The World of Washington Irving

FOREWORD The Flowering of New England, Van Wyck Brooks conceived and animated a new form of literary history. Perceptive and illuminating, his studies of our nineteenth-century authors are a skillful blending of the individual essence with the temper of the times. In this new book, Mr. Brooks turns to New nrk and Philadelphia to appraise those Americans who were writing some fifty years before the New England renascence, in the period when our republic was still experimental, when Toryism was an active force rather than a quaint survival, and when half the citizens of Philadelphia still remembered what Dr. Franklin looked like.

Characteristically he begins with that traveling bookseller, that shrewd, peripatetic biographer, Parson Weems, whose story of the cherry tree has plagued generations of disbelieving schoolboys; here are the fantastic (and pathetic) emigres from the French Revolution; here is Theodosia, the captivating, ill-starred daughter of Aaron Burr: the naturalist, William Bartram, whose glowing accounts of Florida were to be used with poetic license by Coleridge in Kubla Khan: here is the Gothic novelist Charles Brockden Brown, so much admired by Keats and Shelley: here is Washington Irving, the debonaire; Edgar Allan Poe. moody and driven by his debts; Audubon, the all seeing: James Fenimore Cooper, the frontier squire; and William Cullen Bryant, whose poetry owed little if anything to English models.

Against the background of an eager, adolescent nation. Mr. Brooks shows us these authors of the early 1800’s, shows us the statesmen they admired, the painters who painted them, the scientists, native or immigrant, who brought wonder to a society which had already outgrown its provincialism. The world of Washington Irving was far wider than the thirteen colonies, and the people we shall meet in these rich chapters were already, many of them, citizens of the world.

THE WORLD OF WASHINGTON IRVING

by VAN WYCK BROOKS

ONE Locke day Weems in THE wrote year as 1800, follows the to Reverend Mathew Mason Carey, the Philadelphia publisher: “Washington, you know, is gone! Millions are gaping to read something about him, I am nearly primed and cocked for ’em. Six months ago I set myself to collect anecdotes about him. You know I live conveniently for that work.”

Parson Weems meant that he lived on the road, as Mathew Carey’s vagabond book-hawker, — as a vagabond author also,—and that nothing in the way of an anecdote ever escaped him. He had preached at the Pohick church, hard by Mount Vernon, and once he had even visited the father of his country; and he may have picked up in the neighborhood the story of the cherry tree that soon became so famous when he published his book.

This “ragged Mother Carey’s chicken,”as Parson Weems called himself, was a familiar figure on the roads of the South. With his ruddy visage and the locks that flowed over his clerical coat, one saw him humping along in his Jersey wagon, a portable bookcase behind and a fiddle beside him. A little inkhorn hung from one of his lapels, and he carried a quill pen stuck in his hat; and he stopped now and then at a pond or a stream to wash his shirt and take a bath, suspending bis linen to dry on the frame of the wagon. “ Roads horrid and suns torrid" were all the same to Parson Weems; he was still glad to sell books, though he had to plow through Virginia runs that all but covered his wagon wheels, wet, cold, feverish, and hungry

A well-connected Marylander, he had been brought up under English tutors and had been sent abroad to study. At fourteen he had been in Edinburgh as a medical student, and later he had been ordained in London. But the Episcopal Church of the South was demoralized after the Revolution, and many of the clergy took to unwonted courses. Parson Weems, born to rove, had given up his parish to become an itinerant purveyor of morals and culture. He had freed his slaves, for he was a democrat also — lie had a natural affection for the ignorant, and poor; and no one rejoiced more in the triumph of Thomas Jefferson, who was elected to the presidency in 1800. His stock of books was a cross-section of the tastes of the hour, for he knew the interests of the townsfolk, the planters, and the people.

In his breezy letters to Mathew Carey, full of high spirits and bonhomie, the parson recounted his adventures. He was bent on moral-mending, but all in good humor: and, preaching on the village greens, on the courthouse stops, in the parlors of inns, he also played his fiddle at country weddings. He was at home in the grogshops, where he sold The Drunkard’s Looking-Glass. He was equally at home in the houses of the planters, beside the famous mahogany sideboards, for he was a great fel low for “twigging the tickler"; and he loved the bustle of the races and sittings of the county courts, when the roads were alive with cavalcades of countryfolk hastening to the raree-show. There, among the young men showing off their spirited horses, while the mechanics and tradesmen barked in their booths, and candidates for office shouted on stumps, Parson Weems too cried up his wares.

He extolled the virtues of Paradise Lost, Young’s Night, Thoughts, and Thomson’s Seasons, together with The Vicar of Wakefield and Robinson Crusoe. He sold John son’s Rambler, and novels by the cartload, —including Charlotte Temple, the rage of the moment, and Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland and Ormond, — Cook’s Voyages, Voltaire’s Charles XII, Baxter, Watts, and Bunyan, and Female Policy Detected; or The Arts of a Designing Woman Laid Open. Bard’s Compendium of Midwifery sold like green peas in the spring when he hit on the notion of calling it the “grand American Aristotle”; and he sold Thomas Paine’s political works, and he also sold The Age of Reason, for his own views were liberal, to say the least.

Then, discussing his stock at Bel Air with his wife, a “good chimney critic,” he passed his discoveries on to Mathew Carey. At Richmond, he had sold two trunks of Goldsmith’s Animated Nature; and Carey must take pains to see that books for the Virginians were gracefully written, fresh, and splendidly hound. As for the Carolinians, they liked light reading, and jokes and songs went well in Georgia also — but no more Sorrows of Werther, no more Floisas! They were good for any number of Bibles and were begging for Greek and Latin books for the large academies that were growing there.

Thus Weems admonished Mathew Carey, who replied with violent diatribes against Ins Unbusinesslike ways. The publisher and his hawker upbraided each other: they quarreled, they chaffed, they hobnobbed, they consulted, they agreed. The parson was too loose and his chief was too stingy, but they laughed at themselves as much us they laughed at each other: and Carey had good reason to stick to the irresponsible Weems, who was one of his most profitable authors. For the Life of Washington was not his only popular book: there were also fives of William Penn, Franklin, and General Francis Marion, the “ little smoke-dried French-phizzed " Huguenot who turned the tide against Cornwallis.

At night, oral odd moments, in the confusion of Southern inns, after a day on the road, in a spell of rain. Parson Weems sharpened his quill and let his fancy roam and soar in the realms of history, morals, and hero worship. He wrote as he talked, with sweep and color, buoyant, impulsive, and racy, by turns high-flown, bombastic, sprightly, and brisk, recklessly indifferent to facts but with a full-bodied zest tiiat reminded one at times of Fielding and Smollett. His images were bold and even Homeric, and, along with his unblushing fabrications, much of his writing abounded in life and truth. Thee Life of Marion, his best book, was full ot the spirit of the subject. And were not his anecdotes true? Who could ever disprove them?

