"
Such for an off-hand summary of the mighty three that now, by the
women, men, and young folk of the fifty millions given these States
by their late census, have been and are more read than all others put
together.
We hear it said, both of Tennyson and another current leading
literary illustrator of Great Britain, Carlyle--as of Victor Hugo in
France--that not one of them is personally friendly or admirant toward
America; indeed, quite the reverse. _N'importe_. That they (and more
good minds than theirs) cannot span the vast revolutionary arch
thrown by the United States over the centuries, fixed in the present,
launched to the endless future; that they cannot stomach the
high-life-below-stairs coloring all our poetic and genteel social
status so far--the measureless viciousness of the great radical
Republic, with its ruffianly nominations and elections; its loud,
ill-pitched voice, utterly regardless whether the verb agrees with the
nominative; its fights, errors, eructations, repulsions, dishonesties,
audacities; those fearful and varied and long-continued storm and
stress stages (so offensive to the well-regulated college-bred mind)
wherewith Nature, history, and time block out nationalities more
powerful than the past, and to upturn it and press on to the
future;--that they cannot understand and fathom all this, I say, is
it to be wondered at? Fortunately, the gestation of our thirty-eight
empires (and plenty more to come) proceeds on its course, on scales
of area and velocity immense and absolute as the globe, and, like the
globe itself, quite oblivious even of great poets and thinkers.
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