Whitman Town (part 2 of 3)

* I am bom a poet,' wrote Emerson in 1835 ; * of a low class, without doubt, yet a poet. That is my nature and vocation. My singing, to be sure, is very husky, and is for the most part in prose. Still, I am a poet in the sense of a perceiver and true lover of the harmonies that are in the soul and in matter, and specially of the correspondences between these and those.' At other times, Emerson said of himself, * I am not 9l great poet.' On the other hand, Mr. Stedman calls him * our most typical and inspiring poet.' It has often been said that he could not write poetry at all, and as often replied that he could write nothing else. Of course the Question is largely one of definitions. Emerson's own dictum, * The ereat poets are judged by the frame of mind they induce,' which has often been quoted in settlement of the question, is too vague to be of any real help. It would apply equally well as a standard for the judgment of great prose writers, or great orators. Uonfi£sion arises on the one hand from identifying poetiy with whatever is noble and imaginative in thought or feeling, and on the other hand, from narrowing it to the mere singing faculty. The lyric is only one of the many poetic forms ; and the lyric element m poetry is only one of its important elements. In the nineteenth century, to be sure, the lyric almost usurped to itself the whole domain and conception of poetry. But this error can be only a passing one. What lasts from century to century in poetry is even more often those words or phrases which condense thought or feelmg or vision into simple and well-shaped rhythmic form, than the verse that merely appeals to the senses with easy-flowing or even haunting melody. We may even admit that Emerson was not a bom singer, - many of the greatest poets have not been, in the narrow lyric sense of the word, - and still maintain, without falling into the opposite error of identifying poetry with that nobility of thought and originality of imagination which are merely possible material for poetry, that he was a bom poet. For he proved himself a poet in the form as well as in the substance of his work. That he did not altogether lack the lyric note, the * Earth Sone ' in * Hamatreya,' a few passages in * Woodnotes ' and * May Day,' and many stanzas of * My Garden,' of * Waldeinsamkeit,' and of the * Concord Ode,' at once show. But, what is far more important, he has in a supreme degree the faculty of fitting thought to the form of verse rather than merely to its melody. Many a line, many a quatrain, many brief passages, and a few complete poems, stand, and are beginning more and more to stand out, in Emerson's work, like those lines of which Holmes said that a moment after they were written it seemed * as if they had been carved on marble for a thousand years.'

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Henrt Wads worth Longfellow was bom at Portland, Maine, February 27, 1807, the second of eight children. He came of an old New England family. His fatner and his great-grandfather were graduates of Harvard College. On his mother's side he was descend^ from John and Priscilla Alden of Plymouth, and his maternal erandfather. General Peleg Wadsworth, was a distinguished officer in the Revolution. Re spent a happy boyhood m Portland, the memory of which returns often in his poems, especially in * My Lost Youth.' The first book that he remembered with delight was Irving's Sketch Bookf which he read in numbers when it appeared. His first published verses, the ' Battle of Lovell's Pond,' were printed in the Portland Gazette when he was thirteen years old.

done. But his father was now a trustee of Bowdoin, the chief college of Maine, which had only recently been set apart from Massachusetts as a separate state. Longfellow entered the sophomore class at Bowdoin in 1822, and graduated in 1825, ranking second in his class. Hawthorne was in the same class; and Franklin Pierce, later President of the United States, and Hawthorne's close friend, was in the next preceding class.

In his last year at college, when the question of choosing a career in life became pressing, Longfellow wrote to his father (December 5, 1824) : * I take this early opportunity to write to you, because I wish to know fully your inclination with regard to the profession I am to pursue when I leave college. For my part, I have already hinted to you what would best please me. I want to spend one year at Cambridge for the purpose of reading history, and of becoming familiar with the best authors in polite literature ; whilst at the same time I can be acquiring a knowledge of the Italian language, without an acquaintance with which I shall be shut out from one of the most beautiful departments of letters. The French I mean to understand pretty thoroughly before I leave college. After leaving Cambridge, I would attach myself to some literary periodical publication, by which I could maintain myself and still enjov the advantages of reading, ^ow, I do not think that there is anything visionary or chmierical in my plan thus Sir. The fact is - and I will not disguise it in the least, for I think I ought not - the fact is, I most eagerly aspire after future eminence in literature ; my whole soul bums most ardently for it, and every earthly thought centres in it. There may be something visionary in this, but I flatter myself that I have prudence enough to keep my enthusiasm from defeating its object by too great haste. Surely, there never was a better opportunity offered for Uie exertion of literary talent in our own country than is now offered. To be sure, most of our literary men thus far have not been professedly so, until they have studied and entered the practice of Theology, Law, or Medicine. But this is evidently lost time. . . . Whether Nature has giveu me any capacity for knowledge or not, she has at any rate given me a very strong predilection for literary pursuits, and I am almost confident in believing, that, if I can ever rise in the world, it must be by the exercise of my talent in the wide field of literature. With such a belief, I must say that I am unwilling to engage in the study of the law.*

On the last day of the year he wrote again: * I am very desirous to hear your opinion of my project of residing a year at Cambridge. Even if it should be found necessary for me to study a profession, I should think a twelve-months' residence at Harvard before commencing the study would be exceedingly useful. Of divinity, medicine, and law, I should choose the last. Whatever I do study ought to be engaged in with all my soul, - for I will be eminent in something. The question then is, whether I could engage in the law with all that eagerness which in these times is necessary to success. I fear that I could not. . . . Let me then reside one year at Cambridge; let me study belles-lettres; and after that time it will not require a spirit of prophecy to predict with some degree of certainty what kind of a figure I comd make in the literary world.' His i^ther answered: * A literary life, to one who has the means of support, must be very pleasant. But 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 (I will not say whether good or ill) to be bom rich, you must adopt a profession which will afford you subsistence as well as reputation. I am happy to observe that my ambition has never been to accumulate wealth for my children, but to cultivate their minds in the best possible manner, and to imbue them with correct moral, political, and religious principles, - believing that a person thus educated will with proper diligence be certain of attaining all the wealth which is necessary to happiness. With regud to your spending a year at Cambridge, I have always thought it might be beneficial; and if my health should not be impaired and my finances should allow, I should be very happy to gratify you.' The letter goes on with a kindly criticism of some verses by Lc>ng^ellow which had just been published.

Longfellow regretfully accepted his father's decision, choosing, among the three possible professions, the law. * 1 can be a lawyer,' he says. * This will support my real existence, literature my ideal one.' Just at the right moment, however, there came an apparent solution of the di£Bculty in the shape of an offer from the trustees of Bowdoin to establish for Lone^ellow a professorship of modem languages, on condition that he should spend some time m Europe preparing for the position. His father provided the necessair money for foreign travel and study. The season of the year was not favorable for sailing, so it was not imtil the following May (1826), that he began the long voyage from New York to Havre. Meanwhile he spent some time in reading law in his father's ofiBce, and more in writing verses, some of which were printed in the Atlantic Souvenir of Philadelphia, and others in the United States Literary Gazette of Boston, to which he 'had already contnbuted during his last year in college. A few of these pieces were preserved in the section entitled ' Earlier Poems ' of Longfellow's first volume of original verse, published fourteen years later.

On arriving in Europe, in »June, 1826, he went first to Paris, and spent about eight months tiiere; then to Spaiu (where he met Washington Irving), for nearly a year; then to Italy for almost another year (1828); and to Germany for his last six months, returning home in Au^st, 1829. He had acquired a g^ood practical knowledge of French, Spanish, and Italian, but had found German more difficult, and made comparatively little prog^ss in it.

Longfellow entered on his work as a teacher of modem languages and literatures in September, 1829. The idea that study of the modem lang^uafi^es could form any serious part of a college curriculum was at that time a new one. Only one important professorship in the subject existed. There were not even any elementary text-books for English speaking students, and Longfellow had to begin by making his own. He publish^ a translation of L'Homond's French Grammar ; an elementary reading book in French, called Manuel de Proverbes Drarnatioues ; and a similar book for Spanish ; he wrote in French a syllabus of the elements of Italian grammar, and edited a collection of extracts from Italiim writers, writing his preface in Italian. He attended carefully and thoroughly to his work, hearing recitations, composing and correcting exercises, etc., and found time to write, outside of his text-books, only a few articles K)r the North American Review, dealing in elementary fashion with the French, Italian, and Spanish languages and literatures. He found the profession which he had chosen no less exacting than the law would have been, and almost more so; since, by employing him on work closely similar in kind to that which he most desired to do, it left him little freshness of mind for original composition. His work was well and faithfully done, however; he had the respect and liking of his students; and in 1834 the most important position within the field of his chosen work was offered to him, the * Smith Professorship of the French and Spanish Languages and Literatures and of Belles Lettres,' at Harvard, previously held, since its foundation in 1816, by Ticknor. With the offer came a suggestion from the President of the University: * Should it be your wish, previously to entering upon the duties of the office, to reside m Europe, at your own expense, a year or eighteen months, for the purpose of a more perfect attainment of the German, Mr. Ticknor will retain his office till your return.'

