Initial Studies in American Letters Part 8

Alone, in thy cold skies, Thou keep'st thy old, unmoving station yet, Nor join'st the dances of that glittering train, Nor dipp'st thy virgin orb in the blue western main."

In 1821 he read _The Ages_, a didactic poem, in thirty-five stanzas, before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge, and in the same year brought out his first volume of poems. A second collection appeared in 1832, which was printed in London under the auspices of Was.h.i.+ngton Irving. Bryant was the first American poet who had much of an audience in England, and Wordsworth is said to have learned _Thanatopsis_ by heart. Bryant was, indeed, in a measure, a scholar of Wordsworth's school, and his place among American poets corresponds roughly, though not precisely, to Wordsworth's among English poets. With no humor, with somewhat restricted sympathies, with little flexibility or openness to new impressions, but gifted with a high, austere imagination, Bryant became the meditative poet of nature. His best poems are those in which he draws lessons from nature, or sings of its calming, purifying, and bracing influences upon the human soul. His office, in other words, is the same which Matthew Arnold a.s.serts to be the peculiar office of modern poetry, "the moral interpretation of nature." Poems of this cla.s.s are _Green River_, _To a Water-fowl_, _June_, the _Death of the Flowers_, and the _Evening Wind_. The song, "O fairest of the rural maids," which has more fancy than is common in Bryant, and which Poe p.r.o.nounced his best poem, has an obvious resemblance to Wordsworth's "Three years she grew in sun and shade,"

and both of these nameless pieces might fitly be ent.i.tled--as Wordsworth's is in Mr. Palgrave's _Golden Treasury_--"The Education of Nature."

Although Bryant's career is identified with New York his poetry is all of New England. His heart was always turning back fondly to the woods and streams of the Berks.h.i.+re hills. There was nothing of that urban strain in him which appears in Holmes and Willis. He was, in especial, the poet of autumn, of the American October and the New England Indian Summer, that season of "dropping nuts" and "smoky light," to whose subtle a.n.a.logy with the decay of the young by the New England disease, consumption, he gave such tender expression in the _Death of the Flowers_, and amid whose "bright, late quiet" he wished himself to pa.s.s away. Bryant is our poet of "the melancholy days," as Lowell is of June. If, by chance, he touches upon June, it is not with the exultant gladness of Lowell in meadows full of bobolinks, and in the summer day that is

"simply perfect from its own resource, As to the bee the new campanula's Illuminate seclusion swung in air."

Rather, the stir of new life in the clod suggests to Bryant by contrast the thought of death; and there is nowhere in his poetry a pa.s.sage of deeper feeling than the closing stanzas of _June_, in which he speaks of himself, by antic.i.p.ation, as of one

"Whose part in all the pomp that fills The circuit of the summer hills Is--that his grave is green."

Bryant is, _par excellence_, the poet of New England wild flowers, the yellow violet, the fringed gentian--to each of which he dedicated an entire poem--the orchis and the golden-rod, "the aster in the wood and the yellow sunflower by the brook." With these his name will be a.s.sociated as Wordsworth's with the daffodil and the lesser celandine, and Emerson's with the rhodora.

Except when writing of nature he was apt to be commonplace, and there are not many such energetic lines in his purely reflective verse as these famous ones from _The Battle-Field_:

"Truth crushed to earth shall rise again; The eternal years of G.o.d are hers; But Error, wounded, writhes in pain, And dies among his wors.h.i.+pers."

He added but slowly to the number of his poems, publis.h.i.+ng a new collection in 1840, another in 1844, and _Thirty Poems_ in 1864. His work at all ages was remarkably even. _Thanatopsis_ was as mature as any thing that he wrote afterward, and among his later pieces the _Planting of the Apple Tree_ and the _Flood of Years_ were as fresh as any thing that he had written in the first flush of youth. Bryant's poetic style was always pure and correct, without any tincture of affectation or extravagance. His prose writings are not important, consisting mainly of papers of the _Salmagundi_ variety contributed to the _Talisman_, an annual published in 1827-30; some rather sketchy stories, _Tales of the Glauber Spa_, 1832; and impressions of Europe, ent.i.tled _Letters of a Traveler_, issued in two series, in 1849 and 1858. In 1869 and 1871 appeared his blank-verse translations of the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_, a remarkable achievement for a man of his age, and not excelled, upon the whole, by any recent metrical version of Homer in the English tongue. Bryant's half-century of service as the editor of a daily paper should not be overlooked. The _Evening Post_, under his management, was always honest, gentlemanly, and courageous, and did much to raise the tone of journalism in New York.

Another Ma.s.sachusetts poet, who was outside the Boston coterie, like Bryant, and, like him, tried his hand at journalism, was John Greenleaf Whittier (1807- ). He was born in a solitary farm-house near Haverhill, in the valley of the Merrimack, and his life has been pa.s.sed mostly at his native place and at the neighboring town of Amesbury.

