Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 7.djvu/256

252 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 parlour 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 tho 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 for ever and for ever.

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 labours 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