“ Cooper’s ... work is in no sense a jardin des plantes; it is like the woods and sea that mainly form its subject and substance. Only critical myopia can be blind to the magnificent forest, with its pioneer clearings, its fringe of “settlements,” its wood-embosomed lakes, its neighbouring prairie on the one side, and on the other the distant ocean with the cities of its farther shore—the splendid panorama of man, of nature, and of human life unrolled for us by this large intelligence and noble imagination, this manly and patriotic American representative in the literary parliament of the world. ”

“ It was one of the forces which drove forward that enormous movement of human thought and passion which we describe as the American Revolution; and in each of the great agitations of American thought and passion which have occurred since that time, occasioned by the French Revolution, by the War of 1812, and by the war which extinguished American slavery, this scorching satire against social reaction, this jeering burlesque on political obstructiveness, has been sent forth again and again into the world, to renew its mirthful and scornful activity in the ever-renewing battle for human progress. ”

“ After all the abatements which a fair criticism must make from the praise of Captain John Smith either as a doer or as a narrator, his writings still make upon us the impression of a certain personal largeness in him, magnanimity, affluence, sense, and executive force. As a writer his merits are really great—clearness, force, vividness, picturesque and dramatic energy, a diction racy and crisp; and during the first two decades of the seventeenth century he did more than any other Englishman to make an American nation and an American literature possible. ”

“ More and more the possibilities of American life have attracted the writers of prose fiction. In the earlier decades of the last century, as was the case in Europe, the romance was the only fiction in demand; and the romance has ever been the favourite of many readers who maintain that the chief function of literature is to give reality through the alembic of the imagination. Perhaps the creed of romanticism has never been better put than by Mr. Julian Hawthorne:
The value of fiction lies in the fact that it can give us what actual existence cannot ”

“ For our lack of a national art, a national poetry, a superficial reason is often assigned: in the conditions of a new country, in the struggle for existence, in the development of agriculture and commerce, in the assimilation of foreign races, there has been very little time for the nourishment of letters, very little of that leisure which the Greeks called scholé, and which is indispensable for a productive scholarship and for the flourishing of imagination. Yet we have had, or have taken, sufficient leisure to write and publish an immense amount of verse, judged merely by its bulk. ”

“ Thus it was that early American journalism, even though feeble, sluggish, and timid, began to lift the people of each colony to a plane somewhat higher than its own boundaries, and to enable them, by looking abroad, this way and that, upon the proceedings of other people in this country, and upon other interests as precious as their own, to correct the pettiness and the selfishness of mere localism in thought. Colonial journalism was a necessary and a great factor in the slow process of colonial union. ”

“ As a colourist in words, when he happens not to overdo the impression, his art often seems masterly. Yet if we look closely, even in the much lauded “Commemoration Ode,” his technique is seldom if ever inevitable. His prose is stylistically more continuous than his verse, owing to his experience as an editor. He healed others; himself he could heal at least partially. But even as a prose writer, in spite of his studies in the history of literature, he did not reach the point where science and the understanding are seen to be in harmony with poetry and the imagination. ”

“ No man can adequately explain the persistent fascination which it has had, and which it still has, for the American people, or for its undiminished power over them, without taking into account its extraordinary literary merits—its possession of the witchery of true substance wedded to perfect form:—its massiveness and incisiveness of thought, its art in the marshalling of the topics with which it deals, its symmetry, its energy, the definiteness and limpidity of its statements, its exquisite diction, at once terse, musical, and electric ”

“ As Franklin was by far the greatest man of letters on the American side of the Revolutionary controversy, so a most luminous and delightful history of the development of thought and emotion during the Revolution might be composed, by merely bringing together detached sayings of Franklin, humorous and serious, just as these fell from his tongue or pen in the successive stages of that long conflict: it would be a trail of light across a sea of storm and gloom. ”

“ All things considered, he was probably the most symmetrical example both of scientific and of literary culture produced in America during the colonial time; representing what was highest and broadest in it, what was most robust and most delicate; a thinker and a writer born and bred in a province, but neither in thought nor in speech provincial; an American student of nature and of human nature, who stayed at home, and bringing Europe and the universe to his own door, made himself cosmopolitan. ”

“ Were Poe’s appeals to the external senses more wonderful than they are, he would still lag behind those poets—and in the history of literature they are not after all so few—who can touch every chord, whether sad or joyous, known to the human ear, and still maintain that basis of firm reason without which human communication ceases to be broadly human. The intellect also has its music, lacking which no poetry has ever long survived. ”

“ The vast influence that our early colleges exerted upon literary culture can hardly be overstated. Among all the people, they nourished those spiritual conditions out of which, alone, every wholesome and genuine literature must grow; and in their special devotion to classical studies, they imparted to a considerable body of men the finest training for literary work that the world is yet possessed of. It was of incalculable service to American literature that, even in these wild regions of the earth, the accents of Homer, of Thucydides, of Cicero, were made familiar to us from the beginning ”

