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ASSOCIATION OF MASTERS OF THE BOSTON PUBLIC SCHOOLS .- Rejoinder to the "Reply" of the Hon. Horace Mann, Secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education, to the "Remarks" upon his Seventh Annual Re- port (Boston, Little and Brown, 1845).
BOTSFORD, ELI HERBERT .- Fifty Years at Williams under the Administra- tion of Presidents Chadbourne, Carter, Hewitt, Hopkins and Garfield (Pittsfield, Mass., Eagle Printing and Binding Co., 1928)-Vol. I, Book 1, The Story of F. A. Chadbourne, is the only portion yet pub- lished.
BOWKER, WILLIAM HENRY .- The Old Guard; the Famous "Faculty of Four"; the Mission and Future of the College; its Debt to Amherst College, Harvard College, and other Institutions (Boston, Wright and Potter Printing Co., 1908)-The story of Massachusetts State College of Agriculture.
BOYDEN, ALBERT GARDNER .- History and Alumni Record of the State Normal School, Bridgewater, Mass., to July, 1876 (Boston, Noyes and Snow, 1876).
BOYDEN, ARTHUR CLARKE .- Albert Gardner Boyden and the Bridgewater State Normal School (Privately printed, Bridgewater, Mass., 1919).
CHAMBERLAIN, JOSHUA LAWRENCE .- Harvard University, its History, In- fluence, Equipment, and Characteristics, with Biographical Sketches and Portraits of the Founders, Benefactors, Officers, and Alumni (Boston, Herndon, 1900).
COLLEGE OF THE HOLY CROSS, WORCESTER .- Historical Sketch, 1843-1883 (Worcester, Hamilton, 1883).
CONVERSE, FLORENCE .- The Story of Wellesley (Boston, Little, Brown, 1915).
DUNTON, LARKIN .- A Memorial of the Life and Services of John D. Philbrick (Boston, New England Publishing Co., 1888).
EDWARDS, RICHARD .- Memoir of Nicholas. Tillinghast, First Principal of the State Normal School at Bridgewater, Mass. (Boston, Robinson, 1857).
FUESS, CLAUDE MOORE .- An Old New England School: a History of Phillips Academy, Andover (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1917).
FULLER, HOMER TAYLOR .- The Progress of Technical Education, Includ- ing a Quarter-Century Review of the Work of Worcester Polytechnic Institute (Worcester, Mass., Hamilton, 1894).
HINSDALE, BURKE AARON .- Horace Mann and the Common School Revival in the United States (N. Y., Scribner's, 1913).
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SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
GILCHRIST, BETH BRADFORD .- The Life of Mary Lyon (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1910).
HANSCOM, ELIZABETH DEERING, AND GREENE, HELEN FRENCH .- Sophia Smith and the Beginnings of Smith College (Northampton, Smith College, 1925)-Based upon the narrative of John Morton Greene.
INTERNATIONAL KINDERGARTEN UNION : COMMITTEE OF NINETEEN .- Pio- neers of the Kindergarten in America (N. Y., Century, 1924).
JACKMAN, WILBUR SAMUEL .- "Francis Wayland Parker and his Work for Education" (UNITED STATES : BUREAU OF EDUCATION, Annual Report, Washington, 1902)-See Part I, pp. 231-284.
KINGSLEY, MRS. FLORENCE MORSE .- The Life of Henry Fowle Durant, Founder of Wellesley (N. Y., Century, 1924).
KUEHNEMANN, EUGEN .- Charles W. Eliot, President of Harvard Univer- sity (Boston, Harvard University, 1909)-Covers May 19, 1869-May 19, 1904.
MANN, HORACE .- The Life and Work of Horace Mann (5 vols., Boston, Lee and Shepard, 1891)-See Vol. I for his biography by Mrs. Mary Mann. Vols. II-V comprise his annual reports as secretary of the State Board of Education, and other writings on education.
MANN, HORACE .- Reply to the "Remarks" of Thirty-one Boston School- masters on the Seventh Annual Report of the Secretary of the Massa- chusetts Board of Education (Boston, Fowle and Capen, 1844).
MANN, HORACE .- Answer to the "Rejoinder" of Twenty-nine Boston Schoolmasters, Part of the "Thirty-one" Who Published "Remarks" on the Seventh Annual Report of the Secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education (Boston, Fowle and Capen, 1845).
MARTIN, GEORGE HENRY .- Evolution of the Massachusetts Public School System; a Historical Sketch (N. Y., Appleton, 1915).
