“For us, along the great highways of time, those monuments stand,—­ those forms of majesty and beauty.  For us those beacons burn through all the nights.  Unknown Egyptians, graving hieroglyphs; Hindus, with hymn and apothegm and endless epic; Hebrew prophet, with spirituality, as in flames of lightning, conscience like red-hot iron, plaintive songs and screams of vengeance for tyrannies and enslavement; Christ, with bent head, brooding love and peace, like a dove; Greek, creating eternal shapes of physical and aesthetic proportion; Roman, lord of satire, the sword, and the codex,—­of the figures, some far off and veiled, others near and visible; Dante, stalking with lean form, nothing but fibre, not a grain of superfluous flesh; Angelo, and the great painters, architects, musicians; rich Shakespeare, luxuriant as the sun, artist and singer of Feudalism in its sunset, with all the gorgeous colors, owner thereof, and using them at will;—­and so to such as German Kant and Hegel, where they, though near us, leaping over the ages, sit again, impassive, imperturbable, like the Egyptian gods.  Of these, and the like of these, is it too much, indeed, to return to our favorite figure, and view them as orbs, moving in free paths in the spaces of that other heaven, the cosmic intellect, the Soul?

“Ye powerful and resplendent ones! ye were, in your atmospheres, grown not for America, but rather for her foes, the Feudal and the old—­while our genius is democratic and modern.  Yet could ye, indeed, but breathe your breath of life into our New World’s nostrils—­not to enslave us as now, but, for our needs, to breed a spirit like your own—­perhaps (dare we to say it?) to dominate, even destroy what you yourselves have left!  On your plane, and no less, but even higher and wider, will I mete and measure for our wants to-day and here.  I demand races of orbic bards, with unconditional, uncompromising sway.  Come forth, sweet democratic despots of the west!”

Here is another passage of a political cast, but showing the same great pinions and lofty flight:—­

“It seems as if the Almighty had spread before this nation charts of imperial destinies, dazzling as the sun, yet with lines of blood, and many a deep intestine difficulty, and human aggregate of cankerous imperfection,—­saying, Lo! the roads, the only plans of development, long, and varied with all terrible balks and ebullitions.  You said in your soul, I will be empire of empires, overshadowing all else, past and present, putting the history of Old World dynasties, conquests, behind me as of no account,—­making a new history, the history of Democracy, making old history a dwarf,—­I alone inaugurating largeness, culminating time.  If these, O lands of America, are indeed the prizes, the determinations of your Soul, be it so.  But behold the cost, and already specimens of the cost.  Behold the anguish of suspense, existence itself wavering in the balance, uncertain whether to rise or fall; already, close