Cynthia Griffin Wolff holds the Class of 1922 Professorship of the Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is the author of A Feast of Words: The Triumph of Edith Wharton and Samuel Richardson and the Eighteenth Century Puritan Character.

• * Prologue: The Oven Bird My Fathers House * Samuel and Edward: The Last Jerusalem * Mother and Father: The Fall into Language * School: Faith and the Argument from Design * The 1850s: Apprenticeship and Vocation * Interlude: Context and Subject Pugilist And Poet * The Voice * The Wrestle for Dominion: Gods Supernatural Redefined * Love and the Love Poetry * The Razors Edge: Some Specimen Poems Adieu * The Cosmos as Mirror * Can You Make a World Anew with Words? * Requiem * One of the Ones that Midas Touched