t. We hope he will, at least, never mount
Pega'sus, or water him in Heli'con, and that he will leave Mu'seum to
the more vulgar sphere and obtuser sensibilities of Barnum. Where Nature
has sent genius, she has a right to expect that it shall be treated with
a certain elegance of hospitality.

POETRY AND NATIONALITY[1]

[Footnote 1: This essay, to which I have given the above title, forms
the greater part of a review of poems by John James Piatt. The brief,
concluding portion of the review is of little value and is omitted here.
Piatt died several years ago. He was a great friend of William Dean
Howells, and once published a volume of poems in collaboration with him.
A.M.]

One of the dreams of our earlier horoscope-mongers was, that a poet
should come out of the West, fashioned on a scale somewhat proportioned
to our geographical pretensions. Our rivers, forests, mountains,
cataracts, prairies, and inland seas were to find in him their antitype
and voice. Shaggy he was to be, brown-fisted, careless of proprieties,
unhampered by tradition, his Pegasus of the half-horse, half-alligator
breed. By him at last the epos of the New World was to be fitly sung,
the great tragi-comedy of democracy put upon the stage for all time. It
was a cheap vision, for it cost no thought; and, like all judicious
prophecy, it muffled itself from criticism in the loose drapery of its
terms. Till the advent of this splendid apparition, who should dare
affirm positively that he would never come? that, indeed, he was
impossible? And yet his impossibility was demonstrable, nevertheless.

Supposing a great poet to be born in the West, though he would naturally
levy upon what had always been familiar to his eyes for his images and
illustrations, he would almost as certainly look for his ideal somewhere
outside of the life that lay immediately about him. Life in its large
sense, and not as it is temporarily modified by manners or politics, is
the only subject of the poet; and though its elements lie always close
at hand, yet in its unity it seems always infinitely distant, and the
difference of angle at which it is seen in India and in Minnesota is
almost inappreciable. Moreover, a rooted discontent seems always to
underlie all great poetry, if it be not even the motive of it. The Iliad
and the Odyssey paint manners that are only here and there incidentally
true to the actual, but which in their larger truth had either never
existed or had