OKMEN 
 
THE JAMES K. MOFFITT FUND. 
 
 LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA. 
 
 GIFT OF 
 
 JAMES KENNEDY MOFFITT 
 
 OF THE CLASS OF 86. 
 
 Deceived 
 Accession No. . 
 
 3. Class No. 
 
Of TM* 
 
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American Bookmen 
 
 Sketches, Chiefly Biographical, 
 
 of Certain Writers of the 
 
 Nineteenth Century 
 
 By 
 
 M. A. DeWolfe Howe 
 
 New York 
 Dodd, Mead and Company 
 
Copyright, 1897-1898, 
 BY DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY. 
 
 7<? 3 
 
 JOHN WILSON AND SON, CAMBRIDGE, U.S.A. 
 
TO 
 
 E. W. H. 
 
PREFACE 
 
 THE more clearly a book speaks for itself, the 
 less it needs a preface. It is the writer s 
 hope, therefore, that his readers will discover, with 
 out recourse to these few words, what he has tried to 
 do. They are intended rather to give to those who 
 would be saved the trouble of reading, fair warning 
 that he has not attempted to throw entirely new 
 light upon themes already thrice familiar, or to 
 deliver himself in terms of ultimate criticism. His 
 purpose has been to bring together from many 
 sources some of the more interesting facts in the 
 lives of the men with whom he has been concerned, 
 and in the spirit of Montaigne, interpreted in Florio s 
 version of his opening words, " Loe here a well- 
 meaning book," to present these facts primarily as a 
 narrator, incidentally as a critic. The scant mention 
 of such men as Motley and Thoreau, and the entire 
 omission from biographical record of names like 
 
viii PREFACE 
 
 those of George William Curtis, Bayard Taylor and 
 a score of others will suggest the obvious fact that 
 no effort has been made to give a complete account 
 of American writers. 
 
 It is hardly to be hoped that all errors have been 
 avoided, in spite of the pains to escape them. Es 
 pecially in defining the portraits has it been difficult, 
 in some cases, to arrive at absolute certainty ; and 
 the writer will be grateful for any information which 
 may help him to do so. 
 
 The publishers and the author would express 
 their common sense of obligation to the following 
 persons and firms for the use of portraits and 
 other illustrations, which may prove of greater value 
 than the written word in giving reality to scenes and 
 faces : Messrs. G. P. Putnam s Sons, James Kirke 
 Paulding, Esq., Henry C. Sturges, Esq., F. H. 
 Day, Esq., Miss Amelia Poe, John Prentice Poe, 
 Esq., Mrs. Annie Nathan Meyer, W. L. Sawyer, 
 Esq., Messrs. D. Appleton & Co., Messrs. Fords, 
 Howard & Hulbert, Messrs. Little, Brown & Co., 
 W. E. Benjamin, Esq., Horace L. Traubel, Esql, 
 and Messrs. Small, Maynard & Co. 
 
PREFACE ix 
 
 To Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Co. in partic 
 ular must acknowledgment be made for their most 
 generous permission to reproduce a large number 
 of portraits which have originally appeared in books 
 published by them. 
 
 BRISTOL, RHODE ISLAND, 
 September, 1898. 
 
Contents 
 
 Page 
 
 WASHINGTON IRVING i 
 
 JAMES FENIMORE COOPER . . 29 
 
 WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT 52 
 
 EDGAR ALLAN POE 76 
 
 WILLIS, HALLECK AND DRAKE . . 99 
 
 THE HISTORIANS, ESPECIALLY PRESCOTT AND PARKMAN . 125 
 
 SOME HUMOURISTS . . . ... . ... . . 153 
 
 EMERSON AND CONCORD . . . ... . . . 176 
 
 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 200 
 
 WALT WHITMAN . . . ..... . . . . 222 
 
 WHITTIER AND LOWELL ... . . . . . . . . 242 
 
 LONGFELLOW AND HOLMES . . . . 265 
 
 INDEX 287 
 
List of Illustrations 
 
 PAG* 
 
 BRYANT, WEBSTER, AND IRVING Frontispiece 
 
 IRVING AT 22 ............. 4 
 
 LAUNCELOT LANGSTAFF, ESQ. ,.,.,.... 6 
 
 FAC-SIMILE PAGE OF "SALMAGUNDI" AS IT ORIGINALLY 
 
 APPEARED . . ... 8 
 
 MATILDA HOFFMAN 10 
 
 IRVING AT 25 12 
 
 IRVING AT 26 *4 
 
 FAC-SIMILE AUTOGRAPH PAGE FROM THE MS. OF " BRACE- 
 BRIDGE HALL" ............ 17 
 
 IRVING AT 52 * ... 20 
 
 SUNNYSIDE, IRVING S HOUSE ON THE HUDSON .... 24 
 
 IRVING AT 67 * 26 
 
 COOPER S MOTHER IN THE HALL, OTSEGO . . . . . 32 
 
 COOPER AT 33 . . . . . . 3^ 
 
 COOPER AT 45 4 
 
 FAC-SIMILE, SLIGHTLY REDUCED, OF COOPER S HANDWRITING 43 
 
 OTSEGO HALL, COOPERSTOWN, N. Y 46 
 
 JAMES FENIMORE COOPER 4^ 
 
 BRYANT AT ABOUT 43 5 8 
 
 REDUCED FAC-SIMILE OF "THE NEW WORLD," APRIL 24, 
 
 1841, CONTAINING PORTRAIT AND SKETCH OF BRYANT 6 1 
 
 BRYANT AT ABOUT 50 . . 64 
 
 REDUCED FAC-SIMILE OF AUTOGRAPH LETTER BY BRYANT 69 
 
xiv LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 PAGI 
 
 BRYANT NEAR THE END OF HIS LIFE 72 
 
 A EUROPEANISED PoE 76 
 
 EDGAR ALLAN POE 80 
 
 VIRGINIA CLEMM 84 
 
 REDUCED FAC-SIMILE OF THE PROSPECTUS OF THE " PENN 
 
 MAGAZINE " 86 
 
 REDUCED FAC-SIMILE AUTOGRAPH LETTER WRITTEN BY 
 POE ON A BLANK PAGE OF "THE PENN MAGAZINE" 
 
 PROSPECTUS 87 
 
 EDGAR A. POE 88 
 
 POE S COTTAGE AT FORDHAM, N. Y 92 
 
 MRS. MARIA CLEMM 92 
 
 MRS. SARAH HELEN WHITMAN 94 
 
 POE IN THE LAST YEAR OF His LIFE 96 
 
 WILLIS AT 31 ioo 
 
 N. P. WILLIS 102 
 
 FITZ-GREENE HALLECK 106 
 
 J. RODMAN DRAKE 108 
 
 FAC-SIMILE OF PART OF A LETTER FROM WILLIS TO POE 1 1 1 
 FAC-SIMILE STANZA AND SIGNATURE FROM DRAKE S POEM, 
 
 "AflELARD TO ELOISE " I 15 
 
 HALLECK AT 57 n6 
 
 HALLECK AT 7 5 . . . . 1 1 8 
 
 FAC-SIMILE OF AN UNPUBLISHED LETTER OF HALLECK s . 121 
 
 GEORGE BANCROFT 126 
 
 J. L. MOTLEY 128 
 
 WM. H. PRESCOTT 132 
 
 PRESCOTT AT 62 136 
 
 PRESCOTT IN HIS LIBRARY 140 
 
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS xv 
 
 PACK 
 
 PARKMAN AT 20 144 
 
 F. PARKMAN 148 
 
 REDUCED FAC-SIMILE PAGE OF MANUSCRIPT OF PARKMAN s 
 "LA SALLE AND THE DISCOVERY OF THE GREAT WEST," 
 
 THE ONLY BOOK ENTIRELY IN HIS HANDWRITING . . 150 
 
 MAJOR JACK DOWNING 157 
 
 CHARLES F. BROWNE " ARTEMUS WARD " . , - / . . 162 
 
 B. P. SHILLABER . . . . . 166 
 
 "JosH BILLINGS" . . . . . .- - . * . . . 168 
 
 SAXE AT 32 170 
 
 FAC-SIMILE OF A LETTER FROM JOHN G. SAXE REPLYING 
 
 TO A REQUEST FOR AN AUTOGRAPH . . . . . 172 
 
 JOHN G. SAXE 174 
 
 THOREAU AT 37 178 
 
 A CURIOUS EARLY PORTRAIT OF EMERSON 180 
 
 R. WALDO EMERSON . .- . . . 182 
 
 A. BRONSON ALCOTT 184 
 
 AUTOGRAPH LINES FROM EMERSON S "Two RIVERS" . 188 
 
 S. MARGARET FULLER 190 
 
 HENRY D. THOREAU 192 
 
 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 196 
 
 HAWTHORNE AT 36 206 
 
 HAWTHORNE AT 46 . . , , ; 208 
 
 HAWTHORNE S AUTOGRAPH 209 
 
 THE OLD MANSE AT CONCORD 212 
 
 HAWTHORNE AT 56 216 
 
 HAWTHORNE AT 58 218 
 
 FIELDS, HAWTHORNE, AND TICKNOR 220 
 
 LOUISA (VAN VELSOR) WHITMAN . . . . . . 224 
 
xvi LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 WHITMAN AT 36 226 
 
 COVERS OF WHITMAN S OWN COPY OF THE FIRST EDI 
 TION OF "LEAVES OF GRASS" 228-$- 
 
 WHITMAN IN WAR-TIME 232 
 
 FAC-SIMILE FROM THE ORIGINAL MANUSCRIPT . . . . 234 
 
 WHITMAN AT 65 . . . . . 236 
 
 WHITMAN AND Two LITTLE FRIENDS 238 
 
 TOMB AT HARLEIGH, CAMDEN, N. J 240 
 
 BIRTHPLACE OF WHITTIER .......... 244 
 
 WHITTIER AT 29 246 
 
 JOHN G. WHITTIER ; . . 250 
 
 WHITTIER AT 78 252 
 
 LOWELL AT 24 254 
 
 ELMWOOD 256 
 
 LOWELL AT 31 258 
 
 J. R. LOWELL 262 
 
 LONGFELLOW AS A YOUNG MAN 266 
 
 LONGFELLOW AT 47 . . . 268 
 
 HOLMES AT 41 272 
 
 LONGFELLOW AT 55 . 274 
 
 AUTOGRAPH LINES FROM DR. HOLMES S POEM "THE 
 
 LAST LEAF" 274 
 
 HENRY W. LONGFELLOW 276 
 
 AUTOGRAPH STANZA FROM LONGFELLOW S POEM, " THE 
 
 LIGHT OF STARS" 278 
 
 "THE AUTOCRAT OF THE BREAKFAST TABLE" . . . 280 
 
 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 284 
 
American Bookmen 
 
 WASHINGTON IRVING 
 
 A BRITISH matron and her daughter are said 
 to have been seen sixty or seventy years ago 
 in an Italian gallery standing before a bust of 
 Washington. " Mother, who was Washington ? " 
 asked the girl. " Why, my dear, don t you 
 know ? " answered the horrified parent ; " he wrote 
 the Sketch-Book." Whatever confusion was in her 
 mind, it is true that just as clearly as the General 
 was the Father of his Country in affairs of State, 
 his biographer held this place in our republic of 
 letters. Before him no American, with the excep 
 tion of the forgotten novelist, Charles Brockden 
 Brown, had made literature a profession. Writers 
 there had been by the score, and good writers, as 
 names like those of Franklin and Hamilton cry 
 out ; but they were writers after they were some 
 thing else. It remained for Washington Irving to 
 become the first American man of letters known as 
 such the world over. 
 
2 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 A house in William Street, New York, was the 
 place of Irving s birth, on April 3, 1783. The Brit 
 ish were soon to evacuate the city, and Washington 
 was to take possession of it. Mrs. Irving, a warm 
 hearted woman of English birth, and an ardent 
 patriot of the new land, said, cc Washington s work 
 is ended, and the child shall be named after him." 
 The child was still in the care of a Scotch nurse 
 when one day she saw the President, as Washington 
 then was, enter a shop. " Please your Honour," 
 said she, following him in, " here s a bairn was 
 named after you." The President laid his hand on 
 the boy s head, and gave him a blessing, which he 
 never forgot. 
 
 The family into which Irving was born would be 
 called large to-day, since he was an eighth son, and 
 the youngest of eleven children, all but three of 
 whom grew up. The father was Scotch, of excel 
 lent descent, and a Presbyterian of the sterner type. 
 It did not take Irving long to unlearn the lesson 
 of his youth, that everything pleasant was wicked ; 
 yet he never replaced it with the converse belief. 
 " O Washington, if you were only good ! " his 
 mother exclaimed to him one day. Lacking sym 
 pathy with his father s religious views, he yet had 
 goodness enough to betake himself independently 
 to Trinity Church, and to be confirmed in the faith 
 of his mother s earlier days. He possessed, too, 
 enough of another spirit, to slip away, whenever he 
 
WASHINGTON IRVING 3 
 
 could afford it, to the forbidden play-house, return 
 ing home at nine for family prayers, after which he 
 would go promptly to his room, not to sleep, but 
 to climb out of a window and be back at the theatre 
 in time for the after-piece. 
 
 The person who objected to the sight of brethren 
 dwelling together in unity, because it was much 
 less entertaining than that of brothers who quarrel, 
 would have been disappointed in the Irving family. 
 As Washington Irving approached manhood, after 
 a desultory schooling which ended when he was 
 sixteen, his share in literary undertakings with his 
 older brothers was an early evidence of the devoted 
 fraternal intimacy which only death could end. One 
 of these older brothers, Peter, a graduate of Colum 
 bia College as Irving would probably have been 
 if he had given promise of any fondness for method 
 ical study established a newspaper, the Morning 
 Chronicle, and to this the author contributed his 
 first literary productions, a series of letters signed 
 "Jonathan Oldstyle." They were sprightly and 
 clever enough mainly in their criticism of plays 
 and players to set people talking, and to win for 
 the boy of nineteen a small fame even outside his 
 native city. 
 
 How came he by the power to make himself felt 
 at so early a day ? Surely not through his masters 
 at school so much as by his own way of cultivating 
 a strong native gift. When he was placed in a 
 
4 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 lawyer s office at sixteen, his reading was far less in 
 law than in letters for he drank deep of the Eng 
 lish classics, even in " office hours " and his writ 
 ing was more for the expression of himself than for 
 experiment in the profession he never followed. 
 There were in this period, moreover, rambles afield 
 into the Sleepy Hollow region, and farther up the 
 Hudson, and nearer home. The quick eye and 
 the ready mind got their full share of training from 
 these many days sine libro. 
 
 It may have been his delicate health that made 
 him but an indifferent student. It was certainly to 
 this and to his brothers generous care of him that 
 he owed his first trip to Europe, in 1804, for the 
 captain of the ship sailing for Bordeaux ominously 
 remarked, as Irving stepped over the rail, " There s 
 a chap who will go overboard before we get across." 
 On the contrary, he came back vastly stronger early 
 in 1806, and with an horizon widened by the many 
 opportunities of which he had availed himself for 
 seeing stimulating persons and things. 
 
 The New York to which Irving returned, " the 
 gamesome city of the Manhattoes," as he liked to 
 call it, had grown from the Dutch town of 20,000 
 inhabitants, in which he was born, to a gay little 
 city of 80,000 souls. The region between Wall 
 Street and the Battery was still the fashionable part 
 of town, and into the life of this little world the 
 clever and handsome youth entered with all spirit. 
 
IRVING AT 22. 
 From an engraving of the crayon sketch made by Vanderlyn in Paris. 
 
r or THB 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
. 
 
 WASHINGTON IRVING 5 
 
 Of law, again, he read enough to be admitted to the 
 bar, but society for a time was the most engrossing 
 interest of his life. One has but to look at Van- 
 derlyn s sketch of him as he appeared in 1805 to 
 understand why a young man who added wit, good 
 feeling, and gallantry to the charm of such a person 
 found all the doors that he had time to enter open 
 to him, not only in New York, but at Ballston Spa, 
 the summer resort of fashion early in the century, 
 and in Philadelphia, Washington, and Baltimore. 
 One is not sorry to find a trace of the dandy in 
 young Irving, or to read in a letter to his brother 
 Peter in England, before this period was passed, 
 " Send me out a handsome coat, but not with a 
 waist as long as a turnspit s/ Then besides he 
 would have " a waistcoat or two of fashionable kind, 
 and anything that your fancy may suggest." There 
 are ample reasons for believing that the young 
 women of his day believed him quite as fascinating 
 a blade as he would have had himself appear. 
 
 With the gayer young men of the town, too, he 
 played a spirited part. " The Nine Worthies " and 
 " The Lads of Kilkenny " were the names under 
 which a group of them met and dined and frolicked. 
 Most of these Worthies attained distinction of one 
 sort and another in their later years, and the con 
 science of the day suffered no great shock from 
 their convivial doings. A story is gaily told of 
 one of them returning alone from a dinner, and 
 
AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 falling through a grating in the sidewalk. He 
 could not get out, and feared an ill night of it; 
 but one by one the rest of the party which he had 
 left fell into the same pit, and there they spent the 
 remainder of the night happily together. On 
 another occasion a policeman thought he had iden 
 tified one of the 
 Worthies by the hat 
 he wore, and taking 
 him to his lodgings 
 was persuaded with 
 difficulty that the 
 body was that of 
 another member of 
 the company. Their 
 gaiety was not con 
 fined to the town, 
 but at a country- 
 place on the Passaic, 
 which figures in Sal 
 magundi as Cockloft 
 Hall, they spent 
 many merry days and 
 
 nights. It would be utterly unfair to leave the im 
 pression that Irving and his fellows were a bad lot. 
 They were nothing of the sort ; in an age when 
 pleasures of a certain kind were followed more frankly 
 than in our generation, they were merely like other 
 high-spirited young fellows of their world. 
 
 Hatmcrtot. JLonggtaff, 
 
 Frontispiece to the first number of 
 " Salmagundi." 
 
WASHINGTON IRVING 7 
 
 It was characteristic of nearly all the work of 
 Irving s pen that it reflected truthfully some phase 
 of his life ; and it is worth remarking that his first 
 work which is still sometimes read, could never 
 have been but for the somewhat butterfly existence 
 of these early days. In January, 1807, appeared 
 the initial number of Salmagundi, a periodical con 
 ducted by Irving, his older brother William, and 
 James Kirke Paulding, who, besides attaining honour 
 as a writer as time went on, became Secretary of the 
 Navy, and now is awarded the credit of having 
 provided the world with the rhyme of " Peter Piper 
 picked a peck of pickled peppers." These three 
 young editors began their career with the announce 
 ment : " Our intention is simply to instruct the 
 young, reform the old, correct the town, and casti 
 gate the age ; this is an arduous task, and therefore 
 we undertake it with confidence." Their small 
 sheet, with yellow covers, was issued by an eccentric 
 publisher, Longworth, the front of whose house 
 was almost entirely hidden by a huge painting of 
 the crowning of Shakespeare. The paper appeared 
 every fortnight, maintaining to the end a humourous 
 disregard of profit and the public, and with perfect 
 nonchalance ceased to be after twenty numbers had 
 securely established its success. In later years Irv 
 ing put a slight value upon his contributions to Sal 
 magundi, but in them, as in the work of the other 
 editors, it is impossible to ignore a sprightly clever- 
 
SALMAGUNDI; 
 
 OR, THE 
 
 WHIM-WHAMS AND OPINIONS 
 
 OF 
 
 LAUNCELOT LANGSTAFF, ESQ. 
 
 AND OTHERS. 
 
 In hoc e*t hoa*> cum quiz el jokesez, 
 t smokem, toasTtm, roastcm folksez, 
 
 Fe. Taw, fum. Psalma/iazar. 
 
 With baked, and broii d. andste* d,and toasted.. 
 And fried- and boil d, and smok d, and rolled, 
 Vte treat he (own. 
 
 NO. vni.J Saturday, April 18, I8Q7. 
 
 BV ANTHONY. EVERGREEN, GENT. 
 
 ,.* In all thy humors, whether grave or mellow, 
 .Thou rt such a touchy, testy > pleasant feUovr ; 
 Hast so much wit, and mirth, and spleen about thee, 
 There is no living with thee nor without thec." 
 
 NEVER, in the memory of. the oldest inhabitant 
 has there been known a more backward spring." 
 .This is the universal remark among the almanac 
 quidnuncs, and weather wiseacres of the day; and 
 1 have heard it at least fifty-five/ times froqi old 
 mrs. Cockloft, who, poor Woman, is one of those 
 walking almanacs that foretel every snow, rain, or 
 frost by the shooting of corns, a pain in the bones% 
 or an ugly stitch in the side." . I do not recollect, 
 .in the whole course. of my life, to have seen the 
 Tn6hth of March indulge in such untoward capers, 
 caprices and coquetries as it has done this year r 
 I might have forgiven -these vagaries, had they 
 not completely knocked up wy friend LangstaffV 
 
 FAC-SIMILE PAGE OF "SALMAGUNDI" AS IT ORIGINALLY 
 APPEARED. 
 
WASHINGTON IRVING 9 
 
 ness and a reproduction of the colour and foibles of 
 society, so convincingly faithful as to have a posi 
 tive historic value. It was eminently a New York 
 publication, even to the indulgence of the now time- 
 honoured flings at Philadelphia and its people. 
 The chief interest in Irving s work for it, which is 
 easily picked out, lies in the detection of the first 
 notes in the many keys to which his more practised 
 voice was to be set. 
 
 Directly due to his surroundings, also, was Irv 
 ing s next piece of work, Diedrich Knickerbocker s 
 History of New Tork (1809). He began it with his 
 brother Peter as a satire on a serious history of the 
 town, which had just been published ; and when Peter 
 was called abroad Irving had his own will in making 
 it just what it is a masterpiece in the humour of the 
 day which begot it. There is no need of dwelling 
 upon its qualities, but when we call our own day the 
 day of clever advertising, it is well to remember the 
 heralding of the Knickerbocker History. The grave 
 communications to the Evening Post, beginning six 
 weeks before the book appeared, about an old Died 
 rich Knickerbocker who had strayed from New York 
 without paying for his lodgings, about his having 
 been seen on the way to Albany, and the landlord s 
 final decision to print a manuscript which the old 
 man left behind, and to apply the proceeds to the 
 unpaid bill all these would be worth transcribing 
 in full were they not included in the later editions 
 
io AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 of the book. Besides almost leading a city official 
 to offer a reward for the missing Diedrich, they 
 served an excellent purpose in stirring up curiosity, 
 which the book appeased to the satisfaction of all 
 but the representatives of the families which ever 
 since have gone by the name of Knickerbocker. 
 One can see readily now why their ancestral pride 
 must have been touched at first. They could not 
 possibly have foreseen that banks, clubs, buildings, 
 manufactories, and enterprises of every sort would 
 be named one day for their forefathers because of 
 this very book, and that the young author who had 
 hurt their feelings was the creator of the whole 
 Knickerbocker background before which modern 
 New York is very glad to stand. 
 
 While he was at work upon the last part of the 
 Knickerbocker History, the great sorrow of Irving s 
 life befell him. Miss Matilda Hoffman, to whom 
 he was engaged to be married, died after a brief ill 
 ness. George William Curtis once described Irv 
 ing s life as " a life without events, or only the events 
 of all our lives, except that it lacks the great event 
 of marriage." The death which caused this lack, 
 though it did not rob him of the courage to finish 
 his humourous production, drove him for a time 
 from all society, and made an impression upon his 
 spirit which his whole subsequent life of activity 
 never quite removed. It is by no means certain 
 that as the years went by he never thought again of 
 
MATILDA HOFFMAN, 
 
OF TMB 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
WASHINGTON IRVING n 
 
 marriage for himself. Indeed, one is inclined to 
 believe that at Dresden, in 1823, if all the circum 
 stances had been propitious, he would have married 
 an English girl with whom and whose family he had 
 formed a tender intimacy. But when he died an old 
 man, a lock to which he himself had always kept 
 the key was found to guard a braid of hair and a 
 beautiful miniature, with a slip of paper marked in 
 his own handwriting, " Matilda Hoffman." No less 
 faithfully had he kept her Bible and Prayer-Book 
 throughout his life. Of the miniature his publisher, 
 George P. Putnam, told the story of having once 
 had it retouched and remounted for its possessor, 
 forty years after Miss Hoffman s death. " When 
 I returned it to him in a suitable velvet case," said 
 Mr. Putnam, " he took it to a quiet corner and 
 looked intently on the face for some minutes, appar 
 ently unobserved, his tears falling freely on the glass 
 as he gazed." Who shall say that the cherishing of 
 such a memory as this did not find its direct ex 
 pression in the gentle chivalry with which he bore 
 himself, as a writer and as a man, towards all women ? 
 Even before Miss Hoffman s death Irving had 
 been in doubt about the career best suited to his 
 talents ; and the dejection into which he fell at once 
 did not help his decision. The law held his interest 
 but slightly. The editing of a magazine, which he 
 undertook in Philadelphia, was distasteful to him, 
 both because of his tender heart in criticism and 
 
IRVING AT 25. 
 From an original sketch by Jarvis. 
 
WASHINGTON IRVING 13 
 
 because of the necessity for systematic work. " Ah," 
 he said once, in later life, " don t talk to me of sys 
 tem ; I never had any. ... I have, it is true, my 
 little budgets of notes some tied oneway, some 
 another and which when I need, I think I come 
 upon in my pigeon-holes by a sort of instinct. 
 That is all there is of it." But though the maga 
 zine did not please him, and he dropped it at the 
 beginning of 1815, it kept his restless feet some 
 what in the path of letters. 
 
 The War of 1812 had stirred Irving s patriotism, 
 and was responsible for his bearing for a time the 
 title of colonel, as an aide to Governor Tompkins 
 of New York. After peace was declared Irving, 
 always ready for an expedition, was on the very 
 point of sailing with Decatur to the Algerian coast ; 
 but changing his plan almost at the last moment, 
 yet unwilling to give up the journey abroad, he 
 sailed instead for Liverpool to join his brother Peter 
 in the conduct of the English branch of the com 
 mercial house on which their fortunes depended. 
 It was seventeen years later, in 1832, that he set 
 foot again on American soil. 
 
 One of the stock objections to Irving, urged even 
 by English critics, is that his books are more Eng 
 lish than American. As early as in the days of 
 Salmagundi he had shown, as he was always to show, 
 how much his habit of mind and expression owed 
 to Addison, Steele, and other models of our com- 
 
i 4 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 mon tongue. At heart, moreover, Irving was a 
 Tory, a Conservative. His very nature felt a 
 kinship with whatever was long established and 
 mellowed by centuries of tradition. The facts that 
 he spent much time in the family of a married sister 
 in England, and through his talents and graces soon 
 found himself welcomed to the inner life of many 
 other English houses, must have contributed much 
 to his sympathy with the scenes of " our old 
 home." But there is no need of framing a defence 
 for such an attitude. " What, pray, if the hero of 
 Bracebridge Hall be own cousin to Sir Roger de 
 Coverley ? " Ik Marvel once asked. " Is that a 
 relationship to be discarded ? " Surely not, and no 
 less surely did our country and England, in a time 
 when the press of both lands kept the mutual feel 
 ing of animosity at a high tension, owe to Irving 
 a better knowledge of each other and a truer 
 recognition of the good to be found on both sides 
 of the water. It was Thackeray who called him 
 "the first ambassador whom the New World of 
 Letters sent to the Old." Irving s own explana 
 tion of the English interest in him was merely this : 
 " I was looked upon as something new and strange 
 in literature ; a kind of demi-savage, with a feather 
 in his hand instead of on his head ; and there was 
 curiosity to hear what such a being had to say about 
 civilised society." 
 
 This curiosity did not exist at once. When he 
 
IRVING AT 26. 
 From an engraving of the portrait by Jarvis. 
 
WASHINGTON IRVING 15 
 
 came to England he was comparatively unknown. 
 Scott, to be sure, had read what he called " the 
 most excellently jocose history of New York," and 
 had thoroughly enjoyed it. But Irving had no 
 general fame, and for several years had no oppor 
 tunity of creating it. The uncongenial business 
 which had brought him to Liverpool took most of 
 his time, and to no avail, for in 1 8 1 8 the enterprise 
 proved itself a failure. It was this event which 
 made it a necessity for Irving to look upon litera 
 ture as a means of support more than of recreation. 
 He ceased to be merely the ornamental member of 
 his family, and as time went on took upon himself 
 the care of those who had cared for him. A more 
 winning picture of brotherly sympathy and a gener 
 osity in which largeness and delicacy were combined 
 could hardly be found than that which the corre 
 spondence between Irving and his brother Peter, 
 never strong after the Liverpool failure, revealed. 
 Be it said that the success which Irving was not slow 
 in reaching when once he set about to attain it ren 
 dered him abundantly able to do for others besides 
 himself. 
 
 It was the Sketch-Book, of which the first parts 
 appeared in America in 1819, when Irving was 
 thirty-six, that told all English-speaking readers of 
 a new writer who must be recognised. The book 
 was vastly successful at home, and when Irving 
 found its portions copied in English prints, he saw 
 
16 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 the necessity of publishing it in England. Murray, 
 "the prince of publishers," declined at first to take 
 it, employing a formula of considerate rejection which 
 the modern publisher has not learned to improve 
 upon " only because I do not see that scope in 
 the nature of it which would enable me to make 
 those satisfactory accounts between us, without which 
 I really feel no satisfaction in engaging." Accord 
 ingly Irving decided to print the book at his own 
 risk in England ; but the printer failed soon after 
 the book appeared, whereupon Murray was only too 
 glad to take the Sketch-Book into his own hands. 
 From this time on he was Irving s English pub 
 lisher, and so liberal were his dealings throughout 
 their intercourse, that one may well believe with 
 Murray s biographer, that the writer had far more 
 profit from his books than the publisher no com 
 mon circumstance in those or later days. 
 
 It would be tedious to chronicle with precision 
 the completion from time to time of Irving s other 
 books. When the sun has risen above the early 
 morning sky we are content to let it shine on without 
 our close scrutiny. One could not follow Irving s 
 work, however, without noticing how one phase 
 of its early character is continued, how it con 
 stantly reflects the circumstances of his life. As a 
 wanderer about England and the Continent, he 
 turns a quick eye upon social life, marks the 
 pathetic and humourous scenes about him, and tells 
 
//i*** c^it. 
 
 
 V *C+fCrtsi*s &&~ 
 
 
 FAC-SIMILE AUTOGRAPH PAGE FROM THE MS. OF 
 " BRACEBRIDGE HALL." 
 
i8 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 us all he sees in books like Bracebridge Hall and 
 Tales of a Traveller. He goes to Spain to investi 
 gate some special documents concerning Columbus, 
 and the result is not only a body of historical work 
 beyond his own expectations, but the drawing of 
 many small pictures, distinctively Geoffrey Crayon s, 
 like those which figure in The Alhambra. So clearly 
 do the writings express the man that one reads his 
 Life and Letters only to become better acquainted 
 with the genial, sympathetic, good friend one has 
 come to know in his works. Indeed, he might 
 have been writing truthfully of himself when he 
 wrote of Goldsmith : " Few have so eminently 
 possessed the magic gift of identifying themselves 
 with their writings." 
 
 It is in the record of his friendships abroad and 
 at home that one comes, perhaps, most nearly to 
 the man himself. He looked upon the world and 
 people with a smiling front, and so, for the most part, 
 they looked back at him. " Ah, God bless your 
 merry face ! " said an Irish beggarwoman to him 
 one day, as he walked along the street enjoying the 
 memory of one of his own jokes, "surely you re 
 not the man will refuse a poor woman a sixpence? " 
 A guinea was the smallest coin he had in his pocket, 
 and he gave it to her. Much of his philosophy of 
 life is contained in the passage in Irving s hand 
 writing, which the reader can easily make out here 
 for himself. Early in his English life he meets with 
 
WASHINGTON IRVING 19 
 
 Scott, who promptly thanks " Tom " Campbell " for 
 making me known to Mr. Washington Irving, who 
 is one of the best and pleasantest acquaintances I 
 have made this many a day." Of Scott in return 
 Irving says : " He is a man that, if you knew, you 
 would love ; a right honest-hearted, generous-spirited 
 being." Again he calls him " a sterling golden- 
 hearted old worthy, full of the joyousness of youth." 
 He meets with Moore, and cares so greatly for him as 
 even to admire poetry which he had previously con 
 demned not an unprecedented change, be it said, 
 when friendship and criticism become intermingled. 
 Yet he was not quite blind to the weaknesses of his 
 friends. Holding the highest regard for the aged 
 Samuel Rogers, he could make the shrewd observa 
 tion in a letter : " I dined tete-a-tete with him some 
 time since, and he served up his friends as he served 
 up his fish, with a squeeze of lemon over each. It 
 was very piquant, but it rather set my teeth on 
 edge." With the painters Leslie and Gilbert Stuart 
 Newton it was inevitable that Geoffrey Crayon 
 should have felt a close kinship. On the basis of 
 his intimacy with each, and of the sort of figure 
 painting which occupied all three, it were no un 
 worthy task for the proper person to tell us some 
 thing of the art which appealed most strongly to the 
 taste of the twenties and thirties, and to speculate 
 on the different employment which the brushes and 
 the pen of three such friends would find for them 
 selves at this our end of the century. 
 
20 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 One should not bring Irving back from his Eng 
 lish friendships without repeating the classic story 
 of the origin of Rebecca in Ivanhoe. If report be 
 true, it was to Irving that Scott owed his idea of this 
 character. Miss Rebecca Gratz, of Philadelphia, 
 had been one of Miss Hoffman s dearest friends, 
 and was with her to the end of her fatal illness. 
 Irving s account of the beautiful American Jewess, 
 full of devotion to the faith of her fathers, is said to 
 have given Scott the original of the very person 
 that was needed in his tale. 
 
 We cannot follow Irving through his busy sojourn 
 in Spain (where the travelling student Longfellow 
 reported him at work every morning at six o clock), 
 through his service as Secretary of the American 
 Legation in London, his receiving of an honorary 
 degree at Oxford, where the undergraduates, hailing 
 him as Diedrich Knickerbocker and Rip Van Win 
 kle, gave him a reception very like that which Dr. 
 Holmes, amid inquiries about the One Hoss Shay, 
 and the singing of " Holmes, sweet Holmes," re 
 ceived more than half a century later. It was after 
 all these experiences that he returned, in 1832, to 
 New York, having meanwhile declined official posts 
 at home because of his certainty that the life in 
 Europe would be the best he could live for the 
 exercise and development of his own gifts. Home 
 sick he had often been, and always unfalteringly an 
 American at heart. The town he had left had grown 
 
IRVING AT 52. 
 From a steel engraving of the Bust by Ball Hughes. 
 
WASHINGTON IRVING 21 
 
 in seventeen years almost beyond recognition. His 
 countrymen s appreciation of him had grown in equal 
 measure. A great banquet of welcome celebrated 
 his return. " I am asked how long I mean to re 
 main here," he said at the end of his speech at the 
 dinner. " They know but little of my heart or my 
 feelings who can ask me this question. I answer, 
 As long as I live." 
 
 Except for his return to Spain as American Min 
 ister, from 1 842 to 1 846, this is what he did, and it 
 appears that he would not have left his home then 
 but for an impelling sense of duty and the hope for 
 leisure at Madrid to work upon his Life of Wash 
 ington. He had established himself, in 1835, at 
 Wolfert s Roost, an old Dutch house on the Hud 
 son, in the place now known as Irvington, and here, 
 until the end of his life, his affections were centred. 
 An architect extended the cottage, till under its 
 name of " Sunnyside " it bore the look of an Eng 
 lish country-house. Ivy from Melrose Abbey soon 
 covered its walls, and old Dutch weather-cocks, one 
 from the Stadt-house of New Amsterdam, sur 
 mounted its roofs. When Philip Hone first saw 
 the house it was a modest affair in comparison with 
 other country-places near it ; " only one story high," 
 his Diary tells us ; " but the admirers of the gentle 
 Geoffrey think, no doubt, that one story of his is 
 worth more than half a dozen of other people s." 
 Like Scott, Irving took the greatest pleasure in 
 
22 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 beautifying and enlarging his establishment, though, 
 unlike the master of Abbotsford, he had the wisdom 
 not to spend vast sums in such enterprises before 
 they were earned. Within, the house was bright 
 ened by the constant presence of his nieces and his 
 brother Ebenezer, and their loving service each for 
 all. 
 
 The Western travels, of which A Tour on the 
 Prairies preserves the record, took place before the 
 settlement at Sunnyside, but it was not in nature 
 for one who had led Irving s life to retire wholly 
 into rusticity. We find him making frequent visits 
 to New York, for the play, for music, of both of 
 which he was heartily fond. Public appearances he 
 shunned, yet when Dickens came to New York in 
 1842 Irving could not escape presiding at the great 
 dinner in his honour. They had already become 
 friends through correspondence, for Irving s delight 
 in Little Nell had to be expressed in a letter to the 
 author, and Dickens in his enthusiastic response had 
 said : " Diedrich Knickerbocker I have worn to death 
 in my pocket, and yet I should show you his mu 
 tilated carcass with a joy past all expression." The 
 night of the public dinner came, and Irving s dread 
 of the introductory speech kept him murmuring 
 throughout the repast, " I shall certainly break 
 down." At the proper time he rose to his feet, 
 began bravely, but could utter only a few sentences, 
 and ended by taking refuge in the announcement 
 
WASHINGTON IRVING 23 
 
 of the toast, " Charles Dickens, the guest of the 
 nation." The applause was generous, and as Irving 
 took his seat, " There," he said, " I told you I should 
 break down, and I have done it." Later in 1842, 
 while on his way to Madrid, he found himself 
 called upon at the dinner of the Literary Fund 
 in London to respond to the toast " Washington 
 Irving and American Literature." All he could 
 bring himself to say, in acknowledgment of his en 
 thusiastic reception, was, " I beg to return you my 
 very sincere thanks." One Englishman at the table 
 was heard to make the laconic comment, " Brief? " 
 " Yes," said another beside him, " but you can tell 
 the gentleman in the very tone of his voice." 
 
 Going beyond New York in his own country 
 he was sometimes to be found in Baltimore, Wash 
 ington, and other places. Another fragment of 
 Philip Hone s Diary, after he had seen Irving at 
 a levee of President Tyler s, where Dickens was 
 also present, shows clearly enough in what esteem 
 his countrymen held him : " As far as I could 
 judge, Irving outbozzed Boz. He collected a crowd 
 around him ; the men pressed on to shake his hand, 
 and the women to touch the hem of his garment. 
 Somebody told me that they saw a woman put on 
 his hat, in order, as she told her companion, to say 
 that she had worn Washington Irving s hat. All 
 this was c fun to them/ but death to poor Irving, 
 who has no relish for this sort of glorification, and 
 
24 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 has less tact than any man living to get along with 
 it decently." 
 
 It is not the Irving of Washington and Madrid 
 that one likes best to look back upon through his 
 declining years, but the Irving of Sunnyside. Here 
 he was at his best, declaring that no period of his 
 life had been so full of satisfaction to him, working 
 through the mornings, and when his work was done 
 entering with zest into the pleasures of his family 
 and their neighbours. It seems that he was acces 
 sible even to bores, and during his last illness, a 
 few months before its end, could not refuse the 
 importunity of an autograph hunter. He did not 
 feel at the time like writing his name, but promised 
 to forward it by mail. The stranger then inquired 
 what the charge would be, saying, " It is a principle 
 with me always to pay for such things." " It is a 
 principle with me," replied Irving, with a sharpness 
 of which we are glad for once to read, " never to 
 take pay ! " 
 
 The work of his last years, the Life of Wash 
 ington^ of which he was unable to correct the final 
 pages of proof, had been suggested to him as early 
 as 1825 by the publisher Constable. From time 
 to time he had had to postpone his work upon it, 
 and the opportunity might never have come if he 
 had carried out a purpose, long cherished, to tell the 
 story of the "Conquest of Mexico." But in 1838 
 he found that Prescott was at work upon the same 
 
WASHINGTON IRVING 25 
 
 theme, and at no little sacrifice of desire and accom 
 plished work turned the whole subject over to the 
 younger writer. 
 
 It was on November 28, 1859, when Irving was 
 seventy-six years old, that his death came. He 
 had been in poor health for some months, suffering 
 much from sleeplessness and a shortness of breath, 
 but at the last a weakness of the heart brought the 
 sudden end. Lacking to-day a man of letters who 
 holds such a place in the affections of his country 
 men as Irving held, it is difficult for us to realise 
 the impression made by his death. It was as if a 
 President or a great soldier had died in these later 
 years. Flags on shipping and buildings in New 
 York flew at half-mast, and the Mayor and Council 
 recognised the event as a public grief. A multitude 
 of people bore witness to their own sense of loss 
 at the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. The day of the 
 funeral, December i, had the fullest beauty and 
 suggestion of Indian summer "one of his own 
 days," the people said. It is to Longfellow, 
 
 " No singer vast of voice ; yet one who leaves 
 His native air the sweeter for his song," 
 
 that we instinctively turn for the words : 
 
 IN THE CHURCHYARD AT TARRYTOWN 
 
 Here lies the gentle humourist, who died 
 In the bright Indian Summer of his fame ! 
 A simple stone, with but a date and name, 
 Marks his secluded resting-place beside 
 
26 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 The river that he loved and glorified. 
 
 Here in the autumn of his days^he came, 
 But the dry leaves of life were all aflame 
 With tints that brightened and were multiplied. 
 
 How sweet a life was his ; how sweet a death ! 
 Living, to wing with mirth the weary hours, 
 Or with romantic tales the heart to cheer ; 
 
 Dying, to leave a memory like the breath 
 
 Of summers full of sunshine and of showers, , 
 
 A grief and gladness in the atmosphere. 
 
 Since his death there has been time to see Wash 
 ington Irving and the heritage he left our letters in 
 the perspective of distance. Of the tangible debts 
 we owe him, the " Knickerbocker idea " has been 
 mentioned in its place. Shall we not also render 
 him thanks, with Joseph Jefferson as a fellow-inter 
 preter, for our national possession of Rip Van 
 Winkle ? Mr. Jefferson in his charming autobiog 
 raphy tells us how the (play, as we now have it, 
 came into being ; and of course Irving, in his nar 
 rative, stands behind it all. How real a creature 
 Rip has become appears in Jefferson s story of the 
 negro waiter at the Catskill Hotel, who, exclaiming, 
 " Dat s de man," pointed him out to an incredulous 
 visitor as the very person who had slept twenty 
 years. How the author and the actor are mingled 
 in the popular imagination we see in the anecdote of 
 Jefferson s introduction to the Rip Van Winkle 
 Club, of Catskill, by its agitated president as " Mr. 
 Washington Irving." To have given us both the 
 
IRVING AT 67. 
 From an engraving of the last portrait of Irving, by Charles Martin. 
 
WASHINGTON IRVING 27 
 
 Knickerbockers and Rip Van Winkle constitutes an 
 achievement in American letters which it would be 
 hard to parallel. 
 
 Whether a large quantity of his work will go 
 down to later posterity in any living sense, the 
 critic of to-day would assert with less confidence 
 than Irving s contemporaries were wont to feel. 
 The fashions in sentiment, humour, and the nar 
 ration of fact and fiction change, like clothes, with 
 the years. The works of the pen possessing that 
 broad quality which is above fashions are but few ; 
 and even under the great names in letters rigorous 
 selection from a thousand pages sometimes leaves 
 but a score that really live. The critic who would 
 deny that these few pages are not to be found in 
 Irving would himself be hard !to find. Exactly 
 which are these pages? Ah, the days of the 
 prophets are past ! 
 
 But though fashions change in books, in men 
 they are invariable. Whether such.an one as Irving 
 had lived before we had a country, or should pre 
 sent himself to a generation yet unborn, he would 
 still be one of those whom the world must love. 
 He was beyond all things else a gentleman, with 
 the best qualities of that undying race. If it is 
 necessary to enumerate and explain them now, this 
 writing will have been in vain. The poets, after 
 all, are the men who come nearest to the truth, and 
 these lines from the Fable for Critics certainly tell 
 much of it : 
 
28 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 " To a true poet-heart add the fun of Dick Steele, 
 Throw in all of Addison, minus the chill, 
 With the whole of that partnership s stock and good will, 
 Mix well, and while stirring, hum o er, as a spell, 
 The fine old English Gentleman, simmer it well, 
 Sweeten just to your own private liking, then strain, 
 That only the finest and clearest remain, 
 Let it stand out of doors till a soul it receives 
 From the warm, lazy sun loitering down through green leaves, 
 And you 11 find a choice nature, not wholly deserving 
 A name either English or Yankee just Irving. * 
 
 We did not select the Father of our Country, 
 but Washington has pleased us well ; neither did 
 we choose our first American man of letters, but 
 had this opportunity been granted, we could hardly 
 have done better than to select "just Irving." 
 
JAMES FENIMORE COOPER 
 
 THERE is no lack of testimony to show that 
 the men of Cooper s own day were his en 
 thusiastic readers. The men of our time have read 
 him, for the greater part, as boys ; and the men of 
 the decades immediately to come that is, the 
 boys of our own households are principally his 
 readers to-day. Is not this merely another way 
 of saying that the writer who shared with Irving 
 the earliest honours of American literature, in the 
 boyhood of its history, has taken his more perma 
 nent place as the favourite of boyhood through the 
 generations that follow him ? 
 
 Irving late in life is reported to have said of a 
 literary comrade: "He and I were very fortunate 
 in being born so early. We should have no chance 
 now against the battalions of better writers." It is, 
 indeed, hard for us to realise in the present " clash 
 of magazines " and new books how meagre in 
 quantity and quality was the production of Ameri 
 can writers before Cooper attained his first successes. 
 Except for Irving and Bryant, who read his poem, 
 " The Ages," at Cambridge in the year of the ap- 
 
30 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 pearance of The Spy, a list of the writers of that time 
 would be a catalogue of half and quite forgotten 
 names. But it concerns us less to inquire into the 
 precise state of American literature as Cooper found 
 it a suggestion is enough than to see what he 
 brought into it. 
 
 At the very beginning it may be said that no man 
 ever brought more of himself into what he wrote 
 than Cooper. His early training, his later circum 
 stances, his personal weaknesses and strengths all 
 left indelible marks upon the pages of his books. 
 Consequently there is no writer whose life is better 
 worth studying for the light it throws directly upon 
 the productions of his pen. 
 
 It was at Burlington, New Jersey, on September 
 15, 1789, that Cooper was born. His father, 
 William Cooper, was of Quaker, English descent ; 
 his mother, Elizabeth Fenimore, of Swedish blood. 
 The Coopers had come from Shakespeare s birth 
 place in Warwickshire to New Jersey more than 
 a hundred years before the novelist s birth, and, 
 holding broad tracts of land in the new country, had 
 provided their best-known descendant with a well- 
 inherited national feeling. James Cooper, as he was 
 called till the New York Legislature in 1826 made 
 the family name Fenimore-Cooper, in which the 
 hyphen was not long retained, was the eleventh of 
 twelve children. A household in those days was 
 no scanty affair, and when William Cooper, in 1790, 
 
JAMES FENIMORE COOPER 31 
 
 transported his establishment from Burlington to 
 the place that was to bear the name of Cooperstown, 
 the cavalcade numbered fifteen persons. Round 
 and about the head-waters of the Susquehanna, the 
 father of the novelist had recently become possessed 
 of thousands of acres of land, and here, in 1799, he 
 finished the building of his manor-house, Otsego 
 Hall, for a long time the most distinguished pri 
 vate dwelling in or near the Otsego region of New 
 York. 
 
 What is now a prosperous farming district was 
 then a wilderness, at least on one side ; for Coopers- 
 town was a veritable frontier settlement. The 
 young Cooper would have been a strangely differ 
 ent person from the hosts of boys whose delight he 
 has been, if the lake and the woods at his very 
 doors had not called him irresistibly to learn all 
 that they had to teach him, and it is easy to believe 
 that his response to the call was eager. His books 
 themselves bear evidence enough that his knowledge 
 and love of the woods came to him at the time when 
 the mind receives its enduring impressions. The 
 life at his father s house through these early years 
 was also full of expanding influences. The con 
 quest of the wilderness and the furtherance of 
 large-minded plans for the future of a new commu 
 nity are not always joined, as they were in the 
 Cooper family, with a domestic life of grace and 
 refinement. The growing town of Judge William 
 
32 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 Cooper s building drew to itself a population of 
 more than common diversity and strength. At 
 the Hall many distinguished guests found enter 
 tainment. Talleyrand was one of them, and refer 
 ence is often made to an acrostic he is said to have 
 written in honour of the novelist s sister Anna, who 
 was killed in her twenty-third year, 1800, by a fall 
 from a horse. As the lines are not often seen, they 
 are transcribed here from a local history : 
 
 " Aimable philosophe au printems de son age, 
 Ni les terns, ni les lieux n alterent son esprit ; 
 Ne cedant qu a ses gouts, simple et sans etalage, 
 Au milieu des deserts, elle lit, pense, ecrit. 
 
 " Cultivez, belle Anna, votre gout pour 1 etude ; 
 On ne saurait ici mieux employer son terns ; 
 Otsego n est pas gai mais tout est habitude; 
 Paris vous deplairait fort au premier moment ; 
 Et qui jouit de soi dans une solitude, 
 Rentrant au monde, est sur d en faire rornement." 
 
 However truly the statesman might have written 
 " Otsego nest pas gai" it was not for gaiety, but for 
 education that the young Cooper left it. His first 
 important schooling was at the hands of the Eng 
 lish rector of St. Peter s Church in Albany, whence 
 it is not unlikely that he carried to Yale College the 
 strong preference for the Anglican form of worship 
 and Church government, which, with an equally 
 violent feeling against Puritans and New Englanders, 
 he carried through life and into many of his stories. 
 
O o 
 
 J 5 
 
 < ~ 
 
 a -s 
 
 I " 
 h P 
 
 I I 
 
JAMES FENIMORE COOPER 33 
 
 For all his churchmanship he did not present him 
 self for confirmation like Irving, as a boy, but waited 
 until the very year of his death ; both of them, 
 however, were for a time delegates to the diocesan 
 convention of New York. What Cooper took 
 with him to college was merely a boy s feeling on 
 all subjects, for he was only thirteen when he 
 entered the Class of 1 806 in the second term of its 
 Freshman year, with but one classmate younger 
 than himself. A disposition to see more of the 
 country and waters about New Haven than of his 
 books, and the participation in his Junior year in a 
 frolic which the Faculty considered a weightier 
 offence than his father would have had them think 
 it, put an end to his collegiate life. Judge Cooper, 
 a prominent Federalist and several times a member 
 of Congress, had no difficulty in securing his son s 
 appointment as a midshipman in the navy, and the 
 boy for nearly a year had the preliminary training 
 of many of our naval officers while yet there was no 
 Annapolis Academy before the mast on a mer 
 chantman. On the ship Sterling he sailed to Lon 
 don and Gibraltar, and as a quick-minded, active 
 youth won from the sea a species of teaching which 
 served his later purposes as well as his early knowl 
 edge of the woods. When his commission, dated 
 January i, 1808, made a full-fledged midshipman of 
 him, he saw a few years of service on Lake Ontario 
 and Lake Champlain ; but his marriage, in 1811, to 
 
 3 
 
34 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 Miss De Lancey, a sister of the Bishop of Western 
 New York, divorced him from the sea. In the 
 waters about Hell Gate and Shelter Island, well 
 known to modern yachtsmen, one finds that he sailed 
 enthusiastically for pleasure, as, indeed, throughout 
 his life he betook himself to boats and the woods 
 whenever it was possible. 
 
