The specific talent necessary to the expression of local life is much rarer than the ability to write of life in the abstract. If the knack of writing accompanied a sensibility to the life that lay nearest, we should long ago have had an abundant American literature descriptive of conditions that have passed and will not, in the very nature of things, recur. But the line of impressionability may not be controlled; and though many protests have been launched against minor American poets for looking beyond the robin to the nightingale, the rejection of the near continues, though in a diminishing degree. The early poets of the Ohio Valley did not often approach closely to the Western soil; they lacked insight and courage and their work was usually not interesting. When they occasionally essayed a Western subject, they were unable to bring to bear upon it any novelty of treatment; it was all “icily regular, splendidly null.” William T. Coggeshall states in the preface to his “Poets and Poetry of the West” (1864) that in the early years of the nineteenth century “soldiers, hunters, and boatmen had among them many songs descriptive of adventures incident to backwoods life, some of which were not destitute of poetic merit; but they were known only around campfires, or on ‘broadhorns’” (flat-boats), and tradition, he adds, preserved none worthy to be included in his anthology. But these racy songs would have been of greater value than much of the verse that he has preserved in his pages, though as a part of the history of development this, too, is not to be spurned. Coggeshall’s work includes notices of ninety-seven men and fifty-five women. Twenty-three of the total he attributes to Indiana by reason of residence, and thirteen of the number were natives of the State. Only a small proportion of the poets named by Coggeshall survived, though the writers of the biographical notes accompanying his selections were cordial and anxious to confer immortality. William D. Howells and John J. Piatt are included, and Mr. Howells wrote several of the sketches. It is diverting to read the opinion of Mr. Howells’s biographer that “some of his prose sketches are quite equal in grace of conception and individuality of treatment to any of his poems.” He was then twenty-seven.