least important part of New England's service to the country at large. To all that the Puritan gave us we add this also. We appreciate that in those years of her full strength New England not only wrote our greatest poetry, our best histories, and our keenest political satire; that she not only charmed us with her humor, and led the way in scholarship, but that, besides all this, she gave us men who, in a time of national uncertainty and peril, could lead opinions and control events by their genius for speech."-Ibid., pt. III, ch. 2, p. 236. "There has been but one movement in the history of the American mind which has given to literature a group of writers having coherence enough to merit the name of a school. This was the great humanitarian movement, or series of movements, in New England, which, beginning in the Unitarianism of Channing, ran through its later phase in transcendentalism, and spent its last strength in the anti-slavery agitation and the enthusiasms of the Civil War. The second stage of this intellectual and social revolt was transcendentalism. . . . Ralph Waldo Emerson (180382) was the prophet of the sect, and Concord was its Mecca; but the influence of the new ideas was not confined to the little group of professed transcendentalists; it extended to all the young writers within reach, who struck their roots deeper into the soil that it had loosened and freshened. We owe to it in great measure, not merely Emerson, [A. B.] Alcott, Margaret Fuller, and Thoreau, but Hawthorne, Lowell, Whittier, and Holmes. In its strictest sense transcendentalism was a restatement of the idealistic philosophy, and an application of its beliefs to religion, nature, and life. But in a looser sense, and as including the more outward manifestations which drew popular attention the most strongly, it was the name given to that spirit of dissent and protest, of universal inquiry and experiment, which marked the third and fourth decades of this century in America, and especially in New England."-H. A. Beers, Short hist. of Eng. and Amer. literature, pp. 95-96.—"In 1836, he [Emerson] put forth his first book, 'Nature,' and the next year he delivered an oration on The American Scholar.' Hitherto little had happened to him except the commonplaces of existence; thereafter, though his life remained tranquil, he was known to the world at large. He was greeted as are all who declare a new doctrine; welcomed by some, abused by many, misunderstood by most. Proclaiming the value of self-reliance, Emerson denounced man's slavery to his own worldly prosperity, and set forth at once the duty and the pleasure of the plain living which permits high thinking. . . . He never put himself forward; and yet from that time on there was no denying his leadership of the intellectual advance of the United States. The most enlightened spirits of New England gathered about him; and he found himself in the center of the vague movement known as 'Transcendentalism.' . . . He edited for a while the Dial, a magazine for which the Transcendentalists wrote, and which existed from 1840 to 1844. But he took no part in an experiment of communal life undertaken by a group of Transcendentalists at Brook Farm 1841 to 1847... In 1841 Emerson published his first volume of his 'Essays'; and he sent forth a second series in 1844. In his hands the essay returns almost to the form of Montaigne and Bacon; it is weighty and witty; but it is not so light at it was with Addison and Steele, with Goldsmith and Irving. He indulged in fancies sometimes, and he strove to take his readers by surprise, to startle them, and so to arouse them to the true view of

life. Nearly all his essays had been lectures, and every paragraph had been tested by its effect upon an audience. Thus the weak phrases were discarded one by one, until at last every sentence, polished by wear, rounded to a perfect sphere, I went to the mark with unerring certainty. . . . Emerson's first volume of 'Poems' was published in 1846. Ten years before he had written the hymn sung at the completion of the monument commemorating the Concord fight. . . . This is one of the best, and one of the best known, of the poems of American patriotism. But Emerson cared too little for form often to write so perfect a poem. . . . Following Bryant, Emerson put into his verse nature as he saw it about him-the life of American woods and fields. . . . One of Emerson's poems most richly laden with emotion and experience is the 'Threnody,' which he wrote after the death of his first-born. . Certain of the lectures prepared for delivery in England supplied the material for his next book-Representative Men'-published in 1850. Only two of Emerson's books have any singleness of scheme, and this is one of them."B. Matthews, Introduction to the study of American literature, pp. 96, 100-103, 106.

