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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 
 
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 UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 
 
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WASHINGTON IRVING. 
 
AMERICAN AUTHORS 
 
 FOR 
 
 YOUNG FOLKS 
 
 BY 
 AMANDA B HARRIS 
 
 Author of 
 Wild Flowers and Where they Grow 
 Field, Wood, and Meadow Rambles 
 Dooryard Folks 
 
 aud others 
 
 " OCT 7 lefU'y. 
 
 BOSTON 
 D LOTHROP COMPANY 
 
 FRANKLIN AND HAWLEY STREETS 
 
Copyright 1887 
 
 BY 
 
 D LoTHROP Company 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 I. Washington Irving . 
 
 II. James Fenimore Cooper . 
 
 III. William Hickling Prescott 
 
 IV. Ralph Waldo Emerson 
 
 V. Nathaniel Hawthorne ♦ . 
 
 VI. Harriet Beecher Stowe . 
 
 VII. Alice and Phcebe Gary 
 
 VIII. Bayard Taylor .... 
 
 IX. Henry David Thoreau, and other ' 
 OF-DOOR " Writers . 
 
 X. Francis Parkman 
 
 XI. George William Curtis . 
 
 XII. Donald Grant Mitchell . 
 
 XIII. " H. H." and others . 
 
 XIV. James Russell Lowell 
 
 Out- 
 
 Pagb. 
 II 
 29 
 
 49 
 
 69 
 
 87 
 
 107 
 
 125 
 
 141 
 
 163 
 
 185 
 207 
 227 
 
 243 
 ^65 
 
PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR 
 YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 I. 
 
 WASHINGTON IRVING. 
 
 LET US suppose," as that charming story-teller, 
 Annie Keary, used to begin, "let us sup- 
 pose " that these young people have never read 
 Washington Irving, or never read him except in 
 school-book " exercises." There they may have had 
 a page or two out of Rip Van Winkle ; perhaps the 
 ludicrous description of Ichabod Crane, his school 
 and his horse ; possibly a mutilated chapter from 
 the Alhambra — just enough to give a taste, yet 
 just enough to spoil the subject. 
 
 But do they really know Rip, and his dog Wolf ? 
 Poor vagabond Rip with his twenty years' sleep ! 
 
12 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 If not, they have missed one of the masterpieces 
 of English prose, not a sentence of which could be 
 spared. Some things are simply perfect, complete, 
 all right just as they stand, so that 
 
 One shade the more, one ray the less 
 Would half impair the nameless grace, 
 
 and this is of the happy number — an inspiration. 
 Nor is there anything to be taken from or added 
 to the Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Have you, my 
 young people, read it as it stands — all about the 
 perturbations and whimsicalities of pedagogue Icha- 
 bod, and that distracting piece of naughtiness, 
 Katrina Van Tassel ? Have you ever tried to 
 imagine Sleepy Hollow, that drowsy place, immortal 
 valley on the Hudson that will be famous as long 
 as American literature lasts ? or, in your " mind's 
 eye "have you seen the queer, gabled, Dutch houses 
 of old Knickerbocker New York, in the days of the 
 renowned Wouter Van Twiller ? where the burgher 
 used to sit "on the bench at the door of his white- 
 washed house," under the sycamore or willow and 
 smoke the sultry afternoon through, "listening to 
 
WASHINGTON IRVING. I3 
 
 the clucking of his hens, the cackling of his geese, 
 and the sonorous grunting of his swine," where, 
 " the grass grew quietly in the highway — the bleat- 
 ing sheep and frolicsome calves sported about the 
 verdant ridge where now the Broadway loungers 
 take their morning stroll." 
 
 And have you been in the Alhambra, and heard 
 the drip of the fountain in the court of that beauti- 
 ful Morisco palace, while you listened to legends of 
 Granada till the streets seemed alive with Moorish 
 warriors, and the past of five centuries ago came 
 back? If not, you do not know Irving; for it is 
 Dutch life on the Hudson and in New Amsterdam, 
 and the stories of Moorish ascendency and of con- 
 quest in Spain, which most truly represent him. 
 
 Irving's subjects can be put easily into groups, 
 with few exceptions ; and any one who would 
 thoroughly read him, can take his books in that 
 way. 
 
 It would hardly be worth your while to spare the 
 time for the Salmagundi papers, which were the 
 earliest he wrote ; and you could make a long skip 
 over years and space, as well as titles, to Spain, 
 
14 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 and begin there. So you come at once to some of 
 his best work, to be sure; but what better starting 
 place, for there you have several volumes which 
 belong together and make a brilliant period in 
 romantic history. 
 
 So Spain be it then ; and first, Legends of the 
 Conquest of Spain, then, in this order, although it is 
 not the one in which they were written, Moorish 
 Chronicles, Tales of the Alhambra, Chronicles of the 
 Conquest of Granada. By that time you will be 
 steeped in romantic adventure by land, and will be 
 ready for the Life of Columbus, and then for Spanish 
 Voyages of Discovery, which come right along chron- 
 ologically. 
 
 Of the Spanish books, the Columbus was the first 
 written. The author had already won fame when 
 in 1826 he made his temporary home in Madrid, 
 and with abundance of public documents and pri- 
 vate manuscripts at hand, including the archives 
 of the Columbus family, prepared the life of the 
 great navigator, making the only full account there 
 is in English, with all the charm of Irving's incom- 
 parable style. 
 
WASHINGTON IRVING. I5 
 
 This book hath Kinship with the epic old, 
 That sings of Ithacus, the searcher bold : 
 The Homer touch — the purple light is here, 
 That makes men heroes, heroes gods appear ! 
 
 What a happy inspiration was that which came to 
 him of writing it ! for out of it grew all the others. 
 He had a great deal of sentiment and romance 
 about him, and that was the country of all the 
 world to fascinate him ; and the more he wrote of 
 Spain, the more the witchery of the subject took 
 hold of him. Happy inspiration in its results to 
 us and to all future readers and travellers. He 
 enriched our literature with the treasures he 
 brought forth, and cast such a spell over the 
 country itself that people from all lands where his 
 name is known visit the Alhambra, because by the 
 magic of his genius, that old castelated palace has 
 become consecrated with 
 
 The light that never was on sea or land. 
 
 He chose a period rich in romantic episodes and 
 brilliant deeds, when " every man lived with sword 
 in hand," and there was " scarcely a commanding 
 
1 6 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 cliff or hill-top but had its castle," and gave us the 
 chronicles of the Conquest of Granada, which he is 
 said to have himself regarded as almost the best 
 of all he had written, when in the maturity of his 
 powers and before the fire of enthusiasm had begun 
 to die out ; he was aglow with his subject, as a 
 writer should be, full of it, living while he wrote 
 " in a world of dreams." It is a picturesque book ; 
 one for boys to revel in, with its alarms and 
 tumults, its cavalcades of Moorish warriors, its 
 drums and trumpets, banners and glitter of arms ; 
 the clang of weapons, the tramp of mailed men, the 
 neighing and clattering of steeds, the sounds of 
 war, of triumph, are heard along its pages ; one 
 sees the mountain defiles, the city with its Moorish 
 architecture, the plains where armies meet, Fer- 
 dinand and Isabella in royal state, the last Moorish 
 king, Saracen and Christian, cavalier and monk — 
 what pageants, what splendor and stir, what 
 pictures, what an unfolding of events ! 
 
 I come now, by this arrangement (which you 
 understand is purely arbitrary, but which seems to 
 me a convenient one for you), to the chief biog- 
 
WASHINGTON IRVING. 1 7 
 
 raphies ; Mahomet and his Successors, which does 
 not profess to do anything more than put into 
 handy volume shape the facts and legends about 
 the prophet; the Life of Oliver Goldsntith, one of 
 the most captivating of books, to which Irving 
 gave "as graphic a style," he said, as he could 
 command, being himself in love with his subject 
 — a rarely attractive subject, too,was warm-hearted, 
 homely, ungainly, thriftless, amiable " Goldy," poor 
 Goldy ! ^ith his buoyancy, his haps and mishaps, 
 his improvidence, his irresponsibility, his wander- 
 ing life, his impulses that were often right but as 
 likely to be wrong — was there ever such another, 
 such a luckless man, but thrice fortunate in the 
 gentle and genial humorist who wrote his life ; 
 and third, Irving's last work, on which he was 
 engaged for years, broken by many interruptions 
 of ill-health and a long absence in Europe, the 
 Life of Washington, full of incident, and altogether 
 a good thing, though without the flashes of genius 
 of some of his earlier productions. 
 
 Still another group — his western books, made, 
 says some one, "for the market," but capital read- 
 
1 8 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 ing for all that : A Tour on the Prairies, Astoria, 
 and The Adventures of Captain Bonneville. It was 
 in 1832 that he took his trip, and wrote about it 
 .graphically — he could not have done otherwise 
 — then, under the second title, a history of the 
 fur trade which has all the elements for a story, 
 and last, the adventures of a French soldier, Bonne- 
 ville who became a famous hunter and trapper 
 and spent three years among or beyond the Rocky 
 Mountains prior to 1835. 
 
 But he might have written all these and yet 
 would not have been in the sense that he now is, 
 our Irving, but for the Mynheers, Rip, Ichabod, 
 Sleepy Hollow, Communipan, Mannahata, Wol- 
 fert's Roost and the Dutch traditions belonging to 
 them. Here he is purely American, without an 
 imitator, for after his Knickerbocker and kindred 
 papers, who so presumptuous as to attempt to fol- 
 low ? Full of " local color," as artists say, he has 
 made that one portion of our country classic ground. 
 The Hudson River valley is so full of Irving that 
 not a traveller can pass that way without being re- 
 minded of him. 
 
WASHINGTON IRVING. 19 
 
 Next after the Salmagundi Papers (which have 
 that admirable sketch, " The Little Man in Black "), 
 he published in 1809, being then twenty-six years 
 old, that masterly piece of humorous writing, as 
 original as it is whimsical, Diedrich Knickerbock- 
 er's History of New York. It is too wordy, and 
 the humor is sometimes broad, but irresistibly 
 droll and full of merriment from beginning to end. 
 Fancy the wicked enjoyment Irving must have had 
 in describing those old Dutch worthies, like Wouter 
 Van Twiller, who " conceived every object on so 
 comprehensive a scale that he had not room in his 
 head to turn it over and examine both sides of it, 
 so that he always remained in doubt, merely in 
 consequence of the magnitude of his ideas," who 
 had lived in the world for years " without feeling 
 the least curiosity to know whether the sun revolved 
 round it, or it round the sun." Over the queer 
 doings and thunderings, the rollicking life of those 
 smoking, eating, drinking, dozing Dutch founders 
 of New Amsterdam Sir Walter Scott said he laughed 
 till his sides ached. 
 
 Ten years later came into print the first part of 
 
20 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 The Sketch-Book^ made up of refined essays, which 
 at once brought him fame in England, but " floated," 
 as one writer says, by "' Rip Van Winkle," and 
 "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." He further says 
 that if in the changes that may come " the bulk of 
 Irving's works shall go out of print, a volume made 
 up of his Knickerbocker history and the legends 
 relating to the region of New York and the Hud- 
 son would survive as long as anything that has 
 been produced in this country." 
 
 For aught we know, that story of Rip is, in some 
 form, as old as the world ; for similar traditions of 
 long sleep and awakening to strangest of surprises 
 are in oriental and in classic literature and may be in 
 the folk-lore of all nations — but what a use he made, 
 of it ! And you know how Joe Jefferson has person- 
 ated the character — I hardly dare venture to guess 
 how many times. Several years after the death of 
 Irving, it was dramatized by Dion Boucicault, who 
 said to the actor, " I would prefer to start him in 
 the play as a young scamp — thoughtless, gay, just 
 such a curly-headed fellow as all the village girls 
 would love and the children and dogs would run 
 
WASHINGTON IRVING. 21 
 
 after ; " and he did, though at first Jefferson " threw 
 up his hands in despair " at the new idea. Boucicault 
 did not call it much of a literary production and 
 said when it was done, " It is a poor thing, Joe." 
 He replied, "Well, it is good enough for me." 
 And it was a hit. What houses have laughed and 
 wept over it, and how many hearts have been 
 thrilled by that one question, " Are we so soon for- 
 got when we are gone ? " 
 
 Before Washington Irving we had no American 
 literature ; writers, it is true, but he was the first 
 to make it known abroad if he may not indeed be 
 said to have begun to create it. His style had 
 a quality which at once commanded attention. 
 To see in what that literary excellence consisted 
 let us take at random a passage out of Rip Van 
 Winkle ; this : 
 
 In a long ramble of the kind, on a fine autumnal day, Rip 
 had unconsciously scrambled to one of the highest parts of 
 the Kaatskill mountains. He was after his favourite sport of 
 squirrel-shooting, and the still solitudes had echoed and re- 
 echoed with the reports of his gun. Panting and fatigued, 
 he threw himself, late in the afternoon, on a green knoll cov- 
 
22 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 ered with mountain herbage, that crowned the brow of a 
 precipice. From an opening between the trees, he could 
 overlook all the lower country for many a mile of rich wood- 
 land. He saw at a distance the lordly Hudson, far, far be- 
 low him, moving on its silent but majestic course, with the 
 reflection of a purple cloud, or the sail of a lagging bark, 
 here and there sleeping on its glossy bosom, and at last los- 
 ing itself in the blue highlands. 
 
 It is a bit of simple description, nothing more, 
 but it tells a great deal in few words and fitting. 
 Take it apart, analyze it, define the words, mark 
 well the construction and relations, and see if it 
 could be improved, if anything could be spared. 
 It looks like an easy thing to do to write in that 
 style, but try it, and you will find that you are 
 baffled, that there is a subtle something which will 
 elude you ; the words and sentences will, under 
 your hand, become provokingly unmanageable ; 
 you will find it exceedingly difficult to say just 
 what you wish to in just the right words, no others, 
 no more, and no less. 
 
 There is a fitness, grace, dignity, refinement and 
 elegance about the style of Washington Irving 
 
WASHINGTON IRVING, 23 
 
 which have always been recognized and admired. 
 It is true that it lacks in nerve and virile force when 
 brought into comparison with some modern writers. 
 One page of Carlyle has more brawn and muscle, 
 more " attack " in it, so to speak, than the longest 
 essay that Irving ever wrote ; nevertheless, it is 
 not without power of its own — as in Bryant's 
 highly finished verse, the polishing has not worn it 
 away to insipidity ; no one feels the lack of vigor, 
 and all do feel its charm. It is the language of a 
 cultivated gentleman whose habit of thought was 
 that of a gentleman, of one accustomed to think in 
 pure, good English as well as speak and write it — 
 indeed the latter would follow as a matter of course. 
 In 1835 the North American Review pronounced 
 him "the best living writer of English prose." 
 
 You will notice another thing, and that is that 
 he likes to leave a pleasant impression ; unlike 
 some authors, who make you uncomfortable, he 
 1 pleases and entertains. Yet he was never sanguine 
 about the result of his writing, being so sensitive 
 that a word of adverse criticism " upset " him for 
 days \ he was always inclined to depreciate himself, 
 
24 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 was capricious about his fits of working, and had 
 long periods of feeling incompetent to do anything. 
 When The Sketch-Book came into print, it met with 
 such success that he was fairly overpowered and 
 was afraid he could never do so well again ; and 
 yet that was almost at the beginning of his literary 
 career, and besides all the books named above, he 
 afterwards wrote of the essay-ish or story kind. 
 The Talcs of a Traveller, Wolf erf s Roost, Abbotsford 
 and Newstead Abbey, the collection called Crayon 
 Miscellany, and those flattering impressions of Eng- 
 lish life in a country home, Bracebridge Hall, told 
 in a manner which constantly reminds one of Addi- 
 son and the Sir Roger de Coverley papers. 
 
 Washington Irving was born in New York City, 
 April 3, 1783, and as a boy is described as "hand- 
 some, tender-hearted, truthful, susceptible," a 
 " dawdler in routine studies," but, boy-like, fond 
 of Fil^rMs Progress, Robinson Crusoe, Sinbad, 
 Orlando Furioso, and a devourer of " books of voy- 
 ages and travels," growing up so delicate that at 
 twenty-one he was sent for his health to Europe, 
 where he picked up much general information and 
 
WASHINGTON IRVING. 25 
 
 knowledge of the world, all of which came into use 
 when he began to write. He became a great 
 favorite in society, had eyes that laughed and a 
 smile which no one could resist ; and his winning 
 qualities stayed by him through life. 
 
 He was away two years, went abroad again in 
 18 15 for a short sojourn, but remained seventeen, 
 then came home to settle down as he hoped, but 
 in 1842 was appointed Minister to Spain and spent 
 the next four years at the court of Madrid. The 
 story of his life is too well known to need telling. 
 
 Home once more, and for good, with his house 
 full of nieces and other near relatives, at his " dear, 
 little Sunnyside," the Dutch stone house over-run 
 with ivy from a slip brought from fair Melrose, a 
 poet's retreat, now hallowed and historic, where 
 honored and beloved he spent his remaining years ; 
 going down now and then to New York, where 
 George William Curtis says he used to see him, a 
 " quaint figure in the little Talma cloak," with a 
 " springing step and cheery twinkle of the eye as 
 he passed along Broadway." (You will find about 
 him in one of the " Easy Chair " papers, and see 
 
26 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 how he looked in his old age with his " chirping, 
 cheery, old school air,") 
 
 He died on the 28th of November, 1859, and was 
 buried near his favorite Sleepy Hollow. 
 
 Note. — A nearly complete list of his works is as follows : 
 Salmagundi, History of New York, Sketch-Book, Bracebridge 
 Hall, Tales of aTraveller, Life of Columbus, Conquest of Gra- 
 nada, Tales of the Alhavibra, Moorish Chronicles, Legends of 
 the Conquest of Spain, Spanish Voyages, Tour on the Prairies, 
 Astoria, Adventures of Captain Bonneville, Life of Margaret 
 Davidson, Life of Goldsmith, Life of Campbell, Life of 
 Mahomet, Wolf erf s Roost, Crayon Papers, A bbotsford and New- 
 stead Abbey, Life of Washingtoji. (It is not practicable to 
 give each title with exactness, as they vary in different edi- 
 tions, and collections have been published with varying 
 titles.) Pierre M. Irving, a nephew, edited his Life and 
 Letters, and Charles Dudley Warner has lately edited a 
 Life of Washington Irving, for the "American Men of Letters " 
 Series. A sketch of " Sunnyside and its Proprietor " may be 
 found in Tuckerman's Homes of American Authors ; and, 
 finally, the " Irving Centenary Number " of The Critic gives 
 several personal reminiscences and criticisms and a bibliog- 
 raphy. Recently there has been published a luxurious book, 
 by A. E. P. Searing, with more than fifty engravings of 
 scenery, entitled The Land of Rip Van Winkle. 
 
<J. 7€<y? c-r>7 er-^:^ (J^'o c>/ 
 
II. 
 
 / 
 
 JAMES FENIMORE COOPER. 
 
 THE second writer to show to the world that 
 we in America were to have a literature of 
 our own, was the man whose name stands above. 
 Irving was just beginning to be famous when 
 Cooper began. It is a fact worth remembering, 
 too, that it v/as about the period when Walter Scott 
 was at the height of his popularity, and that this 
 new American novelist who was destined to 
 similar popularity among his own countrymen, 
 launched his first book in the same year (1820) 
 that Ivanhoe appeared. 
 
 It was from no purpose, from no following a 
 natural bent, but the result of an impulse, an un- 
 expected coming true of what was spoken in sport- 
 ive boast, that made Cooper an author. Nothing 
 
 in his past had turned him in that direction ; he 
 29 
 
30 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 was thirty years old, and having no si^ecial profes- 
 sion, had apparently settled down as a sort of gen- 
 tleman farmer, engaged in looking after his estate, 
 planting trees and living the country life he was 
 always so fond of. That this should have been 
 broken in upon the way it was, and that he should 
 have written more than thirty novels besides other 
 books during the next thirty years, were circum- 
 stances that must have seemed to him as extraor- 
 dinary as they do to us. 
 
 He happened one day to be reading to his wife 
 an English society novel, and not being pleased 
 with it, he laid it down, saying, " I believe I 
 could write a better story myself," and set to 
 work and wrote Precaution ; whether as good or not, 
 tradition does not tell, but probably quite equal to 
 any of its class — which is not saying that it is in the 
 least attractive. He had a poor opinion of it, and 
 perhaps there his authorship might have ended but 
 for some of his friends, who said as he had done 
 fairly well with a subject he knew nothing about — 
 English society — he must try his hand at some- 
 thing he was acquainted with. 
 
JAMES FENIMORE COOPER. 3 1 
 
 The result was The Spy, in which he created one 
 of his best-known characters from humble Hfe, 
 Harvey Birch, The scene where the story was 
 laid was the battle-ground of a great deal of par- 
 tisan warfare during the Revolution, and some of 
 the incidents he worked up he had heard from the 
 lips of survivors. The pictures of country life and 
 hospitality at the Westchester home were no doubt 
 true to the life ; and who can doubt, while he laughs 
 over it, that the good cheer at the grand dinner- 
 party at the Locusts had some foundation in fact "i 
 — when "the formal procession from the kitchen 
 to the parlor commenced," and Cffisar led the van, 
 supporting a turkey on the palms of his hands, the 
 servant of Captain Lawton following with a Vir- 
 ginia ham, next the valet of Colonel Wellmere 
 with fricasseed chickens and oyster patties, after 
 him the attendant of Doctor Sitgreaves with an 
 enormous tureen of soup, next another trooper with 
 a pair of roasted ducks, followed by a white ser- 
 vant boy groaning under a load of vegetables ; all 
 these things having been deposited on the table, 
 Caesar led the march back to the kitchen, soon re- 
 
32 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 turning again, at the head of the procession, con- 
 ve3'ing " whole flocks of pigeons, certain bevies of 
 quails, shoals of flat-fish, bass, and sundry wood- 
 cock ; and the third attack brought potatoes, 
 onions, beets, cold-slaw, rice, and all the other 
 minutiae of a goodly dinner." 
 
 The next subject chosen was the frontier life 
 which he had been familiar with in his childhood 
 in the valley of the Otsego, and he wrote The 
 Pioneers. It has been complained of it that the 
 descriptions clog the story, but therein, and in the 
 introduction of Natty Bumppo, lies the charm of 
 the book. Every chapter shows that it was written 
 with love and how happy he was in bringing out of 
 the past all those events and scenes of a back- 
 woodsman's life. The aspects of winter scenery, 
 the wood-chopping, the maple-sugar making, the 
 fishing and woodcraft, the hunting, and the spear- 
 ing of bass by torchlight, are some of its best 
 points ; and the free-hand touch in that wilderness 
 story was never surpassed in the later and more 
 artistic novels of the "Leather Stocking Series," 
 of which this was pioneer in fact as well as title. 
 
JAMES FEmMORE COOPER. 33 
 
 Just here you may need to be reminded that 
 Cooper was one of the first to describe natural scen- 
 ery, and mark the changes of the sylvan year ; not 
 with the fine analysis and discrimination of such 
 later writers as Thoreau and John Burroughs, but 
 with broad sweeps, which served well their purpose 
 since we were made to feel that we were there, in 
 the forest, that the freshness of the primitive wil- 
 derness was ours, the aroma of the pines and hem- 
 locks in every breath of the air, that any moment 
 a deer might bound across our path, that civiliza- 
 tion was away behind — we had left it and come 
 joyfully into this new, green, rustling, balsam- 
 scented world where Leather Stocking roamed with 
 all the freedom of Robin Hood in Sherwood For- 
 est, without Robin's outlaw doings. 
 
 No sooner had Cooper begun on this line of fic- 
 tion, than a circumstance occurred which directed 
 him into another, and he wrote a sea story. At a 
 dinner party where he was present, the conver- 
 sation turned on The Pirate of Sir Walter Scott, 
 just published, in which the eye of one skilled in 
 nautical affairs could discern some errors that none 
 
34 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR VOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 but a landsman would have fallen into. Our 
 author, who in his youth had spent a year before 
 the mast in a merchant vessel, and been midship- 
 man three years, attempted to convince the com- 
 pany that if Scott had been a seaman he could 
 have made a more effectual use of his materials ; 
 and so thinking, *' I must write one more book — 
 a sea tale — to see what can be done in that way 
 by a sailor," he said to his wife. 
 
 Thus The Pilot had its origin, with John Paul 
 Jones for the leading personage, though the true 
 hero was another of his strong characters out of 
 humble life. Long Tom Coffin of Nantucket, who 
 was born on the ocean and chose to die there, who 
 could not find his way when he was put on shore, 
 who believed it was a " rank lie " those men had 
 told him, that there " was as much arth as water 
 in the world ; " for, said he : 
 
 I've sailed with a blowing sheet months an-end without 
 falling in with as much land or rock as would answer a gull 
 
 to lay its eggs on Give me a plenty of sea-room 
 
 and good canvas, where there is no occasion for pilots at 
 all, sir. For my part, I was born on board a chibacco-man, 
 
JAMES FENIMORE COOPER. 35 
 
 and never could see the use of more land than here and 
 there a small island to raise a few vegetables and to dry your 
 fish on. 
 
 Cooper meant to have "resuscitated" him in 
 later stories, as he did Natty Bumppo ; but it is 
 perhajDs quite as well that our last look of the sim- 
 ple-hearted old cockswain was on the morning 
 after that night of terror, when he went down, alone, 
 with the vessel he loved so well, sinking with the 
 wreck of the Ariel in the overwhelming sea. In 
 the later sea-stories, of more or less excellence, 
 more skilfully constructed, he never surpassed in 
 thrilling power two or three scenes in this. 
 
 In the succession of novels, he varied from land 
 to ocean, the sea-stories coming along at intervals, 
 being written at different places. The Red Rover 
 came into life at a little hamlet near Paris (during 
 a long residence of himself and family in Europe ), 
 whence his imagination transported him to the 
 scene of the opening chapters, Newport, Rhode 
 Island, where we make the acquaintance of the 
 vessels and men who are to be concerned in those 
 exciting events, pursuit, sea-fight, wreck, height- 
 
2,6 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 ened by the terrors of a tornado — so rapid, so 
 vivid, so well managed that we half incline to place 
 it second in merit. T/ie Water Witch, written two 
 years later, has a jaunty, foreign air, and can more 
 properly be called a romance. The Wi?ig and 
 Wing was a favorite with him, though just why one 
 can hardly see ; the vessel is a French privateer in 
 the Mediterranean, and the sailors and other char- 
 acters are of several nationalities, chief among 
 them Ithuel Bolt, one of the New Englanders 
 whom Cooper had little love for, usually making 
 them hypocrites, or coarse and vulgar. In the same 
 year with the last, was written The Two Admirals, 
 one of the most spirited, narrating the evolutions 
 of fleets instead of single ships. 
 
 He composed and wrote rapidly, and no sooner 
 was one olif his hands than he planned another, 
 sometimes carrying along two together, as in the 
 case oi Jack Tier and The Crater, neither of which 
 ranks with his best, while both have a good deal 
 of power in certain chapters and keep their inter- 
 est nearly to the end. The time of the first is the 
 Mexican War, and the action takes place near the 
 
JAMES FENIMORE COOPER. 37 
 
 Dry Tortugas and neighboring reefs ; thus Cooper 
 takes advantage of many localities, and uses mu- 
 tiny, abandonment, all thrilling episodes on board 
 ship and war of elements, and puts a seaman's 
 knowledge and resources to severest test. There 
 is not one of the sea-stories without brilliant and 
 commanding passages. In Jack Tier is drawn with 
 a bold hand one type of captain, that cruel, coarse 
 " old sea-dog, Stephen Spike, skipper of the Molly 
 Swash,'" and the escape from the sharks, the oc- 
 currences at the lighthouse and the firing at the 
 supposed ghost of the man Spike had abandoned 
 to his fate are in the author's best manner. As 
 for T7ie Crater it is like Jules Verne in preposterous 
 improbability, but the details of life there and at 
 Rancocus Island are Robinson Crusoe-ish in>their 
 fascination. 
 
 Another which tells how The Sea Lions, two ships 
 of the same name, go down to the southern seas 
 in search of seals, has some strong chapters where 
 the men are ice-bound and experience the awful 
 rigors of an antarctic winter ; and probably no 
 such picture of the appalling desolation of Cape 
 
38 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 Plorn and the loneliness of the infinite ocean can 
 be found in any other writing : 
 
 Directly ahead of the schooner rose a sort of pyramid of 
 broken rocks, which occupying a small island stood isolated 
 in a measure, and some distance in advance o£ other and 
 equally ragged ranges of mountains, which belonged also to 
 islands detached from the mainland thousands of years be- 
 fore, under some violent convulsion of nature 
 
 " You know the spot, do you, Stephen ? " demanded Bos- 
 well Gardner, with interest. 
 
 " Yes, sir, there's no mistake. That's the Horn. Eleven 
 times have I doubled it, and this is the third time that I've 
 been so close in as to get a fair sight of it. Once I went in- 
 side as I've told you, sir." 
 
 " I have doubled it six times myself," said Gardner, " but 
 never saw it before. Most navigators give it a wide berth. 
 'Tis said to be the stormiest place on the known earth." 
 
 The men had climbed it, and saw the limitless of world 
 water : — 
 
 The earth probably does not contain a more remarkable 
 sentinel than this pyramid on which our hero had now taken 
 his station. There it stood, actually the Ultima Thule of this 
 vast continent. . . . The eye saw to the right, the Pa- 
 cific ; in front was the Southern or Antarctic ocean, and to 
 the left was the great Atlantic. 
 
JAMES FENIMORE COOPER. 39 
 
 True or imaginar}', Cooper never drew a more 
 vivid picture than in that thirteenth chapter, of 
 which a few extracts give only a faint idea. 
 
 Afloat and Ashore ?ig2an takes him on the sea ; this, 
 his first book in autobiographic form, leaves the 
 hero drowning, but the sequel, Miles WalUngford, 
 picks him *up. Satanstoe, also an autobiography, 
 has a sequel, The Chainbearcr. The four have 
 much to do with colonial life in New York ; doubt- 
 less " Clawbonny," the home of Miles, is a fair 
 representation, with its one-story, gabled stone 
 house, " to which had been added until the whole 
 structure got to resemble a cluster of cottages 
 thrown together without the least attention to 
 order or regularity," orchards, meadows, ploughed 
 fields all around, barns, granaries of solid stone, 
 a comfortable, cosey country place. Lucy Hard- 
 ing in the two stories, and Anneke Mordaunt in 
 Satanstoe, are Cooper's most clearly defined hero- 
 ines. Usually they are so vague and tame there 
 is nothing to remember them by ; there is hardly 
 so much stamina in them all as would furnish one 
 Jane Eyre, or Jeanie Deans, or Dinah Morris. 
 
40 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 You cannot even tell in what story Alice was, or 
 what Cora did, or keep Ellen separate in your 
 mind from Elizabeth or Mabel. They are lovely, 
 or they would not be heroines, and for the same 
 reason they are loved ; they journey into the wil- 
 derness and have adventures, but the pattern is 
 much the same wherever found. 
 
 Satanstoe is a neck of land, a farm, the home of 
 the Littlepage family, from which the young heir 
 goes forth, seeing the word up towards the frontier, 
 Albany way, at a period of which Mrs. Grant wrote 
 in her Afnerican Lady, which Cooper often refers to 
 and would have advised one to take in collateral 
 reading, as he would Parkman's Montcalm and 
 Wolfe, if it had then been written. In this spirited 
 and fine novel, the heir, Corny, sees Dutch life, has 
 experiences in Albany, goes coasting in the streets 
 and engages in the mad pranks of the young men, 
 makes the acquaintance of that vigorously drawn 
 roysterer, Guert Ten Eyck, and is one of the party 
 who have the sleighride on the Hudson on the eve 
 when the ice is breaking up — one of the most 
 curdling passages in modern fiction. The Chain- 
 
JAMES FENIMORE COOPER. 41 
 
 bearer continues the narrative, with less spirit, how- 
 ever, till you come to the episode of the squatters, 
 Thousandacres, his gaunt wife, his half-savage 
 sons and the girl, Lowina, which is drawn with a 
 masterly hand. 
 
