Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v3.djvu/138

I20 Later Essayists American faith in moulding the living material of his own day into the finer forms inherent in his country's institutions, Emerson, the most influential of our essayists, would have had a lesser hold on the minds of his fellow citizens; and the value of Higginson comes largely from a similar happy endowment. The ministry, whose record in our annals is so frequently interwoven with that of American literature, had its greatest literary figures in New England. A distinguished exception was Moncure D. Conway (i 832-1 907), who, like Higginson, gave up his pulpit because of his anti-slavery pronouncements. A Virginian by birth, he did his most important work as an editor in Boston, where he conducted The Dial and The Com- monwealth; and as a lecturer in England, especially in his illuminating discourses during the Civil War. In later life, again in America, he wrote many papers of sterling worth, essays notable because of their high ethical plane; yet, lacking the authentic fire of genius, the light of his writings has now merely become mingled in the wide effulgence emanating from that group of great citizen-writers in whose ranks he marched with so firm a tread. Probably the most immediately successful exponent of practical optimism in the Cambridge group was Edward Everett Hale (1822-1909), Higginson's senior by but a year, and like Higginson a clergyman and one of the Overseers of Harvard University. There is a pleasant logic in the fact that this grand-nephew of the Revolutionary patriot whose only regret, as he mounted the scaffold, was that he had but one life to lose for his country, should have written a tale that, despite the startling improbability of its plot, is, in its stir- ring presentation of the value of patriotism, a masterpiece of our literature. But while the fame of Edward Everett Hale would be assured if he had done nothing further than to write, during the Civil War times. The Man Without a Country, ' let it not be forgotten that his volume published in 1870, entitled Ten Times One is Ten, led to the establishment of philanthropic societies the world over, the nature of whose charitable activi- ties is suggested in their motto : ' ' Look up and not down ; look forward and not back; look out and not in; lend a hand." Hale's magazine with the final phrase of the preceding motto " See Book III, Chap. vi.