TO A FRIEND

247. The poem was addressed to Fitz-Greene Halleck. It may have been called forth by the appearance of Halleck's Fanny, 1819. There is no evidence, however, to explain the occasion of its composition.

6. Strangford, English diplomatist and poet. 1780-1855. He is sarcastically referred to in Byron's English Bards and Scotch Reviewers.

47. McCrea, the victim of one of Burgoyne's scouting parties, near Fort Edward, July 27, 1777. The following account is taken from the Pennsyl vania Evening Post, August 12, 1777: In retreating from Fort Edward the Americans brought off the grain and forage; those that would not come away, relying on General Burgoyne's procla mation, were killed, scalped, or inhumanly butchered by the Indians, without any discrimination of Whigs or Tories. A Miss M'Crea, who was to have been married to one Jones, a Tory, who had joined the enemy, and whom she daily expected to bring her off, was dragged by the savages out of her house, shot twice through her body, her clothes torn off her back, and left scalped in the bushes.'

THANATOPSIS

250. Bryant's first draft of Thanatopsis was written undoubtedly during the autumn of 1811, when, disappointed in his plan to enter Yale, he settled down for a time in his father's house uncertain as to his future. In an autobiographical fragment, reproduced by his biographers, Bryant writes that during this period his father one day brought him home from Boston Southey's Remains of Henry Kirke White, and adds I read the poems with great eagerness and so often that I committed several of them to memory, particularly the ode to the Rosemary.' There were other influences at work. 'I remember reading at that time, that remarkable poem Blair's Grave, and dwelling with pleasure upon its finer passages. I had the opportunity of comparing it with a poem on a kindred subject, also in blank verse, that of Bishop Porteus on Death. He mentions also reading the miscellaneous poems of Southey and also Cowper, the blank verse of whose Task captivated my imagination.

His period of dreaming over poetry, however, was short. Literature as a profession in America was impossible at that early day. He bade farewell to poetry, thrust his early efforts at composition into his desk, and turned all his energies to the law. When Thanatopsis appeared in the September. 1817, number of the North American Review, Bryant was twenty-three. He had completed his four years of legal study, had been admitted to the bar, and had practised law for two years with no thought of any other career.

The story that his father found in his son's desk the fragments of poetry left there while the boy still had dreams of literature and took them to the editors of the North American Review who published them, incredulous at first as to their authorship, bears all the marks of truth, but to call Thanatopsis a marvelous example of precocity is foolishness. The original piece is a fragment echo

ing the spirit of Kirke White's Time and Blair's Grave. Unity and soul were not given to the piece until 1821 when the poet was twenty-seven and when he revised it for publication with his Harvard poem The Ages. The original forty-seven lines were then expanded into eighty-one, among the additions being the familiar opening and closing parts. The changes in every case add distinction.

INSCRIPTION FOR THE ENTRANCE
OF A WOOD

251. This piece was published at the same time as Thanatopsis, a part of the same manuscript that the poet's father put into the hands of the editors. It is, undoubtedly, an attempt of the young poet to try his own hand at a poetic exercise after he had read Southey's collection entitled Inscriptions. His indebtedness to Southey is evident, as may be noted, for example, in the poem entitled For a Tablet in the Banks of a Stream:

Stranger! awhile upon this mossy bank

Recline thee. If the sun rides high, the breeze That loves to ripple o'er the rivulet, Will play around thy brow, and the cool sound Of running waters sooth thee. Mark how clear They sparkle o'er the shallows; and behold, Where o'er their surface wheels with restless speed Yon glossy insect, on the sand below How its swift shadow flits. In solitude The rivulet is pure, and trees and herbs Bend o'er its salutary course refreshed; But, passing on amid the haunts of men, It finds pollution there, and rolls from thence A tainted stream. Seek'st thou for Happiness? Go, Stranger, sojourn in the woodland cot Of Innocence, and thou shalt find her there.' 252. 30. Causey, old form for Causeway.

