erican
literature. All in all, Taylor may unhesitatingly be put first among
our poets of the second generation--the generation succeeding that of
Longfellow and Lowell--although the lack in him of original genius
self-determined to a peculiar sphere, or the want of an inward fixity
and concentration to resist the rich tumult of outward impressions, has
made him less significant in the history of our literary thought than
some other writers less generously endowed.

Taylor's novels had the qualities of his verse. They were profuse,
eloquent, and faulty. _John Godfrey's Fortune_, 1864, gave a picture
of bohemian life in New York. _Hannah Thurston_, 1863, and the _Story
of Kennett_; 1866, introduced many incidents and persons from the old
Quaker life of rural Pennsylvania, as Taylor remembered it in his
boyhood. The former was like Hawthorne's _Blithedale Romance_, a
satire on fanatics and reformers, and its heroine is a nobly conceived
character, though drawn with some exaggeration. The _Story of
Kennett_, which is largely autobiographic, has a greater freshness and
reality than the others, and is full of personal recollections. In
these novels, as in his short stories, Taylor's pictorial skill is
greater on the whole than his power of creating characters or inventing
plots.

Literature in the West now began to have an existence. Another young
poet from Chester County, Pa., namely, Thomas Buchanan Read, went to
Cincinnati, and not to New York, to study sculpture and painting, about
1837, and one of his best-known poems, _Pons Maximus_, was written on
the occasion of the opening of the suspension bridge across the Ohio.
Read came East, to be sure, in 1841, and spent many years in our
sea-board cities and in Italy. He was distinctly a minor poet, but
some of his Pennsylvania pastorals, like the _Deserted Road_, have a
natural sweetness; and his luxurious _Drifting_, which combines the
methods of painting and poetry, is justly popular. _Sheridan's
Ride_--perhaps his most current piece--is a rather forced production,
and has been overpraised. The two Ohio sister poets, Alice and Phoebe
Cary, were attracted to New York in 1850, as soon as their literary
success seemed assured. They made that city their home for the
remainder of their lives. Poe praised Alice Cary's _Pictures of
Memory_, and Phoebe's _Nearer Home_ has become a favorite hymn. There
is nothing peculiarly Western about the verse of the Cary sisters