USA > Massachusetts > Suffolk County > Boston > The memorial history of Boston : including Suffolk County, Massachusetts, 1630-1880, Vol. III > Part 86
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Collections of the speeches of Charles Sumner, of Robert C. Winthrop, of Wendell Phillips, and other prominent orators, have also been published.
When Mr. Prescott's history of Phillip II. was interrupted by his too early death, his subject was, to a certain extent, covered by a younger writer, who, like Prescott himself, had achieved a high place among the historians by his first work. Mr. John Lothrop Motley's history of The Rise of the Dutch Republic made its appearance only a year after the first two volumes of Mr. Of Another Prescott's Philip. No portion of the portentous reign .of that monarch was more important in its relations to the civilization and welfare of Europe than that which was occupied by his desperate struggle with the people of Holland, and his treacherous dealings with the English queens. Of all this the story was as fully and satisfactorily told from Mr. Motley's point of view as it could have been from Mr. Prescott's. Mr. Motley had been as fortunate in the advan- tages he had enjoyed in composing his history as Mr. Prescott had been unfortunate. His long residence abroad gave him ample opportunity to use to the fullest the abundant materials which existed at the various courts of Germany, as well as in Spain, England, and Holland,-some of the most interesting of which had been but recently brought to light. His use of this material was not only conscientious but extremely skilful, and gave to his work a vivacity and human interest of which, until then, the only exam-
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THE PRESS, ETC., OF THE LAST HUNDRED YEARS.
ple was to be found in the pages of Macaulay. The history, when it ap- peared in 1856, was a delightful surprise. Its welcome was not less warm in England and Holland than in the United States. A Dutch translation
Edward Everett 1
was at once prepared, with an introduction by Backhuysen van den Brink. A French translation followed shortly, with an introduction by Guizot. The work was also translated into German and Russian. The author went on
1 [This cut follows a portrait by G. Stuart D.D. A view of the monument on his grave in Newton, painted in 1818 in London, and now Mount Auburn is given in the Harvard Register, owned by his nephew, the Rev. Edward E. Hale, July, 1881 .- ED.]
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THE MEMORIAL HISTORY OF BOSTON.
with his studies, and published in 1861 two volumes of the History of the United Netherlands, the remaining two volumes of which appeared in 1867, bringing the history down to the recognition of the independence of the Republic in 1609. The mournful story of the Life and Death of Fohn of Barnevelde, published in 1874, brought the writer to the threshold of the Thirty Years' War. The history of this dismal period, in which the civil- ization of Europe seemed about to be obscured, was the difficult labor which Mr. Motley next proposed to himself. On retiring from the office of Minister to England in 1870, he took up liis residence at The Hague, in the private villa of the Queen of Holland, and employed himself once more in the congenial task of collecting and arranging his materials. He was . not, however, destined to publish any portion of the work, which was inter- rupted by his death in 1877.1
The poetical promise discernible in the literature of the second period was abundantly realized in the third. Mr. Longfellow had published his Voices of the Night in 1839. For the next thirty years his poems were issued with frequency. He has been through life the most industrious and pro- ductive of all American poets, and both his industry and productiveness have increased since he has passed the period of middle life, when effort, unless quickened by the spur of necessity, is apt to slacken. Mr. Long- fellow's later productions are far more ambitious and labored than his carlier, and they are also more sombre, - the gentle, pensive sadness of his earlier verse has deepened its tone. The melancholy of the Christus and of the New England Tragedies is quite distinct from anything to be found in his poems prior to 1860. But the minor poems of the later years have gained greatly in strength of thought and force of expression, while retaining all the sweetness and tenderness of sentiment which characterize the earlier poems.
Mr. Emerson's earliest poems enriched the pages of the Dial, but are preserved in a small volume published in 1847. From time to time, nota- bly since the establishment of the Atlantic Monthly, specimens of this rare and thoughtful poetry were given to the public, which received them with a curious mixture of reverence and amusement, often, it must be confessed, taking their admirable qualities on trust, but charmed unaffectedly, now and then, by the commanding beauty and depth of thought. But most of Mr. Emerson's warmest admirers would doubtless agree with the judgment of Theodore Parker, that " his best poetry is in his prose, and his poorest, thinnest, and least musical prose is in his poems." 2
Mr. James Russell Lowell printed his first volume, A Year's Life, in 1841. His second, A Legend of Brittany, with which were printed some smaller pieces, -" Rhœcus" among them, - appeared in 1844. The Vision of Sir
1 [The Massachusetts Historical Society ap- pointed Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes to prepare the customary memoir for their Proceedings. The subject grew on the friendly biographer's hands,
and resulted in a separate volume, whose text was subsequently abridged for the Society's rec- ord. See Proceedings, December, 1878. - ED.] 2 Massachusetts Quarterly Review, March, 1850.
