JEFFERSON. 1743-1826. Thomas Jefferson, of Virginia, third President of the United States, was a fine scholar, a wise statesman, and a good and great man. He was born in 1743, and died on July 4, 1826*—the fif tieth anniversary of American independence. Jefferson is the author of Notes on Virginia and other valuable works; but his greatest work is the Declaration of Independence. Of all our great men, he is the truest representative of republican ideas, and he probably did more than any other to shape the destinies of our country. EXTRACTS. We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. II. A DECALOGUE. 1. Never put off till to-morrow what you can do to-day. 2. Never trouble another for what you can do yourself. 3. Never spend your money before you have it. 4. Never buy what you do not want, because it is cheap; i will be dear to you. 5. Pride costs us more than hunger, thirst, and cold. 6. We never repent of having eaten too little. 7. Nothing is troublesome that we do willingly. 8. How much pain have cost us the evils that have never hap pened! 9. Take things always by the smooth handle. 10. When angry, count ten before you speak; if very angry, a hundred. HAMILTON. 1757-1804. Alexander Hamilton, who was killed in a duel by Aaron Burr, in 1804, was distinguished as a soldier, a statesman, and a writer. He was Secretary of the Treasury under Washington, and to him is due the honor of bringing order out of chaos, and establishing By a wonderful coincidence, John Adams, another of the great founders of our nation, died on the same day. the finances of the country upon a firm basis. His fame as a writer rests chiefly upon his contributions to The Federalist, in which are expounded the principles of the Constitution. EXTRACT. The native brilliancy of the diamond needs not the polish of art; the conspicuous features of preeminent merit need not the coloring pencil of imagination, nor the florid decorations of rhetoric. Eulogium on Gen. Greene. DWIGHT. 1752-1817. Dr. Timothy Dwight, one of the most distinguished presidents of Yale College, was also distinguished as an author. In prose his principal work is Theology Explained and Defended. In poetry his best works are Columbia, Greenfield Hill, and some versions of the Psalms, among which the most popular is that beginning,"I love thy kingdom, Lord, The house of thy abode, The church our bless'd Redeemer saved With his own precious blood." EXTRACT. Columbia, Columbia, to glory arise, The queen of the world and the child of the skies! Columbia. AUDUBON. 1780-1851. John James Audubon is celebrated in literature for his great work entitled The Birds of America, in four volumes, folio. magnificently illustrated by four hundred and thirty-five colored. plates, the whole costing originally one thousand dollars a copy. He and his sons subsequently published a work entitled Quadrupeds of America. His ornithology is celebrated no less for the truth and beauty of its descriptions than for the excellence of its illustrations. EXTRACT. Where is the person who, on observing this glittering fragment of the rainbow, would not pause, admire, and instantly turn his mind with reverence towards the Almighty Creator, the wonders of whose hand we at every step discover, and of whose sublime conceptions we everywhere observe the manifestations in his admirable system of creation? OTHER PROSE WRITERS OF THIS AGE. JOHN ADAMS (1735-1826), second President of the United States, author of many political papers. His Letters to his Wife are the most popular of his writings. JAMES MADISON (1751-1836) fourth President of the United States, celebrated for his papers in The Federalist, etc. JOHN WITHERSPOON, D. D., LL. D. (1722-1794), President of Princeton College, signer of the Declaration, and a prolific and able writer on various subjects. WM. ELLERY CHANNING, D. D. (1780-1842), an eloquent preacher and refined writer, author of Evidences of Christianity, Self-Culture, Sermons, etc. DR. DAVID Ramsay (1749-1815), born in Lancaster Co., Pa., but most of his life a resident of South Carolina. He wrote History of South Carolina, History of the United States, Universal History, Life of Washington, etc. WASHINGTON Allston (1779-1843), artist, poet, and prosist; author of The Sylphs of the Seasons, Romance of Monaldi, Lectures on Art, etc. WM. WIRT (1772-1834), a great lawyer, and author of The British Spy and Life of Patrick Henry. ALEXANDER WILSON (1766-1813), a great ornithologist, but little inferior to Audubon. JUDGE KENT (1763-1847), author of Commentaries on American Law. JUDGE STORY (1779-1845), author of a Commentary on the Constitution of the United States, and various other legal treatises. CHIEF JUSTICE Marshall (1755-1835), author of a Life of Washington. ENGLISH CONTEMPORARIES. This age in American Literature is nearly co-extensive with the ages of Johnson and Scott, in English Literature. (See pages 25, 32.) *The humming-bird. PERIOD III.-NATIONAL AGE. 1830-1875. (Embracing, in English history, the reigns of Wm. IV. and Victoria) W E have called this period "The National Age," because now for the first time our literature began to assume a national importance and to show signs of a distinct national life. In the preceding ages it had beer, apart from works of local and temporary interest, insignificant in amount and imitative in character; but with the advent of Cooper, Irving, Bryant, and Emerson, it began to challenge the attention of the world, and to show the results of American thought and culture. There still remained, however, the diffidence of youth, and a sort of intel lectual dependence on the mother country; and it required the rude shock of our civil war and the revulsion of feeling caused by the unfriendly attitude of England, to teach us that manly selfreliance which is essential to great achievement, in individuals or nations. The guns of Sumter were the signal, not only for the social emancipation of three million slaves, but also for the intellectual emancipation of thirty millions of freemen; and the great Civil War will undoubtedly mark the beginning of a new literary era. Already new forces are at work and new tendencies developing, as in the dialect poems of Harte and Hay; but what will be the final result cannot yet be determined. The authors of this period, being numerous, will be divided into two classes : I. THE POETS, represented by Bryant, Longfellow, Whittier, Lowell, Holmes, Poe, Saxe, Read, Boker, Taylor, Alice Cary Aldrich, Stedman, Holland, Harte, Miller, Hayne, and Timrod. II. THE PROSE WRITERS, represented by Irving, Prescott, Bancroft, Motley, Cooper, Hawthorne, Stowe, Everett, Webster, Agassiz, Emerson, Whipple, White, Simms, Parkman, Howells, and "Mark Twain." I. POETS OF THE NATIONAL AGE. BRYANT. 1794-1878. William Cullen Bryant, who may almost be called the father of American poetry, was born at Cummington, Mass., in 1794 After receiving a thorough education and devoting himself for some years to the study and practice of law, he connected himself, in 1826, with the New York Evening Post, which he edited during the rest of his life. He died in 1878, at the ripe age of eighty-four, universally loved and lamented. Among his finest poems are the following: Thanatopsis, Death of the Flowers, Forest Hymn, Green River, The Evening Wind. Song of the Stars, Song of the Sower, The Planting of the Appletree, Waiting at the Gate, and The Flood of Years. The first of these was written at the age of eighteen, the last at the age of eighty-two. These two points mark the extremes of a literary career remarkable no less for its brilliancy than its extent. Besides his original poems, he has published an excellent Translation of Homer, and several books of travel. Bryant may appropriately be called the American Wordsworth, being characterized by the same minute and reverent observation of nature, and the same deep religious feeling, that appear in the works of that great poet; but in classic dignity of style and purity of diction he is Wordsworth's superior. EXTRACTS. Truth, crushed to earth, shall rise again; But Error, wounded, writhes in pain, II. The Battlefield The groves were God's first temples. Ere man learned To hew the shaft and lay the architrave, And spread the roof above them; ere he framed The lofty vault, to gather and roll back |