While, for thirty years, this “Livy of the common people” plodded up and down the Southern roads, Mathew Carey justified the name of Philadelphia as the literary center of the country. An Irish Catholic, born in Dublin, who had been an agitator against the British power there, he had run away to France, where he had found employment in Benjamin Franklin’s printing shop at Passy. Disguised as a woman, he had entered the I niteil States and had set up a newspaper in Franklin’s town, as William Cobbett also did, a few years later, in defense of all that Carey reprobated. Cobbett was a Federalist, while Carey was a democrat, who rejoiced as much as Weems in Jefferson’s election.

2

WITH this change of the government, the city of Penn and Benjamin Franklin — the capital of the nation tor a decade and still the largest of all the American cities was to lose much of its gayety; aud the Quaker simplicity of old returned in part. A few years before, in 1791, Chateaubriand had been shocked by the luxury he found there. This romantic Frenchman had sailed for America in the hope of finding the Northwest Passage. He had expected to go from Albany directly to the North Pole, as one might go from Paris to Pontoise; and he had surrendered this project, when he found it was not quite so simple, to search for the “unknown sylph,” the perfect woman. He found her, after many adventures, in the shady groves of Florida, as the readers of his Atala were aware, but meanwhile he had been disappointed regarding the early Roman manners which he had longed to find in the young republic. Landing at Baltimore, dreaming of the classic races, he had passed on to Philadelphia, looking for Cincinnatus driving his oxen with a goad and holding the tail of his plow.

There was scandalous luxury on all sides and frivolous conversation, there were gaming houses, theaters, and ballrooms — it might have been Bath or Bristol, Boulogne or Nantes. Joseph Priestley had been similarly shocked when he arrived there in 1794. The discoverer of oxygen, the English Unitarian disliked the extravagance and fashion that he found in the city, at which John Adams also stood aghast—the silks and satins, brocades and velvets, the women’s hair piled mountainhigh, the prevalence of bright colors and worldly talk. One saw even strict Quakers with gold snuffboxes and gold-headed eanes and great silver buckles and buttons.

Over the town still brooded the many-sided mind of Franklin, who had so amplified this creation of Penn — the genius of the colonies whose motto might have been fiat lux and who was “all jollity and pleasantry,” as Boswell found him. As a bookseller, he had introduced all the great works of the time, before he drew light from the clouds with his kite-string and key; and, while organizing a hospital, a police force, and a fire company, he had brought in the first Scotch cabbage and the first kohlrabi. He had added three fables to Aesop, and, pefleeting the musical glasses, for which Mozart and Beethoven wrote compositions, he had all but invented as well the American republic.

There were those who also felt that he had invented American literature, for his Autobiography, written to prove that writing should lie “smooth, clear and short,”was the first American book that was certainly a classic. Penn himself had not invented Philadelphia, for the Quaker family, the Drinkers, had been there to greet him; but Franklin had transformed it, and in matters of science at least the town could claim priority aud proudly did so. Its wide, straight, regular streets¹ had been paved and lighted when other towns were dark, malodorous, and muddy; and, just as the stone road to Lancaster was the first highway in the country, so Philadelphia possessed the first museum.

There was the American Philosophical Society, the oldest learned society and the must distinguished; and it was generally knowu that Franklin had first created, in founding this, the public opinion oi the country. He had brought together the leading minds ot all the colonies, giving them a forum and a focus, so that a web of correspondence, spreading north, south, east, and west, distributed fresh ideas through all the regions.² Largely by means of this society, the American mind had found itself and knew it was no longer the New England mind or the Southern mind, but the mind of a nation in posse and partly in esse.

All manner of refugees had sought asylum in Philadelphia, for this was in many ways like the age of Hitler; and royalists and revolutionists, alike unable to live in Europe, fled to the young republic, where all were welcome. Coleridge and Southey, the English poets, had planned for a while to come with Priestley, for the word Susquehanna struck Coleridge as metrical and charming.

In the end Priestley came alone to live and die on the Susquehanna; but meanwhile other émigrés had come to escape from the French Revolution or the Negro insurrection in Santo Domingo. There were in Philadelphia thousands of French families, with their own newspapers, printing press, and bookshop, many of whom were penniless while some of them were brilliant. Talleyrand lived there, posing as a flour merchant in order to conceal his plans as a secret agent; and Louis Philippe, du Pont de Nemours, the naturalists Michaux, father and son, and the Due de la Rochefoueauld-Liancourt were visitors or residents. Most of them were royalists in their political sympathies; some were traveling observers and men of science, among them Constantin Volney, the author of The Ruins. Volney, who had been imprisoned, had escaped the guillotine and hoped to find in America a peaceful refuge; but he had soon returned to Paris, under suspicion of espionage, where Napoleon, shortly after, made him a peer.

3

THE Philadelphia boarding-houses swarmed with these French émigrés, few of whom knew any English. They supplied the theaters with admirable orchestras and modified the manners of the town. To the Gallic damsels, a traveler noted, the young women owed their graceful mien, that nonchalance, that swimming air with which the French girls moved through the streets, drawing all observers to the windows. Cobbett, who arrived in 1794, had taught these refugees English, Talleyrand among them, and in process of doing this he had written his grammar.

Meanwhile, another immigrant, Alexander Wilson, arriving in the same year as Cobbett, had settled at Gray’s Ferry, near the town. A poor young Scottish weaver, who was also a poet, he had lived on a shilling a week to pay tor his passage; and, walking up from Newcastle, where he had left the ship, he had seen a red-headed woodpecker in the Delaware forest. Never had he dreamed of so richly colored a bird before there were no birds like this in the woods of Scotland. He was already making plans for his great Ornithology, while he taught in a little stone schoolhouse.

The town was a battleground of the two political parties, with which the refugees ranged themselves: the Federalists, led by Hamilton, who had ruled the republican court, and the official Republicans, who had won at the polls. The Federalists called for “Yankee Doodle” when the “ Ca ira” was sung at the theater, the song of the French Revolution, which the democrats loved, and which had been suggested by a remark of Franklin;³ but, whatever else was sung or played, the orchestra struck up “Hail Columbia” before the rising of the curtain.

Already Philadelphia had the finest American theater, gilded and frescoed and carved by artisans from England, where excellent companies of actors performed the plays of Shakespeare, Sheridan, and Garrick. It had also the best and for years the only museum. This was Peale’s Museum, at first in the Philosophical rooms and afterwards in Independence Hall, where it occupied the second floor of the building. It was the creation of Charles Willson Peale, the foremost Philadelphia portrait painter, since Benjamin West had gone to England and Robert Fulton, now in Paris, devoted more of his energy to engineering. The great hall, with a skylight above, was lined with historical portraits, and there stood a waxwork image of Peale himself.

