a needlework world, a world in which there was always moonlight on the lake, and twilight in the vale; where drooped the willow and bloomed the eglantine, and jessamine embowered the cot of the village maid; where the lark warbled in the heavens and the nightingale chaunted in the grove 'neath the mouldering ivy-mantled towers; . . . a world in which there were fairy isles, enchanted grottoes, peris, gondolas, and gazelles. All its pleasantly rococo landscape has vanished, brushed rudely away by realism and a 'sincere' art and an 'earnest' literature." With the gentle decline of New York, New England reassumed the literary supremacy.

REVIEW OUTLINE.-For what reason does it happen that the national capital of America is not a literary centre? As New York assumes preeminence, what characteristics are found in the writers of the nineteenth century who settled there? What sort of training for authorship did Irving secure up to the writing of his first satirical papers? What was the nature of these? By what broadly humorous work were they followed? Into what two chief classes can the contents of "The Sketch Book " be grouped? What subsequent works of the same sort followed? What were his contributions to the writing of history? To what English essayists who preceded and followed him may Irving be justly compared ?

What preparation up to the time that Cooper was thirty years of age did he gain for writing stories of English social life, of the American Revolution, of life on the sea, of life on the frontier? Why did he depart from his successful romantic writing of fiction? What two attempts did he make in other lines? What are the most conspicuous defects in his stories of adventure, and what are the qualities which still make them read by readers of romance to-day?

What are the chief events in the life of William Cullen Bryant? How close a relationship can be established between his work as a journalist and his work as a poet after 1825? Cite the chief point of contrast between Bryant and Wordsworth in their attitude toward nature and the Creator. In what sense is Bryant a Puritan? What points in common does he share with Wordsworth in the form into which he threw his work?

Give reasons for the failure of these three New Yorkers to exert a

lasting and significant influence on American literature during the middle of the nineteenth century.

READING GUIDE.-Selections from Irving should come first of all from "The Sketch Book," and include "The Author's Account of Himself," "Rip Van Winkle," "English Writers on America," "The Spectre Bridegroom," and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." A second group should include "The Boar's Head Tavern," "Westminster Abbey," and the five Christmas Sketches. The best specimens of his earlier and later styles are "The Salmagundi Papers" and the "Life of Goldsmith." Good one-volume biographies are C. D. Warner's (American Men of Letters series) and H. W. Boynton's (Riverside Biographical series).

Before

The reading from Cooper must be limited in such a course. reading all the Leatherstocking series, it is highly advisable to read "The Spy" and "The Pilot" in order to see Cooper at his best in stories of military and nautical life. T. R. Lounsbury's life of Cooper (American Men of Letters series) has no close competitor. It is brief, readable, and complete.

The selections from Bryant's poetry should include "Thanatopsis," "To a Waterfowl," "Hymn to Death," "Monument Mountain," "The Poet." A further group should include "Green River," "To the Fringed Gentian," "Song of Marion's Men," "The Planting of the Apple-Tree," "Robert of Lincoln." Two good one-volume biog raphies are John Bigelow's (in American Men of Letters series) and W. A. Bradley's (in English Men of Letters series). Among the best critical essays are those by Churton Collins, in "The Poetry and Poets of America"; E. C. Stedman, in “Poets of America”; and Walt Whit man, in "Specimen Days," April 16, 1881.

CHAPTER III

A GROUP OF SPIRITUAL LEADERS

I. TRANSCENDENTALISM IN NEW ENGLAND

Definition of Transcendentalism.-During the second quarter of the nineteenth century there developed in New England a group of thinkers and writers the quality of whose work was wholly different from that of the leaders in American letters who preceded them. The passing of the influence of the great New York pioneers in essay, novel, and poetry has been accounted for in the last chapter. The time was therefore ripe for the rise of new and vigorous leaders in American life; and the men who were to assert themselves were being bred along the Massachusetts seaboard during those years in which Irving, Cooper, and Bryant were at their height. They are known as Transcendentalists because of their belief in "A system of philosophy founded on the assumption that there are certain great truths, not based on experience, not susceptible of proof, which transcend human life, and are perceived directly and intuitively by the human mind." They were, it is evident, a group of reactionaries against the hard common-sense which had dominated eighteenth-century philosophy and literature before the triumph of the Romantic Movement.

