The moment that the Edinburg Review was thus dealing our fathers these heavy blows seemed to be the real starting point in our career of literary greatness. William Cullen Bryant, Washington Irving, James K. Paulding, Richard H. Dana, James Fenimore Cooper, Mrs. Sigourney and a host of others were giving direction to that stream of literature that has since flowed broad and free over our land, imparting life and vigor and beauty to our society and institutions. It is, however, anterior to the year 1820, the thirty or forty years of our national independence, during which Mr. Smith says we have done “absolutely nothing” in literature, science or art, to which we must more particularly advert. The literary product of those years was scanty enough, it is true. The student of this period will not find much, and not all of that of the first order, to reward his labor—not much, at least, as compared with other nations at the same time. But may there not have been some sufficient reason for this, outside of any downright intellectual deficiencies on the part of our fathers? Let us for a moment consider the condition of things at that time in this country. In the first place, at the time referred to, the citizens of the United States were in a daily struggle with the material difficulties of their situation. The country was new. The region west and north of the Ohio and Mississippi was yet an almost unbroken wilderness, while the country east and south of those rivers was but sparsely populated. At the same time the tide of immigration was sweeping into the country, and with it all the rush and turmoil incident to life in a new country was going on. Forests were to be cut down; farms were to be cleared up; houses were to be built; roads were to be made; bridges were to be thrown across the rivers; while a livelihood was to be compelled from the forests, the streams, and the fields. The conditions of a new country are not favorable to the cultivation of the arts, of sciences, or of literature. Why do not Englishmen twit the people of Australia because during the past forty or fifty years in which they have prospered so greatly in material things, they have not produced a Macaulay, a Tennyson, a Gladstone, a Tyndall, or a Huxley? It would be just as fair to do it. Not only was there this hand to hand contest with their physical environment, but the political conditions were also unfavorable to any general dalliance with the Muses. Only in times of tranquility and ease is it possible. “To sport with Amaryllis in the shade, Or with the tangles of Neaera’s hair.”