 It is not practicable in one short paper to run 
 
 OTSEGO HALL. — FROM DRAWING BY MISS COOPER. 
 
 over the whole of Cooper's novels. He was a very 
 uneven writer ; a few of the books are poor and 
 tiresome, others, like The Wept of Wish-ton- Wish and 
 Wyandotte, are of medium quality, while certain of 
 the sea-stories and the Leather-Stocking Tales are 
 of superlative excellence. These need no exposi- 
 
42 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 tion, no commendation. He was master of that 
 kind of fiction which owes its interest to incident 
 and adventures ; swift in movement, picturesque 
 in treatment. How fresh and exhilarating after 
 the staple novels of mediaeval life, castles, knight- 
 errantry, kings and courts, society in foreign capi- 
 tals, artificiality, must have been The Pioneers and 
 those that followed in the series ! He had created 
 a new kind of romance. These stories of life on the 
 frontier, of the backwoodsmen, Indians, the wilder- 
 ness, were a novelty. We have to thank him for 
 and give him the honor of the true American novel 
 in literature ; and at this late day no one need feel 
 called upon to find fault with him for not being 
 artistic, or for not developing character. Later 
 writers may and do excel in those respects, but we 
 have only one Cooper, and his best books hold the 
 ground, always popular with a large class. 
 
 The question has been asked if he really knew 
 the man, "Natty Bumppo." It does not matter. 
 Was he real ? Every schoolboy believes in him, al- 
 most from the moment when he appears, standing 
 six feet in his stockings, tall, wiry, sandy-haired. 
 
JAMES FENIMORE COOPER. 43 
 
 with gray eyes under shaggy brows, in fox-skin 
 cap, in coat and leggings and moccasons of deer- 
 skin, with leathern pouch, powder horn, rifle, and 
 the old hound, Hector. He refuses to be made a 
 myth of. Leather Stocking has a foothold on the 
 soil, and he will keep it. 
 
 The author had an intimate fondness for him. 
 Clearly to Cooper he was real. See how careful a 
 study he makes of his character in the ninth chap- 
 ter of The Pathfinder; if it had been George Wash- 
 ington, he would not have done it more faithfully ; 
 and in Home as Found Eve Effingham says : 
 
 There, near the small house that is erected over a spring 
 of delicious water, stood the hut of Natty Bumppo, once 
 known throughout all these mountains as a renowned hunter ; 
 a man who had the simplicity of a woodsman, the heroism 
 of a savage, the faith of a Christian, and the feelings of a 
 poet. A better than he, after his fashion, seldom lived. 
 
 In the preface to The Pathfinder is an explana- 
 tion of the order in which the five stories of The 
 Leather Stocking series naturally come. The 
 latest of Cooper's critics, Prof. Lounsbury, says : 
 
44 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOXTNG FOLKS. 
 
 " The life of Leather Stocking was now a com- 
 plete drama in five acts ; beginning with the first 
 war-path in The Deerslayer, followed by his career 
 of activity and love in The Last of the Mohicans 
 and The Pathfinder^ and his old age and death in 
 The Pioneers and The Prairie." 
 
 Of Cooper's Indians, he says : 
 
 " But whether his representation be true or false, 
 it has from that time to this profoundly affected pub- 
 lic opinion. Throughout the whole civilized world 
 the conception of the Indian character as Cooper 
 drew it in The Last of the Mohicans, and further elab- 
 orated it in the later Leather-Stocking Tales, has 
 taken permanent hold of the imaginations of men," 
 
 For yourselves, you must bring your own judg- 
 ment to bear on the question after you have read 
 The Conspiracy of Pontiac, and Montcalm and Wolfe 
 by Parkman — history set against romance. 
 
 From the " Introductions," by the author's 
 daughter, Susan Fenimore Cooper, in a late edition 
 of the novels, many facts about his life may be 
 gathered, and at the end are notes about the an- 
 cestral home on Otsego Lake. Especially valua- 
 
JAMES FENIMORE COOPER, 45 
 
 ble are the description and notes in The Pioneers. 
 In scenes of The Deerslayer he closely describes 
 the Otsego prior to the time when the first rude 
 settlement was begun on its banks. The rock of 
 the rendezvous is still known as Otsego Rock. In 
 the ninth and eleventh chapters of Hotne as Foimd, 
 the mountain called " The Vision " and the village 
 of Templeton ( before described in 77ie Pioneers) 
 show us the Cooper home. It is interesting to 
 trace Cooper and his pursuits in this way. 
 
 He was born in Burlington, N. J., September 15, 
 1790, and two months later the family moved up 
 into the new country near the head-waters of the 
 Susquehanna on Otsego Lake, where he spent his 
 childhood and his later years. It was the place 
 dearest on earth to him ; he loved every inch of 
 its soil, and the Lake (the Glimmerglass of his 
 novels ), was a perpetual delight to him. He en- 
 joyed a farm he had up among the hills, called the 
 " Chalet," and v/as fond of all domestic animals ; 
 had a favorite cat which sat on his shoulder while 
 he wrote, and when he visited the barn quarters 
 a whole procession of poultry, cows, oxen, horses, 
 
46 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 dogs, cats, would gather about him and follow him. 
 He died in Cooperstown, September 14, 1851. 
 The town, whose name is a memorial of him, keeps 
 a reminder of his novels in the names given to 
 picturesque spots he had already made the world 
 familiar with ; the little steamer that plies on the 
 lake is called the Natty Bumppo, and a marble 
 statue of Natty, rifle in hand and hound looking 
 up into his face, has been placed on a point over- 
 looking the cemetery where Cooper is buried. 
 
 Note. — A list of Cooper's novels is as follows : The Spy, 
 The Pioneers, The Pilot, The Last of the Mohteans, The Red 
 Rcroer, The Prairie, The Water Witch, The Pathfinder, The 
 Deerslayer, The Two Ad7nirals, The Wing-and- Wing, Afloat 
 and Ashore, Miles Wallingford, Satanstoe, The Chainbearer, 
 The Sea-Lions, The Bravo, Jack Tier, The Crater, The Wept 
 of Wish-ton-Wish, Wyandotte, Homeward Botind, Home as 
 Found, Lionel Lincoln, The Headstnan, Mercedes of Castile, 
 The Heidenmauer, The Red-Skins, The Manikins, Precaution, 
 The Oak Openings, The Ways of the Hour. The six last 
 named are poor, and the four next preceding are of compari- 
 tively small value. It is better to read the best ones twice 
 than spend time on the others. He wrote several volumes 
 of travels, other miscellaneous works, and a history of the 
 navy of the United States, and biographies of distinguished 
 American naval officers. As it was his request that no 
 " authorized account of his life " be written, there is no biog- 
 raphy of importance except that in the American " Men of 
 Letters " Series, by Professor Lounsbury, which gives a fine 
 critical estimate of his writings. 
 
WILLIAM H. PRESCOTT. 
 
III. 
 
 WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT. 
 
 IF you wish to see how highly favored you are in 
 your historians, in your Macaulay and Green, 
 your Bancroft and Prescott and Palfrey and Motley 
 and Parkman, with all their richness of language, 
 their pleasant way of using incidents and power of 
 making history attractive, you need to be put on a 
 probation of Hume — a penitential one you would 
 find it — till you came to fully appreciate your priv- 
 ileges and see what you have to be thankful for. 
 
 Hume was the bane of my childhood. It was 
 early impressed upon me, enjoined upon me, that 
 I must read Hume's History of England. I must 
 forego the Ossian, the Shenstone, the Campbell, 
 the Burns, the Spectator, the Rambler, and ( saddest 
 of all ) The Scottish Chiefs, which stood, all gay in 
 scarlet morocco and gilding, or rich in russet, a 
 49 
 
50 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS, 
 
 tempting row of twenty-six volumes on the uppei* 
 shelf. Next below, sizing up, were books of the 
 stature of ChesterfieUr s Letters, Tytler, the Idler^ 
 Junius' Letters and Bennett's Letters; and then 
 that almost hateful row of nine — I doubt not they 
 are in all old-fashioned libraries in just the same 
 style of binding — in leathern covers, with a red 
 morocco strip near the top, like a bandage, for the 
 gilt-lettered title, and a green one near the bottom 
 for volume and author, part labeled " Hume," then 
 three " Smollett," and then " Bissett " — a trying 
 mystery to me was that — if the history was by 
 Hume ; but I found out later. 
 
 Dry old Hume ! If I had not known him so long 
 I should love him more. I had to begin on him at 
 ten; and can I ever forget the dreariness of the 
 "tonnage and poundage," and the wonder what it 
 could mean, and why there was so much of it.' 
 Revenues to the crown, confiscations, prorogations 
 of Parliament had some meaning that a child could 
 vaguely grasp at, but that " tonnage and poundage " 
 fairly conquered m'y faculties, swallowed up what 
 little intelligence I had. It was my refreshment, 
 
WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT. 51 
 
 my spot of green in the desert, to read the page 
 where the death of the king came in, and the names 
 of his children were given ( even they were often 
 "issue," instead of sons and daughters), Con- 
 stance, Agatha, Adela, Maud — how delicious ! I 
 luxuriated in, dreamed over, dwelt upon any kind 
 of a passage dug out of the dreariness which seemed 
 to bring anything personal, human, life-like before 
 me. That a king should have a surname, that John 
 should be called "Jackland," and Henry " Beau- 
 clerc " was a keen delight, and the first Richard 
 was the world's hero for all time for the sake of 
 that magic " Lion-hearted." And dare I say that 
 in the general aridity, the strangling of the little 
 princes, the drowning of Clarence in the butt of 
 Malmsey, and the episodes connected with Henry's 
 six wives were events to be turned to with eager 
 interest instead of the proper horror ! 
 
 It was after too much Hume that Prescott came 
 to my relief. History could be made interesting 
 it seemed ; its personages were not like the dry 
 bones of the valley ; it was practicable to marshal 
 them before one as men and women who had acta- 
 
52 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 ally lived. The work that told me this was his 
 first : the History of the R^gji of Ferdinand and 
 Isabella — a period of three important events, the 
 discovery of America, the conquest of the Moors 
 in Spain, the establishment of the Inquisition ; and 
 during their reign three celebrated personages in 
 Spanish history were actors, Columbus, Cardinal 
 Ximenes ( the great statesman ), and Gonsalvo de 
 Cordova, " the great Captain." 
 
 But instead of dwelling upon the great historical 
 works of this author, with which you surely ought 
 to have already become acquainted, let us take a 
 long look back and see why he wrote history, and 
 how he did it. After that, if you have failed to 
 read him, you will do so with keener interest from 
 knowing the difficulties he had to conquer. And 
 if haply you are familiar with those books, you will 
 enjoy them the more. 
 
 William Hickling Prescott was born in Salem, 
 Mass., May 4, 1796. You can see how naturally 
 his imagination must have helped in his work, vivi- 
 fying and brightening it, when you are told that as 
 a boy he was exceedingly susceptible to all stories 
 
WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT. 53 
 
 t)f adventure and romance, and that books of that 
 class were his favorites ; he had games where sol- 
 diers were the actors, and with one of his school- 
 mates used to have fanciful personal combats as in 
 the days of chivalry, the two having appropriated 
 for their use portions of old armor from among the 
 curiosities in the Boston Athenaeum, and they took 
 turns in telling each other interminable stories of 
 their own invention, those of Prescott being the 
 wildest and most incredible. 
 
 At fifteen he entered Harvard College, dreading 
 the examination, but he did himself great credit, 
 and on the following day wrote to his father that 
 the President sent down a dish of pears to the 
 candidates, and treated them like gentlemen, and 
 that he felt twenty pounds lighter after it was over. 
 He had not been long in college when the accident 
 occurred which destroyed the sight of one eye for- 
 ever, and before a year and a half had passed the 
 other was so badly affected that he went to stay a 
 while at the Azores for a remedy ; but growing 
 worse, was shut in a totally dark room for six weeks, 
 where he took his exercise by walking across the 
 
54 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 floor, " hundreds of miles in all," he said, and 
 amused himself by singing, always cheerful, always 
 patient, as he continued to be through his whole 
 life. 
 
 This walking, for the sake of both his physical 
 and mental well-being, one hears a good deal about 
 later; in his increasing blindness it became an 
 absolute necessity, a part of his carefully regulated 
 plan, to keep himself in condition for his work, and 
 at one time he was in the habit of walking six miles 
 a day ; at his beloved country home in Pepperell 
 there was a path worn in the sod which his feet had 
 made, and one most pathetic incident is told of 
 him when towards the close of his life he had a 
 house at Lynn, and as there was hardly a tree on 
 the place, he used to walk round and round in the 
 shade of the broad branches of a cherry-tree, " a 
 certain length of time every day, and there," says 
 his biographer, " he soon wore a path in the green- 
 sward, and so deep did it at last become, that now 
 — four years since any foot has pressed it — the 
 marks still remain, as a sad memorial of his in- 
 firmity." 
 
WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT. 55 
 
 After a visit to Europe he came home not much 
 improved in eyesight, and was obliged to give up 
 his early plans in consequence, but he deliberately 
 chose as the occupation of his life, literary work ; 
 and what do you think his memoranda for prepara- 
 tion w^as ? Though already an educated man, this 
 was the preparatory course of study he marked out: 
 
 " I. Principles of grammar, correct writing, etc ; 
 2, Compendious history of North America ; 3. Fine 
 prose-writers of English from Roger Ascham to the 
 present day, principally with reference to their 
 mode of writing — not including historians, except 
 as far as requisite for an acquaintance with style. 
 4. Latin classics one hour a day." 
 
 And "he studied as if he had been a schoolboy," 
 Blair's Rhetoric, Murray's Grammar, and "the 
 prefatory matter of Johnson's Dictionary' for the 
 grammatical portion of his task," and then " took 
 up the series of good English writers, studying 
 enough of each to get an idea of his style and gen- 
 eral characteristics," and so for nearly one year 
 occupied himself ; which I call your attention to in 
 order to show you how he began with the elements, 
 
56 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 and with what thoroughness he fitted himself for 
 future work. A study of Prescott's painstaking, 
 his systematic industry, and discipline of himself, 
 is well worth the while of any young person, and is 
 calculated to reprove certain flippant and super- 
 ficial ideas about " getting an education " which 
 are too common. In his own person he exalted 
 the task-work of learning and made it heroic, while 
 his simple earnestness and teachableness, like those 
 of a child, throw a great charm around this phase 
 of his life. Prescott the man, in his study, strug- 
 gling with his life-long infirmity, calling himself to 
 account for the least ill-use of his time and powers, 
 always serene, master of himself — Prescott as the 
 man is even greater than the historian. 
 
 After his year of English, he spent one in a se- 
 rious study of French literature, and in the third 
 he began Italian ; next he became interested in 
 Spanish, and says in a letter to Bancroft that he 
 is "battling with it," but doubts if "there are 
 many valuable things that the Key of Knowledge 
 will unlock in that language," never dreaming 
 of the career which that very language was to open 
 
WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT. 57 
 
 to him. Having eventually decided upon histori- 
 cal composition he deliberated long upon the sub- 
 ject, and made this note : " I subscribe to the 
 history of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella. 
 January 19th, 1826 ; " and beneath, years after, he 
 wrote : " A fortunate choice. May, 1847." 
 
 He made a list of several hundred volumes to 
 be read or consulted ; and with regard to his par- 
 tial blindness, he writes : " What I can't read may 
 be read to me. I will secure what I can of the 
 foreign tongues, and leave the English to my sec- 
 retary. When I can't get six, get four hours a day. 
 . . I must confine myself to what exclusively and 
 directly concerns it [my subject] . . I must make 
 memoranda accurate and brief of every book I 
 read for this object." 
 
 He thought that " travelling at this lame gait," 
 he might yet hope in five or six years to reach the 
 goal ; " but it took twice that time. Of one of his 
 secretaries, he writes to a friend : 
 
 " My excellent reader and present scribe reads 
 to me Spanish with a true Castilian accent two 
 hours a day without understanding a word of it. 
 
58 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 What do you think of this for the temperature of 
 the dog-days ? And which would you rather be, the 
 reader or the readee?" 
 
 What a prodigious power of memory and mental 
 assimilation that he could "digest while sitting 
 alone in his study the material of four hours' read- 
 ing which he had been listening to; " more wonder- 
 ful stili. that he could think over a mass of matter 
 and compose in his memory, carrying along what 
 would fill fifty or sixty pages of printed text, keep- 
 i 4 it for several days, running it over and over, 
 r «e going over in his mind a single chapter of 
 One of his histories sixteen times, to be entirely 
 satisfied with its composition ! 
 
 For the first chapter of Ferdinand and Isabella, 
 he was three months reading and taking notes. 
 When you think of such preparation, supplemented 
 by such mental labor, will you not read that his- 
 tory with reverence for the tireless spirit, the pa- 
 tient hand of the author? When it was com- 
 pleted he calculated that he had spent on it ten of 
 the best years of his life, but it had been, he says, 
 " a continual source of pleasure," with all its dis- 
 
WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT. 59 
 
 advantages, and this little record reads : " There 
 is no happiness so great as that of a permanent 
 and lively interest in some intellectual labor;" 
 but he had the elements for enjoyment in himself, 
 in his well-regulated spirit, his learning, his sunny 
 temperament, his affability towards others. One 
 of his friends said, " He could be happy in more 
 ways, and more happy in any one of them, than 
 any other person I have ever known." 
 
 As a specimen of his style, here is the descrip- 
 tion of the future queen, the patroness of Colum- 
 bus, as she was at nineteen, the time of her marriage 
 with her cousin Ferdinand — that event which 
 united the kingdoms of Aragon and Castile : 
 
 Isabella was a year older than her lover. In stature she 
 was somewhat above the middle size. Her complexion was 
 fair ; her hair of a bright chestnut color inclining to red ; 
 and her mild blue eye beamed with intelligence and sensi- 
 bility. She was exceedingly beautiful : " the handsomest 
 lady," said one of her household, " whom I ever beheld, and 
 the most gracious in her manners." The portrait, still ex- 
 isting of her in the royal palace, is conspicuous for an open 
 symmetry of features, indicative of the natural serenity of 
 temper, and that beautiful harmony of intellectual and moral 
 
6o PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 qualities, which most distinguished her. She was dignified 
 in her demeanor, and modest even to a degree of reserve. 
 She spoke the Castilian language with more than usual ele- 
 gance ; and early imbibed a relish for letters, in which she 
 was superior to Ferdinand, whose education in this particu- 
 lar seems to have been neglected. 
 
 This you will see is a highly elaborated, a carefully 
 considered style ; but in his next work, the History 
 of The Conquest of Mexico, it becomes, as the critics 
 of that day were not slow to notice, " richer, freer, 
 more animated and graceful." This second work, 
 which he began after a little rest, naturally came 
 easier and was more speedily brought to a close, 
 having been finished in about four years. He had 
 by this time become accustomed to historical com- 
 position, had more confidence in himself, and was 
 able to break away from any arbitrary restrictions 
 which had almost unconsciously influenced him. 
 He says of this period : " I wrote with much less 
 fastidiousness and elaboration. Yet I rarely wrote 
 without revolving the chapter half a dozen times in 
 my mind. But I did not podder over particulai? 
 phrases." 
 
WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT. 6 1 
 
 The Co7iqiiest of Mexico is a far more absorbing 
 work ; the subject was a grand one, the situations 
 were often highly romantic, as often tragic. What 
 conditions for poem or story in some of the adven- 
 tures, as of the young prince who saw his father 
 beheaded while he himself was concealed in the 
 branches of a tree overhead ! His vicissitudes 
 and perils equal in interest those of Alfred of Eng- 
 land, or Charles II., or the "Young Chevalier;" 
 for instance, one day while playing ball in the 
 court-yard of his own palace, a party of soldiers 
 came with orders to kill him on the spot ; the boy 
 invited them into the palace, and while they were 
 feasting, he passed into the next saloon through 
 a passage, still keeping within their sight until his 
 attendants by flinging spices and aromatics upon 
 a burning censer in the ante-room raised such a 
 cloud of incense as hid him from their view, and 
 when it had passed off he was gone, having escaped 
 by a secret passage which led to some subterranean 
 apartment. 
 
 "And now," says Prescott, on February 3, 1844, 
 " now I propose to break ground on ' Peru.' I 
 
02 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 shall work the mine, however, at my leisure ; " but 
 in 1847, it "^^s ready for the public, that most 
 fascinating of all his books (to young readers at 
 least), the History of the Conquest of Peru. When 
 I presume to speak thus for the younger a>mong 
 his admirers, it is from my own experience. Never 
 had anything been to me so attractive. How sug- 
 gestive of some grand looking-off place in the world 
 of knowledge, as well as the natural world, was 
 this passage about the mountain-chains of South 
 America ! 
 
 Arranged sometimes in a single line, though more fre- 
 quently in two or three lines running parallel or obliquely to 
 each other, they seem to the voyager on the ocean but one 
 continuous chain ; while the huge volcanoes, which to the 
 inhabitants of the table-land, look like solitary and independ- 
 ent masses, appear to him only like so many peaks of the 
 vast and magnificent range. So immense is the scale on 
 which Nature works in these regions that it is only when 
 viewed from a great distance, that the spectator can, in any 
 degree, comprehend the relation of the several parts to the 
 stupendous whole. 
 
 It seemed as if the author himself entered with 
 unusual zest upon the manners and customs, the 
 
WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT. 63 
 
 handiwork and character of the Peruvians ; and 
 intensely interesting are lais accounts of their epicu- 
 rean sense of luxury in ornament ; the bridges of 
 twisted osiers swaying to every motion where they 
 spanned high in air, from cliliE to cliff, the darkly 
 rushing streams; the perfect government of the 
 Incas; the systematic arrangement and regula- 
 tion of everything throughout the vast empire ; 
 the post communication ; the sisterhood of " The 
 Virgins of the Sun " — it was all new, graphically 
 told, enchaining the attention from first to last. But 
 dark and red with carnage was the history after 
 Francisco Pizarro set his foot in the peaceful land, 
 horrible and sickening, but you will be swept along 
 by it as by irresistible destiny till you see the last 
 of the Incas strangled like a vile criminal and the 
 Pizarros one by one laid in their bloody graves ; 
 and when all is done, lo ! it is not fiction you have 
 been spending your sympathy and your tears over, 
 but history, as a master-hand can conjure it up 
 and fix it on the printed page. 
 
 The last undertaking of Prescott was the His- 
 tory of Philip the Second. The Spanish subjects 
 
64 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 Still held their power over him ; see how he writes 
 to Lady Lyell : " If I should go to heaven when I 
 quit this dirty ball, I shall find many acquaintances 
 there, and some of them very respectable, of the 
 olden time. . . . Don't you think I should have a 
 kindly greeting from good Isabella ? . . But there 
 is one that I am sure will owe me a grudge, and 
 that is the very man I have been making two big 
 volumes upon. With all my good-nature I can't 
 wash him even into the darkest French gray. He 
 is black and all black." 
 
 That work he never completed : on the twenty- 
 eighth of January, 1859, he passed from this life. 
 He had expressed a wish that before his burial, 
 his dead body might be placed in the library where 
 he had spent so many studious and happy hours, 
 and there allowed to remain for a time ; and it 
 was done. 
 
 Dead he lay among his books, 
 
 in the silent presence of the great host whose 
 thoughts had been such joy and strength and 
 inspiration to him ; " in unmoved, inaccessible 
 
WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT. 65 
 
 peace ; and the lettered dead of all ages and 
 climes and countries collected there seemed to 
 look down upon him in their earthly and passion- 
 less immortality, and claim that his name should 
 hereafter be imperishably associated with theirs." 
 
 Note. — His principal works are History of the Reign of 
 Mrdinand and Isabella, Conqtiest of Mexico, Conquest of 
 Peru, History of Philip the Second. His biography was writ- 
 ten by George Ticknor. You will find that the paths of 
 Irving, Prescott and Motley sometimes crossed one another. 
 Irving at one time contemplated writing the History of 
 the Conquest of Mexico, but graciously gave it up when he 
 learned of Prescott's intention ; and under similar circum- 
 stances Motley courteously gave up Philip the Second. The 
 particulars of the former case are to be found in the life of 
 Irving by his nephew ; of the latter in Ticknor's biography 
 of Prescott, chap, xx- 
 
RALPH w.i LOG EMERSON. — Prom the bust by Mihnore. 
 
IV. 
 
 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 T AM curious to know," you say, " how we 
 -■• young folks must go to work to become in- 
 terested in the writings of Emerson." 
 
 But why " go to work " at all ? You need not 
 trouble yourself about his mysticism, or his theol- 
 ogy, or try to know what "Transcendentalism" 
 is, or seek to find out the deep meaning of some of 
 his essays and poems. Let those matters go wholly, 
 or till mature years and judgment qualify you for 
 the investigation. Meanwhile, let Emerson speak 
 to you for himself, in words you will find it easy 
 enough to understand. 
 
 A sweeter, serener soul than his it were hard to 
 find ; he taught cheerfulness, courage, steadfast-^ 
 ness ; his books are full of golden keys to unlock 
 
 difficulties ; there are certain essays which it 
 69 
 
70 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 would be worth your while to have always at 
 hand so abounding are they in helps, such inspir- 
 ation is in them. He has a power unsurpassed of 
 crystallizing a thought; there it stands, finished 
 and entire in one of his short sentences. Just a 
 word about that style of his, which a certain critic 
 said was made up of one short sentence and then 
 another, and which Emerson himself said he " got 
 by striking out," being acquired by a succession 
 of the most careful winnowings till everything but 
 the wheat, and good sound kernels at that, had 
 blown away. You will observe as you become 
 acquainted with his writings that he produced no 
 one great work, no masterpiece standing by itself, 
 but in general papers made up of detached 
 thoughts which do not lose much by being taken 
 away from their surroundings. 
 
 Emerson's favorite form of writing was, as you 
 are aware, the essay; not of the picturesque, 
 sketchy, half-narrative kind you are familiar with 
 in Irving's Sketch Book and other volumes of 
 his, but condensed, epigrammatic, crammed with 
 thought. 
 
RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 7 1 
 
 His first series (published in 1841, and known 
 as Assays, First Series) contains twelve, from 
 whicli select for your reading, those on " History," 
 " Friendship " and " Heroism." What an eye- 
 opener you will find that first one ! What enjoy- 
 ment you will have in the grand thoughts of Em- 
 erson — thoughts so crystal-clear that it would be 
 an affront to your understanding to presume upon 
 interpreting them. You will feel your horizon 
 widen, and that you, too, are helping to make his- 
 tory ; that " what Plato has thought " you may 
 think, and " what has befallen any man " you can 
 understand. 
 
 Read the one on " Friendship " for the sake of 
 the exalted place he gives to that relation, and to 
 see how fine and pure, how noble and comforting 
 it may become when his two chief elements go 
 into its composition — truth and tenderness. 
 
 For his nicety in defining a quality, which he 
 possessed in affluent measure, read " Heroism," 
 and see in what that special virtue consists, and 
 what it has stood for in all time. 
 
 He says : 
 
72 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 There is somewhat in great actions, which does not allow 
 us to go behind them. . . . Heroism is an obedience 
 to a secret impulse of an individual's character. ... It 
 speaks the truth, and it is just, generous, hospitable, tem- 
 perate. . . . it is of an undaunted boldness, and of a 
 fortitude not to be wearied out. . . . If we dilate in be- 
 holding the Greek energy, the Roman pride, it is that we 
 are already domesticating the same sentiment. Let us find 
 room for the great guest in our small house. . . . That 
 country is the fairest, which is inhabited by the noblest 
 minds. The pictures which fill the imagination in reading the 
 actions of Pericles, Xenophon, Columbus, Bayard, Sidney, 
 Hampden, teach us how needlessly mean our life is, that we, 
 by the depth of our living, should deck it with more than 
 regal or national splendor, and act on principles that should 
 interest man and nature in the length of our days. 
 
 And finally, I must quote one line on heroism 
 which deserves to stand by itself : 
 
 The day never shines in which this element may not 
 work. 
 
 The next volume, entitled Assays, Second Series 
 (published in 1844), has nine subjects. You 
 should read " The Poet " to learn what his defini- 
 
RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 73 
 
 tion is of a poet, of genius, of imagination, and 
 how poems came to be written. Read " Charac- 
 ter " — pausing over that fifth paragraph, where 
 he says : 
 
 The reason why we feel one man's presence, and do not 
 feel another's, is as simple as gravity. Truth is the summit 
 of being ; justice is the application of it to affairs. All in- 
 dividuals stand in a scale, according to the purity of this 
 element in them. 
 « 
 
 Read " Manners " (but it is not so fine as the 
 
 essay on " Behavior," to which we come in the 
 next volume, where you are told that a beautiful 
 behavior "is the finest of the fine arts"); and 
 read " Nature," for the sake of some delicious 
 passages. 
 
 In i860 appeared the third volume of this char- 
 acter, with the title, Conduct of Life, numbering 
 nine essays, the best of which for you are " Power," 
 "Wealth," "Culture," "Behavior," "Considera- 
 tions by the Way," and " Beauty." 
 
 In "Power" are such thought-quickening sen- 
 tences as these : 
 
74 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 There is always room for a man of force, and he makes 
 room for many. . . . Concentration is the secret of 
 strength. ... in all management of human affairs. . 
 
 . . In human action, against the spasm of energy, we 
 offset the continuity of drill. . . . Practice is nine 
 tenths. 
 
 Even to such an unlikely theme as " Wealth " he 
 can bring his golden truths ; thus : ' 
 
 Do your work, respecting the excellence of the work, and 
 not its acceptableness. . . . Nothing isJaeneath you, if 
 it is in the direction of your life. 
 
 On *' Behavior," courtesy, manners, he can 
 never say enough — away back in an earlier paper 
 is this crystal : 
 
 The whole of heraldry and chivalry is in courtesy. A man 
 of fine manners shall pronounce your name with all the 
 ornament that titles of nobility could ever add. 
 
 And now it is : 
 
 Manners are the happy way of doing things. . . . No 
 man can resist their influence. . . . There are certain 
 manners which are learned in good society of that force, 
 
RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 75 
 
 that, if a person have them, he or she must be considered, 
 and is everywhere welcome, though without beauty, wealth, 
 or genius. ... I have seen manners that make a simi- 
 lar impression with personal beauty ; that give the light ex- 
 hilaration, and refine us like that. . . . But they must 
 be marked by fine perception, the acquaintance with real 
 beauty. . . . Then they must be inspired by the good 
 heart. There is no beautificr of complexion, or form, or be- 
 havior, like the wish to scatter joy and not pain around us. 
 
 That sentence I could not resist having in 
 italics. It deserves to be written with a diamond 
 point. The man who wrote it had the most 
 charming manner; his bearing was courtesy it- 
 self; his countenance was benignant, and so 
 radiant with inward light that one of his biogra- 
 phers, Dr. Holmes, speaks of it as "luminous." 
 None had a better right to put on paper these 
 sentiments and rules of conduct, for he knew in 
 his own life the meaning of sincerity, integrity, af- 
 fability, heroism, courtesy, culture of all that was 
 noble and sweet. He says in the next essay: 
 
 I wish that life should not be cheap, but sacred. . . . 
 Do not make life hard to any. 
 
76 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 He said it was a social crime to discourage the 
 young, and that " power dwells with cheerfulness, 
 hope puts us in a working mood." If any morbid 
 or disheartening line was ever written by Emef- 
 son, I have failed to find it. On the contrary, he 
 constantly helps one upward towards the sun- 
 shine. They were morning thoughts that were 
 his, which could front the auroral freshness of 
 the new day. Sage and seer, mystic and philoso- 
 pher though he was, he had an almost child-like 
 artlessness of nature, with an immortal youthful- 
 ness and buoyancy about him. You would have 
 found him most companionable if you could have 
 had the delight of being with him in a ramble 
 about Concord ; unspoiled and unspoilable ; lov- 
 ing beauty, seeing beauty everywhere, his imagi- 
 nation clothed even 
 
 the palpable and the familiar 
 With golden exhalations of the dawn. 
 
 You have his tenderness and child-like-ness, his 
 simplicity and acceptance of an everyday truth in 
 these lines in his exquisite poem to the Rhodora ; 
 
RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 77 
 
 Rhodora ! If the sages ask thee why 
 
 This charm is wasted on the marsh and sky, 
 
 Dear, tell them that if eyes were made for seeing, 
 
 Then beauty is its own excuse for being; 
 
 Why thou wert there, O rival of the rose ! 
 
 I never thought to ask, I never knew ; 
 
 But in my simple ignorance suppose 
 
 The self-same power that brought me there brought you. 
 
 For title of the fourth volume (published in 
 1870) he had Society and Solitude, containing twelve 
 essays, the best of which for you are " Art," " Elo- 
 quence," " Domestic Life," " Books," and, if you 
 have time for more, " Courage " and " Success." 
 
