Chapter IV: The New England Group (3)

Hawthorne did not care much for philosophical systems, and never concerned himself with the intricacies of transcendentalism. Yet he was affected by that philosophy, as is shown by his personal isolation and that of his characters. His intense belief in individuality is also a transcendental doctrine. He holds that the individual is his own jailer, his own liberator, the preserver or loser of his own Eden. Moral regeneration seems to him an individual, not a social, affair.

His style is easy, exact, flowing, and it shows the skill of a literary artist. He never strains after effect, never uses excessive ornament, never appears hurried. There was not another nineteenth-century prose master on either side of the Atlantic who could in fewer words or simpler language have secured the effect produced by _The Scarlet Letter_. He wished to be impressive in describing Phoebe, that sunbeam in _The House of the Seven Gables_, but he says simply:--

"She was like a prayer, offered up in the homeliest beauty of one's
mother tongue."

Sincerity is the marked characteristic of this simplicity in style, and it makes an impression denied to the mere striver after effect, however cunning his art.

A writer of imperishable romances, a sympathetic revealer of the soul, a great moralist, a master of style, Hawthorne is to be classed with the greatest masters of English fiction. His artist's hand

"Wrought in a sad sincerity;
Himself from God he could not free."

HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW, 1807-1882

LIFE--Longfellow, the most widely read of American poets, was born in Portland, Maine, in 1807. His father was a Harvard graduate, and his mother, like Bryant's, was descended from John and Priscilla Alden of Plymouth. Longfellow, when three years old, began to go to school, and, like Bryant, he published at the ripe age of thirteen his first poem, _Battle of Lovell's Pond_, which appeared in the _Portland Gazette_.

Portland made a great impression on the boy. To his early life there is due the love of the sea, which colors so much of his poetry. In his poem, _My Lost Youth_, he says:--

"I remember the black wharves and the slips,
And the sea tides tossing free;
And Spanish sailors with bearded lips,
And the beauty and mystery of the ships,
And the magic of the sea."

He went to Bowdoin College, Maine, where he had Nathaniel Hawthorne for a classmate. In his senior year Longfellow wrote to his father, "I most eagerly aspire after future eminence in literature; my whole soul burns most ardently for it, and every earthly thought centers in it." His father replied, "There is not enough wealth in this country to afford encouragement and patronage to merely literary men. And as you have not had the fortune ... to be born rich, you must adopt a profession which will afford you subsistence as well as reputation." The son then chose the law, saying, "This will support my real existence; literature, my ideal one." Bowdoin College, however, came to the rescue, and offered him the professorship of modern languages on condition that he would go abroad for study. He accepted the offer, and remained abroad three years. His travel sketches on this trip were published in book form in 1835, under the title of _Outre-Mer: A Pilgrimage beyond the Sea_. This is suggestive of the _Sketch Book_ (p. 119), the earliest book which he remembered reading. After five years' service at Bowdoin, he accepted Harvard's offer of the professorship of modern languages and again went abroad. This journey was saddened by the death of his first wife. His prose romance; _Hyperion_, was one of the fruits of this sojourn abroad. The second Mrs. Longfellow, whose real name was Frances Appleton, appears in this book under the name of Mary Ashburton. Her father bought the Craigie House, which had been Washington's headquarters in Cambridge, and gave it to Longfellow as a residence. In 1854, after eighteen years' teaching at Harvard, he resigned, for his means were then ample to enable him to devote his full time to literature.

From 1854 until 1861 he lived in reality the ideal existence of his youthful dreams. In 1861 his wife's summer dress caught fire, and although he struggled heroically to save her, she died the next day, and he himself was so severely burned that he could not attend her funeral. Years afterwards he wrote:--

"Here in this room she died; and soul more white
Never through martyrdom of fire was led
To its repose."

Like Bryant, he sought refuge in translating. Longfellow chose Dante, and gave the world the fine rendering of his _Divine Comedy_ (1867).

Outside of these domestic sorrows, Longfellow's life was happy and prosperous. His home was blessed with attractive children. Loved by friends, honored by foreigners, possessed of rare sweetness and lovableness of disposition, he became the most popular literary man in America. He desired freedom from turmoil and from constant struggling for daily bread, and this freedom came to him in fuller measure than to most men.

The children of the country felt that he was their own special poet. The public schools of the United States celebrated his seventy-fifth birthday, February 27, 1882. Less than a month later he died, and was laid to rest in Mount Auburn cemetery, Cambridge.

"LAUREATE OF THE COMMON HUMAN HEART."--"God must love the common people," said President Lincoln, "because he has made so many of them." Longfellow wrote for "the common human heart." In him the common people found a poet who could gild the commonplace things of life and make them seem more attractive, more easily borne, more important, more full of meaning.

In his first published volume of poems, _Voices of the Night_ (1839), he shows his aim distinctly in such poems as _A Psalm of Life_. Its lines are the essence of simplicity, but they have instilled patience and noble purpose into many a humble human soul. The two stanzas beginning

"Life is real! Life is earnest,"

and

"Lives of great men all remind us,"

can be repeated by many who know but little poetry, and these very stanzas, as well as many others like them, have affected the lives of large numbers of people. Those born a generation ago not infrequently say that the following stanza from _The Ladder of St. Augustine_ (1850) has been the stepping-stone to their success in life:--

"The heights by great men reached and kept
Were not attained by sudden flight,
But they, while their companions slept,
Were toiling upward in the night."