MASSACHUSETTS : BOARD OF EDUCATION .- Annual Reports (Boston, 1838 and later years)-The first twelve reports were written by Horace Mann, the secretary of the board.
MONROE, PAUL, editor .- A Cyclopaedia of Education (5 vols., N. Y., Mac- millan, 1911-1913).
MOORE, ERNEST CARROLL .- Fifty Years of Education in Massachusetts (Bos- ton, Ginn, 1917)-A sketch of the progress of education in the United States from 1867 to 1917.
MORISON, SAMUEL ELIOT, editor .- The Development of the University from 1869 to 1929 (Cambridge, Harvard Univ. Press, 1929)-A series of monographs on the individual departments and divisions of Harvard University, constituting one volume of the projected Tercentennial History of Harvard University.
PEIRCE, CYRUS, AND SWIFT, MARY .- The First State Normal School in America: the Journals of Cyrus Peirce and Mary Swift (Harvard Documents in the History of Education, Vol. I, Cambridge, Harvard Univ. Press, 1926)-Edited by A. O. Norton. These journals reflect the early years of the State Normal School at Lexington. Five do- cuments on the early history of normal schools in Massachusetts com- plete this volume
PALMER, GEORGE HERBERT .- The Life of Alice Freeman Palmer (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1908).
QUINCY, JOSIAH .- The History of Harvard University (2 vols., Cam- bridge, Owen, 1840).
RADCLIFFE COLLEGE .- Addresses and Exercises Commemorating the Cen- tennial of the Birth of Elizabeth Cary Agassiz, Dec. 5, 1922 (Cam- bridge, 1922).
RHEES, MRS. HARRIET SEELYE .- Laurenus Clark Seelye, First President of Smith College (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1929).
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SEELYE, LAURENUS CLARK .- The Early History of Smith College, 1871- 1910 (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1923).
SPRING, LEVERETT WILSON .- Mark Hopkins, Teacher (N. Y. Industrial Education Association, 1888).
STEARNS, EBEN SPERRY, WALTON, ELECTA N. AND SHEPARD, GRACE F .- Historical Sketches of the Framingham State Normal School (Pri- vately printed, 1914)-Three sketches, covering the period 1839 to 1914.
STOW, MRS. SARAH D. LOCKE .- History of Mount Holyoke Seminary, South Hadley, Mass., during its First Half Century, 1837-1887 (Springfield, Springfield Printing Co., 1880).
SWAIN, GEORGE FILLMORE .- Technical Education at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (N. Y., McClure, Phillips, 1900).
TYLER, WILLIAM SEYMOUR .- History of Amherst College during its First Half-Century, 1821-1871 (Springfield, Bryan, 1873).
TYLER, WILLIAM SEYMOUR .- A History of Amherst College during the Administration of its First Five Presidents from 1821 to 1891 (N. Y., Hitchcock, 1895).
VANDEWALKER, NINA CATHERINE .- The Kindergarten in American Educa- tion (N. Y., Macmillan, 1908).
WINSHIP, ALBERT EDWARD .- Horace Mann, the Educator (Boston, New England Publishing Co., 1896).
CHAPTER VII
MASSACHUSETTS LITERATURE IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY (1820-1860)
BY JOHN MACY Author of The Spirit of American Literature
THE NEW ENGLAND ENLIGHTENMENT
Of important contributors to American literature in the four decades before the Civil War the greater number belong to New England, and more especially to eastern Massachu- setts, either because they were born there or because, as in the case of Longfellow, they spent most of their lives there. This is the richest period of American literature, though in- dividuals in it wrote much after the date arbitrarily set as the terminal of this chapter. There were notable writers of the time who were not New Englanders: Irving, Cooper, Whit- man, Herman Melville, Poe (who though born in Boston, was decidedly not a Bostonian), and others, mostly of New York.
These writers did not constitute a group, as did the New Englanders, who, though they differed from each other, were informed by a unity of spirit, due to their place and time. Arthur Quiller-Couch has cautioned us against "thinking in periods," and there may be an accompanying caution against thinking of literary history in terms of place. Yet it is signifi- cant that these New Englanders were neighbors and lived just when they did. For they made a kind of renaissance, a new age of enlightenment of which each was in his way an expres- sion and a creator. Ideas were in the air, ideas religious, philosophic, social, political, belletristic, artistic; and no alert mind could escape them, though not every intelligent man promoted or even passively accepted them. The old guard was still there, then as now, holding the ancient established forts and compelling the invaders to give a good account of
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themselves (see Emerson's essay on "The Conservative"-a breed which vexed even his serene tolerance). It was a time of intellectual rebellion, of soul-searching, of reaching out for better and broader thought, whether the quest was toward a wider conception of God, a better democracy, self-improve- ment, village-improvement, or an extension of knowledge of European literature, that is, a broadening of general tradi- tional culture, a sort of new humanism.
