of the incomparable romances which the world was to have perfect from his
hand. Doctor Holmes had surpassed all expectations in those who most
admired his brilliant humor and charming poetry by the invention of a new
attitude if not a new sort in literature. The turn that civic affairs
had taken was favorable to the widest recognition of Whittier's splendid
lyrical gift; and that heart of fire, doubly snow-bound by Quaker
tradition and Puritan environment; was penetrating every generous breast
with its flamy impulses, and fusing all wills in its noble purpose. Mrs.
Stowe, who far outfamed the rest as the author of the most renowned novel
ever written, was proving it no accident or miracle by the fiction she
was still writing.

This great New England group might be enlarged perhaps without loss of
quality by the inclusion of Thoreau, who came somewhat before his time,
and whose drastic criticism of our expediential and mainly futile
civilization would find more intelligent acceptance now than it did then,
when all resentment of its defects was specialized in enmity to Southern
slavery. Doctor Edward Everett Hale belonged in this group too, by
virtue of that humor, the most inventive and the most fantastic, the
sanest, the sweetest, the truest, which had begun to find expression in
the Atlantic Monthly; and there a wonderful young girl had written a
series of vivid sketches and taken the heart of youth everywhere with
amaze and joy, so that I thought it would be no less an event to meet
Harriet Prescott than to meet any of those I have named.

I expected somehow to meet them all, and I imagined them all easily
accessible in the office of the Atlantic Monthly, which had lately
adventured in the fine air of high literature where so many other
periodicals had gasped and died before it. The best of these, hitherto,
and better even than the Atlantic for some reasons, the lamented Putnam's