Blacksmith_ and _Evangeline_. He scored
his greatest triumph in _Miles Standish_ in 1858. And another Harvard
professor, Oliver Wendell Holmes, was just coming into a national
reputation in 1860 by his _Autocrat of the Breakfast Table_ and other
similar writings.

A more radical poet was John Greenleaf Whittier, contributor to the
_National Era_, a radical anti-slavery journal which first gave
publicity to Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe's famous _Uncle Tom's Cabin_.
Whittier's _Ichabod_, which appeared in 1850, and is already quoted in
these pages, gave its author a devoted following among the radicals and
hastened Webster to his grave. Mrs. Stowe's work was perhaps the most
influential book ever written by an American, though it hardly ranks as
literature. Of a similarly intense nature was James Russell Lowell,
whose _Biglow Papers_ of 1846 to 1857 unmercifully lampooned the party
which waged the war on Mexico and ridiculed the leaders of the South and
West. Succeeding Longfellow at Harvard, Lowell helped to establish in
1857 the _Atlantic Monthly_, which still remains the best of American
magazines.

There was nowhere else in the country such a school of literary men as
this of New England, though in Charleston William Gilmore Simms was
still publishing historical novels, espousing the cause of Southern
literature in _Russell's Magazine_, and stimulating the ambitions of
young men. One of his pupils, Henry Timrod, whose _At Magnolia Cemetery_
is likely to prove immortal, was worthy to be compared with Poe; and
another, Paul Hamilton Hayne, certainly deserved a higher rank and a
better fortune than either of these struggling poets has been accorded.
But perhaps the most original writings of the time were those of a
certain group of obscure men in Georgia and the lower South. A. B.
Longstreet, the author of _Georgia Scenes_, William Tappan Thompson, of
_Major Jones's Courtship_, and Joseph B. Baldwin, of _Flush Times in
Alabama and Mississippi_, struck a rich vein of ludicrous humor which
Mark Twain worked out after the war.

In Richmond the _Southern Literary Messenger_ was still the
clearing-house for Southern writers, and _De Bow's Review_ was eminent
in the field of social and economic studies. New York City had, however,
become the Mecca of the men who had manuscripts to submit. There the
Harper Brothers published their _Harper's Magazine_, which went to
150,000 subscribers, we are told, each month, and the _Knicke