ultimately prevailed was always present in the earlier charm; and the grace which his strenuousness kept to the end was as inalienably his. He was both artist and moralist from the beginning to the end of his work. He could not help trying for literary beauty in his political writings, in his appeal to the civic sense of his countrymen; he could not forbear to remind himself and his reader of higher things when he seemed rapt in the joy of art.

He was of Massachusetts stock, but it was not for nothing that he was born in Rhode Island. He embodied in literature that transition from New England to New York which his state represents in our civilization. The influences that shaped his mind and character, that kindled his sympathies and inspired his ideals, were New England influences; the circumstances which attracted his energies and formed his opportunities were New York circumstances. He began to write when what has been called, for want of some closer phrase, the Knickerbocker school had shrunken through the waning activity of Irving and the evanescence of Poe to little more than the tradition which it remains, and when the great Boston group of poets and thinkers was in its glory, when Hawthorne, Emerson, Longfellow, Whittier, Lowell, Holmes, Prescott, Ticknor, Motley, Parkman, and Phillips were establishing such claim as we had to literary standing before the world. Yet he did not write like the Bostonians, in spite of his inherent and instinctive ethicism. He was not Puritanic, either in revolt or in acquiescence; he was not provincial in the good way or in the bad way, in the way of Athens, and Florence, and Paris, as the Bostonians sometimes were, or in the way of Little Peddlington, as they sometimes were. He was like the finest and greatest of them in their enlargement to the measure of humanity, though he was not liberated from what is poor and selfish and personal by anything cosmopolitan in his environment, but by his disgust with its social meanness and narrowness. What our best society" in New York was in 1858, the best society in 1898 can perhaps hardly imagine; but the most interesting fact of that period was the evolution of a great public spirit from conditions fatal to poorer natures.

A great public spirit was what Curtis was at first tentatively and falteringly, and then more and more voluntarily and fully. After he once came to his civic consciousness, he could not con

tent himself with sterile satire of New York society, with breaking butterflies or even more vicious insects upon wheels; he must do something, become something; he must live a protest against triviality and vulgarity, and he chose to do this on the American scale. It was not till he had written The Potiphar Papers that he dedicated himself to humanity in the anti-slavery reform, and thereafter to the purification of our practical politics. But he had the root of the matter always in him: it germinated far back in his past, when as a young man he joined the Brook Farm Community and dreamed, in the sweat of his brow and the work of his hands, of the day when economic equality and the social justice which nothing less implies, should rule among men. There are no

miracles in character, and what took the literary world with surprise and sorrow when Curtis left the study for the stump was the simplest possible effect of growth, an effect wholly to be expected and hardly to have been avoided.

His two books of Eastern travel, Nile Notes of a Howadji, and The Howadji in Syria, followed each other in 1851 and 1852, and first sounded the American note which has since been heard in so many agreeable books of travel. They were joyous dances of tints and lights, in great part; they were even more choreographic than musical, though they were written from an ear that sympathetically sought the concord of sweet sounds, and with a skill that almost cloyingly reported it. They give a picture of the pleasing lands of "drowsihed" through which they lead by color rather than by drawing, but the picture is not less true, for all that, and it is not less a work of art because it is at times so purely decorative. Long before impressionism had a name, Curtis's studies of travel were impressionistic; and one is sensible of something like this, not only in the Howadji pages, but in the more conscious effort, Lotus-Eating, a Summer Book, which treated of American watering-places, and tried to divine the poetry of our summer idling.

This appeared in 1852, and was followed in 1854 by The Potiphar Papers, which satirized the vices and follies of the selfcalled best society of New York. The lash was laid on with rather a heavy hand, which was artistically a mistake and morally useless, since it could not penetrate the thick skin it scourged;

but probably the fact was not caricatured in the satire. The next book was that group of tender and winning studies in the ideal, Prue and I, from which a characteristic passage follows. They were reprinted in 1856 from Putnam's Magazine, which Curtis edited, and in which they had won lasting favor. They form undoubtedly his most popular book; with many of his own generation it is not too much to say that they were beloved. They expressed something better than a mood; they were conceived in a love of beauty and expressed in a love of humanity; they are very sentimental, but they are never insincere; the worst that can be said of them is that they are weakened by the tendency to allegory which was always the danger of the author's imagination, but this was their condition. His last fiction was Trumps, a novel, published in 1861, which promptly, and it appears finally, failed of a public.

