en place in America; but what
American--poet, philosopher, scientist, warrior, ruler, saint--is there
who can take his place with the foremost men of all this world? The
American people seem still to be somewhat in the position of our new
millionaires: their fortune is above them, overshadows, and oppresses
them. They live in fine houses, and have common thoughts; they have
costly libraries, and cheap culture; and their rich clothing poorly
hides their coarse breeding. Nor does the tendency seem to be toward a
nobler type of manhood.

The leaders of the Revolution, the framers of the Federal Constitution,
the men who contended for State-rights, and still more those who led in
the great struggle for human rights were of stronger and nobler mold
than the politicians who now crowd the halls of Congress. The promise of
a literature which a generation ago budded forth in New England was, it
appears, delusive. What a sad book is not that recently issued from the
press on the poets of America! It is the chapter on snakes in Ireland
which we have all read,--there are none. And are not our literary men
whom it is possible to admire and love either dead or old enough to die?

All this, however, need not be cause for discouragement, if in the
generations which are springing up around us, and which are soon to
enter upon the scene of active life, we could discover the boundless
confidence, the high courage, the noble sentiments, which make the
faults of youth more attractive than the formal virtues of a maturer
age. But youth seems about to disappear from our life, to leave only
children and men. For a true youth the age of chivalry has not passed,
nor has the age of faith, nor the age of poetry, nor the age of aught
that is godlike and ideal. To our young men, however, high thoughts and
heroic sentiments are what they are to a railroad president or a bank
cashier,--mere nonsense. Life for them is wholly prosaic and without
illusions. They transform ideas into interests, faith into a
speculation, and love into a financial transaction. They have no vague
yearnings for what cannot be; hardly have they any passions. They are
cold and calculating. They deny themselves, and do not believe in
self-denial; they are active, and do not love labor; they are energetic,
and have no enthusiasm; they approach life with the hard, mechanical
thoughts with which a scientist studies matter. Their one idea is
success, and success for them is money.