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The objects of Cuyp, for instance, are few in number and commonplace in their character--a bit of land and water, a few cattle and figures in no way remarkable. His power, says a critic, reminds me of some of the short poems of Longfellow, where things in themselves most prosaic are flooded with a kind of poetic light from the inner soul. {49} It is quite certain that one may go farther in looking back upon the development of our literature and can claim that this simplicity was the precise contribution needed at that early and formative period. Literature in a new country naturally tends to the florid, and one needs only to turn to the novels of Charles Brockden Brown, or even Bancroft's
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History of the United States, to see how eminently this was the case in America. Whatever the genius of Poe, for instance, we can now see that he represented, in this respect, a dangerous tendency, and Poe's followers and admirers exemplified it in its most perilous form. Take, for instance, such an example as that of Dr. Thomas Holley Chivers of Georgia, author of
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Eonchs of Ruby, a man of whom Bayard Taylor wrote in 1871, speaking of that period thirty years earlier,
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{50} It is certain that things wonderful came out of him at the very beginning, for we owe to him the statement that