 The seeker for personalia touching Cooper s early 
 days must often have thought it the pity of pities that 
 on his death-bed he expressed to his family a wish, 
 naturally regarded as a command, that no biography 
 of him should come from them. Family papers, 
 therefore, have had no such publicity as in many 
 another instance. It was in his family life that the 
 best side of Cooper s nature, as time developed it, 
 was shown, yet the lips of those who only could 
 reveal his gentler characteristics, and give the world 
 a fair acquaintance with the whole man, have been 
 for the most part sealed. His daughter, Susan 
 Fenimore Cooper, in the introductions written for 
 his novels since his death, gives many random 
 glimpses of the loveable qualities of her father ; but 
 no complete picture, painted with all the colours 
 that might have entered into it, has ever been 
 drawn. Until Professor Lounsbury s excellent 
 life of Cooper appeared in 1882, there was no 
 more adequate account of his career than that 
 contained in Bryant s memorial oration delivered 
 five months after his death. 
 
JAMES FENIMORE COOPER 35 
 
 One must be content, therefore, with a slender 
 knowledge of Cooper s earlier years. Bits of sug 
 gestion show his young manhood to have been 
 vigorous and spirited in body and mind. One 
 anecdote, preserved in the annals of Cooperstown, 
 may not be too trivial to repeat. It is probably 
 of the time while Cooper was a midshipman, and 
 at home on a furlough. A foot-race was to be run 
 through certain streets of the village, for the prize 
 of a basket of fruit. While Cooper and his com 
 petitor were preparing to start, a little girl stood by, 
 full of eagerness for the exciting event. Cooper 
 quickly turned and picked her up in his arms. 
 " I 11 carry her with me, and beat you ! " he ex 
 claimed, and away they went, Cooper with his 
 laughing burden, the other runner untrammelled. 
 It is almost needless to add that Cooper won the 
 race, else why should the story have been pre 
 served ? 
 
 Nearly ten years passed between Cooper s mar 
 riage and the appearance of his first book. In this 
 time the last thing he could have called himself was 
 a " bookman." He was merely a country gentle 
 man, happily married, of domestic tastes, and in 
 terested in improving the several places in which 
 successively he lived, in Cooperstown and West- 
 chester County. The inevitable anecdote of the 
 beginning of his literary career is that one day, on 
 finishing an English novel, he put the book down 
 
36 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 impatiently and told his wife he could write a better 
 story himself. She challenged him to do it, and 
 his first novel, Precaution, was the result. Appar 
 ently its highest claim to consideration by American 
 readers at the time was that in England it was 
 thought to be the work of an Englishman. The 
 American prophet could hope for little honour at 
 home unless the mother country first accorded it 
 to him. 
 
 " God forbid thou shouldst get in the clutches of Blackwood, 
 O Lord ! how the wits of Old England would grin ! " 
 
 are two lines from some verses addressed by one 
 American writer of Cooper s early day to another, 
 and they indicate fairly a deprecatory attitude that 
 was commonly taken. 
 
 But it was not for a man of Cooper s individu 
 ality to walk long in paths that could be mistaken 
 for any but his own. Such success as Precaution 
 attained was sufficient to make his friends spur him 
 on to further exertion, and The Spy, published in 
 the next year, 1821, was a definite announcement 
 both to English and American readers, who only a 
 year before had seen the completion of Irving s 
 Sketch Book, that still another vital figure had ap 
 peared in literature. Of the impression the book 
 created at home and abroad, the attempts to identify 
 Harvey Birch with various real persons, the trans 
 lation of the story into many languages, and the 
 adoption of the principal character by at least one 
 
COOPER AT 33. 
 From an engraving of" the portrait by Jarvis. 
 
JAMES FENIMORE COOPER 37 
 
 individual, a French spy, as a model for his own 
 actions, of these things, and much besides, many 
 pages might be written if this were the place to 
 tell the whole history of The Spy. 
 
 No time was lost in following up this eminent 
 success. By 1826, Cooper s popular fame was se 
 curely established by The Pioneers, The Pilot (writ 
 ten to show that a truer picture of sea-life than 
 Scott s Pirate could be drawn), and The Last of 
 the Mohicans. In each of these, as in everything 
 else that he did best, he wrote of the scenes he knew 
 and loved. In his failures, the works in which he 
 was obviously out of his element, he has been well 
 likened by his biographer to a backwoods landlord 
 of whom Cooper himself told the story. A party 
 of gentlemen, Cooper being one of them, stopped 
 at his inn one night and asked for entertainment. 
 The landlord, dismayed, said he had nothing in his 
 house fit for them to eat. " What have you ? " 
 they inquired. " Only venison, pheasant, wild 
 duck, and some fresh fish," he replied. What 
 more could be wished, they asked him ; and his 
 answer was that he thought they might want some 
 salt pork. Cooper, as time went on, too often 
 withheld the venison and wild duck which he had 
 already shown himself capable of furnishing. 
 
 But the " salt pork " period of his production did 
 not come for several years more. His popularity was 
 at a high point when, having made literature defi- 
 
38 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 nitely his employment, he moved with his increasing 
 family to New York City, and entered conspicuously 
 into its best social and intellectual affairs. He was 
 the founder and the life of the Bread and Cheese 
 Club, which brought together every week the 
 cleverest men in the town, and before he sailed for 
 Europe, in 1826, a great dinner in his honour gave 
 memorable evidence of the esteem in which his 
 countrymen held him. Chancellor Kent presided ; 
 General Scott, Governor DeWitt Clinton, Charles 
 King, afterwards President of Columbia College, 
 and many others of almost equal note were of the 
 company. 
 
 With a family often persons, including servants, 
 Cooper moved about Europe for more than seven 
 years, always avoiding hotels and establishing him 
 self in rooms, which were made to seem as much like 
 home as possible. Italy was the country which most 
 won his affections, but France, Germany, Switzerland, 
 and England were all seen with an intimacy which 
 gave him some real knowledge of their life. It was 
 during this stay abroad that the habit of draw 
 ing comparisons of national traits fixed itself upon 
 him. The truth, as he conceived it, was always of 
 the first importance to him, and in his telling of it, 
 in story, exhortation, and controversial writing, some 
 times blended into one, he managed by, degrees to 
 step on nearly all the toes that came within his 
 reach. With a wider knowledge of the world 
 
JAMES FENIMORE COOPER 39 
 
 than most of his countrymen, he naturally became 
 conscious of American shortcomings, and they irri 
 tated him. He was no less provoked by the dense 
 European ignorance of American life. It did not 
 reassure him to find a school-teacher in Dresden 
 genuinely surprised at the discovery that the Cooper 
 children were not blacks. In England he was 
 unable to persuade an elderly scholar of his acquaint 
 ance that there was no truth in a certain diction 
 ary definition of the verb to gouge, "to squeeze 
 out a man s eye with the thumb ; a cruel practice 
 used by the Bostonians in America." In France a 
 more serious matter was the part he took in a contro 
 versy about the relative expenses of a republic and 
 a monarchy as forms of government. His position 
 appears to have been patriotic and just, but for some 
 reason it was misunderstood at home, and materially 
 affected his popularity. If Jingoism rears its head 
 in this day, it was rampant in that, and one who 
 cared at all for the esteem of fellow-Americans had 
 to be scrupulous indeed in venturing remarks that 
 could be construed into aspersions, however remote, 
 upon the American eagle. Cooper did not care, 
 and consequently estranged many of his country 
 men ; and readers abroad, finding as many flings at 
 themselves as at Americans, could not regard him 
 with any kinder feeling. 
 
 Yet it would be unfair to leave the impression 
 that Cooper s European days were given over to 
 
4 o AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 conflict. There is constantly the fair background 
 of his family life, the sharing of all his pleasures 
 with those he loved, the putting aside of his work, 
 even an unfinished page, to join in a game of back 
 gammon or chess or to play with his children. 
 There are glimpses of high friendships, such as 
 that with Lafayette. There is the meeting in Paris 
 with Sir Walter Scott. 
 
 " Est-ce Monsieur Cooper que j ai Thonneur 
 devoir?" 
 
 " Monsieur, je m appelle Cooper." 
 
 " Eh bien, done, je suis Walter Scott." A hearty 
 greeting, each to each, ended with Sir Walters sud 
 denly recollecting himself, and saying, <c Well, here 
 have I been -parley vooing to you in a way to sur 
 prise you, no doubt, but these Frenchmen have got 
 my tongue so set to their lingo that I have half 
 forgotten my own language." It is a delight to 
 read of the talk that followed, and worthy of re 
 membrance to find " the American Scott " in these 
 days calling himself a chip from the block of the 
 great romancer, and speaking of Sir Walter as 
 " my sovereign." Nor should it be forgotten that 
 Cooper s years in Europe were full of literary 
 achievement. The Prairie, The Red Rover, and The 
 Water Witch were all written during his absence 
 from America, besides four other tales of varying 
 merit and several productions outside the field of 
 fiction. For future use, moreover, Cooper gathered 
 
COOPER AT 45. 
 
 From the reproduction of an original drawing, in the "New Monthly 
 Magazine," London, April 4, 1834. 
 
JAMES FENIMORE COOPER 41 
 
 the material for ten volumes of travel published 
 after his return. 
 
 It was in 1833 that he set foot again on his native 
 soil, never to leave it. All the growth of New York 
 and much of the development of the country appeared 
 to him a movement in the wrong direction, away 
 from distinction and toward commonplace. A din 
 ner, like the one which marked his departure, was 
 suggested on his return, but feeling or imagining 
 that his countrymen were in no real sympathy with 
 him, he declined the honour. He took up his 
 abode in Cooperstown, renovated Otsego Hall 
 (where before his death seventeen new works of 
 fiction were written), and had the misfortune to 
 enter at once into a controversy with his fellow- 
 townsmen. 
 
 Cooper was in the right, and the Cooperstown 
 folk were wrong. They were not the owners, as 
 they thought they were, of Three-Mile Point, a 
 portion of the Cooper property, which they had 
 long used as a pleasure ground. He warned them 
 against trespassing, and they passed resolutions, full 
 of scorn for " one J. Fenimore Cooper," and de 
 nouncing "any man as sycophant who has, or shall, 
 ask permission of James F. Cooper to visit the 
 Point in question." The newspapers took the 
 people s side, and printed false accounts of the 
 difficulty. Cooper demanded their retraction, and 
 when it was not made sued the editors for libel. 
 
42 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 The courts upheld his attitude and granted verdicts 
 in his favour. Thereupon the Whig press of the 
 country pounced upon him, and, not forgetful of 
 slurs in his books upon the newspaper fraternity, 
 said every evil thing of him which they could un 
 earth or invent. From the portion of an unpub 
 lished letter of 1839, here reproduced in fac-simile, 
 the reader may see not only what manner of hand 
 writing was Cooper s, but how positive were his 
 convictions in the matter of " The Point." 
 
 Bryant is said to have heard Cooper tell a story 
 of a disputatious man, who was confronted in argu 
 ment with the familiar speech, " Why, it is as plain 
 as that two and two make four." " But I deny that 
 too," was the reply, " for two and two make twenty- 
 two." Cooper, indeed, was not wholly unlike that 
 person. Not content with a legal verdict, he in 
 judiciously undertook to have the last word, and to 
 put it into the form of fiction. In 1838 appeared 
 the two novels Homeward Bound and Home as Found 
 which attempted to speak this word. They tell the 
 story of an insufferable family of Effinghams who 
 returned from abroad to their American home, and 
 found everything here, especially the newspapers, 
 common and unclean. The Three-Mile Point 
 controversy entered under its very name into the 
 circumstances of the second story, and it was im 
 possible not to identify one of the Effinghams with 
 Cooper himself. He was a person " whose fine, 
 
5 
 
 Q 
 2 
 
 ffi 
 
 CH 
 O 
 O 
 <J 
 
44 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 curvilinear face," as we are informed on a certain 
 page, " curled even more than usual with con 
 tempt." The writer s best friends trembled at the 
 lack of judgment the books revealed. " I think," 
 wrote Greenough, the sculptor, a devoted friend, 
 " you lose your hold on the American public by 
 rubbing down their shins with brickbats as you do." 
 In the diary of an unprejudiced person of the time 
 is found the frank declaration that the books were 
 " more worthy of the talents of a silly girl than of 
 the matured genius of the author of The Spy and 
 The Pioneers. And verily Cooper never set forth 
 more undeniable " salt pork." 
 
 If the books were injudicious and private opinions 
 unfavourable, the newspapers were shameless in 
 their reviews. They remembered old scores, and did 
 not confine themselves to criticising the stories, but 
 attacked the writer, his motives, and his character. 
 This was more than Cooper could endure, and right 
 and left he began suing the editors again for libel. 
 They made light of the trouble at first, but as suit 
 after suit went against them, they were sobered, and, 
 after several years of litigation, silenced. In the 
 trials Cooper was practically his own counsel, and 
 pleaded his cases successfully against the best lawyers 
 of New York State. 
 
 No editor who attacked him was too prominent 
 to escape his demand for justice. Thurlow Weed, 
 of the Albany Journal,, and Horace Greeley, of the 
 
JAMES FENIMORE COOPER 45 
 
 Tribune, had to pay the piper with their humbler 
 brethren for liberties taken with Cooper s good 
 fame. There is a curious bit in Weed s own ac 
 count of the matter. He tells us that on his way 
 to one of the Cooper trials he picked up a new book 
 to shorten the journey. It "proved to be Mr. 
 Cooper s Two Admirals, received from New York 
 that morning. I commenced reading it in the cars, 
 and became so charmed with it that I took it with 
 me into the court-room, and occupied every inter 
 val that my attention could be withdrawn from the 
 trial in its perusal." Plaintiff and defendant have 
 rarely faced each other under stranger conditions. 
 
 Greeley s first offence lay in printing Weed s 
 jocular account of a suit that went against him, and 
 the Tribune was promptly brought to book. The 
 humourous pen of its editor soon raised a gen 
 eral laugh. " His fun/ he wrote of Cooper, " did 
 seem to us rather inhu Hallo there! we had 
 like to put our foot right into it again, after all our 
 tuition." And farther on one reads : " It seemed 
 to us, considering the present relations of the 
 parties, most ungen There we go again! We 
 mean to say that the whole of this part of 
 Mr. Cooper s speech grated upon our feelings 
 rather harshly. We believe that is n t a libel. 
 (This talking with a gag in the mouth is rather 
 awkward at first, but we 11 get the hang of it in 
 time. Have patience with us, Fenimore, on one 
 
46 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 side, and the Public on the other, till we nick it.) " 
 These unfinished words it is somewhat difficult 
 of belief were made the ground for a second suit 
 against Greeley, which seems, however, not to have 
 been pressed to a trial. 
 
 The most important suit of all was brought 
 against the New York Commercial Advertiser for its 
 review of Cooper s admirable Naval History. He 
 had tried to get at the truth about the battle of 
 Lake Erie, and because he did not glorify the 
 popular Commodore Perry at the expense of the 
 unpopular Commodore Elliott, he found himself 
 and his work ruthlessly condemned. He deter 
 mined to have it shown that he had told truths, his 
 reviewer lies. The case involved too many nice 
 distinctions to be safe in the hands of an ordinary 
 jury, and was entrusted to three eminent referees. 
 There must have been a feeling of relief, by the 
 way, among men liable to be drawn for jury duty, 
 since in a previous case the twelve good men and 
 true had been obliged to listen to the reading aloud 
 of both volumes of Home as Found; and this case, 
 it may be noted with little surprise, was one of the 
 few which Cooper lost. In the Naval History suit, 
 the referees heard for five days all that was to be 
 said on each side, and after Cooper s summing up 
 of his own contention in a speech of remarkable 
 skill and force, occupying in all eight hours, a ver 
 dict was returned setting the historian altogether in 
 
< c 
 ffi .2 
 
 O I 
 
JAMES FENIMORE COOPER 47 
 
 the right. It was a distinguished personal victory, 
 possible only to a strong man, who had shown 
 himself the stronger through the very unpopularity 
 of the course he followed to a successful end. 
 This was in 1842, and then the newspaper attacks 
 and suits came practically to an end. It should 
 always be remembered that Cooper brought these 
 suits on questions of truth, not of opinion, ques 
 tions in which he and not the work of his imagi 
 nation was involved ; and to see the single-handed, 
 sturdy fighter come out of the combat so clearly 
 the winner is one of the spectacles in which the 
 Anglo-Saxon in a man rejoices. 
 
 After this period of battle there were nearly ten 
 years of life left to Cooper, and he did not waste 
 them. In the midst of the lawsuits he had written 
 The Pathfinder (1840) and The Deerslayer (1841), 
 completing, by supplying the first and middle por 
 tions, the sequence of stories in which he himself 
 thought his fame had the strongest hope of con 
 tinuance. Outwardly, the last years of his life were 
 uneventful, but they were crowded with literary 
 activity. This, however, failed to restore the popu 
 larity which for many reasons had in part deserted 
 him. It would be foolish to suppose that Cooper 
 was indifferent to the success of his writings. As 
 early as 1825 his constant friend, Bryant, wrote to 
 R. H. Dana concerning a proposed review of The 
 Last of the Mohicans : " Ah, sir ! he is too sensitive 
 
48 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 a creature for me to touch. He seems to think 
 his own works his own property instead of being 
 the property of the public, to whom he has given 
 them." In an unpublished letter of 1841 Cooper 
 made the frank avowal : " I have lost most of my 
 interest in this country." To another correspond 
 ent, in a letter also unpublished, he wrote in 1 846 : 
 " If I were fifteen years younger I would certainly 
 go abroad and never return. I can say with Wol- 
 sey, c If I had served my God with half the zeal 
 I Ve served my country / it would have been better 
 for me." Yet with all the changes which his fame 
 suffered, the man remained the same through this 
 last portion of his life. Those who knew him best 
 loved him best. Those who knew him and under 
 stood him least made most of the faults, which fre 
 quently did not lie far beneath the surface. The 
 outward show and the inner motive are often so 
 remotely related, that it is surely fairer to attach the 
 greater weight, in estimating a man s character, to 
 the testimony of those who are most competent to 
 speak. Let us remember, then, the strength of will 
 and conviction, the loyalty to truth as he saw it 
 whether steadily and whole or not the affec 
 tion that gave his domestic life a constant beauty, 
 and let the memory of his aggressiveness, his mis 
 takes of pride and judgment, and whatever else may 
 be unlovely, take care of itself. Let the final estimate 
 of his qualities be what it may, it is a certainty that 
 
/C*te** 
 
 From a Daguerreotype by Brady, 1850. 
 
o THB 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
JAMES FENIMORE COOPER 49 
 
 when Cooper died at Otsego Hall, in 1851, lacking 
 one day of sixty-two years, a personality of ex 
 traordinary vigour and distinction was taken from 
 the world, and American letters lost the man 
 through whom American books had won a wider 
 dissemination than any other single hand had given 
 them. 
 
 It would be idle to attempt assigning to Cooper, 
 the chief prophet of the woods and the sea to thou 
 sands of readers in many tongues, his exact place 
 among American writers. It is worth while, how 
 ever, to recall a few of the impressions Cooper has 
 made upon his fellow-craftsmen. His scanty en 
 dowment of humour, whether in fiction or in the 
 conduct of life, prepares one for finding Mark 
 Twain the most violent modern assailant of his 
 " literary offences." The humourist easily pro 
 vokes a laugh when he says, " It is a restful chapter 
 in any book of his when somebody does n t step on 
 a dry twig and alarm all the reds and whites for 
 two hundred yards around. Every time a Cooper 
 person is in peril, and absolute silence is worth four 
 dollars a minute, he is sure to step on a dry twig." 
 But it is the fun and not the unvarying justice of 
 all that Mark Twain says that makes his attack 
 readable. Others than he, equally worthy of atten 
 tion, have felt differently. Balzac declares that 
 "if Cooper had succeeded in the painting of char 
 acter to the same extent that he did in the painting 
 
50 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 of the phenomena of nature, he would have uttered 
 the last word of our art." Last of all comes Du 
 Maurier, bearing witness in The Martian to the 
 effect of " Fenimore Coupere " read aloud in French 
 to the school-boys of the tale, and of their delight 
 in <c the beloved Bas-de-Cuir with that magic rifle 
 of his, that so seldom missed its mark and never 
 got out of repair." Bryant claimed for Cooper s 
 excellences the merit of being translatable ; and 
 bright indeed they must be to have shone for Du 
 Maurier s boys through such " ground glass of a 
 translation " as that by which many French readers 
 have first made the acquaintance of Cooper. The 
 name of a country-place, " The Locusts," is Galli- 
 cised as " Les Sauterelles ; " and where Cooper makes 
 two dragoons tie their horses to locust-trees, the 
 translator implies that locusts of the insect tribe 
 are used as hitching-posts. Yet Du Maurier does 
 not seem to recall Cooper as another Miinchausen. 
 The strength of a creative artist is unlike that 
 of a chain,; it lies in the strongest, not in the weak 
 est link. A few weeks before Irving s death, he 
 is reported to have said of Cooper, in almost the 
 same words he had used in writing of him eight 
 years before : " In life they judge a writer by his 
 last production ; after death by what he has done 
 best." And it is the Cooper of his best works, the 
 Leather Stocking series and the saltest sea tales, who 
 is and will be remembered. Men forget his fail- 
 
JAMES FENIMORE COOPER 51 
 
 ures, as they have forgotten his altercations ; but 
 he still speaks that universal language which the 
 young and the people of all lands comprehend, 
 and the boyhood of American literature bids fair, 
 in Cooper s tales, to preserve a long-enduring 
 youth. 
 
WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT 
 
 THE Mayflower folk could no more have 
 thought of John Alden and Priscilla Mullins 
 as the central figures in a world-read poem than 
 as the direct ancestors of two favourite American 
 poets. Both Bryant and Longfellow had their 
 descent from the union which Miles Standish s 
 courtship brought about. Not only through this 
 strain of Mayflower blood, but from many other 
 ancestral sources, William Cullen Bryant was born j 
 at Cummington in Western Massachusetts, 
 November 3, 1794 into a rightful inheritance 
 of the New England spirit in its purest essence. 
 To say that his father, Dr. Peter Bryant, was 
 known about the countryside as cc the beloved 
 physician," and that at the age of sixty he won a 
 foot-race from a famous runner of the region, will 
 at least suggest something of his qualities. Of 
 Bryant s mother it is told that she kept a diary for 
 fifty-three years without missing a day. For the 
 day of Bryant s birth, the entry read : " Stormy. 
 Wind N. E. Churned. Seven in the evening a son 
 born." If we recall also the report that when she 
 
WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT 53 
 
 rode horseback, she used to spring from the ground 
 into the saddle, we are somewhat prepared for the 
 records of her son s vigorous longevity. 
 
 But the physical prowess of his race was not its 
 only distinction. His father was a man of educa 
 tion and personal charm, and had good books in his 
 library. He was given to verse-making himself, 
 and the works of the best English poets were the 
 daily food of his children, of whom, by the way, 
 William Cullen was the second of seven. Are 
 there any such children in this day as there were a 
 hundred years ago ? We are credibly informed, by 
 Bryant himself, that at sixteen months he knew 
 all the letters of the alphabet, and that his older 
 brother, before the completion of his fourth year, 
 " had read the Scriptures through from beginning 
 to end." Much good they must have done him, 
 one is tempted to interpose. Whether as a cause 
 or an effect of precocity, the head of young Cullen, 
 as he was called, was of such an alarming size that 
 by his father s order he was dipped, head and all, 
 every summer morning, into a spring near the house, 
 the treatment being continued so late into the 
 autumn that it was sometimes necessary to break a 
 film of ice for the child s bath. Before he attained 
 manhood his delicate health was left entirely behind 
 him. 
 
 It was a stern school in which Bryant had his 
 earliest training; but the rigours of old New Eng- 
 
54 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 land boyhood, under teachers, parents, and on the 
 farm, have been so often described that it need 
 only be said here that no exceptions were made 
 in the young poet s favour. As a young poet he 
 very soon came to be known. When he was about 
 ten years old his grandfather gave him a Spanish 
 ninepenny piece for turning the first chapter of Job 
 into verse. This grandfather, it may be said in 
 passing, was less liberal, if more encouraging, than 
 Tennyson s, who gave the youthful English singer 
 half a guinea for writing some mortuary verses at 
 his request. " Here is half a guinea for you," 
 said the old gentleman, " the first you have ever 
 earned by poetry, and, take my word for it, the 
 last." Bryant earned nothing but a little local 
 fame when the Hampshire Gazette of Northampton, 
 soon after the attempt upon Job, began printing his 
 poetical effusions, which were no worse and little 
 better than the work of other youthful bards. It 
 is to be remembered that the most serious early 
 production of the boy whose chief activity in life 
 took the form of political writing was a piece of 
 political satire. Dr. Bryant was an ardent Federal 
 ist, and represented his party in the General Court 
 at Boston. Jefferson and the Embargo of 1807 
 were anathema to all good Federalists ; and in 1 808 
 Dr. Bryant published in Boston his son s little 
 pamphlet, The Embargo ; or, Sketches of the Times,, 
 A Satire by a Touth of Thirteen. After the fashion 
 
WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT 55 
 
 of the day the piece, bristling with invective against 
 Jefferson and the arch-destroyer Napoleon, was 
 fairly spirited and clever. Certainly it was a thing 
 which few youths of thirteen could have done, and 
 it was well enough received to bring about the 
 printing of a second edition in 1809, which con 
 tained various other productions of the same young 
 rhymer. It is a rare work to-day, for Bryant quite 
 discarded it as soon as his maturer powers were 
 proved ; yet he who seeks may find it, full of Lat- 
 inity and grave decorum. Spain becomes Iberia; 
 Belgia and Helvetia step forward from the map of 
 Europe. Even the Connecticut River winds its 
 way as "fair Connecta" and "celebrious stream." 
 
 Such was the boy s promise that his father, sym 
 pathising from the first with his bent toward letters, 
 chose him as the son worthy of collegiate training. 
 His mother s brother, the Rev. Thomas Snell, 
 equipped him with the Latin necessary for entering 
 the Sophomore Class at Williams College, and the 
 Rev. Moses Hallock whose house at Plainfield, 
 where many boys made their preparatory studies, 
 was called the Bread and Milk College guided 
 him in the acquisition of Greek, and received one 
 dollar a week for board and instruction. " I can 
 afford it for that," he used to say, " and it would 
 not be honest to take more." When Bryant entered 
 Williams College, in October of 1810, there were 
 but four men in the faculty, and the standard of 
 
56 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 scholarship was anything but that of the modern 
 college. Such as it was, it appears that Bryant, in 
 spite of the burden of having brought a reputation 
 with him, was easily equal to maintaining and in 
 creasing his good fame. But it is fatiguing to read 
 of unbroken success, and one of the refreshing items 
 of his college history is that, overcome by his own 
 laughter, he broke down in an attempt to declaim a 
 passage from Irving s Knickerbocker. The incident 
 gives early proof of the gayer spirit which the dig 
 nity of his nature often hid, and, moreover, helps us 
 to fix the sixteen-year-old boy in his historical place. 
 Knickerbocker s History had appeared in 1809. 
 
 Two ambitions of Bryant s at this time were to 
 leave Williams and enter Yale ; but only the first 
 of them was fulfilled, and that after but two terms 
 of college work. When the time came for going to 
 the more distant college, the family finances would 
 not permit it. While reaching a decision to study 
 law as the surest means of earning a support, he 
 gave himself that best of instruction, which came 
 from a thorough reading of his father s books. 
 Then followed a few years of legal study in neigh 
 bouring villages, and in August of 1815 he found 
 himself a full-fledged attorney of the Common 
 Pleas. After a short experiment at Plainfield, he 
 established himself, in October of 1816, as a practi 
 tioner of law in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, 
 where he toiled faithfully for nine years. 
 
WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT 57 
 
 It is not the young lawyer, but the young poet 
 that we wish to remember ; not the person who 
 described himself as 
 
 " forced to drudge for the dregs of men, 
 And scrawl strange words with a barbarous pen," 
 
 but the student, who inevitably clung to poetry as 
 the expression of his real life. " Alas ! sir," he 
 wrote to an older friend, " the Muse was my first 
 love, and the remains of that passion, which is not 
 rooted out nor chilled into extinction, will always, I 
 fear, cause me to look coldly on the severe beauties 
 of Themis." It has been seen how early he fell a 
 victim to that " first love," and through all the days 
 of college and law study the Muse was his true mis 
 tress. As Bryant stands almost alone among poets 
 as one whose fame came to him while he was hardly 
 more than a boy, and was only confirmed, not 
 created, by the work of his later years, we may 
 permit ourselves to look somewhat closely at his 
 beginnings in literature. 
 
 Thanatopsis may be said to have given Bryant his 
 place in American letters, and- the story of its origin 
 cannot be told too often. The unfailing wonder is 
 that a boy of seventeen could have written it ; not 
 merely that he could have made verse of such 
 structural beauty and dignity, but that the thoughts 
 of which it is compacted could have been a boy s 
 thoughts. The poem seems to have been written 
 
58 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 while he was at his father s house in Cummington, 
 in the summer of 1811, before he had definitely 
 begun the study of law. Fond as he had been of 
 showing his earlier effusions to his father and others, 
 the consciousness of having done something different 
 and greater must have come upon him at this time, 
 for it was only by accident, six years after the writ 
 ing of Thanatopsis, that his father chanced to find it 
 and the poem now called " An Inscription upon the 
 Entrance to a Wood " among some papers in a 
 desk the boy had used while at home. Dr. Bryant 
 read them with amazement and delight, hurried at 
 once to the house of a neighbour, a lady of whose 
 sympathy he felt sure, thrust them into her hands, 
 and, with the tears running down his cheeks, said 
 " Read them ; they are Cullen V 
 
 Now it had happened only a short time before, 
 that Dr. Bryant had been asked in Boston to urge 
 his son to contribute to the newly established North 
 American Review, and had written him a letter on 
 the editors behalf. Here was the opportunity of a 
 proud father. Without telling his son of his dis 
 covery or his purpose, he left the poems one day, 
 together with some translations from Horace by the 
 same hand, at the office of the North American. 
 The little package was addressed to his editorial 
 friend, Mr. Willard Phillips, of whom tradition tells 
 us that as soon as he had read the poems he betook 
 himself in hot haste to Cambridge to display his 
 
BRYANT AT ABOUT 43. 
 From an engraving of the portrait by Inman. 
 
[xBWAlf? 
 
 OTTHB 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT 
 
 59 
 
 treasures to his associates, Richard H. Dana and 
 Edward T. Channing. " Ah, Phillips," said Dana, 
 when he had heard the poems read, " you have been 
 imposed upon ! No one on this side of the Atlantic 
 is capable of writing such verse." But Phillips, be 
 lieving Dr. Bryant to be responsible for it, declared 
 that he knew the writer, and that Dana could see 
 him at once if he would go to the State House, in 
 Boston. Accordingly the young men posted in to 
 town, and Dana, unconvinced after looking long 
 and carefully at Dr. Bryant in his seat in the Senate, 
 said, "It is a good head, but I do not see Thanatopsis 
 
 in it." 
 
 If any one to-day will take the trouble to look 
 at the North American Review for September, 1817, 
 he will see Thanatopsis in it ; not as we see it now, 
 for the opening lines, as far as the passage 
 
 beginning, 
 
 " Yet a few days and thee," 
 
 are absent, and the poem ends with the words, 
 
 " And made their bed with thee." 
 
 The noble conclusion is lacking, and in place of 
 the introductoryx lines that are now familiar there 
 are four rhymed stanzas on death that were not 
 written as a part of Thanatopsis and yet have merits 
 which would have ranked them high amongst another 
 man s juvenilia. 
 
 To appreciate fully what the publication of such 
 verse as Thanatopsis and the other Bryant poems 
 
60 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 meant, it is worth while to look at the volume of 
 the North American Review which contained them. 
 We find ourselves carried back into the very time 
 of 1817 by a long review of Scott s Tales of My 
 Landlord, with copious extracts. In the last para 
 graph of the notice we read : " If Mr. Scott be the 
 author of these works and we scarcely doubt it 
 he possesses a genius as prolifick and versatile as 
 any on record. ... If we do not err widely, he 
 holds the tenure of his immorality \jic\ most firmly 
 by his novels." Evidently we have not gone back 
 far enough to escape the unobservant proof-reader. 
 But more significant, for our present consideration, 
 is the sort of verse the Review published. It can 
 not be that editors who, recognised so promptly 
 the beauty of Thanatopsis knew no better ; it must 
 have been that, like some later editors, they had 
 to take what they could get. What manner of 
 thing it often was may be inferred from a 
 single quotation. These are the opening lines 
 of a poem " On a Painting of Colonel John 
 Trumbull, representing a scene from Scott s c Lady 
 of the Lake ": 
 
 " Amid the brilliant group, which liberal taste 
 Selects to gild its mansion, and to charm 
 The virtuoso s eye, the landscape fair, 
 The form pourtray d that from the canvas starts, 
 With breathing lip and feature, one there is 
 That mingles all this magick." 
 
THE NEW 
 
 PJUUC BENJAMIN, EDITOR. 
 
 I WORLD. 
 
 WINCHESTER, PUBLISHER, 
 itt ie onro!" 
 
 VOLDMI II .... NO. 
 
 NEW-YORK, SATURDAY, APRIL Q4. 1841. 
 
 LITERARY PORTRAITS, NO. 1. 
 
 LITERARY PORTRAITS No. 1. 
 
 WLLUM CULLEN BRYANT. 
 We, this week, commence > series of 
 
 We, this week, commence senes of portrait! which 
 will be continued from lime to time in the New W.rld, and 
 which cannot fail to be interesting lo the ini.-Jlir,-:,: rear!, r, 
 who is acquainted with Ihe works of our American writers. 
 
 generally known throughout ike ceu.try, as connected with 
 . our gallery that of the Editor uf 
 
 become standard in America, h,,e b^en re.publhed in 
 England and ar retarded with creat favor in both countries 
 
 of Cummington, Mass , a physician of respectable rank. 
 William was >orn on the 3/ day of November, 1194. He 
 
 age. When but nine years old. he compared for a school- 
 the.u certain noes, which received the Impnaatv of the 
 editor of ths Hampshire Caierte. weekly newspaper rub. 
 luted in NrtOiampic... - * 
 
 .^sxss*- 
 
 Instead of checking the imaginauonof^hii son^ W-^nj 
 ajif din cted it i "nd n !h^ptt r r,or, a* knowledges th .t he is 
 indebted to parental teaching for some careful habit, m com- 
 
 Jgj on* fourteen ^.jU-r ^^^ 
 
 -.t^rt^J^ guftgv: 
 ^eS5etr.r poll c " 1Jt " r p " 11 - - 
 
 V 3 ,liim*owr!, i M2ia?huselt." "Ae ""jj^ ", 
 ^e T. s .ldmfti ed ?FS!ft *!&**&. "d aforwardi 
 
 in lM^rr e El l . a m C BlS?of" d ew.Vork, iasued iie lirst 
 
 "^,r=,^;:L,,^rrz,:- 
 
 wh c P hTn.law7" "" d " i """ 
 
 ir,,ed in volume "form, have h^ly "appetrej "in" !te 
 ickerbocker Magazine " and Ihe "Democratic Ke- 
 
 Junc, 1SW, the poet, with his family, sailed for F.a. 
 rope, with Ihe desrjn ..I !>,.- inMU| ,me years to lite 
 rary pursuits and to the education of tis children. He 
 visited Italy .ndC-rnianv, re Mm l.::n.-ipally in Muni, h, 
 Heidlebrg, Florence and P.M. Tn Ihe spring of 1S3H fie 
 
 gelt, his associate in it:* - ijvri,-:/ I ^i " 
 
 "The poelu-aJieputanon of Mr. Bryant," remarks a file 
 :rmc-Mr. Edgar A. IW-w who.-e puhliJied sketch we 
 ire indebted for some facts in this notice, both at home and 
 ibroad, is, perhaps, hij-her lhau that of any other Am-n- 
 :n \, England his writing hate IMlTmInd wtlkH. 
 J-cisI favor, and here Ihe pnWv .ipl.r,,hati..n h ,s !,- d . 
 
 les been denied nor can it be denied that this fact itstlf 
 i< a substantial proof t* tk) esttlMMr and of the e.\ .-n: ,1 
 lhee abilities. Ko man of Ihe noblest order of gemus v .,< 
 
 5=S :: 
 
 111.111!) evemptiM from Ihe prevalent poetical .fleeta , 
 
 of hi! time ha, do,.. ,v .|,an any one po.. 
 
 Hive excellence. Yet of positive excellencies he h.t nuny ; 
 and there are one or two of his ,h, ,,, poems . ,,i, h n,e. 
 
 more ethereal tenip.Ttltan Uiat >, 
 any y. n.Tal or Mendy indication." 
 
 We believe that the reputation 
 Poet," is always accorded to Mr 
 
 give. 
 
 Bryant. His poems 
 
 3x^ss&xz r:?z 
 
 opinioo, Mr. Bryant might ac iuire as u proee-wriier a 
 
 utatien not iufVr.nr K- id.it whi. Ii h- },. ,u- nif-\ - .1 
 t, wfw the subj,ct a oa which he employs his p of a 
 
 1 hvaKtm).fr.&mBt ii of7h stnct^mocmi^Khool ; 
 
 no paptr in ihe Pnited Stai, mor ably -and eonea-Jtenlly 
 
 :!i.i, lu, Mi).;,,medthi .uliiui^.- ran^;* l; t G- n. Jackwn and 
 
 n Hi.enecaH 
 
 gonil, Mr. Bryant ia truly loved. His moral character i , 
 unimpeachable: a kind hniband, an affectionate father-he 
 K,,, E to the .,! e lp ,eed i. m u y rfhi, poem, 
 
 i lir l:k N. ..^ in :hn ul^ve *l.v:< h I* T ry good. The ex- 
 prenion has been caught fay Ihe artist, anil conveyed will, 
 inking fidelity. Our admiration for Mr. Bryant as a 
 poet-oar esteem for him as a man, would have prompted 
 u. to My more ; Ion we could not hav. said with any ju 
 
 DREAMLETS. 
 
 REDUCED FAC-SIMILE PACE OF " THE NEW WORLD," APRIL 24; 
 1841, CONTAINING PORTRAIT AND SKETCH OF BRYANT. 
 
srrrj 
 
 WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT 61 
 
 Any comment upon the difference between Than- 
 atopsis and this sort of thing would of course be 
 superfluous. 
 
 In the six years that fell between the writing and 
 the publication of Thanatopsis Bryant had been con 
 stantly making verses. It was always his habit to 
 destroy far more than he published, but this early 
 period must not be passed without a mention of 
 another one of the poems which could least easily 
 be spared. It is told that in December of 1815 he 
 was walking one day from Cummington to Plain- 
 field where a few years later Mr. Charles Dudley 
 Warner was trying to milk his father s cows to the 
 rhythm of Thanatopsis when a solitary bird flew 
 steadily across the light that had been left by the 
 setting sun. Bryant stood and watched it till it 
 disappeared, and at the end of his walk sat down 
 immediately and wrote the lines " To a Waterfowl," 
 which, appearing in 1818 in the North American, 
 went far to show that the earlier poems were not 
 merely chance shots, never to be repeated. 
 
 As a lawyer in Great Barrington we find him 
 serious, hard-working, more fond, perhaps, of 
 nature than of men, but highly enough esteemed of 
 them to be appointed a tithing man and town 
 clerk. In this second capacity it was his duty to 
 publish all banns of marriage, which was ordinarily 
 done by his reading them aloud in church. Instead 
 of doing this with one notice, he pinned it on the 
 
62 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 door of the church vestibule, where it could not be 
 seen ; yet it was the announcement, all-important 
 to him, of his own marriage, on June n, 1821, to 
 Miss Frances Fairchild. How holy a day it was to 
 him whose simple religious faith was a very real 
 part of all his long life, is shown in a prayer for 
 Divine blessing upon the marriage, found among 
 his papers after death. How close the union was 
 with her whom we are permitted to recognise as 
 " fairest of the rural maids," and the inspiration of 
 poems like " The Future Life " and "The Life that 
 Is," George William Curtis has told us in saying 
 that " his wife was his only really intimate friend, 
 and when she died he had no other." 
 
 With all the seriousness with which Bryant took 
 his marriage and his father s death, celebrated in 
 the " Hymn to Death," had just made him doubly 
 serious he was quite capable of writing to his 
 mother at this time one of the letters which best 
 reveal the vein of humour that was in him : 
 
 " DEAR MOTHER : I hasten to send you the 
 melancholy intelligence of what has lately hap 
 pened to me. 
 
 " Early on the evening of the eleventh day of 
 the present month I was at a neighbouring house 
 in this village. Several people of both sexes were 
 assembled in one of the apartments, and three or 
 four others, with myself, were in another. At last 
 
WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT 63 
 
 came in a little elderly gentleman, pale, thin, with a 
 solemn countenance, pleuritic voice, hooked nose, 
 and hollow eyes. It was not long before we were 
 summoned to attend in the apartment where he and 
 the rest of the company were gathered. We went 
 in and took our seats ; the little elderly gentleman 
 with the hooked nose prayed, and we all stood up. 
 When he had finished most of us sat down. The 
 gentleman with the hooked nose then muttered 
 certain cabalistical expressions, which I was too 
 much frightened to remember, but I recollect that 
 at the conclusion I was given to understand that I 
 was married to a young lady of the name of Frances 
 Fairchild, whom I perceived standing by my side, 
 and I hope in the course of a few months to have 
 the pleasure of introducing to you as your daughter- 
 in-law, which is a matter of some interest to the 
 poor girl, who has neither father nor mother in the 
 world." 
 
 It was in this same year, 1821, that, through 
 the influence of R. H. Dana, who was destined to be 
 the poet s life -long friend and correspondent, Bryant 
 was asked to read the annual poem before the Phi 
 Beta Kappa Society at Harvard. To this invitation 
 he responded with " The Ages," and the result of 
 his visit to Boston and Cambridge was the publica 
 tion of his first acknowledged volume, a small affair 
 in bulk, but memorable as containing in its eight 
 
64 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 poems some of the best work that Bryant ever did. 
 This year of 1821, by the way, was a year of 
 eminent beginnings, a date of importance in the 
 literary history of Cooper, Halleck, Dana, Miss 
 Sedgwick, and a half dozen others whose names 
 mean something to the student of American letters ; 
 and only the year before to turn again to the name 
 which fixed the Greenwich time of our early litera 
 ture had Irving s second success, the Skctch-Book, 
 appeared in its completed form. 
 
 Bryant s glimpse of Cambridge and Boston did not 
 serve to increase his content in the practice of a pro 
 fession for which he had never cared, in a commu 
 nity which now seemed to him smaller than ever. 
 It is interesting to speculate, as some have done, on 
 what would have been Bryant s development if on 
 leaving Great Barrington he had gone to Boston 
 instead of to New York. As we look back upon 
 the two cities as they were seventy-five years ago, 
 we can hardly wonder that he chose New York. 
 Surely the men more truly representative of the 
 time were there, and the recovery from Puritanism 
 had not then advanced far enough to give Boston 
 the place it was soon to take as a seat of the arts. 
 But apart from speculations as to what might have 
 been, the fact was that his disgust with the injustice 
 of a decision in one of his legal cases, and the con 
 fidence of his friend, Mr. Henry Sedgwick, that his 
 pen would earn him success in New York, fell op- 
 
BRYANT AT ABOUT 50. 
 From an engraving of the portrait by Durand. 
 
OF TMB 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT 65 
 
 portunely together, and in 1825 we find him ardently 
 entering upon the new, broader life. 
 
 The rewards of literature were not large in those 
 days. Before leaving Great Barrington Bryant had 
 been receiving two dollars each for poems contributed 
 to the United States Literary Gazette in Boston. 
 The " Forest Hymn " was one of these. Late in life 
 Bryant was told by a friend that he had just given 
 twenty dollars for a copy of the little Cambridge 
 volume of 1821 : " More by a long shot," said Bry 
 ant, " than I received for writing the whole work." 
 Nor were his first enterprises in New York of a 
 lucrative nature. As an associate editor of one 
 magazine, long ago dead, and as a contributor to 
 others that have departed with it, his chief reward 
 must have been in the pleasure of the work. Prob 
 ably this was true also of the lectures on Poetry and 
 Mythology which he found opportunity to deliver. 
 More certainly it must have been the case with his 
 work in conjunction with his good friends, Sands 
 and Verplanck, on the Talisman, one of those strange 
 gift-book products of the younger century, an 
 "affection s tribute" or "friendship s offering," in 
 which it was difficult to tell whether the text was 
 made to illustrate the pictures, or vice versa. Some 
 day an entertaining chapter of our literary annals 
 will be written on these monuments of a superseded 
 taste. In all these early New York days Bryant s 
 friendships with Cooper, for example, and the 
 
 5 
 
66 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 other members of the Bread and Cheese Club 
 give the brighter colours to his story. The darker 
 side was in the struggle for a livelihood. When a 
 temporary assistant-editorship of the Evening Post 
 became, in 1829, a permanent employment, he glee 
 fully wrote to his friend Dana, " You know politics 
 and a belly-full are better than poetry and starvation." 
 In a few months the chief editor died, and Bryant, 
 with a share in the ownership of the paper, was 
 promoted to the vacant position, and here he 
 remained until the end of his life, nearly fifty years 
 later. 
 
 It is in part because the life of an editor is out 
 wardly uneventful that the earlier portion of Bry 
 ant s career has been dwelt upon at a length which 
 may seem at first thought disproportionate. Now 
 that we may leave him established in one chair, so 
 to speak, for half a century, there is ample time to 
 see what manner of man he was. Such geniality as 
 that of Irving and a few other men in whom strength 
 and sweetness are combined does not seem to have 
 been Bryant s possession. Not quite for the same 
 reasons as in the case of Cooper, it was necessary to 
 know him well in order to love him. With an 
 endowment of reserve and equanimity which were 
 often taken for coldness, and led Lowell to write 
 of him : 
 
 " He is very nice reading in summer, but inter 
 Nos, we don t want extra freezing in winter," 
 
WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT 67 
 
 he was apparently quite capable of righteous indig 
 nation, perhaps of something more, for in one 
 of the poems which speak most truly from his 
 deeper nature he writes : 
 
 "And wrath has left its scar that fire of hell 
 Has left its frightful scar upon my soul." 
 
 This might be taken as one of those bits of self- 
 accusation in which the most blameless of poets 
 sometimes indulge, were it not for an incident of 
 which his biographers make no mention. The 
 diary of a New York gentleman tells us that he was 
 shaving one morning, in 1831, when he saw Bryant, 
 across the street, striking a fellow-editor, William L. 
 Stone, with a cowhide, which Stone bore off when 
 the bystanders had separated the combatants ; and 
 the incident is confirmed in a volume of reminis 
 cences more recently published. It is the more to 
 Bryant s credit that with a natural temper, to which, 
 under the old amenities of journalism, he could give 
 such vigorous utterance, he attained so true a poise 
 and dignity as time went on. 
 
 The vigour of his character is shown nowhere 
 more clearly than in his record as an editor. As a 
 Democrat first, as a Free Soil man and a founder of 
 the new Republican Party in later years, he spoke 
 through his paper s columns whatever he considered 
 the truth, in spite of consequences that for the time 
 were clearly disadvantageous. Once a mob threat- 
 
68 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 ened his office, and at other times, through his 
 opposition to the Whigs, the party of respectability, 
 and to slavery, he forfeited nearly all claim to per 
 sonal popularity ; and the Post suffered with him. 
 His remarks upon Nicholas Biddle s death caused 
 Philip Hone to enter in his Diary : " How such a 
 black-hearted misanthrope as Bryant should possess 
 an imagination teeming with beautiful poetical im 
 ages astonishes me ; one would as soon expect to 
 extract drops of honey from the fangs of the rat 
 tlesnake." But such opinions as these were merely 
 the penalties of independence. As more of his 
 fellow-citizens came to think as Bryant did about 
 the tariff, that is, as the New York Evening Post 
 still thinks, as they learned the sturdy honesty of 
 his convictions, and felt the wise patriotism of his 
 utterances, especially in all that related to the war, 
 the better results of independence were shown in the 
 editor s prosperity and honour. 
 
 Of all the many forms in which this honour came 
 to him, the catalogue may not be given here. 
 Public office of all sorts Bryant avoided, though the 
 highest distinctions were put within his reach. It 
 was to him that all men looked for the expression 
 of the public sense of loss when such men as Cooper 
 and Irving died. The volumes of his Memorial 
 Addresses and of the Traveller s Letters, written to 
 the Post at various times while he was abroad, tell 
 us how little the haste of journalism was allowed to 
 
WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT 69 
 
 hurt his prose. " I would sooner the paper would 
 go to press without an editorial article," he once said 
 to an associate, " than send to the printer one I was 
 not satisfied with." What the newspaper doubtless 
 
 REDUCED FAC-SIMILK OF AUTOGRAPH LETTER BY BRYANT. 
 
 helped him to achieve was a quickness of mental 
 working, which stood him in good stead when in 
 later life he was often called upon to acknowledge 
 public compliments. We can hardly think he took 
 joy of all the tributes to his fame. To be exhibited 
 
70 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 as he was by the Governor of New York to both 
 houses of the Legislature at Albany in 1875 mu st 
 have been a rather melancholy pleasure, however 
 fully he deserved his introduction as " the most dis 
 tinguished citizen of our State." Yet the happy 
 word of acknowledgment always came to his lips. 
 There was never a better instance of this than in 
 the anecdote with which he began his thanks for a 
 silver vase given him by national subscription in 
 honour of his eightieth birthday. He told of the 
 presentation of a silver pitcher to an English 
 militia officer ; the spokesman for the company, 
 losing his self-possession, could say nothing but: 
 " Captain, here s the jug ; " to which the captain, 
 in a similar plight, replied : " Aye, is that the 
 jug ? " Of course the likeness between Bryant and 
 the captain stopped there, for a most graceful speech 
 followed. 
 
