FOOTNOTES:

FOOTNOTES:[30]From Chapter I of "Walden, or Life in the Woods."[31]From Chapters I and II of "Walden."[32]From Chapter III of "Walden."[33]From Chapter IV of "Walden."[34]The English regicides who came to America, and after 1660 lived in concealment in New England, a part of the time in a cave near New Haven. William Goffe died in Hadley, Mass., in 1679. Edward Whalley, who had been one of Cromwell's major generals, died also in Hadley a year before Goffe.

[30]From Chapter I of "Walden, or Life in the Woods."

[31]From Chapters I and II of "Walden."

[32]From Chapter III of "Walden."

[33]From Chapter IV of "Walden."

[34]The English regicides who came to America, and after 1660 lived in concealment in New England, a part of the time in a cave near New Haven. William Goffe died in Hadley, Mass., in 1679. Edward Whalley, who had been one of Cromwell's major generals, died also in Hadley a year before Goffe.

Born in 1819, died in 1891; graduated from Harvard in 1838; in 1855 became professor at Harvard; editor ofThe Atlantic Monthlyin 1857-62,The North American Reviewin 1863-72; minister to Spain in 1877-80, and Great Britain in 1880-85; published "A Year's Life" in 1841, "The Vision of Sir Launfal" in 1845, "A Fable for Critics" in 1848, "The Biglow Papers" in 1848, and a second series in 1867, "Under the Willows" in 1868, "The Cathedral" in 1869; among his best-known prose works, "Conversations on Some of the Old Poets" published in 1845, "Fireside Travels" in 1864, "Among My Books" in 1870 and 1876, "My Study Windows" in 1871; his "Letters" edited by Charles Eliot Norton, published in 1893.

Poets are the forerunners and prophets of changes in the moral world. Driven by their fine nature to search into and reverently contemplate the universal laws of the soul, they find some fragment of the broken tables of God's law, and interpret it, half-conscious of its mighty import. While philosophers are wrangling, and politicians playing at snapdragon with, the destiniesof millions, the poet, in the silent deeps of his soul, listens to those mysterious pulses which, from one central heart, send life and beauty through the finest veins of the universe, and utters truths to be sneered at, perchance, by contemporaries, but which become religion to posterity. Not unwisely ordered is that eternal destiny which renders the seer despised of men, since thereby he is but the more surely taught to lay his head meekly upon the mother-breast of Nature, and harken to the musical soft beating of her bounteous heart.

That Poesy, save as she can soar nearer to the blissful throne of the Supreme Beauty, is of no more use than all other beautiful things are, we are fain to grant. That she does not add to the outward wealth of the body, and that she is only so much more excellent than any bodily gift as spirit is more excellent than matter, we must also yield. But, inasmuch as all beautiful things are direct messages and revelations of himself, given us by our Father, and as Poesy is the searcher out and interpreter of all these, tracing by her inborn sympathy the invisible nerves which bind them harmoniously together, she is to be revered and cherished. The poet has a fresher memory of Eden, and of the path leading back thereto, than other men; so that we might almost deem him to have been conceived, at least, if not borne and nursed, beneath the ambrosial shadow of those dimly remembered bowers, and to have had his infant ears filled with the divine converse of angels, who then talked face to face with his sires, as with beloved younger brethren, and of whose golden wordsonly the music remained to him, vibrating forever in his soul, and making him yearn to have all sounds of earth harmonize therewith. In the poet's lofty heart Truth hangs her aerie, and there Love flowers, scattering thence her winged seeds over all the earth with every wind of heaven. In all ages the poet's fiery words have goaded men to remember and regain their ancient freedom, and, when they had regained it, have tempered it with a love of beauty, so as that it should accord with the freedom of nature, and be as unmovably eternal as that. The dreams of poets are morning dreams, coming to them in the early dawn and daybreaking of great truths, and are surely fulfilled at last. They repeat them, as children do, and all Christendom, if it be not too busy with quarreling about the meaning of creeds, which have no meaning at all, listens with a shrug of the shoulders and a smile of pitying incredulity; for reformers are always madmen in their own age, and infallible saints in the next.

We love to go back to the writings of our old poets, for we find in them the tender germs of many a thought which now stands like a huge oak in the inward world, an ornament and a shelter. We can not help reading with awful interest what has been written or rudely scrawled upon the walls of this our earthly prison house, by former dwellers therein. From that which centuries have established, too, we may draw true principles of judgment for the poetry of our own day. A right knowledge and apprehension of the past teaches humbleness and self-sustainment to the present. Showing us what has been,it also reveals what can be done. Progress is Janus-faced, looking to the bygone as well as to the coming; and radicalism should not so much busy itself with lopping off the dead or seeming dead limbs, as with clearing away that poisonous rottenness around the roots, from which the tree has drawn the principle of death into its sap. A love of the beautiful and harmonious, which must be the guide and forerunner to every onward movement of humanity, is created and cherished more surely by pointing out what beauty dwells in anything, even the most deformed (for there is something in that also, else it could not even be), than by searching out and railing at all the foulnesses in nature.

