ever give me the means, I would do something to redress the grievances and relieve the sufferings of that class of beings with whom my lot had so long been cast. II. Rev. Samuel F. Smith (1808-1895) is remembered to-day for his song America, which was published in 1832. AMERICA My country, 'tis of thee, Land where my fathers died, My native country, thee, I love thy rocks and rills, Let music swell the breeze, Let mortal tongues awake, Let rocks their silence break,- Our fathers' God, to Thee, To Thee we sing; Long may our land be bright With freedom's holy light; Protect us by thy might, Great God, our King. BIBLIOGRAPHY I. FOR FURTHER ILLUSTRATION Bryant, W. C.: Library of Poetry and Song. Stedman, E. C.: An American Anthology. Stedman and Hutchinson: Library of American Literature. II. FOR COLLATERAL READING Holmes, O. W.: The Boys. (Contains a humorous reference to Smith's America.) Lowell, J. R.: Fable for Critics. (On Halleck and Willis.) Whittier, J. G.: Fitz-Greene Halleck. CHAPTER IV WRITERS OF THE MID-CENTURY AND AFTER I. Great Names The mid-century discovers a remarkable group of writers in New England, and the literary centre of America shifts from New York to Cambridge. The most distinguished names in American literature are found in this brilliant group of New England authors, and their achievements so far outclass anything else in the realm of American literature before or since that the period of their activity is often called the golden age of American letters. Yet the fact is patent that, while the stature of these men assumes noble proportions when compared with that of other writers native to American soil, it does not measure up to the size of the great Victorian poets and prose-writers. This is said with no lack of appreciation for the positive worth of the contribution that the New England group made to American literature. At this time the influence of Goethe, Coleridge, and Carlyle was dominant in the works of our leaders of culture. Literary men "thought and talked and wrote upon truths which cannot be demonstrated, which lie beyond the sphere of the established, which transcend human experience and ordinary knowledge," says Professor Simonds. Hence they are known as Transcendentalists. Chief among them was Ralph Waldo Emerson. I. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) was born in Boston and educated at Harvard. After graduation he taught school 66 for a while and then studied for the ministry. He was ordained and given charge of the historic Old North Church, where the Mathers had preached in colonial days. This had now become the most important pulpit of the Unitarians. But Emerson could not agree even with the liberal tenets of the Unitarians, so he withdrew from the church. He then went abroad for his health. While in England he visited Carlyle with whom he formed a friendship which lasted through life. On his return to America he settled in Concord, where he lived quietly for the rest of his days. Mr. Barrett Wendell asserts that Emerson was by far the most eminent figure among the Transcendentalists, if not, indeed, in all the literary history of America." Of all American writers he is probably the most inspiring to the young. The bulk of his writings is in the form of essays, many of which were delivered as lectures, but he wrote poems now and then all through his life. Of his ability as a poet he himself says: "I am a born poet, of a low class, without doubt, yet a poet. That is my nature and my vocation." Though most critics agree that his verse is too intellectual, Stedman calls him "our most typical and inspiring poet." He had a genius for the happy word and his essays teem with epigrams such as, "Never read any book that is not a year old," ""Never read any but famed books,' ""Never read any but what you like,' ," "Hitch your wagon to a star," and the like. With him, most emphatically, the style is the man. (From The American Scholar) (This address was delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Harvard, August 31, 1837. Holmes calls it 'our intellectual Declaration of Independence," and Lowell says: "The effect produced upon the audience by its delivery was without any parallel in our literary annals, a scene to be always treasured in the memory for its picturesqueness and its inspiration.") I. The first in time and the first in importance of the influences upon the mind is that of nature. Every day, the sun; and, after sunset, Night and her stars. Ever the winds blow; ever the grass grows. Every day, men and women, conversing, beholding and beholden. The scholar is he of all men whom this spectacle most engages. He must settle its value in his mind. What is nature to him? There is never a beginning, there is never an end, to the inexplicable continuity of this web of God, but always circular power returning into itself. Therein it resembles his own spirit, whose beginning, whose ending, he never can find, so entire, so boundless. Far too as her splendours shine, system on system shooting like rays, upward, downward, without centre, without circumference,—in the mass and in the particle, Nature hastens to render account of herself to the mind. Classification begins. To the young mind every thing is individual, stands by itself. By and by, it finds how to join two things and see in them one nature; then three, then three thousand; and so, tyrannized over by its own unifying instinct, it goes on tying things together, diminishing anomalies, discovering roots running under ground whereby contrary and remote things cohere and flower out from one stem. It presently learns that since the dawn of history there has been a constant accumulation and classifying of facts. But what is classification but the perceiving that these objects are not chaotic, and are not foreign, but have a law which is also a law of the human mind? The astronomer discovers that geometry, a pure abstraction of the human mind, is the measure of planetary motion. The chemist finds proportions and intelligible method throughout matter; and science is nothing but the finding of analogy, identity, in the most remote parts. The ambitious soul sits down before each refractory fact; one after another reduces all strange constitutions, all new powers, to their class and their law, and goes on forever to animate the last fibre of organization, the outskirts of nature, by insight. Thus to him, to this school-boy under the bending dome of day, is suggested that he and it proceed from one root; one is leaf and one is flower; relation, sympathy, stirring in every vein. And what is that root? Is not that the soul of his soul? A thought too bold; a dream too wild. Yet when this spiritual light shall have revealed the law of more earthly natures,—when he has learned to worship |