leaders of the people were the same as of yore. The public hero was the orator, but the orator was as often as not the preacher also, and if in any case it were not so, it would probably be found upon enquiry that he came of a preaching stock and had passed his youth beneath the iron hand of the Calvinist faith.

In the years that succeeded the Revolution the conditions were much the same. Such writers as there were, and writers of the first rank were almost altogether absent, were derived almost exclusively from New England, the home of Puritanism, and were affected more or less directly by their religious environment. Among the men of the higher class Timothy Dwight, the President of Yale, published several books of verse in the manner of Pope, for whose more slovenly work they might indeed have been mistaken; and a select coterie, who have since gained the title of the Hertford Wits, did their utmost, with little power and less success, to produce a taste for literature in their contemporaries. The net result of their labors was of small importance, but their style was remarkably good, and as has been said of another assembly, while they did nothing in particular they did it very well.

There

was in truth nothing living. Form there was in plenty, but even this was borrowed for the most part from the English writers of a previous age. The styles of Goldsmith, Pope, and Samuel Butler were at a premium, and beneath the swelling periods there were stagnation and death.

With the new century, however, there came a new birth. The spirit of literature was reincarnated, and from this time the consideration of American literature really commences. At last American thought ceased to follow in the footsteps of an effete civilization and struck out a new line for herself. By this time the strict Calvanism which

had formerly held undisputed sway in the North had fallen to the ground before the advance of more liberal opinions, and had ceased to hold the literature of the country in its icy grasp. Brockden Brown, James Fenimore Cooper, William Cullen Bryant, Washington Irving, and Edgar Allen Poe were the first prophets of the new era, and of these neither Brown, Cooper, nor Poe was influenced, unless indirectly, by the Puritan spirit.

These five writers are all associated more or less closely with the middle States of the Union, and all spent the best part of their literary lives in the neighborhood of New York. Poe, it is true, is claimed by the South, whence his father came and where part at least of his youth was spent, but his work was almost wholly done further north.

Bryant is a poet of some standing. who has his admirers even in England. Mr. Steadman has applauded him as the Father of American Song, but he appears in general to be too burdened by the literary traditions to which he succeeded. His poems are pretty but uninspired, sweet but shallow and lifeless, perfect in form but lacking in substance. Lowell, in the "Fable for Critics," describes him as a "smooth silent iceberg," a description which might be applied with almost equal justice to many of his contemporaries in American poetry; and although the writer was perhaps only half in earnest, the criticism is not far from the truth.

Washington Irving, again, is chiefly remarkable for the delicacy of his style in which he certainly excelled contemporary English authors; but except in this respect there is little to distinguish his work as natively American, while Poe, on the other hand, with a more original genius struck out a new and powerful line for himself, little affected either by English models or American tradition.

New England, with her Puritan heri

tage, had for the time lost the literary ascendency which she had held in default of a competitor in the previous century; but she lost it only for the time. Even in the first decade of the century there was growing up within her borders a circle of writers who in their prime forty years later represent the literary splendor of American history. In the meantime the preparations for their advent were not lacking. The growth of periodical literature was enormous, writers of the second class were numbered by the score, and after 1819 the revival of the study of modern languages at the universities familiarized the people with the great masters of Europe and prepared them to recognize and welcome the masters who were to arise in their midst.

The first product of the revival of learning was the historian.

Parkman

is a writer whose work, except to students, seems to be much less known than it should be beyond his own country; but Prescott and Motley have world-wide reputations both as historians of authority and masters in literature. The former suffers somewhat from an exuberance of language, and his physical disabilities, as was the case also with Parkman, prevented his work having that exactness which the study of history demands, while Motley, though more exact, allows himself too often to be carried away by religious prejudice. His Spaniard, though he smile, is always a villain, while his Dutchman, like the Boer of Continental imagination, is an angel almost una

wares.

In the meantime the place in popular favor once occupied by Calvinism had now been taken by Unitarianism; and with Unitarianism, and arising out of it, there appeared that system of philosophy known as Transcendentalism, which in its excesses has hardly found a parallel in the regions of the old world. But the influence of Puritanism

still made itself felt. Its lofty standard of thought and life survived though under a different name, and the community at Concord really based its rules of life upon the Puritan ideal. Taken as they were from the very strongholds of the Puritan faith, cradled in many cases in the homes of Puritan preachers, and educated often in the schools of the strictest sect, it was impossible that the leaders of the new movement, even when giving way to its excesses, should cut themselves altogether adrift from the ideals which birth and education had implanted in their hearts.

