MAIN LIB. Entered, according to act of Congress, in the year 1846, by CAREY & HART, in the Office of the Clerk of the District Court of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. STEREOTYPED BY L. JOHNSON & CO. T. K. & P. G. COLLINS, PRINTERS. PREFACE. THIS volume contains a brief survey of our intellectual history, condition, and prospects, followed by more than seventy biographical and critical notices of authors, chronologically arranged, and illustrated, in most cases, by some fragments or entire short compositions from their works. I have not attempted to describe the merely successful writers, but such as have evinced unusual powers in controlling the national mind, or in forming or illustrating the national character; except in a few instances, in which productions of an artificial and transient popularity are mentioned as indications of dangerous tendencies or influences. With Dr. Channing, I consider books of every description, whether devoted to the exact sciences, to mental and ethical philosophy, to history and legislation, or to fiction and poetry, as literature; though it is common thus to distinguish none but such as have relation to human nature and human life. As a complete and intelligible reviewal of all our authors, however, would necessarily occupy several volumes like this, and involve discussions of many subjects of little interest to the general reader, I have confined my attention chiefly to the department of belles lettres, only passing its boundaries occasionally to notice some of our most eminent divines, jurists, economists, and other students of particular science, who stand at the same time as representatives of parties and as monuments of our intellectual power and activity. It seems necessary to a due understanding of an author's mind, that some of the circumstances of his education and general experience should be known to us. To be able to think with him and feel with him, we must live with him; and to do this with contemporaries is sometimes to invade a privacy which is dearer than fame, though a privacy which to some extent is forfeited by the very act of publishing. In the sketches in this volume, I have endeavoured to keep in view the legitimate scope and object of such performances, to be accurate in statement, liberal in principle, and just in criticism; to select and arrange materials with taste, and to form and express opinions with candour. In discussing the difficulties and dangers in the way of American literature, I have frequently referred to the refusal of our government to protect the copy rights of foreigners, in a manner suggested by attentive personal observation of the influence of the present system. A short time before Mr. Washington Irving was appointed Minister to Spain, he undertook to dispose of a production of merit, written by an American who had not yet established a commanding name in the literary market, but found it impossible to get an offer from any of the principal publishers. They even declined to publish it at the author's cost," he says, "alleging that it was not worth their while to trouble themselves about native works, of doubtful success, while they could pick and choose among the successful works daily poured out by the British press, for the copyright of which they had nothing to pay." And not only is the American thus in some degree excluded from the audience of his countrymen, but the publishers, who have a control over many of the newspapers and other periodicals, exert themselves, in the way of their business, to build up the reputation of the foreigner whom they rob, and to destroy that of the home author who aspires to a competition with him. This legalized piracy, supported by some sordid and base arguments, keeps the criminal courts busy; makes divorce committees in the legislatures standing instead of special; every year yields abundant harvests of profligate sons and daughters; and inspires a pervading contempt for our plain republican forms and institutions. Injurious as it is to the foreign author, it is more so to the American, and it falls with heaviest weight upon the people at large, whom it deprives of that nationality of feeling which is among the first and most powerful incentives to every kind of greatness. Portions of this volume have been prepared hastily. The field surveyed is extensive, and lingering over pleasant portions of it, I may have given to others less attention than was necessary for the formation of accurate opinions. I have in no instance, however, trusted to the reports of others. I have examined for myself, with more or less care, all the works I have attempted to describe, and if in any case I have erred in judgment, I believe I have in none failed to write with entire sincerity. Philadelphia, May, 1847. |