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[From the North American Revikw.1 
 
 THE POETRY OF THE FUTURE. 
 
 Strange as it may seem, the topmost proof of a race is its own 
 born poetry. 1 The presence of that, or the absence, each tells its 
 story. As the flowering rose or lily, as the ripened fruit ,to a 
 tree, the apple or the peach, no matter how fine the trunk, or 
 copious or rich the branches and foliage, here waits sine qua non 
 at last. The stamp of entire and finished greatness to any nation, 
 to the American Eepublie among the rest, must be sternly with- 
 held till it has expressed itself, and put what it stands for in 
 the blossom of original, first-class poems. No imitations will do. 
 
 And though no estheUh worthy the present condition or future 
 certainties of the New World seems to have been even outlined 
 in men's minds,* or has been generally called for, or thought 
 needed, I am clear that until the United States have just such 
 definite and native expressers in the highest artistic neld;s, their 
 mere political, geographical, wealth-forming, and even intjsllectual 
 eminence, however astonishing and predominant, will constitute 
 (as I have before likened it) a more and more expanded and 
 well-appointed body^ and perhaps brain, with little or no souL 
 Sugar-eoatj; the grim truth as we may, and ward off with outward 
 plausible words, denials, explanations, to the mental inward per- 
 ception of the land this blank is plain. A barren void exists. 
 For the me anin gs and maturer purposes of these States are not 
 the constructing of a new world of politics merely, and physical 
 comforts for the million, but even more determinedly, in range 
 with science and the modern, of a new world of democratic 
 sociology and imaginative literature. If the latter were not 
 carried out and established to form their only permanent tie and 
 hold, the first-named would be of little avail. 
 
 * In 1850, Emerson said earnestly to Miss Bremer, in response to her 
 praises : "No, you must not be too good-natured. We have not yet any poetry 
 ■which can be said to represent the mind of our ■world. The poet of America 
 is not yet come. When he comes, he will sing 1 quite » differently." 
 
196 TEE NOBTH AMEBICAN BEVIEW. 
 
 With the poems of a first-class land are twined, as weft with 
 warp, its types of personal character, of individuality, peculiar, 
 native, its own physiognomy, man's and woman's, its own shapes, 
 forms, and manners, fully justified under the eternal laws of all 
 forms, all manners, all times. 
 
 I say the hour has come for democracy in America to inaugu- 
 rate itself in the two directions specified, — autochthonic poems and 
 personalities, — born expressersof itself, its spirit alone, to radiate 
 in subtle ways, not only in art, but the practical and familiar, in 
 the transactions between employers and employed persons, in 
 business and wages, and sternly in the army and navy, and 
 revolutionizing them. 
 
 I find nowhere a scope profound enough, and radical and 
 objective enough, either for aggregates or individuals. The 
 thought and identity of a poetry in America to fill, and worthily 
 fill, the great void, and enhance these aims, involves the essence 
 and integral facts, real and spiritual, of the whole land, the whole 
 body. "What the great sympathetic is to the congeries of bones 
 and joints, and heart and fluids and nervous system, and vitality, 
 constituting, launching forth in time and space a human being — 
 aye, an immortal soul — in such relation, and no less, stands true 
 poetry to the single personality or to the nation. 
 
 Here our thirty-eight States stand to-day, the children of 
 past precedents, and, young as they are, heirs of a very old 
 estate. One or two points we will consider, out of the myriads 
 presenting themselves. The feudalism of the British Islands, 
 illustrated by Shakespeare, and by his legitimate followers, Walter 
 Scott and Alfred Tennyson, with all its tyrannies, superstitions, 
 evils, had most superb and heroic permeating veins, poems, 
 manners — even its errors fascinating. It almost seems as if only 
 that feudalism in Europe, like slavery in our own South, could 
 outcrop types of tallest, noblest personal character yet — strength 
 and devotion and love better than elsewhere — invincible courage, 
 generosity, aspiration, the spines of all. Here is where Shake- 
 speare and the others I have named perform a service incalculably 
 precious to our America. Polities, literature, and everything 
 else centers at last in perfect personnel (as democracy is to find 
 the same as the rest) ; and here feudalism is unrivaled — here the 
 rich and highest-rising lessons it bequeaths us — a mass of pre- 
 cious, though' fofeiign/hutriment, which we are to work over, 
 
TEE POETBT OF THE FUTUBE. 197 
 
 and popularize, and enlarge, and present again in Western 
 growths. 
 
 Still, there are pretty grave and anxious drawbacks, jeopar- 
 dies, fears. Let us give some reflections on the subject, a little 
 fluctuating, but starting from one central thought, and returning 
 there again. Two or three curious results may plow up. As 
 in the astronomical laws, the very power that would seem most 
 deadly and destructive turns out to be latently conservative of 
 longest, vastest future births and lives. 
 