Not till we have patiently studied beauty can we safely venture to look at defects, for not till then can we do it in that spirit of earnest love, which gives more than it takes away. Exultingly as we hail all signs of progress, we venerate the past also. The tendrils of the heart, like those of ivy, cling but the more closely to what they have clung to long, and even when that which they entwine crumbles beneath them, they still run greenly over the ruin, and beautify those defects which they can not hide. The past as well as the present, molds the future, and the features of some remote progenitor will revive again freshly in the latest offspring of the womb of time. Our earth hangs well-nigh silent now, amid the chorus of her sister orbs, and not till past and present move harmoniously together will music once more vibrate on this long silent chord in the symphony of the universe.

Dryden has now been in his grave nearly a hundred and seventy years; in the second class of English poets perhaps no one stands, on the whole, so high as he; during his lifetime, in spite of jealousy, detraction, unpopular politics, and a suspicious change of faith, his preeminence was conceded; he was the earliest complete type of the purely literary man, in the modern sense; there is a singular unanimity in allowing him a certain claim to greatness which would be denied to men as famous and more read—to Pope or Swift, for example; he is supposed, in some way or other, to have reformed English poetry. It is now about half a century since the only uniform edition of his works was edited by Scott. No library is complete without him, no name is more familiar than his, and yet it may be suspected that few writers are more thoroughly buried in that great cemetery of the "British Poets."

If contemporary reputation be often deceitful, posthumous fame may be generally trusted, for it is a verdict made up of the suffrages of the select men in succeeding generations. This verdict has been as good as unanimous in favor of Dryden. It is, perhaps, worth while to take a fresh observation of him, to consider him neitheras warning nor example, but to endeavor to make out what it is that has given so lofty and firm a position to one of the most unequal, inconsistent, and faulty writers that ever lived. He is a curious example of what we often remark of the living, but rarely of the dead—that they get credit for what they might be quite as much as for what they are—and posterity has applied to him one of his own rules of criticism, judging him by the best rather than the average of his achievement, a thing posterity is seldom wont to do. On the losing side in politics, it is true of his polemical writings as of Burke's—whom in many respects he resembles, and especially in that supreme quality of a reasoner, that his mind gathers not only heat, but clearness and expansion, by its own motion—that they have won his battle for him in the judgment of after times.

To us, looking back at him, he gradually becomes a singularly interesting and even picturesque figure. He is, in more senses than one, in language, in turn of thought, in style of mind, in the direction of his activity, the first of the moderns. He is the first literary man who was also a man of the world, as we understand the term. He succeeded Ben Jonson as the acknowledged dictator of wit and criticism, as Dr. Johnson, after nearly the same interval, succeeded him. All ages are, in some sense, ages of transition; but there are times when the transition is more marked, more rapid; and it is, perhaps, an ill fortune for a man of letters to arrive at maturity during such a period, still more to represent in himself the change that is going on,and to be an efficient cause in bringing it about. Unless, like Goethe, he is of a singularly uncontemporaneous nature, capable of beingtutta in se romita, and of running parallel with his time rather than being sucked into its current, he will be thwarted in that harmonious development of native force which has so much to do with its steady and successful application. Dryden suffered, no doubt, in this way. Tho in creed he seems to have drifted backward in an eddy of the general current; yet of the intellectual movement of the time, so far certainly as literature shared in it, he could say, with Æneas, not only that he saw, but that himself was a great part of it.

That movement was, on the whole, a downward one, from faith to scepticism, from enthusiasm to cynicism, from the imagination to the understanding. It was in a direction altogether away from those springs of imagination and faith at which they of the last age had slaked the thirst or renewed the vigor of their souls. Dryden himself recognized that indefinable and gregarious influence which we call nowadays the spirit of the age, when he said that "every age has a kind of universal genius." He had also a just notion of that in which he lived; for he remarks, incidentally, that "all knowing ages are naturally sceptic and not at all bigoted, which, if I am not much deceived, is the proper character of our own." It may be conceived that he was even painfully half-aware of having fallen upon a time incapable, not merely of a great poet, but perhaps of any poet at all; for nothing is so sensitive to the chill of a skeptical atmosphere as that enthusiasm which, if it be notgenius, is at least the beautiful illusion, that saves it from the baffling quibbles of self-consciousness. Thrice unhappy he who, born to see things as they might be, is schooled by circumstances to see them as people say they are—to read God in a prose translation. Such was Dryden's lot, and such, for a good part of his days, it was by his own choice. He who was of a stature to snatch the torch of life that flashes from lifted hand to hand along the generations, over the heads of inferior men, chose rather to be a link-boy to the stews....