TO A WATER FOWL

252. The circumstances under which Bryant wrote the poem are thus related by John Bigelow in his Life of Bryant:

'When he journeyed on foot over the hills to Plainfield on the 15th of December, 1816, to see what inducements it offered him to commence there the practice of the profession to which he had just been licensed, he says in one of his letters that he felt " very forlorn and desolate." The world seemed to grow bigger and darker as he ascended, and his future more uncertain and desperate. The sun had already set, leaving be hind it one of those brilliant seas of chrysolite and opal which often flood the New England skies, and, while pausing to contemplate the rosy splendor, with rapt admiration, a solitary bird made its winged way along the illuminated horizon. He watched the lonely wanderer until it was lost in the distance. He then went on with new strength and courage. When he reached the house where he was to stop for the night he immediately sat down and wrote the lines To a Waterfowl, the concluding verse of which will perpetuate to future ages the lesson in faith which the scene had impressed upon him.'

GREEN RIVER

253. 33. Simpler, gatherer of simples or herbs. 55. Though forced to drudge, etc., written when he was practising law in the period before he went to New York to enter upon a literary career.

A WINTER PIECE

254. 70. In the edition of 1836 the line read, 'That stream with rainbow radiance as they

move.

The change is significant. Bryant was constantly revising his poems.

A FOREST HYMN

256. This was the last poem that Mr. Bryant wrote during his residence in the country, just before his removal to New York.'- Godwin.

THE DEATH OF THE FLOWERS

258. 25. And then I think of one, etc., an allusion to the tragedy of his boyhood. The young Bryant was fragile, precocious, over-intellectual, predisposed to consumption, the grim specter of which haunted him even into manhood like a foreboding of death. His little sister faded and died during that home period of his life when every emotion stamps the soul. Everything,- his puritanical environment, his frail hold upon the physical, his reading in the elegiac school of poets: Young, Gray, Parnell, Blair, all inclined him to meditation, melancholy, poetic thought.'— Pattee,

I CANNOT FORGET

258. All that is really distinctive in Bryant's poetry was written before the end of his first year in New York. The publication of 'I Cannot Forget with What Fervid Devotion,' whatever may have been its date of composition, marks the end of his really inspired poetical life. Nowhere else has Bryant so laid bare his inmost heart.

THE PRAIRIES

259. Bryant made a trip to Illinois in 1832 to visit his brothers, who were settlers there.

21. Sonora, one of the western states of Mexico.

HAIL, COLUMBIA

269. This song was written in the summer of 1798, when a war with France was thought to be inevitable, Congress being then in session in Philadelphia, deliberating upon that important subject, and acts of hostility having actually occurred. The contest between England and France was raging, and the people of the United States were divided into parties for the one side or the other; some thinking that policy and duty required us to take part with republican France, as the war was called; others were for our connecting ourselves with England, under the belief that she was the great preservative power of good principles and safe government. The violation of our rights by both belligerents was forcing us from the just and wise policy of President Washington, which was to do equal justice to both, to

take part with neither, but to keep a strict and honest neutrality between them. The prospect of a rupture with France was exceedingly offensive to the portion of the people which espoused her cause, and the violence of the spirit of party has never risen higher, I think not so high, as it did at that time on that question. The theater was then open in our city; a young man belonging to it, whose talent was as a singer, was about to take his benefit. I had known him when he was at school. On this acquaintance, he called on me on Saturday afternoon, his benefit being announced for the following Monday. He said that he had twenty boxes taken, and his prospect was that he should suffer a loss instead of receiving a benefit from the performance; but that if he could get a patriotic song adapted to the tune of the "President's March," then the popular air, he did not doubt of a full house; that the poets of the theatrical corps had been trying to accomplish it, but were satisfied that no words could be composed to suit the music of that march. I told him I would try for him. He came the next afternoon, and the song, such as it is, was ready for him. It was announced on Monday morning, and the theater was crowded to excess, and so continued, night after night, for the rest of the whole season, the song being encored and repeated many times each night, the audience joining in the chorus. It was also sung at night in the streets by large assemblies of citizens, including members of Congress. The enthusiasm was general, and the song was heard, I may say, in every part of the United States.

