Literature in the West now began to have an existence.  Another young poet from Chester County, Pa., namely, Thomas Buchanan Read, went to Cincinnati, and not to New York, to study sculpture and painting, about 1837, and one of his best-known poems, Pons Maximus, was written on the occasion of the opening of the suspension bridge across the Ohio.  Read came East, to be sure, in 1841, and spent many years in our sea-board cities and in Italy.  He was distinctly a minor poet, but some of his Pennsylvania pastorals, like the Deserted Road, have a natural sweetness; and his luxurious Drifting, which combines the methods of painting and poetry, is justly popular. Sheridan’s Ride—­perhaps his most current piece—­is a rather forced production, and has been overpraised.  The two Ohio sister poets, Alice and Phoebe Cary, were attracted to New York in 1850, as soon as their literary success seemed assured.  They made that city their home for the remainder of their lives.  Poe praised Alice Cary’s Pictures of Memory, and Phoebe’s Nearer Home has become a favorite hymn.  There is nothing peculiarly Western about the verse of the Cary sisters.  It is the poetry of sentiment, memory, and domestic affection, entirely feminine, rather tame and diffuse as a whole, but tender and sweet, cherished by many good women and dear to simple hearts.

A stronger smack of the soil is in the Negro melodies like Uncle Ned, O Susanna, Old Folks at Home, ’Way Down South, Nelly was a Lady, My Old Kentucky Home, etc., which were the work, not of any Southern poet, but of Stephen C. Foster, a native of Allegheny, Pa., and a resident of Cincinnati and Pittsburg.  He composed the words and music of these, and many others of a similar kind, during the years 1847 to 1861.  Taken together they form the most original and vital addition which this country has made to the psalmody of the world, and entitle Foster to the first rank among American song-writers.

As Foster’s plaintive melodies carried the pathos and humor of the plantation all over the land, so Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 1852, brought home to millions of readers the sufferings of the Negroes in the “black belt” of the cotton-growing States.  This is the most popular novel ever written in America.  Hundreds of thousands of copies were sold in this country and in England, and some forty translations were made into foreign tongues.  In its dramatized form it still keeps the stage, and the statistics of circulating libraries show that even now it is in greater demand than any other single book.  It did more than any other literary agency to rouse the public conscience to a sense of the shame and horror of slavery; more even than Garrison’s Liberator, more than the indignant poems of Whittier and Lowell or the orations of Sumner and Phillips.  It presented the thing concretely and dramatically, and in particular