Initial Studies in American Letters Part 6

CHAPTER V.

THE CAMBRIDGE SCHOLARS.

1837-1861.

With few exceptions, the men who have made American literature what it is have been college graduates. And yet our colleges have not commonly been, in themselves, literary centers. Most of them have been small and poor, and situated in little towns or provincial cities. Their alumni scatter far and wide immediately after graduation, and even those of them who may feel drawn to a life of scholars.h.i.+p or letters find little to attract them at the home of their _alma mater_, and seek by preference the larger cities, where periodicals and publis.h.i.+ng houses offer some hope of support in a literary career. Even in the older and better equipped universities the faculty is usually a corps of working scholars, each man intent upon his specialty and rather inclined to undervalue merely "literary" performance. In many cases the fastidious and hypercritical turn of mind which besets the scholar, the timid conservatism which naturally characterizes an ancient seat of learning, and the spirit of theological conformity which suppresses free discussion, have exerted their benumbing influence upon the originality and creative impulse of their inmates. Hence it happens that, while the contributions of American college teachers to the exact sciences, to theology and philology, metaphysics, political philosophy, and the severer branches of learning have been honorable and important, they have as a cla.s.s made little mark upon the general literature of the country. The professors of literature in our colleges are usually persons who have made no additions to literature, and the professors of rhetoric seem ordinarily to have been selected to teach students how to write for the reason that they themselves have never written any thing that any one has ever read.

To these remarks the Harvard College of some fifty years ago offers some striking exceptions. It was not the large and fas.h.i.+onable university that it has lately grown to be, with its multiplied elective courses, its numerous faculty, and its somewhat motley collection of undergraduates; but a small school of the cla.s.sics and mathematics, with something of ethics, natural science, and the modern languages added to its old-fas.h.i.+oned, scholastic curriculum, and with a very h.o.m.ogeneous _clientele_, drawn mainly from the Unitarian families of eastern Ma.s.sachusetts. Nevertheless a finer intellectual life, in many respects, was lived at old Cambridge within the years covered by this chapter than nowadays at the same place, or at any date in any other American university town. The neighborhood of Boston, where the commercial life has never so entirely overlain the intellectual as in New York and Philadelphia, has been a standing advantage to Harvard College. The recent upheaval in religious thought had secured toleration and made possible that free and even audacious interchange of ideas without which a literary atmosphere is impossible. From these, or from whatever causes, it happened that the old Harvard scholars.h.i.+p had an elegant and tasteful side to it, so that the dry erudition of the schools blossomed into a generous culture, and there were men in the professors' chairs who were no less efficient as teachers because they were also poets, orators, wits, and men of the world. In the seventeen years from 1821 to 1839 there were graduated from Harvard College Emerson, Holmes, Sumner, Phillips, Motley, Th.o.r.eau, Lowell, and Edward Everett Hale; some of whom took up their residence at Cambridge, others at Boston, and others at Concord, which was quite as much a spiritual suburb of Boston as Cambridge was. In 1836, when Longfellow became professor of modern languages at Harvard, Sumner was lecturing in the Law School. The following year--in which Th.o.r.eau took his bachelor's degree--witnessed the delivery of Emerson's Phi Beta Kappa lecture on the _American Scholar_ in the college chapel, and Wendell Phillips's speech on the _Murder of Lovejoy_ in Faneuil Hall. Lowell, whose description of the impression produced by the former of these famous addresses has been quoted in a previous chapter, was an under-graduate at the time. He took his degree in 1838, and in 1855 succeeded Longfellow in the chair of modern languages. Holmes had been chosen in 1847 professor of anatomy and physiology in the Medical School--a position which he held until 1882. The historians, Prescott and Bancroft, had been graduated in 1814 and 1817 respectively. The former's first important publication, _Ferdinand and Isabella_, appeared in 1837. Bancroft had been a tutor in the college in 1822-23, and the initial volume of his _History of the United States_ was issued in 1835. Another of the Ma.s.sachusetts school of historical writers, Francis Parkman, took his first degree at Harvard in 1844. Cambridge was still hardly more than a village, a rural outskirt of Boston, such as Lowell described it in his article, _Cambridge Thirty Years Ago_, originally contributed to _Putnam's Monthly_ in 1853, and afterward reprinted in his _Fireside Travels_, 1864. The situation of a university scholar in old Cambridge was thus an almost ideal one.

