midst of that period of "storm and stress," and of simmer and sputter, Emerson saw the follies of his associates, and avoided the most glaring of them, while Hawthorne, on a serener height of commonsense, perceived Emerson's mistakes. As the years have gone by, intelligent critics estimate Emerson with substantial fairness. The period of adulation has not yet passed, it is true; but, after all, do we not know what Emerson was and was not, what he did and could not do, and what is the essential value of his prose and of his verse? Emerson the optimist, the stimulating force, the developer of the individual, the deep and true poet, the seer, we know and feel; and yet we can see not the less clearly his inconsistencies, his inferiority to Carlyle in Hebrewlike sense of Jehovah's might, his obscurities of style, his real narrowness of view when he renounced all religious forms. On the whole, the sager contemporary readers know and judge Emerson, Thoreau, Alcott, Margaret Fuller, as they ought to be known and judged.

That there is a difficulty in criticising, during the authors' lifetime, the works of such winsome personalities as Whittier and Holmes, is unquestionable. But is it too soon to say that Whittier, at his best, is high and noble; or that "Snow-Bound" is a characteristic descriptive poem of New England, and seems sure to live? No recognition of his bad rhymes, incorrect pronunciations, or occasional tediousness and thinness need hinder such an expression of opinion. And Holmes and Lowell know in what they have succeeded and in what failed; in the works

of the latter the merits and demerits are so plain, that if the reader were to take his Lowell from the shelf, and mark these merits and demerits, from the first page to the last, from the Tennysonian echoes to "The Cathedral" and the "Commemoration Ode," I have no doubt that their writer would substantially agree with the criticisms made.

I need not speak here of other poets. In the case of Whitman, there is, of course, no agreement as yet. When one critic regards him as a Homer-Shakespeare, with improvements, and another deems him an impostor in the garb of a poet, it is not easy to make a compromise. Much contemporary criticism of Whitman, whether praise or blame, is valueless. The poet arouses undue adulation and unjust contempt. Certainly, however, we may claim that the criticism of Whitman by the best American minds is likely to be approved by the literary historians of the future, in comparison with that expressed by not a few foreigners of high intelligence. In regard to the perspective of American literature, it must never be forgotten that deck-hands, 'longshoremen, and stagedrivers, Californian miners, Chinese, highway robbers, buffaloes, and Indians are but a part of our civilization, and that literature may concern itself with such themes as God, duty, culture, and Eastern lakes or rivers, and still be distinctively American.

A German gentleman, an intelligent reader, for many years a resident of Boston, once expressed to me the opinion that Hawthorne is, perhaps, the greatest writer of this century, and that our historians. are the equals of any who have written in Europe;

beyond this he was hardly ready to make many claims for our literature. I substantially agree with him in these expressions, though I would not stop with them. It is true, however, that American literature should stand firmly on its own ground, making no claims on the score of patriotism, or youth, or disadvantageous circumstances, or bizarre achievement, but gravely pointing to what has been done. It is better to offer to the world, self-respectingly and silently, Emerson, Longfellow, Motley, Bancroft, Irving, Ticknor, Poe, and Hawthorne, in their several works and ways. These stand for themselves; their place is assured, and we have no need to assert their claims with vociferousness or exaggeration.

If honest, searching, and dispassionate criticism of American literature is needed in considering the work and rank of authors of the present century,— who have chiefly given that literature its place in the world's estimation,-it is no less needed in studying our writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. American literature in the colonial period was in its day of small things, promising indeed, but without great achievement. No small honor is to be paid, of course, to the pioneer in any department of work. It was, in a true sense, harder for Mrs. Bradstreet to be Mrs. Bradstreet than for Emerson to be Emerson. The Puritans of Massachusetts Bay were the direct precursors and the actual founders of most that is good in American letters. Those theological treatises and controversial sermons, those painstaking versions of the Psalms, and those faithful records of sight and experience were the index

fingers pointing to future triumphs. Bradford and Winthrop were the intellectual ancestors of Emerson and Hawthorne. Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards were giants in their day. Benjamin Franklin still remains one of the world's great helpful forces. Jefferson and the writers of the "Federalist" made great contributions to the political wisdom of the nations. But when all this has been said, does it not remain true that some critics have bestowed an unwarrantable amount of time and thought and adulation upon writers of humble rank and small influence, simply because they were early? John Smith, temporarily in America, wrote accounts of American scenes and peoples,-accounts more entertaining than trustworthy; he must be mentioned, but is he, therefore, our first writer? When there is a Central African literature in English, will Henry M. Stanley be reckoned one of its early lights? George Sandys translated Ovid in Virginia, and William Morrell made Latin verses in Massachusetts, both returning to the mother country; how did their experience and writings differ from those of other temporary residents in other foreign lands? English literature, from 1607 to 1776, passed from one brilliant period to another; the American colonies were in constant intellectual and personal communication with the old home. If we think of Shakespeare, Bunyan, Milton, the seventeenth-century choir of lyrists, Sir Thomas Browne, Jeremy Taylor, Addison, Swift, Dryden, Gray, Goldsmith, and the eighteenthcentury novelists, what shall we say of the intrinsic literary worth of most of the books written on Amer

ican soil, by writers who inherited, or shared, the intellectual life of England?

In other words, why should writings which would have passed into obscurity in England be magnified beyond their deserts, merely because they were written on the American coast? We may be interested, as antiquarians, in the poor verses of Anne Bradstreet, Nathaniel Ward, Peter Folger, Michael Wigglesworth, and the Bay Psalmists; we may recognize the intellectual force of Richard and Increase Mather and Roger Williams; and we may laboriously describe the hundreds of sermons, the scores of treatises, the dozens of books of verse, which were printed by colonial writers; but we cannot eulogize them at length without a sad distortion of perspective. A few great names stand out, but only a few. For the purposes of comparative criticism, the student should know thoroughly William Bradford, John Winthrop, Samuel Sewall, Cotton Mather, Jonathan Edwards, Benjamin Franklin, and the makers of the new nation from 1750 to 1790. The work of the rest he should recognize and praise in an adequate adequate degree, but should not magnify beyond its deserts. The history of literature is one thing, bibliography is quite another thing. If a certain space be devoted to the colonial literature of America, then, on the same perspective, ten times as much is needed to bring the record down to our day. One should study the great men profoundly, and let the worthy sermonizers, and pamphleteers, and spinners of doggerel go free. Our forefathers were founding