There still remains the Exceptional Literature; some of it is only fugitive, some meant for permanent duration. Here is a new and different spirit: a respect for human nature above human history, for man above all the accidents of man, for God above all the alleged accidents of God; a veneration for the eternal laws which He only makes and man but finds; a law before all statutes, above all constitutions, and holier than all the writings of human hands. Here you find most fully the sentiments and ideas of America, not such as rule the nation now, but which, unconsciously to the people, have caused the noble deeds of our history, and now prophesy a splendid future for this young giant here. These sentiments and ideas are brought to consciousness in this literature. Here a precedent is not a limitation; a fact of history does not eclipse an idea of nature; an investment is not thought more sacred than a right. Here is more hope than memory; little deference to wealth and rank, but a constant aspiration for truth, justice, love and piety; little fear of the public opinion of the many or the few, rather a scorn thereof, almost a defiance of it. It appears in books, in pamphlets, in journals, and in sermons, sorely scant in quantity as yet. New and fresh, it is often greatly deficient in form; rough, rude and uncouth, it yet has in it a soul that will live. Its authors are often men of a wide and fine culture, though mainly tending to underrate the past achievements of mankind. They have little reverence for great names. They value the Greek and Hebrew mind for no more than it is worth. With them a wrong is no more respected because well descended, and supported by all the riches, all the votes; a right, not less a right because unjustly kept out of its own. These men are American all through; so intensely national, that they do not fear to tell the nation of the wrong it does.
The form of this literature is American. It is indigenous to our soil, and could come up in no other land. It is unlike the classic literature of any other nation. It is American as the Bible is Hebrew, and the Odyssey is Greek. It is wild and fantastic, like all fresh original literature at first. You see in it the image of republican institutions—the free school, free state, free church; it reflects the countenance of free men. So the letters of old France, of modern England, of Italy and Spain reflect the monarchic, oligarchic, and ecclesiastic institutions of those lands. Here appears the civilization of the nineteenth century, the treasures of human toil for many a thousand years. More than that, you see the result of a fresh contact with nature, and original intuitions of divine things. Acknowledging inspiration of old, these writers of the newness believe in it now not less, not miraculous, but normal. Here is humanity that overleaps the bounds of class and of nation, and sees a brother in the beggar, pirate, slave, one family of men variously dressed in cuticles of white or yellow, black or red. Here, too, is a new loveliness, somewhat akin to the savage beauty of our own wild woods, seen in their glorious splendor an hour before autumnal suns go down and leave a trail of glory lingering in the sky. Here, too, is a piety somewhat heedless of scriptures, liturgies, and forms, and creeds; it finds its law written in nature, its glorious everlasting Gospel in the soul of man; careless of circumcision and baptismal rites, it finds the world a temple, and rejoices everywhere to hold communion with the Infinite Father of us all, and keep a sacrament in daily life, conscious of immortality, and feeding continually on angel's bread.
The writers of this new literature are full of faults; yet they are often strong, though more by their direction than by native force of mind; more, by their intuitions of the first good, first perfect and first fair, than through their historical knowledge or dialectic power. Their ship sails swift, not because it is sharper built, or carries broader sails than other craft, but because it steers where the current of the ocean coincides with the current of the sky, and so is borne along by nature's wind and nature's wave. Uninvited, its ideas steal into parlor and pulpit, its kingdom coming within men and without observation. The shoemaker feels it as he toils in his narrow shop; it cheers the maiden weaving in the mill, whose wheels the Merrimac is made to turn; the young man at college bids it welcome to his ingenuous soul. So at the breath of spring new life starts up in every plant; the sloping hills are green with corn, and sunny banks are blue and fragrant with the wealth of violets, which only slept till the enchanter came. The sentiments of this literature burn in the bosom of holy-hearted girls, of matrons and of men. Ever and anon its great ideas are heard even in Congress, and in the speech of old and young, which comes tingling into most unwilling ears.
This literature has a work to do, and is about its work. Let the old man crow loud as he may, the young one will crow another strain, for it is written of God, that our march is continually onward, and age shall advance over age forever and forever.
Already America has a few fair specimens from this new field to show. Is the work History? The author writes from the stand-point of American democracy; I mean philanthropy, the celestial democracy, not the satanic; writes with a sense of justice and in the interest of men; writes to tell a nation's purpose in its deeds, and so reveal the universal law of God, which overrules the affairs of States as of a single man. You wonder that history was not before so writ that its facts told the nation's ideas, and its labors were lessons, and so its hard-won life became philosophy.
Is it poetry the man writes? It is not poetry like the old. The poet has seen nature with his own eyes, heard her with his own mortal, bodily ears, and felt her presence, not vicariously through Milton, Uhland, Ariosto, but personally, her heart against his heart. He sings of what he knows, sees, feels, not merely of what he reads in others' song. Common things are not therefore unclean. In plain New England life he finds his poetry, as magnets iron in the blacksmith's dust, and as the bee finds dew-bright cups of honey in the common woods and common weeds. It is not for him to rave of Parnassus, while he knows it not, for the Soul of Song has a seat upon Monadnock, Wachusett, or Katahdin, quite as high. So Scottish Burns was overtaken by the muse of poetry, who met him on his own bleak hills, and showed him beauty in the daisy and the thistle, and the tiny mouse, till to his eye the hills ran o'er with loveliness, and Caledonia became a classic land.
Is it religion the author treats of? It is not worship by fear, but through absolute faith, a never-ending love; for it is not worship of a howling and imperfect God, grim, jealous and revengeful, loving but a few, and them not well, but of the Infinite Father of all mankind, whose universal providence will sure achieve the highest good of all that are.
These men are few; in no land are they numerous, or were or will be. There were few Hebrew Prophets, but a tribe of priests; there are but few mighty bards that hover o'er the world; but here and there a sage, looking deep and living high, who feels the heart of things, and utters oracles which pass for proverbs, psalms and prayers, and stimulate a world of men. They draw the nations, as conjoining moon and sun draw waters shore-ward from the ocean-springs; and as electrifying heat they elevate the life of men. Under their influence you cannot be as before. They stimulate the sound, and intoxicate the silly, but in the heart of noble youths their idea becomes a fact, and their prayer a daily life.
Scholars of such a stamp are few and rare, not without great faults. For every one of them there will be many imitators, as for each lion a hundred lion-flies, thinking their buzz as valiant as his roar, and wondering the forest does not quake thereat, and while they feed on him fancy they suck the breasts of heaven.