he was content to seek the meaning of life amid New York slums and dingy suburban country, in the crossing of the Brooklyn ferry, or in the hospitals of the Civil War. His lifelong eagerness to find in life the stuff of which poetry is made has brought him, after all, the reward he would most have cared for. In one aspect he is thoroughly American. The spirit of his work is that of world-old anarchy; his style has all the perverse oddity of paralytic decadence; but the substance of which his poems are made their imagery as distinguished from their form or their spirit comes wholly from his native country. In this aspect, then, though probably in no other, he may, after all, throw light on the future of literature in America. III LATER NEW ENGLAND REFERENCES WORKS: Dr. Hale's works have been collected in a uniform edition, 10 vols., Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1898-1901. Colonel Higginson's works are similarly collected in 7 vols., Boston: Houghton, 1900. Bishop Brooks's works are published by E. P. Dutton & Co.; Emily Dickinson's and Miss Alcott's, by Roberts Brothers; Miss Jewett's, Celia Thaxter's, Sill's, Aldrich's, Fiske's, and Winsor's, by Houghton, Mifflin & Co.; Mary Wilkins's, by the Harpers. BIOGRAPHY, CRITICISM, and BIBLIOGRAPHY: For biographies, see the dictionaries of American biography; for criticism, the reviews and magazine articles indicated in Poole's Index; for lists of titles, with dates, see Foley or Whitcomb. SELECTIONS: Stedman and Hutchinson (see index in Vol. XI). BEFORE passing on to those parts of America to which we have not yet turned-the South and the West-we must glance at what has occurred in New England since its Renaissance. There is no better way of beginning than to recall the men who were living at Boston in 1857, the year with which our consideration of modern New York began. Everett, Ticknor, Prescott, Motley, Parkman, Emerson, Whittier, Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes, and Hawthorne were all alive, and many of them at the height of their powers. We need go no farther. Try to name the men of letters living in Boston to-day whose reputation is surely more than local, and you will discover at once that the present is a period of decline. The Decline of Its External Though this decline cannot yet be thoroughly accounted for, two or three facts about it are obvious. For one thing, as we have already seen, the intellectual Renaissance of New England coincided with its period of commercial prosperity, which began with foreign commerce, and soon passed into local manufactures and local railways. During the first half of the nineteenth century Boston was probably the most prosperous city in America. Throughout this period, however, the prosperity of Boston never crystallized in what nowadays would be considered large fortunes. The great West, meanwhile, was untamed prairie and wilderness. The intellectual leadership of Boston may roughly be said to have lasted until the Civil War. That great national convulsion affected the Northern States somewhat as an electric current affects temporarily separate chemicals; it flashed the Union into new cohesion. The wildest imagination of 1860 could hardly have conceived such centralized national power as in 1900 had become commonplace to American thought. One price which every separate region must pay for such national union is a decline of local importance. Again, a few years after the Civil War the Pacific Railway was at last completed. Long before this our foreign commerce had disappeared. The opening of the continental transportation lines naturally stimulated that already great development of wheat-growing and the like which now makes our Western prairies perhaps the chief grain-producing region of the world. Coal, and oil, too, and copper, and iron began to sprout like weeds. The centre of economic importance in America inevitably shifted westward. Meantime, New England had lost that mercantile marine which might conceivably have maintained its importance in international trade. Again still, the immense development of Western wealth since 1860 has resulted in enormous private fortunes. Though the fortunes of wealthy New Englanders have undoubtedly increased, they have not increased in like proportion with the fortunes of the West. Such a state of economic fact could not fail, at least for a while, to bring about a marked change in American ideals. The immigrant clergy of New England held such local power as involves personal eminence; such power later passed into the hands of the bar; and during the Renaissance of New England, literature itself had influence enough to make personal eminence its most stimulating prize. To-day, for better or worse, power and eminence throughout America have momentarily become questions rather of enterprising wealth. Cause. These external causes would perhaps have brought to An Internal an end the leadership of New England; but we can see now as well that in the form which its Renaissance took, there was something which could not last long. As we look back on that period now, its most characteristic phase appears to have been that which began with Unitarianism, passed into Transcendentalism, and broke out into militant reform. These movements were all based on the fundamental conception that human beings are inherently good. This naturally involved the right of every individual to think and to act as he chose. Free exercise of this right for a while seemed to uphold the buoyant philosophy which asserted it. So long as human beings were controlled by the discipline of tradition, their vagaries were not so wild as to seem disintegrating. As the years went Mrs. Howe on, however, this tendency inevitably led to excessive individualism. So in recent times the writers of New England have tended to seem rather solitary individuals than contemporary members of a friendly or contentious school of letters. Among them, or rather apart from the rest, in the ripeness of an age which has come so gently that it hardly seems age at all, are three who in years belong to the older period. Mrs. JULIA WARD HOWE (1819-), though born and educated in New York, has lived in Boston ever since her marriage in 1843 to Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, whose work in alleviating the misfortunes of the blind accomplished so much as almost to obscure his equally enthusiastic work in the cause of liberty-first in Greece, later in the antislavery movement of New England. Mrs. Howe shared in the philanthropic impulses of her husband; she has been a constant and eager supporter of various reforms; and is now among the principal advocates of suffrage for women. A public speaker of aptitude and skill, she has published less than she has uttered; but her "Battle Hymn of the Republic," begin ning with that thrilling line, "Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord," seems the supreme expression of the devoted spirit which animated the best antislavery enthusiasm. For along with its fervid sincerity and its noble simplicity-traits which might be paralleled in Whittier-it has that indefinable power of appeal to popular feeling which has made its opening words part of the idiom of our nation. Besides |
