In all
ages, the mind of man has brought up here--and always will. Here, at
least, of whatever race or era, we stand on common ground. Applause,
too, is unanimous, antique or modern. Those authors who work well in
this field--though their reward, instead of a handsome percentage,
or royalty, may be but simply the laurel-crown of the victors in the
great Olympic games--will be dearest to humanity, and their works,
however esthetically defective, will be treasur'd forever. The
altitude of literature and poetry has always been religion--and
always will be. The Indian Vedas, the Nackas of Zoroaster, the Tal
mud of the Jews, the Old Testament, the Gospel of Christ and his
disciples, Plato's works, the Koran of Mohammed, the Edda of Snorro,
and so on toward our own day, to Swedenborg, and to the invaluable
contributions of Leibnitz, Kant and Hegel--these, with such poems only
in which, (while singing well of persons and events, of the passions
of man, and the shows of the material universe,) the religious tone,
the consciousness of mystery, the recognition of the future, of the
unknown, of Deity over and under all, and of the divine purpose, are
never absent, but indirectly give tone to all--exhibit literature's
real heights and elevations, towering up like the great mountains of
the earth.
Standing on this ground--the last, the highest, only permanent
ground--and sternly criticising, from it, all works, either of the
literary, or any art, we have peremptorily to dismiss every pretensive
production, however fine its esthetic or intellectual points, which
violates or ignores, or even does not celebrate, the central divine
idea of All, suffusing universe, of eternal trains of purpose, in the
development, by however slow degrees, of the physical, moral, and
spiritual kosmos.
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