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Northern mountains; in the workmen, the boys, the maidens you meet; in the hopes of the morning, the ennui of noon, and sauntering of the afternoon; in the disquieting comparisons; in the regrets at want of vigor; in the great idea and the puny execution - behold Charles the Fifth's day; another, yet the same; behold Chatham's, Hampden's, Bayard's, Alfred's, Scipio's, Pericles's day-day of all to that are born of women. The difference of circumstance is merely costume. I am tasting the self-same life its sweetness, its greatness, its pain-which I so admire in other men.' The temptation to 15 complete the splendid passage is almost irresistible. But in every page you are drawn on as in a stately symphony of winning music.

and what you will regret to the last day of your life.'

But those who heard his own Divinity School address, or the Cambridge or Dart5 mouth oration, or the Emancipation address, would not exchange that recollection even to have heard the Olympian orator in Faneuil Hall. Tell me,' said a Senator famous for his oratory, to a friend in Washington, what do you call eloquence? Repeat to me an eloquent passage.' The friend quoted from Emerson the unequaled passage from the Dartmouth College address in which the scholar appeals to the young men to be true to the ideals of their youth -a passage which no generous youth can read to-day without deep emotion and a thrill of high resolve. The Senator listened with an air of perplexed incredulity. 'Do you call that eloquent? Now see what I call eloquence,' and he declaimed a glowing piece of rhetoric with ardent feeling. It was a passage from Charles Sprague's Fourth-of-July oration in Boston sixty years ago. But effective as it was, his friend reminded the Senator that if the test of eloquence be glow of feeling and splendor and sincerity of expression, with an inner power of appeal which searches the heart and molds the life, no really greater results in this country could be traced to any speech than to that of Emerson, who read the greater part of his essays as addresses, and who sometimes reached a lyrical strain which not the magnificent Burke nor any other great orator surpasses.

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This passage is from the Dartmouth 20 College address, and it has all the flowing cadence of a discourse written to be spoken. Yet Emerson had little of the orator's temperament save the desire of an audience, and an earnestness which 25 was pure and not passionate. But no orator in the country has exercised a deeper or more permanent influence. His discourses were but essays, but their thought was so noble, their form so sym- 30 metrical, their tone so lofty, and they were spoken with such alluring rhythm, that they threw over young minds a spell which no other eloquence could command. Emerson himself was very susceptible to the power of fine oratory. No man ever praised more warmly the charm of Everett in his earlier day. When Webster delivered his eulogy upon Adams and Jefferson in Faneuil Hall, Emerson was 40 teaching in Cambridge, and Richard H. Dana, Jun., was one of his pupils. The day before Webster spoke, the teacher announced that there would be no school upon the morrow, and he earnestly ex- 45 horted his pupils not to lose the memorable opportunity of hearing the great orator. Dana was of an age to prefer fishing to oratory, and strolled off with his line to the river, where he passed 50 the day. When school was resumed, Mr. Emerson with sympathetic interest asked. him if he had heard Webster. The fisher, half ashamed, reluctantly owned his absence, Emerson looked at him with re- 55 gret and almost pain, and said to him, gravely: My boy, I am very sorry; you have lost what you can never recover,

- To talk of Emerson, even if the talker were not of the circle of his intimate friends, is to raise the flood-gate of happy and inspiring recollections. It is one of the tenderest of the thoughts that hover around his memory, as the low winds sigh through the pine-trees over his grave, that, as with Longfellow, there are no excuses to be made for grotesque eccentricities of genius, nor for a life at any point unworthy of so great a soul. He said of his friend Thoreau, who is buried near him, that he was like the Alpine climber who gathers the edelweiss, the flower that blooms at the very edge of the glacier. He too lived at those pure heights, and taught us how to tread them undazzled and undismayed. Happy teacher, whose long and lovely life illustrated the dignity and excellence of the

truth, old as the morning and as ever fresh, that fidelity to the divine law written upon the conscience is the only safe law of life for every man. Noble and beneficent preacher, who, in a sense that the pensive Goldsmith did not intend,

Allured to brighter worlds, and led the way.'

Harper's Magazine, July, 1882.

THE LECTURE LYCEUM

corrective of the influence of the great tendency of the lyceum lecture. But pa

triotic as his purpose undoubtedly was, his effort to stem the rapidly rising tide of 5 public sentiment was like the protests of Governor Hutchinson and the Colonial conservatives against the fervid revolutionary appeals of Otis and Adams and Quincy. Other popular speakers of the 10 same sympathy as that of Mr. Everett found themselves out of tune with the lyceum audience, and were but meteors flashing across the stage, whose light was lost in the steady and increasing glow of

the great day of the lyceum lecture.