Within easy reach of a great city, with its literary and social clubs, its theaters, lecture courses, public meetings, dinner-parties, etc., he yet lived withdrawn in an academic retirement among elm-shaded avenues and leafy gardens, the dome of the Boston Statehouse looming distantly across the meadows where the Charles laid its "steel blue sickle" upon the variegated, plush-like ground of the wide marsh.

There was thus, at all times during the quarter of a century embraced between 1837 and 1861, a group of brilliant men resident in or about Cambridge and Boston, meeting frequently and intimately, and exerting upon one another a most stimulating influence. Some of the closer circles--all concentric to the university--of which this group was loosely composed were laughed at by outsiders as "Mutual Admiration Societies." Such was, for instance, the "Five of Clubs," whose members were Longfellow, Sumner, C. C. Felton, professor of Greek at Harvard, and afterward president of the college; G. S. Hillard, a graceful lecturer, essayist, and poet, of a somewhat amateurish kind; and Henry R. Cleveland, of Jamaica Plain, a lover of books and a writer of them.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-82), the most widely read and loved of American poets--or, indeed, of all contemporary poets in England and America--though identified with Cambridge for nearly fifty years, was a native of Portland, Maine, and a graduate of Bowdoin College, in the same cla.s.s with Hawthorne. Since leaving college, in 1825, he had studied and traveled for some years in Europe, and had held the professors.h.i.+p of modern languages at Bowdoin. He had published several text-books, a number of articles on the Romance languages and literatures in the _North American Review_, a thin volume of metrical translations from the Spanish, a few original poems in various periodicals, and the pleasant sketches of European travel ent.i.tled _Outre-Mer_. But Longfellow's fame began with the appearance in 1839 of his _Voices of the Night_. Excepting an earlier collection by Bryant this was the first volume of real poetry published in New England, and it had more warmth and sweetness, a greater richness and variety, than Bryant's work ever possessed. Longfellow's genius was almost feminine in its flexibility and its sympathetic quality. It readily took the color of its surroundings and opened itself eagerly to impressions of the beautiful from every quarter, but especially from books. This first volume contained a few things written during his student days at Bowdoin, one of which, a blank-verse piece on _Autumn_, clearly shows the influence of Bryant's _Thanatopsis_. Most of these juvenilia had nature for their theme, but they were not so sternly true to the New England landscape as Th.o.r.eau or Bryant. The skylark and the ivy appear among their scenic properties, and in the best of them, _Woods in Winter_, it is the English "hawthorn" and not any American tree, through which the gale is made to blow, just as later Longfellow uses "rooks" instead of crows. The young poet's fancy was instinctively putting out feelers toward the storied lands of the Old World, and in his _Hymn of the Moravian Nuns of Bethlehem_ he transformed the rude church of the Moravian sisters to a cathedral with "glimmering tapers," swinging censers, chancel, altar, cowls, and "dim mysterious aisle." After his visit to Europe Longfellow returned deeply imbued with the spirit of romance. It was his mission to refine our national taste by opening to American readers, in their own vernacular, new springs of beauty in the literatures of foreign tongues. The fact that this mission was interpretive, rather than creative, hardly detracts from Longfellow's true originality. It merely indicates that his inspiration came to him in the first instance from other sources than the common life about him. He naturally began as a translator, and this first volume contained, among other things, exquisite renderings from the German of Uhland, Salis, and Muller, from the Danish, French, Spanish, and Anglo-Saxon, and a few pa.s.sages from Dante. Longfellow remained all his life a translator, and in subtler ways than by direct translation he infused the fine essence of European poetry into his own. He loved

"Tales that have the rime of age And chronicles of eld."

