Besides Cooper, the third decade of the last century brought into notice the poet James Gates Percival, who unfortunately did not de serve the reputation he speedily aequired. A less highly praised poet, Edward Coate Pinkney, is now more interesting on account of his small but genuine lyric vein. The same decade counts among its worthies the indefatigable historiog rapher, Jared Sparks, and the admirable student of Spanish litorature, George Ticknor. Lydia Maria Child, Edward Everett, the elder William Ellery Channing, and Bronson Alcoa also made their appearance as writers; and Poe and Haw thorne published juvenile works that are now very rare. But. perhaps the best-known produc tion of the period is Webster's reply to Hayne, which struck the keynote that was to dominate our literature for the next generation.
Theyear 1831 sawthe establishment of William Lloyd Garrison's Liberator and the publication of Whittier's first book, Legends of New England. Both men were to do a great work for the anti slavery cause. and Whittier in especial was to endear himself to his native section as its true poet laureate. The writer who best represented New York at this period was .Nathaniel Parker Willis, poet, traveler, and journalist. But be, though still interesting, has greatly declined in reputation. The same thing is true of those representative ante-bellum Southern writers, Gilmore Simms, of South Carolina, and John Pendleton Kennedy, of Maryland. who, with Robert :Montgomery Bird, of Pennsylvania, formed a group of romancers inferior indeed to Cooper, yet worthy of being read, at least in their best novels, such as The Yemassee, Horse Shoe Robinson, and Sick of the Woods. Besides these writers, who began their careers in the thirties, we should recall the historian George Bancroft, whose History of the United States re mains eminently valuable.
The Transcendental movement in New Eng,land, culminating in The Dial of the early forties, is, of course, the prime fact of American literary history before the Civil War. Yet many of the writers more or less connected with it, such as the critics George Ripley and Mar garet Fuller, and the poets C. P. Cranch and Jones Very, have long since become mere names to most readers. The poet - naturalist, Thoreau, however, has not only held his own, but gained ground year by year, and Emerson has taken his place with Hawthorne and Poe in the very front rank of American writera. Through out his long life, Emerson was to his countrymen and to many Europeans not merely a great writer but an inspiring seer, and there are not wanting readers to-day who consider him, in his double capacity of philosopher and poet, the greatest of American men of letters. Since the publication
of his Scarlet Letter (1850), this position has been assigned to Hawthorne by the majority of his fellow citizens, while foreign readers have unhesitatingly assigned it to Edgar Allan Poe, whose haunting poems and tales have seemingly exerted a greater literary influence than the works of any other American.
More influential, so far as the culture of the American people is concerned, has been the poetry of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. It has been recognized by the critics that Longfellow's genius was at first overestimated; but critical de preciation has probably been carried too far, and it seems quite likely that the best loved of Ameri can poets will continue to rank not far below the greatest of his contemporaries. Much the same thing may be said of Oliver Wendell Holmes, whose Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858) has lost little or nothing of its popu larity. As a poet also, Holmes, though he may most fairly be called the laureate of Boston, still has a hold upon the heart of the nation, and he should perhaps be better known as a novelist than he is; for his Elsie Penner (1861) is a striking book.
James Russell Lowell, by his Fable for Critics and the first series of The Biylow Papers (1848), had proved himself to he our greatest poetical humorist and satirist before the Civil War be gan. That cataclysm inspired him to write his great. odes, and later he became easily the first of American critics and lettcr-writers, and one of the first of American publicists. Ile is too near us for a proper estimate to be made of his rank in our literature, but it would appear that his fame as humorist, essayist, and epistolary master is secure. Secure, too, seems the fame of those admirable historians William H. Prescott and John Lothrop Motley, although the former's works have suffered through the discoveries of modern investigators. Their junior, Francis Parkman, is, however, generally regarded as their superior, his great series of histories dealing with the struggle between French and English for the mastery of the New World beingas fascinating and at the same time as scientifically thorough as any other modern historical compositions.