is difficult to indicate the charm of 
 this work, which may be read with relish 
 again and again, so full is it of real human 
 nature, so saturated with that philosophy 
 which believes that this world is a good 
 place and that even the wicked and the 
 ill-natured have more good than evil in 
 their natures. The genial optimism of 
 Holmes has nothing weak or sentimental 
 in it. You feel in reading the Autocrat s 
 
 [82] 
 
WIT AND HUMOR OF HOLMES 
 
 sharp speeches that here is a man who has 
 a very firm grip on the realities of life, 
 who has seen the seamy side of life in the 
 great cities of the world, but who has kept 
 his nature sweet and hopeful because his 
 mind is healthy and his spirit is open to 
 all good influences. 
 
 The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table is 
 Holmes masterpiece. It is assured of 
 immortality so long as the English language 
 endures, for it will be just as good reading 
 fifty years hence as it is today. It has 
 a few earmarks of the period when it was 
 written, such as the tendency to italicize 
 striking sentences and to introduce bits of 
 Latin quotations. But these are the only 
 ones. It is packed full of intellectual meat, 
 and a very pretty vein of humor serves to 
 make the old Autocrat s preaching free 
 from all tedium. 
 
 It will surprise anyone who looks through 
 it to find how many ideas that have become 
 commonplace now were first offered here 
 by Dr. Holmes for public consideration. 
 A strong medical streak runs through all 
 the monologues, and many of the meta 
 phors and similes are also drawn from the 
 domain of natural science; but the charm 
 of the book lies in the sunny philosophy of 
 
GREAT SPIRITUAL WRITERS 
 
 the old scholar, who has seen life at its 
 best and at its worst, and who still finds 
 it good to be alive and to feel the sap of 
 youth in his veins although the years may 
 have touched his head with frost. Here 
 are bits of the Autocrat s wisdom, which 
 may be taken as fair specimens of his talk: 
 
 Your self-made man, whittled into shape with his own jack- 
 knife, deserves more credit than the regular engine-turned article, 
 shaped by the most approved pattern, and French polished by 
 society and travel. But as to saying that one is every way the 
 equal of the other, that is another matter. 
 
 * * * 
 
 Don t flatter yourselves that friendship authorizes you to 
 say disagreeable things to your intimates. On the contrary, 
 the nearer you come into a relation with a person the more neces 
 sary do tacT: and courtesy become. Except in cases of necessity, 
 which are rare, leave your friend to learn unpleasant truths from 
 his enemies: they are ready enough to tell them. 
 
 * * * 
 
 Our brains are seventy-year clocks. The Angel of Life winds 
 them up once for all, then closes the case, and gives the key into 
 the hand of the Angel of the Resurrection. 
 
 Tic-tac! tic-tac! go the wheels of thought; our will cannot 
 stop them; they cannot stop themselves; sleep cannot stop 
 them; madness only makes them go faster; death alone can 
 break the case, and, seizing the ever-swinging pendulum, which 
 we call the heart, silence at last the clicking of the terrible 
 escarpment we have carried so long beneath our wrinkled 
 foreheads. 
 
 Holmes enlivens the "Autocrat" with 
 many poems, which vary greatly in merit, 
 but as they include The Wonderful One- 
 Hoss Sbay, The Chambered Nautilus and 
 The Living Temple, the average is lifted 
 pretty high. The last two serve to illus- 
 
WIT AND HUMOR OF HOLMES 
 
 trate very well Holmes great gift of trans 
 muting scientific truths into the finest 
 poetry. 
 
 The Professor at the Breakfast Table 
 appeared a year after the Autocrat. It 
 was marked by a delightful love story, and 
 the characters were more sharply drawn. 
 Fourteen years later appeared The Poet at 
 the Breakfast Table, a work which showed 
 greater maturity than either of the others, 
 but lacked their spontaneity and charm. 
 
 In Elsie Venner Holmes wrought out a 
 story of the influence of prenatal impres 
 sions which would have attracted Haw 
 thorne. He made of it a remarkable study, 
 despite certain chapters that remind one 
 that the author was a doctor. 
 
 Of Holmes poems the two that have 
 had the widest circulation are Old Ironsides 
 and The Last Leaf, each perfect of its kind. 
 The first was written to arouse public 
 sentiment against the threatened destruc 
 tion of the old frigate Constitution. The 
 other was suggested to Holmes by Major 
 Thomas Melville, the last of the old gener 
 ation in Boston that clung to the cocked 
 hat and the wig of the eighteenth century. 
 
 Holmes poems fill a large octavo volume 
 of 350 pages. They were mainly verses 
 
GREAT SPIRITUAL WRITERS 
 
 written for special occasions, but the poet 
 put so much of real feeling into them that 
 they are worthy of preservation. Take it 
 all in all, Holmes fills a niche in American 
 literature which is his by virtue of his 
 originality and his pervading charm. 
 
 [86] 
 
WHITTIER 
 
 THE PURITAN 
 
 SINGER 
 
 THE ANTI-SLAVERY BARD WHOSE "SNOW 
 BOUND/ "TENT ON THE BEACH" AND 
 OTHER POEMS ARE FULL OF SPIRITUAL 
 FIRE. 
 
 WHITTIER is a poet who appeals far 
 more to Americans than to Euro 
 peans because he appealed with special 
 force to all of New England strain. His 
 life was a complete contradiction to his 
 natural traits. Born a Quaker, with a 
 strong bias in favor of peace, he was thrown 
 from early youth into the fierce turmoil of 
 the anti-slavery agitation, and he contrib 
 uted many poems that served to hearten 
 the small faction in New England that 
 labored for the freedom of the slave. Sel 
 dom traveling more than a few miles from 
 his birthplace in Massachusetts and never 
 visiting Europe, he yet rivals Longfellow 
 
 [8 7 ] 
 
GREAT SPIRITUAL WRITERS 
 
 in his references to foreign scenes and 
 historical events. Whittier had fewer ad 
 vantages and less regular education than 
 any other American writer of prominence; 
 he was also handicapped from early youth 
 by ailments that would have converted a 
 man of less will power into a chronic, 
 peevish invalid. That he educated him 
 self and that he did work in verse which 
 has given him a foremost place among 
 American poets was as great an achieve 
 ment as was the literary work of Robert 
 Louis Stevenson, accomplished often while 
 he was ill in bed and suffering acute pain. 
 This triumph of the mind and the spirit 
 over weakness of the flesh gave power to 
 much of Whittier s work; it touched his 
 words with flame; it fused into the white 
 heat of passion many of his battle hymns 
 during the long anti-slavery struggle that 
 preceded the Civil War. 
 
 Many have forgotten the important part 
 which Whittier played in arousing popular 
 sentiment throughout the Northern states 
 in favor of the rights of the slaves in the 
 South. But it is easy to see what he 
 accomplished when one reads the poems on 
 the wrongs of the slave which he poured 
 forth. One short poem alone roused all 
 
JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER 
 IN His AMESBURY GARDEN AT THE AGE OF 
 
 SEVENTY-NINE 
 FROM A PHOTOGRAPH TAKEN IN 1886 
 
WHITTIER, THE PURITAN SINGER 
 
 New England and seemed to be the audible 
 voice of lamentation over the fall of a great 
 champion of the cause of freedom. In 
 Ichabod Whittier rose to sublime heights 
 of invective; he branded Daniel Webster 
 with the shame of betraying his principles 
 for political ambition, yet this he did more 
 in sorrow than in anger. Much of this 
 anti-slavery work is now dead and mean 
 ingless, but enough remains with the glow 
 of life to show what tremendous force 
 resided in the pale, scholarly recluse whose 
 words were aglow with patriotism. But 
 much of Whittier s work was done in other 
 fields of verse. The New England of the 
 olden time is seen in Skipper Ires on s Ride, 
 while that of a later day is reproduced in 
 such charming work as Snow-Bound and 
 Among the Hills. The beauty of the soul 
 is revealed in My Playmate and In School 
 Days, two perfect poems that in genuine 
 pathos are equal to anything that Words 
 worth ever wrote. Longfellow expressed 
 the strong spiritual quality in Whittier s 
 verse in these fine lines: 
 
 Thou too hast heard 
 
 Voices and melodies from beyond the gates, 
 And speakest only when thy soul is stirred! 
 
 Whittier is one of the few American 
 
 [89] 
 
GREAT SPIRITUAL WRITERS 
 
 poets who sings of life on the farm with 
 real enthusiasm. He was born on a farm 
 at Haverhill, Massachusetts, and, despite 
 his bodily weakness, he knew what farm 
 labor was as well as the sports in which 
 country boys delight. Born December 17, 
 1807, he was nineteen when his first poem 
 was published in the Newburyport FREE 
 PRESS. The editor of that paper was 
 William Lloyd Garrison, afterward the 
 great anti-slavery leader. So impressed 
 was Garrison with the ability of the writer 
 of this poem and another which followed 
 it, that he visited Whittier s home and 
 urged him to attend the neighboring 
 academy. Whittier s father was a hard 
 working Quaker farmer, who did not believe 
 in anything but the virtues of labor and 
 thrift, but the editor of the Haverhill 
 GAZETTE having promised to give the boy 
 a home in his family, the father yielded 
 and the lad was permitted to take up the 
 making of cheap slippers in order to earn 
 enough money to carry him through one 
 term at the academy. School teaching and 
 bookkeeping furnished the funds for a 
 second term, which made up all Whittier s 
 regular education. 
 
 Like all great writers, Whittier had read 
 
 [90] 
 
<r/ 
 
 7 ^ : ^^/-.- 
 
 / 
 
 /V /-/ ?, c/" l- i-f I LfStJt 
 <_.^ - , v, 4.; , /c// -/; 
 
 FACSIMILE OF THE MANUSCRIPT "Mr TRIUMPH," 
 BY JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER 
 
WHITTIER, THE PURITAN SINGER 
 
 widely and, after his brief school life, he 
 entered a Haverhill newspaper office, one 
 of the best of training schools. There and 
 in Boston he continued to edit newspapers 
 and to write poems. His first published 
 work was Legends of New England, issued 
 in 1831. 
 
 As a youth Whittier had taken the keen 
 est interest in the anti-slavery cause, and 
 it was in recognition of his services that 
 he was appointed a delegate to the National 
 Anti-Slavery Society. He served terms in 
 the Massachusetts State Senate and Legis 
 lature, and in 1836 moved to Amesbury, 
 Massachusetts, where he made his home 
 as long as he lived. He was extremely 
 active in the anti-slavery cause for the 
 next four years. Then he began writing 
 for the NATIONAL ERA in Washington. One 
 of his early books was Voices of Freedom, 
 issued in 1849. He had the distinction of 
 contributing a poem to the first number of 
 the ATLANTIC MONTHLY in 1857 and in 
 the same year the well-known Blue and 
 Gold Edition of his poems was published. 
 Then came the Civil War, which called 
 out some fine poems, the most noteworthy 
 of which is Laus Deo y celebrating the pas 
 sage of the constitutional amendment 
 
GREAT SPIRITUAL WRITERS 
 
 abolishing slavery. It was one year before 
 the war ended that Whittier lost the 
 beloved sister whose death he commemo 
 rated a year after in the exquisite lines in 
 Snow-Bound. In Whittier s last years his 
 heart was warmed by the great public 
 appreciation of his poetical work. He was 
 asked to write the Centennial hymn for 
 the Philadelphia Exposition, and his seven 
 tieth birthday was marked by a great 
 banquet given by his publishers in his 
 honor to the contributors to the ATLANTIC 
 MONTHLY. The speeches and the letters 
 which this called out showed the high place 
 which Whittier occupied in public regard. 
 The poet died in 1892, full of years and 
 honors. 
 
 It is needless to look for great dramatic 
 force or unusual passion in Whittier s 
 work. His poems reflect the calm of his 
 life, which was broken only in his youth 
 by the storm and stress of anti-slavery 
 agitation. Had it not been for his Quaker 
 training he would have been found in the 
 ranks of the early volunteers fighting for 
 the cause which he had aided with his pen. 
 The anti-slavery poems, most of them 
 suggested by events of the day, fill nearly 
 one hundred double-column pages in his 
 
 [92] 
 
WHITTIER, THE PURITAN SINGER 
 
 complete works. They begin with tributes 
 to Toussaint L Ouverture and to Garrison, 
 and they range from fiery denunciation of 
 the holders of slaves to songs of rejoicing 
 over the spread of the cause of freedom. 
 Of all these poems the one which appealed 
 most powerfully to the public fancy was 
 Barbara Frietchie, which is known to every 
 American child in the public schools. 
 Many fine poems are included in this col 
 lection of wartime lyrics, among which 
 may be named What the Birds Said, After 
 the War y To Englishmen and The Watchers. 
 These are all instinct with the finest spirit 
 of poetry while they sound the ringing 
 battle-cry of freedom that still has power 
 to stir the blood like the blast of a trumpet. 
 Of all Whittier s work Snow-Bound 
 reaches the highest level of inspiration. It 
 is a picture of New England home life in 
 midwinter, of the family fireside painted 
 with the truth and dignity of a Dutch 
 genre artist, and of the tales told about the 
 chimney corner when the wind roared 
 about the roof-tree and the sleet beat upon 
 the window panes. The sketches of his 
 parents, his beloved sister and of the other 
 persons in the household are fine examples 
 of Whittier s skill in portraiture; but the 
 
 [93] 
 
GREAT SPIRITUAL WRITERS 
 
 lines that lift this poem to the highest 
 plane of inspiration are those in lament 
 over the sister who passed from life and 
 thought only a year before. These are 
 words that bring tears to the eyes of all 
 readers who have lost one near and dear. 
 John Bright, the most eloquent of English 
 parliamentary speakers of the last century, 
 declared this tribute to be the finest he 
 had ever read. The prelude to Among the 
 Hills rises to rare flights in its pi&ure of 
 what American country life should be. In 
 The Tent on the Beach Whit tier produced 
 a poem that reveals some of his best work. 
 It is a collection of short poems demon 
 strating Whittier s easy mastery of many 
 forms of verse. 
 
