American literary masters

_The nineteen men of letters whose work is reviewed in this volume represent an important half-century of our national literary life. The starting-point is the year 1809, the da...

Irving’s prose is distinguished for grace and sweetness. It is unostentatious, natural, easy. At its best it comes near to being a model of good prose. The most striking effects...

The personal side of the biography is not neglected, but no emphasis is laid on particulars of costume, manners, speech, what Washington ate and drank, and said about his neighb...

This is flat contradiction of the idea that entirely self-conscious and self-controlled art can avail to move the reader. Bryant pleads for deepest feeling in exercise of the po...

This warfare disturbed Cooper’s peace of mind, but in no wise interrupted his literary activity. The following list records by no means all that he wrote after 1834, but will su...

A capital passage in _Afloat and Ashore_ is that describing the encounter with the savages off the coast of South America. Even more spirited are those chapters of _Miles Wallin...

In 1834 the style thought appropriate to historical writing was markedly oratorical. Historians addressed their readers. A pomp of expression, something almost liturgical, was h...

Escaping these influences, Prescott took up the chief English authors, beginning with Ascham, Sidney, Bacon, Browne, Raleigh, and Milton. His mind was constantly on the alert to...

On formal public occasions Emerson was often invited to give the address. There was authority in his utterances. That he was not unlikely to say something revolutionary seemed t...

‘Experience’ is in praise of a mode of life which consists in living without making a fuss about it, filling the time, taking hold where one can and exhausting the possibilities...

Poe was of Irish extraction. His great-grandfather, John Poe, came to America about 1745 and settled near Lancaster, Pennsylvania. John Poe’s son David (known in the annals of B...

The masterpiece of the group is ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue.’ Genuinely original, blood-curdling, the story depends for its real force not on the ingenious unravelling of a f...

As a young man Longfellow was pretty much like other young men, fond of society and fond of dress. At Cambridge the sober-minded were a little disturbed by the brilliancy of his...

Part two, _The Golden Legend_, is a retelling of the story of Prince Henry of Hoheneck. Here, Longfellow reproduces with skill the light and color of mediæval life, if not its d...

His variety of metres, if not great, was sufficiently ample to preclude the feeling of sameness. His verse never comes laden with scholarly suggestion in rhythm or thought, with...

He entered Bowdoin College in the same class with Longfellow and Franklin Pierce, and was graduated in 1825. For the next twelve years he lived the life of a recluse in his own...

In its simplest aspect the narrative concerns the persecution of an unfortunate and weak representative of the Pyncheon family by a powerful and unscrupulous representative. At...

Early in September, 1839, the Thoreau brothers, John and Henry, made a voyage down the Concord and Merrimac rivers. The boat used was of their own building. It was painted blue...

That Holmes suffers but little by the persistence of his ‘juvenilia’ and ‘early verses’ is due to their frankly comic and grotesque character. The reader is spared faded sentime...

Here lies Motley’s sympathy. His indignation flames out when misery is brought upon thousands, by the caprice of kings or the selfishness of secular and ecclesiastical politicia...

The first three narratives (_The Pioneers of France_, _The Jesuits_, and _La Salle_) cover the period of inception. They abound in illustrations of heroism, self-sacrifice, and...

_Poems of the Orient_ is a typical volume, full of color, warmth, light, breathing the intoxication and glowing with the fantasy of that great vague region we call ‘the East.’ T...

Half the attractiveness of the ‘Easy Chair’ papers is due to their seemingly unpremeditated character. Curtis was not writing a book, nor was he proposing at some time, ‘in resp...

The ‘Ianthe’ of _A Year’s Life_ was easily identified with Maria White, the gifted and beautiful girl who, in December, 1844, became the poet’s wife. The first year of their mar...

And the poet longs for skill to praise him fitly whom he does fitly praise in the stanzas that follow. It is a thoughtful, nobly eloquent, and poetically beautiful characterizat...

That the structure of Whitman’s rhapsodies is determined by some law cannot be questioned. After one has read these pieces many times, he will find himself instinctively expecti...

Cooper, James Fenimore: his ancestry, 65; boyhood and education, 66; enters the navy, 66; marries and leaves the service, 67; his first books, 67; life abroad, 68; return to Ame...