Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 7.djvu/255

Rh that will live. Its authors are often men of a wide and fine culture, though mainly tending to underrate tho 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 toll the nation of tho wrong it does.

The form of this literature is American. It is indigences 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 tho Odyeaey 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 con- tact 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 splendour an hour before autumnal suns go down and leave a trail of glory lingering in the sky. Here, too, is a piety Somewhat needless 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 angels' bread.

The writers of this new literature are full of faults; yet