live forever on the supernal beauty of
Shelley's "The Cloud" and his soaring lines "To a Skylark," on the rich
melancholy of Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale," on Cyrano de Bergerac's
ideal of a free man, on Wordsworth's philosophy of nature--a philosophy
that has illuminated for me the mesquite flats and oak-studded hills of
Texas--on the adventures in Robert Louis Stevenson, the flavor and wit
of Lamb's essays, the eloquent wisdom of Hazlitt, the dark mysteries
of Conrad, the gaieties of Barrie, the melody of Sir Thomas Browne, the
urbanity of Addison, the dash in Kipling, the mobility, the mightiness,
the lightness, the humor, the humanity, the everything of Shakespeare,
and a world of other delicious, high, beautiful, and inspiring things
that English literature has bestowed upon us. That literature is still
the richest of heritages; but literature is not enough.

Here I am living on a soil that my people have been living and working
and dying on for more than a hundred years--the soil, as it happens,
of Texas. My roots go down into this soil as deep as mesquite roots go.
This soil has nourished me as the banks of the lovely Guadalupe River
nourish cypress trees, as the Brazos bottoms nourish the wild peach, as
the gentle slopes of East Texas nourish the sweet-smelling pines, as the
barren, rocky ridges along the Pecos nourish the daggered lechuguilla. I
am at home here, and I want not only to know about my home land, I want
to live intelligently on it. I want certain data that will enable me to
accommodate myself to it. Knowledge helps sympathy to achieve harmony.
I am made more resolute by Arthur Hugh Clough's picture of the dripping
sailor on the reeling mast, "On stormy nights when wild northwesters
rave," but the winds that have bit into me have been dry Texas northers;
and fantastic yarns about them, along with a cowboy's story of a herd of
Longhorns drifting to death in front of one of them, come home to me and
illuminate those northers like forked lightning playing along the top of
black clouds in the night.

No informed person would hold that the Southwest can claim any
considerable body of PURE LITERATURE as its own. At the same time, the
region has a distinct cultural inheritance, full of life and drama, told
variously in books so numerous that their very existence would surprise
many people who depend on the Book-of-the-Month Club for literary
guidance. Any people have a right to their own cultural inherita