Page:American Historical Review vol. 6.djvu/820

 8 1 o Revieivs of Books century before ; Bryant, writing in the simply luminous style of his own century, expressed a somewhat formal sentimentality which had hardly characterized vital work in England for fifty years. " Bryant's nature- poetry, however, particularly its relation to Wordsworth's, does not re- ceive adequate treatment. Professor Wendell pierces close to the centre of the peculiar genius of Poe : "He had almost in perfection a power more frequently shown by skillful melodramatic actors than by men of letters — the power of assuming an intensely unreal mood and of so setting it forth as to make us for the moment share it unresistingly." The his- torical perspective in the following statement is illuminating: "The Yankee lecturers, of whom Emerson was the most eminent, were only half-secularized preachers — men who stood up and talked to ancestrally attentive audiences. . . . Emerson's essays, in short, prove to be an obvious development from the endless sermons with which for generations his ancestors had regaled the New England fathers." Professor Wen- dell's personal acquaintance with Lowell no doubt helped him to the in- sight here expressed : " One can feel in his literary temper two constant, antagonistic phases. His purity of taste was quite equal to Longfellow's ; particularly as he grew older, he eagerly delighted in those phases of literature which are excellent. Yet all the while he was incessantly im- pelled to whimsical extravagance of thought, feeling, and utterance." Original and striking, although not quite satisfying, is the likening of Holmes to Voltaire. Wholly just and admirable is the frequent insistence upon two general characteristics of American literature in the nineteenth century : its instinctive moral purity ; and its artistic conscience in mat- ters of form, instead of the careless exuberance which might popularly be expected of literature in a young democracy. The forecast that " news- paper humor, the short stories of the magazines, and the popular stage seem the sources from which a characteristic American literature is most likely to spring," is at least not commonplace or superficial. The ungracious task of mentioning certain positive faults may be per- formed rapidly. There are a good many errors, some of them hardly excusable, in matters of fact. What are now the concluding lines of " Thanatopsis " were not written when Bryant was seventeen but several years later ; yet the date here (p. 197) is a part of the argument. Poe (p. 205) at the time of his death was certainly on the way North after visiting his betrothed ; he was not left " in the gutter" but in a rumshop ; he did not " find " his way to the hospital but was taken there by an old friend. Whitman did not ramble about the country "much like those half- criminal wanderers whom we now call tramps" (p. 465); he went as a printer and journalist. John Esten Cooke's novel, The Virginia Come- dians is referred to as " A Virginia Comedy " (p. 487), and the next sen- tence seems to distinguish it from "certain romances connected with his native state." Professor Wendell's st)-le has a certain spontaneous vital- ity and freedom, but lacks conciseness, evenness and distinction; "ad- mirable," "once for all," "then," and "of course" are used so often that they become mannerisms. Statements, sometimes relatively unim-