1836

 

__________ 

“It is not enough to be busy. The question is: What are we busy about?” 

Henry David Thoreau.

__________ 

 

May 25: Members of the U.S. House of Representatives vote to impose a “gag rule” and cut off all debate on the issue of slavery. All petitions from citizens calling for an end, or limit, to slavery will now be “tabled” without discussion.

As a member of Congress, the former president, John Quincy Adams,
 fought this "gag rule" for the rest of his life.

 

* 

BENJAMIN PERLEY POORE, in Reminiscences (Volume 1, p. 399) mentions a new arrival in the nation’s capital – an abolitionist unafraid. 

“Dr. [Gamaliel] Bailey was, however, no novice in dealing with mobs. Ten years before he came to Washington he resided in Cincinnati, where, in conjunction with James G. Birney, he published The Philanthropist, a red-hot anti-slavery sheet. During his first year in this enterprise his office was twice attacked by a mob, and in one of their raids the office was gutted and the press thrown into the river. These lively scenes induced a change of base and settled the good Doctor in the national metropolis.”

 

* 

July 4: Hendricks writes, in A Popular History of Indiana: 

In those early days there were men who earnestly objected to the building railroads, sincerely and anxiously fearing that the roads would ruin the cities by taking away their trade. A few sages shook their heads and said: “These steam car-men will ruin the whole country. There will be no more use for horses and wagons.” But, fortunately, there were others of a more enterprising and progressive spirit, who were confident that the roads would prove a great benefit to the state. One of the leaders of this class was John Walker, who declared that he would have a part of the Lawrenceburg and Indianapolis railroad in running order by July 4, 1836. The day arrived and he had kept his word, though people listened in vain for the screech of the locomotive.

 

There was a road one and one-quarter miles long, but the rails were of wood. The express car, mail car, baggage car, smoking car, ladies’ car, dining car, Pullman’s palace car and all the rest were in one, and John Walker had it made in Shelbyville. The locomotives (there were two of them) had each four legs and were very fond of corn and oats. There was to be a picnic at the other end of the line, with plenty of good things to eat and drink – with good music, good speeches, pretty girls, strong and handsome boys, and all the old settlers of the country and surrounding regions. The fare was only a shilling. … The morning of the Fourth was bright and beautiful. … A Union Pacific train could not have carried all who assembled at the railroad. The locomotive switched – their tails – awhile. The conductor collected the fare from “the fair.” The bells rang out their peals of merry laughter, and the train pulled out on its journey. All day it ran, and away into the night. Nobody who was at the picnic will ever forget it, and the men will talk of it so long as they talk of anything.  (91/217-218) 

The first trains reached speeds of 30 mph.
Passengers and observers were stunned.

* 

Theology as “diabology.” 

RALPH WALDO EMERSON, in an essay called “Nature,” begins to lay down the principles of Transcendentalism. An excellent definition: “Transcendentalism is a very formal word that describes a very simple idea. People, men and women equally, have knowledge about themselves and the world around them that ‘transcends’ or goes beyond what they can see, hear, taste, touch or feel.”

 

NOTE TO TEACHERS: Here, we turn to Halleck again for detail. His description of “The New England Group” runs more than a hundred pages. We have tried to save the parts that might be of use to you today. 

The old Puritan religion taught the total depravity of man, the eternal damnation of the overwhelming majority, of all but the “elect.” A man’s election to salvation depended on God’s foreordination. If the man was not elected, he was justly treated, for he merely received his deserts. Even Jonathan Edwards, in spite of his sweet nature, felt bound to preach hell fire in terms of the old Puritan theology. In one of his sermons, he says:

 

   “The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect, over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked; his wrath toward you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else but to be cast into the fire.”

 

This quotation was not given when we discussed the works of Edwards, because it misrepresents his most often recurring idea of God. But the fact that even he felt impelled to preach such a sermon shows most emphatically that Puritan theology exerted its influence by presenting more vivid pictures of God’s wrath than of his love.

 

A tremendous reaction from such beliefs came in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. William Ellery Channing (1780-1842), pastor of the Federal Street Church in Boston and one of the greatest leaders of this religious reform, wrote in 1809 of the old Puritan creed:

 

“A man of plain sense, whose spirit has not been broken to this creed by education or terror, will think that it is not necessary for us to travel to heathen countries, to learn how mournfully the human mind may misrepresent the Deity.”

 

He maintained that human nature, made in the image of God, is not totally depraved, that the current doctrine of original sin, election, and eternal punishment “misrepresents the Deity” and makes him a monster. This view was speedily adopted by the majority of cultivated people in and around Boston. The Unitarian movement rapidly developed and soon became dominant at Harvard College. Unitarianism was embraced by the majority of Congregational churches in Boston, including the First Church, and the Second Church, where the great John Cotton and Cotton Mather had preached the sternest Puritan theology. Nearly all of the prominent writers mentioned in this chapter adopted liberal religious views. … Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes even called the old theology largely “diabology.” The name of one of his poems is Homesick in Heaven. Had he in the early days chosen such a title, he would either, like Roger Williams, have been exiled, or, like the Quakers, have suffered a worse fate.

 

Many adopted more liberal religious beliefs without embracing Unitarianism. Perhaps these three lines voice most briefly the central thought in man’s new creed and his changed attitude toward God:

 

“For Thou and I are next of kin;

 The pulses that are strong within,

 From the deep Infinite heart begin.”

 

Halleck explains that, for the Puritans, a focus on 

Art, music, literature, and the love of beauty in general had seemed reprehensible because it was thought that they took away the attention from a matter of far graver import, the salvation of the immortal soul [emphasis added]. Now there gradually developed the conviction that these agencies not only helped to save the soul, but made it more worth saving. People began to search for the beautiful and to enjoy it in both nature and art. Emerson says:

 

“… if eyes were made for seeing, Then Beauty is its own excuse for being.”

 

The first half of the nineteenth century saw the New Englanders engaged in a systematic attempt at self-culture, to an extent never before witnessed in America and rarely elsewhere. Many with an income barely sufficient for comfortable living set aside a fund for purchasing books before anything else. Emerson could even write to Carlyle that all the bright girls in New England wanted something better than morning calls and evening parties, and that a life of mere trade did not promise satisfaction to the boys.

 

THE TRANSCENDENTAL PHILOSOPHY. The literature and thought of New England were profoundly modified by the transcendental philosophy. Ralph Waldo Emerson … was the most celebrated expounder of this school of thought. The English philosopher, Locke, had maintained that intellectual action is limited to the world of the senses. The German metaphysician, Kant, claimed that the soul has ideas which are not due to the activity of any of the senses: that everyone has an idea of time and space although no one has ever felt, tasted, seen, eaten, or smelled time or space. He called such an idea an intuition or transcendental form.

 

… We are now prepared to understand what a transcendentalist like Thoreau means when he says:

 

“I hear beyond the range of sound,

 I see beyond the range of sight.”

 

The transcendentalists, therefore, endeavored to transcend, that is, to pass beyond, the range of human sense and experience. … 

 

Below, a few gems from Halleck’s description of Transcendentalist thinking: 

According to Emerson, one of the articles of the transcendental creed was a belief “in inspiration and ecstasy.”

 

The feeling of ecstasy, due to the belief that he was really a part of an infinite Divine Power, made Emerson say:

 

“I see the spectacle of morning from the hill-top over against my house, from daybreak to sunrise, with emotions which an angel might share. The long slender bars of cloud float like fishes in the sea of crimson light. From the earth, as a shore, I look out into that silent sea. I seem to partake its rapid transformations; the active enchantment reaches my dust, and I dilate and conspire with the morning wind.”

