FOUR AMERICANS
REPRINTS FROM THE
YALE REVIEW
A Book of Yale Review Verse
1917
War Poems from The Yale Review
1918
War Poems from The Yale Review
(Second Edition)
1919
Four Americans: Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman
1919
FOUR AMERICANS
ROOSEVELT
HAWTHORNE
EMERSON
WHITMAN
BY
HENRY A. BEERS
AUTHOR OF
STUDIES IN AMERICAN LITERATURE
A HISTORY OF ENGLISH ROMANTICISM
NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT
PUBLISHED FOR THE YALE REVIEW
BY THE
YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS
MDCCCCXX
COPYRIGHT, 1919, BY
YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS
First published, 1919
Second printing, 1920
CONTENTS
ROOSEVELT AS MAN OF LETTERS
In a club corner, just after Roosevelt's death, the question was askedwhether his memory would not fade away, when the living man, with hisvivid personality, had gone. But no: that personality had stamped itselftoo deeply on the mind of his generation to be forgotten. Too manyobservers have recorded their impressions; and already a dozenbiographies and memoirs have appeared. Besides, he is his own recorder.He published twenty-six books, a catalogue of which any professionalauthor might be proud; and a really wonderful feat when it is rememberedthat he wrote them in the intervals of an active public career as CivilService Commissioner, Police Commissioner, member of his statelegislature, Governor of New York, delegate to the National RepublicanConvention, Colonel of Rough Riders, Assistant Secretary of the Navy,Vice-President and President of the United States.
Perhaps in some distant future he may become a myth or symbol, likeother mighty hunters of the beast, Nimrod and Orion and Tristram ofLyonesse. Yet not so long as[Pg 8] "African Game Trails" and the "HuntingTrips of a Ranchman" endure, to lift the imagination to those noblesports denied to the run of mortals by poverty, feebleness, timidity,the engrossments of the humdrum, everyday life, or lack of enterpriseand opportunity. Old scraps of hunting song thrill us with the greatadventure: "In the wild chamois' track at break of day"; "We'll chasethe antelope over the plain"; "Afar in the desert I love