III. WRITERS OF NEW YORK AND PENNSYLVANIA.

For some time, our attention has been centred for the most part in the work of our New England writers; but we must not think that the literary activity of this long period was confined to the immediate vicinity of Boston. The cities of Philadelphia and New York had each its coterie of literary workers. In the rapidly growing metropolis, the generation following that of Irving and his associates of the Knickerbocker group was not without its representatives of greater or less distinction, among whom at least two, Bayard Taylor and George William Curtis, deserve especial recognition. Both were men of letters in the broadest sense, versatile in talent and giving expression to that talent in varied literary forms. Bayard Taylor, 1825-1878.

Taylor was born in a Quaker household upon a Pennsylvania farm, and as a child was conscious of two ambitions: to travel and to become a poet. His literary ambition was gratified prematurely by the publication of a volume of verse, Ximena, -- afterward regretted, -- in 1844. In the same year, his twentieth, he sailed for England, having arranged with several editors to print the letters which he purposed to write while on his travels. For nearly two years, he tramped about over Europe enduring much hardship; his letters were published in 1846, under the title of Views Afoot, or Europe seen with the Knapsack and Staff. An editorial connection with the New York Tribune followed; and in 1849, Taylor was sent to California to report upon the fortunes of the gold-seekers. The next year his letters to the Tribune appeared in the volume Eldorado. A trip to the far East in 1851 resulted not only in more correspondence but also in a volume of verse, Poems of the Orient (1854), containing some of his best compositions, including the Bedouin Song. Bayard Taylor's fame as a traveler and an entertaining descriptive writer was extended by successive volumes recounting his experiences in Africa, in Spain, in India, China, and Japan, and in the northern countries of Europe. But he was ambitious to fill a higher place in literature.

Novels and Poems.

In 1863, he produced his first novel, Hannah Thurston, and the next year, his second, John Godfrey's Fortunes, which is to some extent autobiographical. The Story of Kennett (1866), a semi-historical romance, is his most successful work of fiction. A long and elaborate narrative poem, The Picture of St. John (1866), was followed by The Masque of the Gods (1872), and Lars: a Pastoral of Norway (1873). Other volumes of verse were published in the latter years of his life, including The National Ode, written for the Centennial at Philadelphia in 1876; but no one of Taylor's original efforts resulted in any enduring success. He wrote tirelessly and unceasingly, yet without that inspiration which gives immortality to the works of genius. His one achievement which will most certainly endure is the translation of Goethe's Faust, the two parts of which were published in 1870 and 1871. This altogether admirable version of the German poet's masterpiece ranks with Bryant's Homer and Longfellow's Dante, if it does not surpass them in this delicately difficult field of poetical translation.

Only a portion of Taylor's literary labor is recorded here; he was an indefatigable worker, and his health broke down under the steady strain. In 1878, he was appointed minister to Germany; and it seemed peculiarly appropriate that the translator of Germany's great classic should be thus honored. His appointment was universally approved, for the poet was widely respected and, in the circle of his literary associates, greatly beloved. He was welcomed at Berlin, as Irving had been at the court of Spain; but his diplomatic career was pathetically brief. Death came upon him suddenly as he sat in his library at the German capital in December of the year of his appointment.

G. W. Curtis, 1824-1892.

The boyhood of George William Curtis was spent in Providence, Rhode Island, but his family removed to New York when he was fifteen years old. He was still in his teens when he, with an older brother, entered the Brook Farm community at about the time that Hawthorne joined it. Three or four years of foreign travel, including a visit to Egypt and Syria, resulted in two volumes of description and impression: Nile Notes of a Howadji (1851) and The Howadji in Syria (1852). Lotus Eating (1852) presents another series of travel sketches. In The Potiphar Papers (1853) he satirized some tendencies in New York society.

The Orator.

