The Atlantic Monthly

“ For a man who has been taxed with hereditary indolence, his industry was surprising. His connection with The Atlantic Monthly from its launching, in 1857, until 1861, and with The North American Review from 1864 until 1872, is mentioned elsewhere. His private reading was continuous and discursive. With the approach and outbreak of the Civil War, his heart and pen were enlisted in the service of the North. He wrote perhaps the most stirring political articles in American literature ”

“ The establishment of The Atlantic Monthly in 1857 gave her a constant vehicle for her writings, as did also The Independent of New York, and later The Christian Union, of each of which papers successively her brother, Henry Ward Beecher, was one of the editors. ”

“ The Atlantic Monthly has no illustrations except in the advertising pages—some of those are very good—but it has that sense of uniqueness, that kind of snobbishness, which is appreciated even in a democracy like our glorious democracy, where we are all free and equal, as contrasted with the social distinctions of this monarchy under which we are so hospitably received this evening. It is a mistake to suppose that the visual is suggested merely by drawings and photographs. ”

“ The proudest moment of my life was when I received a check from the Atlantic Monthly for four dollars to pay for a screed in the “Contributors’ Club,”—the only one, alas! I wondered whether I would not attain my heart’s desire sooner by staying in the country and working steadily, slowly, surely on until I made a name among writers of good poetry and fiction. ”

“ How meet a companion the giant Atlantic seemed for that mighty mind, to some of whose noble sentiments I had just been listening with delight and veneration, and yet how far beyond the widest sweep of ocean, is the endless expanse of the immortal intellect—time-overcoming—creation-compelling! ”

“ In that refined and intellectual city which, be it always recollected, holds up its head in such lofty contempt at the rowdyism of New York, a magazine is published by a gentleman universally esteemed the most respectable publisher in all the United States, called the Atlantic Monthly, and the November number commences with an article on George Sand in that fast style of moral sensualism, ill-copied from French models, which has invaded so much of our own periodical literature. ”

“ A magazine like the North American Review usually asks representatives of both parties to present their opinions 153on the same question; and a similar breadth of view is adopted by the Atlantic Monthly, the Review of Reviews, and other leading monthlies, whose great circulation and influence are hardly to be compared with similar magazines of Europe. The point of view common to all is that of a very critical public opinion, well above party politics and devoted to national reform and everything which makes for progress and enlightenment. ”

“ From the Northern wastes, where the hunter and the trapper pursue by force or guile the fur-bearing animals, to the ever-perfumed latitudes of the lemon and the myrtle, — from the stormy Atlantic, where the skiff of the fisherman rocks fearlessly under the menace of beetling crags amid the foam of angry breakers, to where the solemn surge of the Pacific pours itself around our Western continent, boon Nature has spread out fields which ask only the magic touch of Labor to wave with every harvest and blush with every fruitage. ”

“ In 1857 was started the Atlantic Monthly, a magazine which has published a good share of the best work done by American writers within the past thirty years. Its immediate success was assured by Dr. Holmes's brilliant series of papers, the {493} Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, 1858, followed at once by the Professor at the Breakfast Table, 1859, and later by the Poet at the Breakfast Table, 1873. The Autocrat is its author's masterpiece, and holds the fine quintessence of his humor, his scholarship, his satire, genial observation, and ripe experience of men and cities. ”

“ We go eastward to realize history and study the works of art and literature, retracing the steps of the race; we go westward as into the future, with a spirit of enterprise and adventure. The Atlantic is a Lethean stream, in our passage over which we have had an opportunity to forget the Old World and its institutions. ”

“ The surly Atlantic keeps watch over it and growls off the pestilent crowd of excursionists who bring uncleanness and greediness in their train, and are pursued by the land-sharks who prey upon such frivolous flying-fish. A little town, whose life stands still, or rather goes backward, whose ships have sailed away to other ports, whose inhabitants have followed the ships, and whose houses seem to be going after the inhabitants ”

