JEFFERSON. 1743-1826. Thomas Jefferson, of Virginia, third President of the United States, was a fine scholar, a wise statesman, and a good and great man. He was born in 1743, and died on July 4, 1826*—the fif tieth anniversary of American independence. Jefferson is the author of Notes on Virginia and other valuable works; but his greatest work is the Declaration of Independence. Of all our great men, he is the truest representative of republican ideas, and he probably did more than any other to shape the destinies of our country. EXTRACTS. We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pur. suit of happiness. II.-A DECALOGUE. 1. Never put off till to-morrow what you can do to-day. 2. Never trouble another for what you can do yourself. 3. Never spend your money before you have it. 4. Never buy what you do not want, because it is cheap; it will be dear to you. 5. Pride costs us more than hunger, thirst, and cold. 6. We never repent of having eaten too little. 7. Nothing is troublesome that we do willingly. 8. How much pain have cost us the evils that have never happened! 9. Take things always by the smooth handle. 10. When angry, count ten before you speak; if very angry, a hundred. HAMILTON. 1757-1804. Alexander Hamilton, who was killed in a duel by Aaron Buri, in 1804, was distinguished as a soldier, a statesman, and a writer. He was Secretary of the Treasury under Washington, and to him is due the honor of bringing order out of chaos, and establishing * By a wonderful coincidence, John Adams, another of the great founders of our nation, died on the same day the finances of the country upon a firm basis. His fame as a writer rests chiefly upon his contributions to The Federalist, in which are expounded the principles of the Constitution. EXTRACT. The native brilliancy of the diamond needs not the polish of art; the conspicuous features of preeminent merit need not the coloring pencil of imagination, nor the florid decorations of rhetoric. Eulogium on Gen. Greene. DWIGHT. 1752-1817. Dr. Timothy Dwight, one of the most distinguished presidents of Yale College, was also distinguished as an author. In prose his principal work is Theology Explained and Defended. In poetry his best works are Columbia, Greenfield Hill, and some versions of the Psalms, among which the most popular is that beginning,— "I love thy kingdom, Lord, The house of thy abode, The church our bless'd Redeemer saved EXTRACT. Columbia, Columbia, to glory arise, The queen of the world and the child of the skies! Let the crimes of the East ne'er encrimson thy name, Columbia. AUDUBON. 1780-1851. John James Audubon is celebrated in literature for his great work entitled The Birds of America, in four volumes, folio, magnificently illustrated by four hundred and thirty-five colored plates, the whole costing originally one thousand dollars a copy. He and his sons subsequently published a work entitled Quadrupeds of America. His ornithology is celebrated for the truth and beauty of its descriptions and the excellence of its illustrations. EXTRACT. Where is the person who, on observing this glittering fragment of the rainbow,* would not pause, admire, and instantly turn his mind with reverence towards the Almighty Creator, the wonders of whose hand we at every step discover, and of whose sublime conceptions we everywhere observe the manifestations in his admirable system of creation? OTHER PROSE WRITERS OF THIS AGE. JOHN ADAMS (1735-1826), second President of the United States, author of many political papers. His Letters to his Wife are much admired. JAMES MADISON (1751-1836), fourth President of the United States, cele brated for his papers in The Federalist, etc. JOHN WITHERSPOON, D. D., LL. D. (1722–1794), President of Princeton College, signer of the Declaration, and a prolific and able writer. CHARLES BROCkden Brown (1771-1810), first American Novelist; author of Wieland, Ormond, Arthur Mervyn (descriptive of the yellow fever in Philadelphia in 1793), Edgar Huntly, etc.; also a number of political papers and miscellanies. Style vivid, sometimes inflated, but never dull. An edition de luxe of his novels was published in Philada., in 1893. Brown, like his poet contemporary Drake, was a lifelong sufferer-a victim of consumption. WM. ELLERY CHANNING, D. D. (1780-1842), an eloquent preacher and refined writer, author of Evidences of Christianity, Self-Culture, Sermons, etc. DR. DAVID Ramsay (1749-1815), born in Lancaster Co., Pa., but