 Yet our heartiest liking for the man comes from 
 other sources than his public fame. His letters to 
 friends, and such knowledge of his private life as 
 Mr. Parke Godwin, his son-in-law and most com 
 plete biographer, has given to all who care to read, 
 reveal the health, simplicity, and devotion of a nat 
 ure which was not ill described by him who called 
 Bryant a " Puritan Greek." A strong part of the 
 health of this nature was in its love of health. The 
 child who was dipped in the Cummington spring 
 preserved his bodily vigour in later years by rising 
 
WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT 71 
 
 early enough in the morning to exercise with dumb 
 bells, pole, and horizontal bar for an hour or more 
 before breakfast, by adhering to a diet of Spartan 
 simplicity, by walking, rain or shine, to and from his 
 office, three miles from his house in town, and by 
 getting as near to nature in his life as he tried always 
 to come in his poems. Only a few weeks before 
 his death, his second biographer, the Hon. John 
 Bigelow, asked him if he never varied even then 
 from his earlier rules of exercise. " Not the width 
 of your thumb-nail," was the reply. In a shorter 
 account of his life than Mr. Bigelow s, another writer 
 tells of walking with Bryant in the country, when 
 the aged poet swung himself to and fro on the low 
 branch of a tree until he had momentum enough to 
 clear a fence, which he did without touching it. 
 The occasion would almost have warranted some use 
 of the appeal to Lewis Carroll s " Father William," 
 " do you think at your age it is right ? " Evidently 
 the unbroken city life was not for such a man, and 
 as early as 1 843 he became the owner of " Cedar- 
 mere," a place in the Long Island town of Roslyn, 
 so named by the poet himself from the fact that the 
 British, evacuating the island in 1781, had marched 
 away from this particular region to the tune of 
 " Roslyn Castle." Minute directions for transplant 
 ing blackberry bushes, written from Europe in 1857, 
 are but one of the evidences of the thought he gave 
 to his country place. A visitor has recorded another 
 
72 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 item that should not be forgotten. The gardener 
 had nearly sawed off the limb of a tree, on which 
 Mr. Bryant happened to notice a bird s nest. He 
 stopped the man s work at once, and by an interlac 
 ing of ropes had the limb fastened into its place 
 until the young birds the nest had sheltered could 
 shift for themselves. Neither to Roslyn nor to 
 Cummington, where Bryant, in 1865, purchased his 
 father s house, would he bring or do a line of his 
 newspaper work. But each of these towns possesses 
 to-day one in a public hall, the other in a library, 
 the gifts of the poet substantial proof that he did 
 not regard the country as a place for letting the 
 mind lie fallow. 
 
 Bryant s quiet Christian belief was intimately an 
 element of his nature. Throughout his life it found 
 expression in public and private word and deed. 
 Yet it was not until 1858, when Mrs. Bryant was 
 dangerously ill at Naples, that he united him 
 self definitely with any body of Christians. The 
 account which the Rev. R. C. Waterston, of the 
 Unitarian Church, has left of the poet s baptism 
 in a " large upper room," overlooking the bay, 
 brings up a picture of apostolic simplicity and 
 beauty. 
 
 A few months later Hawthorne met Bryant at 
 the house of the Brownings in Florence. Mrs. 
 Bryant s illness was felt to be inevitably fatal in 
 time, and Hawthorne, knowing this, wrote a few 
 
BRYANT NEAR THE END OF HIS LIFE. 
 From an Etching by Aug. Will. 
 
OF THK 
 
 tJKIVERSITT 
 
WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT 73 
 
 words, which for shrewdness of insight have a value 
 all their own : " I take him to be one who cannot 
 get closely home to his sorrow, nor feel it so sen 
 sibly as he gladly would ; and in consequence of that 
 deficiency, the world lacks substance to him. It is 
 partly the result, perhaps, of his not having suffi 
 ciently cultivated his emotional nature. His poetry 
 shows it, and his personal intercourse, though kindly, 
 does not stir one s blood in the least." Making 
 some necessary allowance for Hawthorne s never 
 having known Bryant well, the analyst of character 
 and poetry might extend this speculation far into a 
 study of Bryant ; but he should not forget that 
 Hawthorne pointed out the way. 
 
 It was like a man of Bryant s well-disciplined spirit 
 to fill with a great task the hours of desolation that 
 followed his wife s death in 1866. This task was 
 the translation of Homer, and between 1866 and 
 1871, holding himself to the rule of forty lines a 
 day, he had put both the Iliad and the Odyssey into 
 the English verse through which they are now 
 probably best known to American readers. 
 
 There has been no attempt here to keep up a 
 chronological account of Bryant s poetical work 
 after its first specimens showed what it was con 
 stantly to be. There were other literary under 
 takings, largely editorial, which we need not even 
 stop to name. But we should give at least a mo 
 ment to the thought that Bryant s work in one 
 
74 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 important respect separates itself from the work of 
 many other men. It can almost always be shown 
 how their books reflect the circumstances of their 
 lives ; what we see in Bryant s legacy to us is 
 that he was a poet in spite of circumstance. It 
 may be objected that the best writing of any 
 sort is the most autobiographic, but surely it is 
 one thing to draw upon our daily lives for 
 the scenes and incidents of prose, and it is quite 
 another to live each day a busy life of affairs, 
 and yet leave the world the richer for pages of 
 print which give to the life of the spirit its true pre 
 eminence. 
 
 Perhaps Bryant s strongest appeal to the human 
 mind is in his view of death, his thanatopsis, if his 
 special word may be made a general term. It was 
 fitting, therefore, that death should come to him 
 when, of all men, he must have been most ready to 
 meet it. Honours and years were his in abundance, 
 and with them his mind and body held undiminished 
 vigour. On May 29, 1878, he delivered an 
 address at the unveiling of the Mazzini statue in 
 Central Park. The heat was great, and Mr. Bryant 
 showed fatigue after his speech was done. Yet he 
 insisted on walking across the Park, in acceptance 
 of an invitation to the house of a friend, who, 
 stepping before him to unlock the front door, heard 
 a fall, and turned to see Mr. Bryant lying on the 
 upper step, on which his head had struck with vio- 
 
WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT 75 
 
 lence. Unconsciousness followed, and, taken to 
 his own house, No. 24 West Sixteenth Street, he 
 died on June I2th, having entered the second half 
 of his eighty-fourth year. When he was buried at 
 Roslyn, a few days later, the reading of his poem 
 "June" was a part of the service. Indeed, it could 
 hardly have been omitted. 
 
 By reason of his long-continued life, Bryant 
 seems nearer to our own day than, as a poet, he 
 really is. Historically he must be remembered as 
 the first of American poets, first in poetry as Irv 
 ing was first in one form of prose, and Cooper in 
 another. The body of his poetic work is small, and 
 the greater portion of it is manifestly destined to be 
 forgotten. But with Thanatopsis and the handful of 
 other lines which seem framed for a longer existence, 
 shall we not preserve our memories of the man 
 himself? For the celebration of his seventieth 
 birthday Whittier wrote a poem in which there is 
 a stanza telling one truth about Bryant so accurately 
 that we cannot do better than to leave him with 
 the good Friend s words : 
 
 " We praise not now the poet s art, 
 
 The rounded beauty of his song ; 
 Who weighs him from his life apart 
 Must do his nobler nature wrong." 
 
EDGAR ALLAN POE 
 
 FOR a long time it was hard to get at the truth 
 about Poe s life. His first biographer, the 
 Rev. R. W. Griswold, whom Poe named as his lit 
 erary executor, told such an unflattering tale that 
 since 1850 it has been the role of many writers to 
 abuse this reverend gentleman. An enthusiastic 
 French translator of the tales inquires concerning 
 him : " Ilnexiste done pas en Amerique d ordonnance qui 
 inter dise am chiens T entree des cimetieres ? " An 
 American admirer of Poe asserts that Griswold ap 
 pointed himself literary executor, paid Mrs. Clemm, 
 the poet s mother-in-law, a small sum for the papers 
 in her possession, and made her sign a statement 
 that Poe had chosen him to collect and edit his 
 works, all with the purpose of vilifying the dead 
 man s fame. This is manifestly false ; but from 
 1 850, when Griswold s memoir appeared, until 1885, 
 when Mr. George E. Woodberry, in his biography 
 in the American Men of Letters Series, threw a 
 white light upon many vexed questions, there was 
 hardly an attempt at describing Poe in which the 
 errors either of undue praise or of undue condemna- 
 
A EUROPEANISED PoE. 
 
 From a rare French etching. 
 
OF TKX 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
EDGAR ALLAN POE 77 
 
 tion were not obvious. It is now felt that Griswold 
 in the main told the truth, though sometimes without 
 kindness or discretion. In the present sketch Mr. 
 Woodberry s statements are accepted as authori 
 tative. 
 
 Why should the old, unpleasant stories be told 
 again at all ? " Why do you have the same old 
 toys for sale every Christmas? " a lady once asked a 
 shopkeeper ; " why don t you get some new ones ? " 
 " Madam," was the reply, " there are always new 
 babies. * And there are always new readers and 
 some old ones with short memories. For both of 
 these classes, and for more besides, Poe s tales and 
 poems are eternally new ; and some knowledge of 
 the man who produced them bears essentially upon 
 the fulness of their meaning. 
 
 If we were to adopt Poe s own stories of himself 
 we should have to give him in the first place several 
 birthdays, each later than the actual one. This 
 was January 19, 1809, and, as if his life began 
 with contradictions, Boston, the city of his detesta 
 tion, was his birthplace. But his mother was an 
 actress Elizabeth Arnold whom his father, 
 David Poe, the son of an excellent Maryland family, 
 had married against the wishes of his people ; and 
 it is the fortune of the children of the theatre to be 
 born "upon the road." It was Poe s misfortune 
 that his mother died in Richmond when he was 
 less than three years old ; his father had already 
 
78 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 quitted the scene. The three children of the mar 
 riage were adopted by benevolent friends and rela 
 tives, Edgar falling into the care of the childless 
 wife of a wealthy merchant of Richmond, whose 
 name of Allan the boy received. It could not have 
 been foreseen that the ill-starred waif might almost 
 as well have been left to shift for himself. 
 
 Through his boyhood there was no lack of kind 
 ness in the treatment his foster parents bestowed 
 upon him. They were proud of his good looks and 
 precocity, and gave him the best of schooling, first 
 in Richmond, and then, during their stay abroad, for 
 five years at the Manor House School, Stoke New- 
 ington, a London suburb. Here the headmaster 
 observed merely that the boy was clever, but injured 
 by " an extravagant amount of pocket money." 
 Poe s story of " William Wilson " is said to record 
 his own remembrances of the school. He was 
 brought back to Richmond in 1820, and there for 
 seven years under the best auspices pursued his 
 studies preparatory to entering the University of 
 Virginia. 
 
 It is worth remarking that in this schoolboy 
 period Poe made no friends. He was at once sen 
 sitive and supercilious, desirous of a regard he did 
 not excite, and quick to show his contempt for wits 
 less keen than his own. These qualities he never 
 outgrew, and for the life he was destined to lead 
 they provided as poor an equipment as one can well 
 
EDGAR ALLAN POE 79 
 
 imagine. One strong attachment which he did form 
 at this time, however, is equally noticeable for the 
 quality it foreshadowed. It was his romantic de 
 votion to the young and beautiful mother of one 
 of his schoolmates. Poe never ceased to crave the 
 society of women who could "understand" him; 
 and when this lady of Richmond, after winning the 
 boy s heart by her tenderness, died an early death, 
 the young dreamer would go to her grave by night, 
 and brood by day upon the bitterness of his loss. 
 She seems to have been his first Lenore. 
 
 Of the youth who was capable of such feelings 
 one does not expect precisely the record Poe made 
 for himself at the University of Virginia, which he 
 entered in February of 1826. To be sure, when 
 his university career ended in less than a year, he 
 took with him the highest honours in Latin and 
 French ; but he left behind him gambling debts to 
 the amount of twenty-five hundred dollars and a 
 reputation as an extraordinary drinker. "It was 
 not the taste of the beverage that influenced him," 
 a college contemporary has written ; " without a sip 
 or a smack of the mouth he would seize a full glass, 
 without water or sugar, and send it home at a single 
 gulp." But the cards were his destruction at col 
 lege, and it was no wonder that Mr. Allan declined 
 to send him back to Charlottesville. 
 
 The alternative for college life was a clerkship 
 in Mr. Allan s office, and it was a matter of course 
 
8o AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 that Poe could not long submit to the drudgery of 
 it. If again we were to adopt his own account of 
 himself, at least as he authorised it in biographical 
 sketches of a later date, we should have to follow 
 him now to Greece, where, according to the myth 
 ical story, he went, like Byron, to fight for liberty ; 
 we should find him, too, in St. Petersburg, involved 
 in some mysterious trouble, from which he was 
 extricated only by the help of the American con 
 sul. The real, if less romantic, truth appears to be 
 that going forth from Richmond to seek his for 
 tunes in the world, he soon found himself in pov 
 erty in Boston, where an obscure publisher printed 
 for him in 1827 an obscure little volume, cc Tamer 
 lane, and Other Poems, by a Bostonian," a single copy 
 of which was sold in 1892 for $ 1,850. The infer 
 ence from the fact that the publisher in later life 
 never associated the book with the famous name 
 of Poe is that the unknown singer was making use 
 of another name. This inference is borne out by 
 the enlistment at Boston of Edgar A. Perry, on 
 May 26, 1828, as a private in the United States 
 Army, and by the identification of this young sol 
 dier, who soon became a sergeant-major, with Edgar 
 A. Poe. This person, Poe or Perry, was granted 
 leave of absence from Fortress Monroe when Mrs. 
 Allan, Poe s benefactress, died in Richmond, early 
 in 1829 ; and it was Mr. Allan who applied for it, 
 and a little later was instrumental in bringing about 
 
EDGAR ALLAN POE. 
 
 From an engraving by J. Sartain, after a portrait by S. S. Osgood, 
 date unknown. 
 
EDGAR ALLAN POE 81 
 
 his foster-son s admission as a cadet to the Acad 
 emy at West Point. It was doubtless a relief to the 
 respectable merchant to feel that he had thus done 
 his duty by the young man, with whom his sense 
 of kinship had been growing year by year less 
 intimate. 
 
 It was in 1830 that Poe entered West Point, 
 having published in Baltimore in the year before a 
 second little volume of poems. Though his age 
 was recorded at the Academy as nineteen, it was the 
 face of a man of more than the twenty-one years he 
 had really lived that his fellow-cadets learned to 
 know. It was their jest to say that he had secured 
 an appointment for his son, and,, the boy having 
 died, he had come to take his place. It was no 
 great wonder that Poe bore the look of age before 
 his time. Estranged from those who had tried to 
 help him, solitary, sensitive, and poor, and endowed 
 by nature with a spirit which, from first to last, 
 preyed remorselessly upon itself, what was there 
 to give his face the look of youth ? And how 
 could such an one have been expected to adapt 
 himself to a life in which self-effacement is the first 
 rule ? It made no difference that Poe had chosen 
 for himself the military profession. He soon tired 
 of it, and deliberately brought about his own 
 expulsion from the Academy. Perhaps this was 
 rendered the easier by his reckless habits through 
 the six months of his cadetship. His literary 
 
82 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 tendencies were well known at West Point, and 
 there is a certain irony in the fact that a third little 
 book of verse, which a New York publisher under 
 took on the strength of the cadets support, dis 
 tinctly disappointed the subscribers because it was 
 not made up of local squibs. 
 
 Foe s worldly prospects, when he made his way 
 from West Point to Baltimore, were certainly far 
 from bright. Mr. Allan had married a second wife, 
 and the birth of a son soon dispelled every hope 
 Poe might have entertained of coming into the 
 property which as a boy he had had some reason to 
 count upon. There was nothing for him but to 
 live by his own wits, and for a time the living he 
 made was of the barest. Happily for him, a Balti 
 more paper, fhe Saturday Visiter^ offered in 1833 
 some prizes in money for the best contributions in 
 prose and verse. Poe s story of " The Manuscript 
 Found in a Bottle " won him a hundred dollars, and 
 his poem " The Coliseum " would have been 
 awarded the first place in its class also had it not 
 been thought unwise to give two prizes to one man. 
 The success was of the greatest importance to Poe, 
 for it secured him the influential friendship of John 
 P. Kennedy, through which, in turn, he secured 
 the associate editorship of the Southern Literary 
 Messenger, a new magazine in Richmond. This 
 was not until 1835, and in the mean time Poe had 
 been reduced to the narrowest straits of poverty. 
 
EDGAR ALLAN POE 83 
 
 On one occasion he had been obliged to decline 
 Mr. Kennedy s invitation to dinner, because of his 
 " personal appearance." 
 
 But all was changed in Richmond, where his 
 new duties called him. His remarkable talents as 
 an editor did wonders for the circulation of the 
 Messenger; and his own pen, departing from the 
 traditions of commonplace in fiction and criticism, 
 spread his fame abroad. There was, moreover, 
 almost for the only time in Poe s troublous life, a 
 sufficiency of income for his needs. They were 
 not great, although in September of 1835, feeling 
 himself unable to part with his aunt, Mrs. Clemm, 
 and her daughter, Virginia, with whom he had lived 
 in Baltimore, he had privately married his young 
 cousin. How young she was all the world did not 
 know ; for when the public marriage took place in 
 Richmond, in May, 1836, Poe s bondsman under 
 the marriage law declared on oath that Virginia 
 Clemm was " of the full age of twenty-one years." 
 In reality she was not quite fourteen, and Poe was 
 about twice her age. If this marriage with a child 
 was ominous of evil, the future brought some fulfil 
 ment of good in the relations of sonship and mother 
 hood which Poe and Mrs. Clemm bore to each 
 other through life with a peculiar tenderness. A 
 weak man never needed the help of a strong woman 
 more than Poe needed it, and as it was never to 
 come from his wife, it was well that her mother could 
 
84 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 also be truly his. The fortunate circumstances of 
 Poe s life were few enough. This was one of 
 them. 
 
 Prosperity now seemed easily within reach of the 
 small family in Richmond. Its revenues were in 
 creased by the keeping of a few boarders, and ap 
 parently all would have gone well except for Poe 
 himself. But before he had left Baltimore his habits 
 or freaks of intemperance had begun to get 
 him into trouble. It is better to call them freaks, 
 for it does not appear that they were habitual. No 
 man so susceptible to stimulants could have in 
 dulged in them habitually and have done one half the 
 work that Poe did in the world. It is Mrs. Clemm s 
 testimony that a single cup of coffee would intoxicate 
 him. For such a man the obvious thing to do was 
 to shun liquor as he would shun the plague ; but 
 this, at least for periods of any length, Poe had 
 neither the will nor the courage to do. The pros 
 tration which followed each attack of intemperance 
 was rendered the more complete by his use of opiates. 
 It was as if he did his best to incapacitate both body 
 and spirit. These, in a word, were the conditions 
 under which much of his mature life was led. That 
 they had begun to affect his work as early as in the 
 Richmond days we are clearly informed by a letter to 
 Poe from Mr. White, the proprietor of the Southern 
 Literary Messenger. Its spirit of expostulation is of 
 the kindest, and a single sentence, if it is based 
 
VIRGINIA CLEMM, THE WIFE OF EDGAR ALLAN POE. 
 From the photograph of a water-colour sketch. 
 
EDGAR ALLAN POE 85 
 
 upon fact, shows in what need of good advice Poe 
 already stood : " No man is safe that drinks before 
 breakfast/ It is unnecessary to quote more or to 
 wonder that the first number of the magazine for 
 1837 made the announcement that Poe s connection 
 with it had ceased. <*- 
 
 It would be a sorrowful progress to follow Poe 
 through all his vicissitudes. There is a monotony 
 of pity in the spectacle of the man entering with 
 courage upon new editorial ventures, making surely 
 for success through weeks or months, winning the 
 admiration of his associates, and then, suddenly or 
 by degrees, failing with a completeness which ren 
 dered the brave hope of each beginning only the 
 more tragic. Such, in a general way, were his ex 
 periences with Burton s Gentleman s Magazine and 
 its successor, Graham s Magazine, in Philadelphia, 
 where, after a short sojourn in New York, he lived 
 from 1838 until 1844. Pursuing through all these 
 dark days the ignis fatuus of a magazine of his own, 
 he was nevertheless taking his place more and more 
 firmly as a prose writer of the first popularity. As 
 a poet he was hardly known, but his stories and re 
 views in magazines, and his excellently well-named 
 volume of 1 840, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, 
 had secured him a general esteem quite out of keep 
 ing with the sordidness of his personal circumstances. 
 It was in this period not only that his story of " The 
 Gold Bug " won him his second prize of a hundred 
 
PROSPECTUS 
 
 
 
 THE PENN MAGAZINE. 
 A MONTHLY LITERARY JOURNAL, 
 
 TO BE EDITED AND PUBLISHED IN THE CITY OF PHILADELPHIA, 
 8Y EDGAR A. POE. 
 
 TO Tan rDr,Lic.-Smcc resigning the conduct of The Southern Literary Messenger, at the commencement of its third year, I have 
 hid always in view the establishment of n Magazine which should retain some of the chief features of that Journal, abandoning or greatly 
 modifying the red. Delay, however, has been occasioned by a variety of causes, and not until now have I found myself at liberty to 
 attempt the execution of the design. 
 
 I will be pardoned for speaking more directly of The Messenger. Having to it no proprietary right, my objects too being at vari- 
 nee in many respects with those of its very worthy owner, I found difficulty in stamping upon it* pages Jhat individuality which I 
 behove essential to the full success of all similar publications. In regard to their permanent influence, it appears to mo that a continuous, 
 definite character, and a marked certainty of purpose, are desiderata of vital importance, and only attainable where ore mind alone ha* 
 the general direction of the undertaking. Eiperience has rendered obvious, what might indeed have been demonstrated a pritrt, that 
 in founding a Magazine of my own lies my sole chance of carrying oat to completion whatever peculiar intention* I may havo enter 
 tained. 
 
 To those who remember the early days of the Southern periodical in question it will be scarcely necessary to nay that it* main 
 feature was a somewhat ovcrdono causticity in its department of Critical Notices jf new books. The Penn Magazine will retain thi* 
 . bait of severity in so much only as the calmest yet sternest sense of justice will permit Some years cince el.psed may have mellow 
 ed down the petulance without interfering with the rigor of the critic. Most surely they havo not yet taught him to read through In* 
 medium of a publisher s will, nor convinced him thai the interests of letters are unallied with the interests of truth. It shall bo the first 
 and chief purpose of the Magazine now proposed to become known as one where may be found at all times, and upon all subjects, an 
 honest and a fearless opinion. It shall be a leading object to assert in precept, and to maintain in practice the right., while in effect ft 
 demonstrates the advantages, of an absolutely independent criticum-a criticism self-sustained ; guiding itself only by the purest role* 
 of Art; analyzing and urging these rules as it applies them ; holding itself aloof from all personal bias ; acknowledging no fear save thai 
 of outraging the right; yielding no point either to the vanity of the author, or to the assumptions of antique prejudice, or to the invo. 
 hie and anonymous cant of the Quarterlies, or to the arrogance of lho organized c&guet which, hanging like nightmares upon Ame 
 rican literature, manufacture, at the nod of our principal bookaellcrs. a pseudo-public-opinion by wholesale. These are objects of which 
 no man need be ashamed. They are purposes, moreover, whose novelty at least will give them interest. For assurance that I will futy 
 fil them in the best spirit and to (he very letter, I appeal with confidence to tie marry thousands of my friends, and. especially of my 
 Southern friends, who sustained me in the Messenger, where I had but a very partial opportunity of completing my own plans. 
 
 In respect to the other features of the Penn Magazine, a few words here will suffice. It will endeavour to support the general in* 
 terosts of the republic of letters, without reference to particular regions ; regarding the world at large as the tru. audience of ib* author. 
 Beyond the precincts of literature, properly so callod, it will leart in better handa the task of instruction upon all matters of wry gravs 
 moment. It* aim chiefly shall be I. fileau , and this through means of versatility, originality, and pungency. It may be as well ben 
 to observe that nothing said in this Prospectus should bo construed into a design of sullying the Magazine with any tincture of tb* 
 buffoonery, scurrility, or profanity, which are the blemish of some of the most vigorous of the European prints. la all branch** of 111* 
 literary department, the best aid, from the highest and purest sources, is secured. 
 
 To the mechanical execution of the work the greatest attention will be given which such a matter can require. In Ibis itsjttt it U 
 proposed to surpass, by very much, the ordinary Magazine style. The form will nearly resemble that of The Knickerbocker ; the paper 
 wiO be equal to that of The North American Review ; the pictorial embellishment* will be numcr-us. and by lie leading artist, of tb* 
 country, but will be introduced only in the necessary illustration of the text. 
 
 The Penn Magazine will be published in Philadelphia, on the first of each month, and win form, half-yearly, volume of about 209 
 pages. The price will he $ 5 per annum, payable in advance, or upon dig receipt of the first number, which will bo i*md on the l/st 
 of itaunry, 1841. Letters addressed to the Editor and Proprietor, 
 
 EDGAR A. FOE. 
 
 REDUCED FAC-SIMILE OF THE PROSPECTUS OF 
 " THE PENN MAGAZINE. 
 
REDUCED FAC-SIMILE AUTOGRAPH LETTER WRITTEN BY POE ON 
 A BLANK PAGE OF " THE PENN MAGAZINE" PROSPECTUS. 
 
88 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 dollars, but that he wrought the wonders in cryptog 
 raphy which save the mark ! might have made 
 a Baconian of him to-day, and that he foretold 
 from the opening chapters the conclusion of Bar- 
 naby Rudge, a feat which caused Dickens to inquire 
 if Poe were the Devil. But the substantial value 
 of such successes as these was small, and in 1844, 
 hoping again to better himself by change, he 
 transferred the scene of his struggles to New 
 York. 
 
 There was editorial work to be done on the Even 
 ing Mirror, conducted by N. P. Willis, and Poe 
 was given the opportunity of doing it. Willis was 
 all kindness and forbearance, and has testified hear 
 tily to Poe s regularity and efficiency through all 
 their intercourse. But " Willis was too Willisy for 
 him," as another editor expressed it, and Poe, before a 
 year was out, went through the unfamiliar proceed 
 ing of leaving an employer who was sorry to have 
 him go. Before the end of 1 845 his next venture 
 was a thing of the past. He had joined with C. F. 
 Briggs in the management of the Broadway Journal, 
 had become proprietor of the paper, and had had 
 to give it up, all within about ten months. In the 
 course of this time, during which, by the way, his 
 one-sided " war " with Longfellow for plagiarism 
 was at its height, he lost the friendship of Lowell, 
 through whom Briggs and he had been brought to 
 gether, and supplied Horace Greeley, who had lent 
 
From the engraving of a pastel portrait by Oscar Hailing, after 
 a daguerreotype. 
 
EDGAR ALLAN POE 89 
 
 him money to keep the Journal alive, with one of his 
 characteristic " Recollections " : 
 
 " A gushing youth once wrote to me to this 
 effect : 
 
 " c DEAR SIR : Among your literary treasures you 
 have doubtless preserved several autographs of our 
 country s late lamented poet, Edgar A. Poe. If so, 
 and you can spare one, please inclose it to me, and 
 receive the thanks of yours truly/ 
 
 " I promptly responded as follows : 
 
 " DEAR SIR : Among myliterary treasures there 
 happens to be exactly one autograph of our country s 
 late lamented poet, Edgar A. Poe. It is his note 
 of hand for fifty dollars, with my indorsement across 
 the back. It cost me exactly $50.75 (including 
 protest), and you may have it for half that amount. 
 Yours respectfully/ 
 
 " That autograph, I regret to say, remains on my 
 hands, and is still for sale at first cost, despite the 
 lapse of time and the depreciation of our currency." 
 
 With Poe s abandonment of the Broadway Journal 
 his work as an editor ended. He was still an im 
 portant contributor to the magazines, and his series 
 of articles in Godeys, "The Literati of New York," 
 in which he belauded and berated his contempora 
 ries with equal vigour, made no little stir in its time. 
 
9 o AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 Many of his judgments about the most important 
 men of his day, as, for example, his immediate recog 
 nition of Hawthorne s genius, showed that the true 
 critical faculty was in him. That he did not always 
 exercise it sincerely we may infer from his answer to 
 a protest against his high praise, in print, of the 
 productions of somebody defined by a reminiscent 
 friend as a " lady writer " : " It is true/ he said, " she 
 is really commonplace ; but her husband was kind 
 to me ; I cannot point an arrow against any woman." 
 Something of the same disingenuousness, to call it 
 here by no harsher name, permitted him to sell 
 several times over, often in slightly varied forms, 
 the works of his pen, and to dedicate the same 
 verses to successive ladies as occasion arose. It 
 made the less matter, however, at the time with 
 which we are now concerned, for he had written " The 
 Raven," first printed in the Evening Mirror, Jan 
 uary 29, 1845, fr m advance sheets of the February 
 number of the American Whig Review ; and though 
 the commercial value of the poem is said by some 
 to have been ten, by others five dollars, its effect 
 was to carry Poe s name into every corner of the 
 land. He whose reputation had been based almost 
 entirely upon prose suddenly found himself known 
 high and low as a poet. 
 
 Neither his fame nor the publication of two vol 
 umes in 1 845, Tales and The Raven and Other Poems,, 
 made him less than usually an object of pity. Most 
 
EDGAR ALLAN POE 91 
 
 of the time he was desperately poor, and worse than 
 poverty was the condition described in this letter of 
 his own read it as you will written in 1 848 : 
 " Six years ago, a wife, whom I loved as no man 
 ever loved before, ruptured a blood-vessel in sing 
 ing. Her life was despaired of. I took leave of 
 her forever, and underwent all the agonies of her 
 death. She recovered partially, and I again hoped. 
 At the end of a year the vessel broke again. I 
 went through precisely the same scene. . . . Then 
 again again and even once again, at varying 
 intervals. Each time I felt all the agonies of her 
 death and at each accession of the disorder I 
 loved her more dearly and clung to her life with 
 more desperate pertinacity. But I am constitu 
 tionally sensitive nervous in a very unusual de 
 gree. I became insane, with long intervals of horrible 
 sanity. During these fits of absolute unconscious 
 ness I drank, God only knows how often or how 
 much. As a matter of course, my enemies referred 
 the insanity to the drink, rather than the drink, 
 to the insanity." 
 
 In 1846 Poe, with Virginia and Mrs. Clemm, 
 had moved to Fordham, near New York City, and 
 established himself in the well-known cottage which 
 recently has had to make way for a trolley road. 
 His interrupted writing brought the scantiest re 
 turns in money. By the autumn of this year it 
 was felt that Mrs. Poe s last illness was upon her. 
 
92 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 A visitor has described the scene in the cottage : 
 " There was no clothing on the bed, which was 
 only straw, but a snow-white counterpane and 
 sheets. The weather was cold, and the sick lady 
 had the dreadful chills that accompany the hectic 
 fever of consumption. She lay on the straw bed, 
 wrapped in her husband s great-coat, with a large 
 tortoise-shell cat in her bosom. The wonderful cat 
 
 FOE S COTTAGE AT FORDHAM, N. Y. 
 
 seemed conscious of her great usefulness. The coat 
 and the cat were the sufferer s only means of 
 warmth, except as her husband held her hands and 
 her mother her feet." 
 
 Poe himself was only a little less ill, with poverty 
 and dread ; and when Virginia died, in January of 
 1847, the good women who cared for him nearly 
 despaired of his recovery. There were always good 
 women to care for Poe. To Mrs. Clemm Poe 
 himself well knew what he owed, as the lines "To 
 
MRS. MARIA CLEMM. 
 From a Daguerreotype taken in 1850. 
 
EDGAR ALLAN POE 
 
 93 
 
 My Mother " continue to tell the world ; and it is 
 well worth while to repeat the pathetic words which 
 Willis wrote of her in the Home Journal after Poe 
 himself had died : " Winter after winter, for years, 
 the most touching sight to us, in this whole city, 
 has been that tireless minister to genius, thinly and 
 insufficiently clad, going from office to office with a 
 poem, or an article on some literary subject, to sell, 
 sometimes simply pleading in a broken voice that he 
 was ill, and begging for him mentioning nothing 
 but that c he was ill/ whatever might be the reason 
 for his writing nothing, and never, amid all her 
 tears and recitals of distress, suffering one syllable to 
 escape her lips that could convey a doubt of him, 
 or a complaint, or a lessening of pride in his 
 genius and good intentions." 
 
 At this crisis of Virginia s death it was a Mrs. 
 Shew who, after Mrs. Clemm, was most to Poe. 
 To her we are said to owe " The Bells." The story 
 runs that in one of Poe s visits to her house he 
 said that he had to write a poem, and complained 
 of his total lack of inspiration for it. The sound 
 of church bells prompted her, in spite of his irri 
 tation at the noise they were making, to write at 
 the top of a piece of paper, " The Bells, by E. A. 
 Poe." Then, as a first line, she jotted down "The 
 bells, the little silver bells," and after Poe had done 
 one stanza, wrote " The heavy iron bells " for him 
 in the same way ; having finished this stanza, he 
 
94 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 wrote above them both " By Mrs. M. L. Shew," 
 and handed her the manuscript. This was a pretty 
 bit of fooling, but it lacked the warmth which Poe 
 wished always to infuse into his friendships with 
 women, a warmth which soon afterwards put an 
 end to his intimacy with Mrs. Shew. Another of 
 his women friends has left the record of Poe s own 
 declaration that in his wife, gentle, devoted, and 
 beautiful as she was, he missed " a certain intellectual 
 and spiritual sympathy," a lack which he was 
 always willing to let the women who " understood" 
 him try to supply. After Virginia s death these 
 intimacies took a conspicuous place in the spectacle 
 of his wofully shattered life. 
 
 Poe made no mystery of his affection for sym 
 pathetic women. Such lines as those " To Annie," 
 a lady of Lowell, and the longer poem, " To 
 Helen," strike the personal note with an unmis 
 takable clearness. " Helen " was herself a maker of 
 verse, Mrs. Sarah Helen Whitman, of Providence, 
 Rhode Island, and before she had actually met 
 with Poe wrote and printed verses to him. In 
 1 848 he made desperate efforts to marry her, and if 
 her head had not remained as completely hers as 
 her heart seems to have been his, she would doubt 
 less have become Mrs. Poe. Griswold s story of 
 their final interview was cruelly untrue, although it 
 is evident that Poe s indulgence in his besetting sins 
 at the very time and place when he should have 
 
MRS. SARAH HELEN WHITMAN. 
 
 Reproduced, by permission, from a portrait in the Athenaeum, 
 Providence, R. 1. 
 
EDGAR ALLAN POE 95 
 
 been most himself put an end to his hopes in Provi 
 dence. Apparently he was acting at the time upon 
 the advice of Mrs. Shew to save himself by marriage. 
 One is not surprised, therefore, to find him in 1849 
 ardently wooing a wealthy widow of Richmond, a 
 Mrs. Shelton, with whom as Miss Sarah Elmira Roy- 
 ster he, as a boy, had had romantic dealings. One 
 suspects that the romance was quite of the past, and 
 the suspicion is borne out by a portion of a letter 
 which Poe wrote from Richmond to Mrs. Clemm 
 at Fordham, after he had secured the promise of 
 Mrs. Shelton s prosperous hand : 
 
 " And now, dear Muddy, there is one thing I 
 wish you to pay particular attention to. I told 
 Elmira when I first came here, that I had one of 
 the pencil-sketches of her, that I took a long while 
 ago in Richmond ; and I told her that I would write 
 to you about it. So when you write just copy the 
 following words in your letter : c I have looked 
 again for the pencil-sketch of Mrs. S., but cannot 
 find it anywhere. I took down all the books and 
 shook them one by one, and, unless Eliza White 
 has it, I do not [know] what has become of it. 
 She was looking at it the last time I saw it. The 
 one you spoilt with Indian Ink ought to be some 
 where about the house. I will do my best to 
 find it/" 
 
 We could gladly dispense with the discovery of 
 such letters as this one, written in the last month of 
 Poe s life. It is needless to comment upon it or 
 
96 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 the state of unhealth which it reveals. It is for the 
 psychologist to confer with the physiologist and to 
 divide the blame for Poe s condition between his 
 spirit and his body. He himself once wrote to a 
 friend: " You will find yourself puzzled in judging 
 me by ordinary motives." And if he had been any 
 one else, a fortunate ending to the Richmond visit 
 could almost surely have been predicted. He was 
 lionised by old and new friends. The two lectures 
 which he gave were greatly successful. He was 
 full of hope for the success of his long-desired mag 
 azine, c rhe Stylus. Yet twice during the visit he 
 yielded to his passion for liquor, and the doctors 
 told him that if he did so but once again it would 
 kill him. With this knowledge he started for the 
 North to arrange some business matters preliminary 
 to his marriage. It is difficult to trace his footsteps 
 with certainty from the time he left Richmond, ap 
 parently on Sunday night, September 30, 1849, 
 until Wednesday afternoon, when he was found 
 helpless in a Baltimore polling booth, which was 
 also a rumshop. As the day is said to have been 
 that of election, the supposition is that he had been 
 seized by politicians and made to vote at many polls. 
 When his friends found him, he was taken to the 
 Washington Hospital, where, after four days of 
 delirium, he died on Sunday, October yth, saying, 
 " Lord, help my poor soul." The doctor who at 
 tended him has within recent years published his 
 opinion that Poe was drugged and not intoxicated 
 
POE IN THE LAST YEAR OF HIS LIFE. 
 From a Daguerreotype taken in Lowell, Mass. 
 
EDGAR ALLAN POE 97 
 
 when he was brought to the hospital ; and so with 
 contradictions, as at the beginning, his life ended. 
 
 Except that he was an erect, military-looking 
 person, not tall, but well formed, with clear, respon 
 sive eyes, and of a melancholy countenance, hardly 
 anything can be said of Poe which somebody will 
 not stand ready to contradict. The effect even of 
 his personal appearance upon men and upon women 
 was totally different, and to women we are indebted 
 for the descriptions which endow his presence with 
 the strongest charm. 
 
 As of the man, so of his work ; the differences of 
 the opinion it has excited are as wide as the world. 
 To Emerson he was merely the "jingle-man," and 
 Emerson s was not an isolated belief. For many of 
 our friends in France and our English kinsmen, as 
 for some of us at home, he stands with the supreme 
 few in American letters. It has been possible here 
 to glance merely at some of the conspicuous events 
 of his ill-controlled life. An infinite deal, perhaps 
 of equal interest, has been omitted. Many pages 
 would be needed to discuss to any purpose his 
 familiar definition of poetry as the " rhythmical 
 creation of beauty," his insistence, in and out of 
 season, that long poems do not exist, and the large 
 significance of his work in criticism, fiction, and 
 poetry. Happily there is no dearth of sugges 
 tive comment upon all these themes. Nearly all 
 we know and all we need to know about them is 
 
 7 
 
98 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 gathered into the biography by Mr. Woodberry, 
 and the complete edition of Poe which he and Mr. 
 E. C. Stedman have recently prepared. 
 
 When one has read all there is to be said about 
 the man and his work, and has done a little think 
 ing for one s self, a few considerations make them 
 selves reasonably clear. In the first place, one 
 abandons the foolish thought of " what might have 
 been." In his life of the spirit Poe was a dweller in 
 misty borderlands ; in the flesh he was a highly de 
 veloped Bohemian in the midst of respectability. 
 If he had been something else, in either regard, he 
 simply would not have 1 been Poe, and the different 
 works of a different man would have been his con 
 tribution to literature. He must be taken as he 
 was, and so taken, with all his imperfections on his 
 head, he is yet of those who make us feel the rigour 
 of the line that is drawn between talent and genius. 
 We feel a reasonable confidence in placing him on 
 the higher side of the line, and our confidence goes 
 little further. It carries us far enough in one direc 
 tion, however, to make us disagree with a dictum of 
 Poe s ambitious philosophical work, Eureka, that 
 as man cannot conceive of a being superior to him 
 self, man is therefore God. We are glad of the 
 disagreement, for since judgment is an attribute of 
 deity, and since we are merely human, the necessity 
 for rendering final verdicts upon such fellow-beings 
 as Edgar Allan Poe is happily removed. 
 
WILLIS, HALLECK, AND DRAKE 
 
 IN the Letters from Under a Bridge, by N. P. 
 Willis, which is to-day, perhaps, the most read 
 able of his many volumes, these suggestive words 
 may be found : " In what is the judgment of poster 
 ity better than that of contemporaries ? Simply in 
 that the author is seen from a distance, his per 
 sonal qualities lost to the eye and his literary stature 
 seen in proper relief and proportion." Having 
 thus delivered himself, Willis proceeds to assert, on 
 the very next page, " Rufus Dawes is a poet if God 
 ever created one." It is as if an evil genius of con 
 sistency had guided Willis s pen into writing the very 
 words which should best prove the worthlessness of 
 contemporary opinion, for Rufus Dawes lives to-day 
 if it can be called living only in dusty antholo 
 gies and in the pages which Poe devoted to an un 
 merciful exposure of his shortcomings. For our 
 own generation it cannot be said that Willis himself 
 has any vital importance, yet he cut a prodigious fig 
 ure in his own time ; and while he was extolling the 
 beauties of Dawes, Poe would probably have been 
 only too glad to take the humble place which a few 
 
ioo AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 years later he filled for a time as Willis s office assist 
 ant. Now that Willis s fleet of books is fastened al 
 most as securely to cc Lethe wharf" as the works 
 of Dawes himself, it is not without suggestion to recall 
 and contrast the esteem in which he and Poe were 
 respectively held by the reading public of their time. 
 Poe s literary stature had not begun to be seen in 
 proper relief and proportion. Willis s was of the 
 sort which, from its very adaptation to the taste of 
 the day, had all its greatness then, and now has 
 dwindled almost out of being. It will not be pos 
 sible to note all the contrasts between his career and 
 Poe s, but they can hardly fail to present themselves 
 to minds familiar with the more tragic story of the 
 writer whose fame has not died. 
 
 Nathaniel Parker Willis came of a family that 
 had printer s ink in its veins. His grandfather, 
 whose ancestors were among the earliest English 
 emigrants to Massachusetts, conducted a patriotic 
 journal in Boston during the Revolution, and after 
 ward established newspapers in Virginia and Ohio. 
 His son Nathaniel, who is still recalled in Boston 
 as " Deacon Willis " of the Park Street Church, 
 founded the Boston Recorder, which he declared to 
 be the first religious newspaper in the world, and 
 the Youth s Companion^ which, beginning as a dis 
 tinctly religious journal for children, was probably 
 also the pioneer in its field. Deacon Willis s wife 
 was Hannah Parker, and to the piety which she 
 
WILLIS AT 31. 
 From an engraving of the portrait by Lawrence. 
 
WILLIS, HALLECK, AND DRAKE 101 
 
 shared with her husband her brighter spirit added 
 the quality of gaiety which their son, Nathaniel 
 Parker, the second of nine children, could not pos 
 sibly have inherited from his rigorous father. This 
 boy, the Willis with whom we are now concerned, 
 was born in Portland, Maine, on January 20, 1806, 
 about a year before Longfellow s birth in the same 
 town. 
 
 From the strict orthodoxy of his father s house 
 hold it was natural that the son should be sent first 
 to the school at Andover and then to Yale College. 
 At Andover he took an active part in a religious re 
 vival, of which it would be hard to find the parallel in 
 a modern boarding-school. " Prayer ascends contin 
 ually," wrote Willis at seventeen to his father, 
 " sinners are repenting, and I am as proud as Luci 
 fer. . . . Oh, pray that I may have humility ! It 
 is and must be the burden of my supplications." 
 As to the influence of Yale at the time Willis was 
 in college, he subsequently wrote that the student 
 was " committed to the sincere zealots of Connecti 
 cut ... to learn Latin and Greek, if it pleased 
 Heaven, but the mysteries of c election and free 
 grace/ whether or no." Before Willis had been 
 long under this system of instruction he found that 
 there were many other things to learn. The name 
 he won for himself while still a collegian, by writing 
 a few of his most popular scriptural poems and 
 other verses of an interest more strictly local, ren- 
 
102 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 dered him something of a lion in undergraduate 
 society, and his good looks and attractive manners 
 made it easily possible for him to play his leonine 
 part with success and satisfaction. Accordingly, 
 without developing any tendencies that could be 
 called dangerous, he soon found himself leading 
 a life of social pleasure which placed him in his 
 father s eyes among " the world s people," and 
 made Willis himself conscious of what he called 
 an cc enduring conviction of sin." Yet the convic 
 tion was not overpowering, and indeed could 
 hardly have been "enduring," for the Willis of 
 these college days, concerned with the less serious 
 side of life, pleased with the bright colour of things, 
 and never probing too deeply into strenuous real 
 ities, was the Willis of the later years. 
 
 For four years after leaving college that is, 
 from 1827 to 1831 he was an inmate of his 
 father s house in Boston. Here he served the 
 editorial apprenticeship which prepared him for 
 most of his work in the world. He edited the 
 annuals The Legendary and "The Token for S. G. 
 Goodrich, " Peter Parley," and attempted a maga 
 zine, the American Monthly, on his own account. 
 Already he showed himself essentially a journalist. 
 Annual, monthly, and daily periodicals were his in 
 evitable mediums of expression, and to know the 
 nature of the periodical literature of his time it is 
 only necessary to know Willis, and vice-versa. It 
 
WILLIS, HALLECK, AND DRAKE 103 
 
 was the period of steel engraving in illustrative art ; 
 and the greater portion of Willis s work, then and 
 later, seems now to bear about the same relation 
 to life as these pictures of skies in which thun 
 der-storms were always gathering, and of persons 
 through whose faces the blandness or malignity of 
 undoubted saints or villains was sure to shine. 
 
 No poems that Willis ever wrote attained a 
 greater popularity than those upon scriptural themes. 
 The generation which first read them knew not even 
 what the word realism meant; yet remembering 
 how well they knew their Bibles, it is somewhat hard 
 to understand now why they did not ask even for 
 truth. The vastly popular poem -of " Absalom " is 
 a fair specimen of Willis s best scriptural verse, which 
 Lowell designated as " inspiration and water." It will 
 repay the reader who cares to know how Willis did 
 such things to compare his poem with the Bible 
 story, and to observe how his David pours forth 
 a poetical lamentation in five stanzas over the pall 
 and bier of Absalom, who in the simpler narrative is 
 left beneath a heap of stones in a wood, nobody 
 knows how far from the spot where David uttered 
 his infinitely tragic cry, " O my son Absalom, my 
 son, my son Absalom ! would God I had died for 
 thee, O Absalom, my son, my son ! " Yet Willis 
 in his own day would have suffered little from any 
 application of the parallel column principle. Evi 
 dently his readers had standards of their own, which, 
 
io 4 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 for better or worse, we have not preserved. A 
 living critic has summed the matter up by saying, 
 " He sauntered about the sacred places in a domino, 
 which was mistaken for the prophetic mantle." The 
 saunterer and those who mistook him are thus 
 placed where they belong, side by side. 
 
 While Willis was establishing himself as a re 
 ligious poet, he was also producing a goodly quan 
 tity of secular prose, ephemeral pictures of life, 
 especially in its lighter aspects. Indeed, his rela 
 tions with the world became less than ever those 
 which his early training should have produced. He 
 figured to some extent in the more fashionable 
 society of Boston, gave great care to his dress and 
 personal appearance, and drove a high-stepping bay 
 horse which he named Thalaba. For frequenting 
 the theatre and neglecting his duties in Park Street 
 he was excommunicated from the church. George 
 Ticknor Curtis has left a picturesque and suggestive 
 reminiscence of the man as he was. Curtis as a boy 
 was present at a Harvard commencement, and stood 
 watching the arrival of the carriages that brought 
 the governor and other dignitaries to Cambridge. 
 " The last vehicle in the procession," he says, " and 
 as if a part of it, contained Willis, seated alone in 
 his gig, dressed in a green frock-coat, white waist 
 coat, buff-coloured nankeen trousers, all supremely 
 fine ; his broad-brimmed Leghorn hat lay on the 
 seat by his side. With an air of supreme noncha- 
 
WILLIS, HALLECK, AND DRAKE 105 
 
 lance he tossed his reins to a hostler who stood there 
 waiting for such chances, put a quarter into the 
 man s hand, and told him to take Thalaba to a 
 certain livery-stable. He then passed up the broad 
 aisle in the wake of the procession, and if he did 
 not ascend the stage and seat himself among the 
 dignitaries, it must have been because there was no 
 
 room." 
 
 Neither Willis nor his undertakings were very 
 successful in Boston. His magazine was a failure, 
 and the guardian of a young lady to whom he was 
 engaged forbade his marriage with her. At a later 
 day he wrote of his fellow-townsmen : " They have 
 denied me patronage, abused me, misrepresented 
 me, refused me both character and genius, and I 
 feel that I owe them nothing. . . . The mines of 
 Golconda would not tempt me to return and live in 
 Boston." Nor was this merely a short-lived feeling, 
 for still later he wrote, in the course of a cordial 
 letter to Longfellow, " I confess I see everything, 
 even my friends, through my bilious spectacles in 
 Boston. I do not enjoy anything or anybody within 
 its abominable periphery of hills and salt marshes." 
 
 It was with little regret, therefore, that in 1831 
 he joined his fortunes with those of the New York 
 Mirror, into which his American Monthly was 
 merged at the same time The Mirror had been 
 established by Samuel Woodworth, the author of 
 " The Old Oaken Bucket," and its chief editor at 
 
io6 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 the time of Willis s accession was George P. Mor 
 ris, who wrote "Woodman, Spare that Tree." It 
 was a weekly literary journal, and from the work 
 of its editors it may be imagined that its aim was 
 carefully directed to the mark of popular taste. It 
 was soon decided that a weekly letter from Willis 
 in Europe would ensure the certainty of this aim, 
 and with difficulty the sum of #500 was raised to 
 start him on his travels. With this sum in his 
 pocket, and the promise of ten dollars for each 
 letter he should write, he set sail from Philadelphia, 
 in the autumn of 1831, on a brig bound for Havre. 
 He was not yet twenty-six years old, and all the 
 world lay before him. He had seen much of it 
 before his return nearly five years later. 
 
 Like most young tourists, Willis began his letter- 
 writing on board ship. From Paris, where the 
 American Minister paid him the useful compliment 
 of attaching him to the legation, from Italy, from 
 the Mediterranean and the Levant, from Switzer 
 land and England, he continued to write his " Pen- 
 cillings by the Way " until they had reached the 
 number of one hundred and thirty-nine, and his time 
 for returning home was near. In America, where 
 " First Impressions of Europe," as the sub-title 
 described his " Pencillings," were far less common 
 then than now, the letters were read with eagerness. 
 General Morris declared that they were copied into 
 five hundred newspapers. It has been well said 
 
From an engraving of the portrait by Inman, 1831. 
 