But at whatever period of his life we look at Dryden, and whatever, for the moment, may have been his poetic creed, there was something in the nature of the man that would not be wholly subdued to what it worked in. There are continual glimpses of something in him greater than he, hints of possibilities finer than anything he has done. You feel that the whole of him was better than any random specimens, tho of his best, seem to prove.Incessu patet, he has by times the large stride of the elder race, tho it sinks too often into the slouch of a man who has seen better days. His grand air may, in part, spring from a habit of easy superiority to his competitors; but must also, in part, be ascribed to an innate dignity of character. That this preeminence should have been so generally admitted, during his life, can only be explained by a bottom of good sense, kindliness, and sound judgment, whose solid worth could afford that many a flurry of vanity, petulance, and even error should flit across the surface and be forgotten. Whatever else Dryden may have been,the last and abiding impression of him is that he was thoroughly manly; and while it may be disputed whether he was a great poet, it may be said of him, as Wordsworth said of Burke, "that he was by far the greatest man of his age, not only abounding in knowledge himself, but feeding, in various directions, his most able contemporaries."

Mr. Matthew Arnold seems to think that Shakespeare has damaged English poetry. I wish he had! It is true he lifted Dryden above himself in "All for Love"; but it was Dryden who said of him, by instinctive conviction rather than judgment, that within his magic circle none dared tread but he. Is he to blame for the extravagances of modern diction, which are but the reaction of the brazen age against the degeneracy of art into artifice, that has characterized the silver period in every literature? We see in them only the futile effort of misguided persons to torture out of language the secret of that inspiration which should be in themselves. We do not find the extravagances in Shakespeare himself. We never saw a line in any modernpoet that reminded us of him, and will venture to assert that it is only poets of the second class that find successful imitators. And the reason seems to us a very plain one. The genius of the great poet seeks repose in the expression of itself, and finds it at last in style, which is the establishment of a perfect mutual understanding between the worker and his material. The secondary intellect, on the other hand, seeks for excitement in expression, and stimulates itself into mannerism, which is the wilful obtrusion of self, as style is its unconscious abnegation. No poet of the first class has ever left a school, because his imagination is incommunicable; while, just as surely as the thermometer tells of the neighborhood of an iceberg, you may detect the presence of a genius of the second class in any generation by the influence of his mannerism, for that, being an artificial thing, is capable of reproduction. Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, left no heirs either to the form or mode of their expression; while Milton, Sterne, and Wordsworth left behind them whole regiments uniformed with all their external characteristics.

We do not mean that great poetic geniuses may not have influenced thought (tho we think it would be difficult to show how Shakespeare had done so, directly and wilfully), but that they have not infected contemporaries or followers with mannerism. The quality in him which makes him at once so thoroughly English and so thoroughly cosmopolitan is that aeration of the understanding by the imagination which he has in common with all the greater poets, and which is the privilege of genius. The modern school,which mistakes violence for intensity, seems to catch its breath when it finds itself on the verge of natural expression, and to say to itself, "Good heavens! I had almost forgotten I was inspired!" But of Shakespeare we do not even suspect that he ever remembered it. He does not always speak in that intense way that flames up in Lear and Macbeth through the rifts of a soil volcanic with passion. He allows us here and there the repose of a commonplace character, the consoling distraction of a humorous one. He knows how to be equable and grand without effort, so that we forget the altitude of thought to which he has led us, because the slowly receding slope of a mountain stretching downward by ample gradations gives a less startling impression of height than to look over the edge of a ravine that makes but a wrinkle in its flank.

Shakespeare has been sometimes taxed with the barbarism of profuseness and exaggeration. But this is to measure him by a Sophoclean scale. The simplicity of the antique tragedy is by no means that of expression, but is of form merely. In the utterance of great passions something must be indulged to the extravagance of Nature; the subdued tones to which pathos and sentiment are limited can not express a tempest of the soul. The range between the piteous "no more but so," in which Ophelia compresses the heartbreak whose compression was to make her mad, and that sublime appeal of Lear to the elements of nature, only to be matched, if matched at all, in the "Prometheus," is a wide one, and Shakespeare is as truly simple in the one as in the other. The simplicity of poetry is not that ofprose, nor its clearness that of ready apprehension merely. To a subtile sense, a sense heightened by sympathy, those sudden fervors of phrase, gone ere one can say it lightens, that show us Macbeth groping among the complexities of thought in his conscience-clouded mind, and reveal the intricacy rather than enlighten it, while they leave the eye darkened to the literal meaning of the words, yet make their logical sequence the grandeur of the conception, and its truth to nature clearer than sober daylight could. There is an obscurity of mist rising from the undrained shallows of the mind, and there is the darkness of thunder-cloud gathering its electric masses with passionate intensity from the clear element of the imagination, not at random or wilfully, but by the natural processes of the creative faculty, to brood those flashes of expression that transcend rhetoric, and are only to be apprehended by the poetic instinct.

In that secondary office of imagination, where it serves the artist, not as the reason that shapes, but as the interpreter of his conceptions into words, there is a distinction to be noticed between the higher and lower mode in which it performs its function. It may be either creative or pictorial, may body forth the thought or merely image it forth. With Shakespeare, for example, imagination seems immanent in his very consciousness; with Milton, in his memory. In the one it sends, as if without knowing it, a fiery life into the verse,

"Sei die Braut das Wort,Bräutigam der Geist";

in the other it elaborates a certain pomp and elevation. Accordingly, the bias of the former is toward over-intensity, of the latter toward over-diffuseness. Shakespeare's temptation is to push a willing metaphor beyond its strength, to make a passion over-inform its tenement of words; Milton can not resist running a simile on into a fugue.

