ge in the middle of the _Atlantic_ or the
_North American Review_ or _Everybody's_ and at least make a great book
as prominent as a great soap--almost make it loom up in a country like a
Felt Mattress or a Toothbrush.

The book that has made me feel like this the most is Charles Ferguson's
"Religion of Democracy." I have always wondered why only people here and
there responded to it. The things it made me vaguely see, all those huge
masses of real things, gigantic, half-godlike, looming like towers or
mountains in a mist.... Well, it must have been a little like this that
Columbus felt that first morning!

But as Columbus went on, what he struck after all was real land, some
piece of real land in particular. The mist of vision did precipitate
into something one could walk on, and I found as I went on with Mr.
Ferguson's book that if there was going to be any real land, somebody
would have to make some.

But for the time being Charles Ferguson's book--all those glorious
generalizings in behalf of being individual, all those beautiful,
intoned, chanted abstractions in behalf of being concrete--came to me in
my speechless, happy gratitude as a kind of first sign in the heavens,
as a pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night, up over the place in
the waste of water where land, Land! At last! Land again! will have to
be.

If we ever have a literature in America, it will be found somewhere when
the mist rolls away, right under Charles Ferguson's book.

It may be too soon just now in this time of transition in our land of
piles and of derricks against the sky, for the book. All we are
competent for now is to say that we want such a book, that we see what
it will do for us.

When we want it, we will get it. Let the American people put in their
order now.

In the meantime the Piles and the Derricks.

All these young and mighty derricks against the sky, all these soaring
steel girders with the blue through them--America!

Ah, my God! is it not a hoping nation? Three thousand miles of Hope,
from Eastport, Maine, to San Francisco--does not the very sun itself
racing across it take three hours to get one look at our Hope?

Here it is!--Our World.

Let me, for one, say what I want.

It is already as if I had seen it--one big, heroic imagination at work
at last like a sea upon our world, poetry grappling with the great
cities, with their labour, with their creative might, full of their vast
joys and sorrows, full of