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Walter Scott (search for this): chapter 7
an inheritor of property, trained at Harvard, and an Overseer and Fellow of his University, who disliked the ideals of culture and refinement; a member of the Saturday Club who was bored with literary talk and literary people; a staunch American who despised democracy as thoroughly as Alexander Hamilton, and thought suffrage a failure; a nineteenth century historian who cared nothing for philosophy, science, or the larger lessons of history itself; a fascinating realistic writer who admired Scott, Byron, and Cooper for their tales of action, and despised Wordsworth and Thoreau as effeminate sentimentalists who were preoccupied with themselves. In Parkman the wheel has come full circle, and a movement that began with expansion 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. Befo
Dorothy (search for this): chapter 7
He lingered himself until the autumn of 1894, in his eighty-sixth year-The last Leaf, in truth, of New England's richest springtime. No, my friends, he had said in The Autocrat of the Breakfast table, I go (always, other things being equal) for the man who inherits family traditions and the cumulative humanities of at least four or five generations. The Doctor came naturally by his preference for a man of family, being one himself. He was a descendant of Anne Bradstreet, the poetess. Dorothy Q., whom he had made the most picturesque of the Quincys, was his great-grandmother. Wendell Phillips was his cousin. His father, the Rev. Abiel Holmes, a Yale graduate, was the minister of the First Church in Cambridge, and it was in its gambrel-roofed parsonage that Oliver Wendell was born in 1809. Know old Cambridge? Hope you do.- Born there? Don't say so! I was,too. Nicest place that was ever seen- Colleges red and Common green. So he wrote, in scores of passages of filial dev
Americans (search for this): chapter 7
ver 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 and the Emersons. It is difficult for contemporary Americans to assess the value of such a man, who evidently did nothing except to write a few books. His rare, delicate genius was scarcely touched by passing events. Not many of his countrymen really love his writings, as they love, for instance the wrembered-memoirs of his friends Emerson and Motley, and many miscellaneous essays. His life was exceptionally happy, and his cheery good opinion of himself is still contagious. To pronounce the words Doctor Holmes in any company of intelligent Americans is the prologue to a smile of recognition, comprehension, sympathy. The word Goldsmith has now lost, alas, this provocative quality; the word Stevenson still possesses it. The little Doctor, who died in the same year as Stevenson, belonged lik
Paul Revere (search for this): chapter 7
countrymen has thus become a national asset, and not merely because in his three best known narrative poems, Evangeline, Hiawatha, and The Courtship of miles Standish, he selected his themes from our own history. The building of the ship, written with full faith in the troubled year of 1849, is a national anthem. It is a wonderful gift, said Lincoln, as he listened to it, his eyes filled with tears, to be able to stir men like that. The Skeleton in Armor, a ballad of the French Fleet, Paul Revere's Ride, the Wreck of the Hesperus, are ballads that stir men still. For all of his skill in story-telling in verse-witness the Tales of a Wayside Inn-Longfellow was not by nature a dramatist, and his trilogy now published under the title of Christus, made up of The divine tragedy, the golden legend, and New England tragedies, added little to a reputation won in other fields. His sonnets, particularly those upon Chaucer, Milton, the Divina Commedia, a Nameless grave, Felton, Sumner, nat
Voltaire (search for this): chapter 7
eling for the presence of an imaginary audience of congenial listeners. One still catches the Hear! Hear! between his clever lines. In many of the traits of his mind this Yankee Frenchman resembled such a typical eighteenth century figure as Voltaire. Like Voltaire, he was tolerant-except toward Calvinism and Homeopathy. In some of the tricks of his prose style he is like a kindlier Sterne. His knack for vers de societe was caught from Horace, but he would not have been a child of his ownVoltaire, he was tolerant-except toward Calvinism and Homeopathy. In some of the tricks of his prose style he is like a kindlier Sterne. His knack for vers de societe was caught from Horace, but he would not have been a child of his own age without the additional gift of rhetoric and eloquence which is to be seen in his patriotic poems and his hymns. For Holmes possessed, in spite of all his limitations in poetic range, true devotion, patriotism, humor, and pathos. His poetry was in the best sense of the word occasional, and his prose was only an incidental or accidental harvest of a long career in which his chief duty was that of a professor of anatomy in the Harvard Medical School. He had studied in Paris under sound te
Burton E. Stevenson (search for this): chapter 7
, who evidently did nothing except to write a few books. His rare, delicate genius was scarcely touched by passing events. Not many of his countrymen really love his writings, as they love, for instance the writings of Dickens or Thackeray or Stevenson. Everyone reads, at some time of his life, The Scarlet letter, and trembles at its passionate indictment of the sin of concealment, at its agonized admonition, Be true! Be true! Perhaps the happiest memories of Hawthorne's readers, as of Kipf intelligent Americans is the prologue to a smile of recognition, comprehension, sympathy. The word Goldsmith has now lost, alas, this provocative quality; the word Stevenson still possesses it. The little Doctor, who died in the same year as Stevenson, belonged like him to the genial race of friends of mankind, and a few of his poems, and some gay warm-hearted pages of his prose, will long preserve his memory. But the Boston which he loved has vanished as utterly as Sam Johnson's London.
