the foreign model, the foreign
standards, the foreign ideas, dominate over it all.

"At most, our best books were but struggling beams; behold in
Leaves of Grass the immense and absolute sunrise! It is all
our own! The nation is in it! In form a series of chants, in
substance it is an epic of America. It is distinctively and
utterly American. Without model, without imitation, without
reminiscence, it is evolved entirely from our own polity and
popular life. Look at what it celebrates and contains! hardly
to be enumerated without sometimes using the powerful,
wondrous phrases of its author, so indissoluble are they with
the things described. The essences, the events, the objects of
America; the myriad, varied landscapes; the teeming and giant
cities; the generous and turbulent populations; the prairie
solitudes, the vast pastoral plateaus; the Mississippi; the
land dense with villages and farms; the habits, manners,
customs; the enormous diversity of temperatures; the immense
geography; the red aborigines passing away, 'charging the
water and the land with names'; the early settlements; the
sudden uprising and defiance of the Revolution; the august
figure of Washington; the formation and sacredness of the
Constitution; the pouring in of the emigrants; the
million-masted harbors; the general opulence and comfort; the
fisheries, and whaling, and gold-digging, and manufactures,
and agriculture; the dazzling movement of new States, rushing
to be great; Nevada rising, Dakota rising, Colorado rising;
the tumultuous civilization around and beyond the Rocky
Mountains, thundering and spreading; the Union impregnable;
feudalism in all its forms forever tracked and assaulted;
liberty deathless on these shores; the noble and free
character of the people; the equality of male and female; the
ardor, the fierceness, the friendship, the dignity, the
enterprise, the affection, the courage, the love of music, the
passion for personal freedom; the mercy and justice and
compassion of the people; the popular faults and vices and
crimes; the deference of the President to the private citizen;
the image of Christ forever deepening in the public mind as
the brother of despised and rejected persons; the promise and
wild song of the future; the vision of the Federal Mother,
seated with more than antique majesty in the midst of he