kingdom of God or the chaos of the devil has made headway, may pay some such attention to the tools which men and women have had in hand as the century went by.

Without counting words or pages, it is enough if you will try to read the publications of 1800. Compare the exhibition which they give of the real life of men and women against what we know of the lives of men and women now, we shall begin to see how it is that the living men and women of to-day can control the senseless giants of physical power which in a hundred years God and his children have called into being.

Among a hundred illustrations, the change in literature is one of the most interesting. Its importance must not be overrated, but it is not to be slightly spoken of.

It is, for instance, easy to see that whenever an American wanted to enlarge his life in study, he went, of course, to England. It was precisely as Martial went from Spain to Rome.

Washington Irving, as soon as he had felt his own power, went in 1804 to the south of Europe. At Rome he made the friendship of Washington Allston, and in eighteen months he had travelled

through the Continent of Europe. He came back to America and tried to live here, but after eight years, in which he joined in the Salmagundi and published "Knickerbocker," he went to Europe again. He then lived there seventeen years. Simply this means that he could not live here. For a man like him, the intellectual, spiritual, æsthetic, and literary life of England and the rest of Europe offered advantages, not to say temptations, which America could not offer. That is one instance, which could be multiplied indefinitely, which shows the intellectual desolateness of our own country for the first quarter of a century.

Joel Barlow, as a matter of course, had published his poem in London. As late as 1821 Alexander Hill Everett published his "Europe" in London and reprinted it in his own country. The remark of Sidney Smith's, so often cited, "Who reads an American book?" has been bitterly resented here. But it implied what was substantially true, and it is a convenient enough guide-post to show where the roadway of that time led men. One has only to look at the early American book catalogues and advertisements, say at the droll list which the great house of Harper published in. its first five years, to see

that in truth there was no important American literature.

I have given the second chapter of Volume II. to the historians, or to a few of them whom I

knew. It is wholly fair to say that there is now a school of American History.

Of the poets I can give only a few words to one little company of American poets, who, as it happened, were near personal friends and lived close to each other and ought to be spoken of together.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

Ralph Waldo Emerson returned from his first visit to Europe in 1833. It was soon made known that he would be a lecturer rather than a preacher, and, under the admirable arrangements of the old lyceum systems, he was engaged to deliver some lectures in Boston in the course of what was called the Useful Knowledge Society. I heard those lectures, of which the one which I remember was that on Mahomet, the substance of which is included in "Representative Men," and it must have been at that time that I first saw Emerson to know him by name.

I first spoke to him at the college exhibition of his cousin George Samuel Emerson, a young man who died too early for the rest of us. Young Emerson had, for a few weeks before he entered college, read some of his preparatory Greek with me, and I had become very fond of him. At the junior exhibition, so called, in Cambridge, of 1844, he had the first oration in his class. College "exhibitions" are now unknown in Cambridge, but then they made a pretty part in the life of the time.

What happened was this: Three times a year there was an exhibition-one in May, one in