 Many other poems of Whittier s deserve 
 mention here, but if anyone will read the 
 poems named in this article, he will be 
 pretty sure to keep Whittier on his book 
 shelf as a constant companion. From no 
 other books of verse can one get surer light 
 on the blessings that come from unselfish 
 love and kindly thoughts of others, or a 
 better guide to the beauties of nature that 
 keep the heart young and the mind open 
 to all the sweet influences of the birds and 
 the trees and all growing things. 
 
 [94] 
 
THOREAU 
 
 THE PIONEER WRITER 
 ABOUT NATURE 
 
 THE RECLUSE OF WALDEN POND, WHO 
 FIRST SHOWED THE WORLD How TO 
 LIVE THE SIMPLE LIFE AND How TO 
 ENJOY NATURE. 
 
 IT is only within the last decade that the 
 full stature of Henry D. Thoreau has 
 been appreciated or his services as an 
 original thinker have been valued. How- 
 ells says of his Waldeni "I do not believe 
 Tolstoi himself has more clearly shown the 
 hollowness, the hopelessness, the unworthi- 
 ness of the life of the world than Thoreau 
 did in that book." Only a little over sixty 
 years ago nature study was unknown in 
 America, and to Thoreau belongs the dis 
 tinction of being the pioneer of this litera 
 ture of life in the open air. But he was 
 far more than a remarkable student and 
 observer of nature; he was an original 
 
 [95] 
 
GREAT SPIRITUAL WRITERS 
 
 thinker who foretold many of the problems 
 of our day, especially those which have 
 arisen from the congestion of thousands of 
 the poor in all large American cities. 
 Above all, he was a philosopher who car 
 ried the doctrine of individuality to its 
 extreme limit and who believed that a 
 great part of the work done in this world 
 is wasted because its results are spent on 
 food, drink and raiment that are not neces 
 sary to one s comfort or happiness. 
 
 Not even in the books of John Muir or 
 John Burroughs will one find such pure 
 enjoyment of mountain scenery, or such 
 awe and reverence for the spirit of nature 
 as may be found in Thoreau s records of 
 mountain climbing or of his days spent in 
 the woods, far from the haunts of men. 
 Many have imitated Thoreau in his search 
 for what is now called the "simple life," 
 but no one has equaled him in his capacity 
 for absorbing the spirit of wild nature or 
 his contentment with solitary life in the 
 woods. Companionship means so much 
 to the great majority of people that they 
 cannot understand a man whose nature 
 made no demand for any associate in his 
 tramps or any sharer in his rapture over a 
 glorious view from a mountain summit. 
 
 [96] 
 
HENRY DAVID THOREAU 
 
 IN 1854 
 
 FROM THE CRAYON DRAWING BY S. W. ROWSE 
 IN THE CONCORD PUBLIC LIBRARY 
 
THE PIONEER WRITER ABOUT NATURE 
 
 Thoreau was a natural hermit, but he 
 was eminently companionable when any 
 one invaded his haunts. His nature sim 
 ply ignored the usual fondness for friends 
 or associates. He was the pioneer in a 
 new style of writing about nature, but 
 though others have caught much of his 
 skill in making the woods and the moun 
 tains real to their readers, they could not 
 secure that subtle element of personality 
 which colors all of Thoreau s work and 
 makes it unique. 
 
 Many lovers of nature impress one as 
 profoundly affected by noble scenery, but 
 still one fancies that these excursions into 
 the wild life are simply vacations from 
 prosaic pursuits in the big cities. Not so 
 with Thoreau. When he writes about 
 walking, or about autumnal tints, or about 
 birds, the reader knows at once that his 
 conclusions are the result of much experi 
 ence. In a word, his mind was saturated 
 with many impressions, and his chief labor 
 seems to have been to select such as would 
 prove the most striking. 
 
 For months Thoreau studied all the 
 birds and small animals that frequented 
 the woods in which he built his cabin on 
 the shore of Walden pond. When he made 
 
 [971 
 
GREAT SPIRITUAL WRITERS 
 
 notes on these wild creatures they repre 
 sented many observations, not the impres 
 sions of a pedestrian who passed through 
 this part of Massachusetts on a walking 
 trip. The same sureness of facl, the same 
 reserve of knowledge, is seen in everything 
 that he wrote. Throughout all his essays 
 one has this sense of being admitted to 
 share in only a few of the pleasures of this 
 scholarly recluse, whose eyes were as keen 
 as those of the professional hunter, but 
 who had none of the hunter s lust for kill 
 ing the wild creatures of the woods. 
 
 As Thoreau had unusual gifts as a writer, 
 he was able to make the reader see what 
 impressed him. Much of this work was 
 in the form of elaborate notes and journals 
 left behind him, for Thoreau was one of 
 those unhappy authors who gained no 
 reputation during his lifetime. His bril 
 liant work fell flat because the public of 
 his time was far more interested in such 
 sentimental rhapsodies as Chateaubriand 
 poured forth in Atala or Rousseau in his 
 morbid confessions than in the real impres 
 sions of a genuine student of nature. 
 Four years after the issue of A Week on 
 the Concord and Merrimac Rivers Thoreau 
 records with grim humor the fad that he 
 
THE PIONEER WRITER ABOUT NATURE 
 
 bought 703 copies out of an edition of 
 1000 and stacked them up in his chamber 
 in a pile half as high as his head. "This/ 
 he says, "is authorship; these are the work 
 of my brain." Yet no sooner was he dead 
 than all the work which he left behind 
 him, including a half-dozen volumes of 
 journals, was printed and found thousands 
 of readers. Although most of his writing 
 was done in the forties of the last century, 
 it is as readable today as when it was first 
 written. 
 
 The closest friend of Thoreau was Emer 
 son, although the Sage of Concord was 
 perhaps his sharpest critic, and it was 
 Emerson who furnished the biographical 
 sketch which prefaced the first complete 
 edition of Thoreau s works. Thoreau, of 
 mixed Saxon and French blood, was born 
 in Concord in 1817, and was graduated 
 from Harvard in his twentieth year. His 
 father was a manufacturer of lead pencils, 
 but the son showed no inclination to enter 
 upon any commercial pursuit. 
 
 After six years devoted to teaching, 
 Thoreau decided to live in the woods and 
 do only so much work as would suffice to 
 maintain him in comfort. He built a cabin 
 on Walden pond, near Concord, and for 
 
 [99] 
 
GREAT SPIRITUAL WRITERS 
 
 two years led the simple life. His wants 
 were so few that he was able to live well 
 for two years on less money than one in a 
 city would spend in a month. His time 
 he devoted to study and reading and 
 to patient observation of the birds and 
 animals about his house. Yet his life in 
 this cabin was never squalid. 
 
 It is evident that Thoreau often irritated 
 Emerson by his passion for controversy. 
 Thoreau accepted nothing for granted, and 
 he seemed to have a mania for protesting 
 against all that others accepted. One of 
 his fads was the unwholesome life of the 
 city; another was the small value of a 
 college education. He had no genius for 
 friendship. In fact, one of his friends 
 summed up his unsocial nature in this 
 way: "I love Henry, but I cannot like 
 him; and as for taking his arm, I should 
 as soon think of taking the arm of an elm 
 
 tree." 
 
 In Walden will be found the best reve 
 lation of Thoreau s personality. The man 
 was absolutely independent. As Emerson 
 said, he had no passions, no desires, no 
 ambitions; he was sufficient unto himself; 
 he never felt the need of companionship. 
 Every day saw him take four or five hours 
 
 [100] 
 
THOREAU S COVE, WALDEN POND 
 SHOWING INDIAN PATH ALONG SHORE 
 
THE PIONEER WRITER ABOUT NATURE 
 
 of good, wholesome exercise in the open 
 air. Then he returned to his books or his 
 writing with the same zest that a city man 
 returns to work after social pleasures or 
 the theatre. His hunger was satisfied with 
 the simplest food, which he prepared him 
 self. He devoted much time to the patient 
 study of all the wild creatures that fre 
 quented the woods in which he had built 
 his house. He sets down minutely the 
 cost of his living and finds that for six 
 months he had actually lived for a sum 
 which would not have sustained him one 
 week in any big city. 
 
 Walden is Thoreau s best work, but there 
 is much readable matter in The Maine 
 Woods, Cape Cod and Excursions. Tho- 
 reau was a natural writer, with a genius 
 for style and with that devotion to detail 
 which makes his journals such good read 
 ing. Here is an extract from his essay on 
 Walking: 
 
 Where is the literature which gives expression to Nature? 
 He would be a poet who could impress the winds and streams 
 into his service, to speak for him; who transplanted words to 
 his pages with earth adhering to their roots; whose words were 
 so true and fresh and natural that they would appear to expand 
 like the buds at the approach of spring, though they lay half 
 smothered between two musty leaves in a library. * * * I 
 do not know any poetry to quote which adequately expresses 
 this yearning for the Wild. Approached from this side, the best 
 poetry is tame. 
 
 [101] 
 
GREAT SPIRITUAL WRITERS 
 
 Thoreau wrote some poetry, but it bears 
 a striking resemblance to Emerson s verse, 
 and it has not appealed to the public. 
 Among his notes of journeys and obser 
 vations Thoreau was fond of interpolating 
 his views on transcendental philosophy. 
 He was a New England pagan, with abso 
 lutely no reverence for religious authority 
 and with apparently little interest in any 
 religious dodlrine. This mental attitude 
 irritated Emerson, who could not conceive 
 of any human being without a strong 
 curiosity about the purpose of the universe 
 and a great hunger to know something of 
 the future life. 
 
 Thoreau s fame is sure because he wrote 
 only of the things that he loved, and his 
 style is far finer and richer than the style 
 of most of his famous contemporaries. Men 
 like Alcott looked upon Thoreau as defi 
 cient in the essential qualities of a great 
 writer, but the years have brought their 
 revenges, and today Thoreau is read by 
 thousands who know the leader of Trans 
 cendentalism only as a name. 
 
 102 ] 
 
FRANCIS 
 
 PARKMAN S HISTORICAL 
 WORK 
 
 ALTHOUGH HALF BLIND AND AN INVALID 
 HE DESCRIBED THE LONG STRUGGLE 
 BETWEEN FRANCE AND ENGLAND FOR 
 CANADA. 
 
 OF ALL American historians Francis Park- 
 man seems to me to deserve first 
 place because of a peculiar combination of 
 gifts and because he had the good fortune 
 to select for his subject the most pidhir- 
 esque episode in our history. Parkman 
 himself is always associated in my mind 
 with Stevenson as a literary worker. No 
 two men ever differed more widely in 
 character or in work; but both were 
 invalids, both struggled against tremen 
 dous handicaps of physical disability and 
 both produced an amount of good literature 
 that would have done credit to the strong 
 est man of letters. Parkman, in fact, was 
 
GREAT SPIRITUAL WRITERS 
 
 in worse case than the author of Treasure 
 Island, because in addition to his other 
 physical ailments he was practically blind 
 for years and was forced to depend upon 
 others to do his reading. Nearly all his 
 work was dictated, yet it bears no evidence 
 of such literary method. At one time his 
 literary work was set aside for several 
 years while he devoted himself to the 
 culture of roses. It takes a robust will 
 and iron determination to pursue a literary 
 scheme in the face of constant illness; yet 
 this Parkman accomplished with so little 
 outward sign of suffering that John Fiske, 
 one of his friends who met him frequently 
 at club dinners, never knew that he was 
 an invalid until after his death. 
 
 It is seldom that a college boy in his 
 sophomore year decides definitely upon his 
 life work and begins to prepare himself for 
 it. Yet this was what Parkman did at 
 Harvard when he was eighteen years old. 
 He came to the conclusion that he would 
 write the history of the conflict in America 
 between France and England the "Old 
 French War," as it was called, which ended 
 in the conquest of Canada. This was 
 really the history of the American forest, 
 which from his boyhood had a strong fasci- 
 
 [104] 
 
FRANCIS PARKMAN 
 FROM A DAGUERREOTYPE TAKEN ABOUT 1844 
 
FRANCIS PARKMAN S HISTORICAL WORK 
 
 nation for Parkman. To write this history 
 adequately demanded intimate knowledge 
 of the Indian tribes, then pushed westward 
 beyond the Mississippi, and of the Cana 
 dian habitant and voyageur. During his 
 college vacations and for several years after 
 Parkman devoted himself to gaining first 
 hand information in regard to the scenes 
 of this great conflict, and the Indians who 
 were the most picturesque actors in the 
 struggle. 
 
 Parkman came of good old Devonshire 
 stock, his ancestors migrating to New 
 England from the same shire that produced 
 Raleigh, Gilbert, Drake, Hawkins, and 
 other great English adventurers. All his 
 portraits show a massive chin which con 
 trasts strangely with his refined face. 
 This chin betrayed his leading trait an 
 iron determination which lifelong disease 
 and pain could not shake. Parkman has 
 been well described as a "passionate 
 Puritan." He had all the stoicism of the 
 Puritan, with an eager spirit which flamed 
 into sudden enthusiasms. A natural aris 
 tocrat, this feeling did not breed any con 
 tempt for the working class, but rather a 
 determination to prove that not even ill 
 ness , should exempt him from a man s work 
 
GREAT SPIRITUAL WRITERS 
 
 in the world. His favorite book was the 
 Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. He was 
 as great a stoic as the Roman Emperor, 
 and much of his outlook on life was purely 
 pagan, though no man had keener sym 
 pathy with the poor and the unfortunate. 
 
 When a gymnasium was opened in Har 
 vard during his junior year, young Park- 
 man made the great mistake of trying to 
 crowd into six months the athletic work 
 which should have been spread over six 
 years. He injured his health so badly 
 that he was unable to begin his senior year 
 with his class. Instead he spent the time 
 abroad, but returned in time to take his 
 degree and begin the study of law. The 
 following year Parkman took a trip to 
 Detroit to study the scenes of The Con 
 spiracy of Pontiac, the first of his studies 
 of the great conflict between the French 
 and the English for this huge Western 
 Empire. He interviewed everyone of 
 antiquarian tastes, made topographical 
 studies, and gathered a mass of notes 
 which gave life to his history. 
 
