In the autumn of 1857 there appeared in Boston the first number of the periodical, still in existence, which more than anything else represents the literature of the New England > Renaissance. In the early years of the century, the characteristic publication of literary Boston was the "North American Review." In the 40's the "Dial," limited as was its circulation, was equally characteristic of contemporary literary energy. From 1857 until the renascent literature of New England came to an end, its vehicle was the "Atlantic Monthly."

This youngest and last of the native periodicals of Boston may be distinguished from its predecessors in various ways. Obviously, for one thing, while the primary function of the "North American Review" was scholarly, and that of the “Dial" philosophic, that of the "Atlantic" was literary. In the second place, the "North American Review' was started by young men who at the moment had no vehicle for expression, and who thought they had a good deal to say. The "Dial" was similarly started by a group of enthusiasts comparatively little known in letters. The "Atlantic," on the other hand, did little more than establish a regular means of publication for men whose reputation was already established. After the dignified fashion of half a century ago, the articles in its earlier numbers were not signed. Whoever takes the trouble to ascertain their writers, however, will be surprised to find how few of them had not attained distinction before 1857. In more senses than one, the earlier

periodicals began youthfully; and the "Atlantic" was always

mature.

To understand the mature literature which at last thus concentrated, we have spent what may have seemed excessive time on its environment. Yet without a constant sense of the influences which were alive in the New England air, the literature which finally arose there can hardly be under-✔ stood. It was all based on the traditions of a rigid old society, Puritan in origin and immemorially fixed in structure. To this, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, came that impulse of new life which expressed itself in such varied ways, in the classically rounded periods of our most finished oratory; in the scholarship which ripened into our lasting works of history; in the hopeful dreams of the Unitarians, passing insensibly into the nebulous philosophy of the Transcendentalists, and finally into first fantastic and soon militant reform. Each of these phases of our Renaissance gave us names which are still worth memory: Webster, Everett, and Choate; Ticknor, Prescott, Motley, and Parkman; Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Thoreau; Theodore Parker, Phillips, and Sumner; Mrs. Stowe, and Whittier. Thus grouped together, we can see these people to have been so dissimilar, and sometimes so antagonistic, that human friendship between them, or even mutual understanding, was hardly possible. At the same time, as we look at them together, we must see that all possessed in common a trait which marks them as of the old New England race. Each and all were strenuously earnest; and though the earnestness of some con- ✓ fined itself to matters of this world, to history, to politics, or to reform, while that of others was centred, like that of the Puritan fathers, more on the unseen eternities, not one of them was ever free from a constant ideal of principle, of duty. Nor was the idealism of these men always confined to matters of conduct. In Emerson, more certainly than in the fathers themselves, one feels the ceaseless effort of New

England to grasp, to understand, to formulate the realities which must forever lie beyond human ken. The New Englanders of our Renaissance were no longer Puritans; they had discarded the grim dogmas of Calvinism; but so far as Puritanism was a lifelong effort to recognise and to follow ideals which can never be apprehended by unaided human senses, they were still Puritan at heart.

Herein lies the trait which most clearly distinguishes New England from those neighbouring Middle States where the letters of America sprang into life a few years earlier. In both, the impulse to expression which appeared so early in the nineteenth century may be held only an American phase of the world-wide tendency to revolution which during the century effected so many changes in Europe. To both, too, this impulse came in a guise which may make the term "Renaissance" seem applicable equally to both. In New York, however, the impulse tended immediately to the production of an imitative literature which had done its best work by 1832; in New England, meanwhile, that same year, which is so convenient a landmark, was marked chiefly by Emerson's sermon on the Lord's Supper. Oratory was at its best; scholarship was swiftly developing; Unitarianism had completely dominated Boston; Transcendentalism was just beginning its course of wild, disintegrant luxuriance; and not only destructive reform but pure letters too were still to come. The humours of any period often show its characteristics most plainly. There is an aspect in which the name of Scriptures, by which Bronson Alcott chose to call his philosophic diaries, seems comically applicable to all the earlier writing of the New England where he calmly displayed his innocence of commonsense. When a new impulse came to the children of the Puritheir first instinctive effort was to formulate a new law and

tans,

gospel.

This new law and gospel was concerned with a spirit hitherto strange to the region, the spirit to which the cant of

later days has given the name of Culture. Ancestral New England knew the Bible, the Common Law, the formal traditions of the older classical education, and little else. With the Renaissance there came at last to New England an eager knowledge of all the other phases of human thought and expression which enrich the records of modern civilisation. The temper in which this new learning was received there is nowhere better typified than by the title and the contents of a book which preserves some lectures given by Emerson in 1844, -the year when the "Dial" faded out of existence. "Representative Men" is the name of it, -a name which suggests those countless volumes of contemporary biography wherein successful men of business are frequently invited to insert their lives and portraits at an expense so slight as to be within reach of any respectable citizen of every considerable village. Emerson's "Representative Men" were of different stripe from these. The personages whom he chose to group under his every-day title were Plato, the Philosopher; Swedenborg, the Mystic; Montaigne, the Sceptic; Shakspere, the Poet; Napoleon, the Man of the World; and Goethe, the Writer. To Emerson, in short, and to the New England of which in his peculiar phrase he was a representative man, the whole range of literature was suddenly opened. Two centuries of national inexperience had deprived the region not only of critical power, but for the moment of all suspicion that this was lacking. With the fresh enthusiasm of discovery New England faced this newly found company of the good and great, feeling chiefly that even like ourselves these were men. To any who hold fervent faith in the excellence of human nature the fact of common humanity must seem the chief of all. Plato was a man, and Swedenborg, and the rest. We are men, too. Let us meet our elder brethren, face to face, asking what they may have to tell us. We shall be glad to hear, and doubtless they will gladly be heard. The mood is like that of good old Father Taylor,

the sailor-preacher of Boston Methodism. By some odd chance, he once got into the presence of Gregory XVI., and he is said, in describing the incident, to have ended, in all gravity, with the words, "So the Pope blessed me, and I blessed the Pope."

Fifty years and more have done their work since those aspiring old times. From contemporary New England the fact of greatness obscures the humanity of all classic letters, ancient or modern. In the full flush of our Renaissance, on the other hand, there was left in us something like the artless unconsciousness of healthy children. No wonder, then, we were a little slow to make pure letters for ourselves. It is not that we lacked them, of course. The names we have already considered belong not only to the history of those various phases of Renaissance with which we have chosen to consider them, but to that of letters, too. Hardly any of these men, however, was primarily a maker of literature. All deserve distinction in literary history chiefly because they did with loving care the writing which they held their earthly business.

Naturally, then, the literature of New England was comparatively slow in reaching maturity. It is more than an accident of date that the years when the "Knickerbocker Magazine" began to fade out of New York, and with it the whole elder school of which it marked the blameless decline, saw in Boston the establishment of the first periodical whose function was chiefly literary. The innocent old literature of pleasure which began with the novels of Brockden Brown was truly exhausted. The literature of New England, meanwhile, which had been ripening as its elder was falling into decay, had only just reached the point where it demanded a regular vehicle of expression. This vehicle came, to be sure, only when the strength of the New England Renaissance was beginning to fail. None of the New England men of letters, however, had begun to feel the infirmities of age, when one