The Utica Herald in a pleasant article 15 the group of men who were identified with recently recalled the lecture lyceum of a quarter of a century ago. It was then what is called a power. It greatly influenced public opinion. Its spirit was indicated by the reply of Wendell Phillips 20 to an invitation which asked him his terms and his subject. He answered that for a literary lecture he should expect a hundred dollars, but he would deliver an antislavery address for nothing, and pay 25 his own expenses. The lecturers who were most sought at that time were almost without exception men of very strong convictions upon the great question which, however evaded and dexterously hidden, 30 was the vital thought of the country; and every successive week from November to April, in the largest cities and the smallest cities, along the belt of country from the Kennebec through New England and 35 New York westward through Ohio and the Northwest to the Mississippi, before thousands of the most intelligent American citizens, this band of lecturers advanced, like a well-ordered platoon of 40 sharp-shooters, and delivered their destructive volley at what they felt to be the common enemy.

Edward Everett, the monarch of the platform, as Mr. Edward Parker called 45 him in his book upon American contemporary orators, during part of this same time was making a tour through much of the same region with his oration upon Washington, for the benefit of the 50 fund for the purchase of Mount Vernon, and he was also writing the Mount Vernon papers for the Ledger, in one of which he gave an entertaining description of a night in a sleeping-car, when those itiner- 55 ant bedchambers had but recently taken to the road. Mr. Everett's conservative temperament made his oration a kind of

These men were not all like Wendell Phillips, open leaders of a specific agitation, nor were these lectures always ostensibly upon what are called public questions. But the influence of the lecturers was unmistakable. They were all men known to be in the strongest sympathy with the most advanced feeling of the agitation. It was the plain spirit and tone and drift of those lectures, an occasional allusion and the necessary application of the remarks, however general, to the actual situation, rather than any deliberate discussion of the question itself, which characterized the lyceum of that day. There was sometimes an attempted reaction against this tendency. In Philadelphia it was discovered that colored persons were not admitted to the Musical Fund Hall, in which the lectures had been given. The leading lecturers instantly informed the committee that they declined to speak in the hall so long as the restriction continued. In Albany the reactionary sentiment in the Young Men's Association succeeded in electing a lecture committee which was resolved upon a purely literary' course, and which would not invite the usual lecturers. The result was an independent course, under the auspices of dissatisfied members of the association, in which the rejected lecturers spoke in the largest hall in the city, and the signal triumph of the seceders lay in the immense audience which assembled in contrast to the attenuated attendance upon the regular course.

The singular success of the lyceum lecture of that time was due, undoubtedly, to two causes the simultaneous appearance of a remarkable group of orators, and their profound sympathy with the ques

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tion which absorbed the public mind. The weekly lecture was not merely a display of oratory, not only an amusing recreation, but it brought wit and accomplishment and eloquence to strengthen the public feeling and arouse the public conscience, and to confirm the earnest spirit which was universal, and which forecast the great events and the noble elevation of the public mind that followed. 10 Emerson, Wendell Phillips, Gough, Beecher, Chapin, Starr King, Theodore Parker, could of themselves carry any course of lectures, and each in his own way was thoroughly in accord with the 15 truest American life of that time. The situation and the condition of the public mind would not have availed, indeed, without the happy chance of such orators to create the lyceum, but with that chance 20 the lyceum of that day was as remarkable a continuous display of various and effective eloquence as has been ever known.

If the faithful diary of any lecturer 25 who went the grand rounds twenty-five years ago, from Maine to the Mississippi, could be published, it would be full of the most amusing stories. The lecturers all had them to tell, and they were all men 30 of a singularly fine perception of humor. James T. Fields, the publisher in Boston, was the friend of all the lyceum orators, and towards the close of his life he was himself a popular and attractive lecturer 35 upon literary subjects. His little cell or private office in the old corner bookstore in Boston was an exchange of lecturers for that neighborhood, which teemed with lyceums, and no similar space has ever 40 heard fresher stories better told, or has ever echoed with gayer laughter.

