Monthly" was an era in literature. I
say it cheerfully. I believe, nevertheless, it was not the first era of
the sort. The sanguine generations have been indulging in them all
along, and as "eras" they are apt to flat out, or, as the editor of the
"Atlantic" would say, they "peter out." But the establishment of the
"Atlantic" was the expression of a genuine literary movement. That
movement is the most interesting because it was the most fruitful in our
history. It was nicknamed transcendentalism. It was, in fact, a
recurrence to realism. They who were sitting in Boston saw a great
light. The beauty of this new realism was that it required imagination,
as it always does, to see truth. That was the charm of the Teufelsdroeckh
philosophy; it was also poetry. Mr. Emerson puts it in a phrase--the
poet is the Seer. Most of you recall the intellectual stir of that time.
Mr. Carlyle had spread the German world to us. Mr. Emerson lighted his
torch. The horizon of English literature was broken, and it was not
necessary any longer to imitate English models. Criticism began to
assert itself. Mr. Lowell launched that audacious "Fable for Critics"--a
lusty colt, rejoicing in his young energy, had broken into the
old-fashioned garden, and unceremoniously trampled about among the rows
of box, the beds of pinks and sweet-williams, and mullen seed. I
remember how all this excited the imagination of the college where I
was. It was what that great navigator who made the "swellings from the
Atlantic" called "a fresh-water college." Everybody read "Sartor
Resartus." The best writer in college wrote exactly like Carlyle--why,
it was the universal opinion--without Carlyle's obscurity! The rest of
them wrote like Jean Paul Richter and like Emerson, and like Longfellow,
and like Ossian. The poems of our genius you couldn't tell from Ossian.
I believe it turned out that they were Ossian's. [Laughter.] Something
was evidently about to happen. When this tumult had a little settled the
"Atlantic" arose serenely out of Boston Bay--a consummation and a star
of promise as well.

The promise has been abundantly fulfilled. The magazine has had its fair
share in the total revolution of the character of American literature--I
mean the revolution out of the sentimental period; for the truth of this
I might appeal to the present audience, but for the well-known fact that
writers of books never read any except those they make themselves.
[Laughter.] I distinc