 This trip showed Parkman that he must 
 go further west if he would see the Indian 
 before the vices of civilization robbed him 
 of his ancient traits and customs. So the 
 
 [106] 
 
FRANCIS PARK.MAN 
 
 FROM A PHOTOGRAPH TAKEN IN 1882 
 COPYRIGHT 1897 BV LITTLE, BROWN & COMPANY 
 
FRANCIS PARKMAN S HISTORICAL WORK 
 
 next year, in company with Quincy A. 
 Shaw, a fellow-enthusiast in the study of 
 Cooper and Catlin, Parkman set out for 
 a trip to California and Oregon. This was 
 in the Spring of 1846, three years before 
 the great gold rush to California. The 
 whole country west of the Rocky Moun 
 tains was then the territory of Oregon, and 
 Parkman saw thoroughly only the region 
 now known as Nebraska, Colorado and 
 Wyoming. He and Shaw lived with the 
 Ogillallah tribe and accompanied the chiefs 
 on hunting expeditions and even upon a 
 war raid on the Snake Indians. It was a 
 fine opportunity to study the Indian as he 
 lived, but it cost Parkman very dear, for 
 living exclusively on a meat diet he was 
 attacked by dysentery and reduced to 
 great weakness. Only his iron will kept 
 him in the saddle and led him to undertake 
 alone a hard trip in order to see two Indian 
 tribes on the warpath. He accumulated 
 a mass of material and in early fall returned 
 to the East. 
 
 The poor food, exposure and violent 
 exertion of this trip resulted in an affedion 
 of the eyes which threatened blindness. 
 For two years Parkman was greatly 
 reduced, but during this heavy siege of 
 
GREAT SPIRITUAL WRITERS 
 
 illness he di dated Tbe Oregon Trait y the 
 fine record of his Western trip, which 
 aroused little interest at the time, although 
 it has since been recognized as one of the 
 best studies of the blanket Indians of the 
 plains. 
 
 From this time the story of Parkman s 
 life is the record of an unwearied fight 
 against disease and pain. In the spring of 
 1848, when his sufferings were at their 
 worst, he decided to begin the story of 
 The Conspiracy of Pontiac at Detroit, 
 which, had it succeeded, would have 
 changed the history of France in the New 
 World. To permit him to write he had 
 a wired frame constructed, of the size of 
 a sheet of letter-paper, with a pasteboard 
 back. The paper was inserted between 
 the pasteboard and the wires and, guided 
 by these wires, Parkman could write with 
 a black lead crayon, with closed eyes. 
 Part of the first volume of his history was 
 composed in this way and part was dic 
 tated. The authorities which he had 
 gathered were read to him. In this pain 
 ful way, during two and a half years, the 
 book was slowly prepared. It betrays no 
 sign of the author s hard work. In pictur 
 esque description, in freshness of interest^ 
 
 [108.1 
 
FRANCIS PARKMAN S HISTORICAL WORK 
 
 and in a certain charm of style, it scored 
 a great success. The best critics declared 
 that the book was as readable as a novel, 
 because Parkman s Indians were real flesh 
 and blood, and Pontiac was a leader who 
 aroused the reader s keen interest. 
 
 After the publication of his first book 
 troubles fell upon Parkman thick and fast. 
 He lost his wife and his little boy and was 
 left with two young daughters. His mala 
 dies increased so that he could do no work 
 for two years. But his fortitude remained 
 unbroken and at his country home at 
 Jamaica Pond he devoted himself to the 
 culture of roses. When, finally, he was 
 able to resume his literary work he found 
 that his rose garden had saved him from 
 bitterness. 
 
 So he set about his chosen work which 
 engrossed him for nearly thirty years. 
 The first volume was tfhe Pioneers of 
 France in the New World and this was 
 followed by tfhe Jesuits in North America, 
 La Salle and the Discovery of the Great 
 West, The Old Regime, Frontenac, A Half 
 Century of Conflict and Montcalm and 
 Wolfe. For each of these Parkman made 
 laborious researches, having thousands of 
 pages of manuscript copied from the 
 
 [109] 
 
GREAT SPIRITUAL WRITERS 
 
 archives in Paris and London and from 
 letters found in Montreal and Quebec. 
 He read all the Jesuit Relations one 
 hundred volumes of the manuscript reports 
 of French missionaries in Canada to the 
 home office in Paris. 
 
 The reader who does not know Parkman 
 may begin safely with any of the series, 
 but I would recommend either Pontiac or 
 Montcalm and Wolfe, after a reading of 
 The Oregon Trail. In any of Parkman s 
 histories the reader will be impressed by 
 the clearness of the narrative, the splendid 
 portraits of the great chara&ers, the 
 graphic pictures of wild life in the Western 
 wilderness and the scholarly fair-minded 
 conclusions that he reaches after close 
 study of all the fads. His sympathies, 
 naturally, were with the English, and he 
 came in for some sharp criticism from 
 French-Canadians, but he had warm 
 friends among this race who believed in 
 his impartiality. From English critics 
 Parkman received unstinted praise. To 
 the sympathetic reader Parkman s real self 
 will be seen in the ardor with which he 
 described the bravery and endurance of 
 such heroes as Champlain and La Salle, 
 Tonty and Wolfe. 
 
 [no] 
 
MARK TWAIN 
 
 OUR FINEST 
 
 HUMORIST 
 
 SPRUNG FROM POVERTY, HE WON FAME 
 BY "THE INNOCENTS ABROAD" His 
 BEST BOOK "THE ADVENTURES OF 
 HUCKLEBERRY FINN." 
 
 IF a canvas of intelligent readers were 
 made in any Western State today, the 
 first place among American men of letters 
 would be given by popular vote to Mark 
 Twain. The East does not yet hold him 
 in the same high regard, but every year 
 sees a gain in his popularity with the read 
 ing public. More American than Whitman 
 himself, he appeals to a very wide audience 
 because he is not only the ablest of our 
 humorists, but in his later years he proved 
 that he was a novelist of the first rank as 
 well as an historian and a philosopher. 
 It took Mark Twain many years to live 
 down the idea that he was simply a teller 
 
GREAT SPIRITUAL WRITERS 
 
 of funny stones; but Huckleberry Finn and 
 the Recollections of Joan of Arc abundantly 
 proved that he was far more than a 
 humorist. 
 
 In no other country could Mark Twain 
 have reached such eminence as he enjoyed 
 during the last ten years of his life. It is 
 a far cry from the barefooted boy of Han 
 nibal, Missouri, to the first citizen of New 
 York. Occasionally in Europe is seen such 
 a spectacular rise as that of Lloyd-George, 
 but in the main the political and literary 
 honors in the Old World belong to those 
 born to ample leisure and fortune. Had 
 Mark Twain been born abroad he would 
 probably have remained a printer or a 
 river pilot. In this country, where oppor 
 tunity beckons to everyone who has brains 
 and ambition, Mark Twain dropped pilot 
 ing and took up newspaper work, which 
 proved, as in the case of many American 
 authors, the stepping-stone to success. 
 
 The life of Mark Twain affords a good 
 example of the splendid opportunities in 
 America open to those who have the ability 
 to grasp them. Mark Twain had some 
 thing more than mere literary talent; he 
 had genius of the highest order, for only 
 genius will explain the astonishing develop- 
 
 [112] 
 
MARK TWAIN 
 
 FROM A PHOTOGRAPH. COPYRIGHT 1905 BY 
 HARPER & BROTHERS 
 
OUR FINEST HUMORIST 
 
 ment of his literary faculty in an environ 
 ment which was distinctly hostile to any 
 imaginative work. The poor boy of 
 Hannibal, Missouri, had no advantages 
 beyond those of his companions, but like 
 most of the famous American writers he 
 was a tireless reader and early in life he 
 drifted into a printing office, that training 
 school which inspired Whitman, Howells 
 and Bret Harte. There he found the tools 
 which he learned to use so deftly; but his 
 was no sudden success. Probably the 
 rough life of Nevada and California in 
 early mining days served to develop his 
 humorous ability and The Jumping Frog 
 of Calaveras, a very amusing story which 
 he heard told by a miner in the California 
 foothills, first made his name known from 
 Atlantic to Pacific. Then came lecturing 
 and the Great Opportunity. This was 
 nothing less than the first organized pleas 
 ure excursion to the Old World. Out of 
 it came The Innocents Abroad, which set a 
 new record for books of travel, and estab 
 lished Mark Twain s fame as a humorist. 
 This book should have demonstrated 
 that its author was among the greatest of 
 prose writers, because scattered through it 
 are brilliant pages of description and fine 
 
GREAT SPIRITUAL WRITERS 
 
 bits of philosophy, all couched in a style 
 that is true, strong and original. But the 
 great public paid no attention to anything 
 except the jokes and the delightfully irrev 
 erent passages in which this new humorist 
 flayed the travel writers of the old school. 
 Many since Mark Twain s day have ex 
 pressed their lack of appreciation of the 
 Old Masters, but it remained for him to 
 kill by savage ridicule the absurd affec 
 tations of those who simply followed in the 
 footsteps of former critics. No one can 
 read the chapters on the Holy Land with 
 out being impressed by Mark Twain s 
 graphic pictures of sacred shrines now in 
 the hands of the Unspeakable Turk. These 
 chapters reveal the author s genuine rever 
 ence as well as his close study of the Bible. 
 Years after, Mark Twain wrote A Tramp 
 Abroad, in which he followed the route of 
 his first pilgrimage, but though this book 
 is written with more artistic finish, it lacks 
 the rollicking fun and the spontaneity of 
 the early work. 
 
 Life on the Mississippi an autobiog 
 raphy with some imaginative touches is 
 one of Mark Twain s great books. As 
 readable as a novel, it takes you back to 
 those old days when passenger boats ran 
 
OUR FINEST HUMORIST 
 
 up and down the great river from St. Louis 
 to New Orleans, and when the pilot of one 
 of these fine steamers was as great a man 
 as the driver of a six-horse stage coach in 
 Nevada. You see at once that Mark 
 Twain loved this life on the river and that 
 it is pure joy for him to tell of his hard 
 training as a cub pilot and of the many 
 episodes that marked his life at the wheel. 
 With consummate art he has told this 
 story of a strange life, so that today it is 
 one of his most popular books in this 
 country as well as in France and Germany. 
 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn 
 followed in the next season two master 
 pieces in successive years. Tom Sawyer is 
 a book for boys, although thousands of 
 mature readers have enjoyed it. It is a 
 faithful picture of the author s boyhood in 
 a sleepy little Mississippi river town, and 
 as a study of boy psychology it has never 
 been surpassed; but it is not literature in 
 the same sense that The Adventures of 
 Huckleberry Finn is literature. Many 
 readers bracket these two books together, 
 but they have little in common except 
 their literary art. All the details of 
 Huckleberry Finn serve to paint the most 
 graphic picture ever drawn of life in the 
 
GREAT SPIRITUAL WRITERS 
 
 Southern States before the War. The free 
 ing of the negro Jim from the calaboose, 
 the floating of Huck and Jim down the 
 Mississippi on their raft, the advent of the 
 two tramps and their remarkable adven 
 tures, the episode of the terrible blood 
 feud all these go to make up a unique 
 book. It was literary genius that impelled 
 Mark Twain to write this book without 
 elaborating the great scenes. This makes 
 the Grangerford-Shepperdson family feud 
 one of the most impressive things in all 
 literature. One can fancy the fun Mark 
 got out of the tricks of the Duke and the 
 King, who are among the most lovable 
 rogues in picaresque fidion. If you think 
 my praise of this book too high take down 
 the book and read it again. I think you 
 will agree with me that as pure literature 
 it is worthy of a place among the great 
 books of the world. 
 
 Mark Twain always had a keen desire 
 to show that the "good old times" did not 
 compare with the present age. This 
 resulted in two very attractive stories 
 The Prince and the Pauper and A Connecti 
 cut Yankee in King Arthur s Court. The 
 first is a delightful romance full of real 
 pathos and humanity, which has warmed 
 
 [116] 
 
OUR FINEST HUMORIST 
 
 the heart of many youthful readers. The 
 second is Mark Twain s tremendous on 
 slaught upon British class tyranny and 
 time-honored privilege. Through the per 
 son of the Connecticut Yankee the Amer 
 ican vents his hatred of many British 
 institutions, but he is so extravagant in 
 his language that he defeats his own pur 
 pose. The book, which should have been 
 one of Mark Twain s best, is really one of 
 his worst because of its many artistic 
 blemishes. 
 
 The great romance in Mark Twain s life 
 was his passion for Joan of Arc. When a 
 boy he picked up in the street a scrap of 
 paper containing an outline of the life and 
 the terrible tragedy of the Maid of Orleans, 
 and this incited him to read everything he 
 could find about her. Twelve years he 
 devoted to reading and research and two 
 years to the actual writing of the Recol 
 lections of Joan of Arc. The result is not 
 his best book, as he fondly imagined, 
 because his genius did not move as freely 
 in the past as in the present, but it is a 
 splendid historical picture, full of that 
 spiritual power which will make it endure 
 as long as the language in which it was 
 written. 
 
GREAT SPIRITUAL WRITERS 
 
 Of Clemens, the man, as contrasted 
 with Mark Twain, the author, it is a 
 pleasure to say that he developed with the 
 years from a rather hard, irreverent, fre 
 quently cruel humorist into one of the 
 wisest and most lovable of men. Much 
 of this refinement was due to the daily 
 influence of the wife whom he adored and 
 of association with men like Howells, 
 Warner and the Rev. Joseph Twichell, 
 who was his constant companion. No 
 American author during his life enjoyed 
 his popularity more than Mark Twain, and 
 none was so singularly honored in England. 
 His later years were clouded with many 
 sorrows, but through all he preserved the 
 sweetness of his nature. To meet many 
 authors is a keen disappointment, as they 
 reveal petty traits and unlovely characters; 
 but no one ever met Mark Twain without 
 being impressed by his great sincerity and 
 his goodness of heart. 
 
 [118] 
 
BRET HARTE S 
 
 CALIFORNIA TALES 
 
 AND POEMS 
 
 PIONEER LIFE AMONG GOLD MINERS 
 MIRRORED BY A MASTER OF THE 
 SHORT STORY ONE OF THE GREAT 
 ARTISTS IN VERSE. 
 
