Of Literature | Page 9

New-Englanders and the New-Yorkers, and I
suppose there is no question but our literary centre was then in Boston,
wherever it is, or is not, at present. But I thought Taylor then, and I
think him now, one of the first in our whole American province of the
republic of letters, in a day when it was in a recognizably flourishing
state, whether we regard quantity or quality in the names that gave it
lustre. Lowell was then in perfect command of those varied forces
which will long, if not lastingly, keep him in memory as first among
our literary men, and master in more kinds than any other American.
Longfellow was in the fulness of his world-wide fame, and in the
ripeness of the beautiful genius which was not to know decay while life
endured. Emerson had emerged from the popular darkness which had
so long held him a hopeless mystic, and was shining a lambent star of
poesy and prophecy at the zenith. Hawthorne, the exquisite artist, the
unrivalled dreamer, whom we still always liken this one and that one to,
whenever this one or that one promises greatly to please us, and still
leave without a rival, without a companion, had lately returned from his
long sojourn abroad, and had given us the last of the incomparable
romances which the world was to have perfect from his hand. Doctor
Holmes had surpassed all expectations in those who most admired his
brilliant humor and charming poetry by the invention of a new attitude
if not a new sort in literature. The turn that civic affairs had taken was
favorable to the widest recognition of Whittier's splendid lyrical gift;
and that heart of fire, doubly snow-bound by Quaker tradition and

Puritan environment; was penetrating every generous breast with its
flamy impulses, and fusing all wills in its noble purpose. Mrs. Stowe,
who far outfamed the rest as the author of the most renowned novel
ever written, was proving it no accident or miracle by the fiction she
was still writing.
This great New England group might be enlarged perhaps without loss
of quality by the inclusion of Thoreau, who came somewhat before his
time, and whose drastic criticism of our expediential and mainly futile
civilization would find more intelligent acceptance now than it did then,
when all resentment of its defects was specialized in enmity to
Southern slavery. Doctor Edward Everett Hale belonged in this group
too, by virtue of that humor, the most inventive and the most fantastic,
the sanest, the sweetest, the truest, which had begun to find expression
in the Atlantic Monthly; and there a wonderful young girl had written a
series of vivid sketches and taken the heart of youth everywhere with
amaze and joy, so that I thought it would be no less an event to meet
Harriet Prescott than to meet any of those I have named.
I expected somehow to meet them all, and I imagined them all easily
accessible in the office of the Atlantic Monthly, which had lately
adventured in the fine air of high literature where so many other
periodicals had gasped and died before it. The best of these, hitherto,
and better even than the Atlantic for some reasons, the lamented
Putnam's Magazine, had perished of inanition at New York, and the
claim of the commercial capital to the literary primacy had passed with
that brilliant venture. New York had nothing distinctive to show for
American literature but the decrepit and doting Knickerbocker
Magazine. Harper's New Monthly, though Curtis had already come to it
from the wreck of Putnam's, and it had long ceased to be eclectic in
material, and had begun to stand for native work in the allied arts which
it has since so magnificently advanced, was not distinctively literary,
and the Weekly had just begun to make itself known. The Century,
Scribner's, the Cosmopolitan, McClure's, and I know not what others,
were still unimagined by five, and ten, and twenty years, and the
Galaxy was to flash and fade before any of them should kindle its more
effectual fires. The Nation, which was destined to chastise rather than
nurture our young literature, had still six years of dreamless potentiality
before it; and the Nation was always more Bostonian than

New-Yorkish by nature, whatever it was by nativity.
Philadelphia had long counted for nothing in the literary field.
Graham's Magazine at one time showed a certain critical force, but it
seemed to perish of this expression of vitality; and there remained
Godey's Lady's Book and Peterson's Magazine, publications really
incredible in their insipidity. In the South there was nothing but a
mistaken social ideal, with the moral principles all standing on their
heads in defence of slavery; and in the West there was a feeble and
foolish notion