the self-important man in the cocked hat, who, when the alarm was over, had returned to the field, screwed down the corners of his mouth, and shook his head-upon which there was a general shaking of the head throughout the assemblage. It was determined, however, to take the opinion of old Peter Vanderdonk, who was seen slowly advancing up the road. He was a descendant of the historian of that name, who wrote one of the earliest accounts of the province. Peter was the most ancient inhabitant of the village, and well versed in all the wonderful events and traditions of the neighbourhood. He recollected Rip at once, and corroborated his story in the most satisfactory manner. He assured the company that it was a fact, handed down from his ancestor the historian, that the Kaatskill Mountains had always been haunted by strange beings. That it was affirmed that the great Hendrick Hudson, the first discoverer of the river and country, kept a kind of vigil there every twenty years, with his crew of the Half-moon; being permitted in this way to revisit the scene of his enterprise, and keep a guardian eye upon the river, and the great city called by his name. That his father had once seen them in their old Dutch dresses playing at nine-pins in a hollow of the mountain; and that he himself had heard, one summer afternoon, the sound of their balls, like distant peals of thunder. To make a long story short, the company broke up, and returned to the more important concerns of the election. Rip's daughter took him home to live with her; she had a snug, well-furnished house, and a stout cheery farmer for a husband, whom Rip recollected for one of the urchins that used to climb upon his back. As to Rip's son and heir, who was the ditto of himself, seen leaning against the tree, he was employed to work on the farm; but evinced an hereditary disposition to attend to anything else but his business. Rip now resumed his old walks and habits; he soon found many of his former cronies, though all rather the worse for the wear and tear of time; and preferred making friends among the rising generation, with whom he soon grew into great favour. The above article on Irving has been revised from that written for Chambers's Encyclopædia in 1890 by the late Dr F. H. Underwood. A Life of Irving was published by his nephew, Pierre M. Irving (5 vols. 1862-64); there is also an excellent short biography by Charles Dudley Warner (1881), and a German Life by Laun (1870). Besides the criticisms in the various histories of American literature, see also Bryant's Discourse on Irving's life, character, and genius (1860), and Longfellow's Address before the Massachusetts Historical Society (1870). Fitz-Greene Halleck (1790-1867), born at Guilford in Connecticut, became a clerk in New York, and in 1832 private secretary to John Jacob Astor; in 1849 he retired to Guilford on an annuity of $200 left him by Astor. With his friend Rodman Drake he was responsible for the verse squibs and local satires called The Croaker Papers. His longest poem, Fanny (1819), is a pointed and sprightly satire on the literature, fashions, and politics of the time. His best shorter poem is the elegy on his friend Rodman Drake, beginning, 'Green be the turf above thee;' others still remembered are the verses on Marco Bozzaris, on Burns, and on Alnwick Castle. His complete Poetical Writings and his Life and Letters were edited by J. G. Wilson in 1868-69; his Orations by W. C. Bryant in 1873. George Ticknor (1791–1871), born in Boston the son of a wealthy New Englander, was admitted to the Bar in 1813, but turned his thoughts to study and travel, and, starting for Europe in 1815, remained there for four years-at London, Göttingen, Paris, Geneva, Rome, Venice, Madrid, and Lisbon. Everywhere he mixed in the best society; and his journal is full of the best sort of interviewing. He was Professor of French and Spanish and Belies Lettres at Harvard 1819-35, then again spent three years in Europe, collecting materials for his monumental and learned but far from lively History of Spanish Literature (1849). He also wrote Lives of Lafayette (1824) and Prescott (1864). His delightful Life, Letters, and Journals were pub lished in 1876; and, dealing with European letters as much as with American experiences, are perhaps his most valuable bequest to posterity. Nathaniel Parker Willis (1806-67) was born at Portland of a long line of Puritan ancestors, his father and grandfather being journalists. By the time he left Yale he was a clever writer in prose and verse, and ready to launch his Fugitive Poetry (1829). In New York he established the American Monthly Magazine; in 1831 visited