12 DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 
 
 itself believ d in. What penetrating eye does not every 
 where see through the mask ? The spectacle is appaling. 
 We live in an atmosphere of hypocrisy throughout. The 
 men believe not in the women, nor the women in the men. 
 A scornful superciliousness rules in literature. The aim 
 of all the litterateurs is to find something to make fun of. 
 A lot of churches, sects, &c., the most dismal phantasms I 
 know, usurp the name of religion. Conversation is a mass 
 of badinage. From deceit in the spirit, the mother of all 
 false deeds, the offspring is already incalculable. An acute 
 and candid person, in the revenue department in Washing- 
 / ton, who is led by the course of his employment to 
 regularly visit the cities, north, south and west, to investigate 
 frauds, has talk d much with me about his discoveries. The 
 depravity of the business classes of our country is not less 
 than has been supposed, but infinitely greater. The 
 official services of America, national, state, and municipal, 
 in all their branches and departments, except the judiciary, 
 are saturated in corruption, bribery, falsehood, mal-adminis- 
 tration ; and the judiciary is tainted. The great cities reek 
 with respectable as much as non-respectable robbery and 
 scoundrelism. In fashionable life, flippancy, tepid amours, 
 weak infidelism, small aims, or no aims at all, only to kill 
 time. In business, (this all-devouring modern word, busi 
 ness,) the one sole object is, by any means, pecuniary gain. 
 The magician s serpent in the fable ate up all the other 
 serpents ; and money-making is our magician s serpent, 
 remaining to-day sole master of the field. The best class 
 we show, is but a mob of fashionably dress d speculators 
 and vulgarians. True, indeed, behind this fantastic farce, 
 enacted on the visible stage of society, solid things and 
 stupendous labors are to be discover d, existing crudely and 
 going on in the background, to advance and tell themselves 
 
DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 13 
 
 in time. Yet the truths -are none the less terrible. I say 
 that our New World democracy, however great a success in 
 uplifting the masses out of their sloughs, in materialistic 
 development, products, and in a certain highly-deceptive 
 superficial popular intellectuality, is, so far, an almost com 
 plete failure in its social aspects, and in really grand 
 religious, moral, literary, and esthetic results. In vain do 
 we march with unprecedented strides to empire so colossal, 
 outvying the antique, beyond Alexander s, beyond the 
 proudest sway of Rome. In vain have we annex d Texas, 
 California, Alaska, and reach north for Canada and south 
 for Cuba. It is as if we were somehow being endow d with 
 a vast and more and more thoroughly-appointed body, and 
 then left with little or no soul. 
 
 Let me illustrate further, as I write, with current observa 
 tions, localities, &c. The subject is important, and will 
 bear repetition. After an absence, I am now again 
 (September, 1870) in New York city and Brooklyn, on a 
 few weeks vacation. The splendor, picturesqueness, and 
 oceanic amplitude and rush of these great cities, the 
 unsurpass d situation, rivers and bay, sparkling sea-tides, 
 costly and lofty new buildings, fagades of marble and iron, 
 of original grandeur and elegance of design, with the masses 
 of gay color, the preponderance of white and blue, the flags 
 flying, the endless ships, the tumultuous streets, Broadway, 
 the heavy, low, musical roar, hardly ever intermitted, even 
 at night ; the jobbers houses, the rich shops, the wharves, 
 the great Central Park, and the Brooklyn Park of hills, (as 
 I wander among them this beautiful fall weather, musing, 
 watching, absorbing) the assemblages of the citizens in 
 their groups, conversations, trades, evening amusements, or 
 along the by-quarters these, I say, and the like of these, 
 completely satisfy my senses of power, fulness, motion, &c., 
 
Camelot Series 
 
 EDITED UY ERNKST KHVS 
 
 DEMOCRATIC VISTAS 
 
DEMOCRATIC VISTAS, AND 
 OTHER PAPERS. BY 
 WALT WHITMAN. 
 
 [Published by arrangement with the Author.] 
 
 LONDON 
 WALTER SCOTT, 24 WARWICK LANE 
 
 TORONTO : W. J. GAGE & CO. 
 1888 
 
V/S 
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 DKMOCRATIC VISTAS I 
 
 MY HOOK AND I 84 
 
 A BACKWARD GLANCE ON MY OWN KOAI) . .95 
 
 OUR EMINENT VISITORS (PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE) IOO 
 
 A THOUGHT ON SHAKESPEARE 106 
 
 WHAT LURKS BEHIND SHAKESPEARE S HISTORICAL PLAYS IOQ 
 ROBERT BURNS AS POET AND PERSON . . . .113 
 
 A WORD ABOUT TENNYSON 115 
 
 "HOW I MADE A BOOK" 130 
 
 FIVE THOUSAND POEMS 140 
 
 NOTES LEFT OVER 142 
 
 A LETTER ... . 174 
 
 8^0 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 MAINLY I think I should base the request to 
 weigh the following pages on the assumption 
 that they present, however indirectly, some views of 
 the West and Modern, or of a distinctly western and 
 modern (American) tendency, about certain matters. 
 
 Then too, the pages include (by attempting to 
 illustrate it,) a theory herein immediately mentioned. 
 For another and different point of the issue, the 
 Enlightenment, Democracy and Fair-show of the 
 bulk, the common people of America (from sources 
 representing not only the British Islands, but all the 
 world,) means> at least, eligibility to Enlightenment, 
 Democracy and Fair-show for the bulk, the common 
 people of all civilized nations. 
 
 That positively " the dry land has appeared," at any 
 rate, is an important fact. 
 
 America is really the great test or trial case for all 
 the problems and promises and speculations of 
 humanity, and of the past and present. 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 I say, too, we* are not to look so much to changes, 
 
 1 ameliorations, and adaptations in Politics as to those 
 
 of Literature and (thence) domestic Sociology. I 
 
 have accordingly in the following melange introduced 
 
 many themes besides political ones. 
 
 Several of the pieces are ostensibly in explanation of 
 my own writings ; but in that very process they best 
 include and set forth their side of principles and general 
 ities pressing vehemently for consideration our age. 
 
 Upon the whole, it is on the atmosphere they are 
 born in, and, (I hope) give out, more than any specific 
 piece or trait, I would care to rest. 
 
 I think Literature a new, superb, democratic 
 
 literature is to be the medicine and lever, and (with 
 
 \ 
 
 I i Art) the chief influence in modern civilization. I 
 have myself not so much made a dead set at this 
 theory, or attempted to present it directly, as 
 admitted it to color and sometimes dominate what I 
 had to say. In both Europe and America we have 
 serried phalanxes who promulge and defend the 
 political claims : I go for an equal force to uphold 
 the other. 
 
 WALT WHITMAN. 
 
 CAMDEN, NEW JERSEY, 
 April 1888. 
 
 * We who, in many departments, ways, make the Intilding it/ } r>i the 
 masses, by building up grand individuals ^ our shibboleth : and in luu;f 
 that is thf marrow of this book. 
 
DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 
 
 AS the greatest lessons of Nature through the universe 
 are perhaps the lessons of variety and freedom, the 
 same present the greatest lessons also in New World 
 politics and progress. If a man were ask d, for instance, 
 the distinctive points contrasting modern European and 
 American political and other life with the old Asiatic cultus, 
 as lingering-bequeath d yet in China and Turkey, he might 
 find the amount of them in John Stuart Mill s profound 
 essay on Liberty in the future, where he demands two main 
 constituents, or sub-strata, for a truly grand nationality 
 ist, a large variety of character and 2d, full play for 
 human nature to expand itself in numberless and even con 
 flicting directions (seems to be for general humanity much 
 like the influences that make up, in their limitless field, that 
 perennial health-action of the air we call the weather an 
 infinite number of currents and forces, and contributions, 
 and temperatures, and cross purposes, whose ceaseless play 
 of counterpart upon counterpart brings constant restoration 
 and vitality.) With this thought and not for itself alone, 
 but all it necessitates, and draws after it let me begin my 
 speculations. 
 
 America, filling the present with greatest deeds and 
 problems, cheerfully accepting the past, including feudalism, 
 (as, indeed, the present is but the legitimate birth of the 
 
 i 
 
2 DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 
 
 past, including feudalism,) counts, as I reckon, for her 
 justification and success, (for who, as yet, dare claim 
 success ?) almost entirely on the future. Nor is that hope 
 unwarranted. To-day, ahead, though dimly yet, we see, in 
 vistas, a copious, sane, gigantic offspring. For our New 
 World I consider far less important for what it has done, or 
 what it is, than for results to come. Sole among nation 
 alities, these States have assumed the task to put in forms 
 of lasting power and practicality, on areas of amplitude 
 / | rivaling the operations of the physical kosmos, the moral 
 ^1 political speculations of ages, long, long deferr d, the 
 democratic republican principle, and the theory of develop- 
 1 ment and perfection by voluntary standards, and self- 
 reliance. Who else, indeed, except the United States, 
 in history, so far, have accepted in unwitting faith, and, 
 as we now see, stand, act upon, and go security for, these 
 things ? 
 
 But preluding no longer, let me strike the key-note of the 
 following strain. First premising that, though the passages 
 of it have been written at widely different times, (it is, 
 in fact, a collection of memoranda, perhaps for future 
 designers, comprehenders,) and though it may be open 
 to the charge of one part contradicting another for there 
 are opposite sides to the great question of democracy, as to 
 every great question I feel the parts harmoniously blended 
 in my own realization and convictions, and present them to 
 be read only in such oneness, each page and each claim 
 and assertion modified and temper d by the others. Bear 
 in mind, too, that they are not the result of studying up in 
 political economy, but of the ordinary sense, observing, 
 wandering among men, these States, these stirring years of 
 war and peace. I will not gloss over the appaling dangers 
 of universal suffrage in the United States. In fact, it is to 
 
DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 3 
 
 admit and face these dangers I am writing. To him or her 
 within whose thought rages the battle, advancing, retreating, 
 between democracy s convictions, aspirations, and the 
 people s crudeness. vice, caprices, I mainly write this essay. 
 I shall use the words America and democracy as con 
 vertible terms. Not an ordinary one is the issue. The 
 United States are destined either to surmount the gorgeous 
 history of feudalism, or else prove the most tremendous 
 failure of time. Not the least doubtful am I on any 
 prospects of their material success. The triumphant future 
 of their business, geographic and productive departments, 
 on larger scales and in more varieties than ever, is certain. 
 In those respects the republic must soon (if she does not 
 already) outstrip all examples hitherto afforded, and 
 dominate the world:* 
 
 * " From a territorial area of less than nine hundred thousand 
 square miles, the Union has expanded into over four millions and a 
 half fifteen times larger than that of Great Britain and France com 
 bined with a shore-line, including Alaska, equal to the entire cir 
 cumference of the earth, and with a domain within these lines far 
 wider than that of the Romans in their proudest days of conquest and 
 renown. With a river, lake, and coastwise commerce estimated at 
 over two thousand millions of dollars per year ; with a railway traffic 
 of four to six thousand millions per year, and the annual domestic 
 exchanges of the country running up to nearly ten thousand millions 
 per year ; with over two thousand millions of dollars invested in 
 manufacturing, mechanical, and mining industry ; with over five 
 hundred millions of acres of land in actual occupancy, valued, with 
 their appurtenances, at over seven thousand millions of dollars, and 
 producing annually crops valued at over three thousand millions of 
 dollars ; with a realm which, if the density of Belgium s population 
 were possible, would be vast enough to include all the present in 
 habitants of the world ; and with equal rights guaranteed to even the 
 poorest and humblest of our forty millions of people we can, with a 
 manly pride akin to that which distinguish d the palmiest days of 
 
4 DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 
 
 Admitting all this, with the priceless value of our political 
 institutions, general suffrage, (and fully acknowledging the 
 latest, widest opening of the doors,) I say that, far deeper 
 than these, what finally and only is to make of our western 
 world a nationality superior to any hither known, and 
 outtopping the past, must be vigorous, yet unsuspected 
 Literatures, perfect personalities and sociologies, original, 
 ! transcendental, and expressing (what, in highest sense, are 
 not yet express d at all,) democracy and the modern. With 
 these, and out of these, I promulgate new races of Teachers, 
 and of perfect Women, indispensable to endow the birth- 
 stock of a New World. For feudalism, caste, the 
 ecclesiastic traditions, though palpably retreating from 
 political institutions, still hold essentially, by their spirit, 
 
 Rome, claim," &c., &c., &c. Vice- President Coif ax s Speech y July 4, 
 1870. 
 
 LATER London " Times," (Weekly ,) June 23, 82. 
 
 " The wonderful wealth-producing power of the United States defies 
 and sets at naught the grave drawbacks of a mischievous protective 
 tariff, and has already obliterated, almost wholly, the traces of the 
 greatest of modern civil wars. What is especially remarkable in the 
 present development of American energy and success is its wide and 
 equable distribution. North and south, east and west, on the shores 
 of the Atlantic and the Pacific, along the chain of the great lakes, 
 in the valley of the Mississippi, and on the coasts of the gulf of 
 Mexico, the creation of wealth and the increase of population are 
 signally exhibited. It is quite true, as has been shown by the recent 
 apportionment of population in the House of Representatives, that 
 some sections of the Union have advanced, relatively to the rest, in 
 an extraordinary and unexpected degree. But this does not imply 
 that the States which have gain d no additional representatives or 
 have actually lost some have been stationary or have receded. The 
 fact is that the present tide of prosperity has risen so high that it 
 has overflow d all barriers, and has fill d up the back-waters, and 
 establish d something like an approach to uniform success." 
 
DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 5 
 
 even in this country, entire possession of the more 
 important fields, indeed the very subsoil, of education, and 
 of social standards and literature. 
 
 I say that democracy can never prove itself beyond cavil, 
 until it founds and luxuriantly grows its own forms of art, 
 poems, schools, theology, displacing all that exists, or that 
 has been produced anywhere in the past, under opposite 
 influences. It is curious to me that while so many voices, 
 pens, minds, in the press, lecture-rooms, in our Congress, 
 &c., are discussing intellectual topics, pecuniary dangers, 
 legislative problems, the suffrage, tariff and labor questions, 
 and the various business and benevolent needs of America, 
 with propositions, remedies, often worth deep attention, 
 there is one need, a hiatus the profoundest, that no eye 
 seems to perceive, no voice to state. Our fundamental 
 want to-day in the United States, with closest, amplest 
 reference to present conditions, and to the future, is of a 
 class, and the clear idea of a class, of native authors, 
 literatuses, far different, far higher in grade, than any 
 yet known, sacerdotal, modern, fit to cope with our 
 occasions, lands, permeating the whole mass of American 
 mentality, taste, belief, breathing into it a new breath of 
 life, giving it decision, affecting politics far more than the 
 popular superficial suffrage, with results inside and under 
 neath the elections of Presidents or Congresses radiating, 
 begetting appropriate teachers, schools, manners, and, as its \ 
 grandest result, accomplishing, (what neither the schools . 
 nor the churches and their clergy have hitherto accom- (M* 
 plish d, and without which this nation will no more stand, 
 permanently, soundly, than a house will stand without a t 
 substratum,) a religious and r^nra] rhnrnrtfr bfnpnth the 
 political and productive and intellectual ba^ o. f f ^ p States. j\ 
 For know you not, dear, earnest reader, that the people of 
 
6 DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 
 
 our land may all read and write, and may all possess the 
 right to vote and yet the main things may be entirely 
 lacking? (and this to suggest them.) 
 
 View d, to-day, from a point of view sufficiently over 
 arching, the problem of humanity all over the civilized world 
 is social and religious, and is to be finally met and treated 
 by literature. The priest departs, the divine literatus comes. 
 Never was anything more wanted than, to-day, and here in 
 the States, the poet of the modern is wanted, or the great 
 literatus of the modern. At all times, perhaps, the central } 
 point in any nation, and that whence it is itself really sway d 
 the most, and whence it sways others, is its national litera 
 ture, especially its archetypal poems. Above all previous 
 lands, a great original literature is surely to become the 
 justification and reliance, (in some respects the sole 
 reliance,) of American democracy. 
 
 Few are aware how the great literature penetrates all, 
 gives hue to all, shapes aggregates and individuals, and, 
 after subtle ways, with irresistible power, constructs, 
 sustains, demolishes at will. Why tower, in reminiscence, 
 above all the nations of the earth, two special lands, 
 petty in themselves, yet inexpressibly gigantic, beautiful, 
 columnar ? Immortal Judah lives, and Greece immortal 
 lives, in a couple of poems. 
 
 Nearer than this. It is not generally realized, but it is 
 true, as the genius of Greece, and all the sociology, 
 personality, politics and religion of those wonderful states, 
 resided in their literature or esthetics, that what was 
 afterwards the main support of European chivalry, the 
 feudal, ecclesiastical, dynastic world over there forming 
 its osseous structure, holding it together for hundreds, 
 thousands of years, preserving its flesh and bloom, giving 
 it form, decision, rounding it out, and so saturating it in the 
 
DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 7 
 
 conscious and unconscious blood, breed, belief, and 
 intuitions of men, that it still prevails powerful to this day, 
 in defiance of the mighty changes of time was its litera 
 ture, permeating to the very marrow, especially that major 
 part, its enchanting songs, ballads, and poems.* 
 
 To the ostent of the senses and eyes, I know, the 
 influences which stamp the world s history are wars, up 
 risings or downfalls of dynasties, changeful movements of 
 trade, important inventions, navigation, military or civil 
 governments, advent of powerful personalities, conquerors, 
 &c. These of course play their part; yet, it may be, a 
 single new thought, imagination, abstract principle, even 
 literary style, fit for the time, put in shape by some great 
 literatus, and projected among mankind, may duly cause 
 changes, growths, removals, greater than the longest and 
 bloodiest war, or the most stupendous merely political, 
 dynastic, or commercial overturn. 
 
 In short, as, though it may not be realized, it is strictly 
 true, that a few first-class poets, philosophs, and authors, 
 have substantially settled and given status to the entire 
 religion, education, law, sociology, &c., of the hitherto 
 
 * See, for hereditaments, specimens, Walter Scott s Border 
 Minstrelsy, Percy s collection, Ellis s early English Metrical Romances, 
 the European continental poems of Walter of Aquitania, and the 
 Nibelungen, of pagan stock, but monkish-feudal redaction ; the history 
 of the Troubadours, by Fauriel ; even the far-back cumbrous old Hindu 
 epics, as indicating the Asian eggs out of which European chivalry was 
 hatch d ; Ticknor s chapters on the Cid, and on the Spanish poems and 
 poets of Calderon s time. Then always, and, of course, as the 
 superbest poetic culmination-expression of feudalism, the Shaksperean 
 dramas, in the attitudes, dialogue, characters, &c., of the princes, lords 
 and gentlemen, the pervading atmosphere, the implied and express d 
 standard of manners, the high port and proud stomach, the regal 
 embroidery of style, &c. 
 
8 DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 
 
 civilized world, by tinging and often creating the 
 atmospheres out of which they have arisen, such also must 
 stamp, and more than ever stamp, the interior and real 
 democratic construction of this American continent, to-day, 
 and days to come. Remember also this fact of difference, 
 that, while through the antique and through the mediaeval 
 ages, highest thoughts and ideals realized themselves, and 
 their expression made its way by other arts, as much as, or 
 even more than by, technical literature, (not open to the 
 mass of persons, or even to the majority of eminent 
 persons,) such literature in our day and for current purposes, 
 is not only more eligible than all the other arts put together, 
 but has become the only general means of morally 
 influencing the world. Painting, sculpture, and the 
 dramatic theatre, it would seem, no longer play an 
 indispensable or even important part in the workings and 
 mediumship of intellect, utility, or even high esthetics. 
 Architecture remains, doubtless with capacities, and a real 
 future. Then music, the combiner, nothing more spiritual, 
 nothing more sensuous, a god, yet completely human, 
 advances, prevails, holds highest place ; supplying in 
 certain wants and quarters what nothing else could supply. 
 Yet in the civilization of to-day it is undeniable that, over all 
 the arts, literature dominates, serves beyond all shapes the 
 character of church and schpol or, at any rate, is capable 
 of doing so. Including the literature of science, its scope is 
 indeed unparallel d. 
 
 Before proceeding further, it were perhaps well to dis 
 criminate on certain points. Literature tills its crops in 
 many fields, and some may flourish, while others lag. 
 What I say in these Vistas has its main .bearing on 
 imaginative literature, especially poetry, the stock of all. 
 In the department of science, and the specialty of journalism, 
 
DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 9 
 
 there appear, in these States, promises, perhaps fulfil 
 ments, of highest earnestness, reality, and life. These, of 
 course, are modern. But in the region of imaginative, 
 spinal and essential attributes, something equivalent to 
 creation is, for our age and lands, imperatively demanded. 
 For not only is it not enough that the new blood, new frame 
 of democracy shall be vivified and held together merely by 
 political means, superficial suffrage, legislation, &c., but it 
 is clear to me that, unless it goes deeper, gets at least as 
 firm and as warm a hold in men s hearts, emotions and 
 belief, as, in their days, feudalism or ecclesiasticism, and 
 inaugurates its own perennial sources, welling from the 
 centre forever, its strength will be defective, its growth 
 doubtful, and its main charm wanting. I suggest, there- 
 fore, the possibility, should some two or three really original 
 American poets, (perhaps artists or lecturers,) arise, mount 
 ing the horizon like planets, stars of the first magnitude, 
 that, from their eminence, fusing contributions, races, far 
 localities, &c., together, they would give more compaction 
 and more moral identity, (the quality to-day most needed,) 
 to these States, than all its Constitutions, legislative and 
 judicial ties, and all its hitherto political, warlike, or 
 materialistic experiences. As, for instance, there could 
 hardly happen anything that would more serve the States, 
 with all their variety of origins, their diverse climes, cities, 
 standards, &c., than possessing an aggregate of heroes, 
 characters, exploits, sufferings, prosperity or misfortune, 
 glory or disgrace, common to all, typical of all no less, 
 but even greater would it be to possess the aggregation of a 
 cluster of mighty poets, artists, teachers, fit for us, national 
 expressers, comprehending and effusing for the men and 
 women of the States, what is universal, native, common to 
 all, inland and seaboard, northern and southern. The 
 
to DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 
 
 historians say of ancient Greece, with her ever-jealous 
 autonomies, cities, and states, that the only positive unity 
 she ever own d or receiv d, was the sad unity of a common 
 subjection, at the last, to foreign conquerors. Subjection, 
 aggregation of that sort, is impossible to America ; but the 
 fear of conflicting and irreconcilable interiors, and the lack 
 of a common skeleton, knitting all close, continually haunts 
 me. Or, if it does not, nothing is plainer than the need, a 
 long period to come, of a fusion of the States into the only 
 reliable identity, the moral and artistic one. JFor, I say, the 
 true nationality of the States, the genuine union, when we 
 come to a mortal crisis, is, and is to be, after all, neither the 
 written law, nor, (as is generally supposed,) either self- 
 interestr^r~Common~^ecum^ or material objects but 
 the-iiervid--ad~-lTeTrreTi"6rous"" IDEA, melting everything 
 else witrr- resistless ""heat, and solving all lesser and 
 definite distinctions in vast, indefinite, spiritual, emotional 
 power. 
 
 It may be claim d, (and I admit the weight of the claim,) 
 that common and general worldly prosperity, and a popu 
 lace well-to-do, and with all life s material comforts, is the 
 main thing, and is enough. It may be argued that our 
 republic is, in performance, really enacting to-day the 
 grandest arts, poems, &c., by beating up the wilderness 
 in^o fertile farms, and in her railroads, ships, machinery, 
 &c. And it may be ask d, Are these not better, indeed, 
 for America, than any utterances even of greatest rhapsode, 
 artist, or literatus ? 
 
 I too hail those achievements with pride and joy : then 
 answer that the soul of man will not with such only nay, 
 not with such at all be finally satisfied ; but needs what, 
 (standing on these and on all things, as the feet stand on 
 the ground,) is address d to the loftiest, to itself alone. 
 
DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. n 
 
 Out of such considerations, such truths, arises for treat 
 ment in these Vistas the important question of character, of 
 an American stock-personality, with literatures and arts for 
 outlets and return-expressions, and, of course, to correspond, 
 within outlines common to all. To these, the main affair, 
 the thinkers of the United States, in general so acute, have 
 either given feeblest attention, or have remain d, and 
 remain, in a state of somnolence. 
 
 For my part, I would alarm and caution even the 
 political and business reader, and to the utmost extent, 
 against the prevailing delusion that the establishment of 
 free political institutions, and plentiful intellectual smartness, 
 with general good order, physical plenty, industry, &c., 
 (desirable and precious advantages as they all are,) do, of 
 themselves, determine and yield to our experiment of 
 democracy the fruitage of success. With such advantages 
 at present fully, or almost fully, possess d the Union just 
 issued, victorious, from the struggle with the only foes it 
 need ever fear, (namely, those within itself, the interior 
 ones,) and with unprecedented materialistic advancement 
 society, in these States, is canker d, crude, superstitious, 
 and rotten. Political, or law-made society is, and private, 
 or voluntary society, is also. In any vigor, the element of 
 the moral conscience, the most important, the verteber to 
 State or man, seems to me either entirely lacking, or 
 seriously enfeebled or ungrown. 
 
 I say we had best look our times and lands searchingly in 
 the face, like a physician diagnosing some deep disease. 
 Never was there, perhaps, more hollowness at heart than at 
 present, and here in the United States. Genuine belief 
 seems to have left us. The underlying principles of the 
 States are not honestly believ d in, (for all this hectic glow, 
 and these melo-dramatic screamings,) nor is humanity 
 
12 DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 
 
 itself believ d in. What penetrating eye does not every 
 where see through the mask ? The spectacle is appaling. 
 We live in an atmosphere of hypocrisy throughout. The 
 men believe not in the women, nor the women in the men. 
 A scornful superciliousness rules in literature. The aim 
 of all the litterateurs is to find something to make fun of. 
 A lot of churches, sects, &c., the most dismal phantasms I 
 know, usurp the name of religion. Conversation is a mass 
 of badinage. From deceit in the spirit, the mother of all 
 false deeds, the offspring is already incalculable. An acute 
 and candid person, in the revenue department in Washing 
 ton, who is led by the course of his employment to 
 regularly visit the cities, north, south and west, to investigate 
 frauds, has talk d much with me about his discoveries. The 
 depravity of the business classes of our country is not less 
 than has been supposed, but infinitely greater. The 
 official services of America, national, state, and municipal, 
 in all their branches and departments, except the judiciary, 
 are saturated in corruption, bribery, falsehood, mal-adminis- 
 tration ; and the judiciary is tainted. The great cities reek 
 with respectable as much as non-respectable robbery and 
 scoundrelism. In fashionable life, flippancy, tepid amours, 
 weak infidelism, small aims, or no aims at all, only to kill 
 time. In business, (this all-devouring modern word, busi 
 ness,) the one sole object is, by any means, pecuniary gain. 
 The magician s serpent in the fable ate up all the other 
 serpents ; and money-making is our magician s serpent, 
 remaining to-day sole master of the field. The best class 
 we show, is but a mob of fashionably dress d speculators 
 and vulgarians. True, indeed, behind this fantastic farce, 
 enacted on the visible stage of society, solid things and 
 stupendous labors are to be discover d, existing crudely and 
 going on in the background, to advance and tell themselves 
 
DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 13 
 
 in time. Yet the truths -are none the less terrible. I say 
 that our New World democracy, however great a success in 
 uplifting the masses out of their sloughs, in materialistic 
 development, products, and in a certain highly-deceptive 
 superficial popular intellectuality, is, so far, an almost com 
 plete failure in its social aspects, and in really grand 
 religious, moral, literary, and esthetic results. In vain do 
 we march with unprecedented strides to empire so colossal, 
 outvying the antique, beyond Alexander s, beyond the 
 proudest sway of Rome. In vain have we annex d Texas, 
 California, Alaska, and reach north for Canada and south 
 for Cuba. It is as if we were somehow being endow d with 
 a vast and more and more thoroughly-appointed body, and 
 then left with little or no soul. 
 
 Let me illustrate further, as I write, with current observa 
 tions, localities, &c. The subject is important, and will 
 bear repetition. After an absence, I am now again 
 (September, 1870) in New York city and Brooklyn, on a 
 few weeks vacation. The splendor, picturesqueness, and 
 oceanic amplitude and rush of these great cities, the 
 unsurpass d situation, rivers and bay, sparkling sea-tides, 
 costly and lofty new buildings, fagades of marble and iron, 
 of original grandeur and elegance of design, with the masses 
 of gay color, the preponderance of white and blue, the flags 
 flying, the endless ships, the tumultuous streets, Broadway, 
 the heavy, low, musical roar, hardly ever intermitted, even 
 at night; the jobbers houses, the rich shops, the wharves, 
 the great Central Park, and the Brooklyn Park of hills, (as 
 I wander among them this beautiful fall weather, musing, 
 watching, absorbing) the assemblages of the citizens in 
 their groups, conversations, trades, evening amusements, or 
 along the by-quarters these, I say, and the like of these, 
 completely satisfy my senses of power, fulness, motion, &c., 
 
14 DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 
 
 1 and give me, through such senses and appetites, and 
 through my esthetic conscience, a continued exaltation and 
 J absolute fulfilment. Always and more and more, as I cross 
 the East and North rivers, the ferries, or with the pilots in 
 their pilot-houses, or pass an hour in Wall street, or the 
 gold exchange, I realize, (if we must admit such partialisms,) 
 that not Nature alone is great in her fields of freedom and 
 the open air, in her storms, the shows of night and day, the 
 mountains, forests, seas but in the artificial, the work of 
 man too is equally great in this profusion of teeming 
 humanity in these ingenuities, streets, goods, houses, ships 
 these hurrying, feverish, electric crowds of men, their 
 complicated business genius, (not least among the geniuses,) 
 and all this mighty, many-threaded wealth and industry 
 concentrated here. 
 
 But sternly discarding, shutting our eyes to the glow and 
 grandeur of the general superficial effect, coming down to 
 what is of the only real importance, Personalities, and 
 examining minutely, we question, we ask, Are there, indeed, 
 men here worthy the name ? Are there athletes ? Are 
 there perfect women, to match the generous material 
 luxuriance ? Is there a pervading atmosphere of beautiful 
 manners ? Are there crops of fine youths, and majestic old 
 persons ? Are there arts worthy freedom and a rich people ? 
 Is there a great moral and religious civilization the only 
 justification of a great material one ? Confess that to severe 
 eyes, using the moral microscope upon humanity, a sort of 
 dry and flat Sahara appears, these cities, crowded with petty 
 grotesques, malformations, phantoms, playing meaningless 
 antics. Confess that everywhere, in shop, street, church, 
 theatre, bar-room, official chair, are pervading flippancy 
 and vulgarity, low cunning, infidelity everywhere the youth 
 puny, impudent, foppish, prematurely ripe everywhere 
 
DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 15 
 
 an abnormal libidinousness, unhealthy forms, male, female, 
 painted, padded, dyed, chignon d, muddy complexions, bad 
 blood, the capacity for good motherhood deceasing or 
 deceas d, shallow notions of beauty, with a range of manners, 
 or rather lack of manners, (considering the advantages 
 enjoy d,) probably the meanest to be seen in the world.* 
 
 Of all this, and these lamentable conditions, to breathe 
 into them the breath recuperative of sane and heroic life, I 
 say a new founded literature, not merely to copy and reflect 
 existing surfaces, or pander to what is called taste not 
 only to amuse, pass away time, celebrate the beautiful, the 
 refined, the past, or exhibit technical, rhythmic, or gram 
 matical dexterity but a literature underlying life, religious, 
 consistent with science, handling the elements and forces 
 with competent power, teaching and training men and, as 
 perhaps the most precious of its results, achieving the 
 entire redemption of woman out of these incredible holds 
 and webs of silliness, millinery, and every kind of dyspeptic 
 depletion and thus insuring to the States a strong and sweet 
 Female Race, a race of perfect Mothers is what is needed. 
 
 * Of these rapidly-sketch d hiatuses, the two which seem to be most 
 serious are, for one, the condition, absence, or perhaps the singular 
 abeyance, of moral conscientious fibre all through American society ; 
 and, for another, the appaling depletion of women in their powers of 
 sane athletic maternity, their crowning attribute, and ever making the 
 woman, in loftiest spheres, superior to the man. 
 
 I have sometimes thought, indeed, that the sole avenue and means of 
 a reconstructed sociology depended, primarily, on a new birth, eleva 
 tion, expansion, invigoration of woman, affording, for races to come, 
 (as the conditions that antedate birth are indispensable,) a perfect 
 motherhood. Great, great, indeed, far greater than they know, is the 
 sphere of women. But doubtless the question of such new sociology all 
 goes together, includes many varied and complex influences and 
 premises, and the man as well as the woman, and the woman as well 
 as the man. 
 
1 6 DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 
 
 And now, in the full conception of these facts and points, 
 and all that they infer, pro and con with yet unshaken 
 faith in the elements of the American masses, the com 
 posites, of both sexes, and even consider d as individuals 
 and ever recognizing in them the broadest bases of the best 
 literary and esthetic appreciation I proceed with my 
 speculations, Vistas. 
 
 First, let us see what we can make out of a brief, general, 
 sentimental consideration of political democracy, and 
 whence it has arisen, with regard to some of its current 
 features, as an aggregate, and as the basic structure of our 
 future literature and authorship. We shall, it is true, 
 quickly and continually find the origin-idea of the singleness 
 of man, individualism, asserting itself, and cropping forth, 
 even from the opposite ideas. But the mass, or lump 
 character, for imperative reasons, is to be ever carefully 
 weigh d, borne in mind, and provided for. Only from it, 
 and from its proper regulation and potency, comes the 
 other, comes the chance of individualism. The two are 
 contradictory, but our task is to reconcile them.* 
 
 The political history of the past may be summ d up as 
 having grown out of what underlies the words, order, safety, 
 caste, and especially out of the need of some prompt 
 deciding authority, and of cohesion at all cost. Leaping 
 time, we come to the period within the memory of people 
 
 * The question hinted here is one which time only can answer. 
 Must not the virtue of modern Individualism, continually enlarging, 
 usurping all, seriously affect, perhaps keep down entirely, in America, 
 the like of the ancient virtue of Patriotism, the fervid and absorbing 
 love of general country? I have no doubt myself that the two will 
 merge, and will mutually profit and brace each other, and that from 
 them a greater product, a third, will arise. But I feel that at present 
 they and their oppositions form a serious problem and paradox in ths 
 United States. 
 
DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 17 
 
 now living, when, as from some lair where they had 
 slumber d long, accumulating wrath, sprang up and are yet 
 active, (1790, and on even to the present, 1870,) those noisy 
 eructations, destructive iconoclasms, a fierce sense of 
 wrongs, amid which moves the form, well known in modern 
 history, in the old world, stain d with much blood, and 
 mark d by savage reactionary clamors and demands. These 
 bear, mostly, as on one inclosing point of need. 
 
 For after the rest is said after the many time-honor d 
 and really true things for subordination, experience, rights 
 of property, &c., have been listen d to and acquiesced in 
 after the valuable and well-settled statement of our duties 
 and relations in society is thoroughly conn d over and 
 exhausted it remains to bring forward and modify every 
 thing else with the idea of that Something a man is, (last 
 precious consolation of the drudging poor,) standing apart 
 from all else, divine in his own right, and a woman in hers, 
 sole and untouchable by any canons of Authority, or any 
 rule derived from precedent, state-safety, the acts of legis 
 latures, or even from what is called religion, modesty, or 
 art. The radiation of this truth is the key^f the most , 
 significant doings of our immediately preceding three 
 centuries, and has been the political genesis and life of 
 America. Advancing visibly, it still more advances in 
 visibly. Underneath the fluctuations of the expressions of 
 society, as well as the movements of the politics of the 
 leading nations of the world, we see steadily pressing ahead 
 and strengthening itself, even in the midst of immense 
 tendencies toward aggregation, this image of completeness 
 in separatism, of individual personal dignity, of a single 
 person, either male or female, characterized in the main, 
 not from extrinsic acquirements or position, but in the pride 
 of himself or herself alone ; and, as an eventual conclusion 
 
 2 
 
iS DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 
 
 and summing up, (or else the entire scheme of things is 
 aimless, a cheat, a crash,) the simple idea that the last, 
 best dependence is to be upon humanity itself, and its own 
 inherent, normal, full-grown qualities, without any super 
 stitious support whatever. This idea of perfect individual 
 ism it is indeed that deepest tinges and gives character to 
 the idea of the aggregate. For it is mainly or altogether to 
 serve independent separatism that we favor a strong general 
 ization, consolidation. As it is to give the best vitality and 
 freedom to the rights of the States, (every bit as important 
 as the right of nationality, the union,) that we insist on the 
 identity of the Union at all hazards. 
 
