1. The relation between English literature and American in the initial twenty or thirty years of the last century has already been suggested. Aside from that, or very often through that, the influence of Rousseau was paramount. The doctrine that upheld the innocence of “man in a state of nature,” and maintained the equality of all individuals, and the feeling, half pantheistic, for an external nature opposed to civilisation, since they entered into the vital tissue of our national thought,--and though they are at bottom contrary to science and all demonstrable experience--are among the very conditions, so to speak, of much of our poetry. From these sources, for example, it came about that while in actual practice we despised and maltreated that “natural man” the cruel Indian, we idealised him in poetical effusions; just as Fenimore Cooper, treading in the footsteps of Chateaubriand, idealised him in prose. 2. Our earlier poets, that is, immediately after the Revolution, but again, and especially, after the War of 1812 had confirmed our sense of national solidarity, are much given to the utterance of their patriotism; albeit only a few out of many more or less pretentious or tasteful efforts have survived. Key’s “Star-Spangled Banner” (1814), conceived at the close of the second war, antedates “The American Flag” (1819) of Drake by but five years; these two, with Hopkinson’s “Hail Columbia” (1798), and “America” (1832), the well-known hymn by S. F. Smith, whatever their relative or absolute merits as literature, remain our most cherished national poems. 3. However frequent or insistent the note of patriotism, the general temper of American poets has not been strongly optimistic. As one glances over a long list of the subjects chosen for treatment, a leaning toward the more sombre and melancholy elements and aspects of life becomes more and more apparent. Nor is this leaning confined to the multitude. Exceptions like Walt Whitman to the contrary notwithstanding, it is characteristic, in the main, of the leaders, whenever they escape from common or inherited themes, and give rein to their own personalities. That joy which is the well-spring of Wordsworth’s vitality is greatly diminished in even his nearest American counterpart, Bryant; assuredly it is not akin to the subdued sadness of Longfellow, though this be not strictly “akin to pain.” 4. On the other hand, the noblest American poetry has not been tragic. Tragedy and serious epic have been attempted, but, as in the case of Dwight, Barlow, and so many others, largely as academic exercitations, savouring of the desk and the library. With our national life they have had no essential connection. A central motive in our history like the death of Lincoln still awaits the imagination of a master-dramatist.