Initial Studies in American Letters Part 5

But the year following its publication the remarkable Phi Beta Kappa address at Cambridge, on the _American Scholar_, electrified the little public of the university. This is described by Lowell as "an event without any former parallel in our literary annals, a scene to be always treasured in the memory for its picturesqueness and its inspiration. What crowded and breathless aisles, what windows cl.u.s.tering with eager heads, what grim silence of foregone dissent!" To Concord come many kindred spirits, drawn by Emerson's magnetic attraction. Thither came, from Connecticut, Amos Bronson Alcott, born a few years before Emerson, whom he outlived; a quaint and benignant figure, a visionary and a mystic even among the transcendentalists themselves, and one who lived in unworldly simplicity the life of the soul. Alcott had taught school at Ches.h.i.+re, Conn., and afterward at Boston on an original plan--compelling his scholars, for example, to flog _him_, when they did wrong, instead of taking a flogging themselves. The experiment was successful until his _Conversations on the Gospels_, in Boston, and his insistence upon admitting colored children to his benches, offended conservative opinion and broke up his school. Alcott renounced the eating of animal food in 1835. He believed in the union of thought and manual labor, and supported himself for some years by the work of his hands, gardening, cutting wood, etc. He traveled into the West and elsewhere, holding conversations on philosophy, education, and religion. He set up a little community at the village of Harvard, Ma.s.sachusetts, which was rather less successful than Brook Farm, and he contributed _Orphic Sayings_ to the _Dial_, which were harder for the exoteric to understand than even Emerson's _Brahma_ or the _Over-soul_.

Thither came, also, Sarah Margaret Fuller, the most intellectual woman of her time in America, an eager student of Greek and German literature and an ardent seeker after the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. She threw herself into many causes--such as temperance and the higher education of women. Her brilliant conversation cla.s.ses in Boston attracted many "minds" of her own s.e.x. Subsequently, as literary editor of the _New York Tribune_, she furnished a wider public with reviews and book notices of great ability. She took part in the Brook Farm experiment, and she edited the _Dial_ for a time, contributing to it the papers afterward expanded into her most considerable book, _Woman in the Nineteenth Century_. In 1846 she went abroad, and at Rome took part in the revolutionary movement of Mazzini, having charge of one of the hospitals during the siege of the city by the French. In 1847 she married an impecunious Italian n.o.bleman, the Marquis Ossoli.

In 1850 the s.h.i.+p on which she was returning to America, with her husband and child, was wrecked on Fire Island beach and all three were lost. Margaret Fuller's collected writings are somewhat disappointing, being mainly of temporary interest. She lives less through her books than through the memoirs of her friends, Emerson, James Freeman Clarke, T. W. Higginson, and others who knew her as a personal influence. Her strenuous and rather overbearing individuality made an impression not altogether agreeable upon many of her contemporaries. Lowell introduced a caricature of her as "Miranda" into his _Fable for Critics_, and Hawthorne's caustic sketch of her, preserved in the biography written by his son, has given great offence to her admirers.

"Such a determination to _eat_ this huge universe!" was Carlyle's characteristic comment on her appet.i.te for knowledge and aspirations after perfection.

To Concord also came Nathaniel Hawthorne, who took up his residence there first at the "Old Manse," and afterward at "The Wayside." Though naturally an idealist, he said that he came too late to Concord to fall decidedly under Emerson's influence. Of that he would have stood in little danger even had he come earlier. He appreciated the deep and subtle quality of Emerson's imagination, but his own shy genius always jealously guarded its independence and resented the too close approaches of an alien mind. Among the native disciples of Emerson at Concord the most noteworthy were Henry Th.o.r.eau, and his friend and biographer, William Ellery Channing, Jr., a nephew of the great Channing. Channing was a contributor to the _Dial_, and he published a volume of poems which elicited a fiercely contemptous review from Edgar Poe. Though disfigured by affectation and obscurity, many of Channing's verses were distinguished by true poetic feeling, and the last line of his little piece, _A Poet's Hope_,

"If my bark sink 'tis to another sea,"

has taken a permanent place in the literature of transcendentalism.

