As this poem is a curiously close anticipation of Dr. Holmes's
_Contentment_, so the very popular ballad, _Old Grimes_, written about
1818, by Albert Gorton Greene, an undergraduate of Brown University in
Rhode Island, is in some respects an anticipation of Holmes's quaintly
pathetic _Last Leaf_.

The political literature and public oratory of {424} the United States
during this period, although not absolutely of less importance than
that which preceded and followed the Declaration of Independence and
the adoption of the Constitution, demands less relative attention in a
history of literature by reason of the growth of other departments of
thought. The age was a political one, but no longer exclusively
political. The debates of the time centered about the question of
"State Rights," and the main forum of discussion was the old Senate
chamber, then made illustrious by the presence of Clay, Webster, and
Calhoun. The slavery question, which had threatened trouble, was put
off for awhile by the Missouri Compromise of 1820, only to break out
more fiercely in the debates on the Wilmot Proviso, and the Kansas and
Nebraska Bill. Meanwhile the Abolition movement had been transferred
to the press and the platform. Garrison started his _Liberator_ in
1830, and the Antislavery Society was founded in 1833. The Whig party,
which had inherited the constitutional principles of the old Federal
party, advocated internal improvements at national expense and a high
protective tariff. The State Rights party, which was strongest at the
South, opposed these views, and in 1832 South Carolina claimed the
right to "nullify" the tariff imposed by the general government. The
leader of this party was John Caldwell Calhoun, a South Carolinian, who
in his speech in the United States Senate, on February 13, 1832, on
Nullification and the {425} Force Bill, set forth most authoritatively
the "Carolina doctrine." Calhoun was a great debater, but hardly a
great orator. His speeches are the arguments of a lawyer and a strict
constitutionalist, severely logical, and with a sincere conviction in
the soundness of his case. Their language is free from bad rhetoric;
the reasoning is cogent, but there is an absence of emotion and
imagination; they contain few quotable things, and no passages of
commanding eloquence, such as strew the orations of Webster and Burke.
They are not, in short, literature. Again, the speeches of Henry Clay,
of Kentucky, the