One always fancies Shakespeare in his best verses, and Milton at the keyboard of his organ. Shakespeare's language is no longer the mere vehicle of thought; it has become part of it, its very flesh and blood. The pleasure it gives us is unmixt, direct, like that from the smell of a flower or the flavor of a fruit. Milton sets everywhere his little pitfalls of bookish association for the memory. I know that Milton's manner is very grand. It is slow, it is stately, moving as in triumphal procession, with music, with historic banners, with spoils from every time and every region, and captive epithets, like huge Sicambrians, thrust their broad shoulders between us and the thought whose pomp they decorate. But it is manner, nevertheless, as is proved by the ease with which it is parodied, by the danger it is in of degenerating into mannerism whenever it forgets itself. Fancy a parody of Shakespeare—I do not mean of his words, but of his tone, for that is what distinguishes the master. You might as well try it with the Venus of Melos. In Shakespeare it is always the higher thing, the thought, the fancy, that is preeminent; it is Cæsar that draws all eyes, and not the chariot in which he rides, or the throng which is but the reverberation of his supremacy.If not, how explain the charm with which he dominates in all tongues, even under the disenchantment of translation? Among the most alien races he is as solidly at home as a mountain seen from different sides by many lands, itself superbly solitary, yet the companion of all thoughts and domesticated in all imaginations.

For more than a century the Dutch were the laughing-stock of polite Europe. They were butter-firkins, swillers of beer and schnapps, and theirvrouwsfrom whom Holbein painted the all but loveliest of Madonnas, Rembrandt the graceful girl who sits immortal on his knee in Dresden, and Rubens his abounding goddesses, were the synonyms of clumsy vulgarity. Even so late as Irving the ships of the greatest navigators in the world were represented as sailing equally well stern-foremost. That the aristocratic Venetians should have

"Riveted with gigantic pilesThorough the center their new catchèd miles"

was heroic. But the far more marvelous achievementof the Dutch in the same kind was ludicrous even to republican Marvell. Meanwhile, during that very century of scorn, they were the best artists, sailors, merchants, bankers, printers, scholars, jurisconsults, and statesmen in Europe, and the genius of Motley has revealed them to us, earning a right to themselves by the most heroic struggle in human annals. But, alas! they were not merely simple burghers who had fairly made themselves High Mightinesses, and could treat on equal terms with anointed kings, but their commonwealth carried in its bosom the germs of democracy. They even unmuzzled, at least after dark, that dreadful mastiff, the Press, whose scent is, or ought to be, so keen for wolves in sheep's clothing and for certain other animals in lions' skins. They made fun of sacred majesty, and, what was worse, managed uncommonly well without it. In an age when periwigs made so large a part of the natural dignity of man people with such a turn of mind were dangerous. How could they seem other than vulgar and hateful?

In the natural course of things we succeeded to this unenviable position of general butt. The Dutch had thriven under it pretty well, and there was hope that we could at least contrive to worry along. And we certainly did in a very redoubtable fashion. Perhaps we deserved some of the sarcasm more than our Dutch predecessors in office. We had nothing to boast of in arts or letters, and were given to bragging overmuch of our merely material prosperity, due quite as much to the virtue of our continent as to our own. There was some truth in Carlyle's sneerafter all. Till we had succeeded in some higher way than this, we had only the success of physical growth. Our greatness, like that of enormous Russia, was greatness on the map—barbarian mass only; but had we gone down, like that other Atlantis, in some vast cataclysm, we should have covered but a pin's point on the chart of memory, compared with those ideal spaces occupied by tiny Attica and cramped England. At the same time, our critics somewhat too easily forgot that material must make ready the foundation for ideal triumphs, that the arts have no chance in poor countries. But it must be allowed that democracy stood for a great deal in our shortcoming. TheEdinburgh Reviewnever would have thought of asking, "Who reads a Russian book?" and England was satisfied with iron from Sweden without being impertinently inquisitive after her painters and statuaries. Was it that they expected too much from the mere miracle of freedom? Is it not the highest art of a republic to make men of flesh and blood, and not the marble ideals of such? It may be fairly doubted whether we have produced this higher type of man yet. Perhaps it is the collective, not the individual humanity that is to have a chance of nobler development among us. We shall see. We have a vast amount of imported ignorance, and, still worse, of native ready-made knowledge, to digest before even the preliminaries of such a consummation can be arranged. We have got to learn that statesmanship is the most complicated of all arts, and to come back to the apprenticeship system too hastily abandoned....

So long as we continue to be the most common-schooled and the least cultivated people in the world, I suppose we must consent to endure this condescending manner of foreigners toward us. The more friendly they mean to be the more ludicrously prominent it becomes. They can never appreciate the immense amount of silent work that has been done here, making this continent slowly fit for the abode of man, and which will demonstrate itself, let us hope, in the character of the people. Outsiders can only be expected to judge a nation by the amount it has contributed to the civilization of the world; the amount, that is, that can be seen and handled. A great place in history can only be achieved by competitive examinations, nay, by a long course of them. How much new thought have we contributed to the common stock? Till that question can be triumphantly answered, or needs no answer, we must continue to be simply interesting as an experiment, to be studied as a problem, and not respected as an attained result or an accomplished solution. Perhaps, as I have hinted, their patronizing manner toward us is the fair result of their failing to see here anything more than a poor imitation, a plaster-cast of Europe.

