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Bowdoin (Montana, United States) (search for this): chapter 7
in 1807, of Mayflower stock that had distinguished itself for bravery and uprightness, the youth was graduated from Bowdoin at eighteen. Like his classmate Hawthorne, he had been a wide and secretly ambitious reader, and had followed the successive numbers of Irving's Sketch book, he tells us, with ever increasing wonder and delight. His college offered him in 1826 a professorship of the modern languages, and he spent three happy years in Europe in preparation. He taught successfully at Bowdoin for five or six years, and for eighteen years, 1836 to 1854, served as George Ticknor's successor at Harvard, ultimately surrendering the chair to Lowell. He early published two prose volumes, Hyperion and Outre-mer, Irvingesque romances of European travel. Then came, after ten years of teaching and the death of his young wife, the sudden impulse to write poetry, and he produced, softly excited, I know not why, The Reaper and the Flowers, a Psalm of death. From that December morning in
Kingston (Canada) (search for this): chapter 7
nterval, it may be repeated, often three or four times in the course of the day. By this means nearly the whole of the volume now offered has been composed. There is no more piteous or inspiring story of a fight against odds in the history of literature. For after his fortieth year the enemy gave way a little, and book after book somehow got itself written. There they stand upon the shelves, a dozen of them-The pioneers of France, The Jesuit in North America, La Salle, The Old Regime, Frontenac, Montcalm and Wolfe, A half-century of conflict-the boy's dream realized, the man's long warfare accomplished. The history of the forest, as Parkman saw it, was a pageant with the dark wilderness for a background, and, for the actors, taciturn savages, black-robed Jesuits, intrepid explorers, soldiers of France-all struggling for a vast prize, all changing, passing, with a pomp and color unknown to wearied Europe. It was a superb theme, better after all for an American than the themes ch
Amesbury (Massachusetts, United States) (search for this): chapter 7
ic form, overlooked the blemishes of his verse, and thought only of his vibrant emotion, his scorn of cowardice and evil, his prophetic exaltation. In 1847 came the first general collection of his poems, and here were to be found not merely controversial verses, but spirited Songs of labor, pictures of the lovely Merrimac countryside, legends written in the mood of Hawthorne or Longfellow, and bright bits of foreign lore and fancy. For though Whittier never went abroad, his quiet life at Amesbury gave him leisure for varied reading, and he followed contemporary European politics with the closest interest. He emerged more and more from the atmosphere of faction and section, and, though he retained to the last his Quaker creed, he held its simple tenets in such undogmatic and winning fashion that his hymns are sung today in all the churches. When The Atlantic monthly was established in 1857, Whittier was fifty. He took his place among the contributors to the new magazine not as a
Concord (Massachusetts, United States) (search for this): chapter 7
exquisitely written. After a couple of years in the Boston Custom-House, and a residence at the socialistic community of Brook Farm, Hawthorne made the happiest of marriages to Sophia Peabody, and for nearly four years dwelt in the Old Manse at Concord. He described it in one of the ripest of his essays, the Preface to Mosses from an Old Manse, his second collection of stories. After three years in the Custom-House at Salem, his dismissal in 1849 gave him leisure to produce his masterpiece, erpool and three subsequent years of residence upon the Continent saw no literary harvest except carefully filled notebooks and the deeply imaginative moral romance, The Marble Faun. Hawthorne returned home in 1860 and settled in the Wayside at Concord, busying himself with a new, and, as was destined, a never completed story about the elixir of immortality. But his vitality was ebbing, and in May, 1864, he passed away in his sleep. He rests under the pines in Sleepy Hollow, near the Alcotts
Canada (Canada) (search for this): chapter 7
xpansion of self ended in hard Spartan repression, even in inhibition of emotion. Becoming enamoured of the woods at sixteen, Parkman chose his life work at eighteen, and he was a man who could say proudly: I have not yet abandoned any plan which I ever formed. Before the end of the sophomore year, he wrote in his autobiography, my various schemes had crystallized into a plan of writing the story of what was then known as the Old French War, that is, the war that ended in the conquest of Canada, for here, as it seemed to me, the forest drama was more stirring and the forest stage more thronged with appropriate actors than in any other passage of our history. It was not till some years later that I enlarged the plan to include the whole course of the American conflict between France and England, or, in other words, the history of the American forest: for this was the light in which I regarded it. My theme fascinated me, and I was haunted with wilderness images day and night. To u
