Essays of American Essayists

It is well for our literature that the essayists have spoken. For whether one points to poetry or fiction or history or theology or science, in no category will he find an achievement of supremacy excelling that which the essayists have attained. Includes a wide selection of essays from Benjamin Franklin, William Ellery Channing, Washington Irving, Richard Henry Dana, William Cullen Bryant, William Hickling Prescott, George Bancroft, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, Edar Allan Poe, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Harriet Beecher Stowe, John Lothrop Motley, Henry David Thoreau, James Russell Lowell, Walt Whitman, Francis Parkman, and George William Curtis.