While Massachusetts was creating an American literature other sections of the Union were by no means idle.  The West, indeed, was as yet too raw to add any thing of importance to the artistic product of the country.  The South was hampered by circumstances which will presently be described.  But in and about the sea-board cities of New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Richmond many pens were busy filling the columns of literary weeklies and monthlies; and there was a considerable output, such as it was, of books of poetry, fiction, travel, and miscellaneous light literature.  Time has already relegated most of these to the dusty top shelves.  To rehearse the names of the numerous contributors to the old Knickerbocker Magazine, to Godey’s, and Graham’s, and the New Mirror, and the Southern Literary Messenger, or to run over the list of authorlings and poetasters in Poe’s papers on the Literati of New York, would be very much like reading the inscriptions on the head-stones of an old grave-yard.  In the columns of these prehistoric magazines and in the book notices and reviews away back in the thirties and forties, one encounters the handiwork and the names of Emerson, Holmes, Longfellow, Hawthorne, and Lowell embodied in this mass of forgotten literature.  It would have required a good deal of critical acumen, at the time, to predict that these and a few others would soon be thrown out into bold relief, as the significant and permanent names in the literature of their generation, while Paulding, Hirst, Fay, Dawes, Mrs. Osgood, and scores of others who figured beside them in the fashionable periodicals, and filled quite as large a space in the public eye, would sink into oblivion in less than thirty years.  Some of these latter were clever enough people; they entertained their contemporary public sufficiently, but their work had no vitality or “power of continuance.”  The great majority of the writings of any period are necessarily ephemeral, and time by a slow process of natural selection is constantly sifting out the few representative books which shall carry on the memory of the period to posterity.  Now and then it may be predicted of some undoubted work of genius, even at the moment that it sees the light, that it is destined to endure.  But tastes and fashions change, and few things are better calculated to inspire the literary critic with humility than to read the prophecies in old reviews and see how the future, now become the present, has quietly given them the lie.

From among the professional litterateurs of his day emerges, with ever sharper distinctness as time goes on, the name of Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49).  By the irony of fate Poe was born at Boston, and his first volume, Tamerlane, and Other Poems, 1827, was printed in that city and bore upon its title-page the words, “By a Bostonian.”  But his parentage, so far as it was any thing, was Southern.  His father was a Marylander who had gone upon the