preferring the paradox that we are not born for happiness at all. Happiness in labour, righteousness, and veracity; in all the life of the spirit; happiness and eternal hope; that was Emerson's gospel. I hear it said. that Emerson was too sanguine; that the actual generation in America is not turning out so well as he expected. Very likely he was too sanguine as to the near future; in this country it is difficult not to be too sanguine. Very possibly the present generation may 10 prove unworthy of his high hopes; even several generations succeeding this may prove unworthy of them. But by his conviction that in the life of the spirit is happiness, and by his hope that this life of the spirit. will come more and more to be sanely understood, 15 and to prevail, and to work for happiness,-by this conviction and hope Emerson was great, and he will surely prove in the end to have been right in them. In this country it is difficult, as I said, not to be sanguine. Very many of your writers are over-sanguine, 20 and on the wrong grounds. But you have two men who in what they have written show their sanguineness in a line where courage and hope are just, where they are also infinitely important, but where they are not easy. The two men are Franklin and Emerson.1 25 These two are, I think, the most distinctively and honourably American of your writers; they are the most original and the most valuable. Wise men I found with pleasure that this conjunction of Emerson's name with Franklin's had already occurred to an accomplished 30 writer and delightful man, a friend of Emerson, left almost the 5 everywhere know that we must keep up our courage and hope; they know that hope is, as Wordsworth well says, "The paramount duty which Heaven lays, For its own honour, on man's suffering heart.” But the very word duty points to an effort and a struggle to maintain our hope unbroken. Franklin and Emerson maintained theirs with a convincing ease, an inspiring joy. Franklin's confidence in the happiIo ness with which industry, honesty, and economy will crown the life of this work-day world, is such that he runs over with felicity. With a like felicity does Emerson run over, when he contemplates the happiness eternally attached to the true life in the spirit. 15 You cannot prize him too much, nor heed him too diligently. He has lessons for both the branches of our race. I figure him to my mind as visible upon earth still, as still standing here by Boston Bay, or at his own Concord, in his habit as he lived, but of 20 sole survivor, alas! of the famous literary generation of Boston,— Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes. Dr. Holmes has kindly allowed me to print here the ingenious and interesting lines, hitherto unpublished, in which he speaks of Emerson thus: 25 30 "Where in the realm of thought, whose air is song, He seems a wingéd Franklin, sweetly wise, To guide the storm-cloud's elemental flame, And steal their effluence for his lips and lyre? heightened stature and shining feature, with one hand stretched out towards the East, to our laden and labouring England; the other towards the ever-growing West, to his own dearly-loved America,-"great, intelligent, sensual, avaricious America." To us he shows 5 for guidance his lucid freedom, his cheerfulness and hope; to you his dignity, delicacy, serenity, elevation. -Discourses in America, ed. 1896, pp. 138-207. NOTES. 66 1.-The Function of Criticism. This essay stands first in Arnold's Essays in Criticism: First Series (1865). It may be regarded as a programme" of Arnold's subsequent prose writing. It suggests nearly all the various uses to which he afterward turned criticism: his application of it to social conditions, to science, to philosophy, and to religion, as well as to literature. Properly read, it has also something to say of the causes that gradually led Arnold away from poetry to prose. I: 4.-I said. p. 199. See On Translating Homer, ed. 1883, I: 20.-Mr. Shairp's excellent notice. An essay on Wordsworth: The Man and the Poet, that appeared in the North British Review for August, 1864, vol. xli. "Mr. Shairp" was in 1865 Professor of Humanity at the United College in St. Andrews University, In 1868 he was made Principal of the College. In 1877 he became Professor of Poetry in the University of Oxford. He is best remembered by a series of lectures delivered at Oxford on Aspects of Poetry (1881). On the Poetic Interpretation of Nature had appeared in 1877. He died in 1885. 2:5.-Wordsworth, in one of his letters. See Memoirs of William Wordsworth, ed. 1851, ii. 51. The passage occurs in a letter of 1816 to the Quaker poet, Bernard Barton (Lamb's friend and correspondent), who, on the appearance of the Excursion, had ' addressed some verses to Wordsworth expressing his own admiration, unabated by the strictures of the reviewers." 3:16.-Irenes. Johnson's play of Irene was produced in 1749. "One of the heaviest and most unreadable of dramatic performances; interesting now, if interesting at all, solely as a curious example of the result of bestowing great powers upon a totally uncongenial task. . . The play was carried through nine nights by Garrick's friendly zeal, so that the author had his three nights' profits. . . When asked how he felt upon his ill-success, he replied: 'Like the monument.' Leslie Stephen's Johnson (English Men of Letters Series), p. 36. 3:17.—Lives of the Poets. In these Lives (1779–81) Johnson is at his best. His wide and accurate information, vigorous understanding, and strong common sense give his judgments permanent value, despite the limitations of the eighteenth-century horizon. 3: 19.-Ecclesiastical Sonnets. This series of 132 sonnets (1821-22) deals with the history of the Church in England "from the introduction of Christianity" to the present times." Despite Arnold's sneer, several of the sonnets-notably those on Cranmer and on Walton's Book of Lives—are in Wordsworth's best manner. 3:20.-Celebrated Preface. The allusion is to the Preface prefixed to the second edition (1800) of the Lyrical Ballads. Passages in the Preface remain among the most suggestive and memorable things that have been said of poetry. Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all science." . . "The remotest discoveries of the chemist, the botanist, or mineralogist will be as proper objects of the poet's art as any upon which it can be employed; if the time should ever come when these things shall be familiar to us, and the relations under which they are contemplated by the followers of these respective sciences shall be manifestly and palpably material to us as enjoying and suffering beings; if the time should ever come when what is now called science, thus familiarized to men, shall be ready to put on, as it were, a form of flesh and blood, the poet will lend his divine spirit to aid the transfiguration, and will welcome the |