or traditional, or of actual occurrence during the war; and not a mountain reared its head, unconnected with some marvelous story.” Irving was then a child of three years old, but Rip Van Winkle and Ichabod Crane — or their equivalents — were already on the spot, waiting for some one of sufficient literary talent to tell their tale.
Margaret Fuller grew up at a time when our literature was still essentially colonial; not for want of material, but for want of self-confidence. As Theodore Parker said in his vigorous vernacular, somewhat later, the cultivated American literature was exotic, and the native literature was “rowdy,” consisting mainly of campaign squibs, coarse satire, and frontier jokes.[1] Children were reared, from the time they learned their letters, on Miss Edgeworth and Mrs. Trimmer, whose books, otherwise excellent, were unconsciously saturated with social conventionalisms and distinctions quite foreign to our society. Mrs. Lydia Maria Child, the leader in the now vast field of American literature for children, — and afterwards one of the leaders in that other experiment of the American novel, — was then a young woman, and the fellow-student of Margaret Fuller. Charles Brockden Brown, Irving, Cooper — these were our few literary heroes. Fortunately for Margaret Fuller, she had been led by the political tastes of her father to turn from the weaker side of American intellect, which then was literature, to the
- ↑ Mass. Quarterly Review, iii. 206.