 The purpose of democracy supplanting old belief in the 
 necessary absoluteness of established dynastic rulership, 
 temporal, ecclesiastical, and scholastic, as furnishing the 
 only security against chaos, crime, and ignorance is, 
 through many transmigrations and amid endless ridicules, 
 arguments, and ostensible failures, to illustrate, at all 
 hazards, this doctrine or theory that man, properly train d 
 in sanest, highest freedom, may and must become a law, 
 and series of laws, unto himself, surrounding and providing 
 for, not only his own personal control, but all his relations 
 to other individuals, and to the State ; and that, while other 
 theories, as in the past histories of nationo, have proved 
 wise enough, and indispensable perhaps for their conditions, 
 this, as matters now stand in our civilized world, is the only 
 scheme worth working from, as warranting results like those 
 of Nature s laws, reliable, when once established, to carry 
 on themselves. 
 
 The argument of the matter is extensive, and, we admit, 
 by no means all on one side. What we shall offer will be 
 far, far from sufficient. But while leaving unsaid much that 
 should properly even prepare the way for the treatment of 
 
DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 19 
 
 this many-sided question of political liberty, equality, or 
 republicanism leaving the whole history and consideration 
 of the feudal plan and its products, embodying humanity, 
 its politics and civilization, through the retrospect of past 
 time, (which plan and products, indeed, make up all of the 
 past, and a large part of the present) leaving unanswer d, 
 at least by any specific and local answer, many a well- 
 wrought argument and instance, and many a conscientious 
 declamatory cry and warning as, very lately, from an 
 eminent and venerable person abroad* things, problems, 
 full of doubt, dread, suspense, (not new to me, but old 
 occupiers of many an anxious hour in city s din, or night s 
 silence,) we still may give a page or so, whose drift is 
 opportune. Time alone can finally answer these things. 
 But as a substitute in passing, let us, even if fragmentarily, 
 throw forth a short direct or indirect suggestion of the 
 premises of that other plan, in the new spirit, under the 
 new forms, started here in our America. 
 
 As to the political section of Democracy, which intro 
 duces and breaks ground for further and vaster sections, 
 few probably are the minds, even in these republican States, 
 that fully comprehend the aptness of that phrase, " THE 
 
 GOVERNMENT OF THE PEOPLE, BY THE PEOPLE, FOR THE 
 
 * "SHOOTING NIAGARA." I was at first roused to much anger 
 and abuse by this essay from Mr. Carlyle, so insulting to the theory 
 of America but happening to think afterwards how I had more than 
 once been in the like mood, during which his essay was evidently 
 cast, and seen persons and things in the same light, (indeed some 
 might say there are signs of the same feeling in these Vistas) I 
 have since read it again, not only as a study, expressing as it does 
 certain judgments from the highest feudal point of view, but have 
 read it with respect as coming from an earnest soul, and as con 
 tributing certain sharp-cutting metallic grains, which, if not gold or 
 silver, may be good hard, hontst iron. 
 
20 DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 
 
 PEOPLE," which we inherit from the lips of Abraham 
 Lincoln ; a formula whose verbal shape is homely wit, but 
 whose scope includes both the totality and all minutiae of 
 the lesson. 
 
 The People ! Like our huge earth itself, which, to 
 ordinary scansion, is full of vulgar contradictions and 
 offence, man, viewed in the lump, displeases, and is a 
 constant puzzle and affront to the merely educated classes. 
 The rare, cosmical, artist-mind, lit with the Infinite, alone 
 confronts his manifold and oceanic qualities but taste, 
 intelligence and culture, (so-called,) have been against the 
 masses, and remain so. There is plenty of glamour about 
 the most damnable crimes and hoggish meannesses, special 
 and general, of the feudal and dynastic world over there, 
 with its personnel of lords and queens and courts, so well- 
 dress d and so handsome. But the People are ungram- 
 matical, untidy, and their sins gaunt and ill-bred. 
 
 Literature, strictly consider d, has never recognized the 
 People, and, whatever may be said, does not to-day. 
 Speaking generally, the tendencies of literature, as hitherto 
 pursued, have been to make mostly critical and querulous 
 men. It seems as if, so far, there were some natural 
 repugnance between a literary and professional life, and the 
 rude rank spirit of the democracies. There is, in later 
 literature, a treatment of benevolence, a charity business, rife 
 enough it is true ; but I know nothing more rare, even in this 
 country, than a fit scientific estimate and reverent appreciation 
 of the People of their measurless wealth of latent power and 
 capacity, their vast, artistic contrasts of lights and shades 
 with, in America, their entire reliability in emergencies, and 
 a certain breadth of historic grandeur, of peace or war, far 
 surpassing all the vaunted samples of book-heroes, or any 
 haut ton coteries, in all the records of the world. 
 
DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 21 
 
 The movements of the late secession war, and their 
 results, to any sense that studies well and comprehends 
 them, show that popular democracy, whatever its faults and 
 dangers, practically justifies itself beyond the proudest 
 claims and wildest hopes of its enthusiasts. Probably no 
 future age can know, but I well know, how the gist of this 
 fiercest and most resolute of the world s war-like conten 
 tions resided exclusively in the unnamed, unknown rank 
 and file ; and how the brunt of its labor of death was, to all 
 essential purposes, volunteer d. The People, of their own 
 choice, fighting, dying for their own idea, insolently 
 attack d by the secession-slave-power, and its very existence 
 imperil d. Descending to detail, entering any of the 
 armies, and mixing with the private soldiers, we see and 
 have seen august spectacles. We have seen the alacrity 
 with which the American-born populace, the peaceablest 
 and most good-natured race in the world, and the most 
 personally independent and intelligent, and the least fitted 
 to submit to the irksomeness and exasperation of regimental 
 discipline, sprang, at the first tap of the drum, to arms not 
 for gain, nor even glory, nor to repel invasion but for an 
 emblem, a mere abstraction for the life, the safety of the 
 flag. We have seen the unequal d docility and obedience 
 of these soldiers. We have seen them tried long and long 
 by hopelessness, mismanagement, and by defeat ; have seen 
 the incredible slaughter toward or through which the 
 armies, (as at first Fredericksburg, and afterward at the 
 Wilderness,) still unhesitatingly obey d orders to advance. 
 We have seen them in trench, or crouching behind breast 
 work, or tramping in deep mud, or amid pouring rain or 
 thick-falling snow, or under forced marches in hottest 
 summer (as on the road to get to Gettysburg) vast suffocat 
 ing swarms, divisions, corps, with every single man so 
 
22 DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 
 
 grimed and black with sweat and dust, his own mother 
 would not have known him his clothes all dirty, stain d 
 and torn, with sour, accumulated sweat for perfume many 
 a comrade, perhaps a brother, sun-struck, staggering out, 
 dying, by the roadside, of exhaustion yet the great bulk 
 bearing steadily on, cheery enough, hollow-bellied from 
 hunger, but sinewy with unconquerable resolution. 
 
 We have seen this race proved by wholesale, by drearier, 
 yet more fearful tests the wound, the amputation, the 
 shatter d face or limb, the slow hot fever, long impatient 
 anchorage in bed, and all the forms of maiming, operation 
 and disease. Alas ! America have we seen, though only in 
 her early youth, already to hospital brought. There have 
 we watch d these soldiers, many of them only boys in 
 years mark d their decorum, their religious nature and 
 fortitude, and their sweet affection. Wholesale, truly. For 
 at the front, and through the camps, in countless tents, 
 stood the regimental, brigade and division hospitals ; while 
 everywhere amid the land, in or near cities, rose clusters of 
 huge, white-wash d, crowded, one-story wooden barracks ; 
 and there ruled agony with bitter scourge, yet seldom 
 brought a cry ; and there stalk d death by day and night 
 along the narrow aisles between the rows of cots, or by the 
 blankets on the ground, and touch d lightly many a poor 
 sufferer, often with blessed, welcome touch. 
 
 I know not whether I shall be understood, but I realize 
 that it is finally from what I learn d personally mixing in 
 such scenes that I am now penning these pages. One 
 night in the gloomiest period of the war, in the Patent 
 office hospital in Washington city, as I stood by the bedside 
 of a Pennsylvania soldier, who lay, conscious of quick 
 approaching death, yet perfectly calm, and with noble, 
 spiritual manner, the veteran surgeon, turning aside, said to 
 
DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 23 
 
 me, that though he had witness d many, many deaths of 
 soldiers, and had been a worker at Bull Run, Antietam, 
 Fredericksburg, &c., he had not seen yet the first case of 
 man or boy that met the approach of dissolution with 
 cowardly qualms or terror. My own observation fully 
 bears out the remark. 
 
 What have we here, if not, towering above all talk and 
 argument, the plentifully-supplied, last-needed proof of 
 democracy, in its personalities? Curiously enough, too, 
 the proof on this point comes, I should say, every bit as 
 much from the south, as from the north. Although I have 
 spoken only of the latter, yet I deliberately include all. 
 Grand, common stock ! to me the accomplished and con 
 vincing growth, prophetic of the future ; proof undeniable 
 to sharpest sense, of perfect beauty, tenderness and p.uck, 
 that never feudal lord, nor Greek, nor Roman breed, yet 
 rival d. Let no tongue ever speak in disparagement of the 
 American races, north or south, to one who has been 
 through the war in the great army hospitals. 
 
 Meantime, general humanity, (for to that we return, as, 
 for our purposes, what it really is, to bear in mind,) has 
 always, in every department, been full of perverse malefi 
 cence, and is so yet. In downcast hours the soul thinks it 
 always will be but soon recovers from such sickly moods. 
 I myself see clearly enough the crude, defective streaks in 
 all the strata of the common people ; the specimens and 
 vast collections of the ignorant, the credulous, the unfit and 
 uncouth, the incapable, and the very low and poor. The 
 eminent person just mention d sneeringly asks whether we 
 expect to elevate and improve a nation s politics by absorb 
 ing such morbid collections and qualities therein. The 
 point is a formidable one, and there will doubtless always 
 be numbers of solid and reflective citizens who will never 
 
24 DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 
 
 get over it. Our answer is general, and is involved in the 
 scope and letter of this essay. We believe the ulterior 
 object of political and all other government, (having, of 
 course, provided for the police, the safety of life, property, 
 and for the basic statute and common law, and their admin 
 istration, always first in order,) to be among the rest, not 
 merely to rule, to repress disorder, &c., but to develop, to 
 open up to cultivation, to encourage the possibilities of all 
 beneficent and manly outcroppage, and of that aspiration 
 for independence, and the pride and self-respect latent in 
 all characters. (Or, if there be exceptions, we cannot, 
 fixing our eyes on them alone, make theirs the rule for 
 all.) 
 
 I say the mission of government, henceforth, in civilized 
 lands, is not repression alone, and not authority alone, not 
 even of law, nor by that favorite standard of the eminent 
 writer, the rule of the best men, the born heroes and 
 captains of the race, (as if such ever, or one time out of a 
 hundred, get into the big places, elective or dynastic) but 
 higher than the highest arbitrary rule, to train communities 
 through all their grades, beginning with individuals and 
 ending there again, to rule themselves. What Christ 
 appear d for in the moral-spiritual field for human-kind, 
 namely, that in respect to the absolute soul, there is in the 
 possession of such by each single individual, something so 
 transcendent, so incapable of gradations, (like life,) that, to 
 that extent, it places all beings on a common level, utterly 
 regardless of the distinctions of intellect, virtue, station, or 
 any height or lowliness whatever is tallied in like manner, 
 in this other field, by democracy s rule that men, the nation, 
 as a common aggregate of living identities, affording in each 
 a separate and complete subject for freedom, worldly thrift 
 and happiness, and for a fair chance for growth, and for 
 
DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 25 
 
 protection in citizenship, &c., must, to the political extent 
 of the suffrage or vote, if no further, be placed, in each and 
 in the whole, on one broad, primary, universal, common 
 platform. 
 
 The purpose is not altogether direct ; perhaps it is more 
 indirect. For it is not that democracy is of exhaustive 
 account, in itself. Perhaps, indeed, it is, (like Nature,) of 
 no account in itself. It is that, as we see, it is the best, 
 perhaps only, fit and full means, formulater, general caller- 
 forth, trainer, for the million, not for grand material 
 personalities only, but for immortal souls. To be a voter 
 with the rest is not so much ; and this, like every institute, 
 will have its imperfections. But to become an enfranchised 
 man, and now, impediments removed, to stand and start 
 without humiliation, and equal with the rest j to commence, 
 or have the road clear d to commence, the grand experi 
 ment of development, whose end, (perhaps requiring several 
 generations,) may be the forming of a full-grown man or 
 woman that is something. To ballast the State is also 
 secured, and in our times is to be secured, in no other way. 
 
 We do not, (at any rate I do not,) put it either on the 
 ground that the People, the masses, even the best of them, 
 are, in their latent or exhibited qualities, essentially 
 sensible and good nor on the ground of their rights ; but 
 that good or bad, rights or no rights, the democratic j 
 formula is the only safe and preservative one for coming I 
 times. We endow the masses with the suffrage for their 
 own sake, no doubt ; then, perhaps still more, from another 
 point of view, for community s sake. Leaving the rest to 
 the sentimentalists, we present freedom as sufficient in its 
 scientific aspect, cold as ice, reasoning, deductive, clear and / 
 passionless as crystal. 
 
 Democracy too is law, and of the strictest, amplest kind. 
 
26 DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 
 
 Many suppose, (and often in its own ranks the error,) that 
 it means a throwing aside of law, and running riot. But, 
 briefly, it is the superior law, not alone that of physical 
 force, the body, which, adding to, it supersedes with that of 
 the spirit. Law is the unshakable order of the universe 
 forever ; and the law over all, and law of laws, is the law of 
 successions ; that of the superior law, in time, gradually 
 supplanting and overwhelming the inferior one. (While, 
 for myself, I would cheerfully agree first covenanting that 
 the formative tendencies shall be administer d in favor, 
 or at least not against it, and that this reservation be closely 
 construed that until the individual or community show 
 due signs, or be so minor and fractional as not to endanger 
 the State, the condition of authoritative tutelage may 
 continue, and self-government must abide its time.) Nor 
 is the esthetic point, always an important one, without 
 fascination for highest aiming souls. The common 
 ambition strains for elevations, to become some privileged 
 exclusive. The master sees greatness and health in being 
 part of the mass; nothing will do as well as common 
 ground. Would you have in yourself the divine, vast, 
 general law ? Then merge yourself in it. 
 
 And, topping democracy, this most alluring record, that 
 it alone can bind, and ever seeks to bind, all nations, all 
 men, of however various and distant lands, into a brother 
 hood, a family. It is the old, yet ever-modern dream of 
 earth, out of her eldest and her youngest, her fond 
 philosophers and poets. Not that half only, individualism, 
 which isolates. There is another half, which is adhesive 
 ness or love, that fuses, ties and aggregates, making the 
 races comrades, and fraternizing all. Both are to be 
 vitalized by religion, (sole worthiest elevator of man or 
 State,) breathing into the proud, material tissues, the 
 
DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 27 
 
 breath of life. For I say at the core of democracy, finally, 
 is the religious element. All the religions, old and new, 
 are there. Nor may the scheme step forth, clothed in 
 resplendent beauty and command, till these, bearing the 
 best, the latest fruit, the spiritual, shall fully appear. 
 
 A portion of our pages we might indite with reference 
 toward Europe, especially the British part of it, more than 
 our own land, perhaps not absolutely needed for the home 
 reader. But the whole question hangs together, and 
 fastens and links all peoples. The liberalist of to-day has 
 this advantage over antique or medieval times, that his 
 doctrine seeks not only to individualize but to universalize. 
 The great word Solidarity has arisen. Of all dangers to a 
 nation, as things exist in our day, there can be no greater 
 one than having certain portions of the people set off from 
 the rest by a line drawn they not privileged as others, but 
 degraded, humiliated, made of no account. Much quackery 
 teems, of course, even on democracy s side, yet does not 
 really affect the orbic quality of the matter. To work in, if 
 we may so term it, and justify God, his divine aggregate, the 
 People, (or, the veritable horn d and sharp-tail d Devil, 
 his aggregate, if there be who convulsively insist upon it) 
 this, I say, is what democracy is for ; and this is what our 
 America means, and is doing may I not say, has done ? 
 If not, she means nothing more, and does nothing more, 
 than any other land. And as, by virtue of its kosmical, 
 antiseptic power, Nature s stomach is fully strong enough 
 not only to digest the morbific matter always presented, 
 not to be turn d aside, and perhaps, indeed, intuitively 
 gravitating thither but even to change such contributions 
 into nutriment for highest use and life so American 
 democracy s. That is the lesson we, these days, send over 
 to European lands by every western breeze. 
 
28 DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 
 
 And truly, whatever may be said in the way of abstract 
 argument, for or against the theory of a wider democratizing 
 of institutions in any civilized country, much trouble might 
 well be saved to all European lands by recognizing this 
 palpable fact, (for a palpable fact it is,) that some form of 
 such democratizing is about the only resource now left. 
 That, or chronic dissatisfaction continued, mutterings which 
 grow annually louder and louder, till, in due course, and 
 pretty swiftly in most cases, the inevitable crisis, crash, 
 dynastic ruin. Anything worthy to be call d statesmanship 
 in the Old World, I should say, among the advanced 
 students, adepts, or men of any brains, does not debate to 
 day whether to hold on, attempting to lean back and 
 monarchize, or to look forward and democratize but how, 
 and in what degree and part, most prudently to demo- 
 / cratize. 
 
 The eager and often inconsiderate appeals of reformers 
 and revolutionists are indispensable, to counterbalance the 
 inertness and fossilism making so large a part of human 
 institutions. The latter will always take care of themselves 
 the danger being that they rapidly tend to ossify us. 
 The former is to be treated with indulgence, and even with 
 respect. As circulation to air, so is agitation and a plentiful 
 degree of speculative license to political and moral sanity. 
 Indirectly, but surely, goodness, virtue, law, (of the very 
 best,) follow freedom. These, to democracy, are what the 
 keel is to the ship, or saltness to the ocean. 
 The true gravitation-hold of liberalism in the United 
 S v vj* States will be a more universal ownership of property, 
 general homesteads, general comfort a vast, intertwining 
 reticulation of wealth. As the human frame, or, indeed, 
 any object in this manifold universe, is best kept together 
 by the simple miracle of its own cohesion, and the 
 
DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 29 
 
 necessity, exercise and profit thereof, so a great and varied 
 nationality, occupying millions of square miles, were firmest 
 held and knit by the principle of the safety and endurance 
 of the aggregate of its middling property owners. So that, 
 from another point of view, ungracious as it may sound, and 
 a paradox after what we have been saying, democracy looks 
 with suspicious, ill-satisfied eye upon the very poor, the 
 ignorant, and on those out of business. She asks for men 
 and women with occupations, well-off, owners of houses and 
 acres, and with cash in the bank and with some cravings 
 for literature, too; and must have them, and hastens to 
 make them. Luckily, the seed is already well-sown, and 
 has taken ineradicable root* 
 
 Huge and mighty are our days, our republican lands 
 and most in their rapid shiftings, their changes, all in the 
 interest of the cause. / As I write this particular passage, 
 (November, 1868,) the din of disputation rages around me. 
 Acrid the temper of the parties, vital the pending questions. 
 Congress convenes ; the President sends his message ; re 
 construction is still in abeyance ; the nomination and the 
 contest for the twenty-first Presidentiad draw close, with 
 
 * For fear of mistake, I may as well distinctly specify, as cheerfully 
 included in the model and standard of these Vistas, a practical, stirring, 
 worldly, money-making, even materialistic character. It is undeniable 
 that our farms, stores, offices, dry-goods, coal and groceries, enginery, 
 cash-accounts, trades, earnings, markets, &c., should be attended to in 
 earnest, and actively pursued, just as if they had a real and permanent 
 existence. I perceive clearly that the extreme business energy, and 
 this almost maniacal appetite for wealth prevalent in the United States, 
 are parts of amelioration and progress, indispensably needed to prepare 
 the very results I demand. My theory includes riches, and the getting 
 of riches, and the amplest products, power, activity, inventions, move 
 ments, &c. Upon them, as upon substrata, I raise the edifice design d 
 in these Vistas. 
 
30 DEMOCRATIC VlSTAS. 
 
 loudest threat and bustle. Of these, and all the like of 
 these, the eventuations I know not ; but well I know that 
 behind them, and whatever their eventuations, the vital 
 things remain safe and certain, and all the needed work 
 goes on. Time, with soon or later superciliousness, dis 
 poses of Presidents, Congressmen, party platforms, and 
 such. Anon, it clears the stage of each and any mortal 
 shred that thinks itself so potent to its day ; and at and after 
 which, (with precious, golden exceptions once or twice in a 
 century,) all that relates to sir potency is flung to moulder 
 in a burial-vault, and no one bothers himself the least bit 
 about it afterward. But the People ever remain, tendencies 
 continue, and all the idiocratic transfers in unbroken chain 
 go on. 
 
 In a few years the dominion-heart of America will be far 
 inland, toward the West. Our future national capital may 
 not be where the present one is. It is possible, nay likely, 
 that in less than fifty years, it will migrate a thousand or 
 two miles, will be re-founded, and every thing belonging to 
 it made on a different plan, original, far more superb. The 
 main social, political, spine-character of the States will 
 probably run along the Ohio, Missouri and Mississippi 
 rivers, and west and north of them, including Canada. 
 Those region s, with the group of powerful brothers toward 
 the Pacific, (destined to the mastership of that sea and its 
 countless paradises of islands,) will compact and settle the 
 traits of America, with all the old retain d, but more ex 
 panded, grafted on newer, hardier, purely native stock. A 
 giant growth, composite from the rest, getting their contri 
 bution, absorbing it, to make it more illustrious. From 
 the north, intellect, the sun of things, also the idea of 
 unswayable justice, anchor amid the last, the wildest 
 tempests. From the south the living soul, the animus of 
 
DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 31 
 
 good and bad, haughtily admitting no demonstration but its 
 own. While from the west itself comes solid personality, 
 with blood and brawn, and the deep quality of all-accepting 
 fusion. 
 
 Political democracy, as it exists and practically works in 
 America, with all its threatening evils, supplies a training- 
 school for making first-class men. It is life s gymnasium, 
 not of good only, but of all. We try often, though we fall 
 back often. A brave delight, fit for freedom s athletes, fills 
 these arenas, and fully satisfies, out of the action in them, 
 irrespective of success. Whatever we do not attain, we at 
 any rate attain the experiences of the fight, the hardening 
 of the strong campaign, and throb with currents of attempt 
 at least. Time is ample. Let the victors come after us. 
 Not for nothing does evil play its part among us. Judging 
 from the main portions of the history of the world, so far, 
 justice is always in jeopardy, peace walks amid hourly 
 pit-falls, and of slavery, misery, meanness, the craft of 
 tyrants and the credulity of the populace, in some of their 
 protean forms, no voice can at any time say, They are not. 
 The clouds break a little, and the sun shines out but soon 
 and certain the lowering darkness falls again, as if to last 
 forever. Yet is there an immortal courage and prophecy in 
 every sane soul that cannot, must not, under any circum 
 stances, capitulate. Vive, the attack the perennial assault ! 
 Vive, the unpopular cause the spirit that audaciously aims 
 the never-abandon d efforts, pursued the same amid 
 opposing proofs and precedents. 
 
 Once, before the war, (Alas ! I dare not say how many 
 times the mood has come !) I, too, was fill d with doubt and 
 gloom. A foreigner, an acute and good man, had im 
 pressively said to me, that day putting in form, indeed, my 
 own observations : " I have travel d much in the United 
 
32 DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 
 
 States, and watch d their politicians, and listen d to the 
 speeches of the candidates, and read the journals, and gone 
 into the public houses, and heard the unguarded talk of 
 men. And I have found your vaunted America honey- 
 comb d from top to toe with infidelism, even to itself and 
 its own programme. I have mark d the brazen hell-faces of 
 secession and slavery gazing defiantly from all the windows 
 and doorways. I have everywhere found, primarily, thieves 
 and scalliwags arranging the nominations to offices, and 
 sometimes filling the offices themselves. I have found the 
 north just as full of bad stuff as the south. Of the holders 
 of public office in the Nation or the States or their muni 
 cipalities, I have found that not one in a hundred has been 
 chosen by any spontaneous selection of the outsiders, the 
 people, but all have been nominated and put through by 
 little or large caucuses of the politicians, and have got in 
 by corrupt rings and electioneering, not capacity or desert. 
 I have noticed how the millions of sturdy farmers and 
 mechanics are thus the helpless supple-jacks of com 
 paratively few politicians. And I have noticed more and 
 more, the alarming spectacle of parties usurping the 
 government, and openly and shamelessly wielding it for 
 party purposes." 
 
 Sad, serious, deep truths. Yet are there other, still 
 deeper, amply confronting, dominating truths. Over those 
 politicians and great and little rings, and over all their 
 insolence and wiles, and over the powerfulest parties, looms 
 a power, too sluggish maybe, but ever holding decisions 
 and decrees in hand, ready, with stern process, to execute 
 them as soon as plainly needed and at times, indeed, sum 
 marily crushing to atoms the mightiest parties, even in the 
 hour of their pride. 
 "In saner hours far different are the amounts of these 
 
DEMOCRATJC VISTAS. 33 
 
 things from what, at first sight, they appear. Though it is 
 no doubt important who is elected governor, mayor, or 
 legislator (and full of dismay when incompetent or vile ones 
 get elected, as they sometimes do), there are other, quieter 
 contingencies, infinitely more important. Shams, &c., will 
 always be "the show, like ocean s scum ; enough, if waters 
 deep and clear make up the rest. Enough, that while the 
 piled embroider d shoddy gaud and fraud spreads to the 
 superficial eye, the hidden warp and weft are genuine, and 
 will wear forever. Enough, in short, that the race, the 
 land which could raise such as the late rebellion, could also 
 put it down. 
 
 The average man of a land at last only is important. 
 He, in these States, remains immortal owner and boss, 
 deriving good uses, somehow, out of any sort of servant in 
 office, even the basest; (certain universal requisites, and 
 their settled regularity and protection, being first secured,) 
 a nation like ours, in a sort of geological formation state, 
 trying continually new experiments, choosing new delega 
 tions, is not served by the best men only, but sometimes 
 more by those that provoke it by the combats they 
 arouse. Thus national rage, fury, discussion, &c., better 
 than content. Thus, also, the warning signals, invaluable 
 for after times. 
 
 What is more dramatic than the spectacle we have seen 
 repeated, and doubtless long shall see the popular judg 
 ment taking the successful candidates on trial in the offices 
 standing off, as it were, and observing them and their 
 doings for a while, and always giving, finally, the fit, exactly 
 due reward ? I think, after all, the sublimest part of 
 political history, and its culmination, is currently issuing 
 from the American people. I know nothing grander, better 
 exercise, better digestion, more positive proof of the past, 
 
 3 
 
34 DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 
 
 the triumphant result of faith in human kind, than a well- 
 contested American national election. 
 
 Then still the thought returns, (like the thread-passage in 
 overtures,) giving the key and echo to these pages. When [ 
 pass to and fro, different latitudes, different seasons, behold 
 ing the crowds of, the great -cities, New York, Boston, Phila 
 delphia, Cincinnati, Chicago, St. Louis, San Francisco, New 
 Orleans, Baltimore when I mix with \these interminable 
 swarms of alert, turbulent, good-natured, independent citi 
 zens, mechanics, clerks, young persons at the idea of this 
 mass of men, so fresh and free, so loving and so proud, a 
 singular awe falls upon me. I feel, with dejection and 
 amazement, that among our geniuses and talented writers 
 or speakers, few or none have yet really spoken to this 
 people, created a single image-making work for them, or 
 absorb d the central spirit and the idiosyncrasies which are 
 theirs and which, thus, in highest ranges, so far remain 
 entirely uncelebrated, unexpress d. 
 
 Dominion strong is the body s ; dominion stronger is the 
 mind s. What has fill d, and fills to-day our intellect, our 
 fancy, furnishing the standards therein, is yet foreign. The 
 great poems, Shakspere included, are poisonous to the idea 
 of the pride and dignity of the common people, the life- 
 blood of democracy. The models of our literature, as we 
 L^et it from other lands, ultramarine, have had their birth in 
 courts, and bask d and grown in castle sunshine ; all smells 
 of princes favors. Of workers of a certain sort, we have, 
 indeed, plenty, contributing after their kind ; many elegant, 
 many learn d, all complacent. But touch d by the national 
 test, or tried by the standards of democratic personality, 
 they wither to ashes. I say I have not seen a single writer, 
 artist, lecturer, or what not, that has confronted the voice 
 less but ever erect and active, pervading, underlying will 
 
DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 35 
 
 and typic aspiration of the land, in a spirit kindred to itself. 
 Do you call those genteel little creatures American poets ? 
 Do you term that perpetual, pistareen, paste-pot work, 
 American art, American drama, taste, verse? I think I 
 hear, echoed as from some mountain-top afar in the west, 
 the scornful laugh of the Genius of these States. 
 
 Democracy, in silence, biding its time, ponders its own 
 ideals, not of literature and art only not of men only, but 
 of women. The idea of the women of America, (extricated 
 from this daze, this fossil and unhealthy air which hangs 
 about the word lady?) develop d, raised to become the 
 robust equals, workers, and, it may be, even practical and 
 political deciders with the men greater than man, we may 
 admit, through their divine maternity, always their towering, 
 emblematical attribute but great, at any rate, as man, in 
 all departments ; or, rather, capable of being so, soon as 
 they realize it, and can bring themselves to give up toys and 
 fictions, and launch forth, as men do, amid real, independent, 
 stormy life. 
 
 Then, as towards our thought s finale, (and, in that, over 
 arching the true scholar s lesson,) we have to say there can 
 be no complete or epical presentation of democracy in the 
 aggregate, or anything like it, at this day, because its 
 doctrines will only be effectually incarnated in any one 
 branch, when, in all, their spirit is at the root and centre. 
 Far, far, indeed, stretch, in distance, our Vistas ! How 
 much is still to be disentangled, freed ! How long it takes 
 to make this American world see that it is, in itself, the final 
 authority and reliance ! 
 
 Did you, too, O friend, suppose democracy was only for 
 elections, for politics, and for a party name ? I say 
 democracy is only of use there that it may pass on and 
 come to its flower and fruits in manners, in the highest 
 
36 DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 
 
 forms of interaction between men, and their beliefs in 
 religion, literature, colleges, and schools democracy in all 
 public and private life, and in the army and navy.* I have 
 intimated that, as a paramount scheme, it has yet few or no 
 full realizers and believers. I do not see, either, that it 
 owes any serious thanks to noted propagandists or cham 
 pions, or has been essentially help d, though often harm d, 
 by them. It has been and is carried on by all the moral 
 forces, and by trade, finance, machinery, intercommunica 
 tions, and, in fact, by all the developments of history, and 
 can no more be stopp d than the tides, or the earth in its 
 orbit. Doubtless, also, it resides, crude and latent, well 
 down in the hearts of the fair average of the American-born 
 people, mainly in the agricultural regions. But it is not yet, 
 there or anywhere, the fully-receiv d, the fervid, the absolute 
 faith. 
 
 I submit, therefore, that the fruition of democracy, on 
 aught like a grand scale, resides altogether in the future. 
 As, under any profound and comprehensive view of the 
 gorgeous-composite feudal world, we see in it, through the 
 long ages and cycles of ages, the results of a deep, integral, 
 human and divine principle, or fountain, from which issued 
 laws, ecclesia, manners, institutes, costumes, personalities, 
 poems, (hitherto unequall d,) faithfully partaking of their 
 source, and indeed only arising either to betoken it, or to 
 furnish parts of that varied-flowing display, whose centre 
 was one and absolute so, long ages hence, shall the due 
 
 * The whole present system of the officering and personnel of the 
 army and navy of these States, and the spirit and letter of their trebly- 
 aristocratic rules and regulations, is a monstrous exotic, a nuisance and 
 revolt, and belong here just as much as orders of nobility, or the Pope s 
 council of cardinals. I say if the present theory of our army and navy 
 is sensible and true, then the rest of America in an unmitigated fraud. 
 
DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 37 
 
 historian or critic make at least an equal retrospect, an 
 equal history for the democratic principle. It too must be 
 adorn d, credited with its results then, when it, with im 
 perial power, through amplest time, has dominated mankind 
 has been the source and test of all the moral, esthetic, 
 social, political, and religious expressions and institutes of 
 the civilized world has begotten them in spirit and in form, 
 and has carried them to its own unprecedented heights 
 has had, (it is possible,) monastics and ascetics, more 
 numerous, more devout than the monks and priests of all 
 previous creeds has sway d the ages with a breadth and 
 rectitude tallying Nature s own has fashion d, system 
 atized, and triumphantly finish d and carried out, in its 
 own interest, and with unparallel d success, a new earth 
 and a new man. 
 
 Thus we presume to write, as it were, upon things that 
 exist not, and travel by maps yet unmade, and a blank. 
 But the throes of birth are upon us ; and we have some 
 thing of this advantage in seasons of strong formations, 
 doubts, suspense for then the afflatus of such themes 
 haply may fall upon us, more or less ; and then, hot from 
 surrounding war and revolution, our speech, though without 
 polish d coherence, and a failure by the standard called 
 criticism, comes forth, real at least as the lightnings. 
 
 And may-be we, these days, have, too, our own reward 
 (for there are yet some, in all lands, worthy to be so 
 encouraged.) Though not for us the joy of entering at the 
 last the conquer d city not ours the chance ever to see 
 with our own eyes the peerless power and splendid eclat of 
 the democratic principle, arriv d at meridian, filling the 
 world with effulgence and majesty far beyond those of past 
 history s kings, or all dynastic sway there is yet, to who 
 ever is eligible among us, the prophetic vision, the joy of 
 
38 DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 
 
 being toss d in the brave turmoil of these times the 
 promulgation and the path, obedient, lowly reverent to the 
 voice, the gesture of the god, or holy ghost, which others 
 see not, hear not with the proud consciousness that amid 
 whatever clouds, seductions, or heart-wearying postpone 
 ments, we have never deserted, never despair d, never 
 abandon d the faith. 
 
 So much contributed, to be conn d well, to help prepare 
 and brace our edifice, our plann d Idea we still proceed to 
 give it in another of its aspects perhaps the main, the high 
 fagade of all. For to democracy, the leveler, the unyielding 
 principle of the average, surely join d another principle, 
 equally unyielding, closely tracking the first, indispensable 
 to it, opposite (as the sexes are opposite), and whose exist 
 ence, confronting and ever modifying the other, often 
 clashing, paradoxical, yet neither of highest avail without 
 the other, plainly supplies to these grand cosmic politics of 
 ours, and to the launch d forth mortal dangers of republican 
 ism, to-day, or any day, the counterpart and offset whereby 
 Nature restrains the deadly original relentlessness of all her 
 first-class laws. This second principle is individuality, the 
 pride and centripetal isolation of a human being in himself 
 identity personalism. Whatever the name, its accept 
 ance and thorough infusions through the organizations of 
 political commonalty now shooting Aurora-like about the 
 world, are of utmost importance, as the principle itself is 
 needed for very life s sake. It forms, in a sort, or is to 
 form, the compensating balance-wheel of the successful 
 working machinery of aggregate America. 
 
