the scrutiny of the hidden depths in the immaterial
nature of man. I need not to ramble over earth and sky to discover
a wondrous object woven of contrasts, of greatness and littleness
infinite, of intense gloom and of amazing brightness--capable at once
of exciting pity, admiration, terror, contempt. I find that object in
myself. Man springs out of nothing, crosses time, and disappears forever
in the bosom of God; he is seen but for a moment, staggering on the
verge of the two abysses, and there he is lost. If man were wholly
ignorant of himself, he would have no poetry in him; for it is
impossible to describe what the mind does not conceive. If man clearly
discerned his own nature, his imagination would remain idle, and
would have nothing to add to the picture. But the nature of man is
sufficiently disclosed for him to apprehend something of himself; and
sufficiently obscure for all the rest to be plunged in thick darkness,
in which he gropes forever--and forever in vain--to lay hold on some
completer notion of his being.

Amongst a democratic people poetry will not be fed with legendary lays
or the memorials of old traditions. The poet will not attempt to people
the universe with supernatural beings in whom his readers and his own
fancy have ceased to believe; nor will he present virtues and vices
in the mask of frigid personification, which are better received under
their own features. All these resources fail him; but Man remains, and
the poet needs no more. The destinies of mankind--man himself, taken
aloof from his age and his country, and standing in the presence of
Nature and of God, with his passions, his doubts, his rare prosperities,
and inconceivable wretchedness--will become the chief, if not the sole
theme of poetry amongst these nations. Experience may confirm this
assertion, if we consider the productions of the greatest poets who have
appeared since the world has been turned to democracy. The authors of
our age who have so admirably delineated the features of Faust, Childe
Harold, Rene, and Jocelyn, did not seek to record the actions of an
individual, but to enlarge and to throw light on some of the obscurer
recesses of the human heart. Such are the poems of democracy. The
principle of equality does not then destroy all the subjects of poetry:
it renders them less numerous, but more vast.

Chapter XVIII: Of The Inflated Style Of American Writers And Orators

I have frequently remarked that the