The object of the author was to get up an American spirit which should be independent of and above the interests, passions, and policy of both belligerents, and look and feel exclusively for our own honor and rights. Not an allusion is made either to France or England, or the quarrel between them, or to what was the most in fault in their treatment of us. Of course the song found favor with both parties at least neither could disown the sentiments it inculcated. It was truly American and nothing else, and the patriotic feeling of every American heart responded to it.'— Joseph Hopkinson in the Wyoming Bard of Wilkesbarre, Pa., August 24, 1840.

THE STAR-SPANGLED BANNER

269. This song was composed under the following circumstances: A gentleman had left Baltimore, with a flag of truce, for the purpose of getting released from the British fleet a friend of his, who had been captured at Marlborough. He went as far as the mouth of the Patuxent, and was not permitted to return, lest the intended attack on Baltimore should be disclosed. He was there. fore brought up the bay to the mouth of the Patapsco, where the flag-vessel was kept under the guns of a frigate; and he was compelled to witness the bombardment of Fort McHenry, which the Admiral had boasted he would carry in a few hours, and that the city must fall. He watched the flag at the fort through the whole day, with

an anxiety that can be better felt than described, until the night prevented him from seeing it. In the night he watched the bomb-shells, and at early dawn his eye was again greeted by the flag of his country.' M'Carty's National Songs, iii, 225.

THE OLD OAKEN_BUCKET

Published in the volume entitled Poems, Odes, and Songs, and Other Metrical Effusions, 1818.

THE BUCCANEER

272. 1. The island, Block Island, Rhode Island. Whittier's poem The Palatine has as its theme a deed of the early Block Island wreckers.

ZOPHIEL, ETC.

There is much in Zophiel and in Mrs. Brooks' Cuban songs to remind one of The House of Night and the West India period of Philip Freneau.

NIAGARA

Jared Sparks in Vol. 22 of the North American Review said of this poem: Among all the tributes of the Muses to that great wonder of nature, we do not remember any so comprehensive and forcible, and at the same time so graphically correct, as this.'

AMERICA

Early in 1832 Dr. Lowell Mason, the composer, gave to Mr. Smith a number of German music books arranged for use in schools, and requested him to look them over and report to him what might be used for the Boston schools. In the words of Mr. Smith:

Turning over the leaves of one of the music books I found one song of a patriotic nature set to the tune which England claims as hers because she has so long sung it to the words, "God Save the Queen," but which the Danes claim as theirs and which the Germans claim as original with them, and of the real origin of which I believe no one is certain. The music impressed me by its simplicity and easy movement, and I was at once moved to write a patriotic hymn of my own, which American children could sing to this same tune, which I did on a scrap of waste paper, probably finishing it within half an hour.

'That was in February, 1832. I gave the hymn to Dr. Mason with others - some translations. others my own and thought not more of it. The following Fourth of July I happened into Park Street Church in Boston, where Sunday. school children were enjoying a patriotic festival. It was at this children's Fourth of July celebration that America was first sung, the words of which I had written a few months before. Since then I have heard it sung all over the world.'

EACH AND ALL

In his journal May 16, 1834. Emerson wrote: I remember when I was a boy gazing upon the beach and being charmed with the colors and forms of the shells, I picked up many and put them

in my pocket. When I got home I could find nothing that I gathered nothing but some dry ugly mussel and snail shells. Hence I learned that Composition was more important than the beauty of individual forms to Effect. On the shore they lay wet and social, by the sea and under the sky.'

THE RHODORA

The rhodora, Rhodora Canadensis, is a handsome shrub from one to three feet high, with terminal clusters of pale-purple flowers preceding the deciduous leaves. It is frequent in cool bogs from the mountains of Pennsylvania to Canada and New Eng land.'

THE HUMBLE BEE

May 9, 1837, Emerson wrote in his journal, Yesterday in the woods I followed the fine humble-bee with rhymes and fancies free.' In the earliest version the opening line reads, Fine humble bee! Fine humble bee.'

CONCORD HYMN

The opening lines of the first stanza are carven on the pedestal of French's statue, The Minute Man, which stands at the entrance to Concord bridge on the side of the river opposite the monument dedr cated in 1837.

283. Lines I and 2, 'stood,' 'flood.' Emerson's rimes are often far from perfect. Undoubtedly he was deficient in sense of melody, yet one must not press this idea too far. To him freedom was the poet's birthright. I wish to write,' he wrote in his journal June 27, 1839, such rimes as shall not suggest a restraint, but contrariwise the wildest freedom.'

