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time editor, and has written largely in other periodicals. His favourite subjects are connected with French literature and political history and economy.

Hugh S. Legaré was equal to Edward Everett in classical scholarship, and superior in the vigour and chasteness of his style. Some of his contributions to the New York and Southern Quarterly Reviews have scarcely been excelled for accuracy of investigation and comprehensiveness of views. There was not however much variety in his subjects or his manner.

The Rev. Dr. Gilman, formerly a frequent contributor to the North Ameri'an Review, and the author of that graphic and humorous picture of rural manners, the Memoirs of a New England Village Choir, has written forcibly and with taste upon many subjects connected with philosophy and general literature.

Of contemporary philosophical essayists Ralph Waldo Emerson is the most distinguished. He is an original and independent thinker, and commands attention both by the novelty of his views and the graces and peculiarities of his style. He perceives the evils in society, the falsehoods of popular opinions, the unhappy tendencies of common feelings; and is free from vulgar cant and enslaving prejudice. Mr. Emerson is the leader of a considerable party, which is acquiring strength from the freshness and independence of its litera

ture.

Mr. Orestes A. Brownson is bold and powerful, and I suppose honest, notwithstanding his want of consistency. Conscious of the possession of great abilities, conscious of the validity of certain claims he has to unattained good reputation and happiness, he has sought for both through almost every variety of action and opinion, always thinking himself right, though nearly always, as he has been doomed to learn, in the wrong. He is an exceedingly voluminous writer, in religion and politics as well as in metaphysics, and his works, if collected and chronologically printed, from Charles Elwood down to his last speech in defence of the Roman religion, would present the most remarkable and interesting of psychological histories.

Mr. George P. Marsh is one of our most learned essayists, and his writings are as much distinguished for good sense and acuteness as for scholarship. They are also marked by a thorough nationality.

C. C. Felton, Greek Professor in Harvard University, is one of the principal writers for the North American Review, and is a discriminating critic. His style is brilliant and pointed.

The Rev. Dr. Hawks has an easy and copious style, skill in analysis, accurate acquaintance with history, caustic wit, and a uniform heartiness of purpose, which make him a powerful as well as an attractive character writer.

Francis Bowen, editor of the North American Review, is a clear, forcible, independent thinker, and has much precision and energy of style. His contributions on metaphysical subjects, and on the principles of law and government, are of a very high character. He is a man of large acquirements both in literature and philosophy.

George S. Hillard is one of the most polished writers of New England. His taste is fastidious, and he is a fine rhetorician. He excels in arrangement and condensation, and has an imaginative expression. Of his numerous articles in the North American Review one of the most brilliant is on Prescott's Conquest of Mexico, but I think the happiest of his essays is that on the Mission of the Poet, read before the Phi Beta Kappa Society.

Charles Sumner, though still a young man, is widely known for the extent of his legal knowledge and his general attainments. His style is rapid and energetic, with much fulness of thought and illustration. He has a great deal of enthusiasm and courage, as is shown by his discourse on the True Grandeur of Nations.

Mr. Tuckerman's appreciation of the beautiful seems instinctive, and the style of his criticisms is unaffected, flowing, and graceful. His Thoughts on the Poets contain passages which are the perfection of that sort of writing. He has manly sense, and tenderness without mawkish sentiment, and a just contempt of prudery and hypocrisy. His generous warmth and independence may serve in some degree to counteract in this country the sordid and calculating spirit of the age.

Mr. E. P. Whipple is one of our youngest and most brilliant writers. His papers which have appeared in the reviews and magazines are discriminating and comprehensive, analytical and reflective, and display an extraordinary maturity of judgment.

Respecting Mr. David Hoffman's volumes of pleasant practical morality, Mr. Wilde's ingenious Researches and Considerations concerning Tasso, Mr. Fay's Dreams and Reveries, Mr. Lowell's Essays on the Old Poets, The Analyst of Mr. Jones, and the reviews and other essays on art, literature, philosophy and manners by Dr. Norton, Dr. Bethune, Mr. Hazard, Mr. Parker, Mr. Reed, Mr. Carey, Mr. Hudson, Mr. Simms, Mr. Duyckinck, and many others who have distinguished themselves as essayists and critics, my present limits will not admit any particular commentary.

I shall but allude to our writers of voyages and travels: to the learned, acute and honest Robinson, Stevens, always lively and picturesque, the graphic and

reflective Cooper, the discriminating and humorous Sanderson, the animated and genial Headley, and Cheever, Cushing, Dana, Dewey, Mackenzie, Melville, Miss Sedgwick, Willis, and others, whose journals abroad have delighted the readers of both continents; and with the same brevity I must refer to Lewis and Clarke, Long, Flint, and Irving; to the ingenious and laborious Schoolcraft, to Audubon and Catlin, with their enthusiasm, strange adventure and happy delineation, to Stephens and Norman wandering among the vestiges of forgotten nations in the New World, to the intrepid Fremont, and many beside, who have not only added to the literature of the country by their journals, full of novel facts and important observations, or attractive by the graces of style, but have sown seeds for richer harvests in exposing the subjects and materials for the sculptor and painter, the poet and romancer, scattered from the Atlantic to the Pacific and from the Polar to the Carib seas.

