Literature in New England

Hid in this silent, dull retreat,

Untouched thy honied blossoms blow,

Unseen thy little branches greet;

No roving foot shall crush thee here,

No busy hand provoke a tear."

Of a different tenor are two poems in pensive key: The Indian Student and The Indian Burying-ground. In all these compositions, we feel the spirit of a true poet who loves Nature and responds to her appeals spontaneously and without artifice. There had been a few previous attempts at this form of treatment in American verse, but they had been isolated instances and had failed of the excellence attained by Freneau. These poems are therefore the more worthy of note. The volume which contains these productions appeared in 1786 -- the same year in which the first volume of the poems of Robert Burns was published; and twelve years before the Lyrical Ballads introduced William Wordsworth as the first recognized champion of simplicity and naturalness in English verse.

With the turn of the century, our young republic entered upon an era of expansion and development which can be described only as marvelous. The rapid progress in the settlement of the West, the influx of foreign immigration, the growth of the larger cities, extension of transportation systems by construction of canals and government roads, application of the new inventions employing the power of steam in river navigation and on railroads, -- these features of American progress during the first fifty years in our first completed century of national existence can be here but thus briefly summarized. It is unnecessary to attempt a full historical outline of that period of growth and change except to note that coincidentally with this expansive period of material prosperity and growth, our national literature entered upon what we may not inaptly term its golden age -- the age of its best essayists, novelists and poets, our real American men of letters.

We have traced the slow steps of literary effort recorded in the several colonies to the close of their existence as colonies; and, immediately after the period of revolution, we have recognized the new and fresh impulse of creative imagination in the little group of simple nature-poems by Philip Freneau, and imaginative power of somewhat differing type in the sombre but not altogether unreal romances of Charles Brockden Brown. But Freneau and Brown are only heralds of coming achievements; of the appearance of a literature national in scope and of importance sufficient to command recognition by the people of England and the Continent, and possessed of an artistic excellence felt and enjoyed by all.

There were evidences of literary activity in Boston, in Philadelphia, and in New York. Little groups of literati, as they liked to call themselves, mightily interested in the development of a national literature, gave an atmosphere that was helpful to literary effort; and they themselves accomplished what could be accomplished by interest, patriotism, and industry when joined with talent, modest if not mediocre. For some reason, New York took precedence over Boston and Philadelphia in these first decades of the nineteenth century and not only sheltered a coterie of enthusiastic, congenial comrades of the pen, whose lively essays in both prose and verse provoked the humor of the town, but pushed into the light of more than local fame the names of Paulding, Halleck, Drake, and Dana; and before the quarter mark in the century was reached had produced two of the century's greatest writers, Irving and Cooper. These are the Knickerbocker writers, so called in deference to the old Dutch traditions of Manhattan, the spirit of which was directly inherited by most of them, and the influence of which appeared to some extent in their work. In 1825, the poet Bryant came to live in New York, and his name is therefore grouped with those already mentioned, although not a native of the state. He was, however, of their generation and, like Halleck and Dana, an adopted son of New York.

Washington Irving was born in the city of New York, April 3, 1783. It was the year which marked the end of the long struggle for liberty and the beginning of peace. The British troops evacuated the city and the Continental forces assumed possession. "Washington's work is ended," said Mrs. Irving, "and the child shall be named after him." Some six years later, we are told, when the first president returned to New York, then the seat of government, a Scotch maid-servant of the family finding herself and the child by chance in the presence of Washington, presented the lad to him. "Please, your honor," said Lizzie, all aglow, "here's a bairn was named after you." And the Father of his Country gravely laid his hand upon the head of his future biographer and blessed him.

The household in William Street was comfortably well-to-do. The father, William Irving, a Scotchman, born in the Orkney Islands, and until his marriage an officer upon a vessel plying between Falmouth and New York, was now engaged in the hardware trade. He was a man of strict integrity, rather severe in his attitude toward life, with a good deal of the old strict Covenanter spirit in his make-up. He took little interest in amusements, required that at least one of the half-holidays in every week should be piously employed with the catechism, and saw to it that his children were well grounded in sound Presbyterian doctrine. The mother, daughter of an English curate, was far less rigid in her views and more vivacious in temperament. Needless is it to say that the future chronicler of the Knickerbocker legends resembled the mother more closely than the father in his inheritance of spirits. Full of drollery and mischief, the boy ran merry riot, sometimes a source of perplexity even to the more indulgent parent, who once was heard to exclaim: "O Washington, if you were only good!" He loved music and delighted in the theatre, whither, in spite of his father's prejudices, the boy often betook himself, secretly, in company with his young comrade, Paulding.