The local color, which is very p.r.o.nounced in his poetry, is that of the Merrimack from the vicinity of Haverhill to its mouth at Newburyport, a region of hill-side farms, opening out below into wide marshes--"the low, green prairies of the sea," and the beaches of Hampton and Salisbury. The scenery of the Merrimack is familiar to all readers of Whittier: the cotton-spinning towns along its banks, with their factories and dams, the sloping pastures and orchards of the back country, the sands of Plum Island and the level reaches of water meadow between which glide the broad-sailed "gundalows"--a local corruption of gondola--laden with hay. Whittier was a farmer lad, and had only such education as the district school could supply, supplemented by two years at the Haverhill Academy. In his _School Days_ he gives a picture of the little old country school-house as it used to be, the only _alma mater_ of so many distinguished Americans, and to which many others who have afterward trodden the pavements of great universities look back so fondly as to their first wicket gate into the land of knowledge.

"Still sits the school-house by the road, A ragged beggar sunning; Around it still the sumachs grow And blackberry vines are running.

"Within the master's desk is seen, Deep-scarred by raps official, The warping floor, the battered seats, The jack-knife's carved initial."

A copy of Burns awoke the slumbering instinct in the young poet, and he began to contribute verses to Garrison's _Free Press_, published in Newburyport, and to the _Haverhill Gazette_. Then he went to Boston, and became editor for a short time of the _Manufacturer_. Next he edited the _Ess.e.x Gazette_, at Haverhill, and in 1830 he took charge of George D. Prentice's paper, the _New England Weekly Review_, at Hartford, Conn. Here he fell in with a young Connecticut poet of much promise, J. G. C. Brainard, editor of the _Connecticut Mirror_, whose "Remains" Whittier edited in 1832. At Hartford, too, he published his first book, a volume of prose and verse, ent.i.tled _Legends of New England_, 1831, which is not otherwise remarkable than as showing his early interest in Indian colonial traditions--especially those which had a touch of the supernatural--a mine which he afterward worked to good purpose in the _Bridal of Pennacook_, the _Witch's Daughter_, and similar poems. Some of the _Legends_ testify to Brainard's influence and to the influence of Whittier's temporary residence at Hartford.

One of the prose pieces, for example, deals with the famous "Moodus Noises" at Haddam, on the Connecticut River, and one of the poems is the same in subject with Brainard's _Black Fox of Salmon River_. After a year and a half at Hartford Whittier returned to Haverhill and to farming.

The antislavery agitation was now beginning, and into this he threw himself with all the ardor of his nature. He became the poet of the reform as Garrison was its apostle, and Sumner and Phillips its speakers. In 1833 he published _Justice and Expediency_, a prose tract against slavery, and in the same year he took part in the formation of the American Antislavery Society at Philadelphia, sitting in the convention as a delegate of the Boston abolitionists. Whittier was a Quaker, and that denomination, influenced by the preaching of John Woolman and others, had long since quietly abolished slavery within its own communion. The Quakers of Philadelphia and elsewhere took an earnest though peaceful part in the Garrisonian movement. But it was a strange irony of fate that had made the fiery-hearted Whittier a friend. His poems against slavery and disunion have the martial ring of a Tyrtaeus or a Korner, added to the stern religious zeal of Cromwell's Ironsides. They are like the sound of the trumpet blown before the walls of Jericho, or the psalms of David denouncing woe upon the enemies of G.o.d's chosen people. If there is any purely Puritan strain in American poetry it is in the war-hymns of the Quaker "Hermit of Amesbury." Of these patriotic poems there were three princ.i.p.al collections: _Voices of Freedom_, 1849; _The Panorama, and Other Poems_, 1856; and _In War Time_, 1863. Whittier's work as the poet of freedom was done when, on hearing the bells ring for the pa.s.sage of the const.i.tutional amendment abolis.h.i.+ng slavery, he wrote his splendid _Laus Deo_, thrilling with the ancient Hebrew spirit:

"Loud and long Lift the old exulting song, Sing with Miriam by the sea-- He has cast the mighty down, Horse and rider sink and drown, He hath triumphed gloriously."

Of his poems distinctly relating to the events of the civil war, the best, or at all events the most popular, is _Barbara Frietchie_.

_Ichabod_, expressing the indignation of the Free Soilers at Daniel Webster's seventh of March speech in defense of the Fugitive Slave Law, is one of Whittier's best political poems, and not altogether unworthy of comparison with Browning's _Lost Leader_. The language of Whittier's warlike lyrics is biblical, and many of his purely devotional pieces are religious poetry of a high order and have been included in numerous collections of hymns. Of his songs of faith and doubt, the best are perhaps _Our Master_, _Chapel of the Hermits_, and _Eternal Goodness_; one stanza from the last of which is familiar;

"I know not where his islands lift Their fronded palms in air, I only know I cannot drift, Beyond his love and care."

