History of American Literature

hia came to the front with Benjamin Franklin and Charles Brockden Brown. In this third period, New York forged ahead, both in population and in the number of her litera

ands, due to the increasing population, to the decline in colonial provincialism, and to the growth of the new national spirit. Probably no one would have been inspired, twenty-five years earlier, to write a work like Irving's Knickerbocker's History of New Yo

on Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, and William Cullen Bryant. Before we begin to study them, how

AND

on: JOSEPH

rk City in the same year as the English poet, John Keats, in London. Both Drake and Keats studied medicine, and both died of consumption at the age of twenty-five. Halleck was born in Guilford, Connecticut, but mo

roakers, published in 1819, in the New York Evening Post. This stanza from

n in everyt

st, worst,

is a mer

y speech

watch the cro

h's gay ba

s through a

inade th

ch show that New York life at the beginning of the nineteenth century had something of th

that twice

awson's eat

at Goodri

seat is W

ounge is Eas

on's I tak

ares my mu

makes my wh

on: FITZ GR

ed, which would have been promptly discouraged in Puritan New England. We should not be surprised to find that the literature of this period was swayed by the new demands, that it

mpanies entertainment, as the foll

frets at wo

low, sour

e lad whos

perpetu

ike, turns

e years of age. This shows the influence of the English romantic school, and peoples the Hudson River with f

whist, and th

the shelvy

s heard on t

's chirp and th

uze-winge

of the wailing

seen, and ce

te of wai

g spreads h

sky in her g

en by an English poet. Drake did not sing the praises of the English lark and the nightingale; but chose instead an Amer

7), an elegy on the death of a Grecian leader, killed in 1823. America's sympathies went out to Greece in her struggles for independence against the Turks. In celebrating the heroic death of Bozzaris, Halleck chose a subject that was naturally fitted to appeal to all wh

the last arme

our altars a

green graves

your nat

as fitted to arouse the enthusiasm, not of all time, but of an age,-an age that knew from first-hand experience the meaning

the turf a

f my bet

thee but t

thee but t

ical, and the vehicle of more gen

Their verse, unlike the satires of Freneau and Trumbull, does not use the maiming

N IRVING,

on: WASHING

hman from the Orkney Islands, was descended from De Irwyn, armor bearer to Robert Bruce. Irving's mother was born in England, and the English have thought sufficiently well of her son to

ttlers, whom he was afterwards to immortalize in American literature. On his way to school he looked at the stocks and the whipping post, which had a salaried official to attend to the duties connected with it. He could have noticed two prisons, one for criminals and the other for debtors. He

t to the theater. In school he devoured as many travels and tales as possible, and he acquired much early skill in wri

udson River on his own voyage of discovery. Hendrick Hudson's exploration of this river gave it temporarily to the Dutch; but Irving annexed it for all time to the realm of the romantic imagination.

IRVING AT THE A

ters, modeled closely after Addison's Spectator. Ill health drove Irving at twenty-one to take a European trip, which lasted two years. His next appearance in literature after his return was in connection with his brother, William Irving, and James K. Paulding. The three started a semi-monthly periodical c

he outlived her fifty years, he remained a bachelor, and he carried her Bible with him wherever he traveled in Europe or America. In the same year he f

, which added to his fame on both sides of the Atlantic. This visit abroad lasted seventeen years. Before he returned, in 1832, he had finished the greater part of the literary work of his life. Besides the Sketch Book, he had written Bracebridge Ha

new home "Sunnyside." With the exception of four years (1842-1846), when he served as minister to Spain, Irving lived here, engage

his country expressed a desire to see its two wonders, Niagara Falls and Irving. His English publishers alone paid him

pher adds that it was never Irving's habit to stroke the world the wrong way. One of his maxims

