Literary and Social Essays Part 5

As they travelled by easy stages across Germany, where the campaign of Protestantism had begun, they knew that the decisive battle was yet to be fought. Europe was silent. The tumult of Charles V.'s reign was over, and that great monarch marched and countermarched no more from the Baltic to the Mediterranean. Charles had been victorious so long as he fought kings with words of steel. But the monk Martin Luther drew the sword of the spirit, and the conqueror quailed. Luther challenged the Church of Rome at its own door. The Vatican rained anathemas. It might as well have tried to blow out the stars; and all the fires of the furious popes who followed Leo were not sharp enough to consume the colossal heresy of free thought. But king and emperor and pope fed the fire. The reign of terror blasted the Netherlands, and when it had succeeded there, when Italy, Austria, and Holland surrounded the states of Germany, Philip knew it would be the smothering coil of the serpent around the cradle of religious liberty. But the young Hercules of free thought throttled the serpent, and leaped forth to win his victorious and immortal race.

We can see it now, but Sidney could not know it. To him the future was as inscrutable as our own to the eyes of thirty years ago. Yet he and Languet must have discussed the time with curious earnestness as they pa.s.sed through Germany until they reached Vienna. There Sidney devoted himself to knightly games, to tennis, to music, and especially to horsemans.h.i.+p, which he studied with Pagliono, who, in praise of the horse, became such a poet that in the _Defence of Poesy_ Sidney says that if he had not been a piece of a logician before he came to him, Pagliono would have persuaded him to wish himself a horse.

At Vienna Philip parted with Languet, and arrived in Venice in the year 1573. The great modern days of Italy were pa.s.sed. The golden age of the Medici was gone. Lorenzo the Magnificent had died nearly a century before, in the same year that Columbus had discovered America. His son, Pope Leo X., had eaten his last ortolan, had flown his last falcon, had listened to his last comedy, and hummed his last tune, in the frescoed corridors of the Vatican. Upon its s.h.i.+ning walls the fatal finger of Martin Luther, stretching out of Germany, had written "Mene, Mene."

Beneath the terrible spell the walls were cracking and the earth was shaking, but the splendid pope, in his scarlet cloud of cardinals, saw only the wild beauty of Raphael's Madonnas and the pleasant pages of the recovered literature of pagan Greece. When Sidney stepped for the first time into his gondola at Venice, the famous Italian cathedrals and stately palaces were already built, and the great architects were gone.

Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch, who had created Italian literature, lived about as long before Sidney as we live after him. Cimabue and Giotto had begun; Raphael and Michel Angelo had perfected that art in which they have had no rivals--and they were gone. Andrea Doria steered the galleys of Genoa no more, and since the discovery of the Cape of Good Hope and the West Indies, the spices of the Indian sea were brought by Portuguese s.h.i.+ps into the Baltic instead of the Adriatic. The glory of the Lombards, who were the first merchants of Europe, had pa.s.sed away to the descendants of their old correspondents of Bruges and Ghent, until, with its five hundred s.h.i.+ps daily coming and going, and on market days eight and nine hundred; with its two thousand heavy wagons creaking every week through the gates from France and Germany and Lorraine, Antwerp reigned in the place of Venice, and the long twilight that has never been broken was settling upon the Italy that Sidney saw.

But the soft splendor of its decline was worthy its prime. The universities of Bologna and Padua, of Salerno and Pisa, had fallen from the days when at Bologna alone there were twenty thousand students; but they were still thronged with pupils, and taught by renowned professors.

When the young Sidney came to Venice, t.i.tian was just tottering into the grave, nearly a hundred years old, but still holding the pencil which Charles V. had picked up and handed to him in his studio. Galileo was a youth of twenty, studying mathematics at Pisa. The melancholy Ta.s.so was completing his _Jerusalem Delivered_ under the cypress trees of the Villa d'Este. Palestrina was composing the ma.s.ses which reformed church music, and the Christian charity of Charles Borromeo was making him a saint before he was canonized. Clad in the silk and velvet of Genoa, the young Englishman went to study geometry at Padua, where twenty years later Galileo would have been his teacher, and Sidney writes to Languet that he was perplexed whether to sit to Paul Veronese or to Tintoretto for his portrait.

But he had a shrewd eye for the follies of travellers, and speaks of their tendency to come home "full of disguis.e.m.e.nts not only of apparel but of our countenances, as though the credit of a traveller stood all upon his outside". He then adds a curious prophecy, which Shakespeare made haste to fulfil to the very letter. Sidney says, writing in 1578, "I think, ere it be long, like the mountebanks in Italy, we travellers shall be made sport of in comedies." Twenty years afterwards, Shakespeare makes Rosalind say in "As You Like It", "Farewell, Monsieur Traveller. Look you; lisp, and wear strange suits. Disable all the benefits of your own country. Be out of love with your nativity, and almost chide G.o.d for making you that countenance you are, or I will scarce think you have swam in a gondola."