 Let us for once briefly examine the just-named authors solely 
 from a "Western point of view. It may be, indeed, that we shall 
 use the sun of English literature, and the brightest current stars 
 of his system, mainly as pegs to hang some cogitations on, for 
 home inspection. 
 
 As depicter and dramatist of the passions at their stormiest 
 outstretch, though ranking high, Shakespeare (spanning the arch 
 wide enough) is equaled by several and excelled by the best old 
 Greeks (as JBschylus). But in portraying the mediaeval lords 
 and barons, the arrogant port and stomach so dear to the inmost 
 human heart (pride ! pride ! dearest, perhaps, of all — touching us, 
 too, of the States closest of all — closer than love), he stands 
 alone, and I do not wonder he so witches the world. 
 
 From first to last, also, "Walter Scott and Tennyson, like Shake- 
 speare, exhale that principle of caste which we Americans have 
 come on earth to destroy. Jefferson's criticism on the "Waverly 
 novels was that they turned and condensed brilliant but entirely 
 false lights and glamours over the lords, ladies, courts, and aristo- 
 cratic institutes of Europe, with all their measureless infamies, 
 and then left the bulk of the suffering, down-trodden people con- 
 temptuously in the shade. "Without stopping to answer this 
 hornet-stinging criticism, or to repay any part of the debt of 
 thanks I owe, in common with every American, to the noblest, 
 healthiest, cheeriest romancer that ever lived, I pass on to Tenny- 
 son and his works. 
 
 Poetry here of a very high (perhaps the highest) order of 
 verbal melody, exquisitely clean and pure, and almost always 
 perfumed, like the tuberose, to an extreme of sweetness — some- 
 times not, however, but even then a camellia of the hot-house, 
 never a common flower — the verse of elegance and high-life, and 
 yet preserving amid all its super-delicatesse a smack of outdoors 
 
198 TEE NORTH AMEBIC AN REVIEW. 
 
 and outdoor folk — the old Norman lordhood quality here, too, 
 crossed with that Saxon fiber from which twain the best current 
 stock of England springs — poetry that revels above all things 
 in traditions of knights and chivalry, and deeds of derring-do. 
 The odor of English social life in its highest range — a melan- 
 choly, affectionate, very manly, but dainty breed — pervading the 
 books like an invisible scent; the idleness, the traditions, the 
 mannerisms, the stately ennm; the yearning of love, like a spinal 
 marrow inside of all; the costumes, old brocade and satin; the 
 old houses and furniture, — solid oak, no mere veneering, — the 
 moldy secrets everywhere; the verdure, the ivy on the walls, 
 the moat, the English landscape outside, the buzzing fly in the 
 sun inside the window pane. Never one democratic page; nay, 
 not a line, not a word; never free and naive poetry, but involved, 
 labored, quite sophisticated — even when the theme is ever so 
 simple or rustic (a shell, a bit of sedge, the commonest love- 
 passage between a lad and lass), the handling of the rhyme all 
 showing the scholar and conventional gentleman; showing the 
 Laureate, too, the attachi of the throne, and most excellent, too ; 
 nothing better through the volumes than the dedication "To the 
 Queen" at the beginning, and the other fine dedication, "These to 
 his Memory" (Prince Albert's), preceding "Idylls of the King." 
 Such for an off-hand summary of the mighty three that now, 
 by the women, men, and young folk of the fifty millions given 
 these States by their late census, have been and are more read 
 than all others put together. 
 
 "We hear it said, both of Tennyson and the other current 
 leading literary illustrator of Great Britain, Carlyle, — as of 
 Victor Hugo in France, — that not one of them is personally 
 friendly or admirant toward America ; indeed, quite the reverse. 
 N'importe. That they (and more good minds than theirs) can- 
 not span the vast revolutionary arch thrown by the United States 
 over the centuries, fixed in the present, launched to the endless 
 future; that they cannot stomach the high-life-below-stairs color- 
 ing all our poetic and genteel social status so far — the measure- 
 less viciousness of the great radical republic, with its ruffianly 
 nominations and elections; its loud, ill-pitched voice, utterly re- 
 gardless whether the verb agrees with the nominative; its fights, 
 errors, eructations, repulsions, dishonesties, audacities; those 
 fearful and varied and long continued storm and stress stages 
 
TEE POETRY OF THE FUTURE. 199 
 
 (so offensive to the -well-regulated college-bred mind) wherewith 
 nature, history, and time block out nationalities more powerful 
 than the past, and to upturn it and press on to the future ; — that 
 they cannot understand and fathom all this, I say, is it to be 
 wondered at? Fortunately, the gestation of our thirty-eight 
 empires (and plenty more to come) proceeds on its course, on 
 scales of area and velocity immense and absolute as the globe, 
 and, like the globe itself, quite oblivious even of great poets and 
 thinkers. But we can by no means afford to be oblivious of 
 them. 
 