"While several of those who composed the group of Transcendental thinkers in the Concord circle became more or less noted either for eccentricity or utterance, the most remarkable among them all, after Emerson, was Henry David Thoreau [18171862]. A genuine lover of nature-a naturalist first of all-he was also a philosopher and a poet, too, although a crude one. .. His acquaintance with Emerson began early. In 1845 Thoreau built for himself a cabin on the shore of Walden Pond, and here for two years he lived. . . . It is this experience in his life with its subsequent record which has more than anything else aroused interest in the personality of Thoreau. . . . Walden, or Life in the Woods, contains the story and the thought of these two years; it reveals Thoreau at his best and has long since become an American classic. . . An earlier volume [1849] . . . was . A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers. His journal was... drawn up by others after his death and published.

Various articles by Thoreau were published in The Dial and, through the friendship and assistance of Horace Greeley, in the New York magazines as well as in the Tribune itself."W. E. Simonds, Student's history of American literature, pp. 177-180, 182.

which,

""The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table' [by Oliver Wendell Holmes] has already given evidence that it will outlast 'Elsie Venner' and 'The Guardian Angel'; yet if the miscellanies of Dr. Holmes (1809-94) possess more vitality than his novels, this is in some measure due to the 'Autocrat's' occasional employment of verse. In the 'BreakfastTable' series appeared 'The Chambered Nautilus' and 'The Wonderful "One-Hoss Shay,' with his youthful 'Old Ironsides,' and 'The Broomstick Train,' have retained the firmest hold on the popular memory. Holmes was pleased to trace his ancestry back to Anne Bradstreet, the first American poetess. His own poetry commenced with a schoolboy rendering into heroic couplets from Virgil, and hardly ended with his tribute to the memory of Whittier in 1892. In the standard edition of his works his poems occupy three volumes. Many of them, corresponding to his turn for the novel, are narrative; for story-telling he had a knack amounting to a high degree of talent. His sense of order and proportion is stronger than that of other members of the New England school, and he has a command of at least formal structure. One may not unreasonably attribute this com

mand in part to his studies in human anatomy. At the same time Holmes is beset with the temptation to value manner and brilliancy rather than substance, and he will go out of his way for a fanciful conceit or a striking expression. In the use of odds and ends of recondite lore his cleverness is amazing. He had a tenacious memory and a habit of rapid association, so that as a punster he is almost without a match. However, his glance is not deeply penetrating; he sees fantastic resemblances between things that are really far removed from one another, not so often the fundamental similarities in things whether near or apart. A constructive criticism, however, will lay stress, not on his inheritance of New England provincialism or his slight tendency to be flippant, but on his kindliness, his inexhaustible good humour, his quick and darting intellectual curiosity, and on the appeal which his sprightly moralising makes to the young. It is not a little thing to say of a wit and a power of epigram like this that they were ever genial, and ever on the side of something better than a merely conventional morality." -T. Stanton, Manual of American literature, pp.

294-295; 297.

1830-1890.-Antislavery movement and Civil War. "Uncle Tom's Cabin."-Lincoln.-Whittier. Whitman.- Longfellow.- Lowell.- Many of the early "antislavery men did some of their chief work when the cause they advocated seemed far from public favor. We come to a book produced by the antislavery movement, which suddenly proved that movement popular. This was Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe's (1812-1896) Uncle Tom's Cabin, published in 1852, the year after Sumner had entered the Senate from Massachusetts, and two years after Webster's Seventh of March speech.... At first little noticed, this book rapidly attracted popular attention. During the next five years above half a million copies were sold in the United States alone; and it is hardly excessive to say that wherever Uncle Tom's Cabin went, public conscience was aroused. Written carelessly, and full of crudities, Uncle Tom's Cabin remains a remarkable piece of fiction. The truth is, that almost unawares Mrs. Stowe had in her the stuff of which good novelists are made. . . . Should any one doubt Mrs. Stowe's power as a writer, remembering only that in Uncle Tom's Cabin she achieved a great popular success, partly caused by the changing public opinion of her day, we need only glance at some of her later work to make rure that she had in her a power which, if circumstances had permitted its development, might have given her a distinguished place in English fiction. Her best book is probably Oldtown Folks (1869). ... Mrs. Stowe differed from most American novelists in possessing a spark of genius. Had this genius pervaded her work, she might have been a figure of lasting literary importance. Even as it was, she had power enough to make Uncle Tom's Cabin the most potent literary force of the antislavery days.