Longfellow eagerly accepted this offer. He had been married in 1831 to Mary Potter of Portland, and they sailed for Europe in April, 1835. They went first to Englaud, then to Holland, where Mrs. Longfellow fell ill, and died in November. Long^llow was more than most men one for whom it was * not good that he should be alone.' The rest of his year in Europe was spent in the shadow of sorrow and loneliness. He studied ftiithfully, masterea the German lang^iage, and buried himself in the reading of the modern German romantic literature, the influence of which is so strong in his prose romance, Hyperion, This romance was in part inspired by Miss Frances Appleton, whom he met the following summer in Switzerland, and who appears in it as Mary Ashburton.

On his return to America in the autumn (1836), he entered on the duties of his professorship at Harvard. He had somewhat less of routine work to do than at Bowdoin, and moro lectunng. He had one assistant for each of the foreign languages taught, but still retained personal oversight of the work of each student, and often was confined to his classroom work for three whole days m each week. He now formed broader and richer friend- -hips than be bad known before, particularly with Charles Sumner, then t^^aching in the Haryard Law School, witn C. C. Felton, professor of Greek, and later President^ with George S. Hillard, and others; and renewed his college friendship with Hawthorne. He had grown with the experiences of life, and now found the mechanical duties which filled so much of his time more irksome than before. ' Perhaps the worst thing in college life,' he wrote in his Jowmalj ' is this having your mind constantly a playmate for boys, constantly adapting itself to them, instead of stretching out and grappling with men^t minds; ' and again: ' Lecturing is all well enough, and in my history is an evident advance upon the past. But now one of my French teachers b gone, and this dragooning of schocdboys in lessons is like going backward.' On the whole, however, he believed in his work : ' Have I been wise to give up three whole days (in ihe week) to coll^^ chisses ? I think I have; for thus I make my presence felt here^ and have no idle time to mope and g^ve;' and again: ' After all Cambridge delighteth my heart exceedingly. I have fidlen upon books with a most voracious appetite; ... no doubt, if I could bring myself to give iro all my time to the college ... I could get along very comfortably, but the idea of standing still or going backward is not to be entertained/ Constantly the memory of his early ambitions, and of how little he has done to achieve them, returns to him: ' I could live very happily here if I could chain myself down to college duties and be nothing but a professor. I should then have work enough, and recreation enough. But I am too restless for this. What should I be at fifty ? A fat mill-horse, grinding round with blinkers on. . . . This will not do. It is too much for one's daily bread when one can live on so little.'

These extracts are from his Journal of 183S-39 ; and it is in these same years that he is writing the few brief and simple poems that are the real beginning of his poetical work : the ' Psalm of Life,' the ' Light of Stars,' the < Hynm to the Night,' ' Footsteps of Angels,' and the ' Beleaguered City.' These five poems and four others almost equally well known, with seven < flarlier Poems,' were collected and published in a slender volume called Voices of the Night, in 1839. Hyperion was published m the same year. Two years later he published another small collection entitlea Ballads and Other Poems, containing the * Skeleton in Armor/ the * Wreck of the Hesperus,' the ' Village Blackfonith,' ' £ndymion,' the ' Rainy Day,' * Maidenhood,' and < Excelsior.' In 1842 tiie < Spanish Stodent ' appeared, as a serial, in Graham's Magazine.

Longfellow was now thirty-five years old. His health was somewhat impaired by his years of close work, and he found himself compelled to take a half-year's leave of absence, which he spent mostly at Marienberg, in Germany. Here began his lasting friendship with Freiligrath, who later translated ' Hiawatha.' On his way home he passed through England, met Landor and Dickens, read Dickens's American Notes, and was particularly impressed with * the g^nd chapter on slavery,' as he calls it. During the return voyage, being confined to his cabin for about a fortnight, he wrote the seven brief Poems on Slavery. These, with one additional poem, were published in a little volume of thirty-one pages, in December, 1842, and were hailed with delight by the abolitionists^ who felt that a very strone ally had joined their forces. Longfellow, however, declined to accept the congressional nomination which was offered him through Whittier by the Liberty party, or to take any further part in the anti-slavery contest. He even omitted the poems on slavery from the first collected edition of his poems, an act for which he has Deen severely blamed. Yet even Lowell, ardent abolitionist as he was at the time, and uncompromising as he was on the question of omitting any of his own anti-slavery poems, felt that Longfellow was justified m doing so, since he might well consider these poems to be tlie least valuable part of his work. It is probable, also, that the gentle Longfellow, who did not lack courage, but who did lack * the fighting edge,' omitted the poems rather from a genuine desire to avoid wounding any of his readers than from mere policy. In any case, the poems are unimportant. * I have attempted only to invest the subject with a poetic colormg,' wrote Longfellow to John Forster; and that is all he succeeded in doing; JBMnj^ wjU Bay, with a false poetic coloring. The Poems on Slavery have none of the deep coDviction and intensity of Whittier's or Lowell's, and are more closely related to German literary romanticism than to American social conditions.

Longfellow had not even yet * found himself,' and had barely beeun, in a few ballads, his real poetical work. He had written in his Journal in 1840, speaking of a visit to Mr. Norton: * There I beheld what perfect happiness may exist on this earth, and felt bow I stood alone in life, cut off for a while from those dearest sympathies for which I long.' It was at Marienberg that he wrote the sonnet ' Mezzo Cammin,' oppressed with a feeling that, though he was the author of a few brief and popular poems, yet he had spent half of man's allotted years without having beeun that * tower of son^ with lofty parapet,' which it had been his ambition to build. He was almost entirely dependent upon home life and home affection; and when he at last found these, in his marriage with Miss Frances Appleton, in 1843, his maturity and the creative period of his life really began. He finished his work as a mere editor and compiler (except for the Poems of Places, much later) with the Poets and Poetry of Europe, in 1845. At the end of that year was published the Belfry of Bruges and Other Poems, dated 1846, which closes the first period of his work, and already shows a great advance in artistic quality over the crude moralizing and vaguely romantic commonjuace of his earliest work. The first collected edition of his poems had been published in a sumptuous volume by Carey and Hart of Philadelphia, in 1845, and < Evaneeline ' was just begun.

The characteristics of all Lon^ellow's work, which are especially marked in its first period, are not such as appeal either to the intellectual critic or to the lover of art for art's sake. A good deal of its romantic imagery strikes us now as false, and its simplicity as bathos. ' £xcelsior ' is a truly imaginative conception, but in expression it degenerates into * A tear stood in his bright blue eye. But still he answered with a sigh,' etc. The expression is truly imaginative in that French passage from which he took the idea of the < Old Clock on the Stairs,' yet Lonefellow makes of it such lines as * Some are married, some are dead,' which is almost as bad as the line that Tennyson declared to be typical Wordsworthian blank verse, ' A Mr. Wilkinson, a clergyman.' But it is the veiy triumph of these early poems that most of their lines seem more commonplace than they really are, because they have become, by their simplicity and genuineness, a part of the universal feeling of the race. Simple and genume they are, except for the false romantic imagery already spoken of, such as is found in the ' Reaper and the Flowers.' Their appeal is universal; and to each individual it may at some time be new, as it was to all the young America of 1840. Even in our sophisticated times, it would be a pretty poor sort of youth who would not still be thrilled at his first reading of the ' Psalm of I^e.' * The Day is Done,' hackneyed as it is, is still full of simple and restful beauty.

On the last day of 1845, Longfellow wrote in his Journal : ' Peace to the embers of burnt-out things ; fears, anxieties, doubts, all gone ! I see them now as a thin blue smoke, hanging in the bright heaven of the past year, vanishing away into utter nothingness. Not manv hopes deceived, not many illusions scattered, not many anticipations disappointed ; but love fulfilled, the heart comforted, the soul enriched with affection ! ' The first period of his life and writing was in fact finished, and his next fifteen years were to contain the largest and the most important part of his poetical work. In the earlier period he had been growing, experimenting, preluding ; in the third and last period, which was to follow 1861, he touched deeper notes sometimes, and attained to greater artistic beauty and condensation ; but he produced no such large body of lasting work as in the middle period.

This middle period, from the end of 1845 to the beginning of 1861, contains ' Evangeline ' (1847) ; * Hiawatha ' (1855) ; the * Courtship of Miles Standish ' (1858) ; the * Building of the Ship,' and other poems, especially of the home, in The Seaside and the Fireside (dated 1850, published 1849); the Golden Legend (1851); the *Saga of King Olaf ' and others of the best Tales of a Wayside Inn, not published until later ; * My Lost Youth ; ' the * Fiftieth Birthday of Agassiz ; ' and some of Lonefellow's most beautiful poems of childhood, including * Children,' and * The Children's Hour.' Longfellow's own home was made complete in these years by the coming of his five children, three girls and two boys.

and his outside life wa« broadened by his growing friendship with AgasRJg, Lowell, and Mr. Charles Eliot Norton, and by his continued close relatiims with Sumner. The duties of ius pfofessorship, however, were becoming more and more irksome to him. * What vexes me most,' he wrote in 1847, ' is being cribbed and shut up in college, not that I dis*. like work, but that I have other work to do than iliis ; ' and again later : ' I seem to be quite banished from all literary work save that of my professorship. ... I am tired, not of work, but of the sameness of work . . . these hours in the lecture-room, like a schoolmaster ! It is pleasant enough when the mind gets engaged in it, - but ^ sit is long and life is short. " ' In 1853 he wrote nothing except the brief poem to Lowell, ' The Two Angels.' In 1854, realizing that his means were quite adequate for his support without a eoUege -alary, - they had been so since his second marriage, - he finally decided to resign his professorship and devote himself entirely to literature. The next few years were full of work. ' Hiawatha ' was written inmiediately after his retirement from the professopship, the Courtship of Miles Standish and other Poems was published in 1858, and in the next three years were written many of his best shorter poems and some of the Talei of a Wayside Inn.

