At the very beginning of the nineteenth century, which has aptly been called “the century of the child,” a new sense of the sacredness of childhood found expression in Wordsworth's song written in 1802:

My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.

Unless and until the modern LANguage Association changes its (unwritten) law that the presidency is usually a consolation prize bestowed upon an elder statesman, presumably because he or she has managed to live long enough to become emeritus (not for any merit, but by automatic fiat of the Board of Trustees), the presidential address will lead to reminiscence. We who no longer teach are particularly dangerous. All our academic lives, we have had captive audiences who could not choose but hear our auditions. Now that no one longer receives credit for listening to us, younger generations rightly avoid us ancient mariners, as in my youth I tried to duck American or Canadian relatives who wished to refight the Civil or the Boer Wars.

In the early stages of his long residence in England after 1843, Romeo Elton, who had earlier occupied the positions of Baptist pastor and Professor of Latin and Greek at Brown University, corresponded with Longfellow. In a letter of December 28, 1846, he remarked: On a late visit to Ambleside Mr. Wordsworth inquired after you, & mentioned the pleasing interview he had with you at Rydal Mount, & passed a deserved eulogium upon your Poems. The Poet Laureate is still vigorous both in mind & body. He & his good wife walked a mile, in preference to riding, one evening to take tea with their daughter. He observed that he was solicited to accept of the title of Poet Laureate four times before he consented. In a volume of his Poems he has written a few verses commendatory of the Queen, for which in return she has sent him her portrait, Prince Albert's, & their children's.

The relation between content and style, the functional nature of style, the “balance” between inventio and elocutio —these adumbrate a method of interpretative criticism that has its roots in classical antiquity. But the “balance” concerns more than style. It extends to, or shall we say begins with, the content itself wherein the author manifests his world view, his philosophy of man, his hierarchy of values, and, in the Christian era, his reason-faith relationship. An evaluation of style requires, therefore, a previous evaluation of content.

The discourse of enthusiasm in the antebellum United States played a pivotal role in cultural debates surrounding the right of black people to participate in the “age of Revolution,” as Ralph Waldo Emerson called the era in 1837. This argument is explored through the textual archive of Nat Turner's Rebellion (1831). During this period, enthusiasm could refer to either a democratic-sublime or a fanatical-delusional passion for freedom. The term was applied to Turner pejoratively, not so much because his rebellion represented an instance of wild fanaticism to white audiences but because it represented an instance of familiar democratic revolt inadmissibly claimed by black people. Turner makes his own rhetorical claims for the meaning of enthusiasm: the word signifies an ardent zeal that inspires both direct dissent against slavery and acts of communication that transmit to readers a fervor for occluded black freedoms.

In contrast to the commonly held view that Keller is portraying the high points of Zurich's cultural history in his Züricher Noeellen, the historical phenomenon of periods in transition, particularly the individual response to the fact and realization of transition, appear as the main theme of this cycle of novellas. A detailed analysis of the five stories leads to the observation that the Active present in each novella is a period removed from the actual high point of a given era. Hadfoub, for example, takes place at the very end of the Minnesang period, representing a latecomer among the minnesingers, one who plays an anachronistic role, and Ursula treats events surrounding religious change, in this case the clash between the Zwingli forces and the Anabaptists after the introduction of the Reformation in Zurich. To underscore the idea of transition, Keller makes use of the ironic narrator who frequently voices his discriminating opinion about the characters, and who in the frame novella clearly relates the issue of “transitional time” to Keller's own age, also a period of transition, and in so doing censures those writers who are oblivious to the needs of the present and seek refuge in a glorious portrayal of the past.

This play was unknown to Moratín. When it was examined by Ticknor, it was part of a volume belonging to M. Ternaux-Compans, which contained, besides, the anonymous Farça a manera de tragedia, Güete's Tesorina and Vidriana, the Radiana of Ortiz, Villalón's Tragedia de Mirrha (Medina del Campo, 1536) and the anonymous Jacinta. La Barrera's notice, probably borrowed from Ticknor, states—I believe wrongly, if I have correctly understood Ticknor—that the play was in a collection with other farces, “dos de ellas impresas en 1536.”

Taken together, the descriptions of Salvá, who has given a summary of the play and reproduced 146 lines, and of Heredia, who gave an exact reproduction of the title-page, are satisfactory. Kohler, who does not seem to have known of Salvá's extracts, speaks of the piece as though it were lost and reproduces La Barrera's notice. From Ternaux-Compans the only known copy passed, now separately bound, through Salva to the Madrid Biblioteca Nacional, where it is now preserved under the signature R.3658.

