Prospecting thus the coming unsped days, and that new order in
them--marking the endless train of exercise, development, unwind, in
nation as in man, which life is for--we see, fore-indicated, amid
these prospects and hopes, new law-forces of spoken and written
language--not merely the pedagogue-forms, correct, regular, familiar
with precedents, made for matters of outside propriety, fine words,
thoughts definitely told out--but a language fann'd by the breath of
Nature, which leaps overhead, cares mostly for impetus and effects,
and for what it plants and invigorates to grow--tallies life and
character, and seldomer tells a thing than suggests or necessitates
it. In fact, a new theory of literary composition for imaginative
works of the very first class, and especially for highest poems, is
the sole course open to these States. Books are to be call'd for,
and supplied, on the assumption that the process of reading is not a
half-sleep, but, in highest sense, an exercise, a gymnast's struggle;
that the reader is to do something for himself, must be on the alert,
must himself or herself construct indeed the poem, argument, history,
metaphysical essay--the text furnishing the hints, the clue, the start
or frame-work. Not the book needs so much to be the complete thing,
but the reader of the book does. That were to make a nation of supple
and athletic minds, well-train'd, intuitive, used to depend on
themselves, and not on a few coteries of writers.
Investigating here, we see, not that it is a little thing we have,
in having the bequeath'd libraries, countless shelves of volumes,
records, etc.
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