The private organ of the transcendentalists was the _Dial_, a quarterly magazine, published from 1840 to 1844, and edited by Emerson and Margaret Fuller. Among its contributors, besides those already mentioned, were Ripley, Th.o.r.eau, Parker, James Freeman Clarke, Charles A. Dana, John S. Dwight, C. P. Cranch, Charles Emerson, and William H.

Channing, another nephew of Dr. Channing. It contained, along with a good deal of rubbish, some of the best poetry and prose that has been published in America. The most lasting part of its contents were the contributions of Emerson and Th.o.r.eau. But even as a whole it was a unique way-mark in the history of our literature.

From time to time Emerson collected and published his lectures under various t.i.tles. A first series of _Essays_ came out in 1841, and a second in 1844; the _Conduct of Life_ in 1860, _Society and Solitude_ in 1870, _Letters and Social Aims_ in 1876, and the _Fortune of the Republic_ in 1878. In 1847 he issued a volume of _Poems_, and 1865 _Mayday and Other Poems_. These writings, as a whole, were variations on a single theme, expansions and ill.u.s.trations of the philosophy set forth in _Nature_, and his early addresses. They were strikingly original, rich in thought, filled with wisdom, with lofty morality and spiritual religion. Emerson, said Lowell, first "cut the cable that bound us to English thought and gave us a chance at the dangers and glories of blue water." Nevertheless, as it used to be the fas.h.i.+on to find an English a.n.a.logue for every American writer, so that Cooper was called the American Scott, and Mrs. Sigourney was described as the Hemans of America, a well-worn critical tradition has coupled Emerson with Carlyle. That his mind received a nudge from Carlyle's early essays and from _Sartor Resartus_ is beyond a doubt. They were life-long friends and correspondents, and Emerson's _Representative Men_ is, in some sort, a counterpart of Carlyle's _Hero Wors.h.i.+p_. But in temper and style the two writers were widely different. Carlyle's pessimism and dissatisfaction with the general drift of things gained upon him more and more, while Emerson was a consistent optimist to the end. The last of his writings published during his life-time, the _Fortune of the Republic_, contrasts strangely in its hopefulness with the desperation of Carlyle's later utterances. Even in presence of the doubt as to man's personal immortality he takes refuge in a high and stoical faith. "I think all sound minds rest on a certain preliminary conviction, namely, that if it be best that conscious personal life shall continue it will continue, and if not best, then it will not; and we, if we saw the whole, should of course see that it was better so."

It is this conviction that gives to Emerson's writings their serenity and their tonic quality at the same time that it narrows the range of his dealings with life. As the idealist declines to cross-examine those facts which he regards as merely phenomenal, and looks upon this outward face of things as upon a mask not worthy to dismay the fixed soul, so the optimist turns away his eyes from the evil which he disposes of as merely negative, as the shadow of the good. Hawthorne's interest in the problem of sin finds little place in Emerson's philosophy. Pa.s.sion comes not nigh him, and _Faust_ disturbs him with its disagreeableness. Pessimism is to him "the only skepticism."

The greatest literature is that which is most broadly human, or, in other words, that which will square best with all philosophies. But Emerson's genius was interpretative rather than constructive. The poet dwells in the cheerful world of phenomena. He is most the poet who realizes most intensely the good and the bad of human life. But Idealism makes experience shadowy and subordinates action to contemplation. To it the cities of men, with their "frivolous populations,"

"are but sailing foam-bells Along thought's causing stream."

Shakespeare does not forget that the world will one day vanish "like the baseless fabric of a vision," and that we ourselves are "such stuff as dreams are made on;" but this is not the mood in which he dwells.

