magination were affected with blight;
and which it still bears, wherever its pristine vigor is unabated. All
other literatures endure only as the elms which overshadow our houses;
but this is like the great dragon-tree of the Western Isles, as old as
mankind, and, whether that does or not, will endure as long; for the
decay of other literatures makes the soil in which it thrives.

The West is preparing to add its fables to those of the East. The
valleys of the Ganges, the Nile, and the Shine having yielded their
crop, it remains to be seen what the valleys of the Amazon, the Plate,
the Orinoco, the St. Lawrence, and the Mississippi will produce.
Perchance, when, in the course of ages, American liberty has become
a fiction of the past--as it is to some extent a fiction of the
present--the poets of the world will be inspired by American mythology.

The wildest dreams of wild men, even, are not the less true, though they
may not recommend themselves to the sense which is most common among
Englishmen and Americans today. It is not every truth that recommends
itself to the common sense. Nature has a place for the wild Clematis
as well as for the cabbage. Some expressions of truth are
reminiscent--others merely SENSIBLE, as the phrase is,--others
prophetic. Some forms of disease, even, may prophesy forms of health.
The geologist has discovered that the figures of serpents, griffins,
flying dragons, and other fanciful embellishments of heraldry, have
their prototypes in the forms of fossil species which were extinct
before man was created, and hence "indicate a faint and shadowy
knowledge of a previous state of organic existence." The Hindus dreamed
that the earth rested on an elephant, and the elephant on a tortoise,
and the tortoise on a serpent; and though it may be an unimportant
coincidence, it will not be out of place here to state, that a fossil
tortoise has lately been discovered in Asia large enough to support
an elephant. I confess that I am partial to these wild fancies, which
transcend the order of time and development. They are the sublimest
recreation of the intellect. The partridge loves peas, but not those
that go with her into the pot.

In short, all good things are wild and free. There is something in
a strain of music, whether produced by an instrument or by the human
voice--take the sound of a bugle in a summer night, for instance--which
by its wildness, to speak without satire, reminds me of the cries
e