Page:Genius, and other essays.djvu/290

GENIUS AND OTHER ESSAYS her now?—can never forget that to Cotton Mather's influence she owed a helpful endowment and a name. Meanwhile, after every rebuff and humiliation, and in the domestic tragedies that shrouded his later years, he went to his closet like the men of old, and wrestled wnth his Puritan God. He invariably restored his wounded self-respect by comforting entries in the diaries begun in youth and assiduously kept up—despite the labor of writing some hundreds of other volumes—throughout his life. To an acquaintance with his pangs and ecstasies we are skilfully led by the present biographer. We enter into his secret thoughts; we know him, his people, his time, as not even he or they could have known themselves.

The projectors of the Makers of America Series hardly could have placed him in better hands than those of the accomplished Assistant Professor of English at Harvard. Mr. Wendell brings to his task, his first of the kind, an exact method habitual from university work, and the instinct of a New Englander steeped in the culture and traditions of the Mother of American learning. He has had recourse to the diaries and other MSS., largely unpublished, held by Historical and Antiquarian Societies, and to those in private keeping. It is greatly to be regretted that the outcome is restricted to the narrow limits of a volume in the present "series." What we obtain makes it probable that, if given fuller scope, the author would have produced a very notable biography.

As it is, Dr. Mather was not without wisdom in his careful prevision for the illumination of  [276]