Chapter XI: Part 11

Longfellow taught at Harvard from 1836 until 1854, with but one intermission, in 1842, when on account of his health he made his third trip to Europe. In 1843 he married Miss Frances E. Appleton, whom he had met in Switzerland sixteen years before, and whose presence and influence are likewise traceable in “Hyperion.” Through the generosity of his father-in-law, he was able to establish a home in Craigie House, where he had been a lodger since 1837, a dwelling of Revolutionary fame. For a while, Longfellow’s study was the room once occupied by Washington. Here, surrounded by his books and, as the years went on, by a growing family circle, he lived in comfort and felicity. His reputation spread, and the number of his acquaintances increased. Among his friends he reckoned Sparks and Prescott, the historians; Ticknor, his predecessor at Harvard, and Lowell, who afterward succeeded Longfellow; Fields, Emerson, Holmes, and Hawthorne; Felton, Sumner, Agassiz, and Norton. He read and wrote variously and extensively; he counted it a privilege to be interpreting Dante “to young hearts.” In time, however, his duties as a teacher, above all the preparation of lectures, gradually wore upon him. He felt that he could not serve two masters, and he clave to poetry. At length, in 1854, he resigned his professorship, to devote himself exclusively to authorship. Seven years later, under the most distressing circumstances, he lost his second wife. From this catastrophe, Longfellow, though he eventually regained his outward cheerfulness, never inwardly recovered. “He bore his grief with courage and in silence. Only after months had passed could he speak of it; and then only in fewest words.” In 1868 he made his last visit to Europe, where he was met with “a flood of hospitality.” In London “he breakfasted with Mr. Gladstone, Sir Henry Holland, the Duke of Argyll; lunched with Lord John Russell at Richmond, ... received midnight calls from Bulwer and Aubrey de Vere.... The Queen received him cordially and without ceremony in one of the galleries of Windsor Castle.” After a visit of two days with Tennyson, Longfellow and his party crossed to the Continent. They spent the summer in Switzerland, the autumn in France, the winter in Florence and Rome. When he returned to America, he “found Cambridge in all its beauty; not a leaf faded.” “How glad,” he wrote, “I am to be at home. The quiet and rest are welcome after the surly sea. But there is a tinge of sadness in it, also.” The last ten years of Longfellow’s life were quiet and serene, with a tinge of sadness in them, also. Yet they were filled with literary projects which, for a man of his age, he carried through with remarkable energy; and, until toward the end, his correspondence was enormous. In 1880 his health showed signs of failing. In 1882 he suffered a brief and sharp illness, and on Friday, March 24, “he sank quietly in death.” “The long, busy, blameless life was ended.”

At the age of thirteen, Longfellow printed four stanzas, “The Battle of Lovell’s Pond,” in a corner of _The Portland Gazette_. Within the next six years he wrote a considerable number of poems for _The United States Literary Gazette_. By 1833, in addition to text-books for his classes, he had, in various magazines, published original articles, stories, and several reviews; among them an important estimate of poetry, especially the poetry of America, in a notice of Sidney’s “Defense of Poesy” contributed to _The North American Review_; as well as translations from the Spanish of Manrique and others, with an “Introductory Essay on the Moral and Devotional Poetry of Spain” (1833). “Outre-Mer,” first published as a series of sketches, appeared in book form in 1835, “Hyperion” in 1839, and “Voices of the Night” in the same year as “Hyperion.” “Voices of the Night” made Longfellow’s reputation as a poet; the edition was immediately exhausted. “Hyperion,” which eventually sold well, though at present it is not often enough read, was at first unfortunate, the publisher failing before this book had a fair start. Of Longfellow’s better known works, published during the latter half of his lifetime, his “Ballads and Other Poems” appeared in 1841, “The Spanish Student” in 1843, “Evangeline” in 1847, “Kavanagh,” another prose romance, in 1849, “Hiawatha” in 1855, “The Courtship of Miles Standish” in 1858, “The Golden Legend” in 1872, and “Aftermath” in 1873. The “Tales of a Wayside Inn” came out in 1863, 1872, and 1873, the First Day separately, the Second and the Third Day in company with other writings.

In consequence, it may be, of a latter-day tendency to disparage Longfellow’s verse, there has been an effort of late to rehabilitate his prose; not so much, indeed, for its own sake, as for its importance in the history of our literature. “Hyperion,” for example, is not merely what Longfellow called it, “a sincere book, showing the passage of a morbid mind into a purer and healthier state”; that is, it is not merely the veiled autobiography of our most popular poet. Its final reception and large sale are a proof that in the forties not a few Americans could be interested in German student life and in the discussion of Continental literatures. With this romance, one might say, began an American literature that, without ceasing to be native, could claim to be cosmopolitan. Possibly no single work produced in this country ever effected more in the dissemination of European culture. Its faults are on the surface. The style is not seldom forced and florid, having the colour of Jean Paul rather than Irving; and the sentiment here and there is gushing. Nevertheless, parts of “Hyperion” are good prose, the prose of a scholar who is aware of what he is saying and of a poet who knows how to avoid scraps of metre when he is not writing verse. The poet-scholar knows, too, on what sort of basis the best poetry is founded: “O thou poor authorling!... to cheer thy solitary labour, remember that the secret studies of an author are the sunken piers upon which is to rest the bridge of his fame, spanning the dark waters of Oblivion. They are out of sight; but without them no superstructure can stand secure.”

