lery." The following poem is perhaps his highest achievement in serious verse: "UNSEEN SPIRITS. "The shadows lay along Broadway, 'T was near the twilight-tide- Was walking in her pride. "Peace charmed the street beneath her feet, And all astir looked kind on her, And called her good as fair She kept with chary care. "She kept with care her beauties rare, For her heart was cold to all but gold, And the rich came not to woo -- But honoured well are charms to sell "Now walking there was one more fair A slight girl, lily-pale; And she had unseen company To make the spirit quail; 'Twixt Want and Scorn she walked forlorn, And nothing could avail. "No mercy now can clear her brow For this world's peace to pray; For, as love's wild prayer dissolved in air, But the sin forgiven by Christ in heaven Work so slight may seem hardly worth emphasis. As time passes, however, Willis appears more and more the most characteristic New York man of letters after the year 1832, the most typical of the school which flourished throughout the career of the "Knickerbocker Magazine." The earlier writers whom we have considered were all imitative, or at least their work seems reminiscent. Brockden Brown is reminiscent of Godwin, Irving of Goldsmith, Cooper of Scott, Bryant of Cowper and Wordsworth, and so on. In a similar way Willis may be said to remind one of Leigh Hunt, and perhaps here and there of Benjamin Disraeli, and Bulwer. The contrast of these last names with those of the earlier models tells the story. As men of letters, Godwin and Goldsmith and Scott and Cowper and Wordsworth are distinctly more important than Bulwer and Disraeli and Leigh Hunt. The merits of the former group are solid; those of the latter are meretricious; and when you undertake to dilute Leigh Hunt and Disraeli and Bulwer with Croton water, you get a stimulant hardly strong enough sensibly to affect heads seasoned to draughts of sound old literature. As a descriptive journalist, Willis did work which is still worth reading. His letters from abroad give pleasant and vivid pictures of European life in the 30's; his letters "from Under a Bridge " give pleasant pictures of country life in our Middle States a little later; but when it comes to anything like literature, one can hardly avoid the conviction that he had nothing to say. In the work of the earlier New York school, and even in the work of Poe, we have already remarked, nothing was produced which touched seriously on either God's eternities or the practical conduct of life in the United States. The literature of Brockden Brown, of Irving, of Cooper, and of Poe is only a literature of pleasure, possessing, so far as it has excellence at all, only the excellence of conscientious refinement. Willis, too, so far as his work may be called literature, made nothing higher than literature of pleasure; and for all the bravery with which he worked throughout his later life, one cannot help feeling in his writings, as well as in some of the social records of his earlier years, a palpable falsity of taste. He was a man of far wider social experience than Bryant or Cooper, probably indeed than Irving him self; and those who personally knew him remember him, as Dr. Holmes did, pleasantly and kindly. Yet, after all, one feels in him rather the quality of a dashing adventurer, of an amiably honourable Bohemian, than such secure sense of personal distinction as marked Bryant and Irving and their contemporaries in New England. A school of letters in which a man of Willis's quality could attain the eminence which for years made him conspicuous was certainly declining. The Knickerbocker Magazine," which came to an end in 1864, began to fade about 1857. In that year the “Atlantic Monthly" was started in Boston, and in New York "Harper's Weekly." Both persist; this date, then, two years after the "Knickerbocker Gallery" was published, is a convenient one at which to close our first survey of the literature produced in the Middle States. There are certain names which we might have mentioned; Mrs. Kirkland, for example, whom Poe records among the Literati, wrote some sketches of life in the Middle West which are still vivid, and although of slight positive merit, decidedly interesting as history. Hermann Melville, with his books about the South Seas, which Robert Louis Stevenson is said to have declared the best ever written, and with his novels of maritime adventure, began a career of literary promise, which never came to fruition. Certain writers, too, who reached maturity later had already made themselves known,- Bayard Taylor, for example, and George William Curtis; and in regular journalism Horace Greeley had made the "New York Tribune" already a strong and important ally of the reforms which were strenuously declaring themselves in New England. certainly between 1833 and 1857 the " Tribune," even with Margaret Fuller and later with George Ripley as its literary critics, had not in New York perspective such characteristic importance as had the "Knickerbocker Magazine." What the "Tribune" stood for, was rather an offshoot of some New England energies which we shall consider later. But The truth is, that the school of letters which began in 1798 with the work of Brockden Brown and persisted throughout the lifetime of Sir Walter Scott in the writings of Irving, of Cooper, and of Bryant, never dealt with deeply significant matters. Almost from the time when Bryant first collected his poems, the literature made in New York and under its influence became less and less important. New York newspapers, to be sure, of which the best examples are the "Evening Post" and the "Tribune," were steadily gaining in merit and influence; but literature pure and simple was not. If we may hold Poe to have belonged to the general phase of American literary activity which we have been considering, the only phase which during the first half of the nineteenth century developed itself outside of New England, - we may say that this literary activity reached its acme in the work of Poe, itself for all its merit not deeply significant. And even in Poe's time, and still more surely a little later, the literature of which he proves the most important master declined into such good-humoured trivialities as one finds in the "Knickerbocker Gallery" and in the life and work of Willis. By the middle of the nineteenth century, in fact, the literary impulse of the Middle States had proved abortive. For the serious literature of America we must revert to New England. |