res_.

The slender literary product of the United States from 1815 to 1830 is
contained in magazines rather than in books. Prose and verse which could
never have found a publisher separately appeared in periodicals of every
description. Most of these were ephemeral publications. The more serious
reviews, like the _American Biblical Repository_, the _American Law
Journal_, and the religious reviews, had a longer life; but the lighter
magazines, like the _Ladies' Literary Cabinet_, the _Young Ladies'
Parental Mentor_, and the _Casket: or Flowers of Literature, Wit, and
Sentiment_, rose and fell on the fickle tide of public taste. Even the
West had its magazines. Lexington, Kentucky, which disputed with
Cincinnati the proud title, "Athens of the West," published the _Western
Review_, one number of which contained a review of _Don Juan_ within six
weeks after the poem was published in England.

In the September number of the _North American Review_, in 1817,
appeared an original poem of such merit as to mark an era in the history
of American verse. There was in William Cullen Bryant's _Thanatopsis_,
it is true, no such youthful exuberance of feeling as the first
stirrings of poetic genius in a new world might be expected to exhibit.
The sense of refined form seemed almost un-American; yet there are lines
in the poem which suggest the primeval background of American life and
its influence upon the American mind. In 1819 appeared Washington
Irving's _Sketch-Book_--the first American book which was widely read
in England; and in 1821, Cooper published _The Spy_, which was the first
to win favor on the Continent. Both Cooper and Irving were more or less
conscious imitators of English prose writers, the one of Scott and the
other of Addison; and they lacked consequently that originality which
critics have always demanded as the hall-mark of a genuinely native art.
It is easy to forget, however, that the Americans were not a primitive
people. They were folk with a literary inheritance, of which albeit they
often showed little knowledge. It was not for them to invent new forms,
but to press new wine into old bottles. Of Irving, moreover, it should
be said that he drew freely upon a vein of delicious humor, as in his
_Knickerbocker History of New York_, which may be truly characterized as
American.

The annals of American art in these years are even more bare. Benjamin
West, to be sure, was born in Pennsylvania, but he achieved e