The nature of Longfellow’s secret studies is partly indicated by the extent of his published translations. Although one could hardly aver that the poet was anything like a linguistic investigator in the modern sense, he had a wide acquaintance with Germanic and Romance literatures; he spoke several modern tongues with fluency; and he had a sufficient command of idiom to translate with seeming ease from Swedish, German, Old English, French, Spanish, and Italian. His renderings from Tegnér’s “Frithiof’s Saga” seemed so true to the original that the Swedish poet urged Longfellow to complete the translation. The versions of Uhland and others which he made in Germany during the year 1836 were later on extraordinarily efficacious in popularising German literature for America. He may likewise be counted one of the pioneers among American students of Old English or, as he called it, “Anglo-Saxon.” As a teacher of modern languages, he naturally gave heed to Greek and Latin secondarily, and there came a time when he deplored the fact that his familiarity with Greek had slipped away. Yet he loved the classics, his favourite among the Latin poets being Horace. In Horace, he said, one could find all that was worth while in the message of Goethe, expressed just as well, and uttered earlier. Of course the most considerable piece of scholarship undertaken by Longfellow was his translation of the “Divine Comedy,” a task for which his enthusiastic teaching of Dante had helped to fit him, and one which he had commenced (1839) years before the death of his second wife; yet one which he resumed and mainly completed relatively late in life, and, like Bryant’s Homer, something taken up as the resource of a soul bitterly bereaved, unable to accomplish spontaneous creative work. In compassing this task, Longfellow had the encouragement and the direct assistance of Norton and Lowell, to whose knowledge and taste the translation as it now stands is greatly indebted. Even so, it cannot rank high in artistic workmanship. First of all, the translator found that, in order to reproduce the sense with fidelity, he must sacrifice the rhyme, a dubious concession so long as metrical structure was to be retained at all. Still, Longfellow’s translation is pure and lucid English; for the beginner in Dante the critical apparatus is valuable even now; and the three sonnets prefixed to the “Inferno,” “Purgatorio,” and “Paradiso” are in themselves an introduction to Dante of a sort hardly to be surpassed. The best spirit of America is blended in them with the best of the Middle Ages.

In considering Longfellow as an original poet, we shall not go astray if we remember his own conception of originality. To him the poetic gift meant, not the power of creating new material--as the vulgar suppose--but insight, the power of seeing things according to their eternal values. Doubtless he realised that one needs insight to discover how far the vulgar supposition is blind. At all events, we need not look for new ideas or new sentiments in the poetry of Longfellow, but for an attempt to make us see things as he sees them, after he has tried to see them as they are. In his dramas, and in his narratives--these latter being more important--he frankly took material furnished by his wide reading, or lying ready to his hand, and strove to clothe it in a new and more permanent form. “Evangeline” is an instance of his method. The story was given him by Hawthorne; in elaborating it, Longfellow consulted such works on Nova Scotia and the exile of the Acadians as were accessible to him; he was true to his sources. Had he known of better authorities, he would have read them, and his account of the exile would have been historically more precise. The metre of “Evangeline,” suggested by that of Goethe’s “Hermann und Dorothea,” is one of the rare instances where dactylic hexameter has succeeded in English. One can truthfully say that whatever Longfellow took he really appropriated, that is, made his own. It was but seldom that his materials would not fuse, for he had a thorough command of technique. In “Hiawatha,” which has been called “the nearest approach to an American epic,” he employed a form of verse borrowed from the Finnish “Kalevala,” in which to embody traditions of the Indians. As Freiligrath remarked, there is something odd in the notion of Hiawatha, child of the West Wind, meeting with historical Christian missionaries. However, Longfellow’s daring synthesis of heterogeneous elements pleased that great authority on American antiquities Henry R. Schoolcraft; after many failures, a native poet had at length arisen to portray our aborigines, in a long poem, with fidelity and imagination. Ten thousand copies were sold in this country within four weeks, and the poem was translated into six modern languages.

The dramatic works of Longfellow have suffered in comparison with his narrative poems and lyrics. The causes of this are partly internal and partly external. In his “Christus,” which he fancied would endure, he probably chose a subject of too great magnitude for his powers. Yet the second part at least, “The Golden Legend,” at present operates less vitally than it should, largely because of its sympathy with the ideals of the Middle Ages--with ideals which we, still living in the Renaissance, are not ready to comprehend. “‘The Golden Legend,’” said G. P. R. James, “is like an old ruin with the ivy and the rich blue mould upon it.” Is it not more like a Gothic church before mould and ruin have crept in? It is a bit of wholesome, rejuvenated medievalism, an edifice whose threshold the intellectual pride of our age feels discomfort in crossing.

It is by his shorter poems that Longfellow now chiefly lives. Brief narratives such as “The Skeleton in Armour,” and “The Wreck of the Schooner Hesperus,” lyrics of sentiment and pathos--“Psalms of Life”--more rarely bits of humour like the German mechanic’s song, “I know a maiden, fair to see,” were soon established in the popular memory. It would be ungracious to say that the popular taste has been wrong in preferring what is sentimental and pathetic in Longfellow. A poet whose love of the hearth was so strong, and whose personal acquaintance with domestic happiness and domestic grief was so profound, did well to pour out his soul in verses which add sunshine to daylight for the happy, and in which the deeply afflicted may find pensive solace. Yet the popular taste has clung to “Tell me not in mournful numbers,” where the sentiment is not above suspicion, and to “The Skeleton in Armour,” where character, sentiment, and historical setting are for the most part incongruous; and it has almost let the sonnet on Milton fall asleep.

