the novels printed during the last decade, said to me:  “The main purpose of many of these books is to knock away the underpinning of the marriage relation or of the Bible.”  If parents give house room to trashy or corrupt books, they cannot be surprised if their children give heart-room to “the world, the flesh, and the evil one.”  When interesting and profitable books are so abundant and so cheap, this increasing rage for novels is to me one of the sinister signs of the times.

Within the last two or three decades there has been a most marked change as to the directions in which the human intellect has exerted its highest activities.  This change is especially marked in the literature of the two great English-speaking nations.  For example, there are now in Great Britain no poets who are the peers of Wordsworth, Tennyson and Browning;—­no brilliant essayists who are the peers of Carlyle and Macaulay, and no novelists who are the peers of Scott, Dickens and Thackeray.  In the United States we have no poets who are a match for Bryant, Longfellow, Whittier and Holmes; and no essayists who are a match for Emerson and James Russell Lowell—­no jurists who are the rivals of Marshall, Kent and Story; and no living historians equal Bancroft, Prescott and Motley.  These facts do not necessarily indicate (as some assert) a widespread intellectual famine.  The most probable explanation of the fact is that the mental forces in our day exert themselves in other directions.  This is an age of scientific research and scientific achievement.  It is an age of material advancement, and in those lines in which the human mind can “seek out many inventions.”  The whole trend of human thought is under transformation.  In ancient days “a man was famous according as he had lifted up axes upon thick trees.”  The man is famous now who makes some useful mechanical invention, or explores some unknown territory, or bridges the oceans with swift steamers, or belts the earth with new railways, or organizes powerful financial combinations.  If the law of demand and supply is as applicable to mental products as it is to the imports of commerce, then we may readily understand that the realm of the ideal, which was ruled by the Wordsworths, Carlyles and Longfellows, should be supplanted by a realm in which the master minds should be political economists, or explorers, or railway kings, or financial magnates, or empire-builders of some description.  The philosophical and poetical yield to the practical, when “cui bono?” is the lest question which challenges all comers.  This change, if it be an actual one, may bring its losses as well as its gains.  We are thankful for all the precious boons which inventive genius has brought to us—­for telegraphs, and telephones, and photographic arts, for steam engines and electric motors, for power presses and sewing machines, for pain-killing chloroform, and the splendid achievements of skillful surgery.  But the mind has its necessities as well as the body; and we hope and pray that the human intellect may never be so busy in materialistic inventions that it cannot give us an “Ode to Duty,” and a “Happy Warrior,” a “Snow Bound,” and a “Thanatopsis,” an “Evangeline” and a “Chambered Nautilus,” a “Pippa Passes” or a “Biglow Papers,” an “In Memoriam” or a “Locksley Hall.”