 

The greatest of the women transcendentalists, Margaret Fuller (1810-1850), a distinguished early pleader for equal rights for her sex, believed that when it was fashionable for women to bring to the home “food and fire for the mind as well as for the body,” an ecstatic “harmony of the spheres would ensue.” … 

The titles of sections have been added by the blogger:

 

“Transcendental moonshine.” 

Critics were not wanting to point out the absurdity of many transcendental ecstasies. Amos Bronson Alcott (1799-1888), one of the leading transcendentalists, wrote a peculiar poem called The Seer’s Rations, in which he speaks of

 

“Bowls of sunrise for breakfast,

Brimful of the East.”

 

His neighbors said that this was the diet which he provided for his hungry family. His daughter, Louisa May, the author of that fine juvenile work, Little Women (1868), had a sad struggle with poverty while her father was living in the clouds. The extreme philosophy of the intangible was soon called “transcendental moonshine.” The tenets of Bronson Alcott’s transcendental philosophy required him to believe that human nature is saturated with divinity. He therefore felt that a misbehaving child in school would be most powerfully affected by seeing the suffering which his wrongdoing brought to others. He accordingly used to shake a good child for the bad deeds of others. Sometimes when the class had offended, he would inflict corporal punishment on himself. His extreme applications of the new principle show that lack of balance which many of this school displayed, and yet his reliance on sympathy instead of on the omnipresent rod marks a step forward in educational practice. Emerson was far-seeing enough to say of those who carried the new philosophy to an extreme, “What if they eat clouds and drink wind, they have not been without service to the race of man.”

 

THE NEW VIEW OF NATURE. …To the transcendentalist, nature was a part of divinity. … Emerson says:

 

“The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable. I am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me, and I to them.”

 

Thoreau often enters Nature’s mystic shrine…Of the song of the wood thrush, he says:

 

“Whenever a man hears it, he is young, and Nature is in her spring. Whenever he hears it, it is a new world and a free country, and the gates of heaven are not shut against him…. It changes all hours to an eternal morning. It banishes all trivialness. It reinstates me in my dominion, makes me the lord of creation, is chief musician of my court. This minstrel sings in a time, a heroic age, with which no event in the village can be contemporary.”

 

Thoreau could converse with the Concord River and hear the sound of the rain in its “summer voice.” Hiawatha talked with the reindeer, the beaver, and the rabbit, as with his brothers. … and Lowell was impressed with the yearnings of a clod of earth as it

 

“Climbs to a soul in grass and flowers.”

 

One of the chief glories of this age was the fuller recognition of the companionship that man bears to every child of nature.

 

…Transcendentalism had for its organ a magazine called The Dial, which was published quarterly for four years, from 1840 to 1844. Margaret Fuller, its first editor, was a woman of wide reading and varied culture … She was determined to do her part in ushering in a new social and spiritual world, and it seemed to her that The Dial would be a mighty lever in accomplishing this result. She struggled for two years to make the magazine a success. Then ill health and poverty compelled her to turn the editorship over to Emerson, who continued the struggle for two years longer.

 

Halleck gives numerous examples of the kinds of poetry and prose found in the magazine. This one is from Alcott’s Orphic Sayings: 

“Engage in nothing that cripples or degrades you. Your first duty is self-culture, self-exaltation: you may not violate this high trust. Yourself is sacred, profane it not. Forge no chains wherewith to shackle your own members. Either subordinate your vocation to your life or quit it forever.”

 

If all men had a spark of the divine within, it made sense that slavery was wrong. Wendell Phillips replied to members of an audience who hissed his antislavery sentiments, saying, “Truth dropped into the pit of hell would make a noise just like that.”

 

* 

“Give me health and a day.” 

The History of American Literature includes a lengthy description of Emerson and his works. He came “from a family of clergy.” 

Peter Bulkeley, his ancestor, was the first pastor of Concord in 1635. William Emerson, his grandfather, was pastor in Concord at the opening of the Revolutionary War and witnessed the fight of Concord Bridge from the window of the Old Manse, that famous house which he had built… By that Bridge there stands a monument, commemorating the heroic services of the men who there made the world-famous stand for freedom. On the base of this monument are Ralph Waldo Emerson’s lines:

 

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
                  Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,
            Here once the embattled farmers stood,
                  And fired the shot heard round the world.

 

Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Boston in 1803. His father, who was pastor of the First Church in Boston, died when Ralph Waldo was eight years old, leaving in poverty a widow with six children under ten years of age. His church promptly voted to pay his widow five hundred dollars a year, for seven years, but even with this help the family was so poor that in cold weather it was noticed that Ralph and his brother went to school on alternate days. The boys divined the reason, and were cruel enough to call out, “Whose turn is it to wear the coat to-day?” But the mother struggled heroically with poverty, and gave her sons a good education.

 

Ralph Waldo entered Harvard in 1817. He saved the cost of his lodging by being appointed “President’s Freshman,” as the official message bearer was called, and earned most of his board by waiting on the table at the college Commons.

 

Emerson did not follow the accepted path.  He earned a degree in divinity; but when he tried preaching, found it not to his taste. Nor could he fit his own beliefs with the teachings of John Cotton’s old church where he first served. In 1827, he met Miss Ellen Tucker, “then sixteen years old.” They married in 1829, but she lived “but a few years after their marriage.” 

Mrs. Emerson.

(This picture is not from the author's collection.)

Fortunately, Mrs. Emerson had come from a wealthy family. At her death, she left Waldo, as he liked to be called, a yearly income of $1,200. In 1833, he sailed for Europe, going by way of the Mediterranean. He crossed the continent and returned by way of England, where he met many famous writers. 

He married for a second time in 1835, to Lidian Jackson, and they settled in Concord, where he wrote his famous Essays. 

Louisa May Alcott relates that when eight years old she was sent to the Emerson home to inquire about the health of his oldest son, a boy of five. Emerson answered her knock, and replied, “Child, he is dead!” Years later she wrote, “I never have forgotten the anguish that made a familiar face so tragical …” 

 

“We will speak our own minds.” 

Halleck explains that “Oliver Wendell Holmes said that Emerson removed men’s ‘idols from their pedestals so tenderly that it seemed like an act of worship.’” He toured widely, including Europe, giving lectures. 

Something of his character and personality may be learned from the accounts of contemporary writers. James Russell Lowell, who used to go again and again to hear him, even when the subject was familiar, said, “We do not go to hear what Emerson says so much as to hear Emerson.”

 

…By “Nature” he sometimes means everything that is not his own soul, but he also uses the word in its common significance, and talks of the beauty in cloud, river, forest, and flower.

 

One famous line: “Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous.” 

At another point, he argues that all the processes of nature “hint or thunder to man the laws of right and wrong and echo the Ten Commandments.” 

In The American Scholar, an address delivered at Cambridge in 1837, Emerson announced what Oliver Wendell Holmes calls “our intellectual Declaration of Independence.”

 

[Emerson] emphasized the new importance given to the single person, and asked, “Is it not the chief disgrace in the world not to be a unit – not to be reckoned one character – not to yield that peculiar fruit which each man was created to bear; but to be reckoned in the gross, in the hundred, or the thousand, of the party, the section, to which we belong, and our opinion predicted geographically, as the North, or the South?” Then followed his famous declaration to Americans, “We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds.”  

 

No American author has done more to exalt the individual, to inspire him to act according to his own intuitions [emphasis added] and to mold the world by his own will.

 

Young Americans especially listened to his call, “O friend, never strike sail to a fear! Come into port greatly, or sail with God the seas.” 

Halleck says: 

Before we have finished Self-Reliance, he has made us feel that, with the exercise of self-trust, new powers will appear; that a man should not postpone his life, but live now; that a man is weak if he expects aid from others; that discontent is want of self-reliance. 

Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Other famous lines include, “Hitch your wagon to a star,” in an essay titled Civilization. In the essay, Considerations by the Way: 

“That which lures a solitary American in the woods with the wish to see England, is the moral peculiarity of the Saxon race – its commanding sense of right and wrong – the  love and devotion to that – this is the imperial trait which arms them with the sceptre of the globe.” 

(Blogger’s note: Okay, that one doesn’t hold up very well.)

 

In poetry, Emerson says, 

“I go to the god of the wood
To fetch his word to men.” …

 

Emerson also writes, 

“When Duty whispers low, ‘Thou must,’

   The youth replies, ‘I can.’” 

He also wrote: 

“A breath of will blows eternally through the universe of
   souls in the direction of the Right and Necessary.” 

 

“He believed in reaching the truth, guided by intuition.” 

Halleck explains: 

In a material age he is the great apostle of the spiritual. “Will you not tolerate,” he asks, “one or two solitary voices in the land, speaking for thoughts not marketable or perishable?” To him “mind is the only reality,” and his great man is never the one who can merely alter matter, but who can change our state of mind. He believed in reaching truth, guided by intuition. He would not argue to maintain his positions. He said that he did not know what argument signified with reference to a thought. To him a thought was just as natural a product as a rose and did not need argument to prove or justify its existence. Much of his work is tinged with Plato’s philosophy.

 

Of all American writers, he is the most inspiring teacher of the young. One of his chief objects is, in his own phrase, “to help the young soul, add energy, inspire hope, and blow the coals into a useful flame; to redeem defeat by new thought, by firm action.” … James Russell Lowell wrote, “Were we enthusiasts? I hope and believe we were, and am thankful to the man who made us worth something for once in our lives.” 

 

NOTE TO TEACHERS: In my class, we used to have a great discussion about what students wanted to do with their lives – even their daily lives. 

What gave life true meaning? Could you “waste” your life. 

This blogger tried to keep Thoreau’s words, quoted in the head to this post, in mind in his own life, with varying success. (The proliferation of cellphones has probably done more to destroy this concept than any other invention.)

 

LIFE. Henry David Thoreau, America’s poet-naturalist, was born in 1817 at Concord, Massachusetts. He was one of the youngest of the famous Concord group of writers and the only one who could claim Concord as his birthplace. He was a lifelong student of nature, and he loved the district around Concord. As a boy he knew its woods and streams because he had hunted and fished in them. After his graduation from Harvard in 1837 … He taught school with his brother and lectured, but in order to add to his slender income also did work unusual for a Harvard graduate, such as odd jobs of carpentering, planting trees, and surveying. He also assisted his father in his business of pencil making, and together they made the best pencils in New England.

 

Whatever he undertook, he did thoroughly. He had no tolerance for the shoddy or for compromises. Exact workmanship was part of his religion. “Drive a nail home,” he writes in Walden, “and clinch it so faithfully that you can wake up in the night and think of your work with satisfaction.”

 

BLOGGER’S NOTE: I have made slight alterations in the formatting of this material. I have also added the section headings.

 

 

Like so many of the transcendentalists, Thoreau desired to surround his life with a “wide margin of leisure” in order that he might live in his higher faculties and not be continuously dwarfed with the mere drudgery of earning his sustenance. He determined to divest himself of as many of the burdens of civilization as possible, to lead the simple life, and to waste the least possible time in the making of mere money. The leisure thus secured, he spent in studying birds, plants, trees, fish, and other objects of nature, in jotting down a record of his experiences, and in writing books.

 

Since he did not marry and incur responsibilities for others, he was free to choose his own manner of life. His regular habit was to reserve half of every day for walking in the woods; but for two years and two months he lived alone in the forest, in a small house that he himself built upon a piece of Emerson’s property beside Walden Pond, about a mile south of Concord. Thoreau found that he could earn enough in six weeks to support himself in this simple way for the rest of the year. …

 

He was a pronounced individualist, carrying out Emerson’s doctrine by becoming independent of others’ opinions. What he thought right, he said or did. He disapproved, for example, of slavery, and consequently refused to pay his poll tax to a government that upheld slavery. When he was imprisoned because of non-payment, Emerson visited him and asked, “Why are you here, Henry?” Thoreau merely replied, “Why are you not here?”

 

…His last illness, induced by exposure to cold, confined him for months away from the out of doors that he loved. In 1862, at the age of forty-five, he said, as he lay on his deathbed, “When I was a very little boy, I learned that I must die, and I set that down, so, of course, I am not disappointed now.”

 

WORKS. Only two of his books were published during his lifetime. These were A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers (1849) and Walden (1854). The first of these, usually referred to as The Week, is the record of a week spent in a rowboat on the rivers mentioned … This book did not prove popular, and almost three fourths of the edition were left on his hands. This unfortunate venture caused him to say, “I have now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which were written by myself.”

 

Walden is the book by which Thoreau is best known. It is crisper, livelier, more concise and humorous, and less given to introspective philosophizing than The Week. [Henry explained why he chose a new way to live.]

 

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear.”

 

His food during his twenty-six months of residence there cost him twenty-seven cents a week. “I learned,” he says, “from my two years’ experience that it would cost incredibly little trouble to obtain one’s necessary food, even in this latitude; that a man may use as simple a diet as the animals, and yet retain health and strength…. I am convinced both by faith and experience that to maintain one’s self on this earth is not a hardship, but a pastime.” This book has, directly or indirectly, caused more to desire the simple life and a return to nature than any other work in American literature.

 

NOTE TO TEACHERS: My classes also enjoyed comparing Thoreau’s philosophy to that of the hippies. Not sure if that would still work today.

California - hippie - c. 1967.

  

In Walden he speaks of himself as a “self-appointed inspector of snowstorms and rainstorms.” His companionship with nature became so intimate as to cause him to say, “Every little pine needle expanded and swelled with sympathy and befriended me.” When a sparrow alighted upon his shoulder, he exclaimed, “I felt that I was more distinguished by that circumstance than I should have been by any epaulet I could have worn.” When nature had some special celebration with the trees, such as decking them with snow or ice or the first buds of spring, he frequently tramped eight or ten miles “to keep an appointment with a beech-tree or a yellow-birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines.” It is amusing to read how on such a walk he disturbed the daytime slumbers of a large owl, how the bird opened its eyes wide, “but their lids soon fell again, and he began to nod,” and how a sympathetic hypnotization began to take effect on Thoreau. “I too,” he says, “felt a slumberous influence after watching him half an hour, as he sat thus with his eyes half open, like a cat, winged brother of the cat.”

 

[In his Journal] when he asks, “Who shall stand godfather at the christening of the wild apples?” his reply shows rare poetic appreciation of nature’s work:

 

“We should have to call in the sunrise and the sunset, the rainbow and the autumn woods and the wild flowers, and the woodpecker and the purple finch and the squirrel and the jay and the butterfly, the November traveler and the truant boy, to our aid.”

 

 

“Goodness is the only investment that never fails.” 

The reason why he left Walden shows one of his pronounced transcendental characteristics, a dread of repetition. He gives an account of only his first year of life there, and adds, “the second year was similar to it.”

 

I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one. It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves. I had not lived there a week before my feet wore a path from my door to the pond side.

 

He does not demand that other human beings shall imitate him in devoting their lives to a study of nature. He says, “Follow your genius closely enough, and it will not fail to show you a fresh prospect every hour.” He thus expresses his conception of the fundamental basis of happiness in any of the chosen avenues of life:

 

“Our whole life is startlingly moral. There is never an instant’s truce between virtue and vice. Goodness is the only investment that never fails.”

