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Massachusetts (Massachusetts, United States) (search for this): chapter 6
essimism. Early in the nineteenth century the most ancient and influential churches in Boston and the leading professors at Harvard had accepted the new form of religious liberalism known as Unitarianism. The movement spread throughout Eastern Massachusetts and made its way to other States. Orthodox and liberal Congregational churches split apart, and when Channing preached the ordination sermon for Jared Sparks in Baltimore in 1819, the word Unitarian, accepted by the liberals with some mi The French and Scotch blood in the furtive hermit suddenly grew hot. Instead of renouncing in disgust the uncivil chaos called Civil Government, Thoreau challenged it to a fight. Indeed he had already thrown down the gauntlet in Slavery in Massachusetts, which Garrison had published in the Liberator in 1854. And now the death upon the scaffold of the old fanatic of Ossawatomie changed Thoreau into a complete citizen, arguing the case and glorifying to his neighbors the dead hero. It seems
Concord (Massachusetts, United States) (search for this): chapter 6
, one of the very Sun-Gods. The pilgrim to Concord who stops for a moment in the village librarynorth, close to the rude bridge of the famous Concord fight in 1775, is the Old Manse, once tenanteu and William James close by. But although Concord is the Emerson shrine, he was born in Boston,Emerson occupying a room in the Old Manse at Concord, strolling in the quiet fields, lecturing or second time, had bought a house of his own in Concord, and purposed to make a living by lecturing onfidence in God and the soul. Citizens of Concord in May, 1862, hearing that Henry Thoreau, thetime he printed only two books, A week on the Concord and Merrimac rivers-which was even more complncils and ground plumbago in his own house in Concord. The mother was from New Hampshire. It was er in Boston and elsewhere, he descended upon Concord, flitted to the queer community of Fruitlands, was starved back to Concord, inspired and bored the patient Emerson, talked endlessly, wrote inef
Harper's Ferry (West Virginia, United States) (search for this): chapter 6
ntempt for much that we read and write about the call of the wild; but no reader of his books can escape his infection for the freedom of the woods, for the stark and elemental in nature. Thoreau's passion for this aspect of life may have been selfish, wolflike, but it is still communicative. Once, toward the close of his too brief life, Thoreau signed on again to an American ideal, and no man could have signed more nobly. It was the cause of Freedom, as represented by John Brown of Harper's Ferry. The French and Scotch blood in the furtive hermit suddenly grew hot. Instead of renouncing in disgust the uncivil chaos called Civil Government, Thoreau challenged it to a fight. Indeed he had already thrown down the gauntlet in Slavery in Massachusetts, which Garrison had published in the Liberator in 1854. And now the death upon the scaffold of the old fanatic of Ossawatomie changed Thoreau into a complete citizen, arguing the case and glorifying to his neighbors the dead hero. I
Paris, Tenn. (Tennessee, United States) (search for this): chapter 6
s, her clear brain, her touch of sensuousness. She was an early-ripe, over-crammed scholar in the classics and in modern European languages. She did loyal, unpaid work as the editor of the Dial, which from 1840 to 1844 was the organ of Transcendentalism. She joined the community at Brook Farm, whose story has been so well told by Lindsay Swift. For a while she served as literary editor of the New York Tribune under Horace Greeley. Then she went abroad, touched Rousseau's manuscripts at Paris with trembling, adoring fingers, made a secret marriage in Italy with the young Marquis Ossoli, and perished by shipwreck, with her husband and child, off Fire Island in 1850. Theodore Parker, like Alcott and Margaret, an admirable Greek scholar, an idealist and reformer, still lives in Chadwick's biography, in Colonel Higginson's delightful essay, and in the memories of a few liberal Bostonians who remember his tremendous sermons on the platform of the old Music Hall. He was a Lexington
Oriental (North Carolina, United States) (search for this): chapter 6
ong-continued effort in composition, and he was artist enough to know that his pages, carefully assembled from his notebooks, had pungency, form, atmosphere. No man of his day, not even Lowell the last of the bookmen, abandoned himself more unreservedly to the delight of reading. Thoreau was an accomplished scholar in the Greek and Roman classics, as his translations attest. He had some acquaintance with several modern languages, and at one time possessed the best collection of books on Oriental literature to be found in America. He was drenched in the English poetry of the seventeenth century. His critical essays in the Dial, his letters and the bookish allusions throughout his writings, are evidence of rich harvesting in the records of the past. He left some three thousand manuscript pages of notes on the American Indians, whose history and character had fascinated him from boyhood. Even his antiquarian hobbies gave him durable satisfaction. Then, too, he had deep delight in
