In the spring of 1835, George Ripley, a young Unitarian minister of Boston, remembered an old debt. For some years he had been a leader in that transplantation of German literature and philosophy which was now flowering into Transcendentalism. He could read Kant in the original tongue, and he owned a redoubtable library of German biblical criticism and idealist philosophy. Three years before, in the Christian Examiner (xi, 375) he had explained the differences between Kant and Coleridge and asserted the superiority of Kant; this very spring he had written for the same journal (xviii, 167-221) a biography of Herder and a closely critical review of Marsh's translation of Herder's Spirit of German Poetry. But he was still young enough in erudition to remember the names of those who had first turned his eyes to Germany: the Herder article began with a statement of his indebtedness to “sound and liberal scholars, like Carlyle.”

Extensive manuscript materials in the Ticknor Collection at Dartmouth College now make it possible to complete one of the remarkable cultural, scholarly, and personal records of early American letters—the story of George Ticknor's long and devoted pursuit of Goethe. Ticknor's stature as a literary pioneer is, with this further evidence, markedly increased, and there is new light cast on the beginnings of significant American acquaintance with Germany's great poet.

According to James Fenimore Cooper's daughter, Susan, the novelist was “always ready” to read Shakespeare aloud to the family, “entering with unfeigned delight into the spirit of his works, whether comedy or tragedy”; and he carried as his “constant traveling companions” in Europe the volumes of a 32° edition of the plays. Cooper's reading of Shakespeare was evidently not critical but largely for pleasure. In the volumes of the plays in the library at Cooperstown are no significant marginal comments; in the published letters are no important allusions to the dramatist; and of the many references to Shakespeare in the novels, the only notable one of critical nature is that in Jack Tier, where Shakespeare is called “the great poet of our language, and the greatest that ever lived, perhaps, short of the inspired writers of the Old Testament, and old Homer and Dante.”

Nature requires that between two neighboring hills there must be a valley. Perhaps this is a sufficient explanation for my presence here, and sufficient apology to anyone who thinks that the subject just announced intrudes vulgarly into a program of the Modern Language Association. Certainly our annual meetings should be devoted chiefly to exchanges of high thoughts about the humanities which it is our fortunate lot to profess, and the communication to each other of our discoveries in the delightful world of scholarship. But we know, too, that when we come together we talk of other things—of changes in this department or that, of resignations and retirements, of openings for young men and women of promise. Some of us, indeed, are besieged by hopeful applicants, and are forced to give attention, even in this academic company, to recruiting and placements which will sustain our professional strength. It cannot well be otherwise. Our problems are not simply those arising out of our own studies, but those of preceptors who accept as a principal responsibility the preparation of young men and women for useful careers in colleges and universities. To this end not only the learning which we impart but also the philosophy which we inculcate are of importance; and we may well spare a few minutes, therefore, to consider conditions now prevailing in the academic world which affect our outlook. I shall have little to say that is novel, nothing which cannot easily be discovered. I wish only to give emphasis to conclusions which recent experience has shaped.

For a brief period of about eight months, from June 1796 through February 1797, Coleridge sought to augment his income by reviewing for the Critical Review and the Monthly Magazine. The enthusiasm with which he embraced this hope is shown by numerous references in his letters and in those of Lamb. I have found evidence which identifies two more of Coleridge's uncollected reviews—one of them an essay on Greek, Latin, and English prosody which Coleridge wrote as a review of Bishop Samuel Horslèy's On the Prosodies of the Greek and Latin Languages (1796). Unknown to me, Professor George Whalley was at the same time preparing to authenticate this review, and he recently published his evidence together with a complete text. I have some further evidence to add to Whalley's and a demonstration of the significance of the review.

In 1830, at a time when the United States was still considered in Europe to be a small and insignificant country east of the Mississippi, Goethe published the poem “Den Vereinigten Staaten.” Almost at once it attracted attention, becoming with the years one of his most famous literary productions. A few months after its appearance in Germany, Fraser's Magazine in England offered the following quaint translation:

The United States
America, thou hast it better
Than our ancient hemisphere;
Thou hast no falling castles,
Nor basalt, as here.
Thy children, they know not,
Their youthful prime to mar,
Vain retrospection,
Nor ineffective war.
Fortune wait on thy glorious spring!
And, when in time thy poets sing,
May some good genius guard them all
From Baron, Robber, Knight, and Ghost traditional.

The original poem, as Goethe gave it to the public, was:

In the 1830's and 1840's members of the editorial staffs of certain American periodicals, not satisfied with the common practice of pirating the works of foreign authors, undertook the brazen expedient of writing their own selections and attaching thereto the name of some eminent foreign author. For example, when the Spirit of the Times had reprinted all of Thackeray's Yellowplush Correspondence available in Fraser's Magazine and had found it popular among the subscribers, the editors stated that they had forged for some time thereafter a continuation of the Correspondence that was as good as the original. “Our Yellowplush succeeded him of London,” confessed the journal, “and his letters were considered, in all respects, equal to those of his ‘illustrious predecessor’.” Moreover, this pseudo-continuation was pirated by at least one American periodical in Tennessee which obviously did not know that it was being gulled. The Spirit of the Times regarded the incident with amused indifference rather than indignation, not being in a position to claim copyright protection for a work which it had not called its own.

One of the chief reasons the great Victorian poets are not read with the attention they deserve is that the modern reader is often baffled by the idiom of their more successful poems. We do not know just how to take them, and we find it difficult to do justice to the richness of their language. The case of Tennyson has been particularly unfortunate. In order to discover those poems capable of exciting the contemporary sensibility, one must first discount the adverse critical reaction. Though it may have been historically necessary, it managed to eclipse the Laureate for at least a generation. But having made this effort, one must still penetrate the formidable and misleading mask of household poet which the later Tennyson adopted.

