are extremely good songs, easy to remember, easy to sing, and endowed with a pleasant though somewhat languid lyric appeal which is of a distinctly higher order than that of the general run of such productions. Both were written between 1850 and 1855.

HENRY TIMROD (1829-1867)

Timrod was primarily a poet of the South. Unlike the ephemeral war-poets who succeed in fitting a few sentimental lines to a catchy popular tune, Timrod expressed in his impassioned lyrics the highest aspirations of the Confederacy as well as some of her less lofty ambitions. Before the outbreak of the Civil War, Timrod, Hayne, and a few others were succeeding in making Charleston, S. C., something of a literary center; Timrod's first volume of poems (1860) showed him to be a disciple of Keats and Tennyson, too imitative to assure him a permanent place among our poets. The war (in which he could take no important part as a soldier on account of his frail health) provided the necessary stimulus to vigorous, original work as a poet, but it also ruined his fortune and hastened the time of his death. His poems were subsequently collected and edited by his friend Hayne. Their persistent though moderate popularity-there have been five editions since his death-is an indication of their worth. Intensely local and partisan though he was, his best work has won the admiration of Southerners and Northerners alike.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

An admirable edition of Timrod's poetry is the Memorial, Richmond, Va., 1901. The best biographical study is G. A. Wauchope's Henry Timrod; Man and Poet, Columbia, S. C., 1915. W. P. Trent's William Gilmore Simms, N. Y. 1892, gives an interesting picture of the South as Timrod knew it.

NOTES

ETHNOGENESIS

433. This poem, celebrating, as the title indicates, the birth of a nation, is one of the most optimistic outbursts with which the founding of the Confederacy was hailed. The spiritual aspiration here expressed has given the poem a permanent place in our literature, despite the inaccuracy of its prophecies.

41. The mighty ghosts of Moultrie and of Eutaw. The ghosts of Southern colonial soldiers who fought during the Revolution, and won fame at the memorable defense of Fort Moultrie, and at the crucial battle of Eutaw Springs (Sept. 8, 1781). The reference cannot be to General William Moultrie, since

435. The poem is a tribute to the greatness of the South, and a prophecy of her development. The poet sees in the cotton boll a symbol of future prosperity, and of commercial intercourse with all the world.

61. The curious ointment of the Arabian Tale. "The Story of the Blind Man, Baba Abdallah," in The Arabian Nights, tells of a magic ointment which, when applied to the left eye, gave a view of treasure no matter where hidden; when applied to the right eye, it caused blindness.

436. 98. The Poet of "The Woodlands." William Gilmore Simms (1806-1870), who lived on an estate called "Woodlands."

437. 167. The Port which ruled the Western seas. New York.

CHARLES FARRAR BROWNE (1834-1867)

("ARTEMUS WARD")

Browne was born and brought up in Waterford, Maine, and learned the trade of printer in another country town of the same stateSkowhegan. The backwoods Yankee dialect, which might have been a handicap, he capitalized as one of his chief assets; and when he added to it his ridiculous spellings and his own talent for incisive witticisms, he quickly won his way to a high place among contemporary humorists.

Always of a roving disposition, he served as printer and reporter-or more exactly as a "column-writer"-on various papers from

Maine to Ohio, until in The Cleveland Plain Dealer he found an almost national medium of expression for Artemus Ward and his imaginary "show." In 1861 he began a protracted series of lecture tours which carried him, with ever-increasing popularity, as far west as the Pacific coast and as far east as London. In these lectures he exhibited powers of friendly caricaturing and of humorous moralizing which won him the admiration and personal friendship of even the leading English men of letters. In 1866, with the success of the letters to Punch and of the London lectures, he reached the height of his fame-only to be suddenly cut off by consumption.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

EDITIONS. The most inclusive edition of Browne's work is Artemus Ward Complete, London, 1890 and 1910. Individual works. earliest of which was Artemus Ward, His

ok, N. Y. 1862, are not difficult to

tain. BIOGRAPHIES. E. P. Hingston's The Genial owman, London, 1870, is a good source of graphical information.

NOTES

INTERVIEW WITH PRESIDENT LINCOLN

3. From Artemus Ward, His Book. The Interview was originally published between the time of Lincoln's election and his inauguration.