Longfellow had his greatest success as a narrative poet. For the average reader * the tale 's the thing,' and Longfellow possessed the surprisingly rare faculty of telling a simple story well. For him too the tale was the thing ; he realized by instmct the simple and essential first point that it must be constantly interesting, and he had the faculty of making it so/jin local flavor and truth of detail his work is vastly inferior to Whittier's. Some score of years after he wrote the ' Wreck of the Hesperus,' he still vaguely wondered

J'ust where the Beef of Norman's Woe might be, though it was not fifteen miles from lis own summer home. He knew the country of ' Hiawatha ' only through books, and for ' Evangeline ' he formed ius ideas of the Mississippi from reading (perhaps mostly m Chateaubriand), and from a pictorial diorama which was exhibited at Boston while he was writing the poem, and which he enthusiastically welcomed as a great help. Tet his narrative, as such, is better even than Whittier's, whether in the ringing ballads of the Northland, from the ' Skeleton in Armor ' to the ' Saga of King Olaf,' or in the gentler, easily flowing tales that are more characteristic of his own mood, from ' Evangeune ' to * King Bobert of Sicily ' or the ' Birds of Killiiigworth.' And in * Hiawatha,' by some wondrous alchemy due to the true simplicity of his own mind, he did catch the true local coloi^ even in detail as well as in mood, of a life that he had never seen. ' Hiawatha ' has worn surprisingly well, and has stood the test of being judged even by the people whose life ana legends it describes. It stands out, more and more, as Longfellow's most important work. This is anything but the fate predicted for it by those intellectual critics who (with the exception of Emerson) iudg^ed it so severely at its first appearance. In the ' Courtship of Miles Standish,' Longfellow was dealinp^ with a life that he knew more intimately, by its partial survival and by its traditions livmg all about him, as well as from books; thonen he did not take the trouble to visit Plymouth until the poem had been completed. His treatment of this theme is entirely happy and true. The ' Golden Leg^end ' is naturally much less so, though it is by far the best part of the ambitious trilogy which he planned^ under the title of Ghristus : a Mystery, It has charm and the glamour of mediteval storjy but Longfellov/ was manifestly unfitted for any real dramatic composition, or for the broad picturing of a great period like the Middle Ages.

In 1861 came the tragic break in Longfellow's life. It was in July. Mrs. Longfellow's light summer dress caught fire, and she was so severely burned that she died the next morning. Longfellow also was seriously burned in trying to smother the flames, and could not leave his room on the day of her funeral, - the anniversary of their wedding day.

The story of his next few years is completely told in the first of the ' Divina Commedia ' sonnets. That of the later years is suggested in the ' Cross of Snow.' *I have taken refuge in this translation of the Divina Commedia,' he wrote to his friend Freilig^th. For a while he wrote little else, except to complete and publish, at the end of 1863, the first part of Tales of a Wayside Inn ; the second and third parts were published in

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 673

1872 and 1873. The two New England Tragedies^ the first of which had been written in 1856^7, were published in 1868, the Divine Tragedy was written and published in 1871, and the completed Ckristm in 1872. He wrote ' Morituri Salutamus,' for the fiftieth anni« of ms college class, and this was published in 1875, in the Masque of Pandora and Other Poems, together with the * Haneing of the Crane,' which was written for Thomas Bailey Aldrich, and which holds a peculiar place in Lonp^ellow's work, as summing up within itself so many of the different aspects of home life, of all of which he was the poet laureate.

During this last period of his life, he wrote often in a form which he had hardly more than once or twice tried before, except for translations, - the sonnet. In much of the work of this period, especially the sonnets, his feeling is deeper and stronger (it could not be truer), and his expression richer and more condensed, than before. Longfellow was always a true artist and careful of the form of his work, as few of our American poets, except Poe, have been. The little lyric ' Sea-Weed,' of an earlier period, shows how carefully and well he could fit the form of his idea to a somewhat intricate stanza. But his art was never rich or varied, and he lacked most of all that tenseness of expression which is the mark of any very strong artistic or imaginative feeling for lan^uag^. Li the sonnets, however, hb feeling, now deepened and strengthened by the experiences of bis constantly growing life, and by his communion with Dante, was confined within the narrow walls of a form that did not allow it to flow out thin over the marshes of the commonplace, as it had so often done before, and as it did still in the ' Hanging of the Crane.' There is much of this same strength and condensation in his noble ' Slorituri Salutamus.'

Longfellow's last years were made happier by the devotion of his own children, and by the love of all children who knew him - and it would seem that few in America, or even in England or Grermany, did not know him. The story of his g^t from the Cambridge schoolchildren on his seventy-second birthday, and of their constant visits to his home, is too well known to be repeated. His seventy-fifth birthday was celebrated in the schools throughout the United States, and was made memorable also by Whittier's poem,

Longf>ellow's life was that of a simple, faithful, true man and gentleman, kindly and home-loving. And that is what he has put into his verse. He has been well called ' the laureate of the common human heart.' He is first and most of all the poet of the home. There is not an aspect of home life that he has not touched and beautified. If much of his poetry is mere commonplace, it is always the making beautiful of the commonplace. Bryant's poetry often - as in the well-^own lines from ' The Battle-Field/ - and Emerson's still oftener, are the making noble of the commonplace. Whittier's is the simple and true rendering of it. Whitman's is the apotheosis of it. Poe is the only one of our chief elder poets who is not commonplace, who detests and despises the commonplace.

Next, Longfellow is the only American who has successfully written poems of any considerable length. The long poem is different from the short poem, as the novel is from the short story, not only in quantity, but in kind. For those who can conceive only that kind or class of poetry which finds fit expression in the short poem, Poe's dictum that

* there is no such thing as a long poem ' is true ; for the poenf which by its nature belongs to the short poem ck^s, yet tries to extend itself to greater length, is, as Poe saw, inevitably a failure. The long poem is an entirely different literary class or genre. It is Longfellow's distinctive glory that he had the patience and the sustained artistic power to win success in this difficult form, - a kind of success which is almost the rarest m litenutnre, and second only to success in the true dramatic presentation of character and life. Without comparing Longfellow's achievement in this field with that of greater foreign poets, we may say that it alone would give him an unanswerable claim to the largest space in any fully representatiye collection of our chief American poets.

John Greenleaf Whittier

^ Whittikr is the poet of New England country life, almost as truly and fully as Bums 18 of the country life of Scotland. For this he was fitted by all the circumstances of his own life. He was bom and bred a farmer's boy, on the same farm which his first American ancestor, Thomas Whittier, had taken up and cleared in 1647, and in the very house which ti^ Tbonaas Whittier had built for himself in 1688. This sturdy pioneer came to New ^K^d in 1638, when he was eifi^hteen years old, and so was nearly seventy when he built the house which was to be Whittier's birthplace. Of his ten children, five were boys, and each of the five boys, like his father, was over six feet tall, and strong correspondingly. The youngest son, Joseph, Whittier's great-grandfather, had nine children, of whom the voungest, Whittier's grandfather, married Sarah Greenleaf, and had eleven children, of whom the youngest but one was Whittier's father. There was naturally but little property to divide among so many children, and the older sons usually went out and made their own way in the world, while the farm was left to the youngest - in the last case, to the two youngest, Whittier's father and his uncle, Moses Whittier, who is one of the family group in ** Snow-Bound.'

John Greenleaf Whittier was bom December 17. 1807. He lived and worked on the farm, but be lacked the sturdy strength of his ancestors, and the hard work of his early boyhood resulted in physical injury and weakness which lasted for the rest of his life. His education was that of a typical country boy in those days ; he attended the district school in the outskirts of the town where he lived, and later earned for himself two short terms at the neighboring academy. Only once in his boyhood did he g^ so fsa away from home as to visit Boston. Thus, in ancestry and training, Whittier differs from the other New England poets, who were all college bred, and spent their vouth in a city or an academic town. One other important point is to be noted, - that W hittier's family were devout Quakers.

Books were naturally scarce in the household, except for the Bible and the lives of Quaker worthies. He read all the poetry he could get hold of, from the dry ' Davideis ' spoken of in * Snow-Bound ' to something of Gray and Cowper. He wrote rhymes on his slate after the ' nightly chores ' were done. But his real awakening to poetry came through Bums, as he has told us so vividly and beautifully in his tribute to the Scotch peasant-poet.

