bership included about one hundred and fifty persons; visitors, drawn thither through curiosity or genuine interest, were both numerous and annoying. In 1846 fire destroyed one of the main buildings, and after another year of struggle the Brook Farm settlement dissolved.

The purpose of the experiment was to promote a spirit of co-operation, to emphasize the dignity of labor, and to make mutually helpful and attractive the simple life. Each member was to do a certain amount of daily work; a school was to be established and literature and science studied along with agricultural pursuits. Like all more or less Utopian communities, Brook Farm failed; it proved, however, an interesting objectlesson in idealism, and it furnished pleasing material for several writers. Hawthorne's Blithedale Romance reflects the higher life of the community, while his American Note Books give entertaining glimpses of his own and his fellow Brook-farmers' experiences as agricultural amateurs and social reformers.

Abolitionism. The third phase of the New England awakening was the Abolition movement, or anti-slavery agitation, which is reflected in the works of most of the New England writers. As an influence in literature this movement was of course an outcome of the general passion for democracy which, in the first half of the nineteenth century, affected the Englishspeaking world. Social reform of one kind or another is the theme of numerous English novels and of much poetry. Before the middle of the century slaves had been set free in all the British possessions. Slavery continued in the Southern States because it was profitable and because it was regarded as an indispensable part of the social system. In the North it had long ceased to be industrially desirable; in the South it was a matter of vested rights, and so recognized by the great majority of the people of the North. There had always existed in the South some opposition to the institution of slavery on moral grounds, and here and there a master had freed his slaves; the system, however, had become traditional

and apparently necessary, and was held to be within local and personal rights. It formed a part of the feudal social order which lingered longest in the conservative South where plantation life prevailed.

By 1840 a rather aggressive opposition to slavery had developed in New England, and this rapidly grew into radical proportions and assumed a militant character. Such agitators as William Lloyd Garrison, who violently attacked slavery in his paper The Liberator, and Wendell Phillips, the leading orator of the anti-slavery movement, gradually aroused the New England conscience to the point of action. This radical attitude was for a long time bitterly condemned in the North among the higher classes, and the abolitionists suffered social ostracism and in some cases actual violence. The practical difficulties of abolishing the institution were freely recognized by thoughtful New Englanders: the confiscation of property, though it consisted of human beings, appeared indefensible; the interference with the internal affairs of other states was held to be unjustifiable. Various compromises were suggested 'by statesmen like Clay and Webster, and in this way the inevitable conflict was delayed for years. Patience on both sides was finally exhausted. Secession, never an agreeable alternative to all the Southern states, became at last a fact and the country during the years from 1861 to 1865 was convulsed with war.

1

With the North the slavery agitation was mainly a moral question, growing out of that hereditary ardor for reform which characterized the Puritan conscience and which had its revival in the idealism of the movements just considered; with the South the matter of slavery was a question of property and traditional social rights, and as such was generally defended. The institution, however, being a survival of outgrown worldconditions and to that extent a social and political anachronism, was doomed. Being a moral question, abolition naturally 1See Munford's Virginia's Attitude on Secession.

entered into the making of New England literature, though not so extensively as might be supposed. With the exception of Whittier, the foremost New England writers were not radical abolitionists, as we shall soon see; most of them wrote against slavery, but were not sufficiently partisan to become agitators, feeling that they had other messages to deliver to their own and succeeding generations.

Of all the books and pamphlets connected with the abolition movement one deserves mention because of its contemporary influence and the literary quality which has kept it alive as a minor contribution to American letters-Mrs. Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. HARRIET BEECHER STOWE (1811-1896), born in Lichfield, Connecticut, was daughter of Reverend Lyman Beecher and sister of Henry Ward Beecher; she was carefully educated by her father, a Congregationalist minister, and married Reverend Calvin Stowe, professor in Lane Theological Seminary, Cincinnati, of which her father was for a number of years president. Later, Dr. Stowe was a professor in Bowdoin College, Maine, and in Andover Theological Seminary. During her residence in Cincinnati, Mrs. Stowe visited friends in Kentucky; out of observations there, but more from her reading and conversations, she gained material for her one famous book.

