The historians say of
ancient Greece, with her ever-jealous autonomies, cities, and states,
that the only positive unity she ever own'd or receiv'd, was the sad
unity of a common subjection, at the last, to foreign conquerors.
Subjection, aggregation of that sort, is impossible to America; but
the fear of conflicting and irreconcilable interiors, and the lack of
a common skeleton, knitting all close, continually haunts me. Or, if
it does not, nothing is plainer than the need, a long period to come,
of a fusion of the States into the only reliable identity, the moral
and artistic one. For, I say, the true nationality of the States, the
genuine union, when we come to a moral crisis, is, and is to be, after
all, neither the written law, nor, (as is generally supposed,) either
self-interest, or common pecuniary or material objects--but the fervid
and tremendous IDEA, melting everything else with resistless heat,
and solving all lesser and definite distinctions in vast, indefinite,
spiritual, emotional power.
It may be claim'd, (and I admit the weight of the claim,) that common
and general worldly prosperity, and a populace well-to-do, and with
all life's material comforts, is the main thing, and is enough. It may
be argued that our republic is, in performance, really enacting to-day
the grandest arts, poems, &c., by beating up the wilderness into
fertile farms, and in her railroads, ships, machinery, &c. And it
may be ask'd, Are these not better, indeed, for America, than any
utterances even of greatest rhapsode, artist, or literatus?
I too hail those achievements with pride and joy: then answer that the
soul of man will not with such only--nay, not with such at all--be
finally satisfied; but needs what, (standing on these and on all
things, as the feet stand on the ground,) is address'd to the
loftiest, to itself alone.
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