But in all the gayeties and graces of his travel, Philip Sidney was not content to be merely an elegant lounger. He never forgot for a moment that all his gifts and accomplishments were only weapons to be kept burnished for his country's service. He was a boy of twenty, but his boy's warmth was tempered by the man's wisdom. "You are not over cheerful by nature," Languet writes to him; and when Sidney sat to Paul Veronese, and sent his friend the portrait, Languet replies: "The painter has represented you sad and thoughtful."

He had reason to be so. He had seen the Ma.s.sacre of St. Bartholomew, as many a young Sidney among ourselves saw the horrors of Kansas thirty years ago. He did not believe that a little timely patting on the back was statesmans.h.i.+p. If Spain were crus.h.i.+ng the Netherlands, and hung upon the southern horizon of Europe a black and threatening cloud, he did not believe that the danger would be averted by gagging those who said the storm was coming. He did not hold the thermometer responsible for the weather. "I cannot think," he wrote in May, 1574, "there is any man possessed of common understanding who does not see to what these rough storms are driving by which all Christendom has been agitated now these many years." He did not suppose, as so many of us in our ign.o.ble days, that while men were the same, the tragical differences which had been washed out with blood in all other ages could be drowned in milk and water in his own.

In 1575 Sidney returned to England. Every author who writes of this period breaks out into the most glowing praises of him. Indeed, he is the choice darling of English history. The only discordant note in the chorus of praise came long afterwards in the voice of the pedantic dandy Horace Walpole, who called Goldsmith "an inspired idiot". This is not surprising, for the earnestness and heroic simplicity of Sidney were as incomprehensible to the affected trifler of Strawberry Hill as the fresh enthusiasm of his nephew Arthur to Major Pendennis. The Earl of Leicester, who seemed to love his nephew more than anything except his own ambition, presented his brilliant young relative to the queen, who made him her cup-bearer. Sidney was now twenty-one years old--the finest gentleman, and one of the most accomplished scholars in England. His learning was mainly in the cla.s.sics and in languages; yet he confesses that he could never learn German, which was then hardly worth learning, and in his correspondence with Languet is very distrustful of the Latin, in which language they wrote. But in urging him to grapple with the German, Languet says to him, and it is a striking proof of the exquisite finish of Sidney's accomplishment, "I have watched you closely when speaking my own language (he was a Burgundian), but I hardly ever detected you p.r.o.nouncing a single syllable wrongly."

In Sidney's time the cla.s.sics had few rivals. After reading Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, Boccaccio, with Sanazzaro's _Arcadia_, in Italian; Rabelais, Froissart, and Comines, in French; Chaucer, Gower, and the _Mirror for Magistrates_ in English, what remained for an ardent young student to devour? When Sidney came home, Montaigne--whom he probably saw at the French court--was just writing his _Essays_ at his chateau in the Gironde. The Portuguese Camoens had only just published his great poem, to which his own country would not listen, and of which no other had heard. The Italian Ta.s.so's _Jerusalem_ was still in ma.n.u.script, and the Spanish Ponce de Leon was little known to Europe. All was yet to come. In Spain, Cervantes, Lope de Vega, and Calderon; in France, Corneille and Racine and Moliere, Fenelon and Bossuet, Rousseau and Voltaire; in Germany, everything except the Niebelungen and Hans Sachs's rhymes. When Philip Sidney kissed Elizabeth's hand as her cup-bearer, William Shakespeare, a boy of eleven, was grinding out his trousers on the restless seats of the free grammar-school at Stratford; young Francis Bacon, a youth of sixteen, was studying in France; a poor scholar at Cambridge, Edmund Spenser was just finis.h.i.+ng his studies, and the younger brother of an old Devons.h.i.+re family, Walter Raleigh, had just returned from campaigning in France; indeed, all the literature of modern times was subsequent to Philip Sidney. The young man shone at court, fascinating men and women, courtiers, scholars, and divines; and in a few months was made special amba.s.sador to condole with the Austrian emperor upon the death of his father. Upon this emba.s.sy he departed in great state. His mission, was supposed to be purely complimentary; but he was really the beautiful eye with which England and Elizabeth, becoming the head of the Protestant movement, watched the disposition of the Protestant princes. On his way home, Sidney pa.s.sed into the Low Countries to see William of Orange. He came, resplendent with chivalric magnificence, accompanied by the flower of English n.o.bility, and met the grave William, who had been the richest citizen in the Netherlands, clad in an old serge cloak, and surrounded by plain Dutch burghers. But it was a meeting of men of one mind and heart in the great cause, and neither was disturbed by the tailoring of the other. The interview was the beginning of a faithful friends.h.i.+p, and among all the compliments Sidney received, none is so lofty and touching as that of William, the greatest man in Europe, who called him in their correspondence, "Philip, my master."

