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own day the standard writers of New England were more concerned as to what the Saturday Club might think of their productions than they ever deigned to be about the public.

Such facts, of course, are indefinite. How far the opinion of the Saturday Club really affected the literature of its palmiest days may still be debatable; and so, indeed, may the question of how far the personality of Fields, at once an enthusiastic member of the club, the most successful of New England publishers, and the editor of the "Atlantic," was vitally stimulating. Surely, though, as one begins to see in perspective a period which is passing into history, the importance of these influences seems rather to grow than to lessen. At least, it was when these were at their strongest that much of the best New England literature was made and came to light. Some of its makers we have already considered. Four, however, more unreservedly devoted to letters than the rest, remain for us. These are Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes, and Hawthorne.

XI

HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW

AMONG the men of letters who in mature life gathered about the "Atlantic Monthly " the most popular was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. He was born in 1807 at Portland, Maine, where his father was a lawyer. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the profession of the bar involved in New England a personal eminence similar to that which in colonial times had been held there by the clergy. Though a lawyer might not be rich, he was locally conspicuous, much as rich men have been since the Civil War; and, furthermore, his professional position usually implied what mere wealth has never yet implied among native Yankees, that in private life he enjoyed a certain social distinction. than Longfellow's time, the son of a lawyer would have found himself socially somewhat below the son of a divine; later the bar has had no more social distinction than other respectable callings. As the son of a lawyer in the palmiest days of the New England bar, then, Longfellow was fortunate in birth; and although his life was at times clouded by deep personal sorrows, its external circumstances seem throughout as fortunate as human ones can be.

A little earlier

In boyhood he showed delight in poetry; he early wrote verses, by no means remarkable, for the local papers of Portland. At fifteen he went to Bowdoin College, at Brunswick, Maine, where he took his degree in 1825. At that time there happened to be at Bowdoin more students who were subsequently distinguished than have ever been there since. Among them were J. S. C. Abbott, the historian, Franklin Pierce, who finally became President of the United States, and

Nathaniel Hawthorne.

These college years, too, were those when the spirit of Renaissance was freshest in New England air. Channing's great sermon on Unitarianism had been preached in 1819; Emerson's sermon on the sacrament, which marks the beginning of transcendental disintegration, was not preached until 1832. Longfellow's youth, in brief, came just when the religious and philosophic buoyancy of the New England Renaissance was surging; and this affected him all the more because in a region and at a college where oldfashioned orthodoxy still prevailed, he was from the beginning a Unitarian. Surrounded by fellow-students of marked ability, he found himself in a somewhat militant position, as a champion amid Calvinistic traditions of a philosophy which held human nature essentially good.

At that very moment, another phase of Renaissance was strongly asserting itself not far away. Harvard College had awakened to the existence of a wider range of culture than was comprised in the ancestral traditions of the ancient classics. In 1816, the Smith professorship of the French and Spanish languages was founded there. In 1817, George Ticknor, fresh from his then rare European experience, became the first Smith professor. He filled the chair until 1835; and in those sixteen years he may be said to have established the serious study of modern languages in America. When his teaching began, an educated American was expected to be familiar with no later masters of literature than the Romans. It is to the influences which Ticknor first embodied that we owe the traditional familiarity of educated Americans with such names as Dante, Cervantes, Montaigne, Molière, and Goethe. Nothing marks the spirit of our Renaissance more profoundly than this epoch-making recognition of the dignity and value of everything which is truly literature.

When Longfellow graduated from Bowdoin at the age of nineteen, Ticknor's teaching, then in its seventh year, had made such general impression that the authorities of Bowdoin

began to desire something similar there. The intention of Longfellow's father had been that his son should study for the bar; and the boy, who had hardly ever been out of Maine, had no more obvious qualification for a professorship of modern languages than the fact that he had been a good scholar in an old-fashioned classical college. His enthusiastic love for literature, however, was soon recognised as what the godly would call a vocation; in 1826 he went abroad under an agreement to prepare himself, by a three years' study of modern languages, for a Bowdoin professorship which should resemble Ticknor's at Harvard. Like some old pilgrim to Christian Rome, he set forth, wonderingly ignorant of the truths which he thus proposed apostolically to proclaim. In 1829 he came home with a reading knowledge of Spanish, Italian, French, and German, and began to teach at Bowdoin. In this work he persisted for six years. In 1835, Ticknor grew tired of his professorship, and chancing to possess fortune decided to give up teaching. The question of his successor having presented itself, Ticknor discerned no man in America better qualified to follow him than Longfellow. He recommended Longfellow to the Corporation of Harvard; and Longfellow, who up to that time had had little personal relation with Cambridge, accepted the Smith professorship. To prepare himself for this wider field of work, he went abroad for a year more. In 1836 he began his teaching at Harvard, which continued for eighteen years.

Longfellow's temper, like Ticknor's, proved increasingly impatient of distracting academic routine. As must always be the case with men of literary ambition, he felt more and more how gravely the drudgery of teaching must interfere with work which time may well prove more lasting and significant. His constant, enthusiastic wish was to be a poet. In 1854, then, he resigned the professorship in turn. The next year it was given to James Russell Lowell, who held it, at least

'n title, until his death in 1891.

Since then the Smith professorship has remained vacant. When it may again be filled is uncertain; but one thing seems sure. For seventy-five years it had only three tenants,— George Ticknor, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and James Russell Lowell. When Ticknor began his work modern literature was virtually unknown to America; when Lowell died, modern literature was as familiar to this whole continent as ever were the classics. Meanwhile almost all the literature which our continent has yet produced, and certainly all the memorable literature of New England, had come into existence. In the literary history of New England no three names are more honourable than those of the three Smith professors. Nor is it invidious to add that there is no living man of letters in America who could be invited to the Smith professorship with any hope of increasing or even of maintaining its established personal distinction.

Up to 1854, Longfellow, although already popular as a poet, remained professionally a college professor of a new and radical subject; his business was to introduce into the mental and spiritual life of Harvard students that range of thought and feeling which since classical times has been gathering its records in Europe. Though he always loved his subject, he hated the use which his professional circumstances compelled him to make of it. The instinct which made him recoil from the drudgery of teaching was sound. He is remembered as a faithful teacher; but anybody can teach faithfully, and no faithfulness can make Yankee students very eager pupils. Longfellow's true mission was not to struggle with unwilling hearers; it was rather to set forth in words which should find their way to the eager readers of a continent the spirit as distinguished from the letter of the literatures with which as a professor he conscientiously dealt so long.

From 1854 to the end, Longfellow lived as a professional author in that fine old Cambridge house which before his time was conspicuous as the deserted mansion of some Tories exiled

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