 And, if we think of it, what does civilization itself rest 
 upon and what object has it, what its religions, arts, 
 schools, &c., but rich, luxuriant, varied personalism? To 
 that, all bends; and it is because toward such result 
 
DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 39 
 
 democracy alone, on anything like Nature s scale, breaks 
 up the limitless fallows of humankind, and plants the seed, 
 and gives fair play, that its claims now precede the rest. 
 The literature, songs, esthetics, &c., of a country are of 
 importance principally because they furnish the materials 
 and suggestions of personality for the women and men of 
 that country, and enforce them in a thousand effective 
 ways.* As the topmost claim of a strong consolidating of 
 the nationality of these States, is, that only by such powerful 
 compaction can the separate States secure that full and free 
 
 * After the rest is satiated, all interest culminates in the field of 
 persons, and never flags there. Accordingly in this field have the 
 great poets and literatuses signally toil d. They too, in all ages, 
 all lands, have been creators, fashioning, making types of men and 
 women, as Adam and Eve are made in the divine fable. Behold, 
 shaped, bred by orientalism, feudalism, through their long growth and 
 culmination, and breeding back in return (when shall we have an equal 
 series, typical of democracy?) behold, commencing in primal Asia, 
 (apparently formulated, in what beginning we know, in the gods of 
 the mythologies, and coining down thence), a few samples out of the 
 countless product, bequeath d to the moderns, bequeath d to America 
 as studies. For the men, Yudishtura, Rama, Arjuna, Solomon, most 
 of the Old and New Testament characters ; Achilles, Ulysses, Theseus, 
 Prometheus, Hercules, yneas, Plutarch s heroes ; the Merlin of Celtic 
 bards ; the Cid, Arthur and his knights, Siegfried and Hagen in the 
 Nibelungen ; Roland and Oliver ; Roustam in the Shah-Neman : and 
 so on to Milton s Satan, Cervantes Don Quixote, Shakspere s Hamlet, 
 Richard II., Lear, Marc Antony, &c., and the modern Faust. These, 
 I say, are models, combined, adjusted to other standards than 
 America s, but of priceless value to her and hers. 
 
 Among women, the goddesses of the Egyptian, Indian and Greek 
 mythologies, certain Bible characters, especially the Holy Mother; 
 Cleopatra, Penelope ; the portraits of Brunl.elde and Chriemhilde in 
 the Nibelungen ; Oriana, Una, &c. ; the modern Consuelo, Walter 
 Scott s Jeanie and Erne Deans, &c., &c. (Yet woman portray d or 
 oinlin d at her best, or as perfect human mother, does not hitherto, it 
 seems to me, fully appear in literature.) 
 
40 DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 
 
 svv ing within their spheres, which is becoming to them, 
 each after its kind, so will individuality, and unimpeded 
 branchings, flourish best under imperial republican forms. 
 
 Assuming Democracy to be at present in its embryo 
 condition, and that the only large and satisfactory justifica 
 tion of it resides in the future, mainly through the copious 
 production of perfect characters among the people, and 
 through the advent of a sane and pervading religiousness, it 
 is with regard to the atmosphere and spaciousness fit for 
 such characters, and of certain nutriment and cartoon- 
 draftings proper for them, and indicating them for New 
 World purposes, that I continue the present statement an 
 exploration, as of new ground, wherein, like other primitive 
 surveyors, I must do the best I can, leaving it to those who 
 come after me to do much better. (The service, in fact, if 
 any, must be to break a sort of first path or track, no matter 
 how rude and ungeometrical.) 
 
 We have frequently printed the word Democracy. Yet 
 I cannot too often repeat that it is a word the real gist of 
 which still sleeps, quite unawaken d, notwithstanding the 
 resonance and the many angry tempests out of which its 
 syllables have come, from pen or tongue. It is a great 
 word, whose history, I suppose, remains unwritten, because 
 that history has yet to be enacted. It is, in some sort, 
 younger brother of another great and often-used word, 
 Nature, whose history also waits unwritten. As I perceive, 
 the tendencies of our day, in the States, (and I entirely 
 respect them,) are toward those vast and sweeping move 
 ments, influences, moral and physical, of humanity, now 
 and always current over the planet, on the scale of the 
 impulses of the elements. Then it is also good to reduce 
 the whole matter to the consideration of a single self, a 
 man, a woman, on permanent grounds. Even for the 
 
DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 41 
 
 treatment of the universal, in politics, metaphysics, or any 
 thing, sooner or later we come down to one single, solitary 
 soul. 
 
 There is, in sanest hours, a consciousness, a thought that 
 rises, independent, lifted out from all else, calm, like the 
 stars, shining eternal. This is the thought of identity 
 yours for you, whoever you are, as mine for me. Miracle 
 of miracles, beyond statement, most spiritual and vaguest of 
 earth s dreams, yet hardest basic fact, and only entrance to 
 all facts. In such devout hours, in the midst of the signifi 
 cant wonders of heaven and earth, (significant only because 
 of the Me in the centre,) creeds, conventions, fall away and 
 become of no account before this simple idea. Under the 
 luminousness of real vision, it alone takes possession, takes 
 value. Like the shadowy dwarf in the fable, once liberated 
 and look d upon, it expands over the whole earth, and 
 spreads to the roof of heaven. 
 
 The quality of BEING, in the object s self, according to 
 its own central idea and purpose, and of growing therefrom 
 and thereto not criticism by other standards, and adjust 
 ments thereto is the lesson of Nature. True, the full man 
 wisely gathers, culls, absorbs ; but if, engaged dispropor 
 tionately in that, he slights or overlays the precious idiocrasy 
 and special nativity and intention that he is, the man s self, 
 the main thing, is a failure, however wide his general cul 
 tivation. Thus, in our times, refinement and delicatesse 
 are not only attended to sufficiently, but threaten to eat us 
 up, like a cancer. Already, the democratic genius watches, 
 ill-pleased, these tendencies. Provision for a little healthy 
 rudeness, savage virtue, justification of what one has in 
 one s self, whatever it is, is demanded. Negative qualities, 
 even deficiencies, would be a relief. Singleness and 
 normal simplicity and separation, amid this more and more 
 
42 DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 
 
 complex, more and more artificialized state of society how 
 pensively we yearn for them ! how we would welcome their 
 return ! 
 
 In some such direction, then at any rate enough to pre 
 serve the balance we feel called upon to throw what weight 
 we can, not for absolute reasons, but current ones. To 
 prune, gather, trim, conform, and ever cram and stuff, and 
 be genteel and proper, is the pressure of our days. While 
 aware that much can be said even in behalf of all this, we 
 perceive that we have not now to consider the question of 
 what is demanded to serve a half-starved and barbarous 
 nation, or set of nations, but what is most applicable, most 
 pertinent, for numerous congeries of conventional, over-cor 
 pulent societies, already becoming stifled and rotten with 
 flatulent, infidelistic literature, and polite conformity and 
 art. In addition to establish d sciences, we suggest a 
 science as it were of healthy average personalism, on 
 original-universal grounds, the object of which should be to 
 raise up and supply through the States a copious race of 
 superb American men and women, cheerful, religious, ahead 
 of any yet known. 
 
 America has yet morally and artistically originated 
 nothing. She seems singularly unaware that the models of 
 persons, books, manners, &c., appropriate for former con 
 ditions and for European lands, are but exiles and exotics 
 here. No current of her life, as shown on the surfaces of 
 what is authoritatively called her society, accepts or runs 
 into social or esthetic democracy ; but all the currents set 
 squarely against it. Never, in the Old World, was 
 thoroughly upholster d exterior appearance and show, men 
 tal and other, built entirely on the idea of caste, and on the 
 sufficiency of mere outside acquisition never were glibness, 
 verbal intellect, more the test, the emulation more loftily 
 
DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 43 
 
 elevated as head and sample than they are on the surface 
 of our republican States this day. The writers of a time 
 hint the mottoes of its gods. The word of the modern, say 
 these voices, is the word Culture. 
 
 We find ourselves abruptly in close quarters with the 
 enemy. This word Culture, or what it has come to repre 
 sent, involves, by contrast, our whole theme, and has been, 
 indeed, the spur, urging us to engagement. Certain 
 questions arise. As now taught, accepted and carried out, 
 are not the processes of culture rapidly creating a class of 
 supercilious infidels, who believe in nothing ? Shall a man 
 lose himself in countless masses of adjustments, and be 
 so shnped with reference to this, that, and the other, that 
 the simply good and healthy and brave parts of him are 
 reduced and clipp d away, like the bordering of box in 
 a garden ? You can cultivate corn and roses and orchards 
 but who shall cultivate the mountain peaks, the ocean, 
 and the tumbling gorgeousness of the clouds ? Lastly is 
 the readily-given reply that culture only seeks to help, 
 systematize, and put in attitude, the elements of fertility 
 and power, a conclusive reply ? 
 
 I do not so much object to the name, or word, but I 
 should certainly insist, for the purposes of these States, on 
 a radical change of category, in the distribution of prece 
 dence. I should demand a programme of culture, drawn 
 out, not for a single class alone, or for the parlors or 
 lecture-rooms, but with an eye to practical life, the west, 
 the working-men, the facts of farms and jack-planes and 
 engineers, and of the broad range of the women also of the 
 middle and working strata, and with reference to the perfect 
 equality of women, and of a grand and powerful mother 
 hood. I should demand of this programme or theory a 
 scope generous enough to include the widest human area. 
 
44 DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 
 
 It must have for its spinal meaning the formation of a 
 typical personality of character, eligible to the uses of the 
 high average of men and not restricted by conditions 
 ineligible to the masses. The best culture will always be 
 that of the manly and courageous instincts, and loving 
 perceptions, and of self-respect aiming to form, over this 
 continent, an idiocrasy of universalism, which, true child of 
 America, will bring joy to its mother, returning to her in 
 her own spirit, recruiting myriads of offspring, able, natural, 
 perceptive, tolerant, devout believers in her, America, and 
 with some definite instinct why and for what she has arisen, 
 most vast, most formidable of historic births, and is, now 
 and here, with wonderful step, journeying through Time. 
 
 The problem, as it seems to me, presented to the New 
 World, is, under permanent law and order, and after pre 
 serving cohesion, (ensemble-Individuality.) at all hazards, 
 to vitalize man s free play of special Personalism, recogniz 
 ing in it something that calls ever more to be consider d, 
 fed, and adopted as the substratum for the best that 
 belongs to us, (government indeed is for it,) including the 
 new esthetics of our future. 
 
 To formulate beyond this present vagueness to help 
 line and put before us the species, or a specimen of the 
 species, of the democratic ethnology of the future, is a 
 work toward which the genius of our land, with peculiar 
 encouragement, invites her well-wishers. Already certain 
 limnings, more or less grotesque, more or less fading and 
 watery, have appear d. We too, (repressing doubts and 
 qualms,) will try our hand. 
 
 Attempting, then, however crudely, a basic model or 
 portrait of personality for general use for the manliness of 
 the States, (and doubtless that is most useful which is most 
 simple and comprehensive for all, and toned low enough,) 
 
DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 45 
 
 we should prepare the canvas well beforehand. Parentage 
 must consider itself in advance. (Will the time hasten 
 when fatherhood and motherhood shall become a science 
 and the noblest science ?) To our model, a clear-blooded, 
 strong-fibred physique, is indispensable ; the questions of 
 food, drink, air, exercise, assimilation, digestion, can never 
 be intermitted. Out of these we descry a well-begotten 
 selfhood in youth, fresh, ardent, emotional, aspiring, full 
 of adventure ; at maturity, brave, perceptive, under control, 
 neither too talkative nor too reticent, neither flippant nor 
 sombre ; of the bodily figure, the movements easy, the com 
 plexion showing the best blood, somewhat flush d, breast 
 expanded, an erect attitude, a voice whose sound outvies 
 music, eyes of calm and steady gaze, yet capable also of 
 flashing and a general presence that holds its own in the 
 company of the highest. (For it is native personality, and 
 that alone, that endows a man to stand before presidents or 
 generals, or in any distinguish d collection, with aplomb and 
 not culture, or any knowledge or intellect whatever.) 
 
 With regard to the mental-educational part of our model, 
 enlargement of intellect, stores of cephalic knowledge, &c., 
 the concentration thitherward of all the customs of our age, 
 especially in America, is so overweening, and provides so 
 fully for that part, that, important and necessary as it is, it 
 really needs nothing from us here except, indeed, a 
 phrase of warning and restraint. Manners, costumes, too,v 
 though important, we need not dwell upon here. Like 
 beauty, grace of motion, &c., they are results. Causes, 
 original things, being attended to, the right manners 
 unerringly follow. Much is said, among artists, of " the 
 grand style," as if it were a thing by itself. When a man, 
 artist or whoever, has health, pride, acuteness, noble 
 aspirations, he has the motive-elements of the grandest 
 
46 DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 
 
 style. The rest is but manipulation, (yet that is no small 
 matter.) 
 
 Leaving still unspecified several sterling parts of any 
 model fit for the future personality of America, I must not 
 fail, again and ever, to pronounce myself on one, probably 
 the least attended to in modern times a hiatus, indeed, 
 threatening its gloomiest consequences after us. I mean 
 the simple, unsophisticated Conscience, the primary moral 
 element. If I were asked to specify in what quarter lie the 
 grounds of darkest dread, respecting the America of our 
 hopes, I should have to point to this particular. I should 
 demand the invariable application to individuality, this day 
 and any day, of that old, ever-true plumb-rule of persons, 
 eras, nations. Our triumphant modern civilizee, with his 
 all-schooling and his wondrous appliances, will still show 
 himself but an amputation while this deficiency remains. 
 Beyond, (assuming a more hopeful tone,) the vertebration of 
 the manly and womanly personalism of our western world, 
 can only be, and is, indeed, to be, (I hope,) its all pene 
 trating Religiousness. 
 
 The ripeness of Religion is doubtless to be looked for in 
 this field of individuality, and is a result that no organiza 
 tion or church can ever achieve. As history is poorly 
 retain d by what the technists call history, and is not given 
 out from their pages, except the learner has in himself the 
 sense of the well-wrapt, never yet written, perhaps impossible 
 to be written, history so Religion, although casually 
 arrested, and, after a fashion, preserv d in the churches and 
 creeds, does not depend at all upon them, but is a part of 
 the identified soul, which, when greatest, knows not bibles 
 in the old way, but in new ways the identified soul, 
 which can really confront Religion when it extricates itself 
 entirely from the churches, and not before. 
 
DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 47 
 
 Personalism fuses this, and favors it. I should say. 
 indeed, that only in the perfect uncontamination and 
 solitarinesss of individuality may the spirituality of religion 
 positively come forth at all. Only here, and on such terms, 
 the meditation, the devout ecstasy, the soaring flight. Only 
 here, communion with the mysteries, the eternal problems, 
 whence ? whither ? Alone, and identity, and the mood 
 and the soul emerges, and all statements, churches, sermons, 
 melt away like vapors. Alone, and silent thought and awe, 
 and aspiration and then the interior consciousness, like 
 a hitherto unseen inscription, in magic ink, beams out its 
 wondrous lines to the sense. Bibles may convey, and 
 priests expound, but it is exclusively for the noiseless opera 
 tion of one s isolated Self, to enter the pure ether of 
 veneration, reach the divine levels, and commune with the 
 unutterable. 
 
 To practically enter into politics is an important part of 
 American personalism. To every young man, north and 
 south, earnestly studying these things, I should here, as an 
 offset to what I have said in former pages, now also say, 
 that may-be to views of very large scope, after all, perhaps 
 the political, (perhaps the literary and sociological,) 
 America goes best about its development its own way 
 sometimes, to temporary sight, appaling enough. It is the 
 fashion among dillettants and fops (perhaps I myself am not 
 guiltless,), to decry the whole formulation of the active 
 politics of America, as beyond redemption, and to be care 
 fully kept away from. See you that you do not fall into 
 this error. America, it may be, is doing very well upon the 
 whole, notwithstanding these antics of the parties and their 
 leaders, these half-brain d nominees, the many ignorant 
 ballots, and many elected failures and blatherers. It is the 
 dillettants, and all who shirk their duty, who are not doing 
 
48 DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 
 
 well. As for you, I advise you to enter more strongly yet 
 into politics. I advise every young man to do so. Always 
 inform yourself; always do the best you can ; always vote. 
 Disengage yourself from parties. They have been useful, 
 and to some extent remain so ; but the floating, uncom 
 mitted electors, farmers, clerks, mechanics, the masters of 
 parties watching aloof, inclining victory this side or that 
 side such are the ones most needed, present and future. 
 For America, if eligible at all to downfall and ruin, is eli 
 gible within herself, not without ; for I see clearly that the 
 combined foreign world could not beat her down. But 
 these savage, wolfish parties alarm me. Owning no law 
 but their own will, more and more combative, less and less 
 tolerant of the idea of ensemble and of equal brotherhood, 
 the perfect equality of the States, the ever-overarching 
 American ideas, it behooves you to convey yourself im 
 plicitly to no party, nor submit blindly to their dictators, but 
 steadily hold yourself judge and master over all of them. 
 
 So much, (hastily toss d together, and leaving far more 
 unsaid,) for an ideal, or intimations of an ideal, toward 
 American manhood. But the other sex, in our land, 
 requires at least a basis of suggestion. 
 
 I have seen a young American woman, one of a large 
 family of daughters, who, some years since, migrated from 
 her meagre country home to one of the northern cities, to 
 gain her own support. She soon became an expert seam 
 stress, but finding the employment too confining for health 
 and comfort, she went boldly to work for others, to house- 
 keep, cook, clean, &c. After trying several places, she fell 
 upon one where she was suited She has told me that she 
 finds nothing degrading in her position ; it is not incon 
 sistent with personal dignity, self-respect, and the respect of 
 others. She confers benefits and receives them. She has 
 
DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 49 
 
 good health ; her presence itself is healthy and bracing ; 
 her character is unstain d ; she has made herself understood, 
 and preserves her independence, and has been able to help 
 her parents, and educate and get places for her sisters ; and 
 her course of life is not without opportunities for mental 
 improvement, and of much quiet, uncosting happiness and 
 love. 
 
 I have seen another woman who, from taste and necessity 
 conjoin d, has gone into practical affairs, carries on a 
 mechanical business, partly works at it herself, dashes out 
 more and more into real hardy life, is not abash d by the 
 coarseness of the contact, knows how to be firm and silent 
 at the same time, holds her own with unvarying coolness 
 and decorum, and will compare, any day, with superior 
 carpenters, farmers, and even boatmen and drivers. For all 
 that, she has not lost the charm of the womanly nature, but 
 preserves and bears it fully, though through such rugged 
 presentation. 
 
 Then there is the wife of a mechanic, mother of two 
 children, a woman of merely passable English education, 
 but of fine wit, with all her sex s grace and intuitions, who 
 exhibits, indeed, such a noble female personality, that I am 
 fain to record it here. Never abnegating her own proper 
 independence, but always genially preserving it, and what 
 belongs to it cooking, washing, child-nursing, house- 
 tending she beams sunshine out of all these duties, and 
 makes them illustrious. Physiologically sweet and sound, 
 loving work, practical, she yet knows that there are intervals, 
 however few, devoted to recreation, music, leisure, hospi 
 tality and affords such intervals. Whatever she does, and 
 wherever she is, that charm, that indescribable perfume of 
 genuine womanhood attends her, goes with her, exhales 
 from her, which belongs of right to all the sex, and is, or 
 
 4 
 
So DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 
 
 ought to be, the invariable atmosphere and common aureola 
 of old as well as young. 
 
 My dear mother once described to me a resplendent 
 person, down on Long Island, whom she knew in early 
 days. She was known by the name of the Peacemaker. 
 She was well toward eighty years old, of happy and sunny 
 temperament, had always lived on a farm, and was very 
 neighborly, sensible and discreet, an invariable and welcom d 
 favorite, especially with young married women. She had 
 numerous children and grandchildren. She was uneducated, 
 but possess d a native dignity. She had come to be a 
 tacitly agreed upon domestic regulator, judge, settler of 
 difficulties, shepherdess, and reconciler in the land. She 
 was a sight to draw near and look upon, with her large 
 figure, her profuse snow-white hair, (uncoif d by any head 
 dress or cap,) dark eyes, clear complexion, sweet breath, 
 and peculiar personal magnetism. 
 
 The foregoing portraits, I admit, are frightfully out of 
 line from these imported models of womanly personality 
 the stock feminine characters of the current novelists, or of 
 the foreign court poems, (Ophelias, Enids, princesses, or 
 ladies of one thing or another,) which fill the envying 
 dreams of so many poor girls, and are accepted by our men, 
 too, as supreme ideals of feminine excellence to be sought 
 after. But I present mine just for a change. 
 
 Then there are mutterings, (we will not now stop to heed 
 them here, but they must be heeded,) of something more 
 revolutionary. The day is coming when the deep questions 
 of woman s entrance amid the arenas of practical life, 
 politics, the suffrage, &c., will not only be argued all around 
 us, but may be put to decision, and real experiment. 
 
 Of course, in these States, for both man and woman, we 
 must entirely recast the types of highest personality from 
 
DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 51 
 
 what the oriental, feudal, ecclesiastical worlds bequeath us, 
 and which yet possess the imaginative and esthetic fields of 
 the United States, pictorial and melodramatic, not without 
 use as studies, but making sad work, and forming a strange 
 anachronism upon the scenes and exigencies around us. 
 Of course, the old undying elements remain. The task is, 
 to successfully adjust them to new combinations, our own 
 days. Nor is this so incredible. I can conceive a com 
 munity, to-day and here, in which, on a sufficient scale, the 
 perfect personalities, without noise meet; say in some 
 pleasant western settlement or town, where a couple of 
 hundred best men and women, of ordinary worldly status, 
 have by luck been drawn together, with nothing extra of 
 genius or wealth, but virtuous, chaste, industrious, cheerful, 
 resolute, friendly and devout I can conceive such a com 
 munity organized in running order, powers judiciously 
 delegated farming, building, trade, courts, mails, schools, 
 elections, all attended to ; and then the rest of life, the 
 main thing, freely branching and blossoming in each 
 individual, and bearing golden fruit. I can see there, in 
 every young and old man, after his kind, and in every 
 woman after hers, a true personality, develop d, exercised 
 proportionately in body, mind, and spirit. I can imagine 
 this case as one not necessarily rare or difficult, but in 
 buoyant accordance with the municipal and general require 
 ments of our times. And I can realize in it the culmination 
 of something better than any stereotyped eclat of history or 
 poems. Perhaps, unsung, undramatized, unput in essays 
 or biographies perhaps even some such community already 
 exists, in Ohio, Illinois, Missouri, or somewhere, practically 
 fulfilling itself, and thus outvying, in cheapest vulgar life, all 
 that has been hitherto shown in best ideal pictures. 
 
 In short, and to sum up, America, betaking herself to 
 
52 DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 
 
 formative action, (as it is about time for more solid achieve 
 ment, and less windy promise,) must, for her purposes, 
 cease to recognize a theory of character grown of feudal 
 aristocracies, or form d by merely literary standards, or from 
 any ultramarine, full-dress formulas of culture, polish, caste, 
 &c., and must sternly promulgate her own new standard, 
 yet old enough, and accepting the old, the perennial 
 elements, and combining them into groups, unities, appro 
 priate to the modern, the democratic, the west, and to the 
 practical occasions and needs of our own cities, and of the 
 agricultural regions. Ever the most precious in the com 
 mon. Ever the fresh breeze of field, or hill or lake, is more 
 than any palpitation of fans, though of ivory, and redolent 
 with perfume; and the air is more than the costliest 
 perfumes. 
 
 And now, for fear of mistake, we may not intermit to beg 
 our absolution from all that genuinely is, or goes along 
 with, even Culture. Pardon us, venerable shade ! if we 
 have seem d to speak lightly of your office. The whole 
 civilization of the earth, we know, is yours, with all the 
 glory and the light thereof. It is, indeed, in your own 
 spirit, and seeking to tally the loftiest teachings of it, that 
 we aim these poor utterances. For you, too, mighty 
 minister ! know that there is something greater than you, 
 namely, the fresh, eternal qualities of Being. From them, 
 and by them, as you, at your best, we too evoke the last, 
 the needed help, to vitalize our country and our days. Thus 
 we pronounce not so much against the principle of culture ; 
 we only supervise it, and promulgate along with it, as deep, 
 perhaps a deeper, principle. As we have shown the New 
 World including in itself the all-leveling aggregate of 
 democracy, we show it also including the all-varied, all- 
 permitting, all-free theorem of individuality, and erecting 
 
DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 53 
 
 therefor a lofty and hitherto unoccupied framework or plat 
 form, broad enough for all, eligible to every farmer and 
 mechanic to the female equally with the male a towering 
 self-hood, not physically perfect only not satisfied with the 
 mere mind s and learning s stores, but religious, possessing 
 the idea of the infinite, (rudder and compass sure amid 
 this troublous voyage, o er darkest, wildest wave, through 
 stormiest wind, of man s or nation s progress) realizing, 
 above the rest, that known humanity, in deepest sense, is 
 fair adhesion to itself, for purposes beyond and that, 
 finally, the personality of mortal life is most important with 
 reference to the immortal, the unknown, the spiritual, the 
 only permanently real, which as the ocean waits for and 
 receives the rivers, waits for us each and all. 
 
 Much is there, yet, demanding line and outline in our 
 Vistas, not only on these topics, but others quite unwritten. 
 Indeed, we could talk the matter, and expand it, through 
 lifetime. But it is necessary to return to our original 
 premises. In view of them, we have again pointedly to 
 confess that all the objective grandeurs of the world, for 
 highest purposes, yield themselves up, and depend on 
 mentality alone. Here, and here only, all balances, all 
 rests. For the mind, which alone builds the permanent 
 edifice, haughtily builds it to itself. By it, with what 
 follows it, are convey d to mortal sense the culminations of 
 the materialistic, the known, and a prophecy of the 
 unknown. To take expression, to incarnate, to endow a 
 literature with grand and archetypal models to fill with 
 pride and love the utmost capacity, and to achieve spiritual 
 meanings, and suggest the future these, and these only, 
 satisfy the soul. We must not say one word against real 
 materials ; but the wise know that they do not become real 
 till tonrhed by emotions, the mind. Did we call the latter 
 
54 DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 
 
 imponderable ? Ah, let us rather proclaim that the 
 slightest song-tune, the countless ephemera of passions 
 arous d by orators and tale-tellers, are more dense, more 
 weighty than the engines there in the great factories, or the 
 granite blocks in their foundations. 
 
 Approaching thus the momentous spaces, and considering 
 with reference to a new and greater personalism, the needs 
 and possibilities of American imaginative literature, through 
 the medium-light of what we have already broach d, it will 
 at once be appreciated that a vast gulf of difference 
 separates the present accepted condition of these spaces, 
 inclusive of what is floating in them, from any condition 
 adjusted to, or fit for, the world, the America, there sought 
 to be indicated, and the copious races of complete 
 men and women, along these Vistas crudely outlined. It 
 is, in some sort, no less a difference than lies between that 
 long-continued nebular state and vagueness of the astron 
 omical worlds, compared with the subsequent state, the 
 definitely-form d worlds themselves, duly compacted, clus 
 tering in systems, hung up there, chandeliers of the universe, 
 beholding and mutually lit by each other s lights, serving for 
 ground of all substantial foothold, all vulgar uses yet 
 serving still more as an undying chain and echelon of 
 spiritual proo!s and shows. A boundless field to fill ! A 
 new creation, with needed orbic works launch d forth, to 
 revolve in free and lawful circuits to move, self-poised, 
 through the ether, and shine like heaven s own suns ! With 
 such, and nothing less, we suggest that New World literature, 
 fit to rise upon, cohere, and signalize in time, these States. 
 
 What, however, do we more definitely mean by New 
 World literature? Are we not doing well enough here 
 already ? Are not the United States this day busily using, 
 working, more printer s type, more presses, than any other 
 
DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 55 
 
 country ? uttering and absorbing more publications than any 
 other? Do not our publishers fatten quicker and deeper? 
 (helping themselves, under shelter of a delusive and sneaking 
 law, or rather absence of law, to most of their forage, poeti 
 cal, pictorial, historical, romantic, even comic, without money 
 and without price and fiercely resisting the limidest pro 
 posal to pay for it.) Many will come under this delusion 
 but my purpose is to dispel it. I say that a nation may 
 hold and circulate rivers and oceans of very readable print, 
 journals, magazines, novels, library-books, "poetry," &c. 
 such as the States to-day possess and circulate of unques 
 tionable aid and value hundreds of new volumes annually 
 composed and brought out here, respectable enough, in 
 deed unsurpass d in smartness and erudition with further 
 hundreds, or rather millions, (as by free forage or theft 
 aforemention d,) also thrown into the market and yet, all 
 the while, the said nation, land, strictly speaking, may- 
 possess no literature at all. 
 
 Repeating our inquiry, what, then, do we mean by real 
 literature ? especially the democratic literature of the 
 future ? Hard questions to meet. The clues are inferen 
 tial, and turn us to the past. At best, we can only offer 
 suggestions, comparisons, circuits. 
 
 It must still be reiterated, as, for the purpose of these 
 memoranda, the deep lesson of history and time, that all 
 else in the contributions of a nation or age, through its 
 politics, materials, heroic personalities, military eclat, &c., j 
 remains crude, and defers, in any close and thorough-going 
 estimate, until vitalized by national, original archetypes in 
 literature. They only put the nation in form, finally tell 
 anything prove, complete anything perpetuate anything 
 Without doubt, some of the richest and most powerful and 
 populous communities of the antique world, and some oi 
 
56 DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 
 
 M 
 
 the grandest personalities and events, have, to after and 
 /present times, left themselves entirely unbequeath d. Doubt 
 less, greater than any that have come down to us, were 
 among those lands, heroisms, persons, that have not come 
 down to us at all, even by name, date, or location. Others 
 .( u have arrived safely, as from voyages over wide, century- 
 stretching seas. The little ships, the miracles that have 
 buoy d them, and by incredible chances safely convey d 
 them, (or the best of them, their meaning and essence,) 
 over long wastes, darkness, lethargy, ignorance, &c., have 
 been a few inscriptions a few immortal compositions, 
 small in size, yet compassing what measureless values of 
 reminiscence, contemporary portraitures, manners, idioms 
 and beliefs, with deepest inference, hint and thought, to tfe 
 and touch forever the old, new body, and the old, new 
 soul ! These ! and still these ! bearing the freight so dear 
 dearer than pride dearer than love. All the best 
 experience of humanity, folded, saved, freighted to us here. 
 Some of these tiny ships we call Old and New Testament, 
 Homer, Eschylus, Plato, Juvenal, &c. Precious minims! 
 I think, if were forced to choose, rather than have you, and 
 the likes of you, and what belongs to, and has grown of 
 you, blotted out and gone, we could better afford, appaling 
 as that woiild be, to lose all actual ships, this day fasten d 
 by wharf, or floating on wave, and see them, with all their 
 cargoes, scuttled and sent to the bottom. 
 
 Gather d by geniuses of city, race or age, and put by 
 them in highest of art s forms, namely, the literary form, 
 the peculiar combinations and the outshows of that city, 
 age, or race, its particular modes of the universal attributes 
 and passions, its faiths, heroes, lovers and gods, wars, tra 
 ditions, struggles, crimes, emotions, joys, (or the subtle 
 spirit of these.) having been pass d on to us to illumine our 
 
DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 57 
 
 own selfhood, and its experiences what they supply, indis 
 pensable and highest, if taken away, nothing else in all the 
 world s boundless storehouses could make up to us, or ever 
 again return. 
 
 For us, along the great highways of time, those monu 
 ments stand those forms of majesty and beauty. For us 
 those beacons burn through all the nights. Unknown 
 Egyptians, graving hieroglyphs ; Hindus, with hymn and 
 apothegm and endless epic ; Hebrew prophet, with spirit 
 uality, as in flashes of lightning, conscience like red-hot 
 iron, plaintive songs and screams of vengeance for tyrannies 
 and enslavement ; Christ, with bent head, brooding love 
 and peace, like a dove ; Greek, creating eternal shapes of 
 physical and esthetic proportion ; Roman, lord of satire, 
 the sword, and the codex ; of the figures, some far off and 
 veil d, others nearer and visible ; Dante, stalking with lean 
 form, nothing but fibre, not a grain of superfluous flesh ; 
 Angelo, and the great painters, architects, musicians ; rich 
 Shakspere, luxuriant as the sun, artist and singer of feudal 
 ism in its sunset, with all the gorgeous colors, owner thereof, 
 and using them at will ; and so to such as German Kant 
 and Hegel, where they, though near us, leaping over the 
 ages, sit again, impassive, imperturbable, like the Egyptian 
 gods. Of these, and the like of these, is it too much, 
 indeed, to return to our favorite figure, and view them as 
 orbs and systems of orbs, moving in free paths in the spaces 
 of that other heaven, the kosmic intellect, the soul ? 
 
 Ye powerful and resplendent ones ! ye were, in your 
 atmospheres, grown not for America, but rather for her foes, 
 the feudal and the old while our genius is democratic and 
 modern. Yet could ye, indeed, but breathe your breath of 
 life into our New World s nostrils not to enslave us, as 
 now, but, for our needs, to breed a spirit like your own 
 
5 S DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 
 
 perhaps, (dare we to say it ?) to dominate, even destroy, 
 what you yourselves have left ! On your plane, and no less, 
 but even higher and wider, must we mete and measure for 
 to-day and here. I demand races of orbic bards, with 
 unconditional uncompromising sway. Come forth, sweet 
 democratic despots of the west ! 
 
 By points like these we, in reflection, token what we mean 
 by any land s or people s genuine literature. And thus 
 compared and tested, judging amid the influence of loftiest 
 products only, what do our current copious fields of print, 
 covering in manifold forms, the United States, better, for an 
 analogy, present, than, as in certain regions of the sea, 
 those spreading, undulating masses of squid, through which 
 the whale swimming, with head half out, feeds ? x 
 
 Not but that doubtless our current so-called literature, 
 (like an endless supply of small coin,) performs a certain 
 service, and may-be too, the service needed for the time, 
 (the preparation-service, as children learn to spell.) Every 
 body reads, and truly nearly everybody writes, either books, 
 or for the magazines or journals. The matter has magnitude, 
 too, after a sort. But is it really advancing? or, has it 
 advanced for a long while ? There is something impressive 
 about the huge editions of the dailies and weeklies, the 
 mountain-stacks of white paper piled in the press-vaults, and 
 I the proud, crashing, ten-cylinder presses, which I can stand 
 J and watch any time by the half hour. Then, (though the 
 States in the field of imagination present not a single first- 
 class work, not a single great literatus,) the main objects, to 
 amuse, to titillate, to pass away time, to circulate the news, 
 and rumors of news, to rhyme and read rhyme, are yet 
 attain d, and on a scale of infinity. To-day, in books, in 
 the rivalry of writers, especially novelists, success, (so-call d,) 
 is for him or her who strikes the mean flat average, the 
 
DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 59 
 
 sensational appetite for stimulus, incident, persiflage, &c., 
 and depicts, to the common calibre, sensual, exterior life. 
 To such, or the luckiest of them, as we see, the audiences 
 are limitless and profitable; but they cease presently. 
 While this day, or any day, to workmen portraying interior 
 or spiritual life, the audiences were limited, and often 
 laggard but they last forever. 
 
 Compared with the past, our modern science soars, and 
 our journals serve but ideal and even ordinary romantic 
 literature, does not, I think, substantially advance. Behold 
 the prolific brood of the contemporary novel, magazine-tale, 
 theatre-play, &c. The same endless thread of tangled and 
 superlative love-story, inherited, apparently from the 
 Amadises and Palmerins of the i3th, i4th, and i5th 
 centuries over there in Europe. The costumes and 
 associations brought clown to date, the seasoning hotter and 
 more varied, the dragons and ogres left out but the thing, 
 I should say, has not advanced is just as sensational, 
 just as strain d remains about the same, nor more, nor 
 less. 
 
 What is the reason our time, our lands, that we see no 
 fresh local courage, sanity, of our own the Mississippi, 
 stalwart Western men, real mental and physical facts, 
 Southerners, &c., in the body of our literature ? especially 
 the poetic part of it. But always, instead, a parcel of 
 dandies and ennuyees, dapper little gentlemen from abroad, 
 who flood us with their thin sentiment of parlors, parasols, 
 piano-songs, tinkling rhymes, the five-hundredth importation 
 or whimpering and crying about something, chasing one 
 aborted conceit after another, and forever occupied in 
 dyspeptic amours with dyspeptic women. While, current 
 and novel, the grandest events and revolutions, and 
 stormiest passions of history, are crossing to-day with 
 
60 DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 
 
 unparallel d rapidity and magnificence over the stages of our 
 own and all the continents, offering new materials, opening 
 new vistas, with largest needs, inviting the daring launching 
 forth of conceptions in literature, inspired by them, soaring 
 in highest regions, serving art in its highest, (which is only 
 the other name for serving God, and serving humanity,) 
 where is the man of letters, where is the book, with any 
 nobler aim than to follow in the old track, repeat what has 
 been said before and, as its utmost triumph, sell well, and 
 be erudite or elegant ? 
 
