In America, at any rate,
and as a medium of highest esthetic practical or spiritual expression,
present or future, it palpably fails, and must fail, to serve. The
Muse of the Prairies, of California, Canada, Texas, and of the peaks
of Colorado, dismissing the literary, as well as social etiquette of
over-sea feudalism and caste, joyfully enlarging, adapting itself to
comprehend the size of the whole people, with the free play, emotions,
pride, passions, experiences, that belong to them, body and soul--to
the general globe, and all its relations in astronomy, as the savans
portray them to us--to the modern, the busy Nineteenth century, (as
grandly poetic as any, only different,) with steamships, railroads,
factories, electric telegraphs, cylinder presses--to the thought of
the solidarity of nations, the brotherhood and sisterhood of the
entire earth--to the dignity and heroism of the practical labor of
farms, factories, foundries, workshops, mines, or on shipboard, or
on lakes and rivers--resumes that other medium of expression, more
flexible, more eligible--soars to the freer, vast, diviner heaven of
prose.
Of poems of the third or fourth class, (perhaps even some of the
second,) it makes little or no difference who writes them--they are
good enough for what they are; nor is it necessary that they should be
actual emanations from the personality and life of the writers. The
very reverse sometimes gives piquancy. But poems of the first class,
(poems of the depth, as distinguished from those of the surface,) are
to be sternly tallied with the poets themselves, and tried by them and
their lives.
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