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Chapter 13: later essayists
When, speaking to his classmates on their graduation from college,
William Ellery Channing1 made the address entitled
The present age (1798), the note that he uttered was one that thenceforth reverberated throughout our national life and literature.
It showed affiliation with the
French Revolution, and with the England of
Burns,
Shelley, and
Wordsworth; and notable is the emphasis on the possibility of all human progress, not alone American progress, and on the importance of that culture which shall be shared by all classes of mankind.
To material objects
Channing gave their due, but regarded them merely as the manifestations of character and of power that have in higher fields their most inspiring representation; and beauty was for him a vast treasury of benediction wherefrom he wished his fellow men to draw the priceless blessings available to the poorest purse.
Thus the essay on
Self-culture, written as an address in 1838, is a composition to which the writings of
Emerson,
Curtis,
Higginson,
Mabie, and later authors owe a decided, even if in some cases unconscious, debt—the practical and poetical blending of humanity with the humanities.
As
Channing was the earliest in that firmament of lecturer-essayists where
Emerson shone as the most benignant star, so
Nathaniel Parker Willis2 is the prototype of later semi-literary American journalists.
Now, the mark of the journalist, the trait which surely establishes both his immediate success and his final oblivion, is the intentness of seizure on what the present can give, in swift, exciting, easily apprehensible interest.
It was always the present that fascinated
Willis; and, save in fleeting moments
