On the enormous outgrowth of our unloos'd
individualities, and the rank, self-assertion of humanity here, may
well fall these grace-persuading, _recherche_ influences. We first
require that individuals and communities shall be free; then surely
comes a time when it is requisite that they shall not be too free.
Although to such results in the future I look mainly for a great
poetry native to us, these importations till then will have to be
accepted, such as they are, and thankful they are no worse. The inmost
spiritual currents of the present time curiously revenge and check
their own compell'd tendency to democracy, and absorption in it, by
mark'd leanings to the past--by reminiscences in poems, plots, operas,
novels, to a far-off, contrary, deceased world, as if they dreaded the
great vulgar gulf-tides of to-day. Then what has been fifty centuries
growing, working in, and accepted as crowns and apices for our kind,
is not going to be pulled down and discarded in a hurry.
It is, perhaps, time we paid our respects directly to the honorable
party, the real object of these preambles. But we must make
_reconnaissance_ a little further still. Not the least part of our
lesson were to realize the curiosity and interest of friendly foreign
experts,[35] and how our situation looks to them. "American poetry,"
says the London "Times,"[36] is the poetry of apt pupils, but it is
afflicted from first to last with a fatal want of raciness. Bryant has
been long passed as a poet by Professor Longfellow; but in Longfellow,
with all his scholarly grace and tender feeling, the defect is more
apparent than it was in Bryant.
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