its ambassadors or authors or colleges, or churches, or parlours, nor even
in its newspapers or inventors, but always most in the common people. Their
manners, speech, dress, friendships,--the freshness and candour of their
physiognomy--the picturesque looseness of their carriage--their deathless
attachment to freedom--their aversion to anything indecorous or soft or
mean--the practical acknowledgment of the citizens of one state by the
citizens of all other states--the fierceness of their roused resentment--
their curiosity and welcome of novelty--their self-esteem and wonderful
sympathy--their susceptibility to a slight--the air they have of persons
who never knew how it felt to stand in the presence of superiors--the
fluency of their speech--their delight in music, the sure symptom of manly
tenderness and native elegance of soul--their good temper and open-
handedness--the terrible significance of their elections, the President's
taking off his hat to them, not they to him--these too are unrhymed poetry.
It awaits the gigantic and generous treatment worthy of it.

The largeness of nature or the nation were monstrous without a
corresponding largeness and generosity of the spirit of the citizen. Not
nature, nor swarming states, nor streets and steamships, nor prosperous
business, nor farms nor capital nor learning, may suffice for the ideal of
man, nor suffice the poet. No reminiscences may suffice either. A live
nation can always cut a deep mark, and can have the best authority the
cheapest--namely, from its own soul. This is the sum of the profitable uses
of individuals or states, and of present action and grandeur, and of the
subjects of poets.--As if it were necessary to trot back generation after
generation to the eastern records! As if the beauty and sacredness of the
demonstrable must fall behind that of the mythical! As if men do not make
their mark out of any times! As if the opening of the western continent by
discovery, and what has transpired since in North and South America, were
less than the small theatre of the antique, or the aimless sleep-walking of