“ The first accents of literary speech in the American forests seem not to have been provincial, but free, fearless, natural. Our earliest writers, at any rate, wrote the English language spontaneously, forcefully, like honest men. We shall have to search in some later period of our intellectual history to find, if at all, a race of literary snobs and imitators—writers who in their thin and timid ideas, their nerveless diction, and their slavish simulation of the supposed literary accent of the mother-country, make confession of the inborn weakness and beggarliness of literary provincials. ”

“ From the beginning of the troubles until some months after the first shedding of blood, in 1775, public opinion in America had set strongly in favour of making demand—even armed demand—for our political rights, but without any rupture of the colonial tie. It was, therefore, a period calling for clear and resolute statements of our claims, but with loyalty, urbanity, and tact. To be the chief literary exponent of such a period, John Dickinson was in every way fitted by talent, by temperament, by training. ”

“ No literary production was ever a more genuine embodiment of the spirit and life of a people, in the midst of a stirring and world-famous conflict, than is M’Fingal an embodiment of the spirit and life of the American people, in the midst of that stupendous conflict which formed our great epoch of national deliverance. ”

“ Indeed, barring the work of a mere handful of writers, we find such American humour as is likely to live woven into books which endure for other reasons than because they awaken laughter. For the earliest instance of any importance, we may mention Washington Irving, a writer already discussed as an essayist. He exhibits in various parts of his work a sparkling effervescence which, if a little more spontaneous than that found in The Spectator, is none the less strongly suggestive, like his more serious work, of Addison and Steele, and perhaps also of Goldsmith and Swift. ”

“ The immediate practical effects of this pamphlet in America, and the celebrity which it soon acquired in Europe as well as in America, are a significant part of its history as a potential literary document of the period. In every impassioned popular discussion there is likely to spring up a leader, who with pen or voice strikes in, at just the right moment, with just the right word, so skilfully, so powerfully, that thenceforward the intellectual battle seems to be raging and surging around him and around the fiery word which he has sent shrilling through the air. ”

“ Sometime in the autumn of 1811, his inward eye having been taught to see the operation of a benign258 and healing spirit in the world of nature, this thoughtful youth, now about to begin the study of law, and, as it were, to commence the effort of life, was moved to record his sentiments on the all-pervading fact of death: the universal debt is not an evil; to pay it is as natural as to be born; and to obey the voice of nature, to confide in her will, is the source of human satisfaction. ”

“ By the year 1740, the American students of nature had become a multitude; and from that year to the year 1765, the glory of physical research among us culminated in the brilliant achievements of Benjamin Franklin, whose good fortune it then was to enable his country to step at once to the van of scientific discovery, and for a few years to be the teacher of the world on the one topic of physical inquiry then uppermost in men’s thoughts. ”

“ He was a devoted lover of humanity and life; he was a devoted lover of his art. For him, art and life were one. It is easy for the uninitiated to credit him with a lack of warmth. The fully emancipated are aware what union of fire and self-restraint, of vigour and delicacy, goes to the rearing of a fabric like the orderly and effective career of Bryant.
Like most, or all, great poets, Bryant wrote admirable prose. His essays in criticism have already been alluded to. As a stylist he was indefatigably painstaking even to the smallest detail: “He was not a fluent nor a very prolific writer.... ”

“ In the meantime he had pronounced his speech at the dedication of the National Cemetery on the battlefield of Gettysburg, November 19, 1863. There, devoid of all pretence to rhetorical artifice, yet in the perfection of English style, Lincoln gave to the world a masterpiece of literature, issuing as it were from the life-blood of the people; a masterpiece in which art and life are married, and imaginative and literal truth are become one flesh. Says Mr. Bryce:
That famous Gettysburg speech is the best example one could desire of the characteristic quality of Lincoln’s eloquence. ”

“ Scarcely an American author can be mentioned in the nineteenth century that did not try his hand at metrical composition. The truth is, rather, that we have seldom approached the art of poetry with enough seriousness; that, having rebelled against the Puritan’s unkindly conception of life, we have nevertheless to some extent acquiesced in his belittling estimate of imaginative art; that we have failed to recognise in the poet a necessary servant of the commonwealth, a leader worthy of a high and severe training. ”

“ In dealing with the “poetry of democracy,” it seems to have escaped observation that an age of popular freedom and republican ideals may produce a literature of high refinement and perfect balance between literary tradition and the impulses of the individual author. It is well to remember that the masterpieces of art which ennobled Athens under Pericles were the expression of—for Greece—an age of democracy; and that the epics of Milton, however conventional in one sense, were the outpourings of a nobler champion of liberty than Whitman. ”

“ THE NINETEENTH CENTURY I. THE HISTORIANS Early Dearth of Good Writers.—Among the consciously useful forms of literature there is none in which, by common consent, American men of letters have so uniformly distinguished themselves as in history. Bradford and Winthrop in the seventeenth century are as conspicuous among their countrymen and as respectable before the world as Prescott and Parkman in the nineteenth. Prince and Stith are as minutely conscientious—and almost as dull—as the most scientific of modern students ”