But from politics and war Whittier turned gladly to sing the homely life of the New England country-side. His rural ballads and idyls are as genuinely American as any thing that our poets have written, and have been recommended, as such, to English working-men by Whittier's co-religionist, John Bright. The most popular of these is probably _Maud Muller_, whose closing couplet has pa.s.sed into proverb. _Skipper Ireson's Ride_ is also very current. Better than either of them, as poetry, is _Telling the Bees_. But Whittier's masterpiece in work of a descriptive and reminiscent kind is _Snow-Bound_, 1866, a New England fireside idyl which in its truthfulness recalls the _Winter Evening_ of Cowper's _Task_ and Burns's _Cotter's Sat.u.r.day Night_, but in sweetness and animation is superior to either of them. Although in some things a Puritan of the Puritans, Whittier has never forgotten that he is also a Friend, and several of his ballads and songs have been upon the subject of the early Quaker persecutions in Ma.s.sachusetts. The most impressive of these is _Ca.s.sandra Southwick_. The latest of them, the _King's Missive_, originally contributed to the _Memorial History of Boston_ in 1880, and reprinted the next year in a volume with other poems, has been the occasion of a rather lively controversy. The _Bridal of Pennacook_, 1848, and the _Tent on the Beach_, 1867, which contain some of his best work, were series of ballads told by different narrators, after the fas.h.i.+on of Longfellow's _Tales of a Wayside Inn_. As an artist in verse, Whittier is strong and fervid, rather than delicate or rich. He uses only a few metrical forms--by preference the eight-syllabled rhyming couplet--

"Maud Muller on a summer's day Raked the meadow sweet with hay," etc.

and the emphatic tramp of this measure becomes very monotonous, as do some of Whittier's mannerisms, which proceed, however, never from affectation, but from a lack of study and variety, and so, no doubt, in part from the want of that academic culture and thorough technical equipment which Lowell and Longfellow enjoyed. Though his poems are not in dialect, like Lowell's _Biglow Papers_, he knows how to make an artistic use of homely provincial words, such as "ch.o.r.e," which give his idyls of the hearth and the barnyard a genuine Doric cast.

Whittier's prose is inferior to his verse. The fluency which was a besetting sin of his poetry, when released from the fetters of rhyme and meter, ran into wordiness. His prose writings were partly contributions to the slavery controversy, partly biographical sketches of English and American reformers, and partly studies of the scenery and folk-lore of the Merrimack Valley. Those of most literary interest were the _Supernaturalism of New England_, 1847, and some of the papers in _Literary Recreations and Miscellanies_, 1854.

While Ma.s.sachusetts was creating an American literature other sections of the Union were by no means idle. The West, indeed, was as yet too raw to add any thing of importance to the artistic product of the country. The South was hampered by circ.u.mstances which will presently be described. But in and about the sea-board cities of New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Richmond many pens were busy filling the columns of literary weeklies and monthlies; and there was a considerable output, such as it was, of books of poetry, fiction, travel, and miscellaneous light literature. Time has already relegated most of these to the dusty top shelves. To rehea.r.s.e the names of the numerous contributors to the old _Knickerbocker Magazine_, to _G.o.dey's_, and _Graham's_, and the _New Mirror_, and the _Southern Literary Messenger_, or to run over the list of authorlings and poetasters in Poe's papers on the _Literati of New York_, would be very much like reading the inscriptions on the head-stones of an old grave-yard. In the columns of these prehistoric magazines and in the book notices and reviews away back in the thirties and forties, one encounters the handiwork and the names of Emerson, Holmes, Longfellow, Hawthorne, and Lowell embodied in this ma.s.s of forgotten literature.

It would have required a good deal of critical ac.u.men, at the time, to predict that these and a few others would soon be thrown out into bold relief, as the significant and permanent names in the literature of their generation, while Paulding, Hirst, Fay, Dawes, Mrs. Osgood, and scores of others who figured beside them in the fas.h.i.+onable periodicals, and filled quite as large a s.p.a.ce in the public eye, would sink into oblivion in less than thirty years. Some of these latter were clever enough people; they entertained their contemporary public sufficiently, but their work had no vitality or "power of continuance."

The great majority of the writings of any period are necessarily ephemeral, and time by a slow process of natural selection is constantly sifting out the few representative books which shall carry on the memory of the period to posterity. Now and then it may be predicted of some undoubted work of genius, even at the moment that it sees the light, that it is destined to endure. But tastes and fas.h.i.+ons change, and few things are better calculated to inspire the literary critic with humility than to read the prophecies in old reviews and see how the future, now become the present, has quietly given them the lie.

