Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 7.djvu/246

242 tho admiration, of tho learned. These had at home the German dross, but as tho stories travelled into other lands, they kept their human flesh and blood, but took a different garb, and acquired a different complexion from every country which they visited; and, like tho streams of their native Swabia, took the colour of tho soil they travelled through.

Tho permanent and instantial literature of America is not national in this sense. It has little that is American; it might as well be written by some bookwright in Leipsic or London, and then imported. The individuality of the nation is not there, except in the cheap, gaudy binding of the work. Tho nationality of America is only stamped on the lids, and vulgarly blazoned on the back.

Is the book a history?—it is written with no such freedom as you should expect of a writer, looking at the breadth of the world from the lofty stand-point of America. There is no new philosophy of history in it. You would not think it was written in a democracy that keeps the peace without armies or a national gaol. Mr. Macaulay writes the history of England as none but a North Briton could do. Astonishingly well-read, equipped with literary skill at least equal to the masterly art of Voltaire, mapping out his subject like an engineer, and adorning it like a painter, you yet see, all along, that the author is a Scotchman and a Whig. Nobody else could have written so. It is of Mr. Macaulay. But our American writer thinks about matters just as everybody else does; that is, he does not think at all, but only writes what he reads, and then, like the good-natured bear in the nursery story, " thinks he has been thinking." It is no such thing, he has been writing the common opinion of common men, to get the applause of men as common as himself.

Is the book of poetry?—the substance is chiefly old, the form old, the allusions are old. It is poetry of society, not of nature. You meet in it the same everlasting mythology, the same geography, botany, zoology, the same symbols; a new figure of speech suggested by the sight of nature, not the reading of books, you could no more find than a fresh shad in the Dead Sea. You take at random eight or ten " American poets" of this stamp, you see at once what was tho favourite author with each new bard;