In 1577 Sidney was home again. He had a right to expect conspicuous advancement, but he got nothing. This was the more disagreeable, because living at Elizabeth's court was an expensive luxury for a poor gentleman's son who had magnificent tastes. His father, Lord Henry Sidney, was lord-deputy of Ireland, but he was also an honest man, and, like most honest men in high public office, he was not rich. He wrote to Philip, begging him to remember whose son, not whose nephew, he was; for Philip's companions, the golden youth of the court, blazed in silks and velvets and jewels, until the government had to impose laws, as the subjects had brought luxury from Venice, and Elizabeth, who died the happy owner of three thousand dresses, issued a solemn proclamation against extravagance in dress.

At such a time, the brilliant nephew of Uncle Leicester would have been a quickly ruined man if he had not been Philip Sidney. He bowed and flirted at court, but he chafed under inaction. A marriage was planned for him with Penelope Devereux, sister of the famous Earl of Ess.e.x, one of the thousand fair and unfortunate women who flit across the page of history leaving only a name, and that written in tears. But Philip's father grew cool in the negotiation, and Philip himself was perfectly pa.s.sive. Yet when a few years afterwards the lady was married to Lord Rich, who abused her, Sidney loved her, and wrote the sonnets to Stella, which are his best poetry, and which Charles Lamb so affectionately praised.

But while he loitered at court, beating all the courtiers with their own weapons in wit, in riding, in games, at tournament, the tales of American discovery shed a wondrous glamour upon the new continent.

Nothing was too beautiful for belief, and the fiery feet of youth burned the English soil with eagerness to tread the unutterable Tropics.

Francis Drake sailed from Plymouth to follow Magellan around the world, and he went in a manner consonant with the popular fancy of the countless riches that rewarded such adventures. His cooking-vessels were of silver; his table-plate of exquisite workmans.h.i.+p. The queen knighted him, gave him a sword, and said, "Whoever striketh at you, Drake, striketh at us." A band of musicians accompanied the fleet, and the English sailor went to circ.u.mnavigate the globe with the same nonchalant magnificence with which in other days the gorgeous Alcibiades, with flutes and soft recorders blowing under silken sails, came idling home from victory.

Philip Sidney, his heart alive to all romance, and longing to be his companion, saw him sail away. But he turned and saw the black Italian spider, whose sting he had seen on Bartholomew's Eve in Paris, still weaving her stealthy web, and seeking to entangle Elizabeth into a match with the Duke of Anjou. The queen was forty-six, and Mounseer, as the English called him, twenty-three; and while she was coaxing herself to say the most fatal yes that ever woman said--when Burleigh, Leicester, Walsingham, all the safe, sound, conservative old gentlemen and counsellors were just ceasing to dissuade her--Philip Sidney, a youth of twenty-five, who knew that he had a country as well as a queen, that the hope of that country lay in the triumph of Protestantism, and that to marry Mounseer was to abandon that hope, and for the time betray mankind--Philip Sidney, a youth who did not believe that he could write gravely of sober things because he had written gayly of ladies'

eyebrows, knowing as the true-hearted gentleman always knows that to-day it may be a man's turn to sit at a desk in an office, or bend over a book in college, or fas.h.i.+on a horseshoe at the forge, or toss flowers to some beauty at her window, and to-morrow to stand firm against a cruel church or a despotic court, a brutal sn.o.b or an ignorant public opinion--this youth, this immortal gentleman, wrote the letter which dissuaded her from the marriage, and which was as n.o.ble a triumph for Protestantism and human liberty as the defeat of the Spanish Armada.

I cannot follow this lovely life in detail, nor linger, as I would, upon his literary retirement.

The very name of Sidney's _Arcadia_ is aromatic in the imagination, and its traditional place in our literature is unquestioned. In our day it is very little read, nor is it a very interesting story. But under its quaint and courtly conceit its tone is so pure and lofty, its courtesy and appreciation of women so hearty and honorable; it has so fine a moral atmosphere, such n.o.ble thoughts, such stately and beautiful descriptions, that to read it is like conversing with a hero. So there is no better reading than the _Defence of Poesy_, that n.o.ble hymn of loyalty to intellectual beauty. Hallam well calls Sidney "the first good prose writer" in our language, and scarcely had he finished in his _Defence_ an exquisite criticism of English poetry to that time than the full choir of Elizabethan poets burst into

"the songs that fill The s.p.a.cious times of great Elizabeth With sounds that echo still."