Like many American scholars I have been interested in the issue between science and the humanities in higher education. I have heard lectures and read books that praised the humanities and made reasoned presentations of the claims of literature and the arts in the dissemination of the best and most effective culture. I have been gratified by such discourses. The inference has been that students of science and technology should be urged and persuaded to devote at least some time to history, philosophy, literature, and the arts, and to this I have no objection; but it has seemed to me that we were taking hold of the matter from exactly the wrong end. It is perhaps important for scientists to know the humanities, but it has seemed to me essential that humanists should know the sciences. I presume my acquaintance with the Renaissance has led me to adopt the view that the truths of science, as well as those of history, philosophy, arts and letters, are within the domain of humanism. I need not mention the names of great Renaissance humanists—Erasmus, Spenser, Shakespeare, Bacon, Milton, Rabelais, Montaigne, Ariosto, and Cervantes. We still have, however, a thrill of surprise when we hear Bacon say, “I have taken all knowledge to be my province,” although Bacon is merely expressing the professed doctrine of Renaissance humanism. The truth of the matter is that all Renaissance humanists, with due allowance for the indulgence of special aptitudes, did precisely that.

The student of Coleridge's thought is likely to turn with a sense of relief from the apparent confusion of his metaphysical and epistemological speculations to the relative calm of his semantics. Here, at least, one can operate within a well-defined area, presenting in an orderly fashion Coleridge's great respect for words, his insistence that they be used carefully, his concern with paradox and contradiction, his famous distinctions such as that between reason and understanding, and the background of such coinages as esemplastic. This area provides the clue to Coleridge's whole system and is full of implications which stretch far out beyond the realm of words.

Charles Lamb exhibited the same genial attitude toward books as toward people; he never expected too much of either, and was therefore seldom disappointed. This whimsical tolerance was especially evident in his reactions to prose fiction. He never went at a novel too seriously—with hammer and tongs, as we say; yet he could distinguish between the enduring works and the pulp. Moreover, he professed to like the same qualities in books as in people: individuality, personality, and even eccentricity. In 1821 he disclaimed a taste for the external events in narrative fiction, contrasting his attitude with that of his sister: “Narrative teases me. I have little concern with the progress of events. She must have a story.... The fluctuations of fortune in fiction ... and almost in real life ... have ceased to interest, or to operate but dully upon me. Out of the way humours and opinions—heads with some diverting twist in them—the oddities of authorship please me most” (ii, 75). There is, however, ample evidence that Lamb read widely in prose fiction and enjoyed the works of the great eighteenth-century masters—Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett. He also was acquainted with the writings of Sterne, Goldsmith, Henry Mackenzie, Robert Paltock, Aleman, Cervantes, Jane and Maria Porter, Godwin, Scott, and many figures of less note, including the Minerva Press offerings. As Lamb himself put it, “Defoe was always my darling” (i, 524). In 1829, at the request of his friend Walter Wilson, Lamb wrote a critical essay on Defoe's secondary novels for Wilson's book Memoirs of the Life and Times of Daniel Defoe.4

Unter den großen deutschen Schriftstellern des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts hat sich keiner gründlicher und umfassender mit dem Problem der Sprache befaßt als Herder. Nicht nur in seiner berühmten Preisschrift vom Ursprung der Sprache, in der er Süßmilchs Wundertheorie zurückweist und den natürlichen Ursprung der Sprache und ihre organische Entwicklung im Zusammenhang mit der Entwicklung des menschlichen Geistes verficht, sondern auch in zahlreichen anderen seiner Schriften behandelt er das Wesen der Sprache und kommt immer wieder, bald in systematischer Darstellung, bald in eingestreuten geistvollen Bemerkungen, auf dieses ihm am Herzen liegende Problem zurück.

No one has hitherto undertaken an investigation of Shelley's relation to Robert Malthus. Previous Shelley scholarship contains no adequate examination of the remarks on Malthus in Shelley's prose. No attempt, furthermore, has ever been made to relate these remarks in the prose to any of the poems; and, therefore, some probable and significant allusions to Malthus in the poetry have gone entirely unnoticed. Various scholars, to be sure, have called attention to the main allusions discoverable in the burlesque Oedipus Tyrannus; but past interpretations of these references are in need of some modification. More important, however, than what pertains to Shelley's burlesque is the probable occurrence of hitherto quite unsuspected allusions to Malthus in a number of the major serious poems—including Prometheus Unbound.

The nonpartisan editorial policy of Addison and Steele's Spectator is well known. “I never espoused any Party with Violence,” Mr. Spectator proclaimed in the first number of the periodical, “and am resolved to observe an exact Neutrality between the Whigs and Tories, unless I shall be forced to declare myself by the Hostilities of either Side.” Although in general the two essayists kept their promise, there is often a noticeably Whiggish cast to their writings; and on one occasion Steele threw neutrality to the winds and involved the Spectator in a bit of party pamphleteering that would have done credit, in substance if not in tone, to the most rabid political hack, Whig or Tory.

No poet was ever more fortunate in his initial celebrity, more unfortunate in his ultimate fame, than Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock. He burst like a meteor upon the ken of the mid-eighteenth century, but his light paled rapidly before the rising suns of German Classicism and Romanticism. The nineteenth century, of which he saw the beginning, rendered him a distant “official” homage but read him less and less; and the twentieth century, despite sporadic evidences of interest, seems likewise minded to verify Lessing's early prophecy that Klopstock would be more often praised than perused.