Longfellow was the most popular poet ever brought forth on this continent. His unparalleled vogue was destined to undergo a reaction. Among those who want better bread than is made of wheat, his poetry is not now counted a stimulating diet. However, when American scholarship shall succeed in reducing American literature to a true perspective, he will come to his own again. His patriotism will be rediscovered; his technical skill will be carefully appraised; the honours heaped upon him throughout the civilised world will be recognised as just; and the character from which flowed a well of undefiled poetry will stand out as one of the noblest products of occidental civilisation.

_James Russell Lowell._--By general consent, Longfellow is our American poet, _par excellence_, Emerson our philosopher, James Russell Lowell our man of letters. Others, Lowell among them, have shared more richly than Longfellow in a distinctively lyrical temperament; others have thought more consecutively than Emerson. No one, however, when his initial talents are considered, has produced so much good poetry as Longfellow; no one in the realm of philosophic thought has been so patently influential as Emerson; and no one, not even Irving, has fared well in so many avenues of literature and popular scholarship as Lowell. He was poet, critic, professor, editor, diplomat, patriot, humanist; and withal he was a man and a friend.

He was born on Washington’s birthday, February 22, 1819, at “Elmwood,” Cambridge, a house still in the possession of his family. On his father’s side he was of English blood, being descended from Percival Lowell, who came from Somersetshire to Massachusetts Colony in 1639; through his mother he drew his lineage from the folk of the Orkney Islands. His father was a well educated clergyman, faithful and affectionate; his mother, whether really gifted with second sight or not, was of a less usual type, imaginative, high-strung, with a tendency to mental derangement. During his infancy her youngest son heard ballads for lullabies. As a child he was read to sleep with Spenser’s “Faerie Queene.” When he grew older, he had the range of his father’s generously stocked library. At the age of nine, he was devouring Walter Scott, and, like Scott at the same age, was astonishing his companions with improvised tales of fear and wonder. His imagination was not unduly stimulated; he lived a wholesome outdoor life, and he had a sound schooling in the classics. When he went to Harvard, in 1834, “he was a shy yet not very tractable youth, given, like so many boys who are shy from excess rather than from defect of ability, to occasional violence and oddity of expression or act.” At Harvard, he gradually rebelled against the rigour of a fixed curriculum, but read omnivorously in English literature of the sixteenth and the nineteenth century, and, following the English romanticists of a generation previous, paid particular attention to Spenser and Milton. “Milton,” he observes, “has excited my ambition to read all the Greek and Latin classics which he did.” Lowell had gone through a precocious love affair at the age of ten; while in college he was again “hopelessly in love.” His efforts in the way of serious writing were at this time facile and, naturally, not profound; his humour was naïve, and more engaging. His gradual neglect of the prescribed routine, in spite of his father’s attempts to stir up in the young man a respect for academic honours, at length brought upon Lowell the open displeasure of the Harvard faculty; so that in his senior year he was temporarily suspended, and directed to regain his standing under the private instruction of the Rev. Barzillai Frost at Concord. Longfellow was one of his teachers in Cambridge; in his retirement, he met Emerson and Thoreau. When he left his tutor and returned to Harvard, Class Day was past; but he brought back his Class Poem finished, and allowed it to circulate among his friends. It is interesting as an evidence of Lowell’s early freedom in using a variety of metres, of his feeling for nature, of his New England heritage of conservatism, of his inability as yet to enter into sympathy with the movement for the abolition of slavery, or with Emerson and Transcendentalism. It is interesting as a mixture of the old and the new; its touches of enthusiasm are in odd contrast with its general manner, which is strongly reminiscent of post-Revolutionary satire.

