Where are the dear little Poets? Where are they hiding?
Playing Indian perhaps, or making Parthenons out of blocks.
Perhaps they might begin faintly and modestly at first.
Some dear, hopeful, modest American poet might creep up from under them, out from under the great believing, dumb Derricks standing on tiptoe of faith against the sky, and write a book and call it "Beliefs American Poets Would Like to Believe if They Could."
CHAPTER XII
NEWS-BOOKS II
A nation's religion is its shrewdness about its ideals, its genius for stating its ideals or news about itself, in the terms of its everyday life.
A nation's literature is its power of so stating its ideals that we will not need to be shrewd for them—its power of expressing its ideals in words, of tracing out ideals on white paper, so that ideals shall enthrall the people, so that ideals shall be contagious, shall breathe and be breathed into us, so that ideals shall be caught up in the voices of men and sung in the streets.
Ideals, intangible, electric, implacable irresistible, all-enfolding ideals, shall hold and grip a continent the way a climate grips a continent, like sunshine around a helpless thing, in the hollow of its hand, and possess the hearts of the people.