Showing papers in "The New England Quarterly in 1962"

The journals and miscellaneous notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson

Abstract: FOREWORD TO VOLUME XVI The Journals: 1866-1882 Chronology Symbols and Abbreviations PART ONE The Texts of the Journals LN NY ST PART TWO The Texts of the Miscellaneous Notebooks Books Large Pocket Diary 17 Pocket Diary 18 Pocket Diary 19 Pocket Diary 20 Pocket Diary 21 Pocket Diary 22 Pocket Diary 23 Pocket Diary 24 Pocket Diary 25 Pocket Diary 26 Pocket Diary 27 Pocket Diary 28 Pocket Diary 29 Pocket Diary 30 Pocket Diary 31 Appendix I Journals and Notebooks in the Harvard Edition Appendix II Author and Title Entries in Notebook Books Large Textual Notes Index

Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War.

Abstract: Critical/biographical portraits of such notable figures as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, Ambrose Bierce, Mary Chesnut, William Tecumseh Sherman, and Oliver Wendell Holmes prove Wilson to be the consummate witness to the most eloquently recorded era in American history.

Kansas Crusade: Eli Thayer and the New England Emigrant Aid Company

Abstract: T HE passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act on May 25, 1854, was greeted by a wave of denunciation in the North. The new act repealed the Missouri Compromise and reopened the conflict over slavery which supposedly had been settled by the Compromise of 1850. It was believed that Stephen Douglas and a willful group of pro-Southern Democrats had taken advantage of a temporary Democratic majority in Congress to push through a bill which would open the way to the extension of slavery into the territories. Northern opinion, in general, was decidedly pessimistic; it was taken for granted that the Missourians would cross the border and take the Kansas land before Northern settlers

A Note on Lowell's "Ode Recited at the Harvard Commemoration"

Abstract: IT is impossible not to be aware of the derivative character of some of the language of Lowell's "Ode Recited at the Harvard Commemoration." The influence of Milton, for example, is clearly evident in such phrases as high emprise and ethereal essence. Words like guerdon, sear (as a homonym, hard upon the heels of laurels in both "Lycidas" and the "Commemoration Ode"), mantle, and reck not reveal the extent to which Lowell has absorbed the vocab-

Adams' Esther: The Morality of Taste

Abstract: THE extraordinary sensibility of Henry Adams, with its delicate and powerful response to history, to art, to human personality, would seem to demand expression in the art of fiction. Yet better novels than Esther have been written by men less curious about life and less informed, even by writers with a vastly inferior faculty of style. What Adams lacked, probably, was just the sense of vocation that so completely possessed his friend Henry James. He was a deliberate amateur.

The Concept of Complicity in Howells' Fiction

Abstract: ... he preached the old Christ-humanity ... and enforced again the lessons that no one for good or for evil, for sorrow or joy, for sickness or health, stood apart from his fellows, but each was bound to the highest and lowest by ties that centred in the hand of God. No man ... sinned or suffered to himself alone; his error and his pain darkened and afflicted men who never heard of his name. If a community was corrupt, if an age was immoral, it was not because of the vicious, but the virtuous who fancied themselves indifferent spectators. It was not the tyrant who oppressed, it was the wickedness that had made him possible. The gospel--Christ-God, so far as men had imagined him,-was but a lesson, a type, a witness from everlasting to everlasting of the spiritual unity of man.2

The Prospect Union: A Conservative Quest for Social Justice

Abstract: D URING the late 188o's and early 1890's American reformers imported from England the techniques of university extension and university settlement. The Prospect Union in Cambridge, Massachusetts, combined both of these new reform methods and was one of the first organizations which applied them to America's social problems. Drawing on the resources of Harvard University, the Union initiated its program of evening instruction and social activities for the workingmen of Cambridge in the spring of 1891. English predecessors of the Prospect Union evolved from the church-sponsored settlement work of Oxford students in the 187o's and 188o's. Institutional expression was given to these early student efforts with the opening of Toynbee Hall during the winter of 1884-1885. Toynbee Hall served as a model for Dr. Stanton Coit, who two years later established America's first settlement, the Neighborhood Guild in New York City. When the Prospect Union was founded in January, 1891, only a handful of settlements had appeared in American cities.' University extension in America was also in its formative stage. As late as 1889, Helen Dawes Brown, in a paper presented to the Association of Collegiate Alumnae, inquired, "Why are not Harvard and Yale, Vassar and Wellesley, persuaded to do for young Americans what Oxford is doing for young Englishmen?" Part of the answer was that the lyceum, Lowell Institute, Cooper Union, and Chautauqua had already been meeting most of the demand for adult education for many decades. The rest of the answer was that universities would indeed

Renan on W. E. Channing and American Unitarianism

Abstract: T HE call by Mr. Sidney Ahlstrom, in the March 1957 QUARTERLY, for a new look at William Ellery Channing deserves to be seconded; for Channing, surely, is one of the few significant individuals in our literature before the late 183o's, and we have not yet got hold of him. There is a "mystery," as Mr. Ahlstrom puts it. The man Channing we probably apprehend as well as we are going to, thanks to the numerous memorials of his contemporaries and to Chadwick's fine biography. It is the authority and the influence of the writing that puzzle us. And granting the usefulness of the various tasks Mr. Ahlstrom urges-to "reconceive Channing's milieu," to concentrate attention on his pastoral and evangelical r6le, and to reimagine the special needs of the audience he so effectively spoke to-we may nevertheless feel that the main task, at least for students of American letters, is with the writing, the utterance, itself-to identify its actual substance and quality, to define the example it presents. Perhaps the "mystery" in Channing's case is fairly exemplified by his international reputation, the highest of any American writer between the founding fathers and the generation of the '30's. It resembles the mystery of Poe's reputation in Europe, or of an Unamuno's admiration for a Phillips Brooks. Certain qualities of utterance seem to thrive on translation, just as others-a poet's distinctive voice, for example-vanish away. With Channing as with Poe, a certain underlying originality, an integrity of feeling, an unusual consistency of perspective, seem to rise to the surface in translation. Perhaps American readers who are still attracted to Channing are too close to his habit of mind, or share too much its distinctive inclination, to be able to define it precisely. Perhaps the measure of its authority is in the degree to which it expressed the experience not only of one man but of a whole community,