Summary:

A collection of essays, including: The Ephemera: An Emblem Of Human Life By Benjamin Franklin; The Whistle By Benjamin Franklin; Dialogue Between Franklin And The Gout; Consolation For The Old Bachelor By Francis Hopkinson; John Bull By Washington Irving; The Mutability Of Literature; A Colloquy In Westminster Abbey By Washington Irving; Kean's Acting By Richard Henry Dana; Gifts By Ralph Waldo Emerson; Uses Of Great Men By Ralph Waldo Emerson; Buds And Bird-Voices By Nathaniel Hawthorne; The Philosophy Of Composition By Edgar Allan Poe; Bread And The Newspaper By Oliver Wendell Holmes; Walking By Henry David Thoreau; On A Certain Condescension In Foreigners By James Russell Lowell; Preface To "Leaves Of Grass" (1855) By Walt Whitman; Americanism In Literature By Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and many more.