Uncle Tom's Cabin was written in Brunswick, Maine, in 1851-'52, and published serially in the National Era, an anti-slavery periodical of Washington. When put into book form, it had a wide sale in the North and in Europe; a half million copies are said to have been sold in five years; it was dramatized, and is still sometimes seen on the stage. The work provoked much adverse criticism in the South, where it was asserted that the pictures of conditions in the slave states were distorted, and that the writer made a general application of exceptional abuses. Whatever one may think of the art of the book, which has crudities of style and sensational spots of melodrama, or of the truth of the portrayal of negro life in

slave days, the story has a certain amount of human interest, wholly aside from its purposeful intention. The early success of Uncle Tom's Cabin is largely explained, of course, by its appeal to an agitated public mind; it was written at the psychological moment in a great national crisis as an expression of the sentiment of an individual who voiced at the same time that of the abolitionists. To the reader of to-day, however, Mrs. Stowe's Old-Town Folks, dealing with a subject much more familiar to her-New England village life seems to have more literary merit.

After this preliminary discussion of the literary awakening in New England and its causes, we may now proceed to consider the principal writers. For the sake of clearness and convenience they may be divided into the following groups: (1) The Concord Group, (2) The Cambridge Group, (3) The Historians and the Orators. The poet Whittier belongs to no one of these groups. As Concord and Cambridge were the most conspicuous centers of literary activity, it seems best to treat first of the essayists and poets who did most of their work at one or the other of these places.

THE CONCORD GROUP

The village of Concord, twenty miles from Boston, is famous as the home of the transcendentalists. Here lived for most of his life Ralph Waldo Emerson, essayist, poet, and philosopher; here Henry D. Thoreau, essayist and nature lover, spent his life; and here for a number of years Nathaniel Hawthorne, romancer, made his home.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON (1803-1882)

His Life.-Ralph Waldo Emerson, descendant of a line of clergymen and scholars, was born in Boston, May 25, 1803, son of William Emerson, minister of the First Unitarian Church of that city. The Emersons were of good old Puritan stock, people of culture and refinement, who

in the religious changes in New England had accepted the more liberal form of faith. The mother of Ralph Waldo Emerson was a woman of serene and beautiful character, and from her he must have inherited some of his most distinctive traits; it was she, indeed, who brought him up, for his father died when the boy was only eight years old, leaving five children, the care of whom devolved upon the strong, sacrificing woman. Emerson went to the Boston Latin School, then to Harvard, · graduating in 1821. He was a good, though not a brilliant student; mathematics he did not like; rhetoric and oratory appealed to him, and he was a wide reader. He seems to have impressed his schoolmates as an exceptional boy-"angelic and remarkable," one of them said of him. This does not mean that he was a prig, but that there was about the boy a certain spiritual quality which in a sense detached him from his fellows and at the same time won their love.

For four years following his graduation Emerson taught school. Over his pupils the young pedagogue, not yet twenty when he began teaching, appears to have had complete command, controlling them without effort simply by the calmness and restraint of an engaging personality. He did not punish except with words, which were quite sufficient either to restrain or to stimulate. One of his pupils remembers "a peculiar look in his eyes, as if he saw something beyond what seemed to be in the field of vision." From school-teaching Emerson, as was perfectly natural for a descendant of ministers, turned to the study of theology at the Harvard Divinity School, where he remained for three years. A trip to the South for his health, during which he preached in Charleston and elsewhere, was followed by further preaching experience in Northampton, Concord, and Boston. In 1829 he became associate minister of the Second Unitarian Church of Boston, the "Old North Church," of which Reverend Henry Ware was the head. This same year he married Miss Ellen Tucker a woman of rare beauty and charm; three years later Mrs. Emerson died of consumption. By 1832 Emerson had certain conscientious scruples against administering the Lord's Supper; in a sermon that year he frankly stated his views, which were contrary to those of the church, and resigned. He parted from the congregation in friendliness and good will. He had now to find a new work. In 1833 Emerson visited Europe, making a tour of Sicily, Italy, parts of France and of Great Britain. He was less impressed by the scenery and the places of historic interest than by the men of letters whom he met-Landor, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Carlyle. With the last he formed a friendship which lasted through life. Carlyle was then living in his lonely retreat, Craigenputtoch, in the Scottish moors, and the young American's visit was a cheering experience to him and