ns to the Natural History of the
United States_, which his son, Alexander, was to complete. Joseph Henry,
the first head of the Smithsonian Institution, was equally well known,
and he and Professor Bache were the backbones of the American National
Academy of Science, just beginning its beneficent work. Silliman, of
Yale, and Mitchell, of the University of North Carolina, were the
best-known geologists.

Nor was art degenerating in this period of great prosperity. Hiram
Powers, of Cincinnati, the ablest sculptor of his country, was greatly
hurt because Congress refused him the contract for the decorative work
on the magnificent Capitol in Washington, at last nearing completion.
His aspirations were not unreasonable, for his Greek Slave, a beautiful
work in marble, had captured the imagination of both American and
foreign critics in 1851. Still, Thomas Crawford, his successful
competitor, was a sculptor of real gifts, as one may see in his statues
of Jefferson and Patrick Henry in Richmond. The work of Allston, Sully,
and De Veaux, the painters, was being improved upon by Chester Harding,
Eastman Johnson, and William Morris Hunt, all influenced, however, by
Turner of England, the Duesseldorf (Germany) and Barbizon (France)
schools. There were now many wealthy business men in the country, and
thus artists had a fair chance of a livelihood while their ideals and
technique were developing. In Boston, New York, and Philadelphia were
the beginnings of the museums which were a few years later to become
schools of art of no mean importance.

But the flower of American culture was its literature. To be sure
Edgar Allan Poe, whose _Raven_ and short stories were ere long to
give him the first rank among all American men of letters, had been
suffered to starve in the midst of New York's millions in 1849,
and Hawthorne found it very difficult to find the means of a meager
livelihood in Massachusetts. If the _Raven_ and the _Scarlet Letter_
were born unwelcome, Ralph Waldo Emerson was making a living as
author and sage of his generation, and there were others of the
Transcendentalists--Thoreau, the woodland poet, Margaret Fuller, the
woman knight-errant, recently drowned at sea, and Amos Bronson
Alcott--whose writings appeared in standard editions and who lived by
their pens. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, a professor at Harvard till
1854, though savagely criticized by Poe and Margaret Fuller, had won the
American heart in his _Village