 That on " Domestic Life " gives you an insight 
 into the home-side of Emerson. He was warmly 
 attached to his own fireside and the happy circle 
 around it, as you will see in some of his letters to 
 Carlyle, where he says : 
 
 But at home I am rich, rich enough for ten brothers. My 
 wife Lidian is an incarnation of Christianity — I call her 
 Asia. . . . my mother, whitest, mildest, most conserva- 
 tive of ladies. . . . my boy a piece of love and sun- 
 shine, well worth my watching from morning till night. 
 
78 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 Again, of his little girl, of the Ellen who was 
 such a sta)^ and comfort to him in his declining 
 years : 
 
 The softest, gracef ulest little maiden alive, creeping like 
 a turtle with head erect all about the house. . . . The 
 boy has two deep wells for eyes, into which I gladly peer 
 when I am tired. 
 
 It was this loving and lovely boy of whom he 
 had to write not long after that he had " ended 
 his earthly life," and " A few weeks ago I ac- 
 counted myself a very rich man, and now the 
 poorest of all ; " in lament for whom he poured out 
 his heart in the poem called *' Threnody," which 
 is a father's fond, pathetic lingering over things 
 and places made dear by the little one who had 
 gone : 
 
 His daily haunts I well discern — 
 The poultry yard, the shed, the bam «=» 
 And every inch of garden ground 
 Paced by the blessed feet around. 
 From the roadside to the brook 
 Where into he loved to look. 
 
RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 79 
 
 Hop the meek birds where erst they ranged, 
 The wintry garden lies unchanged, 
 The brook into tlie stream runs on ; 
 But the deep-eyed boy is gone. 
 
 The last volume of essays (in 1876), is Letters 
 ajid Social Aims, numbering eleven subjects. That 
 on " Poetry and Imagination " covers a good deal 
 of ground and is worth your careful study — first 
 defining what common sense is, and then showing 
 how all mankind delight in the poetic and imagi- 
 native, it touches your own experience and un- 
 spoken thoughts. You will enjoy meditating a 
 little on his explanation of poetry as " the perpet- 
 ual endeavor to express the spirit of the thing." 
 In " Social Aims " you meet him again with a 
 message on manners, cultivation, conversation, 
 society. Hei^ is a sample of his dainty way of 
 putting things : 
 
 I think Hans Andersen's story of the cobweb cloth woven 
 so fine that it was invisible — woven for the king's garment 
 — must mean manners, which do really clothe a princely na- 
 ture. 
 
8o PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 Read "Eloquence." Read " Resources," to be 
 reminded " that this world belongs to the ener- 
 getic, that there is always a way to everything 
 desirable," that courage puts a new face on every- 
 thing ; and read " Greatness " that you may re- 
 spect yourself more, seek the best things, and live 
 for the highest good. 
 
 Thus the five volumes properly called *' Essays," 
 of which if you are to choose one for your own 
 library (supposing you can have no more), and one 
 at least you ought to have, let your choice be Con- 
 duct of Life — suggestive title! — but then, how 
 suggestive he is ! His imagination plays like 
 sheet lightning, at unexpected moments, yet how 
 much you see in a flash of it ! 
 
 You will meet with many exaggerated state- 
 ments in his writings, some things that have a 
 
