only authentic history of the times that ever hath been or ever will be published. By Diedrich Knickerbocker.

For the hoax by which Irving introduced it to New York see the Introduction to the book, or Pierre M. Irving's Life of Irving, Chapter XIII.

Concerning the value of the book one may quote Warner's Life of Iring: The book is indeed an original creation, and one of the few masterpieces of humor. In spontaneity, freshness, breadth of conception, and joyous vigor, it belongs to the springtime of literature. It has entered into the popular mind as no other American book ever has, and it may be said to have created a social realm which, with all its whimsical conceit, has almost historical solidity. The Knickerbocker pantheon is almost as real as that of Olympus.'

195. a. 33. Such are my feelings, etc. It must be borne constantly in mind that this purports to have been written by the venerable Dutchman, Diedrich Knickerbocker, and that the style is made purposely pompous and over-ornate, yet there is always more of Irving in the style than there is of Knickerbocker. Compare, for instance, the next paragraph with the closing paragraph in Westminster Abbey' in the Sketch Book.

THE STOUT GENTLEMAN

On the 9th of september, 1821, Irving and his friend, the young American artist, Leslie, made an excursion to Birmingham. The following is from Leslie's Autobiography:

we

'We mounted the top of one of the Oxford coaches at three o'clock in the afternoon, intending only to go as far as Henley that night; but the evening was so fine, and the fields filled with laborers gathering in the corn by the light of a full moon, presented so animated an appearance, that although we had not dined, we determined to proceed to Oxford, which we reached about eleven o'clock, and then sat down to a hot supper. The next day it rained unceasingly, and were confined to the inn, like the nervous traveler whom Irving has described as spending a day in endeavoring to penetrate the mystery of "the stout gentleman." This wet Sunday at Oxford did in fact suggest to him that capital story, if story it can be called. That next morning, as we mounted the coach. I said something about a stout.gentleman who had come from London with us the day before, and Irving remarked that The Stout Gentleman would not be a bad title for a tale: as soon as the coach stopped, he began writing with his pencil, and went on at every like opportunity. We visited Stratford-on-Avon, strolled about Charlecot Park and other places in the neighborhood, and while I was sketching, Irving, mounted on a stile or seated on a stone, was busily engaged with 4 Stout Gentleman. He wrote with the greatest rapidity, often laughing to himself, and from time to time reading the manuscript to me. We loitered some days in this classic neighborhood, visiting Warwick and Kenilworth; and by the time we arrived at Birming

ham, the outline of The Stout Gentleman wa completed.'

199. b. 25. Derby, the capital of Derbyshire, the country lying between Cheshire and Yorkshire, in the midland region of England.

THE BOLD DRAGOON

The

204. This is one of the tales in the first part of Tales of a Traveller. Irving links a series of tales together with the old device of a series of stories told by the guests at a hunting dinner. 'knowing gentleman with the flexible nose has just told The Adventure of My Aunt' and ⚫ the inquisitive gentleman' has said:

'But I don't see, after all, that there was any ghost in this last story.'

'Oh, if it's ghosts you want, honey,' cried the Irish captain of dragoons, if it's ghosts you want, you shall have a whole regiment of them. And since these gentlemen have been giving the adventures of their uncles and aunts, faith and I' e'en give you a chapter too, out of my OWN family history.' Whereupon he tells the story.

'Sir Walter Scott, in his paper on Supernatural and Fictitious Composition, praised Irving's sketch of the Bold Dragoon as the only instance of the fantastic then to be found in the English language.' Higginson's History of American Literature. 204. a. 49. My uncle Toby, a well-known character in Sterne's novel Tristram Shandy.

b. 24. Bruges, see Longfellow's The Belfry of Bruges. 205. b. 21. Heer verkoopt, etc. Here one can buy good drink.

THE DEVIL AND TOM WALKER 208. One may trace the influence on Irving of Hauff's das Wirthshaus im Spessart, particularly of the tale Das Kalte Hertz.

the

twenty guns, and after a fierce engagement of an hour caused it to strike its colors. The narrative of the battle between the Ariel and Alacrity is founded upon this fight between the Ranger and the Drake.

b. 4. Barnstable, commander of the Ariel. 222. a. 11. The cockswain,' Long Tom Coffin of Nantucket, the gigantic whaleman, who in reality is the hero of the novel.

225. b. 4. Dropped lifeless. Captain Burden of the Drake was killed while making an attempt to board Jones's ship the Ranger, and his crew, disheartened by his death, called for quarter. To this extent the account is historical. The circumstance of the harpoon was the product of Cooper's imagination.