Again: while it is for the philosopher to reduce variety to unity, it is the poet's task to detect the manifold under uniformity. In the great creative poets, in Shakespeare and Dante and Goethe, how infinite the swarm of persons, the mult.i.tude of forms! But with Emerson the type is important, the common element. "In youth we are mad for persons. But the larger experience of man discovers the identical nature appearing through them all." "The same--the same!" he exclaims in his essay on _Plato_. "Friend and foe are of one stuff; the plowman, the plow, and the furrow are of one stuff." And this is the thought in _Brahma_:

"They reckon ill who leave me out; When me they fly I am the wings: I am the doubter find the doubt, And I the hymn the Brahmin sings."

It is not easy to fancy a writer who holds this alt.i.tude toward "persons" descending to the composition of a novel or a play. Emerson showed, indeed, a fine power of character-a.n.a.lysis in his _English Traits_ and _Representative Men_ and in his memoirs of Th.o.r.eau and Margaret Fuller. There is even a sort of dramatic humor in his portrait of Socrates. But upon the whole he stands midway between constructive artists, whose instinct it is to tell a story or sing a song, and philosophers, like Sch.e.l.ling, who give poetic expression to a system of thought. He belongs to the cla.s.s of minds of which Sir Thomas Browne is the best English example. He set a high value upon Browne, to whose style his own, though far more sententious, bears a resemblance. Browne's saying, for example, "All things are artificial, for nature is the art of G.o.d," sounds like Emerson, whose workmans.h.i.+p, for the rest, in his prose essays was exceedingly fine and close. He was not afraid to be homely and racy in expressing thought of the highest spirituality. "Hitch your wagon to a star" is a good instance of his favorite manner.

Emerson's verse often seems careless in technique. Most of his pieces are sc.r.a.ppy and have the air of runic rimes, or little oracular "voicings"--as they say at Concord--in rhythmic shape, of single thoughts on "Wors.h.i.+p," "Character," "Heroism," "Art," "Politics,"

"Culture," etc. The content is the important thing, and the form is too frequently awkward or bald. Sometimes, indeed, in the clear-obscure of Emerson's poetry the deep wisdom of the thought finds its most natural expression in the imaginative simplicity of the language. But though this artlessness in him became too frequently in his imitators, like Th.o.r.eau and Ellery Channing, an obtruded simplicity, among his own poems are many that leave nothing to be desired in point of wording and of verse. His _Hymn Sung at the Completion of the Concord Monument_, in 1836, is the perfect model of an occasional poem. Its lines were on every one's lips at the time of the centennial celebrations in 1876, and "the shot heard round the world" has hardly echoed farther than the song which chronicled it.

Equally current is the stanza from _Voluntaries_:

"So nigh is grandeur to our dust, So near is G.o.d to man, When Duty whispers low, 'Thou must,'

The youth replies, 'I can.'"

So, too, the famous lines from the _Problem_:

"The hand that rounded Peter's dome, And groined the aisles of Christian Rome, Wrought in a sad sincerity.

Himself from G.o.d he could not free; He builded better than he knew; The conscious stone to beauty grew."

The most noteworthy of Emerson's pupils was Henry David Th.o.r.eau, "the poet-naturalist." After his graduation from Harvard College, in 1837, Th.o.r.eau engaged in school-teaching and in the manufacture of lead-pencils, but soon gave up all regular business and devoted himself to walking, reading, and the study of nature. He was at one time private tutor in a family on Staten Island, and he supported himself for a season by doing odd jobs in land-surveying for the farmers about Concord. In 1845 he built, with his own hands, a small cabin on the banks of Walden Pond, near Concord, and lived there in seclusion for two years. His expenses during these years were nine cents a day, and he gave an account of his experiment in his most characteristic book, _Walden_, published in 1854. His _Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers_ appeared in 1849. From time to time he went farther afield, and his journeys were reported in _Cape Cod_, the _Maine Woods_, _Excursions_, and _A Yankee in Canada_, all of which, as well as a volume of _Letters_ and _Early Spring in Ma.s.sachusetts_, have been given to the public since his death, which happened in 1862. No one has lived so close to nature, and written of it so intimately, as Th.o.r.eau. His life was a lesson in economy and a sermon on Emerson's text, "Lessen your denominator." He wished to reduce existence to the simplest terms--to

"live all alone Close to the bone, And where life is sweet Constantly eat."

