A white man, gazing on the scene, Would say a lovely spot was here, I like it not-I would the plain The sheep are on the slopes around, And prancing steeds, in trappings gay, Methinks it were a nobler sight To see these vales in woods arrayed, Their summits in the golden light, Their trunks in grateful shade; And herds of deer, that bounding go O'er rills and prostrate trees below. And then to mark the lord of all, The forest hero, trained to wars, This bank, in which the dead were laid, Brought wreaths of beads and flowers, But now the wheat is green and high The weapons of his rest; That the pale race, who waste us now, They waste us-ay, like April snow In the warm noon, we shrink away; And fast they follow, as we go Toward the setting day— Till they shall fill the land, and we But I behold a fearful sign, To which the white men's eyes are blind; Their race may vanish hence, like mine, And leave no trace behind, Save ruins o'er the region spread, And the white stones above the dead. Before these fields were shorn and tilled, Full to the brim our rivers flowed; The melody of waters filled The fresh and boundless wood; And torrents dashed, and rivulets played, And fountains spouted in the shade. Those grateful sounds are heard no more: The realm our tribes are crushed to get, From Thanatopsis.' Yet not to thy eternal resting-place In majesty, and the complaining brooks That make the meadows green; and, poured round all, Of the great tomb of man. The golden sun, The youth in life's green spring, and he who goes By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave From 'The Death of the Flowers.' Heaped in the hollows of the grove, the autumn leaves lie dead; They rustle to the eddying gust, and to the rabbit's tread; The robin and the wren are flown, and from the shrubs the jay, And from the wood-top calls the crow through all the gloomy day. Where are the flowers, the fair young flowers, that lately sprang and stood In brighter light and softer airs, a beauteous sisterhood? Alas! they all are in their graves, the gentle race of flowers Are lying in their lowly beds, with the fair and good of ours. The rain is falling where they lie, but the cold November rain Calls not from out the gloomy earth the lovely ones again. WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT. How gushed the life-blood of her brave- Now all is calm, and fresh, and still; And talk of children on the hill, And bell of wandering kine, are heard. No solemn host goes trailing by The black-mouthed gun and staggering wain; Men start not at the battle-cry, Oh, be it never heard again! Soon rested those who fought; but thou Truth, crushed to earth, shall rise again; When they who helped thee flee in fear, Like those who fell in battle here.. Another hand the standard wave, His son-in-law, Parke Godwin, published Bryant's Life and Works in six volumes in 1883-84; the short Life in the 'American Men of Letters Series' (1890) is by John Bigelow; and see also Wilson's Bryant and his Friends (1883) and Stedman's Poets of America. George Bancroft (1800-91), born in Worcester, Massachusetts, graduated at Harvard with high honours in 1817, and studied for two years at Göttingen in Germany. He lived for a time in Berlin, visited Weimar, and went home tinctured with the new spirit of the world he had moved in-for he had seen and read, talked to or corresponded, with Goethe and Humboldt. Hegel and Schleiermacher, Heeren and Niebuhr. For a year he was Greek tutor in Harvard; and in 1823 he and a fellow-tutor established the Round Hill School at Northampton, Massachusetts, with which he was associated until 1830. During these years he published a volume of poems, and made translations from the German of the minor poems of Goethe, Schiller, and others, and of some of the historico-political works of Heeren. In 1834 appeared the first volume of his History of the United States from the Discovery of the Continent, followed by the second and third volumes in 1837 and 1840. Between 1852 and 1860 came the five volumes narrating the history of the colonial period to the Declaration of Independence, and in 1866 and 1874 respectively the two concluding volumes, bringing the history to the treaty of peace with the mother-country in 1782. The History of the Formation of the Constitution of the United States (2 vols. 1882) afterwards formed a constituent part of the revised edition of the complete History of the United States (6 vols. 1882-84). Bancroft in early life was a Democrat. He served as collector of the port of Boston (1838-41), under President Van Buren, and was an unsuccessful candidate for the governorship of Massachusetts in 1844. He accepted a seat in the Cabinet of President Polk as Secretary of the Navy in 1845, and the following year was appointed minister to the court of St James, a position he filled with credit until 1849. Oxford made him D.C.L., and he was J.U.D. of Bonn. In the Civil War he was heartily in accord with the national Government, and in 1867 he was appointed by President Johnson minister to Berlin, serving with distinguished ability until recalled in 1874 at his own request. In his later years he lived at Washington, contributing occa sional articles to magazines. His history, it has been said, is not a history of the United States -it ends just where the history of the States as a nation begins; and it was calculated that to complete the history on the same scale would require seventy or eighty volumes. Besides his opus magnum, he had written on the progress of the