To offset chivalry,
indeed, those vanish'd countless knights, old altars, abbeys, priests,
ages and strings of ages, a knightlier and more sacred cause to-day
demands, and shall supply, in a New World, to larger, grander work,
more than the counterpart and tally of them.
Arrived now, definitely, at an apex for these Vistas, I confess that
the promulgation and belief in such a class or institution--a new and
greater literatus order--its possibility, (nay certainty,) underlies
these entire speculations--and that the rest, the other parts, as
superstructures, are all founded upon it. It really seems to me the
condition, not only of our future national and democratic development,
but of our perpetuation. In the highly artificial and materialistic
bases of modern civilization, with the corresponding arrangements
and methods of living, the force-infusion of intellect alone, the
depraving influences of riches just as much as poverty, the absence
of all high ideals in character--with the long series of tendencies,
shapings, which few are strong enough to resist, and which now seem,
with steam-engine speed, to be everywhere turning out the generations
of humanity like uniform iron castings--all of which, as compared with
the feudal ages, we can yet do nothing better than accept, make the
best of, and even welcome, upon the whole, for their oceanic practical
grandeur, and their restless wholesale kneading of the masses--I say
of all this tremendous and dominant play of solely materialistic
bearings upon current life in the United States, with the results as
already seen, accumulating, and reaching far into the future, that
they must either be confronted and met by at least an equally subtle
and tremendous force-infusion for purposes of spiritualization, for
the pure conscience, for genuine esthetics, and for absolute and
primal manliness and womanliness--or else our modern civilization,
with all its improvements, is in vain, and we are on the road to a
destiny, a status, equivalent, in its real world, to that of the
fabled damned.
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