 Mark the roads, the processes, through which these 
 States have arrived, standing easy, henceforth ever-equal, 
 ever-compact, in their range to-day. European adventures ? 
 the most antique ? Asiatic or African ? old history miracles 
 romances ? Rather, our own unquestion d facts. They 
 hasten, incredible, blazing bright as lire. From the deeds 
 and days of Columbus down to the present, and including 
 the present and especially the late Secession war when I 
 con them, I feel, every leaf, like stopping to see if I have 
 not made a mistake, and fall n on the splendid figments of 
 some dream. But it is no dream. We stand, live, move, in 
 the huge flow of our age s materialism in its spirituality. 
 We have had founded for us the most positive of lands. 
 The founders have pass d to other spheres but what are 
 these terrible duties they have left us ? 
 
 Their politics the United States have, in my opinion, 
 with all their faults, already substantially establish d, for 
 good, on their own native, sound, long-vista d principles, 
 never to be overturn d, offering a sure basis for all the rest. 
 With that, their future religious forms, sociology, literature, 
 teachers, schools, costumes, &c., are of course to make a 
 compact whole, uniform, on tallying principles. For how 
 can we remain, divided, contradicting ourselves, this 
 
DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 61 
 
 way?* I say we can only attain harmony and stability by con 
 sulting ensemble and the ethic purports, and faithfully build 
 ing upon them. For the New World, indeed, after two 
 grand stages of preparation-strata, I perceive that now a third 
 stage, being ready for, (and without which the other two 
 were useless,) with unmistakable signs appears. The First 
 stage was the planning and putting on record the political 
 foundation rights of immense masses of people indeed all 
 people in the organization of republican National, State, 
 and municipal governments, all constructed with reference 
 to each, and each to all. This is the American programme, 
 not for classes, but for universal man, and is embodied in 
 the compacts of the Declaration of Independence, and, as 
 it began and has now grown, with its amendments, the 
 Federal Constitution and in the State governments, with 
 all their interiors, and with general suffrage ; those having 
 the sense not only of what is in themselves, but that their 
 certain several things started, planted, hundreds of others in 
 the same direction duly arise and follow. The Second 
 stage relates to material prosperity, wealth, produce, labor- 
 saving machines, iron, cotton, local, State and continental 
 railways, intercommunication and trade with all lands, 
 steamships, mining, general employment, organization of 
 great cities, cheap appliances for comfort, numberless tech 
 nical schools, books, newspipers, a currency for money 
 
 * Note, to-day, an instructive, curious spectacle and conflict. Science, 
 (twin, in its fields, of Democracy in its) Science, testing absolutely all 
 thoughts, all works, has already burst well upon the world a sun, 
 mounting, most illuminating, most glorious surely never again to set. 
 But against it, deeply entrench d, holding possession, yet remains, (not 
 only through the churches and schools, but by imaginative literature, 
 and unregenerate poetry,) the fossil theology of the mythic-materialistic, 
 superstitious, untaught and credulous, fable-loving, primitive ages of 
 humanity. 
 
62 DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 
 
 circulation, &c. The Third stage, rising out of the previous 
 ones, to make them and all illustrious, I, now, for one, 
 promulge, announcing a native expression-spirit, getting into 
 form, adult, and through mentality, for these States, self- 
 contain d, different from others, more expansive, more rich 
 and free, to be evidenced by original authors and poets to 
 come, by American personalities, plenty of them, male and 
 female, traversing the States, none excepted and by native 
 superber tableaux and growths of language, songs, operas, 
 orations, lectures, architecture and by a sublime and 
 serious Religious Democracy sternly taking command, dis 
 solving the old, sloughing off surfaces, and from its own 
 interior and vital principles, reconstructing, democratizing 
 society. 
 
 For America, type of progress, and of essential faith in 
 man, above all his errors and wickedness few suspect how 
 deep, how deep it really strikes. The world evidently sup 
 poses, and we have evidently supposed so too, that the 
 States are merely to achieve the equal franchise, an elective 
 government to inaugurate the respectability of labor, and 
 become a nation ol practical operatives, law-abiding, orderly 
 anr 1 well-off. Yes, those are indeed parts of the task of 
 America ; but they not only do not exhaust the progressive 
 conception, but rather arise, teeming with it, as the mediums 
 of deeper, higher progress. Daughter of a physical revolu 
 tion mother of the true revolutions, which are of the 
 interior life, and of the arts. For so long as the spirit is 
 not changed, any change of appearance is of no avail. 
 
 The old men, I remember as a boy, were always talking 
 of American independence. What is independence ? Free 
 dom from all laws or bonds except those of one s own being, 
 control d by the universal ones. To lands, to man, to 
 woman, what is there at last to each, but the inherent soul, 
 
DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 63 
 
 nativity, idiocrasy, free, highest-poised, soaring its own flight, 
 following out itself? 
 
 At present, these States, in their theology and social 
 standards, (of greater importance than their political institu 
 tions,) are entirely held possession of by foreign lands. We 
 see the sons and daughters of the New World, ignorant of 
 its genius, not yet inaugurating the native, the universal, and 
 the near, still importing the distant, the partial, and the 
 dead. We see London, Paris. Italy not original, superb, 
 as where they belong but second-hand here, where they 
 do not belong. We see the shreds of Hebrews, Romans, 
 Greeks ; but where, on her own soil, do we see, in any 
 faithful, highest, proud expression, America herself? I 
 sometimes question whether she has a corner in her own 
 house. 
 
 Not but that in one sense, and a very grand one, good 
 theology, good art, or good literature, has certain features 
 shared in common. The combination fraternizes, ties the 
 races is, in many particulars, under laws applicable indif 
 ferently to all, irrespective of climate or date, and, from 
 whatever source, appeals to emotions, pride, love, spiritual 
 ity, common to humankind. Nevertheless, they touch a 
 man closest, (perhaps only actually touch him,) even in 
 these, in their expression through autochthonic lights and 
 shades, flavors, fondnesses, aversions, specific incidents, 
 illustrations, out of his own nationality, geography, surround 
 ings, antecedents, &c. The spirit and the form are one, 
 and depend far more on association, identity and place, 
 than is supposed. Subtly interwoven with the materiality 
 and personality of a land, a race Teuton, Turk, Califor- 
 nian, or what not there is always something I can hardly 
 tell what it is history but describes the results of it it is 
 the same as the untellable look of some human faces. 
 
H DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 
 
 Nature, too, in her stolid forms, is full of it but to most 
 it is there a secret. This something is rooted in the in 
 visible roots, the profoundest meanings of that place, race, 
 or nationality ; and to absorb and again effuse it, uttering 
 words and products as from its midst, and carrying it into 
 highest regions, is the work, or a main part of the work, of 
 any country s true author, poet, historian, lecturer, and 
 perhaps even priest and philosoph. Here, and here only, 
 are the foundations for our really valuable and permanent 
 verse, drama, &c. 
 
 But at present, (judged by any higher scale than that 
 which finds the chief ends of existence to be to feverishly 
 make money during one-half of it, and by some amuse 
 ment," or perhaps foreign travel, flippantly kill time, the 
 other half,) and consider d with reference to purposes of 
 patriotism, health, a noble personality, religion, and the 
 democratic adjustments, all these swarms of poems, literary 
 magazines, dramatic plays, resultant so far from American 
 intellect, and the formation of our best ideas, are useless 
 and a mockery. They strengthen and nourish no one, 
 express nothing characteristic, give decision and purpose to 
 no one, and suffice only the lowest level of vacant minds. 
 
 Of what is called the drama, or dramatic presentation in 
 the United States, as now put forth at the theatres, I should 
 say it deserves to be treated with the same gravity, and on 
 a par with the questions of ornamental confectionery at 
 public dinners, or the arrangement of curtains and hangings 
 in a ball-room nor more, nor less. Of the other, I will not 
 insult the reader s intelligence, (once really entering into the 
 atmosphere of these Vistas,) by supposing it necessary to 
 show, in detail, why the copious dribble, either of our little 
 or well-known rhymesters, does not fulfil, in any respect, the 
 needs and august occasions of this land. America demands 
 
DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 65 
 
 a poetry that is bold, modern, and all-surrounding and 
 kosmical, as she is herself. It must in no respect ignore 
 science or the modern, but inspire itself with science and 
 the modern. It must bend its vision toward the future, 
 more than the past. Like America, it must extricate itself 
 from even the greatest models of the past, and, while 
 courteous to them, must have entire faith in itself, and the 
 products of its own democratic spirit only. Like her, it 
 must place in the van, and hold up at all hazards, the 
 banner of the divine pride of man in himself, (the radical 
 foundation of the new religion.) Long enough have the 
 People been listening to poems in which common human 
 ity, deferential, bends low, humiliated, acknowledging 
 superiors. But America listens to no such poems. Erect, 
 inflated, and fully self-esteeming be the chant ; and then 
 America will listen with pleased ears. 
 
 Nor may the genuine gold, the gems, when brought to 
 light at last, be probably usher d forth from any of the 
 quarters currently counted on. To-day, doubtless, the 
 infant genius of American poetic expression, (eluding those 
 highly-refined imported and gilt-edged themes, and senti 
 mental and butterfly flights, pleasant to orthodox pub 
 lisherscausing tender spasms in the coteries, and warranted 
 not to chafe the sensitive cuticle of the most exquisitely 
 artificial gossamer delicacy,) lies sleeping far away, happily 
 unrecognized and uninjur d by the coteries, the art-writers, 
 the talkers and critics of the saloons, or the lecturers in the 
 colleges lies sleeping, aside, unrecking itself, in some 
 western idiom, or native Michigan or Tennessee repartee, 
 or stump-speech or in Kentucky or Georgia, or the 
 Carolinas or in some slang or local song or allusion of the 
 Manhattan, Boston, Philadelphia or Baltimore mechanic 
 or up in the Maine woods or off in the hut of the California 
 
 5 
 
65 DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 
 
 miner, or crossing the Rocky mountains, or along the 
 Pacific railroad or on the breasts of the young farmers of 
 the northwest, or Canada, or boatmen of the lakes. Rude 
 and coarse nursing-beds, these ; but only from such begin 
 nings and stocks, indigenous here, may haply arrive, be 
 grafted; and sprout, in time, flowers of genuine American 
 aroma, and fruits truly and fully our own. 
 
 I say it were a standing disgrace to these States I say it 
 were a disgrace to any nation, distinguished above others by 
 the variety and^ vastness of its territories, its materials, its 
 inventive activity, and the splendid practicality of its people, 
 not to rise and soar above others also in its original styles 
 in literature and art, and its own supply of intellectual and 
 esthetic masterpieces, archetypal, and consistent with itseK 
 I know not a land except ours that has not, to some extent, 
 however small, made its title clear. The Scotch have their 
 born ballads, subtly expressing their past and present, and 
 expressing character. The Irish have theirs. England, 
 Italy, France, Spain, theirs. What has America ? With ex- 
 haustless mines of the richest ore of epic, lyric, tale, tune, 
 picture, &c., in the Four Years War ; with, indeed, I some 
 times think, the richest masses of material ever afforded a 
 nation, more variegated, and on a larger scale the first sign 
 of proportionate, native, imaginative Soul, and first-class 
 works to match, is, (I cannot too often repeat,) so far 
 wanting. 
 
 Long ere the second centennial arrives, there will be 
 some forty to fifty great Stales, among them Canada and 
 Cuba. When the present century closes, our population 
 will be sixty or seventy millions. The Pacific will be ours, 
 and the Atlantic mainly ours. There will be daily electric 
 communication with every part of the g o ! e. What an 
 age ! What a land ! Where, elsewhere, one so great ? 
 
DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 67 
 
 The individuality of one nation must then, as always, lead [ 
 the world. Can there be any doubt who the leader ought I 
 to be ? Bear in mind, though, that nothing less than the 
 mightiest original non-subordinated SOUL has ever really, 
 gloriously led, or ever can lead. (This Soul its other 
 name, in these Vistas, is LITERATURE.) 
 
 In fond fancy leaping those hundred years ahead, let us 
 survey America s works, poems, philosophies, fulfilling 
 prophecies, and giving form and decision to best ideals. 
 Much that is now undream d of, we might then perhaps see 
 established, luxuriantly cropping forth, richness, vigor of 
 letters and of artistic expression, in whose products 
 character will be a main requirement, and not merely 
 erudition or elegance. 
 
 Intense and loving comradeship, the personal and 
 passionate attachment of man to man which, hard to 
 define, underlies the lessons and ideals of the profound 
 saviours of every land and age, and which seems to promise, 
 when thoroughly develop d, cultivated and recognized in 
 manners and literature, the most substantial hope and 
 safety of the future of these States, will then be fully 
 express d.* 
 
 A strong fibred joyousness and faith, and the sense of health 
 alfresco, may well enter into the preparation of future noble 
 American authorship. Part of the test of a great literatus 
 
 * It is to the development, identification, and general prevalence 
 of that fervid comradeship, (the adhesive love, at least rivaling the 
 amative love hitherto possessing imaginative literature, if not going 
 beyond it,) that I look for the counterbalance and offset of our 
 materialistic and vulgar American democracy, and for the spiritual- 
 ization thereof. Many will say it is a dream, and will not follow 
 my inferences : but I confidently expect a time when there will be 
 seen, running like a half-hid warp through all the myriad audible 
 
68 DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 
 
 shall be the absence in him of the idea of the covert, the 
 lurid, the maleficent, the devil, the grim estimates inherited 
 from the Puritans, hell, natural depravity, and the like. 
 The great literatus will be known, among the rest, by his 
 cheerful simplicity, his adherence to natural standards, his 
 limitless faith in God, his reverence, and by the absence in 
 him of doubt, ennui, burlesque, persiflage, or any strain d 
 and temporary fashion. 
 
 Nor must I fail, again and yet again, to clinch, reiterate 
 more plainly still, (O that indeed such survey as we fancy, 
 may show in time this part completed also !) the lofty aim, 
 
 /surely the proudest and the purest, in whose service the 
 future literatus, of whatever field, may gladly labor. As we 
 have intimated, offsetting the material civilization of our 
 race, our nationality, its wealth, territories, factories, popu 
 lation, products, trade, and military and naval strength, and 
 breathing breath of life into all these, and more, must be its 
 moral civilization the formulation, expression, and aidancy 
 whereof, is the very highest height of literature. The 
 climax of this loftiest range of civilization, rising above all 
 the gorgeous shows and results of wealth, intellect, power, 
 and art, as such above even theology and religious fervor 
 -is to be its development, from the eternal bases, and the 
 fit expression, of absolute Conscience, moral soundness, 
 Justice. Even in religious fervor there is a touch of animal 
 
 and visible worldly interests of America, threads of manly friendship, 
 fond and loving, pure and sweet, strong and life-long, carried to 
 degrees hitherto unknown not only giving tone to individual char 
 acter, and making it unprecedently emotional, muscular, heroic, and 
 refined, but having the deepest relations to general politics. I say 
 democracy infers such loving comradeship, as its most inevitable twin 
 or counterpart, without which it will be incomplete, in vain, and 
 incapable of perpetuating itself. 
 
DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 69 
 
 heat. But moral conscientiousness, crystalline, without 
 flaw, not Godlike only, entirely human, awes and enchants 
 forever. Great is emotional love, even in the order of the 
 rational universe. But, if we must make gradations, I am 
 clear there is something greater. Power, love, veneration, 
 products, genius, esthetics, tried by subtlest comparisons, 
 analyses, and in serenest moods, somewhere fail, somehow 
 become vain. Then noiseless, with flowing steps, the lord, 
 the sun, the last ideal comes. By the names right, jus! ice, 
 truth, we suggest, but do not describe it. To the world of 
 men it remains a dream, an idea as they call it. But no 
 dream is it to the wise but the proudest, almost only solid 
 lasting thing of all. Its analogy in the material universe is 
 what holds together this world, and every object upon it, 
 and carries its dynamics on forever sure and safe. Its lack, 
 and the persistent shirking of it, as in life, sociology, 
 literature, politics, business, and even sermonizing, these 
 times, or any times, still leaves the abysm, the mortal flaw 
 and smutch, mocking civilization to-day, with all its 
 unquestioned triumphs, and all the civilization so far 
 known."* 
 
 Present literature, while magnificently fulfilling certain 
 popular demands, with plenteous knowledge and verbal 
 smartness, is profoundly sophisticated, insane, aud its very 
 
 * I am reminded as I write that out of this very conscience, or idea 
 of conscience, of intense moral right, and in its name and strain J 
 construction, the worst fanaticisms, wars, persecutions, murders, &c., 
 have yet, in all lands, in the past, been broach d, and have come 
 to their devilish fruition. Much is to be said but I may say here, 
 and in response, that side by side with the unflagging stimulation 
 of the elements of religion and conscience must henceforth move with 
 equal sway, science, absolute reason, and the general proportionate 
 development of the whole man. These scientific facts, deductions, 
 are divine too precious counted parts of moral civilization, and, with 
 
yo DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 
 
 joy is morbid. It needs tally and express Nature, and the 
 spirit of Nature, and to know and obey the standards. 
 I say the question of Nature, largely consider d, involves 
 the questions of the esthetic, the emotional, and the religious 
 and involves happiness. A fitly born and bred race, 
 growing up in right conditions of out-door as much as 
 in-door harmony, activity and development, would probably, 
 from and in those conditions, find it enough merely to live 
 and would, in their relations to the sky, air, water, 
 trees, &c., and to the countless common shows, and in the 
 fact of life itself, discover and achieve happiness with 
 Being suffused night and day by wholesome extasy, 
 surpassing all the pleasures that wealth, amusement, and 
 even gratified intellect, erudition, or the sense of art, can 
 give. 
 
 In the prophetic literature of these States (the reader of 
 my speculations will miss their principal stress unless he 
 allows well for the point that a new Literature, perhaps a 
 new Metaphysics, certainly a new Poetry, are to be, in my 
 opinion, the only sure and worthy supports and expressions 
 of the American Democracy,) Nature, true Nature, and the 
 true idea of Nature, long absent, must, above all, become fully 
 restored, enlarged, and must furnish the pervading atmos 
 phere to poems, and the test of all high literary and esthetic 
 compositions. I do not mean the smooth walks, trimm d 
 
 physical health, indispensable to it, to prevent fanaticism. For 
 abstract religion, I perceive, is easily led astray, ever credulous, and 
 is capable of devouring, remorseless, like lire and flame. Conscience, 
 too, isolated from all else, and from the emotional nature, may but 
 attain the beauty and purity of glacial, snowy ice. We want, for these 
 States, for the general character, a cheerful, religious fervor, endued 
 with the ever-present modifications of the human emotions, friendship, 
 benevolence, with a fair field for scientific inquiry, the right of indi 
 vidual judgment, and always the cooling influences of material Nature. 
 
DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 7! 
 
 hedges, poseys and nightingales of the English poets, but the 
 whole orb, with its geologic history, the kosmos, carrying 
 fire and snow, that rolls through the illimitable areas, light 
 as a feather, though weighing billions of tons. Further 
 more, as by what we now partially call Nature is intended, 
 at most, only what is entertainable by the physical con 
 science, the sense of matter, and of good animal health 
 on these it must be distinctly accumulated, incorporated, 
 that man, comprehending these, has, in towering superad- 
 dition, the moral and spiritual consciences, indicating his 
 destination beyond the ostensible, the mortal. 
 
 To the heights of such estimate of Nature indeed ascend 
 ing, we proceed to make observations for our Vistas, 
 breathing rarest air. What is I believe called Idealism seem 
 to me to suggest, (guarding against extravagance, and ever 
 modified even by its opposite,) the course of inquiry and 
 desert of favor for our New World metaphysics, their 
 foundation of and in literature, giving hue to all.* 
 
 * The culmination and fruit of literary artistic expression, and its 
 final fields of pleasure for the human soul, are in metaphysics, in 
 cluding the mysteries of the spiritual world, the soul itself, and the 
 question of the immortal continuation of our identity. In all ages, the 
 mind of man has brought up here and always will. Here, at least, of 
 whatever race or era, we stand on common ground. Applause, too, 
 is unanimous, antique or modern. Those authors who work well in 
 this field though their reward, instead of a handsome percentage, or 
 royalty, may be but simply the laurel-crown of the victors in the great 
 Olympic games will be dearest to humanity, and their works, how 
 ever esthetically defective, will be treasur d forever. The altitude of 
 literature and poetry has always been religion and always will be. 
 The Indian Vedas, the Naekas of Zoroaster, the Talmud of the Jews, 
 the Old Testament, the Gospel of Christ and his disciples, Plato s 
 works, the Koran of Mohammed, the Edda of Snoiro, and so on to 
 ward our own day, to Swedenborg, and to the invaluable contributions 
 of Leibnitz, Kant and Hegel these, with such poems only in which, 
 
72 DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 
 
 The elevating and etherealizing ideas of the unknown and 
 of unreality must bs brought forward with authority, as they 
 are the legitimate heirs of the known, and of reality, and at 
 least as great as their parents. Fearless of scoffing, and of 
 the ostcnt, let us take our stand, our ground, and never 
 desert it, to confront the growing excess and arrogance of 
 
 (while singing well of persons and events, of the passions of man, 
 and the shows of the material universe,) the religious tone, the con 
 sciousness of mystery, the recognition of the future, of the unknown, 
 of Deity over and under all, and of the divine purpose, are never absent, 
 but indirectly give tone to all exhibit literature s real heights raid 
 elevations, towering up like the great mountains of the earth. 
 
 Standing on this ground the last, the highest, only permanent 
 ground and sternly criticising, from it, all works, either of the literary, 
 or any art, we have peremptorily to dismiss every pretensive produc 
 tion, however fine its esthetic or intellectual points, which violates or 
 ignores, or even does not celebrate, the central divine idea of All, 
 suffusing universe, of eternal trains of purpose, in the development, by 
 however slow degrees, of the physical, moral, and spiritual kosmos. I 
 say he has studied, meditated to no profit, whatever n~ay be his mere 
 erudition, who has not absorb d this simple consciousness and faith. 
 It is not entirely new but it is for Democracy to elaborate it, and look 
 to build upon and expand from it, with uncovnpromising reliance. 
 Above the doors of teaching the inscription is to appear, Though 
 little or nothing can be absolutely known, perceiv d, except from a 
 point of view which is evanescent, yet we know at !exst one perman 
 ency, that Time and Space, in the will of God, furnish successive chains, 
 completions of material births and beginnings, solve all discrepancies, 
 fears and doubts, and eventually fulfil happiness and that the prophecy 
 of those births, namely spiritual results, throws the true arch over all 
 teaching, all science. The local considerations of sin, disease, 
 deformity, ignorance, death, &c., and their measurement by the super 
 ficial mind, and ordinary legislation and theology, are to be met by 
 science, boldly accepting, promulging this faith, and planting the seeds 
 of superber laws of the explication of the physical universe through 
 the spiritual and clearing the way for a religion, sweet and unim- 
 pugnable alike to little child or great savan. 
 
DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 73 
 
 realism. To the cry, now victorious the cry of sense, 
 science, flesh, incomes, farms, merchandise, logic, intellect, 
 demonstrations, solid perpetuities, buildings of brick and 
 iron, or even the facts of the shows of trees, earth, rocks, 
 &c., fear not, my brethren, my sisters, to sound out with 
 equally determin d voice, that conviction brooding within 
 the recesses of every envision d soul illusions! apparitions! 
 figments all ! True, we must not condemn the show, 
 neither absolutely deny it, for the indispensabiHty of its 
 meanings ; but how clearly we see that, migrate in soul to 
 what we can already conceive of superior and spiritual 
 points of view, and palpable as it seems under present 
 relations, it all and several might, nay certainly would, fall 
 apart and vanish. 
 
 I hail with joy the oceanic, variegated, intense practical 
 energy, the demand for facts, even the business materialism 
 of the current age, our States. But wo to the age and land 
 in which these things, movements, stopping at themselves, 
 do not tend to ideas. As fuel to flame, and flame to the 
 heavens, so must wealth, science, materialism even this 
 democracy of which we make so much unerringly feed the 
 highest mind, the soul. Infinitude the flight : fathomless the 
 mystery. Man, so diminutive, dilates beyond the sensible 
 universe, competes with, outcopes space and time, medi 
 tating even one great idea. Thus, and thus only, does a 
 human being, his spirit, ascend above, and justify, objective 
 Nature, which, probably nothing in itself, is incredibly and 
 divinely serviceable, indispensable, real, here. And as the 
 purport of objective Nature is doubtless folded, hidden, 
 somewhere here as somewhere here is what this globe and 
 its manifold forms, and the light of day, and night s dark 
 ness, and life itself, with all its experiences, are for it is 
 here the great literature, especially verse, must get its 
 
74 DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 
 
 ^inspiration and throbbing blood. Then may we attain to a 
 
 poetry worthy the immortal soul of man, and which, while 
 
 absorbing materials, and, in their own sense, the shows of 
 
 Nature, will, above all, have, both directly and indirectly, a 
 
 freeing, fluidizing, expanding, religious character, exulting 
 
 I with science, fructifying the moral elements, and stimulating 
 
 ; aspirations, and meditations on the unknown. 
 
 The process, so far, is indirect and peculiar, and though 
 it may be suggested, cannot be denned. Observing, 
 rapport, and with intuition, the shows and forms presented 
 by Nature, the sensuous luxuriance, the beautiful in living 
 men and women, the actual play of passions, in history and 
 life and, above all, from those developments either in 
 Nature or human personality in which power, (dearest of all 
 to the sense of the artist,) transacts itself out of these, and 
 seizing what is in them, the poet, the esthetic worker in any 
 field, by the divine magic of his genius, projects them, their 
 analogies, by curious removes, indirections, in literature and 
 art. (No useless attempt to repeat the material creation, 
 by daguerreotyping the exact likeness by mortal menial 
 ; means.) This is the image-making faculty, coping wiih 
 , material creation, and rivaling, almost triumphing over it. 
 This alone, when all the other parts of a specimen of 
 literature or art are ready and waiting, can breathe into it 
 the breath of life, and endow it with identity. 
 
 "The true question to ask," says the librarian of Con 
 gress in a paper read before the Social Science Convention 
 at New York, October, 1869, "The true question to ask 
 respecting a book, is, has if helped any human soul?" This 
 is the hint, statement, not only of the great literatus, his 
 book, but of every great artist. It may be that all works of 
 art are to be first tried by their art qualities, their image- 
 forming talent, and their dramatic, pictorial, plot-constructing. 
 
DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 75 
 
 euphonious and other talents. Then, whenever claiming 
 to be first-class works, they are to be strictly and sternly 
 tried by their foundation in, and radiation, in the highest 
 sense, and always indirectly, of the ethic principles, and 
 eligibility to free, arouse, dilate. / 
 
 As, within the purposes of the Kosmos, and vivifying all 
 meteorology, and all the congeries of the mineral, vegetable 
 and animal worlds all the physical growth and develop 
 ment of man, and all the history of the race of politics, 
 religions, wars, &c., there is a moral purpose, a visible 01 
 invisible intention, certainly underlying all its results and 
 proof needing to be patiently waited for needing intuition, 
 faith, idiosyncrasy, to its realization, which many, and 
 especially the intellectual, do not have so in the product, 
 or congeries of the product, of the greatest literatus. This 
 is the last, profoundest measure and test of a first-class 
 literary or esthetic achievement, and when understood and 
 put in force must fain, I say, lead to works, books, nobler 
 then any hitherto known. Lo ! Nature, (the only complete, 
 actual poem,) existing calmly in the divine scheme, con 
 taining all, content, careless of the criticisms of a day, or 
 these endless and wordy chatterers. And lo ! to the con 
 sciousness of the soul, the permanent identity, the thought, 
 the something, before which the magnitude even o! 
 democracy, art, literature, &c., dwindles, becomes partial, 
 measurable something that fully satisfies, (which those do 
 not.) That something is the All, and the idea of All, with 
 the accompanying idea of eternity, and of itself, the soul, 
 buoyant, indestructible, sailing space forever, visiting every 
 region, as a ship the sea. And again lo ! the pulsations in 
 all matter, all spirit, throbbing forever the eternal beats, 
 eternal systole and diastole of life in things wherefrom I 
 feel and know that death is not the ending, as was thought, 
 
76 DEMOCRATIC VJSTAS. 
 
 but rather the real beginning and that nothing ever is or 
 can be lost, nor ever die, nor soul, nor matter. 
 
 In the future of these States must arise poets immenscr 
 far, and make great poems of death. The poems of life are 
 great, but there must be the poems of the purports of life, 
 not only in itself, but beyond itself. I have eulogized 
 Homer, the sacred bards of Jewry, Kschylus, Juvenal, 
 Shakspere, c., and acknowledged their inestimable value. 
 But, (with perhaps the exception, in some, not all respects, 
 of the sccond-mention d,) I say there must, for future and 
 democratic purposes, appear poets, (dare I to say so?) of 
 higher class even than any of those poets not only pos- 
 sess d of the religious fire and abandon of Isaiah, luxuriant 
 in the epic talent of Homer, or for proud characters as in 
 Shakspere, but consistent with the Hegelian formulas, and 
 consistent with modern science. America needs, and the 
 world needs, a class of bards who will, now and ever, so 
 link and tally the rational physical being of man, with the 
 ensembles of time and space, and with this vast and multi 
 form show, Nature, surrounding him, ever tantalizing him, 
 equally a part, and yet not a part of him, as to essentially 
 harmonize, satisfy, and put at rest. Faith, very old, now 
 scared away by science, must be restored, brought back by 
 the same power that caused her departure restored with 
 new sway, deeper, wider, higher than ever. Surely, this 
 universal ennui, this coward fear, this shuddering at death, 
 these low, degrading views, are not always to rule the 
 spirit pervading future society, as it has the past, and does 
 the present. What the Roman Lucretius sought most 
 nobly, yet all too blindly, negatively to do for his age and 
 its successors, must be done positively by some great com 
 ing litcrotus, especially poet, who, while remaining fully 
 poet, will absorb whatever science indicates, with spiritualism, 
 
DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 77 
 
 and out of them, and out of his own genius, will com 
 pose the great poem of death. Then will man indeed 
 con r ront Nature, and confront time and space, both with 
 science, and con amore, and take his right place, prepared 
 for life, master of fortune and misfortune. And then that 
 which was long wanted will be supplied, and the ship that 
 had it not before in all her voyages, will have an anchor. 
 
 There are still other standards, suggestions, for products 
 of high literatuses. That which really balances and con 
 serves the social and political world is not so much legisla 
 tion, police, treaties, and dread of punishment, as the latent 
 eternal intuitional sense, in humanity, of fairness, manliness, 
 decorum, &c. Indeed, this perennial regulation, control, 
 and oversight, by self-suppliance, is sine qua non to demo 
 cracy ; and a highest widest aim of democratic literature 
 may well be to bring forth, cultivate, brace, and strengthen 
 this sense, in individuals and society. A strong mastership 
 of the general inferior self by the superior self, is to be 
 aided, secured, indirectly, but surely, by the literatus, in his 
 works, shaping, for individual or aggregate democracy, a 
 great passionate body, in and along with which goes a great 
 masterful spirit. 
 
 And still, providing for contingencies, I fain confront the 
 fact, the need of powerful native philosophs and orators and 
 bards, these States, as rallying points to come, in times of 
 danger, and to fend off ruin and defection. For history is 
 long, long, long. Shift and turn the combinations of the 
 statement as we may, the problem of the future of America, 
 is in ctrtain respects as dark as it is vast. Pride, competi 
 tion, segregation, vicious willulness, and license beyond 
 example, brood already upon us. Unwieldy and immense, 
 who shall hold in behemoth? who bridle leviathan ? Flaunt 
 it as we choose, athwart and over the roads of our progress 
 
78 DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 
 
 loom huge uncertainty, and dreadful, threatening gloom. 
 It is useless to deny it : Democracy grows rankly up the 
 thickest, noxious, deadliest plants and fruits of all brings 
 worse and worse invaders needs newer, larger, stronger, 
 keener compensations and compellers. 
 
 Our lands, embracing so much, (embracing indeed the 
 whole, rejecting none,) hold in their breast that flame also, 
 capable of consuming themselves, consuming us all. Short 
 as the span of our national life has been, already have death 
 and downfall crowded close upon us and will again crowd 
 close, no doubt, even if warded off. Ages to come may 
 never know, but I know, how narrowly during the late 
 secession war and more than once, and more than twice 
 or thrice our Nationality, (wherein bound up, as in a ship 
 in a storm, depended, and yet depend, all our best life, all 
 hope, all value,) just grazed, just by a hair escaped destruc 
 tion. Alas ! to think of them ! the agony and bloody 
 sweat of certain of those hours ! those cruel, sharp, suspended 
 crises ! 
 
 Even to-day, amid these whirls, incredible flippancy, and 
 blind fury of parties, infidelity, entire lack of first-class 
 captains and leaders, added to the plentiful meanness and 
 vulgarity of the ostensible masses that problem, the labor 
 question, beginning to open like a yawning gulf, rapidly 
 widening every year what prospect have we ? We sail a 
 dangerous sea of seething currents, cross and under-current^ 
 vortices all so dark, untried and whither shall we turn ? 
 It seems as if the Almighty had spread before this nation 
 charts of imperial destinies, dazzling as the sun, yet with 
 many a deep intestine difficulty, and human aggregate of 
 cankerous imperfection, saying, lo ! the roads, the only 
 plans of development, long and varied with all terrible balks 
 and ebullitions. You said in your soul, I will be empire of 
 
DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 79 
 
 empires, overshadowing all else, past and present, putting 
 the history of old-world dynasties, conquests behind me, as 
 of no account making a new history, a history of 
 democracy, making old history a dwarf I alone inaugura 
 ting largeness, culminating time. If these, O lands of 
 America, are indeed the prizes, the determinations of your 
 soul, be it so. But behold the cost, and already specimens 
 of the cost. Thought you greatness was to ripen for you 
 like a pear ? If you would have greatness, know that you 
 must conquer it through ages, centuries must pay for it 
 with a proportionate price. For you too, as for all lands, 
 the struggle, the traitor, the wily person in office, scrofulous 
 wealth, the surfeit of prosperity, the demonism of greed, the 
 hell of passion, the decay of faith, the long postponement, 
 the fossil-like lethargy, the ceaseless need of revolutions, 
 prophets, thunderstorms, deaths, births, new projections and 
 invigorations of ideas and men. 
 
 Yet I have dream d, merged in that hidden-tangled 
 problem of our fate, whose long unraveling stretches 
 mysteriously through time dream d out, portray d, hinted 
 already a little or a larger band a band of brave and true, 
 unprecedented yet arm d and equipt at every point the 
 members separated, it may be, by different dates and States, 
 or south, or north, or east, or west Pacific, Atlantic, 
 Southern, Canadian a year, a century here, and other 
 centuries there but always one, compact in soul, conscience- 
 conserving, God-inculcating, inspired achievers, not only 
 in literature, the greatest art, but achievers in all art a 
 new, undying order, dynasty, from age to age transmitted 
 a band, a class, at least as fit to cope with current years, 
 cur dangers, needs, as those who, for their times, so long, 
 so well, in armour or in cowl, upheld and made illustrious, 
 that far-back feudal, priestly world. To offset chivalry, 
 
So DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 
 
 indeed, those vanish d countless knights, old altars, abbeys, 
 priests, ages and strings of ages, a kniglitlier and more 
 sacred cause to-day demands, and shall supply, in a New 
 World, to larger, grander work, more than the counterpart 
 and tally of them. 
 
