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 behind the virtues to that general moral power which is the source of all the virtues.

There is a familiar saying of Emerson's which would epitomize, if it were understood, most of what is important and dynamic in all the Emersonian messages. Taken from its context in the essay on "Civilization," it has perhaps been more widely quoted than anything else that he uttered. Unfortunately one never hears it quoted with any sense of what it means in the thought of Emerson, where its position is absolutely central. The saying is this: "Hitch your wagon to a star." If one asks a man from whose lips it has glibly slipped what "Hitch your wagon to a star" means, he replies, "Aim high," a useful enough maxim of archery, but as a moral precept dreadfully trite and unproductive. What Emerson really means is: Put yourself in connection with irresistible power. In the physical world, let water turn your mill, let steam pull your cars, let the atmospheric electricity carry your words around the world. "That is the way we are strong, by borrowing the might of the elements." Likewise in the moral world, go where the gods are going, take the direction of all good men and let them bear you along, strike into the current of the great human traditions, discover the law of your higher nature and act with it. Presently you will notice that you are no longer fuming at obstacles and fretting at your personal impotence, but are borne forward like one destined.

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 At just this point many stern critics have cried out against Emerson as a moral teacher, and have charged him with counselling an optimistic passivity. Emerson bids us go with the current. The stern critic snatches at a figure and comes away with an error. Have not all the orthodox doctors taught that the good man goes against the current? Such misapprehension is the penalty for being a poet—for not sticking faithfully to the technical jargon. Without resorting to that medium, however, it should be possible to clear Emerson of the charge of counselling a foolish optimism, an indiscreet or base passivity. It should, at any rate, be possible to clear him in the eyes of any one whose morals have, "like his, a religious basis—for example, in the eyes of the sad and strenuous author of that great line: "In la sua volontade è nostra pace—In his will is our peace." The point is, that Emerson does not urge us to confide in all currents, to yield to all tendencies. It is only after we have arrived by high thinking at a proud definition of man that we are to take for our motto: "I dare do all that may become a man." It is only after we have discovered by severe inquisition the law of our higher self that we are to trust our instincts and follow our nature. We are to be confident and passive. Yes: when we are doing the will of God.

What made Emerson's teaching take hold of his contemporaries, what should commend it to us today, is just its unfailingly positive character, the

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 way it supplements by the restoration of classical virtues our Christian gospel of long-suffering. There is a welcome in it for life, even before the quality is disclosed: "Virtue is uneducated power." There is a place in it for manly resistance: "Be as beneficent as the sun or the sea, but if your rights as a rational being are trenched on, die on the first inch of your territory." There is the strong man's relish for difficulty and hostility: "We must have antagonisms in the tough world for all the variety of our spiritual faculties or they will not be born." There is precept for use of the spur: "He that rides his hobby gently must always give way to him that rides his hobby hard." There is warrant for choosing one's path: It is a man's "essential virtue to carry out into action his own dearest ends, to dare to do what he believes and loves. If he thinks a sonnet the flower and result of the world, let him sacrifice all to the sonnet.' Even in his definition of friendship, Emerson drives at action: "He is my friend who makes me do what I can." It is obvious that he restores ambition, an aspect of magnanimity, to its proper place in the formation of the manly character, ambition to bring one's life to its fullest fruit.

This accounts for his extraordinary emphasis upon the virtue of courage: "It may be safely trusted—God will not have His work made manifest by cowards." Read from that cue, and presently you fancy that all forms of virtue appeared to him as aspects and phases of courage. He has

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 praise for the courage of nonconformity, the courage of inconsistency, the courage of veracity, the courage to mix with men, the courage to be alone, the courage to treat all men as equals—but at this thought he remembers his proud conception of man, his imagination kindles, and he cries: "Shall I not treat all men as gods?" and, elsewhere, "God defend me from ever looking at a man as an animal." It sounds like extravagance. It may turn out to be a maxim of the higher prudence. Treating men like worms has been tried—without particularly gratifying results. Why not explore the consequences of assuming that men have a nobler destiny? If you are educating a prince, all the classical manuals enjoin it upon you to treat him like a prince. Why should not this hold of uncrowned sovereigns in general? Courage to do these extraordinary things Emerson learned of his Aunt Mary Moody Emerson, who taught him in his boyhood to face whatever he feared. Such courage he praised in his last word on Carlyle, "He never feared the face of man."

Moralists present to us in general three distinguishable sanctions for the virtuous life, or as Emerson would have preferred to call it, the heroic life. They may commend conduct as conducive to happiness in the future world—the theological sanction. They may commend it as conducive to pleasure or happiness or convenience on earth—the utilitarian sanction. Or finally they may commend

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 it as in accordance with the proper nature of man—the humanistic sanction. This is the position taken by Marcus Aurelius in a passage extolled by Matthew Arnold. Which of these is Emerson's sanction? In the essay on "Compensation," which he thought one of his prime contributions, he argues that divine justice executes itself in this world in accordance with inevitable laws. It is essentially the argument of Franklin; one is still concerned with reward and punishment. But the general tenor of Emerson's life and teaching rises above this level. Habitually he speaks in the spirit of the Roman Emperor, so deeply appealing to the well-born soul: "A third in a manner does not even know what he has done, but he is like a vine which has produced grapes, and seeks for nothing more after it has once produced its proper fruit. As a horse when he has run, a dog when he has caught the game, a bee when it has made its honey, so a man when he has done a good act, does not call out for others to come and see, but he goes on to another act, as a vine goes on to produce again the grapes in season."

Though Emerson had thought much about the relation of the individual to society and to the state, he was not in any practical diurnal sense of the word

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 a politically-minded man. Politics is the art and science of governing masses. The art and science which appealed to his ambition is that which enables the individual to govern himself. So far as he was concerned, he felt little need of external government. Indeed, like many of the saints and sages, conscious that he himself was actuated by the purest internal motives, he looked with wary and somewhat jealous eye upon the existence of an external controlling power in the state which might be actuated by motives far less pure and in the exercise of its constituted activity, warp him from the bias of his soul. In this respect, he was distinctly a child of the time-spirit which followed the Revolution and preceded the Civil War, that period when the first dire need of a powerful union had passed and the second dire need of it had not yet been fully manifested. He could sympathize with his friend Thoreau, who withdrew from the social organization to the extent of refusing to pay his taxes. But his Yankee common sense preserved him from imitating this fanaticism. He perceived, as every intelligent lover of freedom does, that a decent conformity is the very secret of freedom.

He loved freedom too much to coquet with anarchy. The imaginative masters of his political speculations, Plato, More, Milton, Burke, Montesquieu, had confirmed him, furthermore, in the conviction that "politics rest on necessary foundations, and cannot be treated with levity." The foundation

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 of government, he recognized, is in the constitution of man: "Every human society wants to be officered by the best class, who shall be masters instructed in all the great arts of life; shall be wise, temperate, brave, public men, adorned with dignity and accomplishments." He perceived that it is no true function of the philosopher to bring into contempt even imperfect instruments of order and liberty till better instruments are at hand.

Like most Americans, however, he had pretty much lost respect for government by an hereditary aristocracy. He acknowledges the virtues of the hereditary principle but with a touch of disdain: it has "secured permanence of families, firmness of customs, a certain external culture and good taste; gratified the ear with historic names." Its defect was its failure to make the laws of nature serve it. Nature did not co-operate with the system: "the heroic father did not surely have heroic sons, and still less heroic grandsons; wealth and ease corrupted the race."

He goes a long way towards accepting the principles of the French Revolution. His respect for efficient power makes him betray, in Representative Men, a great admiration for Napoleon Bonaparte, qualified by grave reservations. He desires, with Carlyle, to bring forward a natural aristocracy, an aristocracy of talent. He would like to believe that democracy is the means for recruiting that talent, for organizing the superior class by which

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 society needs to be officered. But his study of the tyrannies of an "efficient state" administered by Napoleonic officers to whose talents a career was opened, has awakened in him as it never did in Carlyle, a deep suspicion of the "natural method," has put him on a criticism of democracy, which is the most valuable element in his political writing.

Might with right, Emerson never confused as Carlyle confused them—hopelessly; as democracies may at any time, under bad leadership, confuse them. "Our institutions," he declares in his "Politics," "though in coincidence with the spirit of the age, have not any exemption from the practical defects which have discredited other forms. Every actual State is corrupt. Good men must not obey the laws too well." His patriotism was free, emancipated. In the year when he became of age, 1824, he wrote in his Journal: "I confess I am a little cynical on some topics, and when a whole nation is roaring Patriotism at the top of its voice, I am fain to explore the cleanness of its hands and the purity of its heart." In his Journal of 1833–5 he wrote "the life of this world has a limited worth in my eyes, and really is not worth such a price as the toleration of slavery." He cried out at the land-grabbing of the Mexican War. He spoke repeatedly between 1837 and 1861 in behalf of free speech, in behalf of emancipating the slaves, and in favor of violating the Fugitive Slave Law. Against the howling of mobs, as Mr. Woodberry

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 shows in an admirable summary of his participation in the Anti-slavery movement, "his civic courage was flawless." He interrupted his lecture on Heroism in 1838 to praise the brave Lovejoy "who gave his breast to the bullets of a mob, for the rights of free speech and opinion, and died when it was better not to live." He received John Brown in Concord, and when two years later the law doomed him to die, he declared publicly in Boston that the new saint would "make the gallows glorious like the cross."