WILLIS, HALLECK, AND DRAKE 107 
 
 that Willis was the progenitor of the Special Cor 
 respondents of our time, and, when the letters had 
 a personal flavour, of the modern interviewer. The 
 qualities which gave him success in these depart 
 ments of journalism were in a large measure the 
 qualities of his prose in general, for he was always 
 more a journalist than a man of letters, as the dis 
 tinction is commonly understood. But his prose 
 belonged to a far more florid journalism than that 
 which is most approved to-day. He had a femi 
 nine eye for the millinery of nature and life. He 
 declared frankly, " The ornamental is my vocation," 
 and a clever old lady is quoted by Willis s admi 
 rable biographer, Professor Henry A. Beers, as hav 
 ing once said, " Nat Willis ought to go about in 
 spring in sky-blue breeches with a rose-coloured 
 bellows to blow the buds open." When he gave 
 the freest rein to his fancy and his affectations, the 
 result was something which to-day seems little less 
 than silly and tiresome ; but taken at his best, in 
 descriptions and playfully imaginative sketches of 
 life, he is still a winning writer whose vogue in his 
 own time stands clearly explained. 
 
 The more personal details of Willis s experience 
 in Europe have an amusing aspect which James 
 Parton has presented in these words, well worthy of 
 quotation : " At this day it has something of the 
 interest of a histrionic performance, which is highly 
 comic to one who has been behind the scenes. 
 
io8 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 Here was a young American, rubbing along through 
 Europe on the slenderest resources, eking out his 
 weekly revenue by an occasional poem or story, but 
 always in mortal fear of coming to the bottom of 
 his purse, and all the time he wrote in the tone and 
 style of a young prince, conveying the impression 
 that castles and palaces, chariots and horses, and 
 all the splendours of aristocratic life, were just as 
 familiar to him as the air he breathed." 
 
 In England especially, where he came armed with 
 excellent letters of introduction, he was observed to 
 be " on exceedingly good terms with himself and 
 with the elite of the best society." Lady Blessing- 
 ton and other persons of less notoriety and perhaps 
 a securer position took him up and made much of 
 him. To women particularly, and often to older 
 women, he was here, as elsewhere, very attractive. 
 He was given the entree of the best clubs, and 
 found it as easy as it had been in New Haven to 
 make himself agreeable to everybody. No, not 
 everybody, for when his <c Pencillings " were re 
 printed in England there were those who took him 
 roundly to task for some of the things he had said. 
 Lockhart attacked him in the Quarterly r , and he was 
 even called out by the truculent Captain Marryat, 
 who could not bear to read that his "gross trash 
 sells immensely about Wapping and Portsmouth, 
 and brings him five or six hundred the book, but 
 that can scarce be called literature." The " hostile 
 
From an engraving in the Bradford Club s limited edition of the 
 " Croaker Papers, 11 1860. 
 
WILLIS, HALLECK, AND DRAKE 109 
 
 meeting " actually took place, but the seconds did 
 their part so well on the very field of conflict that 
 bloodshed was avoided. Willis made many warm 
 friends, however, in England, and when he sailed 
 for home in May of 1836 he was accompanied by a 
 young English wife, the daughter ^of General Stace 
 of the British army. 
 
 By this time Willis had shown very clearly what 
 he could do in prose and verse, and the remainder 
 of his life was devoted, with greater and less success, 
 to doing it. His outward circumstances had the 
 variations which are the common lot of man. At the 
 country place of Glenmary, at Owego, New York, 
 where he lived for several years after his return 
 from England, he seems, if one may judge from the 
 very agreeable Letters from Under a Bridge, to have 
 been as near to happiness as he ever came. But 
 bereavements and losses befell him. After a second 
 journey to England he had to give up Glenmary, 
 and not long afterward his wife died. There was 
 then a third visit to England, and a search on the 
 Continent for escaped health. In 1846 his second 
 marriage took place, to Miss Cornelia Grinnell of 
 New Bedford. Many years before, the sculptor 
 Greenough had carved a statue of her as a little girl 
 in Florence, and, curiously enough, had wrought 
 from a remnant of the same stone a bust of Willis. 
 It was in 1846 also that the Home Journal was born, 
 the last and most prosperous descendant of the 
 
no AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 Mirror > which, under Willis and his constant friend 
 Morris, had passed through various stages of evolu 
 tion. As editor and contributor in New York, and 
 at his second country-place, Idlewild, on the Hud 
 son, Willis toiled faithfully for this periodical 
 through the twenty-one years of life that remained 
 to him. They were years from which trouble was 
 not absent. One of the forms it took was the 
 publication in 1854 of the story Ruth Hall, by 
 Willis s sister, " Fanny Fern," who chose the 
 method of caricature in the guise of fiction for 
 exploiting a family quarrel due to Willis s refusal 
 to accept certain contributions she wished to make 
 to the Home Journal. Another distress was the 
 part he had to take in the famous Edwin Forrest 
 divorce suit. The actor seems to have sought trag 
 edy in daily life, and, in playing the role of Othello, 
 knocked Willis down in the street one day, and 
 involved him unpleasantly in the suit against Mrs. 
 Forrest which resulted disastrously for the jealous 
 husband s private reputation and triumphantly for 
 hers. When the war came, Willis, of all men, under 
 took to be the Home Journal s correspondent in 
 Washington. " He dropped his light plummet of 
 observation," as Professor Beers well says, " into the 
 boiling sea of the civil war, where it was tossed about 
 at no great depth below the surface." His health 
 was already much enfeebled, yet the falling off of the 
 Journal s Southern subscribers and the death of 
 
x^fe,^-^ 4 
 
 _ 
 
 sf 
 
 *~r 
 
 x^t 
 
 FAC-SIMILE OF PART OF A LETTER FROM WILLIS TO POE. 
 
ii2 AMERICAN, BOOKMEN 
 
 General Morris made it seem imperative that he 
 should give all the energies of a younger, stronger 
 man to his work. These failing days and years of 
 men whose pen is their support, days so often 
 clouded by the fear of want and the necessity of 
 work: of which they are really incapable, provide the 
 saddest pages of literary biography. The spectacle 
 of Willis, whom Lowell had truly called" the topmost 
 bright bubble on the wave of the town," righting at 
 the end against the heavy odds of need and illness is 
 one upon which it is unnecessary to dwell. His 
 disease was found to be epilepsy, and finally took 
 the form of paralysis and softening of the brain. 
 The end came at Idlewild on January 20, 1867. 
 
 An essential element of dandyism in Willis and 
 almost everything he did was probably the cause 
 of what might be called his personal unpopularity in 
 print. His biographer declares that it was second 
 only to the unpopularity of Cooper among Ameri 
 can writers ; and it is the less easily understood 
 because Willis s heart was really of the kindest and 
 most human. Furthermore, he was not only prompt 
 with words of praise for promising beginners, but 
 seems to have been almost without literary jealous 
 ies. The truth must be that our countrymen were 
 less tolerant fifty years ago than they are to-day 
 of anything that even seemed frivolous or flippant. 
 Willis evidently did not take himself too seriously, 
 and if one should seek high and low for, terms to 
 
WILLIS, HALLECK, AND DRAKE 113 
 
 define his work, no words more suggestive of its 
 true character could be found than those which he 
 chose as titles for some of his own books. Besides 
 the Pencillings by the Way, there are Inklings of Adven 
 ture, Loiterings of Travel, Hurrygraphs, and Dashes 
 at Life with a Free Pencil. Indeed, he was inces 
 santly dashing at life with a free pencil, and just 
 because this was what he did there is little to show 
 for it fifty years after the best of it was done. With 
 his prose, most of his verse, even the once univer 
 sally known " Love in a Cottage," has ceased to be 
 read. In a few such poems as " Unseen Spirits " 
 and the " Lines on Leaving Europe," the best of 
 Willis is to be found to-day. 
 
 In one of his " Letters from Idlewild " Willis 
 wrote these characteristic words : " With such advan 
 tages of physiognomy and manners, so winning a 
 look and voice, how is it that Fitz-Greene Halleck 
 has never let himself be known to audiences ? . . . 
 What a pity that so admirably formed a creature 
 should die (as he is likely to !) without the eye and 
 ear homage for which Nature gifted him ! " Willis 
 could no more have understood Halleck s objections 
 to publicity than his venturing to stake his fame 
 upon a very few poems, a venture in which Drake, 
 through his early death, stood by Halleck s side. 
 The contrast between Willis and Poe, in the nature 
 of the men and of their work, is sufficiently striking ; 
 yet Willis in many ways is separated as distinctly 
 
n 4 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 from the two men whose names are always linked 
 together in American literary annals, Fitz-Greene 
 Halleck and Joseph Rodman Drake. Willis does 
 not seem to have felt that it was better to live by 
 one poem than to die with many books ; at least he 
 did not proceed upon such a theory, and to-day 
 there is not one thing he wrote which is even as 
 well known as his name. On the other hand, 
 " Marco Bozzaris " is familiar to thousands who 
 know little or nothing about Halleck, and " The 
 Culprit Fay " and " The American Flag " (" When 
 Freedom from her mountain height ") are eminently 
 living specimens of our national poetry. 
 
 Halleck outlived Willis by about ten months, 
 though born sixteen years before him, on July 8, 
 1790, in Guilford, Connecticut. Drake was Hal- 
 leek s junior by five years, August 7, 1795, being 
 the time of his birth, and New York City the 
 place. Like Willis, they were both of old New Eng 
 land stock. To New York came Halleck in 1811. 
 He had received all his schooling in Guilford, and 
 because " he could n t help it," as one of his school 
 mates said, had written more than the usual number 
 of boyish verses, which his biographer, General 
 James Grant Wilson, has done him the doubtful 
 kindness to exhume. In New York he entered a 
 mercantile office having served his apprenticeship 
 of trade in the village store of Guilford and had 
 not long been living his new life when he made the 
 
WILLIS, HALLECK, AND DRAKE 115 
 
 acquaintance of young Drake, then a student of 
 medicine. The story is told that one afternoon, 
 in the spring of 1813, the two friends, not yet 
 intimate, were sailing in New York Bay and discuss- 
 
 M 
 
 x / v^. / 
 
 FAC-SIMILE STANZA AND SIGNATURE FROM DRAKE S POEM, 
 "ABELARD TO ELOISE." 
 
 ing the delights of a future world. " It would be 
 heaven," said Halleck, in the exuberance of youth, 
 " to lounge upon the rainbow and read Tom Camp 
 bell." The thought, according to the anecdote, 
 appealed so strongly to Drake s young sympathies 
 that their devoted intimacy began upon the spot. 
 
n6 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 About three years after this occurrence, Drake 
 produced his masterpiece, " The Culprit Fay." Its 
 origin was not unlike that of Precaution and The Pilot y 
 which Cooper produced, as we have seen, to surpass 
 respectively an English novel writer in interest and 
 Scott in truth to sea life. Drake, in a similar spirit, 
 refused one day to admit the contention of Cooper 
 and Halleck that our American rivers would not 
 lend themselves, like the Scottish streams, to poetic 
 treatment. To prove the truth of his position, and 
 to give the Hudson its due, he wrote " The Culprit 
 Fay " in the space of three days in the summer of 
 1816. Dr. Johnson s Rasselas is hardly more re 
 markable for the rapidity of its creation ; and as 
 the work of a boy of twenty-one, Drake s poem is 
 worthy to be remembered with the best fruits of 
 early ripened powers. 
 
 Halleck could not look with any satisfaction 
 upon Drake s marriage, in 1816, to the daughter of 
 a rich shipbuilder. He thought Drake "the hand 
 somest man in New York a face like an ange! 3 
 a form like an Apollo," and " well knew that his 
 person was the true index of his mind." Though 
 Halleck acted as a groomsman at the wedding, he 
 evidently feared the alliance of genius with wealth. 
 Yet his intimacy with Drake suffered as little abate 
 ment as possible when matrimony steps between 
 bachelor friends. From Europe, travelling with 
 his wife, Dr. Drake, as he was then called, wrote 
 
HALLECK AT 57. 
 From an engraving of a portrait by C. L. Elliott. 
 
WILLIS, HALLECK, AND DRAKE 117 
 
 clever epistles in rhyme to his friend at home, and 
 soon after his return they began to contribute to the 
 Post the verses, printed over the names of Croaker, 
 Croaker Junior, and Croaker & Co., which provided 
 all New York with keen amusement. 
 
 These Croaker verses were undoubtedly witty 
 and penetrating skits on the social and political life 
 of the town, and probably give as clear an idea of 
 the year 1819 in New York as anything to which 
 one can turn. Yet the importance with which they 
 were then invested seems somewhat curious now 
 that they are quite forgotten. Halleck s biographer 
 tells us of the anxiety of Coleman, the editor of the 
 Post, to know who his mysterious correspondents 
 were. They made up their minds one night to go 
 to his house and reveal themselves. 
 
 " They were ushered into the parlour ; the editor 
 soon entered, the young poets expressed a desire for 
 a few minutes strictly private conversation with 
 him, and the door being closed and locked, Dr. 
 Drake said : c I am Croaker, and this gentleman, 
 sir, is Croaker Junior/ Coleman stared at the 
 young men with indescribable and unaffected aston 
 ishment, at length exclaiming, ( My God ! I had no 
 idea that we had such talents in America ! 
 
 This, by the way, seems to have been a favourite 
 idea with editors of the time, for only two years had 
 passed since the instinctive expression of Richard 
 H. Dana s similar misgivings about the origin of 
 
n8 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 " Thanatopsis." If the editors were easily surprised, 
 there is something answerably refreshing and youth 
 ful in the tale that Drake, after reading the proof 
 of one of the Croaker verses, " laid his cheek down 
 upon the lines he had written, and looking at his 
 fellow-poet with beaming eyes, said, c O Halleck, 
 is n t this happiness ! For a clearer actual 
 vision of the romantic pair, we may thank Cole- 
 man s report to Bryant of the momentous Croaker 
 interview : " Drake looked the poet ; you saw the 
 stamp of genius in every feature. Halleck had the 
 aspect of a satirist." 
 
 In this year of 1819 Drake wrote his ringing 
 lines, " The American Flag," for which Halleck 
 supplied the conclusion, and in the next year he 
 died. " There will be less sunshine for me here 
 after, now that Joe is gone," said Halleck as he 
 returned from his friend s funeral. The more 
 enduring expression of his loss is the elegy written 
 on the day of Drake s death, and beginning with 
 the lines, perhaps more familiar than any others 
 from his pen : 
 
 "Green be the turf above thee, 
 Friend of my better days! 
 None knew, thee but to love thee, 
 Nor named thee but to praise." 
 
 Halleck lived a lifetime of nearly half a century 
 after his friend s death, but it was on the work that 
 
1 
 
 HALLECK AT 75. 
 From an engraving of a photograph by Brady. 
 
OF THB 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
WILLIS, HALLECK, AND DRAKE 119 
 
 he did between 1817 and 1827, when his Alnwick 
 Castle, with other Poems, was published anony 
 mously, that his fame must chiefly rest. In 1819 
 his Fanny had appeared, full of brightness and local 
 hits at persons to whom he made reparation many 
 years later in an edition with notes. So great was 
 the favour in which this production was held that 
 Brevoort, the friend of Irving, declared frankly in 
 1820, "that he should be prouder of being the 
 author of Fanny than of any poetical work ever 
 written in America." Such a statement as this has 
 not its least value as a reminder of the condition of 
 the American Parnassus at the time. Halleck s 
 volume of 1827 showed that an improvement had 
 begun, for it contained his " Marco Bozzaris," 
 " Burns," and most of the other poems on the 
 strength of which Poe, in 1846, gave him the 
 second place among American poets. This is 
 the arrangement of Poe s list : 
 
 "Bryant, Halleck, Dana, Sprague, Longfellow, 
 Willis, and so on, Halleck coming second in the 
 series, but holding, in fact, a rank in the public 
 opinion quite equal to that of Bryant." A little 
 later he makes himself surer of his ground by saying 
 " that Mr. Halleck, in the apparent public estimate, 
 maintains a somewhat better position than that 
 to which, on absolute grounds, he is entitled." 
 
 Be that as it may, the " public estimate " ranked 
 him very high in spite of the fact that he wrote 
 
120 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 practically nothing from 1827 until 1864, when he 
 brought forth " Young America/ a poem, or suc 
 cession of lyrics, which seem to have been due 
 equally to the war and to the enterprising Bonner 
 of the Ledger. The poet s fame to-day and in the 
 future, as in the past, will stand or fall without the 
 aid of this evening song. 
 
 Halleck s life was about as uneventful as the 
 visits of his Muse were infrequent. He held posi 
 tions in several business offices before he became 
 the confidential clerk of John Jacob Astor. Once 
 he went abroad, but evidently he cared more for 
 seeing places than persons, and the record of his 
 travels is mainly a long and accurate list of the 
 towns at which he stopped. His deafness, due to 
 the discharge of a drunken militiaman s gun by his 
 ear when he was a child, made his part in the 
 society of New York a little less prominent than it 
 might otherwise have been, for his wit and charm, 
 which have been defined as Gallic, won him many 
 friends, and in spite of his disability and shyness 
 the demand for his company at social gatherings 
 almost always exceeded his willingness to supply it. 
 Lowell felt in Halleck s work the effect of the re 
 stricting circumstances of his life " In a world of 
 back-offices, ledgers, and stoves," and in that " Fable 
 for Critics " which possesses the quality almost 
 unique in contemporary criticism of not passing 
 " out of date," one finds a generous expression of 
 
WILLIS, HALLECK, AND DRAKE 121 
 
 FAC-SIMILE OF AN UNPUBLISHED LETTER OF HALLECK S. 
 
122 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 regret " that so much of a man has been peddled 
 away." 
 
 Halleck never married, yet if the saying of 
 a " superior woman " may be believed, he could 
 not have been without his attractions. This lady 
 is reported to have declared, " If I were on my way 
 to church to be married, yes, even if I were walking 
 up the aisle, and Halleck were to offer himself, I d 
 leave the man I had promised to marry and take 
 him!" To this perhaps should be joined his epi 
 gram written for a young lady who asked for his 
 autograph : 
 
 " There wanted but this drop to fill 
 The wifeless poet s cup of fame. 
 Hurrah ! there lives a lady still, 
 Willing to take his name." 
 
 At the same time one significant story of his de 
 ference to the opposite sex may well be repeated. 
 In 1821 he was travelling as the only passen 
 ger in a stage-coach in the Wyoming Valley. 
 He had lighted a capital cigar, when the coach 
 stopped and an elderly woman got in. True to 
 his principles, he immediately threw away the 
 cigar, which, unhappily, was his last, when, to his 
 horror, the woman produced a pipe and for fifteen 
 miles puffed forth the smoke of her wretched 
 tobacco. " I shall on my deathbed," said Halleck 
 afterward, " undoubtedly recall with horror, as I do 
 
WILLIS, HALLECK, AND DRAKE 123 
 
 at the present moment, that fearful pipe and its 
 smoker." 
 
 The poet was a conservative to the core. It 
 was characteristic of him, when he went to hear 
 Thackeray lecture on George IV., to get up and 
 leave the hall. The king who invented a shoe- 
 buckle was still to him "the first gentleman in 
 Europe," and of Thackeray he could only say, " I 
 can t listen any longer to his abuse of a better man 
 than himself." It was also like him when Mr. 
 Astor died, and left him #200 a year a bequest 
 which Mr. William B. Astor afterward increased 
 by the gift of $ 10,000 to retire in 1849 to his 
 native town of Guilford, and with the sister who 
 was his lifelong friend to pass the rest of his days 
 in quiet. Here he died on November 19, 1867. 
 Since his niche in the pantheon of our earlier 
 writers had been assigned to him, a troop of 
 younger men had come upon the scene, and most 
 of the Knickerbocker figures had lost something of 
 their first distinction. Yet if his place was never 
 so glittering as that of Willis, nor so vividly won 
 as Drake s, it was all his own, as theirs belonged to 
 them. The memory of these three, if not their 
 written word, speaks one thing clearly to us still, 
 that the fame best worth winning is hardly a plant 
 which " in broad rumour lies," except in so far as 
 posterity is concerned therewith. But who shall 
 say that it would be better for creators or critics to 
 
i2 4 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 have the power of projecting themselves fifty or 
 seventy-five years into the future ? One result of 
 such a power would surely be that much less would 
 be written and much less said about it. 
 
THE HISTORIANS, ESPECIALLY PRES- 
 COTT AND PARKMAN 
 
 IT is the present fashion to speak lightly of the 
 " Puritan conscience." Men and women apolo 
 gise for the necessity of exercising it, as if it were 
 an hereditary taint from which it is difficult or im 
 possible to escape. Yet it is an axiom that the spirit 
 out of which it grows has wrought many of our best 
 achievements; and to a high degree it has domi 
 nated the most conspicuous writers of history in 
 America. By ancestry, birth, and training, Ban 
 croft, Prescott, Motley, and Parkman represented 
 the essence of New England. They were all sons 
 of Massachusetts and of Harvard, and at least three 
 of them belonged entirely to that class of the com 
 munity of which Mr. Howells wrote not long ago : 
 " If one names over the men who gave Boston her 
 supremacy in literature during the Unitarian har 
 vest-time of the old Puritanic seed-time which was 
 her Augustan age, one names the people who were 
 and who had been socially first in the city ever since 
 the self-exile of the Tories at the time of the Rev 
 olution." The historians, in their inherited points 
 
126 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 of view, therefore, had much in common. In the 
 precincts of the body, as of the mind, they were 
 neighbours, for at various times of their lives they 
 all lived in houses that faced or were within a stone s 
 throw of Boston Common. Yet the circumstances 
 of their lives naturally divide them into pairs, Ban 
 croft and Motley on one side of the dividing line, 
 Prescott and Parkman on the other. 
 
 Of all the four, George Bancroft must be called 
 least the Bostonian, inasmuch as he belonged most 
 to the world which lies unseen from the State House 
 dome. In the first place, he was not born in Bos 
 ton, but in Worcester, where his father, the author 
 of a Life of Washington once widely read, was a 
 Unitarian minister. But the boy came to Harvard, 
 and graduated at seventeen in the class of 1817. 
 From Cambridge he proceeded to Gottingen, where 
 he won the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, and to 
 Berlin. When he returned to America, he was one 
 of the very few amongst our countrymen at that 
 time who knew anything at first hand about the 
 methods and spirit of exact European scholarship, 
 and he possessed the further distinction of having 
 made the personal acquaintance of Goethe and 
 Byron. After a year of service as a tutor in Greek 
 at Harvard College, he became in 1823 one of the 
 principals of the Round Hill School at North 
 ampton, Massachusetts, an experiment in cc sec 
 ondary instruction " which was continued for ten 
 
From a private plate etched by H. B. Hall, Sr., in 1868. 
 
or THX 
 
 tJlflVERSITT 
 
THE HISTORIANS 127 
 
 years, in spite of its having come several decades in 
 advance of its time. 
 
 Throughout the lifetime and for several years 
 after the death of his first wife, whose family were 
 prominent Whigs, Bancroft, a Democrat, refrained 
 from political activity ; but when Van Buren ap 
 pointed him Collector of the port of Boston in 
 1837, he accepted the office, and from that time for 
 ward was a prominent figure in national affairs. 
 Under Polk he became Secretary of the Navy, and 
 made his term of office especially memorable by 
 establishing the Annapolis Academy. His public 
 service was marked by other achievements, however, 
 and gained great distinction in subsequent years by 
 his performance of the duties of minister of the 
 United States at London and Berlin. 
 
 It "has been said by one writer about Bancroft : 
 " A man who makes part of the history of his own 
 time, can better write that of another ; " and un 
 doubtedly Bancroft s practical knowledge of Ameri 
 can government, no less than his German habits of 
 scholarship, contributed to his special qualifications 
 for becoming the historian of our national begin 
 nings. The early volumes of his History of the 
 United States were written, to be sure, before his 
 political life had begun; but of the ten volumes 
 which appeared between 1834 and 1875, e ig nt were 
 published after his entrance into politics. His 
 work, both in affairs and in authorship, rendered 
 
128 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 him eminently a citizen of the world, and long 
 before he died in 1891, New York, Washington, 
 and Newport had each become more his home than 
 Boston or its neighbourhood. 
 
 There are curious analogies of circumstance be 
 tween the careers of Bancroft and of John Lothrop 
 Motley. After studying at Bancroft s school at 
 Round Hill, Motley, like his master, graduated 
 from Harvard College at seventeen in 1813. 
 Like Bancroft he continued his studies at Berlin 
 and Gottingen, where he was intimate with Bis 
 marck. Bancroft, destined by his parents for the 
 ministry, had made his first literary venture in a 
 volume of poems ; Motley, intended for the law, 
 attempted fiction before giving himself to politics 
 and history. Like Bancroft he did his most con 
 spicuous national service as Minister of the United 
 States, first at Vienna and then at the court of St. 
 James ; but, far less to the credit of our government 
 than of Motley, he felt obliged to resign from the 
 first post, and was recalled from the second. His 
 biographer, Dr. Holmes, has described each of 
 these " incidents " to use the gentle term of di 
 plomacy in such a way as to leave little doubt 
 that a sensitive and high-minded public servant was 
 cruelly wronged by their means. 
 
 But if Motley did not receive his due from the 
 administrations he represented, there was never any 
 dearth of honour for his work as an historian. 
 
From a photograph by Newnham & Field, Bournemouth, where 
 Motley spent the winter of 1872-3. 
 
THE HISTORIANS 129 
 
 Prescott stood aside for him to write The Rise of the 
 Dutch Republic, as Irving had already yielded up 
 his subject of the Conquest of Mexico to Prescott ; 
 and the honest admiration which each of these gen 
 erous men felt for the book he had meant to write 
 himself, was no more sincere than the admiration of 
 all the reading world for Motley s three great his 
 torical pictures of the struggle for liberty in the 
 Netherlands. The Rise of the Dutch Republic was 
 published in 1856, the History of the United Nether 
 lands in 1861-68, and The Life and Death of John 
 of Barneveld in 1 874. Of his theme he once wrote : 
 <c I had not first made up my mind to write a his 
 tory, and then cast about to take up a subject. 
 My subject had taken me up, drawn me on, and 
 absorbed me into itself." Motley s friends knew 
 with what indefatigable labour in the libraries and 
 state archives of Europe he had prepared himself 
 for his task ; they were sure, too, of the rare per 
 sonal qualities which must enter into any work of 
 his hand and brain, for they knew him best in his 
 life of a studious private citizen whose gifts and 
 personality of uncommon charm won him distinc 
 tion wherever he might be. Dr. Holmes has told 
 how he shone at the meetings of the Saturday Club 
 in Boston, and we know that dim lights were easily 
 obscured when Lowell and Emerson and their com 
 rades were shining together. Of all their company 
 none had or deserved warmer friendships, within 
 
 9 
 
130 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 and without their circle, than Motley. He died in 
 England in 1877. 
 
 To attempt to give in a brief space any adequate 
 idea of all the four historians who have been named, 
 would be futile. Perhaps a better purpose will be 
 served by looking somewhat nearly at Prescott and 
 Parkman, who in many important points, though 
 not all, stand related to each other more closely 
 than Bancroft and Motley. 
 
 The "books without which no gentleman s 
 library is complete " look very much alike on the 
 well-ordered shelves. Their backs, nearly uniform, 
 are as those of a company of persons whose lives 
 are regulated by one unvarying set of conventions. 
 Yet we all know what different stories their pages 
 tell, and if we are curious to learn the histories of 
 their own production, we find ourselves dealing with 
 the most human of records, as various as the inmost 
 lives of men. There are stories of patient toil, dis 
 appointments, failures, hopes, and noble victories, 
 and the life-blood of one man gives its colour to 
 each separate story. What we read between the 
 pages of Prescott and Parkman, who, like the blind 
 historian Thierry, " made friends with darkness," is 
 a tale of unflinching courage and successful struggle, 
 not in spurts of a few months or years, but for a 
 lifetime, against difficulties so disheartening that a 
 man might own them too much for him and yet 
 prove himself no coward. The " Puritan con- 
 
THE HISTORIANS 131 
 
 science," or the Puritan will, has rarely been put 
 more rigorously to the test than in the work which 
 these two men elected to do. 
 
 Struggle was familiar to the stock from which 
 William Hickling Prescott came. His first ances 
 tor in this country, John Prescott, settling in the 
 Massachusetts Lancaster which was named for his 
 English home, did brave deeds in King Philip s 
 War. He was a man of stalwart figure, and struck 
 terror to the Indians by entering the fight in a suit 
 of armour, which he is said to have worn in service 
 under Cromwell. The historian s grandfather, 
 Colonel William Prescott, came from his farm at 
 Pepperell to command the American troops at 
 Bunker Hill. The grandfather of Prescott s wife, 
 Captain John Linzee, commanded the British sloop- 
 of-war Falcon as she took her part in the action of 
 the same day ; and any reader who recalls the open 
 ing words of The Virginians knows what became 
 of the swords the colonel and the captain wore in 
 the memorable fight. Prescott was well pleased, 
 as he said in a letter to an English friend, by 
 Thackeray s " very nice tribute to my old swords of 
 Bunker Hill renown, and to their unworthy proprie 
 tor. It was very prettily done of him." When 
 Prescott died the crossed swords were transferred 
 from his library wall to a similar place in the rooms 
 of the Massachusetts Historical Society. The vic 
 tories won by Prescott s father, Judge William 
 
AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 Prescott, were those of peace. Daniel Webster 
 declared that he stood at the very head of the 
 Massachusetts Bar. 
 
 The boy who was to become the historian was 
 the second of seven children, and was born in Salem 
 on May 4, 1796. When he was twelve years old 
 his father and his family came to live in Boston. 
 Here the boy was sent to the school of the Rev. 
 Dr. Gardiner, who, having himself been taught as a 
 boy in England by the celebrated Dr. Parr, linked 
 close together the learning of the Old World and 
 the New. The stories of youthful precocity are not 
 so abundantly told of Prescott as of many other 
 men distinguished in later life. He learned readily, 
 and came to care for books like any boy of quick 
 mind in a family which did not give the first place 
 to material things. When he entered Harvard 
 College as a sophomore in 1811, it was not hard for 
 him to stand well in scholarship, and to stand first 
 seems never to have been his controlling wish. 
 The pleasures of the place appealed to him quite as 
 strongly as its duties, yet it is here that he is first 
 found regulating his conduct by what he afterward 
 called " the last infirmity of feeble minds " good 
 resolutions. " I shall never be too old to make 
 them," he said again in later life : " See if I shall 
 ever be old enough to keep them." In his own 
 way he always tried hard to fulfil the better pur 
 poses for which they stood, and imposed upon him- 
 
THE HISTORIANS 133 
 
 self all manner of fines and forfeits to be paid for 
 failures. What his own way sometimes was, espe 
 cially in earlier years, may be inferred from an anec 
 dote of his travels abroad. An oculist in Paris had 
 advised him to simplify his diet by never taking 
 more than two glasses of wine a day. As he went 
 from place to place, therefore, " one of the first 
 things Prescott did was to require the waiter to 
 show him specimens of all the wine-glasses the 
 house afforded. He would then pick out from 
 among them the largest ; and this, though it might 
 contain two or three times the quantity of a com 
 mon wine-glass, he would have se,t by his plate 
 as his measure at dinner to observe the rule in." 
 In contrast with the superhuman strictness which 
 ruled his later years, this record of boyish ingenuity 
 is good to read. The work of a moment in his 
 college days, however, brought about such dire 
 results that the early acquisition of method as the 
 law of his life stood him perhaps in better stead 
 than any other portion of his training. 
 
 When the college officers had left the students in 
 the Commons Hall one day after dinner, there was 
 a frolic of a sort not unknown to later generations. 
 Prescott had had no part in it, and was leaving the 
 table, when something caused him to look back. At 
 the instant of his turning, his open eye, the left, 
 was violently struck by a large piece of hard bread 
 thrown without special aim in his direction. With 
 
134 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 the blind hero of the blind poet he might well have 
 said, 
 
 " Why was the sight 
 To such a tender ball as th eye confin d, 
 So obvious and so easy to be quencht ? " 
 
 He fell senseless to the ground, was carried to his 
 father s house in Boston, where he became alarm 
 ingly ill, and soon it was found that his left eye, 
 though never bearing any outward mark of the 
 blow, had entirely lost its vision. After a few 
 weeks he was able to return to college and, with 
 greater caution, to pursue his studies, which he did 
 with credit until his graduation in 1814. His 
 family celebrated the day, and his reading of a 
 Latin poem, "Ad Spem" a goddess he had good 
 need to invoke, by entertaining five hundred of 
 their friends at dinner under a tent in Cambridge. 
 Whether the undergraduate who threw the bread 
 was one of the guests history does not relate ; but 
 it is recorded that, thinking himself unknown, he 
 never expressed compunction for what he had done 
 or sympathy with Prescott, who in reality did know 
 him, and in later years, when the results of the 
 accident had been long established, spoke the timely 
 word which secured the offender a comfortable post 
 for life. 
 
 Nature could not have bestowed a more service 
 able gift upon Prescott than that which enabled a 
 friend to say of him : " He could be happy in more 
 
THE HISTORIANS 135 
 
 ways, and more happy in every one of them 
 than any other person I have ever known." Very 
 soon his resources of good cheer and courage were 
 taxed to the uttermost, for the uninjured eye began 
 to show that sympathy which an eye often expresses 
 toward its injured mate to the utter disregard of 
 the sympathy due to the owner of both of them. 
 His right eye became inflamed and so painful as to 
 affect most seriously the health of his entire body. 
 Indeed, the defects of his vision seemed then and 
 later to be but a part of a general rheumatism. 
 Of the time when he was thus first confined in a 
 dark room his mother afterward said : " I never in 
 a single instance groped my way across the apart 
 ment, to take my place at his side, that he did not 
 salute me with some expression of good cheer 
 not a single instance as if we were the patients 
 and his place were to comfort us." 
 
 His mother s father, Thomas Hickling, was the 
 Consul of the United States at St. Michael s Island 
 in the Azores, and thither the young man was sent 
 in the hope that the sea voyage and the different 
 life would mend his health. But he had not been 
 there long when the dark room again became his 
 habitation. Within its walls he sang aloud and 
 exercised, walking hundreds of miles, he said, and 
 his cousins, admitting a little light on the page of a 
 book, read to him by the hour. But neither the 
 life at St. Michael s nor the advice of the specialists 
 
136 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 he consulted in London and Paris, when he was 
 able to continue his journeys, gave him any material 
 help. Nothing which he brought home with him 
 in 1817 was of such value as his " noctograph," a 
 contrivance made by one of the famous Wedgwood 
 family for writing without using the eyes. It had 
 the appearance of a portfolio, about nine by ten 
 inches in size. When unfolded it was seen to be 
 crossed by sixteen parallel brass wires. Underneath 
 them was a sheet of carbonated paper, over the 
 white paper which was to receive the writing. An 
 ivory stylus, kept within bounds by the wires and 
 an outside frame, made the impression through the 
 one sheet upon the other. With the aid of this 
 device all of Prescott s writing was done. 
 
 He did not proceed at once upon his return 
 from Europe to make himself an historian, but first 
 abandoned his hopes of studying law, and then 
 married. Fortunately his father s means were suffi 
 cient to relieve him of the need of earning a living. 
 A mercantile career, which his eyesight would have 
 permitted, had no attractions for him, and strange 
 as it may seem that a life of literary labour was 
 possible when a " learned profession " was not, he 
 deliberately made up his mind to undertake the 
 profession of letters. He believed it to be possible 
 to make his ears do the work of his eyes, and 
 counting all the costs and difficulties, set about an 
 elaborate preparation for his chosen work. He 
 
PRESCOTT AT 62. 
 
 From an engraving by John Sartain, showing the historian 1 
 " noctograph." 
 
OF T 
 
THE HISTORIANS 137 
 
 began at the bottom by studying Lindley Murray s 
 grammar, and listening with critical care while the 
 masters of English style, from Roger Ascham down 
 to his own contemporaries, were read aloud to him. 
 Then he attacked French and Italian. German 
 appears to have been too much for him, and 
 Spanish was taken in its stead. He was not like 
 the person to whom Carlyle objected as trying to 
 persuade himself and others " that he knows about 
 things when he does not know more than the out 
 side skin of them." The list of the books he read, 
 and the uses to which he put his reading in schol 
 arly contributions on various subjects to the " Old 
 North," as the North American Review was nick 
 named, would shame many a man with no more 
 than the ordinary difficulties to contend against. 
 The beginning of his Spanish studies was due to 
 his cherished friend, ultimately his biographer, 
 George Ticknor, who in the autumn of 1824 read 
 him the lectures on Spanish literature which he had 
 prepared for the Senior Class of Harvard College. 
 Soon afterward Prescott was casting about for the 
 subject of a history to which he should devote his 
 serious efforts, and one of the personal Memoranda, 
 which he continued to make through his life, is 
 found to read, " I subscribe myself to the History of 
 the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, January I9th, 
 1826." A letter which he wrote immediately to 
 Alexander H. Everett, our Minister at Madrid, 
 
ij8 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 concerning his project, brought a new injury to his 
 eye, and when the books which Mr. Everett was to 
 send him from Spain arrived they found him utterly 
 disabled. " With my transatlantic treasures lying 
 around me," he wrote at a later day, " I was like 
 one pining from hunger in the midst of abun 
 dance." 
 
 How was it possible, one asks, for a man in his 
 condition to do anything ? The beginnings were 
 indeed discouraging. His first reader knew noth 
 ing of Spanish. " I cannot even now recall to my 
 mind without a smile," wrote Prescott near his 
 death, " the tedious hours in which, seated under 
 some old trees in my country residence, we pursued 
 our slow and melancholy way over pages which 
 afforded no glimmering of light to him, and from 
 which the light came dimly struggling to me 
 through a half-intelligible vocabulary." A second 
 reader who knew the language was better, but best 
 of all were Prescott s own strength and courage. 
 As he listened he jotted notes upon his noctograph; 
 afterward these were copied out and read to him, and 
 as he exercised afoot or on horseback his vigorous 
 mind brought form out of chaos. His composition 
 was all done, the corrections were made before he 
 began to dictate his successive chapters to his 
 amanuensis. It is said that he could carry sixty 
 pages of his printed work accurately in mind before 
 committing it in this way to paper. The wonder is 
 
THE HISTORIANS 139 
 
 not that it took him ten years to complete his first 
 work, but that he could do it at all. When Ferdi 
 nand and Isabella , bearing the imprint of 1838, was 
 published, nearly two years after its completion, the 
 author of it was immediately accorded a place in the 
 front rank of historians. Even the Quarterly Re 
 view was good enough to call the book " by much 
 the first historical work which British America has 
 as yet produced." 
 
 The methodical habits of Prescott s early days 
 constantly played an important part in his labours 
 and his pleasures. His hours were so scrupulously 
 laid out, that when the appointed minute came for 
 putting down a novel that was read aloud to the 
 family circle, Prescott was inexorable, no matter 
 where or how the hero and heroine were to be left. 
 If ten o clock was his bedtime, he was capable, when 
 the hour struck, of leaving a company of bachelor 
 friends whom he was entertaining at dinner, telling 
 them to call for whatever they desired, " and if you 
 don t go home till morning, I wish you a merry night 
 of it." In the morning when he was waked, he 
 gave himself time to count twenty, and if he failed 
 to jump out of bed when he had done so, he paid 
 a fine of his own exaction to the servant who had 
 called him. His tailor marked his clothes with the 
 number of ounces each garment weighed, and being 
 told exactly where the thermometer stood, he dressed 
 himself accordingly. Every morning for a long 
 
1 40 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 period, even in the coldest weather, he rode on his 
 horse from Boston to watch the sunrise from a par 
 ticular spot in Jamaica Plain. In his library the 
 blue window shades were so arranged that the light 
 could be kept at a uniform dimness, even as succes 
 sive clouds crossed the sun. He " reckoned time," 
 he said, " by eyesight, as distances on railroads are 
 reckoned by hours." 
 
 The catalogue of his rigours with himself might 
 be lengthened to such an extent as to make him seem 
 quite without the charm that springs from impulse, 
 but justice forbids one to leave unmentioned the 
 gentler graces of his life the tender devotion to 
 his parents, wife, and children, the social gift which 
 made the acquaintance think himself a friend, and 
 the friend know himself to be fortunate beyond 
 most men in the friendship with such a man. In 
 his father s house and his own in Boston, and the 
 summer places at Pepperell, Nahant, and Lynn, all 
 these graces stood forth against a background of 
 dignity and beauty. How he struck a contempo 
 rary is delightfully shown in a passage from a letter 
 of Longfellow s in 1838 to his friend Greene in 
 Rome : " This morning as I was sitting at break 
 fast, a gentleman on horseback sent up word that I 
 should come down to him. It was Prescott, author 
 of Ferdinand and Isabella. He is an early riser and 
 rides about the country. There on his horse sat 
 the great author. He is one of the best fellows in 
 
PRESCOTT IN HIS LIBRARY. 
 From a portrait by Chappel, after a photograph. 
 
THE HISTORIANS 141 
 
 the world, and very much my friend ; handsome, 
 gay, and forty ; a great diner-out ; gentle, compan 
 ionable, and modest ; quite astonished to find him 
 self so famous." 
 
 Prescott s greatest popular success was won by 
 the Conquest of Mexico, to which the five years of his 
 life after 1838 were devoted. On the appearance 
 of Ferdinand and Isabella Sydney Smith had said, 
 " When Prescott comes to England, a Caspian Sea 
 of soup awaits him." But it was not until 1850, 
 three years after the Conquest of Peru had won him 
 his third laurels, that he made the visit which was 
 little less than a triumphal progress through the 
 most interesting houses of England. He had 
 friends before going, none closer than the head of the 
 family in whose veins ran " all the blood of all the 
 Howards," and he made many others in his few 
 months abroad. A writer in Frasers Magazine 
 after Prescott s death declared that " the social 
 charm of Mr. Prescott, indescribable in words, but 
 certain in its effect, was a subject for general remark 
 in all circles, among bishops sipping their tea at the 
 Athenaeum, and among young beauties rejoicing in 
 their first Queen s ball." Whenever he gave up his 
 literary labours for a season, his eyesight gained in 
 strength. Indeed, the doctors had told him that 
 by abandoning his studies he would surely improve 
 his health in every way; but in 1848, after relin 
 quishing even the slight occasional use he had been 
 
i 4 2 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 able to make of his eye for reading, he had written 
 in his Memoranda, " At fifty-two a man must be 
 even more crippled than I am to be entitled to an 
 honourable discharge from service." Accordingly 
 he kept his harness on until the last. The third 
 volume of Philip the Second appeared only the year 
 before his death, which occurred in 1859. A warn 
 ing stroke of apoplexy had come in the winter of 
 1858. On January 28, 1859, tne secon d and 
 fatal stroke befell him, and he died within a few 
 hours. 
 
 It must be frankly admitted that, as a name 
 to conjure with, Prescott s has lost much of its 
 potency. With Bancroft in a greater, and Motley 
 probably in a lesser degree, is he not now counted 
 amongst the writers about whose work, since it is 
 supposed to be read by everybody, it is safer 
 not to ask too many searching questions ? Park- 
 man s popularity, on the other hand, is waxing 
 rather than waning. His themes may have some 
 thing to do with it, his nearness in method and 
 spirit to our own time something more. As be 
 tween Prescott and Parkman, the living American 
 historian to whom the first place is most generally 
 accorded to-day has no hesitation in saying that the 
 reality in Parkman s work makes the difference in 
 his favour. " In reading Prescott s account of the 
 conquest of Mexico," says Mr. Fiske, "one feels 
 one s self in the world of Arabian nights ; indeed, 
 
THE HISTORIANS 
 
 the author himself, in occasional comments, lets us 
 see that he is unable to get rid of just such a feel 
 ing." Modern research has shown that many of 
 the statements made by Prescott on what he ac 
 cepted as good authority were merely such tales as 
 one should expect from the land of Don Quixote. 
 Parkman, as Mr. Fiske has suggestively pointed 
 out, had the unspeakable advantage of dealing with 
 a life upon which it was possible for him to look 
 with his own eyes before he was deprived of their 
 use. 
 
 Whatever contrasts exist between the work of 
 Prescott and Parkman, they might each have said 
 with Sir Walter Scott, " Author as I am, I wish 
 these good people would recollect that I began 
 with being a gentleman, and don t mean to give 
 up the character." In fact, they began with being 
 quite the same kind of gentleman, for while Pres 
 cott s ancestors were largely concerned with the 
 civil and military affairs of Massachusetts, Park- 
 man s were identified with the class which held 
 perhaps even a stronger control the Brahmini- 
 cal caste of clergymen. On his mother s side he 
 was descended from John Cotton. His grand 
 father, Samuel Parkman, in whose house the his 
 torian was born on September 16, 1823, was 
 counted the richest merchant in Boston, and the 
 boy s father, the Rev. Francis Parkman, was a 
 Unitarian minister of no little eminence. Two 
 
I 4 4 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 long-established " Parkman Professorships " in 
 Harvard University, one of which was held for 
 thirty-five years by Dr. Holmes, still stand for the 
 interest of the family in the sciences of medicine 
 and theology. Into surroundings the most pro 
 pitious, therefore, Parkman, like Prescott, was 
 born. 
 
 The authorised Life of Parkman is yet unpub 
 lished. Whatever new details it may communicate, 
 it can add little or nothing to our realisation of 
 Parkman s personal courage. This is not to be 
 gained so adequately from the many sketches of his 
 career that were written when he died in 1893, as 
 from an autobiographical paper which was subse 
 quently given to the world. Mr. Parkman wrote 
 it in 1868, when, to be sure, he still had a little 
 more than a third of his life to live ; and as he was 
 starting for Europe he handed it to a friend with 
 the request that it should not be opened until after 
 his death. When the Massachusetts Historical 
 Society met to commemorate this event, his friend, 
 the Rev. Dr. George E. Ellis, broke the seal of 
 the parcel he had kept unopened for twenty-five 
 years, and read the record which Parkman had 
 written as dispassionately as a scientist describing a 
 strange case of bodily and mental illness. From this 
 record the present impressions are largely drawn. 
 
 Parkman s boyhood was not altogether a period 
 of open-air activity. There were four early years 
 
PARKMAN AT 20. 
 From a Daguerreotype. 
 
THE HISTORIANS 145 
 
 spent on his grandfather s farm adjoining the wild 
 Middlesex Fells, when the frail little fellow learned 
 more from the woods about him than at the 
 " school of high, but undeserved reputation " to 
 which he was sent. At twelve he returned to 
 Boston, and here for four years he devoted him 
 self to chemical experiments as ardently as he had 
 collected birds eggs and trapped woodchucks in 
 the country. His new hobby, he says, " served 
 little other purpose than injuring him by con 
 finement, poisoning him with noxious gases, and 
 occasionally scorching him with some ill-starred 
 experiment." But at about the time of entering 
 Harvard College with the Class of 1844, his pas 
 sion fixed itself permanently upon the life of the 
 woods. His nature was such that he could never 
 do anything by halves. The " nothing-too-much " 
 principle of Prescott s life was totally foreign to 
 him. His college vacations were passed in ad 
 venturous expeditions through the districts of 
 New Hampshire and Maine, then almost unex 
 plored. As early as in his sophomore year he 
 resolved to write a history of the " Old French 
 War" which ended in the English conquest of 
 Canada. Here, he thought, the most stirring 
 scenes of forest drama had been enacted. A 
 brother of his grandfather, be it said, had served in 
 this war as a private in a Massachusetts regiment. 
 But the historian was doomed early to interruptions 
 
 10 
 
146 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 in his plans. An accident in the college gymna 
 sium sent him to Europe in search of stronger 
 health. Happening to be in Rome in Holy Week, 
 he took his lodging in a monastery of Passionist 
 Fathers, that he might better understand the 
 monastic methods of the church which ministered 
 to the Canadian Indians. Everything was bent 
 to one purpose. He returned home in time to 
 graduate with his class, and afterward yielded for 
 two years to his family s wish that he should study 
 law. But his reading then, as in college, even to 
 the neglect of other books, was directed to the 
 theme upon which his heart was set. In 1846 he 
 took the step, in pursuance of his inflexible purpose, 
 which cost him almost fatally dear. 
 
 As he had learned much of woodcraft and a little 
 of priestcraft, so he believed it necessary that he 
 should know the Indian for himself, and not from 
 Schoolcraft. Accordingly he set out for what was 
 then indeed the wild West with his kinsman, Mr. 
 Quincy A. Shaw. " A highly irritable organism," 
 he says of all this period of his life, " spurred the 
 writer to excess in a course which, with one of dif 
 ferent temperament, would have produced a free 
 and hardy development of such faculties and forces 
 as he possessed/* It would be a misuse of words 
 to employ any others than those with which Park- 
 man himself summed up the most crucial portions 
 of his Western experience : 
 
THE HISTORIANS 147 
 
 " A complication of severe disorders here seized 
 him, and at one time narrowly missed bringing both 
 him and his schemes to an abrupt termination, but 
 yielding to a system of starvation, at length assumed 
 an intermittent and much less threatening form. A 
 concurrence of circumstances left him but one 
 means of accomplishing his purpose. This was to 
 follow a large band of Ogillallah Indians, known to 
 have crossed the Black Hill range a short time 
 before. Reeling in the saddle with weakness and 
 pain, he set forth, attended by a Canadian hunter. 
 With much difficulty the trail was found, the Black 
 Hills crossed, the reluctance of his follower over 
 come, and the Indians discovered on the fifth day 
 encamped near the Medicine Bow range of the 
 Rocky Mountains. On a journey of a hundred 
 miles, over a country in parts of the roughest, he 
 had gained rather than lost strength, while his horse 
 was knocked up and his companion disconsolate 
 with a painful cough. Joining the Indians, he 
 followed their wanderings for several weeks. To 
 have worn the airs of an invalid would certainly 
 have been an indiscretion, since in that case a horse, 
 a rifle, a pair of pistols, and a red shirt might have 
 offered temptations too strong for aboriginal virtue. 
 Yet to hunt the buffalo over a broken country 
 when, without the tonic of the chase, he could 
 scarcely sit upright in the saddle, was not strictly 
 necessary for maintaining the requisite prestige. 
 
148 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 The sport, however, was good, and the faith un- 
 doubting that, to tame the devil, it is best to take 
 him by the horns." 
 
 Beside the personal knowledge of the Indian 
 gained by these heroic means, Parkman brought 
 back with him from the West a shattered consti 
 tution. But as he dealt with his difficulties among 
 the Indians, so he dealt with their results through 
 out his life. It was his purpose to tell the world 
 the things he knew and meant to learn, and " reel 
 ing in the saddle with weakness and pain," he 
 proceeded to do it. In 1849 The re g n Trail,, 
 written originally as a series of papers for the 
 Knickerbocker Magazine, appeared as a book. In 
 1848, when his disorders seemed at their worst, 
 the light of day being unsupportable to his eyes, 
 and his brain driven to a " wild whirl " by any con 
 tinued mental effort, he resolved to begin work 
 upon the History of the Conspiracy of Pontiac. The 
 physicians practically told him that it was madness, 
 and he, rightly believing that his salvation lay in 
 effort, gave them no heed. When he began his 
 work he could not listen for more than half an 
 hour at a time, to the reading of the material he 
 had long been collecting, and there were many days 
 when nothing could be done. He made his notes 
 with closed eyes upon an apparatus like Prescott s 
 noctograph, except that it had no carbonated paper, 
 and the writing was done directly upon the white 
 
Copyright, 1897, by Little, Brown & Co. 
 
 y 
 
 From an engraving of a photograph taken in 1882. 
 