New England Hospitable to New Ideas.-New England was fertile ground for such a system of thinking as this. It had flourished in Germany during the later years of the eighteenth century and the opening of the nineteenth. Through constructive English thinkers it had been imported to England, such leaders as Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Carlyle performing the work of transmission. In part through their influence, though in part from other causes, it had taken root

on this side of the Atlantic. Yet only in Massachusetts did it so far affect a considerable body of people and so far shape their conduct of life as to earn the title of "Transcendentalism" as a school of philosophy definitely located in time and place. There was a natural reason for this. Society in the New World was in a plastic state, free as no Old-World society was from the trammels of tradition. The country had passed recently through the wars of the Revolution and of 1812. It was no time for the smug adoption of self-satisfied orthodoxy in creed and conduct. Little was maintained simply because of its age. Religious theory in America had experienced great modifications; statehood was still much. more of a possibility than an achieved fact. The condition. of affairs was at once full of promise and full of danger; it was a period of delight for the mercurial temperament. In the most serious thinkers, however, was aroused the feeling of mingled distress, irritation, and alarm at the flightiness of the community mind. Sometimes they commented upon the situation in seriousness, but more often with a touch of humor. Says Emerson in one mood: "The reforms whose fame now fills the land with Temperance, Anti-slavery, Nonresistance, New-government, Equal-labor, fair and generous as each appears, are poor, bitter things prosecuted for themselves as an end." In another he writes whimsically to Carlyle: "Not a reading man but has a draft of a new community in his waistcoat pocket. I am gently mad myself." The Inspiration to Self-Perfection.-In such a soil and in such an atmosphere Transcendentalism took root and flourished. What were the great truths which transcended human experience upon which the new school laid its foundations of belief? They believed, as one can see perhaps most easily in Emerson and Thoreau, in the creation as a great unity of which God is the centre, Man the noblest achievement, and Nature the physical symbol. In this great scheme the individual soul was to them the chief fact, and the chief duty was proper nurture of this soul. Each man, they believed, included within himself a spark of the divine. His task in life was therefore to do justice to his own nature by perfecting himself to discharge as best he could his duties in an earthly

life. The escape from one kind of hereafter was an affair of little interest to him, the enjoyment of another kind a matter which could take care of itself. The greatest problem of man was how best to comport himself as a God-created individual in the community in which God had placed him. For guidance he looked into his own heart, and to nature, which was to him a symbol of the Most High.

II. RALPH WALDO EMERSON (1803-1882)

Emerson's Youth and Education.-Ralph Waldo Emerson, the high-priest of Transcendentalism, was born in Boston in 1803. He came of good blood, boasting among his ancestors on both sides a surprising number of the intellectual aristocrats of New England, the members of the professional class. As was to be expected, he went to the Boston Latin School and from there to Harvard. At college he was not a leader in social or intellectual activities. His acquaintances, even while they respected him, greatly deplored his apparent lack of masculine qualities. "He was so universally amiable and complying," wrote one of them, "that my evil spirit would sometimes instigate me to take advantage of his gentleness and forbearance; but nothing could disturb his equanimity." Between the time when he was graduated and the year in which he began studying for the ministry, he is remembered as a school-teacher by certain youths who regarded him with an almost awful respect. Unattracted by the possibilities of pedagogy, he resorted to the church, studying in the Harvard Divinity School and finally receiving his degree without examination by virtue of the fact that trouble with his eyes had prevented him from taking regular lecture notes.

Emerson as a Clergyman.-At the age of twenty-nine he unexpectedly found himself pastor of the leading church in Boston, and here, if he had chosen to remain in the rather easy path of orthodoxy marked out by the most liberal of churches, he might have continued in possession of a very comfortable ecclesiastical berth as long as he lived. But he was destined to "belong" to no church; he was moving toward a condition of absolute freedom of thought; and it