Two really great masters of literature we had in America during the nineteenth century, Poe and Hawthorne. Because of our New England schoolmasters, as it seems to most of us, Poe has never come into his own proper appreciation in this country. The French consider him the great master of the short story, and that has come to occupy such a prominent place in our so-called literature in America, that one might look for an apotheosis of Poe. He is the one writer whose works in both prose and verse have influenced deeply the literary men of other countries besides our own. No other American writer has been given the tribute of more than a perfunctory notice in the non-English-speaking countries. In spite of this Poe's name was kept out of the Hall of Fame at New York University, {456} which was meant to enshrine the memory of our greatest thinkers and literary men, though we had generally supposed that the national selection of the jury to decide those whose names should be honored, would preclude all possibility of any narrow sectional influence perverting the true purpose of the institution. Poe has never been popular in New England, nor has he been appreciated at his true worth by the literary circles of New England. Their schoolmasterly influence has been pervasive enough to keep from Poe his true meed of praise among our people generally, though all our poets and literary men look up to him as our greatest poetic genius. As for Hawthorne, there is no doubt that he is our greatest American writer in prose. He was the one man in New England with a great message. His writings came from deep down in the human heart, from the very wellsprings of human passion, and had their origin not far from where soul touches body in this human compound. The English, usually supposed to be slow of recognition for things American, acknowledged his high worth almost at once. Some of us here in America, indeed, have had the feeling that to a great extent our people have had to learn the lesson of proper appreciation for Hawthorne from the English-speaking people across the water. To Americans, for years, he was little more than a story-writer, not so popular as {457} many another writer of stories, and his really great qualities were to a great extent ignored. Because Puritan New England was out of sympathy with the mystical spirit of his writings only a late and quite inadequate appreciation of the value of his work was formed by his countrymen. Something of this unfortunate lack of appreciation crept into the schoolmastering of the country, and Hawthorne is probably not as highly valued in his native land as he is in England, though France and Germany have learned to look up to him as our greatest of American literary men--the one of our writers who, with Poe, attracts a world audience.