His course at Harvard over--for better or worse,--Lowell consigned himself, with misgivings and vacillation, to the study of law. An unfortunate love affair, the financial reverses of his father, uncertainty about his own livelihood, and his seemingly thwarted longing to become an author conspired to render him at times almost desperate. It appears that he even meditated suicide. His humour saved him. He continued his study of ancient and modern poets and certain aspects of their art; through this study, as well as through his mental sufferings, his knowledge of humanity was broadened and enriched. He began to understand the position of the Abolitionists. With his engagement to Miss Maria White, the horizon finally cleared. He had taken his degree in law. Though he could not immediately be married, the constant influence of Miss White, herself a poetess, and his contact with the circle of young people in which she moved--“the Band”--were from now on vital elements in his spiritual development. His head was full of literary plans. He would write a life of Keats; he would compose a “psycho-historical” tragedy. He became a contributor of verse to _Graham’s Magazine_. In 1840 he brought out the volume of poetry entitled “A Year’s Life,” labelled by reviewers as “humanitarian and idealistic”; and in the next year or so he wrote for other periodicals an assortment of sonnets, prose sketches, and literary essays on the Elizabethan dramatists. By the close of 1842, he had resolved to abandon the law, and associated himself with Robert Carter in founding a magazine to be known as _The Pioneer_. The venture was short-lived, owing to Lowell’s enforced removal to New York, where he was under the care of an eye-specialist. The failure of his periodical involved him in debt; however, he had gained valuable experience as an editor, and had widened his acquaintance among men of letters. Settling once more at Cambridge, he watched over the persons of his mother, whose mind was now astray, and his eldest sister, who already began to show signs of a similar malady. The fruit of two years of poetical activity appeared at the end of 1843 in his first series of “Poems.” He married Miss White on December 26, 1844. Immediately afterward, he assumed for a brief space a position in Philadelphia on _The Pennsylvania Freeman_, he and his wife eking out a slender income by writing for The _Broadway Journal_ of New York. An ardent Abolitionist now, Lowell, on his return to Cambridge, gave his attention during the next four years mainly to articles for _The National Anti-Slavery Standard_. From this point it is impossible in so short an account as the present to record many details of his productivity as a writer. In 1846 appeared the first of the “Biglow Papers,” published in _The Boston Courier_; three more came out the next year. In 1848, besides a large sheaf of articles, Lowell issued the second series of his “Poems,” his “Fable for Critics”--in which he handled contemporary American poets with levity but also with insight--and “The Vision of Sir Launfal,” significant titles in any list of his works. His powers were near their height. His humour was almost as sure as it ever became; his criticism almost as pregnant, his imagination as vital, his attitude toward national issues as uncompromising. The defects in his style and treatment are such as we find even in his later work. Until 1853 Lowell’s life was in the main happy, darkened indeed by the death of several children, and by anxiety over the fading health of his wife. From the grief and loneliness following her death, he sought relief in the preparation of a course of lectures on the English poets, to be delivered before the Lowell Institute in Boston. Their signal success brought him a call to the chair left vacant at Harvard by Longfellow. He gave a year or more to study abroad; returning in 1856, he spent the next sixteen years of his life in the duties of a college professor. He lectured on poetry and fine art, and offered courses in German, Spanish, and Italian literature. He was at his best in teaching Dante, where he could put in motion his belief “that the study of imaginative literature tends to sanity of mind”; that it is “a study of order, proportion, arrangement, of the highest and purest Reason,” and shows “that chance has less to do with success than forethought, will, and work.” Latterly he turned his attention to the literature of Old French. For a man who has been taxed with hereditary indolence, his industry was surprising. His connection with _The Atlantic Monthly_ from its launching, in 1857, until 1861, and with _The North American Review_ from 1864 until 1872, is mentioned elsewhere. His private reading was continuous and discursive. With the approach and outbreak of the Civil War, his heart and pen were enlisted in the service of the North. He wrote perhaps the most stirring political articles in American literature; and his verse ran all the way from a new series of “Biglow Papers” to the “Commemoration Ode” recited at the memorial exercises, July 21, 1865, in honour of the Harvard graduates who had given their lives for their country. After the war, _The North American Review_ provided him with an outlet for many of his best known articles in literary criticism, for example, his essays on Chaucer, Pope, Spenser, and Dante. “The Cathedral,” his most notable poem after the “Commemoration Ode,” appeared in 1870. In 1869, and again in 1870, he delivered a number of lectures, on the poets, at Cornell University. In 1872, unable to secure a leave of absence from Harvard, he resigned his position there, in order to go abroad. After a stay of two years in Europe, where he was the recipient of distinguished honours, he resumed his post at Harvard, retaining it until 1877, when President Hayes appointed him Minister to Spain (1877-80). In 1880 Garfield made him Minister to England; here honours were showered upon him. “The Queen is recorded to have said that during her long reign no ambassador or minister had created so much interest and won so much regard as Mr. Lowell.” Shortly after the death of his second wife, in 1885, he was supplanted in his diplomatic post. For a time he lived with his daughter at Southborough, Massachusetts. Among the later collections of his poetry was “Heartsease and Rue,” published in 1887. The last two years of his life were passed at Cambridge, devoted in part to an edition of his works, in ten volumes. After a season of weakness and pain, borne with fortitude and humour, he died, where he first saw the light, at Elmwood, on August 12, 1891.

It is well-nigh impossible to characterise Lowell briefly. An attempt to sum up a personality that chose so many avenues of expression, and that at bottom was not thoroughly unified, can hardly do justice to the component parts. The most striking thing about the man was his fertility, if not in great constructive ideas, at all events in separate thoughts. What he writes is full of meat. His redundancy is not in the way of useless verbiage; he wants to use all the materials that offer. A less obvious thing in Lowell is what we may term his lack of complete spiritual organisation. He lived in an age of dissolving beliefs and intellectual unrest. Though he was not tormented, as were some others, by fierce internal doubts, he yet failed ever to be quite clear with himself on fundamental questions of philosophy and religion. He was never quite at one with himself. As a writer, his serious and his humorous moods were continually interrupting each other. Partly on this account, he did not possess an assured style. Partly, of course, a kind of indifference, inherited or developed, was to blame; in his formative stage, he did not have the patience--as he himself told Longfellow--to write slowly enough. The result is, our enjoyment of his poetry comes from separate passages, not from organically constituted, harmonious wholes. In the occasional felicitous expression of an individual thought, few can surpass him:

Coy Hebe flies from those that woo,
And shuns the hands would seize upon her;
Follow thy life, and she will sue
To pour for thee the cup of honour.

As a colourist in words, when he happens not to overdo the impression, his art often seems masterly. Yet if we look closely, even in the much lauded “Commemoration Ode,” his technique is seldom if ever inevitable. His prose is stylistically more continuous than his verse, owing to his experience as an editor. He healed others; himself he could heal at least partially. But even as a prose writer, in spite of his studies in the history of literature, he did not reach the point where science and the understanding are seen to be in harmony with poetry and the imagination. It appears that he did not succeed in distinguishing between what was temporary and what was permanent in science, so that he did not escape the danger of confusing the errors of scientists with their ideals; and as he was not in full sympathy, as Dante was, with minute literary research, so he was not willing to subject himself to the last, exacting, and detailed labours of the poet or essayist who determines to write verse or prose that shall endure. It follows that most of his writing, both poetry and prose, lacks finality. Thus in his article on Chaucer, though he met the approval of no less an authority than Professor Child, he could not ultimately have satisfied that great scholar and critic, since Lowell did not confine himself to generalisations based upon exhaustive induction. He does not clearly discriminate between “I think” and “I know.”

