of William Lloyd Garrison's _Liberator_ in 1831 and ending at
Appomattox, that this gigantic supernaturalization of politics reached
its most astounding heights. In those days, indeed, politics and
religion coalesced in a manner not seen in the world since the Middle
Ages, and the combined pull of the two was so powerful that none could
quite resist it. All men of any ability and ambition turned to political
activity for self-expression. It engaged the press to the exclusion of
everything else; it conquered the pulpit; it even laid its hand upon
industry and trade. Drawing the best imaginative talent into its
service--Jefferson and Lincoln may well stand as examples--it left the
cultivation of belles lettres, and of all the other arts no less, to
women and admittedly second-rate men. And when, breaking through this
taboo, some chance first-rate man gave himself over to purely aesthetic
expression, his reward was not only neglect, but even a sort of
ignominy, as if such enterprises were not fitting for males with hair on
their chests. I need not point to Poe and Whitman, both disdained as
dreamers and wasters, and both proceeded against with the utmost rigours
of outraged Philistinism.

In brief, the literature of that whole period, as Algernon Tassin shows
in "The Magazine in America,"[39] was almost completely disassociated
from life as men were then living it. Save one counts in such crude
politico-puritan tracts as "Uncle Tom's Cabin," it is difficult to find
a single contemporaneous work that interprets the culture of the time,
or even accurately represents it. Later on, it found historians and
anatomists, and in one work, at least, to wit, "Huckleberry Finn," it
was studied and projected with the highest art, but no such impulse to
make imaginative use of it showed itself contemporaneously, and there
was not even the crude sentimentalization of here and now that one finds
in the popular novels of today. Fenimore Cooper filled his romances, not
with the people about him, but with the Indians beyond the sky-line, and
made them half-fabulous to boot. Irving told fairy tales about the
forgotten Knickerbockers; Hawthorne turned backward to the Puritans of
Plymouth Rock; Longfellow to the Acadians and the prehistoric Indians;
Emerson took flight from earth altogether; even Poe sought refuge in a
land of fantasy. It was only the frank second-raters--_e.g._, Whittier
and Lowell--who ventured to turn to the life around them