and in his inaugural addresses and in the famous Gettysburg speech such a master of simple and powerfully eloquent English, that, aside from his great political services, any account of American oratory or of antislavery would be incomplete with out some mention of him. But Lincoln's historical importance is so great that any discussion of him would lead us far afield. . . . Among the antislavery leaders of Massachusetts was one who, with the passing of time, seems more and more distinguished as a man of letters. John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892), born at Haverhill, Massachusetts, came of sound country stock, remarkable only because for several generations the family had been Quakers. . . . Though Whittier was precocious, and his literary career extended over more than sixty-five years, he was not prolific. He never wrote much at a time, and he never wrote anything long. . . . His masterpiece, if the word be not excessive, is 'Snowbound,' written when he was about fifty years old. . . . Such vividness as distinguishes the descriptive passages of 'SnowBound' appears throughout Whittier's descriptive verse, . . . for example, [in] . . . the 'Prelude which take [s] one to the very heart of our drowsy New England summers. . . . In general, of course, the most popular literature is narrative. So Whittier's Yankee ballads often seem his most obvious works, 'Skipper Ireson's Ride,' for example, or that artlessly sentimental 'Maud Muller.'"-B Wendell, and C. N. Greenough, History of litera ture in America, pp. 284-294.-"At heart Whittier was no more stirred than were the other antislavery leaders, nor was he gifted with such literary power as sometimes revealed itself in the speeches of Parker or of Phillips, or as enlivened Mrs. Stowe's novel with its gleams of creative genius. But Whittier surpassed all the rest in the impregnable simplicity of his inborn temper, derived from his Quaker ancestry and nurtured by the guilelessness of his personal life."-B. Wendell, Literary history of America, pp. 366-367.

"Walt Whitman (1819-1892) was almost exactly contemporary with Lowell. No two lives could have been much more different. . . . The contrast between Whitman and Whittier, however, is almost as marked as that between Whitman and Lowell. . . . The first edition of Whitman's Leaves of Grass appeared in 1855, the year which produced the Knickerbocker Gallery. During the Civil War he served devotedly as an army nurse. After the war, until 1873, he held some small Government clerkships at Washington. In 1873 a paralytic stroke brought his active life to an end; for his last twenty years he lived an invalid at Camden, New Jersey. Until 1855, when the first edition of Leaves of Grass appeared in a thin folio, some of which he set up with his own hands, Whitman had not declared himself as a man of letters From that time to the end he was constantly publishing verse, which from time to time he collected in increasing bulk under the old title. He published, too, some stray volumes of prose,-Democratic Vistas (1871), Specimen Days and Collect (1882-83), and the like. Prose and poetry alike seem full of a conviction that he had a mission to express and to extend the spirit of democracy. which he believed characteristic of his country Few men have ever cherished a purpose more literally popular. Yet it is doubtful whether any man of letters in this country ever appealed less to the masses. . . . Sometimes, of course, he was more articulate. The Civil War stirred him to his depths; and he drew from it such noble verses as 'My Captain,' his poem on the death of Lincoln, or such little pictures as 'Ethiopia Saluting

"Uncle Tom's Cabin was published in 1852. To its unprecedented popularity may perhaps be traced the final turn of the public tide. [See also U. S. A.: 1852: Appearance of "Uncle Tom's Cabin."] Within ten years the conflict between the slave States and the free reached the inevitable point of civil war. The 1st of January, 1863, saw [the] final proclamation of emancipation. . . . We can hardly speak of the Emancipation Proclamation without touching for a moment upon the great name in American history of the nineteenth century. Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) proved himself in the Lincoln Douglas campaign such a master of debate,

the Colors. Even in bits like these, however, which come so much nearer form than is usual with Whitman, one feels his perverse rudeness of style. Such eccentricity of manner is bound to affect different people in different ways. One kind of reader, naturally eager for individuality and fresh glimpses of truth, is disposed to identify oddity and originality. Another kind of reader instinctively distrusts literary eccentricity. In both of these opinions there is an element of truth. . . In one aspect he is thoroughly American. The spirit of his work is that of world-old anarchy; his style has all the perverse oddity of paralytic decadence; but the substance of which his poems are made their imagery as distinguished from their form or their spirit-comes wholly from his native country. In this aspect, then, though probably in no other, he may, after all, throw light on the future of literature in America."-B. Wendell and C. N. Greenough, History of literature in America, pp. 371-378.

