THE COLONISTS. or Rome. Nor is it entirely through unfairness and caprice that the free range allowed to English poets has been denied our own. The Old World has drawn its countries together, like elderly people in a tacit alliance against the strength of youth which cannot return to them, the fresh, rude beauty and love which they may not share. There is, also, something worth an estimate in the division of an ocean gulf, that makes us like the people of a new planet; and when those on the other side hear us sounding the changes upon familiar themes, with voices not unlike their own, they well may feel as if the highest qualities of our song were not full compensation for its lack of “something rich and strange." A response may fairly be expected to the search for novelty, to the curious yearning of those who look to us from across the seas. 13 the situa tion. Here begin the special restrictions of an American Novelty of poet. He represents, it is true, the music and ardor of a new country, of a land his race has peopled for two hundred and fifty years, a nation that has completed its first century. A new land, a new nation, yet not forced, like those which have progressed from barbarism to a sense of art, to create a language and literature of their own; a new land with an old language, a new nation with all the literature and traditions behind it of the country from whose colonies it has sprung. While the thought and learning of this people began in America just where it had arrived in the mother-land at the dates of the Jamestown and Plymouth settlements, the physical state and environment of Americans were those of men who find themselves encountering the primitive nature of a savage world; with this difference, that they were equipped for the struggle, not as an abo lonial" restriction: riginal race, but with the logic, courage, experience, of the civilization behind them. All the drags, the anchorage, the limitations, involved in the word "coloThe "Co- nial" retarded a new ideality. The colonial restriction has been well determined. It made the western lyre, until the period covered by this survey, a mechanism to echo, without fresh and true feeling, notes that came from over sea. It so occupied this people with a stern, steadfast, ingenious, finally triumphant contest with Nature that their epic passion was absorbed in the clearing of forests, the bridging of rivers, the conquest of savage and beast, the creation of a free government; and this labor is not yet ended, — it goes on with larger cohorts and immensely widening power. But the imagination never dies, and when our first leisure came for its exercise it was awakened by contact with the nature thus tamed, — by communion with the broadest panorama of woods and hills and waters, under the most radiant skies, that civilits dissim-ized man has ever found himself confronting. Pioilar effects neers in art and poetry here caught their inspiration, upon Poetry and and naturally the field of painting was the first to Painting. give token of novel results. The very ease with which books containing the world's best literature were obtainable in the backwoods made our early writers copyists. The painters, meanwhile, had to lament the absence of galleries in this country, and their own inability to go abroad and study. Thrown upon themselves, and deficient in technical knowledge, they sought for models in the nature about them; and thus began our landscape-school of painting, the work of which, however rude and defective, was more original than the verse wherewith it was contemporary. A poet of the first rank is not given to every coun A BARREN TIME. 15 ius not to be consid try, nor to every age. But poets of gifts approaching Latent genthose of our living favorites doubtless have been born in America, according to Nature's average, at differ- ered. ent times of our history. Until recently, the stimulants of their genius must have been wanting. It may be that the people had no real need of them, and song and art, like invention, come not without necessity. What poetry was latent here and there does not concern us. The stone on which our colonial life was founded was frigid as an arctic boulder, there was no molecular motion to give out life and heat. Who were the mute, inglorious Miltons? Of what kind is the verse that was produced? Does it move us? Is it poetry? However fine the cast of individuals, the effect of a perpetual contest with the elemental, often sinister, always gigantic forces of a new continent would be so adverse to art, so directly in the line of necessity and temporal gain, as to stifle their poetic fire, to develop a heroism that was stolid and unimaginative, to mark persons and communities with sternness and angularity, leading them to a homely gauge of values, not wont to esteem the ideal at its true worth. The aspiration of a refined nature would seem to the multitude foolishness and a stumbling-block. For a prolonged season the art of Colonial pedantry. writing verse was almost solely a luxury of the professional classes in America, and its relics bear witness to their pedantry and dulness. It is not to the wigged and gowned that we instinctively listen for the music and freedom of creative song. And if poetry even in England, from the middle of the seventeenth century to the close of the eighteenth, stupidly fashioned itself upon the models of worn-out schools, how should it do more in England's colonies, that brought hither certain shoots of taste and learning from the Old World, and found it hard to protect them at all in the sterile wild-woods of the New? Such was the nature of the barriers which, in the early and later colonial periods, absolutely defied the overleaping of a single notable poet. We find little Prolonged of more significance in the transition era of the Revsterility. olution, although a nation took on life. No poetry The first stages of Republicanism opposed to ideal art. was begotten in the rage of that heroic strife; its hu- At the outset it may be said of Republicanism itself-in which our pride and faith are based, and which we trust is ultimately to promote a literature and an art not below the standard of our bravest hope that it originally somewhat lessened the ardor of our poets, or kept this within temperate bounds. There was a craving for ideality of a certain kind, and in our liberal regions the sense of utility was not the sole controlling power. There was a wide manifestation of that which bears to pure ideality an inferior relationship. Our system diffused the intelligence which lifts our people quite above the dulness and stolidity of the middle classes elsewhere, but did not speedily bring them to the pitch of high emotion. A leveller. It is a leveller, and in its early stages raises a multitude to the level of the commonplace; so that there have been few tall heads of grain above the even field. OUR REPUBLICANISM. 17 ican home stead. The general independence and comfort have not bred those dramatic elements which imply conditions of splendor and squalor, glory and shame, triumph and despair. In their stead we have the spirit of the Amer- The American homesteads, and the loss to the artist of some darker contrast, that would make their virtue and piety more inspiring, certainly is their gain. In no other country are there so many happy little households, although there is a curious foreign belief to the contrary, derived from travelling acquaintanceship. This must be so in the one land where every man can own a portion of the soil and be a freeholder, and where. a man's toil meets no doubtful reward. The popular thrift and freedom, joined with the necessity for labor to steadily maintain them, are not at first productive of the tragic or entrancing dreams of effective art. Wisely bettering their material chances, men are too busy to feel a spiritual want. And the labor of our representative men is so extended and heroic as of itself to feed the popular imagination. In default of Material Homer, we at least have Hector and Achilles; and effort. the peerless exploits of our engineers, capitalists, discoverers, speak louder than a minstrel's words. all this amazing drama of triumphant effort and organization; in the adjustment of our political theory, dependent on statesmanship, and leading to oratory and journalism rather than to art and song; in the despotism of our social unwritten law that an American must be a good citizen first of all, and that the first duties of a citizen are to rear and maintain a family; in the implied doubt as to the sanity of enduring privations for the sake of the ideal, when, by deserting it, a practical success may be had,- amid all this the man of genius has too often betaken himself to the work of his neighbors, and those who keep In |