Norman Duncan - "Doctor Luke of the Labrador"

Leonard Woolsey Bacon - "A History of American Christianity"

Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay) - "Cecilia vol. 2"

Stephen Gwynn - "The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1"

Annual Bibliography of Commonwealth Literature 2007
This paper argues that discourses of love in Ghanaian market literature for youth offer a view into complex negotiations of agency and empowerment. Drawing on Deborah Durham's notion of youth as "social `shifters'" and Francis Nyamnjoh's conception of the "interconnectedness" of agency, I take Ghanaian market literature as one specific case of how African literature for youth foregrounds questions of continuity and change as African societies enter into increasingly complex global relations. In this literature for youth, received notions of love, often constructed out of impressions from American pop and hip hop music, carry new notions of agency that compete with existing "domesticated" forms. Authors like Ike Tandoh and Evelyn Tay employ discourses of love to offer youth alternative avenues for empowerment in a context of socio-economic disenfranchizement. In a creative process of "straddling", this writing both reveals and reproduces the contradictions that obtain in youth configurations of agency.

Complete Prose Works

W >> Walt Whitman >> Complete Prose Works




In the midst of all this, the soldiers of the President's guard, with
others, suddenly drawn to the scene, burst in--(some two hundred
altogether)--they storm the house, through all the tiers, especially
the upper ones, inflam'd with fury, literally charging the audience
with fix'd bayonets, muskets and pistols, snouting _Clear out! clear
out! you sons of_----.... Such the wild scene, or a suggestion of it
rather, inside the play-house that night.

Outside, too, in the atmosphere of shock and craze, crowds of people,
fill'd with frenzy, ready to seize any outlet for it, come near
committing murder several times on innocent individuals. One such case
was especially exciting. The infuriated crowd, through some chance,
got started against one man, either for words he utter'd, or perhaps
without any cause at all, and were proceeding at once to actually hang
him on a neighboring lamp-post, when he was rescued by a few heroic
policemen, who placed him in their midst, and fought their way slowly
and amid great peril toward the station house. It was a fitting
episode of the whole affair. The crowd rushing and eddying to and
fro--the night, the yells, the pale faces, many frighten'd people
trying in vain to extricate themselves--the attack'd man, not yet
freed from the jaws of death, looking like a corpse--the silent,
resolute, half-dozen policemen, with no weapons but their little
clubs, yet stern and steady through all those eddying swarms--made a
fitting side-scene to the grand tragedy of the murder. They gain'd the
station house with the protected man, whom they placed in security for
the night, and discharged him in the morning.

And in the midst of that pandemonium, infuriated soldiers, the
audience and the crowd, the stage, and all its actors and actresses,
its paint-pots, spangles, and gas-lights--the life blood from those
veins, the best and sweetest of the land, drips slowly down, and
death's ooze already begins its little bubbles on the lips.

Thus the visible incidents and surroundings of Abraham Lincoln's
murder, as they really occur'd. Thus ended the attempted secession
of these States; thus the four years' war. But the main things come
subtly and invisibly afterward, perhaps long afterward--neither
military, political, nor (great as those are,) historical. I say,
certain secondary and indirect results, out of the tragedy of this
death, are, in my opinion, greatest. Not the event of the murder
itself. Not that Mr. Lincoln strings the principal points and
personages of the period, like beads, upon the single string of his
career. Not that his idiosyncrasy, in its sudden appearance and
disappearance, stamps this Republic with a stamp more mark'd and
enduring than any yet given by any one man--(more even than
Washington's;)--but, join'd with these, the immeasurable value and
meaning of that whole tragedy lies, to me, in senses finally dearest
to a nation, (and here all our own)--the imaginative and artistic
senses--the literary and dramatic ones. Not in any common or low
meaning of those terms, but a meaning precious to the race, and to
every age. A long and varied series of contradictory events arrives at
last at its highest poetic, single, central, pictorial denouement.
The whole involved, baffling, multiform whirl of the secession
period comes to a head, and is gather'd in one brief flash of
lightning-illumination--one simple, fierce deed. Its sharp
culmination, and as it were solution, of so many bloody and angry
problems, illustrates those climax-moments on the stage of universal
Time, where the historic Muse at one entrance, and the tragic Muse at
the other, suddenly ringing down the curtain, close an immense act in
the long drama of creative thought, and give it radiation,
tableau, stranger than fiction. Fit radiation--fit close! How the
imagination--how the student loves these things! America, too, is to
have them. For not in all great deaths, nor far or near--not Caesar
in the Roman senate-house, or Napoleon passing away in the wild
night-storm at St. Helena--not Paleologus, falling, desperately
fighting, piled over dozens deep with Grecian corpses--not calm old
Socrates, drinking the hemlock--outvies that terminus of the secession
war, in one man's life, here in our midst, in our own time--that seal
of the emancipation of three million slaves--that parturition and
delivery of our at last really free Republic, born again, henceforth
to commence its career of genuine homogeneous Union, compact,
consistent with itself.