 The same of feudalism, its castles, courts, etiquettes, wars, 
 personalities. However they, or the spirits of them hovering in 
 the air, might scowl and glower at such removes as current Kansas 
 or Kentucky life and forms, the latter may by no means repudiate 
 or leave out the former. Allowing all the evil that it did, we get, 
 here and to-day, a balance of good out of its reminiscence almost 
 beyond price. 
 
 Am I content, then, that the general interior chyle of our 
 republic should be supplied and nourished by wholesale from 
 foreign and antagonistic sources such as these I Let me answer 
 that question briefly : 
 
 Tears ago I thought Americans ought to strike out separate, 
 and have expressions of their own in highest literature. I think 
 so still, and more decidedly than ever. But those convictions are 
 now strongly tempered by some additional points (perhaps the 
 results of advancing age, or the reflections of invalidism). I see 
 that this world of the West, as part of all, fuses inseparably with 
 the East, and with all, as time does — the ever new, yet old, old 
 human race — " the same subject continued," as the novels of our 
 grandfathers had it for chapter-heads. If we are not to hos- 
 pitably receive and complete the inaugurations of the old civili- 
 zations, and change their small scale to the largest, broadest scale, 
 what on earth are we for? 
 
 The currents of practical business in America, the rude, 
 coarse, tussling facts of our lives, and all their daily experiences, 
 need just the precipitation and tincture of this entirely different 
 fancy world of lulling, contrasting, even f eudalistic, anti-repub- 
 lican poetry and romance. On the enormous outgrowth of our 
 unloosed individualities, and the rank self-assertion of humanity 
 here, may well fall these grace-persuading, rechercM influences. 
 
200 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. 
 
 "We first require that individuals and communities shall be free ; 
 then surely comes a time when it is requisite that they shall not 
 be too free. Although to such result in the future I look mainly 
 for a great poetry native to us, these importations till then will 
 have to be accepted, such as they are, and thankful they are no 
 worse. 
 
 The inmost spiritual currents of the present time curiously 
 revenge and check their own compelled tendency to democracy, 
 and absorption in it, by marked leanings to the past — by remi- 
 niscences in poems, plots, operas, novels, to a far-off, contrary, 
 deceased world, as if they dreaded the great vulgar gulf tides of 
 to-day. Then what has been fifty centuries growing, working in, 
 and accepted as crowns and apices for our kind, is not going to be 
 pulled down and discarded in a hurry. 
 
 It is, perhaps, time we.paid our respects directly to the honor- 
 able party, the real object of these preambles. But we must make 
 reconnaissance a little further still. Not the least part of our lesson 
 were to realize the curiosity and interest of friendly foreign 
 experts,* and how our situation looks to them. " American poetry," 
 says the London " Times," t " is the poetry of apt pupils, but it is 
 afflicted from first to last with a fatal want of raciness. Bryant 
 has been long passed as a poet by Professor Longfellow ; but in 
 Longfellow, with all his scholarly grace and tender feeling, the 
 defect is more apparent than it was in Bryant. Mr. Lowell can 
 overflow with American humor when politics inspire his muse ; 
 but in the realm of pure -poetry he is no more American than a 
 Newdigate prize-man. Joaquin Miller's verse has fluency and 
 movement and harmony, but as for the thought, his songs of the 
 sierras might as well have been written in Holland." 
 
 * A few years ago I saw the question, "Has America produced any great 
 poet ? " announced as prize-subject for the competition of some university in 
 Northern Europe. I saw the item in a foreign paper, and made note of it ; 
 but being taken down with paralysis, and prostrated for a long season, the 
 matter slipped away, and I have never been able since to get hold of any 
 essay presented for the prize, or report of the discussion, nor to learn for 
 certain whether there was any essay or discussion, nor can I now remember 
 the place. It may have been Upsala, or possibly Heidelberg. Perhaps some 
 German or Scandinavian can give particulars. I think it was in 1872. 
 
 tin a long and prominent editorial, at the time, on the death of William 
 Oullen Bryant. 
 
THE POETRY OF THE FUTURE. 201 
 
 Unless in a certain very slight contingency, the "Times" 
 
 "American verse, from its earliest to its latest stages, seems an exotic, 
 with, an exuberance of gorgeous blossom, but no principle of reproduction. 
 That is the very note and test of its inherent want. Great poets are tortured 
 and massacred by having their flowers of fancy gathered and gummed down 
 in the hortus siccus of an anthology. American poets show better in an 
 anthology than in the collected volumes of their works. like their audience, 
 they have been unable to resist the attraction of the vast orbit of English 
 literature. They may talk of the primeval forest, but it would generally be 
 very hard from internal evidence to detect that they were writing on the 
 banks of the Hudson rather than on those of the Thames. ... In fact, they 
 have caught the English tone and air and mood only too faithfully, and are 
 accepted by the superficially cultivated English intelligence as readily as if 
 they were English bom. 
 