From among the professional _litterateurs_ of his day emerges, with ever sharper distinctness as time goes on, the name of Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49). By the irony of fate Poe was born at Boston, and his first volume, _Tamerlane, and Other Poems_, 1827, was printed in that city and bore upon its t.i.tle-page the words, "By a Bostonian." But his parentage, so far as it was any thing, was Southern. His father was a Marylander who had gone upon the stage and married an actress, herself the daughter of an actress and a native of England. Left an orphan by the early death of both parents, Poe was adopted by a Mr. Allan, a wealthy merchant of Richmond, Va. He was educated partly at an English school, was student for a time in the University of Virginia, and afterward a cadet in the Military Academy at West Point. His youth was wild and irregular; he gambled and drank, was proud, bitter, and perverse, finally quarreled with his guardian and adopted father--by whom he was disowned--and then betook himself to the life of a literary hack. His brilliant but underpaid work for various periodicals soon brought him into notice, and he was given the editors.h.i.+p of the _Southern Literary Messenger_, published at Richmond, and subsequently of the _Gentlemen's_--afterward _Graham's_--_Magazine_ in Philadelphia.

These and all other positions Poe forfeited through his dissipated habits and wayward temper, and finally, in 1844, he drifted to New York, where he found employment on the _Evening Mirror_ and then on the _Broadway Journal_. He died of delirium tremens at the Marine Hospital in Baltimore. His life was one of the most wretched in literary history. He was an extreme instance of what used to be called the "eccentricity of genius." He had the irritable vanity which is popularly supposed to accompany the poetic temperament, and was so insanely egotistic as to imagine that Longfellow and others were constantly plagiarizing from him. The best side of Poe's character came out in his domestic relations, in which he displayed great tenderness, patience, and fidelity. His instincts were gentlemanly, and his manner and conversation were often winning. In the place of moral feeling he had the artistic conscience. In his critical papers, except where warped by pa.s.sion or prejudice, he showed neither fear nor favor, denouncing bad work by the most ill.u.s.trious hands and commending obscure merit. The "impudent literary cliques" who puffed each other's books; the feeble chirrupings of the bardlings who manufactured verses for the "Annuals;" and the twaddle of the "genial" incapables who praised them in flabby reviews--all these Poe exposed with ferocious honesty. Nor, though his writings are unmoral, can they be called in any sense immoral. His poetry is as pure in its unearthliness as Bryant's in its austerity.

By 1831 Poe had published three thin books of verse, none of which had attracted notice, although the latest contained the drafts of a few of his most perfect poems, such as _Israfel_, the _Valley of Unrest_, the _City in the Sea_, and one of the two pieces inscribed _To Helen_. It was his habit to touch and retouch his work until it grew under his more practiced hand into a shape that satisfied his fastidious taste.

Hence the same poem frequently re-appears in different stages of development in successive editions. Poe was a subtle artist in the realm of the weird and the fantastic. In his intellectual nature there was a strange conjunction; an imagination as spiritual as Sh.e.l.ley's, though, unlike Sh.e.l.ley's, haunted perpetually with shapes of fear and the imagery of ruin; with this, an a.n.a.lytic power, a scientific exactness, and a mechanical ingenuity more usual in a chemist or a mathematician than in a poet. He studied carefully the mechanism of his verse and experimented endlessly with verbal and musical effects, such as repet.i.tion and monotone and the selection of words in which the consonants alliterated and the vowels varied. In his _Philosophy of Composition_ he described how his best-known poem, the _Raven_, was systematically built up on a preconceived plan in which the number of lines was first determined and the word "nevermore" selected as a starting-point. No one who knows the mood in which poetry is composed will believe that this ingenious piece of dissection really describes the way in which the _Raven_ was conceived and written, or that any such deliberate and self-conscious process could _originate_ the a.s.sociations from which a true poem springs. But it flattered Poe's pride of intellect to a.s.sert that his cooler reason had control not only over the execution of his poetry, but over the very well-head of thought and emotion. Some of his most successful stories, like the _Gold Bug_, the _Mystery of Marie Roget_, the _Purloined Letter_, and the _Murders in the Rue Morgue_, were applications of this a.n.a.lytic faculty to the solution of puzzles, such as the finding of buried treasure or of a lost doc.u.ment, or the ferreting out of a mysterious crime. After the publication of the _Gold Bug_ he received from all parts of the country specimens of cipher-writing, which he delighted to work out. Others of his tales were clever pieces of mystification, like _Hans Pfaall_, the story of a journey to the moon, or experiments at giving verisimilitude to wild improbabilities by the skillful introduction of scientific details, as in the _Facts in the Case of M.