His poem, _The Rainy Day_ (1841), has developed in many a person the qualities of patience, resignation, and hopefulness. Repetition makes the majority of things seem commonplace, but even repetition has not robbed lines like these of their power:--

"Be still, sad heart! and cease repining,
Behind the clouds is the sun still shining;
Thy fate is the common fate of all;
Into each life some rain must fall,
Some days must be dark and dreary."

Nine days before he died, he wrote his last lines with the same simplicity and hopefulness of former days:--

"Out of the shadows of night
The world rolls into light.
It is daybreak everywhere."

As we examine these typical poems, we shall find that all of them appeal to our common experiences or aspirations, and that all are expressed in that simple language which no one need read twice to understand.

BALLADS.--Longfellow knew how to tell a story which preserved the simplicity and the vigor of the old ballad makers. His _The Wreck of the Hesperus_ (1839) starts in the true fashion to make us wish to finish the tale:--

"It was the schooner Hesperus,
That sailed the wintry sea;
And the skipper had taken his little daughter
To bear him company."

Longfellow says that he wrote this ballad between twelve and three in the morning and that the composition did not come to him by lines, but by stanzas.

Even more vigorous is his ballad of _The Skeleton in Armor_ (1840). The Viking hero of the tale, like young Lochinvar, won the heart of the heroine, the blue-eyed daughter of a Norwegian prince.

"When of old Hildebrand
I asked his daughter's hand,
Mute did the minstrels stand
To hear my story."

The Viking's suit was denied. He put the maiden on his vessel before he was detected and pursued by her father. Those who think that the gentle Longfellow could not write poetry as energetic as Scott's _Lochinvar_ should read the following stanza:--

"As with his wings aslant,
Sails the fierce cormorant,
Seeking some rocky haunt,
With his prey laden,--
So toward the open main,
Beating to sea again,
Through the wild hurricane,
Bore I the maiden."

Those who are fond of this kind of poetry should turn to Longfellow's _Tales of a Wayside Inn_ (1863), where they will find such favorites as _Paul Revere's Ride_ and _The Birds of Killingworth_.

LONGER POEMS.--No other American poet has equaled Longfellow's longer narrative poems. Bryant and Poe would not attempt long poems. The flights of Whittier and Emerson were comparatively short. It is unusually difficult to write long poems that will be read. In the case of _Evangeline_ (1847), _Hiawatha_ (1855), and _The Courtship of Miles Standish_ (1858), Longfellow proved an exception to the rule.

_Evangeline_ is based upon an incident that occurred during the French and Indian War. In 1755 a force of British and colonial troops sailed from Boston to Acadia (Nova Scotia) and deported the French inhabitants. Hawthorne heard the story, how the English put Evangeline and her lover on different ships and how she began her long, sad search for him. When Hawthorne and Longfellow were discussing this one day at dinner at the Craigie House, the poet said, "If you really do not want this incident for a tale, let me have it for a poem." Hawthorne consented to give his classmate all poetical rights to the story.

_Evangeline_ is the tale of a love "that hopes and endures and is patient." The metrical form, dactylic hexameter, is one that few of our poets have successfully used, and many have thought it wholly unfitted to English verse. Longfellow has certainly disproved their theory, for his success with this meter is pronounced. The long, flowing lines seem to be exactly adapted to give the scenes the proper atmosphere and to narrate the heroine's weary search. The poem became immediately popular. It was the first successful long narrative poem to appear in the United States. Whittier had studied the same subject, but had delayed making verses on it until he found that it had been suggested to Longfellow. In a complimentary review of the poem, Whittier said, "Longfellow was just the one to write it. If I had attempted it, I should have spoiled the artistic effect of the poem by my indignation at the treatment of the exiles by the colonial government."

From the moment that Evangeline appears, our interest does not lag.

"Fair was she to behold, that maiden of seventeen summers.
* * * * *
When she had passed, it seemed like the ceasing of exquisite music."

The imagery of the poem is pleasing, no matter whether we are listening to "the murmuring pines and the hemlocks," the softly sounding Angelus, the gossiping looms, the whir of wings in the drowsy air, or seeing the barns bursting with hay, the air filled with a dreamy and mystical light, the forest arrayed in its robes of russet and scarlet and yellow, and the stars, those "forget-me-nots of the angels," blossoming "in the infinite meadows of heaven."

_The Song of Hiawatha_ was begun by Longfellow in 1854, after resigning the professorship of modern languages at Harvard. He seemed to revel in his new freedom, and in less than a year he had produced the poem by which he will probably be longest known to posterity. He studied Schoolcraft's _Algic Researches_ and the same author's _History, Condition, and Prospects of the Indian Tribes of the United States_, and familiarized himself with Indian legends. The simplicity of Longfellow's nature and his ability as a poetic artist seemed rarely suited to deal with these traditions of a race that never wholly emerged from childhood.

Longfellow's invitation to hear this _Song_ does not include all, but only

"Ye whose hearts are fresh and simple,
Who have faith in God and nature."

Those who accept this invitation will rejoice to accompany Shawondasee, the South-Wind, when he sends northward the robin, bluebird, and swallow. They will also wish to go with Kabibonokka, the North-Wind, as he paints the autumn woods with scarlet and sends the snowflakes through the forests. They will be glad to be a child with Hiawatha, to hear again the magical voices of the forest, the whisper of the pines, the lapping of the waters, the hooting of the owl, to learn of every bird and beast its language, and especially to know the joy of calling them all brothers. They will gladly accompany Hiawatha to the land of the Dacotahs, when he woos Minnehaha, Laughing Water, and hears Owaissa, the bluebird, singing:--

"Happy are you, Hiawatha,
Having such a wife to love you!"

