This may be true, and yet it must not be forgotten that the literary world was Cooper's debtor for a new sensation. Leatherstocking and Long Tom Coffin may seem artificial now, but they were vivid pictures once, and the most superior of us have followed their fortunes with breathless interest.* Catherine Maria Sedgwick (1789-1867) was admired in the heyday of Irving and Cooper, and like them won considerable reputation among European readers. She published half-a-dozen graceful novels dealing with life and character in her native Massachusetts, besides some twenty volumes of short stories, essays, criticisms, and sketches of biography and travel. John Pendleton Kennedy (1795– 1870), a native of Baltimore, a lawyer and sometime Secretary of the Navy, produced several successful novels revealing phases of Southern life. Swallow Barn, Horseshoe Robinson, and Rob of the Bowl, though now neglected, won more than transitory reputation. William Gilmore Simms (1806-1870) lived in Charleston, S. C., when that city was a center of literary and social influence. Of his many volumes of poetry, history, biography, and romance, only a few titles have escaped the oblivion which follows the careless and too prolific writer. The same neglect is now the portion of the tales of adventure and incident which brought reputation to John Neal (1793-1876), and of the ambitious historical novels of William Ware (1797-1852). All were too imitative in literary form and too little individualized in human interest to bear the test of time. Richard Henry Dana, Jr. (1815-1882), in his Two Years Before the Mast (1840), held so close to reality and so judiciously excluded prolixities and stilted ornaments of diction as to secure ever-fresh interest for his vivacious narrative. Mrs. Lydia Maria Child (1802-1880), a woman of earnest and beautiful character, while she was still Miss Francis, published her first story, Hobomok (1824). The Rivals next appeared. In 1826 she was married, and for some time confined her attention to juvenile and dramatic literature. Her Appeal in Behalf of that Class of Americans called Africans (1833) was one of the earliest anti-slavery books, and she was editor of the National Anti-Slavery Standard for two years. * Consult Cooper's Life in the "American Men of Letters Series"; C. F. Richardson's American Literature; Lowell's Fable for Critics; The Bookman, March, 1897. Philothea, a Grecian romance of the time of Pericles (1836), and the Progress of Religious Ideas (1855), were her most successful works. Theodore Winthrop (1828-1861), a descendant of Governor John Winthrop and of Jonathan Edwards, was born in New Haven. Delicate, studious, and sensitive, he delayed undertaking serious literary work until the confident hopes of his friends began to take the form of doubt. He had practiced law in New York and St. Louis, had spent two years at Panama, and had been with Lieutenant Strain to Darien, when, in April, 1861, he joined the famous Seventh Regiment of New York. Promotion came rapidly to him, but he was killed at Big Bethel while leading a charge. His novels, all published since his death, give evidence of mental health and enthusiasm. They are crude, however, and, in the opinion of his friends, mere promises of what he would have done had he lived. Cecil Dreeme is a powerful sketch of the darker side of life in New York; John Brent, a breezy story of the plains; Edwin Brothertoft, a romance of the Revolution. The Canoe and the Saddle and Life in the Open Air are reprints of essays and sketches from his note-books and the magazines. Winthrop was an admirer of the Saxon type of body and mind, and endows all his heroes with pluck, persistence, and a love of horse-flesh. Each one of these writers built narratives upon a foundation of classical learning, stirring adventure, or local incident. In no one was the power of invention sufficiently strong to fuse details into a complete and artistic whole. But the United States was soon to welcome - half-grudgingly, it must be owned unquestioned originality. a gifted writer of In this chapter we have considered — 1. Washington Irving. - 2. Fitz-Greene Halleck. - 3. James Fenimore Cooper.-4. Catherine Maria Sedgwick and CHAPTER V. NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, EDGAR ALLAN POE, AND RECENT WRITERS OF FICTION. "Mr. Hawthorne's difficulty seems to have been to find in the vast human workshop of America a frame sufficiently picturesque for the reception of his richly colored pictures."