 BRET HARTE is the one writer of un 
 doubted genius who made California 
 and its pioneers known around the world. 
 His creative activity ran over forty-five 
 years, yet in all that time he seldom chose 
 any other scene for his stories than the 
 early California which he knew so well. 
 Only one side of that pioneer life he 
 painted with such remarkable clearness 
 and force that every reader saw it with his 
 eyes. It was the purely adventurous life 
 of the California mining camps that Bret 
 Harte exploited with the same fidelity that 
 Kipling has pictured the life of the English 
 man in India. The miner who varies 
 
GREAT SPIRITUAL WRITERS 
 
 feverish work with long bouts at the faro 
 table, the professional gambler, the stage- 
 driver, the lawyer, the dance-hall keeper, 
 the harlot and the Chinaman these are 
 Bret Harte s leading types. He makes 
 them all picturesque, but in none of his 
 stories does he give any glimpse of that 
 other life led by many pioneers that 
 life of hard work, careful saving and ulti 
 mate wealth which led to the unparalleled 
 development of California. He never 
 touches on the men who built schools and 
 churches and laid the foundations of New 
 England life in a new and sunnier land. 
 
 Bret Harte was largely self-educated. 
 Forced by the death of his father to work 
 in an office at the early age of nine years, 
 he gained by reading what ordinary school 
 boys acquire by painstaking study. At 
 eighteen he left Albany, his native city, 
 and went to California, where his mother 
 had married again. It was his good for 
 tune to be a school-teacher and an express 
 messenger in the foothill counties of Cali 
 fornia in the late fifties the period 
 which witnessed the decline and end of 
 placer mining. Less than a year Harte 
 spent in this land of the pioneer miners, 
 yet in that short time he gained impressions 
 
 [120] 
 
-- . .;: 
 
 BRET HARTE 
 FROM A PHOTOGRAPH TAKEN BY HOLLYER IN 1896 
 
BRET HARTE S TALES AND POEMS 
 
 of scenes and characters upon which he 
 drew for over forty years, while working 
 in an alien land among alien people. In 
 one of his reminiscent sketches he speaks 
 of his "eager absorption of the strange life 
 around me and a photographic sensitive 
 ness to certain scenes and incidents.* 
 This is as good a description as has ever 
 been given of creative literary genius. 
 
 Like many other American authors, Bret 
 Harte became a compositor, and it was 
 this work in a printing office which stimu 
 lated him to write. He finally drifted to 
 San Francisco and there, after several 
 ventures on weekly newspapers, he became 
 the editor of a new magazine, the OVER 
 LAND MONTHLY. To the second number 
 of this magazine Harte contributed The 
 Luck of Roaring Camp, a short story brim- 
 full of the dare-devil, hilarious spirit of 
 early California mining days. The broad 
 humor, the defiance of all social conven 
 tions, the mingled pathos and art of this 
 story, attracted the American reading pub 
 lic and when this story was followed by 
 another short masterpiece, The Outcasts 
 of Poker Flat and a striking humorous 
 poem, The Heathen Chinee, Harte gained 
 a national reputation almost in a day. 
 
 [12!] 
 
GREAT SPIRITUAL WRITERS 
 
 A Boston publishing house paid him 
 $10,000 for the exclusive right to every 
 thing which he should write in a year. If 
 the firm had known him better it would 
 never have made such a bargain, for he 
 did little for the money. For several years 
 he wrote short stories and sketches and 
 lectured throughout the country. Then 
 he secured a consulship at Crefeld, Ger 
 many, and soon after a similar post at 
 Glasgow. Seven years of this consular 
 service sufficed. Thereafter he lived in 
 London and produced about a book a year 
 for many years. Exile from California 
 seemed to lend force to his imagination, 
 for some of his best work was done in his 
 later years. 
 
 The poetical output of Bret Harte was 
 comparatively small, but this verse is of 
 high quality. Like his prose it reveals the 
 hand of the master-craftsman. Many of 
 the Spanish legends of early California 
 Harte has put into beautiful verse. His 
 is the best bit of poetry on San Francisco 
 and his is also the finest poetical tribute 
 on the death of Dickens. The Heathen 
 Chinee the most famous of Harte s 
 poems was written in the metre of 
 Swinburne s Atalanta in Calydon, which 
 
 [122] 
 
FACSIMILE OF A PAGE OF THE MANUSCRIPT OF THE 
 
 FAMOUS POEM "THE HEATHEN CHINEE" 
 
 BY BRET HARTE 
 
BRET HARTE S TALES AND POEMS 
 
 has since become popular with humorous 
 bards. 
 
 The best way to make the acquaintance 
 of Bret Harte is through he Luck of 
 Roaring Camp and Other Sketches. These 
 short stories are all in perfect form. My 
 favorite is The Outcasts of Poker Flat, 
 which tells of the adventures of four 
 disreputables who have been evicted from 
 the mining camp of Poker Flat. They 
 expect to cross the mountain divide and 
 reach a neighboring camp, but Uncle Billy, 
 a hanger-on about saloons, smells the com 
 ing snowstorm and deserts his companions 
 in the night, taking the pack-animals and 
 most of the provisions. John Oakhurst, a 
 professional gambler, is left with two 
 women, Old Mother Shipton and a hand 
 some damsel, known as "The Duchess." 
 The outcasts are joined by a young couple 
 who have eloped and are on their way to 
 Poker Flat to be married. Oakhurst 
 knows that their fate is sealed, as the first 
 snowfall in the Sierra is usually heavy, but 
 he keeps this knowledge from his com 
 panions, as well as any revelations about 
 the character of the outcasts from the two 
 innocents. The story of this camp among 
 the snows is beautifully told, with many 
 
 [123] 
 
GREAT SPIRITUAL WRITERS 
 
 humorous touches, such as the tale of the 
 Iliad related by the young rustic who 
 refers to the swift-footed Achilles as "Ash- 
 heels." The other campers perish of cold 
 and hunger, but Oakhurst s body is found 
 near by, with a derringer bullet through 
 the brain, and these last words, written on 
 the deuce of clubs, pinned to a pine tree 
 with his bowie knife "Struck a streak of 
 bad luck and passed in his checks." 
 
 Tennessee s Partner is another perfect 
 short story which relates the fidelity of a 
 miner for his partner, although that part 
 ner had stolen his wife. Tennessee is the 
 evil partner, but when he returned to the 
 lonely cabin after this escapade, he was 
 forgiven. Seized by a Vigilance Committee 
 for holding up a man on the stage road, 
 he is being given a fair trial when the part 
 ner appears and pouring all of his gold-dust 
 on the table offers it as a ransom for 
 Tennessee. This attempt to bribe Judge 
 Lynch proved fatal to the accused man 
 and he was promptly hanged. Then came 
 the faithful partner with his little donkey 
 and cart containing the home-made coffin. 
 He cut down the body of his friend and 
 carried it away in the coffin for burial. 
 The story is an idyl of fidelity that is 
 
BRET HARTE S TALES AND POEMS 
 
 stronger than death and it is told with a 
 simple pathos that is never theatrical. 
 Observe the last page of this story, giving 
 the account of the partner s death, with 
 its touches of rare pathos. 
 
 The works of Bret Harte fill nineteen 
 volumes, of which only two are devoted 
 to subjects outside of California. Harte 
 was essentially a short-story writer, his 
 only long romance, Gabriel Conroy, being 
 poorly constructed and lacking in con 
 tinuous interest. It was an attempt to 
 put into the form of fiction the terrible 
 tragedy of the Donner party, many of 
 whom perished in the snow near the 
 Summit, only a few rods away from the 
 main overland trail. Yet this book con 
 tains the finest description of Winter in 
 the High Sierra, and it is full of humor in 
 the relations of Gabriel and his shrewd, 
 managing little sister. 
 
 Bret Harte has drawn in his stories a 
 gallery of characters that appeal to the 
 reader as real flesh and blood people. 
 Among these may be mentioned the two 
 professional gamblers, Oakhurst and Jack 
 Hamlin, the typical Southern gentleman of 
 the old school, Colonel Starbottle, and 
 Yuba Bill, the spectacular stage-driver. 
 
GREAT SPIRITUAL WRITERS 
 
 Harte possessed in supreme degree the 
 faculty of describing a place or a character 
 in a paragraph which clings to the memory. 
 Above all, he seemed to have ever before 
 his eyes a vision of the California foothills, 
 with their dust-laden air, their pungent 
 odors of pine and bay, and their back 
 ground of the snow-crowned mountain wall 
 of the Sierra Nevada. Endless was the 
 variety of the tales he wove about these 
 California scenes, but what makes them 
 appeal powerfully to readers who have 
 never seen the Far Western land that he 
 celebrates, is the joy that he exhibits in 
 the telling and the freshness and enthu 
 siasm of his pictures of the State that he 
 loved and made the whole world love 
 with him. 
 
 126] 
 
HOWELLS 
 
 FIRST OF LIVING 
 AMERICAN NOVELISTS 
 
 A GENIAL HUMORIST WHO HAS PAINTED 
 MANY PHASES OF OUR SOCIAL LIFE 
 His BOOKS OF TRAVEL. 
 
 PROBABLY the most popular of contem 
 porary American men of letters is 
 William Dean Howells, who easily ranks 
 first among our living novelists. For over 
 a half-century he has been one of the most 
 prolific of American writers, yet not a 
 single one of his novels or his books of 
 essays or notes of travel can be called a 
 pot-boiler. Howells began to write during 
 the great Civil War and he has written 
 steadily ever since, averaging about a book 
 a year. Considering the large number of 
 poems, plays, novels, essays, critical esti 
 mates of authors and travel sketches that 
 he has produced, his average of excellence 
 is very high. 
 
GREAT SPIRITUAL WRITERS 
 
 Howells has all the New England traits, 
 with a broader outlook which he gained 
 from early association with the people of 
 the Northern Reserve of Ohio. The Puri 
 tan strain was dominant among these 
 settlers in Northern Ohio but the Western 
 atmosphere was fatal to that class feeling 
 which the intellectual New Englander 
 inherits. So Howells, who very early 
 showed great literary aptitude, escaped the 
 narrowing influence of class prejudice. 
 His boyish fancy turned to poetry, but 
 nothing that he produced in verse is 
 worthy to rank with his best prose work. 
 
 Like Franklin, Whitman, Mark Twain 
 and Bret Harte, Howells* real education 
 was secured in a country printing office of 
 which his father was the proprietor. There 
 is something about composition the set 
 ting up in type by hand of other people s 
 writing which stimulates literary work. 
 A boy with an insatiable craving for read 
 ing, if placed in a printing office, usually 
 becomes a writer. Howells had enjoyed a 
 high school education; he knew some Latin 
 and a little Greek, and he had been an 
 omnivorous reader. With a keen literary 
 faculty he had the foundation laid for 
 literary culture. With the strong desire 
 
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 
 A CHARACTERISTIC PORTRAIT 
 
GREATEST LIVING AMERICAN NOVELIST 
 
 to express his thought in verse he wrote 
 much poetry which is above the average 
 magazine standard, but this verse was 
 forgotten when he began to express him 
 self in his natural medium of prose. 
 
 When he was twenty-two years old and 
 had had some experience as a reporter and 
 correspondent for several Ohio newspapers, 
 the youthful Howells made a pilgrimage 
 to Boston. He had had several poems 
 printed in the ATLANTIC MONTHLY and 
 naturally his first visit was to Lowell, then 
 editor of the magazine. Fifty years after, 
 in Literary Friends and Acquaintance, 
 Howells gives a remarkably readable 
 account of this journey and of his first 
 meeting with Lowell, Emerson, Hawthorne, 
 Longfellow, Holmes, and others of the 
 circle of New England writers who had 
 made the ATLANTIC famous. They were 
 as gods to him, but wonderful to relate, 
 he found them all simple in manners, easily 
 accessible and full of interest in his literary 
 ambitions, except Emerson, whose aloof 
 ness chilled the enthusiastic neophyte. 
 Howells also visited New York and saw 
 the leading literary lights, but in neither 
 city was he able to establish any connec 
 tion, so he returned home. He did some 
 
 [129] 
 
GREAT SPIRITUAL WRITERS 
 
 campaign work for Lincoln which secured 
 him the consulate at Venice, with a salary 
 of $1,500 a yean There he mastered 
 Italian and gave himself up to the study 
 of Dante and the great modern writers of 
 Italy. These four years of literary leisure 
 colored all his life. He wrote articles on 
 Italian cities, afterwards grouped in Vene 
 tian Life and Italian Journeys^ and he 
 developed a prose style of singular flexi 
 bility and charm. On his return after the 
 close of the Civil War Howells did some 
 literary work on the New York NATION, 
 but he gladly accepted the assistant- 
 editorship of the ATLANTIC MONTHLY. 
 
 From that time, almost a full half-cen 
 tury ago, Howells has been a magazine 
 editor, with the later years devoted wholly 
 to literary work. He has written over 
 thirty novels and romances, a dozen 
 comedies and farces, and more than a 
 dozen books of criticism, travel and remin 
 iscence. Although his allegiance to Bos 
 ton was very strong, Howells in 1887 
 established a connection with the Harpers, 
 in New York and from that time all his 
 books have borne the New York publishers 
 imprint, and most of his work has appeared 
 first in the Harper periodicals. 
 
GREATEST LIVING AMERICAN NOVELIST 
 
 Howells began his career as a novelist 
 as far back as 1872 with Their Wedding 
 Journey, a charming tale spiced with quiet 
 humor, but it was The Lady of the Aroos- 
 took, issued seven years later, which first 
 gave him fame. This is a story of the 
 voyage of Lydia Blood, a New England 
 girl, to Italy on one of the old sailing 
 packets in order to study singing. She 
 goes direct to Trieste, where a female 
 cousin is to take the girl to her home in 
 Venice. Her parents died during her 
 childhood and she has made her home with 
 her grandparents in a small New England 
 village. Very amusing are the scenes 
 describing the girl s trip to Boston with 
 her grandfather and the arrangements for 
 her voyage. Only when she is at sea does 
 she discover that she is the only woman 
 on the ship, even the cook being a negro 
 man. But the captain treats her as he 
 would treat one of his own girls, and the 
 other passengers, three young men, are 
 polite and considerate. One of these is a 
 young aristocrat of Boston, who begins by 
 ridicule of Lydia to his companion and 
 ends by falling in love with the girl. The 
 voyage is admirably described, the only 
 sensational incident being the fall over- 
 
GREAT SPIRITUAL WRITERS 
 
 board of one of the passengers who is a 
 dipsomaniac and his rescue by Lydia s 
 admirer. The best work in the book is 
 devoted to Lydia s introduction to Italian 
 life and customs at Venice. There we 
 leave her happy in her love, after a week 
 of suffering during which she believes that 
 her lover has forsaken her. The book is 
 noteworthy as giving a perfect picture of 
 the New England temperament in contact 
 with a strange environment. Although 
 we may laugh at Lydia s ignorance of 
 many things, yet we respect her for her 
 truth, her common-sense and her inde 
 pendence. 
 
