What the great sympathetic is to
the congeries of bones, joints, heart, fluids, nervous system and
vitality, constituting, launching forth in time and space a human
being--aye, an immortal soul--such relation, and no less, holds true
poetry to the single personality, or to the nation.
Here our thirty-eight States stand to-day, the children of past
precedents, and, young as they are, heirs of a very old estate. One or
two points we will consider, out of the myriads presenting themselves.
The feudalism, of the British Islands, illustrated by Shakspere--and
by his legitimate followers, Walter Scott and Alfred Tennyson--with
all its tyrannies, superstitions, evils, had most superb and heroic
permeating veins, poems, manners; even its errors fascinating. It
almost seems as if only that feudalism in Europe, like slavery in our
own South, could outcrop types of tallest, noblest personal character
yet--strength and devotion and love better than elsewhere--invincible
courage, generosity, aspiration, the spines of all. Here is where
Shakspere and the others I have named perform a service incalculably
precious to our America. Politics, literature, and everything else,
centers at last in perfect _personnel_, (as democracy is to find the
same as the rest;) and here feudalism is unrival'd--here the rich and
highest-rising lessons it bequeaths us--a mass of foreign nutriment,
which we are to work over, and popularize and enlarge, and present
again in our own growths.
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