though his style was exotic and Godwinish, yet
found his themes among American Indians and in the scenes of the yellow
fever in Philadelphia. It was not Irving who invested the Hudson with
romance, but the Hudson that inspired Irving. When in 1786, Mrs. Josiah
Quincy, then a young girl, sailed upon that river in a sloop, she wrote,
"Our captain had a legend for every scene, either supernatural or
traditional or of actual occurrence during the war, and not a mountain
reared its head unconnected with some marvellous story." Irving was then
but three years old, yet Ichabod Crane and Rip Van Winkle or their
prototypes were already on the spot waiting for biographers; and it was
much the same with Cooper, who was not born until three years later.
What was needed was self-confidence and a strong literary desire to take
the materials at hand. Irving, Cooper, Dana, had already done this; but
Longfellow followed with more varied gifts, more thorough training; the
"Dial" writers followed in their turn, and a distinctive American
literature was born, this quality reaching a climax in Thoreau, who
frankly wrote, "I have travelled a great deal--in Concord."

And while thus Longfellow found his desire for a national literature
strengthened at every point by the example of his classmate Hawthorne,
so he may have learned much, though not immediately, through the warning
unconsciously given by Bryant, against the perils of undue moralizing.
Bryant's early poem, "To a Water-Fowl," was as profound in feeling and
as perfect in structure as anything of Longfellow's, up to the last
verse, which some profane critic compared to a tin kettle of moralizing,
tied to the legs of the flying bird. Whittier's poems had almost always
some such appendage, and he used to regret in later life that he had not
earlier been contented to leave his moral for the reader to draw, or in
other words, to lop off habitually the last verse of each poem. Apart
from this there was a marked superiority, even on the didactic side, in
Longfellow's moralizing as compared with Bryant's. There is no light or
joy in the "Thanatopsis;" but Longfellow, like Whittier, was always
hopeful. It was not alone that he preached, as an eminent British critic
once said to me, "a safe piety," but his religious impulse was serene
and even joyous, and this under the pressure of the deepest personal
sorrows.

It is also to be observed that Longfellow wrote in this same number of
"The North