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question of slavery was the most vital one of the time. From 1849, when California, recently settled by gold
seekers, applied for admission as a state, with a constitution forbidding slavery, until the end of the Civil War
in 1865, slavery was the irrepressible issue of the republic. The Fugitive Slave Law, which was passed in
1850 to secure the return of slaves from any part of the United States, was very unpopular at the North and did
much to hasten the war, as did also the decision of the United States Supreme Court in the Dred Scott case
(1857), affirming that slaves were property, not persons, and could be moved the same as cattle from one state
to another. Various compromise measures between the North and the South were vainly tried. When Abraham
Lincoln was elected President in 1860, South Carolina led the South in seceding from the Union. In 1861
began the Civil War, which lasted four years and resulted in the restoration of the Union and the freeing of the
slaves.
Before Holmes, the last member of this New England group, died in 1894, both North and South had more
than regained the material prosperity which they had enjoyed before the war. The natural resources of the
country were so great and the energy of her sons so remarkable that not only was the waste of property soon
repaired, but a degree of prosperity was reached which would probably never have been possible without the
war. More than one million human beings perished in the strife. Many of these were from the more cultured
and intellectual classes on both sides. Centuries will not repair that waste of creative ability in either section.
France, after the lapse of more than two hundred years, is still suffering from the loss of her Huguenots. It is
impossible to compute what American literature has lost as a result of this war, not only from the double
waste involved in turning the energies of men to destruction and subsequently to the necessary repairs, but
also from the sacrifice of life of those who might have displayed genius with the pen or furnished an
encouraging audience to the gifted ones who did not speak because there were none to hear.
The development of inventions during this period revolutionized the world's progress. Cities in various parts
of the country had begun to communicate with each other by electricity, when Thoreau was living at Walden;
when Emerson was writing the second series of his _Essays_; Longfellow, his lines about cares "folding their
tents like the Arabs and as silently stealing away"; Lowell, his verses _To the Dandelion_; and Holmes, his
complaint that his humor was diminishing his practice. By the time that Longfellow had finished The
Part I.:_-- 115
Courtship of Miles Standish, and Holmes The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, messages had been cabled
across the Atlantic. A comparison with an event of the preceding period will show the importance of this
method of communication. The treaty of peace to end the last war with England was signed in Belgium,
December 24, 1814. On January 8, 1815, the bloody battle of New Orleans was fought. News of this fight did
not reach Washington until February 4. A week later information of the treaty of peace was received at New
York. A new process of welding the world together had begun, and this welding was further strengthened by
the invention of that modern miracle, the telephone, in 1876.
The result of the battle between the ironclads, the Monitor and the Merrimac (1862), led to a change in the
navies of the entire world. Alaska was bought in 1867, and added an area more than two thirds as large as the
United States comprised in 1783. The improvement and extension of education, the interest in social reform,
the beginning of the decline of the "let alone doctrine," the shortening of the hours of labor, and the
consequent increase in time for self-improvement,--are all especially important steps of progress in this
period.
Authors could no longer complain of small audiences. At the outbreak of the Civil War the United States had
a population of thirty-one millions, while the combined population of Great Britain and Ireland was then only
twenty-nine millions. Before Holmes passed away in 1894 the population of 1860 had doubled. The passage
of an international copyright law in 1891 at last freed American authors from the necessity of competing with
pirated editions of foreign works.
SUMMARY
The great mid-nineteenth century group of New England writers included Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne,
who were often called the Concord group, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, Daniel Webster, Longfellow, Whittier,
Lowell, Holmes, and the historians, Prescott, Motley, and Parkman.
The causes of this great literary awakening were in some measure akin to those which produced the
Elizabethan age,--a "re-formation" of religious opinion and a renaissance, seen in a broader culture which
did not neglect poetry, music, art, and the observation of beautiful things.
The philosophy known as transcendentalism left its impress on much of the work of this age. The
transcendentalists believed that human mind could "transcend" or pass beyond experience and form a
conclusion which was not based on the world of sense. They were intense idealists and individualists, who
despised imitation and repetition, who were full of the ecstasy of discoveries in a glorious new world, who
entered into a new companionship with nature, and who voiced in ways as different as The Dial and Brook
Farm their desire for an opportunity to live in all the faculties of the soul.
The fact that the thought of the age was specially modified by the question of slavery is shown in Webster's
orations, Harriet Beecher Stowe's _Uncle Tom's Cabin_, the poetry of Whittier and Lowell, and to a less
degree in the work of Emerson, Thoreau, and Longfellow.
We have found that Emerson's aim, shown in his Essays and all his prose work, is the moral development of
the individual, the acquisition of self-reliance, character, spirituality. Some of his nature poetry ranks with the
best produced in America. Thoreau, the poet-naturalist, shows how to find enchantment in the world of
nature. Nathaniel Hawthorne, one of the great romance writers of the world, has given the Puritan almost as
great a place in literature as in history. In his short stories and romances, this great artist paints little except the
trial and moral development of human souls in a world where the Ten Commandments are supreme.
Longfellow taught the English-speaking world to love simple poetry. He mastered the difficult art of making
the commonplace seem attractive and of speaking to the great common heart. His ability to tell in verse stories
like Evangeline and Hiawatha remains unsurpassed among our singers. Whittier was the great antislavery
Part I.:_-- 116
poet of the North. Like Longfellow, he spoke simply but more intensely to that overwhelming majority whose
lives stand most in need of poetry. His _Snow-Bound_ makes us feel the moral greatness of simple New
England life. The versatile Lowell has written exquisite nature poetry in his lyrics and Vision of Sir Launfal
and The Biglow Papers. He has produced America's best humorous verse in The Biglow Papers and A Fable
for Critics. He is a great critic, and his prose criticism in Among My Books and the related volumes is
stimulating and interesting. His political prose, of which the best specimen is Democracy, is remarkable for its
high ideals. Holmes is especially distinguished for his humor in such poems as _The Deacon's Masterpiece, or
the Wonderful One-Hoss Shay_ and for the pleasant philosophy and humor in such artistic prose as The [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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