It was the pleasant company in that little retreat which first heard, the day after it occurred, the tale of the belated 45 lecturer who, hurrying from the cars in a carriage to the hall in Boston, long beyond the hour, dinnerless, and with no chance to dress, opened his traveling-bag, and proceeded, to the consternation of 50

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the lady who had taken a seat in the same carriage, and whose pardon he politely and briefly invoked, to change his collar and his coat. As he began to pull off his coat, having pulled off his collar, his amazed and terrified fellow-passenger began to pull at the door, and to call loudly upon the driver, who was furiously whipping his horses into a pace that increased both the noise of the carriage and the conviction of the terrified lady that she was the victim of some dreadful conspiracy, or the hapless victim of a maniac. maniac's earnest but interjectional explanation as he proceeded in his toilet, begging his companion to be pacified, as he was merely going to lecture, was an unintelligible asseveration, which only made his madness more indisputable and awful, and what might have befallen the poor lady, if the carriage had not suddenly stopped at the hall, and the lecturer, in his clean collar and black coat, had not begged her pardon for frightening her, with a fervor that frightened her all the more, and disappeared from the vehicle with his traveling-bag, shawl, and umbrella, he was not prepared to say. the tale, as he told it the next morning with infinite humor in Field's corner, was received, as he ruefully admitted, with louder shouts of laughter than had greeted the brightest witticisms of his. lecture.

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Fields is gone, and his old friend and neighbor Whipple, who was one of the earliest of the noted lyceum lecturers. The old corner in the old corner bookstore is gone, and with it have vanished many of the happy company that gathered there, not only of orators, but of famous authors. The lyceum of the last generation is gone, but it is not surprising that those who recall with the Utica Herald its golden prime should cherish a kindly and regretful feeling for an institution which was so peculiarly American, and which served so well the true American spirit and American life.

Harper's Magazine, April, 1887.

SOME LESSER POETS OF THE MID-CENTURY

From 1830 to 1860 there was produced in America a surprising amount of verse. The most of it Time has proved valueless, but from it have been winnowed a few real lyrics that seem to have taken a permanent place in the American anthology. The work of John G. Saxe, a native of Vermont, a graduate of Harvard, and a lawyer of note, has gone with the greater part of the poetic mass, and some of it undeservedly, for without doubt he was the best producer of 'society verse' of the Praed, Locker-Lamson type that America has produced, surpassing even Holmes. Nevertheless, it must be confessed that his clever and dainty improvisations are now but seldom read. Of an utterly different type was the work of Thomas W. Parsons, who so narrowly escaped being a great poet that one wonders at times just what element it was that he lacked. He spent large part of his life abroad in England and in Italy, and few Americans ever have lived more completely in the higher realms of art than he. He translated Dante, and the immortal lyric 'On a Bust of Dante,' as perfect a thing as there is in English, first appeared in book form in his version of the Inferno in 1843. Only in a few rare stanzas does he reach the heights. One wonders as he reads his collections and his collections were few and brief how one who could do such exquisite work could also produce verses so ordinary. Thomas Dunn English, a Philadelphian, and a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, was as voluminous as Parsons was sparing of product. Among his books are twenty dramas and seven volumes of verse, but he is remembered only for his single song, Ben Bolt,' 'a parlor ballad' which was perhaps the most popular bit of sentiment of its era. For a time the Cary sisters, Alice and Phoebe, natives of Ohio, whose poetic abilities were discovered by Whittier, were supposed to be producers of permanent material. They moved to New York City, and for a time their home was a delightful literary center to which all poets sooner or later gravitated, but they and their work are now forgotten save for Phoebe's immortal hymn which already is recognized as a classic. The greatest genius of the whole period, undoubtedly. was Stephen Collins Foster, a native of Pittsburgh, and for years a man of business there and in Cincinnati. He discovered his musical gifts almost by accident, began to write music composing the words to accompany it, won almost instant recognition, removed to New York City, and spent there the last years of his life. In his list of songs, one hundred and twenty in number, are many which are now known by heart by all in America and as well as in England. Despite the great sales of his work, he himself received little, and it was in misery and destitution that he spent his last days. Lucy Larcom was another poet of real ability discovered by Whittier. She had worked in the Lowell, Massachusetts, mills, had written for the Lowell Offering, the magazine edited by the mill operatives, and then, breaking from this work, had taught school, at one time as far west as Illinois. She threw herself into the anti-slavery cause, and all her life was in the forefront of philanthropic work of every kind. Her poems, sweet and womanly, often touched with the tearfulness of their day, are not read as once they were and she bids fair to be forgotten like Alice Cary and so many other Female Poets of America. Guy H. McMaster is remembered only because of his single stirring lyric which is generally known by the title The Old Continentals.'

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