The restless energy, the love of adventure, the sanguine anticipation which characterized American thought at this time, the picturesque contrasts to be seen in each mushroom town where civilization was encroaching on the raw edge of the wilderness—­all these found expression, not only in such well-known books as Cooper’s Pioneers, 1823, and Irving’s Tour on the Prairies, 1835, but in the minor literature which is read to-day, if at all, not for its own sake, but for the light that it throws on the history of national development:  in such books as Paulding’s story of Westward-Ho! and his poem, The Backwoodsman, 1818; or as Timothy Flint’s Recollections, 1826, and his Geography and History of the Mississippi Valley, 1827.  It was not an age of great books, but it was an age of large ideas and expanding prospects.  The new consciousness of empire uttered itself hastily, crudely, ran into buncombe, “spread-eagleism,” and other noisy forms of patriotic exultation; but it was thoroughly democratic and American.  Though literature—­or at least the best literature of the time—­was not yet emancipated from English models, thought and life, at any rate, were no longer in bondage—­no longer provincial.  And it is significant that the party in office during these years was the Democratic, the party which had broken most completely with conservative traditions.  The famous “Monroe doctrine” was a pronunciamento of this aggressive democracy, and though the Federalists returned to power for a single term, under John Quincy Adams (1825-29), Andrew Jackson received the largest number of electoral votes, and Adams was only chosen by the House of Representatives in the absence of a majority vote for any one candidate.  At the close of his term “Old Hickory,” the hero of the people, the most characteristically democratic of our presidents, and the first backwoodsman who entered the White House, was borne into office on a wave of popular enthusiasm.  We have now arrived at the time when American literature, in the higher and stricter sense of the term, really began to have an existence.  S. G. Goodrich, who settled at Hartford as a bookseller and publisher in 1818, says, in his Recollections:  “About this time I began to think of trying to bring out original American works. . . .  The general impression was that we had not, and could not have, a literature.  It was the precise point at which Sidney Smith had uttered that bitter taunt in the Edinburgh Review, ‘Who reads an American book?’ . . .  It was positively injurious to the commercial credit of a bookseller to undertake American works.”  Washington Irving (1783-1859) was the first American author whose books, as books, obtained recognition abroad; whose name was thought worthy of mention beside the names of English contemporary authors, like Byron, Scott, and Coleridge.  He was also the first American writer whose writings are still read for their own sake.  We read Mather’s Magnalia, and Franklin’s Autobiography, and Trumbull’s McFingal—­if we read them at all—­as history, and to learn about the times or the men.  But we read the Sketch Book, and Knickerbocker’s History of New York, and the Conquest of Granada for themselves and for the pleasure that they give as pieces of literary art.