get the literary activity with which a thousand ready
intellects have furnished convenient food for the people: there has been
no lack of books, nor of the ambition to attempt all the intellectual
forms. Some of this pabulum was not good for a growing frame; the excuse
for offering it may be found in the exigencies of squatter-life. We are
a notable people for our attachment to the frying-pan, and there is no
doubt that it is a shifty utensil: it can be slung at the saddle-bow or
carried in a valise, it will bear the jolting of a corduroy road, and
furnish a camp-mess in the minimum of time out of material that was
perhaps but a moment before sniffing or pecking at its rim. A very
little blaze sets the piece of cold fat swimming, and the black cavity
soon glows and splutters with extemporaneous content. But what dreams
howl about the camp-fires, what hideous scalping-humor creeps from the
leathery supper into the limbs and blood of the adventurous pioneer!

No better, and quite as scrofulous, has been the nourishment furnished
by the rhetorical time-servers and polished conventionalists, whose
gifts have been all directed against the highest good of the country's
mind, to offer sweets to its crying conscience, and draughts of fierce
or languid cordials to lull the uneasy moods of this fast-growing child
of Liberty. Such men are fabricators of smooth speech; they have brought
their gilding to put upon the rising pillars of the country, instead
of strength to plant them firmly in their places and to spread the
protecting roof. This period of storm will wash off their dainty
work. When the clean granite stands where it should to shelter the
four-and-thirty States as they walk the vast colonnades together, intent
upon the great interchanges of the country's thought and work, this
tinsel will not be missed; as men look upon the grave lines that
assure them of security, they will rejoice that the time for the truly
beautiful has arrived, and hasten to relieve the solid space with shapes
as durable as the imagination which conceives.

There must be a great people before there can be a great character in
its books, its instructions, or its works of art. This character is
prophesied only in part by what is said and thought while the people is
becoming great, and the molten constituents are sparkling as they run
into their future form. We have been so dependent upon traditional ideas
that we suppose an epic, for instance, to be t