In 1582 Philip Sidney married the daughter of Walsingham, but in his retirement, whether steadfastly watching the great struggle upon the Continent or listening to the alluring music of far-off seas, he knew that the choice days of his life were pa.s.sing, and if a career were not opened for him by the queen, he must make one for himself. William of Orange had been murdered; Elizabeth promptly succeeded him as the active head of the Protestant world; Philip of Spain was the great enemy.

Strike him at home, said Sidney; strike him at sea, but strike him everywhere; and he arranged with Drake a descent upon Spanish America.

He hurried privately to Plymouth to embark, but at the last moment a peer of the realm arrived from the queen forbidding his departure. The loyal gentleman bowed and obeyed.

But two months after his fleet sailed, on the 7th of November, 1585 (about the time that William Shakespeare first came to London), Elizabeth appointed Sidney governor of Flus.h.i.+ng, in the Netherlands. He went thither gladly on the 18th, with three thousand men, to strike for the cause in which he believed. He had already told the queen that the spirit of the Netherlands was the spirit of G.o.d, and was invincible. His uncle, the Earl of Leicester, followed him as commander-in-chief. The earl was handsome at tournaments, but not fit for battle-fields, and Sidney was annoyed by his uncle's conduct; but he writes to his father-in-law, Walsingham, in a strain full of the music of a n.o.ble soul, and fitly precluding his end: "I think a wise and constant man ought never to grieve while he doth play, as a man may say, his own part truly."

For that he was always ready. In the misty dawn of the 22d of September, 1586, a force of three thousand Spaniards stole silently along to the relief of Zutphen, on the river Isel. Sidney, at the head of five hundred cavalry, rode forward to meet them. In the obscurity the battle was sharp and confused. Seeing his friend Lord Willoughby in special danger, Sidney spurred to the rescue. His horse was shot under him and fell. Springing upon another, he dashed forward again and succored his friend, but at the instant a shot struck him below the knee, glancing upward. His furious horse became unmanageable, and Sir Philip was obliged to leave the field. But as he pa.s.sed slowly along to the rear of the soldiers, he felt faint with bleeding, and called for water. A cup was brought to him, but as he was lifting it to his month he saw a dying soldier staring at it with burning eyes. Philip Sidney paused before tasting it, leaned from the saddle, and handed it to the soldier, saying to him in the same soft, musical voice with which the boy called to his mother in the sunny garden at Penshurst, "Friend, thy necessity is yet greater than mine."

He was borne on to Araheim, and lived in suffering for twenty-six days.

He conversed pleasantly and called for music, and said at last to his brother, whom he had loved as brothers seldom love: "Love my memory; cherish my friends. Their faith to me may a.s.sure you they are honest.

But, above all, govern your will and affections by the will and word of your Creator, in me beholding the end of this world with all her vanities." "And so," says old Stowe, with fond particularity, "he died, the 17th day of October, between two and three of the clock in the afternoon."

"The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power, And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave, Await alike the inevitable hour.

The paths of glory lead but to the grave."

This is the story of Philip Sidney. A letter, a book, a battle. How little to justify his unique fame! How invisible his performance among the ill.u.s.trious events of his prodigious age! Yet is not the instinct of the human heart true; and in the stately society of his time, if Bacon were the philosopher, Shakespeare the poet, Burleigh the counsellor, Raleigh the soldier, Drake the sailor, Hooker the theologian, Ess.e.x the courtier, and Gresham the merchant, was not Philip Sidney as distinctively the gentleman? Heroes stood beside him in cl.u.s.ters, poets in constellations; all the ill.u.s.trious men of the age achieved more tangible results than he, yet none of them has carved his name upon history more permanently and with a more diamond point; for he had that happy harmony of mind and temper, of enthusiasm and good sense, of accomplishment and capacity, which is described by that most exquisite and most abused word, gentleman. His guitar hung by a ribbon at his side, but his sword hung upon leather beneath it. His knee bent gallantly to the queen, but it knelt reverently also to his Maker. And it was the crown of the gentleman that he was neither ashamed of the guitar nor of the sword; neither of the loyalty nor the prayer. For a gentleman is not an idler, a trifler, a dandy; he is not a scholar only, a soldier, a mechanic, a merchant; he is the flower of men, in whom the accomplishment of the scholar, the bravery of the soldier, the skill of the mechanic, the sagacity of the merchant, all have their part and appreciation. A sense of duty is his main-spring, and like a watch crusted with precious stones, his function is not to look prettily, but to tell the time of day. Philip Sidney was not a gentleman because his grandfather was the Duke of Northumberland and his father lord-deputy of Ireland, but because he was himself generous, simple, truthful, n.o.ble, refined. He was born with a gold spoon in his mouth, but the gold is only the test. In the mouths of the base it becomes bra.s.s and iron.

