Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v3.djvu/75

Sill 57 In order to study theology he attended the Divinity School at Harvard; but he quickly gave over this ambition and entered upon a still briefer career as journalist in New York. Then followed his school-teaching years, first in Ohio and afterwards in California, where he eventually became professor of English in the State University. This post he held, with distinction as a teacher, for eight years, resigning in 1882 mainly on account of the failing health that dogged his steps most of his life. In Cuyahoga Palls, Ohio, he continued his literary pursuits to his death at the age of forty-six, in 1887. The struggle between faith and doubt, forced upon him by the spirit of the age even before he was a man, survived all the changing scenes of his life. In another age his Puritan inward- ness might have made of him a poet of faith, if not a minister of the Gospel. But he never attained conviction, was always gently questioning, finding, it seems, a certain twilight gratifi- cation in his inconclusive brooding. This habit of brooding was alleviated by a delicate sense of humour, which removed all suspicion of morbidity, and was intensified by his modesty. "You should see, " he wrote to a friend, "the equanimity with which I write thing after thing — both prose and verse — and stow them away, never sending them anywhere, or thinking of printing any book of them, at present, if ever." Most of his published work, indeed, is posthumous — to use his word, post- humorous — and there is very little of it, only a volume of col- lected prose and a volume of collected poetry. To the Atlantic he sent a number of poems, some of which were printed under a pen-name, and in the "Contributors' Club" his prose enjoyed complete anonymity. Among his prose studies is an essay on Principles of Criti- cism, which contains a statement of the ideal that his own poetry followed : In the poem, the requirement is that it shall be full of lovely images, that it shall be in every way musical, that it shall bring about us troops of high and pure associations, — the very words so chosen that they come "trailing clouds of glory" in their suggestive- ness; and in its matter, that it shall bring us both thought and feeling, for whose intermingling the musical form of speech alone is fitted; and that, coming from a pure and rich nature, it shall leave us purer and richer than it found us.