Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v3.djvu/127

 CHAPTER XIII Later Essayists WHEN, speaking to his classmates on their graduation from college, William EUery Channing^ made the address entitled The Present Age (1798), the note that he uttered was one that thenceforth reverberated through- out our national life and literature. It showed affiliation with the French Revolution, and with the England of Bums, Shelley, and Wordsworth; and notable is the emphasis on the possibility of all human progress, not alone American progress, and on the importance of that culture which shall be shared by all classes of mankind. To material objects Channing gave their due, but regarded them merely as the manifestations of character and of power that have in higher fields their most inspiring repre- sentation ; and beauty was for him a vast treasury of benedic- tion wherefrom he wished his fellow men to draw the priceless blessings available to the poorest purse. Thus the essay on Self-Culture, written as an address in 1838, is a composition to which the writings of Emerson, Curtis, Higginson, Mabie, and later authors owe a decided, even if in some cases unconscious, debt — the practical and poetical blending of humanity with the humanities. As Channing was the earliest, in that fimiament of lecturer- essayists where Emerson shone as the most benignant star, so Nathaniel Parker Willis^ is the prototype of later semi-literary American journalists. Now, the mark of the journalist, the trait which surely establishes both his immediate success and his final oblivion, is the intentness of seizure on what thepresent can give, in swift, exciting, easily apprehensible interest. It was always the present that fascinated Willis; and, save in fleeting mo- 'See Book II, Chap. viii. " Ibid., Chap. iii. 109