 

His insistence on the necessity of a moral basis for a happy life is a characteristic that he shared in common with the great authors of the New England group, but he had his own individual way of impressing this truth. He thought life too earnest a quest to tolerate the frivolous or the dilettante, and he issued his famous warning that no one can “kill time without injuring eternity.” His aim in studying nature was not so much scientific discovery as the revelation of nature’s joyous moral message to the spiritual life of man. He may have been unable to distinguish between the song of the wood thrush and the hermit thrush. To him the most important fact was that the thrush is a rare poet, singing of “the immortal wealth and vigor that is in the forest.”

 

“The thrush sings,” says Thoreau, in his Journal, “to make men take higher and truer view of things.”

 

The sterling honesty and directness of Thoreau’s character are reflected in his style. He says, “The one great rule of composition – and if I were a professor of rhetoric I should insist on this – is to speak the truth.” …. Lowell’s characterization of Thoreau’s style has hardly been surpassed. “His range was narrow, but to be a master is to be a master. There are sentences of his as perfect as anything in the language, and thoughts as clearly crystallized; his metaphors and images are always fresh from the soil.”

 

“June 1, 1857. I hear the note of a bobolink concealed in the top of an apple tree behind me…. He is just touching the strings of his theorbo, his glassichord, his water organ, and one or two notes globe themselves and fall in liquid bubbles from his teeming throat. It is as if he touched his harp within a vase of liquid melody, and when he lifted it out, the notes fell like bubbles from the trembling string … the meadow is all bespattered with melody. His notes fall with the apple blossoms, in the orchard.”

 

Even more characteristic is an entry in his Journal for June 11, 1840, where he tries to fathom the consciousness of the solitary bittern:

 

“With its patient study by rocks and sandy capes, has it wrested the whole of her secret from Nature yet? It has looked out from its dull eye for so long, standing on one leg, on moon and stars sparkling through silence and dark, and now what a rich experience is its! What says it of stagnant pools, and reeds, and damp night fogs? It would be worth while to look in the eye which has been open and seeing in such hours and in such solitudes. When I behold that dull yellowish green, I wonder if my own soul is not a bright invisible green. I would fain lay my eye side by side with its and learn of it.”

…

 

“Like a bird of the air, so perfect was the freedom I enjoyed.”

 

ANCESTRY AND EARLY YEARS. William Hathorne, the ancestor of America’s greatest prose writer, sailed at the age of twenty-three from England on the ship Arbella with John Winthrop … and finally settled at Salem, Massachusetts. He brought with him a copy of Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, a very unusual book for the library of a New England Puritan.

 

John Hathorne, a son of the first settler, was a judge of the poor creatures who were put to death as witches at Salem in 1692. The great romance writer says that this ancestor “made himself so conspicuous in the martyrdom of the witches, that their blood may fairly be said to have left a stain upon him. …I, the present writer, as their representative, hereby take shame upon myself for their sakes, and pray that any curse incurred by them – as I have heard, and as the dreary and unprosperous condition of the race, for many a long year back, would argue to exist – may be now and henceforth removed.” Tradition says that the husband of one of the tortured victims appealed to God to avenge her sufferings and murder. …

 

Nathaniel Hawthorne, the sixth in descent from the first New England ancestor, and the first of his family to add a “w” to his name, was born in Salem in 1804. His father, a sea captain, died of a fever at a foreign port in 1808. Hawthorne’s mother was twenty-seven years old at this time, and for forty years after this sad event, she usually took her meals in her own room away from her three children. Everybody in that household became accustomed to loneliness. At the age of fourteen, the boy went to live for a while on the shore of Sebago Lake, Maine. “I lived in Maine,” he said, “like a bird of the air, so perfect was the freedom I enjoyed. But it was there I got my cursed habits of solitude.” Shyness and aversion to meeting people became marked characteristics.

 

His solitariness predisposed him to reading, and we are told that Bryan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and Shakespeare’s plays were special favorites. …

 

At the age of seventeen, Hawthorne went to Bowdoin College, Maine, where he met such students as Longfellow, Franklin Pierce, and Horatio Bridge …

 

[These friends changed the course of Hawthorne’s life and turned him in the direction of being a writer. After graduating in 1825, Hawthorne returned to Salem.]

 

Here he lived the life of a recluse, frequently postponing his walks until after dark. He was busy serving his apprenticeship as an author. In 1828 he paid one hundred dollars for the publication of Fanshawe, an unsuccessful short romance. In mortification he burned the unsold copies, and his rejected short stories often shared the same fate. He was so depressed that in 1836 his friend Bridge went quietly to a publisher and by guaranteeing him against loss induced him to bring out Hawthorne’s volume entitled Twice Told Tales.

 

The Peabodys of Salem then invited the author to their home, where he met the artistic Miss Sophia Peabody, who made an illustration for his fine historical story, The Gentle Boy. Of her he wrote, “She is a flower to be worn in no man's bosom, but was lent from Heaven to show the possibilities of the human soul.” We find that not long after he wrote in his American Note-Books:

 

“All that seems most real about us is but the thinnest substance of a dream – till the heart be touched. That touch creates us – then we begin to be –thereby we are beings of reality and inheritors of eternity.”

 

He was thinking of Sophia Peabody’s creative touch, for he had become engaged to her.

 

Fired with the ambition of making enough money to enable him to marry, he secured a subordinate position in the Boston customhouse, from which the spoils system was soon responsible for his discharge. He then invested in Brook Farm a thousand dollars which he had saved, thinking that this would prove a home to which he could bring his future wife and combine work and writing in an ideal way. A year’s trial of this life convinced him of his mistake. He was then thirty-eight, and much poorer for his last experiment; but he withdrew and in a few months married Miss Peabody and took her to live in the famous Old Manse at Concord. The first entry in his American Note-Books after this transforming event is:

 

“And what is there to write about? Happiness has no succession of events, because it is a part of eternity, and we have been living in eternity ever since we came to this old manse. Like Enoch we seem to have been translated to the other state of being, without having passed through death.”

 

The history of American literature can record no happier marriage and no more idyllic life than this couple lived for nearly four years in the Old Manse. While residing here, Hawthorne wrote another volume, known as Mosses from an Old Manse (1846). The only serpent to enter that Eden was poverty. Hawthorne’s pen could not support his family. He found himself in debt before he had finished his fourth year in Concord. … Hawthorne’s college friends, Bridge and Pierce, came to his assistance, and used their influence with President Polk to secure for Hawthorne the position of surveyor of customs at Salem, with a yearly salary of twelve hundred dollars.

 

HIS PRIME AND LATER YEARS. He kept his position as head customs officer at Salem for three years. Soon after President Taylor was inaugurated in 1849, the spoils system again secured Hawthorne’s removal. When he came home dejected with this news, his wife smiled and said, “Oh, then you can write your book!” The Scarlet Letter, published in 1850, was the result. The publisher printed five thousand copies, all that he had ever expected to sell, and then ordered the type to be distributed at once. Finding in ten days, however, that every copy had been sold, he gave the order to have the type reset and permanent plates made. Hawthorne had at last, at the age of forty-six, become one of the greatest writers of English prose romance. …

 

In 1852 he bought of Bronson Alcott in Concord a house since known as the “Wayside.” This was to be Hawthorne’s American home during his remaining years. Here he had a tower room so constructed as to be well-nigh inaccessible to visitors, and he also had a romantic study bower built in the pine trees on a hill back of his house.

 

His college friend, Pierce, was inaugurated President of the United States in 1853, and he appointed Hawthorne consul at Liverpool. This consulship then netted the holder between $5000 and $7000 a year. After nearly four years’ service in this position, he resigned and traveled in Europe with his family. …

 

By 1860, he was back in Concord, but his health was failing. He promised to write a new novel for the Atlantic Monthly, but never finished. His health continued to fail, and in May 1864, he and former-President Pierce started on a journey to the White Mountains. Pierce had hoped a trip to the mountains would restore his friend, but it was not to be. “Hawthorne retired for the night at the hotel in Plymouth, New Hampshire, and the next morning Pierce found that Hawthorne’s wish of dying unawares in his sleep had been gratified.” … “He was buried underneath the pines in the Sleepy Hollow cemetery at Concord.” 