I have yet made no particular notice of the contributions to our literature by that sex who until recently were content to be the subjects and the inspiration of the finest creations of genius. Throughout Christendom woman has assumed new offices and achieved new and unlooked-for triumphs. In fifty years she has done more in the domains of intellect than she had done before in five centuries. When Hannah Adams produced her histories she was perhaps not inferior to any historical writer then in America. Miss Sedgwick followed, with her charming pictures of New England Life, Redwood, Clarence, Hope Leslie, the Linwoods, and other novels and tales; Mrs. Child with Hobomok, The Rebels, the classical romance of Philothea, her elegant Biographies, and volumes of Letters; Mrs. Brooks with Zophiel, so full of imagination and passion; Mrs. Hale with Northwood, and Sketches of American Life; Miss Leslie with Mrs. Washington Potts and her other spirited views of society; Miss Beecher with her profound and acute metaphysical and religious writings; Mrs. Gilman with Love's Progress, her graphic Recollections of a Southern Matron, and other works; Mrs. Kirkland with A New Home, Forest Life, and Western Clearings, unequaled as pictures of manners among the pioneers; Miss Fuller with Summer on the Lakes, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, and her brilliant Papers on Literature and Art; Miss Mackintosh with Conquest and Self-conquest, Praise and Principle, and Woman an Enigma; and Mrs. Embury, Mrs. Sigourney, Mrs. Smith, Mrs. Ellet, Mrs. Stephens, Mrs. Worthington, Mrs. Judson, Mrs. Sedgwick, and

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many others who in various departments of literature have written works honourable to themselves, their sex, the country, and the age.

For a survey of our poetical literature I refer to the eighth edition, recently published, of The Poets and Poetry of America. Not all the specimens in that book are fruits of genius or high cultivation. It was designed to show what had been accomplished in the most difficult field of intellectual exertion in the first half century of our national existence. With much of the highest excellence it includes nothing inferior to some of the contents of the most celebrated anthologies of other countries; and while the whole showed a remarkable diffusion of taste and refinement of feeling, we could point to Mrs. Brooks, Mr. Bryant, Mr. Dana, Mr. Halleck, Mr. Longfellow, and others, as poets of whom any people would be proud.

There is indeed no reason why poetry should not be cultivated here as successfully as in any country. The nature of humanity is the same in all the ages, and man is for ever the theme of the poet's noblest song. Paradise Lost, nor the Inferno, nor Hyperion, nor almost any great poem of any nation is founded on authentic annals. Scriptures are true, and old mythologies survive; the gods. of Greece yet live, the sound of the triton's conch is mingling with the roar of waves, and nymphs still stir the forest leaves; and

Fable is love's world, his home, his birth-place.
Delightedly dwells he 'mong fays and talismans
And spirits; and delightedly believes

Divinities, being himself divine.

The intelligible forms of ancient poets,

The fair humanities of old religion,

The power, the beauty, and the majesty,

That had her haunts in dale, or piny mountain,

Or forest, by slow stream or pebbly spring,

Or chasms, or watery depths; all these have vanished:

They live longer in the faith of reason!

But still the heart doth need a language, still

Doth the old instinct bring back the old names.

But, were there a necessity of local and special influences, the dim vistas which have been opened to us of ancient civilization on this continent, the shadowy views we have of the strange adventure and heroic achievements of the many-charactered colonists who first invaded its different latitudes, and the long and singular wars by which nation after nation was annihilated, offer boundless fields for the heroic bard; while our dark old forests, rivers like flowing seas, and lakes which claim fraternity with oceans, valleys, and mountains, and

caverns in which whole nations of the Old World might be hidden, and climates and seasons which are our peculiar heritage, are prolific of subjects and illustrations for the poetry of description.

Little has yet been done toward an American drama. Plays, to be successful on the stage, must be "abstracts and brief chronicles of the time." Their living principle must be the spirit of the age and people. Whether the swell and surge of our revolution, which cannot even now be said to have entirely subsided, bear to the present fragments that may be completed and reproduced, or contemporary life be represented in the comedy of manners, or subjects of any other period or description be chosen, the drama must still have its chorusses, not written by the author, but evoked by him from his audiences in appeals to their hearts. The weak and wicked policy of the government respecting copyrights, inducing a deluge of the most worthless foreign literature, and placing under a ban most of those who would give utterance to the true voice of the people, is undermining the foundations of our nationality; but the success of the plays of Bird and Conrad, and the failure of those of Longfellow and Willis, show that there still is patriotism enough among us to prefer works with the American inspiration to those of any degree of artistic merit without it. Besides the authors already mentioned, Mr. Hillhouse, Mr. John Howard Payne, Mr. Epes Sargent, Mr. George H. Calvert, Mr. Cornelius Mathews, Mr. Rufus Dawes, Mr. Lawton Osborne, and Mrs. Mowatt, have written dramatic pieces of literary merit, some of which have been acted with considerable success.

The relation of the plastic arts to poetry is immediate, and the shortest survey of our intellectual history would be incomplete without some reference to the noble works of our painters and sculptors. We may point with pride to Copley, many of whose best pictures grace the collections of his native town; to West, every where reverenced by the greatest critics;* Allston who in the world left

Mr. West produced a series of compositions from sacred and profane history, profoundly studied, and executed with the most facile power, which not only were superior to any former productions of English art, but, far surpassing contemporary merit on the continent, were unequaled at any period below the school of the Caracci.-Sir Thomas Lawrence.

In his department Mr. West was the most distinguished artist of the age in which he lived.-Sir Martin Archer Shee.

William Beckford, the finest critic of art in our age, exclaims of Mr. West's Lear: "See how his nostril is inflated, like an Arab's in a thunder-storm! I solemnly declare the figure of Lear is as fine

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