tember 30, to return to New York and settle up his affairs. It will never be known what happened on the following days, but he was found, October 3, in the back room of a saloon in Baltimore which was being used as a polling place. It has been suggested that he was drugged by an electioneering gang and made to serve as a repeater; and also that he had been drugged by robbers, for his money was gone. He was taken to a hospital, and died there, four days later, on Sunday, October 7, without having recovered consciousness. The attending physician testified that he was not under the influence of liquor, but this does not seem to be important, though it may refute the repeated statement that his death was caused by delirium tremens.

Poe's character has often been judged harshly, but the case is one rather for human pity than for harsh judgment. His life was a tragedy, and in part a tragedy of hereditary fate, against which his human will struggled as best it could. He should be judged with the same charity which his New England contemporaries showed in their many beautiful tributes to Burns, whose life and character have points of resemblance with Poe's, though Burns's poetry is so much more human and less strange.

In many ways Poe is unique among the chief American poets: in his life, for he is the only one who lived in extreme poverty and loneliness; the only one of weak character and illrepute; the only one (except Lanier) who died young. He is unique in his hatred of commonplace and of convention, in his intense devotion to poetry, in his love of mere music in verse, in his power to express emotion and his inability to express character, in his comparative blindness to Nature (except that strange unreal region of Nature which he creates for himself out of place, out of time'), in his exaltation of love, in his strange visionary conceptions of death. He is the only American who has been intensely a poet, and the only American poet (as Hawthorne is our only prose writer) who can justly be said, in any strict and narrow use of the word, to have had genius.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

THE story of Emerson's life, so far as its external events are related to his poetry, can be told briefly. He was the last of nine successive generations of ministers. Thomas Emerson emigrated from England to Ipswich, Mass., about 1635. At about the same time, Emerson's first American ancestor in another line, Peter Bulkeley (see the beginning of Hamatreya '), settled in Concord as the first minister of that parish. Emerson's grandfather, William Emerson, was minister in Concord at the beginning of the Revolution, and on April 19, 1775, urged the minute-men to stand their ground near his parsonage, the Old Manse.' In 1776 he left Concord to join the troops at Ticonderoga, but caught a fever on his way there, and died in the same year. Emerson's father was minister of the First Church, Boston, which had already become Unitarian.

Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Boston, May 25, 1803. His father died when he was eight years old, and the family was left in comparative poverty. Yet his mother, with devoted help from her sons, succeeded in obtaining an education for all of them. His eldest brother, William, graduated at Harvard in 1818, and studied for two years in Germany. Ralph Waldo graduated at Harvard in 1821, and his younger brothers, Edward and Charles, in 1824 and 1828.

Ralph was prepared for Harvard at the Boston Latin School, where, in his eleventh year, he made a brief verse translation from Virgil's Eclogues, which has been preserved and published. He entered college in 1817, with the appointment of President's Freshman,' receiving free lodging for the work of carrying official messages; and he saved three-fourths of the cost of his board by waiting at table in the college Commons, and in the last years of his course earned something by tutoring. He did not especially distinguish himself in his studies, being generally thought the least brilliant of the brothers, but he was well liked by both teachers and students, and was elected class poet at the end of his course, as Lowell was later. He was only eighteen when he graduated, but immediately began work as a school-teacher, and when his older brother, William, went to

Germany, took charge of his school for young ladies in Boston. He wrote long after : 'I was nineteen, had grown up without sisters, and, in my solitary and secluded way of living, had no acquaintance with girls. I still recall my terrors at entering the school.' It was on the occasion of his weekly escape from these 'terrors' to his home in Roxbury, which was then the country (and not at his retirement to Concord, as has often been said), that he wrote the poem 'Good-bye, proud world.'