He had a pa.s.sion for the wild, and seems like an Anglo-Saxon reversion to the type of the Red Indian. The most distinctive note in Th.o.r.eau is his inhumanity. Emerson spoke of him as a "perfect piece of stoicism."

"Man," said Th.o.r.eau, "is only the point on which I stand." He strove to realize the objective life of nature--nature in its aloofness from man; to identify himself, with the moose and the mountain. He listened, with his ear close to the ground, for the voice of the earth.

"What are the trees saying?" he exclaimed. Following upon the trail of the lumberman, he asked the primeval wilderness for its secret, and

"saw beneath dim aisles, in odorous beds, The slight linnaea hang its twin-born heads."

He tried to interpret the thought of Ktaadn and to fathom the meaning of the billows on the back of Cape Cod, in their indifference to the s.h.i.+pwrecked bodies that they rolled ash.o.r.e. "After sitting in my chamber many days, reading the poets, I have been out early on a foggy morning and heard the cry of an owl in a neighboring wood as from a nature behind the common, unexplored by science or by literature. None of the feathered race has yet realized my youthful conceptions of the woodland depths. I had seen the red election-birds brought from their recesses on my comrade's string, and fancied that their plumage would a.s.sume stranger and more dazzling colors, like the tints of evening, in proportion as I advanced farther into the darkness and solitude of the forest. Still less have I seen such strong and wild tints on any poet's string."

It was on the mystical side that Th.o.r.eau apprehended transcendentalism.

Mysticism has been defined as the soul's recognition of its ident.i.ty with nature. This thought lies plainly in Sch.e.l.ling's philosophy, and he ill.u.s.trated it by his famous figure of the magnet. Mind and nature are one; they are the positive and negative poles of the magnet. In man, the Absolute--that is, G.o.d--becomes conscious of himself; makes of himself, as nature, an object to himself as mind. "The souls of men,"

said Sch.e.l.ling, "are but the innumerable individual eyes with which our infinite World-Spirit beholds himself." This thought is also clearly present in Emerson's view of nature, and has caused him to be accused of pantheism. But if by pantheism is meant the doctrine that the underlying principle of the universe is matter or force, none of the transcendentalists was a pantheist. In their view nature was divine.

Their poetry is always haunted by the sense of a spiritual reality which abides beyond the phenomena. Thus in Emerson's _Two Rivers_:

"Thy summer voice, Musketaquit,[1]

Repeats the music of the rain, But sweeter rivers pulsing flit Through thee as thou through Concord plain.

"Thou in thy narrow banks art pent; The stream I love unbounded goes; Through flood and sea and firmament, Through light, through life, it forward flows.

"I see the inundation sweet, I hear the spending of the stream, Through years, through men, through nature fleet, Through pa.s.sion, thought, through power and dream."

This mood occurs frequently in Th.o.r.eau. The hard world of matter becomes suddenly all fluent and spiritual, and he sees himself in it--sees G.o.d. "This earth," he cries, "which is spread out like a map around me, is but the lining of my inmost soul exposed." "In _me_ is the sucker that I see;" and, of Walden Pond,

"I am its stony sh.o.r.e, And the breeze that pa.s.ses o'er."

"Suddenly old Time winked at me--ah, you know me, you rogue--and news had come that IT was well. That ancient universe is in such capital health, I think, undoubtedly, it will never die. . . . I see, smell, taste, hear, feel that ever-lasting something to which we are allied, at once our maker, our abode, our destiny, our very selves." It was something ulterior that Th.o.r.eau sought in nature. "The other world,"

