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 742 Irving. Cooper. Bryant. [i800-78 Fenimore Cooper, Irving's still more popular contemporary, began writing some ten years later than he, and enjoys to this day the distinction of being the only American novelist whose works, taken as a whole, have an assured place in the literature of the world. The general similarity of his method to that of Scott, so often remarked, has some- what obscured his positive merit. He never approached Scott either in mastery of character or in careless command of style. Among eminent American writers, indeed, Cooper remains the one whose style, taken by itself, is the most cumbrous and faulty. His admirable knowledge of nature, on the other hand, in those two different aspects which are most universal forest and sea has combined with his manly purity of temper to make his better work at once permanently memorable and deeply expressive of the youthful and vigorous age during which he flourished. Cooper lived until 1851 ; Irving until 1859 ; and their chief poetical contemporary, William Cullen Bryant, survived until 1878. But Bryant's work, like that of the others, was so far complete by 1882 the year of Scott's death that we may fairly consider him, with them, as represen- tative of the state of literature in America during the first third of the nineteenth century. His later verse sustained the reputation which his earlier verse had won him, but added no new feature to his poetic individuality. He was calmly romantic, sentimentally melancholy, and punctiliously polished. He was free from all extravagance, and innocently unconscious that his gentle self-restraint often kept him within the bounds of commonplace. Poetry, he maintained, should be "always simple and always luminous." Whatever his defects in respect of sensuousness and passion, he was never intricate or obscure ; nor was he wanting in a certain deliberate grace which has stood the test of time. It has seemed desirable thus to define the chief earlier writers of the Middle States because their work comprises the whole achievement of American letters during the period which began in England with the publication of the Lyrical Ballads and closed with the death of Scott. Naturally they were not solitary. Even such comparatively unimportant achievements as theirs must always involve considerable literary activity. The New York in which they lived produced many less eminent makers of prose and of verse, and many magazines in which these ephemeral authors found fleeting vehicles of expression. In 1833 the Knickerbocker Magazine, on the whole the most important of them, was founded. It lived for about thirty years, to be succeeded by other magazines, more highly developed, several of which are still in existence. Throughout its career, it published the best work of America ; but, on looking back, we may fairly say either that this work was a gently decadent form of such literature as reached its height in the hands of Irving, Cooper, and Bryant, or else that, with the single exception of Edgar Allan Poe, it proceeded from New England.