Cooper, whose name is with his country's woven,
First in her files, her Pioneer of mind-

A wanderer now in other climes, has proven
His love for the young land he left behind;

And throned her in the senate-hall of nations,

Robed like a deluge rainbow, heaven-wrought;
Magnificent as his own mind's creation,

And beautiful as its green world of thought;

And faithful to the Act of Congress quoted
As law authority, it passed nem. con.,
He writes that we are, as ourselves have voted,
The most enlightened people ever known.

That all our week is happy as a Sunday

In Paris-full of song, and dance, and laugh;
And that from Orleans to the Bay of Fundy
There's not a bailiff or an epitaph.

And furthermore-in fifty years, or sooner,
We shall export our poetry and wine;

And our brave fleet-eight frigates and a schooner—
Will sweep the seas from Zembla to the line.

This last stanza contains a prophecy of progress, which though playfully uttered, our poet has lived to see fully realized. The satiric thong of the Edinburgh, and the galling sarcasms of the Quarterly did something more than to awaken mirth and madness. They administered the needful stimulus, and roused into vigorous activity minds which have since amply vindicated our claims to art and authorship in a practical way. We have now names enrolled in every department of science and literature. Our actual achievements have not merely conquered prejudices, but also won the admiration and respect of the critical authorities. The fastidious Jeffrey at length became appreciative and complimentary. Lockhart's cold and sarcastic lip relaxed into a gracious smile. And the old and witty Canon of St. Paul's, long ere he found his final resting place in Kensal Green, learned to speak complaisantly of American books, however, and with equal injustice, he might continue to undervalue Pennsylvania bonds.

Our purpose is not to attempt the history nor the vindication of American Literature, but only to adventure such remarks

upon it as may have been suggested by our reading and reflection. Unquestionably, the truest distinction and glory of nations must be sought in their literature. In it they survive the longest; and by it they achieve the most enduring victories. Mind ever rears the most indestructible monuments. The noblest achievements of the past, in art or arms, live only in the records of genius. Actions may be sublime and impressive; but they are limited in time and space. Thought is free, and wanders through eternity. A conquering army, bannered and plumed and marshaled in proud array, is a grand, stirring pageant; but it is evanescent. The shout and shock of battle sound terrific, but soon die away and are forgotten, like the throes of the earthquake and the rage of the storm. What should we have known of the wars of the Peloponnesus, but for the pen of Thucydides? The battles of Cæsar live only in his Commentaries; and those of Scipio and Hannibal, in the pages of Polybius and Livy. When Alexander was asked whether he would rather be Homer or Achilles, he replied, as we might expect a young warrior, by inquiring which was the greater honor, to be the herald or the victor at the Olympian. games. And yet the herald gave immortality to the victor. Aristotle and Alexander were teacher and pupil. The latter founded the Macedonian Empire, which scarcely survived its brilliant chief: the former established a system of philosophy that has created the thinking of millions for twenty-two centuries. Queen Elizabeth played an important part on the world's stage among kings and courtiers, but William Shakspeare will outlive, as he already outshines, his royal patroness. And the victories and political achievements of Cromwell will be forgotten long before the immortal poem of his Latin secretary, whom Charles II. persecuted as "one John Milton."

The spoken word, or eloquence, is most powerful—overwhelming in its immediate effects. It sways masses of men to and fro, as does the wind the trees of the forest. How it rouses and excites! how it moves and melts! how it storms its way into the very citadel of the soul, and carries it captive! There is magic in the eye and voice of the speaker: we hang his lips, and listen entranced and breathless. But this power of persuasion passes away and perishes with him who

upon

wields it. In death, the voice loses its music, the eye its fire, and the hand its cunning. What have we left of the splendid eloquence of Pericles or Bolingbroke, of Chatham or Patrick Henry, which once roused men like a clarion, and reigned supreme in the "senate-hall of nations?" Gone forever from

the earth-it moves not, melts not, wins not now. That of Demosthenes and Cicero, and of Clay and Webster, survives only in their recorded speeches. Literature has been called the immortality of speech. To it belongs the task of embalming the thoughts, sentiments, and speech, of those regal intellects that are born to rule mankind. "In books," says Carlyle, "lies the soul of the whole past time: the articulate, audible voice of the past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream." Books have proved themselves to be monuments more enduring than brass or marble. The Parthenon is in ruins, but time has spared the Iliad. The statues of Praxiteles and Phidias are but mutilated torsos, while the tragedies of Eschylus and the odes of Pindar are still admired. Rome and its glory survive, not in the golden. palace of Nero, nor in temples and theatres, but in the works of Virgil, and Horace, and Tacitus. This thought is well presented by the Learned Blacksmith, in his somewhat humorous colloquy with a printer's boy.