 Another novel by Howells which is 
 typical is A Modern Instance, published in 
 1882. It is devoted to a full-length picture 
 of a young American, Bartley Campbell, 
 who marries Marcia, the daughter of an 
 old lawyer. Bartley has one grave defect: 
 he has no moral principle. If things had 
 gone right with him he probably would 
 have settled down into a quiet, conservative 
 citizen. As it is, he gives way to a tend 
 ency to drink, and his moral degeneration 
 is slow but sure. Mr. Howells, with rare 
 power, shows us how inevitable is Hartley s 
 decline after the first step in self-indulgence 
 
STUDIO or WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 
 THE INTERIOR OF A REMODELED STABLE, A SINGLE, 
 
 LARGE, SUNNY ROOM 
 COPYRIGHT 1911 BY HARPER & BROTHERS 
 
GREATEST LIVING AMERICAN NOVELIST 
 
 and how this decline is stimulated by the 
 jealous disposition of his wife. In the 
 hands of a woman of tact Bartley might 
 have been saved, but his wife simply aggra 
 vates his malady. Finally he abandons 
 her, going out to Arizona, where he begins 
 a secret suit for divorce. Marcia learns of 
 this legal proceeding and with her old 
 father journeys to the West to contest the 
 suit. The figure of Bartley in the court 
 room the once dapper, clean-cut young 
 fellow now a bloated, shabby hanger-on 
 about the courts, with his fat neck hanging 
 over his greasy coat collar will always 
 remain in the reader s memory. Equally 
 impressive is the figure of the old Judge, 
 Marcia s father, who denounces the man 
 who has ruined his daughter s life. Pro 
 fessor William Lyon Phelps compares this 
 book with George Eliot s Romo/a and 
 declares that the American novelist s pic 
 ture of the gradual moral degeneration of 
 Bartley Campbell is finer than the English 
 author s sketch of the downfall of Tito 
 Melima. 
 
 Other fine stories by Howells are ^The 
 Rise of Silas Lapbam, a powerful sketch of 
 a self-made American, and Indian Summer, 
 a comedy of the tangled relations of a 
 
GREAT SPIRITUAL WRITERS 
 
 young girl and a middle-aged man and 
 woman. Throughout half the book the 
 man sincerely believes he is in love with 
 the romantic young girl, as she believes 
 that she loves him. There is very little 
 action in the story, but the conversations 
 are as witty as the dialogue in the third 
 act of Oscar Wilde s Lady Windermeres 
 Fan. All the talk between the two women 
 is also admirably done. It is surprising 
 that this book should have ceased to keep 
 its hold on American readers, as it is far 
 and away better than most of the humor 
 ous stories issued every year. 
 
 Howells has tried his hand at a number 
 of farces, most of which are very good 
 reading, but they have lacked action to 
 succeed on the stage. His sketches of 
 travel, of which he has written many 
 volumes, are always readable, although of 
 late he has fallen into the style of Henry 
 James, which makes his work very hard 
 reading. It is singular, the influence of 
 Tolstoi upon Howells later novels and the 
 influence of James upon his style. During 
 the last ten years Howells seems to fancy 
 that he must have some moral doctrine to 
 preach in his novels, with the result that 
 his work reminds one of a religious tract 
 
GREATEST LIVING AMERICAN NOVELIST 
 
 disguised as a novel. All the freshness and 
 spontaneity that marked his earlier novels 
 is gone. Then, too, he seems to think, 
 with Mr. James, that his thought cannot 
 be expressed in simple language, but must 
 be elaborated and refined to the last degree. 
 The result is the loss of that simple, flexible 
 style which was once his greatest charm. 
 It is perhaps in reminiscence that Mr. 
 Howells is most happy. In A Boy s Town 
 he has described happily and with great 
 humor his boyhood in an Ohio village, 
 while in Literary Friends and Acquaintance 
 he has sketched most deftly the life of 
 Cambridge and the great figures in New 
 England literature of forty years ago. To 
 Howells also belongs the credit of having 
 encouraged and aided by his wise advice 
 many of the successful American writers 
 of today. 
 
 [135 
 
MARKHAM 
 THE POET OF THE 
 AMERICAN PEOPLE 
 
 WALLACE CALLED HIM "THE GREATEST 
 POET OF THE SOCIAL PASSION" FAME 
 CAME TO THE CALIFORNIAN WITH "THE 
 MAN WITH THE HOE." 
 
 EDWIN MARKHAM and William Dean 
 Howells I have selected as the best 
 representatives of living American spiritual 
 writers because of their work and their 
 influence. In looking over the field of 
 contemporary American authors one is apt 
 to be misled by the ephemeral popularity 
 of certain writers who shrewdly respond 
 to the literary demands of the time. Or 
 he is inclined to give too great prominence 
 to literary skill, as in the case of Henry 
 James, who was acclaimed by leading Eng 
 lish and American critics as one of the 
 greatest of our writers, yet whose works 
 are written in a style so involved and so 
 
EDWIN MARKHAM 
 
 FROM A FAVORITE PHOTOGRAPH OF MR. MARKHAM 
 
 TAKEN BY W. E. DASSONVILLE, 
 
 SAN FRANCISCO 
 
THE POET OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE 
 
 artificial that in my judgment the next 
 generation will refuse to read any of his 
 books except Daisy Miller. The tendency 
 of our own day is toward the undue 
 emphasis of sex problems in literature and 
 on the stage, and so greatly has this warped 
 our literary judgment that the coming 
 generation will be amazed at the popu 
 larity of certain books of this period and 
 at the moral decadence of the stage and 
 the decline of good acting. In fact, we 
 have reached the climax of the gross and 
 the vulgar on the stage just as we have 
 neared the limit in the foolish fad of 
 cabaret-dancing and the popular mania for 
 moving pictures. These things cannot 
 become permanent without seriously im 
 pairing the very fibre of American char 
 acter. Without a strong reaction from the 
 present rage for indecent plays, foolish or 
 brutal moving pictures and erotic fidion, 
 American life is doomed to a far lower 
 plane than it now occupies. England and 
 France were both being weakened in the 
 same way, when the war came and served 
 as the most drastic check to all literary 
 and social heresies founded on lack of 
 sound moral character. 
 
 Edwin Markham I have taken as the 
 
 1137] 
 
GREAT SPIRITUAL WRITERS 
 
 foremost of the new writers of our period 
 because of his moral force and his keen 
 sympathy with the struggles of those who 
 work with their hands. Coming up, as he 
 did, from the ranks of manual labor, 
 securing an education by hard work and 
 painful self-denial, he has a feeling for the 
 working classes which no one can share 
 who has not earned his bread in the sweat 
 of his brow. Had he written nothing 
 more than The Man With the Hoe he 
 would have been worthy of a place among 
 the great laureates of labor; but in both 
 prose and verse he has done fine work in 
 helping to secure better conditions in mills 
 and factories, and especially in protecting 
 young children from the selfishness of 
 parents and employers. 
 
 Markham s natural method of expression 
 is a free blank verse, which he handles 
 with great ease and power. As he says 
 himself, his thought unconsciously crystal 
 lizes in this form of verse, although he is 
 skilful in handling various poetical metres. 
 Before he wrote the poem which suddenly 
 flashed his fame around the world, he had 
 written some fine sonnets and other poems, 
 all of which were tinged with his deep 
 earnestness. Early in his career he was 
 
THE POET OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE 
 
 profoundly stirred by a photographic 
 reproduction of Millet s "The Man With the 
 Hoe", and some of the thoughts which it 
 inspired he cast in poetic form. More 
 than a decade later he saw the original 
 painting in the art gallery of a San Fran 
 cisco millionaire. As Markham himself 
 says: 
 
 "Millet s The Man With the Hoe is 
 to me the most solemnly impressive of all 
 modern paintings. As I look upon the 
 august ruin that it pictures I sometimes 
 dare to think that its strength surpasses 
 the power of Michael Angelo. * * * For 
 an hour I stood before the painting, 
 absorbing the majesty of its despair, the 
 tremendous import of its admonition. I 
 stood there, the power and the terror of 
 the thing growing upon my heart, the pity 
 and sorrow of it eating into my soul. It 
 came to me with a dim echo in it of my 
 own life came with its pitiless pathos 
 and mournful grandeur." 
 
 Markham was so deeply moved by this 
 study of Millet s picture that he took up 
 his original draft, expanded it, and pro 
 duced the poem as it stands today. At a 
 meeting of a literary club in San Francisco 
 he read this poem, which so greatly im- 
 
GREAT SPIRITUAL WRITERS 
 
 pressed Bailey Millard, then Sunday editor 
 of the San Francisco EXAMINER, that he 
 secured the manuscript for publication in 
 his paper. The day it appeared corre 
 spondents of several Eastern newspapers 
 telegraphed it to their journals and it was 
 cabled to London. Markham s name as a 
 world poet was thus flashed over the land 
 and under the sea, and in a single day he 
 found himself famous ! 
 
 This great poem to my mind the 
 finest thing that has been produced in 
 American literature since the Civil War 
 consists of five stanzas, of which I will 
 quote here the first and fourth, merely to 
 give an idea of the quality of the verse 
 and its large number of unforgetable lines : 
 
 Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans 
 Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground, 
 The emptiness of ages in his face, 
 And on his back the burden of the world. 
 Who made him dead to rapture and despair, 
 A thing that grieves not and that never hopes, 
 Stolid and stunned, a brother to the ox? i 
 
 Who loosened and let down that brutal jaw? 
 Whose was the hand that slanted back this brow? 
 Whose breath blew out the light within this brain? 
 * * * 
 
 O masters, lords and rulers in all lands, 
 
 Is this the handiwork you give to God, 
 
 This monstrous thing distorted and soul-quenched? 
 
 How will you straighten up this shape; 
 
 Touch it again with immortality; 
 
 Give back the upward looking and the light; 
 
 [I 4 0] 
 
1 
 
 &; 
 
 X X 
 
 w o 
 
 2 g a *, 
 
 N . P 
 
 Z ?S 
 
THE POET OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE 
 
 Rebuild in it the music and the dream; 
 Make right the immemorial infamies, 
 Perfidious wrongs, immedicable woes? 
 
 Markham is not a poet of occasions, 
 although some of his best work, like his 
 Lincoln, was written for anniversary cele 
 brations. He does not write until the 
 spirit moves him. Hence the gap of more 
 than a decade between his second and third 
 books of verse. He does not always reach 
 the height toward which he aims, but it 
 can be said for his work that it maintains 
 a higher level than the work of any other 
 living American poet. Some may prefer 
 Whitcomb Riley, but to me Markham 
 seems to sound a finer note of a broader 
 humanity than the Hoosier poet, sweet 
 and wholesome and genuine as is all Riley s 
 work. In other words, Markham is what 
 the late Alfred Russell Wallace so aptly 
 called him, "the greatest poet of the 
 Social Passion that has yet appeared in 
 the world." 
 
 Markham seems to feel the woes of the 
 heavy-laden as no other poet of our time 
 has felt them. The burden of poverty, the 
 hopelessness of the poor creatures who are 
 always clinging to the slippery edge of the 
 abyss of want and crime, the injustice of 
 fate that keeps some of the finest natures 
 
GREAT SPIRITUAL WRITERS 
 
 forever in bondage of debt these are the 
 themes which bring forth the lightning of 
 his wrath, the thunder of his scorn. His 
 heart is so moved by the spectacle of the 
 world s unfortunates that he compels the 
 reader s pity and tears. He loses all count 
 of time and space when the spirit moves 
 him. Hence his shortest lyric seems to 
 have the freshness of the first morning, and 
 there is none of the smell of the lamp on 
 any of his work, no matter how careful 
 may be the finish of the verse. 
 
 Without apparent effort Markham also 
 seems to select the right word in every line 
 and his rhymes are never awkward nor 
 far-fetched. In fact, when he wears his 
 singing robes and is under the spell of his 
 powerful imagination, language seems to 
 become plastic under his hands. He uses 
 words as the potter uses the clay on his 
 wheel, with a few deft movements making 
 the shapeless lump take on varied forms of 
 beauty. This power is seen more signally 
 in Virgilia than in anything Markham has 
 written. That poem breathes inspiration 
 in every line, and it has a sweep of imagi 
 nation, a wealth of imagery and a rare 
 kind of prophetic power that bears one 
 along to the noble end. 
 
THE POET OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE 
 
 In Virgilia the poet gives a fine con 
 ception of the meeting of his first self with 
 his soul-mate, the woman who was formed 
 to feed his imagination and to give him 
 courage to struggle against fate, and then 
 of his fruitless quest for her throughout 
 the ages. Here are a few lines from the 
 conclusion of this poem, with the splendid 
 sweep of the verse: 
 
 I will go out where the sea-birds travel, 
 
 And mix my soul with the wind and the sea; 
 
 Let the green waves weave and the gray rains ravel, 
 And the tides go over me. 
 
 The sea is the mother of songs and sorrows, 
 
 And out of her wonder our wild loves come; 
 
 And so it will be through the long tomorrows, 
 Till all our lips are dumb. 
 
 She knows all sighs and she knows all sinning, 
 And they whisper out in her breaking wave; 
 
 She has known it all since the far beginning, , 
 Since the grief of that first grave. 
 
 She shakes the heart with her stars and thunder 
 
 And her soft, low word when the winds are late; 
 
 For the sea is Woman, the sea is Wonder 
 Her other name is Fate! 
 
