either power or renown, so that there be no place for individual fame, the passion for military glory seizes upon the whole nation. At first the monarch and his chosen leaders are the arbiters of praise; but soon all ranks contend who shall confer the highest honours upon the most daring champion. The sacrifice to the gods for victory-the feast-the cries with which they animate each other to the onset of battle-next take the exciting form of choral songs; and poetry, in its rudest shape, begins. In order that a further refinement follow, the physical causes that favour commerce must next concur with the earliest period of national repose, to bring about the cultivation of the arts. If a happy organization have given them a harmonious language, and a gentle climate have permitted the manners and costume to assume graceful and picturesque forms, poetry rises from its ruder shape into its heroic beauty and force. All glory-even that of arms-begins to centre in it; for from it alone can lustre be received. A general phrenzy-a boundless enthusiasm-seizes upon all minds, and impels them all to poetry. It fills all imaginations, from the princely knight down to the lowest serf; and becomes, for a while, the universal language. Sculpture and painting follow more slowly, and learn to embody whatever the evanescent conceptions of the poet had designed. The faculties from which those arts arise, however, seem, even more intimately than poetry itself, to depend upon a peculiar organization, and on other physical causes. At least, they have never become highly flourishing, except in countries abounding in fine scenery, and where a brilliant atmosphere, picturesque manners, and beautiful forms prevailed. The domestic arts and luxury must also have made no slight progress before these begin. The faculties that depend on the imagination seem usually to have passed their utmost excellence, before those of the understanding can flourish. Science and learning have methods and subsidiary arts to invent, before they can achieve any thing that shall divert to them the enthusiasm that had lavished itself upon their predecessors. They come on, nevertheless, with an advance that, however slow, is but too fatal to the dominion of imagination. Exact knowledge, the last and highest fruit of civilization, commences: the fervour of poetic invention declines: rules of art take the place of the strong impulses of genius: imitation supplants the creative facultyand poetry and the arts, losing their predominance, assume that secondary condition, which henceforth is to be their regular form. From this a happy genius, uniting much of ancient enthusiasm with the powerful combinations of modern learning and art, may, from time to time, lift them to something like

their early triumphs. Individual enthusiasm will sometimes arise and accomplish more than belonged to its age: but national enthusiasm can never again be rekindled-can never rcnew its prodigies.

We

Such has been, every where, the course of all literature, exerting itself in a new language, and among a people yet unformed. Nor will the process be greatly modified, although rising letters be assisted by the borrowed stores of older art and of more cultivated languages. The imitation of foreign models can rarely, in a young and vigorous period of national taste, become servile. Indeed, at such a period, the imitation of the beauties of a foreign tongue becomes, in itself, a high species of invention. Those beauties cannot be transfused into an uncultivated idiom, unless by creating them anew. may, by their study, learn loftier conceptions and a purer taste; but these can only embody themselves in our own language, by our elevating its powers and enlarging its resources into a like excellence. The imitation that arises in the secondary periods of literature is utterly different. This always attaches itself, with laborious, minute servility, to the copying the forms, while it forever wants the spirit, of the older monuments that national genius has left. Rules of art have, with it, usurped the place of nature; and the cold suggestions of learning attempt in vain to fill that void of the fancy which artificial forms of thought and manners have made.

It is easy to see that at no part of the progress of art, which we have thus attempted to trace-neither in its rude beginnings, nor at any step of its after advances-was any thing necessary, as to freedom, except the absence of such utter control, as extinguishes all will or thought, except its own. Wherever there can exist any thing like opinion-wherever fear and force are not the sole powers-wherever men may be agitated by a common sympathy or common admiration-wherever there may be any thing of virtue and of praise, there letters, may spring up, and be made to flourish, without the help of any unusual degree of liberty, if the other circumstances, that we have pointed out, favour their developement That the higher mental energies assist and advance each other, is almost always true: knowledge, liberty, virtue and patriotism strengthen one another by their mutual presence; but yet they are continually found to exist apart; and are no more necessary causes, the one of the other, than are freedom and literary refinement.

Thus far, then, we have exposed the futility of the opinion, whose self-complacency would claim for us, in the freedom of

our institutions, sources of literature different from those great and general ones, from which all other nations have been fain to derive these "waters of life." It remains that we should examine such other causes as may seem to check or promote a taste for letters and the arts. We shall be compelled to take only a rapid view of this part of our subject: a still slighter survey, however, than we propose to ourselves, would make the matter abundantly plain to the unprejudiced.

If, then, we are not, as to letters, the peculiar and chosen people, that some of us have deemed, let us next see how far our condition gives us an access to such sources of taste and invention as are common to all nations.