 "Americans themselves confess to a certain disappointment that a literary 
 curiosity and intelligence so diffused [as in the United States] have not taken 
 up English literature at the point at which America has received it, and car- 
 ried it forward and developed it with an independent energy. But like reader 
 like poet. Both show the effects of having come into an estate they have not 
 earned. A nation of readers has required of its poets a diction and symmetry 
 of form equal to that of an old literature like that of Great Britain, which is 
 also theirs. No ruggedness, however racy, would be tolerated by circles 
 which, however superficial their culture, read Byron and Tennyson." 
 
 The English critic, though a gentleman and a scholar, and 
 friendly withal, is evidently not altogether satisfied (perhaps he 
 is jealous) and winds up by saying : 
 
 " Eor the English language to have been enriched with a national poetry 
 which was not English but American, would have been a treasure beyond 
 price." 
 
 With which, as whet and foil, we shall proceed to ventilate 
 more definitely certain no doubt willful opinions. 
 
 Leaving unnoticed at present the great masterpieces of the 
 antique, or anything from the middle ages, the prevailing flow of 
 poetry for the last fifty or eighty years, and now at its height, has 
 been and is (like the music) an expression of mere surface melody, 
 within narrow limits, and yet, to give it its due, perfectly satisfy- 
 ing to the demands of the ear, of wondrous charm, of smooth 
 and easy delivery, and the triumph of technical art. Above all 
 things it is fractional and select. It shrinks with aversion from 
 the sturdy, the universal and the democratic. 
 
202 THE NOBTH AMERICAN REVIEW. 
 
 The poetry of the future (the phrase is open to sharp criti- 
 cism, and is not satisfactory to me, bnt is significant, and I will 
 use it) — the poetry of the future aims at the free expression of 
 emotion (which means far, far more than appears at first), and 
 to arouse and initiate more than to define or finish. Like all 
 modern tendencies, it has direct or indirect reference continually 
 to the reader, to you or me, to the central identity of everything, 
 the mighty Ego. (Byron's was a vehement dash, with plenty of 
 impatient democracy, but lurid and introverted amid all its 
 magnetism; not at all the fitting, lasting song of a grand, secure, 
 free, sunny race.) It is more akin, likewise, to outside life and 
 landscape (returning mainly to the antique feeling), real sun and 
 gale, and woods and shores — to the elements themselves — not 
 sitting at ease in parlor or library listening to a good tale of 
 them, told in good rhyme. Character, a feature far above style 
 or polish, — a feature not absent at any time, but now first brought 
 to the fore, — gives predominant stamp to advancing poetry. Its 
 born sister, music, already responds to the same influences : 
 
 " The musie of the present, Wagner's, Gounod's, even the later Verdi's, 
 all tends toward this free expression of poetie emotion, and demands a vocal- 
 ism totally unlike that required for Bossini's splendid roulades, or Bellini's 
 suave melodies." 
 
 Is there not even now, indeed, an evolution, a departure 
 from the masters? Venerable and unsurpassable after their 
 kind as are the old works, and always unspeakably precious as 
 studies (for Americans more than any other people), is it too 
 much to say that by the shifted combinations of the modern mind 
 the whole underlying theory of first-class verse has changed? 
 " Formerly, during the period termed classic," says Sainte-Beuve, 
 " when literature was governed by recognised rules, he was con- 
 sidered the best poet who had composed the most perfect work, 
 the most beautiful poem, the most intelligible, the most agree- 
 able to read, the most complete in every respect, — the -33neid, the 
 G-erusalemme, a fine tragedy. To-day, something else is wanted. 
 For us, the greatest poet is he who in his works most stimulates 
 the reader's imagination and reflection, who excites him the most 
 himself to poetize. The greatest poet is not he who has done the 
 best ; it is he who suggests the most ; he, not all of whose mean- 
 ing is at first obvious, and who leaves you much to desire, to 
 explain, to study, much to complete in your turn." 
 
TEE POETBY OF THE FUTURE. 203 
 
 The fatal defects our American singers labor under are sub- 
 ordination of spirit, an absence of the concrete and of real patriot- 
 ism, and in excess that modern aesthetic contagion a queer friend 
 of mine calls the beauty disease. "The immoderate taste for 
 beauty and art," says Charles Baudelaire, "leads men into mon- 
 strous excesses. In minds imbued with a frantic greed for the 
 beautiful, all the balances of truth and justice disappear. There 
 is a lust, a disease of the art faculties, which eats up the moral 
 like a cancer." 
 