Are they not partly right? If the tone of the uncultivated American has too often the arrogance of the barbarian, is not that of the cultivated as often vulgarly apologetic? In the America they meet with is there the simplicity, the manliness, the absence of sham, the faith in human nature, the sensitiveness to duty and implied obligation, that in any way distinguishes us from what our orators call "the effete civilization of the Old World"? Is there a politicianamong us daring enough (except a Dana[39]here and there) to risk his future on the chance of our keeping our word with the exactness of superstitious communities like England? Is it certain that we shall be ashamed of a bankruptcy of honor, if we can only keep the letter of our bond? I hope we shall be able to answer all these questions with a frank yes.

At any rate, we would advise our visitors that we are not merely curious creatures, but belong to the family of man, and that, as individuals, we are not to be always subjected to the competitive examination above mentioned, even if we acknowledged their competence as an examining board. Above all, we beg them to remember that America is not to us, as to them, a mere object of external interest to be discust and analyzed, but in us, part of our very marrow. Let them not suppose that we conceive of ourselves as exiles from the graces and amenities of an older date than we, tho very much at home in a state of things not yet all it might be or should be, but which we mean to make so, and which we find both wholesome and pleasant for men (tho perhaps not fordilettanti) to live in. "The full tide of human existence"[40]may be felt here as keenly as Johnson felt it at Charing Cross, and in a larger sense. I know one person whois singular enough to think Cambridge the very best spot on the habitable globe. "Doubtless God could have made a better, but doubtless He never did."

It will take England a great while to get over her airs of patronage toward us, or even passably to conceal them. She can not help confounding the people with the country, and regarding us as lusty juveniles. She has a conviction that whatever good there is in us is wholly English, when the truth is that we are worth nothing except so far as we have disinfected ourselves of Anglicism. She is especially condescending just now, and lavishes sugar-plums on us as if we had not outgrown them. I am no believer in sudden conversions, especially in sudden conversions to a favorable opinion of people who have just proved you to be mistaken in judgment and therefore unwise in policy. I never blamed her for not wishing well to democracy—how should she?—butAlabamasare not wishes. Let her not be too hasty in believing Mr. Reverdy Johnson's[41]pleasant words. Tho there is no thoughtful man in America who would not consider a war with England the greatest of calamities, yet the feeling toward her here is very far from cordial, whatever our minister may say in the effusion that comes after ample dining. Mr. Adams,[42]with his famous "My Lord, this means war," perfectly represented his country. Justly or not, we have a feeling that we have been wronged, not merely insulted. The only sure way of bringing about a healthy relation between the two countries is for Englishmen to clear their minds of the notion that we are always to be treated as a kind of inferior and deported Englishman whose nature they perfectly understand, and whose back they accordingly stroke the wrong way of the fur with amazing perseverance. Let them learn to treat us naturally on our merits as human beings, as they would a German or a Frenchman, and not as if we were a kind of counterfeit Briton whose crime appeared in every shade of difference, and before long there would come that right feeling which we naturally call a good understanding. The common blood, and still more the common language, are fatal instruments of misapprehension. Let them give up trying to understand us, still more thinking that they do, and acting in various absurd ways as the necessary consequence, for they will never arrive at that devoutly-to-be-wished consummation till they learn to look at us as we are and not as they suppose us to be. Dear old long-estranged mother-in-law, it is a great many years since we parted. Since 1660, when you married again, you have been a step-mother to us. Put on your spectacles, dear madam. Yes, we have grown, and changed likewise. You would not let us darken your doors, if you could possibly help it.

We know that perfectly well. But pray, when we look to be treated as men, don't shake thatrattle in our faces, nor talk baby to us any longer.

"Do, child, go to it grandam, child;Give grandam kingdom, and it grandam willGive it a plum, a cherry, and a fig!"

FOOTNOTES:[35]From an essay contributed toThe Pioneerin 1843. Lowell was the founder and editor ofThe Pioneer, Robert Carter being his associate. The magazine lived only three months. Charles Eliot Norton, the editor of Lowell's "Letters," says it "left its projectors burdened with a considerable debt." "I am deeply in debt," wrote Lowell afterward, when hesitating to undertake a journey, "and feel a twinge for every cent I spend."[36]From the first essay in the first series entitled "Among My Books." Copyright, 1870, by James Russell Lowell. Published by Houghton, Mifflin Company.[37]From the essay entitled "Shakespeare Once Again," printed in the first series entitled "Among My Books." Copyright, 1870, by James Russell Lowell. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company.[38]From the essay entitled "On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners," printed in "From My Study Windows." Copyright, 1870, 1871, 1890, by James Russell Lowell. Published by Houghton, Mifflin Company.[39]The reference is to Richard Henry Dana, author of "Two Years Before the Mast," who in 1876 was appointed by President Grant minister to England, but failed of confirmation in the Senate, owing to political intrigues due to his independence. Lowell appears to have inserted this reference to Dana in an edition published subsequent to the first, the date of the first being 1871.[40]A remark of Dr. Johnson's as reported by Boswell.[41]Reverdy Johnson of Maryland, Mr. Adams's successor as minister to England, negotiated a settlement of theAlabamadispute, which was unfavorably received in this country and finally rejected by the Senate, which led to his recall in 1869.[42]Charles Francis Adams, our minister to England from 1861 to 1867, made this remark to a British cabinet minister at the time of the threatened sailing of the Laird rams.