The golden light of romance is shed upon his page, and it is his habit to borrow mediaeval and Catholic imagery from his favorite Middle Ages, even when writing of American subjects. To him the clouds are hooded friars, that "tell their beads in drops of rain;" the midnight winds blowing through woods and mountain pa.s.ses are chanting solemn ma.s.ses for the repose of the dying year, and the strain ends with the prayer--

"Kyrie, eleyson, Christe, eleyson."

In his journal he wrote characteristically: "The black shadows lie upon the gra.s.s like engravings in a book. Autumn has written his rubric on the illuminated leaves, the wind turns them over and chants like a friar." This in Cambridge, of a moons.h.i.+ny night, on the first day of the American October! But several of the pieces in _Voices of the Night_ sprang more immediately from the poet's own inner experience.

The _Hymn to the Night_, the _Psalm of Life_, _The Reaper and the Flowers_, _Footsteps of Angels_, _The Light of Stars_, and _The Beleaguered City_ spoke of love, bereavement, comfort, patience, and faith. In these lovely songs, and in many others of the same kind which he afterward wrote, Longfellow touched the hearts of all his countrymen. America is a country of homes, and Longfellow, as the poet of sentiment and of the domestic affections, became and remains far more general in his appeal than such a "cosmic" singer as Whitman, who is still practically unknown to the "fierce democracy" to which he has addressed himself. It would be hard to overestimate the influence for good exerted by the tender feeling and the pure and sweet morality which the hundreds of thousands of copies of Longfellow's writings, that have been circulated among readers of all cla.s.ses in America and England, have brought with them.

Three later collections, _Ballads and Other Poems_, 1842, _The Belfry of Bruges_, 1846; and _The Seaside and the Fireside_, 1850, comprise most of what is noteworthy in Longfellow's minor poetry. The first of these embraced, together with some renderings from the German and the Scandinavian languages, specimens of stronger original work than the author had yet put forth; namely, the two powerful ballads of _The Skeleton in Armor_ and _The Wreck of the Hesperus_. The former of these, written in the swift leaping meter of Drayton's _Ode to the Cambro Britons on their Harp_, was suggested by the digging up of a mail-clad skeleton at Fall River--a circ.u.mstance which the poet linked with the traditions about the Round Tower at Newport, thus giving to the whole the spirit of a Norse viking song of war and of the sea.

_The Wreck of the Hesperus_ was occasioned by the news of s.h.i.+pwrecks on the coast near Gloucester and by the name of a reef--"Norman's Woe"--where many of them took place. It was written one night between twelve and three, and cost the poet, he said, "hardly an effort."

Indeed, it is the spontaneous ease and grace, the unfailing taste of Longfellow's lines, which are their best technical quality. There is nothing obscure or esoteric about his poetry. If there is little pa.s.sion or intellectual depth, there is always genuine poetic feeling, often a very high order of imagination, and almost invariably the choice of the right word. In this volume were also included _The Village Blacksmith_ and _Excelsior_. The latter, and the _Psalm of Life_, have had a "d.a.m.nable iteration" which causes them to figure as Longfellow's most popular pieces. They are by no means, however, among his best. They are vigorously expressed common-places of that hortatory kind which pa.s.ses for poetry, but is, in reality, a vague species of preaching.

In _The Belfry of Bruges_ and _The Seaside and the Fireside_ the translations were still kept up, and among the original pieces were _The Occupation of Orion_--the most imaginative of all Longfellow's poems; _Seaweed_, which has very n.o.ble stanzas, the favorite _Old Clock on the Stairs_, _The Building of the s.h.i.+p_, with its magnificent closing apostrophe to the Union, and _The Fire of Driftwood_, the subtlest in feeling of any thing that the poet ever wrote. With these were verses of a more familiar quality, such as _The Bridge_, _Resignation_, and _The Day Is Done_, and many others, all reflecting moods of gentle and pensive sentiment, and drawing from a.n.a.logies in nature or in legend lessons which, if somewhat obvious, were expressed with perfect art. Like Keats, he apprehended every thing on its beautiful side. Longfellow was all poet. Like Ophelia in Hamlet,

"Thought and affection, pa.s.sion, h.e.l.l itself, _He_ turns to favor and to prettiness."