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THE PRESS, ETC., OF THE LAST HUNDRED YEARS.
Excelsior
The shades of night was falling fait. Where atomghi an Alpine file age pasia Sym and ica
A youth, who as min
bore , , alime
Rayo with the
Excelsior.
His crow was said, but his care ifwe auch Flushi'd like a fälchin from its sheart
And like a Sina ; clarion
The accents of that
Suite vous tony
Excelsior
September 28. 1841 Half part 3 o'clock morning. ahow to use
THE FIRST DRAFT OF LONGFELLOW'S "EXCELSIOR." 1
Launfal, in which the best qualities of Mr. Lowell's genius are visible, was published in 1848, and was followed within the year by the Fable for Critics
1 [The original of this manuscript, of which and was bequeathed, with his other autographs, the cut gives but a portion, is written on the back of a letter from Charles Sumner to Longfellow,
VOL. ttt. - 85.
by Mr. Sumner to Harvard College Library. - ED.]
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THE MEMORIAL HISTORY OF BOSTON.
and The Biglow Papers. The transcendental movement, in which Mr. Lowell had been somewhat interested, had produced many eccentricities in its disciples which invited raillery, - and these traits were hit off in the Fable for Critics with a nimble wit and skilful touch, in which no suspicion of ill-nature mingled. In the Biglow Papers a new vein was opened. Thc speech of the Yankee on his native heath might be picturesque, but had
Then her rid come back like the tide Down to the Bay o' Funby, An' all I know is they was linde In meeting' come mx" Sunday,
never been called poetic. Mr. Lowell, in these papers, married it to immor- tal verse, and used it with great effect in satire, in denunciation, in warning, in pathetic appeal, to move the heart of the people to indignation and shame against the Mexican War and the schemes of the slave-power. A second series of "Biglow Papers," mostly contributed to the Atlantic Monthly during the Rebellion, satirized with righteous severity the politics of that period, but the old vein was not to be re-opened with success. In 1869 a volume of collected poems was issued, called Under the Willows, which in- cluded most of the verses which had appeared in the magazines of the past ten years; and with them the noble ode spoken at the Harvard Com- memoration, in 1865, of those of her sons who had fallen in the war of the Rebellion. The style of Mr. Lowell's later poems shows, generally speak- ing, a distinct loss of simplicity. Some of them are marked by an involved complexity of style, amounting even to obscurity, and which suggests the influence of Browning.
Oliver Wendell Holmes 1 was in 1830, while an undergraduate at Har- vard, a contributor of verses to a magazine of light literature, maintained wholly by the students, and called the Collegian. For this magazine he wrote some twenty-five pieces, mostly running over with extravagant fun,
Oliver Wendell Hommes.
but showing the turn for easy and graceful versification which has distin- guished his more deliberate productions. Most of these juvenile pieces have been abandoned to oblivion by the author ; but some few examples of them, as " Evening by a Tailor," " The Meeting of the Dryads," "The Spectre Pig," and others, have been admitted to a place among his acknowledged works.
1 [There is a portrait and sketch of Dr. Holmes in the Harvard Register, April, 1881. - ED.]
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THE PRESS, ETC., OF THE LAST HUNDRED YEARS.
On the establishment of the New England Magasine in 1831, Mr. Holmes, then studying law, became a frequent contributor of verses, generally of much the same character as those in the Collegian. In 1836 these pieces, with oth- ers, including a poem read before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge, called Poetry, a Metrical Essay, were published in a volume. This was the beginning of a brilliant career. Dr. Holmes's occasional poems, read before societies on anniversary days, at public dinners, and wherever men have met together for enjoyment or commemoration, liave been more numerous and more admired than those of any other poet. To strike exactly the right note, to hit and emphasize just the emotion of the hour, be it grave or gay, to say the very word that every man at the table or on the benches would say if he could ; and to say it with a turn of grace, a sparkle, a spirit which moved serious men to laughter, or frivolous men to tears, -this has been the felicity of Dr. Holmes. Most of his poems for the last quarter of a century have been first printed in the Atlantic Monthly.
