“You are a poet yourself, Mr. Ridgeley, I understand,” said Miss Giddings.

“I like poetry, which is a totally different thing from the power to produce it; this I am sure I have not,” was the candid answer.

“You have tried?”

“Most young men with a lively fancy and fervid feelings, write verses, I believe.  Here is Mr. Case, quite a verse writer, and some of his lines have a tone or tinge of poetry.”

“Would you like literature for a pursuit?”

“I like books, as I like art and music, but I somehow feel that our state of society at the West, and indeed our civilization, is not ripe enough to reach a first excellence in any of these high branches of achievement.  Our hands are thick and hard from grappling with the rough savagery of our new rude continent.  We can construct the strong works of utility, and shall meet the demands for the higher and better work when that demand actually exists.”

“But does not that demand exist?  Hasn’t there been a clamor for the American novel?  A standing advertisement—­’Wanted, the American Novel’—­has been placarded ever since I can remember; and I must forget how long that is,” said Miss Giddings.

“Yes, I’ve heard of that; but that is not the demand that will compel what it asks for.  It will be the craving of millions, stimulating millions of brains, and some man will arise superior to the herd, and his achievement will challenge every other man of conscious powers, and they will educate and ripen each other till the best, who is never the first, will appear and supply the need.  No great man ever appeared alone.  He is the greatest of a group of great men, many of whom preceded him, and without whom he would have been impossible.  Homer, alone of his group, has reached us; Shakespeare will live alone of his age, four thousand years hence.”

“But, Mr. Ridgeley, our continent and our life, with our fresh, young, intense natures, seem to me to contain all the elements of poetry, and the highest drama,” said Miss Giddings.

“So they seem to us, and yet how much of that is due to our egotism—­because it is ours—­who can tell?  Of course there is any amount of poetry in the raw, and so it will remain until somebody comes to work it up.  There are plenty of things to inspire, but the man to be inspired is the thing most needed.”

“So that, Mr. Ridgeley,” said Ida, “we may not in our time hope for the American novel, the great American epic, or the great American drama?”

“Well, I don’t know that these will ever be.  That will depend upon our luck in acquiring a mode and style, and habit of thought, and power of expression of our own, which for many reasons we may never have.  An American new writes as much like an Englishman as he can—­and the more servile the imitation, the better we like him—­as a woman writes like a man as nearly as she possibly can, for he is the standard.  What is there in Irving, that is not wholly and purely English?  And so of Cooper; his sturdiness and vigor are those of a genuine Englishman, and when they write of American subjects, they write as an Englishman would; and if better, it is because they are better informed.”