he wrote, "is all my art: my pencils will draw no other; my jack-knife will cut nothing else." Th.o.r.eau did not scorn, however, like Emerson, to "examine too microscopically the universal tablet." He was a close observer and accurate reporter of the ways of birds and plants and the minuter aspects of nature. He has had many followers, who have produced much pleasant literature on out-door life. But in none of them is there that unique combination of the poet, the naturalist, and the mystic which gives his page its wild original flavor. He had the woodcraft of a hunter and the eye of a botanist, but his imagination did not stop short with the fact. The sound of a tree falling in the Maine woods was to him "as though a door had shut somewhere in the damp and s.h.a.ggy wilderness." He saw small things in cosmic relations. His trip down the tame Concord has for the reader the excitement of a voyage of exploration into far and unknown regions. The river just above Sherman's Bridge, in time of flood "when the wind blows freshly on a raw March day, heaving up the surface into dark and sober billows," was like Lake Huron, "and you may run aground on Cranberry Island," and "get as good a freezing there as anywhere on the North-west coast." He said that most of the phenomena described in Kane's voyages could be observed in Concord.

The literature of transcendentalism was like the light of the stars in a winter night, keen and cold and high. It had the pale cast of thought, and was almost too spiritual and remote to "hit the sense of mortal sight." But it was at least indigenous. If not an American literature--not national and not inclusive of all sides of American life--it was, at all events, a genuine New England literature and true to the spirit of its section. The tough Puritan stock had at last put forth a blossom which compared with the warm, robust growths of English soil even as the delicate wind flower of the northern spring compares with the cowslips and daisies of old England.

In 1842 Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-64), the greatest American romancer, came to Concord. He had recently left Brook Farm, had just been married, and with his bride he settled down in the "Old Manse" for three paradisaical years. A picture of this protracted honeymoon and this sequestered life, as tranquil as the slow stream on whose banks it was pa.s.sed, is given in the introductory chapter to his _Mosses from an Old Manse_, 1846, and in the more personal and confidential records of his _American Note Books_, posthumously published. Hawthorne was thirty-eight when he took his place among the Concord literati. His childhood and youth had been spent partly at his birthplace, the old and already somewhat decayed sea-port town of Salem, and partly at his grandfather's farm on Sebago Lake, in Maine, then on the edge of the primitive forest. Maine did not become a State, indeed, until 1820, the year before Hawthorne entered Bowdoin College, whence he was graduated in 1825, in the same cla.s.s with Henry W. Longfellow and one year behind Franklin Pierce, afterward President of the United States.

After leaving college Hawthorne buried himself for years in the seclusion of his home at Salem. His mother, who was early widowed, had withdrawn entirely from the world. For months at a time Hawthorne kept his room, seeing no other society than that of his mother and sisters, reading all sorts of books and writing wild tales, most of which he destroyed as soon as he had written them. At twilight he would emerge from the house for a solitary ramble through the streets of the town or along the sea-side. Old Salem had much that was picturesque in its a.s.sociations. It had been the scene of the witch trials in the seventeenth century, and it abounded in ancient mansions, the homes of retired whalers and India merchants. Hawthorne's father had been a s.h.i.+p captain, and many of his ancestors had followed the sea. One of his forefathers, moreover, had been a certain Judge Hawthorne, who in 1691 had sentenced several of the witches to death. The thought of this affected Hawthorne's imagination with a pleasing horror, and he utilized it afterward in his _House of the Seven Gables_. Many of the old Salem houses, too, had their family histories, with now and then the hint of some obscure crime or dark misfortune which haunted posterity with its curse till all the stock died out or fell into poverty and evil ways, as in the Pyncheon family of Hawthorne's romance. In the preface to the _Marble Faun_ Hawthorne wrote: "No author without a trial can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor any thing but a commonplace prosperity in broad and simple daylight." And yet it may be doubted whether any environment could have been found more fitted to his peculiar genius than this of his native town, or any preparation better calculated to ripen the faculty that was in him than these long, lonely years of waiting and brooding thought. From time to time he contributed a story or a sketch to some periodical, such as S. G.

