For us, along the great highways of time, those monuments stand
--those forms of majesty and beauty. For us those beacons burn through
all the nights. Unknown Egyptians, graving hieroglyphs; Hindus, with
hymn and apothegm and endless epic; Hebrew prophet, with spirituality,
as in flashes of lightning, conscience like red-hot iron, plaintive
songs and screams of vengeance for tyrannies and enslavement; Christ,
with bent head, brooding love and peace, like a dove; Greek, creating
eternal shapes of physical and esthetic proportion; Roman, lord of
satire, the sword, and the codex;--of the figures, some far off and
veil'd, others nearer and visible; Dante, stalking with lean form,
nothing but fibre, not a grain of superfluous flesh; Angelo, and the
great painters, architects, musicians; rich Shakspere, luxuriant as
the sun, artist and singer of feudalism in its sunset, with all the
gorgeous colors, owner thereof, and using them at will; and so to such
as German Kant and Hegel, where they, though near us, leaping over the
ages, sit again, impassive, imperturbable, like the Egyptian gods. Of
these, and the like of these, is it too much, indeed, to return to our
favorite figure, and view them as orbs and systems of orbs, moving in
free paths in the spaces of that other heaven, the kosmic intellect,
the soul?
Ye powerful and resplendent ones! ye were, in your atmospheres,
grown not for America, but rather for her foes, the feudal and the
old--while our genius is democratic and modern.
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