OYOYO ESSAYS OF AMERICAN ESSAYISTS INCLUDING BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SKETCHES WITH A SPECIAL INTRODUCTION BY T SPECIAL INTRODUCTION HE earliest American essayists were the clergymen. Those first days of the great republic were religious days. And although the pulpit was eminently spiritual, and fervid, and the devil was duly excoriated, and lessons of faith and humility were inculcated, yet those hour-long homilies were not all theology. Ethics, and manners, and social and national progress were discussed in sermons, which were in reality well-rounded essays. So that the influence of the pulpit became not only moral, but intellectual and even literary, as well. And the lecturers who came later, what was their mission but to spread the influence of the essay? Apart from polemics and in addition to politics and partisanship, they presented to well-filled halls throughout the country essays, essays, nothing but essays. And now the magazines, which visit every fireside, continue the cult and keep it well apace with poetry and fiction, far surpassing the former indeed in worth and quality. The essay then has ever been near to the American heart, has ever basked in public favor. And from the contingencies of our early days it could start full-panoplied and well-equipped. It had the culture of France and England as a fulcrum, and proceeded by main force to lift the taste of our early citizens from the merely utilitarian and the grubbing commonplace to a conception of the graceful and the beautiful. It was necessarily formative and educational. Its task was premeasured, foreordered. Those among the first essayists who were not in the pulpit might well have been, for they were ethical guides and pathfinders. And the statesmen and historians and poets who came to swell the list; they all wore the robe of the prophet and the teacher, even when dallying with lighter themes. It is well for our literature that the essayists have spoken. For whether one points to poetry or fiction or history or theology or science, in no category will he find an achievement of supremacy excelling that which the es iv SPECIAL INTRODUCTION sayists have attained. Take even the greatest exemplars of our poetry and fiction, Poe and Hawthorne, in their lonely majesty of leadership. Their essays fall not far short of their lyrics and romances. To use a geographical metaphor, Poe's life was bounded on the north by sorrow, on the east by poverty, on the south by aspiration and on the west by calumny; his genius was unbounded. There are literary hyenas still prowling about his grave. But his pensive brow wears the garland of immortality. His soul was music and his very life-blood was purest art. His ear caught the cadences of that higher harmony which poets hear above the world's turmoil. In spite of detraction he is safely enshrined in memory while poetry shall live. Young poets will always have tears and roses for his grave. And dreamy, inquisitve Hawthorne, probing and searching the human heart! There is the majesty of the seer about him. He takes one by the hand and leads him through enchanted palaces of art and whispers of the mysteries of life, and discloses the well-springs of character and motive. A favorite of the gods was he, dwelling high upon Olympus. Fancy his life at Salem among those quiet folk; shall we call them pygmies? Bryant's style was pure and cold as a rivulet among his native hills. He was Nature's adept, knowing the language of flower and field and forest, the interpreter of natural beauty. A sweet, unruffled, high-bred quietude possessed him. He had the direct simplicity of Burns, with the lofty dignity of Wordsworth. He respected himself and his fellow-man, and dwelt ever " near to Nature's heart." In Emerson the essay touched its highest pinnacle. Here is a teacher sent from God. His influence upon the people was incalculable and still is immeasurable. He had a high lesson for the people, and he taught it. His wisdom was needed. His exhortative utterances helped to stimulate the plodding common soul and raise it to loftier regions of thought and action. "Hitch your wagon to a star;" there is a dictum one could not by any chance forget. It burns into the memory and becomes a part of it. It is not merely remembered, it is assimilated, incorporated, absorbed. Emerson was a preacher in his essays. Humanity, morality, patriotism, these were his burdens, and he bore them to the end. He made the rostrum a second pulpit. He made culture a religion. He delved into the eternal verities, and refined the gold of thought for the many. He threshed and winnowed and garnered the golden grain of progress and high thinking, and gave it to the people. To-day hardly an essayist will dispute his leadership. His works will remain a storehouse of Christian ethics and promptings to high endeavor and a noble philosophy. "A sweet and gentle soul," Emerson called Longfellow. To be loved by the young, ah, that is a great thing! Before the stress of the decades has wearied the heart and dimmed with tears the eyes expectant, to be then the chosen friend of youth, pure and holy in its Heavenly aspirations and its turnings toward the light! So is it with Longfellow, who sang in lutetones, bard of the gentle, the musing, the refined. He was not sublime, he was more he was human. The youth of the future will hold him to their hearts, as it gladly does in these current days of storm and stress. Readers of the rising generation will never realize the extraordinary influence of Mrs. Stowe. Her cry was an evangel, a clarion-call, a battle hymn. The North and the South, reading her words, saw the camp-fires afar, heard the tread of serried columns, felt the onset of marshalled hosts. Into forty languages her book was translated. It was a golden bugle sounding the charge, but its notes have long since been hushed into the diapason of God-given fraternal peace, happy, forgiving national union and joyous concord. Holmes was a born essayist. If Pope " lisped in numbers, for the numbers came," so the smiling philosopher of the breakfasttable wrote essays as naturally as the sun shines or the waters flow. Brilliant as a poet and novelist, able and beloved as a technical instructor, yet it was those cheery, bonny, playful papers, filled with the keenest wit and deepest feeling, recurring from month to month, essays in all but strict form, which endeared him to all hearts and made him indeed an autocrat. "A gentleman of the old school; " how often do we hear this term misapplied! But it fits Curtis as gracefully as the folds of a toga enwrapped the form of a Roman senator. Here are courtliness and stately ease. Here is urbanity as dignified as an old court minuet. Here is a suggestion of the modern equivalent to "ruffs and cuffs, and farthingales and things." A sweet serenity and perfect taste pervade his pages, a charm like the odor |