Such were Holmes's comments on his contemporaries who followed in the footsteps of Jonathan Edwards. Of Edwards himself he wrote, if possible, more plainly still:

"The practical effect of Edwards's teachings about the relations of God and man has bequeathed a lesson not to be forgotten. A revival in which the majority of converts fell away; nervous disorders of all sorts, insanity, suicide, among the rewards of his eloquence; Religion dressed up in fine phrases and made much of, while Morality, her Poor Relation, was getting hard treatment at the hands of the young persons who had grown up under the reign of terror of the Northampton pulpit; alienation of the hearts of his people to such an extent as is rarely seen in the bitterest quarrels between pastor and flock, — if this was a successful ministry, what disasters would constitute a failure?”

The truth is that Holmes was not only antagonistic to the temper of Calvinism in life and character; he was also its most openly and bitterly persistent opponent. The more you read his prose, the more you feel his consciousness of the old creed cropping out in places where you least expect it. The traditional Unitarianism of New England was apt to neglect orthodoxy; Holmes could not. The dogmas of Calvin lurked constantly in his mind; and he never failed to attack them. This hideous system is untrue, he protests; he will deny it; he will oppose it in every possible way; if so may be he will leave the world better for his work in the destruction of this most monstrous of its spiritual errors. So Holmes, who in his superficial life is remembered as the wittiest and happiest of New England social figures, and as the most finished as well as the most tenderly sentimental maker of our occasional verse, and who wrote so much even of his most serious work with the temper and the manner of a wit, proves to have another aspect. Among our men of letters this rationalist was the most sturdy, the most militant, the most pitiless enemy of a superstition whose tyranny over his childhood had left lifelong scars. In the persistency with which this spectre of Calvinism rose before him there was something which he may well have fancied to be like the diabolic possessions so fer

vently believed in by the Puritan fathers. He might lay the spectre again and again, but every time he took up his pen it would arise inhuman as ever. That he never relaxed his fight shows rare courage. From beginning to end, then, Holmes was a survivor of the eighteenth century. Brave rationalistic attack on outworn superstitions is the bravest note of that past epoch.

If there be any one European figure whose position in world literature is analogous to that of Holmes in the literature of New England, it is Voltaire. The differences between Voltaire and Holmes, to be sure, are so much more marked than the analogies that any analogy may at first seem fantastic. For all his eminence, Voltaire was not born a gentleman and never had quite the traits of one; in our little New England there was never a better gentleman than Holmes. Voltaire was a man of licentious life and pitiless temper, incensed and distracted by all the old-world corruptions which he spent his wits in stabbing to death; Holmes's life had all the simple provincial decency and kindliness of his country. Voltaire's wit was the keenest and most sustained of modern Europe; the wit of Holmes, after all, was only the most delightful which has amused nineteenth-century Boston. For all these differences, there is a true analogy between them: both alike, with superficial frivolity, bravely devoted themselves to lifelong war against what they believed to be delusions which terribly impeded the progress of human nature towards a better future. And each was so earnest that neither could help expressing himself in such manner as to his nature was true. taire's wit, then, teems with blasphemy and licentiousness; that of Holmes is pure of either. This does not mean that one man was essentially better or worse than the other; it means rather that the worlds in which they lived and the superstitions which they combated were different.

Vol

Voltaire died in 1770; Holmes as a writer of prose hardly existed before 1857. The two are a full century apart, yet

there is between them such likeness as almost seems intellect

ually contemporary. In the contrast between them, then, there is something which freshly throws familiar light on New England. The contrast between Holmes and Voltaire, if in one sense a contrast between the eighteenth century and the nineteenth, is in another sense a contrast between a foul old Europe and an America still pure in its national inexperience. Above all, it is a contrast which distinctly shows what freshness of nature and feeling still marked America in Holmes's time. Few men ever expressed themselves less guardedly than he; yet so far as licentiousness or blasphemy is concerned every line of his printed works may be put unreservedly in the hands of any child. Even to our own time the history of American human nature implies our national inexperience. In the New England Renaissance, rationalism itself, and all the freedom of earnest satire, appears for once void of impurity.

IN our study of the New England Renaissance we have glanced at Emerson, whom we may call its prophet; at Whittier, who so admirably phrased its aspirations for reform; at Longfellow, its academic poet; at Lowell, its humanist; and at Holmes, its rationalist. The period produced but one other literary figure of equal eminence with these, — Nathaniel Hawthorne, above and beyond the others an artist.

His origin was different from that of his contemporaries whom we have lately considered. Emerson and Longfellow and Lowell and Holmes were all born into the social class which at their time was dominant in New England; and Whittier sprang from sturdy country yeomen. Hawthorne came from a family eminent in early colonial days, but long lapsed into that sort of obscurity which modern cant would call social degeneracy. His father, a ship captain of the period when New England commerce was most vigorous, died in Guiana when Hawthorne was only four years old; and the boy, who had been born at Salem in 1804, grew up there in his mother's care, singularly solitary. His youthful experience was confined to Salem, then a more important town than now, but already showing symptoms of decline. He made at least one prolonged visit in search of health to the woods of Maine. To this day wild and then wilder still, these forests early made familiar to him the atmosphere of our ancestral wilderness. In 1821 he went to Bowdoin College. There he was a student with Longfellow, and of Franklin Pierce, afterwards President of the United States. His friendship with

the latter was close and lifelong. In 1825, they took their degrees at Bowdoin.

For the ensuing fourteen years Hawthorne lived with his mother at Salem, so quietly that his existence was hardly known to the townsfolk of that gossipy little Yankee seaport. He spent much time indoors, constantly writing but neither successful nor generally recognised as an author. He took long solitary walks, and his personal appearance is said to have been romantic and picturesque. In 1839 he was appointed a clerk in the Boston Custom House; in 1841 the spoils system turned him out of office, and for a few months he was at Brook Farm. The next year he married, and from then until 1846 he lived at Concord, writing and by this time pleasantly recognised as a writer of short stories. From 1846 to 1849 he was Surveyor in the Custom House of Salem. During the ensuing four years, when he resided at various places in Massachusetts, he produced his three most characteristic long books, the "Scarlet Letter," the "House of the Seven Gables," and the "Blithedale Romance," as well as his two volumes of mythological stories for children, the "Wonderbook" and "Tanglewood Tales." In 1853, his friend, President Pierce, made him Consul at Liverpool. He remained abroad until 1860, passing some time during his later stay there in Italy. From this experience resulted the "Marble Faun." In 1860, he came home and returned to Concord, where he lived thenceforth. He died in the White Mountains, on the 18th of May, 1864.

Chronologically, then, Hawthorne's position in New England literature seems earlier than that of his contemporaries at whom we have glanced. He was only a year younger than Emerson, he was three years older than Longfellow and Whittier, five years older than Holmes, and fifteen years older than Lowell. He died thirty-six years ago; and Emerson and Longfellow survived until 1882, Lowell till 1891, Whittier till 1892, and Holmes till 1895. Though Hawthorne, how