An enthusiast for natural history, Peale established his museum in the purest Philadelphia spirit of science, in order to exhibit specimens of the three kingdoms of nature in the classical order of Linnaeus. It was he who originated the habitat arrangement that Audubon developed years later, and to give the muscular forms of the animals he carved them in wood before mounting the skins, placing the figures in natural postures and painting backgrounds tor them. The wild ducks swam in mirror ponds, there were animals in the branches of trees, and many of the birds were suspended flying; and there were mounds of green turf, thickets, a grotto, fishes in pools, and a beach with turtles, lizards, shells, and frogs. It was an unheardof show, and it drew naturalists from all quarters, while every curious traveler stopped to see this famous “world in miniature" of the painter Peale. The most eminent men were proud to contribute to it. Franklin had given Peale the corpse of a French angora cat, and Jefferson sent the museum tomahawks, scalps, and belts of wampum, spoils of the expedition of Lewis and Clark.

Peale was himself a lover of both art and science, as one saw in the names of his seventeen sons and daughters, among whom were Linnaeus and Benjamin Franklin, Rapbaelle, Rembrandt and Rubens, Van Dyck, Rosalba, Angelica Kauffmann and Titian. Like his brother James Feale, two of these were painters, while others engraved or botanized or assisted their father; and Rembrandt Peale never forgot the year in which the museum was founded, when he was a little boy of eight. It was 1786, and one hundred and thirty Italian paintings arrived in the city to be sold, the first group ol so-called old masters that had ever been seen there; and these pictures were deposited in his father’s exhibition room, where they were shown to the public.

Rembrandt raced home from school to watch his father stretch them and mend them, while he pored over the strange designs and subjects, snuffing the new varnish and ravished by the Venetian colors, determining then and there to see Italy himself. Father and son were both enraptured in the presence of these pictures, and, drawing out their Pilkington’s Dictionary, they sat together reading the lives of the painters. Rembrandt Peale became in time a writer as well as a painter, while his father gave the first show of American artists. It was Willson Peale who also formed the first society of American artists, some years before the American Academy was established in New York.

4

ANOTHER well-known naturalist lived, just outside the town, on the five acres of his Botanic Garden. This was William Bartram, who had written the Travels and whose big stone dwelling stood on the banks of the Schuylkill. His father, John Bartram. the old Quaker botanist, had built this house with his own bands, together with terraces and walls sloping down to the river, and William Bartram had grown up there among his father’s friends, who included many of the eminent men of the country, Benjamin Franklin had often been there. He had given John Bartram a Franklin stove, by which they sat on winter afternoons, with mugs of cider drawn from the mill in the garden; and writers, artists, and scientists frequented the spot. Crèvecoeur had described his visit in the Letters from an American Farmer, the honest country dinner he shared with the household, the oblong hall, the savory board, at which the hired men were served, with the family and the venerable father at the head of the table.

John Bartram recounted to Crèvecoeur the story of his youth. Weary one day at the plow, he had stopped to rest in the shade of a tree when his eye fell on a daisy. Plucking it mechanically, he began to study this flower, observing its various parts, and he said to himself what a shame it was that, in tilling the earth for years, he had destroyed so many plants and blossoms of whose structures and uses he knew nothing. Back at the plow, at supper, in bed, he was possessed with this thought, and, hiring a man to plow for him, he made his way into the citv and sought out the house of a bookseller, whom he consulted. He returned to his farm with a Latin grammar and learned enough to read Linnaeus, and then he began to botanize all over the farm. He became acquainted with every plant in the region round and ventured into Maryland, stopping with Friends, and, before many years had passed, he knew every tree and plant in the Lastern country.

Such was the beginning of the Bartram Botanical Garden, which soon became known to naturalists all over Europe. For no one had explored the flora of America, and this was a great age of gardening and gardens. Moreover, English gardening was tending away from the formal style, and the gardeners were in search of natural effects; and John Bartram, who had begun to send his collections abroad, was employed by various English noblemen to gather exotic plants and trees. First or last, he was responsible for the naturalization in England of more than a hundred and fifty American plants, and among his correspondents were Linnaeus and Sir Hans Sloane, Scottish, French, and Russian botanists, and Queen Ulrica of Sweden. Some of these correspondents financed his journeys. The British king employed him to visit the two Floridas-“the very palace garden of old Madam Flora,” as Bartram wrote, for he was in raptures there; and he also visited Canada, the Great Lakes, the Ohio River, herbalizing and journalizing, keeping records of all these travels.

In his Observations, he described a journey northward to Lake Ontario through the woods, during which he slept in traders’ cabins, talked with the Indians round their fires, and paddled down the streams in bark canoes. He fashioned cabins of his own and lived on dried eels and Indian fare, observing the soil and the rocks as well as the plants, for, as a searcher of the forest, he had an omnivorous eye and was interested in minerals and fossils. insects and birds, in frogs, lizards, sea shells, turtles and snakes. Withal, the Quaker Bartram was a mystical deist. He felt that animals had ideas of a more exalted kind than the mystery mongers had ever been willing to allow them.

Under this father’s tutelage, William Bartram had come of age, far less robust but far more sensitive. Though the elder Bartram had freed his slaves and was equally pious and simple, he was more downright and assertive, — his notion of dealing with Indians was to “bang them stoutly,” — while the younger Bartram, adventurous and courageous, was gentle and passive. The Indians for him were the moral equals of Europeanshe believed that men were superior in the primitive state; and the mystical strain in the father became in William Bartram a pantheistic feeling for the animal creation. He found a certain magnanimity even in a rattlesnake, as animals in general for him were benevolent and peaceful, and he felt the life in trees and plants — was it sense or instinct that, as he observed them, influenced their actions? He embodied these speculations in his beautiful Travels, the book that largely suggested to Coleridge and Southey their plan of emigrating to the Susquehanna; and he took Alexander Wilson under his wing and helped him with hisfirst drawings of American birds.

Bartram’s Garden was a haunt of all the illuminati, and Charles Brockden Brown was often there, the Philadelphia Quaker novelist who had something in common with Bartram, for both were ardent believers in the natural man. Brown had learned French from the refugees, with whom he spent much of his time, and he knew the Encyclopœdia, which they brought with them; and, influenced as lie surely was by Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, he had shared their preoccupations before he read them. As in the case of Thomas Paine, Quakerism had predisposed him to the new humanitarian views of life, and Mary Wollstoneeraft’s Rights of Women and Godwin’s Political Justice only confirmed his way of thinking. He knew the Utopias of Sir Thomas More and Harrington, and his early journals abounded in similar plans, dreams of perfectibility, abolition, the reform of education and the relations of the sexes, while he had been stirred as well by the Philadelphia men of science and their interest in medical studies and the powers of the mind.