Nor will ever future American Patriots and Unionists, indifferently
over the whole land, or North or South, find a better moral to their
lesson. The final use of the greatest men of a Nation is, after all,
not with reference to their deeds in themselves, or their direct
bearing on their times or lands. The final use of a heroic-eminent
life--especially of a heroic-eminent death--is its indirect filtering
into the nation and the race, and to give, often at many removes, but
unerringly, age after age, color and fibre to the personalism of the
youth and maturity of that age, and of mankind. Then there is a cement
to the whole people, subtler, more underlying, than any thing in
written constitution, or courts or armies--namely, the cement of a
death identified thoroughly with that people, at its head, and for its
sake. Strange, (is it not?) that battles, martyrs, agonies, blood,
even assassination, should so condense--perhaps only really, lastingly
condense--a Nationality.

I repeat it--the grand deaths of the race--the dramatic deaths of
every nationality--are its most important inheritance-value--in some
respects beyond its literature and art--(as the hero is beyond his
finest portrait, and the battle itself beyond its choicest song or
epic.) Is not here indeed the point underlying all tragedy? the famous
pieces of the Grecian masters--and all masters? Why, if the old Greeks
had had this man, what trilogies of plays--what epics--would have been
made out of him! How the rhapsodes would have recited him! How quickly
that quaint tall form would have enter'd into the region where men
vitalize gods, and gods divinify men! But Lincoln, his times, his
death--great as any, any age--belong altogether to our own, and our
autochthonic. (Sometimes indeed I think our American days, our own
stage--the actors we know and have shaken hands, or talk'd with--more
fateful than anything in Eschylus--more heroic than the fighters
around Troy--afford kings of men for our Democracy prouder than
Agamemnon--models of character cute and hardy as Ulysses--deaths more
pitiful than Priam's.)

When, centuries hence, (as it must, in my opinion, be centuries hence
before the life of these States, or of Democracy, can be really
written and illustrated,) the leading historians and dramatists seek
for some personage, some special event, incisive enough to mark with
deepest cut, and mnemonize, this turbulent Nineteenth century of
ours, (not only these States, but all over the political and social
world)--something, perhaps, to close that gorgeous procession of
European feudalism, with all its pomp and caste-prejudices, (of whose
long train we in America are yet so inextricably the heirs)--something
to identify with terrible identification, by far the greatest
revolutionary step in the history of the United States, (perhaps the
greatest of the world, our century)--the absolute extirpation and
erasure of slavery from the States--those historians will seek in vain
for any point to serve more thoroughly their purpose, than Abraham
Lincoln's death.

Dear to the Muse--thrice dear to Nationality--to the whole human
race--precious to this Union--precious to Democracy--unspeakably and
forever precious--their first great Martyr Chief.




TWO LETTERS

I


TO -- -- -- LONDON, ENGLAND

_Camden, N.J., U.S. America, March 17th, 1876._ DEAR FRIEND:--Yours of
the 28th Feb. receiv'd, and indeed welcom'd. I am jogging along still
about the same in physical condition--still certainly no worse, and I
sometimes lately suspect rather better, or at any rate more adjusted
to the situation. Even begin to think of making some move, some change
of base, &c.: the doctors have been advising it for over two years,
but I haven't felt to do it yet. My paralysis does not lift--I cannot
walk any distance--I still have this baffling, obstinate, apparently
chronic affection of the stomachic apparatus and liver: yet I get out
of doors a little every day--write and read in moderation--appetite
sufficiently good--(eat only very plain food, but always did
that)--digestion tolerable--spirits unflagging. I have told you most
of this before, but suppose you might like to know it all again, up to
date. Of course, and pretty darkly coloring the whole, are bad spells,
prostrations, some pretty grave ones, intervals--and I have resign'd
myself to the certainty of permanent incapacitation from solid work:
but things may continue at least in this half-and-half way for months,
even years.