With the passage of time some of these once revolutionary ideas no longer startle us, have become commonplace, as happens to all novelties of the past, albeit we have not yet caught up with the best thought of that receding era. Some of the issues are dead. The problem of abolitionism, which smouldered or blazed in everybody's heart, was settled by the war-if indeed it was ever settled. The revolt against Cal- vinism, which took the shape of Unitarianism in religion and Transcendentalism in philosophy, is an old story, though the story is not yet universally read. The importation of the best thought of Europe is going on every day in a thousand steel ships, whereas in that day only a few bold, or timidly inquiring explorers brought back the precious cargo. To understand the full force, the real novelty, the intrepid will to discovery which animated that time, we have to recover our historical sense, the vision in perspective.
THE THOUGHT MAKERS: EMERSON
In a time of seers, essayists, intellectual experimenters, the chief prophet is Emerson. His mind absorbed and rephrased all the best ideas that were current, with many from distant times and climes; and he added a pungent originality. The first expression of his independence is his sermon on the Lord's Supper when he resigned his pastorate of the Second Unitarian Church in 1832. He was then twenty-nine. For all its mild manner this sermon is the very "dissidence of dis- sent." Even Unitarianism is too narrow for him; he could not approve the ritualistic forms which lingered in it from the traditional religions. He never ceased to be a preacher, but his church was nature and his God a sort of pantheistic Oversoul.
A second challenge to tradition was The American Scholar,
From a photograph
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
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THE THOUGHT MAKERS
an oration delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge in 1837. It calls upon scholars to think for them- selves and "cast behind you all conformity"; it bids men have courage, self-reliance, trust in one's own instincts; "the world is nothing, the man is all." And that is the gist of Emerson's teaching for forty years.
His thought, however rich and varied and bristling with fresh illustrations, is so homogeneous that the order of pub- lication of his books makes little difference and an essay from one might be transferred to another without being out of place. The central volumes are the Essays (first series, 1841; second series, 1844). Certain essays are especially to be noted, though everything of Emerson's is characteristic and nothing is quite negligible. That on "The Transcendentalist" gives better than seventy-five years of later criticism the es- sence of the New England form of German idealism, and it has the authority of an original source, for Emerson was a Transcendentalist. He believed in intuitive knowledge as something born in human nature and held that logic is only the orderly reasoned account of what the soul already knows. The famous essay on "Compensation" phrases his tempera- mental optimism, which runs through all his work. But his optimism is not the blind and mushy kind; he sees the evils of the immediate world and is one of the most valiant protestants against them; but behind and beyond present disaster is the everlasting soul of man. "Self Reliance," quoted until it would be threadbare if the stuff were not imperishable, rotates about this idea: "Trust thyself : every heart vibrates to that iron string." The essay on "Fate" is a shaking up and humanizing of the freewill-determinism problem.
Much of Emerson's prose is poetic, alive with beautiful and brilliant metaphors. His poetry in verse form, of which he left a considerable volume, has not always either the magic or the art of the authentic poet. But it alone would make him memorable if only for "Brahma", and "The Humble-Bee", which show the range of his thought from the abstract and distant to the near and delightfully familiar. His mind is reflective rather than lyric, though he is capable of intense emotion, and a thousand sentences from his essays could be quoted to show that. In an essay called "Circles" he has un-
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designedly expressed himself: "Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet."
THE THOUGHT MAKERS: THOREAU
About the time when Emerson at the fullness of his power and solidly established was at work on his Representative Men (1850), a young neighbor, Henry David Thoreau, was paddling his canoe in quiet and contented obscurity. He brought back A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers (1849). Only a few, including Emerson, recognized a fresh, original book; and most of the copies of the first edition remained in Thoreau's possession. The Week is indeed all the years that Thoreau had lived (he was thirty-two). Patently under the influence of Emerson yet unmistakably his own wayward, half vagabond, half scholarly self, he meditates as he steers his lazy canoe for a symbolically seven days: the subject may be fish or it may be books, as the mood strikes him; he wanders with the inchoate ease of a seventeenth century English es- sayist. His mind is full of good things and they are the substances of the book. His writing is admirable, and his indolent manner, though precise and vigorous, is charming.
