Will the day ever come--no matter how long deferr'd--when those models
and lay-figures from the British islands--and even the precious
traditions of the classics--will be reminiscences, studies only? The
pure breath, primitiveness, boundless prodigality and amplitude,
strange mixture of delicacy and power, of continence, of real and
ideal, and of all original and first-class elements, of these
prairies, the Rocky mountains, and of the Mississippi and Missouri
rivers--will they ever appear in, and in some sort form a standard for
our poetry and art? (I sometimes think that even the ambition of my
friend Joaquin Miller to put them in, and illustrate them, places him
ahead of the whole crowd.)
Not long ago I was down New York bay, on a steamer, watching the
sunset over the dark green heights of Navesink, and viewing all that
inimitable spread of shore, shipping and sea, around Sandy Hook. But
an intervening week or two, and my eyes catch the shadowy outlines of
the Spanish peaks. In the more than two thousand miles between, though
of infinite and paradoxical variety, a curious and absolute fusion is
doubtless steadily annealing, compacting, identifying all. But subtler
and wider and more solid, (to produce such compaction,) than the laws
of the States, or the common ground of Congress, or the Supreme
Court, or the grim welding of our national wars, or the steel ties of
railroads, or all the kneading and fusing processes of our material
and business history, past or present, would in my opinion be a great
throbbing, vital, imaginative work, or series of works, or literature,
in constructing which the Plains, the Prairies, and the Mississippi
river, with the demesnes of its varied and ample valley, should be
the concrete background, and America's humanity, passions, struggles,
hopes, there and now--an _eclaircissement_ as it is and is to be,
on the stage of the New World, of all Time's hitherto drama of war,
romance and evolution--should furnish the lambent fire, the ideal.
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