most of his life a resident of South Carolina. He wrote History of South Carolina, History of the United States, Universal History, Life of Washington, etc. WASHINGTON Allston (1779-1843), artist, poet, and prosist; author of The Sylphs of the Seasons, Romance of Monaldi, Lectures on Art, etc. WM. WIRT (1772-1834), a great lawyer, and author of The British Spy and Life of Patrick Henry. ALEX. WILSON (1766–1813), a great ornithologist, little inferior to Audubon JUDGE KENT (1763–1847), author of Commentaries on American Law. JUDGE STORY (1779-1845), author of a Commentary on the Constitution of the United States, and various other legal treatises. CHIEF JUSTICE Marshall (1755-1835), author of a Life of Washington. ENGLISH CONTEMPORARIES. This age in American Literature is nearly co-extensive with the ages of Johnson and Scott, in English Literature. (See pages 25, 33.) *The humming-bird. PERIOD III.-NATIONAL AGE. 1830-1876. (Embracing, in English history, the reigns of Wm. IV. and Victoria.) WE E have called this period "The National Age," because now for the first time our literature began to assume a national importance and to show signs of a distinct national life. In the preceding ages it had been, apart from works of local and temporary interest, insignificant in amount and imitative in character; but with the advent of Cooper, Irving, Bryant, and Emerson, it began to challenge the attention of the world, and to show the results of American thought and culture. The unexampled material prosperity of the nation has been accompanied by a corresponding intellectual development; and there has been great literary activity in poetry, history, biography, travels, fiction, and especially in the various departments of scientific inquiry. And with our enormous material growth there has come greater independence of thought and judgment, less dependence on foreign opinion. We no longer ask with fear and trembling, as formerly, what does England think of this or that; we have set up literary standards equally high, of our own, and our authors are judged by these standards, on their own intrinsic merits. The authors of this period being numerous, will be divided into two classes : I. THE POETS, represented by Bryant, Longfellow, Whittier, Lowell, Holmes, Poe, Saxe, Read, Boker, Taylor, Alice Cary, Celia Thaxter, Aldrich, Stedman, Holland, Harte, Miller, Stoddard, Hayne, and Timrod. II. THE PROSE WRITERS, represented by Irving, Prescott, Bancroft, Motley, Cooper, Hawthorne, Stowe, Everett, Webster, Agassiz, Emerson, Whipple, White, Simms, Parkman, Howells, E. E. Hale, Henry James, and “ Mark Twain.” NOTE. This classification is necessarily imperfect, as most poets are also prose writers, and many prose writers are also poets; but some authors are chiefly noted for their verse, others for their prose, and they are classed accordingly. I. POETS OF THE NATIONAL AGE. BRYANT. 1794-1878. William Cullen Bryant, who may almost be called the fatner of American poetry, was born at Cummington, Mass., in 1794. After receiving a thorough education and devoting himself for some years to the study and practice of law, he connected himself, in 1826, with the New York Evening Post, which he edited during the rest of his life. He died in 1878, at the ripe age of eighty-four, universally loved and lamented. Among his finest poems are the following: Thanatopsis, Death of the Flowers, Forest Hymn, Green River, The Evening Wind. Song of the Stars, Song of the Sower, The Planting of the Appletree, Waiting at the Gate, and The Flood of Years. The first of these was written at the age of eighteen, the last at the age of eighty-two. These two points mark the extremes of a literary career remarkable no less for its brilliancy than its extent. Besides his original poems, he has published an excellent Trans lation of Homer, and several books of travel. Bryant may appropriately be called the American Wordsworth, being characterized by the same minute and reverent observation of nature, and the same deep religious feeling, that appear in the works of that great poet; but in classic dignity of style and purity of diction he is Wordsworth's superior. EXTRACTS. Truth, crushed to earth, shall rise again; But Error, wounded, writhes in pain, II. The Battlefield. The groves were God's first temples. Ere man learned To hew the shaft and lay the architrave, And spread the roof above them; ere he framed The lofty vault, to gather and roll back |