American Literature

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1906 edition. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER VII NATIONAL LIFE AND CULTURE.--LONGFELLOW, WHITTIEB, LOWELL, HOLMES, WHITMAN Of the period of our literature now under consideration--the prolific middle of the nineteenth century--four or five major writers and countless minor ones still remain to be treated. Placing them here in a single group is, perhaps, on the ground of coherence, a course not entirely justifiable. Yet to make any of the divisions that suggest themselves would seem to be even less justifiable. A separation, for instance, into poets and prose-writers is scarcely possible, since many of the writers were both; and to divide along other lines, as into Cambridge scholars, anti-slavery agitators, and the like, would again be only to work confusion by making divisions that seriously overlap. It seems better therefore to keep the writers together, regarding them broadly as contributors, each in his way, to our national life and character--as co-workers toward the one end of upbuilding a modern nation of political unity and of continuous moral and intellectual growth. It is true, the writers we have already treated might be regarded in the same light, but there is at least this difference, that they worked more specifically to literary or personal ends, while the men whom we have now to consider were in closer touch with our social organization, and their writings and speeches largely grew out of, or contributed toward, tbe wide activities among which they moved ORATORY Oratory in America, which has perhaps had a more continuous history than any other form of letters except theology, W reached its highest development between 1830 and 1860. This is, of course, only another manifestation of the great intellectual and artistic energy that attended the development and...