What is the reason our time, our lands, that we see no fresh local
courage, sanity, of our own--the Mississippi, stalwart Western men,
real mental and physical facts, Southerners, &c., in the body of our
literature? especially the poetic part of it. But always, instead, a
parcel of dandies and ennuyees, dapper little gentlemen from abroad,
who flood us with their thin sentiment of parlors, parasols,
piano-songs, tinkling rhymes, the five-hundredth importation--or
whimpering and crying about something, chasing one aborted conceit
after another, and forever occupied in dyspeptic amours with dyspeptic
women. While, current and novel, the grandest events and revolutions
and stormiest passions of history, are crossing to-day with
unparallel'd rapidity and magnificence over the stages of our own and
all the continents, offering new materials, opening new vistas, with
largest needs, inviting the daring launching forth of conceptions in
literature, inspired by them, soaring in highest regions, serving art
in its highest (which is only the other name for serving God, and
serving humanity,) where is the man of letters, where is the book,
with any nobler aim than to follow in the old track, repeat what
has been said before--and, as its utmost triumph, sell well, and be
erudite or elegant?
Mark the roads, the processes, through which these States have
arrived, standing easy, henceforth ever-equal, ever-compact in their
range to-day. European adventures? the most antique? Asiatic or
African? old history--miracles--romances? Rather our own unquestion'd
facts.
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