 * * * 
 
 Many of our poets, when they have 
 caught the ear of the public, have heark 
 ened to the voice of the publisher and 
 have put forth poor work. But Markham 
 has written only when the spirit moved 
 him. Hence he has only three books of 
 
GREAT SPIRITUAL WRITERS 
 
 verse to his credit: The Man With the Hoe 
 and Other Poems , Lincoln and Other Poems 
 and The Shoes of Happiness and Other 
 Poems. Hence, also, there is no mediocre 
 verse in these volumes. 
 
 It is not often that a poet has an oppor 
 tunity to celebrate the State which gave 
 him his inspiration as Markham has cele 
 brated California. Though not born in 
 the Far West, Markham spent all his early 
 impressionable years in the country across 
 the bay from San Francisco. There he 
 learned what it was to earn his bread in 
 the sweat of his brow, and there as a 
 farmer s boy, he stored up those pictures 
 of the heavens and the earth which give 
 distinction to his verse. In California , the 
 Wonderful, Markham has produced a 
 unique book. It gives a mass of infor 
 mation about the resources, the history, 
 the scenic beauty and the marvelous 
 development of the Golden State, but all 
 the prosaic details are touched with poetry. 
 The man who witnessed these wonders was 
 a poet, and he was unable to write this 
 history in any other form than poetical 
 prose. This book was prepared to let the 
 world know what the Panama-Pacific 
 Exposition at San Francisco was designed 
 
THE POET OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE 
 
 to commemorate. When the great Expo 
 sition was fairly under way, Markham was 
 invited to visit it and to write his impres 
 sions. He took the occasion to visit all 
 parts of the State, and the reception that 
 he received was so hearty and so enthu 
 siastic that it quite overcame the modest 
 poet. It showed him that the bard, unlike 
 the prophet, might be honored in his own 
 home. 
 
 The poet s other book of prose is Chil 
 dren in Bondage, a startling description of 
 the many American industries in which 
 young children are stunted and ruined, 
 morally and physically, to satisfy the greed 
 of parents and employers. 
 
 Markham s hair is white but his eyes 
 are keen and his voice is vibrant with 
 strength and feeling. So we may expect 
 more poems from his pen that will help the 
 world to live the spiritual life. 
 
Bibliography 
 
 Notes of Standard Editions, with Lives, 
 Sketches, Reminiscences and Criticisms. 
 
 * HESE bibliographical notes have been 
 * prepared especially for the use of those 
 who desire to make a study of the authors 
 whose best works are discussed in this volume. 
 They lay no claim to completeness, but they 
 have been selected with an eye single to their 
 helpfulness. Many fine articles on Ameri 
 can authors are buried in the bound volumes 
 of magazines, and to these the only key is 
 Poolers Index, with its annex, which brings 
 all references up to date. Of Emerson, 
 Lowell, Hawthorne and Holmes full bibliog 
 raphies have been printed in limited editions 
 by Houghton, Miffiin Co. A Study of Eng 
 lish Prose Writers by J. S. Clark, gives 
 excellent sketches of Irving, Hawthorne, 
 Emerson, Lowell and Holmes. American 
 Prose Masters,^ W. C. Brownell, is also 
 worth careful reading. 
 
 EMERSON 
 
 Three editions of Emerson s complete works are printed by 
 Houghton, Mifflin Co. the New Centenary, the Riverside, and 
 
 [147] 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 the Little Classic each complete in twelve volumes. The first 
 has a biography and notes by Edward Waldo Emerson. These 
 notes are also printed in the large type Riverside Pocket Edition 
 recently issued by the same publishers, in twelve volumes, bound 
 in flexible leather. The volumes in all of these editions are sold 
 separately. Many of the essays are printed in separate form. 
 The poems are in the single volume Household Edition. Among 
 the mass of criticism and reminiscence of Emerson it is only 
 possible here to indicate the best books and articles for the 
 general reader. The best short estimate of Emerson is Oliver 
 Wendell Holmes Life in the American Men of Letters series. 
 James Elliott Cabot wrote the authorized biography in two 
 volumes and Edward Waldo Emerson, a son, wrote an interesting 
 sketch, Emerson in Concord, and edited his father s works and 
 the correspondence with John Stirling. Charles Eliot Norton 
 edited correspondence of Carlyle and Emerson. Good estimates 
 of Emerson s work and influence are Alexander Ireland s Ralph 
 Waldo Emerson, His Life, Genius and Writings; A. Bronson 
 Alcott s Ralph Waldo Emerson; Philosopher and Seer; Moncure 
 D. Conway s Emerson at Home and Abroad; Joel Benton s 
 Emerson as a Poet; F. B. Sanborn s The Genius and Character of 
 Emerson; C. J. Woodbury s folks With Emerson; Henry James 
 Partial Portraits, pp. 1-34. Among the mass of critical estimates 
 may be named Lowell s chapter in My Study Windows; Howells 
 in Literary Friends and Acquaintance and Augustine Birrell in 
 Obiter Dicta, second series. Among magazine articles are 
 "Emerson in the Lecture Room "by Annie M. Fields in ATLANTIC 
 MONTHLY, June, 1883; "Emerson, Philosopher and Poet," by 
 A. H. Guernsey in APPLETON S; "Emerson and Concord," by 
 M. A. De Wolfe Howe, in the BOOKMAN, November, 1897; 
 "Homes and Haunts of Emerson," by F. B. Sanborn, in SCRIB- 
 NER S, February, 1879; and E. P. Whipple s " Recollections," in 
 HARPER S, September, 1882. A Bibliography of Emerson by 
 George Willis Cooke is the most complete work of its kind, with 
 a list of biographies, letters, reminiscences, notices and criticisms. 
 Emerson, Poet and thinker by Elisabeth Luther Gary is a good 
 outline study and well illustrated. 
 
 WHITMAN 
 
 Mitchell Kennerley is the present publisher of Walt Whit 
 man s works, having taken over the authorized editions first 
 issued in 1897 and 1898, by Small, Maynard & Co. These 
 
 [i 4 8] 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 include Complete Leaves of Grass and Complete Prose Works, each 
 in one volume. Mr. Kennerley also owns the plates of the 
 Cam Jen Edition, ten volumes, published in 1902 in New York, 
 which contained much biographical and critical matter by O. L. 
 Triggs. Two of Whitman s literary executors, Horace Traubel 
 and Dr. R. M. Bucke, have thrown much light on Whitman s 
 last years. Dr. Bucke edited Calamus, a series of Whitman s 
 letters to Peter Doyle, the young car conductor whom the old 
 poet loved as a son. Dr. Bucke also wrote an authorized 
 biography of Whitman. W. D. O Connor in fbe Good Gray 
 Poet made an eloquent defense of Whitman after his discharge 
 from the Indian Department. Probably the book which gives 
 one the best idea of Whitman is Horace Traubel s With Walt 
 Whitman in Camden a record of daily talks with the old poet 
 in 1888. This is now published by Mitchell Kennerley. The 
 best short sketch is Walt Whitman: His Life and Work, by Bliss 
 Perry in the American Men of Letters series. Other good books 
 are Walt Whitman: A Study, by J. Addington Symonds; Reminis 
 cences of Walt Whitman, by W. S. Kennedy. Critical estimates 
 may be found in Stedman s Poets of America, Robert Louis 
 Stevenson s Familiar Studies of Men and Books, and Dowden s 
 Studies in Literature. Some of the best magazine articles on 
 Whitman are as follows: E. C. Stedman, SCRIBNER S, volume 
 21 ; W. S. Kennedy, NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW, 138; G. C. 
 Macaulay, NINETEENTH CENTURY, 52; C. D. Lanier, CHAU- 
 TAUQUAN, 15; John Burroughs, CRITIC, 20; DIAL, 14, "Relations 
 to Science"; NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW, 154, "The Poet of 
 Democracy"; H. S. Traubel, ARENA, 15, "Conversations with 
 Walt Whitman"; W. S. Kennedy, NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW, 
 138, "Poet Lore," 7; "Walt Whitman and Emerson"; M. D. 
 Conway, OPEN COURT, 6. 
 
 IRVING 
 
 G. P. Putnam was Irving s only American publisher. So 
 well was the author satisfied with his treatment that when the 
 publisher was in financial straits and offered to sell the copy 
 rights to Irving, the author refused, and waived all his royalties 
 until Putnam was once more in prosperous circumstances. The 
 standard editions are still published by the Putnams . Among 
 these are the New Knickerbocker Edition, in forty volumes, and 
 the New Handy Volume Edition, on Bible paper, in twelve 
 volumes. Many of the single works are published in finely 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 illustrated editions, and all of them may be had separately in 
 the Putnam editions. His nephew, Pierre M. Irving, wrote 
 The Life and Letters t in four volumes. The monograph, Wash 
 ington Irving, in the American Men of Letters series, was written 
 by Charles Dudley Warner. Good estimates of Irving may be 
 found in these works: G. P. Putnam s Personal Reminiscences; 
 T. B. Shaw s A Manual of English Literature; E. Dowden s 
 Studies in Literature; F. H. Underwood s Handbook of English 
 Literature; J. Scott Clark s A Study of English Prose Writers; 
 H. A. Beers Initial Studies in American Letters; Donald G. 
 Mitchell in ATLANTIC MONTHLY, volume 13; G. P. Lathrop in 
 SCRIBNER S MONTHLY, volume n; C. Cook in the CENTURY 
 MAGAZINE, volume 12. 
 
 POE 
 
 The standard edition of Edgar Allan Poe s works was issued 
 in 1894-95 in Chicago by Stone & Kimball, in ten volumes, with 
 memoir by G. E. Woodberry and prefaces by E. C. Stedman. 
 This edition has since been published by Charles Scribner s Sons. 
 Two excellent editions, edited by Prof. Richardson of Dart 
 mouth, containing a fine series of illustrations after paintings 
 by Mr. F. S. Coburn, are published by G. P. Putnam s Sons. 
 The Life of Edgar Allan Poe by George E. Woodberry is an 
 excellent biography issued in two well illustrated volumes. 
 The Life and Letters of Poe y by James A. Harrison (1903), gives 
 many new facts and corrects numerous misstatements. Poe s 
 poems and his leading short stories are issued in many forms. 
 His tales have had a greater success in France than in his own 
 country. Rufus W. Griswold, who wrote the first memoir of 
 Poe, had a bitter pen, and he stirred up controversies over Poe s 
 actions and character that were not ended for a half-century. 
 Among magazine articles on Poe may be named: R. H. Stod- 
 dard, HARPER S, 45; John Burroughs, DIAL, 15; Julian Haw 
 thorne, LIPPINCOTT S, 48, "My Adventure with Poe"; G. P. 
 Lathrop, SCRIBNER S, n; S. A. T. Weiss, SCRIBNER S, 15, "Last 
 Days of Poe"; W. F. Gill, ARENA, 22, "After Fifty Years"; 
 H. W. Mabie, OUTLOOK, 62; ATLANTIC, 84, "Poe s Place in 
 American Literature"; E. L. Didier, BOOKMAN, 1 6, "Cult of Poe"; 
 J.F.Carter,LiPPiNCOTT*s,70,"Last Night in Richmond"; Edwin 
 Markham, ARENA, 32, "Poetry of Poe"; H. Scheffauer, OVER 
 LAND, 53, "The Baiting of Poe"; S. Strunsky, NATION, 88," Pop 
 ularity of Poe"; Walt Whitman, CRITIC, 2, "Significance of Poe." 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 HAWTHORNE 
 
 The standard edition of Hawthorne is published by Hough- 
 ton, Mifflin Co., in thirteen volumes, edited with an introduction 
 by Horace E. Scudder and with bibliographical notes by George 
 P. Lathrop. The Gray lock Edit ion , in handy volume form, 
 bound in flexible leather or cloth, twenty-two volumes, has been 
 issued recently by the same publishers, and is sold separately or 
 in the set. His son Julian wrote the authorized biography in 
 Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife. Julian also wrote Haw 
 thorne and His Circle, and edited the love letters of his father 
 and his mother, which show how much Hawthorne depended 
 upon his wife s criticism and what great service she rendered in 
 stimulating his genius. Among reminiscences may be named 
 Personal Recollections of Hawthorne by Horatio Bridge, a college 
 chum and lifelong friend; Memoirs of Hawthorne by Rose Haw 
 thorne Lathrop, a daughter; and Nathaniel Hawthorne by Annie 
 Fields, widow of the publisher. Among critical estimates are 
 Moncure D. Conway s Life in the Great Writers Series; George 
 E. Woodberry s Nathaniel Hawthorne in the American Men of 
 Letters series (the best short sketch and estimate); The Life and 
 Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne by Frank Preston Stearns; Henry 
 James sketch in English Men of Letters series (a very unsatis 
 factory piece of work); Sir Leslie Stephen s chapter in Hours in a 
 Library ; James T. Field s " Our Whispering Gallery " in the ATLAN 
 TIC MONTHLY from February to May, 1871, noteworthy as contain 
 ing a passage descriptive of Lincoln which was omitted from 
 Hawthorne s article in the ATLANTIC about his visit to Wash 
 ington. Nina E. Browne s Bibliography of Nathaniel Hawthorne 
 (1905) is a remarkable work, as it represents the labor of sixteen 
 years. It covers the whole field of American and European 
 biographical and critical articles. Howells in Literary Friends 
 and Acquaintance says of Hawthorne: "He left a legacy which 
 in its kind is the finest the race has received from any mind." 
 