Five years later (1854) Thoreau published his second volume, Walden, or Life in the Woods, the record of a two years experiment in a self-sustaining independence. It is one of the first and certainly one of the best of the back-to- nature books. This deliberate Crusoe pared life down to the barest necessities, subsisted by his Yankee ingenuity in solv- ing elementary problems, had time to read (borrowed books- he was not entirely isolated from society), and above all to observe nature.
Thoreau the naturalist has been overpraised as against Thoreau the thinker. In both he was an excellent amateur. The lover of wild apples (see Excursions, 1863) is a hater of governments, a natural anarchist who believed in "Civil Disobedience". His half humorous but very dogged ac- count of his contest with the unrighteous tax-collector is in a paper called "Resistance to Civil Government", printed in 1849 in a forgotten magazine. Of the eleven volumes of the complete edition of Thoreau only two were published in his lifetime, The Week and Walden. After his premature death
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THE CLERGY
in his forty-fifth year his friends and editors published the admirable Excursions (1863), The Maine Woods (1864), Cape Cod (1865), and later the selections from his journals under the four seasons. The posthumous Thoreau was in- troduced to the world by Emerson's fine biographical sketch in the Atlantic Monthly (1862), which ends with the words: "he had in a short life exhausted the capabilities of this world; wherever there is knowledge, wherever there is virtue, wherever there is beauty, he will find a home."
THE CLERGY: CHANNING AND PARKER
Among the intellectual forces of the time are the Unitarian clergy, whose powers are personal but whose pulpit influence is a direct inheritance from that of the elder Congregational ministry. The color of the theology had changed, but the authority of the preacher, the respect with which he was listened to, the church as a forum from which to spread ideas remained. Conspicuous are William Ellery Channing (the elder, 1780-1842) and Theodore Parker. Channing, who combined a gentle and benignant spirit with great mental vigor and courage, was the acknowledged leader of Unitarianism, and though he disliked formulas and objected even to the use of the word "Unitarian," it was he who first formulated the case for Unitarianism as a spiritual and moral force. Of the Abolitionists he was, though emphatic, most tolerant and least given to abusing the slave-owners. His book, Slavery (1835), is a classic in the literature of the abolition movement ; he protested against political compulsion in the suppression of slavery, appealed consistently to reason and conscience, and refused to join the "immediate emancipationists."
Of more aggressive temperament than Channing is Theo- dore Parker. There was fighting blood in the family, for his grandfather, John Parker, was leader of the Minute Men at Lexington. He had prodigious intellectual energy and be- came one of the most learned men of his time as well as one of the most militantly active. His activity took two direc- tions, religious radicalism and abolitionism. Like Channing he broke away from old orthodox Unitarianism and at first was denied even a pulpit in Boston. The opposition to him undoubtedly invigorated his incandescent sermons, The Dis-
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course of Matters Pertaining to Religion (1842), Ten Ser- mons of Religion (1853), and Sermons of Theism, Atheism, and Popular Theology (1853), which by their eloquence have a place in literature.
Parker's cardinal idea, shared by most of the advanced Unitarians, Transcendentalists, and independent thinkers like Emerson and Thoreau, was the divinity of man. If the soul is divine, then, slavery is a sin, and Parker becomes by logic and passion an uncompromising Abolitionist. He was, with Garrison and Phillips, an immense national influence. His work was not only propaganda but practical and sometimes dangerous service in the "underground railroad," of which his house was one of the stations. He was once indicted under the Fugitive Slave Law but never tried.
It should be remembered that Parker's ideas went to Lin- coln directly or through Parker's letters to Lincoln's partner, Herndon. It is likely that the close of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address is an echo of a sentence in a speech which Parker delivered in 1858: "Democracy is direct self-government, over all the people, by all the people, for all the people." If Parker was not an original thought maker, if he was, indeed, less a thinker than a preacher and propagandist, he was certainly a most effective promulgator of ideas. He had a remarkable gift of phrase and many of his sentences still ring.
GARRISON
Ringing too are the words of William Lloyd Garrison, who has the originality of a pioneer and was a creator of thought, even though his thought was confined, day and night, year after year, to his one great cause. To call Garrison a pioneer is not to imply that he was the first to advocate the abolition of slavery; the idea was at least half a century old in England and America. His immediate teacher was Benjamin Lundy, who is said to have been the first to deliver anti-slavery lectures in America, and of whose paper, The Genius of Uni- versal Emancipation, Garrison was for a time assistant editor. When he founded The Liberator, he was full of his subject, and he was a trained journalist with a forceful, lucid style. And Garrison is much more than a journalist, for he is not writing of the day or for the day, but dealing with funda-
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MINOR CELEBRITIES
mental ideas of liberty and democracy. The Liberator is not a journal; it is a book of prophecy, a moral institution, and it became that in its own time and very rapidly after its foun- dation. It was started on less than a shoe-string, but on the winged bare feet of conviction, and it lasted for thirty-five years, until it had, like some other forces of the time, made itself unnecessary.
