onstant wonder; and throughout his work there is a freshness of
feeling, an air of the open, at once delightful and stimulating. He said
the last word concerning the period which his histories cover, and has
lent to it a fascination and absorbing interest which no historian has
surpassed. The boy or girl who has not read Parkman's histories has
missed one of the greatest treats which literature has to offer.

Other historians there are who have done good service to American
letters and whose work is outranked only by the men we have already
mentioned--John Bach McMaster, whose "History of the People of the
United States" is still uncompleted; James Ford Rhodes, who has
portrayed the Civil War period with admirable exhaustiveness and
accuracy; Justin Winsor, Woodrow Wilson, William M. Sloane, and John
Fiske. John Fiske's work, which deals wholly with the different periods
of American history, is especially suited to young people because of its
simplicity and directness, and because, while accurate, it is not
overburdened with detail.

We have said that, during the Colonial period of American history, most
of the New England divines devoted a certain amount of attention to the
composition of creaking verse. More than that, they composed histories,
biographies and numberless works of a theological character, which
probably constitute the dullest mass of reading ever produced upon this
earth. The Revolution stopped this flood--if anything so dry can be
called a flood--and when the Revolution ended, public thought was for
many years occupied with the formation of the new nation. But in the
second quarter of the nineteenth century there arose in New England a
group of writers who are known as Transcendentalists, and who produced
one of the most important sections of American literature.

Transcendentalism is a long word, and it is rather difficult to define,
but, to put it as briefly as possible, it was a protest against
narrowness in intellectual life, a movement for broader culture and for
a freer spiritual life. It took a tremendous grip on New England,
beginning about 1830, and kept it for nearly forty years; for New
England has always been more or less provincial--provincialism being the
habit of measuring everything by one inadequate standard.

The high priest of the Transcendental movement was Amos Bronson Alcott,
born on a Connecticut farm in 1799, successively in youth a clockmaker,
peddler and book-agent, and fin