Last years, and conclusion. It is a misfortune that most men and women who are willing to risk repute for the freedom to think and speak are eccentric in other respects. They are unusual first of all in having minds so independent that they presume to disagree with the majority even in silence. They are more unusual still in having the courage to disagree aloud. When they have said their say, however, their neighbors begin to carp at them, respectable people to pass by on the other side, and the newspapers to distort what they have said and then abuse them for what they never uttered. The honest and truly reckless talkers, stung to the quick, feel injured and innocent, talk extravagantly, rely more and more on their own judgments and less and less on the facts, and sooner or later lose their influence if they do not become outcasts. In the end they have the courage and honesty with which they started, a few deploring friends, and a thousand enemies who hate them with an honest and unjustified hatred. It is a tragic round which all but the most extraordinary of free speakers seem doomed to travel. And Cooper did not escape it. Yet he did have the strength and good fortune to pass out of this vale of controversy toward the end of his life. With 1842 his campaign against the public ceased — and theirs against him. He spent his last years happily at Cooperstown and slowly returned into an era of good feeling. It was in these later years that Lowell paid him the well-deserved tribute quoted above. He was really a great patriot. If his love of America led him into the sea of troubles, it was the same love that made him the successful writer of a masterly series of American stories. It is the native character of the man that is worth remembering and the native quality of his books that earned him a wide and lasting fame.

SUGGESTIONS FOR STUDY AND CLASS DISCUSSION

1. What early influences tended to make Cooper see things from the point of view of an aristocrat and a conservative ?

2. What literary material had he unconsciously gathered during the thirty years before he became an author?

3. In his first three novels how did Cooper come nearer and nearer to his own experience in his choice of subject?

4. How long was it from the first to the last of the Leatherstocking series? In what order should the novels be read?

5. What other famous story-series can you recall? What poemseries, play-series, novel-series for children and for adults?

6. What are the three key passages to the "Last of the Mohicans" mentioned on page 131. What reasons had Cooper for placing them just where he did?

7. What effect did Cooper's life abroad have on his judgment of conditions at home?

8. What is the difference between the tone of Cooper's criticisms on American life and the tone of Irving's?

9. What is a purpose novel, and what is a problem novel? Which kind did Cooper occasionally write? What are some notable examples of either kind in the fiction of today?

10. Why was it bad policy for Cooper to introduce his quarrel with his townsmen into one of his novels? Why was it inartistic?

11. Read Mark Twain's essay on "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses," and decide how fair it is.

12. Read the prefaces to several of Cooper's novels for the light they will throw on his aggressive tactlessness.

13. Assistance in answering the following questions may be found in the Chronological Outlines at the end of Chapter XII, and Chronological Chart No. II, p. 381:

a. What was the relation of the span of Cooper's life to that of Irving's? What was the relation of their most productive periods? Note how often their names appear together in the Outlines.

b. Name one work of each of the writers mentioned in the text (p. 135) who by using adventure material had helped to prepare the way for a favorable reception for Cooper's American stories.

c. What well-known English novel was published the year of Cooper's first novel?

d. What great European statesman died the year Cooper wrote "The Spy"? What great statesman in our own country died the year he wrote the "Last of the Mohicans"?

e. How far west had the Union extended by the time Cooper wrote the last two books of the Leatherstocking Tales? (Can be answered correctly from Section III of the Outlines.)

CHAPTER XI

WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT (1794-1878)

SUGGESTED READINGS

WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT. Thanatopsis, To a Waterfowl, Hymn to Death, June, Hymn of the City, To the Fringed Gentian, The Battle-Field, O Mother of a Mighty Race, The Planting of the Apple-Tree, The Poet, Abraham Lincoln, Robert of Lincoln. These and other poems are to be found in the following collections:

BOYNTON, P. H. Milestones in American Literature, pp. 158-178. Ginn and Company.

BOYNTON, P. H. American Poetry, pp. 169–194. Charles Scribner's Sons. CALHOUN, M. E., and MACALARNEY, E. L. Readings from American Literature, pp. 239-254. Ginn and Company.

PAGE, C. H. Chief American Poets, pp. 1-35. Houghton Mifflin Company. STEDMAN, E. C. American Anthology, pp. 53-69. Houghton Mifflin Company.

In reading "Thanatopsis" what difference do you find in Bryant's references to the time after death in (1) the original poem, lines 17 to 66, and (2) the last stanza, added four years later? Could one be described as pagan and one as puritan?

Read Bryant's "To a Waterfowl," remembering that to the youthful poet the lines had a very definite, personal application.

In Bryant's early poems, particularly in such as "June," "Hymn of the City," and "To the Fringed Gentian," note how often and unexpectedly the idea of death appears.

Note the self-centered quality in "To a Waterfowl," "The Yellow Violet," and "To the Fringed Gentian."

Read Bryant's "Battle-Field" and "Hymn of the City" and Wordsworth's sonnet "Composed upon Westminster Bridge" for different but not conflicting treatments of the same idea.

How does Bryant's "Poet" explain why he wrote no popular verse for the journals like that written by Freneau and later by Whittier and Lowell?

CHAPTER OUTLINE

Irving, Cooper, and Bryant in New York
Bryant's early life

Boyhood and education

First venture in New York
Bryant's early poetry

Somber and religious in tone

Sentimental and self-centered

The best of it not imitative in form

Bryant's later poetry

Concerned more with humanity and less with self
Many poems dedicated to America

Nature poems less somber

Poems of old age

Bryant's eminence in his later years
Summary

Irving, Cooper, and Bryant in New York. The mention of Irving, Cooper, and Bryant as fellow representatives of New York is likely to mislead students into thinking of them as literary friends. As a matter of fact they seem not to have had any more contact than any other three educated residents of the city. They were not unsociable men, but each went his own social way. Until his last ten years Cooper was leading member of a literary club of which he had been the founder. Irving, without going to the pains of organizing a group, was the natural center of one which delighted in his company and followed his ways of thinking and writing. Bryant, instead of being drawn after either of these older men, stepped into journalism, becoming a friend of the great editors and the political leaders. Irving was the only one of the three who was born and bred in town. Cooper and Bryant were not sons of New York; they were among the first of its long list of famous adopted children.

Bryant's early life-boyhood and education. Bryant (17941878) was born at Cummington, Massachusetts. His descent can be traced to the earliest Plymouth families, and on his

mother's side to Priscilla Alden. His father was a muchloved country doctor, the third of the family in recent generations to follow this budding profession (see pages 311, 312). He was a man of dignities in his town, a state representative and senator, and a welcome friend of the Boston book-lovers. His services were so freely given,

however, that he had little money to spend on his boy's education. This was carried on, according to a common custom, under charge of clergymen, though not the least important teaching came direct from the father's guidance of his reading and criticism of his writing. Bryant's talents began to show promise while he was still a boy, for he read eagerly, and in his early teens wrote a number of "pieces" which were more or less widely circulated in print. One of these, "The Embargo,' a political satire address to President

WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT

An early portrait

Jefferson, ran to two editions and seemed so mature that his father's friends were called on to certify to it as the work of a boy of thirteen. In these years Bryant made Alexander Pope his adored model, and for so young an imitator he succeeded remarkably well. A little later he fell under the influence of a group of minor Englishmen who have rather wickedly been nicknamed the "Graveyard Poets" because of the persistency with which they versified on death, the grave, and the after-life. "Thanatopsis," written before he was eighteen, was a reflection of and a response to certain lines of one of these men, Kirke White, who had deeply stirred his imagination.