Magazine, had perished of inanition at New York, and the claim of the
commercial capital to the literary primacy had passed with that brilliant
venture. New York had nothing distinctive to show for American
literature but the decrepit and doting Knickerbocker Magazine. Harper's
New Monthly, though Curtis had already come to it from the wreck of
Putnam's, and it had long ceased to be eclectic in material, and had
begun to stand for native work in the allied arts which it has since so
magnificently advanced, was not distinctively literary, and the Weekly
had just begun to make itself known. The Century, Scribner's, the
Cosmopolitan, McClure's, and I know not what others, were still
unimagined by five, and ten, and twenty years, and the Galaxy was to
flash and fade before any of them should kindle its more effectual fires.
The Nation, which was destined to chastise rather than nurture our young
literature, had still six years of dreamless potentiality before it; and
the Nation was always more Bostonian than New-Yorkish by nature, whatever
it was by nativity.

Philadelphia had long counted for nothing in the literary field. Graham's
Magazine at one time showed a certain critical force, but it seemed to
perish of this expression of vitality; and there remained Godey's Lady's
Book and Peterson's Magazine, publications really incredible in their
insipidity. In the South there was nothing but a mistaken social ideal,
with the moral principles all standing on their heads in defence of
slavery; and in the West there was a feeble and foolish notion that
Western talent was repressed by Eastern jealousy. At Boston chiefly, if
not at Boston alone, was there a vigorous intellectual life among such
authors as I have named. Every young writer was ambitious to join his
name with theirs in the Atlantic Monthly, and in the lists of Ticknor &
Fields, who were literary publishers in a sense such as the business
world has known nowhere else before or since. Their imprint was a