The fact is that he wrote mainly for his own time, and was bound to have but a temporary reward. This is not saying that the reward was not worth while. His interpretations of Spenser, of Dante, of Milton, of the elder dramatists, sent to those poets many a reader who would not otherwise have gone; for America, he opened the road in the study of Chaucer; and his own “Vision of Sir Launfal” has unlocked many a hard heart to divine influences. When he wrote in dialect, as in the “Biglow Papers,” he was manifestly writing for a time; but in their time the second series did more to justify the Northern cause than almost any other publication that could be mentioned, Whittier’s poems not excepted. It may be thought that his wonderful command of dialect, contrasted with a less perfect and less instinctive success in any higher medium, marks him as above all else a satiric poet. When he was once sitting for his portrait, he so denominated himself, speaking generally--“a bored satiric poet.” Yet were we to name Lowell the greatest of all American satirists, his urgent poems of patriotism--“The Washers of the Shroud,” the “Commemoration Ode”--his “Vision of Sir Launfal,” and “The Cathedral” would immediately proclaim him something greater than any satiric poet could be. Last of all, nobler than the sum of his writings was the work which he effected in bringing together his native land and the mother country, England, in a bond of sympathy unknown since their separation.

_Ralph Waldo Emerson._--Emerson usually passes for a philosophical mystic and lay preacher. He deemed himself more of a poet than anything else, for he always hoped to attain perfect utterance in rhythmical language. Yet the fact that he wrote much more prose, however imaginative, than verse, has relegated the main treatment of him to another section of this volume. Such an arrangement, of course, is grounded in uncritical custom, not in reason.

Arbitrarily limiting ourselves here to his compositions in metre, we find that throughout his life (1803-82), or throughout the years in which he was productive, Emerson was responsible for much more poetry, in the narrower sense, than most of his readers are aware of, and that his poems are as well worth attention as his essays. In his verse, which was written for himself, he is, to be sure, less at home so far as concerns the form, but being less hampered by any regard for an audience, he is more spontaneous in his thought. At the same time, his stock of fundamental ideas and sentiments, however vivid and pure, was pretty much exhausted in his prose, so that, to a considerable extent, he repeated himself when he changed his medium of expression. Moreover, as the hierophant of intellectual independence, he did not come to a practical realisation of the way in which the opulence of the greatest poets and thinkers is related to the wealth and continuity of their reading. Emerson, indeed, read multifariously if not thoroughly; and it is true that his essays are liberal in the use of borrowed matter; the production of an essay on Montaigne might appear to mean little more than throwing together an anthology of excerpts, cemented with Emerson’s own marginal notes. He rarely mastered any single author entire. His insight went by leaps and bounds, and he appropriated what he found congenial, not being pliant enough to enter steadily and long into the thought of another. His prose in general lacks plan. Some of his poems, on the contrary, are more unified, having an organic wholeness which is absent from his longer essays. In an essay, mere continuity of sentiment and preservation of individual style do not constitute an adequate link between the parts. In a lyric poem, such consistency may suffice. Virtually, all of Emerson’s poetry is lyrical and meditative. The technique is seldom smooth, not for want of pains, since it was laboured and continually retouched, but for want of capacity in the artist. The style is apt to be brittle, the cadence is not maintained through passages of any length, and the separate sentences are easily detached from their context. Even so, they are not always clear, but may need commentary and parallel from the “Essays” to explain them. Emerson’s poetry is largely autobiographical and, in no harsh sense, egoistic, a picture of the successive and recurrent states of his own soul. His vision of the universe in each of its parts, his belief in the immanence of God and the educational potency of solitude, and his confidence in the ability of Nature to prepare and suddenly to produce ideal or “representative” men, are ever near the surface. In his descriptions of the external world he is faithful to detail; but as he discovers in each individual thing an intrinsic value transcending the value of its dependence on the whole, he is likely to see the parts without being ready to seize the perspective. Among details his selection, if he makes any, seems altogether an affair of his mood, not of logic. His power of choice is nevertheless stronger than Whitman’s. He has a more than Wordsworthian distaste for analytic science:

But these young scholars, who invade our hills,
Bold as the engineer who fells the wood,
And travelling often in the cut he makes,
Love not the flower they pluck, and know it not,
And all their botany is Latin names.

None the less have science and scientific terms invaded his poetry; nor is it simply the larger and the elemental aspects of modern discovery that claim his regard. With his individualistic turn of mind, he can not choose but have an eye for the precise and specific:

Ah! well I mind the calendar,
Faithful through a thousand years,
Of the painted race of flowers,
Exact to days, exact to hours.

* * * * *

I know the trusty almanac
Of the punctual coming-back,
On their due days, of the birds.