 COOPER 
 
 Cooper s works fill thirty-two volumes in the Household 
 Edition issued by Houghton, Mifflin Co., with introductions to 
 many volumes by Susan Fenimore Cooper. The Leatherstock- 
 ing Tales and the Sea Tales each occupy five volumes. To 
 those who wish a distinctly larger type,the Knickerbocker Edition, 
 in thirty-three volumes, published by G. P. Putnam s Sons, will 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 prove attractive. The same plates are used in printing the less 
 expensive Mohawk Edition, which is sold in separate volumes or 
 in the full set. The most popular of the Leatherstocking Tales 
 is The Last of the Mohicans. Thomas R. Lounsberry has written 
 an excellent sketch of Cooper for The American Men of Letters 
 series, and M. A. De Wolfe Howe makes a good estimate in the 
 series American Bookmen. W. E. Henley wrote the article on 
 Cooper in the Encyclopedia Britannica, but it is marred by his 
 lack of knowledge of American life and his severe strictures on 
 Cooper s criticisms of English life and character. Henley fails 
 to bring out Cooper s intimate knowledge of the Indian and 
 his remarkable power of describing the primeval forest of 
 America. Good estimates of Cooper may be found in SCRIB- 
 NER S MONTHLY for April, 1906, by W. C. Brownell; AMERICAN 
 BOOKMAN for 1898 by M. A. De Wolfe Howe, and in the intro 
 duction to the Macmillan (English) edition of Cooper (1901) 
 by Morris Mowbray. Here are some magazine articles by critics 
 on Cooper s work: S. L. Clemens, NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW, 
 16, "Literary Offenses of Cooper"; M. A. De Wolfe Howe, 
 BOOKMAN, 5; H. A. Beers, CRITIC, 15; S. F. Cooper, ATLANTIC, 
 59; E. E. Hale, Jr., S-WANEE, 18. 
 
 LONGFELLOW 
 
 The standard edition of Longfellow is the Riverside in eleven 
 volumes, but the one most convenient and serviceable is the 
 Cambridge Edition in one volume. Both of these are published 
 by Houghton, Mifflin Co. The best short life is T. W. 
 Higginson s in the American Men of Letters series. Eric S. 
 Robertson has contributed a life to the English series Great 
 Writers. The Life of Henry Wadswortb Longfellow, with Extracts 
 from His Journals and Correspondence, by Samuel Longfellow, 
 is very full and complete. A supplemental volume, Final 
 Memorials, contains the journals and letters of the last fifteen 
 years of Longfellow s life. Of reminiscence there is a mass, as 
 Longfellow was the most accessible of all the New England 
 authors. He never refused to see a caller or to give his auto 
 graph. The best sketch of Longfellow s later life is in Howells 
 Literary Friends and Acquaintance. Among critical articles may 
 be mentioned: E. P. Whipple, Essays and Reviews; E. C. Sted- 
 man, Poets of America; W. E. Henley, Views and Reviews; F. H. 
 Underwood, Henry Wadswortb Longfellow; H. E. Scudder, Men 
 and Letters; Howells, NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW, volume 104; 
 
 [152] 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 R. H. Stoddard, SCRIBNER S, volume 17; G. W. Curtis, HAR 
 PER S, volume 65; Stedman, CENTURY, volume 4; O. W. Holmes, 
 ATLANTIC, volume 49; T. W. Higginson, NATION, volume 34. 
 
 LOWELL 
 
 Lowell s works fill eleven volumes and are issued by 
 Houghton, Mifflin Co. His prose is issued in seven volumes. 
 The Life, in two volumes (1901), was written by Horace E. 
 Scudder who also contributed the sketch of two pages in the 
 Encyclopedia Britannica. Letters of James Russell Lowell, edited 
 by Charles Eliot Norton, appeared in two volumes in 1899 from 
 the Harpers press. James Russell Lowell and His Friends, by 
 Edward Everett Hale, contains many reminiscences. Lives of 
 Lowell have also been written by F. H. Underwood and Ferris 
 Greenslet. Among critical estimates are Henry James Essays 
 in London; George Bancroft, "Our Ablest Critic," in LITERARY 
 WORLD, June 27, 1885; Sarah K. Bolton, Famous American 
 Authors; Royal Cortissoz, "Some Writers of Good Letters," 
 CENTURY, March, 1897; Elbert Hubbard, Little Journeys to 
 Homes of Famous Authors, volume ii; Hamilton Wright Mabie, 
 My Study Fire, second series; Charles Dudley Warner, "The 
 Real American at His Best," in LITERARY WORLD, volume 16; 
 W. C. Wilkinson, SCRIBNER S, volume 4; E. C. Stedman, CEN 
 TURY, volume 2; Henry James, ATLANTIC, volume 69; T. W. 
 Higginson, NATION, volumes 53 and 57. The Bibliography of 
 Lowell by GEORGE WILLIS COOKE gives all the editions and a 
 mass of other material. 
 
 HOLMES 
 
 The complete works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, published 
 by Houghton, Mifflin Co., fill fourteen volumes, with Notes 
 by the author. A popular edition is issued in eight volumes. 
 His poems come in one volume, Cambridge Edition. The stand 
 ard biography is Life and Letters of Oliver Wendell Holmes by 
 James T. Morse. Sir Leslie Stephen wrote an essay which 
 appears as introduction to the English Golden Treasury edition 
 of fbe Autocrat; monographs on Holmes were written by William 
 Sloane Kennedy and Emma E. Brown. A Bibliography by 
 George B. Ives gives everything on the subject of Holmes and 
 his works, as complete as Cooke s Emerson or Lowell. Among 
 articles that discuss Holmes and his works may be mentioned: 
 
 [153] 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 W. D. Howells, Literary Friends and Acquaintance; E. C. Sted- 
 man, Poets of America; F. H. Underwood, SCRIBNER S, May, 
 1879; Edward Everett Hale, "Personal Recollections," ARENA, 
 December, 1895; E. P. Whipple, Essays and Reviews; J. G. 
 Whittier, Literary Recreations (1872); C. F. Richardson, American 
 Literature. 
 
 WHITTIER 
 
 The definitive Riverside Edition of Whittier s Works, revised 
 by himself, fills seven volumes, published by Houghton, Mifflin 
 Co. (1894). His poems, edited by Horace E. Scudder, may 
 be found in the convenient one volume Cambridge Edition. 
 The Life and Letters of Wbittier^ written by his literary executor, 
 Samuel T. Pickard, appeared in 1894. G. R. Carpenter wrote 
 an excellent monograph on Whittier for the American Men of 
 Letters series. Among books and articles on Whittier may be 
 named: E. C. Stedman, Poets of America; F. H. Underwood, 
 a monograph; E. P. Whipple, Essays and Reviews; Miss M. R. 
 Mitford, Recollections of a Literary Life; J. L. and J. B. Gilder, 
 "Authors at Home"; G. E. Woodberry, ATLANTIC, volume 70; 
 H. P. Spofford, HARPER S, volume 68; R. H. Stoddard, SCRIB 
 NER S, volume 18; J. V. Cheney, CHAUTAUQUAN, volume 16. 
 
 THOREAU 
 
 Thoreau s complete works are issued by Houghton, MifBin 
 Co. in eleven volumes, but many reprints of Walden Excur 
 sions and other popular volumes have been issued recently 
 by other publishers, as the copyright has evidently expired. 
 JValden has proved to be Thoreau s most popular book. Emer 
 son wrote an introduction to Excursions which gives a good 
 estimate of his friend s character. Frank B. Sanborn contributed 
 a monograph on Thoreau to the American Men of Letters series 
 and H. S. Salt wrote a Life which appeared in London in 1890. 
 Some readable reminiscences are given by William Ellery Chan- 
 ning in The Poet Naturalist. Critical estimates of Thoreau s 
 work and influence may be found in Lowell s My Study Windows 
 and Stevenson s Familiar Studies in Men and Books. 
 
 PARKMAN 
 
 The complete works of Francis Parkman are brought out by 
 Little, Brown & Co. of Boston. The New Library Edition 
 
 [154] 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 is in thirteen volumes, and includes the Life by C. H. 
 Farnham. The Popular Edition is in twelve volumes. A desir 
 able form is the Pocket Edition in twelve volumes, bound in limp 
 morocco, recently issued. Parkman s most popular books are 
 The Overland frail and The Conspiracy of Pontiac. The Life of 
 Francis Parkman, by G.H. Farnham (1900), gives a good account 
 of the tremendous work accomplished by this literary recluse, 
 who was nearly blind and an invalid for over twenty years. 
 John Fiske, in an article on Parkman in the eleventh edition of 
 the Encyclopedia Britannica, says: "With all its manifold 
 instru&iveness his work is a narrative as entertaining as those 
 of Macaulay or Froude. In judicial impartiality Parkman may 
 be compared to Gardiner, and for accuracy and learning with 
 Stubbs." Among magazine articles are John Fiske, ATLANTIC, 
 73; Justin Winsor, ATLANTIC, 73; J. R. Lowell, CENTURY, 23; 
 M. A. De Wolfe Howe, BOOKMAN, 5; E. L. Godkin, NATION, 71; 
 J. B. Gilder, CRITIC, 23; F. H. Underwood, LIVING AGE, 177; 
 W. E. Simonds, DIAL, 37. 
 
 MARK TWAIN 
 
 The standard edition of Mark Twain s works is issued by the 
 Harpers, and in uniform style is also published the Life of Mark 
 Twain, by Albert Bigelow Paine, his secretary for many years, 
 and his literary executor. The Limp Leather Edition, recently 
 published by the Harpers, in twenty-four volumes, is a con 
 venient and attractive form. Mark Twain s early books were 
 all brought out in subscription editions, with extraordinary illus 
 trations in old-fashioned wood-cuts. These were gathered up in 
 1899 and issued in twenty-two volumes by the American Pub 
 lishing Co. of Hartford. By the aid of H. H. Rodgers, Mark 
 Twain was able to secure the copyrights of these books and to 
 turn them over to the Harpers. The most popular of all Twain s 
 books is The Innocents Abroad. Next to this probably comes 
 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Brander Matthews, in an 
 article on Mark Twain in the eleventh edition of the Encyclo 
 pedia Britannica, says: "In Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn and 
 Pudd nbead Wilson there are not only humor and pathos, char 
 acter and truth, but there is also the largeness of outlook on life 
 such as we find only in the works of the masters." W. D. 
 Howells, after Mark Twain s death, contributed a series of 
 articles to HARPER S MAGAZINE on his dead friend, which were 
 afterward printed in book form under the title, My Mark Twain. 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 In this book Howells has given the best picture of the great 
 humorist, who was great also as a delineator of the life and 
 character of the Southwest. In Essays on Books , William Lyon 
 Phelps has an excellent chapter on Mark Twain. Here are 
 some magazine articles on Mark Twain: J. H. Twichell, HAR 
 PER S, 92; W. P. Trent, BOOKMAN, 3, "As a Historical Novelist"; 
 Dan De Quille, CALIFORNIA MAGAZINE, 4, "As Reporter in 
 San Francisco"; R. W. Gilder, OUTLOOK, 8, "Spoken and 
 Written Art of Mark Twain"; Andrew Lang, CRITIC, 19, "Art 
 of Mark Twain"; A. B. Paine, HARPER S, 118, "Clemens at 
 Stormfield"; Bailey Millard, BOOKMAN, 31, "Mark Twain in 
 San Francisco"; Harry T. Peck, BOOKMAN, 31, "HisJPlace in 
 Literature." 
 
 BRET HARTE 
 
 Houghton Mifflin Co. publish the standard Riverside Edition 
 of Bret Harte s works. The same firm has issued recently 
 the Overland Edition, in handy volume style, bound in flexible 
 leather. Both sets come in nineteen volumes and are sold 
 separately. H. W. Boynton in a volume in the Contem 
 porary Men of Letters series, gives a good sketch of Harte s life 
 and work. T. Edgar Pemberton s Life of Bret Harte is note 
 worthy as giving the only record of the life of the Californian 
 short-story writer and poet in Scotland and England. Pember- 
 ton was a close friend of Harte s during all his life abroad, and 
 wrote several plays in collaboration with him. His book con 
 tains many of Harte s letters to his wife and friends, and it 
 shows the high regard in which Harte was held by many famous 
 English authors. The portraits and illustrations are very inter 
 esting. Henry C. Merwin s Bret Harte is an important biog 
 raphy. A Tramp Through the Bret Harte Country, by Thomas 
 Dykes Beasley, gives an excellent sketch of the region made 
 famous by Harte s stones. 
 
 HOWELLS 
 
 William Dean Howells has been one of the most prolific of 
 American writers. His works, partly issued in Boston, the 
 remainder by the Harpers in New York, fill over fifty volumes, 
 not counting the large number of critical articles contributed to 
 the ATLANTIC and other magazines, which have never been 
 reprinted in book form. Howells has been the subject of a large 
 
 [156] 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 number of magazine articles, among which the following may be 
 mentioned: Brander Matthews, FORUM, 32, "As a Critic"; 
 H. H. Boyesen, COSMOPOLITAN, 12, "Howells and His Work"; 
 T. C. Crawford, CRITIC, 21, "Literary Methods of William 
 Dean Howells"; Harriet W. Preston, ATLANTIC, 91; J. P. Mow- 
 bray, CRITIC, 42; Hamlin Garland, NEW ENGLAND MAGAZINE, 
 2; William Sharp, ACADEMY, 37; Lillian Whiting, AUTHOR, 3, 
 "Howells at Home"; Van Wyck Brooks, WORLD S WORK, 18, 
 "Howells at Work at 72"; SCRIBNER S, 13, "As a Country 
 Printer." Professor William Lyon Phelps in his Essays on 
 Books has a fine chapter on Howells in which he brings out his 
 literary art and his profound Americanism. 
 
 MARKHAM 
 
 Edwin Markham s works, published by Doubleday, Page & 
 Co., are as follows: The Man With the Hoe, and Other Poems; 
 The Man With the Hoc, with Notes by the Author, an extremely 
 interesting little book, as it contains the poet s own account 
 of the origin of the poem; Lincoln, and Other Poems. I he Shoes 
 of Happiness, and Other Poems-, California the Wonderful, finely 
 illustrated, and Children in Bondage: The Child Labor Problem. 
 Bailey Millard has contributed a number of articles to THE 
 BOOKMAN in regard to Markham, and his work, and Poole s 
 Index gives references to the controversy which raged in the 
 various magazines over The Man With the Hoe, soon after its 
 appearance. Among magazine articles on Markham are: 
 Yone Noguchi, NATIONAL MAGAZINE, volume 21; B. O. Flower, 
 ARENA, 27, "A Prophet and Poet of the Fraternal State" 
 Henry Meade Bland, OVERLAND, 50, "Markham and His Art." 
 