My books are out, the new edition; a set of which, immediately on
receiving your letter of 28th, I have sent you, (by mail, March 15,)
and I suppose you have before this receiv'd them. My dear friend, your
offers of help, and those of my other British friends, I think I fully
appreciate, in the right spirit, welcome and acceptive--leaving the
matter altogether in your and their hands, and to your and their
convenience, discretion, leisure, and nicety. Though poor now, even to
penury, I have not so far been deprived of any physical thing I need
or wish whatever, and I feel confident I shall not in the future.
During my employment of seven years or more in Washington after the
war (1865-'72) I regularly saved part of my wages: and, though the sum
has now become about exhausted by my expenses of the last three years,
there are already beginning at present welcome dribbles hitherward
from the sales of my new edition, which I just job and sell, myself,
(all through this illness, my book-agents for three years in New York
successively, badly cheated me,) and shall continue to dispose of the
books myself. And that is the way I should prefer to glean my support.
In that way I cheerfully accept all the aid my friends find it
convenient to proffer.

To repeat a little, and without undertaking details, understand, dear
friend, for yourself and all, that I heartily and most affectionately
thank my British friends, and that I accept their sympathetic
generosity in the same spirit in which I believe (nay, know) it is
offer'd--that though poor I am not in want--that I maintain good heart
and cheer; and that by far the most satisfaction to me (and I think
it can be done, and believe it will be) will be to live, as long as
possible, on the sales, by myself, of my own works, and perhaps, if
practicable, by further writings for the press.

W. W.

I am prohibited from writing too much, and I must make this candid
statement of the situation serve for all my dear friends over there.


II


TO -- -- -- DRESDEN, SAXONY

_Camden, New Jersey, U.S.A., Dec. 20, '81._ DEAR SIR:--Your letter
asking definite endorsement to your translation of my "Leaves of
Grass" into Russian is just received, and I hasten to answer it.
Most warmly and willingly I consent to the translation, and waft a
prayerful God speed to the enterprise.

You Russians and we Americans! Our countries so distant, so unlike at
first glance--such a difference in social and political conditions,
and our respective methods of moral and practical development the last
hundred years;--and yet in certain features, and vastest ones, so
resembling each other. The variety of stock-elements and tongues, to
be resolutely fused in a common identity and union at all hazards--the
idea, perennial through the ages, that they both have their historic
and divine mission--the fervent element of manly friendship throughout
the whole people, surpass'd by no other races--the grand expanse of
territorial limits and boundaries--the unform'd and nebulous state of
many things, not yet permanently settled, but agreed on all hands to
be the preparations of an infinitely greater future--the fact that
both Peoples have their independent and leading positions to hold,
keep, and if necessary, fight for, against the rest of the world--the
deathless aspirations at the inmost centre of each great community,
so vehement, so mysterious, so abysmic--are certainly features you
Russians and we Americans possess in common. As my dearest dream is
for an internationality of poems and poets binding the lands of the
earth closer than all treaties and diplomacy--as the purpose beneath
the rest in my book is such hearty comradeship, for individuals to
begin with, and for all the nations of the earth as a result--how
happy I should be to get the hearing and emotional contact of the
great Russian peoples.

To whom, now and here, (addressing you for Russia and Russians and
empowering you, should you see fit, to print the present letter, in
your book, as a preface,) I waft affectionate salutation from these
shores, in America's name.

W. W.




NOTES LEFT OVER


NATIONALITY--(AND YET) It is more and more clear to me that the main
sustenance for highest separate personality, these States, is to come
from that general sustenance of the aggregate, (as air, earth, rains,
give sustenance to a tree)--and that such personality, by democratic
standards, will only be fully coherent, grand and free, through the
cohesion, grandeur and freedom of the common aggregate, the Union.
Thus the existence of the true American continental solidarity of the
future, depending on myriads of superb, large-sized, emotional and
physically perfect individualities, of one sex just as much as the
other, the supply of such individualities, in my opinion, wholly
depends on a compacted imperial ensemble. The theory and practice of
both sovereignties, contradictory as they are, are necessary. As the
centripetal law were fatal alone, or the centrifugal law deadly and
destructive alone, but together forming the law of eternal kosmical
action, evolution, preservation, and life--so, by itself alone, the
fullness of individuality, even the sanest, would surely destroy
itself. This is what makes the importance to the identities of these
States of the thoroughly fused, relentless, dominating Union--a moral
and spiritual idea, subjecting all the parts with remorseless power,
more needed by American democracy than by any of history's hitherto
empires or feudalities, and the _sine qua non_ of carrying out the
republican principle to develop itself in the New World through
hundreds, thousands of years to come.