"Henry Wadsworth Longfellow . . .was born in Portland, Maine, February 27, 1807. At the age of thirteen, Longfellow printed four stanzas, 'The Battle of Lovell's Pond,' in a corner of The Portland Gazette. Within the next six years he wrote a considerable number of poems for The United States Literary Gazette. By 1833, in addition to text-books for his classes, he had, in various magazines, published original articles, stories, and several reviews; among them an important estimate of poetry, especially the poetry of America, in a notice of 'Sidney's Defense of Poesy' contributed to The North American Review; as well as translations from the Spanish of Manrique and others, with an 'Introductory Essay on the Moral and Devotional Poetry of Spain' (1833). 'Outre-Mer,' first published as a series of sketches, appeared in book form in 1835, 'Hyperion' in 1839, and 'Voices of the Night' in the same year as 'Hyperion.' 'Voices of the Night' made Longfellow's reputation as a poet; the edition was immediately exhausted. 'Hyperion,' which eventually sold well, though at present it is not often enough read, was at first unfortunate, the publisher failing before this book had a fair start. Of Longfellow's better known works, published during the latter half of his lifetime, his 'Ballads and Other Poems' appeared in 1841, "The Spanish Student.' in 1843, 'Evangeline' in 1847, 'Kavanagh,' another prose romance, in 1849, 'Hiawatha' in 1855, 'The Courtship of Miles Standish' in 1858, 'The Golden Legend' in 1872, and 'Aftermath' in 1873. The 'Tales of a Wayside Inn' came out in 1863, 1872, and 1873, the First Day separately, the Second and Third Day in company with other writings.... Longfellow was the most popular poet ever brought forth on this continent. . . . "By general consent, Longfellow is our American poet, par excellence, Emerson our philosopher, James Russell Lowell our man of letters. . . . No one, however, when his initial talents are considered, has produced so much poetry as Longfellow; no one in the realm of philosophic thought has been so patiently influential as Emerson; and no qne, not even Irving, had fared well in so many avenues of literature and popular scholarship as Lowell. He was poet, critic, professor, editor, diplomat, patriot, humanist; and withal he was a man and a friend. . . . It is well-nigh impossible to characterise Lowell briefly. An attempt to sum up a personality that chose so many avenues of expression, and that at bottom was not thoroughly unified, can hardly do justice to the component parts. The most striking thing about the man was his fertility, if not in great constructive ideas, at all

events in separate thoughts. What he writes is full of meat. His redundancy is not in the way of useless verbiage; he wants to use all the materials that offer. A less obvious thing in Lowell is what we may term his lack of complete spiritual organization. He lived in an age of dissolving beliefs and intellectual unrest. Though he was not tormented, as were others, by fierce internal doubts, he yet failed ever to be quite clear with himself on fundamental questions of philosophy and religion. He was never quite at one with himself. As a writer, his serious and his humorous moods were continually interrupting each other. Partly on this account, he did not possess an assured style.... The fact is that he wrote mainly for his own time, and was bound to have but a temporary reward. This is not saying that the reward was not worth while. His interpretations of Spencer, of Dante, of Milton, of the elder dramatists, sent to those poets many a reader who would not otherwise have gone; for America, he opened the road in the study of Chaucer; and his own 'Vision of Sir Launfal' has unlocked many a hard heart to divine influences. When he wrote in dialect, as in the 'Biglow Papers,' he was manifestly writing for a time; but in their time the second series did more to justify the Northern cause than almost any other publication that could be mentioned, Whittier's poems not excepted. It may be thought that his wonderful command of dialect, contrasted with a less perfect and less instinctive success in any higher medium, marks him as above all else a satiric poet. When he was once sitting for his portrait, he so denominated himself, speaking generally a bored satiric poet.' Yet were we to name Lowell the greatest of all American satirists, his urgent poems of patrioitism-'The Washers of the Shroud,' the 'Commemoration Ode'-his 'Vision of Sir Launfal,' and 'The Cathedral' would immediately proclaim him something greater than any satiric poet could be. Last of all, nobler than the sum of his writings was the work which he effected in bringing together his native land and the mother country, England, in a bond of sympathy unknown since their separation."-T. Stanton, Manual of American literature, pp. 275-290.