THE HISTORIANS 149 
 
 sheet with a pencil. When the scrawls were de 
 ciphered and read to him, he mastered their import 
 and dictated his narrative. There were the same 
 perplexities that Prescott had to encounter with 
 foreign documents. " The language was chiefly 
 French," said Parkman, cc and the reader was a girl 
 from the public schools, ignorant of any tongue but 
 her own. The effect, though highly amusing to 
 bystanders, was far from being so to the person 
 endeavouring to follow the meaning of this strange 
 jargon." Yet in spite of everything his condition 
 did improve, and in 1851 the book was published. 
 Such was his view of the obstacles he always had to 
 overcome that he believed the results of his work 
 to be better rather than worse because of them. 
 
 In 1851, also, there was a new disaster in an effu 
 sion of water on the left knee, which plunged him 
 into miseries of body and mind as intense as any he 
 had ever known. But he was already at work upon 
 his greater enterprise, the series of histories which 
 now, in seven volumes, bear the general title of 
 France and England in North America. It was four 
 teen years before the first of these was finished. In 
 1865 appeared The Pioneers of France in the New 
 World. There had been many interruptions, one 
 of four years, and others of lesser duration, from 
 a single year to single months, weeks, and days. 
 Meanwhile he had married and lost his wife, had 
 journeyed often to Europe and to the scenes of his 
 
CtreJZi /^v<^: 
 
 REDUCED FAC-SIMILE PAGE OF MANUSCRIPT OF PARKMAN S " LA 
 SALLE AND THE DISCOVERY OF THE GREAT WEST," THE 
 ONLY BOOK ENTIRELY IN HIS HANDWRITING. 
 
THE HISTORIANS 151 
 
 narratives, and had begun to collect a vast num 
 ber of original documents now preserved in the 
 rooms of the Massachusetts Historical Society. 
 His eyes were at times stronger, so that he could 
 use them, reading a minute and resting a minute 
 for periods of half an hour, repeated several times 
 in the course of a day. Then, again, he could write 
 for a season with his own hand and vision. In 
 1854 he had begun to spend his summers at a 
 country place in Jamaica Plain. Here, unable to 
 use his eyes, he took to the beneficent work of 
 horticulture, and did it so well that the lilium Park- 
 manniy the result of his experiments in hybridisation, 
 perpetuates his name as the creator of a new flower. 
 At various times he was President of the Massa 
 chusetts Horticultural Society, a professor in the 
 agricultural department of Harvard University, a 
 member of the highest governing boards of his alma 
 mater, and President of the St. Botolph Club in 
 Boston. But much as he loved the intercourse 
 with his fellowmen, he had to limit his indulgence 
 in it. The work of his life was the completion of 
 his historical series, and this, in spite of all the 
 obstacles that would have seemed insurmountable 
 to a weaker spirit, he achieved in the year before 
 his death, on November 8, 1893. A writer who 
 lived only to begin his work, Robert Beverly Hale, 
 has left these lines, which help us well to remember 
 both what he began and what Parkman finished : 
 
152 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 "With youth* s blue sky and streaming sunlight blest, 
 And flushed with hope, he set himself to trace 
 The fading footprints of a banished race, 
 
 Unmindful of the storm-clouds in the west. 
 
 In silent pain and torments unconfessed, 
 Determination written on his face, 
 He struggled on, nor faltered in his pace 
 
 Until his work was done and he could rest. 
 
 " He was no frightened paleface stumbling through 
 
 An unknown forest, wandering round and round. 
 Like his own Indians, with instinct fine 
 He knew his trail, though none saw how he knew, 
 
 Reckoned his time, and reached his camping-ground 
 Just as the first white stars began to shine. " 
 
 In that Prescott was blessed with a body less 
 compact of weakness than Parkman s, and with a 
 spirit far more readily schooled to discipline, the 
 record of his achievements may be read in later 
 years with something less of that triumph which 
 every man feels in the victory of another. But no 
 historian has told a tale capable of stirring the blood 
 more quickly than the histories to be read between 
 the pages of these two " friends with darkness." 
 
SOME HUMOURISTS 
 
 THERE are few writings concerned with wit 
 and humour which do not begin with elabo 
 rate definitions of these almost indefinable qualities. 
 The present writing will increase the number of 
 exceptions to this rule by one. If there be readers 
 who cannot satisfy themselves with their own defini 
 tions, they need not look far to find the whole mat 
 ter even to the recognition of that third quality, 
 a sense of humour set forth in a score of different 
 ways. Lowell s opinion on the subject should cer 
 tainly be worth more than most men s, and he once 
 wrote, " My idea of the distinction between wit and 
 humour is that wit makes others laugh, and humour 
 ourselves cry sometimes." The lecturer to a col 
 lege class who quoted the definition of humour as 
 " wit plus sympathy " provided at least one of his 
 hearers, some years ago, with a practical working 
 distinction for every-day use. But there are many 
 others, often subtler, to be picked up in places 
 where more potent appeals to the memory are 
 made than in college class-rooms. Whether we 
 consciously divide the things that amuse us into 
 
154 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 the witty and the humourous sallies of mankind, we 
 are grateful for the provocations to mirth, and enter 
 tain toward the man who gives us laughter a feeling 
 which separates him from the common throng. 
 
 The attempts to formulate the distinctions be 
 tween American humour and that of other lands 
 are almost as frequent as the definitions of humour 
 itself. Again it seems unnecessary here to add one 
 to these attempts. We all know reasonably well 
 how composite and yet how definite are the qualities 
 which render most Americans recognisable wher 
 ever they may be found ; and like them, to a degree 
 equally exclusive of doubt, is the quality of humour 
 which the world knows as American. Mr. T. W. 
 Higginson has said "that the whole department of 
 American humour was created, so to speak, by the 
 amazed curiosity of Englishmen." It would be 
 unfair to take this statement entirely apart from its 
 context, and adorn a tale of confusion between 
 cause and effect by means of it. Yet whatever one 
 may think of it, or of the taste and spirit of much 
 American humour, it would be foolish to forget 
 that, in the department of letters to which it belongs, 
 our fellow-countrymen have done that which gives 
 them their clearest title to a place of their own as 
 writers. 
 
 Much of the best achievement in this direction 
 has obviously been wrought by men whose fame is 
 secured by other gifts than those of mere humour. 
 
SOME HUMOURISTS 155 
 
 It is necessary only to recall such names as Franklin, 
 Irving, Lowell, Holmes, Warner, Curtis, Mitchell, 
 and Bret Harte, and we remember how much besides 
 being humourists some of our best humourists have 
 been and are. It is noteworthy also that the names 
 of women occupy a scanty place in the annals of 
 our humour. In other fields they may be counted 
 now by hundreds, but excepting some short stories 
 here and there, and the work of a few women like 
 " Josiah Allen s Wife " and the Widow Bedott," 
 our humourous writing has been done almost entirely 
 by men. To be sure, there is an American volume, 
 The Wit of Women, compiled by one of their sisters, 
 who with a feminine argument of her own brings it 
 to an end with these lines : 
 
 "If you pronounce this book not funny 
 And wish you hadn t spent your money, 
 There soon will be a general rumour 
 That you re no judge of Wit and Humour." 
 
 But even this argumentum ad hominem fails to con 
 vince. Mark Twain, happily still the living expo 
 nent of American humour in its essence, addressed 
 the readers of his Library of Humour, published 
 more than ten years ago, in a different fashion. 
 Nothing could have been more characteristic of 
 him and of the variety of humour which he repre 
 sents than his " Compiler s Apology," printed in 
 facsimile from his handwriting : " Those selections 
 
156 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 in this book which are from my own works were 
 made by my two assistant-compilers, not by me. 
 This is why there are not more." 
 
 But living writers are not the present theme, nor 
 those whose names derive a lustre from more 
 serious work. Still less is it intended to attempt a 
 discussion of the broad theme of American humour 
 in its ethnic and philosophic bearing. Perhaps the 
 reader will not unwillingly join in the preference to 
 look at a few of the typical creators and creations of 
 our native humour. Two facts he will recognise 
 at once : First, that the newspapers have been an 
 important medium of humourous expression in 
 part because our humourists have dealt frequently 
 with public affairs, and in part because the news 
 papers have mirrored nearly everything, good and 
 bad, that is representative of American life ; and, 
 second, that an amusing, fictitious personality, some 
 thing more than a mere name, has frequently been 
 created as the mouthpiece of a humourous writer. 
 When Lowell began writing his most effective polit 
 ical satires, he sent them to the editors of the Boston 
 Courier and the Anti-Slavery Standard^ and a flesh- 
 and-blood Hosea Biglow loomed large behind his 
 utterances. Herein Lowell, with his own skill and 
 power, was merely elaborating, in the forties, a 
 device which in the thirties had made the name of 
 Major Jack Downing a household word. In the 
 same decade, but a few years after the appearance 
 
SOME HUMOURISTS 
 
 57 
 
 of Major Downing, the first lines in the typical 
 Yankee figure of Sam Slick had been drawn by the 
 
 Frontispiece from " The Life and Writings of Major Jack 
 Downing. 1 Boston, 1833. 
 
 Canadian pen of Judge Haliburton ; but the down- 
 east Major was the first conspicuous figure in 
 this field of New-World letters, and as the proto- 
 
158 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 type of later creations deserves more than a passing 
 glance. 
 
 One is confused at first by finding the origin of 
 the collected Downing letters attributed to two 
 persons, Seba Smith, a Maine journalist, and 
 Charles Augustus Davis (1795-1867), a New 
 York shipping merchant. The truth appears to be 
 that Smith created the Downingville major, and 
 Davis adopted him as his own offspring. In 
 neither of the volumes in which the letters of 
 Major Jack Downing were first collected does the 
 name of their real author appear, but the evidence 
 from various sources goes to show that the Boston 
 volume of 1833, made up of letters to the Portland 
 Courier, was wholly the work of Smith, and the 
 New York volume of 1834, made up of letters to 
 the New York Daily Advertiser, wholly that of 
 Davis. Before the first collection was printed, 
 some of the New York letters had appeared, for 
 an appendix to the Boston volume, declaring that 
 " the real Major has never sent any letter to any 
 other paper than the Portland Courier" proceeds 
 to print "some of Major Jack Downing s letters, 
 that he never wrote," and these are identical with 
 letters addressed to the New York Daily Advertiser, 
 and collected in the volume attributed to Davis. 
 Any possible doubt that Seba Smith was the author 
 of the first volume is removed by the book My 
 Thirty Tears Out of the Senate (New York, 1859), 
 
SOME HUMOURISTS 159 
 
 appearing over his own name, and republishing the 
 letters contained in the Boston volume of 1833. 
 It is not unnatural to resent in some measure the 
 credit which Davis won for himself, abroad and 
 among his friends, of whom Irving was one and 
 Halleck another, by the cleverness of his letters, 
 and their superiority, according to some opinions, 
 to those of Smith ; for in spite of it all he was 
 clearly a trespasser on another man s ground. If 
 he had confined himself to newspapers he would 
 have been merely one of many imitators. Even 
 the father of Motley, the historian, as Dr. Holmes 
 tells us, was " the author of one or more of the 
 well-remembered < Jack Downing letters." 
 
 The ethics and bibliography of the letters, how 
 ever, are less important than the Major and the 
 letters themselves. In his volume of 1859 Seba 
 Smith tells how they first came to be written. 
 From other sources we learn that Smith was born 
 in Buckfield, Maine, on September 14, 1792, was 
 graduated from Bowdoin College in 1818, and in 
 1820 became the editor of the Eastern Argus in 
 Portland. From 1830 until 1837 he conducted the 
 Portland Courier, and it was in 1830, according to 
 his own story, that he began writing for its columns 
 the Downing letters. The Maine Legislature, 
 evenly balanced in politics, afforded a good target 
 for ridicule, and it seemed possible by the exercise 
 of it to profit the young and struggling Courier. 
 
160 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 Accordingly Seba Smith "bethought himself of the 
 plan to bring a green, unsophisticated lad from the 
 country into town with a load of axe-handles, hoop- 
 poles, and other notions for sale, and while waiting 
 the movement of a dull market, let him blunder 
 into the halls of the legislature, and after wit 
 nessing for some days their strange doings, 
 sit down and write an account of them to his 
 friends at home in his own plain language." From 
 the beginning the letters were a success, not 
 only with Maine readers, but in Boston and other 
 places where the newspapers copied them freely. 
 With their progress the Yankee correspondent 
 advanced in importance. From his native town of 
 Downingville, " three miles from the main road as 
 you go back into the country, and . . . jest about 
 in the middle of down East" he proceeded to Wash 
 ington, where he soon became an intimate friend 
 and confidential adviser of President Jackson. He 
 represents himself even as " the Gineral s " bedfel 
 low, and none of cc Old Hickory s " actions is too 
 important or too trivial for Major Downing to have 
 a hand in it. The possibilities of giving the ways 
 of the Administration a ridiculous aspect by this 
 method need merely to be suggested. From Seba 
 Smith s book it is worth while to transcribe some 
 words about the memorable visit to Cambridge 
 when the degree of LL.D. was conferred upon 
 Jackson, for they represent with sufficient clearness 
 
SOME HUMOURISTS 161 
 
 the vein of humour that was characteristic both of 
 the original Jack Downing, who is reported to have 
 known himself only by the scar on his left arm, and 
 of his principal rival. 
 
 "Ye see when we were at Boston they sent word 
 to us to come out to Cambridge, for they wanted to 
 make the President a doctor of laws. What upon 
 airth a doctor of laws was, or why they wanted to 
 make the President one, I could n t think. So 
 when we come to go up to bed I asked the Gineral 
 about it. And says I, c Gineral, what is it they 
 want to do to you out to Cambridge ? Says 
 he, c They want to make a doctor of laws of me/ 
 Well,* says I, c but what good will that do P 
 c Why/ says he, c you know, Major Downing, 
 there s a pesky many of them are laws passed by 
 Congress that are rickety things. Some of em 
 have very poor constitutions, and some of em 
 have n t no constitution at all. So that it is neces 
 sary to have somebody there to doctor em up a 
 little, and not let em go out into the world, where 
 they would stand a chance to catch cold and be 
 sick, without they had good constitutions to bear 
 it. You know, says he, c I ve had to doctor the 
 laws considerable ever since I ve been at Washing 
 ton, although I was n t a regular bred doctor. And 
 I made out so well about it, that these Cambridge 
 folks think I better be made into a regular doctor at 
 once, and then there 11 be no grumbling and disput- 
 
 ii 
 
162 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 ing about my practice/ Says he, ( Major, what do 
 you think of it ? I told him I thought it an excel 
 lent plan ; and asked him if he did n t think they 
 would be willing, bein I d been round in the mili 
 tary business considerable for a year or two past, to 
 make me a doctor of war. He said he did n t know, 
 but he thought it would be no harm to try em." 
 
 There are passages, both in Smith s letters and in 
 Davis s, more broadly humourous and perhaps 
 more conspicuously Yankee ; yet it is evident that 
 to the first Jack Downing, as the principal pioneer 
 in a territory which has since been widely cultivated, 
 all credit is due. In 1837, Seba Smith sold the 
 Courier, and moved soon afterwards to New York, 
 where for many years he went on with the exercise 
 of his pen, not only in Downing letters, but in pro 
 ducing Powhatan : A Metrical Historical Romance, 
 a treatise on geometry and other labours more 
 strictly journalistic. Of his wife, Elizabeth Oakes 
 Smith, the author of The Sinless Child, a poem 
 which in spite of its length called forth praise from 
 Poe, Griswold bears record that " from her earliest 
 years she has delighted in the study of philosophy, 
 in abstruse speculations, and curious science." The 
 Downing letters and a treatise on geometry The 
 Sinless Child and " abstruse speculations " surely 
 the mental range of Seba Smith and his wife was 
 not confined within narrow bounds. He died in 
 Patchogue, Long Island, on July 29, 1868. 
 
SOME HUMOURISTS 163 
 
 According to a reported declaration of Artemus 
 Ward, Major Jack Downing was his pattern. It is 
 not difficult of belief, for in the use to which they 
 put the Yankee vernacular, in their assumed familiar 
 ity with conspicuous persons, and in the " free-born- 
 American-citizen " attitude of each writer there is 
 much that suggests a family relationship. Artemus 
 Ward as the man whose real name was Charles 
 Farrar Browne is more familiarly called may be 
 regarded as typical of the entire class of humourous 
 journalists and speakers who have followed him. 
 Certainly he has not been denied the homage of 
 imitation, and certainly the writings he has left 
 behind him are enough more than mere " comic 
 copy " to give him his place as a representative 
 figure. Lowell told the truth about one of the 
 humourous methods in which Artemus Ward 
 excelled when he said : " There is no fun in bad 
 spelling of itself, but only where the misspelling 
 suggests something else that is droll per se." It is 
 the merit of Artemus Ward s verbal vagaries for 
 example, when a friend sends him a copy of 
 " Chawcer s poems," and he says, " Mr. C. had 
 talent, but he could n t spel " that the droll per 
 sonality of Charles Farrar Browne s creation is 
 always realised more clearly by reason of what may 
 be called his mental dialect. 
 
 If Artemus Ward s descent as a humourist is to 
 be traced from Major Jack Downing, it is thus that 
 
1 64 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 he accounts from the Browns, as the family name 
 was written before he himself adopted the final e : 
 " I should think we came from Jerusalem, for my 
 father s name was Levi, and we had a Nathan and 
 a Moses in the family. But my poor brother s 
 name was Cyrus, so perhaps that makes us Per 
 sians." As a matter of fact, the Browns came to 
 Maine from Massachusetts in 1783, and on April 
 26, 1834, the humourist was born in the village of 
 Waterford. He was one of four children, and, 
 unlike many men who have made a mark in the 
 world, could not have regarded his mother as the 
 source of his peculiar distinction. She is described 
 as the fondest of parents, but a person entirely 
 lacking in humour and the sense of it. It is re 
 lated that when she first heard her son lecture in 
 Boston, she was startled and irritated exceedingly 
 by hearing him vouch for one of his statements by 
 the use of a real name and a real formula which had 
 frequently fallen from her own lips, and was intro 
 duced into the lecture entirely for her benefit : " I 
 know it s true, for my Uncle Ransford Bates said 
 so." The youthful antics ascribed to her son must 
 have been equally trying to the good woman, and 
 yet the devotion which he cherished for her through 
 life helps one to realise what it must have meant to 
 her to let the boy, only thirteen years old when his 
 father died, go out into the world almost immedi 
 ately to make his living in printing-offices. He 
 
SOME HUMOURISTS 165 
 
 was but fifteen when, after four experiments under 
 country editors in New Hampshire and Maine, he 
 found himself in the Boston printing house from 
 which B. P. Shillaber s (Mrs. Partington s) comic 
 paper, The Carpet Bag, was issued. Setting up the 
 type of Mrs. Partington s paragraphs and of J. G. 
 Saxe s witty verses, he ventured to write jokes him 
 self, and had the felicity of seeing them printed. 
 
 A roving disposition carried him, soon after this 
 humble beginning of a journalistic career, to Tiffin, 
 Ohio. This was in 1856, and before 1860 he had 
 won his spurs in Toledo and Cleveland, where the 
 editor of the Plaindealer^ hearing the fame of his 
 wit, secured him as local editor at the salary of 
 twelve, afterward advanced to fifteen dollars a week. 
 At this post he remained three years. His Cleve 
 land associates have since recalled him as a youth 
 of surpassing awkwardness and rusticity at first, but 
 developing by degrees a regard for his personal 
 appearance which brought him later to an ill-advised 
 fondness for diamonds and curled hair. But there 
 is ample evidence in this period also of his more 
 essential graces and virtues. Generous, companion 
 able, and trusting, laughing over his work, serious 
 withal, sometimes to the degree of mental suffering, 
 given to ways eccentric and unconventional, he 
 seems to have fallen in with the mode of journalistic 
 life which needs but does not always receive the 
 help of native qualities like Browne s to make it 
 
166 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 alluring. There are innumerable stories of his 
 practical jokes, but one will suffice to indicate their 
 audacity. One night with a fellow wag in journal 
 ism known as " the Fat Contributor/ he went to 
 the hotel where a dramatic reader, who was to give 
 his first entertainment in the place the next day, 
 was stopping. They called him from his bed, told 
 him they were newspaper men, and would ruin his 
 prospects unless he should come with them as he 
 was to the hall near by, and show what he could do 
 as a reader. The poor man protested, but their 
 threats were too much for his courage, and shiver 
 ing with cold, he went with them to the dreary, 
 unheated hall, and, if the story be true, entertained 
 them for several hours with his selections. " They 
 had always thirsted to hear a dramatic reader in 
 night dress," they told him ; and if they did not 
 commend his more decorous performance in public, 
 their rather heartless idea of humour must have 
 profited the unhappy reader but little. 
 
 It was in Cleveland that Browne began signing 
 the name of Artemus Ward to his productions. 
 The most credible theory of the source of this nom 
 de plume is that the veritable nom de guerre of 
 General Artemas Ward of the Revolutionary army 
 appealed to the humourist, who adopted it with the 
 change of a single letter. By degrees the new 
 Artemus Ward became a definite character, a show 
 man who could write of his equipment : 
 
From an engraving of a Daguerreotype by H. W. Smith, 1853, 
 
or THX 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
SOME HUMOURISTS 167 
 
 " My show at present consists of three moral 
 bares, a Kangaroo (a amoozin little Raskal 
 twould make you larf yerself to deth to see the 
 little cuss jump up and squeal), wax figgers of G. 
 Washington, Gen. Tayler, John Bunyan, Capt. 
 Kidd and Dr. Webster in the act of killin Dr. 
 Parkman, besides several miscellanyus moral wax 
 statoots of celebrated piruts & murderers, &c., 
 ekalled by few & exceld by none." 
 
 It was in Cleveland, too, that Browne first con 
 ceived the idea of becoming a public lecturer. But 
 that was not to be until after he went, in 1860, to 
 live in New York, as editor of the promising comic 
 journal, Vanity Fair, and one of the Bohemian set 
 which frequented Pfaff s, and presented to Mr. 
 Howells, picking up his first impressions of Eastern 
 writers, a notable contrast to the group of men he 
 had just left in Boston. 
 
 On a desperately stormy night, near the end of 
 1 86 1, Browne first faced a New York audience as a 
 public speaker, and suffered a loss of thirty dollars ; 
 but he had already tried his lecture, on " The Babes 
 in the Wood," in Norwich, Connecticut, and other 
 towns. It was a peculiarity of Ward s lectures that 
 they had little or nothing to do with the subject 
 announced. He would begin with a mention of it, 
 then ask the audience to let him tell them a little 
 story, which would wander on into irrelevant witti 
 cisms occupying about an hour and a half, when he 
 
i68 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 would take out his watch, appear to be overcome 
 with shame and confusion, and bring his talk to a 
 hurried, apologetic end. In Norwich the good 
 people, who had laughed immoderately at his jokes, 
 crowded around him when the lecture was finished 
 to express sympathy for the nervousness through 
 which, as they supposed, he had failed to say any 
 thing at all about the Babes in the Wood. He 
 himself modestly told a different story, at the break 
 fast-table of James T. Fields, when he said of his 
 first audiences : " I was prepared for a good deal of 
 gloom, but I had no idea they would be so much 
 depressed." " Artemus Ward will Speak a Piece " 
 was the sum and substance of the advertising 
 placard which announced his appearance in various 
 places. Even the tickets were whimsical and 
 characteristic. For one of his most popular lectures 
 the card of admission read : " Artemus Ward among 
 the Mormons. Admit the Bearer and One Wife." 
 The programmes were not without their individual 
 ity. In London they were enriched with the note, 
 " Mr. ARTEMUS WARD will call on the citizens of 
 London at their residences, and explain any jokes 
 in his narrative which they may not understand." 
 There may have been reason enough in such an 
 offer if John Bright was reported with even an 
 approach to truth in saying : " I must say I can t 
 see what people find to enjoy in this lecture. 
 The information is meagre and is presented in 
 
From a photograph by George M. Baker, Boston, 1870. 
 
SOME HUMOURISTS 169 
 
 a desultory, disconnected manner. In fact, I 
 can t help seriously questioning some of the state 
 ments." 
 
 Probably enough has been said to show that 
 Artemus Ward stood entirely alone among the lect 
 urers who galled one another s kibes on the lyceum 
 platforms of his day. Of the sober entertainments 
 which they provided Ward said : " The men go 
 becauz its poplar and the wimin folks to see what 
 other wimin folks have on." To his lectures they 
 went solely to be amused, and as their success be 
 came rapidly known, he soon found that he had 
 done well to abandon journalism. East and West 
 his " show " was in demand. A San Francisco 
 manager telegraphed him, " What will you take for 
 forty nights in California ? " and his immediate 
 response, " Brandy and water," so tickled the West 
 ern humour that when he came to Virginia City the 
 miners took charge of the entertainment, would 
 have no tickets sold, but invited everybody, and 
 collected sixteen hundred dollars in gold for the 
 lecturer by passing round hats, one of which broke 
 with the weight of its contents. Brigham Young 
 received him cordially in Salt Lake City, in spite 
 of the jests he had made and was still to make 
 about the sect of men whose " religion is singular, 
 but their wives are plural." There was little of 
 appreciation left for him to win from his own 
 countrymen, at least of those who " liked that sort 
 
i7.o AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 of thing," when in 1866 he determined to try the 
 fortunes of his wit in London. 
 
 Mr. Higginson s phrase, " the amazed curiosity 
 of Englishmen," well describes the state of mind 
 which Artemus Ward excited in the mother coun 
 try. There could not have been many John Brights 
 in the audiences which thronged Egyptian Hall 
 for the six weeks before his failing health made 
 the seventh his last week of public appearance. 
 The abashed manner of the lecturer, his personal 
 peculiarities of which he himself made fun, the diffi 
 culties with his panorama, which in general was 
 painted as badly as possible, because excellence was 
 expensive, the eccentricities of the moon and the 
 prairie fires, which would shoot up and flare out at 
 the wrong moments, to the apparent consternation 
 of the lecturer, all these, to say nothing of the 
 humour of his talks, are reported to have kept his 
 hearers in a frenzy of laughter. Who can wonder 
 that they were quite overcome by the gravity with 
 which he would point to dark regions in his canvas 
 and say : " These are intended for horses ; I know 
 they are, because the artist told me so. After two 
 years he came to me one morning and said, c Mr. 
 Ward, I cannot conceal it from you any longer ; 
 they are horses/ It was in the full tide of suc 
 cess, achieved simply by the exercise of natural gifts, 
 that his career of unique popularity was cut short. 
 His contributions to Punch had won him a place on 
 
SAXE AT 32. 
 From a sketch made in England. 
 
OF TUB 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
SOME HUMOURISTS 171 
 
 the staff of the paper, and all things indicated the 
 continuance of success. But the cough which had 
 made nearly all his lecturing in London difficult 
 stopped it entirely. His friends took him to the 
 island of Jersey, in the hope that its milder air 
 might restore him. Then they tried to bring him 
 back to London, but he could not bear the journey 
 beyond Southampton, where he died early in 1867, 
 not quite thirty-three years old. 
 
 It may be thought that an inordinate space has 
 been devoted to a person who stood related to lit 
 erature as bouffe to grand opera. Yet Artemus 
 Ward represented conspicuously a class of writers 
 which must not be overlooked in any general 
 survey of American letters. Indeed, it would 
 not be unprofitable to scrutinise the career and 
 work of other men who stood less upon the dig 
 nity than the drollery of their productions ; for if 
 their appeal has not always been to the most fas 
 tidious, they have often meant more to " the great 
 body of the plain people " than graver bookmen who 
 escape the humourist s penalty of writing, as a rule, 
 for one generation or decade. The mere names of 
 these men, dead and living, would make a catalogue 
 of no scanty length. "John Phoenix," "Orpheus 
 C. Kerr " (Office Seeker), " Petroleum V. Nasby " 
 would stand among the better known. B. P. Shil- 
 laber (1814-90), a Boston journalist, who took 
 his cue and his pseudonym from Sydney Smith s 
 
172 
 
 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 reference in a political speech to a certain Mrs. Par- 
 tington s vain endeavour to mop up the Atlantic 
 
 FAC-SIMILE OF A LETTER FROM JOHN G. SAXE REPLYING TO A 
 REQUEST FOR AN AUTOGRAPH. 
 
 Ocean, and made a new Mrs. Malaprop of his talk 
 ative old heroine, would claim especial attention. 
 
SOME HUMOURISTS 173 
 
 So, too, would Henry W. Shaw (1818-85), who 
 after encountering every experience as a Western 
 pioneer began writing at forty-five, and over the 
 name of " Josh Billings " put forth many witty, 
 homely maxims, of which, perhaps, none is more 
 memorable than that " it iz better to kno less, than 
 to kno so mutch that aint so." 
 
 Apart from these newspaper celebrities stands 
 one of whom Mr. Stedman has written : " For the 
 most part he was a popular specimen of the college- 
 society, lecture-room, dinner-table rhymester that 
 may be set down as a peculiarly American type and 
 of a generation now almost passed away." John 
 Godfrey Saxe dealt less in humour than in clear-cut 
 wit. The mastery of words in rhymes which Richard 
 H. Barham or Tom Hood might often have been 
 willing to own gave him his distinction. Like many 
 of those who have incited our countrymen most suc 
 cessfully to mirth, he was of New England origin and 
 training. Born in Highgate, Vermont, on June 2, 
 1816, he spent his boyhood on a farm, graduated at 
 Middlebury College in 1839, anc ^ began the practice 
 of law. Until he was twenty-five he wrote little 
 or nothing, and then the Knickerbocker Magazine 
 printed his ballad of " The Briefless Barrister," 
 which is not without an autobiographical value : 
 
 " Unfortunate man that I am ! 
 
 I ve never a client but grief; 
 The case is, I ve no case at all, 
 
 And in brief, I ve ne er had a brief." 
 
174 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 Yet with a mingling of law, journalism, and politics 
 he went on with his Vermont life in St. Albans and 
 Burlington, until, twice defeated as a candidate for 
 governor in his native State, he moved to New 
 York. For an impression of his personal appear 
 ance we may look again to his verses : 
 
 " Now I am a man, you must learn, 
 
 Less famous for beauty than strength, 
 And for aught I could ever discern, 
 
 Of rather superfluous length. 
 In truth, tis but seldom one meets 
 
 Such a Titan in human abodes, 
 And when I walk over the streets, 
 
 I m a perfect Colossus of roads." 
 
 In spite of this account of himself, his personality 
 was really most attractive, and, with his skill in 
 speaking, won him great popularity as a lecturer 
 and reader of his own verses. In 1872 he became 
 associated with the Albany Evening Journal, and in 
 Albany he died on March 31, 1887. The last 
 portion of his life affords another story of the 
 sorrow which seems especially to beset the sons of 
 laughter. In 1874 he narrowly escaped death in a 
 railroad accident in Virginia. This shock was soon 
 followed by the death, in rapid succession, of his 
 wife, three daughters, and a son ; and the result of 
 his overwhelming distress was that he became the 
 victim of attacks of melancholy, which caused his 
 
SOME HUMOURISTS 175 
 
 complete retirement from the world. It was indeed 
 a tragic ending for the life of the light-hearted 
 singer of "The Proud Miss MacBride," "The 
 New Rape of the Lock," and scores of other skil 
 ful rhymes and vers de societe, which were the 
 delight of his generation. 
 
 Of men about whom so much might be said it 
 is difficult to say so little. But restraint must be 
 exercised still further, even to exclude that vast 
 anonymous expression of American humour which 
 confronts us every day and every week in the 
 periodical press. The composite person who pro 
 duces it has no dates of birth and death to record, 
 no incidents of struggle and success to relate ; yet 
 as unmistakably as Bret Harte, Mark Twain, and 
 the many others, living and dead, who have been 
 mentioned or more closely regarded, he is a pro 
 duct of our curious civilisation, and, so far as one 
 can see, will continue to help us in realising, still 
 without the need of definitions, the distinctive 
 qualities of our national humour. 
 
EMERSON AND CONCORD 
 
 WHEN Dr. Holmes finished his Life of 
 Emerson in 1884, he wrote in a letter 
 about it : " The truth is that Emerson s life and 
 writings have been so darned over by biographers 
 and critics that a new hand can hardly tell his own 
 yarn from that of his predecessors, or one of theirs 
 from another s." Three years later appeared the 
 more complete Memoirs of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 
 by James Elliot Cabot, his literary executor, and 
 almost incessantly since then the process of darn 
 ing and re-darning has been kept up. It is less 
 with the hope, therefore, of saying new things than 
 of refreshing the memory of the old that any 
 attempt to consider the circumstances of Emerson s 
 life must now be made. The teachings of his 
 philosophy may receive new illumination from time 
 to time. New applications of it to new problems 
 will doubtless be possible for many years to come. 
 The story of his living told itself, and it is enough 
 if somebody will merely repeat it from time to 
 time. The life carried its own interpretation, and 
 needs no commentator to point out either the seem- 
 

OF THB 
 
 TTNTVERSITT 
 
EMERSON AND CONCORD 177 
 
 ing unattainableness of some of its standards for 
 common flesh and blood, or the lofty value of its 
 example as a freed life of intellect and spirit, a 
 breath as of "winds, austere and pure," in the thick 
 air of a workaday world. 
 
 There are two ways of using a village as a place 
 to live in. The one is to take its freedom from the 
 engrossing concerns of city life as an excuse for 
 falling back upon the pettinesses of a small commu 
 nity : standing thus close to trivial things their size 
 is magnified out of all proportion, and the prospect 
 of larger things beyond is blotted out. The other 
 way is to use one s freedom for seeing things both 
 near and far in their true dimensions. The Massa 
 chusetts village of Concord, for a considerable part 
 of our century, has been a place where the practice 
 of this second method was to be found. Any vil 
 lage in which Emerson, Hawthorne, and Thoreau, 
 to cite its greatest names, were living at one time 
 must have been such a place. It is not unnatural 
 that the villagers themselves should have magnified 
 the importance of some of their lesser names. When 
 the amusing writer who made it his task to de 
 scribe America and the Americans from the French 
 point of view, native or acquired, was taken to 
 Concord, he had to confess- that some of the names 
 with which he was expected to be familiar " that 
 of a man named Alcott, for example " were quite 
 unknown to him. His point of view was as dis- 
 
178 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 tinctly that of the outside world as Alcott s own out 
 look seems to have been parochial. Emerson 
 himself told the story of having asked Alcott one 
 day what he could show for himself, what he had 
 really done to justify his existence. " If Pythag 
 oras came to Concord/ was the triumphant reply, 
 " whom would he ask to see ? " The sage was safe 
 enough in his Socratic retort, but in spite of 
 parochial illusions, any pilgrim to Concord in the 
 days of its distinction must have recognised it as a 
 place where the better sort of village life was eagerly 
 lived, and must have known that men and not 
 the village had brought him on his pilgrimage. 
 
 Of all the men of thought and letters who con 
 tributed in a greater and less degree to this distinc 
 tion of the town, Thoreau was the only one who 
 was born in Concord. Yet Emerson, by every 
 right of inheritance, was more truly its son. The 
 town was founded by a direct ancestor, the Rev. 
 Peter Bulkeley, who came to America in 1634. 
 His granddaughter married an Emerson, a minister, 
 who died in Concord in 1680; and his grandson, 
 William Emerson, the minister of the town at the 
 beginning of the Revolution and the first occupant 
 of the "Old Manse," was the grandfather of Ralph 
 Waldo Emerson, whose father was another Rev. 
 William Emerson, minister of the First Church in 
 Boston. Made up of ministers and graduates of 
 Harvard College, the race was eminently of the 
 
THOREAU AT 37. 
 From an engraving of the crayon drawing by Rowse. 
 
OF THK 
 
 TOIVERSITY 
 
EMERSON AND CONCORD 179 
 
 sort which Dr. Holmes defined as academic. Ralph 
 Waldo, born in Boston on May 25, 1803, was the 
 fourth of eight children. Two girls and a boy died 
 in early childhood, and of the boys that remained, 
 their remarkable aunt, Mary Moody Emerson, well 
 said, " They were born to be educated." 
 
 This was no easy end for their mother to achieve 
 in the straitened days that followed the death of 
 the Rev. William Emerson in 1811. But the First 
 Church and a few kind friends and kinsmen lent 
 their aid, and the established training of good Bos- 
 tonians, through the Latin School and Harvard 
 College, was made possible. There were times when 
 Ralph, as he was then called, and his brother Edward 
 had to share the use of one overcoat, and jeering 
 schoolfellows would ask, " Whose turn is it to 
 wear the coat to-day ? " The .boys helped in the 
 household duties, such as driving the cow from the 
 house where they once lived, near the present site 
 of the Boston Athenaeum, to a pasture beyond the 
 Common, and took far less time for play than for 
 the improvement of their minds. At school and 
 college Emerson made himself the name which is 
 commonly won by studious boys of slender health 
 and means and of talents in no wise phenomenal. 
 He was fourteen years old when he entered Harvard 
 College, and became " President s freshman," a kind 
 of errand-boy for the faculty, with the privilege ex 
 qfficio of serving as a waiter at commons, and paying 
 
i8o 
 
 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 thereby for three-fourths of his own board. During 
 his course he took prizes for dissertations and dec 
 lamation, and wrote the class poem after seven youths 
 
 A CURIOUS EARLY PORTRAIT OF EMERSON. 
 
 had declined the honour; but at the end his college 
 rank was only a little above the middle of the class. 
 From college Emerson followed the path he 
 might have been expected to take, the path of a 
 
EMERSON AND CONCORD 181 
 
 school-teacher. His purpose to make it the means 
 of approach to the ministry was less definite than in 
 many cases like his own. It seems to have been 
 a disappointment to him that in teaching others he 
 did not learn more himself. His scholars in vari 
 ous places, however, were unconscious of shortcom 
 ings. One of them has recorded the efficacy of his 
 reproof, consisting merely of the words, " Oh, sad ! " 
 soberly spoken to a youthful offender. His own 
 youthfulness was not overlooked by the young 
 ladies, some of them older than himself, whom he 
 taught in Boston. On Election Day, it is told, 
 they used to ask him for a holiday that he might 
 vote, and rejoiced in the blushes of their master, 
 still a minor. To Emerson the period was one of 
 dissatisfaction and drudgery. In his journal of 1 824, 
 a month before he came of age, he made the entry : 
 " I deliberately dedicate my time, my talents, and 
 my hopes to the Church ; " and before a year had 
 passed that is, in February of 1825 he was 
 established in Divinity Hall at Cambridge as a 
 student for the ministry. 
 
 The ministerial period of Emerson s life was full 
 of struggle and perplexity. Ill health was the first 
 obstacle he had to overcome. The weakness of his 
 eyes interrupted his studies at once, and the weak 
 ness of his lungs made it necessary for him to spend 
 nearly the whole winter and spring of 1827 in the 
 South. Then there were inward questionings about 
 
182 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 the rightfulness of his place even within the flexible 
 boundaries of Unitarianism. Whatever the younger 
 men of this day may be writing to aunts who have 
 their confidence, Emerson at twenty-three was 
 not using the language of his contemporaries when 
 he wrote to Mary Moody Emerson : " T is a queer 
 life, and the only humour proper to it seems quiet 
 astonishment." One of the maxims of his life, early 
 inculcated by this strenuous aunt, was, " Always do 
 what you are afraid to do/ Both in the earlier and 
 in the later days of his ministry this rule must have 
 been in some measure his guide. He did not do 
 the easy thing in establishing himself successfully as 
 a minister ; and when the time came to choose be 
 tween the pleasant incumbency of the Second Church 
 in Boston and an adherence to his personal opinion 
 in a matter of worship, it would have been the 
 course of least resistance to retain his post and 
 modify his views. The issue between him and his 
 parishioners was vital ; he had ceased to think the 
 regular administration of the communion essential 
 or even desirable; naturally his people thought 
 otherwise. He made no attempt to impose his 
 views upon them, but when it was clear that no 
 common ground was tenable, he set forth in a ser 
 mon his reasons for thinking as he did, and brought 
 to an end his connection with the parish. There 
 was the best of good feeling on each side. In 
 many ways he had shown eminent fitness for the 
 
From an engraving of the crayon drawing by Rowse, 1857. 
 
OP TBS 
 
 CnSTIVERSITY 
 
EMERSON AND CONCORD 183 
 
 ministry. When a good choir sang, " its best was 
 coarse and discordant after Emerson s voice." His 
 sermons delighted even those who failed to under 
 stand them. The sincerity of his more personal 
 relations and the inherent charm of the man made 
 him abundantly beloved. In his strictly ministerial 
 functions it appears that he was not always success 
 ful. The story is told that once when he was 
 called to the death-bed of a Revolutionary soldier, 
 and showed some difficulty in administering the 
 usual consolations, the veteran summoned all his 
 strength to exclaim : " Young man, if you don t 
 know your business, you had better go home." 
 But it was the inward voice and not rebuffs like this 
 that brought him to the wise decision that his work 
 in the world could not be that of a regular minister. 
 He was, in fact, too completely a Protestant, too 
 thoroughly imbued with the " dissidence of dis 
 sent " to remain permanently in any church. 
 
 Emerson had married his first wife, Miss Ellen 
 Louisa Tucker, in September of 1829, and early in 
 1831 she had died. It was in 1832 that he resigned 
 his ministry at the Second Church. It is no won- 
 her that the end of a period so filled with anxiety 
 was marked by the breaking down of his own health. 
 On Christmas Day of 1832 he sailed in a small brig 
 for the Mediterranean, and devoted the greater 
 part of 1833 to regaining his strength in Italy, 
 France, and England. The picturesque interest of 
 
1 84 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 foreign lands was less to him than the human, and 
 in this interest he was disappointed, and complained 
 of being " yoked with green, dull, pitiful persons." 
 Indeed, it was the hope of searching out Carlyle, in 
 whose contributions to the English reviews he had 
 detected the accent of a spiritual kinsman, that hur 
 ried him from Paris to London, and from London 
 to Craigenputtock in Scotland, where guest and host 
 each discovered in a day and night what was best in 
 the other, and laid the foundations of the friendship 
 which for nearly forty years survived the difficulties 
 of correspondence. The basis of their sympathy 
 has been well defined by Dr. Holmes: "The hatred 
 of unreality was uppermost with Carlyle ; the love 
 of what is real and genuine with Emerson." It was 
 through Emerson in the thirties that Carlyle first 
 found an American audience, and through Emerson 
 in 1870 Carlyle s gift of the books he had purchased 
 and used in writing; Cromwell and Frederick the 
 
 O 
 
 Great was made to Harvard College. It has often 
 been questioned, however, whether the friendship 
 could have been so well maintained if Carlyle had 
 yielded to Emerson s constant solicitations to come 
 to Concord. 
 
 In Concord Emerson established himself soon 
 after his return from Europe. Before his second 
 marriage, in 1835, to Miss Lydia Jackson, of 
 Plymouth, he and his mother went to live in the 
 " Old Manse " with the Rev. Dr. Ripley, who 
 
From a photograph taken in Iowa, 1882 
 
EMERSON AND CONCORD 185 
 
 long before had become the second husband of 
 Emerson s grandmother. Here he worked upon 
 his essay, " Nature," which, published anonymously 
 in 1836, was the first important statement of his 
 philosophy ; and here he bore the first weeks of 
 grief for the death of his gifted younger " brother 
 of the brief, but blazing star, * Edward Bliss Emer 
 son, of whom he wrote in prose, " I am bereaved 
 of a part of myself," and in poetry the lines, "In 
 Memoriam." Within two years died another 
 brother, Charles Chauncy Emerson, who was soon 
 to have married Miss Elizabeth Hoar, of Concord, 
 and Emerson wrote to his young wife: "You must 
 be content henceforth with only a piece of your 
 husband ; for the best of his strength lay in the 
 soul with which he must no more on earth take 
 counsel." It was the same phase of the sense of 
 loss which found expression in the " Threnody " on 
 the death of his oldest child, Waldo, in 1842: 
 
 " The eager fate which carried thee 
 Took the largest part of me : 
 For this losing is true dying ; 
 This is lordly man s down-lying." 
 
 When Emerson " dodged the doom of building," 
 and, in 1835, bought the Coolidge house, standing 
 on the road over which the British fled from Con 
 cord to Lexington, he settled into the ways of life 
 from which thenceforth he made few departures. 
 
186 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 For about three years he continued to preach in 
 one place and another where he was wanted, and 
 then made a complete end of his active ministry. 
 But there were other ways of delivering to men the 
 messages he had to impart, and the lecture took 
 with him the place of the sermon. The growth of 
 the lyceum system was opportune for Emerson. 
 " His, if any one s," said Alcott, " let the institution 
 pass into history, since his art, more than another s, 
 has clothed it with beauty, and made it the place of 
 popular resort." Early and late, east and west, he 
 went about with his lectures, bearing delight and 
 stimulus to many minds. For the discomforts he 
 suffered, his journal speaks: 
 
 " It was, in short this dragging a decorous old 
 gentleman out of home and out of position, to this 
 juvenile career tantamount to this: C I 11 bet you 
 fifty dollars a day for three weeks that you will not 
 leave your library, and wade, and freeze, and ride, 
 and run, and suffer all manner of indignities, and 
 stand up for an hour each night reading in a hall; 
 and I answer, c I 11 bet I will. I do it and win the 
 nine hundred dollars." 
 
 The beginnings of this work were made nearer 
 home, in courses of lectures in Boston, in the awak 
 ening oration, "The American Scholar," before the 
 Phi Beta Kappa at Harvard, in 1837, and in the 
 address to the Senior Class of the Divinity School 
 at Cambridge, in 1838. The religious radicalism of 
 
EMERSON AND CONCORD 187 
 
 this address caused, indeed, what Emerson defined 
 in a letter to Carlyle as a " storm in our washbowl." 
 It determined Emerson s separation from the 
 churches, and, for many years, from his alma mater. 
 The University at the close of the war made amends 
 for its share in the estrangement by asking him to 
 speak at the Commemoration exercises; in 1866 he 
 was made an overseer and a Doctor of Laws ; and 
 in 1867 he delivered for the second time a Phi Beta 
 Kappa oration. It was after hearing this that Lowell 
 wrote to Mr. Norton the words which described all 
 the weaknesses of Emerson s oratory, especially in 
 later years, and also set forth its peculiar strength : 
 
 " It began nowhere, and ended everywhere, and 
 yet, as always with that divine man, it left you feel 
 ing that something beautiful had passed that way 
 something more beautiful than anything else, like 
 the rising and setting of stars. . . . He boggled, 
 he lost his place, he had to put on his glasses ; 
 but it was as if a creature from some fairer world 
 had lost his way in our fogs, and it was our fault, 
 not his." 
 
 If the lecturing began near home, the source of 
 the lectures themselves was still more intimate. 
 Through all of Emerson s life he kept a journal, of 
 which he wrote in 1837 : "This book is my savings 
 bank. I grow richer because I have somewhere to 
 deposit my earnings, and fractions are worth more 
 to me because corresponding fractions are waiting 
 
i88 
 
 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
EMERSON AND CONCORD 189 
 
 here that shall be made integers by their addition." 
 To Carlyle Emerson wrote in 1 840 : " I dot evermore 
 in my endless journal a line on every knowable in 
 nature ; but the arrangement loiters long, and I get 
 a brick-kiln instead of a house. * From this store 
 of material the builder frequently drew when the time 
 came to write. If his writing has been found dis 
 jointed by others, and has seemed to himself a collec 
 tion of " paragraphs irrepressible, each sentence an 
 infinitely repellent particle," it is well to remember 
 this fractional origin of it. If the form has suffered, 
 surely the spirit has gained in the spontaneity of 
 thoughts recorded almost at the moment of their 
 birth. From the journal to the lecture, from the 
 lecture to the essay, pruned of anecdote and illustra 
 tion such was the evolution of a great part of 
 Emerson s prose. Many of the poems had a simi 
 lar origin. Extracts from the journal have shown 
 his first conceptions, for example, of " The Two 
 Rivers " and " Seashore." Of Days " there is the 
 remarkable record in the journal for 1852, almost as 
 of another " Kubla Khan " : 
 
 " I find one state of mind does not remember or 
 conceive of another state. Thus I have written 
 within a twelvemonth verses ( c Days ) which I do not 
 remember the composition or correction of, and 
 could not write the like to-day, and have only for 
 proof of their being mine various external evidences, 
 
190 
 
 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 as the manuscripts in which I find them, and the 
 circumstances that I have sent copies to friends, etc. 
 Well, if they had been better, if it had been a noble 
 poem, perhaps it would have only more entirely 
 taken up the ladder into heaven/ 
 
 Like many other men, Emerson valued his 
 poetry more highly than his prose, because it was 
 not a thing which he could produce at will. " I can 
 breathe at any time," he once said to a friend, " but 
 I can only whistle when the right pucker comes." 
 
 In the homely humour of a hundred sentences 
 like this Emerson has left sufficient proof of the 
 qualities that saved him from follies which his 
 friends of the Transcendental brotherhood did not 
 escape. In his own metaphor, he hitched his wagon 
 to a star, but in Dr. Holmes s, " he never let go 
 the string of his balloon." Though he could not 
 bring himself to join the communities of Brook 
 Farm and Fruitlands, he made attempts at home 
 to simplify his mode of life. One of these was to 
 seat his servants at his own table, and the plan was 
 thwarted only by the obduracy of the cook, who 
 looked upon human relations through no mist of 
 theories. At one time he believed in tilling his 
 own ground, but soon after his infant son stopped 
 his work by saying, " Papa, I am afraid you will 
 dig your leg," he surrendered the hoe and spade 
 to hands more skilled in their use. His known 
 
After a photograph, by J. J. Hawes, Boston, of a Daguerreotype. 
 