- London Times. "The supernatural here never becomes grossly palpable; the thrill is all the deeper for its action being indefinite and its source vague and distant." - London Athenæum, 1850. "It would be difficult to deny the gift of 'poetic insight' to this mixture of admirable detail with something at once higher and deeper.". - Miss Mitford. "His style . . . is free from mannerism, caricature, and rhetoric; it has a sap and flavor of its own; it is a peculiar combination of ease and finish. . . . By an inevitable law of his mind, every conception to which his pen gave shape was graceful and exact. Before his exquisite sentences verbal criticism folds its hands for lack of argument." - George S. Hillard. "His world was the world of his place and time; but its light and air were those which surround all humanity."— C. F. Richardson. THE most distinctive and certainly one of the strongest features of modern American literature is prose fiction. Foremost among works of fiction ever stands the perfect psychological romance the novel or drama whose interest turns, not on plot or background, but upon the revelation of human minds and hearts. Essentially modern in that his work rises above local and temporary circumstances, and greatest among American writers in his creative gifts, was Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864). The delicate health or morbid heredity of Hawthorne will not alone explain the curious mental bias that makes all his narratives turn on the pivot of conscience and its natural or perverted action. Joined with his analytical insight is a command of all that is quaint, delicate, and suggestive in the English tongue. The result is a literary talent somewhat limited in its range, but wonderfully perfect in its expression. Hawthorne was born in Salem, Massachusetts, was graduated at Bowdoin College with Longfellow, and there became the intimate friend of Franklin Pierce. His life after leaving college was one of seclusion, the beginning of hermit-like habits that lasted all his days. Fanshawe (1828), a romance, was probably the first of his published works, although Hawthorne never acknowledged its authorship. His early efforts to make an income through literature were pathetic. There was little appreciation for the finished work of his pen, until the republication (1837) of some early stories under the title of Twice Told Tales called forth the hearty, discriminating praise of Longfellow in the North American Review. While the public was deciding whether it approved of his somber playfulness of style, Bancroft, then collector of the port, gave the struggling author a place in the Boston custom-house. About this time he joined the group of interesting men and women who were testing their sociological theories at Brook Farm. In the midst of their life, he seems to have been hardly more of it than when his abidingplace was in Salem or Boston. The Blithedale Romance (1852) was his comment upon the experiment, and upon his own lack of sympathy with the principles involved. Hawthorne had been living for three years in his favorite residence, the Old Manse, at Concord, when, in 1846, Mosses from an Old Manse appeared, a collection of papers republished from various magazines. In the same year the return of his personal friends to political power secured his appointment as surveyor of the customhouse in Salem. The Scarlet Letter (1850) found for its author an appreciative audience. A study of fiery passions outlined against a background of New England Puritanism, there is something fantastic in its realism; Nature seems to become dramatic in its overstrained emotion. Meantime Hawthorne had moved to Lenox, where he wrote (1851) The House of the Seven Gables, another novel of somber theme, where the gloom of ancient wrong and hereditary crime is brightened by glimpses of youth, beauty, and happiness. In 1852 Hawthorne was busy with a third series of Twice Told Tales and with a campaign biography of Franklin Pierce. On the election of Pierce, in 1853, Hawthorne was made consul to Liverpool. Seven years spent in Europe were rich in enjoyment and in observation, which is charmingly revealed in the English, French, and Italian Notebooks, also in Our Old Home, a volume of prose sketches. The Marble Faun was the only work of any compass that seems to have had its inspiration there. Hawthorne returned to America in 1860. His life had never been radiant; but from this time it was under a heavy cloud. His health was failing, his country was plunged in civil war, and he had neither heart nor sympathy for the desperate measures of the time. In vain he tried to interest himself in literary work; he never finished any of his undertakings after 1863. Septimius Felton, The Dolliver Romance, The Ancestral Footstep, and Dr. Grimshawe's Secret are incomplete studies found among his papers after his death. Their publication has been of interest, chiefly, as showing the process by which his stories took shape in his mind. The works of Hawthorne stand alone in American literature. Nowhere else is to be found such moral |