graphs and random reflections. They are not always easy to interpret, because they soar into regions of the absolute, where every statement is equally as untrue as it is true. The bearings depend upon the application; so that we have to know Emerson's whole thought, and his life. Applying the highest tests, we find his doctrine a little thin and his example a little tame. He lived through stern times, and while his voice was always on the right side, we feel that he might have been more prompt and more vigorous. His optimism is beautiful, but a trifle lacking in content. We want a man to put more reality into his writings, to show us how to deal with the grim and hateful facts of life. Emerson makes a cryptic statement

I am owner of the sphere,

Of the seven stars and the solar year,

Of Caesar's hand, and Plato's brain,

Of Lord Christ's heart, and Shakespeare's strain.

We say yes, perhaps; but most of us find it difficult to get the Shakespeare strain to come out of us. Likewise, we do not know quite how to reconcile Lord Christ with Caesar; nor can we always get Lord Christ to agree with Shakespeare-watch the scoffing this book will cause among the critics! You see how these mystic utterances are liable to be misunderstood; and how it was possible for the transcendentalist movement, which produced Emerson, to produce also the horrors of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures."

On the other hand, when Emerson deals with justice and liberty in New England he can deliver as heavy a punch as Byron: for example, his "Boston Hymn," discussing the question of compensation for the enfranchised slaves

Pay ransom to the owner,

And fill the bag to the brim.

Who is the owner? The slave is owner,

And ever was. Pay him.

I have discussed these lines in "The Book of Life," and suggested how much cheaper it would have been to pay the owners than to fight the Civil War. I overlooked the fact that this "Boston Hymn" was written after the Civil War was on. Emerson, combining Yankee economy

with wise humanity, had all along been advocating the sensible course of freeing the slaves by purchase.

We think of this Concord sage as a philosopher, and less often as a poet. But he was a great poet; at his best he is among the immortals. Not only is there wisdom and moral beauty in his verse; there is love of nature, and there is passion. People sometimes died young in Concord, just as they did in old England and in Greece, and poets poured their sorrow into song. Emerson's "Threnody," written upon the death of his five-year-old son, is lacking in all the classical paraphernalia of Milton's "Lycidas," but it is full of such beauty and fervor as are native to our country, and I see no reason why we Americans should devote all our time to the worship of foreign gods. If our colleges must teach the classics, to the exclusion of modern work, let them at least teach our native classics, which are easier for us to understand.

I propose a motto for our youth: See Emerson first!

CHAPTER LXXVI

THE AGE OF INNOCENCE

America at this time was an overgrown youthful body, ill-supplied with mind; and a few ardent believers in culture set out to fill this need. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was a student at Bowdoin College, and the faculty decided that Cervantes and Dante and Goethe and Moliere and Hugo ought to be more than names to the American people; somebody ought to study these languages and literatures, and pass them on. They gave Longfellow a traveling scholarship for three years, and he went abroad and collected things romantic and beautiful and innocent in Spain and Italy and Germany and France, and came home and spent the next twenty or thirty years in teaching them, first at Bowdoin and then at Harvard. He translated poetry, and also wrote poetry of his own, very much resembling the translations. At the age of fortyseven he became a poet exclusively, and lived to be a seventy-five-year-old boy, just as romantic and beautiful and innocent as when he had first gone out to gather nourishment for the hungry young soul of America.

Longfellow was a moralist, and it was his purpose to

draw useful conclusions in his poetry. He would start by looking at the planet Mars, and end by proving that human beings must be brave and self-reliant: not that there is anything remotely suggesting such qualities in a "red planet," but because this planet happens to be named after the God of war. He would look at a ship on the stocks, and draw conclusions about the government of his country. He would look at the village blacksmith, and thank him for a lesson in diligence and sobriety.

That kind of poetry has now gone out of fashion. The young intellectuals of America are no longer romantic and beautiful and innocent, and they say that Longfellow is propaganda. But you know my thesis by now-theirs is just as much propaganda, only it is on the other side. What Longfellow called art is incitement towards diligence and sobriety, while what our young sophisticates call art is incitement toward going to hell in a hurry. Anything that pictures the delights of the senses and the breakdown of the will is art; but poor Longfellow, in an unguarded moment, had the misfortune to exclaim that

Life is real! Life is earnest!

And the grave is not its goal.

These two lines have been enough to damn him in the eyes of a whole generation of coterie-litterateurs.