 Of course, by our plentiful verse- writers there is plenty of 
 service performed, of a kind. Nor need we go far for a tally. 
 We see, in every polite circle, a class of accomplished, good- 
 natured persons (" society," in fact, could not get on without them), 
 fully eligible for certain problems, times, and duties — to mix egg- 
 nog, to mend the broken spectacles, to decide whether the 
 stewed eels shall precede the sherry or the sherry the stewed eels, 
 to eke out Mrs. A. B.'s parlor-tableaux with monk, Jew, Turk, 
 lover, Romeo, Puck, Prospero, Caliban, or what not, and to gen- 
 erally contribute and gracefully adapt their flexibilities and 
 talents, in those ranges, to the world's service. But for real 
 crises, great needs and pulls, moral or physical, they might as 
 well have never been born. 
 
 Or the accepted notion of a poet would appear to be a sort of 
 male odalisque, singing or piano-playing a kind of spiced ideas, 
 second-hand reminiscences, or toying late hours at entertain- 
 ments, in rooms stifling with fashionable scent. I think I haven't 
 seen a new-published healthy, bracing, simple lyric in ten years. 
 Not long ago, there were verses in each of three fresh monthlies, 
 from leading authors, and in every one the whole central motif 
 (perfectly serious) was the melancholiness of a marriageable 
 young woman who didn't get a rich husband, but a poor one ! 
 
 Besides its tonic and dl fresco physiology, relieving such as 
 this, the poetry of the future will take on character in a more 
 important respect. Science, having extirpated the old stock- 
 fables and superstitions, is clearing a field for verse, for all the 
 arts, and even for romance, a hundred-fold ampler and more 
 wonderful, with the new principles behind. Republicanism ad- 
 vances over the whole world. Liberty, with Law by her side, 
 will one day be paramount — will at any rate be the central idea. 
 Then only — f or all the splendor and beauty of what has been, or 
 the polish of what is-r-then only will the true poets appear, and 
 vol. cxxxn.— no. 291. 14 
 
204 THE NORTH AMEMCAN REVIEW. 
 
 the true poems. Not the satin and patchouly of to-day, not the 
 glorification of the butcheries and wars of the past, nor any fight 
 between Deity on one side and somebody else on the other — not 
 Milton, not even Shakespeare's plays, grand as they are. Entirely 
 different and hitherto unknown classes of men, being authorita- 
 tively called for in imaginative literature, will certainly appear. 
 "What is hitherto most lacking, perhaps most absolutely indicates 
 the future. Democracy has been hurried on through time by 
 measureless tides and winds, resistless as the revolution of the 
 globe, and as far-reaching and rapid. But in the highest walks 
 of art it has not yet had a single representative, worthy of it any- 
 where upon the earth. 
 
 Never had real bard a task more fit for sublime ardor and 
 genius than to sing worthily the songs these States have already 
 indicated. Their origin, Washington, '76, the picturesqueness of 
 old times, the war of 1812 and the sea-fights; the incredible, 
 rapidity of movement and breadth of area — to fuse and compact 
 the South and North, the Bast and West, to express the native 
 forms, situations, scenes, from Montauk to California, and from 
 the Saguenay to the Rio Grande — the working out on such 
 gigantic scales, and with such a swift and mighty play of 
 changing light and shade, of the great problems of man and 
 freedom, — how far ahead of the stereotyped plots, or gem-cutting, 
 or tales of love, or wars of mere ambition ! Our history is so 
 full of spinal, modern, germinal subjects — one above all. What 
 the ancient siege of Ilium, and the puissance of Hector's and 
 Agamemnon's warriors proved to Hellenic art and literature, and 
 all art and literature since, may prove the war of attempted 
 secession of 1861-5 to the future aesthetics, drama, romance, 
 poems of the United States. 
 
 Nor could utility itself provide anything more practically 
 serviceable to the hundred millions who, a couple of gener- 
 ations hence, will inhabit within the limits just named, than 
 the permeation of a sane, sweet, autochthonous national poetry — 
 must I say of a kind that does not now exist? but which, I fully 
 believe, will in time be supplied on scales as free as Nature's 
 elements. (It is acknowledged that we of the States are the most 
 materialistic and money-making people ever known. My own 
 theory, while fully accepting this, is that we are the most emo- 
 tional, spiritualistic, and poetry-loving people also.) 
 
