Hawthorne, profound and lonely genius, dramatist of the inner life, master of the symbolic story, endowed with the double gift of deep insight and exquisite art; Emerson, herald of self-reliance and poet of the intuitions, whose prose and verse flash with gem-like thoughts and fancies, and whose calm, vigorous accents were potent to awaken and sustain the intellectual independence of America; Longfellow, the sweetest and the richest voice of American song, the household poet of the New World; Whittier, the Quaker bard, whose ballads and lyrics reflect so perfectly the scenery and the sentiment of New England; Holmes, genial and pungent wit, native humorist, with a deep spring of sympathy and a clear vein of poetry in his many-sided personality; Lowell, generous poet of high and noble emotions, inimitable writer of dialect verse, penetrating critic and essayist,--these six authors form a group not yet equalled in the literary history of America. The factors of strength, and the hidden elements of beauty, in the Puritan character came to flower and fruit in these men. They were liberated, enlarged, quickened by the strange flood of poetry, philosophy, and romantic sentiment which flowed into the somewhat narrow and sombre enceinte of Yankee thought and life. They found around them a circle of eager and admiring readers who had felt the same influences. The circle grew wider and wider as the charm and power of these writers made itself felt, and as their ideas were diffused. Their work, always keeping a distinct New England colour, had in it a substance of thought and feeling, an excellence of form and texture, which gave it a much broader appeal. Their fame passed from the sectional to the national stage. In their day Boston was the literary centre of the United States. And in after days, though the sceptre has passed, the influence of these men may be traced in almost all American writers, of the East, the West, or the South, in every field of literature, except perhaps the region of realistic or romantic fiction. Here it seems as if the West had taken the lead. Bret Harte, with his frontier stories, always vivid but not always accurate, was the founder of a new school, or at least the discoverer of a new mine of material, in which Frank Norris followed with some powerful work, too soon cut short by death, and where a number of living men like Owen Wister, Stewart Edward White, and O. Henry are finding graphic stories to tell. Hamlin Garland, Booth Tarkington, William Allen White, and Robert Herrick are vigorous romancers of the Middle West. Winston Churchill studies politics and people in various regions, while Robert Chambers explores the social complications of New York; and both write novels which are full of interest for Americans and count their readers by the hundred thousand.