He soon entered the Divinity School at Harvard, where he studied under Dr. W. E. Channing and Professor Andrews Norton; and was 'approbated to preach' in October, 1826. He had no settled parish, and had not as yet much confidence in himself, his doctrines, or his power to speak. Whatever Heaven has given me or withheld,' he wrote at this time, my feelings, or the expression of them, is very cold, my understanding and my tongue slow and ineffective.' His feelings were soon to be roused and quickened, however, and his expression vivified. In December, 1827, he was preaching at Concord, N. H., and met there Miss Ellen Tucker, then sixteen years old, to whom he became engaged just a year later. Of the beautiful lyrics written for her, one, beginning And Ellen, when the graybeard years,' which was written in 1829, but remained unpublished for seventyfive years, deserves to stand beside anything even of Landor's for its simplicity and condensation, and for that peculiar feeling of the eternal which a brief and perfect poem can give.

In 1829 he was appointed assistant pastor of the Hanover Street Church, Boston (the church of the Mathers). In September he was married. His wife was already frail from consumption, and she died two years later. Emerson found even the liberal doctrines and simple forms of the Unitarian Church somewhat too strict for him, and felt himself compelled, in the following year, 1832, to give up his pastorate. He still preached occasionally for a few years, but for the rest of his life the public lecture platform was his chief pulpit; for he never ceased to be, in a way, a preacher.

In December, 1832, Emerson sailed for Europe, going by the then unusual southern route, and visited first Sicily and Italy. The fragments Written in Naples,' and Written at Rome,' are significant of his mood and thoughts at this time. The first, with its remembrance of

foreshadows the idea which is primarily Emerson's, but for which Whittier found its most perfect expression in his

He who wanders widest, lifts

No more of Beauty's jealous veils
Than he who from his doorway sees
The miracle of flowers and trees,

and reminds us that Emerson was to be the poet of 'Woodnotes,' and, after Bryant, the chief poet of Nature in America, with its own peculiar and distinctive beauties. The seeond, Written at Rome,' with its

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And ever in the strife of your own thoughts
Obey the nobler impulse; that is Rome,

shows that Emerson was already on the track of his answer to the Sphinx's riddle.

He sought in Europe not things but men, not relics of the past but living thoughts. For him Florence seems to have meant Landor, in his villa at the foot of the Fiesolan hill. He passed through France uncomprehending, thinking it a land where poet never grew,' and went to visit the almost unknown Carlyle on his Scotch hillside, and Wordsworth by his English Lakes. His friendship for Carlyle lasted till the end of his life, and he did Carlyle great service in introducing his works to America, taking charge of all the material details of their publication here. He seems to have been much amused at first to see Wordsworth pause in his garden walks and stand apart to declaim his own sonnets, but on second thought recollected that that was what he had come for, and listened with reverence.

On his return, Emerson settled in Concord. He had been through his Lehrjahre and

Wanderjahre, had found his own place, intellectually and spiritually, in the universe, and had acquired confidence in his own thought and his right and power to deliver a message to the world. He now abandoned, as unimportant, the negative side of his earlier Unitarianism and of his revolt from the forms and formal beliefs even of Unitarianism itself; and insisted on what is the positive side of Unitarianism, and, more broadly, of idealistic philosophy, the thought that every man (as well as the Christ, though not in the same degree) has in himself something of the divine, is himself a part of the WorldSoul,' and therefore has within himself, and himself is, the measure of all things; and so can meet fearlessly all the Sphinx-riddles of the universe. The other side of this conception is his thought that all Nature is but another manifestation, or another part of the same manifestation, of the World-Soul;' and that Nature is thus most closely related to the central reality in man. Hardly more than this need be said, I think, in elucidation of the so-called obscure and mystic poems of Emerson, and in elementary statement of his much-discussed transcendentalism.'