Efficient nature, the source of political power, herself requires to be checked. Where is the check to be found? "The wise man is to settle it immovably in his mind, that he only is fit to decide on his best action; he only is fit to praise it; his verdict is praise enough, and as to society, 'their hiss is thine applause (Journals, 1833–5). The contention of parties cannot be trusted to guard the interests of truth. Emerson has no naive respect for numbers. He has looked with disillusioned eye upon the wisdom of majorities. He confides to his Journal, for example, that if Jackson is elected, "we shall all feel dirty." He says that if he were unduly in love with life, he would attend a Jackson caucus, and "I doubt not the unmixed malignity, the withering selfishness, the impudent vulgarity, that mark those meetings would speedily cure me of my appetite for longevity." Yet despite this bitterness, the Jackson party was, as he

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 himself recognized, that towards which his own principles and sympathies—in theory, broadly popular—should have inclined him. Speaking for publication, in his essay on "Politics," he reveals, with less asperity, the fact that he is not captivated by either party. The paragraph that follows might have been written by a disappointed independent of 1920:

"The vice of our leading parties in this country . . . is that they do not plant themselves on the deep and necessary grounds to which they are respectively entitled. . . . Of the two great parties which, at this hour, almost share the nation between them, I should say that the one has the best cause, and the other contains the best men. The philosopher, the poet, or the religious man will, of course, wish to cast his vote with the democrat, for free-trade, for wide suffrage, for the abolition of legal cruelties in the penal code, and for facilitating in every manner the access of the young and the poor to the sources of wealth and power. [My italics]. But he can rarely accept the persons whom the so-called popular party proposes to him as representatives of these liberalities. They have not at heart the ends which give to the name of democracy what hope and virtue are in it."

Possibly Emerson's concern for the "unwashed masses" forged a bit ahead of his sympathies as a man of flesh and blood. Theoretically, he was not afraid of dirt. Before Whitman bade us shun "delicatesse," Emerson had perceived that the effective

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 democrat must not be a "high priest of the kid-glove persuasion." Writing in his Journal at the age of thirty-two, he says: "I would not have a man dainty in his conduct. Let him not be afraid of being besmirched by being advertised in the newspapers, or by going into Athenaeums or town-meetings or by making speeches in public. Let his chapel of private thoughts be so holy that it shall perfume and separate him unto the Lord, though he lay in a kennel."

It ought to be possible to feel "inwardly perfumed and separated unto the Lord" without either showing or feeling that Brahminical spirit of exclusiveness which men like Holmes and Lowell exhibited, and of which they were obviously proud. Emerson was quite earnestly opposed to the celebrated Brahminism of Boston and Cambridge. As Mr. Brownell has finely said: "A constituent of his refinement was an instinctive antipathy to ideas of dominance, dictation, patronage, caste, and material superiority whose essential grossness repelled him and whose ultimate origin in contemptuousness—probably the one moral state except cravenness that chiefly he deemed contemptible—was plain enough to his penetration." Henry Adams suggests, indeed with a touch of characteristic humor, that Emerson, from the spiritual altitude of Concord, probably looked down on the Brahmins themselves, looked down, for instance, on the Adamses, as worldlings.

Now there is interesting evidence in the Journals

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 that Emerson might have looked down on Henry Adams but from a point of view remote from that indicated by Adams:

"I do not forgive in any man this forlorn pride, as if he were an Ultimus Romanorum. I am more American in my feelings. This country is full of people whose fathers were judges, generals, and bank presidents, and if all their boys should give themselves airs thereon and rest henceforth on the oars of their fathers' merit, we should be a sad hungry generation. Moreover, I esteem it my best birthright that our people are not crippled by family and official pride, that the best broadcloth coat in the country is put off to put on a blue frock, that the best man in town may steer his plough-tail or may drive a milk-cart. There is a great deal of work in our men, and a false pride has not yet made them idle or ashamed. Moreover, I am more philosophical than to love this retrospect. I believe in the being God, not in the God that has been. I work; my fathers may have wrought or rested. What have I to do with them, or with the Fellatahs, or the great Khan! I know a worthy man who walks the streets with silent indignation as a last of his race, quite contemptuously eyeing the passing multitude."

Emerson goes farther than that in welcoming the "new man," the power without known antecedents. In a notable passage of his Journal for 1845, one sees him, as it were, shaking off the dust

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 of the house of his fathers, breaking out of the old New England, in order to enter America, to participate in that national spirit which we know today must learn to enfold and assimilate men of all races:

"I hate the narrowness of the Native American Party. It is the dog in the manger. It is precisely opposite to all the dictates of love and magnanimity; and therefore, of course, opposite to true wisdom. . . Manis the most composite of all creatures . . . Well, as in the old burning of the Temple at Corinth, by the melting and intermixture of silver and gold and other metals a new compound more precious than any, called Corinthian brass, was formed; so in this continent—asylum of all nations—the energy of Irish, Germans, Swedes, Poles, and Cossacks, and all the European tribes—of the Africans, and of the Polynesians—will construct a new race, a new religion, a new state, a new literature, which will be as vigorous as the new Europe which came out of the smelting-pot of the Dark Ages, or that which earlier emerged from the Pelasgic and Etruscan barbarism. La Nature aime les croisements."

No man who honestly and earnestly contemplates the making of a nation out of such heterogeneous elements as Emerson here enumerates, no man who truly cherishes the potentialities of human power, wherever they lie, is disposed to assign to political agencies an undue part in shaping the product of

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 the melting pot. Emerson did not. If we were to sum up his attitude towards the state in a single sentence, it would take some such form as this: The State exists for the benefit of all the individuals in it: and its stability and its welfare depend primarily on the effort of each individual in it. All concrete advance towards social regeneration, he believed, is accomplished by minorities—by minorities of one! In a country with a strong inclination towards beginning all efforts for moral reformation by the election of a president and a secretary, he proposes this modest method: "Count from yourself in order the persons that have near relation to you up to ten or fifteen, and see if you can consider your whole relation to each without squirming. That will be something." Commenting, in "Life and Letters in New England," on a socialistic scheme for imposing economic salvation on the world from No. 200 Broadway, he surmises that it would be better to say: "Let us be lovers and servants of that which is just, and straighway every man becomes a center of a holy and beneficent republic, which he sees to include all men in its law, like that of Plato and Christ." Let the great state arch above us, but let it beware of pressing too near, lest it crush more natural and vital powers—the power of the individual over himself; the power of the family, the neighborhood, the town-meeting, the local enterprise; the "atmospheric" power of culture, the gradual and beneficent pressure of a

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 natural society steadily growing stronger by the diffusion of science and humane learning.

The Emersonian doctrine of democratic individualism has its defects. In these days it appears rather homely and old-fashioned. Yet it has merits towards which one occasionally turns with nostalgic yearnings, merits which may yet restore it to some of its former favor. After many a popular election, is it not still the chief available consolation to go quietly home and close the door and reflect that the wise man "occupies all the space between God and the mob?" And in spite of all the allurement of centralized power, with its promise of prompt and "nation-wide" progress in the sense of the men at Washington, shall we not find in the years to come that the preservation of individuality in the private citizen and of pride and initiative in the "parish," the province, and the separate states, is as vital to the health of the far-flung nation as the use of hands and feet?

It has ordinarily been assumed and asserted that Emerson was very little developed on the aestheticæsthetic [sic] side. This assumption is intimately associated with two other popular errors, which, in the light of our examination, we may now dismiss. We may first dismiss the popular error which holds that the center

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 of his being was ethical; for we have seen that the center of his being was religious. We may dismiss, also, the popular error of regarding him as a representative of Puritan decadence; for we have seen that he represents rather a renascence and fresh flowering of the ancient passion for self-perfection. We think rightly of Emerson when we think of him as a humanist bent upon liberating and developing not some but all of the properly human powers. He builds his many-chambered house of life around a private oratory, because like every successfully exploring humanist, he finds a private oratory at the center of his heart. But this innermost shrine of religious inspiration is emphatically not a Calvinistic chapel, hostile to the arts. It is a retreat friendly to all the Muses that ever haunted Siloa's brook or Heliconian springs.

Emerson believed, indeed, like his great predecessor of the seventeenth century, that the pulsing spirit which "voluntary moves harmonious numbers" prefers before all temples "the upright heart and pure." But no one who has approached that inner shrine will ever picture him as summoning the Sacred Nine about him in order to give them a lesson in conduct. No one understands Emerson who fails to perceive that he trusts his inspiration, like a Pythian prophet, like a celebrant of Dionysian mysteries. "If I am the devil's child," he defiantly retorted in his youth to one who had urged him to beware of his instincts, "I will live from the devil."

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 Well assured that he was not the devil's child, he opened communication with his sources of power, resolute to receive and utter whatever they sent, though it might sound like blasphemy, though it might whiff received ethics down the wind. Through a great part of his prose and verse, there is the peculiar beat and throb which marks work conceived in creative heat, under the sway of the "divine madness." Some of the friends who came closest to him testified to receiving from him not counsel but a sheer access of vital energy exhilarating to the verge of intoxication. It is above all a generative and fecundating impulse that he seeks for himself. It is this above all that he desires to impart to others.