Brown dwelt much in his novels on the rights of women. The heroine of Jane Talbot, whose lover was a disciple of Godwin, demanded the right to determine her own life, while the noble Constantia Dudley, in Ormond, who struggled with a malignant destiny, was another character after the heart of Mary Wollstonecraft. This novel was a curious parallel of the life of Shelley, who was deeply impressed by Brockden Brown and borrowed the name of his heroine for the poem “To Constantia, Singing.” Ormond himself, the hedonist, had little in common with Shelley, but his deserted mistress Helena, who committed suicide, reminded one in certain ways of Harriet Shelley, just as the accomplished Constantia, the daughter of an unfortunate artist, also recalled Mary Shelley.

Charles Brockden Brown, at the age of eleven, had read both Greek and Latin. He had planned as a boy three epic poems on Columbus, Pizarro, and Cortes, themes that were later adopted by Washington Irving and Prescott, who wrote a biography of Brown. He had had an unhappy love affair with a young girl from Connecticut, who had given him lessons in Italian, while he taught her Greek, She had played the harpsichord, he the flute, and his letters overflowed with Wertherian sorrows and the sentiments now of Richardson, now of Rousseau. The Gothic Mrs. Radcliffe had also filled his fancy with her ruined castles, secret vaults, sounds of horror, and desperate villains. The president of the Belles Lettres Club, where the Philadelphia writers gathered. Brown at the turn of the century was publishing the novels in which Keats, like Shelley, discovered a “powerful genius.“

Hastily written as they were, the novels of Charles Brockden Brown — admired by Shelley, Scott, Keats, Cooper, and Poe — were singularly original, poetic, and impressive, dim as they seemed to readers of the far-away future. Much of their machinery was hollow and factitious, and there was little visible in them, though the forest scenes were graphic enough and the plague scenes were especially vivid in Ormond and in Arthur Mervyn. Brown had witnessed the panic of the plague in both Philadelphia and New York — he was even smitten himself, though he recovered — and he drew memorable pictures of the deserted city, the roads covered with refugees, the hearses in the stricken street, the ghostlike figures that scurried away, wrapped in cloaks that were sprinkled with vinegar. Poe, who read Brown in his boyhood, was impressed by these scenes, the pillage, the delirious victims rushing from their doors, the half-decayed corpses that were left in the abandoned houses, the sufferers who were sometimes buried alive. There were many images in these novels that reappeared in Poe’s tales, and even perhaps in some of the poems of Poe; and vivid too were the scenes in Wieland, the mansion on the Schuylkill and the little temple on the knoll in its tangle of wild grapes and woodbine.

Brown added a third dimension to the Gothic novel; he suffused his mechanical devices with true horrors of the mind; and, analyzing human emotions after the manner of Richardson, he further explored the inner world of man. He was able to claim with a certain justice that, as a searcher of the depths, he had used means unemployed by earlier writers; and he was a precursor, in more than one respect, of Poe, Melville, Hawthorne, and Henry James. Brown represented, in other words, the native American wild stock that produced these splendid blossoms in the course of time.

5

THE stage from Philadelphia that ran to New York a row of backless benches mounted on wheelspassed through a land that was peopled largely by Quakers. Dotted here and there with villages and little towns, New Jersey was almost wholly a pastoral region, and the traveler John Davis, who walked across it, — remembering the exploits of Goldsmith and Rousseau as walkers, — observed that the New Jersey farmers were strict and grim. Unlike the Virginians, they were not given to smiling and talking. They went on foot to their fields or the village, counted their pennies and held their tongues, and they had no use for the peddlers whom the Southerners encouraged. They had few words of welcome for passersby, and they seemed to have little concern for enlarging their minds.

But there was, at the turn of the century, no little interest in books and learning in the Quaker valleys of New Jersey. Parson Weems found a market for his wares in Elizabeth, Morristown, and Trenton; and it was a New Jersey farmer, as Thomas Jefferson pointed out, who invented the modern wagon wheel, of which he had found an exact description in Homer. This was the wheel with a circumference made from a single piece of wood. American farmers, Jefferson added, when the invention was claimed for an Englishman, were the only farmers who could read Homer. As a land of farms and farmers, where a measure of education prevailed, and in large measure a knowledge of Latin and Greek, New Jersey was a typical American region.

New York was a little London. The taverns were informal clubs, like the older coffee-houses, each with its special circle of clever men, who met around the tables on the sanded floors and discussed books, plays, and politics over jugs of punch. Actors and journalists filled these taverns, and most of the talk was political and largely of the Federalist way of thinking; for, while the Republican Party was strong and had even won over the Livingstons, the Federalists controlled the mass of respectable opinion.

For New York was more aristocratic in tone than any other Northern state and had naturally given birth to Federalism; although everywhere the upper classes retained control of the popular mind and the leaders were men of social standing. The Revolution had been fought under the guidance of the gentry, who possessed most of the learning, talent, and wealth, and the people still thought they were safer in the hands of these tried leaders, who had been trained for public life. Even the election of Jefferson meant a change of policy only, not a change of personnel, and the upper classes retained their dominant role.

New York had a system of large estates, in which the masses were tenants of a few great landlords, and the Federalism of Hamilton combined the interests of these landlords with the financial interests of the mercantile class. Hamilton’s great political service consisted in forming a single nation out of a loose union of sovereign states, and his treatise, The Federalist, had placed him in the front rank of the world’s political writers for an age to come.⁴ Direct, forceful, lucid, learned, Hamilton was acknowledged by all — even his bitterest opponents — as a maker of his country; but he was also a careerist who had no inherited understanding ot the nation he had set out to make and govern. That he was “not the man for America” he saw and said before he died, as John Adams said he was “ignorant of the character ot this nation”; he had no ties of sentiment with it, no knowledge of the long generations that had made the American people different from the English. He hoped and wished to see in America nothing new under the sun, but merely a larger and possibly a better England.

Literature was represented in two or three clubs, the Drone, the Friendly Club, and the Calliopean, at which the members read papers and acclaimed their favorite compositions, passages from Addison, Shakespeare, and especially Pope. These clubs “for improvement in literature” throve in all the American towns—in Hartford, Boston, Baltimore, Wilmington, Charleston; and the little groups of lawyers and doctors and other professional men discussed and even imitated their chosen authors. They composed dissertations on wedlock and recited the speech of Coriolanus or Orlando Furioso, as translated by Hoole, while they compared notes on Roderick Random and Joseph Andrews and the wit, humor, or pathos of Richardson and Sterne. Dr. Johnson was a favorite topic of conversation, and there were those who could relate every Johnsonian anecdote, from the time when the doctor trod on a duck till he purchased an oak stick to repulse Macpkerson. Everyone read Tristram shandy, and the sensibility of its author was a topic discussed in New York and all over the country, in clubs of a similar kind; while no one thought of boggling at the bold aud masculine language that was the native element of Sterne and Smollett. This squcamishuess came in with a later generation, for the American books that, were written at this time were as frank as the novels of the English writers.

