_Memoirs of John Quincy Adams_, Edited by Charles Francis Adams. 12 vols., Philadelphia, 1874. Vol. I, 240-241.
The American publication began in the _Port Folio_, I-1, Jan. 3, 1801, Phila. For a review of the English edition, cf. _The Monthly Review or Literary Journal_, XLV-350, December, 1804, London.]
A little later, in 1809, Alexander Hill Everett went to Russia as secretary to the legation and spent several years in different cities on the continent.[6] George Ticknor visited Germany in 1815 to prepare for his duties as professor of modern languages at Harvard; and George Bancroft, after graduating from college in 1817, studied for five years at Göttingen, Heidelberg and Berlin. Henry E. Dwight was at Göttingen from 1824-1828 and in the next year published in New York _Travels in the North of Germany, 1825-6_. It was about this time that James Fenimore Cooper began his European travels, which lasted from 1826 to 1833.[7] Thus, American scholars had been acquiring German thought and culture at first hand, before Longfellow or Emerson went abroad for the first time. With these two the German influence in America reached its height--Longfellow in literature, and Emerson in his transcendental philosophy.
[Footnote 6: "He [A. H. Everett] had probably studied German while he was associated with John Quincy Adams in St. Petersburg, where German influence was strong and the study of the language and literature could be pursued under the most favorable conditions. The _United States Magazine and Democratic Review_, New York, Vol. X (N. S.) 1842--p. 461, states that he studied at St. Petersburg, among other things, the modern languages."
Frederick H. Wilkens, _Early Influence of German Literature in America_ in the _Americana Germanica_, III, No. 2, p. 155.]
[Footnote 7: M. D. Learned, _German as a Culture Element in American Education_, Milwaukee, 1898.]
This was the second channel by which German literature became known in this country. The first, as has already been indicated, came indirectly through England. There, considerable activity in this line had been manifest since 1790. Books of translations were published and the magazines contained many fugitive pieces from the German. It is chiefly a reflex of this interest that we find in American periodicals to the end of 1810.