Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Walcott Boynton, Reader's History of American Literature

---

[104] disliked long poems, pronouncing them with much truth to be, almost without exception, “unspeakably tiresome.” “The better the poem is,” he said, “the less it is understood, as a general rule, by a promiscuous assembly.” His translation of the Odyssey, on the whole one of the least valuable of his works, was the only breach of this principle of brevity that he himself formulated. This he began on a voyage to Europe, which he made with a copy of Homer in his pocket and a fixed purpose of rendering at least forty lines out of Greek into English every day. It is a curious fact that he had, like Longfellow, a special gift for foreign languages and liked to translate, and, also like Longfellow, had an occasional impulse toward humor, though the result was never very happy.

---

The Knickerbocker group.

Bryant, though sometimes classed among Knickerbocker authors, did not really belong to that clique; not being a native of New York, as were Halleck and Drake, both of whom wrote poems which were declaimed with delight and many gestures by the school-boy of fifty years ago, but which perhaps are no longer heard even in school. The group also