The printing press, we are told, is the grandest invention since the death of Tubal-Cain. "It is a printing press," said a boy standing by the ink trough, with a queueless turban of brown paper on his head. "A printing press!" I queried musingly to myself. "A printing press? What do you print?" I asked. "Print?" said the boy, staring at me doubtfully; "why, we print thoughts." "Print thoughts!" I slowly repeated after him; and we stood looking for a moment at each other in mutual admiration-he in the absence of an idea, and I in the pursuit of one. "But, my boy," I asked, in honest soberness, "what are thoughts, and how can you get hold of them to print them?" "Thoughts are what come out of the people's minds," he replied. "Get hold of them, indeed? Why, minds arn't nothing you can get hold of, nor thoughts either. All the minds that ever thought, and all the thoughts that mind ever made, wouldn't make a ball as big as

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your fist. Minds, they say, are first like air: you can't see them: they don't make any noise, nor have any color: they don't weigh anything. Bill Deepcut, the sexton, says that a man weighs just as much when his mind is gone out of him as he did before. No, sir: all the minds that ever lived, wouldn't weigh an ounce troy." "Then how do you print thoughts?" I asked. Thoughts make tracks," he continued, arranging in his left hand a score or two of metal slips; "and with these here letters we can take the exact impression of every thought that ever went out of the heart of man; and we can print it, too." "Talk about the mind's living forever!" exclaimed the boy, pointing patronizingly at the ground, as if mind were lying there incapable of immortality until the printer reached it a helping hand; "why, the world is brimful of live, bright, industrious thoughts, which would have been dead, if it hadn't been for boys like me, who have run the ink rollers. Immortality, indeed! Why, people's minds," he continued, with his imagination climbing into the profanely sublime, "people's minds wouldn't be immortal if 'twasn't for the printer-at any rate, in this planetary burying-ground. We are the chaps what manufacture immortality for dead men.".... "Give us one good healthy mind to think for us, and we will furnish a dozen worlds as big as this with thoughts to order. Give us such a man, and we will ensure his life: we will keep him alive forever among the living. He can't die, no way you can fix it, when once we have touched him with these bits of inky pewter. He shan't die nor sleep. We will keep his mind at work on all the minds that live on the earth, and all the minds that shall come to live here as long as the world stands."

National literature is a growth as well as a creation. It is a tree of many roots and multiform branches. The literature of a people is their embodied thought, the history of their inner life not imitated or borrowed, but the genuine product of the national mind and heart, and the true exponent of their knowledge, taste, and culture. All literature, that is truly such, must possess the element of universality. Like religion, it addresses itself to man as man. It is to no age or creed confined. It is free of the world. In its broad humanity it

transcends all sectional lines. It is a revelation from the depths of the soul and nature, of truth and beauty. It never becomes obsolete; but wears the freshness of eternal youth. But, as races and languages differ, literature will be modified and moulded by history and tradition, and the thousand circumstances that have influenced the development and progress of the national life. As every man's soul is imaged in his looks and words and actions, so are the mental and moral peculiarities of a nation impressed upon their literature. While answering above almost every other to this requirement of universality, yet how distinct and individual the type of the old Greek literature. It has a style and manner of its own, like their architecture; and as finished and faultless. Thus it is also with the German, the French, and the English. They not only differ in respect to the language in which they are written, but in form, method, and pervading spirit. Each has its marked and striking characteristics. The peculiar genius, taste, temper, and idiosyncracies of each is reflected, so as to appear unmistakably. Coleridge has indicated their line of difference in their mental constitution with the nicest discrimination. "If I take," he writes, "the three great countries of Europe in respect to their intellectual character: namely, Germany, England, and France, I should characterize them in the following way: Germany, genius, talent, fancy; England, genius, sense, humor; France, cleverness, talent, wit." And the literature of each of these nations is bound up with their history, partakes of their character, flourishes on its own stock, and derives its nourishment from their own soil.

Have we in this land a national literature answering these conditions? A reference to our origin and history alone can enable us to determine in what sense and to what degree. Our early history is involved in no obscurity or contradiction. It does not shade off into the darkness of myth and fable. Originally, we existed as a dependent colony: a portion of England detached from the rest, and "sent forward to accomplish its destiny, with fewer aids and fewer contradictions, but with an ampler field." But crossing the ocean did not change our nature, or make us another race. Breathing the air of the new world did not alter the essential qualities of our blood and brain; nor divest