Goodrich's annual, the _Token_, or the _Knickerbocker Magazine_. Some of these attracted the attention of the judicious; but they were anonymous and signed by various _noms de plume_, and their author was at this time--to use his own words--"the obscurest man of letters in America." In 1828 he had issued anonymously and at his own expense a short romance, ent.i.tled _Fanshawe_. It had little success, and copies of the first edition are now exceedingly rare. In 1837 he published a collection of his magazine pieces under the t.i.tle, _Twice-Told Tales_.

The book was generously praised in the _North American Review_ by his former cla.s.smate, Longfellow; and Edgar Poe showed his keen critical perception by predicting that the writer would easily put himself at the head of imaginative literature in America if he would discard allegory, drop short stories, and compose a genuine romance. Poe compared Hawthorne's work with that of the German romancer, Tieck, and it is interesting to find confirmation of this dictum in pa.s.sages of the _American Note Books_, in which Hawthorne speaks of laboring over Tieck with a German dictionary. The _Twice-Told Tales_ are the work of a recluse, who makes guesses at life from a knowledge of his own heart, acquired by a habit of introspection, but who has had little contact with men. Many of them were shadowy, and others were morbid and unwholesome. But their gloom was of an interior kind, never the physically horrible of Poe. It arose from weird psychological situations like that of _Ethan Brand_ in his search for the unpardonable sin. Hawthorne was true to the inherited instinct of Puritanism; he took the conscience for his theme, and in these early tales he was already absorbed in the problem of evil, the subtle ways in which sin works out its retribution, and the species of fate or necessity that the wrong-doer makes for himself in the inevitable sequences of his crime. Hawthorne was strongly drawn toward symbols and types, and never quite followed Poe's advice to abandon allegory.

The _Scarlet Letter_ and his other romances are not, indeed, strictly allegories, since the characters are men and women and not mere personifications of abstract qualities. Still, they all have a certain allegorical tinge. In the _Marble Faun_, for example, Hilda, Kenyon, Miriam, and Donatello have been ingeniously explained as personifications respectively of the conscience, the reason, the imagination, and the senses. Without going so far as this, it is possible to see in these and in Hawthorne's other creations something typical and representative. He uses his characters like algebraic symbols to work out certain problems with; they are rather more and yet rather less than flesh and blood individuals. The stories in _Twice-Told Tales_ and in the second collection, _Mosses from an Old Manse_, 1846, are more openly allegorical than his later work. Thus the _Minister's Black Veil_ is a sort of antic.i.p.ation of Arthur Dimmesdale in the _Scarlet Letter_. From 1846 to 1849 Hawthorne held the position of surveyor of the Custom House of Salem. In the preface to the _Scarlet Letter_ he sketched some of the government officials with whom this office had brought him into contact in a way that gave some offense to the friends of the victims and a great deal of amus.e.m.e.nt to the public. Hawthorne's humor was quiet and fine, like Irving's, but less genial and with a more satiric edge to it. The book last named was written at Salem and published in 1850, just before its author's removal to Lenox, now a sort of inland Newport, but then an unfas.h.i.+onable resort among the Berks.h.i.+re hills. Whatever obscurity may have hung over Hawthorne hitherto was effectually dissolved by this powerful tale, which was as vivid in coloring as the implication of its t.i.tle. Hawthorne chose for his background the somber life of the early settlers of New England. Ho had always been drawn toward this part of American history, and in _Twice-Told Tales_ had given some ill.u.s.trations of it in _Endicott's Red Cross_ and _Legends of the Province House_. Against this dark foil moved in strong relief the figures of Hester Prynne, the woman taken in adultery; her paramour, the Rev. Arthur Dimmesdale; her husband, old Roger Chillingworth; and her illegitimate child. In tragic power, in its grasp of the elementary pa.s.sions of human nature and its deep and subtle insight into the inmost secrets of the heart, this is Hawthorne's greatest book. He never crowded his canvas with figures. In the _Blithedale Romance_ and the _Marble Faun_ there is the same _parti carre_ or group of four characters. In the _House of the Seven Gables_ there are five.

