Life must come before the Thought. Nothing could be more absurd than
the expectation that American literature should spring away into the
air from the top of European performance. Our first literature was
colonial,--that is, imitative, written for the approbation of European
critics,--of course, having somewhat the empty correctness of good
school-boy composition. Next followed what we may call fire-weed
literature,--the first rank, raw product of new lands. Under these two
heads a vast number of books must of course be reckoned. But beyond
these American literature has already passed, and now can point to
books that spring out of the pure genius of the New Man. And having
only these in mind, we hesitate not to say that there is now sounding
upon these shores a deeper, subtler, and more universal note than is
heard in any other land touched by the Atlantic Sea. We have now
writings in several departments of literature, and in both prose and
verse, which are characterized by a breadth and largeness of
suggestion, by a spirituality and a prophetic adherence to the moral
sentiment, which justify all that has here been affirmed or reasoned.
And our deepest thought finds a popular reception which proves it not
foreign or exceptional. Wilkinson's "Human Body," the largest piece of
speculative construction which England has produced in two centuries,
has not yet, after some eight years, we believe, exhausted its first
edition. Emerson's Poems, still less adapted, one would say, than the
work just mentioned, to the taste of populaces, had reached its fourth
edition in about the same period. Learned works have, of course, a
superior reception in the mother-country; works of pure thought in the
daughter. Said to us, during the past season, the subtilest thinker of
Great Britain,--"I must send to America whatever I wish to put in
print, unless I pay for its publication from my own pocket."

And beyond this, there is a hush in the nation's heart, an expectancy,