[35]From an essay contributed toThe Pioneerin 1843. Lowell was the founder and editor ofThe Pioneer, Robert Carter being his associate. The magazine lived only three months. Charles Eliot Norton, the editor of Lowell's "Letters," says it "left its projectors burdened with a considerable debt." "I am deeply in debt," wrote Lowell afterward, when hesitating to undertake a journey, "and feel a twinge for every cent I spend."

[36]From the first essay in the first series entitled "Among My Books." Copyright, 1870, by James Russell Lowell. Published by Houghton, Mifflin Company.

[37]From the essay entitled "Shakespeare Once Again," printed in the first series entitled "Among My Books." Copyright, 1870, by James Russell Lowell. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company.

[38]From the essay entitled "On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners," printed in "From My Study Windows." Copyright, 1870, 1871, 1890, by James Russell Lowell. Published by Houghton, Mifflin Company.

[39]The reference is to Richard Henry Dana, author of "Two Years Before the Mast," who in 1876 was appointed by President Grant minister to England, but failed of confirmation in the Senate, owing to political intrigues due to his independence. Lowell appears to have inserted this reference to Dana in an edition published subsequent to the first, the date of the first being 1871.

[40]A remark of Dr. Johnson's as reported by Boswell.

[41]Reverdy Johnson of Maryland, Mr. Adams's successor as minister to England, negotiated a settlement of theAlabamadispute, which was unfavorably received in this country and finally rejected by the Senate, which led to his recall in 1869.

[42]Charles Francis Adams, our minister to England from 1861 to 1867, made this remark to a British cabinet minister at the time of the threatened sailing of the Laird rams.

Born in 1819, died in 1897; joined the Brook Farm Community in 1842; an editor of the New YorkTribunein 1847-62; Assistant Secretary of War in 1863-64; became editor of the New YorkSunin 1868, remaining editor until his death; published "A Household Book of Poetry" in 1857; joint editor with George Ripley of the "American Encyclopedia."

Those who have examined the history of this remarkable man and who know how to estimate the friendlessness, the disabilities, and the disadvantages which surrounded his childhood and youth; the scanty opportunities, or rather the absence of all opportunity, of education; the destitution and loneliness amid which he struggled for the possession of knowledge; and the unflinching zeal and pertinacity with which he provided for himself the materials for intellectual growth, will heartily echo the popular judgment that he was indeed a man of genius, marked out from his cradle to inspire, animate, and instruct others.

From the first, when a child in his father's log cabin, lying upon the hearth that he might read by the flickering firelight, his attention was given almost exclusively to public and political affairs. This determined his vocation as ajournalist; and he seems never to have felt any attraction toward any other of the intellectual professions. He never had a thought of being a physician, a clergyman, an engineer, or a lawyer. Private questions, individual controversies had little concern for him except as they were connected with public interests. Politics and newspapers were his delight, and he learned to be a printer in order that he might become a newspaper maker. And after he was the editor of a newspaper, what chiefly engaged him was the discussion of political and social questions. His whole greatness as a journalist was in this sphere. For the collection and digestion of news, with the exception of election statistics, he had no great fondness and no special ability. He valued talent in that department only because he knew it was essential to the success of the newspaper he loved. His own thoughts were always elsewhere.

Accordingly there have been journalists who as such, strictly speaking, have surpassed him. Minds not devoted to particular doctrines, not absorbed in the advocacy of cherished ideas—in a word, minds that believe little and aim only at the passing success of a day—may easily excel one like him in the preparation of a mere newspaper. Mr. Greeley was the antipodes of all such persons. He was always absolutely in earnest. His convictions were intense; he had that peculiar courage, most precious in a great man, which enables him to adhere to his own line of action despite the excited appeals of friends and the menaces of variable public opinion; and his constant purpose was to assert his principles,to fight for them, and present them to the public in the way most likely to give them the same hold upon other minds which they had upon his own. In fact, he was not so much a journalist, in the proper meaning of that term, as a pamphleteer or writer of leading articles.