“ After teaching for three years in New York City, he took to writing stories for youth and edited a magazine in their interest. From 1890 to 1898 he edited The Atlantic Monthly, and became a resident of Cambridge, Mass. ”

“ At last, one morning, at daybreak, I went on deck, and saw the shores of England. Only a few days before, we had left America behind us, brown and leafless, just emerging from the long gloom of winter; and now the slopes of another world arose green and inviting in the flush of spring. There was a bracing breeze; the dingy waters of the Mersey rolled up in wreaths of beauty; the fleets of ships, steamers, sloops, lighters, pilot-boats, bounding over the waves, meeting, tacking, plunging, swaying gracefully under the full-swelling canvas, presented a picture of wonderful animation ”

“ What we really wish for is a mind equal to any exigency. You are safe in your rural district, or in the city, in broad daylight, amidst the police, and under the eyes of a hundred thousand people. But how is it on the Atlantic, in a storm? Do you understand how to infuse your reason into men disabled by terror, and to bring yourself off safe then?—how among thieves, or among an infuriated populace, or among cannibals? ”

“ To do this, the surroundings must be such that none shall be conscious of restraint, but that every one, with homely ease, may act out his own peculiar nature. In short, you must make ready for them another Atlantic, in all things but breadth like its grand prototype. ”

“ At what period the Atlantic was first crossed by man it is impossible now to conjecture. It was nevertheless navigated in very early times, and was a sea of light, though at the dawn of history it appears as the "Sea of Darkness," inspiring no little apprehension and dread ”

“ The more purely literary Atlantic Monthly, which was founded in 1857 by a small circle of Boston friends, Lowell, Longfellow, Emerson, Holmes, Whittier, and Motley, and which has always attracted the best talent of the country, is most nearly comparable to the Revue des Deux Mondes. Every monthly paper specially cultivates that literary form for which America has shown the most pronounced talent—the essay. The magazine essay entirely takes the place of the German brochure, a form which is almost unknown in America. ”

“ But in America, owing to our brighter skies and more fervid climate, we have developed an acute, nervous delicacy of temperament far more akin to that of France than of England.
Half of the recipes in our cook-books are mere murder to such constitutions and stomachs as we grow here. We require to ponder these things, and think how we in our climate and under our circumstances ought to live, and in doing so, we may, without accusation of foreign foppery, take some leaves from many foreign books. ”

“ November 1866 in The Atlantic Monthly: Chapters IV - V, featured in Volume 17, Number 99 of The Atlantic Monthly. (January 1866) Chapters VI - VIII, featured in Volume 17, Number 100 of The Atlantic Monthly. (February 1866) Chapters IX - XIV, featured in Volume 17, Number 101 of The Atlantic Monthly. (March 1866) Chapters XXVIII - XXXI, featured in Volume 18, Number 105 of The Atlantic Monthly. (July 1866) Chapters XXXII - XXXVIII, featured in Volume 18, Number 106 of The Atlantic Monthly. (August 1866) Chapters XXXIX - XL, featured in Volume 18, Number 107 of The Atlantic Monthly. ”

“ July 12th.—We have been having a week of bad weather: constant rain, night and day. This is certainly at once the brightest and the blackest spot in New England. The skies can smile, assuredly; but how they can frown! I have been painting rather languidly, and at a great disadvantage, at my window. . . . . Through all this pouring and pattering, Miss Blunt sallies forth to her pupils. She envelops her beautiful head in a great woollen hood, her beautiful figure in a kind of feminine Mackintosh; her feet she puts into heavy clogs, and over the whole she balances a cotton umbrella. ”

“ The sounds which the ocean makes must be very significant and interesting to those who live near it. When I was leaving the shore at this place the next summer, and had got a quarter of a mile distant, ascending a hill, I was startled by a sudden, loud sound from the sea, as if a large steamer were letting off steam by the shore, so that I caught my breath and felt my blood run cold for an instant, and I turned about, expecting to see one of the Atlantic steamers thus far out of her course ”

