show that
his lyrical gift was spontaneous and genuine but had received little
cultivation. A much younger writer than either of these, Donald G.
Mitchell, of New Haven, has a more lasting place in our literature, by
virtue of his charmingly written _Reveries of a Bachelor_, {545} 1850,
and _Dream Life_, 1852, stories which sketch themselves out in a series
of reminiscences and lightly connected scenes, and which always appeal
freshly to young men because they have that dreamy outlook upon life
which is characteristic of youth. But, upon the whole, the most
important contribution made by Connecticut in that generation to the
literary stock of America was the Beecher family. Lyman Beecher had
been an influential preacher and theologian, and a sturdy defender of
orthodoxy against Boston Unitarianism. Of his numerous sons and
daughters, all more or less noted for intellectual vigor and
independence, the most eminent were Mrs. Stowe and Henry Ward Beecher,
the great pulpit orator of Brooklyn. Mr. Beecher was too busy a man to
give more than his spare moments to general literature. His sermons,
lectures, and addresses were reported for the daily papers and printed
in part in book form; but these lose greatly when divorced from the
large, warm, and benignant personality of the man. His volumes made up
of articles in the _Independent_ and the _Ledger_, such as _Star
Papers_, 1855, and _Eyes and Ears_, 1862, contain many delightful
_morceaux_ upon country life and similar topics, though they are hardly
wrought with sufficient closeness and care to take a permanent place in
letters. Like Willis's _Ephemerae_, they are excellent literary
journalism, but hardly literature.

We may close our retrospect of American {546} literature before 1861
with a brief notice of one of the most striking literary phenomena of
the time--the _Leaves of Grass_ of Walt Whitman, published at Brooklyn
in 1855. The author, born at West Hills, Long Island, in 1819, had
been printer, school-teacher, editor, and builder. He had scribbled a
good deal of poetry of the ordinary kind, which attracted little
attention, but finding conventional rhymes and meters too cramping a
vehicle for his need of expression, he discarded them for a kind of
rhythmic chant, of which the following is a fair specimen:

"Press close, bare bosom'd night! Press close, magnetic,
nourishing night!
Night of south winds! night of the few large stars!
Still,