NNYSIDE, IRVING'S

bocker, the old gentleman whose sudden and mysterious disappearance has been noticed. It is published in order to discharge certain debts he has left b

this settlement during the Dutch occupation. He was led to choose this subject, because, as he tells us, few of his fellow citizens were aware that New York had ever been called New Amsterdam, and because the subject, "poetic from its very obscurity," was especially available for an American author, since it gav

on: THE OFF

on: A ONE-P

oot two pounds. We watch the puzzled Indians trying to account for the fact that the largest bundle of furs never weighed more than two pounds. We attend a council of burghers at Communipaw, called to devise means to protect their town from an English expedition. While they are thoughtfully smoking, the English sail by without seeing the smoke-enveloped town. Irving shows us the Dutchmen estimating their distances and time by the period consumed in smoking a pipe,-Hartford, Connecticut, being two hundred pipes distan

y the hands of some cunning Dutch statuary, as a model of majesty and lordly grandeur. He was exactly fiv

ed meals, appropriating exactly an hour to each; he smoked and doubted

on: WOUTER

e suggestive of Addison's Spectator. The Sketch Book is the most famous of Irving's works of this class. While it contains some excellent essays or descriptions, such as those entitled Westminster Abbey and Stratford-on-Avon, the book lives to-day because of two short stories, Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. These were not equaled by Addison, and they have not been surpassed by any English writers of the

tion: ICH

willows, over which amber clouds float forever in the sky; where the fragrant buckwheat fields breathe the odor of the beehive; where the slapjacks are "well buttered and garnished with honey or treacle, by the delicate little dimpled hand of Katrina Van Tassel," where a greeting awaits us from the sucking pigs alr

Knickerbocker sketches and stories have invested the early Dutch settlers of New York with something like Homeric immortality. A traveler in Spain writes of The Alhambra: "Not Ford, nor Murray, nor Hare has b

sentation of incident do not usually tend to one definite goal, after the fashion theoretically prescribed by the art of the modern short story. The author of a modern short tale would need to feel the dire necessity of recording the sage observation of a Dutch housewife, that "ducks and geese are foolish things, and must be looked after, but gi

Sleepy Hollow, but the most of this preliminary matter is very interesting description. The quiet valley with its small brook, the tapping woodpecker, the drowsy shade of the trees, the spots haunted by the headless Hessian,-all fascinate us and provide an atmosphere which the modern shor

ages. Others have written of him as a man who once lived but who died so very long ago that he now has no more life than the portraits of those old masters who made all their figures look like paralytics. Irving did not write this work as if he were imagining a romance. He searched for his facts in all the musty records which he could find in Spain, but he then remembered that they dealt with a living, enthusiastic human being, someti

a of the last kingdom of the Moors in Spain. In this account, royal leaders, chivalrous knights, si

en by an American, not because of its originality, but for its exquisitely sym

e of judgment combined with the wisest toleration, the dignity of mind, and the lofty moral nature," which made George Washington the one man capable of leading a forlorn army in the Revolution, of presiding over the destinies of the young Republic, and of

h he will be longest known is his creation of the "Knickerbocker Legend" in the History of New York and his two most famous short stories, Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Although he is not the father of the modern short story, which travels

ith our great West, but the work by which he is best known is so original that no other American writers can for a moment compare with him i

G'S GRAVE IN THE SLE

rles Brockden Brown and the English Gothic school (p. 88), for Irving's fondness for Addison and Goldsmith, in

s of early settlers of New York, we are in a Dutch atmosphere. If he tells the legends of the Alhambra, the atmosphere is Moorish. If he takes us t

ten pass a long time in his company without experiencing fatigue. His style has been criticized for lack of vigor and for resembl

scination of romance. We shall the better appreciate our debt to him, if we imagine that some wizard has the power to subtract fro

MORE COOPE

n: JAMES FEN

story of Indian adventure, how Charles Brockden Brown in Edgar Huntly deliberately selected the Indian and the life of the wilderness as good material for an American writer of romance. Coo

the Cooper family moved to the southeastern shore of Otsego Lake and founded the village of Cooperstown, at the point where the

he boy's imagination, and which still sheltered deer, bear, and Indians. The most vivid local story which his young ears heard was the account of the Cherry Valley massacre, which ha

