educated congregations, I think its day is gone by." He is so confident that he repeats it on the same page: "The day for any average minister to lead and influence such [that is, educated] people by his preaching is gone by." The day of preaching gone by! So they were saying in the thirteenth century, and while the words were still hot on their lips there suddenly appeared on the smiling Umbrian plain-his coming was as swift and unexpected as if he had been dropped from a cloudless sky-a man of almost diminutive stature, with thin features, of delicate health like Robert Hall, yet practicing the severest austerities, with an indomitable will, yet tender and sympathetic, and by the miracle of preaching, almost before men realized it, the old faith was everywhere revived. So men were saying when Hugh Blair was droning his platitudes in Edinburgh-when, lo, a thousand insistent voices were heard along the highways of England and a new day had dawned on the earth. The day of preaching gone by! Rather is the day at hand for a generation of preachers. Opportunities create preachers. Preachers are made by great themes and great struggles. The ante-bellum days made Whittier, who never rose to grander heights than in his anti-slavery poems. What a day you young ministers of God are entering upon!-a day of alarm and strain, of fatiguing campaigns and peril of battle, of poverty, and wounds, and death; but what of that? If the Spirit of the Lord is upon you, and the death of the Son of God is real to you, and the awesome cries of humanity lash your soul, as the west wind goads the sea into mountains of fury and power, into tumults of eager solicitude and upspringing passion of effort, you will cry as did old Samuel Adams on the morning of the battle of Lexington, "Oh, glorious day!" It is a glorious day, my brethren. Thank God that you will feel its breath upon your faces, and enter with boundless joy into its struggles.

Gyra Squier Pipple

ART. IV.-LONGFELLOW'S SERVICE TO AMERICAN

CULTURE

It is more and more apparent that Longfellow's real distinction is due, not to the excellence of his prose achievement, not to his attainments as a college professor, not even to his greatness as a poet, but to his superiority and grace of manhood. His prose productions do not commend themselves as enduring works of art; his function as a college professor was incidental, temporary, and to some extent perfunctory; and his poetry, sweet and noble as it is, rarely attains supreme excellence. His finest work of art is his own character. No one is ever disappointed in that. It nowhere falls short. He was never able to put into either speech, or poetry, or prose quite all that there was good and great in himself. But whether he was discoursing to a body of students in the classroom, or addressing a wider and more varied audience through OutreMer and Hyperion, or enchanting a nation with his song, through it all and over and above it all he was diffusing his own personality, and so disseminating the finest ideals and the mellowest culture yet known to America.

I am aware that there are those who will question whether culture is not an altogether negligible factor in America. Some there are who will assert that the refinements of life are more honored among us in the breach than in the observance. They will take the rumored reply of the Chicagoan, who, when twitted by a Bostonian on the lack of culture in Chicago, retorted with spirit that Chicago was about to take up culture now and boom it, as indicative of the conception of culture universally held in America. And there is not a little to encourage and justify such a conclusion. For refinement cometh not with observation. The winds of culture blow where they list, and we know neither whence they come nor whither they go. But the Philistine trumpeteth from afar. He goeth hither and thither in the land; and maketh his uprisings and his downsittings to be known throughout the earth. The "yellow" journal and the American millionaire fill the universe with the magnitude of our iniquity and our ignorance. It is too true that

our refinement of late years has had to do very largely with the refinement of oil; and that, far from busying ourselves in creating "a current of true and fresh ideas," in accordance with the gospel of culture preached so assiduously by Matthew Arnold in his day and generation, we have been supremely exercised lest there should be a diminution in the current of our trade in canned meats and sausages, or a decline in the values of real estate. But be our cultural status at present what it may, it is vastly better than it was a hundred years ago. Up to the beginning of the nineteenth century there was everything in New England to chill and nothing to nourish the æsthetic and imaginative life of the people. The one overpowering motive of the Puritans was to work the will of God upon earth; and they believed that God required very rigorous things of them and of all men. They worshiped in bare, cold, ugly meetinghouses where they listened to long, terrible prayers, longer and more terrible sermons, and sang crude and unmusical versions of the Psalms. Gloomy thoughts of the brevity of life, the certainty of death, and the endlessness of future existence stared them continually in the face by day and made their dreams frightful by night. Purely theoretical Puritanism was pretty likely to preach that "human nature is damnable," that conscience and elegance are at variance, and that the refinements of art are seductions of the devil. Emerson's saying, that the Puritans "were so righteous they had to hold on to the huckleberry bushes for fear of being translated," throws not a little light upon the temper of his ancestors. They were consumed with a harsh and unlovely religious zeal on the one hand, and forced to a relentless Yankee clutch upon the huckleberry bushes of material existence on the other. Between the brassy heavens into which they gazed and the obdurate soil in which they delved there was spread out for their delight a whole rich, fair world of opportunity and enjoyment. But to this they were blind. There were, nevertheless, in this hardy vine of New England Puritanism sweet potencies that were later to yield choice vintages of poetry, and wit, and philosophy. The race that could breed Longfellow, and Holmes, and Emerson, is not a race to be ridiculed or despised. But the narrowness and intensity of the Puritan temper and manner of life was not the

