employments. Happy if they should speak, and the people should hear, those
things which pertain at least to their temporal and national salvation!
R. Choate.


XIX.

AMERICAN LITERATURE AND THE UNION.

In leaving this subject, I cannot help suggesting, at the hazard of being
thought whimsical, that a literature of such writings as these, embodying
the romance of the whole revolutionary and ante-revolutionary history of
the United States, might do something to perpetuate the Union itself. The
influence of a rich literature of passion and fancy upon society must not
be denied merely because you cannot measure it by the yard or detect it by
the barometer. Poems and romances which shall be read in every parlor, by
every fireside, in every school-house, behind every counter, in every
printing-office, in every lawyer's office, at every weekly evening club, in
all the States of this confederacy, must do something, along with more
palpable if not more powerful agents, towards moulding and fixing that
final, grand, complex result,--the national character. A keen, well
instructed judge of such things said, if he might write the ballads of a
people, he cared little who made its laws. Let me say, if a hundred men of
genius would extract such a body of romantic literature from our early
history as Scott has extracted from the history of England and Scotland,
and as Homer extracted from that of Greece, it perhaps would not be so
alarming if demagogues should preach, or governors practice, or executives
tolerate nullification. Such a literature would be a common property of all
the States,--a treasure of common ancestral recollections,--more noble and
richer than our thousand million acres of public land; and, unlike that