Irving's training was desultory, and his schooling ended at sixteen. This cutting short of the school-days was due to the state of his health in these early years, which forbade confinement or close association with books. Yet he read, and read intelligently, becoming familiar with the best, especially books of travel, voyages, and adventure. In his rambles about the city -- for he lived much out of doors -- he oftenest turned toward the docks, dreamily wandering among the piers and along the waterside with mind apparently stirred by the sight of the shipping and the romantic suggestions of foreign lands. Up the Hudson, also, he wandered -- into the Highlands and over all the country-side, until the suburbs of Manhattan and the picturesque region of the Catskills were familiar ground.

James Fenimore Cooper was thirty years old when he began to write. He was then living in Westchester County, not far from the city of New York, on what was known as the Angevine Farm, a beautifully situated estate commanding an extended view of the Sound. His resignation from the Navy nine years before had been coincident with his marriage to a Miss De Lancey, whose father during the Revolutionary War had supported the cause of the Crown. Cooper himself had not settled down to any definite vocation -- least of all had any thought of a literary career entered his head.

"He knew the country like a fox or a bird and passed through it as freely by paths of his own. . . . Under his arm he carried an old music-book to press plants; in his pocket his diary and pencil, a spy-glass for birds, microscope, jack-knife and twine. He wore straw hat, stout shoes, strong gray trousers, to brave shrub-oaks and smilax, and to climb a tree for a hawk's or squirrel's nest. He waded into the pool for the water-plants, and his strong legs were no insignificant part of his armor. . . . His power of observation seemed to indicate additional senses. He saw as with microscope, heard as with ear-trumpet, and his memory was a photographic register of all he saw and heard. . . . Every fact lay in glory in his mind, a type of the order and beauty of the whole. His intimacy with animals suggested . . . that `either he had told the bees things, or the bees had told him.' Snakes coiled round his leg, the fishes swam into his hand, and he took them out of the water; he pulled the woodchuck out of its hole by the tail, and took the foxes under his protection from the hunters."

In 1845, Thoreau built for himself a cabin on the shore of Walden Pond, and here for two years he lived, cultivating potatoes, corn, and beans sufficient for his subsistence, recording his observations of all natural phenomena, and transcribing from his journal the narrative of an excursion taken with his brother in 1839. It is this experience in his life with its subsequent record which has more than anything else aroused interest in the personality of Thoreau. "My purpose in going to Walden Pond," he says, "was not to live cheaply nor to live dearly there, but to transact some private business with the fewest obstacles."

Edgar Allan Poe was born January 19, 1809. That his birth occurred in Boston was due to the fact that his parents, members of a theatrical company, were filling an engagement in that city when the event occurred. David Poe, the father of the child, was a Southerner, a native of Baltimore, where the Poes were people of character and standing. Connection with the parental home had ceased, however, when the young man had recklessly pushed his law-books aside for an uncertain career upon the stage. He was never a brilliant actor; the lady whom he married was by far his superior in their profession, and possessed the more vigorous personality of the two. It was from his mother that Edgar inherited his artistic temperament; while the prevailing weaknesses of the boy's later life, it is safe to assert, were a natural inheritance from his father. Within a year of Edgar's birth, his father died, and a year or two later Mrs. Poe also died, at Richmond, Virginia, in poverty, leaving three young children to the charity of friends. A Mrs. Allan, wife of a tobacco merchant of Richmond, had become interested in the suffering family, and took Edgar into her home.

Among the men conspicuous in public life, who by reason of their argumentative skill and the power of their eloquence were the nation's leaders during the critical years of the century, the first to be mentioned is Daniel Webster. No more commanding personality has ever moved among American statesmen. His portrait -- after those of Washington and Lincoln -- is the most familiar of those in our national gallery. So impressive was he in presence, so leonine in feature, that his personal appearance struck every listener with awe. "That amorphous, crag-like

