Modern Eloquence: Vol II | Page 7

story? Why all the honor that we pay them? It is not because in danger, in sacrifice, and in failure, they were stout-hearted. Many a freebooter or soldier of fortune has been that. It is, as one said whose name I bear, "because they were stout-hearted for an ideal--their ideal, not ours, of civil and religious liberty. Wherever and whenever resolute men and women devote themselves, not to material, but to spiritual ends, there the world's heroes are made," and made to be remembered, and to become the inspiration of poem and romance and noble daring.
Scratch a New Englander to-day, it is said, and you find the Puritan. That is no less true of the poets than of the warriors and the men of facts and figures. The New England poets derived their nourishment from the deep earth of that wholesome past, into which the roots of all our lives go down. The mystical and medi?val side of Puritanism finds its embodiment in Hawthorne; its moral ideals shine in Bryant; its independency is incarnated in Emerson. Emerson is the type of the nineteenth-century Puritan, in life pure, in temperament saintly, in spirit detached from the earth, blazing a path for himself through the wilderness of speculation, seeing things from the centre, working for the reconstruction of Christian society and the readjustment of the traditional religion. An enfranchised Puritan is a Puritan still. Of such is Holmes, who shot his flashing arrows at all shams and substitutes for reality, and never failed to hit the mark; of such is Whittier,
"Whose swelling and vehement heart Strains the strait-breasted drab of the Quaker apart;"
of such is Lowell, to whom belongs the supreme distinction of having written the greatest poem yet produced on this continent.
We who have undergone the shock of material, intellectual and spiritual growth too often fail to recognize our debt to the deserted cause. Our poets remind us that our very freedom is our inheritance from the system we reject. It was inevitable that our six great poets should have been in literature, idealists; in politics, abolitionists; in religion, Unitarians. It was the progressive independency of a Puritan ancestry declaring itself. Save, perhaps, in Longfellow, no gloss or glamour of Europe obscures their poetry. No hush of servility rests on it. No patronage summoned it, and no indifference silenced it. Our poetry is the genuine utterance of democracy, and betrays in every syllable the fibre of freemen.
New England poetry is well nigh as Puritan in its form as in its spirit. There is in it a true Cromwellian temper. Our poets have been patriots, firm and prophetic believers in their country's destiny, loving their country so well that they dared to tell the sometimes unwelcome truth about her. The Biblical strain is in our poetry. If our English Bible were lost to us we could reconstruct almost all of its best verses out of Whittier's poems. The thunders of Sinai still roll in Lowell's fiery denunciations of smug conventionalities and wickedness in high places. The music of the psalmist is in Longfellow's meditations, and all the prophet's vision in Emerson's inspired utterance. The Puritan restraint is on New England poetry. There is no noisy rhetoric, no tossing about of big adjectives and stinging epithets, no abuse of our noble English tongue by cheap exaggerations. Our poets do not need to underscore words or to use heavy headlines and italics. Their invective has been mighty because so restrained and so compressed. There is none of the common cant or the common plausibilities. There is no passing off of counterfeits for realities, no "pouring of the waters of concession into the bottomless buckets of expediency."
Thus do our poets declare their inheritance. But they do not stop there. To the indomitable power of the Puritan conscience they have added a wealth of imaginative sympathy. They have made sweetness to be the issue of strength, and beauty to be the halo of power. They have seen the vision of the rainbow round the throne. They have touched with divine light the prosaic story of New England, and found the picturesque in what seemed commonplace. They have seen the great in the little, and ennobled the humbler ways of existence with spiritual insight. They have set to music the homely service and simple enjoyments of common life. They have touched the chords that speak to the universal heart. The very provincialism of our poets endears them to us. Their work, as some foreign critic said, has been done in a corner. We do not deny it. But, verily we believe, that New England is the corner lot of our national estate. Our poets have preserved for us in ballads our homespun legends. They have imaged in verse the beauty of New England's hills and waters. As