We all tend to slip at times into colorless and meaningless routine, into lives of grey commonplace and insignificance. Emerson seems to have apprehended this as a peril to which our democratic society is peculiarly exposed. He cultivates the means of combating it. He cultivates, for example, the color of Oriental poetry. He follows Hafiz, this Unitarian in revolt against the tedium and dead level of the cold New England virtue, and cries: "Let us be crowned with roses, let us drink wine, and break up the tiresome old roof of heaven into new forms." He writes an essay on "Inspiration," which is a study under ten headings of the technique of exaltation, of ecstasy. He chants an ode to Bacchus, calling for

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Under the heading "Morals" in his discourse on "Poetry and Imagination," he comes to the conclusion, entirely characteristic of him, that "Power, new power, is the good which the soul seeks." On this theme Emerson writes occasionally with a recklessness not often associated with the "Victorian" period in America. For power, he intimates in "Mithridates," a poet may perhaps well pay with his soul:

As a priest of the "being God, not the God that has been," Emerson finds that even the greatest of the old poets do not wholly content him. As a

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 believer in the doctrine of continuous revelation, he demands a new revelation. "In a cotillon," he declares in "Poetry and Imagination," "some persons dance and others await their turn when the music and the figure come to them. In the dance of God there is not one of the chorus but can and will begin to spin, monumental as he now looks, whenever the music and figure reach his place and duty. O celestial Bacchus! drive them mad—this multitude of vagabonds, hungry for eloquence, hungry for poetry, starving for symbols, perishing for want of electricity to vitalize this too much pasture, and in the long delay indemnifying themselves with the false wine of alcohol, of politics, or of money."

Emerson knew pretty well what he wanted in the way of a new poet. He was not in the least interested in the production of more "parlor or piano verse." He wanted such utterance as could come only from a great and noble soul immersed in the realities and filled with the spirit of the modern world. His poet must be radical, revolutionary, formative: "Bring us the bards who shall sing all our old ideas out of our heads, and new ones in; men-making poets . . . poetry which finds its rhymes and cadences in the rhymes and iterations of nature, and is the gift to men of new images and symbols, each the ensign and oracle of an age; that shall assimilate men to it, mould itself into religions and mythologies, and impart its quality to centuries." In his essay on "The Poet," he regrets that

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 "we have yet had no genius in America, with tyrannous eye, which knew the value of our incomparable materials, and saw, in the barbarism and materialism of the times, another carnival of the same gods whose picture it so much admires in Homer; then in the middle age; then in Calvinism . . . Our log-rolling, our stumps and their politics, our fisheries, our Negroes, and Indians, our boats, and our repudiations, the wrath of rogues, and the pusillanimity of honest men, the northern trade, the southern planting, the western clearing, Oregon and Texas, are yet unsung. Yet America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres." Clearly, Emerson was calling for a singer in many important respects resembling Whitman; and Whitman answered.

It is not yet adequately recognized to what extent Emerson anticipated not only Whitman but also the poets of the present hour. He anticipates their desire to strike up for the new world a new tune. He thinks that we leaned too much in the past upon England. Our literature has become lifelessly traditional through uninspired imitation. We require some sort of break and shock to liberate our own native talents. In an extremely interesting passage of the third volume of the Journals, he records the surmise that salvation may come from that very element which, in politics, he thought of as constituting the party of unkempt pioneers, barbarians,

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 slave-holders, and corruptionists: "I suppose the evil may be cured by this rank rabble party, the Jacksonism of the country, heedless of English and of all literature—a stone cut out of the ground without hands—they may root out the hollow dilettantism of our cultivation in the coarsest way, and the new born may begin again to frame their own world with greater advantage."

As literary critic, Emerson has, with only an occasional trace of reluctance, the courage of his free religion, his philosophy, his politics. His thought in these matters underlies and supports his Poetics and his Rhetoric. Mystic, symbolist, and democrat, he is constrained to declare that there is no vulgar life save that of which the poetry has not yet been written. He urges us bravely to paint the prospect from our doors, wherever they open. He asserts the possibility of all subjects: "A dog drawn by a master, or a litter of pigs, satisfies, and is a reality not less than the frescoes of Angelo." He detests a bookish and fossilized phrase and diction: "He only is a good writer who keeps one eye on his page, and with the other sweeps over things, so that every sentence brings in a new contribution of observation." He has meditated deeply on image, rhyme, and rhythm; and has discovered the literary value of colloquial cadence, the picturesque language of children, the scoff and violence of the "yeoman," the pungency of natural persons expressing their mother-wit. His essays contain more great

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 "free verse" than any one has written since. Poems, such as "Hamatreya," "Woodnotes," "Monadnoc," and "Musketaquid," prove his possession of senses tinglingly responsive to the touches of native color, scent, and sound; show a poetical nature that has struck root and has been richly nourished "in haunts which others scorned." As for his general theory of art, in his more sanguine and exalted moments he goes beyond our most radical leaders in his passion for reconciling art with nature and restoring it to "all the people," so that the ultimate phase of artistic development would be an habitual happy improvisation.

That aspiration, as Emerson would have been the first to admit, was ideal, was Utopian. It could be realized only in a profoundly regenerated and enriched society. In this world as it is at present, he recognized that great poetry, for example, must be the result of special culture and austere discipline. It must therefore be submitted for judgment to the cultivated and the disciplined. He has no immediate intention of accepting the standards of the mob. Our radical anti-critical friends would indeed dispose of him as "academic." For he comforts himself, in the absence of a national Academy, with this reflection, in the second volume of the Journals: "Consider the permanence of the best opinion: the certainty with which a good book acquires fame, though a bad book succeeds better at first. Consider the natural academy which the best heads of the

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 time constitute, and which 'tis pleasant to see, act almost as harmoniously and efficiently, as if they were organized and acted by vote."

For a writer who is often classified nowadays as a "mere moralist," Emerson liberated an extraordinary number of ideas about both the major and the minor problems of the literary art. You may say, if you like, that his literary scrupulousness is but an aspect of his moral rectitude; but any other writer of his exacting artistic conscience would be saluted by all the anti-Puritans as a "lover of beauty," a "martyr of style." In 1831, long before Flaubert or Pater had announced it, he committed to his Journal the doctrine of the "unique word:" "No man can write well who thinks there is any choice of words for him. The laws of composition are as strict as those of sculpture and architecture. There is always one line that ought to be drawn, or one proportion that should be kept, and every other line or proportion is wrong, and so far wrong as it deviates from this. So in writing, there is always a right word, and every other than that is wrong. There is no beauty in words except in their collocation. The effect of a fanciful word misplaced, is like that of a horn of exquisite polish growing on a human head."

Economy, Emerson regards as the poet's chastity: "Let the poet, of all men, stop with his inspiration. The inexorable rule in the muses' court, either inspiration or silence, compels the bard to report only

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 his supreme moments. It teaches the enormous force of a few words and in proportion to the inspiration checks loquacity." Despite his desire for fresh beginnings in America, he finds it necessary to turn back to the old English writers, "not because they are old, but simply because they wrote well. If we write as well, we may deviate from them and our deviations shall be classical." Every one, it is to be hoped, remembers the little poem called "The Test," in which Emerson challenges his reader to find the "five lines" in his verses which outlasted five hundred. It is a virtue in him, which our present loquacity should some day make esteemed, that he so often anticipates the winnowing of time, as in the firm Landorian carving of the Concord Hymn with its cumulative solemnity, reaching its climax in the breathless pause of the flawless final stanza, before the ultimate foot:

The popular taste in poetry, as is proved by many of the great reputations, is a little waterish. Emerson served "wine of wine." He has been underrated as a poet because he did not understand, or would not practice, dilution. One suspects that he might be reinstated if some student of Japanese verse would display in a wide-margined volume some fifty

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 or a hundred of his "images," selected here and there from his baskets of cut gems, for example:

Or possibly the reviver of Emerson should remind the Chicago School of these lines:

Critics have sufficiently harped upon certain defects in the prose style of Emerson: the apparent lack of firm design and evolution in the larger divisions of his discourse; the difficult transitions, the imperfect coherence, within the paragraphs. It is perhaps worth observing that some of these faults are closely connected with his characteristic virtues, and are truly due to the excess of these virtues. Emerson is characteristically rich and economical. He is so rich that he can put into a sentence as much as another would put into a paragraph, and as much into a paragraph as another would put into his entire discourse. He is so economical of space, so bent on filling every inch with solid matter, that he deliberately prunes away what is merely explanatory and transitional. If one compares passages in the Journals with parallel passages in the essays, one remarks at first with surprise that the superiority

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 on the side of fluency and texture is frequently with the Journals. The superiority of the essays is in condensation and intensity.

