A fitly born and bred race, growing up in right
conditions of out-door as much as in-door harmony, activity and
development, would probably, from and in those conditions, find it
enough merely _to live_--and would, in their relations to the sky,
air, water, trees, &c., and to the countless common shows, and in
the fact of life itself, discover and achieve happiness--with Being
suffused night and day by wholesome extasy, surpassing all the
pleasures that wealth, amusement, and even gratified intellect,
erudition, or the sense of art, can give.
In the prophetic literature of these States, (the reader of my
speculations will miss their principal stress unless he allows well
for the point that a new Literature, perhaps a new Metaphysics,
certainly a new Poetry, are to be, in my opinion, the only sure and
worthy supports and expressions of the American Democracy,) Nature,
true Nature, and the true idea of Nature, long absent, must, above all,
become fully restored, enlarged, and must furnish the pervading
atmosphere to poems, and the test of all high literary and esthetic
compositions. I do not mean the smooth walks, trimm'd hedges, poseys
and nightingales of the English poets, but the whole orb, with its
geologic history, the kosmos, carrying fire and snow, that rolls
through the illimitable areas, light as a feather, though weighing
billions of tons. Furthermore, as by what we now partially call Nature
is intended, at most, only what is entertainable by the physical
conscience, the sense of matter, and of good animal health--on these it
must be distinctly accumulated, incorporated, that man, comprehending
these, has, in towering superaddition, the moral and spiritual
consciences, indicating his destination beyond the ostensible, the
mortal.
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