Page:Margaret Fuller Ossoli (Higginson).djvu/149

Rh coming generations — occupies but two pages and a half in the two volumes of her published memoirs. It will be the duty of the present biographer, in view of the plan which directs this literary series, to dwell more fully on this aspect of her life.

We can now see that a great deal of unnecessary sympathy used to be wasted on our American writers of fifty years ago. It was habitually taken for granted that they lived on a peculiarly barren soil, and that especial credit was to be allowed them if they accomplished anything at all. The concession was quite needless. They undoubtedly had nature and their own souls to draw upon; they had few books, but those were the best; they had some remote glimpse of art through engravings, at least; they had around them the inspiration of a great republic, visibly destined to overspread a continent; and they had two or three centuries of romantic and picturesque pioneer history behind them. We now recognize that Irving, Cooper, Bryant, Whittier did not create their material; they simply used what they found; and Longfellow’s fame did not become assured till he turned from Bruges and Nuremberg, and chose his theme among the exiles of Acadia. It was not Irving who invested the Hudson with romance, but the Hudson that inspired Irving. In 1786, when Mrs. Josiah Quincy, then a young girl, sailed up that river in a sloop, she wrote: “Our captain had a legend for every scene, either supernatural