ed to secure the rights of
citizenship to all souls will be the excitement of a national
intellectual life, which will take on the various forms of a national
literature. This is to be expected for two reasons. First, because our
arms will achieve unity. By this is meant not only that there will be a
real union of all the States, consequent upon an eventual agreement in
great political and moral ideas, but also that this very consent will
bring the different characteristic groups of the country so near
together, in feeling and mutual appreciation, and with a free
interchange of traits, that we shall begin to have a nationality. And
there can be no literature until there is a nation; when the varieties
of the popular life begin to coalesce, as all sections are drawn
together towards the centre of great political ideas which the people
themselves establish, there will be such a rich development of
intellectual action as the Old World has not seen. Without this unity,
literature may be cultivated by cliques of men of talent, who are
chiefly stimulated to express themselves by observing the thought and
beauty which foreign intellects and past times produced; but their
productions will not spring from the country's manifold life, nor
express its mighty individuality. The sections of the country which are
nearest to the intelligence of the Old World will furnish the readiest
writers and the most polished thinkers, until the New World dwarfs the
Old World by its unity, and inspires the best brains with the collected
richness of the popular heart. Up to the period of this war the
country's most original men have been those who, by protesting against
its evils and displaying a genius emancipated from the prescriptions of
Church and State, have prophesied the revolution, and given to America
the first rich foretaste of her growing mind. The thunder rolled up the
sky in the orator's great periods, the lightning began to gleam in the
preacher's moral indignation, the glittering steel slumbered uneasily
and showed its half-drawn menace from the subtle lines of poets and
essayists who have been carrying weapons these twenty years; their souls
thirsted for an opportunity to rescue fair Liberty from the obscene rout
who had her in durance for their purposes, and to hail her accession to
a lawful throne with the rich gifts of knowledge, use, and beauty, a
homage that only free minds can pay, and only when freedom claims it.
We do not for