Europe, where he was well received; and contributed to the New York Mirror his Pencillings by the Way. The Slingsby Papers, a collection of clever stories, belong to the same period. Appointed attaché to the American legation at Paris, he visited Greece and Turkey, and returned to England in 1837. To the London New Monthly he sent his Inkings of Adventure (collected 1836), and in 1840 he described a country life in Letters from under a Bridge. In 1844, now editor of the Daily Mirror, he revisited Europe, and published Dashes at Life with a Free Pencil (1845). In New York again in 1846, he started the Home Journal, to which he contributed most of his later works: in 1850, People I have Met and Life Here and There; 1851, Hurrygraphs, Life of Jenny Lind; 1853, Fun Jottings, A Summer Cruise in the Mediter ranean; 1854, A Health-Trip to the Tropics, Famous Persons and Places; 1855, The Rag-Bag; 1857, Paul Fane; 1859, The Convalescent. For a decade about the middle of the century he was about the most conspicuous and best-paid professional writer in America, though most of his work was trivial and gossipy, and is now forgotten. His early lyric 'Unseen Spirits' is admirable, but most of his short poems, scriptural, pathetic, and other, though they seem to have actually moved a generation trained on sentiment and the Bible, fail of their effect. 'Lady Jane' is at most clever; 'Melanie' and 'Lord Ivan and his Daughter' are all but unreadable. There is a Life of him in the 'American Men of Letters' (1885) by Professor H. A. Beers, who edited Selections from his prose writings (1885).-His sister, Sara Payson Willis, 'Fanny Fern' (1811-72), was a popular writer. See her Life (1873) by her husband, James Parton. James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851) was born at Burlington, New Jersey, son of a Federalist member of Congress, of Quaker descent; but in 1790 the family removed to a property near Otsego Lake, on what was afterwards to be known as Cooperstown, New York, then in a wild frontier region of great natural beauty. Cooper was much influenced in his second home by forest surroundings, red men, traders, and Indian traditions, his sense of mystery and his imagination being strongly stimulated. He entered Yale College in 1802, a boy of thirteen; and after remaining there three years, he was dismissed for neglect of his studies and defiance of academic discipline. In 1806 he shipped as a common sailor in the merchant service, and in 1808 entered the navy as a midshipman. He rose to the rank of a lieutenant, but in 1811 resigned his commission, and married a sister of Bishop De Lancey of New York, a high Tory. For ten years he devoted himself to farming and family life, and plunged into authorship somewhat suddenly. His first novel, Precaution (1819), was a failure; and the thirty-two tales which followed it were of extremely unequal quality. Among those which had exceptional merit and signal success may be named The Spy (1821), The Pilot (1823), The Last of the Mohicans (1826), The Prairie (1826), The Red Rover (1831), The Bravo (1831), The Pathfinder (1840), The Deerslayer (1841), The Two Admirals (1842), Wing-and-Wing (1842), and Satanstoe (1845). His other writings include a meritorious Naval History of the United States (1839; abridged edition, 1841), and Lives of Distinguished American Naval Officers (1846). His novels, upon the whole, and in spite of conspicuous faults, well deserve all the favour they received; the sea-tales and stories of frontier life being out of sight his best. His descriptive talent was as yet unequalled in America; and some of his characters, such as 'Natty Bumppo,' 'Long Tom Coffin,' ' Harvey Birch,'' Uncas,' 'Chingachgook,' and especially 'Leather-Stocking,' are drawn with extraordinary vigour and vividness. From the beginning of his literary career he was greeted as proving that an American had done work which might almost be compared with that of 'the author of Waverley. The peace of many of the later years of his life was much disturbed by literary and newspaper controversies and actions for libel-usually against Horace Greeley and other Whig editors, for he was often denounced as a Tory and aristocrat; and in nearly all of them he was successful. He conducted his own lawsuits, and usually pleaded his cases with admirable tact and ability. One good result of these suits was to impose upon the newspaper press of America some degree of restraint from the scandalously savage and virulent freedom of speech which had till then prevailed. On either side of the Atlantic Cooper's own severity of language won him no small amount of personal unpopularity; yet no