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

'An oration delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society, at Cambridge, August 31, 1837.' Dr. Holmes's title for it was Our Intellectual Declaration of Independence.' Many critics use the date of its delivery as the opening date of a new period in the history of American Literature. The im pression it created was profound. Says Dr. Holmes. 'The young men went out from it as if a prophet had been proclaiming to them, "Thus saith the Lord." No listener ever forgot that address, and among all the noble utterances of the speaker it may be questioned if one ever contained more truth in language more like that of immediate inspiration.' 283. b. 11. Commencement. Until comparatively recent times commencement in American colleges came at the commencement of the college year in August or September.

287. b. 55. Savoyards, inhabitants of the duchy of Savoy in France. 288. b. 15. Druids Berserkers, Druids were priests of the old Celtic religion in England, a religion that centered about the oak tree.

Berserkers: Scandinavian warriors who went into battle foaming at the mouth and howling in mad rage.

'A small portion of the essay came from the lecture "Individualism," the last in the course of "The Philosophy of History," in 1836-37, and the other from "School," passages the lectures, "Human "Genius," and "Duty," in the course on Life," 1838-39.'

Emerson's style is often fragmentary, and his essays seem sometimes at first reading to be collections of brilliant sentences with little logical connection. It will help one's thinking to reduce one of the essays to its outline. The outline of SelfReliance would be something like this:

294. a. 47. Be original, not conventional. Trust thyself.

Obstacles in the way of self-reliance:

295. b. 31. Conformity.

297. b. 4. Consistency.

298. b. 44. Ignorance of Self.

299. a. 16. False estimates of Men.

The reasons for self-trust:

a. 50. The trustee is worthy, for the self is an emanation from the divine spirit.

300. b. 25. The self or soul is an active, original agent, self-sufficing, and therefore self-relying. 301. b. 33. Self-trust is attained by following the Truth, though it requires almost godlike strength to do it.

302. a. 58. The great need of self-reliance at the present time.

303. a. 6. In religion.

b. 57. In motives for travel.

304. a. 43. In intellectual honesty.

b. 48. In the spirit of society.

294. a. 46. An eminent painter, perhaps Washington Allston.

296. a. 10. Barbadoes, in the West Indies, evidently taken as an illustration because its large negro population made it interesting to Abolitionists. 297. b. 30. With consistency, etc.; note the positiveness which is one of Emerson's characteristics. He had a fear always of using a qualifying word. He never weakened his effects by such words as 'perhaps,' undoubtedly,' and the like.

298. b. 36. Shadow of one man, the essence of Carlyle's Heroes and Hero Worship. According to Carlyle, history is the biographies of a few great men. 299. a. 4. Popular fable, see the Induction to The Taming of the Shrew.

24. Scanderbeg, Iskander Bey, 1403-1468, the Albanian patriot.

49. The magnetism, etc.

This paragraph contains

the essence of the Transcendental Philosophy. 303. a. 33. His hidden meaning, etc., the quotation is from Scene I, Act 3. The play, which is attributed to Beaumont and Fletcher, was performed sometime previous to the year 1619.

b. 16. Locke, etc. John Locke, 1632-1704, the English philosopher, who wrote the Essay Concerning the Human Understanding, opposition to which finally brought out the transcendental revolt; Antoine Lavoisier, French chemist, Founder of modern chemistry,' guillotined 1794; Charles Hutton, English mathematician, and James Hutton, Scottish geologist; Jeremy Bentham, 1745-1832, English so Marie philosopher; François ciological Charles Fourier, 1772-1837, French socialist, whose communistic system was the philosophical basis of the Brook Farm experiment.

28. Swedenborgianism.

Emerson was greatly in

terested in Swedenborg, the mystic, and his work He devoted to him a lecture that is now a part of his Representative Men.

BRAHMA

The poem was included in May-Day and Other Pieces, 1867. By its first readers it was considered to be obscure, but its obscurity vanishes when one considers the oriental conception of pantheism which it voices, the doctrine that God is the only substance in the universe; that everything that can be conceived of by man is but a manifestation of God.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN

Remarks at the Memorial Services in Concord, April 19, 1865. Lincoln was shot on the 14th of April and died the following day.

TERMINUS

Edward Waldo Emerson in his biography recounts how in December, 1866, he met his father in New York and spent the night with him. He read me some poems that he was soon to publish in his new volume, May-Day, and among them Terminus. I was startled; for, he, looking SO healthy, so full of life and young in spirit, was reading his deliberate acknowledgment of failing forces and his trusting serene acquiescence. I think he smiled as he read.' He was then sixtythree. The poet had a premonition of the mental disease that soon was to begin to cloud his faculties.

SIGHTS FROM A STEEPLE

This is an example of Hawthorne's Sketches,the observations of a solitary man who views humanity, himself unseen. Others are Night Sketches from Under an Umbrella, Footprints on the Seashore, etc.

311. b. 10. Limping devil of Le Sage. Le Sage's novel, Le Diable Boiteur, was published in 1707.

15. Paul Pry, synonym for a meddlesome, inquisitive nuisance. Made use of by John Poole, the English playwright, whose Paul Pry was produced at the Haymarket theater in 1825.

312. a. 39. Vicentio of Pisa, a character in The Taming of the Shrew. He is described as 'A merchant of great traffic through the world.' 1:i: 12.

b. 3. Paris and the Golden Apple, the wellknown story of the award of the prize of beauty to Venus. The Judgment of Paris is the subject of two paintings by Rubens, one at Dresden and the other in the National Gallery, London. 313. a. 53. Podagra, the medical name for gout in the foot.

b. 5. Atalanta, in Grecian mythology a maiden swift of foot who ridded herself of troublesome suitors by challenging them to a foot-race.

THE GREAT STONE FACE

325. b. 19. The Great Stone Face. Hawthorne had in mind the well-known Profile or Old Man of the Mountain in the Franconia Notch of the White Mountains of New Hampshire.

21. Valley, the valley of the Pemigewasset from Plymouth, N. H., to the Franconia Notch.

326. a. 36. Cottage-door. This is an imaginary touch. The one point where the stone face may be viewed is on the north shore of Profile lake at a focal spot only a few rods wide.

ABSALOM

Willis wrote this poem while in college, probably in his senior year. It is a good example of his early scriptural poems, which, says his biographer Beers, 'were widely quoted and admired, copied about in the newspapers, inserted in readers and collections of verse, and have done as much to upbear his memory as any of his later writings.'

LETTERS FROM UNDER A BRIDGE

These letters, first published in the New York Mirror, appeared in book form in 1839 with the title, A l'Abri; or, The Tent Pitched. It was of this that Lowell wrote in the Fable for Critics, 1848:

'Few volumes I know to read under a tree
More truly delightful than his A l'Abri.'

The book was reissued in London in 1840, with the title Letters from Under a Bridge, and to it was affixed the following preface:

'The Letters which form the first part of the present volume were written in the Valley of the Susquehannah, from a beautiful glen, some eighty miles above Wyoming. The author, after many years' travel in Europe and the East, has there I pitched his tent." The letters were addressed to Dr. T. Olcutt Porter, one of the writer's most accomplished and valued friends, resident in New York. But as they embody a newly-drawn picture of the scenery and mode of life on the banks of the beautiful river made classic by the muse of Campbell, it has been thought worth while to publish them in England.'

339. b. 24. Harping on my daughter, Hamlet ii. 2, 189.

This novel was published in New York in 1835, the same year as The Yemassee. Chapters XLIII and XLIV tell of the Battle of Camden, or, as some historians term it, the Battle of Sanders' Creek, August 16, 1780, and the results which followed.

343. a. 11. Gates, Horatio Gates, who had led the northern army at the time of the surrender of Burgoyne. In June, 1780, he had been placed in command of the army of the South. Simms represents him as being weak and conceited.

a. 12. Cornwallis, in April, 1778. appointed second in command to Sir Henry Clinton, Com mander in Chief in America. Cornwallis had been put in charge of the forces that were to subjugate the southern states.

344. a. 6. Scen foreign service together. Previous to 1776 when he first came to America, Cornwallis had been for 20 years in the army and had served