But the guests will be made of stern stuff if their eyes do not moisten when they hear Hiawatha calling in the midst of the famine of the cold and cruel winter:--

"Give your children food, O father!
Give us food or we must perish!
Give me food for Minnehaha,
For my dying Minnehaha."

_Hiawatha_ overflows with the elemental spirit of childhood. The sense of companionship with all earth's creatures, the mystery of life and of Minnehaha's departure to the Kingdom of Ponemah, make a strong appeal to all who remember childhood's Eden.

_The Courtship of Miles Standish_ (1858), in the same meter as _Evangeline_, is a romantic tale, the scene of which is laid

"In the Old Colony days, in Plymouth, the land of the Pilgrims."

We see Miles Standish, the incarnation of the Puritan church militant, as he

"... wistfully gazed on the landscape,
Washed with a cold gray mist, the vapory breath of the east-wind,
Forest and meadow and hill, and the steel-blue rim of the ocean,
Lying silent and sad in the afternoon shadows and sunshine."

Priscilla Mullins, the heroine of the poem, is a general favorite. Longfellow and Bryant were both proud to trace their descent from her. This poem introduces her

"Seated beside her wheel, and the carded wool like a snow-drift
Piled at her knee, her white hands feeding the ravenous spindle,
While with her foot on the treadle she guided the wheel in its motion.
* * * * *
She, the Puritan girl, in the solitude of the forest,
Making the humble house and the modest apparel of homespun
Beautiful with her beauty, and rich with the wealth of her being!"

This story has more touches of humor than either _Evangeline_ or _Hiawatha_. Longfellow uses with fine effect the contradiction between the preaching of the bluff old captain, that you must do a thing yourself if you want it well done, and his practice in sending by John Alden an offer of marriage to Priscilla. Her reply has become classic:

"Why don't you speak for yourself, John?"

Longfellow's _Christus, a Mystery_, was the title finally given by him to three apparently separate poems, published under the titles, _The Golden Legend_ (1851), _The Divine Tragedy_ (1871), and _The New England Tragedies_ (1868). His idea was to represent the origin, the medieval aspect, and the Puritan conception of Christianity--a task not well suited to Longfellow's genius. _The Golden Legend_ is the most poetic, but _The New England Tragedies_ is the most likely to be read in future years, not for its poetic charms, but because it presents two phases of New England's colonial history, the persecution of the Quakers and the Salem witchcraft delusion.

GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS.--An eminent Scotch educator says that Longfellow has probably taught more people to love poetry than any other nineteenth-century poet, English or American. He is America's best and most widely read story-teller in verse. Success in long narrative poems is rare in any literature. Probably the majority of critics would find it difficult to agree on any English poet since Chaucer who has surpassed Longfellow in this field.

He has achieved the unusual distinction of making the commonplace attractive and beautiful. He is the poet of the home, of the common people, and of those common objects in nature which in his verses convey a lesson to all. He has proved a moral stimulus to his age and he has further helped to make the world kindlier and its troubles more easily borne. This was his message:--

"Bear through sorrow, wrong and ruth
In thy heart the dew of youth,
On thy lips the smile of truth."

His poetry is usually more tinctured with feeling than with thought. Diffuseness is his greatest fault. The _Sonnets_ of his later years and an occasional poem, like _Morituri Salutamus_ (1875), show more condensation, but parts of even _Hiawatha_ would be much improved if told in fewer words.

Some complain that Longfellow finds in books too much of the source of his inspiration; that, although he did not live far from Evangeline's country, he never visited it, and that others had to tell him to substitute pines or hemlocks for chestnut trees. Many critics have found fault with his poetry because it does not offer "sufficient obstruction to the stream of thought,"--because it does not make the mind use its full powers in wrestling with the meaning. It is a mistake, however, to underestimate the virtues of clearness and simplicity. Many great men who have been unsuccessful in their struggle to secure these qualities have consequently failed to reach the ear of the world with a message. While other poets should be read for mental development, the large heart of the world still finds a place for Longfellow, who has voiced its hopes that

"... the night shall be filled with music,
And the cares that infest the day,
Shall fold their tents like the Arabs,
And as silently steal away."

Like most Puritans, Longfellow is usually over-anxious to teach a lesson; but the world must learn, and no one has surpassed him as a poetic teacher of the masses.

JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER, 1807-1892

Life.--Whittier says that the only unusual circumstance about the migration of his Puritan ancestor to New England in 1638 was the fact that he brought over with him a hive of bees. The descendants of this very hive probably suggested the poem, _Telling the Bees_, for it was an old English custom to go straightway to the hive and tell the bees whenever a member of the family died. It was believed that they would swarm and seek another home if this information was withheld. The poet has made both the bees and the snows of his northern home famous. He was born in 1807 in the same house that his first American ancestor built in East Haverhill, about thirty-two miles northwest of Boston. The Whittiers were farmers who for generations had wrung little more than a bare subsistence from the soil. The boy's frail health was early broken by the severe labor. He had to milk seven cows, plow with a yoke of oxen, and keep busy from dawn until dark.

Unlike the other members of the New England group of authors, Whittier never went to college. He received only the scantiest education in the schools near his home. The family was so poor that he had to work as a cobbler, making slippers at eight cents a pair, in order to attend the Haverhill academy for six months. He calculated his expenses so exactly that he had just twenty-five cents left at the end of the term.

