erior expression of the national life, the
recital,--from the lips of an individual animated and transported with
the popular spirit--of the mysteries of his country's existence, and the
desires, aspirations and convictions of his countrymen. The poet is the
interpreter of the moral character of his country to other nations, and
his works are the highest embodiment of the manners and habits of life
in his country and his time. The poetry which does not fulfil these
conditions is not poetry. Any man writing verse, who does not feel
himself agitated in a more lively and distinct manner with the desires
which torment his contemporaries as a vague fever, who does not know
that his whole mission is to express, in an artistic and harmonious
form, the clamors and the incorrect utterance of these desires, is not
and cannot be a poet.

If such be the moral necessities which give birth to poetry, how is it
that America has not an original literature? How is it that she has no
great artists, and that there are but three or four writers--Cooper,
Channing, Emerson--who well express her spirit and tendencies? None of
the great moral qualities necessary to a poet are wanting to Americans.
They have a national pride, approaching even to sensitiveness; they have
firm and free religious faiths; life is energetic and manifests itself
abundantly every where. How is it, we ask, that we meet no man of genius
to tell us of the miracles of triumph over nature and barbarism; of
those hardy industrial enterprises, and those wonderful displays of
human activity around them; to sing the adventurous heroes of commerce
and mechanism, and that singular marriage in domestic life of sedentary
virtues with a changing, nomadic disposition--the love of the fireside,
which remains undisturbed in the midst of perpetual displacement, as of
old the tents of the patriarchs were pitched in the evening and stricken
in the morning? Is it that there is no poetry in these subjects? Here,
indeed, is a curious phenomenon, and one of the least-studied laws of
literary history.

But ought we to regard Americans unfortunate because they have no
literature of their own? In some points of view it is a reason for
envying them. When true poetry appears among a people, it is not always
a prophetic sign of future greatness; it is oftener a reflection of
greatness passed away. It announces not new destinies, but recounts a
history of the vanished and vanishing. Whenever the v