Indeed, what most needs fostering through the hundred years to come,
in all parts of the United States, north, south, Mississippi valley,
and Atlantic and Pacific coasts, is this fused and fervent identity of
the individual, whoever he or she may be, and wherever the place, with
the idea and fact of AMERICAN TOTALITY, and with what is meant by the
Flag, the stars and stripes. We need this conviction of nationality
as a faith, to be absorb'd in the blood and belief of the People
everywhere, south, north, west, east, to emanate in their life, and
in native literature and art. We want the germinal idea that America,
inheritor of the past, is the custodian of the future of humanity.
Judging from history, it is some such moral and spiritual ideas
appropriate to them, (and such ideas only,) that have made the
profoundest glory and endurance of nations in the past. The races of
Judea, the classic clusters of Greece and Rome, and the feudal
and ecclesiastical clusters of the Middle Ages, were each and all
vitalized by their separate distinctive ideas, ingrain'd in them,
redeeming many sins, and indeed, in a sense, the principal reason-why
for their whole career.

Then, in the thought of nationality especially for the United States,
and making them original, and different from all other countries,
another point ever remains to be considered. There are two distinct
principles--aye, paradoxes--at the life-fountain and life-continuation
of the States; one, the sacred principle of the Union, the right of
ensemble, at whatever sacrifice--and yet another, an equally sacred
principle, the right of each State, consider'd as a separate sovereign
individual, in its own sphere. Some go zealously for one set of these
rights, and some as zealously for the other set. We must have both; or
rather, bred out of them, as out of mother and father, a third set,
the perennial result and combination of both, and neither jeopardized.
I say the loss or abdication of one set, in the future, will be ruin
to democracy just as much as the loss of the other set. The problem
is, to harmoniously adjust the two, and the play of the two. [Observe
the lesson of the divinity of Nature, ever checking the excess of one
law, by an opposite, or seemingly opposite law--generally the other
side of the same law.] For the theory of this Republic is, not
that the General government is the fountain of all life and power,
dispensing it forth, around, and to the remotest portions of our
territory, but that THE PEOPLE are, represented in both, underlying
both the General and State governments, and consider'd just as well in
their individualities and in their separate aggregates, or States, as
consider'd in one vast aggregate, the Union. This was the original
dual theory and foundation of the United States, as distinguish'd from
the feudal and ecclesiastical single idea of monarchies and papacies,
and the divine right of kings. (Kings have been of use, hitherto, as
representing the idea of the identity of nations. But, to American
democracy, _both_ ideas must be fulfill'd, and in my opinion the loss
of vitality of either one will indeed be the loss of vitality of the
other.)


EMERSON'S BOOKS, (THE SHADOWS OF THEM)

In the regions we call Nature, towering beyond all measurement,
with infinite spread, infinite depth and height--in those regions,
including Man, socially and historically, with his moral-emotional
influences--how small a part, (it came in my mind to-day,) has
literature really depicted--even summing up all of it, all ages.
Seems at its best some little fleet of boats, hugging the shores of
a boundless sea, and never venturing, exploring the unmapp'd--never,
Columbus-like, sailing out for New Worlds, and to complete the orb's
rondure. Emerson writes frequently in the atmosphere of this thought,
and his books report one or two things from that very ocean and air,
and more legibly address'd to our age and American polity than by any
man yet. But I will begin by scarifying him--thus proving that I am
not insensible to his deepest lessons. I will consider his books from
a democratic and western point of view. I will specify the shadows
on these sunny expanses. Somebody has said of heroic character that
"wherever the tallest peaks are present, must inevitably be deep
chasms and valleys." Mine be the ungracious task (for reasons) of
leaving unmention'd both sunny expanses and sky-reaching heights, to
dwell on the bare spots and darknesses. I have a theory that no artist
or work of the very first class may be or can be without them.

First, then, these pages are perhaps too perfect, too concentrated.
(How good, for instance, is good butter, good sugar. But to be eating
nothing but sugar and butter all the time! even if ever so good.)
And though the author has much to say of freedom and wildness and
simplicity and spontaneity, no performance was ever more based on
artificial scholarships and decorums at third or fourth removes, (he
calls it culture,) and built up from them. It is always a _make_,
never an unconscious _growth_. It is the porcelain figure or statuette
of lion, or stag, or Indian hunter--and a very choice statuette
too--appropriate for the rosewood or marble bracket of parlor or
library; never the animal itself, or the hunter himself. Indeed, who
wants the real animal or hunter? What would that do amid astral and
bric-a-brac and tapestry, and ladies and gentlemen talking in subdued
tones of Browning and Longfellow and art? The least suspicion of such
actual bull, or Indian, or of Nature carrying out itself, would put
all those good people to instant terror and flight.