Two events in his youth had strong influence on his future vocation. When he was fourteen, his school-teacher read aloud to the family from the poems of Robert Burns. The boy was entranced, and, learning that Burns had been merely a plowman, felt that there was hope for himself. He borrowed the volume of poems and read them again and again. Of this experience, he says: "This was about the first poetry I had ever read (with the exception of the Bible, of which I had been a close student) and it had a lasting influence upon me. I began to make rhymes myself and to imagine stories and adventures." The second event was the appearance in print of some of his verses, which his sister had, unknown to him, sent to a Newburyport paper edited by William Lloyd Garrison. The great abolitionist thought enough of the poetry to ride out to Whittier's home and urge him to get an education. This event made an indelible impression on the lad's memory.

Realizing that his health would not allow him to make his living on a farm, he tried teaching school, but, like Thoreau, found that occupation distasteful. Through Garrison's influence, Whittier at the age of twenty-one procured an editorial position in Boston. At various times he served as editor on more than half a dozen different papers, until his own health or his father's brought him back to the farm. Such occupation taught him how to write prose, of which he had produced enough at the time of his death to fill three good-sized volumes, but his prose did not secure the attention given to his verse. While in Hartford, editing _The New England Review_, he fell in love with Miss Cornelia Russ, and a few days before he finally left the city, he wrote a proposal to her in three hundred words of wandering prose. Had he expressed his feelings in one of his inimitable ballads, it is possible that he might have been accepted, for neither she nor he ever married. In the year of her death, he wrote his poem, _Memories_, which recounts some recollections earlier than his Hartford experiences:--

"A beautiful and happy girl,
With step as light as summer air,
Eyes glad with smiles, and brow of pearl
Shadowed by many a careless curl
Of unconfined and flowing hair;
A seeming child in everything,
Save thoughtful brow and ripening charms,
As nature wears the smile of Spring
When sinking into Summer's arms."

He was a Quaker and he came to Hartford in the homespun clothes of the cut of his sect. He may have been thinking of Miss Russ and wondering whether theology had anything to do with her refusal, when in after years he wrote:--

"Thine the Genevan's sternest creed,
While answers to my spirit's need
The Derby dalesman's simple truth."

As Whittier was a skillful politician, he had hopes of making a name for himself in politics as well as in literature. He was chosen to represent his district in the state legislature and there is little doubt that he would have been sent to the national congress later, had he not taken a step which for a long time shut off all avenues of preferment. In 1833 he joined the abolitionists. This step had very nearly the same effect on his fortunes as the public declaration of an adherence to the doctrines of anarchy would to-day have on a man similarly situated. "The best magazines at the North would not open their pages to him. He was even mobbed, and the office of an anti-slavery paper, which he was editing in Philadelphia, was sacked. He wrote many poems to aid the abolition cause. These were really editorials expressed in verse, which caught the attention in a way denied to prose. For more than thirty years such verse constituted the most of his poetical production. Lowell noticed that the Quaker doctrine of peace did not deter Whittier from his vigorous attack on slavery. In A Fable for Critics (1848), Lowell asks:--

"... O leather-clad Fox?
Can that be thy son, in the battlers mid din,
Preaching brotherly love and then driving it in
To the brain of the tough old Goliath of sin,
With the smoothest of pebbles from Castaly's spring
Impressed on his hard moral sense with a sling?"

Whittier did, however, try to keep the spirit of brotherly love warm throughout his life. He always preferred to win his cause from an enemy peacefully. When he was charged with hating the people of the South, he wrote:--

"I was never an enemy to the South or the holders of slaves. I inherited
from my Quaker ancestry hatred of slavery, but not of slaveholders. To
every call of suffering or distress in the South, I have promptly
responded to the extent of my ability. I was one of the very first to
recognize the rare gift of the Carolinian poet Timrod, and I was the
intimate friend of the lamented Paul H. Hayne, though both wrote fiery
lyrics against the North."

With a few striking exceptions, his most popular poems were written after the close of the Civil War. His greatest poem, _Snow-Bound_, was published in the year after the cessation of hostilities (1866). His last thirty years were a time of comparative calm. He wrote poetry as the spirit moved him. He had grown to be loved everywhere at the North, and his birthday, like Longfellow's, was the occasion for frequent celebrations. For years before the close of the war, in fact until _Snow-Bound_ appeared, he was very poor, but the first edition of that poem brought him in ten thousand dollars, and after that he was never again troubled by poverty. In a letter written in 1866, he says:--

"If my health allowed me to write I could make money easily now, as my
anti-slavery reputation does not injure me in the least, at the present
time. For twenty years I was shut out from the favor of booksellers and
magazine editors, but I was enabled by rigid economy to live in spite of
them."

His fixed home for almost all of his life was in the valley of the Merrimac River, at East Haverhill, until 1836, and then at Amesbury, only a few miles east of his birthplace. He died in 1892 and was buried in the Amesbury cemetery.

POETRY.--Although Whittier wrote much forcible anti-slavery verse, most of this has already been forgotten, because it was directly fashioned to appeal to the interests of the time. One of the strongest of these poems is _Ichabod_ (1850), a bitter arraignment of Daniel Webster, because Whittier thought that the great orator's _Seventh of March Speech_ of that year advised a compromise with slavery. Webster writhed under Whittier's criticism more than under that of any other man.

"... from those great eyes
The soul has fled:
When faith is lost, when honor dies
The man is dead!"

