5
relations with the revival of letters, or with the American Renaissance in which he was to take so conspicuous a part. Our American history for a hundred years has been divided into three equal portions, which are named severally the period of the Grandfathers, 1776–1809; that of the Fathers, 1809–1842; and that of the Children, 1842–1876. Taking this ground, we may say that Duyckinck learned in the period of the fathers to do his work and to say his say for the children. Although he was a prolific writer from his youth, and we have publications of his as early as 1836, in a transient paper called The Literary, he began in 1840 as editor of the Arcturus, the serious work which in various forms he continued for nearly forty years to his death. To know what he was and what he thought at the interesting time when his mind was ripening for manly production, we cannot do better than to look through the two manuscript volumes of his Diary in Europe, for the year from November, 1838, to 1839, after studying the various scholarly articles which he previously contributed to the first two volumes of the New York Review in 1837 and 1838.
Looking at him from our New England point of view, and comparing his characteristic line of thought and culture with that of our own set of Massachusetts scholars at about the same time, we recognize the decided influence of the English type of literature and religion, under the lead of Washington Irving, as distinguished from the Transcendental and perhaps Germanic school of thinking, which is so strongly marked by the name of Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose name we always speak with honor, whether in agreement or dissent. Massachusetts and New York, years before, both felt alike the first stir of the Renaissance in the rise of the spirit of citizenship against the old dictum of theology and the church; and in some respects the New York patriots were in advance of the men of Lexington and Bunker Hill, as well as more memorable contributors to the consolidated nation. New York, too, had led the way in elegant literature, especially in romance, history and popular essays, with the help of Cooper, Irving and others, whilst probably New England bore the palm in the culture that shines in the forum and the pulpit, and could hardly find rivals to the eloquence of Webster, Everett and Choate, or to preachers so classic in style and so thoughtful in habit as the masters of the orthodox and liberal puritan pulpit of fifty years ago. Duyckinck clung closely to the old English standards of culture, and went stoutly for a New York school of letters that should be a full match at least for the rising New England literature. In that spirit he wrote for the New York Review those fine, thoughtful articles upon George Herbert and men of that stamp, not in a narrow temper indeed, but rather with hearty and generous recognition of the new and startling school that was rising in Boston and Cambridge. In his travels it is plain that he had made up his