only influence that tended to inhibit culture and ideality in New England during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The time for the dreamer and the singer had not yet come. The era of material conquest must precede that of æsthetic enjoyment; and the process of establishing civil order must anticipate the products of the creative imagination. For many decades our Puritan ancestors found the task of taming the savage and conquering the brute forces of nature about them scarcely less realistic and absorbing than the work of subduing the devil within them. Houses must be erected, forests must be cleared, fields must be planted and harvested, rivers must be bridged, roads must be cut, and, finally, cities must be built and constitutions made before there could be leisure for the refinements of life. There is little need for poetry and painting, and little opportunity to enjoy them while men are on the march or in camp and battle. They themselves are enacting deeds that are later to become the subject-matter for epics, and so warm and fullpulsed is the excitement that accompanies action that any account of it in song or story must seem thin and uninteresting to men who have dared the unknown and achieved adventures stranger than fiction. Books and statues and paintings, like woman, must have a permanent dwelling place; and Labor, during these years, was the young pioneer who had gone forth with an ax and gun to build a home in the wilderness for Art, his fair young bride who was to follow him later. So these first two centuries were centuries of resolute practical endeavor, heroic physical achievement, and farsighted civic beginnings. But not until the opening of the nineteenth century did the starved emotional and imaginative life of New England begin to get itself properly fed. Before the coming of Longfellow there had been harbingers of sweetness and light. "Fine sounds" had been "floating wild about the earth." The genial Washington Irving, sunning himself in the bright lands beyond the sea, had early found favor in the social and literary circles of Europe. And, good American that he was, he turned to captivate the hearts of susceptible New Englanders with romantic suggestions of the ripe beauty of rural England, and the opulence and splendor of Spanish life and Spanish legend. Ticknor too,

and Bryant had made incursions upon Spanish literary soil, and had brought back treasures more welcome than the hoarded gold of pirates. And the enlightened Emerson, who represented the spiritual quintessence of Puritanism in America, with silvery eloquence and pen dipped in the brightest hues of earthly love and heavenly grace, had been announcing in transcendental language the hour of man's intellectual emancipation. So by the time Longfellow took up his residence at Cambridge after his second sojourn abroad, the New World was fully prepared for the fine culture that he was to nourish and disseminate.

If we would fully realize the importance of Longfellow's contribution to ideality in America, we must now for a little time inquire what manner of man he was. America has yet to see, and, perhaps, the world has yet to show a better type of civilization than that which centered in Longfellow and Cambridge during the second third of the last century. Writing of Lowell, Mr. Howells says: "In Lowell I was always conscious of an older and closer and stricter civilization than my own, an unbroken tradition, a more authoritative status." He might as well have written this of Longfellow. There was, at any rate, no good thing lacking in Longfellow's ancestry and breeding. If there ever was a New England aristocracy—and to affirm the contrary would be to challenge the mischievous spirits of Holmes and Lowell to send a twinge of remonstrance from the world of shades--Longfellow belonged to that aristocracy. On his father's side he was descended from sturdy yeomen, brave patriots, and accomplished gentlemen; and on his mother's side he could proudly trace his lineage to John Alden, the first man who set foot on Plymouth rock. He was reared within sound of the sea with its endless riches of poetic suggestions, under the eye of an upright and religious father of national eminence and a sensitive-souled, imaginative, beauty-loving mother. He had access to books, was not destitute of good society, and enjoyed such other refinements as were available in the New England of ninety years ago. He had the advantages of a college education, a thing not to be despised even in that day of small beginnings; and before he had come of age he was given access to the romantic countries of Europe and literatures of the