Puritan (Pennsylvania, United States) (search for this): chapter 7
admirable in feeling and is still so inspiring to his readers that one cannot wish it less in quantity; and in the field of political satire, such as the two series of Biglow papers, he had a theme and a method precisely suited to his temperament. No American has approached Lowell's success in this difficult genre: the swift transitions from rural Yankee humor to splendid scorn of evil and to noblest idealism reveal the full powers of one of our most gifted men. The preacher lurked in this Puritan from first to last, and the war against Mexico and the Civil War stirred him to the depths. His prose, likewise, is a school of loyalty. There was much of Europe in his learning, as his memorable Dante essay shows, and the traditions of great English literature were the daily companions of his mind. He was bookish, as a bookman should be, and sometimes the very richness and whimsicality of his bookish fancies marred the simplicity and good taste of his pages. But the fundamental textu
Liverpool (United Kingdom) (search for this): chapter 7
eface to Mosses from an Old Manse, his second collection of stories. After three years in the Custom-House at Salem, his dismissal in 1849 gave him leisure to produce his masterpiece, The Scarlet letter, published in 1850. He was now forty-six. In 1851, he published The House of the seven Gables, the Wonder-book, and The snow-image, and other tales. In 1852 came The Blithedale romance, a rich ironical story drawn from his Brook Farm experience. Four years in the American Consulate at Liverpool and three subsequent years of residence upon the Continent saw no literary harvest except carefully filled notebooks and the deeply imaginative moral romance, The Marble Faun. Hawthorne returned home in 1860 and settled in the Wayside at Concord, busying himself with a new, and, as was destined, a never completed story about the elixir of immortality. But his vitality was ebbing, and in May, 1864, he passed away in his sleep. He rests under the pines in Sleepy Hollow, near the Alcotts a
Bruges (Belgium) (search for this): chapter 7
held his immense audience throughout the Englishspeaking world. Two of the most popular of all his early pieces, The Psalm of life and Excelsior, have paid the price of a too apt adjustment to the ethical mood of an earnest moment in our national life. We have passed beyond them. And many readers may have outgrown their youthful pleasure in Maidenhood, the rainy day, the bridge, the day is done, verses whose simplicity lent themselves temptingly to parody. Yet such poems as The Belfry of Bruges, Seaweed, the fire of Driftwood, the Arsenal at Springfield, My lost youth, The children's hour, and many another lyric, lose nothing with the lapse of time. There is fortunately infinite room for personal preference in this whole matter of poetry, but the confession of a lack of regard for Longfellow's verse must often be recognized as a confession of a lessening love for what is simple, graceful, and refined. The current of contemporary American taste, especially among consciously cleve
California (California, United States) (search for this): chapter 7
e Prescott, Motley, and Parkman preferred to keep their feet on the solid earth and write admirable histories. So the mellow years went by. Most of the widely-read American books were being produced within twenty miles of the Boston State House. The slavery issue kept growling, far away, but it was only now and then, as in the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, that it was brought sharply home to the North. The golden forties were as truly golden for New England as for idle California. There was wealth, leisure, books, a glow of harvest-time in the air, though the spirit of the writers is the spirit of youth. Nathaniel Hawthorne, our greatest writer of pure romance, was Puritan by inheritance and temperament, though not in doctrine or in sympathy. His literary affiliations were with the English and German Romanticists, and he possessed, for professional use, the ideas and vocabulary of his transcendental friends. Born in Salem in 1804, he was descended from Judge
France (France) (search for this): chapter 7
mpathy never wavered. His linguistic talent helped him to penetrate the secrets of alien ways of thought and speech. He understood Italy and Spain, Holland and France and Germany. He had studied them on the lips of their living men and women and in the books where soldier and historian, priest and poet, had inscribed the recor than in any other passage of our history. It was not till some years later that I enlarged the plan to include the whole course of the American conflict between France and England, or, in other words, the history of the American forest: for this was the light in which I regarded it. My theme fascinated me, and I was haunted withis fortieth year the enemy gave way a little, and book after book somehow got itself written. There they stand upon the shelves, a dozen of them-The pioneers of France, The Jesuit in North America, La Salle, The Old Regime, Frontenac, Montcalm and Wolfe, A half-century of conflict-the boy's dream realized, the man's long warfare
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