man loved his country better than he; and his high regard for the nobler side of the English character, and his appreciation of the grand achievements of British history, found frequent expression in his writings. These writings, other than the best of his novels, contained much to excite opposition, and they brought upon him, not altogether undeservedly, the reputation of being a proud, contentious, and somewhat wrong-headed man; yet there was in his real character much sweetness, great strength and dignity, and unqualified honesty. He was excessively proud, no doubt, but his pride was without vanity; his faults were those of temper and judgment rather than of character. When Cooper is treated- -as he still often is, even in America-mainly as a writer of boys' books, he has an injustice done him. He wrote too much; many of his men are as conventional as his women usually are; his conversations are stilted; his style is careless; and his prejudices. are constantly aired. But he had a very true and very great gift as a story-teller; he was the first to take the virgin forest and the prairie into the domain of fiction, and he wrote the prose epic of the planting of his country. Modern ethnologists do not sneer, as it was once the fashion to do, at his Indians as mere creations of the fancy. Some of his characters are permanent additions to literature; and his power is best felt when he is compared with his predecessor, Brockden Brown. 'He belongs emphatically to the American nation,' as Washington Irving said; and his painting of nature under new aspects gave him a name that will never die. By Lake Otsego. On all sides, wherever the eye turned, nothing met it but the mirror-like surface of the lake, the placid view of heaven, and the dense setting of woods. So rich and fleecy were the outlines of the forest that scarce an opening could be seen; the whole visible earth, from the rounded mountain-top to the water's edge, presenting one unvaried line of unbroken verdure. As if vegetation were not satisfied with a triumph so complete, the trees overhung the lake itself, shooting out towards the light; and there were miles along its eastern shore where a boat might have pulled beneath the branches of dark Rembrandt-looking hemlocks, quivering aspens, and melancholy pines. In a word, the hand of man had never yet defaced or deformed any part of this native scene, which lay bathed in the sunlight, a glorious picture of affluent forest grandeur, softened by the balminess of June, and relieved by the beautiful variety afforded by the presence of so broad an expanse of water. Death of Long Tom Coffin. Lifting his broad hands high into the air, his voice was heard in the tempest. 'God's will be done with me,' he cried I saw the first timber of the Ariel laid, and shall live just long enough to see it turn out of her bottom; after which I wish to live no longer.' But his shipmates. were far beyond the sounds of his voice before these were half uttered. All command of the boat was rendered impossible, by the numbers it contained, as well as the raging of the surf; and as it rose on the white crest of a wave, Tom saw his beloved little craft for the last time. It fell into a trough of the sea, and in a few moments more its fragments were ground into splinters on the adjoining rocks. The cockswain [Tom] still remained where he had cast off the rope, and beheld the numerous heads and arms that appeared rising, at short intervals, on the waves, some making powerful and well-directed efforts to gain the sands, that were becoming visible as the tide fell, and others wildly tossed, in the frantic movements of helpless despair. The honest old seaman gave a cry of joy as he saw Barnstable [the commander, whom Tom had forced into the boat] issue from the surf, where one by one several seamen soon appeared also, dripping and exhausted. Many others of the crew were carried in a similar manner to places JAMES FENIMORE COOPER. After the Portrait by Madame de Mirbel. of safety; though, as Tom returned to his seat on the bowsprit, he could not conceal from his reluctant eyes the lifeless forms that were, in other spots, driven against the rocks with a fury that soon left them but few of the outward vestiges of humanity. Dillon and the cockswain were now the sole occupants of their dreadful station. The former stood in a kind of stupid despair, a witness of the scene; but as his curdled blood began again to flow more warmly to his heart, he crept close to the side of Tom, with that sort of selfish feeling that makes even hopeless misery more tolerable, when endured in participation with another. 