their souls thirsted for an opportunity to rescue fair Liberty from the obscene rout who had her in durance for their purposes, and to hail her accession to a lawful throne with the rich gifts of knowledge, use, and beauty, a homage that only free minds can pay, and only when freedom claims it.  We do not forget the literary activity with which a thousand ready intellects have furnished convenient food for the people:  there has been no lack of books, nor of the ambition to attempt all the intellectual forms.  Some of this pabulum was not good for a growing frame; the excuse for offering it may be found in the exigencies of squatter-life.  We are a notable people for our attachment to the frying-pan, and there is no doubt that it is a shifty utensil:  it can be slung at the saddle-bow or carried in a valise, it will bear the jolting of a corduroy road, and furnish a camp-mess in the minimum of time out of material that was perhaps but a moment before sniffing or pecking at its rim.  A very little blaze sets the piece of cold fat swimming, and the black cavity soon glows and splutters with extemporaneous content.  But what dreams howl about the camp-fires, what hideous scalping-humor creeps from the leathery supper into the limbs and blood of the adventurous pioneer!

No better, and quite as scrofulous, has been the nourishment furnished by the rhetorical time-servers and polished conventionalists, whose gifts have been all directed against the highest good of the country’s mind, to offer sweets to its crying conscience, and draughts of fierce or languid cordials to lull the uneasy moods of this fast-growing child of Liberty.  Such men are fabricators of smooth speech; they have brought their gilding to put upon the rising pillars of the country, instead of strength to plant them firmly in their places and to spread the protecting roof.  This period of storm will wash off their dainty work.  When the clean granite stands where it should to shelter the four-and-thirty States as they walk the vast colonnades together, intent upon the great interchanges of the country’s thought and work, this tinsel will not be missed; as men look upon the grave lines that assure them of security, they will rejoice that the time for the truly beautiful has arrived, and hasten to relieve the solid space with shapes as durable as the imagination which conceives.

There must be a great people before there can be a great character in its books, its instructions, or its works of art.  This character is prophesied only in part by what is said and thought while the people is becoming great, and the molten constituents are sparkling as they run into their future form.  We have been so dependent upon traditional ideas that we suppose an epic, for instance, to be the essential proof that a people is alive and has something to express.  Let us cease to wonder whether there will ever be an American poem, an American symphony, or an American Novum Organon.  It is a sign of