 « 
 ludicrous aspect, some hard knots, some seeming 
 
 contradictions, with much that is erratic, quite out 
 of the common line Emersonian. You will be 
 stopped by thoughts which you cannot understand, 
 ~~~^nd by others that you cannot accept. But even 
 thus encumbered, the common-sense of Emerson 
 
RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 8l 
 
 will be evident enough to you — and most admir- 
 able common sense he had. He was shrewd, wise 
 and practical, as it will not have taken you till this 
 time to find out. That was one side of him — the 
 side with which you have to do. The other, the 
 transcendental, you will, as I have intimated, do 
 well to let alone. You would become bewildered, 
 lose your balance, get no good from his meaning, 
 even if you could find it. Even his best friends 
 did not always feel at home with him when he had 
 on his robes as a mystic and a " Pantheist." 
 
 You are. not to look on the above as the only 
 books of his for your reading. By no means pass 
 by English Traits, which is not a record of travel 
 or description of places after the usual manner. 
 He takes the measure of the English people ; con- 
 siders what England is — to see which country 
 well, he says, needs a hundred years. For most 
 excellent examples of condensation of thought, 
 virile and graphic, read the chapters on " Land," 
 " Race," " Ability," " Manners," " Truth," " Char- 
 acter," "Aristocracy," and "Literature." 
 
 Another volume which he evidently had keen 
 
82 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 enjoyment in writing, for he was a hero- worship- 
 per, is Representative Men, treating of certain lead- 
 ers who were either great thinkers or men of deeds : 
 namely, Plato, or the Philosopher ; Swedenborg, 
 or the Mystic ; Montaigne, or the Skeptic ; Shake- 
 speare, or the Poet; Napoleon, or the Man of 
 the World ; Goethe, or the Writer. Lectures, ad- 
 dresses, miscellanies, poems swell the amount of 
 his works to a long list, but those mentioned above 
 furnish you with ample material for all the time 
 you can now give to this author and for all that is 
 profitable for you. 
 
 It is for his manhood as well as genius that 
 Emerson deserves our reverent admiration ; for 
 his life and the thoughts he contributed to Amer- 
 ican literature belong together in no ordinary 
 sense. He did not write one thing and live 
 another ; his nature was transparent ; his heart 
 was loyal to the truth whose zealous knight he 
 was ; therefore, because a pure, aspiring and sin- 
 cere man was back of the words he uttered, those 
 words have immortal life in them. 
 
 Nowhere was he more loved and honored than 
 
RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 83 
 
 by his neighbors, in the historic town of Concord 
 which was his home for the greater part of his life. 
 He was born in Boston, May 25, 1803, but went to 
 Concord (the home of his forefathers), in 1834, and 
 there he died on the 27th of April, 1882. His 
 first dwelling-place was the old Manse so familiar 
 from Hawthorne's sketches ; afterwards he went 
 to live in the square, white house on the Lexing- 
 ton road which everybody who has ever been to 
 that old town must remember, with the pine trees 
 about it, the front-yard and garden ; an unpreten- 
 tious house with plenty of windows and a sort of 
 hospitable look, as if every passer was invited to 
 walk down the flagstones and in at the open door. 
 Sure of a welcome, it was said; and hospitality 
 ought to have been graven on its lintels, for Emer- 
 son delighted to be host to the stranger, to his 
 townsfolk, to the little children and to the young 
 people especially for whose pleasure he did so 
 much, taking his reward in the sight of beaming 
 faces ; and now, when he is lying in beautiful 
 Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, those village girls, whose 
 aspirations he quickened, to whom he was helper 
 
84 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 and friend, show their loving remembrance by 
 keeping fresh flowers on his grave. 
 
 As you know, the Concord School of Philosophy 
 devoted six or seven days to Emerson — an Emer- 
 son week — when such writers and thinkers as Mrs. 
 Howe, Elizabeth Peabody, Doctor Bartol, Doctor 
 W. T. Harris and others discussed him ; for in- 
 stance, as a poet, as an essayist, as an American, 
 considering every aspect of the man, and paying 
 tribute to his personal worth, his affability, and 
 his high-mindedness. 
 
 Note. — The principal works of Emerson are Essays 
 {First Series), Essays (Second Series), Representative Men, 
 Conduct of Life, Society and Solitude, Miscellanies, besides 
 various Lectures, Addresses, brief Biographies and other 
 papers. The Literary World for May, 1880, has a bibliogra- 
 phy and a list of writings on Emerson up to that time, and 
 the same journal for July 15, 1882, has a concordance by 
 W. S. Kennedy, furnishing a partial index to familiar pas- 
 sages in his poems. Of several biographies, that by George 
 W. Cook has been commended as being "a careful and 
 thorough analysis " of his teachings ; that by Alfred H. 
 Guernsey treats of him as philosopher and poet; Moncure 
 D. Conway wrote of " Emerson at Home and Abroad ; " 
 Alexander Ireland's is a " Biographical Sketch," and the 
 recent one by Oliver Wendell Holmes, in the " American 
 Men of Letters " Series, is genial and discriminating, a run- 
 ning biography done by the hand of a warm friend, with 
 dashes of criticism and comment, interspersed with bits out 
 of Emerson's writings. 
 
NATHA>aEL HAWTHORNE. 
 
V. 
 
 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 
 
 WE come now to an author whose writings 
 are of the finest quality known in our 
 literature. Of Hawthorne it has been said that 
 he had " a grace, a charm, a perfection of lan- 
 guage which no other American writer ever pos- 
 sessed in the same degree," and that his English 
 was " the most beautiful that ever was written." 
 
 The number of volumes he produced was small ; 
 compared with those of Cooper and of Irving how 
 brief is the list ! But all his work has a strong 
 individuality — it has the Hawthorne stamp, sign- 
 manual upon it ; and the three novels The Scarlet 
 Letter, The House of the Seven Gables and The 
 Marble Faun hold a commanding place in the lit- 
 erature of fiction. The first named (and perhaps 
 the others) will always be counted in with a se- 
 87 
 
88 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 lected number of the best novels of modern times , 
 with Les Miserables of Victor Hugo, 21ie Newcomes 
 of Thackeray, George Eliot's Adam Bede, Romola^ 
 and Middletnarch^ Charlotte Bronte's yam Eyre 
 and Villette, Scott's Ivanhoe^ Blackmore's Lorna 
 Doom, Dickens' David Copperfield, with that great 
 work of Mrs. Stowe, JJjide TottCs Cabin. 
 
 Of Hawthorne's life you must already know the 
 leading facts. He was born in Salem, Massa- 
 chusetts, July 4th, 1804. The house was 21 
 Union street. I tell you this because if you should 
 happen to be in that ancient, odd, delightful little 
 city of witch memory, you may like to go there. 
 You will find it in a narrow, prosaic street, and 
 opening right on the sidewalk — perhaps when 
 you are there you will call up in your imagination 
 a little, shy, handsome boy with wonderfully bril- 
 liant, lustrous eyes who used sometimes to sit on 
 the doorstep and look dreamily down towards the 
 shipping seen in the distance. Back of it there 
 used to be a garden where he said he *' rolled on 
 a grass-plat under an apple-tree, and picked abun- 
 dant currants." 
 
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 89 
 
 This garden extended back to Herbert street, 
 where at Number lo, is the Manning House, the 
 old family mansion of his mother, in which he 
 lived at various times ; and it is especially inter- 
 esting because there, in the "haunted chamber," 
 which was " the antechamber of his fame," he 
 says, after leaving college, " I sat myself down to 
 consider what pursuit in life I was best fit for. 
 . . . And year after year I kept on consider- 
 ing what I was fit for, and time and my destiny 
 decided that I was to be the writer that I am," 
 He had read " endlessly all sorts of good and 
 good-for-nothing books," had made a special, ar- 
 tistic study of novels, and had scribbled sketches 
 and stories, most of which he burned ; a few of 
 them, however, began to appear in magazines and 
 in the " annuals " of those days, without his name, 
 but attracting attention by the subtlety of imag- 
 ination shown in them and by their fine literary 
 workmanship ; and in 1837, when he was nearly 
 a middle-aged man, the first volume of Twice Told 
 Tales was published. He had become known as 
 a man of letters. 
 
90 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 In that " tall, ugly, old, grayish " house (these 
 are his adjectives), he lived in great seclusion, 
 taking his vi^alks at twilight, making few acquaint- 
 ances, only coming out of his " owls' nest " at 
 last when his book made him known and he was 
 compelled into society ; but in that quiet and 
 solitude he seems to have been able to discipline 
 his mind for the work before him. Those were 
 years of preparation, whether he had a conscious- 
 ness of it or not. The chamber in which he kept 
 his vigils is pointed out — a low-posted room, 
 with a beam in sight, a corner cupboard, one 
 window looking off over distant tree-tops to Mar- 
 blehead, and another down into the little back 
 garden of the house where he was born. 
 
 If you go out for a stroll about Salem, you will 
 inquire for the Town Pump ; and for the House 
 of the Seven Gables, where poor old Hepsibah 
 set out the little store of toys in the shop window, 
 and where Phoebe flitted about like a butterfly. 
 And probably some of whom you inquire will say 
 that it is that building, or that one, just as they 
 told me about Skipper Ireson's down at Marble- 
 
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. gi 
 
 head ; but that Hawthorne really had any one 
 house in mind is not certain. Tradition says he 
 had, and one in particular will be pointed out to 
 you, and you will believe it, just as I wanted to, 
 and would, and did. As for the Custom House — 
 there it is, real and tangible, with the old, decay- 
 ing Derby wharf stretching down in front. Some- 
 body will show you where Hawthorne purported 
 to discover the manuscript of The Scarlet Letter, 
 and if you ask, you will be told where you must 
 go to see the old red desk at which he wrote. 
 
 See Salem, by all means. It is the Salem of the 
 Lady Arabella Johnson whom you all have known 
 about from your childhood, of Endicott, of the 
 witches. We have a romantic foolishness about 
 some of the old world sea-towns, but this corner 
 of New England is as rich in legendary lore as 
 many beyond the ocean. And what an East 
 Indian aroma it has, as of spices and drugs 
 brought home in merchant vessels in the days 
 when the willow ware and esthetic blue china that 
 now are stored in the corner cupboards were in 
 as common use as if no value were put upon 
 
92 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 them! You know that Edmund Gorse when he 
 was over here went down for a day and wandered 
 about, and he wrote : 
 
 " I was deeply impressed with the strange sen- 
 timent of the place, and walked about the streets 
 until I was thoroughly soaked with the old Puritan 
 spirit." 
 
 Those last words may be said to represent the 
 state of Hawthorne's mind. The early traditions 
 of New England took a mighty hold on him ; 
 especially was he wrought upon by the grimness 
 and severity of Puritan life and character, and 
 from the incidents with which he was familiar he 
 evolved, by the subtle processes of his marvel- 
 lous genius, certain great moral lessons. Many 
 of his short stories might under his hand have 
 been elaborated into a novel of the length of The 
 Scarlet Letter^ if he had so willed. When you 
 read that, and those legends of his, and The 
 House of the Seven Gables, bear in mind the con- 
 scientious fidelity which he brought to his task, 
 and his intimate knowledge of time and place 
 and circumstance. Remember that Hawthorne in 
 
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 93 
 
 prose, and Whittier in poetry, have done for Puri- 
 tan New England, and for that particular comer 
 of New England, what no other writer has ever 
 done, and no coming writer can do. No more 
 can Whittier's ballads and legendary verse be 
 surpassed than can the two great novels of Haw- 
 thorne, in their imaginative quality, insight into 
 motives, and tragic power. 
 
 As for Salem — Hawthorne is as inseparable 
 from that old city as is the air that is over and 
 around it. To the Salem life belong the Tivice 
 Told Tales, some of which, like " A Rill from the 
 Town Pump," daguerreotype the very streets. 
 The Scarlet Letter had its birth there, and there 
 also belongs (though written at Lenox) The House 
 of the Seven Gables, and there was written the 
 lovely story which his children could almost re- 
 peat by heart, from hearing it read so often, " The 
 Snow Image." 
 
 If you go to Concord, so rich in its associations 
 with Emerson, Thoreau and the Alcotts, you 
 come right upon Hawthorne again. There is the 
 old Manse, to which he took his bride, the ex- 
 
94 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 quisitely lovely, pensive Sophia Peabody; there 
 the gifted, first child Una, darlingest little daugh- 
 ter, was born (you will find sweet stories about 
 this pet ** Onion " of his, in Julian Hawthorne's 
 biography of his father and mother). That house 
 is full of Hawthorne. Read in the preface to the 
 Mosses from an old Manse and in some of the 
 scraps of his " Note Books " how he lived there, 
 and how he wrote, and where, and how happy he 
 was. At Concord he found some of the material 
 of The Blithedale Romance, based, as you know, 
 upon the Brook Farm experiment of community 
 of labor. 
 
 It was at Concord that some years later on he 
 bought a house. The Wayside, next to Apple- 
 Clump (which is the Alcott home), where he wrote 
 the second Wonder Book, and later, after return- 
 ing from Europe, Our Old Home. You are aware 
 that he was seven years away from this country, 
 a part of the time as consul at Liverpool, the re- 
 mainder travelling on the continent and living in 
 Italy, and that he came home to settle down to 
 domestic comfort and literary work in this house 
 
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 95 
 
 of his own, where he built what he had always 
 longed for, a tower to write in. Failing in health 
 he started on a little journey to the White Moun- 
 tains, and died suddenly at Plymouth, New 
 Hampshire, May 19, 1864, and was buried from 
 The Wayside on the 23d, in Sleepy Hollow Cem- 
 etery, just across the path from Thoreau. 
 
 You will see that one could hardly be in Salem 
 or Concord without having him constantly in 
 mind, so vitally is he associated with these two 
 places. 
 
 Of all his books, the cheeriest, wholesomest, 
 most delightsome are the Wonder Book and Tan- 
 glcwood Tales. He wrote the first in Lenox, 
 Massachusetts, where he lived for a year or more 
 in a very frugal way, in a little red house which the 
 family called the Red Shanty, with a Tanglewood 
 back of it. Those of you who know these two 
 charming books ought to know, if you do not, 
 that there was a real Tanglewood porch, and 
 that Shadow Brook, Bold Summit, and the Hill- 
 side were real places all, and that the man who 
 went nutting and skating and sliding down hill 
 
96 PLEASANT, AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 with the children was none other than Hawthorne 
 himself, and that he was the most sunshiny, gen- 
 ial, exuberant of companions, so that one of 
 them said " there never was such a playmate in 
 all the world " ; anybody must be an enchanting 
 story-teller who would talk like this before he 
 begun a tale : 
 
 Sit down there every soul of you and be as still as so 
 many mice. At the slightest interruption, whether from 
 great naughty Primrose, little Dandelion, or any other, I 
 shall bite the story short off between my teeth, and swallow 
 the untold part. 
 
 Such delicious stories ! They belong with the 
 goodly list, by best authors, made for children's 
 delectation, like The Water Babies, At the Back of 
 the North Wind, and The King of the Golden River, 
 books which have thrown older people into a 
 " tumult of delight " and made them alraost wish 
 they were children again. Hunt up the originals 
 of the Wonder Book stories as they stand in the 
 old Greek fables, and read them along with his 
 fascinating versions. " The Golden Touch " is 
 the story of Midas ; " The Paradise of Children " 
 
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 97 
 
 is that of Pandora, and so on ; but oh ! what a 
 golden touch was Hawthorne's. Notice his mar- 
 vellous skill, and the beauty of his language as 
 you read ; see in " The Gorgon's Head " how 
 Mercury is described when he meets Perseus in 
 the solitary place ! And what could be lovelier 
 than all there is about Pegasus in " The Chi- 
 msera " ? 
 
 When you read Tlie Marble Faun you should 
 look up every thing relating to the statues and 
 architecture he describes, for example, about the 
 "Faun of Praxiteles" which Donatello resembled. 
 What a world will open to you ! What winter 
 evening's entertainment there will be ! This ro- 
 mance was written while he was living in Italy, 
 ' breathing its atmosphere, amidst pictures and 
 statues and antiquities. There was romance in 
 the daily surroundings of the Hawthorne family, 
 who had a home in a castle so big that each one 
 had three or four rooms, while more than twenty 
 were left for their joint occupancy. 
 
 The fanciful story itself is only one feature ; the 
 art criticism, the fine " points " he makes about 
 
qS pleasant authors for young folks. 
 
 old painting and sculpture have always given it a 
 high place among works of that class — far more 
 common now than when he wrote it — and taken 
 all in all, it is a fine illustration of Hawthorne's 
 vagaries and of his style. For a fine bit, dwell 
 upon that description of Miriam's studio and the 
 fountain in the court. 
 
 Everywhere in Hawthorne you find perfection 
 of finish without loss of vigor ; he is as fine as he 
 is strong, and it was so with him almost from the 
 first. When or how he acquired that gift of writing 
 no biographer can satisfactorily tell, but he had 
 the indefinable quality which we call genius. When 
 you come, some day, to understand the nice dis- 
 tinction between that and talent, you will see why 
 he takes rank with men of genius. 
 
 It has been stated again and again that his 
 manuscript had scarcely any erasures or changes, 
 and few or no italics. He had the skill of so 
 choosing and so using his words that there was no 
 need to emphasize — the thought expressed itself. 
 There was some kind of a crystallizing process in 
 his own mind that not many writers are capable 
 
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 99 
 
 of. He meditated upon his subject, forged at it, 
 hammered, wrought, finished it in his seclusion. 
 
 If you wish to see what he could do with very 
 scanty material read " The old Apple Dealer." 
 You will say that it is of no account. The man 
 did nothing, was nobody, said nothing and noth- 
 ing happened. His was a character whose pecu- 
 liarity consisted in having nothing peculiar about 
 it ; all neutral tints, all negative qualities, passive ; 
 but in the hands of Hawthorne, the old apple 
 dealer sitting in the shadow of the " Old South " 
 is made the centre of a masterly piece of work- 
 manship. I might call your attention to " The 
 Ambitious Guest," "Fancy's Show-box," "The 
 gentle Boy " (who was Hawthorne himself, accord- 
 ing to his sister-in-law. Miss Elizabeth Peabody), 
 and "The Village Uncle," where a little sweet- 
 heart of his is the figure which he sketches ; here 
 she is, the sweet Susan, taken from life : 
 
 You stood on the little bridge over the brook that runs 
 across King's Beach into the sea. It was twilight ; the 
 waves rolling in, the wind sweeping by, the crimson clouds 
 fading in the west, and the silver moon brightening above 
 
lOO PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS, 
 
 the hill ; and on the bridge were you, fluttering in the 
 breeze like a sea-bird that might skim away at your pleas- 
 ure. You seemed a daughter of the viewless wind, a crea- 
 ture of the ocean foam and the crimson light, whose merry 
 life was spent in dancing on the crests of the billows, that 
 threw up their spray to support your footsteps. As I drew 
 nearer, I fancied you akin to the race of mermaids, and 
 thought how pleasant it would be to dwell with you among 
 the quiet coves, in the shadow of the cliffs, and to roam 
 among secluded beaches of the purest sand, and when our 
 northern shores grew bleak, to haunt the islands, green and 
 lonely, far amid summer seas. And yet it gladdened me, 
 after all this nonsense, to find you nothing but a pretty 
 young girl, sadly perplexed with the rude behavior of the 
 wind about your petticoats. 
 
 That is a sample of Hawthorne's style of writing 
 at the very first, pure and limpid as water. 
 
 It is unnecessary to indicate which of his short 
 papers you should select, for you will read them 
 all. For a piece of work artistic in its complete- 
 ness, and at the same time showing the fanciful 
 turn of his mind, there is nothing that better rep- 
 resents him in small space than " David Swan " 
 — you will perhaps need to read it several times 
 to appreciate its quality. In the tales and sketches 
 
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. lOI 
 
 you will find three classes, of which his " Fire 
 Worship " furnishes one example ; a second is 
 illustrated by " Legends of the Province House," 
 and the third is something of the fantasy kind 
 which he liked to work out in a weird way, like 
 "The Artist of the Beautiful" and "Brown's 
 Wooden Image." 
 
 His novels have grewsome things in them. 
 There never could be anything more terrible in 
 its realism, more sickening in its minuteness, 
 than the eighteenth chapter of The House of the 
 Seven Gables, where the Judge is dead ; but you 
 should read it, full of horrors as it is, to see what 
 the English language is capable of in a master's 
 hand. Deeply tragic though some of the events 
 are that Hawthorne treats of, you will perceive 
 before you have gone far that he is dealing with 
 great questions of right and wrong. Robert Coll- 
 yer says that no works of fiction can be found 
 " stronger in moral fibre " than his. He does not 
 allow sin to be covered up, but there is an assert- 
 ing of conscience, an inward retribution which 
 awaits and overtakes the evil-doer. How vigi- 
 
I02 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 lantly his eye searched into motive, and what a 
 probing power he had ! It was not his habit to 
 depict characters, as Mrs. Stowe does ; but he 
 had certain problems of destiny to work out, and 
 he created human beings to be the object and 
 subject, and when they were once in his hand 
 there was no parleying with the wrong they had 
 done. It has been said that the character of 
 Arthur Dimmesdale in The Scarlet Letter is a page 
 from the Book of Judgment. . 
 
 Yet he could make some exquisite beings, and 
 has given us two lovely types of maidenhood, in 
 Phoebe and Hilda, both of whom are said to have 
 traits of his wife. In Hie House of the Seven 
 Gables you will see where the sweet little country 
 girl comes in like a sunbeam, and how by a few 
 dainty, dexterous touches she throws " a kindly 
 and hospitable smile " over the cheerless chamber 
 that Hepzibah had given her, and how she bright- 
 ens the old house, and how pretty and housewifely 
 her ways are. And let me remind you that Haw- 
 thorne used to call his wife " Phcebe," which 
 shows what favorites the name and maiden were ! 
 
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 103 
 
 But it is in Hilda in The Marble Faun we see 
 more likeness to the wife whose rare, pure face is 
 to be seen in Julian Hawthorne's biography, 
 before spoken of. If there was only space to 
 quote all, instead of this fragment : 
 
 She was pretty at all times, in our native New England 
 style, with her light brown ringlets, her delicately tinged 
 but healthful cheek, her sensitive, intelligent, yet most femi- 
 nine and kindly face. But every few moments this pretty 
 and girlish face grew beautiful and striking, as some inward 
 thought and feeling brightened, rose to the surface, and 
 then, as it were, passed out again. ... So that it really 
 seemed as if Hilda were only visible by the sunshine of her 
 soul. 
 
 Hawthorne's family life was in the sweetest, 
 tenderest atmosphere, his marriage was an ideally 
 happy one. He educated his children as far as 
 possible at home, and was very careful of his 
 little daughters. The pictures of his home are [ 
 delightful. Towards the very close, at The Way- 
 side, we have a glimpse of him reading all of 
 Scott's novels to his wife and children, and Julian 
 says: 
 
I04 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 "There was no conceivable entertainment 
 which they would not have postponed in favor of 
 this presentation of Scott through the medium of 
 Hawthorne. I have never since ventured to open 
 the Waverley Novels." 
 
 This son when a child used to wonder why his 
 father need write books. " He was a very good 
 and satisfactory father without that." Such was 
 Hawthorne, the man. 
 
 Note. — Hawthorne's most important books are (this is 
 the order for you) Grandfather''s Chair, The Wonder Book, 
 Tajiglewood Tales, The Snow Image, Tzvice Told Tales, 
 Mosses from an old Manse, Our old Home, Note Books 
 (American, English, French and Italian), The House of the 
 Seven Gables, The Scarlet Letter, The Blithedale Romance, 
 The Marble Fatin. There is A Study of Hazuthorne, by his 
 son-in-law, George P. Lathrop, a biography, Nathaniel Haw- 
 thorite and his Wife, by Julian Hawthorne, a biography by 
 James Russell Lowell in the American Men of Letters 
 Series ; and one in the English Men of Letters Series. 
 
 That by Julian will give you most about Hawthorne as a 
 man. There is also a useful Analytical Index to his works, 
 in " Little Classic " form. 
 
- '^S' 
 
 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE. 
 
VI. 
 
 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE. 
 
 YOU need no introduction to the lady whose 
 name stands there, for even if you are un- 
 acquainted with other books of hers — which is 
 not at all probable — you know Uncle Tom's Cabin 
 better than you do your spelling-book, and you 
 are on as good terms with " Topsy " as with 
 your own black cat that you named for her. Not 
 the slightest need of saying anything about a 
 book so popular all over the world, and in more 
 languages than I can enumerate ; as Dr. Holmes 
 read, at the garden-party in honor of Mrs. Stowe's 
 seventieth birthday : 
 
 Briton and Frenchman, Swede and Dane, 
 Turk, Spaniard, Tartar of Ukraine, 
 Hidalgo, Cossack, Cadi, 
 107 
 
I08 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 High Dutchman and Low Dutchman, too, 
 The Russian serf, the Polish Jew, 
 Arab, Armenian and Mantchoo 
 Would shout, " We know the lady I " 
 
 There are two other forms of her literary work, 
 showing other phases of her genius, that you are 
 now to have brought before you — her representa- 
 tions of New England life and character, as shown 
 in such books as Oldtoivn Folks, and her every- 
 day sort of wisdom, of which the House and Home 
 Papers are example. 
 
 Mrs. Stowe is a genuine New Englander, with 
 the deepest sense of Yankee humor, and the 
 most thorough appreciation of the picturesqueness 
 of old-fashioned life. If you wish to see one of 
 her most characteristic chapters and a capital 
 sample of her off-hand, ready way of writing, take 
 the opening one of The Minister's Wooing. Notice 
 the happy tact in getting started : 
 
 Mrs. Katy Scudder had invited Mrs. Brown and Mrs. 
 Jones, and Deacon Twitchel's wife to take tea with her on 
 the afternoon of June second, A. D. 17 — 
 
 When one has a story to tell, one is always puzzled which 
 
HARRIET BEECHER STOWE. 109 
 
 end of it to begin at. You have a whole corps of people to 
 introduce that yoii know and your reader doesn't ; and one 
 thing so pre-supposes another, that whichever way you turn 
 your patch-work, the figures still seem ill-arranged. The 
 small item which I have given will do as well as any other 
 to begin with, as it will certainly lead you to ask, " Pray, 
 who was Mrs. Katy Scudder ? " — and this will start me 
 systematically on my story. 
 
 By the time you have read so far, you will feel 
 sure that your author knows what she is about, 
 and that she is going to act on a principle she 
 once laid down for those who desire to become 
 writers : " First think what you want to say, 
 AND THEN SAY IT." Before you have turned the 
 second leaf, you will have become aware of another 
 thing — that that quick, bright brain of hers is 
 peopled with New England characters, of whom 
 Mrs. Katy Scudder is a representative as one 
 possessing "faculty," which is a quality indige- 
 nous to that locality. Here follows a part of 
 Mrs. Stowe's exposition of it : 
 
 Faculty is the greatest virtue, and shiftlessness the great- 
 est vice of Yankee men and women. To her who has fac- 
 
no PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 ulty nothing shall be impossible. She shall scrub floors, 
 wash, wring, bake, brew, and yet her hands shall be small 
 and white; she shall have no perceptible income, yet be 
 always handsomely dressed ; she shall have not a servant 
 in her house, — with a dairy to manage, hired men to feed, 
 a boarder or two to care for, unheard-of pickling and pre- 
 serving to do, — and yet you commonly see her every after- 
 noon sitting at her shady parlor-window behind the lilacs, 
 cool and easy, hemming muslin cap-strings, or reading the 
 last new book. She who hath faculty is never in a hurry, 
 never behind-hand. 
 
 In the same spirit here is Mrs. Katy's gospel, 
 wherein she declares 
 
 Never say there isn't time for a thing that ought to be 
 done. If a thing is necessary, why, life is long enough to 
 find a place for it. That's my doctrine. When anybody 
 tells me they can't Jind time for this or that, I don't think 
 much of 'em. 
 
 In this admirable novel, which gives an insight 
 into the theology of the day, portrays an old-style 
 divine, and, in sharp contrast, the brilliant Aaron 
 Burr, we have along the thread of the story the 
 warmest, most inviting atmosphere of neighborly 
 life, the quilting and gentle gossiping, the parties 
 
HARRIET BEECHER STOWE. Ill 
 
 in the parlor and cooking in the kitchen. It is to 
 this book that we owe the big-hearted, black ser- 
 vant (slave indeed), Candace, " Queen of Ethi- 
 opia," who, when she had her freedom given her. 
 wanted them all to understand 
 
 " dat it's my will an' pleasure to go right on doin' my work 
 jes' de same: an' missis, please, I'll allers put three eggs 
 in de crullers now ; an' I won't turn de wash-basin down in 
 de sink, but hang it jam-up on de nail ; an' I won't pick up 
 chips in a milk-pan, if I'm in ever so big a hurry." 
 
 And to The Mifiister's Wooing we owe, too, the 
 little, dapper, old-maid dressmaker. Miss Prissy 
 Dimond, as nimble with her tongue as with her 
 fingers, who had such professional pride in being 
 able to get a wonderful dress out of a small pat- 
 tern of silk ; reaching the climax of skill in mak- 
 ing over a gown spoiled by another of the craft, 
 and not a scrap of the goods left to do with, so 
 that she had to piece " one of the sleeves twenty- 
 nine times, and yet nobody would ever have known 
 that there was a joining in it." 
 
 T7ie Pearl of Orr's Island, like the above, has 
 one of the delicate heroines who represents the 
 
112 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 ideal New England maiden, an apple-blossom of 
 a girl, dainty as the sweet-brier rose, like the 
 May-flower whose tints are on her cheek ; another 
 of the clergy, whom Mrs. Stowe delights to por- 
 tray, for she knew his kind from her childhood ; 
 and two more of the typical, good old maids — 
 we shall come upon the hard and cruel one in 
 Miss Asphyxia in Oldtown Folks — aunt Ruey 
 and her sister, aunt Roxy, who is introduced as 
 presiding over the steeping of catnip tea in a 
 snub-nosed tea-pot on the hearth, at the same 
 time patting with a gentle tattoo on the back of a 
 baby she was trotting on her knee. It is a pa- 
 thetic story of the Maine coast, but brightened up 
 by the " yarns " of the old sea-captain whose vivid 
 imagination run away with him, and sprinkled 
 with those bits of wisdom which remind us of the 
 author's English cotemporary, George Eliot ; like 
 aunt Roxy's remark about the bringing up chil- 
 dren : 
 
 " All children ain't alike, Mis' Kittridge. . . . This 
 'un ain't like your Sally. A hen and a bumble-bee can't be 
 fetched up alike, fix it how you will." 
 
HARRIET BEECHER STOWE. II3 
 
 Or, in another story : 
 
 A satin vest and a nutmeg-grater are both perfectly harm- 
 less, and even worthy existences, but their close proximity 
 on a jolting journey is not to be recommended. 
 
 It is in Oldtown Folks that we have some of her 
 boldest strokes, masterly delineations of charac- 
 ter. Sam Lawson goes into the picture-gallery of 
 ne'er-do-wells in fiction to which Walter Scott fur- 
 nished so many subjects. See what a favorite he 
 is with her : 
 
 Work, thrift, and industry are such an incessant steam- 
 power in Yankee life, that society would burn itself out 
 with intense friction were there not interposed here and 
 there the lubricating power of a decided do-nothing — a 
 man who won't be hurried, and won't work, and will take 
 his ease in his own way, in spite of the whole protest of his 
 neighborhood to the contrary. 
 
 Sam Lawson and his fireside stories, the boys 
 know, or ought to know. One wonders what 
 Hawthorne would have done with such a person- 
 age, or with aunt Lois, or any of the inconsistent 
 very faultily human beings Mrs. Stowe handles so 
 
114 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 easily. There is this difference between the two 
 authors : she took people as she found them, and 
 made us see them, natural beings whom we recog- 
 nize as such ; while he furnished individuals from 
 his own brain to be used in carrying out certain 
 purposes he had in mind. 
 
 If one were to select from her books the juciest 
 one, the one warmest with pulsing life-blood, rich- 
 est in experience, lighted up with finest humor, 
 at once homely and romantic, which but Oldtown 
 Folks should it be ? 
 
 Oh ! that kitchen of the olden times, the old, clean, roomy 
 New England kitchen! — who that has breakfasted, dined 
 and supped in one has not cheery visions of its thrift, its 
 warmth, its welcome ? 
 
 She seems to have revelled in that culinary 
 region redolent of savory odors, and besides giv- 
 ing a rapturous but not over-done chapter to its 
 praise in The Minister's Wooing^ and reverted to 
 it lovingly and lingeringly again and again in 
 other stories, she has delectable, tempting chap- 
 ters where she tells of the Oldtown days. For 
 three that are incomparable in what they reveal 
 
HARRIET BEECHER STOWE. 1 15 
 
 to US of a kind of life that will never be seen 
 again, read VI., XXII. and XXVII., and bear in 
 mind that there is a deal of family history therein. 
 If you should read the biography of Lyman Beecher 
 you would identify scenes, occurrences and indi- 
 viduals. Harriet Beecher as a child was one of a 
 family where there were sometimes thirteen, be- 
 sides visitors, so that the old carry-all was forever 
 on the go : there were aunts and children, faith- 
 ful domestics, brewings and bakings, great festival 
 days of cooking election cake and Thanksgiving 
 good things, roaring fires in the wide chimney 
 and big woodpiles without. You must not fail to 
 associate her with that warm, generous, genial 
 family life ; with the " Firelight Talks in my 
 grandmother's kitchen," and the " Daily living in 
 Oldtown." 
 
 Now come we to the practical papers. Com- 
 monsense is a great gift, and Mrs. Stowe possesses 
 it. When we read her House and Home Talks and 
 The ChiniJiey Corner, which includes Little Foxes, 
 we shall appreciate it, and wish the gift was a 
 more universal one. Meanwhile, let us avail our- 
 
Il6 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 selves of her practical way of seeing things and 
 put it to personal use. If there was only space 
 to quote liberally from the store-house which she, 
 under the name of Christopher Crowfield wrote ! 
 — about dress, cooking, economy, home-making, 
 housekeeping ; wise, helpful words for everybody, 
 the outcome of her own experience and keen way 
 of looking on at the modes and manners of others ; 
 words which are of use for every-day living, for 
 nobody knew better than she that it is our com- 
 mon life we need to make the most account of — 
 company days can take care of themselves. The 
 rambling papers with the above general titles 
 cover the whole ground of which they treat, and 
 family life, the home life of brothers and sisters 
 and their elders, would be much sweeter, more 
 delicate, refined, genial, and what home should 
 be, if these things could be laid to heart. 
 
 Read what she says about " the economy of 
 beauty," and see how all things that a woman of 
 a certain style touches, will "fall at once into har- 
 mony and proportion." Read that admirable 
 picture of a " New England saint," who was her 
 
HARRIET BEECHER STOWE. II7 
 
 own aunt Esther. Read that tempting description 
 of her library, her chimney corner, around which 
 the others had pitched their winter tents, while 
 " Rover makes a hearth-rug of himself in winking 
 satisfaction in front of my fire," 
 
 Of all the papers, perhaps the most helpful are 
 the " Little Foxes," worthy of earnest heed, " by 
 which," she says, " I mean those unsuspected, 
 unwatched, insignificant, little causes that nibble 
 away domestic happiness ; " and she numbers 
 "the pet foxes of good people " as seven : "Fault- 
 finding, Intolerance, Reticence, Irritability, Exaot- 
 ingness. Discourtesy, Self-will ; " while fretfulness 
 and grumbling come in as specific ones. 
 
 Here are some of her words : 
 
 How much more we might make of our family life, of 
 our friendships, if every secret thought of love blossomed 
 into a deed. . . . We can make ourselves say the kind 
 things that rise in our hearts and tremble on our lips, — do 
 the gentle and helpful deeds which we long to do and 
 shrink back from ; and little by little it will grow easier . 
 
 . . till the hearts in the family circle, instead of being 
 so many frozen islands, shall be full of warm airs and echo- 
 ing bird-voices answering back and forth with a constant 
 
Il8 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 melody of love. . . . I do not think that it makes family 
 life more sincere, or any more honest, to have the members 
 of a domestic circle feel a freedom to blurt out in each 
 other's faces, without thought or care, all the disagreeable 
 things that occur to them, as, for example, " How horridly 
 you look this morning ! " . . " What makes you wear 
 such a dreadfully unbecoming dress ?" etc. 
 
 You will find a great deal in her writings of 
 insistence upon the powers and gifts of even the 
 most ordinary women and girls to make life cheer- 
 ful, and praise of that "art of arts," appointing 
 a household rightly and making the wheels run 
 smoothly, which belongs to the " sisters of the 
 most holy and blessed order of the fireside." 
 
 She also gives much advice about writing, and 
 tells (in papers in " Hearth and Home ") how 
 she began at about ten or twelve years to try her 
 hand at composition, how she helped her style by 
 reading Ivanhoe, which she read through seven 
 times within six months, till she knew most of it 
 by heart. There were none but grown people's 
 books in her family, but she says of herself — 
 using the editorial " we : " 
 
HARRIET BEECHER STOWE. II9 
 
 We read a few things a great many times over — read 
 and thought and re-read, until the words and the sentences 
 were fixed in our minds, . . . and in that slow way we 
 were twenty years in learning to write — older than that be- 
 fore we ever thought of having a piece in print ; and for 
 years our first pieces were always given away ; . . and 
 we found it pleasant to learn so, because we liked writing, 
 even when we did not write well, and we loved study and 
 reading and thinking for themselves, and without a dream 
 of any use we might make of them or what other people 
 might think of us. 
 
 That is the way the foremost woman-writer of 
 America, with gifts " of the Walter Scott pattern," 
 began her literary work. It was in the parsonage 
 at Litchfield, Connecticut, that the girl, Harriet 
 Elizabeth Beecher, was born, June 14, 181 1 ; the 
 seventh child, so you may be sure she was in no 
 danger of too much coddling and petting. Part 
 of her education she obtained running wild on 
 the long, breezy hill of Litchfield ; and at home, 
 though teachable and docile, she must have been, 
 as Rose Terry Cook says, " a very little pickle " 
 of a girl, for one of her mischievous acts was to 
 beguile her brothers and sisters " to eat up a bag 
 
I20 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 of rare tulip-roots under the impression that they 
 were onions and very nice." 
 
 They were wide-awake, bright, heahhful, happy 
 children in that family, in the whole numbering 
 twelve, of whom eight became authors. She 
 probably meant her own big and miscellaneous 
 household where she says in Ohitown Folks "we 
 were a sharp-cut and peculiar set in our house," 
 and she surely means the comradeship of her 