In 1840 Mr. Whittier, having exercised himself in a variety of situations, -as farmer, shoemaker, editor at Boston, at Hartford, at Philadelphia; and having already been a contributor of prose and Shinswhitten verse to newspapers and periodicals in all those cities, and published two or three small volumes of poetry, - abandoned the active walks of business, and fixed his residence at Amesbury, on the banks of the Merrimack. From this calm retreat he sent forth, mostly through the columns of the National Era, published at Washington, the vigorous and stirring Antislavery poems by which he became most widely known. - He. had been greatly moved by the brave crusade of Garrison, and was early enrolled among the active and avowed adherents of the Antislavery movement. His poems against slavery took a more fiery and aggressive tone about the time of the Mexican War, and several of the pieces inspired by that nefarious enterprise remain to this day unsurpassed in eloquence and vigor of denunciation, not unrelieved by the truest pathos. This is one side of Whittier's nature, the side earliest known by the public. There was another side, not less remarkable and more fully represented at a later period, of which the main feature is a genuine love of Nature and a keen appreciation and sympathy for every aspect in which she shows herself to the New England eye. The fields and woods, the rocks and streams of his native State, - her ice and snows as well, - are to him a constantly inspir- ing theme; and not less so are the homely virtues, the artless graces, the latent heroism of her sons and daughters. Snow-Bound, Mand Muller, The Barefoot Boy, In School-Days, are instances not more marked than scores of others of this warmth of loyal affection. The first collection of his poems was published in 1838, but his productiveness increased with his years, and
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THE MEMORIAL HISTORY OF BOSTON.
was greatest at about and after the close of the Rebellion. " Eight volumes of poems," says the memoir in Duyckinck's Cyclopedia, " were added by Mr. Whittier to his works in as many years (1864-72), one of which was a series of selections."
To account for all the poets in a community where no man with pre- tensions to the calling of a man of letters thinks his position assured without at least an occasional copy of verses, would here be impossible. Among the writers less known than those above noticed, are Thomas William Par- sons and William W. Story. Born in the same year, the latter put forth a small volume of poems in 1847, the former in 1854. Mr. Parsons had, however, published ten years before his translation of the first ten cantos of Dante's Inferno, whose excellence had attracted the attention of scholars. His careful and continued study of Dante had colored visibly the style of all his minor works, the best of which are marked by reserve and purity of expression, and by gravity of thought and feeling. They exhibit, however, a certain narrowness of range and restricted sympathies; while the verses of Story are the recreations of a busy man, versatile and unequal, much more varied in style and subject than those of Parsons, with the animation and interest which come of various relations and pursuits.
In fiction, beyond the pleasant stories of Miss Sedgwick and Mrs. Child, and the Eastern tales of William Ware, little had been done which retains a place in New England literature until the publication, in 1843, of Sylvester Judd's remarkable story of Margaret, - a production in its main features so genuine that to the present day it holds the place which Mr. Lowell assigned to it a few years after its first appearance, as "the most emphatically American book ever written." Nobody has ever caught more exactly the spirit, at once grim and humorous, of New England country life, before its hardships were mitigated by a measure of material prosperity and by emancipation from priestly rule and the superstitions which accompanied it. Nobody has ever more lovingly observed or more accurately described the natural aspect of the New England summer and winter, and its influence on the character and temperament of the inhabitants. The book is often crude, extrava- gant, repelling; but its charm is neither to be denied nor resisted.
Three years after the publication of Margaret, a yet more remarkable story appeared. The name of Nathaniel Hawthorne had been slowly grow-
hatte . Hawthorne ing familiar to a limited circle of readers through the Twice Told Tales, of which a portion had been collected and published in 1837, and a second series in 1842; but which, keenly appreciated by a few, had left the author, as he has himself remarked, "the obscurest man of letters in America." " These stories were published in magazines and annuals, extending over a period of ten or twelve years, and comprising the whole of the writer's
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THE PRESS, ETC., OF THE LAST HUNDRED YEARS.
young manhood, without making (so far as he has ever been aware) the slightest impression on the public."