Whittier's first printed verses appeared when he was eighteen years old, in the local newspaper, edited by William Llova Garrison, then only twenty. Garrison at once sought out his new contributor, and ure^ed the necessity of further education and cultivation of bis talent. * Sir,' replied Whittier's father, * poetry will not give him bread.' Whittier, however, earned enoueh by shoeraaking to support himself for one term at Haverhill Academy in 1827, and by school-teaching enough for another term in 1828. During these two years he wrote for the local papers, especially the Haverhill Gazette, something like a hunared poems.

A college education seemed out of the question, but Whittier obtained employment in the following winter as hack editor of a Boston trade journal, the American Manufacturer, The following summer his father fell seriously ill, and he had to return home and take charge of the farm. But here he found an opportunity for continuing his other work, in the editorship of the chief local paper, the Haverhill Gazette. His father died in June, 1830. In July he went to Hartford, Conn., to be editor of the New England Review, and continued to conduct it until the end of 1831, although he was compelled to spend a good deal of that year at home in Haverhill, and ultimately to give up his editorial position, on account of serious illness.

In these excursions into the outside world, at Boston, and particularly at Hartford^ which was then somewhat of a literary centre, and where he held an important prisitioQ, Whittier's outlook had of course been greatly broadened, and his literary ambition jtren^hened. His letters at the time show a strong desire and even hope of winnins^ fame as a poet. His editorial work had also drawn him into politics, and when he returned to Haverhill, in spite of his ill health, he took an important practical part in the local contests. In September, 1832, he wrote : ' Even if my health was restorea, I should not leave this place. I have too many friends around me, and my prospects are too g^ood to be sacrificed for any uncertainty.' The prospect which he was un¥rilling to sacrifice was that of being elected to Congress in the following year. It appears that he could probably have been elected in 1832, but he was not yet of the required age.

Both his literary and political ambitions, however, seemed to be once for all sacrificed when, almost by a sort of religious conversion, he devoted himself to the abolition cause. The abolitionists were at that time a small and persecuted band, despised by all ' respectable ' people in church, state, or university, and generally looked on much as an avowed anarchist is now. They were, in fact, setting themselves in opposition to what was then the law of the land, and to what seemed, to Northerners as well as Southerners, part of the very basis of its social and economic system. Whittier had far more common sense and balance than most of the abolitionists in 1833. * He counted the cost with Quaker coolness of judgment,' says Pickard. ' before takine a step that closed to him the gates of both political and literary preferment. He realized more fully than did most of the early abolitionists that the institution of slavery would not fall at the first blast of their horns. When he decided to enter upon this contest, he understood that his cherished ambitions must be laid aside, and that an entire change in his plans was involved. He took the step deliberately and after serious consideration.' What induced Whittier to take this step, even while realizing its cost so clearly, was an intense idealistic belief, a belief amountu^ almost to relu^ous fervor, in the principle of universal liberty and equality. Late in life, giving counsel to a boy of fifteen, Whittier said, ' My lad, if thou wouldest win success, join thyself to some unpopular but noble cause.'

This is not the place to give any extended account of Whittier's work in the abolition movement. It has been treated with admirable completeness and fairness in Professor Carpenter's Whittier. Strange as this seems to us now, Whittier was, aside from his poetry, one of the most able workers in practical politics on the abolition side. He held together a small band of followers in his own congressional district, and kept the balance of power in such a way as often to force anti-slavery declarations from any candidate who wished to be elected. He had taken no part in founding the New England Anti- Slavery Socieir in 1832; but in 1833 he was a delegate from Massachusetts to the Convention at Philadelphia which founded the American Anti-Slavery Society. (See note on page 260.) He later became somewhat estranged from the purely idealistic faction of the abolitionists, led by Garrison, who refused to have anything to ao with a government based, as it seemed to them, on false principles, or even to vote under it, and who advocated immediate dissolution of the Union in order to break away from the slave power. Whittier was elected as representative to the Massachusetts Legislature in 1835, and again in 1836, but could not serve his second term on account of ill health, and was unable, for the same reason, to take office himself at any subsequent time. He still continued to play an active part in politics, however, even to the end of his life. He is described in a letter quoted by Professor Carpenter, as ' one of the greatest workers, politically, even, in all our State. I sometimes wonder how so fine a mind can stoop to such drudgery. But Whittier has as much benevolence as he has ideality. He knows the drudgery must be done, and, since no one else does it, will do it himself. May Heaven bless him.' Whittier was largely instrumental in securing the nomination of Charles Sumner to the Senate, and in persuading him to accept the nomination. His correspondence with Sumner, from 1840 on, is very important for the history of that period. Toward the end of Sumner's life, when he had been censured by the Massachusetts Leg^lature for advocating the proposal that the names of battles fought against fellow-citizens should no longer be inscribed on regimental flags, it was Whiter who aroused public opinion to compel the repeal of this vote of censure. In 1834 Whittier was instrumental in oringing the English abolitionist, George Thompson, to New England, and this caused bitter personal opposition. He accompanied Thompson to New Hampshire, and at Conciord they were stoned and shot at by a mob, and barely escaped. Whittier went to Philadelphia in 1838, to edit the Pennsylvania Freeman; Pennsylvania Hall, where he had his office, was burned by a mob without interference from the authorities. He took part, from 1835 to 1850, in the editing of several anti-slavery papers, and in many anti-slavery conventions.

During all this time, he was a great influence by his poetry also. The ringing lines of < Expostulation,' and of ' Massachusetts to Virginia,' were declaimed again and again through the North and West. The anti-slavery movement rapidly grew, and won the allegiance of men like Dr. Channing in 1836, and Lowell in 1841. But it was still the unpopular cause, and abolitionists were mobbed in Massachusetts as late as 1861.

Whittier's anti-slavery poems form the larger part of his work for all this period. His earliest volumes were almost entirely made up of them, - the Poems, of 1837, the BalladSf Anti-Slavery Poems, etc., of 1838, and the Voices of Freedom, of 1841. Of course little of this verse can survive, except for its historic interest. Sometimes, however, though local and temporary in its origin, it expresses something universal and eternal, as with the idea of freedom m * Expostulation,' of truth and honor and the shame of their betrayal, in * Ichabod,' of loathmg at the triumph of wrong, in * The Christian Slave ' and ' The Rendition.' * Massachusetts to Virginia ' is one of the greatest of ' poems of places,' making the venr rocks arise and speak.

In the meantime, Whittier was writing other poems, more enduring than the mass of his anti-slavery work. The Lays of my Home was published in 1843, the first collected edition of his Poems in 1849, Songs of Labor in 1850, the Chapel of the Hermits and Other Poems in 1853, the ' blue and gold ' edition of his Poetical Works in 1857. Except for the publication of his works, there is little to note in his life-story. He had given up the farm, and moved to a little house in the near-by village of Amesbury, where he lived until 1876. His income was very small, until after the publication of ' Snow-Bound,' in 1866, for in the earlier years he could necessarily earn out little by his writing^. ' For twenty years,' he said, < 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, and to see the end of the institution that proscribed me.' ' Snow-Bound,' and all his later works, brought him large profits.

During the war Whittier wrote little. His feeling is expressed intensely in * The Wait^ ing ' and * The Watchers,' and he wrote the best ballad of the war in ' Barbara Frietchie.' He hailed the coming of emancipation in ' Laus Deo ' and the ' Emancipation Hynm.' In 1866 came < Snow-Bound,' in 1867 the < Tent on the Beach,' in 1869 < Among the Hills,' in 1870 the Ballads of New England. These are his most important volumes, and mark his late maturity as a poet, which came only with his freedom from the partisan struggle that had filled the best years of his life.

he says truly of himself in ' An Autograph ; ' while in his Prelude to the ' Tent on the Beach,' he expresses more fully this feeling of what his life had been : -

The crank of an opinion-mill, Making his rustic reed of song A wei^wn in the war with wrong, Yoking his fancy to the hreaUng-plongh That beam-deep turned the soil for truth to qning and grow*

Oliver Wendell Holmes 677

The work his hands had found to do, He heard the fitful music still Of winds that out of dream-land blew. n The din about him could not drown

Sang in his ear he sang aloud ; In stiU, shut bays, on wmdy capes. He heard the call of beckoning shapes. And, as the gray old shadows prompted him. To homely moulds of rhyme he shaped their legends grim.

Whittier never married. < Circumstances,' he wrote, - ' the care of an aged mother, and the duty owed to a sister in delicate health for many years, must be my excuse for living the lonely life which has called out thy pity. ... I have learned to look into happiness through the eyes of others.' Still more cogent reasons for not marrying were his comparative poverty, his ill health, and especially the strong feeling of the Quakers that It was not permissible to marry out of their own sect. There are beautiful memories of his school-boy loves in poems like * My Playmate,' ' Benedicite,' * A Sea Dream,' * Memories,' and * In School-Days,' and these poems of dim and delicate reminiscence, untouched by the realities of life, sometimes seem more beautiful than any song^ of living passion. His home, for many years, was made by his younger sister, Elizabeth, until her death, in 1864 ; then by his niece, Elizabeth Whittier, till her marriage, in 1876. After this he lived most of the time with three sisters, his cousins, at Oak Knoll, Danvers. His faculties remained unimpaired to the last, and he died at the age of eighty-four, September 7, 1892.