 Arrived now, definitely, at an apex for these Vistas, I 
 confess that the promulgation and belief in such a class or 
 institution a new and greater literatus order its possi 
 bility, (nay certainty,) underlies these entire speculations 
 and that the rest, the other parts, as superstructures, are all 
 founded upon it. It really seems to me the condition, not 
 only of our future national and democratic development, 
 but of our perpetuation. In the highly artificial and 
 materialistic bases of modern civilization, with the corres 
 ponding arrangements and methods of living, the force- 
 infusion of intellect alone, the depraving influences of riches 
 just as much as poverty, the absence of all high ideals in 
 character with the long series of tendencies, shapings, 
 which few are strong enough to resist, and which now seem, 
 with steam-engine speed, to be everywhere turning out the 
 generations of humanity like uniform iron castings all of 
 which, as compared with the feudal ages, we can yet do 
 nothing better than accept, make the best of, and even 
 welcome, upon the whole, for their oceanic practical 
 grandeur, and their restless wholesale kneading of the 
 masses : I say of all this tremendous and dominant play of 
 solely materialistic bearings upon current life in the United 
 , States, with the results as already seen, accumulating, and 
 reaching far into the future, that they must either be 
 confronted and met by at least an equally subtle and 
 tremendous force-infusion for purposes of spiritualization, 
 for the pure conscience, for genuine esthetics, and for 
 absolute and primal manliness and womanliness or else 
 
DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 81 
 
 our modern civilization, with all its improvements, is in 
 vain, and we are on the road to a destiny, a status, 
 equivalent, in its real world, to that of the fabled damned. 
 
 Prospecting thus the coming unsped days, and that new 
 order in them marking the endless train of exercise, 
 development, unwind, in nation as in man, which life is for 
 we see, fore-indicated, amid these prospects and hopes, 
 new law-forces of spoken and written language not merely 
 the pedagogue-forms, correct, regular, familiar with prece 
 dents, made for matters of outside propriety, fine words, 
 thoughts definitely told out but a language fann d by the 
 breath of Nature, which leaps overhead, cares mostly for 
 impetus and effects, and for what it plants and invigorates 
 to grow tallies life and character, and seldomer tells a 
 thing than suggests or necessitates it. In fact, a new theory 
 of literary composition for imaginative works of the very 
 first class, and especially for highest poems, is the sole 
 course open to these States. Books are to be call d for, 
 and supplied, on the assumption that the process of reading 
 is not a half sleep, but, in highest sense, an exercise, a 
 gymnast s struggle ; that the reader is to do something for 
 himself, must be on the alert, must himself or herself 
 construct indeed the poem 5 argument, history, metaphysical 
 essay the text furnishing the hints, the clue, the start or 
 frame-work. Not the book needs so much to be the com 
 plete thing, but the reader of the book does. That were to 
 make a nation of supple and athletic minds, well-train d, 
 intuitive, used to depend on themselves, and not on a few 
 coteries of writers. 
 
 Investigating here, we see, not that it is a little thing we 
 have, in having the bequeath d libraries, countless shelves 
 of volumes, records, &c. ; yet how serious the danger, 
 depending entirely on them, of the bloodless vein, the 
 
 6 
 
82 DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 
 
 nerveless arm, the false application, at second or third 
 hand. We see that the real interest of this people of ours 
 in the theology, history, poetry, politics, and personal 
 models of the past, (the British islands, for instance, and 
 indeed all the past,) is not necessarily to mould ourselves 
 or our literature upon them, but to attain fuller, more 
 definite comparisons, warnings, and the insight to ourselves, 
 our own present, and our own far grander, different, future 
 history, religion, social customs, &c. We see that almost 
 everything that has been written, sung, or stated, of old, 
 with reference to humanity under the feudal and oriental 
 institutes, religions, and for other lands, needs to be 
 re-written, re-sung, re-stated, in terms consistent with the 
 ins .itution of these States, and to come in range and 
 obedient uniformity with them. 
 
 We see, as in the universes of the material kosmos, after 
 meteorological, vegetable, and animal cycles, man at last 
 arises, born through them, to prove them, concentrate them, 
 to turn upon them with wonder and love to command 
 them, adorn them, and carry them upward into superior 
 realms so, out of the series of the preceding social and 
 political universes, now arise these States. We see that 
 while many were supposing things established and com 
 pleted, really the grandest things always remain; and 
 discover that the work of the New World is not ended, but 
 only fairly begun. 
 
 We see our land, America, her literature, esthetics, &c., 
 as, substantially, the getting in form, or effusement and 
 statement, of deepest basic elements and loftiest final 
 meanings, of history and man and the portrayal, (under 
 the eternal laws and conditions of beauty,) of our own 
 physiognomy, the subjective tie and expression of the 
 objective, as from our own combination, continuation, and 
 
DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 83 
 
 points of view and the deposit and record of the national 
 mentality, character, appeals, heroism, wars, and even 
 liberties where these, and all, culminate in native literary 
 and artistic formulation, to be perpetuated ; and not having 
 which native, first-class formulation, she will flounder about, 
 and her other, however imposing, eminent greatness, prove 
 merely a passing gleam ; but truly having which, she will 
 understand herself, live nobly, nobly contribute, emanate, 
 and, swinging, poised safely on herself, illumin d and illum 
 ing, become a full-form d world, and divine Mother not 
 only of material but spiritual worlds, in ceaseless succession 
 through time the main thing being the average, the bodily, 
 the concrete, the democratic, the popular, on which all the 
 superstructures of the future are to permanently rest 
 
MY BOOK AND I. 
 
 PERHAPS the best of a song heard, or of any and all 
 true love, or life s fairest episodes, or sailors , 
 soldiers trying scenes on land or sea, is the floating resume 
 ot them, or any of them, long afterwards, looking at the 
 actualities away back past, with all their practical exci 
 tations gone. How the soul loves to hover over such 
 reminiscences ! 
 
 So here I sit gossiping in the early candle-light of old. 
 age, I and my book, casting backward glances over our 
 travelled road. After completing, as it were, the journey (a 
 varied jaunt of years, with many halts and gaps of intervals 
 or some lengthened ship-voyage, wherein more than once 
 the last hour had apparently arrived, and we seemed 
 certainly going down, yet reaching port in a sufficient way 
 through all discomfitures at last) after completing my 
 poems, and letting an interval elapse to settle them, I am 
 curious to review all in the light of their own (at the time 
 unconscious, or mostly unconscious) intentions, with certain 
 unfoldings of the thirty years they seek to embody. These 
 lines, therefore, will probably blend the weft of first purposes 
 and speculations with the warp of that experience afterwards, 
 always bringing strange developments. 
 
 Result of seven or eight stages and struggles extending 
 through nearly thirty years, T lor,k up^n "Leaves of Grass," 
 
MY BOOK AND I. 85 
 
 now finished to the end of its opportunities and powers, as 
 my definitive carle visite to the coming generations of the 
 New World,* if I may assume to say so. That I have not 
 gained the acceptance of my own time, but have fallen back 
 on fond dreams of the future (" Still lives the song, though 
 Regnar dies "), that from a worldly and business point of 
 view " Leaves of Grass " has been worse than a failure, 
 that after thirty years of trial public criticism on the book 
 and myself as author of it shows marked anger and contempt 
 more than anything else (" I find a solid line of enemies to 
 you everywhere," letter from W. S. K., Boston, May 28, 
 1884), and that solely for publishing it I have been the 
 object of two or three pretty serious official bufferings, is 
 all probably no more than I ought to have expected. I 
 had my choice when I commenced. I bid neither for soft 
 eulogies, big money returns, nor the approbation of existing 
 schools and conventions. As fulfilled, or partially fulfilled, 
 the best comfort of the whole business (after a small band 
 of the dearest friends and upholders ever vouchsafed to man 
 or cause, doubtless all the more faithful and uncom 
 promising this little phalanx ! for being so few) is that, 
 unstopped and unwarped by any influence outside the soul 
 within me, I have had my say entirely my own way, and put 
 it unerringly on record, the value thereof to be decided by 
 time. 
 
 In calculating that decision, William O Connor and Dr. 
 Bucke are far more peremptory than I am. Behind all else 
 that can be said, I consider " Leaves of Grass " and its 
 theory experimental, as, in the deepest sense, I consider 
 our American republic itself to be, with its theory. I think 
 
 * When Champollion, on his death-bed, handed to the printer the 
 revised proof of his " Egyptian Grammar," he said gayly, " Be careful 
 of this, it is my carte de visite to posterity." 
 
86 MY BOOK AND I. 
 
 I have at least enough philosophy not to be too absolutely 
 certain of any thing or any results. In the second place, 
 the volume is a sortie, whether to prove triumphant and 
 conquer its field of aim and escape and construction, 
 nothing less than a hundred years from now can fully 
 answer. I consider the point that I have positively gained 
 a hearing to far more than make up for any and all other 
 lacks and withholdings. Essentially that was from the first, 
 and has remained throughout, the main object. Now it is 
 achieved, I am certainly contented to waive any otherwise 
 momentous drawbacks, as of little account. 
 
 After continued personal ambition and effort, as a young 
 fellow, to enter with the rest into competition for the usual 
 rewards, business, political, literary, etc., to take part in 
 the great mel ee, both for victory s prize itself and to do some 
 good, after years of those aims and pursuits, I found 
 myself remaining possessed, at the age of thirty-three to 
 thirty-five, with a special desire and conviction. Or rather, 
 to be quite exact, a desire and conviction that had been 
 more or less flitting through my previous life, or hovering on 
 the flanks, mostly indefinite hitherto, had steadily advanced 
 to the front, defined itself, and finally dominated everything 
 else. This was a feeling or ambition to articulate and 
 faithfully express in literary form and uncompromisingly my 
 own physical, emotional, moral, intellectual, and cesthetic 
 Personality, in the midst of, and tallying, the momentous 
 spirit and facts of its immediate days and of current 
 America, and to exploit that Personality in a far more 
 candid and comprehensive sense than any hitherto book. 
 
 Perhaps this is in brief or suggests all I have sought to 
 do. Given the nineteenth century with the United States 
 and what they furnish as areas and points of view, " Leaves 
 of Grass " is, or seeks to be, simply a faithful and doubtless 
 
MY BOOK AND I. 87 
 
 self-willed record. In the midst of all it gives one man s 
 the author s identity, ardors, observations, faiths, and 
 thoughts, colored hardly at all with any coloring from other 
 faiths, other authors, other identities or times. Plenty of 
 songs had been sung, beautiful, matchless songs adjusted 
 to other lands than these other days, another spirit and 
 stage ol evolution ; but I would sing, and leave out or put 
 in, solely with reference to America and myself and to-day. 
 Modern science and democracy seemed to be throwing out 
 their challenge to Poetry to put them in its statements in 
 contradistinction to the songs and myths of the past As I 
 see it now (perhaps too late), I have unwittingly taken up 
 that challenge and made an attempt at such statements, 
 which I certainly would not assume to do now, knowing 
 more clearly what it means. 
 
 For grounds for " Leaves of Grass," as poetry, I have 
 abandoned the conventional themes, which do not appear 
 in it : none of the stock ornamentation, or choice plots of 
 love or war, or high, exceptional personages of Old-World 
 song ; nothing, as I may say, for beauty s sake, no legend, 
 or myth, or romance, nor euphemism, nor rhyme. But 
 the broadest average of humanity and its identities in the 
 now ripening nineteenth century, and especially in each of 
 their countless examples and practical occupations in the 
 United States to day. 
 
 One main contrast of the ideas behind every page of my 
 verses, compared with established poems, is (as I have said 
 once before) their different relative attitude towards God, 
 towards the objective universe, and still more (by reflection, 
 confession, assumption, etc.) the quite changed attitude of 
 the ego, the one chanting or talking, towards himself and 
 towards his fellow-humanity. It is certainly time for 
 America, above all, to begin this readjustment in the 
 
88 MY BOOK AND L 
 
 scope of verse, for everything else has changed. As I write, 
 I see in an article on Wordsworth, in one of the current 
 English magazines, the lines, " A few weeks ago an eminent 
 French critic said that, owing to the special tendency to 
 science and to its all-devouring force, poetry would cease 
 to be read in fifty years." But I anticipate the very con 
 trary. Only a firmer, vastly broader, new area begins to 
 exist nay, is already formed to which the poetic genius 
 must emigrate. Whatever may have been the case in years 
 gone by, the true use for the imaginative faculty of modern 
 times is to give ultimate vivification to facts, to science, and 
 to common lives, endowing them with the glows and glories 
 and final illustriousness which belong to every real thing, 
 and to real things only. Without that ultimate vivification 
 which the poet or other artist alone can give reality 
 would seem incomplete, and science, democracy, and life 
 itself finally in vain. 
 
 Few appreciate the moral revolutions, our age, which 
 have been profounder far than the material or inventive or 
 war-produced ones. The nineteenth century, now well 
 towards its close (and ripening into fruit the seeds of the 
 two preceding centuries*), the uprisings of national masses 
 and shiftings of boundary lines, the historical and other 
 prominent facts of the United States, the Secession War, 
 the stormy rush and haste of nebulous forces, never can 
 future years witness more excitement and din of action 
 never completer change of army front along the whole line, 
 
 * The ferment and germination even of the United States to day, 
 dating back to, and in my opinion mainly founded on, the Elizabethan 
 age in English history, the age of Francis Bacon and Shakespeare. 
 Inde -d, when we pursue it, what growth or advent is there that does 
 not date back, back, until lost perhaps its most tantalizing clues lost 
 in the recorded horizons of the past ? 
 
MY SO OK AND I. 89 
 
 the whole civilized world. For all these new and evolu 
 tionary facts, meanings, purposes, new messages, new forms 
 and expressions, are inevitable. 
 
 My Book and I, what a period we have presumed to 
 span ! those thirty years from 1850 to 80 and America in 
 them ! Proud, proud indeed may we be if we have culled 
 enough of that period in its own spirit to worthily waft a 
 few live breaths of it to the future ! 
 
 Let me not dare, here or anywhere, to attempt any 
 definition of Poetry, nor answer the question what it is. 
 Like Religion, Love, Nature, while those terms are indis 
 pensable, and we all give a sufficiently accurate meaning to 
 them, no definition that has ever been made sufficiently 
 encloses the name Poetry ; nor can any rule or convention 
 ever so absolutely obtain but some great exception may 
 arise and disregard and overturn it. 
 
 Also it must be carefully remembered that first-class 
 literature does not shine by any luminosity of its own, nor 
 do its poems. They grow of circumstances, and are evolu 
 tionary. The actual living light is always from elsewhere, 
 follows unaccountable sources, and is lunar and relative at 
 the best. There ate, I know, certain controlling themes that 
 seem endlessly appropriated to the poets, as war, in the 
 past, in the Bible, religious rapture and adoration, always 
 love, beauty, some plot, or some pensive or other emotion. 
 But, strange as it may sound at first, I will say there is 
 something far deeper and towering far higher than those 
 themes for the elements of modern song. 
 
 Just as all the old imaginative works rest, after their kind, 
 on long trains of presuppositions, often entirely un men 
 tioned by themselves, yet supplying the most important 
 parts or bases of them, and without which they could have 
 had no reason for being, so " Leaves of Grass," before a 
 
90 MY BOOK AND L 
 
 line was written, presupposed something different from any 
 other, and as it stands is the result of such presupposition. 
 I should say, indeed, it were useless to attempt reading the 
 book without first carefully tallying that preparatory back 
 ground and quality in the mind. Think of the United 
 States to-day the facts of these thirty- eight or forty empires 
 soldered in one fifty or sixty millions of equals, with their 
 lives, their passions, their future these incalculable and 
 seething multitudes around us, and of which we are in 
 separable parts ! Think, in comparison, of the petty 
 environage and limited area of the poets of past or present 
 Europe, no matter how great their genius. Think of the 
 absence and ignorance, in all cases hitherto, of the multt- 
 tudinousness, vitality, and the unprecedented stimulants of 
 to-day and here. It almost seems as if a poetry with any 
 thing like cosmic features were never possible before. It is 
 certain that a poetry of absolute faith and equality for the 
 use of the modern never was. 
 
 In estimating first-class song, a sufficient nationality, or, 
 on the other hand, what may be called the negative and 
 lack of it (as in Goethe s case, it sometimes seems to me), is 
 often, if not always, the first element. One needs only a little 
 penetration to see, at more or less removes, the material 
 facts of their country and radius, with the coloring of the 
 moods of humanity at the time, and its gloomy or hopeful 
 prospects, behind all poets and each poet, and forming their 
 birth-marks. I know very well that my " Leaves " could 
 not possibly have emerged from any other era than the 
 latter half of the nineteenth century, nor any other land 
 than America, and from the absolute triumph of the 
 National Union arms. 
 
 And whether my friends claim it for me or not, I know 
 well enough, too, that in respect to pictorial talent, 
 
MY BOOK AND I gi 
 
 dramatic situations, and especially in verbal melody and all 
 the conventional technique of poetry, not only the divine 
 works that to-day stand ahead in the world s reading, but 
 dozens more, transcend (some of them immeasurably tran 
 scend) all I have done, or could do. But it seemed to me, 
 as the objects in nature, the themes of sestheticism, and 
 all special exploitations of the mind and soul, involve not 
 only their own inherent quality, but the quality, just as 
 inherent and important, of their point of view* the time had 
 come to reflect all themes and things, old and new, in the 
 lights thrown on them by the advent of America and 
 democracy to chant those themes through the utterance ot 
 one, not only the grateful and reverent legatee of the past, 
 but the born child of the New World to illustrate all 
 through the genesis and ensemble of to-day and that such 
 illustration and ensemble are the chief demands of 
 America s prospective imaginative literature. Not to carry 
 out, in the approved style, some choice plot or fancy, or 
 fine thoughts, or incidents, or courtesies, all of which has 
 been done overwhelmingly and well, probably never to be 
 excelled, but that while in such aesthetic presentation of 
 objects, passions, plots, thoughts, etc., our lands and days 
 do not want, and probably will never have, anything better 
 than they already possess from the bequests of the past, it 
 still remains to be said that there is even towards all those 
 a subjective and democratic point of view appropriate to 
 ourselves alone, and to our new genius and environments, 
 different from anything hitherto, and that such conception 
 of current life and art is for us the only means of their 
 assimilation consistent with the Western world. 
 
 Indeed, and anyhow, to put it specifically, has not the 
 
 * According to Immanuel Kant, the essential reality, giving shape and 
 significance to all the rest. 
 
92 MY BOOK AND I. 
 
 time arrived when, for highest current and future aims, 
 there must imperatively come a readjustment of the whole 
 theory and nature of Poetry ? The question is important, 
 and I may turn the argument over and repeat it : Does 
 not the best thought of our day conceive of a birth and 
 spirit of song superior to anything past or present ? To the 
 effectual and moral consolidation of America (already, as 
 materially established, the greatest factor in known history, 
 and far, far greater through what it preludes and necessi 
 tates, and is to be in future) to conform with and build on 
 the concrete realities and theories of the universe furnished 
 by modern science, and the only irrefragable basis for any 
 thing, verse included to root both influences in the 
 emotional and imaginative action of our time and any time, 
 and dominate all that precedes or opposes them is not 
 a radically new verteber of the best song indispensable ? 
 
 The New World receives with joy the poems of the 
 antique, with European feudalism s rich fund of epics, plays, 
 ballads seeks not in the least to deaden or displace those 
 voices from our present time and area holds them indeed 
 as indispensable studies, influences, records, comparisons. 
 But though the dawn-dazzle of the sun of literature is in 
 those poems for us of to-day though the best parts of 
 current character in nations, social groups, or any man s or 
 woman s individuality, Old World or New, are from them 
 and though if I were asked to name the most precious 
 bequest to American civilization from all the hitherto ages, 
 I am not sure but I would name those old and less old 
 songs ferried hither from east and west, some serious 
 words and debits remain ; some acrid considerations 
 demand a hearing. Of the great poems received from 
 abroad and from the ages, and to-day enveloping and 
 penetrating America, is there one that is consistent with 
 
MY BOOK AND I. 93 
 
 these United States, or essentially applicable to them as 
 they are and are to be ? Is there one whose underlying 
 basis is not a denial and insult to democracy ? What a 
 comment it forms, anyhow, on this era of literary fulfilment, 
 with the splendid day-rise of science and resuscitation of 
 history, that our chief religious and poetical works are not 
 our own, but have been furnished by far-back ages cut of 
 their arriere and darkness, or, at most, twilight ! What is 
 there in those works that so imperiously and scornfully 
 dominates all our advancement, boasted civilization, and 
 culture ? 
 
 Even Shakespeare, who so suffuses current literature and 
 art (which indeed have in most degrees grown out of him), 
 he too belongs essentially to the buried past. Only he 
 holds the proud distinction for certain important phases of 
 that past, of being the loftiest of the singers life has yet 
 given voice to. All, however, relate to and rest upon con 
 ditions, standards, politics, sociologies, ranges of belief, that 
 have been quite eliminated from the Eastern hemisphere, 
 and never existed at all in the Western. As authoritative 
 types of song they belong in America just about as much as 
 the persons and institutes they depict. True, it may be 
 said, the emotional, moral, and aesthetic natures of humanity 
 have not changed that in these the old poems apply to our 
 times and all times, irrespective of date ; and that they are 
 of incalculable value as pictures of the past. I willingly 
 make those admissions, and to their fullest extent ; then ad 
 vance the points herewith as of serious, even paramount 
 importance. 
 
 I have indeed put on record elsewhere my reverence and 
 eulogy for those never-to-be-excelled poetic bequests, and 
 their indescribable preciousness as heirlooms for America. 
 Another and separate point must now be candidly stated. 
 
94 MY BOOK AND I. 
 
 If I had not stood before those poems with uncovered head, 
 fully aware of their colossal grandeur and beauty of form 
 and spirit, I could not have written " Leaves of Grass." 
 My verdict and conclusions as illustrated in its pages are 
 arrived at through the temper and inculcation of the old 
 works as much as through anything else, perhaps more 
 than through anything else. As America fully and fairly 
 construed is the legitimate result and evolutionary outcome 
 of the past, so I would dare to claim for my verse. With 
 out stopping to qualify the averment, the Old World has 
 had the poems of myths, fictions, feudalism, conquest, caste, 
 dynastic wars, and splendid exceptional characters and 
 affairs, which have been great ; but the New World needs 
 the poems of realities and science and of the democratic 
 average and basic equality, which shall be greater. In the 
 centre of all, and object of all, stands the Human Being, 
 towards whose heroic and spiritual evolution poems and 
 everything directly or indirectly tend, Old World or New. 
 
A BACKWARD GLANCE ON MY 
 OWN ROAD. 
 
 IT is probably best at once to give warning, (even more 
 specific than in the head-line,) that the following 
 paragraphs have my Leaves of Grass, and some of its 
 reasons and aims, for their radiating centre. Altogether, 
 they form a backward glimpse along my own road and 
 journey the last thirty years. 
 
 Many consider the expression of poetry and art to come 
 under certain inflexible standards, set patterns, fixed and 
 immovable, like iron castings. Really, nothing of the sort. 
 As, in the theatre of to-day, each new actor of real merit 
 (for Hamlet or any eminent role) recreates the persons of 
 the older drama, sending traditions to the winds, and 
 producing a new character on the stage, the adaptation, 
 development, incarnation, of his own traits, idiosyncrasy, 
 and environment there being not merely one good way 
 of representing a great part, but as many ways as there are 
 great actors so in constructing poems. Another illustra 
 tion would be that for delineating purposes, the melange of 
 existence is but an eternal font of type, and may be set up 
 to any text, however different with room and welcome, at 
 whatever time, for new compositors. 
 
 I should say real American poetry nay, within any high 
 
96 A BACKWARD GLANCE. 
 
 sense, American literature is something yet to be. So far, 
 the aims and stress of the book-making business here the 
 miscellaneous and fashionable parts of it, the majority- 
 seem entirely adjusted (like American society life,) to certain 
 fine-drawn, surface, imported ways and examples, having no 
 deep root or hold in our soil. I hardly know a volume 
 emanating American nativity, manliness, from its centre. 
 It is true, the numberless issues of our day and land (the 
 leading monthlies are the best,) as they continue feeding the 
 insatiable public appetite, convey the kind of provender 
 temporarily wanted and with certain magnificently copious 
 mass results. But as surely as childhood and youth pass to 
 maturity, all that now exists, after going on for a while will 
 meet with a grand revulsion nay, its very self works 
 steadily toward that revulsion. 
 
 What a comment it is on our era of literary fulfilment, 
 with the splendid day-rise of science, and resuscitation of 
 history, that its chief religious and poetical works are not its 
 own, but have been furnished by far-back ages, out of their 
 darkness and ignorance or, at most, twilight ! What is 
 there in those works that so imperiously and scornfully 
 dominates all our advancement, boasted civilization, and 
 culture? 
 
 The intellect of to-day is stupendous and keen, backed by 
 stores of accumulated erudition but in a most important 
 phase the antique seems to have had the advantage of us. 
 Unconsciously, it possessed and exploited that something 
 there was and is in Nature immeasurably beyond, and even 
 altogether ignoring, what we call the artistic, the beautiful, 
 the literary, and even the moral, the good. Not easy to put 
 one s finger on, or name in a word, this something, invisibly 
 permeating the old poems, religion-sources and art. If I 
 were asked to suggest it in such single word, I should write 
 
A BACKWARD GLANCE. 97 
 
 (at the ri>k of being quite misunJcrstood at first, at any 
 rate) the word physiological. 
 
 I have never wondered why so many men and women 
 balk at Leaves of Grass. None should try it till ready to 
 accept (unfortunately for me ; not one in a hundred, or in 
 several hundred, is ready) that utterance from full-grown 
 human personality, as of a tree growing in itself, or any 
 other objective result of the universe, from its own laws, 
 oblivious of conformity an expression, faithful exclusively 
 to its own ideal and receptivity, however egotistical or enor 
 mous (/All is mine, for I have it in me, sings the old Chant 
 of Jupiter) not mainly indeed with any of the usual pur 
 poses of poems, or of literature, but just as much (indeed 
 far more) with other aims and purposes. These will only 
 be learned by the study of the book itself will be arrived 
 at, if at all, by indirections and even at best, the task no 
 easy one. The physiological point of view will almost 
 always have to dominate in the reader as it does in the 
 book only now and then the psychological or intellectual, 
 and very seldom indeed the merely aesthetic. 
 
 1 hen I wished above all things to arrest the actual 
 moment, our years, the existing, and dwell on the present- 
 to view all else through the present. What the past has 
 sent forth in its incalcuable volume and variety, is of course 
 on record. What the next generation, or the next, may 
 furnish, I know not. But for indications of the individuality 
 and physiognomy, of the present, in America, my two 
 books are candidates. And though it may not appear at 
 first look, I am more and more fond of thinking, and 
 indeed am quite decided for myself, that they have for their 
 nerve-centre the Secession War of 1860-65. 
 
 Then the volumes (for reasons well conned over before I 
 took the first step) were intended to be most decided, 
 
 7 
 
98 A BACKWARD GLANCE. 
 
 serious, bona fide expressions of an identical individual per 
 sonality ego/ism, if you choose, for I shall not quarrel 
 about the word They proceed out of, and revolve around, 
 express myself, an identity, and declaredly make that self 
 the nucleus of the whole utterance. After all is said, it is 
 only a concrete special personality that can finally satisfy 
 and vitalize the student of verse, heroism, or religion- 
 abstractions will do neither. (Carlyle said, There is no 
 grand poem in the world but is at bottom a biography the 
 life of a man. ) 
 
 That I have not been accepted during my own time 
 that the largely prevailing range of criticism on my book 
 has been either mockery or denunciation and that I, as its 
 author, have been the marked object of two or three (to me 
 pretty serious) official buffetings is probably no more than 
 I ought to have expected. I had my choice when I com 
 menced. I bid neither for soft eulogies, big money returns, 
 nor the approbation of existing schools and conventions. 
 As now fulfilled after thirty years, the best of the achieve 
 ment is, that I have had my say entirely my own way, and 
 put it unerringly on record the value thereof to be decided 
 by time. In calculating that decision, Dr. Bucke and 
 William O Connor are far more definite and peremptory 
 than I am. I consider the whole thing experimental as 
 indeed, in a very large sense, I consider the American 
 Republic itself, to be. 
 
 There is always an invisible background to a high- 
 intentioned book the palimpsest on which every page is 
 written. Apply this to my volume. The facts of these 
 thirty-eight or forty empires soldered in one fifty or sixty 
 millions of equals, with their lives, their passions, their 
 future these incalculable areas and seething multitudes 
 around us, and of which we are inseparable parts ! Think, 
 
A BACKWARD GLANCE. 99 
 
 in comparison, of the petty environage and limited area of 
 the poets of past or present Europe, no matter how great 
 their genius. 
 
 That America necessitates for her poetry entirely new 
 standards of measurement is such a point with me, that I 
 never tire of dwelling on it. Think of the absence and 
 ignorance, in all cases hitherto, of the vast ensemble, multi- 
 tudinousness, vitality, and the unprecedented stimulants of 
 to-day and here. It almost seems as if a poetry with any 
 thing like cosmic features were never possible before. It is 
 certain that a poetry of democracy and absolute faith, for 
 the use of the modern, never was. 
 
OUR EMINENT VISITORS (PAST, 
 PRESENT, AND FUTURE). 
 
 WELCOME to them each and all ! They do good 
 the deepest, widest, most needed, good though 
 quite certainly not in the ways attempted which have, at 
 times, to the appreciative nostril, a scent of something 
 irresistibly comic. Can there be anything more farcical, for 
 instance, than the sight of a worthy gentleman, coming 
 three or four thousand miles through wet and wind to 
 spzak complacently and at great length on matters of which 
 he both entirely mistakes and knows nothing, before a 
 crowd of auditors equally complacent and equally at 
 fault? 
 
 Yet welcome and thanks, we say, to those we have, and 
 have had, among us and may the procession continue ! 
 We have had Dickens and Thackeray, Froude, Herbert 
 Spencer, Oscar Wilde, Lord Coleridge and now Matthew 
 Arnold and Irving the actor. Some have come to make 
 money some for a good time some to help us along 
 and give us advice and some undoubtedly to investigate, 
 bona fide, this great problem, democratic America, looming 
 upon the world with such cumulative power through a 
 hundred years, now wLh evident intention (since the 
 Secession War) to stay, and take a leading hand, for many 
 
OUR EMINENT VISITORS. 101 
 
 a century to come, in civilization s and humanity s eternal 
 game. But alas! in that very investigation at any rate 
 the method of that investigation is where the deficit most 
 surely and helplessly comes in. Let not Lord Coleridge 
 and Mr. Arnold, (to say nothing of the illustrious actor,) 
 imagine that when they have met and surveyed the etiquet- 
 tical gatherings of our wealthy, distinguished, and sure-to-bc- 
 put-forward-on-such-occasions citizens, (New York, Boston, 
 Philadelphia, etc., have certain stereotyped strings of them, 
 continually lined and paraded like the lists of dinner dishes 
 at hotel tables you are sure to get the same over and 
 over again it is very amusing,) and the bowing and 
 introducing, the receptions at the swell clubs, the eating and 
 drinking and praising and praising back and the next day 
 riding about Central Park, or doing the Public Institutions 
 and so passing through, one after another, the full-dress 
 coteries of the Atlantic cities, all grammatical and cultured 
 and correct, with the toned-down manners of the gentlemen, 
 and the kid-gloves, and luncheons and finger-glasses. Let 
 not our eminent visitors, we say, suppose that they have 
 seen America, or captured any distinctive clew or purport 
 thereof. Not a bit of it. Of the pulse-beats that lie within 
 and vitalize this Commonweal to-day of the hard-pan 
 purports and idiosyncrasies pursued faithfully and trium 
 phantly by its bulk of men, generation after generation, 
 superficially unconscious of their own aims, yet none the 
 less pressing onward with deathless intuition age after age 
 those coteries will not furnish the faintest scintilla. In 
 the Old World the best flavor and significance of a race 
 may possibly need to be looked for in its upper classes, 
 its gentries, its court, its etat major. In the United States 
 the rule is reversed. Besides, the special marks of our 
 grouping and design are not going to be understood in a 
 
io2 OUR EMINENT VISITORS. 
 
 hurry. The lesson and scanning right on the ground are 
 difficult, I was going to say they are impossible to foreigners 
 but I have occasionally found the clearest appreciation of 
 all coming from far-off quarters. Surely nothing could be 
 more apt, not only for our eminent visitors present and to 
 come, but for home study, than the following editorial 
 criticism of the London Times on Mr. Froude s visit and 
 lectures here a few years ago, and the culminating dinner 
 given at Delmonico s : 
 
 We read the list, says the Times, of those who 
 assembled to do honor to Mr. Froude : there were Mr. 
 Emerson, Mr. Beecher, Mr. Curtis, Mr. Bryant ; we add 
 the names of those who sent letters of regret that they 
 could not attend in person Mr. Longfellow, Mr. Whittier. 
 They are names which are well known almost as well 
 known and as much honored in England as in America ; 
 and yet what must we say in the end ? The American 
 people outside this assemblage of writers is something vaster 
 and greater than they, singly or together, can comprehend. 
 It cannot be said of any or all of them that they can speak 
 for their nation. We who look on at this distance are able 
 perhaps on that account to see the more clearly that there 
 are qualities of the American people which find no repre 
 sentation, no voice, among these their spokesmen. And 
 what is true of them is true of the English class of whom 
 Mr. Froude may be said to be the ambassador. Mr. 
 Froude is master of a charming style. He has the gift of 
 grace and the gift of sympathy. Taking any single 
 character as the subject of his study, he may succeed after 
 a very short time in so comprehending its workings as to be 
 able to present a living figure to the intelligence and 
 memory of his readers. But the movements of a nation, 
 the voiceless purpose of a people which cannoi put its cwn 
 
OUR EMINENT VISITORS. 103 
 
 thoughts into ivords, yet acts upon them in each successive 
 generation, these things do not lie within his grasp. 7. . 
 The functions of literature such as he represents are limited 
 in their action ; the influence he can wield is artificial and 
 restricted, and, while he and his hearers please and are 
 pleased with pleasant periods, the great mass of national 
 life will flow around them unmoved in its tides by action 
 as powerless as that of the dwellers by the shore to direct 
 the currents of the ocean. 
 
 A thought, here, that needs to be echoed, expanded, 
 permanently treasured, by our literary classes and edu 
 cators. How few think of it, though it is the impetus and 
 back-ground of our whole Nationality and popular life. In 
 the present brief memorandum, I very likely for the first 
 time awake the intelligent reader to the idea and 
 inquiry whether where isn t such a thing as the distinctive 
 genius of our New World, universal, immanent, bringing to 
 a head the best experience of the past not specially 
 literary or intellectual not even merely good, (in the 
 Sunday School and Temperance Society sense,) some 
 invisible spine and great sympathetic to these States, resi 
 dent only in the average People, in their practical life, in 
 their physiology, in their emotions, in their nebulous yet fiery 
 patriotism, in the armies (both sides) through the whole 
 Secession War an identity and character which indeed so 
 far finds no voice among their spokesmen. 
 
 To my mind America, vast and fruitful as it appears 
 to-day, is even yet, for its most important results, entirely 
 in the tentative state. (Its very formation-stir and whirling 
 trials and essays more splendid and picturesque, to my 
 thinking, than the accomplished growths and shows of 
 other lands, through European history or Greece, or all the 
 past) Surely a New World literature, worthy the name, is 
 
io 4 OUR EMINENT VISITORS. 
 
 not to be, if it ever comes, some fiction, or fancy, or bit of 
 sentimentalism or polished work merely by itself or in 
 abstraction. So long as such literature is no born branch 
 and offshoot of the Nationality, rooted and grown from its 
 roots, and fibred with its fibre, it can never answer any 
 deep call or perennial need. Perhaps the untaught 
 Republic is deeper, wiser, than its teachers. The best 
 literature is always a result of something far greater than 
 itself is not the hero, but the portrait of the hero. 
 Before there can be recorded history or poem there must 
 be the transaction. Beyond the old masterpieces, the Iliad, 
 the iuterminable Hindu epics, the Greek tragedies, even the 
 Bible itself, range the immense facts of what must have pre 
 ceded them their sine qua non the veritable poems and 
 masterpieces, of which these are but shreds and cartoons. 
 