He understands his own interest in such matters; not being very objective, he cannot understand the impulse of the young botanist. Lacking the dramatic and historical impulse, he wrote no long poems. “May-Day” is his longest and most sustained, although he never quite succeeded in ordering its parts. It “was probably written in snatches in the woods on his afternoon walks, through many years.” The volume to which it gave its name (1867) marked a distinct advance in fluency over the collection of his poems that had appeared twenty years earlier. But even considering his own final selection (1876) or considering the now standard text of all his poetry (published in 1904), we can scarcely affirm that the longing he expressed in 1839 was ever fully satisfied: “I am naturally keenly susceptible to the pleasures of rhythm, and cannot believe but one day I shall attain to that splendid dialect, so ardent is my wish; and these wishes, I suppose, are ever only the buds of power; but up to this hour I have never had a true success in such attempts.” It is probable that in spite of his New England good sense, his inherent esteem for propriety, his insight into the subtler workings of nature, he did not have the initial impulse of a Bryant and a Longfellow toward what he most needed in his education. Nature works also through the scientist and the pedagogue. Emerson doubts it:

Can rules or tutors educate
The semigod whom we await?
He must be musical,
Tremulous, impressional,
Alive to gentle influence
Of landscape and of sky,
And tender to the spirit-touch
Of man’s or maiden’s eye;
But, to his native centre fast,
Shall into Future fuse the Past,
And the world’s flowing fates in his own mould recast.

_Henry David Thoreau._--Emerson had the originality that enables a seer to pierce beneath the surface, and to find a likeness in things where passive minds detect no brotherhood; he did not have the originality by virtue of which amply creative minds gather a multitude of elements, properly subordinated one to another, into new, harmonious, and embracing wholes. His is a crucial defect in American poetry, a defect in the constructive imagination. This defect is intimately associated with an unscholarly dread of minute research. Emerson’s attitude of distrust toward science was shared by his friend and disciple Thoreau (1817-62), in whom the creed of individualism ran almost to the point of caricature. In his youth and prime, Thoreau wrote a great deal of verse, only a little of which has been preserved. The conception of Prometheus, suffering and isolated friend of humanity, tenacious in the assertion of his own will, was to Thoreau’s taste; hence his rough but stirring translation from the tragedy by Æschylus. He had the Emersonian fondness for gnomic sentences and verses, such as he found scattered through the “Odes” of Pindar. His versions of Pindaric gnomes show that he was not afraid of difficult Greek; still, he hovered between belief and disbelief in scholarship. His ear was better than Emerson’s. It is unfortunate that his unrivalled gift of observation did not more frequently leave a record of itself in lines like those “To a Stray Fowl.” His mind was not without the New England love of the startling and paradoxical. Yet his search for hidden analogies borders oftener on true imagination than was the case with Holmes.

_Oliver Wendell Holmes._--“The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table” has already given evidence that it will outlast “Elsie Venner” and “The Guardian Angel”; yet if the miscellanies of Dr. Holmes (1809-94) possess more vitality than his novels, this is in some measure due to the “Autocrat’s” occasional employment of verse. In the “Breakfast-Table” series appeared “The Chambered Nautilus” and “The Wonderful ‘One-Hoss Shay,’” which, with his youthful “Old Ironsides,” and “The Broomstick Train,” have retained the firmest hold on the popular memory. Holmes was pleased to trace his ancestry back to Anne Bradstreet, the first American poetess. His own poetry commenced with a schoolboy rendering into heroic couplets from Virgil, and hardly ended with his tribute to the memory of Whittier in 1892. In the standard edition of his works his poems occupy three volumes. Many of them, corresponding to his turn for the novel, are narrative; for story-telling he had a knack amounting to a high degree of talent. His sense of order and proportion is stronger than that of other members of the New England school, and he has a command of at least formal structure. One may not unreasonably attribute this command in part to his studies in human anatomy. At the same time Holmes is beset with the temptation to value manner and brilliancy rather than substance, and he will go out of his way for a fanciful conceit or a striking expression. In the use of odds and ends of recondite lore his cleverness is amazing. He had a tenacious memory and a habit of rapid association, so that as a punster he is almost without a match. However, his glance is not deeply penetrating; he sees fantastic resemblances between things that are really far removed from one another, not so often the fundamental similarities in things whether near or apart. One may in vain search through Holmes for anything so truly poetic as Thoreau’s comparison of sex in human beings and flowers. Accordingly, his mind may be classed as fanciful rather than imaginative. It ought not to be misunderstood, and will not be unduly detracting from his great excellence, if we say that the poetry of Holmes does not always evince the highest moral seriousness--a lack that is not fully supplied when he attempts moral subjects, as in “The Chambered Nautilus,” where, though the comparison of the growing mollusk with the expanding human soul is beautiful, the preaching is a little trite.

As regards the form of his poetry, Holmes is a survival of the eighteenth century. In his boyhood, he was a devoted admirer of Pope, but instead of abandoning the style of the Augustans, as Bryant and Lowell abandoned or outgrew it, he chose rather to perfect himself in it; until, somewhat more plastic than it was in his models, somewhat modernised and provincial, that style became his normal accent. Having Holmes’ purpose in view, one may add that no poet in America has acquired a surer control over his medium. Within this medium he was able to unite sparkle, humour, clearness, good sense, and oratorical emphasis. It is the opinion of several very able critics that no one in his century can vie with him in the art of writing verses for an occasion. Here is the source not only of his strength but also of his weakness. A large proportion of his verse is of mainly local or temporary interest. The poems which he offered year by year at the exercises of the Harvard Commencement will year by year engender less enthusiasm. A constructive criticism, however, will lay stress, not on his inheritance of New England provincialism or his slight tendency to be flippant, but on his kindliness, his inexhaustible good humour, his quick and darting intellectual curiosity, and on the appeal which his sprightly moralising makes to the young. It is not a little thing to say of a wit and a power of epigram like his that they were ever genial, and ever on the side of something better than a merely conventional morality.

