Read Ebook: Initial Studies in American Letters by Beers Henry A Henry Augustin

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 453 lines and 100390 words, and 10 pages

"If my bark sink 'tis to another sea,"

has taken a permanent place in the literature of transcendentalism.

The greatest literature is that which is most broadly human, or, in other words, that which will square best with all philosophies. But Emerson's genius was interpretative rather than constructive. The poet dwells in the cheerful world of phenomena. He is most the poet who realizes most intensely the good and the bad of human life. But Idealism makes experience shadowy and subordinates action to contemplation. To it the cities of men, with their "frivolous populations,"

"are but sailing foam-bells Along thought's causing stream."

"They reckon ill who leave me out; When me they fly I am the wings: I am the doubter find the doubt, And I the hymn the Brahmin sings."

"So nigh is grandeur to our dust, So near is God to man, When Duty whispers low, 'Thou must,' The youth replies, 'I can.'"

"The hand that rounded Peter's dome, And groined the aisles of Christian Rome, Wrought in a sad sincerity. Himself from God he could not free; He builded better than he knew; The conscious stone to beauty grew."

"live all alone Close to the bone, And where life is sweet Constantly eat."

He had a passion for the wild, and seems like an Anglo-Saxon reversion to the type of the Red Indian. The most distinctive note in Thoreau is his inhumanity. Emerson spoke of him as a "perfect piece of stoicism." "Man," said Thoreau, "is only the point on which I stand." He strove to realize the objective life of nature--nature in its aloofness from man; to identify himself, with the moose and the mountain. He listened, with his ear close to the ground, for the voice of the earth. "What are the trees saying?" he exclaimed. Following upon the trail of the lumberman, he asked the primeval wilderness for its secret, and

"saw beneath dim aisles, in odorous beds, The slight linnaea hang its twin-born heads."

He tried to interpret the thought of Ktaadn and to fathom the meaning of the billows on the back of Cape Cod, in their indifference to the shipwrecked bodies that they rolled ashore. "After sitting in my chamber many days, reading the poets, I have been out early on a foggy morning and heard the cry of an owl in a neighboring wood as from a nature behind the common, unexplored by science or by literature. None of the feathered race has yet realized my youthful conceptions of the woodland depths. I had seen the red election-birds brought from their recesses on my comrade's string, and fancied that their plumage would assume stranger and more dazzling colors, like the tints of evening, in proportion as I advanced farther into the darkness and solitude of the forest. Still less have I seen such strong and wild tints on any poet's string."

"Thy summer voice, Musketaquit, Repeats the music of the rain, But sweeter rivers pulsing flit Through thee as thou through Concord plain.

"Thou in thy narrow banks art pent; The stream I love unbounded goes; Through flood and sea and firmament, Through light, through life, it forward flows.

"I see the inundation sweet, I hear the spending of the stream, Through years, through men, through nature fleet, Through passion, thought, through power and dream."

"I am its stony shore, And the breeze that passes o'er."

"Suddenly old Time winked at me--ah, you know me, you rogue--and news had come that IT was well. That ancient universe is in such capital health, I think, undoubtedly, it will never die. . . . I see, smell, taste, hear, feel that ever-lasting something to which we are allied, at once our maker, our abode, our destiny, our very selves." It was something ulterior that Thoreau sought in nature. "The other world," he wrote, "is all my art: my pencils will draw no other; my jack-knife will cut nothing else." Thoreau did not scorn, however, like Emerson, to "examine too microscopically the universal tablet." He was a close observer and accurate reporter of the ways of birds and plants and the minuter aspects of nature. He has had many followers, who have produced much pleasant literature on out-door life. But in none of them is there that unique combination of the poet, the naturalist, and the mystic which gives his page its wild original flavor. He had the woodcraft of a hunter and the eye of a botanist, but his imagination did not stop short with the fact. The sound of a tree falling in the Maine woods was to him "as though a door had shut somewhere in the damp and shaggy wilderness." He saw small things in cosmic relations. His trip down the tame Concord has for the reader the excitement of a voyage of exploration into far and unknown regions. The river just above Sherman's Bridge, in time of flood "when the wind blows freshly on a raw March day, heaving up the surface into dark and sober billows," was like Lake Huron, "and you may run aground on Cranberry Island," and "get as good a freezing there as anywhere on the North-west coast." He said that most of the phenomena described in Kane's voyages could be observed in Concord.

The literature of transcendentalism was like the light of the stars in a winter night, keen and cold and high. It had the pale cast of thought, and was almost too spiritual and remote to "hit the sense of mortal sight." But it was at least indigenous. If not an American literature--not national and not inclusive of all sides of American life--it was, at all events, a genuine New England literature and true to the spirit of its section. The tough Puritan stock had at last put forth a blossom which compared with the warm, robust growths of English soil even as the delicate wind flower of the northern spring compares with the cowslips and daisies of old England.

Hawthorne was no transcendentalist. He dwelt much in a world of ideas, and he sometimes doubted whether the tree on the bank or its image in the stream were the more real. But this had little in common with the philosophical idealism of his neighbors. He reverenced Emerson, and he held kindly intercourse--albeit a silent man and easily bored--with Thoreau and Ellery Channing, and even with Margaret Fuller. But his sharp eyes saw whatever was whimsical or weak in the apostles of the new faith. He had little enthusiasm for causes or reforms, and among so many Abolitionists he remained a Democrat, and even wrote a campaign life of his friend Pierce.