'EMUS WARD AT THE TOMB OF SHAKESPEARE

. From Punch, September 29, 1866.

ENRY WHEELER SHAW (1818-1885)

("JOSH BILLINGS")

During the first forty years of Shaw's life, was anything but a man of letters. Lured m Hamilton College by tales of the adturous west, he gave himself up to an ive and varied career as boatman, farmer, 1 auctioneer. By 1858, however, he had urned to the east, and had settled at ghkeepsie, where he began to write. He s attracted the attention of the public en he revised the spelling of his Essay on Mule (1859) so that it appeared as An a on the Muel. His annual burlesque, e Farmer's Allminax, appeared from 1860 1870, and sold over a hundred thousand ies a year. Gradually his awkward but orous and original type of humor won him increasingly large audience, and he soon e to be as well known as his contempoArtemus Ward. Josh Billings, his Say(1866), Josh Billings on Ice (1875), and ry Boddy's Friend (1876), were followed his Complete Works in 1876. The stuwho turns the pages of this last book find in it more of proverbial wisdom and sing irony than has often come from the of a single writer.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Complete Works, N. Y. 1876, is not plete, but contains a large and adequate tion of Shaw's sayings. No good biogy has yet appeared, though Francis S. h's Life and Adventures of Josh Billings, 7. 1883, is reasonably accurate.

NOTES

REMARKS

All the selections in this volume are from Josh Billings, His Sayings, 1866.

LPH WALDO EMERSON (1803-1882)

en Matthew Arnold was lecturing in ica, during the winter of 1883-84, Emer

son had been dead less than two years. Many of the people who composed Arnold's audiences had listened to Emerson; all of them were more or less familiar with his reputation and general achievement. Consequently, Arnold's attempt to estimate the significance of Emerson in American life and thought proved of more than ordinary interest to his auditors. The resulting summary was not in all ways flattering. Emerson was not a great poet, said Arnold, because his verse lacked that inevitableness which one finds in the highest sort of poetry; he was not a great prose writer, because he had not the sure sense of style that distinguishes the work of men like Swift and Voltaire; he was not a great philosopher, because his thinking was unsystematic. But-and here Arnold put the case so well that his phrasing has not yet been improved upon-he was "the friend and aider of those who would live in the spirit." Harsh though the first part of Arnold's summary may appear to some persons, the concluding tribute to Emerson's tonic quality, to his potency as a spiritual energizer, seems after the lapse of forty years as close an approximation as has yet been made to a concise statement of Emerson's particular contribution to American culture.

Had Emerson been born a hundred years earlier, before the Puritan leadership had begun to falter, or seventy years later, when the spiritual unrest of the post-Revolutionary period had given place to a somewhat lethargic materialism, it is inconceivable that he should have become the Emerson whom the world knows. Despite his cosmopolitanism and his almost dateless paganism, he was definitely a product of America at the turn of the century; of New England, center of Puritan dominance, at the time the Puritan was finding himself mellowed and humanized by the inexplicable but very powerful forces that we associate with what it is difficult to call anything except the Romantic revolt. He was a product of this second Renaissance, of this age of expansion; he was himself influential in carrying the revolt to high issues. At the same time he never lost touch with the sturdy Puritanism which was his spiritual heritage, and against the background of which all his subsequent development was to take place.

But no such deterministic attempt to "account for" Emerson in terms of race, time, and place, can ever be satisfactory. He would have been great in any age. He bore the marks of genius. However much he owed to his world, he gave away more than he borrowed. More and more he is coming to seem the chief figure among American men of let

ters.

The important facts concerning his life and personality have now become so well known as to be part of American tradition. Especially since the publication of his Journals, it has been possible to follow him in some de

tail during the most interesting period of his life, and to gain a new conception of the workings of his mind, and his methods of literary composition.