Strong in this belief in the intellectual independence of himself and of every individual man, Emerson prepared that famous address on The American Scholar,' which was given before the Phi Beta Kappa of Harvard University in 1837. That and his little book called Nature, published in the previous year, give us the two sides of his thought just stated. In the Phi Beta Kappa address, however, he stated this thought more especially as related to the intellectual attitude of America in 1837, and as a protest against its provincialism. Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close. . . We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds . . . a nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Will, which also inspires all men.' This address was America's Declaration of Independence in the intellectual life. His Divinity School address, in the following year, was a spiritual declaration of independence: 'Let me admonish you, first of all, to go alone; to refuse the good models, even those which are sacred in the imagination of men, and dare to love God without mediator or veil . . . Thank God for these good men, but say, "I am also a man.". . . Yourself a new-born bard of the Holy Ghost, cast behind you all conformity, and acquaint yourself at first hand with the Deity.' These two addresses aroused great opposition, but Emerson entirely disregarded it, and went quietly on his way. He seems to have regretted it only so far as he felt that opposition to him personally might injure the success in America of Carlyle's works, for which he stood sponsor.

In the years of this (as it then seemed) revolutionary thinking and speaking, Emerson was living a quiet, simple, practical life at Concord, taking his part in the affairs of the village, even accepting an election as hog-reeve of the township, delivering the Bi-Centennial Address in 1835, and writing the Hymn for the Completion of the Battle Monument in 1837. In 1834 his brother Edward died, and in 1836 his youngest brother, Charles. It was in 1838, at the mid-point of life's pathway,' as Dante expresses it in the first line of his Divina Commedia, that Emerson wrote the beautiful' Dirge' for them :

My good, my noble, in their prime,
Who made this world the feast it was,
Who learned with me the lore of time,
Who loved this dwelling-place!

They took this valley for their toy,
They played with it in every mood;
A cell for prayer, a hall for joy, -
They treated Nature as they would.

They colored the horizon round;

Stars flamed and faded as they bade,
All echoes hearkened for their sound,
They made the woodlands glad or mad.

I touch this flower of silken leaf,
Which once our childhood knew;
Its soft leaves wound me with a grief
Whose balsam never grew.

From this time on, Emerson's life was diversified only by home joys and sorrows. He married in 1835 Miss Lidian Jackson of Plymouth. In October, 1836, was born the beautiful boy who died in January, 1842, the wondrous child' of his Threnody.' Some of his most important poems were published in the Dial in 1840 and 1841, and he was editor of that short-lived transcendentalist magazine from 1842 to 1844. The first series of his Essays was published in 1841, the second in 1844, the second edition of Nature in 1849, Representative Men in 1850, and English Traits in 1856. He had taken a second brief trip to Europe in 1847-48. The only important collections of his verse during his lifetime were the Poems of 1846 (dated 1847), May Day and Other Pieces, 1867, and a selection in the Little Classics edition, 1876, including a few poems not previously collected. The editions of the Poems, 1883, and 1904 (Centenary Edition), both contain very important additions. His lecture field was extended in 1843 to New York and Philadelphia, in 184748 to England and Scotland, in 1854 to the States of the new Northwest, Michigan and Wisconsin, in 1862 to Washington, where Lincoln attended his lecture on American Civilization.' From 1854 to 1868 he gave many lecture courses in the West, and in 1871 went as far as the Pacific coast, but the larger part of his lectures were still given in New England, especially at Boston and Concord. In 1870 he gave a regular course in the Graduate School of Harvard, then just established. During these years his life in Concord was enriched by the friendships with Thoreau, Alcott, and Ellery Channing, as well as by his acquaintance in Boston and Cambridge with Longfellow, Agassiz, Holmes, and Lowell; he and Hawthorne were good neighbors, but never intimate friends. Concord became a shrine of pilgrimage, and many of the best and ablest minds of the time, as well as many unbalanced and vague idealists, made themselves, like Lowell, Emerson's faithful liegemen.'

Emerson always refused to be drawn into the anti-slavery contest as an active worker. He gives his reasons in full in the 'Ode to W. H. Channing.' He advocated the purchase of the slaves, for two billion dollars, less than the war ultimately cost, in mere money expenditure, to the North alone. But though he did not identify himself with the abolitionists, he never hesitated on occasion to express his views clearly. His first speech on American Slavery was given at Concord in 1837, and his address on Emancipation in 1841; he voted with the Free-Soil party in 1850, joined in the mistaken opposition to Webster in 1851, denounced the Fugitive Slave Law and the assault on Charles Sumner, and took part in the memorial service for John Brown of Ossawatomie. In January, 1861, with Wendell Phillips, he was mobbed at the Tremont Temple in Boston. During the war be was a strong advocate of unconditional emancipation. But that he did wisely in keeping for the most part to his chosen work,' was proved by the outcome. His political idealism, his belief in man, which finds its perfect expression in the famous quatrain of Voluntaries,' became a pervading influence. To this influence, more than to anything else, said Lowell, the young martyrs of our Civil War owe the astounding strength of thoughtful heroism that is so touching in every record of their lives.' It was Emerson who was chosen

