rolina. {509} Sumner's oratory was stately and
somewhat labored. While speaking he always seemed, as has been wittily
said, to be surveying a "broad landscape of his own convictions." His
most impressive qualities as a speaker were his intense moral
earnestness and his thorough knowledge of his subject. The most
telling of his parliamentary speeches are perhaps his speech _On the
Kansas-Nebraska Bill_, of February 3, 1854, and _On the Crime against
Kansas_, May 19 and 20, 1856; of his platform addresses, the oration on
the _True Grandeur of Nations_.

1. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Voices of the Night. The Skeleton in
Armor. The Wreck of the Hesperus. The Village Blacksmith. The Belfry
of Bruges and Other Poems (1846). By the Seaside. Hiawatha. Tales of
a Wayside Inn.

2. Oliver Wendell Holmes. Autocrat of the Breakfast Table. Elsie
Venner. Old Ironsides. The Last Leaf. My Aunt. The Music-Grinders.
On Lending a Punch Bowl. Nux Postcoenatica. A Modest Request. The
Living Temple. Meeting of the Alumni of Harvard College. Homesick in
Heaven. Epilogue to the Breakfast Table Series. The Boys. Dorothy.
The Iron Gate.

3. James Russell Lowell. The Biglow Papers (two series). Under the
Willows and Other Poems. 1868. Rhoecus. The Shepherd of King
Admetus. The Vision of Sir Launfal. The {510} Present Crisis. The
Dandelion. The Birch Tree. Beaver Brook. Essays on Chaucer:
Shakspere Once More: Dryden: Emerson; the Lecturer: Thoreau: My Garden
Acquaintance: A Good Word for Winter: A Certain Condescension in
Foreigners.

4. William Hickling Prescott. The Conquest of Mexico.

5. John Lothrop Motley. The United Netherlands.

6. Francis Parkman. The Oregon Trail. The Jesuits in North America.

7. Representative American Orations; volume v. Edited by Alexander
Johnston. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. 1884.

{511}

CHAPTER VI.

LITERATURE IN THE CITIES.

1837-1861.

Literature as a profession has hardly existed in the United States
until very recently. Even now the number of those who support
themselves by purely literary work is small, although the growth of the
reading public and the establishment of great magazines, such as
_Harper's_, the _Century_, and the _Atlantic_, have made a market for
intellectual wares which forty years ago would have seemed a godsend to
poorly paid Bohemians like Poe or obscure men of genius like Hawthorne.
About 1840 two Philadelphia magaz