Quaker (West Virginia, United States) (search for this): chapter 6
by a gift of emotional interpretation of the meaning of phenomena. Lovers of literature celebrate his sheer force and penetration of phrase. But to the student of American thought Thoreau's prime value lies in the courage and consistency with which he endeavored to realize the gospel of Transcendentalism in his own inner life. Lovers of racial traits like to remember that Thoreau's grandfather was an immigrant Frenchman from the island of Jersey, and that his grandmother was Scotch and Quaker. His father made lead pencils and ground plumbago in his own house in Concord. The mother was from New Hampshire. It was a high-minded family. All the four children taught school and were good talkers. Henry, born in 1817, was duly baptized by good Dr. Ripley of the Old Manse, studied Greek and Latin, and was graduated at Harvard in 1837, the year of Emerson's Phi Beta Kappa address. Even in college the young man was a trifle difficult. Cold and unimpressible, wrote a classmate. The
Merrimack (United States) (search for this): chapter 6
rty-fifth year, would have smiled cannily at the notion that after fifty years their townsman's literary works would be published in a sumptuous twenty-volume edition, and that critics in his own country and in Europe would rank him with Ralph Waldo Emerson. Yet that is precisely what has happened. Our literature has no more curious story than the evolution of this local crank into his rightful place of mastership. In his lifetime he printed only two books, A week on the Concord and Merrimac rivers-which was even more completely neglected by the public than Emerson's Nature--and Walden, now one of the classics, but only beginning to be talked about when its shy, proud author penned his last line and died with the words moose and Indian on his lips. Thoreau, like all thinkers who reach below the surface of human life, means many different things to men of various temperaments. Collectors of human novelties, like Stevenson, rejoice in his uniqueness of flavor; critics, like Lowe
Baltimore, Md. (Maryland, United States) (search for this): chapter 6
was now an increasingly sharp reaction against its determinism and its pessimism. Early in the nineteenth century the most ancient and influential churches in Boston and the leading professors at Harvard had accepted the new form of religious liberalism known as Unitarianism. The movement spread throughout Eastern Massachusetts and made its way to other States. Orthodox and liberal Congregational churches split apart, and when Channing preached the ordination sermon for Jared Sparks in Baltimore in 1819, the word Unitarian, accepted by the liberals with some misgiving, became the recognized motto of the new creed. It is only with its literary influence that we are here concerned, yet that literary influence became so potent that there is scarcely a New England writer of the first rank, from Bryant onward, who remained untouched by it. The most interesting and peculiar phase of the new liberalism has little directly to do with the specific tenets of theological Unitarianism, an
France (France) (search for this): chapter 6
ciples of the New Testament as Balaam's ass was of Hebrew grammar. By and by came an open difference with his congregation over the question of administering the Communion. I am not interested in it, Emerson admitted, and he wrote in his Journal the noble words: It is my desire, in the office of a Christian minister, to do nothing which I cannot do with my whole heart. His resignation was accepted in 1832. His young wife had died of consumption in the same year. He now sailed for Italy, France, and England, a memorable journey which gave him an acquaintance with Landor, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Carlyle, but which was even more significant in sending him, as he says, back to himself, to the resources of his own nature. When shows break up, wrote Whitman afterward, what but oneself is sure? In 1834 and 1835 we find Emerson occupying a room in the Old Manse at Concord, strolling in the quiet fields, lecturing or preaching if he were invited to do so, but chiefly absorbed in a li
New England (United States) (search for this): chapter 6
To understand the literary leadership of New England during the thirty years immediately precedily assimilated. The physical remoteness of New England from other sections of the country, and theas to warrant the term of the Renascence of New England. No single cause is sufficient to account land in the sixteenth century, so now young New England college men like Edward Everett and George of the most brilliant and radical minds of New England. Its foremost representative in our literat are invisible. Now turn to some of the New England men. Dr. C. A. Bartol, a disciple of Emerso the West brought him, more widely than any New England man of letters, into contact with the new, of Ben Franklin. Like most of the greater New England writers, he could be, on occasion, an admir essays on Life and letters in New England, New England reformers, politics, and the successive ent than a glimpse at the other members of the New England Transcendental group. They are a very mixe[9 more...]
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