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The poet in him brought him back continually to the beauty in what he saw. He did not particularly incline to philosophize about creation like Emerson, the sheer facts of it meant so much more to him. Nor did he care to expound the beauties of nature; he simply held them up to view. Take, for example, this bit from “The Pond in Winter,” in which the last twelve words are quite as beautiful as the thing they describe:
Standing on the snow-covered plain, as if in a pasture amid the hills, I cut my way first through a foot of snow, and then a foot of ice, and open a window under my feet, where, kneeling to drink, I look down into the quiet parlor of fishes, pervaded by a softened light as through a window of ground glass, with its bright sanded floor the same as in summer; there a perennial waveless serenity reigns as in the amber, twilight sky.
Or, again, this prose poem quoted in Channing’s book:
One more confiding heifer, the fairest of the herd, did by degrees approach as if to take some morsel from our hands, while our hearts leaped to our mouths with expectation and delight. She by degrees drew near with her fair limbs (progressive), making pretence of browsing; nearer and nearer, till there was wafted to us the bovine fragrance, – cream of all the dairies that ever were or will be: and then she raised her gentle muzzle toward us, and snuffed an honest recognition within hand’s reach. I saw it was possible for his herd to inspire with love the herdsman. She was as delicately featured as a hind. Her hide was mingled white and fawn-color, and on her muzzle’s tip there was a white spot not bigger than a daisy; and on her side turned toward me, the map of Asia plain to see.
The following passages fulfill the main tenets of the contemporary Imagists:
I am no more lonely than the loon in the pond that laughs so loud, or than Walden pond itself. What company has that lonely lake, I pray?.. I am no more lonely than a single mullein or dandelion in a pasture, or a bean-leaf, or sorrel, or a horse-fly, or a bumble-bee. I am no more lonely than the Mill Brook, or a weather-cock, or the north star, or the south wind, or an April shower, or a January thaw, or the first spider in a new house.
The wind has gently murmured through the blinds, or puffed with feathery softness against the windows, and occasionally sighed like a summer zephyr, lifting the leaves along, the livelong night. The meadow-mouse has slept in his snug gallery in the sod, the owl has sat in a hollow tree in the depth of the swamp; the rabbit, the squirrel and the fox have all been housed. The watch-dog has lain quiet on the hearth, and the cattle have stood silent in their stalls… But while the earth has slumbered, all the air has been alive with feathery flakes descending, as if some northern Ceres reigned, showering her silvery grain over all the fields.
No yard; but unfenced Nature reaching to your very sills. A young forest growing up under your windows, and wild sumachs and blackberry vines breaking through into your cellar; sturdy pitch-pines rubbing and creaking against the shingles for want of room, their roots reaching quite under the house. Instead of a scuttle or a blind blown off in the gale, – a pine tree torn up by the roots behind your house for fuel. Instead of no path to the front-yard gate in the Great Snow, – no gate – no front yard, and no path to the civilized world.
His manner of writing was so like Emerson’s that the comments on the style of the elder man (see pp. 212–215) apply for the most part to that of the younger.
From the year of “Walden’s” appearance to the end of Thoreau’s life, in 1862, three matters are specially worthy of record. The first is that recognition began at last to come. This probably did not hasten his writing, but it released some of the great accumulation of manuscript in his possession. Several of the magazines accepted his papers, notably The Atlantic Monthly, which took eight of his articles, although seven of them were not published until the two years just after his death. The second is his eager friendship for two of the most strikingly unconventional men of his day – Walt Whitman and John Brown “of Harper’s Ferry.” Of Whitman he wrote, when few were reading him and few of these approving:
I have just read his second edition (which he gave me), and it has done me more good than any reading for a long time… I have found his poems exhilarating, encouraging… We ought to rejoice greatly in him. He occasionally suggests something a little more than human. You can’t confound him with the other inhabitants of Brooklyn or New York. How they must shudder when they read him!.. Since I have seen him, I find I am not disturbed by any brag or egoism in his book. He may turn out the least of a braggart of all, having a better right to be confident.
John Brown he had met in Concord only a few weeks before the Harper’s Ferry raid. Two weeks after the capture of Brown he delivered an address on the issues, first in Concord and later in Worcester and in Boston, defying his friends who advised him to silence. And after the execution of the old Kansan he arranged funeral services in Concord.