Thirty years later, Whittier, feeling that perhaps Webster merely intended to try to save the Union and do away with slavery without a conflict, wrote _The Lost Occasion_, in which he lamented the too early death of the great orator:--

"Some die too late and some too soon,
At early morning, heat of noon,
Or the chill evening twilight. Thou,
Whom the rich heavens did so endow
With eyes of power and Jove's own brow,
* * * * *
Too soon for us, too soon for thee,
Beside thy lonely Northern sea,
Where long and low the marsh-lands spread,
Laid wearily down thy august head."

Whittier is emphatically the poet of New England. His verses which will live the longest are those which spring directly from its soil. His poem entitled _The Barefoot Boy_ tells how the typical New England farmer's lad acquired:--

"Knowledge never learned of schools,
Of the wild bee's morning chase,
Of the wild flower's time and place,
Flight of fowl and habitude
Of the tenants of the wood."

His greatest poem, the one by which he will probably be chiefly known to posterity, is _Snow-Bound_, which describes the life of a rural New England household. At the beginning of this poem of 735 lines, the coming of the all-enveloping snowstorm, with its "ghostly finger tips of sleet" on the window-panes, is the central event, but we soon realize that this storm merely serves to focus intensely the New England life with which he was familiar. The household is shut in from the outside world by the snow, and there is nothing else to distract the attention from the picture of isolated Puritan life. There is not another poet in America who has produced such a masterpiece under such limitations. One prose writer, Hawthorne, in _The Scarlet Letter_, had indeed taken even more unpromising materials and achieved one of the greatest successes in English romance, but in this special narrow field Whittier has not yet been surpassed by poets.

The sense of isolation and what painters would call "the atmosphere" are conveyed in lines like these:--

"Shut in from all the world without,
We sat the clean-winged hearth about,
Content to let the north wind roar
In baffled rage at pane and door,
While the red logs before us beat
The frost line back with tropic heat;
And ever when a louder blast
Shook beam and rafter as it passed,
The merrier up its roaring draught
The great throat of the chimney laughed."

In such a focus he shows the life of the household; the mother, who often left her home to attend sick neighbors, now:--

"... seeking to express
Her grateful sense of happiness
For food and shelter, warmth and health,
And love's contentment, more than wealth,"

the uncle:--

"... innocent of books,
Was rich in lore of fields and brooks,
* * * * *
A simple, guileless, childlike man,
Strong only on his native grounds,
The little world of sights and sounds
Whose girdle was the parish bounds,"

the aunt, who:--

"Found peace in love's unselfishness,"

the sister:--

"A full rich nature, free to trust,
Truthful and even sternly just,
Impulsive, earnest, prompt to act,
And make her generous thought a fact,
Keeping with many a light disguise
The secret of self-sacrifice."

Some read Snow-Bound for its pictures of nature and some for its still more remarkable portraits of the members of that household. This poem has achieved for the New England fireside what Burns accomplished for the hearths of Scotland in _The Cotter's Saturday Night_.

Whittier wrote many fine short lyrical poems, such as _Ichabod_, _The Lost Occasion_, _My Playmate_ (which was Tennyson's favorite), _In School Days_, _Memories_, _My Triumph_, _Telling the Bees_, _The Eternal Goodness_, and the second part of _A Sea Dream_. His narrative poems and ballads are second only to Longfellow's. _Maud Muller_, _Skipper Iresons Ride_, _Cassandra Southwick_, _Barbara Frietchie_, and _Mabel Martin_ are among the best of these.

GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS--Whittier and Longfellow resemble each other in simplicity. Both are the poets of the masses, of those whose lives most need the consolation of poetry. Both suffer from diffuseness, Whittier in his greatest poems less than Longfellow. Whittier was self-educated, and he never traveled far from home. His range is narrower than Longfellow's, who was college bred and broadened by European travel. But if Whittier's poetic range is narrower, if he is the poet of only the common things of life, he shows more intensity of feeling. Often his simplest verse comes from the depths of his heart. He wrote _In School Days_ forty years after the grass had been growing on the grave of the little girl who spelled correctly the word which the boy had missed:--

"'I'm sorry that I spelt the word:
I hate to go above you,
Because,'--the brown eyes lower fell,--
'Because you see, I love you!'

* * * * *

"He lives to learn, in life's hard school,
How few who pass above him
Lament their triumph and his loss,
Like her,--because they love him."

Whittier's simplicity, genuineness, and sympathetic heart stand revealed in those lines.

His youthful work shows traces of the influence of many poets, but he learned most from Robert Burns. Whittier himself says that it was Burns who taught him to see

"... through all familiar things
The romance underlying,"

and especially to note that

"Through all his tuneful art, how strong
The human feeling gushes!"

The critics have found three indictments against Whittier; first, for the unequal value of his poetry; second, for its loose rhymes; and third, for too much moralizing. He would probably plead guilty to all of these indictments. His tendency to moralize is certainly excessive, but critics have too frequently forgotten that this very moralizing draws him closer to the heart of suffering humanity. There are times when the majority of human beings feel the need of the consolation which he brings in his religious verse and in such lines as these from _Snow-Bound:_--

"Alas for him who never sees
The stars shine through his cypress trees
Who, hopeless, lays his dead away,
Nor looks to see the breaking day
Across the mournful marbles play!
Who hath not learned, in hours of faith,
The truth to flesh and sense unknown,
That Life is ever lord of Death
And Love can never lose its own!"

He strives to impress on all the duty of keeping the windows of the heart open to the day and of "finding peace in love's unselfishness."