Srt of his work. Next, he was the poet of Nature in New England. His poems of the errimac Valley, of Lake Winnipesaukee and the mountains near it, of Hampton Beach and the Marblehead coast, are unsurpassed in simple truth and love. But most of all he is the poet of country life in New England. This means more than at first appears, for it was from these New England homes that the lar^r number and the more energetic of the young men, like the older brothers of Whittier s father and grandfather, went out to take and make the great Northwest and then the grater West ; moreover Whittier, in speaking for his own section, often expresses what the whole of America is and means as contrasted with the Old World, - in * The Last Walk in Autimui,' for instance. There are two or three other points to be noted in summary. One is the simple beauty, truth, and modesty of Whittier's own nature, constantly and unconsciously showing itself in his many personal poems, and in his modest estimate of his own work, as in the ' Proem.' Another is that he ranks as our truest, though not our greatest, narrative poet. This has already been touched on in speaking of Longfellow ; as a writer of ballads, Whittier surpasses Longfellow in everything except that which is after all the first essential, but only one essential, - spirited movement. And finally, he is our chief religious poet.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Holmes was a great believer in ancestry, and very proud of his own. Throup^h his mother he was connected with the Phillipses, and was a cousin of Wendell PhiUip ; with the Bradstreets, and was a direct descendant of Anne Bradstreet, the first American poetess; with the Quincys, and was the great-grandson of 'Dorothv Q.;' with the Hancocks, one of whom bad married the second Dorothy Quincy, niece of the first; and with the Wen- deOs, one of the old Dutch fomilies who came to America ahont 1646. He wa« mimed for hii maternal grandfather, the Honorable Oliyer Wendell On the other side of the funflj his great-great-grandfather, John Holmes, of Pnritan stock, settled in Woodstock, Com!., in 1686, His grandfother, Da^id Holmes, the ' Deacon ' who built the ' One-Hoes Shay,* was a captain in the French and Indian wars, and surgeon in the RcTolutionary armj. His father, Rev. Abiel Holmes, graduated at Tale in 1782, preached ii Georgia for six years, and then came to settle in Cambridge, Mass., where for forty years he was pastes of the First Church. He was also an autl^r and lecturer, and wrote the ArmalM of AmerioOj the first important history after the RcTolution. He lived in the ' house with the gambrelroof ,' which stood near the site of the present Harvard Gymnasium, and which is so often alluded to in Holmes*s writings and so lovingly described in the Poet at the BreakfaU Table, Here Holmes was bom, almost under the shadow of the elms in the Harvard College yard, August 29, 1809. He went to school first in Cambridge, then at Phillipa Academy, Andover. While at the Academy, he made a translation in heroic couplets of the first book of Virgil*s iEneid. He entered Harvard with the ' famous class of ^29 ' (see notes on ' The Boys, pages 374, 375). Beside hb own classmates who later became illustrious, he knew in college Charles Sumner, of the class of 1830, and Wendell Phillips and John Lothrop Motley, of 1831.

After graduation he spent a year in the Law School, and published during this year more than a score of poems, many of them in a college periodical, the Collegian. Most of these were humorous skits, but there ring out among them the thrilling lines of ' Old Ironsides.' Thus from the beginning, as throughout his life, love of fun and love of country were two chief elements in Holmes's poetry. At the end of the year he abandoned the law and took up the study of medicine. From 1833 to 1835 he spent a little nobore than two years in study abroad, mostly at Paris, and came back to take his degree at the Harvard Medical School in 1836. At the same Commencement he read his Phi Beta Kappa poem: 'Poetry; A Metrical Essay.' This was published later in the year, with other poems, among them the ' Last Leaf,' which had already appeared in a miscellaneous collectioft, the Harbinger, in 1833. We may say that he ' commenced ' doctor and poet at the same time; and his profession and his poetry were to be the two chief interests of his life, neither ever crowding out the other.

During the following years he published or edited a number of important medical books, was professor of anatomy at Dartmouth College for a short time, settled in Boston in 1840 to the practice of his profession, and was married in that year to Miss Amelia Lee Jackson. In 1846 he published bis second volume of collected Poems, and in 1847 was appointed professor of anatomy and physiology at Harvard, a position which he held as an active teacher until 1882, and as professor emeritus until his death, in 1894, in all fortyseven years.

Like the other New England poets, Holmes came rather late to his maturity as a writer. It was not until he began the Breakfast Table series, on which, even more than on his verse, will depend his ultimate fame, that he began also to write his best poetry. ' The Chambered rl^autilus,' the * One-Hoss Shay,' * Latter-Day Wamingfs,' * Contentment,' * Parson Turell's Legacy,' * The Living Temple,* * The Voiceless,' all appeared first with the Autocrat papers (1857-58). Among these are two of his best humorous narratives, and two of his best serious lyrics. In the Professor at the Breakfast Table (1859) appeared ' The Boys,' * Under the Violets,' and Holmes's two best hymns. The Civil War period called out some of his strongest verse, notably ' Union and Liberty,' ^ The Voyage of the Good Ship Union,' and the poem on Bryant s seventieth birthday. Meanwhile he had begun that series of poems for his class reunions, in which there is not a break for thirty-nine years, and which thus forms one of the largest and most characteristic sections of his work. Occasional poetry is usually doomed to sure and quick oblivion. Holmes had the rare faculty of giving it a touch of greater vitality, while at the same time fitting it closely to the occasion. Ckss loyalty, and college loyalty, and the lasting reality of men's friendships, ar3 not merely local and occasional things. Holmes has expressed these in his class poems, and in others like ' At a Meeting of Friends,' and ' At the Saturday Club,' and in his trib- utes to his fellow poets. In these and others of his occasional poems (the ' Voyage of the Grood Ship Union ' is one of the class poems) he has expressed also the broader loyal^ of patriotism, both local and national. And in his later class poems the charm of mellow, genial, and youthful old age has found unique expression.

There is uttle further to be said of the external facts of Holmes*s life, or of his work. This is not the place to speak of his lAOvels and other prose work, or of how he gave to the A tlantic Monthly its name and its character. Lowell was willing to accept the editorship only on condition that Holmes should be a constant contributor, and later he said: * You see the Doctor is like a bright mountain stream that has been dammed up among the hills, and is waiting for an outlet into the Atlantic' His later yolumes of yerse were published. Songs in Many Keys in 1861, Humorous Poems in 1865, Songs of Many Seasons in 1874, Bunker Hill Battle, etc. in 1876, The Iron Gate, etc. in 1880, Be/ore the Curfew in 1888. He died October 7, 1894, the oldest, and the * last suryiyor,' of our elder poets.

If Whittier is the poet of a single section. New England, Holmes is the poet of a single city, Boston. It is a pity that he, instead of Emerson, did not write the quatrain

Holmes would haye written it better, and with some peculiar quaint touch of his own humor. He makes one of his characters in the Autocrat say: * Boston State House is the hub of the Solar System. You could n*t pry that out of a Boston man if you had the tire of all creation straightened out for a crowbar.' He says it in satire, but he has a subtle feeling that it is true. On the whole his yerse, howeyer, is to a less deg^e merely local in flayor than his prose.

Holmes seldom strikes the deeper notes or touches on the higher themes of poetry, except that of patriotism. He is one of the chief poets of friendship and loyalty^, as we haye seen, but he expresses friendsbijp rather in its social aspect, and chooses only to suggest its deeper feeling. So always, it is his own choice to touch but lightly on the surface of things. But if he is not among the great poets, he is among the rare. It is eyen one of the rarest things to make real poetry out of mere wit and humor, as he has so often done, in his humorous uarratiyes, from the * One-Hoss Shay ' to the * Broomstick Train,' . and perhaps most of all in ' How the Old Horse won the Bet,' his yerse sparkles and crackles in eyery line. And he has written two lyrics that are sure to liye, the one serious, and the other so interwoyen of fun and pathos that we shall neyer know whether it be serious or not: the ' Chambered Nautilns, and the ' Last Leaf.'

James Russell Lowell

James Russell Lowell was bom February 22, 1819, in Cambridge, at ' Elmwood,' the house which he occupied during so large a part of his life. The Lowells were an old New England family, going back, in Massachusetts Colony, to 1639. The poet's father, grandfather, and great-grandfather were graduates of Haryard College. It was John Ixiwell, his grandfather, who as a member of the Constitutional Conyention of Massachusetts in 1780 introduced into the Bill of Rights of the State a clause abolishing slayery - < a good sort of grandfather for the author of the Biglow Papers,* as Dr. Edward Eyerett Hale says. The great-grandfather was a clergyman, the grandfather a lawyer, and the father again a clergyman, pastor of the First Church in Boston. The family had always been distinguished for ability and public spirit. An uncle of the poet, Francis Cabot Lowell, was one of the first successnil manufacturers of New England, and for him the city of Lowell was named. Another uncle, John Lowell, Jr., founded the Lowell Institute in Boston.

Lowell's mother was of Orkney descent. Both her father, Keith Spenoe, and her mother's father, Robert Traill, were New EngUuid merohants who had QOYBAtc5scfi^^<SM^

Orkney Islands. Her mother's mother, Mary Whipple, was, however, of New England ancestry. Mary Whipple's father, William Whipple, was one of the signers or the Declaration of Independence, and her mother belonged to another old ^ew Eng^^md family, the Cutts, gomg back to the first half of the seventeenth century in New England.