It turns what sweetness I have to gall, to hear, or hear of, the remarks of some of my neighbors. When we heard at first that he was dead, one of my townsmen observed that “he died as the fool dieth”; which, pardon me, for an instant suggested a likeness in him dying to my neighbor living… This event advertises me that there is such a fact as death, – the possibility of a man’s dying. It seems as if no man had ever lived before; for in order to die you must first have lived… I hear a good many pretend that they are going to die; or that they have died, for aught that I know. Nonsense! I’ll defy them to do it. They haven’t got life enough in them. They’ll deliquesce like fungi; and keep a hundred eulogists mopping the spot where they left off. Only a half a dozen or so have died since the world began.
The final fact of these later years is the breakdown of his own health. In spite of the moderation and sanity of his out-of-door habits his strength began to fail him before he had reached what should be the prime of life. From the ages of thirty-eight to forty he had to exercise the greatest care, avoiding any heavy exertion. A severe cold caught in 1860 developed soon into consumption, which carried him off in the spring of 1862 at the age of forty-five.
BOOK LIST
Henry David Thoreau. Works. The Riverside Edition. 1894. 10 vols. Walden Edition. 1906. 20 vols. (Of these volumes the last fourteen are the complete Journal, which includes in its original form what stands in Vols. V–VIII of the Riverside Edition, as Early Spring in Massachusetts, Summer, Autumn, Winter.) His works appeared in book form originally as follows: A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, 1849; Walden, 1854; Excursions, 1863; The Maine Woods, 1864; Cape Cod, 1865; Letters to Various Persons, 1865; A Yankee in Canada, 1866; Early Spring in Massachusetts, 1881; Summer, 1884; Winter, 1888; Anti-Slavery and Reform Papers, 1890; Essays and Other Writings, 1891; Autumn, 1892; Miscellanies, 1893; Familiar Letters, 1894; Poems, 1895.
Bibliography
A volume compiled by Francis H. Allen. 1908. Also Cambridge History of American Literature, Vol. II, pp. 411–415.
Biography and Criticism
The standard life is by Frank B. Sanborn. 1917.
Benton, Joel. The Poetry of Thoreau. Lippincot’s, May, 1886.
Burroughs, John. Indoor Studies. 1889.
Channing, W. E. Thoreau, the Poet-Naturalist. 1873.
Emerson, R. W. Lectures and Biographical Sketches. Centenary Edition. 1903.
Foerster, Norman. Humanism of Thoreau. Nation, Vol. CV, pp. 9–12.
Lowell, J. R. My Study Windows. 1871.
Macmechan, Archibald. Cambridge History of American Literature, Vol. II, Bk. II, chap. x.
Marble, A. R. Thoreau: his Home, Friends, and Books. 1902.
More, P. E. Shelburne Essays. Ser. 1. 1904.
Pattee, F. L. American Literature since 1870, chap. viii, sec. I. 1915.
Richardson, C. F. American Literature, Vol. I. 1887.
Salt, H. S. Life of Thoreau. 1890.
Salt, H. S. Literary Sketches. 1888.
Sanborn, F. B. Life of Thoreau. 1882. (A.M.L.Ser.)
Sanborn, F. B. Personality of Thoreau. 1901.
Stevenson, R. L. Familiar Studies of Men and Books. 1882.
Torrey, Bradford. Friends on the Shelf. 1906.
Trent, W. P. American Literature. 1903.
Van Doren, Mark. Henry David Thoreau: a Critical Study. 1916. Pertaining to Thoreau. S. A. Jones, editor. 1901. (Contains ten reprinted magazine articles on Thoreau.)
TOPICS AND PROBLEMS
Read Emerson’s “Woodnotes,” Vol. I, pp. 2 and 3, for a passage which admirably characterizes Thoreau, though it is said to have been written without specific regard to him.
Read “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers,” noting chiefly either the passages on literature and men of letters or the passages of a sociological interest. Is there a connecting unity in these passages?
Read “Economy” in “Walden” and the second and third of Crèvecœur’s “Letters from an American Farmer” for the contrast in ideas on property or for the contrast in ideas on the privileges and the obligations of citizenship.
Read in “Walden” or “The Maine Woods” or “Cape Cod” or “A Yankee in Canada” or “Excursions” for examples of exaggeration and of aggressive self-consciousness. Is there any real likeness between Thoreau and Whitman in these respects?