. The faculty dismissed him in his junior year. It was unfortunate that he did not study more and submit to the restraints and discipline of regular college life;

oy serve a year on a merchant vessel. After this apprenticeship, Cooper entered the navy as a midshipman. From such experiences he gained sufficient knowledge

hich he was then reading to her. She immediately challenged him to try, and he promptly wrote the novel called Precaution. He chose to have this deal with English life because the critics of his ti

f The Spy, which was at once printed. As he still doubted, however, whether his countrymen would read "a book that treated of their own familiar interests," he delayed writing the second volume for several months. When he did start to write it, his publisher feared that it might be too long to pay, so before Cooper had thought out the intervening chapters, he wrote the last chapter and had it printed and paged to satisfy the publisher. When The Spy was publi

: OTSEGO HALL

826, the year of the publication of The Last of the Mohicans, he found that his work was as well known abroad as at home. Sir Walter Scott, who met Cooper in Paris, ment

the most unpopular of American authors. Some of his townspeople cut down one of his valuable trees and otherwise misused the picnic grounds on a part of his estate fronting the lake. When he remonstrated, the public denounced him and ordered his books removed from the local library. He then forbade the further use of his

has been judicially determined. It is

f his countrymen. A friend, trying to dissuade him from publishing such matter, wrote, "You lose hold on the American public by rubbing down their shins with brickbats, as you do." Cooper, however, published the book in 1838, and then there was a general rush to attack him. A critic of his History of the Navy of the United States of America (1839), a work which is still an au

OF LEATHERSTOCKING O

not to aid in the preparation of any account of his life. He died in 1851 at the age of sixty-two, and wa

pleasantly with their fellows than Cooper.... But she counts on the scanty roll of her men of letters the name of no one

arabine (The Long Rifle), and Natty Bumppo. A statue of this great original creation of American fiction now overlooks Otsego Lake. Leatherstocking embodies the fearlessness, the energy, the rug

he order in which they should be read to follow

n parenthesis refer to t

or The First W

ohicans; a Narrat

r; or the Inl

he Sources of the

rie; a T

ion: LEATH

of relating the fall of Ilium, Cooper tells of the conquest of the wilderness. The wanderings or Leatherstocking in the forest and the wilderness are substituted for those of Ulysses on the sea. This story could not have been related with much of the vividness of an eye-witness of the events

COOPER AT THE A

our warmest admiration. The American boy longs to enter the fray to aid Uncas. Cooper knew that the Indian had good traits, and he embodied them in these two red

makes us realize that the life of the pioneer was not without its elemental spirit of poetry. We may feel something of this sp

the devilish Mingos, that can cheat me. I have heard the forest moan like mortal men in their affliction; often and again have I listened to the wind playing its music in the branches of the girdled trees; and I have heard the lightning cracking in the air, like the snapping

tocking Tales, three other roman

of the Neutral

Tale of the

over; a T

r's mastery in telling

e Pilot, is a

and some appeal more to special students than to general readers. Satanstoe (1845), f

33, Morse, the inventor of the electric telegraph, had another answer ready-"Europe is reading Cooper." He said that as soon as Cooper's works

the pioneer. He is not a successful novelist of the drawing-room. His women are mediocre and conventional, of the type described in the old Sunday school books. But

e situations. His plots were not carefully planned in advance; they often seem to have been suggested by an inspiration of the mo

order to retire at eleven, but having reached the point where Uncas was taken prisoner by the Hurons, found the suspense too great, and quietly got the book and read the next four chapters in bed. Cooper has in a pre-eminent degree the first absolutely necessary qualification of the writer of fiction-the power to hold the interest. In some respects he resembles Scott, but although the "Wizard of the North" has a far

