We are eminently a people of action; we are fond of shows, processions, and organized spectacles; we are so much more imitative than our British cousins, that, without limiting its appeals to the mimetic files of fashion, the ungentlemanly theory of a Simian descent for man might find support in the features of our general life.  To complete the large compound of qualities that are required, in order that an emulous people give birth to a drama, one is yet wanting; but that one is not merely the most important of all, but is the one which lifts the others into dramatic importance.  Are we poetical?  Ask any number of continental Europeans, whether the English are a poetical people.  A loud, unanimous, derisive no would be the answer.  And yet, there is Shakespeare! and around him, back to Chaucer and forward to Tennyson, a band of such poets, that this prosaic nation has the richest poetic literature in Christendom.  Especially in this matter are appearances delusive, and hasty inferences liable to be illogical.  From the prosers that one hears in pulpits, legislatures, lecture-rooms, at morning calls and well-appointed dinner-tables in Anglo-America, let no man infer against our poetic endowment.  Shakespeare, and Milton, and Burns, and Wordsworth, are of our stock; and what we have already done in poetry and the plastic arts, while yet, as a nation, hardly out of swaddling-clothes, is an earnest of a creative future.  We are to have a national literature and a national drama.  What is a national drama?  Premising that as little in their depth as in their length will our remarks be commensurate with the dimensions of this great theme, we would say a few words.

A literature is the expression of what is warmest and deepest in the heart of a people.  Good books are the crystallization of thoughts and feelings.  To have a literature—­that is, a body of enduring books—­implies vigor and depth.  Such books are the measure of the mental vitality in a people.  Those peoples that have the best books will be found to be at the top of the scale of humanity; those that have none, at the bottom.  Good books, once brought forth, exhale ever after both fragrance and nourishment.  They educate while they delight many generations.

Good books are the best thoughts of the best men.  They issue out of deep hearts and strong heads; and where there are deep hearts and strong heads such books are sure to come to life.  The mind, like the body, will reproduce itself:  the mind, too, is procreative, transmitting itself to a remote posterity.

The best books are the highest products of human effort.  Themselves the evidence of creative power, they kindle and nourish power.  Consider what a spring of life to European people have been the books of the Hebrews.  What so precious treasure has England as Shakespeare?

To be good, books must be generic.  They may be, in subject, in tone, and in color, national; but in substance they must be so universally human, that other cognate nations can imbibe and be nourished by them.  Not that, in their fashioning, this fitness for foreign minds is to be a conscious aim; but to be thus attractive and assimilative, is a proof of their breadth and depth—­of their high humanity.