'When the tide falls,' he said in a voice that betrayed the agony of fear, though his words expressed the renewal of hope, we shall be able to walk to land.' · 'There was One, and only One, to whose feet the waters were the same as a dry deck,' returned the cockswain; and none but such as have His power will ever be able to walk from these rocks to the sands.' The old seaman paused, and turning his eyes, which exhibited a mingled expression of disgust and compassion, on his companion, he added with reverence: 'Had you thought more of Him in fair weather, your case would be less to be pitied in this tempest.' 'Do you still think there is much danger?' asked Dillon. To them that have reason to fear death. Listen! Do you hear that hollow noise beneath ye?' "'Tis the wind driving by the vessel !' "Tis the poor thing herself,' said the affected cockswain, 'giving her last groans. The water is breaking up her decks; and in a few minutes more, the handsomest model that ever cut a wave will be like the chips that fell from her in framing!' 'Why, then, did you remain here?' cried Dillon wildly. 'To die in my coffin, if it should be the will of God,' returned Tom. These waves are to me what the land is to you; I was born on them, and I have always meant that they should be my grave.' 'But I-I,' shrieked Dillon-'I am not ready to die!I cannot die !-I will not die!' 'Poor wretch!' muttered his companion; you must go like the rest of us: when the death-watch is called, none can skulk from the muster.' 'I can swim,' Dillon continued, rushing with frantic eagerness to the side of the wreck. Is there no billet of wood, no rope, that I can take with me?' 'None; everything has been cut away, or carried off by the sea. If ye are about to strive for your life, take with ye a stout heart and a clean conscience, and trust the rest to God.' 'God!' echoed Dillon, in the madness of his frenzy; 'I know no God! there is no God that knows me!' 'Peace!' said the deep tones of the cockswain, in a voice that seemed to speak in the elements; 'blasphemer, peace!' The heavy groaning produced by the water in the timbers of the Ariel, at that moment added its impulse to the raging feelings of Dillon, and he cast himself headlong into the sea. The water thrown by the rolling of the surf on the beach was necessarily returned to the ocean, in eddies, in different places favourable to such an action of the element. Into the edge of one of these counter-currents, that was produced by the very rocks on which the schooner lay, and which the watermen call the 'under-tow,' Dillon had unknowingly thrown his person; and when the waves had driven him a short distance from the wreck, he was met by a stream that his most desperate efforts could not overcome. He was a light and powerful swimmer, and the struggle was hard and protracted. With the shore immediately before his eyes, and at no great distance, he was led, as by a false phantom, to continue his efforts, although they did not advance him a foot. The old seaman, who at first had watched his motions with careless indifference, understood the danger of his situation at a glance, and, forgetful of his own fate, he shouted aloud, in a voice that was driven over the struggling victim to the ears of his shipmates on the sands: Sheer to port, and clear the under-tow! Sheer to the southward!' Dillon heard the sounds, but his faculties were too much obscured by terror to distinguish their object: he, however, blindly yielded to the call, and gradually changed his direction until his face was once more turned towards the vessel. Tom looked around him for a rope, but all had gone over with the spars, or been swept away by the waves. At this moment of disappointment his eyes met those of the desperate Dillon. Calm and inured to horrors as was the veteran seaman, he involuntarily passed his hand before his brow to exclude the look of despair he encountered; and when, a moment afterwards, he removed the rigid member, he beheld the sinking form of the victim as it gradually settled in the ocean, still struggling with regular but impotent strokes of the arms and feet to gain the wreck, and to preserve an existence that had been so much abused in its hour of allotted probation. He will soon meet his God, and learn that his God knows him!' murmured the cockswain to himself. As he yet spoke, the wreck of the Aril yielded to an overwhelming sea, and after a universal shudder, her timbers and planks gave way, and were swept towards the cliffs, bearing the body of the simplehearted cockswain among the ruins. (From The Pilot.) Lounsbury's Life of Fenimore Cooper (1882) is the standard one, and contains a full bibliography; there is also a book