MINOR CELEBRITIES
Around the oustanding figures of the time is a swarm of minor writers, some of whose work is still memorable, but of whom only a few can here be mentioned. Most of the books of A. Bronson Alcott were published after the Civil War, but before that, his essential ideas were expressed in his talks and his note-books of "scriptures." "Orphic Sayings" appeared in The Dial. His ideas on education, which he put in practice in his school and which, then revolutionary, are now a com- monplace in theories of child-training, are to be found in Observations on the Principles and Methods of Infant In- struction (1830). Margaret Fuller (Ossoli), the first editor of The Dial, was a literary critic (Papers on Literature and Art, 1846), and one of the first feminists (Woman in the Nineteenth Century, 1844). Orestes A. Brownson tells his story in Charles Elwood, or The Infidel Converted (1840) ; The Spirit Rapper: an Autobiography (1864) ; The Convert, or Leaves from My Experience (1857). The best remem- bered work of James Freeman Clarke, Ten Great Religions, was published late in life (Part I, 1871; Part II, 1883). His earlier writings on religious liberalism-he was one of the leaders of the broader Unitarians-are The Peculiar Doctrine of Christianity (1844) ; History of the Doctrine of the Atone- ment (1845) ; Orthodoxy (1866). George Ripley, originator of Brook Farm, and one of the founders of The Dial, was one of many New Englanders, like Bryant and Charles A. Dana, and Greeley, who went to New York and became editors, journalists, critics. The enriching of New York thought from New England is an interesting chapter in American literary history. As the country, northeast, west, and, later, south, pulled toward unity, it made less and less difference where a man of letters had his desk. Ripley and Dana were
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editors of The American Cyclopedia, the first important work of that kind in this country.
HISTORIANS
If some departments of the literature of Massachusetts and of all America seem weak and inadequate, there is no question of the strength of the department of history. In this period the part of the American past to be studied was the colonial and revolutionary, and historians approached that past in a spirit combining patriotism, scholarship, and literary art. Many of them (and their readers) would have said with Jared Sparks : "I have got a passion for revolutionary history", and the passion often went further than any period or than Amer- ica. Sparks published from 1834 to 1837 the twelve volumes of The Life and Writings of George Washington. The work is done with loyalty and ability. But the editor took it upon himself to correct Washington's spelling, syntax, and even his words. That would not be tolerated now and it was not tolerated by the most careful critics and editors of Sparks's time.
A somewhat different falsification mars George Bancroft's History of The United States from the Discovery of the American Continent, the ten volumes of which appeared at intervals from 1834 to 1874. The magniloquent manner which pleased his contemporaries is no longer to our taste. More serious is the defect of matter, for Bancroft makes history an orotund celebration of democracy and its heroes; it is a democratic pamphlet, somewhat as Macaulay's History was said to be a Whig pamphlet. But the work made Ban- croft one of the most popular figures of his time. His de- mocracy, sincere but uncritical, was what the people wanted.
John Gorham Palfrey's History of New England during the Stuart Dynasty (1858-1864), to which were added two volumes, History of New England from the Revolution of the Seventeenth Century to the Revolution of the Eighteenth (1875-1890) are said to be accurate; but again the defect of piety and patriotism shows that the age of historical criticism had not fully arrived and that the New Englander still took the virtues of his ancestors for granted. That view has been
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superceded in our time by a severe analysis of the Puritan character.
William Hickling Prescott found his subjects in Spain and the Spanish colonies. Irving's pleasant work perhaps led him to these rich materials; but even more important for Prescott and important in the scholarly literature of Massachusetts is George Ticknor's History of Spanish Literature (1849), the first adequate work on the subject in any language. This was published after Prescott's first three histories, but Ticknor was his friend and early initiated him into Spanish life and history. Prescott's Ferdinand and Isabella (1837) was im- mediately successful. It was followed by The Conquest of Mexico (1843) ; The Conquest of Peru (1847) ; and the un- finished History of the Reign of Philip II (1855-1859). Whatever corrections later studies and discoveries demand in Prescott's work, it stands secure as literature by virtue of its clear, rapid narrative, its colorful but not ornate style.
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