ngue, but certainly the purest artist in that
sphere of fiction. Now, it is a mere truism to say that each of these
men was, in his way, a typical product of New England, inconceivable as
the offspring of any other soil in the world. Emerson, it has been said,
not without truth, was the first of the American humourists, carrying
into metaphysics that gift of realistic vision and inspired hyperbole
which has somehow been grafted upon the Anglo-Saxon character by the
conditions of American life. As for Hawthorne, though he has felt and
reproduced the physical charm of Rome more subtly than any other artist,
his genius drew at once its strength and its delicacy from his Puritan
ancestry and environment. To realise how intimately he smacks of the
soil, we have but to think of that marvellous scene in _The Blithedale
Romance_, the search for Zenobia's body. From what does it derive its
peculiar quality, its haunting savour? Simply from the presence of Silas
Foster, that delightful incarnation of the New England yeoman. "If I
thought anything had happened to Zenobia, I should feel kind o'
sorrowful," said the grim Silas; and there never was a speech more
dramatically true, or, in its context, more bitterly pathetic.

Even while English critics were proving that there could be no such
thing as an American literature, Washington Irving and Fenimore Cooper
were laying its foundations on a thoroughly American basis. Irving was
none the less American for loving the picturesque traditions of his
English ancestry; Cooper, a gallant and fertile genius, did his country
and our language an inestimable service by adding a whole group of
specifically American figures to the deathless aristocracy of the realms
of romance. Then, in the generation which has just passed away, we have
such men as Thoreau, racy of his native soil; Longfellow, in his day and
way the chief interpreter of America to England; Whittier, so intensely
local that, as Professor Matthews puts it, "he wrote for New England
rather than for the whole of the United States;" Lowell, courtly,
cultured, cosmopolitan, and yet the creator of Hosea Biglow; Holmes, as
American in his humour as Lamb was English, who justly ranks with Lamb
and Goldsmith among the personally best-beloved writers of the English
tongue. Prescott, in the sphere of history, paralleled the achievement
of Cooper in fiction, by giving literary form to the romance of the New
World; while Motley was inspired (