In this sphere of effort he had scarcely an equal. His command of language was extraordinary, tho he had little imagination and his vocabulary was limited; but he possest the faculty of expressing himself in a racy, virile manner, within the apprehension of every reader. As he treated every topic in a practical rather than a philosophical spirit, and with strong feeling rather than infallible logic, so he never wrote above the heads of the public. What he said was plain, clear, striking. His illustrations were quaint and homely, sometimes even vulgar, but they never failed to tell. He was gifted also with an excellent humor which greatly enlivened his writing. In retort, especially when provoked, he was dangerous to his antagonist; and tho his reasoning might be faulty, he would frequently gain his cause by a flash of wit that took the public, and, as it were, hustled his adversary out of court. But he was not always a victorious polemic. His vehemence in controversy was sometimes too precipitate for his prudence; he would rush into a fight with his armor unfastened, and with only a part of the necessary weapons; and as the late Washington Hunt[44]once exprest it, he could be more damaging to his friends than to his opponents....

The occasional uncertainty of his judgment was probably due, in a measure, to the deficiency of his education. Self-educated men are not always endowed with the strong logical faculty and sure good sense which are developed and strengthened by thorough intellectual culture. Besides, a man of powerful intellect who is not regularly disciplined is apt to fall into an exaggerated mental self-esteem from which more accurate training and information would have preserved him. But the very imperfection of Greeley's early studies had a compensation in the fact that they left him, in all the tendencies and habits of his mind, an American. No foreign mixture of thought or tradition went to the composition of his strong intelligence. Of all the great men who have become renowned on this side of the Atlantic he was most purely and entirely the product of the country and its institutions. Accordingly, a sturdy reliance on his own conclusions and a readiness to defy the world in their behalf were among his most strongly marked characteristics.

But a kind of moral unsteadiness diminished his power. The miseries of his childhood had left their trace in a querulous, lamentable, helpless tone of feeling, into which he fell upon any little misfortune or disappointment; and as he grew older he came to lack hope.

FOOTNOTES:[43]From an article printed in the New YorkSun, December 5, 1872. Greeley had died November 29, of this year.[44]Governor of New York in 1851-53, having been elected by the Whigs.

[43]From an article printed in the New YorkSun, December 5, 1872. Greeley had died November 29, of this year.

[44]Governor of New York in 1851-53, having been elected by the Whigs.

Born in 1822, died in 1891; noted biographer and miscellaneous writer; published "Life of Horace Greeley" in 1855, "Aaron Burr" in 1857, "Andrew Jackson" in 1860, "Benjamin Franklin" in 1864, "Thomas Jefferson" in 1874, "Voltaire" in 1881; author of several other books.

In the year 1822 M. Jumel lost a considerable part of his fortune, and madame returned alone to New York, bringing with her a prodigious quantity of grand furniture and paintings. Retiring to a seat in the upper part of Manhattan Island, which she possest in her own right,[46]she began with native energy the task of restoring her husband's broken fortunes. She cultivated her farm; she looked vigilantly to the remains of the estate; she economized. In 1828, when M. Jumel returned to the United States, they were not as rich as in former days, but their estate was ample for all rational purposes and enjoyments. In 1832 M. Jumel, a man ofmagnificent proportions, very handsome, and perfectly preserved (a great waltzer at seventy), was thrown from a wagon and fatally injured. He died in a few days. Madame was then little past her prime.

There was talk of cholera in the city. Madame Jumel resolved upon taking a carriage tour in the country. Before setting out she wished to take legal advice respecting some real estate, and as Colonel Burr's reputation in that department was preeminent, to his office in Reade street she drove. In other days he had known her well, and tho many an eventful year had passed since he had seen her, he recognized her at once. He received her in his courtliest manner, complimented her with admirable tact, listened with soft deference to her statement. He was the ideal man of business—confidential, self-possest, polite—giving his client the flattering impression that the faculties of his whole soul were concentrated upon the affair in hand. She was charmed, yet feared him. He took the papers, named the day when his opinion would be ready, and handed her to her carriage with winning grace. At seventy-eight years of age, he was still straight, active, agile, fascinating.

On the appointed day she sent to his office a relative, a student of law, to receive his opinion. This young gentleman, timid and inexperienced, had an immense opinion of Burr's talents; had heard all good and all evil of him; supposed him to be, at least, the acutest of possible men. He went. Burr behaved to him in a manner so exquisitely pleasing that, to this hour, he has the liveliest recollection of the scene. No topicwas introduced but such as were familiar and interesting to young men. His manners were such as this age of slangy familiarity can not so much as imagine. The young gentleman went home to Madame Jumel only to extol and glorify him.

Madame and her party began their journey, revisiting Ballston, whither, in former times, she had been wont to go in a chariot drawn by eight horses; visiting Saratoga, then in the beginning of its celebrity, where, in exactly ten minutes after her arrival, the decisive lady bought a house and all it contained. Returning to New York to find that her mansion had been despoiled by robbers in her absence, she lived for a while in the city. Colonel Burr called upon the young gentleman who had been madame's messenger, and, after their acquaintance had ripened, said to him, "Come into my office; I can teach you more in a year than you can learn in ten in an ordinary way." The proposition being submitted to Madame Jumel, she, anxious for the young man's advancement, gladly and gratefully consented. He entered the office. Burr kept him close at his books. He did teach him more in a year than he could have learned in ten in an ordinary way. Burr lived then in Jersey City. His office (23 Nassau street) swarmed with applicants for aid, and he seemed now to have quite lost the power of refusing. In no other respects, bodily or mental, did he exhibit signs of decrepitude.

