entury; no European standard of comparison is too
high for him; he belongs with Pascal, with Augustine, if you like, with
Dante. But his great treatises written in the Stockbridge woods are
known only to a few technical students of philosophy. One terrible
sermon, preached at Enfield in 1741, is still read by the curious; but
scarcely anybody knows of the ineffable tenderness, dignity, and pathos
of his farewell sermon to his flock at Northampton: and the Yale
Library possesses nearly twelve hundred of Edwards's sermons which have
never been printed at all. Nor does anybody, save here and there an
antiquarian, read Shepard and Hooker and Mayhew. And yet these
preachers and their successors furnished the emotional equivalents of
great prose and verse to generations of men. "That is poetry," says
Professor Saintsbury (in a dangerous latitudinarianism, perhaps!),
"which gives the reader the feeling of poetry." Here we touch one of
the fundamental characteristics of our national state of mind, in its
relation to literature. We are careless of form and type, yet we crave
the emotional stimulus. Milton, greatest of Puritan poets, was read and
quoted all too seldom in the Puritan colonies, and yet those colonists
were no strangers to the emotions of sublimity and awe and beauty. They
found them in the meeting-house instead of in a book; precisely as, in
a later day, millions of Americans experienced what was for them the
emotional equivalent of poetry in the sermons of Henry Ward Beecher and
Phillips Brooks. French pulpit oratory of the seventeenth century wins
recognition as a distinct type of literature; its great practitioners,
like Massillon, Bourdaloue, Bossuet, are appraised in all the histories
of the national literature and in books devoted to the evolution of
literary species. In the American colonies the great preachers
performed the functions of men of letters without knowing it. They have
been treated with too scant respect in the histories of American
literature. It is one of the penalties of Protestantism that the
audiences, after a while, outgrow the preacher. The development of the
historic sense, of criticism, of science, makes an impassable gulf
between Jonathan Edwards and the American churches of the twentieth
century. A sense of profound changes in theology has left our
contemporaries indifferent to the literature in which the old theology
was clothed.

There is one department of American literary producti