their husbands. No nation ever tried the experiment of such abstinence from amusement. We have no time for sport, and so lose much of the poetry of life. All work and no play does not always make a dull boy, but it commonly makes a hard man.

We rush from school into business early; we hurry while in business; we aim to be rich quickly, making a fortune at a stroke, making or losing it twice or thrice in a lifetime. "Soft and fair, goes safe and far," is no proverb to our taste. We are the most restless of people. How we crowd into cars and steamboats; a locomotive would well typify our fuming, fizzing spirit. In our large towns life seems to be only a scamper. Not satisfied with bustling about all day, when night comes we cannot sit still, but alone of all nations have added rockers to our chairs.

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All is haste, from the tanning of leather to the education of a boy, and the old saw holds its edge good as ever more haste the worse speed." The young stripling, innocent of all manner of lore, whom a judicious father has barrelled down in a college, or law school, or theological seminary, till his beard be grown, mourns over the few years he must spend there awaiting that operation. His rule is, " to make a spoon or spoil a horn;" he longs to be out in the world "making a fortune," or "doing good," as he calls what his father better names "making noisy work for repentance, and doing mischief." So he rushes into life not fitted, and would fly towards Heaven, this young Icarus, his wings not half fledged. There seems little taste for thoroughness. In our schools as our farms, we pass over much ground but pass over it poorly.

In Education the aim is not to get the most we can, but the least we can get along with. A ship with over much canvas and over little ballast were no bad emblem of many amongst us. In no country is it so easy to get a reputation for learning-accumulated thought, because so few devote themselves to that accumulation. In this respect our standard is low. So a man of one attainment is sure to be honored, but a man of many and varied abilities is in danger of being undervalued. A Spurzheim would be warmly welcomed, while a Humboldt would be suspected of superficiality, as we have not the standard to judge him by. Yet in no country in the world is it so difficult to get a reputation for eloquence, as many speak and that well. It is surprising with what natural strength and beauty the young American addresses himself to speak.

Some hatter's apprentice, or shoemaker's journeyman, at a temperance or anti-slavery meeting, will speak words like the blows of an axe, that cut clean and deep. The country swarms with orators, more abundantly where Education is least esteemed-in the West or South.

We have secured National Unity of Action for the white citizens, without much curtailing Individual Variety of Action, so we have at the North pretty well solved that problem which other nations have so often boggled over; we have balanced the Centripetal Power, the government and laws, with the Centrifugal Power, the mass of individuals, into harmonious proportions. If one were to leave out of sight the three million slaves, one sixth part of the population, the problem might be regarded as very happily solved. As the consequence of this, in no country is there more talent, or so much awake and active. In the South this Unity is attained by sacrificing all the Rights of three million slaves and almost all the Rights of the other colored population. In despotic countries this Unity is brought about by the sacrifice of freedom, individual variety of action, in all except the Despot and his favorites; so much of the nation's energy is stifled in the chains of the State, while here it is friendly to institutions which are friendly to it, goes to its work, and approves itself in the vast increase of wealth and comfort throughout the North, where there is no class of men which is so oppressed that it cannot rise. One is amazed at the amount of ready skill and general ability which he finds in all the North, where each man has a little culture, takes his newspaper, manages his own business, and talks with some intelligence of many things-especially of Politics and Theology. In respect to this general intellectual ability and power of self-help, the mass of people seem far in advance of any other nation. But at the same time our scholars, who always represent the nation's higher modes of consciousness, will not bear comparison with the scholars of England, France, and Germany, men thoroughly furnished for their work. This is a great reproach and mischief to us, for we need most accomplished leaders, who by their thought can direct this national intensity of life. Our literature does not furnish them; we have no great men there; Irving, Channing, Cooper, are not names to conjure with in literature. One reads thick volumes devoted to the Poets of America, or her Prose Writers, and finds many names which he wonders he never heard of before, but when he turns over their works he finds consolation and recovers his composure.

American literature may be divided into two departments: the Permanent Literature, which gets printed in books, that sometimes reach more than one edition; and the Evanescent Literature, which appears only in the form of speeches, pamphlets, reviews, newspaper articles, and the like extempore productions. Now our permanent literature, as a general thing, is superficial, tame, and weak,; it is not American; it has not our ideas, our contempt of authority, our philosophical turn, nor even our uncertainty as to first principles, still less our national intensity, our hope, and fresh intuitive perceptions of truth. It is a miserable imitation. Love of freedom is not there. The real national literature is found almost wholly in speeches, pamphlets, and newspapers. The latter are pretty thoroughly American; mirrors in which we see no very flattering likeness of our morals or our manners. Yet the picture is true that vulgarity, that rant, that bragging violence, that recklessness of Truth and Justice, that disregard of Right and Duty, are a part of the nation's every day life. Our newspapers are low and "wicked to a fault;" only in this weakness. are they un-American. Yet they exhibit, and abundantly, the four qualities we have mentioned as belonging to the signs of our times. As a general rule our orators are also American - with our good and ill. Now and then one rises who has studied Demosthenes in Leland or Francis, and got a secondhand acquaintance with old models; a man who uses literary common-places, and thinks himself original and classic be cause he can quote a line or so of Horace, in a Western House of Representatives, without getting so many words wrong as his reporter; but such men are rare, and after making due abatement for them, our orators all over the land are pretty thoroughly American, a little turgid, hot, sometimes brilliant, hopeful, intuitive, abounding in half truths, full of great ideas; often inconsequent; sometimes coarse; patriotic, vain, self-confident, rash, strong, and young-mannish. Of course the most of our speeches are vulgar, ranting, and worthless, but we have produced some magnificent specimens of oratory, which are fresh, original, American, and brand new.