His classmate, Longfellow, wrote: 

“There in seclusion and remote from men,
The wizard hand lies cold.”

 

 

“Little nuggets of gold.” 

Halleck commends a story called Snow Image, 

one of the greatest of this class, relates how two children make a companion out of a snow image, how Jack Frost and the pure west wind endow this image with life and give them a little “snow sister.” She grows more vigorous with every life-giving breath inhaled from the west wind. She extends her hands to the snow-birds, and they joyously flock to her. The father of these children is a deadly literal man. No tale of fairy, no story of dryad, of Aladdin’s lamp, or of winged sandal had ever carried magical meaning to his unimaginative literal mind, and he proceeds to disenchant the children.

 

Halleck also compliments his stories on the history of New England: The Gentle Boy, The Maypole of Merry Mount, Endicott’s Red Cross, and Lady Eleanore’s Mantle. 

If we wish, for instance, to supplement the cold page of history with a tale that breathes the very atmosphere of the Quaker persecution of New England, let us open The Twice-Told Tales and read the story of The Gentle Boy, a Quaker child of six, found sobbing on his father’s newly-made grave beside the scaffold under the fir tree. Let us enter the solemn meeting house, hear the clergyman inveigh against the Quakers, and sit petrified when, at the end of the sermon, that boy’s mother, like a Daniel entering the lion’s den, ascends the pulpit, and invokes woe upon the Puritans.

 

NOTE TO TEACHERS: That story might be worth checking. I will try to get to it myself. But I’m retired and need my naps. 

 

CHILDREN’S STORIES. Hawthorne’s Grandfather’s Chair (1841) is a series of simple stories of New England history, from the coming of the Mayflower to the death of Samuel Adams in 1803. …  Many would rejoice to be young enough again to hear for the first time the story of The Golden Touch – how Midas prized gold above all things, how he secured the golden touch, and how the flies that alighted on his nose fell off little nuggets of gold. What a fine thing we thought the golden touch until he touched his beautiful little daughter, Marygold! No sermon could better have taught us that gold is not the thing above all to be desired.

 

The Scarlet Letter was written to show that the consequences of a sin cannot be escaped and that many different lives are influenced by one wrong deed. The lives of Hester Prynne, Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, and Roger Chillingworth are wrecked by the crime in The Scarlet Letter. Roger Chillingworth is transformed into a demon of revenge. So malevolent does he become that Hester wonders “whether the tender grass of early spring would not be blighted beneath him.” She would not be surprised to see him “spread bat’s wings and flee away.” The penalty paid by Arthur Dimmesdale is to appear to be what he is not, and this is a terrible punishment to his sensitive nature. The slow steps by which his soul is tortured and darkened are followed with wonderful clearness, and the agony of his soul alone with God is presented with an almost Shakespearean pen. The third sufferer is the beautiful Hester Prynne. Her fate is the most terrible because she not only writhes under a severe punishment inflicted by the authorities, but also suffers from daily, even hourly, remorse. To help assuage her grief, and to purify her soul, Hester becomes the self-effacing good Samaritan of the village. Her uncomplaining courage, noble beauty, and self-sacrifice make her the center of this tragic story.

… 

[In his writing, Hawthorne] ascends the pillory with Hester Prynne, and writhes with Arthur Dimmesdale’s agony. He plays on the seashore with little Pearl. He shares Hepzibah Pyncheon’s solitude and waits on the customers in the cent shop with Phoebe. He eats two dromedaries and a gingerbread locomotive with little Ned Higgins. …

 

He wished to be impressive in describing Phoebe, that sunbeam in The House of the Seven Gables, but he says simply:

 

“She was like a prayer, offered up in the homeliest beauty of one’s mother tongue.” 

 

“I most eagerly aspire after future eminence in literature.” 

LIFE. [Henry Wadsworth] Longfellow, the most widely read of American poets, was born in Portland, Maine, in 1807. His father was a Harvard graduate, and his mother, like Bryant’s, was descended from John and Priscilla Alden of Plymouth. Longfellow, when three years old, began to go to school, and, like Bryant, he published at the ripe age of thirteen his first poem, Battle of Lovell’s Pond, which appeared in the Portland Gazette.

 

Portland made a great impression on the boy. To his early life there is due the love of the sea, which colors so much of his poetry. In his poem, My Lost Youth, he says:

 

  “I remember the black wharves and the slips,
     And the sea tides tossing free;
   And Spanish sailors with bearded lips,
   And the beauty and mystery of the ships,
     And the magic of the sea.”

 

He went to Bowdoin College, Maine, where he had Nathaniel Hawthorne for a classmate. In his senior year Longfellow wrote to his father, “I most eagerly aspire after future eminence in literature; my whole soul burns most ardently for it, and every earthly thought centers in it.” His father replied, “There is not enough wealth in this country to afford encouragement and patronage to merely literary men. And as you have not had the fortune … to be born rich, you must adopt a profession which will afford you subsistence as well as reputation.” The son then chose the law, saying, “This will support my real existence; literature, my ideal one.” Bowdoin College, however, came to the rescue, and offered him the professorship of modern languages on condition that he would go abroad for study. He accepted the offer, and remained abroad three years. … After five years’ service at Bowdoin, he accepted Harvard’s offer of the professorship of modern languages and again went abroad. This journey was saddened by the death of his first wife. … The second Mrs. Longfellow, whose real name was Frances Appleton, appears in this book under the name of Mary Ashburton. Her father bought the Craigie House, which had been Washington’s headquarters in Cambridge, and gave it to Longfellow as a residence. In 1854, after eighteen years’ teaching at Harvard, he resigned, for his means were then ample to enable him to devote his full time to literature.

 

From 1854 until 1861 he lived in reality the ideal existence of his youthful dreams. In 1861 his wife’s summer dress caught fire, and although he struggled heroically to save her, she died the next day, and he himself was so severely burned that he could not attend her funeral. Years afterwards he wrote:

 

  “Here in this room she died; and soul more white
   Never through martyrdom of fire was led
   To its repose.”

…

 

Outside of these domestic sorrows, Longfellow’s life was happy and prosperous. His home was blessed with attractive children. Loved by friends, honored by foreigners, possessed of rare sweetness and lovableness of disposition, he became the most popular literary man in America. …

 

The children of the country felt that he was their own special poet. The
public schools of the United States celebrated his seventy-fifth birthday, February 27, 1882.

 

…Longfellow wrote for “the common human heart.” …

 

In his first published volume of poems, Voices of the Night (1839), he shows his aim distinctly in such poems as A Psalm of Life. Its lines are the essence of simplicity, but they have instilled patience and noble purpose into many a humble human soul. The two stanzas beginning

 

“Life is real! Life is earnest,”

 

And

 

“Lives of great men all remind us,”

 

can be repeated by many who know but little poetry, and these very stanzas, as well as many others like them, have affected the lives of large numbers of people. Those born a generation ago not infrequently say that the following stanza from The Ladder of St. Augustine (1850) has been the stepping-stone to their success in life:

 

  “The heights by great men reached and kept
     Were not attained by sudden flight,
   But they, while their companions slept,
     Were toiling upward in the night.”

 

His poem, The Rainy Day (1841), has developed in many a person the qualities of patience, resignation, and hopefulness. Repetition makes the majority of things seem commonplace, but even repetition has not robbed lines like these of their power:

 

“Be still, sad heart! and cease repining,
   Behind the clouds is the sun still shining;
   Thy fate is the common fate of all;
   Into each life some rain must fall,
   Some days must be dark and dreary.”