THE POETRY OF TSE FUTUBE. 205 
 
 • 
 
 Infinite are the new and orbic traits waiting to be launched 
 forth in the firmament that is, and is to be, America. Lately I 
 have wondered whether the last meaning of this cluster of thirty- 
 eight States is not only practical fraternity among themselves — 
 the only real uwion (much nearer its accomplishment, too, than 
 appears on the surface) — but for fraternity over the whole globe- 
 that dazzling, pensive dream of ages ! Indeed, the peculiar glory 
 of our lands, I have come to see, or expect to see, not in their geo- 
 graphical or republican greatness, nor wealth or products, nor 
 military or naval power, nor special, eminent names in any 
 department, to shine with, or outshine, foreign special names in 
 similar departments, — but more and more in a vaster, saner, 
 . more splendid Comradeship, uniting closer and closer not only 
 the American States, but all nations, and all humanity. That, 
 poets! is not that a theme worth chanting, striving for? Why 
 not fix your verses henceforth to the gauge of the round globe? 
 the whole race ? 
 
 Perhaps the most illustrious culmination of the modern may 
 thus prove to be a sigual growth of joyous, more exalted bards of 
 adhesiveness, identically one in soul, but contributed by every 
 nation, each after its distinctive kind. Let us, audacious, start 
 it. Let the diplomates, as ever, still deeply plan, seeking advan- 
 tages, proposing treaties between governments, and to bind them, 
 on paper : what I seek is different, simpler. I would inaugurate 
 from America, for this purpose, new formulas — international 
 poems. I have thought that the invisible root out of which the 
 poetry deepest in, and dearest to, humanity grows, is Friendship. 
 I have thought that both in patriotism and song (even amid their 
 grandest shows past) we have adhered too long to petty limits, 
 and that the time has come to enfold the world. 
 
 Not only is the human and artificial world we have established 
 in the "West a radical departure from anything hitherto known, — 
 not only men and politics, and all that goes with them, — but 
 Nature itself, in the main sense, its construction, is different. The 
 same old font of type, of course, but set up to a text never 
 composed or issued before. For Nature consists not only in itself 
 objectively, but at least just as much in its subjective rejection 
 from the person, spirit, age, looking at it, in the midst of it, and 
 absorbing it — faithfully sends back the characteristic beliefs of 
 the time or individual — takes, and readily gives again, the phys- 
 
206 TEE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. 
 
 iognomy of any nation or literature — falls like a great elastic 
 veil on a face, or like the molding plaster on a statue. 
 
 What is Nature? What were the elements, the invisible hack- 
 grounds and eidolons of it, to Homer's heroes, voyagers, gods? 
 What all through the wanderings of Virgil's iEneas? Then to 
 Shakespeare's characters — Hamlet, Lear, the English-Norman 
 kings, the Romans? What was nature to Rousseau, to Voltaire, to 
 the German G-oethe in his little classical court gardens? In those 
 presentments in Tennyson (see the " Idylls of the King" — what 
 sumptuous, perfumed, arras-and-gold nature, inimitably described, 
 better than any, fit for princes and knights and peerless ladies — 
 wrathful or peaceful, just the same— Vivien and Merlin in their 
 strange dalliance, or the death-float of Elaine, or G-eraint and the 
 long journey of his disgraced Enid and himself through the 
 wood, and the wife all day driving the horses), as in all the great 
 imported art-works, treatises, systems, from Lucretius down, 
 there is a constantly lurking, often pervading something that 
 will have to be eliminated, as not only unsuited to modern de- 
 mocracy and science in America, but insulting to them, and dis- 
 proved by them. 
 
 Still, the rule and demesne of poetry will always be not the 
 exterior, but interior; not the macrocosm, but microcosm; not 
 Nature, but Man. I haven't said anything about the imperative 
 need of a race of giant bards in the future, to hold up high to 
 eyes of land and race the eternal antiseptic models, and to 
 dauntlessly confront greed, injustice, and all forms of that wili- 
 ness and tyranny whose roots never die (my opinion is, that after 
 all the rest is advanced, that is what first-class poets are for, as, 
 to their days and occasions, the Hebrew lyrists, Roman Juvenal, 
 and doubtless the old singers of India and the British Druids), — 
 to counteract dangers, immensest ones, already looming in 
 America — measureless corruption in politics ; what we call 
 religion a mere mask of wax or lace; for ensemble, that most 
 cankerous, offensive of all earth's shows — a vast and varied 
 community, prosperous and fat with wealth of money and 
 products and business ventures, — plenty of mere intellectuality 
 too,— *and then utterly without the sound, prevailing, moral, and 
 aesthetic health-action beyond all the money and mere intellect of 
 the world. 
 
 Is it a dream of mine that, in times to come, West, South, East, 
 
TEE POETRY OF TEE FUTUBE. 207 
 
 North, -will silently, surely arise a race of such poets, varied, yet 
 one in soul — nor only poets, and of the best, but newer, larger 
 prophets — larger than Judea's, and more passionate — to meet 
 and penetrate those woes, as shafts of light the darkness ? 
 