James Russell Lowell was the youngest of six brothers and sisters. His home training, as in the case of Holmes, was that of a scholarly minister's family, illuminated in his case by his mother's strong imaginative temperament and skill in music. As a child, he was read to sleep from Spenser's Faerie Queene. He was surrounded by books and by nature (Elmwood being then at a considerable distance from other houses, among the woods and meadows), and from the first he showed an almost passionate love of both.

After fitting for college in a Cambridge school, he entered Harvard in 1834, and had among his teachers there C. C. Felton, professor of Greek and later president of the college (celebrated by Longfellow in ' Three Friends of Mine ' ), Benjamin Peirce, the mathematician of Holmes's ' famous Class of '29,' George Ticknor, Longfellow's predecessor in the Smith professorship of Belles Lettres, and, in the last half of his course, Longfellow himself. Lowell read in college, he tells us, 'almost everything except the text-books prescribed by the faculty.' He had already devoured Scott's novels before entering college. Now he read Dante, Tasso, Montaigne, the old English dramatists, Butler, Cowper, Bums, Landor, Byron, Cpleridge, Keats, Carlyle, and Milton, and, mider the impulse of his study of Milton, something of the classics. As Dr. Hale tells us in his reminiscences, the college boys of those days were passionately devoted to literature, and Lowell's knowledge and ability made him a leader among them. He was an editor of Harvardiana, and was elected class poet. During his senior year he became so much more devoted to reading than to studying, and so regardless of prescribed exercises, including chapel, that he wus suspended ' on account of continued neglect of his college duties^ as it was expressed in the vote of the faculty ; and was rusticated at Concora, where he lived and studied in the household of the Rev. Barzillai Frost.- During this rustication he perhaps found models both for the Rev. Homer Wilbur and for Hosea Biglow.

In any case, he met Emerson, and walked and talked with him, but at first was influenced more toward opposition than toward discipleship. In his class poem, which he was not allowed to deliver, but which he printed for distribution among his classmates, he ridiculed the transcendeutalists and the abolitionists, and, in a mild way, Emerson himself. He loyally sent a copy of the poem to Emerson, with a note excusing himself for these liberties, but stoutly maintaining his own opinions. Emerson's influence gradually * struck in,' however, and Lowell became, though not a disciple, an ardent admirer. Late in life he signed himself Emerson's * liegeman, and said that he for one must ' Obey the voice at eve obeyed at prime.' We also find the anti-slavery feeling growing in him during this same year, and beginning to dominate his thought at least a year before he first met Miss Maria White, to whose influence it has usuaUy been attributed. ' The abolitionists,* he wrote in November, 1838, ' are the only ones with whom I sympathize of the present extant parties.'

He had been allowed to return to Cambridge just in time to graduate with his class in 1838. Not knowing what else to do, he, like Holmes, began the study of the law, and graduated from the Law School in 1840. During these two years he continued his eager reading, and now paid much more attention to the classics than he had done in college when they were prescribed subjects. Ovid, Theocritus, and the Greek dramatists seem to have been his favorites. In August, 1840, he graduated from the Law School, and became engaged to Miss Maria White, whom he had met late in the previous year. He entered a law office in Boston, but spent most of his time in reading and in writing verse, and seems never to have had, on his own account, that * First Client ' whose imaginary ezistenoe offered the material of his later humorous sketch. Late in this year (1840) he pablished nis Bnt book of verse, A Yearns Life^ dated 1841 ; and in 1841-1842 he published many poems and essays in the magazines of the time. Among his poems of this period are beautiful lyrics, ' My Love/ ' Irene/ and the song * O Moonlight deep and tender ; ' the and in many of the sonnets there is a personal sincerity and a fineness of poetic quality to be found in few other American sonnets. These poems express his feelmg for Miss White, whose influence upon him was strong and always ideal. It was partly through her influence, and partly through his own natural development, that Lowell had now openly joined forces with the extreme abolitionists, at a time when abolition seemed mere quixotism, was despised by almost all conservative people, even in New England, and shut out its devotees from the social circles to which Lowell was bom, and from many of the most important literary magazines and publishing houses.

At the end of 1842 Lowell entirely gave up the law, and with Robert Carter attempted to start a new magazine. The Pioneer, This was not a success financially, and left Lowell considerably in debt by its failure after the third number had been published. The list of contributors to the three numbers which did appear included most of the chief contemporary writers, - Hawthorne, Whittier, Poe, W. W. Story, Thomas William Parsons, and Lowell. Lowell was in New York during the winter of 1842-43, and made many acquaintances and friends among the men of letters there. He published a new volume of Poems in December, 1843 (dated 1844), which contained 'Rhcecus,' 'An Incident in a Railroad Car,' ' The Shepherd of King Admetus,' the ' Stanzas on Freedom,' etc. A year later, in December, 1844, he published Conversations on Some of the Old Poets, Both these volumes were republished in London, and they brought Lowell considerable reputation in England and in America.

Lowell was married to Miss White in December, 1844, and for some months after his marriage lived in Philadelphia, where he was employed as editorial writer on the Pennsylvania Freeman at the munificent salary of ten dollars a month. In Mi^, 1845, he returned to Elm wood, where he lived until his first trip to Europe, in 1851. These were the busiest and poetically the most productive years oi his life, and they were years full of both joy and sorrow in his home life, and of growing friendships with his chief contem-

Siraries, most of them, like Holmes and Longfellow, his elders by ten years or more, is first child, Blanche, was born December 31, 1845, and died March 19, 1847. The second daughter, Mabel, was bom September 9, 1847. Lowell is not so popular a poet of the home as Longfellow, but in ' The First Snowfall,' ' The Changeling, ' She Came and Went,' ' I thought our love at full, but I did err,' and later, in ' After the Burial,' ' The Dead House,' *The Wind-Harp,' and * Auf Wiedersehen,' he has written poems of home joys and sorrows that have a deeper and more intimate appeal.

The year 1848 has been called by Lowell's latest biographer his * annus mirabilis.' Just at the end of 1847 appeared his Poems, Second Series (dated 1848), containing the noble poem 'Columbus;' the characteristic 'Indian Summer Reverie;' 'The Present Crisis,' as strong and as imiversal in its truth as the very best of Whittier's work; 'To the Dandelion; and other important short poems. In 1848 were published the Biglow Papers, First Series^ the Fable for Critics, and the Vision of Sir Launfal, besides some forty articles and poems in various periodicals. From 1846 to 1850 Lowell was a reg^ular contributor to the National Anti^Slavery Standard, In July, 1851, he sailed for Europe, spent nearly a year in Italy, and returned home through Switzerland, Germany, France, and England, having for companions on the return vovag^ Thackeray and Clough. The journey had been undertaken partly on account of Mrs. Lowell's health, but she continued to fail, and died October 21, 1853.

Holmes had given his lectures on the Englbh Poets of the Nineteenth Century at the Lowell Institute in 1853. In the winter of 1854-55 Lowell gave there a general course on poetry, which marked the beginning of his mature criticism, and which seems to have impressed its hearers as the best lecture-course ever given at this &mous Institute. Three weeks after the beginning of the course he was appointed to the Smith Professorship at Harvard (which LongfeUow had just resigned), with a year's leave of absence for' study and travel abroad. He held this professorship, except for an interval of two years, until his appointment as Minister to Spain in 1877. Since Lowell's resignation of it no

Duriiu^ bis year of preparation Lowell went to Paris (and to Chartres, where he reeeirad the impressions out of which erew his poem ' The Cathedral ') ; then to London, where be visited Thackeray and Leigh Hunt; then to Dresden for the winter, where he attended lectures at the University. There is something pathetic - or oven tragic - in the idea of putting the poet to school again after be has reached middle age, to make of him a professor I - even so distinguished a professor as Lowell was. In the spring he -scaped for another visit to Italv, and retumea to America in August.

He taueht regularly from 1856 to 1872, giving courses on Dante, Grerman Literature^ Spanish Literature (especially Don Quixote), and later on old French; and public lectures on English Poetry and Belles Lettres. He was not so faithful a routine teacher as Longfellow, but many students have borne witness to the inspiration received from him. He was not of course a scholar in the narrow modem sense of the word, except to a certain extent in old French; but he was an onmivorous reader, and his general knowled^ of literature was probably not surpassed in breadth or intimacy by that of any teacher m his time.

Lowell was the first editor-in-chief of the Atlantic Monthly from its foundation in 1857 uitil 1861. From 1864 to 1872 he was editor, with his close friend, Mr. Charles Eliot Norton, of the North American Review, Leaving out of account the second series of the Bialow Papers f all of which appeared in the Atlantic Monthly from 1862 to 1866, his contributions to both of these reviews were much more important in prose than in verie. During the first part of the period, his articles dealt particularly with public affairs, and were notable for his strong support of Lincoln. (See note on page 490 ) In the later part of the period appeared some of Lowell's best literary essays, wnich were collected in Among My Books (1870), My Study Windows (1871), and Among My Books, Second Series (1876). In 1869 was published Cinder the Willows and Other Poems, and in 1870 The Cathedral.

