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

---

[141] attract far more attention. This was due largely to the new atmosphere of German life and literature which it opened to Americans. The kingdom in which Germany ruled was not then, as now, a kingdom of material force and business enterprise, but, as Germans themselves claimed, a kingdom of the air; and into that realm Hyperion gave American readers the first glimpse. There is no doubt that under the sway of the simpler style now prevailing, much of the rhetoric of Hyperion seems turgid, some of its learning obtrusive, and a good deal of its emotion forced; it was, nevertheless, an epoch-making book.

The curious fact, however, remains, that at the very time when the author was at work upon Hyperion, his mind was undergoing a reaction toward the simpler treatment of more strictly American subjects. It must be remembered that Longfellow came forward at a time when cultivated Americans were wasting a great deal of sympathy on themselves. It was the general impression that the soil was barren, that the past offered no material, and that American authors must be European or die. Yet Longfellow's few