and other, into which they found themselves plunged; and into this journalism the writers of prose were one and all lured, so that the history of the prose of New York is mostly the history of her Danas and Ripleys and Greeleys. These were able and even scholarly men, but their work passed, usually with the day's paper for which it was done. A little more enduring is the work of those who had the larger leisure of the weekly or monthly magazine. But the very best of the New York magazines, though they have contributed much to science, art, and general culture, have never represented quite the same high literary standard as the Atlantic Monthly. And among their editors and contributors there was no Lowell or Holmes, but only a Holland, a Curtis, and a Warner. Even these three, it must be noted, like Dana, Ripley, Greeley, and Bryant himself, were natives of New England and did much of their best literary work there.

Josiah Gilbert Holland, after trying both teaching and medicine, set out upon a literary career at Springfield, Massachusetts, where he joined the staff of the Springfield Republi

1819-1881.

can. He won his early fame there through his J. G. Holland, "Timothy Titcomb" Letters to Young People (collected in 1858)-wholesome social essays of the sermonizing type, very popular in their day, and always worth reading, though never quite demanding to be read. He followed up this popularity with an equally popular poem, BitterSweet (1858). The poem contained some pleasant pictures of New England life-a Thanksgiving festival and the like that anticipated the finer work of Whittier's Snow-Bound, but it won its vogue, like the later Kathrina (1867), chiefly by its sentimental and rather melodramatic story. Dr. Holland was the author, too, of some little lyrics of a wide currency-Babyhood, for instance, and Gradatim ("Heaven is not reached at a single bound"). In 1870 at New York he assisted in establishing Scrib

ner's Monthly, now The Century, and he was the efficient editor of that magazine until his death. He had written a Life of Lincoln in 1865; and in the latter portion of his career he essayed virtually the only form of literary composition he had left untried and produced several novels. Arthur Bonnicastle (1873), Sevenoaks (1875), etc., are good, readable stories of Yankee life, but they bear too clearly the stamp of the professional man of letters and cannot be ranked with the similar novels of Mrs. Stowe or Dr. Holmes.

1824-1892.

If Holland in some ways suggests Whittier and Holmes, George William Curtis suggests quite as readily Lowell. Curtis was not a poet, but he was a foremost representative of that class of industrious literary journalists who G. W. Curtis, combine private study with public service and who have done so much to mould the character of our later national life. He was a native of Providence, Rhode Island, and was a student at Brook Farm at eighteen. A journey through Europe, Egypt, and the Holy Land, resulted in several highly colored volumes of travel-the Nile Notes of a Howadji (1851), etc. His life thereafter was spent in journalism at New York. He conducted for a long time the "Easy Chair" of Harper's Magazine and was editor of Harper's Weekly at the time of his death. He was interested in all wise reforms,—took part in the abolition movement, and later attained national fame for his resolute support of the cause of civil service reform. As a platform orator, he rose almost to the rank of Everett and Phillips, and he stands to us to-day more for his character as a man and an influential public citizen than as a writer. Yet his name is associated with some well-remembered books. The literary flavor is most apparent in his early work-the volumes of travel noted above, certain essays of social satire, like The Potiphar Papers (1853), and the little sketch of Prue and I (1856), which, with

its delicate sentiment and slender romance, has charmed two generations of readers. His later works were more directly the result of his contact with public life and public men. His addresses include, besides those like Party and Patronage on civil service reform, eulogies on Bryant, Phillips, and Lowell.

Charles Dudley Warner remained more persistently in New England than Holland or Curtis, but his name was so long associated with the editorial department of Harper's Monthly

1829-1900.

