“In poetry we were still to seek. Byrant’s ‘Waterfowl’ had begun that immortal flight that will be followed by many a delighted eye long after ours shall have been darkened; Dana had written some verses which showed a velleity for better and sincerer things; Willis was frittering away a natural and genuine gift; Longfellow was preluding that sweet, pure, and sympathetic song which persuaded so many Englishmen that he must be a countrymen of theirs. In his case the question certainly became not ‘Who reads an American book?’ but ‘Who does _not_ read one?’ Holmes had written one imperishable poem. “This was the state of things when I was a boy. That old question, once so cruelly irritating, because it was so cruelly to the point, has long ago lost its sting. When I look round me on this platform, I see a company of authors whose books are read wherever English is read, and some whose books are read in languages that are other than their own. The American who lounges over an English railway-book-stall while his train is making-up sees almost as many volumes with names of his countrymen on their backs as he sees of native authors. American Literature has asserted and made good its claim to a definite place in the world. Sixty years ago there were only two American authors, Irving and Cooper, who could have lived by their literary incomes, and they fortunately had other sources of revenue. There are now scores who find in letters a handsome estate. Our literature has developed itself out of English literature, as our political forms have developed themselves out of English political forms, but with a difference. Not as parasitic plants fed from the parent stock, but only as new growths from seeds the mother tree has dropped, could they have prospered as they have done. And so our literature is a part of English literature and must always continue to be so, but, as I have said, with a difference. What that difference is, it would be very hard to define, though it be something of which we are very sensible when we read an American book. We are, I think, especially sensible of it in the biography of any of our countrymen, as I could not help feeling as I read that admirable one of Emerson by Mr. Cabot. There was nothing English in the conditions which shaped the earlier part of Emerson’s life. Something Scottish there was, it may be said, but the later life at Concord which was so beautiful in its noble simplicity, in its frugality never parsimonious, and practised to secure not wealth but independence, that is--or must we say was?--thoroughly American. Without pretension, without swagger, with the need of proclaiming itself, and with no affectation of that commonness which our late politicians seem to think especially dear to a democracy, it represented whatever was peculiar and whatever was best in the novel inspirations of our soil. These inspirations began to make themselves felt early in our history and I think I find traces of their