 childhood in the chapter where, " we begin to be 
 grown-up people," and she speaks of the influences 
 " all homely, innocent and pure." 
 
 At fifteen she was associated with her talented 
 sister, Catherine, in a girls' seminary at Hartford, 
 at twenty-one she became the wife of Professor 
 Stowe, at forty-one she wrote Uncle Tonics Cabin 
 (her first printed work of much importance), and 
 almost at once took the place she now occupies in 
 literature, for, however admirable some of her 
 later books, that was the one that made her 
 famous. 
 
 Her winter home, as you are aware, is in Man- 
 darin, Florida ; her other is in Hartford. In an 
 
HARRIET BEECHER STOWE. 12 1 
 
 earlier number of Harper's Monthly it is briefly de- 
 scribed — a slate-colored cottage, modestly fitted 
 up, where, " a very quiet little lady, plainly attired," 
 the writer of that article found her, appearing 
 " the wife, the mother, the grandmother, living in 
 her domestic interests, rather than the woman 
 distinguished in national history and literature," 
 Long may it be before she passes on to join 
 the great company of immortals on the other 
 side! 
 
 Note. — A list of Mrs. Stowe's prose writings : Uncle 
 Toiti's Cabin (which has been translated into nineteen dif- 
 ferent tongues), Alna Gordon ( or Drcd), Agnes of Sorrento, 
 The Pearl of Orr's Island, The Minister'' s Wooijig, Oldtown 
 Folks, Sam Lawsoiis Oldtown Fireside Stories, My Wife and 
 I, We and our Neighbors, The Mayflower and other Sketches, 
 Poganuc People, House and Home Papers, The Chimney Cor- 
 ner, Little Foxes, Little Pussy Willow, A Dog's Mission, 
 Queer little People, Palmetto Leaves (Florida Sketches), 
 Men of our Times (being brief biographies of eighteen per- 
 sons whom she calls " specimen citizens," to teach how a 
 Christian republic trains her sons, and how out of our so- 
 ciety grow such men as Lincoln, Grant, Greeley, Farragut 
 and others). 
 
VII. 
 
 ALICE AND PHCEBE GARY. 
 
 SEVERAL years ago — perhaps fifteen — Whit- 
 tier published a sweet and tender poem, 
 called " The Singer," beginning : 
 
 Years since (but names to me before), 
 Two sisters sought at eve my door ; 
 Two song-birds wandering from their nest, 
 A gray old farm-house in the West. 
 
 Very likely you have it in your scrap-book, and 
 may have wondered whom he meant. The two 
 were Alice and Phoebe Gary, then on a sort of 
 pilgrimage from their home in Ohio, to see face to 
 face their literary friends in New York, and they 
 kept on to Amesbury to pay the homage of admir- 
 ing hearts to the Quaker poet who had written in 
 kindly terms of their verse. That was in 1850 j 
 
 I2S 
 
126 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 Alice was then thirty, her sister twenty-six. Alice 
 was the one whom he commemorated as the 
 " singer " (though both were poets) in these lines, 
 which were not written till twenty years after the 
 visit, when he heard of her death. 
 
 There is to me something almost as pathetic 
 about the early history of these girls as there is 
 about that of the Bronte sisters, though the fami- 
 lies were wholly unlike ; the Carys were loving and 
 confiding, whereas the Brontes while having deep 
 feelings, were held from manifestations of tender- 
 ness by a kind of unnatural repression that seemed 
 hard, and at times almost cruel. In both households 
 there were many deaths, and sorrowful fortunes ; 
 in both, the children were excessively fond of out- 
 of-door life, and of simple pleasures ; they dreamed 
 dreams, and, shut in upon themselves, cherished 
 aspirations which they shyly put into verse, and se- 
 cretly sent forth into the world, of which they knew 
 almost nothing, but which soon began to know 
 them, and to wonder where these singing-birds 
 were hidden away. Wonderful children in both 
 cases, with heart-hunger and heart-break in their 
 
ALICE AND PHCEEE GARY. 127 
 
 portion, and wistful longings that could not be sat- 
 isfied with all the literary success that came to them. 
 
 To know just what privations and bereavements 
 Alice and Phoebe experienced, you must read the 
 pathetic Memorial, written by their dear friend 
 Mary Clemmer, who has just passed out of life her- 
 self, and her own biography now adds one more to 
 the fast-increasing list on the rolls of the dead 
 whose names we know and honor. 
 
 She tells how their father and mother began their 
 married life in a new settlement in Ohio, on the 
 very land where is the Clovernook of Alice's stories ; 
 there they spent eighteen years of hard toil, and 
 nine children were born ; Alice was the fourth, 
 born on the place called Mount Healthy (near 
 Cincinnati) April 26, 1820 ; Phoebe, the sixth, was 
 born at Clovernook, September 24, 1824, Two 
 darling sisters out of the band, Rhoda and Lucy, 
 died in one year, and that was one cause of so 
 much of the sadness in Alice Gary's writings. It 
 was a loss and a wrench which she never could get 
 over to the last day of her life. She was sensitive, 
 and all such wounds cut deep, and never healed. 
 
128 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 Neither could she ever wholly overcome the influ- 
 ence of the hardships of her early life ; for even, 
 towards the close, when she had everything she 
 wanted, she said : 
 
 The first fourteen years of my life it seemed as if there was 
 actually nothing in existence but work. The whole family 
 struggle was just for the right to live free from the curse of 
 debt. My father worked early and late ; my mother's work 
 was never done. The mother of nine children, with no other 
 help than that of their little hands, I shall always feel that 
 she was taxed beyond her strength and died before her time. 
 . . . Rhoda and I pined for beauty ; but there was no 
 beauty about our homely house, but that which Nature gave 
 us. We hungered and thirsted for knowledge ; but there 
 were not a dozen books on our family shelf, not a library 
 within our reach. There was little time to study, and had 
 there been more, there was no chance to learn but in the 
 district school-house down the road. I never went to any 
 other — not much to that. 
 
 It is marvellous the use these two made of their 
 Iwes under their depressing circumstances. After 
 a step-mother came to direct the ways of the house, 
 she grudged candles for them to read by when 
 their day's work was done ; but the aspiring girls, 
 
ALICE AND PHCEBE GARY. 
 
 129 
 
 who, unknown to each other, had already begun to 
 put on paper the songs that sung themselves in 
 their hearts, substituted a saucer of lard with a rag 
 in it, and by that light studied and wrote. Phoebe's 
 first poem was published when she was only four- 
 teen; and talking about it with a friend, not long 
 before her death, and of her rapture when the 
 newspaper came and her eyes beheld in print 
 the verses she had written, she said : " O, if they 
 could only look like that now, it would be better 
 than money ! " She said she laughed and she 
 cried : 
 
 I did not care any more if I was poor, or my clothes plain. 
 Somebody cared enough for my verses to print them, and I 
 was happy. I looked with compassion on my schoolmates. 
 You may know more than I do, I thought, but you can't 
 write verses that are printed in a newspaper. 
 
 Alice's first appearance was when she was sev- 
 enteen, and she wrote only poetry until 1847, when 
 she began a series of prose articles in the National 
 Era, signed " Patty Lee." In a few years she be- 
 came well and widely known by her papers on rural 
 life, which are now in books with the titles Clover' 
 
130 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 nook (three series) and Pictures of Country Life. 
 There is but one fault to be found with them, and 
 that is the under-tone of sadness, before referred 
 to, and which pervades many of her poems ; but 
 that we can forget, in the fond and faithful por- 
 traiture of scenes and characters she had known so 
 well. In " My Grandfather " are some of her best 
 reminiscences, of the days when she was a child 
 stringing a wreath of sweet-brier berries which she 
 called coral ; there is the walk to the old mill, 
 along the turnpike, then into a grass-grown road : 
 
 A narrow lane bordered on each side by old and decaying 
 cherry-trees led us to the house, ancient-fashioned, with high, 
 steep gables, narrow windows, and low, heavy chimneys, of 
 stone. In the rear was an old mill, with a plank sloping 
 from the door-sill to the ground, by way of step, and a square, 
 open window in the gable, through which, with ropes and 
 pulleys the grain was drawn up. . . In truth it was a lone- 
 some sort of place, with dark lofts and curious binns, and 
 ladders leading from place to place ; and there were cats 
 creeping stealthily along the beams in wait for mice and 
 swallows, if as sometimes happened, the dry nest should be 
 loosened from the rafter, and the whole tumble ruinously 
 down. 
 
ALICE AND PHCEBE GARY. 13I 
 
 The mill was a favorite theme with both sisters ; 
 Phcebe (who did not write much in prose) has de- 
 lightful verses in the ballad of "Dovecote Mill," 
 where she lets you see her heart, and tells you all 
 her country love, and shows how dear was " the 
 old mill rusty-red " with its moss-grown roof: 
 
 Through a loop-hole made in the gable high, 
 
 In and out like arrows fly 
 
 The slender swallows swift and shy. 
 
 And with bosoms purple, brown, and white, 
 Along the eaves in the shimmering light, 
 Sits a row of doves from morn till night 
 
 jr.nd there is a great deal here, as in other poems, 
 about the children, and where they played — real 
 children, who seem to come out of the past and 
 be living before you, as you read : 
 
 They watched the mice through the corn sacks steal, 
 The steady shower of the snowy meal, 
 And the water falling over the wheel. 
 
 Homely scenes, of simple, rustic life, told in unpre- 
 tending measure — but to those of us who love 
 country ways, how sweet they are ! 
 
132 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 One of Alice's most entertaining sketches is that 
 of Mrs. Joseph Dale in her " goose-room." No 
 such picture could be made now, for no such cus- 
 tom, after just that pattern, can exist, Mrs. Dale, 
 adhering to the primitive way, was engaged in her 
 yearly picking of seventeen geese, though she was 
 rich and could afford to hire some one else to do 
 it, and though she had no need of the feathers, for 
 says the story : 
 
 Her down beds were stuffed already to hardness with 
 feathers, but that mattered not. She would have thought 
 as soon of dispensing with her extra fine blue and red woolen 
 coverlids with which all the chamber closets were heaped 
 and which were only taken down about the tenth of July to 
 garnish the garden fence and to receive the benefit of sun 
 and air, as with the seventeen geese and two or three ducks. 
 But passing these peculiarities, herself and the man-servant 
 and the maid-servant with the larger children more or less, 
 had succeeded, after many crosses and drivings hither and 
 thither, in lodging the gobblers in the vacant room of an out- 
 building, denominated by common usage the goose-room. 
 
 And there, this notable housewife, with a white 
 muslin close cap on, and clad in an old-fashioned 
 gown " used by her mother before her for a similar 
 
ALICE AND PHCEBE GARY. 133 
 
 purpose," gave herself up to the stuffy, smothering 
 work, emerging with a fringe of down on her eye- 
 brows and around the edge of her hair. 
 
 You feel that all these things took place pre- 
 cisely as they are told ; and that Mrs. Dale, and 
 Mrs. Hill, and Mrs. Troost, and the Templetons, 
 and the Wetherbees, the various uncles and aunts 
 and deacons were her own old neighbors. 
 
 You know that the unfrequented road "traversed 
 mostly by persons going to mill " actually existed. 
 You see the horses in the door-yard, the turkeys, 
 and that surly-looking little red cow with a white 
 line down her back standing near a trough of water 
 in the lane. Little " bits," like still-life pictures, 
 are they. After all these years, and the sisters so 
 long in their graves, you can see, through the words 
 of Alice, what they saw — their own humble home, 
 and other homes ; the old-fashioned dressers with 
 the polished platters, and blue or red crockery ; 
 the sanded floors, the floors scoured white with a 
 strip of home-made carpet before the blue stone 
 hearth of the fire-place, which was filled with green 
 boughs in summer, and in winter glowed with a 
 
134 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 blazing wood-fire ; you can see the very room with 
 its desk and table and few, plain chairs where the 
 grandmother sat in her bereavement, with the 
 black ribbon tied over her cap. 
 
 You know about the farm-work, the chopping, the 
 smoke-house, the sugar-camp. In that graceful 
 ballad, spoken of above, the sugar-making is told 
 deliciously : 
 
 Ah ! then there was life and fun enough, 
 
 In making the " spile " and setting the trough, 
 
 And all, till the time of stirring off. 
 
 They followed the sturdy hired man, 
 V/ith his brawny arms and face of tan, 
 Who gathered the sap each day as it ran. 
 
 Both Alice and Phoebe delighted in these memo- 
 ries, half pensive though the atmosphere was 
 through which they looked back. They could 
 never say enough about the gray old homestead, 
 the " old house with windows to the morn ; " and 
 there are always fruit-trees, cherries, and 
 
 The old, familiar quince and apple-trees, 
 Chafing against the wall with every breeze, 
 
ALICE AND PHCEBE GARY. 135 
 
 and there are always old-fashioned flowers, lilies 
 down the path, and "prince's feather at the garden 
 gate," and 
 
 . . the candytuft and the columbine 
 And lady-grass like a ribbon fine, 
 
 lilacs, and dearest of all to both, the sweet-brier, 
 Phoebe writes : 
 
 And the lilac flings her perfume wide, 
 And the sweet-brier up to the lattice tied, 
 Seems trying to push herself inside. 
 
 Alice writes : 
 
 I search and find the flower that used to grow 
 Close by the door-stone of the dear, old home. 
 
 We come to love our simple four-leaved rose, 
 
 As if she were a sister or a friend, 
 And if my eyes all flowers but one should lose, 
 Our wild sweet-brier would be the one to choose. 
 
 The love of the Clovernook days grew upon 
 them, and some of the later poems, written in their 
 city home, show how each was living them over, and 
 it is noticeable what a similarity there is in their 
 themes and also in their modes of treatment. In 
 
136 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 her poem "The Sight of Days gone by," where she 
 calls up the new furrows, the hedges, the barn, and 
 the well 
 
 . . that we used to think ran through 
 To the other side of the world, 
 
 Alice has : 
 
 I thought of the old barn set about 
 
 With its stacks of sweet, dry hay ; 
 Of the swallows flying in and out 
 
 Through the gables steep and gray. 
 
 While Phoebe in one of her poems has : 
 
 The barn with crowded mows of hay 
 And roof upheld by golden sheaves ; 
 
 Its rows of doves at close of day 
 Cooing together on the eaves. 
 
 Both wrote a great deal of poetry, and some of 
 their best pieces are to be found in school-books, 
 in collections and selections, re-appearing in news- 
 papers from time to time, and always favorites. 
 No danger but the memory of Alice and Phoebe 
 Gary will be kept green, for poems from their 
 hearts go straight to the deep places where love 
 
ALICE AND PHCEBE GARY. 137 
 
 and tenderness abide in other hearts. Phoebe had 
 a more joyous temperament than Alice, and saw 
 life through a more cheerful atmosphere, and in 
 her home she was always brimming over with mer- 
 riment and fun. 
 
 That they should have gone to New York city to 
 live, and there have become such a centre of attrac- 
 tion that cultivated men and women, the choicest, 
 should have delighted to gather about them, seems 
 like romance. It was Alice, broken in health and 
 poor, but brave and resolute, who started off to 
 seek her fortune, believing that New York would 
 prove a good place for literary work ; and in a 
 short time she sent for Phoebe and a younger sis- 
 ter, Elmina, to join her ; and there they made a 
 home, writing for whatever papers would pay them, 
 living frugally, and keeping out of debt. After a 
 few years they were able to buy a house, where the 
 two elder sisters spent the remainder of their lives, 
 and in which Alice and Elmina died. To know 
 how prettily and with what taste they fitted it up, 
 what troops of friends they drew to it, what gra- 
 cious hostesses they were, and how beautiful were 
 
138 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 the lives of the Gary sisters, you must read Mary 
 Clemmer's book. Elmina died early ; Alice on the 
 twelfth of February, 1876 ; worn out with incessant 
 writing during the many later years in which she 
 did not give herself needed recreation in the coun- 
 try atmosphere she was born in, and which most 
 probably would have given her help and healing. 
 
 Then, it appears that for Phoebe, who had 
 always depended upon her, " the very impulse and 
 power to live were gone. She sank and died, be- 
 cause she could not live on, in a world where her 
 sister was not." Her death took place at Newport, 
 Rhode Island, whither her friends had taken her, 
 on July 3 1 of the same year. 
 
 One of the last things she had read to her, while 
 lying sick, was " The Singer," to which she listened 
 with closed eyes, and then said, " It was all I could 
 wish or ask for." 
 
 Note. — Alice wrote Clovemook Papers ( three series ), 
 Pictures of Coiatfry Life ; three novels, //agar. Married not 
 J\'/ated, and the Bishop^s Son ; several volumes of poems ; 
 and two collections for children, Clovertiook Children, and 
 Snow Berries. Phoebe had two volumes of poems, and aided 
 in editing several books. The record of their lives is in the 
 Memorial by Mary Clemmer, who also edited their last 
 poems. 
 
BAYARD TAYLOR. 
 
VIII. 
 
 BAYARD TAYLOR. 
 
 IT was the unquenchable ambition of Bayard 
 Taylor to be remembered as a poet. How in- 
 tense was this longing, how steadfastly he labored 
 to produce poems which should endure, how per- 
 sistent was his determination to do worthy work in 
 this line, is shown in scores of letters to his inti- 
 mate friends. As he grew older, he put away 
 from him the idea that he must depend at all on 
 his volumes of travel, and constantly spoke of their 
 popularity as something that could not last long, 
 even becoming half disgusted at being called " the 
 great American traveller." Only a few years before 
 his death he wrote to a friend : 
 
 " The other day I looked into a volume of my 
 travels published in 1859. Ye gods ! what a flip- 
 pant style ! I assure you some things made me 
 141 
 
142 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 wince, with a feeling almost like physical pain." 
 There was no occasion for depreciating himself 
 in this way. You will look long before you find 
 his superior as a writer of books of travel — I am 
 half ready to say you will look in vain, take him all 
 in all. He did not depend on guide-books or on a 
 mass of knowledge acquired in preparation for 
 sight-seeing and, consequently, his letters are re- 
 markably free from the statistics, traditionary lore 
 and historic matter which cumber most works of 
 the kind — greatly to the vexation of soul of the 
 reader. 
 
 He was an easy and natural writer, and did 
 write well, notwithstanding his unmerciful criti- 
 cisms of himself ; he had the fair sense of propor- 
 tion which is indispensable, gave variety, and did 
 not dwell too long on any one topic. 
 
 More important than all, he was splendidly 
 equipped by nature and temperament to be a trav- 
 eller. He was strong and enduring, with ardor 
 and buoyancy that nothing could overcome ; he 
 had great joy in out-of-door life, and had a craving 
 that would not be put aside to go everywhere and 
 
BAYARD TAYLOR. 1 43 
 
 see everything. The spirit of adventure was born 
 in him. Here is what he says of himself as a child : 
 
 In looking back to my childhood, I can recall . . the 
 intensest desire to climb upward . . . and take in a far 
 wider sweep of vision ; . . I remember as distinctly as if 
 it were yesterday the first time this passion was gratified. 
 Looking out of the garret window, on a bright May morn- 
 ing, I discovered a row of slats which had been nailed over 
 the shingles for the convenience of the carpenters in roofing 
 the house, and had not been removed. Here was at last a 
 chance to reach the comb of the steep roof, and take my 
 first look abroad into the world ! Not without some trepi- 
 dation I ventured out, and was soon seated outside of the 
 sharp ridge. Unknown forests, new fields and houses, ap- 
 peared to my triumphant view. The prospect, though it 
 did not extend more than four miles in any direction, was 
 boundless. Away in the northwest, glimmering through 
 the trees, was a white object, probably the front of a distant 
 barn, but I shouted to the astonished servant girl who had 
 just discovered me from the garden below, " I see the Falls 
 of Niagara ! " 
 
 You will think of this incident and of the child 
 Bayard in his Pennsylvania home, when you come 
 to some passages in his books, where he stood upon 
 
144 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 the high places of the world and took in the widest 
 sweep of vision, in his own country, in Africa, in 
 Asia, and in Northern Europe. 
 
 A genuine, healthy-natured boy he was, who 
 went fishing by torchlight, gathered lobelia and 
 sumach to provide himself with pocket money, did 
 chores and foddered the cattle at night and then 
 sat down to his beloved books — a few of them his 
 own, bought with money he earned by picking 
 nuts — reading everything he could lay his hands 
 on, but delighting most in travels, which set his 
 imagination wild, as his own have kindled many a 
 boy since ; and he had presentiments " amounting 
 to positive belief " that he should one day visit the 
 cities of the Pld World that he read of. So he 
 made ideal journeys, and at about fifteen he learned 
 French and Spanish, which came into use a few 
 years later. He tells in one of his sketches how 
 when he was in Spain (it was fourteen years after- 
 wards) he could not speak the language, but after 
 desperate efforts to recover it : 
 
 Like Mrs. Dombey with her pain, I felt as if there were 
 Spanish words somewhere in the room, but I could not pos- 
 
BAYARD TAYLOR. 
 
 145 
 
 ftively say that I had them. . . I had taken a carriage 
 for Valldemosa, after a long talk with the proprietor, a most 
 agreeable fellow, when I suddenly stopped, and exclaimed 
 to myself, " You are talking Spanish, did you know it ? " 
 It was even so ; as much of the language as I ever knew 
 was suddenly and unaccountably restored to me. 
 
 This is but a single instance of the remarkable 
 way he had all his life of packing things away in 
 his mind, which he was always sure of finding when 
 he wanted them. 
 
 His memory was prodigious, and he would store 
 up materials for future use on some poem he had 
 planned and leave them till the right time came 
 for them to be brought forth. 
 
 He taught school, wrote poetry, learned the 
 printer's trade, and at nineteen began the realiza- 
 tion of his early dreams by going to Europe, having 
 a small sum of money advanced for letters he was 
 to write home for publication. It was a wonderful 
 thing to do, and so his countrymen thought, and 
 when after two years he came back he found him- 
 self the hero of the hour. His first book of prose 
 appeared in 1846 and had a great sale — Viezos 
 
146 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 Afoot; or, Europe seen with Knapsack a?id Staff, 
 Three years l^ter, when the discovery of gold in 
 California created such an excitement he was sent 
 out to write letters for the iV^Z£/ York Tribune; and, 
 notwithstanding so much has since been written 
 concerning that period, you will probably nowhere 
 else find so accurate a portraiture of the California 
 of '49, and life in the gold diggings as his, taken 
 freshly on the spot, when everything was novel, 
 and a phase of crude, lawless, struggling, frantic 
 life was seen such as will never be witnessed 
 within our borders again. He was all aglow with 
 his subject, and those letters are among the most 
 spirited he ever wrote. He minded nothing about 
 discomforts and hindrances ; even over the dread- 
 ful journey across the Isthmus which was a terror 
 to emigrants, he says, *' I feel fresh enough to turn 
 about and make the trip over again." The scenery 
 of California, the mountain ranges, the deep val- 
 leys, the magnificent proportions of the scattered 
 trees, delighted his eye and touched his poetic im- 
 agination ; and numerous are the passages express- 
 ive of his enthusiasm, like this : 
 
BAYARD TAYLOR. I 47 
 
 The broad oval valleys, shaded by magnificent oaks, and 
 enclosed by the lofty mountains of the Coast Range, open 
 beyond each other like a suite of palace chambers, each 
 charming more than the last. 
 
 He spent five months in the midst of that rough, 
 half-savage life, and says : 
 
 I lived almost entirely in the open air, sleeping on the 
 ground, with my saddle for a pillow, and sharing the hard- 
 ships of the gold-diggers, without taking part in their labors. 
 
 In a private letter, he writes in this rapturous 
 way : 
 
 " It is so delicious to fall asleep with the stars 
 above you — to feel their rays, the last thing, glim- 
 mering in your hazy consciousness. . . one 
 night . . I slept, or rather watched, all alone 
 on the top of a mountain with vast plains glim- 
 mering in the moonlight below me, and the wolves 
 howling far down the ravines. Was it not a glo- 
 rious night ? " 
 
 This record of travel was put into book form in 
 1850, under the leading title of El Dorado^ or Ad' 
 ventures in the Path of Empire. 
 
148 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 His next long journey was to the East, whither 
 he set his face in 185 1 ; and there he went to what 
 he called the "farther East," to India, where, char- 
 acteristic of the child who wished to climb high 
 and see off, he persisted, though he had scant time, 
 in going to the highest point in the Himalayas 
 which could be reached in the winter season ; came 
 home after two years' absence ; and three books 
 were the result : A Journey to Central Africa, 1854, 
 The Lands of the Saracens, 1854, A Visit to India, 
 China and Japan, 1855. 
 
 Just as before, he adapted himself to circum- 
 stances and climate. When on the Nile, he says : 
 
 Every day opens with z. jubilate, and closes with a thanks- 
 giving. If such a balm and blessing as this life has been to 
 me, thus far, can be felt twice in one's existence, there must . 
 be another Nile somewhere in the world. . . A portion 
 of the old Egyptian repose seems to be infused in our na- 
 tures, and lately when I saw my face in a mirror, I thought I 
 saw in its features something of the patience and resignation 
 of the Sphinx. 
 
 The Southern letters are rich in coloring and 
 steeped in sunshine, but for spirit, freshness and 
 
BAYARD TAYLOR. 1 49 
 
 vigor they cannot compare with those from the 
 North of Europe, where he went in 1856, publish- 
 ing in the year following a volume called Northern 
 Travel: Summer and Whiter Pictures of Sweden, 
 Denmark and Lapland. 
 
 I wish I could quote liberally from his account 
 of the Thuringian Forest, and tell you how he and 
 his friends went four miles deep into it and supped 
 with the forester, how they piled on the logs " un- 
 til the flames rose high and red and snapped in the 
 frosty wind," and one of the forester's men "went 
 into the wood for green fir-boughs, which crackled 
 resinously and sent up clouds of brilliant sparks," 
 and by the light of the flashing, sparkling, fragrant 
 firwood they ate the royal meal of sausages and 
 potatoes cooked over the coals there in the open 
 air. It is like Robin Hood and his merry men in 
 the greenwood. 
 
 He was determined to see the Polar day with- 
 out a sun, and about the middle of January, he 
 started from Stockholm, without having been able 
 to find a man who had ever been up there in win- 
 ter, or one who could tell him what to expect or 
 
150 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 what to do. Nothing daunted he set out and was 
 gone two months, during which he travelled " nearly 
 twenty-two hundred miles, two hundred and fifty of 
 them by reindeer, and nearly five hundred within 
 the Arctic Circle." Away up at Kantokeino he had 
 his heart's desire, and saw at half-past eleven a red 
 light almost as if the sun was coming up, but a few- 
 minutes after high noon it began to fade, and he 
 records that at last, once in his life, he had seen 
 the day which had no sun. 
 
 He made such close acquaintance with the 
 Aurora Borealis that he felt he was almost touched 
 by the marvellous presence ; he says it changed 
 
 and fell in a broad luminous curtain straight downward 
 through the air until its fringed hem swung apparently but 
 a few yards over our heads. This phenomena was so un- 
 expected and startling that for a moment I thought our 
 faces would be touched by the skirts of this glorious auroral 
 drapery. . . . Anything so strange, so capricious, so 
 wonderful, so gloriously beautiful, I scarcely hope to see 
 again. 
 
 That he was not much charmed by reindeer 
 travel, you can judge : 
 
BAYARD TAYLOR. 15I 
 
 Nothing can exceed the coolness with which your deer 
 jumps off the track, slackens his tow-rope, turns around and 
 looks you in the face, as much as to say " what are you go- 
 ing to do about it ? " . . This is particularly pleasant on 
 the marshy table-lands of Lapland, where if he takes a no- 
 tion to bolt with you, your pulkha bounces over the hard tus- 
 socks, sheers sideways down the sudden pitches, or swamps 
 itself in beds of loose snow. Harness a frisky sturgeon to 
 a " dug-out " in a rough sea, and you will have some idea of 
 this method of travelling. While I acknowledge the Provi- 
 dential disposition of things which has given the reindeer to 
 the Lapp, I cannot avoid thanking Heaven that I am not a 
 Lapp, and that I shall never travel again with reindeer. 
 
 After seeing Lapps, Finns and Northlanders he 
 was glad to get back to Germany ; and after the 
 polar twilight it rejoiced his eyes to see a blue sky 
 and the sun riding high in the heavens, " like a 
 strong, healthy sun again." As he left those North- 
 ern solitudes, he writes : 
 
 Not the table-land of Pamir in Thibet, the cradle of the 
 Oxus and the Indus, but this lower Lapland terrace is en- 
 titled to the designation of the " Roof of the World." We 
 were on the summit, creeping along the mountain rafters 
 and looking southward over her shelving eaves. . . Here 
 
152 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 for once, we seemed to look down on the horizon, and I 
 thought of Europe and the Tropics as lying below. Our 
 journey north had been an ascent, but now the world's steep 
 sloped downward before us into sunshine and warm air. 
 
 He was indeed a child of the sun. Many a pas- 
 sage like these might be selected from his letters 
 or diaries : 
 
 I feel strongest and happiest when I am where the sun 
 can blaze upon me. . . I am a worshipper of the sun. 
 I took off my hat to him. . and let him blaze away in 
 my face for a quarter of an hour. . . The Parsees wor- 
 ship the sun, as the greatest visible manifestation of the 
 Deity; and I assure you I have felt very much inclined to 
 do the same , when he and I were alone in the desert. 
 
 He was sensitive, " thin skinned," as he said, and 
 once he wrote to a friend : *' Don't you know that 
 slow moaning and crying of the wind, as if some- 
 thing ached ? When it sounds that way I can't 
 work. I long for friends ; I think of the blue 
 Mediterranean ; I want to be an angel, and with 
 the angels stand — or something else to keep me 
 from sympathizing with all out-of-doors." 
 
 But such moods were rare. He was one of the 
 
BAYARD TAYLOR. I 53 
 
 most tireless of workers, never willing to stop to 
 take rest, and he died in his prime, of over-work. 
 His brain was always full of plans, which he carried 
 along till the time came to give them shape, and he 
 could have a novel and a long poem in hand, writ- 
 ing every day on both, " prose by daylight, and 
 poetry by night ! a new tandem, which I never 
 drove before, but it goes smoothly and well." 
 Whatever he undertook he attacked vigorously, 
 and held to it, no matter what the hindrances, till 
 it was done ; and always there stayed by him the 
 conviction that presently he should do something 
 better ; that with his enlarged experience and men- 
 tal discipline he should do himself justice and 
 reach that ideal which was always advancing as he 
 went on, keeping a little way before him, but just 
 near enough to allure and encourage. 
 
 It is with renewed reverence for the great, loyal, 
 tender and sweet nature of Bayard Taylor that one 
 reads such sentences as these : 
 
 The soul must sometimes sweat blood. Nothing great is 
 achieved without the severest discipline of heart and mind ; 
 nothing is well done that is done easily. 
 
154 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 My ruling passion as an author, is to do something better 
 
 — to overcome, by hard work and honest study, the disad- 
 vantages of early sentimentality and shallowness. 
 
 Mere grace of phrase, surface brilliancy, simulated fire, 
 cannot endure : we must build of hewn blocks from the ever- 
 lasting quarries. 
 
 There is not space to do more than indicate the 
 different kinds of work he engaged in ; he was edi- 
 tor, newspaper correspondent, lecturer, translator, 
 writer of books of travel, poems, novels and dramas. 
 His translation of Faust — an arduous undertaking 
 
 — is pronounced a master-piece, the best in verse 
 in the English language. He succeeded in more 
 departments than any other man of letters in this 
 country ; and no other ever labored so incessantly 
 accomplishing so much in the same time. His first 
 book (poetry) was published when he was nineteen, 
 and he died at fifty-three ; in those intervening 
 thirty-four years he had written no less than 
 thirty-seven volumes. 
 
 I have directed your attention to his books of 
 travel almost to the exclusion of the others, for 
 reasons which you will understand, and because an 
 
BAYARD TAYIOR, 155 
 
 interest in such adventures is to be encouraged ; 
 everything that enlarges the boundaries of your 
 thought, while giving you a pure and healthful 
 pleasure and an added zest to life, is worth know- 
 ing, is worth reading ; and, though I have told you 
 nothing new, perhaps you may be stimulated to a 
 study of the peculiarities and scenes of other coun- 
 tries. 
 
 I wish I could dwell upon his love of animals, 
 his love of home, and speak at length of his stories. 
 It was always a great pleasure to him when he 
 struck a new vein, as when the idea of writing a 
 novel came to him; and he constructed the plot of 
 Hannah Thurston^ and set to work enthusiastically, 
 following it up eventually by three others. He 
 also wrote shorter stories, depicting the gentle kind 
 of life in his own Quaker neighborhood, with sweet, 
 modest Quaker maidens, like Asenath in " Friend 
 Elis' Daughter." Again he hit upon a happy 
 thought in his " Home Ballads " or Pastorals start- 
 ing off with " The Quaker Widow," which he said 
 popped into his head one day, and with which he 
 v/as as much pleased as a child with a new toy. 
 
156 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 His home feeling and local attachments were 
 strong. Pennsylvania was the State of his birth, 
 and had been the dwelling-place of his kin since 
 the days of William Penn. He knew the men 
 and women of his beloved Chester County and all 
 their ways, so that those *' Pastorals " are warm 
 and mellow with human love and experiences. 
 
 Bayard Taylor was born at Kennett Square in 
 that beautiful county, on January 11, 1825, and it 
 was in that neighborhood more than thirty years 
 later that he built his new home, Cedarcroft, the 
 home of his dreams, just as he had long hoped to, 
 just where his heart's desire was : 
 
 But when I build a house, I thought, I shall build it upon 
 the ridge, with a high steeple from the top of which I can 
 see far and wide. 
 
 And when at last he had it, he writes : 
 
 While I live, I trust I shall have my trees, my peaceful, 
 idyllic landscape, my free country life at least half the year ; 
 and while I possess so much, with the ties out of which all 
 this has grown, I shall own one hundred thousand shares in 
 the Bank of Contentment. 
 
BAYARD TAYLOR. 157 
 
 There he lived delightfully, most happily — the 
 ideal life come true — for a time exercising mag- 
 nificent hospitality, on a scale with his warm and 
 generous nature, throwing wide his doors for 
 guests who came at will, and it seemed as if the 
 fairies who wait on the doers of good deeds had 
 nothing but kindness in store for him. His rare 
 qualities were appreciated by the friends who were 
 drawn to him in no common degree, and who, 
 while they loved him, admired the industry and 
 patience by which he had accomplished so much 
 — this self-educated, hard-working man who was 
 abundantly entitled to all the praise he had won and 
 the success he had achieved. 
 
 But reverses came, and with them the necessity 
 of change, increased toil of brain and production 
 of books that should bring in money ; and a harass- 
 ing, wearing anxiety beset him, though his fortitude 
 and hope never failed. In 1878 he was sent as 
 our minister to Germany — and such a send off ! 
 He was banqueted by his literary associates, his 
 German fellow-citizens made addresses, sung songs, 
 and their bands played, and they nearly went wild 
 
158 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 over his appointment. No man ever went from his 
 native land so cheered on and with such happy aug- 
 uries as he. 
 
 Just as everything was beginning to brighten, 
 and he was preparing to settle to his official duties 
 and a literary task he anticipated great pleasure in, 
 he died at Berlin, on October 19 of that same year. 
 
 The beautiful testimony of his friends was in 
 newspapers all over the country, telling what a 
 charm there was about him, how frank and sweet- 
 tempered and generous he was, how true and 
 honorable, how high his aims, what a delightful 
 companion, how faithful in his attachment, how 
 earnest in his work ; and poets who had loved 
 him put their sorrow into verse. 
 
 You will remember Longfellow's lines : 
 
 Traveller ! in what realms afar, 
 In what planet, in what star, 
 
 In what vast aerial space 
 Shines the light upon thy face ? 
 
 In what gardens of delight 
 Rest thy weary feet to-night ? 
 
BAYARD TAYLOR. I 59 
 
 And the questioning of Aldrich : 
 
 What unknown way is this that he has gone, 
 
 Our Bayard, in such silence and alone ? 
 
 What new, strange quest has tempted him once more 
 
 To leave us ? 
 
 Note. — He wrote Views Afoot ; or Europe seen with 
 Knapsack and Staff ; El Dorado ; or Adventures in the Path 
 of Empire ; A fourney to Central Africa ; The Lands of the 
 Saracens ; A Visit to India, China and Japan ; A'orthern 
 Travel ; Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark 
 and Lapland ; Travels in Greece and Russia ; At Home and 
 Abroad ; Colorado, a Summer Trip ; Byways of Europe ; 
 Travels in Arabia ; Egypt and Icelattd (all of which you 
 should read in connection with the Biography and in Chron- 
 ological order) ; a book for young people called The Boys of 
 other Countries ; a collection of stories entitled Beauty atid 
 the Beast ; and Tales of Home ; also the four novels, Ha7tnah 
 Thurston, John Godfrey's Eortunes, The Story of Kennett, 
 Joseph and his Friend. The list includes also many volumes 
 of poetry, drama, translation and compilations. The biog- 
 raphy which has for title Life and Letters of Bayard Taylor, 
 edited by Marie Hansen-Taylor and Horace E. Scudder, is in 
 two volumes, and of great interest. 
 
FENRY DAVID THOREAU. 
 
IX. 
 
 HENRY DAVID THOREAU ; AND OTHER " OUT-OF- 
 DOOR " WRITERS, 
 
 THIS name stands for an odd kind of man 
 and original writer. Thoreau has always 
 been looked upon as one of the unique characters 
 among American men of letters, (With what a 
 half satiric smile he would have received that term 
 " men-of-letters " as applied to himself ! ) It is 
 said by those who do not admire him that he 
 prided himself on doing things in a different way 
 from common people ; while on the other hand, 
 to those who take pains to understand him, the 
 evidence seems conclusive that he could no more 
 have helped being what he was than a partridge, 
 or a fox, or any other creature of the wood can 
 help acting according to the instincts it was born 
 with. No one was ever like him, and perhaps no 
 one would care to be. 
 
164 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 He has been over-rated, he has been disparaged. 
 The matter that has been written about him, in 
 the shape of criticisms, studies, biographies, is out 
 of all porportion to his own writings all put to- 
 gether, which proves him to be a person worthy 
 of consideration ; and there is not much doubt 
 that he will have a permanent place in American 
 literature. 
 
 Of the many authors who have made Concord, 
 Massachusetts, so famous, Emerson, Hawthorne, 
 Margaret Fuller, the Alcotts and others, he is the 
 only one who was born there. To him Concord 
 represented the whole universe, and was the only 
 place worth living in. Like the man in Pollok's 
 verse, he 
 
 . . thought the visual line that girt him round, 
 The world's extreme. 
 
 That is, for all purposes needful for himself and 
 his own culture ; and saving only the look out 
 into the world beyond which he had in his college 
 days at Harvard, and the trips he took to the 
 Maine woods. Cape Cod, the West, and some 
 
