It is no essential contradiction of that title that during the era there throve such glorious barbarians as Whitman and Mark Twain; they came from a class and a region which flowered later than the Shantung of the nation, the New England of the image-breaking Emerson, the philosophical hired man Thoreau, the transcendental critic and artist Hawthorne, the fighting Quaker Whittier, the many-tongued translator Longfellow, the jolly Cantabrigian Lowell, the festive Bostonian Holmes. Nor is it a contradiction that at the end of the century came such a rollicking philosopher as William James or such a silken ironist as George Santayana, or such naturalistic young men as Stephen Crane and Frank Norris and Jack London, or such a multitudinous cynic and sentimentalist as O. Henry; or even that during the era lived those three terrible infants of the Adams family, Charles Francis 2d, Henry, and Brooks, to flay the era and all its inherited conceptions. The background and the prevailing colour of the age were still silver. It was then that reminiscence began to enrich the texture of our literary past. Most of the epigones—Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Frank B. Sanborn, for instance—devoted a good part of their lives to writing about the lives of the protagonists. Holmes, of the greater line, wrote memoirs of Emerson and Motley; Howells, later but greater too, gave us dozens of precious memorial essays. Our classics settled into comfortable positions to wait till some revolution should spill them out. Washington as chief national hero gave way to Lincoln, whom the Silver Age softened and sweetened until his angularities hardly showed. The old flaming ardours about manifest destiny considerably cooled, not so much because the national humility was stronger but because there was a stronger sense of decorum current. Poetry was dainty and smooth and rounded as never before in this country. The short story after many experiments straitened itself to a few prevailing types of a distinctly native form and substance. The novel, with Howells as choragus, even subdued Mark Twain from the extravagance of his earlier burlesques to the suaver annals of Huckleberry Finn and Joan of Arc; and it taught the drama that reality had a place on the stage as well as in books. Our essayists grew lighter and gayer, not without a good deal of orthodoxy and a gusto which somehow seemed to have been trained upon sweet cider, but still mellow and kindly and urbane. After the faun Thoreau, the sage John Burroughs! Scholarship grew to Alexandrian proportions; dissertations showed their heads. At the best, these silver qualities all tended towards art; at the worst they bred dilettantism and languor.