In its more moderate courses the new philosophy had great results, for it produced a new era of speculative thought. To have produced Emerson alone would have made it worthy of respect, and he, although the greatest, was not by any means alone among its great supporters. But he at least was truly great, perhaps the greatest man America has produced; and he possessed a moderating quality of common-sense in which many of his followers were conspicuously lacking. In many respects he resembles more the great philosophers of the past than any of our moderns. He "hitched his wagon to a star," and was rather the prophet and teacher than the artist and literary man, while both in prose and verse he had the limitations which his position entailed. He confines himself almost entirely to Nature and abstract thought; humanity is almost altogether absent from his work; it is wanting in life, action, and passion. His seat is set aloft, and his gaze is too steadily fixed upon the stars to reck of the storms of life; and while he inspires awe and respect, he cannot arouse sympathy or stimulate enthusi

asm.

No other of the Transcendentalists even approached the position of Emerson. His best known followers were Thoreau and Alcott, and one is some

times puzzled to know whether to treat them with respect or ridicule. In his studies of Nature, in "Walden" for instance, Thoreau is a writer of acknowledged power; but his eccentricity was so pronounced as to dwarf all other attributes, and he is remembered today rather as the inspired tramp than as the man of letters; while Alcott was, among these new philosophers, the man of all others who best justified Lowell's satirical indictment.

About this time there arose a movement which, even from a purely literary point of view, has had greater effect and wrought better work than any other in American history. The new wave of thought which produced the excesses of Transcendentalism, produced at the same time a spirit of reform, and that spirit seized immediately upon the question of slavery, the subject which lay nearest to its hand.

American literature has always suffered from the narrowness of American national experience, and this narrowness has been accentuated by the early Puritanism which at one stroke ruled out of life a great part of the joy of existence. It tended always to become parochial and unsympathetic. The antislavery movement, and the civil war in which it culminated, provided it with new ideas and infused into it for the first time an approach to passion. The movement had its origin in New England the home of Puritanism, and its prophet was before all things a New Englander.

John Greenleaf Whittier was the poet of New England, and he suffered like all his predecessors from his environment. The circumscribed limits of his life combined with a lack of humor to make much of his writings superficially commonplace. His support of the Abolitionist cause was at once his literary gain and loss, for all that there is of fire and passion in his work can be traced to his enthusiasm in this

movement, and at the same time all that is most imperfect, most formless, and most ephemeral. Had he remained uninfluenced he would have been perhaps the better poet. He would have been simple, sincere, and at times fervent; his work would have been more perfect in form, but like that of Bryant it would have remained cold, provincial, and commonplace.

Apart from Whittier himself the leaders of the anti-slavery party were rather orators than men of letters, but at the same time the movement profoundly affected all the great writers of the day and, in common with Whittier, Longfellow, Lowell, and Holmes owed to it much of the power and many of the best qualities that their works possess. Longfellow to a considerable extent shares the faults of Whittier. He is indeed picturesque at times, but his imagination was never creative. In finitely simple and infinitely sweet he may be, but it is with the sweetness that too often cloys.

Over all the writers of the New England school there hovers the shadow of Puritan influence. Even Oliver Wendell Holmes was always tilting with a certain bitterness at the ghost of an influence which he himself had felt, and in no American writer does it show its power more plainly than in Nathaniel Hawthorne, the artist of the group. In all his work it stands forever in the background making its presence felt in an air of dread solemnity, an atmosphere of mysterious melancholy which fastens on every character and holds the story itself in its relentless grasp. For fifty years Hawthorne lived in his native province, never leav ing it for long, and he never succeeded in shaking off the burden of his Puritan birth. But though as a result the range of his vision was limited and his habit of thought provincial, by so much the more he gained in individuality as the foremost of native American novelists.

The

for he was left the natural product of his time and country untouched by the fashions of an elder world. His style has a dignity of its own, which is perhaps increased by the brooding melancholy of his themes; and it is only on occasion that one regrets the broader thought and wider vision which might have been his in another environment. The New England school ended with the lives of its first members. centre of power in America has long been slowly shifting westwards, and this is true of literary power no less than of commercial or political. New York had for a time been shadowed by the literary glow of Concord and Boston, but it had never been totally eclipsed. Even in the palmiest days of "The Atlantic Monthly" and "The North American Review" the periodical literature of New York was of the highest repute, and among her literary men were Dana, Curtis, Raymond, Bayard Taylor and Walt Whitman, the apostle of Anarchy. With the change in the literary centre the literature of America was withdrawn from the influence which had for so long mastered its course; and now that influence only remains as a tradition, a survival from the past which is fast disappearing in the march of time.