It should be observed, furthermore, that in the prose which Emerson himself published the degree of fluency and stylistic coherence varies greatly with the subject. The moral essays, such as "Self-Reliance" and "Compensation," are written more or less in the manner of the Book of Proverbs or the Essays of Bacon. They are built of distinct injunctions, maxims, and fragments of wisdom, twenty or thirty of them to a paragraph. "Solid bags of duckshot," Carlyle called these paragraphs, and urged Emerson to fuse them into a solid luminous bar. They are close packed enough, in all conscience, without fusion. There is stuff enough for a morning's meditation in any half-dozen of the hundreds of maxims which make up the essay on Self-Reliance. But no ordinary mind can read easily page after page of epitomized moral experience: "Be it how it will, do right now. Always scorn appearances, and you always may. The force of character is cumulative. All the foregone days of virtue work their health into this." Before such matter can be made to flow, it must be diluted. Read in youth and for the first time, a page of such writing seems pebbly and difficult. But at each re-reading one discovers more pebbles that are interestingly translucent, opalescent, with a fire at the heart of them. Returning later in life, after per-

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 haps the twentieth reading, one may discover that the pattern in the page comes out, that the gaps are bridged by one's own experience, that each sentence is illustrated by one's own verification of it, and that somehow this swift "saltation" from epitome to epitome of moral wisdom makes all other moral writing seem thin and flat.

But Emerson has many other prose manners, to which the stock criticisms and the traditional jests are not at all applicable. Turn, for example, to his "Thoreau," a biographical portrait executed in the firm objective manner of Suetonious yet with the gusto of Plutarch—a superbly vital piece of characterization, unsurpassed if not unequalled by anything of like scope in American literature. Or consider the flow of his reminiscences of Brook Farm and his bland comment on Fourierism in Life and Letters in New England; it is beautiful writing, urbane, luminous, exquisitely ironical. Or for still another vein, turn to the pages in English Traits where he describes meeting Thomas Carlyle, with something of the Scotch master's graphic force:

On my return, I came from Glasgow to Dumfries, and being intent on delivering a letter which I had brought from Rome, inquired for Craigenputtock. It was a farm in Nithdale, in the parish of Dumscore, sixteen miles distant. No public coach passed near it, so I took a private carriage from the inn. I found the house amid heathery hills, where the lonely scholar nourished his mighty heart. Car-

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 lyle was a man from his youth, an author who did not need to hide from his readers, and as absolute a man of the world, unknown and exiled on that hill-farm as if holding on his own terms what is best in London. He was tall and gaunt, with a cliff-like brow, self possessed and holding his extraordinary powers of conversation in easy command; clinging to his northern accent with evident relish; full of lively anecdote, and with a streaming humor, which floated everything he looked upon.

If Emerson writes comparatively little in the descriptive and narrative veins, it is neither from impotence nor by chance but on consideration. "Do you see," he asks himself, "what we preserve of history? a few anecdotes of a moral quality of some momentary act or word." The word of Canute on the, he observes, is all the world remembers of the Danish conquest. Under the influence of this thought, he seems, for a time, to have meditated composing "a modern Plutarch," British and American—in which his "Thoreau" would well have taken the place of Cato, and his "Lincoln" a place of its own. His Representative Men was a partial fulfilment of the design. But quite early in life Emerson was much occupied by a rival thought, thus recorded in the fourth volume of the Journals: "I said to Bryant and to these young people, that the high poetry of the world from the beginning has been ethical, and it is the tendency of the ripe modern mind to produce it. . . . As, I think, no man could be better occupied than in making up his

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 own bible by hearkening to all those sentences which now here, now there, now in nursery rhymes, now in Hebrew, now in English bards, thrill him like the sound of a trumpet." In fulfilment of that design Emerson wrote his great essays.

To many a lonely student, obscure and friendless, meditating in the long cold spring and adolescence of his talent on his untried powers, Emerson has come as with the sound of a magical trumpet, shattering the dungeons of fear, sending the young knight on his quest inwardly fortified and resolute to give soul and body to that undertaking, whatever it may be, for which he was sent into the world. Such is the primary function of the religious and democratic ethos with which he sought to impregnate American letters. He, too, had been lonely, obscure, uncertain of his way, feeble, and prone to husband his strength and gifts. But when he found which way the planets are going and the well where the gods drink, he faltered no longer. "What a discovery I made one day, that the more I spent the more I grew, that it was as easy to occupy a large place and do much work as an obscure place to do little; and that in the winter in which I communicated all my results to classes, I was full of new thoughts." To this, let us add that other thought, so precious to him that it appears repeatedly in various forms in the Journals and in the essays: "If a man knows the law, he may settle himself in a shanty in a pine forest, and men will

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 and must find their way to him as readily as if he lived in the City Hall." We shall keep near the main stream of Emersonian virtue, if we close with a variation and enlargement of the same theme: "Penetrate to the bottom of the fact that draws you, although no newspaper, no poet, no man, has ever yet found life and beauty in that region, and presently when men are whispered by the gods to go and hunt in that direction, they shall find that they cannot get to the point which they would reach without passing over that highway which you have built. Your hermit's lodge shall be the Holy City and the Fair of the whole world."

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Of that group of eminent New Englanders who made American literature in the middle of the last century it has become the fashion among our youth to speak with a certain condescension as of country cousins or old friends outgrown. Since Emerson and Lowell and Holmes and the other worthies of the age laid the author of The Scarlet Letter to rest in Sleepy Hollow, new generations have arisen, who have looked for a less austere leadership than New England followed, and for interpreters of appetites and passions in human nature which the "spiritual patricians" of an elder time deliberately suppressed and disdainfully ignored. Our literary historians tell us that the "national period" has arrived, and that in the widened domain of our letters the voices of the "Puritan aristocracy" must inevitably sound somewhat thin and provincial. Under the influence of European example our authors, particularly our novelists, are learning to overcome the Anglo-Saxon, or rather the Victorian, diffidence. In the choice and treatment of their themes they enjoy a liberty

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 which neither public opinion nor private conscience granted to the novelist of 1850; and with the new freedom and the tolerant national public, they are supposed to have become more secular, more sensuous, more erudite, and, above all, more vital and realistic.

To whatever disadvantages New England birth and breeding exposes the artist, Hawthorne was exposed. Born in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1804, he had in his veins the blood of Puritans, counted a witch-hanging judge among his ancestors, and was probably the first of his line who did not regard the writing and reading of romances as idleness and vanity. After nearly all his important literary work was done he saw something of England and Italy, but his experience till late in life was provincial, not to say parochial, and he himself avowed that New England was as large a lump of earth as his sympathies could embrace. The society of his native town he found so unremunerative or so formidable that he lived there for twelve years, following his graduation from Bowdoin, in virtual solitude, writing in obscurity and publishing anonymously the stories later collected as Twice Told Tales. In personal relations he ordinarily exhibited a taciturnity and reserve no doubt fostered by his hermit years but alleged to be characteristic of those who live too steadily by the "rockbound coast." In his art he maintained a reticence about many things which are now cried from the housetops. He

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 lacked the stimulus of fellow-workers in his own kind, and he labored in a romantic vein which even in his own day was on the point of appearing old-fashioned. Associated with an intellectual movement animated by an hereditary passion for righteousness, he was interested in the moral significance of his narratives; and his moral sympathies are said to have been at least deeply tinged with what the impatient young people of our day impatiently, not to say wrathfully, designate as Puritanism.

It should follow that his treatment of forbidden love has been quite overshadowed by the masterpieces of successors working with so many superiorities of circumstance and method. But as a matter of fact The Scarlet Letter appears to be as safe from competitors as Pilgrim's Progress or Robinson Crusoe. It is recognized as the classical treatment of its particular theme. Its symbols and scenes of guilt and penitence—the red letter on the breast of Hester Prynne, Arthur Dimmesdale on the scaffold—have fixed themselves in the memory of men like the figure of Crusoe bending over the footprint in the sand, and have become a part of the common stock of images like Christian facing the lions in the way. When a book has achieved this sort of celebrity, it needs ask for nothing more; it has entered into immortal life, and passes through all changes of fashion unscathed. But Hawthorne and this book have won the critical as well as the popular tribute. Nearly thirty years after the publica-

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 tion of The Scarlet Letter, Henry James, the most fastidious and the most sophisticated of critics, declared him to be "the most valuable example of the American genius," and The Scarlet Letter the finest specimen of his art. And in 1909, Mr. W. C. Brownell, an exacting critic, as free from suspicion of indulgence to the New England school as Henry James and more severe than James in his attitude towards Hawthorne's general reputation, finds this scarlet leaf among his withered laurels undamaged by the ruinous touch of time or rival splendors.

With the most restricted permanent glory Hawthorne himself would certainly have been better contented than with the widest transitory blaze. If he has left one book that cannot die, it is rather idle to make a pathetic story of his straitened circumstances and the narrow field in which his beautiful talent was perfected. Had he lived in a great literary center, kept his mind brisk by frequent intercourse with men of letters, and enriched his stores by travel and observation of various societies in the "grand style," his production might have been more abundant; it would probably have had more of the realistic virtue so highly valued at present; but it is doubtful whether it would have included The Scarlet Letter or the other works in which we recognize his special and unique quality. For the charm, with difficulty definable, which pervades his best writing is due to the felt presence of a subtle and exquisite spirit that has dwelt apart from the

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 throng in still and shadowed places, preserving with a kind of virginal jealousy its own internal vision of beauty, its own internal scale of values. If we value him in proportion as he approaches the interests and methods of contemporary realism, we miss what is most precious in him, namely, his power of reducing the insolent pretensions of circumstance to insignificance, and of giving to the moral and ideal world reality, importance, and supreme interest.