Dean Milman (search for this): chapter 7
al source of pleasure. It was published at his own expense on Christmas Day, 1837, and met with instantaneous success. My market and my reputation rest principally with England, he wrote in 1838--a curious footnote, by the way, to Emerson's Phi Beta Kappa Address of the year before. But America joined with England, in praising the new book. Then Prescott turned to the Conquest of Mexico, the Conquest of Peru, and finally to his unfinished History of the Reign of Philip II. He had, as Dean Milman wrote him, the judgment to choose noble subjects. He wrote with serenity and dignity, with fine balance and proportion. Some of the Spanish documents upon which he relied have been proved less trustworthy than he thought, but this unsuspected defect in his materials scarcely impaired the skill with which this unhasting, unresting painter filled his great canvases. They need retouching, perhaps, but the younger historians are incompetent for the task. Prescott died in 1859, in the sam
Roger Chillingworth (search for this): chapter 7
, the Puritan reverence for the magistrate-minister — differing so widely from the respect of Latin countries for the priest — the Puritan preoccupation with the life of the soul, or, as more narrowly construed by Calvinism, the problem of evil. The word Adultery, although suggestively enough present in one of the finest symbolical titles ever devised by a romancer, does not once occur in the book. The sins dealt with are hypocrisy and revenge. Arthur Dimmesdale, Hester Prynne, and Roger Chillingworth are developing, suffering, living creatures, caught inextricably in the toils of a moral situation. By an incomparable succession of pictures Hawthorne exhibits the travail of their souls. In the greatest scene of all, that between Hester and Arthur in the forest, the Puritan framework of the story gives way beneath the weight of human passion, and we seem on the verge of another and perhaps larger solution than was actually worked out by the logic of succeeding events. But though
Zenobia (search for this): chapter 7
, are motives that Ibsen might have developed. But the Norseman would have failed to rival Hawthorne's delicate manipulation of his shadows, and the no less masterly deftness of the ultimate mediation of a dark inheritance through the love of the light-hearted Phoebe for the latest descendant of the Maules. In The Blithedale romance Hawthorne stood for once, perhaps, too near his material to allow the rich atmospheric effects which he prefers, and in spite of the unforgetable portrait of Zenobia and powerful passages of realistic description, the book is not quite focussed. In The Marble Faun Hawthorne comes into his own again. Its central problem is one of those dark insoluble ones that he loves: the influence of a crime upon the development of a soul. Donatello, the Faun, is a charming young creature of the natural sunshine until his love for the somber Miriam tempts him to the commission of murder: then begins the growth of his mind and character. Perhaps the haunting power
Benjamin Franklin (search for this): chapter 7
jurist, had published his five-volume life of his fellow Virginian a score of years earlier. But Sparks proceeded to write another biography of Washington and to edit his writings. He also edited a Library of American biography, wrote lives of Franklin and Gouverneur Morris, was professor of history and President of Harvard, and lived to be seventy-seven. As editor of the writings of Franklin and Washington, he took what we now consider unpardonable liberties in altering the text, and this erFranklin and Washington, he took what we now consider unpardonable liberties in altering the text, and this error of judgment has somewhat clouded his just reputation as a pioneer in historical research. George Bancroft, who was born in 1800, and died, a horseback-riding sage, at ninety-one, inherited from his clergyman father a taste for history. He studied in Germany after leaving Harvard, turned schoolmaster, Democratic politician and office-holder, served as Secretary of the Navy, Minister to England and then to the German Empire, and won distinction in each of his avocations, though the real pa
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