THE ATLANTIC FOREST REGION 391 



purely physical effects upon the tissues. It is reflected in many char- 

 acteristics. As a matter mainly of feeling it finds expression in litera- 

 ture; as a motor response, in the working out of ideals and in material 

 progress. 



A sense of spaciousness, of being untrammelled by close-set bound- 

 aries, had worked upon the imagination of the people. More than 

 anything else was the idea of expanse in the vast extent of territory 

 that lay to the west. The motor response to this feeling found ex- 

 pression in that great westward movement of population into the rich 

 bottomlands and fertile prairies of the Mississippi Basin. Men had 

 caught the inspiration on the threshold, amid the homely farm-lands 

 and clearings, and in the growing towns with their semblance of Euro- 

 pean culture. Here on the threshold they felt the stir of a new life 

 and moved under its impulse. Daniel Boone, standing on the bluff 

 edge of Muldraugh's Hill and gazing out over the vast primeval forest 

 that lay at his feet, is the prophetic figure of that time ; a figure with its 

 face ever turned toward the west. 



The earliest feeling for the natural objects and scenery of the 

 American land that found expression in literature appears in the 

 stories, essay and verse of such writers as Cooper, Irving, Bryant and 

 Thoreau, and in the journals of travelers and naturalists. In the 

 " Episodes " which Audubon interspersed through his " Ornithological 

 Biography," and often, indeed, in the descriptions of various birds, we 

 find portrayed many scenes of the early American background. 

 Thoreau was steeped in the natural features of New England and the 

 fascination of his books is largely in the local color which he reflects 

 through his peculiar personality. To a less extent both Emerson and 

 Lowell have reflected this home environment of the Atlantic slope. 

 Cooper's " Novels " emphasize the frontier life as it existed on the 

 western edge of the threshold — the typical " backwoods " period in cen- 

 tral New York and the northern Appalachian region. Washington 

 Irving, for all his indebtedness to a long residence in England and to 

 Addisonian sources, found the inspiration for much of his best work in 

 the Hudson Valley and. the Catskills. English poets and writers had 

 set the nightingale, the skylark and the cuckoo forever singing in the 

 hearts of men. Irving, harking back to his boyhood days, im- 

 mortalized the bobolink, " the happiest bird of our spring." William 

 Cullen Bryant, in like manner, gave literary value to many objects 

 of native growth. To lovers of that English literature that found 

 expression in the new homeland the " Fringed Gentian " and the 

 " Yellow Violet " will hold an equal place in the heart with the " rathe 

 primrose " and " daffodils that come before the swallow dares." 

 Bryant was under the spell of the aboriginal spirit of the land, and the 

 haunting mood of the ancient wilderness appears in many of his verses. 

 In his poem, " The Prairies," he has given voice to that sense of dis- 



