Indeed, it is time we should realize and fully
fructify those germs we also hold from Italy, France, Spain,
especially in the best imaginative productions of those lands, which
are, in many ways, loftier and subtler than the English, or British,
and indispensable to complete our service, proportions, education,
reminiscences, &c.... The British element these States hold, and have
always held, enormously beyond its fit proportions. I have already
spoken of Shakspere. He seems to me of astral genius, first class,
entirely fit for feudalism. His contributions, especially to the
literature of the passions, are immense, forever dear to humanity--and
his name is always to be reverenced in America. But there is much
in him ever offensive to democracy. He is not only the tally of
feudalism, but I should say Shakspere is incarnated, uncompromising
feudalism, in literature. Then one seems to detect something in him--I
hardly know how to describe it--even amid the dazzle of his genius;
and, in inferior manifestations, it is found in nearly all leading
British authors. (Perhaps we will have to import the words Snob,
Snobbish, &c., after all.) While of the great poems of Asian
antiquity, the Indian epics, the book of Job, the Ionian Iliad, the
unsurpassedly simple, loving, perfect idyls of the life and death
of Christ, in the New Testament, (indeed Homer and the Biblical
utterances intertwine familiarly with us, in the main,) and along
down, of most of the characteristic, imaginative or romantic relics of
the continent, as the Cid, Cervantes' Don Quixote, &c.
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