could have given a few hints to the Almighty. Not
I. I play Alphonso neither to genius nor to God.

"What is this poem, for the giving of which to America and the
world, and for that alone, its author has been dismissed with
ignominy from a Government office? It is a poem which Schiller
might have hailed as the noblest specimen of native
literature, worthy of a place beside Homer. It is, in the
first place, a work purely and entirely American,
autochthonic, sprung from our own soil; no savor of Europe nor
the past, nor of any other literature in it; a vast carol of
our own land, and of its Present and Future; the strong and
haughty psalm of the Republic. There is not one other book, I
care not whose, of which this can be said. I weigh my words
and have considered well. Every other book by an American
author implies, both in form and substance, I cannot even say
the European, but the British mind. The shadow of Temple Bar
and Arthur's Seat lies dark on all our letters. Intellectually
we are still a dependency of Great Britain, and one
word--colonial--comprehends and stamps our literature. In no
literary form, except our newspapers, has there been anything
distinctively American. I note our best books--the works of
Jefferson, the romances of Brockden Brown, the speeches of
Webster, Everett's rhetoric, the divinity of Channing, some of
Cooper's novels, the writings of Theodore Parker, the poetry
of Bryant, the masterly law arguments of Lysander Spooner, the
miscellanies of Margaret Fuller, the histories of Hildreth,
Bancroft and Motley, Ticknor's History of Spanish Literature,
Judd's Margaret, the political treatises of Calhoun, the rich,
benignant poems of Longfellow, the ballads of Whittier, the
delicate songs of Philip Pendleton Cooke, the weird poetry of
Edgar Poe, the wizard tales of Hawthorne, Irving's
Knickerbocker, Delia Bacon's splendid sibyllic book on
Shakespeare, the political economy of Carey, the prison
letters and immortal speech of John Brown, the lofty patrician
eloquence of Wendell Phillips, and those diamonds of the first
water, the great clear essays and greater poems of Emerson.
This literature has often commanding merits, and much of it is
very precious to me; but in respect to its national character,
all that can be said is that it is tinged, more or less
deeply, with America; and