Valdemar_ and _Von Kempelen's Discovery_. In his narratives of this kind Poe antic.i.p.ated the detective novels of Gaboriau and Wilkie Collins, the scientific hoaxes of Jules Verne, and, though in a less degree, the artfully worked up likeness to fact in Edward Everett Hale's _Man Without a Country_, and similar fictions. While d.i.c.kens's _Barnaby Rudge_ was publis.h.i.+ng in parts Poe showed his skill as a plot-hunter by publis.h.i.+ng a paper in _Graham's Magazine_ in which the very tangled intrigue of the novel was correctly raveled and the finale predicted in advance.

In his union of imagination and a.n.a.lytic power Poe resembled Coleridge, who, if any one, was his teacher in poetry and criticism. Poe's verse often reminds one of _Christabel_ and the _Ancient Mariner_, still oftener of _Kubla Khan_. Like Coleridge, too, he indulged at times in the opium habit. But in Poe the artist predominated over every thing else. He began not with sentiment or thought, but with technique, with melody and color, tricks of language, and effects of verse. It is curious to study the growth of his style in his successive volumes of poetry. At first these are metrical experiments and vague images, original, and with a fascinating suggestiveness, but with so little meaning that some of his earlier pieces are hardly removed from nonsense. Gradually, like distant music drawing nearer and nearer, his poetry becomes fuller of imagination and of an inward significance, without ever losing, however, its mysterious aloofness from the real world of the senses. It was a part of Poe's literary creed--formed upon his own practice and his own limitations, but set forth with a great display of _a priori_ reasoning in his essay on the _Poetic Principle_ and elsewhere--that pleasure and not instruction or moral exhortation was the end of poetry; that beauty and not truth or goodness was its means; and, furthermore, that the pleasure which it gave should be indefinite. About his own poetry there was always this indefiniteness. His imagination dwelt in a strange country of dream--a "ghoul-haunted region of Weir," "out of s.p.a.ce, out of time"--filled with unsubstantial landscapes and peopled by spectral shapes. And yet there is a wonderful, hidden significance in this uncanny scenery. The reader feels that the wild, fantasmal imagery is in itself a kind of language, and that it in some way expresses a brooding thought or pa.s.sion, the terror and despair of a lost soul. Sometimes there is an obvious allegory, as in the _Haunted Palace_, which is the parable of a ruined mind, or in the _Raven_, the most popular of all Poe's poems, originally published in the _American Whig Review_ for February, 1845.

Sometimes the meaning is more obscure, as in _Ulalume_, which, to most people, is quite incomprehensible, and yet to all readers of poetic feeling is among the most characteristic, and, therefore, the most fascinating, of its author's creations.

Now and then, as in the beautiful ballad _Annabel Lee_, and _To One in Paradise_, the poet emerges into the light of common human feeling and speaks a more intelligible language. But in general his poetry is not the poetry of the heart, and its pa.s.sion is not the pa.s.sion of flesh and blood. In Poe the thought of death is always near, and of the shadowy borderland between death and life.

"The play is the tragedy 'Man,'

And its hero the Conqueror Worm."

The prose tale, _Ligeia_, in which these verses are inserted, is one of the most powerful of all Poe's writings, and its theme is the power of the will to overcome death. In that singularly impressive poem, _The Sleeper_, the morbid horror which invests the tomb springs from the same source, the materiality of Poe's imagination, which refuses to let the soul go free from the body.

This quality explains why Poe's _Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque_, 1840, are on a lower plane than Hawthorne's romances, to which a few of them, like _William Wilson_, and _The Man of the Crowd_, have some resemblance. The former of these, in particular, is in Hawthorne's peculiar province, the allegory of the conscience. But in general the tragedy in Hawthorne is a spiritual one, while Poe calls in the aid of material forces. The pa.s.sion of physical fear or of superst.i.tious horror is that which his writings most frequently excite. These tales represent various grades of the frightful and the ghastly, from the mere bugaboo story like the _Black Cat_, which makes children afraid to go in the dark, up to the breathless terror of the _Cask of Amontillado_, or the _Red Death_. Poe's masterpiece in this kind is the fateful tale of the _Fall of the House of Usher_, with its solemn and magnificent close. His prose, at its best, often recalls, in its richly imaginative cast, the manner of De Quincey in such pa.s.sages as his _Dream Fugue_, or _Our Ladies of Sorrow_. In descriptive pieces like the _Domain of Arnheim_, and stories of adventure like the _Descent into the Maelstrom_, and his long sea-tale, _The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym_, 1838, he displayed, a realistic inventiveness almost equal to Swift's or De Foe's. He was not without a mocking irony, but he had no constructive humor, and his attempts at the facetious were mostly failures.

