and all found a common meeting-ground in the pages of the "Atlantic Monthly."

The "Atlantic" is thus associated with almost every name eminent in our later New England letters; but most closely of all, perhaps, with that of a man whose presence in Boston, from 1834 until his death in 1881, had incalculable influence on local literary life. This was James Thomas Fields, ✔ for many years publisher of the "Atlantic," and from 1862 to 1870 its editor.

Fields was a self-made man, born in 1816 at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and educated only in the common schools there. When a mere boy he began active life as a clerk in a Boston book store. Like many intelligent Yankees he had business ability; at twenty-two he was already partner in a publishing house; and he remained an active publisher in Boston for thirty-five years, retiring with a comfortable fortune. What makes Fields memorable, however, are not his practical gifts, nor yet the fact that in a modest way he was himself a man of letters. His most familiar poem implies his limits. This "Ballad of the Tempest" tells the story of a storm at sea. Things go very wrong until

"We are lost,' the captain shouted,

As he staggered down the stairs.
But his little daughter whispered,
As she took his icy hand,
'Is n't God upon the ocean,
Just the same as on the land?'"

All of

And the next morning they come safe to harbour. which, though very pretty and moral, expresses a course of marine conduct quite inconceivable when you reflect that the author was brought up in a still busy Yankee seaport. So far as Fields was a poet or merely a man of business, he might be dismissed as unimportant.

And yet it is doubtful whether any one had greater or better

influence on the literature of New England. From boyhood Fields devotedly loved letters; and his literary enthusiasm combined with great personal amiability and with sympathetic kindness of nature to make him, before he reached middle life, the intimate personal friend of every man of letters in New England, and of many such men in the old world too. The result of this is evident to any one who will glance at the trade-lists of the firm of which he was for years the head. Here, to go no further, you will find all the works of Emerson, Thoreau, Whittier, Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes, and Hawthorne. There are plenty of other honourable American names there, too, as well as those of eminent foreign writers. For one thing, Fields was the first to collect and to set forth in systematic form the work of Thomas De Quincey, until Fields's time lost in numberless periodicals. As a sincere lover of letters, then, and a publisher of unusual tact and skill, Fields, during the years between 1840 and 1870, afforded to the literary men of New England a rare opportunity. One and all had constantly near by a skilful publisher, who was at the same time a wise counsellor, a warm personal friend, and an ardent admirer. The stimulus to literary production afforded by such a patron of letters can hardly be estimated.

Though Fields was not the originator of the "Atlantic Monthly," he was for years its publisher and for some time its editor. He was not the originator, either, of a little society of which he was an early and enthusiastic member. This was the Saturday Club, which grew spontaneously into existence sometime about 1857, assembling at occasional dinners the principal literary personages of the day. Emerson was a member; so were Motley, Holmes, Longfellow, Agassiz, and many more. The club, which survives, is too private for detailed mention. As New England literature has faded, too, the club, though still distinguished in membership, is no longer a centre of literary creation. Very lately, however, a man familiar with the social history of Boston declared that in their

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.

ΧΙ

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. A little earlier 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.

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