finish, all previous works on the same subjects, and that they have won for our literature a lasting and honorable report.

Not to mention all who have graced this field of our literature though all of them less conspicuously than the foregoing-we will name in this place Jared Sparks, Hildreth, Cooper, Lossing, and Parkman.* The first has given us well-written biographies of prominent Revolutionary characters: Hildreth, an unadorned but reliable History of the United States; Lossing, a minute and popular FieldBook of the Revolution; Cooper has all but dramatized the exploits of the American sailor in his Naval History of the United States, making up in vivid description and patriotic sentiment what he lacks in fullness of detail; and Parkman, in his Conspiracy of Pontiac and Pioneers of France in the New World, has presented a picturesque and authentic account of some of the most thrilling events of French and Indian warfare in our country.

Later Poetry.—In a new country like our own-new in natural aspect, in social experience, in political complexion, in fine, in all that appertains to the free growth of the individual and society—it was fair, doubtless, to expect that a characteristic Muse should inspire the souls of its poets, and that our poetry should be as distinctive as our civilization. That such was not the case during the first two centuries of our existence we have already shown.

The poetry of that early period, though aspiring to cele

* Others of our prominent historical writers are John S. C. Abbott, Jacob Abbott, J. R. Albach, J. N. Arnold, Thomas H. Benton, Cocke, George L. Craik, George T. Curtis, J. W. Draper, Horace Greeley, J. T. Headley, McKenny and Hall, J. G. Palfrey, George Ticknor. Of biographical writers, the Abbotts, S. A. Allibone, W. T. Coggeshall, George W. P. Custis, George T. Curtis, Benjamin Franklin (autobiographer), Parke Godwin, R. W. Griswold, J. T. Headley, P. C, Headley, A. S. Mackenzie, John Marshall, James Parton, S. M. Schmucker, W. B. Stone, George Ticknor, George Townsend, Weems, and Robert C. Winthrop.

one of the happiest experiments, both artistically a ically considered, in modern hexameter verse; w Tales of a Wayside Inn, Voices of the Night, and man of his poems, flow with a melody and limpid beaut if not always, or even generally, national, is yet Nature and to the poet.

Bryant is more American. His theatre of thou fancy is the woods, the fields, and the streams of h land. To describe in lifelike lines and colors the m features of Nature, to interpret their speech and the of beauty, sublimity, and moral import they stand impart to the sympathetic bard,-this is mainly office among our poets. The Forest Hymn and Th alone are emphatic witnesses to the truth of this.

Whittier is recognized as the American lyrist. H evince strong feeling, strongly, and sometimes pu expressed. A bitter, uncompromising enemy of and a zealous advocate of the national cause in rebellion, the whole energy of his poetic genius pressed itself in lyrics like Barbara Frietchie and Freedom. His gentler moods are reflected in the Labor; and his love for the rural, the social, domestic has melodized itself in Snow-Bound and A the Beach. His poems are not only characteristic, incidents, imagery, and sentiment, singularly Am nay, New-Englandish.

Poe, although popularly known by only a few poems, is yet the intensest and most idiosyncrati our poets. Leading a life now of the wildest exci and anon of the deepest melancholy-a being of and impulse, devoid of principle and natural sensi his poems embody in a striking manner the same u elements. Though passages of exquisite beauty a gular vigor abound, yet there is generally evident a herence and obscurity of idea, and a labored mec of versification, which mark them as being the pro an erratic mind and a diseased heart. Even Anno

his sweetest poem, is sadly marred by the fault-finding and despairing tone which pervades it.

Holmes, Saxe, and Lowell represent the claims of our poets in the realm of wit and humor. The first, by virtue of his clever satires, has won the name of the "Pope of America." Most of his poems, however, like those of Saxe, are short and varied in theme, and, in concise and sparkIng phrase and apt figure, delineate and caricature men and manners. Pathos, too, of the most genuine quality characterizes the writings of these poets.

Lowell, in his first and second series of The Biglow Papers, has achieved the most sustained effort in the vein of humorous composition, and certainly the most characteristic and national one of the three. "The humor of the Biglow Papers is audible and full of vent,' racy in hilarious hyperbole, and it has that infusion of poetry necessary to the richest and deepest humor. The book is a national birth, and it possesses that element of nationality which has been the most enduring part of all the best and greatest births in literature and art. . . The life of art, poetry, and humor must be found at home or nowhere. And the crowning quality of Lowell's book is, that it was found at home. It could not have been written in any other country than America."*

Washington Allston, John Pierpont, Richard H. Dana, James A. Hillhouse, Charles Sprague, James G. Percival, Fitz-Greene Halleck, J. R. Drake, Charles F. Hoffman, George H. Boker, Alfred B. Street, George P. Morris, J. K. Paulding, John H. Payne, and N. P. Willis,† though some *North British Review, Nov., 1860.

The names of the best known of our later poets are-T. B. Aldrich, J. G. Holland, E. Hopper, S. W. Patten, T. B. Read, Theo. Tilton, R. G. White, Bret Harte, J. J. Piatt, Walt Whitman, G. D. Prentice, G. W. Cutter, and A. Pike. Of poetesses we have had not a few. Prominent among them are the names of Mrs. Sigourney, Alice Cary, Phœbe Cary, Harriet B. Stowe, Julia W. Howe, Mrs. Hale, Mrs. Lee, Mrs. Ellett, Mrs. Brooks, Lucy Larcom, Mrs. Peters, Miss Gould, Mrs. Child, Mrs. Hewitt, Mrs. E. Oakes Smith, and Mrs. Osgood.