both houses of Congress, minister to England, governor of his State,
and President of Harvard, was a speaker of great finish and elegance.
His addresses were mainly of the memorial and anniversary kind, and
were rather lectures and Phi. B. K. prolusions than speeches. Everett
was an instance of careful culture bestowed on a soil of no very great
natural richness. It is doubtful whether his classical orations on
Washington, the Republic, Bunker Hill Monument, and kindred themes,
have enough of the breath of life in them to preserve them much longer
in recollection.

New England, during these years, did not take that leading part in the
purely literary development of the country which it afterward assumed.
It had no names to match against those of Irving and Cooper. Drake and
Halleck--slender as was their performance in point of quantity--were
better poets than the Boston bards, Charles Sprague, whose _Shakespeare
Ode_, delivered at the Boston theater in 1833, was locally famous; and
Richard Henry Dana, whose longish narrative poem, the _Buccaneer_,
1827, once had admirers. But Boston has at no time been without a
serious intellectual life of its own, nor without a circle of highly
educated men of literary pursuits, even in default of great geniuses.
The _North American Review_, established in 1815, though it has been
wittily described as "ponderously revolving through space" for a few
years after its foundation, did not exist in an absolute vacuum, but
was scholarly, if somewhat heavy. Webster, to be sure, was a
Massachusetts man--as were Everett and Choate--but his triumphs were
won in the wider field of national politics. There was, however, a
movement at this time, in the intellectual life of Boston and eastern
Massachusetts, which, though not immediately contributory to the finer
kinds of literature, prepared the way, by its clarifying and
stimulating influences, for the eminent writers of the next generation.