“There is a charm in writing for the pure and intelligent young worth all the plaudits of sinister or hypocritical wisdom.  At a certain age, and while the writings that please have a gloss of novelty about them, hiding the blemishes that may afterward be discovered as their characteristics,—­then it is that the young convert their approbation into enthusiasm.  An author benefits in a wide and most pleasing range of public opinion by this natural and common disposition in the young; and the only cloud thrown athwart the rays of pleasure thus saluting his spirit is flung from the thought that they who are thus moved by the movings of his own mind may come in a few years to look upon his pages with hearts less ardent in their sympathies, and with altered eyes, which have acquired additional keenness by looking longer upon the world.”

“The competent American litterateur has a glorious career before him.  So much is there in your magnificent country, hitherto undescribed and unexpressed, in scenery, manners, morals, that all may be wells from which he may be the first to drink.  Yet it cannot be expected—­for it has passed to a proverb that escape from persecution and detraction can never and nowhere be the lot of literature—­that there will not be many instances, even in America, where every attempt on the part of gifted writers (and young writers especially, who are commonly regarded with eyes of invidious jaundice by the elders, whose waning reputations they may through industry either supplant or explode) will be rendered an uneasy struggle, and sometimes almost a curse, by the envy of those who deny approval while blind to success, and the affected disdain of those who exaggerate demerit.  Yet these obstacles warm the spirit of honest ambition, and enhance its inevitable conquests.”

“It is a sight of gratification and pride to behold a laborer in the vineyard of letters escaping from the envy, the jealousy, the rivalry, the leaven of all uncharitableness, with which literary intercourse is so often polluted.  The writers of England have been tardy in their justice, not only to the progress, circumstances and customs of America, but to her intellectual offspring; and the time is not remote—­nay, has already dawned—­when, in this regard, the spirit of Change wields his wand and finds obedience to his prerogatives.”

“‘No hostility between nations affects the arts:’  so said the old maxim, but it has rarely been found a truism.  They who feel it, feel also the virtue which dictated the aphorism.  Men whose object is to enlighten the nations or exalt the judgment or (the least ambition) to refine the tastes of others—­men who feel that this object is dearer to them than a petty and vain ambition—­feel also that all who labor in the same cause are united with them in a friendship which exists in one climate as in another—­in a I republic or in a despotism:  these are the best cosmopolites, the truest citizens of the world.”