Investigations in, and sketches of, our physical geography and of the natural history of our flora, fauna, reptilia, fishes, and birds, by Professor Barton, Alexander Wilson, John J. Audubon, Samuel L. Mitchell, Timothy Flint, and kindred minds, brought out, in lights as brilliant as our October sunsets, our wide surfaces, and the objects crawling, flitting, or flying upon and over them. In sacred literature, theology, and polemics, Samuel Miller, Edward Robinson, Moses Stuart, William Ellery Channing, Francis Wayland, Nicholas Murray, the Wares (father and son), Theodore Parker, the Alexanders, George Bush, Edward Beecher, and a marshalled host of others, upheld by logical force and with learned or lively dialectics the cherished views of their various sects. Philosophy, moral, mental, metaphysical, and international, spoke golden-mouthed and eloquent its reasoned rules, principles, and large, grasping deductions through Henry James, Tayler Lewis, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Asa Mahan, C. S. Henry, L. P. Hickok, Henry Wheaton, and other diligent minds; while language was enriched and fertilized by the culturing labors of Worcester, Webster, Marsh, Schoolcraft, and Duponceau. In general literature our hemisphere sparkled with fixed stars, like Irving, Prescott, Story, the Everetts (Alexander and Edward), Cooper, Motley, Ticknor, Bancroft, Paulding, Hawthorne, Hillard, Wilde, Legarè, and uncounted more, which lit it up with beautiful lights, that blent their flames with the soft poetic rays of Bryant, Longfellow, Halleck, Whittier, Saxe, Lowell, Poe, Willis, Hillhouse, the Careys, the Davidson sisters,—scarcely shown ere they were snatched away, “Ostendent terris hunc tantum fata neque ultra Esse sinent.” Magazines and Reviews, although first appearing in 1745, began to be cultivated about 1815 by scholarly minds, for refined readers. “The North American Review,” “The American Quarterly,” “Southern Quarterly,” “The Christian Examiner,” “The New York Review,” “The Knickerbocker,” and eager crowds of less note, presented, ere the half-shell was cast aside, such palatable relishes that people wondered how they had ever contrived to make a meal without them.