Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 7.djvu/247

Rh you often see what particular work of Shelley, or Tennyson, or Milton, or George Herbert, or, if the man has culture enough, of Goethe, or Uhland, Jean Paul, or Schiller, suggested the "American original." His inspiration comes from literature, not from the great universe of nature or of human life. You see that this writer has read Percy's Reliques, and the German Wunderhorn; but you would not know that he wrote in a republic—in a land full of new life, with great rivers and tall mountains, with maple and oak trees that turn red in the autumn; amongst a people who hold town-meetings, have free schools for everybody, read newspapers voraciously, who have lightning rods on their steeples, ride in railroads, are daguerreotyped by the sun, and who talk by lightning from Halifax to New Orleans; who listen to the whippoorwill and the bobolink, who believe in Slavery and the Declaration of Independence, in the devil and the five points of Calvinism. You would not know where our poet lived, or that he lived anywhere. Reading the Iliad, you doubt that Homer was born blind; but our bard seems to have been deaf also, and for expressing what was national in his time, might likewise have been dumb.

Is it a volume of sermons?—they might have been written at Edinburgh, Madrid, or Constantinople, as well as in New England; as well preached to the "Homo Sapiens" of Linnæus, or the man in the moon, as to the special audience that heard, or heard them not, but only paid for having the things preached. There is nothing individual about them; the author seems as impersonal as Spinoza's conception of God. The sermons are like an almanack calculated for the meridian of no place in particular, for no time in special. There is no allusion to anything American. The author never mentions a river this side of the Jordan; knows no mountain but Lebanon, Zion, and Carmel, and would think it profane to talk of the Alleghanies and the Mississippi, of Monadnock and the Androscoggin. He mentions Babylon and Jerusalem, not New York and Baltimore; you would never dream that he lived in a church without a bishop, and a State without a king, in a democratic nation that held three million slaves, with ministers chosen by the people. He is surrounded, clouded over, and hid by the traditions of the "ages of