“Man wants but little here below,
    Nor wants that little long.”

As this poem is a curiously close anticipation of Dr. Holmes’s Contentment, so the very popular ballad, Old Grimes, written about 1818, by Albert Gorton Greene, an undergraduate of Brown University in Rhode Island, is in some respects an anticipation of Holmes’s quaintly pathetic Last Leaf.

The political literature and public oratory of the United States during this period, although not absolutely of less importance than that which preceded and followed the Declaration of Independence and the adoption of the Constitution, demands less relative attention in a history of literature by reason of the growth of other departments of thought.  The age was a political one, but no longer exclusively political.  The debates of the time centered about the question of “State Rights,” and the main forum of discussion was the old Senate chamber, then made illustrious by the presence of Clay, Webster, and Calhoun.  The slavery question, which had threatened trouble, was put off for a while by the Missouri Compromise of 1820, only to break out more fiercely in the debates on the Wilmot Proviso and the Kansas and Nebraska Bill.  Meanwhile the Abolition movement had been transferred to the press and the platform.  Garrison started his Liberator in 1830, and the Antislavery Society was founded in 1833.  The Whig party, which had inherited the constitutional principles of the old Federal party, advocated internal improvements at national expense and a high protective tariff.  The State Rights party, which was strongest at the South, opposed these views, and in 1832 South Carolina claimed the right to “nullify” the tariff imposed by the general government.  The leader of this party was John Caldwell Calhoun, a South Carolinian, who in his speech in the United States Senate, on February 13, 1832, on Nullification and the Force Bill, set forth most authoritatively the “Carolina doctrine.”  Calhoun was a great debater, but hardly a great orator.  His speeches are the arguments of a lawyer and a strict constitutionalist, severely logical, and with a sincere conviction in the soundness of his case.  Their language is free from bad rhetoric; the reasoning is cogent, but there is an absence of emotion and imagination; they contain few quotable things, and no passages of commanding eloquence, such as strew the orations of Webster and Burke.  They are not, in short, literature.  Again, the speeches of Henry Clay, of Kentucky, the leader of the Whigs, whose persuasive oratory is a matter of tradition, disappoint in the reading.  The fire has gone out of them.