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

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“ [100] have uttered the last word of our art.” Upon such praise as this the reputation of James Fenimore Cooper may well rest.

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William Cullen Bryant.

The third of the three recognized founders of American literature during the New York period was a New Englander by birth, the poet Bryant. There was never a more curious illustration of the unexpected channels by which literature creates itself in a new country than was offered by the fact that the first recognized American poet should be by personal temperament and bearing one of the last men to whom the poetic function would at first be attributed. Quiet, prim, grave, reticent, slender, he seemed more like an old-fashioned lawyer or conveyancer, than one through whom a new world of song should come into being. In his actual pursuits, moreover, even as an editor, he was among the more formal and staid of his class, held all his assistants to the greatest accuracy and hung lists of correct spellings in his counting room, whereas most newspaper editors are chiefly anxious to accumulate words and trust Providence with the spelling. This was his daily life, and it resulted in founding what must to this