He has of late years written charmingly of travels in his own land. In the fiction which is his last literary venture, he is still rather the essayist than the novelist. The Golden House, his most ambitious story, lacks vigor and constructive power, although exhibiting his native grace and delicate observation. Mr. Warner has ripened his editorial talents through a varied experience beginning immediately after his college days and culminating in his connection with the staff of Harper's Monthly (1884-). Much conscientious work from his pen has conduced to the benefit of the public, though never finding its way into his published volumes. He has edited the excellent "American Men of Letters Series," contributing thereto an appreciative Life of Washington Irving.

Edmund Clarence Stedman (born 1833), a son of New England, who has for many years been a leader in the literary life of New York, gave the first decade of his active work to journalism. Since 1864 he has pursued the muse amid the distractions of Wall Street. He published Poems, Lyrical and Idyllic in 1860; Alice of Monmouth, The Blameless Prince, his stirring war-songs, Hawthorne, and Other Poems, — all have shown the same fastidious polish, the same sensitiveness of taste. Stedman's work is characterized by lyric grace, the reflective spirit, and a mingling of pathos, humor, and satire that is peculiarly modern. He seems essentially a critical poet; in fact, his later authorship has been almost entirely of a critical nature. Two volumes of his collected essays, Victorian Poets, (1876 and 1887) and Poets of America (1886), have won marked appreciation. They show breadth of view, genial yet pronounced individuality of opinion, and the utmost refinement of taste. Justice of purpose is everywhere dominant, even where the reader dissents from the critic's dictum. Stedman's mind acts with less of spontaneity and illuminating power than Lowell's; but he judges more comprehensively and more evenly. In the published lectures on The Nature and Elements of Poetry, he has clearly set forth his poetical creeds

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and standards. A Victorian Anthology, and the invaluable collection, A Library of American Literature (11 vols., 1888-1890), prepared in collaboration with Ellen Mackay Hutchinson, attest the catholicity of his sympathies.

Celia Thaxter (1830–1895) passed most of her early life upon the rocky Isles of Shoals, then a spot of primeval simplicity and loneliness. She has published a number of exquisite poems, redolent of the true spirit of the sea. Several graphic descriptive articles concerning her early home, published in the Atlantic Monthly, had the double effect of making it a spot of great interest to tourists, and of setting curious observers on the track of the quaint varieties of human life existing along our Atlantic coast.

William Winter (born in Massachusetts, 1836), like many other American writers, forsook the law for literature and the lecture platform. He had already published poems before his removal to New York in 1859, and during more than thirty years (1865-) of service, as dramatic critic of the New York Tribune, he has found time for several issues of dainty, sympathetic verse. Besides his lives of Edwin Booth, Henry Irving, The Jeffersons, John Brougham, and Mary Anderson, -all characterized by refined appreciation and dramatic insight, — he has published charming sketches of travel. Some of these are embodied in Shakespeare's England. Shadows of the Stage (1892-1895) and The Press and the Stage derive double interest from his point of view.

John Hay (born 1838), a soldier of the Civil War and a private secretary to President Lincoln, has since filled several diplomatic appointments, being made ambassador to Great Britain at the incoming of President McKinley (1897). He has also served in editorial positions, and prepared, in conjunction with John G. Nicolay, Abraham Lincoln; a History, an authoritative and detailed biographical study, first appearing in the Century, 1887-1889. Colonel Hay has made painstaking studies in dialect and the types of character behind them. Pike County Ballads and Other Pieces (1871), Poems (1890), contain his verses; and Castilian Days (1871) is an instructive summary of his observations in Spain.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich (born 1836), a native of New Hampshire, displays in his literary work certain qualities not often