He cared very little about the intellectual movement of the age. The transcendental ideas of Emerson pa.s.sed over his head and left him undisturbed. For politics he had that gentlemanly distaste which the cultivated cla.s.s in America had already begun to entertain. In 1842 he printed a small volume of _Poems on Slavery_, which drew commendation from his friend Sumner, but had nothing of the fervor of Whittier's or Lowell's utterances on the same subject. It is interesting to compare his journals with Hawthorne's _American Note Books_, and to observe in what very different ways the two writers made prey of their daily experiences for literary material. A favorite haunt of Longfellow's was the bridge between Boston and Cambridgeport, the same which he put into verse in his poem, _The Bridge_. "I always stop on the bridge,"

he writes in his journal; "tide waters are beautiful. From the ocean up into the land they go, like messengers, to ask why the tribute has not been paid. The brooks and rivers answer that there has been little harvest of snow and rain this year. Floating sea-wood and kelp is carried up into the meadows, as returning sailors bring oranges in bandanna handkerchiefs to friends in the country." And again: "We leaned for a while on the wooden rail and enjoyed the silvery reflection on the sea, making sundry comparisons. Among other thoughts we had this cheering one, that the whole sea was flas.h.i.+ng with this heavenly light, though we saw it only in a single track; the dark waves are the dark providences of G.o.d; luminous, though not to us; and even to ourselves in another position." "Walk on the bridge, both ends of which are lost in the fog, like human life midway between two eternities; beginning and ending in mist." In Hawthorne an allegoric moaning is usually something deeper and subtler than this, and seldom so openly expressed. Many of Longfellow's poems--the _Beleaguered City_, for example--may be definitely divided into two parts; in the first, a story is told or a natural phenomenon described; in the second, the spiritual application of the parable is formally set forth.

This method became with him almost a trick of style, and his readers learn to look for the _hoec fabula docet_ at the end as a matter of course. As for the prevailing optimism in Longfellow's view of life--of which the above pa.s.sage is an instance--it seems to be in him an affair of temperament, and not, as in Emerson, the result of philosophic insight. Perhaps, however, in the last a.n.a.lysis optimism and pessimism are subjective--the expression of temperament or individual experience, since the facts of life are the same, whether seen through Schopenhauer's eyes or through Emerson's. If there is any particular in which Longfellow's inspiration came to him at first hand and not through books, it is in respect to the aspects of the sea. On this theme no American poet has written more beautifully and with a keener sympathy than the author of _The Wreck of the Hesperus_ and of _Seaweed_.

In 1847 was published the long poem of _Evangeline_. The story of the Acadian peasant girl, who was separated from her lover in the dispersion of her people by the English troops, and after weary wanderings and a life-long search, found him at last, an old man dying in a Philadelphia hospital, was told to Longfellow by the Rev. H. L.

Conolly, who had previously suggested it to Hawthorne as a subject for a story. Longfellow, characteristically enough, "got up" the local color for his poem from Haliburton's account of the dispersion of the Grand-Pre Acadians, from Darby's _Geographical Description of Louisiana_ and Watson's _Annals of Philadelphia_. He never needed to go much outside of his library for literary impulse and material.

Whatever may be held as to Longfellow's inventive powers as a creator of characters or an interpreter of American life, his originality as an artist is manifested by his successful domestication in _Evangeline_ of the dactylic hexameter, which no English poet had yet used with effect.

The English poet, Arthur Hugh Clough, who lived for a time in Cambridge, followed Longfellow's example in the use of hexameter in his _Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich_, so that we have now arrived at the time--a proud moment for American letters--when the works of our writers began to react upon the literature of Europe. But the beauty of the descriptions in _Evangeline_ and the pathos--somewhat too drawn out--of the story made it dear to a mult.i.tude of readers who cared nothing about the technical disputes of Poe and other critics as to whether or not Longfellow's lines were sufficiently "spondaic" to represent truthfully the quant.i.tative hexameters of Homer and Vergil.