 For to-day and the States, I think the vividest, rapidest, 
 most stupendous processes ever known, ever performed by 
 man or nation, on the largest scales and in countless varie 
 ties, are now and here presented. Not as our poets and 
 preachers are always conventionally putting it but quite 
 different. Some colossal foundry, the flaming of the fire, 
 the melted metal, the pounding trip-hammers, the surging 
 crowds of workmen shifting from point to point, the murky 
 shadows, the rolling haze, the discord, the crudeness, the 
 deafening din, the disorder, the dross and clouds of dust, 
 the waste and extravagance of material, the shafts of darted 
 sunshine through the vast open roof-scuttles aloft the 
 mighty castings, many of them not yet fitted, perhaps 
 delayed long, yet each in its due time, with definite place 
 and use and meaning such, more like, is a Symbol of 
 America. 
 
 After all of which, returning to our starting-point, we re 
 iterate, and in the whole Land s name, a welcome to our 
 
OUR EMINENT VISITORS. 105 
 
 eminent guests. Visits like theirs, and hospitalities, and 
 hand-shaking, and face meeting face, and the distant brought 
 near what divine solvents they are ! Travel, reciprocity, 
 interviewing, intercommunion of lands what are they but 
 Democracy s and the highest Law s best aids ? O that our 
 own country that every land in the world could annually, 
 continually, receive the poets, thinkers, scientists, even the 
 official magnates, of other lands, as honored guests. O 
 that the United States, especially the West, could have had 
 a good long visit and explorative jaunt, from the noble and 
 melancholy Tourgue neff, before he died or from Thomas 
 Carlyle, Castelar, Tennyson, Victor Hugo were they and 
 we to come face to face, how is it possible but that the right 
 and amicable understanding would ensue ? 
 
A THOUGHT ON SHAKSPERE. 
 
 THE most distinctive poems the most permanently 
 rooted and with heartiest reasoii for being the 
 copious cycle of Arthurian legends, or the almost equally 
 copious Charlemagne cycle, or the poems of the Cid, or 
 Scandinavian Eddas, or Niebelungen, or Chaucer, or 
 Spenser, or Ossian, or Inferno probably had their rise 
 in great historic perturbations, which they came in to sum 
 up and confirm, indirectly embodying results to date. 
 However precious to * culture, the grandest of those poems, 
 it may be said, preserve and typify results offensive to the 
 modern spirit, and long past away. To state it briefly, and 
 taking the strongest examples, in Homer lives the ruthless 
 military prowess of Greece, and of its special god-descended 
 dynastic houses; in Shakspere, the dragon-rancors and 
 stormy feudal splendor of mediaeval caste. 
 
 Poetry, largely considered, is an evolution, sending out 
 improved and ever-expanded types in one sense, the past, 
 even the best of it, necessarily giving place, and dying out. 
 For our existing world, the bases on which all the grand old 
 poems were built have become vacuums and even those of 
 many comparatively modern ones are broken and half-gone. 
 For us to-day, not their own intrinsic value, vast as that is, 
 backs and maintains those poems, but a mountain-high 
 
A THOUGHT. ON SHAKSPERE. 107 
 
 growth of associations, the layers of successive ages. Every 
 where their own lands included (is there not something 
 terrible in the tenacity with which the one book out of mill 
 ions holds its grip ?) the Homeric and Virgilian works, the 
 interminable ballad-romances of the middle ages, the utter 
 ances of Dante, Spenser, and others, are upheld by their 
 cumulus-entrenchment in scholarship, and as precious, 
 always welcome, unspeakably valuable reminiscences. 
 
 Even the one who at present reigns unquestioned of 
 Shakspere for all he stands for so much in modern litera 
 ture, he stands entirely for the mighty aesthetic sceptres of 
 the past, not for the spiritual and democratic, the sceptres 
 of the future. The inward and outward characteristics of 
 Shakspere are his vast and rich variety of persons and 
 themes, with his wondrous delineation of each and all not 
 only limitless funds of verbal and pictorial resource, but 
 great excess, superfcetation mannerism, like a fine, aristo 
 cratic perfume, holding a touch of musk (Euphues, his 
 mark) with boundless sumptuousness and adornment, real 
 velvet and gems, not shoddy nor paste but a good deal of 
 bombast and fustian (certainly some terrific mouthing in 
 Shakspere !) 
 
 Superb and inimitable as all is, it is mostly an objective 
 and physiological kind of power and beauty the soul finds 
 in Shakspere a style supremely grand of the sort, but in 
 my opinion stopping short of the grandest sort, at any rate 
 for fulfilling and satisfying modern and scientific and demo 
 cratic American purposes. Think, not of growths as forests 
 primeval, or Yosemite geysers, or Colorado ravines, but of 
 costly marble palaces, and palace rooms, and the noblest 
 fixings and furniture, and noble owners and occupants to 
 correspond think of carefully built gardens from the 
 beautiful but sophisticated gardening art at its best, with 
 
xo8 A THOUGHT ON SHAKSPERE. 
 
 walks and bowers and artificial lakes, and appropriate statue- 
 groups and the finest roses and lilies and japonicas in plenty 
 and you have the tally of Shakspere. The low characters, 
 mechanics, even the loyal henchmen all in themselves 
 nothing serve as capital foils to the aristocracy. The 
 comedies (exquisite as they certainly are) bringing in 
 admirably portrayed common characters, have the unmis 
 takable hue of plays, portraits, made for the divertisement 
 only of the elite of the castle, and from its point of view. 
 The comedies are altogether non-acceptable to America and 
 Democracy. 
 
 But to the deepest soul, it seems a shame to pick and 
 choose from the riches Shakspere has left us to criticise 
 his infinitely royal, multiform quality to gauge, with optic 
 glasses, the dazzle of his sun-like beams. 
 
 The best poetic utterance, after all, can merely hint, or 
 remind, often very indirectly, or at distant removes. Aught 
 of real perfection, or the solution of any deep problem, or 
 any completed statement of the moral, the true, the beauti 
 ful, eludes the greatest, deftest poet flies away like an 
 always uncaught bird. 
 
WHAT LURKS BEHIND 
 SHAKSPERE S HISTORICAL PLAYS. 
 
 WE all know how much my thus there is in the 
 Shakspere question as it stands to-day. Beneath a 
 few foundations of proved facts are certainly engulfed far 
 more dim and elusive ones, of deepest importance- 
 tantalizing and half suspected suggesting explanations that 
 one dare not put in plain statement. But coming at once 
 to the point, the English historical plays are to me not only 
 the most eminent as dramatic performances (my malurest 
 judgment confirming the impressions of my early years, that 
 the distinctiveness and glory of the Poet reside not in his 
 vaunted dramas of the passions, but those founded on the 
 contests of English dynasties, and the French wars), but 
 form, as we get it all, the chief in a complexity of puzzles. 
 Conceived out of the fullest heat and pulse of European 
 feudalism personifying in unparalleled ways the mediaeval 
 aristocracy, its towering spirit of ruthless and gigantic caste, 
 with its own peculiar air and arrogance, no mere imitation 
 only one of the wolfish earls so plenteous in the plays 
 themselves, or some born descendant and knower, might 
 seem to be the true author of those amazing works works 
 in some respects greater than anything else in recorded 
 literature. 
 
 The start and germ--tock of the pieces en which the 
 
no SHAKSPERES HISTORICAL PLA VS. 
 
 present speculation is founded are undoubtedly (with, at the 
 outset, no small amount of bungling work), in Henry VI. 
 It is plain to me that as profound and forecasting a brain and 
 pen as ever appeared in literature, after floundering some 
 what in the first part of that trilogy or perhaps draughting 
 it more or less experimentally or by accident afterward 
 developed and defined his plan in the Second and Third 
 Parts, and from time to time, thenceforward, systematically 
 enlarged it to majestic and mature proportions in Richard 
 II, Richard III, King John, Henry IV, Henry V, 
 and even in Macbeth and Lear. For it is impossible to 
 grasp the whole cluster of those plays, however wide the 
 intervals and different circumstances of their composition, 
 without thinking of them as, in a free sense, the result of an 
 essentially controlling plan. What was that plan ? Or, 
 rather, what was veiled behind it? for to me there was 
 certainly something so veiled. Even the episodes of Cade, 
 Joan of Arc, and the like (which sometimes seem to me like 
 interpolations allowed), may be meant to foil the possible 
 sleuth, and throw any too cute pursuer off the scent. In 
 the whole matter I should specially dwell on, and make 
 much of, that inexplicable element of every highest poetic 
 nature which causes it to cover up and involve its real 
 purpose and meanings in folded removes and far recesses. 
 Of this trait hiding the nest where common seekers may 
 never find it the Shaksperian works afford the most 
 numerous and marked illustrations known to me. I would 
 even call that trait the leading one through the whole of 
 those works. 
 
 All the foregoing to premise a brief statement of how 
 and where I get my new light on Shakspere. Speaking 
 of the special English plays, my friend William O Connor 
 says : 
 
SUAKSPERE S HISTORICAL PL A VS. 1 1 1 
 
 " They seem simply and rudely historical in their motive, as 
 aiming to give in the rough a tableau of warring dynasties, 
 and carry to me a lurking sense of being in aid of some ulterior 
 design, probably well enough understood in that age, which 
 perhaps time and criticism will reveal Their atmos 
 phere is one of barbarous and tumultuous gloom, they do not 
 make us love the times they limn, .... and it is impossible to 
 believe that the greatest of the Elizabethan men could have 
 sought to indoctrinate the age with the love of feudalism which 
 his own drama in its entirety, if the view taken of it herein be 
 true, certainly and subtly saps and mines." 
 
 Reading the just-specified plays in the light of Mr. 
 O Connor s suggestion, I defy any one to escape such new 
 and deep utterance-meanings, like magic ink, warmed by 
 the fire, and previously invisible. Will it not indeed be 
 strange if the author of Othello and Hamlet is destined 
 to live in America, in a generation or two, less as the 
 cunning draughtsman of the passions, and more as putting 
 on record the first full expose and by far the most vivid 
 one, immeasurably ahead of doctrinaires and economists 
 of the political theory and results which America has come 
 on earth to abnegate and replace ? 
 
 The summary of my suggestion would be, therefore, 
 that while the more the rich and tangled jungle of the 
 Sbaksperian area is traversed and studied, and the more 
 baffled and mixed, as so far appears, becomes the exploring 
 student (who at last surmises everything, and remains 
 certain of nothing), it is possible a future age of criticism, 
 diving deeper, mapping the land and lines freer, com- 
 p!eter than hitherto, may discover in the plays named the 
 scientific (Baconian ?) inauguration of modem Democracy 
 furnishing realistic and first class artistic portraitures of 
 the mediaeval world, the feudal personalities, institutes, in 
 their morbid accumulations, deposits, upon politics and 
 
H2 SlIAKSPERVS HISTORICAL PLA YS. 
 
 sociology, may penetrate to that hard-pan, far down and 
 back of the ostent of to-day, on which (and on which only) 
 the progressism of the last two centuries has built this 
 Democracy which now holds secure lodgment over the 
 whole civilized world. 
 
 Whether such was the unconscious, or (as I think likely) 
 the more or less conscious, purpose of him who fashioned 
 those marvellous architectonics, is a secondary question. 
 
ROBERT BURNS AS POET AND 
 PERSON. 
 
 WHAT the future will decide about Robert Burns and 
 his works what place will be assigned them on 
 that great roster of geniuses and genius which can only be 
 finished by the slow but sure balancing of the centuries 
 with their ample average I of course cannot tell. But as 
 we know him, from his recorded utterances, and after nearly 
 one century, and its diligence of collections, personal songs, 
 letters, anecdotes, presenting the figure of the canny Scotch 
 man in a fullness and detail wonderfully complete, and the 
 lines mainly by his own hand, he forms to-day, in some 
 respects, the most interesting personality among singers. 
 Then there are many things in Burns s poems and character 
 that specially endear him to America. He was essentially 
 a republican would have been at home in the Western 
 United States, and probably become eminent there. He 
 was an average sample of the good-natured, warm-blooded, 
 proud-spirited, amative, alimentive, convivial, young and 
 early-middle-aged man of the decent-born middle classes 
 everywhere and any how. Without the race of which he is 
 a distinct specimen, (and peihaps his poems), America and 
 her powerful democracy could not exist to day could not 
 project with unparalleled historic sway into the future. 
 Perhaps the peculiar coloring of the era of Burns, in the 
 
 8 
 
ii4 ROBER T B URNS. 
 
 world s history, biography and civilization, needs always 
 first to be considered. It included the times of the y6- S3 
 Revolution in America, of the French Revolution, and the 
 unparallel d chaos-development in Europe and elsewhere. 
 In every department, shining and strange names, like stars, 
 some rising, some in meridian, some declining Voltaire, 
 Franklin, Washington, Kant, Goethe, Fulton, Napoleon, 
 mark the era. And while so much, and of moment, fit for 
 the trumpet of the world s fame, was being transacted that 
 little tragi-comedy of R. B. s life and death was going on in 
 a country by-place in Scotland ! 
 
 Burns s correspondence, generally collected and published 
 since his death, gives wonderful glints into both the amiable 
 and weak (and worse than weak) parts of his portraiture, 
 habits, good and bad luck, ambition and associations. His 
 letters to Mrs. Dunlop, Mrs. McLehose, (Clarinda,) Mr. 
 Thomson, Dr. Moore, Robert Muir, Mr. Cunningham, 
 Miss Margaret Chalmers, Peter Hill, Richard Brown, Mrs. 
 Riddel, Robert Ainslie, and Robert Graham, afford valuable 
 lights and shades to the outline, and with numerous others, 
 help to a touch here, and fill-in there, of poet and poems. 
 There are suspicions, it is true, of "the Genteel Letter- 
 Writer," with scraps and words from "the Manual of French 
 Quotations," and, in the love-letters, some hollow mouthings. 
 Yet we wouldn t on any account lack the letters. A full 
 and true portrait is always what is wanted ; veracity at every 
 hazard. Besides, do not we all see by this time that the 
 story of Burns, even for its own sake, requires the record of 
 the whole and several, with nothing left out? Completely 
 and minutely told, it fullest explains and justifies itself (as 
 perhaps almost any life does). He is very close to the 
 earth. He picked up his best words and tunes directly 
 from the Scotch home-singers, but tells Thomson they 
 
ROBERT B URNS. 1 1 5 
 
 would not please his, (T. s), "learned lugs," adding, "I call 
 them simple you would pronounce them silly." As before 
 said, the Scotch idiom was undoubtedly his happiest hit. 
 (Yet Dr. Moore, in 1789, writes to Burns, "If I were to 
 offer an opinion, it would be that in your future productions 
 you should abandon the Scotch stanza and dialect, and 
 adopt the measure and language of modern English 
 poetry " !) 
 
 As the 1 28th birth-anniversary of the poet draws on, 
 (January, 1887) with its increasing club-suppers, vehement 
 celebrations, letters, speeches, and so on (mostly, as 
 William O Connor says, from people who would not have 
 noticed R. B. at all during his actual life, nor kept his 
 company, or read his verses, on any account) it may be 
 opportune to print some leisurely-jotted notes I find in my 
 budget. I take my observation of the Scottish bard by 
 considering him as an individual amid the crowded clusters, 
 galaxies, of the old world and fairly inquiring and sug 
 gesting what out of those myriads he too may be to us, to 
 the Western Republic. In the first place no poet on record 
 so fully bequeaths his own personal magnetism,* nor 
 illustrates more pointedly how one s verses, by time and 
 reading, can so curiously fuse with the versifier s own life 
 and death, and give light and shade to all. 
 
 I would say a large part of the fascination of Burns s 
 
 * Probably no man that ever lived a friend has made the 
 statement \vas so fondly loved, both by men and women, as Robert 
 Burns. The reason is not hard to find : he had a real heart of flesh 
 and blood beating in his bosom ; you could almost hear it throb. 
 "Some one said, that if you had shaken hands with him his hand 
 would have burnt yours. The gods, indeed, made him poetical, but 
 nature had a hand in him first. His heart was in the right place ; 
 he did not pile up cantos of poetic diction j he plucked the moun 
 tain daisy under his feet ; he wrote of a field-mouse hurrying from its 
 
n6 ROBERT BURNS. 
 
 homely, simple, dialect-melodies is due, for all current and 
 future readers, to the poet s personal " errors," the general 
 bleakness of his lot, his ingrained pensiveness, his brief 
 dash into dazzling, tantalizing, evanescent sunshine finally 
 culminating in those last years of his life, his being tabooed 
 and in debt, sick and sore, yawed as by contending gales, 
 deeply dissatisfied with everything, most of all with himself 
 high-spirited too (no man ever really higher-spirited than 
 Robert Burns). I think it a perfectly legitimate part too. 
 At any rate it has come to be an impalpable aroma 
 through which only both the songs and their singer must 
 henceforth be received. Through that view-medium of 
 misfortune of a noble spirit in low environments, and 
 of a squalid and premature death we view the un 
 doubted facts, (giving, as we read them now, a sad 
 kind of pungency,) that Burns s were, before all else, 
 the lyrics of illicit loves and carousing intoxication. 
 Perhaps even it is this strange, impalpable post-mortem 
 comment and influence referred to, that gives them their 
 contrast, attraction, the zest of their author s after fame. If 
 he had lived steady, fat, moral, comfortable, well-to-do 
 years, on his own grade, (let alone, what of course was out 
 of the question, the ease and velvet and rosewood and 
 copious royalties of Tennyson or Victor Hugo or 
 Longfellow), and died well-ripened and respectable, where 
 
 ruined dwelling. He held the plough or the pen with the same firm, 
 manly grasp." And he was loved. The simple roll of the women 
 who gave him their affection and their sympathy would make a long 
 manuscript ; and most of these were of such noble worth that, as 
 Robert Chambers says, " their character may stand as a testimony 
 in favor of that of Burns." [As I understand, the foregoing is from 
 an extremely tare book published by M Kie, in Kilmarnock. I find 
 the whole beautiful paragraph in a capital paper on Burns, by Amelia 
 Barr.] 
 
ROBER T B URNS. 1 1 7 
 
 could have come in that burst of passionate sobbing and 
 remorse which welled forth instantly and generally in 
 Scotland, and soon followed everywhere among English- 
 speaking races, on the announcement of his death, and 
 which, with no sign of stopping, only regulated and veined 
 with fitting appreciation, flows deeply, widely yet ? 
 
 Dear Rob ! manly, witty, fond, friendly, full of weak 
 spots as well as strong ones essential type of so many 
 thousands perhaps the average, as just said, of the decent- 
 born young men and the early mid-aged, not only of the 
 British Isles, but America too, North and South, just the 
 same. I think indeed one best part of Burns is the 
 unquestionable proof he presents of the perennial existence 
 among the laboring classes, especially farmers, of the finest 
 latent poetic elements in their blood. (How clear it is to 
 me that the common soil has always been, and is now, 
 thickly strewn with just such gems.) He is well-called the 
 Ploughman. " Holding the plough," said his brother 
 Gilbert, " was the favorite situation with Robert for poetic 
 compositions, and some of his best verses were produced 
 while he was at that exercise." " I must return to my 
 humble station, and woo my rustic muse in my wonted way, 
 at the plough-tail." 1787, to the Earl of Buchan. He has 
 no high ideal of the poet or the poet s office ; indeed quite 
 a low and contracted notion of both : 
 
 " Fortune ! if thou ll but gie me still 
 Hale breeks, a scone, an whiskey gill, 
 An rowth o rhyme to rave at will, 
 Tak a the rest." 
 
 See also his rhymed letters to Robert Graham, invoking 
 patronage ; " one stronghold," Lord Glencairn, being dead, 
 now these appeals to " Fintra, my other stay," (with in one 
 letter a copious shower of vituperation generally). In his 
 
1 18 ROBERT BURNS. 
 
 collected poems there is no particular unity, nothing th.it 
 can be called a leading theory, no unmistakable spine or 
 skeleton. Perhaps, indeed, their very desultoriness is one 
 charm of his songs : " I take up one or another," he says in 
 a letter to Thomson, "just as the bee of the moment 
 buzzes in my bonnet-lug." 
 
 Consonantly with the customs of the time yet markedly 
 inconsistent in spirit with Burns s own case, (and not a little 
 painful as it remains on record, as depicting some features 
 of the bard himself), the relation called patronage existed 
 between the nobility and gentry on one side, and literary 
 people on the other, and gives one of the strongest side 
 lights to the general coloring of poems and poet. It crops 
 out a good deal in Burns s Letters, and even necessitated a 
 certain flunkeyism on occasions, through life. It probably, 
 with its requirements, (while it helped in money and coun 
 tenance), did as much as any one cause in making that life 
 a chafed and unhappy one, ended by a premature and 
 miserable death. 
 
 Yes, there is something about Burns peculiarly acceptable 
 to the concrete, human points of view. He poetizes work- 
 a-day agricultural labor and life, (whose spirit and sym- 
 p.ithies, as well as practicalities, are much the same every 
 where,) and treats fresh, often coarse, natural occurrences, 
 loves, persons, not like many new and some old poets in a 
 genteel style of gilt and china, or at second or third re 
 moves, but in their own born atmosphere, laughter, sweat, 
 unction. Perhaps no one ever sang " lads and lasses " 
 that universal race, mainly the same, too, all ages, all lands 
 down on their own plane, as he has. The surge and swell 
 of animal appetites, with masculinity over all, is in his 
 utterances from first to last. He exhibits no philosophy 
 worth mentioning ; his morality is hardly more than parrot- 
 
ROBER T B URNS. 1 1 9 
 
 talk not bad or deficient, but cheap, shop-worn, the plati 
 tudes of old aunts and uncles to the youngsters (be good 
 boys and keep your noses clean). Only when he gets at 
 Poosie Nansie s, celebrating the " barley bree," or among 
 tramps, or democratic bouts and drinking generally, 
 
 (" Freedom and whiskey gang thegither,") 
 
 we have, in his own unmistakable color and warmth, those 
 interiors of rake-helly life and tavern fun -the cantabile of 
 jolly beggars in highest jinks lights and groupings of rank 
 glee and brawny amorousness, outvying the best painted 
 pictures of the Dutch school, or any school. 
 
 By America and her democracy, such a poet, I cannot 
 too often repeat, must be kept in loving remembrance ; but 
 it is best that discriminations be made. His admirers, (as 
 at those anniversary suppers, over the " hot Scotch "), will 
 not accept for their favorite anything less than the highest 
 rank, alongside of Homer, Shakspere, etc. Such, in candor, 
 are not the true friends of the Ayrshire bard, who really 
 needs a different place quite by himself. The Iliad and 
 the Odyssey express courage, craft, full-growni heroism in 
 situations of danger, the sense of command and leadership, 
 emulation, the last and fullest evolution of self-poise as in 
 kings, and god-like even while animal appetites. The 
 Shaksperian compositions, on vertebers and framework of 
 the primary passions, portray, (essentially the same as 
 Homer s, and with that certain heroic ecstasy, which, or the 
 suggestion of which, is never absent in the works of the 
 masters I find it plainly in Walter Scott and Tennyson), 
 the spirit and letter of the feudal world, the Norman lord, 
 ambitious and arrogant, taller and nobler than common 
 men with much underplay and gusts of heat and cold, 
 volcanoes and stormy seas Burns, (and some will say to 
 
120 ROBERT BUR NS. 
 
 his credit), attempts none of these themes. He poeliz?s 
 the humor, riotous blood, sulks, amorous torments, fondness 
 for the tavern and for cheap objective nature, with 
 disgust at the grim and narrow ecclesiasticism of his time 
 and land, of a young farmer on a bleak and hired farm in 
 Scotland, through the years and under the circumstances of 
 the British politics of that time, and of his short personal 
 career as author, from 1783 to 1796. He is intuitive and 
 affectionate, and just emerged or emerging from the shackles 
 of the kirk, from poverty, ignorance, and from his own low 
 appetites (out of which latter, however, he never extricated 
 himself). It is to be said that amid not a little smoke and 
 gas in his poems, there is in almost every piece a spark of 
 fire, and now and then the real afflatus. He has been 
 applauded as democratic, and with some warrant; while 
 Shakspere, and with the greatest warrant, has been called 
 monarchical or aristocratic, (which he certainly is). But 
 the splendid personalizations of Shakspere, formulated on 
 the largest, freest, most heroic, most artistic mould, are to 
 me far dearer as lessons, and more precious even as models 
 for Democracy, than the humdrum samples Burns presents. 
 The motives of some of his effusions are certainly discredit 
 able personally one or two of them markedly so. He has, 
 moreover, little or no spirituality. This last is his mortal 
 flaw and defect, tried by highest standards. The ideal he 
 never reached, (and yet I think he leads the way to it). 
 He gives melodies, and now and then the simplest and 
 sweetest ones ; but harmonies, complications, oratorios in 
 words, never. (I do not speak this in any deprecatory 
 sense. Blessed be the memory of the warm-hearted 
 Scotchman for what he has left us, just as it is !) He 
 likewise did not know himself, in more ways than one. 
 Though so really free and independent, he prided himself 
 
ROBER T B URNS. 1 2 1 
 
 in his songs on being a reactionist and a Jacobite on 
 persistent sentimental adherency to the " cause of the 
 Stuarts the weakest, thinnest, most faithless, brainless 
 dynasty that ever held a throne. 
 
 Thus, while Burns is not at all great for New-World study, 
 in the sense that Isaiah and ^Eschylus and the Book of Job 
 are unquestionably great is not to be mentioned with 
 Shakspere hardly even with current Tennyson or our 
 Emerson he has a nestling niche of his own, all fragrant, 
 fond, and quaint and homely a lodge built near but 
 outside the mighty temple of the gods of song and art 
 those universal strivers, through their works of harmony and 
 melody and power, to ever show or intimate man s crown 
 ing, last, victorious fusion in himself of Real and Ideal. 
 Precious, too, fit and precious beyond all singers, high or 
 low will Bums ever be to the native Scotch, especially to 
 the working-classes of North Britain ; so intensely one of 
 them, and so racy of the soil, sights, and local customs. 
 He often apostrophizes Scotland, and is, or would be, 
 enthusiastically patriotic. His country has lately com 
 memorated him in a statue.* His aim is declaredly to be 
 
 * The Dumfries statue of Robert Burns was successfully unveiled 
 April 1 88 1 by Lord Rosebery, the occasion having been made national 
 in its character. Before the ceremony, a large procession paraded the 
 streets of the town, all the trades and societies of that part of Scotland 
 being represented, and at the head of which went dairymen and 
 ploughmen, the former driving their carts and being accompanied by 
 their maids. The statue is of Sicilian marble. It rests on a pedestal 
 of gray stone five feet high. The poet is represented as sitting easily 
 on an old tree root, holding in his left hand a cluster of daisies. His 
 face is turned toward the right shoulder, and the eyes gaze into the 
 di-tance. Near by lie a collie dog, a broad bonnet half covering a 
 well-thumbed song-book, and a rustic flageolet. The costume is taken 
 from the Nasmyth portrait, which has been followed for the features of 
 the face. 
 
122 ROBER1 BURNS. 
 
 1 a Rustic Bard. His poems were all written in youth or 
 young manhood ; (he was little more than a young man 
 when he died). His collected works, in giving everything, 
 are nearly one half first drafts. His brightest hit is his use 
 of the Scotch patois, so full of terms flavored like wild fruit 
 or berries. Then I should make an allowance to Burns 
 which cannot be made for any other poet. Curiously, even 
 the frequent crudeness, haste, deficiencies, (flatness and 
 puerilities by no means absent), prove upon the whole not 
 out of keeping in any comprehensive collection of his 
 works, heroically printed, following copy, every piece, 
 every line according to originals. Other poets might 
 tremble for such boldness, such rawness. In This odd 
 kind chiel such points hardly mar the rest. Not only are 
 they in consonance with the underlying spirit of the pieces, 
 but complete the full abandon and veracity of the farm- 
 fields, and the home-brewed flavor of the Scotch vernacular. 
 (Is there not often something in the very neglect, unfinish, 
 careless nudity, slovenly hiatus, coming from intrinsic 
 genius, and not put on, that secretly pleases the soul more 
 than the wrought and re- wrought polish of the most perfect 
 verse ?) Mark the native spice and untranslatable twang in 
 the very names of his songs " O for ane and twenty, Tarn," 
 " John Barleycorn," " Last May a braw Wooer," " Rattlin 
 roarin Willie," " O wert thou in the cauld, cauld blast," 
 " Gude e en to you, Kimmer," " Merry has I been teething 
 a Heckle," " O lay thy loof in mine, lass," and others. 
 
 The longer and more elaborated poems of Burns are just 
 such as would please a natural but homely taste, and cute 
 but average intellect, and are inimitable in their way. The 
 " Twa Dogs, ; (one of the best), with the conversation 
 between Caesar and Luath, the " Brigs of Ayr," " the Cotter s 
 Saturday Night," " Tarn O Shanter " all will be long read 
 
ROBER I B URNS. 123 
 
 and re-read and admired, and ever deserve to be. With 
 nothing profound in any of them, what there is of moral 
 and plot has an inimitably fresh and racy flavor. If it came 
 to question, Literature could well afford to send adrift many 
 a pretensive poem, and even book of poems, before it could 
 spare these compositions. 
 
 Never indeed was there truer utterance in a certain range 
 of idiosyncracy than by this poet. Hardly a piece of his, 
 large or small, but has " snap " and raciness. He puts in 
 cantering rhyme, (o r ten doggerel), much cutting irony and 
 idiomatic ear-cuffing of the kirk-deacons drily good- 
 natured addresses to his cronies, (he certainly would not 
 stop us if he were here this moment, from classing that " to 
 the De il " among them) " to Mailie and her Lambs," " to 
 auld Mare Maggie," " to a Mouse," 
 
 " Wee, sleekit, cowrin, tim rous beastie : " 
 
 "to a Mountain Daisy," "to a Haggis," "to a Louse," 
 "to the Toothache," &c. and occasionally to his brother 
 bards and lady or gentleman patrons, often with strokes 
 of tenderest sensibility, idiopathic humor, and genuine 
 poetic imagination still oftener with shrewd, original, 
 sheeny, steel-flashes of wit, home-spun sense, or lance- 
 blade puncturing. Then, strangely, the basis of Burns s 
 character, with all its fun and manliness, was hypochondria, 
 the blues, palpable enough in "Despondency," "Man was 
 made to Mourn," " Address to Ruin," a "Bard s Epitaph," 
 &c. From such deep-down elements sprout up, in very 
 contrast and paradox, those riant utterances of which a 
 superficial reading will not detect the hidden foundation. 
 Yet nothing is clearer to me than the black and desperate 
 background behind those pieces as I shall now specify 
 them. I find his most characteristic, Nature s masterly 
 
124 ROBER T B URNS. 
 
 touch and luxuriant life-blood, color and heat, not in "Tarn 
 O Shanter," "the Cotter s Saturday Night," "Scots wha 
 hae," " Highland Mary," " the Twa Dogs," and the like, 
 but in "the Jolly Beggars," Rigs of Barley/ "Scotch 
 Drink," " the Epistle to John Rankine," "Holy Willie s 
 Prayer," and in " Halloween, &c. In these compositions, 
 especially the first, there is much indelicacy, (some editions 
 flatly leave it out), but the composer reigns alone, with 
 handling free and broad and true, and is an artist. You 
 may see and feel the man indirectly in his other verses, all 
 of them, with more or less life-likeness but these I have 
 named last call out pronouncedly in his own voice, 
 
 " I, Rob, am here." 
 
 Finally, in any summing-up of Burns, though so much is 
 to be said in the way of fault-finding, drawing black marks, 
 and doubtless severe literary criticism (in the present out 
 pouring I have kept myself in, rather than allowed any 
 free flow) after full retrospect of his works and life, the 
 "odd-kind chiel " remains to my heart and brain as almost 
 the tenderest, manliest, (even if contradictory), dearest flesh- 
 and-blood figure in all the streams and clusters of by-gone 
 poets. 
 
A WORD ABOUT TENNYSON. 
 
 BEAUTIFUL as the song was, the original Locksley 
 Hall of half a century ago was essentially morbid, 
 heart-broken, finding fault with everything, especially the 
 fact of money s being made (as it ever must be, and perhaps 
 should be) the paramount matter in worldly affairs. 
 
 Every door is barr d with gold, and opens but to golden keys. 
 
 First, a fa. her, having fallen in battle, his child (the singer) 
 
 Was left a trampled orphan, and a selfish uncle s ward. 
 
 Of course love ensues. The woman in the chant or 
 monologue proves a false one ; and as far as appears the 
 ideal of woman, in the poet s reflections, is a false one, at 
 any rate for America. Woman is not the lesser man/ 
 (The heart is not the brain.) The b.st of the piece of fifty 
 years since is its concluding line : 
 
 For the mighty wind arises roaring seaward and I go. 
 
 Then for this current 1886-7, a just-out sequel, which (as 
 an apparently authentic summary says) reviews the life of 
 mankind during the past sixty years, and comes to the con 
 clusion that its boasted progress is of doubtful credit to the 
 world in general and to England in particular. A cynical 
 vein of denunciation of democratic opinions and aspirations 
 
126 A WORD ABOUT TENNYSON. 
 
 runs throughout the poem, in marked contrast with the 
 spirit of the poet s youth. Among the most striking lines 
 of this sequel are the following : 
 
 Envy wears the mask of love, and, laughing sober fact to scorn, 
 Cries to weakest as to strongest, Ye are equals, equal-born. 
 Equal born ! Oh yes, if yonder hill be level with the flat. 
 Charm us, orator, till the lion look no larger than the cat ; 
 Till the cat, through that mirage of overheated language, loom 
 Larger than the lion Demos end in working its own doom. 
 Tumble nature heel o er head, and, yelling with the yelling street, 
 Set the feet above the brain and swear the brain is in the feet. 
 Bring the old Dark Ages back, without the failh, without the hope 
 Beneath the State, the Church, the throne, and roll their ruins 
 down the slope. 
 
 I should say that all this is a legitimate consequence of the 
 tone and convictions of the earlier standards and points of 
 view. Then some reflections, down to the hard-pan of 
 this sort of thing. 
 
 The course of progressive politics (democracy) is so 
 certain and resistless, not only in America but in Europe, 
 that we can well afford the warning calls, threats, checks, 
 neutralizings, in imaginative literature, or any department, 
 of such deep-sounding and high-soaring voices as Carlyle s 
 and Tennyson s. Nay, the blindness, excesses, of the 
 prevalent tendency the dangers of the urgent trends of 
 our times in my opinion, need such voices almost more 
 than any. I should, too, call it a signal instance of demo 
 cratic humanity s luck that it has such enemies to contend 
 with so candid, so fervid, so heroic. But why do I say 
 enemy? Upon the whole is not Tennyson and was not 
 Carlyle (like an honest and stern physician) the true 
 friend of our age ? 
 
 Let me assume to pass verdict, or perhaps momentary 
 
A WORD ABOUT TENNYSON. 127 
 
 judgment, for the United States on this poet a removed 
 and distant position giving some advantages over a nigh 
 one. What is Tennyson s service to his race, times, and 
 especially to America? First, I should say, his personal 
 character. He is not to be mentioned as a rugged, evolu 
 tionary, aboriginal force but (and a great lesson is in it) 
 he has been consistent throughout with the native, per 
 sonal, healthy, patriotic spinal element and promptings of 
 himself. His moral line is local and conventional, but it is 
 vital and genuine. He reflects the upper-crust of his time, 
 its pale cast of thought even its ennui. Then the simile 
 of my friend John Burroughs is entirely true, his glove is 
 a glove of silk, but the hand is a hand of iron. He shows 
 how one can be a royal laureate, quite elegant and 
 aristocratic, and a little queer and affected, and at the 
 same time perfectly manly and natural. As to his non- 
 democracy, it fits him well, and I like him the better for it. 
 I guess we all like to have (I am sure I do) some one who 
 presents those sides of a thought, or possibility, different 
 from our own different, and yet with a sort of home- 
 likeness a tartness and contradiction offsetting the theory 
 as we view it, and construed from tastes and proclivities not 
 all our own. 
 
 To me, Tennyson shows more than any poet I know 
 (perhaps has been a warning to me) how much there is in 
 finest verbalism. There is such a latent charm in mere 
 words, cunning collocutions, and in the voice ringing them, 
 which he has caught and brought out, beyond all others 
 as in the line, 
 
 And hollow, hollow, hollow, all delight, 
 
 in The Passing of Arthur, and evidenced in The Lady 
 cf Shalott, The Deserted House, and many other pieces. 
 