LLEN BRYAN

n: WILLIAM C

Manhattan, hunted squirrels in Sleepy Hollow, and voyaged up the Hudson past the Catskills, he would have had small chance of becoming famous as the author of the "Knickerbocker Legend." Had Cooper not spent his boyhood on the frontier, living in

hills of western Massachusetts. In her

wind N. E. Churned. Sev

rn

n. Bryant's religious training determined the general attitude of all his poetry toward nature. His parents expected their children to know the Bible in a way that can scarcely be comprehended in the twentieth centur

just, in Uz had

od and shunned

aughters and his

alth bestowed on

o end," and he cited such expressions from them as, "Let not our feet stumble on the dark mountains of eternal death." From the Puritan point of view, the boy made in his own prayers one daring variation from the petitions based on scriptural s

n: BRYANT AS

e Country which bred Wordsworth. The glory of this region reappears in his verse; the rock-ribbed hills, the vales stretching in pensive quietness

en buds beg

blue bird's

ryant: The Y

he subject matter of his poetry, and his Puri

t the time of his entrance in 1810 had a teaching staff of one professor and two tutors, besides the president. Bryant left Williams, intending to en

ch had secured wide circulation in New England. Keenly disappointed at not being able to continue his college education, he regretfully began the study of law in order to earn his living as soon as possible. He celebrated

of the ru

SIMILE OF RECORD O

rothal prayer, which they repeated together b

ful of our mutual promises of attachment and truth. In due time, if it be the will of Providence, may we become more nearly conne

Violet, The Song, and Green River. This was an epoch-making volume for American poetry. Freneau's best lyrics were so few that they had attracted little attention, but Bryant's 1821 volume of verse furnished a new standard of excellence, below which poets who aspired to the first rank could not fall. D

rofessional author. In 1825 he abandoned the law and went to New York City. Here he managed to secure a livelihood for awhile on the editorial force of short-lived periodic

Evening Post a power in the development of the nation, but his work as editor inter

py his attention after his wife died in 1866, he translated Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, at the nearly uni

BRYANT'S HOME

urnalism and for incorruptible integrity, as well as for the excellence of his poetry. He die

hat Dr. Bryant, the author, had left them at the office, and that the Doctor was at that moment sitting in the State Senate, representing his county. The editor at once dashed away to the State House, took a long look at the Doctor, and reported, "It is a good head, but I do not see Thanatop

osed in my solitary rambles in the woods. As it was first committed to paper, it began with the half line-'Yet a few days, and thee'-and ended with the beginni

production. It is a stately poem upon death, and

om all

waters and the

still

w days,

ing sun shall

uch vastness. The majestic solemnity of the poem and the fin

The

ancient as the

pensive quie

e woods-rive

and the comp

dows green; and,

ray and melan

solemn dec

reat tom

ription for Entrance to a Wood, written in 1815 and published in the same

and stirring branches is al

ects,-all focus our attention on the "deep content" to be found in "the haunts of Nature," and suggest Wordsworth's philosophy of

enters a forest, power seems to come unbidden to his pen. B

in the s

g the summit

mus

divinity that sh

icate for

eath and look s

han the smile of a forest flower. This entire Hymn seems like a great pra

is work finished at that time. At this age, in addition to the five poems in his 1821 volume (p. 139), he had written The Winter Piece, A Forest Hymn, and The Death of the Flowers. These and a number of other poems, written before he had finished his thirtieth year, would have entitled him to approximately the same rank that he now holds

d to earth, sh

years of G

listen respectfully to The Flood of Years (1876), as the final

its elevation, simplicity, and moral earnestness. He lacks dramatic power and skill in narration. Calmness and restraint, the lack of emotion

f calm power an

rneying through t

worth. In the following lines Bryant gives poetic expression to his feeling that a certain m

he beauty

heart and

t of the tr

ght shade of

rest of the Rural

e Wordsworth's Three Ye

r (17

shall lea

a secr

s dance their

born of mur

ss into

"into a strange freshness and life." It is no discredit to him to have been Wordswor

r, stream, animal, and the composite landscape, only as they served to illumine the eternal verities, and the one verity toward which nature most freq

hing that he did, Bryant was a careful workman. Painters have noticed his skill i

and orchard, That bask

dy lake," "marge of river wide," and "the chafed ocean sid

n his verse. The third line of even his poem June brings us to the grave. His great poems are often like a prayer accompanied by