In 1855 appeared _Hiawatha_, Longfellow's most aboriginal and "American" book. The tripping trochaic measure he borrowed from the Finnish epic _Kalevala_. The vague, child-like mythology of the Indian tribes, with its anthropomorphic sense of the brotherhood between men, animals, and the forms of inanimate nature, he took from Schoolcraft's _Algic Researches_, 1839. He fixed forever, in a skillfully chosen poetic form, the more inward and imaginative part of Indian character, as Cooper had given permanence to its external and active side. Of Longfellow's dramatic experiments, the _Golden Legend_, 1851, alone deserves mention here. This was in his chosen realm, a tale taken from the ecclesiastical annals of the Middle Ages, precious with martyrs'

blood and bathed in the rich twilight of the cloister. It contains some of his best work, but its merit is rather poetic than dramatic, although Ruskin praised it for the closeness with which it entered into the temper of the monk.

Longfellow has pleased the people more than the critics. He gave freely what he had, and the gift was beautiful. Those who have looked in his poetry for something else than poetry, or for poetry of some other kind, have not been slow to a.s.sert that he was a lady's poet--one who satisfied callow youths and school-girls by uttering commonplaces in graceful and musical shape, but who offered no strong meat for men.

Miss Fuller called his poetry thin, and the poet himself--or, rather, a portrait of the poet which frontispieced an ill.u.s.trated edition of his works--a "dandy Pindar." This is not true of his poetry, or of the best of it. But he had a singing and not a talking voice, and in his prose one becomes sensible of a certain weakness. _Hyperion_, for example, published in 1839, a loitering fiction, interspersed with descriptions of European travel, is, upon the whole, a weak book, overflowery in diction and sentimental in tone.

The crown of Longfellow's achievements as a translator was his great version of Dante's _Divina Commedia_, published between 1867 and 1870.

It is a severely literal, almost a line for line, rendering. The meter is preserved, but the rhyme sacrificed. If not the best English poem constructed from Dante, it is at all events the most faithful and scholarly paraphrase. The sonnets which accompanied it are among Longfellow's best work. He seems to have been raised by daily communion with the great Tuscan into a habit of deeper and more subtle thought than is elsewhere common in his poetry.

Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809- ) is a native of Cambridge and a graduate of Harvard in the cla.s.s of '29; a cla.s.s whose anniversary reunions he has celebrated in something like forty distinct poems and songs. For sheer cleverness and versatility Dr. Holmes is, perhaps, unrivaled among American men of letters. He has been poet, wit, humorist, novelist, essayist, and a college lecturer and writer on medical topics. In all of these departments he has produced work which ranks high, if not with the highest. His father, Dr. Abiel Holmes, was a graduate of Yale and an orthodox minister of liberal temper, but the son early threw in his lot with the Unitarians; and, as was natural to a man of satiric turn and with a very human enjoyment of a fight, whose youth was cast in an age of theological controversy, he has always had his fling at Calvinism, and has prolonged the slogans of old battles into a later generation; sometimes, perhaps, insisting upon them rather wearisomely and beyond the limits of good taste. He had, even as an undergraduate, a reputation for cleverness at writing comic verses, and many of his good things in this kind, such as the _Dorchester Giant_ and the _Height of the Ridiculous_, were contributed to the _Collegian_, a students' paper. But he first drew the attention of a wider public by his spirited ballad of _Old Ironsides_--

