Poe's magical creations were rootless flowers. He took no hold upon the life about him, and cared nothing for the public concerns of his country. His poems and tales might have been written in vacuo for any thing American in them. Perhaps for this reason, in part, his fame has been so cosmopolitan. In France especially his writings have been favorites. Charles Baudelaire, the author of the Fleurs du Mal, translated them into French, and his own impressive but unhealthy poetry shows evidence of Poe's influence. The defect in Poe was in character—a defect which will make itself felt in art as in life. If he had had the sweet home feeling of Longfellow or the moral fervor of Whittier he might have been a greater poet than either.
"If I could dwell
Where Israfel
Hath dwelt, and he where I,
He might not sing so wildly well
A mortal melody,
While a bolder note than this might swell
From my lyre within the sky!"
Though Poe was a Southerner, if not by birth, at least by race and breeding, there was nothing distinctly Southern about his peculiar genius, and in his wandering life he was associated as much with Philadelphia and New York as with Baltimore and Richmond. The conditions which had made the Southern colonies unfruitful in literary and educational works before the Revolution continued to act down to the time of the civil war. Eli Whitney's invention of the cotton-gin in the closing years of the last century gave extension to slavery, making it profitable to cultivate the now staple by enormous gangs of field-hands working under the whip of the overseer in large plantations. Slavery became henceforth a business speculation in the States furthest south, and not, as in Old Virginia and Kentucky, a comparatively mild domestic system. The necessity of defending its peculiar institution against the attacks of a growing faction in the North compelled the South to throw all its intellectual strength into politics, which, for that matter, is the natural occupation and excitement of a social aristocracy. Meanwhile immigration sought the free States, and there was no middle class at the South. The "poor whites" were ignorant and degraded. There were people of education in the cities and on some of the plantations, but there was no great educated class from which a literature could proceed. And the culture of the South, such as it was, was becoming old-fashioned and local, as the section was isolated more and more from the rest of the Union and from the enlightened public opinion of Europe by its reactionary prejudices and its sensitiveness on the subject of slavery. Nothing can be imagined more ridiculously provincial than the sophomorical editorials in the Southern press just before the outbreak of the war, or than the backward and ill-informed articles which passed for reviews in the poorly supported periodicals of the South.
In the general dearth of work of high and permanent value, one or two Southern authors may be mentioned whose writings have at least done something to illustrate the life and scenery of their section. When in 1833 the Baltimore Saturday Visitor offered a prize of a hundred dollars for the best prose tale, one of the committee who awarded the prize to Poe's first story, the MS. Found in a Bottle, was John P. Kennedy, a Whig gentleman of Baltimore, who afterward became secretary of the navy in Fillmore's administration. The year before he had published Swallow Barn, a series of agreeable sketches of country life in Virginia. In 1835 and 1838 he published his two novels, Horse-Shoe Robinson and Rob of the Bowl, the former a story of the Revolutionary War in South Carolina, the latter an historical tale of colonial Maryland. These had sufficient success to warrant reprinting as late as 1852. But the most popular and voluminous of all Southern writers of fiction was William Gilmore Simms, a South Carolinian, who died in 1870. He wrote over thirty novels, mostly romances of Revolutionary history, Southern life, and wild adventure, among the best of which were the Partisan, 1835, and the Yemassee. Simms was an inferior Cooper, with a difference. His novels are good boys' books, but are crude and hasty in composition. He was strongly Southern in his sympathies, though his newspaper, the Charleston City Gazette, took part against the Nullifiers. His miscellaneous writings include several histories and biographies, political tracts, addresses, and critical papers contributed to Southern magazines. He also wrote numerous poems, the most ambitious of which was Atlantis, a Story of the Sea, 1832. His poems have little value except as here and there illustrating local scenery and manners, as in Southern Passages and Pictures, 1839. Mr. John Esten Cooke's pleasant but not very strong Virginia Comedians was, perhaps, in literary quality the best Southern novel produced before the civil war.
When Poe came to New York the most conspicuous literary figure of the metropolis, with the possible exception of Bryant and Halleck, was N. P. Willis, one of the editors of the Evening Mirror, upon which journal Poe was for a time engaged. Willis had made a literary reputation, when a student at Yale, by his Scripture Poems, written in smooth blank verse. Afterward he had edited the American Monthly in his native city of Boston, and more recently he had published Pencillings by the Way, 1835, a pleasant record of European saunterings; Inklings of Adventure, 1836, a collection of dashing stories and sketches of American and foreign life; and Letters from Under a Bridge, 1839, a series of charming rural letters from his country place at Owego, on the Susquehanna. Willis's work, always graceful and sparkling, sometimes even brilliant, though light in substance and jaunty in style, had quickly raised him to the summit of popularity. During the years from 1835 to 1850 he was the most successful American magazinist, and even down to the day of his death, in 1867, he retained his hold upon the attention of the fashionable public by his easy paragraphing and correspondence in the Mirror and its successor, the Home Journal, which catered to the literary wants of the beau monde. Much of Willis's work was ephemeral, though clever of its kind, but a few of his best tales and sketches, such as F. Smith, The Ghost Ball at Congress Hall, Edith Linsey, and the Lunatic's Skate, together with some of the Letters from Under a Bridge, are worthy of preservation, not only as readable stories, but as society studies of life at American watering-places like Nahant and Saratoga and Ballston Spa half a century ago. A number of his simpler poems, like Unseen Spirits, Spring, To M—— from Abroad, and Lines on Leaving Europe, still retain a deserved place in collections and anthologies.