We have already shewn that the creative, inventive period of literature can only arise in a manner that would never have permitted any thing like an original literature to have sprung up here. Every thing, in the outset of our national existence, forbade it. The forlorn and dismal nature of the enterprize of settlement-that melancholy going-forth into regions so cut off from all that can make life sweet, except a dreary and savage freedom-this was surely, of itself, enough to have daunted, from any such purpose, all but those coarser and hardier spirits, born for action alone, for whom letters can scarcely be said to exist. If some golden dream had seduced, or some mischance of life had driven, perchance, one scholar into so sad an exile from all that the student loves, how long could the thirst of knowledge-how long learning or taste, have survived the total absence of whatever nourishes them? At the very best,, however, invention and learning could only have pursued, with infinitely inferior helps, the paths that they had been taught to tread, in the European world of letters. To it would all their communion with enlightened minds-all their hope of a larger usefulness and fame-all their warmer sympathies and associations constantly recur. There could manifestly, then, be nothing like letters, that was not strictly dependent upon the superior taste and science of Europe-more especially of England. To the latter country, too, necessarily reverted, as to this fountain, the little of romance and of poetic sentiment, that could spring up, amidst a people occupied only with the rude necessities of a half-savage condition. We find accordingly, that the earliest of these attempts, which Messrs. Knapp and Kettell celebrate as "literary," though of a barbarism wonderfully congenial to the soil, were purely imitative. They are genuine specimens from that school of taste, which had been founded but a little while before in Britain-a school of which Bunyan and Quarles are the polite writers; and whose

verse-makers seem only to have thought of reinforcing whatever was most ill-fashioned in their native polemics with all that the metaphysical poets could lend of most pedantic mysticism. Indeed, how is it possible that any thing like true poetry should be found, where a gloomy and all-pervading theology saddens every thing with its presence, and turns the gay beings of the imagination into shapes scarcely less formidable, if less poetic, than those that filled the brain of Orestes? The chief part of the forms of religious belief, that prevail in protestant countries, seem to us, we confess, exceedingly averse to the poetic faculty, however favourable they may be to severe truth and reason. Of all these, none, perhaps, except that of the Friends, or that of the Shakers, renders man a more perfectly unpoetic animal than the Calvinistic doctrines. Wherever these have prevailed, neither letters nor the arts seem to flourish. Switzerland can scarcely be said to have produced a poet; and Scotland, in spite of strong original tendencies that way, has been almost barren of poetry. Nay, the whole body of English dissenters has, since the days of Milton, hardly possessed a poet, or an elegant writer. Vigorous and original thinkers they have had-but elegance and accomplished learning seem forever denied them.

There is little need, however, thus to subjugate an imagination that has never been excited. In a country where the confounding together all races and customs, has led to the abolition of all original peculiarities-where local history, and superstitions, and usages have no existence-where the legends and marvels of a wilder age-the shews and observances of more picturesque manners, have all perished at once, there can clearly be nothing on which the imagination should found itself. Without fable-without associations-without manners to paint-how can there be imagination? But fable, in order that it may produce its poetic effects, must have more than a bare existence; and the ideal can never warm the taste into any fine conception, of which the counterpart has never visited the senses. The mere beings of the mind-the airy creations of the fancy, can give us no pleasure. There must be something of strong illusion-of belief, or, at least, of sympathy with popular belief, to give reality and life to what the imagination shapes.

A third cause, equally powerful with these, and only inferior in permanency, is the continual flow of emigration from the Atlantic States to the West. Its office is to maintain for us a level, in physical and intellectual improvement, between the older States, and each new wilderness whose unlocated pa

radise offers itself-or is offered by the land-speculator, in each successive Hesperia. Whatever checks population, represses improvement of all sorts--and more than all-education. While active life, in these new countries, calls to easy and profuse rewards, education becomes necessarily at once slight and ambitious. Not the mounting spirits alone, that every where burn to anticipate the tardy course of regular success, but each impatient and idle boy longs to overleap the vile impediments of preparation, and to seize, at once, his destined honours. As, in thinly peopled communities, want cannot urge to studious labour, so enthusiasm can as little, in them, impel the affluent to intellectual enjoyments, or the spirit of society arise, to give grace and elegance to the understandings that it controls. A separate class, therefore, cannot be found, that occupies itself with letters alone; nor is it possible that we should possess, in such a state of things, a single one of those more determined scholars, patient and quiet toilers in the mine of thought, who obscurely dig out for others the deep treasures of the intellect.

The narrow theatre for reputation which our provincial governments afford, is a further cause of the neglect of letters. The influence of a great city, the centre of cultivation and of taste the point of union where the highest talents are assembled by the greatest rewards-seems essential to the advancement of literature and of the fine arts. The Federal metropolis, which would naturally form this point for us, is as utterly unfit for such purposes as the most sordid trading town in all the land. Not a generous ambition nor the passionate love of lasting fame assemble the rapidly shifting crowd that congregates there-but the ignoble love of the power and notoriety of the day. The worst vices of a court contrive to subsist there, without an atom of the elegance which, in courts, usually softens and conceals their grossness. The most thorough corruption of the manners there flourishes apart from every thing like taste and refinement. Neither government, nor powerful and wealthy individuals ever think of patronizing any thing that may not, in its turn, patronize them. Corruption, the great purpose of all expense there, has no need of poets and philosophers. Posterity has no votes; and who, therefore, cares for posterity?

But, though we might easily adduce other causes, that powerfully conspire with those that we have developed, in retarding the intellectual advancement of this country, we must, at present, rest their enumeration here. It is time that we should turn to the latter part of our task, and bring those, whom