on him by Clymer (1901). William Gilmore Simms (1806-70), the first notable man of letters in the Southern States, was born at Charleston in South Carolina, and had been both druggist and law-student when in 1828 he became editor of the City Gazette. His first poetic venture, Lyrical and other Poems (1827), was followed by The Vision of Cortes (1829), The Tricolour (1830), and Atalantis (1832); but his poetry is almost uniformly mediocre, though Southern Passages and Pictures (1839) contains some good verse. His essays, dramas, histories, and biographies are unimportant; he was a vigorous and successful journalist. But it is as novelist, the most capable of Fenimore Cooper's successors and imitators, that he has earned his place in literary history. Martin Faber (1833), somewhat on Brockden Brown's lines, attracted notice. Guy Rivers (1834) was a tale of life in the Georgia goldfields. The Yemassee (1835), dealing with Indians in colonial days, is an advance on these, and though it too plainly shows Cooper's influence, is usually accounted Simms's greatest work. The Partisan (1835), The Scout, Woodcraft, and Eutaw (1856) are the most notable of a series dealing with adventure and warfare in the South during the revolutionary wars. Richard Hurdis, Border Beagles, Helen Halsey, and Charlemont continued the Border series begun by Guy Rivers. Pelayo, Count Julian, The Damsel of Darien, Vasconselos, are too ambitious historical novels on times and regions to which Simms could not do justice. Carl Werner, Castle Dismal, and Marie de Berniere are domestic novels; The Wigwam and the Cabin is a collection of short tales. The Cassique of Kiawah (1860) would have been one of his triumphs but for the excitements of the Civil War, on which Simms wrote zealously as a fervid Southerner. During the war he was ruined and his library was burnt; he never retrieved his losses or regained his eminence in the public viewfor 'at the North' his vehement partisanship had made him unpopular. In his life he had founded or conducted some half-dozen literary serials, and to them and other periodicals he contributed largely; he did much hack-work on a vast variety of subjects; and he was highly thought of as lecturer and orator. The illustrated edition of his See works (1882-86) fills seventeen volumes. Lives by Cable (1888) and Professor Trent (1892). Richard Henry Dana (1787-1879) was born at Cambridge, Massachusetts, educated at Harvard, and admitted to the Bar at Boston in 1811. In 1818 he became associate editor of the North American Review, to which he contributed largely. His Dying Raven (1821), The Buccaneer (1827), and some others of his poems were warmly praised by critics; but his best work was in criticism. His son, Richard Henry Dana (1815-82), graduated at Harvard in 1837; but during a break in his college career, occasioned in part by an affection of the eyes, he had shipped as a common sailor, and made a voyage round Cape Horn to California and back. This voyage he described in Two Years before the Mast (1840), on the whole, perhaps, the best book of its kind; in 1840 he was admitted to the Massachusetts Bar, and was especially distinguished in maritime law. Among his works are The Seaman's Friend (1841) and To Cuba and Back (1859). He also edited Wheaton's International Law, and was a prominent Free-soiler and Republican. There is a Life of him by Adams (2 vols. 1890). Joseph Rodman Drake (1795-1820), associated with Fitz-Greene Halleck in The Croaker Papers, was born in New York city, and bred to medicine, but died of consumption in his twentysixth year. His most considerable poem, 'The Culprit Fay,' was written to show that American rivers also had just claims to the glories of fancy and romance. 'The American Flag' is even better known. The volume containing The Culprit Fay and other Poems was first published in 1835, and has been repeatedly reprinted. William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878), long the patriarch of American poets, was born of good New England stock at Cummington in Massachusetts, his father being a distinguished medical practitioner, who sat in the State legislature; and his name commemorates the doctor's reverence for the great Edinburgh physician, William Cullen, then recently dead. The precocious boy, keenly interested in literature, was trained to admire the poetry of Pope, and early encouraged to imitate him; the most noted fruit of these attempts being a satire, The Embargo, or Sketches of the Times (1807) a singular production for a youth of thirteen. In 1810 he entered Williams College, but, the family finances being straitened, he after two sessions resumed