The more studied, polished, and elegant literature is not so; that is mainly an imitation. It seems not a thing of native growth. Sometimes, as in Channing, the thought and the hope are American, but the form and the coloring old and foreign. We dare not be original; our American Pine must be cut to the trim pattern of the English Yew, though the Pine bleed

at every clip. This poet tunes his lyre at the harp of Goethe, Milton, Pope, or Tennyson. His songs might better be sung on the Rhine than the Kennebec. They are not American in form or feeling; they have not the breath of our air; the smell of our ground is not in them. Hence our poet seems cold and poor. He loves the old mythology; talks about Pluto-the Greek devil, the Fates and Furies — witches of old time in Greece, but would blush to use our mythology, or breathe the name in verse of our Devil, or our own Witches, lest he should be thought to believe what he wrote. The mother and sisters, who with many a pinch and pain sent the hopeful boy to college, must turn over the Classical Dictionary before they can find out what the youth would be at in his rhymes. Our Poet is not deep enough to see that Aphrodite came from the ordinary waters, that Homer only hitched into rythm and furnished the accomplishment of verse to street-talk, nursery tales, and old men's gossip, in the Ionian towns; he thinks what is common is unclean. So he sings of Corinth and Athens, which he never saw, but has not a word to say of Boston, and Fall River, and Baltimore, and New York, which are just as meet for song. He raves of Thermopyla and Marathon, with never a word for Lexington and Bunkerhill, for Cowpens, and Lundy's Lane, and Bemis's Heights. He loves to tell of the Ilyssus, of "smooth sliding Mincius, crowned with vocal reeds," yet sings not of the Petapsco, the Susquehannah, the Aroostook, and the Willimantick. He prates of the narcissus, and the daisy, never of American dandelions and blue eyed grass; he dwells on the lark and the nightingale, but has not a thought for the brown thrasher and the bobolink, who every morning in June rain down such showers of melody on his affected head. What a lesson Burns teaches us addressing his "rough bur thistle," his daisy, "wee crimson tippit thing," and finding marvellous poetry in the mouse whose nest his plough turned over! Nay, how beautifully has even our sweet Poet sung of our own Green river, our waterfowl, of the blue and fringed gentian, the glory of autumnal days.

Hitherto, spite of the great reading public, we have no permanent literature which corresponds to the American Idea. Perhaps it is not time for that; it must be organized in deeds before it becomes classic in words; but as yet we have no such literature which reflects even the surface of American life, certainly nothing which portrays our intensity of life, our hope, or even our daily doings and drivings, as the Odyssey

paints old Greek life, or Don Quixote and Gil Blas portray Spanish life. Literary men are commonly timid; ours know they are but poorly fledged as yet, so dare not fly away from the parent-tree, but hop timidly from branch to branch. Our writers love to creep about in the shadow of some old renown, not venturing to soar away into the unwinged air, to sing of things here and now, making our life classic. So, without the grace of high culture and the energy of American thought, they become weak, cold, and poor; are "curious, not knowing, not exact, but nice." Too fastidious to be wise, too unlettered to be elegant, too critical to create, they prefer a dull saying that is old to a novel form of speech, or a natural expression of a new truth. In a single American work,and a famous one, too, there are over sixty similes, not one original, and all poor. A few men, conscious of this defect, this sin against the Holy Spirit of Literature, go to the opposite extreme, and are American-mad; they wilfully talk rude, write in-numerous verse, and play their harps all jangling, out of tune. A yet fewer few are American without madness. One such must not here be passed by, alike philosopher and bard, in whose writings "ancient wisdom shines with newborn beauty," and who has enriched a genius thoroughly American in the best sense, with a cosmopolitan culture and a literary skill, which were wonderful in any land. But of American literature in general, and of him in special, more shall be said at another time.

Another remarkable feature is our Excessive Love of Material Things. This is more than a Utilitarianism a preference of the useful over the beautiful. The Puritan at Plymouth had a corn-field, a cabbage-garden, and a patch for potatoes, a school-house, and a church, before he sat down to play the fiddle. He would have been a fool to reverse this process. It were poor economy and worse taste to have painters, sculptors, and musicians, while the rude wants of the body are uncared for. But our fault in this respect is, that we place too much the charm of life in mere material things,

houses, lands, well spread tables, and elegant furniture, not enough in man, in virtue, wisdom, genius, religion, greatness of soul, and nobleness of life. We mistake a perfection of the means of manliness for the end—manhood itself. Yet the housekeeping of a Shakspeare, Milton, Franklin, had only one thing worth boasting of. Strange to say, that was