The village of Concord has perhaps done more for American literature than the city of New York. Certainly there are few places where associations, both patriotic and poetic, cluster so thickly. At one side of the grounds of the Old Manse--which has the river at its back--runs down a shaded lane to the Concord monument and the figure of the Minute Man and the successor of "the rude bridge that arched the flood." Scarce two miles away, among the woods, is little Walden--"God's drop." The men who made Concord famous are asleep in Sleepy Hollow, yet still their memory prevails to draw seekers after truth to the Concord Summer School of Philosophy, which met annually, a few years since, to reason high of "God, Freedom, and Immortality," next door to the "Wayside," and under the hill on whose ridge Hawthorne wore a path as he paced up and down beneath the hemlocks.

The Indian name of Concord River.

THE CAMBRIDGE SCHOLARS.

"Tales that have the rime of age And chronicles of eld."

The golden light of romance is shed upon his page, and it is his habit to borrow mediaeval and Catholic imagery from his favorite Middle Ages, even when writing of American subjects. To him the clouds are hooded friars, that "tell their beads in drops of rain;" the midnight winds blowing through woods and mountain passes are chanting solemn masses for the repose of the dying year, and the strain ends with the prayer--

"Kyrie, eleyson, Christe, eleyson."

"Ay! Tear her tattered ensign down!"--

"The quaint trick to cram the pithy line That cracks so crisply over bubbling wine."

"feel the old convivial glow o'er me stealing, The warm, champagny, old-particular-brandy-punchy feeling."

"Who rides a beetle which he calls a 'sphinx.' And O what questions asked in club-foot rhyme Of Earth the tongueless, and the deaf-mute Time! Here babbling 'Insight' shouts in Nature's ears His last conundrum on the orbs and spheres; There Self-inspection sucks its little thumb, With 'Whence am I?' and 'Wherefore did I come?'"

"Learning condemns beyond the reach of hope The careless lips that speak of soap for soap. . . . Do put your accents in the proper spot: Don't, let me beg you, don't say 'How?' for 'What?' The things named 'pants' in certain documents, A word not made for gentlemen, but 'gents.'"

With the rest of "society" he was disposed to ridicule the abolition movement as a crotchet of the eccentric and the long-haired. But when the civil war broke out he lent his pen, his tongue, and his own flesh and blood to the cause of the Union. The individuality of Holmes's writings comes in part from their local and provincial bias. He has been the laureate of Harvard College and the bard of Boston city, an urban poet, with a cockneyish fondness for old Boston ways and things--the Common and the Frog Pond, Faneuil Hall and King's Chapel and the Old South, Bunker Hill, Long Wharf, the Tea Party, and the town crier. It was Holmes who invented the playful saying that "Boston Statehouse is the hub of the solar system."

"Ez for war, I call it murder-- There you hev it plain an' flat; I don't want to go no furder Than my Testyment for that; God hez said so plump an' fairly, It's as long as it is broad, An' you've gut to git up airly Ef you want to take in God."

The second number was a versified paraphrase of a letter received from Mr. Birdofredom Sawin, "a yung feller of our town that was cussed fool enuff to goe atrottin inter Miss Chiff arter a dram and fife," and who finds when he gets to Mexico that

"This kind o' sogerin' aint a mite like our October trainin'."

"They are slaves who dare not be In the right with two or three,"

and the passage beginning

"Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne,"

"And what is so rare as a day in June? Then if ever come perfect days,"

"Wut's words to them whose faith an' truth On war's red techstone rang true metal, Who ventered life an' love an' youth For the gret prize o' death in battle? To him who, deadly hurt, agen Flashed on afore the charge's thunder, Tippin' with fire the bolt of men That rived the rebel line asunder?"

"Ihr naht euch wieder, schwankende Gestalten;"

"Come transfigured back, Secure from change in their high-hearted ways, Beautiful evermore and with the rays Of morn on their white Shields of Expectation."

"Spume-sliding down the baffled decuman."

It must be acknowledged that his style lacks the crowning grace of simplicity, but it is precisely by reason of its allusive quality that scholarly readers take pleasure in it. They like a diction that has stuff in it and is woven thick, and where a thing is said in such a way as to recall many other things.

LITERATURE IN THE CITIES.

In the same way William Cullen Bryant , the earliest American poet of importance, whose impulses drew him to the solitudes of nature, was compelled to gain a livelihood, by conducting a daily newspaper; or, as he himself puts it, was

"Forced to drudge for the dregs of men, And scrawl strange words with the barbarous pen."

"And thou dost see them rise, Star of the pole! and thou dost see them set. Alone, in thy cold skies, Thou keep'st thy old, unmoving station yet, Nor join'st the dances of that glittering train, Nor dipp'st thy virgin orb in the blue western main."

"simply perfect from its own resource, As to the bee the new campanula's Illuminate seclusion swung in air."

"Whose part in all the pomp that fills The circuit of the summer hills Is--that his grave is green."

"Truth crushed to earth shall rise again; The eternal years of God are hers; But Error, wounded, writhes in pain, And dies among his worshipers."

"Still sits the school-house by the road, A ragged beggar sunning; Around it still the sumachs grow And blackberry vines are running.

"Within the master's desk is seen, Deep-scarred by raps official, The warping floor, the battered seats, The jack-knife's carved initial."

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet