extreme, but he had not arrived at it by revolutionary means; without storm or stress, with characteristic peacefulness, he came to the great denials, and without much concerning himself with them turned to his own affirmations of spiritual reality, methods of life and personal results. Serenity was his peculiar trait; amid all the agitation about him he was entirely unmoved, lived calmly and wrote with placid power, concentrating into the slowly:wrought sentences of his Essays (1841–1875) the spiritual essence and moral metal of a life lived to God, to himself and to his fellow-men. He, more than any other single writer, reunited American thought with the philosophy of the world; more than all others, he opened the ways of liberalism, wherever they may lead. He was an emancipator of the mind. In his Poems (1847–1867), though the abstract and the concrete often find themselves awkward mates, his philosophic ideas are put forth under forms of imagination and his personal life is expressed with nobility; his poetic originality, though so different in kind, is as unique as Poe’s, and reaches a height of imaginative faculty not elsewhere found in American verse. His poetry belongs more peculiarly to universal art, so pure in general is its philosophic content and so free from any temporal trait is the style; but it is as distinguished for the laconic expression of American ideas, minted with one blow, as his prose is for the constant breathing of the American spirit. It is the less possible to define the American traits in Emerson, because they constituted the man. He was as purely an American type as Lincoln. The grain of the man is in his work also; and the best that his prose and verse contain is his personal force. In him alone is genius felt as power; in the others it impresses one primarily as culture, modes of artistic faculty, phases of temperament. In this, too, he brings to mind Jonathan Edwards, the other climax of the religious spirit in New England; in Edwards it was intellectual power, in Emerson it was moral power; in both it was indigenous, power springing from what was most profound in the historic life of the community.
Three other names, John Greenleaf Whittier (1807–1892), Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–1894), James Russell Lowell (1819–1891), complete the group of the greater writers of New England. Holmes was a more local figure, by his humour and wit and his mental acuteness a Yankee Whittier: Holmes: Lowell.and having the flavour of race, but neither in his verse nor his novels reaching a high degree of excellence and best known by The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858), which is the Yankee prose classic. His contemporary reputation was largely social and owed much to the length of his life, but his actual hold on literature already seems slight and his work of little permanent value. Whittier stands somewhat apart as the poet of the soil and also because of his Quakerism; he was first eminent as the poet of the anti-slavery movement, to which he contributed much stirring verse, and later secured a broader fame by Snowbound (1866) and his religious poems of simple piety, welcome to every faith; he was also a balladist of local legends. In general he is the voice of the plain people without the medium of academic culture, and his verse though of low flight is near to their life and faith. Lowell first won distinction by The Biglow Papers (1848), which with the second series (1886) is the Yankee classic in verse, and is second only to his patriotic odes in maintaining his poetic reputation; his other verse, variously romantic in theme and feeling, and latterly more kindred to English classic style, shows little originality and was never popularly received; it is rather the fruit of great talent working in close literary sympathy with other poets whom from time to time he valued. His prose consists in the main of literary studies in criticism, a field in which he held the first rank. Together with Holmes and Whittier he gives greater body, diversity and illustration to the literature of New England; but in the work of none of these is there the initiative or the presence of single genius that characterize Emerson, Hawthorne and Longfellow. Lowell was a scholar with academic ties, a patriot above party, master of prose and verse highly developed and finished, and at times of a lofty strain owing to his moral enthusiasm; Whittier was a Quaker priest, vigorous in a great cause of humanity, with fluent power to express in poetry the life of the farm, the roadside and the legends that were like folklore in the memory of the settlement; Holmes was a town wit and master of occasional verse, with notes here and there of a higher strain in single rare poems.
The secondary literature that accompanied the work of these writers was abundant. It was largely the product of Transcendentalism and much of it gathered about Emerson. In The Dial (1840) the organ of Transcendentalism, he introduced to the public his young friend, Henry David Thoreau Transcen-dentalism.(1817–1862), author of Walden (1854) and the father of the nature-writers, who as a hermit-type has had some European vogue and shows an increasing hold as an exception among men, but whose work has little literary distinction; and together with him, his companion, William Ellery Channing (1818–1901), a poet who has significance only in the transcendentalist group. With them should be named Emerson’s coeval, Amos Bronson Alcott (1799–1888), the patriarch of the so-called Concord philosophers, better esteemed for his powers of monologue than as a writer in either prose or verse. Emerson’s associate-editor in The Dial was Sarah Margaret Fuller, afterwards Marchioness d’Ossoli (1810–1850), a woman of extraordinary qualities and much usefulness, who is best remembered by her Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1844), but contributed no permanent work to literature. She was a leading figure at Brook Farm, the socialistic community founded by members of the group, and especially by Ripley, who like her afterwards emigrated to New York and together with her began a distinguished critical career in connexion with The New York Tribune. Transcendentalism produced also its peculiar poet in Jones Very (1813–1881), whose Poems (1839) have original quality though slight merit, and its novelist in Sylvester Judd (1813–1853), whose Margaret (1845) is a unique work in American fiction. Other transcendentalist poets were Christopher Pearse Cranch (1813–1892), and Charles Timothy Brooks (1813–1883), who translated Faust (1856), besides a score of minor names. Outside of this group Thomas William Parsons (1819–1892), who translated Dante’s Inferno (1843), was a poet of greater distinction, but his product was slight. The prose of the movement, though abundant, yielded nothing that is remembered.
The literary life of Boston was, however, by no means confined within this circle of thought. It was most distinguished in the field of history, where indeed the writers rivalled the imaginative authors in public fame. They were, besides George Bancroft already mentioned, John Gorham Palfrey History.(1796–1881), author of The History of New England (1858), William Hickling Prescott (1796–1859), whose field was Spanish and Spanish-American history, John Lothrop Motley (1814–1877), whose attention was given to Dutch history, and Jared Sparks (1789–1866), whose work lay in biography. In the writings of Prescott and Motley the romanticism of the period is clearly felt, and they attained the highest distinction in the literary school of history of the period. Oratory also flourished in Daniel Webster (1782–1852), Edward Everett (1794–1865), Rufus Choate (1799–1859), Wendell Phillips (1811–1884), Charles Sumner (1811–1874), and Robert Charles WinthropOratory. (1809–1894), the last survivor of a long line of fiery or classic oratory in which New England was especially distinguished and had rivalry only from Henry Clay (1777–1852) of Virginia, and John Caldwell Calhoun (1782–1850) of South Carolina. The church also produced two powerful speakers in Theodore Parker (1810–1860), the protagonist of the liberals in Boston, and Henry Ward Beecher (1813–1887), who sustained a liberal form of New England congregationalism in Brooklyn, New York, where he made Plymouth Church a national pulpit. The single memorable novel of the period was Mrs Harriet Beecher Stowe’s (1811–1896) Fiction.Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), which had a world-wide vogue; it is the chief contribution of the anti-slavery movement to American literature and stands for plantation life in the old south. Another female writer, Mrs Lydia Maria Child (1802–1880), remembered by her Philothea (1836), deserves mention in the line of notable American women who served their generation in literary ways and by devotion to public causes. Criticism was served excellently by Edwin Percy Whipple (1819–1885),
