Contents

Introduction -- The ephemera: an emblem of human life / Benjamin Franklin -- The whistle / Benjamin Franklin -- Dialogue between Franklin and the gout / Benjamin Franklin -- Consolation for the old bachelor / Francis Hopkinson -- John Bull / Washington Irving -- The mutability of literature / Washington Irving -- Kean's acting / Richard Henry Dana -- Gifts / Ralph Waldo Emerson -- Uses of great men / Ralph Waldo Emerson -- Buds and bird-voices / Nathaniel Hawthorne -- The philosophy of composition / Edgar Allan Poe -- Bread and the newspaper / Oliver Wendell Holmes -- Walking / Henry David Thoreau -- On a certain condescension in foreigners / James Russell Lowell -- Preface to "Leaves of Grass" / Walt Whitman -- Americanism in literature / Thomas Wentworth Higginson -- Thackeray in America / George William Curtis -- Our march to Washington / Theodore Winthrop -- Calvin / Charles Dudley Warner -- Five American contributions to civilization / Charles William Eliot -- I talk of dreams / William Dean Howells -- An idyl of the honey-bee / John Burroughs -- Cut-off Copples's / Clarence King -- The Théâtre Français / Henry James -- Theocritus on Cape Cod / Hamilton Wright Mabie -- Colonialism in the United States / Henry Cabot Lodge -- New York after Paris / William Crary Brownell -- The tyranny of things / Edward Sandford Martin -- Free trade vs. protection in literature / Samuel McChord Crothers -- Dante and the Bowery / Theodore Roosevelt -- The revolt of the unfit / Nicholas Murray Butler -- On translating the odes of Horace / William Peterfield Trent.