as Irving did New Amsterdam. Besides his longer romances he popularized New England history in the form of stories for children, one of which, "Grandfather's Chair," contains the chapter, "The Pine-Tree Shillings." However, one of his romances, "The Marble Faun," has a foreign setting. James Russell Lowell, the youngest of the New Englanders represented in our list, comes of one of the oldest and most influential families. Born in an atmosphere of learning, in the JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 1819-1891 old family home in historic Cambridge, at the very doors of Harvard College, he enjoyed every advantage for culture that inherited tastes, ample means and convenient opportunity could offer. Besides the facilities of the college near by, his father's library in which he roamed at will from his very infancy, was one of the richest in the whole country. It is not strange then, that he grew to be one of the most scholarly Americans of his time. After leaving college he studied law in a listless sort of way and opened an office in Boston, but did not for a time show evidence of any remarkable talent or strength of character. He became deeply interested in the political issues of the times and was thus stirred to his first serious efforts in literature. In 1848 appeared his "Vision of Sir Launfal," founded upon the legend of the Holy Grail, and one of the most spiritually beautiful poems in any literature. Few patriotic poems surpass his "Commemoration Ode." Besides his poetical works he wrote many essays, books of travel and of criticism; succeeded Longfellow in his professorship at Harvard, and was the first editor of the Atlantic Monthly magazine. He served successively as Minister to Spain and to England. Near the little town of Haverhill in the extreme northeast corner of Massachusetts in the same county with Salem, the birthplace of Hawthorne, still stands the old farmhouse built by the poet's great-great-grandfather, in which John Greenleaf Whittier was born in 1807, the same year as Longfellow. His family were Quakers, sturdy of stature as of character. His boyhood was in complete contrast to that of Lowell. He led the JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER life of a typical New England farm boy, used to hard work, no luxuries and few pleasures. His library con sisted of practically one book, the family Bible. This was later supplemented by a copy of Burns's poems, loaned him by the district schoolmaster. He is often compared with Burns in the simple homeliness of his style, his patriotism, his fiery indignation at wrong and his sympathy with the humble and the oppressed. He has celebrated the legends of his own locality and the life of toil in "The Bride of Pennacook," "Skipper Ireson's Ride," "Home Ballads" and "Songs of Labor." "Snow-Bound," a New England winter Idyl, is a realistic description of Whittier's own home and family. At a certain “dinner party” in Boston in the spring of 1857 the well-known magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, was founded and, as has already been told, James Russell Lowell was appointed editor. At this same dinner party were four of the six New England authors represented in the present collectionLongfellow, Emerson, Lowell and Oliver Wendell Holmes. It was Holmes who suggested the name which the magazine still bears. This dinner party was typical of the close fellowship and happy relations existing among all the members of this group. Indeed, there is no more beautiful picture in the history of all literature than that of the personal, almost brotherly relations of these high-minded, sweet-hearted men. Twenty-two years later, in the fall of 1879, the proprietors of the Atlantic Monthly honored the seventieth birthday of Dr. Holmes, who had been sponsor at the christening of their magazine, by a breakfast. At this breakfast Professor J. T. Trowbridge read a humorous poem in tribute to the guest of honor, in which he represented that Miss Columbia, always on the lookout for something a little better than her neighbors, had gone to the shop of Dame Nature and ordered "Three geniuses, each A-1, to grace her foremost city, The first a poet, the second wise, the third supremely witty." Mother Nature was at first quite nonplussed, but after long puzzling of her brain conceived the following solution of her problem: "I'll make a single, rare phenomenon, And of three common geniuses, concoct a most uncommon one, So that the world shall smile to see a soul so universal, "Poet, Professor, and Wit," this appropriately sums up the many-sided character of the sixth and last to be mentioned of this noteworthy group. He also was born in Cambridge, the son of a Congregational minister, and attended Philips-Exeter Academy and graduated from Harvard with one of OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES its famous classes (1829). After studying medicine and anatomy in Paris he practiced for a time in Boston, was made Professor of Anatomy and Physiology at Dartmouth, and later, (1847) at Harvard. In 1850 he wrote the poem "Old Ironsides" as a protest against the dismantling of the historic battleship "Constitution" which lay in the harbor. It stirred the entire country so that the Secretary of the Navy found it advisable to recall the order he had issued. Like Bryant, Holmes was a poet on occasion, not by profession. For more than forty years after he entered on his duties at Harvard he delivered his four lectures a week eight months of the year on a very difficult subject, and President Eliot bore witness at the above "breakfast" that he was no less skillful with the scalpel and the microscope than with the pen. On being offered the editorship of the Atlantic, Lowell made it a condition of his acceptance that Holmes should be a contributor, and the result was a series of articles entitled "The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table." This was followed later by "The Professor at the Breakfast Table." Among his poems, the best known are his "Chambered Nautilus," "The Deacon's Masterpiece" (The One Hoss Shay), and his short poems in celebration of various occasions. Among these are some forty poems read at the various anniversaries of his class, notably the one beginning: "Has any old fellow got inixed with the boys?" in which he refers playfully to the author of "America” as one whom "Fate tried to conceal by naming him Smith.” He wrote several novels, but it is as the author of the "Autocrat" series and by his humorous poems that he will be best remem• bered by his readers. By his personal associates he was most fondly remembered for his sunny, cheerful disposition and his witty conversation. THE SOUTHERN GROUP. We come now to a poet who stands alone, belonging to no place or group, scarcely to any country, for he is better known and more honored throughout Europe than in America. His parents belonged by profession to the stage, his mother English and his father American by birth. Born in Boston, EDGAR ALLAN POE 1809-1849 left an orphan at an early age and adopted by a Mr. Allan, a wealthy citizen of Richmond, Virginia, he was sent to school in London, at the University of Virginia and at West Point, and lived by turns in Boston, New York and Philadelphia; but after lavishing money and other inducements upon him in vain efforts to get him to settle down to a permanent profession his foster father finally abandoned him to his own resources. He eked out a living by publishing his poems and tales, by contributions to newspapers and magazines and by editorial work. But he was of too capricious a temper and too erratic in his habits to retain long either positions or friends. His writings were pervaded by his character-weird, mysterious, haunted by brooding melancholy. But his poetry is perhaps the most purely musical of any in our language--for Poe believed poetry to be the language of the feelings rather than of thought, and that it should therefore seek to produce its effects through its "har mony of sweet sounds" rather than through the meaning of its lines. His prose tales of mystery and adventure have served as models for many well known writers. Mysteriously as he had lived, his fitful, troubled life ended at Baltimore, in 1849, in the fortieth year of his age. The pathos of it is well summed up in the inscription on a memorial tablet erected to him in the New York Museum of Art: "He was great in his genius, unhappy in his life, wretched in his death, but in his fame, immortal.” SIDNEY LANIER 1842-1881 No fitter representative of the South could be selected for this group than Sidney Lanier. He was a native of Georgia, and when a mere lad, just out of college, entered the Confederate army and faithfully devoted the most precious years of his life to that service. His few remaining years were a constant struggle with poverty and with the dread "White Plague,” which he had perhaps contracted in a military prison. He was a talented musician, and often found it necessary to supplement the earnings of his pen by playing in an orchestra. His thorough knowledge and fine sense of music also appear in his masterly treatise on the "Science of English Verse." During his last years he held a lectureship on English Literature in Johns Hopkins University, at Baltimore. He has been compared with Poe in the exquisite melody of his verse, while in unaffected simplicity and in truthfulness to nature he is not surpassed by |