1865-1900.-Literature after the Civil War.Realistic school.-American humor.-"Following the lead of certain great contemporary novelists in Russia, France, and Spain, many of our later fiction-writers have aimed to reproduce, with an unrelieved and unswerving truth and minuteness, just those every-day aspects of American society which their great predecessors instinctively idealized or ignored. A so-called 'realistic' school of fiction has consequently risen up among us, which, according to one definition, 'aims at embodying in art the common landscape, common figures, and common hopes and loves and ambitions of our common life.' In nearly every great section of our huge country keen-eyed observers have been recording in fiction one or another of the almost innumerable phases of American society. Taken together, these studies give to the careful reader a fairly accurate notion of our composite national life. But life in this country is as yet such a roughly-pieced patchwork of local differences, that the novelist who aims at a faithful reproduction of it often gets no further than a study of some particular locality, which he paints over and over again up to the extreme limits of endurance. The last thirty years has given us a long procession of these local studies; it has produced writers who are practically specialists on some particular and often narrow plot of ground. We have had experts on the old lady of the New England village, on the Tennes

sce mountaineer and the plantation negro; or, among the novelists who have taken a somewhat wider outlook, we have had elaborate studies of society life in Boston, Washington, Newport, Philadelphia, or New York. . . . New England has not lacked some notable writers in recent years, some of whom have been clearly leaders in the especial line to which they have devoted themselves. In fiction, New England life, particularly in the country districts and the smaller towns, has been portrayed with minuteness and fidelity by such writers as Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Harriet Prescott Spofford, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Mary E. Wilkins. John Fiske has become widely known as a scientist and philosophical thinker, and more recently as one of our ablest writers on American history. The labors of a group of writers in this last-named field-Justin Winsor (1831-1897), the author of a scholarly and elaborate history of America; Henry Adams, Henry Cabot Lodge, and others—are too important to be passed over. Indeed it may be Isaid here that outside of New England as well as within its limits an increasing attention to our country's history and institutions has been one of the distinctions of these later years. In the South the labors of Professor Herbert B. Adams, of Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, have been instrumental in raising up a school of capable students and historians of our institutions and our past. The Middle States have given us the admirable works of Professor [President] Woodrow Wilson, [formerly] of Princeton University and of John Bach McMaster, Professor of American History at the University of Pennsylvania. . . . One characteristic feature of our recent literature -its humor-we have reserved for a separate mention. Probably no other element in our literature is so distinctly and exclusively American. Imitative as much of our serious work may be, our humor is unmistakably a genuinely national production. Even the English, while their perception of the American joke is apt to be delayed and uncertain, admit that our humor is ours alone. They may call it 'vulgar,' or 'rudimentary,' or 'middleclass,' but they acknowledge that we are at least entitled to say of it, 'a poor thing, sir, but mine own.' A leading English critic and essayist, for instance, writes: 'The Americans are of our own stock, yet in their treatment of the ludicrous how unlike us they are! As far as fun goes, the race has certainly become differentiated.' In fact, humor is a charactertistic element in the American people. Neither our poetry nor our scholarship rests on such a broad basis of popular appreciation Our sense of the ludicrous is not the possession of a limited class; it is a national trait. It declares itself in the funny columns of countless newspapers, in our popular songs, our minstrels, our theatres, our slang: it is stamped on thousands of funny stories that, handed on from one to another, traverse the whole country with wonderful swiftness. No wonder, then, that when some of this popular sense of humor gets into literature we recognize in it marks of a national trait." -H. S. Pancoast, Introduction to American literature, pt. III, ch. 5.