Poe's magical creations were rootless flowers. He took no hold upon the life about him, and cared nothing for the public concerns of his country. His poems and tales might have been written _in vacuo_ for any thing American in them. Perhaps for this reason, in part, his fame has been so cosmopolitan. In France especially his writings have been favorites. Charles Baudelaire, the author of the _Fleurs du Mal_, translated them into French, and his own impressive but unhealthy poetry shows evidence of Poe's influence. The defect in Poe was in character--a defect which will make itself felt in art as in life. If he had had the sweet home feeling of Longfellow or the moral fervor of Whittier he might have been a greater poet than either.

"If I could dwell Where Israfel Hath dwelt, and he where I, He might not sing so wildly well A mortal melody, While a bolder note than this might swell From my lyre within the sky!"

Though Poe was a Southerner, if not by birth, at least by race and breeding, there was nothing distinctly Southern about his peculiar genius, and in his wandering life he was a.s.sociated as much with Philadelphia and New York as with Baltimore and Richmond. The conditions which had made the Southern colonies unfruitful in literary and educational works before the Revolution continued to act down to the time of the civil war. Eli Whitney's invention of the cotton-gin in the closing years of the last century gave extension to slavery, making it profitable to cultivate the now staple by enormous gangs of field-hands working under the whip of the overseer in large plantations. Slavery became henceforth a business speculation in the States furthest south, and not, as in Old Virginia and Kentucky, a comparatively mild domestic system. The necessity of defending its peculiar inst.i.tution against the attacks of a growing faction in the North compelled the South to throw all its intellectual strength into politics, which, for that matter, is the natural occupation and excitement of a social aristocracy. Meanwhile immigration sought the free States, and there was no middle cla.s.s at the South. The "poor whites" were ignorant and degraded. There were people of education in the cities and on some of the plantations, but there was no great educated cla.s.s from which a literature could proceed. And the culture of the South, such as it was, was becoming old-fas.h.i.+oned and local, as the section was isolated more and more from the rest of the Union and from the enlightened public opinion of Europe by its reactionary prejudices and its sensitiveness on the subject of slavery. Nothing can be imagined more ridiculously provincial than the soph.o.m.orical editorials in the Southern press just before the outbreak of the war, or than the backward and ill-informed articles which pa.s.sed for reviews in the poorly supported periodicals of the South.

In the general dearth of work of high and permanent value, one or two Southern authors may be mentioned whose writings have at least done something to ill.u.s.trate the life and scenery of their section. When in 1833 the Baltimore _Sat.u.r.day Visitor_ offered a prize of a hundred dollars for the best prose tale, one of the committee who awarded the prize to Poe's first story, the _MS. Found in a Bottle_, was John P.

Kennedy, a Whig gentleman of Baltimore, who afterward became secretary of the navy in Fillmore's administration. The year before he had published _Swallow Barn_, a series of agreeable sketches of country life in Virginia. In 1835 and 1838 he published his two novels, _Horse-Shoe Robinson_ and _Rob of the Bowl_, the former a story of the Revolutionary War in South Carolina, the latter an historical tale of colonial Maryland. These had sufficient success to warrant reprinting as late as 1852. But the most popular and voluminous of all Southern writers of fiction was William Gilmore Simms, a South Carolinian, who died in 1870. He wrote over thirty novels, mostly romances of Revolutionary history, Southern life, and wild adventure, among the best of which were the _Partisan_, 1835, and the _Yema.s.see_. Simms was an inferior Cooper, with a difference. His novels are good boys'

books, but are crude and hasty in composition. He was strongly Southern in his sympathies, though his newspaper, the _Charleston City Gazette_, took part against the Nullifiers. His miscellaneous writings include several histories and biographies, political tracts, addresses, and critical papers contributed to Southern magazines. He also wrote numerous poems, the most ambitious of which was _Atlantis, a Story of the Sea_, 1832. His poems have little value except as here and there ill.u.s.trating local scenery and manners, as in _Southern Pa.s.sages and Pictures_, 1839. Mr. John Esten Cooke's pleasant but not very strong _Virginia Comedians_ was, perhaps, in literary quality the best Southern novel produced before the civil war.

When Poe came to New York the most conspicuous literary figure of the metropolis, with the possible exception of Bryant and Halleck, was N.

