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La Salle, Ill. (Illinois, United States) (search for this): chapter 7
Then, after a sufficient interval, 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 A
Quaker (Missouri, United States) (search for this): chapter 7
an himself, and he also knew, by intimate experience as a maker of public opinion, how variable are its judgments. Whittier represents a stock different from that of the Longfellows, but equally American, equally thoroughbred: the Essex County Quaker farmer of Massachusetts. The homestead in which he was born in 1807, at East Haverhill, had been built by his great-great-grandfather in 1688. Mount Vernon in Virginia and the Craigie House in Cambridge are newer than this by two generations. Tis 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
Peru, Mass. (Massachusetts, United States) (search for this): chapter 7
t, or any sense of obligation to complete it in a given time, I have found it a continual 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 t
Essex County (Massachusetts, United States) (search for this): chapter 7
artist than himself, and he also knew, by intimate experience as a maker of public opinion, how variable are its judgments. Whittier represents a stock different from that of the Longfellows, but equally American, equally thoroughbred: the Essex County Quaker farmer of Massachusetts. The homestead in which he was born in 1807, at East Haverhill, had been built by his great-great-grandfather in 1688. Mount Vernon in Virginia and the Craigie House in Cambridge are newer than this by two generent his Exile's Departure to William Lloyd Garrison, then twenty, and the editor of the Newburyport free Press. The neighbors liked it, and the tall frail author was rewarded with a term at the Haverhill Academy, where he paid his way, in old Essex County fashion, by making shoes. He had little more formal schooling than this, was too poor to enter college, but had what he modestly called a knack at rhyming, and much facility in prose. He turned to journalism and politics, for which he poss
New England (United States) (search for this): chapter 7
The golden forties were as truly golden for New England as for idle California. There was wealth, s, and atmospheres, and he knew the past of New England as few men have ever known it. There is sol turned aside from those pleasant fields of New England legend and history to which he was destined lost youth and painted for all time a true New England hearthside. Whittier was still to write eshness and delicacy of his reaction to the New England scene. Thoreau himself, whom Lowell did noere are no other names in the literature of New England quite comparable with those that have just along the line of westward emigration from New England as far as the Mississippi is one tangible en afford curious material to the student of New England's golden age. In the seventy years of his h at the close of the golden age. Whatever a New England will can accomplish was wrought manfully byen, these were something which our later Greeks of the New England Athens esteemed as foolishness. [3 more...]
Mount Vernon, Knox County, Ohio (Ohio, United States) (search for this): chapter 7
mbled Cooper's LeatherStocking. Whittier knew that his friend Longfellow was a better artist than himself, and he also knew, by intimate experience as a maker of public opinion, how variable are its judgments. Whittier represents a stock different from that of the Longfellows, but equally American, equally thoroughbred: the Essex County Quaker farmer of Massachusetts. The homestead in which he was born in 1807, at East Haverhill, had been built by his great-great-grandfather in 1688. Mount Vernon in Virginia and the Craigie House in Cambridge are newer than this by two generations. The house has been restored to the precise aspect it had in Whittier's boyhood: and the garden, lawn, and brook, even the door-stone and bridlepost and the barn across the road are witnesses to the fidelity of the descriptions in Snow-bound. The neighborhood is still a lonely one. The youth grew up in seclusion, yet in contact with a few great ideas, chief among them Liberty. My father, he said, was
Salem (Massachusetts, United States) (search for this): chapter 7
ossessed, for professional use, the ideas and vocabulary of his transcendental friends. Born in Salem in 1804, he was descended from Judge Haw. thorne of Salem Witchcraft fame, and from a long linegate Calendar, was graduated at Bowdoin, with Longfellow, in the class of 1825, and returned to Salem for thirteen brooding lonely years in which he tried to teach himself the art of story-writing. s 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, publisheimself was inclined to think a better book than The Scarlet letter. Certainly this story of old Salem is impeccably written and its subtle handling of tone and atmosphere is beyond dispute. An ancelive in. Grandson of Prescott the brave of Bunker Hill, and son of the rich Judge Prescott of Salem, William Hickling Prescott was born in 1796, and was graduated from Harvard in 1814. An acciden
Addison, Steuben County, New York (New York, United States) (search for this): chapter 7
d The Wonder-book is like having grown old without ever catching the sweetness of the green world at dawn. But our public has learned to enjoy a wholly different kind of style, taught by the daily journals, a nervous, graphic, sensational, physical style, fit for describing an automobile, a department store, a steamship, a lynching party. It is the style of our day, and judged by it Hawthorne, who wrote with severity, conscience, and good taste, seems somewhat oldfashioned, like Irving or Addison. He is perhaps too completely a New Englander to be understood by men of other stock, and has never, like Poe and Whitman, excited strong interest among European minds. Yet no American is surer, generation after generation, of finding a fit audience. Hawthorne's genius was meditative rather than dramatic. His artistic material was moral rather than physical; he brooded over the soul of man as affected by this and that condition and situation. The child of a new analytical age, he tho
Lowell (Massachusetts, United States) (search for this): chapter 7
e passion, sweetness, and splendor of certain strophes, rather than to the perfection of these poems as artistic wholes. Lowell's personal lyrics of sorrow, such as The Changeling, the first Snowfall, after the Burial, have touched many hearts. Hitwo 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 noblestose ardors and fidelities of friendship which men like Emerson and Thoreau longed after without ever quite experiencing. Lowell's cosmopolitan reputation, which was greatly enhanced in the last decade of his life, seemed to his old associates of the friends throughout his lifetime, and to win fresh ones of a new generation through his books, is perhaps the greatest of Lowell's personal felicities. While there are no other names in the literature of New England quite comparable with those tha
Puritan (Ohio, United States) (search for this): chapter 7
thin 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 Haw. thorne of Salem Witchcraft fame, and from a long line of sea-faring ancestors. He inherited a morbid solitariness, redeemed in some measure by a physical endowment of rare strength and beauty. H
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