so obvious, too, that the traveller
to whom they would not occur can be but little qualified for the work
of observing.

It is clear that we cannot know the mind of a nation, any more than of
an individual, by merely looking at it, without hearing any speech.
National literature is national speech. By this are its prevalent ideas
and feelings uttered. It is necessarily so; for books which do not meet
sympathy from numbers die immediately, and books which strike upon the
sympathies of all never die. Between the two extremes, of books which
command the sympathies of a class, and those which are the delight of
all, there is an extensive gradation, from which the careful observer
may almost frame for himself a scale of popular morals and manners. I
mean, of course, in countries where there is a copious classical, or a
growing modern literature. A people which happens to be without a
literature,--the Americans, for instance,--must be judged of, as
cautiously as may be, by such other means of utterance as they may
have,--the political institutions which the present generation has
formed or assented to,--their preferences in selection from the
literature of other countries; and so on. But there is a far greater
danger of their being misunderstood than there can ever be with regard
to a nation which speaks for itself through books. "A country which has
no national literature," writes a student of man, "or a literature too
insignificant to force its way abroad, must always be to its neighbours,
at least in every important spiritual respect, an unknown and
misestimated country. Its towns may figure on our maps; its revenues,
population, manufactures, political connexions, may be recorded in
statistical books: but the character of the people has no symbol and no
voice; we cannot know them by speech and discourse, but only by mere
sight and outward observation of their habits and procedure."[I]

The very fact of there being no literature in a nation may, however,
yield inferences as to its mental and moral state. There is a very
limited set of reasons why a people is without speech. They are
barbarous, or they are politically oppressed; or the nation is young,
and busy in providing and securing the means of national existence; or
it has the same language with another people, and therefore the full
advantage of its literature, as if it were not foreign. These seem to be
nearly all the reasons for national silence; and any one of t