Bliss Perry, The American spirit in lierature: a chronicle of great interpreters

[89] volumes. Even while he was asking it, London was eagerly reading Irving's Sketch book. In 1821 came Fenimore Cooper's Spy and Bryant's Poems, and by 1826, when Webster was announcing in his rolling orotund that Adams and Jefferson were no more, the London and Paris booksellers were covering their stalls with Cooper's The last of the Mohicans. Irving, Cooper, and Bryant are thus the pioneers in a new phase of American literary activity, often called, for convenience in labeling, the Knickerbocker Group because of the identification of these men with New York. And close behind these leaders come a younger company, destined likewise, in the shy boyish words of Hawthorne, one of the number, “to write books that would be read in England.” For by 1826 Hawthorne and Longfellow were out of college and were trying to learn to write. Ticknor, Prescott, and Bancroft, somewhat older men, were settling to their great tasks. Emerson was entering upon his duties as a minister. Edgar Allan Poe, at that University of Virginia which Jefferson had just founded, was doubtless revising Tamerlane and other poems which he was to publish in Boston in the following year. Holmes was a Harvard undergraduate. Garrison had just printed