fine imagination which had been familiar to
them from the first. To hold the old friends throughout his lifetime,
and to win fresh ones of a new generation through his books, is perhaps
the greatest of Lowell's personal felicities.

While there are no other names in the literature of New England quite
comparable with those that have just been discussed, it should be
remembered that the immediate effectiveness and popularity of these
representative poets and prose writers were dependent upon the existence
of an intelligent and responsive reading public. The lectures of
Emerson, the speeches of Webster, the stories of Hawthorne, the
political verse of Whittier and Lowell, presupposed a keen, reflecting
audience, mentally and morally exigent. The spread of the Lyceum system
along the line of westward emigration from New England as far as the
Mississippi is one tangible evidence of the high level of popular
intelligence. That there was much of the superficial and the
spread-eagle in the American life of the eighteen-forties is apparent
enough without the amusing comments of such English travellers as
Dickens, Miss Martineau, and Captain Basil Hall. But there was also
genuine intellectual curiosity and a general reading habit which are
evidenced not only by a steady growth of newspapers and magazines but
also by the demand for substantial books. Biography and history began to
be widely read, and it was natural that the most notable productiveness
in historical writing should manifest itself in that section of the
country where there were libraries, wealth, leisure for the pursuits of
scholarship, a sense of intimate concern with the great issues of the
past, and a diffusion of intellectual tastes throughout the community.
It was no accident that Sparks and Ticknor, Bancroft and Prescott,
Motley and Parkman, were Massachusetts men.

Jared Sparks, it is true, inherited neither wealth nor leisure. He was a
furious, unwearied toiler in the field of our national history. Born in
1789, by profession a Unitarian minister, he began collecting the papers
of George Washington by 1825. John Marshall, the great jurist, had
published his five-volume life of his fellow Virginian a score of years
earlier. But Sparks proceeded to write another biography of Washington
and to edit his writings. He also edited a "Library of American
Biography," wrote lives of Franklin and Gouverneur Morris, was professor
of history and President of Harvard, a