n
Irishman by birth, a gentleman of scholarly tastes and accomplishments,
who wrote a great deal on Italian literature, and sat for several terms
in Congress as Representative of the State of Georgia, was the author
of the favorite song, _My Life is Like the Summer Rose_. Another
Southerner, and a member of a distinguished Southern family, was Edward
Coate Pinkney, who served nine years in the navy, and died in 1828, at
the age of twenty-six, having published in 1825 a small volume of
lyrical poems which had a fire and a grace uncommon at that time in
American verse. One of these, _A Health_, beginning,

"I fill this cup to one made up of loveliness alone."

though perhaps somewhat overpraised by Edgar Poe, has rare beauty of
thought and expression.

John Quincy Adams, sixth President of the United States (1825-29), was
a man of culture and literary tastes. He published his lectures on
rhetoric, delivered during his tenure of the Boylston Professorship at
Harvard in 1806-9; he left a voluminous diary, which has been edited
since his death in 1848; and among his experiments in poetry is one of
considerable merit, entitled _The Wants of Man_, an ironical sermon on
Goldsmith's text:

"Man wants but little here below,
Nor wants that little long."

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 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 a while 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 tra