human race, addresses on Jackson and Lincoln, and a book on Van Buren. The solidity of his work as historian, his acumen, insight, and common-sense, are more remarkable than his method of presentation-his style is laboured and often heavy, his rhetoric crude and tedious, and his generalisations somewhat too 'philosophical' and too discursive. But he faithfully followed a high ideal of the historian's responsibility, and in his day of popularity-now past did much to cherish in America an ennobling conception of the national destiny. Boston in 1770. The king set himself, and his ministry, and parliament, and all Great Britain, to subdue to his will one stubborn little town on the sterile coast of the Massachusetts Bay. The odds against it were fearful; but it showed a life inextinguishable, and had been chosen to keep guard over the liberties of mankind. The Old World had not its parallel. It counted about sixteen thousand inhabitants of European origin, all of whom learned to read and write. Good public schools were the foundation of its political system; and Benjamin Franklin, one of their grateful pupils, in his youth apprenticed to the art which makes knowledge the common property of mankind, had gone forth from them to stand before the nations as the representative of the modern plebeian class. As its schools were for all its children, so the great body of its male inhabitants of twenty-one years of age, when assembled in a hall which Faneuil, of Huguenot ancestry, had built for them, was the source of all municipal authority. In the meeting of the town, its taxes were voted, its affairs discussed and settled; its agents and public servants annually elected by ballot; and abstract political principles freely debated. A small property qualification was attached to the right of suffrage, but did not exclude enough to change the character of the institution. There had never existed a considerable municipality approaching so nearly to a pure democracy; and, for so populous a place, it was undoubtedly the most orderly and best governed in the world. Its ecclesiastical polity was in like manner republican. The great mass were Congregationalists; each church was an assembly formed by voluntary agreement, selfconstituted, self-supported, and independent. They were clear that no person or church had power over another church. There was not a Roman Catholic altar in the place; the usages of 'papists' were looked upon as worn-out superstitions, fit only for the ignorant. But the people were not merely the fiercest enemies of 'popery and slavery; they were Protestants even against Protestantism; and though the English Church was tolerated, Boston kept up its exasperation against prelacy. Its ministers were still its prophets and its guides; its pulpit, in which, now that Mayhew was no more, Cooper was admired above all others for eloquence and patriotism, by weekly appeals inflamed alike the fervour of piety and of liberty. In the Boston Gazette, it enjoyed a free press, which gave currency to its conclusions on the natural right of man to selfgovernment. Its citizens were inquisitive, seeking to know the causes of things, and to search for the reason of existing institutions in the laws of nature. Yet they controlled their speculative turn by practical judgment, exhibiting the seeming contradiction of susceptibility to enthusiasm and calculating shrewdness. They were fond of gain, and adventurous, penetrating, and keen in their pursuit of it; yet their avidity was tempered by a well-considered and continuing liberality. Nearly every man was struggling to make his own way in the world and GEORGE BANCROFT. his own fortune; and yet individually, and as a body, they were public-spirited. (From History of the United States) There are books on Bancroft and his historical work by Rives (1867), Green (1891), Wallis (1896), and West (1900). Professor Trent in his American Literature (1903) is perhaps somewhat too severe on his defects as a historical writer. Amos Bronson Alcott (1799-1888) was the son of a farmer at Wolcott in Connecticut, and began life for himself as a pedlar in the southern states. In 1828 he established a school in Boston on highly reformed methods, which, laudable and psychologically sound as many of them were, provoked so much opposition that erelong the school had to be dropped; and the transcendental (and somewhat nebulous) philosopher sought to propagate his original views on education, theology, social economics, and vegetarianism by lectures, for which his attractive personality secured attention if not much pecuniary success. A scheme to establish a community on an estate bought by a friend of his near Boston failed utterly, and he spent his later years largely as a peripatetic philosopher. He contributed to the Transcendental Dial, and published Tablets (from his diary), Concord Days, a collection of sonnets and canzonets, and an essay on Emerson. His daughter, Louisa May Alcott (1832-88), born at Germantown in Pennsylvania, became a teacher somewhat on her father's lines, but wrote for the magazines, and published in 1855 Flower Fables. During the Civil War she served as nurse, and sent to a newspaper what were afterwards made into a book as Hospital Sketches. But it was her Little Women (1868-69), for children, that made her famous; and this, her chef d'œuvre, she never equalled either in her Old-fashioned Girl, Little Men, and Jo's Boys (all 'juveniles'), or in her novels, Moods (1863) and Work (1873). Yet in all her writings (nearly