Hawthorne was at times a close and shrewd observer of external fact, but he did not dwell habitually in the world of external fact, and other men have far surpassed him in their notation of manners and the visible aspects of nature. External nature he tended to regard as hieroglyphic and symbolical. It engaged his attention chiefly for the correspondences which he could discern between it and the forms and relations of his ideas. His notebooks are full of brief jottings of apparently trivial scenes and incidents intended to serve as starting points for his interpretive imagination: "A cloud in the shape of an old woman kneeling, with arms extended towards the moon." "An old looking-glass. Somebody finds out the secret of making all the images that have been reflected in it pass back again across its surface." "A person to catch fireflies, and try to kindle his household fire with them. It would be symbolical of something." Underlying this search for ulterior meanings and spiritual signifcances there was doubtless in Hawthorne a certain

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 disdain for primary meanings, for the immediate gross reports of the senses. His imagination he sets continually at work contriving an avenue of escape from the vulgar and the humdrum. On a fine day in February he notes as follows the aspiration of the poor wingless biped man to raise himself a little above the earth: "How much mud and mire, how many pools of unclean water, how many slippery, and perchance heavy tumbles, might be avoided, if one could tread but six inches above the crust of this world. Physically we cannot do this; our bodies cannot; but it seems to me that our hearts and minds may keep themselves above moral mudpuddles and other discomforts of the soul's pathway."

To the development of his peculiar imaginative faculty it would not be difficult to show that his circumstances, far from being inauspicious, were highly favorable—as favorable, perhaps, as exile in Ireland was to his favorite poet, the author of The Faerie Queene. Solitude drives the hungry man to intensive cultivation of the inner life, and a plain domicile reminds him of the necessity of building for his soul a more stately mansion. After his engagement to Sophia Peabody, looking back in 1840 upon the long lonely years when he was learning his art in the locked room in Salem, he feels the pathos of his earnest and externally cheerless prime, and yet he testifies, in a passage deeply moving and beautiful, that those were the richest and

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 happiest years of his life till love transformed it; and in the quiet exultation of the new emotion he blesses them still because they made and kept him fit for the transformation:

. . . Here I sit in my old accustomed chamber, where I used to sit in days gone by. . . . Here I have written many tales—many that have been burned to ashes, many that doubtless deserved the same fate. This claims to be called a haunted chamber, for thousands upon thousands of visions have appeared to me in it; and some few of them have become visible to the world. If ever I should have a biographer, he ought to make great mention of this chamber in my memoirs, because so much of my lonely youth was wasted here, and here my mind and character were formed; and here I have been glad and hopeful, and here I have been despondent. And here I sat a long, long time, waiting patiently for the world to know me, and sometimes wondering why it did not know me sooner, or whether it would ever know me at all—at least, till I were in my grave. And sometimes it seemed as if I were already in the grave, with only life enough to be chilled and benumbed. But oftener I was happy—at least as happy as I then knew how to be, or was aware of the possibility of being. By and by, the world found me out in my lonely chamber, and called me forth—not, indeed, with a loud roar of acclamation, but rather with a still, small voice—and forth I went, but found nothing in the world that I thought preferable to my old solitude till now. . . . And now I begin to understand why I was imprisoned so many years in this lonely chamber, and why I could never break through the view

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 less bolts and bars; for if I had sooner made escape into the world, I should have grown hard and rough, and been covered with earthly dust, and my heart might have become callous by rude encounters with the multitude,. . . but living in solitude till the fulness of time was come, I still kept the dew of my youth and the freshness of my heart. . . . used to think I could imagine all passions, all feelings, and states of the heart and mind; but how little did I know! . . . Indeed, we are but shadows; we are not endowed with real life, and all that seems most real about us is but the thinnest substance of a dream—till the heart be touched. That touch creates us—then we begin to be—thereby we are beings of reality and inheritors of eternity. . . ..

By the time he was appointed weigher and gauger at the Boston Custom House, in 1839, Hawthorne had learned to live, somewhat according to the Emersonian injunction, in business, if not in society, with his hands and in solitude with his head and heart. One who reads in the American Note-Books his memoranda of that period cannot fail to be impressed with the fact that his thraldom and drudgery and the sordidness of his daily occupation intensified his delight in his inner freedom and perfected it. All day long he measures coal in a black little British schooner, in a dismal dock at the north end of the city. He thinks that his profession is somewhat akin to that of a chimney-sweeper. He grieves

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 occasionally at the havoc it makes with his wits and at the waste of blessed hours; yet he thanks it for teaching him to "know a politician," and to acquit himself like a man in a world of men. Then this strange coal-gauger walks home under the cloud-rack of a scattered storm—"so glorious indeed, and so lovely, that I had a fantasy of heaven's being broken into fleecy fragments and dispersed through space, with its blest inhabitants dwelling blissfully upon those scattered islands." He enters his room and lies down to read his Spenser, or records in his journal some such half-mystical experience as this: "Besides the bleak, unkindly air, I have been plagued by two sets of coal-shovellers at the same time, and have been obliged to keep two separate tallies simultaneously. But I was conscious this was merely a vision and a fantasy, and that, in reality, I was not half frozen by the bitter blast, nor tormented by those grimy coal-heavers, but that I was basking quietly in the sunshine of eternity. . . . Any sort of bodily and earthly torment may serve to make us sensible that we have a soul that is not within the jurisdiction of such shadowy demons,—it separates the immortal within us from the mortal."

It was doubtless in the hope of bringing the inner and the outer worlds into harmony that Hawthorne in the spring of 1841 joined the socialistic commu-

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 nity at Brook Farm, an adventure commemorated in his Blithedale Romance. His sojourn among these interesting Utopians seems to have dispelled the hope and to have confirmed his instinctive deep-seated individualism. It is significant that Cloverdale even at Brook Farm retreats from his socialistic brethren to a hermitage in a circumjacent wood—"It symbolized my individuality, and aided me in keeping it inviolate." "The real Me," Hawthorne declared later, "was never an associate of the community; there has been a spectral Appearance there, sounding the horn at daybreak, and milking the cows, and hoeing potatoes, and raking hay, toiling in the sun, and doing me the honor to assume my name. But this spectre was not myself." The effort to externalize felicity and to make of it common property impressed him on the whole as a failure, renewing in him the old passion for seclusion in which "to think, to feel, to dream." His cutting private judgment of Margaret Fuller, the Zenobia of The Blithedale Romance, represents his mature conviction that beauty and perfectness of character result from the gradual unfolding of some innermost germ of divine grace, and are unattainable by mechanical means and local applications. As this passage illustrates forcibly an aspect of Hawthorne ordinarily little emphasized, his occasionally severe and penetrating critical faculty, it

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 may be quoted here to offset our emphasis upon his tendency to revery and fantasy:

She was a person anxious to try all things, and fill up her experience in all directions; she had a strong and coarse nature, which she had done her utmost to refine, with infinite pains; but of course it could only be superficially changed. The solution of the riddle lies in this direction; nor does one's conscience revolt at the idea of thus solving it; for (at least, this is my own experience) Margaret has not left in the hearts and minds of those who knew her any deep witness of her integrity and purity. She was a great humbug,—of course with much talent and much moral reality, or else she could never have been so great a humbug. But she had stuck herself full of borrowed qualities, which she chose to provide herself with, but which had no root in her. . . . It was such an awful joke, that she should have resolved—in all sincerity, no doubt—to make herself the greatest, wisest, best woman of the age. And to that end she set to work on her strong, heavy, unpliable, and, in many respects, defective and evil nature, and adorned it with a mosaic of admirable qualities, such as she chose to possess; putting in here a splendid talent and there a moral excellence, and polishing each separate piece, and the whole together, till it seemed to shine afar and dazzle all who saw it. She took credit to herself for having been her own Redeemer, if not her own Creator; and, indeed, she was far more a work of art than any of Mozier's statues. But she was not working on an inanimate substance, like marble or clay; there was something within her that she could not possibly come at, to re-create or

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 refine it; and, by and by, this rude old potency bestirred itself, and undid all her labor in the twinkling of an eye. On the whole, I do not know, but I like her the better for it; because she proved herself a very woman after all, and fell as the weakest of her sisters might.

After his departure from Brook Farm, Hawthorne married that fine intelligent Emersonian woman Sophia Peabody, July 9, 1842, and lived for the next four years at the Old Manse in Concord. There in former days, as he remembers in the quietly rapturous introduction to Mosses from an Old Manse, Emerson had written Nature; "or he was then an inhabitant of the Manse, and used to watch the Assyrian dawn and Paphian sunset and moonrise from the summit of our eastern hill." For Hawthorne it was a return from an uncomfortable hot-bed of culture to Eden, and he was accustomed indeed to speak of himself and his wife at that period as Adam and Eve. In a serene felicity of mutual understanding and perfect sympathy they dwelt in their solitude à deux, each sufficient for the other, though occasionally he would hunt Indian arrowheads or water lilies with Thoreau and Ellery Channing, or they would meet Emerson "in the woodpaths, or sometimes in our avenue, with that pure, intellectual gleam diffused about his presence like the garment of a shining one; and he, so quiet,

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 so simple, so without pretension, encountering each man alive as if expecting to receive more than he could impart." At another period, he says, "I, too, might have asked of this prophet the master word that would solve me the riddle of the universe, but now, being happy, I felt as if there were no question to be put, and therefore admired Emerson as a poet of deep beauty and austere tenderness, but sought nothing from him as a philosopher."