P. Willis, one of the editors of the _Evening Mirror_, upon which journal Poe was for a time engaged. Willis had made a literary reputation, when a student at Yale, by his _Scripture Poems_, written in smooth blank verse. Afterward he had edited the _American Monthly_ in his native city of Boston, and more recently he had published _Pencillings by the Way_, 1835, a pleasant record of European saunterings; _Inklings of Adventure_, 1836, a collection of das.h.i.+ng stories and sketches of American and foreign life; and _Letters from Under a Bridge_, 1839, a series of charming rural letters from his country place at Owego, on the Susquehanna. Willis's work, always graceful and sparkling, sometimes even brilliant, though light in substance and jaunty in style, had quickly raised him to the summit of popularity. During the years from 1835 to 1850 he was the most successful American magazinist, and even down to the day of his death, in 1867, he retained his hold upon the attention of the fas.h.i.+onable public by his easy paragraphing and correspondence in the _Mirror_ and its successor, the _Home Journal_, which catered to the literary wants of the _beau monde_. Much of Willis's work was ephemeral, though clever of its kind, but a few of his best tales and sketches, such as _F. Smith_, _The Ghost Ball at Congress Hall_, _Edith Linsey_, and the _Lunatic's Skate_, together with some of the _Letters from Under a Bridge_, are worthy of preservation, not only as readable stories, but as society studies of life at American watering-places like Nahant and Saratoga and b.a.l.l.ston Spa half a century ago. A number of his simpler poems, like _Unseen Spirits_, _Spring_, _To M---- from Abroad_, and _Lines on Leaving Europe_, still retain a deserved place in collections and anthologies.

The senior editor of the _Mirror_, George P. Morris, was once a very popular song-writer, and his _Woodman, Spare that Tree_, still survives. Other residents of New York city who have written single famous pieces were Clement C. Moore, a professor in the General Theological Seminary, whose _Visit from St. Nicholas_--"'Twas the Night Before Christmas," etc.--is a favorite ballad in every nursery in the land; Charles Fenno Hoffman, a novelist of reputation in his time, but now remembered only as the author of the song _Sparkling and Bright_, and the patriotic ballad of _Monterey_; Robert H. Messinger, a native of Boston, but long resident in New York, where he was a familiar figure in fas.h.i.+onable society, who wrote _Give Me the Old_, a fine ode with a choice Horatian flavor; and William Allen Butler, a lawyer and occasional writer, whose capital satire of _Nothing to Wear_ was published anonymously and had a great run. Of younger poets, like Stoddard and Aldrich, who formerly wrote for the _Mirror_ and who are still living and working in the maturity of their powers, it is not within the limits and design of this sketch to speak. But one of their contemporaries, Bayard Taylor, who died American minister at Berlin, in 1878, though a Pennsylvanian by birth and rearing, may be reckoned among the "literati of New York." A farmer lad from Chester County, who had learned the printer's trade and printed a little volume of his juvenile verses in 1844, he came to New York shortly after with credentials from Dr. Griswold, the editor of _Graham's_, and obtaining encouragement and aid from Willis, Horace Greeley, and others, he set out to make the tour of Europe, walking from town to town in Germany and getting employment now and then at his trade to help pay the expenses of the trip. The story of these _Wanderjahre_ he told in his _Views Afoot_, 1846. This was the first of eleven books of travel written during the course of his life. He was an inveterate nomad, and his journeyings carried him to the remotest regions--to California, India, China, j.a.pan, and the isles of the sea, to Central Africa and the Soudan, Palestine, Egypt, Iceland, and the "by-ways of Europe." His head-quarters at home were in New York, where he did literary work for the _Tribune_. He was a rapid and incessant worker, throwing off many volumes of verse and prose, fiction, essays, sketches, translations, and criticisms, mainly contributed in the first instance to the magazines. His versatility was very marked, and his poetry ranged from _Rhymes of Travel_, 1848, and _Poems of the Orient_, 1854, to idyls and home ballads of Pennsylvania life, like the _Quaker Widow_ and the _Old Pennsylvania Farmer_; and on the other side, to ambitious and somewhat mystical poems, like the _Masque of the G.o.ds_, 1872--written in four days--and dramatic experiments like the _Prophet_, 1874, and _Prince Deukalion_, 1878. He was a man of buoyant and eager nature, with a great appet.i.te for new experience, a remarkable memory, a talent for learning languages, and a too great readiness to take the hue of his favorite books. From his facility, his openness to external impressions of scenery and costume and his habit of turning these at once into the service of his pen, it results that there is something "newspapery" and superficial about most of his prose. It is reporter's work, though reporting of a high order. His poetry too, though full of glow and picturesqueness, is largely imitative, suggesting Tennyson not unfrequently, but more often Sh.e.l.ley. His spirited _Bedouin Song_, for example, has an echo of Sh.e.l.ley's _Lines to an Indian Air_:

"From the desert I come to thee On a stallion shod with fire; And the winds are left behind In the speed of my desire.

Under thy window I stand, And the midnight hears my cry; I love thee, I love but thee, With a love that shall not die."