"Ay! Tear her tattered ensign down!"--

composed about 1830, when it was proposed by the government to take to pieces the unseaworthy hulk of the famous old man-of-war, _Const.i.tution_. Holmes's indignant protest--which has been a favorite subject for school-boy declamation--had the effect of postponing the vessel's fate for a great many years. From 1830-35 the young poet was pursuing his medical studies in Boston and Paris, contributing now and then some verses to the magazines. Of his life as a medical student in Paris there are many pleasant reminiscences in his _Autocrat_ and other writings, as where he tells, for instance, of a dinner-party of Americans in the French capital, where one of the company brought tears of homesickness into the eyes of his _sodales_ by saying that the tinkle of the ice in the champagne-gla.s.ses reminded him of the cow-bells in the rocky old pastures of New England. In 1836 he printed his first collection of poems. The volume contained, among a number of pieces broadly comic, like the _September Gale_, the _Music Grinders_, and the _Ballad of the Oyster-man_--which at once became widely popular--a few poems of a finer and quieter temper, in which there was a quaint blending of the humorous and the pathetic. Such were _My Aunt_ and the _Last Leaf_--which Abraham Lincoln found "inexpressibly touching," and which it is difficult to read without the double tribute of a smile and a tear. The volume contained also _Poetry: A Metrical Essay_, read before the Harvard Chapter of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, which was the first of that long line of capital occasional poems which Holmes has been spinning for half a century with no sign of fatigue and with scarcely any falling off in freshness; poems read or spoken or sung at all manner of gatherings, public and private, at Harvard commencements, cla.s.s days, and other academic anniversaries; at inaugurations, centennials, dedications of cemeteries, meetings of medical a.s.sociations, mercantile libraries, Burns clubs, and New England societies; at rural festivals and city fairs; openings of theaters, layings of corner-stones, birthday celebrations, jubilees, funerals, commemoration services, dinners of welcome or farewell to d.i.c.kens, Bryant, Everett, Whittier, Longfellow, Grant, Farragut, the Grand Duke Alexis, the Chinese emba.s.sy, and what not. Probably no poet of any age or clime has written so much and so well to order. He has been particularly happy in verses of a convivial kind, toasts for big civic feasts, or post-prandial rhymes for the _pet.i.t comite_--the snug little dinners of the chosen few; his

"The quaint trick to cram the pithy line That cracks so crisply over bubbling wine."

And although he could write on occasion a _Song for a Temperance Dinner_, he has preferred to chant the praise of the punch bowl and to

"feel the old convivial glow (unaided) o'er me stealing, The warm, champagny, old-particular-brandy-punchy feeling."

It would be impossible to enumerate the many good things of this sort which Holmes has written, full of wit and wisdom, and of humor lightly dashed with sentiment and sparkling with droll a.n.a.logies, sudden puns, and unexpected turns of rhyme and phrase. Among the best of them are _Nux Postcoenatica_, _A Modest Request_, _Ode for a Social Meeting_, _The Boys_, and _Rip Van Winkle, M.D_. Holmes's favorite measure, in his longer poems, is the heroic couplet which Pope's example seems to have consecrated forever to satiric and didactic verse. He writes as easily in this meter as if it were prose, and with much of Pope's epigrammatic neatness. He also manages with facility the anapaestics of Moore and the ballad stanza which Hood had made the vehicle for his drolleries. It cannot be expected that verses manufactured to pop with the corks and fizz with the champagne at academic banquets should much outlive the occasion; or that the habit of producing such verses on demand should foster in the producer that "high seriousness" which Matthew Arnold a.s.serts to be one mark of all great poetry. Holmes's poetry is mostly on the colloquial level, excellent society-verse, but even in its serious moments too smart and too pretty to be taken very gravely; with a certain glitter, knowingness, and flippancy about it, and an absence of that self-forgetfulness and intense absorption in its theme which characterize the work of the higher imagination. This is rather the product of fancy and wit. Wit, indeed, in the old sense of quickness in the perception of a.n.a.logies, is the staple of his mind.

His resources in the way of figure, ill.u.s.tration, allusion, and anecdote are wonderful. Age cannot wither him nor custom stale his infinite variety, and there is as much powder in his latest pyrotechnics as in the rockets which he sent up half a century ago.

Yet, though the humorist in him rather outweighs the poet, he has written a few things, like the _Chambered Nautilus_ and _Homesick in Heaven_, which are as purely and deeply poetic as the _One-Hoss Shay_ and the _Prologue_ are funny. Dr. Holmes is not of the stuff of which idealists and enthusiasts are made. As a physician and a student of science, the facts of the material universe have counted for much with him. His clear, positive, alert intellect was always impatient of mysticism. He had the sharp eye of the satirist and the man of the world for oddities of dress, dialect, and manners. Naturally the transcendental movement struck him on its ludicrous side, and in his _After-Dinner Poem_, read at the Phi Beta Kappa dinner at Cambridge in 1843, he had his laugh at the "Orphic odes" and "runes" of the bedlamite seer and bard of mystery

"Who rides a beetle which he calls a 'sphinx.'

