1809, was published within the recollection of some yet living, and the
venerable poet Richard H. Dana--Irving's junior by only four
years--survived to 1879, when the youngest of the generation of writers
that now occupy public attention had already won their spurs. Bryant,
whose _Thanatopsis_ was printed in 1816, lived down to 1878. He saw
the beginnings of our national literature, and he saw almost as much of
the latest phase of it as we see to-day in this year 1891. Still, even
within the limits of a single life-time, there have been progress and
change. And so, while it will happen that the consideration of
writers, a part of whose work falls between the dates at the head of
this chapter, may be postponed to subsequent chapters, we may in a
general way follow the sequence of time.

The period between the close of the second war with England, in 1815,
and the great financial crash of 1837, has been called, in language
attributed to President Monroe, "the era of good feeling." It was a
time of peace and prosperity, of rapid growth in population and rapid
extension of territory. The new nation was entering upon its vast
estates and beginning to realize its manifest destiny. The peace with
Great Britain, by calling off the Canadian Indians and the other tribes
in alliance with England, had opened up the North-west to settlement.
Ohio had been admitted as a State in 1802; but at the time of President
Monroe's tour, in 1817, Cincinnati had only seven thousand inhabitants,
and half of the State was unsettled. The Ohio River flowed for most of
its course through an unbroken wilderness. Chicago was merely a fort.
Hitherto the emigration to the West had been sporadic; now it took on
the dimensions of a general and almost a concerted exodus. This
movement was stimulated in New England by the cold summer of 1816 and
the late spring of 1817, which produced a scarcity of food that
amounted in parts of the interior to a veritable famine. All through