HENRY DAVID THOREAU. 1 65 
 
 Others, he had only, and wished only, Concord 
 experiences. He thought he could find and learn 
 everything there that was worth having or know- 
 ing ; and by his insistency upon this point he 
 gained a reputation for egotism and absurd exag- 
 geration of the resources of that historic town. 
 
 The Thoreaus were of several mixed races, 
 which circumstance has been given as a reason 
 for peculiar combination of qualities in this eccen- 
 tric author. His great-grandmother was French, 
 his grandmother Scotch, his mother a New Eng- 
 lander, his grandfather a native of the Isle of 
 Jersey. He inherited a certain kind of shrewd 
 wisdom, independence and wit ; he had a keen 
 way of looking at life, with a fair amount of every- 
 day sense, a poetic taste and a quality of reti- 
 cence, self-command and satisfaction with self 
 which give a distinctive character to all his writ- 
 ings. There were three other children, all tal- 
 ented ; John, of whom he was very fond, Helen, 
 and Sophia who died a few years since — the last 
 of the Thoreau name in America with the excep- 
 tion of one elderly maiden aunt. 
 
l66 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 After his college days were over, at twenty, 
 Henry found it impossible to give himself up to 
 any special trade or profession, though eventually 
 his tastes led him to become a surveyor — one of 
 the best, so that Emerson, speaking of the won- 
 derful fitness of his body and mind, says, " He 
 could pace sixteen rods more accurately than 
 another man could measure them with rod and 
 chain," and that he was held in the highest regard 
 for his practical knowledge about lands and boun- 
 daries. 
 
 His first trip of interest was taken in company 
 with his beloved brother ; and he put his obser- 
 vations into a book (his first), A Week on the Con- 
 cord and Merrimack Rivers, which had so poor a 
 sale that he had most of the edition returned to 
 him by the publishers; it was of this that he 
 wrote in his diary the good-natured memoranda 
 so often quoted, that he had a library of nine 
 hundred volumes, " seven hundred of which I 
 wrote myself." In spite of its lack of success, it 
 is an attractive book, and though there have been 
 so many accounts of boating trips since, his nar- 
 
HENRY DAVID THOREAU. 167 
 
 rative is not out of date. He makes much of the 
 starting, and of every slight adventure, according 
 to his wont ; sees the hero in a very ordinary per- 
 son, and great possibilities in the commonest life ; 
 sees everything — nothing ever escapes his eyes 
 — and he philosophizes and says things to set one 
 thinking. , 
 
 It was the same always, wherever he went. 
 He was a student of Nature, of himself, and of a 
 few choice authors. The pursuits and ambitions 
 which engross most men he was more than indif- 
 ferent to. Wealth, position, social influence were 
 of no account to him. In his nature there was 
 the Indian fondness for open-air life, and the 
 sharp instincts and unerring sagacity of an Indian ; 
 in knowledge of wood-craft few men in New Eng- 
 land have surpassed him. He knew the ways 
 and haunts, the times and seasons of the wild 
 creatures in the woods and waters ; and to him 
 they were never wild, but almost came at his bid- 
 ding. One of his intimate friends says : 
 
 " Sometimes I have gone with Thoreau and his 
 young comrades for an expedition on the river. 
 
1 68 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 . . . He would tell stories of the Indians who 
 once dwelt thereabout, until the children almost 
 looked to see a red man skulking with his arrow 
 on the shore ; and every plant or flower on the 
 bank or in the water, and every fish, turtle, frog, 
 lizard about us was transformed by the wand of 
 his knowledge from the low form into which the 
 spell of our ignorance had reduced it into a mys- 
 tic beauty. One of his surprises was to thrust 
 his hand softly into the water, and as softly raise 
 up before our astonished eyes a large bright fish, 
 which lay as contentedly in his hand as if they 
 were old acquaintances. If the fish had also 
 dropped a penny from its mouth, it could not 
 have been a more miraculous proceeding to us." 
 He did not use a gun, and never captured ani- 
 mals except in gentle ways, and afterwards re- 
 leased them. Squirrels would run up his arm, 
 and the partridge, shyest of birds, would lead her 
 brood to the door of his cabin in the woods. 
 You should read a fine paper on Thoreau, by 
 Emerson, who was his warm friend, to see how 
 this quality of attracting dumb animals was exer- 
 
HENRY DAVID THOREAU. 1 69 
 
 cised, as well as to see what estimate the poet- 
 philosopher put upon his young townsman, the 
 poet-naturalist. Much fuller, however, and more 
 elaborate with regard to that trait in Thoreau's 
 character is a volume with which you ought to be 
 acquainted, called Thoreau : His Life and Aims. 
 A Study. By H. A. Page, an Englishman. 
 
 Everybody who has ever heard of Thoreau at all 
 knows at least one thing about him, and that is 
 that he had a hermitage by Walden Pond. It 
 was about two miles from his mother's door, on 
 Emerson's land, and Alcott and Channing helped 
 cut down the trees of which the little house was 
 made — a tiny building with just room enough 
 for his few pieces of furniture, and none to spare, 
 for whenever he had occasion to sweep and tidy 
 up, he used to set everything out of doors. His 
 life there was a sort of experiment, but he de- 
 lighted in the freedom from conventional ways 
 and in the seclusion, or he would never have tried 
 it for two years. Often Emerson or some other 
 choice friend would go to visit him, and they had 
 many an hour of lofty converse about his favorite 
 
170 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 authors, Chaucer and Spenser, Homer and Virgil, 
 Mihon and Wordsworth. 
 
 It was a primitive way of living, but not exactly 
 one's ideal to be followed for any length of time, 
 however much one might be in love with Nature ; 
 he varied his gardening in his little patch of 
 ground with surveying, and taking long tramps 
 to see the sun set from some hilltop, to search 
 into the habits of some wild creature, to find 
 some favorite flower and be on the spot at its 
 time of blooming — foolish excursions most per- 
 sons would call them, but to this keen observer, 
 this ardent lover of bird and blossom, nothing 
 was trivial or common. 
 
 He was first of all a naturalist, and his life and 
 work are of consequence as having given an im- 
 pulse in that direction whose value and extent 
 can hardly be over-rated ; but he was also a fine 
 writer, careful and discriminating in the use of 
 language, and imparting to all he wrote a kind 
 of quaintness and originality which fitly represent 
 his own unique personality. From association 
 with Emerson he had caught an Emersonian tone 
 
HENRY DAVID THOREAU. 171 
 
 which sometimes appears in a terse way of putting 
 things, as in such passages as these : 
 
 The outward is only the outside of that which is within. 
 Men are not concealed under habits, but are revealed by 
 them ; they are their true clothes. 
 
 In the long run men hit only what they aim at. 
 
 Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance 
 to read them at all. 
 
 I shall not be as cheap to myself if I see that another 
 values me. 
 
 What a man does, compared with what he is, is but a 
 small part. . . . Otte may well feel chagrined when he 
 finds he can do nearly all he can conceive. 
 
 Life is a battle in which you are to show your pluck, and 
 woe be to the coward. . . . Men were born to succeed, 
 not to fail. 
 
 That sentence in italics is for you to think 
 about in earnest. 
 
 But in the main Thoreau is himself and no 
 other. His prose is fragrant of the woods ; it 
 carries you to the uplands and brings the air of 
 the new dawn to your cheek ; you feel the morn- 
 ing in all your veins ; the invigorating atmosphere 
 of the mountain tops is about you ; for the time 
 
172 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 you are lifted up out of the pettiness of everyday 
 living, and see how pure and sweet, how restful 
 and helpful the sylvan influences and the skyey 
 influences may be. You will, in time, grow to 
 like the companionship of this writer, and while 
 you pass over his oddities you will accept him 
 as a guide through the woodlands and along the 
 streams; and the more you observe, the more 
 you will enjoy such bits of minute descriptions as 
 you will find on almost every page, like the fol- 
 lowing about the peeping of his favorite hylodes 
 in March ; 
 
 I hear it now faintly from through and over the bare gray 
 twigs and the sheeny needles of an oak and pine wood, and 
 from over the russet fields beyond. . . . It is a singu- 
 larly emphatic and ear-piercing proclamation of animal life, 
 when, with a very few and slight exceptions, vegetation is 
 yet dormant. . . . The shrill piping of the hylodes 
 locates itself nowhere in particular. It seems to take its 
 rise at an indefinite distance over wood and hill and pasture, 
 from clefts and hollows in the March wind. It is not so 
 much of the earth, earthy, as of the air, airy. It rises at 
 once on the wind and is at home there and we are incapable 
 of tracing it further back. 
 
HENRY DAVID THOREAU. 173 
 
 Or what he says about the red squirrel, which 
 
 makes so many queer sounds, and so different from one 
 another, that you would think they came from half a dozen 
 creatures. . . . You might say that he successfully ac- 
 complished the difficult feat of singing and whistling at the 
 same time. 
 
 The chief teaching to be had from his writings 
 is that there is unbounded wealth of happiness 
 and a liberal education in using one's eyes. He 
 says : 
 
 The woman who sits in the house and sees is a match for 
 a stirring captain. . . . We are as much as we see. 
 
 This belief he expresses more fully, and in 
 pungent words, in his fine paper on " Autumnal 
 Tints." Often there is a dash of humor about 
 him, like this : 
 
 The youth gets together his materials to build a bridge to 
 the moon, or perchance a palace or temple on the earth, 
 and at length the middle-aged man concludes to build a 
 wood-shed with them. 
 
 Or he follows out a grotesque fancy, as in this 
 case : 
 
174 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS, 
 
 The age of the world is great enough for our imagina- 
 tions, even according to the Mosaic account, without bor- 
 rowing any years from the geologist. From Adam and Eve 
 at one leap sheer down to the deluge, and then through the 
 ancient monarchies, through Babylon and Thebes, Brahma 
 and Abraham, to Greece and the Argonauts ; whence we 
 might start again, with Orpheus and the Trojan War, the 
 Pyramids and the Olympic games, and Homer and Athens 
 for our stages ; and after a breathing space at the building of 
 Rome, continue our journey down through Odin and Christ 
 to — America. It is a wearisome while, and yet the lives of 
 but sixty old women such as live under the hill, say of a 
 century each, strung together, are sufficient to reach over 
 the whole ground. Taking hold of hands they would span 
 the interval from Eve to my own mother. A respectable 
 tea-party merely — whose gossip would be Universal His- 
 tory. The fourth old woman from myself suckled Colum- 
 bus — the ninth was nurse to the Norman Conqueror — the 
 nineteenth was the Virgin Mary — the twenty-fourth the Cu- 
 maean Sibyl — the thirtieth was at the Trojan War and Helen 
 her name — the thirty-eighth was Queen Semiramis — the 
 sixtieth was Eve the mother of mankind. So much for the 
 
 Old woman that lives under the hill, 
 And if she's not gone she lives there still. 
 
 It will not take many great-granddaughters of hers to be in 
 at the death of time. 
 
HENRY DAVID THOREAU. 1 75 
 
 But a few selections do not in any sense repre- 
 sent Thoreau. His books are all worth careful 
 reading. No one has given a better account of 
 Cape Cod than he, and if you should ever happen 
 to be in that strange region of downs and wind- 
 swept spaces at Truro, and where the Highland 
 Light-house stands solitary above a lonely sea, 
 you will find in his little volume the truest, most 
 appreciative guide you could have. His Waldeti 
 has become a kind of classic, and by that he is 
 most widely known. 
 
 Thoreau does not seem to belong to our every- 
 day world, but away ba,ck among sylvan folk of 
 the days of fable, and that is how Hawthorne 
 regarded him, for he says he drew his first con- 
 ception of Donatello (in The Marble Faun), from 
 him. But with all his eccentricity and egotism, 
 there is one emulative thing to be said of him — 
 he lived his own life, he was honest, without sham, 
 and while clinging to his own ideas he did not 
 consciously violate those of other men. 
 
 His last days were spent in careful revision of 
 his writings ; a friend who visited him says he 
 
176 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOITNG FOLKS. 
 
 found him lying back in an easy chair, his mother 
 standing behind him bathing his head, and Sophia 
 on one side with a pile of manuscript which, 
 measuring with his hand, he would now and then 
 feebly make a suggestion about. His mother 
 said> " Henry wished everything of a light charac- 
 ter removed from his writings — he thinks life too 
 serious for anything trifling." Death came to him 
 in the Concord home he was so fond of, and his 
 grave is in Sleepy Hollow, marked with a brown 
 stone in which is a sunken panel with the inscrip- 
 tion : "Henry D. Thoreau, born July 12, 1817; 
 died May 6, 1862." The Walden hut is gone, but 
 arrowy pines still shelter the place, the little clear- 
 ing is open towards the lovely pond, and a cross 
 set in the midst of a heap of stones marks the 
 site where Thoreau lived — a pathetic cairn to 
 which the chance passer-by, or visitor from afar, 
 adds the tribute of a memorial stone. 
 
 Nothing in recent American literature has been 
 more remarkable than the increase of writings on 
 the class of subjects in which Thoreau was pio- 
 neer. One of the first (whom there is danger of 
 
HENRY DAVID THOREAU. 1 77 
 
 your overlooking, since new writers are crowding 
 along so fast), was Wilson Flagg, who was born 
 in Beverly, Massachusetts, November 5, 1805, and 
 died in Cambridge, May 4, 1878. His first book, 
 Studies in the Field and Forest, was published in 
 1857. He afterwards published Woods and By- 
 ways of New England, and . Birds and Seasons of 
 New England — three volumes with tempting titles, 
 and contents which did not disappoint their prom- 
 ise. He made no claim to technical knowledge, 
 but wrote because he loved the subjects ; in his 
 own words : " My book differs from learned works 
 as a lover's description of his lady's hand would 
 differ from Bell's anatomical description of it." 
 One fancies him a small, slender man, taking long 
 walks about the country, along the old roads and 
 grassy cart-paths through the woods which he has 
 pictured for us, sauntering rather than keeping on 
 like your true pedestrian, lingering often to de- 
 light his eye in some scene of rural beauty, or to 
 watch the movements of some bird and listen to 
 its song, then going home to write in poetical 
 prose his pleasant experiences. 
 
178 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 So, one after another, the lovers of sylvan life 
 have taken up the pen from pure delight in their 
 favorite theme. Thirty years or more ago Colonel 
 Higginson wrote those Out of Door Papers^ which 
 " H. H." thought were in the most perfect style 
 the English language is capable of. But, in her 
 modest unconsciousness of her own matchless 
 gift of expression, she could not have foreseen 
 what the readers who sorrow over her death are 
 keenly mindful of — that for prose which should 
 exceed in force and beauty that which she herself 
 wrote, we should have far to seek. Read her Bits 
 of Travel and her Bits of Travel about Home for 
 some of the choicest paragraphs that can any- 
 where be found. Here, for instance, is the past- 
 ture we know as we know our own door-yard — 
 so faithfully can the master-hand paint a typical 
 " bit " of New England territory : 
 
 Considered as pastures, from an animal's point of view 
 they must be disappointing ; stones for bread to a cruel ex- 
 tent they give. Considered as landscape, they have, to a 
 trained eye, a charm and fascination which smooth, fulsome 
 meadow levels cannot equal. There can be no more ex- 
 
HENRY DAVID THOREAU. 179 
 
 quisite tones of color, no daintier mosaic, than one sees if 
 he looks attentively on an August day at these fields of gray 
 granite, lichen-painted boulders, lying in beds of light-green 
 ferns bordered by pink and white spiraeas, and lighted up by 
 red lilies. 
 
 Could anything surpass that ? From just such 
 beds of fern have you not drawn forth long stems 
 of luscious strawberries, and just such red lilies 
 have you not borne away in sheaves ? 
 
 Not a word of the descriptions of natural scen- 
 ery, outward life, written by " H. H." can you 
 afford to skip ; not an essay or passage of the 
 kind by Miss Jewett can you afford not to read. 
 You will be interested in seeing how different the 
 style of two or three writers on the same subject 
 (yet sometimes how similar!) as in the case of 
 Thoreau who wrote about the Maine woods, and 
 Theodore Winthrop, who in a series called Life in 
 the Open Air, wrote of the same region. You 
 might compare also two passages about a mount- 
 ain, or, for another topic, see how Winthrop treats 
 a loon and its uncanny cry, see what Thoreau has 
 to tell, and then what John Burroughs says about 
 
l8o PLEASANT AUTHOTiS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 the same thing — you will find it in "Touches of 
 Nature," in his Birds and Poets. 
 
 Of this last-named writer, now in the prime and 
 fulness of his power, you surely know a great deal, 
 for his essays are all about you, and appearing in 
 the magazines of the day. What more attractive 
 reading than his Wake Robin, Winter Sunshine, 
 Birds and Poets, Locusts and Wild Honey, Pepacton, 
 and Fresh Fields ? A virile, crisp, breezy writer, 
 whose pages lose nothing in picturesqueness when 
 compared with any American author. The pa- 
 pers in those volumes are enough to kindle in 
 you an ardent interest in the subject we have 
 been dwelling upon, even if you had not the faint- 
 est inclination that way before. 
 
 It would require far wider limits than are al- 
 lowed me here to speak of all the authors who 
 have made this theme an attractive one in our 
 literature. Lowell has charming papers among 
 his few volumes of prose, such as " My Garden 
 Acquaintance," and others you will find no diffi- 
 culty in selecting. Susan Fenimore Cooper (daugh- 
 ter of the great novelist) wrote more than thirty 
 
HENRY DAVID THOREAU. l8l 
 
 years ago a record of the sylvan year, which she 
 called Rural Hours. Celia Thaxter described in 
 her Among the Isles of Shoals- all the phases of 
 flower life, and the wild characteristics of those 
 bleak but most fascinating islands ofif the New 
 Hampshire coast — a book which it is a joy to 
 read, autobiographic, descriptive, brimming over 
 with poetic thought. 
 
 Such a library of out-of-door literature by our 
 own countrymen and countrywomen, and about 
 different sections of our own country, as one might 
 have ! A summer corner, where we should seem 
 transported to the cool, green solitudes of woods 
 far inland, to glens among the mountains, to 
 beaches lapped by ocean waves. The tonic of 
 the hills and the sea is in them, the invigorating 
 freshness of the west winds, the song of birds, the 
 sound of waters, the incense of flowers. You 
 would find in that nook some choice papers by 
 Joel Benton, which he meant to put into a book 
 to be called Under the Apple Boughs (perhaps he 
 has done so) ; a volume or more by Maurice 
 Thompson, By-ways and Bird Notes, for one ; you 
 
l82 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 will find the classic pastorals (for such they must 
 be termed, incongruous though it sound), of Edith 
 Thomas ; the Adirondack sketches of Charles 
 Dudley Warner; certain volumes by Ik Marvel 
 (of which more by and by). How long the list 
 might be made, not forgetting one lately pub- 
 lished. Tenants of an old Farm, by Dr. McCook, 
 with its comical adaptations by Dan Beard ; and, 
 also new, A Naturalisf s Rambles about Home, and 
 Uplatid and Meadow, both about that famous 
 region for naturalists, the New Jersey creeks and 
 barrens, both by Dr. Charles C. Abbott. Finally 
 our magazines and our book stores abound with 
 this class of literature, so that there is an embar- 
 rassment of riches, from North, East, South and 
 West, all in the same general line with Thoreau, 
 but treated in as many ways as there are authors. 
 
 Note. — Thoreau's prose books are A Week on the Con- 
 cord and Merrimack Kivers, IValden, or Life in the Woods, 
 A Yankee in Canada, Excursions in Field ajid Forest, The 
 Maine Woods, Cape Cod, Early Spring in Massachusetts, 
 and Slimmer. The two last named are selections from his 
 journals, edited by IT. O. O. Blake. Two of the most at- 
 tractive among his single papers, arc "Autumnal Tints" 
 and " Wild Apples." There is a biography by Wm. E. Chan- 
 ning, a " Life " by F. B. Sanborn, and " A Study " of his life 
 and aims, by H. A. Page. 
 

 FRANCIS PARKMAN. 
 
X. 
 
 FRANCIS PARKMAN. 
 
 IN reading history, the intelligent and profitable 
 way is to have some plan, and then follow it 
 out. Select a certain period, and make yourself 
 as thoroughly acquainted as possible with that; 
 and for collateral reading, take biographies or other 
 books bearing upon the times, individuals, leading 
 events, or the country you are engaged upon; by 
 doing which you may have the benefit of some 
 side-lights upon your subject, and also the opinion 
 of writers from some other point-of-view, helping 
 you to form your own opinion. It is often the case 
 that one reads history in a kind of hap-hazard way, 
 now a little about England, now the Middle Ages, 
 now Greece or Rome. The result is an accumula- 
 tion of incidents and dates ; of a kind of informa- 
 tion which is not knowledge. You have a confused 
 185 
 
1 86 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 mass. in your mind which you cannot use, a cL—'^s, 
 a miscellany ; even after much reading and study 
 you are in deplorable uncertainty about the momen- 
 tous causes which have brought about the very 
 revolutions in government, dethronement of sover- 
 eigns, overthrow of nations which you have just 
 given your time to. It is a Ip-mentable failure 
 to appreciate the chief aim for which history is 
 written. 
 
 Already you have had Prescott brought before 
 you with his subjects of discovery, adventures and 
 conquest. Another series is the splendid group 
 which the genius of Motley made as captivating 
 as romance, covering a period of portentous im- 
 port to more than one of the great European pow- 
 ers. Coming to our own United States, you have 
 the general history by Hildreth, and that upon 
 which the venerable and venerated George Ban- 
 croft has been fifty years engaged ; besides the 
 many local and topical works to aid in a clear 
 knowledge of certain regions or subjects, such as 
 Palfrey's History of Neiv England, and Frothing- 
 ham's Siege of Boston. These men are our own his- 
 
FRANCIS PARKMAN. 1 87 
 
 torians, American authors, eminent for scholarship, 
 for painstaking research. 
 
 There is another who stands without a superior, 
 second to no American historian living or dead ; 
 second to no historian who has written in the Eng- 
 lish tongue — Francis Parkman. 
 
 ' As early as the age of eighteen he formed the 
 purpose of writing on " French-American history," 
 limiting himself to the contest which ended with 
 the death of Montcalm and Wolfe, the fall of Que- 
 bec and of the French dominion in North Amer- 
 ica. But afterwards he extended his plan so as to 
 include the entire subject of French colonization ; 
 and in carrying it out he arranged it in separate 
 narratives with different titles. 
 
 To-day, after forty-five years, it stands complete, 
 with the exception of a comparatively unimportant 
 portion of seven years, by and by to come into 
 place ; and in his own words, " When this gap is 
 filled, the series of ' France and England in North 
 America' will form a continuous history of the 
 French occupation of the continent." A series 
 unsurpassed for brilliancy, for the quality of the 
 
165 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 literary workmanship, accuracy, scholarship and 
 picturesque narrative. You can hardly know what 
 a charm history may have until you have made 
 yourself acquainted with these volumes ; in his 
 hands it is like a story-book. 
 
 His first movement in preparation was a trip to 
 the Rocky Mountains for the purpose of studying 
 savage life, customs and character among the wild- 
 est tribes. With a friend, like himself just out of 
 college, he set out from St. Louis in the April of 
 1846 and, after various adventures, left him and 
 went on with a hunter-guide and lived among the 
 Sioux; sleeping in their wigwams, eating their 
 detestable food, sharing all their hardships and rov- 
 ing life, following the hunt and the war-path, wit- 
 nessing their ceremonies ; in short he was domes- 
 ticated for several weeks with a horde of the most 
 thorough savages ; as utterly lost to civilization as 
 if no such thing existed, and sometimes so ill that 
 he expected to leave his bones there in Oregon. 
 No white man, unless it might have been a fur 
 trader, could have had better opportunity. His 
 nerve and determination never failed ; he says he 
 
FRANCIS PARKMAN. 1 89 
 
 placed himself in positions so perilous because 
 " my business was observation, and I was willing 
 to pay dearly for the opportunity of exercising it." 
 After his return his experiences were put into 
 a book, The Oregon Trail, brim full of novel situa- 
 tions, perils and escapes, buffalo-hunts in the region 
 of the Black Hills, and all the hideous details of 
 that savage kind of living. You will see just what 
 Indians were at the Far West forty years ago. No 
 such account could be written to-day, for that state 
 of things has passed away forever. He went boldly 
 to the lodge of an old chief, and had the guide an- 
 nounce that he had come to live with him ; and as 
 hospitality under such circumstances is an Indian 
 virtue he became one of the family of Kongra 
 Tonga. Here is a passage after the big buffalo 
 hunt was over : 
 
 I entered the lodge of my host. His squaw instantly 
 brought me food and water, and spread a buffalo-robe for 
 me to lie upon ; and being much fatigued I lay down and fell 
 asleep. In about an hour, the entrance of Kongra Tonga, 
 with his arms smeared with blood to the elbows, awoke 
 me. . . His squaw gave him a vessel of water for wash- 
 ing, set before him a bowl of boiled meat, and, as he was 
 
I go PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 eating, pulled off his bloody moccasins and placed fresh . 
 ones on his feet. . . . And now the hunters, two or 
 three at a time, came rapidly in and, each consigning his 
 horses to the squaws, entered his lodge with the air of a 
 man whose day's work was done. The squaws flung down 
 the load from the burdened horses, and vast piles of meat 
 and hides were soon gathered before the door of every lodge. 
 By this time it was darkening fast, and the whole village was 
 illumined by the glare of fires. All the squaws and children 
 were gathered about the piles of meat, exploring them for 
 the daintiest portion. 
 
 An intimate, most trying, often sickening inside 
 view of savage life and character which was after- 
 ward of incalculable service to him. Thus, in the 
 outset, you must understand that your historian is 
 personally familiar with his ground ; that besides 
 collecting material from foreign archives, from 
 French manuscripts, documents and letters hith- 
 erto inaccessible, from every possible quarter, he 
 has journeyed through forests, been up and down 
 the great rivers, along the lakes, visited the fields 
 where battles were fought, examined the ruins of 
 forts and old defences, taken note of the scenery 
 and vegetable growths, and traversed what were 
 once trails through the wilderness. He says : 
 
FRANCIS PARKMAN. 19I 
 
 I have visited and examined every spot where events of 
 any importance in connection with the contest took place, 
 and have observed with attention such scenes and persons 
 as might help to illustrate those I meant to describe. In 
 short, the subject has been studied as much from life and in 
 the open air as at the library table. 
 
 And now let me emphasize the importance of 
 this magnificent work by reminding you that while 
 so much interest is connected with the War of the 
 Revolution and the late War of the Rebellion, there 
 was danger that the momentous consequences in- 
 volved in that earlier, great struggle between the 
 French and English might be almost lost sight of. 
 
 The general title is " France and England in 
 North America, A series of historical narratives." 
 The time covered is from 1512 (the discovery of 
 Florida) to the fall of Canada, in 1760, with a sup- 
 plementary chapter or two relative to the treaty 
 and results. The scenes, personages, accessories 
 and events during this period of about two hun- 
 dred and fifty years are wonderfully varied and 
 dramatic. The chief actors are French noblemen 
 fresh from the most polished court in Europe, ofifi- 
 cers victorious in famous European campaigns, 
 
1 92 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 explorers, Jesuit fathers, trappers, guides, half- 
 breeds, Indian warriors, and in the ancient re'gime, 
 nuns, high-born ladies and peasant girls. The 
 region is romantic, taking in the coast at Mount 
 Desert, and that wild stretch along the St. Law- 
 rence and the chain of great lakes to the far 
 Northwest, the Mississippi river and the fateful 
 lagoons at its mouth. 
 
 It has the Acadia of the people of Evangeline, 
 Quebec with its heights and historic " Plain," Mon- 
 treal and the convent whose walls were reared dur- 
 ing the reign of that re'gime, Lake George, Cham- 
 plain, Ticonderoga, the forts where diabolic savage* 
 wreaked their vengeance, trading-posts, lonely mis- 
 sions in the wilderness. The scenes s?iift, and suc- 
 ceed one another like those in some long panorama; 
 now a pageant or a religious ceremonial, now an 
 ambuscade or a war-dance. Dramatic in the highest 
 degree, it was life lived rapidly and insecurely, al- 
 ternating from festivity to carnage ; a time of splen- 
 did success and one of downfall, of glory, of triumph 
 and of dire misfortune. Nowhere else on this con- 
 tinent have been such varied and stirring events. 
 
FRANCIS PARKMAN. I93 
 
 Part I. is Pioneers of Fra7ice in the New World, 
 and the author introduces it by saying : 
 
 The springs of American civilization, unlike those of the 
 older world, lie revealed in the clear light of History. 
 
 He says it was Feudalism, Monarchy and Rome 
 — "a gigantic ambition striving to master a con- 
 tinent" — which sent those foreign expeditions to 
 our shore, and that " the story of New France 
 opens with a tragedy, in the wilds of Florida." 
 The first division of Part I. is " Huguenots in Flor- 
 ida," and while reading it it is worth while to take 
 up the chapters in the first volume of Bancroft's 
 History of the United States which treat of the 
 same subject, and also to give careful attention 
 to a recent volume by Charles B. Reynolds, entitled 
 Old Saint Augustine. The second division is " Sam- 
 uel de Champlain," a far more agreeable topic, 
 and a kind of adventurer more worthy than many 
 who appear in those pages. Here is an account 
 of an Ottawa village as his exploring party saw it ; 
 they were the first white m.en the Indians had seen : 
 
 Here was a rough clearing. The trees had been burned ; 
 there was a rude m& .desolate gap in the sombre green of 
 
194 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 the pine forest. Dead trunks, blasted and black with fire, 
 stood grimly upright amid the charred stumps and prostrate 
 bodies of fallen comrades half consumed. In the interven- 
 ing spaces the soil had been feebly scratched with hoes of 
 wood or bone, and a crop of maize was growing, now some 
 four inches high. The dwellings of these slovenly farmers, 
 framed of poles covered with sheets of 'bark, were scattered 
 here and there, singly or in groups, while their tenants were 
 running to the shore in amazement. Warriors stood with 
 their hands over their mouths — the usual attitude of aston- 
 ishment ; squaws stared between curiosity and fear ; and 
 naked pappooses screamed and ran. 
 
 This was the first intrusion upon wigwams in 
 the "forest primeval," and here the red man as he 
 was, the aboriginal inhabitant, the North American 
 Indian who was to play so important a part in 
 coming events. • 
 
 Part II. is The Jesuits in North America, and is a 
 history of the efforts, perseverance, zeal and hard- 
 ships of the priests in establishing Missions among 
 the Indians. No annals afford a picture of more 
 sublime patience and self-sacrifice than the lives 
 of those men, who were more than ready to shut 
 themselves off in the heart of the wilderness, to be 
 massacred, burnt at the stake, by their savage as- 
 
FRANCIS PARKMAN. I95 
 
 sociates, and perish there alone, as was the fate of 
 many. 
 
 But their religious enthusiasm had results com- 
 mensurate with their heroism, and its influence 
 was of weight in founding Montreal and determin- 
 ing the site of towns which perpetuate their names 
 to this day. 
 
 Part III., La Salle and the Discovery of the Great 
 JVest, you will find one of the most captivating of 
 the series. A biography of one of the most daring 
 of all the explorers in an age of daring men ; one 
 whom no perils could daunt, a man of unconquer- 
 able mind "in a frame of iron" — that educated 
 young French gentleman who came over to Can- 
 ada at twenty-two to seek his fortune, learned 
 seven or eight Indian languages and dialects, and 
 with his imagination on fire to find a new passage 
 to the South Sea by way of the Ohio and Missis- 
 sippi, lent his life to "exploring the mystery of the 
 great unknown river of the West." Of the perils 
 and tragic experiences through the years that fol- 
 lowed, through wintry forests, beset by savage 
 hordes, we have his own words : 
 
196 PLEASANT AUTHORS F _)R YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 Often without food ; watch by night and march by day, 
 loaded with baggage, such as blanket, clothing, kettle, 
 hatchet, gun, powder, lead, and skins to make moccasins; 
 sometimes pushing through thickets, sometimes climbing 
 rocks covered with snow, sometimes wading whole days 
 through marshes where the water was waist-deep or even 
 more, at a season when the snow was not entirely melted. 
 
 Again, when snow kept on falling for nineteen 
 days in succession, he says : 
 
 We were obliged to cross forty leagues of open country, 
 where we could hardly find wood to warm ourselves at even- 
 ing, and could get no bark whatever to make a hut, so that 
 we had to spend the night exposed to the furious winds that 
 blow over those plains. 
 
 Through regions where there had been Indian 
 fights, and sights most sickening after that " hyena 
 warfare " met their sight ; losing vessels and boats ; 
 encountering the murderous savages; amidst plun- 
 derers and mutineers; subject to every hindrance 
 conceivable — to understand all this, you must read 
 this strangely fascinating but saddening volume 
 which closes with loss and disappointment, with 
 tragedy, and the assassination of the brave leader 
 at forty-four. 
 
FRANCIS PARKMAN. 197 
 
 Part IV., The Old Regime in Canada^ is a more 
 peaceful division treating of the mode of life in 
 Montreal and other settlements, the arrival of the 
 emigrant girls from France, the establishment of 
 the Sisterhoods still existing in that quaint Cana- 
 dian city, building, mission work, intrigues, dissen- 
 sions, the rude conditions of a new colony with a 
 promiscuous population. 
 
 Part v.. Count Frontenac and New France under 
 Louis XIV., gives the history of " the most remark- 
 able man who ever represented the crown of France 
 in the New World," and the beginning of the trou- 
 bles between the French and the English colonies 
 which grew into that long and bloody contest, 
 during which bands of Indian allies swept down 
 through the wilderness upon our defenceless set- 
 tlements, and along our northern frontiers there 
 was an unbroken reign of terror. It is in this part 
 (Chapter XVI.) that you come upon the Acadians 
 of whom you are to know more by and by. 
 
 As was said in the beginning, there is a vacancy 
 in the series, which leaves us to pass on to the 
 grand culmination in Part VII., Montcalm and 
 
198 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 IVo/fe, one of the finest pieces of historical writing 
 in our language. In this the author has surpassed 
 all the preceding volumes. In the Introduction 
 he says : 
 
 The most momentous and far-reaching question ever 
 brought to issue on this continent was : Shall France 
 remain here, or shall she not ? 
 
 This work tells why and how French dominion 
 was overthrown ; and first, with clearness of state- 
 ment that a child could understand, shows the 
 situation, what France claimed, and what she 
 actually held ; then the position and conditions of 
 the thirteen British colonies at the period dating 
 1745 ; then the struggles between the French and 
 English for trading-posts : and here at one of the 
 French forts commanded by Saint Pierre, we meet, 
 in the autumn of 1753, George Washington: 
 
 The surrounding forests had dropped their leaves, and in 
 gray and patient desolation bided the coming winter. Chill 
 rains drizzled over the gloomy " clearing," and drenched the 
 palisades and log-built barracks, raw from the axe. Buried 
 in the wilderness, the military exiles resigned themselves as 
 they might to months of monotonous solitude, when, just 
 after sunset on the eleventh of December, a tall youth came 
 
FRANCIS PARKMAN. 1 99 
 
 out of the forest on horseback, attended by a companion 
 much older and rougher than himself, and followed by sev- 
 eral Indians and four or five white men with pack horses. 
 Officers from the fort went out to meet the strangers ; and 
 wading through mud and sodden snow, they entered at the 
 gate. On the next day the young leader of the party, with 
 the help of an interpreter, for he spoke no French, had an 
 interview with the commandant, and gave him a letter 
 from Governor Dinwiddle. Saint Pierre and the officer 
 next in rank, who knew a little English, took it to another 
 room, to study it at their ease ; and in it, all unconsciously, 
 they read a name destined to stand one of the noblest in the 
 annals of mankind ; for it introduced Major George Wash- 
 ington, Adjutant General of the Virginia militia. 
 
 I have quoted that passage for a twofold pur- 
 pose, one of which is to show you the unsurpassed 
 clearness and picturesque beauty of this author's 
 style. In the whole paragraph it hardly would be 
 possible to change a word, or the position of a 
 word, without damage. It is a style wonderful in 
 its simplicity and purity, its directness and vigor, 
 its pictorial charm. You will find it everywhere. 
 In no historical writings will you have the reality 
 of events more vividly brought before 3'ou ; the 
 author had the power of identifying himself with 
 them, as if he had traversed the swamps with La 
 
200 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 Salle, and lived in the bark-roofed cabin with the 
 priest ; as if he had been an eye-witness of Brad- 
 dock's defeat. When you read that bloody story 
 in Chapter VII. you will feel as if you yourself had 
 been a looker-on. 
 
 In this part, you have the true story of the Aca- 
 dians (dififerent from that in Evangeline) ; you 
 see of what rude elements the Provincial army was 
 made ; you meet John Stark and Rogers " the 
 Ranger ; " you feel afresh the horrors of the sav- 
 age raids ; you live in terror of ambuscades ; you 
 wait in suspense to learn the fate of the frontier 
 forts and their brave defenders. Last of all these 
 intensely dramatic scenes, you witness the desper- 
 ate attempts to gain the Heights of Quebec, you 
 see the plateau of grass patched with corn fields, 
 the Plains of Abraham, where the long, long strug- 
 gle between England and France for American 
 dominion came to its final issue, where Wolfe fell 
 and Montcalm received his death-shot. 
 
 Our author loves a hero ; he delights to portray 
 a character ; to picture the man, bringing him out 
 of the past and making him alive before us. He 
 
FRANCIS PARKMAN. 20I 
 
 has done this for the two brave officers who gave 
 the title to this, his crowning work. 
 
 He has done it, too, for an Indian chief, who is 
 the subject of another volume, which, though stand- 
 ing independently and written earlier than the 
 others may be said to belong here — The Conspiracy 
 of Pontiac. Though small space remains, let me 
 say that the introductory part is a careful account 
 of the social institutions and habits, and the tribal 
 relations of the North American Indians. Prob- 
 ably in no one volume will you find so much, put 
 in so concise and attractive shape — their order of 
 tribes, councils, plan of government, what the iotcm 
 meant, their ancient transmitted customs which 
 took the place of laws. 
 
 The main theme is the gathering of all the In- 
 dians into one great confederacy to strike for their 
 lost territory ; and the aspect of the country when 
 this is about to take place is sketched — the lone- 
 liness, the scattered Indian villages ; even in the 
 most populous portion " one might sometimes 
