James Bayard Taylor. (1825–1878.) Ximena; or, the Battle of Sierra Morena, and other Poems, Philadelphia, 1844; Rhymes of Travel, Ballads, Lyrics, and Songs, Boston and London, 1851; Poems of the Orient, Boston, 1854; Poems of Home and Travel, 1855; The Poet's Journal, 1862; The Picture of St. John, a Poem, 1866; Translation of Faust, 1870–1871; The Masque of the Gods, 1872; Lars: a Pastoral of Norway, 1873; The Prophet: a Tragedy, 1874; Home Pastorals, Ballads, and Lyrics, 1875; The National Ode, 1876; Prince Deukalion, 1878; Poetical Works, Household Edition, 1880, 1902; Life and Letters of Bayard Taylor, edited by Marie Hansen Taylor and Horace E. Scudder. 2 vols. 1884; Bayard Taylor, American Men of Letters Series, A. H. Smyth. 1896; Life of Bayard Taylor, R. H. Conwell.
Richard Henry Stoddard. (1825–1903.) Footprints, New York, 1849; Poems, Boston, 1852; Songs of Summer, Boston, 1857; The King's Bell, New York, 1862; Abraham Lincoln: an Horatian Ode, New York, 1865; The Book of the East, and Other Poems, Boston, 1871; Poems, New York, 1880; The Lion's Cub, with Other Verse, New York, 1890; Recollections, Personal and Literary, by Richard Henry Stoddard. Edited by Ripley Hitchcock, New York, 1903.
Edmund Clarence Stedman. (1833–1908.) The Prince's Ball, New York, 1860; Poems, Lyrical and Idyllic, New York, 1860; The Battle of Bull Run, New York, 1861; Alice of Monmouth. An Idyl of the Great War and Other Poems, New York, 1863; The Blameless Prince, and Other Poems, Boston, 1869; The Poetical Works of Edmund Clarence Stedman, Boston, 1873; Favorite Poems. Vest Pocket Series, 1877; Hawthorne and Other Poems, 1877; Lyrics and Idyls with Other Poems, London, 1879; The Poetical Works of Edmund Clarence Stedman. Household Edition, 1884; Songs and Ballads, 1884; Poems Now First Collected, 1897; Mater Coronata, 1901; The Poems of Edmund Clarence Stedman, 1908; Life and Letters of Edmund Clarence Stedman. By Laura Stedman and George M. Gould. 2 vols. New York, 1910.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich. (1836–1907.) The Bells. A Collection of Chimes, New York, 1855; Daisy's Necklace and What Came of It. A Literary Episode [Prose], New York, 1857; The Course of True Love Never Did Run Smooth, New York, 1858; The Ballad of Babie Bell, and Other Poems, New York, 1859; Pampinea, and Other Poems, New York, 1861; Poems. With Portrait, New York, 1863; The Poems of Thomas Bailey Aldrich. Boston, 1865; Cloth of Gold, and Other Poems, 1874; Flower and Thorn. Later Poems, 1877; Friar Jerome's Beautiful Book, and Other Poems, 1881; XXXVI Lyrics and XII Sonnets, 1881; The Poems of Thomas Bailey Aldrich. Illustrated by the Paint and Clay Club, 1882; Mercedes, and Later Lyrics, 1884; The Poems of Thomas Bailey Aldrich. Household Edition, 1885; Wyndham Towers, 1890; The Sisters' Tragedy, with Other Poems, Lyrical and Dramatic, 1891; Mercedes. A Drama in Two Acts, as Performed at Palmer's Theatre, 1894; Unguarded Gates, and Other Poems, 1895; Later Lyrics, 1896; Judith and Holofernes, a Poem, 1896; The Works of Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Riverside Edition, 1896; The Poems of Thomas Bailey Aldrich. Revised and Complete Household Edition, 1897; A Book of Songs and Sonnets Selected from the Poems of Thomas Bailey Aldrich, 1906; The Life of Thomas Bailey Aldrich, by Ferris Greenslet, 1908.