 

Nine days before he died, he wrote his last lines with the same simplicity and hopefulness of former days:

 

“Out of the shadows of night
   The world rolls into light.
   It is daybreak everywhere.”

 

 

BALLADS. Longfellow knew how to tell a story which preserved the simplicity and the vigor of the old ballad makers. His The Wreck of the Hesperus (1839) starts in the true fashion to make us wish to finish the tale:

 

  “It was the schooner Hesperus,
     That sailed the wintry sea;
   And the skipper had taken his little daughter
     To bear him company.” …

 

Even more vigorous is his ballad of The Skeleton in Armor (1840). The Viking hero of the tale, like young Lochinvar, won the heart of the heroine, the blue-eyed daughter of a Norwegian prince.

 

  “When of old Hildebrand
   I asked his daughter’s hand,
   Mute did the minstrels stand
     To hear my story.”

 

The Viking’s suit was denied. He put the maiden on his vessel before he was detected and pursued by her father. …

 

  “As with his wings aslant,
   Sails the fierce cormorant,
   Seeking some rocky haunt,
     With his prey laden,
   So toward the open main,
   Beating to sea again,
   Through the wild hurricane,
     Bore I the maiden.”

 

Halleck also suggests that readers consider such favorites as Paul Revere’s Ride and The Birds of Killingworth.

 

 

“Why don’t you speak for yourself, John?”

 

LONGER POEMS. No other American poet has equaled Longfellow’s longer narrative poems.

 

Evangeline is based upon an incident that occurred during the French and Indian War. In 1755 a force of British and colonial troops sailed from Boston to Acadia (Nova Scotia) and deported the French inhabitants. Hawthorne heard the story, how the English put Evangeline and her lover on different ships and how she began her long, sad search for him. …

 

Evangeline is the tale of a love “that hopes and endures and is patient.” … From the moment that Evangeline appears, our interest does not lag.

 

  “Fair was she to behold, that maiden of seventeen summers.
   When she had passed, it seemed like the ceasing of exquisite music.”

 

The Song of Hiawatha was begun by Longfellow in 1854, after resigning the professorship of modern languages at Harvard. He seemed to revel in his new freedom, and in less than a year he had produced the poem by which he will probably be longest known to posterity. He studied Schoolcraft’s Algic Researches and the same author’s History, Condition, and Prospects of the Indian Tribes of the United States, and familiarized himself with Indian legends. The simplicity of Longfellow’s nature and his ability as a poetic artist seemed rarely suited to deal with these traditions of a race that never wholly emerged from childhood. … 

(Blogger’s note:  We’ll just pretend we didn’t read that last line.)

 

Longfellow’s invitation to hear this Song does not include all, but only

 

  “Ye whose hearts are fresh and simple,
   Who have faith in God and nature.”

 

Those who accept this invitation will rejoice to accompany Shawondasee, the South-Wind, when he sends northward the robin, bluebird, and swallow. They will also wish to go with Kabibonokka, the North-Wind, as he paints the autumn woods with scarlet and sends the snowflakes through the forests. They will be glad to be a child with Hiawatha, to hear again the magical voices of the forest, the whisper of the pines, the lapping of the waters, the hooting of the owl, to learn of every bird and beast its language, and especially to know the joy of calling them all brothers. They will gladly accompany Hiawatha to the land of the Dacotahs, when he woos Minnehaha, Laughing Water, and hears Owaissa, the bluebird, singing:

 

  “Happy are you, Hiawatha,
   Having such a wife to love you!”

 

But the guests will be made of stern stuff if their eyes do not moisten when they hear Hiawatha calling in the midst of the famine of the cold and cruel winter:

 

  “Give your children food, O father!
   Give us food or we must perish!
   Give me food for Minnehaha,
   For my dying Minnehaha.”

 

 

The Courtship of Miles Standish (1858), in the same meter as Evangeline, is a romantic tale, the scene of which is laid, “In the Old Colony days, in Plymouth, the land of the Pilgrims.”

 

We see Miles Standish, the incarnation of the Puritan church militant, as he

 

                             “… wistfully gazed on the landscape,
  Washed with a cold gray mist, the vapory breath of the east-wind,
  Forest and meadow and hill, and the steel-blue rim of the ocean,
  Lying silent and sad in the afternoon shadows and sunshine.”

 

Priscilla Mullins, the heroine of the poem, is a general favorite. Longfellow and Bryant were both proud to trace their descent from her. This poem introduces her

 

  “Seated beside her wheel, and the carded wool like a snow-drift
   Piled at her knee, her white hands feeding the ravenous spindle,
   While with her foot on the treadle she guided the wheel in its motion.
      
   She, the Puritan girl, in the solitude of the forest,
   Making the humble house and the modest apparel of homespun
   Beautiful with her beauty, and rich with the wealth of her being!”

 

This story has more touches of humor than either Evangeline or Hiawatha. Longfellow uses with fine effect the contradiction between the preaching of the bluff old captain, that you must do a thing yourself if you want it well done, and his practice in sending by John Alden an offer of marriage to Priscilla. Her reply has become classic:

 

“Why don’t you speak for yourself, John?”

Scene from "The Courtship of Miles Standish."

 

GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS. … He has achieved the unusual distinction of making the commonplace attractive and beautiful. He is the poet of the home, of the common people, and of those common objects in nature which in his verses convey a lesson to all. He has proved a moral stimulus to his age and he has further helped to make the world kindlier and its troubles more easily borne. This was his message:

 

  “Bear through sorrow, wrong and ruth
   In thy heart the dew of youth,
   On thy lips the smile of truth.”

 

…While other poets should be read for mental development, the large heart of the world still finds a place for Longfellow, who has voiced its hopes that

 

  … the night shall be filled with music,
     And the cares that infest the day,
  Shall fold their tents like the Arabs,
     And as silently steal away. 

 

“This was about the first poetry I had ever read.” 

LIFE. [John Greenlief] Whittier says that the only unusual circumstance about the migration of his Puritan ancestor to New England in 1638 was the fact that he brought over with him a hive of bees. The descendants of this very hive probably suggested the poem, Telling the Bees, for it was an old English custom to go straightway to the hive and tell the bees whenever a member of the family died. It was believed that they would swarm and seek another home if this information was withheld. … He was born in 1807 in the same house that his first American ancestor built in East Haverhill, about thirty-two miles northwest of Boston. The Whittiers were farmers who for generations had wrung little more than a bare subsistence from the soil. The boy’s frail health was early broken by the severe labor. He had to milk seven cows, plow with a yoke of oxen, and keep busy from dawn until dark.

 

Unlike the other members of the New England group of authors, Whittier never went to college. He received only the scantiest education in the schools near his home. The family was so poor that he had to work as a cobbler, making slippers at eight cents a pair, in order to attend the Haverhill academy for six months. He calculated his expenses so exactly that he had just twenty-five cents left at the end of the term.

 

Two events in his youth had strong influence on his future vocation. When he was fourteen, his school-teacher read aloud to the family from the poems of Robert Burns. The boy was entranced, and, learning that Burns had been merely a plowman, felt that there was hope for himself. He borrowed the volume of poems and read them again and again. Of this experience, he says: “This was about the first poetry I had ever read (with the exception of the Bible, of which I had been a close student) and it had a lasting influence upon me. I began to make rhymes myself and to imagine stories and adventures.” The second event was the appearance in print of some of his verses, which his sister had, unknown to him, sent to a Newburyport paper edited by William Lloyd Garrison. The great abolitionist thought enough of the poetry to ride out to Whittier’s home and urge him to get an education. This event made an indelible impression on the lad’s memory.