Emerson, in my opinion, is not most eminent as poet or artist or
teacher, though valuable in all those. He is best as critic, or
diagnoser. Not passion or imagination or warp or weakness, or any
pronounced cause or specialty, dominates him. Cold and bloodless
intellectuality dominates him. (I know the fires, emotions, love,
egotisms, glow deep, perennial, as in all New Englanders--but the
facade, hides them well--they give no sign.) He does not see or take
one side, one presentation only or mainly, (as all the poets, or most
of the fine writers anyhow)--he sees all sides. His final influence
is to make his students cease to worship anything--almost cease to
believe in anything, outside of themselves. These books will fill, and
well fill, certain stretches of life, certain stages of development--
are, (like the tenets or theology the author of them preach'd when a
young man,) unspeakably serviceable and precious as a stage. But
in old or nervous or solemnest or dying hours, when one needs the
impalpably soothing and vitalizing influences of abysmic Nature, or
its affinities in literature or human society, and the soul resents
the keenest mere intellection, they will not be sought for.

For a philosopher, Emerson possesses a singularly dandified theory of
manners. He seems to have no notion at all that manners are simply the
signs by which the chemist or metallurgist knows his metals. To the
profound scientist, all metals are profound, as they really are. The
little one, like the conventional world, will make much of gold and
silver only. Then to the real artist in humanity, what are called bad
manners are often the most picturesque and significant of all. Suppose
these books becoming absorb'd, the permanent chyle of American general
and particular character--what a well-wash'd and grammatical, but
bloodless and helpless, race we should turn out! No, no, dear friend;
though the States want scholars, undoubtedly, and perhaps want ladies
and gentlemen who use the bath frequently, and never laugh loud, or
talk wrong, they don't want scholars, or ladies and gentlemen, at the
expense of all the rest. They want good farmers, sailors, mechanics,
clerks, citizens--perfect business and social relations--perfect
fathers and mothers. If we could only have these, or their
approximations, plenty of them, fine and large and sane and generous
and patriotic, they might make their verbs disagree from their
nominatives, and laugh like volleys of musketeers, if they should
please. Of course these are not all America wants, but they are first
of all to be provided on a large scale. And, with tremendous errors
and escapades, this, substantially, is what the States seem to have an
intuition of, and to be mainly aiming at. The plan of a select class,
superfined, (demarcated from the rest,) the plan of Old World lands
and literatures, is not so objectionable in itself, but because it
chokes the true plan for us, and indeed is death to it. As to such
special class, the United States can never produce any equal to the
splendid show, (far, far beyond comparison or competition here,) of
the principal European nations, both in the past and at the present
day. But an immense and distinctive commonalty over our vast and
varied area, west and east, south and north--in fact, for the first
time in history, a great, aggregated, real PEOPLE, worthy the name,
and made of develop'd heroic individuals, both sexes--is America's
principal, perhaps only, reason for being. If ever accomplish'd, it
will be at least as much, (I lately think, doubly as much,) the result
of fitting and democratic sociologies, literatures and arts--if we
ever get them--as of our democratic politics.

At times it has been doubtful to me if Emerson really knows or feels
what Poetry is at its highest, as in the Bible, for instance, or Homer
or Shakspere. I see he covertly or plainly likes best superb verbal
polish, or something old or odd--Waller's "Go, lovely rose," or
Lovelace's lines "to Lucusta"--the quaint conceits of the old French
bards, and the like. Of _power_ he seems to have a gentleman's
admiration--but in his inmost heart the grandest attribute of God and
Poets is always subordinate to the octaves, conceits, polite kinks,
and verbs.

The reminiscence that years ago I began like most youngsters to have
a touch (though it came late, and was only on the surface) of
Emerson-on-the-brain--that I read his writings reverently, and
address'd him in print as "Master," and for a month or so thought
of him as such--I retain not only with composure, but positive
satisfaction. I have noticed that most young people of eager minds
pass through this stage of exercise.

The best part of Emersonianism is, it breeds the giant that destroys
itself. Who wants to be any man's mere follower? lurks behind every
page. No teacher ever taught, that has so provided for his pupil's
setting up independently--no truer evolutionist.

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