the lightness, the humor, the humanity, the everything of
Shakespeare, and a world of other delicious, high, beautiful,
and inspiring things that English literature has bestowed
upon us. That literature is still the richest of heritages; but
literature is not enough.

Here I am living on a soil that my people have been
living and working and dying on for more than a hundred
years--the soil, as it happens, of Texas. My roots go down
into this soil as deep as mesquite roots go. This soil has
nourished me as the banks of the lovely Guadalupe River nourish
cypress trees, as the Brazos bottoms nourish the wild peach,
as the gentle slopes of East Texas nourish the sweet-smelling
pines, as the barren, rocky ridges along the Pecos nourish the
daggered lechuguilla. I am at home here, and I want not only
to know about my home land, I want to live intelligently
on it. I want certain data that will enable me to accommodate
myself to it. Knowledge helps sympathy to achieve harmony.
I am made more resolute by Arthur Hugh Clough's
picture of the dripping sailor on the reeling mast, "On
stormy nights when wild northwesters rave," but the winds
that have bit into me have been dry Texas northers; and
fantastic yarns about them, along with a cowboy's story of
a herd of Longhorns drifting to death in front of one of
them, come home to me and illuminate those northers like
forked lightning playing along the top of black clouds in
the night.

No informed person would hold that the Southwest can
claim any considerable body of PURE LITERATURE as its own. At