In 1872, Lowell asked the Harvard authorities for leave of absence with half pay, which is now granted to most college professors every seventh year. After his sixteen years of continuous teaching, however, this was refused him, and he resigned his position. The years 1872-74 he spent in Europe, mostly at Paris, Rome, and Florence, w bile in England he received the degrees of D. C. L. from Oxford and LL. D. from Cambridge. On his return in 1874 he again took up his professorship.

Lowell's poems of the war period, even if we were to leave out of account the second series of the Biglow Papers, which stand by themselves and are incomparable, must still be considered more important than those of any other poet except Whitman. They include * The Washers of the Shroud ' (1861), tha n emonal poem to Robert Gould Shaw (1864), * Oil Board the 76 * (1866), and culminate in the * Commemoration Ode,' which seems by almost universal consent to be ranked as the greatest single poem yet written in America. Lowell had the right to speak as he did in these poems and in the Biglow Papers, He had not, like Longfellow and Holmes, any son of his own to send to the war (though it is certain that if there had been a son in Lowell's family, he would have g^ne), but his nephews, * the hope of our race,' as he calls them, whom he loved almost as if they were his own sons, - three as noble young men as f oueht on either side, - all won their death-wounds in battle. Lowell's ' Commemoration Ode,' the Biglow Papers, and the Three Memorial Poems, make hira unquestionably our greatest poet of patriotism.

Yet, when he was aroused to bitter denunciation of the corruption in public life revealed under Grant's administration, and in his 'Agassiz' wrote a few stinging lines about the siH>ctaclo which * The land of honest Abraham * (or, as he first wrote it, the < land of brokon promise ') was then offering to the world, he naturally received a storm of abuse from the party press of the time. His sufficient answer was the three memorial poems of 1875 and 1876. In his Epistle to George William Curtis,' written in 1874, but not published till 1888, he answered for himself more directly: -

James Russell Lowell 683

Lowell was delegate to the Republican Convention, and presidential elector, in 1876. In 1877 he was appointed Minister to Spain, where he at once won the sympathies of the Spanish people. His coming was looked on as a revival of the days when Irving was minister. Among other honors, he received that of an election to the Spanish Academy. In January, 1880, he was transferred to London, the most important post in the American diplomatic service. Here he was equally successful in his larger field. He did more than any other minister has done to interpret to Enjo^land the character and the strength of America, and to lay the foundations of that friendship, based on mutual respect, which has since been built up between the two chief branches of the English-speaking race. It has been said that he was the most popular man in England. Ceitainly no one was more in demand on every public occasion, especially where speech-making was in order. Lowell's speeches were clever, witty, always fitted to the occasion, and, wherever this was appropriate, were weighty and important ; and they were almost as numerous as the days of the year. In these speeches he was always, on occasion, strongly American and strongly democratic. There is no better exposition of the American idea than his address on * Democracv ' at Manchester. And he conducted public affairs with absolute firmness, never yieldin^p anything so far as America was in the right. ' With all his grace,' it has been well said, ' there was a plainness of purpose that could not be mistaken. Yet dvanng his mission, and after his return to America, he was again bitterly assailed by the parti* san press, who blamed him for his very success and for the respect which he had won. Because he was a gentleman and a man of the world, and had conducted affairs with courtesy as well as firmness, he was accused of being un-American, and of toadying to the British nobility. Nothing could be more unjust or farther from the truth. It was precisely because he was always and strongly American that he won the respect of the Enj"- lish. In many other Americans of culture, as for instance Washington Irving and Au. Charles Eliot Norton, they had thought they found simply Englishmen transferred to an unfortunate CDTdronment and making the best of it. Lowell compelled them to feel that he was always, as one of them has expressed it, <a scrappy Yankee,' and a typical Yankee. It was Lowell's great service to prove that a thoroughly typical American could be also a thorough genSeman, a man of broad culture, and, in every best sense, a man of the

He returned to America in 1885. Shortly before his return the second Mrs. Lowell died. He had married, in September, 1857, the sister of a close friend of his first wife, who had been chosen by her to care for her only daughter. He came back to find many of his best friends eone, - among them Longfellow and Emerson, - but younger friend still remained to him, like George William Curtis, Mr. Norton, and Mr. Ho wells. He wrote in the < Postscript ' (1887) of his * Epistle to George William Curtis: '-*

These lioet describe his kwt jears. He retanied to poetry; he eomjileted his '£»- djmiofi,' which has in it a qoalitj rare in Lowell's work, the poetie soggestion of more than is expressed; and he wrote some ezqmnte Ijries, with a lightness of toneh he had not possessed before, and some poems full of his best strei^th, like those on Tnmer'a Old T^m^raire ' and on i^^rant. His but years care ns also important addresses like thoae on

* The Independent in Polities,' and ' Onr Literatnre,' and charmii^ essays like that on ' Izaak Walton.' He died at Elmwood, Angnst 12, 1891.

Lowell is the largest and best ronnded personality that onr literature yet pnswpsscs. He has unquestionably written onr best literary essays, and perhaps also oar best politieal essays in literary form. In his poetry he has all but surpassed the other poets, eaeh in his own fieUL He is as true a nature poet as Bryant; though he has nothii^ to cmnpare with the higher ranges of Bryant's nature poetry, like the ' Forest Hymn,'yet his treatment of Nature in her gentler aspects can well meet the comparison. *Tob, Dandelion,' for instance, may be set beside ' To the Fringed Gentian.' Wliat is more important, he writes of Nature with a happy intimacy which Bryant never had, as in the

* Indian Summer Reverie ' and ' Sunthin m the Pastoral Line,' and in many of the essays, like ' My Garden Acquaintance ' and ' A Good Word for Winter.' There is a personal genuineness in his early work, especially the sonnets, which we do not find elsewhere except in Longfellow or Whittier, and in them it hardly has Lowell's deeper poetic quality; while in his later work, there is a bifh dignity which we do not find elsewhere except ra Bryant. He is a true poet of New Lngland country life, once at least, in * The CourtinV surpassing Whittier in his own field. He has written poems of sincere thought, though without tne condensation and the fitness of form of Emerson at his best, in ' Bibliolaties,' ' The Lesson,' * Masaccio,' ' The Miner,' ' Turner's Old T^m^raire,' etc. ; and these poems are somewhat more human in quality than Emerson's. He is our greatest humorist; the Biglow Papers have far broader and more significant power than the best of Holmes's humor, and the ' Fable for Critics ' is almost as sparkling as the best wit of Holmes. If he is not a greater poet of occasions than Holmes, he is certainly a poet of greater occasions, and adequate to them. He has a lightness of touch in familiar verse that no one of our greater poets had (though it is to be found in Thomas Bailey Aldrich and others), as in 'Hebe,' 'The Pregnant Comment,' 'An Ember Picture' and 'Telepathy.' Tet there is something lacking in most of his work, something of charm, especially of rbythmie charm, something of poetic snggestiveness, somethiiu^ which he seems always striTing after (see ' L'Envoi to the Muse,' ' Auspex,' and ' The Secret '), and which now and then he df>eH alnifjst attain, as in ' In the Twilight.' He lacks, usually, just that last touch of eenins, that ' St. Elmo's Fire ' playing over all, which he so well describes in his own essay on Keats. His life and character possessed something of this charm which did not quite get expression in his verse. He bad a genius for friendship; he was one of the best talkers, and b^ far the best letter-writer, we have bad; and we feel that uncaptured charm hovenng near some of his poems of personal moods, like ' My Study Fire, ' To Charles Eliot Norton,' or the ' Envoi to the Muse ' and the others just mentioned. In personality, ho was the fine flower of American society. Noble and varied as his verse is, he lived out his own motto, -

Walt Whitman 685

Whitman, like Holmes, was of combined Connecticut and Dutch ancestry. His imme* diate ancestors, like Whittier's, were farmers, but more prosperous, his father owning five hundred acres of good land on Long Island, which Whitman preferred to call by its Indian name of Paumanok. His mother's family were also prosperous farmers. On his other's side, the first American ancestor. Rev. Zachariah Whitman, came to tliis country in 1635 and settled at Milford, Conn. In the last part of the seventeenth century Long Island was settled, largely from Connecticut, and the son of Rev. Zachariah Whitman crossed the Sound with the others. At about the same time Whitman's ancestors on his mother's side, a family of Dutch origin, the Van Velsors, settled in Long Island a little further to the west, nearer New York. There was also Quaker blood in Whitman's veins, coming from his maternal g^ndmother.