 As I write, the last fifth of the nineteenth century is entered 
 upon, and will soon be waning. Now, and for a long time to come, 
 what the United States most need, to give purport, definiteness, 
 reason why, to their unprecedented material wealth, industrial 
 products, education by rote merely, great populousness and intel-' 
 lectual activity, is the central, spinal reality (or even the idea of 
 it) of such a democratic band of native-born-and-bred teachers, 
 artists, Utt4rateurs, tolerant and receptive of importations, but 
 entirely adjusted to the "West, to ourselves, to our own days, 
 purports, combinations, differences, superiorities. Indeed, I am 
 fond of thinking that the whole series of concrete and political 
 triumphs of the republic are mainly as bases and preparations 
 for half a dozen first-rate future poets, ideal personalities, refer- 
 ring not to a special class, but to the entire people, four or five 
 millions of square miles. 
 
 Long, long are the processes of the development of a nation- 
 ality. Only to the rapt vision does the seen become the prophecy 
 of the unseen.* Democracy, so far attending only to the real, is 
 
 * Is there not such a thing as the philosophy of American history and poli- 
 ties? And if so — what is it? . . . Wise men say there are two sets of wills 
 to nations and to persons — one set that acts and works from explainable 
 motives — from teaching, intelligence, judgment, circumstance, caprice, emu- 
 lation, greed, etc. — and then another set, perhaps deep, hidden, unsuspected, 
 yet often more potent than the first, refusing to be argued with, rising as it 
 were out of abysses, resistlessly urging on speakers, doers, communities, 
 unwitting to themselves — the poet to his fieriest words — the race to pursue 
 its loftiest ideal. . . . Indeed, the paradox of a nation's life and career, with 
 all its wondrous contradictions, can probably only be explained from these 
 two wills, sometimes conflicting, each operating in its sphere, combining in 
 races or in persons, and producing strangest results. 
 
 Let us hope there is (indeed, can there be any doubt there is ?) this great, 
 unconscious, and abysmic second will also running through the average 
 nationality and career of America. Let us hope that, amid .all the dangers 
 and defections of the present, and through all the processes of the conscious 
 will, it alone is the permanent and sovereign force, destined to carry on the 
 New World to fulfill its destinies in the future — to resolutely pursue those 
 destinies, age upon age; to build, far, far beyond its past vision, present 
 thought; to form and fashion, and for the general type, men and women 
 more noble, more athletic than the world has yet seen; to gradually, firmly 
 
208 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. 
 
 not for the real only, but the grandest ideal — to justify the modern 
 by that, and not only to equal, but to become by that superior to 
 the past. On a comprehensive summing up of the processes and 
 present and hitherto condition of the United States with reference 
 to their future and the indispensable precedents to it, I say I am 
 fully content. My point, below all surfaces, and subsoiling them, 
 is, that the bases and prerequisites of a leading nationality are, 
 first, at all hazards, freedom, worldly wealth and products on the 
 largest and most varied scale, common education and intercommu- 
 nication, and, in general, the passing through of just the stages 
 and crudities we have passed or are passing through in the United 
 States. 
 
 Then, perhaps, as weightiest factor of the whole business, and 
 of the main outgrowths of the future, it remains to be definitely 
 avowed that the native-born middle-class population of quite all 
 the United States, — the average of farmers and mechanics every- 
 where, — the real though latent and silent bulk of America, city 
 
 blond, from all the States, with all varieties, a friendly,' happy, free, religious 
 nationality — a nationality not only the richest, most inventive, most pro- 
 ductive and materialistic the world has yet known, but compacted indissolu- 
 bly, and out of whose ample and solid bulk, and giving purpose and finish to 
 it, conscience, morals, and all the spiritual attributes, shall surely rise, like 
 spires above ,some group of edifices, firm-footed on the earth, yet scaling 
 space and heaven. 
 
 Great as they are, and greater far to be, the United States, too, are but a 
 series of steps in the eternal process of creative thought. And here is, to my 
 mind, their final justification, and certain perpetuity. There is in that sub- 
 lime process, in the laws of the universe — and, above all, in the moral law 
 — something that would make unsatisfactory, and even vain and contemptible, 
 all the triumphs of war, the gains of peace, and the proudest worldly grand- 
 eur of all the nations that have ever existed, or that (ours included) now 
 exist, except that we constantly see, through all their worldly career, however 
 struggling and blind and lame, attempts, by all ages, all peoples, according 
 to their development, to reach, to press, to progress on, and farther on, to more 
 , and more advanced ideals. 
 
