Yet could ye, indeed,
but breathe your breath of life into our New World's nostrils--not to
enslave us, as now, but, for our needs, to breed a spirit like your
own--perhaps, (dare we to say it?) to dominate, even destroy, what you
yourselves have left! On your plane, and no less, but even higher and
wider, must we mete and measure for to-day and here. I demand races of
orbic bards, with unconditional uncompromising sway. Come forth, sweet
democratic despots of the west!
By points like these we, in reflection, token what we mean by any
land's or people's genuine literature. And thus compared and tested,
judging amid the influence of loftiest products only, what do our
current copious fields of print, covering in manifold forms, the
United States, better, for an analogy, present, than, as in certain
regions of the sea, those spreading, undulating masses of squid,
through which the whale swimming, with head half out, feeds?
Not but that doubtless our current so-called literature, (like an
endless supply of small coin,) performs a certain service, and may-be,
too, the service needed for the time, (the preparation-service, as
children learn to spell.) Everybody reads, and truly nearly everybody
writes, either books, or for the magazines or journals. The matter has
magnitude, too, after a sort. But is it really advancing? or, has it
advanced for a long while? There is something impressive about the
huge editions of the dailies and weeklies, the mountain-stacks of
white paper piled in the press-vaults, and the proud, crashing,
ten-cylinder presses, which I can stand and watch any time by the half
hour.
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