n East Haverhill, Massachusetts, during the early
nineteenth century, but of a mode of thinking and feeling which is
widely diffused wherever the Anglo-Saxon race has wandered. Perhaps
_Snow-Bound_ lacks a certain universality of suggestiveness which
belongs to a still more famous poem, _The Cotter's Saturday Night_ of
Burns, but both of these portrayals of rustic simplicity and peace owe
their celebrity to their truly representative character. They are
evidence furnished by a single art, as to a certain mode and coloring
of human existence; but every corroboration of that evidence heightens
our admiration for the artistic sincerity and insight of the poet. To
draw an illustration from a more splendid epoch, let us remind
ourselves that the literature of the "spacious times of great
Elizabeth"--a period of strong national excitement, and one deeply
representative of the very noblest and most permanent traits of English
national character--was produced within startlingly few years and in a
local territory extremely limited. The very language in which that
literature is clothed was spoken only by the court, by a couple of
counties, and at the two universities. Its prose and verse were frankly
experimental. It is true that such was the emotional ferment of the
score of years preceding the Armada, that great captains and voyagers
who scarcely wrote a line were hailed as kings of the realm of
imagination, and that Puttenham, in phrases which that generation
could not have found extravagant, inscribes his book on Poetry to Queen
Elizabeth as the "most excellent Poet" of the age. Well, the glorified
political images may grow dim or tawdry with time, but the poetry has
endured, and it is everywhere felt to be a truly national, a deeply
racial product. Its time and place and hour were all local; but the
Canadian and the American, the South African and Australasian
Englishman feels that that Elizabethan poetry is his poetry still.

When we pass, therefore, as we must shortly do, to the consideration of
this and that literary product of America, and to the scrutiny of the
really representative character of our books, we must bear in mind that
the questions concerning the race, the place, the hour, the
man,--questions so familiar to modern criticism,--remain valid and
indeed essential; but that in applying them to American writing there
are certain allowances, qualifications, adjustments of the scale of
values, which are no less im