 The glory of the republic of the United States, in my opinion, is to be 
 that, emerging in the light of the modern and the splendor of science, and 
 solidly based on the past, it is to cheerfully range itself, and its polities are 
 henceforth to come, under those universal laws, and embody them, and carry 
 them out, to serve them. . . . And as only that individual becomes truly great 
 who understands well that, while complete in himself in a certain sense, he 
 is but a part of the divine, eternal scheme, and whose special life and laws 
 are adjusted to move in harmonious relations with the general laws of nature, 
 and especially with the moral law, the deepest and highest of all, and the 
 last vitality of man or State — so those nations, and so the United States, may 
 
THE POETBY OF TRE FUTURE. 209 
 
 or country, presents a magnificent mass of material, never before 
 equaled on earth. It is this material, quite unexpressed by liter- 
 ature or art, that in every respect insures the future of the 
 republic. During the secession war I was with the armies, and 
 saw the rank and file, North and South, and studied them for 
 four years. I have never had the least doubt about the country 
 in its essential future since. 
 
 Meantime, we can (perhaps) do no better than saturate our- 
 selves with, and continue to give imitations, yet a while, of the 
 aesthetic models, supplies, of that past and of. those lands we spring 
 from. Those wondrous stores, reminiscences, floods, currents ! 
 Let them flow on, flow hither freely. And le't the sources be 
 enlarged, to include not only the works of British origin, as now, 
 but stately and devout Spain, courteous Prance, profound Ger- 
 many, the manly Scandinavian lands, Italy's art race, and always 
 the mystic Orient. 
 
 only become the greatest and the most continuous, by understanding well 
 their harmonious relations with entire humanity and history, and all their laws 
 and progress, and sublimed with the creative thought of Deity, through all 
 time, past, present, and future. Thus will they expand to the amplitude of 
 their destiny, and become splendid illustrations and culminating parts of the 
 cosmos, and of civilization. 
 
 No more considering the States as an incident, or series of incidents, how- 
 ever vast, coming accidentally along the path of time, and shaped by casual 
 emergencies as they happen to arise, and the mere result of modern improve- 
 ments, vulgar and lucky, ahead of other nations and times, I would finally 
 plant, as seeds, these thoughts or speculations in the growth of our republic — 
 that it is the deliberate culmination and result of all the past — that here, too, 
 as in all departments of the universe, regular laws (slow and sure in acting, 
 slow and sure in ripening) have controlled and governed, and will yet control 
 and govern ; and that those laws can no more be baffled or steered clear of, or 
 vitiated, by chance, or any fortune or opposition, than the laws of winter and 
 summer, or darkness and light. 
 
 The summing up of the tremendous moral and military perturbations of 
 1861-5, and their results — and indeed of the entire hundred years of the 
 past of our national experiment, from its inchoate movement down to the 
 present day (1780-1881) — is, that they all now launch the United States 
 fairly forth, consistently with the entirety of civilization and humanity, and 
 in main sort the representative of them, leading the van, leading the fleet of 
 the modern and democratic, on the seas and voyages of the future. 
 
 And the real history of the United States — starting from that great con- 
 vulsive struggle for unity, the secession war, triumphantly concluded, and 
 the South victorious, after all — is only to be written at the remove of hundreds, 
 perhaps a thousand, years hence. — From my "Memoranda of the War." 
 
210 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. 
 
 Remembering that fyt present, and -detobfless long ahead, a 
 certain humility would well become us. The course through 
 time of highest civilization, does it not wait the first glimpse of 
 our contribution to its cosmic train of poems, : bibles, structures, 
 perpetuities — Egypt and Palestine and India^— Greece and Eome 
 and mediaeval- Europe— and so onward ^-The shadowy proces- 
 sion- is not a meager one, and the standard not a low one. All 
 that is mighty or precious in our kind seems to have trod the 
 road. Ah, never may America forget her thanks' and reverence 
 for samples, treasures such as these — that other life-blood, inspi- 
 ration, sunshine, hourly in use to-day, all days, forever, through- 
 out her broad demesne ! 
 
 « 
 
 All serves our New World progress, even the bafflers, head- 
 winds, cross-tides. Through many perturbations and squalls, 
 and much backing and filling, the ship, upon the whole, makes 
 unmistakably for her destination. Shakespeare has served, and 
 serves, may be, the best of any. 
 
 For conclusion, a passing thought, a contrast, of him who, in 
 my opinion, continues and stands for the Shakespearean cultus 
 at the present day among all English-writing peoples — of Tenny- 
 son, his poetry. I find it impossible, as I taste the sweetness of 
 these lines, to escape the flavor, the conviction, the lush-ripening 
 culmination, and last honey of decay (I dare not call it rotten- 
 ness), of that feudalism which the mighty English dramatist 
 painted in all the splendors of its noon and afternoon. And how 
 they are chanted — both poets ! Happy those kings and nobles to 
 be so sung, so told ! To run their course — to get their deeds and 
 shapes in lasting pigments — the very pomp and dazzle of the 
 sunset! .. 
 
 Meanwhile, democracy waits the coming of its bards In silence- 
 and in twilight — but 'tis the twilight of the dawn. 
 
 Wai/t Whttma^. 
 
Cornell University Library 
 PS 3222.P7 
 
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