inculcates are always noble. Little Women (1867) and An Old-Fashioned Girl were the most successful of her many stories. Moods, an early work, marked by the uncertain touch of a tyro, is exceptional among her productions, because of its morbid sentiment.

Miss Alcott's Life and Letters throws interesting sidelights upon the contemporary life of Concord and Boston, and discloses the heroic struggles which won her literary

success.

Mrs. Adeline Dutton Train Whitney has written much fiction treating of the development of character in girls, expounding practical philanthropy, and tinged with the author's theological mysticism. The moral purpose of her books is more commendable than her literary style. This is often too colloquial for elegance. However, it is full of sprightly, kindly humor; and her best books bristle with terse, familiar aphorisms of every-day life. A Summer in Leslie Goldthwaite's Life, Faith Gartney's Girlhood, The Gayworthys, Hitherto, and Sights and Insights, well represent her work. At her best, she is a vivacious narrator, with genuine gifts of characterization. She has published several collections of verse, mainly religious and contemplative in tone. Mother Goose for Grown Folks (1860) has decided cleverness, and transcends the commonplace both in witty parody and tenderness of feeling.

Edward Payson Roe (1838-1888) was a voluminous and popular writer of books which are lacking in the first principles of modern realism, and yet appeal strongly to the sympathies of the middle classes by their hearty support of fundamental, every-day morality. The ideal world which Mr. Roe represents puts all its rewards within the

reach of industry and integrity. There is, however, no morbidness, no sophistry, in his pages. He is frankly a lay-preacher, commonplace in style, but honest and genial in aim.

In this chapter we have considered

1. Nathaniel Hawthorne. - 2. Edgar Allan Poe.-3. Josiah Gilbert Holland. 4. Edward Everett Hale.

5. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps-Ward.-6. Louisa M. Alcott. 7. Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney.-8. Edward Payson Roe.

CHAPTER VI.

THE POETS OF AMERICA.

THE literary activity of Boston was by no means confined to the theological subjects which had been first discussed there.

The North American Review was established in 1815 by the Anthology Club, under the editorship of William Tudor (17991830), a Harvard graduate, and author of the Life of James Otis (1823), and Gebel Teir (1829). The latter is a clever description of the politics of nations, under the allegory of a council of birds on a mountain in Africa. Mr. Tudor was the author of three-fourths of the first four volumes of the North American.

Richard Henry Dana (1787-1879), a descendant of Anne Bradstreet, was born at Cambridge. He was a member of the Anthology Club, and from the first took an interest in the North American Review, being associate editor with his cousin, Edward T. Channing, in 1818–1820. He began a periodical called The Idle Man in 1821, but stopped after the first six numbers, discouraged by lack of recognition. Bryant and Washington Allston generously assisted his efforts to raise a higher American standard of literary excellence. The creative instinct in the poet was not strong enough to overcome his sensitiveness and reserve. The Buccaneer, a poem of sober theme in the ballad style, was published in 1827, and two volumes of miscellaneous writings appeared in 1850, comprising most of his essays and review articles. Mr. Dana took an active part in the Unitarian controversy (1825–1835), and delivered a course of lectures on Shakespeare in the prin

cipal cities of the United States (1839-1840). He also wrote two novels, Tom Thornton and Saul Fenton.

Various influences at this time combined to develop a number of poets, who endeared themselves to the public by their sentiment or their patriotism. They sprang up in all parts of the country.

James Gates Percival's The Coral Grove, New England, and Seneca Lake; Charles Sprague's Shakespeare Ode, and the poem on Curiosity; the poems of N. P. Willis and George P. Morris; the lyrics of E. C. Pinkney, and C. F. Hoffman have all received merited admiration. The Star Spangled Banner was written by Francis Scott Key during a short imprisonment in the War of 1812. The Old Oaken Bucket, by Samuel Woodworth; Home, Sweet Home, by John Howard Payne; My Life is Like a Summer Rose, by R. H. Wilde; and I Would not Live Alway, by William Augustus Muhlenberg, keep alive the memory of their authors among the readers of American lyric verse.

BRYANT.

"His poetry overflows with natural religion-with what Wordsworth calls 'the religion of the woods.'"— Christopher North.

"Bryant's writings transport us into the depths of the solemn, primeval forest, to the shores of the lonely lake, the banks of the wild, nameless stream, or the brow of the rocky upland rising like a promontory from amidst a wild ocean of foliage, while they shed around us the glories of a climate fierce in its extremes, but splendid in its vicissitudes."- Washington Irving.

William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878). The village doctor of Cummington, Massachusetts, was the father of a precocious boy who wrote verses at nine years of age, and in his fifteenth year published a volume of them in Boston, under the title, The Embargo; by William Cullen Bryant. The young poet went to Williams College, but left before graduating, in order to study law. In the North American Review of September, 1817, appeared his Thanatopsis, of which an English critic says: "Had Bryant written nothing else, this poem would have embalmed his mem

ory. Wordsworth has written nothing of the same sort to surpass it." The Ages was delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society in 1822. The poet abandoned the law in 1825, went to New York, edited successively the New York Review and Athenæum Magazine and the United States Review and Literary Gazette, also a short-lived annual, The Talisman. In these publications much of his criticism and some of his best poems appeared; among them The Death of the Flowers, The Disinterred Warrior, The African Chief, and the Indian Girl's Lament. In 1826 Bryant became connected with the Evening Post; in 1829 he was made its editor-in-chief. In its columns, till the end of his years, he earnestly advocated good government, free trade, and high standards of literature and art. He varied his laborious days by tours in Europe, the West and South, and the West Indies. The English edition of his poems in 1832 was brought about by the joint efforts of Verplanck and Irving. Irving wrote a preface, and consented to have his name appear on the title-page as the editor, although he was at the time personally unacquainted with Bryant. Bryant's translation of the Iliad is due to the generous importunity of his brother-poets, Longfellow and Lowell, who so much admired a fragment published in the Atlantic that they urged the undertaking, serious as it seemed to a man of seventy. It was successfully finished in 1869, and was followed by the Odyssey in 1871.

Bryant stands almost alone among American authors in the finish and repose of his poetry. He shows a love of Nature so great that it has everything of passion except the warmth. He was a loving follower of Wordsworth. The poet was a precise and pitiless critic. He has rendered substantial services to American prose by refusing