128 A WORD ABOUT 1ENNYSON. 
 
 Among the best (I often linger over them again and again) 
 are Lucretius, The Lotos Eaters, and The Northern 
 Farmer. His mannerism is great, but it is a noble and 
 welcome mannerism. His very best work, to me, is con 
 tained in the books of The Idyls of the King, all of them, 
 and all that has grown out of them. Though indeed we 
 could spare nothing of Tennyson, however small or how 
 ever peculiar not Break, Break, nor Flower in the 
 Crannied Wall nor the old, eternally told passion of 
 Edward Gray; 
 
 Love may come and love may go, 
 And fly like a bird from tree to tree ; 
 
 Tut I will love no more, no more, 
 Till Ellen Adair come back to me. 
 
 Yes, Alfred Tennyson s is a superb character, and will 
 help give illustriousness, through the long roll of time, to 
 our Nineteenth Century. In its bunch of orbic names, 
 shining like a constellation of stars, his will be one of the 
 brightest. His very faults, doubts, swervings, doublings 
 upon himself, have been typical of our age. We are like 
 the voyagers of a ship, casting off for new seas, distant 
 shores. We would still dwell in the old suffocating and 
 dead haunts, remembering and magnifying their pleasant 
 experiences only, and more than once impelled to jump 
 ashore before it is too late, and stay where our fathers 
 stayed, and live as they lived. 
 
 May-be I am non-literary and non-decorous (let me at 
 least be human, and pay part of my debt) in this word 
 about Tennyson. I want him to realize that here is a great 
 and ardent Nation that absorbs his songs, and has a respect 
 and affection for him personally, as almost for no other 
 foreigner, I want this word to go to the old man at 
 
A WORD ABOUT TENNYSON. 129 
 
 Farringford as conveying no more than the simple truth ; 
 and that truth (a little Christmas gift) no slight one either. 
 I have written impromptu, and shall let it all go at that. 
 The readers of more than fifty millions of people in the New 
 AV orld not only owe to him some of their most agreeable 
 and healthy hours, but he has entered into the formative 
 influences of character here, not only in the Atlantic cities, 
 but inland and far West, out in Missouri, in Kansas, and 
 away in Oregon, in farmer s house and miner s cabin. 
 
 Best thanks, anyhow, to Alfred Tennyson thanks and 
 appreciation in America s name. 
 
" HOW I MADE A BOOK." 
 
 MY friends have more than once suggested or maybe 
 the garrulity of advancing age is possessing me 
 ^.ome embryonic facts of " Leaves of Grass," and how I 
 entered upon them. Dr. Bucke has already fully and fairly 
 described the preparation of my poetic field, with the 
 particular and general plowing, planting, seeding and 
 occupation of the ground, till everything was fertilized, 
 rooted and ready to start its own way for good or bad. 
 
 Along in my i6th year I had become possessor of a stout, 
 well-crammed 1000 page octavo volume (I have it yet), 
 containing Walter Scott s poetry entire an inexhaustible 
 mine and treasury of poetic study (especially the endless 
 forests and jungles of notes) has been so to me for fifty 
 years, and remains so to this day. 
 
 Later, at intervals, I used to go off, sometimes for a week 
 at a stretch, down in the country, or to Long Island s 
 seashores there, in the presence of outdoor influences, I 
 went over thoroughly the Old and New Testaments, and 
 absorbed (probably to better advantage for me than in any 
 library or indoor room it makes such difference where 
 you read), Shakspere, Ossian, the best versions I could 
 get of Homer, Kschylus, Sophocles, the old German 
 Nibehmgen, the ancient Hindoo poems and one or two 
 
"HOW 2 MADE A BOOK" 131 
 
 other masterpieces, Dante s among them. As it happened, 
 I read the latter mostly in an old wood. The Iliad 
 (Buckley s prose version) I read first thoroughly on the 
 peninsula of Orient, Northeast end of Long Island, in a 
 sheltered hollow of rocks and sand, with the sea on. each 
 bide. I have wondered since why I was not overwhelmed 
 by those mighty masters. Likely because I read them, as 
 described, in the full presence of nature, under the sun, 
 with the far-spreading landscape and vistas, or the sea 
 rolling in. 
 
 Toward the last I had among much else look d over 
 Kdgar Poe s poems of which I was not an admirer, tho I 
 always saw that beyond their limited range of melody (like 
 perpetual chimes of music bells, ringing from lower b flat 
 up to g) they were expressions, and perhaps never excelled 
 ones, of certain pronounced phases of human morbidity. 
 (The Poetic area is very spacious has so many mansions !) 
 Hut I was repaid in Poe s prose by the idea that (at any 
 rate for our occasion, our day) there can be no such thing 
 as a long poem. The same thought had baen haunting my 
 mind before, but Poe s argument, though short, work d the 
 sum out and proved it to me. 
 
 Another point had an early settlement, clearing the 
 ground greatly. I saw, from the time my enterprise and 
 questionings positively shaped themselves (how best can I 
 express my own era and surroundings, America, Demo 
 cracy ?) that the trunk and centre whence the answer was 
 to radiate, and to which all should return from straying 
 however far a distance, must be an identical body and 
 soul, a Personality which personality, after many consider 
 ations and ponderings I deliberately settled should be 
 myself indeed could not be any other. I felt strongly 
 (whether 1 have shown it or not) that to the true and full 
 
132 "HOW 2 MADE 
 
 estimate of the Present, both the Past and the Future are 
 main considerations. 
 
 These, however, and much more might have gone on and 
 come to naught (almost positively would have come to 
 naught) if a sudden, vast, terrible, direct and indirect 
 stimulus for new and national poetic expression had not 
 been given to me. It is certain, I say, that, although I had 
 made a start before, only from the occurrence of the Seces 
 sion War, and what it show d me by flashes of lightning, 
 with the emotional depths it sounded and arous d (of 
 course, I don t mean in my own heart only, I saw it just as 
 plainly in others, in millions) that only from the strong 
 flare and provocation of that war s sights and scenes, the 
 final reasons-for-being of an autochthonic American song 
 definitely came forth. 
 
 I went down to the war field in Virginia (end of 1862), 
 lived thenceforward in camp saw great battles and the 
 days and nights afterward all the fluctuations, gloom, 
 despair, hopes again arous d, courage evoked death readily 
 risk d the cause^ too along and filling those agonistic and 
 lurid years, 1863-4-5 the real parturition years (more than 
 1776-83) of this henceforth homogeneous Union. Without 
 those three or four years, my " Leaves of Grass/ as they 
 stand, would not now be existing. 
 
 But I set out with the intention also of indicating or hint 
 ing some point-characteristics which I since see (though 1 
 did not then, at least not definitely) were bases and urgings 
 toward those " Leaves " from the first. The word I myself 
 put primarily for the description of them is the word Sug- 
 gestiveness. I round and finish little, if anything ; and 
 could not, consistently with my scheme. The reader will 
 always have his or her part to do, just as much as I have 
 had mine. .1 seek less to state or display any theme or 
 
" HO W I MADE A BOOK" 133 
 
 thought, and more to bring you, reader, into the atmos 
 phere of the theme or thought there to pursue your own 
 flight. 
 
 Another impetus-word is Comradeship as for all lands, 
 and in a more commanding and acknowledged sense than 
 hitherto. Other word-signs would be Good Cheer, Content 
 and Hope. The chief trait of any given poet is always the 
 spirit he brings to the observation of humanity and Nature 
 the mood out of which he contemplates his subjects. 
 What kind of temper and what amount of faith report these 
 things ? Up to how recent a date is the song carried ? 
 What the equipment, and special raciness of the singer 
 what his tinge of coloring ? The last value of artistic 
 expressers, past and present Greek aesthetes, Shakspere, or 
 in our own day Tennyson, Victor Hugo, Carlyle, Emerson 
 is certainly involved in such questions. 
 
 I say the profoundest service that poems or any other 
 writings can do for their reader is not merely to satisfy the 
 intellect or supply something polished and interesting, nor 
 even to depict great passions, or persons or events, but to 
 fill him with vigorous and clean manliness, religiousness, 
 and give him good heart as a radical possession and habit. 
 The educated world seems to have been growing more and 
 more ennuyed for ages, leaving to our time the inheritance 
 of it all. Fortunately there is the original inexhaustible 
 fund of buoyancy, normally resident in the race, forever 
 eligible to be appealed to and relied on. 
 
 As for native American individuality, though certain to 
 contain on a large scale the distinctive and ideal type of 
 Western character (as consistent with the operative political 
 and even money-making features of United States humanity 
 in the Nineteenth Century as chosen knights, gentlemen 
 and warriors were the ideals of the centuries of European 
 
T 3 4 "HOW I MADE A BOOK? 
 
 feudalism) it has not yet appear d. I have allowed the 
 stress of my poems from beginning to end to bear upon 
 American individuality and assist it (not only because that 
 is a great lesson in Nature, amid all her generalizing laws, 
 but as counterpoise to the levelling tendencies of Democracy 
 and for other reasons. 
 
 Defiant of ostensible literary and other conventions I 
 avowedly chant "the great pride of man in himself," and 
 permit it to be more or less a motif of nearly all my verse. 
 I think this pride indispensable to an American. I think it 
 not inconsistent with obedience, humility, deference and 
 self-questioning. 
 
 Democracy has been so retarded and jeopardized by 
 powerful personalities that its first instincts are fain to clip, 
 conform, bring in stragglers and reduce everything to a 
 dead level. While the ambitious thought of my song is to 
 help the forming of a great aggregate nation, it is, perhaps, 
 altogether through the forming of myriads of fully developed 
 and enclosing individuals. Welcome as are equality s and 
 fraternity s doctrines and popular education, a certain 
 liability accompanies them all, as we see. That primal and 
 interior something in man, in his soul s abysms, coloring all, 
 and, by exceptional fruitions, giving the last majesty to him 
 something continually touched upon and attained by the 
 old poems and ballads of feudalism and often the principal 
 foundation of them modern science and democracy appear 
 to be endangering, perhaps eliminating. 
 
 The new influences, upon the whole, are surely preparing 
 the way for grander individualities than ever. To-day and 
 here, personal force is behind everything, just the same. 
 The times and depictions from the Iliad to Shakspere 
 inclusive can happily never again be realized but the 
 elements of courageous and lofty manhood are unchanged. 
 
" nOW I MADE A KOOK." 135 
 
 Thus the working-man and working woman were to be 
 in my pages from first to last. The ranges of heroism and 
 loftiness with which Greek and feudal poets endowed their 
 god-like or lordly born characters indeed prouder and 
 better based and with fuller ranges than those I was to 
 endow the democratic averages of America s men and 
 women. I was to show that we, here and to-day, are 
 eligible to the grandest and the best more eligible now 
 than any times of old were. I will also want my utterances 
 (I said to myself before beginning) to be in spirit the poems 
 of the morning. They were founded and mainly written 
 in the sunny forenoon and early midday of my life. I will 
 want them to be the poems of women entirely as much as 
 men. I have wished to put the complete union of the 
 states in my songs without any partiality whatever. Hence 
 forth, if they live and are read, it must be just as much 
 South as North just as much along the Pacific as Atlantic 
 in the valley of the Mississippi, in Canada, up in Maine, 
 down in Texas and on the shores of Puget Sound. 
 
 From another point of view " Leaves of Grass " is 
 avowedly the song of Sex and Animality though meanings 
 that do not usually go along with those words are behind 
 all, and will duly emerge ; and all are sought to be lifted 
 into a different light and atmosphere. Of this feature, 
 intentionally palpable in a few lines, I shall only say the 
 espousing principle of those few lines so gives breath of life 
 to my whole scheme that the bulk of the pieces might as 
 well have been left unwritten were those lines omitted. 
 
 Difficult as it will be, it has become, in my opinion, im 
 perative to achieve a shifted attitude from superior men 
 and women towards the thought and fact of sexuality, as an 
 element in character, personality, the emotions, and a theme 
 in literature. I am not going to argue the question by 
 
136 " HO W 1 MADE A BOOK." 
 
 itself; it does not stand by itself. The vitality of it is 
 altogether in its relations, bearings, significance like the 
 clef of a symphony. At last analogy the lines I allude to 
 and the spirit in which they are spoken permeate all 
 " Leaves of Grass," and the work must stand or fall with 
 them, as the identified human body and soul must remain 
 as an entirety. 
 
 Universal as are certain facts and symptoms of communi 
 ties or individuals all times, there is nothing so rare in 
 modern conventions and poetry as their normal recognizance. 
 Literature is always calling in the doctor for consultation 
 and confession, and always giving evasions and swathing 
 suppressions in place of that "heroic nudity" ("Nineteenth 
 Century," July, 1883) on which only a genuine diagnosis of 
 serious cases can be built. And in respect to editions of 
 "Leaves of Grass" in time to come (if there should be 
 such) I take occasion now to confirm those lines with the 
 settled convictions and deliberate renewals of thirty years, 
 and to hereby prohibit, as far as word of mine can do so, 
 any elision of them. 
 
 Then still a purpose enclosing all, and over and beneath 
 all. Ever since what might be called thought, or the bud 
 ding of thought, fairly began in my youthful mind I had 
 had a desire to attempt some worthy record of that entire 
 faith and acceptance ("to justify the ways of God to man" 
 is Milton s well-known and ambitious phrase) which is the 
 foundation of moral America. I felt it all as positively 
 then in my young days as I do now in my old ones. To 
 formulate a poem whose every line should directly or 
 indirectly be an implicit belief in the wisdom, health, 
 mystery, beauty of every process, every concrete object, 
 every human or other existence, not only considered from 
 the point of view of all, but of each. While I can not 
 
11 HOW I MADE A BOOK." 137 
 
 understand it or argue it out, I fully believe in each clue 
 and purpose in Nature, entire and several ; and that in 
 visible spiritual results, just as real and definite as the 
 visible, eventuate all concrete life and all materialism, 
 through Time. The book ought to emanate buoyancy and 
 gladness, too, for it was grown out of those elements and 
 has been the comfort of my life since it was originally com 
 menced. I should be willing to jaunt the whole life over 
 again, with all its worldly failures and serious detriments, 
 deficiencies and denials, to get the happiness of retraveling 
 that part of the road. 
 
 One genesis-motive of the verses was my conviction that 
 the crowning growth of the United States is to be spiritual 
 and heroic. To help start and favor that growth or even 
 to call attention to it, or the need of it is the beginning, 
 middle and final purpose of " Leaves of Grass." In fact, 
 when really ciphered out and summed to the last, plowing 
 up in earnest the interminable average fallows of humanity, 
 not " good government " merely, in the common sense, is 
 the justification and main purpose of these States. 
 
 Isolated advantages in any rank or grace or fortune the 
 direct or indirect threads of all the poetry of the past are 
 in my opinion distasteful to the republican genius, and 
 offer no foundation for its fitting verse. Established poems, 
 I know, have the very great advantage of chanting the 
 already performed, so full of glories, reminiscences dear to 
 the minds of men. But my volume is a candidate for the 
 future. "All original art," says Taine, anyhow, "is self- 
 regulated, and no original art can be regulated from with 
 out ; it carries its own counterpoise and does not receive it 
 from elsewhere lives on its own blood " a solace to my 
 frequent bruises and sulky vanity. 
 
 As the present is perhaps mainly an attempt at personal 
 
1 38 " HO W I. MA DE A 
 
 statement or illustration, I will allow myself as further help 
 to extract the following anecdote from a book, " Annals of 
 Old Painters," conned by me in youth. Rubens, the 
 Flemish painter, in one of his wanderings through the 
 galleries of old convents, came across a singular work. 
 After looking at it thoughtfully for a good while, and 
 listening to the criticisms of his suite of students, he said to 
 the latter, in answer to their questions (as to what school 
 the work implied or belonged, etc.) : " I do not believe the 
 artist, unknown and perhaps no longer living, who has 
 given the world this legacy ever belonged to any school, or 
 even painted anything but this one picture, which is a 
 personal affair a piece out of a man s life." 
 
 No one will get at my verses who insists upon viewing 
 them as a literary performance, or attempt at such per 
 formance, or as aiming mainly toward art or sestheticism. 
 I hope to go on record for something different something 
 better, if I may dare to say so. If I rested " Leaves ol 
 Grass " on the usual claims if I did not feel that the 
 deepest moral, social, political purposes of America (aye, of 
 the modern world,) are the underlying endeavors at least of 
 my pages ; that the geography and hydrography of this 
 continent, the Prairies, the St. Lawrence, Ohio, the 
 Carolinas, Texas, Missouri are the real current concrete 1 
 should not dare to have them put in type and printed and 
 offered for sale. 
 
 I say no land or people or circumstances ever existed so 
 needing a race of singers and poems differing from all others 
 and rigidly their own as the land and people and circum 
 stances of our United States need such singers and poems 
 to-day and for the future. Still further, as long as the 
 States continue to absorb and be domiciled by the poetry of 
 the Old World and to remain unsupplied with autochthonous 
 
" HOW I MADE A LOOK? 139 
 
 song, to express, vitalize and give color to and define their 
 material and political success and minister to them dis 
 tinctively, so long will they- stop short of first-class 
 nationality and remain defective. 
 
 I conclude with two items for the imaginative genius of 
 the West, when it worthily rises First, what Herder taught 
 to the young Goethe, that really great poetry is always (like 
 the Homeric or Biblical canticles) the result of a national 
 spirit, and not the privilege of a polished and select few ; 
 second, that the strongest and sweetest songs yet remain to 
 he sunsf. 
 
FIVE THOUSAND POEMS. 
 
 THERE have been collected in a cluster nearly five 
 thousand big and little American poems all that 
 diligent and long-continued research could lay hands on ! 
 The author of Old Grimes is Dead commenced it, more 
 than fifty years ago ; then the cluster was passed on and 
 accumulated by C. F. Harris ; then further passed on and 
 added to by the late Senator Anthony, from whom the 
 whole collection has been bequeathed to Brown University. 
 A catalogue (such as it is) has been made and published of 
 these five thousand poems and is probably the most 
 curious and suggestive part of the whole affair. At any 
 rate it has led me to some abstract reflections like the 
 following. 
 
 I should like, for myself, to put on record my devout ac 
 knowledgment not only of the great masterpieces of the 
 past, but of the benefit of all poets, past and present, and of 
 all poetic utterance in its entirety the dominant moral 
 factor of humanity s progress. In view of that progress and 
 of evolution, the religious and aesthetic elements, the dis 
 tinctive and most important of any, seem to me more 
 indebted to poetry than to all other means and influences 
 combined. In a very profound sense religion is the poetry 
 of humanity. Then the points of union and rapport among 
 all the poems and poets of the world, however wide their 
 
FIVE THOUSAND POEMS. 141 
 
 separations of time and place and theme, are much more 
 numerous and weighty than the points of contrast. With 
 out relation as they may seem at first sight, the whole 
 earth s poets and poetry en masse the Oriental, the 
 Greek, and what there is of Roman the oldest myths the 
 interminable ballad-romances of the Middle Ages the 
 hymns and psalms of worship the epics, plays, swarms of 
 lyrics of the British Islands, or the Teutonic old or new 
 or modern French or what there is in America, Bryant s, 
 for instance, or Whittier s or Longfellow s the verse of all 
 tongues and ages, all forms, all subjects from primitive 
 times to our own day inclusive really combine in one 
 aggregate and electric globe or universe, with all its number 
 less parts and radiations, held together by a common centre 
 or verteber. To repeat it, all poetry thus has (to the point 
 of view comprehensive enough) more features of resem 
 blance than difference, and becomes essentially, like the 
 planetary globe itself, compact and orbic and whole. Even 
 science has sometimes to vail or bow her majestic head to 
 her imaginative sister. That there should be a good deal 
 of waste land and many sterile spots is doubtless an inher 
 ent necessity of the case perhaps that the greater part of 
 the rondure should be waste (at least until brought out, 
 discovered). Nature seems to sow countless seeds makes 
 incessant crude attempts thankful to get now and then, 
 even at rare and long intervals, something approximately 
 good. 
 
NOTES LEFT OVER. 
 
 NATIONALITY (AND YET.) 
 
 IT is more and more clear to me that the main sustenance 
 for highest separate personality, these States, is to 
 come from that general sustenance of the aggregate, (as air, 
 earth, rains, give sustenance to a tree) and that such 
 personality, by democratic standards, will only be fully 
 coherent, grand and free, through the cohesion, grandeur 
 and freedom of the common aggregate, the Union. Thus 
 the existence of the true American continental solidarity of 
 the future, depending on myriads of superb, large-sized, 
 emotional and physically perfect individualities, of one sex- 
 just as much as the other, the supply of such individualities, 
 in my opinion, wholly depends on a compacted imperial 
 ensemble. The theory and practice of both sovereignties, 
 contradictory as they are, are necessary. As the centripetal 
 law were fatal alone, or the centrifugal law deadly and 
 destructive alone, but together forming the law of eternal 
 kosmical action, evolution, preservation, and life so, by 
 itself alone, the fullness of individuality, even the sanest, 
 would surely destroy itself. This is what makes the import 
 ance to the identities of these States of the thoroughly 
 fused, relentless, dominating Union a moral and spiritual 
 idea, subjecting all the parts with remorseless power, more 
 needed by American democracy than by any of history s 
 
NOTES LEFT VER. \ 43 
 
 hitherto empires or feudalities, and the sine qua non of 
 carrying out the republican principle to develop itself in the 
 New World through hundreds, thousands of years to come. 
 
 Indeed, what most needs fostering through the hundred 
 years to come, in all parts of the United States, north, 
 south, Mississippi valley, and Atlantic and Pacific coasts, is 
 this fused and fervent identity of the individual, whoever he 
 or she may be, and wherever the place, with the idea and 
 fact of AMERICAN TOTALITY, and with what is meant by the 
 Flag, the stars and stripes. We need this conviction of 
 nationality as a faith, to be absorb d in the blood and belief 
 of the people everywhere, south, north, west, east, to 
 emanate in their life, and in native literature and art We 
 want the germinal idea that America, inheritor of the past, 
 is the custodian of the future of humanity. Judging from 
 history, it is some such moral and spiritual ideas appropriate 
 to them, (and such ideas only,) that have made the pro 
 found est glory and endurance of nations in the past. The 
 races of Judea, the classic clusters of Greece and Rome, 
 and the feudal and ecclesiastical clusters of the Middle 
 Ages, were each and all vitalized by their separate distinc 
 tive ideas, ingrain d in them, redeeming many sins, and 
 indeed, in a sense, the principal reason-why for their whole 
 career. 
 
 Then, in the thought of nationality especially for the 
 United States, and making them original, and different from 
 all other countries, another point ever remains to be con 
 sidered. There are two distinct principles aye, paradoxes 
 at the life-fountain and life-continuation of the States ; 
 one, the sacred principle of the Union, the right of 
 ensemble, at whatever sacrifice and yet another, an 
 equally sacred principle, the right of each State, consider d 
 as a separate sovereign individual, in its own sphere. Some 
 
144 NOTES LEFT OVER. 
 
 go zealously for one set of these rights, and some as zeal 
 ously for the other set. We must have both ; or rather, 
 bred out of them, as out of mother and father, a third set, 
 the perennial result and combination of both, and neither 
 jeopardized. I say the loss or abdication of one set, in the 
 future, will be ruin to democracy just as much as the loss 
 of the other set. The problem is, to harmoniously adjust 
 the two, and the play of the two. [Observe the lesson of 
 the divinity of Nature, ever checking the excess of one law, 
 by an opposite, or seemingly opposite law generally the 
 other side of the same law.] For the theory of this 
 Republic is, not that the General government is the 
 fountain of all life and power, dispensing it forth, around, 
 and to the remotest portions of our territory, but that THE 
 PEOPLE are, represented in both, underlying both the 
 General and State governments, and consider d just as well 
 in their individualities and in their separate aggregates, or 
 States, as consider d in one vast aggregate, the Union. 
 This was the original dual theory and foundation of the 
 United States, as distinguish d from the feudal and eccle 
 siastical single idea of monarchies and papacies, and the 
 divine right of kings. (Kings have been of use, hitherto, 
 as representing the idea of the identity of nations. But, to 
 American democracy, both ideas must be fulfill d, and in my 
 opinion the loss of vitality of either one will indeed be the 
 loss of vitality of the other.) 
 
 EMERSON S BOOKS, (THE SHADOWS OF THEM.) 
 
 In the regions we call Nature, towering beyond all 
 measurement, with infinite spread, infinite depth and 
 height in those regions, including Man, socially and 
 historically, with his moral-emotional influences how small 
 
NOTES LEFT OVER. 145 
 
 a part, (it came in my mind to-day,) has literature really 
 depicted even summing up all of it, all ages. Seems at 
 its best some little fleet of boats, hugging the shores of 
 a boundless sea, and never venturing, exploring the 
 unmapp d never, Columbus-like, sailing out for New 
 Worlds, and to complete the orb s rondure. Emerson 
 writes frequently in the atmosphere of this thought-, and his 
 books report one or two things from that very ocean and air, 
 and more legibly address d to our age and American polity 
 than by any man yet. But I will begin by scarifying him 
 thus proving that I am not insensible to his deepest lessons. 
 I will consider his books from a democratic and western 
 point of view. I will specify the shadows on these sunny 
 expanses. Somebody has said of heroic character that 
 " wherever the tallest peaks are present, must inevitably be 
 deep chasms and valleys." Mine be the ungracious task 
 (for reasons) of leaving unmention d both sunny expanses 
 and sky-reaching heights, to dwell on the bare spots and 
 darknesses. I have a theory that no artist or work of the 
 very first class may be or can be without them. 
 
 First, then, these pages are perhaps too perfect, too con 
 centrated. (How good, for instance, is good butter, good 
 sugar. But to be eating nothing but sugar and butter all 
 the time ! even if ever so good.) And though the author 
 has much to say of freedom and wildness and simplicity 
 and spontaneity, no performance was ever more based on 
 artificial scholarships and decorums at third or fourth 
 removes, (he calls it culture,) and built up from them. It 
 is always a make t never an unconscious growth. It is the 
 porcelain figure or statuette of lion, or stag, or Indian 
 hunter and a very choice statuette too appropriate for the 
 rosewood or marble bracket of parlor or library ; never the 
 animal itself, or the hunter himself. Indeed, who wants 
 
 10 
 
146 NOTES LEFT OVER. 
 
 the real animal or hunter ? What would that do amid astral 
 and bric-a-brac and tapestry, and ladies and gentlemen talk 
 ing in subdued tones of Browning and Longfellow and art ? 
 The least suspicion of such actual bull, or Indian, or of 
 Nature carrying out itself, would put all those good people 
 to instant terror and flight. 
 
 Emerson, in my opinion, is not most eminent as poet or 
 artist or teacher, though valuable in all those. He is best 
 as critic, or diagnoser. Not passion or imagination or warp 
 or weakness, or any pronounced cause or specialty, 
 dominates him. Cold and bloodless intellectuality dom 
 inates him. (I know the fires, emotions, love, egotisms, 
 glow deep, perennial, as in all New Englanders but the 
 fagade hides them well they give no sign.) He does not 
 see or take one side, one presentation only or mainly, (as 
 all the poets, or most of the fine writers anyhow) he sees 
 all sides. His final influence is to make his students cease 
 to worship anything almost cease to believe in anything, 
 outside of themselves. These books will fill, and well fill, 
 certain stretches of life, certain stages of development are, 
 (like the tenets or theology the author of them preach d 
 when a young man,) unspeakably serviceable and precious 
 as a stage. But in old or nervous or solemnest or dying 
 hours, when one needs the impalpably soothing and vitaliz 
 ing influences of abysmic Nature, or its affinities in litera 
 ture or human society, and the soul resents the keenest 
 mere intellection, they will not be sought for. 
 
 For a philosopher, Emerson possesses a singularly 
 dandified theory of manners. He seems to have no notion 
 at all that manners are simply the signs by which the 
 chemist or metallurgist knows his metals. To the profound 
 scientist, all metals are profound, as they really are. The 
 little one, like the conventional world, will make much 
 
NOTES LEFT OVER. 147 
 
 of gold and silver only. Then to the real artist in 
 humanity, what are called bad manners are often the most 
 picturesque and significant of all. Suppose these books 
 becoming absorb d, the permanent chyle of American 
 general and particular character what a well-wash d and 
 grammatical, but bloodless and helpless, race we should 
 turn out ! No, no, dear friend ; though the States want 
 scholars, undoubtedly, and perhaps want ladies and gentle 
 men who use the bath frequently, and never laugh loud, or 
 talk wrong, they don t want scholars, or ladies and gentle 
 men, at the expense of all the rest. They want good 
 farmers, sailors, mechanics, clerks, citizens perfect busi 
 ness and social relations perfect fathers and mothers. If 
 we could only have these, or their approximations, 
 plenty of them, fine and large and sane and generous and 
 patriotic, they might make their verbs disagree from their 
 nominatives, and laugh like volleys of musketeers, if they 
 should please. Of course these are not all America wants, 
 but they are first of all to be provided on a large scale. 
 And, with tremendous errors and escapades, this, sub 
 stantially, is what the States seem to have an intuition of, 
 and to be mainly aiming at. The plan of a select class, 
 superfined, (demarcated from the rest,) the plan of Old 
 World lands and literatures, is not so objectionable in itself, 
 but because it chokes the true plan for us, and indeed is 
 death to it. As to such special class, the United States can 
 never produce any equal to the splendid show, (far, far 
 beyond comparison or competition here,) of the principal 
 European nations, both in the past and at the present day. 
 But an immense and distinctive commonalty over our vast 
 and varied area, west and east, south and north in fact, 
 for the first time in history, a great, aggregated, real 
 PEOPLE, worthy the name, and made of develop d heroic 
 
148 NOTES LEFT OVER. 
 
 individuals, both sexes is America s principal, perhaps 
 only, reason for being. If ever accomplish d, it will be at 
 least as much, (I lately think, doubly as much,) the result 
 of fitting and democratic sociologies, literatures and arts 
 if we ever get them as of our democratic politics. 
 
 At times it has been doubtful to me if Emerson really 
 knows or feels what Poetry is at its highest, as in the Bible, 
 for instance, or Homer or Shakspere. I see he covertly or 
 plainly likes best superb verbal polish, or something old or 
 odd Waller s "Go, lovely rose," or Lovelace s lines "to 
 Lucusta " the quaint conceits of the old French bards, and 
 the like. Of power he seems to have a gentleman s admir 
 ation but in his inmost heart the grandest attribute of 
 God and Poets is always subordinate to the octaves, con 
 ceits, polite kinks, and verbs. 
 
 The reminiscence that years ago I began like most 
 youngsters to have a touch (though it came late, and was 
 only on the surface) of Emerson-on-the-brain that I 
 read his writings reverently, and address d him in print as 
 " Master," and for a month or so thought of him as such 
 I retain not only with composure, but positive satisfaction. 
 I have noticed that most young people of eager minds pass 
 through this stage of exercise. 
 
 The best part of Emersonianism is, it breeds the giant 
 that destroys itself. Who wants to be any man s mere 
 follower? lurks behind every page. No teacher ever 
 taught, that has so provided for his pupil s setting up 
 independently no truer evolutionist. 
 
 VENTURES, ON AN OLD THEME. 
 
 A DIALOGUE One party says We arrange our lives 
 even the best and boldest men and women that exist, just 
 
NOTES LEFT OVER. 149 
 
 as much as the most limited with reference to what society 
 conventionally rules and makes right. We retire to our 
 rooms for freedom ; to undress, bathe, unloose everything 
 in freedom. These, and much else, would not be proper 
 in society. 
 
 Other party answers Such is the rule of society. Not 
 always so, and considerable exceptions still exist. How 
 ever, it must be called the general rule, sanction d by 
 immemorial usage, and will probably always remain so. 
 First party Why, not, then, respect it in your poems ? 
 Answer One reason, and to me a profound one, is that 
 the soul of a man or woman demands, enjoys compensa 
 tion in the highest directions for this very restraint of 
 himself or herself, level d to the average, or rather mean, 
 low, however eternally practical, requirements of society s 
 intercourse. To balance this indispensable abnegation, the 
 free minds of poets relieve themselves, and strengthen and 
 enrich mankind with free flights in all the directions not 
 tolerated by ordinary society. 
 
 First parly But must not outrage or give offence to it. 
 Answer No, not in the deepest sense and do not, and 
 cannot. The vast averages of time and the race en masse 
 settle these things. Only understand that the conventional 
 standards and laws proper enough for ordinary society 
 apply neither to the action of the soul, nor its poets. In 
 fact the latter know no laws but the laws of themselves, 
 planted in them by God, and are themselves the last 
 standards of the law, and its final exponents responsible to 
 Him directly, and not at all to mere etiquette. Often the best 
 service that can be done to the race, is to lift the veil, at 
 least for a time, from these rules and fossil-etiquettes. 
 
 NEW POETRY California, Canada, Texas In my 
 opinion the time has arrived to essentially break down the 
 
ISO NO TES LEFT O VER. 
 
 barriers of form between prose and poetry. I say the 
 latter is henceforth to win and maintain its character 
 regardless of rhyme, and the measurement-rules of iambic, 
 spondee, dactyl, &c., and that even if rhyme and those 
 measurements continue to furnish the medium for inferior 
 writers and themes, (especially for persiflage and the comic, 
 as there seems henceforward, to the perfect taste, some 
 thing inevitably comic in rhyme, merely in itself, and any 
 how,) the truest and greatest Poetry, (while subtly and 
 necessarily always rhythmic, and distinguishable easily 
 enough,) can never again, in the English language, be ex- 
 press d in arbitrary and rhyming metre, any more than the 
 greatest eloquence, or the truest power and passion. While 
 admitting that the venerable and heavenly forms of chiming 
 versification have in their time play d great and fitting 
 parts that the pensive complaint, the ballads, wars, 
 amours, legends of Europe, &c., have, many of them, been 
 inimitably render d in rhyming verse that there have been 
 very illustrious poets whose shapes the mantle of such verse 
 has beautifully and appropriately envelopt and though the 
 mantle has fallen, with perhaps added beauty, on some of 
 our own age it is, notwithstanding, certain to me, that the 
 day of such conventional rhyme is ended. In America, at 
 any rate, and as a medium of highest aesthetic 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 
 
NO TES LEFT O VER. 1 5 * 
 
 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 some 
 times 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. Who wants a glorification of 
 courage and manly defiance from a coward or a sneak ? 
 a ballad of benevolence or chastity from some rhyming 
 hunks, or lascivious, glib roue ? 
 
 In these States, beyond all precedent, poetry will have to 
 do with actual facts, with the concrete States, and for we 
 have not much more than begun with the definitive 
 getting into shape of the Union. Indeed I sometimes 
 think // alone is to define the Union, (namely, to give it 
 artistic character, spirituality, dignity.) What American 
 humanity is most in danger of is an overwhelming prosperity, 
 " business " worldliness, materialism : what is most lacking, 
 east, west, north, south, is a fervid and glowing Nationality 
 and patriotism, cohering all the parts into one. Who may 
 fend that danger, and fill that lack in the future, but a class 
 of loftiest poets ? 
 
152 NOTES LEFT OVER. 
 
 If the United States havn t grown poets, on any scale of 
 grandeur, it is certain they import, print, and read more 
 poetry than any equal number of people elsewhere 
 probably more than all the rest of the world combined. 
 
 Poetry (like a grand personality) is a growth of many 
 generations many rare combinations. 
 
 To have great poets, there must be great audiences, too. 
 
 BRITISH LITERATURE. 
 
 To avoid mistake, I would say that I not only commend 
 the study of this literature, but wish our sources of supply 
 and comparison vastly enlarged. American students may 
 well derive from all former lands from forenoon Greece 
 and Rome, down to the perturb d medieval times, the 
 Crusades, and so to Italy, the German intellect all the 
 older literatures, and all the newer ones from witty and 
 warlike France, and markedly, and in many ways, and at 
 many different periods, from the enterprise and soul of the 
 great Spanish race bearing ourselves always courteous, 
 always deferential, indebted beyond measure to the mother- 
 world, to all its nations dead, as all its nations living the 
 offspring, this America of ours, the daughter, not by any 
 means of the British isles exclusively, but of the continent, 
 and all continents. Indeed, it is time we should realize 
 and fully fructify those germs we also hold from Italy, 
 France, Spain, especially in the best imaginative produc 
 tions 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 
 
NO TES LEFT O VER. 1 5 3 
 
 genius, first class, entirely fit for feudalism. His contribu 
 tions, 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, uncom 
 promising 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 ot the 
 continent, as the Cid, Cervantes Don Quixote, &c., I 
 should say they substantially adjust themselves to us, and, 
 far off as they are, accord curiously with our bed and board 
 to day, in New York, Washington, Canada, Ohio, Texas, 
 California and with our notions, both of seriousness and 
 of fun, and our standards of heroism, manliness, and even 
 the democratic requirements those requirements are not 
 only not fulfilled in the Shaksperian productions, but are 
 insulted on every page. 
 
