Poetry reveals itself everywhere in his phrasing. The haze is "the sun's dust of travel." The ice of the pond "whoops' on a winter's night. Toadstools are "round-tables of the swamp gods." Some taller mast of pine rises in the midst of the woods like a pagoda." The crowing of the wild Indian pheasant would "put nations on the alert." Moreover, there are records of sounds and visions that none but a poet could hear or see: "The winds which passed over my dwelling were such as sweep over the ridges of mountains, bearing the broken strains, or celestial parts only, of terrestrial music. The morning wind forever blows, the poem of creation is uninterrupted; but few are the ears that hear it. Olympus is but the outside of the earth everywhere." "Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars.” Sometimes he runs into rhyme and becomes a poet confessed; and though his verse, as such, is very erratic, his delicate lines on Smoke, "Light winged smoke, Icarian bird! Melting thy pinions in thy upward flight, are worth all the praise they have received. In the four years immediately following Thoreau's death five books were published from the mass of manuscript which he left-Excursions, The Maine Woods, Cape Cod, Letters, and A Yankee in Canada. To these of late years have been added five more-Spring, Summer, etc. They give him a very dignified place in the library and assure him of a permanence of which he little dreamed. In his own day, when the polished N. P. Willis of New York was a favorite among the younger writers, few knew his name and none would have ventured to prophesy for him any place in American letters. But time has slowly reversed the verdict. Willis's little light is flickering, Thoreau's begins to burn with the steadiness of a fixed star. The day is past, too, for the criticism that he was only a reflection of Emerson. Each owed something to the other, and doubtless Thoreau's debt was the greater, for he was the younger man and his was the inferior mind. But the difference between them was greater than the likeness. Emerson's books belong on those shelves where we put the philosophical works of Plato, Marcus Aurelius, Montaigne, and Bacon. Thoreau's belong with that group of more modest classics of the forest and field that gather about White's Selborne and Walton's Complete Angler. CHAPTER VII NATIONAL LIFE AND CULTURE.-LONGFELLOW, WHITTIER, LOWELL, HOLMES, WHITMAN Of the period of our literature now under consideration— the prolific middle of the nineteenth century-four or five major writers and countless minor ones still remain to be treated. Placing them here in a single group is, perhaps, on the ground of coherence, a course not entirely justifiable. to make any of the divisions that suggest themselves would seem to be even less justifiable. A separation, for instance, into poets and prose-writers is scarcely possible, since many of the writers were both; and to divide along other lines, as into Cambridge scholars, anti-slavery agitators, and the like, would again be only to work confusion by making divisions that seriously overlap. It seems better therefore to keep the writers together, regarding them broadly as contributors, each in his way, to our national life and character-as co-workers toward the one end of upbuilding a modern nation of political unity and of continuous moral and intellectual growth. It is true, the writers we have already treated might be regarded in the same light, but there is at least this difference, that they worked more specifically to literary or personal ends, while the men whom we have now to consider were in closer touch with our social organization, and their writings and speeches largely grew out of, or contributed toward, the wide activities among which they moved. ORATORY Oratory in America, which has perhaps had a more continuous history than any other form of letters except theology, reached its highest development between 1830 and 1860. This is, of course, only another manifestation of the great intellectual and artistic energy that attended the development and fixing of our national character, the more direct stimulus in this case being found in the political conditions—in the difficult adjustment of early national principles, and especially in the unsettled and continually vexing issue of slavery. But our oratory scarcely rose to the level attained in other literary forms. It was made illustrious by at least two eminently great men— Webster and Lincoln-but it never united in one man all the original genius and the eloquent and scholarly virtues that have made the speeches of Demosthenes, Cicero, Bossuet, and Burke, permanent classics in the world's literature. Daniel Webster we are still disposed to regard as our foremost exponent of deliberative and forensic eloquence. He had, to begin with, physical advantages that seemed to proclaim him an even greater man than he was. Daniel Webster, 1782-1852. ...... Carlyle, a master at portraiture, saw him once and described him in a letter to Emerson: "The tanned complexion; that amorphous, crag-like face; the dull black eyes under their precipice of eyebrow, like dull anthracite furnaces, needing only to be blown; the mastiff mouth, accurately closed. He is a magnificent specimen; you might say to all the world, 'This is your Yankee Englishman, such limbs we make in Yankeeland."" Born on a backwoods farm in New Hampshire at the close of the Revolutionary War, and graduated from Dartmouth in 1801, Webster rapidly rose in the legal profession, until he was sent to Congress in 1813. He shortly afterward took up his residence at Boston, and from that time on, as representative, senator, secretary of state, and Whig aspirant for the Presidency, he was, as Carlyle put it, "the notablest of our notabilities.' His supremacy in American statesmanship was somewhat comparable to that, in later years, of Gladstone in English or of Bismarck in Prussian. Webster's great service was done in the stormy Congressional debates of 1830-1832, when he came forward in opposition to the principle of state sovereignty, and helped to fix finally the supreme power and authority of the federal constitution. He made himself the champion of the national idea, of complete union, and it is fitting that he should be remembered by those famous words with which he closed the speech in reply to Hayne: "Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable." The great blemish upon his career was his weak ness in not facing squarely the question of slave-holding when that issue was approaching a crisis. By supporting the compromise measures of 1850 instead of throwing his influence with the radical opponents of slavery, he added to the confidence of the slave power and contributed much to the final disastrous results. Whittier, in the poem Ichabod, lashed him severely for his defection. But Webster suffered to the full for his weakness, and many years after his death Whittier was glad to do his memory justice, mourning, in The Lost Occasion, that Webster had not been spared till the day of actual disunion, assured that no stronger voice than his would have then "Called out the utmost might of men, To make the Union's charter free And strengthen law by liberty." The best examples of Webster's forensic pleading are to be found in the argument on the Dartmouth College Case before the United States Supreme Court in 1818 and in his speech at the White murder trial at Salem in 1829. His great deliberative speeches in the Senate have already been mentioned— the Reply to Hayne in 1830, and the "Seventh of March Speech" in favor of compromise in 1850. His best public addresses include one delivered at the anniversary at Plymouth in 1820, one at the laying of the corner-stone of the Bunker Hill Monument and another at its completion, and a eulogy on |