ainted youth is still blooming on the
canvas, but the fresh-cheecked, jaunty young author of the year 1830 has
long faded out of human sight. I took the leaves which lie before me
at this moment, as I write, from his coffin, as it lay just outside the
door of Saint Paul's Church, on a sad, overclouded winter's day, in the
year 1867. At that earlier time, Willis was by far the most prominent
young American author. Cooper, Irving, Bryant, Dana, Halleck, Drake, had
all done their best work. Longfellow was not yet conspicuous. Lowell was
a school-boy. Emerson was unheard of. Whittier was beginning to make his
way against the writers with better educational advantages whom he was
destined to outdo and to outlive. Not one of the great histories,
which have done honor to our literature, had appeared. Our school-books
depended, so far as American authors were concerned, on extracts
from the orations and speeches of Webster and Everett; on Bryant's
Thanatopsis, his lines To a Waterfowl, and the Death of the Flowers,
Halleck's Marco Bozzaris, Red Jacket, and Burns; on Drake's American
Flag, and Percival's Coral Grove, and his Genius Sleeping and Genius
Waking,--and not getting very wide awake, either. These could be
depended upon. A few other copies of verses might be found, but Dwight's
"Columbia, Columbia," and Pierpont's Airs of Palestine, were already
effaced, as many of the favorites of our own day and generation must
soon be, by the great wave which the near future will pour over the
sands in which they still are legible.

About this time, in the year 1832, came out a small volume entitled
"Truth, a Gift for Scribblers," which made some talk for a while, and
is now chiefly valuable as a kind of literary tombstone on which may be
read the names of many whose renown has been buried with their bones.
The "London Athenaeum" spoke of it as having been described as a
"tomahawk sort of satire." As the author had been a trapper in Missouri,
he was familiarly acquainted with that weapon and the warfare of its
owners. Born in Boston, in 1804, the son of an army officer, educated
at West Point, he came back to his native city about the year 1830. He
wrote an article on Bryant's Poems for the "North American Review," and
another on the famous Indian chief, Black Hawk. In this last-mentioned
article he tells this story as the great warrior told it himself. It was
an incident of a fight with the Osages.

"Standing by my father's side, I