of original literature,--its prolific
new births in our own day are one of the most conspicuous fruits of
emancipation,--clung fondly to the classical and feudal traditions, and
hardly admitted any literary sovereign later than Scott and Byron.

In a national union, as in marriage, there may be long continuance and
even substantial happiness in spite of many differences. So was it with
England and Scotland, so is it with Germany and with Italy. But in
slavery there was so profound an incompatibility with the fact and idea
of personal freedom as held by the American people at large, that the
inevitable opposition of the two systems was desperate almost beyond
cure. That opposition, and all the attendant circumstances of
divergence, were aggravated in their divisive effects by the extreme
bitterness of the foremost debaters on both sides. The very nature of
the subject tempted to vehement criticism, and defense of equal
vehemence. But there was a great aggravation of bitterness when, in the
van of the attack on slavery, the temper of Woolman and Lundy, of
Jefferson and Franklin and Channing, was replaced by the temper of
Garrison and his followers. Their violence inflamed alike the North and
the South, and, with the answering violence it provoked, worked the two
peoples into a largely false and unjust conception of each other's
character. The South's retort was no less passionate in words, while in
act it took form in expulsion of citizens and suppression of free
speech. Garrison's burning words, and the polished invective of
Phillips, live in literature; the wrath which answered them in Southern
orators and newspapers has left less of record; but on both sides the
work was effectually done of sowing mutual suspicion and hate.

If only North and South could have known each other's best, as they knew
each other's worst! They were kept apart by the want of any stream of
migration between them, like that which united East and West, with the
resulting network of family connections and friendly intercourse.
Sometimes a Northern visitor, or an English traveler like Thackeray, saw
and appreciated the cultivated society of Charleston or Richmond, or
plantation life at its best,--a hospitable, genial, outdoor life, with
masters and mistresses who gave their best thought and toil to the care
of their servants. Sometimes a Southerner had a revelation like that of
General Zachary Taylor, when, looking from one of the heights in
Spri