Index 
 
 A Boy s Town, 135. 
 
 A Connecticut Yankee in King 
 Arthur s Court, 1 1 6. 
 
 Addison, 25. 
 
 A Descent Into the Mael 
 strom, 35. 
 
 Adventures of Captain Bonne- 
 ville, 24. 
 
 Adventures of Huckleberry 
 Finn, The, 1 12, 115. 
 
 A Half Century of Conflict, 
 109. 
 
 A Fable for Critics, 76. 
 
 Afloat and Ashore, 56. 
 
 After the Burial, 75. 
 
 After the War, 93. 
 
 Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane and 
 Minor Poems, 33. 
 
 Alcott, 102. 
 
 Alhambra, The, 24, 26. 
 
 Allan, Mrs. John, 31. 
 
 Allan, John, 32. 
 
 Allston, Washington, 23. 
 
 American Scholar, The, 9, 10. 
 
 A Modern Instance, 132. 
 
 Among My Books, 76. 
 
 Among the Hills, 89, 94. 
 
 Annabel Lee, 36. 
 
 A Psalm of Life, 64. 
 
 Arnold, Matthew, 68. 
 
 Arsenal at Springfield, The, 
 65. 
 
 Arthur Dimmesdale, 44. 
 
 Astoria, 24. 
 
 Astor, John Jacob, 24. 
 
 Atala, 98. 
 
 Atalanta in Calydon, 122. 
 
 Atlantic Monthly, 80, 82, 91, 
 
 92, 129, 130. 
 A Tramp Abroad, 114. 
 Autocrat of the Breakfast 
 
 Table, The, 78, 79, 82, 83. 
 A Week on the Concord and 
 
 Merrimac Rivers, 98. 
 
 Bacon, 6. 
 
 Balzac, 51. 
 
 Barbara Frietchie, 93. 
 
 Bartlett, John, 64. 
 
 Battle of Lowell s Pond, The, 
 
 61. 
 
 Belfry of Bruges, The, 65. 
 Bells, The, 31, 36. 
 Biglow Papers, The, 70, 71, 
 
 73. 75- 
 
 Birthmark, The, 43, 44. 
 Blithedale Romance, The, 43. 
 Bracebridge Hall, 24, 26. 
 Bridge, Horatio, 42. 
 Bright, John, 94. 
 Browning, 58, 60. 
 Bryant, 62. 
 Burroughs, 96. 
 Byron, 22, 70. 
 
 California, the Wonderful, 
 
 144. 
 
 Cape Cod, 101. 
 Carlyle, 6, 8,9, 11,77. 
 Carson, Kit, 54. 
 Cask of Amontillado, The, 35. 
 Catlin, 107. 
 Chambers, 37. 
 Chambered Nautilus, 84. 
 
 [159] 
 
INDEX 
 
 Champlain, no. 
 Chateaubriand, 98. 
 Chaucer, 60, 72, 76. 
 Children in Bondage, 145. 
 Christus, 67. 
 Christmas, 26. 
 Cleveland, President, 74. 
 Cody, "Buffalo Bill," 54. 
 Commemoration Ode, 70, 74. 
 Conquest of Granada, The, 24. 
 Cooper, 107. 
 Conspiracy of Pontiac, The, 
 
 106, 108, no. 
 Courtship of Miles Standish, 
 
 The, 66, 67. 
 Cowley, 60. 
 
 Cross of Snow, The, 67. 
 Curtis, George William, 42. 
 
 Daisy Miller, 137. 
 
 Dante, 72, 130. 
 
 Deerslayer, The, 51, 54. 
 
 Dickens, 57. 
 
 Divine Comedy of Dante, 
 
 The, 67. 
 Donatello, 46. 
 Don Juan, 31. 
 Drum Taps, 16, 20. 
 Dryden, 60, 76. 
 
 Elia, 79. 
 
 Eliot, George, 133. 
 
 Elsie Venner, 78, 85. 
 
 Emerson, 19, 59, 64, 73, 99, 
 
 loo, 129. 
 
 English Literature, 9. 
 Evangeline, 58, 66. 
 Excelsior, 64. 
 Excursions, 101. 
 
 Faerie Queene, The, 41. 
 Fall of the House of Usher, 
 The, 34. 
 
 Familiar Quotations, 64. 
 
 Fiske, John, 104. 
 
 Franklin, 128. 
 
 Freedom, 73. 
 
 Free Press, Newburyport, 90. 
 
 Frontenac, 109. 
 
 Froude, 72, 77. 
 
 Gabriel Conroy, 125. 
 Garrison, William Lloyd, 90, 
 
 93- 
 
 Gazette (Haverhill), 90. 
 Geoffrey Crayon, 22. 
 Gold Bug, The, 30, 35. 
 Good Gray Poet, The, 17. 
 Grovesnor, Professor, 58. 
 
 Hale, Edward Everett, 19. 
 
 Harlan, James, 17. 
 
 Harte, Bret, 113, 128. 
 
 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 5, 129. 
 
 Hazlitt, 72. 
 
 Heathen Chinee, The, 121, 
 
 122. 
 
 Heroes and Hero Worship, 9. 
 Hiawatha, The Song of, 58, 
 
 61, 66. 
 Higginson, Thomas Went- 
 
 worth, 58, 59, 67. 
 Hoffman, Matilda, 23. 
 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 59, 
 
 69, 129. 
 
 Hood, Thomas, 79. 
 House of the Seven Gables, 
 
 The, 43, 45. 
 Howells, William Dean, 37, 
 
 63, 68, 113, 118, 136. 
 Hugo, 58, 59. 
 Human Culture, 9. 
 Hyperion, 63. 
 
 Ichabod, 89. 
 
 Indian Summer, 133. 
 
 [160] 
 
INDEX 
 
 In School Days, 89. 
 Innocents Abroad, The, 113. 
 Irving, 49. 
 
 Italian Journeys, 130. 
 Ivanhoe, 51. 
 
 James, Henry, 38, 134, 135, 
 
 136. 
 
 Jefferson, Thomas, 3. 
 Jefferson, Joseph, 25. 
 Jesuits in North America, 
 
 The, 109. 
 Joan of Arc, 117. 
 Job, Book of, 7. 
 Jones, John Paul, 56. 
 Jumping Frog of Calaveras, 
 
 The, 113. 
 
 Kavalero, 66. 
 Kipling, 119. 
 
 Knickerbocker s History of 
 New York, 23, 26. 
 
 Lady of the Aroostook, The, 
 
 31- 
 
 Lady Windermere s Fan, 134. 
 
 Lamb, 79. 
 
 La Salle, no. 
 
 La Salle and the Discovery of 
 
 the Great West, 109. 
 Last Leaf, The, 78, 85. 
 Last of the Mohicans, The, 
 
 5i> 54- 
 
 Laus Deo, 91. 
 Leatherstocking, 50, 52, 54, 
 
 55, 56. 
 Leaves of Grass, 12, 14, 16, 18, 
 
 20. 
 
 Legends of New England, 91. 
 Legend of Sleepy Hollow, The, 
 
 aS- 
 Life of Columbus, 24. 
 Life on the Mississippi, 114. 
 
 Lincoln, 74. 
 
 Lincoln and Other Poems, 
 141,144. 
 
 Literary Friends and Acquain 
 tance, 63, 129, 135. 
 
 Living Temple, The, 84. 
 
 Lloyd-George, 112. 
 
 Longfellow, 42, 74, 87, 89, 129. 
 
 L Ouverture, Toussaint, 93. 
 
 Lowell, n, 59, 60, 129. 
 
 Luck of Roaring Camp, The, 
 121, 123. 
 
 Macaulay, 6. 
 Maidenhood, 64. 
 Maine Woods, The, 101. 
 Man with the Hoe, The, 138, 
 
 144. 
 
 Marble Faun, The, 43, 45. 
 Mather, Cotton, n 
 Maupassant, Guy de, 28. 
 McCutcheon, 37. 
 Meditations of Marcus Au- 
 
 relius, 106. 
 
 Melville, Major Thomas, 85. 
 Michael Angelo, 139. 
 Millard, Bailey, 140. 
 Millet, 139. 
 Milton, 76. 
 
 Montcalm and Wolfe, 109, 1 10. 
 Mosses From an Old Manse, 
 
 37, 42, 43- 
 
 MS. Found in a Bottle, 35. 
 Muir, John, 96. 
 Murders in the Rue Morgue, 
 
 The, 35. 
 
 Musset, Alfred de, 28. 
 My Playmate, 89. 
 My Study Windows, 76. 
 
 National Era (Washington), 
 ft. 
 
 Nature, 9. 
 
 [161] 
 
INDEX 
 
 Natty Bumpo, 52. 
 
 O Captain, My Captain, 16. 
 O Connor, W. D., 17. 
 Ojibway, 66. 
 Old Clock on the Stairs, The, 
 
 65. 
 
 "Old French War," 104. 
 Old Ironsides, 78, 81, 85. 
 Old Regime, The, 109. 
 Oregon Trail, The, 108, no. 
 Our Native Writers, 61. 
 Our Old Home, 46. 
 Outcasts of Poker Flat, The, 
 
 121, 123. 
 Outre Mer, 62. 
 Overland Monthly, 121. 
 
 Parkman, 49. 
 
 Parting of the Ways, The, 73. 
 
 Pathfinders, The, 54. 
 
 Peabody, Sophia, 42. 
 
 Phelps, William Lyon, 37, 133. 
 
 Philosophy of History, The, 9. 
 
 Pierce, Franklin, 42. 
 
 Pilot, The, 54, 56. 
 
 Pilgrim s Progress, 41. 
 
 Pioneers, The, 54. 
 
 Pioneers of France in the New 
 
 World, The, 109. 
 Pippa Passes, 31. 
 Poe, 48, 59- 
 Poet at the Breakfast Table, 
 
 The, 85. 
 
 Pontiac, 49, 109. 
 Prairie, The, 54. 
 Prescott, 24. 
 Prince and the Pauper, The, 
 
 116. 
 Professor at the Breakfast 
 
 Table, The, 85. 
 
 Quentin, Durward, 51. 
 
 [162] 
 
 Raven, The, 31,36. 
 Recollections of Joan of Arc, 
 
 112, 117. 
 
 Reilly, Dr. Joseph J., 68. 
 Representative Men, 7, 9. 
 Resignation, 65. 
 Riley, James Whitcomb, 141. 
 Rip Van Winkle, 25. 
 Rise of Silas Lapham, The, 
 
 133- 
 Roger Malvin s Burial, 38, 
 
 43- 
 
 Romola, 133. 
 Rousseau, 98. 
 
 Saint-Beuve, 68. 
 
 Scarlet Letter, The, 5, 37, 38, 
 
 39, 43, 44- 
 
 Scott, 22, 23, 49, 51. 
 Shaw, Quincy A., 107. 
 Shakespeare, 58, 59, 69, 72, 76. 
 Shoes of Happiness, The, 144. 
 Skeleton in Armor, The, 64. 
 Sketch Book, The, 21, 22, 23, 
 
 25- 
 
 Skipper Ireson s Ride, 89. 
 Snow Bound, 89, 92, 93. 
 Specimen Days and Collect, 
 
 17, 20. 
 
 Spectator, The, 25. 
 Spy, The, 53. 
 Stedman, u. 
 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 50, 
 
 88, 103. 
 
 Stratford-on-Avon, 26. 
 Strauss, 31. 
 Sumner, Charles, 65. 
 Swinburne, 70. 
 
 Tales of a Traveler, 24. 
 Tamerlane, 32. 
 Tennesse s Partner, 124. 
 Tennyson, 58, 60. 
 
INDEX 
 
 Tent on the Beach, The, 94. 
 
 Thackeray, 77. 
 
 Their Wedding Journey, 131. 
 
 The Reaper and the Flowers, 
 
 64. 
 
 Ticknor, 74. 
 To Englishmen, 93. 
 To One in Paradise, 36. 
 Tolstoi, 95, 134. 
 Tom Sawyer, 115. 
 Tonty, Henri de, 1 10. 
 Treasure Island, 104. 
 Trollope, Mrs., 57. 
 Turgenieff, 28. 
 Twain, Mark, 128. 
 Twice Told Tales, 42. 
 Twichell, Reverend Joseph, 
 
 118. 
 
 Ulalume, 36. 
 Under the Willows, 76. 
 United States Literary Ga 
 zette, 62. 
 
 Venice, An Italian Song, 61. 
 Venetian Life, 130. 
 Verne, Jules, 30, 35. 
 Village Blacksmith, The, 64. 
 Virgil, 8 1. 
 Virgilia, 142, 143. 
 
 Vision of Sir Launfal, The, 75. 
 Voices of Freedom, 91 . 
 Voices of the Night, 63, 64. 
 
 Walden, 95, 100, 101. 
 Walking, 101. 
 
 Wallace, Alfred Russell, 141. 
 Washers of the Shroud, The, 
 
 73 75- 
 
 Watchers, The, 93. 
 Webster, Daniel, 89. 
 What the Birds Said, 93. 
 When Lilacs Last in the 
 
 Dooryard Bloomed, 1 6. 
 Whipple, ii. 
 Whitman, Walt, 3, 59, lui, 
 
 113, 128. 
 Whittier, 59. 
 Wilde, Oscar, 134. 
 William Wilson, 32. 
 Wing and Wing, 56. 
 Wolf, 1 10. 
 Wonderful One Hoss Shay, 
 
 The, 78, 84. 
 Wreck of the Hesperus, The, 
 
 64. 
 
 Young Goodman Brown, 38, 
 43- 
 
 [163] 
 
HERE ENDS GREAT SPIRITUAL WRITERS OF 
 AMERICA, BEING A THIRD SERIES OF ESSAYS 
 ON GREAT BOOKS AND THEIR WRITERS BY 
 GEORGE HAMLIN FITCH. PUBLISHED BY PAUL 
 ELDER AND COMPANY AT THEIR TOMOYE PRESS 
 IN THE CITY OF SAN FRANCISCO AND SEEN 
 THROUGH THE PRESS BY HERMAN A. FUNKE 
 IN THE MONTH OF MARCH AND THE YEAR 
 NINETEEN HUNDRED AND SIXTEEN 
 
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