Some months passed on without his again meeting Madame Jumel. At the suggestion of the student, who felt exceedingly grateful to Burrfor the solicitude with which he assisted in his studies, Madame Jumel invited Colonel Burr to dinner. It was a grand banquet, at which he displayed all the charms of his manner, and shone to conspicuous advantage. On handing to dinner the giver of the feast, he said: "I give you my hand, madame; my heart has long been yours." This was supposed to be merely a compliment, and was little remarked at the time. Colonel Burr called upon the lady; called frequently; became ever warmer in his attentions; proposed, at length, and was refused. He still plied his suit, however, and obtained at last, not the lady's consent, but an undecided No. Improving his advantage on the instant, he said, in a jocular manner, that he should bring out a clergyman to Fort Washington on a certain day, and there he would once more solicit her hand.

He was as good as his word. At the time appointed, he drove out in his gig to the lady's country residence, accompanied by Dr. Bogart, the very clergyman who, just fifty years before, had married him to the mother of his Theodosia. The lady was embarrassed, and still refused. But then the scandal! And, after all, why not? Her estate needed a vigilant guardian, and the old house was lonely. After much hesitation, she at length consented to be drest, and to receive her visitors. And she was married. The ceremony was witnessed only by the members of Madame Jumel's family, and by the eight servants of the household, who peered eagerly in at the doors and windows. The ceremony over, Mrs. Burr ordered supper. Some bins ofM. Jumel's wine-cellar, that had not been opened for half a century, were laid under contribution. The little party was a very merry one. The parson, in particular, it is remembered, was in the highest spirits, overflowing with humor and anecdote. Except for Colonel Burr's great age (which was not apparent), the match seemed not an unwise one. The lurking fear he had had of being a poor and homeless old man was put to rest. She had a companion who had been ever agreeable, and her estate a steward than whom no one living was supposed to be more competent.

As a remarkable circumstance connected with this marriage, it may be just mentioned that there was a woman in New York who had aspired to the hand of Colonel Burr, and who, when she heard of his union with another, wrung her hands and shed tears! A feeling of that nature can seldom, since the creation of man, have been excited by the marriage of a man on the verge of fourscore.

A few days after the wedding the "happy pair" paid a visit to Connecticut, of which State a nephew of Colonel Burr was then governor. They were received with attention. At Hartford Burr advised his wife to sell out her shares in the bridge over the Connecticut at that place, and invest the proceeds in real estate. She ordered them sold. The stock was in demand, and the shares brought several thousand dollars. The purchasers offered to pay her the money, but she said, "No; pay it to my husband." To him, accordingly, it was paid, and he had it sewed up in his pocket, a prodigious bulk, andbrought it to New York, and deposited it in his own bank, to his own credit.

Texas was then beginning to attract the tide of emigration which, a few years later, set so strongly thither. Burr had always taken a great interest in that country. Persons with whom he had been variously connected in life had a scheme on foot for settling a large colony of Germans on a tract of land in Texas. A brig had been chartered, and the project was in a state of forwardness, when the possession of a sum of money enabled Burr to buy shares in the enterprise. The greater part of the money which he had brought from Hartford was invested in this way. It proved a total loss. The time had not yet come for emigration to Texas. The Germans became discouraged and separated, and, to complete the failure of the scheme, the title of the lands in the confusion of the times proved defective. Meanwhile madame, who was a remarkably thrifty woman, with a talent for the management of property, wondered that her husband made no allusion to the subject of the investment; for the Texas speculation had not been mentioned to her. She caused him to be questioned on the subject. He begged to intimate to the lady's messenger that it was no affair of hers, and requested him to remind the lady that she now had a husband to manage her affairs, and one who would manage them.

Coolness between the husband and wife was the result of this colloquy. Then came remonstrances. Then estrangement. Burr got into the habit of remaining at his office in the city. Then partial reconciliation. Full of schemes andspeculations to the last, without retaining any of his former ability to operate successfully, he lost more money, and more, and more. The patience of the lady was exhausted. She filed a complaint accusing him of infidelity, and praying that he might have no more control or authority over her affairs. The accusation is now known to have been groundless; nor, indeed, at the time was it seriously believed. It was used merely as the most convenient legal mode of depriving him of control over her property. At first he answered the complaint vigorously, but afterward he allowed it to go by default, and proceedings were carried no further. A few short weeks of happiness, followed by a few months of alternate estrangement and reconciliation, and this union, that began not inauspiciously, was, in effect, tho never in law, dissolved. What is strangest of all is that the lady, tho she never saw her husband during the last two years of his life, cherished no ill-will toward him, and shed tears at his death. To this hour Madame Jumel thinks and speaks of him with kindness, attributing what was wrong or unwise in his conduct to the infirmities of age.

Men of seventy-eight have been married before and since. But, probably, never has there been another instance of a man of that age winning a lady of fortune and distinction, grieving another by his marriage, and exciting suspicions of incontinence against himself by his attentions to a third!

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