Read the characterizations of Thoreau in the essays by Robert Louis Stevenson and James Russell Lowell and decide in which points they should be modified.
Read any one or two essays for Thoreau’s allusions to science and to the sciences, the kind of allusions made, and the kind of significances derived from them.
Read any two or three essays for the nature element in them, the kind of things alluded to, and the kind of significances derived from them.
CHAPTER XVI
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
The thought of Hawthorne (1804–1864) as a member of the “Concord group” should be made with a mental reservation. He did not belong to Concord in any literal or figurative sense, he was not an intimate of those who did, he lived there for only seven years at two different periods in his career, and, wherever he lived, he was in thought and conduct anything but a group man. Yet he was a resident there for the first three years after his marriage (1842–1846), and he developed enough of a liking for the town to return to it for the closing four years of his life. What the town was by tradition and what it had become through Emerson’s influence made it the most congenial spot in America for Hawthorne.
On the other hand, he lived far longer in Salem – all but twelve out of his first forty-six years – and he belonged to the town of his heritage both far more and far less. Through instinctive feelings which were quite beyond his control he belonged to Salem from the bottom of his heart.
This old town of Salem – my native place, though I have dwelt much away from it, both in boyhood and maturer years – possesses, or did possess, a hold on my affections, the force of which I have never realized during my seasons of actual residence here… And yet, though invariably happiest elsewhere, there is within me a feeling for old Salem, which, in lack of a better phrase, I must be content to call affection. The sentiment is probably assignable to the deep and aged roots which my family has struck into the soil. It is now nearly two centuries and a quarter since the original Briton, the earliest emigrant of my name, made his appearance in the wild and forest-bordered settlement, which has since become a city. And here his descendants have been born and died, and have mingled their earthy substance with the soil; until no small portion of it must necessarily be akin to the mortal frame wherewith, for a little while, I walk the streets. In part, therefore, the attachment which I speak of is the mere sensuous sympathy of dust for dust. Few of my countrymen can know what it is; nor, as frequent transplantation is perhaps better for the stock, need they consider it desirable to know.
Yet, strong as this unreasoned feeling was, to his mind the traditions of Salem were repellent, and it offered him no attractions as a place to live in.
But the sentiment has likewise its moral quality. The figure of that first ancestor, invested by family tradition with a dim and dusky grandeur, was present to my boyish imagination, as far back as I can remember. It still haunts me, and induces a sort of home feeling for the past, which I scarcely claim in reference to the present phase of the town. I seem to have a stronger claim to a residence here on account of this grave, bearded, sable-cloaked and steeple-crowned progenitor … than for myself, whose name is seldom heard and my face hardly known. He was a soldier, legislator, judge; he was a ruler in the Church; he had all the Puritanic traits, both good and evil. He was likewise a better persecutor… His son, too, inherited the persecuting spirit… I know not whether these ancestors of mine bethought themselves to repent, and ask pardon of heaven for their cruelties; or whether they are now groaning under the heavy consequences of them, in another state of being. At all events, I, the present writer, as their representative, hereby take shame upon myself for their sakes, and pray that any curse incurred by them – as I have heard, and as the dreary and unprosperous condition of the race, for many a long year back, would argue to exist – may be now and henceforth removed.
On this side Hawthorne’s attitude toward Salem – but really toward New England and all America – was like that of a man who has inherited debts of honor which he feels bound to discharge, though he never would have incurred them himself.
Hawthorne was born in this town of his affection and his distrust on the Fourth of July, 1804. When he was four years old his father, a shipmaster, died during a foreign voyage. The sobering effect of this loss was increased by the way in which Mrs. Hawthorne solemnized it, for she dedicated her life to mourning, not only withdrawing from the outer world but even taking all her meals apart from her little daughters and her son. An accident to the boy when he was nine years old robbed him of healthy companionship with playmates by keeping him out of active sports for the next three years. So he developed, a bookish child in a muffled household. At this time he was reading Shakespeare, Milton, and the eighteenth-century poets; later he was to transfer allegiance to the romantic novelists. In his fifteenth year the family lived together for several months at Raymond, Maine, a “town” of a half-dozen houses on the shore of Sebago Lake. “There,” he told his publisher, James T. Fields, late in life, “I lived … like a bird of the air, so perfect was the freedom I enjoyed. But it was there I first got my cursed habits of solitude.” The need of proper tutoring for college preparation caused his reluctant return to Salem, and he was glad to escape from it again when he went back in Maine to Bowdoin College at the age of seventeen. He was not at all eager for college, but regarded it as an unavoidable step in his training. At the same time he rejected the prospect of entering the church, the law, or the practice of medicine, and even as a freshman he wrote to his mother, “What do you think of my becoming an author, and relying for support upon my pen?” With such a point of view he did no better work than could have been expected. He was more interested in the reading of his own choice than in the assigned studies. He was somewhat frivolous, and even incurred discipline for minor offenses concerning which he wrote to his mother with amused and amusing frankness. He finished a shade below the middle of his class, and left Bowdoin with no more college interest than he had brought to it.