The Jumping Frog and Other Sketches, came out in 1867, Innocents Abroad in 1869, Adventures of Tom Sawyer in 1876, Life on the Mississippi in 1883, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in 1885, Pudd'n-head Wilson in 1894, and Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc in 1895-1896. The earlier work of Mark Twain seemed broadly comic-only another manifestation of that rollicking sort of journalistic fun which is generally ephemeral. As the years... passed, however, he . . . slowly distinguished himself more and more from anyone else. No other .writer, for one thing, so completely exemplifies the kind of humor which is most characteristically American-a shrewd sense of fact expressing itself in an inextricable confusion of literal statement and wild extravagance, uttered with no lapse from what seems unmoved gravity of manner."-B. Wendell and C. N. Greenough, History of literature in America, pp. 421-422.

"I suppose that Mark Twain transcends all other American humorists in the universal qualities. He deals very little with the pathetic, which he nevertheless knows very well how to manage, . . . but there is a poetic lift in his work, even when he permits you to recognize it only as something satirized. There is always the touch of nature, the presence of a sincere and frank manliness in what he says, the companionship of a spirit which is at once delightfully open and deliciously shrewd ... His humor is at its best the foamy break of the strong tide of earnestness in him. But it would be limiting him unjustly to describe him as a satirist; and it is hardly practicable to establish him in people's minds as a moralist; he has made them laugh too long.... I prefer to speak of Mr. Clemens's artistic qualities because it is to these that his humor will owe its perpetuity. . . . He portrays and interprets real types, not only with exquisite appreciation and sympathy, but with a force and truth of drawing that makes them permanent. . . . One of the characteristics I observe in him is his sin leminded use of words. . . . He writes English as if it were a primitive and not a derivative language The result is the English in which the most vital works of English literature are cast. . . . What you will have in him is a style which is as persona as biographical as the style of any one who has written, and expresses a civilization whose courage of the chances, the preferences, the duties, is not the measure of its essential modesty. It has a thing to say, and it says it in the word that may be the firs or second or third choice, but will not be the in strument of the most fastidious ear, the most de icate and exacting sense, though it will be the word that surely and strongly conveys intention from the author's mind to the reader's. It is the Abraham Lincolnian word, . . . it is American, Western."-W. D. Howells, My Mark Twain, pp 140141, 143, 169-170.

"Among the representatives of the 'New South, Sidney Lanier (1842-81), musician, poet, teacher of English, is easily foremost The poor recep

tion given to his 'Tiger Lilies' (1867), a nove. based on experiences in the army, did not dis hearten him. In 1875 he definitely announced himself by his poem entitled 'Corn,' published in Lippincott's Magazine, a vision of the South restored through agriculture. This brought him the oppor tunity of writing the 'Centennial Cantata' for the Philadelphia Exposition, where he expressed the faith he now had in the future of the reunited na tion. The Cantata finished, he immediately be gan a much longer centennial ode, his 'Psalm of the West' (1876), which appeared in Lippincott Magazine, and which, with 'Corn' and 'The Sym phony,' made part of a small volume published in

"Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 'Mark Twain,' (1835-1910), after an apprenticeship to a printer, became a pilot on the Mississipi River in 1851. Later he tried mining, and still later journalism in California. Thence he removed to Hawaii, and finally to Hartford, Connecticut. . . . In 1884 he founded the publishing firm of C. L. Webster & Company; he lost heavily by its failure. His subsequent labor to pay its debts suggests the similarly heroic efforts of Sir Walter Scott. His first book,

the autumn of 1876. Lanier's important critical works were the product of the years between 1876 and his death. Some three years after he died, his poems were collected and edited by his wife If we had to rely upon one poem to keep alive the fame of Lanier, thinks his biographer, Mr. Edwin Mims, we 'could single out "The Marshes of Glynn" with assurance that there is something so individual and original about it, and that, at the same time, there is such a roll and range of verse in it, that it will surely live not only in American poetry but in English. He is the poet of the marshes as surely as Bryant is of the forests.'"-T. Stanton, Manual of American literature, pp. 272-274.