George IV., called with bitter irony the first gentleman in Europe, was born with the gold spoon, but his acrid humors turned it to the basest metal, betraying his mean soul. George Stephenson was born with the pewter spoon in his mouth, but the true temper of his soul turned it into pure gold. The test of a gentleman is his use, not his uselessness; whether that use be direct or indirect, whether it be actual service or only inspiring and aiding action. "To what purpose should our thoughts be directed to various kinds of knowledge," wrote Philip Sidney in 1578, "unless room be afforded for putting it into practice so that public advantage may be the result?" And Algernon Sidney said, nearly a century later: "I have ever had it in my mind that when G.o.d cast me into such a condition as that I cannot save my life but by doing an indecent thing, he shows me the time has come wherein I should resign it." And when that time came he did resign it; for every gentleman instinctively serves justice and liberty. He feels himself personally disgraced by an insult to humanity, for he, too, is only a man; and however stately his house may be and murmurous with music, however glowing with pictures and graceful with statues and reverend with books--however his horses may out-trot other horses, and his yachts outsail all yachts--the gentleman is king and master of these and not their servant; he wears them for ornament, like the ring upon his finger or the flower in his b.u.t.ton-hole, and if they go the gentleman remains. He knows that all their worth came from human genius and human training; and loving man more than the works of man, he instinctively shuns whatever in the shape of man is degraded, outraged, and forsaken. He does not make the poverty of others the reason for robbing them; he does not make the oppression of others the reason for oppressing them, for his gentility is his religion; and therefore with simple truth and tender audacity the old English dramatist Dekkar calls Him who gave the name to our religion, and who destroyed the plea that might makes right, "the first true gentleman, that ever breathed".

But not only is Philip Sidney's story the poem of a gentleman, it is that of a young man. It was the age of young men. No man was thought flippant, whatever his years, who could say a good thing well, or do a brave thing successfully, or give the right advice at the right moment.

The great men of the day were all young. At sixteen Bacon had already sketched his _Philosophy_. At seventeen Walter Raleigh had gone to find some good wars. At seventeen Edmund Spenser had first published. Before he was twenty, Alexander Farnese, Prince of Parma, and the greatest general of Sidney's time, had revealed his masterly genius. At twenty-one Don John of Austria had been commander-in-chief against the Moors. The Prince of Conde and Henry of Navarre were leaders while they were yet boys. At twenty Francis Drake sailed, a captain, with John Hawkins; and at twenty-one the Was.h.i.+ngton of European history, to whom an American has for the first time paid just homage with an enthusiasm and eloquence of Sidney describing his friend--at twenty-one William of Orange commanded an army of Charles V.

When England wanted leaders in those tremendous days that shaped her destiny, it did just what America did in those recent perilous hours that determined hers--she sent young men with faith in their hearts and fire in their veins--not old men with feathers in their hats; and everywhere it is the young men who have made history. At thirty-two Alexander wept for another world to conquer. On his thirty-seventh birthday Raphael lay dead beneath his last picture. At thirty-six Mozart had sung his swan-song. At twenty-five Hannibal was commander-in-chief of the Carthaginian armies. At thirty-three Turenne was marshal of France. At twenty-seven Bonaparte was triumphant in Italy. At forty-five Wellington had conquered Bonaparte, and at forty-eight retired from active military service. At forty-three Was.h.i.+ngton was chief of the Continental army. On his forty-fifth birthday Sherman was piercing the heart of the American Rebellion; and before he was forty-three Grant had "fought it out on this line" to perfect victory. Young men! Of course they were young men. Youth is the main-spring of the world. The experience of age is wise in action only when it is electrified by the enthusiasm of youth. Show me a land in which the young men are cold and sceptical and prematurely wise; which in polite indifference is called political wisdom, contempt for ideas common-sense, and honesty in politics Sunday-school statesmans.h.i.+p--show me a land in which the young men are more anxious about doing well than about doing right--and I will show you a country in which public corruption and ruin overtakes private infidelity and cowardice, and in which, if there were originally a hope for mankind, a faith in principle, and a conquering enthusiasm, that faith, hope, and enthusiasm are expiring like the deserted camp-fires of a retiring army. "Woe to a man when his heart grows old! Woe to a nation when its young men shuffle in the gouty shoes and limp on the untimely crutches of age, instead of leaping along the course of life with the jubilant spring of their years and the st.u.r.dy play of their own muscles!" Sir Philip Sidney's was the age of young men: and wherever there are self-reliance, universal human sympathy, and confidence in G.o.d, there is the age of youth and national triumph; just as whenever Joan of Arc leads the army, or Molly Stark dares to be a widow, or Rosa Bonheur paints, or Hattie Hosmer carves, or Jenny Lind sings, or Mrs.

