In fine, the New World had brought forth a hopeful young giant of a nation; and its hopefulness was reflected, with more of zeal than of art, in the prose and poetry of its literary men. Just as the enthusiastic Elizabethan spirit reflected itself in lyric or drama after the defeat of the Armada, so the American spirit seemed to exult in the romances of Cooper and Simms; in the verse of Pinckney, Halleck, Drake and Percival; in a multitude of national songs, such as "The American Flag," Warren's Address, "Home Sweet Home" and "The Star-Spangled Banner." We would not venture to liken one set of writings to the other, for we should be on the weak side of an Elizabethan comparison; we simply note that a great national enthusiasm was largely responsible for the sudden appearance of a new literature in the one land as in the other. LITERARY ENVIRONMENT. In the works of four writers, Irving, Cooper, Bryant and Poe, we have the best that the early national period produced; but we shall not appreciate these writers until we see them, like pines in a wood, lifting their heads over numerous companions, all drawing their nourishment from the same soil and air. The growth of towns and cities in America had led to a rapid increase of newspapers, magazines and annuals (collections of contemporary prose and verse), which called with increasing emphasis for poems, stories, essays, light or "polite" literature. The rapid growth of the nation set men to singing the old psalm of _Sursum Corda_, and every man and woman who felt the impulse added his story or his verse to the national chorus. When the first attempt at a summary of American literature was made in 1837, the author, Royal Robbins, found more than two thousand living writers demanding his attention. [Sidenote: KNICKERBOCKER SCHOOL] It was due, one must think, to geography rather than to any spirit of sectionalism, to difficulty of travel between the larger towns rather than to any difference of aim or motive, that the writers of this period associated themselves in a number of so-called schools or literary centers. New York, which now offered a better field for literary work than Boston or Philadelphia, had its important group of writers called the Knickerbocker School, which included Fitz-Greene Halleck and Joseph Rodman Drake, both poets and cheerful satirists of New World society; the versatile Nathaniel Parker Willis, writer of twenty volumes of poems, essays, stories and sketches of travel; and James Kirke Paulding, also a voluminous writer, who worked with Irving in the _Salmagundi_ essays and whose historical novels, such as _The Dutchman's Fireside_ (1831), are still mildly interesting. [Footnote: Irving, Cooper and Bryant are sometimes classed among the Knickerbockers; but the work of these major writers is national rather than local or sectional, and will be studied later in detail.] [Sidenote: SOUTHERN WRITERS]