And O what questions asked in club-foot rhyme Of Earth the tongueless, and the deaf-mute Time!

Here babbling 'Insight' shouts in Nature's ears His last conundrum on the orbs and spheres; There Self-inspection sucks its little thumb, With 'Whence am I?' and 'Wherefore did I come?'"

Curiously enough, the author of these lines lived to write an appreciative life of the poet who wrote the _Sphinx_. There was a good deal of toryism or social conservatism in Holmes. He acknowledged a preference for the man with a pedigree, the man who owned family portraits, had been brought up in familiarity with books, and could p.r.o.nounce "view" correctly. Readers unhappily not of the "Brahmin caste of New England" have sometimes resented as sn.o.bbishness Holmes's harping on "family," and his perpetual application of certain favorite s.h.i.+bboleths to other people's ways of speech. "The woman who calc'lates is lost."

"Learning condemns beyond the reach of hope The careless lips that speak of soap for soap. . . .

Do put your accents in the proper spot: Don't, let me beg you, don't say 'How?' for 'What?'

The things named 'pants' in certain doc.u.ments, A word not made for gentlemen, but 'gents.'"

With the rest of "society" he was disposed to ridicule the abolition movement as a crotchet of the eccentric and the long-haired. But when the civil war broke out he lent his pen, his tongue, and his own flesh and blood to the cause of the Union. The individuality of Holmes's writings comes in part from their local and provincial bias. He has been the laureate of Harvard College and the bard of Boston city, an urban poet, with a c.o.c.kneyish fondness for old Boston ways and things--the Common and the Frog Pond, Faneuil Hall and King's Chapel and the Old South, Bunker Hill, Long Wharf, the Tea Party, and the town crier. It was Holmes who invented the playful saying that "Boston Statehouse is the hub of the solar system."

In 1857 was started the _Atlantic Monthly_, a magazine which has published a good share of the best work done by American writers within the past generation. Its immediate success was a.s.sured by Dr. Holmes's brilliant series of papers, the _Autocrat of the Breakfast Table_, 1858, followed at once by the _Professor at the Breakfast Table_, 1859, and later by the _Poet at the Breakfast Table_, 1873. The _Autocrat_ is its author's masterpiece, and holds the fine quintessence of his humor, his scholars.h.i.+p, his satire, genial observation, and ripe experience of men and cities. The form is as unique and original as the contents, being something between an essay and a drama; a succession of monologues or table-talks at a typical American boarding-house, with a thread of story running through the whole. The variety of mood and thought is so great that these conversations never tire, and the prose is interspersed with some of the author's choicest verse. The _Professor at the Breakfast Table_ followed too closely on the heels of the _Autocrat_, and had less freshness. The third number of the series was better, and was pleasantly reminiscent and slightly garrulous, Dr. Holmes being now (1873) sixty-four years old, and ent.i.tled to the gossiping privilege of age. The personnel of the _Breakfast Table_ series, such as the landlady and the landlady's daughter and her son, Benjamin Franklin; the schoolmistress, the young man named John, the Divinity Student, the Kohinoor, the Sculpin, the Scarabaeus, and the Old Gentleman who sits opposite, are not fully drawn characters, but outlined figures, lightly sketched--as is the Autocrat's wont--by means of some trick of speech, or dress, or feature, but they are quite life-like enough for their purpose, which is mainly to furnish listeners and foils to the eloquence and wit of the chief talker.