A year ago last summer, when I was privately digesting the fact that I had been nominated to the presidency of the Modern Language Association of America, I happened to be sitting at the daily luncheon table with a group of teachers, some of whom were just returning from a meeting of one of the learned societies in the social sciences. The subject turned on presidential addresses and some excellent wit was broken on their demerits. For understandable reasons I kept silence while the conclusion was being arrived at that presidents were elected too late in life. There was bound to be disappointment on the part of younger men when some veteran of the profession of whom they had heard much delivered himself of commonplaces entirely unworthy of his position and of his better self. At this point one member of the group, whose own lectures are a theme of admiration, made the suggestion laughingly that every scholar who gave any promise of being ultimately chosen by his colleagues to such an office be required to write a presidential address in his younger years against the day when his talent might be required of him on an occasion like the present.

Perhaps no reproach is oftener addressed to those who call themselves philologists than that they are unconcerned with that beauty which has furnished a distinctive epithet for the word ‘literature’ in the phrase belles lettres, that they lack imagination and insight, and that they are quite unfitted to impart to others a sense of the spiritual values which inhere in the productions that form the subject-matter of their studies. An eloquent writer, who is himself a capable investigator, has recently presented this view in an essay which deserves the attention of every teacher of literature, and especially of every teacher of English literature.

Judge Jaffrey Pyncheon has been dead for over one hundred years, and according to F. O. Matthiessen the chapter on his death was one of the “favorite showpieces” of the age of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Yet there is doubt—if one may be pardoned for borrowing for a moment the pose of the hack who rewrites accounts of old murders—that the facts surrounding his death have been properly explored. Did he simply die of some kind of pulmonary hemorrhage, to which his ancestors were prone? Was no one present when he died? If he did die a natural death, is it possible that his “hereditary liability” was helped somehow, by circumstances taking place in the room with him, in precipitating his final seizure?

In 1862, eight years after the death of John Wilson, appeared his biography written by his daughter, Mrs. Mary Gordon. George Gleig in a critique of this volume in the Quarterly Review of January, 1863, unsympathetically declares that Mrs. Gordon's “story of his first love, and of its influence upon his character and prospects, is mere silliness.” Later he declares also that the disproportionate space devoted to this romantic story “is a mistake into which only a woman could fall.” There is certainly a difference, sentimentally, between reading the faded manuscript letters now in the National Library of Scotland and reading these same letters in the cold print of a book; but Mrs. Gordon's inclusion of them is not “mere silliness.” Perhaps she would have omitted them had she realized how vividly they illustrate not only her father's emotional nature, but also his inherent weakness.

Les trois expressions de vers libres, de vers irréguliers et de vers mêlés s'emploient indistinctement au XVIIe siècle pour désigner les vers où se mélangent les différents mètres, sans qu'un ordre puisse être discerné dans le retour du même mètre: La Fontaine dans ses Fables, Molière dans Amphitryon, Corneille et Molière dans Psyché ont usé de cette forme poétique.

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.”

That Keats in The Eve of St. Agnes was possibly indebted to Mrs. Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho was suggested to me by my colleague, Professor Margaret Sherwood, who pointed out several signs of relationship between the two works. Since that time I have made some study of the problem, and record the following observations. No attempt is here made to discuss the question raised by President MacCracken of Keats's obligation to Boccaccio's Filocolo, since it is not possible to reach final conclusions in regard to the matter without making a systematic study of the relationship of the Eve of St. Agnes to Floris and Blancheflur, Filocolo, Romeus and Juliet, Romeo and Juliet, The Mysteries of Udolpho, and Christabel.

Professor R. M. Peterson in his admirable article on the “Echoes of the Italian Risorgimento in Contemporaneous American Writers” might well have added to his list of poems illustrating Longfellow's interest in the movement the final sonnet of the Divina Commedia group. At odd moments in his life Longfellow had occupied his time in translating portions of the Divina Commedia. But with the death of his second wife in 1861, largely as an escape from his grief, he applied himself more systematically to the work, until the entire epic was at length translated, probably at the close of 1866. During the last few years of concentration on his task, he produced six sonnets, inspired by the Commedia, which, so far as his purely lyrical work is concerned, undoubtedly represent Longfellow's crowning achievement. Although, as Professor Peterson correctly points out (p. 240), Longfellow's interest in Italy “centered chiefly in the literature and culture of past ages rather than contemporaneous conditions,” the sixth and last of the Divina Commedia sonnets is of special significance in that it combines the poet's artistic and scholarly enthusiasm for Italy's great epic with his interest in “Italian aspirations.” In the octet of the sonnet Longfellow uses the Divina Commedia as a symbol of the liberty and glory which he believed would eventually come to Italy; and in the sestet he extends his symbolism to include other lands.

Some loose vellum leaves of a manuscript written between 1431 and 1450 (according to Dr. Kenyon of the British Museum) are bound in with a paper ms. of Hoccleve's Regement of Princes, in ms. British Museum Sloane 1212. These leaves, written in what may be a different hand from that of the Hoccleve scribe, contain some interesting material, most of which has up to now remained unidentified.