Patten steers the wrecked s.h.i.+p to port, or Florence Nightingale walks the midnight hospital--these are the age and the sphere of woman. Queen Elizabeth's was the age of young men; but so it is always when there are young men who can make an age.

And ours is such an age. We live in a country which has been saved by its young men. Before us opens a future which is to be secured by the young men. I have not held up Sir Philip Sidney as a reproach, but only for his brothers to admire--only that we may scatter the glamour of the past and of history, and understand that we do not live in the lees of time and the world's decrepitude. There is no country so fair that ours is not fairer; there is no age so heroic that ours is not as n.o.ble; there is no youth in history so romantic and beloved that in a thousand American homes you may not find his peer to-day. It is the Sidneys we have known who interpret this Philip of three hundred years ago. Dear, n.o.ble gentleman! he does not move alone in our imaginations, for our own memories supply his splendid society. We too have seen, how often and how often, the bitter fight of the misty morning on the Isel--the ringing charge, the fatal fall. A thousand times we saw the same true Sidney heart that, dying, gave the cup of cold water to a fellow-soldier. And we, for whom the Sidneys died, let us thank G.o.d for showing us in our own experience, as in history, that the n.o.blest traits of human character are still spanned by the rainbow of perfect beauty; and that human love and faith and fidelity, like day and night, like seed-time and harvest, shall never, never fail.

LONGFELLOW

In the school readers of half a century ago there were two poems which every boy and girl read and declaimed and remembered. How much of that old literature has disappeared! How much that stirred the hearts and touched the fancies of those boys and girls, their children have never heard of! Willis's "Sat.u.r.day Afternoon" and "Burial of Arnold" have floated away, almost out of sight, with Pierpont's "Bunker Hill" and Sprague's Fourth-of-July oration. The relentless winds of oblivion incessantly blow. Sc.r.a.ps of verse and rhetoric once so familiar are caught up, wafted noiselessly away, and lodged in neglected books and in the dark corners of fading memories, gradually vanish from familiar knowledge. But the two little poems of which we speak have survived. One of them was Bryant's "March", and the other was Longfellow's "April", and the names of the two poets singing of spring were thus a.s.sociated in the spring-time of our poetry, as the fathers of which they will be always honored.

Both poems originally appeared in the _United States Literary Gazette_, and were included in the modest volume of selections from that journal which was published in Boston in 1826. The chief names in this little book are those of Bryant, Longfellow, Percival, Mellen, Dawes, and Jones. Percival has already become a name only; Dawes, and Greenville Mellen, who, like Longfellow, was a son of Maine, are hardly known to this generation, and Jones does not even appear in Duyckinck's Cyclopaedia. But in turning over the pages it is evident that Time has dealt justly with the youthful bards, and that the laurel rests upon the heads of the singers whose earliest strains fitly preluded the music of their prime. Longfellow was nineteen years old when the book was published. He had graduated at Bowdoin College the year before, and the verses had been written and printed in the _Gazette_ while he was still a student.

The glimpses of the boy that we catch through the recollections of his old professor, Packard, and of his college mates, are of the same character as at every period of his life. They reveal a modest, refined, manly youth, devoted to study, of great personal charm and gentle manners. It is the boy that the older man suggested. To look back upon him is to trace the broad and clear and beautiful river far up the green meadows to the limpid rill.

His poetic taste and faculty were already apparent, and it is related that a version of an ode of Horace which he wrote in his Soph.o.m.ore year so impressed one of the members of the examining board that when afterwards a chair of modern languages was established in the college, he proposed as its inc.u.mbent the young Soph.o.m.ore whose fluent verse he remembered. The impression made by the young Longfellow is doubtlessly accurately described by one of his famous cla.s.smates, Hawthorne, for the cla.s.s of '25 is a proud tradition of Bowdoin. In "P.'s Correspondence", one of the _Mosses from an Old Manse_, a quaint fancy of a letter from "my unfortunate friend P.", whose wits were a little disordered, there are grotesque hints of the fate of famous persons. P. talks with Burns at eighty-seven; Byron, grown old and fat, wears a wig and spectacles; Sh.e.l.ley is reconciled to the Church of England; Coleridge finishes "Christabel"; Keats writes a religious epic on the millennium; and George Canning is a peer. On our side of the sea, Dr. Channing had just published a volume of verses; Whittier had been lynched ten years before in South Carolina; and, continues P., "I remember, too, a lad just from college, Longfellow by name, who scattered some delicate verses to the winds, and went to Germany, and perished, I think, of intense application, at the University of Gottingen." Longfellow, in turn, recalled his cla.s.smate Hawthorne--a shy, dark-haired youth flitting across the college grounds in a coat with bright b.u.t.tons.

