or a day with incredible rapidity, and then expire. In
the midst of all these obscure productions of the human brain are to be
found the more remarkable works of that small number of authors, whose
names are, or ought to be, known to Europeans.

Although America is perhaps in our days the civilized country in
which literature is least attended to, a large number of persons are
nevertheless to be found there who take an interest in the productions
of the mind, and who make them, if not the study of their lives, at
least the charm of their leisure hours. But England supplies these
readers with the larger portion of the books which they require. Almost
all important English books are republished in the United States. The
literary genius of Great Britain still darts its rays into the recesses
of the forests of the New World. There is hardly a pioneer's hut which
does not contain a few odd volumes of Shakespeare. I remember that I
read the feudal play of Henry V for the first time in a loghouse.

Not only do the Americans constantly draw upon the treasures of English
literature, but it may be said with truth that they find the literature
of England growing on their own soil. The larger part of that small
number of men in the United States who are engaged in the composition of
literary works are English in substance, and still more so in form.
Thus they transport into the midst of democracy the ideas and literary
fashions which are current amongst the aristocratic nation they have
taken for their model. They paint with colors borrowed from foreign
manners; and as they hardly ever represent the country they were born
in as it really is, they are seldom popular there. The citizens of the
United States are themselves so convinced that it is not for them that
books are published, that before they can make up their minds upon the
merit of one of their authors, they generally wait till his fame has
been ratified in England, just as in pictures the author of an original
is held to be entitled to judge of the merit of a copy. The inhabitants
of the United States have then at present, properly speaking, no
literature. The only authors whom I acknowledge as American are the
journalists. They indeed are not great writers, but they speak the
language of their countrymen, and make themselves heard by them. Other
authors are aliens; they are to the Americans what the imitators of the
Greeks and Romans were to us at the revival of learning-