What species of giant the watchful affection of Motherland awaits in a
literature whose unfledged bantlings are Cooper, Emerson, Holmes, Motley
and Lowell, our imagination does not attempt to depict. We venture,
however, to predict that the _National Review_ will not be called upon
to stand sponsor for the bairn, whose advent it so pleasantly announces,
and for whose christening should be erected a cathedral more vast than
St. Peter's, a temple rarer than that of Baalbec. But while our
sensitive cousin across the water would pin us down to a _credo_ as
absurd as that of Tertullian, and hedge us in with the adamantine wall
of his own lordly fiat, let us, who fondly hope we have a literature,
whose principal defect--a defect to which the one infallible remedy is
daily applied by the winged mower--is youth, inquire into its leading
characteristics, seeing if haply we may descry the elements of a golden
maturity.
It has been asserted that we are a gloomy people; it is currently
reported that the Hippocrene in which of old the Heliconian muses bathed
their soft skins, is now fed only with their tears; that instead of
branches of luxuriant olive, these maidens, now older grown and wise,
present to their devout adorers twigs of suggestive birch and thorny
staves, by whose aid these mournful priests wander gloomily up and down
the rugged steeps of the past.
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