In the year following the adoption of the Constitution, when the young nation was getting its breath and bearings, our writers multiplied tremendously, especially the poets, long-winded, pony-gaited mavericks, who should have been hitched to the plow. But that was the trouble with American literature, everybody had been hitched too much to the plow and too little to the pen. Yet how could it be otherwise in a land so new, so hardly won? But all of this poor poetry was a preparation—first, of the minds of the people for the greater work to come; and, second, of the pens of the masters who were already in training and about to come. When a great wave breaks crashing on the shore, you know the swell started away off at sea. So with every great wave of literature. The Golden Age of American letters, beginning with Bryant and closing with the death of Oliver Wendell Holmes, took its very definite start in the tremendous years from 1789 to 1809. But those years themselves have left us almost nothing. The year 1809, however, is one to remember. _Knickerbocker’s history of New York_ was published that year, and real literature in America began. Mark that date in red. But meantime if everybody was writing, everybody was reading. The spread of the newspaper and the birth and growth of the magazine were two of the notable literary signs of these early years of the new Republic. The people were hungry for reading. The whole nation was like a man who has always been denied books and pictures and music, and who, at thirty-five or forty, wakes up to a keen realization of his loss. The nation had dreamed and dared, had fought and plowed and broken trails, had leveled forests, peopled prairies, opened mines, built mills and roads, and now was pausing to look about and ask what it meant, and what it was all to mean. Bread the nation had. Now it wanted books. A body it had. But did it have a soul? To do and to have—that is first; to know, to feel, to be—that is second, but it is an even deeper need. Along with the spread of periodicals came the drama, the short story, and the novel. Our first professional man of letters, the first American to devote all of his time to literary work, Charles Brockden Brown, published in 1798 a powerful and terrible novel called _Wieland_, which perhaps should be reckoned as the first piece of durable fiction done in our country. What a flood has followed it! Brown himself did ten such tales. And they are worth reading. If you want to feel your hair curl into barbed wire on your bare skull, and your spinal column walk off and leave the rest of your congealed anatomy, read _Wieland_ or _Edgar Huntley_. Washington Irving was our first international writer. With the publication of THE SKETCH BOOK