And to say this is to confess that Dr. Oliver Wendell
Holmes has worked, through a number of books, to futile purpose. His
books are justified by something quite apart from his purpose.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
The United States have produced authors not a few; among some names not
the most famous, perhaps, on the popular tongue, are two or three names
of their poets; but they have hardly given to the world more than one man
of letters--judicious, judicial, disinterested, patient, happy,
temperate, delighted. The colonial days, with the 'painful' divines who
brought the parish into the wilderness; the experimental period of
ambition and attempts at a literature that should be young as the soil
and much younger than the race; the civil-war years, with a literature
that matched the self-conscious and inexpert heroism of the army;--none
of these periods of the national life could fitly be represented by a man
of letters. And though James Russell Lowell was the contemporary of the
'transcendentalists,' and a man of middle age when the South seceded, and
though indeed his fame as a Yankee humourist is to be discerned through
the smoke and the dust, through the gravity and the burlesque, of the
war, clear upon the other side, yet he was virtually the child of
national leisure, of moderation and education, an American of the
seventies and onwards.
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