his studies at home, and formed himself by loving study of his favourite poets (amongst them Blair and Kirke White, Cowper and Campbell), while watching with a keen eye the quiet life of nature as he rambled among the woods. His quickened imagination found expression in the sonorous blank verse of Thanatopsis, which, published in the North American Review for September 1817 (though partly written as early as 1811), was unanimously greeted as having in it more of real poetry than anything hitherto written by an American. It has been described as the culmination of the poetry of the churchyard school. Meantime Bryant had studied law, had been admitted to the Bar, and had settled at Great Barrington. Invited to contribute further to the Review, he sent both verse and prose; among the former Lines to a Waterfowl,' and among the latter a criticism on American poetry. In 1821 he delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Harvard a patriotic poem on 'The Ages' in Spenserian verse. In the same year he was married to Miss Frances Fairchild, who inspired his poem 'O Fairest of the Rural Maids.' In this year, too, he lost his father, to whom he paid a tribute in his 'Hymn to Death.' Other noted poems of this time are 'The Rivulet,' 'The West Wind,' 'Green River,' 'The Forest Hymn,' and 'June,' which were published in Boston periodicals. In 1825 the poet was induced by his friends to remove to New York to become editor of the New York Review, and when it failed a year later, he was made assistant-editor of the Evening Post. In 1829 he had become editor-in-chief, and by his various gifts of mind and character, by his dignity and high principle, did much to raise the tone of the daily press. A collection of his poems was published in 1832, and, on its republication in England through Washington Irving, and with his warm commendation, received favourable notice from Blackwood's Magazine. Bryant was now, however, absorbed in journalism. His paper was democratic in politics, but when the slavery question became prominent it inclined to the anti-slavery side, and in 1856 it assisted in forming the Republican party. He was often called upon to make public addresses, and of these a volume was published in 1873. His visits to Europe, the West Indies, and many parts of the United States gave occasion for several series of letters to his paper (republished in three volumes). Meantime his poems had taken possession of the hearts of his countrymen, and several editions were issued, some of them finely illustrated. In his old age, when editorial duties were less absorbing, he again found time and temper for poetry. His later verse is strikingly similar in tone and manner to that of his youth; sometimes, as in 'Robert of Lincoln' and 'The Planting of an Apple-tree,' he seemed to reach a higher level than of old. At seventy-two he commenced translations of the Iliad and Odyssey in English blank verse, which proved as inadequate as those of many greater men before him. Almost his last poem was The Flood of Years, a worthy counterpart to Thanatopsis. In May 1878 Bryant delivered an eloquent address at the unveiling of a bust of Mazzini in the Central Park of New York; and as he was afterwards entering a house he fell on the doorstep, receiving injuries of which he died a fortnight later. Historically the earliest of the true poets of America, Bryant justly ranks amongst the great writers of his country. His poetry, though lacking in fire and power and the essentially lyrical note, has in it a true vein of tenderness and sympathy, and much restrained dignity, reflectiveness, and patriotic love of liberty; upon the whole more closely akin in temper to the work of Gray and Cowper than of contemporary English poets, it too often tends to be commonplace. The secret of its popularity was perhaps more its moral than its poetic attractiveness. Bryant deals kindly with the nobler side of the Red Indian, and he is hardly equalled in his descriptions of the larger aspects of American scenery. Most of his poems are short, and his verse forms are not very varied -he is most at home in blank verse. 'The Death of the Flowers,' 'The Fringed Gentian,' 'The Crowded Street,' 'Oh, Mother of a Mighty Race,' 'Our Country's Call,' and 'The Battlefield' are others of his most memorable poems. He had little more than a nominal share in Bryant and Gay's Popular History of the United States (18761880); and his books of travel, addresses, and essays are little read. An Indian at the Burying-place of his Fathers. My fathers' ancient burial-place, It is the spot-I know it well- For here the upland bank sends out I know the shaggy hills about, |