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL, 1819-1891

Early Years.--James Russell Lowell, the son of the Rev. Charles Lowell, was a descendant of one of the best of the old New England families. The city of Lowell and the Lowell Institute of Boston received their names from uncles of the author. His mother's name was Spence, and she used to tell her son that the Spence family, which was of Scotch origin, was descended from Sir Patrick Spens of ballad fame. She loved to sing to her boy in the gloaming:--

"O forty miles off Aberdeen,
'Tis fifty fathoms deep,
And there lies gude Sir Patrick Spens,
Wi' the Scots lords at his feet."

From her Celtic blood her son inherited a tendency toward poetry. When a child, he was read to sleep with Spenser's _Faerie Queene_ and he found amusement in retelling its stories to his playmates.

James Russell Lowell was born in 1819, in the suburbs of Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the fine old historic home called "Elmwood," which was one of the few homes to witness the birth and death of a great American author and to remain his native residence for seventy-two years.

His early opportunities were in striking contrast to those of Whittier; for Lowell, like his ancestors for three generations, went to Harvard. Because of what the Lowell side of his family called "the Spence negligence," he was suspended from college for inattention to his studies and sent to Concord to be coached by a tutor. We know, however, that a part of Lowell's negligence was due to his reading and imitating such poetry as suited his fancy. It was fortunate that he was sent to Concord, for there he had the opportunity of meeting Emerson and Thoreau and of drinking in patriotism as he walked "the rude bridge that arch'd the flood" (p. 179). He was elected class poet, but he was not allowed to return in time to deliver his poem before his classmates, although he received his degree with them in 1838.

MARRIAGE AND NEW IMPULSES.--Like Irving and Bryant, Lowell studied law, and then gave up that profession for literature. In 1839 he met Miss Maria White, a transcendentalist of noble impulses. Before this he had made fun of the abolitionists, but under her influence he followed men like Whittier into the anti-slavery ranks. She was herself a poet and she wrote to Lowell after they became engaged:--

"I love thee for thyself--thyself alone;
For that great soul whose breath most full and rare
Shall to humanity a message bear,
Flooding their dreary waste with organ tone."

Under such inspiration, "the Spence negligence" left him, and with rapid steps he entered the temple of fame. In December, 1844, the month in which he married her, he wrote the finest lines ever penned by him:--

"Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne,--
Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim unknown,
Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own."

Lowell's twenty-ninth year, 1848, is called his _annus mirabilis_, the wonderful year of his life. He had published small volumes of poems in 1840, 1843, and 1847, but in 1848 there appeared three of his most famous works,--_The Biglow Papers, First Series_, _A Fable for Critics_, and _The Vision of Sir Launfal._

As Mrs. Lowell's health was delicate, Lowell took her abroad, in 1851, for a year's stay. Thackeray came over on the same ship with them, on their return in 1852, and proved a genial companion. The next year Mrs. Lowell died. When he thought of the inspiration which she had given him and of the thirteen years of her companionship, he said, "It is a million times better to have had her and lost her, than to have had and kept any other woman I ever saw."

LATER WORK.--After his great bereavement in 1853, Lowell became one of America's greatest prose writers. In 1855 he was appointed Longfellow's successor in the Harvard professorship of modern languages and polite literature, a position which he held, with the exception of two years spent in European travel, until 1877. The duties of his chair called for wide reading and frequent lecturing, and he turned much of his attention toward writing critical essays. The routine work of his professorship often grew irksome and the "Spence negligence" was sometimes in evidence in his failure to meet his classes. As a teacher, he was, however, frequently very stimulating.

He was the editor of the _Atlantic Monthly_, from its beginning in 1857 until 1861. All of the second series of the _Biglow Papers_ appeared in this magazine. From 1864 to 1872 he was one of the editors of the North American Review.

In 1877 he became the minister of the United States to Spain. The Spanish welcomed him to the post that Washington Irving had once filled. In 1880 Lowell was transferred to England, where he represented his country until 1885. No other American minister has ever proved a greater success in England. He was respected for his literary attainments and for his ability as a speaker. He had the reputation of being one of the very best speakers in the Kingdom, and he was in much demand to speak at banquets and on special occasions. Many of his articles and speeches were on political subjects, the greatest of these being his address on _Democracy_, at Birmingham, in 1884.

Although his later years showed his great achievements in prose, he did not cease to produce poetry. The second series of the _Biglow Papers_ was written during the Civil War. His _Ode Recited at the Harvard Commemoration_ in 1865, in honor of those who fell in freeing the slave,

"Who in warm life-blood wrote their nobler verse,"

his three memorial poems: (1) _Ode Read at the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Fight at Concord Bridge_ (1875), (2) _Under the Old Elm_ (1875), written in commemoration of Washington's taking command of the Continental forces under that tree, a century before, and (3) _Ode for the Fourth of July_, 1876, are well-known patriotic American poems.

After returning from England and passing from the excitement of diplomatic and social life to a quiet New England home, he wrote:--

"I take my reed again and blow it free
Of dusty silence, murmuring, 'Sing to me.'
And, as its stops my curious touch retries,
The stir of earlier instincts I surprise,--
Instincts, if less imperious, yet more strong,
And happy in the toil that ends with song."

In 1888 he published a volume of poems called _Heartsease and Rue_. He died in 1891 and was buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery, near his "Elmwood" home, not far from the last resting place of Longfellow.