There were no professional men of letters, nor had there ever been one in New York, save possibly Lindley Murray, who had gone to England. Lindley Murray, the Quaker lawyer, whose father was a West Indian merchant and after whose family Murray Hill was named, was an old friend of John Jay and an invalid of large means who had devoted himself to the study of grammar. Retiring from his legal practice, he had gone abroad for the sake of his health and settled near York, like John Woolman, where he lived and died. For the Quaker school at York he had written the English Grammar that remained for two generations the standard textbook throughout the English-speaking world, and he had followed this with an English Reader and a French Reader, intended to promote correct reading and elegance of style. But the town had no other professional authors until Washington Irving began to write, and the most interesting things that were written, outside the political sphere, were diaries and letters that never reached the public. Gouverueur Morris’s Diary of the French Revolution was a work of extraordinary interest, and Aaron Burr’s letters to bis daughter were exceptionally fine at a time when there were many good writers of letters.

6

THIS was an age of letter-writing, pre-eminently so. Many novels were written in the form of letters. While Richardson had set the pattern, which the American novelists followed, — Brockden Brown, for instance, and the author of The Coquette, — the art was so universal and exercised with such conscious care that novels assumed this form in the most natural fashion. The highest of female accomplishments was to write a fine letter, ami there were many male masters of this art as well, one of whom, Aaron Burr, excelled in the letters he wrote to his daughter, largely to instruct her in letter-writing. Burr, in these years of his glory, before the fatal duel with Hamilton and before his escapade on the Mississippi, lived when he was in New York — for he was Jefferson’s vice-president — in a large and luxurious house on Richmond Hill. There he kept his chariot and his small coach aud five horses, with his liveried flunkies and cellar of excellent wines, and his little French girls “behind the bookcase”; and there, a patron of the arts and a man of fashion, he watched over Theodosia, the apple of his eye.

This grandson of Jonathan Edwards had risen early to high place. Like Hamilton, his rival, he had been one of Washington’s aides, and, as a brilliant New york lawyer, he cherished Napoleonic ambitions, which he attempted to realize a few years later. He hoped to be emperor of Mexico, as he wrote to Theodosia, and she, with her beauty, was to adorn the court, where her son was to be the heir-apparent; and he had prepared her for some such role when she was a girl of fourteen who already presided at his table. As courtly as Talleyrand, and as devious also, with somethiug serpentine in his gifts of enchantment, the charming, lively, high-spirited Burr was a lover of style and ideas alike, with a passion for books and for pictures and especially sculpture. He had numbers of natural children, whose parentage he accepted gladly, for, like Pierpont Edwards, his uncle, he was proud of his conquests, and blackmail had uo terrors for him — he was ready to pay any sum rather than lose the compliment, of an imputed triumph.

But the lovely Theodosia absorbed his attention, and when anything amused him his first thought was whether it would not also amuse her, and from a distance as at home he followed with a jealous eye the progress of her accomplishments and her studies. He offered her the model of Lady Mary Worthy Montagu, whom he thought she could easily surpass with a little more pains, and, directing her study of languages, he corrected her carriage, her manners, her temper— she must always be calm and serene and never in a hurry. The daily ride with her groom must never be forgotten, nor her hours at the piano and the harp, and her dancing and her skating were as much to be considered as the correctness and fluency of her Italian and French. Under Burr’s instruction, she had read Plautus and Terence at nine and was well advanced in her Greek grammar, while she spoke her modern languages without an accent, and he set for her two hundred lines of Homer every day and four and sometimes nine pages of Lucian. Reading her Quintilian, she was to take the utmost care never to miss the meaning of a word or a sentence, and he required her to visit a Catholic chapel once — she must be prepared to meet with a certain understanding the foreigners of eminence who appeared at the table.

Theodosia had read Gibbon and discussed with Burr the various ancient histories and the modern novels of which, on the whole, he thought little; for he hoped that she would be realistic and free from the kind of romantic fancies that filled the heads of young girls with visions and delusions. He preferred Voltaire and Chesterfield, but he had brought her up on Sterne and also recommended Fanny Burney, urging her to describe a ball with all the little details that Miss Burney used in her novels. As for the Edinburgh Review, she must not miss a number of it-indeed she must have it at hand from the very first issue; and he begged her to read Bartram’s Travels, after his flight from New York, when he was wandering in Georgia, to follow his movements. Under whatever stress be was living, Theodosia was never out of his mind, nor were her progress and skill in the art of writing; and he was prodigiously pleased at last with the manner of her letters and their sprightliness, ease, and good sense.

7

MEANWHILE, the Hudson River valley and all the country about New York teemed with the legends of the Dutch. At Hell Gate a black man known as the Pirate’s Spook, whom Stuyvesant had shot with a silver bullet, was often seen in stormy weather in a three-cornered hat, in the stern of a jolly-boat, or so it was said; and from Tappan Zee to Albany, especially in the Highlands, every crag and cove had its story. The Zee was supposed to be haunted by the storm-ship of the Palisades, whose misty form blew from shore to shore whenever a gale was coming up, as well as the ghost of Rambout van Dam, the roistering Dutchman of Spuyten Duyvil, who had desecrated the Sabbath on a drunken frolic. Rambout had never appeared again, but the muffled sound of his oars was heard on evenings when, among the shadows, there was no boat to be seen, although some people thought it was one of the whaleboats sunk by the British in the war, haunting its old cruising grounds. Point-no-Point was the resort of another storm-ship, often seen towards midnight in the light of the moon, when the chanting of the crew was heard as if they were heaving the lead; and the Donderberg and Sugar Loaf, Storm King, and Anthony’s Nose bristled with legends as with trees and rocks.

The captains of the river craft, when they approached the Donderberg, lowered their peaks in deference to the keeper of the mountain, the bulbous Dutch goblin, the Heer, with the sugar-loaf hat, who was supposed to carry a speaking trumpet. With this, when a storm was rising, he gave orders in Low Dutch for the piping up of a gust of wind or the rattling of a thunderclap. Once he was seen astride of the bowsprit of a sloop, which he rode full butt against Anthony’s Nose; and once the dominie of Esopus exorcised him, singing the hymn of St. Nicholas, whereupon the goblin threw himself up like a ball in the air and disappeared as suddenly in a whirlwind. He carried with him the nightcap of the dominie’s wife, and this was found on the following Sunday morning hanging on the steeple of a church that was forty miles off.

Sometimes this foul-weather urchin was surrounded by a crew of imps who, in broad breeches and short doublets, tumbled about in the rack and the mist. They buzzed like a swarm of flies about Anthony’s Nose when the storm was at the height of its hurry-scurry; and once, when a sloop was overtaken by a thunder gust, the crew saw a little white sugar-loaf hat on the masthead. This, everyone knew at once, was the hat of the Heer.