In 1860 and 1867 Holmes entered the field of fiction with two "medicated novels," _Elsie Venner_ and the _Guardian Angel_. The first of these was a singular tale, whose heroine united with her very fascinating human attributes something of the nature of a serpent; her mother having been bitten by a rattlesnake a few months before the birth of the girl, and kept alive meanwhile by the use of powerful antidotes. The heroine of the _Guardian Angel_ inherited lawless instincts from a vein of Indian blood in her ancestry. These two books were studies of certain medico-psychological problems. They preached Dr. Holmes's favorite doctrines of heredity and of the modified nature of moral responsibility by reason of transmitted tendencies which limit the freedom of the will. In _Elsie Venner_, in particular, the weirdly imaginative and speculative character of the leading motive suggests Hawthorne's method in fiction, but the background and the subsidiary figures have a realism that is in abrupt contrast with this, and gives a kind of doubleness and want of keeping to the whole. The Yankee characters, in particular, and the satirical pictures of New England country life are open to the charge of caricature. In the _Guardian Angel_ the figure of Byles Gridley, the old scholar, is drawn with thorough sympathy, and though some of his acts are improbable, he is, on the whole, Holmes's most vital conception in the region of dramatic creation.

James Russell Lowell (1819- ), the foremost of American critics and of living American poets, is, like Holmes, a native of Cambridge, and, like Emerson and Holmes, a clergyman's son. In 1855 he succeeded Longfellow as professor of modern languages in Harvard College. Of late years he has held important diplomatic posts, like Everett, Irving, Bancroft, Motley, and other Americans distinguished in letters, having been United States minister to Spain, and, under two administrations, to the court of St. James. Lowell is not so spontaneously and exclusively a poet as Longfellow, and his popularity with the average reader has never been so great. His appeal has been to the few rather than the many, to an audience of scholars and of the judicious rather than to the "groundlings" of the general public.

Nevertheless his verse, though without the evenness, instinctive grace, and unerring good taste of Longfellow's, has more energy and a stronger intellectual fiber, while in prose he is very greatly the superior.

His first volume, _A Year's Life_, 1841, gave some promise. In 1843 he started a magazine, the _Pioneer_, which only reached its third number, though it counted among its contributors Hawthorne, Poe, Whittier, and Miss Barrett (afterward Mrs. Browning). A second volume of poems, printed in 1844, showed a distinct advance, in such pieces as the _Shepherd of King Admetus_, _Rhoecus_, a cla.s.sical myth, told in excellent blank verse, and the same in subject with one of Landor's polished intaglios; and the _Legend of Brittany_, a narrative poem, which had fine pa.s.sages, but no firmness in the management of the story. As yet, it was evident, the young poet had not found his theme.

This came with the outbreak of the Mexican War, which was unpopular in New England, and which the Free Soil party regarded as a slave-holders'

war waged without provocation against a sister republic, and simply for the purpose of extending the area of slavery.

In 1846, accordingly, the _Biglow Papers_ began to appear in the _Boston Courier_, and were collected and published in book form in 1848. These were a series of rhymed satires upon the government and the war party, written in the Yankee dialect, and supposed to be the work of Hosea Biglow, a home-spun genius in a down-east country town, whose letters to the editor were indorsed and accompanied by the comments of the Rev. Homer Wilbur, A.M., pastor of the First Church in Jaalam, and (prospective) member of many learned societies. The first paper was a derisive address to a recruiting sergeant, with a denunciation of the "n.i.g.g.e.r-drivin' States" and the "Northern dough-faces;" a plain hint that the North would do better to secede than to continue doing dirty work for the South; and an expression of those universal peace doctrines which were then in the air, and to which Longfellow gave serious utterance in his _Occultation of Orion_.

"Ez for war, I call it murder-- There you hev it plain an' flat; I don't want to go no furder Than my Testyment for that; G.o.d hez said so plump an' fairly, It's as long as it is broad, An' you've gut to git up airly Ef you want to take in G.o.d."

The second number was a versified paraphrase of a letter received from Mr. Birdofredom Sawin, "a yung feller of our town that was cussed fool enuff to goe atrottin inter Miss Chiff arter a dram and fife," and who finds when he gets to Mexico that

"This kind o' sogerin' aint a mite like our October trainin'."

Of the subsequent papers the best was, perhaps, _What Mr. Robinson Thinks_, an election ballad, which caused universal laughter, and was on every body's tongue.