POETRY.--Lowell wrote many short lyrical poems, which rank high. Some of them, like _Our Love is not a Fading Earthly Flower_, _O Moonlight Deep and Tender_, _To the Dandelion_, and _The First Snow-Fall_ are exquisite lyrics of nature and sentiment. Others, like _The Present Crisis_, have for their text, "Humanity sweeps onward," and teach high moral ideals. Still others, like his poems written in commemoration of some event, are instinct with patriotism.

He is best known for three long poems, _The Biglow Papers_, _A Fable for Critics_ and _The Vision of Sir Launfal_. All of these, with the exception of the second series of _The Biglow Papers_, appeared in his wonderful poetic year, 1848.

He will, perhaps, be longest known to posterity for that remarkable series of papers written in what he called the Yankee dialect and designed at first to stop the extension of slavery and afterwards to suppress it. These are called "Biglow Papers" because the chief author is represented to be Hosea Biglow, a typical New England farmer. The immediate occasion of the first series of these _Papers_ was the outbreak of the Mexican War in 1846. Lowell said in after years, "I believed our war with Mexico to be essentially a war of false pretences, and that it would result in widening the boundaries and so prolonging the life of slavery." The second series of these _Papers_, dealing with our Civil War, began to be published in the _Atlantic Monthly_ in 1862. The poem lives to-day, however, not for its censure of the war or for its attack on slavery, but for its expression of the mid-nineteenth century New England ideals, hard common sense, and dry humor. Where shall we turn for a more incisive statement of the Puritan's attitude toward pleasure?

"Pleasure doos make us Yankees kind o' winch,
Ez though't wuz sunthin' paid for by the inch;
But yit we du contrive to worry thru,
Ef Dooty tells us thet the thing's to du,
An' kerry a hollerday, ef we set out,
Ez stiddily ez though't wuz a redoubt."

The homely New England common-sense philosophy is in evidence throughout the _Papers_. We frequently meet, such expressions as:--

"I like the plain all wool o' common-sense
Thet warms ye now, an' will a twelve-month hence."

"Now's the only bird lays eggs o' gold."

"Democracy gives every man
The right to be his own oppressor."

"But Chance is like an amberill,--it don't take twice to lose it."

"An' you've gut to git up airly,
Ef you want to take in God."

In the second series of the _Papers_, there is one of Lowell's best lyrics, _The Courtin'_. It would be difficult to find another poem which gives within the compass of four lines a better characterization of many a New England maiden:--

"... she was jes' the quiet kind
Whose naturs never vary,
Like streams that keep a summer mind,
Snowhid in Jenooary."

This series contains some of Lowell's best nature poetry. We catch rare glimpses of

"Moonshine an' snow on field an' hill
All silence an' all glisten,"

and we actually see a belated spring

"Toss the fields full o' blossoms, leaves, an' birds."

_The Vision of Sir Launfal_ has been the most widely read of Lowell's poems. This is the _vision_ of a search for the Holy Grail. Lowell in a letter to a friend called the poem "a sort of story and more likely to be popular than what I write about generally." But the best part of the poem is to be found in the apotheosis of the New England June, in the _Prelude to Part I.:_--

"And what is so rare as a day in June?
Then, if ever, come perfect days;
Then Heaven tries the earth if it be in tune,
And over it softly her warm ear lays."

The poem teaches a noble lesson of sympathy with suffering:--

"Not what we give, but what we share,--
For the gift without the giver is bare;
Who gives himself with his alms feeds three,--
Himself, his hungering neighbor, and Me."

Lowell said that he "scrawled at full gallop" _A Fable for Critics_, which is a humorous poem of about two thousand long lines, presenting an unusually excellent criticism of his contemporary authors. In this most difficult type of criticism, Lowell was not infallible; but a comparison of his criticisms with the verdicts generally accepted to-day will show his unusual ability in this field. Not a few of these criticisms remain the best of their kind, and they serve to focus many of the characteristics of the authors of the first half of the nineteenth century. It will benefit all writers, present and prospective, to read this criticism on Bryant:--

"He is almost the one of your poets that knows
How much grace, strength, and dignity lie in Repose;
If he sometimes fall short, he is too wise to mar
His thought's modest fulness by going too far;
'Twould be well if your authors should all make a trial
Of what virtue there is in severe self-denial,
And measure their writings by Hesiod's staff,
Who teaches that all has less value than half."

Especially humorous are those lines which give a recipe for the making of a Washington Irving and those which describe the idealistic philosophy of Emerson:--

"In whose mind all creation is duly respected
As parts of himself--just a little projected."

Prose.--Lowell's literary essays entitle him to rank as a great American critic. The chief of these are to be found gathered in three volumes: _Among My Books_ (1870), _My Study Windows_ (1871), _Among My Books_, _Second Series_ (1876). These volumes as originally issued contain 1140 pages. If we should wish to persuade a group of moderately intelligent persons to read less fiction and more solid literature, it is doubtful if we could accomplish our purpose more easily than by inducing them to dip into some of these essays. Lowell had tested many of them on his college students, and he had noted what served to kindle interest and to produce results. We may recommend five of his greater literary essays, which would give a vivid idea of the development of English poetry from Chaucer to the death of Pope. These five are: _Chaucer_, in _My Study Windows; Spenser_, in _Among My Books, Second Series; Shakespeare Once More_, and _Dryden_, in _Among My Books, First Series_; and _Pope_, in _My Study Windows_. If we add to these the short addresses on _Wordsworth_ and _Coleridge_, delivered in England, and printed in the volume _Democracy and Other Addresses_ (1886), we shall have the incentive to continue the study of poetry into the nineteenth century.