found in unison. He writes at once with dash and care, has pure taste in poetry, and produces novels displaying analytic skill. There is the spirit of genuine mischief in his literary jokes. But for the pathetic and playful lyrics which voice the man of the world, and the polished sentences which reveal the high finish of poetic craftmanship, we might enjoy him always as the grown-up, fun-loving hero of his own juvenile classic, The Story of a Bad Boy. His apprenticeship to literature has been long and painstaking. For more than ten years he was a member of New York's choicest literary circles. He has labored assiduously as editor, critic, poet, novelist, and essayist, always with refined ambitions and fastidious taste. Since 1866 Boston has been his headquarters. From 1881 to 1890 he was editor of the Atlantic Monthly, in whose pages first appeared Marjorie Daw and Other People, his sparkling prose sketches, also his novels, most important of which are The Queen of Sheba and The Stillwater Tragedy, besides a series of sketches of travel, From Ponkapog to Pesth. An Old Town by the Sea has shown how well he knew and loved quaint old Portsmouth. The quality, even more than the quantity, of his poetry reveals him, like Taylor, Stoddard, and Stedman, the poet by right of his own preference. His dainty ballad, Babie Bell, first won him popularity, and several volumes, Pampinea and Other Poems, Cloth of Gold, Flower and Thorn, Later Lyrics, Wyndham Towers, The Sister's Tragedy and Other Poems, have contained brief, but finished lyrics, besides longer narrative poems, studies of the East, sonnets, and polished vers de société. He is essentially a poet of culture. Doubtless for that reason, most of his sustained poetic flights, while satisfying the canons of criticism, fail to move the heart in the same degree as his simpler, more spontaneous expressions.

"H. H." is the modest signature over which Mrs. Helen Hunt Jackson (1831-1885) wrote her early poems and sketches. Her first volume of verse was published in 1874. Mrs. Jackson was a regular contributor to several magazines, where

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her graceful style and sympathetic touch were always welcomed by their readers. In 1883 she received an appointment as special commissioner to inquire into the condition of the Mission Indians of California; and Ramona, a novel embodying her observations, is perhaps her most valuable contribution to literature. A Century of Dishonor is a more literal presentation of the same arguments.

Sidney Lanier (1842-1881) was born in Macon, Georgia, but spent most of his life in Baltimore. Tiger Lilies, his novel, appeared in 1867. In 1875 he published Florida, a prose work, and in 1876 claimed the hearing of the whole country by his cantata, From this Hundredterraced Height, sung at the opening of the Centennial Exposition. He also published in this year a volume of poems of marked originality. They were not always either clear or musical to ears untrained in complicated verse, but they were often wonderfully graceful, tender, and heroic. The Science of English Verse and The Theory of the English Novel are critical works of decided merit and interest. 1879 he was appointed lecturer on English literature for the Johns Hopkins University. Lanier died of consumption, after a lifetime of brave warfare with poverty and the ill health which was aggravated by his service in the Civil War. Some of his best works appeared posthumously. The Boy's Froissart, the Boy's King Arthur, the Boy's Mabinogion, and the Boy's Percy are veritable children's classics.

In

In this chapter we have considered

1. Ralph Waldo Emerson. -2. Margaret Fuller Ossoli. 3. Henry David Thoreau. -4. George William Curtis. -5. Donald Grant Mitchell.-6. Edwin Percy Whipple. 7. Bayard Taylor. 8. Thomas Wentworth Higginson.-9. Charles Godfrey Leland.-10. Richard Henry Stoddard. 11. Charles Dudley Warner. 12. Edmund Clarence Stedman. - 13. Thomas Bailey Aldrich.-14. Sidney Lanier.

CHAPTER IX.

SCHOOLS OF CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN FICTION.

Fiction Delineating Provincial Characteristics. The mere outlines of biography given in the preceding pages must have suggested the difficulties which have beset American men of letters. These very obstacles, however, have curiously determined some forms of our literature. In the hurry of business, the confusion of manners, and the license of pioneer life, there have been keen-eyed observers who busied their pens with those special or imperfect developments of character fairly described by Ben Jonson's old term humors.

Sylvester Judd (1813-1853), a Unitarian minister in Augusta, Maine, spent his early life among Calvinists, and brought to the work of his maturer years all the enthusiasm of a recent convert. Margaret (1845), written with the avowed object of filling a gap in the religious literature of the Unitarians, has vitality enough to have survived the change in literary fashions. Mr. Judd was hampered by the moral of his story and by his learning, so that his action is halting and clumsy; but there are isolated passages of great force and beauty in his book. It was greatly admired by Emerson, Lowell, and other critics, as an original picture of some of the most salient features of American life.

William Mumford Baker (1825-1883), born in Washington City, a graduate of Princeton, and a Presbyterian minister in Texas and other parts of the United States, worked a comparatively untilled field in his esoteric studies of "poor whites," secession episodes, and pulpit orators. His novels have a social and historical value quite apart from the incidents which they detail. His first story, The Virginians in Texas, was written for the amusement of his children. Inside, depicting the Civil War as Mr. Baker saw it, appeared as a serial in