Hawthorne’s life for the twelve years which followed graduation explains why he later referred so bitterly to his “cursed habits of solitude.” The household to which he returned from Bowdoin was almost utterly unsocial. His mother’s way of life had been adopted by his two sisters as well. The four members of the family – one is tempted to refer to them as “inmates” – saw very little of each other as the days went on. The young author neither gave nor received open sympathy. His writing, done in solitude, was not read to the rest. Conditions would have been sufficiently abnormal if he had daily come back to this sort of negative family experience from busy activity in the outer world, but of the outer world he knew nothing. Not twenty people in all Salem, he said, were even aware of his existence. If he left the house during sunlight hours, it was to take long walks in the country. He swam in the near-by sea before the town was stirring; he walked the streets in the shadows of evening. His vital energy was drawn from reading and was vented on his own manuscripts.
His writing during these years was done with patient persistence and without any reward of applause from the public. His first novel, “Fanshawe,” was published in 1828 at his expense, was a failure, and was subsequently suppressed – as far as the discouraged author could recover the copies issued. From 1829 to 1836 The Token, an annual put out by S. G. Goodrich of Boston, was his main channel of publication, taking in these years about twenty-five stories and sketches. Through Goodrich he had also found a market for his wares in the New England Magazine, and toward the end of the period in the American Monthly Magazine of New York, and, best of all, with the Knickerbocker Magazine, which was the periodical embodiment of the Irving tradition and point of view. But though he was not unsuccessful in getting his work into print, he enjoyed no reputation from it, for only a few discriminating critics took any notice of it, and none of these was fully aware of the author’s output, since he wrote not under one but under several pseudonyms. The lack of wholesome human contact either at home or abroad told inevitably on Hawthorne’s nerves and temper – he had become abnormally thin-skinned – and resulted in the touch of querulousness which the student finds from time to time in his accounts of himself. And it also resulted in the deep self-distrust and discouragement which grew steadily on him. “I have made a captive of myself,” he wrote finally to his old college classmate, Longfellow, “and put me into a dungeon, and now I cannot find the key to let myself out, – and if the door were open, I should be almost afraid to come out. You tell me that you have met with troubles and changes. I know not what these may have been, but I can assure you that trouble is the next best thing to enjoyment, and that there is no fate in this world so horrible as to have no share in either its joys or sorrows.”
With 1837 the friendship of two college associates, Horatio Bridge, a man of political influence and a large heart, and Franklin Pierce, soon to be the president of the country, began to assert itself. Through Bridge the publication of “Twice-Told Tales” was effected in 1838. Through the influence these men were able to exert, Hawthorne was appointed weigher and gauger in the Boston Customhouse. With this post Hawthorne for the first time entered into active life, yet when he lost it as a result of a change of administration in 1841 he was somewhat relieved at the hardship. His engagement to Sophia Peabody led him next to attempt a living solution through residence and partnership in the Brook Farm enterprise during 1841. Again he was oppressed by having the world too much with him, and in 1842, on his marriage, he settled in the seclusion of Concord for his first residence of something over three years. At the end of this time the needs of his growing family made an assured income imperative, and once more through the political influence at his command he was given a federal office, this time as head of the customhouse at Salem. He held this position, like the one at Boston, until a political reverse took it away from him in 1849.