 journey for days together through the twilight 
 forest and meet no human form ; " the English 
 
202 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 settlements lay "like a narrow strip between the 
 wilderness and the sea," with places of rendezvous 
 and outposts. 
 
 Pontiac, at the head of the confederacy, a man 
 of remarkable foresight and power over his people, 
 enters upon the scene at about fifty, in 1760, when 
 Rogers the Ranger with his men was sent to the 
 western forts to take possession in the nam.e of His 
 Britanic Majesty. Pontiac, who had been an ally 
 of the French, demands to know why they are there. 
 
 Soon begins the murderous strife, which means 
 attack upon the forts, stratagems, ambuscades, 
 every diabolic measure that savages could resort 
 to — it is a bloody, a curdling story, of which we 
 have details even to the preparation where the 
 Indians put on the war-paint. Through it all, we 
 cannot help sharing the author's admiration for 
 the man whom he calls "the greatest Indian on 
 the American continent." Pontiac was assassin- 
 ated by a strolling Indian, but, says the historian, 
 
 whole tribes were rooted out to expiate it . . . over the 
 grave of Pontiac more blood was poured out in atonement 
 than flowed from the hecatomb of slaughtered heroes on the 
 
FRANCIS PARKMAN. 203 
 
 corpse of Patroclus. . . . Neither mound nor tablet 
 marked the burial place of Pontiac. For a mausoleum, a 
 city [St. Louis] has risen above the forest hero, and the race 
 whom he hated with such burning rancor trample with un- 
 ceasing footsteps over his forgotten grave. 
 
 I hope I have been able to indicate to you that 
 vast pleasure and profit await you in reading the 
 works of this historian, and that you will be 
 tempted to avail yourself of the whole series. 
 Great enjoyment is before you. 
 
 Francis Parkman was born in Boston, September 
 16, 1823, and in these later years his time is 
 chiefly spent there and at his summer home a few 
 miles out, by Jamaica Pond, where he indulges 
 himself in his favorite pastime of horticulture, and 
 may be found of a summer day at work among his 
 beloved roses and lilies — you will notice how flow- 
 ers bloom along the pages of his books — of which 
 he is so fond and for the cultivation of which he is 
 so distinguished that he has written a " Book of 
 Roses," and had a lily named for him, Lilium 
 Parkmanni. 
 
 Note. — His books are Pioneers of France in the New 
 World, The Jesuits in North America, La Salle and the Dis- 
 
204 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 co7'ery of the Great West, The Old Regime in Canada, Count 
 Frontenac and New Fra7tcc under Louis XIV., Montcalm and 
 
 Wolfe, The Oregon Trail, The Conspiracy of Pontiac. He 
 has lately prepared a Historic Handbook of the Northern 
 
 Tour. A short sketch of his life may be found in The Critic 
 of February 27, 18S6. In connection with the Acadian epi- 
 sode you will find it of interest to read Evangeline ; and 
 Hiawatha, and the Algonquin Legends of Charles G. Leland 
 may afford help in understanding Indian customs and tradi- 
 tions. It is also well to read what Bancroft says upon these 
 topics. 
 
4':!0''^ 
 
 
 GRORGE WILHAM CURTIS. 
 
XI. 
 
 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 
 
 INFINITE variety goes to the making of litera- 
 ture, and we-^duld not have it otherwise if 
 we could. We do not want all, or much, to be 
 of the sledge-hammer style of Carlyle ; we weary of 
 the ponderous sentences of Dr. Johnson, even of 
 the elegant finish of Addison. It would not be 
 satisfactory to have all writers rambling and remi- 
 niscent like De Quincey and Ruskin, notwithstand- 
 ing their wondrous affluence of words, their sug- 
 gestiveness, their picturesqueness and charm. We 
 tire too much of the stately and statuesque, of the 
 too highly elaborated, of the abrupt and brusque, 
 of too much piquancy or too much dash. 
 
 We must not read history only, or biography, 
 or dry essays on vital subjects to the exclusion of 
 everything else. What would life be with the 
 207 
 
2o8 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 poetry eliminated from it ? Let us have our ideals, 
 only they must be high ones ; let us sometimes — 
 not too often — dream dreams, even as the old 
 book-keeper did in Prue and /, provided they 
 make us gentler, tenderer, purer, kindlier. 
 
 Take away from literature the poetic and imagi- 
 native part, and what a dreary residue it would be ! 
 Take away the beings who have had no existence 
 but in the author's brain, and what wide, what 
 awfully wide gaps there would be ! The favorites 
 of your childhood would be the first to go. You 
 would lose your fairy princes and princesses, Cin- 
 derella, and the Mother Goose people of your ear- 
 liest remembrance. As with the waving of a con- 
 jurer's wand, away, away they go ; as swiftly and 
 as noiselessly as the fairies who had been dancing 
 on the sands by moonlight, in Allston's lovely 
 sketch. Robinson Crusoe would go; and the 
 Pilgrim to the Celestial City and all he had to do 
 with. Prospero and Ariel would be no more ; 
 Oberon and Titania and Robin Good-fellow would 
 be spirited away. 
 
 Are you acquainted with the " Howadji ? " Do 
 
GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 209 
 
 you know " Prue " and the book-keeper ? Have 
 you ever mused over the unfortunate possession 
 Titbottom had in his magic spectacles ? — spec- 
 tacles with the power of magic that was malign, 
 not beneficent. If so, you know the quality of 
 this author's prose, unlike anything you have yet 
 had brought before you. There is always the 
 same individual imprint in whatever his pen 
 touches. You see it month by month, in the Easy 
 Chair of Harper's Monthly — a little dreamy, full 
 of memories with a flavor of pensiveness that you 
 are conscious of, as you are of a delicate perfume. 
 In the perfection of finish, the elegance and re- 
 finement of language, there is a hint of Irving ; 
 and there is a something, not easily defined, which 
 is a reminder of Charles Lamb. And yet, Curtis 
 is like neither. 
 
 If you would know for yourself just what it is 
 that I find such difficulty in defining, put yourself 
 under the spell, and read Frue and /, one of the 
 most engaging of modern classics, a little volume 
 made up of seven short sketches. What makes 
 the charm ? There is no story, no grand march 
 
2IO PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 of syllables, no incisive statement, no crystallized 
 thought to compel your attention. Yes ; where 
 lies the charm ? You have it the same in the 
 Howadji books of travel. 
 
 It is the daintiest of poetic prose. It is not the 
 bread of life, but a choice conserve. You do not 
 care to have all quince or all pine-apple, but vi^hen 
 you spread your table you would not forego the 
 exquisite aroma and the delicious flavor which 
 give zest to your banquet. When you have our 
 author for your guide you find yourself in the 
 realm of fancy, and for the time being you walk 
 in the glamour that it casts over common things. 
 Too much of such prose would be enervating, like 
 soft airs, floating clouds, the fragrance of flowers, 
 the calm of summer seas. You do not find here 
 the sinews and thews, the brawn and muscle of 
 literature, but another and essential part, refine- 
 ment, elegance, delicacy, quiet humor, something 
 subtle and evasive ; what odor is to the tuberose, 
 what poetry is to language. 
 
 It is an ineffably lovely quality of the imagina- 
 tion which conjures up pictures, like that in Elia's 
 
GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 211 
 
 " Dream Children," in the seven sketches men- 
 tioned. See how the gray-haired book-keeper in- 
 dulges his fancies about his Spanish castles, in 
 *• My Chateaux " : 
 
 My finest castles are in Spain. It is a country famously 
 romantic, and my castles are all of perfect proportions and 
 appropriately set in the most picturesque situations. I have 
 never been to Spain myself, but I have naturally conversed 
 much with travellers to that country. . . . The wisest of 
 them told me that there were more holders of real estate in 
 Spain than in any region he had ever heard of, and they are 
 all great proprietors. Every one of them possesses a mul- 
 titude of the stateliest castles. . . . It is not easy to say 
 how I know so much, as I certainly do about my castles in 
 Spain. The sun always shines upon them. They stand 
 lofty and fair in a luminous, golden atmosphere, a little hazy 
 and dreamy perhaps, like the Indian summer. . . . All 
 the sublime mountains, and beautiful valleys, and soft land- 
 scapes that I have not yet seen are to be found in the 
 grounds. . . . From the windows of those castles look 
 the beautiful women whom I have never seen, whose por- 
 traits the poets have painted. . . . The lights that never 
 shone glance at evening in the vaulted halls upon banquets 
 that were never spread. 
 
 How delightful it would be if you could read in 
 
212 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 connection with this some of the poems in verse 
 (for this, you know, is a poem in prose) where a 
 similar fancy has taken form in words. Thus, 
 Mrs. Browning called hers "The House of 
 Clouds;" Tennyson dreamed of "The Lotos- 
 Eaters," and " The Palace of Art ; " and in the 
 poems of a writer on this side the ocean, " A. W. 
 H." (Rose Terry Cooke), you will find a veritable 
 Spanish Chateau, entitled " En Espagne," in per- 
 fect verse, beginning : 
 
 I built a palace white and high 
 "With gold and purple tapestried. 
 
 No dusty highway ran thereby, 
 But guarded alleys to it led 
 And shaven lawns about were spread 
 
 Where bee and moth danced daintily. 
 
 The old book-keeper of Curtis has the vision and 
 the faculty divine ; he does not need to leave the 
 room to see the world, for he says : 
 
 An orange takes me to Sorrento, and roses when they 
 blow to Paestnm. The camelias in Aurelia's hair bring 
 Brazil into the happy room she treads. . . . The pearls 
 upon her neck make me free of the Persian Gulf. Upon her 
 
GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 213 
 
 shawl, like the Arabian prince upon his carpet, I am trans- 
 ported to the valley of Cashmere, and thus as I daily walk 
 in the bright spring days, I go round the world. 
 
 He can sit upon the shore, and see in one ship 
 Cleopatra's galley, Columbus' Santa Maria, the 
 Bucentaur of the Adriatic, the Spanish Armada, 
 the May Flower, and all the famous ships of his- 
 tory, tradition and song. In " Sea from Shore " 
 he lets the vessel from India take him far away. 
 He says of his own resources : 
 
 For those of us whom Nature means to keep at home she 
 provides entertainment. One man goes four thousand 
 miles to see Italy, and does not see it, he is so short-sighted. 
 Another is so far-sighted that he stays in his room and sees 
 more than Italy : 
 
 which is his poetical way of telling us what writers 
 before and since have said, and which you will 
 apprehend for yourselves, if you are true observ- 
 ers, that the eye sees only what it has in itself the 
 power of seeing, but having power, sees wonder- 
 ful and precious things hidden from other eyes 
 that have it not. 
 
 The seven sketches referred to are " Dinner 
 
214 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 Time," " My Chateaux," " Sea from Shore," " Tit- 
 bottom's Spectacles," " A Cruise in the Flying 
 Dutchman," " Family Portraits," " Our Cousin 
 the Curate ; " and if you fail to appreciate their 
 beauty it is because your taste is not educated. 
 Curtis's one novel Trump you will perhaps better 
 like, written to show up the folly, shame and 
 wickedness of society, after the Thackeray man- 
 ner, with a spice of sarcasm, pungent and biting. 
 There is a sweet, true, pure girl for a heroine, 
 Hope Wayne, the primness of whose bringing up 
 is intimated thus : 
 
 So Hope as a child had played with little girls who were 
 invited to Pinewood — select little girls, who came in the 
 prettiest frocks and behaved in the prettiest way, superin- 
 tended by nurses and ladies maids. They tended their 
 dolls peaceably in the nursery ; they played clean little 
 games upon the lawn. . . . They were not chattery 
 French nurses who presided over these solemnities ; they 
 were grave, housekeeping, Mrs. Simcoe-kind of people. Julia 
 and Mary were exhorted to behave themselves like little 
 ladies, and the frolic ended by their all taking books from 
 the library shelves and settling properly in a large chair, or 
 on the sofa, or even upon the piazza if it had been nicely 
 
GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 215 
 
 dusted and inspected until the setting sun sent them away 
 with the calmest kisses at parting. 
 
 It was in the days of a genuine old-time min- 
 ister, who wore 
 
 a silken gown in summer, and a woolen gown in winter, 
 and black worsted gloves, always with the middle finger of 
 the right-hand glove slit that he might more conveniently 
 turn the leaves of the Bible, and the hymn-book, and his 
 own sermons. 
 
 And it looks at first as if we were going to have 
 a book of the country life of Curtis's own 3'outh 
 in a rural town in Massachusetts, but New York 
 city soon draws in the characters, and it ends in 
 a whirlpool of fashion and folly, amidst which 
 the face of Hope Wayne shines out serene and 
 unspoiled, sweet and lovable to the end. There 
 is a dreadful Aunt Dagon (who ought to have 
 been Dragon), and upstart people who have noth- 
 ing but money — the Dinkses and Newts and Van 
 Boosenbergs and their kind. 
 
 In that novel you have a vivid description of 
 the wonderful boy-preacher, Summerfield, who 
 
2l6 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR VOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 magnetized the people, so that one of his hearers 
 said : 
 
 I have been into the old John Strut meeting-house when 
 the crowds hung out of the windows and doors like swarm- 
 ing bees clustered upon a hive. He swayed them as wind 
 bends a grain field. 
 
 Somewhat in contrast to this boy with the sweet 
 blue eyes, and " face of earnest expression and a 
 kind of fairy sweetness," comes a fine account of 
 Dr. Channing, whose style and influence were evi- 
 dently not without potence over Curtis, whose 
 belief is of the Channing order. Read it, that 
 you may know just what was the presence and 
 manner of that distinguished New England di- 
 vine of rarely fine qualities and saintly life : 
 
 In a few minutes a slight man, wrapped in a black silk 
 gown slowly ascended the pulpit stairs, and before seating 
 himself stood for a moment looking down at the congrega- 
 tion. His face was small and thin and pale, but there was 
 a pure light, an earnest spiritual sweetness in the eyes — the 
 irradiation of an an.xious soul. . . . A natural manly can- 
 dor certified the truth of every word he spoke. ... Ashe 
 warmed in his discourse a kind of celestial grace glimmered 
 about his person, and his pale, thoughtful face kindled and 
 
GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 217 
 
 beamed with holy light. His sentences were entirely simple. 
 . . • The people sat as if they were listening to a dis- 
 embodied soul. 
 
 You will remember that in The Minister's Woo- 
 ing of Mrs. Stowe you have a powerful portraiture 
 of another New England clergyman of former 
 days, and that to the novelist we often owe some 
 of the best pictures of actual people that we find 
 anywhere in print. 
 
 Another book by Curtis which had great popu- 
 larity, showing up the hollowness and snobbish- 
 ness of New York society, after the same Thack- 
 eray manner, was The Potiphar Papers ; but those 
 of his writings of greatest interest to you are 
 the books of travel, the Nile Notes of a IIow- 
 adji, and The Howadji in Syria. Romantic yet 
 realistic, steeped in the poetry and glow of the 
 orient, each volume of his Eastern experiences 
 has the same luxuriance of language, while giving 
 at the same time a more satisfactory' impression of 
 the scenes and places than columns of matter- 
 of-fact description would do. They are summer 
 books, to dream over, under the trees, in the 
 
2l8 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 hammock, on the veranda. Different books are 
 for different times and seasons and places. Some 
 are to be read when snow-bound, in acosey corner 
 by the evening lamp ; some are for odd hours, 
 left to lie about on the window seat and taken up 
 by snatches, like Leigh Hunt's; some are for 
 travelling companions, but the Howadji books are 
 for summer days. Esthetic, leisurely, strangely 
 fascinating, and potent over the young imagina- 
 tion. There is a golden haze about them, and 
 yet through it we see distinctly what he said, and 
 in a light we can never forget. Here are bits from 
 what he says about his first sight of Jerusalem : 
 
 I passed rapidly over this lofty, breezy table-land with an in- 
 conceivable ardor of expectation. ... As I paced more 
 slowly along the hills, the words of the psalm suddenly 
 rang through my mind, like a sublime organ peal through a 
 hushed cathedral. " Beautiful for situation, the joy of the 
 whole earth is Mount Zion, on the sides of the North, the city 
 of the Great King." . . . The high land unrolled itself 
 more broadly. The breezy morning died into silent noon. 
 . . . There was a low line of wall, a minaret, a black dome, 
 a few flat roofs, and in the midst a group of dark, slender 
 c}prcssc: , ami oli\cs aiul [ alms. There lay Jerusalem dead 
 
GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS, 219 
 
 in the white noon. The desolation of the wilderness 
 moaned at her gates. There was no suburb of trees or 
 houses. She lay upon a high hill in the midst of hills bar- 
 ren as those we had passed. There were no sights or 
 sounds of life. The light was colorless, the air was still. 
 Nature had swooned around the dead city. There was no 
 sound in the air; but a wailing in my heart. 
 
 When he was in Nazareth the music of the con- 
 vent bells brought up that New England town 
 which was Hope Wayne's home, and here follows 
 an autobiographic passage which perfectly repre- 
 sents both the style and the meditative spirit of 
 the man : 
 
 My heart sang hymns, and preached of remembered 
 days and places, — June Sundays in country churches, to 
 which we walked along the edges of the fields, and under 
 branching elms hushed in Sunday repose, — of the long, 
 village road, with the open wagons and chaises, in which 
 the red-handed farmers in holiday suits drove the red- 
 cheeked family to the church-door, . . . the long sermon, 
 of which I faithfully remembered the text and forgot the drift, 
 and in which the names of Galilee, and Mary, and Nazareth 
 were sweet sounds only, filling my mind with vague imagery, 
 whose outline has long since faded, the flowers and the 
 sunny hay fields breathing sweetly in at the open window, 
 
220 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 . . . the people in the pews, all whose faces have vanished 
 now, save hers, so many years my elder, yet still radiant 
 with youth, queenly in beauty and bearing, who came, when 
 all were seated, following the old grandfather with powdered 
 hair and gold-headed cane, and who sat serene during the 
 service, while I, an eight years' child, felt a vague sadness 
 overshadow the sweet day, and quite forgot the sermon. 
 
 Compare his pictures with those of any other 
 writer of Eastern travel. The Howadji's have 
 that golden light thrown over prosaic reality. 
 His is the very romance of travel. There is noth- 
 ing else so steeped in oriental atmosphere — you 
 feel it as you feel the warm, soft air of a summer 
 night. He takes in all that is picturesque and 
 genial, and yields himself to the spell, which you, 
 too, will come under ; and you, too, will dream as 
 he did and think yourself in Syria or on the 
 Nile. 
 
 You will find it interesting to take up books by 
 other writers over the same routes. Look over 
 those of Bayard Taylor ; 77;*? Land and the Book of 
 Dr. Thomson ; Henry M. Field's From Egypt to 
 Japan^ On the Desert, and Among the Holy Hills ; 
 
GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 221 
 
 William C. Prime's Boat-Life in Egypt and Nubia 
 and Tent-Life in the LLoly Land ; Charles Dudley 
 Warner's My Winter on the Nile and Ltt the Lei'ant ; 
 in a word acquaint yourself with the experiences 
 and impressions of different authors on the same 
 subject, and so test your powers of criticism and 
 comparison, and arrive at your own conclusions. 
 George William Curtis was born in Providence, 
 Rhode Island, Feb. 24, 1824. He was one of the 
 brilliant company who tried the famous Brook 
 Farm experiment ; spent two years in foreign travel, 
 and after his return was on the staff of the New 
 York Tribune; was editor of that capital but short- 
 lived magazine, Putnam! s Monthly ; was for many 
 years, as you know, one of the most popular speak- 
 ers in the " lecture field," and long ago (perhaps 
 more than thirty years) settled into the Easy Chair 
 of LLay-per's Monthly, since which withdrawal, no 
 more books. His books belong to his early man- 
 hood ; but, as before indicated, the same qualities 
 of elegance, high-breeding, refined taste which dis- 
 tinguish the man, are in all his work. The occu- 
 pant of the Easy Chair is the Howadji of old. The 
 
222 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 essay-ish paragraphs from that cosey retreat are 
 choice and captivating. 
 
 His home is on Staten Island, and near it is a 
 little Gothic church where sometimes of a Sunday, 
 he reads a sermon. A lady who was an ardent 
 admirer of his, while visiting in the neighborhood 
 went one day to hear him, and she wrote to a 
 friend : 
 
 " The small church in which he officiates is a 
 quaint building with many points, the surroundings 
 being quite country-like. As we sat in the car- 
 riage waiting for the gates to open, the birds sang, 
 making sweeter music than the bells. . . The 
 chancel window is of stained glass, circular, and 
 the colors blue and gold, and each side are fluted 
 pillars the same colors ; a little lower down, the 
 organ ; and as these are the prevailing tints every- 
 thing harmonizes and the effect is very pretty. As 
 Mr. Curtis walked up the aisle, my first impression 
 of him was of harmony. I was not disappointed 
 in the man who wrote Prue and /, and if he had 
 leaned over the desk excusing Adoniram's absence 
 from church I should not have been surprised. . . 
 
GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 223 
 
 . I never heard such clear, fine pronunciation as 
 his ; it must have required years of study to have 
 reached such perfection." 
 
 Note. — The list of Curtis's books is as follows : Lotus Eating 
 (a record of summer rambles in America), A'i'/^ Notes of a 
 Howadji, Prue and /, The Hozvadji in Syria, The Potiphar 
 Papers, Trtimps. A sketch of his Life is to be found in The 
 Century for February, 1S83. 
 
DONALD GRANT MITCHELL. 
 
XII. 
 
 DONALD GRANT MITCHELL. 
 
 LET US call him Ik Marvel, for by that name 
 and no other we first knew him, in those early 
 books, Reveries of a Bachelor and Dream Life. Here 
 is the identical Dream Life now, which has been 
 lying about on some handy shelf, as if somebody 
 would be wanting to take it up, for these twenty- 
 five years or more ; in dark-green covers, with 
 red edges, a much thumbed and slightly shaky 
 volume, but good for service for many years to 
 come. 
 
 If you were to look it over — this book written 
 in his early manhood — you would notice the same 
 quality which has continued to prove captivating 
 to his readers all along through everything he has 
 written since. You will see a love of country life, 
 warm and abiding ; an intuitive sense of the beau- 
 227 
 
2 28 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 tiful, refinement, and taste ; and underlying all, 
 prevailing over all, that delicacy and sympathy 
 and tenderness of feeling which we call sentiment. 
 Not sentimentality : do not mistake, for there 
 is a wide, wide difference between the two, as 
 wide as that between an affected and a natural 
 feeling, between sham and sincerity, for one is 
 true while the other is pretence. Shall we not 
 define sentiment in the words of Sir William 
 Hamilton, as a term " applied to the higher feel- 
 ings ? " You will understand it as you read Ik 
 Marvel. In this very book, Dreafn Life, in the 
 second chapter, called " With my Reader," he 
 confesses to his sympathy and his honesty in writ- 
 ing down his fancies, and says : 
 
 Nature is very much the same thing in one man that it is 
 in another : and as I have already said, Feeling has a higher 
 truth in it than circumstance. Let it only be touched fairly 
 and honestly, and the heart of humanity answers. . . . 
 Of one thing I am sure : — if my pictures are fair, worthy, 
 and hearty, you must see it in the reading. 
 
 That is just what has come to pass. People 
 have recognized what he hoped they would, and 
 
DONALD GRANT MITCHELL. 
 
 229 
 
 those who read him of the new generation that 
 has come up since the words were written, appre- 
 ciate tliat truth to human experience, those touches 
 which show the whole world of one kin in loving 
 and hoping, in suffering and sorrowing. He is 
 sympathetic and tender ; the very atmosphere of 
 his books is genial ; they are full of home love, 
 fireside content, family life, and the domestic feel- 
 ings which no one can too sacredly cherish, the 
 sweet sanctities and charities of every-day living 
 under the same roof-tree, by the same hearth-side. 
 Then, again, his own personality is in every 
 volume, almost on every page. How unlike au- 
 thors are in this respect you will one day know, 
 when you are able to discriminate through wider 
 reading and careful study and comparison. Some 
 writers hardly give you a hint of their individuality, 
 they are so separate from their books, as if the 
 books were merely the result of brain-work, or 
 were purely imaginative or outside of themselves. 
 Yet, after all, it is this personality which interests 
 us and invests one's writings with a charm whose 
 power is felt at once ; even if it is such bare ego 
 
230 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 tism as in the case of Ruskin, we delight in it. 
 What is there more attractive than the frank reve- 
 lations in those chapters of Prceterita just now 
 being publislied, where John Ruskin shows us all 
 his heart and talks about himself with the candor 
 of dear old Anthony TroUope in his autobiography ? 
 Ik Marvel does not follow the Ruskin method, 
 to be sure, but the boy, the collegian, the man in 
 his own library, in his garden, abroad in his 
 fields, is before us. We know his tastes, his fav- 
 orite books, his walks, his employments, his feel- 
 ings. We have him for a companion, and he is 
 always that, more than he is the author. So it 
 follows that the books he wrote are winning and 
 engaging, and very much alive they are, too, with 
 real life-blood pulsing through them. 
 
 Of all American authors I can think of no one 
 who has so much of boy feeling and boy experi- 
 ence, who understands a boy's nature so well. 
 Usually it is in the country that his boy finds de- 
 light, and there is nothing worth finding out or 
 enjoying that he does not know and enter into. 
 Ik Marvel was not in a strict sense country-born, 
 
DONALD GRANT MITCHELL. 23 1 
 
 for his native place was the old town of Norwich 
 in Connecticut (where his life began in April, 
 1822), but he must have early known the joys that 
 farm-life has for a child. It is Connecticut coun- 
 try living that he pictures ; the flavor of the old 
 hill pastures, of the meadows and orchards, of 
 blooming peach-trees, of fennel and clover, of 
 wild-grapes in grape-time and nuts in nutting-time 
 is along the pages. That State has had liberal 
 treatment in the lighter literature of New Eng- 
 land, in Mrs. Stowe's old-time stories and those of 
 Rose Terry Cooke and Ik Marvel's loving repro- 
 ductions of landscape and farm-life as in his boy- 
 hood he delighted in them and in manhood trans- 
 ferred them to his magic page. 
 
 I have marked a score of passages in his books 
 to quote for you, beginning with the old garret : 
 
 I know no nobler forage ground for a romantic, venture- 
 some, mischievous boy, than the garret of an old family 
 mansion on a day of storm. It is a perfect field of chivalry. 
 The heavy rafters, the dashing rain, the piles of spare mat- 
 tresses to carouse upon, the big trunks to hide in, the old 
 white coats and hats hanging in obscure corners, like ghosts 
 
232 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 — are great ! And it is so far away from the old lady who 
 keeps rule in the nursery that there is no possible risk of a 
 scolding. . . . There is no baby in the garret to wake 
 up. There is no company in the garret to be disturbed by 
 the noise. There is no crotchety old uncle, or grandma, 
 with their everlasting — "Boys — boys! " — and then a look 
 of such horror 1 
 
 But there is not space for many of them. This, 
 however, you shall have about the Fourth of July, 
 from one of his later books, Bound Together : 
 
 I do not know what the habit of the boys' schools may be 
 now-a-days; but in those old times when loe wore round- 
 abouts, and studied Adams' Latin Grammar, the Master (or 
 " Principal," as we Scottishly called him) used to give us a 
 day's excursion by omnibus or stage-coach on the Fourth. 
 And we piled into, and all over such vehicles, by the dozen, 
 infesting the doors and windows and roof — hanging about 
 the beloved stage-coach like bees on gone-by fruit — making 
 the hills resound with our jollity. . . . The old ladies, 
 standing akimbo in the doors, stared blank astonishment 
 at us through their iron-rimmed spectacles, and shy girls 
 caught admiring glimpses of our spick and span new white 
 drilling from behind the farm-house curtains. What a tri- 
 umphal progress it was to be sure ! Dew on the grass, 
 larks singing, late roses blooming, cherries ripening, tall 
 
DONALD GRANT MITCHELL. 233 
 
 rye waving, the old coach crick-cracking. . . . Then we 
 stopped towards high noon at some huge, lumbering vil- 
 lage tavern for dinner. A tavern dinner ! — my mouth 
 waters even now to think what ambrosian fare had been 
 provided. ... A turkey — positively a turkey (and 
 stuffed too) — at one end of the long table, and at the other 
 — great heavens ! — a dapper, crisp, curled-tailed pig, with 
 a sprig of parsley in his mouth, and giblets and what-not, 
 in a little paunch-y tureen of gravy close by. 
 
 And this : 
 
 Who that feels the gray shadows of middle age thickening 
 over his head (for my part I confess to it) does not remem- 
 ber the peach-orchard near to every old homestead of New 
 England, and the rich burden of rare-ripes and free-stones 
 and cling-stones (before yet the magnificent Melocoton was 
 known) and how round-jacketed school-boys with big 
 pouches of pockets thought it no theft to abstract a few 
 from between the fence-bars. 
 
 And these scraps — tantalizing enough I trust to 
 make you read Ik Marvel and become acquainted 
 with him : 
 
 I believe that boys' vacations, now-a-days, come around 
 in July, or thereabouts; but five and thirty years ago, in 
 those boys' schools of which I had painful experience, va- 
 
234 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 cations happened somewhere in October. . . , What a 
 gorgeous thing it was to take that first tramp after the re- 
 turn . . . through the melon-patch where the yellow- 
 faced cantaloupes smiled at us ! We knew well enough that 
 the cantaloupes would not be gone ; we knew some " roasting 
 ears " would be left : we knew the Pound-sweets would be 
 just at their best. ... I do not know how a month 
 could have a better naming for a boy than to be called va- 
 cation month. ... I think that a good, wholesome long- 
 ing for vacation-time to come is one of the best possible 
 evidences that a boy is kept up to the notch of a good daily 
 gain. 
 
 And now see what advice he gives in the clos- 
 ing words of "Two College Talks," to students : 
 
 Live up to the level of your best thought ; keep the line 
 of your life tense and true ; it is but a thread ; but it be- 
 longs to the great Republican warp, where Time is weaving 
 a Nation. You cannot alter its attachment yonder, to the 
 past — nor yonder, to the unrolling years. . . . And if 
 you would broider such things there as will stand fast, and 
 carry your name worthily upon the roll of history, you will 
 have need of all your energy to dare — all your cultivation 
 to refine — of all your charity to ennoble. 
 
 Let the hope of this . • . keep you wakeful to all 
 honorable duties. Let it make you bold, and honest, and 
 
DONALD GRANT MITCHELL. 235 
 
 painstaking. Let it nerve you to shun affectations — to hate 
 shams — to love truth — to cherish simplicity; and then — 
 whatever may betide — you will walk with a freer and more 
 elastic step toward the gates, where we must all go in. 
 
 Ik Marvel wrote one novel, about twenty years 
 ago, Dr. jfoJms, the story of an old-time Con- 
 necticut minister, and he has a volume called 
 Seven Stories, with Basement and Attic, made up 
 from reminiscences of travel; but with these ex- 
 ceptions, and the two named at the beginning of 
 this paper, his writings are chiefly of rural life. 
 
 Many years ago he bought a country place not 
 far from New Haven, and there after his own 
 tasteful plan re-modelled and embellished till the 
 beautiful home which he named Edgewood grew 
 with the years, as a true home with all its acces- 
 sories and adornments of tree and vine, of shrub 
 and lawn must grow, for it does not come into 
 being in a day. To know about it, and how the 
 master's heart was in all the work and in all the 
 growing, you must read My Fa7-m of Edgewood — 
 a book practical enough for an agriculturist, yet 
 romantic enough for a poet ; picturesque, and full 
 
236 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 of that personality before referred to. You will 
 read about the stone cottage he built, with its gables 
 and sharp pent roof, the gray walls which lichens 
 and creepers are decorating, and all about his 
 country tastes which have made it so attractive 
 without, so restful within. 
 
 If you wish to know more about it, and see the 
 sketches of house and gable, of porch and gate- 
 way, and know just what the ideas of the owner 
 were and are, about the making of a home, from 
 the house-building down to the simplest details, 
 which with him are esthetic and refined, read Out- 
 of-Town Places. 
 
 If you would know yet more, and more about 
 the owner, read Wet Days at Edgewood, which is 
 made up of rambling sketches about some of the 
 " worthies " who wrote something concerning 
 agriculture. Of such books he says he has " a 
 motley array " in one corner of his library. Be 
 not deterred by the fact that he calls them "farm- 
 books," for not to these does he confine himself; 
 on the contrary, they serve as the excuse (as one 
 may say) for some of the most delightful off-hand 
 
DONALD GRANT MITCHELL, 237 
 
 writing and personal revelations of our author him- 
 self. They remind one of Leigh Hunt in more 
 ways than one, but chiefly in that joy in books 
 which is so marked a feature in Hunt. 
 
 What Ik Marvel says so lovingly and gracefully 
 about Virgil and others among the ancients is 
 pleasant reading for your, own rainy days ; and 
 be sure to read those papers, called " A Picture 
 of Rain," "English Weather," "Old English 
 Homes," "A British Tavern," "A Brace of Pas- 
 torals," "Goldsmith," "William Cowper," "Gil- 
 bert White," and " Country Story-tellers." What 
 toothsome dainties in prose they are ! If you are 
 tempted to take up some of the authors he writes 
 about, so much the better. Why not read the 
 Vicar of Wakefield after you have read what he 
 says. " I do," he writes, " still keep his Essays 
 or his Vicar in my hand, or in my thought most 
 lovingly." 
 
 And how can you let " As you Like It " alone 
 after reading : 
 
 Gne pastoral remains to mention, published at the very 
 opening of the year 1600, and spending its fine forest- 
 
238 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 aroma thenceforward all down the century. I mean Shakes- 
 peare's play of " As you Like It." 
 
 From beginning to end the grand old forest of Arden is 
 astir overhead; from beginning to end the brooks brawl' 
 in your ear ; from beginning to end you smell the bruised 
 ferns and the delicate-scented wood flowers. ... Who 
 . . . will match us the fair, lithe, witty, capricious, mirth- 
 ful, buxom Rosalind? Nowhere in books have we met 
 with her like, — but only at some long-gone picnic in the 
 woods, where we worshipped "blushing sixteen" in dainty 
 boots and white muslin. . . . 
 
 . . . "As you Like It " is as broad as the sky, or love, 
 or folly, or hope. 
 
 In Bound Together — the felicitous title of a 
 " Sheaf of Papers" — you come upon more of the 
 Edge wood pastorals, under the divisions called 
 " Procession of the Months," and " In doors and 
 Out of doors," winding up with a children's chapter 
 and Thanksgiving Day. 
 
 The influence of Ik Marvel is tranquilizing and 
 refining. If sometimes there is an excess of sen- 
 timent, we know that the springs are pure and 
 sweet, the sources deep and unfailing of such 
 tender feeling that we do not care to criticise. 
 
DONALD GRANT MITCHELL. 239 
 
 He has kept his hold upon two generations of 
 readers because he is true to human nature, in 
 sympathy with childhood, and one at heart with 
 youths and maidens, so that the stories he tells 
 are their own lives, their own hopes and joys and 
 anticipations. There is an air of repose, of rest- 
 fulness and peace about his writings. Some one 
 has said of them that " they are the wood-fire on 
 the hearth in American letters. They are light, 
 warmth, cheer." 
 
 Note. — Nearly all his writings are in the following books : 
 
 Fresh Gleanings (European Travel), Reveries of a Barhelor, 
 Dream Life, My Farm of Edgewood, Wet Days at Edge- 
 ivood, Out-of-Town Places (formerly Rural Studies), Doctor 
 Johns, Seven Stories, "with Basement and Attic, Bound To- 
 gether, About Old Story- Tellers ; and a new and complete edi- 
 tion has just been published, in unique, simple style, with 
 characteristic prefatory notes by the author. 
 
JACOB ABBOTT. 
 
XIII. 
 
 H. H." AND OTHERS. 
 
 SINCE this series of papers was begun, one of 
 the foremost women-writers of America has 
 passed from this life. The hand of " H. H," will 
 write nothing more. How pathetic that brief 
 statement seems when we think of the brilliant 
 spirit that was here a little more than a year ago ! 
 
 It is well worth your while at this time, when 
 her last work is passing through the press, to give 
 attention to the books she has contributed to our 
 literature. I know that they are all about you, 
 some of them, indeed, almost fresh from her pen 
 — it seems but yesterday, perhaps, that you read 
 Ratnona, and Zeph you have but just laid down. 
 
 Looking back now and considering how late it 
 was when she began writing prose (in 1866, when 
 she was thirty-five years old), never dreaming of 
 
 243 
 
244 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS, 
 
 becoming an author of distinction, we are sur- 
 prised at both the quantity and quality. 
 
 Let me recall to you, in scantest outline, her 
 personal and literary history. As " H. H." the 
 world of her readers — and a wide world it is — ■ 
 has known and will remember her ; the two modest 
 initials which represent such an amount of ex- 
 quisite work, which have always been so warmly 
 welcomed, and which will be so sadly missed! 
 Helen Maria Fiske was her maiden name, and she 
 was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, October i8, 
 1831. On the 28th of October, 1852, she was 
 married to Captain Edward B. Hunt of the United 
 States Army, and on the 2d of October, 1863, she 
 became a widow. One son had died when an 
 infant, and the other died in less than two years 
 after his father, so that, bereaved and heart- 
 broken, she withdrew from society and even from 
 her best friends, giving herself up to the feeling 
 that life had nothing more for her. 
 
 She had a fine, natural gift of expression in 
 poetry, and when the first sharp pain was over she 
 did what hundreds of others have done, put her 
 
" H. H. AND OTHERS. 245 
 
 sorrow into verse, and soon the world recognized 
 a new poet. A sketch called " In the White 
 Mountains " was her introduction to prose, and 
 the success and fame which eventually came to 
 her from this simple beginning were a revelation 
 and continual surprise to her. 
 
 In October, 1875, ^^^ '^^.s married to William 
 Sharpless Jackson, and thenceforth her home was 
 in Colorado Springs, whence she went for benefit 
 to her health, to California, where, in San Fran- 
 cisco, she died August 12, 1885. 
 
 How slight is this thread of facts concerning a 
 woman so rich in personal and intellectual gifts, 
 of a spirit so alert, so responsive, so versatile, so 
 full of enthusiasm ! You know well how her 
 burning indignation found a voice that made it- 
 self heard for the Indian ; and you will mark all 
 through her writings that she was easily kindled 
 — a marvellously susceptible, electric being, all 
 ardor and fire. You see it all through her Bits of 
 Talk about Home Matters, where she enters the 
 lists, or charges as a free lance, in hot attack on 
 those who are guilty of wrongs to children. 
 
246 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 Never did childhood have a more fearless, a more 
 valiant champion, and one can but think how in- 
 judicious parents must have winced under the 
 pricks and thrusts of her weapon that pierced the 
 stoutest mail. 
 
 Her feelings were intense and her powers of 
 observation of the keenest ; she had the swift in- 
 tuitions of genius and her pen was true to the 
