A History of American Literature

It was reserved for Poe to write a genuinely critical estimate of it. See The Southern Literary Messenger, Vol. II, pp. 326 ff. Reprinted in “The Literati,” p. 374.

13

Found in the volume “Nature, Addresses and Lectures.”

14

“Self-Reliance” Essays, First Series.

15

Such abstruse poems as the following are really expounded in corresponding essays: “Written in Naples” and “Written in Rome” – the essay on “History”; “Each and All” – the essay on “Compensation”; “The Problem” – the essays on “Art” and “Compensation”; “Merlin” – the essay on “The Poet”; “The World-Soul” – the essays on “Nominalist and Realist” and “The Over-Soul”; “Hamatreya” – the essay on “Compensation”; “Musketaquid” – the essay on “Nature”; “Étienne de la Boéce” – the essay on “Friendship”; “Brahma” – the essays on “Circles” and “The Over-Soul.”

16

See his own acknowledgment in the “Proem” to the poems of 1842.

17

See the first chapter of Holmes’s “Elsie Venner” for a discussion of this New England aristocracy of birth and learning rather than of wealth.

18

A short list of the chief titles will include Longfellow’s “Hyperion” (1839), Willis’s “Loiterings of Travel” (1840), Taylor’s “Views Afoot” (1846), Curtis’s “Nile Notes of a Howadji” (1851), Mrs. Stowe’s “Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands” (1854), Emerson’s “English Traits” (1856), Bryant’s “Letters from Spain and Other Countries” (1859), Norton’s “Notes of Travel and Study in Italy” (1859), Hawthorne’s “Our Old Home” (1863), Howells’s “Venetian Life” (1866), Mark Twain’s “Innocents Abroad” (1869), and so on down to and beyond Holmes’s “Our Hundred Days in Europe” (1887).

19

See pages 2–7 in T. W. Higginson’s “Longfellow,” American Men of Letters Series.

20

See Bliss Perry’s “Park Street Papers,” “The Editor who Never was Editor,” pp. 205–277.

21

W. C. Brownell, “American Prose Masters,” pp. 271, 272.

22

W. D. Howells, “My Mark Twain,” p. 46.

23

In view of the lack of any copyright protection it is interesting to record that three of the London publishers offered Mrs. Stowe an interest in the sales of their editions.

24

See “Theological Tea,” chap. iv.

25

New York Tribune, June 13, 1859.

26

This distinction is valid even though the Oldtown folks belonged to Mrs. Stowe’s childhood. The Andover of her later years was Oldtown in all essential respects.

27

“Elsie Venner,” chap. i, “The Brahmin Caste of New England.”

28

Meeting of the American Medical Association, May, 1853. The response was a poem.

29

For a direct statement on the resumption of the old attempt, see “The Autocrat’s Autobiography” printed as a foreword to the volume. For an indirect account, see the passages on Byles Gridley and his “Thoughts on the Universe” in Holmes’s “The Guardian Angel.”

30

For varying sentiments about “Bohemia” see the following passages: Ferris Greenslet, “Life of Thomas Bailey Aldrich,” pp. 37–47; W. D. Howells, “Literary Friends and Acquaintances,” pp. 68–76; Stedman and Gould, “Life of Edmund Clarence Stedman,” pp. 208, 209; William Winter, “Old Friends,” pp. 291–297.

31

In reply to this and like passages William Winter wrote: “No literary circle comparable with the Bohemian group of that period, in ardor of genius, variety of character, and singularity of achievement, has since existed in New York, nor has any group of writers anywhere existent in our country been so ignorantly and grossly misrepresented and maligned” (“Old Friends,” p. 138).

32

A corresponding danger on the other hand is that a people who abjure all such phrases will abjure also the things for which they stand, until they become irredeemably prosaic and matter of fact.

33

This was the second time that President Gilman had placed a poet in the position of teacher, for he had already done this with Edward Rowland Sill at the University of California (see p. 397).

34

“Mark Twain, a Biography,” by Albert Bigelow Paine. 3 vols. 1912.

35

See his essay “How to Tell a Story” in “The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg,” pp. 225–230.

36

James Russell Lowell, “Ode on Agassiz.”

37