Modern Eloquence: Vol II | Page 7

that marked the outward life. The Pilgrims were often pinched
for food; they suffered in a bitter climate; they lived in isolation. We
think lightly of these things because we cannot help imagining that they
knew that they were founding a mighty nation. But that knowledge was
denied them. Generations of them sank into nameless graves without
any vision of the days when their descendants should rise up and call
them blessed. Nor is there any inspiration in the measure of their
outward success. Judged by their own ideals, the Puritans failed. They
would neither recognize nor approve the civilization that has sprung

from the seeds of their planting. They tried to establish a theocracy;
they stand in history as the heroes of democracy. Alike in their social
and religious aims they ignored ineradicable elements in human nature.
They attempted the impossible. How then have their deeds become the
source of song and 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 mediæval 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