he essential proof that
a people is alive and has something to express. Let us cease to wonder
whether there will ever be an American poem, an American symphony, or an
American Novum Organon. It is a sign of weakness and subservience: and
this is a period crowded with acts of emancipation. We cannot escape
from the past, if we would; we have a right to inherit all the previous
life of men that does not surfeit us and impede our proper work, but
let us stop our unavailing sighs for Iliads. The newspaper gathers and
circulates all true achievements faster than blind poets can plod round
with the story. The special form of the epic answered to a state of
society when the harper connected cities with his golden wire, slowly
unrolling its burden as he went. Vibrations travel faster now; men would
be foolish to expect that the new life will go journeying in classic
vehicles. When the imagination becomes free, it can invent forms equally
surprising and better adapted to the face of the country.

There is no part of this country which has not its broad characters and
tendencies, different from anything ever seen before, imperfect while
they are doomed to isolation, during which they show only a maimed and
grotesque vitality. The religious tendency is different, the humor is
different, the imagination differs from anything beyond the Atlantic.
And the East differs from the West, the North from the South; and
the Pacific States will have also to contribute gifts peculiar to
themselves, as the silt of the Sacramento glitters unlike that of the
Merrimac or the Potomac. We are not yet a People; but we have great,
vivid masses of popular life, which a century of literary expression
will not exhaust. All these passionate characters are running together
in this general danger, having seized a weapon: they have found an idea
in common, they are pervaded by their first really solemn feeling, they
issue the same word for the night from East to West. The nationality
thus commenced will introduce the tendency to blend in place of the
tendency to keep apart, and each other's gifts will pass sympathetically
from hand to hand.

The heightened life of this epoch is another cause which shall prepare
a great development of intellectual forms. Excitement and enthusiasm
pervade all classes of the people. All the primitive emotions of
the human heart--friendship, scorn, sympathy, human and religious
love--break into the liveliest expression, penetr