_John Greenleaf Whittier._--In so brief a section, it has seemed impossible to offer more than a few scattered remarks on the poetry that arose in both the North and the South in connection with slavery and the Civil War. Something has been said of Confederate writers, including Timrod and Lanier; more might be added on the patriotic verse of Lowell and Longfellow, Emerson and Holmes, and a throng of lesser men, who sang to the North of courage and consolation, or attacked those whom they considered the foes of the Republic at home or abroad. One poetess, yet living, Mrs. Julia Ward Howe (born in 1819), immortalised herself in 1862 by her “Battle-Hymn of the Republic,” a piece breathing the very essence of righteousness and love of country, and having a value out of all proportion to the rest of her work. Something similar must be said of Thomas B. Read (1822-72) and his popular “Sheridan’s Ride” (1865). The true bard of the battle-field and bivouac, of course, was Walt Whitman, who, as a nurse in the Union army, had actual experience of war. If, however, any one person is to be singled out from his century as the proclaimer of American freedom, this must be Whittier; and that too, it might almost be said, in spite of his heredity, his early hopes, and his natural bent. At least, his Quaker blood and his love for the peaceful ways of nature would not designate him for the office of poet militant. Furthermore, if Whittier’s art and sentiment in the progress of years elicit more and more admiration from qualified arbiters, such admiration will be mainly bestowed, not on his war lyrics or his denunciations of slavery, but on his hymns, his legends of New England, and his rustic idyls--above all, on “Snow Bound.”

He was born at Haverhill, Massachusetts, on December 17, 1807, springing from pious English stock, in a family that belonged to the Society of Friends. A minute and animated picture of his home and its inmates is given in “Snow Bound.” Whittier’s opportunities for regular schooling were slender. Though he did not inherit the rugged strength of his ancestors, his help was required on the farm; and his father, without absolutely discouraging the lad’s effort to win an education, was reluctant to see him busied with a useless or dangerous plaything such as their sect generally regarded poetry. The boy attended district school, read the few books that were in his home, and even managed to obtain copies of Burns and Shakespeare, and a novel, perused in secret, of Scott. His mother was inwardly gratified by the lines which he wrote under the inspiration of Burns. When his sister clandestinely forwarded one of his poems to _The Free Press_ of Newburyport, and thus paved the way for an acquaintance between Whittier and the editor, William Lloyd Garrison, the trend of the young man’s life was determined. Thanks to the influence of Garrison, and by the strictest husbanding of his own means, Whittier was able to pass, in all, a year at the new Haverhill Academy. “Thus ended his school-days,” says his biographer, Pickard; “but this was only the beginning of his student life. By wide and well-chosen reading, he was constantly adding to his stores of information. While revelling in the fields of English literature, he became familiar through translations with ancient and current literature of other nations, and kept abreast of all political and reformatory movements.” In the development of his thought, he owed most to the Bible, to the tracts of the Friends, and to the poetry of Burns. The mainspring of his activity, whether as student, poet, politician, or anti-slavery agitator, was an intense desire to be useful to his kind, coupled with a burning belief in the sacredness of individual liberty. During his early manhood, he continued to write verse, sending it to various New England periodicals; and he became editor, successively of a Boston trade journal, of _The Haverhill Gazette_, and of _The New England Magazine_. Journalism helped him to enter politics, and in 1832 the Whigs of his native place seemed ready to elect him to Congress. After careful deliberation, he renounced his political aspirations, not without an inward struggle, and decided to lend his energies to the abolition of negro slavery, to assist the discredited and obscure band led by Garrison. “My lad,” so in after years he counselled a youth of fifteen, “if thou wouldst win success, join thyself to some unpopular but noble cause.” With all his idealism--let us rather say, on account of his thoroughgoing idealism--Whittier was thoroughly practical. He had keen insight into the characters of men, and knew how to turn their motives, both good and bad, to account; his political sagacity, which, with his untiring industry, made him one of the most capable workers on the side of Abolition, was largely responsible for the rise of Charles Sumner to a position of beneficent influence. Ever frail in health, yet labouring on, and subjected more than once to personal violence at the hands of opponents, Whittier had the satisfaction of seeing the movement which he championed emerge from persecution into triumph. Regarded superficially, his devotion delayed his own progress as an artist, and his best poetry came late. In a deeper sense, he could not have developed into the poet that he became without living the life that he did.