EMERSON AND CONCORD 191 
 
 sympathy with all independence of thought brought 
 many a strange "devastator of the day" to his 
 gates, and each was received with friendly consider 
 ation. Once a Russian appeared, so bent upon his 
 projects, that he scorned to take off his hat in the 
 house. " Very well, then," said Emerson, " we 
 will talk in the yard," and under the apple-trees 
 the interview was conducted. It must have been 
 of men like this visitor, that Emerson, when one 
 of them wished an introduction to him, said : 
 " Whom God hath put asunder, why should man 
 join together ? " 
 
 Hawthorne wrote of Concord in 1843 " -^ was 
 necessary to go but a little way beyond my thresh 
 old before meeting with stranger moral shapes of 
 men than might have been encountered elsewhere 
 in a circuit of a thousand miles." These were the 
 pilgrims, " hobgoblins of flesh and blood," who came 
 to see Emerson ; but some of the Concord folk 
 themselves were strange enough. George William 
 Curtis could see the drollery of the meetings at 
 Emerson s house in 1845 ^ a g rou p which con 
 tained such persons as Emerson himself, Haw 
 thorne, Thoreau, Alcott, and others, of lesser fame 
 but equally diverse in nature, to whom he might 
 have added Margaret Fuller, Emerson s predecessor 
 in the editorship of the Transcendental Dial, if Mr. 
 Greeley had not brought her to earth as a literary 
 critic for the New York Tribune. They sat about, 
 
r 9 2 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 said Curtis, in a silence which seemed to ask, " Who 
 will now proceed to say the finest thing that has ever 
 been said ? " The assemblage was not unlike the 
 Boston Transcendental "club of the like-minded/ so 
 called, said one of its members, " because no two of 
 us thought alike." To be absolutely one s self, to 
 omit from the mind all that had come to it by 
 tradition as Emerson once advised a seeker after 
 Transcendental truth this was the chief intellectual 
 and spiritual purpose of the men who recognised 
 Emerson as their leader. The fulfilment of this 
 purpose led them, of course, in various directions. 
 It took Thoreau, " half college graduate and half 
 Algonquin," after he had given up the making of 
 lead-pencils, because he would not do twice what 
 he had once done well, to the banks of Walden 
 Pond. The good Whittier could see little virtue 
 in an experiment which proved "that if a man is 
 willing to sink himself into a woodchuck he can 
 live as cheaply as that quadruped." But Emerson 
 saw all that was best in Thoreau, for two years an 
 occupant of his house, and Thoreau, with all his 
 individuality, undoubtedly owed much to Emerson. 
 Since Thoreau s death in 1862 the world has been 
 coming every year nearer to Emerson s way of 
 thinking about him, as contrasted with the way of 
 their fellow-townsman, Judge Hoar, who once 
 asked Colonel Higginson "Why should anyone care 
 to have Thoreau s journals put in print?" The 
 
^ ^^ 
 
 From an engraving of an ambrotype taken in New Bedford, 1861 
 
EMERSON AND CONCORD 193 
 
 expression of Alcott s personality bore him into the 
 clouds of philosophic discourse, and the public 
 utterance of the soliloquies to which he gave the 
 strange name of cc Conversations." Emerson placed 
 a value on Alcott s mind which was shared by few 
 of his contemporaries, and still fewer of the later 
 generation. At one time he wished that Alcott and 
 his whole family would come and live with him, 
 but Mrs. Alcott s wise veto averted the trouble 
 which would have been sure to follow. Emerson s 
 admiration, however, was tempered by his good 
 sense, and he saw as clearly as anybody the most 
 obvious of Alcott s limitations. For some time, 
 indeed, his eyes were obliged to rest upon a tangible 
 reminder of his friend s shortcomings in practical 
 matters. In 1847 he essayed to build Emerson a 
 summer-house. The result was a structure which, 
 in its first and best estate, Emerson s mother called 
 " The Ruin." Thoreau tried to help him build it, 
 but had to admit : " I feel as if I were nowhere, 
 doing nothing." 
 
 The impression of Emerson as dwelling in cloud- 
 land, the central figure in a company of ethereal 
 shapes, is removed when he is seen before other 
 backgrounds than those of Transcendentalism. The 
 good people of Concord began by giving him the 
 office of hogreeve, usually bestowed upon newly 
 married men, and always found him eager for the 
 well-being of the place, not only in wishes, but in 
 
 13 
 
i 9 4 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 service. If he had given the town nothing but the 
 lines which live with "the embattled farmer" of 
 French s noble statue, it would have been much. 
 But there were many local " occasions " made richer 
 by the voice and wisdom of Emerson. There was 
 no little significance in the words of a simple woman 
 who brought her work to an early end one day to 
 go to a lecture of Emerson s before the Concord 
 Lyceum. When she was asked if she could under 
 stand him, she replied : " Not a word, but I like to 
 go and see him stand up there and look as if he 
 thought every one was as good as he was." 
 Through his friendships in Boston, especially after 
 the foundation of the Atlantic Monthly and the 
 Saturday Club in 1857, he was brought often into 
 contact with men of the world, in the best sense of 
 that elastic phrase. The names of the men asso 
 ciated with the beginnings of these two organisations 
 are too well known to need repetition. Emerson 
 had great pleasure in their society ; and of his 
 effect upon them, perhaps Lowell spoke for all 
 when he wrote to Thomas Hughes : " He is as 
 sweetly high-minded as ever, and when one meets 
 him the Fall of Adam seems a false report. After 
 ward we feel our throats, and are startled by the 
 tell-tale lump there." 
 
 As all men are judged by their companions or 
 the books on their shelves, so we wish to know of 
 the men who lived through the civil war, what was 
 
EMERSON AND CONCORD 195 
 
 their part in the conflict or their attitude toward it. 
 Emerson was not to be found in the ranks of aggres 
 sive antislavery in the early days when Whittier 
 and Lowell had dedicated their powers to the cause. 
 One so intent upon freedom of thought could not 
 be indifferent to the freedom of men, but violent 
 partisanship of any sort was foreign to Emerson s 
 nature, and for some time his hopefulness made him 
 believe that the differences between the North and 
 South could be adjusted without open disagreement. 
 As the issues defined themselves more clearly, he 
 saw that this could not be. Yet as late as 1855 he 
 favoured the Government s purchase for emancipa 
 tion of all the slaves in the South for the sum of 
 two thousand millions of dollars. If there had been 
 any doubt that Emerson welcomed the war when it 
 came, it would have been removed by the series of 
 poems which he brought one day to Mr. Fields 
 without a title : the editor named them "Voluntaries," 
 and printed them at once in the Atlantic Monthly. 
 At the end of their third portion is the quatrain, 
 quoted as often as any lines of Emerson s : 
 
 "So nigh is grandeur to our dust, 
 
 So near is God to man, 
 When Duty whispers low, Thou must, 
 The youth replies, I can." 
 
 Of Emerson s written words which justify the recent 
 statement that he sent ten thousand men to the war, 
 
196 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 these pre-eminently breathe the spirit through which 
 he could have wrought such a work. 
 
 To Emerson s second visit to Europe, in 1847-48, 
 for the purpose of lecturing in England, we owe his 
 English Traits. For him the visit, like the lecturing 
 tours in the Middle States and West, was one of the 
 strong counteracting influences against the dangers 
 of living too long in a small community. In 1871 
 and 1872 he made the last long journeys of his life, 
 to California and to Europe and the Nile. In the 
 time between these journeys he had been driven 
 from his house in Concord by fire, and on his re 
 turn from Europe, in May of 1873, he was met not 
 only with the public demonstration of his townsmen, 
 who escorted him with music from the train to his 
 house, but with the private delight of finding the 
 house rebuilt and restored to its former condition 
 through the kindness of personal friends. From 
 this time forth his public appearances were rare, and 
 within a few years they were given over entirely. 
 As Dr. Holmes expressed it in a letter to Lowell : 
 " Emerson is gently fading out like a photograph 
 the outlines are all there, but the details are getting 
 fainter." There was a gradual failure of the memory, 
 noticeable especially in his attempts to recall the 
 names of familiar objects, and often of dear friends. 
 " My memory hides itself," he said. There was a 
 pathos, touched with humour, in his asking one day 
 for an umbrella after this wise : " I can t tell its name. 
 
RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 From an original drawing, artist and date unknown. 
 
OFTH* 
 
 XTNIVERSITT 
 
EMERSON AND CONCORD 197 
 
 but I can tell its history. Strangers take it away." 
 In spite of disabilities, however, he spent much time 
 in his last years in helping Mr. Cabot, his literary 
 executor, to fix the final form of some of his writ 
 ings. When the end, so gradual in its approach, 
 really came, it came quickly. A severe cold passed 
 into pneumonia, and on April 27 th, 1882, Emer 
 son died, within a month of his seventy-ninth 
 birthday. 
 
 Those who knew Emerson best found in him 
 something ineffable, something which defied the 
 analysis of words. Those who know him only by 
 tradition find in whatever is told about him the 
 complement of his writings. Jn them he stands 
 aloof from sordid aims, sufficient unto himself, 
 serene, clear-sighted, sensitive, and hopeful. Mat 
 thew Arnold, after an elaborate statement of what 
 he is not as a writer, declares succinctly what he 
 is "the friend and aider of those who would 
 live in the spirit." From such an one it is not to 
 be expected that all the needs of man will derive 
 sustenance, for man is not a bloodless creature of 
 mind and spirit only. There is more than the 
 
 "hidden ground 
 Of thought and of austerity within ; 
 
 but it is to this portion of our nature that Emer 
 son especially ministers. Let none find fault with 
 him for what he is not. Others can give us other 
 
198 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 things. Emerson s precious gift is as unmistakably 
 from himself as the life he chose to live was his 
 own. 
 
 This were a late hour to begin a new discussion 
 of Emerson s place as an essayist and poet, a phil 
 osopher, an interpreter of man to himself, of nature 
 and of universal law. His writings are so easily 
 within the reach of all, that even the few to whom 
 they are closed books have but to open them. 
 " Glad when you speak my thoughts, and skipping 
 the page that has nothing for me : " such was 
 Emerson s own rule of reading, and doubtless he 
 would have had others come to him on the same 
 terms. " If you see truth as he does," said one of 
 his admirers, 1 " you will recognise him for a gifted 
 teacher; if not, there is little or nothing to be 
 said." But whether one s angle of vision corre 
 sponds with Emerson s or not, this consideration 
 cannot be overlooked, that of all the emancipating 
 influences which have affected the thought of men 
 since Emerson s voice was first heard in the world, 
 there has probably been among us no single per 
 sonal agency of wider scope than his. The very 
 men who would be last to confess it are in his debt. 
 Their disagreement from opinions to be found on 
 one page of his writings is in all probability tem 
 pered with a generosity which they have learned on 
 another page. " An iconoclast without a hammer," 
 Dr. Holmes once called him, "who took down our 
 
EMERSON AND CONCORD 199 
 
 idols from their pedestals so tenderly that it seemed 
 like an act of worship." It is not necessary to 
 share in all the beliefs or unbeliefs of such an 
 iconoclast to gain many things from the imitation 
 of his spirit. 
 
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 
 
 IT is related of one of our magazines that some 
 years ago it published a story, translated from 
 the German, which was found to be nothing but 
 Hawthorne s " Great Stone Face " restored to its 
 native language. " Here was the story," says Mr. 
 Julian Hawthorne, "sentence for sentence the same, 
 yet as different from it as is a cabbage from a rose." 
 The subtle aroma which marks it as Hawthorne s 
 had entirely escaped. A similar mischance befell 
 Longfellow s " Tell me not in mournful numbers," 
 when it found its way through a Chinese translation 
 back into English as " Do not manifest your dis 
 content in a piece of verse." Such are the penalties 
 of fame for those who must be read in all languages. 
 It is not too fanciful, perhaps, to detect an analogy 
 between these processes of translation and the 
 changes which befall an actual man in becoming the 
 man of biographies. His real life is the original 
 story ; the impression it makes upon those who 
 observe it is the translation ; the writers of biog 
 raphies attempt to restore it to its mother tongue. 
 If the divergence is sometimes wide it is no great 
 wonder. 
 
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 201 
 
 When the subject of these attempts is a man with 
 a personality so baffling as Hawthorne s, the wonder 
 is that he is re-translated with any success at all. 
 Precisely contrary opinions of him have been placed 
 upon record. He was one thing in his daily life, 
 and quite another in his books. His son Julian, 
 though eighteen years old when his father died, 
 read none of Hawthorne s books until after that 
 time, and then could not understand how such a 
 man as the father he had known was their author. 
 When The Scarlet Letter appeared, a good friend 
 wrote to Hawthorne : " I should fancy from your 
 books that you were burdened with secret sorrow ; 
 that you had some blue chamber in your soul, into 
 which you hardly dared to enter yourself; but when 
 I see you, you give me the impression of a man as 
 healthy as Adam was in Paradise." Hawthorne 
 definitely objected to the unveiling of his real self 
 in public, and would have been well content to let 
 his works of fiction and his Note-Books speak for him. 
 Indeed, the autobiography of his spirit is writ large 
 in all his many volumes ; but his representatives, 
 in spite of his recorded wish that this might suffice, 
 have seen fit to be more explicit. It must be said 
 in their justification that they have helped the 
 world at least in coming somewhat nearer to a true 
 estimate of one who did not belong only to them, 
 but joined himself to the greatness of the literature 
 of the English tongue. 
 
202 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 A critic across the seas once spoke of Hawthorne 
 as " the ghost of New England." Although it was 
 not intended that this phrase should be taken in its 
 most obvious sense, it may surely be said that there 
 was good reason for the author and his books to 
 be haunted with the past of his native land. The 
 son of the first American Hathorne (as Hawthorne 
 himself wrote the name throughout his boyhood) was 
 a stern judge in the witch trials at Salem, and is said 
 to have called down upon himself from one found 
 guilty of witchcraft a curse not unlike Matthew 
 Maule s upon Colonel Pyncheon. Perhaps it was 
 this curse which prevented the family of Hathorne, 
 mariners through many generations, from achieving 
 the material success of other seafaring families in 
 Salem. They did succeed, however, in transmitting 
 to Hawthorne certain well-defined traits of New 
 England character, especially an independent vigour 
 of spirit which in itself is no mean inheritance. 
 His mother, Elizabeth Clarke Manning, came of 
 another family long established in Salem. That 
 she was by no means an ordinary person may be 
 inferred from the fact that when her husband died 
 of yellow fever in Surinam in 1808, she restricted 
 herself to the privacy of her own house and room, 
 and did not emerge from it through the remaining 
 forty-one years of her life. She was but twenty- 
 eight at the time of Captain Nathaniel Hathorne s 
 death, and of the three children that were left to 
 
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 203 
 
 her, the oldest and the youngest were daughters. 
 Her son Nathaniel was born in Salem on July 4, 
 1804. If her spirit and influence had not be 
 queathed a strange equipment of sensibility to her 
 children, it would be time to look about for new 
 theories touching the early formation of character. 
 
 Hawthorne was an active, well-formed boy, as he 
 was a man of uncommon physical beauty. But an 
 accident to one of his feet, while he was playing at 
 " bat-and-ball " one day, rendered him quite lame 
 for a portion of his youth, in which he acquired 
 voracious habits of reading, and fortunately the 
 English classics were the books within his reach. 
 An event of even more important influence was the 
 early removal of his family to Raymond, Maine, 
 where his mother s people owned a large tract of 
 land. " It was there," said Hawthorne in later life, 
 "that I first got my cursed habits of solitude." 
 The woods about Sebago Lake, the ice that cov 
 ered it in winter, gave him free foot for solitary 
 excursions under sun and stars. He lived, he said, 
 like a bird of the air. But his mother, for all her 
 own seclusion, would not have the boy grow up in 
 complete separation from men, and sent him back to 
 Salem, where a private instructor prepared him for 
 entrance to Bowdoin College. Longfellow was one 
 of his classmates, though not of his intimates in col 
 lege. Horatio Bridge, afterwards Paymaster-General 
 of the Navy, was both, and, moreover, was acknowl- 
 
204 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 edged by Hawthorne as the friend who was respon 
 sible for his becoming an author. In the class 
 above him was Franklin Pierce, a lifelong friend, of 
 whom Hawthorne could write when both were 
 growing old, " I do not love him one whit the less 
 for having been President." At his graduation, in 
 1825, Hawthorne s college rank was eighteenth in a 
 class of thirty-eight, but, especially in " the human 
 ities," he had acquired some sound learning, and in 
 his long walks and frank intercourse with his best 
 friends, he had doubtless gained a knowledge of 
 himself and of them which was to serve him well. 
 
 As a period of human companionships Haw 
 thorne s four years at college stand out in bright 
 relief. He had come there from a solitary boy 
 hood, and emerged into a manhood still more soli 
 tary. While all his friends were taking up active 
 pursuits, he established himself with his mother 
 and sisters at Salem, whither they had returned to 
 live in the house of his grandfather Manning. 
 Instead of undertaking any recognised work, " year 
 after year," he said, " I kept on considering what I 
 was fit for." But he had known for a long time. 
 Even as a boy he had written from Salem to his 
 mother in Maine : " What do you think of my 
 becoming an author, and relying for support upon 
 my pen ? Indeed, I think the illegibility of my 
 handwriting is very author-like. How proud you 
 would be to see my books praised by the reviewers 
 
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 205 
 
 as equal to the proudest productions of the scrib 
 bling sons of John Bull." In pursuance of this 
 inclination he seems to have made up his mind in 
 college to adopt the profession of authorship ; once 
 committed to it, and conscious of the powers within 
 him, he would not permit himself or others to turn 
 them cheaply to account. His first book, Seven 
 Tales of My Native Land, he burned in manuscript. 
 His second, Fans/iawe, a novel, he made every 
 effort to disown and suppress. What he desired 
 above and beyond any immediate success was to do 
 only such work as he felt to be worthy of him. 
 
 It was a strange apprenticeship to which he bound 
 himself. It is hard to think of another writer whose 
 young manhood is not to be regarded in the light of 
 its outward circumstances. Nearly all the circum 
 stances of Hawthorne s life for some years after his 
 leaving college were inward. Though possessed of 
 such beauty of person that an old gipsy woman, 
 meeting him suddenly in the woods, exclaimed, 
 " Are you a man or an angel ? " and though sought 
 out for a time by the " good society " of his native 
 town, he kept himself resolutely to himself. " For 
 months together," to repeat his own words, " I 
 scarcely held human intercourse outside of my own 
 family, seldom going out except at twilight, or only 
 to take the nearest way to the most convenient soli 
 tude, which was oftenest the seashore. . . . Once a 
 year or thereabouts I used to make an excursion of 
 
206 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 a few weeks, in which I enjoyed as much of life as 
 other people in the whole year round." He doubted 
 whether so many as twenty persons in Salem were 
 aware of his existence. Within his mother s house, 
 his cloistral habits were not infringed upon. For 
 months at a time he scarcely saw his older sister, 
 who was almost as strict a recluse as his mother. 
 Both of these ladies had their meals brought to their 
 separate rooms. Indeed, this was Mrs. Hawthorne s 
 unbroken custom from the time of her husband s 
 death. In the evening she and her younger daugh 
 ter used to come down to the little parlour and sit 
 with Hawthorne. Love and respect seem to have 
 gone out from each corner of the curious personal 
 quadrangle to each and all of the other corners, but 
 the life of the family could not have been such as to 
 make amends in any way for the dearth of human 
 influences from without. 
 
 Hawthorne, to be sure, maintained a certain con 
 tact with mankind through correspondence with his 
 college friends, and by means of his occasional ex 
 cursions into the world. It marked him as a man 
 of uncommon mould that by looking merely into 
 himself, and drawing forth what he found there, he 
 could produce so much that was worth producing, 
 for this is not the usual result of such a process. 
 In his room at Salem, which has been well called 
 " the ante-chamber of his fame," he read and wrote 
 interminably. The results of this labour were pub- 
 
HAWTHORNE AT 36. 
 From the Etching by S. A. Schoff, after a portrait, 
 
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 207 
 
 lished in the magazines of the day, and in Good- 
 rich s annual, The Token, where Willis s first efforts 
 were rapidly winning him fame, while Hawthorne s 
 attracted so little attention that he could call him 
 self with some truth, " the obscurest man of letters 
 in America." It was twelve years after his gradua 
 tion from college that is, in 1837 that the first 
 collection of Twice-Told Tales brought together the 
 best of his work for this period. Longfellow wrote an 
 appreciative review of it for The North American, and 
 so moved Hawthorne, that he despatched a hearty 
 letter to his old classmate, saying : " Whether or no 
 the public will agree to the praise you bestow on 
 me, there are at least five persons who think you 
 the most sagacious critic on earth viz., my mother 
 and two sisters, my old maiden aunt, and finally 
 the sturdiest believer of the whole five my own 
 self." It is no wonder that the praise of Long 
 fellow brought true pleasure to one who complained 
 that for lack of approbation he had cc always written 
 with benumbed fingers." He could not have been 
 blind to the relation between his life and his Tales 
 even before 1851, when he wrote in the preface of 
 a new edition: "The book, if you would see any 
 thing in it, requires to be read in the clear, brown, 
 twilight atmosphere in which it was written ; if 
 opened in the sunshine, it is apt to look exceedingly 
 like a volume of blank pages." 
 
 Hawthorne had come out from his twilight atmos- 
 
2o8 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 phere for a short time before the publication of 
 Twice-Told Tales to edit an ill-fated American Mag 
 azine of Knowledge in Boston, and would have stood 
 in a still more glaring light if his desire to be ap 
 pointed historian of a Government expedition to 
 the South Polar seas had been fulfilled. He gained 
 no glory by the anonymous writing of Peter Parley s 
 Universal History (1837). Two events which soon 
 took place, however, brought about all-important 
 changes in the course of his life, and saved him 
 from the dangers of continuing longer in his career 
 of solitude. The one was his appointment by 
 George Bancroft, in 1839, as weigher and gauger 
 in the Boston Custom-House ; the other was his 
 engagement to Miss Sophia Peabody, of Salem, 
 which occurred at about the same time. 
 
 It cannot be imagined that the life Hawthorne 
 had been leading could naturally bring him to 
 matrimony. But for his writings it is to be 
 doubted whether his path would ever have crossed 
 that of the Peabody family. The three sisters of 
 that name, however, had read and admired certain 
 fugitive pieces of writing which they had succeeded 
 in tracing to their townsman, and through the 
 rather difficult mediation of his sisters, they made 
 his acquaintance. This was in 1837, and neither 
 Hawthorne s reserve nor Sophia Peabody s invalid- 
 ism could have given promise of the result. Un 
 interruptedly from her twelfth year she had been 
 
HAWTHORNE AT 46. 
 From an engraving of a portrait by C. G. Thompson. 
 
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 209 
 
 afflicted with an acute nervous headache. She had 
 felt that she must never marry, yet her illness had 
 served to heighten all the beauties of a nature in 
 herently beautiful, and Hawthorne recognised her 
 for what she was ; nor did she fail, early or late, to 
 see in Hawthorne the incarnation of all her ideals. 
 When they became conditionally engaged she said 
 to him, " If God intends us to marry, He will let 
 me be cured ; if not, it will be a sign that it is not 
 best." It was not only possible for them to marry 
 in 1842, but from that time forth her malady never 
 returned. 
 
 HAWTHORNE S AUTOGRAPH. 
 
 It was an abrupt transition for Hawthorne from 
 the quiet of Salem to the Boston wharves, noisy with 
 the unlading of coal-schooners. But he toiled 
 faithfully at his work of supervision, and did not 
 let the opportunity of observing keenly the ways 
 of men and of his own heart pass unimproved. 
 His next change of surroundings provided him 
 with contrasts no less striking, for in 1841 he joined 
 his fortunes with those of the Brook Farm commu 
 nity. Here he toiled like a veritable Hodge, and 
 stored his mind and his Note-Books with many im 
 pressions which found their way into The Blithedale 
 
 14 
 
210 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 Romance ten years later. Emerson suggested many 
 of the shortcomings of the Brook Farm experiment 
 when he wrote : " The ladies again took cold on 
 washing-days, and it was ordained that the gentle 
 men shepherds should hang out the clothes, which 
 they punctually did ; but a great anachronism fol 
 lowed in the evening, for when they began to dance 
 the clothes-pins dropped plentifully from their 
 pockets." Hawthorne, too, had so clear a vision 
 for the humour of things, that he could not take 
 himself and his "brethren in affliction," as he called 
 them, altogether seriously in their new life. The 
 eight cows and the " transcendental heifer belong 
 ing to Miss Margaret Fuller" were never com 
 plete realities to him, though he worked hard in 
 the barnyard. There was, however, sufficient 
 reality in the loss of his Custom-House savings, 
 which he had invested in the community, and in 
 his failure to satisfy himself that the farm would 
 be the best place for him to begin his married life. 
 He could not have chosen a better place for this 
 purpose than the Old Manse at Concord, where he 
 and his bride took up their abode in the summer of 
 1842. The introductory paper to the Mosses from 
 an Old Manse (1846) tells with inimitable charm as 
 much as Hawthorne was willing to tell of the delight 
 of his new life. He frankly declares himself to be 
 not " one of those supremely hospitable people who 
 serve up their own hearts, delicately fried, with brain 
 
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 211 
 
 sauce, as a tidbit for their beloved public." One 
 cannot help feeling that something like this has 
 been done in the publication of Mrs. Hawthorne s 
 intimate letters written at this time. But the life 
 which they reveal was filled with ideal beauty, the 
 more rare because it remained unchanged till 
 the end. In these early days Hawthorne is seen 
 raising vegetables, which acquire from his care a 
 flavour unknown before on earth ; nobly cooking 
 and washing dishes in domestic emergencies ; and 
 rejoicing his young wife with long evenings of read 
 ing aloud. How shrewd an eye she herself pos 
 sessed, a single bit of winter landscape-drawing will 
 show : " One afternoon Mr. Emerson and Mr. 
 Thoreau went with him down the river. Henry 
 Thoreau is an experienced skater, and was figuring 
 dithyrambic dances and Bacchic leaps on the ice 
 very remarkable, but very ugly, methought. Next 
 him followed Mr. Hawthorne, wrapped in his cloak, 
 moved like a self-impelled Greek statue, stately 
 and grave. Mr. Emerson closed the line, evidently 
 too weary to hold himself erect, pitching headfore 
 most, half lying on the air." The deeper spiritual 
 understanding constantly shown in these letters of 
 Mrs. Hawthorne s made her a wife in whose com 
 radeship her husband could not suffer again from 
 loneliness. The birth of his daughter Una at Con 
 cord rendered Hawthorne s home still more com 
 pletely the centre of his life. The scene 5 however, 
 
212 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 was not to remain long unchanged, and late in 1845 
 the little family left the Manse, and moved to Salem, 
 where Hawthorne soon received President Folk s 
 appointment as surveyor in the Custom-House. 
 
 It is hardly surprising that the prosaic duties of 
 the radically new surroundings were not productive 
 at once of literary results. But when a little more 
 than three years had passed, during which time his 
 son was born, his mother died, and Hawthorne 
 himself suffered political decapitation, he was ready 
 to show the world that the years had not gone in 
 vain. His wife hailed the release from office as the 
 opportunity for writing his book, and to her hus 
 band s amazement brought forth a sum of money 
 which she had been saving against a rainy day. 
 His mind was doubtless full of The Scarlet Letter, 
 for it took him only six months to write it, amid 
 the distractions of his mother s fatal illness and his 
 own sufferings of care and pain. James T. Fields 
 has told with what difficulty he forced Hawthorne, 
 when the book was done, even to admit that he had 
 been about such a piece of work, and to surrender 
 up the manuscript. The publisher s delight in the 
 story as a work of art seems to have exceeded his 
 belief in it as a commercial venture, for as soon as 
 the first edition of five thousand copies was printed 
 the type was distributed. In ten days the entire 
 edition was sold, and all the printers work had to be 
 done over again. The book was published in 1850, 
 
U 
 
 ^ g 
 
 CiT en 
 
 2 W 
 
 < S 
 
OP THB 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 213 
 
 and won the world s instant recognition, at home 
 and abroad, of Hawthorne s consummate literary 
 skill and penetrating vision into the mysteries of 
 the human soul. Thenceforth his fame was secure. 
 Thenceforth, also, his physical powers were as 
 those of a man no longer young. With the hope 
 that change might be of benefit, he moved in 1850 
 with his family to Lenox, and lived for a little more 
 than a year in a small red farmhouse, which bore to 
 his eyes the aspect of the Scarlet Letter. Here his 
 youngest child was born, and here he wrote The 
 House of the Seven Gables which he frankly called 
 " a more natural book for me to write than The 
 Scarlet Letter was," and also The Wonder Book, pro 
 jected some years before, it appears, as a thing to 
 be done in collaboration with Longfellow. Here, 
 too, he is seen in intercourse with friends and his 
 children, which showed him to be something other 
 than the brooding mystic of his books, and the 
 moody, inaccessible creature of common report. 
 His son tells of his own boyish delight in the nut 
 ting excursions in which the father, standing beneath 
 a great walnut-tree, used to bid the children turn 
 their backs and cover their faces, till they heard a 
 shout above them, when they looked up to see 
 Hawthorne, " a delightful mystery and miracle," 
 in the topmost branches. Such are the brighter 
 glimpses of the Lenox life, from which an increas 
 ing spirit of unrest bore Hawthorne with his family, 
 
2i 4 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 before the end of 1851, back to the neighbourhood 
 of Boston. The winter that followed was spent in 
 the house of Mrs. Hawthorne s brother-in-law, 
 Horace Mann, at West Newton, and here The 
 Blithedale Romance was written between the first of 
 December and the end of April. The three years 
 brought to a close by this performance are almost 
 without parallel in the importance of their produc 
 tiveness. 
 
 The time had come for Hawthorne to establish 
 himself more permanently in one place, and Con 
 cord, the town of his happiest days, was naturally 
 chosen. Here he bought from Alcott the house 
 known as " Wayside," standing a little farther from 
 the village than Emerson s dwelling upon the same 
 road. It was told of Hawthorne in Lenox that 
 when in his walks he saw the approach of any one 
 to whom he might have to talk, he would suddenly 
 leave the road and take to the pasture beside it. 
 His aversion to promiscuous intercourse kept him 
 in Concord from taking any such part in the village 
 life as Emerson took. Alcott, his next-door neigh 
 bour, has told how difficult it was to see him except 
 as a hare vanishing in the shrubbery on the hill 
 behind his house. Here he used to walk to and 
 fro for hours under the larches in the path which 
 he called " the only remembrance of me that will 
 remain." Emerson s son has recorded the one 
 formal visit paid by Hawthorne to his father s 
 
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 215 
 
 house, on a certain Sunday evening when the caller, 
 to cover his shyness, began looking at pictures in 
 a stereoscope. He asked what the scenes were, 
 and was much surprised to hear that they were the 
 Concord Court and Town House and Common, 
 all of which his body must have passed, at least 
 occasionally, though his spirit was elsewhere. An 
 other resident of Concord, the clear-sighted Henry 
 James, Sr., in writing to Emerson of a Satur 
 day Club dinner at which Hawthorne was pres 
 ent, said : " He has the look all the time, to one 
 who does n t know him, of a rogue who finds him 
 self suddenly in a company of detectives." Haw 
 thorne himself knew that the dinner-table of any 
 house but his own was not the best place for him, 
 and once said : " I have an almost miraculous 
 power of escaping from necessities of this kind. 
 Destiny itself has often been worsted in the attempt 
 to get me out to dinner." 
 
 That such a man, after two experiences of politi 
 cal office, should have been removed again from 
 private life was one of the anomalies of his career. 
 The writing of the Tanglewood Tales soon after his 
 removal to Concord was more what might have 
 been expected of him than any mingling in a presi 
 dential campaign. But his friend Pierce had been 
 nominated for the Presidency, and Hawthorne has 
 tened to his support with the offer of any service 
 in his power. This, he was told, might best be 
 
216 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 a campaign life of the candidate. When it was 
 written, and Pierce was elected, of course it was 
 said that the book paid the price of the good 
 appointment to the Liverpool consulate. This crit 
 icism had its sufficient answer, for Hawthorne and 
 for all minds capable of generous judgment, in 
 the friendship between him and Pierce, long before 
 his presidency and long after it. The outward 
 episode revealed less of Hawthorne than an anec 
 dote related by Pierce. When he was nominated, 
 " Hawthorne came to see him, sat down by him 
 on a sofa, and after a melancholy silence, heaving 
 a deep sigh, said, c Frank, what a pity ! Then, 
 after a pause, c But, after all, this world was not 
 meant to be happy in only to succeed in ! 
 
 Hawthorne succeeded well enough at Liverpool, 
 where he performed the duties of consul from 1853 
 to 1857. For three years after his resignation he 
 remained abroad, especially in Italy and England, 
 enjoying some of the most satisfying friendships of 
 his life, and writing or preparing to write the books 
 which fixed his fame more firmly from year to year, 
 even after his death, when the passages from his 
 various Note-Books were published. The literary 
 result of sojourns in Europe would furnish forth 
 a chapter by itself in any account of American 
 writers. The effect of foreign lands upon Irving, 
 Cooper, Willis, and a score of others were no un 
 fruitful theme. Here it suffices to be thankful for 
 
HAWTHORNE AT 56. 
 From an engraving of a photograph by Mayal, London. 
 

 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 217 
 
 its provocation of Hawthorne s Marble Faun. His 
 Italian Note-Books show how the scenes of Italy 
 were preparing him to write the Romance of Monte- 
 Beni. Outside of Florence he made the first sketch 
 for the book. In the summer of 1859 ne returned 
 to England to write it, and chiefly at Redcar, on 
 the Yorkshire coast, and at Leamington, the work 
 was done in time to be published by March of 
 1860. The London publishers insisted upon giv 
 ing it the title of Transformation, against Haw 
 thorne s wish. It was his preference also not to 
 write for the second edition the " Conclusion " 
 which is now joined to the last chapter. But there 
 were objections of vagueness, and Hawthorne was 
 willing to meet half-way the whimsical suggestion 
 of Motley : " To those who complain, I suppose 
 that nothing less than an illustrated edition, with 
 a large gallows on the last page, with Donatello in 
 the most pensile of attitudes his ears revealed 
 through a white night-cap would be satisfactory." 
 When Longfellow read the book he found " the 
 old, dull pain in it that runs through all Haw 
 thorne s writings," but he found it also "wonder 
 ful ; " and so did the world. 
 
 When Hawthorne came back to America and 
 re-established himself at " Wayside," in 1860, the 
 country stood on the threshold of war. As a friend 
 of Pierce he was, to say the least, not a friend of 
 the Northern party which was readiest for the 
 
2i8 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 struggle. But when it began, the consciousness 
 that he had a country stirred him to regret that he 
 was too old to carry a musket ; the compensating 
 joy was that his son was too young. A War Demo 
 crat like Hawthorne was not precisely the person 
 from whom one would expect an article " Chiefly 
 About War Matters " for the vigorously Northern 
 Atlantic Monthly. Yet a paper under this title, 
 signed " By a Peaceable Man," was the result of a 
 visit he paid to Washington in the spring of 1862. 
 The foot-notes which accompanied it protested 
 against the disloyalty of some of the writer s words. 
 " Can it be a son of old Massachusetts who utters 
 this abominable sentiment ? For shame ! " So 
 read one of the notes, fairly typical of all. Donald 
 G. Mitchell detected Hawthorne s touch in the 
 article, and wrote to him as one " ready to swear 
 at the marginal impertinences. Pray, is Governor 
 Andrew editor ? " The truth, revealed some years 
 later, was that Hawthorne himself, requested by 
 James T. Fields to make certain omissions, had 
 made them, at the same time writing the foot-notes 
 and befooling the public with the remonstrances 
 against himself. 
 
 The strain of the almost fatal illness of Una 
 Hawthorne in Rome had seriously sapped her 
 father s strength. Neither his physical condition 
 nor the mental state induced by the war, was pro 
 pitious for literary production. Yet in the few 
 
HAWTHORNE AT 58. 
 From an engraving of a photograph taken in Boston. 
 
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 219 
 
 years that followed his return from Europe he 
 wrote, in the quiet tower added to the " Wayside " 
 house, the papers which filled the volume of Our 
 Old Home,, besides the fiction which has been pub 
 lished since his death, under the titles of Septimius 
 Felton, The Dolliver Romance, and Dr. Grimshaive s 
 Secret. True to a constant friendship, he insisted, 
 against all the protests of his publisher, upon dedi 
 cating Our Old Home to Franklin Pierce, whose 
 unpopular name was sure to excite hostility to the 
 book. However fully the publisher s fears were 
 borne out, Hawthorne s own name is memorably the 
 brighter for his devotion to a friend. In England, 
 it must be said, the book gave other cause for 
 offence, in that Hawthorne, speaking of the English 
 woman in her riper age and portlier dimensions, 
 made bold to say, " You inevitably think of her as 
 made up of steaks and sirloins," and to venture 
 other remarks equally unflattering. Yet the book 
 has not been unknown even in recent years to serve 
 in England the purpose to which travellers in Rome 
 sometimes put The Marble Faun a prosaic test, 
 if you will, to apply to a work which does not make 
 utility its first aim. 
 
 Happily it is not needed here to follow Haw 
 thorne closely through all the days of failing strength. 
 More than a year before the final failure Longfellow 
 made the record, "He looks gray and grand, with 
 something very pathetic about him." In March 
 
220 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 of 1864 his health was so broken that a journey to 
 Washington was attempted with hopes of improve 
 ment. His travelling companion was his friend 
 and publisher, William D. Ticknor. Hawthorne 
 was gaining in strength, when, with appalling sud 
 denness, Mr. Ticknor died in Philadelphia. In 
 stead of being the object of care, Hawthorne found 
 himself borne down by the most sorrowful of re 
 sponsibilities. He returned to Concord far worse 
 than he had left it. This was in April. In May 
 another attempt was made to restore him by means 
 of a driving tour with Franklin Pierce through the 
 White Mountains. The travellers went only as far 
 as Plymouth, in New Hampshire, and here in the 
 darkness before the sunrise of May 19, death came 
 to Hawthorne while he slept. His burial, at 
 Sleepy Hollow, in Concord, took place on May 23. 
 Within a few days his wife, who needed no human 
 consolations, wrote with gladness : " There can be no 
 death nor loss for me for evermore. . . . God gave 
 me the rose of time ; the blossom of the ages to 
 call my own for twenty-five years of human life.* 
 
 The variety of the attempts to apply epithets of 
 accurate definition to Hawthorne and his writings 
 recalls the fate of a bust for which he sat in 
 Rome. The clay, a good likeness, was finished, and 
 handed over to the marble-cutters to be reproduced 
 in stone. While this process was going forward an 
 American, who might have known better, directed 
 
FIELDS, HAWTHORNE, AND TICKNOR. 
 From the photograph of a Daguerreotype. 
 
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 221 
 
 the workmen, on his own responsibility, to make 
 certain changes in the lower part of the face, with 
 the result that the finished bust, in the words of 
 Hawthorne s son, "looks like a combination of 
 Daniel Webster and George Washington." Some 
 thing like this happens when words like " glimmer 
 ing " and " cobwebby," well enough as far as they 
 go, are too freely used to describe the attributes of 
 Hawthorne. Different eyes see different things in 
 his books, just as the man differed in the circles of 
 intimacy and of the outer world. The remodelled 
 bust doubtless suited the interfering critic better 
 than the truer likeness. Mr. Howells, when he 
 had met the man face to face, said, " Hawthorne s 
 look was different from that of any picture of him 
 that I have seen." And so it may be said of his 
 writings that the terms used for their definition 
 never quite define them. To characterise the obvi 
 ous is easy enough. But there are personalities and 
 works of art about which the last word in modifica 
 tion of any confident statement is far to seek. To 
 a certain degree it defines them merely to make 
 this assertion about them. Let us be satisfied with 
 making it of Hawthorne and of his books. What 
 he is, in our heritage from his pen, is immeasurably 
 more important than any words about him. It is 
 enough that the stony soil of New England could 
 bear such fruits of the imagination as he has gar 
 nered for our wonder and delight. 
 
WALT WHITMAN 
 
 INSTEAD of defining Walt Whitman as an 
 " American Bookman," one might with greater 
 justice describe him and his Leaves of Grass for 
 they are virtually one as an American Book and 
 a Man. It is merely a distinction of syllables, yet 
 it has an important significance. The precise signi 
 ficance of Whitman, with relation to other poets, 
 has never been more truly pointed out by an 
 admirer than by Mr. John Burroughs in these 
 words : " Just as ripe, mellowed, storied, ivy-tow 
 ered, velvet-turfed England lies back of Tennyson, 
 and is vocal through him ; just as canny, cove 
 nanting, conscience-burdened, craggy, sharp-tongued 
 Scotland lies back of Carlyle ; just as thrifty, well- 
 schooled, well-housed, prudent, and moral New 
 England lies back of her group of poets, and is 
 voiced by them, so America as a whole, our tur 
 bulent democracy, our self-glorification, our faith 
 in the future, our huge mass-movements, our con 
 tinental spirit, our sprawling, sublime, and unkempt 
 nature lie back of Whitman and are implied by his 
 work." 
 
WALT WHITMAN 223 
 
 In the life of the man who proclaims himself the 
 mouthpiece of these national qualities, it would be 
 idle to look for the circumstances which enter into 
 the making of other men who have made books, 
 since books in any large measure expressive of 
 these qualities have not hitherto been made. It 
 must not be expected, therefore, to follow him 
 through college and foreign travel, and into friend 
 ships and domestic relations which make conspic 
 uously for what are called the refinements of life. 
 He constantly spoke in his writings of the " lit- 
 erats " as a class distinct from himself. His book, 
 he maintained, is not to be viewed as a literary 
 performance, but merely as an attempt to put a 
 Person " freely, fully, and truly on record." This 
 person is of course Walt Whitman, not merely 
 Walt Whitman the private citizen, but also Walt 
 Whitman as he conceived himself, " a great, com 
 posite democratic individual, male or female," ready 
 to "raise high the perpendicular hand" to every 
 person and every experience to be found on earth. 
 It is tne first step toward any acceptance of Whit 
 man to accept him in this double personality. 
 Whether the " composite, democratic individual " 
 is or is not a person to one s liking in every respect, 
 the Leaves of Grass speak for him in unmistakable 
 terms. For Walt Whitman, the private citizen, his 
 life speaks with an equal clearness. There are few 
 writers whose lives and whose writings are so com- 
 
224 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 pletely at one. It is therefore more than commonly 
 helpful, in arriving at a true estimate of Walt 
 Whitman as a writer, to gain a clear knowledge 
 of him as a man. 
 
 The poet of democracy has need to be born and 
 bred of the people, and Whitman had all the fitness 
 for his work which comes from such a birth and 
 breeding. His father, Walter W. Whitman, was a 
 skilful carpenter and builder, living on a farm which 
 his father and grandfather had owned before him at 
 West Hills, Huntington Township, Long Island. 
 Here his wife, Louisa Van Velsor, of a neighbour 
 ing Dutch family of farmers, also long established 
 in the region, and famed for the raising of horses, 
 bore him a son, Walter, the second of nine children, 
 on May Jist, 1819. To distinguish the boy from 
 his father, his name was abbreviated in common 
 use to Walt, and its owner, except in signing his 
 early, conventional attempts at authorship, did not 
 permit the years to restore the lost syllable. He 
 was not five years old when his family removed to 
 Brooklyn, where he went to the public schools, and 
 " tended " in a lawyer s and doctor s office, until 
 at the age of fourteen he was set to learn the print 
 er s trade. Two years of this work were followed 
 by a period of country-school teaching and " board 
 ing round " in the neighbourhood of his birthplace. 
 To this experience he owed some of his " deepest 
 lessons in human nature behind the scenes and in 
 
LOUISA (VAN VELSOR) WHITMAN, FROM A DAGUERREOTYPE 
 TAKEN ABOUT 1855. 
 
OP THE 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
WALT WHITMAN 225 
 
 the masses." Moreover, he was then at the time 
 of life for Nature to teach him her best lessons, and 
 the images of sea and shore, which appear and re 
 appear in his writings, show that he learned them 
 well. In 1839 and 1840 he is seen in his native 
 town of Huntington as the founder and publisher 
 of a weekly newspaper, The Long Islander. For 
 the most part his boyhood and younger manhood 
 differed in few outward respects from those of youths 
 who go on to be good mechanics and tradesmen, or 
 rural teachers and editors. Nor did the years that 
 followed his return to New York and Brooklyn, in 
 1840, conspicuously foretell what was to come. 
 Yet it was mainly in the fifteen years which preceded 
 the first publication of Leaves of Grass, in 1855, 
 that Whitman was traversing the " long foreground " 
 into which Emerson s keen eye pierced its way when 
 the book appeared. The elements of this foreground 
 were the permanent elements of Whitman s thought, 
 except for the great additions that were made to it 
 by his experiences in the civil war. Though his 
 productions in prose and verse were printed in the 
 magazines of the day, they were not distinguished 
 for individual merit, and he took no uncommon 
 place as a writer. It was rather as a compositor 
 in printing-offices, and then as the editor of a daily 
 paper, the Brooklyn Eagle y that he provided him 
 self with his slender sufficiency of money. It was 
 still more as the observer and sharer of the life 
 
 15 
 
226 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 about him that he passed his days. The spectacles 
 of the harbour and Broadway were his delight. 
 The pilots on the ferry-boats, in which he crossed 
 from Brooklyn to New York over and over again 
 for mere pleasure, were his friends. Talking on 
 all manner of subjects with them, giving and tak 
 ing, lending a copy of Homer to a youth who 
 swabbed the deck, listening to long accounts of 
 their work and thoughts, thus he passed whole 
 afternoons and even nights. Of some of these 
 friends he wrote at a later time, " When we meet 
 we kiss each other (I am an exception to all their 
 customs with others)." The drivers of the Broad 
 way stages were equally his intimates. Sitting on 
 the box beside them, their life for the time be 
 came his. One winter, in order to keep a disabled 
 driver s place for him, he drove a stage himself. 
 To museums and theatres, and especially to the 
 opera, he paid frequent visits. Then there were 
 solitary days of walking, reading, and bathing at 
 the seashore. In all these ways the multiform life 
 about him was taken into himself and made a living 
 part of his own nature. 
 
 Yet the " foreground " would have been in 
 complete if its horizon had not been spread beyond 
 that of New York and its vicinity, for the national 
 sense enters as strongly into Whitman s complete 
 ness as the spirit of " Manahatta my city." This 
 enlargement of view was brought about in 1 848 and 
 
WHITMAN AT 36. 
 From a Daguerreotype. 
 
WALT WHITMAN 
 
 227 
 
 1849 ^7 what Whitman called " a leisurely journey 
 and working expedition" with his brother "Jeff" 
 through the Middle States, down the Ohio and 
 Mississippi, to New Orleans, where he served on 
 the editorial staff of The Crescent. Thence he 
 returned by easy stages up the Mississippi and 
 Missouri, and home by the way of the Great Lakes 
 and Lower Canada. Back in Brooklyn in 1850, 
 he published and edited The. Freeman, a newspaper 
 of his own, for about two years, after which he 
 undertook the business of building and selling small 
 houses. It seems to have been the danger of grow 
 ing rich that made him abandon this enterprise. 
 
 Still one important elerrient seems needed to 
 complete the foreground for Leaves of Grass an 
 active personal share, more than the portion of a 
 mere observer, in many expressions of man s physi 
 cal nature. The testimony of Whitman s friends 
 is that he was essentially a temperate man in all 
 respects. If in the years from 1840 to 1855 "he 
 sounded all experiences of life," as one well- 
 accredited biographer has said, he was not one 
 to disown his conduct, for he empowered John 
 Addington Symonds to publish his statement : 
 " My life, young manhood, mid-age, times South, 
 etc., have been jolly bodily, and doubtless open to 
 criticism." It would be no less misleading, in con 
 sidering Whitman, to withhold these facts than to 
 interpret them in the light of his poems without 
 
228 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 remembering that Walt Whitman the individual 
 and Walt Whitman in his imagined life of " the 
 average man " are at many points distinct person 
 alities. It is in his personality of the average man 
 that he changes the old saying, C There, but for the 
 grace of God, goes John Newton," into the new 
 and unqualified, " There goes Walt Whitman." 
 
 We are told that the purpose of Leaves of Grass 
 formed itself in Whitman s mind early in the fifties, 
 and that in 1854 he began putting on paper the 
 twelve poems which made up the book, published 
 as a thin quarto in 1855. It is worth while to 
 bring together two statements concerning him and 
 his work at this precise time. One of his brothers 
 makes the report : " Walt did not always dress in 
 this present style. He was rather stylish when 
 young. He started in with his new notions "some 
 where between 1850-55." So much for the adop 
 tion of the unconventional costume which marked 
 him from this time forth. Concerning the mode of 
 utterance which he adopted at the same time, his 
 own words are : cc I had great trouble in leaving 
 out the stock c poetical touches, but succeeded at 
 last." His own conception of his work and the best 
 way to do it was clear to him, and he squarely 
 faced what seemed to be demanded of him. His 
 warmest admirers in later years are tempted to 
 regard as fools and blind all those who did not 
 immediately put a high value upon his book. Yet 
 
T</-*i 
 
 leaves of 
 
 i 
 
 COVERS OF WHITMAN S OWN COPY OF THE FIRST EDITION OF 
 
WALT WHITMAN 229 
 
 it was no more strange that it met with hostility 
 than that " the average person," utterly ignorant of 
 Wagner and his intentions, should not rejoice in a 
 first hearing of the most " Wagnerian " portions of 
 Tristan and Isolde, or that another person quite 
 unacquainted with impressionist art should experi 
 ence scant pleasure in finding himself in a room full 
 of Monet s pictures. Whitman s very themes, re 
 garded in the light in which he saw them, forbade 
 a cordial welcome. " The main objects of his enthu 
 siasm " have been defined by Symonds as " America, 
 Self, Sex, the People." To treat these themes in a 
 series of " slack-twisted " dithyrambic chants, ap 
 parently flying in the face of all poetic tradition, and 
 written with a frankness and egotism and lack of 
 humour which, after forty years of Whitman " in 
 the air," are still detested by many, was inevitably 
 to court the opposition of " persons of taste." The 
 critics representing these persons fell upon the book 
 with a savage fury. The writer of it was " a 
 beast;" he "should be kicked from all decent 
 society." To one London journal he appeared as 
 " a wild Tupper of the West ; " another, comment 
 ing upon a later edition, declared : " Of all writers 
 we have perused, Walt Whitman is the most silly, 
 the most blasphemous, and the most disgusting." 
 The bitterest condemnations of the book were due 
 to its many offences against " the proprieties." 
 Most men could not possibly take its unfamiliar 
 
2jo AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 point of view immediately. After many years the 
 New York Tribune echoed but faintly the first 
 voices of denunciation when it said : " The chief 
 question raised by this publication is whether 
 anybody even a poet ought to take off his 
 trousers in the market-place." 
 