to give the address at the Harvard Commemoration for which Lowell's great Ode was

written.

The last ten years of Emerson's life were somewhat clouded by a gradual failure of his mental powers, especially of the memory, but he was always, as Whitman has described him in his reminiscences, beautiful in old age. Holmes tells us of the last time he saw Emerson, at Longfellow's funeral, in 1882. Twice he rose, and looked intently on the face of the dead poet, and the last time turned and said to a friend near him, 'That gentleman was a sweet, beautiful soul, but I have entirely forgotten his name.' Emerson died just a month after Longfellow, April 24, 1882.

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'I am born a poet,' wrote Emerson in 1835; of a low class, without doubt, yet a poet. That is my nature and vocation. My singing, to be sure, is very husky, and is for the most part in prose. Still, I am a poet in the sense of a perceiver and true lover of the harmonies that are in the soul and in matter, and specially of the correspondences between these and those.' At other times, Emerson said of himself, 'I am not a great poet.' On the other hand, Mr. Stedman calls him our most typical and inspiring poet.' It has often been said that he could not write poetry at all, and as often replied that he could write nothing else. Of course the question is largely one of definitions. Emerson's own dictum, The great poets are judged by the frame of mind they induce,' which has often been quoted in settlement of the question, is too vague to be of any real help. It would apply equally well as a standard for the judgment of great prose writers, or great orators. Confusion arises on the one hand from identifying poetry with whatever is noble and imaginative in thought or feeling, and on the other hand, from narrowing it to the mere singing faculty. The lyric is only one of the many poetic forms; and the lyric element in poetry is only one of its important elements. In the nineteenth century, to be sure, the lyric almost usurped to itself the whole domain and conception of poetry. But this error can be only a passing one. What lasts from century to century in poetry is even more often those words or phrases which condense thought or feeling or vision into simple and well-shaped rhythmic form, than the verse that merely appeals to the senses with easy-flowing or even haunting melody. We may even admit that Emerson was not a born singer, many of the greatest poets have not been, in the narrow lyric sense of the word, and still maintain, without falling into the opposite error of identifying poetry with that nobility of thought and originality of imagination which are merely possible material for poetry, that he was a born poet. For he proved himself a poet in the form as well as in the substance of his work. That he did not altogether lack the lyric note, the Earth Song' in Hamatreya,' a few passages in Woodnotes' and 'May Day,' and many stanzas of 'My Garden,' of Waldeinsamkeit,' and of the 'Concord Ode,' at once show. But, what is far more important, he has in a supreme degree the faculty of fitting thought to the form of verse rather than merely to its melody. Many a line, many a quatrain, many brief passages, and a few complete poems, stand, and are beginning more and more to stand out, in Emerson's work, like those lines of which Holmes said that a moment after they were written it seemed as if they had been carved on marble for a thousand years.'

HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW

HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW was born at Portland, Maine, February 27, 1807, the second of eight children. He came of an old New England family. His father and his great-grandfather were graduates of Harvard College. On his mother's side he was descended from John and Priscilla Alden of Plymouth, and his maternal grandfather, General Peleg Wadsworth, was a distinguished officer in the Revolution. He spent a happy boyhood in Portland, the memory of which returns often in his poems, especially in My Lost Youth.' The first book that he remembered with delight was Irving's Sketch Book, which he read in numbers when it appeared. His first published verses, the Battle of Lovell's Pond,' were printed in the Portland Gazette when he was thirteen years old.

It might have been expected that he would go to Harvard College, as his father had