y mental effort made by the inhabitants of a country through the
medium of the press," yet no literature can be national in the highest
sense unless it "bears upon it the stamp of national character." This he
illustrates by calling attention to certain local peculiarities of
English poetry as compared with that of the southern nations of Europe.
He gives examples to show that the English poets excel their rivals in
their descriptions of morning and evening, this being due, he thinks, to
their longer twilights in both directions. On the other hand, the
greater dreaminess and more abundant figurative language of southern
nations are qualities which he attributes to their soft, voluptuous
climate, where the body lies at ease and suffers the dream fancy "to
lose itself in idle reverie and give a form to the wind and a spirit to
the shadow and the leaf." He then sums up his argument.

"We repeat, then, that we wish our native poets would give a more
national character to their writings. In order to effect this, they have
only to write more naturally, to write from their own feelings and
impressions, from the influence of what they see around them, and not
from any preconceived notions of what poetry ought to be, caught by
reading many books and imitating many models. This is peculiarly true in
descriptions of natural scenery. In these, let us have no more sky-larks
and nightingales. For us they only warble in books. A painter might as
well introduce an elephant or a rhinoceros into a New England landscape.
[This comes, we must remember, from the young poet who had written in
his "Angler's Song" six years before,--

"Upward speeds the morning lark
To its silver cloud."]

We would not restrict our poets in the choice of their subjects, or the
scenes of their story; but when they sing under an American sky, and
describe a native landscape, let the description be graphic, as if it
had been seen and not imagined. We wish, too, to see the figures and
imagery of poetry a little more characteristic, as if drawn from nature
and not from books. Of this we have constantly recurring examples in the
language of our North American Indians. Our readers will all recollect
the last words of Pushmataha, the Choctaw chief, who died at Washington
in the year 1824: 'I shall die, but you will return to your brethren. As
you go along the paths, you will see the flowers and hear the birds; but
Pushmataha will see them and hear them no more. W