orecastle and the camp-fire; and the scholar in his study, though
he may put the _Deerslayer_ or the _Last of the Mohicans_ away on the
top-shelf, will take it down now and again, and sit up half the night
over it.

Before dismissing the _belles-lettres_ writings of this period, mention
should be made of a few poems of the fugitive kind which seem to have
taken a permanent place in popular regard. John Howard Payne, a native
of Long Island, a wandering actor and playwright, who died American
Consul at Tunis in 1852, wrote about 1820 for Covent Garden Theater an
opera, entitled _Clari_, the libretto of which included the now famous
song of _Home, Sweet Home_. Its literary pretensions were of the
humblest kind, but it spoke a true word which touched the Anglo-Saxon
heart in its tenderest spot, and being happily married to a plaintive
air was sold by the hundred thousand, and is evidently destined to be
sung forever. A like success has attended the _Old Oaken Bucket_,
composed by Samuel Woodworth, a printer and journalist from
Massachusetts, whose other poems, of which two collections were issued
in 1818 and 1826, were soon forgotten. Richard Henry Wilde, an
Irishman by birth, a gentleman of scholarly tastes and accomplishments,
who wrote a great deal on Italian literature, and sat for several terms
in Congress as Representative of the State of Georgia, was the author
of the favorite song, _My Life is Like the Summer Rose_. Another {423}
Southerner, and a member of a distinguished Southern family, was Edward
Coate Pinkney, who served nine years in the navy, and died in 1828, at
the age of twenty-six, having published in 1825 a small volume of
lyrical poems which had a fire and a grace uncommon at that time in
American verse. One of these, _A Health_, beginning

"I fill this cup to one made up of loveliness alone,"

though perhaps somewhat overpraised by Edgar Poe, has rare beauty of
thought and expression. John Quincy Adams, sixth President of the
United States (1825-29), was a man of culture and of literary tastes.
He published his lectures on rhetoric delivered during his tenure of
the Boylston Professorship at Harvard in 1806-09; he left a voluminous
diary, which has been edited since his death in 1848; and among his
experiments in poetry is one of considerable merit, entitled the _Wants
of Man_, an ironical sermon on Goldsmith's text:

"Man wants but little here below
Nor wants that little long."