Whitman's father, Walter Whitman, was a carpenter and builder as well as a farmer, and lived at Huntington, Long Island. There Walt Whitman was born, May 31, 1819, the second of nine children. He was christened Walter, but to distinguish him from his father was called Walt, and he kept this name throughout his life. When he was four years old the family moved to Brooklyn, and there Wait attended the public schools. He was still almost as much a countrv as a city boy, however. He tells of his expeditions with his comrades on the ice of the Long Island bays in the winter, and of his own walks on the bare shores of Coney Island in sunmier, which then, he says, * I had all to myself.' These expeditions to deserted Coney Island lasted until he was more than thirty years old, and he tells how^ in its solitudes, he ' loved after bathing to race up and down the hard sand, and declaim Homer and Shakspere to the surf and sea-g^lls by the hour.' In 1833-34 he was in printing offices in Brooklyn, learning the trade, and until 1837 worked as compositor in Brooklyn and New York. For the following year or two he taught school in country towns on Long Island, and * boarded round.' * This,' he says, < I consider one of my best experiences and deepest lessons in human nature behind the scenes and in the masses.' In the following year (1839-40), he started and published a weekly paper in his native town, probably doing both the writing and the typesetting himself. ' All these years,' he says, ' I was down Long Island more or less every summer, now east, now west, sometimes months at a stretch.' For the five years following 1840, all the time, and off and on for the next fifteen years, he lived winters in Brooklyn, working more or less as a compositor in New York city. He tells how his life was

* Crossing Brooklyn Ferry '), how he crossed almost daily, often in the pilot-house, familiar with all the pilots, as he was in New York with all the omnibus drivers, with whom he spent many hours riding the length of Broadway. He passionately loved the g^at city and its sights and its people, and no one has given so vivid a picture of it either in verse or in prose. He had a passion for music also, spent night after night at the opera, and went much to the theatre. In 1848-49 he was editor of the Brooklyn Eagle, He had written more or less since 1839 for newspapers and magazines, among others the Democratic Review. A few specimens of this early writing, Doth in. prose and verse, are preserved in his Complete Prose Works (pages 334-374). The - Dough-Face Song' is good ordinary rhyme, and in both substance and form reminds us a little of the first series of the Biglow Papers^ though it is dated earlier. His prose, so far as preserved, consists of story-sketehes, which hold the reader's interest but are in no way remarkable. Among other things he wrote at this time a temperance tract, Franklin Evans,

In 1849 he broke away from all reg^ular employment, and started off on a leisurely and apparently purposeless excursion, which was to be of great importance in forming the character of his later work. He calls it ' a leisurely journey and working expemtion.' It must be described in his own words of brief summary. He went, he savs, with his brother Jeff, ' through all the Middle States, and down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. Lived awUle in New Orleans, and work'd there on the editorial staff of ** daily Crescent " news- paper. After a time plodded back northward, up the Mississippi, and aromid to and by way of the Great Lakes, Michigan, Huron, and* Erie, to Niagara falls and lower Canada, finally returning through centnd New York and down the Hudson ; traveling altogether probably 8,000 miles this trip, to and fro.' From what we know of his life in New York and Brooklyn, we can infer what this expedition was to him. Speaking of the origin of Leaves of Grass, he once said, * Remember, tlie book arose out of my life in Brooklyn and New York from 1838 to 1853, absorbing a million people, for fifteen years, with an intimacy, an eagerness, an abandon, probably never equalled.' With the same passion he must have absorbed the sights and the life of the country he passed through - almost the whole of the United States at that time - on this 8,000 mile excursion, making his own way, working here and. there at his trade, living the life of the people. There are vivid reminiscences of the South constantly recurring in his later writing, as in the poem of the live-oak; and there is everywhere present the feeling of bigness, £eedom, ana heartiness, of the life of the West.

On his return, he took up for a little while his former occupations, editing and printing i$ daily and weekly paper, the Freeman, and engag^g, with his father, as he had done before g^ing away, m the business of building and selling houses in Brooklyn. But he had now conceived the work which he was to do, to chant the songs of democracy as he imderstood it, to ' Compose a march for these States.' According to his first biographer, Dr. Bucke, he experienced a sort of conversion, and, like other mystics, felt his lue-work given him as a mission. At any rate, he lost interest in other occupations, except so far as was necessary for simple self-support, gave up the successful house-building business, and devoted himself to the composition of his Leaves of Grass, This was issued without any publisher, the typesetting and printing having been done partly by Whitman himself, in 1855.

Apparently the last specimen we possess of Whitman's earlier style is the poem * Sailing the Mississippi at Midnight,' probably written in 1849, and given, as by a rather pleasant irony are all the specimens which we have of his regular verse, in the Prose JVorks, I quote from what seems to be its original form, in the Nates and Fragments c^ -

The change from this style to that of the first edition of Leaves of Grass is so neat that it seems as thoueh some connecting links must be found in his newspaper writmg of the time. Yet this is doubtful. The first edition of Leaves of Grass, he says, was printed ' after many MS. doings and undoings,' and possibly all the transition stages were lost in this repeated revision. The section of ' First Drafts and Rejected Lines and Passages ' given in the Notes and Fragments does not show this transition, but is entirely in the style of Leaves of Grass itself. AH that we know of the development of Whitman's pecuuar style is what he tells us in one brief sentence: 'I had great trouble in leaving out the stock <' poetical " touches, but succeeded at last.'

The first edition of Leaoes of Grass had practically no sale. Some copies were sent out for review, which received litUe attention, and some were g^ven away. Only one copy, so &r as we know, won a real response, and that was the one sent to Emerson. His letter to Whitman must be quoted in full : -

' I am not blind to the worth of the wonderfid g^t of ** Leaves of Grass." I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed. I am very happy in reading it, as great power makes us happy. It meets the demand I am always making of wluit seems the sterile and stingv Nature, as if too much handiwork or too much lymph in the temperament were makmg our western wits fat and mean. I give you joy of your free and brave thought. I have great joy in it. I find incomparable things said incomparably well, as they must be. I find the courage of treatment which so delights us, and which large perception only can inspire.

' I greet you at the beginnmg of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere for such a start. I rubbed my eyes a little to see if this sunbeam were no illusion; but the solid sense of the book is a sober certainty. It has the best merits, namely of fortifying and encouraging.

' I did not know until I, last night, saw the book advertised in a newspaper, that I could trust the name as real and available for a post-office. I wish to see my benefactor, and have felt much like striking my tasks and visiting New York to pay you my respecto.'

Whitman published this letter, together with his own long reply to it, in the second edition of Leaves of Grass, which appeared in 1856. On the back of this edition was printed, over Emerson's name, * I greet you at the beginning of a great career.' AU this was at least in somewhat doubtful taste, but Emerson was above resenting it or retracting anything he had said, though naturally in a private letter, acknowledging the gift of a book from its author, he perhaps expressed himself somewhat otherwise than he would have done in writing for public print. In 1856 he wrote to Carlyle, * One book lai^ summer came out in New x ork, a non-<lescript monster which yet had terrible eyes and buffalo strength, and was indisputably American.' (See the whole letter in the Carlyle- Emerson Correspondence, volume ii, page 283.) He visited Whitman in New York, as he had spoken of Going, and friendly relations were kept up between the two till the end of Emerson's life. In 1856 Thoreau also visited Whitman, and wrote of him soon after: < That Walt Whitman ... is the most interesting fact to me at present. I have just read his second edition (which he gave me), and it has done me more good than any reading for a long time. . . . There are two or three pieces in the book which are disag^eable, to say the after whatever deductions. I do not believe that all the sermons, so called, that have been preached in this land, put together, are equal to it for preaching. We ought to rejoice greatly in him. . . . Though rude and sometimes ineffectual, it is a g^at primitive poem, an alarum or trumpet-note ringing through the American camp. . . . Since I have seen him, I find that I am not disturbed by any brag or egotism in his book. He may turn out the least of a braggart of all, having a better right to be confident. He is a g^at fellow.'

The personal impression Whitman made upon all who ever saw him seems to have been such as to counteract any previous notions they mav have had of his work as being either ' egotistic' or < sensual.' Howells, not a judge prejudiced in his favor, met him in New York in 1860, and speaks of < the spiritual punty which I felt in him, no less than the dignity.' Howells had previously conceived lum as 'the apostle of the rough, the uncouth.' Now he found him to be 'the gentlest person; his barbaric yawp, tnmslated into terms of social encounter, was an address of sing^ular quiet, delivered in a voice of winning and endearing friendliness.'

There are in Whitman's work passages which, though Thorean's word < sensual ' is by no means the right one to describe them, are anything but fit reading for young ladies' seminaries. Such passages he has in common with nearly all the greatest writers. But naturally at their first appearance they aroused bitter opposition to him, and from time to time this opposition took serious practical form. When the third edition of Leaves of Grass was being printed at Boston in 1860, Emerson tried to persuade Whitman to omit these parts of his work. Whitman owns that ' each point of Emerson's statement was unanswerable,' but his own * unmistakable conviction ' that he must leave his work complete, as he understood completeness, was unshaken.

The 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass contained more than twice as many poems as the edition of 1855. The edition of 1860 was still further augmented, especially by the important collection of poems on men's friendship entitled Calamus. Neither of these editions, however, had much sale, and the firm which published the Boston edition failed at the beginnmg of the war.

Whitman's younger brother, Georgfe, enlisted in the Union army, and served throughout the war, rising to the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel. He was in most of the important battles in Virginia. In 1862 he was wounded at the first battle of Fredericksburg. The wound was thought to be serious (though it did not prove so), and Whitman at an hour's notice started for the army. He spent a considerable part of that winter with the Army of the Potomac, and began the attendance on wounded soldiers which he did not give up until the last hospitals at Washington were closed.