All these legends had long been current when Washington Irving, in 1800, made his first voyage up the Hudson. Irving, a boy of seventeen, the son of a New York merchant, sailed up the river to visit his sisters, who were living west of Albany. Although he was a town boy, he already knew Westchester County. He had gone squirrel hunting in Sleepy Hollow and stayed at Tarrytown with James K. Paulding, whose sister had married his brother, and there, in the region where he lived in later years, he had steeped himself in the poetry of the old Dutch life. He knew every spot that was famous in history or fable, and he listened, ascending the river, while an Indian trader told him legends of the Hudson.

The Hudson River sloops, in one of which Irving sailed, carried furs from Albany and ruled the stream, and every river town had sloops of its own to convey the local produce to the New York market. They were sometimes as long as seventy feet and painted like Italian carts, with gay stripes of gold, red, green, and blue, and the fore castles were stowed with chicken coops and boxes, and often with carriages and horses. One had to wait in New York till a sloop was ready to sail, and provide one’s own supplies and bedding for the voyage, and this was often a voyage of a week or longer.

Some years before, the “American Farmer, Saint John de Crevecoeur, had picked up the legends of the Hudson. He was told by the skipper of one of the sloops that the high hill walls were inhabited by wood nymphs. In fact, the skipper had hailed them from the river and seventeen lovely creatures had appeared at once. Crèvecoeur himself had had several farms, but the house he built was behind the Highlands, and it was there he planted his orchard and observed the wasps, as he described them in his Letters. This was in 1769, the very year in which Rip Van Winkle, who lived in the village of Catskill, began his long slumber, and when Rip awoke to the bustle of the young republic, Crèvecoeur had already left the region. He had gathered in seventeen harvests during these years, and his picture of the life of the American farmers had carried his name all over Europe.

Crèvecoeur depicted in detail an early American farming community — the plows, barns, wagons, hog pens, root cellars, and corncribs, and the rustic abundance and good cheer; and he was a naturalist also, a lover and student of birds and bees, who delighted in the bloom of his orchard and its splendor and perfume. He rose before dawn, entranced by the warbling of the birds; he followed each succession of their tuneful notes, and he watched the hornets building their nests and observed the blackbirds and kingbirds and the clouds of wood pigeons obscuring the sun in their flight. Some of his longer pieces — the battle of the two snakes, for instance — were as fine as anything in Audubon or Bartram.

The happy farmer Crèvecoeur had vanished from this region, although he had returned to America as consul in New York. He sent American trees to France and en couraged correspondence on French and American ways in agriculture, and he led scores of French families to settle in the country “west of the bridge, as people said of all the region that lay beyond the outlet of Lake Cayuga — the Genesee valley, Buffalo, and Niagara Falls. This was the country through which Chateaubriand had passed on his way to Niagara, where the primeval forest was all but unbroken, the home of the wildcat, the panther, the wolf, and the bear; but even here one fouud settlers, plowed fields, prosperous farms, the sign of an inn hang ing from the bough of an oak. the spire of a church shooting up in the midst of the trees.

Indian wigwams were scattered in clearings that were covered with stumps and rude fences and piles of charred or half-burned logs, and sometimes one encountered the dwelling of a planter with carpets, a piano, mirrors, aud mahogany chairs. Chateaubriand had listened while the daughters of his host, with their fair hair dressed in ring lets, sang the songs of Cimarosa to the murmuring sound of a waterfall. Wandering with joy from tree to tree, saying to himself, “There are no roads here, no towns, no monarchies, no men,” he had suddenly come upon a score of painted savages dancing quadrilles to a violin. It was played by a frizzed little Frenchman, with powdered locks and muslin ruffles, whom the Indians had retained as a dancing master in exchange for the hams of bears and beaverskins.

8

ALL this now seemed remote enough from the quiet old settled villages of the Hudson valley, the smiling Dutch farms with their snug stone cottages that clung to the verdant declivities of the peaceful stream. Dutch was spoken in all these towns, at least as much as English, which had been quite recently only a sort of court language. In Albany, the housewives consulted Mother Doortje when spoons or sheets were lost through the pil fering of servants, and everyone knew the Schuylers there and recalled old Madame Schuyler, about whom Mrs. Grant of Laggan wrote a book.⁵ In the days when Anne Grant had lived in the manor house, Sir William Johnson was active in the Mohawk valley, the Anglo-Irish border baron, the sachem of the Indians under whom Natty Bumppo had fought in the French and Indian war. He had built Johnson Hall near Schenectady and he had been the first white man to taste the medicinal waters of Saratoga Springs, the fame of which had since been noised abroad, together with the fame of Ballston Spa near-by. The young men of Albany had begun their careers with a trading voyage, a sort of ordeal of manhood, among the savages of the borders. Setting out in canoes laden with goods, they had returned with furs from the Western Lakes.

The Mohawk valley now was full of busy settlements, where one heard the sound of the hammer all day long, cottages, barns, flourishing orchards, waving fields of corn, and roads that wound their way through the depths of the forest. Albany was a-bustle with settlers and squatters footing it through the woods with pack and axe; and the highways were thronged with sleighs in winter, bearing piles of furniture, and wagons returning to the town with loads of produce.

Such was the road to Cooperstown, — traversed by sixhorse stages and fleets of wagons bearing grain and farmstuff, — the pioneer village where Judge Cooper had just built Otsego Hall beside the lake whence sprang the Sus quehanna. Judge Cooper, a member of Congress whose portrait was painted by Stuarl and Trumbull, owned a vast tract of the virgin forest; and, while he was also a land agent for the Frenchman James Le Ray, he had settled more land of his own, he said, than any other Ameri can living. The Hall, in whieh he installed his family, bringing them up from New Jersey, where his son James Eenimore was born, was a large, square mansion built of homemade brick, the most imposing west of Albany. In the ample drawing room, with its heavy mahogany chairs and tables, its chandeliers and ivory-mounted piano, stood five busts in blackened plaster of Paris and au urn that symbolically held the ashes of Dido. Four of the busts represented Homer, Shakespeare, Washington, and Franklin, and the fifth, which might have been Julius Caesar, was also said to be Dr. Faustus. The wallpaper depicted Britannia weeping over the tomb of Wolfe.

The Coopers were Quakers who had turned Episcopalians, as befitted a landowning family of the State of New York, and the manly, calm, and cheerful judge kept open house and superintended the village that he had created in the forest by the lake. Talleyrand had visited him and written a poem for his daughter, and there were settlers already of four or five races — English, Irish, Scotch, Spanish, and French. The grocer, M. le Quoy, was one of those mysterious persons whom this epoch of revolution scattered through the woods — he had been, and was to be again, the governor of the French colony of Martinique. There was an academy, used as a courthouse, ballroom, and church, where a sermon was read on Sunday, usually from Sterne, and an inn, a whipping post, a jail, and stocks; and, what with logging and sugar-making and sending cartloads of potash to Albany, the village throve and grew by leaps and bounds. There were deer in the hills and bass in the lake, — one haul of the net caught a thousand, — and wood pigeons were so abundant. Already the settler saw in the forest bridges, factories, canals, and mines.

