“Second.  A literature which shall not only be the proper outgrowth of the American mind, but which shall form a distinctive school, as clearly so as the literature of Greece!” Under this head he says, “Very much would I prefer that our literature should appear even in the guise of the awkward, speculating, guessing, but still original, strong-minded American Yankee, than to see it mincing in the costume of a London dandy.  I would rather see it, if need be, showing the wild rough strength, the naturalness and fervour of the extreme West, equally prepared to liquor with a stranger or to fight with him, than to see it clad in the gay but filthy garments of the saloons of Paris.  Nay more, much as every right mind abhors and detests such things, I would sooner behold our literature holding in one hand the murderous Bowie knife, and in the other the pistol of the duellist, than to see her laden with the foul secrets of a London hell, or the gaming-houses of Paris. * * * If we must meet with vice in our literature, let it be the growth of our own soil; for I think our own rascality has yet the healthier aspect.”

“Third.  A new era in the fine arts, from which future ages shall derive their models and their inspirations, as we do from Greece and Italy. * * * So far as scenery is concerned in the moulding of character, we may safely expect that a country where vastness and beauty are so wonderfully blended will stamp upon the national soul its own magestic and glorious image.  It must be so.  The mind will expand itself to the measure of things about it.  Deep in the wide American soul there shall be Lake Superiors, inland oceans of thought; and the streams of her eloquence shall be like the sweep of the Mississippi in his strength.  The rugged strength of the New England hills, the luxuriance of the sunny South, the measureless expanse of the prairie, the broad flow of our rivers, the dashing of our cataracts, the huge battlements of the everlasting mountains,—­these are American.  On the face of the globe there is nothing like to them.  When therefore these various influences have been thoroughly wrought into the national soul, there will be such a correspondence between man and the works of God about him, that our music, our poetry, our eloquence, our all, shall be our own, individual and peculiar, like the Amazon and the Andes, the Mississippi and Niagara, alone in their strength and glory.”

Now, mark you! amidst all these splendid visions of the future, there is no vision of liberty for 3,000,000 of slaves.  That idea was too small to find a place among conceptions so vast.  The lecture contains not a syllable of reference to them.  On the contrary, the empty boast of freedom is heard in the following words of solemn mockery:  “The soul of man here no longer sits bound and blind amid the despotic forms of the past; it walks abroad without a shackle, and with an uncovered eye.”  It follows then that there is an essential difference