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1835. Edward Coate Pinkney's A Health, so well known for its lines beginning

I fill this cup to one made up of loveliness alone,

was written during this period. Pinkney and Poe were both Southern poets. It will be seen that the literature of the United States was thus far produced in either New York or the South. In the last year of this period, however, the literary geography was changed, and New England became prominent. In 1837 appeared the first series of Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales, and in that same year Emerson delivered the declaration of American intellectual independence in his stirring Phi Beta Kappa address at Harvard University on The American Scholar. Nothing of any great value had come from New England previous to that year, unless we except Old Ironsides and The Last Leaf, by Oliver Wendell Holmes. Unquestionably Cooper, Hawthorne, and Poe are worthy of comparison with their contemporaries in the Old World, Hawthorne being one of the greatest novelists of any country or time; but we can merely mention them in a book devoted chiefly to the literature of England.

QUESTIONS AND TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION

1. Discuss the general characteristics of the nineteenth-century life and thought.

2. Give the dates marking off the periods of its literature.

3. What features especially characterize the first period?

4. Who were the great poets of the first period of the nineteenth century, and who its great novelists?

5. Discuss the effects of the French Revolution upon English poets. 6. How would you distinguish the poetic work of Coleridge from that

of Wordsworth, and how that of Scott from both of them?

7. How distinguish the work of Byron from that of Shelley, and that of Keats from each of the other two?

8. What poem by Shelley do you like best? What makes you like it better than others by him?

9. Memorize Keats's The Human Seasons; also the stanzas of The Eve of Saint Agnes which you like best.

IO.. What were the chief influences molding the work of Shelley? of Keats? 11. Why could not the pictures in Keats's La Belle Dame Sans Merci be painted?

Give your reasons.

12. Compare the work of Jane Austen with that of Sir Walter Scott. 13. Ivanhoe: (a) Compare the first chapter with the opening chapter of Waverley; with the opening chapter of Quentin Durward. (b) Draw a plan of the lists from the description in Chapter VII. (c) Of Chapters XII, XIII, and XXIX, which do you think the best? (d) Find as many passages as you can illustrating the differences between Saxon and Norman. (e) Point out some differences between conversation in fiction and conversation in actual life. (f) In landscape description do you think Scott is better in his novels or in his poems? (g) What is the most picturesque incident in Ivanhoe?

14. Commit to memory one of the poems of Thomas Campbell, preferably one of his patriotic poems.

15. Which of the essays of Charles Lamb is your favorite? Why?

16. Name the other essayists of the period; also three of the lesser novelists.

17. Who were the leading writers in America before 1837? What have you already read of their writings?

READING LIST FOR THE EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY

COLERIDGE,

WORDSWORTH,

SCOTT,
BYRON,

POETRY

Christabel and Other Poems. Edited by Hannaford
Bennett..

Ode on Intimations of Immortality, The Solitary
Reaper, Ode to Duty. In Selected Poems,
edited by Clara L. Thomson.

The Lady of the Lake. Edited by L. DuPont Syle.
Childe Harold's Departure, The Destruction of Sen-
nacherib, Mazeppa's Ride, Sonnet on Chillon. In
Poems, chosen and arranged by Matthew Arnold.

SHELLEY,

KEATS,

MACAULAY,

LAMB,

DE QUINCEY,

The Cloud, To a Skylark, Ode to the West Wind. In Poems by Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats, edited by James Webber Linn.

Isabella, The Eve of Saint Agnes, Ode on a Grecian Urn, La Belle Dame Sans Merci. In Poems, edited by Arlo Bates.

ESSAY

Milton, Johnson. "Everyman's Library." Miscellaneous Essays. "Winston's Illustrated Handy

Classics."

A Dissertation upon Roast Pig, Dream Children.
In A Book of English Essays, edited by C. T.
Winchester.

Joan of Arc, The English Mail-Coach.

J. M. Hart.

Edited by

DICKENS,

JANE AUSTEN,

SCOTT,

MARRYAT,

JANE PORTER,

NOVEL

Pickwick Papers.
period.)

"Everyman's Library." (See next

Pride and Prejudice. Winston's "Illustrated Handy

Classics."

Waverley, Ivanhoe, Quentin Durward, Rob Roy, The
Heart of Midlothian, The Pirate, Guy Mannering,
Kenilworth, The Talisman. "Everyman's Library."
Mr. Midshipman Easy. "Everyman's Library.”
Thaddeus of Warsaw, with Introduction by Ernest A.

Baker.

BULWER LYTTON, The Last Days of Pompeii, Rienzi. "Everyman's

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HELPFUL BOOKS ON THE PERIOD

A History of Nineteenth Century Literature, George Saintsbury. (The Macmillan Company.)

The French Revolution and English Literature, Edward Dowden. (Scrib

ner's.)

English Poetry from Blake to Browning, W. Macneale Dixon. (Methuen & Co.)

The Age of Wordsworth, C. H. Herford. (George Bell & Sons.)

The French Revolution and the English Poets, A. E. Hancock. (Henry Holt & Co.)

Shelley, Godwin, and Their Circle, H. N. Brailsford. (Henry Holt & Co.) History of English Literature and of the English Language, pages 435 to 520, George L. Craik. (Griffin, Bohn, & Co.)

See also Bibliography on The Novel, in Chapter IX, page 378.

CHAPTER VII

THE VICTORIAN ERA

1837-1890

I. GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS

Science and imagination. The nineteenth century was above all a century of progress in science. Contrary, however, to what one might carelessly think, the rise of science to great importance by no means weakened the power of the imagination. The fact of the matter is that the highest achievements of science are due to the exercise of the power of the imagination rather than to that of any other power, though its working comes generally at the end of a long process of patient observation and correlation of the results of what has been observed. After such a process, the imagination, as in the case of Newton or of Darwin, seizes the correlated results and from them wrests a conclusion which we call a law of nature. A law of nature is simply a statement covering what Huxley called "an observed uniformity." Every one recognizes that it is the imaginative power of the mind which makes possible the work of such a man as Thomas Edison, or Commodore Peary, or the man who builds a transcontinental railway, or one who constructs a Panama or a Cape Cod or a Kiel canal. The imagination is not confined to the operations of the spirit of a fictionist or of a poet only. Hence it is that science, instead of retarding the advance of the expression of the human spirit in

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