Hawthorne was now nearly forty-six years of age. For the twelve years following the publication of “Twice-Told Tales” he had accomplished almost nothing in creative authorship. The human sympathy and companionship of his marriage, much as it meant to him, was offset as far as authorship went by the distracting need for money. With the loss of the post at Salem the outlook was almost desperate. In the dark hour, however, it appeared that his wife had saved a little from his slender earnings, and in the following months he wrote what appeared, through the friendly insistence of James T. Fields, as his first widely recognized work – “The Scarlet Letter.” The first edition of this was exhausted in two weeks. The stimulus of popular attention encouraged him to a rapidity of production wholly out of proportion to anything in his earlier experience. In 1851 “The House of the Seven Gables” was issued; in 1852 “The Blithedale Romance”; and in the meanwhile various lesser narratives were produced. At this stage his political friendships once more proved of value, and through the influence of Pierce, now president, he was enabled to go abroad in the consular service, first to Liverpool and then to Rome. His foreign residence continued until 1860 and resulted, in authorship, in the last of his great romances, “The Marble Faun,” the book of English reminiscences, “Our Old Home,” and the “Italian Notebooks.” With his return to America he went back to Concord, but though he was quite free and undistracted by financial worries, his major period as an author was over, and he died in 1864, leaving behind him only the unimportant stories “Doctor Grimshaw’s Secret,” “Septimius Felton,” and the uncompleted “Dolliver Romance.”
In all the most obvious ways Hawthorne’s literary output was a fruit of his peculiar heritage and surroundings and his consequent manner of life. A reading of his “American Notebooks,” the product of the late 30’s and the 40’s, reveals how definite was the preparation for the harvest to come. It was the gift of Hawthorne’s imagination to shroud with a kind of unreality characters and backgrounds that were drawn from close observation. His interpretation made them his own, though they were evidently derived from the life about him. This process is in utter contrast, for example, with the invention of Poe. There never were such individuals as Arthur Gordon Pym or Monsieur Dupin or Fortunato or Roderick Usher. They are essentially human, but they belong to no time or place. But Arthur Dimmesdale, Jaffrey Pyncheon, Hollingsworth and Kenyon, Hester, Phœbe, Zenobia, and Miriam were portraits, made in the image of people who had walked the streets familiar to Hawthorne. Poe’s settings are convincingly real. One can visualize every detail of the City in the Sea or the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir, although one realizes that they never existed in fact; but Boston, Salem, Brook Farm, and Rome supply actual backgrounds for Hawthorne. Had the Puritans builded as securely as the Romans, “The Scarlet Letter,” “The House of the Seven Gables,” and “The Blithedale Romance” could be illustrated – as “The Marble Faun” often has been – from photographs of surviving structures. Again, these actual scenes and people were put into stories for which there were historical bases, and the symbols around which they were constructed – like the letter of scarlet and the many-gabled house – had been seen and touched by the author. The Maypole of Merry Mount once stood on the Wollaston hilltop, the great stone face is not yet weathered beyond all recognition, and the legends of the Province House are amply documented.
In the Notebooks, particularly for 1835–1845, there is abundant record of how Hawthorne’s fancy was continually at play with the material within his reach. He made definite entries as to past events and vital associations of old buildings. He made detailed studies of odd characters seen in his occasional little journeys into the world. He even saved proper names, phrases, similes, epigrams which some day might be of use: “Miss Asphyxia Davis,” “A lament for life’s wasted sunshine,” “A scold and a blockhead, – brimstone and wood, – a good match,” “Men of cold passions have quick eyes.” But far more significant than these explicit items are the many which are suggestive of whole sketches or stories later to be written. Among these the following may easily be identified: “To make one’s own reflection in a mirror the subject of a story”; “A snake taken into a man’s stomach and nourished there from fifteen years to thirty-five, tormenting him most horribly. A type of envy or some other evil passion.” “A person to be in the possession of something as perfect as mortal man has a right to demand; he tries to make it better, and ruins it entirely.” "Some very famous jewel or other thing, much talked of all over the world. Some person to meet with it, and get possession of it in some unexpected manner, amid homely circumstances.” “The influence of a peculiar mind, in close communion with another, to drive the latter to insanity.” “Pandora’s Box for a child’s story.” “A person to be the death of his beloved in trying to raise her to more than mortal perfection; yet this should be a comfort to him for having aimed so highly and holily.” “To make a story out of a scarecrow, giving it odd attributes…” “A phantom of the old royal governors, or some such shadowy pageant, on the night of the evacuation of Boston by the British.” What Hawthorne attempted was essentially what Wordsworth did: to lift the material of everyday life out of the realm of the commonplace.