This deep happiness of the Hawthornes, as nearly perfect as any recorded in literature, this happiness that asked little of friends or fortune or metaphysical philosophy, was in truth for both of them the fruit of solitude, the reward of a prolonged silent discipline in living, as the Transcendentalists would say, "in the Ideal," a discipline that determined the level of their meeting and enabled them, when they were united, to maintain without effort their ideal relations. To her in 1839, in the days of their engagement, he had written: "I never, till now, had a friend who could give me repose; all have disturbed me, and, whether for pleasure or pain, it was still disturbance. But peace overflows from your heart into mine. Then I feel that there is a Now, and that Now must be always calm and happy, and that sorrow and evil are but phantoms that seem to flit across it." Of him, in October, 1842, she writes to her mother: "His will is

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 strong, but not to govern others. He is so simple, so just, so tender, so magnanimous, that my highest instinct could only correspond with his will. I never knew such delicacy of nature. His panoply of reserve is a providential shield and breastplate. . . . He is completely pure from earthliness. He is under the dominion of his intellect and sentiments. Was ever such a union of power and gentleness, softness and spirit, passion and reason?" As this was written but two or three months after marriage, it may be subject to interpretation as the sweet effusion of an uncritical young bride. But living with one's husband eight years on a few hundred dollars a year ordinarily makes an adequate critic of the most emotional bride. Hear this same witness eight years later:

He is as severe as a stoic about all personal comforts, and never in his life allowed himself a luxury. It is exactly upon him, therefore, that I would like to shower luxuries, because he has such a spiritual taste for beauty. It is both wonderful and admirable to see how his taste for splendor and perfection is not the slightest temptation to him; how wholly independent he is of what he would like, all things being equal. Beauty and the love of it, in him, are the true culmination of the good and true, and there is no beauty to him without these bases. He has perfect dominion over himself in every respect, so that to do the highest, wisest, loveliest thing is not the least effort to him, any

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 more than it is to a baby to be innocent. . . . I never knew such loftiness, so simply borne. I have never known him to stoop from it in the most trivial household matter, any more than in a larger or more public one. If the Hours make out to reach him in his high sphere, their wings are very strong. But I have never thought of him as in time, and so the Hours have nothing to do with him. Happy, happiest is the wife who can bear such and so sincere testimony to her husband after eight years' intimate union.

Is this the portrait of a Puritan? If Puritanism means, as many of our over-heated young people would have it mean, fear of ecclesiastical and social censure, slavish obedience to a rigorous moral code, a self-torturing conscience, harsh judgments of the frailties of one's fellows, morbid asceticism, insensibility and hostility to the beauties of nature and art, Hawthorne was as little of a Puritan as any man that ever lived. But if Puritanism in America means to-day what the lineal and spiritual descendants of the Puritans exemplified at their best in Emerson's New England—emancipation from ecclesiastical and social oppression, escape from the extortion of the senses and the tyranny of things, a consciousness at least partly liberated from the impositions of space and time, freedom for self-dominion, a hopeful and exultant effort to enter into right, and noble, and harmonious relations with the highest impulses of one's fellows, and a vision, a love, a

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 pursuit of the beauty which has its basis in "the good and true"—if Puritanism means these things, then Hawthorne was a Puritan. If, however, our young people will not permit us to use the term in this high derivative sense, if they persist in employing it as a term of dire derogation, then let us call Hawthorne a Transcendentalist, let us call him a subtle critic and satirist of Puritanism from the Transcendental point of view. But let us make this concession to our over-heated young people with a strict understanding that in return they shall abjure their ill custom of applying to a fanatic or to a starched hypocrite the same term that they apply to Emerson. If Puritanism is to mean what they would have it, they must cease and refrain entirely from referring to the leaders of the Renaissance in New England as Puritans. The essence of that movement of which Hawthorne is an admirable representative is a deliverance from the letter of the law and a recovery of happiness through the right uses of the imagination.

The close relationship between Hawthorne's Transcendental point of view and the character of his fiction has hardly received the attention that it deserves. Henry James, who can with difficulty forgive him for not being a realist, declares that "he was not a man with a literary theory," and goes on to complain that "he has been almost culpably indifferent to his opportunities for commemorating the variations of colloquial English that may

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 be observed in the New World." But there is abundant evidence that Hawthorne was conscious of the realistic method and that he deliberately rejected it. What should a man whose wife "never thought of him as in time" care for the variations of colloquial English in the New World? It is very clear that he sought to winnow out of his fiction everything that can be brought or carried away by the Hours. His literary theory becomes explicit enough in his exquisite chapter on "Lichfield and Uttoxeter" in Our Old Home. He had made a pilgrimage "to indulge a solemn and high emotion" to the scene of Samuel Johnson's penance in the market place of Uttoxeter. Arrived at the spot where his pious errand should have been consummated, he confesses that his first act was to step into a hostelry and order a dinner of bacon and greens, mutton-chops, gooseberry pudding, and ale—"a sufficient meal for six yeomen." On enquiry he finds the Doctor's fellow-townsmen generally unacquainted with the story which had consecrated the place "in the heart of a stranger from three thousand miles over the sea." And his own emotions remain unstirred till he has left the visible Uttoxeter behind him and returned to the Uttoxeter of his inner vision. His comment on this incident may serve us as a commentary on his literary method:

A sensible"A sensible [sic] man had better not let himself be betrayed into these attempts to realize the things

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 which he has dreamed about, and which, when they cease to be purely ideal in his mind, will have lost the truest of their truth, the loftiest and profoundest part of their power over his sympathies. Facts, as we really find them, whatever poetry they may involve, are covered with a stony excrescence of prose, resembling the crust on a beautiful sea-shell, and they never show their most delicate and divinest colors until we shall have dissolved away their grosser actualities by steeping them long in a powerful menstruum of thought. And seeking to actualize them again, we do but renew the crust. If this were otherwise—if the moral sublimity of a great fact depended in any degree on its garb of external circumstances, things which change and decay—it could not itself be immortal and ubiquitous, and only a brief point of time and a little neighborhood would be spiritually nourished by its grandeur and beauty."

When Hawthorne was settled in the Old Manse, an abode so happily adapted to his still contemplative habit, he had pondered, he intimates, various grave literary projects, and had "resolved at least to achieve a novel that should evolve some deep lesson and should possess physical substance enough to stand alone." He wrote there some of his finest short stories, "The Birthmark," "Young Goodman Brown," "Rappaccini's Daughter," "Roger Malvin's Burial," "The Artist of the Beautiful"; but the production of his novel was to take place in another scene and under a rather singular stimulus. By 1846 the prospect of being able to make both

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 ends meet in Concord was so unpromising that to relieve himself of the anxiety occasioned by his small debts and his keen sense of obligation he obtained appointment as surveyor of customs at Salem. How he meditated Hester Prynne's story as he passed "with a hundred-fold repetition, the long extent from the front-door of the Custom-House to the side entrance, and back again," he has told in his fascinating introductory chapter. And there he admits that despite his long practice in creative revery he found himself not wholly independent of circumstances and "atmospheric" conditions. His imagination was dimmed, and the shadowy creatures of his dream turned upon him and said: "What have you to do with us? The little power you might once have possessed over the tribe of unrealities is gone! You have bartered it for a pittance of the public gold. Go, then, and earn your wages." After three years of service, which we understand was efficiently performed, the politicians turned him out of office. Him the dismissal appears to have filled temporarily with chagrin and a measure of bitterness; but Mrs. Hawthorne, in her admirable superiority to the loss of their visible means of support, showed herself at this crisis a guardian angel—or at least a more finished Transcendentalist than her husband. Let us have this beautiful incident as reported by George Parsons Lathrop:

On finding himself superseded, he walked away from the Custom-House, returned home, and enter-

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 ing sat down in the nearest chair, without uttering a word. Mrs. Hawthorne asked him if he was well.

"Well enough," was the answer.

"What is the matter, then?" said she. "Are you 'decapitated'?"

He replied with gloom that he was, and that the occurrence was no joke.

"Oh," said his wife, gayly, "now you can write your Romance!" For he had told her several times that he had a romance "growling" in him.

"Write my Romance!" he exclaimed. "But what are we to do for bread and rice, next week?"

"I will take care of that," she answered. "And I will tell Ann to put a fire in your study, now."

Hawthorne's introductory account of the origin of the romance in papers and relics discovered in the Custom-House is a part of the fiction. The original germ of it had probably begun to strike root in his imagination years before when he had come upon an historical record of a punishment like Hester's. In "Endicott and the Red Cross" (included in the second installment of Twice Told Tales), he had introduced for a moment among a group of culprits suffering various ingenious penalties, "a young woman, with no mean share of beauty, whose doom it was to wear the letter A on the breast of her gown, in the eyes of all the world and her own children. And even her own children knew what that initial signified. Sporting

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 with her infamy, the lost and desperate creature had embroidered the fatal token in scarlet cloth, with golden thread and the nicest art of needlework; so that the capital A might have been thought to mean Admirable, or anything rather than Adulteress." There, for him, was the typical nucleus of an imaginative tale.