 

Realizing that his health would not allow him to make his living on a farm, he tried teaching school, but, like Thoreau, found that occupation distasteful. Through Garrison’s influence, Whittier at the age of twenty-one procured an editorial position in Boston. At various times he served as editor on more than half a dozen different papers, until his own health or his father’s brought him back to the farm. … While in Hartford, editing The New England Review, he fell in love with Miss Cornelia Russ, and a few days before he finally left the city, he wrote a proposal to her in three hundred words of wandering prose. Had he expressed his feelings in one of his inimitable ballads, it is possible that he might have been accepted, for neither she nor he ever married. …

 

He was a Quaker and he came to Hartford in the homespun clothes of the cut of his sect.…

 

Slave shackles.

(This picture is not in the author's collection.)

 

“Hatred of slavery, but not of slaveholders.” 

As Whittier was a skillful politician, he had hopes of making a name for himself in politics as well as in literature. He was chosen to represent his district in the state legislature and there is little doubt that he would have been sent to the national congress later, had he not taken a step which for a long time shut off all avenues of preferment. In 1833 he joined the abolitionists. This step had very nearly the same effect on his fortunes as the public declaration of an adherence to the doctrines of anarchy would to-day have on a man similarly situated. The best magazines at the North would not open their pages to him. He was even mobbed, and the office of an anti-slavery paper, which he was editing in Philadelphia, was sacked. He wrote many poems to aid the abolition cause. These were really editorials expressed in verse, which caught the attention in a way denied to prose. … Lowell noticed that the Quaker doctrine of peace did not deter Whittier from his vigorous attack on slavery. …

 

When he was charged with hating the people of the South, he wrote:

 

“I was never an enemy to the South or the holders of slaves. I inherited from my Quaker ancestry hatred of slavery, but not of slaveholders. To every call of suffering or distress in the South, I have promptly responded to the extent of my ability. I was one of the very first to recognize the rare gift of the Carolinian poet Timrod, and I was the intimate friend of the lamented Paul H. Hayne, though both wrote fiery lyrics against the North.”

 

With a few striking exceptions, his most popular poems were written after the close of the Civil War. His greatest poem, Snow-Bound, was published in the year after the cessation of hostilities (1866). His last thirty years were a time of comparative calm. He wrote poetry as the spirit moved him. He had grown to be loved everywhere at the North, and his birthday, like Longfellow’s, was the occasion for frequent celebrations. For years before the close of the war, in fact until Snow-Bound appeared, he was very poor, but the first edition of that poem brought him in ten thousand dollars, and after that he was never again troubled by poverty. In a letter written in 1866, he says:

 

“If my health allowed me to write I could make money easily now, as my anti-slavery reputation does not injure me in the least, at the present time. For twenty years I was shut out from the favor of booksellers and magazine editors, but I was enabled by rigid economy to live in spite of them.”

 

…One of the strongest of [his anti-slavery poems] is Ichabod (1850), a bitter arraignment of Daniel Webster, because Whittier thought that the great orator’s Seventh of March Speech of that year advised a compromise with slavery. Webster writhed under Whittier’s criticism more than under that of any other man.

 

  “… from those great eyes
     The soul has fled:
   When faith is lost, when honor dies
     The man is dead!” …

 

His greatest poem, the one by which he will probably be chiefly known to posterity, is Snow-Bound, which describes the life of a rural New England household. At the beginning of this poem … the coming of the all-enveloping snowstorm, with its “ghostly finger tips of sleet” on the window-panes, is the central event, but we soon realize that this storm merely serves to focus intensely the New England life with which he was familiar. The household is shut in from the outside world by the snow, and there is nothing else to distract the attention from the picture of isolated Puritan life. …

 

In such a focus he shows the life of the household; the mother, who often left her home to attend sick neighbors, now:

 

  “… seeking to express
   Her grateful sense of happiness
   For food and shelter, warmth and health,
   And love’s contentment, more than wealth,”

 

the uncle:

 

  “… innocent of books,
   Was rich in lore of fields and brooks,
       
   A simple, guileless, childlike man,
   Strong only on his native grounds,
   The little world of sights and sounds
   Whose girdle was the parish bounds,”

 

the aunt, who:

 

“Found peace in love’s unselfishness,”

 

the sister:

 

  “A full rich nature, free to trust,
   Truthful and even sternly just,
   Impulsive, earnest, prompt to act,
   And make her generous thought a fact,
   Keeping with many a light disguise
   The secret of self-sacrifice.”

 

Some read Snow-Bound for its pictures of nature and some for its still more remarkable portraits of the members of that household. … Often his simplest verse comes from the depths of his heart. He wrote In School Days forty years after the grass had been growing on the grave of the little girl who spelled correctly the word which the boy had missed:

 

  “‘I’m sorry that I spelt the word:
   I hate to go above you,
   Because,’ – the brown eyes lower fell –
   ‘Because you see, I love you!’

   

 

His youthful work shows traces of the influence of many poets, but he learned most from Robert Burns. Whittier himself says that it was Burns who taught him to see

 

“… through all familiar things the romance underlying,”

 

 

“Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne.” 

EARLY YEARS. James Russell Lowell, the son of the Rev. Charles Lowell, was a descendant of one of the best of the old New England families. The city of Lowell and the Lowell Institute of Boston received their names from uncles of the author. His mother’s name was Spence, and she used to tell her son that the Spence family, which was of Scotch origin, was descended from Sir Patrick Spens of ballad fame.

 

[He] was born in 1819, in the suburbs of Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the fine old historic home called “Elmwood,” which was one of the few homes to witness the birth and death of a great American author and to remain his native residence for seventy-two years.

 

His early opportunities were in striking contrast to those of Whittier; for Lowell, like his ancestors for three generations, went to Harvard. Because of what the Lowell side of his family called “the Spence negligence,” he was suspended from college for inattention to his studies and sent to Concord to be coached by a tutor. We know, however, that a part of Lowell’s negligence was due to his reading and imitating such poetry as suited his fancy. It was fortunate that he was sent to Concord, for there he had the opportunity of meeting Emerson and Thoreau and of drinking in patriotism as he walked “the rude bridge that arch’d the flood” … He was elected class poet, but he was not allowed to return in time to deliver his poem before his classmates, although he received his degree with them in 1838.

 

MARRIAGE AND NEW IMPULSES. Like Irving and Bryant, Lowell studied law, and then gave up that profession for literature. In 1839 he met Miss Maria White, a transcendentalist of noble impulses. Before this he had made fun of the abolitionists, but under her influence he followed men like Whittier into the anti-slavery ranks. She was herself a poet and she wrote to Lowell after they became engaged:

 

  “I love thee for thyself – thyself alone;
     For that great soul whose breath most full and rare
     Shall to humanity a message bear,
   Flooding their dreary waste with organ tone.”

 

Under such inspiration, “the Spence negligence” left him, and with rapid steps he entered the temple of fame. In December, 1844, the month in which he married her, he wrote the finest lines ever penned by him:

 

  “Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne,
   Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim unknown,
   Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.”

 

…

 

As Mrs. Lowell’s health was delicate, Lowell took her abroad, in 1851, for a year’s stay. Thackeray came over on the same ship with them, on their return in 1852, and proved a genial companion. The next year Mrs. Lowell died. When he thought of the inspiration which she had given him and of the thirteen years of her companionship, he said, “It is a million times better to have had her and lost her, than to have had and kept any other woman I ever saw.”