With the appearance of The Scarlet Letter, in 1846, Mr. Hawthorne found himself promptly raised to as much conspicuousness as the most exacting author could desire. Criticism was silenced. Here was a book as faithful to a single phase of the New England character as Judd's had been, but informed with an imagination and creative power quite new in American literature. With a subject as sombre and revolting as any in the whole range of modern fiction, with a succession of incidents and experiences scarcely relieved by so much as a gleam of human joy or mental health, this story, like all which followed it from the same hand, but more strongly than any other, impresses the reader with a certain uneasy sense of a preter- natural influence about him, yet an influence from which he is by no means anxious to escape. The author seems to have fixed on the dark ages of New England history a gaze so intense, an attention so profound and searching, as to have pierced the veil of the past, and to have seen " the very age and body of the time." This makes the commanding power of the book; its charm lies in the air of poetry and mystery with which the characters of the story are invested, and in the incomparable beauty of the style. Here, one would say, are all the essential elements of true poetry, - creative imagina- tion, the poetic atmosphere, and exquisiteness of expression. These qualities, it is no exaggeration to say, exist in a more eminent degree in the works of Hawthorne than in any American poetry either before or since his time.
The works which followed The Scarlet Letter, - The House of the Seven Gables ; The Blithedale Romance ; The Marble Faun ; Septimius Fel- ton,-are all, with the exception, perhaps, of the second, more agreeable, since in them the dismal and morbid psychology, which in all is the most salient characteristic, is relieved at intervals by the sweetest and purest human sunshine.
In The Marble Fann Mr. Hawthorne made, for the first time, a wide de- parture from the field in which he had worked so long and brilliantly, only to return to it again in The Dolliver Romance, his last work, of which but a few chapters had been finished at the time of his death. Those few chap- ters were, however, enough to show the powers of the writer at their high- est, with an added grace and tenderness which was full of the most alluring promisc.
In 1850 and the following year, Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe (known to the public only through a little series of tales published a year or two before. called The Mayflower, or Sketches of the Pilgrims ) contributed to the National Era, a weekly Antislavery newspaper in Washington, a serial story with the title of Uncle Tom's Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly. The circulation of the newspaper was limited, and the story was brought to the attention of few be- yond the usual readers. When the serial was completed, its author proposed publishing it in a volume, but found much difficulty in getting any publisher to accept it. Its publication was at length undertaken by Messrs. John P.
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THE MEMORIAL HISTORY OF BOSTON.
Jewett & Co., of Boston, and the book appeared in 1852. Its instant and extraordinary popularity must always remain one of the most remarkable among the curiosities of literature. It has been stated that more than two hundred thousand copies of the Boston edition were sold within a year from its first appearance. Its reception in England was much more astonishing. " The sale of Uncle Tom's Cabin," says the Edinburgh Review, in 1855, " is the most marvellous literary phenomenon that the world has ever witnessed. . . . The first London edition was published in May, 1852, and was not large. But in the following September the London publishers furnished to one house ten thousand copies per day for about four weeks, and had to em- ploy a thousand persons in preparing copies to supply the general demand. We cannot follow it beyond 1852; but it is probable that by the end of that year more than a million copies were sold in England." The un- doubted cleverness of this book; its variety, vivacity, and fulness of in- cident; its broad and striking contrasts, of exuberant fun with the most genuine and moving pathos; its picturesque description ; its vivid charac- terizations,-are still not enough to account for such an unprecedented success. We may, perhaps, explain its popularity in the United States by remembering that the book fell upon a time when the people North and South were intensely excited upon the portentous question of slavery, then getting visibly hotter and more dangerous year by year. This book rep- resents every form of opposition to slavery, - argument, wit, ridicule, pathos, satire, and the bullet, - and appeals with force and enthusiasm to every phase and every degree of Antislavery sentiment and opinion. And it was, strange to say, with the exception of Hildreth's White Slave, the first book which had attempted such a thing. For its enormous circulation abroad, its translation into every language of Europe,1 its dramatization in twenty different forms, and its representation in the theatres of every Euro- pean capital, it is less easy to account, further than as an illustration of the solidarity of the race, in virtue of which whatever stirs profoundly one portion of mankind becomes forthwith matter of interest to all the rest.
It would have been strange if such an achievement had not stimulated the author to new enterprises. In 1856 Mrs. Stowe published Dred, a Tale AB Stowe of the Great Dismal Swamp. This was, like its great predecessor, a story of slave-life, but the moral purpose of the book as an Antislavery tract was more constantly and directly enforced, and with less relief in the way of incident and variety of character. All the prestige of the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin was insufficient to procure for Dred more than a moderate and ordinary circulation. This was the last of Mrs. Stowe's Antislavery novels. She continued to write with persevering industry, but her stories were no longer stories of slavery, and were widely various in sub- ject. The Minister's Wooing, The Pearl of Orr's Island, Agnes of Sorrento, Pink and White Tyranny, were successively printed, in part as serial stories
1 [See note to Dr. Clarke's chapter in this volume. - ED.]
