It is, indeed, too important to the power and perpetuity of
the New World to be consign'd any longer to the churches, old or
new, Catholic or Protestant--Saint this, or Saint that. It must be
consign'd henceforth to democracy _en masse_, and to literature. It
must enter into the poems of the nation. It must make the nation.
The Four Years' War is over--and in the peaceful, strong, exciting,
fresh occasions of to-day, and of the future, that strange, sad war is
hurrying even now to be forgotten. The camp, the drill, the lines of
sentries, the prisons, the hospitals--(ah! the hospitals!)--all have
passed away--all seem now like a dream. A new race, a young and lusty
generation, already sweeps in with oceanic currents, obliterating the
war, and all its scars, its mounded graves, and all its reminiscences
of hatred, conflict, death. So let It be obliterated. I say the life
of the present and the future makes undeniable demands upon us each
and all, south, north, east, west. To help put the United States (even
if only in imagination) hand in hand, in one unbroken circle in a
chant--to rouse them to the unprecedented grandeur of the part they
are to play, and are even now playing--to the thought of their great
future, and the attitude conform'd to it--especially their great
esthetic, moral, scientific future, (of which their vulgar material
and political present is but as the preparatory tuning of instruments
by an orchestra,) these, as hitherto, are still, for me, among my
hopes, ambitions.
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