While the North had been making a literature for itself, the South had remained almost stationary in its old condition of literary stagnation. Its social constitution was not one calculated to encourage the growth of a literary class, and the civil war, while it destroyed the constitution, destroyed with it the means of gratifying whatever literary taste had existed before. Of the few poets the South produced, Sims, Ticnor, Timrod, and Sidney Lanier, the last alone can be credited with anything like genius. Like Poe, his work has a warmth and color hardly to be found in the North, and over some of his poems there is a

glamour which is strangely fascinat

ing.

Since the setting of those literary stars whose brilliance illumined the middle decades of the last century, American literature has been becalmed. Little in her poetry tempts comparison even with the work of our English poets; her philosophers are scarcely known beyond her own borders, and in one region alone, the region of fiction, has she improved upon her position in the past.

Half a century ago it appeared possible and even probable that the efforts of a few men, the giants of American literature, would in time produce an American school which should have distinctive American characteristics, and in due course should cut itself free from the shackles of English tradition and work out its own salvation by following national methods in evolving a national style. The gods, however, were adverse. So long as literary America consisted but of a mere strip of land upon the Atlantic coast, so long as there were but two nations, the cold North and the sunny South, to harmonize into a consistent whole, there was still hope for the national school. The genius of Bryant and Poe, of Whittier and Lanier, though distant as the poles, might in time find one common denominator; but with the march of time the possibility, or at least the probability, has passed. The America of to-day is far other than the America of yesterday. She has stretched her borders to Mexico in the South and to the Golden Gate in the West. By conquest or colonization she has brought under her flag Spaniard, Indian, and Negro, while immigration and expulsion from older lands has given her a motley horde of citizens, Irish, Italians, Magyars, Teutons, Poles, and Russians, a very Pentecostal crowd whose strange and often savage blood she must assimilate with her own before she can become a single

and united nation. And although the task may, and no doubt will, in time be accomplished, the question of a single national literature will still remain untouched. The country is too big. The South looks with suspicion on the West, and both are leagued against the East; the desires of New Orleans are not the desires of Chicago, and the ideals of Vermont would be scouted as outworn upon the soil of Colorado. It may be centuries before the work of all these warring factions, spread over half a world, can be welded into a single homogeneous literature.

What has been the value of the Puritan influence upon American literature as a whole? If yet but half developed this literature certainly exists, and the first and most powerful influence which has moulded its youth has been the allpervasive shadow of that austere Calvinism which has affected, if not on the surface at least by undercurrents, the work of well nigh every writer who was born under its ban. Some of its effects have, indeed, been excellent. One is a certain moral cleanness which distinguishes the works of American writers over those of every other nation, and stands out in marked contrast to much of the literature of England, and still more of that of the Continent. But on the other hand Puritanism has much to answer for. To its influence can be traced many of the defects that are observable in American literature. In that literature in general there is little that is rich or rare, too much that is common-place and simple. Cold Calvinism has chilled the imagination, and it is only where the warmer blood of the South has had play, as in Poe or Lanier, that a more generous color has been given to the work.

In other climes literature traces its origin from the spontaneous songs and ballads of the people. The German was born in the "Niebelungen Lied" and the songs of the wandering Minnesingers.

Celtic literature begins with the poems of Ossian, while the literature of England is based in great part on the fragmentary ballads which are preserved in Percy's "Reliques of Ancient Poetry." In America it was otherwise. There literature was a blind child who knew nothing of the joys of youth. Separated from it by two hundred years, it was full grown when its eyes were opened to the beauties of the universe. Continuity with the traditions of the past was lost, and without the inspiration of an historic past Americans have evolved a literature of their own; and in so far as they were aided by history at all, it was only by the unhallowed history of the present. In America Calvinism appears to have taken the place of those traditions which in other lands have infused life and color into literature; and though here and there individuals have cast off the closer of its toils, they have never entirely escaped from the environment of youth, and "suckled in a creed outworn," have been in after-life ever haunted by its sombre shadow.

On the whole the influence of Puritanism has not been an altogether favorable one. Little of the Elizabethan brilliance has survived. All that was cut off by a century of Puritan ascendency, and little was given in exchange. Dignity, perhaps has been gained, clearness of diction too and purity of thought, but the fire that purified is dead and the cold grayness of the ashes is all that remains. One cannot undertake a study of the literature of America without some longing for a greater warmth, brighter color, a more fervid imagination.

Whether these qualities will be supplied in the future remains to be seen. The younger writers of America certainly possess them to a degree undiscoverable in those of the past. Over some, perhaps over the majority of them, the Puritan tradition, in so far