He has given us to see Nineveh disinterred by an English hero.
He has given us to see the northwest passage forced, and winter bearded on his everlasting throne, by another. (Is it the hero's fault if self and snowdrop-singing poetasters cannot see this feat with the eyes of Camoens?)
He has given us to see Titans enslaved by man; Steam harnessed to our carriages and ships; Galvanism tamed into an alphabet—a Gamut, and its metal harp-strings stretched across the earth malgre'' mountains and the sea, and so men's minds defying the twin monsters Time and Space; and now, gold revealed in the East and West at once, and so mankind now first in earnest peopling the enormous globe. Yet old women and children of the pen say, this is a bad, a small, a lifeless, an unpoetic age—and they are not mistaken. For they lie.
As only tooth-stoppers, retailers of conventional phrases, links in the great cuckoo-chain, universal pill-venders, Satan, and ancient booksellers' ancient nameless hacks can lie, they lie.
It is they who are small-eyed. Now, as heretofore, weaklings cannot rise high enough to take a bird's-eye view of their own age, and calculate its dimensions.
The age, smaller than epochs to come, is a giant compared with the past, and full of mighty materials for any great pen in prose or verse.
My little friends aged nineteen and downward—fourscore and upward—who have been lending your ears to the stale little cant of every age, as chanted in this one by Buffo-Bombastes and other foaming-at-the-pen old women of both sexes—take by way of antidote to all that poisonous, soul-withering drivel, ten honest words.
I say before heaven and earth that the man who could grasp the facts of this day and do an immortal writer's duty by them, i.e., so paint them as a later age will be content to engrave them, would be the greatest writer ever lived. Such is the force, weight and number of the grand topics that lie this day on the world's face. I say that he who has eyes to see may now see greater and far more poetic things than human eyes have seen since our Lord and his Apostles and his miracles left the earth.
It is very hard to write a good book or a good play, or to invent a good picture, and having invented paint it. But it always was hard, except to those—to whom it was impossible. Bunglers will not mend matters by blackening the great canvases they can't paint on, nor the impotent become males by detraction.
“Justice!”