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