The senior editor of the Mirror, George P. Morris, was once a very popular song-writer, and his Woodman, Spare that Tree, still survives. Other residents of New York city who have written single famous pieces were Clement C. Moore, a professor in the General Theological Seminary, whose Visit from St. Nicholas—"'Twas the Night Before Christmas," etc.—is a favorite ballad in every nursery in the land; Charles Fenno Hoffman, a novelist of reputation in his time, but now remembered only as the author of the song Sparkling and Bright, and the patriotic ballad of Monterey; Robert H. Messinger, a native of Boston, but long resident in New York, where he was a familiar figure in fashionable society, who wrote Give Me the Old, a fine ode with a choice Horatian flavor; and William Allen Butler, a lawyer and occasional writer, whose capital satire of Nothing to Wear was published anonymously and had a great run. Of younger poets, like Stoddard and Aldrich, who formerly wrote for the Mirror and who are still living and working in the maturity of their powers, it is not within the limits and design of this sketch to speak. But one of their contemporaries, Bayard Taylor, who died American minister at Berlin, in 1878, though a Pennsylvanian by birth and rearing, may be reckoned among the "literati of New York." A farmer lad from Chester County, who had learned the printer's trade and printed a little volume of his juvenile verses in 1844, he came to New York shortly after with credentials from Dr. Griswold, the editor of Graham's, and obtaining encouragement and aid from Willis, Horace Greeley, and others, he set out to make the tour of Europe, walking from town to town in Germany and getting employment now and then at his trade to help pay the expenses of the trip. The story of these Wanderjahre he told in his Views Afoot, 1846. This was the first of eleven books of travel written during the course of his life. He was an inveterate nomad, and his journeyings carried him to the remotest regions—to California, India, China, Japan, and the isles of the sea, to Central Africa and the Soudan, Palestine, Egypt, Iceland, and the "by-ways of Europe." His head-quarters at home were in New York, where he did literary work for the Tribune. He was a rapid and incessant worker, throwing off many volumes of verse and prose, fiction, essays, sketches, translations, and criticisms, mainly contributed in the first instance to the magazines. His versatility was very marked, and his poetry ranged from Rhymes of Travel, 1848, and Poems of the Orient, 1854, to idyls and home ballads of Pennsylvania life, like the Quaker Widow and the Old Pennsylvania Farmer; and on the other side, to ambitious and somewhat mystical poems, like the Masque of the Gods, 1872—written in four days—and dramatic experiments like the Prophet, 1874, and Prince Deukalion, 1878. He was a man of buoyant and eager nature, with a great appetite for new experience, a remarkable memory, a talent for learning languages, and a too great readiness to take the hue of his favorite books. From his facility, his openness to external impressions of scenery and costume and his habit of turning these at once into the service of his pen, it results that there is something "newspapery" and superficial about most of his prose. It is reporter's work, though reporting of a high order. His poetry too, though full of glow and picturesqueness, is largely imitative, suggesting Tennyson not unfrequently, but more often Shelley. His spirited Bedouin Song, for example, has an echo of Shelley's Lines to an Indian Air:
"From the desert I come to thee
On a stallion shod with fire;
And the winds are left behind
In the speed of my desire.
Under thy window I stand,
And the midnight hears my cry;
I love thee, I love but thee,
With a love that shall not die."
The dangerous quickness with which he caught the manner of other poets made him an admirable parodist and translator. His Echo Club, 1876, contains some of the best travesties in the tongue, and his great translation of Goethe's Faust, 1870-71—with its wonderfully close reproduction of the original meters—is one of the glories of American literature. All in all, Taylor may unhesitatingly be put first among our poets of the second generation—the generation succeeding that of Longfellow and Lowell—although the lack in him of original genius self-determined to a peculiar sphere, or the want of an inward fixity and concentration to resist the rich tumult of outward impressions, has made him less significant in the history of our literary thought than some other writers less generously endowed.
Taylor's novels had the qualities of his verse. They were profuse, eloquent, and faulty. John Godfrey's Fortune, 1864, gave a picture of bohemian life in New York. Hannah Thurston, 1863, and the Story of Kennett; 1866, introduced many incidents and persons from the old Quaker life of rural Pennsylvania, as Taylor remembered it in his boyhood. The former was like Hawthorne's Blithedale Romance, a satire on fanatics and reformers, and its heroine is a nobly conceived character, though drawn with some exaggeration. The Story of Kennett, which is largely autobiographic, has a greater freshness and reality than the others, and is full of personal recollections. In these novels, as in his short stories, Taylor's pictorial skill is greater on the whole than his power of creating characters or inventing plots.
Literature in the West now began to have an existence. Another young poet from Chester County, Pa., namely, Thomas Buchanan Read, went to Cincinnati, and not to New York, to study sculpture and painting, about 1837, and one of his best-known poems, Pons Maximus, was written on the occasion of the opening of the suspension bridge across the Ohio. Read came East, to be sure, in 1841, and spent many years in our sea-board cities and in Italy. He was distinctly a minor poet, but some of his Pennsylvania pastorals, like the Deserted Road, have a natural sweetness; and his luxurious Drifting, which combines the methods of painting and poetry, is justly popular. Sheridan's Ride—perhaps his most current piece—is a rather forced production, and has been overpraised. The two Ohio sister poets, Alice and Phoebe Cary, were attracted to New York in 1850, as soon as their literary success seemed assured. They made that city their home for the remainder of their lives. Poe praised Alice Cary's Pictures of Memory, and Phoebe's Nearer Home has become a favorite hymn. There is nothing peculiarly Western about the verse of the Cary sisters. It is the poetry of sentiment, memory, and domestic affection, entirely feminine, rather tame and diffuse as a whole, but tender and sweet, cherished by many good women and dear to simple hearts.