4 LITEEATUEE ON STATEN ISLAND. 



minutes lie could have unfolded to the poet who sighed for England 

 the immense compensations in bird and beast and flower which Staten 

 Island offered him. 



The works of Theodore Winthrop are the most memorable literary 

 production of the Island. The scenes of his stories are laid elsewhere, 

 but they were written here. He was not known as an author until 

 his death; and his fame, like that of Philip Sidney and Theodore 

 Koerner, is blended of the tyre and the sword. After a life of travel 

 and daring adventure and of some sad experience, he lived here with 

 his sister, who is herself a singer and her brother's biographer, and 

 a story of Winthrop's had been accepted by Mr. Lowell for the 

 Atlantic Monthly just before the civil war began. On the morning 

 after the fall of Sumter he joined the seventh regiment and marched 

 in its ranks to Washington. Then he served upon the staff of General 

 Butler in Virginia, and with Lieutenant Greble of the regular army 

 the young volunteer, leading the advance, fell at Great Bethel on 

 June 10th, 1861. It was a death like that of Warren at Bunker Hill. 

 At that early period of the war it touched keenly the heart of the 

 country, as a forecast of the coming sorrow, and the impression was 

 deepened by the publication of his articles and stories which soon 

 followed. He knew the Island well, rambling and riding all over it, 

 and his name and heroic death are among its precious possessions. 

 His literary instinct and ambition were very strong but his tempera- 

 ment was shy, and few even of his intimate friends knew that he was a 

 prolific but unpublished author, when he went to the field. Associated 

 with Winthrop and his works Staten Island passes into literary history. 



Hawthorne complained that this country was barren of material for 

 romance, but he disproved his own complaint by writing romances 

 drawn from American history, tradition and circumstance, which place 

 him among the greatest of modern authors. Irving also, fascinated 

 as he was with the exquisite charm of English rural life, yet found his 

 best material at home, and his most characteristic works are those 

 which deal with our own neighborhood and with the river at whose 

 mouth the Island lies. It is not, therefore, to the want of material 

 upon or around Staten Island that we can attribute our literary pov- 

 erty hitherto. We must take refuge in the old explanation of the slow 

 development of all literature in America, and insist that a people busy 



