DEAR SIR,--I return the article you were so good as to send me. In many respects it has a good deal of merit, but on the whole I do not think it suited to the "Review." Many of the thoughts and reflections are good, but they want maturity and betray a young writer. The style, too, is a little ambitious, although not without occasional elegance. With more practice the author cannot fail to become a good writer; and perhaps my judgment in regard to this article would not agree with that of others whose opinion is to be respected; but, after all, you know, we editors have no other criterion than our own judgment.{7} Nevertheless the young aspirant felt more and more strongly drawn to a literary life, and this found expression in his Commencement oration on "Our Native Writers." His brother and biographer, writing of this address in later years, says of it, "How interesting that [theme] could be made in seven minutes the reader may imagine," and he does not even reprint it; but it seems to me to be one of the most interesting landmarks in the author's early career, and to point directly towards all that followed. OUR NATIVE WRITERS To an American there is something endearing in the very sound,--Our Native Writers. Like the music of our native tongue, when heard in a foreign land, they have power to kindle up within him the tender memory of his home and fireside; and more than this, they foretell that whatever is noble and attractive in our national character will one day be associated with the sweet magic of Poetry. Is, then, our land to be indeed the land of song? Will it one day be rich in romantic associations? Will poetry, that hallows every scene,--that renders every spot classical,--and pours out on all things the soul of its enthusiasm, breathe over it that enchantment, which lives in the isles of Greece, and is more than life amid the "woods, that wave o'er Delphi's steep"? Yes!--and palms are to be won by our native writers!--by those that have been nursed and brought up with us in the civil and religious freedom of our country. Already has a voice been lifted up in this land,--already a spirit and a love of literature are springing up in the shadow of our free political institutions. But as yet we can boast of nothing farther than a first beginning of a national literature: a literature associated and linked in with the grand and beautiful scenery of our country,--with our institutions, our manners, our customs,--in a word, with all that has helped to form whatever there is peculiar to us, and to the land in which we live. We cannot yet throw off our literary allegiance to Old England, we cannot yet remove from our shelves every book which is not strictly and truly American. English literature is a great and glorious monument, built up by the master-spirits of old time, that had no peers, and rising bright and beautiful until its summit is hid in the mists of antiquity.