Two decades later, Fenimore Cooper—eleven years old in 1800, a ruddy boy who delighted in hunting and skating — described this life in The Pioneers and so described a thousand towns that were springing into existence on all the frontiers. There, by the “Glimmerglass,” where the wail of the panther was heard in the woods, one might also have found the characters whom Cooper imagined: the wilderness hunter Natty Bumppo and old Chingacheook, “Indian John,”—the white man who bad adopted the Indian ways, and the Indian who had accepted the creed of the whites.

9

FOLLOWING the shore of Long Island Sound, one crossed the Connecticut border beyond the Huguenot village of New Rochelle, and there one entered the land of the Yankees,⁶ who were famous for their schools as well as the stones in their fields and the stiffness of their necks. The most literate of all the Americans, the toughestminded, the most contentious, they had the cleverest fingers and the sharpest wits, and, while they were the most homogeneous, — of almost purely English stock, —they also revealed the greatest variation of types. Rebels and dissenters, inclined to “differ from all the world, and from one another and shortly from themselves,”they were profounder students than others, more adventurous, more inquiring, and also the keenest mechanicians and the shrewdest traders.

Yankees were restless, ambitious, lovers of perfection, given to improving themselves and improving others, and, cunning as many of them were, they were industrious and orderly — only one capital crime was committed in New England during the whole eight years of the Revolution. They had a marked regard for both principle and law. They were not universally loved — indeed, they were often detested; but those who had little affection for them recognized their virtues. New England was called the “land of steady habits.”

While most of the Yankees were farmers still, they were far behind the Pennsylvanians in their agricultural methods and the richness of their crops. Even the country ministers tilled their own fields. But the soil of New England was hard and stony, and many of the farmers were going West, to the regions of the Muskingum and the Scioto. Others took up manufacturing, while, for the rest, the Yankees were perhaps more at home on the sea than they were on the land.

The long New England coastline bred thousands of sailors, and every boy in a score of ports knew how to make flat knots and bowlines before be could read the Bible or Robinson Crusoe. The whalers of Nantucket and sealers of Stonington had visited the South Shetlands and Palmer’s Land, and, with little science and few charts, they had called at antarctic islands and headlands which the navigators of Europe had not yet discovered. They sailed around the globe and stopped at Madagascar, and many a Yankee boy bad been to Canton who had never seen a city block at home; for as early as 1792 there were Yankee ships in the China trade, taking their peltries thither by way of the South Sea islands, where they paused for pearls and sandalwood to be exchanged for tea.

In times past, the Yankees had also moved in the realms of thought with a comparable adventurousness and vigor. They had produced three men of literary genius: Cotton Mather, Jonathan Edwards, and Franklin. But while there was in the region still a measure of intellectual life, the prevailing tone of mind was conservative and sterile. What Charles Francis Adams, a contury later, called the “ice-age” of Massachusetts retained its grip — and Connecticut was almost as cold. The thirty years 1790 to 1820 were singularly barren and dark. By the end of this period the great age of New England letters was already beginning to appear, especially in Boston, as before 1790 the orators of the Revolution had tilled the Boston air with life and hope. But this was the time when, as Emerson said, looking back upon Massachusetts, there was not a book, a speech, or a thought in the state; and, while this could not have been said of Connecticut, where there were poets of a sort, the heavy hand of reaction lay over all.

Joseph Dennie, the Boston essayist, had just gone to Philadelphia to edit The Port Folio. The author of The Lay Preacher, the most popular work on the continent, and the best of American writers, as many believed, he was interesting in later times as a spokesman of the Anglophiles who could never forgive their country for breaking with England.

Dennie, a precocious boy, the child of a Boston loyalist family, had never found anything good in the American scene. He had grown up at Lexington, surrounded by “wretched and ignorant cottagers,”as he described them to a friend, on the green where the “rascal populace,”with their “natural malignity,”had declared themselves in favor of “this execrable country.” His family had lost its wealth, and he was determined to raise himself from the “mud and dust and ashes" of this village existence.

There may have been some personal pique in Dennie’s discontent, for he was too poor to cut a figure in Boston. His spirit, disdained a residence there, he said, “without pluralities,” a “glossy vest,” and guineas for the tavern; and, as he further observed in a, letter, he had found Harvard a “sink of vice” — it was a “temple of dullness" and a “roost of owls.” Settling in Walpole, New Hampshire, as a country lawyer, he had established a paper, The Farmer’s Museum.

The lawyer Jeremiah Mason said that Dennie’s legal knowledge consisted of a collection of phrases merely, which he used for the sole purpose of ridiculing law, but his two series of essays, The Farrago and The Lay Preacher, soon won him a great reputation all over the country. He had no illusions about his talent, which he called showy and superficial, but his classical form and his constant vivacity appealed to thousands of Federalist readers who praised him for his buoyancy and freshness. Eager for this national fame, he had gone to Philadelphia, where, as the “American Addison, ‘ he fell in with Cobbett, and there he became another Peter Porcupine, “with a little more tinsel,” as one of his enemies said. He abused the “loathsome” Thomas Paine and the “hoary traitor" Samuel Adams, while he haunted the British embassy and dreamed of England, where he felt that he might have had a great career; and Cobbett encouraged him in this and drew a brilliant picture of his literary future in England if he chose to go there. Ho thought of joining Cobbett when the latter returned in 1800, but he founded The Port Folio instead; and although he all but ceased to write and never forgave the “swindling pedlars" among whom he was obliged to pass his days, he produced the ablest magazine — for a decade — in the country. It surveyed the theater, law, and literature, and it had subscribers from Maine to Kentucky, and even in England and Scotland, although it was keener all the time for English recognition and fell back more and more upon English authors.

10

THE hright little sophomore Dennie was not the only man who felt there was really some physical cause in the air that prevented the existence of a writer on American ground. Fisher Ames held much the same opinion and indeed there were few enough writers to disprove the point. The leading Boston poet, Robert Treat Paine, a glass of fashion, was also a minikin wit who wrote satirical verses in the manner of Churchill. Jedidiah Morse, the father of Samuel F. B. Morse, had written his famous Geography, a standard work, and the founder of the Massachusetts Historical Society was the only other eminent Bostonian of letters. This was Jeremy Belknap, whose history of New Hampshire was “the first,” as the poet Bryant said, " to make American history attractive.”