Born in Boston on May 25, 1803, he was a descendant of a long line of Puritan_pioneers and ministers. His father, William Emerson, pastor of the first Unitarian Church of Boston, was a man of local distinction and intellectual ambition, and though liberal in his theology, was firm in his adherence to the Puritan tradition of morality and idealism. He died when his son Ralph was ten years old, at a time when the boy's ambition was limited to following his father and grandfather in the ministry, and to writing a little verse. Entering Harvard College in 1817, Emerson had in considerable measure to "work his way through." In his first year he served as "President's freshman," or messenger; in his second year he acted as a waiter in the Junior dining hall. The activities of his Junior and Senior years are recorded in some detail in the first published volume of his Journals. That he was an unusual youngster, different from the general run of college students then or now, is obvious; at the same time such selections as are printed in this book show him to have taken a genuine interest in college friendships and college fun. During his undergraduate years he won prizes for declamation and essay writing; at the end of his course his fellows elected him Class Poet an honor which pleased him greatly, despite the fact that seven other men had declined the position before it was offered to him. He graduated in 1821, near the middle of his class, and promptly went home to teach school in order that a younger brother might take his turn at Harvard. Three years later, after a rather distasteful experience as schoolmaster, he returned to Cambridge to study for the ministry. In 1826 he was licensed to preach; in 1829 he was installed as Assistant Pastor, and shortly afterwards as Pastor of the Second Church (Unitarian) of Boston.

Thus by the time he was twenty-six years old he had achieved the first part of his boyish ambition, and had become comfortably established in what he supposed would be his life work. Already, however, his thinking had progressed far from even the liberal creed of his denomination; by 1832 he considered it impossible conscientiously to remain in the ministry. Finding himself "no longer interested" in the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper, he proposed to his church that the service be discontinued. When the church declined to take this step, he at once resigned. A memorable trip to Europe, in which he met Wordsworth, Coleridge, and -more important from the point of view of subsequent friendship and influence on his work-Carlyle, occupied the next few months; by 1834 he was settled in Concord, where he was to live till his death in 1882.

What he accomplished in this half century of quiet residence in a country village, the world knows. He continued to serve as a preacher, but instead of a pulpit, he used the lecture platform for his rostrum. Boston early accepted him as the most popular lecturer of the day; gradually the circle of his influence widened till by the time of the Civil War he was known and welcomed from Massachusetts Bay to the Mississippi. A master of the sort of public address which the Lyceum course demanded, with a manner which forced people to listen, albeit they were not always certain of the significance of what they were hearing, Emerson spent his best energies in preaching his gospel to audiences that crowded the halls in which he spoke, and became a spiritual tonic to a great portion of the United States. He died on April 27, 1882.

The years in which. Emerson was best known as a lecturer were naturally the years in which he did most of his publishing. Much of his work appeared first in magazine form, to be republished later under various titles. Nature (1836) might well be called his inaugural address; it was an announcement of his gospel, and an indication that a new voice was making itself heard in the land. In 1841 and 1844 came two collections of Essays; in 1847 a collected volume of Poems, and in 1849, Nature, Addresses and Lectures. Rep resentative Men, frankly modeled on his friend Carlyle's Heroes and Hero-Worship, appeared in 1850; in 1856 English Traits gave expression to the pleasant impressions gained on two visits to England. The Conduct of Life (1860) might well have been called Essays, Third Series. Though there are other titles in the Emerson bibliography, the student who owns the nine here listed, and adds to them the Journals (1909-1914), will possess all that is best in Emerson's work.

In the total of Emerson's publications the poetry occupies a relatively small space. Yet it is hardly an exaggeration to say that the ideas which lie at the center of all his thinking may all be found, stated or implied, in his verse. In reading this verse the student should remember that Emerson's chief concern was to give expression to what seemed a significant idea. "It is not metres,” he wrote in his essay The Poet, "but a metremaking argument, that makes a poem." For technical niceties and poetical conventions he cared relatively little; he was eager, as he puts it in Merlin, to

Climb to Heaven by the stairway of surprise

He was not averse to putting a sermon inte poetry which a school-boy could understand nor did he avoid the other extreme, the poer. in which the central idea is never clearly ex pressed, but merely suggested, hinted s throughout a series of figures and image

is obvious that he possessed in rich measthe essential qualifications of a poet: he ld state an abstract idea, or paint a pice, or give expression to a mood, in lanage which is at once rhythmically effective, drich with concrete, sensuous, imagery. ery poem he wrote, as well as much of his se, attests this fact. Occasionally, as even hold admitted, he struck off those "inevole" lines or quatrains which passed at once the literature of the race. Rarely, hower, is he as effective in large units as in all. For the fact seems clear that when erson wrote, he was-one might almost -thinking aloud; he was passing on to reader ideas which came to him out of blue, and which sometimes followed one ther without apparent connection. Conuently, the student who would read Emer's verse with intelligent appreciation must content to go slowly, to disregard superal breaks in the thought, to do without formal structure which Emerson did not sider needful, and above all, to think. If will do these things, he will find in EmerIs verse a poetic beauty which is never unted to some stimulating idea.

