I say in the popular conception, for literature is wholly different from this, not only in its effect upon individual lives, but upon the procession of lives upon this earth; it is not only an integral part of all of them, but, with its sister arts, it is the one unceasing continuity in history.  Literature and art are not only the records and monuments made by the successive races of men, not only the local expressions of thought and emotion, but they are, to change the figure, the streams that flow on, enduring, amid the passing show of men, reviving, transforming, ennobling the fleeting generations.  Without this continuity of thought and emotion, history would present us only a succession of meaningless experiments.  The experiments fail, the experiments succeed—­at any rate, they end—­and what remains for transmission, for the sustenance of succeeding peoples?  Nothing but the thought and emotion evolved and expressed.  It is true that every era, each generation, seems to have its peculiar work to do; it is to subdue the intractable earth, to repel or to civilize the barbarians, to settle society in order, to build cities, to amass wealth in centres, to make deserts bloom, to construct edifices such as were never made before, to bring all men within speaking distance of each other—­lucky if they have anything to say when that is accomplished—­to extend the information of the few among the many, or to multiply the means of easy and luxurious living.  Age after age the world labors for these things with the busy absorption of a colony of ants in its castle of sand.  And we must confess that the process, such, for instance, as that now going on here—­this onset of many peoples, which is transforming the continent of America—­is a spectacle to excite the imagination in the highest degree.  If there were any poet capable of putting into an epic the spirit of this achievement, what an epic would be his!  Can it be that there is anything of more consequence in life than the great business in hand, which absorbs the vitality and genius of this age?  Surely, we say, it is better to go by steam than to go afoot, because we reach our destination sooner—­getting there quickly being a supreme object.  It is well to force the soil to yield a hundred-fold, to congregate men in masses so that all their energies shall be taxed to bring food to themselves, to stimulate industries, drag coal and metal from the bowels of the earth, cover its surface with rails for swift-running carriages, to build ever larger palaces, warehouses, ships.  This gigantic achievement strikes the imagination.