 I add that while England is among the greatest of lands 
 in political freedom, or the idea of it, and in stalwart 
 personal character, &c. the spirit of English literature is 
 not great, at least is not greatest and its products are no 
 models for us. With the exception of Shakspere, there is no 
 first-class genius in that literature which, with a truly vast 
 
i54 NOTES LEFT OVER. 
 
 amount of value, and of artificial beauty, (largely from the 
 classics,) is almost always material, sensual, not spiritual 
 almost always congests, makes plethoric, not frees, expands, 
 dilates is cold, anti-democratic, loves to be sluggish and 
 stately, and shows much of that characteristic of vulgar 
 persons, the dread of saying or doing something not at all 
 improper in itself, but unconventional, and that may be 
 laugh d at. In its best, the sombre pervades it ; it is 
 moody, melancholy, and, to give it its due, expresses, in 
 characters and plots, those qualities, in an unrival d manner. 
 Yet not as the black thunderstorms, and in great normal, 
 crashing passions, of the Greek dramatists clearing the air, 
 refreshing afterward, bracing with power ; but as in 
 Hamlet, moping, sick, uncertain, and leaving ever after a 
 secret taste for the blues, the morbid fascination, the luxury 
 of wo. . . . 
 
 I strongly recommend all the young men and young 
 women of the United States to whom it may be eligible, to 
 overhaul the well-freighted fleets, the literatures of Italy, 
 Spain, France, Germany, so full of those elements of 
 freedom, self-possession, gay-heartedness, subtlety, dilation, 
 needed in preparations for the future of the States. I only 
 wish we could have really good translations. I rejoice at 
 the feeling for Oriental researches and poetry, and hope it 
 will go on. 
 
 DARWINISM (THEN FURTHERMORE.) 
 
 Running through prehistoric ages coming down from 
 them into the daybreak of our records, founding theology, 
 suffusing literature, and so brought onward (a sort of 
 verteber and marrow to all the antique races and lands, 
 Egypt, India, Greece, Rome, the Chinese, the Jews, &c., 
 
NOTES LEFT OVER. 155 
 
 and giving cast and complexion to their art, poems, and 
 their politics as well as ecclesiasticism, all of which we more 
 or less inherit,) appear those venerable claims to origin 
 from God himself, or from gods and goddesses ancestry 
 from divine beings of vaster beauty, size, and power than 
 ours. But in current and latest times, the theory of human 
 origin that seems to have most made its mark, (curiously 
 reversing the antique,) is that we have come on, originated, 
 developt, from monkeys, baboons a theory more significant 
 perhaps in its indirections, or what it necessitates, than it is 
 even in itself. (Of the twain, far apart as they seem, and 
 angrily as their conflicting advocates to-day oppose each 
 other, are not both theories to be possibly reconciled, and 
 even blended ? Can we, indeed, spare either of them ? 
 Better still, out of them is not a third theory, the real one, 
 or suggesting the real one, to arise ?) 
 
 Of this old theory, evolution, as broach d anew, trebled, 
 with indeed all-devouring claims, by Darwin, it has so much 
 in it, and is so needed as a counterpoise to yet widely 
 prevailing and unspeakably tenacious, enfeebling super 
 stitions is fused, by the new man, into such grand, modest, 
 truly scientific accompaniments that the world of eru 
 dition, both moral and physical, cannot but be eventually 
 better d and broaden d in its speculations, from the advent 
 of Darwinism. Nevertheless, the problem of origins, 
 human and other, is not the least whit nearer its solution. 
 In due time the Evolution theory will have to abate its 
 vehemence, cannot be allow d to dominate every thing else, 
 and will have to take its place as a segment of the circle, 
 the cluster as but one of many theories, many thoughts, 
 of profoundest value and re-adjusting and differentiating 
 much, yet leaving the divine secrets just as inexplicable and 
 un reach able as before may-be more so. 
 
156 NOTES LEFT OVER. 
 
 Then furthermore What is finally to be done by priest 
 or poet and by priest or poet only amid all the 
 stupendous and dazzling novelties of our century, with the 
 advent of America, and of science and democracy remains 
 just as indispensable, after all the work of the grand 
 astronomers, chemists, linguists, historians, and explorers of 
 the last hundred years and the wondrous German and 
 other metaphysicians of that time and will continue to 
 remain, needed, America and here, just the same as in the 
 world of Europe, or Asia, of a hundred, or a thousand, or 
 several thousand years ago. I think indeed more needed, 
 to furnish statements from the present points, the added 
 arriere, and the unspeakably immenser vistas of to-day. 
 Only the priests and poets of the modern, at least as exalted 
 as any in the past, fully absorbing and appreciating the 
 results of the past, in the commonalty of all humanity, all 
 time, (the main results already, for there is perhaps nothing 
 more, or at any rate not much, strictly new, only more 
 important modern- combinations, and new relative adjust 
 ments,) must indeed recast the old metal, the already 
 achiev d material, into and through new moulds, current 
 forms. 
 
 Meantime, the highest and subtlest and broadest truths 
 of modern science wait for their true assignment and last 
 vivid flashes of light as Democracy waits for it s through 
 first-class metaphysicians and speculative philosophs 
 laying the basements and foundations for those new, 
 more expanded, more harmonious, more melodious, freer 
 American poems. 
 
 "SOCIETY." 
 
 I have myself little or no hope from what is technically 
 called "Society" in our American cities. New York, of 
 
NOTES LEFT OVER. 157 
 
 which place I have spoken so sharply, still promises some 
 thing, in time, out of its tremendous and varied materials, 
 with a certain superiority of intuitions, and the advantage of 
 constant agitation, and ever new and rapid dealings of the 
 cards. Of Boston, with its circles of social mummies, swathed 
 in cerements harder than brass its bloodless religion, 
 (Unitarianism,) its complacent vanity of scientism and 
 literature, lots of grammatical correctness, mere knowledge, 
 (always wearisome, in itself) its zealous abstractions, ghosts 
 of reforms I should say, (ever admitting its business 
 powers, its sharp, almost demoniac, intellect, and no lack, 
 in its own way, of courage and generosity) there is, at 
 present, little of cheering, satisfying sign. In the West, 
 California, &c., " society " is yet unform d, puerile, seemingly 
 unconscious of anything above a driving business, or to 
 liberally spend the money made by it, in the usual rounds 
 and shows. 
 
 Then there is, to the humorous observer of American 
 attempts at fashion, according to the models of foreign 
 courts and saloons, quite a comic side particularly visible 
 at Washington city a sort of high-life-below-stairs business. 
 As if any farce could be funnier, for instance, than the 
 scenes of the crowds, winter nights, meandering around our 
 Presidents and their wives, cabinet officers, western or other 
 Senators, Representatives, &c. ; born of good laboring me 
 chanic or farmer stock and antecedents, attempting tljose 
 full-dress receptions, finesse of parlors, foreign ceremonies, 
 etiquettes, &c. 
 
 Indeed, consider d with any sense of propriety, or any 
 sense at all, the whole of this illy-play d fashionable play 
 and display, with their absorption of the best part of our 
 wealthier citizens time, money, energies, &c., is ridiculously 
 out of place in the United States. As if our proper man 
 
158 NOTES LEFT OVER. 
 
 and woman, (far, far greater words than " gentleman" and 
 "lady,") could still fail to see, and presently achieve, not 
 this spectral business, but something truly noble, active, sane, 
 American by modes, perfections of character, manners, 
 costumes, social relations, &c., adjusted to standards, far, 
 far different from those. 
 
 Eminent and liberal foreigners, British or continental, 
 must at times have their faith fearfully tried by what they see 
 of our New World personalities. The shallowest and least 
 American persons seem surest to push abroad, and call 
 without fail on well-known foreigners, who are doubtless 
 affected with indescribable qualms by these queer ones. 
 Then, more than half of our authors and writers evidently 
 think it a great thing to be aristocratic," and sneer at pro 
 gress, democracy, revolution, &c. If some international 
 literary snobs gallery were establish d, it is certain that 
 America could contribute at least her full share of the 
 portraits, and some very distinguish d ones. Observe that 
 the most impudent slanders, low insults, &c., on the great 
 revolutionary authors, leaders, poets, &c., of Europe, have 
 their origin and main circulation in certain circles here. 
 The treatment of Victor Hugo living, and Byron dead, are 
 samples. Both deserving so well of America, and both per 
 sistently attempted to be soil d here by unclean birds, male 
 and female. 
 
 Meanwhile I must still offset the like of the foregoing, and 
 all it infers, by the recognition of the fact, that while the 
 surfaces of current society here show so much that is dismal, 
 noisome, and vapory, there are, beyond question, inexhaust 
 ible supplies, as of true gold ore, in the mines of America s 
 general humanity. Let us, not ignoring the dross, give fit 
 stress to these precious immortal values also. Let it be 
 distinctly admitted, that whatever may be said of our 
 
NOTES LEFT OVER. 159 
 
 fashionable society, and of any foul fractions and episodes 
 only here in America, out of the long history and manifold 
 presentations of the ages, has at last arisen, and now stands, 
 what never before took positive form and sway, the People 
 and that view d en masse, and while fully acknowledging 
 deficiencies, dangers, faults, this people, inchoate, latent, not 
 yet come to majority, nor to its own religious, literary, or 
 aesthetic expression, yet affords, to-day, an exultant justifi 
 cation of all the faith, all the hopes and prayers and 
 prophecies of good men through the past the stablest, 
 solidest-based government of the world the most assured 
 in a future the beaming Pharos to whose perennial light all 
 earnest eyes, the world over, are tending and that already, 
 in and from it, the democratic principle, having been 
 mortally tried by severest tests, fatalities of war and peace, 
 now issues from the trial, unharm d, trebly-invigorated, 
 perhaps to commence forthwith its finally triumphant march 
 around the globe. 
 
 THE TRAMP AND STRIKE QUESTIONS. 
 
 Part of a Lecture proposed, (never deliver d.) 
 
 Two grim and spectral dangers dangerous to peace, to 
 health, to social security, to progress long known in con 
 crete to the governments of the Old World, and there 
 eventuating, more than once or twice, in dynastic overturns, 
 bloodshed, days, months, of terror seem of late years to be 
 nearing the New World, nay, to be gradually establishing 
 themselves among us. What mean these phantoms here ? 
 (I personify them in fictitious shapes, but they are very 
 real.) Is the fresh and broad demesne of America destined 
 also to give them foothold and lodgment, permanent 
 domicile ? 
 
1 60 NO TES LEFT O VER. 
 
 Beneath the whole political world, what most presses and 
 perplexes to-day, sending vastest results affecting the future, 
 is not the abstract question of democracy, but of social and 
 economic organization, the treatment of working-people by 
 employers, and all that goes along with it not only the 
 wages-payment part, but a certain spirit and principle, to 
 vivify anew these relations ; all the questions of progress, 
 strength, tariffs, finance, &c., really evolving themselves 
 more or less directly out of the Poverty Question, ("the 
 Science of Wealth," and a dozen other names are given it, 
 but I prefer the severe one just used.) I will begin by 
 calling the reader s attention to a thought upon the matter 
 which may not have struck you before the wealth of the 
 civilized world, as contrasted with its poverty what does it 
 derivatively stand for, and represent ? A rich person ought 
 to have a strong stomach. As in Europe the wealth of 
 to-day mainly results from, and represents, the rapine, 
 murder, outrages, treachery, hoggishness, of hundreds of 
 years ago, and onward, later, so in America, after the same 
 token (not yet so bad, perhaps, or at any rate not so 
 palpable we have not existed long enough but we seem 
 to be doing our best to make it up.) 
 
 Curious as it may seem, it is in what are call d the 
 poorest, lowest characters you will sometimes, nay generally, 
 find glints of the most sublime virtues, eligibilities, 
 heroisms. Then it is doubtful whether the State is to be 
 saved, either in the monotonous long run, or in tremendous 
 special crises, by its good people only. When the storm is 
 deadliest, and the disease most imminent, help often 
 comes from strange quarters (the homoeopathic motto, you 
 remember, cure the bite ivith a hair of the same dog.) 
 
 The American Revolution of 1776 was simply a great 
 strike, successful for its immediate object but whether a 
 
NOTES LEFT OVER. 161 
 
 real success judged by the scale of the centuries, and the 
 long-striking balance of Time, yet remains to be settled. 
 The French Revolution was absolutely a strike, and a very 
 terrible and relentless one, against ages of bad pay, unjust 
 division of wealth-products, and the hoggish monopoly of a 
 few, rolling in superfluity, against the vast bulk of the work 
 people, living in squalor. 
 
 If the United States, like the countries of the Old World, 
 are also to grow vast crops of poor, desperate, dissatisfied, 
 nomadic, miserably-waged populations, such as we see 
 looming upon us of late years steadily, even if slowly, 
 eating into them like a cancer of lungs or stomach then 
 our republican experiment, notwithstanding all its surface- 
 successes, is at heart an unhealthy failure. 
 
 Feb., 79. I saw to-day a sight I had never seen before 
 and it amazed, and made me serious ; three quite good- 
 looking American men, of respectable personal presence, 
 two of them young, carrying chiffonier-bags on their 
 shoulders, and the usual long iron hooks in their hands, 
 plodding along, their eyes cast down, spying for scraps, 
 rags, bones, &c. 
 
 DEMOCRACY IN THE NEW WORLD, 
 
 estimated and summ d-up to-day, having thoroughly justified 
 itself the past hundred years, (as far as growth, vitality and 
 power are concern d,) by severest and most varied trials of 
 peace and war, and having establish d itself for good, with 
 all its necessities and benefits, for time to come, is now to 
 be seriously consider d also in its pronounc d and already 
 developt dangers. While the battle was raging, and the 
 result suspended, all defections and criticisms were to be 
 hush d, and everything bent with vehemence unmitigated 
 
 ii 
 
162 NOTES LEFT OVER. 
 
 toward the urge of victory. But that victory settled, new 
 responsibilities advance. I can conceive of no better 
 service in the United States, henceforth, by democrats of 
 thorough and heart- felt faith, than boldly exposing the 
 weakness, liabilities and infinite corruptions of democracy. 
 By the unprecedented opening-up of humanity en-masse in 
 the United States, the last hundred years, under our institu 
 tions, not only the good qualities of the race, but just as 
 much the bad ones, are prominently brought forward. Man 
 is about the same, in the main, whether with despotism, or 
 whether with freedom. 
 
 " The ideal form of human society," Canon Kingsley 
 declares, "is democracy. A nation and were it even 
 possible, a whole world of free men, lifting free foreheads 
 to God and Nature ; calling no man master, for One is 
 their master, even God ; knowing and doing their duties 
 toward the Maker of the universe, and therefore to each 
 other ; not from fear, nor calculation of profit or loss, but 
 because they have seen the beauty of righteousness, and 
 trust, and peace ; because the law of God is in their hearts. 
 Such a nation such a society what nobler conception of 
 moral existence can we form ? Would not that, indeed, be 
 the kingdom of God come on earth ? " 
 
 To this faith, founded in the ideal, let us hold and 
 never abandon or lose it. Then what a spectacle is 
 practically exhibited by our American democracy to-day ! 
 
 FOUNDATION STAGES THEN OTHERS. 
 
 Though I think I fully comprehend the absence of moral 
 tone in our current politics and business, and the almost 
 entire futility of absolute and simple honor as a counterpoise 
 against the enormous greed for worldly wealth, with the 
 
NOTES LEFT OVER. 163 
 
 trickeries of gaining it, all through society our day, I still do 
 not share the depression and despair on the subject which I 
 find possessing many good people. The advent of America, 
 the history of the past century, has been the first general 
 aperture and opening-up to the average human commonalty, 
 on the broadest scale, of the eligibilities to wealth and 
 worldly success and eminence, and has been fully taken 
 advantage of ; and the example has spread hence, in ripples, 
 to all nations. To these eligibilities to this limitless aper 
 ture, the race has tended, en-masse, roaring and rushing and 
 crude, and fiercely, turbidly hastening and we have seen 
 the first stages, and are now in the midst of the result of it 
 all, so far. But there will certainly ensue other stages, and 
 entirely different ones. In nothing is there more evolution 
 than the American mind. Soon, it will be fully realized that 
 ostensible wealth and money-making, show, luxury, &c., 
 imperatively necessitate something beyond namely, the 
 sane, eternal moral and spiritual-esthetic attributes, elements. 
 (We cannot have even that realization on any less terms than 
 the price we are now paying for it.) Soon, it will be under 
 stood clearly, that the State cannot flourish, (nay, cannot 
 exist,) without those elements. They will gradually enter 
 into the chyle of sociology and literature. They will 
 finally make the blood and brawn of the best American 
 individualities of both sexes and thus, with them, to a 
 certainty, (through these very processes of to-day, ) dominate 
 the New World. 
 
 GENERAL SUFFRAGE, ELECTIONS, &c. 
 
 It still remains doubtful to me whether these will ever 
 secure, officially, the best wit and capacity whether, through 
 them, the first-class genius of America will ever personally 
 
1 64 NOTES LEFT O VER. 
 
 appear in the high political stations, the Presidency, Congress, 
 the leading State offices, &c. Those offices, or the candidacy 
 for them, arranged, won, by caucusing, money, the favoritism 
 or pecuniary interest of rings, the superior manipulation of 
 the ins over the outs, or the outs over the ins, are, indeed, 
 at best, the mere business agencies of the people, are useful 
 as formulating, neither the best and highest, but the average 
 of the public judgment, sense, justice, (or sometimes want of 
 judgment, sense, justice.) We elect Presidents, Congress 
 men &c., not so much to have them consider and decide for 
 us, but as surest practical means of expressing the will of 
 majorities on mooted questions, measures, &c. 
 
 As to general suffrage, after all, since we have gone so far, 
 the more general it is, the better. I favor the widest opening 
 of the doors. Let the ventilation and area be wide enough, 
 and all is safe. We can never have a born penitentiary-bird, 
 or panel-thief, or lowest gambling-hell or groggery keeper, 
 for President though such may not only emulate, but get, 
 high offices from localities even from the proud and wealthy 
 city of New York. 
 
 WHO GETS THE PLUNDER? 
 
 The protectionists are fond of flashing to the public eye 
 the glittering delusion of great money-results from manu 
 factures, mines, artificial exports so many millions from this 
 source, and so many from that such a seductive, unanswer 
 able show an immense revenue of annual cash from iron, 
 cotton, woollen, leather goods, and a hundred other things, 
 all bolstered up by protection." But the really important 
 point of all is, into whose pockets does this plunder really go ? 
 It would be some excuse and satisfaction if even a fair 
 proportion of it went to the masses of laboring-men 
 
NOTES LEFT OVER. 165 
 
 resulting in homesteads to such, men, women, children 
 myriads of actual homes in fee simple, in every State, (not 
 the false glamour of the stunning wealth reported in the 
 census, in the statistics, or tables in the newspapers,) but a 
 fair division and generous average to those workmen and 
 workwomen that would be something. But the fact itself 
 is nothing of the kind. The profits of "protection" go 
 altogether to a few score select persons who, by favors of 
 Congress, State legislatures, the banks, and other special 
 advantages, are forming a vulgar aristocracy, full as bad as 
 anything in the British or European castes, of blood, or the 
 dynasties there of the past. As Sismondi pointed out, the 
 true prosperity of a nation is not in the great wealth of a 
 special class, but is only to be really attain d in having the 
 bulk of the people provided with homes or land in fee 
 simple. This may not be the best show, but it is the best 
 reality. 
 
 FRIENDSHIP, (THE REAL ARTICLE.) 
 
 Though Nature maintains, and must prevail, there will 
 always be plenty of people, and good people, who cannot, 
 or think they cannot, see anything in that last, wisest, most 
 envelop d of proverbs, " Friendship rules the World." 
 Modern society, in its largest Vein, is essentially intellectual, 
 infidelistic secretly admires, and depends most on, pure 
 compulsion or science, its rule and sovereignty is, in short, 
 in "cultivated" quarters, deeply Napoleonic. 
 
 " Friendship," said Bonaparte, in one of his lightning- 
 flashes of candid garrulity, "Friendship is but a name. I 
 love no one not even my brothers ; Joseph perhaps a 
 little. Still, if I do love him, it is from habit, because he is 
 the eldest of us. Duroc ? Ay, him, if any one, I love in a 
 
166 NOTES LEFT OVER. 
 
 sort but why ? He suits me ; he is cool, undemonstrative, 
 unfeeling has no weak affections never embraces any 
 one never weeps." 
 
 I am not sure but the same analogy is to be applied, 
 in cases, often seen, where, with an extra development and 
 acuteness of the intellectual faculties, there is a mark d 
 absence of the spiritual, affectional, and sometimes, though 
 more rarely, the highest aesthetic and moral elements of 
 cognition. 
 
 LACKS AND WANTS YET. 
 
 Of most foreign countries, small or large, from the 
 remotest times known, down to our own, each has contri 
 buted after its kind, directly or indirectly, at least one great 
 undying song, to help vitalize and increase the valor, 
 wisdom, and elegance of humanity, from the points of view 
 attain d by it up to date. The stupendous epics of India, 
 the holy Bible itself, the Homeric canticles, the Nibelungen, 
 the Cid Campeador, the Inferno, Shakspere s dramas of the 
 passions and of the feudal lords, Burns s songs, Goethe s in 
 Germany, Tennyson s poems in England, Victor Hugo s in 
 France, and many more, are the widely various yet integral 
 signs or land-marks, (in certain respects the highest set up 
 by the human mind and soul, beyond science, invention, 
 political amelioration, &c.,) narrating in subtlest, best ways, 
 the long, long routes of history, and giving identity to the 
 stages arrived at by aggregate humanity, and the conclusions 
 assumed in its progressive and varied civilizations. , . , 
 Where is America s art-rendering, in any thing like the 
 spirit worthy of herself and the modem, to these character 
 istic immortal monuments ? So far, our Democratic society, 
 (estimating its various strata, in the mass, as one,) possesses 
 nothing nor have we contributed any characteristic music, 
 
NOTES LEFT OVER. 167 
 
 the finest tie of nationality to make up for that glow 
 ing, blood-throbbing, religious, social, emotional, artistic, 
 indefinable, indescribably beautiful charm and hold which 
 fused the separate parts of the old feudal societies together, 
 in their wonderful interpenetration, in Europe and Asia, of 
 love, belief, and loyalty, running one way like a living weft 
 and picturesque responsibility, duty, and blessedness, 
 running like a warp the other way. (In the Southern 
 States, under slavery, much of the same.) ... In 
 coincidence, and as things now exist in the States, what is 
 more terrible, more alarming, than the total want of any 
 such fusion and mutuality of love, belief, and rapport of 
 interest, between the comparatively few successful rich, and 
 the great masses of the unsuccessful, the poor? As a 
 mixed political and social question, is not this full of dark 
 significance ? Is it not worth considering as a problem and 
 puzzle in our democracy an indispensable want to be 
 supplied ? 
 
 RULERS STRICTLY OUT OF THE MASSES. 
 
 In the talk (which I welcome) about the need of men of 
 training, thoroughly school d and experienced men, for 
 statesmen, I would present the following as an offset. It 
 was written by me twenty years ago and has been 
 curiously verified since : 
 
 I say no body of men are fit to make Presidents, Judges, 
 and Generals, unless they themselves supply the best speci 
 mens of the same ; and that supplying one or two such 
 specimens illuminates the whole body for a thousand years. 
 I expect to see the day when the like of the present person 
 nel of the governments, Federal, State, municipal, military, 
 and naval, will be look d upon with derision, and when 
 
168 NOTES LEFT OVER. 
 
 qualified mechanics and young men will reach Congress 
 and other official stations, sent in their working costumes, 
 fresh from their benches and tools, and returning to them 
 again with dignity. The young fellows must prepare to do 
 credit to this destiny, for the stuff is in them. Nothing- 
 gives place, recollect, and never ought to give place, except 
 to its clean superiors. There is more rude and undevelopt 
 bravery, friendship, conscientiousness, clear-sightedness, and 
 practical genius for any scope of action, even the broadest 
 and highest, now among the American mechanics and 
 young men, than in all the official persons in these States, 
 legislative, executive, judicial, military, and naval, and more 
 than among all the literary persons. I would be much 
 pleased to see some heroic, shrewd, fully-inform d, healthy- 
 bodied, middle-aged, beard-faced American blacksmith or 
 boatman come down from the West across the Alleghanies, 
 and walk into the Presidency, dress d in a clean suit of 
 working attire, and with the tan all over his face, breast, 
 and arms ; I would certainly vote for that sort of man, 
 possessing the due requirements, before any other candi 
 date. 
 
 (The facts of rank-and-file workingmen, mechanics, 
 Lincoln, Johnson, Grant, Garfield, brought forward from the 
 masses and placed in the Presidency, and swaying its mighty 
 powers with firm hand really with more sway than any 
 king in history, and with better capacity in using that sway 
 can we not see that these facts have bearings far, far 
 beyond their political or party ones ?) 
 
 MONUMENTS THE PAST AND PRESENT. 
 
 If you go to Europe, (to say nothing of Asia, more 
 ancient and massive still,) you cannot stir without meeting 
 venerable mementos cathedrals, ruins of temples, castles, 
 
NOTES LEFT OVER. 169 
 
 monuments of the great, statues and paintings, (far, far 
 beyond anything America can ever expect to produce,) 
 haunts of heroes long dead, saints, poets, divinities, with 
 deepest associations of ages. But here in the New World, 
 while those we can never emulate, we have more than 
 those to build, and far more greatly to build. (I am 
 not sure but the day for conventional monuments, statues, 
 memorials, &c., has pass d away and that they are hence 
 forth superfluous and vulgar.) An enlarged general superior 
 humanity, (partly indeed resulting from those,) we are to 
 build. European, Asiatic greatness are in the past. Vaster 
 and subtler, America, combining, justifying the past, 
 yet works for a grander future, in living democratic forms. 
 (Here too are indicated the paths for our national bards.) 
 Other times, other lands, have had their missions Art, 
 War, Ecclesiasticism, Literature, Discovery, Trade, Architec 
 ture, &c., &c. but that grand future is the enclosing 
 purport of the United States. 
 
 LITTLE OR NOTHING NEW, AFTER ALL. 
 
 How small were the best thoughts, poems, conclusions, 
 except for a certain invariable resemblance and uniform 
 standard in the final thoughts, theology, poems, &c., of all 
 nations, all civilizations, all centuries and times. Those 
 precious legacies accumulations ! They come to us from 
 the far-off from all eras, and all lands from Egypt, and 
 India, and Greece, and Rome and along through the 
 middle and later ages, in the grand monarchies of Europe 
 born under far different institutes and conditions from ours 
 but out of the insight and inspiration of the same old 
 humanity the same old heart and brain the same old 
 countenance yearningly, pensively, looking forth. What 
 we have to do to-day is to receive them cheerfully, and 
 
170 NOTES LEFT OVER. 
 
 to give them ensemble, and a modern American and 
 democratic physiognomy. 
 
 A LINCOLN REMINISCENCE. 
 
 As is well known, story-telling was often with President 
 Lincoln a weapon which he employ d with great skill. 
 Very often he could not give a point-blank reply or com 
 ment and these indirections, (sometimes funny, but not 
 always so,) were probably the best responses possible. In 
 the gloomiest period of the war, he had a call from a 
 large delegation of bank presidents. In the talk after 
 business was settled, one of the big Dons asked Mr. 
 Lincoln if his confidence in the permanency of the 
 Union was not beginning to be shaken whereupon the 
 homely President told a little story : " When I was a young 
 man in Illinois," said he, "I boarded for a time with a 
 deacon of the Presbyterian church. One night I was 
 roused from my sleep by a rap at the door, and I heard the 
 deacon s voice exclaiming, Arise, Abraham ! the day of 
 judgment has come ! I sprang from my bed and rushed 
 to the window, and saw the stars falling in great showers ; 
 but looking back of them in the heavens I saw the grand 
 old constellations, with which I was so well acquainted, 
 fixed and true in their places. Gentlemen, the world did 
 not come to an end then, nor will the Union now." 
 
 FREEDOM. 
 
 It is not only true that most people entirely misunder 
 stand Freedom, but I sometimes think I have not 
 yet met one person who rightly understands it. The 
 whole Universe is absolute Law. Freedom only opens 
 entire activity and license under the law. To the degraded 
 or undevelopt and even to too many others the thought 
 
NOTES LEFT OVER. 171 
 
 of freedom is a thought of escaping from law which, of 
 course, is impossible. More precious than all worldly 
 riches is Freedom freedom from the painful constipation 
 and poor narrowness of ecclesiasticism freedom in manners, 
 habiliments, furniture, from the silliness and tyranny of 
 local fashions entire freedom from party rings and mere 
 conventions in Politics and better than all, a general 
 freedom of One s-Self from the tyrannic domination of 
 vices, habits, appetites, under which nearly every man of 
 us, (often the greatest brawler for freedom,) is enslaved. 
 Can we attain such enfranchisement the true Democ 
 racy, and the height of it? While we are from birth to 
 death the subjects of irresistible law, enclosing every move 
 ment and minute, we yet escape, by a paradox, into true 
 free will. Strange as it may seem, we only attain to free 
 dom by a knowledge of, and implicit obedience to, Law. 
 Great unspeakably great is the Will ! the free Soul of 
 man ! At its greatest, understanding and obeying the 
 laws, it can then, and then only, maintain true liberty. For 
 there is to the highest, that law as absolute as any more 
 absolute than any the Law of Liberty. The shallow, as 
 intimated, consider liberty a release from all law, from every 
 constraint. The wise see in it, on the contrary, the potent 
 Law of Laws, namely, the fusion and combination of the 
 conscious will, or partial individual law, with those universal, 
 eternal, unconscious ones, which run through all Time, 
 pervade history, prove immortality, give moral purpose 
 to the entire objective world, and the last dignity to human 
 life. 
 
 BOOK-CLASSESAMERICA S LITERATURE. 
 
 For certain purposes, literary productions through all the 
 recorded ages may be roughly divided into two classes. 
 
172 NOTES LEFT VER. 
 
 The first consisting of only a score or two, perhaps less, of 
 typical, primal, representative works, different from any 
 before, and embodying in themselves their own main laws 
 and reasons for being. Then the second class, books and 
 writings innumerable, incessant to be briefly described as 
 radiations or offshoots, or more or less imitations of the first. 
 The works of the first class, as said, have their own laws, 
 and may indeed be described as making those laws, and 
 amenable only to them. The sharp warning of Margaret 
 Fuller, unquell d for thirty years, yet sounds in the air ; " It 
 does not follow that because the United States print and 
 read more books, magazines, and newspapers than all the 
 rest of the world, that they really have, therefore, a 
 literature." 
 
 OUR REAL CULMINATION. 
 
 The final culmination of this vast and varied Republic 
 will be the production and perennial establishment of 
 millions of comfortable city homesteads and moderate-sized 
 farms, healthy and independent, single separate ownership, 
 fee simple, life in them complete but cheap, within reach of 
 all. Exceptional wealth, splendor, countless manufactures, 
 excess of exports, immense capital and capitalists, the five- 
 dollar-a-day hotels well fill d, artificial improvements, even 
 books, colleges, and the suffrage all, in many respects, in 
 themselves, (hard as it is to say so, and sharp as a surgeon s 
 lance,) form, more or less, a sort of anti-democratic disease 
 and monstrosity, except as they contribute by curious 
 indirections to that culmination seem to me mainly of 
 value, or worth consideration, only with reference to it. 
 
 There is a subtle something in the common earth, crops, 
 cattle, air, trees, &c., and in having to do at first hand with 
 them, that forms the only purifying and perennial element 
 
NOTES LEFT OVER. 173 
 
 for individuals and for society. I must confess I want to 
 see the agricultural occupation of America at first hand per 
 manently broaden d. Its gains are the only ones on which 
 God seems to smile. What others what business, profit, 
 wealth, without a taint ? What fortune else what dollar 
 does not stand for, and come from, more or less imposition, 
 lying, unnaturalness ? 
 
 AN AMERICAN PROBLEM. 
 
 One of the problems presented in America these times is, 
 how to combine one s duty and policy as a member of 
 associations, societies, brotherhoods or what not, and one s 
 obligations to the State and Nation, with essential freedom 
 as an individual personality, without which freedom a man 
 cannot grow or expand, or be full, modern, heroic, demo 
 cratic, American. With all the necessities and benefits of 
 association, (and the world cannot get along without it,) the 
 true nobility and satisfaction of a man consist in his thinking 
 and acting for himself. The problem, I say, is to combine 
 the two, so as not to ignore either. 
 
 THE LAST COLLECTIVE COMPACTION. 
 
 I like well our polyglot construction-stamp, and the 
 retention thereof, in the broad, the tolerating, the many- 
 sided, the collective. All nations here a home for every 
 race on earth. British, German, Scandinavian, Spanish, 
 French, Italian papers published, plays acted, speeches 
 made, in all languages on our shores the crowning resultant 
 of those distillations, decantations, compactions of humanity, 
 that have been going on, on trial, over the earth so long. 
 
A LETTER. 
 
 To (Dresden, Saxony.) 
 
 CAMDEN, New Jersey, U. S. A., Dec. 20, 81. 
 
 DEAR SIR : Your letter asking definite endorsement to 
 your translation of my " Leaves of Grass " into Russian is 
 just received, and I hasten to answer it. Most warmly and 
 willingly I consent to the translation, and waft a prayerful 
 God speed to the enterprise. 
 
 You Russians and we Americans ! Our countries so dis 
 tant, so unlike at first glance such a difference in social and 
 political conditions, and our respective methods of moral 
 and practical development the last hundred years ; and yet 
 in certain features, and vastest ones, so resembling each 
 other. The variety of stock-elements and tongues, to be 
 resolutely fused in a common identity and union at all 
 hazards the idea, perennial through the ages, that they both 
 have their historic and divine mission the fervent element 
 of manly friendship throughout the whole people, surpass d 
 by no other races the grand expanse of territorial limits 
 and boundaries the unform d and nebulous state of many 
 things, not yet permanently settled, but agreed on all hands 
 to be the preparations of an infinitely greater future the 
 fact that both Peoples have their independent and leading 
 positions to hold, keep, and if necessary, fight for, against 
 the rest of the world the deathless aspirations at the inmost 
 centre of each great community, so vehement, so mysterious, 
 
A LETTER. 175 
 
 so abysmic are certainly features you Russians and we 
 Americans possess in common. 
 
 As my dearest dream is for internationality of poems and 
 poets, binding the lands of the earth closer than all treaties 
 and diplomacy As the purpose beneath the rest in my book 
 is such hearty comradeship, for individuals to begin with, 
 and for all the nations of the earth as a result how happy 
 I should be to get the hearing and emotional contact of the 
 great Russian peoples. 
 
 To whom, now and here, (addressing you for Russia and 
 Russians, and empowering you, should you see fit, to print 
 the present letter, in your book, as a preface,) I waft 
 affectionate salutation from these shores in America s name. 
 
 Printed by WALTER SCOTT, Felling, Ncu-castte-on-Tyne. 
 
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 Selected and Edited, with Notes, by G. S. Macquoid. 
 
 Irish Minstrelsy. Edited, with 
 
 Notes and Introduction, by H. H. Sparling. 
 
 The Sonnets of Europe. A 
 
 Volume of Translations. Selected and arranged, with Notes, 
 by Samuel Waddington. 
 
 Early English Poetry, Selected 
 
 and Edited by H. Macaulay Fitzgibbon. 
 
 Ballads of the North Countrie. 
 
 Edited, with Introduction, by Graham R. Tomson. 
 
 Songs and Poems of the Sea. 
 
 An Anthology of Poems and Passages descriptive of the Sea. 
 Edited by Mrs. William Sharp. 
 The above may also be had in various Calf and Morocco Bindings. 
 
 j ondon : WALTER SCOTT, 24 Warwick T.nne, Paternoster Row. ] 
 
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