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Instinctive

Purity.

hardly a passage which anybody would hesitate to put into Cooper's the hands of a child; nor does this purity seem studied. The scenes of his novels are often laid in very rough places, and as a natural consequence many of his characters and incidents are of a rough, adventurous kind; but, with a delicacy as instinctive as his robustness, Cooper avoids those phases of rough human life which are essentially base.

Cooper lived until 1851, and Irving lived eight years longer. As both men wrote until they died, their work might evidently be held to extend to a later period than that in which we are considering them; for here we have treated them as almost contemporary with Brockden Brown, who died in 1810. In another aspect, however, they belong very early in the history of American letters. In 1798, we remember, the year when Wordsworth and Coleridge published the Lyrical Ballads, appeared also Brockden Brown's Wieland. In 1832 the death of Sir Walter Scott brought to an end that epoch of English letters which the Lyrical Ballads may be said to have opened. In that year Brown had long been dead; and both Irving and Cooper had still some years to write. The reputation of each, however, was virtually complete. Irving had already published his Knickerbocker History, his Sketch Book, his Bracebridge Hall, his Tales of a Traveller, his Life of Columbus, his Fall of Granada, and his Alhambra; nothing later materially increased his reputation. Cooper had published The Spy, The Pioneers, The Pilot, Lionel Lincoln, The Last of the Mohicans, The Prairie, the Red Rover, the Wept of Wish-ton-Wish, The Water Witch, and the Bravo. When Scott died, it thus appears, Cooper too had produced enough to make his reputation permanent.

Brown, Irving, and

Cooper.

The three writers whom we have considered-Brockden Brown, Irving, and Cooper-were the only Americans who between 1798 and 1832 achieved lasting names in prose. Though they form no school, though they are very different from one another, two or three things may be said of them in common. They all developed in the Middle States; the names of all are associated with the chief city of that region, New York. The most significant work of all assumed a form which in the general history of literatures comes not early but late,-prose fiction. This form, meantime, happened to be on the whole that which was most popular in contemporary England.

Again, in the previous literature of America, if literature it may be called, two serious motives were expressed. In the first place, particularly in New England, there was a considerable development of theologic thought. A little later, partly in New England, but more in Virginia and in New York, there was admirable political writing. These two motives-the one characteristic of the earliest type of native American, the second of that second type which politically expressed itself in the American Revolution— may be regarded as expressions in this country of the two ideals most deeply inherent in our native language,—those of the Bible and of the Common Law. Whatever the ultimate significance of American writing during the seventeenth or the eighteenth centuries, such of it as now remains worthy of attention is earnest in' purpose, dealing either with the eternal destinies of mankind or with deep problems of political conduct.

Our first purely literary expression, on the other hand, shows a different temper. Neither Brown nor Irving nor Cooper has left us anything profoundly significant. All

three are properly remembered as writers of wholesome fiction; and the object of wholesome fiction is neither to lead men heavenward nor to teach them how to behave on earth; it is rather to please. There is a commonplace which divides great literature into the literature of knowledge, which enlarges the intellect, and that of power, which stimulates the emotions until they become living motives. Such work as Brockden Brown's or Irving's or Cooper's can hardly be put in either category. Theirs is rather a literature of wholesome pleasure.

This prose on which we have now touched was the most important literature produced in New York, or indeed in America, during the period which was marked in England by everything between the Lyrical Ballads and the death of Scott. Even in America, however, the time had its poetry. At this we must now glance.

IV

'WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT

REFERENCES

BRYANT

WORKS: Poetical Works, ed. Parke Godwin, 2 vols., New York: Apple ton, 1883; Prose Writings, ed. Godwin, 2 vols., New York: Appleton, 1884.

BIOGRAPHY AND CRITICISM: *Parke Godwin, A Biography of William Cullen Bryant, with Extracts from his Private Correspondence, 2 vols., New York: Appleton, 1883; John Bigelow, William Cullen Bryant, Boston: Houghton, 1890; (AML) *Stedman, Poets of America, Chapter III. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Foley, 29-34.

SELECTIONS: Duyckinck, II, 186-191; Griswold, Poetry, 171-183; Hart, Contemporaries, IV, No. 76; Stedman, 53-67; *Stedman and Hutchinson, V, 305-325.

DRAKE AND HALLECK

WORKS: Drake's Culprit Fay, New York: Putnam, 1890; Halleck's Poetical Writings, with Extracts from those of Joseph Rodman Drake, ed. J. G. Wilson, New York: Appleton, 1869.

BIOGRAPHY AND CRITICISM: Halleck's Life and Letters, ed. J. G. Wilson, New York: Appleton, 1869.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Foley, 74-75 and 107-108.

SELECTIONS: Duyckinck, II, 205–207 and 209–212; Griswold, Poetry, 204-210 and 212-218; Stedman, 36-40 and 42-47; *Stedman and Hutchinson, V, 216-225 and 363–379.

In the early summer of 1878 there died at New York, from a sunstroke received just after delivering a speech at the unveiling of a monument in Central Park, WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT (1794-1878), by far the most eminent man of letters in our chief city. The circumstances of his death show how thoroughly he retained his vitality

to the end; and his striking personal appearance combined with the extreme physical activity which kept him constantly in the streets to make him a familiar local figure. Yet his first published work-a very precocious one, to be sure,—had appeared before Brockden Brown died, in the same year with Scott's Marmion; and this remote 1808 had seen the Quarterly Review founded in England, and Andover Seminary in Massachusetts. Bryant's "Thanatopsis" had been printed in 1817, the year in which Byron wrote Manfred, in which Jane Austen died, in which Coleridge produced his Biographia Literaria, and Keats the first volume of his poems, and Mrs. Shelley her Frankenstein, and Moore his Lalla Rookh. A collected edition of Bryant's poems had appeared in 1821, the year when Keats died, when the first version of De Quincey's Opium-Eater came into existence, when Scott published Kenilworth and The Pirate, and Shelley Adonais. And incidentally Bryant was for a full half-century at the head of the New York Evening Post, which brought him the rare reward of a considerable personal fortune earned by a newspaper in which from beginning to end the editor could feel honest pride. As a journalist, indeed, Bryant belongs almost to our own time. As a poet, however,and it is as a poet that we are considering him here,—he belongs to the earliest period of American letters.

He was born, the son of a country doctor, at Cumming- Life. ton, a small town of Western Massachusetts, in 1794. At that time a country doctor, though generally poor, was, like the minister and the squire, an educated man, and a person of local eminence; and Dr. Bryant, who was occasionally a member of the General Court at Boston, came to have a considerable acquaintance among the better

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