Among these delicate verses was the poem to "An April Day". As the work of a very young man it is singularly restrained and finished. It has the characteristic elegance and flowing melody of his later verse, and its half-pensive tone is not excessive nor immature. It is not, however, for this that it is most interesting, but because, with Bryant's "March", it is the fresh and simple note of a truly American strain. Perhaps the curious reader, enlightened by the observation of subsequent years, may find in the "March" a more vigorous love of nature, and in the "April"

a tenderer tone of tranquil sentiment. But neither of the poems is the echo of a foreign music, nor an exercise of remembered reading. They both deal with the sights and sounds and suggestions of the American, landscape in the early spring. In Longfellow's "April" there are none of the bishops' caps and foreign ornament of ill.u.s.tration to which Margaret Fuller afterwards objected in his verse. But these early a.s.sociated poems, both of the younger and of the older singer, show an original movement of American literary genius, and, like the months which they celebrate, they foretold a summer.

That summer bad been long awaited. In 1809, Buckminster said in his Phi Beta Kappa oration at Harvard College: "Oar poets and historians, our critics and orators, the men of whom posterity are to stand in awe, and by whom they are to be instructed, are yet to appear among us." Happily, however, the orator thought that he beheld the promise of their coming, although he does not say where. But even as he spoke they were at hand. Irving's _Knickerbocker_ was published in 1809, and Bryant's "Thanatopsis" was written in 1812. The _North American Review_, an enterprise of literary men in Boston and Cambridge, was begun in 1815, and Bryant and Longfellow were both contributors. But it was in the year 1821, the year in which Longfellow entered college, that the beginning of a distinctive American literature became most evident. There were signs of an independent intellectual movement both in the choice of subjects and in the character of treatment. This was the year of the publication of Bryant's first slim volume, and of Cooper's _Spy_, and of Dana's _Idle Man_. Irving's _Sketch Book_ was already finished, Miss Sedgwick's _Hope Leslie_ and Percival's first volume had been issued, and Halleck's and Drake's "Croakers" were already popular. In these works, as in all others of that time, there was indeed no evidence of great creative genius.

The poet and historian whom Buckminster foresaw, and who were to strike posterity with awe, had not yet appeared, but in the same year the voice of the orator whom he antic.i.p.ated was heard upon Plymouth Rock in cadences ma.s.sive and sonorous as the voice of the sea. In the year 1821 there was the plain evidence of an awakening original literary activity.

Longfellow was the youngest of the group in which he first appeared. His work was graceful, tender, pensive, gentle, melodious, the strain of a troubadour. When he went to Europe in 1826 to fit himself more fully for his professors.h.i.+p, he had but "scattered some delicate verses to the winds". When he returned, and published in 1833 his translations of "Coplas de Manrique" and other Spanish poems, he had apparently done no more. There was plainly shown an exquisite literary artist, a very Benvenuto of grace and skill. But he would hardly have been selected as the poet who was to take the strongest hold of the hearts of his countrymen, the singer whose sweet and hallowing spell was to be so deep and universal that at last it would be said in another country that to it also his death was a national loss.

The qualities of these early verses, however, were never lost. The genius of the poet steadily and beautifully developed, flowering according to its nature. The most urbane and sympathetic of men, never aggressive, nor vehement, nor self-a.s.serting, he was yet thoroughly independent, and the individuality of his genius held its tranquil way as surely as the river Charles, whose placid beauty he so often sang, wound through the meadows calm and free. When Longfellow came to Cambridge, the impulse of Transcendentalism in New England was deeply affecting scholars.h.i.+p and literature. It was represented by the most original of American thinkers and the typical American scholar, Emerson, and its elevating, purifying, and emanc.i.p.ating influences are memorable in our moral and intellectual history. Longfellow lived in the very heart of the movement. Its leaders were his cherished friends. He too was a scholar and a devoted student of German literature, who had drunk deeply also of the romance of German life. Indeed, his first important works stimulated the taste for German studies and the enjoyment of its literature more than any other impulse in this country. But he remained without the charmed Transcendental circle, serene and friendly and attentive. There are those whose career was wholly moulded by the intellectual revival of that time. But Longfellow was untouched by it, except as his sympathies were attracted by the vigor and purity of its influence. His tastes, his interests, his activities, his career, would have been the same had that great light never shone. If he had been the ductile, echoing, imitative nature that the more ardent disciples of the faith supposed him to be, he would have been absorbed and swept away by the flood. But he was as untouched by it as Charles Lamb by the wars of Napoleon.