[CHAPTER VIII]
RISE OF THE NATURE WRITERS
One phase of the new discovery of America following the Civil War—return to reality, insistence upon things as they are—expressed itself in nature study. While the new local color school was ransacking the odd corners of the land for curious types of humanity, these writers were calling attention to the hitherto unnoticed phenomena of fields and meadows and woodlands. Handbooks of birds and trees, nature guides and charts of all varieties were multiplied. Nature study became an art, and it ranged all the way from a fad for dilettantes to a solemn exercise in the public school curriculum.
I
The creator and inspirer and greatest figure of this school of nature writers was Henry David Thoreau. In point of time he was of the mid-century school that gathered about Emerson. He was born in 1817, two years earlier than Lowell, and he died in 1862, the first to break the earlier group, yet in spirit and influence and indeed in everything that makes for the final fixing of an author's place in the literary history of his land, he belongs to the period after 1870.
His own generation rejected Thoreau. They could see in him only an imitator of Emerson and an exploiter of newnesses in an age grown weary of newnesses. They did not condemn him: they ignored him. Of his first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers, 1849, printed at Thoreau's expense, only two hundred and nineteen copies had been sold in 1853 when the remainder of the edition was returned to the author. Walden; or, Life in the Woods fared somewhat better because of the unique social experiment which it recorded, but not enough better to encourage its author ever to publish another book. After the death of Thoreau, Emerson undertook to give him permanence by editing four or five posthumous volumes made up of his scattered magazine articles and papers, but even this powerful influence could not arouse enthusiasm. The North American Review, which in 1854 had devoted seven patronizing lines to Walden, took no note of Emerson's editings until the Letters to Various Persons appeared in 1865. Then it awoke in anger. To publish the letters of an author is to proclaim that author's importance, and what had Thoreau done save to live as a hermit for two years in the woods? He was a mere eccentric, a "Diogenes in his barrel, reducing his wants to a little sunlight"; one of "the pistillate plants kindled to fruitage by the Emersonian pollen." "It is something eminently fitting that his posthumous works should be offered us by Emerson, for they are strawberries from his own garden." He was an egotist, a poser for effect, a condemner of what he could not himself attain to. "He condemns a world, the hollowness of whose satisfactions he had never had the means of testing." "He had no humor"; "he had little active imagination"; "he was not by nature an observer." "He turns commonplaces end for end, and fancies it makes something new of them." His nature study was only "one more symptom of the general liver complaint." "I look upon a great deal of the modern sentimentalism about Nature as a mark of disease."
The review was from no less a pen than Lowell's and it carried conviction. Its author spread it widely by republishing it in My Study Windows, 1871, and including it in his collected works. It was the voice of Thoreau's generation, and to England at least it seems to have been the final word. Stevenson after reading the essay was emboldened to sum up the man in one word, a "skulker." The effect was almost equally strong in America. During the period from 1868 to 1881, not one of the author's volumes was republished in a new edition. When in 1870 Thomas Wentworth Higginson, his foremost champion in the dark period, had attempted to secure the manuscript journal for possible publication, he was met by Judge Hoar, the latter-day guardian of Concord, with the question: "Why should any one wish to have Thoreau's journal printed?"
That was the attitude of the seventies. Then had come the slow revival of the eighties. At the beginning of the decade H. G. O. Blake, into whose hands Thoreau's papers had fallen, began to publish extracts from the journals grouped according to days and seasons: Early Spring in Massachusetts, 1881. Summer, 1884, and Winter, 1888. The break came in the nineties. Between 1893 and 1906 were published, in addition to many individual reprints of Thoreau's books, the Riverside edition in ten volumes, the complete journal in fourteen volumes, and the definitive Walden edition in twenty volumes. A Thoreau cult had arisen that hailed him as leader and master. After all the years he had arrived at his own. In the case of no other American has there been so complete and overwhelming a reversal of the verdict of an author's own generation.
Lowell devoted his whole essay to a criticism of Thoreau as a Transcendental theorist and social reformer. To-day it is recognized that fundamentally he was neither of these. His rehabilitation has come solely because of that element condemned by Lowell as a certain "modern sentimentalism about Nature." It is not alone because he was a naturalist that he has lived, or because he loved and lived with Nature: it was because he brought to the study of Nature a new manner, because he created a new nature sentiment, and so added a new field to literature. Instead of having been an imitator of Emerson, he is now seen to have been a positive original force, the most original, perhaps, save Whitman, that has contributed to American literature.