TERATURE O

24), the poet of revolt against the former world, shows the same influences that manifest themselves in the American and the French Revolution. He voices the complaints, and, to some extent, the aspirations of Europe. He shows his influence in Fitz-Greene Halleck's Marco Bozzaris. Shelley, who a

. r

wood from his

om the innum

harmonies that h

ested by Shelley's Ode

lyre, even as

ves are fallin

of thy migh

both a deep a

ature audible to ears which had hitherto not heard them. KEATS (1795-1821) is the poet of beau

beauty is a

radually extend to l

832 to delight the world with his genius as a writer of romances. His influence may be traced in Cooper's work, although the American author occupies an original field. Readers are st

ORICAL FACTS

: in "the manufacture of farms" and in the introduction and use of steam. At the time of the inauguration of Washington in 1789, the center of population of the entire country was thirty mile

country; the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, the rapid extension of steamboats on rivers, the trial of the first steam locomotive in 1828, the increased westward movement of population, which reached Californ

r single cause. At the beginning of his administration, there were no steam railroads, but fifteen hundred miles were in operation before the end of his second term. His predecessor in

ry one felt that he was as good as anybody else, and in the new settlements all mingled on terms of equality. When Cooper came back to the United States in 1833, after an absence of six years in Euro

es. The decade between 1840 and 1850 witnessed the war with Mexico and the acquisition from her of our vast southwestern territory,-Texas, California, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, and some interior lands to the north of these. The South was ch

MM

ond city in the country. Drake and Halleck, two minor poets, calling themselves "The Croakers," issued a series of poems with the principal object of en

tories, of essays like those in Addison's Spectator, and of popular history and biography. He is the first American writer whose works are still read for pure pleasure. Humor and restrained sentiment are two of his pron

ter in fiction. Cooper is also our greatest writer of stories of the sea. The Pilot and The Red Rover still fascinate readers with the magic of the ocean. The scenes of all of his best stories are laid out of doors. His style is often careless, and he sometimes does not take the trouble to correct positiv

tion, simplicity, and moral earnestness. His range is narrow. His communion with nature often leads him to the grave, but no other American poet invests it with as much majesty as is f

era with its strenuous materialistic trend in the administration of Andrew Jackson marked a great change in the development of th

S FOR FUR

TOR

can and English historie

nsulted: Burgess's The

istory of the United Sta

ry of the United States

f the Ameri

TE

s American

tory of Ameri

ory of Literat

nual of Americ

The Age of

f America. (Drake

oetical Writings of Fitz-Greene Hal

eene Halleck's L

ife and Letters of Was

Washington Irving (

rving (304 pages, Ame

rican Essayists, pp

tory in English, pp

re Cooper. (American Men

nimore Cooper. (B

rican Prose Ma

merican Novelists,

ohicans, edited with I

William Cullen Bryant,

nce, 2 vols. (The s

l Works of William C

ullen Bryant. (Amer

en Bryant. (English Me

ri

f a Great Poem (Thanato

mber,

TED RE

kers, in Wilson's editi

tin

lleck may be found in Stedman's American A

ndensed from chapters which he and his brother had jointly written on a different plan.

l also wish to read some tales from The Alhambra, and some of his essays: e.g. Westminster Abbey and

deservedly the most popular, should be read. If a tale of the sea is desired, read either Th

o the Fringed Gentian, and The Poet. All of these are accessible in Bryant's poetical works, and almost all may be found in Page's T

S AND SU

the readers of contemporary New York? Do you find a genuine romantic element in Drake's Culprit Fay? Com

ike the Dutch? Why is this History an original work? Why have Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow been such general favorites? Compare these with any of Addison'

made use of the Indian in literature? Can you find any point of similarity between his work and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow? What are the most st

regard to Bryant's early training and the cast of his mind? Of all Bryant's poems indicated for reading, which do you prefer? Which of his references to nature do you like bes