It was in the first flush of the Transcendental epoch that Longfellow's first important works appeared. In 1839, his prose-romance of _Hyperion_ was published, following the sketches of travel, called _Outre-Mer_. He was living in Cambridge, in the famous house in which he died, and in which _Hyperion_ and all of his familiar books were written. Under the form of a slight love tale, _Hyperion_ is the diary of a poet's wandering in a storied and picturesque land, the hearty, home-like genius of whose life and literature is peculiarly akin to his own. The book bubbles and sings with s.n.a.t.c.hes of the songs of the country; it reproduces the tone and feeling of the landscape, the grandeur of Switzerland, the rich romance of the Rhine; it decorates itself with a quaint scholars.h.i.+p, and is so steeped in the spirit of the country, so glowing with the palpitating tenderness of pa.s.sion, that it is still eagerly bought at the chief points which it commemorates, and is cherished by young hearts as no prose romance was ever cherished before.

_Hyperion_, indeed, is a poet's and lover's romance. It is full of deep feeling, of that intense and delighted appreciation of nature in her grander forms, and of scenes consecrated by poetic tradition, which belongs to a singularly fine, sensitive, and receptive nature, when exalted by pure and lofty affection; and it has the fulness and swing of youth, saddened by experience indeed, yet rising with renewed hope, like a field of springing grain in May bowed by the west wind, and touched with the shadow of a cloud, but presently lifting itself again to heaven. A clear sweet humor and blitheness of heart blend in this romance. What is called its artificial tone is not insincerity; it is the play of an artist conscious of his skill and revelling in it, even while his hand and his heart are deeply in earnest. _Werther_ is a romance, Disraeli's _Wondrous Tale of Alroy_ is a romance, but they belong to the realm of Beverley and Julia in Sheridan's _Rivals_. In _Hyperion_, with all its elaborate picturesqueness, its spicy literary atmosphere, and imaginative outline, there is a breezy freshness and simplicity and healthiness of feeling which leaves it still unique.

In the same year with _Hyperion_ came the _Voices of the Night_, a volume of poems which contained the "Coplas de Manrique" and the translations, with a selection from the verses of the _Literary Gazette_, which the author playfully reclaims in a note from their vagabond and precarious existence in the corners of newspapers--gathering his children from wanderings in lanes and alleys, and introducing them decorously to the world. A few later poems were added, and these, with the _Hyperion_, showed a new and distinctive literary talent. In both of these volumes there is the purity of spirit, the elegance of form, the romantic tone, the airy grace, which were already a.s.sociated with Longfellow's name. But there are other qualities. The boy of nineteen, the poet of Bowdoin, has become a scholar and a traveller. The teeming hours, the ample opportunities of youth, have not been neglected or squandered, but, like a golden-banded bee, humming as he sails, the young poet has drained all the flowers of literature of their nectar, and has built for himself a hive of sweetness. More than this, he had proved in his own experience the truth of Irving's tender remark, that an early sorrow is often the truest benediction for the poet.

Through all the romantic grace and elegance of the _Voices of the Night_ and _Hyperion_, however, there is a moral earnestness which is even more remarkable in the poems than in the romance. No volume of poems ever published in the country was so popular. Severe critics indeed, while acknowledging its melody and charm, thought it too morally didactic, the work of a student too fondly enamoured of foreign literatures. But while they conceded taste and facility, two of the poems at least--the "Psalm of Life" and the "Footsteps of Angels"--penetrated the common heart at once, and have held it ever since. A young Scotchman saw them reprinted in some paper or magazine, and, meeting a literary lady in London, repeated them to her, and then to a literary a.s.sembly at her house; and the presence of a new poet was at once acknowledged. If the "Midnight Ma.s.s for the Dying Year" in its form and phrase and conception recalled a land of cathedrals and a historic religious ritual, and had but a vague and remote charm for the woodman in the pine forests of Maine and the farmer on the Illinois prairie, yet the "Psalm of Life" was the very heart-beat of the American conscience, and the "Footsteps of Angels" was a hymn of the fond yearning of every loving heart.

During the period of more than forty years from the publication of the _Voices of the Night_ to his death, the fame of Longfellow constantly increased. It was not because his genius, like that of another scholarly poet, Gray, seldom blossomed in song, so that his renown rested upon a few gem-like verses. He was not intimidated by his own fame. During those forty years he wrote and published constantly. Other great fames arose around him. New poets began to sing. Popular historians took their places. But still with Bryant the name of Longfellow was always a.s.sociated at the head of American singers, and far beyond that of any other American author was his name known through all the reading world.

The volume of _Voices of the Night_ was followed by similar collections, then by _The Spanish Student_, _Evangeline_, _The Golden Legend_, _Hiawatha_, _The Courts.h.i.+p of Miles Standish_, _The Tales of a Wayside Inn_, _The New England Tragedies_, _The Masque of Pandora_, _The Hanging of the Crane_, the _Morituri Salutarnus_, the _Keramos_. But all of these, like stately birds