orld's literature is like an ocean in whose waves and
tides there is a continuity which sets at naught the imposition of
definite limits. Literature is first of all human; and American books,
which express human thought, feeling, and experience, are American
literature, even if they show no distinctive national feature.

In what follows, Margaret confesses that her own studies have been
largely of the classics of foreign countries. She has found, she says, a
model "in the simple masculine minds of the great Latin authors." She
has observed, too, the features of kindred between the character of the
ancient Roman and that of the Briton of to-day.

She remarks upon the reaction which was felt in her time against the
revolutionary opposition to the mother country. This reaction, she
feels, may be carried too far.

"What suits Great Britain, with her insular position and consequent need
to concentrate and intensify her life, her limited monarchy and spirit
of trade, does not suit a mixed race, continually enriched (?) with new
blood from other stocks the most unlike that of our first descent, with
ample field and verge enough to range in and leave every impulse free,
and abundant opportunity to develop a genius wide and full as our
rivers, luxuriant and impassioned as our vast prairies, rooted in
strength as the rocks on which the Puritan fathers landed."

Margaret anticipates for this Western hemisphere the rise and
development of such a genius, but says that this cannot come until the
fusion of races shall be more advanced, nor "until this nation shall
attain sufficient moral and intellectual dignity to prize moral and
intellectual no less highly than political freedom."

She finds the earnest of this greater time in the movements already
leading to social reforms, and in the "stern sincerity" of elect
individuals, but thinks that the influences at work "must go deeper
before we can have poets."

At the time of her writing (1844-45) she considers literature as in a
"dim and struggling state," with "pecuniary results exceedingly pitiful.
The state of things gets worse and worse, as less and less is offered
for works demanding great devotion of time and labor, and the publisher,
obliged to regard the transaction as a matter of business, demands of
the author only what will find an immediate market, for he cannot afford
to take anything else."

Margaret thinks that matters were better in this respect during the
first