ack Valley. Those of most literary interest
were the _Supernaturalism of New England_, 1847, and some of the papers
in _Literary Recreations and Miscellanies_, 1854.

While Massachusetts was creating an American literature other sections
of the Union were by no means idle. The West, indeed, was as yet too
raw to add any thing of importance to the artistic product of the
country. The South was hampered by circumstances which will presently
be described. But in and about the sea-board cities of New York,
Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Richmond many pens were busy filling the
columns of literary weeklies and monthlies; and there was a
considerable output, such as it was, of books of poetry, fiction,
travel, and miscellaneous light literature. Time has already relegated
most of these to the dusty top shelves. To rehearse the names of the
numerous contributors to the old _Knickerbocker Magazine_, to
_Godey's_, and _Graham's_, and the _New Mirror_, and the _Southern
Literary Messenger_, or to run over the list of authorlings and
poetasters in Poe's papers on the _Literati of New York_, would be very
much like reading the inscriptions on the head-stones of an old
grave-yard. In the columns of these prehistoric magazines and in the
book notices and reviews away back in the thirties and forties, one
encounters the handiwork and the names of Emerson, Holmes, Longfellow,
Hawthorne, and Lowell embodied in this mass of forgotten literature.
It would have required a good deal of critical acumen, at the time, to
predict that these and a few others would soon be thrown out into bold
relief, as the significant and permanent names in the literature of
their generation, while Paulding, Hirst, Fay, Dawes, Mrs. Osgood, and
scores of others who figured beside them in the fashionable
periodicals, and filled quite as large a space in the public eye, would
sink into oblivion in less than thirty years. Some of these latter
were clever enough people; they entertained their contemporary public
sufficiently, but their work had no vitality or "power of continuance."
The great majority of the writings of any period are necessarily
ephemeral, and time by a slow process of natural selection is
constantly sifting out the few representative books which shall carry
on the memory of the period to posterity. Now and then it may be
predicted of some undoubted work of genius, even at the moment that it
sees the light, that it is destined to endure. Bu