_
In future we shall be on the outlook. I love your _Dial,_ and
yet it is with a kind of shudder. You seem to me in danger of
dividing yourselves from the Fact of this present Universe, in
which alone, ugly as it is, can I find any anchorage, and soaring
away after Ideas, Beliefs, Revelations, and such like,--into
perilous altitudes, as I think; beyond the curve of perpetual
frost, for one thing! I know not how to utter what impression
you give me; take the above as some stamping of the fore-hoof.
Surely I could wish you _returned_ into your own poor nineteenth
century, its follies and maladies, its blind or half-blind, but
gigantic toilings, its laughter and its tears, and trying to
evolve in some measure the hidden Godlike that lies in it;--that
seems to me the kind of feat for literary men. Alas, it is so
easy to screw one's self up into high and ever higher altitudes
of Transcendentalism, and see nothing under one but the
everlasting snows of Himmalayah, the Earth shrinking to a Planet,
and the indigo firmament sowing itself with daylight stars; easy
for _you,_ for me: but whither does it lead? I dread always, To
inanity and mere injuring of the lungs!--"Stamp, Stamp, Stamp!"--
Well, I do believe, for one thing, a man has no right to say to
his own generation, turning quite away from it, "Be damned!" It
is the whole Past and the whole Future, this same cotton-spinning,
dollar-hunting, canting and shrieking, very wretched generation
of ours.
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