This stream, as we have said, first began to assume definite form and direction about the time that Sydney Smith was uttering his tirades against the genius and achievements of our countrymen. In 1817, appeared in the North American Review a remarkable poem called “Thanatopsis.” The author was a young man named William Cullen Bryant, only twenty-three years of age; yet the poem had been written four years before. The annals of literature do not furnish another example of such excellence at so early an age. The poem yet stands as one of the most exquisite in the language. A recent critic has characterized it as “lofty in conception, beautiful in execution, full of chaste language and delicate and striking imagery, and, above all, pervaded by a noble and cheerful religious philosophy.” This first effort on the part of Bryant was succeeded by a long career of eminence in the field of literature. In 1818 appeared a volume of miscellanies called “The Sketch Book,” by Washington Irving, a young man who had already acquired some slight reputation as a dabbler in literature of a trifling or humorous kind. The Sketch Book was almost immediately honored by republication in England. This initial volume was followed by a second series of miscellanies called “Bracebridge Hall,” which was published in London in 1822. In the preliminary chapter the author pleasantly adverts to the general feeling with which American authorship was regarded in England. “It has been a matter of marvel to my European readers,” says he, “that a man from the wilds of America should express himself in tolerable English. I was looked upon as something new and strange in literature; a kind of demi-savage, with a feather in his hand instead of on his head; and there was a curiosity to hear what such a being had to say about civilized society.” In the same year with Irving’s Sketch Book appeared Drake’s Culprit Fay, a poem that has not been surpassed in its kind since Milton’s Comus. In 1821 Percival issued his first volume of poems, Dana his Idle Man, and Cooper, his Precaution. His last named volume was at once followed by a long list of works including such famous titles as The Spy, The Last of the Mohicans, The Pathfinder, and The Deerslayer. It marked the advent of our most distinguished novelist—a man who has been styled the Walter Scott of America. He justly stands in the same rank with the mighty Wizard of the North, and has no other equal. Thus the stream of American literature rolled on its course, and was swelled as it flowed by the contributions of Everett, Prescott, Bancroft, Emerson, Hawthorne, Poe, Willis, Holmes, Whittier, Lowell, and a host of others, whose names the world will not willingly let die.