Lowell's criticism provokes thought. It will not submit to a passive reading. It expresses truth in unique and striking ways. Speaking of the French and Italian sources on which Chaucer drew, Lowell says:--

"Should a man discover the art of transmuting metals, and present us with
a lump of gold as large as an ostrich egg, would it be in human nature to
inquire too nicely whether he had stolen the lead? ...

"Chaucer, like Shakespeare, invented almost nothing. Wherever he found
anything directed to Geoffrey Chaucer, he took it and made the most of
it....

"Sometimes he describes amply by the merest hint, as where the Friar,
before setting himself softly down, drives away the cat. We know without
need of more words that he has chosen the snuggest corner."

Lowell usually makes the laziest readers do a little pleasant thinking. It is common for even inert students to investigate his meaning; for instance, in his statements that in the age of Pope "everybody ceremoniously took a bushel basket to bring a wren's egg to market in," and that everybody "called everything something else."

The high ideals and sterling common sense of Lowell's political prose deserve special mention. In _Democracy_ (1886), which should be read by every citizen, Lowell shows that old age had not shattered his faith in ideals. "I believe," he said, "that the real will never find an irremovable basis until it rests on the ideal." Voters and lawmakers are to-day beginning to realize that they will go far to find in the same compass a greater amount of common sense than is contained in these words:--

"It is only when the reasonable and the practicable are denied that men
demand the unreasonable and impracticable; only when the possible is made
difficult that they fancy the impossible to be easy. Fairy tales are made
out of the dreams of the poor." [Footnote: _Democracy and Other
Addresses_, p. 15.]

General Characteristics.--Lowell has written verse which shows sympathetic treatment of nature. His lines _To the Dandelion_:--

"Dear common flower, that grow'st beside the way,
Fringing the dusty road with harmless gold,
First pledge of blithesome May
Which children pluck, and full of pride uphold
* * * * *
... thou art more dear to me
Than all the prouder summer-blooms may be,"

show rare genuineness of feeling. No one not enthusiastic about nature would ever have heard her calling to him:--

"To mix his blood with sunshine, and to take
The winds into his pulses."

He invites us in March to watch:--

"The bluebird, shifting his light load of song
From post to post along the cheerless fence,"

and in June to lie under the willows and rejoice with

"The thin-winged swallow, skating on the air."

Another pronounced characteristic which he has in common with the New England group is nobility of ideals. His poem entitled _For an Autograph_, voices in one line the settled conviction of his life:--

"Not failure, but low aim, is crime."

He is America's greatest humorist in verse. _The Biglow Papers_ and _A Fable for Critics_ are ample justification for such an estimate.

As Lowell grew older, his poetry, dominated too much by his acute intellect, became more and more abstract. In _Under the Old Elm_, for example, he speaks of Washington as:--

"The equestrian shape with unimpassioned brow
That paces silent on through vistas of acclaim."

It is possible to read fifty consecutive lines of his _Commemoration Ode_ without finding any but abstract or general terms, which are rarely the warp and woof out of which the best poetry is spun. This criticism explains why repeated readings of some of his poems leave so little impression on the mind. Some of the poetry of his later life is, however, concrete and sensuous, as the following lines from his poem _Agassiz_ (1874) show:--

"To lie in buttercups and clover-bloom,
Tenants in common with the bees,
And watch the white clouds drift through gulfs of trees,
Is better than long waiting in the tomb."

In prose literary criticism, he keeps his place with Poe at the head of American writers. Lowell's sentences are usually simple in form and easily understood; they are frequently enlivened by illuminating figures of rhetoric and by humor, or rendered impressive by the striking way in which they express thought, _e.g._ "The foolish and the dead alone never change their opinion." A pun, digression, or out-of-the-way allusion may occasionally provoke readers, but onlookers have frequently noticed that few wrinkle their brows while reading his critical essays, and that a pleased expression, such as photographers like, is almost certain to appear. He has the rare faculty of making his readers think hard enough for agreeable exercise, and yet he spares them undue fatigue and rarely takes them among miry bogs or through sandy deserts.

Lowell's versatility is a striking characteristic. He was a poet, reformer, college professor, editor, literary critic, diplomatist, speaker, and writer on political subjects. We feel that he sometimes narrowly escaped being a genius, and that he might have crossed the boundary line into genius-land, if he had confined his attention to one department of literature and had been willing to write at less breakneck speed, taking time and thought to prune, revise, and suppress more of his productions. Not a few, however, think that Lowell, in spite of his defects, has left the impress of genius on some of his work. When his sonnet, _Our Love is not a Fading Earthly Flower_, was read to a cultured group, some who did not recognize the authorship of the verses thought that they were Shakespeare's.

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, 1809-1894

LIFE.--The year 1809 was prolific in the birth of great men, producing Holmes, Poe, Lincoln, Tennyson, and Darwin. Holmes was descended from Anne Bradstreet, New England's "Tenth Muse" (p. 39) His father was a Congregational clergyman, preaching at Cambridge when Oliver was born. The family was in comfortable circumstances, and the boy was reared in a cultured atmosphere. In middle age Holmes wrote, "I like books,--I was born and bred among them, and have the easy feeling, when I get into their presence, that a stable boy has among horses."

He graduated from Harvard in the famous class of 1829, for which he afterward wrote many anniversary poems. He went to Paris to study medicine, a science that held his interest through life. For thirty-five years he was professor of anatomy in the Harvard Medical School, where he was the only member of the faculty who could at the end of the day take the class, fagged and wearied, and by his wit, stories, and lively illustrations both instruct and interest the students.