After that Curtis wrote the graceful and gracious, humanizing, civilizing papers of the Easy Chair in Harper's Monthly. He had already made his mark as an orator on the anti-slavery side of politics; he touched widely on various topics in these pages for ten or twelve years; he took an active part in all patriotic interests as long as he lived; the Civil Service Reform he may be said almost to have created.

WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS

THE DUTY OF THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

Do you ask me our duty as scholars? Gentlemen, thought, which the scholar represents, is life and liberty. There is no intellectual or moral life without liberty. Therefore, as a man must breathe and see before he can study, the scholar must have liberty, first of all; and as the American scholar is a man and has a voice in his own government, so his interest in political affairs must precede all others. He must build his house before he can live in it. He must be a perpetual inspiration of freedom in politics. He must recognize that the intelligent exercise of political rights which is a privilege in a monarchy, is a duty in a republic. If it clash with his ease, his retirement, his taste, his study, let it clash, but let him do his duty. The course of events is incessant, and when the good deed is slighted, the bad deed is done.

Young scholars, young Americans, young men, we are all called upon to do a great duty. Nobody is released from it. It is a work to be done by hard strokes, and everywhere. I see a rising enthusiasm, but enthusiasm is not an election; and I hear cheers from the heart, but cheers are not votes. Every man must labor with his neighbor — in the street, at the plough, at the bench, early and late, at home and abroad. Generally we are concerned, in elections, with the measures of government. This time it is with the essential principle of government itself. Therefore there must be no doubt about our leader. He must not prevaricate, or stand in the fog, or use terms to court popular favor, which every demagogue and traitor has always used. If he says he favors the interest of the whole country, let him frankly say whether he thinks the interest of the whole country demands the extension of slavery. If he declares for the Union, let him say whether he means a Union for freedom or for slavery. If he swear by the Constitution, let him state, so that the humblest free laborer can hear and understand, whether he believes the Constitution means to prefer slave labor to free labor in the national representation of the Territories. Ask him as an honest man, in a great crisis, if he be for the Union, the Constitution, and slavery extension, or for "Liberty and union, now and forever, one and inseparable."

Scholars, you would like to loiter in the pleasant paths of study. Every man loves his ease - loves to please his taste. But into how many homes along this lovely valley came the news of Lexington and Bunker Hill eighty years ago; and young men like us, studious, fond of leisure, young lovers, young husbands, young brothers, and sons, knew that they must forsake the wooded hillside, the river meadows golden with harvest, the twilight walk along the river, the summer Sunday in the old church, parents, wife, child, mistress, and go away to uncertain war. Putnam heard the call at

his plough, and turned to go without waiting. Wooster heard it and obeyed.

Not less lovely in those days was this peaceful valley, not less soft this summer air. Life was as dear, and love as beautiful, to those young men as to us who stand upon their graves. But because they were so dear and beautiful those men went out, bravely to fight for them and fall. Through these very streets they marched, who never returned. They fell and were buried; but they can never die. Not sweeter are the flowers that make your valley fair, not greener are the pines that give your river its name, than the memory of the brave men who died for freedom. And yet no victim of those days, sleeping under the green sod of Connecticut, is more truly a martyr of Liberty than every murdered man whose bones lie bleaching in this summer sun upon the silent plains of Kansas.

Gentlemen, while we read history we make history. Because our fathers fought in this great cause, we must not hope to escape fighting. Because two thousand years ago Leonidas stood against Xerxes, we must not suppose that Xerxes was slain, nor, thank God! that Leonidas is not immortal. Every great crisis of human history is a pass of Thermopylae, and there is always a Leonidas and his three hundred to die in it, if they cannot conquer. And so long as Liberty has one martyr, so long as one drop of blood is poured out for her, so long from that single drop of bloody sweat of the agony of humanity shall spring hosts as countless as the forest leaves and mighty as the sea.

Brothers! the call has come to us. I bring it to you in these calm retreats. I summon you to the great fight of Freedom. I call upon you to say with your voices, whenever the occasion offers, and with your votes when the day comes, that upon these