he discovery, the
colonization, the high tide of life, which ran like lightning through
the Nation's arteries, made the drama, not only a possibility, but a
fact. It was the embodiment of the mighty activities of a mighty age.
The tragedy, to use the splendid figure of Milton, "rose like an
exhalation." A solitary lifetime brought it from sunrise to high noon;
and from that hour what could the sun do but sink?

Our century is one of general iconoclasm. It is the Ishmael among the
ages. Its hand is against every man. It has reversed the old-time
order, that what was believed by our fathers and received by them
should be received by us. It takes no truth second-hand. It goes to
sources. Its motto is, "I came, I saw, I investigated." It found many
things believed of old, which were founded on the sand. Physical
science discovered the vast domain of physical law, and that science
began to legislate for the universe, forgetting sometimes that it was
not a law enactor, but a law discoverer. Investigation found that many
ideas and systems of ideas, supposed philosophies and sciences, were
false and unsubstantial as the "baseless fabric of a vision." Things
received as truths from time immemorial were shown to be untrue. The
tendency of the human intellect is to generalize; and finding many
previously received systems and facts to be without evidence sufficient
to substantiate them, there arose the unwilled generalization that all
these systems are likewise false. I do not say that man has formulated
this thought into speech, but that the trend of the intellect in our
century has been such as is explicable only on this theory. In many
instances the motto of investigation in the domain of history,
criticism, and science has been, "Believe all things false until you
prove them true." If such is the spirit of the age, and if literature
be colored with the light of the century which produces it, shall we
wonder if the nineteenth-century literature is distinctively an
iconoclastic one?

All about us is the battle of the books. War rages along the entire
line. No work of antiquity is free from this belligerency. Mars has
the field. The investigation has been crucial. In so far as it has
been learning coupled with wisdom, this is well. Truth never flinches
before the charge of a wise investigation. But no truth can stand as
such before a system of inquiry the canons of which are empirical,
fallacious, and fals