It is already as if I had seen it—­one big, heroic imagination at work at last like a sea upon our world, poetry grappling with the great cities, with their labour, with their creative might, full of their vast joys and sorrows, full of their tussle with the sea and with the powers of the air and with the iron in the earth!—­the big, speechless cities that no one has spoken for yet, so splendid, and so eager, and so silent about their souls!

It is true we are crude and young.

Behold the Derricks like mighty Youths!

In our glorious adolescence so sublime, so ugly, so believing, will no one sing a hymn to the Derricks?

Where are the dear little Poets?  Where are they hiding?

Playing Indian perhaps, or making Parthenons out of blocks.

Perhaps they might begin faintly and modestly at first.

Some dear, hopeful, modest American poet might creep up from under them, out from under the great believing, dumb Derricks standing on tiptoe of faith against the sky, and write a book and call it “Beliefs American Poets Would Like to Believe if They Could.”

CHAPTER XII

NEWS-BOOKS II

A nation’s religion is its shrewdness about its ideals, its genius for stating its ideals or news about itself, in the terms of its everyday life.

A nation’s literature is its power of so stating its ideals that we will not need to be shrewd for them—­its power of expressing its ideals in words, of tracing out ideals on white paper, so that ideals shall enthrall the people, so that ideals shall be contagious, shall breathe and be breathed into us, so that ideals shall be caught up in the voices of men and sung in the streets.

Ideals, intangible, electric, implacable irresistible, all-enfolding ideals, shall hold and grip a continent the way a climate grips a continent, like sunshine around a helpless thing, in the hollow of its hand, and possess the hearts of the people.

What our government needs now is a National band in Washington.

America is a Tune.

America is not a formula.  America is not statistics, even graphic statistics.  A great nation cannot be made, cannot be discovered, and then be laid coldly together like a census.  America is a Tune.  It must be sung together.

The next thing statesmen are going to learn in this country is that from a practical point of view in making a great nation only our Tune in America and only our singing our Tune can save us.  A great nation can be made out of the truth about us.  The truth may be—­must be probably,—­plain.  But the truth must sing.