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THE CONGRESS OF WOMEN.

typical American. A new spirit is born, the old eliminated, and with the period of Franklin we can begin to lay claim to American literature. To him can be traced the humor of our American authors, the birth of the “ short story ” in “ Dogood Papers.” His services were required along other lines than that of authorship, else we should have seen in Franklin an American Swift or Smollett.

Pre-revolutionary writers can be summed up in a few names. Men were busy making history then, and not literature, yet in the pamphlets of Tory and Whig we see the germ of our future authors.

P'or some time after the Revolution our people were absorbed in the work of fram­ing the Constitution and in restoring order, and were too busy in the details of nation­forming to devote attention to literature. We should like to dwell upon the spirit of those days, but in a limited paper like this we can only point out the leading authors in American literature.

Charles Brockden Brown, who belongs to the early part of the nineteenth cen­tury, might be brought up as our first novelist of note. P'reneau, Trumbull, Hopkin- son, Barlow, Thomas Paine, Jefferson—all contributed their share in laying the foun­dation of American literature. We shall be disappointed if we expect to find any such legends in our early literature as the Arthurian or Carlovingian, for our people did not nurse their children to sleep with song of fairy, or quiet them with story of valiant knight. Our ancestors were stern, practical men and women; Indians, wolves and wild-cats were realities and not myths, and the Puritan religion forbade the little Franklins from believing even in Santa Claus.

The “doubting Thomases,” Paine and Jefferson, the Prometheus Franklin, dealt with reality and cared little for romance. Yet we must not think that the germ of romance in Brockden Brown, or the ideal of Trumbull, was lost in political and military heroism, or in Franklin’s utilitarianism. Though America had not the myths of the Old World she had her peculiar legends, and these Washington Irving invested with all the romance of Scott, and enlivened them with a humor known nowhere but among Americans—American authors. “The Legends of Sleepy Hollow” make up for the lack of an heroic people in our aborigines.

Cooper introduced the Indian into romance, but it was not the matter of his

words so much as the form that made them popular. Neither the Indian or the

negro is heroic, although Harriet Beecher Stowe at an opportune moment succeeded in introducing the latter into her novel, and Helen Hunt Jackson with the Indian worked upon the sympathies of her readers without appealing to their reason.

Edgar Allan Poe in this new life of American authors stands not only as a typi­cal Southern poet, but as one of whom the world loves to hear. He was a master

of verse, but he lacked that inspiration that will give him a seat “with those saints

who see God.” The weird charm, the strange fascination of Poe’s verse is without rival. “His heart-strings are a lute; none sings so wildly nor so well.”

For a while after Irving and Poe’s period our country was so torn with sectional hate that there was no motive for high literature. The John C. Calhoun, Wendell Phillipsand Garrison oratory; the Harriet Beecher Stowe romance; the Bryant, Father Ryan and Whittier poetry, were engaged too much in stirring up jealousy and hatred to inspire lofty thought. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Bryant, Father Ryan and Whittier, and even Longfellow, based their writings upon events that are not universal in sig­nificance, and, like Wigglesworth’s writings, will meet their doom.

Rodman Drake, our American Keats, in his “Culprit Fay,” kept alive the ideality and sincerity of the poet of this period.

PYom this great strife there was born an ethical spirit, and Emerson, an almost Christ-man, arose in strange contrast to the Garrisons and Calhouns of the day. The Alcotts, the Fullers, Thoreaus and Channings followed as disciples of Emerson.

Theories and speculations of all kinds set men’s minds wild in those days, and as Irving worked up the follies and superstitions just anti-dating him, so do we have Hawthorne evolved from the extremes of his age. As was Franklin evolved from