Dickinson. But she lived to write a novel that set her name, with the multitude at least, in a higher place, and her fame will henceforth be most closely associated with that. After her removal to Colorado she became interested in the condition of the American Indians and their ill treatment by government agents, and in 1881 published a protest in their behalf (A Century of Dishonor), which led to her appointment as special examiner to the mission Indians of California. The final out

was the composition and publication of her novel, Ramona, in 1884. Ramona scarcely needs description, any more than Uncle Tom's Cabin. It was written in the same sincere philanthropic spirit, and although, like Mrs. Stowe's book, or Cooper's novels, it idealizes somewhat the objects of its defence, such idealization is surely pardonable. Artistically considered, it is one of the finest creations of our fiction—a romance so infused with tropic warmth and glow, and so permeated with human sympathy, that its pictures of Arcadian life in old California and the gentle figures of Ramona, Alessandro, and Father Salvierderra will not easily fade.

1850-1895.

The Middle West, in its entire expanse from the Ohio Valley to the Rocky Mountains, has been rather slower than the Pacific Slope to bring forth either poetry or prose, Eugene Field, and it still has little of worth to its credit. If any of its literature, besides the works of Mark Twain already mentioned, has a chance for such "immortality" as literature may attain to, one thinks it must be some of the children's poems of Eugene Field. Field, who was born at St. Louis, was, during his too short life, a hard-working journalist in various cities of the west from Denver to Chicago. He did his latest and best work at Chicago. He had a scholarly mind, which revealed itself in his most trifling hack work; and he made some delightful free translations and paraphrases of Horace (Echoes from the Sabine Farm, with R. M. Field,

1893). A true bibliophile, he wrote much upon the love of books. But the love of children called forth his best work, and his poems thus inspired, easily comparable to Stevenson's in their mingled quaintness, humor, and pathos, are scarcely second to any in the language. Little Boy Blue, Wynken, Blynken, and Nod, and half a dozen others, though barely ten years old, have already become classics.

Other writers of the Middle and Far West come readily to mind. There is James Whitcomb Riley, of Indiana, another typical rover and journalist, well-known for his dialect poems of humble life, and the author of child verse almost as popular though never so entirely unaffected as Field's. There is Edwin Markham, of Oregon and California, lately sprung into fame with his over-praised poem, The Man with the Hoe, but before that the author of many a genuine lyric unfretted with sense of social wrong. And to go back almost to an earlier generation there are, or were, John Hay, the Piatts, Richard Realf, and more. But here it is safest to pause. The anthologies will winnow out such productions of these as have any permanent significance. The later novelists remain, and in them, possibly, the hope of the coming literature of this section now lies; but none of them as yet call for special treatment and the mention of whatever promise they reveal will be reserved for another place.

CHAPTER X

POETRY AND CRITICISM IN THE EAST

The later literature of the north and middle Atlantic states stands forth in no such clear outlines as that of either the South or the West. In this eastern region, of course, the succession was never entirely broken, and it is not easy to separate later writers from earlier, especially since the later largely uphold familiar traditions, standing for the inherited ideals of dignity, scholarship, refinement, taste, and finish. But a difference in quality may be detected, possibly because the later writers have suffered from the very fact of having clung to their inheritance. The old veins were worked out and new were not found. The earlier writers, too, many of whom lived on into an active old age, overshadowing their natural successors, were natively superior in all points of genius. In the field of poetry in particular, the very best of the later writers have been the readiest to recognize the easy pre-eminence of the elder group; so that, feeling no insistent voice within and finding no encouraging demand from without, they have produced sparingly and are even disposed, as the years go by, to reduce the bulk of their acknowledged product. Another restraining factor which must doubtless be taken into account, is the gradual encroachment of the virile and picturesque literature of the South and the West, which the East itself has been prone to treat lightly, but which has often penetrated more readily into the centres of European culture than anything the conservative East has produced.

T. B. Aldrich, 1836

Thomas Bailey Aldrich was one of the first to publish of the eastern succession, and has been most steadfast in his devotion to the profession of his early choice. He was born in New Hampshire, passed a part of his youth in Louisiana, and, foregoing a college education, at the age of seventeen entered journalism at New York, where he won the friendship of Willis and became associated with Taylor, Stoddard, and Stedman. There, before he was twenty, he wrote the pathetic Ballad of Babie Bell, and also published his first volume of verse, The Bells (1854). A few years later he removed to Boston and became an integral part of the literary life of New England. Lowell, the first editor of the Atlantic Monthly, had welcomed his contributions to that magazine, and in 1881 Mr. Aldrich found himself in the editor's chair with Lowell as his contributor. He remained editor of the Atlantic for nine years, and his contributions to it number over a hundred. His poems have appeared in many successive volumes and editions.

Though Aldrich works with comparative ease in a variety of forms, from the sonnet to dramatic blank verse, he is at his best in lyrics of sentiment and fancy and the polished trifles that go to make up "society verse. One critic has ventured to say that he recalls the English Herrick. He has some characteristics in common with Longfellow. But Longfellow's simplicity is often replaced in Aldrich by a greater subtlety of thought and overlaid with a more elaborate art. His romantic fancy, too, has more of the far East in it than Longfellow's. Like Stoddard, he fell under the influence of Taylor's travelenriched fancy, and he affects strains that are blent with odors from the Orient." His Dressing the Bride and When the Sultan Goes to Ispahan are replete with color and all sensuous appeals. He is better known, however, by such simpler lyrics as Babie Bell, Before the Rain, and The Face Against the Pane.

Nor is it to be forgotten that Aldrich immensely widened his audience by those prose tales with which, in middle life, he began to vary the product of his pen, and which are marked by the same daintiness and artistic charm as his poetry, supplemented with a rare quality of humor. The Story of a Bad Boy (1870), Marjorie Daw (1873), and Two Bites at a Cherry (1893) are all well known. The first, largely drawn from memories of Portsmouth, the city of his birth, has become a classic "juvenile"; it was a forerunner of various books in a similar vein, notably Warner's Being a Boy and Howells's A Boy's Town. The second, Marjorie Daw, ranks among the very best short stories written by American authors.

Emily Dickinson, 1830-1886.

Classification and comparison, in the case of a poet like Emily Dickinson, avail nothing. She was modern; beyond that the chances of time and place do not signify; her life and her poetry were equally remote from the ways of others. Her years were passed in seclusion at Amherst, Massachusetts, where her father was treasurer of Amherst College. Her scanty verses, a kind of soul's diary, written with no thought of publication, became known to a few friends, and after much persuasion she allowed two or three to be published during her life-time. A volume was published only after her death, in 1890. The poems baffle description. They seldom have titles, and sometimes no more words than poets three centuries ago put into their titles, for she pours her words as a chemist his tinctures, fearful of a drop too much. Two stanzas, of four lines each, imperfectly rhymed, and with about four words to the line, are her favorite form. A fourteen-line sonnet is spacious by the side of such poems. Yet few sonnets have ever compressed so much within their bounds. To read one is to be given a pause that will outlast the reading of many sonnets; for they come with revelation, like a flash of lightning that illuminates a landscape