In another and more important way Hawthorne’s writings show the effect of these long years of preparation, and that is in the self-reflection in the majority of them, and especially in the four major romances. In the quarter century between his graduation from Bowdoin and the publication of “The Marble Faun,” the most striking and the most dangerous feature had been his long isolation and the resultant effects of it. He had not withdrawn from the world in contempt; he had insensibly drifted out of it. He was by no means indifferent to it; on the contrary, he was increasingly sensitive to it. He needed to fill his purse and he needed encouragement to write. Yet when he went out into the market place he was cruelly ignored by many and shouldered about by the hustling crowds, who were so used to their own rude ways that they were often quite innocent of the affronts they put upon him. It is a consequence of this unhappy experience that in the famous romances and in many of the shorter sketches the narrative is woven around two types – a shrinking, hypersensitive character and a rude or insidious but always malevolent man who stands for the incarnation of the outer world. For Hester and for Arthur Dimmesdale, for Hepzibah and Clifford Pyncheon, for Priscilla and for Donatello, no complete isolation is possible. No deed which involves them, whether committed by themselves or by others, can be committed without regard to the future. Always there is a knocking at the gate, as the outer world insists on obtruding itself into the holiest of holies. And this invasion is the more cruel as it is the less deserved. Chillingworth’s malign and subtle revenge on Arthur Dimmesdale is an exercise of poetic justice. It is a horrible but not undeserved visitation. But Priscilla, Donatello, and the two pitiful Pyncheons are innocent victims. Hepzibah and Clifford are hounded out of life by a bland representative of the law and the church, a wolf in the sheep’s clothing of respectability. Priscilla falls in love with a reformer, one of the type who Thoreau complained pursued and pawed him with their “dirty institutions” and tried to constrain him into their “desperate, odd-fellow society”; she wilts at his touch. Donatello, the embodiment of innocent happiness, is enmeshed in the web of society and destroyed by the fell spirit at its center. Hawthorne never could have presented this view in its repeated tableaux if he had not for years seen the concourse of life rush by him, and for years made his successive efforts to reënter its currents.
The whole situation is summarized in Hawthorne’s introduction of Septimius Felton, hero of the last work of his pen. “I am dissevered from it,” he says in the opening scene. “It is my doom to be only a spectator of life; to look on as one apart from it. Is it not well, therefore, that, sharing none of its pleasures and happiness, I should be free of its fatalities, its brevity? How cold I am now, while this whirlpool is eddying all around me.” Yet, a moment later he snatches a gun and rushes out of the house to where he can see the British redcoats passing the Concord house. He refrains from shooting, only to be seen by a flanking party, and against his will is forced to fire a deadly bullet. “I have seen and done such things,” he says an hour later, “as change a man in a moment… I have done a terrible thing for once … one that might well trace a dark line through all my future life.” To this degree, then, Hawthorne’s surroundings and his own unfolding experience had supplied him with themes and materials.
Much of the remainder of his work had its source in his Puritan inheritance. To this the already quoted passage on old Salem (p. 237) bears witness. To this heritage is due in large measure the essential gravity of his nature, which has been unfairly but suggestively described as a compound of “seven eighths conscience and the rest remorse”; and to this is partly attributable his absorption with the presence and the problem of sin in the world. “The Scarlet Letter” deals with its immediate effect on the transgressor; “The House of the Seven Gables,” with its effect on succeeding generations; “The Blithedale Romance,” with its blighting effect on the reformer, who is selfish and heartless even in his fight against social wrong; “The Marble Faun,” with the basic reasons for the existence of evil. Yet though the Puritan strain in him could determine the direction of his thoughts, it could not determine their goal, for Hawthorne recoiled from the Puritan acceptance of sin as a devil’s wile to be atoned for only through the sufferings of a mediator or the tortures of the damned. He rejected the Calvinistic fear of eternal punishment for the Miltonic conclusion that the mind is its own place, and of itself can make a heaven of hell; at which point he was at one with the Transcendentalists in substituting “for a dogmatic dread, an illimitable hope.” His indictment of the Puritans themselves was more insistent than his charges against their theology. He condemned them for their cruel intolerance and for the arid bleakness of their lives. So he was at once a product of his ancestry and a living protest against it.