 Such were the views most commonly held regard 
 ing the Leaves of Grass. But there were those, 
 neither fools nor blind, who saw many other things 
 in the book. In England, where Whitman has 
 found many of his best admirers, a prompt word of 
 appreciation was spoken by Richard Monckton 
 Milnes (not yet Lord Houghton), in a letter to 
 Hawthorne at the Liverpool consulate : " I wanted 
 to see you mainly for your own sake, and also to 
 ask you about an American book which has fallen 
 into my hands. It is called Leaves of Grass, and 
 the author calls himself Walt Whitman. Do you 
 know anything about him ? I will not call it poetry, 
 because I am unwilling to apply that word to a work 
 totally destitute of art ; but, whatever we call it, it 
 is a most notable and true book. It is not written 
 virginibus puerlsque ; but as I am neither the one nor 
 the other, I may express my admiration of its vigor 
 ous virility and bold, natural truth. There are 
 things in it that read like the old Greek plays. It 
 is of the same family as those delightful books of 
 Thoreau s which you introduced me to, and which 
 are so little known and valued here." In America 
 
LEAVES OF GRASS," WITH AUTOGRAPH NOTES AND OTHER MEMORANDA. 
 
WALT WHITMAN 231 
 
 Whitman had the satisfaction of winning at once 
 the highest opinion of the man whose good opinion 
 was worth most at the time namely, Emerson. 
 It is said that Whitman knew nothing of Emerson s 
 writings before producing the Leaves of Grass, yet 
 if Emerson had withheld his hand from one whose 
 practice so conspicuously reflected his own preaching 
 of the gospel of individuality, this preaching would 
 have seemed a mockery. Wide as the gulf between 
 the two men must have appeared, Emerson took 
 no account of it when he handed a copy of Whit 
 man s book to a friend and said, " Americans 
 abroad may now come home : unto us a man is 
 born." He sent a copy of the book to Carlyle, not 
 without misgivings, calling it " a nondescript mon 
 ster, which yet had terrible eyes and buffalo strength, 
 and was indisputably American ; " and he added, 
 " after you have looked into it, if you think, as you 
 may, that it is only an auctioneer s inventory of a 
 warehouse, you can light your pipe with it." There 
 were no misgivings, however, in the words of thanks 
 which he sent to Whitman himself for his gift of 
 the book. " I find it the most extraordinary piece 
 of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed. 
 ... I find incomparable things said incomparably 
 well, as they must be. ... I greet you at the be 
 ginning of a great career, which must yet have had a 
 long foreground somewhere, for such a start." With 
 a letter in his pocket from Emerson saying such 
 
232 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 words as these, Whitman, though needing no confi 
 dence but his own, could well afford to write, 
 "Why should I hurry or compromise?" From 
 the general storm of abuse which greeted his book, 
 he did shield and recover himself in the summer 
 and autumn of 1855 by going to the east end of 
 Long Island. When he came back to New York 
 it was, he said, " with the confirmed resolution to go 
 on with my poetic enterprise in my own way, and 
 finish it as well as I could." 
 
 The carrying out of this enterprise was Whitman s 
 work for the rest of his life, for even his vivid share 
 in the life of the war time may be regarded in the 
 closest relation with his poetic purpose. It is not 
 possible here to follow the book through all its for 
 tunes and misfortunes of successive editions and 
 gradual growth. When the second edition appeared 
 in 1856, Emerson had good reason to be annoyed 
 at finding his sentence, " I greet you at the begin 
 ning of a great career," printed in letters of gold 
 over his name on the back of the volume. But he 
 had the good sense to know that the standards of 
 taste in Whitman s Brooklyn v were different from 
 those of his own Concord, and when Whitman came 
 to Boston, in 1860, to superintend the issue of his 
 third edition, Emerson took so great an interest in 
 the undertaking that he walked for two hours up 
 and down the Beacon Street mall of the Common, 
 arguing with Whitman for the omission of many 
 
WHITMAN IN WAR-TIME. 
 From a photograph by Gardner, Washington. 
 
WALT WHITMAN 233 
 
 things in the " Children of Adam " poems. Whit 
 man listened without contention, knowing, as he 
 said, " I could never hear the points better put 
 and then I felt down in my soul the clear and un 
 mistakable conviction to disobey all, and pursue 
 my own way." When the seventh edition of the 
 poems was brought out in Boston, in 1881, the 
 threat of official prosecution, on the ground of 
 the objections urged by Emerson, caused the publish 
 ers, who had known well what they were doing, to 
 abandon the book with incontinent haste. But 
 publishers in Philadelphia were not slow to take it 
 up, and after growing year by year, until Whitman s 
 death, the book has returned to Boston, committed 
 by the literary executors of the author to a young 
 house which has made Whitman its first enterprise. 
 It has been the present writer s fortune to see 
 a few of the many note-books simple, home 
 made things in which Whitman jotted down his 
 thoughts, and entered words and phrases that took 
 his fancy, with their meanings and derivations. 
 Here may be found such favourite terms of his own 
 as " kosmos " and " literat " and " rondure," noted 
 with a carefulness that would have seemed almost 
 superfluous for a man without a certain conscious 
 ness that he was conducting his own education. 
 Here the sentences which from time to time found 
 their way into his chants are marked off as of no 
 further use. We are told that these note-books 
 
U 
 
 O 
 
WALT WHITMAN 235 
 
 were always with him, and that writing more liter 
 ally with " his eye on the object " than most poets, 
 his thoughts were put into their first form wherever 
 he might happen to be. That their final form was 
 the result of offhand work is a mistaken idea, for his 
 manuscripts often show with what careful elaboration 
 his lines were wrought. Mr. Stedman has called him 
 " more formal than others in his non-conformity, 
 and haughtier in his plainness than many in their 
 pride." Certainly it is not without suggestion that 
 the title which he chose for his first book defined 
 all his subsequent work not in prose, and remains 
 as the title of all that he did through nearly forty 
 years. Few writers have maintained an identity so 
 unvarying, so sure of its right to permanence. 
 Time somewhat mellowed and broadened its expres 
 sion. At first his cry was, cc I sound my barbaric 
 yawp over the roofs of the world." Later it became, 
 " Over the tree-tops I float thee a song." But this 
 was in his threnody for Lincoln, and the events of 
 which Lincoln was the centre were the chief influ 
 ences that brought the man and the poet to com 
 pleteness. 
 
 To understand the effect of the war in widening 
 his poetic scope, national and human, it is necessary 
 only to see how his life tallied with it if one of his 
 own words may be used. When his brother George, 
 afterward lieutenant-colonel in his New York regi 
 ment, was wounded at Fredericksburg, in 1862, 
 
236 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 Whitman, at an hour s notice, started from Brook 
 lyn to care for him. His wound was not severe, 
 and the new-comer at the front soon found himself 
 in Washington caring for other Brooklyn soldiers 
 sent thither from camp in his charge. Gradually 
 this care-taking extended itself to wounded soldiers 
 in general, from both sides, in the army hospitals 
 chiefly in Washington. In this capacity, rather of 
 comforter than of nurse, Whitman gave of his best 
 to the soldiers till the war was over. No man could 
 have been better qualified for such a task. His 
 habit of life had made him the comrade of all, 
 especially the obscure. * Unmarried through an 
 " overmastering passion," as he said, " for entire 
 freedom, unconstraint " he was checked by none 
 of the ties which bind other men from holding their 
 lives cheap. Blessed with a feminine gift of sym 
 pathy, which made children and weak persons in 
 stinctively trust in him, his touch and word were 
 often what the wounded men needed most. His 
 very physical presence was comforting. When 
 Lincoln, looking from the White House window, 
 saw Whitman pass, his word was, " Well, he looks 
 like a man ! " Six feet in height, of vigorous mould 
 and carriage, ruddy of skin, bearded and gray of 
 hair since thirty, given to frequent baths, the clean 
 est linen and simple clothes, he carried about with 
 him an air of health and sunlight. By friends in 
 Northern cities he was supplied with the means for 
 
WHITMAN AT 65. 
 From a photograph. 
 
WALT WHITMAN 237 
 
 bringing more tangible things to the hospitals. A 
 friend who once went his rounds with him has told 
 of what he saw, and a part of the record must speak 
 for the whole of a beneficent service, a personal 
 ministration, it has been estimated, to about one 
 hundred thousand men. " From cot to cot they 
 called him, often in tremulous tones or in whispers ; 
 they embraced him ; they touched his hand ; they 
 gazed at him. To one he gave a few words of 
 cheer ; for another he wrote a letter home ; to others 
 he gave an orange, a few comfits, a cigar, a pipe and 
 tobacco, a sheet of paper or a postage-stamp, all of 
 which and many other things were in his capacious 
 haversack. From another he would receive a dying 
 message for mother, wife, or sweetheart ; for another 
 he would promise to go an errand; to another, 
 some special friend very low, he would give a manly 
 farewell kiss. He did the things for them no nurse 
 or doctor could do, and he seemed to leave a bene 
 diction at every cot as he passed along. The lights 
 had gleamed for hours in the hospital that night 
 before he left it, and as he took his way towards the 
 door, you could hear the voices of many a stricken 
 hero calling, c Walt, Walt, Walt, come again ! Come 
 again! " 
 
 Before the war was over Whitman had the first 
 illness of his life, an attack of " hospital malaria," 
 induced by his labours, which converted him from a 
 young into an old man. But the illness kept him 
 
238 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 only a short time from the hospitals, where all the 
 hours which he could spare from his new clerkship 
 in the Department of the Interior were spent. This 
 clerkship itself was short-lived, by reason of his dis 
 missal as the author of Leaves of Grass. The incident 
 brought forth W. D. O Connor s flaming pamphlet, 
 The Good Gray Poef, which provided Whitman with 
 a permanent name better than anything he had lost. 
 Another clerkship in the office of the Attorney- 
 General was promptly secured, and there he worked 
 till 1873, when an attack of paralysis, which had its 
 first cause in his hospital service, incapacitated him 
 for all regular labour. Thenceforth, until his death, 
 on March 26th, 1892, he lived in Camden, New 
 Jersey, in health of varying feebleness. At its best 
 it permitted him to go about freely in the world, as 
 in his journeys to Colorado and Canada. At its 
 worst, it rendered him almost helpless. Yet his 
 good cheer and courage never failed him. Living 
 in one of the simplest houses in an unpretentious 
 district, rejoicing, as of old, in the life of the ferries 
 and the streets, and in all the aspects of nature, 
 cared for by devoted friends, who gave him, among 
 other things, a horse and buggy of his own, hon 
 oured by the recognition of the masters in literature, 
 as the letters from Tennyson alone are enough to 
 show, writing in prose the Specimen Days, which 
 Symonds called " the brightest and halest c Diary of 
 an Invalid ever written," and singing in verse the 
 
WHITMAN AND Two LITTLE FRIENDS. 
 From a photograph taken by Kurtz, New York, 1880. 
 
OP TH* 
 
 UKIVERSITT 
 
WALT WHITMAN 239 
 
 ripened songs of one who has seen and suffered 
 much, Whitman lived his old age so as to blur in 
 no wise the picture of his life, but to work its ful 
 filment. 
 
 After all has been said about Whitman, there are 
 good folk who ask, " But is not the whole Whit 
 man attitude a monstrous pose ? Why should cata 
 logues be considered poetry ? Why must all things 
 be thought equally worthy of honour? Are the 
 graces of humility, reverence, and proportion obso 
 lete, that they should be thrown to the winds ? 
 This Whitman brings us no new discoveries, or 
 very few but barbarous declamation of common 
 place in plenty : why should we listen to him ? " 
 
 It is quite possible that for many persons these 
 honest questions cannot be satisfactorily answered. 
 The Whitmaniacs, as the renegade admirer Swin 
 burne called Whitman s followers, sometimes an 
 swer such inquiries with a heat which is meant to 
 warm, but burns instead. It would be idle to tell 
 all men that they must accept Whitman entire or 
 not at all. He has been called cc an acquired 
 taste " and surely he yields to those who turn to 
 him something different from that which other poets 
 give ; yet he need not displace, but supplement 
 them. The things which most open-minded read 
 ers who turn to Whitman can accept and rejoice in 
 are his large enthusiasm for mankind, especially in 
 "these States," whose national spirit he utters as 
 
2 4 o AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 no one else has done ; his elemental scorn, such as 
 a cloud or a north wind might hold, for all but the 
 real things ; his faith and hope and love. With 
 these watchwords he sets free the spirit which can 
 respond to him, and accomplishes his definite pur 
 pose, of which he wrote : " The reader will have his 
 or her part to do, just as much as I have had mine. 
 I seek less to state or display any theme or thought, 
 and more to bring you, reader, into the atmosphere 
 of the theme or thought there to pursue your 
 own flight." 
 
 Persons of a casual temper read a page or two of 
 Whitman, and, ignorant of the truth set forth by 
 Stevenson, that " no one can appreciate Whitman s 
 excellences until he has grown accustomed to his 
 faults," find it easy to toss him aside as an offender 
 against all preconceived ideas of poetry, and there 
 fore not a poet. It would be less easy for these 
 persons to explain the effect his writings have had 
 upon men and women whom they do not so readily 
 dismiss. It is not necessary to enumerate the 
 names of all his earlier and later admirers, at home 
 and abroad. It is, however, worth while to repeat 
 the deliberate statement of John Addington Sy- 
 monds, surely a critical voice worth heeding : 
 " Leaves of Grass, which I first read at the age of 
 twenty-five, influenced me more, perhaps, than any 
 other book has done, except the Bible ; more than 
 Plato, more than Goethe." If this was a personal 
 
TOMB AT HARLEIGH, CAMDEN, N. J. 
 Built under Whitman s supervision. 
 
or TUB 
 
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WALT WHITMAN 241 
 
 rather than a critical estimate, a value of its own 
 may be attached to his statement : that he was will 
 ing to pledge his reputation as a critic on the opin 
 ion that Whitman produced not only poetry, but 
 " poetry of a very high order." Nor has the prophet 
 been without honour in his own country, for the 
 last and least faltering voice in his praise has been 
 uplifted in a book, which confesses itself at the 
 outset a panegyric, by Mr. John Burroughs, whose 
 standards are pre-eminently those of sanity and 
 nature. 
 
 "I charge you forever reject those who would expound me, for I 
 cannot expound myself." 
 
 This was Whitman s command, and it cannot be 
 said that his disciples have literally obeyed it, or that 
 he has never tried to expound himself. His own 
 prose paper, A Backward Glance O er Travel* d Roads, 
 is in effect an exposition. His biographer, Dr. R. 
 M. Bucke, who is also one of his literary executors, 
 and yet another of these, Mr. Horace L. Traubel, 
 have written many pages which really serve to clarify 
 the understanding of Walt Whitman and his book. 
 Whether men call him a poet or a prophet or " a 
 great composite, democratic individual," he is a 
 figure which refuses to be passed by in the records 
 of American letters ; and the truest exposition of 
 him, after all, is to be found in the Leaves of Grass 
 itself. 
 
 16 
 
WHITTIER AND LOWELL 
 
 THE scholar in politics is familiar enough in 
 other lands, but here he has never quite lost 
 a certain strangeness of aspect. The poet in poli 
 tics is almost an anomaly everywhere, and if any 
 justification were needed for bringing together the 
 names of Whittier and Lowell, it would be found 
 in the fact that they won their first conspicuous 
 laurels in devoting their Muse to the service of a 
 political cause. This fact alone distinguishes them 
 from their fellows in American letters. 
 
 When all the writers of the older generation 
 were young men, the country was richer than it is 
 now in " moral issues." The problems of national 
 life provided every man with food for searching 
 thought. Its themes were not essentially poetical, 
 except in so far as human freedom and the freed 
 spirit of poetry are at one. A freed spirit of opinion 
 was indispensable to him who would espouse the 
 cause to which Whittier and Lowell gave their 
 young vigour, the cause of antislavery. All the 
 forces of conservatism, North and South, were 
 arrayed against it, and to array one s self unequivo- 
 
WHITTIER AND LOWELL 243 
 
 cally on its side required a courage quite unneeded 
 for partisanship in the political issues known to our 
 day. 
 
 The question of slavery ceased so long ago to be 
 a question at all, that it is well-nigh impossible for 
 the younger generation to-day to acquire the point of 
 view in which the opponents of the institution were 
 once regarded very much as anarchists and social 
 outlaws. It has been well said by Professor Wen 
 dell : " Perhaps the closest analogy which we can 
 imagine to-day to the Abolitionists of 1833 would 
 be a body of earnest. God-fearing men who should 
 be convinced that God bade them cry out against 
 the institution of marriage." Indeed, it may be 
 doubted whether such a body of men would not be 
 held in greater tolerance to-day, at least so far as their 
 writings and their persons are concerned. As late 
 as 1 842 it was thus that Longfellow s slender pam 
 phlet of Poems on Slavery was received by Graham s 
 Magazine, then one of the leading literary periodicals 
 of the country : the editor printed a guarded notice 
 of it, and justified himself by writing to Longfellow 
 that " the word slavery was never allowed to appear 
 in a Philadelphia periodical, and the publisher ob 
 jected to have even the name of the book appear in 
 his pages." In person, moreover, the antislavery 
 men were far less safe than on paper. In 1835 
 Whittier, in company with George Thompson, an 
 English Abolitionist, was mobbed in Concord, New 
 
244 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 Hampshire. For Thompson s ears three thousand 
 dollars were offered in one place ; in New Orleans 
 a purse of twenty thousand dollars was publicly 
 made up as a reward for his person. When he was 
 to lecture in Boston a vessel was waiting to carry 
 him to the South, if the following placard, posted 
 all over the town, should result in his seizure : 
 
 THOMPSON, THE ABOLITIONIST. 
 
 u That infamous foreign scoundrel, Thompson, will 
 hold forth this afternoon at the Liberator Office, No. 48, 
 Washington Street. The present is a fair opportunity for 
 the friends of the Union to snake Thompson out. It will 
 be a contest between the Abolitionists and the friends of 
 the Union. A purse of one hundred dollars has been raised 
 by a number of patriotic citizens to reward the individual 
 who shall first lay violent hands on Thompson, so that he 
 may be brought to the tar-kettle before dark. Friends of 
 the Union, be vigilant ! " 
 
 It would be easily possible to multiply illustra 
 tions of the sentiment which the opponents of slav 
 ery had to face, and even to show that the 
 influences from which the strongest help might 
 have been expected the church, the press, and 
 respectable private opinion were the last to exert 
 themselves in favour of the views which were 
 finally to prevail. But it is needed here merely 
 to indicate the strenuousness of the cause which 
 brought Lowell and Whittier to stand for an im- 
 
OF THB 
 
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WHITTIER AND LOWELL 245 
 
 portant period of their lives upon common ground. 
 Their approach to this ground and their departure 
 from it were by utterly different routes, and the 
 ultimate place they have attained is remote, in a 
 greater and less degree, from that of partisans in 
 any cause. Yet what they brought to the national 
 problem, found in it, and carried away from it, 
 might well form the -basis for a comparative study 
 of their lives. This account of them would exceed 
 all bounds if it should attempt such a study. So 
 abundant, indeed, are the records of the lives of these 
 two men, that it is hardly fair to the reader to assume 
 that the details need to be repeated with any minute 
 ness. Perhaps he will prefer to be reminded of 
 certain salient points, and to this end will not be 
 unwilling to regard Whittier and Lowell at several 
 separated periods of their careers. 
 
 The life of John Greenleaf Whittier was not lack 
 ing in picturesque moments. From those of his 
 boyhood may be chosen one in the nineteenth year 
 from his birth at Haverhill, Mass., on December 
 iyth, 1807. On a summer day of 1826 he was 
 mending a wall by the roadside with his father, 
 when the postman, riding past, threw him a copy of 
 the weekly Free Press of Newburyport. The boy 
 opened it, and stood spellbound at the sight of 
 some verses of his own in the " Poet s Corner." 
 Without his knowledge they had been sent to the 
 paper by his elder sister, who did not share her 
 
246 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 father s opinion that Greenleaf s habit of verse- 
 making was wholly wasteful of precious time. 
 When he was about fourteen, good fortune had put 
 a copy of Burns into his hands, and the New Eng 
 land boy s response, like the New England poet s 
 constant allegiance, to the Scottish singer marked 
 an essential sympathy in their natures, underlying 
 the conspicuous contrasts in their lives. If one 
 youth on a farm could make verses, why not an 
 other, Whittier must have asked himself, and from 
 that time forward many of the moments he could 
 spare from his farmwork and rustic schooling were 
 given to the trial of his own wings. So strenuous 
 were the inheritances and surroundings of the 
 Quaker household into which he was born that the 
 gentler impulses of poetic musing might easily have 
 been checked, but for that blending of gentleness 
 with strenuousness which is the birthright of 
 Friends. In Whittier himself the qualities were 
 so notably blended, that there was a special fitness 
 in his bearing the name of Greenleaf, transmitted 
 from a Huguenot ancestor, on whose coat-of-arms 
 both a warrior s helmet and a dove bearing an olive 
 branch are said to have figured. To the strenuous 
 cause of antislavery, therefore, Whittier brought so 
 excellently tempered an inheritance, that he has 
 been justly called " perhaps the least irritating of 
 reformers." The relation between the antislavery 
 cause and those early printed verses, at which he 
 
WHITTIER AT 29. 
 After a painting by Bass Otis. 
 
WHITTIER AND LOWELL 247 
 
 stared speechless until his father impatiently bade 
 him keep at his work, is not remote, for the editor 
 of the Free Press, who soon sought out his young 
 contributor, and urged the cultivation of his talents, 
 was none other than his lifelong friend and fellow- 
 worker, William Lloyd Garrison. 
 
 Twelve years after this first recognition of his 
 promise Whittier was to be seen under strangely 
 different circumstances. In May of 1838 a mob 
 in Philadelphia attacked and burned " Pennsylvania 
 Hall," a building erected, at the cost of more than 
 forty thousand dollars, as the headquarters for work 
 on behalf of civil liberty. Whittier at the time 
 was the editor of an anti-slavery journal, the Penn 
 sylvania Freeman, which had its office in the Hall. 
 Knowing well that if he were seen in the crowd in 
 his proper person he would suffer violence without 
 attaining his purpose, he changed his ordinary 
 Quaker aspect by putting on a wig and a long 
 white overcoat, and, joining the mob which was sack 
 ing his office, saved as many of his papers as he 
 could. The editors of antislavery papers were not 
 all unused to seeing their presses shattered and their 
 type thrown into the street or river. Whittier him 
 self, in his own New England, had narrowly escaped 
 tar and feathers. Mud, stones, sticks, and eggs of 
 the age which qualifies them as missiles he had not 
 escaped. But before joining his fortunes with those 
 of antislavery he had deliberately counted the cost. 
 
248 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 In later life he advised a boy, "if thou wouldst 
 win success, join thyself to some unpopular, but 
 noble cause." The giving of advice, however, is a 
 different thing from courting the experience which 
 prompts it, and what the embracing of an " unpop 
 ular, but noble cause " meant to Whittier was the 
 strict limitation of high political ambitions. The 
 varied editorial experiences, in Boston, Hartford, 
 and Haverhill, which followed the short term of 
 study after the discovery of his talents by Garrison, 
 gave him good reason to think that he might excel 
 either in politics or in literature. But in 1833 ne 
 wrote from Haverhill to Mrs. Sigourney in Hart 
 ford, " I have found that my political reputation is 
 more influential than my poetical ; so I try to 
 make myself a man of the world and the public 
 are deceived, but / am not." So slender a store 
 of health had the " toughening process " of Whit- 
 tier s youth left for his manhood, that it could not 
 have seemed possible for him at that time to attain 
 distinction in both directions. The mere fact, how 
 ever, that at the age of thirty he went to Philadel 
 phia, where he remained till 1840, as the editor of 
 the Freeman, indicates the regard in which he was 
 held by his fellows in the agitation against slavery. 
 Quaker that he was, he could never advocate war, 
 yet with his own weapons he fought ferociously. 
 To the zeal with which he plied one weapon, the 
 great body of Anti-Slavery Poems in his collected 
 
WHITTIER AND LOWELL 249 
 
 works bears witness. The weapon of shrewd, high- 
 minded politics was no less effective in his hands. 
 So pre-eminently do we regard him now as the 
 poet that it is difficult to realise how telling were 
 his labours, not only as a member of the Massachu 
 setts General Court in 1835 an< ^ l $36> but as a 
 quiet power, through a long succeeding period, in 
 the political counsels of the parties in which he 
 believed successively as competent to advance the 
 interests to which his life was devoted. In the full 
 record of his life, by Mr. S. T. Pickard, it is pecu 
 liarly interesting to learn how intimately the politi 
 cal fortunes of men so prominent as Caleb Cushing, 
 Sumner, Fremont, and indirectly Lincoln, were 
 affected by the opinions and actions of Whittier. 
 As the disguised Quaker, accomplishing his own 
 ends undetected of the angry crowd, Whittier pre 
 sented in one evening a type of his life through 
 many years. The phase of it thus recalled is not 
 that which is best remembered, but to forget it is to 
 forget a vital element of his completeness. 
 
 When Whittier gave up the editorship of the 
 Pennsylvania Freeman, in 1840, he fell into the 
 mode of life which remained practically unchanged 
 for more than fifty years. In 1836 he had sold the 
 Haverhill farm, and established himself with his 
 mother and sister in the village of Amesbury. 
 Hither he retired from Philadelphia in a broken 
 condition of health, which rendered the remainder 
 
250 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 of his life uniformly quiet. There were frequent 
 periods in which he could not read or write for more 
 than half an hour at a time. " I dread to touch a 
 pen," he once wrote to a friend. " Whenever I do 
 it increases the dull, wearing pain in my head, 
 which I am scarcely ever free from." When he was 
 but forty he could truly say, " I have already lived a 
 long life, if thought and action constitute it. I have 
 crowded into a few years what should have been 
 given to many." It was not, however, for him " to 
 rust unburnish d," for the very circumstances which 
 put an end to some of his activities quickened 
 others. Indeed, the poet as now we know him 
 best could hardly have been developed through a 
 continuance of his early labours. 
 
 In the long life still to be lived there was no 
 dearth of stimulus to the meditative, spiritual ele 
 ments of his nature, and to the expression of all 
 the gentler, intimate spirit of New England, of 
 which his poems are peculiarly the voice. His 
 domestic life was marked by singular simplicity and 
 affection. The death of his mother, at the end of 
 1857, left him for nearly seven years in a devoted 
 relationship with his sister Elizabeth, like himself 
 unmarried, and not unlike the sisters of Lamb and 
 Renan in the place she held in her brother s heart. 
 When she died, in 1864, Whittier wrote, "The 
 great motive of life seems lost ; " but friends and 
 kindred did not suffer him to want for affection and 
 
I 
 
 From an etching of a photograph taken about 1880. 
 
OF THB 
 
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WHITTIER AND LOWELL 251 
 
 care. Of his capability for friendships with men his 
 Personal Poems speak with clearness, and many a 
 one might have written as Bayard Taylor wrote to 
 Fields when " The Tent on the Beach " appeared : 
 " How pleasantly you and I will float down to pos 
 terity, each holding on to the strong swimmer, 
 J. G. W. ! " There are abundant memorials also 
 of his friendships with women, especially Mrs. 
 Child, Mrs. Fields, Lucy Larcom, Celia Thaxter, 
 and Gail Hamilton, who cleverly wrought him in 
 the war-time a pair of slippers typical of his bearing 
 toward the conflict. The bellicose American eagle 
 which adorned each foot held in its talons a cluster 
 of thunderbolts, but the colour of his plumage was 
 a Quaker drab. A joke was not easily lost on 
 Whittier, for a Yankee gift and sense of humour 
 came to him as directly as his other inheritances. 
 The marks of appreciation and honour flowing 
 from widely various sources in his later years more 
 than offset the indignities to which the young 
 antislavery agitator was subjected. He died on 
 September yth, 1892, at the house of a friend at 
 Hampton Falls, New Hampshire, leaving Dr. 
 Holmes as the sole survivor of the group of New 
 Englanders who had done more than any other 
 body of men for American letters. In the death of 
 Whittier, a voice, clear to the last, truly and broadly 
 representative both of his region and of his coun 
 try, was hushed. 
 
252 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 Even to suggest in a brief space all the achieve 
 ments of a life of eighty-five industrious years is 
 next to impossible. Still more foolhardy were the 
 attempt to point out all the qualities of the work 
 which remains as its monument. The best of it is 
 too familiar to require comment. One could almost 
 wish " Barbara Frietchie " and " Maud Muller " 
 like tunes that lose their charm from too much repe 
 tition less familiar. But " Snowbound," which 
 many agree upon as Whittier s masterpiece, " In 
 School Days," " Ichabod," " My Psalm," and the 
 dozen or dozens of other poems which other tastes 
 will elect, could ill be spared from the pages of our 
 literature ; nay, the best of them could not be 
 spared at all. When Whittier fails of his best, his 
 artistic faults are not far to seek. Still farther from 
 the beaten ways of books, however, are his sweet 
 ness and purity of spiritual sense, his faithfulness to 
 simple and true standards of living, and his hatred 
 of wrong, however strongly entrenched. In such 
 qualities as these he and his work make their quiet 
 claim to abiding remembrance. v 
 
 James Russell Lowell indicated clearly the differ 
 ence between himself and the class of men known 
 primarily as reformers when he wrote to a friend : 
 " Reform cannot take up the whole of me, and I 
 am quite sure that eyes were given us to look about 
 us with sometimes, and not always to be looking 
 forward." Your complete reformer is generally a 
 
WHITTIER AT 78. 
 From an engraving by J. A. J. Wilcox. 
 
or THB 
 
 XWJVERSITT 
 
WHITTIER AND LOWELL 253 
 
 man of one idea. Whittier was by no means alto 
 gether such an one, and if Lowell had even more of 
 the mellowness which belongs to the fruit of richer 
 soils, the difference between the men is sufficiently 
 explained by the circumstances of their ancestry and 
 training. Lowell s inheritances from many genera 
 tions, were of the best that New England could give 
 to its children. His father, the Rev. Charles Low 
 ell, lovingly described by Lowell as " Dr. Primrose 
 in the comparative degree," was for more than fifty 
 years minister of the West Church, occupying the 
 building now used as the West End Branch of the 
 Public Library, in Boston. He lived at Elmwood, 
 in Cambridge, four miles away from his church, and 
 here his more famous son, the youngest of five chil 
 dren, was born on February 22nd, 1819. It is easy to 
 fill in the background of the boy s life in a scholarly 
 family of high standing in the college town. When 
 the time for him to graduate from Harvard drew 
 near, his course of reading everything except the 
 books prescribed by the faculty brought about his 
 rustication at Concord until Commencement Day, 
 and the Class Poem of 1838 was not read by its 
 author. When he was a professor himself he 
 asked one of his class in Dante, who was anxious 
 to know his marks, what he thought he really de 
 served, and when the youth named a figure which 
 would pass him in his examination, Lowell answered, 
 " You may take it, and I shan t have the bother of 
 
254 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 reading your book." Under such treatment he 
 would doubtless have been with his fellows on Class 
 Day. Both the earlier and the later incident point 
 to the fact that Lowell s nature had a place for other 
 qualities than the strenuousness of the mere re 
 former. So various, indeed, were his endowments 
 that at different stages of his career he was to be 
 seen in widely different lights. 
 
 In 1848, ten years after graduating from college, 
 he published three pieces of writing which spoke for 
 three distinct elements in the man as he already was, 
 and foreshadowed what he was still more conspicu 
 ously to become. It was a broadly diversified expres 
 sion of a single nature to bring forth in one year The 
 Vision of Sir Launfal, The Fable for Critics, and the 
 first series of The Eiglow Papers, which had been 
 appearing for about two years in periodicals. In 
 the first of these three productions a poet spoke, in 
 the second a wit who was also a penetrating critic 
 of literature, in the third a wit, too, but at the same 
 time a patriot, a scholar overflowing with recondite 
 lore, and a shrewd interpreter of New England 
 character. The ten years which had passed since 
 Lowell s graduation had contributed to his develop 
 ment in all these directions. First of all, after he 
 had tried manfully to devote himself to the law, it 
 became clear to him and his friends that literature 
 must be the vital concern of his life. In 1840 he 
 had become engaged to Miss Maria White, who 
 
LOWELL AT 24. 
 From an engraving of the portrait by W. Page. 
 
or THB 
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WHITTIER AND LOWELL 255 
 
 was gifted not only with poetic talents, but with a 
 nature of sensitive response to the spirit of reform 
 that had begun to fill the air. The effect of this 
 nature upon Lowell s was to quicken both the poet 
 and the citizen in him. His first volume of poems 
 appeared soon after his engagement, and his second 
 before his marriage in 1844. In the intervening 
 period the Abolitionists, of whom at nineteen he 
 wrote that they " are the only ones with whom I 
 sympathise of the present extant parties," had 
 learned to recognise the value of his services as a 
 writer, and the first winter of his married life was 
 passed in Philadelphia, in an editorial connection 
 with the Pennsylvania Freeman, which had drawn 
 Whittier also from New England. In Cambridge 
 again, Lowell began in 1846 a four years* service as 
 a regular contributor to the Anti-Slavery Standard of 
 New York, in which some of the first Eiglow Papers 
 originally appeared. Meanwhile, in his private 
 capacity he was leading the life which permitted 
 him to speak of himself in later years as " one of 
 the last of the great readers," and a volume of Con 
 versations on Some of the Old Poets, published in 
 1845, was the fruit of it. In addition to all this, 
 the ripening experiences of personal joy and sorrow, 
 and the feeling toward friends which always made 
 him care more that they should esteem him highly 
 than think well of what he wrote, had helped to form 
 the writer of the three remarkable books of 1848. 
 
256 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 It is little strange that such a man, not yet thirty 
 years old, should feel within himself a sure, though 
 unaggressive, confidence of achieving still greater 
 things. 
 
 The Lowell at whom we look in 1858 goes by 
 the dignified titles of Professor in Harvard College 
 and Editor of the Atlantic Monthly, then completing 
 its first year of existence. A letter written by Long 
 fellow, in 1855, says that Lowell "astonished the 
 town last winter with a course of lectures on Poetry. 
 Whereupon the college immediately laid hold of 
 him and made him my successor." Lowell felt 
 himself to be " not the stuff that professors are 
 made of," believed that he would have been " a 
 more poetical poet " if he had never become a pro 
 fessor, and called his college work " my annual dis 
 satisfaction of lecturing." But it was an annual 
 delight to the undergraduates, whose relations with 
 him were frequently as human as they were aca 
 demic. The outer world also owed much to the 
 professorship, for it led him more than ever to the 
 pursuit of congenial studies with a view to sharing 
 with others his pleasure in them. It is doubtful, 
 however, whether all the essays, which stand alike 
 for his scholarship and his mastery of English style, 
 would have come into being if he had not been also 
 an editor, first of the Atlantic Monthly , and then, with 
 Mr. Charles Eliot Norton, of the North American 
 Review. In the pages of these periodicals many of 
 
a 
 o 
 
 a 
 
 o 
 
 ffi 
 
WHITTIER AND LOWELL 257 
 
 Lowell s prose writings first appeared, for those were 
 days in which the editor of a magazine was expected 
 to be one of its chief contributors. When the Atlan 
 tic was begun, who but Lowell could be its editor ? 
 The time was ripe for banding together the writers 
 of New England in an enterprise which should not 
 be merely " literary," but should bring the strongest 
 literary forces of the country to bear upon the 
 problem which had to be solved in the end by war. 
 Lowell was eminently of the craft of writers, emi 
 nently a skilful judge of the writings of others, and 
 eminently competent to use his own pen in the 
 interest of Northern sentiments. With such a 
 company of contributors as he had at his elbow, it 
 was not difficult for the right man to giv.e the mag 
 azine the place it took at once, but the contributors 
 were hardly more essential to this than the right 
 man, and that man was Lowell. 
 
 The decade between 1848 and 1858 wrought its 
 greatest changes in Lowell s domestic surroundings, 
 changes which he was not unwilling to record in 
 such verses as "After the Burial," written in 1850 
 upon the death of a daughter. In 1847 n ^ s ^ rst 
 child had died, and in 1852, while he was travelling 
 in Europe, partly in hope that Mrs. Lowell s broken 
 strength and spirit might be restored, the loss of 
 their only son befell them at Rome. From this 
 grief Mrs. Lowell never recovered, and before the 
 end of 1853, about a year after their return, she 
 
258 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 died at Elmwood. When Lowell was appointed to 
 the Harvard professorship, he made a second visit 
 of a year to Europe, for the purpose of study. A 
 year after his return in 1856, his second marriage 
 to Miss Frances Dunlap, who had been entrusted 
 with the education of his one surviving daughter 
 took place, and the relationship which lasted through 
 nearly thirty years of his life was begun. Dates 
 and figures give but a bloodless record of affections 
 so strong as Lowell s. Because they were also most 
 tender, one does not wish to say more about them. 
 
 To know of Lowell in the war-time, it is needless 
 to look beyond his poems. In "The Washers of 
 the Shroud " he is seen at the beginning of the con 
 flict, looking forward. The second series of the 
 Biglow Papers, which he himself thought better than 
 the first, carries us through its course, and into the 
 troublous period that followed. The noble " Com 
 memoration Ode " marks the ending of the war 
 itself. Lowell could not bring himself to begin the 
 ode until two days before it was to be read, when 
 " something," as he said, "gave me a jog, and the 
 whole thing came out of me with a rush." The 
 memory of his nephews who had been killed, " three 
 likely lads ez wal could be," burned within him, 
 and the truth of Mr. Henry James s remark, that 
 " the man and the author in him were singularly 
 convertible," has no firmer support than in this in 
 stance of his attaining almost his highest poetical 
 
LOWELL AT 3 I . 
 From an engraving by J. A. J. Wilcox. 
 
OF TH* 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
WHITTIER AND LOWELL 259 
 
 expression when stirred in his deepest personal 
 feelings. 
 
 It remains to look at Lowell in still another im 
 portant aspect, that of Minister of the United States, 
 under the administration of President Hayes, at the 
 Court of St. James. Even regarding the shorter 
 time of service at Madrid in the same capacity as a 
 step of transition, the change from Cambridge to 
 London was abrupt. But Lowell, through actual 
 sojournings abroad almost as much as in his "fire 
 side travels," had long been a citizen of the world, 
 and it was no surprise to those who knew him that 
 the less cloistral life of London seemed hardly more 
 foreign to him than Elmwood. " The true reward 
 of an English style," Mr. James has characteristi 
 cally said, "was to be sent to England." A young 
 English poet, writing in prose not long ago, con 
 trasted Emerson s philosophical mission, Haw 
 thorne s mission of silence, and Dr. Holmes s 
 mission of dining with Lowell s coming pre-emi 
 nently as " his Excellency the Ambassador of 
 American Literature to the Court of Shakespeare." 
 It is not impossible that Mr. Watson was uncon 
 sciously recalling and expanding the title which 
 Thackeray gave to Washington Irving. Be that 
 as it may, the fitness of Lowell for his post was in 
 stantly recognised in England, and his personal 
 popularity won even the tribute of distrust from the 
 loudest disciples of " Americanism " at home. How 
 
260 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 sure he must have been that his English friends, 
 who never could have enough of his after-dinner 
 and " occasional " speaking, would not misunder 
 stand him, may be inferred from his saying to the 
 Master and Fellows of Emmanuel College, Cam 
 bridge, John Harvard s alma mater: "I must 
 allow that, considering how long we have been 
 divided from you, you speak English remarkably 
 well." So far was Lowell from ceasing to be even 
 aggressively an American, that Mr. G. W. Smalley, 
 who reports this last remark, quotes the words of 
 an English lady who said : " Hawthorne insulted 
 us all by saying all English women are fat, but I 
 dare not say in Mr. Lowell s presence that an 
 American woman is thin." The truth is that 
 Lowell constantly expressed his nationality in Eng 
 land as clearly as he had expressed it at home in 
 such lines as "Jonathan to John," but with the 
 difference which the different circumstances de 
 manded. Dr. Holmes had written to him in 1876 
 to thank him not only for a volume of his essays, 
 but also for showing " our young American schol 
 ars that they need not be provincial in their way 
 of thought or scholarship because they happen to 
 be born or bred in an outlying district of the great 
 world of letters." It was but another evidence of 
 the convertibility of man and author in Lowell that 
 his public life set forth conspicuously a similar 
 absence of all provincialism in the best product of 
 
WHITTIER AND LOWELL 261 
 
 our civilisation. When any representative of a 
 government brings both his own and a foreign 
 people to a better understanding of their relations 
 to each other, he does his country the service of 
 a patriot. To this work, Lowell gave his riper 
 powers, as he had given his younger zeal to the 
 cause in which he thought he could best serve his 
 native land. 
 
 When President Cleveland came into power, in 
 1885, it was inevitable that Lowell s place in Lon 
 don should be taken by another. He returned 
 to America full of honours, but could not yet re 
 turn to Elmwood, for his wife had died in London, 
 and the old house, he thought, would be " full of 
 ghosts." His winters, therefore, were divided be 
 tween Boston and the " Deerfoot Farm " of his 
 son-in-law at Southborough, Massachusetts, and 
 the early and late summers between London and 
 Whitby, on the Yorkshire coast. When his 
 grandsons were to enter Harvard his daughter s 
 family came to Elmwood to live, and Lowell 
 came with them. There he died on August i2th, 
 1891. 
 
 The quality in Lowell which Mr. Leslie Stephen 
 has defined as " his ineradicable boyishness " kept 
 him at heart very much the same person from the 
 beginning to the end of his life of seventy-two years. 
 It helped him always to make light of unessential 
 troubles. Soon after he was first married, Mrs. 
 
262 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 Lowell wrote to Mrs. Hawthorne, " I begin to 
 fear we shall not have the satisfaction of being so 
 very poor, after all." At times her fears were not 
 realised, but they were the times when Lowell, in 
 letters to his friends, could give the most amusing 
 accounts of his condition. Once when he was in 
 Europe he told his bankers to let him know when 
 his money was spent, for then he meant to go 
 home. He had no accounts of his own to tell 
 him, and an error in the banker s accounts brought 
 his visit prematurely to an end. But in later years 
 the bankers made good his disappointment by a 
 profitable investment of the sum which really had 
 remained to his credit, and Lowell made the inci 
 dent a text for a humourous denunciation of all 
 accounts and figures. Humourous and enthusiastic, 
 companionable and sympathetic, he was the best of 
 friends, and the life of congenial assemblies. From 
 London he wrote to Mr. Norton, " I have never 
 seen society, on the whole, so good as I used to 
 meet at our Saturday Club." What wit and spirit 
 he brought to its meetings the testimony of others 
 informs us. What memories he was capable of 
 carrying away with him, one may find recorded in 
 his Elegy on Agassiz, in which it is as easy to 
 find the lines relating to Emerson, Hawthorne and 
 others as if their names were given. Here, indeed, 
 as everywhere in his writings, Lowell himself stands 
 revealed. His authoritative Life remains to be 
 
From an engraving by J. A. J. Wilcox. 
 
WHITTIER AND LOWELL 263 
 
 written, but when it is done it will be almost as 
 so brief a paper as this must be altogether a 
 superfluous piece of reading for one who has made 
 the direct acquaintance of Lowell through his 
 poems, his essays, and his letters. 
 
 The contrast between the lives of Whittier and 
 Lowell prepares one for precisely the contrasts that 
 may be drawn between the work of the one and the 
 other, both in quality and in scope. The differ 
 ences are obvious, but beneath them all, like the 
 family likeness of brothers whose features are widely 
 unlike, the resemblance they bear to each other is 
 that of true sons of older New England, and they 
 show themselves at times to be close, of kin. Their 
 most striking outward resemblance lay in their atti 
 tude in early life toward the cause of antislavery. 
 To see two men for whom the later years held such 
 different things in store joined at any time in a 
 common warfare helps us truly to realise the vitality 
 of the uniting cause. The change in the attitude 
 of a whole nation towards a cause which has ceased 
 to exist, except as history, may not unfitly be 
 likened to the change that sometimes comes to a 
 fleet of boats lying quietly at sundown in a crowded 
 harbour, and heading all in one direction. In the 
 night a sharp wind comes out of a new quarter, and 
 there is a great confusion of swinging vessels ; but 
 in the morning the fleet is seen pointing as peace 
 fully in a new direction as if nothing had happened. 
 
264 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 The difference in the change of a national attitude 
 is that the lives and the writings of such men as 
 Lowell and Whittier help us to recall the turmoil 
 of the night as something more than a sleepy re 
 membrance. 
 
LONGFELLOW AND HOLMES 
 
 FEW of us know at first hand the music of 
 shepherds, sailors, and gipsies ; yet certain 
 strains and cadences unfailingly bring the images 
 of these persons before the mind, even without the 
 visual aid which opera provides. The notes by 
 which we recognise them have become a part of 
 musical tradition. So have the personalities of 
 Longfellow and Holmes, to say nothing of the notes 
 of their music, become virtually traditional. Their 
 habits of thought and expression entered long ago 
 into the common stock of accepted knowledge. It 
 has been said by Mr. Andrew Lang of Longfellow, 
 and the words may be applied with hardly less of 
 accuracy to Dr. Holmes, that his " qualities are so 
 mixed with what the reader brings, with so many 
 kindliest associations of memory, that one cannot 
 easily criticise him in cold blood." If such a pro 
 ceeding is difficult, there is the double difficulty, in 
 dealing with the personal records of the two writers, 
 that their lives are at once singularly well known 
 and singularly uneventful, It is almost like reciting 
 
266 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 certain of their own most familiar lines to relate 
 anew the incidents of their careers. The knowledge 
 of them must be well-nigh universal, so that the 
 narrator can do little more than to refrain, if possi 
 ble, from such traditional phrases as " the genial 
 autocrat" and "the beloved poet of Cambridge, * 
 and content himself with saying again what many 
 of his readers must know already. 
 
 The contrast between the volumes containing the 
 complete works of Longfellow and of Holmes is 
 strong enough to speak for the contrast between 
 their native endowments. Indeed, there would be 
 scanty reason for placing their names side by side 
 were it not that the backgrounds of their lives pre 
 sent resemblances many and marked. In modern 
 American life there can hardly be a social unit 
 so definite and distinct as that which stood for 
 " society " in Boston in the days when Longfellow 
 and Holmes were in their long-continued prime. 
 Their background, to a striking degree, was the 
 background of this social unit, their Boston, of 
 course, being that which stretches toward Cambridge 
 and Harvard College, rather than toward State 
 Street and the wharves. If for stricter accuracy it 
 must be said that for Longfellow it was Cambridge, 
 on the contrary, that stretched itself toward Boston, 
 it is necessary only to remember that the best intel 
 lectual and social interests of the two places were 
 one. It was not for the persons identified most 
 
LONGFELLOW AS A YOUNG MAN. 
 
LONGFELLOW AND HOLMES 267 
 
 strongly with these conservative interests to be seen 
 in the front ranks of such Cf movements " as Aboli 
 tion and Transcendentalism. Emerson and Lowell 
 took greater liberties in being laws unto themselves. 
 Lowell could undoubtedly see the truth and humour 
 of his wife s remark about Abolitionists : " They do 
 not modulate their words and voices. They are 
 like people who live with the deaf, or near water 
 falls, and whose voices become high and harsh." 
 At the same time Lowell could become early and 
 heartily an Abolitionist, Longfellow less promptly 
 and completely, and Holmes not at all. Perhaps 
 this is but an evidence of the fact that Holmes and 
 Longfellow stood supreme amongst their brother 
 hood of writers in their identification with the social 
 world in which they found themselves. It was a 
 world which cared not a whit whether Bohemia was 
 bounded by the sea or by mountains, which was 
 sufficient unto itself, which restricted its travels to 
 foreign lands unless now and then a lecturing 
 tour had to be made in America and withal it 
 was a world from which sordidness and low ideals 
 were excluded with rare success. It is no more dif 
 ficult to discover its limitations in certain directions 
 than it is to find entertainment in the unfailing ap 
 pearance of one member of its group of writers with 
 a copy of verses when another member was about 
 to sail for Europe ; yet this larger world of " soci 
 ety " and its smaller imperium in imperio of letters, 
 
268 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 were fruits of American life which one would be 
 only too glad to see still ripening in any quarter of 
 the land. That this fruitage should take two such 
 different forms as those presented by the work of 
 Longfellow and of Holmes is not the least signifi 
 cant point in placing them together against their 
 common background. 
 
 It was not until the year 1836, when Longfellow 
 was but little short of thirty years old, that he found 
 himself before this background. He had ancestral 
 rights to being there. His father and great-grand 
 father were graduates of Harvard College, and 
 through his mother s family his descent from John 
 Alden and Priscilla Mullins was as direct as Bryant s. 
 But the Boston and Cambridge surroundings were 
 not those of his earlier years. He was born on 
 February 27, 1807, in Portland, Maine, where his 
 father was a distinguished lawyer, and in 1825, with 
 Hawthorne for a classmate, he was graduated from 
 Bowdoin College. During his college years the 
 tendency toward books and verse-making, which had 
 begun early in his well-conditioned boyhood, was 
 clearly enough marked to reveal unmistakable signs 
 of his future both to himself and to his elders. 
 " The fact is," he wrote to his father before his 
 graduation, " I most eagerly aspire after future emin 
 ence in literature; my whole soul burns most 
 ardently for it, and every earthly thought centres in 
 it." That his elders were not without hopes of this 
 
LONGFELLOW AT 47. 
 From an engraving of a crayon portrait by Lawrence. 
 
OF THB 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
LONGFELLOW AND HOLMES 269 
 
 future may be inferred from the encouragement 
 given him by the editors of the day to send them 
 his productions in prose and verse. Still more 
 encouraging to him must have been the proffer, 
 immediately upon his graduation, of the newly estab 
 lished Professorship of Modern Languages at Bow- 
 doin College, with the opportunity of studying in 
 Europe before his duties should begin. 
 
 In yet another of his college letters to his father 
 Longfellow declared : " I have resolutely deter 
 mined to enjoy myself heartily wherever I am. I 
 find it most profitable to form such plans as are 
 least liable to failure." These statements might 
 almost be taken from a credo of optimism. They 
 were the words of a boy, but of the very boy who 
 became the Longfellow of later years. In the letters 
 which he wrote from Europe, between the ages of 
 nineteen and twenty-two, the connecting links be 
 tween the boy and the man are clearly apparent. A 
 shrewdness of observation, a kindliness of humour 
 hardly consistent with its utmost keenness, and a 
 thorough good feeling for those about him and at 
 home are constantly manifested. What strikes one, 
 perhaps even more forcibly, is the fact that this boy 
 from a quiet New England town and college was so 
 excellently well qualified to travel. His mind was 
 already well enough trained to tell his eye what it 
 needed most to see, and his serious study of the lit 
 eratures of France, Spain, Italy and Germany, car- 
 
270 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 ried on for three years in their own countries, ren 
 dered this mind indeed a well-tempered instrument 
 for the work it had to do when he returned to Bow- 
 doin College in 1829. 
 