luch the same things, mutatis mutandis, true of the various collections of essays. s_platitudinous to repeat the statement Emerson's essays were first lectures, and his lectures were collections of sentences ing some relation to the announced topic, never fused into the unified whole that er, for instance, would have demanded. ence it is almost impossible to "outline" of the essays; rarely is there a "first," a ond," or a "third." But the student who s with a pencil in his hand will seldom better use for it than when turning the s of Emerson's prose. He will use it not indicate the formal divisions of the ght, for these do not appear, but rather nderscore those pithy, stimulating utters, each of which may contain more value will appear in a page of other writers. 1 will not make himself manifest to rds"; "Prayer is the contemplation of facts of life from the highest point of "; "Hitch your wagon to a star"; "Noths at last sacred but the integrity of your mind"; "Trust thyself: every heart vis to that iron string"; "If a single man himself indomitably on his instincts, there abide, the huge world will come 1 to him"; "See [a thing] to be a lie, you have already dealt it its mortal "; "Beauty is the mark God sets upon e"; "In God, every end is converted into ✓ means" in such pregnant sentences as one finds an explanation of the influEmerson exerted upon his auditors, may exert upon his readers. It is in utterances that Emerson the lecturer essayist became Emerson the prophet, g forth ideas which had proved of comg significance in his own life, and which

were to stir unnumbered hearers to higher thinking and more generous living. He who could thus phrase his precepts could well trust to the sympathetic reader the task of divining the informing unity-intuitional, and not structural-which bound together the apparently disconnected fragments.

That there was such a unity, not of form or structure, but of idea, of attitude, becomes apparent when one realizes that each of the poems and essays centers around some one of the concepts which, taken together, compose Emerson's philosophy. To call him a Transcendentalist, is to place him among those who were in revolt against Locke's empiricism, and to align him with the thinkers who hold that man's most important ideas and beliefs are not based on experience, but "transcend" it: are in part innate, and in part derived by intuition. It is clear that he was the most influential of American Transcendentalists; it is as clear that he owed much to kindred minds, from Plato and Confucius to Carlyle. Yet as philosopher he developed no systematic cosmogony, nor did he face some of the central problems that have given pause to thinkers of all ages. He was content to announce his gospel in his own way, and to leave "systems" to other hands.

What the ideas are which compose that gospel, and of which his poems and essays are fragmentary developments, it is not difficult to state: The spiritual nature of reality; the primary importance of self-reliance; the existence of a unifying "Over-Soul" which harmonizes and explains all the diverse phenomena of life; the supreme significance of character; the obligation of optimism, of hope these are some of the truths which Emerson preached to his countrymen. That he never forced-or permitted-himself to develop systematically any one of his central themes, as Edwards had done in The Freedom of the Will; that his phraseology is at times baffling and obscure; that his conception of an "Over-Soul" seemed to some people an unsatisfactory substitute for God; that his revolt against authority went so far as to alienate still others among his contemporaries -these matters are of less significance than that the world in which he lived caught gleams of inspiration from his personality as well as from his philosophy, and accepted him as "the friend and aider of those who would live in the spirit." He may well serve in the same capacity today.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The bibliography of Emerson is so extensive that only the most important sources of information and guides to further study can be indicated in this volume.

The student of Emerson might well begin his reading with Harold C. Goddard's Studies in New England Transcendentalism, N. Y. 1908, which is an admirable survey of the

philosophical and religious background against which Emerson's figure appears. To make the picture more complete one should add such works as Lindsay Swift's Brook Farm; its Members, Scholars, and Visitors, N. Y. 1900; Bronson Alcott's Concord Days, Boston, 1872; F. B. Sanborn and W. T. Harris's A. Bronson Alcott, Boston, 1893, 2 vols.; Charles T. Brooks's William Ellery Channing, Boston, 1880; Thomas Wentworth Higginson's Margaret Fuller Ossoli (A. M. L. series) Boston, 1884; and O. B. Frothingham's George Ripley (A. M. L. series), Boston, 1882.