During the decade just preceding the Civil War, Curtis participated not only as a writer but also as a public speaker in the great debate on slavery, and laid the foundation of his later fame as one of the most forceful and graceful of American orators -- a reputation maintained to the end of his career.

In Fiction and Essay.

In 1856, Curtis published a charming little work of light and delicate sentiment entitled Prue and I, a work which was exceedingly popular at the time, and which retains its popularity still. Trumps, an experiment in novel writing, appeared in 1861. The chief claim of Curtis to literary distinction, however, is as an essayist. For nearly fifty years he was associated editorially with Harper's Magazine, and throughout that period contributed regularly those delightful papers -- essays in miniature -- which we associate with the department so sympathetically named "the Easy Chair." Something of the Addisonian flavor, with more of the spirit of Charles Lamb, is to be recognized in these vivacious contributions of comment, criticism, and reminiscence. Nevertheless, Curtis was as much a master of a style distinctly his own as was the author of the Autocrat. Three volumes of selections from these papers have been published, some of the essays appearing in an expanded form. Two volumes of Orations and Addresses have also appeared, including the eulogies on Wendell Phillips and James Russell Lowell.

J. G. Holland, 1819-1881.

Josiah Gilbert Holland was a Massachusetts physician when he left his professional practice and, like Taylor and Curtis, entered journalism in New York. Over the pen-name Timothy Titcomb, Dr. Holland, while editor of the Springfield (Mass.) Republican, wrote a series of familiar essays, letters of wholesome counsel, which were received with favor in book form under the title Timothy Titcomb's Letters (1858). The publication of two volumes of verse, The Bay Path (1857) and Bitter-Sweet (1858), gave him a place among the "popular poets," which was re-inforced by the appearance of Kathrina, a sentimental romance in metre, in 1867. Dr. Holland's claims to literary distinction are not especially strong, but his novels, Miss Gilbert's Career (1860), Arthur Bonnicastle (1873), Seven oaks (1875), and Nicholas Minturn (1877), were widely read. In 1870, he became the editor of the new Scribner's Magazine (which in 1881 changed its name to the Century).

"Ik Marvel," 1822-1908.

Donald Grant Mitchell, a member of this same interesting group of genial essayists who long survived the rest, is the author of two delightful books which, like Curtis's Prue and I, still retain a popularity hardly diminished by the lapse of a generation. Reveries of a Bachelor was published in 1850, Dream Life in 1851. The same charm of style and matter pervades My Farm of Edgewood (1863) and Wet Days at Edgewood (1864); nor is it lacking in the volumes of literary anecdote, English Lands, Letters, and Kings (1889) and American Lands and Letters (1897-1899).

C. D. Warner, 1829-1900.

Charles Dudley Warner, whose delightful sketchbook, My Summer in a Garden (1870), suggests comparison with the "Edgewood" books, was born in Massachusetts. For many years he was a member of the famous literary coterie in Hartford, Connecticut, his professional duties -- he was also a journalist -- associating him with the New York group. His pleasant volume of Backlog Studies appeared in 1872. In collaboration with Samuel L. Clemens ("Mark Twain"), he wrote The Gilded Age (1873). Two volumes of travel sketches, My Winter on the Nile and In the Levant, were published in 1876. Being a Boy, a picturesque presentation of youth on a New England farm, belongs to the year following. Warner was the author of numerous volumes, including a Life of Washington Irving (1881) and two realistic novels, effective studies of New York society, A Little Journey in the World (1889) and The Golden House (1894).

Richard H. Stoddard, 1825-1903.

Richard Henry Stoddard, whose early years were years of poverty, was toiling in an iron foundry when he began his poetical career in New York. A friendship with Bayard Taylor led to the publication of his first poems and to much literary work. From 1859 to 1870, Mr. Stoddard was employed in the New York custom-house, a position obtained with the friendly assistance of Hawthorne. From that time on, he was engaged in editorial work and held a high place among our minor poets. An autobiographic volume of Recollections (1903) is not the least interesting of his prose works. The poet's wife, Elizabeth B. Stoddard (1823-1902), was also a writer of verse and the author of three noteworthy novels, The Morgesons (1862), Two Men (1865), and Temple House (1867).

