James Fenimore Cooper was the first American novelist of note, as he still is the most widely read. His earliest success was The Spy, a tale of the Revolution. His sea-tales, the best of which are The Pilot and The Red Rover, are only rivaled, not surpassed, by those of Marryat and William Clark Russell. Cooper created the novel of the sea and of the backwoods; but in his stories of wild adventure in the wilderness he has no rivals. The hero of the famous Leatherstocking Tales, Natty Bumpo or Leatherstocking, the backwoods philosopher, is Cooper's finest character. Almost as good are his Indian characters, known to all America and Europe, Chingachgook, Uncas, Hist and the Huron warriors. A number of single poems written at this period have kept their popularity, as John Howard Payne's Home, Sweet Home, Samuel Woodworth's The Old Oaken Bucket, Richard Henry Wilde's My Life is Like the Summer Rose and Albert Gorton Greene's Old Grimes. The senate was made illustrious by the speeches of Clay, Webster and Calhoun. Calhoun was greater as a debater than as an orator. Clay's speeches depended so much for their effect on his voice and personality that the mere reading of them reveals only the smoldering embers of the fire once there. With Daniel Webster, perhaps the greatest of English-speaking orators, the case is different. Webster's great underlying thought was the Union, and the power and passion with which this thought is expressed in his speeches made them lasting literature. Rufus Choate perhaps ranks next to Webster, while Edward Everett's speeches are more polished than powerful. William Ellery Channing gave his time and thought to the Unitarian movement in Massachusetts, of which he was the head; but his critical essays on John Milton and Napoleon Bonaparte rank high.
The movement in Massachusetts, known as transcendentalism, which by-and-large was the ideal philosophy of Kant applied to religion, nature and life, is related to literature in that to it we owe not only its leaders, Emerson and Thoreau, but in great measure Hawthorne, Lowell, Whittier and Holmes, the leading writers from 1837 to the Civil War. The center of the movement was Concord, where was published The Dial, which contained some of the best prose and poetry published in America. Emerson's views are set forth in Nature and his address on the American Scholar, but he will be longest remembered by his Essays, bis published lectures, Conduct of Life, Society and Solitude and Representative Men, writings which are rich and striking and teach a high morality. Thoreau, the poet-naturalist, wrote of nature as no one else had then done. Among his books are Walden, Cape Cod, A Yankee in Canada and Maine Woods. Hawthorne, the greatest American novelist, wrote Mosses from an Old Manse, a collection of stories, as was also his first important venture, Twice-Told Tales. His greatest book is The Scarlet Letter, with quiet and fine humor, grasp of human nature and a powerful story, whose background is the somber life of the early settlers of New England. The House of the Seven Gables is almost equally good. Besides these and his Notebooks, Marble Faun and The Blithedale Romance, Hawthorne wrote two first-class children's books, The Wonder-Book and Tanglewood Tales. Harvard College, as well as Concord, was a center of literature. Longfellow, though not one of its graduates, was identified with Cambridge for over 50 years. His first prominence came from Voices of the Night (1839). Some of the pieces in this collection are as fine as any he afterwards wrote—as Hymn to Night, The Reaper and the Flowers and The Beleaguered City. Others of his smaller pieces are the fine ballads of The Skeleton in Armor, The Wreck of the Hesperus Seaweed, The Old Clock on the Stair and The Building of the Ship. Evangeline, the story of an Acadian peasant-girl, appeared in 1847. Hiawatha, the most original of Longfellow's poems, came out in 1856. Longfellow is the most widely read of any American poet—one reason being that he wrote for the home; and it would be hard to overstate the influence for good of his writings. Hundreds of thousands of copies of them have been sold in America and England.
Oliver Wendell Holmes' well-known ballad of Old Ironsides first gained him notice. Most of his poetry is humorous, and of the finest; as Rip Van Winkle, M. D., The Boys and The One-Hoss Shay. Some pieces, though, are pathetic as well as humorous, as The Last Leaf, which Abraham Lincoln called “inexpressibly touching;” or exquisitely beautiful, as The Chambered Nautilus. His masterpiece, however, is his table-talk, The Autocrat at the Breakfast Table, in which Holmes put the best of his humor, satire and sense. Lowell, besides being one of our leading poets and perhaps the greatest American critic, was a native of Cambridge. His popularity came with the appearance of The Biglow Papers (1846), rhymed satires on the government in its conduct of the Mexican War and in Yankee dialect. A second series came out during the Civil War. His critical papers, which took high rank, appeared as Among My Books, My Study Windows, and in other titles. The oldest of our leading historians was Prescott, who, in spite of being almost blind, entertained the world with brilliantly tinted histories of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, the Conquest of Mexico, and the Conquest of Peru. George Bancroft spent over half a century on his History of the United States, which comes down only to 1789, but is written with a thoroughness that leaves nothing to be desired. He supplemented it with a volume on the federal constitution. Our greatest historians are
