3.  James Russell Lowell. The Biglow Papers (two series). Under the Willows, and Other Poems (1868). Rhoecus. The Shepherd of King Admetus. The Vision of Sir Launfal. The Present Crisis. The Dandelion. The Birch Tree. Beaver Brook. Essays on Chaucer. Shakespeare Once More. Dryden. Emerson, the Lecturer. Thoreau. My Garden Acquaintance. A Good Word for Winter. A Certain Condescension in Foreigners.

4.  William Hickling Prescott. The Conquest of Mexico.

5.  John Lothrop Motley. The United Netherlands.

6.  Francis Parkman. The Oregon Trail. The Jesuits in North America.

7. Representative American Orations, volume v.  Edited by Alexander Johnston.  New York:  G. P. Putnam’s Sons. 1884.

[Transcriber’s note:  In the poem fragment “soap for soap” the o’s in each “soap” must be rendered with Unicode to appear correctly—­in the first “soap”, o-breve (Ux014F); in the second, o-macron (Ux014D).]

CHAPTER VI.

LITERATURE IN THE CITIES.

1837-1861.

Literature as a profession has hardly existed in the United States until very recently.  Even now the number of those who support themselves by purely literary work is small, although the growth of the reading public and the establishment of great magazines, such as Harper’s, the Century, and the Atlantic, have made a market for intellectual wares which forty years ago would have seemed a godsend to poorly paid Bohemians like Poe or obscure men of genius like Hawthorne.  About 1840, two Philadelphia magazines—­Godey’s Lady’s Book and Graham’s Monthly—­began to pay their contributors twelve dollars a page, a price then thought wildly munificent.  But the first magazine of the modern type was Harper’s Monthly, founded in 1850.  American books have always suffered, and still continue to suffer, from the want of an international copyright, which has flooded the country with cheap reprints and translations of foreign works, with which the domestic product has been unable to contend on such uneven terms.  With the first ocean steamers there started up a class of large-paged weeklies in New York and elsewhere, such as Brother Jonathan, the New World, and the Corsair, which furnished their readers with the freshest writings of Dickens and Bulwer and other British celebrities within a fortnight after their appearance in London.  This still further restricted the profits of native authors and nearly drove them from the field of periodical literature.  By special arrangement the novels of Thackeray and other English writers were printed in Harper’s in installments simultaneously with their issue in English periodicals.  The Atlantic was