 thing she had to say. Gifts for writing may come 
 by nature, but if that were all, how discouraging 
 it would be ! What if " H. H." had never de- 
 veloped what she seems hardly to have known she 
 possessed until the accident (almost) of a single 
 sketchy article in prose induced her to attempt 
 further work ? Study, reading, culture, pains- 
 taking, thoroughness — all these are quantities 
 which enter into the training of a writer. No suc- 
 cessful author ever trusted to born gifts ; the 
 equipments are not ready provided, and it is not 
 always a royal highway with banners flying along 
 which one goes. I think I have seen that she 
 was an acute critic of her own composition as well 
 as that of others ; that she made a careful study 
 
"h. h. and others. 247 
 
 of style, and, as an instance of it, that she took 
 certain paragraphs of Higginson's which she much 
 admired and changed the construction of the sen- 
 tences to see in what their power and beauty as 
 purely literary work consisted, and if any other 
 arrangement would do as well. 
 
 You might try that with almost any descriptive 
 page of her writing. You will find a wonderful 
 affluence of language, charged with feeling, often 
 the words rushing on impetuously; but what ar- 
 tistic finish, fitness, and completeness ! Take this 
 from her description of the Rocky Mountains in 
 her Bits of Travel at Home : 
 
 There seemed no defined horizon to west, or north, or 
 south ; only a great, outlying continent of mountain peaks, 
 bounding, upholding, containing the valley, and rounding, 
 upholding and piercing the dome above it. There was no 
 sound, no sight, no trace of human life. The silence, the 
 sense of space in these Rocky Mountain solitudes cannot 
 be expressed, neither can the peculiar atmospheric beauty 
 be described. It is the result partly of the grand distances, 
 partly of the rarefied air. The shapes are the shapes of 
 the north, but the air is like the air of the tropics, shimmer- 
 ing, kindling. . . . No dome of Constantinople or 
 
248 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 Venice, no pyramid of Egypt ever glowed and swam in 
 warmer light and of warmer hue than do these colossal 
 mountains. 
 
 Read what she says about the wild flowers of 
 Colorado, where words crowd upon words as if 
 they could not keep pace with her admiration, 
 and the very pages glow and burn with color. 
 Read about the gorgeousness, the glory of autumn 
 woods at Bethlehem in what she calls the " Mir- 
 acle Play," and wherever she writes of skies or 
 flowers, of anything rich, warm, beautiful. Her 
 tastes were sumptuous ; she revelled in color, and 
 nowhere can be found finer word paintings than 
 in her books. And the descriptions are always in 
 harmony with the subject. Here, for example, 
 from " The Katrina Saga," in Glimpses of Three 
 Coasts, is a bit from the page and a half about the 
 islands of the Norway coast : 
 
 There are myriads of them still unknown, untrodden, and 
 sure to remain so forever, no matter how long the world 
 may last. ... At the mouths of the great fjords they 
 seem sometimes to have fallen back and into line, as if to 
 do honor to whomever might come sailing in. They must 
 
"h. h. and others. 249 
 
 have greatly helped the splendor of the processions of 
 viking ships, a thousand years ago, in the days when a vik- 
 ing thought nothing of setting sail for the south or the east 
 with six or seven hundred ships in his fleet. If their birch- 
 trees were as plumy then as now, there was nothing finer 
 than they in all that a viking adorned his ships with not 
 even the gilt dragons at the prow. 
 
 If you wish to appreciate some of the finest 
 work done by any of our countrymen and women, 
 read Ramona again. It will bear more than one 
 perusal. Leaving out of the question the purpose 
 for which it was written, and reading it just as a 
 story, consider its attractiveness and power. Notice 
 the grace of the narrative — how easily it slips 
 along without a break or a dull sentence or a sen- 
 tence you would skip ! the charm of the language, 
 not a word that does not fit its place — how tempt- 
 ing and how delightful it is ! the beauty of the 
 description — you are transported to the Mexican 
 house and are sharer of the life on the balcony, 
 in the court, are present at the sheep-shearing and 
 the feast ! the reality and life-likeness of the peo- 
 ple who live there — you become intent upon 
 
250 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 watching the movements of the shrewd Senora 
 and wonder over the success or failure of her 
 plans. Study its construction, and the way in 
 which character develops ; see with what a firm 
 hand the author keeps the mastery over her sub- 
 ject, and yet with what impetuosity of feeling she 
 enters into the wrongs of Ramona and Allessan- 
 dro! You will enjoy comparing this story with 
 two strong novelettes by another of our best 
 women writers — The Led Horse Claim a.nd Jb/in 
 Bodewin's Testimofiy, by Mary Hallock Foote, the 
 artist author. 
 
 In reading " H. H," you always have a sense 
 of such exuberance, such rapturous enjoyment of 
 everything, perfume, flowers, sky and sea, scenery, 
 travel ; she was part of them, partner, sharer with 
 them. She threw her whole soul into everything, 
 and a vital, positive life pulses along her pages. 
 Bear this in your thought as your eye follows down 
 the lines, and see how alive they are. You can 
 separate some authors from their work ; or, to put it 
 as it is, you cannot by any possibility connect them 
 with it as a warm, human, living force ; you can- 
 
H. H. ' AND OTHERS. 
 
 251 
 
 not by what is written tell what manner of man or 
 woman held the pen. But " H. H." is in every 
 line, an ardent, eager, spirited woman, full of 
 poetry, glowing with enthusiasm which was ready 
 to leap into flame, and infusing herself into every- 
 thing she wrote, coloring everything by her own 
 personality. In no other American woman is this 
 so pronounced a trait ; in few will you find a nat- 
 ure at the same time so tropical and so sympa- 
 thetic, taking expression in a style as clear and 
 vigorous as it is captivating. 
 
 Especially for children she wrote Nelly's Silver 
 Mine, Bits of Talk for Young Folks, Mammy Tittle- 
 back and her Family, and The Hunter Cats of Con- 
 norloa, besides editing Letters frotn a Cat (which 
 was by her mother). The titles of her other prose 
 works are Bits of Travel (foreign, and very charm- 
 ing). Bits of Travel at Home (California, Colorado 
 and New England), Bits of Talk aboict Home Mat- 
 ters, Mercy Philbrick^s Choice, Hetty's Strange His- 
 tory, Ramona, A Century of Dishonor, Zeph, Glimpses 
 of Three Coasts (California and Oregon, Scotland 
 and England, Norway, Denmark and Germany) ; 
 
252 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS, 
 
 and soon to be published, Betweeti Whiles, a vol- 
 ume of short stories, of which, not long before her 
 death she wrote to her publishers, "Isn't it a 
 lovely title ? " 
 
 To what other authors of the many there are, 
 shall I call your attention in the space that is left 
 me ? Do you need, does this generation of young 
 people need, to be reminded of the beloved Jacob 
 Abbott who did more for them, I have no hesita- 
 tion in saying, than any other writer, perhaps it 
 would be safe to say than any two or more wri- 
 ters ? Abraham Lincoln paid his tribute to the 
 little " Red Histories " by saying that he learned 
 from them all the history he ever knew ; and here, 
 not many weeks ago, a lady who has written many 
 excellent things, in a little article about bringing 
 up boys, says, "over all the years that lie be- 
 tween us, I send my love to Jonas, as one of the 
 best companions a little girl ever had, and the 
 charming mentor of the little girl's brother." 
 
 Did it ever occur to you that so long ago as the 
 time when Washington Irving and Cooper were 
 writing sketches and novels this author was busy 
 
"h. h, and others. 253 
 
 over books for the young, and that he kept on 
 writing book after book for them, and that that 
 good, wise pen of his was never idle ? He had 
 wonderful tact and skill as a teacher, in manage- 
 ment, in understanding character, a clear insight 
 into what the needs of young people were, and 
 from writing something to help those immediate- 
 ly under his care, the question naturally arose. 
 Why not help thousands of boys and girls ? Hence 
 some of the wise and sound little books which 
 have gone on in their influence in the ratio of 
 Edward Everett Hale's Ten Times One. 
 
 The mind of Jacob Abbott must have been as 
 clear as crystal to judge by the way his thoughts 
 appear in print, by his accurate way of putting 
 things, candid, discriminating and to the point. 
 They are every day facts and moral lessons, but 
 duty is presented as a pleasure, and the right way 
 as the tempting way. Practical duties and em- 
 ployments, doing good, living right, building up 
 character — these are favorite themes, just as 
 vital to-day as when he wrote, and more needed, 
 good for a thousand years and as much longer as 
 
254 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 human nature, boy and girl nature, are what they 
 were and are. 
 
 You have already had loving biographies of this 
 teacher, pastor and author, and I am not expected 
 to dwell upon the subject, but let me say that not 
 long ago I had occasion to look over some of his 
 books in a great public library, and found them 
 thumbed and worn — that told the story of their 
 popularity. History, biography, travels, science, 
 out-of-door employments — he wrote of all these. 
 In his series of adventure and travel he was pio- 
 neer of the Family Flights, the Zig-Zag and Bodley 
 books and so many of that class which are favor- 
 ites to-day. The stories of history and of biog- 
 raphy written by himself and his brother (John 
 S. C. who was also preacher and teacher) do not 
 go out of date. Divided into " Founders of Em- 
 pires, "British Kings and Queens," "Queens and 
 Heroines," " Heroes of Roman History," " Later 
 British Kings and Queens," and " Rulers of Later 
 Times," they make a trim and compact little ref- 
 erence library of much in small space for your 
 handy corner and often use. Any young person 
 
"h. h, and others. 255 
 
 who was brought up on Jacob Abbott's clear sense 
 books, before the days of sensationalism, has 
 something to be grateful for ; and one who goes 
 to them now finds soundness and simplicity, 
 wholesome truth wholesomely treated, a whole 
 gospel to be guided by. 
 
 You hardly need to have recalled to your mind 
 another friend not long gone from this life, the 
 author of Yesterdays with Authors, and Underbrush. 
 The first-named is one of the books that stimulates 
 the love for books. James T. Fields appreciated 
 literature himself, and was a leal friend to the 
 young writers who went to him with their first- 
 lings. He had keenest joy in books, and in those 
 papers he shows the pleasant side, to make his 
 authors attractive. It was one of the intense de- 
 sires of his later life to have a good influence over 
 young people, and his words are wise and cheer- 
 I ing from out his own experience and genial whole- 
 heartedness. In his Underbrush he says: 
 
 Instead of trying so hard as some of us do to be happy, 
 as if that were the sole purpose of life, I would, if I were 
 a boy again, try still harder to deserve happiness. 
 
256 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 Of books and authors, this is characteristic of 
 the man : 
 
 We can never be grateful enough to the men and women 
 who have written books to make us more in love with the 
 beauties and harmonies of nature, who have themselves 
 been transported with the glories of her divine works. 
 
 And he adds that he always felt like taking off 
 his hat when he met in the street the man (George 
 B. Emerson) who wrote that valuable and attract- 
 ive work on the " Trees and Shrubs of Massa- 
 chusetts." 
 
 Already you have a long list, but you must add 
 the dainty prose of Aldrich ; and Warner with his 
 mellowness and humor ; and Holmes with his 
 scintillations of wit flashing like the white light, 
 the pellucid light of diamonds — unique, the only 
 man of his kind, it will be long before you see 
 another *' autocrat." And in choosing American 
 books do not forget Charles G. Leland's Algonquin 
 Legends, and his book about the gypsies ; or 
 Drake's Old Landmarks of Boston^ and Nooks and 
 Corners of the New England Coast, and others from 
 his pen ; or Mrs. Rollins' New England By-gones^ 
 
"h. h." and others. 257 
 
 a vivid reproduction of rural home-life sweet and 
 true and charming, loyal to the past, but fresh as 
 a morning in May ; or Dana's Two Years before the 
 Mast^ best of all sea-books that have been written 
 from a sailor's point of view, as enchanting for a 
 boy as the Arabian Nights, as homely in its de- 
 tails as Robinson Crusoe. What vitality there is 
 about a book which has real life inside of it, in its 
 texture and substance, in its warp and woof ! And 
 such is this. 
 
 I cannot refrain from including another book, 
 most delightful in its pictures of life in the Old 
 Dominion, having the appearance of being genuine- 
 ly as well as in form autobiographic (as it per- 
 haps is to some extent) — the jfudith of Marion 
 Harland, to me more fascinating than anything 
 else of hers I have ever read. 
 
 And yet one more, a thin volume of only five 
 sketches — and one of them incomplete — its title 
 Old Salem. The author, who wrote under the 
 name of " Eleanor Putnam," was Mrs, Harriet L, 
 V, Bates, and she died at Brookline, Massachu- 
 setts, March 13, 1886, at about the age of thirty. 
 
258 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 I should like to quote liberally from " Old Salem 
 Shops," and from " A Salem Dame School," to 
 which she went wearing antiquated raiment, and 
 carrying for a satchel 
 
 the old green bag in which my grandfather had carried his 
 law papers. It was so long and I so short that it nearly 
 touched the ground as I walked, and my book and my ap- 
 ple rolled about unpleasantly. 
 
 For a choice piece of writing, a perfect little 
 crystal, read her "Salem Cupboards" — it is as 
 dainty a bit as you will often find, after this style : 
 
 Foremost in the memory of delightful Salem cupboards 
 stands the dining-room closet of a second-cousin of ours 
 whom we called Cousin Susan. ... A most delicious 
 odor came forth when the door was opened : a hint of the 
 spiciness of rich cake, a tingling sense of preserved ginger, 
 and a certain ineffable sweetness which no other closet ever 
 possessed. ... At the left hand of Cousin Susan's 
 shelves of china was a little cupboard with a diamond-paned 
 glass door. . . . This little glass cupboard held the 
 stock of foreign sweetmeats ; the round-shouldered blue 
 jars, inclosed in network of split bamboo, which contained 
 the fiery, amber ginger ; the flat boxes of guava jelly, hot 
 curry powders, chilli sauce, and choleric Bengal chutney. 
 
"h. h. and others. 259 
 
 Here were two miniature casks of tamarinds, jolly and 
 black. . . . 
 
 There were black fruit-cake in a japanned box ; " hearts 
 and rounds " of rich yellow pound cake ; and certain deli- 
 cate but inane little sponge biscuit, of which our cousin 
 spoke by the old-fashioned name of diet — or, as she chose 
 to pronounce it " dier " — bread. She always called the 
 sponge cakes " little dier breads." 
 
 An entire paper ought to be given to single 
 books where scenes or incidents of our own coun- 
 try form the subject. Another might profitably 
 be devoted to biographies of American men and 
 women by American writers. In the " Notes " to 
 the preceding papers I have furnished you with 
 many titles, but only a small number out of the 
 rich store. To name a few more, beginning with 
 Sparks who wrote twenty-five of persons more or 
 less associated with our histor}'^, how quickly you 
 are reminded of the full and carefully prepared 
 and edited Lives and Letters of Daniel Webster, 
 George Ticknor, Charles Sumner ; the memorials 
 of Bryant, and of John Howard Payne who wrote 
 " Home, Sweet Home," of Agassiz, by his wife, 
 
26o PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 of Jacob Abbott (including, or prefacing, the work 
 its author would have desired to be best known 
 by. The Yowig Christian), the Reminiscences of Wil- 
 liam Ellery Channing, by Elizabeth Peabody, the 
 Life and Letters of James and Lucretia Mott (de- 
 lightful record of Quaker ways, of a liberal, loving 
 household, and characters greatly to be admired), 
 Miss Stebbins' memories of Charlotte Cushman, 
 the Letters, with a biographical sketch of Lydia 
 Maria Child (which will make you regret that it 
 is too late to let her know how you honor her for 
 her great, royal heart of unselfish devotion to a 
 cause she was enlisted in, for her loyalty to friends 
 and her patience and bravery), the memoir of 
 Mrs. Edward Livingston, of Mary Lyon, of Alice 
 B. Haven, of Mary L. Ware, of Mrs. Prentiss 
 (author of Stepping Heaven7i)ard), that of General 
 Bartlett, of James T. Fields, Holmes' memoir of 
 Motley, the sketches called Worthy Women of our 
 First Century (which includes that rare woman and 
 scholar, Mrs. Ripley of Concord, Massachusetts), 
 the list of distinguished men in the " American 
 Statesmen " series, and "American Men of Let- 
 
" H. H." AND OTHERS. 261 
 
 ters " series ; and scores of others might be in- 
 cluded, and nearly all are histories of the lives of 
 Americans. 
 
 What treasures await you, lie ready at your 
 hand ! All are histories of the lives of Americans, 
 worthy your earnest perusal, full of interest, in 
 many cases having a charm beyond stories. How 
 rich in lessons of wisdom and statesmanship, of 
 culture and refinement, of goodness and Chris- 
 tian experience, of benevolence and self-denial, of 
 true living and high thinking, of aspiration and 
 endeavor, of fidelity to truth, to country, to 
 science, to human kind are the pages represented 
 by those names ! 
 
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
XIV. 
 
 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL, AND OTHER CRITICS. 
 
 YOU may be dismayed at the word " critics " 
 and shrink from the phase of literature we 
 are approaching, for hitherto you have had writers 
 who had positive attractions for you — historians, 
 novelists, essayists — and the present word sug- 
 gests those who are severe, even censorious, and 
 a kind of writing which is dry and prosy. But you 
 will be agreeably disappointed and will take an al- 
 together different view of the matter when you 
 learn that a critic is not necessarily a fault-finder, 
 even if that be the general opinion, and that you 
 are to look upon him as a guide, as one who by 
 insight, good judgment and training is qualified 
 for that office. 
 
 As fair a definition as I can give you of criti- 
 cism, in words, is that it is the interpretation of 
 265 
 
266 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 an author. It is a department in literature, and 
 has become indispensable as a help and a dis- 
 cipline. It opens your eyes to merits (and faults 
 also) you might not have discerned ; it is an edu- 
 cator of the perceptions, of the taste, and the 
 weighing and comparing faculties. If you wish 
 as you grow older to understand the finer shades 
 of meaning, and the different styles by which dif- 
 ferent writers express themselves, to be apprecia- 
 tive and discriminating, and to get the best there 
 is out of a book, you will be only too glad to have 
 recourse to the work of critics. 
 
 For one instance, when the time arrives for you 
 to take up Shakespeare in earnest, you will if you 
 are wise avail }fourself of all the helps you can 
 command from those who have made him a special 
 study. If you can have access to the prose of 
 Coleridge you will enjoy and ponder the brief but 
 forceful comments he makes : you will be aided 
 by the expository touches of Hazlitt in his Charac- 
 ters of Shakespeare^ s Plays ; and for a most delight- 
 ful analysis of many of the heroines, you will 
 hardly find anything more desirable — both to 
 
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL, AND OTHER CRITICS. 267 
 
 read and to own — than the Characteristics of 
 Women by Mrs. Anna Jameson, which is a book 
 that should be in every girl's library, on that 
 special shelf where stand Sesame arid Lilies, and 
 Crauiford, and other sweet and true books to which 
 your attention has been directed in these two 
 series of authors. Criticisms on the immortal 
 dramatist are very abundant, and every year adds 
 to the number ; but for something that goes over 
 the whole field, you cannot do better than choose 
 the " Lectures " by one of our own countrymen, 
 Henry Norman Hudson, a Shakespearian critic of 
 high standing, one who almost deified Shakes- 
 peare (which is his chief fault), but whose work is 
 excellent and is the result of a life-time of study. 
 You will, have no adequate idea how the beauty 
 of a play like " Tempest " or of the character of a 
 Miranda or Harmione will be revealed to you until 
 you see them in the flood of strong light which a 
 fine, sympathetic, cultured critic throws upon 
 them. You need it, and will be grateful for it. 
 
 Among living American critics the name that 
 stands highest is that of James Russell Lowell; 
 
268 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 in liberal scholarship, keenness, brilliance and fine 
 judgment no one surpasses him. The results of 
 his work in this line you will find in My Study 
 Windows, and in the two series called A7no7ig my 
 Books. It is impossible to give you any concep- 
 tion of the breadth and insight of these papers. 
 Your most profitable way of reaching them will be 
 in connection with the subjects they treat of. 
 When you read Shakespeare, acquaint yourself 
 with the one entitled " Shakespeare Once More," 
 which is full of suggestions about the influences of 
 the age on that dramatist, and his fitness for the 
 time in which he was born, also about the struct- 
 ure and the possibilities of their own noble Eng- 
 lish tongue as Shakespeare used it, about his 
 adaptiveness to all understandings, because he 
 knew human nature and wrote of it as he saw it, 
 as it was, not as it ought to be. Much food for 
 you is there in that meaty paper of Lowell's. 
 
 And when you are ready to read Wordsworth 
 (as ready you must be some day), read the paper 
 on him ; the same of Milton and others. That on 
 Dante is considered the most thorough and by far 
 
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL, AND OTHER CRITICS. 269 
 
 the ablest on the subject which has been produced 
 in this country. Bear it in mind when the day 
 arrives for Dante, and see what is the estimate put 
 upon him by the most distinguished man of let- 
 ters we have among us. But Milton and Words- 
 worth come before the Florentine. In company 
 with your " Paradise Lost," have before you what 
 Lowell says of its grandeur and sweep, like this : 
 
 In reading " Paradise Lost " one has a feelirtg of vastness. 
 You float under an illimitable sky, brimmed with sunshine 
 or hung with constellations ; the abysses of space are about 
 you; you hear the cadenced surges of an unseen ocean; thun- 
 ders mutter round the horizon ; and if the scene change, it 
 is with an elemental movement like the shifting of mighty 
 winds. . . He was founder of the vague, perhaps I 
 should rather say the indefinite, where more is meant than 
 meets the ear, than any other of our poets. He loved epi- 
 thets (like old andy^zr) that suggest great reaches, whether 
 of space or time. . . Milton's respect for himself and 
 for his own mind and its movements rises well nigh to vene- 
 ration. . . There is no such unfailing dignity as his. 
 
 I wish I could have space to quote more, but 
 you must read it, and as you do, mark the splen- 
 
270 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS, 
 
 did structure of Lowell's sentences and what a 
 power words are in his hands, how flexible is our 
 language when a master of prose makes use of it. 
 And here, in his paper on Keats, is something on 
 this very subject ; most timely : 
 
 There is a great deal more than is commonly supposed in 
 this choice of words. Men's thoughts and opinions are in 
 a great degree vassals of him who invents a new phrase or 
 re-applies an old epithet. The thought of feeling a thousand 
 times repeated becomes his at last who utters it best. . . As 
 soon as we have discovered the word for our joy or sorrow 
 we are no longer its serfs, but its lords. 
 
 That sentence which I have emphazised reveals 
 the secret of a writer's power. Ponder it. You 
 will find these three volumes full of choice bits of 
 wisdom precious to one who loves our English 
 tongue and delights in the beauty and strength of 
 prose. What revelations we get of the penman's 
 craft, of the guild of writers, of the workmen like 
 Chaucer and Spenser ! What fine, careful studies 
 of the work of a single poet, like Wordsworth J 
 The influences that made him what he was are 
 sharply defined, his merits, and his faults, even 
 
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL, AND OTHER CRITICS. 27 I 
 
 the wearisome poems, but then, says Lowell, in 
 spite of the things that detract from his poetic 
 excellence and symmetry : 
 
 With what splendors as of mountain-sunsets are we re- 
 warded ! What golden rounds of verse do we not see stretch- 
 ing heavenward with angels ascending and descending! 
 What haunting harmonies hover around us deep and eternal 
 like the undying barytone of the sea ! and if we are com- 
 pelled to fare through sands and desert wildernesses, how 
 often do we not hear airy shapes that syllable our names 
 with a startling personal appeal to our highest conscious- 
 ness and our noblest aspiration such as we wait for in vain 
 in any other poet ! 
 
 Read this, and from page 240 on to the close of 
 the paper, and you will get as just an estimate of 
 Wordsworth as can be anywhere found in the same 
 space, if indeed it be not clearer, wiser, fairer as 
 r'ell as more sympathetic than from any other 
 critic. And the glow there is about Lowell's prose 
 — how soon you will see and feel it ! All the 
 ripeness of his scholarship is back of it, all his 
 years of training are in it. No man is born a 
 writer like that ; nor does the skill come without 
 
272 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 painstaking and an absorption of all that is best in 
 the older writers. When you consider this, you 
 will begin to appreciate the value to you of one 
 who brings to his pleasant task not only keenness 
 of perception, but the result of his life's reading 
 and work. The papers of most interest to you are 
 "Carlyle," "Abraham Lincoln," and "Chaucer," 
 in My Study Windows, " Shakespeare once more " 
 in the first series of Amojig my Books, and " Spen- 
 ser," "Wordsworth," "Milton," and "Keats," in 
 the second series : there is also in the first vol- 
 ume named a criticism of Thoreau which gives 
 rather an adverse view of him. 
 
 Let me refer you for some knowledge (which 
 you ought to have) of a man who gave the fruit of 
 his scholarship to newspaper literature in some of 
 the ablest criticism our country has known, to the 
 biography of the late George Ripley in the 
 " American Men of Letters " series. His work 
 you cannot avail yourself of, but by reading this 
 record of what he did, you can at least see the im- 
 portance of the department we are considering, 
 and how he dignified it. See his explanation to a 
 
JAMES RUSSET.L LOWELL, AND OTHER CRITICS. 273 
 
 friend of the reason for the ease with which in the 
 later years of his life he " threw off " an article : 
 " It is not wonderful seeing that I have been fifty 
 years about it ; " and this is quoted from one of 
 his reviews in illustration of his own literary prin- 
 ciples : " He who does not write as well as he can 
 on every occasion will soon form the habit of not 
 writing well at all." Mr. Ripley was connected 
 with Harper's Magazine for thirty years, a portion 
 of the time as writer of literary reviews, then as a 
 reader of manuscripts on all subjects, to which he 
 gave his careful attention, without prejudice or 
 favoritism, but always in the interests of literature, 
 and then submitted his opinion. These "opin- 
 ions," terse, deliberately weighed and conscien- 
 tious, are said by the biographer to show better 
 his " extraordinary mental force " than even his 
 elaborate reviews. 
 
 The objection of inaccessibility to the results of 
 such faithful work does not apply to another man 
 eminent in this field who has also lately died, 
 Edwin Percy Whipple. His books are in public 
 libraries, and most of them have been there a long 
 
2 74 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 enough time to have become well known and to 
 have been well read. In all, his collected essays, 
 criticisms and lectures make six volumes. He 
 was a clear thinker and able writer, and has the 
 distinction of being one of the earliest to give his 
 energies to this kind of writing and to raise the 
 tone of culture in America. In the first volume of 
 his Essays and Reinews he takes a survey of the 
 " Poets and Poetry of America," of " English 
 Poets of the Nineteenth Century " — subjects to 
 which we shall presently come in the later books 
 of Stedman. In that volume you will find a nota- 
 ble paper on Daniel Webster, prepared on occasion 
 of the publication of the great statesman's speeches 
 and forensic arguments. You may be surprised 
 to see Webster ranked among writers, but Whipple 
 considers him one of the masters of the English 
 language, and what he says you must not fail to 
 read. A passage or two I will quote : 
 
 In all the characteristics of great literary performances 
 they are fully equal to many works which have stood the 
 test of ages. . . Every great writer has a style of his 
 own, constructed according to the character of his mind and 
 
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL, AND OTHER CRITICS. 27.1:; 
 
 disposition. The style of Mr. Webster has great merit, not 
 only for its vigor, clearness and compression, but for the 
 broad impress it bears of the writer's nature. It owes noth- 
 ing to the usual tricks of rhetoric, but seems the enforced 
 utterance of his intellect, and is eminently Wcbsterian. There 
 is a granite-like strength in its construction. . . Words 
 in his mind are not masters, but instruments. They seem 
 selected, or rather clutched, by the faculty or feeling they 
 serve. . . lie bends language into the shape of his 
 thought, he never accommodates his thought to his language. 
 The grave, high, earnest nature of the man looks out upon 
 us from his well-knit, massive, compact sentences. . . 
 There is a tough, sinewy strength in his diction which gives 
 it almost muscular power in forcing its way to the heart and 
 understanding. Occasionally his words are of that kind 
 which are called " half-battles, stronger than most men's 
 deeds." In the course of an abstract discussion, or a clear 
 statement, he will throw in a sentence which almost makes 
 us spring to our feet. 
 
 In his " English Poets of the Nineteenth Cen- 
 tury " notice the tribute he pays to books, be- 
 ginning " Who shall estimate what vast stores of 
 happiness and improvement the domain of im- 
 agination has revealed to us ? " Consider his defi- 
 nition of what poetry is, and compare it with 
 
276 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 Emerson's to which your attention was directed 
 in the paper on that author. 
 
 It is well, and likewise interesting, to get the 
 opinions of different critics on the same subject, 
 and thereby avoid the danger of having a one- 
 sided view. By all means read Stedman's two 
 books, Victorian Poets and Poetry of Apierica ; a 
 part of the ground, but only a small part has been 
 gone over by other critics. Whipple's most elab- 
 orate single volume is on the Elizabethan poets 
 only ; Lowell's single papers are on selected 
 authors from Chaucer to Keats ; Stedman gives 
 " a historical review of the course of British poetry 
 during the present reign," with literary and bio- 
 graphical criticisms, and you can judge of the 
 compass from the fact that there are one hundred 
 and fifty British poets who are named for more or 
 less criticism. For a concise and well-defined ac- 
 count you will find nothing to take its place, and 
 the classification and arrangement, with the side 
 notes, are such as to be of vast help to the under- 
 standing of the conditions and the individuals. 
 While reading his comments on any special poem 
 
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL, AND OTHER CRITICS. 277 
 
 it will be greatly to your advantage to make your- 
 self thoroughly acquainted with the poem itself ; 
 that is the true moment and opportunity for so 
 doing and for gaining intelligent knowledge which 
 under such circumstances will be likely to stay by 
 you, and will be of more worth to you than week:^ 
 of miscellaneous, disconnected and superficial read, 
 ing of the poets. 
 
 In his volume on American poets, Stedman re- 
 views the whole ground from the beginning down 
 to the poets whose verse appears from week to 
 week in our periodicals, and he also devotes nine 
 chapters to certain leading poets, one of whom is 
 Lowell, and Lowell's prose, even his criticisms, 
 the very ones we have been considering are here 
 made subjects for this other critic's comment, and 
 verj' interesting reading it is for you. He says : 
 
 But one must spend time in gathering knowledge to give 
 it out richly, and few comprehend what goes to a page of 
 Lowell's manuscript. The page itself, were it a letter or 
 press-report, could be written in a quarter-hour ; but sup- 
 pose it represents, as in one of his greater essays, the re- 
 sult of prolonged studies — the reading, indexing, formulat- 
 
278 PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 ing works in various languages, upon his shelves or in the 
 Harvard library? Of all this he gives the ultimate quin- 
 tessence, a distillation fragrant with his own genius. Who 
 can estimate the toil of such work ? 
 
 Again : 
 
 Certainly Lowell is a most suggestive essayist. He sets 
 us a-thinking, and, after a stretch of comment, halts in by- 
 paths, or enlivens us with his sudden wit. He has the in- 
 tellect, held to be a mark of greatness, that " puts in motion 
 the intellect of others." 
 
 Besides the class of book and solitary articles 
 strictly called criticism (which includes a moderate 
 list of names there is not space for, among them 
 Margaret Fuller), there is a' new form of half- 
 descriptive, half-critical work which comes under 
 the general title of " studies." 
 
 Thus Higginson has twelve very pleasing papers 
 under the head of Short Studies of American Au- 
 thors : G. P. Lathrop has A Study of Hawthorne, 
 George Willis Cooke has George Eliot ; A Critical 
 Study of her Life, Writings and Philosophy : other 
 books are within the same plan of work like Abba 
 Goold Woolson's George Eliot and her Heroines. 
 
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL, AND OTHER CRITICS. 279 
 
 When you come, some day, to a careful reading of 
 George Eliot's novels, take with them these two 
 volumes by American writers for help towards an 
 estimate of the foremost woman writer of English 
 prose which this century has produced. Cooke's 
 is an exposition of her stories with an analysis of 
 each with extracts, is reasonably fair and more 
 sympathetic than Mrs. Woolson's ; while her study, 
 from a different stand-point, directs your thought 
 especially to certain failures and lacks in the great 
 novelist. 
 
 Of biographical criticism there are such books 
 as Cooke's on Emerson, Francis H. Underwood's 
 three, on Whittier, Longfellow and Lowell, and 
 many others. All such are of advantage in your 
 reading of best authors. Also books which have 
 literature in general for their theme, like Henry 
 Reed's Lectures on English Literature, which, though 
 they do not come strictly within the present 
 American plan, I cannot refrain from commend- 
 ing to you on account of the lovely, teachable 
 spirit manifested all through them. He was Pro- 
 fessor of English Literature and Rhetoric in the 
 
28o PLEASANT AUTHORS FOR YOUNG FOLKS. 
 
 University of Pennsylvania, and was lost at sea on 
 his return from Europe in 1854. He was a gentle, 
 refined man with a most reverent love for books ; 
 he valued the guidance of any who had shown 
 him where the best was to be found, and he rec- 
 ognized the fact that many though surrounded by 
 books do not know how to use them. He ad- 
 vised only the sweet and sound, that which should 
 be a means of culture, developing all that is best 
 in man and woman. To him the noble English 
 language had a sanctity and dignity of its own 
 which he would not have trifled with : he would 
 not have it brought down, or in any way debased. 
 Let such a thought be with you as you grow up 
 with a love of books, and you will have a true ap- 
 preciation not only of the strength of the Saxon 
 idioms and their grand attributes and possibilities 
 in the hands of a master, but you will know how 
 to choose the sweet kernels of truth, and learn to 
 loathe the evil and to distrust everything which 
 confuses the border lines between right and wrong. 
 
Classified List. — Religious. 
 
 GOOD FIGHT (A); or, George Dana Boardraan and (tw 
 
 Burman Mission. By Rev. A. King. Large i6mo, %i 25. 
 GOSPEL LIFE OF JESUS (The). By L. A. Davids. 
 
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 HELPFUL THOUGHTS FOR YOUNG MEN. By 
 T. D. WooLSEY, D. D., LL. D. i6mo, 60 cents. 
 The writer knows and understands the class to whom he speaks, 
 
 and his words are full of practical wisdom. 
 
 LIVING TRUTHS. (Spare Minute Series). From 
 Charles Kingslev. Edited by E. E. Brown, with an Intro- 
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 One cannot read it without feeling the brotherhood of a soul 
 
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 Juier-O'^can. 
 
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 THROUGH THE YEAR WITH THE POETS. - 
 December, January, February, March, April, 
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 Tlie cream of English literature, past and current, has been 
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 WHILE SHEPHERDS WATCHED THEIR 
 FLOCKS BY NIGHT. Illustrated, ^2.50. 
 Nothing more exquisite in the way of a presentation book. — 
 
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 WOMAN IN SACRED SONG. Compiled and edited 
 
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 It gives a very full representation of the contributions of woman 
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 YOUNG FOLKS' POETRY. By A. P. and M. T. 
 
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 It deser'^es to become a standard in the schools of the country- 
 
 — B. B. Bulletin. 
 
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 THE PANSY BOOKS. 
 
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 they portray is indeed remarkable. 
 
 " Her stories move alternately to laughter and tears." ... 
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 " Girl life and character portrayed with rare power." ... 
 " Too much cannot be said of the insight given into the true way 
 of studying and using the word of God." . . . These are a 
 few quotations from words of praise everywhere spoken. The 
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 hesitation as to their character or acceptability. 
 
 Each volume \2mo, $1.50. 
 
 Chautauqua Girls at Home. Links in Rebecca's Life. 
 
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 Pour Girls at Chautauqua. Ruth Erskine's Crosses. 
 
 From different Standpoints. Randolphs (The). 
 
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 Household Puzzles. Those Boys. 
 
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 Julia Ried. Tip Lewis and his Lamp. 
 
 King's Daughter (The). Wise and Otherwise. 
 
Classified Lis I. — Birthday. 
 
 BIRTHDAY. 
 
 ABNOLD BIRTHDAY BOOK. With many original 
 
 Poems. Cloth, gilt, $i.oo; seal, §2. 50. 
 
 The editors are the two daughters of the poet, who have gone 
 over the various works of their father with a judicious, as well as a 
 loving hand, and have added a collection of gems worthy of the 
 publisher's setting. — Interior, Chicago. 
 
 LITTLE POLKS' BIRTHDAY BOOK. Arranged by 
 Amanda B. Harris. Twelve full-page illustrations in color, 
 and pictures for every day. Square i8mo, cloth, tinted edges, 
 f i.oo. 
 With each rHyme is a childish picture, some of them being very 
 
 clever, the whole bouna ^n a very artistic cover, and one calculated 
 to amuse and please childien. — Churchman. 
 
 POETS' BIRTHDAY BOOK (The). Arranged by 
 Amanda B. Harris, with original poems for each month by 
 Longfellow, Whittier, Will Carleton and others. Twenty-four 
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 You cannot select anything prettier for a gift book, — Herald 
 
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 This exquisite little birthday book cannot help meeting with 
 
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 WEDDING DAY BOOK. Edited by Katherine Lek 
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 quarto, extra cloth, bevelled, gilt edges, $1.25. 
 
Classified List. — Standard Miscellaneous. 
 
 HOLD UP YOUR HEADS, GIRLS ! By Annie H. 
 
 Ryder, ^i.oo. 
 
 It is a book for study, for companionship, and the girl who reads 
 it thoughtfully and with an intent to profit by it will get more real 
 help and good from it than from a term at the best boarding-school 
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 HONOR BRIGHT (the story oO. By Charles R. Tai^ 
 
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 HOW TO LEARN AND EARN. Half Hours in some 
 
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