It is quite true, as has been shown by the recent
apportionment of population in the House of Representatives, that some
sections of the Union have advanced, relatively to the rest, in an
extraordinary and unexpected degree. But this does not imply that
the States which have gain'd no additional representatives or have
actually lost some have been stationary or have receded. The fact is
that the present tide of prosperity has risen so high that it has
overflow' d all barriers, and has fill'd up the back-waters, and
establish'd something like an approach to uniform success."
[21] See, for hereditaments, specimens, Walter Scott's Border
Minstrelsy, Percy's collection, Ellis's early English Metrical
Romances, the European continental poems of Walter of Aquitania, and
the Nibelungen, of pagan stock, but monkish-feudal redaction; the
history of the Troubadours, by Fauriel; even the far-back cumbrous
old Hindu epics, as indicating the Asian eggs out of which European
chivalry was hatch'd; Ticknor's chapters on the Cid, and on the
Spanish poems and poets of Calderon's time. Then always, and, of
course, as the superbest poetic culmination-expression of feudalism,
the Shaksperean dramas, in the attitudes, dialogue, characters, &c.,
of the princes, lords and gentlemen, the pervading atmosphere, the
implied and express'd standard of manners, the high port and proud
stomach, the regal embroidery of style, &c.
[22] Of these rapidly-sketch'd hiatuses, the two which seem to me most
serious are, for one, the condition, absence, or perhaps the singular
abeyance, of moral conscientious fibre all through American society;
and, for another, the appaling depletion of women in their powers of
sane athletic maternity, their crowning attribute, and ever making the
woman, in loftiest spheres, superior to the man.
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