A Philadelphia writer, George Henry Boker (1823-1890), represents substantial attainment in the field of dramatic poetry. His successful tragedy, Francesca da Rimini (1856), is possibly the best of several which embody that romantic theme. Thomas Buchanan Read (1822-1872), like Boker a Pennsylvanian and a friend of Taylor and the Stoddards, was also an artist as well as poet. Of all his verse the battle lyric, Sheridan's Ride (1865), is the poem inevitably associated with his name.

Walt Whitman, 1819-1892.

By far the most interesting and important figure among the New York writers of this generation is that presented in the picturesque personality of Walt Whitman. Strictly speaking, he was not so much a member as one outside the literary circle just described. A man of rich vitality, lustily greeting life in all its phases, emphasizing, perhaps needlessly, the physical side of life, Whitman strode forth on his course, violating the conventionalities at every step. Not only in what he had to say as a poet was Whitman unconventional; he was unconventional also in the manner of saying. He violated the established rules of poetical expression as boldly and as confidently as he disregarded the ordinary rule of silence concerning the topics which he discussed with such amazing frankness. He was an innovator, a representative of new ideas. In the literary history of our country he stands unique. At once the target of criticism, he persevered in the delivery of what he certainly believed a "message"; and now, half a century and more since the publication of his earliest volume, he still stands a some-what problematical personality. In the minds of many he appears a man of undoubted genius, Ossianic, elemental, impressive; to some he is the teacher of new-found truths, the prophet and the poet of democracy.

His Life.

Walt Whitman was born on a farm on Long Island. His father was a descendant of pioneer New England stock; his mother's ancestry was Dutch. While Whitman was a child, his parents removed to Brooklyn, where his father practiced the trade of carpenter and builder. The boy was educated but scantily in the public schools, and entered a printer's office at thirteen. He was not continuously employed; he found time to roam the moors and beaches of Long Island in close touch with nature and delighting in the sea; he also found time to read much good literature, the Arabian Nights, Scott, Shakespeare, Ossian, the hero-poetry. of the Germans, and translations of the Greek dramatists and poets. There was a strange fitness in it -- this abrupt, haphazard introduction to the masterpieces of literature. Dante he read in the shadows of a wood; Homer he learned by heart in the shelter of great rocks, listening to the roar of the surf. At fifteen, he one day notices a ship under full sail, and has the desire to describe it like a poet. At eighteen, he teaches a country school. At twenty, he starts a weekly paper in his birthplace, then edits in leisurely fashion a daily paper in New York. He writes romances and verse of the conventional sort for a magazine, rides on the Broadway omnibuses and makes stanch friends with the drivers, is welcomed in the pilot-houses of the ferry-boats that ply on East River, frequents the Bowery, and is a conspicuous figure among the Bohemians who gather in Pfaff's restaurant. At twenty-eight, he is editor of the Brooklyn Eagle, and then suddenly takes to the "open road" to see the country and get near the people. This "leisurely journey and working expedition," as Whitman termed it, takes him through the Middle States and down the Ohio and Mississippi to New Orleans, where for a time he works in a newspaper office. Retracing his steps in part, he visits the Great Lakes, sees Niagara, and crosses into Canada, finally returning through Central New York and down the Hudson.

Leaves of Grass.

In 1855, appeared the first edition of Whitman's poems, entitled Leaves of Grass, a title which was used by the poet with each subsequent issue until the eighth edition, in 1892. This first volume was perhaps more widely talked about than widely read. To most of those who did read it, it was both mystifying and repellent. Not only did they find here a startling freedom of speech which shocked them and an apparent egotism that amazed, but they found also a form of expression that bade defiance to every principle of constructive art.

"I celebrate myself, and sing myself,"