Literary Friends and Acquaintance | Page 6

Doctor
Holmes had surpassed all expectations in those who most admired his
brilliant humor and charming poetry by the invention of a new attitude
if not a new sort in literature. The turn that civic affairs had taken was
favorable to the widest recognition of Whittier's splendid lyrical gift;
and that heart of fire, doubly snow-bound by Quaker tradition and
Puritan environment; was penetrating every generous breast with its
flamy impulses, and fusing all wills in its noble purpose. Mrs. Stowe,
who far outfamed the rest as the author of the most renowned novel
ever written, was proving it no accident or miracle by the fiction she
was still writing.
This great New England group might be enlarged perhaps without loss
of quality by the inclusion of Thoreau, who came somewhat before his
time, and whose drastic criticism of our expediential and mainly futile
civilization would find more intelligent acceptance now than it did then,
when all resentment of its defects was specialized in enmity to
Southern slavery. Doctor Edward Everett Hale belonged in this group

too, by virtue of that humor, the most inventive and the most fantastic,
the sanest, the sweetest, the truest, which had begun to find expression
in the Atlantic Monthly; and there a wonderful young girl had written a
series of vivid sketches and taken the heart of youth everywhere with
amaze and joy, so that I thought it would be no less an event to meet
Harriet Prescott than to meet any of those I have named.
I expected somehow to meet them all, and I imagined them all easily
accessible in the office of the Atlantic Monthly, which had lately
adventured in the fine air of high literature where so many other
periodicals had gasped and died before it. The best of these, hitherto,
and better even than the Atlantic for some reasons, the lamented
Putnam's Magazine, had perished of inanition at New York, and the
claim of the commercial capital to the literary primacy had passed with
that brilliant venture. New York had nothing distinctive to show for
American literature but the decrepit and doting Knickerbocker
Magazine. Harper's New Monthly, though Curtis had already come to it
from the wreck of Putnam's, and it had long ceased to be eclectic in
material, and had begun to stand for native work in the allied arts which
it has since so magnificently advanced, was not distinctively literary,
and the Weekly had just begun to make itself known. The Century,
Scribner's, the Cosmopolitan, McClure's, and I know not what others,
were still unimagined by five, and ten, and twenty years, and the
Galaxy was to flash and fade before any of them should kindle its more
effectual fires. The Nation, which was destined to chastise rather than
nurture our young literature, had still six years of dreamless potentiality
before it; and the Nation was always more Bostonian than
New-Yorkish by nature, whatever it was by nativity.
Philadelphia had long counted for nothing in the literary field.
Graham's Magazine at one time showed a certain critical force, but it
seemed to perish of this expression of vitality; and there remained
Godey's Lady's Book and Peterson's Magazine, publications really
incredible in their insipidity. In the South there was nothing but a
mistaken social ideal, with the moral principles all standing on their
heads in defence of slavery; and in the West there was a feeble and
foolish notion that Western talent was repressed by Eastern jealousy.

At Boston chiefly, if not at Boston alone, was there a vigorous
intellectual life among such authors as I have named. Every young
writer was ambitious to join his name with theirs in the Atlantic
Monthly, and in the lists of Ticknor & Fields, who were literary
publishers in a sense such as the business world has known nowhere
else before or since. Their imprint was a warrant of quality to the reader
and of immortality to the author, so that if I could have had a book
issued by them at that day I should now be in the full enjoyment of an
undying fame.

V.
Such was the literary situation as the passionate pilgrim from the West
approached his holy land at Boston, by way of the Grand Trunk
Railway from Quebec to Portland. I have no recollection of a
sleeping-car, and I suppose I waked and watched during the whole of
that long, rough journey; but I should hardly have slept if there had
been a car for the purpose. I was too eager to see what New England
was like, and too anxious not to lose the least glimpse of it, to close my
eyes after I crossed the border at Island Pond. I found that in the
elm-dotted levels of Maine it was very like the Western