…

 

His Ode Recited at the Harvard Commemoration in 1865, in honor of those who fell in freeing the slave [is still remembered],

 

“Who in warm life-blood wrote their nobler verse,”

…

 

He will, perhaps, be longest known to posterity for that remarkable series of papers written in what he called the Yankee dialect and designed at first to stop the extension of slavery and afterwards to suppress it. These are called “Biglow Papers” because the chief author is represented to be Hosea Biglow, a typical New England farmer. The immediate occasion of the first series of these Papers was the outbreak of the Mexican War in 1846. Lowell said in after years, “I believed our war with Mexico to be essentially a war of false pretenses, and that it would result in widening the boundaries and so prolonging the life of slavery.” The second series of these Papers, dealing with our Civil War, began to be published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1862. …

 

Lowell usually makes the laziest readers do a little pleasant thinking. It is common for even inert students to investigate his meaning; for instance, in his statements that in the age of Pope “everybody ceremoniously took a bushel basket to bring a wren’s egg to market in,” and that everybody “called everything something else.”

 

NOTE TO TEACHERS: One of my favorite quotes from Lowell is this: “Folks never understand the folks they hate.” 

That was always good for discussion. 

I was also adamantly opposed to any time of dehumanizing language, and we would discuss this, also from Lowell: “Language is the soil of thought.” 

This quote, I think, is always pertinent: 

Fact is, the less the people know ‘o wut ther’ is

a-doin’

The hendier ‘t is for Guv’ment, sence it henders

trouble brewin’.   

 

“Fairy tales are made out of the dreams of the poor.” 

The high ideals and sterling common sense of Lowell’s political prose deserve special mention. In Democracy (1886), which should be read by every citizen, Lowell shows that old age had not shattered his faith in ideals. “I believe,” he said, “that the real will never find an irremovable basis until it rests on the ideal.” Voters and lawmakers are to-day beginning to realize that they will go far to find in the same compass a greater amount of common sense than is contained in these words:

 

“It is only when the reasonable and the practicable are denied that men demand the unreasonable and impracticable; only when the possible is made difficult that they fancy the impossible to be easy. Fairy tales are made out of the dreams of the poor.” [Footnote: Democracy and Other Addresses, p. 15.]

 

Like the other writers Halleck had mentioned, Lowell wrote often about the beauties of nature. For example, he invites us in March to watch: 

  “The bluebird, shifting his

 light load of song
   From post to post along the cheerless fence,”

 

and in June to lie under the willows and rejoice with

 

“The thin-winged swallow, skating on the air.”

 

[Also, we have this] from his poem Agassiz (1874):

 

“To lie in buttercups and clover-bloom,
     Tenants in common with the bees,
     And watch the white clouds drift through gulfs of trees,
   Is better than long waiting in the tomb.”

 

 

Another pronounced characteristic which he has in common with the New England group is nobility of ideals. His poem entitled For an Autograph, voices in one line the settled conviction of his life:

 

“Not failure, but low aim, is crime.” 

 

“He who makes jests should not escort people to their graves.” 

LIFE. The year 1809 was prolific in the birth of great men, producing Holmes, Poe, Lincoln, Tennyson, and Darwin. [Oliver Wendell] Holmes was descended from Anne Bradstreet, New England’s “Tenth Muse” … His father was a Congregational clergyman, preaching at Cambridge when Oliver was born. The family was in comfortable circumstances, and the boy was reared in a cultured atmosphere. In middle age Holmes wrote, “I like books – I was born and bred among them, and have the easy feeling, when I get into their presence, that a stable boy has among horses.”

 

He graduated from Harvard in the famous class of 1829. … He went to Paris to study medicine, a science that held his interest through life. For thirty-five years he was professor of anatomy in the Harvard Medical School, where he was the only member of the faculty who could at the end of the day take the class, fagged and wearied, and by his wit, stories, and lively illustrations both instruct and interest the students.

 

His announcement, “small fevers gratefully received,” his humor in general, and his poetry especially, did not aid him in securing patients. His biographer says that Holmes learned at his cost as a doctor that the world had made up its mind “that he who writes rhymes must not write prescriptions, and he who makes jests should not escort people to their graves.” …

 

He was driven, like Emerson and Lowell, to supplement his modest income by what he called “lecture peddling.” …

 

Holmes was a conscientious worker, but he characteristically treated his mental processes in a joking way, and wrote to a friend: “I like nine tenths of any matter I study, but I do not like to lick the plate. If I did, I suppose I should be more of a man of science and find my brain tired oftener than I do.” Again he wrote, “my nature is to snatch at all the fruits of knowledge and take a good bite out of the sunny side – after that let in the pigs.” Despite these statements, Holmes worked steadily every year at his medical lectures. He was very particular about the exactness and finish of all that he wrote, and he was neither careless nor slipshod in anything. His life, while filled with steady, hard work, was a placid one, full of love and friendships, and he passed into his eightieth year with a young heart. He died in 1894, at the age of eighty-five, and was buried in Mt. Auburn cemetery not far from Longfellow and Lowell.

 

POETRY. In 1836 he published his first volume of verse. This contained his first widely known poem, Old Ironsides, a successful plea for saving the old battleship, Constitution, which had been ordered destroyed. With the exception of this poem and The Last Leaf, the volume is remarkable for little except the rollicking fun which we find in such favorites as The Ballad of the Oysterman and My Aunt. This type of humor is shown in this simile from The Ballad:

 

“Her hair drooped round her pallid cheeks, like seaweed on a clam,” and in his description of his aunt:

 

 “Her waist is ampler than her life,
   For life is but a span.”

 

He continued to write verses until his death. … The best, and the one by which he himself wished to be remembered, is The Chambered Nautilus. No member of the New England group voiced higher ideals than we find in the noble closing stanza of this poem:

 

   “Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul,
   As the swift seasons roll!
   Leave thy low-vaulted past!
   Let each new temple, nobler than the last,
   Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast,
   Till thou at length art free,
   Leaving thine outgrown shell by life’s unresting sea!”

 

Probably The Last Leaf, which was such a favorite with Lincoln, would rank second. …

 

He wrote no more serious poem than Homesick in Heaven, certain stanzas of which appeal strongly to bereaved hearts. It is not easy to forget the song of the spirits who have recently come from earth, of the mother who was torn from her clinging babe, of the bride called away with the kiss of love still burning on her cheek, of the daughter taken from her blind and helpless father:

 

“For there we loved, and where we love is home.” … 

 

“Three Johns,” and “Three Thomases.” 

PROSE. He was nearly fifty when he published his first famous prose work. He had named the Atlantic Monthly, and Lowell had agreed to edit it only on condition that Holmes would promise to be a contributor. In the first number appeared The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table. Holmes had hit upon a style that exactly suited his temperament, and had invented a new prose form. His great conversational gift was now crystallized in these breakfast table talks, which the Autocrat all but monopolizes. However, the other characters at the table of this remarkable boarding house in Boston join in often enough to keep up the interest in their opinions, feelings, and relations to each other. The reader always wants to know the impression that the Autocrat’s fine talk makes upon “the young man whom they call ‘John.’” John sometimes puts his feelings into action, as when the Autocrat gives a typical illustration of his mixture of reasoning and humor, in explaining that there are always six persons present when two people are talking:

 

“Three Johns.

1. The real John; known only to his Maker.

2. John’s ideal John; never the real one, and often very unlike him.

3. Thomas’s ideal John; never the real John, nor John’s John, but often very unlike either.

 

“Three Thomases.

1. The real Thomas.

2. Thomas’s ideal Thomas.

3. John’s ideal Thomas.”

 

“A certain basket of peaches, a rare vegetable, little known to boarding-houses, was on its way to me,” says the Autocrat, “via this unlettered Johannes. He appropriated the three that remained in the basket, remarking that there was just one apiece for him. I convinced him that his practical inference was hasty and illogical, but in the meantime he had eaten the peaches.” …

Lake just beyond the summit of Tioga Pass,
leading into Yosemite National Park, California.
In Nature, the Transcendentalists saw God.