 Early in 1829 he had written from Gottingen to 
 one of his sisters, " My poetic career is finished," 
 and for some years nobody would have questioned 
 the truth of the statement. Except for the poetical 
 translation of Cop/as de Mdnrique, the writings of 
 the five years of his Bowdoin professorship were in 
 prose magazine articles, text-books of French, 
 Spanish, and Italian, and the sketches of travel 
 brought together in 1835 m tne two volumes of 
 Outre-Mer. The kinship of this first original pro 
 duction of his with Irving s Sketch-Book is almost 
 invariably pointed out ; and when this is done, it is 
 worth while to remind one s self that Longfellow, in 
 his later years, is reported to have spoken of the 
 Sketch-Book as the first book that fascinated his boy 
 ish imagination. It was less as a poet, then, than as 
 a scholar and a writer of good prose that he was 
 asked in 1834, to undertake the Professorship of 
 Modern Languages at Harvard, in which his pre 
 decessor was George Ticknor, and his successor 
 Lowell. There was again an opportunity to go 
 abroad for further study, and he eagerly accepted it. 
 With him went his wife (Mary Storer Potter), whom 
 he had married in Portland in 1831. In Sweden 
 and Denmark and Germany he applied himself to 
 
LONGFELLOW AND HOLMES 271 
 
 study as in his earlier days. Before the end of 1835 
 the first great sorrow of his life came to him in the 
 death of his wife at Rotterdam. In the Paul Flem- 
 ming of Hyperion, published four years later, the 
 Longfellow of this heavy-hearted time revealed him 
 self with tolerable clearness. We need but com 
 pare the book with his journal and letters to see 
 how much of real life was reproduced in the form of 
 fiction. Even at the time it must have been a palp 
 ably open secret that the heroine of the story was 
 the heroine of the real and longer romance of Long 
 fellow s second marriage. It was not only through 
 study, therefore, but also through vital experience 
 that Longfellow s second sojourn abroad had its 
 telling effect upon him, both as a professor and as a 
 poet. At the end of 1836 he established himself in 
 Cambridge. " This was no broken-winded minis 
 ter," as Dr. Hale has said, "who had been made 
 professor ; " and Longfellow and the place in which 
 he found himself seemed from that time forth 
 inalienably fitted to each other. 
 
 This very year of 1836 was marked by the ap 
 pearance of Dr. Holmes s first volume of Poems ; 
 but to the surroundings into which Longfellow was 
 just coming, Dr. Holmes, like another St. Paul, 
 was born free. It gave him evident pleasure to re 
 late how his entry into the world at Cambridge, 
 Massachusetts, was marked by the simple record in 
 his father s almanac of son b. against the date August 
 
272 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 29th, 1809. As one who declared his preference 
 politically for equality, but socially for the quality, 
 it must have given him constant satisfaction to re 
 flect upon his ancestry, for it was about as good as 
 any which New England could afford, and gave 
 him an unquestioned place in the caste well 
 named by himself, Brahmin. His early training at 
 home, at Andover, and at Harvard College, where 
 he was graduated in the year which his verses for 
 the " Class of 29 " rendered famous, differed from 
 that of his contemporaries born to circumstances 
 like his own, mainly in its larger infusion of Calvin 
 ism. He began early to rebel against the doctrines 
 which his orthodox father, the Rev. Abiel Holmes, 
 would have had him accept, and never quite ceased 
 to resent the attempt to force them upon him. Evi 
 dently he was not to follow in his father s profes 
 sional footsteps. For a year he attempted the study 
 of the law, as Lowell did later ; but the best thing 
 he achieved during that time was the impetuous 
 writing of " Old Ironsides," which carried his name 
 up and down through the country. A college 
 periodical, as he said half a century later, also 
 tempted him into print, and infected him with that 
 pervasive form of lead-poisoning "which reaches 
 the young author through mental contact with type- 
 metal." Of his two mistresses, the muse and medi 
 cal science, it was thus the muse to whom he gave 
 his first allegiance. But medicine was soon to be- 
 
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES AT 41 
 After a Daguerreotype. 
 
\i -^ ff y 
 
 " OF TH* 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
LONGFELLOW AND HOLMES 273 
 
 come his serious occupation, and for three years 
 one at home and two in Paris he applied himself 
 diligently to professional study. At the beginning 
 of 1836 he was ready to hang out his sign in Bos 
 ton, but his medical success was to lie in the work 
 of a writer and lecturer rather than of a practitioner. 
 As his biographer, Mr. John T. Morse, Jr., has 
 admirably put it : " When he said that the smallest 
 fevers were thankfully received, the people who had 
 no fevers laughed, but the people who had them / 
 preferred some one who would take the matter more 
 seriously than they thought this lively young joker 
 was likely to do." Mr. Morse has also pointed 
 out the fact that his publishing a volume of poems 
 in the very year of his beginning to practise was, 
 professionally, reckless. If the book, however, had 
 contained nothing worth reading except " The Last 
 Leaf" and " Old Ironsides," it would have marked 
 the arrival of a new and distinct figure in American 
 letters. 
 
 Here, then, were Longfellow and Holmes, in the 
 year 1836 beginning their respective careers as a 
 Harvard professor and as a Boston physician and 
 writer of verses. Each was to become much more 
 in the years that followed, but for Holmes there was 
 to be a long period of comparatively limited fame. 
 Mr. Leslie Stephen has said of him, " Few popular 
 authors have had a narrower escape from obscurity," 
 and the remark is full of truth. It surely might be 
 
 18 
 
274 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 held as one of the genuine Ifs of literary history 
 that if the Atlantic Monthly had not come into being 
 in 1857, with Lowell as its chief editor, insisting as 
 
 ts s& 
 
 tfrvt? iffStZr a^t,<z 
 
 ^^^^-^7^ 
 
 AUTOGRAPH LINES FROM DR. HOLMES S POEM "THE LAST LEAF." 
 
 " a condition precedent " that Dr. Holmes should 
 be his foremost contributor, the " Breakfast-Table " 
 series of books, and Dr. Holmes^ novels, which 
 also first saw the light in the Atlantic, would have 
 
LONGFELLOW AT 55. 
 From an engraving of a portrait by G. P. A. Healy. 
 
LONGFELLOW AND HOLMES 275 
 
 stood an excellent chance of remaining unwritten. 
 To see the possible author of these books in the 
 Holmes of the twenty-one years between 1836 and 
 1857 required a shrewd vision. Many admirable 
 realities were visible to eyes less keen than Lowell s. 
 Not only as a writer of medical essays, but still 
 more as a professor of anatomy, first for two years 
 at Dartmouth College, and then for the better part 
 of a lifetime in the Medical School of Harvard Uni 
 versity, where he said he occupied not a chair, but 
 a whole settee, he did the things necessary to attain 
 a good name as a scientist. His lectures on the 
 English poets, and other literary themes, in Boston 
 and the New England towns where the lyceum 
 system flourished added something to the reputa 
 tion as a man of letters which he was making for 
 himself by the publication of successive volumes of 
 verse. But through all this time it was within his 
 own circle that his gifts were most fully appreciated. 
 His marriage, in 1840, to Miss Amelia Lee Jack 
 son had made this native circle doubly his own. If 
 it was provincial, none realised the fact better than 
 he. " We all carry the Common in our heads as 
 the unit of space/ he once wrote to Motley, " the 
 State House as the standard of architecture, and 
 measure off men in Edward Everetts as with a yard 
 stick ; " and less consciously he bears witness to his 
 nativity by writing of his health, " I am nicely." 
 But he was intensely proud of his Boston, and was 
 
276 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 yet to show by the literary uses to which he put it 
 how the local might be extended into the universal. 
 For himself, he declared in later life that he would 
 rest upon having said, " Boston is the hub of the 
 universe." And this Boston which he knew came 
 to know him well as a delightful wit and talker, a 
 curious student of himself so frank that he could 
 write, " I have always considered my face a conven 
 ience rather than an ornament " a shrewd observer 
 of men, and the local laureate of civic, social, and 
 academic " occasions." Nothing that he has left 
 shows more clearly than the " Poems of the Class 
 of 29 " the strength of his social instinct and the 
 nature of his social gift. Add to the printed lines 
 the knowledge that he frequently sang instead of 
 reading these verses at the class meetings, to which 
 he brought them without a break for thirty-eight 
 years, and the man and the lyric tendency of his 
 muse both stand forth with a certain clearness. It 
 is equally easy to see, however, that if the light in 
 Dr. Holmes s hand had continued to show itself 
 exclusively to those who for a long time were its 
 only witnesses, his escape from obscurity would not 
 have been narrow, but impossible. 
 
 When 1857 came to Longfellow, it found his 
 fame far beyond the need of such help as might 
 come to it through the medium of a new magazine. 
 From 1839, wnen Hyperion and his first volume of 
 poems, Voices of the Night , appeared, he had gone 
 
(Ar ^ 
 
 % ) n QA/Y/\_A_ i 1 i . 
 
 \ 
 
 
 From a photograph taken m Portland, Maine. 
 
OF TH 
 
 XTNIVERSITY 
 
LONGFELLOW AND HOLMES 277 
 
 on year by year bringing out the poems, short and 
 long, that carried his name and the love for the 
 books which bore it through most of the world. It 
 is needless to recite the list of these works, for they 
 are still household words. As early as 1847 came 
 Evangcline, raising among the critics the intermi 
 nable question of the possibility of English hexa 
 meters, a question which the unnumbered thousands 
 did not take time to answer, except by buying the 
 book and reading it with delight. Hawthorne had 
 provided him with the story, and when the book 
 won its immediate recognition, Longfellow modestly 
 wrote to him : cc This success I owe entirely to you, 
 for being willing to forego the pleasure of writing a 
 prose tale which many people would have taken for 
 poetry, that I might write a poem which many 
 people take for prose." In 1855 Hiawatha, which 
 may not unfairly be considered as Longfellow s most 
 individual production, took its separate place in 
 American literature. From time to time, through 
 out the entire period ending with 1857, a great 
 number of the shorter poems by which Longfellow 
 is best known made their appearance. For him the 
 chief effect of the establishment of the Atlantic 
 Monthly was external, in that it provided, virtually 
 at his door, a medium for almost anything he might 
 write. 
 
 It has become a truism to say that the serenity 
 of Longfellow s poetry was merely a reflection from 
 
il 
 
 4? 
 
 i 
 
 3 
 
 1 A 
 
 4 
 
 > -C OS 
 
 M 
 
 f4 ^ 
 
 I 
 
 
 
 O 
 
 w 
 
 J 
 
 1 
 
 g 
 
 ^ 
 
LONGFELLOW AND HOLMES 279 
 
 his own life. It is no less a threadbare story to tell 
 of the young professor s applying to Madam Craigie 
 for rooms in the house which had been Washing 
 ton s headquarters at Cambridge, and of her inform 
 ing him that she could take no more students as 
 lodgers. But her lodger he became, and in 1843, 
 when he married Miss Frances E. Appleton, of 
 Boston, her father bought the Craigie house and 
 gave it to the young professor and his wife. The 
 daily life encompassed by its walls is set forth with 
 sufficient detail in Longfellow s published journals. 
 It was a scholarly, placid life, filled with domestic 
 content, varied within its own limits by constant, 
 gracious hospitality and by journeyings in the sum 
 mer, for many years no farther than to Nahant. 
 There were few occasions for rebelling against cir 
 cumstances in such a life as Longfellow s, and the 
 notes of complaint in the journals are rare. Ill 
 ness, troublesome eyesight, the inroads of imper 
 tinent admirers and seekers after autographs and 
 advice, whom he treated with patient, tender consid 
 eration these sometimes gave him fair occasion 
 for protest. But most of all were his college duties 
 irksome " the working in the crypts of life, the 
 underground labour," as he defined his teaching. 
 The longing for greater freedom for literary produc 
 tion was gratified in 1855, when he gave up his pro 
 fessorship. Through all the ensuing period, in 
 which Dr. Holmes began to win his universal fame, 
 
280 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 Longfellow, already a firmly established " figure," 
 was merely fixing more securely the fame he had 
 won. " I do not see why a successful book " says 
 one of the characters in Hyperion, " is not as great 
 an event as a successful campaign." For the re 
 mainder of Longfellow s life the events were gener 
 ally of this character. 
 
 The tragic exception from the smoothness of 
 these years was the death of Mrs. Longfellow in the 
 summer of 1861. Her dress took fire from a match 
 on the floor, and the next day she died from the 
 shock of the burning. Longfellow, some weeks 
 later, defined himself as " outwardly calm, but in 
 wardly bleeding to death." What the loss of his 
 wife was to him we know best from the fact that the 
 only reference to it in his writings is found in the 
 sonnet, "The Cross of Snow," written eighteen 
 years after her death, and kept from the world until 
 after his own. As Bryant undertook the translation 
 of Homer, so Longfellow in his sorrow turned to 
 Dante. The evenings devoted to the criticism of 
 this work by Lowell, Mr. Norton, and other friends 
 whose opinion was worth getting, showed Long 
 fellow at his best, in the midst of friends. His 
 letters, throughout his life, tell us how much his 
 friendships were to him, even from the almost 
 boyish days, when Charles Sumner, George W. 
 Greene, and Samuel Ward first took their important 
 places in his life. It is not without a certain signifi- 
 
I 
 
 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE BREAKFAST TABLE/" 
 From Vanity Fair (London), June 19, 1886. 
 
of nit 
 
 TJNIVERSl IrT 
 
LONGFELLOW AND HOLMES 281 
 
 cance to find Mr. Howells saying that " he was 
 Longfellow to friends who were James and Charles 
 and Wendell to one another." For somewhat the 
 same reason, perhaps, it is easier for everybody to 
 speak of him merely as " Longfellow," than it is to 
 drop the " Dr." from before the name of Holmes. 
 The contrast between the men in the relations of 
 friendship is brought clearly to mind by comparing 
 the quality and frequency of Dr. Holmes s class 
 poems with Longfellow s single production of the 
 kind, his " Morituri Salutamus," written fifty years 
 after graduation. " Just before leaving for our re 
 spective homes," writes one of those who heard him 
 read it, " we gathered in a retired college-room for 
 the last time, talked together a half hour as of old, 
 agreed to exchange photographs, and prayed to 
 gether." The seriousness of this picture undoubt 
 edly had its counterpart in some of the later meetings 
 of Dr. Holmes s class ; but it would be impossible 
 to imagine Longfellow as the singer of the earlier 
 rollicking verses of Holmes. What the one said 
 of the other is this : " I find Longfellow peculiarly 
 sweet in disposition, gentle, soothing to be with, not 
 commonly brilliant in conversation, but at times 
 very agreeable, and saying excellent things with a 
 singular modesty." In another place he is described 
 by the same hand as " luminous with gentle graces 
 as always." Such expressions as these help one to 
 understand why the word " benignant " has so often 
 
282 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 been applied to him. In the personal quality of the 
 man there must have been much of the temper which 
 prompted him to write of Poe : " The harshness of 
 his criticisms I have never attributed to anything 
 but the irritation of a sensitive nature chafed by some 
 indefinite sense of wrong." And many years later 
 he wrote in his journal, as if in gentle protest : 
 " Poets who cannot write long poems think that 
 no long poems should be written." In Poe s pas 
 sionate charge of plagiarism there undoubtedly was 
 as much truth as Mr. Stedman expresses in calling 
 Longfellow " a good borrower/ and as any one 
 may see by looking at the obvious connection be 
 tween what Longfellow read and what he wrote. 
 But there was never any attempt to conceal this ob 
 viousness, any more than there was to refrain from 
 entering in his journal from year to year the same 
 reflection prompted by the date of October ist. 
 The obviousness of another sort which characterises 
 much of his work may well be mentioned in the 
 same breath with Mr. Stedman s just remark about 
 the fashion of slighting him " for the very qualities 
 which had made him beloved and famous," and with 
 his own saying that authors, of all men, must come 
 at the right time. Longfellow surely did this, and 
 if later singers are not permitted to deal so freely in 
 the obvious, may it not be in part because his unerr 
 ing craftsmanship has imposed upon them the need 
 of doing simple things extremely well if they are to 
 
LONGFELLOW AND HOLMES 283 
 
 be done at all ? So many gifts, not of craftsmanship 
 only, were his, and such was the spell of his personal 
 presence, that Mr. Howells could truly write of a 
 chance meeting with him in a Cambridge street, 
 " You felt that the encounter made you a part of 
 literary history." This feeling rendered it impos 
 sible for his contemporaries and their immediate 
 successors to give him his true place. Whether he 
 is held above it to-day, or has sunk below it, can 
 hardly be told with complete certainty, for the 
 Longfellow tradition is still potent to attract some 
 minds and to repel others. At the time of his death, 
 on March 24th, 1882, there were few voices of dis 
 sent from the opinion that the clearest and best- 
 beloved light of American letters was extinguished. 
 " Let em put in all their ifs and buts" wrote Lowell 
 once ; " I don t wonder the public are hungrier and 
 thirstier for his verse than for that of all the rest of 
 us put together." 
 
 The year of Longfellow s death was the very year 
 in which Dr. Holmes gave up his medical professor 
 ship, and became more than ever such a " figure " 
 as Longfellow had been. Fame had come to him 
 with extraordinary swiftness as soon as the " Auto 
 crat" papers, begun in the first number of the 
 Atlantic Monthly, November, 1857, were known to 
 be his. It would be so strange at this day to think 
 of ascribing their manner and method to anybody 
 else, that one is amused to find in the December, 
 
284 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 1857, number of the Knickerbocker Magazine the 
 statement : " If John Sanderson, author of c The 
 American in Paris/ were alive, we should unhesi 
 tatingly attribute c The Autocrat at the Breakfast 
 Table to his facile pen." The open secret in 
 Boston that Dr. Holmes was its author soon be 
 came open everywhere ; and particularly when the 
 second series, " The Professor at the Breakfast 
 Table/ dealing somewhat more freely with religious 
 beliefs, began to appear, the name of Holmes asso 
 ciated itself in many minds with everything that 
 was dangerous and iconoclastic. The mildness to 
 modern ears of many of the passages that seemed 
 most shocking forty years ago is more eloquent 
 than any words could be about that general temper 
 ing of rigorous beliefs in which Dr. Holmes was 
 undoubtedly one of the strongest influences. As 
 his habit of mind in this regard extended itself to 
 others, so did his more personal habits of thought 
 and phrase shrewd, whimsical, and kindly be 
 come year by year more familiar. In verse, in 
 fiction, not wholly clear of the charge of being 
 " medicated," in the memoirs of his friends, Motley 
 and Emerson, in the volume written to acknowledge 
 the overpowering attentions that filled his hundred 
 days of 1886 in Europe, and in later returns to 
 what Mr. Howells has excellently called " the form 
 of dramatised essay which he invented in the Auto 
 crat " in all these writings the personal Dr. 
 
From an etching by S. A. Schoff, 1879. 
 
LONGFELLOW AND HOLMES 285 
 
 Holmes is eminently present, " a Boswell writing 
 out himself." It is no wonder that the regard 
 in which Lowell and his own circle had long held 
 him in Boston spread, almost without modification, 
 to an entire world of readers. 
 
 Dr. Holmes died on October yth, 1894. Of all 
 the company of men who laid the scene of so much 
 of our literary history within and near Boston, it 
 was for him to walk farthest with the new genera 
 tion. But with his death a period which had virtu 
 ally ended some years before was brought to an 
 outward close. The work of what came as nearly 
 as anything we have had to being a " school " of 
 writers was definitely completed. What variety 
 within its general uniformity was possible, the two 
 names of Longfellow and Holmes abundantly 
 suggest. Yet diverse as they were, it is well worth 
 while to think of them together as representatives 
 in literature of all the good things that come of the 
 best birth and breeding, and of the scholarly high- 
 mindedness which should be implied by those terms. 
 " There is a little plant called Reverence in the 
 corner of my Soul s garden, which I love to have 
 watered about once a week ; " so Dr. Holmes once 
 said of his church-going habits. Not only would 
 Longfellow have spoken a hearty Amen to these 
 words, but their meaning for both might be so 
 extended as to include the general attitude of men 
 who are conservatives at heart. Such they both 
 
286 AMERICAN BOOKMEN 
 
 were in spite of occasional demonstrations to the 
 contrary. To aid in the foundation of a national 
 literature which should stand entirely apart from our 
 inheritance of letters was obviously not the work 
 for which such men were made. What they re 
 ceived from their past and reflected from their pre 
 sent may not have been largely typical of the thing 
 we call " Americanism," but they both transmitted 
 faithfully what came to them, and apart from all the 
 delight they communicated to others by this process, 
 the background they cannot help revealing is one 
 which the best Americans will do well to remember 
 and revere. 
 
Ind 
 
 ex 
 
 ABSALOM," 103. 
 " Ad Spent," 134. 
 
 Advertiser, Daily, New York, 158. 
 " After the Burial," 257. 
 Agassiz, Alexander, 262. 
 " Ages, The," 29, 63. 
 Alcott, Amos Bronson, 177, 178, 
 
 186, 191, 193, 214. 
 Alden, John, 52, 268. 
 Alhambra, The, 18. 
 Allan, John, 78, 79, 82. 
 Allan, Mrs. John, 78, 80. 
 "Allen s Wife, Josiah," 155. 
 Alniuick Castle, with Other Poems, 
 
 119. 
 "American Flag, The," 114, 116, 
 
 118. 
 
 " American in Paris, The," 284. 
 American Magazine of Knowledge, 
 
 208. 
 " American Men of Letters Series," 
 
 76. 
 
 American Monthly, The, 102, 105. 
 " American Scholar, The," 186. 
 American Whig Review, 90. 
 Andrew, Gov. J. A., 218. 
 Annapolis Academy, 33, 127. 
 Anti-Slavery Poems, 248. 
 Anti-Slavery Standard, 156, 255. 
 Appleton, Miss Frances E., 279. 
 Arnold, Matthew, 197. 
 Ascham, Roger, 137. 
 Astor, John Jacob, 120. 
 Astor, William B., 123. 
 
 Atlantic Monthly, 194, 195, 218, 256, 
 
 257, 274, 277, 283. 
 Autocrat at the Breakfast Table, 
 
 The, 283, 284. 
 
 BABES in the Wood, The," 
 167. 
 Backward Glance O er TraveVd 
 
 Roads, A, 241. 
 Balzac, Honore de, 49. 
 Bancroft, George, 125, 126-128, 
 
 130, 142, 208. 
 " Barbara Frietchie," 252. 
 Barham, Richard H., 173. 
 Barnaby Rudge, 88. 
 "Bedott, Widow," 155. 
 Beers, Prof. Henry A., 107, no. 
 " Bells, The," 93. 
 Biddle, Nicholas, 68. 
 Bigelow, Hon. John, 71. 
 Biglow Papers, The, 254, 255, 258. 
 "Billings, Josh" (H. W. Shaw), 
 
 173- 
 
 Bismarck, 128. 
 Blessington, Lady, 108. 
 Blithedale Romance, The, 209, 214. 
 Bonner, Robert, 120. 
 Bowdoin College, 159, 203, 268, 
 
 269, 270. 
 
 Bracebridge Hall, 18. 
 Bread and Cheese Club, The, 38, 
 
 66. 
 
 Bread and Milk College, The, 55. 
 Breakfast Table series, 274 ; Auto- 
 
288 
 
 INDEX 
 
 crat at the, 283, 284; Professor 
 
 at the, 284. 
 
 Brevoort, Henry, 119. 
 Bridge, Horatio, 203 
 " Briefless Barrister, The," 173. 
 Briggs, Charles F., 88. 
 Bright, John, 168. 
 Broad-way Journal, New York, 88, 
 
 89. 
 
 Brook Farm, 190, 209, 210. 
 Brown, Charles Brockden, i. 
 Browne, Charles Farrar (Artemus 
 
 Ward), 163-171. 
 Browning, R. and E. B., 72. 
 Bryant, Mrs. Frances Fairchild, 62, 
 
 72, 73- 
 
 Bryant, Dr. Peter, 52, 54, 58, 59. 
 BRYANT, WILLIAM CULLEN, 29, 
 
 34, 42, 47, 50, 52-75, 118, 119, 
 
 280. 
 
 Bucke, Dr. Richard Maurice, 241. 
 Bulkeley, Rev. Peter, 178. 
 " Burns," 119. 
 Burns, Robert, 246. 
 Burroughs, John, 222, 241. 
 Byron, Lord, 80, 126. 
 
 CABOT, James Elliot, 176, 197. 
 Campbell, Thomas, 19, 115. 
 Carlyle, Thomas, 137, 184, 187, 
 
 189, 222, 231. 
 Carpet Bag, The, 165. 
 "Carroll, Lewis," 71. 
 " Cedarmere," 71. 
 Channing, Edward Tyrrel, 59. 
 " Chiefly about War Matters," 218. 
 Child, Mrs. Lydia Maria, 251. 
 " Children of Adam," 233. 
 Chronicle, Morning, New York, 3. 
 " Class of 29, Poems of the," 276. 
 Clemm, Mrs. Maria, 76, 83, 84, 91, 
 
 92, 93 95- 
 Clemm, Miss Virginia, 83. (See 
 
 Poe.) 
 
 Cleveland, Pres. Grover, 261. 
 Cockloft Hall, 6. 
 
 Coleman, William, 117, 118. 
 
 " Coliseum, The," 82. 
 
 Columbia College, 3, 38. 
 
 " Commemoration Ode," 258. 
 
 Commercial Advertiser, New York, 
 
 46. 
 
 CONCORD, EMERSON AND, 176-199. 
 Conquest of Mexico, The, 24, 129, 141. 
 Conquest of Peru, The, 141. 
 Constable, Archibald, 24. 
 " Conversations," 193. 
 Conversations on Some of the Old 
 
 Poets, 255. 
 Cooper, Anna, 32. 
 Cooper, Mrs. Elizabeth Fenimore, 
 
 3- 
 COOPER, JAMES FENIMORE, 29-51, 
 
 64, 65, 66, 68, 75, 112, 116, 216. 
 Cooper, Susan Fenimore, 34. 
 Cooper, Judge William, 30, 32, 33. 
 Coplas de Afanrique, 270. 
 Cotton, John, 143. 
 Courier, Boston, 156. 
 Courier, Portland, 158, 159, 162. 
 Craigie, Madam, 279. 
 " Crayon, Geoffrey," 18. 
 Crescent, The, New Orleans, 227. 
 "Croaker" verses, The, 117, 118. 
 Cromwell, 184. 
 " Cross of Snow, The," 280. 
 "Culprit Fay, The," 114. 
 Curtis, George Ticknor, 104. 
 Curtis, George William, 10, 62, 155, 
 
 191, 192. 
 Gushing, Caleb, 249. 
 
 DANA, Richard Henry, 47, 59, 
 63, 64, 66, 117, 119. 
 Dartmouth College, 275. 
 Dashes at Life with a Free Pencil, 
 
 "3- 
 Davis, Charles Augustus, 158, 159, 
 
 162. 
 
 Dawes, Rufus, 99. 
 "Days," 189. 
 Decatur, Stephen, 13. 
 
INDEX 
 
 289 
 
 "Deerfoot Farm," 261. 
 
 Deerslayer, The, 47. 
 
 De Lancey, Miss Susan Augusta, 
 
 34- 
 
 Dial, The, 191. 
 Dickens, Charles, 22, 23, 88. 
 Dr. Grims/iawe s Secret, 219. 
 Dolliver Romance, The, 219. 
 "Downing, Major Jack," 156-162, 
 
 163- 
 DRAKE, WILLIS, HALLECK, AND, 
 
 99-124. 
 Drake, Joseph Rodman, 113-118, 
 
 123. 
 
 Du Maurier, George, 50. 
 Dunlap, Miss Frances, 258. 
 
 T?AGLE, Brooklyn, 225. 
 
 Eastern Argus, Portland, 159. 
 
 Elliott, Com. Jesse, 46. 
 
 Ellis, Rev. Dr. George E., 144. 
 
 "Elmwood," 253, 259, 261. 
 
 Embargo, The, 54. 
 
 Emerson, Charles Chauncy, 185. 
 
 Emerson, Edward Bliss, 179, 185. 
 
 Emerson, Mrs. Ellen Louisa Tuck 
 er, 183. 
 
 Emerson, Mrs. Lydia Jackson, 184. 
 
 Emerson, Miss Mary Moody, 179, 
 182. 
 
 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 97, 129, 
 176-199, 210, 211, 214, 225, 231, 
 232, 233, 259, 262, 267, 284. 
 
 Emerson, Rev. William, 178, 179. 
 
 EMERSON AND CONCORD, 176-199. 
 
 Emmanuel College, Cambridge, 
 260. 
 
 " English Traits," 196. 
 
 Eureka, 98. 
 
 Evangeline, 277. 
 
 Everett, Alexander H., 137. 
 
 Everett, Edward, 275. 
 
 TfABLE for Critics, A, 27, 120, 
 1 254. 
 Fairchild, Miss Frances, 62. 
 
 Fanny, 119. 
 
 Fanshawe, 205. 
 
 Fenimore, Miss Elizabeth, 30. 
 
 Ferdinand and Isabella, 139, 140, 
 
 141. 
 
 " Fern, Fanny," no. 
 Fields, James T., 168, 195, 212, 218, 
 
 251. 
 
 Fields, Mrs. James T., 251. 
 Fiske, John, 142. 
 " Forest Hymn, The," 65. 
 Forrest, Edwin, no. 
 France and England in North 
 
 America, 149. 
 
 Franklin, Benjamin, i, 155. 
 Eraser s Magazine, 141. 
 Frederick the Great, 184. 
 Freeman, The, Brooklyn, 227. 
 Freeman, Pennsylvania, 247, 248, 
 
 249, 255. 
 
 Free Press, Newburyport, 245, 247. 
 Fremont, John C., 249. 
 French, Daniel C., 194. 
 Fruitlands, 190. 
 
 Fuller, Miss Margaret, 191, 210. 
 " Future Life, The," 62. 
 
 /^ARDINER, Rev. Dr. John 
 
 V_T Sylvester John, 132. 
 
 Garrison, William Lloyd, 247. 
 
 Gentleman s Magazine, Burton s, 85. 
 
 " Glenmary," 109. 
 
 Godey s Magazine, 89. 
 
 Godwin, Parke, 70. 
 
 Goethe, 126, 240. 
 
 " Gold Bug, The," 85. 
 
 Goldsmith, Oliver, 18. 
 
 Good Gray Poet, The, 238. 
 
 Goodrich, Samuel Griswold, 102, 
 
 207. 
 
 Graham s Magazine, 85, 243. 
 Gratz, Miss Rebecca, 20. 
 Greeley, Horace, 44-46, 88, 191. 
 Greene, George Washington, 140, 
 
 280. 
 Greenough, Horatio, 44, 109. 
 
290 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Grinnell, Miss Cornelia, 109. 
 Griswold, Rev. Rufus Wilmot, 76, 
 94, 162. 
 
 HALE, Rev. Dr. Edward Ev 
 erett, 271. 
 
 Hale, Robert Beverly, 151. 
 Haliburton, Judge Thomas Chand 
 ler, 157. 
 HALLECK, AND DRAKE, WILLIS, 
 
 99-124. 
 Halleck, Fitz-Greene, 64, 113-124, 
 
 159- 
 
 Hallock, Rev. Moses, 55. 
 Hamilton, Alexander, I. 
 Hamilton, Gail, 251. 
 Hampshire Gazette, Northampton, 
 
 54- 
 
 Harte, Bret, 155, 175. 
 
 Harvard College, 63, 104, 125, 126, 
 128, 132, 137, 145, 179, 184, 253, 
 256, 258, 261, 266, 268, 270, 272. 
 
 Harvard University, 144, 151, 187, 
 
 275- 
 
 Hathorne, Capt. Nathaniel, 202. 
 Hathorne, Mrs. Nathaniel, 202, 206. 
 Hawthorne, Julian, 200, 201, 213, 
 
 221. 
 
 HAWTHORNE, NATHANIEL, 72, 73, 
 
 90, 177, 191, 200-221, 230, 259, 
 
 260, 262, 268, 277. 
 Hawthorne, Mrs. Sophia Peabody, 
 
 211, 212, 220, 262. 
 Hawthorne, Una, 211, 218. 
 Hayes, Pres. Rutherford B., 259. 
 Hiawatha, 277. 
 Hickling, Thomas, 135. 
 Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, 
 
 154, 170. 
 HISTORIANS, THE, ESPECIALLY 
 
 PRESCOTT AND PARKMAN, 125- 
 
 152. 
 History of the Conspiracy of Pontiac, 
 
 148. 
 History of the United Netherlands, 
 
 129. 
 
 History of the United States, 127. 
 Hoar, Judge E. R., 192. 
 Hoar, Miss Elizabeth, 185. 
 Hoffman, Miss Matilda, 10, n, 20. 
 Holmes, Rev. Abiel, 272. 
 Holmes, Mrs. Amelia Lee Jackson, 
 
 275- 
 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 20, 128, 
 
 129, 144, 155, 159, 176, 179, 184, 
 
 190, 196, 198, 251, 259, 260, 265- 
 
 268, 271-276, 279, 281, 283-286. 
 HOLMES, LONGFELLOW AND, 265- 
 
 286. 
 
 Home as Found, 42, 46. 
 Home Journal, New York, 93, 109, 
 
 no. 
 
 Homeward Bound, 42. 
 Hone, Philip, 21, 23,68. 
 Hood, Thomas, 173. 
 Houghton, Lord (R. M. Milnes), 
 
 230. 
 
 House of the Seven Gables, The, 213. 
 Howells, William Dean, 125, 167, 
 
 221, 281, 283, 284. 
 Hughes, Thomas, 194. 
 HUMOURISTS, SOME, 153-175. 
 Hurrygraphs, 113. 
 " Hymn to Death," 62. 
 Hyperion, 271, 276, 280. 
 
 ICHABOD," 252. 
 " Idlewild," 1 10, 112. 
 Iliad, Bryant, 73. 
 " In School Days," 252. 
 Inklings of Adventure, 113. 
 " Inscription upon the Entrance to 
 
 a Wood, An," 58. 
 Irving, Ebenezer, 22. 
 Irving, Peter, 3, 5, 9, 13, 15. 
 Irving, Mrs. Sarah, 2. 
 IRVING, WASHINGTON, 1-28, 29, 
 
 33, 50, 64, 66, 68, 75, 119, 129, 
 
 155, 159, 216, 259, 270. 
 Irving, William, 7. 
 Italian Note- Books, 217. 
 
INDEX 
 
 291 
 
 JACKSON, Miss Amelia Lee, 
 275- 
 
 Jackson, Pres. Andrew, 160, 161. 
 Jackson, Miss Lydia, 184. 
 James, Henry, Jr., 258, 259. 
 James, Henry, Sr., 215. 
 Jefferson, Joseph, 26. 
 Jefferson, Pres. Thomas, 54, 55. 
 Johnson, Dr. Samuel, 116. 
 " Jonathan to John," 260. 
 Journal, Evening, Albany, 174. 
 " June," 75- 
 
 T/ENNEDY, John Pendleton, 
 J^ 83. 
 
 Kent, Chancellor James, 38. 
 
 "Kerr, Orpheus C.," 171. 
 
 " Kilkenny, The Lads of," 5. 
 
 King, Charles, 38. 
 
 " Knickerbocker idea, The," 10, 26. 
 
 Knickerbocker Magazine, 148, 173, 
 
 284. 
 Knickerbocker s History of New 
 
 York, Diedrich, 9, 56. 
 " Kubla Khan," 189. 
 
 40. 
 
 JADYofthe Lake, The, 60. 
 
 ^ Lafayette, Marquis de, 4 
 
 Lamb, Charles, 250. 
 
 Lang, Andrew, 265. 
 
 Larcom, Lucy, 251. 
 
 Last Leaf, The, 273. 
 
 Last of the Mohicans, The, 37, 47. 
 
 Leather Stocking Tales, The, 47, 50. 
 
 Leaves of Grass, 222, 223, 225, 227, 
 
 228, 230, 231, 238, 240, 241. 
 Ledger, New York, 120. 
 Legendary, The, 102. 
 Leslie, Charles Robert, 19. 
 "Letters from Idlewild," 113. 
 Letters from Under a Bridge, 99, 
 
 109. 
 Life and Death of John of Barne- 
 
 veld, The, 129. 
 " Life that is, The," 62. 
 Lilium Parkmanni, 151. 
 
 Lincoln, Pres. Abraham, 235, 236, 
 249. 
 
 "Lines on Leaving Europe," 113. 
 
 Linzee, Capt. John, 131. 
 
 " Literati of New York, The," 89. 
 
 Loiterings of Travel, 1 13. 
 
 Long Islander, The, 225. 
 
 Longfellow, Mrs. Frances E. Apple- 
 ton, 279, 280. 
 
 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 20, 
 25, 52, 88, 101, 105, 119, 140, 200, 
 203, 207, 213, 217, 219, 243, 256, 
 265-271, 273, 276-283, 285. 
 
 Longfellow, Mrs. Mary Storer 
 Potter, 270. 
 
 LONGFELLOW AND HOLMES, 265- 
 286. 
 
 Longworth, David, 7. ., 
 
 Lounsbury, Prof. Thomas R^/34- 
 
 "Love in a Cottage," 113. 
 
 Lowell, Rev. Charles, 253. 
 
 Lowell, Mrs. Frances Dunlap, 258. 
 
 Lowell, James Russell, 66, 88, 112, 
 120, 129, 153, 156, 163, 187, 194, 
 195, 196, 242, 244, 252-264, 267, 
 270, 272, 274, 275, 280, 283, 285. 
 
 Lowell, Mrs. Maria White, 257, 
 262, 267. 
 
 LOWELL, WHITTIER AND, 242- 
 264. 
 
 MANN, Horace, 214. 
 Manning, Miss Elizabeth 
 Clarke, 202. 
 
 " Manuscript Found in a Bottle, 
 The," 82. 
 
 Marble Faun, The, 217, 219. 
 
 "Marco Bozzaris," 114, 119. 
 
 Marryat, Capt. Frederick, 108. 
 
 Martian, The, 50. 
 
 "Marvel, Ik" (Donald G. Mitch 
 ell), 14. 
 
 Massachusetts Historical Society, 
 131, 144, 151. 
 
 Massachusetts Horticultural So 
 ciety, 151. 
 
292 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Mazzini Statue, Central Park, 74. 
 
 " Maud Muller," 252. 
 
 Middlebury College, 173. 
 
 Milnes, Richard Monckton (Lord 
 Houghton), 230. 
 
 Mirror, New York, 88, 90, 105, no. 
 
 Mitchell, Donald G. ("Ik Mar 
 vel"), 14, 155, 218. 
 
 Monet, Claude, 229. 
 
 Moore, Thomas, 19. 
 
 "Morituri Salutamus," 281. 
 
 Morris, George Pope, 106, 112. 
 
 Morse, John T., Jr., 273. 
 
 Mosses from an Old Manse, 210. 
 
 Motley, John Lothrop, 125, 126, 
 128-130, 142, 159, 217, 275, 284. 
 
 Mullins, Priscilla, 52, 268. 
 
 Murray, John, 16. 
 
 Murray, Lindley, 137. 
 
 " My Psalm," 252. 
 
 NASBY, Petroleum V.," 171. 
 " Nature," 185. 
 Naval History, 46. 
 "New Rape of the Lock, The," 
 
 175- 
 
 Newton, Gilbert Stuart, 19. 
 North American Review, 58, 59, 60, 
 
 61, 137, 207, 256. 
 Norton, Prof. Charles Eliot, 187, 
 
 256, 262, 280. 
 Note-Books, 201, 209, 216, 217. 
 
 O CONNOR, William Douglas, 
 238. 
 
 Odyssey, Bryant, 73. 
 " Old Ironsides," 272, 273. 
 "Old Manse, The," 184, 210. 
 " Old Oaken Bucket, The," 105. 
 " Oldstyle, Jonathan," 3. 
 Oregon Trail, The, 148. 
 Otsego Hall, 31, 32, 41, 49. 
 Our Old Home, 219. 
 Outre-Mer, 270. 
 
 pARKER, Miss Hannah, 100. 
 A PARKMAN, THE HISTORIANS, 
 
 ESPECIALLY PRESCOTT AND, 
 125-152. 
 
 Parkman, Francis, 125, 126, 130, 
 
 142-152. 
 
 Parkman, Rev. Francis, 143. 
 Parkman, Samuel, 143. 
 " Parley, Peter," 102. 
 Parr, Rev. Dr. Samuel, 132. 
 "Partington, Mrs." (B. P. Shilla- 
 
 ber), 165, 171. 
 Parton, James, 107. 
 Passionist Fathers, 146. 
 Pathfinder, The, 47. 
 Paulding, James Kirke, 7. 
 Peabody, Miss Sophia Amelia, 208. 
 Pencil lings by the Way, 106, 108, 
 
 IJ 3- 
 
 Pennsylvania Freeman, 247, 248, 
 
 249> 255- 
 
 " Pennsylvania Hall," 247. 
 Perry, Edgar A., 80. 
 Perry, Com. Oliver Hazard, 46. 
 Personal Poem s, 251. 
 Peter Parley s Universal History, 
 
 208. 
 
 " Peter Piper," etc., 7. 
 Pfaffs, 167. 
 Phi Beta Kappa, Harvard, 63, 186, 
 
 187. 
 
 Philip the Second, 142. 
 Phillips, Willard, 58, 59. 
 "Phoenix, John," 171. 
 Pickard, Samuel T., 249. 
 Pierce, Pres. Franklin, 204, 215, 
 
 216, 217, 219, 220. 
 Pilot, The, 37, 116. 
 Pioneers, The, 37, 44. 
 Pioneers of France in the New 
 
 World, The, 149. 
 Plaindealer, Cleveland, 165. 
 Poe, David, 77. 
 POE, EDGAR ALLAN, 76-98, 99, 
 
 113, 162, 282. 
 Poe, Mrs. Elizabeth Arnold, 77. 
 
INDEX 
 
 293 
 
 Poe, Mrs. Virginia Clemm, 83, 91, 
 
 9 2 > 93 94- 
 
 Poems (Holmes, 1836), 271. 
 " Poems of the Class of 29," 276. 
 Poems on Slavery, 243. 
 Polk, Pres. James K., 212. 
 Post, Evening, New York, 9, 66, 
 
 68, 117. 
 
 Potter, Miss Mary Storer, 270. 
 Powhatan: A Metrical Historical 
 
 Romance, 162. 
 Prairie, The, 40. 
 Precaution, 36, 1 1 6. 
 Prescott, John, 131. 
 Prescott, Col. William, 131. 
 Prescott, Judge William, 132. 
 Prescott, William Hickling, 24, 125, 
 
 126, 129, 130, 131-143* J 44, J 48, 
 
 149, 152. 
 PRESCOTT AND PARKMAN, THE 
 
 HISTORIANS, ESPECIALLY, 125- 
 
 152. 
 Professor at the Breakfast Table, 
 
 The, 284. 
 
 " Proud Miss MacBride, The," 175. 
 Punch, London, 170. 
 Putnam, George P., n. 
 
 QUAR TERL Y Review, 1 08, 
 & 139. 
 
 !DASSELAS,ii6. 
 ** " Raven, The," 90. 
 Raven and Other Poems, The, 90. 
 Recorder, Boston, 100. 
 Red Rover, The, 40. 
 Renan, Ernest, 250. 
 Rip Van Winkle, 26. 
 Ripley, Rev. Dr. Ezra, 184. 
 Rise of the Dutch Republic, The, 
 
 129. 
 
 Rogers, Samuel, 19. 
 Romance of Monte- Bent, 217. 
 Round Hill School, 127, 128. 
 Royster, Miss Sarah Elmira, 95. 
 Ruth Hall, 1 10. 
 
 ST. BOTOLPH Club (Boston), 
 IS- 
 
 Salmagundi, 6, 7, 13. 
 
 Sanderson, John, 284. 
 
 Sands, Robert C., 65. 
 
 Saturday Club, 129, 194, 262. 
 
 Saturday Visiter, Baltimore, 82. 
 
 Saxe, John Godfrey, 165, 173-175. 
 
 Scarlet Letter, The, 201, 212, 213. 
 
 Schoolcraft, Henry Rowe, 146. 
 
 Scott, Sir Walter, 15, 19, 20, 21, 
 40, 60, 143. 
 
 Scott, Gen. Winfield, 38. 
 
 " Seashore," 189. 
 
 Sedgwick, Miss Catherine Maria, 
 64. 
 
 Sedgwick, Henry, 64. 
 
 Septimius Felton, 219. 
 
 Seven Tales of My Native Land, 
 205. 
 
 Shaw, Henry W. ("Josh Bill 
 ings" ), 173. 
 
 Shaw, Quincy A., 146. 
 
 Shelton, Mrs. Sarah Elmira Roys 
 ter, 95. 
 
 Shew, Mrs. Maria Louise, 93, 94, 
 
 95- 
 Shall aber, Benjamin Penhallow 
 
 ("Mrs. Partington "), 165, 171. 
 Sigourney, Mrs. Lydia Huntley, 
 
 248. 
 
 Sinless Child, The, 162. 
 Sketch- Book, The, I, 15, 36, 64, 270. 
 Slick, Sam, 157. 
 Smalley, George W., 260 
 Smith, Mrs. Elizabeth Oakes, 162. 
 Smith, Seba, 158-162. 
 Smith, Sydney, 141, 171. 
 Snell, Rev. Thomas, 55. 
 "Snowbound," 252. 
 SOME HUMOURISTS, 153-175. 
 Southern Literary Messenger, The, 
 
 82, 83, 84. 
 
 Specimen Days, 238. 
 Sprague, Charles, 119. 
 Spy, The, 30, 36, 37, 44. 
 
294 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Stace, Gen. William, 109. 
 Stedman, Edmund Clarence, 98, 
 
 i?3> 2 35 282 - 
 Stephen, Leslie, 261, 273. 
 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 240. 
 Stone, William L., 67. 
 Stylus, The, 96. 
 Sumner, Charles, 249, 280. 
 " Sunnyside," 21, 22, 24. 
 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 
 
 239- 
 
 Symonds, John Addington, 227, 
 229, 238, 240. 
 
 ^T\4LS (Poe, 1845), 9- 
 
 * Tales of a Traveller, 18. 
 
 Tales of my Landlord, 60. 
 
 Tales of the Grotesque and Ara 
 besque, 85. 
 
 Talisman, The, 65. 
 
 Talleyrand, 32. 
 
 Tamerlane and Other Poems, 80. 
 
 Tanglewood Tales, 215. 
 
 Taylor, Bayard, 251. 
 
 Tennyson, Lord, 54, 222, 238. 
 
 " Tent on the Beach, The," 251. 
 
 Thackeray, William Makepeace, 
 14, 123, 131, 259. 
 
 Thanatopsis, 57-61, 75, 118. 
 
 Thaxter, Celia, 251. 
 
 Thierry, Augustin, 130. 
 
 Thirty Years Out of the Senate, My, 
 158. 
 
 Thompson, George, 243, 244. 
 
 Thoreau, Henry David, 177, 178, 
 191, 192, 193, 211, 230. 
 
 " Threnody," 185. 
 
 Ticknor, George, 137, 270. 
 
 Ticknor, William D., 220. 
 
 " To a Waterfowl," 61. 
 
 " To Annie," 94. 
 
 " To Helen," 94. 
 
 " To my Mother," 93. 
 
 Token, The, 102, 207. 
 
 Tompkins, Governor, of New 
 York, 13. 
 
 Tour on the Prairies, A, 22. 
 Transformation, 217. 
 Traubel, Horace L., 241. 
 Tribune, New York, 45, 191, 230. 
 Tristan and Isolde, 229. 
 Trumbull, Col. John, 60. 
 Tucker, Miss Ellen Louisa, 183. 
 Twain, Mark, 49, 155, 175. 
 Twice-Told Tales, 207, 208. 
 Two Admirals, The, 45. 
 " Two Rivers, The," 189. 
 Tyler, Pres. John, 22. 
 
 T TNI TED STATES Literary 
 U Gazette, The, 65. 
 " Unseen Spirits," 113. 
 
 VAN BUREN, Pres. Martin, 
 127. 
 
 Vanderlyn s sketch of Irving, 5. 
 Vanity Fair, New York, 167. 
 Van Velsor, Louisa, 224. 
 Verplanck, Gulian Crommelin, 65. 
 Virginia, University of, 78, 79. 
 Virginians, The, 131. 
 Vision of Sir Launfal, The, 254. 
 Voices of the Night, 276. 
 " Voluntaries," 195. 
 
 WAGNER, Richard, 229. 
 Ward, Gen. Artemas, 166. 
 Ward, Artemus (C. F. Browne), 
 
 163-171. 
 
 Ward, Samuel, 280. 
 Warner, Charles Dudley, 61, 155. 
 "Washers of the Shroud, The," 
 
 258. 
 Washington, George, I, 2, 28, 221, 
 
 279. 
 Washington, Life of (A. Bancroft), 
 
 126. 
 
 Washington, Life of ( Irving), 21, 24. 
 Washington Hospital (Baltimore), 
 
 96. 
 
 Water Witch, The, 40. 
 "Waterfowl, To a," 61. 
 
INDEX 
 
 295 
 
 Waterston, Rev. Robert C., 72. 
 Watson, William, 259. 
 "Wayside," 214, 217, 219. 
 Webster, Daniel, 132, 221. 
 Wedgwood family, 136. 
 Weed, Thurlow, 44, 45. 
 Wendell, Prof. Barrett, 243. 
 West Point Academy, 81, 82. 
 White, Eliza, 95. 
 White, Miss Maria, 254. 
 White, T. W., 84. 
 Whitman, George Washington, 
 
 2 35- 
 Whitman, Mrs. Louisa Van Vel- 
 
 sor, 224. 
 
 Whitman, Mrs. Sarah Helen, 94. 
 Whitman, Thomas Jefferson, 227. 
 WHITMAN, WALT, 222-241. 
 Whitman, Walter W., 224. 
 Whittier, Elizabeth, 250. 
 Whittier, John Greenleaf, 75, 192, 
 
 195, 242, 243, 244, 245-252, 263, 
 
 264. 
 WHITTIER AND LOWELL, 242-264. 
 
 Williams College, 55, 56. 
 WILLIS, HALLECK, AND DRAKE, 
 
 99-124. 
 
 Willis, Mrs. Cornelia Grinnell, 109. 
 Willis, Mrs. Hannah Parker, 100. 
 Willis, Mrs. Mary Stace, 109. 
 Willis, Deacon Nathaniel, 100. 
 Willis, Nathaniel Parker, 88, 93, 
 
 99-113, 114, 119, 123, 216. 
 Wilson, Gen. James Grant, 114. 
 Wit of Women, The, 155. 
 Wolfert s Roost, 21. 
 Wonder Book, The, 213. 
 Woodberry, Prof. George E., 76, 
 
 77, 98. 
 "Woodman, Spare that Tree," 
 
 106. 
 
 Woodworth, Samuel, 105. 
 " Worthies, The Nine," 5. 
 
 YALE College, 32, 56, 101. 
 Young, Brigham, 169. 
 " Young America," 120. 
 Youth s Companion, The, 100. 
 
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