We have not much information about the course of its development into The Scarlet Letter beyond what James T. Fields, the publisher, has related in his Yesterdays With Authors. In the winter of 1849 Fields went to Salem to call on Hawthorne and to urge him to publish something. His author, whom he seems to have found in low spirits, replied that he had nothing to publish, and sent him away empty-handed. Rut before he had reached the street, Hawthorne overtook him and thrust into his hands a manuscript which he read on the way back to Boston. It was a sketch or first draft of The Scarlet Letter. "Before I slept that night," says Fields, "I wrote him a note all aglow with admiration of the marvellous story he had put into my hands, and told him I would come again to Salem the next day and arrange for its publication. I went on in such an amazing state of excitement, when we met again in the little house, that he would not believe that I was really in earnest. He seemed to think I was beside myself, and laughed sadly at my enthusiasm." In the English Note-Books, Haw-

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 thorne instances as a case of remarkable phlegm the fact that Thackeray read the touching last number of The Newcomes to James Russell Lowell and William Story in a cider-cellar. In this connection he remarks: "I cannot but wonder at his coolness in respect to his own pathos, and compare it with my emotions, when I read the last scene of The Scarlet Letter to my wife, just after writing it—tried to read it rather, for my voice swelled and heaved, as if I were tossed up and down on an ocean as it subsides after a storm. But I was in a very nervous state then, having gone through a great diversity of emotion, while writing it, for many months. I think I have never overcome my own adamant in any other instance."

The success of the book on its publication in 1856 was immediate and, considering the restrictions put upon novel reading in the days of our fathers and grandfathers, extensive. In a striking passage of a most charming piece of criticism, Henry James records the reverberation of its fame registered in his own then youthful breast, an instrument more than ordinarily sensitive to such impressions, yet reacting in a sufficiently representative fashion to serve as a general indicator:

. . . The writer of these lines, who was a child at the time, remembers dimly the sensation the book produced, and the little shudder with which people

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 alluded to it, as if a peculiar horror were mixed with its attractions. He was too young to read it himself; but its title, upon which he fixed his eyes as the book lay upon the table, had a mysterious charm. He had a vague belief, indeed, that the "letter" in question was one of the documents that come by the post, and it was a source of perpetual wonderment to him that it should be of such an unaccustomed hue. Of course it was difficult to explain to a child the significance of poor Hester Prynne's blood-coloured A. But the mystery was at last partly dispelled by his being taken to see a collection of pictures (the annual exhibition of the National Academy), where he encountered a representation of a pale, handsome woman, in a quaint black dress and a white coif, holding between her knees an elfish-looking little girl, fantastically dressed, and crowned with flowers. Embroidered on the woman's breast was a great crimson A, over which the child's fingers, as she glanced strangely out of the picture, were maliciously playing. I was told that this was Hester Prynne and little Pearl, and that when I grew older I might read their interesting history. But the picture remained vividly imprinted on my mind; I had been vaguely frightened and made uneasy by it; and when, years afterwards, I first read the novel, I seemed to myself to have read it before, and to be familiar with its two strange heroines. I mention this incident simply as an indication of the degree to which the success of The Scarlet Letter had-made the book what is called an actuality. . . . The book was the finest piece of imaginative writing yet put forth in the country. There was a consciousness of this in the welcome that was given it—a satisfaction in the

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 idea of America having produced a novel that belonged to literature, and to the forefront of it. Something might at last be sent to Europe as exquisite in quality as anything that had been received, and the best of it was that the thing was absolutely American; it belonged to the soil, to the air; it came out of the very heart of New England.

No commentator can fail to remark that the story of Arthur Dimmesdale and Hester Prynne begins where a seductive love-story hastens to end, with the bitterness of stolen waters and the unpalatableness of bread eaten in secret. Without one glance backward over the secret path that led to the jail door, we are invited to fix our attention upon the sombre drama of punishment, atonement, remorse. "To Hawthorne's imagination," says Henry James, "the fact that these two persons had loved each other too well was of an interest comparatively vulgar; what appealed to him was the idea of their moral situation in the long years that follow. "This is probably to represent the case as more exclusively a matter of artistic interest than it was to Hawthorne, though not more so than it might have been to James. When, in the Inferno, Dante confronts a pair of lovers at a similar point in their progress, the first question he raises is how they fell into that predicament. Hawthorne would hardly have regarded either the answer or the curi-

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 osity which evoked it as vulgar. But by refraining in The Scarlet Letter from lifting the veil that hides the antecedent history of this passionate experience he evades what would have been for him, or for any novelist, the extremely difficult problem of representing Arthur Dimmesdale in love. By this abridgment he obtains, furthermore, an intense concentration of interest upon that portion of the history which a writer wishing to "evolve some deep lesson" would desire to emphasize. Finally, it is obvious that he has striven sedulously to avoid all occasion for exhibiting an aberrant passion in its possible aspects of alluring and romantic glamour, so that one desperate embrace of the lovers and Hester's entreaty for forgiveness under the deep shadow of foreboding (in the seventeenth chapter) remain almost the only vivid evidence and certification of their continuing tenderness and attraction for each other.

Arthur Dimmesdale is ordinarily considered the figure of primary importance, and, so far as the external evolution of the story is concerned, unquestionably he is. His, apparently, is the main tragic problem, and his is the solution of it. Undoubtedly, also, we are admitted from first to last very much more fully into his consciousness than into Hester's. While she remains for the most part in isolation with her enigmatic child, he is defined by his relations to the elder clergyman and the officials of the colony in that superbly ironical scene

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 in which Governor Bellingham says: "Good Master Dimmesdale, the responsibility of this woman's soul lies greatly with you. It behooves you, therefore, to exhort her to repentance, and to confession, as a proof and consequence thereof." He is defined by his peculiarly excruciating relations with Roger Chillingworth, a creature of somewhat uncertain significance even to his creator, who sometimes invites us to think of him as the devil incarnate, sometimes as an avenging fury, sometimes as the Puritan conscience, but never as merely a wronged husband. He is defined by his relations to a series of his parishioners in the great temptation scene of the twentieth chapter, where the baser elements of his nature are exhibited in riot and all but victorious. He is defined by the passionate exaltation of his Election Sermon and by his last words on the scaffold. His is the character that is most adequately realized and presented and that affects us as most unquestionably human. And yet when all is said and done, he does not become an individual; he remains a type. The forms of his temptation, sin, suffering, struggle, and aspiration are all strictly determined for him by the pressure of Puritan society and his clerical profession. Our special interest in him is due not to any noteworthy differentiation of his character but to the tremendous irony of his situation.

In Hester, on the other hand, it is manifest that Hawthorne intended to present an individual. She

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 is differentiated by her rich dark beauty, her voluptuous Oriental taste for the gorgeously beautiful, and by her aspect, when she is flushed with momentary joy, of a heroine of romance. But her most interesting distinction is her moral independence and originality. It is to be noted that though her punishment causes her shame and suffering, it does not appear to bring her to any clear state of contrition or repentance. She feels that society by making her an outcast has severed her obligation to it. For it, she exists only as a terrible example. For herself, she is a free spirit liberated in a moral wilderness with her own way to make and take. In these circumstances her thinking has little reference to the doctrines expounded in the meeting-house. She thinks as her heart prompts; and her heart tells her that Arthur Dimmesdale is still her supreme good, and devotion to him her highest duty. The world's frown she had endured and the frown of heaven; "but the frown of this pale, weak, sinful, and sorrow-stricken man was what Hester could not bear and live!" To save him she had borne in silence the burden of her knowledge of Roger Chillingworth's presence. To redeem him from misery she is ready to flee with him to other lands. Though in the years of her exile she had quietly conformed to the external regulations of society, "the world's law," says her historian, "was no law for her mind." Her readiness to leave the colony with the minister, Hawthorne desires us to

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 understand, was no mere impulse of unreflecting emotion. It was due to her vision of the possibility of reconstructing their shattered lives, and this vision in turn was the consequence of her internal emancipation from the power of the Puritan system of ideas: "She assumed a freedom of speculation, then common enough on the other side of the Atlantic, but which our forefathers, had they known it, would have held to be a deadlier crime than that stigmatized by the scarlet letter. In her lonesome cottage, by the, thoughts visited her, such as dared to enter no other dwelling in New England; shadowy guests, that would have been as perilous as demons to their entertainer, could they have been seen so much as knocking at her door." This free speculative impulse in Hester, her reach—ing out for "spiritual laws" not generally recognized—by the society of her time, makes her a Transcendentalist before the appointed hour.