Turning the pages of the art which Longfellow brought back from Europe, there flashes to mind a memory of the days when I also traveled in Europe, collecting culture. It was in Naples, a soft moonlit evening in early spring, and I stood before a great statue, noting its dim outlines. A figure slipped up beside me, and a soft voice began to whisper, offering to take me to a place where there were beautiful boys: "beautiful, sweet Neapolitan boys," I remember the phrase. I wonder what the traveling idealist from Bowdoin College would have made of such a whisper in the moonlight!

That was a dozen years ago, and we in America have learned something about Europe since then. I am the last person in the world who would desire a return to the age of innocence, or advocate, even for the young, the blinking of grim and hideous facts. But this I do believe: a time will come, and not so far in the future, when American youth will react from the hip-pocket flask and petting

party stage of culture. With full knowledge of vice and disease, it will choose virtue and health, because these are the truly interesting and worth while things, and the truly great themes of art.

Pending the arrival of such a time, I record my notion, that poetry does not cease to be great because it is declaimed by a million schoolboys. "To be or not to be," and "Friends, Romans, countrymen," are great poetry, even though we personally are tired of them. If it be permitted to tell a story in verse, then assuredly "The Wreck of the Hesperus" is a tragic story told in vivid and stirring language. I say that anyone who does not know this for a great ballad simply does not know what a ballad is. You may spend your time digging in Percy's "Reliques" and other old volumes, and find things less easy to read, but nothing more worth reading. I go farther and admit that when I was young I found delight in "Paul Revere's Ride" and "Hiawatha" and "Evangeline," and I don't believe that kind of young person is yet entirely extinct in America.

CHAPTER LXXVII

A SNOW-BOUND SAINT

The Puritans, having been driven from England by religious persecution, set to work in their New England to persecute others. Among their victims was a Massachusetts Quaker by the name of Whittier, who was deprived of the franchise for daring to petition the town council for liberty to preach. Undaunted by the punishment, this pioneer raised a family of ten stalwart children in the Quaker faith, and became the great-great-grandfather of a Quaker poet, who has received but scant appreciation from the literary critics of his country.

John Greenleaf Whittier was born in 1807, one of a large family, and grew up to toil upon a rocky farm. He got his education in a country school, and his first glimpse of poetry from a wandering Scotchman who spent a night at the farm-house, and who sang the songs of Robert Burns. The frail and sensitive lad who sat and listened enraptured was to grow up to be the Burns of New Eng

land; a saintly Burns, having the Scotch poet's energy and rebellious ardor, but not his destroying vices.

Independence, hard work, and religion were the three factors in Whittier's environment. He wanted to go to an academy to continue his education, but there was no money, so he earned it by work as a cobbler. You remember the sneer of the Tory critic-"Back to your gallipots, Mr. Keats"; and here we find a critic satirizing our Quaker poet: "the wax still sticking to his fingers' ends." You remember how Keats fell in love with an elegant young lady; Whittier became a country editor and presumed to aspire to the daughter of a local judge, and was spurned, and went back home, ill, poverty-stricken and humiliated.

But he continued to study and write verses, and found another job as editor, and a prospect of success in politics. Then came the crisis in his life; the anti-slavery movement was making its first feeble beginnings in New England, and Whittier became the friend of William Lloyd Garrison, and spent sleepless nights wrestling with the angel of duty. At the age of twenty-seven he made the choice; he threw away his career, and spent his hard-won savings to print and send out five hundred copies of an address in opposition to chattel slavery. We who in these days are daring to challenge wage slavery, and are witnessing mobbings and jailings and torturing for the cause, must not forget that back in the 1830's this gentle Quaker poet was stoned and nearly lynched in Massachusetts, and mobbed again and had his office burned about his head in Philadelphia.

He suffered from ill health all his life, yet he never gave up the cause. He suffered from poverty; having a mother and sisters dependent upon him, he was too poor ever to marry. He continued to edit papers, he wrote and spoke against slavery, and composed verses which were taken up and recopied by constantly increasing numbers of newspapers. Many of these verses are now found in his collected works, and one who reads them is surprised by their uniformly high quality, not merely the fervor and energy, but the beauty of expression and the treasures of imagination which this self-taught country boy poured into his propaganda. You recall Browning's rebuke to the old poet Wordsworth, "The Lost Leader." Here is Whit