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THE PRESS, ETC., OF THE LAST HUNDRED YEARS.
in the Atlantic Monthly, and afterward in book form, but without any unusual degree of favor.
Of miscellaneous works, conprising biography, travels, essays, etc., the production during the period with which we are at present concerned was, in the absence of the stimulus afforded by a prosperous and well conducted magazine, somewhat limited. Mr. R. H. Dana, Jr.'s Two Years Before the Mast, Mich 4. Dane for which first appeared in 1840, was one of the first books of travel and adventure to be published in this unadventurous community, as it has remained one of the best. Mr. Hillard's Six Months in Italy, a graceful, scholarly, and apprecia- G.S Aillard tive account of the most familiar portions of that much described country, was published in 1853; and Mr. Charles Eliot Norton's Notes of Travel and Study in Italy, in 1860. The latter was less the work of a tourist than Mr. Hillard's work, and more the work of a stu- dent in the by-ways of Italian art and literature, and the social and ecclesi- astical history of the Italian cities. Perhaps the first contribution to the literature of Fine Art was the publication in 1850, under the editorship of R. H. Dana, Jr., of Washington Allston's Lectures on Art. These lec- tures were never read in public, and they formed but a portion of a course which was intended to cover the whole field of the theory and practice of painting.
The last literary division of the century, dating from the establishment of the Atlantic Monthly, has been vastly more prolific than any of the pre- ceding divisions ; too prolific, indeed, to permit so much as an enumeration here of all the writers who have sprung up and flourished. As in the second period the North American Review furnished the stimulus and the oppor- tunity for the young writers of that early day, so forty years later the Atlantic gathered into its more varied pages the work, less formal for the most part, but more spirited and confident, of the newer generation. The new maga- zine was established in 1857; the first number appeared .in November of that year.1 It took at once a leading position among the literary periodicals of the country, and has steadily maintained that position. It had from the first not only the firm and judicious management of able and accomplished editors, but the cordial support of the best writers in the country on the one hand and of a large and appreciative body of readers on the other. The philosophy of Emerson; the poetry of Longfellow, Lowell, Whittier, and
1 It was published by Messrs. Phillips and azine passed into the hands of Messrs. Ticknor Sampson, under the editorship of James Russell & Fields. This firm, under successive styles, continued to issue it till the close of 1873. Professor Lowell was succeeded by Mr. Fields, with whom at a later day was associated Mr. W. D. Howells, who in his turn became editor- in-chief in 1874," and in 1881 he in turn was suc- ceeded by Mr. Thomas B. Aldrich. Lowell. " Four volumes," says Mr. Scudder, in his preface to the index of the first twenty volumes, " covering two years and two months, were issued by this firm, when the deaths succes- sively of Mr. Phillips and Mr. Sampson were fol- lowed by a dissolution of the firm, and the mag-
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THE MEMORIAL HISTORY OF BOSTON.
Bryant; the science of Agassiz ; the criticism of Weiss and Whipple, -were at its service from the beginning. Dr. Holmes, whose youthful contribu- tions to the New England Magasine twenty years before were dimly remem- bered by the older readers, revived in the very first number of the Atlantic the series of papers then begun under the title of The Autoerat of the Break- fast Table, but revived then with the sobered wit and matured wisdom of middle age. For the first two years these delightful papers, continued under the title of The Professor at the Breakfast Table, and touching one after another, with wit, satire, pathos or grave reflection, every passing folly and every serious interest of the day, were to the Atlantic what the recreations of Christopher North were to Blackwood. Imbedded in them are many of the most admirable of the serious poems of Dr. Holmes, as well as many of the most amusing. They were followed by The Professor's Story, published later under the title of Elsie Venner ; and this again by The Guardian Angel,- stories in which the interest which comes from picturesque situations and stirring incidents is by no means wanting, but in which the peculiar attrac- Edward 6 Hale 1 tion lies in a certain curious analysis of abnormal and he- reditary twists of character and disposition, which show the hand of the Professor, to whom all this pleasant story- telling is but an avocation. Dr. Holmes's contributions also included single papers on a great variety of topics, - social, scientific, biograph- ical, - all marked by the same bright alertness, wit, and good sense.
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