But who had not read The Coquette, the work of a lady of Boston, and who did not know Charlotte Temple? Susanna Rowson, the author of this popular classic, had lived at Nantasket as a child. She had had a career as an actress in England before she returned to the region of Boston, where she conducted a well-known school for young ladies, and she wrote Charlotte Temple to warn her dear girls against the seducer who lurked in the scarlet coat. Charlotte was an English young lady in a boarding school at Portsmouth, a tall and elegant creature with lovely blue eyes, who was led astray by one of the teachers, a Mademoiselle La Rue, and listened to the voice of a soldier with a smart cockade. The little French schemer had a soldier of her own, and the four sailed off to America, where the tragedy began, For the artful Frenchwoman captured a general while Charlotte’s lover deserted her and left her to perish with her child.⁷

The Coquette, by Hannah Foster, was a similar tale, although Eliza Wharton, the heroine, had only herself to blame for her fall, for she was not only gay but volatile also. She despised the contracted ideas of her circle and liked a man of show and fashion, and she knew that Major Sanford was a second Lovelace. What if he was a notorious rake who practiced the arts of seduction? She loved the festive haunts of fashionable life. She was charmed by the major’s rhetoric and captivated by his address, and she would have none of the minister who tried to save her. Eliza was a minx, in short. Her heart warned her against the seducer, and inwardly she disapproved of his “frothy and illiberal sallies of licentious wit.” But she heard him gladly, and gladly fell into his toils.

So in New England, after all, there were a number of writers, aside from the Connecticut poets whom everyone knew — Timothy Dwight, Joel Barlow, and Trumbull; and this Puritan region produced the best novels, after Charles Brookden Brown’s, although Puritanism was supposed to frown on fiction. It produced some of the best plays, the drawing-room pieces of Mercy Warren and, above all, The Contrast of Royall Tyler; for, while Puritanism was not dead, as Robert Treat Paine averred, it was moribund or mixed in certain circles, and the worldly society of little Boston, retaining the traits of the old court life, was even reflected in Hartford and New Haven also.

While the Memoirs of Stephen Burroughs could not be described as a novel, it had the same scandalous interest, and there were novels enough to worry Timothy Dwight, who inveighed against their influence on the minds of the young. If one believed the novelists, they wrote to foster virtue only, but they filled the heads of girls with notions, airy delusions, and dreams of rapture, as many an anxious father and mother complained. These were the novels that Aaron Burr discouraged Theodosia from reading, for he wished her to be cool and realistic. But the novels, after all, were few, — ten a year at most, — while poetry was all but universal.

The country newspapers bristled with poems-every accomplished young woman wrote them, and where was the young man of education who could not produce a few elegiac stanzas? Rural doctors encouraged their sons to paraphrase the Psalms and even translate the Aeneid into English verse, while poetry possessed a public function, in the years round 1800, that was unparalleled later in the days of real poets. No bridge was opened without, an ode, and the Fourth of July resounded with poems. The newsboys on New Year’s day saluted their patrons in doggerel lines, a custom that was maintained for another generation, and the “foolish songs and ballads" that Cotton Mather censured were hawked and sung in every town. An adroit man of the world knew what was expected of him when a lady gave him a rosebud at a concert. He had to be ready to write on the back of the program a few impromptu verses in the gallant style.

The modes of Queen Anne’s day ruled the poetasters, and Pope, who had fathered the willow trees along the Housatonic, was father and despot also of the minds of the poets. Pope swayed them for a century, as Addison ruled the prose writers from Franklin to Joseph Dennie and Washington Irving, although here and there an occasional voice had begun to suggest already the strains of the later poetry that was called Romantic. In the little town of Cummington in Western Massachusetts lived William Cullen Bryant, six years old, the son of a cultivated doctor who delighted in the poets and wrote many a verse himself in the good old style. Bryant, in a few years, was to write poems in the new manner, and a young man in Walpole, New Hampshire, had written numbers of natural verses. This was another minister’s son, Thomas Green Fessenden, who grew up in the Walpole circle of Dennie and Tyler. He had sent poems from Dartmouth to the Farmer’s Museum that were wholly new departures in American verse, sprightly colloquial Yankee ballads, “The Country Lovers,” “The Rustick Revel,” that anticipated James Russell Lowell by fifty years.

Philip Freneau, the New Jersey Huguenot, abhorred by the Federalist tribe, the Jacobin and friend of Jefferson, — produced a handful of lyrical poems so lovely in their feeling that there was no contemporary to be placed beside him. These were “The Wild Honeysuckle,” “The Indian Burying Ground,” “Eutaw Springs,” and two or three other pieces, from which Scott and Campbell borrowed lines, for Freneau had numbers of readers and pilferers in England. There were fine imaginative passages in “The Beauties of Santa Cruz” as well, and in the “Ode to Fancy” and “The House of Night"; and Freneau introduced into his poems the pumpkin and the honeysuckle, the whippoorwill, the katydid, the blackbird, and the squirrel. These American plants and living creatures were all new in American verse, and some of Freneau’s sea poems were also stirring, but he had given up poetry for political satire and propaganda and had all but ceased to write by 1800.

In the circle of the “ Hartford wits,”the name of Freneau was anathema, for the brothers Dwight, Trumbull, and Lemuel Hopkins were Calvinists and Federalists who detested the Jacobin brood as libertines and mockers. All these bright Connecticut men had met at Hartford for a while to combat the French-infidel democrats and their rowdy ways; for they had grown up on Hogarth’s prints of Industry and Idleness and they meant to have no nonsense in this orthodox region. They represented an oligarchy of preachers, professors, and politicians who ruled their little world with an iron hand, though, un happily, the brightest of them, the author of The Vision of Columbus, had himself gone over to the devil. Joel Barlow, a friend of them all, a chaplain during the Revolution, had revised Watts’s hymns for the Connecticut churches, and yet he had cast in his lot with the infidels Priestley and Thomas Paine, and had even abetted the latter and his Age of Reason. It was known that Barlow in Paris had rescued the manuscript of this book and placed it in the hands of the printer.

The “Hartford wits” no longer spoke of Barlow. But Paine was the arch-infidel, and no one liked to recall in Connecticut that he had been a great man once, admired as much by Washington as by any of the others. In the times that tried men’s souls, the spare, athletic, brighteyed Quaker, with his snuff-colored coat aud bony nose, had “crystallized public opinion,”as John Adams said, and had been “the first factor in bringing about the Revolution.” Even the “sunshine patriot" and the “summer soldier” were conviuced by his great pamphlet Common Sense that the birthday of a new world was at hand, and the first issue of The Crisis, written on a drumhead, had rallied the reluctant colonials like martial music. The grand phrases of Thomas Paine, expressions of courage and principle, rang through the country; and he had used first the greatest phrase of all, perhaps, the United States of America, — in one of his papers.

(To be continued)

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