Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 7.djvu/245

Rh Scotts, half a dozen Addisons, one or two Macaulays—a historian that was Hume and Gibbon both ia one, several Burases, and Miltons by the quantity, not "mute," the more is the pity, but "inglorious" enough; nay, even vain-glorious at the praise which some penny-a-liner or dollar-a-pager foolishly gave their cheap extemporary stuff. In sacred literature it is the same : in a single winter at Boston we had two American Saint Johns, in full blast for several months. Though no Felix trembles, there are now extant in the United States not less than six American Saint Pauls, in no manner of peril except the most dangerous—of idle praise.

A living, natural, and full-grown literature contains two elements. One is of mankind in general; that is human and universal. The other is of the tribe in special, and of the writer in particular. This is national and even personal: you see the idiosyncracy of the nation and the individual author in the work. The universal human substance accepts the author's form, and the public wine of mankind runs into the private bottle of the author. Thus the Hebrew literature of the Old Testament is fresh and original in substance and in form; the two elements are plain enough, the universal and the particular. The staple of the Psalms of David is human, of mankind, it is trust in God; but the twist, the die, the texture, the pattern, all that is Hebrew—of the tribe, and personal—of David, shepherd, warrior, poet, king. You see the pastoral hill-sides of Judges in his holy hymns ; nay, "Uriah's beauteous wife" now and then sidles into his sweetest psalm. The Old Testament books smell of Palestine, of its air and its soil. The Rose of Sharon has Hebrew earth about its roots. The geography of the Holy Land, its fauna and its flora both, even its wind and sky, its early and: its latter rainfall appear in the literature of historian and bard. It is so in the Iliad. You see how the sea looked from Homer's point of view, and know how he felt the west wind, cold and raw. The human element has an Ionian form and a Homeric hue. The ballads of the people in Scotland and England are national in the same way ; the staple of human fife is wrought into the Scottish form. Before the Germans had any permanent national literature of this character, their fertile mind found vent in legends, popular stories, now