thirty publications) there is an attractive strain of optimistic hope and faith in human nature and democratic freedom. See the father's Life and Philosophy, by Sanborn and Harris (1893). and Lowell's Fable for Critics; and Louisa's Life, Letters, and Journals, by Cheney (1889). Lydia Huntley Sigourney (1791-1865), the daughter of Ezekiel Huntley, a soldier of the revolutionary war, was born at Norwich in Connecticut, was well educated there and at Hartford, and, under her maiden name of Lydia Huntley, for five years taught a class of ladies in Hartford. In 1815 she published a volume of eminently Moral Pieces in Prose and Verse; and in 1819 she married Charles Sigourney, a Hartford merchant. descriptive poem in blank verse on the Traits of the Aborigines of America (1822), and her Sketch of Connecticut Forty Years Since (1824), were followed by Pocahontas and other Poems, Lays of the Heart, Tales in Prose and Verse, and Letters to Young Ladies and to Mothers. In 1840 she Her visited Europe, and on her return wrote her Pleasant Memories of Pleasant Lands. A pureminded and lovable woman, an appallingly copious and oppressively sentimental writer of verse, she was a constant contributor of ballads, descriptive poems, epithalamiums, elegies, and occasional verses to magazines and periodicals. But her English prototype is hardly flattered when Mrs Sigourney is called 'the American Hemans.' See her autobiographical-and not a little significant— Letters of Life (New York, 1866). Lydia Maria Child (1802–80), born in Medford, Massachusetts, published her first novel, Hobomok, under her maiden name of Lydia Maria Francis, in 1821, and her second, The Rebels, a story of Boston before the Revolution, in 1822. In 1828 she married David Lee Child (1794-1874), a journalist, with whom she edited the Anti-Slavery Standard in New York in 1843-44. Her works, nearly thirty in number, include novels, the best of them relating to early New England history, stories for children, a biography or two, and an ambitious but rather inaccurate work on the history of religion (1855). Philothea (1836), sometimes described as her masterpiece, is an ambitious tale of the days of Pericles. Her popularity died before her. See her Letters (1882) and Higginson's Contemporaries (1899). Sarah Margaret Fuller (1810-50), for the last three years of her life the Marchesa Ossoli, was the daughter of a Massachusetts lawyer and politician living at Cambridgeport, and by her father and other preceptors was injudiciously encouraged so to labour in all the branches of a liberal education that before she was well in her teens her health was permanently injured by the continued strain. After her father's death in 1835 she supported her seven brothers and sisters (she was the eldest child) both by private teaching and by school work in Boston and Providence. Ere this she was familiar with what was best not merely in English but in French, Spanish, and Italian literature, and under the influence of Körner and Novalis, Goethe and Schiller, was one of the pioneers of New England Transcendentalism --that vigorous reaction as well against timehonoured Puritan prejudices and humdrum orthodoxy as against eighteenth-century philistinism and materialistic utilitarianism. Sarah Fuller shared to the full in the vague idealism, pantheism, mysticism, of the new movement, whose most conspicuous representatives were George Ripley and Theodore Parker, as also in its pedantic, paradoxical, and extravagant elements. But though she was a frequent and welcome guest at Brook Farm, she did not cherish its communistic enthusiasms. Emerson, Hawthorne, and Channing were her most intimate friends; and it was she who conducted the Transcendental organ The Dial (1840-42) She translated Eckermann's Conversations with Goethe and other notable German books; and she conducted a novel kind of conversation classes for ladies, comprising discussions of social and philosophical problems, in which some have sought the origin of the New England woman's rights moveShe was not prepossessing in face, figure, or manner, was somewhat obviously self-conscious, though perfectly lady-like, but was gifted with a quiet exceptional power of conciliating sympathy, and in her talk and writing was rather clever and eccentric than really original or profound. In 1844 she published her first volume, Summer on the Lakes, a record of a season's travel. In the same year she went to New York as literary critic of the Tribune, and to that paper contributed a series of miscellaneous articles, republished as Papers on Literature and Art (1846). Having gone to Europe in 1846, at Rome she met the Marquis Giovanni Angelo Ossoli, a friend of Mazzini's, to whom she was married at the end of 1847. In 1849, during the siege of Rome, she, at Mazzini's request, took charge of a hospital, while her husband fought on the walls; and after the capture of the city by the French she and her husband took refuge in the mountains of the Abruzzi, and then in Florence, till in May 1850 they could sail with their infant for America. From the beginning the voyage was tragically disastrous. The captain of the ship died of smallpox; and the Ossolis' child fell ill of the same disease. Finally, when the ment. miserable voyage was all but over, on the 16th of July the vessel was wrecked on Fire Island near New York; the child's body was washed ashore, but nothing was ever seen of mother or father. Her Autobiography, with additional memoirs by Emerson, Clarke, and Channing, appeared in 1852 (new ed. 1884); there are also Lives by her brother A. B. Fuller (1855), by Julia Ward Howe (1883), who also edited her love-letters in 1903, and by T. W. Higginson (1884). Ralph Waldo Emerson, the most original and influential writer that America has yet produced, was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on the 25th of May 1803. The centennial commemorations which in 1903 were celebrated throughout the United States, and in Great Britain as well, testify to the depth and extent of the influence which has been exerted by this free-thinking idealist and seer. Contemporary with Carlyle, who accepted very much as a matter of course the homage which the distant New Englander paid to his genius, Emerson was from the first not less independent and self-centred than the iconoclastic Scotsman whom, expecting to find a master, he visited at Craigenputtock in 1833, and with whom, from that time, he maintained an affectionate, lifelong friendship. This friendship was never disturbed either by opposition of views or by contrariety of character; for beneath their diversities, great as they were, each undoubtedly recognised in the other a fundamental love of truth, justice, and righteousness. Emerson came of a family distinguished by a long succession of clergymen and college graduates. His father, the Rev. William Emerson, graduated at Harvard College in 1789, and at the time of Ralph Waldo's birth he was minister of the First Church in Boston. He died in 1811, leaving a widow and six children, all under ten years of age, with but scanty means of support. But Mrs Emerson was courageous and capable, and she eked out her resources by taking boarders, her sons helping her with the house-work. It was the mother's ambition to have her boys educated, and her fond hope to see at least some of them ministers. They were accordingly sent regularly to school, and at home, in the spare time which remained after doing the household chores, they were encouraged to read standard works of poetry, history, and oratory. In this educational work and stimulus the mother was greatly aided by her sisterin-law, Miss Mary Emerson, for whom Ralph Waldo entertained the greatest affection and veneration. She must always occupy a saint's place,' he wrote long afterwards, 'in my household; and I have no hour of poetry or philosophy since I knew these things, into which she does not enter as a genius.' This early life of poverty, tempered with the delights of Plato and Plutarch, Shakespeare and Milton, Addison and Pope, Rollin and Robertson, left an ineffaceable impress upon Ralph Waldo Emerson, and some of the descriptive passages of his essay on 'Domestic Life' are a reminiscence and biography of those days, though the form is strictly impersonal and objective. The boy was at a private school before he was three years of age, and at eleven he entered the Latin School. He was soon turning Virgil into readable English verse; he liked Greek and history, and he developed a considerable facility for rhyming. In 1817 he entered Harvard College, which, considering both the age of the students and the subjects of the curriculum, was then little more than a boys' school. Emerson did not in any way distinguish himself in college, and in mathematics he utterly failed; but to the more serious members of his class he was known as a studious reader and lover of the best literature. After graduation he taught school for a few years; but that profession was exceedingly irksome to him, and nothing but the compensation it afforded would have kept him at the work. Already, too, he had looked forward to the ministry as the natural field for his life-work, though now with less enthusiasm than when in boyish days he dreamt of drawing men to religion by the spell of his oratory. Yet speculative difficulties (which, indeed, he always quietly shelved) did not bar his way to the pulpit, as happened with his elder brother, William, who turned to law. In 1823 Emerson began studying for the ministry, attending some lectures at the Divinity School at Cambridge, but on account of poor health not enrolling in the regular course. In 1826 he was 'approbated to preach' by the Middlesex Association of Ministers; and, after a winter in the South in search of health, he was in March 1829 ordained as colleague of the Rev. Henry Ware, minister of the Second Church in Boston. On the resignation of Mr Ware shortly afterwards, Emerson became sole pastor of this important church. But he was not destined to remain a clergyman. In the summer of 1832 he resigned his pastorate and, as it turned out, terminated his career as a settled minister, though he continued to exercise the function of preaching as late as 1847. The immediate occasion of this action was the maturing in Emerson's mind of a conviction that the Lord's Supper was never intended to be a perpetual rite, and that its sacramental observance was prejudicial to religion by emphasising forms instead of spirit, and by transferring the worship of God to Christ. Otherwise he had no hostility to the institution. He simply lacked sympathy with it, as indeed he did with public prayers. But his Unitarian brethren had not yet travelled so far from traditional orthodoxy, and with friendly feelings on both sides they parted. In the sermon he preached to them on the Lord's Supper-the only sermon to be found in his published worksEmerson had declared that 'the day of formal religion is past.' This was, indeed, a wider departure from current Unitarianism than a mere difference |