weakness and subservience:  and this is a period crowded with acts of emancipation.  We cannot escape from the past, if we would; we have a right to inherit all the previous life of men that does not surfeit us and impede our proper work, but let us stop our unavailing sighs for Iliads.  The newspaper gathers and circulates all true achievements faster than blind poets can plod round with the story.  The special form of the epic answered to a state of society when the harper connected cities with his golden wire, slowly unrolling its burden as he went.  Vibrations travel faster now; men would be foolish to expect that the new life will go journeying in classic vehicles.  When the imagination becomes free, it can invent forms equally surprising and better adapted to the face of the country.

There is no part of this country which has not its broad characters and tendencies, different from anything ever seen before, imperfect while they are doomed to isolation, during which they show only a maimed and grotesque vitality.  The religious tendency is different, the humor is different, the imagination differs from anything beyond the Atlantic.  And the East differs from the West, the North from the South; and the Pacific States will have also to contribute gifts peculiar to themselves, as the silt of the Sacramento glitters unlike that of the Merrimac or the Potomac.  We are not yet a People; but we have great, vivid masses of popular life, which a century of literary expression will not exhaust.  All these passionate characters are running together in this general danger, having seized a weapon:  they have found an idea in common, they are pervaded by their first really solemn feeling, they issue the same word for the night from East to West.  The nationality thus commenced will introduce the tendency to blend in place of the tendency to keep apart, and each other’s gifts will pass sympathetically from hand to hand.

The heightened life of this epoch is another cause which shall prepare a great development of intellectual forms.  Excitement and enthusiasm pervade all classes of the people.  All the primitive emotions of the human heart—­friendship, scorn, sympathy, human and religious love—­break into the liveliest expression, penetrate every quarter of society; a great river is let loose from the rugged mountain-recesses of the people; its waters, saturated with Nature’s simple fertility, cover the whole country, and will not retire without depositing their renewing elements.  A sincere and humble people Is feeling the exigency.  A million families have fitted out their volunteers with the most sumptuous of all equipments, which no Government could furnish, love, tears of anxiety and pride, last kisses and farewells, and prayers more heaven-cleaving than a time of peace can breathe.  What an invisible cloud of domestic pathos overhung for a year the course of the Potomac, and settled upon those huts and tents where the best part of home resided!