1894-1915. Significant phases.-Howells and James. "The death of Holmes in the fall of 1894, following fast upon the deaths of Whittier and of Parkman and of Lowell, marked the close of an epoch. The leaders of the great New England group of authors had gone; and the period of American literature which they had made illustrious was completed In the first half of the nineteenth century the literary center of the United States had been in New York, where were Irving and Cooper, Bryant, Halleck, and Drake. Toward the middle of the century the literary center had shifted to Boston, in which city or in its immediate vicinity were the homes of Emerson, Longfellow, Whittier, Holmes, Parkman, Lowell, and Thoreau. When these had departed they left no successors there of the same relative influence. The nation has been spreading so fast and the men of letters are so scattered, that there is in the last years of the nineteenth century no single group of authors whose position at the head of American literature is beyond question. . . . The example set by Irving has been followed by writers who happened to have special knowledge of this or that portion of the country, until there is now hardly a corner of the United States which has not served as the scene of a story of some sort. Many of these local fictions are short stories, but some of them are long novels. As was natural, New England is the portion which has been most carefully explored. But of late the young writers of the South and of the West have been almost more successful in this department of literature than the writers of New England and of New York In story and in sketch we have had made known to us the Southern gentleman of the old school, the old negro body-servant, the field hand, and the poor white. In like manner we have had faithfully observed and honestly presented to us the more marked types of Western character. What gives its real value to these studies of life in the South and in the West is that they are studies of life, that they have the note of sincerity and of reality, that they are not vain imaginings merely, but the result of an earnest effort to see life as it is and to tell the truth about it-the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Many of these Southern and Western tales, even more than the New York and New England tales on which they are modeled, abound in humor, which sometimes refines itself into delicate character-drawing, and which sometimes breaks out into more hearty fun. Franklin was perhaps the earliest of American humorists; after him came Irving, and then Lowell; and they have to-day many followers not unworthy of them.

"The earlier American historians, Prescott and Motley and Parkman, have also many not unworthy followers, working to-day as loyally as did their great predecessors. At no time since the United States became an independent nation has there been greater interest in historical study. At no time have more able writers been devoting

themselves to the history of our own country. Although we have now no essayist of the stipulating force of Emerson, and no critic with the insight and the equipment of Lowell, yet there is no lack of delightful essayists and of accomplished critics. Indeed, the general level of American criticism has been immensely raised since the days of Poe. American critics are far more self-reliant at the end of the nineteenth century than they were at the beginning. They have lost the colonial attitude, for they no longer look for light across the Atlantic to England only. They know now that American literature has to grow in its own way and of its own accord. Yet they are not so narrow as they were, and they are ready to apply far higher standards. An American poet or novelist or historian is not now either unduly praised or unduly condemned merely because he is an American. He is judged on his own merits, and he is compared with the leading contemporary, writers of England and of France, of Germany, of Italy. and of Spain. It is by the loftiest standards of the rest of the world that American literature must hereafter be measured "-B. Matthews, Introduction to the study of American literature, p. 229-233.

"One who compares American literature of the last fifty years with that of the preceding half century will be struck first of all by the scarcity of great writers, the very large number of minor authors, and the high average of talent shown, especially in prose. This literary talent is well distributed, New England and the Middle States having lost the preeminence they once had. The lack of a literary metropolis deprives American authors of a valuable stimulus and hinders an all-American point of view; yet the fact that our men of letters work alone, or in literary centres far apart in space and widely different in temper and traditions, encourages originality and the use of varied material; and if we ever have a more unitary and national literature, these pictures of local conditions in North, South, and West will prove to have been of much value as preliminary studies. Largely because of such studies there has emerged another marked feature of the new literature, its Americanism in subject and spirit. While American writers are more cosmopolitan than ever before in the sense of being open to the cultures of the world, foreign influence as a whole is relatively less apparent than formerly, and American literature is much more the product of American soil This is due in part to the Civil War, which brought the country to a new sense of its power and even of its fundamental unity, for during that struggle the men of the East and the West and the South came to know one another better, recognizing in comrades and foes alike a common Americanism. The fading away of the Old South as a result of the war, and the disappearance of the most picturesque features of the West in the recent rapid expansion of population and wealth, gave a heightened value to these aspects of American life in the eyes of writers and readers. To these causes has been added of late a growing feeling of independence, the natural result of greater maturity and power. The present generation cares less than did its forefathers for the censure or the approval of Europe, and is rather amused than irritated by Old World misunderstanding and condescension, feeling that if it has much to learn it has also much to teach."-W. C. Bronson, Short history of American literature, p. 282-283

"It is in accordance with the spirit of the time that recent tendencies in novel writings are in the direction of realism and character analysis. T1