face; the dull black eyes under the precipice of brows, like dull anthracite furnaces needing only to be blown; the mastiff mouth, accurately closed" -- this is the way in which Carlyle described his picture. He was an acute reasoner as well as an eloquent speaker. His famous arguments in the Dartmouth College case (1818) and in the White murder case at Salem (1830) are models of logical structure. His orations at the two hundredth anniversary of the landing of the Pilgrims (1820), at the laying of the corner-stone of Bunker Hill Monument (1825), and at the completion of the monument (1843) are noted examples of his eloquence. It was his self-appointed task to guard the integrity of the Constitution; and it was this idea which inspired the best known of all his great addresses, the Reply to Hayne, delivered in the United States Senate in 1830. It was his devotion to the Union and the preservation of national unity which led to his support of compromise measures when the separation of South and North seemed imminent; and it was this which brought forth the speech on the seventh of March, 1850, -- the speech which aroused the indignation of the anti-slavery party in New England and drew from Whittier that scathing utterance of disappointment and grief, the poem Ichabod. Webster was born at Salisbury, New Hampshire. He studied at Phillips Academy, then recently founded at Exeter, and was graduated from Dartmouth College in 1801. He practiced law in Portsmouth and served for a term as a representative of New Hampshire in Congress. In 1816, he removed to Boston, again went to Congress, and then entered the Senate in 1827. He was Secretary of State (1841-1843), and returned to the Senate in 1845. His home was at Marshfield, Massachusetts, at the time of his death.

Representing the South in the arena of political debate were John C. Calhoun (1782-1850) and Henry Clay (1777-1852); while the names of Rufus Choate (1799-1859) and Edward Everett (1794-1865) are joined with that of Webster, as representative of the eloquence of New England. Foremost among the orators developed by anti-slavery sentiment in the North were Wendell Phillips (1811-1884) and Charles Sumner (1811-1874). The eloquent voice of Henry Ward Beecher (1813-1887) was raised in the same cause. Nor should the names of Stephen A. Douglas (1813-1861) and Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) be omitted from this list. In a dramatic series of public debates conducted in 1858 upon the prairies of Illinois, Lincoln and Douglas contended over the great issue of the time, -- the institution of slavery and the momentous national problem to which it had given rise. While nominally a campaign for the Illinois senatorship, this remarkable discussion between the rival candidates -- Douglas, the national leader of the Democratic party, and Lincoln, the candidate of the recently organized Republicans -- aroused the interest of the entire country. Mr. Douglas was elected to the Senate; but the contest made Lincoln, two years later, the logical candidate of the Republican party for the presidency of the United States. It is not necessary here to discuss the genius of Abraham Lincoln. His lowly origin, his primitive surroundings, the scanty education, the unique personality, the lofty spirit in the awkward, almost grotesque frame, are all parts of a familiar story. He was yet another in the group of socalled self-made men in whom genius has triumphed over circumstances. It should not be forgotten that the opponent of the highly trained, debonair Douglas had had his forensic training during twenty years of practice before the Illinois bar, and that he was regarded as the best jury lawyer in the state; nor that theauthor of the speech at Gettysburg had steeped his mind in youth with the English of Shakespeare and the Bible -- almost his

For some time, our attention has been centred for the most part in the work of our New England writers; but we must not think that the literary activity of this long period was confined to the immediate vicinity of Boston. The cities of Philadelphia and New York had each its coterie of literary workers. In the rapidly growing metropolis, the generation following that of Irving and his associates of the Knickerbocker group was not without its representatives of greater or less distinction, among whom at least two, Bayard Taylor and George William Curtis, deserve especial recognition. Both were men of letters in the broadest sense, versatile in talent and giving expression to that talent in varied literary forms.

Taylor was born in a Quaker household upon a Pennsylvania farm, and as a child was conscious of two ambitions: to travel and to become a poet. His literary ambition was gratified prematurely by the publication of a volume of verse, Ximena, -- afterward regretted, -- in 1844. In the same year, his twentieth, he sailed for England, having arranged with several editors to print the letters which he purposed to write while on his travels. For nearly two years, he tramped about over Europe enduring much hardship; his letters were published in 1846, under the title of Views Afoot, or Europe seen with the Knapsack and Staff. An editorial connection with the New York Tribune followed; and in 1849, Taylor was sent to California to report upon the fortunes of the gold-seekers. The next year his letters to the Tribune appeared in the volume Eldorado. A trip to the far East in 1851 resulted not only in more correspondence but also in a volume of verse, Poems of the Orient (1854), containing some of his best compositions, including the Bedouin Song. Bayard Taylor's fame as a traveler and an entertaining descriptive writer was extended by successive volumes recounting his experiences in Africa, in Spain, in India, China, and Japan, and in the northern countries of Europe. But he was ambitious to fill a higher place in literature.

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