The last mentioned of these, published in 1852, was of a more subdued intensity than the _Scarlet Letter_, but equally original, and, upon the whole, perhaps equally good. The _Blithedale Romance_, published in the same year, though not strikingly inferior to the others, adhered more to conventional patterns in its plot and in the sensational nature of its ending. The suicide of the heroine by drowning, and the terrible scene of the recovery of her body, were suggested to the author by an experience of his own on Concord River, the account of which, in his own words, may be read in Julian Hawthorne's _Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife_. In 1852 Hawthorne returned to Concord and bought the "Wayside" property, which he retained until his death. But in the following year his old college friend Pierce, now become President, appointed him consul to Liverpool, and he went abroad for seven years. The most valuable fruit of his foreign residence was the romance of the _Marble Faun_, 1860, the longest of his fictions and the richest in descriptive beauty. The theme of this was the development of the soul through the experience of sin. There is a haunting mystery thrown about the story, like a soft veil of mist, veiling the beginning and the end. There is even a delicate teasing suggestion of the preternatural in Donatello, the Faun, a creation as original as Shakespeare's Caliban or Fouque's Undine, and yet quite on this side the border-line of the human. _Our Old Home_, a book of charming papers on England, was published in 1863. Manifold experience of life and contact with men, affording scope for his always keen observation, had added range, fullness, warmth to the imaginative subtlety which had manifested itself even in his earliest tales. Two admirable books for children, the _Wonder Book_ and _Tanglewood Tales_, in which the cla.s.sical mythologies were retold, should also be mentioned in the list of Hawthorne's writings, as well as the _American_, _English_, and _Italian Note Books_, the first of which contains the seed-thoughts of some of his finished works, together with hundreds of hints for plots, episodes, descriptions, etc., which he never found time to work out.

Hawthorne's style, in his first sketches and stories a little stilted and "bookish," gradually acquired an exquisite perfection, and is as well worth study as that of any prose cla.s.sic in the English tongue.

Hawthorne was no transcendentalist. He dwelt much in a world of ideas, and he sometimes doubted whether the tree on the bank or its image in the stream were the more real. But this had little in common with the philosophical idealism of his neighbors. He reverenced Emerson, and he held kindly intercourse--albeit a silent man and easily bored--with Th.o.r.eau and Ellery Channing, and even with Margaret Fuller. But his sharp eyes saw whatever was whimsical or weak in the apostles of the new faith. He had little enthusiasm for causes or reforms, and among so many Abolitionists he remained a Democrat, and even wrote a campaign life of his friend Pierce.

The village of Concord has perhaps done more for American literature than the city of New York. Certainly there are few places where a.s.sociations, both patriotic and poetic, cl.u.s.ter so thickly. At one side of the grounds of the Old Manse--which has the river at its back--runs down a shaded lane to the Concord monument and the figure of the Minute Man and the successor of "the rude bridge that arched the flood." Scarce two miles away, among the woods, is little Walden--"G.o.d's drop." The men who made Concord famous are asleep in Sleepy Hollow, yet still their memory prevails to draw seekers after truth to the Concord Summer School of Philosophy, which met annually, a few years since, to reason high of "G.o.d, Freedom, and Immortality,"

next door to the "Wayside," and under the hill on whose ridge Hawthorne wore a path as he paced up and down beneath the hemlocks.

1. Ralph Waldo Emerson. _Nature_. _The American Scholar_. _Literary Ethics_. _The Transcendentalism_. _The Over-soul_. _Address before the Cambridge Divinity School_. _English Traits_. _Representative Men_. _Poems_.

2. Henry David Th.o.r.eau. _Excursions_. _Walden_. _A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers_. _Cape Cod_. _The Maine Woods_.

3. Nathaniel Hawthorne. _Mosses from an Old Manse_. _The Scarlet Letter_. _The House of the Seven Gables_. _The Blithedale Romance_.

_The Marble Faun_. _Our Old Home_.

4. _Transcendentalism in New England_. By O. B. Frothingham. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. 1875.

[1]The Indian name of Concord River.