EDITIONS. Of Emerson's own works, the Centenary, edited with biographical introduction and notes by E. W. Emerson, Boston, 1903, 12 vols., is the best readily available collected edition. To this should of course be added the Journals, edited by E. W. Emerson and W. E. Forbes, Boston, 1909-14, 10 vols.; for excellent selections see The Heart of Emerson's Journals by Bliss Perry, Boston, 1926. There are several collections of Emerson's letters, though no one is inclusive. Perhaps the most significant is The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, revised edition, Boston, 1888, 2 vols. There are countless reprints of the earlier volumes of essays.

BIOGRAPHIES. The standard biography is J. E. Cabot's A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Boston, 1887, 2 vols. Oliver Wendell Holmes's Ralph Waldo Emerson (A. M. L. series), Boston, 1885, is a sympathetic study by a personal friend. Edward Waldo Emerson's Emerson in Concord, Boston, 1888, is the most detailed treatment of Emerson's home life. George E. Woodberry's Ralph Waldo Emerson (E. M. L. series) N. Y. 1907, is an admirable brief biography. O. W. Firkins's Ralph Waldo Emerson, Boston, 1915, presents an adequate account of Emerson's life, and a searching, stimulating, commentary on Emerson as prose writer, as poet, and as philosopher. If one had to limit one's reading to a single biographical work, this last would probably be the one to choose.

CRITICAL ARTICLES. Matthew Arnold's essay Emerson, in his Discourses in America, should be read by every student. Bliss Perry's two essays on Emerson, in his The Praise of Folly, Boston, 1923, add much to Our understanding of Emerson. As both have appeared since the C. H. A. L., they should be listed here. For other suggestions, see the C. H. A. L.

NOTES

THE JOURNALS

445. The greater part of Emerson's Journals is made up of random jottings on philosophy, literature, and politics, rather than of personal memoirs. From these jottings, as Emerson wrote his essays, he took sentence after sentence until by the

end of his life he had skimmed most of the cream from the Journals. Much of the remainder is now available in the Houghton Mifflin edition prepared by E. W. Emerson and W. E. Forbes. For an admirable review of the Journals see Bliss Perry's essay Emerson's Savings Bank, in The Praise of Folly and other Papers, Boston, 1923. The passages here reprinted are from the first volume, and are significant only as they throw a somewhat new light upon Emerson the college student.

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

447. From the volume Nature, Addresses, and Lectures (1849). The address, often referred to as "America's intellectual Declaration of Independence," was delivered before the Harvard chapter of Phi Beta Kappa on August 31, 1837. For the best account of the occasion see Bliss Perry's Emerson's Most Famous Speech, in The Praise of Folly. Holmes, in commenting on it, said, "The young men went from it as if a prophet had been proclaiming to them, 'Thus saith the Lord.' No listener ever forgot that address, and among all the noble utterances of the speaker it may be questioned if one ever contained more truth in language more like that of immediate inspiration." (Emerson, p. 88.) 453. a. 44. Flamsteed and Herschel. John Flamsteed (1646-1719), the first Astronomer Royal; Sir William Herschel (1738-1822) and his son John were both famous astronomers.

457. a. 15. Emanuel Swedenborg. A Swedish mystic and theologian (1688-1772), founder of "The New Church." Emerson makes him the subject of one of the chapters in his Representative Men. a. 46. Pestalozzi. Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746-1827), a Swiss educator and writer.

SELF-RELIANCE

458. Self-Reliance was published in Essay ays, First Series (1841). Perhaps the best short comment on the controversy which it aroused and on the proper interpretation of Emerson's thought is to be found in the following passage from Emerson in Concord by Ralph Waldo Emerson, p. 250: "Hence his essay on Self-Reliance, which has been called the lowest note in his philosoph, rightly read, is the highest note. He explains it, after his manner, elsewhere [in the Anti-Slavery Address of March 7, 1854), and says that one comes at last to learn 'That self-reliance, the height and perfection of man, is reliance on God."" a. 18. Ne te quaesiveris extra. Seek not outside thyself.