In a general way his work may be divided into two parts--that produced during his more active interest in journalism and politics, and that produced after his retirement. In 1831 he published his “Legends of New England in Prose and Verse,” a pamphlet, and in 1832, another pamphlet, “Moll Pitcher,” neither of them of much interest save in comparison with his better choice of subjects and better handling at a later date. A third pamphlet, “Justice and Expediency” (1833), published at his own expense and with a full consciousness of its probable effect, was the document that severed him from the dominant party and openly leagued him with the Abolitionists. “Mogg Megone” (1836), his first bound volume, which he afterward vainly tried to suppress, was published after he became a secretary of the American Anti-Slavery Society. The next year (1837), Isaac Knapp, without consulting Whittier, issued a collection of “Poems Written during the Progress of the Abolition Movement in America.” It was followed in 1838 by an authorised collection. The poet represented Haverhill in the Massachusetts Legislature in 1835; ill-health prevented his finishing a second term. In 1837 he went to Philadelphia to aid “the venerable anti-slavery pioneer Benjamin Lundy, who was editing _The National Enquirer_,” afterward called _The Pennsylvania Freeman_. In 1840 he retired to Amesbury, Massachusetts, taking up his abode with his mother and his sister Elizabeth. He never married. At Amesbury and at Danvers, in the same county, he spent the remainder of his life in quiet. The record is one of domestic peace and literary endeavour, whose first fruits were “Lays of my Home, and Other Poems” (1843). With this volume Whittier’s writings began to be remunerative. Some of the more noteworthy subsequent dates in his life are as follows: Of his prose works, “The Stranger in Lowell” appeared in 1845, “Supernaturalism in New England” in 1847, “Literary Recollections” in 1854. From the founding of _The Atlantic Monthly_, in 1857, Whittier was a most welcome contributor. He also edited John Woolman’s _Journal_, and in other ways displayed interest in the writings of the Friends. “Voices of Freedom” (1849) was the first comprehensive edition of his poems. He published “Songs of Labour” in 1850, “A Sabbath Scene” in 1853, “Home Ballads” in 1860, “National Lyrics” in 1865. After the war, his most important publications included “Snow Bound” (1866), “Maud Muller” (1867), “Ballads of New England” (1869), “Miriam and Other Poems” (1871), “Mabel Martin” (1874), “Hazel Blossoms” (1875), “Poems of Nature” (1885), “St. Gregory’s Quest, and Recent Poems” (1886). His last collection, “At Sundown” (1890), was dedicated to E. C. Stedman, and closed with a valediction to Dr. Holmes. Many of Whittier’s poems were first published in magazines; “Maud Muller” appeared in _The National Era_, in 1854.

Whittier’s personality was one of indescribable attractiveness. He was gentle, yet full of repressed fire, an ardent nature that had steadily submitted to the Christian spirit of self-control. He had the inward beauty that springs from generous impulses under the habitual guidance of principle and forethought. Toward his opponents he showed no rancour; he strove against parties, not individuals; and he commanded the respect of his adversaries. If he had a foible, it was his delight in playful teasing. He never visited a theatre or a circus in his life. He is described in his early manhood as “tall, slight, and very erect,” of a distinguished presence, yet bashful--but never awkward. His eye was brilliant and expressive. In maturity, his face in repose was almost stern, but a smile would light up his entire countenance. “His voice in reading was of a quality entirely different from that in conversation--much fuller and deeper.” In later years, “while retaining a lively interest in all literary and political matters and keeping abreast of current events, he dwelt most intently ... upon the great spiritual and eternal realities of God. By the open fire in the evening he would talk for hours upon sacred themes, ever grateful for the rich blessings of his life and looking with reverent curiosity towards the future.... There was not the shadow of a doubt in his mind concerning the immortality of the soul.” He died after a stroke of paralysis, on September 7, 1892, and was buried at Amesbury.

In a recent and praiseworthy volume of “The Chief American Poets,” Dr. C. H. Page has included a longer list of selections from Whittier than from Longfellow, although the contributions representing Whittier occupy less space. This is significant. Whittier was mainly a writer of short poems. In the ballad he had a form suited to the general taste, and to his aim of stinging a sluggish populace into revolt against slavery. He painted that institution in its most repellent aspects, seeing nought of the glamour which Southern writers have shed over plantation life as it existed before the war. Living in the North, he saw something of escaping and recaptured negroes. His glance was very direct; he described matters simply; he accomplished the task that he set himself. Among his lyrics of the war, “Barbara Frietchie” is altogether the best known--not with complete justice to others, for example “The Watchers.” To his treatment of tales and legends of colonial New England Whittier brought an inveterate hatred of persecution and oppression in every shape. Accordingly, many of his narratives, like “Cassandra Southwick,” touch on wrongs attempted or inflicted upon the early Quakers. As an interpreter of colonial life Whittier comes second only to Hawthorne. As a herald of the beauty in flower and hill and stream, in “The Trailing Arbutus,” “Among the Hills,” “The Merrimac,” he is second to none in America. True, he does not always refrain from what Ruskin has called the pathetic fallacy, so that he descries in the face of nature moods that are really in the heart of man; but he does this more rarely than his contemporaries. In his revelation of humble and rustic types, “Maud Muller,” “The Barefoot Boy,” “The Huskers,” he is almost the equal of Burns or Wordsworth. He is not their rival in perfection of style. More frequently than they he suffers from a bad line; and his rhymes are often defective. Yet one must not conclude that he was inattentive to technique. On the contrary, Whittier was a born artist. But the nice discipline of the ear which so many English poets have owed to the cultivation of Greek and Latin prosody was not vouchsafed to him; and for his manner he missed the advantage of rigorous criticism. The positive excellence of Whittier’s verse is due to the harmonious blending and interworking in him of varied powers. His senses were alert and sure, his humour was fine, his intellect strong, his pathos firm. He was not afraid of a theme that was tragic. His realism might be compared to that of Crabbe, but it is more hopeful. In his religious poems there is a belief more satisfying than transcendental pantheism; and there is a quality of personal joy and optimism which, as we have previously observed, is not typical of American literature.

Best loved and saintliest of our singing train,
Earth’s noblest tributes to thy name belong.
A lifelong record closed without a stain,
A blameless memory shrined in deathless song.

Such was Holmes’ eulogy of Whittier. With it we may take leave of New England.