The new movement seemed to the Brahmins of the older school a veritable renaissance of vulgarity. Even Lowell, who had written the _Biglow Papers_, cried out against it. The new literature from the West and the South was the work of what Holmes had called "the homespun class," "the great multitude." It was written, almost all of it, by authors from no college. They had been educated at the printer's case, on the farm, in the mines, and along the frontiers. As compared with the roll of the Brahmins the list is significant: Whitman, Warner, Helen Jackson, Stockton, Shaw, Clemens, Piatt, Thaxter, Howells, Eggleston, Burroughs, F. H. Smith, Hay, Harte, Miller, Cable, Gilder, Allen, Harris, Jewett, Wilkins, Murfree, Riley, Page, Russell. The whole school thrilled with the new life of America, and they wrote often without models save as they took life itself as their model. Coarse and uncouth some parts of their work might be, but teeming it always was with the freshness, the vitality, and the vigor of a new soil and a newly awakened nation. VI The new period began in the early seventies. The years of the war and the years immediately following it were fallow so far as significant literary output was concerned. "Literature is at a standstill in America, paralyzed by the Civil War," wrote Stedman in 1864, and at a later time he added, "For ten years the new generation read nothing but newspapers." The old group was still producing voluminously, but their work was done. They had been borne into an era in which they could have no part, and they contented themselves with reëchoings of the old music and with translations. In 1871 _The London School Board Chronicle_ could declare that, "The most gifted of American singers are not great as creators of home-bred poetry, but as translators," and then add without reservation that the best translations in the English language had been made in America. It was the statement of a literal fact. Within a single period of six years, from 1867 to 1872, there appeared Longfellow's _Divina Commedia_, C. E. Norton's _Vita Nuova_, T. W. Parsons' _Inferno_, Bryant's _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_, Taylor's _Faust_ and C. P. Cranch's _Æneid_. It was the period of swan songs. Emerson's _Terminus_ came in 1866; _Last Poems_ of the Cary sisters, Longfellow's _Aftermath_ and Whittier's _Hazel Blossoms_ appeared in 1874; and Holmes's _The Iron Gate_ was published in 1880. Lowell, the youngest of the group, alone seemed to have been awakened by the war. His real message to America, the national odes and the essays on Democracy which will make his name permanent in literature, came after 1865, and so falls into the new period.