“ Our own waters have, it may be, exhibited spectacles as graceful, though less known to fame. Never may I forget the bevy of bright maidens who under my pilotage buffeted on many a summer's day the surges of Cape Ann, learning a wholly new delight in trusting the buoyancy of the kind old ocean and the vigor of their own fair arms. ”

“ There is an influence in the season that makes it almost impossible for me to bring my mind down to literary employment; perhaps because several months' pretty constant work has exhausted that species of energy,—perhaps because in spring it is more natural to labor actively than to think. But my impulse now is to be idle altogether,—to lie in the sun, or wander about and look at the revival of Nature from her deathlike slumber, or to be borne down the current of the river in my boat. ”

“ And, in truth, I begin to think I must be mad, when I find myself, like the man shut up with eleven obstinate jurymen, alone in thinking England a gay, beautiful, happy country, teeming with every gratification of art or nature, and inhabited by a manly, generous, and intelligent race; and that life in Paris, as Americans live it, is a senseless rush after excitement, where comfort is abandoned for unreal luxury, and society for vicious boon-companionship. ”

“ For any form of locomotion less winged than skating and dancing the feet of American girls have hitherto seemed somehow unfitted by Nature. There is every abstract reason why they should love walking, on this side of the Atlantic: there is plenty of room for it, the continent is large ”

“ Handsome, well-dressed girls, with a few polygynic young men in the usual island proportion of the sexes, came out of the cottages, and stood in the lanes talking and laughing, or walked to the edge of the bluff to see the sun go down. We rubbed our eyes. Was this real, or were we looking into some showman's box? It seemed like the Petit Trianon adapted to an island in the Atlantic, with Louis XV. and his marquises playing at fishing instead of farming. ”

“ Such hospitality as that island has seen there has not been the like of in these our New England sovereignties. There is nothing in the shape of kindness and courtesy that can make life beautiful, which has not found its home in that ocean-principality. ”

“ They have a rule and a routine, which they follow with as little variety as other people do their rule and routine, and when once we have fathomed their mystery, nothing can be more wearisome. An innate perception and reflection of truth give the only sort of originality that does not finally grow intolerable.
Sept. 4.—I made a voyage in the Pond-Lily all by myself yesterday morning, and was much encouraged by my success in causing the boat to go whither I would. ”

“ In fine, the effects observed in our autumn foliage may be traced in the people themselves, a heightening of colors; and while this accounts for much that is prurient and bizarre, it infolds also the best promise of America. ”

“ And poor indeed must be that New-England village's October which has not the Maple in its streets. This October festival costs no powder, nor ringing of bells, but every tree is a living liberty-pole on which a thousand bright flags are waving. ”

“ Sept. 18.—How the summer-time flits away, even while it seems to be loitering onward, arm in arm with autumn! Of late I have walked but little over the hills and through the woods, my leisure being chiefly occupied with my boat, which I have now learned to manage with tolerable skill. Yesterday afternoon I made a voyage alone up the North Branch of Concord River. ”

“ If the magnolia can bloom in northern New England, why should not a poet or a painter come to his full growth here just as well? Yes, but if the gorgeous tree-flower is rare, and only as if by a freak of Nature springs up in a single spot among the beeches and alders, is there not as much reason to think the perfumed flower of imaginative genius will find it hard to be born and harder to spread its leaves in the clear, cold atmosphere of our ultra-temperate zone of humanity? ”

“ It is American in its vast applications of arithmetic; in the facility with which it brings the breadth of a continent within the limits of a summer's ride; in the eloquence which rises to sublimity over mining stock, and dwindles to the verge of commonplace before unmarketable natural beauties. ”

“ This war, these sufferings, these sacrifices, ought to make every American man and woman look on himself and herself as belonging to a royal priesthood, a peculiar people. The blood of our slain ought to be a gulf, wide and deep as the Atlantic, dividing us from the opinions and the practices of countries whose government and society are founded on other and antagonistic ideas. Democratic republicanism has never yet been perfectly worked out either in this or any other country. ”