There is no reason why our continent should not sing as well as the rest.  We have had the practical forced upon us by our position.  We have had a whole hemisphere to clear up and put to rights.  And we are descended from men who were hardened and stiffened by a downright wrestle with necessity.  There was no chance for poetry among the Puritans.  And yet if any people have a right to imagination, it should be the descendants of these very Puritans.  They had enough of it, or they could never have conceived the great epic they did, whose books are States, and which is written on this continent from Maine to California.

But there seems to be another reason why we should not become a poetical people.  Formerly the poet embodied the hopes and desires of men in visible types.  He gave them the shoes of swiftness, the cap of invisibility and the purse of Fortunatus.  These were once stories for grown men, and not for the nursery as now.  We are apt ignorantly to wonder how our forefathers could find satisfaction in fiction the absurdity of which any of our primary-school children could demonstrate.  But we forget that the world’s gray fathers were children themselves, and that in their little world, with its circle of the black unknown all about it, the imagination was as active as it is with people in the dark.  Look at a child’s toys, and we shall understand the matter well enough.  Imagination is the fairy godmother (every child has one still), at the wave of whose wand sticks become heroes, the closet in which she has been shut fifty times for being naughty is turned into a palace, and a bit of lath acquires all the potency of Excalibur.

But nowadays it is the understanding itself that has turned poet.  In her railroads she has given us the shoes of swiftness.  Fine-Ear herself could not hear so far as she, who in her magnetic telegraph can listen in Boston and hear what is going on in New Orleans.  And what need of Aladdin’s lamp when a man can build a palace with a patent pill?  The office of the poet seems to be reversed, and he must give back these miracles of the understanding to poetry again, and find out what there is imaginative in steam and iron and telegraph-wires.  After all, there is as much poetry in the iron horses that eat fire as in those of Diomed that fed on men.  If you cut an apple across you may trace in it the lines of the blossom that the bee hummed around in May, and so the soul of poetry survives in things prosaic.  Borrowing money on a bond does not seem the most promising subject in the world, but Shakespeare found the “Merchant of Venice” in it.  Themes of song are waiting everywhere for the right man to sing them, like those enchanted swords which no one can pull out of the rock till the hero comes, and he finds no more trouble than in plucking a violet.