Magazine that he seems to be legitimately of

C. D. Warner, the New York group. Born at Plainfield, Massachusetts, he went to Chicago before the war, practicing law there for a time, and then settled down to an editorial career at Hartford, Connecticut. He did much "hack work" of the better kind. "The American Men of Letters Series," to which he contributed the biography of Irving, was prepared under his supervision, as was also a "Library of the World's Best Literature." He wrote several novels, and several books of travel not unlike Curtis's-My Winter on the Nile (1876), etc. But his most characteristic work is to be sought in his collections of essays, such as My Summer in a Garden (1870) and Backlog Studies (1872). These have abundant humor and that undefinable charm of personality by which, with very little in the way of substance besides a mild social philosophy, some writers succeed in winning the affections of a large audience. Clean, gentle, and whole-souled, are the words to apply to Warner; and it seems eminently fitting that we should close this review of later New York prose with one who was, in his modest way, not unlike him with whom our study of the earlier prose began-Washington Irving.

The affiliations of Curtis and Warner, as of Hale and Higginson, were distinctly enough with the old school to justify the classification of them that is here made, but it is to be

noted that the date of Warner brings us fairly into the contemporary period. And it would be easy in this place to make the transition to that group of writers, led by Stedman, Aldrich, and Howells, who have maintained the literary traditions of the East since the Civil War. But one considerable figure remains; and it is through Walt Whitman after all, perhaps, that the transition to our later literature in its broadest and most characteristic aspects can best be made.

A Unique
Character.

WALT WHITMAN, 1819-1892

It has been customary to regard Walt Whitman, the startling innovator and scorner of traditions, as belonging to the younger school of American writers, and any departure from that custom is not likely to pass unchallenged. Without troubling ourselves about his relation to culture, which, whatever Mr. Burroughs* may contend, is not very obvious, we may yet feel that he is, in manifold ways, sufficiently representative of the American national spirit to give him a place in this chapter. It is true, the uniqueness of the man puts him apart from the other writers, and would so put him wherever he were placed. He seems to defy classification. The public has not yet made up its mind whether he was a poet or a prose writer, a philosopher or an ignoramus, a genius or a charlatan. But his position is becoming each day more clearly defined; and the undeniable conspicuousness, not to say eminence, of that position, together with the nature of his message, which after all was not new but was only a more emphatic declaration of what was already in the prose of Emerson and the verse of Whittier and Lowell, gives ample warrant for putting him with the men of that elder period. Besides, there is a chronological warrant in the date of his birth, which is the same as that of Lowell's;

Whitman: A Study. By John Burroughs.

and though he was much later than Lowell in coming to as sured fame, his work was well begun before the war.

The School of Life.

mans.

The details of Whitman's life are of peculiar importance for the understanding of the man and his work. He was born May 31, 1819, at West Hills, thirty miles from New York city, on "the fish-shaped" Long Island, which he loved to call by its Indian name of "Paumanok." His ancestors were English and Dutch yeomen, with a slight Quaker strain; three centuries of them, he tells us, concentrate on one sterile acre, the burial hill of the WhitHis grandfather had farmed his lands after the manner of Southern planters, with the assistance of a dozen slaves. His father was a carpenter and builder. His mother"my dearest mother," "a perfect mother," was Louise Van "-was Velsor, in her youth a healthy Dutch-American lass and a horseback rider only less daring than his paternal grandmother who had smoked a pipe and acted as overseer of the slaves. His formal schooling, which was elementary only, was obtained rather irregularly. Many days of his youth he spent in roaming over Long Island, lounging with the fishermen on the beach, talking to the salt-hay cutters in the meadows or the herdsmen in the hills, clam-digging in summer, hauling fat eels through the ice in winter. Later, when his father moved to Brooklyn, he often stole back to declaim Homer or Shakespeare to the sea-gulls and the surf. In Brooklyn he became a typesetter in a printing-office, reading between whiles the Arabian Nights and the Waverley Novelslater, too, Ossian, Eschylus, and Dante. He was particularly impressed with the busy tides of life surging between New York and Brooklyn, through the city streets and up and down the Sound. He had a passion for crowds, for haunting the ferries, the omnibuses, and the theatres. Thus he got to see most of the celebrated men and women of the time