THE PIONEERS

225. The Pioneers has in it more of autobiography than any other of Cooper's novels. He wrote it with enthusiasm. The author,' he says in the Introduction, has had more pleasure in writing The Pioneers than the book will, probably, ever give any of its readers.' It is fiction, yet it is founded on historical fact. Judge Temple was Cooper's father; the village of Templeton Cooperstown; and the mansion from which the Judge ruled the region as a sort of king over a society of nobles was the home of Cooper during his boyhood. When the novel opens in 1793,

was

Cooper was four years old, the wild forest life had begun rapidly to disappear, and Leatherstocking, who had appeared as a young man in The Deerslayer and The Last of the Mohicans, and as a man at full maturity in The Pathfinder, is approaching old age. The plot of the story turns upon the act passed by the State of New York, in the words of Hiram Doolittle, to lay a fine of five pounds currency, or twelve dollars and fifty cents, by decimals, on every man who kills a deer betwixt January and August. The Judge had a great hand in getting the law through.' Leather-stocking kills a deer, assaults the mean-souled constable sent to arrest him, and is formally tried on the two charges of killing game out of season and resisting an officer of the law.

Chapter XLI. Leather-stocking sat his hour in the stocks, but, being placed in jail, escaped by the aid of friends. After an eventful chase, however, he was recaptured and remanded to jail where he lay until a pardon by the Governor set him free. Elizabeth, the Judge's daughter, whose life he had once saved, and her husband hasten to congratulate him.

The tribe has gathered to determine the fate of the captives. In the midst of the debate the eccentric naturalist Obed has been brought in and his deportment has been so extraordinary that the savages have agreed that he is insane. 230. b. 19. Mahtoree, the Sioux Chief. 21. The trapper, Leather-stocking. 43. Teton, Sioux.

60. Dahcotah, the Indian name of the tribes of Indians known to the whites as Sioux.

231. a. 15. Unconscious subject, the captive HardHeart who stood bound to a stake in the center of the assembly.

238. The poem records an incident in the war waged against the Turks for independence. The Greek general Bozzaris fell in a victorious night attack on the Moslem camp at Laspi, the ancient Plataea. The name in modern Greek is pronounced Bot-záh-ri.

13. Suliote, Greco-Albanians who had settled at Suli in Albania, but, defeated by the Turks in 1822, had been forced into Greece where they played an active part in the war for independence.

18. On old Plataea's day. On the very field that Bozzaris won, the Greek general Pausanias in 479 B. C., with a force of 110,000 had met and defeated 300,000 Persians under Mardonius.

THE CULPRIT FAY

240. 7. Old Cronest, a well-known landmark of the Hudson region. After the first two or three stanzas Drake abandoned the attempt to give the piece a distinctively American background. The fays are finally put to flight by the skylark, a European bird.

241. 55. Ising-stars, a poetic word for bits of shining mica.

67. Ouphe, an obsolete form of oaf or elf.

95. Elfin chain, the bond that connected him with the elves.

242. 174. Osier, willow.

204. Prong, Squab, etc. One can only guess at the meaning of some of these words. The poet has invented names for these sea creatures that will be in harmony with his elfin story. Quarl undoubtedly refers to the medusa or jelly fish. The sea fauna described is hardly that of the Hudson. 243. 266. Calamus root, sweet flag. It figures in some of the Uncle Remus stories.

290. Bootle-blade, a word known only in the fairy-land of Drake's dream.

245. 456. Sea-roc, a fabulous bird described in Sinbad's tale in the Arabian Nights.

480. Sylphid queen, queen of the sylphs or the elemental spirits of the air, who according to Paracelsus, hold a place intermediate between material and immaterial creatures.

495. Lily roon, the border or edge of a lily.

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 fare. well to poetry, thrust his early efforts at com. position 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 com. pleted 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

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 im mediately 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 Light, 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 betweer. 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 therefore 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 wit ness 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

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 Sundayschool 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 ugly mussel and snail shells. Hence I learn.... 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 hard some shrub from one to three feet high, with terr nal clusters of pale-purple flowers preceding the le ciduous 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, 'Yes terday in the woods I followed the fine humble-be with rhymes and fancies free.' In the earliest vr sion the opening line reads, Fine humble ber Fine humble bee.'

CONCORD HYMN

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

283. Lines 1 and 2, stood, flood.' Emerson's rimes are often far from perfect. Undoubtedly b was deficient in sense of melody, yet one must press this idea too far. To him freedom was th poet's birthright. I wish to write,' he wrote his journal June 27, 1839, such rimes as sha not suggest a restraint, but contrariwise the wilder freedom.'

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

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

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

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