the situation with perfect equanimity. Only let him be a native of New
York, or Boston, or San Francisco, or Mullenville, and be inspired with
the American idea, and we ask no more. Whatever he writes will belong to
our literature, and add lustre to it.

One hears many complaints about the snobbishness of running after things
European. Go West, young man, these moralists say, or go down Fifth
Avenue, and investigate Chatham Street, and learn that all the elements of
romance, to him who has the seeing eye, lie around your own front doorstep
and back yard. But let not these persons forget that he who fears Europe
is a less respectable snob than he who studies it. Let us welcome Europe
in our books as freely as we do at Castle Garden; we may do so safely. If
our digestion be not strong enough to assimilate her, and work up whatever
is valuable in her into our own bone and sinew, then America is not the
thing we took her for. For what is America? Is it simply a reproduction of
one of these Eastern nationalities, which we are so fond of alluding to as
effete? Surely not. It is a new departure in history; it is a new door
opened to the development of the human race, or, as I should prefer to
say, of humanity. We are misled by the chatter of politicians and the
bombast of Congress. In the course of ages, the time has at last arrived
when man, all over this planet, is entering upon a new career of moral,
intellectual, and political emancipation; and America is the concrete
expression and theatre of that great fact, as all spiritual truths find
their fitting and representative physical incarnation. But what would this
huge western continent be, if America--the real America of the mind--had
no existence? It would be a body without a soul, and would better,
therefore, not be at all. If America is to be a repetition of Europe on a
larger scale, it is not worth the pain of governing it. Europe has shown
what European ideas can accomplish; and whatever fresh thought or impulse
comes to birth in it can be nothing else than an American thought and