The dangerous quickness with which he caught the manner of other poets made him an admirable parodist and translator. His _Echo Club_, 1876, contains some of the best travesties in the tongue, and his great translation of Goethe's _Faust_, 1870-71--with its wonderfully close reproduction of the original meters--is one of the glories of American literature. All in all, Taylor may unhesitatingly be put first among our poets of the second generation--the generation succeeding that of Longfellow and Lowell--although the lack in him of original genius self-determined to a peculiar sphere, or the want of an inward fixity and concentration to resist the rich tumult of outward impressions, has made him less significant in the history of our literary thought than some other writers less generously endowed.

Taylor's novels had the qualities of his verse. They were profuse, eloquent, and faulty. _John G.o.dfrey's Fortune_, 1864, gave a picture of bohemian life in New York. _Hannah Thurston_, 1863, and the _Story of Kennett_; 1866, introduced many incidents and persons from the old Quaker life of rural Pennsylvania, as Taylor remembered it in his boyhood. The former was like Hawthorne's _Blithedale Romance_, a satire on fanatics and reformers, and its heroine is a n.o.bly conceived character, though drawn with some exaggeration. The _Story of Kennett_, which is largely autobiographic, has a greater freshness and reality than the others, and is full of personal recollections. In these novels, as in his short stories, Taylor's pictorial skill is greater on the whole than his power of creating characters or inventing plots.

Literature in the West now began to have an existence. Another young poet from Chester County, Pa., namely, Thomas Buchanan Read, went to Cincinnati, and not to New York, to study sculpture and painting, about 1837, and one of his best-known poems, _Pons Maximus_, was written on the occasion of the opening of the suspension bridge across the Ohio.

Read came East, to be sure, in 1841, and spent many years in our sea-board cities and in Italy. He was distinctly a minor poet, but some of his Pennsylvania pastorals, like the _Deserted Road_, have a natural sweetness; and his luxurious _Drifting_, which combines the methods of painting and poetry, is justly popular. _Sheridan's Ride_--perhaps his most current piece--is a rather forced production, and has been overpraised. The two Ohio sister poets, Alice and Phoebe Cary, were attracted to New York in 1850, as soon as their literary success seemed a.s.sured. They made that city their home for the remainder of their lives. Poe praised Alice Cary's _Pictures of Memory_, and Phoebe's _Nearer Home_ has become a favorite hymn. There is nothing peculiarly Western about the verse of the Cary sisters. It is the poetry of sentiment, memory, and domestic affection, entirely feminine, rather tame and diffuse as a whole, but tender and sweet, cherished by many good women and dear to simple hearts.

A stronger smack of the soil is in the Negro melodies like _Uncle Ned_, _O Susanna_, _Old Folks at Home_, _'Way Down South_, _Nelly was a Lady_, _My Old Kentucky Home_, etc., which were the work, not of any Southern poet, but of Stephen C. Foster, a native of Allegheny, Pa., and a resident of Cincinnati and Pittsburg. He composed the words and music of these, and many others of a similar kind, during the years 1847 to 1861. Taken together they form the most original and vital addition which this country has made to the psalmody of the world, and ent.i.tle Foster to the first rank among American song-writers.

As Foster's plaintive melodies carried the pathos and humor of the plantation all over the land, so Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe's _Uncle Tom's Cabin_, 1852, brought home to millions of readers the sufferings of the Negroes in the "black belt" of the cotton-growing States. This is the most popular novel ever written in America. Hundreds of thousands of copies were sold in this country and in England, and some forty translations were made into foreign tongues. In its dramatized form it still keeps the stage, and the statistics of circulating libraries show that even now it is in greater demand than any other single book. It did more than any other literary agency to rouse the public conscience to a sense of the shame and horror of slavery; more even than Garrison's _Liberator_, more than the indignant poems of Whittier and Lowell or the orations of Sumner and Phillips. It presented the thing concretely and dramatically, and in particular it made the odious Fugitive Slave Law forever impossible to enforce. It was useless for the defenders of slavery to protest that the picture was exaggerated, and that planters like Legree were the exception. The system under which such brutalities could happen, and did sometimes happen, was doomed. It is easy now to point out defects of taste and art in this masterpiece, to show that the tone is occasionally melodramatic, that some of the characters are conventional, and that the literary execution is in parts feeble and in others coa.r.s.e. In spite of all, it remains true that _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ is a great book, the work of genius seizing instinctively upon its opportunity and uttering the thought of the time with a power that thrilled the heart of the nation and of the world. Mrs. Stowe never repeated her first success. Some of her novels of New England life, such as the _Minister's Wooing_, 1859, and the _Pearl of Orr's Island_, 1862, have a mild kind of interest, and contain truthful portraiture of provincial ways and traits; while later fictions of a domestic type, like _Pink and White Tyranny_ and _My Wife and I_, are really beneath criticism.

There were other Connecticut writers contemporary with Mrs. Stowe: Mrs.