at world, as possessing an
ideal beauty. I think so still, even after seeing the wood-cutters and
their slovenly huts.

In times of slower growth, man did not enter a situation without a
certain preparation or adaptedness to it. He drew from it, if not to
the poetical extent, at least in some proportion, its moral and its
meaning. The wood-cutter did not cut down so many trees a day, that
the Hamadryads had not time to make their plaints heard; the shepherd
tended his sheep, and did no jobs or chores the while; the idyl had a
chance to grow up, and modulate his oaten pipe. But now the poet
must be at the whole expense of the poetry in describing one of these
positions; the worker is a true Midas to the gold he makes. The poet
must describe, as the painter sketches Irish peasant-girls and Danish
fishwives, adding the beauty, and leaving out the dirt.

I come to the West prepared for the distaste I must experience at its
mushroom growth. I know that, where "go ahead" is tire only motto, the
village cannot grow into the gentle proportions that successive
lives and the gradations of experience involuntarily give. In older
countries the house of the son grew from that of the father, as
naturally as new joints on a bough, and the cathedral crowned the
whole as naturally as the leafy summit the tree. This cannot be here.
The march of peaceful is scarce less wanton than that of warlike
invasion. The old landmarks are broken down, and the land, for a
season, bears none, except of the rudeness of conquest and the needs
of the day, whose bivouac-fires blacken the sweetest forest glades. I
have come prepared to see all this, to dislike it, but not with stupid
narrowness to distrust or defame. On the contrary, while I will not be
so obliging as to confound ugliness with beauty, discord with harmony,
and laud and be contented with all I meet, when it conflicts with my
best desires and tastes, I trust by reverent faith to woo the mighty
meaning of the scene, perhaps to foresee the law by which a new order,
a new poetry, is to be evoked from this chaos, and with a curiosity
as ardent, but not so selfish, as that of Macbeth, to call up the
apparitions of future kings from the strange ingredients of the
witch's caldron. Thus I will not grieve that all the noble trees are
gone already from this island to feed this caldron, but believe
it will have Medea's virtue, and reproduce them in the form of new
intellectual growths, since centurie