I hail with joy the oceanic, variegated, intense practical energy, the
demand for facts, even the business materialism of the current
age, our States. But we to the age or land in which these things,
movements, stopping at themselves, do not tend to ideas. As fuel
to flame, and flame to the heavens, so must wealth, science,
materialism--even this democracy of which we make so much--unerringly
feed the highest mind, the soul. Infinitude the flight: fathomless the
mystery. Man, so diminutive, dilates beyond the sensible universe,
competes with, outcopes space and time, meditating even one great
idea. Thus, and thus only, does a human being, his spirit, ascend
above, and justify, objective Nature, which, probably nothing in
itself, is incredibly and divinely serviceable, indispensable, real,
here. And as the purport of objective Nature is doubtless folded,
hidden, somewhere here--as somewhere here is what this globe and its
manifold forms, and the light of day, and night's darkness, and life
itself, with all its experiences, are for--it is here the great
literature, especially verse, must get its inspiration and throbbing
blood. Then may we attain to a poetry worthy the immortal soul of man,
and widen, while absorbing materials, and, in their own sense, the
shows of Nature, will, above all, have, both directly and indirectly,
a freeing, fluidizing, expanding, religious character, exulting with
science, fructifying the moral elements, and stimulating aspirations,
and meditations on the unknown.
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