here and there incidentally true to the actual, but which in their larger truth had either never existed or had long since passed away.  Had Dante’s scope been narrowed to contemporary Italy, the “Divina Commedia” would have been a picture-book merely.  But his theme was Man, and the vision that inspired him was of an Italy that never was nor could be, his political theories as abstract as those of Plato or Spinoza.  Shakespeare shows us less of the England that then was than any other considerable poet of his time.  The struggle of Goethe’s whole life was to emancipate himself from Germany, and fill his lungs for once with a more universal air.

Yet there is always a flavor of the climate in these rare fruits, some gift of the sun peculiar to the region that ripened them.  If we are ever to have a national poet, let us hope that his nationality will be of this subtile essence, something that shall make him unspeakably nearer to us, while it does not provincialize him for the rest of mankind.  The popular recipe for compounding him would give us, perhaps, the most sublimely furnished bore in human annals.  The novel aspects of life under our novel conditions may give some freshness of color to our literature; but democracy itself, which many seem to regard as the necessary Lucina of some new poetic birth, is altogether too abstract an influence to serve for any such purpose.  If any American author may be looked on as in some sort the result of our social and political ideal, it is Emerson, who, in his emancipation from the traditional, in the irresponsible freedom of his speculation, and his faith in the absolute value of his own individuality, is certainly, to some extent, typical; but if ever author was inspired by the past, it is he, and he is as far as possible from the shaggy hero of prophecy.  Of the sham-shaggy, who have tried the trick of Jacob upon us, we have had quite enough, and may safely doubt whether this satyr of masquerade is to be our representative singer.[1] Were it so, it would not be greatly to the credit of democracy as an element of aesthetics.  But we may safely hope for better things.

[Footnote 1:  This is undoubtedly an allusion to Walt Whitman, who is mentioned by name, also derogatorily, in the next essay on Howells.  The Howells essay appeared two years before the above.  A.M.]

The themes of poetry have been pretty much the same from the first; and if a man should ever be born among us with a great imagination, and the gift of the right word,—­for it is these, and not sublime spaces, that make a poet,—­he will be original rather in spite of democracy than in consequence of it, and will owe his inspiration quite as much to the accumulations of the Old World as to the promises of the New.  But for a long while yet the proper conditions will be wanting, not, perhaps, for the birth of such a man, but for his development and culture.  At present, with the largest reading population in the