the prosperous, the well-educated, with a mixture, of course, of
mere placemen and tuft-hunters. They composed weighty pamphlets,
eloquent sermons, and sparkling satire in praise of the old order
of things. When their cause was lost forever, they wrote gossipy
letters from their exile in London or pathetic verses in their
new home in Nova Scotia and Ontario. Their place in our national
life and literature has never been filled, and their talents and
virtues are never likely to receive adequate recognition. They
took the wrong fork of the road.

There were gentle spirits, too, in this period, endowed with
delicate literary gifts, but quite unsuited for the clash of
controversy--members, in Crevecoeur's touching words, of the
"secret communion among good men throughout the world." "I am a
lover of peace, what must I do?" asks Crevecoeur in his "Letters
from an American Farmer." "I was happy before this unfortunate
Revolution. I feel that I am no longer so, therefore I regret the
change. My heart sometimes seems tired with beating, it wants
rest like my eyelids, which feel oppressed with so many
watchings." Crevecoeur, an immigrant from Normandy, was certainly
no weakling, but he felt that the great idyllic American
adventure which he described so captivatingly in his chapter
entitled "What is an American"--was ending tragically in civil
war. Another whitesouled itinerant of that day was John Woolman
of New Jersey, whose "Journal," praised by Charles Lamb and
Channing and edited by Whittier, is finding more readers in the
twentieth century than it won in the nineteenth. "A man
unlettered," said Whittier, "but with natural refinement and
delicate sense of fitness, the purity of whose heart enters into
his language." Woolman died at fifty-two in far-away York,