In the forest scene Hawthorne represents Nature as in mysterious and joyous sympathy with the bliss of the lovers in their vision of a new life together. That he does not accept Nature as moral oracle, however, he indicates by an emphatic parenthesis—"that wild, heathen Nature of the forest, never subjugated by human law, nor illumined by higher truth." On the other hand, his giving the solution of the problem to Arthur Dimmesdale does not prove by any means that his sympathies were wholly on the side of the Puritans. His comment upon the

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 two possibilities of escape from the predicament in which he has placed his hero and heroine is more subtle than is ordinarily noticed. What he has made clear is, that for the minister, who at the end is as thoroughly dominated by Puritan forms of thought as at the beginning, confession was fated and inevitable. For him Hester's solution would have involved the repetition of a deadly sin. His temporary decision to flee with her is therefore consistently represented as filling his mind with perverse suggestions of evil. Arthur Dimmesdale, we may be sure, was happier dying on the scaffold than he would have been sailing to Europe.

It is to be observed, however, that the devilish persecution which afflicts him does not touch Hester. Nor is she exhibited as participating in the ecstasy of his confession. To his question, "Is not this better than what we dreamed of in the forest?" she only murmurs, "I know not! I know not!" And her last words express her quite heretical hope of union with the minister in another world. She believes that in her seven years of suffering she has made amends to heaven for her wrongdoing. With the lapse of time even her rigorous fellow-townsmen relent, take her again into their affections, and even turn to her for counsel "in the continually recurring trials of wounded, wasted, wronged, misplaced, or erring and sinful passion." Hawthorne, while remarking that she often thinks amiss, obviously admires the natural desire of her

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 rich warm nature to regain a place of usefulness and happiness in society. In the conclusion, furthermore, he intimates pointedly enough that the Puritans of the seventeenth century had not received the final word on the regulation of human relationships; that, when the world is ripe for it, there will be a "higher law" declared, a new revelation, "showing how sacred love should make us happy, by the truest test of a life successful to such an end!"

In his preface to The House of the Seven Gables Hawthorne deprecates attempts to "impale the story with its moral, as with an iron rod." "A high truth," he declares, "fairly, finely, and skilfully wrought out, brightening at every step, and crowning the final development of a work of fiction, may add an artistic glory, but is never truer, and seldom more evident, at the last page than at the first." In the face of this caution it would be imprudent to speak directly of the moral intentions wrought into the fabric of The Scarlet Letter. It may be permissible, however, to call attention to the singular union of judgment with compassion which characterizes Hawthorne's treatment of his principal personages, and which he also solicits for them from the reader. He solicits compassion in this romance, as in the little tale of "The Minister with the Black Veil," by perpetually suggesting to the reader that search in his own heart would discover at least the seeds and latent possibilities of kindred

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 tragic guilt. He solicits judgment on the ground which the most gentle-spirited Transcendentalist may take, and so save himself from dissolution in sympathy, namely, that we should abide firmly by the law we have till the higher law is ready. The method of Hawthorne's moral appeal is the method of tragic poetry: the image of anguish that never fades, the cadenced cry that, like the despairing wail of Lady Macbeth, lingers in the memory—"Is there not shade enough in all this boundless forest to hide thy heart from the gaze of Roger Chillingworth?"

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Whitman interests and disquiets us beyond all other American poets by that personality of his, so original, so indolent yet intense, so fearlessly flaunted yet so enigmatically reserved, so palpably carnal yet so illuminated with mystical ardor that at the first bewildering contact one questions whether his urgent touch is of lewdness or divinity. There is something daimonic in the effluence of the man, which visitors remark and remember months and years afterwards as an impulse unaccountably affecting the temper of their lives. It is a sign by which one recognizes native power of one sort or another quite above talent. Hawthorne and other observers were conscious of such an effluence from Whitman's master, Emerson—"a pure, intellectual gleam diffused about his presence like the garment of a shining one." But the aura of the disciple, who roved so far from the decorous circle of the Concord Platonist, was, I fancy, spiked with yellow flame, like the gold-colored nimbus that he sought to paint above the heads of his fellow countrymen—"I paint

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 many heads: but I paint no head without its nimbus of gold-colored light. "Something a little more than human," commented Thoreau, that cool-blooded New Englander, after an hour's conversation with the bard. Edward Carpenter, an English pilgrim who visited him in 1877, says that in the first ten minutes he became conscious "of an impression which subsequently grew even more marked—the impression, namely, of immense vista or background in his personality." As to the final quality of Whitman's personal effluence the testimony of John Burroughs, recorded in 1878, should be decisive: "After the test of time nothing goes home like the test of actual intimacy, and to tell me that Whitman is not a large, fine, fresh magnetic personality, making you love him, and want always to be with him, were to tell me that my whole past life is a deception, and all the perception of my impressions a fraud." His appeal to the imagination was not diminished by his offering to the eye. The mere physical image of him standing against the sky, so nonchalant and imperturbable in his workman's shirt and trousers, as in his first edition of 1855, is, or was, of a novel and compelling effrontery in the smooth gallery of our national statuary. Like the image of Franklin at Paris in his coonskin cap, the image of Lincoln as the railsplitter, or of Mark Twain as the Mississippi pilot, or of Roosevelt as Rough Rider, so the image of

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 Walt Whitman as the carpenter or printer turned bard in Manhattan pleases one's taste for the autocthonous, the home-grown. More than that, it touches the heart by symbolizing the national sense that, after all our civilizing efforts, we live still in an unfinished world. He acquired blandness with the years; yet even in his mild old age he looked out from under his wide-brimmed hat and from the cloudy covert of beard and hair with no academic mien—rather with the untamed and heroic aspect of

On the centenaries of most of the American poets who flourished at the time when the Leaves of Grass was first put forth, we enquire rather coldly and incuriously what is left of them. They have sadly dwindled—most of them—they have lost their warmth for us, they have become irrelevant to our occasions. Whitman still with astonishing completeness lives. He lives because he marvelously well identified that daimonic personality with his book, so that whoever touches it, as he himself declared, touches a man, and a man of singularly intense perceptiveness. One can hardly exaggerate the potency of Whitman's imaginative process—a process easier to illustrate than to define. Let us take, for example, these lines on the fugitive slave and consider the almost intolerable immediacy of the presentment:

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This is the method of Whitman: imaginative contemplation of the object, which identifies him with the object. It does not suggest comparison with the method of Longfellow or of Tennyson. It reminds one rather of the imaginative contemplation practised by mediæval saints, which brought out in hands and brow the marks of the Crucifixion. The vitality and validity of Whitman's report is not that of an experience observed but rather that of an experience repeated.

But Whitman lives for another reason which is worth dwelling upon for the sake of young poets

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 eager for immortality. He lives because of the richness of his vital reference, the fulness of the relations which he established between his book and the living world. There is a sect of poets to-day, with attendant critics, who expect to outlast their age by shunning contact with its hopes and fears, by avoiding commitments and allegiances, and by confining themselves to decorating the interior of an ivory tower in the style of Kubla Khan. Whitman made his bid for perpetuity on another basis. He identified himself and his chants with innumerable things that are precious and deathless—with his wide-extended land and the unending miracles of the seasons, with the independence and union and destiny of "These States," with common people and heroes, their proud memories, their limitless aspiration, and with the sunlight and starlight of the heaven. Committing himself to democratic America, he surrendered with "immitigable adoration" to a spirit that preserved and magnified him with its own unfolding greatness. And so as the seasons return, he returns with the spring and the musical winds and tides that play about his beloved Mannahatta, with the subtle odor of lilacs in the dooryard, with valor and suffering and victory, with the thoughts and words that perennially consecrate the old battlefield at Gettysburg, with the young men returning from the latest "great war," with civil labor resumed and civil comradeship, with furled flags and May-time and hopes recurrent. He

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 returns; and if we wish to salute him, he will give us the tune:

But why is this interesting and vital personality important to us? Open the Leaves of Grass, and you will find this piquantly intimate answer: "I considered long and seriously of you before you were born." Other poets have given little thought to us, and we, in compensation, give little thought to them; for we modern men and women of realistic temper go not to literature to escape from life, but to intensify our sense of it and to find a spirit that will animate us in the thick of it. Whitman, proclaimer of egotism, foresaw our intentness upon our own enterprises, and prepared for the day when we should demand of him: "What have you said, Poet, that concerns us?" Though he is saturated with historical and contemporary references, nothing in him is merely contemporary, merely historical. He gathers up ages, literatures, philosophies, and consumes them as the food of passion and prophecy. He strides with the energy and momentum of the national past into the national future,

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 towering above a poetical movement which he has fathered, scattering social and political and religious gospels, with troops of disciples and unbelievers in this and other lands, crying still proudly as of old: "All that I have said concerns you." He is important, because he recognized that, though there are many ways by which a man can attract attention and get a temporary hearing, there is only one way by which he can permanently interest and attach the affections of the American people and so hold a place among the great Americans: that is by helping them unfold the meanings, fulfil the promises, and justify the faith of democratic society.

By making himself important to the American people as the poetic interpreter of their political and social ideals, Whitman, as things are turning out, finds himself now mid-stream in the democratic movement which encompasses the earth. At the present time it is manifest that, in spite of obstacles and cross-currents, the central current of the world is making towards democracy. Whatever else it involves, democracy involves at least one grand salutary elementary admission, namely, that the world exists for the benefit and for the improvement of all the decent individuals in it. Till recently this admission in many quarters had never been made, had been savagely opposed. It is covertly, secretly, indirectly opposed in many quarters of our own country even to-day. Now the indications are that those who opposite it are going to

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